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The question was, the thing no one could answer was the question of casualties and we assumed with respect to the air war that our worst night would be the first night. That you had the Iraqi forces, the air force basically full up, the air defence system in place -- that we would suffer our largest number of casualties that first night of the air war. And in fact when it was all over with I spent the night in my office at the Pentagon and I got the word when all the aircraft came back we'd only lost one airplane and it was just a phenomenal result. I could not believe that we'd done that well. Obviously we'd been enormously successful and all the training and planning that had went into it had paid off.
Cheney: It was a very important assignment. From a military standpoint if we could not get into Saudi Arabia it was going to be very hard for us to do anything militarily other than mount a naval blockade for example.
Cheney: I told King Fahd that the Iraqis were amassed on his border and we briefed him on the intelligence in terms of the size of the force that the Iraqis had already used in Kuwait. Pointed out that it was very hard for us to be able to help them unless we could get plenty of advance time 'cos it takes a long time to move heavy forces half way around the world and that timing was of the essence. That they did not have the luxury of waiting until Saddam began an invasion of Saudi Arabia and then ask for help because then it would be too late. We could not get there in time to help them if that were the case. That if he wanted help and assistance and we thought they needed it then it was important to start immediately. King Fahd had listened attentively throughout the meeting They knew exactly why we were there. There was very little small talk, we went right straight to the issue. We had about a two-hour session, at the end of which there was a short conversation between King Fahd and his associates, the Crown Prince, the Foreign Minister, and then he turned back to me after about five minutes of discussions in Arabic and said through the interpreter, through Prince Bandar, that they were prepared to go ahead to accept the U.S. forces in the Kingdom.
Cheney: When King Fahd said that he was prepared to accept our proposition, I was pleased, obviously. That was something that was very important to achieve but, secondly, I also had a sense that this particular decision then triggered a whole sequence of pretty momentous events. Hundreds of thousands of troops going to the desert--US deploying major force half way round the world was obviously a significant event. Cheney: Well, I always thought that the commitment to use force if necessary -- clearly the hope was that we wouldn't have to, that there'd be other ways to resolve it diplomatically or through the application of sanctions -- but that the commitment to use force to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait was there when the President came down from Camp David that first week into the crisis and said that this aggression will not stand. I mean, I took that to mean that we were prepared to do whatever we had to do in the end to expel him from Kuwait. Now it did not make sense for us to talk about offensive options in August; we didn't have any forces there yet and if there was a lot of banter and loose talk about offensive operations, it would simply possibly provoke Saddam Hussein into moving them to pre-empt us so that we couldn't get into Saudi Arabia.
But again remember, if he'd gone another 200-250 miles he would have been able to capture the bases and the air fields and the port facilities we needed for our forces. And in August all we had over there initially was the ready brigade of the 82nd airborne and wing of F15's from Langley in Virginia and relatively small forces at the outset, so it wasn't really until the end of August that we began to feel fairly comfortable with the size forces we were getting there. That we could respond aggressively if he were to launch an attack. In September, as you move through the month of September and US forces have arrived, the 24th from Fort Jackson the other kinds of heavy forces began to flow into the region, elements of the 101st, the Marines and so forth and then you begin to feel that you've achieved your first stage objective which is to be able to defend Saudi Arabia. Then you move into the second phase which is OK -- now what are we going to do to get this guy out of Kuwait?
Cheney: Basically this was the first look by the senior civilian leadership what we might do by way of offensive action to kick Saddam out of Kuwait. And in effect what I had said and General Powell had said and General Schwarzkopf, was to bring us a briefing on how they would use their forces offensively once this first phase deployment was complete. There were two parts. The first part was really the use of our air capabilities, the air war. That went fairly well, the basic plan that was laid out for us in late September; early October was the one that we ultimately used and was splashed out with a lot more detail, but the overall strategic concept remained the same. The second part of it--how they would use ground forces then to follow through on the air campaign to actually expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait--most of us felt that was unacceptable. Because of the size of the force, General Schwarzkopf really was limited in the sense that he didn't have enough forces there to do a large flanking attack, which we ultimately undertook. Rather, if he was going to cover Saudi Arabia and defend it against an Iraqi force, and at the same time use it offensively, he really felt he had no option but to go straight up into Kuwait. General Schwarzkopf did not like this option. It was not something he was recommending to us, but it was all they felt they could do, given the forces that were available to them at the time.
