Tom Ricks on Michael Krasny's Forum Show at KQED

Paul Brown alerts us to today's KQED Forum:

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: Thomas E. Ricks (2006), "Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq": On today's KQED Forum Program, Ricks was confronted by the kind of arguments we're discussing here. His response was that, Hey! He was only a reporter. But revealingly, he said that when he heard someone in power say something he knew to be ridiculous his instinct was not to write a piece with the lede "Rumsfeld (for example) said 'X' today, which is completely ridiculous because Y and Z.". Instead he wanted only to get Rumsfeld's ridiculousness "on the record".

In other words, Ricks knew what Rumsfeld said was ridiculous, and he knew that anyone 'in the know' would realize just how ridiculous it was. Taking up Brad's theme about the ongoing quality decline of print media and it's economic implications for big media firms, the number of people 'in the know' (who can benefit from knowing Rumsfeld is being ridiculous) is tiny. The rest of us benefit little from the unadorned quote. So we get less and less value from these well paid, ink-stained wretches.

And eventually, Thomas Ricks loses his office, and his press pass, and gets a blog.

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Here's what that particular exchange was, from the mp3:

Michael Krasny: "Here's an email saying: 'Brad DeLong complains that your reporting during the war did not say that administration officials were saying things that we're not true--let's not say they lied, in particular with respect to Mr. Wolfowitz's testimony before Congress. How do you justify this?"

Tom Ricks: "I'm a reporter. One of the parts of the job of being a reporter is to accurately report what people say. It doesn't mean that I agree with it. One of the things in fact you do as a reporter is that sometimes somebody will say something and you say, 'I can't believe he said that. I'm going to write a story about that to get it on the record in the paper'."

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Here are the links to Michael Krasny KQED Forum 10 AM August 3, 2006:

KQED | Programs A-Z: Forum: Home: KQED's live call-in program presents wide-ranging discussions of local, state, national and international issues, as well as in-depth interviews. http://www.kqed.org/.stream/anon/radio/forum/2006/08/2006-08-03b-forum.mp3

And here is a partial transcript--what Tom Ricks said during the program:

I don't think you get a mess this big from the mistakes of two or three people. Absolutely. President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld made serious mistakes, both during the run-up to the war, and during the occupation. But to get a mess this big you really need a systemic breakdown is the argument at the beginning of the book. I look to five basic groups: the Bush Administration, the CIA and the intelligence community, the media, the military which I think is an area that really needs to be looked at more, and finally Congress which is in this case the dog that didn't bark. The other institutions were basically sins of commission. Congress's sins were essentially sins of omission, a lack of oversight, a lack of accountability...

So kind of ineptly and in my own way I stepped up to the plate and tried to get answers to the questions that I wished Congress had been asking and getting answers to. Why has the occupation gone the way it has? Was it inevitable? Are resources being spent well or are they being squandered? I don't have the power of subpoena. I don't have massive resources. More important, I don't have the power of the purse string. But I went at it and asked a lot of these questions and looked at a lot of documents and tried to answer as best as possible and say here's what happened here's how it happened here's why it happened. But I'll never do as good a job as the Congress could do. It's just that I did what I could do...

It's especially worrisome to me because when you don't look at the military errors then things go wrong. Troops die unnecessarily. Iraqis die unnecessarily. And we don't win. One of the reasons I gave this book its provocative title, "Fiasco," was to put up a blinking red light and say "Hey, let's pay attention here. This could have been done better." Congress doesn't do this for I think two reasons: The Republicans don't want to embarrass the administration, and the Democrats really don't know how to ask the questions. I think they've confused supporting the troops with supporting the generals. There's a big difference between the troops and the generals, and one way to support the troops is to question and to criticize the generals. Yet in this war not a single general has been relieved. Compare that to World War II, where at the beginning of World War II George Marshall who was the army chief of staff relieved over one hundred senior officers. Lincoln during the Civil War ran through generals looking for someone who could fight and win the war for him. But we have a military that really doesn't want to look at its own leadership lapses, and a Congress that isn't forcing the military to do that. And I think it's unfair to the troops...

The more I looked at Franks, the less impressed I was. I came away thinking after doing these interviews--and I want to emphasize that this is not a book of my opinions; I do not believe I appear in the book. It's a book of the best judgments I could find, inside and outside the U.S. military. But the judgment on Franks is harsh in the book: that he helped write what may be the worst war plan in American history. That his war plan helped create the insurgency. And that he then walked away and retired. And the image that comes to my mind is as if General Eisenhower in July 1944, a month after D-Day, had retired and turned to General Bradley and said, "Good luck on the way to Berlin. I'm off to play golf"...

