Haass: As soon as the President said that my heart sank 'cos I knew what he meant and I knew how it would be interpreted. What the President meant was we were not yet discussing it 'cos the feeling was it would be premature, we were looking at our other options, but the way it came out, it came out too hard edged and it made, it made it sound as if we had considered it and we'd rejected it. And it would be interpreted as a signal of weakness. As soon as the meeting ended I went up to Brad Skocroft and I said we have to look for an opportunity to correct that. I explained and he said `You're right' and we ultimately found opportunities to correct it.

Q: Could you describe the nature of that meeting?

Haass: That first meeting reinforced the rule that first meetings of any group are always awful. First meetings are kind of a time for what I call station identification, people go on the air and they say things and they haven't really quite thought it through. In this case you also had several key people out of town, people hadn't had a lot of sleep, they were absorbing stuff. To call it unfocused would probably be uncharitable. What you had was a lot of people talking. To put it bluntly, what we ultimately did--sending half a million people around the world and all that that entails--that was too big of a thought for people at that first meeting even to think about. So instead you had people talking all over the place many of whom were talking about how we could live with this. Let me give you an example... some of the people, particularly from the economics side of the house, were talking about the impossibility of embargoing oil cos the idea that oil is fungible. The moment someone said `well hold it! we're not just talking about voluntary embargoes we're talking about physical cut offs, closing down pipelines, shooting oil tankers out of the seas' and you could see people's eyes go very wide, `oh my god I never thought of that, are you serious? you can't really be serious'. What that first meeting was a kind of coming to terms with the crisis and as a result it was a fairly unfocused effort.

Q: The President, was he making it clear at that meeting that he wasn't accepting the status quo or at that stage was he just keeping his counsel?

Haass: The President was pretty much keeping his counsel; he wanted to let other people talk a lot to get their unvarnished views. He was in more of a listening mode at that point.

Q: And was Colin Powell talking at that stage about the use of military power?

Haass: Not really, there was very little about that. I think it was Colin who gave an initial briefing about where our forces were, what the latest Iraqi military order of battle looked like. The first serious military briefing didn't happen 'til Saturday morning up at Camp David.

Q: Why were you so upset after that meeting?

Haass: I walked out of that meeting about as unhappy as I've ever been in government. My sense was that Saddam had thrown down a gauntlet not just for the Gulf but for much bigger stakes... and I think it means something. And there is a sense I had at the meeting that the people around the table didn't grasp it, they didn't get it and they were not responding commensurate with the stakes. And I was just extremely unhappy and I remember telling Scowcroft how unhappy I was and he said `I hear you, I hear you' and he and the President were taking off for Aspen and he said `Look there's going to be another meeting, get us ready for that, I'm with you, don't worry about me don't worry about the President, but do what you have to do'. So I went back to my office and wrote the briefing memo for the second NSC meeting and it gave me a chance to put on paper what I thought were the stakes l what I thought needed to be done and it was almost therapeutic 'cos it allowed me to sort of say I really didn't like this first meeting and here's the sort of response that I think we need.

Q: And why did this invasion matter?

Haass: The invasion mattered on a couple of levels, one was oil. If Saddam controlled Kuwait it wouldn't simply be the control over that chunk of the world's oil but no other country in the region could ever be independent again. They knew that if they ever crossed Saddam at the next OPEC meeting this could happen to them, he didn't have to invade Saudi Arabia or the other producers to have control over them. Big end to the peace process, Israel would never be free to even contemplate a trade of territory for peace with anybody . But beyond the region it would set in motion the worst conceivable trends that this was going to be the nature of the post cold war world there's essentially going to become a free for all. You don't get historical training points a lot, maybe I studied too much history, but this to me was one of those training points and I just had the sense that whatever he did and didn't do, whatever he said or didn't say, was going to have consequences beyond this crisis. Even though the crisis itself had enormous stakes. So I just thought this was one of those times in history when things counted.

Q: Aspen....the meeting between Thatcher and Bush. What was its significance?

