24

WAR IN THE GULF

THE AIR WAR began on January 16, 1991, at 7:00 P.M. sharp in Washington—3:00 A.M. on January 17 in Iraq. It seemed at first that Navy and Air Force had blown the timing. At 6:35 P.M., CNN showed the Baghdad night sky being lit up by tracers; Bush, Quayle, Scowcroft, Sununu, and Marlin Fitzwater, who were all in the national security advisor’s West Wing office, couldn’t account for why the Iraqis were firing before the attack.⁶²³ But at 7:00 P.M. sharp, the president and his senior advisers heard a large boom on the television. Scowcroft, Bush, and the others watched the aerial assault in real time. The first bombs hit the power grid, Iraq’s air defenses, its airplanes and airports, and its telecommunications—though not the oil refineries or civilian targets. With an itemized schedule of the United States’ air war plans in his lap, it was if Scowcroft could read a movie script while that same movie was being screened in front of him.⁶²⁴

But once wars are under way, they have a way of departing from their scripts. Later that same day, Iraqi-launched SCUD missiles—Iraqi versions of the Soviet R-17, ballistic missiles that have a range of 100–180 miles—landed in Israel, four on Tel Aviv and three in Haifa, killing and injuring Israeli civilians and spreading fear and panic.⁶²⁵ Other SCUDs landed in Riyadh, but without casualties; about half the SCUDs launched by Iraq were targeted at Saudi Arabia, half at Israel. Making things even more intense and raising the stakes higher still were reports that some of the SCUDs were carrying nerve gas.

Upon hearing the news of the missile attacks, Baker, Quayle, Eagleburger, Haass, Sununu, Richard Darman, and deputy chief of staff Andy Card crowded into Scowcroft’s office, with the secretary of defense on speakerphone. Scowcroft was able to get them all to agree that they would try to delay the Israelis from retaliating. “But it is hard to talk the Israelis out of responding,” Scowcroft said on January 18, “even though the situation looks all right for today.”⁶²⁶ Baker proceeded to telephone Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, who agreed to withhold any Israeli actions for the time being. But Cheney and others in the Department of Defense were “furious” the White House didn’t approve of Israel’s participation in the air attacks once the SCUDs began hitting Israeli civilian targets. Cheney believed that Israel had a right to defend itself against the SCUDs, which were terrifyingly unpredictable because of their poor accuracy.627

Scowcroft disagreed. Including Israel in the allied coalition would be unacceptable to most of the Arab states. Furthermore, any attack by Israeli forces would require Israel Defense Forces (IDF) aircraft to fly over Saudi Arabia, Jordan, or Syria to reach Iraq. None of those countries was likely to grant Israeli aircraft permission to do so, and their own air forces would try to intercept any Israeli aircraft. The exclusion of the Israelis from the multinational coalition meant that IDF aircraft wouldn’t have friend-or-foe identification codes, placing the IDF aircraft in grave danger of being shot down by US and other coalition aircraft.⁶²⁸ So any retaliation by the Israelis for the SCUD attacks risked setting off a larger Arab-Israeli conflict and wrecking the international coalition the administration had worked so hard to create. Bush told King Fahd that Saddam Hussein was deliberately trying “to draw Israel into this conflict” so as to split the coalition. No one in the Gang of Eight other than Cheney thought it made sense for the Israelis to join the coalition forces.⁶²⁹

Further exacerbating Arab-Israeli relations was the news earlier that on October 8 Israeli security forces had killed twenty-one Palestinians on the Temple Mount. In response, even the United States voted in favor of a UN resolution condemning Israel’s excessive use of force (No. 672 of October 12, 1990)—but only after diluting its language.⁶³⁰

Fortunately, the reports that the SCUDs contained nerve gas were mistaken. But the SCUD attacks were nonetheless terrifying to the Israelis, and when another missile killed three people in Tel Aviv on January 22, Scowcroft proposed that Deputy Secretary of State Eagleburger and Under Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz travel to Israel to meet with Prime Minister Shamir and his aides, accompanying an overnight shipment of Patriot missiles and their specialist military operators. In the meantime, the United States deployed F-15s based in Turkey as well as other aircraft to search for and destroy the SCUD launching sites—fixed or mobile—in Iraq.⁶³¹ Nonetheless, additional SCUD attacks killed one more Israeli and injured an additional forty-two. As President Bush told Gorbachev, “The attack on Israel . . . [adds] a whole new dimension.”⁶³²

Despite the immense pressure building up on Shamir, the Israeli prime minister overruled his defense minister, Moshe Arens, and others in his cabinet by letting the terrorist missile attacks go unpunished. He also kept quiet the fact that the Patriot missiles didn’t actually work very well, which helped prevent any domestic outcry and discouraged Iraq from further SCUD attacks on Israeli targets. The United States had helped with $3 billion in military and economic aid to Israel in 1990, with 56 percent of the aid consisting of foreign military sales (and some of the economic aid going to pay off military debts).633