Well, the President, rightly or wrongly, had instructed Franks to go to Iraq, and invade it, with the purpose of transforming Iraq and transforming the region. This was this transformational vision that the Bush Administration had after 9/11 of what they wanted to do in Iraq. Remember, they were going to "drain the swamp" of the Middle East, and it began there. Franks's war plan was a war plan that looked more like a plan for a coup d'etat in a banana republic, where you zip to the capital and decapitate the regime and you leave. The original war plan called for us to be down to 30,000 troops by August 2003. In fact, here we are three years later August 2006 and we're at 127,000 troops and growing. So, the assumptions on which Franks based his war plan were incorrect, and he didn't have Plan B. He spent 80% or 90% of his energies looking at how to get to Baghdad and very little of his energy at what to do once he got there. And that was the hard problem. There was no question that we were going to get to Baghdad pretty fast, but there was very little serious thought, planning, for OK what to do once you get there. And what if your assumptions are wrong. What if you are not greeted as liberators. And that fecklessness in the plan, I think, gave the insurgency valuable time in which to coalesce and grow and plan their attack...

One very senior U.S. military intelligence officer looked at me during the interview and said, "Tom, what's the difference between Tommy Franks and the Iranian government?" I said "I dunno." He said "The Iranians had a plan for Phase IV." And I said, "What do you mean by that?" He said, "They were on our heels as we came across southern Iraq they were right behind us. They knew what they wanted to do and they came in fast." Whereas we didn't really have a plan for what we'd do once we got there. Franks sometimes reminds me of a taxi driver who drives extremely fast and gets you to the wrong address, and when you complain says, "Well at least I got you here fast."

There are huge similarities here to Vietnam or Halberstam's book. In some ways I think this could be worse than the Vietnam War. At the end of the Vietnam War we could walk away and pretty much wash our hands. It didn't have much effect on us. It was pretty bad if you were a Vietnamese ally of the United States or a Cambodian who suffered a holocaust, but for an American we could walk away. I don't think we can walk away from Iraq. As for the Best and the Brightest, yes the generals tend to agree with that phrase--we are the best and the brightest. There's not a lot of self-examination among many generals. There are some who stand out as exceptions. But broadly the attitude was "We're the best in the world." There's a lot of hubris. "We're winners, how can we possibly be doing things wrong here?" So there was not an inclination to really critically and soberly look at the situation and look at their own actions and think about whether some of those actions were counterproductive. A good example is in the fall of 2003, when the insurgency started to rise and we started to crack down on them, they conducted big coordinate-sweep operations. In certain areas all military-age males were scarfed up, frequently humiliated in the course of the arrest, sandbags placed over their head, shipped off to Abu Ghraib or other prisons like that, kept there for ninety days, maybe eventually released. During those ninety days they might have been abused by yahoos from Abu Ghraib who were running the prison. And they were also held cheek-by-jowl with hard-core Al Qaeda types. And this might be Ahmej Achmed the farmer. Well when Ahmej Achmed went in, he was one guy, and when he came out he probably was a little less pro-American than when he went in. So that kind of big coordinate-sweep operation, I think, was unproductive...

Very much. And the other thing I think that the generals were very slow to focus on was how ill-prepared U.S. troops were. I don't mean just equipment. I mean conceptually. What do you do? An example is the first armored division in Baghdad in the summer of 2003. A pretty good unit by the way. Pretty well led. They had some soldiers who were supposed to stop looters. They decided that the best way to deter looters was to make them cry. Now you will find this nowhere in any army manual or doctrine or any counterinsurgency tactics--to make them cry. But they decided that's what they would do. So one day they caught a father and his two teenage sons looting. And they asked the father, "Which of your sons do you want us to shoot?" A chilling thing to say. And the father says, "No, please shoot me instead." They said, "No, you don't get to make that choice." They took one of the sons around to the other side of the truck and they fired a weapon past his head. And then they cried and they turned them loose...

They might have deterred those looters but that's no way to win a war. Fundamentally, the U.S. military did not understand that the people were not the playing field on which you play the enemy. The people were the prize. You need to win the people over. Instead, again and again U.S. policies and U.S. tactics alienated the broad middle...

And that's not taking care of the troops. This takes me back to the issue of Congress. This isn't a matter of just not informing the American people. It's a matter of not waging war effectively. When the military won't ask the tough questions, then the Congress should. And the Congress has not been...

