The budget agreement that Congress finally passed did what Bush's Andrews Air Force Base deal had not done: raise marginal income tax rates. (The Democrats had taken advantage of what Darman referred to as Bush's "weakened position" because of the GOP unrest.) Though the president was forced to increase the highest rate from 28 to 31 percent, he signed it into law on Monday, November 5, 1990-and the deal, while politically toxic for Bush, became, in Dick Darman's phrase, "the largest deficit-savings program ever enacted."
"I supported him on the budget deal," Bill Clinton recalled. "I thought he did the right thing. Bush 41 was the only Republican around who knew that anything that consistently defies arithmetic can't work for very long."
FORTY.
The Threat of Impeachment
If it starts dragging out and there's high casualties, I will be history; [but] no problem-sometimes in life you've got to do what you've got to do.
-GEORGE H. W. BUSH I have a feeling that I need to pray, and yet I am not certain my prayers are heard.
-BUSH, on the eve of war WAR PLANNING WAS A CONSTANT FEATURE of the fall of 1990. Bush closely studied the charts the Pentagon prepared for him. Sitting in the Oval Office, or in his West Wing study, or in the Residence, he would gaze at the large maps, taking everything in. Pressed by Dick Cheney, Joint Chiefs chairman Colin Powell and CENTCOM commander Norman Schwarzkopf brought the president a strategy to transform, if necessary, the defensive Operation Desert Shield into an offensive Operation Desert Storm. Should Saddam fail to withdraw from Kuwait by the UN-mandated deadline, the allies would launch an initial air war to weaken Iraq's defenses and clear the way for a ground assault to drive Iraqi troops from Kuwait.
Through the autumn months and into the new year of 1991, Bush presided over a vast deployment to the Persian Gulf. He wanted more of everything in place-more troops, more tanks, more planes, more, more, more. The president sent half a million U.S. forces into the region. He had thoroughly absorbed the post-Vietnam Powell Doctrine of American warfare, the list of criteria developed by both Powell and by former secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger, whom Powell had served as military assistant in the 1980s: Define the mission, then apply overwhelming force to carry it out.
Congressional Democrats in particular worried that Bush was hell-bent on war. Why not give diplomacy and sanctions more time to work? Wouldn't an isolated Saddam ultimately give in and allow the coalition to achieve its war aims without the risks of actual war? Bush did feel honor bound to pursue diplomacy, both personally and through the global efforts of Jim Baker, yet Bush, in his heart of hearts, worried that negotiations with Saddam might signal weakness. He particularly hated the idea of freelance diplomacy. "Word is still around that Jimmy Carter wants to be an emissary to Baghdad," Bush told his diary in midautumn. "Oh, God forbid-Oh, God forbid." (Carter later angered Bush by writing the other members of the UN Security Council, urging them to vote against the resolution seeking international sanction for the use of force.) Bush encouraged military planning on the grounds that Saddam would, in the end, only understand force. "The final analysis: we will prevail," Bush dictated in the autumn. "Saddam Hussein will get out of Kuwait, and the United States will have been the catalyst and the key in getting this done, and that is important. Our role as world leader will once again have been reaffirmed, but if we compromise and if we fail, we would be reduced to total impotence, and that is not going to happen."
- There was also the issue of the war-making power itself. Bush met with the congressional leadership at the White House on Wednesday, November 14, 1990. "There's great concern, if a decision is made unilaterally by you as President," Tom Foley told Bush. In Bush's notes from the meeting, Mitchell said the United States needed to give "sanctions time to work." Dick Gephardt believed the sanctions needed one to one and a half years to take effect. Bob Dole alone called for a "no-holds-barred" approach to Iraq's continued occupation.
Congress was at the center of the president's thinking about Iraq. While he believed that he had the constitutional power as commander in chief to proceed without specific authorization from Congress, he very much wanted a congressional resolution in support of the mission. Wanting, however, was not the same as getting. What if he lost the vote on the Hill? What then?
He would still, he thought, go to war, and he would take the consequences. To a degree he kept hidden from many of his closest advisers, before whom he largely maintained a mask of command, Bush, in private, fretted that Congress might impeach him a) if he launched full-scale military operations in the absence of congressional approval and b) if the ensuing war went badly. Bush alluded to this possibility in his presidential diary on five different occasions, ranging from Wednesday, December 12, 1990, to Sunday, January 13, 1991.
