The dog days were creeping up on the Washington Navy Yard, a placid backwater in the District of Columbia. One sultry day last August Vice Adm. Francis R. Donovan, chief of the Navy’s Military Sealift Command, sat down with his senior staff to review the overnight cables. On the table in front of them lay the Defense Department’s morning intelligence briefing. Those rumors about Iraq invading Kuwait? Just rumors. No basis in fact. Discount them. Looking up, the admiral studied a TV screen across the room. CNN was broadcasting invasion bulletins from the Persian Gulf. Saddam Hussein already had Kuwait in his pocket. As the bad news spilled from the set, an aide waved at the intelligence report and said, “Whoever wrote “this’ should be out of a job.”
They all laughed nervously; Saddam had thrown everyone off balance. In retrospect, perhaps, the remarkable thing was how quickly the American government righted itself after the initial fiasco. In the months that followed, an odd symmetry shaped the unfolding confrontation between Saddam, who struck while the president was preoccupied with the reunification of Germany, the democratization of Eastern Europe and the perils of Mikhail Gorbachev. Although American intelligence tracked every belch of his tanks, no one got his intentions right in time to stop him. All the rounds that followed went to Bush. Weathering three frightening weeks in August, he deployed an American force in Saudi Arabia with astounding speed. He organized the industrialized democracies, the majority of the Arab League states and the United Nations into an allied coalition that put teeth into gummy commitments to collective security. Then he assembled his own invasion force, the largest since Dwight Eisenhower’s landings in Normandy. Saddam had counted on raking in a buccaneer’s easy prize. Instead, he bought himself humiliation and total defeat.
This is the behind-the-scenes story of that war. It opens with the earnest efforts of President Bush to cultivate Saddam as a force for peace in the gulf at the moment the dictator was nurturing his aggressive designs. It moves through the failure of the American intelligence network to predict Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, even though he had talked wildly of slicing off bits of the Arabian Peninsula. And it looks behind the placid surface of President Bush’s summer vacation in Maine to find his aides wondering nervously whether Saddam intended to invade Saudi Arabia, blow up its oilfields and challenge the United States to a war for which it was quite unprepared.
Then, the momentum shifts. Starting with a hopelessly outdated plan of battle, the Pentagon marshals a massive fighting force. Exhausted officers cobble together an intricate plant to move it halfway round the world–an exercise that overcomes some foul-ups and prospers from some deft deception. The president, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Secretary of State James Baker wage an enormously delicate campaign on three fronts–military, diplomatic and political–in a final effort to pry Saddam out of Kuwait peacefully.
When all efforts to bring the dictator to his senses fail, the deadliest air armada in history attacks Saddam’s military machine, bringing war to Baghdad’s doorstep. In the euphoria that follows the first air raid, it looks as if the war will be over sooner than anyone had dared hope. But Saddam proves to be a stubborn enemy, a man ready to defend his folly right down to his last soldier, no matter what it costs the ordinary people of Iraq.
The allies drop so heavy a rain of steel on military targets in Kuwait and Iraq that at times Air Force logistics people worry that they might run out of bombs. The pounding inflicts terrible casualties on Saddam’s Army, destroying the morale of regular units and his elite Republican Guard. As they dig in deeper and wait for a ground assault, the dictator sends execution squads to keep them in their trenches at gunpoint.
Saddam makes a series of terminal mistakes. Misreading Vietnam, he misjudges the will of Americans to fight. He deploys his own Army in fixed defensive positions and completely fails to anticipate the surprise flanking attack organized by Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, his shrewd field commander. In the final push, the allied coalition sends its troops over the top to deflate Saddam’s hubris and mangle his armed forces. It suffers astonishingly few casualties of its own. After a cease-fire 100 hours into the assault, the first American troops return home to a joyful welcome, leaving to Baker and the diplomats the intricate task of trying once again to bring peace and stability to the Middle East.
The road to war began with a severe case of American myopia. During the Iran-Iraq War, when Ronald Reagan restored diplomatic relations with Iraq, he also slipped a CIA station into Baghdad. But the job was to share intelligence with Saddam, not to snoop on him. Before last August the conventional wisdom within the U.S. intelligence community was that while Saddam’s goal was to control the gulf, it would take him about three years to position himself and he wouldn’t risk another war for perhaps a decade. “We had his intentions right a little over a year ago,” says CIA Director William Webster. “We did not, I suppose, accurately pin down the time frame in which he was prepared to act the way he did act.”
Instead, a bright veil of wishful thinking descended over American analysis of Saddam’s dark designs. After Iraq’s cease-fire with Iran, Joseph Wilson, a tough-minded young diplomat, arrived in Baghdad to work as U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie’s deputy chief of mission. “We were advised by our friends in the region that the Iraqi government was seeking an opening to the West and was seeking to moderate its behavior,” he recalls. The same friends advised Washington to encourage Saddam in that supposed course; incentives, it was said, would work better with him than sanctions.
The policy was consistent with what the United States had done successfully elsewhere, but did it misfire? Wilson now says, “It sure did.”
Diplomates in the Middle East now think Saddam began preparing for the invasion of Kuwait a year ago. At a meeting of the Arab Cooperation Council in Amman and at an Arab summit in Baghdad last year, he argued that the United States wanted to dominate the gulf, succor Israel and humiliate the Arabs, who could no longer count on Moscow to help them. He picked a fight with Kuwait over oil prices and OPEC production quotas, protesting that Emir Jabir al-Ahmad al-Sabah was keeping world prices low and crippling Iraq when it was struggling to pay $80 billion in war debts. Even after Kuwait agreed to cut production and OPEC raised oil prices, he didn’t let up. Some of his advisers pointed out that by combining the OPEC quotas of Iraq and Kuwait and by forcing prices up to $30 a barrel, he would rake in $60 billion each year, double his development budget and pay off his debts within four years. He would expand Iraq’s coastline from a mere 37 miles to 225 miles and wind up with a deepwater port. All he had to do was devour Kuwait.
