Cheney: Not necessarily that we were going to have to acquiesce but there were two schools of thought here within our Government in terms of how to respond. One was sort of stiff the Israelis and I didn't think that was the right way to go. I was more an advocate that we need to work with them. We needed to let them know that we were doing absolutely everything we could to head off this scud missile threat to Israel, that we were sympathetic to it, that we didn't want them to respond because that would obviously do damage to the coalition and respond in a way that would let Saddam Hussein break the coalition apart possibly. That was his strategic gamble. But we wanted to co-operate with them in terms of the Patriot deployments for example and in terms of setting up the joint intelligence cell which we finally did, in terms of reallocating some of our assets. I had directed General Schwarzkopf eventually to put more aircraft into the scud hunt in Western Iraq, not because it necessarily was the right military target but because it was very important in terms of being able to persuade the Israelis that we were doing everything that they could do to deal with this crisis and there was no need for them to get involved.

Q: A couple of days later, a lot of people remember this you were having your morning briefing and, unusual for you, you exploded when you discovered there were only 30 sorties against the scuds and you said 'Come on we've got to get this together'. You told Schwarzkopf to get on with it.

Cheney: Well I think the difference between myself and General Schwarzkopf - perfectly understandable we have different perspectives - his job was to execute the war plan and he wanted to put aircraft on targets that would allow him to achieve his objective. Also Israel was not part of his command. Israel has always been covered by the European command not the central command and so in a sense this wasn't his problem. I think it's also fair to say that militarily the scud attacks were not doing very much damage. A few casualties, some property damage but in the relative standard of things the scuds are a very crude instrument, conventional warhead on it weren't likely to seriously jeopardise or threaten our forces or the military outcome of the conflict. So when I directed him to reallocate resources and put them on the scud hunts he didn't like it because it was taking aircraft off targets that he wanted to work on in Iraq. From my perspective, from the strategic perspective and the President's perspective, I was doing this with the President's approval-- it was vital to keep the Israelis out of the conflict and the way we did that was to make certain that they knew we were doing everything humanly possible to deal with that scud threat. I talked to Mr Arens every day and I needed to be able to say 'Look last night we flew 50 sorties over Western Iraq dealing with this and here are the results we got' That's the one place where I intervened really in the conduct of the war..

Q: The final Soviet initiative, what did you think the attitude should have been to Gorbachev, what advice were you giving the President?

Cheney: Well this was late, shortly before we started the ground war. And we all got together late in the evening upstairs in his office. Gorbachev from time to time weighed in and while their overall posture was one of co-operation, they went along with the votes in the UN Security Council and so forth, they stopped the flow of arms to Iraq. Nonetheless, diplomatically they frequently were difficult and they kept trying to sort of intervene to negotiate some kind of a settlement and generally I was not happy with the Soviet intervention. Often at times very difficult. The easy thing to do by this stage would have been to say 'Look you don't have any forces deployed, the lives of no Soviet troops are at risk here and sort of put a sock in it, get out of our way and let us go on about our business' And that was not the President's response. Obviously the President makes those decisions and so he felt very strongly that he wanted to keep the Soviets on board. That Gorbachev had stuck his neck out to sort of support us domestically within this venture and that it was important to keep stroking him and keep him on board. And he sort of accepted that responsibility personally himself and did a beautiful job of it. He spent a lot of time on the phone with Gorbachev explaining why we were doing what we were doing. Listening to him, politely but firmly saying 'No we're not going to do it that way, this is the way we're going to do it' and so he handled that account personally himself.

Q: The land war started and there was this scene where you slip into church and pass the President a note. Can you tell me that story?

