Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait did not begin well. In the early hours of August 2, more than one hundred Iraqi helicopters carrying special forces lifted off to assault Kuwaiti bases and strike in downtown Kuwait City, to kill or capture the Sabah royal family. But Iraqi helicopter pilots had no night-vision equipment and scant experience flying in the dark. By one account, Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law, ordered the pilots to “fly as low as possible,” to evade antiaircraft missiles and achieve surprise. Someone, in any event, gave that catastrophic order, and more than forty of the helicopters crashed. Some collided with one another after churning up clouds of sand from the desert floor. Others flew over the highway to Kuwait, to avoid getting lost, but hit power lines or electricity towers.[1]
Jaber al-Ahmad al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti emir, was at his main residence, Dasman Palace, on the northern tip of Kuwait City’s peninsula. A light royal guard protected him. Crown Prince Saad al-Abdullah al-Sabah gathered hastily with ministers at the capital’s international airport. By radio, they had learned of the helicopter crashes and other sightings of the Iraqi invasion force. Soon they heard gunshots and heavy vehicles rumbling on Kuwait City’s streets. Before dawn, they decided to flee. Saad led a snaking convoy of luxury cars to Dasman Palace. He got on his car phone to persuade Jaber to jump aboard. The vehicles sped south toward Saudi Arabia less than thirty minutes before Iraqi special forces turned up at Dasman. The Iraqis shot dead a younger brother of the emir, Fahad al-Ahmad al-Sabah, who had arrived at the palace too late to join the convoy. But the rest of the royal leadership escaped into exile, providing the Bush administration with an intact Kuwaiti government it could seek to restore to power, if Bush chose to challenge Saddam.[2]
It wasn’t initially clear that Bush would. Just after 8:00 a.m. in Washington on August 2, his national security team gathered at the White House to discuss the crisis. The meeting that followed was unhelpful. Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser, called it “a bit chaotic,” informed by an “undertone” of resignation about Saddam’s invasion. Dick Cheney said that “the rest of the world badly needs oil” and has “little interest in poor Kuwait.” There was extensive discussion about the invasion’s impact on oil markets and very little about the restoration of Kuwait’s independence.[3]
Bush’s most important Arab allies were no less flummoxed. King Hussein tried repeatedly to get through to Baghdad, but Saddam would not take his calls. The king then flew to Alexandria, Egypt, where, sitting on a veranda, he and Hosni Mubarak telephoned Bush. The president was by now on Air Force One, flying from Washington to Aspen, Colorado, where he would meet Margaret Thatcher.
“I really implore you, sir, to keep calm,” Hussein said. “We want to deal with this in an Arab context.”
Bush said the invasion was unacceptable to the United States and Hussein could relay that to Saddam “from me.”[4]
Bush convened with Thatcher at the Woody Creek ranch of Henry E. Catto Jr., the U.S. ambassador to London.
“If Iraq wins, no small state is safe,” Thatcher told the president. “This is no time to go wobbly, George,” she added. The prime minister also said that King Hussein was “not helpful.” Even after this outrageous invasion, the king had said the Kuwaitis “had it coming.”
Bush said he feared that Israel might strike Iraq with atomic weapons. Of all the Middle Eastern governments he had consulted during July, only Tel Aviv’s had predicted that Saddam would take Kuwait. “Israel was right and we were wrong,” Bush admitted.
As Bush and Thatcher prepared to face the press, someone noted that there might be a question about whether the U.S. administration’s “approach to Iraq has been a failure.”
“At this point, I wouldn’t say it’s been an outstanding success,” Bush quipped.[5]
That evening, the president called King Fahd of Saudi Arabia from one of Catto’s bedrooms. Fahd had spoken with Saddam earlier in the day, he reported, and he now diagnosed him: “He is conceited. He doesn’t realize the implications of his actions. . . . He seems to think only of himself. He is following Hitler in creating world problems, with one difference—one was conceited, and one is both conceited and crazy.
“I believe nothing will work with Saddam but use of force,” Fahd continued. “He is a liar. . . . Saddam must be taught a lesson he will not forget the rest of his life—if he remains alive.”
Yet at the end of their conversation, when Bush offered to immediately send a squadron of American F-15 warplanes to Saudi Arabia, to strengthen the kingdom’s defenses, Fahd demurred.[6]
On August 5, Bush arrived back at the White House and addressed reporters on the South Lawn. “This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait,” he said. It was his most forceful pronouncement yet, but it was still unclear what America or America’s Arab allies would do to back it up.
