In My Time (30 page)

At around 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday, December 19, we got word that Guillermo Endara would agree to be sworn in and restored to power by the United States. This was crucial. If he hadn’t agreed, we would have had to rethink our entire operation. Later that night I headed down to the National Military Command Center, where Tom Kelly and the joint staff team presided. Kelly had set up a small conference room where Powell and I could work. We were close enough to monitor what was happening, but we had a quiet space away from everyone else if we needed to talk.

Shortly after midnight, Just Cause was under way. As reports came in, I stepped out of the conference room every half hour or so to use a secure line to the White House. My first call of the evening was to Scowcroft, but the president asked that I call him directly after that. He wanted as much information as we could give him, and as quickly as possible.

Most of the news that first night was good, although I did have to report the loss of four Navy SEALs, killed at Patilla airfield. We also failed to find Noriega. He wasn’t seen until December 24, when he arrived at the Papal Nunciatura, the residence of the pope’s representative in Panama. He stepped out of his car, carrying two AK-47s, strolled into the protected grounds, and requested political asylum. From this point forward, his capture was a certainty, the date of it hurried along by a plan devised by our troops to blast heavy metal music at earsplitting levels toward the Nunciatura. On January 3 Noriega walked out and surrendered to our forces. Operation Just Cause was a success.

CHRISTMAS IS A FAMILY time in the Cheney household. Liz and Mary, in their twenties by the time of Just Cause, would always make it home, and we would get up early on Christmas morning to open presents, eat a big breakfast, and start cooking the turkey—an effort that I customarily led. But Christmas 1989 was different. I flew to Panama on Christmas Eve, landing in blackout conditions for security, while Lynne, Liz, and Mary stayed in McLean under blackout conditions of their own. The power, notoriously fickle in Northern Virginia, went out, inspiring them to try to cook Christmas dinner in the fireplace—an effort that they have never chosen to repeat.

My host in Panama was Lieutenant General Carl Stiner, who had helped develop the plans for Just Cause and as commander on the ground done a superb job of seeing to their execution. On Christmas Day, we traveled from Panama City to Fort Amador, Rio Hato, Colón, and Patilla, and as I met with the troops who had participated in Just Cause, I stressed the importance of their achievement. “Democracy exists in Panama today because Panamanians voted for it,” I said, “and each one of you has stood by them.” I wanted them to know how proud their nation was of them, and I tried to convey my own high personal regard:

Every day that I’m in office as Secretary of Defense, my admiration increases for the men and women who have chosen to serve this nation. This thought is brought home to me each time I walk out of my
door into the halls of the Pentagon. In the stairwell facing my office is a saying from the prophet Isaiah. It is a fitting reminder of what you mean to America.

Isaiah said, “I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And Isaiah said, “Here I am. Send me.”

In the face of an unknown peril and in a dangerous world, each of you has answered, “Send me.” I am proud to be with you all today.

THOSE OF US ON the National Security Council had come to our jobs with a lot of experience. I had been White House chief of staff and a member of Congress, in the leadership; Jim Baker had been chief of staff and Treasury secretary; Brent Scowcroft had been NSC advisor to President Ford, and Colin Powell likewise to President Reagan. But even with all that background, we had made mistakes when we first started working together. The lesson here is that while experience matters, it’s not just each individual’s experience that’s important, but experience working together as a team. We learned a lot from our missteps during the failed coup as well as from our success with Just Cause. And I believe it was because we’d had real experience managing crises together that we were able to respond as well as we did eight months later when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

THE MOST MOMENTOUS EVENT of 1989 happened in Berlin. In October I had been there, and I was feeling greater optimism than I had earlier about the sincerity of Mikhail Gorbachev and the historic nature of the changes we were seeing. But even as thousands of East Germans were finding ways to flee to the West that fall, the Berlin Wall was still standing. The East German government was still trying to force people to live under a system and society they would not freely choose. “The biggest symbol of the inadequacy of the government in East Germany is the continued presence of the Wall,” I said in West Berlin, and I noted that “the sooner it comes down, the better off it will be for everyone.”

It is hard now to describe the elation when the Wall did come down in November 1989. I remember the nightly coverage of people who had been trapped for years in the communist bloc suddenly able to stream across the border. I remember Leonard Bernstein at Christmas conducting Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in both East and West Berlin. The words of “Ode to Joy” were changed so that it became “Ode to Freedom.”

As I watched the celebrations on TV, I kept looking for a glimpse of my good friend Dave Nicholas. He’d been best man at my wedding, chairman of my first campaign for Congress, and was now my representative to NATO, and I knew that he and his family were in the middle of those happy crowds somewhere. Dedicated to the idea of freedom in Eastern Europe, Dave would later become an ambassador from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe to Ukraine, where he helped in the movement for democratic reform. Before he died unexpectedly in Kiev in 2005, he would see the triumph of the Orange Revolution and thrill to it, as did we all.

After forty years, we were seeing the Iron Curtain lift and the Soviet threat diminish, and it was happening in a peaceful and promising way. I had no doubt that the United States military was the most effective single reason for the transformation we were witnessing. The victory of the West in the Cold War still stands as a preeminent historic example of peace achieved through strength.

But there was another dimension as well. Ronald Reagan’s determination that people should live in freedom was part of it. His clear call in 1987 at the Brandenburg Gate—“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”—deservedly lives in history, as do the words of Pope John Paul II: “Be not afraid.” When the pope visited his native Poland in 1979 he took that biblical message behind the Iron Curtain, where it inspired freedom-seekers such as Lech Walesa. I would have the honor of an audience with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican in January 2004, nine months after U.S. and coalition forces had liberated Iraq. I knew the pope had not favored our action; nevertheless, when everyone else had left the room, he took one of my hands in both of his and said, “God bless America.”

