Press Briefing 27 FEB 91

File: doc53_08.txt
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Q: Yotj said t!)~- Traqi S )`-ivt' g()t ~~)L~Stt: divisions a] oi.~ ~10~ bc~rde,; ~~h
seriously attritt~d. Xt figures to be about 200,000 troops, r:~aybe, that ~ch were
were there.
You've 9ot 50,000 prisoners. ?;here are the rest of the.?
A: There were a very, very l~rge nuinber of dead in these units a very1 ver3,
large number of dead. We even found then, when we went into the units ourselves, we
found them in the trench lines. There werc very heavy desertions. At One point we
had reports of desertion rates of nore than 30 percent of the units that were along
the front here. As you know, we had quite a large nwnber of POW's that came across,
50 J think it1s a cornbination of desertions, of people that were killed, of the
people that we ve captured, and of some other people who are 3ust flat still runnin~.

Q: It seerns you've done so n1uch, that the job is effectively done. Can I as~
you, what do you thint really needs more to be done? Xi5 forces are,. if not
destroyed, certainly no longer capable of posing a threat to the region. They seem
to want to go home. What more has to be done?
A: If I'm to accomplish the mission that I was given, and that's to make sure
that the Republican Guard is rendered incapable o~ conducting the type of heinous
acts that they've conducted so often in the past, what has to be done is these forces
conLinue to attack across here, and put the ~epublican Guard out of business. We're
not in the business of killing them. We have psy QOS aircraft up. We're telling
them over and over a~~in, all you've got to do is get out of your tanks and move off,
and you will not be killed. But they're continuing to fight, and as long as they
continue to fight, we're going to continue to fight with them.

Q: That rnove on the extreme left whIch got within 150 r:ii~les of Baghdad, was it
also a part of the plan that the Iraqis n'ight have thought it was going to Baghdad,
and would that have contributed to the deception?
A: I wouldn't have minded at all if they'd 9otten a little bit nervous about
it. ~ mean that, very sincerely. I would have been delighted if they had gotten
~`ery, very nervous about it. ~ran]:ly, I don't thint they ever knew it was there. I
thin~ they never knew it was there until the door had already been closed on them.

~: I'rn wondering how much resistance there still is in Ku'~ait, and I'm
wonderin9 what you would say to people who would say the purpose of. this war was to
get the Iraqis out of Kuwait, and they're now out. What would you say to that public
that is thinking th~t right now?
A: I would say there was a lot more purpose to this war than just get the
Iraqis out of Kuwait. The purpose of this war was to enforce the resolutions of the
United Nations. There are some 12 different resolutions of the Unit'ed Nations, not
all of which have been accepted by Iraq to date, as I understand it. But I've got to
tell you, that in the business of the military, of a military corrt;nander, my job is
not to go ahead and at Some point say that's great, they've just now pulled Out of
Kuwait -- even though they're still shooting at us, they're moving backward, and
therefore, I1ve accomplished my mission. That's not the way you fight it, and that's
not the way I would ever fight it.

Q: You talked about heavy press coverage of Irtr~Ł'nent Thunder early on, and how
it helped fool the Iraqis into thinking that it was a serious operation. I wondered
if you could talk about other ways in which the press contributed to the campaign.
(Laughter)
A: First of all, I don't want to characterize Im~inent. Thunder as being onl', a
~~Q~9t{~~, bQcau&e it wasn't. We had every intention of conducting amph~biou~
operations if they were neCe~5ary, and that was a very, very real rehearsal -- as
~ere the other rehearsals. I guess the one thing I would say~to the press that I wL
delighted with is in the very, very early otages of this operation when "`e `ere over