General H. Norman Schwarzkopf 1991 Interview with David Frost

[Music] hey let's face it if he dares if he dares come across that border and come down here i'm completely confident that we're gonna kick his butt [Music] general norman schwarzkopf talking with his troops [Music] and tonight talking with david frost we had asked the general to share with us the story of the war as only he can tell it the whole of our interview took place four floors below the saudi ministry of defense in the war room command center for all allied operations inevitably our conversation began with the man saddam hussein what was the psychological profile you were working to were you assuming this man is clever and cunning or crazy or crazy like a fox i mean what was your psychological profile of your adversary do you think he's mad i don't think he's mad i think that he uh someone wants to ask me what's the difference between me and saddam hussein the answer is i have a conscience and he doesn't if you look at the way he has risen to power it has been over dead bodies and murders and and i think he has no uh abs absolutely no conscience no no regard for human life and and views the taking of human life is just one more step in his progress to the to the top i think he's a megalomaniac now maybe the maniac part means that there's a certain degree of madness there but but i don't think he's mad i just think he absolutely had illusions of grandeur as the next nebuchadnezzar and he was going to be the unifier of the arab world but hit that arab world was going to be unified under his conditions with him at the top and the man who has no conscience is another way of saying you really regarded him as evil in a way oh i i think there's no question about in my mind he's he is an evil man can you remember the moment when you first realized that your future was going to be inextricably linked with that of saddam hussein's it was a it was a phone call from general colin powell wasn't it yes at the time i was i just completed a workout and i was in my workout gear and the phone rang the hotline from colin powell and he was on the phone he said well you were right they crossed the border and i said yeah gee i really you know really thought they would now at that time at that time i didn't think i was going to be inextricably involved with saddam hussein because i really and i think everybody else thought that they would go down uh you know take the romalia and then stop right there and then use it as a bargaining chip and then we were started monitoring the situation i immediately changed my clothes and and got ready to uh to uh go to work and of course then the next phone call i got from colin was well they're now we've just got reports that they're in downtown kuwait that made it an entirely different situation um so uh of course we then went on to the 24-hour business but but i think the time when i really really knew was um uh was over here in riyadh because secretary cheney and i were sent over here by the president to uh to uh king to talk to king fahd and and and i think at least i know what my expectations were my expectations were we would brief king fahd we would tell him what the situation was and the real danger to saudi arabia the president's message was very clear and that's if asked to defend saudi arabia we would we would also leave when asked to leave and we wouldn't establish any permanent bases and i think that based upon uh the decision-making processes as we've seen them over here before we i was quite sure in my own mind and now that we've been told thank you very much i now need to confer with the with my advisors and the king would tell us and then he would you know subs want to give us an answer instead after a discussion the king said fine we want you to come and that at that moment then i knew we were we were we were we were more than involved we were committed at that time we were committed and at that point really when we drew the line in the sand when the president drew the line of the sand at the beginning that first line was in defense of uh in defense of saudi arabia it developed into liberating kuwait after that and so do you think in fact um that saddam hussein would have attacked saudi arabia without that strong response and i suppose that was the one of his first mistakes because if he had moved straight in and taken daran he would have presented us with a really serious problem yeah very true i don't think there's any question at all that he would have eventually attacked saudi arabia i don't know whether he would have done it exactly at that moment or a week later but subsequently you know just the amount of ammunition for instance that we have found just north of the kuwaiti border uh the amount of supplies that were pre-positioned there is far in excess of anything anyone ever would have needed for either the the to attack kuwait or to defend kuwait so obviously i think we're all pretty well convinced that he had greater aims than just taking kuwait but if you'd been uh running his military operation which thank god you weren't um would you have said go straight in there before the americans or anyone else can respond go straight from kuwait straight in and take down yeah i i the no question about it that militarily that would have been the course of action you see i think that probably the major miscalculation on the part of saddam and his military is they never thought that the free world would care if kuwait was taken i think they thought the timetable was of their choosing and therefore they could go in and take kuwait and then subsequently take the oil fields of saudi arabia without anyone ever caring and of course that was probably the reason why they thought that they had all the time in the world when they when they really didn't actually we touched on one other mistake already too haven't we in the sense that if he had just gone in and taken the oil field and babayan and warbur or one of them it might have been much more difficult to get the world together to stop him sure but let's just stop and think he would have taken you know just a few kilometers inside the border um i think that probably there were many people in the gulf at that time that would have agreed that uh that that was a proper thing to do because kuwait was really almost by itself as far as opec was concerned