Bremer flew into Baghdad in the spring of 2003 determined to show there was a new sheriff in town. He was going to be bold and striking. One of the things he was going to do was put a ban on anyone who'd been a fairly senior member of the Baathist Party. And he showed this draft order to the CIA station chief, who read it, and looked it over, and said, "You know, will you give me an hour to kind of redraft this?" Bremer said no. And he was asked again. Bremer said no. Finally the CIA station chief said, "You can issue this order as you have written it, but by nightfall you will have driven 50,000 people underground, and in six months you are going to regret it." It was one of those policies along with dissolving the Iraqi military and the interior police that took care of one of the basic problems for anyone trying to establish an insurgency: recruiting. DeBaathification--which is very different but deNazification was in postwar Germany, which was done in a much more studied way beginning at the grass roots level--this was top-down, centralized deBaathification issued from the top. And that gave the insurgency a lot of leaders. Its cadre of leaders. And then the next order which dissolved the military solved the other problem of recruiting: here's tens of thousands of angry well-armed men...

The military called the CPA--the civilian occupation authority--"Can't Provide Anything." We would be with officers who were working at these dusty patrol bases way out in the desert or in the jungly areas between the rivers, and there eyes would get big when they went to the Green Zone. Some would call it "Oz." The Green Zone was the U.S. civilian headquarters in downtown Baghdad which became increasingly isolated as the insurgency began and as its front door was bombed. It became harder for them to get out. But it really had very little to do with what was happening in the rest of Iraq because it became so isolated. And officers in the military would say that these guys are totally at cross-purposes with us. We're trying to bring stability, and they keep on issuing orders that are destabilizing, because the Green Zone--the civilian authority--were the home of a lot of ideologues: people who would say "We have to make this country not only a democracy but a free-market. One of Bremer's initiatives, by the way, was a flat tax. One of the things that a lot of American conservatives had wanted...

I don't want to be too negative. There are commanders who get it. Especially guys who have some of their own education--not just the army. One example is Major General Dave Petraeus, has a Ph.D. in international affairs in Princeton, and had studied Vietnam, and operated very well with his 101st Airborne Division in northern Iraq. Another example, also a well educated man, Col. H.R. McMaster, in command of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, also wrote the book "Dereliction of Duty" about Vietnam. There were a few, though. Also, their example tended to be neglected. I was embedded with H.R. McMaster's armored cavalry regiment early this year up in Tel Afar up in northwestern Iraq. It is worth looking at because it is the road not taken. McMaster took the 3rd ACR which is a unit that had a mediocre first tour in Iraq. One Iraqi general who turned himself in to them was beaten to death in interrogation. There was an officer in the unit who carried a baseball bat that he called his Iraqi beater. McMaster took over that unit and looked every soldier in the eye and said every time you disrespect an Iraqi you are working for the enemy. That's counterinsurgency doctrine phrased in a way that any 21 year old soldier can understand, grasp in that form. McMaster went out to Iraq and one of the first things he did was start a program called "Ask the Customer." Who was the customer? Detainees. It's a very different way of looking at detainees. And all detainees in his unit were asked, upon release, "How were you treated?" And the soldiers knew that they would be asked. And they had not one case of abuse in the 3rd ACR's second tour in Iraq...

The 4th ID stood out especially. The 4th Infantry Division was in the northern part of the Sunni triangle. Tikrit. I was up there in the summer of '03 briefly, and I was also across the river with one of their brigades across the Tigris in July of 2003. An interesting unit because the guy who commanded them, Odierno, is going back later this year as the number two commander in Iraq in charge of day-to-day operations. And there is a general view among many of his peers that his unit was unnecessarily aggressive and abusive and helped fuel the insurgency through their actions...

I think it's an honorable position to talk about leaving as soon as possible. But if we are going to talk about that we should talk about the consequences of doing so. Would there be a civil war? Would there be a bloodbath across the country?...

I think civil war has already happened in that we have a low-level civil war going on there right now. Every day scores of people are being killed in some sort of civil war by violence. I think our unspoken mission there right now is to keep a lid on that civil war, keep it from intensifying. A full-blown civil war, I think, would be far bloodier and far uglier than what we have there now. And look, it is possible for Iraq to get worse. Every time I've been there, and I've been there five times over the past three years, I've been stunned at how bad it is. And every time I've gone back it's been much worse the next time. So it can get much worse. We may look back on this and say: man that was just act III of a five-act tragedy. You know, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were still alive back then. It could get very tough over there if we do have a full-blown civil war. I think, first of all, this country would be blamed by many people around the world. Second, it could easily pull over the borders and pull in Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and even Turkey, our NATO ally. If the Kurds made a bid for independence the Turks would invade. Then we'd have a NATO country involved. It could get extremely messy extremely quickly...

In my personal opinion yes, we need to stay in as an occupying force, if we can, that's probably the best-case scenario. What strategists told us is that we need to radically change our posture. The current force is not sustainable either here or in Iraq. But what you could do is probably cut your force structure by about two-thirds, get down to about 50,000 troops. And take the 1.5 billion dollars a week that we are spending there now, and dedicate it much more to the training advisory program. Make those Iraqis who are allied with us look like winners. And put the best and brightest of our current force, our future generals, to be their advisors, rather than use ???? for advisors...

