My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  “If that’s the case,” the President said, “why not end it today?” He caught me by surprise. “I’d like you all to think about that,” he added, looking around the room. “We’re starting to pick up some undesirable public and political baggage with all those scenes of carnage. You say we’ve accomplished the mission. Why not end it?” He could go on the air and announce a suspension of hostilities this evening, he said.

  “That’s something to consider,” I replied. “But I need to talk to Norm first.” I excused myself and went into the President’s small private study just off the Oval Office. I picked up a secure phone, and the White House military operator put me through to Riyadh.

  “Norm,” I said, “the President wants to know if we can end it now.”

  “When is now?” he asked.

  “We’re looking at this evening.” Given the eight-hour time difference, that would mean stopping the war in the middle of the night in the Gulf region.

  “I don’t have any problem,” Norm said. “Our objective was to drive ’em out, and we’ve done it. But let me talk to my commanders, and unless they’ve run into a snag I don’t know about, I don’t see why we shouldn’t stop.”

  “Cheney and I have to go up to the Hill and brief Congress soon,” I said. “We can talk again when I get back.”

  I did not anticipate any objection from Schwarzkopf’s field commanders. Norm had just given a televised press conference from Riyadh at 1:00 P.M. Washington time, and in this now famous “mother of all briefings,” he had said, “We’ve accomplished our mission, and when the decision-makers come to the decision that there should be a cease-fire, nobody will be happier than me.” He had also said, regarding the fleeing Iraqi forces, “The gate is closed. There is no way out of here.” Later, he amended this statement to: “When I say the gate is closed, I don’t want to give the impression that absolutely nothing is escaping.” Heavy tanks and artillery were not getting through, he said. “I’m talking about the gate that is closed on the war machine….”

  I went back into the Oval Office and reported to the President that the proposal looked okay to Schwarzkopf and to me, but Norm wanted to check with his commanders. No one in the room disagreed with the tentative decision to stop the war. Jim Baker was concerned about the effect on world opinion of pointless killing. Brent Scowcroft thought that fighting beyond necessity would leave a bad taste over what was so far a brilliant military operation. Cheney said that what mattered was achieving the coalition’s aims, not how many more tanks we knocked out. We would meet again, however, for one last discussion after Cheney and I returned from Capitol Hill.

  Before heading for the Hill, I called the vice chairman, Dave Jeremiah, and told him to brief the chiefs on the President’s tentative decision to bring the war to an end. Dave called me later and said that all the chiefs concurred.

  Cheney and I briefed the Senate at 3:00 P.M. and the House at 4:30 P.M. Their respective hearing rooms were packed for both presentations. We gave the members essentially the same map-and-chart show we had put on for the President. But we mentioned nothing about the war possibly ending this day.

  By 5:30 P.M. we were back at the White House, where we joined the President in the small office off the Oval Office. I took note of the time the President made his final decision to suspend hostilities, 5:57. It was the commander in chief’s decision to make, and he had made it. Every member of his policymaking team agreed. Schwarzkopf and I agreed. And there is no doubt in my mind that if Norm or I had had the slightest reservation about stopping now, the President would have given us all the time we needed.

  We moved into the Oval Office and started discussing the timing and content of the announcement President Bush would make to the American people that night. He also began calling his coalition partners. We initially considered having the President go on the air at 9:00 P.M. to announce a “suspension of hostilities” as of 0500, February 28, in Riyadh. The word “suspension” was picked deliberately to make clear that this was not a cease-fire negotiated with the Iraqis, but a halt taken on our own initiative. I said that I would like to give Norm a few more hours of daylight so that he could check the battlefield and clean up any loose ends, which prompted an inspiration from John Sununu. “Why not make it effective midnight our time? That’ll make it the Hundred-Hour War,” John said. The President agreed, and shortly after 6:00 P.M., I got on the phone again with Schwarzkopf. I told him the President would speak at 9:00 our time to announce that the fighting would stop at 8:00 A.M. the following morning Riyadh time. That would give Norm almost the one more day he had asked for in our conversation earlier in the morning.

  The President and then Cheney came on the line to congratulate the CINC. “Helluva job, Norm,” the President said.

  Schwarzkopf was soon back on the phone with a cautionary note. The gate was still slightly open, he told me. Some Republican Guard units and T-72 tanks could slip away. I told him to keep hitting them, and I would get back to him. I passed Norm’s report to the President and the others. Although we were all taken slightly aback, no one felt that what we had heard changed the basic equation. The back of the Iraqi army had been broken. What was left of it was retreating north. There was no need to fight a battle of annihilation to see how many more combatants on both sides could be killed. Obviously, the President would have preferred total capitulation, the way World War II had ended. And we knew, barring a lucky bomb hit, that Saddam would likely survive the war. We further accepted that we would face criticism from some quarters for not continuing the fight. However, we had a clear mandate, and it was being achieved. The President reaffirmed his decision to end the fighting. I then called Schwarzkopf again and relayed to him that the White House understood that there would be some leakage of Iraqi forces, but that this condition was acceptable.

