Powell: You have to remember that the major issue before us, Saturday through Sunday, was to get the Saudis permission to allow us to start moving troops. If they didn't give us that permission and we couldn't defend Saudi Arabia then we wouldn't be able to eject the Iraqis from Kuwait if that ultimately became our objective.

So Saturday and Sunday were sort of a waiting time for us, waiting for Cheney to get to the Kingdom to talk to His Majesty. And then suddenly the President returns Sunday afternoon from Camp David and he is walking toward the White House residence, he is getting shouted questions, "What are you going to do? What are you going to do?" "What's your reaction to the invasion?" And the President just turns and says, "This will not stand." He's pressed. "Wh... What?"

"This invasion of Kuwait. This will not stand".

And that was, for me anyway, the first direct expression from the President that he has crossed the line and there's no question he will do what is necessary to get the Iraqis out of Kuwait. Whether it's by sanctions, sanctions and force, force alone, whatever it's going to take. And so he had crossed the river at that point in my mind and I sat up and said, "Wow." I wasn't perturbed, I was just surprised to hear it in that manner and I immediately started thinking about what I called this new mission that we had just received.

For me and for Schwarzkopf it was a new mission. Now maybe for some of my other colleagues, they had thought that direction had been given earlier or the President had crossed this line earlier, but for me, and I think for Norm, and I'll let Norm speak for himself, for at least for me this was a new mission you had to start getting ready for.

Q: Now he gives this speech on August the 15th. Tell me about that.

Powell: After the President uttered this famous expression "This will not stand" and I started to internalise this and Schwarzkopf was on his way to the Kingdom with Cheney, the next day, Monday, we waited anxiously for the results of the Cheney/King Fahd meeting. And then late that afternoon Cheney called the White House and then he calls me and says "We have permission. Start the force moving." And I immediately contacted the commanders concerned and a massive airlift began to move forces. So not only were options available, the options were ready to be executed some four days after the invasion of Kuwait.

For the next week and a half our interest was getting forces on the ground. As I said to Cheney and to my other political leaders, "The most important thing is to get an American flag in the desert." Because I didn't think the Iraqis wanted to fight America and I didn't think they had made a decision yet to invade Saudi Arabia, but they might be tempted to.

The first chance we had to bring the President over to the Pentagon and give him a more formal briefing and to meet with all the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was on the 15th of August and the flow had began. We had oh maybe ten or twenty, maybe as high as thirty thousand troops already in the region after just a week and a half.

I wanted, at that point, to put in the President's mind firmly the time line and the decisions that would be needed as we went down the road. And after the briefing in the tank we adjourned to Secretary Cheney's office, Secretary Cheney, myself and one or two others. And using a simple chart I described to the President the build up and how fast it would occur, when we would have to bring in the decision to call up reserves, when we would have to bring in the decision to activate all of our civil airlift fleet...the various decision points.

And I told him that sometime about the third week in October we would have reached the level of force needed for defending Saudi Arabia. Without question we would have the ability to defend Saudi Arabia. And by the third week in October we would be putting the last unit in the pipeline at this end to arrive in Saudi Arabia sometime in late November. And at that point he would have to make a decision as to whether he wanted to continue to just defend Saudi Arabia or we kick more troops into the pipeline because we wanted to go on to the offense.

So as early as the 15th of August the President knew the time lines against which we were operating and he would have to make decisions. And by then, the 15th of August, the international community had adopted a sanctions policy and that was the policy of the United States and the policy of the international community as reflected in the UN resolutions.

After that briefing the President just took note of it and said, "Thanks, it's good to know what these time lines are." He then went out in front of the Pentagon where overnight the White House advance team had created a podium and a platform and a place for people to assemble so the President can speak to them.

Schwarzkopf was there, and the President's speech was very very attuned to the military and Pentagon audience. It was tough, it was unyielding and in different words, he re-enforced his point of 4 August that this will not stand and there is no question that he was going forward with this and he was going to reverse the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. How we would have to do it remained to be determined.

Q: Lots of people have talked about it...that you became concerned that containment--sanctions--wasn't receiving proper consideration. Tell me what the President said back to you when you laid out this particular option.

Powell: The build up continued through all of August and into September. The sanctions policy was in effect by then, we were intercepting ships at sea and we were building up.

The President had a major political problem. How do you keep this coalition together, how do you get public support for whatever we might have to do and how long are we going to be stuck with this problem.

