In My Time - Dick Cheney [97]
But at the end of July, when Saddam began moving his artillery forward, it looked increasingly as though he would cross the border and attempt to take Kuwait. On Wednesday, August 1, 1990, General Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander in chief of U.S. Central Command, which is in charge of most of the Middle East, came to the Pentagon to brief me. I’d met Schwarzkopf, a big, physically imposing man, apparently with a temper to match, but I didn’t know him well. I took a close look at him, wanting to be sure that he was the right man to command our operations through what lay ahead. One of the most important things I could do in a crisis was make sure we had the right people in charge.
Schwarzkopf knew his brief, but his message was not reassuring. Saddam would probably go into Kuwait, he said, perhaps to seize the Rumaila oil field or to take two disputed islands just over the border, Warba and Bubiyan.
Later that night, I was at home in McLean when I got a call from my military aide, Admiral Bill Owens. The Iraqis had crossed into Kuwait.
By the time the National Security Council met the next morning, Iraqi troops had rolled across the desert and into downtown Kuwait City. They had another line of tanks moving south toward the Kuwait-Saudi border. The White House press pool was brought in at the top of the meeting and reporters wanted to know what the United States was planning to do. Was the president going to use military force? “I’m not contemplating such actions,” President Bush said. I suspect he responded in the way he did because we hadn’t even begun to discuss the invasion. Was this a significant strategic event? Did it matter from the standpoint of the United States if Iraq had taken Kuwait, a small country out in the Persian Gulf? In the discussion that followed, Colin Powell indicated that he wasn’t convinced that it did, but it sure seemed important to me. On a White House notepad I made notes about the enormous economic clout that Saddam would gain from Kuwait, how its wealth would enable him to acquire increasingly sophisticated capabilities, chemical weapons, nuclear weapons, and ballistic missiles. It was also clear to me that we needed to make a strong statement of commitment to Saudi Arabia, whose oil fields Saddam was surely thinking about. After taking Kuwait, he controlled 20 percent of the world’s oil reserves. The eastern province of Saudi Arabia would give him 45–50 percent.
WHEN THE NSC MEETING broke up, the president prepared to depart for Aspen, Colorado, where he was scheduled to give a speech about America’s post–Cold War military force. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet position in Eastern Europe, there was growing pressure in Washington to modify our national security strategy and defense budget. At the Defense Department we had focused on a new force structure called the “base force” and a regional strategy that would enable us to deny any adversary the ability to control a part of the world that was vital to our interests.
Powell and I went to Capitol Hill to brief members of Congress on the base force concept, but all anyone was really interested in was what was happening in Kuwait. After the session on the Hill, Powell and I headed back to my office, where we got an update from General Tom Kelly, head of operations for the joint staff, on the Iraqi invasion. When he had finished, I turned to Powell. “What options do we have to respond?” I asked. Powell said the options were being worked and began discussing domestic political concerns, public opinion polls, and the American public’s view of Kuwait.