My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  But we also needed an air plan to help drive Saddam out of Kuwait, if it came to that. Schwarzkopf and I asked Warden to expand his strategic plan to include tactical strikes against the Iraqi army deployed in Kuwait. Warden went to Saudi Arabia and worked directly with two Air Force generals, Lieutenant General Chuck Horner, Schwarzkopf’s air component commander, and Horner’s assistant, Brigadier General “Buster” Glosson. Warden’s original plan would undergo numerous modifications and there would be much debate over targets, but his original concept remained the heart of the Desert Storm air war.

  Schwarzkopf formed a ground-planning equivalent of Warden and his team called the “Jedi Knights,” composed of bright Army lieutenant colonels. The Jedi Knights were closeted and told to come up with a contingency plan for a ground attack to kick the Iraqi army out of Kuwait.

  In September I had to go to Madrid for a NATO meeting, and I decided to tack a trip to Saudi Arabia onto the front end. On September 12, at the Riyadh airport, I stepped out of an Air Force 707 and felt as if I had entered a blast furnace. The temperature was 105 degrees, and it was still early morning. At least I had had a good night’s sleep on the plane. When I first became chairman, the Air Force had provided me with a C-135, a modified aerial refueling tanker with VIP accommodations suggesting a flying motel room. The problem was climate control, since between the floor and the ceiling the temperature ranged from arctic to equatorial. I was always wrapping blankets around my feet while my head sweated. And I usually came home with a cold. I asked the Air Force for something more temperate, and they started flying me in an old Air Force One, maybe no longer up to presidential standards, but not exactly no-frills transportation.

  Norm Schwarzkopf had been in Saudi Arabia only a couple of weeks when I arrived. He now had the weight of the world on his shoulders, and it showed. I asked him about troop arrivals. A little ragged, he said. What about deployment of the enemy? We had them spotted practically down to the battalion level, he told me. He also set up a whirlwind tour for me, the 24th Infantry Division, the 1st Tactical Fighter Wing, the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, the U.S.S. Blue Ridge (a command and control ship), and the battleship Wisconsin.

  At this early stage, morale among our troops was high, but the desert was a bleak, forbidding world, hedged in by Muslim moral strictures uncongenial to GIs from the Western world. At one point, Prince Bandar warned me, “No Bibles.” “Are you kidding?” I said. We were being inundated with Bibles from religious groups, and I could imagine the military trying to tell these folks, “The Arabs will take your sons, but not their Bibles.”

  “Saudi customs officials will have to confiscate the Bibles,” Bandar insisted. We finally worked out a deal whereby we flew the Bibles directly to our air bases, while Saudi officials looked the other way.

  Then Bandar informed me that no religious services could be held on Arab soil for our Jewish troops. “They can die defending your country, but they can’t pray in it?” I asked.

  “Colin, be reasonable,” he answered. “It will be reported on CNN. What will our people think?”

  We found a practical solution. We planned to helicopter Jewish personnel out to American vessels in the Persian Gulf and hold Jewish services aboard ship.

  Bandar also worried about crucifixes. I told him our soldiers would be ordered to wear them inside and not outside of their T-shirts.

  But what about these American women, with their bare arms and T-shirts, driving vehicles? There seemed no end to Arab sensitivities. Actually, our servicewomen provoked a mini social revolution. Saudi women saw them driving, and some started driving themselves. Since they were violating Islamic law, the women were arrested.

  Bandar and I made one last gentleman’s agreement. If any trouble grew out of sexual hanky-panky between an American and a Saudi, he would call me and we would be allowed to whisk the American out of the country and take appropriate disciplinary action ourselves before Islamic law clicked in. This likelihood proved to be the least of our worries. American troops in the region had less than usual rates of misconduct. I was proud of their discipline. But, frankly, part of the good behavior resulted from another Arab taboo: we had agreed not to allow our troops any alcohol in Saudi Arabia.

