The Commanders

by Bob Woodward

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  CONTENTS

  Introduction to the Simon & Schuster Paperbacks Edition

  Chain of Command

  A Note to the Reader

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  PART TWO

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  About Bob Woodward

  Index

  To Ben Bradlee and Dick Snyder. the best friends a writer could have

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Two colleagues have helped me in every step of researching and writing this book:

  WILLIAM F. POWERS, JR., a former aide to Senator John H. Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island, supplied much of the brainpower and editing skills. A remarkable man of grace and high purpose, Bill provided a truly independent evaluation of every step and idea. He made this book possible. No author ever had a better collaborator or friend.

  MARC E. SOLOMON, a 1989 Yale graduate, joined us in this enterprise for the last 15 months. No one could have offered more intelligence, tact and resourcefulness. He chased down information, edited drafts, transcribed endless tapes and brought a sense of fairness and balance to each task. Without Marc’s maturity, energy and spirit, we never would have finished.

  PHOTO CREDITS

  1, 2, 8, 15, 17, 18, 19, 26, 27, 28—David Hume Kennerly

  3—Sullivan/Agence France Presse

  4, 9, 16—AP

  5—Department of Defense Photo

  6—Tim Aubry/Reuters

  7—Maria Bastone/Agence France Presse

  10,12—David Valdez/White House Photo

  11, 23—Susan Biddle/White House Photo

  13—Margaret Thomas/The Washington Post

  14—Scott Allen/Department of Defense Photo

  20—Robert D. Ward/Department of Defense Photo

  21—Lisa Berg

  22, 25—Helene Stikkel/Department of Defense Photo

  24—Carol T. Powers/White House Photo

  Introduction to the Simon & Schuster Paperbacks Edition

  During my 30 years of reporting and book writing, I have found that journalism and public discussion too often turn to the future, which we can’t know, rather than the past, which we can.

  The coordinated terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 that killed nearly 5,000 people in New York City, at the Pentagon, and in Pennsylvania will likely mark a pivot point in history. President George W. Bush has declared what he says will be a prolonged war on terrorism, and as I write, the initial phase of that war has begun against Afghanistan.

  The Gulf War of 1991 was the last time this country was in a major war. Two of the men at the epicenter then were Dick Cheney, then Secretary of Defense, and Colin Powell, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top military man. Together they effectively ran that war. In the current war on terrorism, Cheney, now the Vice President, and Powell, now the Secretary of State, are the only war veterans with previous service in senior roles. The others, including President George W. Bush, have never been tested in the crucible of war. Cheney and Powell have lived in that crucible.

  There are many coincidences between the 1991 Gulf War and the current war on terrorism. In 1991, Cheney and Powell served a President Bush experienced in and obsessed with foreign affairs. Now they serve another President Bush, younger and a foreign-affairs neophyte. In both wars, building and holding an international coalition has been absolutely critical. A decade ago, the task largely fell to President Bush; now it pretty much falls to Secretary of State Powell. Both the Iraq war and the initial phase of the terrorism war in Afghanistan are in roughly the same Asian corridor of trouble running from Iraq through Iran to Afghanistan. In both wars, Saudi Arabia, a key ally and supplier of oil, is in jeopardy.

  Cheney and Powell have salted the upper ranks of the new Bush administration with personal friends and long-time associates. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was Cheney’s mentor in the Ford White House; Paul Wolfowitz, the number three in the Cheney Pentagon a decade ago, is now the number two at Defense to Rumsfeld. Stephen J. Hadley, the current Deputy National Security Adviser, was a top Pentagon official in Cheney’s Pentagon. Sean O’Keefe, the current Deputy Director of the powerful and influential Office of Management and Budget, also served Cheney in the Pentagon. Powell’s best friend, Richard Armitage, is his number two at the State Department.

  It is impossible to examine any part of the current war on terrorism without seeing the hand of Cheney, Powell or one of their loyalists.

  The Commanders, which was first published in 1991, is in many respects their story—the intimate account of the tensions, disagreements and debates on the road to war. Based on many interviews with Cheney, Powell and many others—plus an extensive documentary record of meeting notes and files—The Commanders shows how they wrestled with the great questions of military and foreign policy in the closed meeting rooms and private offices of the Pentagon and the White House. It also shows the two men up close, their values, friendships, emotions, setbacks, miscalculations and accomplishments. Their collaboration, which at times was uneasy, led to victory in the Gulf War. The Commanders is the story of the how and why amid competing rivalries and often confusing goals.

