23

ON-RAMP

AT 8:20 P.M. on Wednesday, August 1, 1990, Brent Scowcroft informed President Bush that Iraqi troops were on the verge of invading Kuwait. He had been paged at a nearby restaurant, called the White House, and heard the news from Acting Secretary of State Kimmitt.⁵¹² About an hour later, US intelligence sources confirmed the story. Within just six hours, the Iraqi army had seized all of Kuwait, an area slightly smaller than the state of New Jersey with a population of 1.8 million (although over 1 million subsequently fled).⁵¹³

Scowcroft’s “very instinctive” and “visceral reaction,” he told one of his NSC staff members late that night, was that Saddam Hussein would get away with it.⁵¹⁴

He wouldn’t, of course. And it was Scowcroft who was largely responsible.⁵¹⁵ Almost single-handedly, he determined what the United States’ response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was going to be. But there were many steps along the way, none of them preordained.

In times of crisis, power flows to the national security advisor and the NSC, a fact that was particularly evident in the first few days after the invasion. Scowcroft was involved with “setting up the president’s schedules, staying at Mr. Bush’s side as he met with allies, receiving foreign officials himself, writing inserts on the Middle East crisis for the president’s speeches, [and] helping set up talking points for phone calls to world leaders,” as Maureen Dowd, then the New York Times’ White House correspondent, reported. He had “an uncommonly high profile role” during the crisis, Dowd noted, especially since none of the president’s other foreign policy advisers took the invasion as seriously as he did. “If I’m not here, talk to Brent Scowcroft,” as Bush himself told King Hussein of Jordan shortly after the invasion.⁵¹⁶

The night of the invasion, Scowcroft scheduled an NSC meeting for early the next day. Bush declined to take Dan Quayle’s advice to call an emergency NSC meeting that same evening, a decision the vice president attributed to Scowcroft.517 Instead, Scowcroft first wanted to convene a Deputies Committee meeting. After Scowcroft made a quick trip home to check in on Jackie, he, Kimmitt, Wolfowitz, Kerr, and Jeremiah met over secure video (with Scowcroft acting as chair, since Robert Gates was on vacation). Over the next three hours, until “well after two” in the morning, by Scowcroft’s account, the deputies reviewed the situation and Iraq’s behavior. They decided that the United States should freeze Iraqi and Kuwaiti assets and that the administration should ask the UN Security Council to demand Iraq’s immediate and unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait. (Later that day, the UN Security Council unanimously approved Resolution 660, which unequivocally condemned the invasion, directed Iraq to remove its armed forces from Kuwait, and called for the two countries to hold negotiations over the issues dividing them.) The deputies also agreed to move a squadron of F-15s into forward positions, pending Saudi approval.⁵¹⁸

Afterward, Scowcroft and White House counsel Boyden Gray worked together on editing the executive orders that had been drafted by Treasury officials to impose economic sanctions on Iraq and freeze Iraqi and Kuwaiti assets in the United States. At 4:30 A.M., the national security advisor went over to the presidential residence, briefed the president on the overnight developments, and had him sign the two executive orders. (The two men were relieved to find that Iraq hadn’t withdrawn its financial assets from Western banks overnight.) At 6:00 A.M., Scowcroft called UN ambassador Thomas Pickering about the NSC meeting, and shortly after 8:00 A.M. the full National Security Council—the foreign policy principals, their deputies, and a handful of others—convened in the cabinet room.⁵¹⁹

After DCI William Webster reported that Iraq’s army of a hundred thousand was now in control of Kuwait and outmanned Saudi Arabia’s seventy-thousand-person army, the conversation turned toward international diplomacy and the steps that the United States and other states had taken. The attendees then held a lengthy discussion of the world’s oil reserves. Scowcroft said little at the meeting, making only one comment on the possibility of shutting off Iraqi oil exports.

Bush himself seemed uncertain as to whether the United States should try to force Iraq from Kuwait. Just before the meeting, he told the senior UPI correspondent, Helen Thomas, “We’re not discussing intervention,” adding, “Even if we’d agreed upon [the use of force], I would not discuss any military options.” (Scowcroft said that Bush’s words, if “not felicitous,” only meant that the NSC was meeting simply to discuss the situation and review the United States’ options, not to make any final decisions.)⁵²⁰

Privately, however, Scowcroft was appalled by how mildly his colleagues were reacting to the invasion. He agreed with Richard Haass that the meeting was “unfocused and a sharp disappointment,” and described it (with his typical understatement) as being “a bit chaotic.” He sensed that the other members of Bush’s foreign policy team had already accepted the invasion of Kuwait as a fait accompli and were conceding Iraq’s conquest of the country—just so long as the Iraqi military didn’t cross over into Saudi Arabia. Gates had the same impression.521

Scowcroft considered this unacceptable. After the meeting, he took the president aside and argued forcefully that the Iraqi invasion shouldn’t be tolerated. “This was a case of naked aggression,” as Scowcroft later said, “as clear as you could find.”⁵²² There was too much at stake in the Middle East, especially with the Saudi oilfields lying just to the south. Iraq already possessed 20 percent of the world’s oil, and if it took Saudi Arabia it would control fully half the world’s oil supply.⁵²³ Furthermore, for the United States to leave the invasion unchallenged would set exactly the wrong kind of precedent in the new post–Cold War era. The United States should accept nothing less than the complete withdrawal of Iraqi forces, he argued.

Scowcroft wanted to convene another NSC meeting as soon as possible once the president returned from a planned trip to Colorado, where, ironically, Bush was scheduled to talk about plans Scowcroft had drawn up for restructuring the military—and cutting it by 25 percent.⁵²⁴ “I would like to start out the meeting and lay out why Kuwait is important,” he said. That was “something that I usually didn’t do,” he admitted later. Bush volunteered to make the case for intervention himself: “Why don’t I do it?” But Scowcroft demurred, saying that if the president led things off, “the discussion would quickly be over. . . . If I run the meeting, then we will see how others think.” Before leaving for Aspen with the president, he asked Haass to draft a memorandum making the case.⁵²⁵

The next day, Bush, Scowcroft, and John Sununu were the only passengers aboard the eight-passenger G-20 Gulfstream (also known by the air traffic control call sign Air Force One, which applies to any Air Force aircraft the president is traveling on). The president telephoned King Hussein of Jordan, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, and President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen to solicit their views and to inform them that the new status quo “was unacceptable to the United States.” King Hussein and Mubarak each promised to talk to Saddam Hussein. Scowcroft, meanwhile, worked feverishly to modify the president’s Aspen speech in light of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.⁵²⁶

In Aspen, Bush met with Margaret Thatcher at the home of the US ambassador to Britain, Henry E. Catto Jr. He discovered that he and Thatcher “saw the situation in remarkably similar ways.” Neither of them was willing to accept the Iraqi takeover of Kuwait, and both recognized that the cooperation of Saudi Arabia was absolutely critical.527 It was during the discussion with Thatcher, Scowcroft later told the BBC, that the full significance of Iraq’s actions hit them. If Iraq continued to grow in power, it could easily become a serious threat over the next ten to twenty years, with the potential to dominate the Middle East and OPEC oil supplies and to threaten Israel and Saudi Arabia.⁵²⁸

President Bush and Scowcroft arrived back in Washington late that evening, and the NSC met at 9:10 Friday morning. In the meantime, Scowcroft gave the president the memo he’d had Richard Haass draft. “I am aware as you are of just how costly and risky such a conflict would prove to be,” it read. “But so too would be accepting this new status quo. We would be setting a terrible precedent—one that would only accelerate violent centrifugal tendencies—in this emerging ‘post Cold War’ era. We could be encouraging a dangerous adversary in the Gulf at a time when the United States has provided a de facto commitment to Gulf stability—a commitment reinforced by our statements and military movements—that also raises the issue of US reliability in a most serious way.”⁵²⁹

Bush was on board.

