Gates: One of the concerns that we all had, and that certainly the Saudis had, was the impact of tens of thousands, potentially, hundreds of thousands, of young American soldiers coming to Saudi Arabia and the potential for terrible cultural clash in very conservative, very religious Saudi Arabia, where relationships between men and women are very different and where there was generally a real worry on the part of the Saudis about sort of the presumed cultural backwardness of this occupying army. And I remember on the way to the airport Chas Freeman and I rode together in the motorcab, going out to Cheney's plane. I remember Chas turning to meand he says my greatest fear on all this is when the Saudis capture some young GI pissing on a Mosque. But the other side is exactly that it never did happen and in fact one of the things that I think somewhat stunned the Saudis was how religious the American Army was, and the provision for religious services and so on, and it is not the image of this country that is conveyed by television or anything around the world. So they were really unprepared for that.

Q: Were you present when Mrs Thatcher made her 'No time to go wobbly' remark? Were you up at Walkers Point when that conversation took place?

Gates: I think that may have taken place immediately after I left. Scowcroft and I would split Bush's vacation in Kennybunkport and the day of the meeting about the Iraqi tanker when everybody flew up from Washington for that meeting was my last day there. And so when the plane went back to Washington that afternoon, I went back on it and Brent stayed. But the real issue was what to do about this Iraqi tanker, that had left the Gulf and whether to stop it. A shot had been fired across its bow and it had not stopped and so the question was whether to disable it. And the notion of disabling a ship without sinking it, is a little more complicated than the movies would have one think and the chances of trying to shoot the rudder off and not putting a shell right through the engine room is a problematical. I have to say that the debate was very strong. And Scowcroft and I, and I think Cheney were all of a mind that we should disable the ship. And if we had to sink it, to sink it.

It was the first military engagement after we had made decisions to send large numbers of forces, we were beginning to send fighters already and some were already in Saudi Arabia. We were talking very tough and it seemed to us very dangerous in the first occasion when the use of force might take place, for us to back off, that it would make it look to the Iraqis and even worse to our allies that maybe we were just talk and when push came to shove we weren't ready to use force.

Baker's position--he wanted to use this incident to gain time to get Soviet agreement to a UN Security Council Resolution, that would authorise the use of force in enforcing the sanctions. And it was a very close call for the President. And ultimately he sided with Baker and decided to give Baker the additional time, which Baker then used very effectively, did get Soviet agreement to vote with us on that resolution.

In retrospect I believe that, at least Brent and I became convinced that we had been wrong. That in fact Bush had made the right decision and that it created an environment in which we had Soviet support for virtually all of the ensuing UN Security Councils Resolutions. But our worry about the impact, I think, was what was being reflected by Mrs Thatcher in her comment about this is no time to go wobbly. There was never any danger in my view of George Bush going wobbly. I believe that from the first weekend on, he never deviated from his determination to throw Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.

Q: Did Jim Baker go wobbly?

Gates: No, I do not think that Baker went wobbly. I think Baker saw the value of the coalition. He basically had two separate threads of action in the administration, two separate paths. Cheney in charge of the military preparations and Baker in charge of the diplomacy. And it seems to me the measure of Bush's skill in which he moved fairly easily between the two paths, sometimes siding with Cheney and sometimes siding with Baker, but basically without a single mis-step creating the coalition and then still fighting the war, and doing so as effectively as our forces did.

And I think it was in this instance he was right to go with Baker that getting the resolution out-weighed the risk of upsetting the allies. For example, later the same kind of decision had to be made in terms of the offer for one last, exchange with the Iraqis, in terms of the domestic and the international audience whether it was worth the risk.

Q: Do you remember the day when you sat and got the first Schwarzkopf briefing?

Gates: Military was asked to provide during this briefing what kind of an offensive strategy they would pursue with the forces that they had available to them, and there about 200,000. And the briefing was given and there really wasn't a lot of give and take in the meeting itself. But after the meeting was over, Scowcroft and I went back up to his office and we just were very disturbed at what we had heard, because the proposal was to just attack the heart of the Iraqi line, rather than some kind of a faint around the flank or something like that, and I approached this somewhat modestly because, I was in the AirForce and not in the Army and we were dealing with Generals who had a lot of combat experience, and, so on but I have had a lot of history. And it seemed to me, and to Brent, sort of the classic American frontal attack counting on supply lines, logistics and over-whelming support, to be able to over-whelm an enemy rather than the cleverness and the clever generalship if you will. Now that all may have been total nonsense but at least it was our reaction to the briefing.

Q: Why did you react to that, what did you think was going on? Why did you think they were giving you that briefing?

Gates: I have to separate out how I viewed what happened at that briefing--what I thought at the time--from what one reads later about the military views of why they gave the briefing that way. Their later view was that they had no choice given the small number of forces that they had. Our view at the time, I think was, that this was an effort, however, conscious or unconscious, to basically say this is going to be a no win thing, and the casualties are going to be very high. And maybe we ought not do this. I think that there was very little enthusiasm in the American military for, in fact, throwing Saddam out of Kuwait militarily.

Q: Why was that?

Gates: One of my experiences over the years, in Washington, as I have watched different Presidents deal with the military and I worked in the White House for four Presidents and attended decision meetings under five, is that contrary to mythology, the biggest doves in Washington wear uniforms. And I think that particularly after Vietnam they are very leery of feather-merchants of civilians, greying notions of using military force to accomplish a range of objectives however sensible or justified they may be. And I think that they try, perhaps even un-consciously, not only to exaggerate the level of forces that will be required to accomplish a specific objective but the casualties as well, in the hope of forcing a sanity check on the politicians or on the civilian experts who have no concept of what it is like to sit there and watch a young soldier bleed and die. And I think that these guys also think that war in the situation room is too clinical. And that we don't have an appreciation for what it is really like, and that they would prefer to avoid the use of military force at all cost.