A secret defense intelligence profile calls Saddam “irrational”; Israeli intelligence has concluded that he suffers from “a form of mania.” It is too glib to dismiss him as crazy, but some of his maneuvers during the year before the invasion were outlandish. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt told a U.S. senator that at one point Saddam took him aside and proposed a military coalition of Iraq, Egypt, Syria and Jordan. They would pool their weapons and carve up Kuwait and Saudi Arabia (with which Iraq has a nonaggression pact). Egypt would get $25 billion in spoils. Mubarak said no thanks, On another occasion, he offered Yemen two of Saudi Arabia’s southern provinces. He once told Jordan’s King Hussein that he could have the western part of the Saudi Peninsula. Then, according to Saudi sources, he suggested to Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd that the smaller countries of the gulf just “didn’t make sense” and declared that he was going to seize Kuwait. To the startled Saudi monarch, he added, “You take Qatar.”
His fellow Arabs didn’t take this seriously enough until it was too late. His Iraqi colleagues knew that their lives depended on letting Saddam be Saddam. They didn’t give him bad news. Instead of correcting his delusions, his advisers fed them. One of these counselors was Mohammad al-Mashat, Iraq’s ambassador to the United States. Chain-smoking in his gloomy embassy off Dupont Circle in Washington, al-Mashat fired off cables warning that the Americans, the Israelis and the media were out to get Saddam. “I’d begun to suspect that there was some kind of conspiracy to destabilize Iraq,” he says. Why else would tiny Kuwait be so stiff-necked?
Iraq and Kuwait had been playing cat and mouse for 30 years: Iraq clawed periodically, then Kuwait bought it off. In the latest spat between them, Iraq complained that Kuwait had stolen $2.4 billion worth of oils from its Rumaila oilfield by slanting wells down from the small Kuwaiti corner of the field. What’s more, Kuwait was helping to drive down world oil prices by exceeding its OPEC quota. Iraq demanded that Kuwait pay $13 billion to $15 billion in reparations. Saddam also accused the Kuwaitis of advancing their border 45 miles to the north while Baghdad was preoccupied with its war with Iran. Iraq wanted that border rectified; it wanted Kuwait to give up its corner of Rumaila and it wanted a long lease on two Kuwaiti islands that block unrestricted Iraqi access to the Persian Gulf. On top of this, Iraq demanded that Kuwait forgive $10 billion in war debts. Private negotiations between the two countries had begun, brokered by the Egyptians. The Kuwaitis were hanging tough, exasperated by Saddam’s ingratitude for billions of dollars of Kuwaiti aid during the Iran-Iraq War and reckoning he was still too weakened to launch another. Still, the Americans expected the dispute to be settled, as usual, by a few concessions on both sides. They thought Saddam could be reasoned with. Finally, when the game became more serious this year, Washington was still treating Saddam with extreme daintiness. Despite Iraq’s terrible human-rights record, its experiments with chemical warfare, its Exocet missile that killed 37 American sailors aboard the USS Stark and its pursuit of nuclear weapons, the administration kept trying to cultivate Saddam.
“It is better to be talking to this man than isolating him,” Glaspie argued. Many agreed. Last April, when Saddam harangued a group of senators about American plots, Sen. Robert Dole said, “Not President Bush. He told us yesterday he is against that.” “Sen. Alan Simpson said Saddam’s real problem was “conceited” Western reporters. Stroking didn’t slow Saddam down. And there in the background al-Mashat was doing some calculations. Did the United States send troops when Turkey invaded Cyprus? Did it interfere when China invaded Tibet? Did it intrude when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan? Why worry? Saddam tried a Big Lie of gargantuan proportions, telling everyone he had no intention of invading anyone, this year at any rate. And it worked.
On July 25 Saddam called Glaspie to his palace, her first meeting since her posting. He accused the State Department and CIA of waging economic war against him; he said the White House was plotting with Kuwait to keep oil prices down. “Yours is a society which cannot accept 10,000 dead in one battle,” he declared. He warned the United States to pick its enemies and friends wisely. If America brought pressure on him, he would respond with terrorism.
The ambassador, normally blunt, was also loyal, a diplomat who stuck by the book. And the book still called for cajolery. She said, “I have direct instructions for President Bush to seek better relations with Iraq.” When she said that the United States was concerned about Iraqi troop movements on Kuwait’s border, Saddam told her he would do nothing until he had more time to talk to fellow Arabs about the situation. He picked up the telephone in front of her and repeated the same lie to Egypt’s President Mubarak. She told the dictator she would go ahead with plans for a vacation.
Top aides to Baker later leaked word that the transcript of the meeting had shocked them. They did not say why no one had thought to change Glaspie’s instructions beforehand. “The blame had to shift down the line so Baker could continue to operate with credibility,” explains one Glaspie loyalist. “That’s the way the system is set up, and everybody understands it.” The system is different in Britain, for example. When Argentina took Margaret Thatcher by surprise and invaded the Falklands, Lord Carrington, her foreign secretary, took responsibility and stepped down. Under American rules, Glaspie too the rap. After her chat with Saddam the department cabled a message to Baghdad from President Bush saying that the United States would stand by its friends and protect its interests in the region. But the letter called for no demarche explicitly warning Iraq not to attack Kuwait.
Shortly before the invasion, an American KH-11 spy satellite picked up 100,000 Iraqi troops along Kuwait’s border. Saddam had tripled his forces. Satellite photos also showed a new “logistics train” that gave him everything he needed to invade. Noting that he had done nothing to disguise his moves, the U.S. intelligence community assumed it was a bluff to bully Kuwait into a more compliant oil policy. It was a classic case of making the intelligence fit the policy, instead of making the policy fit the intelligence. The CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research all concluded there was little danger.