Haass: Aspen's become one of the myths of the crisis, that George Bush went off there weak-kneed and returned back to Washington stiffened. I just don't see it ..., based on what I knew from him and Brent Scowcroft before they went off pretty much knowing what they wanted. What I figured happened between him and Mrs Thatcher at Aspen was a kind of reinforcing of each other's spirit, I think they were essentially in the same place. What was nice for each of them was to have this kind of echo effect and I think each of them came out sort of aaah- isn't this great, now we can move forward together so I think it had a reinforcing effect that sort of added 5 or 10%. It didn't create the American response any more than it created the British response. A lot of people also confused the don't go wobbly, heh it didn't happen here, it had nothing to do with Aspen and happened six weeks later and I think there has just been a lot of historical confusion which has exaggerated the significance of it.

Q: I'll ask you about the 'don't go wobbly', were you there for that incident. The 'don't go wobbly'. We'll get on to it later. Were you at the second NSE meeting? How was this different?

Haass: The second NSE meeting was night and day, if the previous one was night this one was day. Before the meeting there was a little huddle in the Oval Office where B..... Dick T.... and others had essentially talked. Everybody knew when they were coming out. The President wanted to speak because the President was upset with the first meeting and B said then 'Mr President, hold back, if you speak we'll never know what everybody else thinks', the President agreed. What you then had was a meeting where Larry, Dick Cheney and Grant ..... each spoke uh, one more passionate and the other cooler than the other. It was really impressive, each one sang 'this is one of those moments in history where you've got to do the right thing, we've got to stand out, we've got to resist' and the media on the table was 'OK, let's do it'. The meeting no longer was a debate about what the United States had to do.

Q: And the President, what did he say? Haass: Uh, he gave you his careful pursuit of ... certain things to ... but he was 100% with the consensus at the point, at that point.

Q: You've said it so I'm not asking you to be disloyal to the President or anything um, cos actually I don't think it's a matter of disloyalty. Your sense of where the President was at at that time?

Haass: Oh at that time I think the President was at least as far if not farther than any of his advisers. I think he understood that when Presidents of the United States start using words like unacceptable and the rest about what the consequences are you don't bandy about these words lightly. I think the President understood what he was potentially going to have to do. But he still hoped he could avoid having to do it but he had no doubts whatsoever that Saddam had to be denied what he had done.

Q: At this meeting, I mean in terms of my tidy Television Producers mind, this meeting mattered?

Haass: I think the second NSE meeting, the Friday meeting mattered because it was a way in which the Government got its legs. It was the way which the Government consensus came together after the awful first meeting and just simply, maybe by then 36 hours had passed, people had found their balance and had essentially gotten a sense of direction and a sense of purpose, a sense of seriousness, and all the lack of focus of that first meeting had dissipated.

Q: Camp David, a sense of history as you gather there?

Haass: ... humour basically lasted for 2 hours. I think it was from 8 - 10 or so that morning uh, most of us helicoptered up from the Vice President's place. The people from the Pentagon helicoptered out from there. Uh, the first hour was essentially a briefing from the military types, from S..... about what the other side was doing, what we could do. And the second hour was really a conversation about our military options and in particular about how to approach the Saudis and get them on board. What Camp David was, was the first serious military conversation and a real sense of seriousness that this had to go forward if diplomacy was to have a chance and this had to go forward assuming diplomacy didn't work.

Q: People have told me the President's very graphic dangers of appeasement at that meeting. Do you remember him talking about that?

Haass: I never saw it. I was the note taker and I should have.

Q: As you say you were the note taker, I've heard all sorts of long interminable accounts of the meeting but what for you were the high points, what do you remember? Colin Powell or Schwarzkopf or the President or Dick Cheney?

