Transcript for:
Overview of the Gulf War Dynamics

[Music] in the winter of 1991 amid the burning oil wells of Kuwait two armies faced each other in the desert at stake with the oil fields of the Middle East and America's leadership in the world the war in the Persian Gulf would be the first test after the Cold War of the American promise of a new world order the Gulf War was an American war there were Iraqis there and there were lots of allies in the Coalition were there but was a US war from start to finish for the American Military this would be a war fought on two fronts against an Iraqi Army entrenched in the desert and against the entrenched ghosts of an old war the Persian Gulf War didn't last for 6 weeks it lasted for 20 years Vietnam is a poltergeist through this whole thing it had a a psychological Dimension as a consequence of Vietnam that um transcended Saddam Hussein in the invasion of Kuwait somehow in ways that made uh made this war larger than than it really was this is the story of what happened when America confronted Saddam Hussein and itself in the Arabian Desert funding for Frontline is provided by The Corporation for Public [Music] Broadcasting and by annual financial support from viewers like you this is Frontline [Music] it was in July 1990 when American spy satellites first photographed unusual military movement in the Persian Gulf my intelligence officer came in and started to show me satellite photos and other intelligence which suggested an Iraqi buildup in the southern part of Iraq um it wasn't immediately troubling because uh it was just to build up within their own country it did not have the backup that one would expect to see for an invasion of another country the legistics 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 uh of interest and troubling it did not yet become uh something of great concern the US had cited with Saddam Hussein during Iraq's 8year war with Iran now the Iraqi dictator was using his vast oil revenues to build nuclear weapons and equip a million man army that could dominate the Middle East but the American government was confident it could contain his Ambitions one of the basic problems at the outset of the crisis was that the administration was convinced of the rectitude of its policy towards Iraq which was to extend them credits and to try to build Bridges to Iraq to change their behavior they knew Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator but the idea if we build Bridges maybe we can change as fellows way of doing business meanwhile the intelligence community in the summer of 1990 was watching what Saddam Hussein did and what he said and they were trying to send this message to their political Masters that the Iraqis were serious about moving into Kuwait but the administration just couldn't conceive that its policy was failing and therefore they turned a deaf fear to these warnings in Washington that summer President Bush was distracted by a much bigger problem managing the fall of Communism and the end of the Cold War the idea that on a Monday afternoon or something I was going to stroll into the oval and go oh by the way Mr President Saddam Hussein is going to mass 100,000 plus forces and is going to walk into Kuwait and is going to make this the 19th province of Iraq and this is going to be the major test of the post cold war world that was too big it was too dramatic two months earlier Saddam Hussein had welcomed his neighbor and Ally the Amir of Kuwait [Music] the Amir ruled one of the wealthiest countries on Earth Kuwait owned 1/10th of the world's oil Iraq was rich in oil too but saddam's military spending had pushed his regime to the brink of bankruptcy Saddam blamed the Amir for his troubles accusing Kuwait of flooding the market with cheap oil lowering prices and hastening Iraq's descent into economic crisis we started to realize that there is a conspiracy against Iraq a deliberate conspiracy against Iraq by Kuwait organized devised by the United States later that day Saddam would issue the Amir a stark warning He said Each dollar less in price means to US 1 billion in revenues for a year if you do not mean waging a war against Iraq please stop it but the Amir took a tough stand and a month later saddam's Inner Circle decided that unless Kuwait handed over10 billion to Iraq immediately they would invade Iraq had no choice but to act either to be destroyed to be suff located and strangled inside its territory or attack the enemy and the outside the Republican guard was ordered to move South toward Iraq's border with [Music] Kuwait these were the Iraqi Army's Elite divisions equipped with Soviet tanks no other Middle Eastern country except Israel had forces to rival them soon 30,000 Iraqi troops had massed on the border between Iraq and [Music] Kuwait with the crisis building Egyptian president hne Mubarak rushed to Baghdad sent by Kuwait and the Arab world to arrange negotiations Mubarak one of America's closest allies in the region was determined to discover saddam's plans it was an encounter that would have far-reaching consequences I met with Saddam Hussein he met me in the airport then he took me in the car he was driving this inside him nobody with us until he went to one of the Palaces near the lake there and we went upstairs to the first floor T in a big room and we were both alone nobody with us I asked him about the what's the problem what's happening I told do you have any intention to attack them in Vietnam he told me no but don't tell the quits about that it was a very clear answer as soon as he left Baghdad the Egyptian president telephoned the White House to report that Saddam was bluffing Mubarak told George Bush that the Iraqi leader was desperate for money but that the Arabs would sort things out since we didn't know the internal situation in Iraq no nor Saddam Hussein our best bet was to take counsel from the people who did know him and what he was really saying is you know don't jump in this thing just just let it work it let it work its way out you got to handle this guy right at his head quarters in Tampa Florida the American military commander responsible for the Middle East was following the Diplomatic developments every Elder Statesman in the world who was an arabist was saying oh this will never happen you know an Arab will never invade another Arab this is all a force on saddam's part and that the kuwaitis will cave and and Grant him the concessions that he was looking for and he won't have to do this Invasion the day after mubarak's visit Saddam abruptly summoned the American ambassador April glas 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 glasby repeated for Saddam the state Department's position this was hardly tmount to a warning shot across the bow she said we're watching you we're concerned about the bellico statements that you've been issuing uh but our fundamental feeling is that we have no direct vested interest in Arab Arab disputes including the dispute that you're having with the kuwes over the uh the the mutual border that you share as the meeting ended Saddam announced there would be more talks with the kuwaitis and glasby caed Washington Saddam is worried I believe we would now be well advised to ease off on public criticism of Iraq until we see how negotiations develop the cable reached the president's Middle East adviser at a critical moment I had actually written a memo to the president saying we're getting all this intelligence obviously concerned when suddenly the cable from April glassby came and what I did was I scribbled on the top of the memo what I've written you may be a little bit OB overtaken by events Mr President cuz things look a little bit calmer now a just come in with the cable essentially saying uh I think this Situation's going to wind down we Americans need to sit tight and not overreact I think by the time George Bush went back to the residence on July 25th the general sense was a crisis that while probably not passed had largely peaked and that it was on its way to getting resolved but the Iraqi threat was still building on the Kuwaiti border the original 30,000 troops grew to 70,000 then 100,000 Arab leaders continued to insist it was all a bluff then on August 1st the Iraqis walked out on talks when the kuwaitis refused to meet their demands Saddam issued his orders we gathered at 4:00 on the afternoon before the invasion and on a map table we were shown our objectives in Kuwait our captain explained the Kuwaiti government was about to change we had been asked to help set up the new government during the crisis Major General wafi Al Samurai held a key position in Iraqi Military Intelligence he says he met with s am Hussein nearly every day and remembers saddam's final calculations about what America would do Saddam thought any reprisals would be limited and would tail off with time he thought that America's involvement in Vietnam had badly damaged its willingness to use military power Vietnam had been an outright defeat militarily and politically as as they spoke a satellite took this Photograph American intelligence analysts searched for the bases which had been crammed with hundreds of Iraqi tanks but when they found them they were empty the Republican guard was on the Move more photographs arrived showing assault helicopters at Iraqi airfields within striking range of Kuwait us defense intelligence issued its highest alert watchcon one [Music] Schwarz kov came up to the meeting place of The Joint Chiefs of Staff on the 1st of August and it was in that meeting that it all sort of clicked for me that this could no longer be just a faint or a demonstration but it was a serious serious threat to Kuwait I explained to them that I was quite sure that this was a plan I couldn't guarantee them that they were going to invade but I felt that all the indications were there that they were going to invade as I walked out of that meeting with uh with secretary Cheney as said uh dick this this cannot be just a faint and we've got to try to get some kind of message off immediately I was essentially deputized to go back to the White House to meet with skoof and the president and to convince them to take one last shot at trying to influence Saddam and just as we were talking about what exactly he would say to Saddam in this last effort to get him to think twice before doing anything that's when the phone rang saying we just heard from our people in Kuwait shooting has has started this war or whatever it is has [Music] begun well on that morning I was woken up by a large explosion and I looked out the window and there's the tower all in a PO of smoke I thought hello hello we got a problem going on here Republican guard tanks sealed off the city while Iraqi Special Forces seized government buildings the advancing Iraqis met Little Resistance the Amir had stood down his army to avoid provoking Saddam many of his soldiers were taking their summer vacations I received a call from from a friend in the in the foreign Ministry and he told me that the foreign minister said that now and stress now is the time for the US to [Music] act and I said to him there may have been a time to act yesterday there may be a time to act in the future but I don't know what we can do right [Music] now for us was shocking shocking I couldn't believe that this could happen in the AR Saddam Hussein we were very in good terms and he was a friend we know each other very well but didn't expect him to do that by noon Saddam Hussein controlled 1 of the world's oil Saddam probably figured the Arab world and the World At Large would [ __ ] and moan for a couple of days and then people would get used to it and the world would essentially learned to live with it and the United States which had left Lebanon a decade before and so forth uh was not going to do anything and even if the United States wanted to do something the local Arabs would never do anything they would never work with the United States and stand up to Saddam so I think Saddam took the pretty intelligent decision that he could probably get away with it Mr President yeah hel do you contemplate intervention as one of your options we're not discussing intervention I would not discuss any military options even if we'd agreed upon them but one of the the president summoned his National Security Council to confront the crisis but bush is confused statement to the Press set the tone for the subsequent meeting it was rambling and inconclusive and um we will we really needed some time to to come to grips with this basic fundamental question of of our strategic assessment of what this meant did it matter that he taken Kuwait the notion of Iraq which was an oal Powerhouse in itself acquiring the Kuwaiti resources and thus perhaps being able to dominate uh uh OPEC was a tremendous danger to the United States and the industrialized world I thought it made a lot of difference to put it bluntly what we ultimately did sending half a million people around the world and all that that entailed that was too big of a thought for people at that first meeting even to think about so instead you had people talking all over the place many of whom were talking about uh how we could live with this the president left to give a speech in Aspen Brent skok traveled with him the president was way out in front of most of his advisers he felt the same way I did about it about the sort of resigned tone of the meaning and that there was no uh uh no sense of of outrage or no sense of imperative waiting in Aspen for the president was the British prime minister Margaret Thatcher the Victor in the faland was already thinking about war George Bush just said to me Margaret what is your view and so indeed I told him that aggressors must be stopped not only stopped but they must be thrown out an aggressor cannot gain from his aggression he must be thrown out and really by that time in my mind I thought we ought to throw him out so decisively that he could never think of doing it again it was like to two soulmates finding each other they found from the very first words that they were exactly on the same wavelength that this was a tremendously serious event that it could not be tolerated and something had to be done the president said little to the Press but he was already thinking about military action Thatcher remembers telling him Saddam was a potential Hitler who must be stopped both leaders Drew their history lessons from World War II don't forget George Bush fought bravely in the last war he knew what it was like to fight he was injured so he knew that if you didn't turn out an aggressor then you could have simply terrible consequences for future Generations George Bush had been formed by his experiences as a young Navy pilot in the Pacific but but for his generals the last war was Vietnam where Norman schwarzkoff and colen Powell had served as young officers and 20 years later the military and the country were still traumatized by the disaster in Vietnam as the president returned to Washington the political challenge that faced him was enormous to throw Saddam out of Kuwait he would have to overcome stiff resistance inside his own government and in the country but now as the president headed for a meeting with his key advisers there was fresh intelligence that the Iraqis might be headed for Saudi Arabia one of the first questions was uh is he going to stop at the borders of Kuwait Saddam is he going to stop there or or is he likely to go on into Saudi Arabia and move down to the oil fields we had no idea what he was going to do everybody had been dead wrong with respect to the question of whether or not he was going to invade Kuwait and he invaded Kuwait and he had 140,000 Iraqi troops on the Saudi border 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 are we prepared should we be prepared to go forward and uh fight for Kuwait the president gave no response to Powell's question that night or the next day at Camp David Vietnam was at the table the old fear of another escalating conflict with no clear end for those of us who were Vietnam veterans 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 a clear statement of what political objective you're trying to achieve initially anyway General pow was not as concerned about the crisis as I was he in fact was more of an advocate of sanctions as opposed to military force the senior military leadership understands better than anybody else that if in fact you're going to use military force uh you're going to suffer casualties uh it's almost impossible not to and uh it's their people that are hurting the process at Camp David the military briefed the president on its plan to defend Saudi Arabia the bottom line I was trying to make to the president is that this is the force that was necessary to guarantee a defense of Saudi Arabia and the rest of the gulf oil fields it was not an offensive Force by any means the force would have to be considerably bigger if we were going to eject the Iraqis out of Kuwait by Force of Arms after the meeting while Brent skof stayed on with the president to figure out how to persuade the Saudis to accept American troops colen Powell left for Washington I don't recall anybody saying uh we're going to go take back Kuwait I recall everybody saying we are going to clearly do whatever is necessary to defend Saudi Arabia the next afternoon Bush returned to Washington the generals hoped the talk of liberating Kuwait had gone away it wasn't the last time they would misread George Bush he motioned me to come out so I went out there and he said uh what's going on what have we heard and what I essentially reported was that there had been zero progress he was uh pretty fired up uh even before I spoke to him uh I think I probably added 10% but he was he was pretty much there to begin with and then he went off and U this will not stand line was not mine uh that was his and that was just his speaking from where he was this will not stand this will not stand this aggression against Kuwait I'm home watching this in television and that was 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 in 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've got the go I have to go to work I got to go to work I liked it I liked it very much uh others uh colon Powell says that'll teach us to leave you up Camp David alone with [Laughter] him satellites now showed two Iraqi divisions near the Saudi border the CIA reported the Saudis were considering buying Saddam off if the Iraqis captured Saudi Arabia's ports Saddam would control 40% of the world's oil the president dispatched defense secretary Dick Cheney to Saudi Arabia Cheney and his highlevel delegation had to convince the Saudi rulers who had never allowed US troops on their soil that they could soon become another Kuwait I told the king fod that they did not have the luxury of waiting until Saddam began an invasion of Saudi Arabia and then ask for our help because then it would be too late when Norm schwarzkoff started laying out what we were prepared to send to Saudi Arabia beginning with 200,000 troops I just had the sense that fad was absolutely stunned at the end of that discussion the king turned and said okay and I almost fell out of my chair because I absolutely was sitting there thinking well you know this this is going to be thank you very much for the information we'll let you know and the King said okay and and I think we all did a double take and went back and said you know secretary cheny said so you agree and the King said yes I agree we walked out of the meeting and I said to secretary Cheney I said sir I'm prepared to start the flow now uh do you want me to do that and secretary Cheney said yes and so I turned to Chuck and I said Chuck send them on their way it would be the largest military deployment since Vietnam more than a qu million US troops the president emphasized the buildup was wholly defensive to assume Iraq will not attack again would be unwise and unrealistic if history teaches us anything it is that we must resist aggression or it will destroy our freedoms appeasement does not work as was the case in the 1930s we see in Saddam Hussein an aggressive dictator threatening his [Music] neighbors the first American aircraft refueled above the Saudi desert Saddam Hussein had never expected to see forces from America the great Ally of Israel operating from Arab soil but the invasion had turned both Western and Arab governments against Iraq soon British French and Egyptian troops arrived the beginnings of a coalition of 30 countries Saddam struck back rounding up foreigners in Kuwait as hostages he hoped to intimidate the west but his chilling encounter with 7-year-old Stuart Lockwood had the opposite effect does Stuart get his milk yes he does he patched me on the head and ruffled my hair I was scared cuz of the solders are you getting your milk Stuart my Thro was going all shivering and all that and