The president was determined but fatalistic. Confident of the rightness of his course, he was prepared to go to war if a bill authorizing the use of force never came to a vote or even failed in the Congress. In late November 1990, mulling a scenario in which he lacked an explicit congressional resolution, Bush dictated: "It is only the United States that can do what needs to be done. I still hope against hope that Saddam will get the message; but if he doesn't, we've got to take this action; and if it works in a few days, and he gives up, or is killed, or gets out, Congress will say, 'Attaboy, we did it, wonderful job; wasn't it great we stayed together.' If it drags out and there are high casualties, I will be history; but no problem-sometimes in life you've got to do what you've got to do."
By musing that he could be "history" if the worst happened, Bush might have just meant that he risked losing reelection in 1992. Two weeks later, though, he explicitly expressed thoughts about impeachment. "I'm convinced that they'll support us-the Congress-provided it's fast and surgical," Bush told his diary on Wednesday, December 12. "But if it's drawn out and long, well then you'll have all the hand wringers saying, 'They shouldn't have done it,' and they'll be after my neck on, perhaps, impeachment for violating the Constitution." Hawaii senator Dan Inouye warned Bush that an American military defeat without congressional authorization would likely cost him the presidency. "If you're wrong about this," Inouye told Bush, "you are going to be impeached by the Congress."
At a Thursday, December 20, 1990, meeting with a Democratic delegation from the Senate, the mood was pessimistic. "What do you want Congress to do?" Senator Richard Shelby, Democrat of Alabama, asked the president.
"Come in and pass a resolution auth[orizing the] President to implement UN resolutions," Bush replied. The response in the room was unenthusiastic. Paul Simon, Democrat of Illinois, pleaded for "a year" to let sanctions work. Others discouraged sending up a resolution on force, contending that the votes for "overwhelming support" did not exist and any kind of divisive fight would "make S[addam] H[ussein] a hero." Bush understood that well, which was why he wanted to make sure that a resolution, if submitted for approval, succeeded. If it didn't, well, that was too bad. "Congress is in a turmoil, and I am more determined than ever to do what I have to do," Bush told his diary on Friday, January 4, 1991. "If they are not going to bite the bullet, I am. They can file impeachment papers if they want to." Bush was certain enough about his mission-the ejection of Saddam from Kuwait-that he was willing to risk everything for it.
- In New York and around the world, Jim Baker fought for UN Security Council Resolution 678, which set a deadline of January 15, 1991, for Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait. The measure passed by a 12 to 2 vote. Yemen and Cuba voted no; China abstained. It was the first such authorization of force since the Korean War forty years before. Bush and Baker mulled over different last-minute diplomatic possibilities-including a face-to-face session between Bush and Saddam. "Talked about my meeting with Saddam Hussein," Bush told his diary, and "we talked about [Baker] meeting with Saddam Hussein in Baghdad." The argument, as Bush put it, was that "we need to have, for domestic consumption in the United States, a high level meeting where Saddam Hussein is told exactly how strongly we feel about this." (Some of Baker's advisers cautioned against a mission to Baghdad for fear that the secretary of state might be held hostage, but Baker was determined to go if the president wanted him to.) The president's emotional commitment to Kuwait deepened around Christmas when he read an Amnesty International report on the brutalities of the Iraqi occupation. He cited it frequently, offering it as evidence in support of his moral case for war. The Right Reverend Edmond Browning, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States, called at the White House to urge peace. An unusually passionate president handed Browning a copy of the Amnesty International report, then peppered the bishop with questions. In light of such systemic terror, "Now what do we do about peace?" Bush asked. "How do we handle it when these people are being raped?" His growing determination led him to one of his rare open avowals of the price he was willing to pay to remove Saddam from Kuwait. "If I don't get the votes" in Congress for war, Bush remarked to Bob Gates one day in the Oval Office, "I'm going to do it anyway. And if I get impeached, so be it."
- Over Christmas, as the family gathered at Camp David, Bush read letters from parents of troops in the Persian Gulf. "All of them saying, 'take care of my kid'; some saying, 'please don't shoot'; some saying, 'it's not worth dying for gasoline,' and on and on it goes; but the cry is, 'Save my boy, save my boy!'"
He was both melancholy and resolute. His mind was halfway around the world as he waited for a small caroling service to begin. "I keep thinking of the Gulf, and I see the faces of the young pilots...[saying], 'Let us go; let us do our job; we can do it'; then the Marines and the Army guys-young, young, so very young. I think of the Iraqi babies, and yet I think of the evil that is this man." In his Christmas Eve reverie, rare responsibility and raw politics were mixed up together. "They say I don't concentrate on domestic affairs, and I expect that charge is true; but how can you when you hold the life and death of a lot of young troops in your hand?"
