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That did it. I had backed Norm at every step, fended off his critics with one hand while soothing his anxieties with the other. "Don't you pull that on me!" I yelled back. "Don't you try to lay a patronizing guilt trip on me! Don't tell me I don't care about casualties! What are you doing, putting on some kind of show in front of your commanders?"
He was alone, Schwarzkopf said, in his private office, and he was taking as much heat as I was. "You're pressuring me to put aside my military judgment out of political expediency. I've felt this way for a long time!" he said. Suddenly, his tone shifted from anger to despair. "Colin, I feel like my head's in a vise. Maybe I'm losing it. Maybe I'm losing my objectivity."
I took a deep breath. The last thing I needed was to push the commander in the field over the edge on the eve of battle. "You're not losing it," I said. "We've just got a problem we have to work out. You have the full confidence of all of us back here. At the end of the day, you know I'm going to carry your message, and we'll do it your way." It was time to break off the conversation before one of us threw another match into the gasoline.
Within half an hour, Norm was back on the phone with the latest weather update. The 24th and the 25th did not look too bad after all. "We're ready," he said. We had a go for the 24th.
By the afternoon of Feb. 27, the ground war had gone so well that Powell met with Bush and other aides in the Oval Office to discuss ending the offensive.
I had already spoken to Norm Schwarzkopf earlier in the morning and told him I sensed we were nearing endgame. The prisoner catch was approaching 70,000. Saddam had ordered his forces to withdraw from Kuwait. The last major escape route was choked with fleeing soldiers and littered with the charred hulks of nearly 1,500 military and civilian vehicles. Reporters began referring to this road as the "Highway of Death."
I would have to give the President and Secretary Cheney a recommendation soon as to when to stop, I told Norm. The television coverage, I added, was starting to make it look as if we were engaged in slaughter for slaughter's sake.
"I've been thinking the same thing," Norm said. I asked him what he wanted. "One more day should do it," he answered. By then he would be able to declare that Iraq was no longer militarily capable of threatening its neighbors. And he added, "Do you realize, if we stop tomorrow night, the ground campaign will have lasted five days? How does that sound, the Five-Day War?"
Since that chipped one day off the famous victory of the Israelis over the Arab states in 1967, I said, "Not bad. I'll pass it along."
"We don't want to be seen as killing for the sake of killing, Mr. President," I said. "We're within the window of success. I've talked to General Schwarzkopf. I expect by sometime tomorrow the job will be done, and I'll probably be bringing you a recommendation to stop the fighting."
"If that's the case," the President said, "why not end it today?" He caught me by surprise. "I'd like you all to think about that," he added, looking around the room. "We're starting to pick up some undesirable public and political baggage with all those scenes of carnage. You say we've accomplished the mission. Why not end it?"