I goes I no it's going to get me or something like that you're going to put me in and this room forever with my mom and dad and my brother I felt really nervous he was a man who miscalculated in taking hostages and then compounded his miscalculation and made schwarz's military efforts much easier by letting them go in December every time he had to make a major strategic decision Saddam guessed wrong the UN imposed sanctions and called on Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait instead he sent in over 300,000 soldiers Kuwait's wealth was systematically [Music] plundered some kuwaitis tried to fight back but the resistance was soon broken Saddam ruled Kuwait as he'd always ruled Iraq with torture and Terror but this time the United States was no longer turning a blind eye and saddam's methods allowed President Bush to elevate the struggle to a moral Crusade summary executions routine torture Hitler Revisited America will not stand decide the world will not allow the strong to swallow up the Weak by the time Saddam paid his first visit to Kuwait bush had authorized the CIA to start recruiting Iraqi dissident to overthrow him the US Army's Delta Force was on standby to go into Iraq and kidnap him but saddam's security was too tight we did try to Target Saddam Hussein he was a very difficult Target Saddam Hussein moved around a lot he had a lot of different locations when you're going to conduct an operation to go in and capture someone uh you need a lot of detailed intelligence uh and you've got to know what it is you're going about uh you certainly have to think of the downside of it is is can I do that and uh and if I can can't uh do I want to end up with 20 or 30 dead Americans or uh 50 captured President Bush had isolated Saddam diplomatically he met miky gorbachov to ask the Soviet Union not to stand in the way if America went to war with Iraq Iraq was an old Ally of the Soviet Union but gorbachov agreed the Cold War had just ended gorbachov did not want to risk his new relationship with America very this was a key meeting a country had been occupied if at that point in history we had not been able to deal with that situation everything else we had worked for would have been null and void without the Soviet Union on board we never would have been able to Marshall the international uh Coalition that we were able to build up it just gave a completely different Dynamic uh to the whole effort instead of being an effort let's say by the United States and the United Kingdom to eject Iraq from Kuwait it was an effort by the entire International Community Baker and Bush had methodically built a broad International Coalition to oppose Saddam ultimately Bush would convince over 30 Nations to contribute Financial or Military Support to the effort this is US Navy warship Channel 14 can you tell us what country your flag does under and your Port of registry over in the Persian Gulf a multinational Naval Force had cut off Iraqi shipping enforcing the stiff United Nations economic sanctions but the CIA was telling President Bush it could take years for sanctions to drive Saddam from K wa and inside the American government there was a growing split over whether sanctions alone could work my thinking was that it would be great if sanctions would do the job because then we would avoid a war with unknown consequences um and therefore we should give sanctions as much of a right as was politically possible Powell went to see the president he feared that bush might rush to war War because his civilian advisers had not properly explained how long-term sanctions might work I laid out for him what a sanctions policy might look like and how it would work he listened intently in in that way he has somewhat slouched in his chair with his chin slightly down and his response was well colon 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 even after this meeting Coen Powell would continue to argue against the president's line two weeks later in the Pentagon Powell spoke with a top British commander col pal said to me that he would be prepared to give sanctions a considerable time to work and I said well how long are we talking about to my astonishment colen pal said well I would give them up to two years to work he said I don't think we should mount a military operation for at least that length of time if that's what it takes for the sanctions to work which he was confident that they would would you have given the sanctions two years I don't I don't know I don't know um at that point when we were talking about this on the 24th of September sanctions had only been at work for about a month little over a month it wasn't clear whether they would have uh desired effect um I was prepared to uh wait and see the president and his generals were on a collision course in the Saudi desert schwarzkoff now commanded over 200,000 us and Coalition troops in early October Bush asked for an immediate briefing on how the military planed to throw Saddam out of Kuwait but schwarzkoff believed he didn't have a large enough Force the Iraqis outnumbered him at least 2 to one they great AR aren't they colon called me and said I want you to send an offensive option back and I objected strongly I said look I've told everybody all along we do not have the forces on the ground to conduct an offensive option my view was well that's all right you know it's a work in progress bring it bring it back to the United States let us brief it and we'll all see where we are 3 Days Later Schwarz cof's Chief planner Colonel Joe pvis flew to Washington to brief the president and his AIDS to pervis it was obvious the best option was to outflank the Iraqi defenses but he and Schwarz believed they only had enough troops to attack headon the computers predicted 10,000 casualties when I put up the view graph that had the graphics on it showing the military operation uh the arrow pointing straight into Kuwait from Saudi Arabia General scor immediately uh responded by it uh that didn't look right to him ask why why are you attacking ing into the strength of the Iraqi defense my first question is why don't you go around to the west and the answer was well we don't have enough gas trucks we'll run out of gas when we're up there on the shoulder we can't do that it's not a feasible option and maybe something we don't know what kind of sand there is something but I I was pretty appalled the military were saying here's the way we'd have to do it in a manner that would suggest extraordin orinary number of casualties and a and a large um a large price to pay this was an effort uh however conscious or unconscious to basically say this is going to be a nearr run thing and the casualties are going to be very high and maybe we ought not do this I think that there was very little enthusiasm in the American Military for in fact throwing Saddam out of Kuwait militarily I wasn't trying to frighten them I wanted to make sure they understood the significance of the operation we were thinking about this wasn't going to be just a simple walk in the woods drop a few bombs and they'll all go home the way the Egyptians and the Saudis and the Turks were telling my political colleagues and these were all gentlemen who had never really been in a major war and so what I was trying to do is make sure they understood what we were doing and the difficulties of what we were doing especially when it came to a ground plan and I think the plan is what scared them all to death that night there was a crisis of confidence at the heart of the administration the White House team wondered if the right generals were in command and I went immediately to Cheney and said you know this this can't happen if if this is what we're going to get then we'll just have to find a different way to do the military planning I shared the Brent's concern and I wanted to send a message through the organization that said guys we mean business now one way or another we're going to get an option put together that allows us to launch offensive action to go after the Iraqis what I told them was not not don't don't panic um um this is a solvable problem and we will come up with a plan that you will find workable poell rushed to Saudi Arabia to meet with Schwarz they knew that back in Washington Dick Cheney was forming his own Pentagon team to develop a war plan in Riad schwarzkoff laid out for Powell the additional forces he would need if the president wanted War when Coen came over for his briefing I pointed out all of my trepidations and the conclusion of that was colon said okay if you are going to be required to attack you will have the forces that you need that was very reassuring to me poell returned to to the White House with a new plan so 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 they asked for the seventh core the two heaviest uh divisions in the American Army out of Europe uh which totally weakened NATO they asked for six carrier battle groups and then the political poison pill they asked for the activation of the National Guard and the Army Reserves the the force represented in the these three requests was just awesome overwhelming not to mention the cost the president pushed his chair back said you have you've got it and if you need more come see me Bush made that commitment in secret just days before the Congressional [Music] [Applause] elections so the decision was made in the White House not surprisingly I think in retrospect although somewhat duplicitously that uh the decision would not be announced until after the election a belief that you didn't want to complicate Matters by making it even more of a political issue than it already was 2 days after the election a quarter million more troops began heading for the gulf I have today directed the Secretary of Defense to increase the size of US forces committed to Desert Shield to to ensure that the Coalition has an adequate offensive military option should that be necessary to achieve our common goals bush had taken his generals to the brink of War now he had to bring along the American public Saddam Hussein believed the trauma of Vietnam meant that the American people would not stand for a war now the poll showed support for Bush 's handling of the crisis was slipping sanctions working doesn't mean just the destruction of the Iraqi economy it means getting Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait Secretary General po will be back here an angry Democratic Congress convened hearings to grill the administration on its plans for war that not offer us our best Prospect to succeed if the president were to ask me today can you guarantee that these sanctions will work within a year or two the answer is no I cannot the point is it's going to be bloody they're going to be thousands and thousands and thousands of casualties States or some kind of consideration some of the sharpest criticism came from the defense establishment especially from the man who had planned the war in Vietnam surely we should be prepared to extend the sanctions over a 12 or 18 month period if that offers an opportunity to achieve our political obje Ive without the loss of American Lives who can doubt that a year of blockade will be cheaper than a week of War it would be a sad commentary if Saddam Hussein a two- bit Tyrant who sits on 17 million people and possesses a gross national product of $40 billion proved to be more patient than the United States the world's most affluent and Powerful Nation thank you Mr chairman thank you very much adal Crow these are two of uh the most powerful statements I've heard before this Committee in my 18 years here and I think you have rented a real service and giv us a great deal to to think about this administration had to build up a certain amount of support for the for the administration's position and they drew in all sorts of people to talk about the aggression of the Iraqis and and how horrible they were the same sort of thing that we saw in every previous war and they weren't too careful about checking the credentials and The credibility of the people that they were enlisting no one lobbied Congress harder than the kuwaitis who spent $10 million on a campaign that's centered on Iraqi atrocities the Congressional human rights caucus convened a special hearing to look into the abuses and heard from a host of witnesses presented by the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US they tortured him they abused him and after 10 days of torture they brought him to his parents home called out all of the family members the neighbors and shot him dead in front of his mother I stayed behind and wanted to do something for my country but the most compelling testimony came from an anonymous 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl volunteered at the aladan hospital she said she witnessed firsthand Iraqi soldiers removing Kuwaiti babies from hospital incubators other women were and then stealing the incubators while I was there I saw the raki soldiers coming to the hospital hospital with guns they took the babies out of the incubators took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor we have never heard in all this time in all circumstances a record of inhumanity and brutality and sadism as the ones that the witnesses have given us today only later was it discovered that the girl was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador and that there were doubts about whether she had actually seen the event she described scores of hearings I have to ask why she was not identified as your daughter when she gave that testimony to the uh house committee house caucus well for security reasons I didn't believe it was um uh just for to for her safety did uh the human rights caucus members and the chair people know who she was they knew her identity they knew had identity and they knew exactly what what the girl was telling them was a truth how many people knew that she was the ambassador's daughter I didn't I don't know who who knew uh I I did not know she was the ambassador's daughter now I don't know the truth of the story but it certainly undermined her credibility and in a certain sense undermined The credibility of the administ Administration 22 premature babies they all died and then they shot the hospital employees George Bush rose up in righteous anger and call this aggression Allah the Nazi era the fight is about naked aggression the American people didn't quite understand that then the next argument was that the war was about oil we had to protect oil if control of the world's great oil reserves fell into the hands of that one man Saddam Hussein the banners came out in Harvard Square hell no we won't go we won't die for texo uh that really didn't didn't resonate and then if you recall Jim Baker got up there and said it's about jobs jobs jobs if you want to sum it up in one word it's jobs the American people said hm what's this all about I'm deeply concerned about satam's efforts to acquire nuclear weapons and then the final thing in which capped the demonization s husin was the announcement that SD Hussein was secretly working on weapons of mass destruction chemicals Biologicals and mostly all most of all nuclear weapons and that's what we're dealing with we're dealing with Hitler Revisited a totalitarianism and a brutality that is naked and unprecedented in Modern Times And that must not stand we cannot talk about when you demonize uh an enemy such as the president intended to do with sodam Hussein you raised expectations that you would do something about him at the end of the day we did not know how to get sodam Hussein this is a man who has survived for three decades by nobody knowing how to get him and so by demonizing him which was a useful way to to raise public interest and support of what we were doing um we also fa the problem of if he was still there at the end of it which he most likely would be um it it would take some Shine off the achievement the Bush Administration was having much more success building up international support for war their maneuvering led to a historic un vote authorizing the use of force in 6 weeks if Iraq refused to leave Kuwait will those in favor of the draft resolution contained in document s stroke 21969 please raise their hand there were various concessions made to different countries whose support was critical uh Egypt was forgiven uh $7 billion in various debts uh Syria was forgiven many of the same sins of which Saddam was accused turkey was basically granted certain trade concessions in return for their very important support the draft resolution has been adopted as resolution 678 1990 we have taken political economic and Military measures to quarantine Iraq and to contain its aggression the nations of the world have not stood idly by but the UN resolution only deepened the fears of the American people there was very little public support in the United States for the idea of going to war in the Persian Gulf in fact it was overwhelmingly opposed if we were going to fight a war we had to do so with the support of the American people if possible with the support of the American Congress but that if we were going to send people Americans off to die in the Persian Gulf we had to be able to uh to survive the judgments of History that we didn't do so precipitously to go the extra mile for peace I will issue an invitation to a foreign minister T aiz to come to Washington in addition I'm asking secretary Jim Baker to go to Baghdad to see Saddam Hussein just 6 days before the UN deadline for war and after many changes of plan James Baker prepared to meet ter aiz the Bush Administration needed the talks to win over public opinion and a hostile Congress but they feared the Iraqis might offer a deal that would split the Coalition if there is a genuine sincere serious intention to make peace in the whole region of the Middle East we are ready to reciprocate when I went to meet with James Baker I hadn't the slightest uh idea that uh that meeting would succeed I knew that that was public relations that he wanted to tell the Congress look to the end I tried to find the Diplomatic settlement so that he could get few more votes which was Baker carried a letter from President Bush to the the Iraqi leader demanding withdrawal and reminding Saddam America had nuclear [Music] weapons the president's letter to Saddam Hussein which Tariq aiz read in uh in Geneva uh made it very clear that if Iraq used weapons of mass destruction chemical weapons against United States forces that the American people would uh would demand uh uh Vengeance and that we had the the means uh to uh to achieve it I read it very carefully and then when I uh ended reading it I told him look uh Mr secretary this is not uh the kind of Correspondence between uh two heads of state this is a letter of threat and I cannot receive from you a letter of threat to my president and I returned it to him the president's team could only wait had they given Saddam a chance to escape we basically said what if Saddam proposes this what if he proposes a temp uh a partial pullback what if he actually does a partial pullback and Promises a complete pullback what we did was we must have gained out 10 different Iraqi scenarios that we thought would test the Coalition and I could never figure out why he didn't do it he could have he could have just given fits and that was what I was worried about happening as a result of a meeting like this but in Geneva tazes had offered no lastminute compromise instead the talk had turned to war I said that they should not make the mistake of assuming that they would control the terms of the of the battle as perhaps they might have assumed in their war with Iran that this would be a totally different situation that our techn logical superiority was overwhelming and would be brought to bear my response was very cool I told him Mr secretary Iraq is a very ancient Nation we have lived for uh 6,000 years I have no uh doubts that you are a very powerful Nation I have no doubts that uh you have a very strong uh military machine and you will inflict on us uh heavy losses but Iraq Will Survive and this leadership will decide the future of Iraq and I uh was certain at the time that we would be going to war and going to war very very soon regrettably ladies and gentlemen in over 6 hours I heard nothing that suggested to me any Iraqi flexibility whatsoever even to this day I am stunned by saddam's failure to exploit all of his options time and time again Saddam by opting for the maximum uh actually made it relatively I hate to use the word easy but made it much less difficult on the United States and the coalition to sustain itself and you know I'm not sure at time so much whether we won it but clearly he lost it Congress debated whether to give the president the authority to go to war the house was supporting Bush but the Senate vote would be close but this is the truth