In the days leading up to the invasion, the intelligence agencies sent President Bush a list of predictions. “No one had as their first choice the prediction that Saddam Hussein would attack,” says one intelligence operative who saw the reports. Prediction No. 1 was that Saddam was bluffing. Prediction No. 2 was that he might seize part of the Rumaila oilfield that straddles Iraq and Kuwait and possibly Warba and Bubiyan islands, two mud flats blocking Iraq’s access to the Persian Gulf. It was assumed that he would pull back from Kuwait once the islands were secured. “The line we kept hearing around here was that he’s just massed there along the Kuwait border to drive the price of oil up,” recalls one senior Pentagon officer. “If people were saying he’s for real and he’s going to invade, it wasn’t briefed to us as definite.”
Several sounder voices did predict an invasion, but they went unheard. One midlevel Mideast analyst at the CIA got it right, but his warning “got lost” in the opposing consensus. Marine Corps officers, scanning satellite photos that showed Iraqi air-defense units, tanks and artillery deployed forward at the Kuwait border, surmised that this could only mean an invasion, but they kept silent because of bureaucratic pressures. The Defense Intelligence Agency’s top analyst for the Middle East was convinced that Saddam would invade and warned the Senate Intelligence Committee that the dictator might not be bluffing. His own shop didn’t buy it. The DIA joined the pack.
While the Iraqis and Kuwaitis gathered in Jidda for a final haggle over oil and borders, the House Foreign Affairs Committee summoned John Kelly, the assistant secretary of state covering the Mideast, to explain what was going on. “If Iraq, for example, charged into Kuwait for whatever reason, what would our position be with regard to the use of U.S. forces?” chairman Lee Hamilton inquired. “That, Mr. Chairman, is a hypothetical or a contingency question, the kind which I can’t get into,” Kelly replied. Was there a treaty committing the United States to use force? Kelly said there was none. That was true, though the United States had sent its warships to protect Kuwait’s oil tankers during the most fiery days of the Iran-Iraq War. However, not since 1950, when Dean Acheson announced that South Korea was not within America’s Asian defense perimeter, had the State Department left a friendly nation so open to attack. Still, given the intelligence about Saddam’s intentions that Kelly was receiving, his performance was not surprising. Arab leaders insisted that Saddam would not invade; even Kuwait had relaxed its military alert.
Two days later Kelly sat in his sixth-floor office at the State Department glaring at Ambassador al-Mashat. “Our national interest is at stake,” the Iraqi began. “We are forced to take military action.” Furious, Kelly cut him off. He demanded that the Iraqis pull out. Al-Mashat looked at him and said nothing.
The invasion of Kuwait took less than a day. The closest American forces were on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, 2,500 miles away. There, a squadron of five MPS-2 cargo ships held enough ammunition and equipment to supply a brigade of 16,500 Marines for 30 days of combat. But in June, as Saddam’s plans were taking shape, one of the ships was sent home to Norfolk, Va., on routine maintenance. In late July, as the crisis was coming to a boil, another vessel, the USS Fisher, set off for Norfolk on the same mission. When Saddam broke into Kuwait, the Fisher was rounding the southern tip of Africa. As it had been for months, the United States was headed in the wrong direction.
The vanguard of the Iraqi Army smashed across the border of Kuwait at 2 a.m. on Aug. 2. Roaring past the customs shed and a gas station at Abdali, the Iraqis sped down a six-lane superhighway for Kuwait City 80 miles away. In the darkness, the crump of artillery shells and the rattle of machine-gun fire awakened Kuwaitis. They looked out their windows to find Saddam’s jets and helicopter gunships buzzing the city. Rockets torched the Dasman Palace of Emir al-Sabah. One step ahead of Saddam, he jumped into his own chopper and fled to Saudi Arabia. Tanks shouldered up to the central bank, the repository of much of Kuwait’s cash and gold bullion. Troops assaulted the Ministry of Information, where Kuwaiti state radio and television had their studios. “Hurry to our aid,” a voice cried over the air. Then the transmitter went dead.
Seven thousand miles and eight time zones to the west, President Bush was sitting in the family quarters at the White House. At about 8 p.m. his phone rang. Brent Scowcroft, the national-security adviser, was on the line. The first CIA intelligence reports suggested that Saddam was not intent on any deep penetration; it soon became clear that he meant to occupy Kuwait. After a round of crisis meetings, the president caught a few hours’ sleep. At 5 a.m., Scowcroft sorting through the immediate problems: how to persuade allies to expand the freeze on assets, how to quiet the Israelis and how to enlist the help of the Soviet Union.
Both men saw in the invasion a challenge to the post-cold-war leadership of the United States. That morning, before a meeting of the National Security Council, Bush twice told reporters that he had no plans to use American troops. But once the media were gone, the president looked at his top political and military advisers and said, “What if we do nothing?” The result would be catastrophic. Saddam had hijacked an entire nation. “This must be reversed,” Bush said as they adjourned. At that moment, the president has told a few close aides, he wasn’t quite sure what he was going to do to make Saddam stand down.
In his first public appearances after the invasion, Bush seemed a bit nonplused. On a trip to Aspen, Colo., he began to stiffen in his resolve. By chance Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was also in Aspen. She had received news of the invasion the night before at U.S. Ambassador to Britain Henry Catto’s mountain guest house. She understood Saddam. “He must be stopped,” she told the president. They spent two hours talking. Thatcher argued that the only way to convince Saddam that he would not get away with the invasion was to send troops immediately.
The special relationship between the United States and Britain provided a base upon which Bush could build a coalition against Iraq. “It was not that some magical, restorative medicine was applied that day to the president’s rubber spine,” recalls one senior British aide who was there. “But the Rubicon between what happened and a much weaker response was crossed that after afternoon.”