Cheney: I understand why General Schwarzkopf felt that this was the best they could do at that point. But then it's also important to point out that the slide in the briefing that they showed us that day and General Johnston did the briefing, General Schwarzkopf's chief of staff, the last line in the briefing said this is what we would do if you told us today we had to move offensively but we don't like it, we don't think it's the right way to go and subsequent to that briefing I then sent General Powell out to the Gulf on a mission to meet with General Schwarzkopf which he reported on later in the month. Which basically said 'All right if you don't like that, tell us what you would need in order to be able to undertake an offensive operation to defeat Saddam Hussein and kick him out of Kuwait?' Cheney: Machiavellian is a phrase I would disagree with. I found the plan unimaginative in terms of the ground war because I felt it did risk the possibility that we would not be successful, that we would get bogged down trying to attack the Iraqi fortifications head on, that we'd suffer a lot of casualties, but there weren't many options given the size force we had. 'Cos what had happened as we deployed forces in early August when we were starting out in August, we had nothing then and the Iraqis had about 140,000 troops in Kuwait. As we deployed forces in August and on into September they were building up their forces in Kuwait so that by the time we were finishing our first phase deployment and this briefing was taking place---we were talking about maybe 200,000 US troops in the theatre but they were up to 500-plus thousand troops on the Iraqi side so I would not describe it as Machiavellian. I think that there was this stated understanding on the part of General Schwarzkopf that this was not something he wanted to do in terms of using that small a force to try to liberate Kuwait. I think also the other thing that runs through here and I think there's some justification for it is, is that some of our senior military commanders still had doubts about whether or not the same thing would happen to them here that had happened in Vietnam. Now in Vietnam we had a President who refused to deploy reserves. He would never call up the reserves and the National Guard. He didn't want to offend the American people and create a political problem for himself. So the active duty force was forced to fight the war all by themselves without the kind of support that they'd planned on. They had a gradual escalation in the air war in Vietnam, they were, all of these senior military commanders had had the experience of a political leadership that was not full square behind the effort and not prepared to make the tough decisions to give them what they needed to do the job.
Now that wasn't true of George Bush, we did it very differently in the Bush administration. I think we had it right, but in these early stages when you're deploying forces and planning the operation I think there was a legitimate reluctance there from some to say you know, are these guys really for real? Now, of course, what they found out was that we were, and when we said "What do you need to do the job?"-- they said "Well, we want VII Corps out of Germany, that's two additional divisions, we want the 1st Infantry division out of Kansas, give us another Marine division and six aircraft carrier battle groups." We said "You got it, now what do you need?" I think we came together and agreed upon the strategy and executed it beautifully. But in those early, early weeks I think there were different points of view within the administration between the military and the civilians in terms of how we were going to proceed. I would agree with Brent on the notion that the President and Brent and I were probably the most aggressive in terms of wanting to develop a military option. Probably less convinced than others that diplomacy was going to work, and leaned hardest on the military to produce an adequate plan with adequate forces to achieve our objective.
Cheney: Well, I shared Brent's concern. And it was clear to me that we didn't want to do sort of ground war plan one. That that was unacceptable and that we had to find a way to be more creative in the application of those forces and so we were, we looked at other options. I had work done within the Department by the joint staff to look at something we called the Western Excursion. I mean we experimented with various possibles, some of which we eventually briefed to the President, that looked at the possibility for examples of taking the small force and going out into Western Iraq and occupying the Oman-Baghdad highway cutting that road and occupying some airfields out there for several reasons.
Cheney: I did that very deliberately because it wasn't enough for me just to give instructions. Give me options. I also wanted to have alternatives being debated and I wanted to send a message through the organization that said 'Guys we mean business, now one way or another we're going to get an option put together that allows us to launch offensive action to go after the Iraqis'. In this particular case I had some work done in the policy shop, separate and apart from the joint staff by a retired three star who was a very capable officer in his own right but who was no longer on active duty. He came up with some fascinating ideas and Harry Rowan was involved in it. He worked for Bob ...we took that then and had the joint staff staff it out, but by virtue of having them staff it out it was useful in terms of our planning exercise, that it let us think about some problems we were going to have to deal with down the road but it also sent the signal to everybody, the joint staff, out in the field and central command 'Guys get your act together and produce a plan because if you don't produce one that I'm comfortable with, I'll impose one'.
Cheney: Yeah, and in the meantime what I'd done was taken Admiral Jeremiah over and we'd briefed the President while General Powell was out in the Gulf and they knew what I was doing but I took the Vice Chairman, Joint Chiefs over and we briefed the President on this Western Excursion option, various ways that we might in fact move there. So I think everybody had the message by the end of October that we were serious and we really wanted to move on.
Cheney: Well, I had a pretty good idea what he was going to ask for really. Because we had conversations before he actually did the brief obviously but, I wanted to make certain that they had everything they requested. I did not want to be in a position where the civilians had denied our military leaders the resources they said they needed to do the job. I didn't want there to be any excuse there that "we can't do this because you won't let us have the reserves and haven't given us enough divisions" or whatever. So they came in with a fairly long shopping list and instead of debating it, I just said 'Yes'. And the President had bought off on that. He never questioned once the size of the force we wanted to commit, and he was quick when we said we wanted a quarter of a million reserves. He immediately agreed to a quarter of a million reserves. We said we wanted the VII Corps out of Germany, no problem, he immediately agreed to all of that so that I think the that there was no excuse possible for anybody in the military to say that the civilian side of the house had not supported them. We gave them absolutely everything they asked for and then said, 'Now you must get on with the job.' Cheney: I think it's difficult to overstate the pressures that the President was under through this period of time. I mean you've got to remember, we've got not only the military option that we're developing and deploying the troops and so forth and of course he spent Thanksgiving in the desert with the troops. I think that was tremendously morale boosting event for him, not just for the troops but for him. Plus, we'd been through this cycle where in the fall there was a lot of doubt. The public was not united behind this matter when we started, the Democrats and the Congress were opposed to it. Sam Nunn, the Chairman of the Armed Services Committee held hearings after we'd announced at the beginning of November that we were going to double the size of the force we'd sent out there. There was consternation in many quarters.
