If nothing else, the Al Firdos bunker strike underscored the need to start the combined air/ground offensive and end the war. During a quick visit Cheney and I had made to the war zone between February 8 and 10, Schwarzkopf had told us that he would be ready to go by February 21. As soon as Cheney and I got back to Washington, we reported this date to an impatient George Bush. Three days later, however, Norm called and told me that the 21st was out.
“The President wants to get on with this,” I said. “What happened?”
“Walt Boomer needs more time,” Schwarzkopf answered. Boomer’s ist and 2nd Marine Divisions were deployed to drive head-on from the center of the line toward Kuwait City. But first they had to breach a savage complex of entrenchments that the Iraqis had spent months erecting.
The Marines would have to penetrate belts of antipersonnel and antitank mines, tangled rolls of booby-trapped barbed wire, more minefields, and deep tank traps, and then climb twenty-foot-high berms and cross trenches filled with burning oil. All the while, they would be under fire from Iraqi troops and artillery. Boomer wanted time to shift his point of attack twenty miles to the west, where one Iraqi defensive position had been largely abandoned under air attack and another line farther back was incomplete. He also wanted more airstrikes to weaken the enemy defenses before his troops moved.
“It’ll cost a few days,” Norm said. He wanted to put off the ground offensive until February 24.
“Remember the strategy,” I reminded him. The frontal assaults were intended only to tie down the entrenched Iraqis, and that included the Marines’ mission. “If Boomer hits serious resistance, he’s to stop,” I said. Having engaged the enemy, his troops would have accomplished their mission by allowing VII Corps and XVIII Airborne Corps to pull off the left hook in the sparsely defended western desert. “We don’t need to kill a bunch of kids singing ‘The Marines’ Hymn,’” I said.
One of my fundamental operating premises is that the commander in the field is always right and the rear echelon is wrong, unless proved otherwise. The field commander is on the scene, feeling the terrain, directing the troops, facing and judging the enemy. I therefore advised Cheney to accept Norm’s recommendation. Cheney reluctantly went to the President and got a postponement to February 24.
I backed Norm, though I thought he was being overly cautious. Over the previous weeks, I had watched VII Corps, with its tens of thousands of troops and hundreds of tanks, pour into Saudi Arabia. We had secretly moved our armored and airborne forces to Iraq’s exposed western flank, and we had been holding our breath to see if the Iraqis responded. All they did was send another undermanned division to that part of the desert. That’s it, I told myself. They had been sucked in by our moves hinting at a major frontal assault and an amphibious landing on Kuwait from the Persian Gulf. They had shown us everything they had, and it was nowhere near enough to stop our left hook. Earlier we had worried that the desert soil on the western flank might not be able to support heavy armored vehicles. The engineers had tested the sands, however, and gave us a “Go.” We questioned local Bedouins, and they confirmed the solidness of the terrain.
… … …
The offensive timetable was further clouded as Mikhail Gorbachev tried to play peacemaker. On February 18, the Iraqi foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, went to Moscow to hear a plan under which we would stop hostilities if the Iraqis withdrew from Kuwait. President Bush was in a bind. It was too late for this approach, he believed. After the expenditure of $60 billion and transporting half a million troops eight thousand miles, Bush wanted to deliver a knockout punch to the Iraqi invaders in Kuwait. He did not want to win by a TKO that would allow Saddam to withdraw with his army unpunished and intact and wait for another day. Nevertheless, the President could not be seen as turning his back on a chance for peace.
On February 20, Norm called saying he had talked to his commanders and needed still another delay, to the 26th. He had the latest weather report in hand, he said, and bad weather was predicted for the 24th and 25th, maybe clearing on the 26th. Bad weather equaled reduced air support, which equaled higher casualties. I was on the spot. So far, Cheney had accepted my counsel. But now I did not feel that Norm was giving me sufficiently convincing arguments to take back to Cheney and the President, first that Boomer needed to move his Marines, then that the Marines needed more air support, then that the weather was bad, and on still another occasion, that the Saudi army was not ready. What should I expect next, a postponement to the 28th?
