My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  On October 1, the day after Moiseyev and his wife, Galina Iosifovna, had arrived, I had rousted the general from the VIP quarters at Boiling Air Force Base and taken him to visit my favorite Washington sites. We had with us again as interpreter Peter Afanasenko, always a joy as a companion and a scholar of the Russian soul as well as the language. We began in the stillness of dawn at the Jefferson Memorial, since Jefferson is my special hero among the Founding Fathers. I particularly admired his modesty on assuming the presidency: “I advance with obedience to the work,” he had said in his first inaugural, “ready to retire from it whenever you become sensible how much better choice it is in your power to make.” And in the same message, he revealed a realism about public office that rang true to anyone who has been there: “I have learnt to expect that it will rarely fall to the lot of imperfect man to retire from this station with the reputation and favor which bring him into it.”

  I explained to Moiseyev the excerpts from the Declaration of Independence chiseled onto the southwest wall of the memorial. “Those words,” I said, “launched the country I am going to show you.”

  Jefferson might seem an unlikely hero for me. As an African-American, I am aware of the contradictions in a man who could pledge in his second inaugural address, “Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion,” yet own slaves. We all are the products of our time, however, and as Jefferson once observed, people change, or else “we might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy.”

  I next drove Moiseyev by the Washington Monument, which he barely glanced at, and then took him to the Lincoln Memorial, which clearly impressed him. He was most moved, however, at our last stop, the simple wall cut into the earth on the Mall, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I showed him how we could locate, by computer, the name of any of the more than 58,000 fallen, using my late friend Tony Mavroudis as an example. Moiseyev was quiet as we trooped along the wall. At the end he said, “We need to do more. We don’t remember enough.”

  I knew he was not speaking of World War II, which is commemorated in practically every Russian village. He was thinking of the Soviet Union’s own Vietnam, Afghanistan, which had cost over 13,000 lives and which his government blotted from public awareness as though it had never happened, leaving only the families of the dead to grieve. The visit to the wall brought us together as brothers in the profession of arms, no matter what flag we served, “content to fill a soldier’s grave,” as the old poem goes.

  I took my guest to the Department of Veterans Affairs to give him a sense of what we did for those who had borne the battle. His eyes glazed over as VA officials described GI benefits and VA hospitals. But when we reached a display of prosthetic devices, we had his attention again. “We don’t do enough,” he repeated. “We should do more.” The war in Afghanistan, with the heavy mujahedin use of mines and booby traps, had been hell on Russian limbs.

  I took Moiseyev to the General Motors Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac Assembly Center in Detroit, Michigan, to give him a taste of American industry. Robert Semple, chairman and CEO of GMC, was our host, and when the tour of the assembly line ended, Semple escorted us to a test track, where the company had set out several late-model cars. All eyes went to a sleek red Corvette. Semple asked a GM driver to take Moiseyev and then me on a ride in the two-seater. I waved the driver off and said, “I’ll take the general for a spin.” Moiseyev and I got in. We had made a couple of turns around the track, and I had the Corvette pushing ninety, when Moiseyev gestured that he wanted to drive. I brought the car to a halt and we changed places. He bucked the six-speed sports car up to seventy and suddenly downshifted it to first, revving the Corvette to about 6,000 rpm. GGGrrrr!!! I hope this car never wound up on any dealer’s lot.

  At another point, Moiseyev and I were inspecting one of our ships in San Diego, and when we reached the galley, he decided to show off his proletarian credentials. A couple of cooks were peeling potatoes, and Moiseyev motioned for a peeler. He signaled me to take one, and proposed a race. We won the Cold War; but that day we lost the spud war. The champ was Moiseyev from Siberia over Powell from Banana Kelly.

