Atkinson: Franks had been adamant that once the attack was launched there would be no pause. In fact, it became known as the P word, and it was prohibited from using the P word in Franks' presence. Yet, because the attack had been launched prematurely in effect, that the time table had been thrown out the window, there were certain problems that Franks and his 140,000 soldiers were facing, which now caused him to rethink. For one thing the attack was going forward in hours of darkness when he'd anticipated they would have light. And this is difficult to move yourself across minefields in the dark. There were certain other things that had disrupted his timetable in a way that made him think that perhaps pausing for a few hours was more sensible than plunging ahead and risking friendly fire, risking running into minefields, risking having a fuel truck run over an unexploded artillery shell and blowing up. So much to the surprise of his staff, and it was quite a controversial decision, he decided that they would pause. He invoked the P word himself, and announced that they would wait until first light on the morning of the 25th and then proceed ahead. Franks believed that it was important to keep a fist together. That all of his combat power had to be in a clenched fist, and that you wanted to hit the enemy with the mass of that fist rather than as five separate fingers. This was a metaphor that he used ad nauseum. And he believed that if he were to allow that fist to come undone that it would cost him the lives of soldiers in the long run.

Q: What was Schwarzkopf's reaction?

Atkinson: Schwartzkopf got up after a couple of hours of sleep on the morning of the 25th and went in to look at the map in the war room. And he saw that the Marines were plunging ahead, that the 18th Airborne Corps out in the far west was plunging ahead, the French were doing OK. And then he looked and saw that the VII Corps basically had not moved since the time when he went to sleep. He completely and utterly lost his temper. First of all, he demanded to know why the plots on the map were wrong. And there was a great deal of scrambling and hubbub as they tried to get the coordinates that had been given by the VII Corps and match them to the map and realize that that's where VII Corps said they were. And then he called Yeosock the Army commander and said, what the hell's going on here. And worked himself into a lather that persisted for the rest of the ground campaign. Threatened to fire Yeosock, threatened to fire Franks, threatened to get himself a new range of Army commanders who could in fact show the kind of aggressiveness that he thought that he needed to show.

Q: What was Schwarzkopf's general evaluation of Franks?

Atkinson: Well, he'd initially been very happy to have Fred Franks show up. I don't think he knew Franks very well, but he was happy to have Franks and VII Corps to provide the kind of combat punch they had. This appreciation gradually eroded over the course of a couple of months before the war began to the point where Schwarzkopf began to think of Franks as a slow moving pedant. He talked about a pachyderm mentality that VII Corps had. He believed that Franks was a man who made a plan and could not alter it. Was not able to react quickly and spontaneously to the flow of events. That despite the fact that Franks was a cavalry man by training and at heart-- that he didn't have a cavalryman's brio somehow. That he was in fact a rather ponderous tactician. And this problem that Schwarzkopf saw as the ground attack unfolded very slowly -- only reinforced his suspicions of Franks.

Q: Was he being unfair?

Atkinson: I think that Schwarzkopf, being 300 miles from the front and 40 feet underground, didn't fully appreciate the difficulties that Franks was facing. Didn't appreciate the fact that friendly fire was already a big problem and would only get bigger if in fact this vast army were allowed to charge across the desert willy-nilly. Didn't appreciate the difficulties of accelerating the attack, of changing the time table completely. Of transgressing across a minefield at night. I think that he was fundamentally unfair. The commanders who were serving under Franks by and large, believed then, and believe today, that Franks did the right thing under difficult circumstances.

Q: Until the 25th or so, the SCUDs had done relatively little damage. But that goes wrong in Dhahran. What happened?

Atkinson: The SCUDs had caused very little damage until February 25th when a SCUD was launched toward....outside of the port city of Dhahran. The Patriot batteries that were there to defend Dhahran had had a new kind of software installed, and for complex reasons that no one appreciated at the time, failed to recognize the SCUD that was flying overhead. There was a technical glitch that blinded the Patriot temporarily to this one particular SCUD. This SCUD by luck and bad luck on the part of the Allies, hit a warehouse that was being used as a barracks, and immediately caused an inferno, while the soldiers for the most part were sleeping there. And caused the biggest single loss of life of any event during the war.