Q: And in headline terms your message for the President when you went up to see him at Camp David?
Cheney: Very positive. We were talking then in terms of the date when we would kick off the operation air war. And of course by then we'd been through this diplomatic sequence. What Jim Baker and the President were doing diplomatically was very important.
I was not enthusiastic about going to Congress to ask for an additional grant of authority. I was concerned that they might well vote NO and that would make life more difficult for us, or that even if they voted YES and then we had a disaster on our hands and it didn't work they'd still be against us. The President to his great credit felt very strongly that he wanted the Congress on board and he felt we could get them on board and he was correct. We went to work on them and had that vote and in fact prevailed. I think having had the Congress vote ultimately was a major plus.
Cheney: If we'd lost the vote in Congress, I would certainly have recommended to the President we go forward anyway. Again, as I say, you don't go back having deployed forces over there and decided it was of strategically vital interest. The worst thing you could do in terms of the situation in that part of the world once you've got 500,000 troops out there in the desert is you can't leave them there indefinitely, you cannot sustain that kind of deployment over time. Then you're in real trouble if you decide you're gonna bring them home...
Cheney: It's my conviction, that he would in fact have gone forward whether Congress had supported the effort or not. Cheney: Well, you had a problem throughout the crisis, in that you had different audiences you had to play to. We had the American public here at home to worry about. Then you had the Iraqis. So if you got tough and sort of belligerent really hammering the Iraqis then people would get nervous sometimes here at home. Public opinion would say, 'Well gee you guys are you know, too warlike, too eager to go to war.' If on the other hand you did something like schedule a meeting with the Iraqis to give them one last chance to get out, then the allies would get nervous. So we were always working sort of a three cornered billiard shot throughout this operation. But also, from very early on in the crisis I operated on the assumption that we were going to have to use force. That this guy would not get out and it was my job as Secretary of Defence to make certain that that was a live option.
I had been concerned at those times as some others had I think that we'd end up with half a loaf of some kind. That he would withdraw half way or something like that. The President was very, very good at showing everybody up on that and while the Geneva meeting was controversial in some circles, I think especially with the allies, in fact it was very helpful here at home in the US because it demonstrated conclusively to the public and to the Congress that we in fact were deadly serious about trying every last option to get him out and we would only use force as a last resort. The meeting in Geneva as I recall took place on about the 9th of January and the vote in Congress about the 12th of January. And being able to say to the American people and to the press and the Congress, 'Look guys we tried everything and now we've got no option left but to use military force' really set the stage for the kind of unified mission we had behind the effort when we finally had the round up. Cheney: I never tried to penetrate a mine field, how do you do that? How do you run air control traffic pattern when you've to get 4,000 airplanes all trying to get over Baghdad at the same time? How does a cruise missile work? What's a laser guided munition all about? What's the secret of the F1 17 Stealths? Which are global positioning systems and the Abram tanks? All the other things that went into it. There was an awful lot of the operational art that as a civilian I didn't know. And so I'd scheduled a whole series of briefings for myself with the joint staff in the run up to Desert Storm and by the time we started the operation I had great confidence that the guys would be able to do what they said they could do and I never had any doubt about the military outcome, could we achieve our objective?
The question was, the thing no one could answer was the question of casualties and we assumed with respect to the air war that our worst night would be the first night. That you had the Iraqi forces, the air force basically full up, the air defence system in place -- that we would suffer our largest number of casualties that first night of the air war. And in fact when it was all over with I spent the night in my office at the Pentagon and I got the word when all the aircraft came back we'd only lost one airplane and it was just a phenomenal result. I could not believe that we'd done that well. Obviously we'd been enormously successful and all the training and planning that had went into it had paid off. Cheney: Well, he and I had had a long running conversation in effect--back in the fall when we were first deploying forces I had offered Patriots to the Israelis because they didn't have any yet. They'd bought some, but their crews weren't trained yet and they turned them down and their attitudes changed obviously when the scuds started flying...I had called Moshe Arens the day the air war started and I gave the Israelis notice that that evening we were actually going to launch the attack so he was my contact in that regard. And then when the scuds started to fly the next night the Israelis came up on this radar screen and really wanted to retaliate, which was normal. I mean you imagine an American President sitting quietly as missiles land on the United States saying 'No we're not going to do anything?' I mean that's an unacceptable political position for any government but what the Israelis wanted was for us to not only clear our aircraft out, or to give them the codes identification for interflow codes, so that they could operate there and not have any accidental conflicts with our aircraft, but they also wanted us to negotiate access for them because the only way the Israelis can get at the Iraqis except to overfly Saudi Arabia, Jordan or Syria and they wanted us to negotiate access routes through one of those locales. Which of course, we refused to do.
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