Interview with Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

And so I had come back to present this plan to my political masters and we assembled in the Situation Room. Brent Scowcroft led off the meeting and Brent said "We are...Mr President," solemnly he said, "Mr President, we are at a Y in the road. Down one branch we can continue sanctions, which was the policy, and we can just be prepared to defend Saudi Arabia. Down the other branch we start to get the necessary political authority to go on the attack."

They chatted about that. This conversation broke out between Baker and Scowcroft and Cheney as to when we might go to the UN, this, that and the other. The President got just tired of it after a while and I was standing there with all my maps and he said "Fine, fine, fine. Colin let's hear from you."

And for the next...oh thirty or forty minutes I took the President through two plans. I had a big map of the region, I draw up the first graphic overlay and said, "This is General Schwarzkopf's plan to defend Saudi Arabia, which is the mission he has been assigned. And here's how he would accept an Iraqi invasion in the empty desert, here's how he would counter attack, here's how he would cut it off, here's how we would do that."

They listened with passive interest because they knew we could do that. And then finally I said "Mr President, that satisfies the original mission you gave us." I rolled up my overlay, took it off, put on another overlay and I said, "Mr President, if you direct us to attack in order to eject the Iraqi army out of Kuwait, this is how we're going to do it."

And I rolled it down, no longer passive interest, active interest. Everybody leaned forward. And I described how we would have the secondary air campaign, the secondary attacks, the amphibious feints, and then finally the deep hook around the left side of the Iraqi forces and took 'em through that in considerable detail and then told them it would take a much larger force. And then I laid out the size of that force.

There were some gasps, there were some (...sound of gulping...). The President listened very carefully and the President said, "Now Colin, you and Norm are really sure that air power alone can't do it?" And my response was, "Mr President, I wish to God that I could assure you that air power alone could do it but you can't take that chance. We've gotta take the initiative out of the enemy's hands if we're going to go to war. We've got to make sure that this is...there is no ordained conclusion and outcome, that there'll be no guessing as to, you know, we're going to be successful with this plan and this is the plan we recommend."

Secretary Cheney then joined in and said he recommended it fully as well and so did all of my Joint Chiefs of Staff colleagues. There was some more discussion, as there always is in this meeting of old friends and colleagues and sometimes adversaries and protagonists, but always friends.

And then finally, when the meeting had gone on long enough for the President to have gotten everybody's views and drifters, everything, he simply looked up and he said, "Do it."

And I left that meeting after that with a firm decision, no question about it, that sanctions had about three months left to produce a result and if they did not produce a result in three months we were going to war. And so I had no further questions about what our mission was or what our policy was or where we were heading.

Q: Let's spool back, early 1990...before he's moved in on Kuwait...Saddam was obviously building up a nuclear program, an arms program, chemical weapons. What was your assessment of this guy?

Powell: I had some relationship to this situation as National Security Adviser to President Reagan in 1987, 88 and the early part of 89, and during that period essentially we were tilting toward the Iraqis because Iran was our mortal enemy at that time. In fact, we were hoping for what Kissinger hoped for, that they both could lose...they both couldn't lose.

But when we got the ceasefire arranged between Iran and Iraq in 1988, as National Security Adviser, I was a little bit nervous about that because there we had Iraq with a very powerful, trained, experienced million man army and no enemy to use that army against any longer. In fact, when people suggested that we should go forward and try to get a peace agreement between Iraq and Iran, I said "No, more better if it's a ceasefire so they stare at each other forever hopefully, and not turn their attention elsewhere. But I was concerned that Iraq was now as much a danger to our interests as Iran was perhaps, and we had to be very, very careful.

I then left the White House and went to another command and then rapidly found myself as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in late '89. We had to get through the Panamanian invasion and some other things that came along but, by early 1990, as we were looking at our overall national security strategy and looking at that part of the world, we shifted our strategy quite deliberately a little bit away from Iran and more toward Iraq because of the belicose nature of the mutterings that would come from the Iraqi leadership from Baghdad, because Saddam Hussein had this enormous military capability and, frankly, he was on the right side of the Persian Gulf to cause mischief, more so than Iran on the other side of the Persian Gulf.

So we started to watch it more carefully but we never saw it as an immediate pressing threat to our interests or to our friends in the region, but we were watching it and we shifted our defense guidance to pay more attention to Iraq than Iran.

Q: What do you make of the administration policy--trying to pull them into the family of nations--misguided?