“Look,” I told Norm, “ten days ago you told me the 21st. Then you wanted the 24th. Now you’re asking for the 26th. I’ve got a President and a Secretary of Defense on my back. They’ve got a bad Russian peace proposal they’re trying to dodge. You’ve got to give me a better case for postponement. I don’t think you understand the pressure I’m under.”
Schwarzkopf exploded. “You’re giving me political reasons why you don’t want to tell the President not to do something militarily unsound!” He was yelling. “Don’t you understand? My Marine commander says we need to wait. We’re talking about Marines’ lives.” He had to worry about them, he said, even if nobody else cared.
That did it. I had backed Norm at every step, fended off his critics with one hand while soothing his anxieties with the other. “Don’t you pull that on me!” I yelled back. “Don’t you try to lay a patronizing guilt trip on me! Don’t tell me I don’t care about casualties! What are you doing, putting on some kind of show in front of your commanders?”
He was alone, Schwarzkopf said, in his private office, and he was taking as much heat as I was. “You’re pressuring me to put aside my military judgment out of political expediency. I’ve felt this way for a long time!” he said. Suddenly, his tone shifted from anger to despair. “Colin, I feel like my head’s in a vise. Maybe I’m losing it. Maybe I’m losing my objectivity.”
I took a deep breath. The last thing I needed was to push the commander in the field over the edge on the eve of battle. “You’re not losing it,” I said. “We’ve just got a problem we have to work out. You have the full confidence of all of us back here. At the end of the day, you know I’m going to carry your message, and we’ll do it your way.” It was time to break off the conversation before one of us threw another match into the gasoline.
Within half an hour, Norm was back on the phone with the latest weather update. The 24th and the 25th did not look too bad after all. “We’re ready,” he said. We had a go for the 24th.
It was not my custom to show up at the White House in a turtleneck sweater and sport jacket, but I had been summoned suddenly from home for a meeting at 10:30 on Thursday evening, February 21. I found the President in his study. He had just come from Ford’s Theater, where he had seen a great play, he said, Leslie Lee’s Black Eagles, about the Tuskegee Airmen, the black fighter pilots of World War II fame. Cheney showed up next, wearing a tux, fresh from a reception for the queen of Denmark. The others arrived, rounding out the Gang of Eight. We had to make a decision about Gorbachev’s pending peace proposal. The Russian leader had called Bush about it earlier in the evening. The President’s problem was how to say no to Gorbachev without appearing to throw away a chance for peace.
“You’ve got two options,” Brent Scowcroft said. “One is to tell the Russians to butt out. The other is to get better conditions and accept.”
I looked at Cheney, who was sitting on the arm of a chair. I knew what he was thinking. He disliked and distrusted the Russians and hated seeing them use world opinion to pressure us and then get credit for what might turn out to be a bad solution. He preferred to throw out the Iraqis forcibly.
I could hear the President’s growing distress in his voice. “I don’t want to take this deal,” he said. “But I don’t want to stiff Gorbachev, not after he’s come this far with us. We’ve got to find a way out.”
I raised a finger. The President turned to me. “Got something, Colin?”
“We don’t stiff Gorbachev,” I said. I pointed
out that world opinion had supported the UN’s January 15 deadline for Saddam to clear out of Kuwait. “So let’s put a deadline on Gorby’s proposal. We say, great idea, as long as they’re completely on their way out by, say, noon Saturday. If they go, you get the Nobel Peace Prize, Mr. Gorbachev. If, as I suspect, they don’t move, then the flogging begins.”
The room was silent as everybody seemed to chew on the idea. “What about that?” the President asked. He quickly won agreement all around, except from Cheney. “What about you, Dick?” the President asked.
Cheney looked as if he had been handed a dead rat. “I guess it’s okay,” he said.
At 10:40 A.M. the next morning, President Bush stood before the cameras in the Rose Garden. “The coalition will give Saddam Hussein until noon Saturday to do what he must do,” a grim-visaged Bush said, “begin his immediate and unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait.”
