Interview with Bernard Trainor, co-author of The Generals' War

Trainor: The administration people were convinced that Sadam Hussein was just rattling his saber and had no intention of invading Kuwait, but that he simply was trying to intimidate Kuwait. The intelligence people, however, looking at the evidence of the buildup of Iraqi forces on the Kuwaiti border became convinced that the Iraqis intended to invade Kuwait.

Q: What are the U.S. assumptions about Iraq at that point and about Saddam?

Trainor: Since the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988, the Administration had been focused on the danger of fundamentalism in Iran and its spread. And it sought to balance that off by building bridges to Iraq. They knew Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator, but the devil you know is... is better than the devil you don't. So we were extending bridges, primarily through farm credits and so forth, with the Iraqis, hoping to use them as a counter-balance against Iran. That was the policy. And when Saddam Hussein started to threaten Kuwait, the administration had a great deal of difficulty accepting the fact that their bridge-building policy was a failure.

Q: Who were some of the people making those kind of assumptions--for example, were they in particular from the farm states?

Trainor: The Administration's position of course was endorsed by the people that were from the farm states, Bob Dole being one of them. He went out and visited Saddam Hussein, and more or less gave him his blessing, because it was the farm credits which were allowing us to export the grain and other products, farm products to the Iraqis. So needless to say the support came from the farm states to the administration's policy. It was in their economic interest.

Q: With regard to April Glaspie's discussions with Saddam, what is she saying and whose mistake is it? Is it hers or the administration's?

Trainor: One of the critical junctures in the build-up to the crisis was this unprecedented meeting that Saddam Hussein called with April Glaspie who was our Ambassador to Baghdad. And in essence what Saddam Hussein was doing was feeling her out as to what the American position would be if the Iraqis moved against the Kuwaitis. And the response that he got was a very satisfactory one. She indicated, pretty much under instructions from the State Department that the United States wanted to be friends with everybody in the region, and inter-Arab disputes were the problems of the Arabs, not of the United States. Now in that sense she was carrying out her instructions from the State Department. But I think where she has to take some blame is that after this interview with Saddam Hussein, she recommended to the Administration that they not have a tough response to Saddam Hussein and his threatening moves. That, in a certain sense, gave Saddam Hussein the impression that the United States would simply tolerate, in the interest of Iraqi-American relationships, any sort of Iraqi move against the Kuwaitis. That was a bad miscalculation.

Q: So, in this pre-invasion period, summarize -- what is the U.S. picture of Iraq?

Trainor: The Administration in this fixation that they had on Iran, had pretty much discounted aggression on the part of Iraq. They thought that Iraq in the backwash of the Iran-Iraq war would be concentrating on the reconstruction of the country and would demobilize the army. Even the CIA predicted that it would be a benign Iraq for the foreseeable future. But there was, rather, a great sense of concern, when it turned out that the Iraqis did not demobilize their army, and started to show certain sort of aggressive attitudes towards Kuwait. The Iraqis claiming that the Kuwaitis should give them benefits, financial benefits, because we, the Iraqis have fought the hated Persians, and fought for the Arabs, therefore we should get certain breaks. And the Kuwaitis were ignoring them as were the rest of the Gulf States. But the Administration was convinced that Iraq was not a threat in the area. And it wasn't until July of 1990 that the intelligence community started to see this build-up of Iraqi forces and started to interpret the Iraqi move as being hostile. And not everybody in the intelligence community. It was down at the middle level, not the high level of the community.

Meanwhile, on the military side, Norman Schwarzkopf is down in the central command in Tampa, Florida, which has the responsibility for the U.S. military interest in the Persian Gulf region. He has looked around and the command was designed primarily as accounted to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is gone now, so he's looking around for an enemy. Who's the possible enemy in the region? And he sees Iraq as the most logical enemy in the region, even over Iran, and starts to put together some contingency plans in case the Iraqis should move against Saudi Arabia. But it was not because of anything that the Iraqis were doing from the point of view of his command. It was by default. He had to find an enemy to give some reason to his command. So the enemy that he picked was Iraq, and he turned out to be right.

Q: In explaining the reasons for standing up against this invasion, what about Bush's characterization of Saddam?

Trainor: Jim Baker attempted to hit the American psyche by saying, it's jobs, jobs, jobs, and the American people simply shrugged their shoulders and didn't know what he was talking about. But what happened -- there was a demonization took place with Saddam Hussein, as a result of three things that I think changed American attitudes towards the aggression out there, and led ultimately to the support of the war. Number one, it was Saddam Hussein taking hostages and supposedly putting the hostages around military targets. The second thing, again in relation to the hostages, is in what he thought was going to be a public relations coup, he went to the Al Rashid Hotel in downtown Baghdad to visit one of the hostage families that happened to be a British family. And there's the very famous TV interview of Saddam Hussein sitting there patting this little British boy on the head. And the little British boy is standing there absolutely frozen with fright. And the picture that comes through is this moustached, dirty old uncle with this little boy. So now the American people had a vision of a man who was particularly nasty. And then the final thing, in my judgment ,which capped the demonization of Saddam Hussein was the announcement that Saddam Hussein was secretly working on weapons of mass destruction, chemicals, biologicals, and most of all nuclear weapons. Now when the American people, who had lived under the nuclear cloud and the umbrella for forty years of the Cold War, and finally felt that they were free of it, once again now with this monster down in the Gulf, who has taken hostages, who frightens little boys, now has nuclear weapons, the American people started to feel that this fellow was a demon, and that Bush was correct that this man had to be stopped.

Q: Why weren't sanctions going to work?