and regarding the price of oil but so if he had done that i think that where you'd see him today is with his entire armed forces intact sitting there in control of the romania oil field sitting there in control of boubian but more importantly having taking that slight aggressive step he would really be a major uh threatening power for the entire rest of the gulf to have to contend with so i i guess my from a from a political military standpoint he really would have been able to dominate the gulf for many many years to come by just stopping after taking the memorial oil fields and so he really made an absolutely a strategic miscalculation of major order when did you give your first briefing to the president you said in a quote recently that uh the first advice you gave him was dreadful because you you you said it would take much longer and take many more people and so when when was that when was that briefing uh let me see um the the invasion was on thursday i guess and that was on um i i gave an initial briefing in the white house on thursday morning i gave another briefing to camp david on the on the following saturday now uh my briefing to the president was in fact how we would defend saudi arabia it was our operations plan that we had worked on for for over a year and a half the entire briefing was on the defense of saudi arabia but the very last slide in that briefing was oh by the way you know in the event that we changed our objectives from one of defending saudi arabia to one of taking him on offensively here is his offensive capability and therefore it's going to require many many many more troops than we currently plan to deploy if if it's approved and furthermore it will take a lot longer than what i'm showing you in terms of the timelines for the defense i had briefed him on the forces and the timelines for the defense and my only point was to illustrate that offensive was a lot different than defense however i will admit that that i i'd said that at that time you know when and that was you know that it would require many more forces and a lot more time and that was based purely upon a very very simplistic uh military analysis of all the factors involved when you came to work out the the great hail mary stroke left hook or whatever plan uh was that your second or your third strategy because there were reports at the beginning of the october you had a different a different plan is that true no that's not true i i'm glad you asked that question let me lay this one to rest forever the forces that we had sent over here were forces that were purely designed for the defense of saudi arabia it was the capability that was required to defend it was far less than those forces that we needed to in fact eject them from kuwait but at the same time by that time it had been announced that one of the one of the by one of the united nations resolutions that the ultimate resolution was you know to eject iraqi forces from kuwait uh or i think it was to cause the withdrawal so at that time the the strategy was we would defend saudi arabia and put into effect the sanctions and the combination of the sanctions and the defense of saudi arabia and the world reaction would cause saddam to withdraw but at the same time okay i was then asked how would you how would you eject the iraqis from kuwait if you had to do it and i immediately went back and said i don't have the necessary forces in place to do that and they said yeah but if you had to do it right now with the forces you have what would you do so we put together a plan which based upon the forces that were available at that time uh would be the plan that we would have to use but when that plan was briefed that plan was briefed immediately followed by a statement which said that is not what the commander-in-chief of central command is recommending it is a weak plan and it is not the plan we choose to execute and hear all the things that are wrong with it a b c d e f g h i and j and a lot more and if in fact we are serious about in fact ejecting them from uh kuwait what we need is more forces to be able to execute a proper campaign so that's the context in which it was given okay it was never a recommendation it was you know we were asked how would you do it if you had to do it right now and this was the only thing we had available but it was certainly not the recommendation not the recommendation that very interesting for history the and when you came up with the recommendation um i mean when did you actually conceive hail mary and was your inspiration as people say hannibal at can i or montgomery versus rommel or manstein of germany or who i wish i could say it was all of that and a lot more but it wasn't well was once we knew the forces once the announcement had been made in washington of the forces that were going to come over here um really it's a very simple solution you you make your you make your plan based upon what we call mept mission enemy terrain troops available and time and so you made an analysis of all those and the big factor was really the terrain the troops available in the enemy when you looked at the way they were deploying their forces in kuwait they had an exposed link they had it very simple they had an open flank over there the terrain on that flank looked like it was traffickable but we didn't know we really didn't know whether it was traffickable or not and secondly i never ever believed well i couldn't conceive of a commander of any tor type leaving that flank exposed so so what what we really did was you know uh is i looked at the new forces that were available and i said all right if he stays in this configuration that he's in right now and if that terrain over on on the left flank his right flank is in fact trafficable we have a wonderful opportunity to cut off and destroy his forces and that was sort of the generation of of now we had already done a lot of deception planning that was devised to make him think we were coming from the sea and his troop disposition was that way but uh but as you know once we announced our reinforcement he announced his reinforcement and every day more forces were coming in and i've got to tell you every morning when i would get out of bed the first thing i would do is go look at the map to see where his forces were and whether or not he was in fact extending his forces further out and more