Livsey looked stricken. “Sir, you don’t really mean to cut down a tree?” He ticked off the opponents I would be taking on—the post engineers, public affairs officers, and budding environmentalists. And suppose the Washington Post got wind of the story, he warned.
“That tree is only going to get bigger until it destroys one of the finest views of Washington,” I said. “Tell the post engineers to have it removed.”
The Fort Myer post engineers decided, just to be contrary, I think, to schedule the tree removal for Earth Day! Shades of the plan to shoot little dogs to carry out wound research. Once the deed is done, how do you explain that you cut down a tree on Earth Day? I made a strategic retreat and let the matter rest.
A few weeks later, I called in Livsey again and laid out my strategy. The post engineers were to cut down the tree, pull the stump, and lay sod over the scar. And get it all done in an hour, I told Tim. The next morning, when Otis arrived to drive me to the Pentagon, I told him to wait a few minutes while I wandered out onto the lawn. The view across the Potomac was magnificent, unobstructed. I looked down at the thick grass and could barely make out where the tree had stood. Nor did anyone else seem to notice it was gone. Surprise, stealth, and swiftness have historically been key elements in successful campaigns.
August 1, 1990, began conventionally enough. Up at 5:30 A.M., worked out on the Lifecycle, had my standard breakfast, raisin bran, a banana, orange juice, and coffee. Arrived at the Pentagon before 7:00, where I received the usual overnight briefing from the CIA analyst waiting for me in the outer office.
This was, however, to be no ordinary day. In one respect, it should be triumphant. For the previous eight months I had been shepherding the Base Force through the bureaucratic maze, fighting reluctant chiefs and service secretaries and gaining key support from Paul Wolfowitz, the tough-minded undersecretary of defense for policy, who had reached conclusions similar to mine through his own analysis. Dick Cheney, who kept an open mind throughout, despite early doubts, finally approved the concept. The chiefs were mostly on board. Admiral Dave Jeremiah, my new vice chairman, was a strong fellow advocate. At times, I had been discouraged by setbacks and had almost given up hope. But the day Dick, Paul, and I briefed President Bush and won his approval, the Base Force became the administration’s position. The President was going to Aspen, Colorado, the next day, August 2, where he would meet with the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, and give a speech at the Aspen Institute Symposium announcing his new strategy and the Base Force as the new shape of America’s armed forces. The changes envisioned were enormous, from a total active duty strength of 2.1 million down to 1.6 million. The strategic heart, the four forces I urged, had survived intact. The plan the President was going to propose would effectively mark the end of a forty-year-old strategy of communist containment, a strategy that had succeeded. We had won. The next day, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and I were to go to Capitol Hill to start selling the Base Force to the armed services and appropriations committees.
Also, this day, I had asked Norm Schwarzkopf to come up from CENTCOM headquarters to brief the chiefs and Cheney in the Tank on alarming rumbles along the Iraq-Kuwait border.
I went through the usual ceremonial hoops in a chairman’s day, a photo op with one of the Joint Staff colonels getting his first star, and observing a parade in front of the Pentagon for President Gnassingbe Eyadema of Togo. Later, I went to Blair House for a luncheon honoring Eyadema. The State Department liked having black African leaders meet prominent African-Americans and milked these occasions for all they were worth.
I plowed through the rest of the day, and was home by 7:00 P.M. for dinner. Afterward, I retired to my study to go through an aviator’s bag full of paperwork. A few minutes before 8:00 P.M., the secure phone rang, rarely the harbinger of good news. Mike Cams, director of the Joint Staff, was calling to tell me that Saddam Hussein had just sent the Iraqi army across the border into Kuwait.
Eighteen
A Line in the Sand
SADDAM HUSSEIN’S INVASION OF KUWAIT OCCURRED ABOUT NINE MONTHS after I had projected, in my “Strategic Overview—1994,” that Korea and the Persian Gulf were the two world hot spots likeliest to involve U.S. forces. The Iraqi army had made me uncomfortable ever since Iraq and Iran ended their bloody eight-year war in 1988, while I was National Security Advisor. Once Saddam, with an army over one million men strong, no longer had Iran to worry about, I feared he would look for mischief somewhere else.