Haass: To me the high point of the meeting was people being realistic and understanding that there was no way to do this without the Saudis. What you have to remember is that when this meeting was held there was some uncertainty about whether the Saudis and the others were going to throw in their lot with us and there was some toying around with, 'well let's do this without them if we have to', some kind of tough talk. And people like me and others were saying 'Hold it, you really can't, uh you need a place to work with' uh and so the meeting was really realistic about our military requirements and more than anything else led to the Cheney mission and the whole idea of building a close working relationship with the Saudis and the other Gulf countries in order to put together a large scale military effort.

Q: Was there any serious discussion of just having an air campaign and not putting ground troops in?

Haass: Well there was some discussion about what to do if the Saudis didn't go along and it was all over the place. And what was good was that by the end of the discussion the sense was 'Look let's make a focused attempt to get the Saudis, I think we have a decent chance' and that it was essential to have even an air campaign as well as well as a ground effort.

Q: So to sum up by the end of that meeting, the President and the administration were saying that we're going to send ground troops, we're going to get military option going but we need the Saudis. Could you sum up for me where, by the end of that meeting, the situation had gotten?

Haass: By the end of Saturday morning's meeting at the Camp David there was a consensus that we had to get the Saudis on board. The idea was that first Skowcroft, I think S... and I were going to meet with the Saudi Ambassador several times in Washington. The whole idea then was to launch what became an achieving mission. Uh and that this was the precursor for the United States ..... ultimate troops. Ground troops as well as air forces uh in that part of the world to defend Saudi Arabia and also the view to put into place the beginnings, the foundations of what might ultimately be required if we were ever going to have to go beyond that and actually liberate Kuwait. But the whole idea at this point was to defend Saudi Arabia. We knew that while we could put airforces in first we also needed some ground forces as well.

Q: How much worry was there that he would move into Saudi?

Haass: There was real worry and this to me, actually, was the most frightening time in the crisis. This was the point at which there was the greatest difference between what Saddam could do and where we were. If he had gone on those first few days, if he for example had sent in forces, had destroyed runways, had used chemical weapons against Saudi runways, it would have been a nightmare for us. We were at our most vulnerable, this was the point at which the comparison between what he could bring to battle and what we could bring to battle was at its most dramatic. So this to me, these few days from that meeting and when we first began to introduce forces, several days later, this was the scariest time of the crisis.

Q: And the mood of that meeting. I asked you to characterize that mood. Was it purposeful or was there still a feeling of great crisis? I'm not saying that people were panicking, was there a feeling of crisis, a feeling that this was serious stuff, the administration's arse was on the line, that, you know, this had to be sorted out.

Haass: Oh, yeah, there was a feeling, a feeling of, there was a feeling of real purposefulness and also of stakes. There was a sense that our situation in the Gulf, our ... ... and probably the administration was on the line. And did any of us imagine and that we would succeed and the Administration still didn't get re-elected. That's a different point. But there was very much a sense that if this went badly this would be the end of the Bush administration.

Q: What happened with the Saudis next. There is evidence and .... ... was telling me that these guys, no doubt with some funny dish somewhere was picking up evidence or that the Saudis were thinking of cutting a deal in Geneva, paying a bit of money to the Iraqi's. How much to you was the worry that the Saudis were going to cut a deal, kiss some cheeks and sign a cheque.

Haass: There was real concern about the Saudis, about what either they would do with Iraq or what they wouldn't do with us. The feeling was that maybe the Saudis wouldn't be comfortable about .... ..... inviting us in and really casting their lot with us. There are those who protected their word, there were those who said 'No way'. What we made sure is that before Dick Cheney went over was that Saudis understood that his mission was not to ask them about whether they would work with us, but he would only go over if they understood in advance that by his going over they had already agreed to work with us and that his going over was to work out the details. And the Saudis resisted that and then they tried to basically say 'Well send Dick Cheney over, we'll talk about it' and in the meetings that B... Skowcroft, ... .... and I had with Prince .... the message was very much 'Uh, uh, we want to work with you but we can't have a situation where the American Secretary of Defense flies over and then you all say thank you very much and we don't want to proceed'. That would be the worst of all possible outcomes. If you accept him you have to know that you have accepted the idea of working with us voluntarily. They resisted that at first, ultimately they agreed and the mission went forward.

