My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  When I finished, Scowcroft asked, “What size force are we talking about?”

  “We’re approaching two hundred and fifty thousand for the defensive phase,” I said. “But if the President opts for this offensive, we’ll need a hell of a lot more.”

  “How much more?” Scowcroft asked.

  “Nearly double,” I said. “About another two hundred thousand troops.”

  “Whew,” Scowcroft said, his gasp echoed by others around the room. I glanced at the President. He had not blinked. Dick Cheney added that he and the Joint Chiefs, whom we had briefed earlier, were all on board for the offensive plan.

  President Bush asked again about airpower. “Colin, are you sure that won’t do it?”

  “I’d be the happiest soldier in the Army if the Iraqis turned tail when the bombs start falling,” I said. “If they do, you can take the expense for deploying the ground forces out of my pay.” But, I reminded the group, history offered no encouragement that airpower alone would succeed.

  We considered issuing an ultimatum to Saddam by a certain date: get out or be thrown out. Jim Baker suggested February 1. “If we make the threat, we have to mean it,” I said. “We have to be ready to go to war.”

  Again, the President nodded. He let the talk ramble a bit, as was his habit, and then he shut it off. “Okay, do it,” he said. We had a decision. We would go to war in three months if sanctions did not work and the Iraqis were still in Kuwait.

  Just after the midterm elections, on November 8, President Bush announced that another 200,000 U.S. troops were on their way to the Gulf, and he made their mission unmistakable: “to insure that the coalition has an adequate offensive military option.” The howling in the Congress was loud. Was this George Bush, whom some people criticized as a “wimp,” trying to prove his manhood by starting a war? The debate throughout the country started to take on the acrimony of the hawk-dove controversy of the sixties over Vietnam.

  On November 29, the United Nations was scheduled to vote whether or not to sanction military force to get Iraq out of Kuwait. Resolution 678 displayed the usual fuzziness of documents written by many hands. Jim Baker had wanted plain language, arguing for “use of force.” But the Soviet foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, wanted something less naked. They compromised on “all necessary means.” It did not matter. A bullet fired through a euphemism is still a bullet. The resolution passed the Security Council 12–2, with Cuba and Yemen voting no and China abstaining. History was made that day. If it came to war, the United States and the Soviet Union would not be antagonists for the first time since World War II.

  The UN approval capped an extraordinary feat of diplomacy in this century, and the lion’s share of the credit for this triumph belongs to George Bush, superbly aided by Jim Baker. By the time Resolution 678 was passed, a remarkable coalition had been welded together, mostly over the phone from the Oval Office. By now, thirteen NATO nations were contributing to the multinational force, including large contingents from the United Kingdom and France. Nearly all the Arab nations joined, with Egypt and Syria contributing a combined fifty thousand troops. Countries that had only just slipped out of the Soviet yoke came on board, including Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Bulgaria. Poor countries, like Bangladesh, Senegal, Somalia, and Zaire, had pledged what they could. Thirty-five nations were providing manpower, armaments, or money. All told, 200,000 coalition troops would be deployed alongside the Americans.

  The UN resolution made clear that the mission was only to free Kuwait. However much we despised Saddam and what he had done, the United States had little desire to shatter his country. For the previous ten years, Iran, not Iraq, had been our Persian Gulf nemesis. We wanted Iraq to continue as a threat and a counterweight to Iran. Our Arab allies never intended to set foot beyond Kuwait. Saudi Arabia did not want a Shiite regime breaking off from Iraq in the south. The Turks did not want a Kurdish regime splitting off from Iraq in the north. We also knew that only a little more than half of the Iraqi army was committed to Kuwait. The rest was still in Iraq, able to maintain internal order and to fend off a still hostile Iran. In none of the meetings I attended was dismembering Iraq, conquering Baghdad, or changing the Iraqi form of government ever seriously considered. We hoped that Saddam would not survive the coming fury. But his elimination was not a stated objective. What we hoped for, frankly, in a postwar Gulf region was an Iraq still standing, with Saddam overthrown. The UN had given us our marching orders, and the President intended to stay within them.