I could not accept the loss of life of any of our children in the Persian Gulf right now and that tells me that in my gut I do not believe that it's time to go to war I see no compelling reason to rush to military action of course there are no guarantees on economic sanctions there are also no guarantees on war where are the guarantees on war it is not an option for the Congress of the United States to disapprove what we for months have asked others to support it is Unthinkable that our government would now lose its will on this vote the Y's are 52 and the Nays are 47 we would not have won the vote without jeva we simply wouldn't in the aftermath of the Geneva meeting opposition to our use of force eroded so it was an idea that would that that germinated uh with the president it was the right idea we did it right and uh there really should be no uh no second thoughts about that it worked exactly the way it should have worked in the beginning George Bush had been almost alone in his determination to turn back the invasion of Kuwait 5 months later the man often derided as a political wimp had maneuvered his generals his country and most of the world to join his stand in the zert president privately with the most Inner Circle made absolutely clear he was going to go forward with this action even if he were impeached the truth of the matter is that while public opinion and the voice of Congress was important to Bush I believe it had no impact on his decision about what he would do he was going to throw that son of a [ __ ] out of Kuwait regardless of whether the Congress or the public supported him in the final hours before the UN deadline Saddam appeared on television to assure the Iraqi people Victory would be [Music] theirs you are the new leader of the Arab world he was told the Americans said Saddam rely too much on technology they never fight man to man they can never win the [Music] [Applause] battle Across America midnight vigils Mark the passing of the deadline to at dawn the president signed the order that would take America and the coalition to war he was ordering people into situations where they would lose their lives and the kind of magnitude of that awful decision I think haunted him you know how much is a life worth how much is are lives worth a thousand 10,000 in the Gulf 1700 Coalition aircraft now prepared to attack they faced modern Iraqi Fighters many built by the French and Soviets hundreds of missile batteries and thousands of anti-aircraft guns at one stage Pentagon estimates suggested one in five aircraft in the first attack might be shot down we were filled with uncertainty our press had been telling us that our generals couldn't General that our technology didn't work and our young people were no good now we didn't believe it but we worried about it because it was sort of imbued in our whole National psyche Vietnam was a ghost we carried with us the airplanner first targets were not the 400,000 Iraqi troops in and around Kuwait but key strategic political and Military Targets in bdad and all over Iraq some hop that for the first time in history air power alone would bring Victory I thought the Strategic campaign would not only work but that it would be uh bordering on unbelievably successful and that was based on the fact that technology had finally caught up with a vision that we' always had of how to apply Str care campaign imagine Iraq like a human body what happens if you take away somebody's ability to think somebody's ability to communicate with the rest of the body what happens if you sever their spinal cord they can't function right before the planes could attack task force Normandy would fire the first shots of the war its Apache gunship had been training for months their mission was vital to destroy at all costs two Iraqi radar sites that would otherwise give Baghdad an early warning of what was to come it was a moonless night eight Apaches armed with Hellfire missiles took off towards aaq this is a pilot's ey view videotaped from one helicopter's night vision camera the gunships flew just a few feet off the desert until they were 8 miles from the radar dishes we slowed our air speed to about 40 knots came up online all a breast so we're all at the same distance from the Target and at this point I'm not looking through my goggles I'm looking at a TV screen right in front of me watch the clock tick to zero I gave the code word get some at that point everybody fired their hellfires [ __ ] second missile from a range of four miles each crew aimed a laser beam that guided their missiles the Iraqis had anti-aircraft guns but could not see or hear the helicopters this was a new kind of War how you there still okay H that one slideing left hit that one okay with the initial blast the then we really saw some activity in the [Applause] Target I running around now all right hold steady got it there it [Music] [Applause] goes I select my gun I've got very bright flashes of light to my left and right as the hellfires are leaving people running the in the site and underneath my goggles I can see the explosions my wingman firing is 30 mm the muzzle flashes from [Music] that out of the probably 150 people that we were brief were at the site I I would imagine not more than 10 or 20 probably live through that engagement within 5 minutes of the time that the uh first aircraft were scheduled to hit their targets General swarov came in the door open his senior military assistant announced the commanderin-chief of United States Central Command and uh he bursted through the door and took his place at the table and then I uh asked the chaplain to say prayer and then I played God Bless the USA a blatantly chauvinistic piece of music but I think it characterized planes were in the air at that time heading towards their targets uh with with no guarantees of the outcome uh to know that we had taken a very big step and and that the war had started and none of us knew exactly how it was going to end uh that's a very very emotional moment time launch one minute sir in the Gulf the Navy prepared to launch dozens of cruise missiles but the missiles guidance systems couldn't navigate over the flat desert of Iraq they needed landmarks to lock onto so they were secretly programmed to fly over the mountains of Iran and then turn towards Baghdad the IR were told nothing and no one knew exactly what would happen 3 2 1 launch downtown Tyron would not have been a good uh a good [Music] Mission this away we were dealing with neighboring countries who we didn't want to join in to the freight we never used him in Conflict before and uh there was a lot of apprehension about do we launch these things and then they make up their own mind where they're [Music] going by 225 in the morning I was tired sitting in the CNN workspace I had a Englishman engineer and I was sort of telling him you know it was a bust we'd have to wait for another night and then he started to hear he claimed dogs boing and my hearing is not so good as the result of being in Vietnam for many years but I too started to hear dogs boing and he said that has to be a signal and I laughed and I said dog radar come on and uh 10 seconds after I'd made that uh memorable statement the sound of anti aircraft fire started 10 stealth bombers were just minutes away from downtown Baghdad the stealth was designed to be invisible to radar but to be safe the Air Force started jamming baghdad's radar defenses the jamming gave the game away the Iraqi Radars were blinded but 3,00 th000 anti-aircraft guns and 60 missile batteries began firing wildly into the sky that night orders came from headquarters to fire back any way we could even if it meant closing our eyes and firing into the sky you see it was so dark and the aircraft were coming so quickly and we didn't have the capability to aim accurately that's why they told us put up a fire any way you can in the approaching stealth bombers the pilot saw The Firestorm of shells and missiles exploding above the city they flew straight towards it as I'm flying in the aircraft is actually being buffeted by the AAA exploding looking back it's kind of like an old World War II movie where they sit in the cockpit their b29 and bounce around over Dresden doon's bomb destroyed Iraq's Main telephone exchange I just remember looking over my shoulder and I thought to myself you know it's a miracle there's no way anybody else is coming out of there a minute behind Dawson's wingman was still flying through the barrage stuff going off all around you under you you know some of it arcing over above you I know that I've trained my whole Air Force career to make sure that I could do this and now the the did I have the right stuff now Leatherman destroyed the main telephone Tower another laser guided bomb hit the headquarters controlling baghdad's air defenses other Pilots destroyed government Ministries and a key Communications Tower also targeted saddam's Lakeside Palace what we wanted to do was to sever his ability to communicate with his Frontline forces and if that meant killing him then so be it holy cow that was a large air burst that we saw it was a filling this guy and I think John that air burst took out the telecommunication now you may CNN gave a running account to the rest of the world 6 minutes after the stealth bombers left the crews missiles arrived some destroyed government buildings others dropped carbon filament which shorted out the electrical grid system the president and his advisers watched the war unfold on television this is one of those times when I really had a sense of History I had the battle plan on my lap and we were sitting here watching CNN and to see the battle unfold in from the CNN Parts when when the CNN announcer a couple of minutes after uh the first radar should have been hit on the border uh that we we have reports of air strikes down in the southern part of the country and it was it was uncanny with baghdad's air defense headquarters destroyed and its radar system in chaos hundreds of Iraq's Fighters couldn't operate only a few struggled into the air and I see that somebody's targeted on me it's an Iraqi fighter who wants to Target me and shoot me down so I remember firing a missile I remember seeing this big blue flame coming across the sky 3 to 5 Seconds long and I remember seeing it and and then it goes away I remember thinking to myself that uh that my Missile hit him and that the target's destroyed and that he's down but what's ahead with hundreds of Allied aircraft flying awax planes packed with computer equipment helped control the battle that night the Coalition Armada systematically attacked Iraq's War Machine the factories that made chemical and biological weapons the scud missile plants in all over 200 different targets were hit the first 24 hours consisted of more attacks in the master attack plan than the entire number of targets that were targeted in the Years 1942 and 1943 during the combined bomber offensive in Europe that first night was a new Benchmark in the history of warfare the first time the world had seen Precision bombing on a vast scale and defying all expectations only one Allied pilot an American had been killed and the whole world starts to watch this war in real time and suddenly one of the first scenes coming off one of our airfields is of this F16 Landing rolls to a stop canopy pops open pilot comes out I met him later his name is jet Jernigan who all I mean right out of Hollywood Central Casting jet Jernigan is the young man's name and I'm watching this in real time in my office and suddenly the youngster turns around to talk to the reporters I said uhoh no telling what jet Jernigan is liable to say to a pushy reporter and what jet Jernigan says is I'll tell you what it was all about first I want to thank God that I completed my mission successfully and I got back to my basee safely been a very fortunate fell sounds pretty good American people hearing this confident Young American pilot starts to walk away and he looks over his shoulder second time he says Lord bless me with a good woman he starts to walk away again he looks over shoulder third time he says I want to thank God that I'm an American and then he looks over his shoulder fourth time he says I want to thank God that I'm an American fighter pilot about swooned God Bless America American people saw this Spirit of confidence Spirit of professionalism it was a feel-good that we had not seen since the end of World War II with their superiority established over the Iraqis the Coalition airplanner were now confident enough to launch conventional aircraft on massive daylight raids my Squadron was part of a large Armada of airplanes doing one of the first daylight raids Over Baghdad my particular Target was an oil refinery on the bend in the river in uh in Baghdad a lot of people trying to shoot at us another couple missiles are fired uh we maneuver heavily to avoid those missiles and and they go by us very very nicely you know one went by on my right I could see two go by my wingman on his left and right okay as I continue to roll my jet I looked back over the right to where the missile would have gone and there was a cloud of you know just black and and silver metal flying everywhere and I thought maybe I took a small hit well in the Nan second that it took me to roll up and look and make that assessment my airplane just decided it's going to shut down and all the systems just went boom it's like somebody pulled the plug and I thought oh Jesus I'm hit engine quit realized I was going to have to get out and I just configured the aircraft as much as I possibly could to Glide as far as I could I wanted to get as far south as I could and as far away from the western edge of Iraq again checked my map one more time and said okay I'm in the middle of nowhere the sun's going down this is not going to be too bad then all of a sudden I see some clouds of smoke coming up oh no someone's shooting at me in Baghdad Saddam Hussein was moving between safe houses in the suburbs the bombing had been more devastating than he'd expected without the civilian deaths he believed would outrage World opinion his intelligence Chief says saddam's temper flared when he was briefed on the gravity of Iraq's situation an I said I know that Iraq will be destroyed I am telling you the truth Sadam said these Americans are technicians not soldiers who fight they have technology on their side but that won't help them win when Saddam met with his ministers after the first night's bombing he had already ordered action he believed would shatter the Coalition of Western and Arab countries attacking Iraq [Music] scud missile launchers hidden in the desert fired at Israel we had the capability we did it when you are attacked by an enemy you attack your enemies that's natural the scuds were fired indiscriminately at Israel's largest city Saddam calculated the Israelis would retire alate and join the conflict the Arabs in the Coalition would then refuse to fight alongside Israel the Coalition would collapse and so would the war soon more scuds were on the way well I wasn't told I I heard them and I rushed out of my home to go to our our headquarters in the defense Ministry and on the way I heard the sc's landing in the to area Israel's nuclear forces now went on full alert six Israeli Jets took to the skies early warning radar appeared to show Iraqi bombers headed for Israel in the Pentagon the defense secretary picked up the hotline to Tel Aviv Israeli retaliation seemed inevitable you imagine an American president uh sitting quietly as missiles land on the United States saying no we're not going to do anything I mean that's an unacceptable political position for any government I think it was sheny that called me and I reported to him on the hits that we taken I had no doubt that ail was going to take action the question was uh action one and what type of action the Israeli Army reported nerve gas in the debris of one of the missiles Israelis prepared for the worst we knew we had a real problem at this point because if Israel got into the war this was a real break for Saddam if he provoked the Israelis into attack him then the chances of holding the Coalition together really U became problematical I must say that this is the darnest way to conduct an interview if ultimately none of the eight scuds that landed proved to have chemical Warheads after some discussion Baghdad had decided the Israelis might retaliate against a chemical attack with nuclear weapons now we would like to see that threat removed and we will uh uh take the actions that are necessary to remove it I cannot tell you when I cannot tell you where I can tell you how will some of the scud missiles were loaded with chemical Warheads but they were not used they were kept hidden throughout the war we didn't use them because the other side had a deterrent Force the man who would decide what happened next was was prime minister yach Shamir he and George Bush disliked each other and when Bush telephoned him Shamir angrily told the president that if America couldn't stop the scuds the Israeli Air Force would Bush said to Shamir leaded with Shamir try to cono Shamir that Israel not take any M action that this would be injurious to the cause of to the Allied cause that then the F this would also be injurious uh to Israel cause this was not a warm and close and fuzzy relationship but yet for this one period they communicated and maybe because they hadn't been all folksy and friendly it was almost more real because of it and it was very very straight very honest no flourishes no thrills but I really think they got through to each other I think in such situations you have not to play with words it's not it couldn't be a moment of diplomatic discussions and debates and well I explained to him it's very difficult Mr President it's very difficult I don't know what the day of tomorrow will bring but at this moment we will act accordingly in according accordingly with you Concepts Israel became the president's top priority we were going to be redoubling our efforts and the darnest Search and Destroy effort that's ever been undertaken in that out that out in that area and I hope that that is very reassuring to the citizens of Israel Washington's approach to the scuds was purely a political approach my Approach was purely a military approach as I told you before I think scuds are militarily insignificant in Riad schwarzkoff rebelled against the new emphasis on scuds he wanted to use his Air Force to win the war not plate the Israelis as you know the total scud launches have been no one in Israel was ever killed by a scud missile they did have some people die as a result of putting their gas mask on wrong but no one was ever killed as a result of scud missiles from my perspective from the Strategic perspective in the president's perspective and obviously I was doing this with the president's approval was it was vital to keep the Israeli out of the conflict and that the way he did that was to make certain that they knew we were doing everything humanly possible to deal with that scud threat well Jo swov uh thought that many of these people who had these easy answers about how to solve this scut problem were a bunch of uh pointy headed politicians who had never fought them fought their way out of a wet paper [Applause] bag Cheney overruled shorts top aircraft started to crisscross 28,000 s Mi of desert looking for perhaps 14 mobile scut [Applause] launchers the pilots couldn't find the launchers or the Iraqi convoys bringing in more missiles 7 I'm going to have General Glen come back up here and I show you some film that I think will speak for itself through the help two weeks into the scud campaign schwarzkoff was finally able to show some results let you look into the night sky of Iraq as we are attacking mobile scuds and now the pilot is maneuvering to drop laser guided bombs on this target there are a total of 11 vehicles in this uh area of and all of these are already loaded with scud missiles as you can see these have already been fired Washington at Langley in Virginia CIA headquarters this was being watched on CNN as it was everywhere else and CIA analysts looked at it and they said oh my God those are Oil Trucks and elsewhere there was even a suspicion that they may have been milk trucks as far as the American public was concerned they remained scud launchers they were never told otherwise but there was another way to hunt scud British Special Forces the SAS were operating deep inside Iraq schwarzkoff distrusted Special Forces but the SAS Commander had persuaded him to make an exception there had to be people on the ground the human eye cannot be replaced by technology we were well armed we had good strength we above all had the desert as our friend to retreat and hide into we were told in very categoric terms that our priorities 1 to 10 were scud scud and