U.S. Officials Set Date for the Attack Nearly 2 Weeks Ago

For the scores of thousands of American and allied troops who launched the ground attack against Iraq early this morning and for their commanders, the last week of frantic diplomatic maneuverings in Moscow, Baghdad and the United Nations were a sideshow that might just as well never have taken place.

For nearly two weeks, the machinery to launch the assault proceeded like a vast train moving down the tracks. Only a massive and sudden decision by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to surrender his forces would have changed it.

So firm was the planning that President Bush did not even ask aides to call him at Camp David when the assault began, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said.

“He knew it had started,” Fitzwater said, “that was the plan.”

The only visible impact that the past week’s Soviet peace initiative had on the process, officials said, was to prompt the Administration to go public with its “last chance” ultimatum to Hussein to pull his forces out of Kuwait. By the time the decision was made Thursday night to make that public appeal, officials already had known for days that 8 p.m. EST Saturday (4 a.m. today in Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia) was the final hour for the assault.

The first decisions on the ground attack actually were made months ago, when Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf and his aides set out the initial plans for Operation Desert Storm. All along, officials said, they assumed that a ground attack would be necessary to force Iraq’s military out of Kuwait. The orders to launch the war, which Bush signed Jan. 15, included authorization for both an air and a ground-based offensive, Fitzwater said.

But the final decision-making process that would open the largest ground battle in decades began with a visit by Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Gen. Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to Saudi Arabia on Feb. 9 and 10.

The two men met with Schwarzkopf, the allied commander, and returned to Washington with a recommendation to Bush, a “window” of several dates within which Schwarzkopf believed the final phase of the battle should begin.

On Saturday, Feb. 9 in a basement bunker four floors below the streets of Riyadh, Cheney and Powell had received eight and a half hours of briefings from Schwarzkopf and from the brigade, division and corps commanders who would lead the major thrusts into Iraq and Kuwait.

Those commanders told Cheney and Powell that if U.S. casualties were to be minimized--a “number one priority” of campaign planning, according to Cheney--they would want allied warplanes to bomb Iraqi troops for another two weeks or so.

Under the original military plan drafted in November and December, the ground phase of the operation would have begun closer to Feb. 15. But, Schwarzkopf explained to Cheney and Powell, an initial spate of bad weather early in the war as well as the diversion of airplanes to hunt down Iraqi Scud missiles and their launchers, had slowed the air campaign by several days.

“We made a very strong commitment to Israel” to find the Scuds after the initial Iraqi missile attack on the Israeli cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa, Fitzwater said. Because of that, “the air war phase went on a little longer than they had anticipated.”

Bush met with Cheney and Powell on Feb. 11, then held meetings with his national security advisers and the defense ministers of the two main Western allies in the anti-Iraq coalition--Britain’s Tom King and France’s Pierre Joxe. Out of those meetings came the word to Schwarzkopf: Fire when ready.

Because of the political pressure being put on the Administration by the peace proposals of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, it was only on Thursday that Bush decided to offer a final, public, ultimatum to Hussein.

As with the Jan. 15 ultimatum before the start of the air war, the final deadline was set knowing that the assault would begin at the first available moment after the expiration date.

Administration officials were determined not to allow Hussein any time for delay, for political maneuvers that might weaken international support for the war, or for any move that might allow his shellshocked and disoriented troops to regroup before a ground assault began.

On Friday, after a lengthy telephone conversation with Gorbachev and consultations with allied leaders, Bush left the White House for Camp David, telling aides he planned to return Saturday night to address the nation.

He rose Saturday morning early, went to his office in Camp David’s Laurel Lodge at 7 a.m., and after an early morning discussion with National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and Cheney, phoned British Prime Minister John Major, Japan’s Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu, Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, Australia’s Prime Minister Bob Hawke and Turkish President Turgut Ozal before taking a call from Gorbachev, the third telephone conversation between the two presidents in the last three days.

Early in the afternoon, Bush called two more foreign leaders--German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Early in the evening, with the war coming ever closer, Bush called his four predecessors in the White House--Presidents Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald R. Ford and Richard M. Nixon--then informed the top four leaders of Congress--House Speaker Thomas S. Foley, House Minority Leader Robert H. Michel of Illinois, Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell of Maine and Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas.

Just about 9 p.m., the President boarded his helicopter for the flight back to Washington and after a half-hour flight, landed on the South Lawn and proceeded to the Oval Office, where he greeted Cheney with a question.

“What have we heard?” he asked.