by Oliver Stone
Cheney, Powell, and General Norman Schwarzkopf rushed to meet with Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd. They showed him doctored photos of 150,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks poised just across his border in Kuwait and convinced him to allow a large U.S. military force onto Saudi soil, giving the United States its long-sought toehold in the region. The deception was soon exposed. A Japanese newspaper obtained satellite photos showing no Iraqi troop buildup in the area. American media took interest in the story. ABC News purchased additional satellite photos the following month, reconfirming the original assessment. Newsweek called it “the case of the ‘missing’ military presence.” “In fact,” Newsweek reported, “all they could see, in crystal-clear detail, was the U.S. buildup in Saudi Arabia.” U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Charles Freeman warned, “This will never work. All it’s going to take is one photo of some GI pissing on the wall of a mosque, and the Saudi government will be overthrown.”33 Despite Pentagon pressure to bury the story, Jean Heller, a highly respected reporter with the St. Petersburg Times, decided to pursue it, obtaining more photos that she showed to physicist and defense analyst Peter Zimmerman, who exposed the fraudulence of the U.S. claims. Newsday reported the comments of one senior U.S. commander who acknowledged, “There was a great disinformation campaign surrounding this war.”34
There is no evidence that Saddam ever intended to invade Saudi Arabia. Powell acknowledged that for the first three weeks, Iraq could have marched unimpeded into Saudi Arabia if it had so desired. He agreed with Turkish and Arab leaders that sanctions would force Saddam to reverse course. Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara urged the Senate to use sanctions, not war. In fact, UN-imposed sanctions were taking a tremendous toll on Iraq. In October, CIA Director William Webster reported that sanctions had curtailed 98 percent of Iraq’s oil exports and perhaps 95 percent of its imports. Zbigniew Brzezinski testified that an invasion could be “highly counterproductive,” turning the Arab world and European allies against the United States and causing chaos in the region.35
Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney meets with Crown Prince Sultan, the Saudi minister of defense and aviation. Following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Cheney, along with Generals Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf, rushed to meet with the Saudis, showing them doctored photos of an alleged Iraqi troop buildup on their border with Kuwait. Convincing King Fahd to allow a large U.S. military force onto Saudi soil, the United States gained its long-sought toehold in the region.
Pressure mounted quickly for a strong response by Bush. The Israeli press led the charge. An editorial in Hadashot was typical. “The pro-Iraqi puppet Government in Kuwait,” it lashed out, “is an expression of U.S. impotence and the weakness of President George Bush. Bush, until now at least, resembles Chamberlain in his knowing capitulation to Hitler.”36
Bush turned the tired Munich analogy on its head. In an August 8 televised address to the nation, he described Saddam as “an aggressive dictator threatening his neighbors” and compared him to Hitler.37 He kept the rhetoric at a fever pitch. Washington Post editor Charles Paul Freund dissected the Bush strategy: “Bush’s major rhetorical device in constructing his argument against aggression was Hitler. . . . Saddam Hussein’s sudden media Hitlerization was . . . another chapter in a process we have seen several times in recent years involving such figures as ‘strongman’ Noriega of Panama, the ‘fanatical’ Khomeini of Iran and Libya’s ‘madman’ Gadhafi.”38
Comparing Saddam Hussein to the most justly reviled figure of the twentieth century struck many observers as unreasonable, even absurd. At a campaign event in the Boston suburbs, Bush suggested that Saddam was worse than Hitler in using hostages as “human shields” at potential military targets. When asked how this could make him worse than the man responsible for the Holocaust, Bush equivocated, “I didn’t say the Holocaust, I mean, that is outrageous. But I think brutalizing young kids in a square in Kuwait is outrageous, too. I was told that Hitler did not stake people out against potential military targets and that he did, indeed, respect—not much else, but he did, indeed respect the legitimacy of the embassies. So we’ve got some differences there.”39
Bush also announced that U.S. troops were headed toward the Persian Gulf to take up positions in Saudi Arabia. He decided to act before the Saudis came up with their own solution to the crisis, fearing that a Saudi initiative might undermine U.S. domination of the region and its oil resources. Given the Saudis’ disdain for the Kuwaiti oligarchy, he feared that an “Arab solution” would leave Iraq in a powerful position.40
Meanwhile, Kuwaiti officials hired the world’s largest public relations firm, Hill & Knowlton, to sell the war. The firm’s Washington director, Craig Fuller, had been Bush’s chief of staff when he was vice president. Fuller helped orchestrate the largest foreign-funded effort ever undertaken to manipulate U.S. public opinion. On October 10, at hearings sponsored by Congress’s Human Rights Caucus, a fifteen-year-old girl testified that she had been a volunteer in a Kuwaiti hospital when Iraqi troops burst in. She described what she had witnessed: “They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die.” Bush cited the story repeatedly in making the case for war: “It turns your stomach to listen to the tales of those that have escaped the brutality of Saddam the invader. Mass hangings. Babies pulled from incubators and scattered like firewood across the floor.” It was later discovered that not only was the young witness lying about having been at the hospital, she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States and a member of the ruling family.41 By the time the fraud was exposed, U.S. bombing of Baghdad had already begun.