importantly building these see he started as soon as he started reinforcing he also started building very very heavy obstacles and barriers in front of his forces which could have given us a lot of problem but the more you watched his deployment of forces the more he was stuffing forces into into a bag for all intents and purposes called kuwait and he was not defending that flank so by i think the meeting that i had with my i had a brief meeting with the component commanders in here sometime around the 10th of november where i said okay this is what i think we're going to do and i said and then i called another meal that was two days after the president announced to 200 000 yeah yeah because i you know the minute i knew i had the forces then it was different and i drew the big arrows on the map and said i said uh this is this is the plan and i said now you gotta understand this is preliminary and and uh you know one of the mistakes planners have made in the past that they've forgotten this fact are called the enemy and i said you know if the enemy changes then we may have to change his plan but right now this is the way i see it happening he never changed so the tentative approval of the president october the third of the speech november 8th you were able to talk to people november 10 and then november 29 the un security council set the deadline of january the 15th which made it even more serious yeah we'll see now the factor of time is in there now the clock is ticking under this met t the clock is ticking on you and one of the questions you know you have in your mind is how quickly are we going to be ready you know how quickly can we get these forces from germany over here how quickly can we get them acclimated to fighting in the desert how quickly can i get them in place but but as i say my concern at that time was yeah get the forces over here but more than anything else is he going to start building out on that right flank and i'll tell you you see the day we executed the day we executed the air campaign i said we got you because see then then it would it was impossible after that for them to reinforce that flank then they they at that time we'd still kept all of our forces over at east they had reacted beautifully to all of our forces being east we had nothing in the west he had not reacted to it in the west and now i knew that number one i could move the forces without him being able to see them and more importantly even if he saw him he couldn't do anything about it because we were going to control the air and had he tried to go out there and do that we could have gone ahead so that's when i knew we got you so with the first day of the of the air war you had your gotcha with the second day of the air war you had one of your worst moments i would have thought with the scat attack on israel and the fear that israel might join in there was a concern i wouldn't say it was one of the worst moments uh you know we we um i i think we all expected the scud attack on israel uh then it became a question of how soon can we get it under control and and and and would israel be patient enough to allow us to get it under control before they decided to to enter into the fray because there was no question about the fact that had israel entered the fray at that moment it would have put severe pressures on the entire coalition could you held it together do you think no i don't think we could have held it all together i think parts of it would have stayed together but i don't think i it we could not have held it all together and it certainly would have made uh our task much much more difficult in the long run is there anything that israel with its military capacity could have done that we couldn't do absolutely not i think they may have thought there was but i would also say that they did not know everything that we were doing uh nobody knew everything that we were doing except very few people in washington and uh even even it was even a limited group of people here in this headquarters that knew everything that we were doing so and and we were very successful i might add i uh we not only succeeded in in uh in stopping the number of launchings on on israel but more importantly what we did is we changed the location from which those launches were taking place so the launches became highly inaccurate uh even much more inaccurate than when they were originally and by forcing them to launch from from sites that were not pre-surveyed and this sort of thing made a big difference on the accuracy and that's why the last few scuds that were launched in israel were you know were in the wrong places and out in the water or out of the middle of nowhere when they landed did they they had more they had more scud launchers than we thought yes yeah they certainly did i they had what 200 rather than 35. well we don't know i don't think we know i one of the figures i read recently is they had 15 battalions of 15 launchers each and that adds up i mean it multiplies out to be 225 and that was a lot more than we thought because the maximum estimate that we had had prior to the beginning was 48 and in fact um uh at one point uh we right before we launched the hostilities that we had had pretty good intelligence that they had a maximum of only 18. so uh so by the time we had destroyed 16 of them i was feeling pretty confident matter of fact i made the statement well i you know i was i was limiting my numbers but i was pretty confident that that we were really doing a job on them and i think that night deliberately lost a whole salvo to prove me to prove me wrong how many they got today i wish i knew i have no idea but but i do know that this the scud missile is militarily irrelevant unless they've been able to put chemical or biological yeah that would be an entirely different story but even even chemicals they would have had to do far more than just have a chemical warhead they would have to have a chemical warhead with an air burst capability and they would have had enough accuracy so you see they could they could fire a salvo of these things in and have them all burst at in some sort of a pattern to lay down a large cloud of chemical weapons that's why we were never really terribly concerned about the chemical capability of the scud because even if they had a chemical warhead and there was a lot of questions whether they did or not