Q: But in a sense when it happened....there was some luck there, perhaps?

Atkinson: In a sense it was fortunate in the face of misfortune, that this happened when it did. Had this catastrophe occurred on the 17th of January say, right at the beginning of the war, it could very well have changed perceptions of the war, the cost of the war. It would have certainly caused doubts about the Patriot. It certainly would have given the Israelis reason to thinkthat the Patriot assurances were worth even less than the Israelis believed and might have caused the Israelis to leap into the war in ways that they didn't otherwise. So the fact that the tragedy occurred when it did, rendered it almost a footnote.

Q: Can you explain how there could be two distinct visions of the battlefield, one in Riyadh and one with Franks?

Atkinson: There really were two distinct visions of the battlefield as the ground war unfolded. In Riyadh where Schwarzkopf had the benefit of seeing the entire campaign map in front of him you saw the Marines having great success, the Arab forces even making ponderous but steady progress. Out in the far west, the 18th Airborne Corps, including the French making steady progress, the 101st Airborne in the Valley of the Euphrates, the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division, Schwarzkopf's old division which he had commanded, on its way to the Euphrates. For the VII Corps commanders in particular, none of this mattered much. What they were facing was a different enemy than the front line cannon fodder troops that the Marines for the most part had faced in Kuwait. The 18th Airborne Corps had faced very little resistance. There weren't many Iraqis out there. For Franks and his commanders they were focused on the Republican Guard, the best of the Iraqi troops--who were not retreating. Who were in some cases repositioning toward the on-coming VII Corps. For them the fight was not over. In Riyadh, on the other hand, the fight was all but over.

Q: Jumping to the fight known as 73 Easting, what of importance did it reveal?

Atkinson: Well, one of the sharpest early fights in the ground attack was at what was known in the military maps as 73 Easting. It's a map coordinate. And elements of the 2nd Armored Cavalry had come across dug-in Republican Guard troops. And there was a very sharp fight over the course of several hours in which essentially, virtually without losses, the American soldiers destroyed a good portion of the Republican Guard units that they fought. Absolutely demolished dozens of tanks. It showed a couple of things that were important as the rest of the battle unfolded. First of all it showed the prowess of the American soldiers. They fought very competently. They also employed not only tactics, but equipment, weaponry that was far superior when used competently than anything the Iraqis had. They were able to fight at night. They were able to fight with weapons systems that could simply outshoot and outpunch the Iraqis in a way that would be repeated subsequently through the ground war. It showed that the Iraqis were, in some cases, willing to fight. This was a fairly bold effort by the Iraqi commander to stand and slug it out, and yet again, never really had a chance.

Q: The 'highway of death'--do we know how many Iraqis were killed there?

Atkinson: I don't think we'll ever know how many Iraqis were killed there. There were about 1500 vehicles on the highway of death, counted, destroyed vehicles after the war. And another 400 or so on another road, a spur that ran parallel to the coast. Those who wandered through this wreckage right after the Iraqi surrender found relatively few bodies. Certainly some, and many that were terribly incinerated of those that were found. But the prevailing view is that many of the Iraqis had simply gotten out of their vehicles and ran. And it's difficult to believe that deaths on the highway of death probably exceeded more than a couple of hundred perhaps.

Q: So Franks has encountered the Republican Guard with his fist, and he's moving further east....Despite this overwhelming success going on with the Army and with the Marines, where is it all headed.....?

Atkinson: Well, by the end of the second full day of the ground attack everything is proceeding very well, albeit not as quickly as Schwarzkopf had hoped, particularly with the VII Corps. Nevertheless, the VII Corps is wheeling from a northern trajectory to one to the east, and prepared to move across and cut off the fleeing Iraqis who had begun to decamp from Kuwait. the Marines by this point are pretty close to capturing the Kuwait City International Airport. They're pretty close to beginning to move into Kuwait City itself. In the far west the Euphrates Valley is occupied. The concern about a counterattack from Baghdad, has long been forgotten at this point. And it's clear that it's now a matter of time. It's clear that now it's a matter of how much destruction do you want to inflict.