Cheney flew to Jeddah to meet King Fahd and persuade him to join the United States in a military response. “He will grow stronger—especially if he has all that Kuwaiti wealth,” Cheney warned. “He will dominate the Gulf. . . . He will acquire more, deadlier armaments.” Fahd finally agreed to accept American military forces on Saudi soil, even though it would be provocative to his subjects and Islamic clergy. Thousands of American, British, and French soldiers poured into the kingdom. Ultimately, thirty-nine countries would come to the defense of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, mustering a total force of more than eight hundred thousand.
In modern times, the Saudis and their small neighboring emirates had never been involved in a destructive war. They seemed uncertain about what such a conflict might entail.
Cheney stopped in Qatar to meet that emirate’s royal leadership. Afterward, he rode back to the airport with the minister of defense.
“So, are you going to nuke Saddam?” the minister asked.
No, Cheney answered. That was not the plan.[7]
Saddam, like Bush, regarded nuclear war as a realistic possibility. Soon after the invasion, he received the president of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, a fellow strongman, and told him that the United States and Israel “may attack us by the atomic bombs. . . . We are ready for that.” He assured Saleh that Iraq could also manage any American “blockade” or other military retaliation. He would attack American “fleets in the Gulf” with “Kamikaze” air strikes.[8]
The Iraqi Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned Joseph Wilson, the senior U.S. diplomat then in Baghdad, to a morning meeting on the day after Bush’s “this will not stand” comment made headlines. After her late July session with Saddam, April Glaspie had left the country to arrange for her ailing mother’s care in London.
Wilson and Nancy Johnson, the political officer, arrived at the ministry’s concrete headquarters at about 10:00 a.m. Tariq Aziz ushered them to see Saddam. Wearing military fatigues and his signature pistol belt, he greeted them in a curtained meeting room and again began his messaging to the Bush administration with a monologue that lasted forty-five minutes to an hour.
His main argument was: Why fight? If the U.S. would allow him to have his way in Kuwait, he could supply cheap oil to America for years to come. He also pledged that he would not attack Saudi Arabia, as long as King Fahd did not allow his kingdom to be used to attack or destabilize Iraq. But if the U.S. sent its armed forces to confront Iraq, Saddam continued, America would face the “spilling of the blood of ten thousand soldiers in the Arabian desert. . . . You are a superpower and I know you can hurt us, but you will lose the whole area. You will never bring us to our knees.”
Overall, Saddam offered “the carrot of cheap oil coupled with the stick of dead American soldiers,” as Wilson summarized it. The Iraqi leader dismissed Kuwait’s royal family as a thing of the past. The interpreter had trouble with Saddam’s meaning, so Aziz jumped in, using the popular phrase in English: “The Sabah family is history.”[9]
To make good on that forecast, Saddam appointed his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, the mass killer behind the Anfal, to govern the “Nineteenth Province,” as Iraq’s propagandists soon called Kuwait. Majid swiftly established a regime of official looting, widespread arrests, and the erasure of Kuwaiti national identity. At an early meeting with Saddam and other Iraqi leaders, he announced that the province “must become less developed” and reported that Kuwaitis “only care about money and not moral values.” Some were already taking up arms against Iraq.
Saddam ordered that looting be managed as an official “spoils of war” operation to transfer Kuwaiti machinery, medical equipment, and luxury cars to Iraq. He asked his longtime comrade Taha Yassin Ramadan to include the appropriation of camel herds in the plundering program. Iraqis stole 3,216 gold bars from government stores, worth at least $390 million. Ultimately, the occupying forces would ransack or vandalize about 170,000 Kuwaiti homes; a U.N. commission would later approve $52 billion in compensation payments.[10]
The occupation authorities changed the names of schools, streets, public buildings, and residential areas, removing any reference to the Sabah family and honoring Saddam Hussein or well-known dates and figures in Iraqi history. In a letter headed “Erasing Kuwaiti Identity, Absorbing Kuwait,” the Ministry of Education banned textbooks that depicted Kuwait “as an independent state or anything related to the old regime and their family.”[11]
Hussein Kamel al-Majid, rarely sluggish, sprang into hyperdrive after the invasion. He seemed to work without sleep. On August 18, he met with Jafar Dhia Jafar and three other high-level scientists. Jafar now served as one of Hussein Kamel’s deputies. Their collective work—to enrich uranium to bomb grade using electromagnetic and gas centrifuge technologies—had made substantial progress during the last several years. But despite what they had once forecasted to Saddam, they still appeared to be several years away from producing enough fissile material for a single bomb.
