In reflecting on these events and my participation in them with the benefit of some distance, I was reminded of something I learned in both the political and the governmental service I was privileged to render to President Ford, President Reagan. and President Bush: Politics and policy are inextricably linked. It’s only through politics (in its larger sense – as opposed to specific electoral campaigns) that we can transform philosophy into policy. This is particularly true in geopolitics, where the difference between success and failure is often measured by the ability (or lack thereof) to understand how political constraints inevitably shape the outcome of any negotiation.
We sometimes overlook the fact that most foreign leaders are themselves politicians, frequently elected or members of some ruling party. These senior foreign officials view their problems, and opportunities, through political eyes. To persuade them, it is often helpful to put oneself in their shoes – to determine how to help them explain justify, or even rationalize positions to their colleagues and publics. Foreign political leaders also respect counterparts who can work domestically in order to deliver internationally.
I had the good fortune to be part of a Bush national security team that consisted of a group of experienced, collegial peers who had worked together before and who liked and respected one another. That’s not to suggest we didn’t disagree. We often argued like crazy -and loudly. It’s also no secret that both Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and national security adviser Brent Scowcroft were more generically cautious about changing some policy approaches than I, which led to major disagreements on arms control, Soviet-American relations, and the Middle East. But our differences never took the form of the backbiting of the Kissinger-Rogers, Vance-Brzezinski eras, or the slugfests of our national security teams during the Reagan years. There was no trashing of colleagues at the upper levels, and very little leaking to the press.
By contrast, I do not think President Reagan’s foreign policy apparatus served him the way it should have. It was often a witches’ brew of intrigue, elbows, egos, and separate agendas. I can’t remember any extended period of time when someone in the national security cluster wasn’t at someone else’s throat. The National Security Council frequently ran amok, as the Iran-contra scandal documented in embarrassing detail. And sometimes when the President decided a major policy issue, his subordinates would ignore his wishes and pursue their own policy schemes.
Saddam Hussein is a man of many defects, and fortunately for America and the rest of the civilized world, an atrocious sense of timing is one of them. A more prudent despot would surely have chosen a moment other than August 2, 1990, to launch his invasion of a helpless neighbor. On that very day, the President of the United States was preparing to meet with the Prime Minister of Great Britain, an iron lady not known for counseling half measures in time of challenge. The American Secretary of State was in Siberia for talks with his Soviet counterpart. Senior diplomats from both countries were finalizing preparations for two days of long-scheduled joint policy-planning talks in Moscow.
Confronting tyrants is never easy work, but this fundamental tactical miscalculation by Saddam had enormous strategic ramifications. It gave us a critical running start in shaping our response to the crisis. Without this fortuitous advantage, we might never have been able to mobilize the will, both international and domestic, to counter his blatant aggression.
As the world now knows, it was a disaster for Saddam, a triumph for American diplomacy and military might, and a centerpiece of George Bush’s legacy. Saddam’s brutal invasion of Kuwait also provided the unexpected opportunity to write an end to fifty years of Cold War conflict with resounding finality. Beyond binding Moscow to a Western coalition, our efforts in the Gulf opened up new avenues that “augur well for the future of the Arab-Israeli peace process,” as I told Syria’s President Assad, and led to the October 1991 Mideast peace conference in Madrid.
Soviet participation was crucial to our coalition. When I arrived in Moscow from Siberia, Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze met me on the steps of the terminal, and as reporters shouted questions at us, we went directly to an austere second-floor conference room. A joint statement that I had proposed, including an arms embargo on Iraq, was “right and correct,” Shevardnadze said, and Gorbachev agreed. But two aspects worried him: a statement might put the 8,000 Soviet citizens in Iraq and an additional 900 in Kuwait at risk, and might also anger other Soviet clients in the Arab world.
I began my response by saying that we too had citizens at risk in Iraq but that the joint statement needed to be substantive, not cosmetic, which was why the disputed language about an arms embargo was so critical. “If we can’t do this, what the press and the international community are going to say is, well, the United States and the Soviets got together and issued a statement that reaffirmed what each has already done. What’s the point?”
“Khorosho,” Shevardnadze said. “Okay, I can see it’s important to you.” Much later, after he became President of Georgia, I learned from him that he had not had Gorbachev’s okay on the arms-embargo language, and just did it on his own because he thought it right.
