In My Time (36 page)

We also sent special operations forces into western Iraq to work behind enemy lines to hunt down the Scud launchers. As theater commander, Norm had ultimate sign-off for anyone operating in his area of responsibility, and at first he did not want the special operators there. He shared some of the suspicion of others in the regular army that our special operations forces were overrated. I disagreed. I’d spent time learning about what they could do when I was in Congress, and after I was briefed by Wayne Downing, who commanded our joint special operations command and was an enormously capable officer and a true gentleman, I was convinced he and his men had an important contribution to make to our effort to shut down the Scud attacks. They did not disappoint. Once we combined special operations raids with air patrols, the number of attacks fell dramatically, and although they increased slightly as the Iraqis adjusted to our tactics, the Israelis did what we asked of them and stayed out of the war. It wasn’t until after the war that I came to understand what a near-run thing it had been. A senior Israeli official told me that at one point Israeli commandos were loaded into helicopters ready to fly into Iraq, but their mission was canceled after one of the phone calls I made reporting on the extent of our efforts to go after the Scuds. I emphasized that since we already had people on the ground, Israeli intervention could endanger American forces.

THE SOVIETS HAD BEEN helpful in the early days after the Iraqis invaded Kuwait and had not opposed our efforts to liberate that country. However, once we launched operations, they began trying to arrange a cease-fire on terms we could not accept. They urged that we pause our bombing in response to a vague promise from Saddam to comply with UN Security Council resolutions. We knew that a pause would only give him time to rearm and regroup and we could not accept
it. We had also been clear that Saddam had actually to withdraw from Kuwait, not simply make promises to do so.

On January 28, a little less than two weeks into the air campaign, the new Soviet foreign minister, Alexander Bessmertnykh, was in Washington for meetings with Jim Baker. I had the sense that the Soviets, their empire on its last legs, were desperate to make themselves seem relevant by attempting to negotiate a cease-fire between us and the Iraqis. It also seemed that they wanted to show the world they could prevent their former client state, Iraq, from being on the receiving end of a massive military defeat. To his credit the president bore the brunt of the Soviet efforts to negotiate a cease-fire, patiently responding to call after call from Gorbachev himself. But on January 29 Jim decided to issue a joint statement with Bessmertnykh on Iraq without clearing it with the White House or showing it to us at the Pentagon. The statement was a problem because it suggested that we would in fact agree to a cease-fire in exchange for a
promise
from Saddam to pull out. The statement also suggested a linkage between a cease-fire and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Although the language of the joint statement suggested this wasn’t a change in our policy, it was in fact a change and caught all of us by surprise. It was released on the day of the president’s State of the Union address, and it caused a flurry of questions from the press about our cease-fire conditions.

Jim, to his credit, apologized for the foul-up and said later it was one of his biggest mistakes as secretary of state. We all make mistakes. I had made my own with the Soviets two years earlier when I’d publicly predicted Gorbachev’s demise shortly after I became secretary of defense. I do think, though, that Jim was more willing to try to find a negotiated settlement than the president was. And the president held firm.

ON FEBRUARY 7 Colin Powell and I flew to the desert. The trip gave us a chance to see the troops—and what an inspiration they were. We visited the 101st Airborne Division, and the atmosphere inside the tent where we gathered was electric. Colin had once commanded the second brigade of the 101st, and when he reached in his pocket and pulled out
his coin—a souvenir he still had from his time in command—the place just went wild.

We also had a session with pilots flying missions over Iraq. One pilot, who had been hit by Iraqi antiaircraft fire while flying an A-10, a 1970s-era tank killer, showed us the huge hole in his airplane’s wing and gave us a blow-by-blow of how he’d been hit and survived and made it back to base. I never tired of listening to the troops talk about their experiences. They were very, very good.

Killing Iraqi tanks was a key mission for our air campaign. In early February, some of our F-111 pilots had discovered that their planes, developed for long-range bombing missions during Vietnam, had an advantage when it came to finding and taking out Iraqi tanks. The F-111s were equipped with an infrared targeting system. Many of the Iraqi tanks had been hidden under sandbags or behind berms. Our air force planners discovered that often the Iraqis weren’t turning them off at night, and even if they did, the heat the tanks had absorbed during the day would be released as night temperatures cooled. In either case, the F-111s could see the tanks, hotter than the surrounding sand, on their infrared systems and take them out. We started destroying a good number of Iraqi tanks this way. The pilots called it “
tank plinking
.”

Although the method was successful, the kills were often difficult for the CIA to track using satellite photos. This meant their estimates of numbers of tanks destroyed varied widely from the CENTCOM estimates, which had the advantage of gun-camera footage from the F-111s and other planes firing on the tanks. Since we had agreed our aim was to degrade Iraq’s tank force by 50 percent before we launched the ground war, the difference in estimates mattered. At one point CIA Director Bill Webster went to the president to tell him we had not met our target. This led to a meeting in Brent’s office with Powell, Webster, Mike McConnell and me. We compared our estimates and convinced Scowcroft and the president that CENTCOM had it right and that we were, in fact, ready to begin the ground war.

On our February trip to the desert, Powell and I spent eight hours in meetings with Schwarzkopf and his team to get up to speed on preparations
for launching the ground invasion.

