wow, john stockman, he and i were in charge of the pentagon. as the secretary and he was the comptroller. and as i think back on that, and careful here not to challenge my colleagues from that area because they think they all did good work. but my recollection of the close of the gulf war was that there was unanimity on the part of the president, his senior civilian and military appraisers, that we gathered around the desk in the oval office. we had the secure line open to riyadh, where our senior military commander general schwarzkopf was. and you could look back on it later and say well, we should ms or we should not let them have helicopters or there were things we didn't know at the time. but there was a general sense that we done what we set out to do. it's what the congress authorize call it the u.n. security council to find out. as we told the coalition and our troops were going to do and i promise when i got over there initially to get permission to put u.s. forces into saudi, it also promised them as soon as we completed the mission we