Hussein Kamel announced that he had a new plan. In light of the imminent threat of war with America, he proposed to quickly make a crude atomic bomb by grabbing highly enriched uranium that Iraq held at its Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center, stored under international safeguards. One cache of this fuel had been supplied for the French reactor at Tuwaitha that had never operated because of Israel’s air strike in 1981. It had been kept on-site, inspected periodically by the watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency to be sure it wasn’t misused for weapons. A second batch of enriched uranium, also under safeguards, had been received to fuel the 1960s-era Soviet research reactor. The two batches would need alterations in order to be most suitable for a bomb, but this might be done in a matter of months, if they got cracking. Should their modifications work, they would be able to produce about twenty-five kilograms of highly enriched uranium bomb fuel—enough for a single, highly destructive device.
“You must do this,” Hussein Kamel said.
Jafar was stunned. It was a desperate plan, one that was almost certainly unworkable on Hussein Kamel’s timeline and sure to be discovered by international nuclear inspectors, who visited Iraq once every two or three months. If they got caught, the outcry would be immediate, and they might risk exposing the secret enrichment work they had been doing for almost a decade.[12]
Days later, Jafar wrote to Hussein Kamel, pointing out that what he was proposing would violate not only Iraq’s obligations as a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty but also related promises it had made to France. If Jafar was to supervise the work, he wanted “direct presidential approval.”
Hussein Kamel wrote back the same day. Approval had “been obtained and signed” from Saddam, he asserted. Jafar had no way of knowing whether this was true, but he now had written orders, and defying Saddam’s son-in-law meant a return to prison or worse. So he began work. Hussein Kamel directed that they finish an atomic bomb within six months—by February 1991. This became known as Project 601.
There were several tasks. One was making preparations to “reprocess” the highly enriched French fuel, which was already radioactive, so that it would be better suited for a bomb. This would require constructing a facility to safely apply chemical treatments. Jafar appointed a group to work on that. They also had to modify the fuel from the Soviet reactor. This uranium was enriched to about 80 percent, not as fissionable as the French fuel, at 93 percent. So they discussed using gas centrifuges they had built in their secret program to enrich some of the Soviet fuel to a grade of 93 percent, matching that of the French.[13]
The centrifuge program had advanced impressively since 1988. This was largely because Hussein Kamel had secretly enlisted West German technical specialists. He had handed out multimillion-dollar deals to secure the services of German engineers who had access to classified European designs. They had made so much progress by the fall of 1990 that they were building a new facility for a thousand or so centrifuges.
In late September or early October, A. Q. Khan, the metallurgist who had fathered Pakistan’s bomb, secretly wrote to Iraq to offer “project designs for a nuclear bomb,” as well as European-made equipment. Khan was becoming the world’s leading smuggler of atomic-bomb technology, and he saw a sales opportunity in Iraq’s effort to fend off war with America. Jafar rejected the entreaty, noting that it was standing policy to avoid such proposals “because of the technique of entrapment which is still used by hostile parties.”
Jafar visited Mahdi Obeidi to explain the plan to remove enriched uranium from safeguarded stores. This meant that “Saddam was desperate for a nuclear weapon as soon as possible,” Obeidi thought.[14]
Even if the reprocessing and enrichment of uranium worked on the timeline Hussein Kamel had demanded, there remained the problem of manufacturing a reliable bomb. As part of the reorganization of 1988, Iraq had created a team, known as Group Four, to design a workable bomb device. The team examined the open literature about Little Boy, the uranium-fueled bomb that had devastated Hiroshima, and Fat Man, the plutonium implosion device that leveled Nagasaki. They settled on a more challenging design that would require less highly enriched uranium but might produce an explosion of twenty kilotons, or about the same yield as that of the bombs dropped on Japan.
