by Dick Cheney
The 1st and 2nd Marine divisions had breached the first line of Iraqi defenses and were now working through the second line. The first brigade of the 101st was approximately one hundred miles inside Iraq, at Forward Operating Base Cobra. The second brigade would be at Cobra within two to three hours. The third brigade would close on FOB Gold sometime during the morning. The 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment was twenty miles into Iraq and had met no resistance. The VII Corps, which was scheduled to attack that night, was in position and had begun cutting through the berm the Iraqis had erected as a barrier. The 1st Cavalry, scheduled to go at H+26, might go early.
The Egyptians had crossed into Kuwait against light resistance. The Saudis on the coast were also meeting light resistance. Air operations were continuing as planned. The only major losses reported were two Apache helicopters that collided, but both crews were reported to be okay.
It was encouraging, I noted, that in these first hours when we had expected some of the heaviest fighting, the resistance had been so light. But after laying out all this good news for the president, I cautioned that these were only first reports, and we had not yet encountered the Republican Guard, Saddam’s best troops.
By the next afternoon, February 25, we began to get word that Saddam was promising to withdraw in exchange for a UN-brokered cease-fire. Although we could see some of Saddam’s troops heading toward the Iraqi border and out of Kuwait, others were continuing to engage our troops. Saddam had not given up, but he was clearly hoping for a UN cease-fire that would allow him to retreat while keeping most of his forces intact.
Events on the ground were moving too fast by then for Saddam to get help from the UN. On February 26, with Arab forces in the lead, the liberation of Kuwait City began. And as we gathered in the Oval Office on February 27, we were faced with an unexpected situation—the prospect of the war coming to an end much sooner than we anticipated. Our forces had moved with much greater speed than we had predicted, meeting much smaller resistance than we’d planned for. Faced with the might of the oncoming American forces, Iraqis were now fleeing, many of them headed north out of Kuwait on what came to be known as the Highway of Death. Images from burnt-out tanks and abandoned vehicles along the road were broadcast around the world.
As it became clear that our forces had delivered a massive defeat to the Iraqis, we addressed the question of when to order them to stop. After months of planning and dealing with issues of transportation and logistics to get our troops to the desert, it was a very sudden shift, after three days of ground operations, to be sitting in the Oval Office deciding when to call a halt. General Powell and the president were particularly concerned that we not ask our young soldiers to continue to fire upon an enemy that seemed to be retreating in defeat.
Powell, using a secure phone in a drawer in the president’s desk, placed a call to Schwarzkopf in Riyadh. He told Schwarzkopf that the president wanted to know when we could bring things to an end. It was a question we all wanted an answer to. Schwarzkopf had just conducted a briefing in Riyadh in which he had told the press we’d accomplished our mission, and he was supportive of the idea of stopping as soon as feasible. He asked for some time to consult with his commanders. A few hours later we gathered again, and Schwarzkopf said his commanders agreed we could call a halt to hostilities. Someone came up with the idea of a hundred-hour war, which would mean stopping the fighting at midnight Washington time.
At the time the decision to end the war was made, there was confusion about how far coalition forces had advanced into Iraq. This led to calling a halt before the escape routes into Iraq had been blocked, and as a result, some Iraqi forces escaped, including armored units of the Republican Guard. There was further confusion when Schwarzkopf announced that cease-fire negotiations would be held in Safwan, just inside the Iraqi border with Kuwait. As it turned out Safwan was not under allied control. With the help of some low flyovers by A-10s, our forces were able to convince the Iraqis to abandon the site.
The Iraqis were represented at Safwan by Saddam’s generals, which at the time seemed appropriate since Schwarzkopf, along with Saudi Lieutenant General Khalid bin Sultan, represented the coalition. But one result was that Saddam never publicly admitted defeat, and we should have insisted upon that. We had been told repeatedly by our own intelligence services and by our Arab allies that Saddam would never survive after the blow the coalition had delivered, but he was able to turn the fact that he had stood up to and survived a massive assault into a personal victory. This would have been more difficult if we had demanded that he acknowledge having led his country to defeat.