nothing that SC for 43 days the SAS patrolled the Iraqi desert closest to Israel they called it the scud boox this is the only known film of an sas column it was taken by the gun camera of an American helicopter flying in to take back a prisoner within two days of the SAS arriving there were no more scud launches from the scud box columns like this destroyed radar sites microwave towers and cut Communications cables when they saw a scud Convoy they attacked it on the 4th of February we had a column that encountered a scud Convoy they knocked out one missile uh the engagement then uh lasted I think something about 4 and 1/ half hours uh young officer uh eventually called in the f-15s to take on the other targets be aware there are my friendly forces eight Vehicles total in the open 500 M north and west your original Target was three launchers plus Associated Vehicles by the burning light bombs away bombs away but it was a huge desert and the Iraqis simply moved their mobile launchers far away from the sas's scud box going [Music] America had rushed Patriot missiles to Israel and Saudi Arabia to shoot down scuds in the skies above Tel Aviv and Riyad they dued with the incoming missiles the Patriots got as close as they could and detonated filling the air with shrapnel the Patriot became a symbol of resistance damping down the pressure for Israel to join the war Patriot is 41 for 42 42 scuds engaged 41 [Applause] [Music] intercepted I view it as an honor to be here to come to rathon the home of the men and women who built the scud Busters we're very very proud of you the Israeli government thought all this was nonsense the Pentagon was claiming a kill every time a patriot exploded near a scud and the Israelis simply didn't believe the American [Applause] figures on the ground in Tel Aviv experts from the Israeli military analyzed the damage every time a scud fell to Earth what they discovered was kept top secret so as not to inflame Israeli public opinion when I met President Bush in Washington we doubt some human an argument because he was convinced that Patriots are doing a great job I told him that at the very best the the The Intercept ratio maybe was 20% intercept probability he asked me what I meant about that and I said that maybe out of every 10 scuds Patriots Strider they might succeed in with two but in retrospect I was overstating the case I think that probably not a single uh scud was intercepted by Patriot when the scud started falling the Americans didn't realize that they were in fact breaking up as they were re-entering the atmosphere the Patriot would see not only the Warhead falling but pieces of fuel tank going to the ground pieces of missile that were disintegrating and the patri was designed in such a way that its radar would lock on an incoming object and fire two missiles at that object well that's that's fine if you see one Warhead coming in it's not so fine if you see six or seven pieces of junk coming in after the war the Army downgraded the Patriots overall success rate against scuds to 60% but that figure was hotly disputed and other studies placed the kill rate much lower a GAO study of classified military records said the Army really had quote high confidence end quote that 25% of the scud Warheads were destroyed but the there was no way to conclusively determine how many targets the Patriots had killed from my perspective Patriot was an air defense system designed to shoot down aircraft not missiles we've been able to upgrade it and improve it and it was a miracle that we had anything at all to use against missiles it wasn't perfect but in fact it did its job it did its job in the sense that it helped us justify to the Israelis why they had to stay out of the war that we were doing everything that could be done as the air War continued the British RAF tornadoes were taking a beating during bombing raids over Iraqi airfields the tornado Pilots were trained to fight a war in Europe to surprise enemy defenses by flying low but in the desert these tactics left them vulnerable in the first week four tornadoes were lost one quarter of the Coalition casualties out there it was burning blue I mean it was probably 8:00 in the morning at 8:30 and it was blue sky and the visibility was 1,000 miles we were flying at maybe 60 or 70 ft in about 5 or 600 mes hour and there's this huge explosion and a Flash and the aircraft just we was hit by a missile where I had blue above my head suddenly the desert was above my head and it was just tumbling I was going and John said don't bloody well and I was going and eventually I just grab we have the swing Wing obviously in the tornado and I through the lever Ford and the aircraft righted itself I couldn't see the back of the aircraft all it was was uh a ball of fire and the fire was spreading its way down the spine of the aircraft towards me and then you say this aircraft is going no further and then you go give me the ejection drills you know it's actually half a second between pulling the handle and being thrown clear of the aircraft and that half a second is like a lifetime and then it's as if someone a huge giant just grabs you by the shoulder Yanks you up and I remember my head G forward and then as's the crack as the canopy opens and you're left in your parachute and it's deathly silent and then you realize how big the desert is then we saw some Iraqis coming towards us you could sense the anxiety and unease throughout the body politic gosh it's been going on for a week why isn't it over maybe it's not going well what 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 uh secretary Cheney and said to uh secretary you know we we've got to do something because uh this is you know we're starting to lose the public on this one the secretary will have a short statement many of the military commanders involved in Desert Storm believed that the Press had been a prime contributor to the loss in Vietnam that the Press by negative reporting uh tended to undermine support for the US military at home our strategy to go after this Army is very very simple first we're going to cut it off and then we're going to kill it pal had a more sophisticated view he recognized that the media was for one thing very important part of his Arsenal because you can win the battle and lose the war through television as a measure of effectiveness of how we're doing in the air campaign I just pull these two things out I've laundered them so you can't really tell what I'm talking about because I don't want the Iraqi to know what I'm talking about but trust me trust me it was a telling moment an American General saying trust me and getting away with it a measure of how far the Army had traveled since Vietnam out of the Iraq I think it showed that we had reached a point where American Military had gain a level of credibility again um with the American people in the Press uh and although there may have been members of the press who were skeptical about trusting me um the American people at that point were willing to trust [Music] me a week into the war the air planners still believed that by bombing Iraq they could deliver a decisive victory the air campaign was still focused on Iraq's infrastructure rather than on the troops occupying Kuwait but Saddam was determined to sit out the [Music] bombing officially Saddam was not a Target but the allies launched 260 missions against sites where they thought he might be hiding eventually spies reported Saddam slept in private houses changing location every night you can find out perhaps where he has been you can find out even where he is but what you need to know is where he's going to be because you must mount an attack and so it's almost a uh an impossible task her methin you might find it strange but the president of the Republic of Iraq was sometimes driven around the city in an old taxi it's strange but true that Saddam also used aori to move around the city these are some of the measures he resorted to the Air Force kept searching these Iraqi television pictures showing Saddam and an American made win of launched more missions when we saw him sitting in a Winnebago we went after the winnebagos with a Vengeance and uh whenever we saw one or tried to find one and whenever we saw one or two or three we would we would attack them as quickly as we possibly could the closest we came we had a report that there was a convoy one night a very very large Convoy moving down a road um uh we then attack that Convoy and it's my understanding that we hit the vehicle in front of his and the vehicle behind his and killed the bodyguards in it and and didn't touch him a week into the air War Iraqi troops opened a Kuwaiti pipeline that flooded the gulf with oil the oil endangered the desalination plants that provided Saudi Arabia with drinking water but the plants continued to work and a bombing raid cut the flow of oil Saddam was already already planning a bigger move his strategy of course was to bleed the Americans and cause a a um an outrage in the United States and a reaction which would lead to negotiated settlement of the war well he had to have Americans to bleed but there were no Americans bleeding so he hurried up his his um his time schedule by if they won't attack us we'll attack them Saddam ordered his forces to attack a Saudi border town called kafi Sadam said capture for me four or 5,000 American English and French troops and we'll use them as human Shields we'll tie them to our tanks and overrun the Saudi oil wells if we do this the allly won't attack that evening US Marines sent an unmanned spy plane on a routine flight over Southern Kuwait what do we have let's see what they are man this is something whatever they're Towing it's got four wheels on it I don't see any tubes coming out AA perhaps as the Drone beamed back television pictures of the Iraqi Advance Marine helicopter Pilots waited for orders to attack but the orders didn't come we' been on the land line back to our wing headquarters letting them know what was going on we started you know a million in one scenarios began running through our minds on you know why in the world would they not be letting us launch on these vehicles guess what closer closer and uh 22 253 hours they've crossed the board crossed in Saudi Arabia King F's going to be pissed fod baby's going to be pissed he's he's going to be hot for an hour and a half the Marines waited for the air strikes to begin but at Air Force Headquarters they were concentrating on their strategic campaign at first they simply didn't see the importance of the Iraqi Advance where's our air this is ridiculous freaking bomber couldn't ask for any better Target than not why was the Roi Advance not stopped prior to cofi a very straightforward simple question deserves a very straightforward simple answer it was not the Air Force's best day but the Iraqis too had miscalculated kafi had been evacuated the only people there were two Marine reconnaissance patrols hidden in the town I got got the team together and I said we've been practicing for some of us 5 years to play in the big game and now here we all of a sudden get a chance I think we ought to stay and they agreed you're the only people there yourself and another team of your buddies somewhere else in the city and you know that that's it um the point of no return cby AR missile sh down range take that bad boy out Baghdad announced a great victory at CFI but by Dawn the next day American artillery was in position with am up hidden on rooftops the Marines inside the city radioed precise instructions on where to fire when I finally got artillery fire it was the best feeling in the [Music] world everything we called in was what we call danger close which simply means that it's so close that the round could actually hit us instead of the enemy every moment the Marines in the town expected to be discovered Rockies came very close to capturing us they were inside of our building for at least a day you could see their heads down there and if you wanted to you could spit on them 2 Days Later Saudi forces formed up to retake their town the attack would cost them 19 dead perhaps 100 Iraqis died meanwhile air strikes destroyed two Iraqi divisions desperately trying to reach kchi north of the Town One Survivor recalls thousands of dead and scenes of Carnage were afraid we could see death all around us we could see people we had just spoken to people we knew people we' lived with wounded and dying there was nothing we could do for them we couldn't reach them we couldn't save them or pull them to safety saddam's terrible defeat at kafi showed that because of American Air power the Iraqis could not attack and maneuver in the open I told General schwarzkoff I said you know I hate to say this at this time but these guys aren't worth the [ __ ] they can't put together coordinate an attack above the Brigade level and I hated to say that because you know you you you hate to say something as as definitive as that but I was at that time convinced uh that we could really uh we could really destroy these guys in detail the American side uh particularly Schwarz Scot never read the battle properly they thought this was just kind of a minor Excursion on the part of the Iraqis when in fact it was a major attempt to start the war so Schwarz can still continue to build his plan on on the assumption that the Iraqis were going to stand and Fight Hard rather than than to retreat Schwarz should have modified his plan well he never did that Saddam became tense and anxious although he always tried to conceal it he was Restless it wasn't so much that he cared about the casualties but they exasperated [Music] him dozens of Coalition prisoners many of them Pilots were being held in Baghdad the Iraqis uh the guards put a wire around this here ran it under my chin put and wrapped it around this here obviously hooked it to some sort of electrical device uh and uh they were very interested in having me say something on their camera and I was not interested in telling them anything or saying anything on camera I told them quite a bit more than IID wanted to at this point in time what was your mission so uh they turned on the juice uh and what that did was basically uh drives your jaw together with violent force all your muscles contract my nose went to my chest and it felt like a little electron a little lightning bolt at me right in the forehead it was a Flash and again it was momentary in contact uh you know second on and you know everything contracts in your body and uh I started spitting out pieces of teeth what was your mission I'm exhausted and know I'm drenched in sweat and urine and everything else uh and I uh and he finally says look you know we'll let you talk to your wife and children you probably are interested and you know now it's very attractive to me and I said okay I'll make the tape what was your mission I was to an attack an oil refinery near Baghdad so I was thrw back in the hallway and I said oh I can't believe I made the tape in this distinct British voice not more than 3 fet away from me says don't worry mate we all made the tape they just yanked me up and just karate chopped uh through and kind of felt like the heel of the the boot just into my knee and I claps it and they just pulled me up smacked pulled me up smacked Pull Me Up Smack pull out smack and eventually and somewhere in there whilst they're doing that they say are you pilot or Navigator are you pilot and eventually pilot and it just came out I couldn't I couldn't stop it and that's when you realize you've broken to the violence you feel a desperate sense of failure that you've let everyone down message I thought everyone would thought I was a bet traitor and that everyone would see that I'd failed and that that was the last last image my family was going to see of me ton G I love you I'm now going to show you a picture of the luckiest man in Iraq on this particular day keep your eye on the crosshairs right there look at here right through the crosshairs in Riad the military's carefully screened videos were giving the impression that this was a bloodless War and now in his rear view [Laughter] mirror the image that we got from the war has reinforced that American attitude that you can fight a a clean war from the air uh with very few friendly casualties and the only one being hurt on the enemy side uh are the enemy soldiers and not the enemy civilians wrong war is a dirty confusing thing whether it's from the air or from the ground late in uh January we came to the lower part of the list and uh one of those targets that we hadn't been able to get to before because it wasn't high priority was a bunker in the alfredus area of Baghdad the things that we were monitoring of course showed uh some of the leadership people going to this bunker at different times during night the night and leaving and some of the um signals that we were picking up indicated that uh uh things were happening in that bunker it was not just a place to go sleep and uh so that's why it became a military Target and that's why we bombed it when we did two stealth bombers were assigned to the mission days before a spy inside the Iraqi government had reported Iraqi intelligence was using the bunker [Music] we just ran followed the fire fireman in down a ramp the heat was terrible the smell was awful and it was clear to me as we got into the main room that the bodies themselves had been ignited by the by the tremendous heat and were just burning in their own fat and the firemen were just stepping over bodies as we did the bunker was a public air raid shelter 204 people many women and children were killed the shelters were the only places in the city with running water and electricity so each night families gathered in them the bunker that was attacked last night was a military Target a command and control center that fed INR ructions directly to the Iraqi War Machine painted and camouflaged to avoid detection and well documented as a military Target i l my wife and my children is that fair nobody nobody say something to some this m we wondered momentarily if in fact there was some sort of a propaganda ploy these people were Kurds that sodam hsein had murdered and put in there things like that but it was obvious that in fact it was being used near R shelter the Pentagon says if it had known about the civilians the shelter would never have been bombed but the military has always insisted that a section of Iraq's intelligence service also used this building Baghdad has always denied it but wafik Al Samurai now in Exile says the Americans are right part of the shelter was used by this intelligent service there were different groups but mostly there were people from the technical Affairs department they would often go in and out of the bunker and on one occasion Saddam himself visited [Music] the alferos disaster brought home the bloody reality of even a high-tech war and created a major public relations problem for the Allies I called General Schwarz we talked about it and I said Norm clearly we we did what we thought was right but it turned out to to be full of civilians we've got to look at the Target list a little more closely and we got to take a look at what it is we're doing in Baghdad itself we didn't shut down all Targets in Baghdad but I asked questions like why are we bombing the bath party headquarters for the eighth time do we think there is somebody still in the bath party headquarters why are we bouncing Rubble with million dooll missiles the word was passed bombing Bagdad now would be the exception not the rule and that ended the illusion that air power alone would win this War I thought it was a mistake uh to live left the intensity uh off of the leadership in Baghdad and um I thought it would give them uh an opportunity to uh show more mischief and be more involved in uh what was going on in Kuwait City and down with the land Army how much more hitting of strategic Targets in Baghdad would have caused Saddam Hussein to move his forces out of the desert ultimately if you want to gain Kuwait back and if you want to do what the United Nations charged us to do you got to go on the ground and take it back in the Saudi desert half a million American British French and Arab troops move to their final positions the ground war would begin in 11 days [Music] next time the Gulf War continues the ground plan is what scared them all to death look left and right you see mines everywhere the war Behind Enemy Lines I looked up and I saw five Iraqi guys were there rifles poed at me so then I knew I wasn't dead the bombs came roaring through that building building picked me up set me right back down on the floor the war between the generals so I said we have not accomplished our mission I was just damn glad to have the victory in our hands with a minimum loss of casualty and the war's ragged end there is the aggressor Saddam Hussein still in power