Obeidi asked himself what Saddam’s calculation might be. Even if Iraq could come up with “a crude bomb,” where would it explode the device? In Israel, which had “a vast nuclear arsenal of its own” and was likely to respond with an “annihilating counterattack”? Acquiring a single bomb in order to deter the United States and its allies from launching a war over Kuwait made more sense. But in that case, the smart move would be to delay any war until the bomb could be completed and revealed, and Saddam showed no sign of such strategic patience. “Iraq was in the grip of a delusional leader,” the scientist concluded.[15]
Saddam’s conduct in the aftermath of his invasion of Kuwait altered his place in world politics. He had not just mistimed his gambit by invading when the Cold War’s sudden end had created new possibilities for alliances against him; he had also acted at a moment when cable and satellite television created new networks and audiences for cross-border TV news coverage, bringing world audiences directly into the lurid visual theater of Saddam’s propaganda. CNN, the BBC, and Arabic-language satellite networks beamed out Saddam’s speeches, interviews, and glad-handing strolls. He decided to hold hostages—diplomats and civilians from the United States, Britain, and other countries—and called them “guests.” He visited them before the cameras, all hospitality and solicitude. In one viral moment, Saddam walked among British hostages and met a five-year-old boy named Stuart Lockwood. He patted him on the head and asked, “Did Stuart have his milk today?” The image of Stuart shrinking away became fodder for countless outraged editorials. Yet Saddam seemed oblivious to how his hostage-taking shredded his threadbare credibility and narrowed—rather than enlarged—his room to maneuver.
He continued to perform, too, for the Arab audiences he imagined he would rally to his side in a decisive conflict against the United States. He seemed particularly offended that Bush had called him a liar. “President of the superpower,” he wrote in an open letter to Bush, “you have lied to the people and public opinion, because you accused Saddam Hussein of being a liar.” After Bush compared the danger of Iraqi expansionism to the threat Hitler posed, Saddam responded in another open letter: “He forgets that all these descriptions apply to him.”[16]
Bush had served as a naval aviator during the Second World War, and he continually invoked comparisons of Saddam to Hitler after the Kuwait invasion. “It has been personalized,” he wrote in his diary. “He is the epitome of evil.” The analogy seemed to influence Bush’s decisions—he should stop Saddam militarily while he had the means to do so, before the Iraqi leader could engorge himself on Kuwaiti oil and expand his warmaking potential. Yet like all analogies comparing geopolitical problems in different eras and regions, this one suffered from simplification. After a decade of helping to manage Saddam subtly, Bush had abruptly adopted a Manichaean outlook. His uncompromising policy was perhaps the best available, given American and European interests in the free flow of oil, and in light of Israel’s security, yet it also closed down the president’s curiosity and ability to listen. Arguably, he had stumbled into this mess by taking too much counsel from Arab friends; he now seemed determined to use the Hitler analogy to close off further arguments.[17]
Weeks after the invasion, Bush met Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at a summit in Helsinki, Finland. Gorbachev had already gone to unprecedented lengths to cooperate with Bush. Yet he sought to maintain Soviet influence even as his multinational country crumbled. At a morning session in the Finnish presidential palace, Gorbachev unveiled a plan by which Saddam would withdraw and the U.S. would agree to participate in a conference on the Middle East to address Saddam’s grievances.
“We need to give him some daylight,” Gorbachev said. “Let’s give the impression that he is not on his knees.”
“If we had offered Hitler some way out, would it have succeeded?” Bush countered.
“Not the same situation.”
“Only in personality,” Bush insisted.[18]
Weeks after the invasion of Kuwait, Bush signed a Top Secret order authorizing the C.I.A. to work with Iraqi exiles and dissidents to remove Saddam from office. This was a long shot, given Saddam’s octopus-like security regime and the paucity of American contacts with Iraqis in a position to stage a coup d’état. As a practical matter, during the months ahead, the agency’s most significant work would be collecting intelligence to aid an eventual U.S.-led war to strike Iraq and liberate Kuwait, if Bush ordered one.
The C.I.A.’s station chief in Baghdad at the time of the invasion was Charles “Charlie” Seidel, who was in his early thirties. He was a “legacy” officer, meaning that he had followed his father into the spy business. His family line, colloquial Arabic, and willingness to take initiative marked him as a rising star in the Near East Division. Seidel had had no better luck than his predecessors at recruiting agents inside Saddam’s inner circle. But after the invasion, he embraced an emergency mission in which he could act directly: rescuing American diplomats and other citizens stranded in Kuwait City.
W. Nathaniel Howell, the U.S. ambassador, lived on a five-acre embassy compound in the capital. His deputy, Barbara Bodine, and the C.I.A. station chief, J. Hunter Downes, lived nearby. But other diplomats and military officers were scattered around Kuwait City. Howell invited all Americans inside the compound, and many joined him there.
Saddam initially set August 24 as a deadline for all embassies in Kuwait to close or withdraw—since it was no longer an independent state, the emirate no longer required foreign embassies, Iraq explained. Howell and the White House decided to defy that order, but they wanted to evacuate as many people as possible—all but a core staff—before the deadline arrived.