Iraq was nearly $90 billion in debt after the war. As a proportion of its gross national product, it was a sum that made the U.S. deficit look prudent. Saddam blamed Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for preventing Iraq from working its way out of this Grand Canyon of a hole. They had thrust a “poisoned dagger” into Iraq’s back by busting the oil quotas set by OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, thus driving prices down and reducing Iraq’s income. Kuwait, he further charged, had siphoned off $2.5 billion in oil from the Rumaila field, which the two countries shared. And he covetously eyed two Kuwaiti-held islands, Warba and Bubiyan, which blocked his access to the Gulf. The Kuwaitis were not Arab brothers, but “greedy lapdogs” of the West.
On a trip in early July 1990 to Tunisia, Egypt, and Jordan, I found these states optimistic about finding an “Arab” solution to Iraq’s financial problems. However, when I went on to Israel I found the Israelis less sanguine about Saddam’s intentions. The trip had not been all work. In Jerusalem my counterpart, Lieutenant General Dan Shomron, the Israeli chief of staff, threw a party for me, at which I surprised the guests with some Bronx-acquired Yiddish. Word got out that I even conducted a private meeting with Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir in Yiddish; not true, but too good to deny.
Back in Washington, during the third week in July, Rear Admiral Mike McConnell, my Joint Staff intelligence officer, came to the office and spread satellite photos on my desk. “The Iraqis have deployed three divisions near Kuwait’s border, about thirty-five thousand men so far,” McConnell told me, as he traced the startlingly clear images. He could identify the force as part of the Republican Guard, Saddam Hussein’s elite troops, who were equipped with hundreds of modern Soviet-made T-72 tanks. Saddam’s deployment near the border was ominous. But what did it represent? Intimidation? Pressure? Invasion? How far was he ready to go?
By July 24, I was concerned enough to call Norm Schwarzkopf at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. If the United States got involved militarily in the Persian Gulf, it would be in Norm’s court. As CINC of CENTCOM, he was responsible for our military activities in South Asia, the Horn of Africa, and critical parts of the Middle East. We discussed the continuing Iraqi buildup, by now four divisions and over 100,000 troops. Arab leaders kept telling us not to worry. Arab brothers did not war against each other. Nevertheless, I told Norm, “I want you to come up with a two-tiered response.” Tier one should provide for a range of retaliatory options “if Saddam commits a minor border infraction.” But if his intentions turned out to be more ambitious, “I want to see a second-tier response, how we’d stop him and protect the region.”
“I’ll get started,” Norm said. He already had a leg up on the problem. CENTCOM had grown out of the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force created during Jimmy Carter’s presidency to deal with a possible conflict between our then friend, Iran, and the Soviet army. An enormous amount of time and money had been spent on a bizarre U.S. response to stop the Russian army from ever coming through the Zagros Mountains of northern Iran. After the fall of the Shah, Iran went from friend to enemy, and the likelihood of the Soviet Union heading toward the Persian Gulf seemed far-fetched. CENTCOM, consequently, had turned its attention to the threat Iraq posed to its smaller neighbors.
Military men look for three surefire clues that an enemy force is preparing to attack. Is it moving its artillery forward? Is it laying down communications? Is it reinforcing its forces logistically, with stocks of fuel and ammunition? By July 31, all three conditions wer
e present in southern Iraq. I called Schwarzkopf again. “I want you,” I said, “to come up tomorrow to brief Cheney and the chiefs on your assessment of the situation and your contingency plans.”
It was the next day that I attended the Blair House luncheon for President Eyadema of Togo. After lunch, I had Otis whip me back to the Pentagon. I was impatient to return for Schwarzkopf’s briefing, scheduled for 2:00 P.M. I arrived at the Tank at about the same time as Dick Cheney. The chiefs rose, and we took our places. Cheney had me lead off. I quickly turned the floor over to Schwarzkopf, whose robust six-foot-three-inch frame and force of personality filled the room. Norm gave a sobering ninety-minute survey.
“What do you think they’ll do?” Cheney asked.