there is the president of the United States no longer in power I wonder who won don't miss the compelling conclusion of the Gulf War next time on front [Music] line there is more on the Gulf War at Frontline online check out our web exclusive debate on Gulf War syndrome and the pentagon's response to charges of coverup you'll also find an extensive oral history of the war agreed with the president saying look I don't want and more first hand accounts from Airmen and soldiers where were you from where were you flying what was your target find out more about the weapons and technology used for the first time and lots more at www.pbs.org and please let us know what you thought about the program [Music] [Applause] funding for Frontline is provided by The Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by annual financial support from viewers like you Frontline is produced for the documentary Consortium by wgb Boston which is solely responsible for its content you can order the golf war on home video cassette by calling 1-800 25594 to4 this 4-Hour series is $39.95 plus shipping and handling [Music] this is [Music] PBS for 6 weeks in the winter of 1991 an American lead military machine conducted an air war of unprecedented technological Fury against Saddam [Music] Hussein its Target the centers of military and political life in Baghdad the air Campaign which was designed to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait and win the war without the necessity of ground attack had not achieved its objective the Iraqis were very very badly hurt it achieved lot of its military objectives but if you make the assumption that you go to war for a political purpose which is to change the situation uh it had not done that in the Saudi Arabian Desert over half a million American British French and Arab troops waited for the ground war to begin there was a feeling that what they were about to do with something stupendous something on a on a vast scale that it was almost home ERC uh in in its magnitude and a feeling that it was going to be decisive that this was the last act that had all been building toward this and that there would be no messy ending that it would be resolved by Force of Arms with this one last Titanic battle in the desert funding for front line is provided by The Corporation for Public [Music] Broadcasting and by annual financial support from viewers like you this is [Music] Frontline in the final weeks before the ground attack into Kuwait the Allied Commander was haunted by the fear of massive Coalition casualties more than ever General Norman schwarz's volcanic temper dominated the headquarters in Riyad working with norov was sort of like watching a thomet uh the blood would start around the shirt collar and then it would work its way up to the jaw line and then to the ears and by the time it got to the ears you ought to watch out I would say that working for General Schwarz goof was a privilege and an honor but there were many times when if someone had asked me if I would rather have been in that war room or in the dental chair having a root canal without anesthesia I probably would have chosen the dental chair Schwarz was more than a bully I mean he was a he was a competent military officer but for most of the offices that served under him uh it was a frightening thing to have this man of such large size and power just exploding all over you and he did intimidate many of his of his subordinates and most of them considered them to be a tyrant and a bully I have always regretted the fact that I have a temper I think it's more the fact that I that I care so very much about the lives of our troops when human lives are on the line you cannot be Cavalier you can't do enough you cannot do enough you must must do everything you possibly can and leave no stone unturned and you can't settle can never settle for second best or a second class solution when you're dealing with Enterprises of such magnitude uh that they involve the lives of literally thousands and thousands and thousands of people despite the devastating air campaign Saddam Hussein still believed he could force a bloody stalemate on the ground just as he had done in his war against Iran and he believed that America still traumatized by Vietnam had a critical weakness Saddam Hussein was counting on American adversion to casualties in support of his strategy that when the Americans attacked they would take so many casualties the American people would rise up and say this is not worth the effort and let's see if we can have a negotia settlement and he would end up with the fruits of his of his aggression that was his strategy for 6 months the Iraqis had prepared for the Allied assault their Frontline troops surrounded Kuwait behind a barrier of minefields trenches and barbed wire and in reserve Saddam kept his Elite Republican guard and their Soviet tanks despite the bombing Iraq still had about 400 ,000 soldiers positioned for battle when you're proposing uh to launch an attack of the magnitude that we were going to launch with the unknowns out there you want to do everything you can to to level the playing field to make sure that your forces have every Advantage but as the ground war grew closer bitter arguments broke out among schwarz's commanders about how best to prepare for the land War the ground commanders wanted to shift the air War to the Iraqi forces in Kuwait the Air Force wanted to keep targeting Iraqi leadership in Baghdad I really believe that uh General gloss Bast glass really believed in his own mind that if he could just have a few more days or hit a few more targets that there wouldn't be a need for a ground war now hardly anybody else believe that but I think in busta's own mind he believed it the Army had one View and the Air Force obviously probably with the Navy had another view uh we believed uh and I still do that the U the attacking of a Targets in Baghdad had as much or more to do with the success or failure of that field Army than attacking it directly in the overall scheme of what our Coalition was trying to accomp accomplish they had 41 days of almost uninterrupted bombing 41 days to bring Sodom to his knees and someone says to me or to those Ground Forces commanders out there whether they Army whether they are Coalition forces or whether they're marines that if we didn't have to go out and shape the battlefield and hit those targets that you insisted on us hitting we could have won this War I think they're on drugs or something they must be smoking something this air campaign in its totality was Norman schwarz's air campaign wasn't Cal wallers nor Buster glosson nor Chuck horners and the campaign was part of it Schwarz cot's overall War plan we executed that the way he wanted it executed if that happened to not be the way Cal Waller thought it should be executed that's tough I distinctly remember telling buster glosson one day Buster if you divert another flight of aircraft without my approval I'm going to choke your tongue up and I think he got the message after that initially B-52s from the Vietnam era were assigned to attack the Iraqi forces in Kuwait but most of their bombs fell in an empty desert an error in the navigation system was corrected but high winds still blew most of the bombs off course we thought that we would destroy tanks somewhere between 20 and 30 a day and we weren't coming anywhere close we were down in the area of 6 or eight and so after about 10 days of that um I knew that we had to do something different Lawson decided to send two sophisticated F-111 Jets on a new mission ready now when they reached the Iraqi front lines the crews saw that even the best camouflage tank showed up as a white rectangle on their heat detecting cameras the tanks had grown hot in the daytime Sun seconds there's definitely is East unlike The B-52s the f-111s carried laser guided bombs 3 2 One impact okay see I called General gloss and I said uh Buster you wouldn't believe how uh successful we were tonight it was really [ __ ] hot we had uh seven for eight direct hits uh piece of cake the Air Force called it tank plinking and soon hundreds of these missions were being flown under the constant bombardment the Iraqi Army began to disintegrate the Allies didn't yet realize it but some 200,000 soldiers deserted it had a devastating effect let me give you an example we paid an inspection visit to one Infantry Division there should have been 15,000 soldiers in that division but we found only 34 there was nobody left 34 men out of 15,000 I was wondering why didn't we think about this uh weeks ago I was elated because I said now finally we are providing the ground commanders with something that they sorely need to uh reduce the number of tanks that they're going to be faced with or reduce the number of artillery pieces that will be bringing uh fire upon them as they cross the desert or try to reach those areas so everyone was happy but the bombing of Baghdad also continued one stealth bomber Mission targeted an anonymous intelligence headquarters that was also a prison unlike uh the way they say in the movies you know the way you hear it in the movies the bombs don't whistle in they crackle cuz they're slowing down and crackling through the sound barrier I heard it crackling through and it came roaring through that building uh and and the whole building just literally just shook apart then you hear the second bomb coming in and by that stage you're fully curled up in a ball and that's when you hear and it's deafening as it comes in and and some kind of shouted incoming went right through me and I and it picked me up set me right back down on the floor and the and the building literally began to come down around me and then the third and they just got closer and closer and you just thought you're just sitting there waiting in Washington President Bush was growing impatient colen Powell and Dick Cheney returned from a final meeting with General schwarzkoff with the news that the Allied attack could begin in 2 weeks but Bush was anxious moscow's support was weakening and gorbachov was suggesting the attack be postponed to allow for negotiations and so we will just continue down this road we're the ones that are going to set the time uh for how this war is this the time for any action that is taken uh we are not going to suit somebody else's timetable whether he lives in Baghdad or any place else and that's exactly the way it should be the president had reason to worry by rocket by Miss or by by rockets on gorbachov's orders a high ranking Soviet Diplomat traveled to Baghdad yini primakov's mission was to urge Saddam Hussein to accept a face- saving deal he came in wearing a long Overcoat it was cold there was an electric stove on when we were left alone I told him I'm not a military expert but if a land offensive begins your troops in Kuwait will be wiped out you have a great burden of responsibility then he said for the first time quite directly okay I'm going to withdraw my troops from Kuwait I just want to be sure that as I retreat they don't shoot me in the back 48 hours before the ground attack was due Iraq's foreign minister TK aiz arrived in Moscow saddam's admission that he was willing to withdraw had led to some frantic Soviet diplomacy to save their old Ally from defeat gorbachov to me was was making one last attempt to try and have it both ways he wanted to stay with the United States in the course of this conflict and yet he also wanted was under I think great pressure from various elements of the Soviet bureaucracy to try and preserve this client relationship with the Iraqis and with Saddam Hussein who after all had been a Soviet client for many many years asiz went straight to the Kremlin the Soviet president was waiting aiz told gorbachov Saddam wouldn't accept the UN resolutions that called for Iraq to recognize Kuwait's Independence and pay it compensation but he said Iraq would withdraw from Kuwait gorbachov thought this was good enough he called the White House I told President Bush George you shouldn't just be thinking about how to begin your attack you should be thinking about how to avoid it while the General's plan we should think about how to end the war we kept coming back to him and saying no you continually are suggesting uh approaches which do not require an unconditional withdrawal and we were never never never never going to accept a negotiating down from the UN resolutions the president summoned his key advisers to discuss the Soviet offer if Iraq withdrew it would mean no bloody ground war but Saddam would walk away unpunished his War Machine undefeated at dawn the president called gorbachov to tell him the deal was unacceptable it was a very difficult phone call for the president and a very anguished one for gorbachov I said we shouldn't waste any time we must still try to find a political way out said I am interested in that I'm interested in that understand me I'm interested in finding a political solution but nothing happens well I told him don't lose that will don't lose the opportunity don't rush things we're acting together let's find a political solution the president just said no I'm sorry you know he's he's had all the chances he's had months he's had from August 2nd we have given him every opportunity and we've told him that this aggression would not stand and now it's too late Bush's carefully crafted International Coalition was fragmenting the French President franois Mand called to demand more time for diplomacy we received word that Saddam had blown the oil wells and I went rushing up to the Oval Office and bush used it right then in the telephone call um with mean sort of franois we' just received this piece of information that shows that we cannot delay that uh that uh Saddam is going to produce U some a catastrophe in uh in Kuwait um he's already set all the oil wells on fire and God knows what he may do next and uh that pretty well resolved that issue as hundreds of oil wells Blaze across Kuwait the President issued a final ultimatum the Coalition will give Sadam Hussein until noon Saturday to do what he must do begin his immediate and unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait Sadam ignored the warning to obey he believed would have humiliated him in the eyes of the Arab world [Music] I have therefore directed General Norman Schwarz goof to use all forces available to eject the Iraqi Army from Kuwait more than anything else in those Final hours I was asking myself what did I forget what have I missed what more can I do once you have thrown the dice in the air you can't call them back at that point all you can do is wait until they land on the table to see what the numbers come up and that is a very awkward time because you can just sit there on your hands and wait there's nothing more you can do schwarz's Plan called for the US Marines to attack first straight into Kuwait he expected that would draw the elite Republican guard into battle 400 Mi to the West French and American airborne troops would begin encircling the battlefield 24 hours later Arab armies would support the attack into Kuwait only then would seven cores heavy armor smash through the Iraqi defenses and race in a left hook across the desert to destroy the Republican guard my nightmare scenario was that our forces would attack into Iraq and find themselves in such a great concentration that they became Target by chemical weapons or some sort of a rudimentary nuclear device that would cause Mass casualties that's exactly what the Iraqis did in the Iran Iraq war they would take the attacking masses of the Iranians let them run up against their barrier system and when there were thousands of people masked against the barrier system they would drop chemical weapons on them and and kill thousands of people a whole buch schwarz's plan meant that Walt Boomer the Marine Commander would be the first to lead his men into action despite the air War Boomer feared storming the minefields and barbed wire of Southern Kuwait would be a murderous Affair fought under a barrage of Iraqi chemicals and nerve gas I was overwhelmingly concerned about casualties we were right numbered when we attack into Kuwait sometimes people um have lost sight of that but in addition to being outnumbered there was this overriding concern overwhelming concern about chemical warfare uh this just occupied most of my waking moments beneath the smoke from the burning oil wells Marine assault units pulled on the clumsy charcoal line suits that might save their lives in a chemical bombardment there were predictions that the Marines could take as many as 10,000 casualties in a week of fighting weather conditions were absolutely critical and the weather predictions that we were getting at that time were very mixed the Marines do not have a lot of heavy artillery and depend upon their aircraft to provide the close air support to replace the artillery and Walt Boomer came to me and said he was very concern concerned about launching his attack uh when the weather was predicted to be so bad Schwarz called colen Powell in the Pentagon and asked that the ground war be delayed we have a president who is anxious to get this over with and I went and talked to Norm on the phone and said Norm look this is getting hard to explain and I took him through why I was getting hard to explain and he he just had it he exploded and said you know you do not understand my problem you're talking in political terms um if you don't care about the lives of young people well I do that did it I uh I'm I I uh exploded and I started shouting back at him um you know I care as much as you do but there's there's a limit and I have to work in both the political world and the military world he said colon I think I'm losing it I feel my head's in Vice said you're not losing it if you have a total confidence we got a problem we'll work our way through this problem and about 30 minutes later Norm called said oh weather's fine we can go on the Kuwaiti border Advanced teams of marine engineers began to crawl through the Mine Fields and barbed wire that protected the Iraqi front line they used fiberglass rods to probe for mines marking safe paths for the first troops to race through the next day you see mines everywhere you you can look left and right and you see mines half buried mines full view mines just as as far as you can see you look left and right and there's desert and there's just lines and lines and lines and groups of Mines out there we crawled uh low crawled which is on your belly probing along with with the fiberglass rods 70 m in front of you Iraqis Marine snipers are behind us trying to suppress Iraqis that are moving through the trench lines you hear artillery mortars Small Arms meanwhile 177,000 Marines headed for the beaches of Kuwait City but they weren't going to land it was only a faint Schwarz had decided there would be too many US casualties and had canceled the amphibious Landing but he still wanted the Iraqis to think it was coming that night 20 mi off the coast The Guns of the Battleship Missouri shelled the beach to complete the deception the Missouri had fought against the Japanese in the Pacific and this was to be her last battle the shells achieved their purpose Iraqi troops moved toward the the coast and away from the point the Marines would actually attack in the morning first Marine Division will cross west of the OA Zone approximately 0500 at H hour in the desert the Marine Commanders rehearsed their plans for the last time they expected a tough fight while I remain apprehensive about some of their capability I'm also confident that we can work through that I think we can work through their chemical capability Before Dawn the attack began I don't think anyone predicted that the Marines would get much farther than maybe five kilm at the very most maybe eight and that then with the enormous uh overwhelming forces that were array in that area that it would stop the Marines we're going through the breeze but by Dawn the generals realized something remarkable was happening the Marine columns were driving right through the enemy positions Iraqi fighting positions while Allied aircraft watched for a Counterattack thousands of Marines poured into Kuwait almost unopposed we expected casually somewhere in the 25 to 30% range but there was essentially no firefights essentially no battles the Iraqis were there but they chose they eled not to fight in many respects they could Retreat and they could surrender much faster than we could attack or advance and that the the war really became a war of collection of of enemy prisoners of war after 6 weeks of Relentless bombing half the Iraqi conscripts on the front line had already deserted those who stayed were just waiting for their chance to surrender what kind of Saddam said our young soldiers were behaving like women they were turning into women they weren't