Seidel drove down to Kuwait City. On August 22, at about 3:00 a.m., after much chaos, arm-waving, and shouting, Howell’s flag-flying Cadillac led a convoy full of American children and government colleagues toward the Iraqi border. Nervous drivers speeding in darkness crashed into one another, and two injured Americans had to be rerouted to a Kuwaiti hospital. Howell got out at a border post and waved his comrades on to Baghdad. They made it to the U.S. embassy, where they found temporary cots and sleeping areas. Seidel soon led a second convoy through Kurdistan and across the Turkish border.[19]
The Iraqis tightened their occupation of Kuwait as summer turned to autumn. They established more than two dozen interrogation and torture centers in Kuwait City. They arrested anyone who spoke ill of Saddam, and they bulldozed and burned the homes of suspected members of the Kuwaiti resistance. Warned of an upcoming public protest by Kuwaitis, Bariq Abdullah al-Haj Hinta, the local commander of special forces, sent orders to his 65th Brigade about how to respond:
You need to walk to the demonstration area, without vehicles and quietly, quietly, quietly get close to the demonstrators from behind and close their alternative routes of escape. Then open fire at the same time with everything you have, including rifles, automatic weapons, light cannons, and flamethrowers for the objective of killing all the demonstrators so to serve as an example to all others.
Iraqi soldiers raped Western, Asian, and Arab women in Kuwait, although the extent of these crimes is unknown. The Iraqis arrested nearly four thousand Kuwaitis during the first seven weeks of the occupation, according to regime records. Kuwait later compiled a list of 2,242 civilians and military personnel who went missing; many almost certainly died or were executed in Iraqi prisons.[20]
In mid-September, Bush addressed Congress. “Iraq will not be permitted to annex Kuwait,” he said. “That’s not a threat, that’s not a boast, that’s just the way it’s going to be.”
“It looks like the old man Bush is beginning to warn us,” Saddam told Tariq Aziz in a private meeting soon after. “He must be crazy.” The public rhetoric between Bush and Saddam—you’re a liar; no, you’re a liar—narrowed the potential for international diplomacy to stave off war. The more the Bush administration pushed through tougher sanctions at the U.N., “the more unbending we become,” Saddam told Aziz privately. He found it “disgusting” the way the U.S. was leading the U.N. “under its whip. . . . This is an organization that belongs to Bush.”[21]
Saddam had long deftly parlayed with Washington, Moscow, and Paris while often defying their rules for international conduct. Now that he was under direct threat, he seemed to regress to his revolutionary youth, extending his middle finger to the world’s great powers. Saddam had always spoken radically in private to his comrades, as if he felt a continual need to renew his credentials as a revolutionary before them. But then he often acted to avoid confrontation. Now he spoke rashly in private and seemed to mean what he said.
On October 6, Yevgeny Primakov, an envoy of Gorbachev, met with Saddam in Baghdad. Primakov and Saddam had known one another since the former’s days as a Middle East correspondent for Pravda. The Russian brought a letter from Gorbachev, who was still trying to find a way to resolve the Kuwait crisis by launching a new effort to resolve the Arab-Israel conflict.
Saddam dismissed the possibility that America would bargain seriously over Palestine. In any event, if he backed down now, he intimated, he might lose his grip on power. He needed to save face. He suggested that a compromise might be possible, such as a partial withdrawal from Kuwait, if Bush allowed him to “preserve his authority in Iraq.”
Two weeks later, Primakov flew to Washington and met Bush in the Oval Office. Saddam “was not being well informed by his inner circle and was hearing more about his support than about his political isolation,” Primakov reported.
Bush asked if Saddam would survive the crisis. Primakov predicted that he would. Economic and trade sanctions alone “would not force Saddam out and could be counterproductive, encouraging him to strike at Israel.” If Saddam believed that his choice was withdrawal or war, Primakov reported, his attitude was: “I’m prepared to die.”