The president began the meeting by reporting that he and Thatcher were “seeing eye to eye.” Scowcroft chaired the remainder of the sixty-five-minute meeting. He began by making the argument that the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait could not be accepted. Unless the United States opposed the Iraqi invasion, Iraq “would dominate OPEC policies, Palestinian politics and the PLO, and lead the Arab world to the detriment of the United States, and the great stakes we have in the Middle East and Israel.”⁵³⁰

Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger spoke next, carefully distinguishing his views from those of Secretary of State Baker (who was in Moscow meeting with Shevardnadze and Gorbachev). “I couldn’t agree more,” Eagleburger said, pounding the table. “This is the first test of the postwar system,” one in which “Saddam Hussein has great flexibility. . . . If he succeeds, others may try the same thing.” Cheney remarked that Saddam’s forces were only “40 kilometers from Saudi Arabia.” Even if Iraq didn’t take the Saudi oilfields, it was now in a position “to dominate OPEC, the Gulf and the Arab world.” They “should not underestimate the U.S. military forces we would need to be prepared for a major conflict,” he warned. Scowcroft then interjected, saying, “This should be kept in this room. The press has already indicated interest in this.”531

The conversation turned to the impact of Iraq’s action on oil supplies, to the United Nations and US diplomacy more generally, and to what might happen afterward. What caused those at the NSC meeting special concern was the fact that “in 72 hours,” Cheney pointed out, Iraqi troops “could take the eastern province” of Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia was highly vulnerable, and if Iraq chose to invade, there wouldn’t be much the United States would be able to do.⁵³²

Colin Powell, however, was concerned and a bit incredulous. Even before Thursday’s NSC meeting, Powell had told CENTCOM commander Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf he thought the administration would go to war over Saudi Arabia, but said he doubted it would “go to war over Kuwait.” As he told Cheney, Wolfowitz, and others in the secretary of defense’s office, “Wait a minute, it’s Kuwait. Does anybody really care about Kuwait?”⁵³³ (Robert Gates, too, noted that “the honest analysis is that there was not a lot of sympathy for the Kuwaitis, either in Washington or the Arab world.”)⁵³⁴ Powell had lived through Vietnam and the Lebanon disaster of 1983, and at the NSC meeting he sought to be sure that the president and the others were clear on their ultimate objectives—especially when the opponent would be a battle-hardened Iraqi military.

Yet Powell’s cautionary remarks came across as though he were lecturing the president and his top aides. A chill came over the room, Powell himself reports. Although they were all too polite to say anything at the time, Cheney thought it was out of place for Powell to be telling his civilian superiors how to conduct US national security policy—and later that day, at the Pentagon, he told Powell precisely that.⁵³⁵

The consensus was that Iraq’s international aggression couldn’t go unchallenged. “Naked aggression against an unoffending country” was bad enough and sufficient justification for a response, Scowcroft said on the PBS show Frontline. “But what gave enormous urgency to it was the issue of oil.”⁵³⁶

The administration’s views became unmistakably public two days later. As the president was making his way across the lawn from the Marine Corps One helicopter to the White House that Sunday, returning from Camp David, reporters repeatedly asked whether he was going to take military action. Finally Bush’s “face hardened.” Visibly upset, he “began stabbing the air with his finger. ‘This will not stand, this will not stand,’ he said, ‘this aggression against Kuwait.’”⁵³⁷

When Powell heard the news, he was stunned. It was “as if the president had six-shooters in both hand and was blazing away,” he said, according to Bob Woodward in The Commanders.538 Yet Powell either had not been paying attention or was being disingenuous. He surely was smart enough to realize that Scowcroft, Eagleburger, and Cheney would not have spoken in favor of intervention at the August 3 NSC meeting if they didn’t know the president’s mind. He surely must have seen reports of Bush and Thatcher’s joint news conference in Aspen, where both called for Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait. And he surely must have realized, just as Haass and others at the Friday meeting did, that “the future direction of US policy”—of not “allowing Saddam to keep Kuwait”—“was there for all to see.”⁵³⁹

President Bush said that Powell “may have known beforehand,” but he conceded that his declaration on the White House lawn “was an unscripted moment” and that “some were surprised, including Colin Powell.”⁵⁴⁰ Powell, for his part, described important meetings with the president as being too jovial and too informal. He blamed Scowcroft for the inappropriate atmosphere, telling Woodward that while the national security advisor “had become the First Companion and all-purpose playmate to the president on golf, fishing and weekend outings,” he “was regularly failing in his larger duty to ensure that policy was carefully debated and formulated,” Powell later told Woodward, and he “seemed unable, or unwilling, to coordinate and make sense of all the components of Gulf policy, military, diplomatic, public affairs, economic, [and] the United Nations.”⁵⁴¹

Despite Powell’s misgivings, ousting Saddam from Kuwait was now the administration’s official policy. Brent Scowcroft set about implementing it.

The first thing the Bush administration had to do was to convince Saudi Arabia to allow foreign military forces on its soil—no small feat, given Muslim customs, American culture, and the reluctance of the Saudi ruling family to alienate Saddam Hussein, a fellow Arab head of state and Sunni Muslim. Neither did King Fahd and others in the Saudi ruling family trust the United States fully after an emergency shipment of jet fighters in 1979 (following the fall of the shah of Iran) had been delivered by the Carter administration unarmed and after the sudden withdrawal of US military forces from Lebanon following the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks.