  Now Cheney and Powell, masters of Washington power and survival, are back as the critical members of Bush’s war cabinet. Who they are and how they, and their close associates, do in the current crisis will ultimately be central to the outcome of the new war on terrorism. The chain of events began 12 years ago when the two men—so different and so strangely intertwined—first so dramatically took the national stage.

  A Note to the Reader

  This is an account of U.S. military decision making during the 800 days from November 8, 1988, when George Bush was elected President, through January 16, 1991, the beginning of the Persian Gulf War.

  I initially planned to focus on the military and civilian leadership of the Pentagon, headquarters for one of the world’s largest enterprises, the modern American defense establishment. I had worked in the Pentagon for a year in 1969–70 as a 26-year-old Navy lieutenant. Few can serve in that unique, five-sided structure with its 23,000 employees, its maze of floors, corridors, rings and offices—or even visit as a tourist—and not wonder how it all fits together.

  Eighteen years later, I was still curious.

  My initial research emphasized the Pentagon under Bush, but I also did extensive interviewing with former secretaries of Defense and other former senior officials going back as far as the Kennedy administration. The fast-approaching end of the Cold War suggested it could be a quiet time for the military, an opportunity for me to try to understand the Defense Department’s subtle intricacies.

  The December 1989 Panama invasion, and more importantly the 1990 Gulf crisis, changed all that. The militar
y was not going to play a smaller role in the new world, as some had expected. It was moving to center stage. These two operations allowed me to study post-Vietnam, post-Cold War military decision making in action. After the brief Panama operation, I spent months piecing together the meetings and decision points leading up to it. From the time of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, I concentrated on the evolution of the Persian Gulf crisis and the decision to go to war against Saddam Hussein.

  Nearly all of the information comes from interviews with people directly involved in the decisions. More than 400 people were interviewed over the course of 27 months. The key sources were administration and Pentagon officials, both civilian and military. President Bush was not interviewed. Many key participants were interviewed repeatedly, some on a regular basis as events unfolded. Several were interviewed two to three dozen times. I interviewed one important source 40 times, sometimes in a rushed four-minute phone call during a crisis, at other times in freewheeling one-hour conversations. Several important sources allowed me to tape our conversations, so their stories and recollections could be retold more fully than if I had been relying on my notes alone. A number of sources provided access to documents, memos, contemporaneous handwritten notes, schedules and chronologies.

  Direct quotations from meetings or conversations come from at least one participant who specifically recalled or took notes on what was said. Quotation marks are not used when the sources were unsure about the exact wording.

  Thoughts, beliefs and conclusions attributed to a participant come from that individual or from a source who gained knowledge of them directly from that person. Participants’ written notes were also used on occasion to describe personal attitudes about events.

  I’ve tried wherever possible to preserve the language the participants themselves used to describe meetings, attitudes and emotions.

  Often I spoke to participants within hours or days of events in which they played a role. In some cases, I talked to sources right after an event and then several weeks or months later, only to find that in retrospect they had partially, and at times conveniently, altered their original version. I have generally found that accounts given soon after an event are the most reliable.

  It is impossible to reconstruct conversations and meetings perfectly. I have made every effort to present statements in the order in which participants said they were made, and to re-create as closely as possible the way the discussion flowed. Many of the sources for this book have decades of experience participating in important policy discussions and are trained to recall the details. Nonetheless, the sources’ accounts were carefully checked and rechecked against each other.

  The sources are not identified in the text. Nearly all the interviews were conducted under journalistic ground rules of “deep background,” meaning the sources provided the information with the understanding that they would not be identified by name or title.

  This book falls somewhere between newspaper journalism and history. The daily newspaper tells what happened, but rarely gives the full why and how that are traditionally the specialty of historians. While the book seeks to provide a fuller explanation than daily journalism can, it does not have history’s distance from events. It aspires to be a closely focused snapshot of contemporary events.

  The more I learned about the military through this project, the more it was apparent to me that the Pentagon is not always the center of military decision making. The building’s top civilian and military officials, most notably the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, can have a great, at times even dominant, role in the process when the attention of the White House is turned elsewhere. This was largely the case in the months prior to the Panama operation, though the President, as commander-in-chief, ultimately made the decision to invade.

  The Persian Gulf crisis was different. President Bush and his White House staff devoted great attention to it from the outset, managing the crisis from Pennsylvania Avenue. When the President and his advisers are engaged, they run the show.

  So this is not a book about the Pentagon, although the building and the military play central roles. This book is not about most of the things the military does. It is not about weapons procurement, defense budget fights, recruiting, training or military field exercises. With a few brief exceptions, it does not touch on the way the military has actually fought the wars of the last few years. It will not take you into the helicopters descending on Panama City, or to the desert tank battles in Iraq and Kuwait.

