Against All Enemies (13 page)

In the months that followed, President Bush and Secretary Baker engaged in a diplomatic tour de force. They created a consensus coalition of over one hundred nations, many of which agreed to send forces to defend Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. My job was to coordinate the solicitations for military units and to find space for the immense Tower of Babel military force that was heading to the Gulf: French, Syrians, Egyptians, units from South and Central America, Africa, and Asia. At one point when I told Cheney that the Australians had made a decision to send F-111 aircraft, he threw up his hands in frustration, “Dick, we do not have room for any more allies. Stop asking them.” Cheney's attitude then foreshadowed his attitude twelve years later: we can deal with Iraq militarily by ourselves and everybody else is just more trouble than they are worth.

By contrast, Bush and Baker knew that the thought of an American army going to war with an Arab nation could be enormously damaging to America's image in the Muslim world. They believed that the only way to inoculate against that damage was by extraordinary, unprecedented diplomatic effort and coalition building. Both spent long hours on the telephone for months, building and holding together the eclectic coalition. They knew that for that alliance to stay united, they had to demonstrate that they had taken the time and given Iraq every opportunity to avoid war. It could not just look that way, it had to be a really exhaustive effort to achieve a peaceful outcome. Only then could American forces go on the attack, along with the militaries of seven Arab nations. Their historic efforts are in marked contrast to the go-it-alone, hell-bent-for-war policy pursued by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney twelve years later.

When Bush's and Baker's diplomatic efforts failed to persuade Saddam Hussein to abandon Kuwait, the U.S. plan changed from defending Saudi Arabia to invading Kuwait. The Saudis supported the offensive plan, fearing the effects in their own country if hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops had to stay for years defending the Kingdom against a possible Iraqi invasion.

The Iraqis expected a frontal assault on Kuwait, supplemented by amphibious landings by U.S. Marines. So did I, until late November 1990 when Schwarzkopf asked me to fly around the Gulf to visit American units and give speeches to the troops about the coming war and why we had to fight. I was with the 101st Airborne in a forward desert camp one night when I learned that we had a trick planned. After my speech, the fifth of a very long day, the general who was the division commander and I stood in the chow line with the troops and then grabbed an outdoor table alone. “Aren't those fine troops?” the general asked as we ate baked beans.

“They are, but I'm sick at the thought that many of the guys I talked to today will be killed in a few weeks,” I admitted. The general looked surprised. “Hell, Dick, the Hail Mary will catch Saddam off guard. We'll envelop him before he knows what hit him. He'll still be looking for the Marines landing, which ain't ever gonna happen.”

I asked the general to show me in the sand. He drew a dramatic left hook from Saudi Arabia into Iraq, which would attack the Iraqis in Kuwait from the rear. Barry McCaffrey's 24th Division was to lead the sweep around. (Twelve years later, renamed the 3rd Infantry, the same division would race to Baghdad in three weeks.) I smiled. “Well, General Shelton, if we can pull that off we ought to be able to eliminate Saddam's army once and for all.”

Hugh Shelton smiled back. “That's the idea.” Shelton had no fear of boots on the ground in Iraq then. When it came to boots on the ground in Afghanistan in 1999, he would be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and would think otherwise.

At Schwarzkopf's request, I had placed some of my staff in his bunker in Riyadh. He asked them, although civilians, to dress in camouflage uniforms. He requested one of my staff, John Tritak, who had a newly minted degree in war studies from London's Kings College, to conduct a series of seminars for his senior commanders on how wars end. Tritak explained the “unconditional surrender” logic that Churchill had insisted on in World War II. My staff in Riyadh also provided Schwarzkopf with informal reports on the latest bureaucratic maneuvering in Washington. What Schwarzkopf also knew was that my guys kept me well informed about his plans.

As soon as the air phase of the U.S. attack began, Iraqi missiles landed on Israel. Initial reports reaching me in the State Department Operations Center spoke of chemical clouds coming from the missiles. If that were true, I knew the Israelis could not be held back from responding. Seymour Hersh reported in his book
The Samson Option
that Israel actually prepared missiles for launch against Iraq during this period and they did so in a way that the United States detected. The Patriot missiles in Israel fired at the incoming Iraqi warheads, but still the warheads landed. My Israeli counterpart, David Ivry, told me of their plans to send Airborne forces into western Iraq to clean out the Iraqi missile launchers. If that happened, if it became the U.S. and Israel attacking Iraq, the U.S.-Arab coalition might rupture before the ground war had even begun.

My staff in Riyadh were reporting that Schwarzkopf was refusing to pull U.S. aircraft off scheduled bombing missions to search for Iraqi missiles in the west. I used my unauthorized back channel to Schwarzkopf and called him. “Norm, you said to call you directly anytime I needed to. Well, I need to. I'm hearing that we don't have a lot of assets hunting for the Scuds. The Israelis are about to go nuts.”

“To hell with them, not one Israeli has died from the Scuds,” Schwarzkopf fumed. “Those things are just big firecrackers. The bombing missions I am running are eliminating Iraqi units that will kill American troops if those Iraqis are still alive when the ground war starts.” He was right, not one Israeli had died at that point and we did need to bomb the front-line Iraqi troops. He was also wrong. If we did not do something about the Scuds, Israeli parachutists would be the first troops into Iraq.

Schwarzkopf was ordered by Cheney and Powell to divert bombing missions to do Scud hunting. A diplomatic mission to Israel by Deputy Secretary Larry Eagleburger, and promises that U.S. forces would take out the Scud missile launchers, persuaded Israel to stand down. (The Scud-hunting bombing missions failed to destroy a single Iraqi missile.)

