In My Time (33 page)

I asked Joe Lopez to have Dugan report to my office at eight the next morning. Just before eight I met with my deputy Don Atwood and General Powell. I told them I planned to relieve Dugan. I think Powell was surprised. He knew Dugan had made a mistake in sharing so much information with the press, but I don’t think he believed I would fire Dugan over it. He didn’t object. He left my office, but I wanted a witness in the room and asked Atwood to remain. General Dugan came in and took a seat. I went through the major points in the articles and asked the general if he’d been accurately quoted. He said he had. I told him I needed his resignation by the end of the day. He took it like a man, saluted smartly, and left. I placed another call to the president to inform him that I had indeed relieved General Dugan.

I recommended General Tony McPeak, an F-15 pilot, as Dugan’s replacement, and in short order the president nominated him and the Senate confirmed him. Some days later, McPeak introduced me to a group of retired air force four-stars. “This is Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney,” he said. “He wasn’t the president’s first choice, either.”

AS U.S. FORCES CONTINUED to flow into the desert, Colin Powell repeatedly pressed the case for long-term sanctions, for waiting and hoping that economic pressure would drive Saddam out of Kuwait. I had little faith in sanctions to begin with, and to think that Saddam would give up one of the world’s great oil reserves—100 billion barrels,
roughly, in Kuwait—because of sanctions struck me as foolish. Moreover, we couldn’t let our troops sit in the desert indefinitely, hoping that sanctions would squeeze Saddam. There was also the matter of the coalition of nations that the president had led the way in assembling. It was very impressive, but it would not hold forever.

On September 24, when Powell came to me to make the case for long-term sanctions one more time, I told him I thought he should make his argument directly to the president. It was important for President Bush to hear Powell’s arguments firsthand, I believed—and I didn’t want Powell, after the fact, to be able to say we hadn’t listened to him. I took him to the Oval Office that afternoon, told the president that General Powell had something to say, and Powell said it. A week or so later, President Bush asked for a briefing on our plans to use force to evict Saddam from Kuwait.

On Wednesday, October 10, 1990, a small group gathered in the “Tank,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff conference room in the Pentagon, to hear Schwarzkopf’s representative, Major General Robert Johnston, brief us on their offensive war plan. General Schwarzkopf and the team of planners he had working with him in Riyadh had broken the war plan into four phases. The first three involved air attacks on Iraqi command, control, and communications; Iraqi supply and munitions bases; and the Republican Guard. The fourth phase would be the ground assault. As described that day in the Tank, coalition forces would be moving directly north into the heart of Iraq’s most lethal forces.

It didn’t make any sense. Why would we send our forces—some of which were only lightly armored—up against the heavily armored core of Saddam’s defenses? Why not swing to the west? I wasn’t the only one asking questions. No one in the Tank seemed happy with the ground assault plan. General Schwarzkopf himself wasn’t happy with it. He had ordered that a final slide be included in the presentation that read, “Offensive Ground Plan Not Solid. We Do Not Have The Capability To Attack On Ground At This Time.” The planners in Riyadh believed at least another corps would be needed to undertake an offensive ground operation.

I thought the president needed to see the brief right away. He needed to know, as commander in chief, what the forces in theater were and weren’t capable of doing. I arranged for Schwarzkopf’s briefers to provide the brief to the president and Brent Scowcroft in the White House Situation Room the next day. I opened with an overview for the president in which I explained that the first three phases of the offensive plan, all part of the air campaign, were well planned and ready to execute with three days’ notice. We had a high degree of confidence in the air plan and our ability to execute.

Phase IV, the ground campaign, was a different proposition. We now had nearly 200,000 troops in theater, while the Iraqis had built up to well over 400,000. Saddam had not been idle. His troops had erected fortifications, laid down minefields, and established an effective logistics network. The bottom line, I said, was that while the plan showed how we might use the forces we currently had in theater to liberate Kuwait, it laid out a very high-risk proposition, one that depended on everything going perfectly—which it never does.

Briefing the air campaign to the president and the National Security Council was Buster Glosson, an air force one-star. Glosson had been working in legislative affairs when I first arrived at the Pentagon. When his tour was up, Larry Welch, then air force chief of staff, had assigned him to be deputy commander of the Joint Task Force Middle East. I suspected Glosson had crossed Welch at some point because being an air force officer assigned to duty on board a ship steaming around the Persian Gulf wasn’t exactly career-enhancing. But if the intent had been to sideline Glosson, it didn’t work. Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait put him right in the center of the action. Here he was in the White House briefing the commander in chief.

When Glosson finished, General Johnston briefed the ground war and explained that no one in theater liked the straight-up-the-middle concept, but that it was all we could do with the numbers of forces deployed. The president and Brent were not happy with the plan. What would it take, the president wanted to know, to have a satisfactory offensive ground option? I told him we would get him answers ASAP.

The next morning I made clear to Powell that he needed to get with Norm Schwarzkopf and come back with a workable plan. What I didn’t tell him was that I intended to push the system myself to make sure we got such a battle plan.

Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz pulled together a small team to study and develop a plan that came to be called the “Western Excursion.” The concept originally came from Henry Rowen, the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. Wolfowitz’s team, headed by a retired army general, Dale Vesser, took Rowen’s concept and expanded it into a plan to move coalition forces into the western desert of Iraq. Rather than go straight into the heart of Iraqi defenses in Kuwait, this plan would involve taking Iraqi territory, forcing the Iraqis to move key elements of their best troops to defend a potential threat to Baghdad, and perhaps acquiring for the coalition territory they could use to bargain for Kuwait. The team began working on the plan in secret as I left on a nine-day trip that would take me to London, Paris, and the Soviet Union.