On November 29, the final UN Security Council resolution authorized use of “all necessary means” to force Iraqi evacuation from Kuwait. Votes for the resolution didn’t come cheap. Egypt had almost $14 billion of debt written off by the United States and the Gulf states another $6.7 billion. Syria received over $2 billion from Europe, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab states. Saudi Arabia gave the Soviets $1 billion, and the United States offered credit guarantees. For not vetoing the resolution, China’s foreign minister, who had been persona non grata after Tiananmen Square, was given a White House reception.
For joining Cuba in voting against the resolution, Yemen was punished severely. A senior U.S. diplomat informed the Yemeni ambassador, “That was the most expensive ‘no’ vote you ever cast.”42 Three days later, the United States cut $70 million in desperately needed aid to Yemen. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) started squeezing Yemen, and Saudi Arabia expelled 800,000 Yemeni workers.
While understanding the importance of marshaling international support to provide a “cloak of acceptability” to their invasion, U.S. leaders made it clear that they weren’t about to relinquish control to the United Nations or anyone else. As Bush and Scowcroft explained in their memoirs, “It was important to reach out to the rest of the world, but even more important to keep the strings of control tightly in our hands.”43
The U.S. public was also sharply divided. Approval of Bush’s handling of the crisis had dropped by 30 percent in three months. Despite Bush’s rhetoric about the nobility of the United States’ motives, it was difficult to sell the despotic leaders of Saudi Arabia or Kuwait as paragons of democracy. Nor was it easy to make the case that crucial U.S. interests were at stake. The United States, unlike Western Europe and Japan, depended very little on Kuwaiti oil. In fact, Iraqi and Kuwaiti oil combined accounted for only 9 percent of U.S. imports. And neither the Europeans nor the Japanese were eager to go to war over Kuwait.
Confronted with growing opposition, administration officials seized upon another strategy to frighten both the American public and vacillating UN officials. In late November, Cheney and Scowcroft appeared on Sunday talk shows brandishing the nuclear threat. Cheney spoke about Iraq’s nuclear weapons progress and its chances of achieving “some kind of crude device” in less than a year. Scowcroft told David Brinkley that S
addam might achieve that goal within “months.” “One has to assume,” he added, “that he might be more willing to use nuclear weapons than has any other power.” Scowcroft had apparently forgotten which country it was that had previously dropped nuclear bombs on an adversary and had threatened to do so again dozens more times over the years. And as if the nuclear threat weren’t frightening enough, Scowcroft added the terrorist threat for good measure. When asked, “What we have heard is that [Saddam] has gathered a whole raft of terrorists into his country and they are standing around awaiting instructions. Is that right?” “That’s right,” Scowcroft replied.44
Despite Cheney’s insistence that congressional approval of the use of force was not needed, Bush decided to take the measure to Congress. With antiwar protesters filling the streets, the House passed the war resolution on January 12 by 250–183. The Senate passed it 52–47.
By mid-January, the United States had 560,000 troops in the region. Almost 700,000 would serve by the end of the war. This gargantuan force was justified by even larger estimates of the number of Iraqi troops. Powell estimated half a million, Cheney a million, and Schwarzkopf 1.5 million.
The Security Council resolution had given the Iraqis until January 15, 1991, to withdraw their forces. Had Saddam been more savvy, he might have outfoxed the Americans who were most bent on war. New York Times reporter Judith Miller had earlier described what one European diplomat termed the “nightmare scenario” for the Americans: an Iraqi withdrawal that would leave Saddam in power and his arsenal intact, especially if it were accompanied by calls for elections to determine Kuwait’s future political structure. If that had happened, the carefully crafted U.S. game plan could have unraveled and Saddam would have survived. The Saudis would have felt compelled to request the removal of all international forces, whose stay in the country, Bush and King Fahd had promised, would last only as long as the danger persisted. The ruling Sabah family in Kuwait would either be toppled or have its powers sharply constrained. U.S. plans to establish a long-term presence in the Gulf region would be thwarted.45
The Iraqis would pay severely for Saddam’s failure to snatch diplomatic victory from the jaws of military defeat. Operation Desert Storm began on January 17, 1991. The United States pummeled Iraqi facilities for five weeks with its new high-tech weapons, including cruise and Tomahawk missiles and laser-guided bombs. After having crippled Iraq’s communications and military infrastructure, U.S. and Saudi forces attacked battered, demoralized, and outnumbered Iraqi troops in Kuwait, who put up little if any resistance. U.S. forces slaughtered escaping Iraqis along what became known as the “highway of death.” They deployed a new category of weapons made out of depleted uranium, whose radioactivity and chemical toxicity would produce cancers and birth defects for years. Victims may have included U.S. soldiers, who suffered from what became known as Gulf War Syndrome. But enough of the Republican Guard escaped the slaughter to ensure that Saddam would retain his hold on power.
Antiwar protesters filled the streets in January 1991.