  At 9:02 P.M., the President spoke to the nation from the Oval Office. “Kuwait is liberated. Iraq’s army is defeated. Our military objectives are met,” he began. “I am pleased to announce that at midnight tonight, eastern standard time, exactly one hundred hours since ground operations commenced and six weeks since the start of Operation Desert Storm, all U.S. and coalition forces will suspend offensive combat operations.”

  After the President’s speech, he and Mrs. Bush invited the group up to the residential quarters for a quiet celebration. The ushers passed drinks around, and I sipped my usual rum and Coke. The atmosphere was one of relief more than festivity. We had not given George Bush another V-E Day. Still, he said, “I’m comfortable. No second thoughts.” We had done the right thing, he believed, and we had prevailed. Within an hour I was back at Quarters 6 at Fort Myer. I wanted to tell Alma that we had just won a war. But she was already asleep.

  Over 130 years after the event, historians are still debating General George Meade’s decision not to pursue General Robert E. Lee’s forces after the Union victory at Gettysburg. A half century after World War II, scholars are still arguing over General Eisenhower’s decision not to beat the Soviet armies to Berlin. And, I expect, years from now, historians will still ask if we should not have fought longer and destroyed more of the Iraqi army. Critics argue that we should have widened our war aims to include seizing Baghdad and driving Saddam Hussein from power, as we had done with Noriega and the Panama Defense Force in Panama. The critics include even Admiral Crowe, who testified in Congress for continued sanctions and against going to war; but in his memoirs he argues that we should have continued fighting and expanded the mission to go after Saddam Hussein.

  Matters were not helped when, one month after the war’s end, Norm Schwarzkopf appeared on a PBS program, Talking with David Frost. Regarding the decision to end the fighting, Norm first said, “I reported that situation to General Powell. And he and I discussed, have we accomplished our military objectives, the campaign objectives. And the answer is yes.” But a moment later, Norm said, “Frankly, my recommendation had been, you know, continue the march. I mean, we had them in a rout and we could have c
ontinued, you know, to reap great destruction upon them.”

  The next morning the direct White House line on my console rang with that insistent shrillness that made me sit at attention. George Bush sounded more hurt than angered. What did Norm mean? He had certainly been consulted about stopping the fighting. The war would not have ended then if he had asked for more time. “I talked to Norm myself,” the President said.

  I shared the President’s disappointment. In fact, I was mad as hell at what Schwarzkopf had told David Frost. I called Norm in Riyadh. “That story won’t fly,” I said. “You’re saying the President made a mistake. You made it look as if you gave him a different recommendation, and he ignored it.”

  “That’s not what I meant at all,” Norm replied.

  “That’s what came across,” I said. “And the media are beating up on him.”

  Norm Schwarzkopf was, deservedly, a national hero. And the criticism that the fighting had stopped too soon had chipped his pedestal. He did not like it. The President, ever loyal, learned that Norm was feeling abused and called him once again, telling him not to worry. Still, I felt it was important to keep the record straight. Schwarzkopf had been a party to the decision, and now he seemed to be distancing himself from it. I put out a public statement, after clearing it with Norm, that read: “General Schwarzkopf and I both supported terminating Desert Storm combat operations at 12:00 midnight, 27 February 1991 (EST), as did all the President’s advisors…. There was no contrary recommendation. There was no disagreement. There was no debate.”

  Norm began to back off from his Frost statement, and in his book, It Doesn’t Take a Hero, he explained his thinking:

  My gut reaction was that a quick cease-fire would save lives. If we continued to attack through Thursday, more of our troops would get killed, probably not many, but some. What was more, we’d accomplished our mission: I’d just finished telling the American people that there wasn’t enough left of Iraq’s army for it to be a regional military threat… we’d kicked this guy’s butt, leaving no doubt in anybody’s mind that we’d won decisively, and we’d done it with very few casualties. Why not end it? Why get somebody else killed tomorrow? That made up my mind.

  Schwarzkopf was absolutely right. Yet, it is still hard to drive a stake through charges that the job was left unfinished. The truth is that Iraq began the war with an army of over a million men, approximately half of whom were committed to the Kuwait theater of operations, where they were mauled. Iraq took such a battering in the Gulf War that four years afterward, its army is half its original size. And within the Iraqi ranks, I am sure that horror stories are told about what it was like to endure the wrath from the skies and on the ground during Desert Storm. The remaining Iraqi army is hardly a force with a will to fight to the death.

  In October 1994, Saddam Hussein sent twenty thousand Republican Guards toward the Kuwaiti border, a paltry attempt to look tough while trying to get relief from UN sanctions. Immediately, the cry went up from the simple-solutionists: if only Saddam had been polished off during the Gulf War, he would not be stirring up trouble now. On October 23, the New York Times printed on its front page a long excerpt from a book on the Gulf War coauthored by one of the paper’s reporters. The book excerpt was headlined “How Iraq Escaped to Threaten Kuwait Again.” In it, the authors stated that “much of Iraq’s crack troops, the Republican Guard, had not been destroyed,” and that was why Saddam could still wield threatening military power.

