Atkinson: I think sometimes the measure of a commander is not so much in the hard decisions that he makes to commit forces or to do something, but in the hard decision he makes not to do something. Schwarzkopf made the hard decision to hold back the Marines not to launch an amphibious landing. And I think it was a decision that was worthy of a Commander in Chief.

Q: What does it say about him?

Atkinson: It showed among other things his ability to evaluate very difficult conflicting pieces of information and make the right strategic judgment. It also showed his ability to resist the impulse to fling forces where forces didn't need to be flung. It was a tough call at the time. It's easier in retrospect to look back and say, oh that was easy, you didn't want to send Marines across the beaches. Why would you have had to do that. At the time it wasn't so easy and he made the right call.

Q: General Franks. What's his character and tell me what he personified.

Atkinson: Well, Fred Franks was a very mild-mannered man. You would have thought he was a college professor, which in fact he had been at West Point at one time. He had been captain of the West Point baseball team. He had later gone back and gotten a degree in English, studying Cromwell and 17th century English literature. Taught English at West Point. In Cambodia in May of 1970, he had had most of his left leg blown off. Here is a man who spent the better part of two years trying to put his life and his body literally back together. In many ways, he personified the Army after Vietnam. Maimed, traumatized, he stayed the course after the war in the face of national opprobrium toward the military, stayed the course at a time when the American Army was really unravelling from within, not only having lost a war but being destroyed by racial strife and drugs and all kinds of indiscipline. And Fred Franks stuck with it. He showed a certain inner grit that people tended to underestimate. He was also a man who was constitutionally inclined to wait as long as he could before making a decision. One of his closest aides said that he was a man who couldn't make the decision to pee if his pants were on fire. This was something that drove his subordinates crazy. They would say, General Franks we need a decision out of you now. And he'd say, I need more information, I need more information. He would wait and wait and wait. And he was the kind of man by personal inclination was not going to get along well with Schwarzkopf. He was very quiet, very mild-mannered, not blustery at all. And he was almost professorial. He would give tutorials on military subjects that Schwarzkopf found difficult to swallow.

Q: Tell me about the growing intelligence picture about the bunker at Al Firdos.

Atkinson: American intelligence knew that in the early '80s the Iraqis had had Finnish contractors build 25 shelters around Baghdad. In 1985, several of these were hardened against air attack and even against nuclear attack. These shelters were watched carefully on the belief that they could have been command bunkers. And in the attack planning there was a plan made to go ahead and strike several of the bunkers which was rescinded when the Allied intelligence determined that the bunkers were not being used. As the war developed into early February three of the bunkers showed signs of life. One of them in particular in a Baghdad neighborhood had been camouflaged on the first day of the war, they put green paint and so on on the ceiling. Reconnaissance satellites were seeing military automobiles and traffic in and around the bunker. The big ears that were listening with military eavesdropping satellites were hearing message traffic in and out of the bunker. There were signs that it was indeed being used as a command post of some sort. None of this was considered absolutely convincing to Buster Glosson. What was convincing, what put the final nail in the coffin of the Al Firdos bunker, as it was known to Allied targeteers, was a spy. The human intelligence network in Baghdad was not very good, but there was one spy, a high ranking Iraqi, who had been quite accurate, and who passed information that was very tightly held within the U.S. government that the Al Firdos bunker was in fact being used as an alternate command post by Iraqi intelligence and secret police.

Q: What about the bitterness of the Israelis about the performance of the Patriot? In the end, how did this work out?