Later that day, Scowcroft met with Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in Washington, to ask for his country’s cooperation. The president wanted to send a small US delegation to talk to King Fahd, and Bandar asked Scowcroft if he would go. But when Scowcroft contacted Cheney, the secretary of defense said he himself should go. Scowcroft agreed, but only if Saudi Arabia agreed to be defended by the United States. Bandar thereupon called King Fahd, who gave his approval. Helping to persuade Fahd was an arms package for the kingdom, consisting of F-15s and other equipment able to address Saudi Arabia’s “immediate and short term crisis related needs.”542

On Sunday, August 5, Cheney, General Schwarzkopf, Gates, and Wolfowitz flew to Saudi Arabia. The US delegation met with King Fahd on Monday evening and, after a two-hour presentation, Fahd agreed to the United States’ intervention plans. The delegation then visited Egypt and Morocco, to get permission for the aircraft carrier USS Eisenhower to pass through the Suez Canal, and to enlist the support of Morocco’s King Hassan for the United States’ intervention.⁵⁴³

That same day, Bush signed National Security Directive 45, drafted by Scowcroft and his NSC staff. NSD 45 stated that the United States had “vital” interests in the Persian Gulf, including “access to oil and the security and stability of key friendly states in the region”—reiterating Jimmy Carter’s Presidential Directive 68 of 1979, which established the Persian Gulf as a vital national security interest—and that the United States would defend its national security interests “through the use of U.S. military force if necessary and appropriate” against any hostile power. NSD 45 also declared that the administration wanted “the immediate, complete, and unconditional withdrawal of all Iraqi forces from Kuwait,” and “the restoration of Kuwait’s legitimate government.” NSD 45 further directed the United States to work with other countries, the UN Security Council, and other international organizations in pursuit of its diplomatic, economic, and military objectives—among them the formation of a multinational military force and adjustments in the global supply and demand of oil so as to compensate for the loss of 4.3 million barrels a day from Kuwait and Iraq.⁵⁴⁴

Scowcroft and Haass stayed up until 3:00 A.M. Monday drafting a speech for the president to deliver to the American public and a global audience, explaining why the invasion wouldn’t be tolerated. Bush spoke of the threat posed by Iraq, given the United States’ dependence on Middle East oil, and compared Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait to Hitler’s conquests of Poland and the Rhineland. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was more than a Saudi, American, European, or Middle Eastern problem, the president stated. It was a world problem.⁵⁴⁵

The president’s resolve was clear, but the precise nature of the United States’ commitment was not. Scowcroft began working on a series of tasks dedicated to assembling the resources needed to reverse the invasion of Kuwait.⁵⁴⁶

One was improving the functioning of the NSC process. Scowcroft created a small decision-making group that became known as the “Gang of Eight.” Essentially an expanded Principals Committee, it consisted of the president, Quayle, Baker, Cheney, Powell, Gates, Sununu, and Scowcroft. (Press secretary Marlin Fitzwater also attended regularly, although he rarely spoke.) Scowcroft was the only principal who had a deputy. Neither Quayle, Cheney, nor Sununu had a deputy present. Others, such as Nicholas Brady, Schwarzkopf, Eagleburger, Haass, Jeremiah, Webster, and USMC Gen. Paul Kelley, as well as others, would attend the meetings if need be. Baker described them as “frank, honest discussions that went on for hours,” with issues debated openly and trustingly.547

Of further importance was the establishment of the “small group” consisting of Gates, Haass, Jeremiah, Kerr, Kimmitt, and Wolfowitz. The six men met before the Gang of Eight, and Gates would then take their recommendations to the Gang of Eight. The small group would convene after the Gang of Eight meetings to see to the implementation of the policies that were agreed upon. It met several times a week and “at the peak of the crisis, several times a day,” with the result that they often worked late into the night and missed weekends. After the war, Bush said, “the contribution made by the ‘small group’ to our success in the Gulf was really nothing short of monumental,” and awarded each of the six, along with Eagleburger and Deputy Secretary of Defense Donald Atwood, a Presidential Citizen’s Medal.⁵⁴⁸

Less formally, Scowcroft, Haass, and Gates began to gather on Saturday mornings in the national security advisor’s office. “Brent would be lying down on his couch, and . . . say, Okay, what do we do now?” Haass reports. “What do we do next? What aren’t we thinking about? And we just institutionalized it. Every Saturday morning, the two or three of us would spend time taking a step back, saying okay, here’s my list. Here’s everything we’re working on. What are we comfortable with? What could happen that we’re not thinking of? And we just tried to do that, to stay one step ahead of events.”⁵⁴⁹

Scowcroft further contributed by making sure that the Pentagon’s positions and plans were consistent with those of the president and the White House. So when Air Force chief Gen. Michael Dugan on Sunday, September 16, 1990, was quoted by the Washington Post as saying that the Joint Chiefs had concluded that airpower was the “only effective option to force Iraqi forces from Kuwait if war erupts,” Scowcroft was “aghast,” according to Woodward, and Powell and Cheney were furious. Cheney called Scowcroft, and on CBS’s Face the Nation that same Sunday, Scowcroft emphasized that General Dugan didn’t speak for the Bush administration. Cheney fired Dugan the next day—contrary to Powell’s advice.550

Three weeks later, when General Schwarzkopf’s chief of staff presented Bush and his advisers with the Pentagon’s combat plans on October 11, Scowcroft questioned why the US military should go “force on force” and not instead “go around and come in from the side.” He also took Powell to task, snapping at him for presenting an unimaginative plan that made a direct assault on Iraqi forces—what Haass termed the “hi diddle-diddle, up the middle” football rushing scheme. Scowcroft persuaded Bush to reject the Joint Chiefs’ plans. He thought the plans had been “prepared by people who didn’t want to do it and it just didn’t make sense, so I resisted,” he said.⁵⁵¹

Members of Cheney’s staff came up with the scheme that was eventually adopted: a combination of the US Marines’ landing on the coast of northern Kuwait, which was to serve as a feint so as to lure the attention of Iraqi forces, and the famous “left hook” plan whereby allied armored forces would sweep far to the west so as to outflank the Iraqi forces dug in north of the Saudi border.⁵⁵² Cheney’s staff then handed over the plans to the Pentagon for further development.

On October 30, the Joint Chiefs met the president to present him with the revised plans. This is Gates’s account:

Briefer says, you’ll need Seventh Corps out of Germany, heart of NATO’s defense. Six carrier groups, a week before mid-term elections, and “Oh, and you’ll have to activate both the National Guard and the Reserves.” In other words, you’re going to reach into every community in America and take people away from their homes and their jobs. To the day I die I’ll never forget, Bush pushed his chair back, stood up, looked at Cheney and said, “You got it, let me know if you need more,” and walked out of the room.

