3. Lessons from the 1991 Gulf War: Protect Civilian Infrastructure

During the first Gulf War, attacks against Iraqi infrastructure by US-led military forces claimed a minimum of 110,000 civilian casualties.²⁴ The vast majority of deaths were caused not by the direct impact of bombs but by the destruction of the electric power grid and the ensuing collapse of the public health, water and sanitation systems, leading to outbreaks of dysentery, cholera, and other water-borne diseases. The first post-war epidemiological survey throughout Iraq in August 1991 reported the deaths of 47,000 children under the age of five.²⁵ The first United Nations mission to post-war Iraq documented how “apocalyptic damage” to the infrastructure had reduced the country to “the pre-industrial age.”²⁶ 

While devastating to the civilian population, the attacks against electricity and water in 1991 played little role in defeating the Iraqi army. One week into the war, Chief of Staff General Colin Powell, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, dismissed the military value of attacking electricity, acknowledging that Iraq’s leaders “have redundant systems, resilient systems, they have work-arounds, they have alternatives, and they are still able to command their forces.”²⁷

The human costs of disabling Iraq’s civilian infrastructure were known in advance to the Pentagon. Partially declassified Defense Intelligence Agency assessments from January to March 1991 accurately predict the onset of a public health crisis in Iraq.²⁸ One document, entitled “Disease Outbreaks in Iraq,” reports that:

Conditions are favorable for communicable disease outbreaks, particularly in major urban areas affected by coalition bombing… Infectious disease prevalence in major Iraqi urban areas targeted by coalition bombing (Baghdad, Basrah) undoubtedly has increased since the beginning of Desert Storm… Current public health problems are attributable to the reduction of normal preventive medicine, waste disposal, water purification and distribution, electricity, and the decreased ability to control disease outbreaks.²⁹

By attacking infrastructure targets without direct military value, the US intended to pressure the Iraqi leadership by imposing widespread suffering on the civilian population. A US Air force planner stated that “we wanted to let people know, ‘we’re not going to tolerate Saddam Hussein or his regime. Fix that and we’ll fix your electricity.’”³⁰ Similarly, Brig. Gen. Buster Glosson, the architect of the 1991 air campaign, explained that bombing telecommunications was meant to “put every household in an autonomous mode and make them feel they were isolated. I didn't want them to listen to radio stations and know what was happening. I wanted to play with their psyche.”³¹