Atkinson: The 2nd Brigade had had a fairly tough fight against a dug in Iraqi armored brigade which was fundamentally destroyed in a rather intense bit of armored combat across the open desert. And as the word filtered down that the war in fact had ended, that the ceasefire had been declared and that this was it, there was an effort to find some way to commemorate the end of the war, that captured both the relief the soldiers felt, and the exhilaration that they felt. And they rooted around in the back of a jeep for a copy of Lee Greenwood's tape, that had become the anthem of the Desert Storm Operation. And they couldn't find Lee Greenwood. All they could find was James Brown, "I Feel Good," which was an anthem from a different war of a different kind--1968, I think it came out. So they plugged James Brown into this truck with big speakers on it, and you heard James Brown, "I Feel Good" blaring all over the desert, as their hymn of thanksgiving that the war was finally over.

Q: At the Safwan ceasefire talks with the Iraqi generals--what happens with the Iraqis' request to fly helicopters in?

Atkinson: The Iraqis asked Schwarzkopf during the talks at Safwan if it would be OK if they were to use helicopters. They explained that the air campaign had done such damage to the bridge system and the highway system that it was very difficult to get around, which was true. At this point, Schwarzkopf was feeling fairly generous and said, as long as you're not flying over our positions I will order our pilots not to shoot down your helicopters. Unfortunately the Iraqis took this largesse and converted it into a military advantage because when subsequently there was an uprising of Shi'ites in southern Iraq, the Iraqis launched many helicopter, attack helicopter strikes against them in ways that resulted in the deaths of many Shi'ites.

Q: What was Washington's miscalculation about the Shi'ites?

Atkinson: Well, when the twin rebellions began shortly after the war ended with the Iraqi Shi'ites in the south and the Kurds in the north both rebelling, there was a fundamental misunderstanding I think in Washington that the Shi'ites in the south were tools of the Iranian fundamentalist regime. And that what they wanted was to overthrow Saddam and to establish something akin to what the Ayatollah had established in Tehran. There was some concern about this. Not realizing, in fact, that there wasn't much connection. The Iranians were supplying some weapons and were certainly providing moral support, and encouraging the Shi'ites in southern Iraq to do their best to make life miserable for Saddam. But there's no firm evidence that they were in fact, that the Shi'ites in southern Iraq were taking orders from Iraq or from Iran or were bent on a kind of overthrow of the government that would have led to an Islamic republic.

Q: Explain to me why Bush's decision to stay away from getting involved in the uprisings in Iraq.....

Atkinson: Well, Bush had encouraged the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hand and to overthrow the government of Saddam Hussein. He'd said this publicly during the course of the war. The Iraqi Shi'ites in southern Iraq and the Kurds in northern Iraq were foolish enough to take him at his word. They did precisely that. They rebelled. The difficulty was that the rebellion was seen, not only by Saddam--but by the party that he headed and by the sect of Islamic believers who were a minority and yet in power in Iraq --as a threat to them. So they rallied round Saddam essentially. Bush made the decision that getting involved in 2,000 years of Mesopotamian politics probably was a losing cause in the long run. He was certainly encouraged toward this belief by Powell, who believed himself that getting involved in Iraqi politics had no benefit for the United States. And the decision was made to fundamentally keep hands off and let the Iraqis fight it out among themselves.

Q: At the end of the war when you look at Bush's struggle to explain why we were going to war....what are we left with?

Atkinson: Well, Bush tried to convince people in the United States that this was fundamentally a moral crusade, that we were going to war to uphold certain fundamental values on which our country was based. That it was a war of good against evil, of upholding the integrity of territorial boundaries of all of the things that we believe are necessary to civilized behavior, particularly in the new world order that Bush was espousing. And the fact of the matter is that the war was about cheap oil and benign monarchies and preventing the rise of hostile powers in the Persian Gulf region that were inimical to the interests of the United States. So the gap between what Bush was peddling in terms of a rationale for warfare, and the reality of that warfare itself, it was pretty substantial. Pretty hard rhetorically to make the leap from one to the other. And I think ultimately pretty difficult for Bush to carry that larger purpose beyond the war in a way that was really satisfying to the American public.