Cheney’s jaw dropped. Powell’s jaw dropped. Cheney looked at Scowcroft and says, “Does he know what he just authorized?” And Brent smiled and he said, “He knows perfectly well what he authorized.”⁵⁵³

Scowcroft wondered whether the joint chiefs had made their force requirements “so large” because “they were set forth by a command hoping their size would change [the president’s] mind about pursuing a military option.” Haass thought that the military was simply erring on the side of caution with its demands, and he pointed out that he’d rather have the military be reluctant to commit US forces than have it promise and commit to more than it could deliver.⁵⁵⁴

The administration consequently doubled the number of US troops in the Gulf. But it didn’t announce the move until November 8, two days after the midterm elections. One of Baker’s top aides, Janet Mullins, noted that Baker, who was out of town, was furious with Scowcroft and Haass for not informing him of the decision. Neither did they inform Congress. “Sam Nunn went bananas,” Mullins reported. “Les Aspin went bananas. The leadership went bananas. Finally, they knew what it meant. Oh! This is really serious.” And at a bipartisan leadership meeting at the White House once Baker returned to Washington, “[House Speaker Thomas S.] Foley and [Senate majority leader George] Mitchell and [Senator Sam] Nunn were apoplectic that [the president] had obviously made this decision and not just on his own but really [not] given them any kind of warning whatsoever. It was the closest we came to losing these guys on this issue.”555

A less heralded but nonetheless critical contribution was Scowcroft’s work with the press. He realized the administration had to make Americans care about Kuwait and support the legitimacy of and logic of the planned military action. The whole White House communications operation, Director of Public Affairs Dave Carney recalled, was “extremely well run,” with Gates, Rice, Haass, Roman Popadiuk, and the NSC being “very engaged” in the White House public relations’ efforts. “Brent was very sensitive to the process,” NSC staff member Walter Kansteiner noted, “so he completely understood the role of the press and was very comfortable with it all.”⁵⁵⁶

Scowcroft regularly met with individual journalists one-on-one, gave telephone interviews, and spoke weekly with small groups of newspaper, newsmagazine, and network television reporters so they could get color and context for the people and events featured in their news stories. Scowcroft excelled at these background briefings.⁵⁵⁷ While he didn’t take over a room through the sheer force of his personality and presence in the way that Kissinger, Powell, Bill Clinton, or, for a period, Rumsfeld could, he was nonetheless very effective because of his precise and deliberate diction, his nuanced understanding of foreign policy, his command of the facts, and his ability to contextualize events within the broader picture of national security, military affairs, international politics, and world history. Words left “his mouth slowly, with long pauses between phrases,” one reporter observed, “each carefully weighed to ensure that they contain not a gram more of information than their author wishes to convey.”⁵⁵⁸ And thanks to his teaching experience at West Point and the Air Force Academy and his years of Pentagon briefings, he was well experienced at explaining complex situations in clear and accessible terms. He didn’t bullshit.

Scowcroft also worked with the White House communications office and the White House press office to orchestrate the administration’s public relations campaign. Scowcroft and his NSC staff helped with the president’s speeches, prepared Bush’s talking points for conversations with members of Congress, foreign leaders, and press conferences, and coordinated the timing and substance of what administration officials would say to the media. Ten days after the invasion of Kuwait, for example, Scowcroft went over the themes for the Sunday television talk shows and Sunday newspapers along with Baker, Cheney, and Wolfowitz. Scowcroft also appeared on television talk shows himself, from CNN’s Newsmaker Saturday to ABC’s This Week with David Brinkley.559

Shortly after the invasion, Kuwaiti leaders contacted Hill & Knowlton to form Citizens for a Free Kuwait, an organization to manage its public relations campaign—that is, to conduct focus groups, commission polls, and work with the media to promote the interests of the exiled Kuwait government. Heading Hill & Knowlton’s Washington office was Craig Fuller, who had been Bush’s chief of staff during his vice presidency and the director of the 1988–1989 presidential transition team.

Fuller “was in frequent contact with National Security Council members and staff, with whom he exchanged information about the situation in Kuwait,” a Hill & Knowlton associate told the Washington Post. Fuller attended “a lot of the meetings” with White House personnel; after all, the Bush administration and Hill & Knowlton “had the exact same mission, which was to liberate Kuwait,” as one official noted. Indicatively, when President Bush hosted a lunch for many of his trusted political advisers to discuss how to shore up a “‘softening’ of public support for military intervention in the Gulf,” for instance, not only did Quayle and Sununu attend, but so did Fuller and a half dozen others, including Fred Malek (who had worked in the Nixon administration, served with the Carlyle Group, and would later serve as the president’s 1992 campaign manager) and Haley Barbour (a prominent Washington lobbyist who had worked for Reagan and on Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign). With “119 Hill & Knowlton executives in twelve offices around the U.S. . . . working on the Kuwait account,” Fuller and his colleagues were well placed to be supportive.⁵⁶⁰

The plight of Kuwait in the aftermath of the invasion was one of the factors that heightened the president’s eagerness to act. He had met with the Kuwait ambassador, who told Bush of billions in gold bullion that had been taken from Kuwaiti vaults and of widespread plundering, pillaging, and rape. “I thought we should try to get the word out about Iraq’s brutality,” Bush remarked, “but despite these reports, the world did not seem to be really aware of what was happening in Kuwait, and this deeply disturbed me.”561

Hill & Knowlton subsequently put out more than thirty “video news releases” of atrocities and other human rights violations that were then run by CNN and other broadcasters, often without attribution. It provided photographs for use by news organizations. And it used focus groups and polling data to perfect the messages of its video news releases, calibrate the content of its communications with Congress, and select witnesses who would attract the best press coverage.⁵⁶² By law, Hill & Knowlton—as well as the Rendon Group and Neill & Co., which were also being paid by Kuwait—should have been subject to the Foreign Agents Registration Act, but the Justice Department chose not to enforce the law in this case.⁵⁶³

Fuller realized he was on treacherous moral ground, at one point asking rhetorically, “Is it right to help a foreign government build popular support for an American war effort?” The answer was “a complicated one. But it is not easy for someone raised in Kuwait City to explain his case to the national news media,” he said, “and it was important that the case be accurately portrayed.”⁵⁶⁴ In the end, Fuller believed there was no contradiction between his duties as an American and his work on behalf of Kuwait. “By helping the Kuwaiti citizens,” Fuller said, “it was clear we would be helping the Bush administration.” And Bush, Scowcroft, and others in the White House just as clearly agreed.

Yet by late October the president realized that there was “incredible fuzziness” among Americans about “what the hell we were doing in the Gulf,” despite Hill & Knowlton’s efforts, and that the administration had to be sharper with its message. Bush contacted his chief of staff, and Sununu called Scowcroft, telling him there was “a big problem.” Scowcroft had Gates meet with Sununu and David Demarest. In the meeting, Demarest said the administration had to have a coordinated communications strategy and that he would be happy to lead the effort. Sununu and Scowcroft agreed, and officials in the White House Office of Communications, Office of Political Affairs, and other offices began constructing a “communications plan” for “getting the message out” about Operation Desert Shield.⁵⁶⁵

Leading the effort was the Gulf Working Group (officially, the White House Communications Working Group on the Persian Gulf), similar to the ad hoc groups the White House had previously set up for getting China’s most-favored-nation trade status approved in the Senate and for handling the supreme court nomination of David Souter.⁵⁶⁶ With the Office of Public Liaison (which handled the interface between interest groups and the presidency) and the Legislative Affairs Office both reporting to him, and with about “four or five deputies and four or five special assistants,” Demarest said, he “had more authority and clarity about my role and my mission than at any other time in the four years” at the White House.567

