Aziz: They bombed everything.

Q: Do you remember President Hussein during this period? He must have been living a very dangerous life....

Aziz: Well... this is history and Hussein's family is going to tell the Americans how the President lived. For they have defected, they are American spies and they will tell everything, so I am not going to reveal any secret.

The President lived very quietly, very normally during that period. As for me, I did not work in the same building of the Foreign Ministry. I chose another building, and used to go early in the morning to my office, then return to where I was living with my family, have lunch, rest, go back to the new headquarters, do my job and by the end of the night go back to my family, have dinner, sometimes a drink in that cold weather, smoke my cigar.

Q: And the President?

Aziz: And the President was doing the same with the exception of having a drink, he doesn't drink, he's a Muslim. But he didn't spend his time underground. He was most of the time in Baghdad. When he left Baghdad he went to the front to see the military situation. He was in good mood, very quiet thinking very serenely about the situation, having regular meetings with the Revolution Command Council, and with the military leadership.

We had several several meetings at that period, just in the city of Baghdad, not in bunkers, not in tunnels. In the city of Baghdad.

Q: What was the calculation in firing the Scud missiles at Israel?

Aziz: Well, Israel was part and parcel of the military aggression against Iraq. They did not participate directly, openly, but they provided all support to the aggression against Iraq so.

Q: Did you hope to provoke them into retaliating to split off the Arab zone?

Aziz: No, we didn't think that they will do anything in the sense of ground attack because if they have to fight on the ground, they have to cross Jordan. That makes it difficult for them, that's another complication.

And having a ground confrontation with Iraq--the Americans avoided that. Had Israel entered a ground confrontation with the Iraqi troops, the results of the conflict would have been different.

Q: So why do it then...a gesture of defiance?

Aziz: Well, when you are attacked by an enemy, you attack your enemies, that's natural eh? Israel acted as an enemy to Iraq at that time. It participated fully, first of all in the preparation of the war in urging George Bush and the United Kingdom to destroy Iraq by all means and we know and time will prove that er, Israel provided many many logistics, you see to the preparation of the war, before the war and during the war, so why don't you hit them if you can? We had the capability, we did it and it was not a surprise. If you go back to my press conference in Geneva, I was asked this question, 'are you going to attack Israel if you are attacked by the Americans?' My answer was "Absolutely--yes."

Q: And when was the decision taken to fire the Scuds?

Aziz: It was taken by the leadership that when they started attacking us, we will attack Saudi Arabia and we will attack Israel and of course the American troops, so we didn't need a meeting to say, 'go ahead', it was left to the military leadership to act upon the instructions which were made before the war.

Q: Why did the planes go [to] Iran? Had you fixed a deal with them--to take the planes?

Aziz: No, there are two kinds of planes. The transportation planes were sent to Iran before the war, and that was a deal, we asked them to send the transport planes, the civilian and the military transport planes to Iran and they said OK, we will keep them for you.

The.. military planes were sent without their knowledge, we didn't have enough time. The President made the instructions that whoever can cross to Iran to keep his plane safe do it and tell the Iranians when you are in the Iranian air space.

The reason was that during the war they started attacking our airplanes but they couldn't make a lot of damage because of the shelters we had but during the war, they got information from a Yugoslav firm, about what kind of a shelter it was and they changed their munition which they were using and they started attacking the planes, shelters and destroying them. So we thought that we could save planes by sending them to Iran.

Q: Why were the oil wells in Kuwait ignited?

Aziz: Well the attacks on oil industry were started by the Americans. The Americans attacked our oil industry from the north to the south. They attacked oil fields, stores, refineries. So when you are at war, when your enemy is using anything in his power to destroy your capabilities, you just retaliate.

Q: Why didn't you use your chemical weapons?

Aziz: Well, we didn't think it wise to use them.

Q: Can you tell me in more detail....?

Aziz: That's all I can say. It was not wise to use such kind of weapons in such kind of war, with such an enemy.

Q: Because they had nuclear weapons?

Aziz: You can....... make your own conclusions...

Q: The Americans ended the war. They had taken back Kuwait, they captured sixty to eighty thousand of your troops. Were you surprised they called a ceasefire?

Aziz: No, I think that was the end because if they decided to go ahead on the ground assault against Iraq, then the results will be quite different from what really happened. They tried to avoid man to man conflict..

Q: Were you expecting them to go to Baghdad?

Aziz: We would have laughed if they had decided to come to Baghdad because the results would have become quite different.

Q: That's why they didn't do it?...

Aziz: Yeah...

