by Dick Cheney
By October 30 Powell had returned from the Gulf with Central Command’s troop requests. When I met with him at 8:00 that morning to review the bidding, he laid out a long and lengthy list—and I said that I fully supported it. That afternoon Powell and I went to the White House for a meeting in the Situation Room, and the president, Scowcroft, Baker, and I listened as Powell briefed us on what Schwarzkopf wanted if he was ordered to carry out the offensive option—basically a doubling of the force. When Powell had finished, I told the president that I fully supported the request, and I went further. I was convinced the offensive option was the right one, and that we should give the generals whatever they thought it would take. The president agreed and signed off on Powell’s and Schwarzkopf’s requests.
Prior to the public announcement of the new deployment on November 8, 1990, I placed calls to congressional leaders to notify them it was imminent. Then, at 4:00 p.m., I joined President Bush at the White House as he announced, “I have today directed the secretary of defense to increase the size of the U.S. forces committed to Desert Shield to ensure that the coalition has an adequate offensive military option should that be necessary to achieve our common goals.” After the White House briefing, I went directly back to the Pentagon, where, at 4:45 p.m., Colin and I briefed the Pentagon press corps. I set forth a long list of units to be deployed: the VII Corps Headquarters out of Stuttgart, Germany; the 1st Armored Division in Germany; the 3rd Armored Division in Germany; the 2nd Armored Division (forward); and the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment. In addition, we were taking 2nd Corps Support Command from Stuttgart and the Big Red One, the 1st Infantry Division, from Fort Riley, Kansas. The navy would be sending three additional aircraft carrier battle groups and their escorts; one additional battleship and another amphibious group. The Marine Corps would be sending the II Marine Expeditionary Force out of Camp Lejeune and the 5th Marine Expeditionary Brigade out of Camp Pendleton. I also announced that we would be calling up combat units of the Army National Guard.
On November 18, when I appeared on Meet the Press, there was interest in whether we had decided to seek congressional authorization for the use of force in Iraq. I told Garrick Utley that I loved the Congress. I had served there for ten years. But I also had a sense of its limitations. “I take you back to September 1941,” I said, “when World War II had been under way for two years; Hitler had taken Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and was halfway to Moscow. And the Congress, in that setting, two months before Pearl Harbor, agreed to extend . . . the draft for twelve more months, by just one vote.”
I made clear the decision hadn’t been made, but I also emphasized that putting a matter of the nation’s security in the hands of the 535 members of the U.S. Congress could be a risky proposition. And I cautioned that a drawn-out debate in Congress could convey a sense to our allies and to Saddam that we weren’t resolute in our commitment to liberate Kuwait.
By the end of the month, Congress was holding hearings, and Sam Nunn, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, his mind on a presidential run, seemed intent on providing a forum for those opposed to using force to liberate Kuwait. Among the witnesses was Admiral Bill Crowe, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said we needed to give sanctions another year to work before we considered force.
The day after Crowe’s testimony, a United Nations Security Council resolution set a January 15, 1991, deadline for Iraq to get out of Kuwait and authorized “all necessary means” to accomplish that end. But this clear message to the world—and Jim Baker deserves enormous credit for it—was muddied when the president announced he was going to send Jim to negotiate with Saddam. Tariq Aziz was also going to be invited to the United States, and many of our allies were dismayed. The Saudis, in particular, felt as though we’d pulled the rug out from under them.
On a crucial front, we were making progress. The generals in the Pentagon were starting to believe we meant business. The president’s approval of General Schwarzkopf’s large additional troop request had been key, as had the successful vote in the UN Security Council. It also helped enormously when I issued an order in mid-November authorizing the services to call up additional reserve and National Guard forces as needed. This was another effort that the president supported unhesitatingly, overruling Chief of Staff John Sununu’s political objections. Yes, communities across the country would be affected when their folks were called up to serve, but we were going to build the force the generals thought we needed.
These actions signaled to the military that the civilians now in charge had learned the lessons of Vietnam—and other steps we were taking did as well. We were embarked on a massive buildup, not a gradual one in hopes that Saddam would change his mind. We were deploying troops in units, not using the individual rotations that had created turmoil during Vietnam. I had issued a stop-loss order. Nobody was leaving the armed forces until this job was done. The president had meant it when he said, “This will not stand.”
The execution of this war would be in the hands of the generals, but I wanted to be sure I understood as thoroughly as possible the details of what our troops were doing, and with that in mind I set up a series of briefings for myself, perhaps three dozen in all. Tom Kelly, the director of operations for the joint staff, was in charge of them. He would bring a team up to my office or sometimes I would go to the Tank, and I would be briefed on how a cruise missile works or on how to penetrate a minefield. We spent a lot of time on chemical weapons, which Saddam had used before, and on how we could defend our troops against them.
ON DECEMBER 18, POWELL and I left D.C. and headed for Saudi Arabia.