What was remarkable about the US-Israeli cooperation was the fact that Bush, Baker, and Scowcroft weren’t as close to Israel as most US presidents and their top advisers. Bush found the Israeli prime minister to be cold and arrogant (although the two were always polite and civil) and the two never had an easy friendship, unlike Bush’s relationships with so many other heads of state.⁶³⁴ Nonetheless, when Shamir visited Washington on December 11, Bush reassured him that the United States was avoiding a linkage between the Iraqi conflict and the Middle East peace process at all costs. And the two countries set up a secure hotline in case US satellites detected any missiles being launched.⁶³⁵ Bush, Baker, and Scowcroft well understood the importance of the US-Israel relationship and the need to work with Jewish-American leaders, and they were at pains to separate the Israeli-Palestinian issue from the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. After the war, they could get to work, beginning with the subsequent Madrid peace process.⁶³⁶

The air war evoked another issue that Bush, Baker, and Scowcroft had to handle delicately. This was the peace initiative for resolving the Iraqi occupation offered by Gorbachev and Yevgeny Primakov, Gorbachev’s special envoy to Iraq. Scowcroft and others in the administration suspected that right-wing military leaders and party officials were behind Gorbachev’s initiative. Iraq was a former ally of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet leaders didn’t want to see the United States get a “big victory” or embarrass the Soviet Union by revealing how poorly the Soviet equipment matched up against American matériel. Yet the Soviet proposal was too little, too late; it set no time limit on when Iraqi forces would withdraw after a cease-fire, made no mention of POWs, and had no reference to reparations, for instance. Bush and his advisers were extremely wary of any cease-fire proposal, given the difficulty of keeping the hundreds of thousands of troops in the Gulf and holding the coalition together. Baker said he regarded Primakov’s plan as a disaster. And “unconditional” meant unconditional.⁶³⁷

Five weeks later, on February 21 and 22, Gorbachev again tried to broker a peace deal with Iraq, just days before the ground war was to begin. Again, it was to no avail, with President Bush charging Saddam with “stalling and ducking and sending Jordan and the PLO and Yemen to stall and give his side.” Bush thought the Iraqi president was taking advantage of Gorbachev’s good faith effort, and he found no way to bridge the “profound differences” the two of them had on the matter.638

Still, it was uncomfortable for President Bush to have to repeatedly reject the proposals offered by the Soviets, especially since Bush had formed a personal relationship with Gorbachev. Too, he was sensitive to the Soviet leader’s pride as well as internal Soviet politics. So when Bush had to dissuade Gorbachev from making an attempt to broker a deal on January 18, for example—an effort that came just after the United States began the air attack—he repeatedly talked to the Soviet leader, who, as journalists Thomas Friedman and Patrick Tyler pointed out, was trying to address his own domestic concerns but was also unwilling to break with the United States. And when Bush finally had to say no, he delivered the news considerately over the course of an hour-long phone call.⁶³⁹ One other scare for Scowcroft came during Bush’s State of the Union address on January 29, when Scowcroft learned that Baker and Soviet foreign minister Alexander Bessmertnykh had agreed “that a cessation of hostilities would be possible if Iraq would make an unequivocal commitment to withdraw from Kuwait.” The two ministers also agreed that “dealing with the cause of instability and the sources of conflict, including the Arab-Israeli conflict, will be especially important” and that “without a meaningful peace process—one that promotes a just peace . . . for Israel, Arab states, and Palestinians—it will not be possible” to achieve peace and stability. Furthermore, they “agreed that in the aftermath of the crisis in the Persian Gulf,” the United States and the Soviet Union, along with “other parties in the region,” would facilitate efforts to establish peace and stability.⁶⁴⁰ The joint statement’s use of the word “commitment,” its linkage of the Gulf crisis with an Arab-Israeli settlement, and its involvement of the Soviet Union in a settlement after the Gulf War contradicted the administration’s policies, and Baker later conceded he had erred.

With the success of the ongoing air war and the delay in starting the ground war, Scowcroft and Gates became increasingly frustrated over what they saw as General Schwarzkopf’s undue caution. “Brent and I began making references to McClellan and military after the air war began, and how he delayed,” Gates recalls, “while Schwarzkopf kept saying he needed more time to prepare the ground war.” (President Lincoln had found Gen. George McClellan notoriously reluctant to move against the Confederate forces during the Civil War.) Gates said, “McClellan lives,” and Scowcroft and Cheney also spoke of “our reluctant generals.”⁶⁴¹ But when some in the military learned of the White House’s reactions to Schwarzkopf and Powell’s foot-dragging, it was pointed out that none of Bush’s four most hawkish advisers—Cheney, Scowcroft, Gates, and Quayle—had themselves ever served in combat. Some in the military accused Scowcroft of attempting to fight a war from his West Wing office.642

Part of the problem was a discrepancy in intelligence. Schwarzkopf wanted to delay launching the ground attack until at least seventeen hundred Iraqi tanks (40 percent of the total) had been destroyed. Using pilot reports, CENTCOM estimated that this had been achieved by mid-February. But the CIA was unable to confirm the military’s numbers. When the president asked Scowcroft to resolve the uncertainty, Scowcroft sided with CENTCOM. But postwar analysis showed that the military had overestimated the actual number of destroyed tanks by a factor of two, while the CIA had used more accurate satellite images that employed thermal imaging.⁶⁴³