Back in Washington the next morning, Bush convened the National Security Council in the Cabinet Room. “What are our interests?” he asked. His counselors reviewed the main ones: the danger to oil supplies, Saddam’s program to develop nuclear weapons, the security of Israel, the threat to the credibility of American leadership now that only one superpower was left on its feet. The dangers were real. The most intelligent way to confront them was harder to define.
Traditional tactics in the Middle East called for rich Arabs simply to buy off bandits. Tradition clearly wasn’t going to work this time. That afternoon, in the E Ring inner sanctum of the Pentagon, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, sat down at a small conference table with Cheney and Powell. The ambassador said that the House of Saud doubted the United States meant to do all it would take to drive Saddam back. He reminded them that during an earlier Mideast flare-up, Jimmy Carter had sent only a dozen unarmed F-15 fighters to defend the kingdom. Only a fool would accept such tokens this time. The royal family was already arguing over the wisdom of accepting American military support. King Fahd wasn’t interested in a puny show of force that would only goad Saddam. Was the United States really willing to stop him?
Cheney and Powell showed the prince the classified U.S. military-operations plan that the Pentagon had worked up to defend Saudi Arabia against an attack from Iraq. The package had been on the shelf for several years, but it did call for deploying two and one-third U.S. division, an air wing and a carrier task force. The president had not approved the deployment, Cheney told Bandar, but he was leaning toward it. Bandar said if the United States meant business, he thought the royal family would welcome American troops.
At 5 p.m. the president reconvened the National Security Council. Having been embarrassed by its predictions on the invasion, the CIA was taking no chances. Director William Webster now argued forcefully that Saddam intended a second invasion. Together with Defense Department analysts, the agency reported that Iraq’s elite troops were moving south toward the Saudi border. The CIA’s guess was that Saddam meant to take over the oilfields of eastern Saudi Arabia and that the Saudis would not fight back.
A few senior political and military advisers were not convinced, but the president was. He said he had concluded that Saddam intended to take Saudi Arabia. The threat to oil supplies was unmistakable. Americans in Iraq and Kuwait were in danger. The United States could not condone a military adventure that would rearrange the MIddle East and jar the global economy. Sensing that the commander in chief was ready to use force, Powell advised him to “draw a line in the sand.” He said the United States did not have to send many troops, but it had to send enough “for him to know that if he attacks Saudi Arabia, he attacks the United States.” Bush asked the Joint Chiefs to meet him the next morning at Camp David to discuss the options. At the end of the meeting, he said, “I believe we go.”
In Camp David’s Aspen Lodge next morning, the president and his men set the course that ultimately led to war. Jim Baker had already put the diplomatic machine in motion. The invasion had caught him heading for a hunting trip in Mongolia. Wheeling around, in a quick burst of diplomacy he persuaded the Soviets to condemn Saddam and cut off his supplies of Soviet weapons. The administration’s good working relationship with the Soviet Union isolated Iraq in a way that would have been impossible 10 years earlier. The next step was to get the United Nations to put some teeth behind its condemnation of the invasion by imposing economic sanctions and a naval embargo on Iraq. Baker left Camp David early to press on with this successful effort.
Well before Baker had to leave, Schwarzkopf, the Army commander responsible for the Middle East, laid the military possibilities before Bush and his men: what troops were available, how quickly they could get to the gulf, the most likely hitches and delays. He warned the president that sending planes and ships would not be enough. He would have to deploy ground forces. For a moment they discussed asking Mubarak to do the job with Egyptian troops, then dropped the idea. Saddam would not have been impressed. They had to get American boots on the sand.
In the middle of the session, the war council got a jolt: “a very authoritative report” from a friendly head of state that the Saudis had decided to reject American troops. The president rose, left the room and placed a call to King Fahd. He didn’t mention the tip he had just received. Instead, he told the king that he was firmly committed to defending Saudi Arabia, that he didn’t want any permanent military bases, that he would withdraw all American troops whenever the king thought the right time had come. Then, turning Bandar’s arguments on Fahd, he advised the king not even to ask for troops if all he wanted was a token force. The call seemed to help, though the king remained shaky. Bush returned to the meeting and said that the Saudis still seemed willing to accept troops.
What level of force to apply was the critical issue. The president’s military advisers warned him that it would take months before the United States could fight Saddam on the ground without suffering huge casualties. They outlined a few ideas for pushing the dictator out of Kuwait but said the cost in lives would be terrible. “This is the Super Bowl,” said Powell. “Don’t count on the easy ways.” To dislodge the dictator, Bush would have to do more than order a gunboat to the gulf and lob in a few shells. Powell told the president that if he meant to use troops at all, he should send as many as he could muster. The president eventually settled on the plan favored by Powell and Schwarzkopf: a massive deployment of American air, sea and ground forces to defend the Saudis.
As a realist, Bush knew that it might ultimately take a war to defeat Saddam, but at first he though diplomacy and economic sanctions might do the job. His initial military deployment was defensive. He agreed to send a trip wire force of 2,300 men from the 82nd Airborne’s lightly armed “ready brigade,” to be protected by Navy carrier plans and Air Force F-15s. A 16,500-man Marine amphibious brigade with heavy armor aboard its pre-positioned ships would steam in next, followed by 19,000 troops of the 101st air mobile division, good tank killers and up to 12,000 troops of the 24th heavy armored division, trained in desert warfare. No one recommended an offensive to liberate Kuwait, nor did the president order one. The only offensive action envisioned in the original plan was to use air power to neutralize Saddam if he attacked Saudi oilfields.
The next day the Saudis were still dithering. The president had asked King Fahd to accept a visit from Cheney, and the king had tried to beg off, saying it made more sense to send a lower-level emissary so it wouldn’t look bad if anything went wrong. Then, in another flourish of The Big Lie, Saddam broke a promise he had made to brother Arabs to withdraw almost immediately from Kuwait (though he meant to install a puppet regime to do his bidding). This galvanized the king. After a 14-hour delay, he invited Cheney to come ahead.