  I was amazed, given the forces and power now arrayed against Saddam Hussein, unmatched since D-Day, that he still had not blinked. He had passed the sanctions exit, the defense-buildup exit, the offensive-buildup exit, and now the UN-authorization-of-force exit. And still he kept barreling down the highway to disaster. He had to know that he would lose, but as long as he could survive in power, he was apparently willing to pay the price for his Kuwait adventure in dead Iraqis. The President’s instincts had been right from the start. As he told me on his return from a Thanksgiving visit to the troops, sanctions would not work. What we had to do was becoming inevitable.

  I still believe that sanctions are a useful weapon in the armory of nations. They helped, for example, to hasten the meltdown of apartheid in South Africa. But sanctions work best against leaders who have the interests of their country and people at heart, because sanctions hurt the people and the country more than the leaders. The problem is that sanctions are most often imposed against regimes that have only their own interests and the retention of power at heart. And since these leaders are still going to have a roof over their heads, food on their table, gas in their tank, and power in their hands, sanctions rarely work against them. Saddam was the perfect example.

  President Bush had taken to demonizing Saddam in public just as he had Manuel Noriega. “We are dealing with Hitler revisited,” he said on one occasion, and described Saddam as “a tyrant unmoved by human decency.” I suggested to Cheney and Scowcroft that they might try to get the President to cool the rhetoric. Not that the charges were untrue, but the demonizing left me uneasy. I preferred to talk about the “Iraqi regime” or the “Hussein regime.” Our plan contemplated only ejecting Iraq from Kuwait. It did not include toppling Saddam’s dictatorship. Within these limits, we could not bring George Bush Saddam Hussein’s scalp. And I thought it unwise to elevate public expectations by making the man out to be the devil incarnate and then leaving him in place.

  While the country faced the prospect of war that fall, war’s reality was being driven home by a remarkable television event. Earlier in the year, I had been invited to a lecture on the Lincoln years that the Bushes had arranged at the White House. Afterward, I was standing in the East Room talking to a young man. “That period fascinates me,” I said. “Really,” this fellow said. “You know, I’m doing a television series on the Civil War. Would you like to see the tapes we’ve finished so far?”

  That is how I first came to know of Ken Burns and his now famous documentary. My family was so moved by the tapes Ken sent that I told the President how we had been glued to the television set for hours. He asked to see them. I sent the tapes to the White House, and he and Barbara were so impressed that it took forever for me to get them back. After Ken Burns finished the series, he sent me a complete set. I gave the tapes to Cheney, who presented them to Norm Schwarzkopf as a 1990 Christmas gift. From the moment the program aired nationally on September 23, it held the country spellbound for five nights. “At least now people know what war is about,” I said to Norm during one of our phone conversations. “It’s damn good they do,” he answered, as his own preparations accelerated.

  Schwarzkopf later wrote that Ken Burns’s Civil War renewed his determination to hold down casualties to the minimum. Thanks to Burns’s artistry, millions of Americans understood that, yes, you went to war for high principles, but you should not go into it with any romantic illusions.

  Norm Schwarzkopf, under pressure, was an active volcano.
I occasionally found myself in transoceanic shouting matches with him that were full of barracks profanity. The cussing meant nothing. The anger passed, the mutual respect continued, and a deepening affection grew. I recognized the root of his rages. Blowing up acted as a safety valve for his frustrations. His subordinates took plenty of heat from him, yet remained fiercely, loyal. However, his exasperations, which were real enough, he also vented upward, principally his conviction that his position and his needs were not always understood in Washington. Who was he going to rail against? The Secretary of Defense? The President of the United States? So he blew up at me.

  I understood this; but Cheney occasionally required my reassurance that we had the right man in Riyadh. Dick is a man of plain style, and after his first trip to Saudi Arabia with Norm to sell King Fahd on asking for our help, he mentioned a couple of incidents to me that had bothered him. During the fifteen-hour flight to the Saudi capital, passengers had formed a line to get into the bathroom. According to Cheney, a major had finally worked his way to the front, and when he got there, he called out, “General!” He had been keeping a place for Norm. On the same trip, Cheney said that he had seen a colonel on his hands and knees on the floor of the plane, pressing Schwarzkopf’s uniform.

  After that trip and on subsequent occasions, Cheney asked me about Norm. Most recently, he had said, “This is for all the marbles, you know. The presidency is riding on this one. Are you absolutely confident about Schwarzkopf?”