“I think they’re going to attack,” Norm said. He thought it would be a limited attack to seize the Kuwaiti part of the Rumaila oil field and Bubiyan Island. He did not think Saddam intended to swallow all of Kuwait and topple the ruling family. On that note, the meeting ended.
Earlier, Dick Kerr, deputy director of the CIA, had given us the same judgment. The Bush administration, however, seemed intent on keeping out of inter-Arab squabbles. During a meeting with Saddam Hussein, five days earlier, our ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, told him, “… we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts like your border disagreement with Kuwait.” Afterward, the ambassador sent a cable to Washington urging that the United States “ease off on criticism” until Iraq and Kuwait could settle their dispute themselves. In a subsequent message to Saddam, President Bush cabled that his administration “continues to desire better relations with Iraq.” We had Arab states saying nothing was going to happen, and the United States saying that if anything did, it was not our concern.
Several suggestions had surfaced in the State Department and the Pentagon as to how we might deter the Iraqis. One was to speed up the aircraft carrier Independence, already headed to the Persian Gulf. Al Gray, the Marine Corps Commandant, had suggested sending Marine Prepositioned Squadron ships already loaded with Marine equipment that were presently stationed at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. These moves, however, would be invisible and have no deterrent effect unless we publicly announced the purpose behind them. At that stage, the administration had not considered warning Iraq, and Cheney and I were reluctant to get out in front of the White House. The only action we had taken had been to fill a request from the UAE for two U.S. Air Force tankers to help conduct air surveillance, not a move likely to strike terror into Saddam Hussein.
By now, I regretted our earlier political and military inaction, although it was not clear that Hussein would be deterred by token moves. After Schwarzkopf’s briefing, as Cheney and I were leaving the Tank, I said, “Dick, this is serious. We can’t ignore what’s going on. I think the President should get off a tough message to Saddam today. Even call him, but try to scare him off.” Dick was as concerned as I was and began touching bases at the NSC and State to prepare a protest. But it was too late. Before we could fire a diplomatic warning shot, eighty thousand of Saddam’s Republican Guards were across the border rolling toward Kuwait City.
The President called a full NSC meeting for 8:00 A.M. the next day. Schwarzkopf was already back in Tampa. I asked him to jump on a plane and bring his maps and plans to the White House meeting. This was Norm’s first chance to see the senior policy crowd in action, and I wanted him to get a feel for the people with whom he was likely to be working. It was quite an introduction. The talk was disjointed and unfocused. As much time was spent discussing the impact of the invasion on the price of oil as on how we should respond to Saddam’s aggression. The overhanging question was Saddam’s next move. Would he stop at taking Kuwait or strike Saudi Arabia next? Should we seek sanctions? Just how far were we prepared to go? Before the meeting, the President had been asked by reporters if he intended to send troops, and he had replied, “I am not contemplating any such action.”
The tier-one response having been overrun, Norm made his White House debut describing his contingency plan for defending Saudi Arabia. Still the discussion did not come to grips with the issues. I am uncomfortable with meetings that do not arrive at conclusions, and as I saw this one about to end, I tried to get clearer guidance. “Mr. President,” I asked, “should we think about laying down a line in the sand concerning Saudi Arabia?” Bush thought for a moment, then said, yes, we should. But the fate of Kuwait was left unresolved. Bush left immediately for Aspen, Colorado, to meet with Prime Minister Thatcher and give the speech we had labored over so long laying out his new national security strategy, incorporating the Base Force. Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and I went to supersecure Room S 407 in the Capitol to pitch the Base Force to leaders of the Defense Department’s congressional oversight committees. But all we heard was, yeah, sure, right. But what’s going on in Kuwait?
On Friday, after the President returned from Aspen, he called the NSC together again in the Cabinet Room. “It sure has been some twenty-four hours,” he said, as he took his customary place at mid-table. “Doing fine so far, though. Prime Minister Thatcher and I see eye-to-eye. I expect we can get our friends to support joint political and economic action in the Gulf.” He was particularly pleased that one old mold appeared to have been broken. Mikhail Gorbachev had not treated this crisis as another East-West confrontation, with the Soviet Union willy-nilly lining up behind its onetime friend Saddam. The day before, the UN Security Council had voted 14–0 to condemn the invasion and demand immediate and unconditional Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait, and the yea votes included the Soviet Union.