Scowcroft was becoming increasingly impatient with the Pentagon’s deliberateness and Gorbachev and Primakov’s repeated efforts to intervene and go to the United Nations. “We no longer have the luxury of time to resolve our differences w/in the UN and then gain Saddam’s acceptance” he jotted down in his notes at a Camp David meeting on February 23. “We must act now, especially in view of his disgusting scorched earth attack on Kuwait. Time is precious.”⁶⁴⁴

On February 25, 1991, five weeks after the start of the air war, the coalition forces began the ground war against Iraq, led by the US Marines and the US Army. The Air Force and the Navy had more than proven their capacity with their aerial bombardment and cruise missiles and their repeated attacks on many of the key Iraqi targets, such as its binary chemical weapons facilities, other weapons sites, and communications centers.⁶⁴⁵

The Marines and Army likewise exceeded expectations. The war was over remarkably quickly. Employing the strategy first proposed by Scowcroft and Cheney—a western sweep of coalition forces into Saudi Arabia and then Iraq in combination with the publicized shore landing by the Marines in Kuwait—American and allied forces succeeding in defeating the Iraqi military and taking Kuwait in just one hundred hours of fighting. For all of the dire predictions of thousands of American deaths—the Pentagon ordered some sixteen thousand body bags—only 383 US casualties resulted directly from the war, according to the US Department of Veterans Affairs, 148 caused in battle and 235 by accidents, friendly fire, and other causes.⁶⁴⁶

With the world glimpsing photographs and videos of Iraqis fleeing Kuwait via the so-called highway of death and heading to Basra, where columns of troops and equipment were being destroyed by US forces—and with American pilots talking of a “turkey shoot”—Powell went to the Oval Office to propose that the United States end the war. Gates says that Powell was bothered more than anyone else by what seemed to be a mass slaughter of Iraqi soldiers, but Scowcroft also mentioned that the images of the highway of death were a “significant aspect of the decision.” The president and his advisers “did not want to look like butchers who were bent on revenge by slaughtering people.”647

Scowcroft therefore joined Powell in recommending the United States stop the attack. Baker also worried about the world reaction if the US military continued its strikes on the retreating Iraqi columns: it would have been like “piling on in football,” he said, producing a counterproductive political effect in the eyes of the world. Cheney, too, argued that the coalition’s goals had been accomplished. There was also the fear that the Soviet Union, opposed to the ground war, might call for a UN Security Council meeting. In the end, the key leaders all agreed—General Schwarzkopf, Admiral Jeremiah, and President Bush included—on ending the war and not pursuing the retreating army further into Iraq. Bush said it wasn’t the American tradition to shoot people in the back.⁶⁴⁸

The decision was also shaped by the agreed purpose of the intervention. CENTCOM was operating under a UN resolution mandating the expulsion of Iraq from Kuwait, not the removal of Saddam Hussein. It was precisely for that purpose that the administration had built an international coalition among Arab states, European allies, and other countries worldwide. Those who had voted in favor of the UN resolutions against Iraq and the members of the U.S.-led coalition had not agreed to an invasion of a sovereign Arab state or the overthrow of its president, and there would have been significantly less agreement on continuing to invade Iraq, much less to shifting the coalition’s objectives to include deposing Saddam Hussein.

Here, for Scowcroft, the Korean War set a useful precedent. His analysis of what happened in Korea suggested that it would be a mistake for the United States to change its objectives in midstream, no matter the revised circumstances (as the United States had done in Korea by pushing all the way to the Chinese border after the success of General Douglas MacArthur’s landing at Inchon, rather than stopping at the already-established 38th parallel).⁶⁴⁹

“At the time [going to Baghdad] was not an option,” Cheney said, “and the whole way in which we had built the coalition, devised the policy, conducted the campaign was as a coalition. . . . I don’t know what the hell we would have done if we’d captured him. What do you do, shoot him?”⁶⁵⁰ As Gates also pointed out, Noriega had a half dozen residences in Panama and large number of “hidey holes”—and he was less paranoid than Hussein. The likelihood “of being able to find Saddam we thought was almost impossible and it was based primarily on our experience in Panama.”651

Besides not knowing what they would do once they invaded Iraq and captured Saddam, Scowcroft warned that “Iraq could fall apart” were the Iraqi leader removed from power. He and Haass both wanted to preserve “sufficient military capability, to prevent Iraq from becoming a power vacuum (unable to deter or prevent dismemberment by one of its neighbors).” The administration didn’t want the United States drawn into an internal Iraqi conflict. No one in the administration wanted a partition of Iraq, either, since an intact and secular Iraq functioned as a regional balance to the religious, Shi’a-dominated Iran.⁶⁵²

What’s more, no one in the administration figured that Saddam would survive his embarrassing defeat. Rather, Bush and Scowcroft, along with others, believed there was a strong chance that the Iraq leader would be “overthrown by his own people for the death and destruction he brought down on them,” as Powell described the White House thinking.⁶⁵³

