Powell: October 30th, we assembled in the Situation Room at the White House. I'd just returned from Saudi Arabia where Norm and I and all of his commanders sat down and went over what troops would be needed for a more workable plan than the plan that had been presented on the 11th of October. And we'd come up by now with a good plan. Lots of people worked on it, I don't think anyone can claim ownership of that plan. It was a plan that almost emerged out of what the Iraqis were doing and the situation that presented itself.

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: Can you sum up--so my mother understands it--what's the policy of overwhelming force.

Powell: Well, just for your 'Mum' to understand, I like to use the term decisive force which essentially says, "If this is important enough to go to war for, we're going to do it in a way that there's no question what the outcome will be and we're going to do it by putting the force necessary to take the initiative away from your enemy and impose your will upon him. If you're not serious enough to do that, then you ought to think twice about going to war.

It's the equivalent of being the biggest bully on the block. "I've got my knife, I've got my gun, I've got my stick ball bat, are you sure you really want to challenge me?"

Very often, if you go into a crisis situation in that way, you can perhaps even avoid the crisis, avoid going to war. And if you do have to go to war then you will achieve your objective with minimum loss of life and that's been my approach. Does that mean it fits every situation and you could never do anything else? No. But it seems to me that that ought to be the way to look at a problem in the first instance. If you can not do that then do something less but be prepared for achieving something less than a success.

Q: By having this massive call up, by calling up the reserves, were you actively trying to make sure the American people were behind this endeavor?

Powell: No, we called up the reserves because we can't go to war without them, a war of this size. One of the things that was done back in the mid-seventies, after Vietnam, was that the structure of the armed forces was changed and back then they may have had more than the military motivation but a political motivation. General Abrams and some of those key commanders and leaders back then, made sure that the reserves were an essential element of the armed forces structure so that the whole nation would get involved.

So when my turn came along, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff with my colleagues in the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to put together an operation like this, you could not perform such an operation without calling up the reserves. So it wasn't a matter of gamesmanship that I was doing it to make sure that the American people were totally committed to this effort but we couldn't have gone to war without them.

Q: The period that followed, there was outcry when the announcement was made over doubling the forces. How concerned were you that once again the military would be out in front and there'd be no public opinion behind them?

Powell: I wasn't concerned about that at that time. Frankly when we decided to double the size of the force there was even a debate as to whether we had to announce it or not. Finally I pressed and said, "This is not a trivial matter."

And we had a formal announcement of it and there was a great deal of...of controversy principally in the Congress, and a great deal of editorial commentary.

Because what that decision said was, "We're going to war and three months of sanctions haven't worked." And there were those who did not want to go to war under any set of circumstances, they wanted the sanctions to have a full period of time to run. But I wasn't concerned at that point about public support. I think we were starting to garner public support.

Q: But were you thinking about Vietnam?

Powell: No. The American military has constantly been nailed about the so-called Vietnam syndrome. Does it affect our thinking? Sure it was the most definitive military event in our lives and in our career.

But it is not a syndrome, as if it's some sort of mental disease we have. It's the right way to go about dealing with war: have a clear objective, know what you're doing,... It's know what you're getting into, know what you're trying to achieve. And if it's important, and if you're going to send young men and women to die to achieve that objective, then by God give them every advantage to achieve it and go in for a decisive win. Maybe you can't always do that. But you should always look to do that in the first instance.

And so it is more than just a syndrome that we're suffering from. Sometimes I think it's some of my civilian political friends and media friends who are suffering from the syndrome. What those of us in the military are trying to do is to use all of the lessons in military history, to make sure that our political leaders understand the consequences of going to war and how to go to war well and do it well.

Q: What were your concerns over the President demonizing Saddam Hussein?

Powell: When you demonize an enemy such as the President tended to do with Saddam Hussein and others did--and frankly I did it from time to time because it was useful putting a face on this crisis--but, in so demonising him, by the President and the rest of us, you raised expectations that you would do something about him at the end of the day.

But we never had a plan that said we were going to go to Baghdad and actually remove this guy from power the way we removed Noriega from power in Panama. Because we had no international authority for that, we had no agreement within the coalition, especially the Arab members of the coalition, that we would do such a thing. They were anxious to see Iraq stay together, the Iraqi army out of Kuwait, Saddam gone preferably but the son of Saddam, figuratively, or another Sunni leader emerge to hold this country together and so that the country's not so prostrate that Iran could walk over it.