Q: What were the victories of the war?

Atkinson: Well, I think there were some clear achievements that ought not be denigrated. The United States affirmed the use of military power as an instrument of international diplomacy, something that had been discredited basically as a consequence of Vietnam. The American military showed that it could fight and win. That it was extraordinarily competent, that all of that money that we had spent in the 1980s was in fact used for a credible purpose. Saddam had been largely defanged. Saddam was as a threat to peace and stability in the Middle East fundamentally finished. Not as finished as we would have liked in seeing that head on a spit outside the gates of Baghdad, perhaps. But he no longer posed the kind of threat to the stability of the world that he had. It provided a certain impetus for Israel and its Arab neighbors to talk. And provided some glimmer of hope that this most intractable of problems was going to be solved. It empowered the United Nations in ways that the United Nations had never been empowered before. It showed that the United States as a leader on the world stage still had the ability to pull together a very diverse coalition of nations and to lead. And to exert itself as a superpower. All of these things were achievements of the Gulf War.

Q: And the ultimate effect on the so-called Vietnam Syndrome in the military?

Atkinson: Well, George Bush said, we've licked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all. I think there's something to that. I think that certainly within the military there was a feeling that the 20 years that they had spent, in effect, preparing for this war, had been well spent. And that they had exonerated themselves by fighting capably by preparing for war, by minimizing losses by American forces and coalition forces. So I personally would hope that we haven't licked the Vietnam Syndrome to the point where we forget about Vietnam and the consequences, the terrible, the terrible results of wandering into a war that you ought not wander into. But in terms of Vietnam being a monkey on the backs of the military and the American public at large, I think there's something to that.

What's your assessment of Schwarzkopf's performance?

Atkinson: Well, I think Schwarzkopf needs to be given his due. He won the war. If he had lost the war or if he had come back with 10,000 dead, we would not have been singing his praises. He had done what he set out to do. He'd held together a very diverse coalition under very difficult circumstances in ways that no one could have anticipated he was prepared to do. He had showed himself to be a diplomat as well as a warrior. I think on the other hand, Schwarzkopf performed in ways that weren't necessarily unique to Schwarzkopf. He had, after all, seven hundred thousand troops there. He was fighting a second rate military with a first rate military. He tended to be rather niggardly in giving credit to his subordinates, in ways that I think are unfortunate. He had a lot of help, and sometimes you would not have known that from his subsequent statement after the war. The bottom line was Schwarzkopf was given a job and he did it.

Q: What did we learn about Colin Powell through this war?

Atkinson: Well, Powell showed himself to be extraordinarily competent in many ways during this war. I think that it's difficult to come away from Desert Shield and Desert Storm without an appreciation for the fact that here is somebody who seems to float above the shoals that snag lesser mortals. His capabilities in keeping the other chiefs of the services satisfied and unified, his ability in handling the Schwarzkopf account which was not an insignificant part of his role in the whole war. His role as a fulcrum between the military and the civilian side of the government, as the interlocutor basically between the theater and Washington, was carried off with remarkable aplomb I think. And we saw, as a consequence of looking behind the scenes after the war and what had happened and so on, we saw certain things about his character that I think are interesting. The fact that he's basically, he's a very profane, very earthy man in some ways. He's a man who's got a temper himself, Lord only knows. He's somebody who doesn't have an overly inflated view of himself, who recognizes that he's got limitations and perhaps even deficiencies. And I think we saw that he's a pretty accomplished guy, not only in a military uniform but as someone who recognizes where the pieces fit together in something as complex as the political military enterprise that was the Persian Gulf War.

Q: What did the moment mean to George Bush? What is it going to mean to his place in history?

