Gates: By the time Jim Baker visited the border area and called the President to report what he had seen, I think we were a fair way down the track to deal with the situation there. But there's no question that Baker's call and clearly the impact that seeing this first hand had made on him, he was able to convey to the President.

I think the President wasn't as moved but also understood that, something had to be done and it was under those circumstances that the decisions were then made, that the US would become involved.

Q: Why did something have to be done, why did the President say, 'Okay let's do something?'

Gates: I think that the decision to act was, was primarily motivated by two factors. The first was pragmatic and that was the concern of our ally Turkey. We still needed Turkish co-operation, after all the big oil pipeline goes through Turkey, there still a major staging base for US forces, they were opposite Iraq and so on. So their concerns about the Kurds were an important factor for us and a sort of hardheaded world of geo-politics, I also think that there was a humanitarian element to it and a feeling that this was a consequence of an action that we had taken in some respects and however, indirect and that we did in fact have some responsibility to try and help.

Q: If you gave yourself a luxury of hindsight is there anything you would do that you didn't do to try and alter that ending of the war?

Gates: I do not believe I would have made decisions or recommendations differently in terms of how we dealt with the end of the war. All of the alternatives to the way things turned out in my judgement would have resulted in the American troops still being in Iraq today. And I believe that the American people would not tolerate that. We accomplished the objectives we set for ourselves. Our objectives do not include the total destruction of Iraq it did not include the total destruction of the Iraqi Army. We wanted to maintain the territorial integrity of Iraq, we didn't want Syria taking a piece here and the Iranians taking a piece here and somebody else taking a piece there. We wanted the territorial integrity of Iraq. We believe that enough army divisions were left for the regular army to be able to protect Iraq from intrusions into its territory. But its ability to invade its neighbours have been destroyed--the Republican Guards. So I think you have to keep coming back to what the objectives were in this war. Why we were there in the first place and not over time began to expand those objectives in retrospect, and those of expansion would have resulted in, in what I believe would have been a quagmire.

Q: Mrs Thatcher said, 'George Bush is no longer President, I'm no longer Prime Minister, Saddam Hussein is still President, who won, who won?'

Gates: I think if you want to know who won, you only have to look at the state of the Iraqi people today and the state of the Iraqi army. There's no question in anybody's mind who won. It maybe some source of consolation to Saddam that he's there at a time when Mrs Thatcher and President Bush are no longer in office. But he still has no offensive capability to attack his neighbours.

Q: What did the war achieve?

Gates: It achieved the two objectives that United States set for itself. We destroyed the Republican Guard as an offensive arm of the Iraqi Army, and of the Iraqi Government. And we liberated Kuwait from an invader. But I would go beyond that.

We destroyed Iraq's recent nuclear program, and we have now put in place a system of controls that makes it most unlikely that program will be restarted again, at least as long as the UN is paying attention.

Q: And if the war hadn't been fought?

Gates: If the war hadn't been fought, I believe that Iraq would have a nuclear weapon today and more than one nuclear weapon. I believe they would have longer range missiles, I believe there would have been another war by now. Because of Saddam's offensive capabilities. I don't believe we would have maintained 200,000 troops in Saudi Arabia for four years simply to deter further aggression by Saddam. I think that the Gulf would be a far, far more unstable place today, than it now is because we fought the war.

Q: In the Summer of 1990 how did you view Saddam Hussein?

Gates: The notion that there was some kind of love feast going on and some great relationship between the United States and Iraq during the period before the war in 1990 or whenever is just a cock. That is just not true at all.

We had done study in the International Security Council in the fall of 1989 on policy in the Gulf and policy with respect to Iraq. And in essence the policy said this is a very bad man, this is an aggressor, this is a man who has weapons of mass destruction, and the question is whether by offering some inducements, whether offering trade and so on, we might be able to bring him inside the tent, we may be able to moderate his behavior in some way. It was a long shot, nobody, had any confidence or optimism that it would work.

In the intervening months beginning in early 1990 we began taking a number of actions against Saddam Hussein that were antagonistic from his stand point. We co-operated with our British colleagues in exposing and capturing the fuses that were being sent to Iraq. We co-operated in uncovering the supergun thing. We refused to give him a second charge of, assistance in terms of loan guarantees to buy American rice, so there were a number of things that were done in the first months of 1990 that clearly were a manifestation that the American Government had become convinced that he was in effect ir-reconcilable. That there was no way we were going to get this guy, to .moderate his behavior or his rhetoric or anything else. And it was during that period that he made his inflammatory comments about attacking is real and so on.

So there were no illusions about Saddam Hussein and what kind of a person he was. I remember very explicitly the CIA Deputy Director my successor, at the time Richard Kerr, at a International Security Council meeting, saying this is a man with blood all over his hands, and he will continue to have blood all over his hands. So I don't think there were any illusions about this.

We knew, beginning in the Spring, that he was beginning to assemble forces. Presumably looking towards Kuwait. Everyone, who knew Saddam all of the Arab Leaders, including the Emir all believed that this was a typical Saddam tactic to try and intimidate his neighbors and to reducing their OPEC quotas and thereby increase the price of oil, he was in desperate economic shape. And everybody assured us, not just the CIA's analysis and the others but even more importantly King Fahd and the Emir and King Hussein and Mubarak and all the rest, not to worry this is the way Saddam does business, he's not going to invade.