All the same, the US-led coalition could have affected the odds of Saddam Hussein being overthrown and weakened his military capacity had the Bush administration let the military finish its encirclement of the Republican Guards. In fact, several US generals in Kuwait opposed the timing of the decision to halt the war, Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor report. However, those consulted chose not to answer Schwarzkopf’s request for objections to ending the war (the same language and phrasing that Powell had used with the CENTCOM commander). By ending the war when it did, however, the US-led military enabled half of the Republican Guard equipment to escape destruction and 70 percent of the Republican Guards to survive. Hundreds of Iraqi tanks—842 according to a postwar analysis—and 1,412 armored vehicles were able to flee to Basra. Furthermore, almost 130 of Iraq’s best military aircraft were flown to safety in Iran in January and February 1991, notwithstanding the eight-year Iran-Iraq War; some aircraft were simply stationed in Iran for safekeeping, while others may have been used as reparations.⁶⁵⁴ But with so much of Saddam’s forces intact, the Iraqi president was not only hugely relieved but also able to present himself as a victor to the Iraqi people.⁶⁵⁵

Many Americans didn’t understand why Saddam Hussein was allowed to stay in power. If he were the equivalent to Hitler, as the president had claimed, then the Iraqi president should at the very least be removed from power and be tried for war crimes.⁶⁵⁶ And if he was so dangerous, critics wondered, why the president and his military advisers—Schwarzkopf, Powell, Cheney, and Scowcroft, in particular—didn’t build on the coalition’s overwhelming victory and the superiority of US forces to insist on seizing the advantage and destroying more of Iraq’s military?

Notwithstanding the fact that an important share of the Iraqi military survived unscathed, the overall damage to Iraq was “near apocalyptic,” according to a March 1991 UN report. Another study estimated the damage to Iraq at $100 billion, with Iraq’s energy-generating capacity and water purification systems degraded to the point of being insufficient to meet foreseeable demand. Roads, highways, bridges, railroads, and telecommunications were also badly damaged. The CIA’s own estimate of the destruction in Iraq came to $30 billion. Then there was the immense environmental damage done by the 650 oil wells ignited by Iraqi forces on their retreat from Kuwait (and only two hundred of them capped as of August 1991). The Kuwait government figured its oil loss alone at $12 billion.657

Critics specifically questioned the decision by Schwarzkopf—and therefore by the Bush administration—to allow the Iraqi army to keep its helicopter gunships following Iraq’s surrender. The Iraqi government argued they were necessary for transport to remote areas, and Schwarzkopf had been given no special instructions for handling the surrender, after which UN forces were to supervise the terms of the peace agreement. Later, the administration learned to its horror that the Iraqi military was using its helicopters to kill thousands of Kurds in northern Iraq and Shi’a in southern Iraq. Although Scowcroft had opposed letting Saddam keep the helicopters, “I lost that argument,” he said to his staff. He wanted CENTCOM to intervene to stop the Iraqi helicopters from making any further attacks, but others in the administration feared that if the president issued this order, it would undermine Schwarzkopf’s authority. Scowcroft didn’t press the case.⁶⁵⁸ But neither the president, the defense secretary, nor the national security advisor wanted to interfere with the judgment of the uniformed military this time around.⁶⁵⁹ Once the attacks began, the administration didn’t want to be drawn into an internal Iraqi conflict, and so US forces stationed nearby were explicitly ordered not to intervene.⁶⁶⁰

Scowcroft said he wasn’t proud of the action and recognized the cold-bloodedness of the administration’s behavior with “more than a hundred thousand people” dying as a result.⁶⁶¹ What made United States’ abandonment of the Kurds and Shi’a in Iraq especially troubling was the fact that the administration had encouraged the Iraqi people to rebel, with the CIA distributing leaflets over Iraq calling for Saddam Hussein’s overthrow.⁶⁶² And because Bush and his advisers assumed Saddam would be toppled soon after Iraq’s devastating defeat, Scowcroft, Cheney, and Powell hadn’t given much thought to what would happen once Iraq was defeated and hadn’t made the necessary contingency plans. The administration “could have done a better job of thinking through the more classic war termination issues,” Robert Kimmitt noted. If it had, the helicopter fiasco might well have been avoided.663

The names Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm are themselves somewhat confusing. Desert Shield was the name for the military defense of Saudi Arabia and its oil installations by the United States and the multinational coalition following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, and Desert Storm was the air and ground war against Iraq. So they are viewed sequentially, with the air and then the ground war following on the heels of the buildup of forces in Saudi Arabia, and with CENTCOM launching an offensive only once it succeeded in deterring Iraq from an invasion of Saudi Arabia.

What is confusing about the two terms is that Scowcroft and Bush always had offensive plans under serious consideration. The administration’s decision in late October to massively increase the numbers of US troops in Saudi Arabia merely manifested its commitment to use force, given the Pentagon’s requests, the fact that Iraq wasn’t relinquishing Kuwait, and that the effects of the sanctions were occurring too slowly to suit Bush and Scowcroft. They didn’t want to let Saddam off the hook or enable him to profit in any way possible from the invasion—and any kind of a compromise or last-minute face-saving deal would have done precisely that.

