Cheney: My first obligation was to achieve the objective, win the war. Secondly, to do it in the lowest possible cost in terms of American lives and after that worry about the needs and the care and feeding of the press corps. Now I think this was the best-covered war in history. We provided more information in near, real time than ever before in history in any conflict. The press was not happy with the way we did it because a lot of it we did direct to the American people. Our daily briefings for example that were covered live on television and they didn't get to cover the war they wanted to cover but in fact the nature of modern combat, the fact you fight at dark at very high speeds across desert terrain means the old romantic notions of a reporter going out sort of travelling with the troops are a thing of the past and you have to, in fact, make arrangements for the press to cover that kind of an operation. It has to be done in conjunction with military and as I say I was interested in seeing that they got a chance to do their job but not at the risk of accomplishing the mission or at the risk of casualties to American troops.

Those considerations came first and black-outs specifically was designed to deny information to the Iraqis that might prove valuable in trying to counter our ground attack. And with CNN being received in Baghdad and a lot of the press coverage going on around the world I didn't want any stories going out that would somehow undermine or put at risk the situation of the operations. So I issued the orders for the black-out, then the operation went very fast, more rapidly than we thought and so it didn't last very long and we were able to lift it.

Q: And were you concerned also that the press, through its looking for, you know, tanks getting bogged down in the mud and chinks in the armor as it were...inconsistencies... were to undermine public support?

Cheney: Well the press were going to do that anyway. I mean the fact is that there were some reporters who were very good and some who weren't very good. Some who take their jobs very seriously and do a good job of reporting, understand the military and how it works and others who were referred to derisively as food editors. Last week they were food editors; this week they're covering the war. Again, what we did was we felt we had to maintain credibility and credibility meant we never said anything we couldn't deliver on, we didn't make promises we couldn't keep. We never set out to mislead anybody and at the heart of that was to say to the American people, this is what we're going to do and this is why we are going to do it. And that's exactly what we did, and I think the Government and the Defence Department and the administration, me personally, General Powell had more credibility because of the way we explained what we were doing and then delivered on it than any recent administration. But we didn't do it through the press, we did it direct to the American people, we did it on television, we did it live at our press briefings and I think the press per se was unhappy that they didn't control the flow of information, but in fact they didn't because we went over their heads for a lot of it and I felt that was essential in terms of my getting the honest straight message through to the American people. So that's why we did it.

Q: February 11th, Moshe Arens again visited the White House, in a very bad temper. He turned up and said 'Heh, the Patriots aren't working it's time for us to go in.' How did you feel?

Cheney: Well, I disagreed with his assessment on Patriot and I always felt to some extent that Moshe Arens was never a big Patriot fan. He didn't like Patriot, he'd rejected them early when they'd been offered he finally accepted them somewhat reluctantly later on. And he was a big supporter of Arrow and some of the other projects. But he'd always been a critic of Patriot. From my perspective Patriot was an air defence system designed to shoot down aircraft, not missiles, we'd been able to upgrade it and improve it and it was a miracle that we had anything at all to use against missiles, it wasn't perfect but in fact it did its job. It did its job in the sense that it helped us justify to the Israelis why they had to stay out of the war--that we were doing everything that could be done.

The other thing too that's important to understand about Patriot is that in the air defence business, it's designed to defend a point target, if you get an incoming warhead headed for an air field and you launch Patriot at it and you knock the war head off course so it misses the air field, that's a success, that's a kill. If, on the other hand you're trying to defend a city which is what we were doing in Israel, Haifa and Tel Aviv and so forth. If you knock the war head off course and it falls in another suburb, well that's not a success so whether you'd consider it an area defence weapon or point target defence weapon makes a big difference. Obviously the Israelis were much more interested in a broad area coverage but there is no such system, it just doesn't exist and so there was something of a dispute there. But I think that on balance Patriot was a success, that it was strategically an important part of the equation.

Q: But was the importance of [the] Patriot not whether it hit scuds but whether politically it sustained Israeli people?

Cheney: I think that was probably a significant part of it. It was like allocating F15's, taking them off their missions to Baghdad and putting them out over the desert flying scud patrol. Didn't kill many scuds, it turns out we didn't apparently, hadn't been able to confirm that we knocked out any mobile launchers. But it was very important that we tried, we were perceived as doing everything we could. And you would not have wanted to operate any other way. Same for Patriot, we were able to get them there in a hurry put American troops in Israel, helping defend Israel against the Iraqis was strategically important.

Q: And at the time you thought they were working.

Cheney: Well I think they did have some success but, you know, there's an ongoing debate about how much.

Q: I can remember the numbers 41 out of 42 or something......at the time you thought that was good?

Cheney: We've learnt a lot from the process but again what I remind everybody. All my friends in the United States who think we've got defences against missiles we don't. All we've got is Patriot and we're working on upgrades but the idea of defending against missiles, incoming missiles was something that Ronald Reagan was big on the three-year-old strategic defence initiative, but the Democrats and this administration basically shut down on a big part of that.

Q: The meeting at the end of the war -- the conversation you had with Norman Schwarzkopf...

Cheney: Well, remember what's happened by this time. We've run six weeks of air war. Enormously successful, devastated the Iraqi armed forces. We then have launched the ground war. I think we planned for it for months, deployed thousands of troops for all kinds of logistical machinations to get the forces out there for the flanking attack and the thing has gone unbelievably well. And so the outcome's no longer in doubt I mean the Iraqis are done, they're finished in Kuwait, they have been stripped of a lot of their offensive capability. Their air force is basically not operational, their communications network is shut down. 41 out of 65 divisions are rendered ineffective so there's a tremendous sense of victory and then this question of when the war ends is a relatively small matter of fine tuning in a sense relative to what we'd already accomplished.