Powell: Well I don't know that I would characterise it as misguided. I think it was a reasonable thing to try to do at that time. A new strategic situation existed in the Persian Gulf with a ceasefire in place brokered by the much maligned United Nations, but that's what we had, and so I think it was reasonable to try to persuade the Iraqis that this was the time now to look at broader interest and regional aggression or regional challenges and to pull them into the community of nations. It was a very rich country, I mean oil riches, and they could do so much for their people and so much for their neighbours in the region if we could get them into the community of nations. But we were dealing with somebody who was not interested in becoming a member of the community of nations--Iraq headed by Saddam Hussein.

Q: June 1990, just before all this starts, sum up how you viewed Saddam Hussein.

Powell: Saddam Hussein was not an enemy of ours but he had a capability that was troubling. He had started to make some statements that were causing us concern but, as of the end of June 1990, we did not yet see anything that presented a real and present danger to our interests or to our friends in the region.

Q: In your book you tell the story, third week of July, Mike McConnell turns up with his photograph album. Can you tell me that story?

Powell: About the third week in July, or thereabouts, my intelligence officer, Admiral Mike McConnell, recently joined, I mean he'd only been there a short period of time, came in and started to show me satellite photos and other intelligence which suggested an Iraqi build up in the Southern part of Iraq. It wasn't immediately troubling because it was just a build up within their own country. It did not have the back up that one would expect to see for an invasion of another country. The logistics system was not in place to support an invasion, they had not brought forward artillery, we couldn't see their communications coming up in a way that one would expect to see. And so although it was of interest and troubling, it did not yet become something of great concern.

Then over the next few days, or a relatively short period of time, more and more information came forward that started to put these pieces in place, artillery was coming forward, logistics units were being seen, signals--networks were coming up, to the point that finally it could not be ignored and I called General Schwarzkopf and said "Norm, are you looking at what I'm looking at?" and he says, "Yes," and we were both going from the same base of intelligence. And I said, "We'd better start thinking about this".

It turned out that Norm was getting ready to go out on a command post exercise, if I might call it that, and exercise some of his contengency plans, and I said, "You'd better factor this real life situation into your exercise plans and I want you to look at two tiers of possible response should this turn out to be something. Tier one would be a short incursion by the Iraqis against the Kuwaitis or the Saudis and we would have to retaliate in some way and it's just a single, limited incident with a retaliation on our part. And then the second tier I want you to look at is, if this turns out to be much more than that, an invasion or seizing a port...part of Kuwait and a threat to Saudi Arabia, what would we do at that point."

Norm went to work on that and then for the last week in July we watched the intelligence build up and it became more and more troubling to us to the point that I said to Norm "I want you to come up"--I guess it was the1st of August--"and brief all of the Chiefs and Secretary Cheney on what you see and what your contingency plans would be." And so that was all flowing along.

Meanwhile, we kept receiving these assurances from all of our friends around the world, President Mubarak, the President of Turkey, our Saudi Arabian friends--Prince Bandar. We sent Ambassador Glaspie in to ask about this. And all the assurances we got coming back were of a nature that said not to worry, yes there's a bit of a problem, yes, you know, the Iraqis are posturing, but they would not attack an Arab brother, you should not worry about this.

So while we were worrying about it and starting to make military plans, in a political diplomatic world we were being told not to worry about it. And so there were mixed signals in this environment during the last week of August, mixed signals that we couldn't see our way through.

Q: You had this very good intelligence, here's the build up, here are the tanks, it's all coming in and yet nothing was happening. What was your take on this at the time?

Powell: My take and General Schwarzkopf's...we had a common view of it as we proceeded along. It looked like bluster, it looked like an armed threat really for the purpose of achieving some diplomatic or political objective, but it didn't look like an invasion. But as you got deeper into July, as you started to approach the end of July, it was just too much to merely be a futile or empty threat for political purposes, it was just too much to ignore. And we started to look at options and one that came along was well should we start moving our prepositioned equipment into the area. Another option that was discussed was should we speed up the aircraft carrier that was moving to that part of the world. I was uneasy about jumping the gun and precipitating something and so was Dick Cheney and so was....

Q: Jumping the gun on the White House?

Powell: Jumping the gun on the politics of it. I mean there had been no suggestion that we were going to undertake any political or diplomatic activity to issue a warning or a threat to him. Quite the contrary, all those political signals we were getting were to the contrary. And so we were uneasy about starting military actions that might make a bad situation worse.

Further, the military actions we were taking would have no real deterrent effect. I mean they really were quite distant. The carrier could not have gotten there that quickly and the pre-positioned ships were some days away from being in the region.