At noon on Saturday, February 23, Saddam let the Russian withdrawal proposal go by and passed the last exit. At 4:00 A.M., Riyadh time, the following day, in darkness and cold rain, U.S. Marines and an Army tank brigade, followed by Saudi, Egyptian, Kuwaiti, Syrian, and other Arab troops, crossed the border into Kuwait. Far to the west, XVIII Airborne Corps jumped off with the 82d Airborne Division and a French light armored division covering the left flank. The 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) and the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized) moved straight north into Iraq, heading for the Euphrates River Valley. Between these forces, VII Corps, with the British ist Armored Division, stood poised to launch the left-hook main attack as soon as it was clear that the supporting attacks were holding the Iraqis in place. The ground war had begun.
Too keyed up to sleep, I stayed in the office and took incoming reports from Tom Kelly and Mike McConnell. I also watched CNN so that I would know the picture the rest of the world was getting. The Marines, rather than merely pinning down the Iraqis, had broken through the enemy defenses and were already moving toward Kuwait City. The way had been prepared by Marine reconnaissance teams who, days before, had exposed themselves to terrifying risks, crawling through the barbed wire and over the oil-filled trenches to lay out cleared lanes for the assault troops to race through.
In the west, General Barry McCaffrey’s 24th Infantry Division punched sixty miles into Iraqi territory on the first day. The initial penetrations were so swift and so deep that Schwarzkopf was able to move up the left-hook timetable by fifteen hours. In those twenty-four hours of land combat, ten thousand hungry, thirsty, exhausted Iraqi soldiers, stunned by thirty-eight days of air bombardment, surrendered. Gary Luck’s XVIII Airborne Corps alone took 3,200 prisoners, while suffering one man wounded. Our total casualties the first day were eight dead, twenty-seven wounded.
By the morning of the second day, the 1st Marine Division was fighting in and around Kuwait City International Airport. The Marines would have fulfilled their mission even if they had only tied down Iraqi forces. Instead, by the end of the day, they had encircled Kuwait City. An amphibious feint off the Kuwaiti coast tied down more Iraqi units. XVIII Airborne Corps thrust deeper into Iraq. VII Corps, under Lieutenant General Fred Franks, had the master strategic role, the flanking attack from west to east to cut off the Iraqi army in Kuwait and kill it, particularly the vaunted Republican Guard. But VII Corps was not moving as fast as we expected.
On that second day, we suffered a heavy blow. A Soviet-made Scud missile slammed into a makeshift barracks near Dhahran, killing twenty-eight American soldiers. The casualty list presented a harsh reality of our modern army; women were among the victims.
On February 26, the third day, I called Schwarzkopf at about noon his time. I told him that I hated second-guessing field commanders, but I could not understand why VII Corps was still not fully engaged. “Can’t you get Fred Franks moving faster?” I asked. Schwarzkopf himself had already been leaning hard on Franks, and was just as happy to pass along additional pressure from the chairman. He soon got back to me with word that VII Corps was finally in the thick of the fight. Franks’s troops had almost completely destroyed one Republican Guard division and had driven two others into retreat.
U.S. Marines, U.S. Army Special Forces, and Saudi, Egyptian, Kuwaiti, and other Arab troops liberated Kuwait City. XVIII Airborne Corps was approaching the Euphrates River Valley. Our intelligence indicated that of forty-two Iraqi divisions in the war zone, twenty-seven had already been destroyed or overrun. We had taken 38,000 prisoners and more kept pouring in. Our casualties remained light, though we suffered disturbing losses from friendly fire. Overall, however, the casualty rate was far below even our most optimistic estimates, thanks largely to the constant pounding our air forces were inflicting on the Iraqis.
Before the war began, someone on my staff had given me a book entitled Every War Must End, by Fred Ikle. I had worked with Ikle when he was undersecretary of defense for policy and I was Cap Weinberger’s military assistant. The theme of his book intrigued me, because I had spent two tours in a war that seemed endless and often pointless. Warfare is such an all-absorbing enterprise, Ikle wrote, that after starting one, a government may lose sight of ending it. As he put it:
Thus it can happen that military men, while skillfully planning their intricate operations and coordinating complicated maneuvers, remain curiously blind in failing to perceive that it is the outcome of the war, not the outcome of the campaigns within it, that determines how well their plans serve the nation’s interests. At the same time, the senior statesmen may hesitate to insist that these beautifully planned campaigns be linked to some clear ideas for ending the war….”