Cheney: Well, the ground attack had begun on what was it, a Saturday night Washington time, and on Sunday morning the President invited a few of us to go to church--St John's across Lafayette Park. And I got briefed just before I went into the church, I talked to General Powell and had gotten the latest on the ground war. And it was all very positive and in effect it said that the marines had gotten into Kuwait. Things were going so well. That VII Corp that was scheduled to start 24 hours after the Marines launched their attack and 18th airborne had launched their attack, they wanted to go early, they wanted to accelerate by 12 hours and I'd signed off on that so they were going to go forward 12 hours sooner. But as we said in church, the President was right ahead of me in the next pew up I passed him a note and said Mr President things are going very well and he sent it back and said, you know, come up for coffee after the service.

So we all went back to the White House and went upstairs in the residence and sat around the coffee table in the West End living room. As I recall there was a map, I got out a map from Time magazine to sort show him exactly what was happening. And there was family there and there were some classified things I needed to talk to him about so I took him in the back bedroom and I was able to tell him there that the Marines had gotten through the wire and the barricades and the minefield and we only had four killed in action in that operation and that things were going extraordinarily well and again this was sort of the second feeling of great relief because again we had assumed that this toughest part of the ground war in terms of casualties would have been the early hours of that conflict and, and in fact what we were finding was that the air war had been enormously effective and decimated the Iraqi forces and that they in effect were collapsing in front of us.

Q: What would you have done if the Iraqis had used chemicals and caused heavy casualties.

Cheney: Well we had not made that decision yet. What we had done is to convey the message to Saddam Hussein and I did this repeatedly in public statements when I was asked about it all the time and said 'well we reserve the right to decide how to respond and the President will consider use of any of the means at his disposal.' It was deliberately left that vague but obviously somewhat threatening to convey the message to Saddam Hussein that he was much better off if he never, never crossed over that line of actually using chemical weapons against us.

Q: February 27th-- How did the war end?

Cheney: Well as I recall, there was a morning meeting in the Oval Office and the usual suspects present and I sent off General Powell, Secretary Baker, General Scowcroft, probably the Vice President, Mr Gates ----and by this time, what we had on our hands was a collapse of the Iraqi forces and the question that was put to us really was whether or not we had achieved our military objectives and the answer was 'Yes we had... Our assessment was, for example, that we had rendered combat ineffective-- 41 out of 65 divisions. We had a pretty good fix on what we had done to their air force that part they had fled to Iran. We shut down a power grid, air communication, air defence network, their communications system, a lot of their transportation system. We had the highway of death going north out of Kuwait City where we'd decimated what was left of the Iraqis as they tried to escape Kuwait.

Plus we had vast numbers of prisoners as the Iraqis surrendered we had all this footage of our troops switching from being warriors to being angels of mercy, taking care of the surrendering Iraqis. And there was a feeling, I think it was especially pronounced on the part of General Powell, that we'd asked the troops to do about all we could do by way of continuing the slaughter. I mean in fact the Iraqi resistance was collapsing fairly rapidly and it was pretty clear that we'd had a tremendous victory. That in fact we had liberated Kuwait and done enormous damage to the Iraqi armed forces.

Q: The President suggested that a call be put in to Norman Schwarzkopf...

Cheney: We called Norm, and General Powell and I both talked to him I think the President probably did too.

Q: And what was his message?

Cheney: Well the question for him was whether or not he had achieved what he'd set out to achieve and/or were there significant additional things yet to be done. And I think that's where the notion came from that there was a general consensus that we had in fact achieved our objectives we'd done what we said we were going to do.

Q: And that's what General Schwarzkopf was saying to you? When I talked to the commanders on the ground, they were all amazed that the war stopped, putting aside Schwarzkopf......None of them were consulted. [T]hey all reckoned on the evening of the 27th they'd finally got themselves into position to encircle the Republican Guard and go out. Was the decision to stop the war a political one or, was it one taken in consultation with the military?