So we hesitated and as I subsequently said in my own memoirs, we probably should have looked a little harder at those sorts of deterrent actions, we probably made a mistake, maybe we should have done something, what would have been lost. But I'm not sure anything would have been gained. I'm not sure that these sorts of limited deterrent actions, in the absence of a clear political message that linked these deterrent actions to some overall strategy, would have had much effect--or any effect.

Q: What's your take on why the administration preferred the advice of the Mubaraks and Fahds, and so on, to the advice they were getting from their own intelligence people?

Powell: I'm sure you've talked to the intelligence people on this one, but the intelligence was mixed until you got to the very end of July. It was really in those last few days before the invasion that it became crystal clear that this had to be something more than just posturing. And it was only within the last two days, I think, that the CIA, and especially Dick Kerr, declared himself and said that this is going to be an invasion. And even then it wasn't clear what the nature of the invasion was.

General Schwarzkopf thought that it might be sort of a limited incursion to seize part of the oil fields or some of the offshore islands. It just wasn't clear that Saddam Hussein planned not only a full invasion of Kuwait but the actual absorption of Kuwait into Iraq as a new province.

And it was really only in the last forty-eight or seventy-two hours that this all started to become clear as a possibility. And it was really the last day when it crystalized for me was when Norm came up to the tank, as we called it--the meeting place of the Joint Chiefs of Staff--on the first of August and spent that afternoon, and he presented not only an intelligence estimate but also an operational estimate. He saw the Iraqi plans as an operational matter and he was thinking about our counter plans or what we would do in the event that they actually attacked.

And it was in that meeting that it all sort of clicked for me that this could no longer be just a feint or a demonstration but it was a serious, serious threat to Kuwait. Whether it was all of Kuwait, part of Kuwait, I could not tell, but as I walked out of that meeting with Secretary Cheney I said, "Dick, this can not be just a feint and we've got to try to get some kind of message off immediately." But by then it was too late.

Q: On that final day, nothing was done. All day the stuff was coming in and I've heard from Richard Haass that they did turn up and were going to get the President to call but it was too late. Why was no signal sent at this last moment?

Powell:There are lots of things going on in Washington in any day and that particular day we had foreign visitors in town. Part of my day was spent with the President of Togo, and it just did not gel early enough for us to deal with as a single problem that required immediate effort on our part to send a deterrent message to Saddam Hussein. And it was only late afternoon, early evening when all of the pieces came together and it was clear that some kind of message had to go back to Saddam Hussein immediately. But by then it was too late.

The question has to also be asked whether or not Saddam Hussein would have paid any attention to such a message. The question that I don't know the answer to is how committed were the Iraqis at this point. At what point had they made their decision that we're going forward. I suspect it was some time much earlier and we did not divine that they had made such a decision and, in fact, they had a marvellous dis-information plan to keep us away from that decision. Their dealing with April Glaspie, the signals they were sending out.

So they had a very coherent strategic strategy, put all these pieces in place, put out political and diplomatic dis-information to keep us off the case and we didn't get on the case until the very last two or three days and it was the very last day where it all came together and by then it was too late.

And it seems to me that a case can be made that, notwithstanding any messages or anything else that might have happened in that last two days, that Saddam Hussein had made his decision some time earlier that this was what he was going to do.

Q: You get the news. What do you feel? What are you thinking?

Powell: A sinking feeling. I got the news that evening that we are into a major major crisis with profound implications, not only for the region but for the United States, and that somehow we were going to get involved in this one way or the other. I knew that the next day would be a very very challenging and difficult, as would the days that followed.

Q: Everyone tells me that this 8 am meeting was a fiasco....I see you've got it in your book. What was going on?

Powell: It was eight o'clock in the morning when we assembled. The President had to leave shortly after the meeting began to go out to Aspen, Colorado to meet with Prime Minister Thatcher and also to give a speech announcing the new re-structuring of the armed forces of the United States that I worked on so hard, as had all of my colleages in the administration. And you have to remember the invasion was only about twelve hours old. Invasions don't come full blown and you know exactly what your enemy is doing and how many forces he's pulling, putting in and what his political objective is.

And so at eight o'clock that morning we still did not have a complete picture of what was going on. And I had General Schwarzkopf come up so he could present the plans that we had developed over the last two weeks, the tier two plans, tier one, you know, the retaliatory strike that I talked about earlier, no longer relevant.

But the meeting became quite a garble as people talked about the price of oil and what this would do to the oil markets and financial markets and then finally, with the time that we had available, we focused on the actual invasion and what reaction we should take. And what came out of that meeting was that one, we would go to the UN and seek the necessary authority to condemn this and then go from there.