Q: The first night of the war you describe in your book seeing a pilot come back from a mission. Tell me about that and why it mattered so much.

Powell: The first night of the war was the most difficult night for me, frankly, because we had put this plan together, could not avoid war, sanctions did not work, they were a failure. And I was quite confident we would be successful because we had put together a decisive force.

But no plan survives first contact with a real enemy and so I was anxious to see how the plan would start to unfold. It was also the first war that was about to be broadcast in living color, complete with commercial breaks, to the whole world at once.

And so I sat in my office watching and waiting. I knew where every plane was and I knew where the B52s were that came all the way from the United States, I knew when the cruise missiles were launched, and all I could do at this point was wait for the results.

And while waiting for the results, suddenly there is CNN with my three friends, the CNN reporters, in the Rashid Hotel reporting something. Green tracers flying up into the sky and the whole world starts to watch this war in real time.

Finally Norm starts to give me spot reports and then he gives me one summary report early the next morning which is quite good. We'd only lost one perhaps two airplanes and we'd had good target coverage. So Norm's taking care of that war and it's going to go fine. But how are the American people reacting to the war, what are they seeing, what is the world seeing?

It's a new environment. You have to pay as much attention to what people have seen in real time as you do with what's going on in the war in real time.

And so I was anxiously waiting to see how the people would react to this. And suddenly one of the first scenes coming off one of our airfields is of this F16 landing and we finally have allowed some reporters aboard...on the airfield to watch it. Rolls to a stop, canopy pops open, pilot comes out. I met him later, his name is Jet Jurnigen I mean, right out of Hollywood Central Casting--Jet Jurnigen is the young man's name.

And so he comes down, and he's walking away, he's just finished his first combat mission, the adrenalin's flowing out of him and...and he just wants to be alone for a while but the reporters are persistent.

And I'm watching this in real time in my office and suddenly the youngster turns around to talk to the reporters and I say, "Oh, no telling what Jet Jurnigen is liable to say to a pushy reporter."

And what Jet Jurnigen says is, "I'll tell you what it was all about, what is what like. First, I want to thank God that I completed my mission successfully and I got back to my base safely." That's pretty good. American people are hearing this. Confident, that American pilot.

He starts to walk away and he looks over his shoulder a second time and he says, "I want to thank God for the love of a good woman."

He starts to walk away again and he looks over his shoulder a third time and he says "I want to thank God that I'm an American." And then he looks over his shoulder a fourth time and he says, "I want to thank God that I'm an American fighter pilot." I about swooned.

And for the next number of weeks American people saw this spirit of confidence, spirit of professionalism, well-trained, well-equipped, well-led young Americans, the best and brightest, side by side with well-equipped, well-trained Brits, Canadians, Italians, all of the twenty-eight nations or thereabouts that sent troops to the region. And they sort of fell in love with them and they felt very, very good about what they were doing at that point. There was a feel good that we had not seen since World War II....

When we came home from Vietnam we had lost faith. You didn't wear...a uniform.

And this time we would try to do it right, we were trying to do it with the right blend of political objectives, decisive military means and making sure that when we had accomplished that objective, we would know it and we would stop the war. The American people understood that, they supported it, and they saw political and military leaders who seemed to know what they were doing.

And the American people, and I suspect, the people of Britain as well, you didn't have a Vietnam experience like we did, you were kind of off the wind from the Falklands war, but the American people, and I would also say the British people, kind of fell in love with their armed forces again. And at least in America, a spirit was recreated that we hadn't seen since 1945--VE Day and VJ Day--and we were very proud of that.

Q: You gave this amazing press conference. "Here's our plan for the Iraqi army. We're going to cut it off, then we're going to kill it." Why did you give that press conference?

Powell: The first night of the war everybody was in heaven, they saw these strikes going very successfully, casualties were almost nil, television pictures of bombs going down chimney stacks and all that sort of stuff. And some of the reporters were running around saying, "This is going to be over right away."

And I had to call down to the Pentagon press office and tell them to shut those guys up. We have just started a war, it isn't a one day affair. It is not going to be over before the next commercial break, tell 'em to cool it.

And after a week of this you could sense the angst and anxiety and unease throughout the American body politic. "Gosh, it's been going on for a week. Why isn't it over? Maybe it's not going well? What are we trying to do?"