Billy Graham called in. The evangelist was a reassuring pastoral presence; in his company, or even on the telephone, he had a gift for projecting calm. In his conversation with Bush, Graham recited a line from James Russell Lowell's poem "The Present Crisis": Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide .................................................
and the choice goes by forever 'twixt the darkness and that light.
Bush was moved by the quotation. "It does hit me pretty hard-'Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide.' That moment is upon us."
- On Tuesday, January 8, 1991, on the eve of a critical meeting between Jim Baker and Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz in Geneva, Bush, after months of debate, wrote the congressional leadership seeking an endorsement of the UN resolutions. The move was triggered in part by surveys showing strong popular support for Bush's view of the use of force. "I hope that today's poll will convince the Congress that they must support the President," Bush dictated on Tuesday, January 8. On the same day, the head of Veterans Affairs, Ed Derwinski, told Bush that the VA hospitals were preparing "to take an overflow of casualties [if] required"-a sobering report.
In Geneva, Baker presented Aziz with a letter from Bush to Saddam, but the Iraqis rejected any overture from Washington. Bush took the call from Baker and then went to the briefing room for a press conference that began at five minutes to four on the afternoon of Wednesday the ninth. "The conclusion is clear: Saddam Hussein continues to reject a diplomatic solution," Bush said. The chances for peace were ever more remote as January 15, 1991-the UN deadline-approached.
- It was snowing in Washington on Friday, January 11. Bush had decided to risk a resolution authorizing the use of force, thinking it best for the country and for the coalition for the American government to be united-and on the record. Inside the Capitol, the House and Senate debated the subject that had consumed Bush since Scowcroft and Richard Haass had found the president in his T-shirt in the Medical Unit on that warm August evening. Lawmaker after lawmaker rose to speak for and against the use of force. Like much of the country, the president was impressed by the quality of argument in both chambers. He did worry that some of the grimmer predictions had "frightened the American people into believing this will be a long, drawn-out war. I'm still convinced it won't be; but we have made the proper preparations to guarantee that it will be short."
The president won the vote in both chambers, 250 to 183 in the House and 52 to 47 in the Senate. As he went to bed on the evening on Saturday, January 12, Bush felt free to act. "The big burden, lifted from my shoulders, is this Constitutional burden-the threat of impeachment," Bush told his diary on the night of the congressional victory. "All that cleared now by this very sound vote of the Congress."
For the moment, Bush was the president of a united country and, to a remarkable extent, he was the leading statesman of a united world, thanks to the administration's diplomacy. "I now have the constitutional authority, and no fear of fighting battles in the court over impeachment, or over the abuse of power," he dictated on the thirteenth. "But the decision still is a weighty one. The weightiest that any President has to make, ever."
He could think of nothing but Iraq. "I do think that World War II shaped my thinking on the Gulf. I have Saddam Hussein now as clearly bad and evil as Hitler and as the Japanese war machine that attacked Pearl Harbor. And I say, check him now, check him now."
- War was at hand, and Bush was acutely, even painfully, aware that he was the final authority on whether Americans would see combat. "It is my decision; it's my decision to send these kids into battle; it's my decision," Bush told his diary on Sunday night, January 13, 1991. The call to arms was his to make. There were alternatives. "It is my decision to step back and let sanctions work, or to move forward, and in my view, help establish a New World Order"-a vision of international cooperation that Bush acknowledged had been sought, unsuccessfully, for "a hundred generations."
Until, possibly, just possibly, now, in the presidency of George H. W. Bush . "It is my decision to stand, and take the heat, or to fall back, and wait and hope," Bush dictated. "It is my decision that affects the husband in the Gulf, or the wife that is waiting, or the mother who writes, 'Take care of my son.'"
Restless and always hungry for information-the newest cable from the Situation Room, the freshest report from the front, the latest word on anything-Bush kept CNN on in the White House. Watching on this Sunday evening, he "saw a father kissing his son goodbye" as more troops shipped out. The son cried. The father embraced him, tight.
In the president's mind, time dissolved, and he was transported back to Penn Station in the summer of 1942. "I remembered just as clearly as it can be when I went off to Chapel Hill and my dad gave me a hug on that platform," he dictated. "I climbed on the [train]; I didn't know one single soul; and I was off for an experience unto the unknown, and it shaped my life."
