As the midnight deadline came and went in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 15, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein`s troops were still in Kuwait. TV cameras showed dark windows in the White House. The likelihood was that President Bush had turned in for the night and there would be no immediate attack.
Just hours earlier, Pope John Paul II had sent final pleas to Bush and Hussein asking each to avert a war.
Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro said Bush promised the pope, ”Our aim is to bring peace to the region.”
Iraq did not respond.
United Nations Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar was back in New York for a Security Council meeting after his futile meeting the previous Sunday with Hussein. A final French peace initiative on deadline day drew no response from Hussein.
As the first few minutes of Jan. 16 passed across the United States, it was dawn in the Middle East.
Midmorning in Saudi Arabia, wailing sirens sent American soldiers scrambling into gas masks, gloves and heavy suits, and diving into bunkers to await an Iraqi missile attack. But it was a false alarm.
President Bush began his day at 7:20 a.m. with a walk around the White House South Lawn. He called his pastor, Episcopal Bishop Edmond Browning of the National Cathedral. He prayed.
At 7:30 a.m., Secretary of State James A. Baker III asked the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the U.S., Prince Bandar bin Sultan, to come to his office in the State Department. American forces were ready to attack Iraq that night, Baker said, and President Bush wanted to notify King Fahd.
Prince Bandar relayed the news to the king in Saudi Arabia.
It was afternoon in Britain, where police and immigration officers were rounding up 28 Iraqis who, only a few weeks before, had been ordered out of Britain as security threats.
At 10:30 a.m. in Washington, Bush discussed the coming war with Baker;
Defense Secretary Dick Cheney; Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft; Chief of Staff John Sununu, and Vice President Dan Quayle.
One mile northwest of the White House, Iraqi Ambassador Mohamed Mashat entered his embassy for the last time.
”I am leaving today,” he said.
Bush sought to keep a normal schedule. He spent 50 minutes with members of his Education Policy Advisory Committee, who urged Bush to ”regain the crown” as the education president he had promised to be.
In Israel, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir addressed his people on television.
”We would like to see ourselves remain out of the conflict,” he said.
”It is not our affair, but the Iraqi tyrant wants to force us into it.”
One hour before the attack, Baker placed a call to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to alert him to the coming action.
Gorbachev asked Baker if he could try one last time to talk Hussein into leaving Kuwait. Baker agreed. Immediately Gorbachev sent a message to the Iraqi leader through his ambassador to Iraq.
The Soviet ambassador met Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz in a fortified bunker in Baghdad and handed him the message. But this last diplomatic peace attempt also fell short. Hussein was not in the bunker at the time, and Baghdad made no response to Gorbachev`s appeal.
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Israel also got an hour`s notice from Washington. Immediately the government declared a state of emergency and ordered civilians to open their gas mask kits and keep them nearby. A total curfew for the occupied territories confined 1.65 million residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to their homes.
Between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. Washington time, Bush notified Congress. He phoned Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), president pro tem of the Senate, and House Speaker Thomas Foley (D-Wash.), and sent Congress the official notification that all diplomatic efforts had failed.
In the Persian Gulf, allied bases and warships had been bustling with activity for several hours.
Despite the clear, desert night skies, it was darker than usual because of the new moon. That was an asset for the hundreds of thousands of allied soldiers in the region who had been preparing for war with Iraq since August. It would not be this dark again until Feb. 14. It was a perfect night for a surprise attack.
The 5 1/2-month containment action labeled Desert Shield was over.
Now the allied fighting forces had orders to fire against and fight the million-strong Iraqi army in earnest under the sobriquet Desert Storm.
On air bases scattered across the Saudi Peninsula and on allied warships gathered in the gulf and the Red Sea, the first, select pilots and sailors were told, finally, it was time to fight.
Pilots from the U.S., Britain, France, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait got final briefings for the night`s sorties.
Their aircraft were fueled and armed with an astonishing array of
”smart” weapons-high-tech computer- and laser-guided bombs.
They were new weapons developed in the last 10 years, touted to be revolutionary, but largely untested in combat.
Shortly after 1 a.m. Thursday, on a base in eastern Saudi Arabia, the first of the allies` warplanes took off.
For the next hour, on bases and aircraft carriers throughout the region, hundreds of planes from the allies` massed armada of 1,800 aircraft streaked into the sky and headed north.
”Hey, Bud man,” shouted Col. Merrill Karp, commander of the Air Force 35th Tactical Fighter Wing, to one of his pilots who was taxiing for takeoff in the Saudi desert, ”hit `em hard.” His pilot shot a thumbs-up gesture through the cockpit bubble and roared into the night sky.
Among the 60 American warships in the gulf and the Red Sea, on the venerable, World War II-vintage battleships Wisconsin and Missouri, sailors fired off some space-age Tomahawks. The 21-foot-long cruise missiles rose off the decks of the hulking old battlewagons and proceeded toward pre-selected Iraqi targets at a relatively slow 550 m.p.h.
The surge of activity made it obvious to the troops and reporters on the allied outposts and warships what the pilots and aircraft ground crews already knew.
Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who commands all 420,000 American warriors in the gulf arena, delivered the news to his troops in a stirring, Churchillian way:
”Soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines of the United States Central Command: This morning at 0300 hours we launched Operation Desert Storm, an offensive campaign that will enforce United Nations resolutions that Iraq must cease its rape and pillage of its weaker neighbor and withdraw its forces from Kuwait.
”. . . During my visits with you (in the last five months), I have seen in your eyes a fire of determination to get this job done quickly so that we may all return to the shores of our great nation.
”My confidence in you is total. Our cause is just! Now you must be the thunder and lightning of Desert Storm. May God be with you, your loved ones at home and our country.”
Sometime before 3 a.m., the Tomahawk missiles were probably the first allied craft to cross into Iraqi-held airspace. Apparently the Iraqis did not detect the first 100. The missiles hugged the ground at altitudes of 50 to 330 feet, flying the contours of the land, guided by their computers.
If any Iraqis spotted airborne Tomahawks in the predawn darkness, they must have been chilled by the sight of a giant cigar with a winking light rocketing overhead. The missile`s light sporadically flashes to illuminate ground features in the dark, so the computer can make course corrections.
The attack was not secret for long in Iraq, however. Radar picked up the gathering cloud of warplanes coming its way shortly before 3 a.m. in Baghdad. Peter Arnett and John Holliman, correspondents for Atlanta-based Cable News Network, reported live from their ninth-floor room in Baghdad`s Rashid Hotel that Iraqi anti-aircraft fire was filling the sky over the city at 2:40 a.m.
”There has been an attack,” Arnett said shortly afterward. The lights and most phones in the Iraqi capital went dead within the hour.
The first allied shot to hit an Iraqi target was a 2,000-pound, laser-guided bomb dropped on telephone headquarters in downtown Baghdad. It was delivered by a Stealth fighter, the eerie, bat-like radar-evading warplane.
The telephone building, considered crucial to Iraqi military communications, was targeted for early removal by allied planners. For the Stealth, it was an easy target.
The pilot, armed with enhanced night-vision equipment spotted the building as easily as if it were day. He caught its roof in the cross hairs of his bomb sight, engaged the laser guidance system and fired.
The building exploded.
Armed with a special telephone line that didn`t depend on the ruined Baghdad telephone system, the CNN correspondents continued broadcasting through satellite relays around the world.