A professional study of the Persian Gulf War, just completed by Israel Defense Force historians, is said to be critical of U.S. Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the highly acclaimed supreme commander of the coalition forces that ousted Iraq from Kuwait.
But whatever conclusions the IDF’s history department reached will be kept secret for the next 50 years, under standing regulations.
Although the study is supposed to be for IDF use only, copies have been sent to the U.S. Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
The study is titled “U.S. Conduct of the War Against Iraq — The Military Dimension.”
Col. Benny Michelson, who heads the IDF History Department, disclosed that a multivolume study of the 1956 Sinai Campaign has also been completed. He said the military historian who did the research had been given access to unpublished documents in British and French military archives.
The Sinai Campaign was an effort by Britain and France to topple Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in order to regain control of the Suez Canal, which Nasser had just nationalized.
Israel cooperated by invading Sinai, giving the British and French a pretext to land troops in Egypt.
But their project coincided with the Soviet occupation of Hungary and a presidential election campaign in the United States. Powerful pressure from a furious President Dwight Eisenhower forced the invaders to quit Egyptian soil.
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