Five days later, Demarest came up with a communications plan. “Ultimately,” it said, “our goal is broad, grass-roots support for the President’s initiative.” The plan noted that “as time passes, the President’s critics will become more vocal. The message that the President has gone to historic lengths to avoid war (economic embargo and ten UN resolutions) and garnered unprecedented international support should be a fundamental component of all outreach activity.” It went on to observe that the administration should immediately “offer up key administration spokesmen (Sununu, Cheney, Baker, Powell) for satellite interviews on Thursday. Radio interviews as well.” Plans were crafted for op-ed articles and guest editorials to be distributed to leading newspapers.⁵⁶⁸

The Gulf Working Group developed and implemented these and other tactics in the period between mid-November and the end of the year. These tactics involved scheduling new activities, floating ideas for the future, and regularly updating Scowcroft and Sununu on developments. It was the job of one of the members of the Gulf Working Group, NSC executive secretary Bill Sittmann, to keep Scowcroft “completely up to speed” on their progress.⁵⁶⁹

On December 5, for instance, Deb Amend (now Deb Gullet), who was with the Office of Public Liaison, reported that the group had “about 45 non-cabinet level presidential surrogates on the road,” most of whom had “scheduled local press interviews and editorial board meetings.” Her goal was “100 for next week.” She reported she now “had a three-tier surrogate program,” one that “makes all kinds of sense and will help us track people and events more efficiently than [she] ever imagined.” (As for finding surrogates, Demarest said that was easy: he used the president’s fat Rolodex.) “In the new ideas department, [the Office of Public Liaison] has suggested we target young college age people with a ‘not another Vietnam’ theme. We all thought this made tremendous sense. A subgroup is developing a plan.”⁵⁷⁰

For its planning, the Gulf Working Group relied on the NSC staff for briefing materials and other communications. The NSC had “extraordinary expertise,” Amend noted. The NSC employees were “committed to advance the president’s agenda” and were “good at providing background material and talking points.” They were “always easy” and “unbelievably pleasant to work with” whenever the communications team needed something, too—especially since this was “in an environment with a lot of intensity.”⁵⁷¹

On December 11, “an inventory of ideas we’ve proposed and projects in the works” included:

       •   Former hostages welcomed home by President.

       •   Weekly mailing for opinion leaders—content this week?

       •   Presidential meeting with all the ambassadors from countries (26 militarily, 50 financially) united against Iraq.

       •   Status of the President visiting a large military base or hosting an event with military families at the White House during the Christmas season.

       •   On December 22, convene military chaplains from commands that have deployed soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines at the US Naval Academy. President Bush and Mrs. Bush attend an ecumenical service and ask the attendees to carry the Bush’s best wishes to troops, families, etc.

       •   Inviting all four of the living past Presidents to the WH for a briefing with the President. President Ford was briefed by DOD, Bob Gates is meeting with Presidents Reagan and Carter this week.

       •   Surrogates on radio interviews (All members received lists of target stations).

       •   NSC/State Department Statement on Christmas services in the Gulf. Pending discussions with the Saudis.

       •   Target potential witnesses and favorable MC’s with information before Congressional committees such as House Foreign Affairs and Senate Armed Services convene. Cheney and Powell testify this week.

       •   Schedule both Roosevelt Room and room 450 briefings for a variety of constituent groups. Need report—these were to include:

              Top CEOs from across the country

              Religio[u]s Leaders/Minority Groups

              Foreign Policy Groups/Veterans Groups

              Business Leaders/oil executives

              Labor leaders/Educators/Ethnic Groups572

Other proposed projects included a New York Times op-ed by Ann Lewis, the former political director of the Democratic National Committee, a New Republic article by Representative Stephen Solarz, an op-ed column by former UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, and an op-ed by Senator Howard Baker. At one point in A World Transformed Bush describes these activities, but he doesn’t suggest that the cooperation of the administration’s supporters was anything but voluntary and serendipitous.⁵⁷³

Scowcroft played his part in the public relations campaign. Scowcroft went on Face the Nation on December 2, for instance, and spoke of UN Security Council Resolution 678, which authorized the use of force, as showing “Saddam Hussein the strength of the world coalition against him, the fact that there’s no temporizing, that there’s no negotiating, that he has to get out.” He emphasized that Iraq couldn’t just hope to delay and thereby slowly cause the dismantling of the twenty-eight-nation coalition. On the contrary, Saddam Hussein had to withdraw or “face the consequences.” The following weekend Scowcroft went on CNN’s Newsmaker Saturday and NBC’s Meet the Press, where he stated that Saddam Hussein had to realize that his “options [were] very limited” if he did not “get out,” given the fact that the United States and an international coalition were “determined to enforce” the UN Resolution. Iraq had reached “the moment of truth.”574

The White House’s campaign was distinct from Hill & Knowlton’s, partly because Hill & Knowlton had Democrats in prominent leadership positions—for example, the head of the Citizens for a Free Kuwait account, Lauri J. Fitz-Pegado, and the vice chairman, Frank Mankiewicz, had worked for Robert F. Kennedy and George McGovern.⁵⁷⁵ Furthermore, for White House officials to work closely with a private public relations company would have “not only not fit the president’s personality,” Demarest said, but would have “start[ed] bumping up against anti-lobbying laws.” He didn’t want to go “to jail for anybody.”⁵⁷⁶

But neither was this an arm’s-length arrangement, precisely. While the degree to which the White House and Hill & Knowlton coordinated their efforts isn’t exactly clear, a five-person subgroup of the Iraq Working Group headed by Dave Carney did meet “with Craig Fuller of Hill and Knowlton to discuss grassroots [communications efforts] with the Kuwaitis since they were having some difficulties in this area.”⁵⁷⁷ Too, the White House used polling data from the Wirthlin Group commissioned by Hill & Knowlton, and Fuller was himself in frequent contact with the White House. And in New York City, the Kuwaitis and Hill & Knowlton worked closely with Ambassador Pickering of the US mission to the United Nations so as to persuade the UN Security Council.⁵⁷⁸

Significantly, Hill & Knowlton arranged for the remarkable congressional testimony in October 1990 by a young Kuwaiti woman claiming to have “seen Iraqi soldiers killing children by unplugging and stealing incubators from a neonatal intensive care unit” in a Kuwait City hospital; she wasn’t identified at the time, allegedly for her own protection. The president himself referred to incident, of fifteen babies being removed from their incubators, six times over the next four weeks, and for weeks the story dominated the news. Furthermore, seven US senators referred to the story in speeches supporting the January 12, 1991, resolution to authorize military action. But not only had Hill & Knowlton arranged for the hearings, the company’s employees had coached the girl on her testimony—and she turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador.579

Fuller defended his actions, saying that “to debate the degree of atrocity is useful, but I’m not sure how useful. It had to be a horrifying place to be, and that was the message we were trying to get out.” Yet the planted baby-incubator story amounted to what Time would later describe as a “ruthless deception.”⁵⁸⁰ By effectively claiming that the ends justified the means, however, Fuller was conceding the incubator-baby story to be a fraud.