As an example, Ikle mentioned the cunningly conceived attack on Pearl Harbor, as contrasted to the scant thought the Japanese had given to how the war they started would end. I was so impressed by Ikle’s ideas that I had key passages photocopied and circulated to the Joint Chiefs, Cheney, and Scowcroft. We were fighting a limited war under a limited mandate for a limited purpose, which was soon going to be achieved. I thought that the people responsible ought to start thinking about how it would end.
On the afternoon of February 27, Otis Pearson drove me to the White House for the Gang of Eight’s daily military briefing. The heavy armor-plated bulletproof Cadillac held the road with a reassuring hug, around the huge Pentagon parking lot, up Route 27 over the Memorial Bridge, and into Washington. As we rode along, words from Ikle’s book ran through my mind: “… fighting often continues long past the point where a ‘rational’ calculation would indicate that the war should be ended.”
I had already spoken to Norm Schwarzkopf earlier in the morning and told him I sensed we were nearing endgame. The prisoner catch was approaching seventy thousand. Saddam had ordered his forces to withdraw from Kuwait. The last major escape route, a four-lane highway leading out of Kuwait City toward the Iraqi city of Basrah, had turned into a shooting gallery for our fliers. The road was choked with fleeing soldiers and littered with the charred hulks of nearly fifteen hundred military and civilian vehicles. Reporters began referring to this road as the “Highway of Death.”
I would have to give the President and the Secretary a recommendation soon as to when to stop, I told Norm. The television coverage, I added, was starting to make it look as if we were engaged in slaughter for slaughter’s sake.
“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” Norm said.
I asked him what he wanted. “One more day should do it,” he answered. By then he would be able to declare that Iraq was no longer militarily capable of threatening its neighbors. And he added, “Do you realize, if we stop tomorrow night, the ground campaign will have lasted five days? How does that sound, the Five-Day War?”
Since that chipped one day off the famous victory of the Israelis over the Arab states in 1967, I said, “Not bad. I’ll pass it along.”
At about 2:00 P.M., I rode through the gate to the West Wing entrance of the White House. Otis let me out, parked, and then discreetly brought me a big black leather map case as I waited in the lo
bby. I went up the stairway to the left, past the Chief of Staff’s office, to avoid going through the reception room. You never knew who you might run into there, from the Soviet ambassador to a Girl Scout delegation. An Air Force officer, Major Bruce Caughman, the President’s personal assistant, helped me set up an easel in the Oval Office facing the fireplace.
George Bush was upbeat and relaxed. The Gang of Eight, plus Richard Haas, Scowcroft’s Middle East specialist, formed the usual U in front of the fireplace. Someone joked about the President leaving the fire to the pros. At a briefing a couple of days before, Bush had lit the fire himself, without opening the flue. The Oval Office had instantly filled with smoke. Alarms rang. Secret Service agents ran around frantically, throwing doors open, while freezing February winds blew in from the Rose Garden.
This morning, I snapped on the laser pointer and began describing the positions: the Marines and Prince Khaled’s Arab force in Kuwait City, VII Corps closing its noose around the Iraqi forces trying to flee Kuwait, with only the Republican Guard still offering any serious resistance. In the far west, XVIII Airborne Corps had driven deep into Iraq to the banks of the Euphrates. When I finished describing the military chessboard, I said, “Mr. President, it’s going much better than we expected. The Iraqi army is broken. All they’re trying to do now is get out.”
Our forces had a specific objective, authorized by the UN, to liberate Kuwait, and we had achieved it. The President had never expressed any desire to exceed that mandate, in spite of his verbal lambasting of Saddam. We presently held the moral high ground. We could lose it by fighting past the “rational calculation” Fred Ikle had warned about. And, as a professional soldier, I honored the warrior’s code. “We don’t want to be seen as killing for the sake of killing, Mr. President,” I said. “We’re within the window of success. I’ve talked to General Schwarzkopf. I expect by sometime tomorrow the job will be done, and I’ll probably be bringing you a recommendation to stop the fighting.”
My American Journey Page 64