Atkinson: The Israelis believed that the Americans didn't fully understand the deficiencies of the Patriot. That the Americans were being willfully blind about it. And there were bitter complaints. Moshe Arens came to Washington in February and had a meeting with Bush and his senior advisors in which he said, the Patriot is not working... We believe that only 20 percent of the SCUDs that are attacked with the Patriot are in fact, destroyed. Cheney at the same meeting spoke up and said, there is a fundamental disagreement over how effective the Patriots are. Nevertheless, the Israelis recognized that a belief that the Patriot was effective was almost as important as the effectiveness of the missile itself. It helped to calm the Israeli population. It helped to prevent the Israeli government, the Shamir government from coming under pressure to actively leap into the war. It was a very effective propaganda tool. And whenever suggestions were made within the Israeli government that the truth about the Patriot as seen by the Israelis be made public other voices prevailed saying, why would we tell Sadam that the Patriot is not working when in fact it's in our best interest to let him believe that it's infallible.

Q: The Al Firdos bunker attack...After the attack, Powell reacts. Can you talk about that...?

Atkinson: After Al Firdos--after perhaps 200 civilians were killed in that bunker--Powell believed that there was a serious danger of a public backlash in the United States and among the publics of the other coalition partners, that people would say, enough is enough, why are we killing women and children and civilians in general? Powell believed that another Al Firdos could cause the coalition to come unglued. My belief is that he underestimated the resolve of the American public at this point to some extent. That his analysis of the American public as having reacted ultimately against bloodshed in Vietnam for instance, -- there was not a parallel with Al Firdos. The American public reacted to American deaths, 56,000 Americans ultimately dying in Vietnam and not to the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese that were killed. So I think that probably there was a steely eyed resolve that he underestimated a bit in this case.

Q: And was there resentment when Powell ordered strategic attacks be curtailed in Baghdad?

Atkinson: There was great dismay when Powell made the decision to, in effect, curtail the strategic attacks in Baghdad and elsewhere. There was a belief that this was akin to the kind of civilian meddling that had bedeviled the military in Vietnam. A belief that it was a Vietnam-style mistake, as one of the senior officers put it. The feeling toward Powell, I think, was certainly mixed. There was some concern that perhaps he had ambitions and aspirations that went beyond making hard military calls here that perhaps he had presidential aspirations. Some people felt that others would not have ascribed this to him. In general there was an anxiety among those who designed the air campaign that it was being truncated, that it was being cut short. That just at the point when they thought they had the Iraqis on the ropes, the Iraqis were being allowed to get off the ropes, that Powell, in effect, had rung the bell, just when the opponent was about to go to the canvas.

Q: So, on the eve of the ground war, what's the coalition's military position?

Atkinson: Well, as they get close to the launching of the ground war on the 24th of February, the military had every reason to be immensely pleased with themselves. The predictions of severe losses of aircraft and pilots had not come true. The losses had been quite minimal. The extent of the damage inflicted on the Iraqis while difficult to judge in some cases was clearly immense. This despite the fact that the weather had been atrocious. Forty percent of all the sorties had been weathered out in the first weeks of the war. And a feeling that the political aspects of the war had unfolded about as well as you could have hoped. The Israelis had not come in. The Arab countries had remained steadfast in their opposition to Saddam. The diverse countries of western Europe and elsewhere that were part of the coalition had remained steadfast in following American leadership. And now there was a feeling that it was time to deliver the knock-out blow and to launch the ground attack.

Q: What is Bush's state of thinking as the ground war approaches?

Atkinson: Well, Bush had several concerns as the moment of truth came for the ground attack to begin. One concern involved the Russians. A fear that Russian meddling--Gorbachev and his emissary to Baghdad, Primokov--were about to screw up the efforts of the Allies to bring the war to a resolute conclusion. Another concern that Bush had was that the Iraqis would pull back part way, perhaps to the northern border. That they would remain a threat, that they would perhaps occupy Bubiyan Island or the Ramalia Oil Field which was the source of the dispute in the first place. And that the Iraqis would subsequently be able to say that they had only been defeated by Allied superior technology, air power, and had not really been pummelled in a man to man fight across the desert. So these things weighed in Bush's mind as he made the decision whether to approve the launching of the ground campaign or not. On the other hand I think Bush had to feel quite good about how he had handled things thus far. He had showed fixed purpose, which the Prussian military theorist, Klausowitz tells us is very important in military commanders. And Bush had really played out the role of a Commander in Chief about as well as I think anybody could have expected.