fighting like real men all right you're all right this was not fair to our proud Army our army did not believe in this war it was a dirty war this war in Kuwait the Marines waited for a chemical attack it never came we didn't think that it was wise to use them that's all what I can say that it was not it was not wise to use such kind of weapons in such kind of a war with with such an enemy if chemicals had killed large numbers of Marines the Pentagon had plans to flood Baghdad under 6 ft of water knocking off the dams on the Tigers and Euphrates rivers would have caused enormous destruction Downstream the loss of civilian life would would have been terrible and we really had not thoroughly analyzed we we knew how to hit the dams but I don't know if we analyzed what the effect Downstream would have been but nevertheless it would have been a good one to threaten the Iraqis with and of course there was always the implicit uh threat of nuclear weapons I don't think we ever would have used them uh but nevertheless the Iraqis didn't know that and we could have if provocation was serious we will not you we are here to help you in those first hours 8,000 Iraqis were [Applause] captured home soon great the Iraqi collapse was so sudden the Allied commanders didn't yet realize how their success could undermine the larger plan my own guess is that about 75% of them gave up and about 25% fought as the day wore on I began to become uh elated the Marines had Advanced into Kuwait so quickly the Republican guard didn't come South to Counterattack and seven core's left hook attack was not Doe until the following day that would give the Republican guard time to escape schwarzkoff had miscalculated but had there been evidence weeks earlier of what might really happen when the Allies attacked the Iraqis had there been lessons to learn from the Battle of kafi after Saddam attacked the Saudi town in January and his forces were destroyed some of short staff began to suspect the Iraqis simply couldn't stay in a fight with the Allies if he had read Kofi correctly and had had come to the conclusion as was it was obvious that the Iraqis were not going to be able to fight effectively and would probably Retreat he could have done a number of things he could have speeded up the Army attack or he could have held the Marine attack and let the Army the Army go first which was one of the things that was recommended to him by one of his General officers but he didn't he never reassessed the situation after U after Ki and continued to assume that the Iraqis were going to stand and fight as a young officer in Vietnam schwarzkoff had learned the dangers of underestimating the enemy this time he had done just the opposite he had overestimated the Iraqis and now he had to act quickly I decided to move the main attack up to 3:00 in the afternoon it became obvious that if we were going to inflict that damage on the Republican guard we had to go ahead and and uh inflict it as early as possible 1 2 3 a withering artillery and Rocket barrage for the main attack seven cores left hook began that afternoon seven cor's Commander General Fred Franks like many of the American generals was a veteran of Vietnam he' lost a leg destroyed by a North Vietnamese grenade during the invasion of Cambodia in 1970 he was a careful methodical Man Memories of Vietnam are very sharp clear to me I mean never far from from my mind and especially during the Gulf War we didn't say it to each other but I I think we all felt that uh we're we're going to do it right this time troops doing okay yes sir good in many ways Frank's personified the Army after Vietnam maimed traumatized he was also a man who was constitutionally inclined to wait as long as he could before making a decision one of his closest A's said he was a man who who couldn't make the decision to pee if his pants were on fire he was the kind of man who by personal inclination was not going to get along well with Schwarz goov as the artillery barrage lifted seven cor surged across the desert this was the army that had been stationed in Europe to fight World War II now the end of the Cold War allowed it to be Unleashed against Iraq the generals had expected 2 days of fighting to breach the Iraqi Frontline defenses followed by six days of massive tank battles with the Republican guard I thought that we would lose somewhere between in the breaching units that we would lose somewhere between 20 and 40% the American first Infantry Division had the job of storming the trenches to clear a path for the tanks to avoid hand-to-hand fighting they plan to bury the Iraqi Defenders alive a thought occurred to me we could actually use these plows to fill in the trenches in fact I tested it myself I got down in the ditch myself and had them had two tanks plow towards me just to see what it did I learned several things one is I learned that it that it happens very quickly so the defender has a choice to make but he has to make it very quickly he can either give up and hop out of the trench he can try to run down the trench and get away but he better do those quickly because these things move at amazing speed down there along the Iraqi border ran a sand barrier a burm Beyond it lay 5 mies of minefields and then the Iraqi trenches you got the first one first firm in a minute that's real good the second one's a tougher one armored bulldozers and tanks fitted with plows broke through the BM and moved onto the trenches 18-year-old Joe Queen drove one of the lead bulldozers what we did is we just took the dirt that the Iraqi soldiers had dug out you just pushed that dirt right back into the trench you could just look at the Man's eyes and see fear you know you see him scared you know you're looking at a man's the whites of his eyes is you're going through in the trench with this bulldozer covering in a trench and they were firing at the bulldozer and the first bullet they hit the blade that made me know then hey look this is for Real there's no game those are real bullets and a bullet will kill you after the war press accounts reported thousands of Iraqis were buried most independent analysts estimate it was just hundreds the Army says it was about 150 you don't think about hey what about this guy what about that guy he had a chance to get out he had every opportunity to get out and he took the way to die for his country just like any American would St into Iraq by the end of the ground War's first day all of shortz cof's forces were on the [Music] attack I went to bed that night uh very satisfied with the fact that the campaign plan was unfolding and that that it looked like we're going to have a terrific success on you know and and uh and accomplish everything we wanted to [Music] accomplish in Washington that Sunday President Bush had received little news if there were heavy us casualties it could finish him politically and could even stop the War I got briefed just before I went into into the church the president was right ahead of me I passed him a note and said Mr President things are going very well we all went back to the White House I got out of map from Time Magazine to sort of show him exactly what was happening and I was able to tell him there that things were going extraordinarily well we had assumed that the toughest part of the ground war in terms of casualties would have been the the early hours of that conflict and and in fact what we were finding was that the air War had been enormously effective and decimated the Iraqi forces that they in in fact were collapsing in front of us pretty but in Riad the Allied Commander was having a bad morning Schwarz got up after a couple hours of sleep on the morning of the 25th and went in to look at the map in in the war room and he saw that the Marines were plunging ahead that the 18th airborn core out in the Far West uh was plunging ahead and then he looked and saw that seventh core BAS basically had not moved since uh the time when he went to sleep he completely and utterly lost his temper just across the Iraqi lines seven cor had stopped for the night General Franks had decided there was too much danger of entangling his large force of Friendly Fire of too many casualties if he continued the advance in darkness there's an old German saying that says go slow now and go fast later and so the scheme of maneuver based on my own assessment and my discussions with the Tactical commanders my informing my higher headquarters that that it would be actually faster we would conduct the mission faster if we did not continue it during hours of uh Darkness but we continue it at first light I was repeatedly calling up my subordinate commander and telling him you know we must attack we must attack we must make contact with the Enemy they're running away on us and we must and maintain contact to keep them from running away and passing down these orders and then sitting back and hours later seeing that nothing was happening nothing was changing Jon Schartz off said in no uncertain terms get seven core moving right now and get them doing what it is they have to do and if uh General Franks uh can't do that I'll get somebody who can meanwhile inside Kuwait on the second day the Marines pushed on towards Kuwait City but Saddam had ordered a surprise out of the burning oil fields hundreds of tanks from Iraq's second line of defense the regular army suddenly attacked the Marines right flank the Marines regrouped Cobra helicopter gunships were quickly sent into the fight it was the largest tank battle in the Marines history we' got the word that there was an Iraqi Counterattack as we arrive out there we saw Horizon to Horizon Iraqi tanks armored vehicles and as we started hitting these tanks and things started happening in our favor uh the attack basically just gr to a halt uh all the tanks stopped the armored vehicles stopped the hatches flew open the Iraqi started bailing out out of the tanks and uh you know scramble around in the desert trying to figure out what was going [Applause] on the Iraqi troops tried to retreat back into the oil smoke it was like you know something out of a you know spaghetti western with the trip wire and the hes Fallen it was uh you know as you engage these these uh troops with 20 mm uh it was the first time I'd ever done that and they just kind of pitch over in the desert over a 100 armored vehicles were destroyed flying over the oil wells it was like something out of Dante's Inferno the thick black oil field smoke a littered Battlefield burning tanks aircraft flying around very surrealistic and you almost had to slap yourself in reality to go out there and do your mission in Baghdad Saddam was told his Counterattack had failed and the Allied Advance on Kuwait City had resumed Sadam was very upset he was deeply depressed and for reasons known only to himself he accused five top ranking officers of betrayal and then ordered their execution the sentence was carried out immediately by his personal [Music] guards once we broke that Counterattack we broke their back that was the last gasp on their part to throw us back out of Kuwait and from then on we had pretty uh we had a pretty straight shot into the [Music] city but that night one of the last Iraqi scuds finally found its Mark in Duran Saudi Arabia get out there was a glitch basically a technical glitch that blinded the Patriot temporarily to this one particular scud this scud by luck hit a warehouse that was being used as a barracks and immediately caused an inferno all the people are up here 28 American soldiers were killed 98 more were wounded the worst Allied casualties so far had this catastrophe occurred right at the beginning of the war it could very well have changed perceptions of the war the cost uh of the war it would have certainly caused doubts about the Patriot might have caused the Israel to LEAP into the war in ways they didn't otherwise so the fact that the the tragedy in damam occurred when it did rendered it almost a footnote get out of here with that damn cam out of here right now get out of here get him out that same night the Iraqis began to pull out of Kuwait City Iraqi soldiers piled into every vehicle they could find a vast Convoy headed north Saddam himself issued the order to withdraw when the land assault started he became desperate he was now convinced that it was impossible for him to keep Kuwait I frequently talked to the resistance in Kuwait City via satellite telephone I picked up and it was a colonel from the Kuai Air Force who'd been trapped in quit City and he'd been in the resistance all this time he started to tell me about the Iraqis forming up and fleeing the town he became so emotionally happy relieved Overjoyed about his country being freed the terrible oppressors leaving he started to cry I'm embarrassed to say it but I started to cry as well I have never been so touched in my entire life an F-15 crew their aircraft Laden with bombs for an attack into Iraq was given a new Mission they were ordered to hit the Convoy leaving Kuwait City and to stop it at all costs as the crew walked to their aircraft their commanding officer stopped them he just received the first report of the casualties caused by the scud that had landed on Duran I told him of the importance of the mission this not just a retreating Army these guys are rapists Killers murderers and coincidentally a scut had just hit hit daharan airport and killed 60 Americans and I convinced them and I'm sure that that I did that they needed to put some hate in their heart and go out and stop those son of a [ __ ] from getting out of quate as we Dove out of the clouds the the picture was out absolutely astounding there were thousands of headlights heading on every Road road that that led North out of Kuwait City it's almost like um hitting the jackpot I mean there are Vehicles all over the place it is a very lucrative Target we had 12 500lb bombs and we elected to drop them three at a time the bombs impact in a string right across the highway with the center bomb impacting on a uh in between two trucks as a matter of fact uh causing both of the trucks to uh burst into flame those first bombs s destroyed the lead vehicles and created a huge traffic jam soon other aircraft arrived their cluster bombs wreaking havoc on the stalled Convoy [Applause] below there were many wounded people on the road some of them without arms or legs they were just stranded there dead when they saw our car they started to crawl towards us we didn't have space for them with all the strength they could muster they were throwing themselves at the side of the car the windows were smeared with blood we had no space we had to drive on the pilots called it the highway of death 3 days into the land War the army that had occupied Kuwait City for 7 months no longer existed as a fighting force thousands of footprints LED off into the desert hundreds had been killed in the coming hours what happened here would become an important factor in ending the war why did we bomb them because there was a great deal of military equipment on that highway I had given orders to all of my commanders that I wanted every piece of Iraqi equipment that we possibly could destroyed this was not a bunch of innocent people just trying to make their way back across the border uh to Iraq this was a bunch of of rapists murderers and thugs who had raped and pillaged downtown Kuwait City and now were trying to get out of the country before they were caught an American surveillance plane now recorded this radar image of the battlefield it showed sanam's best troops the Republican guard were starting to escape J swov was possessed with the Republican Gods from the outset I mean it was as if this was satam's Crown Jewel and any mention of the fact that the Republican guards might slip away or might not be annihilated or destroyed was repugnant to norko it was now the third day of the land war and seven cor had still not engaged the Republican guard schwarzkoff was Furious here we have the golden opportunity to accomplish far beyond our dream dreams what it is we set out to accomplish and to get this thing over once and for all very quickly and it doesn't seem like we are able to capitalize on that opportunity 7 core tanks were driving hard Schwarz wanted them to drive harder he had assumed the Republican guard would move South to defend Kuwait but they hadn't and seven cor struggled to make up the distance schwarzkoff wanted a headlong charge General Franks was more cautious you get the probability of an attack that starts and stops and starts and stops loses momentum I wanted to hit the Republican guards with a with a three division fist I didn't want to poke at them with the fingers in other words peacemeal commitment of my forces I want to hit him with a fist at full speed at full speed and I kept saying but the enemy situation has changed and therefore the plan should be changing and that's the whole reason why we moved up the main attack we've got the enemy reeling and most importantly they hadn't encountered any enemy any fire with that J schof indicated Freddy let's get this mission accomplished and let's do it ASAP on that third afternoon of the war the was finally joined with the Republican guard a Cavalry troop of nine tanks and 12 armored personnel carriers was leading the seven core Advance ahead behind a slight rise in the desert Republican guard tanks waited in Ambush as we crested the rise my Gunner identified tanks to our direct front he said identified tanks I yelled fire as I was yelling fire on the intercom the gun erupted around impacted on the frontal slope of the tank and the tank commander was ejected out of the hatch and he himself was was in Flames as the other tanks crested the rise they began to select their targets and engaged in an almost simultaneous manner so 15 seconds before there was a cohesive or coherent Iraqi defense 15 seconds later that defense was completely INF flames when we look back over the armored vehicles you think you think my God this is what an armored Cavalry troop in the assault can accomplish in that short amount of time 28 Republican guard tanks were destroyed there were no American losses when seventh Corp finally uh you know engaged the enemy they did a marvelous job and I was quite relieved that they had finally gotten up there and gotten in contact with some of the Republican guard and could start you know start you know get on with the battle that night seven Corp routed an entire division of the Republican guard the other five Republican guard division started a desperate retreat but in Washington there was already talk of ending the war Coen Powell and Dick Cheney came over to the White House to give the president their daily report on how how the war was going and by that time we knew both from the military reports and from satellites about the highway of death leading North out of Kuwait City and the incredible destruction of the Iraqi convoys and and so on we knew all this would eventually be on television and and uh I remember very clearly Cole and Powell uh saying that this thing was turning into a massacre and that to continue it Beyond beond a certain point uh would be unamerican and he even used the word unchivalrous and uh and he said that he thought that they were probably within 24 hours of uh concluding the war of completing uh their objectives 72 hours after Crossing into Kuwait the US Marines were on the outskirts of Kuwait City destroyed Iraqi tanks lined the road the Marine Commander had once feared thousands of his troops would be killed but only 28 had died we had made arrangements for the Arab Coalition forces to go into the City and I was sitting there getting a little restless and wondering oh okay what are we going to do I'm tired of sitting here so so we drove into the City and the height pouring was something I'll never forget I don't know where all the people came from they came down to the side of the road by the thousands and they had Katy flags and some had American flags [Applause] vehicles that the Iraqis hadn't stolen or destroyed they had acquired some of those so they were driving around us in this mad Circle I thought sure we were going to crush a vehicle what they were saying was God bless you America God bless you you know we love you very uh very emotional moment for us after all of this in Baghdad that morning Saddam Hussein was fighting just to survive the Allies were trying to cut off and Destroy his retreating Army especially the Republican guard one of the keys to his power in the region and inside Iraq even Saddam feared his regime might be finished he sat in front of me and he was almost in tears not crying but almost in tears he said we do not know what God will bring upon us tomorrow he was virtually collapsing he had reached the depths the Marines had liberated Kuwait City but the most intense fighting of the war had yet to begin the heavy armor of seven