we knew that they didn't have an airburst capability which meant the missile would have come in impacted the ground exploded there and that would give them a very limited area that those chemicals would affected january the 21st iraqi television broadcast those interviews with the captured allied pilots obviously most of whom had been brutalized can you remember where you saw those pictures and how you reacted sitting right here looking at that television set up here and how did you react well i was angry but uh but i also knew at that time that they were paying a terrible price you know it's it wasn't was not it was it was a combination of of anger at them for doing that because it was such a blatant violation the geneva convention and at the same time compassion for the for not only the pilots but their families because you just didn't know what the pilots were going to have to go through and it was great concern for them too it was so it was a combination of you know just and i didn't like the idea that i was seeing it on cnn i will have to state that openly i did resent the you know cnn aiding and abetting an enemy who was violating the geneva convention by putting you know and that that's clear violations you can mention yet cnn was broadcasting into the world that bothers me but of course i'm not in the news business and and there's first amendment rights and the american public's right to know i just think that you know in the future when when people choose to justify their actions based upon the american public's right to know they better check with the american public first because the american public's made very clear to me and all of literally hundreds of thousands of letters i've gotten how they felt about the term quote the american people's right to know as it was being used by the people who were doing that sort of thing i think the answer is that the right to know is probably sacred but there are certain occasions when it has to be delayed i i would certainly agree with that particularly when the lives of other americans uh hang in the balance now after the visit of uh dick cheney and colin powell uh the date was fixed about february the 21st and then you adjusted it to uh feb 24th was there any what why one day rather than the other no that's not exactly correct what what uh what uh was decided at that time wasn't decided what you know we we discussed it and uh it was decided that they they would go back and and pass on the recommendation the president there'd be a window in there there was a window because there were a lot of last minute things that were still going on at the time we briefed them we were still executing the hail mary i mean the quarterback was standing behind the ball but we were still sending the wide receivers out to the left out there so what i asked for was i said you know give me a little window in there give me a little slack and and and we'll we'll shoot for for this this sort of window and and that was the recommendation that they made and and and and again the president uh was magnificent because he not only agreed to the window but also the the you know the word came back whatever whatever day you choose whatever timing you choose even if it's a little bit later is fine so there was no uh there wasn't any attempt to second guess or or anything like that and when you mentioned that the old hail mary was going on and so on when did that exactly start when did you start moving the people 150 miles well probably about uh zero 300 hours on the morning of the 17th of january as early as that and straight away absolutely because you see we knew that we were going to establish air superiority immediately so so on the 17th of january it started i mean we need because we needed all of that time i mean this was you know the tonnage of things that were moved and the amount of transportation was required not only just to move the logistics but to get the troops over there was huge so so the day we launched the uh offensive campaign that was also the day we started moving west and then the day we launched the air campaign i'm sorry and then as we move on and the and you're getting ready and uh and the date is fixed for february february the 24th um the it seemed to me one of the most crucial moments of the war was that moment when on the thursday night on the thursday night before the sunday the world was saying that oh the president's going to have to accept the coalition are going to have to accept this unsatisfactory soviet peace proposal you know because the coalition will fall apart and the cold war will start and all of that and that seemed to me to be a moment of real character that the the next morning as the new york times said the president reversed the conventional wisdom following a meeting with colin powell the night before that was a crucial moment wasn't it were you worried about those negotiations with the russians going off at half no i don't i don't think the term worried is is the right term you know has infuriated with them oh no no not that at all no you know you you we're as military commanders you're always on on you have mixed emotions your first choice is not to go to war because you know war kills people so so uh obviously my first choice all along would be hey if we can get to if we could solve this situation bring peace to the middle east and not kill a single soldier that's the best way to resolve this whole thing um if on the other hand we have to go to war then then we don't want our hands tied behind our back we're going to do it 100 all the way and do whatever is necessary to expect maximum casualties on the enemy and minimum on our own forces and that's sort of the two extremes that you're at you don't like anything that's in between now you may be forced eventually to live with something that's in between but what you would prefer is one of those two extremes so when when this business was going on about the soviet proposal and that sort of thing it looked like it was going to fall someplace in the middle and although half of you is saying well gee that's great because that doesn't mean a single service member is going to get killed the other half of you said yeah but is that going to accomplish the objectives that we went through all of this uh deployment over here to to accomplish in the first place and i i've got to tell you