In My Time - Dick Cheney [118]
As it became clear that our forces had delivered a massive defeat to the Iraqis, we addressed the question of when to order them to stop. After months of planning and dealing with issues of transportation and logistics to get our troops to the desert, it was a very sudden shift, after three days of ground operations, to be sitting in the Oval Office deciding when to call a halt. General Powell and the president were particularly concerned that we not ask our young soldiers to continue to fire upon an enemy that seemed to be retreating in defeat.
Powell, using a secure phone in a drawer in the president’s desk, placed a call to Schwarzkopf in Riyadh. He told Schwarzkopf that the president wanted to know when we could bring things to an end. It was a question we all wanted an answer to. Schwarzkopf had just conducted a briefing in Riyadh in which he had told the press we’d accomplished our mission, and he was supportive of the idea of stopping as soon as feasible. He asked for some time to consult with his commanders. A few hours later we gathered again, and Schwarzkopf said his commanders agreed we could call a halt to hostilities. Someone came up with the idea of a hundred-hour war, which would mean stopping the fighting at midnight Washington time.
At the time the decision to end the war was made, there was confusion about how far coalition forces had advanced into Iraq. This led to calling a halt before the escape routes into Iraq had been blocked, and as a result, some Iraqi forces escaped, including armored units of the Republican Guard. There was further confusion when Schwarzkopf announced that cease-fire negotiations would be held in Safwan, just inside the Iraqi border with Kuwait. As it turned out Safwan was not under allied control. With the help of some low flyovers by A-10s, our forces were able to convince the Iraqis to abandon the site.
The Iraqis were represented at Safwan by Saddam’s generals, which at the time seemed appropriate since Schwarzkopf, along with Saudi Lieutenant General Khalid bin Sultan, represented the coalition. But one result was that Saddam never publicly admitted defeat, and we should have insisted upon that. We had been told repeatedly by our own intelligence services and by our Arab allies that Saddam would never survive after the blow the coalition had delivered, but he was able to turn the fact that he had stood up to and survived a massive assault into a personal victory. This would have been more difficult if we had demanded that he acknowledge having led his country to defeat.
Schwarzkopf was more accommodating of the Iraqis than he should have been as he sat down and agreed to terms of the cease-fire. When they argued that they needed their helicopters for official transport since we’d taken out most of the major bridges and roads in the country, he agreed that helicopters, even armed ones, could fly over Iraq.
In February before the ground war began and in March after the war was over, President Bush made public statements suggesting the Iraqis should “take matters into their own hands” and force Saddam Hussein “to step aside.” We hoped that Saddam’s military, in particular, might turn against him after the humiliating defeat we had just delivered them on the battlefield, but this failed to happen. There were public uprisings, especially among the Kurds in the north and the