Q: The President was getting his morning briefings from William Webster, the National Intelligence Briefing, the build up was being monitored, marvellous tactical intelligence. Why didn't the President pay attention to this?

Gates: I think that there needs to be a greater understanding of the contribution that Intelligence can make in an environment such as we faced in the Summer of 1990. We had wonderful Intelligence on the Iraqi Military build-up. Colin Powell would later say, 'No Field Commander ever had better Intelligence' there has been a lot of quibbling later even by some of the Commanders, a lot of criticism of the Intelligence. But time and time again, Powell and others would say it was the best Intelligence the Field Commander ever had. We knew where every single Division of the Iraqi Army was. We knew exactly how much equipment they had. We knew the capabilities of that equipment and throughout the war there wasn't single technological surprise of the American Forces, so we had great Intelligence from military standards. After all it was Intelligence that made smart weapons smart, knowing where the tele-communications, knowing where the targets were and so on.

So there is a lot of mythology that's grown up about Intelligence during the war, that I think is not fair and is not realistic.

The question of intentions is very different. One has to remember, that we faced an adversary at that time, who operated in an extremely closed circle. Even his own generals, we would later learn did not know that Saddam intended to invade Kuwait. I think that President Bush and the rest of us who had some familiarity and experience with intelligence had no expectation that intelligence would be able to provide us with convincing information one way of the other in terms of Saddams intentions.

What was important, was not necessarily what the guess work of some American college-educated-however-good-analysis that CIA might think--but that the Arab leaders themselves were convinced that Saddam had no aggressive intent against Kuwait. Mubarak, King Hussein, the Emir, King Fahd. These people knew Saddam far better than any western analyst could have ever known Saddam, they dealt with him for many, many years, they had spent intimate time with him in negotiations and talks and so on. The people who knew him best did not think that he would attack. And I believe that the President and the rest of us attached considerable importance to their view of what Saddam was up to. So we had great tactical warning on the part of Intelligence. But intentions -- he basically fooled everybody. Nobody thought that he would be that crazy. I used to have a sign on my office wall, when I was Director of CIA, er, that in effect said, 'The greatest strategic surprise is when an adversary does something that is totally contrary to his own self-interest. And that's what Saddam did.

Q: Why wasn't an explicit cable-- message sent to Saddam Hussein?

Gates: It's an interesting question why an ultimatum or some kind of explicit warning was not sent to Saddam. I think again you have to put yourself back in time to that period. One of the things that I think characterized the Bush foreign policy team was that they were pretty experienced in foreign affairs and one of the things that they were experienced about is that you don't make threats, you're not prepared to carry out. And there was no indication, in July 1990, what the United States might in fact do, if Saddam crossed the border. One of the great problems, one of the great challenges would have been, what if he had just taken the Rumaila Oilfield. My guess is that if Saddam had just taken the Rumaila Oilfield, he would still be there. There would have been no war.

Q: You couldn't bang the table and say, 'Hey we would invade Kuwait..

Gates: The notion in July of 1990 that the United States would put 50,000 men in the field much less half a million. To take on Saddam Hussein's army in the Persian Gulf is nonsense, and so if you are not prepared to carry out the threat, after all he was... And besides the Arabs were totally unprepared to support any kind of a threat like that, even if we had, had forces in mind, and specific contingencies for dealing with it. I mean it had been a big deal when one of the Gulf states not Saudi Arabia had allowed an American tanker to land there. So the Arabs were totally unprepared to support or agree to an American military conflict. And it is interesting, the degree of internal struggle that took place in Saudi Arabia about even after the invasion whether to allow the United States to come in, when they saw a direct threat to their oil fields sitting on their border in the North after the complete occupation of Kuwait. So the revisionism that you could make threat in July of 1990 that would have been persuasive at all and that it might have in fact not come back to, embarrass you deeply.

Q: The Kuwaitis-- I hadn't realised that you guys were trying to make them take at least a symbolic force, and they refused. Do you remember much of the Kuwaiti attitude?

Gates: The honest analysis is that there was not a lot of sympathy for the Kuwaitis, either in Washington or the Arab world. In fact our first contacts with some of the Arabs after the invasion, -- some of them felt that the Kuwaitis had got their come-uppance and that they deserved everything they got and so, the general view of the Kuwaitis at that time was,this was the people that had...I mean they were teasing around a little bit with the Soviets and they were kind of playing all the angles and generally trying to use their money to safe-guard their security, rather than establishing a strong relationship with a country like the United States, that actually could do something for their security so.

Q: How much were they to blame for it themselves. Someone said to me-- they weren't doing really anything to deter Saddam or they weren't willing to placate him.

Gates: Again, I think the idea of blaming the Kuwaitis for either failing to placate Saddam or take action to deterring is a lot of hindsight revisionism, I think that is nonsense, I don't think that unless they were prepared to giving literally billions of dollars, or something like that that there was any way they were going to placate and I don't think they could have put a force in there, even without our troops, that would have deterred him once that he had made up his mind he was going to act. I think that whatever one might have thought about the Kuwaitis at the time, they were clearly the victims and not responsible for the invasion.