Chemey: The military was very much a part of it. General Powell was present in the room, was a strong advocate of the course that we ultimately adopted and Norm was contacted on the telephone from Riyadh. So there was no sense, I don't believe on the part of any of us who were there that day that there was any disagreement with this approach. There might have been some different views down further in the ranks -- General McCaffrey and the guys in the 24th fought a major engagement the day after the cease-fire obviously against a brigade of Iraqi Republican Guard. But there was no sense at that time that there was any different point of view that we ought to keep the conflict going much longer. There was a feeling too, there was an important consideration, call it political if you want, but there's only so much you can ask young Americans to do. I mean we really went from this position where they were literally fighting for their lives, conducting military operations against a formidable foe to the point where you've got something like 70 or 80,000 Iraqi troops on your hands. They're surrendering in droves and the biggest problem is figuring out what to do with all the surrendering Iraqis. And General Powell as I recall was a strong proponent as well of this view that there was a limit to how long you could continue the bloodshed without having it look as though we were asking our troops to do something we probably shouldn't ask them to do.

Q: You were comfortable personally with this?

Cheney: I was.

Q: What was the mood as the war ended? What was your mood?

Cheney: Well I mean it was obviously a great sense of relief. A sense that we'd been enormously successful that we'd done what we set out to do . The American military had performed magnificently, the American people were behind the effort in ways we hadn't seen in this country in fifty years. I mean there was this tremendous outpouring of public support, goodwill, restoration of confidence in the military. This sort of a healing process that needed to take place.

Q: The President was surprisingly downbeat.......worried that Saddam Hussein was still there? ... Did he seem downbeat to you?

Cheney: No, I don't recall him particularly being downbeat. I think he was as pleased as the rest of us were. The assumption from the experts was that Saddam would never survive the defeat -- that you could not impose this sort of uh battering on Iraq and Iraqi armed forces and have Saddam Hussein stay in power.

Q: Had you expected the uprisings to occur?

Cheney: The uprisings --you're talking about the Shi'a in the South and the Kurds in the North? I don't recall any specific forecast that that would happen. No. You'd been dealing with Saddam Hussein--he did totally unpredictable things day after day, month after month after month, I mean you could have told me anything might happen in Iraq and I'd say 'OK maybe it will, maybe it won't' but there wasn't anybody who had a very good track record at forecasting those kinds of things anyway. But I don't recall a specific forecast that there would be uprisings.

Q: What was your advice to the President about those uprisings?

Cheney: I was not an enthusiast about getting US forces and going into Iraq. We were there in the southern part of Iraq to the extent we needed to be there to defeat his forces and to get him out of Kuwait but the idea of going into Baghdad for example or trying to topple the regime wasn't anything I was enthusiastic about. I felt there was a real danger here that you would get bogged down in a long drawn out conflict, that this was a dangerous difficult part of the world, if you recall we were all worried about the possibility of Iraq coming apart, the Iranians restarting the conflict that they'd had in the eight year bloody war with the Iranians and the Iraqis over eastern Iraq. We had concerns about the Kurds in the north, the Turks get very nervous every time we start to talk about an independent Kurdistan.

Plus there was the notion that you were going to set yourself a new war aim that we hadn't talked to anybody about. That you hadn't gotten Congress to approve, hadn't talked to the American people about. You're going to find yourself in a situation where you've redefined your war aims and now set up a new war aim that in effect would detract from the enormous success you just had. What we set out to do was to liberate Kuwait and to destroy his offensive capability, that's what I said repeatedly in my public statements. That was the mission I was given by the President. That's what we did. Now you can say well you should have gone to Baghdad and gotten Saddam, I don't think so I think if we had done that we would have been bogged down there for a very long period of time with the real possibility we might not have succeeded.

Q: Did you feel you'd betrayed the Shi'a? The President had asked people to rise up.

Cheney: No I didn't have that feeling.

Q: What was different about the Kurds? What turned it in terms of helping the Kurds?