  Toward the end of the week-long visit, I hosted a dinner honoring Moiseyev and his wife at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington. On our last night together, the Soviets threw a caviar-laden and vodka-drenched reciprocal dinner. By then, Galina, or Galla as we had come to know her, and Alma had become as close as the two old soldiers. Then it was time for us to take our friends out to Andrews Air Force Base for their flight back to Moscow. Alma and Galla rode in a limousine behind me and Moiseyev, and afterward Alma described Galla’s conversation. During the stay, she had had a good introduction to the United States. “I do not envy anything I have seen in your country,” Galla told Alma. “I am not jealous. I am just sad. We wasted seventy years. We lost the opportunity to do what you have done. And it will not be fixed in my lifetime.”

  On October 6, I called Norm Schwarzkopf in Riyadh over my secure phone. It was a beautiful system. The President’s button was in the left-hand corner of the console and had a shrill, attention-demanding ring. Norm’s button was in the right-hand corner, and all I had to do was punch it and his phone rang in Riyadh, easy as talking to the guy in the office next door. I asked Norm to send a team to Washington to brief the President on the offensive strategy we would use if we had to drive the Iraqis from Kuwait. Norm resisted: “I got no goddam offensive plan because I haven’t got the ground forces.” He still had only one corps, he pointed out. “I can’t get there from here,” he warned me.

  I knew what Norm was worried about. All he had coming at this point were four Army divisions, a Marine division, an armored cavalry regiment, a British armored brigade, a French light brigade, a mixed Egyptian/Syrian force, and a collection of small coalition elements—all told, just over 200,000 troops. He would have enough to defend Saudi Arabia, but hardly enough to drive out an entrenched Iraqi army estimated at half a million men. Still, I needed to brief the President on what Schwarzkopf could do with what he had. And since he had maintained from the beginning that he would need more force to go on the offensive, I wanted to know how much more he required.

  “Look,” I told him, “your air plan is coming together nicely, and the White House needs to be briefed on it. I also need to show the bosses what the ground plan looks like, even if it isn’t complete.”

  “All right,” Norm said, “but I’d like to conduct this one myself.” I told him no, his presence was far more important in Riyadh.

  Schwarzkopf reluctantly dispatched a briefing team headed by Marine Major General Bob Johnston, his chief of staff. I wanted Cheney and the chiefs to hear the briefing before taking Johnston to the White House. We met in the Tank on the afternoon of October 10. Johnston reviewed the overall plan and then called on Brigadier General Buster Glosson to brief the air portion. Since Colonel John Warden had laid out the air plan for me in early August, Horner and Glosson had made it even more impressive, involving Navy, Air Force, and coalition aircraft and cruise missiles. The target list stretched from installations around Baghdad to the Iraqi trenches in Kuwait and all lines of supply and communication in between. The plan was bold, imaginative, and solid.

  When Glosson finished, Lieutenant Colonel Joe Purvis from the School of Advanced Military Studies at Leavenworth, who was heading the Jedi Knights, briefed on the ground phase. This plan was based only on forces allocated so far. It involved three feints and a main attack. The Marines would feint an amphibious assault to hold down Iraqi divisions along the Kuwaiti coast. A second Marine feint would take place along the border between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia just in from the coast. The multinational coalition forces would conduct a third feint on the western end of the Kuwaiti-Saudi border. The main attack, consisting of all American divisions, would drive up the middle into the Iraqi main defenses with the aim of reaching a key road junction north of Kuwait City. We would be outnumbered and heading straight into the
Iraqis’ killing zones.

  Schwarzkopf was right; it was a weak plan, and I could see why he had been reluctant to have it presented in Washington. He wanted two more divisions and a corps headquarters in order to do a better job. What surprised me was that Johnston and Purvis did not show what CENTCOM could do if it did have such a force. But even with only the one currently available corps, the plan was faulty. You do not send an outnumbered attacking force into the enemy’s jaws. Furthermore, an obvious stratagem had not been addressed. Frontline Iraqi infantry were dug into Kuwait and therefore could not easily attack south. The Iraqi mechanized forces would not be likely to strike south into the endless Saudi desert if we attacked them on their right and from the air. The current plan made no attempt to exploit this vulnerable Iraqi western flank.

