In My Time - Dick Cheney [103]
ON AUGUST 17 I left on my second trip to the Gulf in two weeks. On the way over I considered the implications of reports we were receiving about Saddam’s readiness to invade Saudi Arabia. Should he launch an attack, he could capture or disable Saudi oil production, and he could disrupt U.S. deployments, handing our forces a defeat. There was every reason for him to do this. Saddam’s forces were at their peak, unaffected as yet by the embargo we had put in place that would deny him such things as spare parts and munitions. U.S. and Saudi forces, on the other hand, were at their weakest and would only gain strength with the passage of time and increased U.S. deployments. I called both Colin and Brent to make sure that we were working this contingency—which they assured me we were. But we couldn’t have done much had Saddam decided to keep right on rolling into the Saudi oil fields.
I flew first to Saudi Arabia, then headed to three other countries that lie on the western side of the Persian Gulf—Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman. Saudi Defense Minister Sultan had helped arrange these visits, in which I intended to seek additional basing rights for U.S. forces and gain support for what was to become Operation Desert Storm.
leaving the Oval Office with President Bush after reporting to him on one of my trips to the Middle East during Operation Desert Shield. (Photo by David Kennerly)
Sultan’s help was key since Saudi Arabia is the dominant Arab state in the Gulf—the largest producer of oil, the biggest geographically, the strongest militarily. Without Saudi approval, it would have been virtually impossible to gain the full cooperation of the other Gulf allies. Once the Saudis had signed on, the others were eager to join the coalition that we were building to oppose Saddam. The only exceptions were Jordan, where the king was dependent on Iraqi oil, and Yemen, which had also thrown in its lot with Saddam.
I was welcomed warmly in Bahrain, a longtime ally of the United States and the headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s activities in the Persian Gulf. When I stopped in the United Arab Emirates, I was the highest-ranking U.S. official ever to have visited. My host was the president of the UAE, Sheikh Zayed, a man held in high regard by all of his neighbors and revered by his people. He agreed to let us base C-130s and F-16s there. Oman, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, also had an established relationship with the U.S. military. For some time we had prepositioned supplies and spare parts in Oman for just the sort of contingency we now faced. Sultan Qaboos, a graduate of England’s Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, was also willing to provide bases that were important to our air and naval forces.
I had not intended to stop in Qatar, another country on the west side of the Gulf, because of strained relations between our two nations. The Qataris had asked us to provide Stinger missiles to them, as we had to our close allies in Bahrain. When we said no, the Qataris purchased a Stinger on the black market and put a photo on the front page of their newspaper of the Qatari defense minister holding the shoulder-fired antiaircraft missile. This in turn had generated protests to the government of Qatar by our State Department.
But Prince Sultan, one of our most important allies in helping us gain agreement and cooperation from Arab countries, had been working the phones from Jeddah, and late in the day he called to report that he had been in touch with the Qataris and that they would welcome a visit. It was a memorable stop, where I was received in a beautiful palace by the emir and his son—who would in 1995 depose his father and become emir himself. Under the rule of the son, also a graduate of Sandhurst, Qatar would become the location of an important U.S. military base, perhaps the most important in the region, although Qatari