Interestingly, Bush and Scowcroft omit any mention of Craig Fuller, Hill & Knowlton, or the incubator-baby story in their extended account of the Persian Gulf War in A World Transformed. Woodward, too, neglects to bring up Fuller’s connection to Hill & Knowlton in The Commanders.⁵⁸¹ Yet the members of the press, Bob Schieffer pointed out, were “always aware” of the administration’s communications and outreach efforts.⁵⁸²

This outreach was particularly important during the debate in Congress over the possible war. Senator Sam Nunn opened the hearings on November 30, 1990, and invited several prominent policy makers to testify. Paul Nitze, James Schlesinger, Gen. David Jones, and Adm. William Crowe (Crowe was the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Bush) all spoke out against the war; they variously questioned the readiness of the military, wanted to see stronger American popular support, criticized the White House’s process and its lack of consultation with Congress on doubling US troops in the Gulf, and wanted to give sanctions more time. Henry Kissinger, in contrast, argued in favor of the war, saying that the sanctions would take too long and that the longer the situation persisted, the harder it would be to hold the coalition together. President Bush thought the Democratic-controlled Senate had stacked the witness list.⁵⁸³

At the same time, the administration was engaging in public diplomacy to build international support for intervention.⁵⁸⁴ President Bush was an emotional man who believed in the importance of personal connections. In the first ten days of the Iraq-Kuwait crisis, for instance, Bush had thirty-four telephone conversations with foreign heads of state; he originated all but two of them.⁵⁸⁵ This personal contact, in turn, made it easier for him to form coalitions and reconcile differences—as with German reunification—and he was often on the phone with other world leaders. This personal diplomacy was instrumental to forming the twenty-nine-member coalition against Iraq, getting the positive votes in the UN Security Council, and, with the help of Baker, Brady, and Kimmitt, in getting Germany, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates to contribute over $60 billion toward defraying the cost of the war effort (in lieu of providing troops or matériel). Separately, two dozen countries contributed over $50 billion in economic assistance to Egypt, Turkey, and Jordan—the states most economically affected by cut-off of trade to Iraq—via the Gulf Crisis Coordination Group, headed by David Mulford in the Treasury Department.586

Bush’s personal approach to international relations also had its drawbacks. When other heads of state behaved unacceptably or acted in ways Bush viewed as immoral—which was how he saw Saddam Hussein—Bush lost his normal affability and became angry, even vengeful, and was not above humiliating or ridiculing those he considered his antagonists. By invading Kuwait, mistreating its people, and deceiving the world, Saddam had violated Bush’s moral code. The president now considered him a personal enemy. So he deliberately mispronounced Saddam Hussein’s first name, for instance—the emphasis should be on the second syllable—thereby not only disrespecting and insulting the Iraqi president, but also changing the meaning of his name.⁵⁸⁷ As a result, the same genuine emotion that induced Bush’s comparison of Hussein to Hitler and enabled the president to rally public opinion against Iraq also clouded his judgment and potentially interfered with a dispassionate interpretation of US interests and objective analysis of foreign policy.

Scowcroft consequently had to ask the president to tone down his rhetoric on occasion, as with the Hitler analogy—an occasion where Powell, Gates, and Haass very much agreed with the national security advisor. Conversely, Scowcroft also helped sharpen the president’s speeches, as with his first address of September 9 and then the president’s address to a joint session of Congress two days later.⁵⁸⁸

Bush and Scowcroft shared the concern that US relations with the Soviet Union on Iraq and Kuwait had to be handled carefully. Since Baker had been traveling with Soviet foreign minister Shevardnadze in Irkutsk when Iraq invaded Kuwait, the secretary of state was able to persuade Shevardnadze that the two of them should issue a joint statement condemning the action. (The fact that Saddam had lied to the Soviets and not informed them of the invasion in advance made it easier for Shevardnadze and the Soviets to break with him.) The president and his advisers wanted to maximize the size of the US-led coalition against Iraq, and having the Soviets on their side would be a tremendous coup, given that the Soviets had been patrons of Iraq for three decades and that many Soviet military officers and diplomatic officials had previously worked with and lived in Iraq. They also needed the Soviets to vote with them in the UN Security Council—or at least to refrain from vetoing any US-led action (just as the United States needed China’s cooperation).589

So when Bush and Gorbachev met in Helsinki on September 9, Bush told him that American and Soviet cooperation in response to the Gulf crisis could lay the foundation for a new world order of collective security. The president further told the Soviet leader that he would be happy if sanctions worked, but if Saddam Hussein “does not withdraw, he must know that the status quo is unacceptable.” With the two superpowers working together, Bush thought that he and Gorbachev would be able to “close the book on the Cold War and offer [the American people] the vision of this new world order in which we will cooperate.” Gorbachev agreed, saying that the Soviets accepted the UN position and “condemned Iraqi aggression.”⁵⁹⁰

Scowcroft described the meeting as a historic moment, “a new era in international affairs.” For Scowcroft, the Helsinki meeting came to “nothing short of the complete acceptance, implementation of the Security Council resolutions,” and if the first steps weren’t sufficient, “then further steps will be considered,” he said to one historian.⁵⁹¹

But collaboration with the Soviets came with its own problems. Neither Bush, Scowcroft, nor any other senior adviser wanted the other members of the coalition to constrain the United States’ diplomatic initiatives or military actions. And if the Soviet Union became a near-equal partner in the coalition, it would be in a prime position to do so.⁵⁹² In fact, the national security advisor thought the administration had dodged a bullet. “We had worked for decades to keep Soviet forces out of the Middle East,” Scowcroft said. So when Baker’s “spur of the moment” invitation on August 4 to Shevardnadze that the Soviets participate with the United States on its multinational force, Scowcroft was relieved that the Soviets declined to send troops and only later had a few of their naval vessels help monitor the blockade against Iraq.⁵⁹³

Scowcroft was also worried that Gorbachev would try “to straddle: stand strong by the United States, but work diligently behind the scenes to protect Saddam and the Soviet investment” in Iraq. He and Bush were further concerned that Gorbachev and Shevardnadze would want to link Israel’s occupied territories with the occupation of Kuwait, thereby bringing Israel’s Shamir government into the mix and jeopardizing the Gulf coalition. So they were very much against the Soviet proposal to have an international peace conference on the Middle East that September.594

Britain, by contrast, was the United States’ foremost ally. When Thatcher exhorted that Bush “not go wobbly,” it was in reference to stopping an Iraqi oil tanker in the Gulf. (“The common wisdom that she stiffened my spine” with respect to opposing the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Bush said, “pisses me off.”)⁵⁹⁵ Thatcher, along with Cheney, Powell, Scowcroft, and Gates, thought the United States should stop the Iraqi vessel from going any further, thereby enforcing a trade embargo in advance of the approval of a resolution that the UN Security Council sanctions would be upheld through force. However, Baker, Sununu, and Eagleburger, as well as the French, argued that the United States should wait for UN authorization instead—which also meant Soviet agreement—so that any interdiction of shipping by the United States would have sanction in international law.