And we had not been sort of on stage to explain what we were trying to do. So I went up to see Secretary Cheney and said "You know, we...we've got to do something because now we're starting to lose the public on this one."

And Dick agreed readily. And the next day, Tuesday, we set up a press conference. And Cheney and I worked so closely together that we almost always knew who would say what, we could always mesh it very, very well. And he was always good about letting me do the military stuff as the Chairman and he would handle the diplomatic and political context.

And so we went down to the press office and Cheney put it all in political context, what we were trying to achieve. And I had thought through what I wanted to say and I wanted to describe to the American people the whole campaign.

Everybody remembers that line "Cut it off and kill it." I wished they'd remember the rest of the briefing as well where, essentially, I laid out the campaign plan, all phases of the air campaign, how we had isolated the battlefield, how we had tried to cut communications, how we'd done this, how we'd done that. And then finally I moved from Baghdad South and said, "Now the immediate objective is the Iraqi army in Kuwait and our strategy for going after this is very very simple."

And then I used the line that "we're going to cut...first we're going to cut it off and then we're going to kill it." And I had thought that through. It wasn't just a spontaneous expression. I needed something to capture the essence of what we were trying to do and so that's why I used that line.

And then the other one that became well known was, "Trust me, trust me," where I put some dummied up data of how we had knocked out Iraqi radar systems. I didn't want to put the real data up so I used charts without numbers on them. And the reporters immediately started looking at them very suspiciously and all I could says was--"I can't tell you what the numbers really are, but trust me, trust me."

Q: Were you surprised you got away with that one?

Powell: Got away with it, God (laugh) I got away with it, and...but they could trust me. I was not trying to deceive them, I was trying to give the American people a sense of how it was going.

We knew that when you stood up in one of those press conferences, you weren't talking to reporters, you were answering their questions but you were talking to the American people, you were talking to a hundred and fifty capitals, you were talking to the enemy and you were talking to your troops. So you always had to have a message that would fit all five audiences and the fifth audience of course being the reporters themselves.

And so I tried to make sure that "to cut it off and kill" was something that would reassure the American people, communicate a signal to Baghdad, give assurance to our coalition friends around the world, each of whom has a President, a Prime Minister or a King with their own political constituencies, that we knew where we were and where we were going and also make sure the troops understood it.

Q: What do you say to those people who feel..."Hey, if only we'd been allowed to carry on bombing Baghdad, we could have won the war ourselves."

Powell: Air power advocates have been saying this forever and one of these days it may prove to be true. But it wasn't demonstrated in Desert Storm and the lessons of the bombing of London and many other cities in the course of history suggest that that is not necessarily the outcome that you get from sustained bombing in Baghdad.

Keeping in mind also that we were bombing very selectively in Baghdad. In fact it's one of the cleanest bombing campaigns that's ever been held so I just can't accept the judgement that if they were allowed to bomb for, how long, two years, it would have produced a result. I wish it had produced a result in the first thirty eight days, but it didn't.

Q: The meeting about the Gorbachev approach on the eve of the land war. Can you describe your contribution to that meeting?

Powell: Earlier in the evening, while the President was at the theatre, we heard about the Gorbachev approach. And I came over early, went to Scowcroft's office and sat with him for a while and started thinking about it and jotted some notes to myself. And then we went to the President's private residence when he returned from the theatre.

We were all assembled, it was late at night, the last thing we needed to have is this thrown into our laps. The President was irritated by it. But at the same time Gorbachev had been helpful all along, for his own purposes not necessarily always for ours, but nevertheless helpful. And so the President was anxious not to lose him at this point.

The first response that came out of the...the policy crowd that was there was, "Stiff him," and that was essentially it. The President became irritated. He said "Can't do that. Come on, I need something different."

And then we chatted about it for a while and I looked at the notes I had scribbled myself and then sort of looked at the President in a questioning way and he said "Well Colin, do you have something?"

And I said "Well sir, yes sir. An alternative might be not to stiff him directly but to stiff him by putting out a deadline. Mr. Gorbachev, glad you're for peace but we're going to set a deadline and if you can get these guys out of Kuwait by that deadline, or essentially out of Kuwait by that deadline, fine--you can put yourself in for a Nobel Peace Prize. But if you don't, we continue. We take this to a conclusion."

The President heard that, there was a bit of silence in the room for a moment and then it was kicked around. And, "What time should we make this deadline for?" and finally everybody agreed to it. And that's what the President announced the next morning.