C
old War military planners looked at the Persian Gulf and envisioned a threat coming from the Soviet Union. As they saw it, the United States needed to be ready for Soviet tanks rolling south through Iran, headed for the oil-rich Arabian Peninsula. But as the Cold War was ending, Admiral Bill Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the first few months of my term, decided that with a diminished Soviet threat, the Persian Gulf needed less attention, and in 1989 he published guidance for the military services that made the Gulf into an afterthought as far as America’s strategic priorities were concerned.

I disagreed with this assessment. I thought it was too early to discount the Soviets entirely and a mistake to overlook the possibility of a threat arising from within the region. In January 1990, I put out revised guidance, making it clear that the Arabian Peninsula had high priority and that we should plan for a crisis in the Gulf. It came sooner than anyone—except, perhaps, Saddam Hussein—could have imagined.

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SADDAM WAS IN A fury in the spring and early summer of 1990. He threatened chemical warfare, swearing to “let our fire eat half of Israel if it tries to wage anything against Iraq.” He lashed out at Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates for driving down the price of oil and thus thrusting “their poisoned dagger into our back.” His foreign minister and deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, zeroed in on the Kuwaitis for encroaching on Iraqi territory, stealing Iraqi oil, and ungratefully refusing to forgive loans made to Iraq at a time it was battling Iran and spilling “rivers of blood in defense of pan-Arab sovereignty and dignity.” The accusations were harsh, but what followed was still a shock. In mid-July, Iraqi tanks began moving toward Kuwait, and by July 19 our satellite photos showed three heavy armored divisions within striking distance of the Kuwait border.

Word of what was happening was still not public when I received two visitors in my office, Moshe Arens and Ehud Barak. Arens, slight and studious, was the Israeli defense minister. General Barak, a future Israeli prime minister, was deputy chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces. A round-faced, unassuming man, he was also his country’s most decorated soldier. On July 20, the two of them took seats at the small round table in my office, and pulling papers and maps out of their briefcases, they presented evidence of the advanced stage of the Iraqi nuclear program. Access to European technology, they believed, was helping the Iraqis speed completion of a uranium enrichment facility, and we had a narrow window of time in which to stop the program.

The Israelis had long considered a nuclear-armed Iraq a mortal threat, and in 1981 had bombed the reactor at Osirak, dealing a severe setback to the Iraqi program. I took very seriously what Arens and Barak had to say—particularly since they described a program much further advanced than the one portrayed in our intelligence assessments. After the war, we would find out that the Israelis had been closer to the truth than our own intelligence community was.

Barak and Arens were concerned about the growing danger of war in the Middle East and wanted to beef up their technology to counter the threat of ballistic missiles launched at Israel from Iraq. They had
developed their own system, the Arrow, comparable to the U.S. Patriot antimissile system, but they needed U.S. assistance, particularly in the areas of radar and a more effective early warning system. This was a conversation to which we would return with increased urgency in the coming months.

As Saddam continued to mass elements of the Republican Guard—his best, most experienced units—on the Iraq-Kuwait border, we heard from many quarters that he was bluffing, saber-rattling to get the Kuwaitis and perhaps the United Arab Emirates to pay him off. Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and other Arab leaders assured us that they would handle what they viewed as an intra-Arab dispute and urged us not to take any steps that would provoke Saddam. We got similar advice from the State Department and most of the intelligence community.

But at the end of July, when Saddam began moving his artillery forward, it looked increasingly as though he would cross the border and attempt to take Kuwait. On Wednesday, August 1, 1990, General Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander in chief of U.S. Central Command, which is in charge of most of the Middle East, came to the Pentagon to brief me. I’d met Schwarzkopf, a big, physically imposing man, apparently with a temper to match, but I didn’t know him well. I took a close look at him, wanting to be sure that he was the right man to command our operations through what lay ahead. One of the most important things I could do in a crisis was make sure we had the right people in charge.

Schwarzkopf knew his brief, but his message was not reassuring. Saddam would probably go into Kuwait, he said, perhaps to seize the Rumaila oil field or to take two disputed islands just over the border, Warba and Bubiyan.

Later that night, I was at home in McLean when I got a call from my military aide, Admiral Bill Owens. The Iraqis had crossed into Kuwait.

By the time the National Security Council met the next morning, Iraqi troops had rolled across the desert and into downtown Kuwait City. They had another line of tanks moving south toward the Kuwait-Saudi
border. The White House press pool was brought in at the top of the meeting and reporters wanted to know what the United States was planning to do. Was the president going to use military force? “I’m not contemplating such actions,” President Bush said. I suspect he responded in the way he did because we hadn’t even begun to discuss the invasion. Was this a significant strategic event? Did it matter from the standpoint of the United States if Iraq had taken Kuwait, a small country out in the Persian Gulf? In the discussion that followed, Colin Powell indicated that he wasn’t convinced that it did, but it sure seemed important to me. On a White House notepad I made notes about the enormous economic clout that Saddam would gain from Kuwait, how its wealth would enable him to acquire increasingly sophisticated capabilities, chemical weapons, nuclear weapons, and ballistic missiles. It was also clear to me that we needed to make a strong statement of commitment to Saudi Arabia, whose oil fields Saddam was surely thinking about. After taking Kuwait, he controlled 20 percent of the world’s oil reserves. The eastern province of Saudi Arabia would give him 45–50 percent.