Now the eighteen-year-old naval enlistee was a commander in chief facing the ultimate decision. "I have a feeling that I need to pray," Bush remarked a few nights later, "and yet I am not certain my prayers are heard." He was sure of one thing. It was all on him-all of it. If America prevailed, he had prevailed. If things went wrong, he, and no one else, would be to blame. There would be no excuses, no ducking of responsibility. "The face of war," he told his diary, "looks at me." Reading disturbing predictions about casualties in the Persian Gulf, Barbara asked her husband how he could stand all the portentous news coverage. "I know what I am doing," Bush replied. "I know what I have to do, and I don't worry about what they say. I know."
- On the fourteenth, Bush tried to work through the paper on his desk-subjects included energy, climate change, and the budget-but was unable to concentrate. "Today is one of great tension," Bush dictated. "Walk out of the White House and you can feel it. You walk into the West Wing, and you can feel it also. Unbelievably tense." It was, he noted, "war, war, war."
As Tuesday, January 15, 1991, came and went, the Iraqi leader refused to withdraw from Kuwait, prompting Bush to direct Dick Cheney to issue an "execute order" that would soon unleash American airpower against Iraqi targets. War was about a day away. Growing uncomfortable with the "eerie calmness" of the White House, Bush told his aides, "Let's get some meetings on the economy or something else."
The attempt at distraction failed. He took three walks on the fifteenth, all on the White House grounds, moving, always moving. "People keep coming up, and saying, 'God Bless you,'" Bush told his diary. "My mind is a thousand miles away. I simply can't sleep. I think of what other Presidents went through. The agony of war."
FORTY-ONE.
Nothing Like It Since Truman
I have no fear of making the call. I know that we'll lose lives, but I am convinced that we'll move fast, move swiftly, and carry the day, and kick Saddam out of Kuwait.
-GEORGE H. W. BUSH It's going very well!
-DICK CHENEY, in a note passed to Bush during a church service as the ground war began THE BUSHES DINED with Billy Graham on the night the war began. The president's speech to the nation, to be delivered at nine P.M. Washington time, was at his setting on the table. Bush had written much of it himself; confident of his course, he had had no trouble finding the words he wanted. "Tonight, the battle has been joined," Bush said in the address from the Oval Office. "I am convinced not only that we will prevail but that out of the horror of combat will come the recognition that no nation can stand against a world united, no nation will be permitted to brutally assault its neighbor."
After a largely sleepless night, Bush walked over to the Situation Room at about five A.M. on Thursday, January 17, 1991. The news was a relief. Things seemed to be going wonderfully on the military front. "Mr. President, we have sent fifty-six navy planes out and we've got fifty-six back," Cheney reported to Bush. "We have over two hundred air force planes out and no sign of any missing." (Later one F-18 pilot was shot down.) Among the successes in the opening weeks of the coalition's aerial assault were what an account prepared by the Army's Center of Military History described as a "virtually paralyzed" Iraqi command and control network and the achievement of unchallenged air supremacy over the Persian Gulf and Kuwait.
Bush's mission was well defined: the removal of Saddam from Kuwait. The president of the United States was not seeking to march to Baghdad, or to depose Saddam, or to occupy Iraq. He hoped, even expected, the Iraqis would take care of Saddam themselves, but regime change in Iraq was not a war aim in 1991. In response to a National Security Council memorandum in early February, Bush was so insistent about returning the region to the status quo ante that he agreed with Brent Scowcroft that the United States would not "follow up Iraq's occupation with one of our own." The "model," Bush added, was therefore "postWorld War II France, not Germany." And in a paper entitled "Beyond the Gulf War," the NSC specifically endorsed the president's desire to "avoid the emergence of a regional hegemon" and instead spoke of seeking a "balance involving Iran, Iraq, and the Saudi/GCC states." Bush intended to do what he had said he would do-restore Kuwait's sovereignty, providing Saudi Arabia a measure of security and reestablishing balance-and nothing more.
- The first day of the air war, Bush recalled, was one of "euphoria." After attending a service at Memorial Chapel at Fort Myer, Virginia-the congregation sang "God of Our Fathers" and listened to the U.S. Army Chorus's rendition of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"-Bush attempted to manage expectations. "We must be realistic," Bush told reporters. "There will be losses. There will be obstacles along the way. War is never cheap or easy." As evening came in Washington, Saddam launched a series of Scud missile attacks against Israel. At ten after eight on the night of the seventeenth, Bush was concerned about possible chaos. "Now we don't know how the Israelis are going to react," he dictated, "and what they are going to do, and so we are in the soup."
