Haass: I was uh, yeah there was just some desire to see uh what was the thinking and...Uh late September, early October Desert Shield was already getting pretty far along. There was also the growing sense that sanctions might not do the trick so clearly thinking had begun to turn towards what ultimately became Desert Storm. Towards the idea of an offensive action to liberate Kuwait and the President and Scowcroft, in particular, were getting anxious to see what was being cooked. And so uh at some point curiosity and impatience got the best of them if you will and people said 'heh, we want to beat him' um hence October 11th.

Q: You didn't sit in on their meeting, can you recount though what happened after it?

Haass: Yeah I was with, I can't remember what I was doing that day but I was doing something else and then afterwards I met with B.... and um I asked him about the meeting and his enthusiasm for what he had heard was finite.

Q: What was your take on it? I must ask what you felt?

Haass: I didn't quite know how to read it. The generous part of me said well these guys haven't had a lot of time to focus on it yet and that explained the rather lack of uh imagination that we were getting. The dark and suspicious side of me said, heh these guys don't want to have to use force to liberate Kuwait and what they've done is come up with proposals that, that they know will get rejected. One of the things uh I've learned over the years from watching people in Washington play the bureaucratic game is the best way to say no is often to say yes. You say yes to what you're asked but you design your answer in such a way with so many conditions that the person who asked you says 'Oh well in that case I don't want it'. And my suspicion at the time was, the dark side of me was saying this is the way certain people were saying no, which was by saying yes in a heavily unimaginative sort of way.

Q: How much in the months before were you, I want to ask it straight and whether you use peoples names or not is up to you, two days before that briefing Conan Powell sat down with Sir Patrick Heine, therefore British Commander and his equivalent, and said he thought sanctions should be given another two years and that a war would be a disaster in the Middle East. Heinz told me all this...in London and people wondered what the hell was going on, um, in dealing in preparing for offensive options at that time how much was this tension, the tension between the people who said 'hey we've got to get on with this' and the people who were saying 'containment'. How much was that a dominant feature of the politics?

Haass: The tension between those who were saying 'let sanctions work' and those who were saying 'sanctions are never going to work, let's get serious about the military alternative' didn't really get that strong yet. Uh, by October it will. Uh the closer we got uh to November and then December clearly, but by September that tension hadn't really coalesced yet. What you sensed was people resisting more than real, more than anything else.

Q: You had this sense that the military were perhaps trying to say 'heh do you really want to fight this'. What happened next from your point of view?

Haass: I, by late October, the political leadership had essentially concluded that sanctions were not going to work, or if they did work were only going to work against a specific military deadline. And what you then had were two tracks that began. One was the acceleration of the military preparations track which ultimately led to the decision to double the forces by uh late October early November, that decision. And secondly you had the diplomatic track which led in late November to Resolution 678 which then set the January 15th deadline and the two were very much connected. Again the diplomatic track it was believe would only work if there was a credible military option but we also knew that unless we established the credible diplomatic track we wouldn't be able to put into place the military options. The two were very much mutually reinforcing.

Q: And getting back to the briefing at the White House, I remember talking to you about this and then we were chatting off the record. OK you weren't in the briefing but you heard what the plan was. What was your perception of the plan itself, I remember you were talking about it in football terms and so on. I had General McLellan thrown at me I've had heh diddle diddle straight up the middle. I mean what did you think about this plan when you heard about it?

Haass: I'm no military expert but it seemed to me to be unimaginative and then some. The analogy I came up with was Ohio state football under Woody Hayes which used to be three yards and a cloud of dust. Never try the forward pass, never try the underarm, but basically go up the middle and grind it out and it's an effective way of giving yardage very slowly with an awful lot of losses along the way.

Q: October 30th, again I don't know if you were at the meeting....

Haass: No I was on...you know I was on the vapour truck so, so I wasn't at that meeting.

Q: Right this was to try and get everything....

Haass: I was on the 678 track, Baker in late October early November, Secretary Baker was leading the diplomatic mission to get countries to sign up to what became resolution 678.