that that i was honestly you know you torn between those two extremes and when you say about inflicting uh maximum damage and so on given what you feel about the desirability of a war never taking place being anti-war as you were saying and so on uh and you're fierce and uh in defending the lives of your own soldiers and so on um what attitude does a military man with a conscience like you've got what what attitude do you take to the uh fifty or 100 000 deaths on the other side i mean how does one feel about those when it's all over i feel two ways number one i regret the death of anyone number two we only had 150 people killed and the reason why we only had 150 people killed is because we so fiercely went after them that we struck terror in their hearts and that resulted in and i mean 50 000 or 100 000 or 150 or whatever of them to be killed um i i guess i could put it another way if this battle had gone on for six months it would have been a whole lot more than 50 or 150 so so uh but you don't you don't pursue a battle worried about the casualties you inflict upon the enemy the war was not hard choosing the war was their choosing they had ample opportunity to avoid the war sherman said what was it the sherman said you know war is the remedy that our enemy has chosen therefore let them have as much of it as they want i think that was his words i think to be a military commander you have to have that attitude and that is look war is not of my choosing but when it comes my objective is to keep as many of my people alive as i can and you do that by conflicting the maximum casualties on your enemy i'm not proud of killing this you know being responsible for the death of a single person i never will be but but perhaps by the loss of those lives we have saved literally hundreds of thousands more in this entire region for many many years to come and i like to think of it in those terms did you expect on february the 24th that you'd have it all over in 100 hours no no my estimate uh i i knew it i knew it could be over in that amount of time but but um but i really thought it would take about three weeks i thought that we would probably uh gain great initial surprise uh had they chosen to stand and fight i'm not too sure that it wouldn't have taken longer uh i mean i'm quite sure it would have taken longer but it but my initial estimate was about two to three weeks a really uh city guys question this is a real city guys question but it's amazing triumph you started as you said right back on january the 17th and you managed to do all that with total surprise the whole left hook the whole hail mary thing in that whole area we were taking people through and so on wasn't there a single iraqi living there with a telephone who picked up and rang baghdad 4278 and said guess i just saw some americans walking by yeah but but somebody mentioned that to me the other day and said you know uh gee we had better ones wandering through the area but the secretary dressed as bedouins no no but they i mean you know better would say but did we disguise ourselves i mean no not not not in this particular area but when you're on the ground it is very difficult to understand the magnitude of what you are seeing i mean you can be driving your sheep through and all of a sudden you can say gosh gee the whole bunch of trucks here i mean if you're not trained you don't know the difference between a tanker and a tanker for that matter a fuel tanker so i mean so as an innocent beta when driving your your sheep through you probably say gee there's a whole lot of vehicles around here but you don't you don't understand the magnitude of what you're looking at it's only when you get up in the air way up in the air and you look down and you say all these smokes not only there are a whole bunch of tanks there but there's a whole bunch of tanks over here there's a whole bunch of tanks over there and you add it all up and then all of a sudden the magnitude of the force and you see i think that was i i the iraqis knew we were out there because we had had border skirmishes and and this sort of thing and certainly the week before we had gone ahead and prepared the area for where we're going to attack so they knew we were out there but they didn't know we were out there with two full cores i mean the maximum of our combat power was out to the west not directly in front of them but two full cores the total of eight divisions were out there how are you consulted about the ceasefire i mean how did it happen well you know general powell and i talk to each other several times a day every day on and where i was keeping him very closely advised on what was going on uh here he was keeping me very closely advised as to what was going on in washington uh and of course more importantly he was keeping the secretary of defense and the president very closely advised on a daily basis and so once as after the third day as i say we knew we had them i mean there was we had closed the back door uh the bridges across the tigers and euphrates were out uh we had cut highway eight that ran up to tigers and euphrates valley on this side of the river there was no way out for them i mean there was they could go through basra there were a few bridges going across the old file there was a to the alpha but there was nothing else and and and it was literally about to become the battle of canai a battle of annihilation um so we were we were driving into their flank now with two cores completely intact and they were in complete route and i reported that situation to general powell and and and uh and he and i discussed have we accomplished our military objectives the campaign objectives and the answer was yes you know there was no question about the fact that the campaign objectives that we established for ourselves were accomplished the enemy was was being kicked out of kuwait was going to be gone from kuwait uh we had destroyed the republican guard as a militarily effective force had you totally destroyed it i mean in the sense egypt and syria wanted to carry on and destroyed a bit more well yeah i mean it's a question of what how do you define the word destroy the republican guard was a military in a militarily ineffective force and we'd afflicted great damage upon them and and they had been routed now i obviously you know if you we didn't destroy them to the very last tank