Q: And the scope, the scale of the ground war about to unfold?

Atkinson: Well, you have essentially two huge armies lined up facing one another across a vast expanse of desert in a way that hadn't been seen in at least a generation. It was an old-fashioned kind of war in some ways in that you had a very clearly demarcated line between two adversaries. There's a certain romance, I think too, to desert warfare. If warfare retained any romance at all after the horrors of war in the 20th century, you could probably find it in desert war. There was a kind of Lawrence of Arabia quality to all of this, that certainly the American commanders felt. Schwarzkopf had described himself once dressing up in Arab robes and parading in front of a mirror like Lawrence of Arabia. There was a feeling that what they were about to do was something stupendous, something on a vast scale. That it was almost Homeric in its magnitude. And a feeling that it was going to be decisive. That this in fact, was the last act. It had all been building toward this, and that there would be no messy ending, that in fact, it would be resolved by force of arms by this one last titanic battle in the desert.

Q: And yet with all that, Bush has limited war aims......

Atkinson: Throughout the run-up to the war, and throughout the war itself, there were innumerable debates in Washington over exactly what the war ambitions should be. How far should you push it? And a great concern that the limited aims of a limited war not be changed. The antecedent that was most often in the minds of policy-makers in Washington was not Vietnam, but it was Korea. A concern that as in Korea there would be a decision made that the war is going well, why not just push on up to the Chinese border, which happened in Korea and brought China into the war with disastrous consequences. Bush ultimately decided that occupying Iraq, occupying Baghdad was not only militarily difficult, but politically foolhardy. It placed a burden of responsibility on the Americans in particular that would have implied an American presence in Iraq that could last for decades. There was also a recognition that the Iraqis would probably fight better in defense of hearth and homeland in Baghdad than they had in defense of Kuwait. You could make the case that you would be willing to die for your own home in Baghdad, when you're not willing to die for the Emir's Mercedes in Kuwait. All of this led to a conclusion that the war would be stopped at a point short of total victory. And it planted the seeds of a limited victory that would lead to a clear dissatisfaction and discontent at home.

Q: And.....the challenges of fighting this war with regard to the memory of Vietnam?

Atkinson: Vietnam is a poltergeist through this whole thing. For Schwarzkopf and his generals the Persian Gulf war didn't last for six weeks, it lasted for twenty years. The legacy of Vietnam was something that was with them all the time. The knowledge that they had been participants in a catastrophe, in a war that we lost, in a war that called into question the relationship between the Army and the Republic, the oldest, most complex relationship in our nation's history. So Vietnam is a very heavy presence that in a sense needs to be exorcised, and in a sense needs to be reconciled before this war can be finished.

Q: Tell me about the great deception strategy.......

Atkinson: Well, one of the things that Schwarzkopf and company needed to do was to hide the fact that they had moved more than 300,000 soldiers out to western Iraq in preparation for this great roundhouse hook that was to come from the west. There were all kinds of deceptive ploys, employed, including the creation of whole armies electronically. They would have electronic emulators that would send out radio signals back and forth. They would be scrambled, the Iraqis wouldn't be able to hear, but they would hear the hiss of radios operating. There were at night trucks with speakers that would go up and down the border playing tapes of tank noises, so that the Iraqis would think that there were armored brigades moving back and forth on the Kuwaiti and the Saudi side. There were inflatable dummies of tanks and various other military things that would cause any observer from a distance to think that --ah hah--there is in fact the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division just over there. And in fact, the 24th Infantry Division was 300 miles to the west.

Q: At the start of the ground war did the commanders tend to overestimate the strength of the Iraqis--and, why would they do that?