  There was nothing particularly subversive about Cheney’s question. Inevitably, reports of Norm’s rough treatment of subordinates seeped back to Washington. Cheney dealt with Norm infrequently, while I was talking with him every day. Consequently, Dick relied on my judgment. I told him that my faith in Norm was total.

  Still, a good commander always has a replacement in the back of his mind. People have heart attacks. They step in front of buses. A soldier takes a hit. Norm, under enormous pressure, was not immune. He had already come down with the flu a couple of times. Once, I had to insist that he go off and give himself a rest. For all his pyrotechnics and histrionics, however, Norm was a brilliant officer, a born leader, and a skilled diplomat in the region. He was the right man in the right place and I was happy to reassure Cheney from time to time.

  On Monday, December 3, Cheney and I testified on Desert Shield before the Senate Armed Services Committee, a fairly tough sell, since Sam Nunn, the chairman, opposed going to war over Kuwait without giving sanctions a hard ride. Nunn reasoned that sanctions should be given as much time to work as they required, which seemed to me like entering a tunnel with no end. I reviewed the progress of the coalition buildup, and I gave a cold, hard appraisal of what we faced. Iraq was the fourth-largest military power in the world. Saddam’s forces deployed in and around Kuwait numbered over 450,000 men, 3,800 tanks, and 2,500 artillery pieces; plus he had announced his intention to send another 250,000 troops. Also, hanging like a specter over the desert was the Iraqi biological arsenal and Saddam’s feverish drive for nuclear capability. If war came, I had no intention of letting anyone on that committee think it was going to be a cakewalk.

  That night, I flew to London with Alma. I had been invited by Winston S. Churchill, a member of the House of Commons and the grandson of Sir Winston, to address MPs and members of the British-American Parliamentary Group in the Palace of Westminster. The room where I spoke resembled a miniature Chamber of the House of Commons, and there I described the operations in the Gulf and the Base Force concept. As I spoke in this seat of Western democracy, the image of my mother and father, born as humble British subjects in a tiny tropical colony, flashed before me, and I wished they could see where fate had taken their son.

  I was curious about the man I was to meet next, in office at this point for less than a week, and for whom I turned out to be his first foreign visitor. John Major greeted me, my executive assistant, Colonel Dick Chilcoat, the British secretary of state for defense, Tom King, and my counterpart, British chief of defense staff, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir David Craig, in a sitting room at 10 Downing Street. Major, at forty-seven, was boyish-looking and quite a switch from the redoubtable Mrs. Thatcher. Underneath the PM’s mild exterior, however, I detected a steeliness. Major shot quick questions at me. How was the training going in the Gulf? How would the Iraqis respond to the air attack? How long would that campaign last? He cut off my answers as soon as he caught the drift and fired his next round. An aide came in and whispered in his ear. The prime minister had to leave. He ended the conversation cordially but briskly.

  Underneath the high drama of preparing for war, the bizarre also went on. What, for example, did one horse in Minnesota have to do with our mobilization in the Persian Gulf? The wild card in this conflict was whether or not the Iraqis might resort to germ warfare. I assigned Brigadier General John Jumper to oversee our defenses against chemical and biological weapons, which Jumper did as head of a team dubbed “Bugs and Gases.” One biological agent we believed the Iraqis possessed was botulinum toxin, one of the deadliest known to man. The only way to neutralize its lethal paralytic effects was through an antibody produced by one old horse named First Flight, stabled at the Veterinary College of the University of Minnesota. First Flight had so far produced some three hundred liters of antibody plasma, a valiant effort, but a drop in the bucket given the forces to be inoculated, now approaching half a million. Johnny Jumper and his team recruited another hundred horses to produce antibodies against botulinum toxin and to give First Flight a rest.

  We hit other bumps on the road to readiness. Early in the buildup, the Saudis made a simple pronouncement. They were not going to allow any reporters into their country. That, we knew, could not stand. You do not send nearly half a million Americans, plus thousands of other nationals, halfway around the world to prepare for a major war and then impose a news blackout. We implored the Saudis to issue press visas. They grudgingly admitted a handful of correspondents. Some favorable news stories followed. Maybe, the Saudis reasoned, the Americans were right. And they then opened the floodgates to a point where handling the press crush, with some 2,500 correspondents eventually accredited, became a major headache for Norm Schwarzkopf.