Q: You're a professional diplomat, admired even by many of the people you have mentioned today, who've dealt with you. As a professional diplomat, analyze for me, where did the Americans go wrong in the end?

Aziz: Well they were wrong from the beginning to the end, and they are still wrong...

Q: It was a huge defeat, how come you're still here, how come the President is still intact?

Aziz: Go back to my meeting with Baker, he said another leadership is going to decide Iraq, I told him you are wrong, in our region, when a leadership fights against the Americans, it politically survives. It's not a wrong-doing you see, in the eyes of the Iraqi people, to have a conflict with Israel, or the United States, because of history of this region. You can remember what happened to Nasser when he was defeated in 1967, he resigned then, then the the people returned him to power.

That's why we stayed because we are part of our nation, we have deep rules in this land. Nobody brought us to power so that he could move us from power, we came to power through revolution, we stayed in power because we are on good terms with our people, and that's it. And all the damages of the war, the very bitter and painful repercussions of sanctions -- it's not only the regime that survived, it is the State that has survived.

Q: And the uprisings were you surprised the Americans didn't intervene to help...?

Aziz: No, the uprising was a surprise to them, it was not part of their plan, it was not their own you see. It was an Iranian plan. The Iranians devised and pushed for that so called uprising which was a very chaotic one, a very primitive and savage act of violence against, not only the regime, it was against the people, against civilian and state property.

It didn't live because it didn't have strong roots in the Iraqi society. The Iraqi society is not the society that destroys itself in an endeavour to change the regime. We changed the previous regime, we did not destroy Iraq because we wanted to remove the the then President.

In 1963, we participated in a revolution. It was a wild and bloody one, but we wanted to keep the State as it is, because we will be the leaders of that State when we win. What those people did in the south of Iraq, they burned everything, they destroyed everything, they killed whoever they reached and that is not the behaviour of a person or a political group that's going to hold power.

That was the behavior of a number of people who hated Iraq, who wanted to destroy Iraq, who wanted to revenge their defeat in front of Iraq in the moment of weakness of Iraq. Therefore it took us only few days to recover from the surprise, to reorganise our troops, our resources and to impose peace and order in the Southern governors. It took two weeks to do that.

Q: Wasn't this whole saga, a huge mistake for Iraq and here we are five years later and still sanctions? Wasn't it a huge miscalculation?

Aziz: Iraq had no choice but to act as it acted on the 2nd of August 1990. Either to be destroyed, to be suffocated and strangled inside its territory, or attack the enemy in the outside. That was the calculation, and I think it was a correct one. Correct in the sense that you had no other options.

Q: One of the Americans, I spoke to, Paul Wolfowitz, Cheney's Deputy, said that 'the point about this war was not what it achieved from the American viewpoint, but what it prevented'. He said it prevented an Iraq, possibly armed with nuclear weapons, taking over the Gulf region, taking over Israel in the future, becoming a threat because this war was fought over oil.....

Aziz: Well that was the propaganda machine which the Americans used to justify their policy in the in the region. It is not true.

Q: Why do you think they fought you?

Aziz: To take over the most strategic region left in the world. It was a big prize, the Americans wanted to achieve it since the time of Roosevelt. You remember the story that when Roosevelt was told about the oil revenues in Saudi Arabia etc and how important was that to America and to the world and he was asked by one of his advisors, 'How much do you want of the Saudi oil?' He said, "All of it".

So.. George Bush realised that in 1990 he could do that,... all the oil in the region....

Q: Who won this conflict?

Aziz: Well... this is still an historic process which has not reached an end. But in the end, of course Iraq suffered great losses, but in the end my analysis--not as a diplomat but as a writer, as an analyst--in the long run when I use the term 'long', it is not very long term, America will lose in this region and I have a final conclusion which to me is very clear, that the allies of America in this region who participated in the war against Iraq, politically, militarily, economically are nowpolitically weaker than they were in 1990, economically than they were in 1990 and their future is not secure as it was in 1990.

So the allies of America in the region are not in good shape. They were in better shape in 1990. In the long run, a few years from now, this will lead to such developments that will be very negative to an America which cannot wage a similar war that it waged in 1991 against Iraq.

Q: The Kurds rose up, and America did eventually intervene there and you backed off, why?

Aziz: We didn't want to get into a long, bloody conflict with our people. We deliberately withdrew our forces and our administration from the region whe we couldn't reach an agreement with them. We reached a full agreement by the end of August 1991, but the Americans prevented them from signing it and implementing it. And we anticipated trouble that they will start....

Q: Surely you backed off because the Americans were putting troops there?