Q: How did you get the agreement? Was it B that came to you or?

Haass: We had meetings with B... who then spoke to his Uncle, the King, and we were determined that actually they had to be impressed, and I think B... himself would say this to you, they had to be impressed or convinced of our seriousness. We said be convinced, we are not playing around and whatever numbers you are thinking about multiply them several times over. If we send forces to this we are not going in light. Be convinced of our seriousness, I think that gave B.... the ammunition he needed to go back home to convince his Uncle to give us the green light and as a result the Cheney mission could proceed.

Q: And how did you get the green light? Was there a phone call or was there...?

Haass: B.... was with us and if my memory serves us right uh, it was understood that they agreed to our terms to the visit.

Q: Why would it have been so disastrous, I mean I can understand you said ....., why would it have been so disastrous if Dick Cheney had gone and they said 'heh, no it's nice to see you but forget it'.

Haass: If Dick Cheney had gone over and left with anything less than full Saudi agreement to a serious military effort they would have convinced Saddam that he was white. That the Americans and/or his local Arab partners would not stand up to him and secondly it might have actually encouraged him to go on. Not only would it have allowed him to consolidate what he had done it may have actually tempted him to keep going. Plus it would have been a terrible message for us, the United States, to send that we were unable to arrange an adequate diplomatic base to do something militarily. This was still early on in the crisis, everything that was said or done would send out all sorts of signals, would establish precedence, it was essential that we started out on a firm footing with the Saudis.

Q: What was the significance of the actual Cheney meeting. I mean I've seen it dressed up as this moment of great drama and Dick Cheney makes it clear that he wasn't sure what the outcome was going to be, and for you was there a degree of nervousness over the meeting or did you think 'Heh, signed and sealed he's just got to shake hands and away we go'?

Haass: There's always a degree of uncertainty no matter what you know in advance and no matter what assurances we had that the Saudis were all on board. You never knew until you knew. That said, I was pretty confident that it would work and the people we were sending over I had zero doubts about whatsoever. It would be presumptuous or .... for me to have any doubts in the first place. No, I felt pretty good about it.

Q: And just to leap ahead in the chronology for a bit, where you in the White House when Dick Cheney, were you in the Oval Office when Dick Cheney called there?

Haass: I don't remember.

Q: What I really want to ask you about now, after Camp David you went back to Washington. .....

Haass: We're breaking up from the meeting, it's about 10 o'clock in the morning and the Presidents .... we're walking towards the, uh to get to the helicopters, and there's Pam Schreiber and Chris Evert, and the President goes uh we should ... and stay you need a fourth for tennis. Uh, you know the idea of joining that foursome would have been uh needless to say one of the great moments, and I sort of looked at Skowcroft. He ...... ..... what the hell did you think you ...... anyhow. Uh and I trooped back to Washington because it was a beautiful day and needless to say did not see any of it.

Q: As the President landed... I mean on the following day on the Sunday, you met him. Could you describe how you met him and what you said to him, what you briefed him?

Haass: Yeah, it was a Sunday afternoon. I had been there all day and most of the night and Brad called and said that the President was helicoptering in from Camp David, he Brad couldn't be there, would I please meet him would I please brief him on what is going on and would I please give him some talking points. Uh because he was going to have to say some things to the press. Uh, so I said OK I would do it. I sat down at the machine and was so tired I almost needed help typing away uh, got the help and essentially we were waiting for the President when he landed and didn't move until motioned. Motion leader came out so I went out there and he said uh 'What's going on? What have we heard?' and at this point a lot of it was really to hear form Arab capitals, whether they'd been able to work any diplomatic uh, success. What I essentially reported was NO and despite the promises we had heard from Oman and elsewhere that there had been zero progress and clearly that we weren't going to get any help from those quarters publicly and privately. And that I thought, you know, publicly that we needed to .... ..... .... some very firm messages to the uh, to the press obviously of .... ..... He was pretty fired up even before I spoke to him uh, I think I probably added 10% but he was, he was pretty much there to begin with and then he went off. And uh, this .... ..... ..... uh was not mine and that was just his speaking from where he was.