And I came out of that meeting realising that we clearly would have to make sure that this did not go beyond the border of Kuwait. We clearly would probably be in a situation where we would defend Saudi Arabia, or at least offer to defend Saudi Arabia, if the Saudis would allow us to defend them. And so that's what Norm and I left with.

But nothing was decided at that meeting with respect to Kuwait. Kuwait had not been totally overrun but just about overrun. And so the President went off to Aspen to give his speech and to meet with Mrs Thatcher and I went back to the Pentagon to start to draw up plans for the deployment of forces, if that's what was called for, and I sent Norm back to Tampa, Florida....

Q: And did the President say anything at that meeting? What was your take on the President?

Powell: My take was that the President, in George Bush fashion, he was keeping his counsel. He was listening to his advisers, he was formulating things in his own mind, he was asking questions, but the only decision, if one can call it a decision, the only guidance I walked out of that meeting with was that Saudi Arabia was our immediate first problem. We may have to deal with Kuwait in due course, and we would, but Saudi Arabia is the thing we had to worry about right not. And then the President went off.

Now you may recall that at the beginning of that meeting when the President was asked, "Well, are you going to do something? Are you going to intervene, are you going to get involved?" And the President just said "Nobody's talking about intervention now. We're just here to review the situation."

So that's how it started, nobody's talking about intervention now, we're just here to review the situation, see where we are. A perfectly reasonable statement when you have only been watching an invasion for twelve hours. And so he went off to Aspen and we knew we would meet once he came back from Aspen.

Q: In those early hours, did you think Kuwait was worth fighting a war over?

Powell: I think that was the question...did it measure up as a regime, as a nation and, frankly, as the source of twenty percent of the world's oil. So it seemed to me that Kuwait did measure up, it was worth an effort to get the Iraqi army out of Kuwait and to restore it to its legitimate status. The question was how best to do that. That was the question we had not answered and didn't answer it for some weeks and months.

But that was ultimately the political question that I kept pushing to the forefront. So when military options were being asked for during this contentious meeting that's been reported, I kept asking, "Military options to do what?" and all I kept getting was "Military options". And I said, "OK, but military options--where are we going with this?"

And I have been repeatedly criticised for always asking these questions and in my own memoirs I talk about the fact that Cheney took me to the woodshed on it. But I felt my responsibility and, not just because of my background in Vietnam, but Beirut and a lot of other places, my responsibility was to push that question in front of our political leaders at the very first instance, at the very first opportunity, so we would know what it is the military was being asked to do and we would know how to do it for our political leaders.

Q: Well let's talk about that August 3rd meeting, the NSC meeting. The people I've spoken to, they basically remember saying "Yep, we've gotta do something," and Richard Haass, who was taking notes, remembers the mood around the table was, "OK, let's do it", there was no longer really a debate about what the United States had to do. And then you're the party pooper, you ask this question. Tell me what happened.

Powell: The third of August, Friday, the President's back from Aspen and we're debating the status of the invasion, how far has it gone. Remember, Saddam Hussein had said he was going to be withdrawing soon and this was just a temporary thing, which was nonsense but nevertheless it's what he said. And our Arab friends were still saying there would be an Arab solution and so we had to make some decisions. Not one troop had been ordered to go anywhere yet.

And so the decisions that came out of that meeting, the key decision that came out of that meeting is...we will defend Saudi Arabia. There was no debate about that. The question I then posed is "Then what. Should we be prepared to go forward and fight for Kuwait, to eject the Iraqi army out of Kuwait to do what"? And I guess some people suggested that that was not the correct thing for me to ask but I asked it.

And it was later that day that Secretary Cheney said, "Look, you just do military options. Don't be the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Defense or the National Security Adviser"--which he used to be--"You just do military options."

And my response to Secretary Cheney is that--"I will do military options; we've been doing military options. The troops are waiting now, I mean they're on alert. But it is important that we start off with a common understanding of what it is we are trying to achieve."

And keep in mind also, to this point, the President had made no public statements and had not recorded any decision of where he ultimately is prepared to go or what he ultimately is going to commit to this effort.

Q: How much is Vietnam running through your minds?

Powell: Vietnam is running through my mind very much. For those of us who were Vietnam veterans and rose to positions of leadership in the American armed forces later, and we all have a view that says "If you're going to put us into something then you owe the armed forces, you owe the American people, you owe just your desire to succeed, a clear statement of what political objective you're trying to achieve and then you put the force to that objective and you know when you've accomplished it, you take the initiative out of the hands of your enemy.

