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Long-range planning began too. U.S. and British officials intended to begin some token withdrawals of troops from the gulf as early as this week, but Americans warned that bringing all the forces home might take longer than the seven months that had been required to complete the buildup. Most will have to stay on until some permanent peacekeeping arrangements can be forged. U.S. Secretary of State James Baker prepared to set out on a swing through the Middle East this week, including his first visit ever to Israel, to scout the possibilities for a wider regional settlement.
Postmortems had already begun. Baghdad Radio claimed that Iraq had won but could give no rationale except some mumblings about spirit. In Moscow generals hastened to proclaim that the destruction of Iraq's mostly Soviet-built equipment said more about the deficiencies of the Iraqi military than the quality of the weapons. Some of them hinted, however, that Soviet cuts in military spending, if carried much further, might begin to weaken the nation's defenses against the demonstrated proficiency of Western high-tech weaponry.
On the allied side, Schwarzkopf seemed right in terming the coalition's ability to achieve nearly total success with so few losses "almost miraculous." Not only were the pessimists and skeptics wrong, including all those who had said the aerial bombing was going badly, but the optimists were far off the mark too. American casualties were less than 5% of the lowest prewar Pentagon estimates. U.S. forces had prepared about 10,000 beds, aboard ships and in three field hospitals, to receive the wounded; only a tiny fraction were filled.
Such overwhelming success, in fact, may be unrepeatable. The U.S. and its partners are unlikely to face soon, or ever, another combination of a cause so clear that it unites a mighty coalition; ideal terrain for high-tech warfare; a dispirited and war-weary enemy army; an almost total lack of opposition in the air; and an adversary, Saddam, who made nearly every blunder in the book.