  The big question on the troops’ minds during my visit was rotation. How long before somebody else took their place? The issue went to the root of our commitment. Would the President wait out lengthy sanctions, which would require rotation? Or would he opt for an offensive, which likely meant staying in place for the duration? I wondered how long we could leave tens of thousands of restless young Americans there, baking in the sun, under Islam’s prohibitions, wondering which way their government would go.

  In Saudi Arabia, I witnessed the beginnings of a formidable force gathering as our allies started to arrive, the British first. The Gulf states committed forces, along with France, Canada, Italy, Egypt, Syria, and others eventually totaling twenty-eight nations. Countries unable to contribute troops helped finance the buildup.

  We had been planning for this kind of war on a grand scale for years at NATO. But we had assumed it would be fought amid hills and forests against a Soviet enemy, not across sand dunes against an Arab foe. From the outbreak of the crisis I had spent much of my time with my NATO and other coalition counterparts or dealing by phone with them. Every nation had an equivalent of a JCS Chairman answerable to its political leaders, as I was answerable to Cheney and Bush. Luckily, the coalition allies who had much invested in this adventure had extraordinary defense chiefs. Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir David Craig of Great Britain and I became close. I had solid relationships with General Maurice Schmitt of France, General Domenico Corcione of Italy, General John de Chastelain of Canada, and General Dogan Gures of Turkey, whose country was providing bases for us.

  Leading such a diverse force presented a challenge not unlike that which General Eisenhower faced as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II. Every country involved in the Gulf was sovereign and wanted assurances as to how its forces would be used. Very possibly, Norm Schwarzkopf’s greatest single achievement was his extraordinary ability to weld this babel of armies into one fighting force, without offending dozens of heads of state.

  Schwarzkopf was also a master at getting along with his Arab hosts. He had lived in the region as a young man and was a serious student of Arab culture. Big, profane Norm could sit and drink tea with Arabs and exchange courtesies for hours with the best of them. He became a favorite of King Fahd. Prince Khalid Bin Sultan, Bandar’s half brother and an air force general, was appointed commander of the Arab forces and became Schwarzkopf’s link to the royal family. Despite occasional flare-ups, the two of them worked together successfully. Khalid had the royal clout to get things done, and he was big and tough enough to stand toe-to-toe with Norm.

  I returned home from my trip to Madrid and the Middle East on September 15, a Saturday night, looking forward to a quiet Sunday to shake off the jet lag. It was not to be. I woke up early the next morning and went to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. Alma was already at the table and pointed to the front page of the Washington Post. The headline was “U.S. to Rely on Air Strikes if War Erupts.” It was the worst possible message at this time. The President was already being oversold on airpower. In one meeting he had told me, “Colin, these guys have never been seriously bombed. Bandar tells me a couple of bombs and they’ll fold. Mubarak, Ozal in Turkey, they all tell me the same thing. We can knock ’em out in twenty-four hours.”

  I understood his impatience. He wondered how long he could keep the tide of troops flowing to a distant rampart, build an international coalition, and hold on to public support. Air strikes are so tempting, so swift, so seemingly surgical. We might be able to win a war by air, though, so far, no one had. “The trouble with airpower,” I had warned the President, “is that you leave the initiative in the hands of your enemy. He gets to decide when he’s had enough.” We were planning a full campaign—air, land, sea, and s
pace—to remove the decision from Saddam’s hands.

  The source for the Post story was General Michael Dugan, who had replaced Larry Welch as Air Force Chief of Staff just three months before. Dugan too had just returned from a trip to Saudi Arabia and had treated the traveling press to an on-the-record interview for hours on end, an act of supreme courage, but not too prudent. I had warned Mike Dugan twice before about statements he had made to reporters that did not square with administration policy. Within just ten days of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, he had publicly claimed that air power could do the job. Among the things Dugan was quoted as saying in the Post article were that “airpower is the only answer that’s available to our country”; that the Israelis had advised him “the best way to hurt Saddam” was to target his family, his personal guard, and his mistress; that Dugan did not “expect to be concerned” with political constraints in selecting bombing targets; that Iraq’s air force had “very limited military capability”; and that its army was “incompetent.” The Post piece ended by quoting Dugan as telling an F-15 squadron stationed in the desert, “The American people will support this operation until the body bags come home.”