Talking to troops (Photo by Pete Williams)
In Schwarzkopf’s headquarters, located in a bunker beneath the Saudi Ministry of Defense, Norm had assembled his command team to brief us on every aspect of the air and ground war planning. During our first morning session, we focused on intelligence—what did we know about Saddam’s troops, their locations, their readiness—and the readiness of our own forces. One of my biggest concerns was that the planners not make overly optimistic assumptions. We needed to be ready, I told them, for the possibility of a long conflict. We needed to assume the worst.
The afternoon briefing covered the war plan itself. It had come a long way since our first session two months earlier, when the only option for a ground campaign had been the straight-up-the-middle approach. We now had three phases of an air campaign, followed by a ground campaign, which would involve a left-hook maneuver where our forces swung wide and then attacked Saddam from the side, rather than driving directly into the heart of his best troops.
This left-hook maneuver would put heavy logistical demands on our troops, as we moved the forces and their equipment hundreds of miles to the west. Our success would depend upon air superiority and on the element of surprise—we had to hope Saddam either would not find out about the plan or wouldn’t believe it if he did.
Satisfied that Norm and his team had done a very solid job putting the plan in place, preparing for contingencies, and getting ready to move, Powell and I left for Washington. On the way home we got word that Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens wanted to meet me—anytime, anywhere. The Israelis had promised us they would not preemptively strike Iraq, but they were understandably nervous about the war planning and wanted to know what to expect.
I was concerned that if I left Saudi Arabia and went directly to a meeting with the Israelis, it would put real pressure on our coalition. It was important that we do everything possible to keep Israel out of the action. We did not want them to become an excuse for Saddam to divide our coalition. Instead of a meeting, we agreed to install a hotline, code-named Hammer Rick, which would connect my office in the Pentagon directly to Israeli Defense Minister Arens.
Back in Washington after the holidays, talk turned to whether we should seek congressional approval for a use of force against Iraq. I opposed the idea. We had all the authority we needed,
because the United States Senate had previously ratified the United Nations Charter, including Article 51, which allowed us to go to the assistance of a member state, such as Kuwait, that had been invaded. Moreover, if we got turned down by the Congress, that would be a huge blow to our coalition and to our troops already deployed. If the military action was successful, it wouldn’t matter whether Congress had supported us beforehand. If, on the other hand, we failed, even if we had a vote supporting the use of force we’d be faced with intense criticism, including from those who had voted with us. In other words, I thought there was significant risk in seeking their approval and very little to be gained.
I also thought it would set a dangerous precedent. As a legal and constitutional matter, the president had the authority he needed. If he sought congressional approval, that would surely be read by some as a message that he needed the congressional vote. It looked to me like a move that would diminish the power of the office. The president heard these arguments, but decided to go for a vote, and on January 8 he sent a letter to Congress seeking their approval for the use of “all necessary means to implement UN Security Council Resolution 678,” which required that Saddam withdraw from Kuwait.
Meanwhile, in an effort to ensure that we had exhausted all possibilities for a peaceful resolution, the president sent Jim Baker to Geneva to meet with Saddam’s foreign minister, Tariq Aziz. I had been concerned that Jim might broker a last-minute deal based on Saddam’s promising to withdraw from Kuwait. What if Saddam used such a pledge to push us beyond the UN deadline? What if he pulled back into Iraq? Would we bring half a million troops home and wait for him to go over the border again? But when Baker called the president on the morning of January 9, it was to say that the Iraqis were determined to stay in Kuwait. The president, Brent, and I gathered around a small television set in the president’s private office as Baker was about to address the press corps gathered in the Intercontinental Hotel in Geneva. As soon as he stepped in front of the cameras it was clear to the world from the look on his face that no deal had been struck. “Regrettably, ladies and gentlemen,...in over six hours I heard nothing that suggested to me any Iraqi flexibility whatsoever on complying with the United Nations Security Council resolutions.”
Baker left Geneva to confer with our allies in Riyadh, and I went to work, lobbying hard for Congress to authorize the use of force against Iraq. On January 12, the resolution made it through the House handily, 250–183, but it was close in the Senate, 52–47. I called George Bush. “Mr. President,” I said, “you were right.” Years later, President Bush wrote that if the vote had been negative, he would still have ordered our troops into battle—and probably been impeached. Going to Congress was high-risk, no doubt about it, but it had worked.
Late in the afternoon of January 15, General Powell came to my office with an order for me to sign. As secretary of defense, I signed a lot of orders. All deployments required my sign-off, and I usually just initialed them. But this order was different. This was an execute order, authorizing war. I signed my full name, and then I asked General Powell to sign his.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Desert Storm
In the early morning hours of Wednesday, January 16, 1991, my limousine pulled to a stop on Constitution Avenue. Lynne and I got out and walked through a light rain down the sloping path to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. We stood in front of the long black wall as visitors often do, silent and in awe. The fifty-eight thousand names etched on the wall are a reminder of the terrible cost of war. They were also a reminder to me, as operations in Iraq were about to begin, of the solemn obligation of America’s civilian leaders to provide our soldiers with a clear mission and the resources to prevail. We bowed our heads in prayer, thinking of the young Americans who would soon be flying in combat over Iraq.