  While the belief that Saddam pulled off some sort of Dunkirk at the end of Desert Storm may have a superficial attraction, I want to cut it off and kill it once and for all. It is true that more tanks and Republican Guard troops escaped from Kuwait than we expected. And yes, we could have taken another day or two to close that escape hatch. And yes, we could have killed, wounded, or captured every single soldier in the Republican Guard in that trap. But it would not have made a bit of difference in Saddam’s future conduct. Iraq, a nation of twenty million people, can always pose a threat to its tiny neighbor, Kuwait, with only 1.5 million people. With or without Saddam and with or without the Republican Guard, Kuwait’s security depends on arrangements with its friends in the region and the United States. That is the strategic reality. The other reality is that in 1991 we met the Iraqi army in the field and, while fulfilling the United Nation’s objectives, dealt it a crushing defeat and left it less than half of what it had been.

  But why didn’t we push on to Baghdad once we had Saddam on the run? Why didn’t we finish him off? Or, to put it another way, why didn’t we move the goalposts? What tends to be forgotten is that while the United States led the way, we were heading an international coalition carrying out a clearly defined UN mission. That mission was accomplished. The President even hoped to bring all the troops home by July 4, which would have been dramatic but proved logistically impossible. He had promised the American people that Desert Storm would not become a Persian Gulf Vietnam, and he kept his promise.

  From the geopolitical standpoint, the coalition, particularly the Arab states, never wanted Iraq invaded and dismembered. Before the fighting, I received a copy of a cable sent by Charles Freeman, the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. “For a range of reasons,” Freeman said, “we cannot pursue Iraq’s unconditional surrender and occupation by us. It is not in our interest to destroy Iraq or weaken it to the point that Iran and/or Syria are not constrained by it.” Wise words, Mr. Ambassador. It would not contribute to the stability we want in the Middle East to have Iraq fragmented into separate Sunni, Shia, and Kurd political entities. The only way to have avoided this outcome was to have undertaken a largely U.S. conquest and occupation of a remote nation of twenty million people. I don’t think that is what the American people signed up for.

  Of course, we would have loved to see Saddam overthrown by his own people for the death and destruction he had brought down on them. But that did not happen. And the President’s demonizing of Saddam as the devil incarnate did not help the public understand why he was allowed to stay in power. It is naive, however, to think that if Saddam had fallen, he would necessarily have been replaced by a Jeffersonian in some sort of desert democracy where people read The Federalist Papers along with the Koran. Quite possibly, we would have wound up with a Saddam by another name.

  Often, as I travel around the country, parents will come up to me and say, “General, we want you to know our son”—or daughter—“fought in the Gulf War.” I am always a little apprehensive when I ask, “I hope everything turned out all right.” They usually say yes and express their thanks that their soldier came home safely. One hundred and forty-seven Americans gave their lives in combat in the Gulf; another 236 died from accidents and other causes. Small losses as military statistics go, but a tragedy for each family. I have met some of these families, and their loss is heartbreaking. Sadly, their tragedy is compounded by the high incidence of casualties caused by friendly fire. I am relieved that I don’t have to say to many more parents, “I’m sorry your son or daughter died in the siege of Baghdad.” I stand by my role in the President’s decision to end the war when and how he did. It is an accountability I carry with pride and without apology.

  Not only did Desert Storm accomplish its political objective, it started to reverse the climate of chronic hostility in the Middle East. King Hussein of Jordan and Yasser Arafat, chairman of the PLO, were the only two major Arab leaders who showed any support for the Iraqi position during the Gulf War, and both were weakened by their stance. As a result, three years later, they were trying to reach accommodations with Israel and their other neighbors. The Madrid Middle East Peace Conference, following Desert Storm, started the process that resulted in the historic agreement between Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Rabin in September 1993 and the peace treaty between King Hussein and Israel in October 1994. The United States today enjoys access to the region denied before Desert Storm. Even the hostages in Lebanon were released in the aftermath of the conflict. And Iraq remains weak and isolated
, kept in check by UN inspectors. Not a bad bottom line.

  I am content with the judgment rendered on Desert Storm by probably the world’s foremost contemporary military historian, John Keegan. “The Gulf War, whatever it is now fashionable to say,” Keegan has written, “was a triumph of incisive planning and almost faultless execution.” It fulfilled the highest purpose of military action: “the use of force in the cause of order.”

  Many correspondents covering the war, and their media bosses back home, complained that they were overcontrolled by the military. They were confined to press pools. They could not roam around the battlefield without military escorts. The image of World War II’s legendary Ernie Pyle, filing stories from European foxholes and Pacific beachheads, was thrown in our faces by our critics. Yet, press coverage of Desert Storm was unprecedented. Of the 2,500 accredited journalists overall, 1,400 crowded the theater of operations at the peak. Compare this figure with twenty-seven reporters going ashore with the first wave at Normandy on D-Day. Desert Storm correspondents totaled nearly four times the number covering Vietnam during that war’s height. And, for the record, Ernie Pyle and his fellow World War II reporters were strictly censored. In the Gulf War, stories were reviewed by the military for security purposes. Of 1,350 print stories submitted by press pool reporters, one was changed to protect intelligence procedures. In Desert Storm, we tried to maintain military security while handling the largest concentration of correspondents ever gathered for a combat operation.