Bush's main fear: that an Israeli response to the attacks from Iraq would splinter the anti-Saddam coalition. Everything was confused. "There's all kinds of rumors-which reminds me to never make a decision in a war environment on rumors," Bush dictated. There were reports that Saddam had used chemical weapons and that seven Scuds had hit Israel. The reality: There had been no chemical attacks, and while seven missiles were fired, there was little damage in Israel and no one was killed.
Still, the Israeli government was eager to strike back. Bush understood the impulse for self-defense but was desperate to keep Israel from engaging. The Americans were ready to crush Saddam if those plans could go forward without the Israeli complication. "The big problem is how to keep Israel out, and it is going to be almost impossible," Bush dictated on the seventeenth. "Cheney wants to let them go, and go fast. Get it over with."
On Friday, January 18, 1991, Bush addressed the subject at a noon press conference. "I also want to say how outraged I am by Iraq's latest act of aggression-in this case, against Israel," he said. "Once again, we see that no neighbor of Iraq is safe." After leaving the briefing room, Bush spoke with Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir. "[I] put on the hardest sale I have ever used," Bush told his diary. "I tried to convince him that we have doubled up, or tripled up, our attention to the Scuds out west, and urging him to stay out and let us do the job, even though I knew it would be difficult. God, I hope I made headway on that."
At one thirty Saturday morning, Scowcroft woke the president with news of yet more Iraqi attacks on Israel. In the darkness, Bush contemplated the coming debacle. "They are going to retaliate," he told his diary. Yet Shamir again acceded to Bush's wishes and did not strike. Relieved, Bush called to thank the Israeli prime minister. He also dispatched a high-level team to Israel as well as anti-Scud Patriot missiles.
Overall, the military outlook was terrific. "We own the skies-practically own the skies," Bush dictated on Saturday, January 19, 1991. The calls through the night left Bush tired, but he enjoyed having Doro and Marvin's children around for the weekend at Camp David. At one point the grandchildren were conducting a long-distance leaping contest off the bed in the presidential cabin while their grandfather, a wartime commander in chief, tried to read. It was, Bush dictated, "a marvelous madhouse that brings total relaxation." He took a call from Henry Kissinger, who told the president, "Thank you for saving us all from this demon, that Saddam Hussein." Bush called the Situation Room every morning. "How are the overnights?" he would ask. "What happened?"
On Sunday, January 20, he mused to his diary about all the terrible predictions that had failed to come true. The stock market was supposed to have gone down if the country went to war; the opposite had happened. Oil prices were to have soared, but after spiking at around forty dollars a barrel, they fell to pre-August 1990 lows. High U.S. casualties had been projected-what Bush called the "body-bag argument"-but so far the numbers were quite small. Protests were to have roiled the nation and public opinion was said to be fickle, but national polls had enormous majorities supporting the president and the troops. There had been the fear of terrorism, but there had been no significant asymmetrical assaults on the West.
For all the good news of the first days, however, there was the overarching fact of Saddam. "As I think about it, it would be very good if we didn't leave him intact," Bush dictated on the twentieth. "We can't have a goal of the assassination of Saddam Hussein, obviously. But it would be far simpler if his military did what they ought to do and take him out." Yes, Bush thought, that was the optimal scenario. "The best thing is that [Saddam] is taken out by his own people, and we reduce his armor tremendously, get our people the hell out of there." In a call from Camp David with Turgut Ozal, Bush and the Turkish president speculated that the war might last a few months. "It will depend on the ground forces," Bush said. "Or one of [Saddam's] officers may decide enough is enough and get rid of him."
The president felt a cold coming on, and soon was fighting a hundred-degree fever. "I could use a week in the sun, but those days, I think, are gone forever," he told his diary. "Or at least for a long, long, time to come."
- By Monday, February 4, 1991, Bush was ready for the next big decision: when to begin the ground war. "I have no fear of making the call," he told his diary. "I know that we'll lose lives, but I am convinced that we will move fast, move swiftly, and carry the day, and kick Saddam out of Kuwait. And regrettably there will be a lot of casualties on his side, and there will be some on ours. But we can't stop now, we can't look back now, we can't pause now, we can't cease-fire now. We can't fail in our mission." From Baghdad, Saddam announced that Bush himself would be "a target for revenge for the rest of his life....[It] remains for Bush, and his accomplices in crime, to understand that they are personally responsible for their crime. The Iraqi people will pursue them for this crime even if they leave office and disappear into oblivion." Bush thought it a "scary kind of sounding statement, but a little desperate."