Aziz: No -- no. The American troops entered only in some parts not all over Kurdistan. They imposed a no-fly zone but we withdrew our forces and we withdrew our administration because the Kurds, the two major Kurdish parties were making skirmishes with our army, with our police, with our security, with our administration. We decided that enough is enough we don't have to go to a bloody conflict with our people. Let them do whatever they like for a while, it might take months or years, but in the end they will come back to their homeland because they will realise that there is no other option for them except to be part of the state of Iraq.

Q: And Khafji..? I read that the purpose of the attack on Khafji was to take prisoners to use as hostages--true?

Aziz: No, the purpose was to have a direct contact with the other side on the ground . We were waiting for them to come but they came late when they inflicted on us a lot of casualties and especially in the civilian area, so it was a an attack an offensive in which we tried to make what you call in Arabic -- a touch you see between the two armies, but they avoided that.

Q: You wanted to see if you could inflict some casualties, a little like in Vietnam?

Aziz: Yes... but they withdrew from Khafji, it was almost vacant, they used the Air Force and we had to withdraw our tanks and people from there, otherwise they would be eliminated. There was no person to fight. Only a few Arabs and that was not significant to stay there to continue.

Q: For the record, what was the closest they came to killing President Hussein?

Aziz: The Americans don't know Iraq. They don't know President Saddam Hussein, they don't know how we think, how we act you see. Therefore they failed and they will fail.

Even with the new information they will get from those two defectors, they will not succeed in doing anything against the President, because we have our own means and ways to protect our President and ourselves from the enemies.

Q: In August or July 1990, if George Bush had said, 'Do not invade Kuwait or we will fight you', what would you have done?

Aziz: We would have told him, tell the Kuwaitis to stop threatening Iraq, to stop their wrong policies, deliberate wrong policies against Iraq and we will not go to Kuwait, very, very simple.

Q: And if they didn't stop?

Aziz: That means that the war has already started and you have to act.

Q: You've talked about fatalism. You seem almost to have thrown your hands up and just drifted towards this war.

Aziz: No, we are good fighters when we decide to fight, even when we lose, but we have proved to be good fighters and we have proved to be good statesman and we have proved to be good builders as well.

Q: Did you fight this war because in the end to back down would have been too humiliating for the Iraqi people, that it was a war fought for pride?

Aziz: No I don't think....the Iraqi people have a long history and they have trust and love for a bold leader who leads them but they want that bold leader to be wise as well, and when any leader including Saddam Hussein acts in a wise manner that serves the protection of the country and the welfare of the country, they will understand the reasons of his decision, so it was not a psychological reason that we did this. Our analysis was that it was imminent, they wanted to destroy Iraq.

Q: The uprisings were put down with a great loss of life, I know there was savagery on that side, but there was savagery by your troops as well. Was it necessary to put down the uprising with so much bloodshed?

Aziz: Well there was a savage uprising against not only the government but against the Iraqi society. You have to act in such circumstances, you have to act. Every nation will act in such circumstances.

When the Southerners in the United States revolted against the central government, they had a bloody war for four years and many many people were killed in that war. The President of the United States at that time, Abraham Lincoln, didn't count casualties, he wanted to reunite his nation. When you have a bloody uprising, a savage uprising in Northern Ireland, you will act and you will send troops and you have to fire and kill if you need, but we had to do that, because they were killing people, they were destroying schools, looting hospitals, destroying every government building, killing whoever they hated etc etc and what, what would you do in such circumstances. You have to use force to regain control, impose order, that's what we did. It took us two weeks.

Q: The Americans wonder if they had carried the war on for another 24 hours, whether they would cut off more of the Republican Guard and it would have been more difficult for you to put down the uprisings. Is that true?

Aziz: Well if the Americans had entered inside Iraq they would have faced the Iraqi army. The Republican Guard is an army which fights and kills when it is man to man conflict, when it is a man to man touch between two armies, they kill, so they avoided casualties in their troops, by taking that decision. It is not a favor to Iraq, they were not kind to us, they did not love us to stay in power, it was quite clear that they wanted to avoid casualties because George Bush entered that adventure, promising the American people that it would not be another Vietnam. And he kept his promise, very efficiently, by limiting the war, mainly to airplanes and missiles.

You speak about the war. It was an air attack.....

Q: Well there was a land war, it lasted three days, and took 80,000 prisoners.

Aziz: Yes, but that was after the preparations made by the air attack. It was not a a conventional war you see between two armies.

Q: But if they had carried on the war for another 24 hours, they would have cut off more Iraqis...

Aziz: The Republican Guard fought against them very well and they knew that. They knew that it was not easy to fight against well equipped, trained Iraqi troops.