Scowcroft: I can't answer that. Again in retrospect I think we probably left too much of the details of the armistice and those negotiations to the Field Commanders. In retrospect, it was probably a mistake.

Q: And why did that happen?

Scowcroft: There's not a very deep reason because it was basically a military armistice and what they were concerned with was the disposition of troops, of contacts, the kinds of things one has to do to unravel a military situation, the kinds of things tha crept through, if you will, which is not insisting on who would represent Iraq on a decision to let them fly their helicopters and so on, turned out to be mistakes.

Q: You wanted the helicopter decision reversed didn't you?

Scowcroft: Yes.

Q: Could you tell us why?

Scowcroft: Well,it was a decision that came to General Schwarzkopf and they said, "Whole roads have been destroyed. We have to administer the country and therefore we'd like to be able to fly helicopters" and he said "Okay." I thought it was a mistake because I didn't care whether the country was administered that way or not and it gave him a great loophole because we would never know what a particular helicopter was doing in the air.

But that decision was not reversed.

Q: Why not?

Scowcroft: I think it's probably supporting the commander in the field and his judgment.

Q: The President, on a number of occasions, he said I mean this is a direct quote, he actually said "The Iraqi people should put him aside"...

Scowcroft: Well that really wasn't the case. In the first place, there was no way that the Shi'ites could have put Saddam Hussein aside. The Shi'ites were fighting for if you will, independence from Iraq and in part so were the Kurds in the North.

W had made quite clear that we were not interested in breaking Iraq up into groups and indeed what conceivably happened as a result of those insurrections is that the military commanders who had every reason to go after Saddam Hussein who had locked in this humiliation instead supported him because the integrity of Iraq was at stake.

Q: Wouldn't have aiding that Shi'ite rebellion, would it not have helped destabilise Saddam?

Scowcroft: I doubt it. If the defeat in Kuwait didn't destabilise him, then it's hard to see how an uprising with the marsh people would have.

Q: What was different about the Kurds?

Scowcroft: The difference ] about the Kurds was that a) we could get to them. The first problem the Kurds is that they tried to flee into Turkey and the Turks didn't want them in Turkey for obvious reasons, so we had a close ally involved and we had a terrible problem.

So we couldn't stop them on the border and visually watch them being starved to death or freeze to death or be slaughtered so that the situation was different, it was a purely humanitarian gesture.

Q: Looking back at this whole thing, what did the war achieve?

Scowcroft: I think the war achieved several things. First, it made it clear that we were prepared to support our friends and allies, and that went not only for the Arabs in the Middle East but also for the Israelis.

That we could and would use massive power, we knew how to do it, knew how to do it well. That when the war was over we left and that reassured all of the Arabs who were worried that once the United States got in the Middle East it would stay there.

It humiliated the PLO and led the way directly to the Madrid Conference which actually got the peace process that we're now seeing.

So, I think all of those things were a result of the conflict. And in the United States it completed the transformation of the American spirit from the days of Vietnam.

Q: Mrs. Thatcher, the final words to us, she leant across and she said "George Bush isn't President anymore, I'm not Prime Minister. Saddam Hussein is President."

Scowcroft: That's right.

Q: Who won?

Scowcroft: We did. We did. As long as we are alert and observant Saddam Hussein is not a threat to his neighbours. He's a nuisance, he's an annoyance but he's not a threat. That we achieved.

It was never our objective to get Saddam Hussein. Indeed, had we tried we still might be occupying Baghdad. That would have turned a great success into a very messy, probable defeat.

Q: Why is Saddam Hussein still there?

Scowcroft: He's still there because probably we underestimated his ability at survival. He's very, very good at it.

Q: In retrospect,what could have been done that wasn't done to get rid of him?

Scowcroft: Not much. As I say, we could have tried to humiliate him like forcing him to come to Safwan, forcing him to say, you know "This was my war. I lost the war."

Beyond that-- I don't think other than even, trying to take a direct hand in it which were from doing, I don't think would have necessarily achieved it.

After all when we went into Panama we couldn't even find Noriega even though we knew Panama like the back of our hands and we knew every place that he usually stayed. We had no way of finding Saddam in Iraq.

Q: You had to sort out the row over bomb damage assessment.

Scowcroft: Yes.

Q: Do you recall that?

Scowcroft: Yes, I recall it. Vividly. It was a difficult issue.

We had bomb damage assessments both from the CIA and from the Field Command.

They sometimes differed markedly with the Field Command usually estimating higher than the CIA. The Field Command argued that photography didn't always show the whole picture. That instead they used other kinds of data to get a more complete picture of what the damage was.

It never was resolved. I brought, I think, minimal peace between the two contending agencies. One of the, problems was that with modern munitions, take a tank for example the actual penetration of the tank might be just a little tiny pin hole but the round, once it penetrated would rattle around inside and just devastate everything inside the tank. But you can't see it.

Q: But the issue was you were having to decide you know, the CIA were saying...

Scowcroft: Actually we went basically with the Field Command. But we tried to compromise. We set up a process by which they would compare notes and so on and that they would share the data, 'cos they weren't even doing that.

In fact, after the war, a retrospective indicated that the CIA was closer than the Field Command on actual damage.

Q: Finally, George Bush. Could you just sum up your impressions as you were approaching war..

Scowcroft: As the time for the conflict got closer, he more and more started to think about what it was he was doing. That he, in fact, was ordering people into situations where they would lose their lives. And the kind of magnitude of that awful decision I think, haunted him, and he did-- He became subdued.

That's an awful responsibility, and you have to ask yourself, you know, how much is a life worth, how much is a hundred lives worth, a thousand, ten thousand, and of course some of the estimates we got were that the casualties would be worse than than Vietnam. Not from military, but from outside, so called experts.

So he became very conscious, and in part weighed down, by the awesomeness of the decision he was making.

Q: His contribution to making this whole thing happen?

Scowcroft: Absolutely essential. Absolutely essential. He was a pillar of strength. Confident, strong, not self doubting. He realized early on what was required and determined to do it and simply kept on course.

Q: You were talking earlier about reading about the Second

World War. Did he see this as a struggle between good and evil..? Scowcroft: I think in part, yes. I think in part he did. I think he in his own mind demonized Saddam Hussein. And it's not hard to do. This was not an attractive person and when the reports came in about the way Kuwait was being treated, or just the way Saddam treated his own people in different circumstances, it took on a good versus evil kind of quality to it.