By 7:15 a.m. I was at the White House for a meeting with Jim Baker and Brent Scowcroft in Brent’s West Wing office. We went over the details of what would unfold in the coming hours and walked through the list of world leaders whom we would call to notify in advance that operations would soon be under way. I made my first call of the day back in my Pentagon office to Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens, with whom I had been staying in touch. We had offered to send Patriot antimissile batteries to help protect Israel from missile attacks that Saddam might launch. Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger had traveled to Israel with that offer, but the Israelis had declined. They had accepted our offer of early warning from our satellites of any missiles launched, and we had established the Hammer Rick hotline between my office and the Israeli Defense Ministry. In my 9:00 a.m. call to Arens, I told him that H-Hour, the hour when the operation would begin, was 7:00 p.m. Washington time, 3:00 a.m. in Baghdad. I urged him to use the secure communications link to call me anytime.
By the time I talked to Arens, seven B-52 long-range bombers had already taken off from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, armed with cruise missiles and headed for Iraq. As H-Hour approached, F-15E fighter-bombers, AWACS, KC-135 refueling planes, and F-117 stealth fighters prepared to take off from bases inside Saudi Arabia. Sailors on board ships such as the U.S.S. Wisconsin and the U.S.S. Missouri in the Persian Gulf ran through checklists, readying cruise missiles for launch.
Because our F-117s were stealthy, they would be able to penetrate Iraqi airspace without being detected by radar. As they were flying toward Baghdad, eight Apache gunships would fly in low in the dark and take out two of the key nodes of the Iraqi early warning system, opening up a hole in their air defenses so that we could start flowing the rest of our airplanes through to attack Baghdad. Desert Shield was about to become Desert Storm.
As H-Hour neared, I sent an assistant to my home in McLean to retrieve the suitcase I’d packed. I planned to spend the night in the small bedroom connected to my office, but I hadn’t brought the suitcase in with me that morning out of concern that it might alert any close observers that the war was about to begin. By late afternoon, it was clear we had done all we could from Washington. The only thing left now was to wait. At 5:00 p.m. General Powell and Deputy Secretary Atwood joined me in my office for our daily evening wrap-up session. We turned the television to CNN, then the only twenty-four-hour news channel. Bernard Shaw was on the air from Baghdad. He was interviewing Walter Cronkite in New York, who was telling stories about covering World War II as a young correspondent. After the two talked for a while, Shaw said he was heading back to the States. He said that he’d be on the first plane out of Baghdad in the morning. We knew that wasn’t happening. Not long after, the night sky outside Bernie’s hotel room window lit up as Operation Desert Storm began. This would be the first war Americans would be able to watch unfold, in real time, on live television.
The president spoke to the nation from the Oval Office at 9:00 p.m. to announce the beginning of military operations. At 9:30 p.m. General Powell and I appeared in the Pentagon briefing room to hold a brief press conference. I noted that great care was being taken to minimize U.S. casualties and focus on military targets and that we were hitting targets in both Iraq and Kuwait. We couldn’t say a lot at this early stage, but I wanted to establish the precedent of the American people hearing information about our military operations directly from the Pentagon briefing room. General Schwarzkopf would also conduct briefings from Riyadh.
Before the war my assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, Pete Williams, had gone to see Lieutenant General Tom Kelly, the director of operations for the joint staff. Pete told Tom we wanted to hold daily briefings for the press once the war started and said that he, Pete, thought Tom ought to conduct the briefings. Tom resisted mightily. He told Pete there was absolutely no way, given his responsibilities in the upcoming conflict, that he had time to brief the press every day. It just wasn’t going to happen, he said. Pete came to see me with the suggestion, and I backed him up. I thought it made tremendous sense to put senior guys such as Tom Kelly and Rear Admiral Mike McConnel
l, the director of intelligence for the joint staff, out in front of the press each day. These were the same officers who briefed General Powell and me in the morning. They were knowledgeable enough to answer tough questions and experienced enough to know what they could and couldn’t tell the press. When Pete went back to see Tom a few days later, he said, “You know, Tom, the secretary would really like you to give the daily briefings.” Kelly replied, “That’s an excellent idea, Pete. I’d be thrilled to do that.”
We had given a good deal of thought to ensuring the most accurate coverage of the war. Before Desert Storm began, Pete put together a plan that would have embedded reporters directly with our military units, an early version of the plan the Pentagon followed twelve years later. I supported Pete’s concept and one evening had him come to my office to brief General Powell and me on it. General Powell was decidedly unsupportive. There was absolutely no way we could embed reporters without compromising operational security, he said, expressing robust views on the subject in very strong terms. As Pete was leaving I told him not to worry about it. “Good briefing, Pete. We’re gaining on him,” I said with a smile.
