This passage was taken from “The Opening Guns of World War III: Washington’s Assault on Iraq” by Jack Barnes, the national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party (US), on March 30, 1991.
The most concentrated single bloodletting was organized by the U.S. command in the final forty-eight hours of the invasion, as Iraqi soldiers fled Kuwait along the roads to Basra. While publicly denying that Iraqi forces were withdrawing from Kuwait, Washington ordered that tens of thousands of fleeing Iraqi soldiers be targeted for wave after wave of bombing, strafing, and shelling. These were people who were putting up no resistance, many with no weapons, others with rifles packed in bedrolls, leaving in cars, trucks, carts, and on foot. Many civilians from Iraq, Kuwait, and immigrant workers from other countries were killed at the same time as they tried to flee.
The U.S. armed forces bombed one end of the main highway from Kuwait city to Basra, sealing it off. They bombed the other end of the highway and sealed it off. They positioned mechanized artillery units on the hills overlooking it. And then, from the air and from the land they simply massacred every living thing on the road. Fighter bombers, helicopter gunships, and armored battalions poured merciless firepower on traffic jams backed up for as much as twenty miles. When the traffic became gridlocked, the B-52s were sent in for carpet bombing.
That was the killing zone. You couldn’t move down the road. You couldn’t move up the road. You couldn’t move off the road. You couldn’t surrender, wave a white flag, or give yourself up. The allied forces simply kept bombing and firing - at every person, jeep, truck, car, and bicycle. One allied air force officer called it a “turkey shoot.” …
This slaughter, along with similar unreported operations during Bush’s heroic hundred hours, ranks among the great atrocities of modern warfare. It was the Guernica, the Hiroshima, the Dresden, the My Lai of the U.S. war against Iraq.
Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked by a reporter to provide an estimate of the number of Iraqis killed as a result of combined allied bombing and ground operations. …. Powell replied: “It’s really not a number I’m terribly interested in.”