core was chasing the Republican guard they had destroyed One Division the night before the remaining divisions were now trying to escape toward Basra leaving behind only a rear guard check their Retreat as core advanced Rocky rear guard prepared for battle scores of tanks from the Republican guard's Medina division dug in along a low Ridge the defensive line stretched for 6 miles what happened next became known as the Battle of Medina Ridge I know there's enemy out there but I don't know where the heck they're at and then boom we were in it I look up and it was about 3700 M away and and there's bmps and t72 sitting on the ridge the whole Brigade online within 3 seconds had let loose with their first rounds moving about 20 25 mph like a Cavalry charg towards the Iraqi imp placements and all you could see every time we shot was a massive explosion the guns on the American tanks had a range of around 2 mi twice that of the Soviet made Rocky tanks the turrets were flipping 40 50 fet in the air 11 tons of steel just it was incredible to see a gun tube and the turret just spinning up in the air and Landing hundreds of yards away from the [Music] [Music] [Music] vehicles we took very few prisoners at Medina Ridge very few I saw three and in the desert You Could See For Miles most people I saw were dead later on in the battle when I rolled up there there was pieces everywhere I have never seen such destruction in my life I was just shocked that people can do so much Devastation in such a short period of time 300 Iraqi tanks and armored vehicles and their Crews were destroyed at Medina Ridge only one American was killed nothing now stood between the retreating Republican guard and destruction a radio message told Saddam Hussein of the defeat he thought that his downfall was imminent he asked me straight out do you think that the Allies will come as far as Baghdad he was quite desperate and fr having destroyed the rear guard seven core pushed on to towards the sea meanwhile the American 18th Corps Advanced to cut off the remaining Iraqi resistance 60 helicopters from the 101st Airborne Division leapfrogged 100 Mil ahead deep into the Iraqi desert the troops had orders to build an Airbase from which Apache helicopter gunships could attack the retreating Republican guard until the American tanks closed in within 2 hours the base was operational waves of Apaches arrived and refueled then they headed north to hunt for the enemy Doug gabram LED one flight of four Apaches we took off due north as fast as we could go probably 30 ft off the ground 120 knots the terrain changed we started flying over marshes this is what gabram could see through his gun camera he found the retreating forces on a Causeway built across the marshes the White Flag we saw people dismounted infantry I'd see the AK-47 raised with the white flag on it initially I didn't fire um my chalk two or three would say hey the guy's shooting at us you know know they're shooting at us with white flags on the end of their barrels and uh My Philosophy changed and that I'm not going to take any chances so when I see troops I'm you know I'm going to fire I got people running on the road there now hundreds of soldiers were lying in the reads along the edges of the causeway scratch one b as gabram continued down the causeway an F-16 pilot who'd been shot down and was parachuting to the ground put out an emergency broadcast2 I'm in my shoot I'm in my shoot they're shooting at me in Parachute me it looks like they want to get me where's thatway the pilot managed to land safely and a rescue mission set off Dr Ronda corham was one of the crew this was an opportunity to really go save somebody we thought and we took two Apaches and my Blackhawk and just started going there right within a couple kilometers of where this guy supposedly was we're still seeing American troops so we thought man it's going to be not difficult and then all of a sudden like maybe a minute later we are in the middle of a crossfire just the worst anti-aircraft guns we'd ever had we' got shot at before but but it was clear that these guys were waiting for us you could feel the aircraft shutter then I think that's when the tail boom kind of dis separated from the rest of the aircraft and then everything went black it was some time later and all of a sudden I just realized I was lying down and and I thought I was dead it was uh it was the most weird feeling cuz nothing hurt and I couldn't hear anything and um it was it was very peaceful and I thought well I must be dead I looked up and I saw five Iraqi guys with their you know rifles pointed at me so then I knew I wasn't dead and I knew I was captured then one of them reached down grabbed me by the arm and stood me up and that's when he separated my already broken right arm and then I knew I was pretty badly hurt and uh clearly clearly not dead so I took off my flight helmet and uh you know all this long below shoulder length brown hair came out and until then I'm sure they just thought I was a skinny guy but uh but all of a sudden they realized oh my goodness this is a girl I was just leaning back on the seat and all of a sudden I feel this this guy sitting next to me who um puts his hand on my face and starts to kiss me and I thought well how bizarre and and I never I don't know what I was thinking but I I really thought surely he can do better I mean I've got one eye that I got a cut above my eye and it's soaked with blood and I don't I'm sure I don't smell very good and I'm thinking how can he possibly want to do this and then he he unsi my flight suit and started fing me and um I thought I can't believe it a lot of people make a big deal about getting molested and I'm I'm sure it's a I'm sure it's a big deal um but but in the hierarchy of of things that were going wrong that was pretty low on my list all afternoon waves of gunships attack the retreating Iraqi troops we're going to back away from them a little bit to [Applause] at okayer in the confusion of battle no one could be sure how many units were retreating undetected but the American forces intended to cut them off and Tra them all in a ring of Allied tanks [Music] know more than 70,000 Iraqis had surrendered it doesn't seem like this third War I just feel sorry for them you know one and it doesn't seem like they want to fight if the Allies were going to close the ring on the Republican guard the fighting would have to continue but in Washington colen Powell was worried that further Slaughter would stain the military's reputation you don't do unnecessary killing if it can be avoided at some point you decide you've accomplished your objectives and you stop we owned Kuwait City the question was how much additional destruction do we want to uh inflict upon uh the Iraqi Army that was in the Kuwait theater on the battlefield Apache gunships designed to destroy tank columns were hunting down indiv idual soldiers colen Powell had once said to the Iraqi Army first we're going to cut it off and then we're going to kill it the Iraqis were not completely cut off but Powell decided there had been enough killing he called Norman Schwarz it was 7:00 a.m. in Washington 3:00 p.m. in the desert colon said to May what are your plans my response to him was we plan to continue to execute the operation and continue to drive towards the sea east towards the sea and he then said to me how long would that take you and my response to him was it will probably take until it will take until the end of tomorrow so we could cease fire tomorrow evening at dark and we would have completely accomplished the plan sitting in the Pentagon Powell knew this meant another day of killing the president had to make a decision after talking to Schwarz goof I went over to the White House I took the president through the situation on the ground I pointed out that we were starting to see some scenes that were unpleasant and uh we were in the window of calling an end to it so is that there was not uh unnecessary additional loss of life on the part of American and Coalition forces or on the part of Iraqi youngsters colon said we basically have done it uh we have destroyed the Republican guard uh we have expelled them from Kuwait uh we have essentially completed our objectives and I believe we are just a few hours uh from completing that effort and I would expect that within the next 24 hours I would be bringing you a recommendation uh with respect to the cessation of hostilities the president then said well if that's the case we're within the window um why not end it now colen pal called me he said I'm at the White House we've discussed ending the war could you execute a ceasefire if it was declared effective midnight Washington time tonight I told him that I could live with that quite frankly if we went on another day we were going to kill some more of our people and we had already won an overwhelming Victory with a minimum of casualties and that was good enough for me at 5:57 p.m. the president told Powell to stop the war it's the thing to do he said it was a decision that I that as best I can recall there was absolutely no uh dissent from on the part of any of the president's advisor deep down I wondered if we really had done quite enough but I did not descent from the decision did not argue that we should go uh should go another day in the war room there had been no thought of ceasefire only of completing the plan and completely trapping the Iraqis the next day General swov walked into the war room and he said we are going to have a ceasefire well I thought that he was jesting so I said that's [ __ ] so he says no I'm serious we will have a ceasefire so I said we have not accomplished our mission why is it that we're going to stop what we set out to do and stop the war and jonov says Cal godamn it the president of the United States has made a decision to stop this war ladies and gentlemen General Schwarz good evening ladies and gentlemen thank you for being here here a few hours before the president made his decision Schwarz had summed up the state of the war before a worldwide television audience in a Brava performance that became known as the mother of all briefings why we were doing it but we have rendered completely ineffective over 29 Iraqi divisions and the gates are closed there was no way out of here there is no way out of here and the enemy is fighting Us in this location right here schwarz's orders were to destroy the Republican God not neutralize them destroy them and when he got up in his briefing the mother of all briefings he said the gate is closed meaning that our forces had cut them off and that they were helpless lying helpless in in front of us yeah you said the gate was closed have you uh have you got Ground Forces blocking the roads to Basra uh no so is there any way that they can get out that way no cuz that's why the gate's closed uh right here yeah of course that wasn't true at all the gate was not closed and it was still wide open at at Bas and the Iraqis were fleeing and they had brought their core headquarters across the Euphrates and then they were bringing the rest of the divisions across and ended up with about 23s of the Republican guard units escaping with about 50% uh of their equipment so he Dev carried out the the goal that he had set for himself in his own mission orders why did you draw back at this moment well I don't consider it a drawing back from the information that I had in my headquarters we had inflicted tremendous damage on the Republican guard we had bombed them for over 30 days straight we had attacked them and fought them we had destroyed many many many pieces of equipment we had attacked them from the air during the ground campaign and inflicted great damage on them so I already felt that there were several divisions of the Republican guard it was reported to me that had been destroyed uh it wasn't 100% destruction but had we been allowed to go on for one more day it would not have been 100% destruction then just hours before the ceasefire went into effect the British army charged out of the desert towards the road running from Kuwait City North to Iraq as we pulled over the top of the ridge in front of us was the highway [Music] we'd seen dead bodies before but it was in the next few hours that once you were actually in and among it for the first time walking around clearing your positions or whatever that's when it start you know they actually came across of of how much Carnage there was there none of the pictures of of the highway of death had yet appeared on television but these were the scenes the men in the White House had anticipated as they weighed the political risks of continuing the war hundreds had died here of an estimated 25,000 Iraqis killed in the war as many as 12,000 soldiers had died during the 6 weeks of the air War along with 2,300 non-combatant civilians and another 10,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed during the 4 days of the ground [Music] War there was a lot of Civilian equipment that have been stalen from kuwa City for me the thing that I found most distressing was the smell of cheap perfume this sweet sickly smell I was ready for the smell of War but I wasn't ready for the smell of kind of everyday life and and normality I felt there was a an immense sense of evil there I mean I detested being there and for 3 days that we actually sat on the highway I hated it um and it enveloped me more and more and [Music] more Kuwait is liberated Iraq's Army is defeated our military objectives are met I am pleased to announce that at midnight tonight Eastern Standard Time exactly 100 hours since ground operations commenced and 6 weeks since the start of Operation Desert Storm all United States and Coalition forces will suspend offensive combat operations 3 hours later the fighting stopped time to go home and as the word filtered down that the war in fact had ended second Brigade rooted around for a copy of Lee Greenwood's tape uh that had become the anthem of the of the uh Desert Storm operation and they couldn't find Lee Greenwood um all they could find was James Brown I Feel Good which was an Anthem from a different war of a different con 1968 I think it came out so they plug James Brown in into this uh this truck with big speakers on [Applause] it you heard James Brown I Feel Good blaring all over the desert uh as their Hymn of Thanksgiving that the war was finally [Applause] over I phone Sadam and told him that bush had agreed to this ceasefire he felt himself to be a great great hero he started to say we won we won his morale Rose from zero to 100 each day of War had left saddam's regime more vulnerable to overthrow now the humiliation was over the greatest fear of Allied tanks in Baghdad was gone the Allies had stopped the war Saddam could concentrate on surviving on the question of going to Baghdad if you remember the Vietnam War we had no International legitimacy for what we did as a result we first of all lost the battle in World public opinion eventually we lost the battle at home in the Gulf War we had great International legitimacy in the form of eight United Nations resolutions every one of which said kick Iraq out of Kuwait did not say one word about going into Iraq taking Baghdad Conquering the whole country and and hanging Saddam Hussein that's Point number one point number two had we gone on to Baghdad I don't believe the French would have gone and I'm quite sure that the Arab Coalition would not have gone the Coalition would have ruptured the only people that would have gone would have been the United Kingdom and the United States of America and oh by the way I think we'd still be there we' be like a dinosaur in a tar pit we could not have gotten out and we'd still be the occupying power and we'd be paying 100% of all the cost to administer all of [Music] Iraq 2 days after the ceasefire a brigade of Republican guards returning to Iraq fired upon the 24th Infantry Division the Americans replied with overwhelming Firepower 7 months after Iraqi forces marched into k the last battle had been fought the conflict cost 240 Coalition lives 146 of them Americans after the war over 80,000 veterans would claim they were victims of a mysterious Gulf War syndrome the Pentagon now acknowledges some of those illnesses were caused by wartime stress but denies there is a wider syndrome meanwhile the medical studies [Music] continue Iraq had been broken as a military threat but Saddam had escaped with a third of his forces from Kuwait and his hold on [Music] power you know to be very honest with you I don't I haven't yet uh felt this this wonderfully euphoric feeling that many of the American people feel you mentioned World War II there was a there was a definitive end to that conflict and now we have Saddam Hussein still there he's sitting there with a frown on his face and saying to himself neighbors why don't I feel better about this in other words he's signaling that yeah it was all great it went right but there's still something wrong there's still something missing missing I don't feel the same Elation I felt when we had won World War II and the reason I think is obvious that it was an incomplete Victory it was a modest Victory snatched from the jaws of Triumph and Saddam Hussein was still in power [Applause] now Another War began the war to overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraqi cities in the South close to the Allied front lines saddam's rule had collapsed Ordinary People mostly Shia Muslims took up arms against a regime they hated during the War President Bush had called again and again for the Iraqis to overthrow Saddam [Applause] and there's another way for the Bloodshed to stop and that is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein to step aside we have no argument with the people of Iraq our differences are with that brutal dictator in Baghdad as the rebellions erupted Bush repeated his call for saddam's overthrow in Basra soldiers who had fled from Kuwait joined the rebels it wasn't organized opposition people just rebelled against oppression rebelled against cruelty and starvation against the executions and detentions there was Injustice and people in the streets rose up to overthrow this regime in the first heady days of the uprising the rebels not Iraqi officials controlled the streets we did not think uh the president nor any of us thought at that time that Sadam would uh would continue in power having suffered such a uh such a resounding defeat With Victory 1 the political concentration that had brought such success now seemed to Desert the White House team Washington left the details of the ceasefire for the generals to work out alone nartov said how did we make this happen What do we do and uh we had a state department representative in our war room and he said to the state department representative what is it we're supposed to do Mr State Department rep and the state department ref gave what we call the Iraqi salute he didn't know I had no instructions whatsoever so lacking any and based upon the conversations Cole and I had had I I I called my stenographer in and dictated my own terms of reference and then I called up Co and said I'm going to send these to you you know if if if you all approves and send them back to me and this is what I'll do the Pentagon changed happy to glad we to they and put in a few fixes gave it to the state department the state department uh changed a couple of words and send it back TS and sis use this schwarzkoff decided that the ceasefire talks would be held in Coalition occupied Iraq near the town of safan the Iraqi leadership wanted a deal that would return their captured territory and give them the freedom to crush the rebellions schwarz's objectives were simpler I went to safwan with my own instructions which basically number one was to get our PS back and then number two to to make sure that we had very very clear lines drawn so that we didn't have any inadvertent battles after that a pair of Apache gunships hovered over the approaching Iraqi Convoy just hours before Saddam had personally briefed the Iraqi generals arriving to meet Schwarz Sadam wanted to consolidate the ceasefire in any way he could and he ordered his officers to give any information knew about the minefields and the prisoners of War he didn't want to give the West any excuse to resume fighting he wanted to sign a ceasefire agreement at any price accompanied by the Saudi commanderin-chief schwarzkoff led the defeated Iraqi generals to the tent where the meeting would be held once the talks got underway schwarzkoff got everything he wanted but so did the Iraqis what they were most concerned about was that this was going to be a permanent border and and over and over again they kept saying is this a permanent border or is this just temporary and I kept having to reassure them that no this is not a permanent border this is a temporary demarcation line