The Commanders

by Bob Woodward

  Bush described how, since taking office as President, he had been laying the groundwork, building relations with other heads of state. He’d had no specific purpose in mind, just a strategic sense that it was a good idea. Now his good working relationships with the Thatchers, Mubaraks, Fahds and Gorbachevs of the world could be put to use. There might be some rough times, some down times, Bush conceded, but he felt good. “This will be successful,” he assured Teeter.

  • • •

  For months Scowcroft had been concerned that Baker was not a supporter of the Gulf policy. In the inner-circle discussions he seemed to oppose the large deployment of troops, favoring a diplomatic solution almost to the exclusion of the military pressure. But Baker was coming around. Cheney was fishing with him over the weekend and they would have time to talk.

  Baker felt the foundation for the Gulf policy was not solid enough. The plight of the emir of Kuwait, his people, aggression and oil were not selling to the American people. The polls showed that the greatest concern was over the American hostages in Iraq and Kuwait. Baker had argued that the focus of the Gulf policy should be shifted to the hostage issue. It was the one issue that would unite Americans and the international community because most nations, including the Soviets, had hostages held in Iraq. It was the one issue that might justify a war.

  Scowcroft thought a new emphasis on the hostages would be changing horses in the middle of the stream, but he saw that public opinion polls were showing increasing doubts about the military deployment. Baker wanted to play the hostage card himself in a strong speech. Scowcroft was willing to go along. The national security adviser also realized that Baker saw the handwriting on the wall. The Bush presidency was likely to rise or fall on the outcome of the Gulf policy. Baker, Bush’s friend of 35 years, his campaign manager and the senior cabinet officer, had no other choice than to become an aggressive supporter of the policy.

  On Monday, October 29, Baker addressed the Los Angeles World Affairs Council. The more than 100 American human shields, he said, “are forced to sleep on vermin-ridden concrete floors. They are kept in the dark during the day and moved only at night. They have had their meals cut to two a day. And many are becoming sick as they endure a terrible ordeal. The very idea of Americans being used as human shields is simply unconscionable.”

  The Secretary of State added: “We will not rule out a possible use of force if Iraq continues to occupy Kuwait.”

  • • •

  Bush had 15 congressional leaders from both houses and both parties to the White House the next day, October 30. He opened the meeting with a status report, noting that Iraq had released the French hostages, but more reports of maltreatment of American and British hostages were being received. He said that he was reading Martin Gilbert’s The Second World War: A Complete History, which described the appeasement of a dictator and the sequence of events leading up to the conflict.

  Visibly riled up, Bush said that he was just not going to let that happen again. The treatment of the hostages was horrible and barbarous, the President said. He described a report of one foreign hostage family that had been taken to a hospital, where the Iraqis had shot the children in front of the parents and then shot the parents.

  Baker then made some supporting points about the treatment of the hostages.

  House Speaker Thomas S. Foley said, Mr. President, we’re with you to this point. He hoped there would be more such meetings and consultations in advance of any military action in the Gulf.

  Barring some event that required quick action, Bush said, he would continue consulting.

  Has there been more maltreatment of the hostages? Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell asked. The Congress didn’t know about that. It was not documented.

  Isn’t deprivation of liberty maltreatment? Baker asked indignantly.

  It certainly is, Mitchell responded, but the question is whether there has been an escalation of the maltreatment as the President suggested.

  Senator William Cohen, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, raised his hand. He said that the CIA and DIA had testified in the committee last week that there was no new evidence of more maltreatment.

  Baker, unused to being challenged, lit up and turned several shades of red. He asked what the group considered maltreatment. Was not kidnapping and murder sufficient?

  Yes, Cohen and Mitchell agreed. But the hostage taking was nearly three months old. Is this new? Is this considered a provocation by Saddam?

  The questioning zeroed in. Several Democrats suggested pointedly that this new focus on the American hostages had a bad aroma. Was it going to be used as justification for military action now? It would not withstand outside scrutiny, they suggested.

  Cohen said the administration might be so concerned for the hostages that it might wind up eliminating their maltreatment permanently by getting them killed. He had never seen emotions—including his own—quite so high in a White House meeting.

  Bush shifted the discussion to the situation of the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait City where a few U.S. diplomats remained. The Iraqis were denying them food and water. He had no way to use the military effectively to protect them without a full-scale invasion, he said. And what would it mean if the American flag were lowered and the U.S. diplomats also made “guests,” Saddam’s term for the hostages? I will not sit still for it, the President said, tension showing in the muscles of his neck.

  Representative Les Aspin estimated that it would take some ten months for the sanctions to work.

  Representative John P. Murtha, a hawkish Democrat from Pennsylvania, said he supported the President strongly, adding that there might be no choice but to go in militarily, and as far as he was concerned the sooner the better.

  Afterwards, Cohen went up to Cheney, who had said nothing during the meeting. “You managed to duck this one,” Cohen said lightly. “We’ll be coming back to you on what options are being considered.”

