In My Time - Dick Cheney [117]
ON FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 22, largely in response to continued Soviet efforts to broker a cease-fire, President Bush went into the Rose Garden and gave Saddam an ultimatum. He said the Iraqis would have until noon on Saturday to begin an immediate and unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait. Forty-five minutes before the deadline expired the next day, Gorbachev called the president again with yet another proposal that fell short of immediate unconditional withdrawal. No, the president told Gorbachev, a deadline is a deadline.
ON FEBRUARY 24, THE morning after the ground war started, Lynne and I went to St. John’s Church near the White House. President and Mrs. Bush were there and I knew he would be anxious for news from the desert. I passed him a note that said, “Mr. President, things are going very well.”
With President Bush in the White House residence briefing him on the first hours of the ground war in Operation Desert Storm, Sunday (Official White House Photograph)
He invited Lynne and me to come up to the White House residence after church, and as we sat in the second-floor sitting room, I told him that there had been no major glitches so far. The campaign was going according to plan. Resistance was light all across the front. The most significant problem we were having was dealing with the Iraqis who were surrendering in droves to our forces.
Time magazine had published an excellent war map that I laid out on the president’s coffee table. It showed the Iraqi forces arrayed along the Kuwait-Saudi border, the Republican Guard deployed on the Iraq-Kuwait border, and the general positions of the U.S. Army and Marines and our allies. It also showed our impressive naval assets: the aircraft carriers Saratoga, Kennedy, Theodore Roosevelt, and America in the Red Sea; the carriers Midway and Ranger and the battleships Missouri and Wisconsin in the Persian Gulf. Using a pen as a pointer, I walked the president through what had happened overnight.
The 1st and 2nd Marine divisions had breached the first line of Iraqi defenses and were now working through the second line. The first brigade of the 101st was approximately one hundred miles inside Iraq, at Forward Operating Base Cobra. The second brigade would be at Cobra within two to three hours. The third brigade would close on FOB Gold sometime during the morning. The 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment was twenty miles into Iraq and had met no resistance. The VII Corps, which was scheduled to attack that night, was in position and had begun cutting through the berm the Iraqis had erected as a barrier. The 1st Cavalry, scheduled to go at H+26, might go early.
The Egyptians had crossed into Kuwait against light resistance. The Saudis on the coast were also meeting light resistance. Air operations were continuing as planned. The only major losses reported were two Apache helicopters that collided, but both crews were reported to be okay.
It was encouraging, I noted, that in these first hours when we had expected some of the heaviest fighting, the resistance had been so light. But after laying out all this good news for the president, I cautioned that these were only first reports, and we had not yet encountered the Republican Guard, Saddam’s best troops.
By the next afternoon, February 25, we began to get word that Saddam was promising to withdraw in exchange for a UN-brokered cease-fire. Although we could see some of Saddam’s troops heading toward the Iraqi border and out of Kuwait, others were continuing to engage our troops. Saddam had not given up, but he was clearly hoping for a UN cease-fire that would allow him to retreat while keeping most of his forces intact.
Events on the ground