62                                       U.S. MARINES IN THE PERSIAN GULF, 1990-1991


means it really isn't an offensive army.   So it doesn't have enough left, unless
someone chooses to re-arm them in the future.

    Q.   You said the Iraqis have got these divisions along the border which were
seriously attritted. ftfigures to be about 200,000 troops, maybe, that were there.
You `ve got 50,000 prisoners. `Where are the rest of them?
    A:   There were a very, very large number of dead in these units--a very,
very large number of dead.    We even found them, when we went into the units
ourselves, we found them in the trench lines. There were very heavy desertions.
At one point we had reports of desertion rates of more than 30 percent of the
units that were along the front here.   As you know, we had quite a large number
of prisoners of war that came across, so I think it's a combination of desertions,
of people that were killed, of the people that we've captured, and of some other
people who are just flat still running.

    Q.   It seems you've done so much, that the job is effectively done. Can I ask
you, what do you think really needs more to be done? His forces are, tf 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 of conducting the type of
heinous acts that they've conducted so often in the past, what has to be done is
these forces continue to attack across here and put the Republican Guard out of
business.    We're not in the business of killing them.      We have PSYOP
[psychological operations] aircraft up.  We're telling them over and over again,
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 move on the extreme left, which got within 150 miles of Baghdad,
was it also a part of the plan that the Iraqis might 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 gotten a little bit nervous about
it. I mean that, very sincerely. I would have been delighted if they had gotten
very, very nervous about it.  Frankly, I don't think they ever knew it was there.
I think they never knew it was there until the door had already been closed on
them.

    Q.   I'm wondering how much resistance there still is in Kuwait, and I'm
wondering what you would say to people who would say the puipose of this war
was to get the Iraqis out of Kuwait, and they `re now out.  What would you say
to the public that is thinking that 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 United
Nations, not all of which have been accepted by Iraq to date, as I understand it.