  Cheney smiled and left.

  • • •

  At 3:30 that afternoon, Bush met with Baker, Cheney, Scowcroft and Powell in the Situation Room.

  “We are at a ‘Y’ in the road,” Scowcroft began. The policy could continue to be deter-and-defend, or it could switch to developing the offensive option.

  Powell was struck once again by the informality of the rolling discussion among these five men who had been friends for years. There was no real organization to the proceedings as they weighed the options. Ideas bounced back and forth as one thought or another occurred to one of them. Bush and Scowcroft seemed primed to go ahead with the development of the offensive option. Baker, less anxious and more cautious, was measured, inquiring about the attitudes in Congress and in the public, but he was no longer reluctant.

  Listening, Cheney saw no willingness on Bush’s part to accept anything less than the fulfillment of his stated objective, the liberation of Kuwait. The Secretary of Defense was not going to recommend any military action unless they were sure of success. He said that he had a growing conviction that they had to develop the offensive option. The international coalition was too fragile to hold out indefinitely—to outsiders it might look different, but they knew, from the inside, that the arrangements were delicate. Cheney felt it was quite likely that some outside event could absolutely shatter the coalition.

  Powell saw that patience was not the order of the day. As in the past, he did not advocate containment. Powell had found the others previously tolerated his broad political advice, but now he sensed that he had less permission to speak up, having already made the case for containment to the President. Now no one was soliciting Powell’s overall political advice on this subject.

  The meeting had been billed in advance as a chance for the Chairman to report on his discussions with Schwarzkopf.

  “Okay, okay, okay,” the President finally said, “let’s hear what he has to say.”

  “Mr. President,” Powell began, “we have accomplished the mission assigned.” The defense of
Saudi Arabia had been achieved earlier than expected. He described how Schwarzkopf had moved some of his forces around to accomplish this in light of the continuing Iraqi buildup.

  “Now, if you, Mr. President, decide to build up—go for an offensive option—this is what we need.” He then unveiled the Schwarzkopf request to double the force. A central feature was the VII Corps so Schwarzkopf would have the high-speed tanks to conduct flanking attacks on the Iraqis. In this way, they could avoid a frontal assault into Iraqi strength.

  Scowcroft was amazed that Schwarzkopf wanted so much more. The request for three aircraft carriers in addition to the three he already had especially surprised Scowcroft. Several oohs and ahs were heard around the table, but not from Bush.

  Powell said he supported Schwarzkopf’s recommendations, if the President wanted an offensive option. He turned to the President. “If you give me more time, say three months, I’ll move more troops. It’s that important. You can take me to the Savings and Loan bailout account, and we’ll all go broke together.” Powell’s message: it was going to be expensive.

  As far as Powell was concerned, the only constraint was going to be the capacity of the transportation system.

  Cheney said he supported Schwarzkopf and Powell without conditions. He went even further. It was not a question if the President wanted the offensive option; the President should want it and should go ahead and order it, Cheney said. He explained that this would guarantee success if they had to fight. He did not want to be in the position of making another request for more forces come January or February. Saddam was fully capable of responding with more of his own forces. Cheney did not want to be back here in the Situation Room saying then, “Mr. President, I know what we told you back in October, and we put the additional force over there, but we still can’t do it.”

  Finally, Bush said, “If that’s what you need, we’ll do it.”

  The President gave the final approval the next day.

  • • •

  Paul Wolfowitz, who as undersecretary for policy was one of few Pentagon civilians granted oversight of war plans, was worried that the administration had transitioned into the decision on the offensive option without a lot of clear thought. There was little or no process where alternatives and implications were written down so they could be systematically weighed and argued. Wolfowitz, a scholarly senior career government official and former ambassador, thought it would have been possible to decide to send additional troops and not say specifically whether they were replacements or an offensive reinforcement. The decision as to their ultimate purpose could be made later. But Wolfowitz didn’t have time to get the idea considered.

  The deputies committee, the second-tier interagency group that included Wolfowitz, had not met on the subject.

  Wolfowitz felt that the inner circle of Bush, Baker, Cheney, Scowcroft and Powell was perhaps a little too close knit. Their meetings, given their frequency and privacy, ought to have been the forum for discussing and debating alternatives and fundamentals. But Wolfowitz did not get that sense. There was no feedback from Cheney, and if there was any kind of organized debate within the inner circle, it was done without benefit of staff. At times Wolfowitz felt he was out in the deep darkness on vital questions.

  Wolfowitz was also worried that the announcement of this very big decision would be flubbed. The whole administration, Bush in particular, disliked explaining itself in an organized, coherent way. Bush just didn’t like to give speeches and the White House speechwriters didn’t write very good ones.

  Baker for his part was worried about the allies. What did they think about whether to use force—or when or how? What was their resolve? Did they fully understand President Bush’s determination to roll back the invasion? It was agreed that Baker would visit Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, London, Paris and Moscow so all the soundings could be made before the announcement on doubling the force was made.

