Five Decisive Moments

By Richard Lacayo

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."

With reporting by Michael Duffy/Washington, Dean Fischer/Riyadh and Ron Ben-Yishai/Jerusalem