Five Decisive Moments

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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