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By Root 1967 0

was a key mission for our air campaign. In early February, some of our F-111 pilots had discovered that their planes, developed for long-range bombing missions during Vietnam, had an advantage when it came to finding and taking out Iraqi tanks. The F-111s were equipped with an infrared targeting system. Many of the Iraqi tanks had been hidden under sandbags or behind berms. Our air force planners discovered that often the Iraqis weren’t turning them off at night, and even if they did, the heat the tanks had absorbed during the day would be released as night temperatures cooled. In either case, the F-111s could see the tanks, hotter than the surrounding sand, on their infrared systems and take them out. We started destroying a good number of Iraqi tanks this way. The pilots called it “tank plinking.”

Although the method was successful, the kills were often difficult for the CIA to track using satellite photos. This meant their estimates of numbers of tanks destroyed varied widely from the CENTCOM estimates, which had the advantage of gun-camera footage from the F-111s and other planes firing on the tanks. Since we had agreed our aim was to degrade Iraq’s tank force by 50 percent before we launched the ground war, the difference in estimates mattered. At one point CIA Director Bill Webster went to the president to tell him we had not met our target. This led to a meeting in Brent’s office with Powell, Webster, Mike McConnell and me. We compared our estimates and convinced Scowcroft and the president that CENTCOM had it right and that we were, in fact, ready to begin the ground war.

On our February trip to the desert, Powell and I spent eight hours in meetings with Schwarzkopf and his team to get up to speed on preparations for launching the ground invasion.

In Saudi Arabia with Generals Powell and Schwarzkopf preparing for a press conference (Photo by David Kennerly)

They walked us through the status of the air campaign and updated us on the bomb damage assessments for each category of strategic targets and the status of Iraqi forces in the Kuwait Theater of Operations. They briefed us on the current deployment of our ground forces, logistics issues, and our ability to guard against the possible use of chemical weapons against our troops.

One of the key pieces of information Powell and I needed from Schwarzkopf was a date when he would be ready to begin ground operations. He told us what he thought made sense—sometime around February 21, with a window of three days. When Powell and I returned to Washington, we met upstairs in the White House with President Bush in the Yellow Oval Room and gave him the word.

Those of us in charge of the war effort knew that the air campaign had succeeded in destroying much of Saddam’s air force and sending much of the rest of it fleeing to Iran. We had also degraded his army, but we still thought we’d have a fight on our hands. And there were some very troubling predictions: An expert at the Brookings Institution said between a thousand and four thousand Americans were going to die. Others warned that ten thousand Americans would be killed.

A question in our minds all along had been whether Saddam would use chemical weapons. We made sure our troops had the gear for that, and we also made sure there was plenty of footage of our guys practicing the drill, putting those suits on. We wanted to be certain Saddam knew our guys would be much better prepared to deal with any chemical attack than his own troops would be. The president, Jim Baker, and I also made clear that the military had a wide range of options that could be used against Saddam Hussein if he used chemical weapons. I had warned that Saddam “needs to be made aware that the President will have available the full spectrum of capabilities. And were Saddam Hussein foolish enough to use weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. response would be absolutely overwhelming and it would be devastating.”

After the war, Saddam’s foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, said that our statements, which Iraq had interpreted as threats of nuclear retaliation,