The Commanders by Bob Woodward

Author:Bob Woodward
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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I. The direct quotes are from an Iraqi translation of the meeting made from a tape recording. A U.S. official said Ambassador Glaspie’s own official report of the meeting to the State Department corresponds with the Iraqi version, but Glaspie later said that only 80 percent of the meeting had been published by the Iraqis.;

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18

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ON AN OVERCAST SATURDAY MORNING, August 4, Cheney, Powell, Wolfowitz, Schwarzkopf and several of his top commanders flew up to Camp David.

Cheney was comfortable with Operations Plan 90–1002. It was the only one they had and he did not want to reinvent the wheel in the midst of a crisis.

They all went into the retreat’s big lodge, with its modern conference room. Bush, Quayle, Cheney, Sununu, Webster and Wolfowitz sat on one side of the 25-foot conference table. On the other side were Baker, Scowcroft, Powell, Schwarzkopf, Fitzwater and Richard Haass. Five small model airplanes were arranged down the middle of the table.

Webster opened with an intelligence update. The CIA director did not usually receive a lot of attention in such meetings because most senior officials felt his briefings were a mere summary of the various classified reports and analyses that had already circulated to them.

This morning his report spoke for itself: an unnecessarily large Iraqi force of more than 100,000 was in Kuwait. Some of these Iraqi soldiers were approaching and massing near the Saudi border—a possible grim foreshadowing of what happened before the Kuwait invasion. The only thing standing between Saddam and the vast Saudi oil fields was a battalion of the Saudi National Guard, fewer than 1,000 men.

Cheney called on Powell, who said that General Schwarzkopf would give an expanded version of the Tier Two option discussed earlier, Operations Plan 90–1002. “The plan is do-able,” Powell said. “It will achieve the mission of defending or repelling an attack. Should there be a subsequent decision to move north to Kuwait” under the same plan, that would be “do-able but expensive.” Under any circumstance, “some [Reserve] call-ups would be required to sustain this force over the long term.”

Summarizing, he said: “There’s a deterrence piece and a warfighting piece. The sooner we put something in place to deter, the better we are. What we can get there most quickly is air power. The Navy’s in position. There’s more moving. Within a month, we could have a large field army in Saudi Arabia. It would be hard to sustain, though, for a long period. There is not much left for elsewhere” in the world should a new crisis develop.

The Chairman reminded them that, given the size of the force that would be necessary to meet the threat, and the distance it would have to travel, this was not another Panama.

What about the Iraqi Air Force versus the Saudi Air Force, asked Sununu, who was sitting between Quayle and Webster.

Iraq has 1,127 aircraft, Schwarzkopf replied. Limited quantities of good ones. The Iraqi Air Force is predominantly used for defense.

Schwarzkopf’s Air Force commander, Lieutenant General Charles Horner, said the Saudis had 60 U.

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