The policy toward Iraq that President Bush had inherited from the Reagan administration was grounded in a determination to thwart the expansionist aspirations of the revolutionary government of Iran. Four months before President Reagan took office, Iraq had invaded Iran, beginning a war that would last for eight years, end in stalemate, and devastate both nations. But the war provided the Reagan administration a convenient vehicle by which to contain Iran – helping Iraq. In 1983, after Saddam Hussein broke with the infamous terrorist Abu Nidal, the Reagan administration removed Iraq from the list of nations engaged in state-sponsored terrorism. A year later, diplomatic relations were resumed after seventeen years, the United States began extending credit guarantees that enabled Baghdad to buy American grain, and military intelligence was shared with the Iraqis.
Our strategic calculation changed irrevocably on April 2, when Saddam explicitly threatened Israel in a speech to the General Command of his armed forces. For the first time, Saddam confirmed that Iraq possessed chemical weapons and vowed that if he were attacked, “By God, we will make fire eat up half of Israel.” These remarks set off alarms throughout the Western world and in Middle East capitals, and were quickly denounced by the administration.
On July 25, as Iraq ominously moved forces toward the Kuwait border, I left Washington for Jakarta to begin a week of consultations in Asia. Later that day, April Glaspie, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, was summoned to the Foreign Ministry in Baghdad and, without warning, was ushered into Saddam’s office for an extraordinary two-hour audience. In her analysis, Glaspie contended that joint military maneuvers we had agreed to at the request of the United Arab Emirates had created the desired effect. Saddam was now worried about American intentions and anxious to avoid antagonizing the United States further. “I believe we would now be well-advised to ease off on public criticism of Iraq until we see how the negotiations develop,” she concluded.
We still hoped the crisis could be defused. On July 28, the NSC staff drafted, and State routinely cleared, the following presidential message to Saddam: “I was pleased to learn of the agreement between Iraq and Kuwait to begin negotiations in Jeddah to find a peaceful solution to the current tensions between you. The United States and Iraq both have a strong interest in preserving the peace and stability of the Middle East. . .” It’s clear this message was not sufficiently firm and, coming three days after Glaspie’s meeting, may have been interpreted by Saddam to mean that we weren’t overly concerned.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to argue that we should have recognized earlier that we weren’t going to moderate Saddam’s behavior, and shifted our policy approach sooner and to a greater degree than we did. At the least, we should have given Iraqi policy a more prominent place on orr radar screen at an earlier date. And while I wish we’d focused more attention on Iraq earlier, given what happened, I remain unpersuaded that anything we might have done, short of actually moving armed forces to the region, would have deterred Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait – and neither the Kuwaitis, the Saudis, the Soviets, nor the Congress would have supported that course before August 2.
During this period the administration was preoccupied with the fundamentally more important strategic shift in East-West relations and global politics brought on by the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Furthermore, without exception, our friends in the region consistently argued that Saddam was only posturing and that confrontation would simply make matters worse. Even the Israelis believed that Saddam was bluffing to bully the Kuwaitis into economic concessions. Ironically, most of our allies privately worried throughout the spring and summer of 1990 that the United States might overreact to Saddam’s new aggressiveness!
The ultimate irony, of course, is that if we had succeeded in deterring Iraq’s aggression, the West would now be debating how to contain an emboldened Saddam with a substantially stronger military machine and a nuclear and chemical arsenal even more lethal than Western intelligence had imagined.
By October, American deterrence had succeeded in the Gulf. If Saddam Hussein had been planning to invade Saudi Arabia, the President’s initial deployment of troops in August had erased that threat.
Indeed, a few weeks after the end of the Gulf War, I was told that on the eve of his invasion, Saddam sent a personal message to Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran’s leader, describing his intention of living in peace with Iran on land which he referred to as “our 840-kilometer seacoast.” Saddam was describing a new frontier extending from present-day Iraq to the United Arab Emirates – which, of course, would include Saudi Arabia’s Persian Gulf seacoast.
Still Saddam remained in Kuwait. In mid-October, Colin Powell telephoned me and said, “I’d like to have a little private chat with you.” So on October 19, the Joint Chiefs chairman and I met for forty-five minutes in my office. Since he had asked that the meeting be private, I dispensed with my custom of informing Dick Cheney of such contacts. Some have suggested that Powell and I knew that we were both opposed to the use of force and that he was soliciting my help in opposing any such course of action. This is not the case and, in fact, this meeting produced a consensus that both a more aggressive military and diplomatic policy was required if there was any hope of getting Iraq out of Kuwait.