The president decided to wait, and later, with Baker’s assistance, he was able to get the Soviets to agree to a UN resolution giving the United States the right to enforce the trade embargo against Iraq—if necessary, by stopping and boarding cargo ships and oil tankers. Scowcroft subsequently acknowledged Bush had made the right choice.⁵⁹⁶

Over time, Bush, Baker, Scowcroft, and other administration officials (such as UN ambassador Pickering and Under Secretary Kimmitt) succeeded in building an extensive multinational coalition that included France, Turkey, and a total of ten Arab states as well as more likely allies such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, and the Netherlands. Cooperating heads of state, such as Turkish president Turgut Özal, helped the administration by giving interviews on American television and in US newspapers during the full-court press to bring Congress on board.⁵⁹⁷

What truly infuriated Scowcroft and Bush, though, was learning from Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney that former president Jimmy Carter had been taking diplomatic initiatives behind their backs. They found out that in mid-November Carter had written personal letters to the heads of the countries on the UN Security Council, requesting they that negotiate separately with Saddam Hussein. The former president then secretly sent a dozen additional letters out to other heads of state in the hope that these other countries would pressure the four permanent members of the UN Security Council to drop out of the US-led coalition, Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy report in their book The Presidents Club. Not only was Carter’s behavior in clear violation of the Logan Act, which bars private individuals from lobbying foreign states and conducting diplomacy for objectives contrary to those of the US government, but Carter’s actions could have had the effect of undermining the cohesion of the international coalition and weakening its resolve.598

Scowcroft, via a third party, told Carter to “cease and desist.” Yet only a few days before the deadline for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait, Carter again sent private letters to President Mubarak, King Fahd, and Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, requesting they “call publicly for a delay in the use of force while Arab leaders seek a peaceful solution to the crisis”; he assured each that they’d find the Soviets and French receptive.⁵⁹⁹

Even though Bush and Scowcroft were again outraged, the president declined to publicize Carter’s actions and asked Scowcroft to drop the matter. But the administration quietly began to exclude the former president from all foreign policy matters—contrary to the courtesies normally afforded ex-presidents—and withdrew any further cooperation with or assistance to Carter by the State Department or other US department or agency.⁶⁰⁰

While the anti-Iraq coalition was being built, efforts to negotiate a peaceful solution continued. On November 30, at an early morning meeting with Baker and Scowcroft, the president said he wanted to meet with Saddam Hussein. Baker wrote that Bush thought the meeting could well avert war, help the administration domestically, and further the unity of the allied coalition. Scowcroft, though, was nervous that the Iraqi leader would exploit the meeting and force the administration into a difficult position if he offered most of what United States wanted. Bush nevertheless offered to send Baker to Baghdad on the week of December 10.⁶⁰¹

Although the visit never happened, Baker’s last-minute peace attempt caused headaches. Saudi Ambassador Bandar, King Fahd, and the Kuwaiti leaders were very concerned that Iraq would pull its military out of Kuwait but leave its forces intact, poised to attack later on. And while the British were quietly informed of the proposed visit, other US allies were not at all pleased at not being consulted in advance. Scowcroft described the last-minute initiative as having “shaken the coalition to the core.”⁶⁰²

But the idea—that the secretary of state should try to meet with Iraqi leaders one last time and that the United States should make every effort to avert war—persisted. On New Year’s Day 1991, Bush, Gates, Cheney, and Powell met over dinner at the White House residence and agreed that Baker should try to negotiate with Iraq one last time. Over the next two days, they worked out that Baker would meet Tariq Aziz, one of Saddam’s top advisers, in Geneva.⁶⁰³ Scowcroft, however, worried that last-minute negotiations would send the wrong signals to the members of the Arab coalition about the president’s and the United States’ resolve. He suspected, too, that Baker might like nothing better than to come out with a deal—even a less-than-desirable one.604 (Of course, practicing diplomacy was central to the job of secretary of state; as Cheney remarked, “If he’s not going flat out” to make a deal, he wasn’t “doing his job.”) Together with other hawks in the administration and the US-led coalition, Scowcroft was “very apprehensive” some kind of a deal might be cut that would save face for Saddam Hussein and leave him with something in his pocket after the invasion. He worried that Iraq would be receiving an award, in effect, for withdrawing its forces:⁶⁰⁵

I could think of any number of deceptively attractive, purposely vague proposals and ploys Saddam could put forth which could result in severe strains on the coalition and accentuate divisions within the Unites States. There was absolutely no doubt that Jim Baker was a brilliant negotiator. But I also had no doubt that he would do everything possible to attain our demands by persuasion rather than force. The unhappy reality of the situation . . . was that an Iraqi withdrawal would leave us in a most difficult position. Saddam could pull his forces back just north of the border and leave them there, poised for attack. US forces, on the other hand, could not long remain in place. The force exceeded our capacity to rotate it and, in any event, it would not be tolerable for the Saudis to have such a large foreign force indefinitely on their territory.⁶⁰⁶

Scowcroft therefore feared “that there would be a settlement with Tariq Aziz,” he told Cheney. Instead, he “wanted [the] Iraq situation solved as decisively as possible.”⁶⁰⁷

At the same time, Scowcroft realized “there was strong logic to the argument that the stakes were so high that a serious effort at direct discussion was important.” It was Scowcroft who in a January 3 meeting with congressional leaders recommended that a vote on a joint resolution authorizing the use of force be delayed until after a final attempt at negotiations was made.⁶⁰⁸ If Bush and Baker could in good faith say they made every effort and if the overture to Iraq gave the president peace of mind, he was happy to help. So he and Baker had Haass and Kimmitt draft a tough statement for President Bush to deliver to Saddam Hussein via Tariq Aziz.

But there was ultimately little need for Scowcroft’s concern about any promised Iraqi deal; as the Baker-Aziz meeting of January 8 dragged on hour after hour, it became apparent that neither Aziz nor Saddam expected anything to come of the negotiation. Aziz claimed the letter—which had been altered slightly at Mitterrand’s suggestion beforehand to make it less explicit—contained “nothing but threats” and said the Iraqis “were insulted.” He refused even to deliver the letter to Saddam Hussein.609

Having gone the extra mile and with the international community almost unanimously in agreement—and this was one of the rare occasions where there was a palpable “international community,” thanks in large part to Bush’s incessant personal diplomacy—the White House began its full-court press to achieve the support for the US armed forces to engage in military operations from a majority in the House and the Senate.

Scowcroft mildly opposed having the administration seek Congress’s approval for its plans. Under the terms of the UN Charter, which gives member states the right to come to the aid of other states’ self-defense, and given the Carter Doctrine—Presidential Directive 63 of 1979—that established the Persian Gulf as a region of US vital interest, the United States had the authority to act under UN Security Council resolution 678 and respond to Kuwait’s request for assistance, so long as it abided by the terms of the War Powers Resolution (requiring that the administration inform Congress within forty-eight hours of committing US forces to military action and disallowing actions beyond sixty days without a formal determination by Congress).