The envoy outlined Gorbachev’s ideas for diplomacy, which struck Bush as “face-savers” for Saddam that would be seen as a “reward” for Iraqi aggression. The president remained firmly committed to “unconditional withdrawal.” The discussion left Bush pessimistic about “finding any solution to the crisis short of the use of force.”[22]
Bush ordered preparations for a war to liberate Kuwait. General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commanding from Saudi Arabia, and Colin Powell, who advised the White House as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, led the planning. They possessed sharply contrasting temperaments. Six foot three and 240 pounds, Schwarzkopf was an egoist at press-conference podiums who could inspire troops with his energy and audacity. He was also a short-tempered screamer behind closed doors. Powell, with whom Schwarzkopf spoke several times a day, screened the general from the White House. A son of Jamaican-born parents, Powell had grown up in Harlem and the South Bronx and had attended City College of New York before rising through the U.S. Army to become his country’s first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He was a classic staff officer—part diplomat, part strategist, and part facilitator of military decisions. He often reflected on the connection between America’s armed forces and public opinion. He had served two tours in Vietnam, an experience that gave rise to what came to be known as the “Powell Doctrine,” which held that the United States should only fight wars with overwhelming force, clear goals, and a decisive exit plan. As a practical matter, this meant fewer wars, which Powell favored: “Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men most,” read an aphorism he kept on his desk.[23]
Week by week that autumn, the United States, Britain, and France deployed to Saudi Arabia and neighboring emirates a massive armada of tanks, ships, aircraft, and soldiers. Bush and his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, came to conceive of the war to liberate Kuwait as an exemplar of the Powell Doctrine: they would apply overwhelming force to achieve in the shortest time possible a clear and finite goal—namely, the expulsion of Iraqi forces and the restoration of Kuwait’s independence. Powell believed the war would ultimately have to be won on the ground, by armor and infantry. The president and his top generals were not nearly as deterred by the prospect of U.S. casualties as Saddam Hussein believed. Yet they worried nonetheless about American losses. The Joint Chiefs predicted that the U.S. might endure twenty thousand to thirty thousand dead and wounded, while some independent military specialists forecasted up to one hundred thousand.[24]
Bush had built his formidable alliance around a war aim derived from United Nations resolutions: Iraq must withdraw unconditionally from Kuwait. That fall, however, Bush also asked his National Security Council staff to review other war aims the United States might pursue. They recommended destroying as much of Iraq’s elite armored force, the Republican Guard, as possible. The loss of these divisions would diminish Saddam’s potential to threaten neighbors in the future, and “since these troops were also the backbone of the regime, their destruction would further undermine Saddam’s grip on power,” as Scowcroft recalled.
The president’s closest Arab allies—the same kings and strongmen who had failed to predict the invasion of Kuwait—now advised Bush that if Saddam were crushed in war against the U.S.-led coalition, this would “shatter what support he had within the military, which probably would then topple him.” This prediction appealed to Bush, a former C.I.A. director. The White House review “raised the question of making Saddam’s removal an objective” of the military campaign to liberate Kuwait, but neither Bush nor Scowcroft believed this was wise or easily achievable. “The best solution was to do as much damage as we could to his military, and wait for the Baath regime to collapse,” Scowcroft concluded.[25]
In Washington, opposition to going to war over Kuwait grew among Democrats and some Republicans in Congress. Watching from Baghdad, Saddam struggled to understand. If Bush “can’t reach an agreement with the opposing party, would the president be able to make a dangerous decision” to go to war on his own authority? “What we have here is a complicated country,” Saddam remarked at one point.
He told his advisers that he was prepared to use Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons, if necessary. “If we wanted to use chemicals, we will beat them down,” he said at a meeting in November. “We have biological weapons that can kill, even if you step on it forty years later.” The latter claim was, of course, absurd.[26]
Saddam’s comrades assured him that he had tied the Americans in knots. “Bush is losing his mind, he is going crazy,” Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri told him around this time. “He is wondering: Are they mentally stable? Are they bluffing? Will they really fight or not? The United States is stunned . . . stunned!” Saddam continued to describe the looming conflict as the inevitable result of the American-Israeli-Iranian conspiracy against Iraq dating back years. “The war was launched on us long before all this . . . and was exposed under the title ‘Irangate,’ ” he told his comrades.[27]
He remained fixated on the prospect that Iraq would be struck preemptively with nuclear weapons, most likely by Israel. After the invasion, he had ordered preparations for the evacuation of Baghdad. The capital’s two million or so residents were instructed to find companions in the countryside who might shelter them. A civil-defense campaign educated Baghdadis about the effects of atomic war. At a meeting late in 1990, Ali Hassan al-Majid questioned the need for “all this hoopla about the effects of nuclear and atomic attack. . . . It frightens children, it frightens parents, it frightens fighters.”
