In My Time - Dick Cheney [109]
By the end of the month, Congress was holding hearings, and Sam Nunn, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, his mind on a presidential run, seemed intent on providing a forum for those opposed to using force to liberate Kuwait. Among the witnesses was Admiral Bill Crowe, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said we needed to give sanctions another year to work before we considered force.
The day after Crowe’s testimony, a United Nations Security Council resolution set a January 15, 1991, deadline for Iraq to get out of Kuwait and authorized “all necessary means” to accomplish that end. But this clear message to the world—and Jim Baker deserves enormous credit for it—was muddied when the president announced he was going to send Jim to negotiate with Saddam. Tariq Aziz was also going to be invited to the United States, and many of our allies were dismayed. The Saudis, in particular, felt as though we’d pulled the rug out from under them.
On a crucial front, we were making progress. The generals in the Pentagon were starting to believe we meant business. The president’s approval of General Schwarzkopf’s large additional troop request had been key, as had the successful vote in the UN Security Council. It also helped enormously when I issued an order in mid-November authorizing the services to call up additional reserve and National Guard forces as needed. This was another effort that the president supported unhesitatingly, overruling Chief of Staff John Sununu’s political objections. Yes, communities across the country would be affected when their folks were called up to serve, but we were going to build the force the generals thought we needed.
These actions signaled to the military that the civilians now in charge had learned the lessons of Vietnam—and other steps we were taking did as well. We were embarked on a massive buildup, not a gradual one in hopes that Saddam would change his mind. We were deploying troops in units, not using the individual rotations that had created turmoil during Vietnam. I had issued a stop-loss order. Nobody was leaving the armed forces until this job was done. The president had meant it when he said, “This will not stand.”
The execution of this war would be in the hands of the generals, but I wanted to be sure I understood as thoroughly as possible the details of what our troops were doing, and with that in mind I set up a series of briefings for myself, perhaps three dozen in all. Tom Kelly, the director of operations for the joint staff, was in charge of them. He would bring a team up to my office or sometimes I would go to the Tank, and I would be briefed on how a cruise missile works or on how to penetrate a minefield. We spent a lot of time on chemical weapons, which Saddam had used before, and on how we could defend our troops against them.
ON DECEMBER 18, POWELL and I left D.C. and headed for Saudi Arabia.
Talking to troops (Photo by Pete Williams)
In Schwarzkopf’s headquarters, located in a bunker beneath the Saudi Ministry of Defense, Norm had assembled his command team to brief us on every aspect of the air and ground war planning. During our first morning session, we focused on intelligence—what did we know about Saddam’s troops, their locations, their readiness—and the readiness of our own forces. One of my biggest concerns was that the planners not make overly optimistic assumptions. We needed to be ready, I told them, for the possibility of a long conflict. We needed to assume the worst.
The afternoon briefing covered the war plan itself. It had come a long way since our first session two months earlier, when the only option for a ground campaign had been the straight-up-the-middle approach. We now had three phases of an air campaign, followed by a ground campaign, which would involve a left-hook maneuver where our forces swung wide and then attacked Saddam