The key gathering of the day on the eleventh was in the Yellow Oval Room upstairs at the White House. The president heard Cheney and Powell's report at two in the afternoon. The news from the front was good. Cheney, Powell, and Schwarzkopf "were totally in agreement on what had to be done next," Bush told his diary. The target date was about ten days out. "They are very, very optimistic about getting this done with few casualties, although I dare not say that."
As he listened to his commanders, Bush heard history's echoes. Powell had told him that the allied offensive would be three times greater in size than the Normandy assault on Hitler's Fortress Europe. In the Yellow Oval Room, Bush envisioned other hours of crisis, remembering that this was where FDR had learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor and where Roosevelt and Churchill, along with representatives of the Soviet Union and China, had signed their charter of alliance on New Year's Day, 1942.
Bush felt comfortable taking his place in the long line of war presidents. "I have no qualms now about ordering a ground war-none at all," he dictated on Thursday, February 14, 1991. "I don't have the aching that I felt the night before the bombing started and we went to war. The reason is that the military are unanimous in recommending the course of action that Colin and Cheney outlined to me the other day. I have not second-guessed; I have not told them what targets to hit; I have not told them how much ordnance to use or how much not to use, or what weapons to use and what weapons not to use. I have learned from Vietnam, and I think the Army and the other services are doing a superb job."
On Saturday, February 16, army units secretly got as far as twenty-five miles into Iraqi-held territory "without encountering any opposition."
- On the eve of the ground war, at a White House briefing, Powell and Cheney discussed the question of casualties. As Cheney recalled, the Brookings Institution estimated that "between a thousand and four thousand Americans were going to die. Others warned that ten thousand Americans would be killed." In the meeting, Scowcroft suggested that the president be protected from hearing the grisliest details of the coming battle. "We've got to spare you from some things," Scowcroft said.
"I know," Bush replied, "but that isn't one of them."
At midday on Friday, February 22, Bush issued an ultimatum to Saddam: Withdraw totally from Kuwait by noon on Saturday, February 23, or face a ground offensive. Iraq refused. At ten P.M. on Saturday, Bush went to the briefing room. "The liberation of Kuwait has now entered a final phase," the president announced. "I have complete confidence in the ability of the coalition forces swiftly and decisively to accomplish their mission."
To himself, he wondered about the unknown. "I worry about chemical weapons, I worry about some surprise weapon," Bush dictated on the twenty-third. "I will sit back, like every other American now, with apprehension wondering at how it's going and not knowing."
- The administration had been clear with the Iraqis about the price of a chemical attack. As Dick Cheney had put it, "were Saddam Hussein foolish enough to use weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. response would be absolutely overwhelming and it would be devastating." The Iraqis took this to mean that the United States would be prepared to use nuclear weapons. According to Cheney, the head of Iraqi military intelligence later remarked that "the warning was quite severe and quite effective. The allied troops were certain to use nuclear arms and the price will be too dear and too high."
As secretary of defense, Cheney quietly asked Powell and the Pentagon planners a fundamental question in the run-up to the war. Cheney's query: "Tell me how many tactical nukes are we going to have to use to take out an Iraqi Republican Guard division" if circumstances required it. "That was the question," Cheney recalled. "It took a while for them to figure that out. Finally, after I asked about three or four times, Powell came back and the answer was 'seventeen.'"
Powell recalled that the speculative number was high because planners could not really know how the Republican Guard might be positioned at the time the United States might deploy such tactical weapons. If the Iraqi troops were thinly spread along a long front, it would require more; if they were more densely massed, it might require fewer.
Cheney did not brief Bush on the tactical nuclear planning but wanted to be ready in the event of disaster. "I was curious: If you get into a situation and we have to follow through on our threat," Cheney recalled, "what's that going to look like?"
- On Saturday, February 23, 1991, the ground offensive began at four A.M. Baghdad time (it was already Sunday there), eight P.M. in Washington. Bush addressed the nation on Saturday evening, then attended a seven A.M. Sunday service at St. John's Church. In his pew at St. John's, the president, in his mind, veered between the service and the desert. Cheney passed him a note: "Norm says it's going very well!"
There, in the familiar setting of an Episcopal church, hearing the words of the Book of Common Prayer, surrounded by his family, his cabinet, and his advisers, Bush read the news with relief. Cheney and Powell briefed him at the White House after church, and then, sitting with Barbara, Bush listened to a Schwarzkopf press conference describing the coalition's rapid progress through its Iraqi targets.