Q: Were you surprised?

Haass: No because I knew exactly where his head was at and this was simply saying in public what I had already heard him say in private.

Q: People like Colin Powell, and no secret about that, were appalled when they heard him say that the policy making on the hoof, ... we're just talking about containment in Saudi Arabia and was it policy making on the hoof?

Haass: I don't think it was policy making on the fly, I don't think it was uh unthought through uh, we had been talking about defending Saudi Arabia but everything up to that from the UN Resolutions to the freezing of assets to the public comments to the military preparations to the private diplomacy. We had said that this aggression would not stand so what the President simply did was said it publicly. It was stark it was dramatic , it wasn't simply what he said it was how he said it. People got a sense of resolution. I don't think anybody who was involved in the deliberations up to that point ought to have been surprised.

Q: And could I just get you to scroll back and I would just like you to redo what you were advising him because I can see you sort of reeling it off, um, you went out you met the President. You had this some people call it as the coffee order, what was the conversation with the President, what were you telling him?

Haass: What he wanted to know, when I went out to meet the President what he wanted to know was what had happened in the last few hours and what I did was fill him in on the diplomacy. Uh What we might have heard if you ... .... what we had gotten Oman and what we had gotten from Cairo. The entire thing was to give the Arab moderates several days to try to work this out and what I essentially said was there is no progress whatsoever to report. Indeed there might even be a lack of progress because what we see is Iraq digging in and we see no efforts that any of this diplomacy is doing anything but buying time for him. President said 'I hear you' uh and then we just talked very briefly about what he might say and I had typed out some talking points for him which refer to the .... bomb about our resolve and uh how concerned we were. Our disappointment at the lack of progress, our continuing consultation in capitals, in New York and so forth in regards to that and then clearly I did his own spin on it and uh, came up with this ....

Q: Very briefly to talk to you about at one stage when I was making a series I was going to go in to the ins and outs of Mubarak and King Hussein and so on. It seems to me pointless and it's probably better to go for the more global view. Why didn't they get it together? Why weren't the Arab moderates able to pull together some sort of deal?

Haass: The whole tradition of the contemporary Arab world has been trying to work out things collectively. The whole idea of Arab unity, the Arab nation being this collective concept, the whole idea that an Arab state would do to another state what Iraq did to Kuwait was completely foreign, it was really a rejection of an entire concept of modern Arab politics. It was very ... then for the moderate Arabs, the Jordanians uh the Egyptians and the others to really respond in kind and to be as firm with Saddam as the situation warranted 'cos it went against the grain of 'my Arab brother' and let us work this out. The whole theology, if you will, was that Arab unity and the enemy is Israel. Well Israel wasn't the enemy in this case the enemy was another Arab state. I think it was just too big a the thought, it was too politically hard for a lot of these guys to absorb and then act on.

Q: Apparently President Mubarak, he said that weekend, you know as the first initiatives .... ... Mubarak said when the President stood ... the wall that marked the end of Arab politics as he'd known it for 20, 30 years.

Haass: That Sunday, more than anything else I can crystallise that this was not simply business as usual, that this was not just another foreign policy crisis, that this was going to become the final moment for this President and this administration. This was going to become the defining moment for international relations. That Arab politics would never be the same again, that the Gulf would never be the same again. A lot of people watched it, a lot of people were glued to their TV sets and there was something about not simply what President Bush said but how he said it and the starkness of it and the resolution that that image is really ingrained in people's memories.

Q: Whereon about this time America tuned in over many months, you were on the deputy's committee but you drafted most of the stuff, started to think about war aims. What were the war aims and where did you cut them the way you did?