Q: Could you just sum up now...... how remarkable a trip was it?

Haass: That trip was not quite the magical mystery tour. I'd had more fun in my life. Uh on the other hand it was, it was satisfying in a way to do a trip where you had such a specific goal. These were not consultations in the general sense. This was to get countries to sign up to a resolution that had all sorts of consequences. We wanted to get the resolution passed while the United States was still the President of the Security Counsel which meant that it had to be passed by the end of November. We wanted to set a firm deadline and we ultimately came up with January 15 as a sort of compromise date. And the idea was one after one after one to get countries to agree, at least, not to oppose us and we succeeded. And so it was a gruelling but it was, it was a satisfying and necessary undertaking.

Q: Were you with part of the team who was calling the Shevhadnazzi when this phrase or necessary means came up? Can you recall the discussions...? Even if you can't recall in great detail?

Haass: I'm not sure if I was in the room when .... it might have been just Baker and Dennis Ross with Shevhadnazzi. Sorry.....

Q: And in all of this, the Soviets as they were then, how important were they to this whole endeavour?

Haass: The Soviets were important, not simply by what they did but more importantly by what they didn't do. The crisis had taken place a decade before. It would have been very hard to imagine the United States going to bat for countries that worked with and supported and the Soviet Union simply sitting on its hands while one of its major proxies or allies was getting creamed. So the biggest thing the Soviets could do was not do a lot. No, they actually, they did for us as they did in the counsel, that to me is icing on the cake. But my real concern with the Soviets is that they backed, that they sat, they sat it out and they didn't give Saddam reason to believe that they were a friend in his court.

Q: Do you remember watching the vote, the all necessary means vote ..... Tell me where you were.....?

Haass: Uh, no but that is a foregone conclusion cos when we had um, we nearly had everybody on board. The actual vote itself was a bit of theatre, the key thing was getting countries there and even before that what was important was not bringing that process too far along unless we were sure we had the votes. What I wanted to avoid was a situation where the United States in a visible hope, high profile sort of way were not to get support for what became resolution 678 for the use of all necessary means, and fail. Because then if we had failed it would have made it much more difficult to get international, much less domestic support, for going to war with Saddam. So my own view was we could only go for it if we were 99% plus sure that we were going to get it. That was the tricky part. So we went forward enough to get it but not so far forward that if you couldn't get it you couldn't walk away from it. 'Cos people like me thought we could do this without that resolution. It's nice to have but it's not necessary to have. We just had to avoid a situation where we tried to get it and couldn't.

Q: The following day there was the announcement made that James Baker would attempt to go to Baghdad. What did you think of that?

Haass: Uh it's no secret that my enthusiasm for this last ditch diplomatic effort was modest. I didn't see the need for it and I worried that it could be turned against us. That it could be, you know, manipulated. That the Iraqi's could put just enough on the table that the world would say, halt, hold off, let's give diplomacy a chance. So I was very worried that this could be used as a way to pull out the string and once we lost the momentum diplomatically and militarily uh, which was inherent in the resolution leading to January 15th, I was worried that it would be extremely hard maybe even impossible to regain the momentum.

Q: This was domestic politics .......?

Haass: Well, the argument for the mission was 'Go the extra mile' that if you were going to have to go to war and you'd have to remember at that point we estimated that our casualties would be much greater, that it's important to show that you've gone every mile. It was important diplomatically in keeping the coalition together. So I think those were the strong arguments and really even there was a chance it would succeed. This one last chance would show Saddam that we were serious. I was worried that the fact that we were going to the negotiation would have just the opposite effect. That it would show Saddam that we were too hungry to go to war and that it would give him a chance to put things on the table that would feed us diplomatically because people would say 'Well why don't you give him a chance' and ... ... believing why don't you work with that. So I was extremely worried that this would boomerang on us.

Q: How did you find out about it?