  During the Tank briefing, Cheney asked a few perfunctory questions and left. He did not look pleased. I excused the briefers and discussed with the chiefs what we had heard. We held a common view: a better one-corps plan should have been prepared. Even so, any one-corps plan was too risky. I saw Cheney later, and he told me, “I may be a layman, but that strategy disappointed me.”

  He was right to feel that way, I agreed. But I reminded him, “We’ve just seen a first cut, and we’ve seen it under Norm’s protest. We’ll get something better. We’ve still got time.”

  The next day, Bob Johnston and his team presented the same briefing in the Situation Room to the President and what was now called the “Gang of Eight,” President Bush, Vice President Quayle, Jim Baker, John Sununu, Brent Scowcroft, Bob Gates, Cheney, and me. The air plan continued to impress. But the reaction to the ground strategy was predictable. Scowcroft, a retired Air Force lieutenant general, jumped all over it. I pointed out again that Schwarzkopf had unveiled this plan under protest, and that we had time to come up with something better. In my own mind, I had concluded that Schwarzkopf’s senior ground commanders had been so consumed with deployment and the defense plan that they had not given ground offensive planning their priority attention. I told the President that we would do better. He seemed relaxed. Bob Gates, however, was later heard to make a crack to the effect that “General McClellan lives,” referring to the Civil War commander who would not budge because he never had enough troops, no matter how many Lincoln gave him.

  I called Norm the next day, October 12, and gave him the reviews. The air briefing had gone well, but the ground strategy needed work. Then I said mischievously, holding the receiver away from my ear, “You know, some people are saying we’ve got a McClellan out there.”

  Norm took the bait. “You tell me what son of a bitch said that,” he yelled. “I’ll show him the difference between Schwarzkopf and McClellan!”

  I felt slightly guilty. I had deliberately shoved the bayonet between his ribs to goad him into thinking harder about our ground offensive plan. After I hung up, I decided it was time for me to make another trip to Saudi Arabia.

  Cheney kept assigning me last-minute tasks as I prepared to leave. “I want to know the high-side number for an offensive force,” he said. “I want to know when Norm can give me a go for an attack.” He had a third question, and I jotted it down in my notebook simply as “Prefix 5,” my nuclear qualification code dating back to my Infantry Officers Advanced Course at Fort Benning in 1964. “Let’s not even think about nukes,” I said. “You know we’re not going to let that genie loose.”

  “Of course not,” Cheney said. “But take a look to be thorough and just out of curiosity.”

  I told Tom Kelly to gather a handful of people in the most secure cell in the building to work out nuclear strike options. The results unnerved me. To do serious damage to just one armored division dispersed in the desert would require a considerable number of small tactical nuclear weapons. I showed this analysis to Cheney and then had it destroyed. If I had had any doubts before about the practicality of nukes on the field of battle, this report clinched them.

  Cheney’s last words before I left for Saudi Arabia were: “Let’s see an offensive plan with a little imagination this time.”

  By Monday, October 22, I was in the Saudi Ministry of Defense, sitting in Schwarzkopf’s war room, five stories below ground. We gathered at a long table in the center of the room facing a wall plastered with map boards. Present were Norm; Lieutenant General John Yeosock, the Army commander; Lieutenant General Walt Boomer, the Marine commander; Admiral Stan Arthur, the Navy commander; Lieutenant General Chuck Horner, the Air Force commander; and Lieutenant General Cal Waller, CENTCOM’s deputy commanding general. We talked a little about the one-corps offensive; it was still a loser and quickly set aside. The Jedi Knights had come up with a two-corps plan that would take advantage of our superior armored capability and the helicopter mobility of the 101st Airborne Division. This latest plan also took advantage of the exposed Iraqi western flank, but just barely. “Thanks,” I said to the briefers, but after they left, I told Norm, “We’ve still got to do better.”