As it turned out, Powell and I were pretty much of one mind. I agreed with his concern that existing policy was “drifting.” Our military deployment had contained Saddam’s designs on Saudi Arabia but would not be sufficient to persuade him to leave Kuwait. It was obvious to both of us that more would be required in order to do that, and absent some further provocation by Saddam, our choices boiled down to three: just keeping all options open, which would perpetuate the drift; consciously opting for a policy of declared containment, in which the sanctions would be strengthened and U.S. military forces would remain in the Gulf indefinitely but in an essentially defensive role; or building a deliberate offensive capability sufficient to eject Iraq from Kuwait if necessary.
We favored the third course. “We have the capability to put together a real offensive force,” Powell said. This should persuade Saddam Hussein we were serious. Such a force augmentation would require at least four more divisions of ground troops. But we both felt that we probably couldn’t survive politically if the United States were taking 75 percent of the casualties in the event of war. A force buildup should include the deployment of a substantial number of additional forces from other countries, particularly Arab states. This expanded force could be ready to fight in three months. Powell agreed with my belief that the military option had to be linked with a diplomatic offensive to authorize the use of force if necessary.
On October 31, the day after a two-hour meeting in the Situation Room, the President officially approved a force augmentation of 200,000 troops to Saudi Arabia, subject to Saudi approval. This deployment effectively doubled U.S. troop strength and would provide the heavy amor capability required to fight a ground war – and win.
Although some have charged that the force augmentation was tantamount to deciding to go to war, the President and his senior advisers still hoped our buildup would persuade Saddam to leave peacefully – that our coercive diplomacy would work. In retrospect, the war may seem to have been a clinical and relatively straightforward affair. At the time, however, we were confronted with very sobering casualty figures, estimated by the Pentagon to be in the thousands; the specter of possible chemical and biological attacks; and a war expected to last for months, not days.
I flew to cold and snowy Moscow on November 7, the seventy-third anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, for what turned out to be thirteen hours of talks with Shevardnadze and Gorbachev. I knew that in a few hours the President would be announcing our force augmentation, so I began by giving Shevardnadze the details as a courtesy. I laid out the case for a use-of-force resolution, but Shevardnadze wasn’t persuaded the time was right. Threatening force might make Saddam a hero, he thought. I reminded him that our Arab partners were adamant that hostilities couldn’t begin after mid-March, when the holy season of Ramadan began, and thereafter, we would be constrained by the searing summer heat. As a practical matter, further delay might force us to postpone military action into the fall. “The likelihood of being able to sustain the coalition that long is very suspect,” I argued.
“I understand,” Shevardnadze said as soon as I finished. “The only thing that’s critical, then, is that if you’re going to use force, you have to know that you will succeed. We learned from Afghanistan. Don’t listen to military men who give you these simplistic views that you’ll succeed . . . Are you really sure you’ve thought this through?”
“I want you to hear from our military,” I replied. “I’m going to bring Howard Graves in. It’s a measure of our relationship that I’m going to bring him in and have him talk to you. We’re doing something that we never would have done before.” The room was cleared of everyone except the interpreters, and General Graves, an expert from the U.S. Joint Chiefs staff, delivered a highly detailed classified briefing on our war plan. Graves was careful not to be too specific about what our weapons could do in battle, but his presentation of our tactical concept for conducting the war was nevertheless an extraordinary exchange of military information from one former foe to another. In another era, it would have been the most far-fetched thing imaginable that a high-ranking U.S. officer would be authorized to brief the Soviet Foreign Minister on war plans against a Soviet client state.
Shevardnadze seemed absorbed by the detail and the confidence of Graves’s brief. He had only a single question: “Aren’t you concerned about the Scuds?” he wondered. “No, we’re not concerned about them at all, because they’re just not very accurate,” Graves replied. It took a moment for the enormity of Graves’s mild-mannered insult to sink in. The Foreign Minister had just been informed that one of his military’s best missiles was a worthless piece of junk. Shevardnadze was silent for a moment, then broke out into a broad grin. He’d at least been persuaded we knew what we were doing.