For all of the impressiveness of the United States’ victory in the Persian Gulf War, the Bush administration “displayed shockingly poor foresight about what it would mean to leave Saddam Hussein in power in Iraq afterward,” one critic later writes. For leaving Saddam in power—where he would ultimately remain longer than either President Bush or Prime Minister Thatcher—and for destroying only about a third of his military forces, the Bush administration came under serious fire from conservative Republicans, military strategists, and media commentators. Not only did the neoconservatives such as William Kristol criticize the Bush administration, but so, too, did other Republicans and Democrats.⁶⁶⁴ As one of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign bumper stickers read, “Saddam Hussein still has his job. Do you?”

Over the next few years, the Bush administration and then the Clinton administration would have to grapple with Saddam over no-fly zones, weapons inspections, and the enforcement of economic sanctions.

There were other criticisms of the administration’s—and therefore of Scowcroft’s—handling of the Gulf crisis. One was that, prior to the invasion of Kuwait, President Bush and his foreign policy advisers, especially the US ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, were too close to Iraq, and that the administration falsely encouraged Saddam in his dispute with Kuwait and failed to discourage the invasion. Another was that the war was all about the United States protecting its oil supplies, and that the arguments in support of the war on the basis of international law and humanitarian concerns were mere rhetorical subterfuges.

Both arguments contain some truth, yet both are somewhat misleading.

As Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor point out in The Generals’ War, the Gulf War represented the utter failure of deterrence.665 Had Bush, Scowcroft, Baker, and their aides not misperceived the situation, the war might have been avoided. This was a likely legacy of the fact that the Reagan administration—of which Bush was a key member—had quietly helped Saddam Hussein in his fight against Iran by providing Iraq with funds, military equipment, and agricultural credits.

The new Bush administration kept working with Iraq upon first taking office. According to the National Security Directive 26 (October 1989), “Normal relations between the United States and Iraq would serve [the United States’] longer-term interests and promote stability both in the Gulf and the Middle East. The United States should propose economic and political incentives for Iraq to moderate its behavior and to increase our influence.”⁶⁶⁶ On November 6, 1989, the administration granted Iraq $1 billion in credits, with $500 million as the first tranche, and the Export-Import Bank gave Iraq almost $200 million in agricultural credits for grain purchases. The Deputies Committee also recommended a continuation of the Reagan administration’s policies, even though the Bush administration’s internal review found Iraq’s human rights record to be “abysmal.” And in July 1990 the White House blocked Congress’s attempt to deny Iraqi loan guarantees on the basis of its human rights record.⁶⁶⁷

The Bush administration’s benign diplomacy vis-à-vis Iraq may thus have caused the president and his senior advisers to misperceive Saddam Hussein’s intentions. And Saddam, upon receiving this kid-glove treatment and observing how the White House responded to China after Tiananmen Square, may have thought the administration wouldn’t respond to an invasion of Kuwait.⁶⁶⁸

So even as the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA gathered evidence from satellite photos and other intelligence of the movement of Iraqi military vehicles and troops, the administration didn’t act. On July 25, the CIA estimated the probability of an Iraqi attack on Kuwait to be 60 percent, but Bush and his top advisers were reassured by Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, King Hussein of Jordan, and Egypt’s Mubarak, all of whom maintained that Saddam Hussein was bluffing. Iraqi ministers were also engaged in talks in Jeddah with representatives from Kuwait over their differences.669 This was a regional matter that many argued the Gulf states could sort out themselves. Neither did either Soviet or Israeli intelligence predict the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

Nor was the Bush White House wholly unsympathetic to Iraq’s complaints about excessive levels of Kuwaiti oil production, which had the effect of depressing world oil prices, and about its diagonal drilling under Iraqi soil. On July 24, 1990, Margaret Tutwiler, Secretary Baker’s spokesperson, told a reporter, “We do not have any defense treaties with Kuwait, and there are no special defense or security commitments to Kuwait.” The very next day, July 25, Ambassador Glaspie met with President Hussein and infamously declared that the demarcation of the Iraq-Kuwait border wasn’t the United States’ concern. And she said nothing to Saddam to deter him from invading Kuwait.⁶⁷⁰ But the White House had a chance to follow up with a personal message from the president, and here, too, the message—one drafted by Richard Haass, Gordon and Trainor report, and then cabled to Glaspie for her to deliver personally before July 30—was conciliatory and reassuring.⁶⁷¹

However, the US-Iraq relationship had already begun to show signs of strain. In early 1990, the Israelis and Americans found out that Iraq was trying to buy a “supergun” from the Canadian artillery engineer Gerald Bull that could launch shells up to four hundred miles away through a barrel hundreds of feet long. In April 1990, Saddam Hussein threatened Israel with “incineration” if it appeared that Israeli forces would again attack Iraq, and he denounced the immigration of Soviet Jews to Israel. In response to these threats, the NSC Deputies Committee came up with two dozen options, ranging “from the largely symbolic to a virtually total economic embargo and political break with Iraq.” Scowcroft decided there was no need to change policy. However, in May, the administration decided to cancel the second half of its $1 billion credit for wheat purchases, other agricultural products, and farm equipment (such as dual-use trucks); as it turned out, the Senate defeated the administration’s proposal.⁶⁷²