The news was fantastic. Bush had hoped for a fast victory, but this was more than even he had dared to expect. "I felt myself choking up, just as I did in church," Bush dictated on February 24. He savored the moment. "It's going to be quicker than anyone ever thought. All the talking heads, and all the worst case, and all the Congress and their pusillanimous views, look, now, to be wrong. God, I hope so, because it means American life."
- Desert Storm's speed and success was prompting talk that had been largely unimaginable even weeks before, when the congressional vote was so close and commentators argued that Bush might be leading American forces into a bloodbath. Should Bush redefine the mission and seek regime change in Baghdad? Why not push on to the capital?
Though the formal military and policy structure around the president did not raise the issue-occupying Baghdad seemed a nightmare that would splinter the coalition-the president was beginning to hear such chatter informally. In the sauna at the House gym, for instance, several old colleagues, including Sonny Montgomery of Mississippi, pressured him to take Saddam out altogether. "Our people want him gone," the lawmakers told Bush in the dry heat at the end of February. "They want him out of there."
Emotionally, Bush agreed with such locker-room talk. Intellectually, though, he knew the smart move was the limited move. "I firmly believed that we should not march into Baghdad," Bush recalled in 1998, continuing: Our stated mission, as codified in UN resolutions, was a simple one-end the aggression, knock Iraq's forces out of Kuwait, and restore Kuwait's leaders. To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us, and make a broken tyrant into a latter-day Arab hero. It would have taken us way beyond the imprimatur of international law bestowed by the resolutions of the Security Council, assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an unwinnable urban guerrilla war. It could only plunge that part of the world into ever greater instability and destroy the credibility we were working so hard to reestablish.
All sound points, but Bush also wanted a clear, decisive end to the conflict-or as clear and decisive an end as one could have when the mission allowed the enemy chief to remain in power. "Nobody wants to use the word surrender-[it] doesn't go [over] well out there [in the Arab world]-but I've never heard of a war where there's not a winner or a loser," he told his diary on the evening of the twenty-fifth. "Well, maybe that's not true-you've got Vietnam and Korea. But on this one, we need the clarity of purpose if we're going to finally kick, in totality, the Vietnam syndrome."
Bush was handicapped by the clarity of his own mission. "We need a surrender, we need Saddam out," he told his diary. "And yet our objectives are to stop short of all of that." Bush had come this far in large measure because he had limited his demands. In the intensity of the moment, he wanted more-he wanted a formal Iraqi capitulation and Saddam removed from power. "I'm not interested in his saving face and neither is the rest of the world," Bush dictated. What he wanted, however, would not trump what he thought was right in terms of keeping his commitment to the coalition.
The rout of Saddam's troops was nearly total. Television images of the U.S. military blasting Iraqi troops, vehicles, and armor along the highway from Kuwait City to Basra were being watched worldwide. Bush asked his commanders whether it was time to declare victory. Powell called Schwarzkopf from the president's study next to the Oval Office. They agreed that they had accomplished their mission: Saddam had been driven from Kuwait in rapid fashion. The ground war was approaching the hundred-hour mark, which offered a poetic stopping point.
- At nine P.M. on Wednesday, February 27, 1991, Bush spoke to the nation from the Oval Office. Barbara had been scheduled to deliver a dinner speech that night. He asked her to shift her plans so that she could be in the Oval Office, sitting just outside camera range. He wanted her with him.
The United States, under Bush's direct, personal leadership, had created an unlikely coalition of allies that included the Soviet Union, China, and Arab nations long skeptical of the United States. In the aftermath of Korea and of Vietnam, unhappy conflicts that had sapped America's confidence, Bush and his commanders had projected power and accomplished a carefully defined objective at minimal cost in American blood.
The Iraqis lost nearly 90 percent of their tanks, and the victorious coalition had to shift its focus to guarding and housing some 60,000 Iraqi prisoners. American forces lost 148 troops killed in action, compared to the more than 20,000 Iraqi army dead.
With diplomacy and a determination to honor his word-that Saddam's aggression against Kuwait would not stand-Bush had done something virtually no one would have thought possible only two years before: He had risen further in the eyes of the American public than Ronald Reagan ever had-further, in fact, than any other president in the history of public opinion surveys.
Eighty-nine percent of Americans polled by Gallup approved of Bush's performance in these weeks. Truman never rated that highly; nor had Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, or Reagan. Several had come close in hours of victory (Truman polled 87 percent approval after V-E Day in 1945), but George Bush, flush from the hundred-hour ground campaign against Saddam Hussein, now stood at an unmatched summit of popularity.
In a series of telephone calls from his desk in the Oval Office around six P.M., Bush spoke with his comrades in arms-John Major in London, General Schwarzkopf at the front. (Major, a Tory, had become Britain's prime minister after Thatcher fell from power at home in November 1990.) Powell and Cheney had just passed along the cease-fire order to Schwarzkopf for midnight eastern standard time that evening, three hours after Bush's scheduled speech. "It's just dawning on me," Bush dictated, "that what is about to happen is historic."
His wife could hardly believe what the world was saying about her husband. "I wish I could freeze the newspaper columns in a time capsule," Barbara told her diary on Saturday, March 2, 1991. "They are raving over George today. It won't last, but nobody thought that a war could be fought like this and won in this manner."
- Yet there was no swagger, no self-satisfaction, in the wake of the victory in the Persian Gulf. For Bush the best course-the only course-was to move on to the next thing: "I know that these euphoric...ratings, nothing like it since Truman after World War II, are nothing, they go away tomorrow." One might think a president who had spent much of his life preparing to lead in complicated diplomatic moments would savor Desert Storm, finding a quiet joy in his own skill and success. Yet the restless Bush-the man for whom forward motion was everything-was certain that this glorious hour, like all other hours, would pass away.
Bush made mistakes at the end of the Gulf War. By failing to force Saddam to the surrender table at Safwan, where Schwarzkopf received the Iraqi capitulation on Sunday, March 3, 1991, the president enabled Saddam to save some personal face. (Bush had not insisted for fear that Saddam might refuse to come.) He regretted the decision. "It hasn't been clean, there is no Battleship Missouri surrender," he told his diary. "This is what's missing to make this akin to World War II, to separate it from Korea, and Vietnam." More substantively, Bush had encouraged Iraqis to rise up against the regime. When Shiites and Kurds did, in fact, rebel against Saddam after Safwan, though, everything went wrong. The United States did nothing to support the insurgents, and the uprising was put down in part by Iraqi helicopters that the coalition had allowed Saddam's army to keep. In the beginning of the war, in January, Bush had told reporters that war was not easy. Neither was war's wake.
- What kind of victory was it, Bush wondered, when the defeated rival remained in power? Turgut Ozal of Turkey called in with a hawkish message. "[Ozal] wants to humiliate Saddam," Bush dictated. "He simply doesn't want to let him off the hook, in saying this, he's putting his finger on why I don't feel euphoria. Hitler is alive, indeed, Hitler is still in office, and that's the problem. And that's why, though I take great pride in the fact the shooting has stopped, our military [is] doing great, American people elated, [but] I have no elation."
Bush's postwar despondency-there is no other word for it-was well masked. He spoke of it to himself, in his diary, but seems not to have shared it with others. (To have complained of the burdens of the office to others was unthinkable-self-indulgent and self-pitying.) The letdown was rooted in his failure to bring about Saddam's fall, which wounded Bush's competitive spirit, and in his closely held view, articulated in private, that the work he had been born to do was now likely done. "The basic thing is I'm tired," Bush dictated. "So life goes on, and I'm thinking to myself at this moment, I'll probably get over it, I want out, I want to go back to the real world....I want to get out of this, I want to walk into the drugstore at Kennebunkport; build a house in Houston; or teach at the library at A&M, with less pressure." He knew he was down, and he hoped he could talk himself back to good cheer: "I'm so lucky to be here, too, so I'll sort it all out when the day dawns."
Credit 41.1 A lonely walk on the South Lawn of the White House after deciding to initiate the coalition's air war against Saddam Hussein, January 1991. "I know what to do," he told Barbara privately-but he was consumed with worry about the loss of American and Iraqi lives.
If he remained in the arena. "Confession: I wish that this were six months later, because what I think I'd do is say, 'I'm getting a little old, a little tired, somebody else ought to have a shot now,'" Bush told his diary in late February 1991. "Bar wants to hear nothing of that...but I've got to confess that it's on my mind. It's not that I don't want to fight, but it's that I've lost heart for a lot of the gut political fighting, as a result of trying to lead this country and bring it together in the Gulf. It's strange but true."
He should have been on top of the world. Instead, victory in a real war had sapped his energies for the often-manufactured skirmishes of politics, and he was realistic about what was ahead.