In My Time - Dick Cheney [106]
When Glosson finished, General Johnston briefed the ground war and explained that no one in theater liked the straight-up-the-middle concept, but that it was all we could do with the numbers of forces deployed. The president and Brent were not happy with the plan. What would it take, the president wanted to know, to have a satisfactory offensive ground option? I told him we would get him answers ASAP.
The next morning I made clear to Powell that he needed to get with Norm Schwarzkopf and come back with a workable plan. What I didn’t tell him was that I intended to push the system myself to make sure we got such a battle plan.
Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz pulled together a small team to study and develop a plan that came to be called the “Western Excursion.” The concept originally came from Henry Rowen, the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. Wolfowitz’s team, headed by a retired army general, Dale Vesser, took Rowen’s concept and expanded it into a plan to move coalition forces into the western desert of Iraq. Rather than go straight into the heart of Iraqi defenses in Kuwait, this plan would involve taking Iraqi territory, forcing the Iraqis to move key elements of their best troops to defend a potential threat to Baghdad, and perhaps acquiring for the coalition territory they could use to bargain for Kuwait. The team began working on the plan in secret as I left on a nine-day trip that would take me to London, Paris, and the Soviet Union.
IN LONDON I MET with Prime Minister Thatcher at Number 10 Downing Street.
Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher visited the White House on the fifth anniversary of 9/11. It was an honor to give her a tour of the Map Room where the maps President Roosevelt consulted during World War II are displayed. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)
Shortly after our meeting began, she asked everyone to leave the room except for me and my British counterpart, Tom King, and the three of us spent more than an hour talking about the Gulf crisis. She drew on her own experience in the Falklands War in 1982 for lessons both in military strategy and how to build and maintain public support. She was eloquent and insightful, and my session with her, the single most valuable I had in the run-up to the war, illustrated why she deserves to be regarded as one of the most effective national leaders of the twentieth century. That session also came near the end of her political career. Little more than a month later, facing a growing challenge within her own Conservative Party, she would inform the queen that she did not intend to stand again for prime minister.
The next day, Tuesday, October 16, 1990, I landed in Moscow. In Red Square at dusk, I laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It was a stirring moment for an American secretary of defense. Afterward I was driven to a dacha outside Moscow for a dinner hosted by Soviet Defense Minister Yazov. On that cold Russian night, there were many toasts, and I was struck by the historic moment. Here I was, the U.S. secretary of defense, exchanging toasts with men who a few years earlier had been our deadliest and staunchest enemies. I raised my glass: “To peace.”
The next morning I had a formal meeting with Gorbachev in his Kremlin office. He emphasized that his government wanted a peaceful solution to the Gulf crisis, but in meetings with him, Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, and Defense Minister Yazov, I gained information that was important if we did go to war. Had the Soviets provided any weapons to the Iraqis that we didn’t know about? I asked. In years past, the Soviets would surely have refused to enter into such a conversation, but now they assured me that we would encounter no surprises.
My hosts showed me the Moscow Air Defense Center, buried sixty-five feet beneath Moscow and entered through