General Colin Powell, General Norman Schwarzkopf, and Paul Wolfowitz listen to Dick Cheney (not pictured) at a press conference during Operation Desert Storm. The United States’ use of a gargantuan force of almost 700,000 troops during the war was justified by the massive estimates of Iraqi troops by Powell, Cheney, and Schwarzkopf, who predicted a half-million, a million, and 1.5 million, respectively.
Bush and his advisors decided not to push to Baghdad to overthrow the regime, recognizing that such a move would bolster the regional hegemony of Iran, antagonize the United States’ Arab allies, and embroil the United States in a costly and complicated occupation. Cheney warned, “Once we cross over the line and start intervening in a civil war . . . it raises the very real specter of getting us involved in a quagmire figuring out who the hell is going to govern Iraq.” On another occasion he elaborated:
It’s not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one that’s currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists? How much credibility is that government going to have if it’s set up by the United States military when it’s there? How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens to it once we leave?46
Colin Powell agreed with Cheney. The United States didn’t want to occupy Iraq, and there was no “Jeffersonian democrat waiting in the Ba’ath Party to take over.” The United States, he argued, was better off not getting “mired down in a Mesopotamian mess.”47
Wolfowitz and fellow State Department official I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby disagreed. But Bush resisted their urgings. “Trying to eliminate Saddam . . . would have incurred incalculable human and political costs,” he later explained. “We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq.” He added that “there was no viable ‘exit strategy.’ ”48
U.S. officials urged the Iraqis to rise up and topple Saddam. Shiites and Kurds responded en masse. But the United States stood idly by while the Iraqi government crushed the uprising, using poison gas and helicopter gunships. Still, the war showcased U.S. military power. Bush proclaimed a new world order and gushed, “The ghosts of Vietnam have been laid to rest beneath the sands of the Arabian desert.”49 One White House speechwriter programmed his word processor so he could write “New World Order” by hitting a single command key.50 Among those who dismissed this empty “burst of triumphalism” was conservative columnist George Will, who wrote, “If that war, in which the United States and a largely rented and Potemkin coalition of allies smashed a nation with the GNP of Kentucky, could . . . make America ‘feel good about itself,’ then America should not feel good about itself.” He noted “how close Bush came to unilaterally amending the Constitution by stripping from Congress all right to involvement in the making of war. Bush only grudgingly . . . sought constitutional approval for launching the biggest military operation in U.S. history, an attack on a nation with which we were not at war.”51 In two months of bombing, the United States destroyed much of Iraq’s infrastructure, including roads, bridges, sanitation facilities, waterways, railroads, communications systems, factories, and the electrical grid, and caused immense suffering. In March, the United Nations described the bombing as “near apocalyptic,” driving Iraq back into the “pre-industrial age.”52 A Harvard team reported a “public health catastrophe.”53 The continuing UN sanctions exacerbated a miserable situation, reducing real wages by over 90 percent. Although estimates vary widely, credible sources report that over 200,000 Iraqis died in the war and its aftermath, approximately half of them women and children. The U.S. death toll stood at 158.
Operation Desert Storm began on January 17, 1991. The United States pummeled Iraqi facilities for five weeks with its new high-tech weapons. After crippling Iraq’s communications and military infrastructure, U.S. and Saudi forces attacked battered, demoralized, and outnumbered Iraqi troops in Kuwait, who put up little if any resistance. U.S. forces slaughtered escaping Iraqis along what became known as the “highway of death.”
“By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!” Bush rejoiced. But privately he was more circumspect. As the war was coming to an end, he wrote in his diary that he was experiencing “no feeling of euphoria.” “It hasn’t been a clean end,” he regretted. “There is no battleship Missouri surrender. This is what’s missing to make this akin to WWII, to separate Kuwait from Korea and Vietnam.”54 And with Saddam Hussein remaining safely ensconced in power, victory seemed hollow and incomplete.
Gorbachev, meanwhile, had even less to celebrate. Just a few days after signing the START I treaty, on August 18, 1991, as he prepared to give even greater autonomy to the Soviet republics, Communist hard-liners placed him under house arrest. Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Republic, led a popular uprising that returned Gorbachev to power. But Gorbach
ev’s days were numbered. He was determined to use whatever time he had left to pursue his nuclear arms control agenda. START I would limit both sides to 6,000 strategic nuclear warheads and 1,600 delivery systems. Gorbachev also pushed for elimination of the 45,000 smaller-yield tactical nuclear weapons that the United States and Soviet Union had placed primarily in Europe. Although less dangerous than the powerful strategic weapons that were being slowly reduced, some of these battlefield weapons could yield up to a megaton, which was the equivalent of almost seventy Hiroshima bombs. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell had commissioned a study that recommended eliminating the tactical nuclear weapons, but it was rejected by the Pentagon. “The report went up to the Pentagon policy staff, a refuge of Reagan-era hard-liners, who stomped all over it, from Paul Wolfowitz on down,” Powell wrote in his memoirs. Cheney stomped, too.55 Despite the setbacks, both sides made significant unilateral cuts in their nuclear arsenals that would reduce, though not eliminate, the danger of complete nuclear annihilation.
