In My Time - Dick Cheney [114]
It was time for me to have a talk with Schwarzkopf, and when I got him on the phone, I told him he was doing a hell of a job, which he was, and that I understood his point: Civilians approve strategy and generals execute. But he needed to understand that the president considered this a strategic question. Whether our effort was successful or not could well depend on keeping Israel out of the war, and we had to devote resources to bombing Scud bunkers and launch sites. I also told him that he needed to understand my problem. “I’m the guy who gets to lean on the Israelis and who has to reassure them that we are doing everything we can. My credibility is crucial. If I tell them we are going to do something, then we will do it.”
The air sorties over the western desert didn’t bring an end to Scud attacks by any means, not on Israel nor on Saudi Arabia, which Saddam was also targeting. Part of the problem was that while we’d identified a number of fixed sites where we knew there were Scud launchers, the Iraqis were using mobile launchers instead. Although we weren’t able to stop the launches, the diversion of air assets to the western desert did go a long way toward convincing the Israelis we were serious about doing all we could to stop the attacks. I’d call Arens with daily updates: twenty-four F-15s, cluster-bomb units, flying at midnight; four F-15s flying combat air patrol from 0300 to 1000; forty-eight A-10s during twelve hours of daylight; twelve F-16s on a fixed target at 1100; twenty-four on mobile units at 1400; twelve on bunkers at 1500.
Larry Eagleburger from the State Department and Paul Wolfowitz from the Pentagon went to Israel again, which helped enormously in letting the Israelis know what we were doing and understand the size and scale of our effort. The deployment of Patriot batteries out of Germany and into Israel, which we managed in about forty-eight hours, was another sign of our commitment—though the missile turned out to be less effective against Scuds than we first thought. One problem was that the Patriot was developed to defend a point target, something like an airfield, not a whole area, not a city. If you’re protecting a base and you hit a Scud warhead coming in and knock it off target, that’s a success. But if you’re protecting Tel Aviv and you hit the incoming Scud and it goes down two miles away, that’s not a success. It’s also the case that Scuds are really crude devices. They’d break up as they came down, so that a lot of what we were shooting at was junk, not warheads.
We also sent special operations forces into western Iraq to work behind enemy lines to hunt down the Scud launchers. As theater commander, Norm had ultimate sign-off for anyone operating in his area of responsibility, and at first he did not want the special operators there. He shared some of the suspicion of others in the regular army that our special operations forces were overrated. I disagreed. I’d spent time learning about what they could do when I was in Congress, and after I was briefed by Wayne Downing, who commanded our joint special operations command and was an enormously capable officer