  In a single story, Dugan had made the Iraqis look like a pushover; suggested that American commanders were taking their cue from Israel, a perception fatal to the Arab alliance we were trying to forge; suggested political assassination, which a presidential executive order forbade; claimed that airpower was the only option; and said in a lugubrious way that the American people would not support any other administration strategy. Dugan was not in the chain of command and should not have been commenting on operational matters anyway. His remarks had been an obvious grab for Air Force glory. It would have been difficult to pack more impolitic, indiscreet, and parochial statements into a single interview.

  I tracked down Dugan in Florida, where he was attending a conference, and woke him out of a sound sleep. “Mike,” I said, “have you seen the Post?”

  “No.”

  “Then let me read you something.” I went through the piece, item by item. He did not seem concerned.

  I next called Cheney, who had not seen the Post article either. “We’ve got a problem,” I told him. He would get back to me, he said, after he had a chance to read the paper.

  Cheney called me right back. “That was dumb, dumb, dumb,” he said.

  “What do you want to do?” I asked.

  “I’ll brief Scowcroft, and then I’m going to take a walk along the C&O Canal,” he answered.

  I called Mike Dugan again, told him I had talked to Cheney, and braced him. Brent Scowcroft, I knew, was going to be on CBS’s Face the Nation that morning, and a traditional part of that appearance for administration officials was to carry out damage control against negative weekend stories. “Stand by to have your butt chewed,” I said. “And don’t be surprised if it’s on network television.”

  Mike answered only, “Right, yeah, I’m ready.”

  Scowcroft shot Dugan down, as expected.

  At 7:45 the following Monday morning, I was working at my stand-up desk, going through the overnight intelligence reports, and watching commuters arrive through the one-way Mylar window when Cheney phoned. He wanted me to come up to join him and Deputy Secretary Don Atwood. I barely had the door closed behind me when Cheney said, “I’m going to fire Mike Dugan.”

  “Dick,” I said, “can we talk about it?”

  “I’m going to fire Dugan. I have lost confidence in him.”

  “Let’s make sure the punishment fits the crime,” I said. I watched Cheney’s expression set like hardening concrete.

  “As soon as you leave the room,” he said, “I’m calling Dugan, and I’m relieving him.” I assumed, correctly as it turned out, that Cheney had already obtained the President’s approval.

  With Cheney, there was never any doubt when you had hit the wall. My job now was to start thinking about a replacement, since Dugan would be out of his office before the sun set on the Pentagon. On an earlier trip to the Pacific, I had met General Merrill “Tony” McPeak, a lean-as-leather fighter pilot, fifty-four years old, bursting with energy and imagination. I had been warned that McPeak was a hip shooter, prone to fire off ten ideas in one burst, of which three might be good. Not a bad average, as ideas go, I thought. I recommended McPeak to Cheney and to Don Rice, the Air Force Secretary. He was their pick as well, and Tony became the new Air Force Chief of Staff. Dugan was being replaced by another airpower advocate, one, I hoped, who would be a tad more discreet.

  Something was bothering me. On September 24 I went to Dick Cheney’s office. “Dick,” I said, “the President’s really getting impatient. He keeps asking if we can’t get the Iraqis out of Kuwait with air strikes.”

  “Yes,” Cheney said. “He’s concerned that time is running out on him.” We both understood the President’s restlessness, even though I had told him back on August 15 that he had until sometime in October to decide between continued sanctions or war. George Bush was investing enormous political capital in Desert Shield. His administration had come almost to a domestic standstill as the Gulf swallowed up his attention. And he did not think he could hold the international coalition together indefinitely.

  “You know how Norm, the chiefs, and I feel,” I said to Cheney. “We shouldn’t go on the offensive until we have a force in place that can guarantee victory. And that’s going to take time.”

  “So what do you want to do?” Cheney asked.