An important decision, I don't deny that at all but I must say I still have the feeling that there's been a lot of nit-picking afterwards that if I sat back long enough and some folks let them go on long enough - the Patriots didn't work, the guys stopped too soon etc. etc. etc. - if you spin that tale out long enough you'd be convinced that we lost the war. And of course we didn't. It was a tremendous success and I think the mood in the office that day when we made that decision about how much longer will we continue combat operations was very much one of we've had a tremendous success. We did what we set out to do and now we've got to decide when we're going to tell the guys to stop shooting.

Q: To what extent was there a constant debate between you and Powell with you saying 'Heh you know we're achieving very clear political aims here let's go do it...' and Colin Powell saying 'Woah, I remember Vietnam. Don't go too fast, we'll lose the American public.'

Cheney: I think it's been overdone. At the outset we had slightly different views about the strategic significance of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. I was more concerned about it than he was and then as we went through the build-up, I think it would be fair to say that he was more prepared to sit tight and let sanctions work and I was not as prepared to let sanctions work, didn't have as much confidence in sanctions as he did. He made his case to the President, I was with him at the time. Perfectly legitimate for him to make that case, he also was very good at giving us military advice on the potential consequences and cost of the various courses, course of action. He was also instrumental in devising the ultimate strategy and executing the strategy. But overall impression of that whole crisis from the day Saddam invaded Kuwait until the Spring of '91 when it was all over with is much more one of cooperation and moving in sync and agreeing 90% of the time.

Q: Did your confidence in Schwarzkopf ever waiver?

Cheney: I basically made the decision to have him serve in that capacity. I mean I inherited him as head of Central Command when I became secretary, he already had the job but I took it upon myself to make the conscious decision about whether or not I wanted General Schwarzkopf to be the commander or whether we should get somebody else. The Panama operation that we'd done in December of '89 was an example of where I went in and relieved the Four Star who was in command and replaced him. I figured that was my obligation to make certain I had somebody there that I had confidence in and who I trusted. And this is a subject that I discussed at some length with General Powell it was not related just to General Schwarzkopf -- if Joe Blow had been the Central Commander at that time I would have gone through exactly the same kind of evaluation process with him. After I looked at it and thought about it and watched Norm operate for a while and spent time talking to General Powell about it. I was persuaded that he was in fact the right man for the job and I think he was, I think he did a superb job.

Now all of us have our flaws. I've got mine and Norm's got his. You will find people who will say you should have done this or you should have done that. The fact is the results speak for themselves. And in the final analysis what we had was a team that did a superb a job as any team has done in, in recent memory in terms of managing this kind of problem. I thought we had superb military leadership, I thought we had superb civilian leadership. We had our differences, we discussed those differences but we didn't let them out in public and uh we came to conclusions. The President got to make the decisions that a President ought to make and we executed and it's one of the most successful military operations in history so people might not like Norm's personality and he can be difficult at times. May not like my personality, people might not like the way I did my particular job, but I think on balance that's all Monday morning quarter back and a lot of nit-picking. You've got to look at the results and the results were phenomenal.

Q: George Bush ...?

Cheney: He felt I think very, very deeply that what Saddam had done was an outrage. That what he had done to Kuwait the terms of aggression against a harmless neighbour, a small country, was really despicable and I think he harped back to some extent to his World War II experience. I know there were a couple of times where he drew on analogies from the 1940's but certainly triggered for me the memory that he was a guy who's formative years had been spent in World War II as a Navy pilot in the Pacific, shot down in combat and all of that had had a big impact on his thinking and when he watched and saw what happened out here on his watch it was clear that there had to be an aggressive response and he was prepared to lead it and to put his entire administration on the line to do it and did a superb job of it.

Q: The POW's-- Is there anything you want to comment on the POW's or about the emotions of that reunion or, just about the Iraqis treated the POW's in general?

Cheney: It was one of the more emotional moments. There were a lot of moments of high emotion and celebrations and parades and so forth. There were two that were far more sombre that stick in my mind. One was the memorial service up in Arlington, the morning we had the parade here in Washington where we had a service for the families of the guys who didn't make it back and the other then was the return of the POW's. On the one hand -- I was deeply distressed at the very difficult situation they found themselves in, 'cos some of them were very badly treated. On the other hand there was this great sense of relief that they were coming home and also some satisfaction that we'd been able to account for everybody and as we did not, when we finished the war in the Gulf we didn't have the kind of problem we had after Vietnam where we had thousands of people unaccounted for.

Q: At the memorial service you were the guy who with the President sent those abroad...a difficult experience?

Cheney: Well it was, it was. You know in the midst of all of the joy and celebration of the victory and the outpouring support for the troops afterwards, you always had to remember the cost and for the 140-some men killed in action and for their families it wasn't a cheap war and the reminder of that was that memorial service up at Arlington that morning and the President spoke, I didn't have to speak, I'm not sure I could have. It was it was a very emotional service. We had the families gathered there. I always remember a young woman, obviously the wife of a pilot standing right down in the front of the service with a very young girl, 5-6 years of age, on her hand and at the end of the service we had the missing man formation fly over. A formation of aircraft with one slot vacant to commemorate those who didn't return and I'll always remember the look on their faces, as that missing man formation came over.