Iraq only grew more bellicose. That weekend Saddam sent two divisions around Kuwait City toward the Saudi border, and the Iraqi Air Force began to load its bomb racks and to deploy forward. As Cheney winged eastward, the Saudi royal palace was convulsed with infighting. The king spent two hours talking to the secretary of defense. CIA operatives used maps and satellite photos to prove how Saddam had lied about his buildup. Crown Prince Abdullah said the Saudi military could cope with Iraq and that as long as Kuwait existed as a country, an Arab solution was possible. The king dismissed that notion. “Kuwait,” he said, “is a country whose only territory is in hotel rooms in Saudi Arabia.”
The administration wanted Saudi Arabia to cut off Iraq’s oil pipeline across its territory. This was a clear act of war; it was sure to enrage Saddam. The Saudis, more used to caviar than combat, had to be sure the United States would deploy enough force to keep him at bay. Sources in the Middle East and in Washington differ over the exact wording of the assurances Fahd wanted. But they say the king demanded that if there were a fight, Saddam would “not get up again.” This could be taken as an early commitment to total war. Cheney repeated the assurances Bush had made over the telephone. Finally, the king turned to the secretary of defense and said “We accept.” As one senior American recalled later, the Saudis were terrified. The president went on television to tell the country that he was sending troops to the Middle East. “This mission is wholly defensive,” he said.
Although he had just ordered 125,000 troops to the gulf, the president wanted to project a business-as-usual image. Eager to avoid the impression Jimmy Carter had given of being trapped in the White House during the Iran hostage crisis, he went to his summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine, for a three-week vacation. He also believed that Ronald Reagan’s sentimental feelings for American hostages in Lebanon had led him into the Iran-contra debacle. With 3,000 Americans and 1.5 million other foreign nationals now trapped in Kuwait and Iraq, he faced a far larger hostage crisis of his own. For weeks he didn’t even use the word hostage in his public statements. But there was another gauge of his feelings: his deliberate display of the near-manic athleticism that had always marked his vacations–nonstop golf and horseshoes, iron-man jogs, marathon sets of tennis, relentless trolls for bluefish aboard his speedboat Fidelity. When he was president, he was president, he said, and when he was “recreating, he was recreating.”
The surface calm at Kennebunkport was highly deceptive. For the better part of three weeks, the president’s advisers had to fight off panic as they waited for Saddam’s next move. Iraqi fighters darted in and out of Saudi airspace, testing defenses. Satellite scans indicated that Saddam was reinforcing his Army and moving closer to the Saudi border. When Bush concluded that a quick naval blockade was the only way to enforce U.N. sanctions, he had no way of knowing whether Saddam would shoot back. Anxieties crescendoed the first time the Navy fired a shot across the bow of an Iraqi tanker. “It was the scariest moment of the crisis,” says one of the president’s men. “I would sit on my bed looking out the window down the Kennebunk River and I could almost see those destroyers on the horizon. At any moment I thought we were going to war.”
During those critical weeks, Saddam could have advanced in any direction he chose: down the gulf coast to the Arab emirates, through Jordan toward Israel. “We had nothing there to speak of,” admits one senior administration officer. “We were scared to death he’d figure out that he didn’t have to hold the [Saudi] oilfields; he just had to blow them up. There was no way we could have stopped him.”
The dictator hesitated, and Bush was able to keep to the defensive. At the time, both Scowcroft and Baker were advising him to give diplomacy and the U.N. sanctions plenty of time to work. One morning in late August Bush invited Scowcroft to go fishing with him. They spent four hours talking. What if sanctions didn’t work? How long should they stick to them? How long would the support of world leaders and the American people hold up? What should they do about the hostages? They couldn’t let emotions dictate their actions. They tried to put themselves in Saddam’s position. They calculates his next moves. Bush caught two bluefish, Scowcroft hooked only one. But the national-security adviser talked eloquently about diplomacy and a new world order, and Fidelity brought the president back to the dock determined to avoid a shooting war. He thought his chances of succeeding were no better than 50-50.
On Aug. 4, Colin Powell hurried back from Camp David to the Pentagon, where he briefed his generals and admirals on the decision to confront Saddam with American troops. About 50 warships–including the aircraft carriers USS Independence and USS Eisenhower–were sent steaming toward the gulf to begin enforcing the embargo. A top-secret order was flashed to Schwarzkopf’s headquarters in Tampa, Fla., directing him to develop detailed plans for deploying forces. The next day Powell phoned Gen. Hansford T. Johnson, chief of the U.S. Transport Command. “Here’s what we are thinking about,” he said: the biggest, fastest, farthest military deployment in the country’s history. Just 24 hours later, Col. Rick Fields sat in the Military Sealift message center at the Washington Navy Yard scanning an astonishing stream of orders. Hotfooting it to his office, he pulled the secret Mideast deployment plan out of his file safe. It was hopelessly out of date. “Oh my God, how are we going to do this?” he thought. “We don’t have a plan.”
The mission that led to war with Iraq started in chaos. The Pentagon did have a plan (1002-88) that spelled out the way the United States could fight a war in the Persian Gulf, but its basic assumptions were badly outdated. The scenario envisioned the United States and the Soviet Union waging a two-front world war in Europe and Southwest Asia; the gulf fight was a sideshow. The plan assumed that the president would be able to give the Pentagon 30 days’ warning to get two-and-a-third divisions up and rolling. Saddam hadn’t given them any time at all. The news wasn’t all bad, however. During the summer of 1989, after the Joint Chiefs concluded that a superpower clash was unlikely, Schwarzkopf had begun to work to turn 1002-88 into an updated 1002-90 plan. By good luck, in June and July of 1990, he had run an elaborate war game–a “command post exercise,” or CPX in military jargon–that projected Iraq as the adversary. The test led him to conclude that in a scrape he would need four-and-a-third divisions to keep Saddam at bay.
At Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Va., word had gone out after the invasion “to lean forward and green up” for action. On Aug. 6 orders came to deploy two squadrons of F-15 Eagles to secret airfields near Riyadh and Dhahran. The objective was to establish air superiority, so the 82nd Airborne wouldn’t land naked. The next afternoon, hundreds of cars lined up at Langley’s West Gate. Word had gone around, and ordinary Americans from Hampton Beach were there to see the First Tactical Air Wing off. As the F-15s roared into the sky, “It wasn’t, “Let’s go kick some butts’,” recalls one Air Force major who watched. “It was, “My God. What are we doing?'”
Those 48 F-15s were the first Desert Shield forces to be landing in Saudi Arabia, and at the time the Air Force was afraid they might have to shoot their way into the Middle East. Accordingly, their mission was timed to land at dusk; Iraqi pilots don’t like night flying. “Welcome to Saudi Arabia,” a crewman said to one of the first pilots to arrive. “You’re going to be a hostage in three hours.” The pilot didn’t laugh.
Arriving with the First Tactical Air Wing, the paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne hit Saudi Arabia in combat gear outmanned and outgunned. The brigade was armed with light antitank weapons and M-551 Sheridan armored reconnaissance vehicles. It had no tanks of its own, and none arrived for a week. For the first 100 hours of the operation, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Carl Vuono agonized over the vulnerability of the 82nd. If Saddam had broken across the Saudi border, and if the paratroopers had not been able to hold their enclave at Dhahran, Pentagon insiders believe, they would have been pulled out. The defeat would have been humiliating, but there was no acceptable alternative. “We would not have sacrificed them,” says one knowledgeable Army officer. “They would have been heroes, but they would have been dead heroes.”
For the first month, Desert Shield was a test of Schwarzkopf’s agility and nerve and the president’s ability to bluff. “Schwarzkopf was terrified about our vulnerability,” recalls an aide. After the invasion the DIA compiled an updated order of battle listing Saddam’s main assets: a million-man Army with eight years of combat experience against Iran. The Iraqis had seized Kuwait three times faster than the DIA had believed possible. Then the CIA took another scan and reported that the Iraqis had 1,000 more tanks 2,000 more armored personnel carriers and 250 more combat aircraft than had been publicly estimated. And they were pouring into Kuwait.
Schwarzkopf had to improvise a credible defense from whatever he could scratch up. At one point he phoned the Navy to ask what Iraqi targets the USs Wisconsin could hit with its sea-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles. The answer came back: zero. The Tomahawks must be programmed with electronic terrain maps to home in on their targets. The CIA and DIA, preoccupied with monitoring the Soviet Union’s withdrawal of conventional forces in Eastern Europe, hadn’t programmed their satellites to make such maps for Iraq. The maps didn’t arrive until the end of August.
What Schwarzkopf needed to cope with Saddam could be summed up in one word: more. The main thing was to get the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division with its 216 M-1A1 tanks into the country. The original Desert Shield plan called for the delivery of all cargo in 120 days; the Navy was able to cut the time to 95 days. While he was waiting, he tore up tidy computer projections and ordered all the tank killer he could lay his hands on: more air Force fighters and A-10 close-support planes, more Apache choppers with their Hellfire missiles. To protect his increasing troops and growing bases against Saddam’s Air Force and Soviet Scud B missiles, he wangled more Patriot antiaircraft missiles.
The Pentagon orchestrated a stream of public announcements of units deployed in the gulf; the statements left out the fact that only elements of these units had actually been sent. Saddam had no satellites or spy planes to watch the buildup; he got much of his intelligence from CNN. So Schwarzkopf made sure television crews were out each day shooting the giant C-5 Galaxy transports that landed every few minutes in Dhahran.
American law barred any attempt to assassinate Saddam. But early in Desert Shield, an Iraqi defector told CIA operatives that Saddam had hired foreign contractors to build several dozen underground bunkers for his family and friends. The agency reviewed bales of satellite photos taken over Baghdad throughout the 1980s and identified many of the sites.
Moving the troops, weapons and supplies was harder than anything done at Normandy. The distances were greater, the amount of cargo huge. There The had been no time to prepare. But by the end of August the cargo planes, flying as many as 300 missions a day, had shuttled 72,000 passengers and 100,000 tons of cargo to the gulf. The 24th Mechanized Division arrived in the gulf in early September. And for the first time, Schwarzkopf could breath easier.
The United States still occupied a defensive posture against Saddam. The president, Baker and Scowcroft hoped the sanctions would bring the dictator to his senses. Sanctions and the naval blockade had cut off 90 percent of Iraq’s imports and exports. But the war with Iran had taught the country how to absorb misery, and Saddam was willing to let his countrymen suffer to keep his troops supplied. Toward late September, the CIA sent a secret assessment to the White House. The agency predicted that “in the short term or medium term,” sanctions would not drive the dictator from Kuwait.
The report did not lead Bush, Baker and Scowcroft to give up entirely on sanctions, but it strengthened the hands of Powell and Cheney, who had always been skeptical about their effectiveness. The alternative was to go beyond the defense of Saudi Arabia and prepare to move on to the offensive. At the beginning of Desert Shield, the Pentagon had estimated that if the president ever chose to go on the attack, Schwarzkopf would need two more heavy divisions, perhaps 100,000 additional troops. The original thinking was that the Marines and the allies would pin Saddam’s Army on the Kuwait border while Schwarzkopf’s XVIII Corps would sweep around Kuwait in a flanking maneuver and surround the Iraqis. But in the intervening two months, the tactical landscape had changed. Saddam had stripped his defenses on the Iranian border, a move that took the Pentagon by surprise. He moved hundreds of thousands of reinforcements into Kuwait. The Iraqis built roads, improved supply lines and dug protective earth berms for their tanks; they implanted antiaircraft defenses and enlarged minefields. They also rigged Kuwait’s oilfields and refineries with plastic explosives.