Bill Webster, the CIA director, gave us a bleak status report. “The Iraqis,” he said, “are within eight tenths of a mile of the Saudi border. If Saddam stays where he is, he’ll own twenty percent of the world’s oil reserves. And a few miles away he can seize another twenty percent. He’ll have easy access to the sea from Kuwaiti ports. Jordan and Yemen will probably tilt toward him, and he’ll be in a position to extort the others. We can expect the Arab states to start cutting deals. Iran will be at Iraq’s feet. Israel will be threatened.” Saddam Hussein, Webster concluded, would become the preeminent figure in the Persian Gulf.
“We’ve got to make a response,” Brent Scowcroft said, “and accommodating Saddam is not an option.”
“You can’t separate Kuwait from Saudi Arabia,” Cheney added. “When the Iraqis hit the Saudi border, they’re only forty kilometers from the Saudi oil fields. We have the potential here for a major conflict.”
Larry Eagleburger, deputy secretary of state, sitting in for Jim Baker, urged, “We ought to go for a Chapter 7 from the UN,” which would authorize military force and economic sanctions.
“I’ve already been on the phone with the Arab leaders,” the President said. He had talked to President Mubarak of Egypt, King Hussein of Jordan, and King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. “They still tell me they can find an Arab solution.” He sounded unconvinced. “But whatever we do, we’ve got to get the international community behind us.”
Cheney turned to me to review military options. Again, I went over the Schwarzkopf plan for defending Saudi Arabia. I described the units we could put into the Gulf region in a hurry. I was reasonably sure that the Iraqis had not yet decided to invade Saudi Arabia. I was also confident that they did not relish a war with the United States. “But it’s important,” I said, “to plant the American flag in the Saudi desert as soon as possible, assuming we can get their okay.” We did not want our inaction to embolden Saddam further.
Cheney and Eagleburger agreed. Scowcroft had taken this position within hours of the invasion. “We’re committed to Saudi Arabia,” the President said. We could start alerting units to be prepared to defend the country.
I then asked if it was worth going to war to liberate Kuwait. It was a Clausewitzian question which I posed so that the military would know what preparations it might have to make. I detected a chill in the room. The question was premature, and it should not have come from me. I had overstepped. I was no
t the National Security Advisor now; I was only supposed to give military advice. Nevertheless, I had wrestled with the politics and economics of crises for almost two years in the White House, in this very room. I had participated in superpower summits. More to the point, as a midlevel career officer, I had been appalled at the docility of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, fighting the war in Vietnam without ever pressing the political leaders to lay out clear objectives for them. Before we start talking about how many divisions, carriers, and fighter wings we need, I said, we have to ask, to achieve what end? But the question was not answered before the meeting broke up.
Later that day, President Bush and Scowcroft spoke with Prince Bandar, my old racquetball partner, now Saudi ambassador to the United States. They wanted Bandar to understand the threat his country faced and to know that we were prepared to come to its aid. Afterward, Scowcroft called Cheney at the Pentagon. Bandar was coming over, he said, and we were to give him another dose of reality. On his arrival at Cheney’s office, Bandar played his usual Americanized, jaunty fighter-pilot role, drinking coffee from a foam cup and stirring it with a gold pen. Ordinarily, we addressed each other in terms bordering on the obscene, with my printable favorites including “Bandar the Magnificent” and “Bandar, you Arab Gatsby,” while he called me “Milord.” This day we did not kid around. As we sat at Cheney’s small round table, I traced on reconnaissance photos the Iraqi forces practically on Saudi Arabia’s doorstep. Bandar studied them, an unlit cigar clenched between his teeth, but he said nothing.
“We’re ready to help you defend yourselves from Saddam,” Cheney said.
Bandar gave us a look of bemused skepticism. “Like Jimmy Carter did?” He was referring to an earlier crisis in which President Carter had come to Saudi Arabia’s aid with unarmed F-15 aircraft.
My American Journey Page 57