Michael Gordon of the New York Times argues that the Bush administration should have taken further precautionary measures against an Iraqi conquest of Kuwait, such as deploying an aircraft carrier in the North Arabian Sea, moving a squadron of F-15s to the region, or sending B-52 bombers to Diego Garcia. Some US officials, including Dennis Ross and Paul Wolfowitz, had earlier drafted a report on handling precisely this sort of Middle East contingency, Gordon points out. Yet the administration was uninterested in seeming belligerent and had little wish to upset friendly Arab states or assume the worst of Iraq.673

Given the mixed evidence and the reassurances the president was receiving from his Middle East counterparts, Bush, Baker, Scowcroft, and other top officials gave Iraq the benefit of the doubt. It appears that the president and Scowcroft would have been prepared to accept some Kuwaiti loss of territory. They just didn’t think Iraq would take all of Kuwait. Two days before Iraq’s invasion, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, John Kelly, told members of Congress that the “United States has no commitment to defend Kuwait and the US has no intention of defending Kuwait if it is attacked by Iraq.” And immediately after the invasion, Glaspie told a reporter that she “didn’t think, and nobody else did, that the Iraqis were going to take all of Kuwait.” As Gates later said, “My guess is that if Saddam had just taken the Rumalia Oilfield, he would still be there. There would have been no war.”⁶⁷⁴

Ambassador Glaspie became the scapegoat for the Bush administration’s misjudgment—that of Scowcroft and Haass in the NSC, Baker, Ross, and others in the State Department, the CIA and military intelligence, and the president himself. She dropped out of sight for several months, and later, in April 1991, testified about the incident before the Senate. Glaspie was subsequently assigned as the US consul general in Cape Town, South Africa, and in 2002 retired from the US Foreign Service and State Department.

The administration did ultimately draw a line in the sand—but not until after Iraq had already ventured well past that line and threatened to cross another line, the Saudi border. Indeed, Scowcroft later admitted he had made the wrong call on the Iraqi invasion. As Gates said of Saddam, “Nobody thought he’d be that crazy.”⁶⁷⁵

As for the charge that the Gulf War was essentially about oil, it’s certainly true that the president’s economic advisers were deeply concerned about the supply shortages and higher oil and gas prices that were expected to result from the loss of Kuwaiti and Iraqi oil.⁶⁷⁶ And the one trigger for the United States to depose Saddam Hussein was if Iraq destroyed the Kuwaiti oil infrastructure, in which case NSD 54 mandated that “it shall become an explicit objective of the United States to replace the current leadership of Iraq.”

Yet there was more at stake than Kuwait’s oil. There was Iraq’s (and Kuwait’s) location and the implications for regional stability and the near-term safety of Saudi Arabia—and, of course, its oil. Iraq possessed binary chemical weapons, sophisticated military technology, and nuclear weapons materials, which posed a regional threat as well as possibly endangering Israel. Then, too, there was the ruthless and arrogant nature of Iraq’s action, not unlike Argentina’s conquest of the Falklands eight years earlier. And there was the timing of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait at the beginning of a new, undefined post–Cold War era.

ONE OF THE most positive results of the Gulf War was the Madrid peace conference, where Israelis and Palestinians met face-to-face for the first time. Without Madrid, there would have been no Oslo agreements in August 1993. Madrid occurred because Baker wanted to build on the momentum from the Gulf War and give the peace process a try. Scowcroft was skeptical, but the president supported the secretary of state, and Baker’s effort paid off—a separate story that Baker tells in The Politics of Diplomacy. One of the casualties of the single-term Bush presidency was that Baker and others in the administration were unable to leverage what happened in Madrid into an agreement toward a lasting peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. The Oslo accords were of only limited effect, despite the renunciation of violence by the PLO and prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s formal recognition of the PLO. The agreements on curtailing the construction of new settlements, on allowing for limited Palestinian sovereignty, and on other issues quickly lost their momentum following the assassination of Rabin in November 1995, with the Israelis and Palestinians both violating the agreements and being deeply split over the merits of the accords.

Yet what happened on the West Bank and Gaza affected Arabs (and Jews) around the world. Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, an Afghan military commander, who was affiliated with the Sunni, pro-Saudi, and Pashtun mujahedin, noted that Osama bin Laden, besides being “more anti-American than our leaders,” was “deeply concerned about other Islamic causes,” such as the Arab-Israeli conflict. “He was always telling us, ‘Behind every rock and mountain, there is the shadow of Palestine.’ And when we beat the Russians, he said, ‘We should go to Palestine.’”677

The statement suggests the potentially huge payoff that might have accompanied a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Had the Bush administration been able to defuse the Palestinian issue, the course of world history might have been dramatically altered.

