SADDAM'S SURVIVAL SURPRISED U.S.\Bush says he misjudged Iraqi leader's resilience after Gulf War.

Byline: Robert Burns Associated Press 

Former President George Bush says he underestimated Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's political staying power after the Persian Gulf War and regrets that the allies didn't do more to undercut Saddam's authority.

In an interview with David Frost to be aired Tuesday on PBS, Bush said he still thinks Saddam will be overthrown by his own people. But Bush recalled that during the 1991 Gulf War he and others felt a sound military defeat would lead to his downfall.

"I miscalculated," Bush said. "I thought he'd be gone."

Bush reiterated his views that it was a correct judgment to end the war, after having evicted Iraq's occupying army from Kuwait, and that it would have been a mistake to order the U.S. military to hunt down Saddam in Baghdad.

But the former president, in the interview taped Dec. 12 in his Houston office, said Saddam fooled him when he quickly used his surviving military power to crush postwar revolts by Kurds in Iraq's north and Shiites in the south.

"I think he took us by surprise," Bush said.

While expressing no regret at his decision to end the war with a cease-fire Feb. 28, just 100 hours after the ground war was launched, Bush said he now thinks mistakes were made in the armistice meeting held March 3 at Safwan, Iraq.

At that meeting, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of the U.S.-led coalition in the Gulf War, agreed to permit the Iraqis to fly armed helicopters anywhere inside Iraq so long as they were not near U.S. forces. Saddam used that air power, combined with tanks and other heavy ground armor that survived the war, to kill thousands of Kurd and Shiite rebels.

"We might have handled the flying of helicopters differently," Bush said. "So I think there's room for some ex-post-facto criticism here."

Asked by Frost whether Saddam should have been required to surrender at the Safwan meeting to deepen his humiliation and undercut his authority, Bush responded first by saying, "I think maybe in retrospect we could have done more."

He added that summoning Saddam to Safwan could have backfired, however, if the Iraqi leader had resisted and forced U.S. troops to march to Baghdad to grab him.

"And there we would be, . . . searching for this brutal dictator who had the best security in the world, involved in an urban guerrilla war," Bush said. "This is not a formula that I wanted to contemplate, and I think history will say we did the right thing."

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George Bush Interviewed for PBS