Atkinson: Well, everyone tended to overestimate the strength and the fighting prowess of the Iraqis, I think. They tended to overestimate the number of Iraqis that were probably still in the theater at the time that the ground war was launched. Part of it was a mentality that had come out of Vietnam and had been reinforced by events since then, which virtually precluded commanders like Schwarzkopf from underestimating the enemy. Schwarzkopf had been the ground commander in Grenada, where it was assumed this would be a cake walk against some happy natives and perhaps a few Cubans and in fact, ended up being a fairly bloody fight that stretched on for several days and was embarrassing to the U.S. military. Schwarzkopf had vowed that he was never going to underestimate his enemy again. Therefore there was a penchant to overestimate them, to think that he was greater in number, that he was greater in fighting spirit and capacity. And this was compounded by the fact that it was very difficult for U.S. Allied intelligence to get a handle on precisely how badly the Iraqis had been damaged.

Q: And was Vietnam a factor in this penchant to overestimate?

Atkinson: Well, I don't know... I mean there were technical reasons that caused them to miscalculate . The Iraqis had reorganized their army in a way that made it very difficult for Allied intelligence to calculate exactly how many artillery tubes there were in an artillery battalion, how many tanks there were in a tank company, how many of them were left as a consequence of the weeks of air pounding. There was a general inclination to err on the side of caution in evaluating the enemy because of a concern that the Vietnamese, the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong had been underestimated. A belief that this ragtag barefoot gang of peasants could not resist the military might of the victor of World War II. That was a very painful lesson that stuck with all of the commanders who subsequently led the fight in the Persian Gulf War.

Q: When the Marines started their assault, can you describe the reaction of the front line Iraqi troops?

Atkinson: Well, when the Marines began their attack, very quickly it was recognized that the Iraqis were not going to fight well. And General Boomer, the Marine Commander, was well ahead of schedule, hours ahead of schedule before the attack had hardly begun at all. The Iraqi soldiers in the front lines had been pounded and pounded and pounded. They had been hammered with artillery, with long range rockets, and particularly with air power now for weeks. And they were in no shape to fight. In many cases desertions had been so high as to virtually eviscerate the units that were in the front lines. Was it surprising? I think for soldiers who believed that they were being flung into the teeth of a serious adversary, it was a bit surprising. And in places the Iraqis did fight there were some scraps, there were a couple of pretty good shoot-outs, but all in all, the Marines cut through those Iraqi defenses like the proverbial hot knife through butter.

Q: And how did that collapse then affect Schwarzkopf's timing of the main event?

Atkinson: Schwarzkopf in his bunker 40 feet below the ground in Riyadh has a problem at this point. He sees on the map quite clearly that the Marines are ahead of schedule, and the Marines are plunging on into Kuwait in a way that leaves them exposed. If you can imagine sort of this protrusion of forces. And there was concern that the Iraqis could attack perhaps from the west in ways that could hit the Marines in the flanks. So Schwarzkopf had to decide whether or not to, on the spur of the moment accelerate his attack plan and launch the rest of his forces, particularly the VII Corps, the heart of his ground forces further west, in a way that would completely upset his timetable, but nevertheless would react to the success of the Marines. You had to be prepared to exploit success.

Q: And what does he do?

Atkinson: Schwarzkopf after checking down the chain of command with his Army commanders, made the decision to launch the second phase of the ground attack, the main attack of the VII Corps into Iraq and toward the Republican Guard, almost a full day early. This was clearly the right decision to make given the fact that the Iraqi defenses were so weak and the fact that the Marines were making such progress. But it certainly threw the Army commanders involved for a loop, trying to move, in the case of Fred Franks, commander of the VII Corps, 140,000 men, thousands and tens of thousands of armored and ordinary vehicles forward, all of a sudden ain't easy. And trying to tell the commanders, who have been preparing for months to go on a certain time table that in fact that time table is now out the window, is something that was very difficult.