and again this is this is a point that i think may be lost on a lot of people that was a very courageous decision on the part of the president to also stop the offensive you know we didn't declare a ceasefire what we did is we suspended offensive operations uh frankly my recommendation had been you know continue to march i mean we had them on in a route and we could have continued to you know re great destruction upon them we could have completely closed the door and made it in fact a battle of annihilation and the president uh you know made the decision that you know that we should stop at a given time at a given place that did leave some escape routes open for them to get back out and and i think it was a very humane decision a very courageous decision on this part also because it's you know it's one of those ones that historians are going to second guess you know forever why you know why didn't we go for one more day versus why do we stop when we did when we had them completely routed we're already getting the questions well the re they really weren't there in as much force as they said they were because you've only captured x number uh you've only got y number of of estimated dead and therefore you that doesn't compute well there were obviously a lot of people that escaped who wouldn't have escaped if the decision hadn't been made you know to stop us right we were at that time but uh again i think that was a very courageous decision on the part of president a very courageous decision and a very real debate really that between on the one hand completely dispensing with the republican guard so it could never be used again as you were recommending another 24 hours versus the humanitarian decision that is one of the as you say that is one of the great decisions of history yeah which way to do that i i don't think you should put it in the context republican guard because they remember were the ones who were mostly to the rear and a lot of them had bugged out already i mean they had long since uh i think once they discovered that their flank up route 8 was blocked and they weren't going i think some of them had already long since escaped matter of fact they were north of the river and we probably could have had we gone on for another 24 hours we could have inflicted terrible damage on them with air attacks and that sort of thing on the far side of the river but nowhere near the devastation we were afflicting and the troops on this side of the river because of course the tank columns were just ripping through them at that time uh but the forces that we really had trapped in that pocket were that were all the forces that were all the way down into kuwait and we're still trying to desperately retreat out of this very very small small route of escape that was left open to them and so i think we probably would have inflicted a lot more damage probably on the on the poor the poor fellows that had been all the way down in the front lines and had managed to get all the way back there and still there then then it would have been actually republican guard i think they had pretty well bugged out by that time so will the phrase that we read so often the elite republican guard go down in history as one of the most inaccurate cliches of all time elite is a relative word okay uh compared to the to the forces that we had a raid against them they definitely were not elite when you went to the talks about the ceasefire and so on and you made those arrangements um looking back now what angers you most about their infractions or breaches is it is it to do with the use of helicopters to suppress the civilian population is it the reports of napalm uh what what breaches of what they promised you that day and you most now let me make very clear that this is norm schwarzkopf's personal opinion okay and certainly not a position of the government or anything like that i think they suckered me i i think that when they asked me to use helicopters at that time you see nothing was flying over iraq and we had said you will not fly over iran and and they looked me straight in the eye and said well you know you know you've destroyed all of our bridges you know you've destroyed all of our roads and therefore it's hard to get around the country we would like to fly our helicopters and the purpose of flying those helicopters will be for transportation of of government officials it seemed like given my marching orders which was to make sure that we were establishing measures that would prevent the furtherance of of of conflict you know that would avoid a furtherance of unnecessary bloodshed uh and and to and to dictate rather strong terms to them of what they would have to do it i was really interested in two things first in getting the pows back as fast as we possibly could and then secondly setting up certain demarcation lines and that sort of thing so so that the conflict would not continue inadvertently by accident and those are really the two primary things so when they said to me uh you know we would like to fly helicopters i said not over our forces oh oh no definitely not over your forces just over iraq because for the transportation government officials that seemed like a reasonable request and and within my charter i felt that that was something that it was perfectly all right to grant i think i was suckered because i think they intended right then when they asked that question to use those helicopters against the insurrections that was going were going on i think absolutely was their intention again personal opinion but i just as i say they they uh they uh suckered me so even even in defeat you can't trust saddam hussein there'll be no real ceasefire will there until he goes really a genuine one will there uh um yeah there will be a ceasefire they wouldn't dare attack us or anyone else right now first of all there's such chaos in their own country that they've got to get the home fund straightened out so so the ceasefire is in effect as far as them attacking us and taking any overt action against us however we're not going to let down our guard we're going to continue to do exactly what we told them we were going to do and if they violate uh those rules uh and in any way threaten us even in the slightest uh they're gonna pay for it uh we're not gonna tolerate any situation that would endanger our forces but on the other