Haass: Not my happiest day bureaucratically. Uh I found out about it which is after it essentially had been cooked up and I went in and I uh, I complained, uh I told G... I felt this was a bad idea, here's why. He said 'I hear you, you may be right, but it's too late'. Whenever I'd disagree with him and the President he'd say 'You know the guy in the Oval office he has this uh habit of thinking that he is elected by the majority of the American people and uh, sometimes uh, even if you're right you're going to have to go along', I said 'I hear you, I'll salute, I'll support in any way I can I just think it's a bad idea' and uh, not for the first time I lost an argument.

Q: Were you right? A lot of people in the Middle East believed that Saddam conned ... and pulled the war because of this?

Haass: I don't understand.

Q: Well, a lot of people say that you know because the Americans were in pursuit of .... Saddam conned ... and he might have got out?

Haass: I don't know, I think I'm right that I still think the meeting was ill advised. Uh, in the end it turned out to be a wash Saddam was not clever when they refused to accept the letter, when they basically were so hard headed, um again Saddam saved us from ourselves. If you had handled that meeting with some adeptness, if he had given us a quarter of a loaf he could have complicated things considerably but because uh Tarik Aziz clearly was on an extremely short leash uh it made it feel easy for us to say we tried and no matter what we did Saddam clearly did not want a peaceful way out. So in the end the meeting didn't hurt us but I think it was an unnecessary risk.

Q: Did you want Saddam to withdraw at that stage?

Haass: It sounds awful to say but um you didn't want a peaceful resolution but I mean I was torn, part of me wanted a peaceful resolution for all the obvious reasons, you didn't want any drop of blood to be spilt, but part of me was extremely worried that if there was a peaceful resolution that would, we would buy ourselves some false time and that it would make it much harder to do this sort of thing again 'cos people would say 'Oh well you did it last time, it wasn't necessary, Saddam never meant to do it' and that with the passage of time he would be that much stronger. So my concern was that if we didn't take advantage of this the next time the crisis came around, and I was sure it would, we would be much better, much worse off. Secondly, I had done a paper with the deputy's committee about what a containment strategy would look like. What it would take for us to contain Saddam in the event we didn't have a war and the political and military demands of that policy were enormous and I simply didn't know if we could sustain it ourselves, the United States, and more important the Saudi's the Kuwaiti's and others. 'Cos it would have meant an awfully large American presence in that part of the world so my concern was the alternative to war might over time simply not be sustainable.

Q: The other thing that's going on....

Haass: Could I just add one thing to that?

Q: Yes, of course.

Haass: Uh, with that said I really hadn't accepted yes for an answer. So if Saddam had decided to back out and follow the UN resolutions I knew he had no choice but to act with us and declare victory but I also had no illusions that sustaining victory over time would be an awfully difficult thing because the political and military consequences of having to contain an armed Saddam Hussein I knew would be extraordinarily difficult.

Q: Why didn't he do it?

Haass: Oh, he made constant withdrawals. Even to this day I am stunned by Saddam's failure to exploit all of his options. If he had simply offered up half a loaf, 'OK I'll pull back from this part of Kuwait and not that' or even at the beginning if he'd only gone in to part of Kuwait and rather than getting greedy and going after the whole thing. I think he could have made it infinitely harder for us to have put together the coalition for us to have sustained airforce to have fought the war so forth. But time and time again Saddam, by opting for the maximum, actually made it relatively, I don't like to use the word easy, but made it much less difficult on the United States and the coalition to sustain itself. Yeah, I'm not sure at times so much weather we wanted but clearly he lost it.

Q: One of the .... a lot of people in the intelligence world remember, they had a huge bust up in December, they were .... Did this register on your scope? Or weren't you that interested?

Haass: The .... of the intelligence community there were Saddam's intentions didn't impress me a whole hell of a lot and at some point you become your own intelligence analyst, for better and for worse. And unlike the intelligence people, people like me on the policy side had a better sense of what the policy dimension of it was so I knew often better than they did what was going in and out of the diplomatic channel and so forth. And there guess about Saddam's intentions was arguably no better or worse than anybody else's and whether that person was writing it out ... in the New York Times or sitting uh on the policy side of the Government, I didn't know. Nothing they could say would prove to me that either he's going to stay or not. I just thought that we had to prepare for the fact that he might not leave and that we had to put into place militarily everything we would need to get him out but diplomatically we have to try everything to get him to leave peacefully. The important thing is that if we had to use force no-one could say we rushed to it, no one could say we didn't explore every avenue we had. The force had to be seen as something of a necessary, rather than an optional, choice for us and I think we succeeded at that.