Schwarzkopf was more accommodating of the Iraqis than he should have been as he sat down and agreed to terms of the cease-fire. When they argued that they needed their helicopters for official transport since we’d taken out most of the major bridges and roads in the country, he agreed that helicopters, even armed ones, could fly over Iraq.
In February before the ground war began and in March after the war was over, President Bush made public statements suggesting the Iraqis should “take matters into their own hands” and force Saddam Hussein “to step aside.” We hoped that Saddam’s military, in particular, might turn against him after the humiliating defeat we had just delivered them on the battlefield, but this failed to happen. There were public uprisings, especially among the Kurds in the north and the Shia in the south. In the north, six weeks after the war ended, the United States joined the British and French in establishing a no-fly zone and creating a secure Kurdish enclave to prevent Saddam from slaughtering the Kurds and to stop the significant flow of Kurdish refugees across the border into Turkey.
In the south, Saddam, using his helicopters, began a brutal crackdown on the Shia. At one point I learned that more than ten thousand refugees had fled to the part of Iraq where the U.S. Army was still in control and were pleading with our soldiers to take them with them. Schwarzkopf, I was told, had given orders that our forces should have nothing to do with the refugees. I sent word to Scowcroft’s deputy, Bob Gates, that we couldn’t leave Iraq until some honorable arrangement was made for these people. The Saudis agreed to set up a refugee camp.
A year and a half later we established a no-fly zone in southern Iraq, but Saddam continued his oppression of the Shia with ground forces. He ordered the draining of the marshes near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, displacing thousands of the predominantly Shiite Marsh Arabs. Our failure to do more to protect the Shia from Saddam contributed to a sense of betrayal and suspicion that affected our relationships twelve years later when America was confronting Saddam once again.
Our reaction to the Shia uprising was guided in part by a mistaken perception about the Iraqi Shiites—one that would persist until we were confronting Saddam again in 2003. Many in the U.S. government, and in the Department of State in particular, viewed the Iraqi Shia as natural allies of Iran—also a predominantly Shiite country. Iranians are Persian and Iraqis are Arab, but the State Department view held that sectarian ties among Shiite Muslims were stronger than cultural ties among Arabs. This notion overlooked the fact that thousands of Iraqi Shiites had fought Iran for eight years in the Iran-Iraq War. It also, I believe, misjudged the divide between Arabs and Persians. However, the fact that Iran began expressing overt support for the uprisings in 1991 seemed to confirm the State Department’s view of the situation and highlighted the complexity of the choices we faced.
At the time we had accomplished a tremendous military victory and the impetus was to be good for our word. We’d told our Arab allies, the Saudis in particular, that we’d bring enough forces to liberate Kuwait and that we’d leave when we were done, that we were not interested in becoming an occupying power or leaving our combat forces in the desert for the long term. In addition, neither the United Nations nor the U.S. Congress had signed on for anything beyond the liberation of Kuwait. Now that our mission was done, we would begin to bring our troops home.
Twelve years later, when we did g
o all the way to Baghdad, toppled Saddam, and liberated Iraq, the world looked very different. We had suffered a mass casualty attack on the U.S. homeland. We worried that Saddam was a dangerous nexus between terrorists and weapons of mass destruction capability. We had attempted for twelve years, with sixteen UN Security Council resolutions and international sanctions, to contain the threat he posed. By 2003 that sanctions regime was crumbling, Saddam had corrupted the UN’s oil-for-food program to buy prohibited materials and enrich himself, and he was biding his time planning, as soon as he could, to reconstitute programs that had been halted or slowed in the aftermath of Desert Storm. The calculation about the nature of the direct threat Saddam posed to America and the military action required to defend against that threat was very different in 2003.