hand so we wouldn't rule out i mean if he's listening to this i mean we wouldn't rule out a bombing raid if we had to protect our boys we wouldn't rule out a bit more territory if we had to protect remember we don't have a ceasefire we have a unilateral secession of offensive actions on the part of the coalition and we agreed at sofwan that if they abided by the conditions that we set down that we would continue with that unilateral cessation of offensive operations the ceasefire has not been declared they've declared a ceasefire of course i would too if i had been routed and was on the run and say hey we've and they kept they kept using the tournament safwan ceasefire and i kept saying this is not a ceasefire what it is we have chosen to suspend offensive operations uh but but i think a more important thing is when you go back and look at saddam hussein's record he's lied at every turn he's never stopped lying and so therefore uh we're not about to uh you know this and they've told us on several other occasions since then oh you have to trust us and you're almost tempted to come back and say why you know why should we trust you at all given the long established record of lies that you have behind you so so we're not going to trust them we're going to continue to keep our guard up until such time as as there is in fact a ceasefire that's been declared and we are very very sure that no one absolutely no one out there on the battlefield is is going to take offensive action against us and i mean anyone who does is going to pay a price for it there there'll be a cease-fire but there won't be peace i guess until saddam hussein goes probably would be a more accurate quote i i think that uh that piece i you know i would not speak for all the leadership of the gulf nations but i think that they're going to be much more comfortable when saddam is gone because saddam is is iraq as far as the actions of the iraqi government they are the actions and orders of one man saddam and uh and he is the one that has inflicted the iran iraq war on the gulf he is the one that has inflicted this this catastrophic uh occurrence in kuwait he is the one that has afflicted the ecological disaster to e-coli not just one but two you know the oil spill the oils deliberate oils release into the gulf number one which has done just devastating things to the to the gulf fisheries and that sort of thing an unforgivable act of ecological terrorism and then if you go to kuwait and see what they've done to the air that the world was going to breathe for many years to come by this senseless destruction of the oil wells and the setting the oil walls on fire just spewing black smoke into the air not not only for kuwait but for the whole world it's going to cause agricultural disasters in many areas it's certainly going to contaminate the air of the world for i i would guess years to come so so all of that is saddam hussein they were his orders caused that to happen and when you list all those things that sarah hussain was responsible for has been responsible for i know there's all sorts of academic discussion that can go on between history professors for for decades about nuremberg trials and war crimes trials and so on but if after that list that we've just been talking about saddam hussein got off scot-free it wouldn't be right would it again it's my personal opinion as you know it's differentiated from the official position he's not going to get off uh but but as i say philosophically the man is a war criminal by any any definition you choose to apply uh practically practically it is difficult to see a nuremberg trial type scenario unfolding given the the limited military objectives given the fact that we didn't take over the entire country of iraq it was never our intention to do that uh given the the the uh the point at which this campaign terminated practically it is difficult to see a war i mean i cannot envision a government of iraq handing over a saddam to the to the world court to do so i i may be proven wrong but so i guess philosophically i certainly agree with you but practically i practically what normally happens to people like saddam hussein is at some point they are taken care of by their own folks good and evil the greatest moral challenge since world war ii and so on as a result of all those phrases did you feel you're a religious man aren't you yes and did you feel that god was on your side in this war he had to be um i don't i don't the results show that he had to be i mean i've got to tell you i uh probably the two of the greatest days of my life was day one of the bombing campaign when when the planes came home and we realized how how yeah yes we were successful and that was very important but far more important to me once we had achieved that success was the fact that we did it with so little loss of human life and then i i'll never forget as long as i live uh gary luck the commander of the 18th airborne corps which was the furthest west core that absolutely charged out across and we were in the euphrates valley and gary called me on the phone and we were talking and he said well i want to report to you and i said what's your report he said well we've captured 3 200 uh prisoners so far and they're just streaming in and we've accomplished all of our objectives and we're in the euphrates valley with 101st and i said okay fine i was waiting for the other chew to fall and he said now let me tell you about our cavities and i said okay said we have one wounded inaction i mean now can you imagine one wounded in action at that time now they we had more after that but i mean you know what what uh i i you know obviously i've known i you know i care a lot about my troops i really do our troops and and i'm no different than the other commander out there but i do care you know intensely about the soldiers and sailors and airmen and i feel a tremendous responsibility for their lives and you so you can imagine how that made me feel that here we were we were not only winning this war but we were routing the enemy absolutely rounding the enemy and yet our casualties were you know practically non-existent and you know that that made you kind of feel that god was on your side had to be on your side for that to happen you had the bible every i keep reading everywhere beside your bed yeah do you have did you have the favorite text there