Congress had the constitutional authority to declare war, but President Bush was the commander in chief. Since the division of power between the two institutions was ambiguous and “not a black and white issue,” he didn’t think the administration had to ask Congress for the authority to go to war. Neither did he want to concede anything to the Democratic-controlled Congress, since it might later turn on the administration. Would the White House then have to recall the half a million troops in Saudi Arabia before they had a chance to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait?⁶¹⁰

The president nonetheless decided he wanted to secure congressional support before proceeding. Certainly, many in Congress (including Senator Bob Dole and other leading Republicans), in the press, and among the public strongly preferred that any US military engagement have the express support of Congress. Among Democrats, Senator Sam Nunn was among those upset they had never been consulted on the decision to double the number of troops in the Gulf; Nunn and other members of Congress certainly wanted to be able to have a say on a possible war. There was thus considerable risk in Bush’s plan to consult with Congress. If Congress didn’t grant its approval and if the military then got bogged down or faced unexpected setbacks, it might bring impeachment charges against him. Bush understood these risks and decided to go ahead anyway.⁶¹¹

Scowcroft became the administration’s point man. He lobbied individual members of Congress, talked to members of the press, and otherwise assisted the administration in any way possible. He didn’t engage in horse-trading: Scowcroft didn’t cut deals with members on Congress on behalf of the administration, but simply argued on the merits.

In the final week, Scowcroft—who Mullins described as carrying water for the administration—“and the President were lobbying one on one themselves on the phone.”612

Bush and Scowcroft report the debate being “passionate,” although “not bitter.” Senator Nunn questioned the “rush to war,” as did Paul Nitze, who argued in an op-ed that sanctions coupled with air strikes might possibly be enough.⁶¹³ Many on the Hill sided with the administration. Representative Stephen Solarz emphasized that this was a bipartisan issue, and Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania argued that if Congress rebuked President Bush and repudiated the UN Security Council resolution, “the credibility of the United States will be diminished . . . [and] we will be incapacitating the president as an institution in the future.”⁶¹⁴

Interestingly, the only member of the Senate who cast a purely political vote, according to James Baker’s aide Janet Mullins and others, was Al Gore. “And he just . . . calculated it start to finish, and had some outrageous conversations with Brent in the process, and made a purely political calculation.” So Gore would say he was leaning one way and then he’d lean the other way. He would tell Senator Mitchell he was “going to vote against and Brent he was going to vote for the war resolution,” Mullins said.⁶¹⁵

In the end, the administration was able to secure Congress’s approval. The outcome in the vote in the House of Representatives, 250–183, was never seriously in question, and the White House saw to it that the House voted first so as to provide momentum for a positive vote in Senate. On January 12, the administration got ten Senate Democrats on its side, with a final Senate vote of 52–47. Senator Nunn later told Dick Cheney that voting against the Gulf War resolution was “biggest mistake he ever made.”⁶¹⁶ The Democrats did get one symbolic victory, though: Bush asked for congressional support for the administration, but the joint resolution stated that Congress authorized the administration’s use of force. Bush later admitted he would have gone ahead anyway under his authority as commander in chief, but he hoped to have Congress’s approval.

Bush and Scowcroft knew they wanted to force the issue. They had become increasingly impatient with the sanctions and were more and more pessimistic that they would work. In fact, Scowcroft and Bush never held an NSC meeting to explicitly discuss whether or not to give the sanctions time to work; they knew they wanted to force the issue. As Senator Nunn observed, there was no way the administration was going to put out a force of this size, with no rotation, for a year or two. The president was committed to action unless Iraq unconditionally withdrew its forces from Kuwait. Without a complete withdrawal by Iraq, the administration’s deployment decision of October 30 was tantamount to a decision to go to war.617

As Scowcroft explains in A World Transformed, he wanted “to reduce Saddam’s military might so that he would no longer pose a threat to the region.” He said, “Our Arab allies were convinced, and we began to assume, that dealing Saddam another battlefield defeat would shatter what support he had within the military, which probably would topple him. Hitting the Republican Guard went to the heart of the problem.” In his view, “the best solution was to do as much damage as we could to his military, and wait for the Ba’ath regime to collapse.”⁶¹⁸ He was worried, too, about any significant delay in taking action, since the large numbers of US troops couldn’t be rotated out easily (thus constraining how long the American soldiers could remain in the region). Moreover, a postponement of military operations would conflict with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, the hajj to Mecca, and the later onset of unbearably hot weather.

Scowcroft was also troubled by Iraq’s progress on acquiring nuclear capacity (justifiably, as was later confirmed), and on November 25 he warned on national television that if the United States relied solely on an economic embargo, it risked facing a nuclear-armed Iraq, whether “in months” or “as much as ten years.” (Defense secretary Dick Cheney appeared on a separate news show and issued the same warning.) And in early December, Scowcroft went on NBC News’s Meet the Press to advocate that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, Saddam’s “nuclear, biological, and chemical programs,” be placed “under strict international supervision so that he cannot develop that kind of capability.”⁶¹⁹

Every bit as much as Bush, and possibly more, Scowcroft wanted war. One member of the NSC staff described Scowcroft’s thinking as being “we need to have this war . . . we need to do something to him. . . . We need to mess [Saddam Hussein] up.”⁶²⁰ Another senior member of the administration, who asked to remain anonymous, likewise reported that Scowcroft would have been disappointed by a diplomatic solution. Had Scowcroft ever actually been in combat and “had young kids die in [his] arms,” this official remarked, “he would have thought differently about going to war.” And an eyewitness separately reported that Cheney and Scowcroft exulted upon learning there had been no progress in Geneva. (If things hadn’t later gone so well in the aerial and ground phases of the Gulf War, this official noted, “we could have lost a lot more kids. Unfortunately,” he added, “there wasn’t a single person in that room except for George Bush who had ever seen a shot fired in anger. That is Cheney, [Prince] Bandar, Scowcroft, [and] Gates. The toughest battle Scowcroft was ever in [was in] the social science department of West Point.”)

The day after the Senate vote, the president and his senior foreign policy and military advisers met in the residence, where they decided that the time of attack would be 3:00 A.M. Gulf time on January 17 (7:00 P.M. on January 16, Eastern Standard Time). They further determined the aircraft and missile flight paths, and they selected which infrastructure targets (power stations, refineries, highways, and so on) they would hit, and in which order.621

On January 15, the president signed NSC 54, which authorized the use of military force. And on January 16, Bush announced to the nation and the world that the United States and its coalition partners were about to begin air strikes against Iraq. The United States had exhausted all of its alternatives, he said, and any further delay would serve no purpose other than to “reward aggression” and continue to harm the international economy. The war would not be another Vietnam, Bush promised. “We will not fail.”⁶²²

Then the United States and its coalition allies began their attack.