Saddam reacted with an angry rant: “What are we, a bunch of kids?” He excoriated Izzat for his work on the preparations—“I swear on your mustache . . . pay attention to civil defense!”—before agreeing that the campaign “should not explain to the citizen what the atomic bomb will do.”[28]
On November 29, the United Nations adopted a deadline for Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait. If Saddam did not retreat by January 15, 1991, the United States and its allies could use force to liberate the emirate. The Security Council’s unity would have been all but impossible to imagine before Gorbachev—Saddam had misjudged this aspect of the Cold War’s end. Bush had accepted by now that January 15 would all but certainly mark the start of war. In Baghdad, Tariq Aziz assured Saddam that war would at least not begin before the announced deadline: the intervening Christmas holidays, he explained, were a time for “family gatherings,” and any American president “who brings corpses to his country” during that season “will be skinned alive.”[29]
The White House authorized one last try at diplomacy. Secretary of State James Baker sought a meeting with Saddam in Baghdad, but the Iraqis refused. They settled on a conference between Baker and Aziz in Geneva on January 9, 1991.
Aziz flew from Baghdad to Switzerland. They convened late the next morning at the Intercontinental Hotel, on a rise above Lake Geneva. Baker led a delegation that also included Cheney. Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, still posted as a diplomat in Geneva, joined Aziz. The Americans saw Barzan as an “enforcer” of Saddam’s, there to keep Aziz in line—an assessment of Barzan’s influence that was years out of date.[30]
Baker had met Aziz before and found him “urbane and sort of cosmopolitan,” a strong English speaker with “an excellent command of his brief.” The two delegations faced off across a conference table laden with water bottles and vinyl ice buckets. Baker handed across a sealed envelope containing a three-page letter from Bush to Saddam, as well as a copy translated into Arabic for Aziz. “Unless you withdraw from Kuwait completely and without condition, you will lose more than Kuwait. What is at issue here is not the future of Kuwait . . . but rather the future of Iraq. The choice is yours to make.”
Aziz read Bush’s letter and then set it back on the table. He called the document insulting and said he would not accept it or carry it to Saddam. He suggested that the Americans hand it out to the media.
The Baker-Aziz meeting proved to be mainly rehearsed theater on both sides, except in one respect: at the urging of Dick Cheney and Colin Powell, Baker issued a stark warning about what the U.S. would do if Saddam used chemical or biological weapons. “The American people will demand vengeance,” Baker said. “And we have the means to exact it. Let me say with regard to this part of my presentation, this is not a threat; it is a promise. If there is any use of weapons like that, our objective won’t just be the liberation of Kuwait, but the elimination of the current Iraqi regime.” The retaliation Iraq would face in that case would leave the country “weak and backward.”
Although the secretary of state did not mention nuclear weapons, he wanted to impress on Aziz that the U.S. might go nuclear if it were hit with Iraqi chemical or biological arms. Whether Baker knew it or not, his threat reinforced Saddam’s belief that America and Israel would not hesitate to strike Iraq with atomic bombs.[31]
The meeting ended, and Baker and Aziz told the world’s press that there had been no breakthrough. Six days remained until the war deadline.
Around the time of the summit in Geneva, Saddam met with senior advisers, including his son-in-law Hussein Kamel. The president sought assurance that he had an option to use chemical and biological arms. “I want to make sure that—close the door, please—the germ and chemical warheads, as well as the chemical and germ bombs, are available to the ‘concerned people,’ so that in case we ordered an attack, they can do it without missing any of their targets,” Saddam said.
The demand put Hussein Kamel in an awkward position. In reality, as he now sought to delicately explain, Iraqi forces were prepared to wage chemical war against the American-led coalition, if so ordered, but the biological and nuclear programs were less ready.
“Sir, if you’ll allow me,” he began, “some of the chemicals now are distributed. . . . Chemical warheads are stored and ready at air bases,” he said. As he started to wander into details—mentioning phosphorous, ethyl alcohol, methyl alcohol—Saddam interrupted.
“This is not important to me. . . . The missiles, by tomorrow, will be ready on the fifteenth.”
“Sir, we don’t have the germs,” Hussein Kamel now admitted.
“Then, where are they?”
“It’s with us,” he said, meaning the ministries he ran.
“What is it doing with you? I need these germs to be fixed on the missiles. . . . Starting the fifteenth, everyone should be ready for the action to happen at any time, and I consider Riyadh as a target.” They went on to discuss other targets: Jeddah, Saudi Arabia’s sprawling city on the Red Sea, and “all the Israeli cities.”[32]
Such was Hussein Kamel’s work, dancing to his father-in-law’s demands. Only Saddam’s son-in-law could offer a truth like “Sir, we don’t have the germs” and expect to live a free man.