is a prayer attributed to to saint francis you know that starts off dear lord make us instruments of your peace and that's probably my you know the one i read the most often absolutely what's the greatest lesson you've learned out of all this i i think there's so many lessons but i i think that the there's one really fundamental military truth and that's that's you can you can add up the correlation of forces you can look at the number of tanks you can look at the number of airplanes you can look at all of these factors of military might and put them together but unless unless the soldier on the ground or the airman in the air has the will to win has the strength of character uh to go into battle believes that his cause is just and has the support of his country unless you have that all the rest of that stuff is irrelevant because by it's just like it's just like hannibal hannibal never should have gone across the alps if he looked at the correlation of forces and the number of chariots okay alexander the great never should have left macedonia certainly at the battle of arabella he never should have taken on xerxes ever i mean if he looked at all the chariots and everything else that xerxes had but the difference was the the the really when you get right down to it it was the the fighting spirit of the individual going into combat and you see i i'm convinced that because of the support of the world that our soldiers sailors airmen and marines from the entire coalition knew that they had behind them that gave them a great great uh advantage that the iraqi forces didn't have and even with greater technology and so on the will to win the will of the individual soldier remains preeminent barry mccaffrey i think said if they'd had all our weapons and we'd had theirs we'd still have one is that true absolutely absolutely because you see they chose not to stay and fight that's why when when the the armchair strategists are now all say well obviously there couldn't be as many people there because the war was over so quickly they could have ten times more people but the people have to decide to stay and fight if they you know a football game can be over very quickly if the other team decides not to play and that's what you had in this case i mean when when the when the kickoff came okay our our team was there to play our team came to play ball and they were not willing to to fight and when you look at your philosophy of life and so on some people might and your feeling about being anti-war and so on and being you quoted i think it was robert e lee about the fact that you have to kill those you love the most that you're in a kill and be killed sort of profession and yet you hate war and so on you hate death and you hate the loss of life uh do you sometimes think it's a paradox that you're doing what you're doing no i'm an idealist think of myself as an idealist and there are some things worth fighting for um there's a great poem not a great poem um there was a play called franklin in paris and franklin paris was about benjamin franklin and and it was on during the vietnam war years and it's my probably one of my very favorite quotes and and just to extract from it you know benjamin franklin's talking about a fly that was in a bottle of madeira wine and and came back to life 200 years later when when it was poured out of the madeira wine and he he goes on to talk about how wonderful it'd be to be pickled in a cask of madeira wine for 200 years and then come back and what he says in that in that that soliloquy that's delivered at the very end of this play is you know 200 years i wonder i wonder how i should find the men uh those men to whom the word american is not new would they love liberty having been given an outright from the crib for nothing and would they understand that if you are not free you are lost without face and and it goes on to say and will they be willing to strive uh to preserve these ideals as we strove to plant them that all men are created equal and that each is endowed with certain inalienable rights and it finishes off and says and would they die for them for that is the question one must ultimately ask oneself would i die for it and the answer must be yes sir i would that sums it up there are certain things out there none of us want to die uh but but there are certain things out there worth fighting for and i think family i would die for my family tomorrow to protect my family and i think most people would and i think liberty freedom uh you know there are some things out there that you you have to be willing to die for in conclusion general let's just revert back to something that we've been able to rejoice about two or three times in the course of this conversation which was that our casualties were much lower than we were led to fear in advance but as you said in your that magnificent press briefing you gave the statistics were miraculous but they weren't miraculous for those who were killed in action now and i agree for every one of those families and i still agree we're still losing people out there and you know that every human life is special and then and so i do agree for those families and i always will well the defense department have supplied us with a list of those people we lost killed in action and may i suggest that's the way we end the sound i think that'd be a great [Music] ending [Music] oh [Music] um [Music] um [Music] oh [Music] oh [Music] uh [Music] is [Music] um [Music] a thanks for watching if you'd like to help us produce more compelling historical content like this please like comment below and share this video with fellow history buffs and of course be sure to subscribe to help keep history happening

Channel: LionHeart FilmWorks

Views: 10,551

Rating: 4.9242425 out of 5

Keywords: desert storm, gulf war, operation desert storm, desert storm footage, norman schwarzkopf, desert storm documentary, desert storm air war, desert storm ground war, desert storm tank battle, desert storm begins, gulf war news coverage, gulf war victory parade, persian gulf war cnn, norman schwarzkopf luckiest man in iraq, norman schwarzkopf leadership, norman schwarzkopf interview, norman schwarzkopf saddam, david frost, 1991 interview, first gulf war, kuwait, 4 star general

Id: 7515NbF2imI

Length: 56min 50sec (3410 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 21 2021