  Mail began clogging the arteries of war. As we approached Christmas, letters and packages to the troops swamped the military postal system. Everything imaginable and unimaginable arrived, insect repellent, suntan lotion, frozen pizzas, Christmas trees, wiffle balls, surgical gloves, Frisbees, Passover food, and lollipops (200,000 of them). Arnold Schwarzenegger begged me to let him send a planeload of Life-cycles and weight-lifting gear to keep the troops in fighting trim. I explained to Arnold that we were moving ammunition that week and would try to make room for his gift later, which we did.

  The letters sent by schoolkids were touching but came in sufficient volume to sink a troop transport. Thousands of generic letters arrived with addresses like “Any Soldier USA.” One had been sent by a schoolteacher who poured her heart out telling how proud she was of the troops. A hormonally hopped-up soldier wrote back describing in graphic detail how he would like to repay her kind words. She complained to the Defense Department, and we had to send a letter to the lad’s commanding officer telling him to have his men knock off any further heavy breathing by mail.

  The deluge reached a point where every day we were filling three and four C-5 Galaxies, those flying warehouses, just to accommodate mail and gifts to the troops. We tried to deliver everything, because it was as important to morale on the home front as it was on the imminent war front. American civilians were rallying around the troops as though they wanted to make up for the neglect during the Vietnam years. The explosion of yellow ribbons on trees, homes, jackets, and blouses recalled a national unity not felt since World War II.

  We welcomed morale-building USO entertainers, but other visiting firemen became too much. Members of Congress on fact-finding trips began to show up at all hours, chewing up Schwarzkopf’s priceless time to a point where Cheney
had to go to the Hill and put a stop to it. We rationed congressional visits to one delegation per week.

  Even in the grimmest of enterprises there are tension breakers. At one point, the tabloid National Enquirer ran a story headlined “Bush and Saddam Are Cousins” and offered genealogical “proof” that not only was George Bush related to the queen of England, but “Hussein and President Bush share a common ancestry dating back at least to the crusades.” This news prompted the President to circulate a memo to the national security team that said, “No decisions I make will be affected by my relationship with Saddam Hussein. The Queen and I would have it no other way.”

  Lawyers got into the act. We could not complete a list of air targets until the Pentagon general counsel’s office approved. In one preliminary list, we had targeted a triumphal arch celebrating Iraq’s proclaimed victory over Iran in the eight-year war and a huge statue of Saddam, both in Baghdad. Colonel Fred Green, my legal advisor, came to see me with a battery of lawyers. They had gone over the list and approved everything except the arch and the statue. “Sorry, General,” Fred said, “you can’t touch them.”

  “Why not?” I asked, puzzled.

  “You’d be bombing cultural landmarks of no military significance.”

  “Cultural landmarks! Gimme a break. I want to show his people Saddam’s not out of bounds.”

  “Can’t do it, General,” Green said. “It would be like someone bombing the Lincoln Memorial or the Washington Monument. It contravenes international laws governing the conduct of war.”

  The arch and the statue were crossed off the target list. When I explained what had happened to Cheney, he shook his head and muttered, “Lawyers running a war?”

  We ran into unexpected problems in getting the sinews of battle shipped from U.S. and European ports to the Gulf. Some insurance companies demanded exorbitant premiums to cover commercial vessels sailing into a potential war zone. We had to beat them down or find cheaper coverage. The flow of manpower and matériel, nevertheless, was stupefying. In the first six weeks of Desert Shield, we brought in more tonnage than in the first three months of the Korean War. The lion’s share of credit for this miracle of logistics belonged to a short, wiry dynamo named Gus Pagonis, an Army major general and the Desert Shield logistics chief. I had spotted Pagonis as a comer when he was still a lieutenant colonel. Nothing daunted the man. No shelter for the troops in the baking desert? Get the West Germans to provide the huge tents they used for festivals. Need still more shelter? Get the Saudis to lend the colorful tents they used for hundreds of thousands of Muslims making the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Gus was stymied by only one obstacle, his rank. Commanders with more horsepower leaned on him to give their units priority, putting Gus in an impossible squeeze. Norm Schwarzkopf explained to me what Gus was going through, and our solution was to give Gus a third star, so that he had enough rank to match his responsibility.