Q: And what ultimately is about to happen?

Atkinson: Well, almost from the time the ground attack began, Colin Powell began examining in his own mind, when it should stop. He became increasingly concerned about media reports of pilots talking about a turkey shoot and shooting fish in a barrel. He became increasingly concerned that this would be seen as an unmitigated slaughter. That basically the American soldiers would be remembered most for shooting a fleeing foe in the back. He was as of the 26th talking very directly to Schwarzkopf about when we're going to stop it, when do we see an end and so on. As of the 27th the decision was made to stop it, largely at Powell's instigation. Powell was again, the brakeman on this train who persuaded Bush, and others, that enough was enough.

Q: But, what did it mean to end a war like that?

Atkinson: Well, the difficulty that the Bush Administration had right from the beginning was in ending a limited war with limited gains in a way that was not utterly dissatisfying somehow. I think in Powell's mind the military objectives were fairly clear and were clearly achieved. Kuwait had been liberated. The Iraqi military had been badly eviscerated. The Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programs had been badly battered, although not as badly battered as was believed at the time. So he had checked off all the boxes, in effect, of the mission that he had been given. And so the conclusion was in his mind, we're finished. We've done what we set out to do. Now it's time to stop it before we face certain consequences of an unmitigated slaughter that will come back to haunt us. The problem with this was that first of all the degree of destruction to the Iraqis was not as great as was widely thought or the public was led to believe. Schwarzkopf gave a briefing in which he said, the gate is closed. That the Iraqi fleeing force cannot get out. That essentially they were encircled. This wasn't true. Why the Commander in Chief would have told people that it was true, why he would have believed in his own mind that it was true isn't clear. But the gate was not closed. There were still plenty of Iraqis getting out. And consequently there was always the hazard that there was going to be a sour taste, the taste of ashes afterwards that a prostrate enemy had been allowed to get away.

Q: How concerned is Powell that images of a turkey shoot is going to tarnish this victory?

Atkinson: Powell was very concerned that in fact, the victory would be besmirched in effect. He believed, as part of his military ethos that there is a kind of chivalry in combat. And that one of the credos of this code of chivalry is that you don't slaughter an enemy that is essentially, has already been laid low. And in his own mind he believed that the strategic gains of killing a few thousand more Iraqi teenagers were probably not worth the risk of being perceived as piling on, as one of the White House advisors put it, of being a bully. And consequently, Powell who always had one eye on public opinion when it came to military matters, quickly came to the conclusion that we had reached the saturation point.

Q: February 27, Washington and Riyadh seemed to misunderstand whether the Republican Guard is encircled or not. Could you contrast how it looked to them and what the reality was.

Atkinson: Schwarzkopf told the press in one of his famous briefings that the gate was closed, implying that the Republican Guard in effect was encircled. That there was no way out. That Basra was cut off. This simply wasn't true. The roads into Basra had not been cut, the roads north of Basra had not been cut. The road across the body of water that's west of Basra had not been severed, the gate was not closed. I think part of this is just the fabled fog of war. I think there was a misapprehension about exactly how far American forces were, to what extent they had looped around north of Basra, the extent to which air power had cut certain roads and certain bridges...

Q: The 'mother of all press conferences.' Can you sum up your sense of what that was....?

Atkinson: Well, Schwarzkopf came out and basically for an hour kept the world spellbound. He presented a fait accompli of a war won in a way that was dazzling. Among other things it played to our sense of great relief that in fact the war was virtually over. He very much was the American Mars here. He was a man who was wielding a pointer like Hector wielding a sword. He conveyed this image of competence, of humor, of strength that was very reassuring in some ways. And I think probably elevated the American esteem toward the military in general probably as high as it had been since before the dark days of Vietnam.

Q: What's your overall assessment of the decision to end the war?

Atkinson: I think that in fact they ended the war when they should have ended the war. I think that it's difficult to make an argument that pursuing the Iraqis for another day, another two days, was going to make any strategic difference to the shape of the peace consequently.