Saddam did make extensive preparations to use chemical weapons on American and coalition troops. Documents show Iraqi forces preparing to field 1,232 chemical aircraft bombs, 13,000 artillery shells loaded with mustard, and 8,320 Soviet-made Grad rockets loaded with nerve agents. Hussein Kamel also managed to prepare 166 bombs and 25 missiles loaded with biological weapons, although the chance that these weapons would work if fired was much smaller than with Iraq’s battle-tested chemical arsenal.[33]
Yet for all his bold talk, Saddam reserved judgment on whether he would ever use “special weapons” against the United States and its allies. He made clear that the decision rested solely with him. He indicated ambiguously that he would permit use “only in case we are obliged and there is a great necessity.” He added, “We will never lower our heads as long as we are alive, even if we have to destroy everybody.”[34]
Predictably, the nuclear-weapons program had also missed Hussein Kamel’s deadlines. Work on a usable bomb device remained particularly far behind. The bottom line was that Iraq was in no position to finish or launch an atomic bomb that winter.
How far had the secret bomb program first conceived in 1980 actually come toward success, after roughly a decade of effort and enormous expenditure? The answer depends on many hypotheticals and so cannot be given with precision. If Saddam had not invaded Kuwait, the bomb program’s prospects probably would have depended on how quickly the electromagnetic and centrifuge teams could produce enough highly enriched uranium, and on how quickly a workable device could be completed and tested. Fadhil al-Janabi, who served as chair of the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission, estimated that the program was still six or seven years away from a finished bomb. That seems a conservative estimate. Garry Dillon, who spent years examining Iraq’s nuclear program during the 1990s as a senior inspector at the watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency, judged that the effort “had been close to the threshold of success” in such important areas as the production of highly enriched uranium and the development of an explosives package for a bomb. He noted, however, that by early 1991, Iraq had yet to produce more than a few grams of bomb-grade material indigenously. Late in 1991, the C.I.A. concluded that Iraq “probably” had the technical competence to build a bomb by the end of the 1990s with its own talent and resources. It might have been able to do so “within a few months” in the “much less likely” scenario of a crash program to misuse Iraq’s reactor fuel—at the time it produced its 1991 report, the C.I.A. did not know Iraq had taken steps to do just that as the Gulf War loomed.
Whether Saddam was months or seven years away, in Washington, Tehran, and Tel Aviv, any chance that he might have acquired an atomic bomb before he could be stopped was terrifying.[35]
The qualities that had led George H. W. Bush to miss the chance to deter Saddam Hussein from invading Kuwait—his reliance on personal diplomacy, his openness to the advice of allies, and his innate optimism—served him better as he prepared for war. To expel Iraq from Kuwait, Bush constructed a formidable warfighting coalition. He secured Gorbachev’s cooperation without succumbing to Soviet interference. He allowed Congress to debate the war and won its approval. The underlying Western interests driving Bush toward war—the free flow of oil, above all—were less noble than the president believed. Yet Bush’s performance was impressive. So was his prescience about the decisions he would soon have to make.
“I have trouble with how this ends,” he dictated to his diary on the morning of January 15, as the war loomed inescapably. He planned a prolonged aerial bombardment of Iraq that would destroy much of its infrastructure and—he hoped—might make American casualties in a ground war unnecessary. “Say the air attack is devastating and Saddam gets done in by his own people,” he speculated. “How do they stop? How do we keep from having overkill? Most people don’t see that as a scenario because they are convinced it will be long and drawn out, with numerous body bags on the U.S. side. But I want to be sure we are not in there pounding people. I think we need to watch and see when our military objectives are taken care of in Baghdad and Iraq.”[36]
Even before the first shot was fired, Bush was reminding himself to stop the fighting before “pounding people” undermined the common cause of the coalition he had assembled. After months of councils with his generals, Bush understood his war plan well. America’s virtual monopoly on air power would set conditions for the ground war to liberate Kuwait. America’s superior armor would then speed across desert terrain, out of Saudi Arabia, to flank Iraqi forces and encircle the Republican Guard while U.S. Marines punched into Kuwait City directly. No war’s course could be predicted with certainty, but the preparations left Bush reasonably confident that he would not preside over a bloody quagmire. Still, his plan had no answer for the question that would come to shadow his legacy and shape the presidency of his son a decade later: What could or should be done about the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein?