TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/031191/0311994.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.5 KB | 196 lines

                                                                                THE GULF WAR, Page 32

Five Decisive Moments


By RICHARD LACAYO -- Reported by Michael Duffy/Washington, Dean
Fischer/Riyadh and Ron Ben-Yishai/Jerusalem


    1. JANUARY 9: MISJUDGMENT IN GENEVA

    Scarcely had the meeting begun in the Salon des Nations
conference room of Geneva's Intercontinental Hotel when U.S.
Secretary of State James Baker handed Iraqi Foreign Minister
Tariq Aziz a brown manila envelope stamped with the
presidential seal. Inside was a letter from George Bush warning
Saddam Hussein to get out of Kuwait by Jan. 15 -- six days
hence -- or face the certainty that the 28-nation coalition
would force him out. Aziz, fluent in English, carefully looked
over a photocopy that had been provided for him. When he
finished, the Iraqi lowered his heavy black-frame glasses. "I
am sorry," he said. "I cannot receive this letter. The language
in this letter is not compatible with language between heads
of state."

    When the talks ended 6 1/2 hours later, Aziz's posture was
unchanged. A senior member of the American team decided then
and there that Saddam had never intended the meeting to have
any chance of success. "These guys had not come to make a
deal," he says. "War was inevitable."

    But it may have been an Iraqi judgment at the meeting itself
that made war inescapable. Throughout the talks Saddam's
half-brother Barzan Tikriti had sat on Aziz's right, closely
scrutinizing the American team. Soon after the session ended,
Barzan called Baghdad. The Americans don't want to fight, he
told Saddam. They want to talk their way out. They are weak.

    It was a fateful misjudgment. Baker flew to Saudi Arabia the
next day, where he told Saudi King Fahd that, barring any
last-minute developments, the U.S. would begin an air battle
within two days of the Jan. 15 deadline. In a meeting at the
White House that Sunday, Bush and his advisers chose the hour
to strike: 2:30 a.m., Jan. 17, Baghdad time.


    2. JANUARY 17: THE HAIL MARY PLAY

    On the day the allied air campaign began, a massive troop
movement was secretly set in motion that would seal Saddam's
fate. Fearing that a frontal assault on heavily dug-in Iraqi
defenders could lead to thousands of allied casualties,
Schwarzkopf launched the flanking maneuver he would later
compare to the Hail Mary play -- the football maneuver in which
a quarterback praying for a last-minute touchdown sends his
receivers far off to one side and then deep into the end zone.

    Schwarzkopf did not find it easy to sell the idea to
skeptical U.S. tactical commanders when he first proposed it
last November. They argued that more than 150,000 soldiers
could not be moved that far that fast, with all their armor,
artillery and 60 days of ammunition and supplies, over a desert
with only rudimentary roads. "I got a lot of guff," he recalls.
"They thought that Schwarzkopf had lost his marbles." So stiff
was their resistance that Schwarzkopf ordered his logistics
commander, Major General William Pagonis, to sign his name to
a pledge that the troops and their equipment would be in place
by the Feb. 21 deadline.

    Schwarzkopf reasoned that if his subordinates doubted it
could be done, Saddam's generals would be quite certain that
such a move was impossible and, lacking any aerial
reconnaissance to indicate it was actually under way, would
leave "this big, open flank" largely undefended. He was right.


    3. JANUARY 31: THE BATTLE OF KHAFJI

    Khafji was already a ghost town when a sudden Iraqi thrust
made it the site of the first large ground battle of the war.
Six miles south of the Saudi border with Kuwait, the town had
been abandoned two weeks earlier by residents who fled out of
the range of Iraqi artillery fire. On Tuesday, Jan. 29, nine
brigades of Iraq's 5th Mechanized Division -- regarded by the
U.S. as one of Saddam's better units -- swept into Saudi
Arabia. They entered along a stretch of border that began north
of Khafji and ended at the town of Umm Hujul, 50 miles to the
west. By the next night they had occupied the town. Supported
by U.S. air and artillery attacks, troops from Saudi Arabia and
Qatar retook Khafji the following day after 12 hours of fierce
fighting.

    If Saddam had intended the raid to lure allied forces into
a ground war before they were ready, he failed. Not only did
troops from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the U.S. repel the
invaders, but Saddam's ploy actually contributed to the success
of the allied ground offensive. The battle provided U.S.
military planners with their first opportunity to see how
Iraq's troops operated against American mobile tactics. The
Iraqis performed badly, surrendering en masse when the Marines
counterattacked. "They showed us they couldn't handle combined
operations," says a senior Pentagon official. "They maneuvered
but couldn't work effectively as a unit." Postbattle inspection
disclosed that Iraqi tanks and armored personnel carriers were
in terrible shape. As General Norman Schwarzkopf put it, Khafji
"led us to believe that we were really going to kick this guy's
tail."


    4. FEBRUARY 11: KEEPING ISRAEL IN CHECK

    When Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens arrived in
Washington for a crucial White House meeting, Israel had
withstood 11 attacks by Iraqi Scuds. Some had been shot down
by the Patriot missiles that the U.S. had rushed to Israel
after the first attack on Jan. 17. But a number had hit home,
leaving four dead and 98 wounded. Though the restless Israelis
had acceded to Washington's pleas not to retaliate, the
continuing threat of Scud attacks and fear of chemical warheads
had stretched Jerusalem's patience to the limit.

    Sitting in the Oval Office, Arens unveiled a disturbing
proposal: an Israeli air and ground operation in Iraq that
could take place after the allied ground war had begun.
American cooperation would be essential. To keep U.S. and
Israeli pilots from accidentally attacking each other, Arens
wanted U.S. planes to stay out of western Iraqi skies where
Israeli planes were operating.

    Bush was sympathetic but refused to go along with the plan,
and cautioned Israel against taking any action on its own. His
reasoning: even in the midst of a ground war, an Israeli move
against Iraq could split apart the allied coalition and
enormously complicate battle plans. Israel's best deterrence,
he argued, was to be a close ally of the foremost world power.
But Arens did not leave empty-handed; shortly afterward, the
U.S. increased its Scud-busting air sorties against Iraq.


    5. FEBRUARY 27: GEORGE BUSH SAYS THE WAR IS OVER

    By last Wednesday the explosive gains of the allied advance
had taken even the President by surprise. That afternoon he
heard the full story in a private assessment from General Colin
Powell. At 2:30 Bush gathered his war cabinet in the Oval
Office. "I want to stop the killing," he told them. After Bush
consulted by phone with Schwarzkopf in Riyadh, the group agreed
on midnight as the hour for a cease-fire.

    Though Bush had known for more than a day that the war was
drawing to a quick conclusion, it required a change of heart
for him finally to call off the fighting. Just two days
earlier, after Baghdad radio announced that the Iraqi
leadership had ordered a withdrawal, the President and his
advisers had decided to keep the pressure on: no peace, the
White House would declare, until Saddam "publicly and
personally" agreed to the terms of the U.S. ultimatum outlined
the previous weekend. By humbling the Iraqi leader Bush hoped
to circumvent any prospect that Saddam might pluck political
triumph from military defeat. "Bush was asking him to get down
on his knees," says a presidential aide. "None of this
face-saving stuff."

    By midday Wednesday, however, allied forces were routing the
Iraqis so thoroughly that U.S. military leaders could tell the
President that field commanders were running out of things to
shoot at. "It became harder to justify taking American and
coalition casualties for diminishing returns," says a senior
policymaker.

    The Administration had also stopped worrying that a
cease-fire might leave Saddam with no incentive to agree to
allied demands about POWs or reparations. "The incentive was
the fact that there is nothing between the 24th Mechanized
Infantry Division and Baghdad but 150 miles," says a White
House official. "The Iraqis had a choice: an easy peace or a
hard peace."