Q: Very quickly what did this whole affair tell you about the intelligence agencies, not just the NIE but the whole......

Haass: Well in ... the crisis, from before the crisis through it intelligence never tells you an awful lot about intentions particularly in a country like Iraq where you're not, where you don't have the luxury or talking to a lot of people or even getting at the way people feel. You mustn't, you're often dealing with a person so it's extremely hard to read this man's intentions, as a result it's extremely hard to read Iraq's intentions. As a result our intelligence community, through no fault of its own, couldn't shine an awful lot of light on what Saddam or Iraq were likely to do next.

Q: Geneva, you and the Deputy's Committee drafted a letter or I suspect you drafted it and they had a look at it. What were you trying to achieve with that letter?

Haass: The letter to Saddam that Secretary Baker tried to hand over to Tarik Aziz at Geneva uh had the same problem of every other communication we had, or the same challenge. We wanted to communicate to Iraq firmness, you have to also communicate to the American audience and to the Arab audience a sense of fairness and what it was was a balancing act that here's what you've got to do uh, here's what will befall you if you don't but you couldn't ask him to go things that were impossible so we weren't asking him, for example to give up power, we weren't asking him for humiliation but we were asking him to get out of Iraq and pull out of Kuwait by the date certain. And, like this communication like all others had to withstand scrutiny in different markets. In the Iraqi market place we had to differentiate between Saddam and the Iraqi people, in the Arab market place and the Islamic market place where we couldn't look insensitive to the welfare of Muslims and Arabs. In the American market place where we had to show a respect for law and fairness but also we had to be tough and again there was an attempt at balancing these various concerns.

Q: The day of the talks, I guess you were sitting with your television turned up. Um, as Jim Baker walked in, what were you thinking?

Haass: I was trying to keep busy. I was trying not to watch uh, the tube and to just keep busy and at that point really preparing for half loaves. A lot of what me and the Deputy's Committed did at that time was uh, play out various gambits. And we would basically say what if Saddam proposes this, what if he proposes a tenth, uh a partial pull back, what if he actually does a partial pull back and promises a complete pull back. What we did was we must have gamed out ten different Iraqi scenarios that we thought would test the coalition. And that's how I was spending my time which was preparing our responses 'cos I knew that if Saddam did something like that we had to be ready immediately with a response. I didn't want him to dominate a news cycle. So if he came out with something I wanted to have us ready to go with a very demanding response that would test his intentions.

Q: Did it seem to you inconceivable that Jim Baker wouldn't walk out with something?

Haass: I had no idea. It seemed to me that yeah, there was that possibility. Again without my job, I couldn't control any of that. All I could do was be prepared for any strategy that Iraq put on the table and the most likely one was the half loaf, quarter loaf. Either they did something or they promised to do something or both. What I really had to have in hand was a script saying 'OK thank you very much but here are the following ... other things you have to do by the following timetable if you want us to lift, if you will, the sword that's hanging over you.' And that to me was the most useful thing I could focus on.

Q: When did you realise the Iraqi's weren't playing ball?

Haass: Oh, I didn't realise that until the end. Once the war began. I still thought at any moment they might say 'OK now we're ready to do it', as indeed happened at various times to the Russians and the French. So at no point until the entire crisis was over did I ever assume that the Iraqi's might not throw us a code ball. Might not put out something that would somehow threaten coalition consensus.

Q: But do you remember Jim Baker, on that specific day in Geneva do you remember Jim Baker coming out?