Less positive was the situation in Iraq, where more than a quarter of a million people, mostly women and children and overwhelmingly Kurds, fled the northern part of the country, accumulating on the Turkish border. Secretary of State Baker visited the region, the United States, France, Britain, and other countries airlifted in food and medical assistance, and the United Nations and other NGOs stepped in. The United States also enforced what was in effect a safe haven or enclave north of the 36th parallel, where Iraq was not to use military force. In Mitterrand’s words, not to act would have ruined the moral credit that the United States and the coalition earned by their victory in the Persian Gulf.678

Despite this mixed historical record, the consensus is that the Gulf War was a triumph for the Bush-Scowcroft foreign policy team. The war is celebrated as a “war of necessity” in Richard Haass’s description, rather than a “war of choice.” It is regarded as an American victory and considered to be a “good war.” For Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who was the director of the Iraq-Kuwait Task Force at the time, it ranks “among the finest moments of American diplomatic and military achievement.”⁶⁷⁹

Yet this striking success was far from inevitable. Many of the critical components of Desert Shield and Desert Storm involved extremely hard work, difficult negotiations, and an element of the unpredictable.

Saddam Hussein himself was responsible for some of the unpredictable events that helped ensure international support for the war. His use of hostages, his treatment of prisoners, the SCUD attacks against Israel, and the widespread environmental destruction caused by setting fire to almost all of the Kuwaiti oil fields—including wells and storage tanks and distribution facilities—were among the unnecessary “horrible things” that antagonized the international community.⁶⁸⁰

Buoyed by the worldwide revulsion against Saddam, the Bush administration was able to create an international coalition of almost thirty states aligned against Iraq. It was able to have twelve UN Security Council resolutions passed that supported and ultimately led to the coercive eviction of Iraq from Kuwait (ten were passed before the war, in the summer and fall of 1990, and two afterward). It succeeded in deploying hundreds of thousands of American troops on Saudi Arabian soil. It enjoyed overwhelming success in the US military’s air and ground attacks on Iraqi targets. It was able to elicit large contributions from its allies to the cover the costs of Desert Shield and Desert Storm. And it was able to persuade the Israel Defense Forces not to retaliate after SCUD missiles hit Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

Bush, Scowcroft, and others in the administration took all the necessary steps to secure a dominant military victory. The White House successfully mobilized policy experts, opinion leaders, and American public and international opinion toward the objective of restoring the Middle East to the status quo ante, and it was able to muster and transport more than half a million troops to the Middle East (most of which were to be based in Saudi Arabia), get the UN Security Council to support its proposed policies, and persuade a majority in both houses of Congress to authorize the use of force against Iraq. For all these reasons, the Gulf War is considered to be one of George Bush’s major achievements as president. Heads of state from around the world almost unanimously praised the American president for his handling of the crisis and his strong leadership.681

“People underestimated George Bush’s determination to make good on what he said [on August 4], that this ‘will not stand,’” Philip Zelikow remarks. Zelikow credits Bush with leading the United States and the world in reversing the Iraqi conquest of Kuwait. The president “doesn’t want Saddam to have a graceful retreat. He doesn’t want him to be able to go back into Kuwait in six months. He doesn’t want a compromise solution. He doesn’t want Saddam Hussein to save face. Bush wants to win.”⁶⁸² To Zelikow it was obvious from “the very start, within the first 24 hours,” that “Bush was going to act . . . [and that] Brent thought the same way.”⁶⁸³

Phillip D. Brady, the president’s staff secretary, likewise observed that his boss was an extraordinarily disciplined man during Desert Shield and Desert Storm and that his attention was, “understandably, very much focused” on the crisis. In particular, his “focus was more on those things that Brent wanted to get done and had to get done, and those sort of communications,” Brady said—confirming Zelikow’s observation that Bush and Scowcroft operated in tandem.⁶⁸⁴ The president ran with the ball that Scowcroft handed him. Zelikow identified Bush as the “chief hawk,” as have most other historians and journalists, but it was Scowcroft who at the very outset persuaded Bush to become that chief hawk.

So the credit that outside observers accord President Bush for his determination at seeing through the defeat of Iraq results from the fact that Bush quickly accepted Scowcroft’s logic and then acted rapidly to lead the United States in Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Scowcroft himself has helped to obscure this reality, since he has “loyally insist[ed]” to reporters “that the President arrived at his decision alone,” journalist Jeffrey Goldberg writes. But as Goldberg corroborates, “several of Scowcroft’s former colleagues said that it was Scowcroft’s firmness, along with Thatcher’s prodding, that strengthened Bush’s resolve to confront Saddam.”⁶⁸⁵

In late February, one day before Desert Storm was to end, White House officials told the New York Times that it was Scowcroft’s presentation at the Friday morning NSC meeting of August 3 “that made clear what the stakes were, crystallized people’s thinking and galvanized support for a very strong response.” And Bush himself, David Schmitz points out in his biography of Scowcroft, “gave the lion’s share of the credit to Scowcroft for conceiving the rationale for the war” and then putting it into practice.686