  It is above all a book about how the United States decides to fight its wars before shots are fired. The main setting is Washington, and the main action is the tug-and-pull among the players in the military decision-making process, both inside and outside the Pentagon.

  Decision making at the highest levels of national government is a complex human interaction. The inside story of government involves conversations, arguments, meetings, phone calls, personal attitudes, backgrounds and relationships. This human story is the core.

  There is always some historical mystery about events such as the Panama operation or the Gulf War. Government officials are by nature protective of information, and are often less than fully candid. As I write these words, the Persian Gulf War is winding to a conclusion. I am aware there is much I don’t know. Over the first two years of his administration, President Bush and his close advisers made a series of important, at times momentous, choices about the military. The choices and the process deserve scrupulous examination, even at this early date.

  The decision to go to war is one that defines a nation, both to the world and, perhaps more importantly, to itself. There is no more serious business for a national government, no more accurate measure of national leadership.

  Bob Woodward, March 14, 1991

  PROLOGUE

  THE RETIRED CHAIRMAN OF THE joint chiefs of staff, Admiral William J. Crowe, Jr., hurried through security at the Pentagon’s River Entrance in the early afternoon of Tuesday, November 27, 1990. He was late for a private 1 p.m. lunch with his successor, Army General Colin L. Powell. As soon as he entered the building, Crowe, who was 65, felt the Pentagon’s familiar, oppressive atmosphere—the colonels, bursting with self-importance, rushing around the E-Ring, the outermost corridor. It was a building dedicated to appearing busy, he thought.

  Wheeling to the right, he slipped into the first doorway, Room 2E878, the office of the Chairman. He passed through a reception area and entered the room where he’d worked for four years, until Powell had taken over from him 14 months earlier.

  At 53, Powell was the youngest Chairman in history and the first black to hold the post. He usually conveyed a sense of energy and stamina, but today he looked tired.

  The general had redecorated. New windows offered a magnificent view across the Potomac River to the national monuments. There was a rich, dark blue carpet, and a comfortable couch and matching chair upholstered in a delicately patterned maroon fabric.

  As they sat down at a small antique table set for lunch, Powell joked that he wished he’d never accepted the job. Why didn’t you warn me? he asked.

  Crowe knew he didn’t mean it for a minute. It was the classic, transparent lament of a man who loves being at the top.

  A steward from the Chairman’s mess in a bright yellow jacket took their orders. Both chose light lunches.

  In the previous four months, Powell had overseen the largest American military deployment since Vietnam. Some 230,000 U.S. military men and women had already been sent to the Persian Gulf as part of Operation Desert Shield, following Iraq’s invasion and takeover of Kuwait. Three weeks earlier, President Bush had announced his decision to nearly double the troop strength, to give himself the option of using offensive force to expel Iraq from Kuwait. The decision had set off a fierce debate, and the national consensus that had been supporting Bush now seemed to be unraveling.

  “I hear you’re going to testify,” Powell had said when he had called Crowe the
previous week to invite him to lunch. Crowe had agreed to give public testimony on the Gulf crisis before the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Sam Nunn, the Georgia Democrat.

  Although he had supported Bush’s initial deployment of forces to defend Saudi Arabia from Iraq, Nunn had publicly criticized the decision to create an offensive military capability. He was demanding to know how Bush had determined that it was in the vital interest of the United States to liberate Kuwait. What was the hurry? Why not give the unprecedented United Nations economic sanctions that had shut down trade between Iraq and most of the world time to work?

  Crowe now recounted how he had been traveling around the country giving speeches, and had heard serious doubts raised about whether the liberation of Kuwait was worth a war. There was great concern in the country about the prospect, duration, objectives and necessity of war.

  Yeah, I have detected the same thing, Powell confided.

  Crowe’s guard went up. Over the years, he’d watched Powell operate up close, especially in 1988 when Powell was Reagan’s national security adviser. Powell had a tendency to read people and then tell them in a very general and circumspect way what he thought they wanted to hear, Crowe thought.

  Despite the President’s statements that he did not want war, Crowe felt that Bush was too anxious to throw hundreds of thousands of troops into combat. One was Crowe’s son Blake, a Marine captain commanding a company of 200 in the Saudi Arabian desert.

  “Not everyone is going to like what I’m going to say,” Crowe said. He didn’t want to give a full dress rehearsal of his testimony, so he resisted telling Powell the specifics.

  Powell sensed the reserve.

  Crowe said he wondered about the apparent rush to go to war. “Everyone is so impatient.” Some seemed to think the U.S. military had trained its soldiers for combat and hostile fire, but not to be patient and wait.