In My Time - Dick Cheney [96]
CHAPTER SIX
Desert Shield
Cold War military planners looked at the Persian Gulf and envisioned a threat coming from the Soviet Union. As they saw it, the United States needed to be ready for Soviet tanks rolling south through Iran, headed for the oil-rich Arabian Peninsula. But as the Cold War was ending, Admiral Bill Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the first few months of my term, decided that with a diminished Soviet threat, the Persian Gulf needed less attention, and in 1989 he published guidance for the military services that made the Gulf into an afterthought as far as America’s strategic priorities were concerned.
I disagreed with this assessment. I thought it was too early to discount the Soviets entirely and a mistake to overlook the possibility of a threat arising from within the region. In January 1990, I put out revised guidance, making it clear that the Arabian Peninsula had high priority and that we should plan for a crisis in the Gulf. It came sooner than anyone—except, perhaps, Saddam Hussein—could have imagined.
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SADDAM WAS IN A fury in the spring and early summer of 1990. He threatened chemical warfare, swearing to “let our fire eat half of Israel if it tries to wage anything against Iraq.” He lashed out at Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates for driving down the price of oil and thus thrusting “their poisoned dagger into our back.” His foreign minister and deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, zeroed in on the Kuwaitis for encroaching on Iraqi territory, stealing Iraqi oil, and ungratefully refusing to forgive loans made to Iraq at a time it was battling Iran and spilling “rivers of blood in defense of pan-Arab sovereignty and dignity.” The accusations were harsh, but what followed was still a shock. In mid-July, Iraqi tanks began moving toward Kuwait, and by July 19 our satellite photos showed three heavy armored divisions within striking distance of the Kuwait border.
Word of what was happening was still not public when I received two visitors in my office, Moshe Arens and Ehud Barak. Arens, slight and studious, was the Israeli defense minister. General Barak, a future Israeli prime minister, was deputy chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces. A round-faced, unassuming man, he was also his country’s most decorated soldier. On July 20, the two of them took seats at the small round table in my office, and pulling papers and maps out of their briefcases, they presented evidence of the advanced stage of the Iraqi nuclear program. Access to European technology, they believed, was helping the Iraqis speed completion of a uranium enrichment facility, and we had a narrow window of time in which to stop the program.
The Israelis had long considered a nuclear-armed Iraq a mortal threat, and in 1981 had bombed the reactor at Osirak, dealing a severe setback to the Iraqi program. I took very seriously what Arens and Barak had to say—particularly since they described a program much further advanced than the one portrayed in our intelligence assessments. After the war, we would find out that the Israelis had been closer to the truth than our own intelligence community was.
Barak and Arens were concerned about the growing danger of war in the Middle East and wanted to beef up their technology to counter the threat of ballistic missiles launched at Israel from Iraq. They had developed their own system, the Arrow, comparable to the U.S. Patriot antimissile system, but they needed U.S. assistance, particularly in the areas of radar and a more effective early warning system. This was a conversation to which we would return with increased urgency in the coming months.
As Saddam continued to mass elements of the Republican Guard—his best, most