There were a number of people around who were suggesting to the President that--just bomb them a little bit and they'll quit. We were getting this from the Egyptians, we were getting this from the Saudis, we were getting these ideas from a lot of different people and it went counter to my view, counter to the views of the Joint Chiefs of Staff frankly and to Norm Schwarzkopf. We could not just rely on a simple strike as the way to get this taken care of and therefore we should not jump into a war that we were not prepared to prosecute to its conclusion.

But the President had a problem, he wanted to get this on. My concern was that it was going to take us a while to build this force up and the President should not be just looking at a single option of invading at the end of a time....I felt it was important that he look at all options available to him.

The option that was being executed at that time was not a counter invasion or an offensive option, it was a sanctions option. And so I wanted to make sure he understood how we could prosecute that until some point when the force was built up.

I also wanted to make sure he understood that there was yet one more option and it was an option that said "Maybe you don't want to undertake a major regional conflict in the area. You might want to adopt a policy of continued sanctions and strangulation to bring the Iraqis to their senses and reverse the invasion without having to go to war."

And so on during this period in early September, Cheney and I talked about it, I talked about it with Paul Wolfowitz, I talked about it with Jim Baker who had some slight enthusiasm for it. Scowcroft and I also talked about it. He listened to it but Scowcroft, he was, "You know, this just isn't going to work in a timely manner and I don't think the President will buy it."

And then finally on a Monday afternoon, I think it was the 24th of September, it's been reported as some time in October but it was the 24th of September, Cheney and I got to talking about it again and he says, "Well let's just go over and talk to the President."

At this point he was allowing me to give all kinds of advice again having, you know, put me in my box. But Dick was wonderful in that regard. He gave me full opportunity to vent whatever was on my mind that I felt was important.

We go to the White House. It is not a full meeting of the NSC, nobody from the State Department was there, Baker's not there, Eagleburger's not there. It's just sort of a regular afternoon meeting that Cheney occasionally had with the President and the President, myself, Cheney, Scowcroft and Sununu were the only ones in the room.

And we sat around the President's desk, we didn't even go off to the normal seating area, and just leaning over the President's desk I took him through the state of the build up following up from what I said earlier, how the build up was going and from the 15th August now to the 24th of September.

I laid out for him when we'd be ready to go on the attack and then I laid out for him what a sanctions policy might look like and how it would work. And when I was through, he listened intently in that way he has, somewhat slouched in his chair with his chin slightly down. The picture's been published and it's kind of famous. And when I was through he took it all in. We chatted for just a moment or two and his response was "Well Colin, that's all, very very interesting. It's good to consider all options but I just don't think we're going to have time for sanctions to work."

And I said "That is the problem. You don't know how long it takes sanctions to work, you're not seizing the initiative from your enemy, you're essentially hoping that this pressure will cause your enemy to come to a decision rather than you making the decision for him. That's the problem with sanctions but I felt you should hear it all."

Q: What was your thinking at the time? What was your preferred option...

Powell: My thinking was that it would be great if sanctions would do the job because then we would avoid a war with unknown consequences and therefore we should give sanctions as much of a ride as was politically possible. In the meantime, let's continue to build up our forces so that you have every option available to you.

Some people think that was the only policy I was pushing at that point but I would take issue with that. I felt it was important that the President hear all sides and meanwhile, while he was considering all sides, I was doing everything I could to put in place, with Schwarzkopf, a powerful, powerful force that would win decisively if that's what the President wished for.

I had no preferred option at that time. I was hoping sanctions would work. I was not making a recommendation that we should ignore or don't consider or set aside the offensive option and just go straight for a strangulation policy that might take years to work.

Q: In terms of the reluctant warrior, do you object to the characterisation of reluctant warrior?

Powell: No I'm guilty. I say quite candidly that if you can solve a crisis of this nature without a war, you certainly should try to do that and take a look at it. But what I discovered as the months went by was that it wasn't going to work without a war. And the most important meeting, at least in my mind, was the meeting at the end of October when just as I had suggested to the President on the 15th of August, I would be coming back to him at the end of October to say, "Here are your choices." And by then it was clear that sanctions were not going to work in any kind of reasonable time.

The President could not keep this coalition together for the length of time it might take for sanctions to work. As we have seen from recent events, sanctions might now be working, but it's taken four years for sons-in-laws and daughters to start leaving Baghdad.