IN LONDON I MET with Prime Minister Thatcher at Number 10 Downing Street.

Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher visited the White House on the fifth anniversary of 9/11. It was an honor to give her a tour of the Map Room where the maps President Roosevelt consulted during World War II are displayed. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)

Shortly after our meeting began, she asked everyone to leave the room except for me and my British counterpart, Tom King, and the three of us spent more than an hour talking about the Gulf crisis. She drew on her own experience in the Falklands War in 1982 for lessons both in military strategy and how to build and maintain public support. She was eloquent and insightful, and my session with her, the single most valuable I had in the run-up to the war, illustrated why she deserves to be regarded as one of the most effective national leaders of the twentieth century. That session also came near the end of her political career. Little more than a month later, facing a growing challenge within her own Conservative Party, she would inform the queen that she did not intend to stand again for prime minister.

The next day, Tuesday, October 16, 1990, I landed in Moscow. In Red Square at dusk, I laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It was a stirring moment for an American secretary of defense. Afterward
I was driven to a dacha outside Moscow for a dinner hosted by Soviet Defense Minister Yazov. On that cold Russian night, there were many toasts, and I was struck by the historic moment. Here I was, the U.S. secretary of defense, exchanging toasts with men who a few years earlier had been our deadliest and staunchest enemies. I raised my glass: “To peace.”

The next morning I had a formal meeting with Gorbachev in his Kremlin office. He emphasized that his government wanted a peaceful solution to the Gulf crisis, but in meetings with him, Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, and Defense Minister Yazov, I gained information that was important if we did go to war. Had the Soviets provided any weapons to the Iraqis that we didn’t know about? I asked. In years past, the Soviets would surely have refused to enter into such a conversation, but now they assured me that we would encounter no surprises.

My hosts showed me the Moscow Air Defense Center, buried sixty-five feet beneath Moscow and entered through nine steel doors. Surrounded by Soviet generals, I sat at the computer console in the control room and watched as huge maps flashed on the wall, first of Moscow, then of the eastern Soviet Union, and finally, of all Europe. In the event of nuclear war, the Soviets would have overseen some of their defensive operations from this command post. I was the first American to see it.

I was also taken to the ancient Russian city of Tula, site of a training center for Soviet airborne forces that was roughly equivalent to our Fort Bragg in North Carolina, but a much less sophisticated facility. While I was there, elite Soviet troops staged an exercise, an airdrop of several hundred men in an impressive show—although it did not match what I’d seen our own forces do.

My host at Tula was Soviet General Alexander Lebed, commander of the 106th Division. A hero of the fighting in Afghanistan, he looked every inch the tough soldier he was, but he would oppose hard-liners like Yazov when they tried to overthrow Gorbachev for moving too quickly with reform, and he had an eye for politics. Later, as a civilian, he visited America, stopping to see me in Texas, where I was heading up Halliburton, and presenting me with his memoirs and a knife used by
Soviet fighters. For a time he was seen as Boris Yeltsin’s successor, a position that eventually went to Vladimir Putin. Lebed was subsequently governor of Krasnoyarsk, a huge, mineral-rich region of Siberia, where he remained a political force until he was killed in a helicopter accident in 2002.

One of my last stops was at a large industrial site, a factory for MiG-29s, the top-of-the-line Soviet fighter. But the planes being produced were unfinished. Various key parts simply weren’t available. Rather than shut the plant doors, plant managers continued to operate in order to keep the workforce employed, but the products coming off the assembly line were worthless from a military standpoint. The managers of the plant indicated they were working on converting to the production of food processors similar to those found in millions of American homes, but when they showed me their prototype, I realized their plan wasn’t going to work. The food processor they so proudly showed me was the size of a small refrigerator.

The Soviets were clearly heading for a significantly diminished military capability. And what I saw, coming on top of the dramatic shifts that had occurred—the decision to free Eastern Europe peacefully and to allow Germany to reunify—convinced me that much of the talk about reform was real.

At a final meeting in Moscow, I found myself sitting across from members of the Supreme Soviet in an ornate room in the Kremlin, where I had attended a similar meeting in 1983. Then I had been a member of Congress and our delegation had had a very tense exchange with our Soviet counterparts over arms control, human rights, and Soviet treatment of dissidents. Now the feeling of standoff was gone, and the debates were mostly on the Soviet side as they argued over the merits and wisdom of different elements of economic reform.

AS I WAS FLYING home from Moscow, General Powell was departing Washington for Riyadh. His mission was to work with General Schwarzkopf to come up with a list of additional troops Schwarzkopf would need to go on the offense and liberate Kuwait.

In the meanwhile Paul Wolfowitz and his team had been working on the Western Excursion option, and it was time to staff it out. I called Admiral Dave Jeremiah, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to my office on the morning of October 23, 1990, and had him briefed on the plan and given the work Paul’s team had completed. I knew that as soon as the staff of the Joint Chiefs saw the plan, word would get around—and I was counting on that to convey my seriousness to the generals. We were going to provide the president with an offensive option, one way or another.

That task took on increasing importance the next day, when the president told me he was leaning toward action to remove Saddam from Kuwait. How many more troops would it require, he wanted to know. I told him that as soon as Powell got back from the Gulf, I would get to him with a report.