Saddam withdrew his crack Republican Guards to southern Iraq and reinforced them with 150,000 troops. The Iraqis at the Saudi border were poorly trained cannon fodder. Behind them Saddam arrayed tougher mechanized and armored units. Then came the Republican Guards. The results was a layered, politically sophisticated array. “His defense was designed to attrit us,” says one Pentagon officer. “Every American you kill, it’s another family protesting the war. If he kills enough of us, the president has to stop the war.” Saddam though he had found Schwarzkopf’s strategic weak point–American public opinion.
Saddam replaced light infantry units along the coast of Kuwait with heavy armored division; he also moved heavy armor to the neutral zone between Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The line that Schwarzkopf had meant to sweep around was now dangerously long. Even if XVIII Corps succeeded in its flanking movement, it would not trap the Republican Guards. They could still counterattack the Americans in Kuwait, inflicting punishing casualties and a political backlash. To neutralize the threat, Schwarzkopf needed a new plan requiring more troops. He would have to launch a much wider flanking attack, beginning farther west, in order to cut off the Republican Guards. For this he would need VII Corps from Germany, which could field two-and-a-third armored divisions and an armored cavalry regiment, plus the First Mechanized Infantry Division from Fort Riley, Kans.: “The Big Red One.”
During the weeks that followed, Schwarzkopf sent a preliminary outline of his ideas to Powell. Then, on Oct. 21, Powell flew to Saudi Arabia to talk to him. Their meeting was crucial. Schwarzkopf argued that the United States had to be imaginative and daring if it was going to avoid another Vietnam. Army planners in the Pentagon decided he would need VII Corps and other outfits. Powell flew home and sold Cheney on a plan that they began to call “the enhanced option.” Powell limited knowledge of the enhanced option to no more than 25 senior officers. The planning team beefed up Schwarzkopf’s original request. It dispatched three more aircraft carrier battle groups and a battleship, the Second Marine Expeditionary Force and Fifth Marine Expeditionary Brigade. It also alerted three Army National Guard combat brigades.
The escalation added up to 200,000 troops. If the president accepted it, he would be doubling his bets against Saddam. What happened next was instructive. Powell and Schwarzkopf handled the military end of the plan much better than the civilians in the administration handled the politics. On Oct. 24 Cheney went to S-407, the soundproof room near the dome of the Capitol, to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He said nothing about the buildup. On three network talk shows the next morning, however, he hinted that the United States might be sending as many as 100,000 more troops to the gulf. Later, word leaked that the Pentagon was considering canceling the early rotation of troops in the war zone. When angry aides on the Armed Services Committee phoned to find out what was going on, they were told that nothing new was afoot; that no one had ever put a lid on the number of troops it might take to curb Saddam. On Oct. 30 Cheney and Powell offered a more candid briefing to the president, who had been told earlier about Schwarzkopf’s thinking. They said phase two of Desert Shield, the new buildup, would take until about Jan. 15 to complete.
The next day–Halloween–Bush, Baker, Cheney, Powell, Scowcroft and chief of staff John Sununu met at the White House. Many people had told the president Saddam did not believe the United States would ever use force against him. It was essential to establish “a credible military threat.” Bush approved the enhanced option. The decision moved the United States from the defense to the offense, though it didn’t look that way at the time. The president himself did not think the escalation would necessarily lead to war. What he hoped was that a doubled show of military power would bluff Saddam into backing down.
Everyone in the room agreed that they must inform the members of the coalition about the change in strategy. And how would the shift play at home? They were at a very sensitive juncture. They decided not to tell the country until after the November elections.
The secretary of state was wearing khaki and cowboy boots. For 90 minutes his helicopter flew across endless white dunes to an outpost of the First Cavalry Division in Saudi Arabia. On landing, Baker stepped out into whirling sand so fine it instantly powdered his eyebrows and stuck in his throat. He found 4,200 American troops waiting for him under the hot sun. “These are the guys who are going to get chewed up,” thought one of his aides, suddenly depressed. The secretary gave a short pep talk. “This is a long, long way from home, but I think Americans are home wherever their principles are,” he said. Then he plunged among the men and women of the First Cav, shaking hands, thanking them. One after another they said, “Let’s get this over with and go home.”
By November the administration faced a difficult political problem: how to send a tougher message to Saddam without rousing the home-front opposition by making it look as if the president were hungry for war. The United States would lobby force against Iraq if Saddam didn’t comply unconditionally with U.N. resolutions demanding his withdrawal from Kuwait. The NSC and Defense were worried about this tack: they feared that the United Nations might grant the authority, only to withdraw it later. But Baker pointed out that if the United Nations passed a war-powers resolution, it would make it hard for Congress not to do the same.
Baker’s trip thus had two objectives: to bind the leaders of the coalition to the expanded goals of phase two and to persuade the Soviet Union to support an authorization of force by the United Nations.
In Moscow, Baker met Gorbachev. The Soviet leader had sent an emissary of his own to Baghdad twice: Yevgeny Primakov, an old-school Soviet Arabist who did not want to lose Moscow’s longstanding special relationship with Iraq. Would Gorbachev side with Primakov, or with Shevardnadze, who saw things Baker’s way? Gorbachev invited Baker to his “dacha’ outside Moscow. He was pessimistic about the chances for peace unless they stepped up the heat. He made no commitments. But he held two fingers together and said, “We have to stay like this.” Later in Moscow, Shevardnadze said certain situations might indeed require the use of force.