(It was not long afterwards, ironically, as the USSR was collapsing, that Boris Yeltsin provided me with an unprecedented outline of the Soviet nuclear-missile launch system, and of the system he envisioned for the Commonwealth of Independent States then taking its place. Only he and Russian Defense Minister Yevgeny Shaposhnikov would have briefcases with the launch codes, though the other “nuclear” leaders would get “hot line” telephones. “The leaders of Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Byelorussia do not understand how these things work, that’s why I’m telling only you,” he said. “They’ll be satisfied with having telephones.”)
The genesis for my meeting with Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz lay in a proposal President Bush had been pondering for three weeks: a face-to-face attempt to avert war in the Gulf. This was easily the biggest surprise of the entire conflict and arguably the most controversial. It confounded our friends, delighted our critics, and fueled whispers about a weakening of America’s resolve.
The truth is that I hoped Aziz would be swayed by what he heard from me about U.S. and coalition military capabilities, but I was under no illusions. Most of the very pessimistic opening statement I delivered at a press conference after the meeting was in fact drafted the day before our talks.
With the photo opportunity out of the way, we sat down to work in the hotel’s Salon de Nations, room D. “Our objective is for you to leave Kuwait,” I told him. “That’s the only solution we’ll accept. And if you will not do that, then we’ll find ourselves at war, and if you do go to war with the coalition, you will surely lose. This will not be a war of attrition like you fought with Iran. It will be fought using the means and weapons that play to our strengths, not to yours. We have the means to define how the battle will be fought, and you do not . . . "
I then made a point “on the dark side of this issue” that Colin Powell had specifically asked me to deliver in the bluntest possible terms. “If the conflict involves your use of chemical or biological weapons against our forces,” I warned, “the American people will demand vengeance. We have the means to exact it . . . This is not a threat, it is a promise. If there is any use of weapons like that, our objective won’t just be the liberation of Kuwait. but the elimination of the current Iraqi regime. and anyone responsible for using those weapons would be held accountable.”
The President had decided, at Camp David in December, that the best deterrent of the use of weapons of mass destruction by Iraq would be a threat to go after the Ba’ath regime itself. He had also decided that U.S. forces would not retaliate with chemical or nuclear weapons if the Iraqis attacked with chemical munitions. There was obviously no reason to inform the Iraqis of this. In hopes of persuading them to consider more soberly the folly of war, I purposely left the impression that the use of chemical or biological agents by Iraq could invite tactical nuclear retaliation. (Recent events and U.N. statements have demonstrated that this calculated ambiguity regarding how we might respond is at least part of the reason there appears to have been no confirmed use by Iraq of chemical weapons during the war.)
Instead of reacting to the substance of my remarks, Aziz began with a demand for respect. As though plagued by some inner demon of national inferiority, he felt compelled to insist that Iraq was not governed by fools. He would return to this theme constantly throughout this meeting. “The present leadership will continue to lead Iraq now and in the future,” he concluded. In this, of course, Aziz was right. But our threat to the regime in Iraq was conditioned on its use of weapons of mass destruction, which we do not believe occurred.
Although in many respects it was anticlimactic, I was frankly nervous about the start of ground operations. I remember looking across the Potomac River to Arlington National Cemetery. I wondered how many more brave young Americans would soon be lying beneath those hallowed slopes.
There had been no internal debate on the necessity of a ground war to achieve both our war aims and our political aims. But the ground assault, launched in the predawn darkness of February 24, was a phenomenal success. Iraq’s forces were routed, and American casualties were gratifyingly light. Within forty-eight hours, organized resistance was crumbling throughout the theater of operations.
On the morning of February 27, we gathered in the Oval Office to assess the situation. The general view was that we had achieved both our war and political aims. I remember Colin Powell saying with a trace of emotion, “We’re killing literally thousands of people” -Iraqis trying to escape along the “highway of death.” The President telephoned General Norm Schwarzkopf, who agreed our war aims had been achieved. That night, the President announced a cease-fire after 100 hours of fighting.
The administration’s policy in the weeks immediately following the cessation of hostilities was designed with one overriding strategic concern clearly in mind: to avoid what we often referred to as the Lebanonization of Iraq, which we believed would create a geopolitical nightmare. But there was a strong emotional component at play as well – and this reality was most apparent in the President’s decision, endorsed by all his senior military and political advisers, to end the war when he did, instead of pursuing it for another few days. Of the criticism leveled at our decision making during this period, this has the least merit. The fact is conveniently overlooked that the President’s decision to order a cease-fire after 100 hours of fighting was enthusiastically endorsed by the military, our coalition partners, the Congress, and American public opinion.