The Gulf War made the bond between Bush and Scowcroft even stronger. The “President just loved him,” NSC staffer Deb Amend recalled. “He really, really adored him. . . . A number of times I went by the Oval Office and outside I’d see Cheney, Powell, Sununu, by themselves or with others waiting. And Scowcroft would be in there, talking to the President. He was valued by the President above all others [and] Scowcroft would see him before anyone else.” And Bush, thanks to the NSC process he and Scowcroft had put in place, gave Scowcroft and his staff “a lot of control.”⁶⁸⁷

Gates, too, writes of how “Scowcroft’s loyalty toward and affection for Bush was reciprocated.” Indeed, in his 1996 book, Gates writes that he didn’t think that any president and national security advisor had ever had a closer personal bond. “With all the game-playing and maneuvering that goes on in every White House, no one would have dared utter a criticism of Brent to George Bush—substantive issues apart. And his friendship with Barbara Bush was equally strong.”⁶⁸⁸

Notwithstanding his friendship with Bush, Scowcroft “was fair, intellectually open, and did not use his close relationship . . . to undermine others or prevent them from making their case,” Haass said. “Indeed, he would often make it for them just to make sure [the president] knew what everyone was thinking.”⁶⁸⁹

The president himself appreciated that Scowcroft had “a great propensity for friendship. By that I mean someone I can depend on to tell me what I need to know and not just what I want to hear, and at the same time he is someone on whom I know I always can rely and trust implicitly.” He was the opposite of “a blowhard,’” Bush told one writer.⁶⁹⁰ Indeed, after “intelligence confirmed that Iraq had swept into Kuwait with a large number of troops,” Bush wrote in A World Transformed, Brent would play “a critical, and often overlooked, role” in the coming months. “Much of the subsequent original planning and careful thought was done with him at my side, probably more than history will ever know.”⁶⁹¹

The huge role played by Scowcroft in the successful prosecution of the war is even more extraordinary in light of the personal pressures he was under at the time.

Throughout the months of crisis, Scowcroft’s wife, Jackie, was very ill—an invalid, in effect—and Brent would accompany the president only on overseas trips, because when he left town he had to hire a full-time nurse and arrange for twenty-four-hour-a-day care for his wife. When Margaret Thatcher found out about Jackie, she cabled a personal message to “DEAR BRENT,” telling him she was “SORRY TO HEAR THAT YOUR WIFE IS ILL AND IN HOSPITAL . . . AND DON’T LET IT GET YOU DOWN. WE ALL OF US, FROM THE PRESIDENT DOWN DEPEND ON YOU VERY MUCH. YOU ARE AN ABSOLUTE TOWER OF STRENGTH.”692

Jackie’s condition was most likely the chief reason President Bush was never offended when Brent dozed off in meetings: he knew that his national security advisor had to go home to care for his wife after spending fifteen or sixteen hours at the White House. At home, he’d have to “do the laundry, the cleaning, he’d go to the grocery store, he’d do all these things.”⁶⁹³ And as “Brent’s wife became sicker, the President and I would conspire against Brent,” Gates reported, “and I would find a way to let the President know that Jackie was in the hospital again and so the President would call Brent, maybe at 4:30 or 5:00 in the afternoon, and tell him that he was going over to the residence, that he was done for the day. Then Brent would come back to the office and we’d do a couple more hours’ work. It was a very close feeling among all of us and I think it made a big difference on substance.”⁶⁹⁴

Gates and Bush had no choice but to intervene, given that Scowcroft was virtually living in White House office during those months, often “sleeping on his couch” to grab a few minutes of rest when he wasn’t working.⁶⁹⁵ He had “almost no social life,” a former colleague commented; rather, he was “always thinking, always working.” As another White House official observed, “he was there all the time.”⁶⁹⁶

Writing in A World Transformed, Bush acknowledged the contributions of his “superb team,” particularly Powell, Schwarzkopf, Cheney, and Baker. His final accolade was for the national security advisor and his beloved friend, Brent Scowcroft, who lifted the “burden off the president, task[ed] the bureaucracy, spott[ed] out the differences and never with credit for himself.” He was “always quiet but always there and always dependable.”⁶⁹⁷

On Wednesday, July 3, 1991, four months after Desert Storm, President Bush assembled staff and guests for a White House ceremony. He bestowed Presidential Medals of Freedom on James Baker and Dick Cheney. He then announced a final Medal of Freedom:

The ideal of a statesman, a quiet yet passionate defender of the American interests, Brent Scowcroft’s sound counsel has enhanced our national security and advanced American foreign policy and the cause of freedom around the world. In the Gulf, General Scowcroft never wavered in pursuit of this nation’s goal of reversing Iraq’s aggression against Kuwait. He superbly coordinated the national security system in the development of recommendations for the President, enabling the United States to conduct an effective and united foreign policy and a victorious military campaign. America honors an outstanding general, a true patriot, and a wise statesman.698

The honor came as a complete surprise. Of all the awards and the prizes Scowcroft has received over the years, he told his close friend and colleague, Virginia Mulberger, it is the one of which he is most proud.⁶⁹⁹