Atkinson: In retrospect, I think it's clear that Bush rose above the limitations of character and vision for the first time, and as it turned out, the only time, in his presidency to become a really extraordinary man, briefly during Desert Shield and during Desert Storm. It's hard to see that his presidency will be remembered for anything greater than his performance during the war. He showed himself to be a really remarkable commander in chief. It was a major war, it was our tenth major war as a country. But, it wasn't World War II. It's hard to argue that he was Franklin Roosevelt. I think history will look back and smile on George Bush's performance. He performed in ways that might have been difficult to predict beforehand. And he performed after the war in ways that in many ways were entirely predictable. Again, Bush came back to earth when the war ended. And there Bush, I think, will remain.

Q: Did the war teach us anything?

Atkinson: Well, I think that the Gulf War was unique in some ways. And that it's always hazardous to try and project one set of circumstances that lead you to war on other circumstances in the future. I mean I think what the war showed in part was that expeditionary warfare is no panacea for domestic ills. That's what brought Bush down. The country recognized, quite quickly, faster than he did certainly, that having shipped off a very large army, and then brought them home again, then the country had to turn its attention to serious domestic issues, which Bush was incapable of handling in a resolute way that was satisfactory to the electorate. Sending armies off to defeat despots, has only a limited shelf life politically. And my own view is that the war affirmed military power as as a viable lever in diplomacy. It reaffirmed it. It reminded us that we're capable of doing this, and that it has results that sometimes can only be brought by military power. Other than that ,I think it's dangerous to suggest that the war really had a lasting impact in ways that shaped the world. There's no new world order that came out of it. The new world order is something that's much vaster than the Persian Gulf War, if it exists at all. And the Persian Gulf enterprise was only a way station toward a post Cold War arrangement of nations. So I think it's difficult to make the case that the Gulf War had say, the kind of influence and impact that World War II did-- or anything even remotely like that.

We've certainly seen subsequent to March of '91 that the efforts that went into putting together a coalition and fighting a war against a despot in Iraq, aren't necessarily prescriptive for other problems. In Somalia we put together a coalition of sorts under a UN banner and went down there and accomplished very little. The forces and the conditions which had led us to a certain measure of success in the Persian Gulf didn't obtain in Somalia. It's not clear whether they will obtain in Bosnia. And I think there are just limitations in trying to predict history as a consequence of past history.

Q: Is the impact clear about Saddam's ability to be a menace in that area of the world?

Atkinson: Well, I think the price of limited warfare is always going to be eternal vigilance. If you're not going to fight total war with a war aim that includes capturing the capital of your adversary and destroying the leader of, in this case Iraq and all of the power structure that supported him, then you're left with a requirement to keep an eye on him, maybe for decades. Is Saddam a menace? Saddam's certainly a nuisance. It's hard to believe that he's really going to be a menace in the same way. He's not going to have the kind of strength to capture Kuwait again. He's going to be a pain in the neck. And it's necessary to keep an eye on him. I don't think it's necessary to believe that he's going to arise again in the same form that he did in 1990.

Q: Is that why some feel disappointed with this war?

Atkinson: Certainly you can feel irritated that Saddam has survived, and he's outlasted all of his principal adversaries. I mean Thatcher's gone, Gorbachev's gone, Bush is gone, they're all gone, Shamir is gone. Saddam is still there. He pulled his pistol out of his holster when Bush was defeated by Clinton in '92 and fired a few celebratory shots in the air. That's very irritating, regardless of whether you voted for Clinton or Bush. There's part of us that wants a sense of closure, and in this circumstance closure includes seeing Sadam dead or gone or both. So, I think it's human to feel that there's an incompleteness there.

Q: Because of that shall we call this war a great success or not?

Atkinson: I think the war was not a great success, but I think it was a success. I think if you look at what the coalition powers in the United States set out to do that it was largely accomplished at minimal loss of life on our side. And in ways that would be difficult to improve upon. So I think it's a success. And I think it denigrates the achievements of those who fought it to claim otherwise.