In My Time - Dick Cheney [113]
Ultimately, no matter what the Pentagon does with the press during a time of war, the U.S. government is likely to be criticized for it. If they embed reporters and give them access to lots of information, the military is accused of trying to shape the truth or sugarcoat things. If reporters don’t get access then the military is accused of trying to hide the truth. In some sense it’s a no-win situation, but I think all in all we handled it pretty well.
One of my main concerns was not getting into a situation where the press was deciding whether or not we were winning. I wanted information about what was happening to come straight from the military and civilian leadership, not be filtered or skewed by the press in any way. Though we could not guard against this completely, I think our schedule of daily briefings and pool coverage helped ensure that plenty of accurate information did get through.
After Powell and I finished our briefing on the first night of the war, I called the president, a World War II veteran of carrier-based combat operations. “Mr. President,” I told him, “we have sent fifty-six navy planes out and we’ve got fifty-six back. We have over two hundred air force planes out and no sign of any missing.” Overnight, however, we would lose a pilot, Lieutenant Commander Scott Speicher, whose F-18 was shot down over Iraq.
ON THE SECOND DAY of the war, Saddam began launching Scud missiles at Israel. These were low-tech 1960s Soviet hardware, but in an urban setting they could cause considerable damage, and there were repeated rumors, all of which turned out to be false, that the Iraqis were putting chemical warheads on some of them. Shortly after the first Scuds struck, my phone rang. It was Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens. He was urgently requesting the Patriot missile batteries and crews we had offered before the war began. Arens said the Israelis also planned to launch retaliatory air strikes, and he asked for the Identification Friend or Foe, or IFF, codes that would allow Israeli pilots to avoid being shot down by allied planes. I told him I would get back to him. Then I called Scowcroft at the White House.
In discussions before the war began, we had agreed that we had to do everything we could to keep the Israelis out of the war, because once they got in, the conflict might look like an Arab-Israeli war, and Arab nations might well leave the coalition. Saddam, no fool, had launched the Scuds with that in mind. Scowcroft thought the best way to keep the Israelis on the sidelines was to hold them at arm’s length. My assessment was that we should keep them close, tell them everything we were doing, and do everything we could to ensure Israel’s safety, which did not include giving them IFF codes, but, I told Arens, we would go after the Scud launchers in the western desert. The Israelis had to know there was no reason for them to get into the conflict, because we were doing all that could be done.
In our discussions before the war, General Powell and the air commanders had assured me that we would have F-15E flights over the Iraqi western desert ready to take out any launch site from which a Scud was fired. As it turned out, the F-15Es had run into refueling difficulties and had not been flying the night of January 18. Nor did it seem—judging from CENTCOM’s plans for the next day’s air strikes—that General Schwarzkopf fully understood the importance of dedicating assets to hunting Scuds.
The next day Tel Aviv was hit again, and the Hammer Rick phone line got a workout. I could understand the Israeli anger. I myself was furious when I asked about the number of sorties that Central Command was flying against the Scuds and got a totally unsatisfactory answer.