  “Our policy now is to hope sanctions will work,” I said. But I pointed out that by next month, the President had to decide whether to continue sanctions or keep building up to go to war. “I think we owe him a more complete description of how long-term sanctions and strangulation would work,” I said. I thought we ought to lay out the advantages and disadvantages so that the President would have an alternative to going to war. “In the meantime,” I said, “the buildup goes on.” I had already discussed such an alternative with Baker and Scowcroft. Baker had been interested, but Scowcroft shared Bush’s lack of faith in long-term sanctions.

  “The President’s available this afternoon,” Cheney said. “We’ll go over and you can lay it all out for him.” I had time only to grab some handwritten notes before Dick and I went to the Oval Office.

  It was a warm, drowsy autumn afternoon. The President was seated at his desk talking with Scowcroft and Sununu. Secretary of State Baker and the other members of the national security team were not present, since this was a spur-of-the-moment gathering and not an NSC decision meeting. I picked up a certain preoccupation in Bush’s demeanor. I was not sure we had the President’s undivided attention. He was meeting with President De Klerk of South Africa later that day and negotiating with Congress on a budget deal that would kill his “Read my lips; no new taxes” pledge.

  “Mr. President,” Cheney said, “the chairman has some thoughts for you.” The President nodded for me to proceed.

  “Sir,” I began, “you still have two basic options available. The first is the offensive option.” I walked him through the mobilization schedule. I also explained the air option we had in place, should Saddam attempt another provocation requiring our instant response. “I still recommend that we continue preparing for a full-scale air, land, and sea campaign,” I said. “If you decide to go that route in October, we’ll be ready to launch sometime in January.”

  But there was still the other option, sanctions. I described how we could maintain our defensive posture in Saudi Arabia while keeping sanctions in place. Even if we built up to an offensive force, we could always ratchet it back down to a defensive level. Containing Iraq from further aggression through our defensive strategy and strangling her into withdrawal through sanctions remained a live option. “Of course, there is a serious disadvantage,” I conceded. Sanctions left the initiative with the Iraqis to decide when they had had enough. And history had taught us that sanctions take time, if they work at all. I was not advocating either route, war or sanctions, on this d
ay. I simply believed that both options had to be considered fully and fairly. No decision would be required from the President for weeks.

  When I finished, he said, “Thanks, Colin. That’s useful. That’s very interesting. It’s good to consider all angles. But I really don’t think we have time for sanctions to work.” With that, the meeting ended.

  In his book The Commanders, Bob Woodward paints a dramatic picture of this scene in the Oval Office. (He has it occurring “in early October.”) Woodward has me wanting to steer the President toward a less aggressive course in the Gulf, but fearful to press my point hard enough because none of the other advisors present backed me. After his book came out, there was a lot of talk about Powell the “reluctant warrior.” Guilty. War is a deadly game; and I do not believe in spending the lives of Americans lightly. My responsibility that day was to lay out all options for the nation’s civilian leadership. However, in our democracy it is the President, not generals, who make decisions about going to war. I had done my duty. The sanctions clock was ticking down. If the President was right, if he decided that it must be war, then my job was to make sure we were ready to go in and win.

  In early October, I found myself standing next to a Soviet general inside a missile silo at Ellsworth Air Force Base in North Dakota, with the missile targeted toward his homeland. I also took him into the secret recesses of NORAD, the North American Air Defense Command in Colorado, explaining how we would track his country’s incoming missiles. I was squiring General Mikhail Moiseyev, chief of the Soviet general staff, around America in the midst of the Gulf buildup. The task was an intrusion, but necessary. In building the new harmony that we and the Soviets both wanted, personal relationships had become critical, especially given their cooperation so far in the Gulf crisis.

  The warm feelings from my first Vienna meeting with Moiseyev had carried over. I liked and admired this man. Beyond the obligatory grand tour of American martial might, I also wanted Moiseyev to see everyday America, to feel it, to sense it, to touch it, to know the real strength of a free society. Besides, every time I took him to a military installation or showed him a weapons system, he looked bored stiff. “Yes, we have one too, only better.”