Trainor: The questions of sanctions of course became the great debate in the fall of 1990, even though the administration was not interested in sanctions. The likelihood of sanctions working, I think, were very low. The borders were too porous, there would be all sorts of smuggling going on. Sanctions traditionally have not been particularly effective. And I think the proof of the pudding is the fact that we have maintained sanctions on Saddam Hussein since the Gulf War, even after having destroyed his infrastructure, and while it's a very crippled state, it's still a viable state. So the likelihood of sanctions working I think were very, very low.

Q: Could you give me your view of the Powell doctrine.....his reluctance to use force?

Trainor: Colin Powell, of course, becomes a major player in in the Gulf War, because he was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, exercised enormous power in that role as the principal military advisor to the President. And Powell was a man that was badly scarred by his experience in Vietnam, as were most of the generals that fought in the war. They saw the U.S. strength and power dissipated and lots of casualties in that war, which was of an inconclusive nature. And they said to themselves, never again, we will never allow the politicians to make the military a plaything. So when the build-up took place on the Kuwaiti border there was some discussion about sending a signal to Sadam Hussein as a deterrent. There was talk about speeding up an aircraft carrier to get it there, to move some ships with military equipment that were in the Indian Ocean up to the region, to fly some airplanes out there. Traditional things that are done in a crisis to show American concern and that America would get involved if the crisis went into any sort of aggression. But Colin Powell was very hesitant on that, and did not support that approach because he took the position, look if we take these deterrent actions and he still crosses the border then we find ourselves either having our bluff called or in a war that we may not want to get involved in. So he opposed it.

So what you had was a case of April Glaspie in her interview with Saddam Hussein not taking a firm stand on the issue of aggression against Kuwait, and you have a lack of a deterrent move on the part of the United States military. Saddam Hussein now gets the impression that he's getting the green light from the Americans that they're not going to interfere with whatever he does in his relationship with Kuwait. So in that sense it contributed to the war.

Q: In that group of key decisionmakers, what position is Colin Powell staking out?

Trainor: When the Administration got together to figure out what they were going to do, there were major players. The President, obviously, he was a hawk. He was a super hawk. His National Security Advisor, Scowcroft, he was also a hawk, wanted to take a tough line. Jim Baker, the Secretary of State, was somewhat reluctant, he tended to fall into the dove category. The Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, he was a hawk. And the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the final member of this kind of group that was playing such a major role, he also was in the Baker camp as being somewhat of a dove. Let's see if we can't find some negotiated solution to this problem. Let's not cross the Rubicon and go to war in that area. But both Baker and Powell were kind of odd men out. But they were also strong supporters of the Administration so they didn't fight the President on this issue at all. They just expressed, either privately or by body English, their reluctance to see this end up in a fighting war.

Q: So when we look at pictures of that group in that circle around the President, what position does Powell keep?

Trainor: There was an inner circle and an outer circle if you will, of the decisionmakers. And the inner circle in all of the decisions on the war really came down to three. And that was the President, Scowcroft and Baker. People like Gates of the CIA, Powell and Cheney, and Eagleburger, they were kind of in the outer circle. Very, very influential, but the key decisionmakers were the triumvirate of Bush, Baker and Scowcroft.

Q: Can you give a capsule summary of what you see as the Powell doctrine being in this pre-invasion period, and what that means?

Trainor: The position that Powell took, not only on crisis in the Persian Gulf but in general, is that look, Mr. President, if you're going to use military force, don't use it as it was used in Vietnam. You must have a clear objective as you want that force to do. You must have public support for that. You must use overwhelming force and use it decisively for the purpose of winning. Get the operation over quickly, keep the casualties low, and have an exit strategy to get out. If you can't meet those requirements then you should have second thoughts about using military force. This was in keeping with the thinking of former Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, who had more or less the same position, and interestingly enough, Weinberger expressed those views back in the early '80s when Colin Powell was his military advisor. This was an outgrowth of the Vietnam War, which violated all of those dictates. Each of those elements was noble in itself. But if you take that sort of approach and apply it too rigidly you'd never go to war. And you'd deny the President of the United States the use of military force as the steel fist inside the velvet glove of diplomacy. So the Powell doctrine had its virtues, but a rigid application of the doctrine is not useful to American policy.

Q: The kinds of things that Powell was opposed to-- what does that take away from the President?

Trainor: During the build-up off the crisis in July of 1990, there was some thought of taking some military action to signal Saddam Hussein that there would be American opposition. Powell felt this was a dangerous thing to do. First of all, the Administration did not think that the Iraqis were serious about moving into Kuwait. We were trying to ameliorate the situation through our Ambassador April Glaspie in what turned out to be a miscalculation of major proportions. And the idea of trying to send friendly signals to the Iraqis at the same time threatening the Iraqis with some sort of military deployment didn't seem to make too much sense. But most of all, Colin Powell took the position that if we did take military deterrent action to send the signal and a war erupted between Iraq and Kuwait anyway, then we would find ourselves either in the position of bluffing or find ourselves in a war that we may not want to be involved in. And he certainly felt that we did not want to be involved in it. So therefore, he did not support the movement of military forces as a deterrent signal. And what that deprived the President of was a method of signaling Saddam Hussein that the Americans would oppose any sort of aggression against Kuwait. And Saddam Hussein, not seeing a military signal, not seeing a diplomatic signal, presumably concluded in a classic miscalculation that the United States would not invade, or would not resist an invasion of Kuwait.

Q: What's you view of Bush's statement--'drawing the line in the sand?'

Trainor: When the Iraqi invasion took place and George Bush was trying to excite the American people to oppose it because it was aggression a la Adolf Hitler, he used this marvelous line about drawing a line in the sand against the Iraqis. The only trouble was, he was drawing the line a little bit late. The Iraqis had already crossed the line, they were in Kuwait, and now the best thing he could possibly do was defend Saudi Arabia, and build up support from the international community and the American public to eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.