Haass: Well the war aims were fairly limited, essentially the liberation of Kuwait, the restoration of its Government and so forth. The war aims were limited because we were concerned about fashion and the consensus around them. We wanted to work that not simply through the UN, not simply through Moscow but really throughout the Arab world, we didn't want to have a situation where the United States did things to liberate Kuwait then in turn created great unrest in Cairo or elsewhere so the whole idea was to fashion a set of aims that were militarily do-able and that were politically sustainable.

Q: Going to Baghdad, overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Why weren't those ever taken up?

Haass: I don't know how to draft .... that tell you to 'Replace this government with something better'. I don't know how to do that sort of thing without years of occupation and even then I can't guarantee it. But unless you are willing to do the sort of thing the United States and the world did after World War II with Germany and Japan and spend years and years on the ground in a retail occupation, door to door, street to street. I don't know anyway to use military force to engineer the societies of other peoples. The fact in this case it was the 1990's, it was an Islamic society, it was an Arab society, it was half the world away where there were no common traditions. I just thought that was beyond the do-able.

Q: You were looking at what was happening in Sanctions. What was your advice to the President by the time you were getting to the end of September?

Haass: S... stuff out, uh, the decision to go to sanctions was a smart one. There was not a lot else we could do at that point, we'd had the military action early on. There was the chance that sanctions might work. Uh, but just as important, before you could ever use the military option we had to try sanctions. There's always some box you have to check. People couldn't say you didn't try it if you tried it and it didn't work so the feeling was, lets try sanctions, it buys us time, it's a necessary stop, if it works great if it doesn't work OK. Uh, so that's where we were and that's why we began to go down that road real early on, from early August on. People like me did not have a lot of hope that sanctions would work. One, history teaches you to be fairly suspect of sanctions particularly when you're going off to fairly ...... societies uh like Iraq had the potential to be given how totalitarian it was. Uh, I just was worried that it would take too long and ..... the time then began to fray, so I never had any illusions. Quite honestly I was surprised they worked as well as they did and, but I never thought that sanctions alone would do the trick.

Q: Was there a moment when, I'm trying to find a sort of turning point, maybe it doesn't exist, when the President said heh, it's time to crack on now so lets get the offensive options lined up. Some people suggested was when the Emir visited that that precipitated a lot of stuff. When do you think it was?

Haass: You see the Emir's visit was a very emotional one. I remember the meeting in the Oval and then we went on to lunch. The President was clearly affected by that, in detail of it, and uh we all can deal in abstractions but when you reduce all the other concerns to people getting tortured and suffering it's something that people can knot their hands around and they understood. I think it had an impact. The biggest impact was it told us that there's a price to be paid for time. That while we needed some time to build up militarily at some point the passage of time became dysfunctional from our point of view. One of the main reasons it became dysfunctional was the price the Kuwaiti's were paying and to put a good ... sometime there wouldn't be a Kuwait to see. And I think that what the Emir's meeting did was it shortened the President's time for licence.

Q: You say the President was affected could I get you to describe that, both Ambassador Massey and S...... D..... told me he was, his eyes were full, he was almost in tears. Could you describe?

Haass: It was quite different the Emir of Kuwait is not a flashy sort of person, he's very low keyed dour, I think is probably the word. There is something about the setting, uh first in the Oval and then I remember over lunch uh and I was at one end of the table and the President and the Emir of Kuwait were sitting opposite each other in the middle. And sitting there eating my soup and there was something trying to take notes, eat soup and listen and it was just too incongruous. And here is this man here in this splendid setting with this very nice meal and this man was telling them all just powerful stories about whether or not... Uh, the President at one point left and then, and um, get him some map of Kuwait or something, went back in to his study or whatever it was off the room and brought it in. It was just flip. People forget that policy is made by people, Governments are made up of people and it's not actually '.....' to me that another president or another administration would have done the same thing that George Bush and his administration did. A lot of people in hindsight say everything you all did was obvious. Well it wasn't so obvious at the same, at the time, and again my guess says that others would have done, likely would have done different things. Now you can either get it in better or worse. The people of the Bush administration were affected by this crisis and I think what they did was affected by some of these details on accounts.