Some of the biggest debates that I have ever witnessed in the situation room on this problem and on dozens of others was the debate between the Military representatives and the State Department representatives. With the State Department representatives arguing for the use of military force and the military officers arguing for the use of diplomacy. So I think it is a cultural thing and I don't second guess the military on that, I think that their concerns are justified, because I have seen a lot of civilians make a lot of proposals for a lot of silly military actions that eventually did not take place. So I understand their caution, but I think it's that kind of a cultural environment that manifested itself, in the lack of enthusiasm on the part of the military for actually going to war.

Q: You have expressed very adequately exactly what Colin Powell thought. How aware were you that these were his views?

Gates: I never heard Colin Powell try and deflect the President from, his course of action or to argue in front of the President for containment. I don't recall any such thing. He would at times in the privacy of Scowcroft's office, sometimes with Cheney there, sometimes with Cheney and Baker both there make those points.

On the last day before the war began, when the President signed the directive authorizing the action, Colin made a very eloquent statement, warning everybody, it was going to be a lot uglier and a lot messier than they thought. And that he had an obligation to warn the President about casualties, that the battle would not go as the plan said, that there would be, things would happen, that no-one had anticipated, that there were unpredictable circumstances at war, and that once it has started, the President was no longer in control. It was a very eloquent, very thoughtful, and I think it totally responsible statement by the General of what we should expect.

Q: What effect did that have, how did the President reply?

Gates: All of us took it very seriously, there may have been people at lower levels who are fanciful and have naive view, of how this whole thing might go. I don't think anybody in the decision circle and the gang of eight if you will had any illusions or believe this was anything other than very, very serious business. The estimates of casualties that we got while, significantly lower than were being banded about in the American Press, nonetheless constituted serious numbers, and I mean as far as the President was concerned, one casualty was one too many.

The President had a great sense of responsibility in all of this, I mean as the war got closer, he became very contemptulative about it all, and we all along the way knew that this was a major undertaking that historians would dissect for decades about the decisions that were made and why we were doing things and often when the Deputird Committee for example was writing the war objectives, one or another of us would say, 'Historians are going to ask why we didn't do this or that other thing, let's make sure that we have thought this all through and that we make these decisions and that we record, and we make the right decisions and that we record them properly.' So there was a sense of history about the whole thing, at least for those at the most senior level, I think.

Q: To pull you back--after that first briefing in the White House, I want to get an understanding of the dynamics. What happened as a result? What did you guys do to make things start to move?

Gates: As a result of the briefing, Scowcroft called Cheney, and they had several long conversations, and my sense of it was that, that Dick was sympathetic with Brent's concerns. And I think that was the circumstance under which further contingency planning took place in terms of what kind of a force the military thought they really needed in order to carry out an offensive in which you could limit American casualties, and then the briefing on that force took place on October 30th.

Q: Would you have been surprised at that stage if the Commander had been changed, I mean how badly did this briefing go down?

Gates: I don't think that the briefing went down so badly that there was ever any consideration given to changing any of the senior military officers at all, I don't think that issue ever arose.

Q: As a result of the critical reception that first briefing received, did the military start to get the message?

Gates: I think a couple of things happened that changed the situation, One I thinkthe message got through that there had been a lot of unhappiness at the White House and as much as they might dismiss Scowcroft's view of military tactics--because after all he was an Air Force General, and not an Army General--I think that they also were smart enough to realise the very close nature of the relationship between Scowcroft and the President, and that they had better take these concerns seriously. Also I think that was the point at which people were beginning to realise--including we at the White House--that the force that we had there was inadequate to go on the offensive, the Iraqis had continued to re-inforce, and by that time, by mid October or so, the Iraqis had something over 400,000 troops in the theatre of military operations. The notion of going up against that with the American half the size, really didn't make any sense to anybody. And that's when the contingency planning for other options began.

Q: Describe this the October 30th meeting the military briefing about what it would take--

Gates: We all met in the situation room on October the 30th, the gang of eight plus some of the senior military people. I think that the new contingency planning the new proposals were actually presented by one of Norman Schwarzkopf's deputies, both Colin and Cheney were there. And I don't remember a lot of the details about the meeting but, but it clearly had the potential to overwhelm the President with what was required, and I have to admit rather cynically I thought to deter him from going forward. I remember the briefer in essence saying, 'Well first of all, we will need the 7th Corps out of Europe', now what they were talking about was taking the heart of the NATO defence the two heaviest divisions in the American Army and moving them from Germany to Saudi Arabia. The cost, the implications of doing that for the alliance, all of the different things that were going on, were just awesome, in terms ofwhat was involved. Then he said, 'We will need six carrier battle groups.' Well, a carrier battle group is several dozen ships, so that the magnitude of the naval force being assembled again was just awesome. And I don't think that perhaps since Vietnam or earlier we had ever assembled six carrier battle groups for anything, and it was just an incredible force.

And then the last thing I remembered on the list which is usually the political poison pill that takes care of any of these options the civilians want to explore was of course you will have to activate the National Guard and the Reserves. In other words you are going to have to pull Americans out of the daily lives in every city, town, and farm area in the country. Disrupt their lives and make them a part of the war effort. And I'll never forget Bush pushing his chair back and in essence saying,'you've got it, if you need more come and see me'. And he left, and I sensed that the military folks were just absolutely stunned by the---does he really know what he has just done, and how much it would cost and so on and so forth...and I think he did.