With the benefit of hindsight, some critics have suggested that steps such as pursuing covert operations, shooting down helicopters, or holding on to Iraqi territory might have assisted our long-term goal of ensuring that the Iraqi regime would not pose a threat to stability in the region. Yet at the time, all of these possible actions raised one kind of risk or another. On the one hand, there was the risk of having the U.S. military bogged down or sucked into an Iraqi civil war. Moreover, we wanted to encourage the Gulf states to work together with the Syrians and Egyptians to develop postwar security structures in the region.
We also were leery o f fragmenting Iraq or dissolving the coalition. We needed the coalition as much in the postwar period as we had before the war. First, we had learned that Saddam Hussein’s program to develop weapons of mass destruction was both more substantial and better concealed than we had believed. We were determined to use our victory in Desert Storm to put the Iraqi regime under the most intrusive weapons-inspections regime ever developed, to root out every last bit of that program. To put Saddam Hussein in that cage, we needed implementation of existing U.N. resolutions (and an additional U.N. resolution enacted), and we needed all our coalition partners to be with us to achieve this. Second, Saddam’s defeat was a clear repudiation of Arab radicalism and created a unique opportunity to pursue a lasting peace in the Middle East among Arabs and Israelis. To do that, we needed to keep the coalition intact and focused on building the peace.
In addition to a politician’s knack for negotiating, Baker brought to diplomacy both tangy slang and Texas humor. Examples:
On September 12, I was in Moscow to sign the documents sealing the historic reunification of Germany. Afterward. Gorbachev asked if he and Shevardnadze could meet privately. “We need help,” he began. “The domestic situation is getting much worse. I understand there’s a limit to what you can do. but can you help get some money from the Saudis for us?” He mentioned a figure of $4 billion to $5 billion. I said I would see what I could do. (The Saudis later came through with a very generous $4 billion line of credit.)
This very serious meeting ended on a note of levity when I showed Gorbachev something someone had given me as a joke in the United States. It was a small packet with a single condom inside. On its front was a picture of Saddam. On the back was written “For big pricks who don’t know when to withdraw.” Gorbachev and Shevardnadze both roared with laughter when the translation came and Gorbachev put the packet in his pocket.
I told Assad [and Shamir] that I was prepared to explore the concept of a formal American pledge guaranteeing the security of the Israeli-Syrian border along the Golan Heights. Our idea was to station U.S. troops as peacekeepers in a buffer zone along the Golan. I made clear that such a commitment could be offered only after Israel and Syria had negotiated a full and complete peace.
Assad continued to spar about requirements for Syria’s participation in a Mideast peace conference, surfacing peripheral demands that I knew were utterly unrealistic. I groped for an analogy that might force him hack to the real world. Finally, I blurted out, “Well, you know, Mr. President, as we say in Texas, if a bullfrog had wings, it wouldn’t scrape its ass on the ground.” Ed Djerejian, the U.S. ambassador, was so aghast that he accidentally plunged his hand into a bowl of hummus. Gemal Helal, the U.S. interpreter, looked at me in sheer terror. “I can’t translate that into English, much less Arabic.”
For several days before I arrived in Saudi Arabia, I’d left messages for Prince Bandar, which were never returned. A chronic back condition had flared up, and he’d been recuperating at his father’s chalet near Geneva. My last call was designed to get his attention: “Tell Prince Bandar I’m just calling to ask about him. I’m busting my commoner’s ass out here while he’s sitting on his royal butt. I hope he’s having a good time.”
I tried to persuade the Palestinians that the various statements, assurances, and gestures we had so laboriously constructed would demonstrate they hadn’t surrendered their claims relating to Jerusalem in advance of negotiations. “If you tell me that’s not good enough,” I said, “then I must tell you that your position is that symbols are more important than substance -and unfortunately, that position has helped to create and sustain the Palestinian tragedy, For God’s sake, don’t let Israel hide behind symbols.” As the meeting concluded, I made one last appeal for them to tell reporters we were making progress, “You don’t want a story,” I said, “that the cat died on the Palestinian doorstep.”
