"That is really tough, Mister President. Iraq is a big place, about two thirds the size of Texas, and those missiles can be launched from something the size of a tractor trailer." His voice was clear, but sounded like he was speaking from a car or limousine. "During the Gulf War we spent 40% of all our sorties on Scud hunts and never found a one of them."
"Great! Well, we are going to have to do something about them, because they are pissing off the Israelis and the Turks."
"Yes, sir. I just had my driver turn it around and I will be in the Pentagon in a bit. I will be in touch."
"Call me when you figure something out."
I hit the button and cut off the call. "Well, you heard it. We have both a real problem as well as a real help here. I want the Turks involved as much as we can. That gets a third NATO member involved, and we can get some more cooperation out of the others. Kuwait is on board, and the Saudis are making nice, too. Tom, we need to figure out a way to neutralize the Scuds, and I don't much care how we do it. Send more Patriots to Israel. Start running Scud hunts at night. Whatever it takes! Condi, get together with your embassies and with Eric and John and make sure we are all speaking with the same voice."
Tom Ridge asked, "Isn't the Chinese symbol for crisis the symbols for danger and opportunity mixed together?"
I shrugged and gave him a blank look. "No idea, but if that's true, we got us a genuine crisis going on. Let's try to maximize the opportunity part of that." I stood up. "I am going to let everybody else work on this. You know how to do your jobs better than I do." I looked at the team in the Situation Room. "Colonel, Major, thank you for the information. You and the whole crew have been very helpful." I headed back upstairs to tell Marilyn that the world was going to survive another day.
There really was nothing more I could do about this, so I went upstairs and spent the rest of the evening with Marilyn and the twins. Saturday morning I met with General Pace and took a few phone calls, but otherwise I took the weekend off. For the next few nights the Iraqis continued to launch anywhere from six to ten missiles at their neighbors. The Kuwaitis didn't seem to care, since none even came close to hitting anything but a few camels in the desert. The Turks were really pissed by it all, especially when a second hit an apartment building on the outskirts of Adana. The Israelis continued to stew, but held their fire. Even the Saudis managed to catch one, in their desert near Riyadh, though nobody could understand why they had been targeted.
That first battle in the Azwya Valley had been the worst of the fighting, so far. We were beginning to hear the phrase 'Kurdish Coalition' in the media, and it wasn't a phrase we had coined. Helicopter gunships began trickling into the theater from Europe, although the necessary support was lagging badly. The airhead at Erbil was dangerously overcrowded and the Kurds began using nearby roads and flat terrain as secondary airstrips. The Turks were restricting their participation to fighter and close air support; while the Kurds were properly appreciative, there was just too much bad history to allow Turkish ground troops into Kurdistan. The 82nd and the Rangers were forming a defensive line and the Republican Guard seemed to be gearing up for an assault, but with American troops in the line and close air support overhead, they were being handed a bloody nose every time they got rambunctious. Even so, the infantry was being chewed on. The momentum in the war had shifted from the Iraqis, to a stalemate. Meanwhile, behind them, the rest of Iraq was being systematically trashed by the Navy and Air Force. When this war was over, whoever was left alive was going to spend the next generation rebuilding.
If I had one complaint about Bush 41 in the Gulf War it was that he had allowed public opinion to influence how the war ended. After four days of rampaging practically at will through Iraqi armored formations, he had called for a truce after 100 hours. The fact was that public horror at the carnage they saw televised from 'The Highway of Death' was a major factor in the truce, and it allowed over 70,000 Iraqi troops and their equipment to escape into southern Iraq, including large elements of the Republican Guard. One more day and he could have destroyed any remaining Guard units and put a massive crimp in Hussein's personal power base. The Republican Guard was separate from the regular army, with a different chain of command and superior equipment, pay, and privileges. After the Gulf War ended, they formed the foundation he rebuilt his power on. When the time came, I wanted to cripple the Republican Guard beyond reconstruction.
Whether I would be allowed to do that was questionable. So far public opinion was almost uniformly favorable. The use of chemical weapons and the horrifying casualties which were coming to light had solidified American and international disgust with Saddam Hussein. The American casualties during the gas attacks, and our subsequent response had my personal approval ratings back into the 80s, the highest it had been since 9-11. I could afford to trade some of that approval for a definitive end to the Hussein regime.
Part of that approval was the fact that after almost a week into the war the press was beginning to show up. Unlike the Gulf War, when the Pentagon instituted formal procedures to embed reporters with military units during the six months of run-up to combat, this mess had come up too fast. We didn't have the time to brainwash the reporters properly ahead of time. Now they were just showing up on their own, flying commercial into Adana and Aleppo and Tabriz and then making their way across the border into Kurdistan. There were even some managing to make their way to Erbil on commercial flights chartered to bring in air freight supporting the troops.
That didn't always work out so well for the reporters. MSNBC managed to send a crew into a town northwest of Kirkuk that had been shelled with mustard gas. They got all sorts of ghastly footage of dead bodies on the ground, but in doing so managed to contaminate themselves. Since mustard gas is an oily and persistent agent and doesn't manifest symptoms for up to 24 hours after contact, they managed to get back to Erbil before breaking out in hideous pus filled blisters that caused screaming agony and blindness and necessitated immediate hospitalization. Ooops!
I think my lowest moment during the war occurred Monday night the 20th. We were barely a week into the conflict, and only a few days after the battle in the Azwya Valley. That night Richard Engel, NBC's famous war correspondent, was on the air, after managing to make his way into the war zone. The man must have a death wish, I thought to myself, since he made a living going to places everybody else wanted to leave! Regardless, Brian Williams announced that in an exclusive report, Engel was broadcasting from the battlefield where American paratroopers had first made contact with the Republican Guard. Marilyn and I had finished dinner and were sitting there with the mutt, having a drink.
"When the first members of the 82nd Airborne landed at the airport in Erbil, the local Kurdish Peshmerga fighters were a bit skeptical. They had been on the border facing the Iraqi army for many years, and that border has never been a peaceful place. Who were these fancy new soldiers, and what were they going to do in Kurdistan, those were the questions on everybody's minds. As a way to introduce themselves to the Kurds, one of the 82nd's officers showed the Kurds a picture of President Buckman, from when he was in the 82nd, when he received his Bronze Star."
The picture Marilyn had framed with my citation flashed on the screen. When I was in Congress I had only used it a few times in my first campaign against Andy Stewart, but during the Vice Presidential campaign it had been dragged out repeatedly by the national campaign. I grimaced as it came on the screen.