Haass: Yeah, I was sitting in the uh, I think we were all in the cabinet room. The meeting was congression of leaders at that time and the President went out to take the call from Secretary Baker and I was sitting, he had the uh what I call the big boys, in the cabinet and the congressional leader types were sitting round the table. People like me who also used to be known as the back benchers uh were sitting back then and I was just like everybody else, waiting through uh, to see what the results were.

Q: And what happened then?

Haass: Our President came in uh, his face showed it all uh as did Secretary Bakers' face if you saw him on television, the greyness the, looked drawn, and uh said 'So be it'. Where were we and let's go back to the conversation and indeed they added a real injection of realism and sobriety to the conversation because it was clear then that this was uh, this was not just a dress rehearsal.

Q: Do you remember anything, I don't know how often you see him, but ....the President knew at this time... he became very contemplative over the Christmas period....?

Haass: No not really, ..... would walk around the .... line and so forth, you know, later on.

Q: Tell me about that?

Haass: Yes contemplative but not to the point of immobilism. I mean, everybody would have a sense of seriousness, you had a sense of purpose. I think we were all exhausted what with an overload of adrenaline. There was a sense we were doing the right thing though, it sounds corny but it's true. There was a sense that we would have been nice in this crisis and that what we were doing was right and necessary and we had been responsible and we had looked at all the alternatives and we had tried to work this thing out and we had prepared the military side and we had not micro-managed them and we had basically given them their head. That we had handled this as well as we were capable of doing and in that kind of certain confidence, a certain serenity, because there wasn't a lot of looking over your shoulder over what we might have done differently.

Q: Did you ever gain any insight at the time about what the President would have done if he'd lost the vote. Since he stayed with you on a couple of things I discovered an obscure interview he gave where he said he would have gone ahead anyway. Charles ... recalls a conversation where he said 'Yeah, I would have done it' and Bob Gasse says 'Yes he would have done it'. So can I ask you?

Haass: Various conversations where that question came up involving Ben Skocroft, myself, Bob Gates, Johnson ... President, uh the President's determination at that point not to be deterred by congress was high. I think he would have gone ahead even in the absence of a congressional vote of support. The reason I say I think is, you never know. That it's one thing to say so at the time. It would have been something else to actually have done it. Talk about rolling the dice because there would have been a million uh things introduced in the courts and on the floor of congress and impeachment resolutions and it would have been hard ball. No, it's true that .... but even if that question happened, even if the President had lost the vote, had gone ahead I think had the situation on the ground went well enough he would have been politically safe. He would have insulated himself from it, but we would have had a good old fashioned constitutional crisis on our hands. Whether he really would have pressed it that far I don't know, I think so, but you can never be sure. It's the difference between saying you'll do something in the abstract and actually doing it.

Q: Were you present, again I don't know, for the signing of the national security directive?

Haass: No I think that I was the principal drafter but that uh it happened in the Deputy's Committee but if I'm not mistaken, I don't remember whether B..... did that himself or whether I was in the room as well. As ridiculous as it sounds I just don't remember.

Q: What do you remember about the moment the deadline was crossed? What was it like being in the heart of things, any particular memories?

Haass: I thought of it as being, what a lot of time as being the eye of the storm, and the eye of the hurricane. We were incredibly busy, I'm a list keeper, you know I must have had lists of hundreds of things I wanted to do everyday and crossed them off and so forth. Uh, you are dealing with a hundred things, you're exhausted, you're living on a couple of hours sleep. Uh, because you're kind of calm, because you've got to keep control. It doesn't do to lose control. It doesn't help you, it doesn't help the way you're perceived. And the people around you are kind of businesslike, there's a purpose almost to it. So it's not as though you're nervous, it's, you're too busy doing what you're doing to have the luxury of being nervous.

Q: And the night the air war broke out, where were you then?

Haass: Uh, I was in my office. Um, it was actually one of the nice moments uh, which is, Ben Schocroft called me, um it was one of the reasons that he was one of the best people in the world to work for. And I picked up the phone and he said I just want to tell you um that you've done a great job and you've really helped us up to this point, um and anyway he just, he was confident and I was, we were confident about how this would turn out militarily but it was just a really nice moment to uh, for a boss to say that.

