Deadline Ideal for Launching Night Attack

WASHINGTON —  A grim-faced President Bush, huddling at the White House with members of his war council in the early hours of Friday morning, decided on today’s “high noon” deadline for Saddam Hussein because that would be nighttime in the Saudi Arabian desert, perfect for launching the massive ground war if Bush gives the final signal.

“The 12 noon deadline,” a source familiar with the war strategy sessions said Friday, “was set on the basis that . . . that would allow the allies to take military action tomorrow night if Saddam Hussein doesn’t pull out and Bush decides to go ahead with a ground attack.”

Bush plunged into the discussion of how to respond to the surprise Soviet-Iraqi peace plan for ending the Gulf War immediately after returning to the White House about 10:20 p.m. Thursday from Ford’s Theater, where he had watched a special performance of “Black Eagles,” a play about black combat pilots in World War II.

Members of the war council had already been weighing the issue in National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft’s spacious office in the West Wing of the White House for several hours when they were summoned to meet with the President in the residential quarters. And the discussions there extended nearly three hours more.

Wide-ranging as the war council’s opinions were, however, two fundamental points quickly emerged:

All agreed that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s decision to go public with his peace proposal, a formulation Bush deemed “unacceptable,” put the United States under pressure to make a dramatic gesture of its own. The Soviet move threatened to wrest control of the course of events away from the coalition arrayed against Iraqi forces and hand it to Moscow, and indeed to Baghdad itself.

Second, Bush himself was determined to do what he has done at every crucial stage of the Gulf crisis: stick with the plan. “ ‘I want to lay out the plan for what we require,’ ” White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater later quoted Bush as saying.

“ ‘Let’s set a deadline.’ ”

And Bush’s decision to hand Hussein an ultimatum of a little more than 24 hours to withdraw unconditionally or face a destructive ground assault that could begin at any time after noon today (9 a.m. PST) was determined by convictions that the President came to hold weeks before the dramatic late-night meeting with his advisers, aides say.

The President had made up his mind long ago that he was pursuing the right course against Hussein and would not be deterred, a senior White House aide said. Bush, he said, returned to the White House on Jan. 2 after spending the Christmas holidays at Camp David and told his war council and his senior staff:

“In these 12 days of thinking over things, I’ve resolved all the moral issues in my own mind. This is a case of good versus evil. Saddam has to be dealt with, and we should have plans to do it.”

Moreover, senior aides said, Bush had never believed that the Iraqi president would leave Kuwait unconditionally. Nor had he held out real hope for Moscow’s efforts to broker a settlement, though he publicly commended it as a “useful” effort.

Accordingly, while his advisers presented a range of options for dealing with the Soviet plan, Bush was set on taking an unyielding position: If Iraq defied today’s deadline, a ground war could--and probably will--begin almost immediately.

Hussein defied an earlier deadline of midnight Jan. 15 that the allies set before launching the aerial bombardment of Iraq. Since the deadline fell at 11 a.m. in Baghdad, the allies waited until the following night to launch their attack.

This time, said sources familiar with Bush’s thinking, things may move faster.

“Any time after noon is fair game,” a senior Pentagon official said Friday, adding that if a ground war begins, it would likely last about two weeks and include a swift and massive encirclement of Iraqi troops by allied ground forces.

One White House official said that until Bush lined up the allies behind his ultimatum, there had been “a lot of concern that we were going to get snookered.”

Now, a senior Pentagon official said, if the Iraqis do bow to the allied position and withdraw, “this would not be an orderly, dignified pullout; this would be a defeat.”

Indeed, officials said, the White House war council had been marked by what one senior Pentagon official called a “consensus position” that the United States had to make sure that the end of the war could be accomplished in a way that would not only defeat Hussein, but humiliate him.

Bush’s decision on how to respond to Moscow’s peace bid was quickly and strongly endorsed by Britain and Saudi Arabia.

The ultimatum, said a Saudi source familiar with the war strategy sessions, means that Hussein “now can be humiliated by conceding everything or by what the allied ground forces do; he has his choice of humiliation.”

A rush of overseas telephone calls to allied leaders during the next several hours brought the rest of the coalition on board by about 7 a.m., although one source said the Egyptians at first proposed that Hussein be granted an extension of the deadline beyond today.

Bush’s decision to announce the ultimatum personally reflected the way he has personalized the Gulf crisis in his own mind ever since Iraq invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2. Only about 20 minutes before deciding to go to the Rose Garden himself instead of leaving the announcement to Fitzwater, Bush had received intelligence reports that Iraq had begun setting fire to Kuwait’s oil wells, refineries and other petroleum installations--a “scorched earth” act of defiance that mocked Hussein’s earlier offer in the Soviet-brokered plan to withdraw peacefully.

During the war council discussions, both Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed concern about the amount of military equipment that the Iraqis could remove from Kuwait and take back to Iraq during a withdrawal.

Although the seven-day timetable that Bush laid down Friday will “implicitly” limit Iraqi efforts to take home all their combat vehicles from Kuwait, a Defense Department official said that most of Hussein’s toughest troops, the Republican Guard, “would not be affected” because it is dug in on the Iraqi side of the border with Kuwait.

While Cheney and Powell expressed concern about the long-term implications of leaving this force intact, defense officials said such a consideration would not justify continuing the war if Iraq agreed an unconditionally withdraw.

Word of the Soviet offer, which government officials said Bush regarded as an ill-advised gesture aimed at winning Soviet influence in the Arab world at the expense of allied goals, broke into an evening that the President had planned as a relaxing night of dinner and theater.

As Bush dined with his wife, Barbara, Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Merrill A. (Tony) McPeak and Benjamin Paton, president of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, word reached him that Gorbachev was planning to call.

The President went to his office in the White House residential quarters and took the call from Moscow at 6:47 p.m. The two men spoke for a little over half an hour as Gorbachev outlined the peace proposal and Bush “raised serious concerns about several points,” Fitzwater said.

At the same time, Scowcroft and Secretary of State James A. Baker III began meetings at the White House to consider how best to respond to the Soviet-Iraqi offer.

Leaving his aides behind to work on the response, Bush and his dinner guests hurried off to Ford’s Theater, the historic playhouse a few blocks from the White House where Abraham Lincoln was shot.

As the President left for the theater, other members of his war council arrived at the White House. Cheney and Vice President Dan Quayle, both dressed in the black-tie evening clothes that they had planned to wear to a dinner at the Danish Embassy, joined Baker, Powell, Scowcroft and his deputy, Robert M. Gates, and White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu.

Their meetings resulted in an initial U.S. response, which Fitzwater announced to the press about 8:45 p.m.

The presidential motorcade returned to the White House about 10:20 p.m. About three hours later, with the ultimatum strategy adopted, Baker went to the State Department and began calling allied leaders.

Times staff writers Melissa Healy, David Lauter and Norman Kempster contributed to this report.