between our forces and then this fellow looked at me and said well can we fly our helicopters and I knew the great Devastation we had inflicted upon their roads and their Bridges and that seemed like a very reasonable request to me and then the Iraqis asked the question which should have given Schwarz pause and that was well how about armed helicopters and Schwarz without even thinking said yes armed helicopters now what the Iraqis had in mind were using their helicopter gunships to put down the Shia Uprising which which had taken place and uh Schwarz goof gave them uh gave them C cart blanch to do it so he was he was finessed by the by the Iraqis at the South War conference the Iraqi generals got exactly what Saddam wanted to the astonishment of some of the civilian architects of the war they should surrender that equipment the lot when you're dealing with a dictator he has got not only to be defeated well and truly but he's got to be seen to be defeated by his own people so that they identify the privations they've had to go through with his actions and we didn't do that I think what we should have insisted upon is Saddam Hussein come to safon that was our mistake because that allowed him to blame his generals for the defeat and not he himself Saddam Hussein now moved forces loyal to him from Baghdad to suppress the uprisings in the South American troops could see the fighting from their positions but they were ordered not to intervene good pres my advice to the president throughout the period of this Uprising is that this did not seem to me to be an operation that we uh we needed to get uh get involved in because I couldn't figure out who was doing what to whom and it would have required us to move further into Iraq and take responsibility for that part of Iraq and for a purpose that was not stated and that was the Quagmire therein laid Vietnam as far as we were concerned because we would still be there and what's more given the American way of doing things we would have then had the responsibility for rebuilding all of the infrastructure and we were just determined not to get sucked into that [Applause] trap inside Iraq as each Rebel Village and town fell there were terrible reprisals [Music] these pictures filmed by the Iraqis themselves would not reach the West for 2 years they show Shia prisoners and Senior officers from the Iraqi regime there are estimates that tens of thousands of Shia were killed the Americans did not interfere therefore it took us only few days to recover from the surprise to reorganize our troops reorganize our resources and uh impose peace and Order and the southern Governors it took us two weeks to do that just a few miles away half a million Coalition troops began to leave Iraq after months in the desert they were returning home the Allies still hoped one of saddam's generals would overthrow him but the ill-fated Uprising had caused the Iraqi military to Rally around Saddam out of fear of something worse the White House had miscalculated meanwhile the Iraqi leader had his part of the bargain to keep around about March 3rd or 4th this uh grayhair gentleman opens at my cell door and says do you need anything I said well at this point in time I said yes I could use a couple blankets I would like some shoes I hadn't had any shoes I was wearing yellow uh P pajamas now that didn't fit you know so I started asking for stuff I figur I better ask now I may not get anything ever again no one has ever asked me if I needed anything so I started asking for stuff and he says don't worry you won't need any of that you'll be leaving you'll be going home in 15 minutes and around there were hundreds of reporters and that's really quite overwhelming I mean you know you've just been in solitary and uh I I think that's really when you thought well I probably am released but I still didn't reckon I was prison of War until I was out of Iraq and then the pilot announces you know we're in Saudi Arabian airspace and everybody starts shouting and and you know high-fiving each other and and a Brit tornado comes up and joins up and rocks his wings and and he we can see the guy out the windows and and we're waving and he's waving back at us and it was just joyful and we landed in R and I saw all these people and I thought my God you know what what's this what's this all about so I started walking down stairs I realized that this really is for us and uh my wingman was there to meet me and he was he was overjoyed obviously to see me I was overjoyed to see him it's the first time that I had actually expressed any any real emotion since uh since being beaten I've spent very little of the war worried about whether or not I was female it just didn't seem to matter but I didn't want anyone to think that I was weak or more emotionally vulnerable or anything like that when I got back and I have to say that when they sing that song um I'm proud to be an American I mean I always well up it's kind of like when they play Taps or something and and so I was I played the song over my mind several times and it even had what it like to be trying to convince anybody what the realities of War are like is very difficult not not just my situation you know if you've been shot at or in combat and seeing friends die see in the films you don't smell it you don't hear it and you don't see grown men cry and you don't see what it's like to see real people hurt and you can never put it in words when you return either now there was a second Uprising in Iraq this time in the Kurdish North Saddam had used chemical weapons to suppress previous revolts but the Kurds sensed weakness the secret police headquarters in sulimania was one of the regimes nerve centers for years Kurdish gorillas had fought for independence now they United with mutinous troops and attacked the men inside resisted desperately they knew there was much to avenge as night fell the gates were stormed a Kurdish teenager educated in Britain was there he'd heard President Bush on the radio when George Bush said that he would back up a people's Revolution Iraq then they thought that's all we need that's all we wanted to hear so they just did it in the South the uprisings had been incoherent but the Kurdish Uprising was different the Kurds had political leaders who could give the Revolt shape as the Rebellion gathered momentum these Kurdish leaders who'd been living abroad began to return they wanted to trigger a coup against against Saddam they hoped a new Iraqi leader would let the Kurds run their own Affairs traveling with them was an American an observer from the United States Senate at that point everything hung in the balance had the United States signaled its support for the uprising I am convinced it would have succeeded there were Iraqi generals who were in fact in with the opposition and who were sitting on the fence waiting to see what would happen uh and when the United States did nothing said nothing sat on its hands of course they took the course of of caution that very night Saddam Hussein's troops attacked Washington had decided it did not want to support an uprising that might lead to the breakup of Iraq the rebel forces fought back but they were hopelessly outgunned the Kurdish leaders who'd encouraged the Revolt had made a terrible miscalculation as shells began landing on the cities there was Panic not only were the casualties heavy but they feared a chemical attack at any moment [Applause] I do not want to push American forces beyond our mandate and we've done the heavy lifting our kids perform with Superior courage and they don't need uh to be thrust into a war that's been going on for years the Iraqi forces Advanced relentlessly and the cities of Kurdistan emptied before them now a million people were on the move they headed for the mountains trying to reach the safety of the Turkish and Iranian borders when George Bush said that he didn't want the American Military interfering in this the CDs got scared we heard the shelling and the bombing and our Nextel neighbor came around and he said look you've heard what people are saying about the Iraqis I think he'd be you know Wise of us just to leave SL Mania so my dad agreed and said okay we'll leave [Applause] it reminded me of refugees leaving Paris in June 1940 just ahead of the German Army everybody knew of George Bush's call for for them to rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein and they all had exactly one question why isn't Bush helping us [Applause] the American Pilots patrolling the skies above Iraq could see the Kurds being chased into the mountains but they had strict orders not to intervene we saw helicopters chasing a lot of people down a road and we saw the gunships shooting at them you could see the smoke coming out of the gunship and occasionally see flashes of the tracers even though the sun had just started coming up S bombing bom helicopters destroyed us I don't know they they saw this but they don't know why we are human we felt frustrated in the fact that we couldn't help the uprising that was going on in the ground uh for whatever uh political reasons that were above our Rank and uh the best we could do is report what we saw and uh eventually hope hope that it was taken care of the only issue that came up is should we do something about the Iraqi helicopters it had never been one of our objectives to get involved in this kind of civil Uprising between uh factions within Iraq and the Iraqi government and so um it was not clear what purpose would have been achieved by getting ourselves mixed up in the middle of that now to be an American where East I know I'm fre a week after the Iraqis attacked the Kurds the president went home to Houston to celebrate his [Music] victory but the television images of the Kurdish Exodus were making that Victory ring [Applause] Hollow the president ask James Baker to see how the situation could be [Applause] diffused we did not want to take on the responsibility uh for having to create a safe haven there uh and if if it was going to be enforced it wasn't going to be enforced by others it was going to have to be enforced by U by Uncle whiskers and we really didn't want to do it Baker's AIDS suggested a visit to the Kurds as we were flying along we all of a sudden saw a whole sea of people camped out in the mountains and this was early spring when it was quite uh cold we landed there and then we took four-wheel drive vehicles up the mountain there were 50 to 75,000 people in this little Valley every piece of ground had a little tent or a makeshift shelter on it and they'd cut down all the trees for firewood and they were drinking out of the Mountain Streams and some were barefooted Baker was able to spend only 7 minutes on the ground before security men hustled him away but he saw and heard enough to be sure this was not just a humanitarian nightmare it also had the potential to become a poit IAL disaster I called the president from the airplane and told him I'd never seen anything like this and that there a lot that a lot of people were going to die if we didn't do something and do something quickly and that he need needed to uh to really uh break break whatever China was required in order to get it done I have directed the US military to begin immediately to establish several encampments in Northern Iraq where relief supplies for these refugees will be made available in large quantities once the safe havens were established the Iraqis backed off raising questions about how much suffering could have been avoided if decisive action had been taken [Applause] earlier The Men Who planned the war feared what they called a ragged ending a quagmire like Vietnam or a stalemate like Korea they had been completely surprised by what actually happened two rebellions brutally suppressed by an Iraqi military which threw in its lot with a humiliated Saddam and kept him in power this was a ragged ending no one had seen coming 2 weeks after The Liberation the Amir of Kuwait returned to his country the Allies had fought a war for Kuwait and its oil and against the tyranny of Saddam but the promises of a greater democracy in Kuwait would come to Little on the streets the priority was Revenge hundreds of kuwaitis had died during the occupation and now Vigilantes picked up suspected collaborators on the flimsiest of evidence the PLO leader Yasser Arafat had supported Saddam Hussein and now all Palestinians were under suspicion many were tortured hundreds disappeared and 400,000 were eventually driven out of the country but for the American Military its stunning victory over the Iraqis and over its own demons seemed complete I was just thinking as I sat in the stands watching norm and the guys walk by this is incredible uh we have come a far piece from the early 1970s when we came home to a state of being ignored we had come a long way to rebuild the Armed Forces of the United States I was in Vietnam twice and uh I couldn't help but just think to myself this is the right way to come home home to your country and it it tended to exercise a lot of ghosts uh and a lot of wounds that uh all of us over in Vietnam carryed with us after it was all over my wife and I walked over to the Vietnam memorial and talked to some of the Vietnam veterans who were there and I said to them hey this one's for you too if the victory in the Gulf buried America's Vietnam syndrome it also resurrected War as a means of achieving National objectives and it demonstrated that America's generals would again have a tremendous influence on how those Wars would be [Applause] fought the War showed that col Powell is an enormously conservative man who is reluctant to use military force as an active instrument of foreign policy and diplomacy the war as it unfolded was in keeping with his concept of what Warfare should be and the so-called power Doctrine uh with an objective and getting in very quickly with overwhelming Force if you have to use that Force but reluctant to use it in the first instance but if you use it use it in a big way and then pack your bags and come home that's exactly the way the war was flought because he was the major influence on the decision-making process and he has to share the glory of what was good about the war and he must also share some of the burden of where things did not work out exactly as they should have we can grind our teeth forever as to whether we should have fought a day or two longer we could grind our teeth forever as to who was for sanctions who wasn't but we are recognize the significant achievement that Desert Shield Desert Storm was President Bush said this will not stand that did not stand Mr Speaker the president of the United States in retrospect I think it's clear that bush Rose above the limitations of character and vision for the first time and as it turned out the only time in his presidency to become a really extraordinary man I can report to the aggression is defeated the war is [Applause] over because the world would not look the other way Ambassador elaba tonight Kuwait is [Applause] free George Bush's vision of the new world order was that uh countries could uh unite in common purpose for the benefit of of all mankind but it it wasn't World War II it's hard to argue that he was Franklin [Applause] Roosevelt and this I promise you for all that Saddam has done to his own people to the kues and to the entire world Saddam and those around him are accountable [Applause] by demonizing Saddam bush in fact planted the seeds of discontent in the country in the same way that Lieutenant George Bush in 1945 would have felt dissatisfied had the real Adolf Hitler still been in power in Berlin and the Japanese warlord still been in power in Tokyo may God bless this great nation the United States of America thank you all very very much despite his enormous popularity at that moment 2 years later Bush would be decisively defeated for reelection thank you guys Saddam Hussein's survival seemed to emphasize the American recession and Bush's timid domestic agenda saddam's got his job red one bumper sticker how about you he performed after the war in ways that in many ways were entirely predictable Bush came back to Earth when the war ended and their Bush I think will remain Saddam Hussein is still in power still claiming that his survival was his victory but his invasion of Kuwait had turned to dust and his dreams of dominating the Middle East have vanished the Gulf War left the Iraqi Armed Forces broken un teams are still dismantling its nuclear and biological weapons programs and sanctions crippled the economy but Saddam is still defiant there is the aggressor Saddam Hussein still in power there is the president of the United States no longer in power there is the prime minister of Britain who did quite a lot to get things there no longer in power I wonder who won we did we did as long as we are alert and observant Saddam Hussein is not a threat to his neighbors he's a nuisance he's an annoyance but he's not a threat that that we achieved and I can also tell you that in due course Saddam Hussein will not be there uh and when that happens all this uh interesting second guessing will seem quite [Music] irrelevant it took 7 months to extinguish the oil wells which burned across the battlefield [Applause] the war changed the balance of power in the Middle East and ignited the peace process between Israel and its Arab [Music] neighbors but with time its promise as the herald of a new world Unity that would confront the moral outrages of our time has faded I think that the notion that the Gulf War was being fought for new world order was in fact intended to obscure the fact that it was being fought for very much the Old World Order cheap petroleum benign monarchies there was no new world order that came out of the Persian Gulf War in fact I think that's proven to be mostly a pipe dream since then [Music] there is more on the Gulf War at Frontline online check out our web exclusive debate on Gulf War syndrome and the pentagon's response to charges of cover up you'll also find an extensive oral history of the war agreed with the president saying look I don't want and more firsthand accounts from Airmen and soldiers ask where were you from where were you flying what was your target find out more about the weapons and Technology used for the first time and lots more at [Music] www.pbs.org and next time on front line it was dark little brief pieces of light she was scared but it was just long enough for me to think and Furious okay his nose looks this way if she got out of it alive the rapist would pay then I chose the photo of Ronald cotton and for 12 years Ronald cotton paid for what Jennifer saw the Lord knows I'm an innocent man next time on front line now your letters dear front line betting on the market was an excellent and illumin betting on the market examined America's seduction by the bull market of the 9s as a younger Baby Boom Generation member everyone tells me to invest if don't want to spend my golden years in some dezian nightmare then I'm told how dangerous it is if I do invest and we hit the bare Market wall what am I supposed to do it's annoying exasperating dear Frontline I'm a member of an investment club and I'm learning how to invest my money in individual stocks with a tried andrue technique of research number crunching and common sense if Boomers learn to put their money into well-managed companies with valuable products to sell these companies would grow and prosper along with the stockholders Investments while feeding frenzies would become a thing of the past Smith Norman oklah okay it's an important topic and you spread some caution that is much needed but you did a better job on the betting part than on the market next time tell the folks in TV Land why the market is a bit different than Las Vegas that there is supposed to be a relationship between the value of the outstanding stock and the assets that accomp front line I almost fell off the couch when the woman in your piece was talking about the investment she made off of a tip the only thing she knew was a stock symbol that's insane she might as well go to the track with her money and put it on the number two horse because it has the prettiest colors true investors are in it for the long haul and carefully scrutinize their investments before they buy Dan grieve Highland Heights Ohio tell us your thoughts about tonight's program [Music] [Music] [Applause] funding for Frontline is provided by The Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by annual financial support from viewers like you Frontline is produced for the documentary Consortium by WGBH Boston which is solely responsible for its content you can order the Gulf War on home video cassette by calling 1 1800 25594 4 this 4-Hour series is 3995 plus shipping and handling this is PBS [Applause] [Music] there is a place where a mountain recreates itself with each turn of the season