But those decisions were many years ahead of us. No one on President George H. W. Bush’s national security team was arguing in 1991 that we should continue on to Baghdad to oust Saddam. And though there were arguably some misjudgments at the end of the war, I think you would be hard-pressed to argue that they fundamentally altered the strategic landscape.
AS OUR TROOPS RETURNED home from the desert, there was a palpable sense that their magnificent performance had restored a feeling of pride we had lost in Vietnam. The country welcomed our servicemen and servicewomen home with the celebrations they deserved.
On June 8, 1991, we honored our troops in Washington. The day opened with a prayer service at Arlington National Cemetery, where we remembered those who had not returned and expressed our gratitude to the families who would mourn them forever. President Bush spoke about the dream of “a commonwealth of freedom” that is at the foundation of who we are as a people:
America endures because it dares to defend that dream. That dream links the fields of Flanders and the cliffs of Normandy, Korea’s snow-covered uplands, and the rice paddies of the Mekong. It’s lived in the last year on barren desert flats, on sea-tossed ships, in jets streaking miles above hostile terrain. It lives because we dared risk our most precious asset—our sons and daughters, our brothers and sisters, our husbands and wives—the finest troops any country has ever had.
Receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George H.W. Bush (Official White House Photograph)
The president also talked about the yellow ribbons, perhaps one of the clearest signs that the stigma of Vietnam was gone. From the moment the conflict began, Americans across the nation began showing support for our troops by tying ribbons to trees and pinning them to lapels, joining, as President Bush said, “this nation’s hands and souls.”
I left Arlington National Cemetery and went to a reviewing stand on Constitution Avenue to watch our troops march by in a grand review. I couldn’t help but think of my great-grandfather, Samuel Fletcher Cheney, who had marched in just such a parade after the Civil War. America had also welcomed her heroes home from World War I and World War II with parades through our beautiful capital city.
A few days later, New York City held a ticker-tape parade.
Ticker tape parade in New York City for troops returning from Desert Storm. Lynne and I, together with Generals Powell and Schwarzkopf and their wives, rode at the front of the parade. (Rick Maiman/Sygma/Corbis)
Our troops marched through the Canyon of Heroes on a glorious spring day, and Colin Powell, Norm Schwarzkopf, and I were fortunate enough to join them along with our wives. American flags were everywhere, huge red, white, and blue balloons floated through the air, and the ticker tape and paper raining down on our troops soon got so deep that the street cleaners were darting into the street between the marching bands to try to clear the way.
Before the time of celebration was over, I placed two phone calls—one to David Ivry, who had been commander of the Israeli Air Force on June 7, 1981, when the Israelis conducted a daring raid to take out Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor. Although the Israelis had faced international condemnation for the attack, I believed they deserved our gratitude, and I wanted to thank Ivry. Without Israel’s courageous action we may well have had to face a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein in 1991.
I also called Ronald Reagan. We had won this war with the army, navy, air force, and Marine Corps he had helped build. I thanked him for his unwavering commitment to a strong national defense and his years of support for America’s military. I had a chance to visit with the former president the next month when I was in Los Angeles for a USO gala to welcome home the troops. I went to the Reagans’ home in Bel Air, where Mrs. Reagan greeted me at the door. She and the president showed me into their living room and directed me to take a seat in a big armchair. President Reagan pulled up a hassock so he could sit close as we talked about what was happening in the world. He concentrated on every detail I had to relate about our victory in the Gulf and he quizzed me about developments in the Soviet Union, which was now a very different place from when he had been in office. It was a great privilege for me to brief him on what I knew, because so much of the change we were seeing came from the U.S. military buildup he had insisted upon. It also came from the moral clarity of his vision. He had not been afraid to call the Soviet Union what it was: an evil empire.
IN ADDITION TO SUCCESSFULLY accomplishing our mission in the Persian Gulf, we’d worked hard to get other nations to contribute. My staff prepared a concept that they jokingly called “Operation Tin Cup” to encourage other countries to share the financial burdens of the war. With President Bush’s leadership and the fine help of such cabinet members as Secretary of State James Baker and Secretary of the Treasury Nicholas Brady, the United States received $53.7 billion to offset costs of $61.1 billion.