Once the ground war started, Schwarzkopf's plan worked perfectly. Iraqi units began to flee Kuwait. Meanwhile, McCaffrey drove his division farther and faster than any American unit had ever gone in combat, moving into position to cut the withdrawing Iraqis from behind. But then the pro-war tenor of U.S. news reporting began to change. American television carried stories of American aircraft slaughtering retreating Iraqi troops. Returning pilots were interviewed plane-side talking about “turkey shoots.”

Schwarzkopf's view was that these withdrawing Iraqis were combat units with their equipment intact, repositioning. Individual Iraqis who had abandoned their weapons were not being attacked by U.S. aircraft. The repositioning units were, however, a threat. They were elite Republican Guard divisions with the best equipment the Iraqi army had. They could resume combat at any time. He wanted McCaffrey and the air strikes to eliminate them. Washington thought otherwise. The war was coming up on its hundredth hour, Iraq was abandoning Kuwait, and there was no sense risking adverse U.S. media coverage. Schwarzkopf was ordered to stop. Although he writes in his memoir that he agreed with the order, it seemed otherwise to some in his headquarters who were sitting behind him on the secure phone to me.

In the field, McCaffrey was stunned. A few more hours and he could have eliminated any future Iraqi military threat to anyone by destroying the Republican Guard divisions. Without them, the chances of Saddam Hussein being overthrown increased. Many in Washington, however, had come to take it as a given that the Iraqi military would in any event oust the adventurous Saddam once the war ended.

Schwarzkopf was sent to negotiate a surrender with Iraqi generals at Safwan, near Kuwait. A joint U.S.-U.K. working group I led had discussed proposed surrender terms, including the destruction of the heavy armor of the Guard divisions. In the talks at Safwan, however, the Iraqi units were allowed to withdraw intact. At the request of the Iraqis, the no-flying rule was amended to permit the Iraqi army to fly its helicopters. The U.S. forces inside Iraq would withdraw, although Iraqi units could not be stationed near the Kuwaiti border.

There had never been a U.S. plan to march on Baghdad, nor an advocate in Washington for doing so. The Arab nations with large numbers of troops fighting in the coalition (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria) were not eager to see American troops occupy an Arab country, nor did they want to see the Shi'a Muslim majority take over Iraq and set up a pro-Iranian regime. Thus, the Saudis and Egyptians had backed U.N. Security Council resolutions authorizing only the liberation of Kuwait.

The Bush administration also shied away from the enormous task of occupying Iraq. How much would that cost? What Iraqi would we put in charge? What would we do with the Shi'a majority in Iraq? Left to their own devices, they thought, the Iraqi army would no doubt pick some Sunni general, but one who would be less dangerous than Saddam. After all, this defeat in Kuwait followed hard on the heels of the defeat in the long war with Iran, which was also started by Saddam's desire to expand his territory into another nation's oil fields. The Iraqis had now suffered hundreds of thousands of dead because of his lunacy. The Bush White House was convinced, wrongly, Saddam would not last.

In the postwar period, of course, Saddam was not overthrown. Quite the contrary, he used his surviving Republican Guard units to massacre those who did rise up against him, notably the Shi'a, the “marsh Arabs” in the south, and the Kurds in the north. Iraqi helicopters mowed down the rebels. U.S. forces stood by. Years later, the Shi'a would remember how Washington had called on them to rise up, but then did nothing as they were slaughtered.

It can and has been well argued as to whether the United States should have continued the war for a day or a week to destroy the Republican Guard, as had been originally intended. To me it was obvious then and now that another seventy-two hours of combat was needed. After all we had been through, we needed to insure that the Iraqi military was not strong enough to pose a future threat; otherwise we would have to keep our military in Saudi Arabia for the indefinite future.

Some even believe, wrongly, that we should have gone on to Baghdad. I can see how people can make that argument, although continuing into Baghdad would have shattered the coalition and left the U.S. holding the very messy bag of an occupied Iraq. What I cannot understand is how anyone can defend the Bush administration's decision to stand by and let the Republican Guard mass-murder the Shi'a and the Kurds. We had it within our power to resume the bombing of the Republican Guard and regime targets. Our Arab coalition partners and the world in general would have had to respect an American decision to renew hostilities for the limited purpose of stopping the slaughter. If we had bombed the Republican Guard and defended the Shi'a and Kurds, the Bush calculus that Saddam Hussein would fall without our occupying Baghdad might have proved true. Since we did not, a moral outrage was committed and Saddam Hussein stayed in power, and the U.S. had to keep forces in Saudi Arabia to defend against a renewed strike on Kuwait by a reconstituted Republican Guard.

W
EAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
had figured little in the justification for the war. Nonetheless, before the end of the war, my U.K.-U.S. working group on the postwar period had focused on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. We proposed a Special Commission, run by the U.N., that would require Iraq to destroy its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs. The U.N. would call it the United Nations Special Commission, UNSCOM.

Now, after the war, I developed plans for UNSCOM to have a forward base in Bahrain, equipment from various allies, and expert staff drawn heavily from the U.S. and U.K. I asked Bob Gallucci, who had been teaching at the War College, to be the top American and the Deputy Director of the Commission.

Although UNSCOM was shown tons of chemical weapons and some missiles, U.S. and British intelligence indicated that Iraq was hiding other programs, notably its nuclear weapons effort. U.N. teams found an enormous nuclear weapons research and development campus, which had been unknown to CIA prior to and during the war. Thus, it had never been bombed. The program was much farther along than CIA had known.

Prior to the war, Israeli intelligence had urgently reported that Iraq was close to developing a nuclear weapon. When pressed by doubting CIA analysts, however, Israel had refused to provide corroboration or reveal sources. Now it began to appear that Israel may have been right.