  • • •

  Saturday, November 3, the day Baker was leaving, Powell picked up his New York Times. Under the headline, “Baker Seen as a Balance to Bush on Crisis in Gulf,” Powell read that unnamed senior administration officials were saying that Baker “has been a brake on any immediate impulse to use military force. . . . When the issue was how much time was needed to give the sanctions an opportunity to work, Mr. Baker advised more time rather than less.”

  Though hedged and qualified, the story at least put the issue of a policy debate out in the open. Powell thought to himself: Hey, look at this, I’m off the hook.

  But the story’s substance—a brake on the President, containment, more time for economic sanctions—had no second bounce. There was no serious discussion or comment on it. The only comment Powell heard was that Baker and his aides had put out another self-serving story to distance the Secretary of State carefully from a possible disaster.

  Scowcroft saw the story as a classic piece of State Department spin. But it was about a week late. Baker was now on board.

  * * *

  I. Described in the Prologue, pp. 41–42.

  * * *

  22

  * * *

  ON THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 8, Cheney called the major congressional chairmen to inform them that Bush was going to make an announcement that afternoon about a troop reinforcement. He reached Les Aspin in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee had just been elected without opposition to his 11th term.

  Aspin had pretty much given up on trying to communicate with Dick Cheney, and had taken to calling him “the Sphinx.” Instead, Aspin’s channel into the administration was Scowcroft.

  After telling Aspin about the reinforcement package, Cheney listed some of the units, including the Army’s VII Corps of heavy tank divisions from Europe, but didn’t provide an overall number of troops.

  “That’s a lot bigger than I expected,” Aspin said. He did the arithmetic in his head and realized it meant another 200,000 men.

  Cheney tracked down Sam Nunn in a restaurant. The senator was unhappy that he was being informed rather than consulted. Why the hurry, he asked. Were they sure the economic sanctions would not work?

  Cheney sensed a real change in Nunn and attributed much of it to politics. Ever the political calculator, Cheney had concluded that Nunn was planning a long-shot run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992 and wanted to get in the good graces of his party by taking on President Bush.

  The decision, Cheney said, was to nail down with certainty a viable offensive military option for the President.

  Baker was meeting with Gorbachev in the Soviet Union when he received word that Bush was going ahead with an announcement on the troop increase. He questioned the timing and wondered about the hurry. This was not something to drop out of the sky without carefully laying the foundations. There ought to have been a round of Washington consultations and hand-holding sessions, particularly in Congress. Once again, he felt the White House was not handling an announcement properly; but there was nothing he could do from Russia.

  • • •

  Cheney was monitoring the public debate. The administration still had not found a successful formula for speaking to the various publics out there. It was trying to keep the American people behind the policy, and explain to the troops what was being done and why, while attending to the Congress, the United Nations and the Arabs. It was also trying to manage the Israeli problem. Saddam was attempting to link resolution of the Kuwait question with resolution of the Palestinians’ grievances against Israel.

  It was difficult to come up with one single message to speak with equal credibility and force to all those groups. And the message the administration wanted to convey now—its rationale for deploying an offensive capability—was different from the one it had wanted to convey in August when the mission was defensive. Cheney did not feel that the communications effort to date was a triumph. Now they were entering a new, critical phase of trying to keep all the constituencies happy.

  • • •


  Bush and Cheney appeared at a 4 p.m. news briefing. Powell, who had been included in the major Desert Shield announcements so far, was not there.

  “I have today directed the Secretary of Defense to increase the size of the U.S. forces committed to Desert Shield,” Bush said, “to ensure that the coalition has an adequate offensive military option should that be necessary to achieve our common goals.” He mentioned no numbers.

  Asked why he wanted to put an offensive force in Saudi Arabia, Bush said he was acting “upon the advice of our able Secretary of Defense and others.”

  The President left to spend the long Veterans Day weekend at Camp David.

  The next afternoon, Friday, November 9, Prince Bandar stopped by the Pentagon to see Powell. It seemed to him that Powell and Baker were the members of the Bush inner circle least inclined to go to war against Saddam.

  “If we don’t have to fight, it will be better,” Powell told the prince. “If we have to, I’ll do it but we’re going to do it with everything we have.” Powell said that the President had ordered that this not turn into another Vietnam. The guiding principle was going to be a maximization of firepower and troops.

  Later, Cheney told Bandar, “The military is finished in this society, if we screw this up.”

  • • •

  The White House had made no arrangements for administration officials to appear on that Sunday’s television talk shows or the morning shows on Monday. These shows are a primary arena for Washington players to slug it out and make headlines. The Democrats were out in force. Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York said sharply, “It’s as if the great armed force which was created to fight the Cold War is at the President’s own disposal for any diversion he may wish, no matter what it costs. He will wreck our military. He will wreck his administration, and he’ll spoil a chance to get a collective security system working. It breaks your heart.”