In Saudi Arabia with Generals Powell and Schwarzkopf preparing for a press conference (Photo by David Kennerly)

They walked us through the status of the air campaign and updated us on the bomb damage assessments for each category of strategic targets and the status of Iraqi forces in the Kuwait Theater of Operations. They briefed us on the current deployment of our ground forces, logistics issues, and our ability to guard against the possible use of chemical weapons against our troops.

One of the key pieces of information Powell and I needed from Schwarzkopf was a date when he would be ready to begin ground operations. He told us what he thought made sense—sometime around February 21, with a window of three days. When Powell and I returned to Washington, we met upstairs in the White House with President Bush in the Yellow Oval Room and gave him the word.

Those of us in charge of the war effort knew that the air campaign had succeeded in destroying much of Saddam’s air force and sending much of the rest of it fleeing to Iran. We had also degraded his army, but we still thought we’d have a fight on our hands. And there were some very troubling predictions: An expert at the Brookings Institution said between a thousand and four thousand Americans were going to die. Others warned that ten thousand Americans would be killed.

A question in our minds all along had been whether Saddam would use chemical weapons. We made sure our troops had the gear for that, and we also made sure there was plenty of footage of our guys practicing the drill, putting those suits on. We wanted to be certain Saddam knew our guys would be much better prepared to deal with any chemical attack than his own troops would be. The president, Jim Baker, and I also made clear that the military had a wide range of options that could be used against Saddam Hussein if he used chemical weapons. I had warned that Saddam “needs to be made aware that the President will have available the full spectrum of capabilities. And were Saddam Hussein foolish enough to use weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. response would be absolutely overwhelming and it would be devastating.”

After the war, Saddam’s foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, said that our statements, which Iraq had interpreted as threats of nuclear retaliation, had deterred Iraq
from using its WMD
. General Wafiq al Sammarai,
who headed Iraqi military intelligence during the Gulf War, said in an interview that some of the Iraqis’ Scud missiles had been loaded with chemical warheads, but they were not used, “because the warning was quite severe and quite effective. The allied troops were certain to use nuclear arms and the price will be
too dear and too high
.”

ON FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 22, largely in response to continued Soviet efforts to broker a cease-fire, President Bush went into the Rose Garden and gave Saddam an ultimatum. He said the Iraqis would have until noon on Saturday to begin an immediate and unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait. Forty-five minutes before the deadline expired the next day, Gorbachev called the president again with yet another proposal that fell short of immediate unconditional withdrawal. No, the president told Gorbachev, a deadline is a deadline.

ON FEBRUARY 24, THE morning after the ground war started, Lynne and I went to St. John’s Church near the White House. President and Mrs. Bush were there and I knew he would be anxious for news from the desert. I passed him a note that said, “Mr. President, things are going very well.”

With President Bush in the White House residence briefing him on the first hours of the ground war in Operation Desert Storm, Sunday (Official White House Photograph)

He invited Lynne and me to come up to the White House residence after church, and as we sat in the second-floor sitting room, I told him that there had been no major glitches so far. The campaign was going according to plan. Resistance was light all across the front. The most significant problem we were having was dealing with the Iraqis who were surrendering in droves to our forces.

Time
magazine had published an excellent war map that I laid out on the president’s coffee table. It showed the Iraqi forces arrayed along the Kuwait-Saudi border, the Republican Guard deployed on the Iraq-Kuwait border, and the general positions of the U.S. Army and Marines and our allies. It also showed our impressive naval assets: the aircraft carriers
Saratoga, Kennedy, Theodore Roosevelt,
and
America
in the Red Sea; the carriers
Midway
and
Ranger
and the battleships
Missouri
and
Wisconsin
in the Persian Gulf. Using a pen as a pointer, I walked the president through what had happened overnight.

The 1st and 2nd Marine divisions had breached the first line of Iraqi defenses and were now working through the second line. The first brigade of the 101st was approximately one hundred miles inside Iraq, at Forward Operating Base Cobra. The second brigade would be at Cobra within two to three hours. The third brigade would close on FOB Gold sometime during the morning. The 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment was twenty miles into Iraq and had met no resistance. The VII Corps, which was scheduled to attack that night, was in position and had begun cutting through the berm the Iraqis had erected as a barrier. The 1st Cavalry, scheduled to go at H+26, might go early.

The Egyptians had crossed into Kuwait against light resistance. The Saudis on the coast were also meeting light resistance. Air operations were continuing as planned. The only major losses reported were two Apache helicopters that collided, but both crews were reported to be okay.

It was encouraging, I noted, that in these first hours when we had expected some of the heaviest fighting, the resistance had been so light. But after laying out all this good news for the president, I cautioned that these were only first reports, and we had not yet encountered the Republican Guard, Saddam’s best troops.

By the next afternoon, February 25, we began to get word that Saddam was promising to withdraw in exchange for a UN-brokered cease-fire. Although we could see some of Saddam’s troops heading toward the Iraqi border and out of Kuwait, others were continuing to engage our troops. Saddam had not given up, but he was clearly hoping for a UN cease-fire that would allow him to retreat while keeping most of his forces intact.