In the run-up to the war, General Kelly and members of the joint staff had conducted a series of in-depth briefings for me on different facets of the operational aspects of war. After the war was over, we did a series of seminars on lessons learned. They were important sessions that enabled us, for example, to learn about the capabilities of our Apache helicopters by hearing directly from a pilot who had flown one of the missions the first night of the air war in Iraq. One very significant area of advancement from previous wars was in precision-guided munitions, or PGMs. The first major use of these “smart” weapons, which can be guided with great accuracy onto a target using laser or other technology, came in Operation Desert Storm. Although most of the ordnance we dropped in that conflict were the older “dumb” or “gravity” bombs, we saw what PGMs could do. They could be precisely targeted on an enemy’s communications networks or electricity grid, enabling us to disable key functions of an adversary’s capital city, for example, with minimal collateral damage.
A FEW MONTHS AFTER celebrating the end of the Persian Gulf war, I was standing knee-deep in the waters of the Dean River in British Columbia, just about to cast my fly line and thinking about landing a twenty-pound steelhead. It was August 19, 1991. The fishing had been slow and the water high from late season runoff, but it was starting to clear, and I’d just seen the fisherman next to me hook a magnificent fish.
“Mr. Secretary,” I heard someone call. I looked over to the riverbank to see my communications specialist waving me down. “There’s been a coup in the Soviet Union!” he shouted. “Deputy Secretary Atwood needs to talk to you.” So much for my steelhead. I waded over to the riverbank, climbed out of the water, and walked downriver with the communicator to where a solar-powered satellite phone had been set up that morning. We placed a secure call back to the Pentagon. “Dick, Gorbachev’s out,” Atwood said—prematurely, as it turned out—when I got him on the phone. “We don’t know if the coup is still under way or complete. Things are moving fast.” I needed to get back to Washington.
The Dean River is remote, which is why the fishing is so good, and it was complicated to get back to Washington quickly. Some of the guys I’d been camping with on the Dean had a homemade rig, a flat-bottom jet boat built specifically to operate on this river. They took my security agent, communications specialist, and me, along with our gear, in the boat
downriver to the head of the falls, where we got out and loaded our stuff into an old school bus for the journey down the rough mountain road around the falls. From there we headed to a nearby airstrip, where a single-engine wilderness charter, with huge rubber tires that enabled it to land on extremely rough runways, waited. It flew us to Prince George, British Columbia, where an air force C-20 was waiting to take us the rest of the way back to D.C.
As the C-20 climbed to altitude over glaciers and sharp peaks, I thought about what the events in the Soviet Union might mean. For the last two years I had been spending time in Saturday sessions in my Pentagon conference room with experts on the Soviet Union from inside and outside the government. I found these sessions extremely useful as a way to gather very smart people together and step back from the rush of daily crisis management in order to think strategically about developments inside our most significant adversary and what they might mean for American defense policy.
I got on a conference call with General Powell, Admiral Mike McConnell, and Lieutenant Colonel John Barry, my junior military assistant. Powell reported on a meeting at the White House that had just wrapped up. He said that the president had been on the phone to world leaders, and although everyone was very concerned, it was clear we shouldn’t rule Gorbachev out quite yet. Intelligence reports were indicating that this was not a completed coup. There were military units milling around in Moscow, but they didn’t seem to have their act together.
One of the key questions we focused on in the first hours after we learned about the potential coup was the location of the Soviet equivalent of the nuclear “football”—the briefcase that contained the launch codes for the Soviet nuclear arsenal. With Gorbachev apparently in his dacha in the Crimea and the Soviet Minister of Defense Yazov and Marshal Akhromeyev among the coup plotters, it was not at all clear who was in control of the nuclear weapons.