Cheney: From my perspective in terms of the mission we were assigned with when we sent troops and set up camps and so forth -- a lot of my concern was driven by Turkey. Turkey's a NATO ally, Turkey had just given us access to their bases to use in the war against Saddam Hussein. The Turks had signed on earlier on and shut down the oil pipeline that went from Iraq across Turkey to the cost of millions and millions of dollars. They had been great allies, they were NATO allies, with a solemn treaty obligation to come to the defence of Turkey if they were attacked. And this surge of Kurds north out of Iraq into Turkey was a major, major concern to them and we had Turkey's troops on the border up their trying to seal the border and contain the problem and so I looked at what we did in terms of helping the Kurdish population out, partly it's a humanitarian mission, partly also it helped stabilize the situation so that we didn't make things much worse for the Turks than they now already were.

Q: You would have liked to have seen Saddam Hussein go. Why didn't he?

Cheney: We deemed him a legitimate target as the commander of the Iraqi armed forces and the first night of the air war we took down his presidential palace with cruise missiles. We hit a lot of command centers where he might have been expected to be and if he had been in any of those centers he would have been a casualty. That would have been a perfectly acceptable outcome. I don't think he went near a military facility during the Gulf War. I think he probably hung out in the civilian sections of Baghdad, he knew we'd never attack a civilian area and he was safe. I think in terms of the expectation of the time, as I say there was the view.. belief on the part of many of the experts and others in the region that if you administer a decisive defeat to his military forces that he will not be able to survive politically. There have since the war been a number of occasions on which there have been serious attempts to throw him out but he's always defeated them because he has a very tight security service. He's got a security service watching his security service. He's a brutal, very harsh, tough, individual and so far he's been able to survive.

Q: You find that personally frustrating?

Cheney: No. I don't. There's this line that people use-- well, George Bush is out of power and Saddam Hussein is still there-- well, we have a democracy in this country, we elect Presidents, we unelect Presidents, people serve for four years or eight years, it's not a dictatorship. It's not like Iraq, it's goofy even to make a comparison. I think if Saddam wasn't there that his successor probably wouldn't be notably friendlier to the United States than he is. I also look at that part of the world as of vital interest to the United States for the next hundred years it's going to be the world's supply of oil. We've got a lot of friends in the region. We're always going to have to be involved there. Maybe it's part of our national character, you know we like to have these problems nice and neatly wrapped up, put a ribbon around it. You deploy a force, you win the war and the problem goes away and it doesn't work that way in the Middle East it never has and isn't likely to in my lifetime.

We are always going to have to be involved there and Saddam is just one more irritant but there's a long list of irritants in that part of the world and for us to have done what would have been necessary to get rid of him--certainly a very large force for a long time into Iraq to run him to ground and then you've got to worry about what comes after. And you then have to accept the responsibility for what happens in Iraq, accept more responsibility for what happens in the region. It would have been an all US operation, I don't think any of our allies would have been with us, maybe Britain, but nobody else. And you're going to take a lot more American casualties if you're gonna go muck around in Iraq for weeks on end trying to run Saddam Hussein to ground and capture Baghdad and so forth and I don't think it would have been worth it. I think the, the decision the President made in effect to stop when we did was the right one.

Q: What did the war achieve?

Cheney: Well I guess it achieved a great deal. It reversed a blatant act of naked aggression by Saddam Hussein against a UN member. That was an important principle to establish. Yet denied control of the world oil supplies to a guy who obviously is hostile to the United States and most of our friends around the world. I think it dramatically changed the situation in the Middle East and made possible for example the peace process now that's underway in Israel. It was sort of the capstone, the end of Soviet involvement in the Middle East and an awful lot of our problems over the years had been that they were there as support for Syria or for others who wanted to fish in troubled waters. Hostile to US interests. Brought an end to the hostage crisis in Lebanon. It had the effect I think of showing all of our friends, not only in the Middle East but around the world that the United States meant business, that when we make commitments we keep them, that we have the capacity to send force to defend our interests to wherever they're threatened, and that we are prepared to do that. It was all in all, I think a very good solid performance primarily by the United States but also with a lot of help from our allies.