MR. RUSSERT: And we are back, talking to Tom Ricks, the Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post.
“Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq.” That sounds like a very harsh assessment. Who did you talk to? What documents did you see?
MR. THOMAS E. RICKS: I talked to over 100 senior military officers and, and soldiers of all ranks, from private to four-star general for the book. I did five reporting trips in Iraq and also talked to a lot of people back here. I read 37,000 pages of documents. Enormous amounts of information are available. And guys at the end of interviews would say, “Here’s a CD-ROM with every e-mail I sent to Paul Bremer when I was out there.” So there’s an amazing amount of information available.
MR. RUSSERT: Here is the summary, early on in your book. “This book’s subtitle terms the U.S. effort in Iraq an adventure in the critical sense of adventurism—that is, with the view that the U.S.-led invasion was launched recklessly, with a flawed plan for war and a worse approach to occupation. Spooked by its own false conclusions about the threat, the Bush administration hurried its diplomacy, short-circuited its war planning, and assembled an agonizingly incompetent occupation. None of this was inevitable. It was made possible only through the intellectual acrobatics of simultaneously ‘worst-casing’ the threat presented by Iraq while ‘best-casing’ the subsequent cost and difficulty of occupying the country.”
Let’s talk about the intelligence first. And, you write about the national intelligence estimate. And this is how you described it. “In September of ‘02 the U.S. intelligence prepared a comprehensive summary, called the National Intelligence Estimate, or NIE, of what it knew about ‘Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction.’ ... It was prepared at the request of members of Congress who expected to vote on going to war with Iraq and wanted something on which to base their vote. ... As a political document that made the case for war the NIE of October ‘02 succeeded brilliantly. As a professional intelligence product it was shameful. But it did its job, which wasn’t really to assess Iraqi weapons programs but to sell a war. There was only one way to disprove its assertions: invade Iraq, which is what the Bush administration wanted to do.”
You’re suggesting the intelligence community was an accomplice in providing information to Congress that wasn’t accurate?
MR. RICKS: Yes. That document did not accurately reflect the information available inside the intelligence community. But you had a process of narrowing; as the information moved its way upward, doubts were stripped away. And so what you finally had in that document was something very different from what the experts actually thought. And it kind of just all veered off in one direction. It wasn’t like all the doubts were, were stripped off, it was all the doubts that said, “This may be wrong, they may not have WMD.”
MR. RUSSERT: There were some caveats in the NIE.
MR. RICKS: There were, but they tended to be ignored, especially in the summaries, which is what officials actually had. And you wound up with a situation where Colin Powell basically sacrificed his credibility and gave a speech at the U.N. based on that NIE that was utterly false, as he now admits.
MR. RUSSERT: General Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, you write in his book, he was “worried by the possibility of ‘a major influx of Islamic fighters’ from elsewhere to the Middle East ... concluded that it would be necessary ‘to size the postwar force bigger than the wartime force.’ [Shinseki] prepared carefully for the Capitol Hill appearance at which he would unveil that thought and effectively go into public opposition against the war plan being devised under Rumsfeld’s supervision.”
That was the famous testimony where Shinseki said it may take a couple hundred thousand troops in order to success—be successful in Iraq. Paul Wolfowitz, a deputy Pentagon chief said that he was wildly off the mark.
MR. RICKS: Mm-hmm.
MR. RUSSERT: And that Shinseki really was stampeded into answering that question. You found something else?
MR. RICKS: That was one of the surprises to me in reporting the book, that Shinseki had had his staff go and talk to historians, looked at other occupations and come up with a very concrete estimate based on historical precedent of how many troops might be needed. And he concluded several hundred thousand. The Bush administration saw that as an attempt to actually stop the invasion because they really came to distrust the Army because the Army was coming up with all these objections and doubts and saying things like this is not really—or invading Iraq would not be part of the war on terror. And ultimately, the joint chiefs of staff sent out an order saying you will consider an invasion of Iraq part, part of the war on terror.
MR. RUSSERT: You said that General Tommy Franks, who was in head of the initial invasion of the war, used the phrase “speed kills” in terms of supporting a lower force than Shinseki had talked about. Talk about Franks, what he recommended, and the effectiveness of that initial invasion as opposed to the occupation.
MR. RICKS: Another surprise to me in writing this was that I think this probably was one of the worst war plans in American history. When you talked to people who had to implement it, they said it didn’t speak to the basic problem. All the energy went to how you get to Baghdad, which was the easy part of it. Very little thought went to what do you do after you get there. So they spent 90 percent of their time on 10 percent of the problem. And they had a war plan that was effectively a kind of a banana republic coup d’etats: decapitate the Iraqi regime. When actually the plan that they were supposed to do was supposed to change Iraq and change the Middle East. So the war plan really didn’t speak to what top authorities, the president, had asked them to do.
MR. RUSSERT: Donald Rumsfeld, when the first looting was shown on the TV screens criticized the media for showing the pictures over and over again. He said that, “Stuff happens.” That sometimes these things are untidy—freedom’s untidy. And then there was a debate between Rumsfeld and the press corps as to whether we were involved in a guerilla warfare. You said that Secretary Rumsfeld was paralyzed when the looting began. Talk about that.
MR. RICKS: This would have been, I think, the time when Rumsfeld’s forceful personality really could’ve helped if he’d come in in this late spring and early summer of 2003 and said, “This is different from what we thought it was going to be.” But what I heard from officials who were at the CPA, the American Occupation Authority, was there was kind of a paralysis at the top, that they couldn’t get Rumsfeld to change, couldn’t get him to adjust, couldn’t even get him to say yes, we are fighting a war. And so for about eight weeks, a crucial time early in the occupation, June and July, you really have the U.S. military frozen in place because it’s a hierarchical institution. And the guy at the top was not adjusting to changed circumstances.
MR. RUSSERT: You end the book by saying that history will determine whether the president was correct in saying that the invasion will make our country more secure. Right now you have doubts.
MR. RICKS: I have real doubts because while there’s a small chance, I think, that Iraq ultimately will become a stable pro-American democracy, I think there’s a much larger chance that it won’t. And I think it’s an extremely worrisome situation. We kind of have a low-level civil war there. If it becomes a more intensible war, it easily could spill over its own borders and across the Middle East and we’d have a regional war on our hands.
MR. RUSSERT: But you do not think American troops should withdraw immediately.
MR. RICKS: I think it would be irresponsible to go in there and do what we’ve done and then walk away from it. There’s a lot of Iraqis out there who have committed their lives to helping the Americans do something there. And to abandon those people, I think, would be absolutely shameful as well.
MR. RUSSERT: How long do you think we’ll be there?
MR. RICKS: Ten to 15 years, at least.
MR. RUSSERT: At what size force?
MR. RICKS: I think they’ll probably get it down to maybe 110,000 by the end of this year, and probably 50,000 by the end of next year. And then you could have a steady stay for five or 10 years, even 15 years, but I think it’s going to be a long, hard struggle.
MR. RUSSERT: Tom Ricks. The book, “Fiasco: the American Military Adventure in Iraq.” We thank you for sharing your views.
MR. RICKS: Thank you.
Fiasco Book Review
Originally Posted by Jones_RE
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