Q: The next night Scud Thursday as it's been called. Could you tell me the story...?

Haass: Actually it was funny. Scud Thursday was the Friday night because again there's a sense of being in the eye of the storm. Once the war began there was surprisingly enough a little bit less for people like me to do because the ball was handed off to the military. So .... effects me but it wasn't quite as intense from diplomacy was right and centre. I actually was thinking of getting home at a reasonable hour uh that night. I recently had gotten married uh .... the person I was married to, and it was about 7-7.30 and I could begin to see that I actually would get home for dinner. Uh something that hadn't happened in months and um I remember walking over to Bert's office around 7 or 7:30 just for a final talk. We had spent hours together every day checking about stuff and this was the final check and I walked over to his office and just when I was there the phone rang, we learned about, about the scud launches. And thus began Scud Thursday and it must have gone from about 7-7:30 at night 'til maybe 10:30-11 o'clock at night. It was a very intense 3, 4 hours and Burt and I were there and Bob Gates and he, Bert's office became sort of action central. Jim Baker,...Marlin Fitzwater... we were all gathered in Bert's office uh, and that's how we spent that night. One of the people who weren't there Dick Cheney, who was over at the Pentagon and the President, who was over in the residence. But otherwise the uh, the Government if you will had gotten reduced to very much the people who were in uh Skocroft's office.

Q: Do you remember Dick Cheney calling?

Haass: Well I remember quite a few things from that night. Uh, Dick Cheyney called early on in the evening to say he's just gotten a call from Misha Adams who was his opposite number, the Israeli Minister of Defence. And the Israeli's clearly wanted to act and my recollection of it is that Dick felt that it would be pretty impossible to keep them out and he relayed that I think to Mr Brent who he was speaking to. Brent got off the phone and relayed the conversation and asked well does everyone agree? I said 'I don't', uh, obviously we argued strongly but perhaps more strong than someone at my modest level should have. I argued extremely strongly how I felt that it was not desirable for the Israeli's to come in for the reasons about coalition consensus and I don't think militarily they could add much at that point and also that I though it wasn't inevitable. That I thought if we laid in, if Secretary Baker and the President laid in I thought we had a chance of keeping the Israeli's out and Adams was not necessarily the right person to take the queue from because he was the Defence Minister. Of course he would want to go in because that's what Defence Ministers naturally wanted to do. I thought if we approached it more from a diplomatic angle that we had a chance of keeping the Israeli's out and people heard me out and agreed to try.

Q: And what happened then?

Haass: Secretary Baker picked up the phone and tried to get Prime Minister Shamir. Who after first Secretary Baker I think spoke to the President explaining the strategy. The President said 'Let's try' the President agreed that he would be valuable to help. Secretary Baker picked up the phone uh I was on the other extension. I speak some Hebrew and the idea was to have a conversation between him and Prime Minister Shamir. And we tried getting through, I don't know if it was a bad connection or we couldn't get the Prime Minister and Secretary, and they asked us for the telephone number. Uh they were going to call us back. And Secretary Baker said 'heh what's our telephone number here' and I said in one of those moments uh Mr Secretary you should remember it's your favourite number uh, everybody cracked up. The reason being a few weeks before Secretary Baker had some fairly rough testimony on the hill where he had told the Israeli Government that if you want peace, uh all you've got to do is call. And he gave them the White House telephone number 202 - 456-1414, I think it was.

And uh anyhow ... comment at the time was ... there goes your chance of ever getting an Embassy and uh, in any case the Israeli's did call back uh, Secretary Baker did have the conversation with um Prime Minister Shamir ... and then in the course of the next 12 hours what you have was a combination of conversations between the President and Prime Minister Shamir and conversations, and cables, or letters rather from the President to Prime Minister Shamir uh basically saying please ..... offer to send ... the Deputy Secretary of State at that time over to speak to him to basically engage the Israeli's to. What brought them together is the serious diplomacy of trying to keep the Israeli's out of the conflict, actively at the same time they did things to make it politically and militarily impossible for them to stay out.