  Later that evening, he came to my suite at a resplendent guest palace made available by the Saudis. We talked about how we might better exploit the enemy’s static position. The Iraqi army was just sitting there in Kuwait. The sea was to the east. Their own fortifications were to their south. In effect, they had trapped themselves. We talked about slamming the doors shut on the west and north and cutting off their lines of support. “We can use a heavy armored corps to roll fast and deep around the western flank,” I said, “and we can send the XVIII Airborne Corps farther west and then north to block the Euphrates River Valley and cut off their lines of reinforcement and withdrawal.” We continued trading ideas, sketching them out on stationery I found in a desk drawer. The strategy we were coming to required no genius. The Iraqis’ disposition of forces practically wrote the plan for us.

  The next morning, we met again at Schwarzkopf’s headquarters to flesh out our ideas of the night before. Norm repeated his request for a two-division corps from Europe. I agreed and said we would add a third division from the United States. We would also send another Marine division. I beefed up his request for additional fighter squadrons. Aircraft carriers? Let’s send six. We had paid for this stuff. Why not use it? What were we saving it for? We had learned a lesson in Panama. Go in big, and end it quickly. We could not put the United States through another Vietnam. We could be so lavish with resources because the world had changed. We could now afford to pull divisions out of Germany that had been there for the past forty years to stop a Soviet offensive that was no longer coming.

  “Norm,” I said, “you’ve got to understand that the President and Cheney will give you anything you need to get the job done. And don’t worry,” I added, “you won’t be jumping off until you’re ready. We’re not going off half-cocked.” As I spoke, I saw the tension flow out of Schwarzkopf for the first time since I had arrived. As he later described this moment, “I felt as though he [Powell] had lifted a great load from my shoulders.” And I went back to Washington feeling better than I had in weeks.

  It was nearing 3:30 P.M., October 30, as Otis drove through the gate and pulled up before the West Wing entrance to the White House. I told him to let me off, then drive on farther and park. I played a little game on these occasions. The TV camera crews were usually gathered outside the gate. If I wanted news coverage of me taking maps into the White House, I removed them from the trunk myself. If I did not want to tip my hand, I had Otis drop me off, then discreetly bring me the maps inside the lobby.

  Of all the times we had gathered in the White House since Saddam had grabbed Kuwait, this day was the most crucial. The President had pulled together the Gang of Eight, minus Dan Quayle, who was out of town. We had to resolve the fundamental question I had posed back in August and September: do we limit ourselves to defending Saudi Arabia and count on sanctions to squeeze Saddam out of Kuwait? Or do we gear up to drive him out? Defend or eject?

  We met in the Situation Room, which pleased me. Gatherings in the Oval Office tended to take on a bull-se
ssion informality; between cups of coffee and people gazing out into the Rose Garden, it was harder to keep a discussion on track. This day, Brent Scowcroft led off, laying out the two options succinctly. “We’re at a Y in the road,” he said. If we took the route of ejecting the Iraqi army, that raised a critical question. Did we try to get a UN resolution authorizing the use of force? And if we could not get it, were we prepared to go it alone with other willing allies? Jim Baker was about to embark on a trip to Europe, and we discussed how much more help he could hope to enlist from our friends. We next went over the supersensitive need to keep Israel out of the fight. If the Arab states were to be held together against an errant brother, the one thing they would not tolerate was fighting alongside Israelis.

  Eventually, the President said, “Okay, let’s hear what Colin has to say.”

  I set my acetate overlays on an easel. I snapped on the pen-size laser. The President smiled. “I just got back from Riyadh,” I began, “and I can report that the first phase of the mission is just about accomplished. We’ll soon be in a position to defend Saudi Arabia. By early December, the last division, the last company, the last tent pole will be in place.” I went into a detailed explanation of where every unit was posted, and how Norm intended to fight a defensive battle. After about ten minutes of describing the Saudi chessboard, I let a new overlay drop. “And here,” I said, “is how we would go on the offensive to kick the Iraqis out of Kuwait.” The President leaned forward. This was what he was waiting to hear. I described the air campaign, then the frontal supporting attacks into Kuwait to pin down the occupying Iraqi army, while a sweeping left hook against the western flank would cut off the Iraqis from the rear.