Two days after the elections, Bush finally announced his decision of late October: he was doubling his troop commitments in the gulf. The ensuing uproar over the buildup astonished him. “The public thought it meant war was inevitable,” recalls one top Bush aide. “We saw it as part of the Big Bluff.” The polls showed that most Americans wanted to stay with economic sanctions even if they failed to prod Saddam out of Kuwait by January or February. Only one in four wanted to go to war over Kuwait.
One of the angriest men on the Hill was Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. In August, when Powell briefed Nunn and other senators on the initial deployment, he said the idea was to use air power with land support; he said nothing about large numbers of ground troops.
Nunn ordered up public hearings before his committee that swiftly kindled a far-ranging national debate on the crisis. Among the first witnesses were former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former secretaries of defense, who urged that sanctions should be given a better chance. This made it politically safe for Democrats like House Speaker Thomas Foley and Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, who had strong doubts about using force, to go on the attack. The hearings kindled a run of op-ed criticism and the first national debate on the crisis.
Bush returned from a Thanksgiving visit to the gulf in a subdued mood. He had studied the eyes of men and women who might have to die, and aides saw a change in him. He grew short with the staff. He read Amnesty International’s account of Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait. Aboard Air Force One he kept a copy of Martin Gilbert’s “The Second World War.” He told aides he had noticed that when HItler’s Death’s Head regiments had invaded Poland in 1939, they had done things “hauntingly similar” to the crimes committed by Iraqi troops during the invasion of Kuwait. He became convinced that Saddam was so evil that anyone would be morally justified in bringing him down. When the Rt. Rev. Edmond Browning, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, cam to the Oval Office to urge patience on him, he said, “You should read the Amnesty International report. “Then’ you tell me what I should do.”
Meanwhile, Baker was nudging the U.N. Security Council toward approving the use-of-force resolution against Saddam. There was one stumbling block. The Soviet Union insisted on a deadline, thinking it would help. Baker wanted no deadlines, but Moscow insisted. He then suggested Jan. 1, Moscow came back with Jan. 15, the United States concurred. On the last day of November, the Security Council approved the resolution.
Although Baker had won, the administration once again found itself trying to execute a somewhat contradictory strategy. It had to quiet domestic rumbling at the very moment it was trying to stir Saddam’s anxieties. The U.N. resolution set off more domestic war jitters. To calm them, Bush tried a new diplomatic gambit: he invited Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz to Washington and he offered to dispatch Baker to Baghdad. Saddam responded by accepting the invitation for Aziz; then he topped Bush’s gesture by freeing all the hostages. The result was a muddle. The president and Baker hoped the hostage release indicated that Saddam might yet yield on the rest of the U.N. resolutions. While they could not budge from the United Nations’ demands for unconditional compliance, they had been hinting to Saddam for months that “after’ he withdrew from Kuwait, some of his preoccupations could be addressed, like a Mideast peace conference covering the Palestinians and new border arrangements with Kuwait. That was a far as they would go on the crucial question of “linkage.” But at no time did Saddam show any interest in so open-ended a bargain, and he sent world that he wouldn’t receive Baker in Baghdad until the very eve of the U.N. deadline. It seemed clear to the administration that he was trying to stall, not to talk.
Four days before Christmas, passing up his annual turkey shoot down in Beeville, Texas, Bush left for a 12-day retreat at Camp David. For a while he took to the phone, calling Gorbachev and other foreign leaders. He conducted his own opinion survey of staffers, members of Congress and personal friends. The he hung up and took some time to think. “He was communing with his private God don this,” recalls a close adviser. “And when he came back it was done.” He had made peace with the possibility that Saddam would not back down, that he would have to enforce the U.N. resolutions, that he would have to go to war.
On New Year’s Day, Bush invited a half dozen of his closest advisers to the White House. They met in the family quarters upstairs. The president listened as they considered the polls and brainstormed the debate that was sure to erupt when Congress reconvened. They wondered about the Israelis. They considered the seams and cracks in the international coalition. No one talked much about Desert Shield. The next day Bush walked into the first senior-staff meeting of the New Year. When he started talking about the gulf, it became clear that whatever doubts he may have had about starting a war, he had exorcised them at Camp David. He said he had come to terms with the problem, sorted it all through. “For me it boils down to a very moral case of good versus evil, black versus white. If I have to go, it’s not going to matter to me if there isn’t one congressman who supports this, or what happens to public opinion. If it’s right, it’s gotta be done.”
He offered Saddam one last chance: he would send Baker to meet Aziz in Geneva, a gesture designed to reassure Congress, which was about to debate its own war-powers resolution. The world hoped for a breakthrough. But the president had no faith in Aziz. He viewed him as Saddam’s lap dog who might not tell Saddam what Baker had to say. To make sure there could be no mistakes, he wrote Saddam a letter. Aziz refused to accept it. The insult turned out to be a political gift. It took the onus for intransigence off the president. Three days later Congress voted on the use of force: the margin in the Senate was only five votes. One could almost sense a sigh of relief from the losing as well as the winning side: no one wanted to contemplate the constitutional spectacle of a president going into battle against the expressed wishes of the Congress.
As the Jan. 15 deadline approached, the old Bush was back, friendly, confident, almost eerily serene. He still found it hard to believe that Saddam could look at the firepower Cheney, Powell and Schwarzkopf had arrayed before him and not believe the president meant to use it. He shook his head at the way Saddam was willing to sacrifice his people and his country for vanity alone. But that was not Bush’s responsibility. His own course was now absolutely clear to him. From the beginning, Powell, the commander in chief’s top soldier, had told the troops, “If we go in, we go in to win, not to fool around.” Saddam failed to get the message. The road to war had come to an end. With the thunder of jets and the lightning of missiles, Desert Shield exploded into Desert Storm.