But it's not just Vietnam. The one I like to point to as an example is Beirut, where you have a situation that nobody can really quite understand. It is a horrible war taking place between people who have a vital interest and are prepared to die for their vital interest and we stick our troops in the middle of it without thinking through what it is they're trying to accomplish. And it sounded nice and neat at the beginning, an 'interpositional force' was the very lovely term that was invented for it.

But suddenly someone started killing those Marines and then the Marines fired back and then political officials said "Let's shoot battleship shells at them." This wasn't military judgement, this was a political judgement, and guess what, we made people very, very mad that they were being shot at, and they knew how to respond....

These Marines at the airport, that were essentially relatively defenseless with no particular mission, and I carry that to its logical conclusion: it resulted in the death of 240 Marines and another 70 French soldiers. And so this is also weighing on my mind.

We came to the same sort of situation when we did Panama in the fall of 1989. The question was how do we get rid of the Panamanian regime, not just Manuel Noriega. And the solution I took to the President, once I understood what he wanted accomplished, was "We take down Noriega, we take the whole Panamanian defense force and we restore democracy in its totality by putting in a new President and rebuilding the defense force. That will solve this problem. Now that will achieve your political objective in a decisive way."

Q: Very briefly, what did you say and what was the reaction?

Powell: My statement, as best I recall, was, "Good, you know, we're going to draw a line in the sand now. Does everybody agree it's worth going to war to reverse the invasion of Kuwait," and that was not a well received statement.

Q: Were you the ghost of Vietnam sitting at the table?

Powell: Perhaps I was the ghost of Vietnam, the ghost of Beirut, and I think as the senior military adviser to the President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense it was my responsibility not only to provide for military options but to help them shape clear political objectives for the military to help achieve.

Now, I'm not usurping their authority and I'm not, in my judgement anyway, going beyond my own authority. I think I'm doing my job as the principal military adviser to the President of the United States.

There had been cases in our past, particularly in the Vietnam period, when senior leaders, military leaders, did not force civilians to make those kind of clear choices, and if it caused me to be the skunk at the picnic...(sniff) take a deep smell.

Q: Camp David. What was decided there as far as you were concerned?

Powell: Camp David was an exceptionally good meeting, I thought. We all assembled early in the morning, fresh. Norm had come up from Tampa. All of the principal leaders were there in that marvellous cabin that the President has for conferences. The President and his political and civilian advisers were on one side of the table, Norm and I and our assistants were on the other side of the table.

There were several cross currents going on in the meeting. One cross current was "Can we get the Saudis to accept the forces that we want to send." Keeping in mind that this general, who sometimes is accused of not having military options, sat with Prince Bandar at three o clock the Friday--the 2nd--in Dick Cheney's office, and laid out to Prince Bandar a deployment of US forces that would initially go up to one hundred thousand and my dear friend Prince Bandar said, "Whew, you guys aren't kidding."

Now this is thirty-six hours after the invasion, so the suggestion that we didn't have military options, we weren't providing military options, I think falls a little flat when we presented to Bandar our military option involving one hundred thousand US troops going to the Kingdom, immediately, and this was less than thirty-six hours after the invasion.

Q: But the decision at Camp David--was it a decision to defend Saudi Arabia or a decision to send a force that would later be used to take back Kuwait?

Powell: The Camp David meeting was very, very interesting and a very, very constructive meeting because we were able to lay out to the President what we could do right away to deal with the immediate problem, which was the defense of Saudi Arabia. Kuwait was at this point gone, it had been invaded and occupied.

Our immediate problem that Saturday was to start moving forces that could defend Saudi Arabia and the bulk of Norm's very, very fine briefing dealt with the movement of forces and the disposition of forces to defend Saudi Arabia.

At the tail end of that briefing, in just a few minutes, Norm then said, "If, Mr President, your decision is to go beyond the defense of Saudi Arabia and the mission is given to us to eject the Iraqi army out of Kuwait and restore the legitimate government in Kuwait, here are the additional forces that would be required." Note, here are the additional forces that would be required on top of the forces needed for the mission we're talking about, which was the defense of Saudi Arabia.

And the President took note of that, he understood it, and Norm even gave a time line, which turned out to be reasonably accurate compared to what we did subsequently.

And so what we left that meeting with what was an urgent need to convince the Saudis that they should let US forces begin to arrive in the Kingdom in large number. That was the major outcome of the meeting and an understanding of what it would take if we had to go beyond that and eject the Iraqi army from Kuwait.

But I did not leave that meeting with that as a decision. It was an option, it was something we had to consider, it's something we might well have to do. But the crisis that was before us that day was the defense of Saudi Arabia. And as you know, it was the next day before we could get Secretary Cheney off with General Schwarzkopf to go visit His Majesty in the Kingdom.