This was supposed to be the year of the [troop] cuts. Everybody in the army was saying we'd be down to 100,000 troops by the end of this year. But we're more than halfway through this year and the troop numbers are increasing. It's been bouncing between 127 and 138 for months now. The army has long wanted and planned to cut, but that never seems to happen...

I worry that if we keep messing this up as badly as we have, eventually Iraqis will get sick of it. It's a terrible thing to live in Baghdad day by day. It's just terrifying. I was out in a part of the city. It's a myth that reporters live in the Green Zone, by the way. We had a house in the Red Zone, where I stayed. And one day I was sitting there writing a story. And my bureau chief, a very tough woman "I've been sitting here writing my story, and I've heard two explosions and a couple of hundred rounds of fire." And she said, "Yes. Quiet day." The U.S. military tends not to see that. I later looked at the classified database. They said, "That area's secure, sir." I said, "What do you mean? I've heard lots of stuff out there." They said, "It's secure. It's really green." What I realized is that what the U.S. military looks at is two things. Any threat to American troops, and any killing of Iraqis. What does that leave out? Probably half of what goes on. Rapes. Robberies. Maiming and intimidation. The pervasive sense of no security. So they really don't have an accurate picture of what's happening outside of the Green Zone. Iraqis will sicken of that, I think eventually, and say: "Look. Let's just get somebody to hold this country together, a new Saddam"...

A young, vigorous Saddam who harnesses that oil money, buys a couple of nukes, and decides to knock Tel Aviv, New York, and Washington off in an hour...

One of the limiting factors on the troop numbers in Iraq is the lack of troop numbers on the shelf. As one Pentagon official said to me recently, "We're out of Schlitz." This is a problem not only for Iraq but for the rest of the world. Any adversary elsewhere--North Korea, for example--the Americans are tied down in Iraq, and now is time to act...

You put your figure on the problem. The problem was that the Congress had no incentive. The Republicans didn't want to cross the president of their own party. And the Democrats didn't seem to know how to do it...

There's a narrowness in the way the country went to war, a narrowing out of support that was really striking. The Bush administration--I noticed this pattern in reporting out how we went to war. People inside the government who had information were skeptical and expressed doubts were not invited back to the next meeting. That extended even to Congress. Representative Ike Skelton. A conservative Missouri Democrat. A natural ally of the administration. He sent a letter to President Bush expressing very insightful doubts and concerns about the occupation of Iraq. The response he got from the White House was, "Mr. Congressman, we don't need your vote." Contrast that with FDR, who at the outset of WWII brought in a Republican, Henry Stimson, as his Secretary of War. Usually when you go to war you try to bring the nation together. Instead, this war has been prosecuted in a very partisan manner in which loyal dissent, honest dissent and criticism have been slapped down as unpatriotic...

Lincoln's greatness, I think, was his ability to even humiliate himself to do the right thing. He brought in Stanton, a guy who had humiliated him as a lawyer, kicked him off major cases, because he thought he would be the best man for the job...

One of the things future historians will look back on is the reliance on private-sector contractors who are essentially mercenaries. I think it had a polluting effect on the battlefield. They are well-armed. They are inclined to shoot. They are not subject to military discipline or the chain of command. It's not clear what law they're subject to. And their mission is not to help the U.S. win but to do whatever job they've been assigned. So, for example, if you're a bodyguard for a VIP, your job is to keep that guy alive. You might do that by shooting Iraqis or driving on Baghdad sidewalks--which they do frequently. That will antagonize Iraqis. I remember one colonel saying: We have 100 missions out there in Baghdad every day. If every mission alienates 100 people, that's 10,000 people a day alienated simply through our VIP bodyguard service...

There was a lot of worrying among smart officers in Iraq that we really had six months to get it right, that after that we would have lost the prospect of winning the Iraqis over to us. These are the guys who are arguing, "Let's get out of here. This isn't going to work. We're in a hole, and we're responding by digging harder." I want to emphasize what has really surprised me. As of today I have not had a single negative email response from a single U.S. soldier, and I have had many positive ones. And my favorite is one from a battalion commander who says, "I'm glad finally somebody is saying publicly what we all have been saying privately for the past two years"...

That's step 2 in creating an insurgency. We've talked about step 1: recruiting. Step 2 is arming. One of the classic problems for an insurgency is getting weapons and you have to smuggle them in and you can follow the smuggling networks and find the leadership. No, we didn't want the Iraqi insurgents to have that problem. We didn't have enough soldiers to guard these huge weapons dumps. And we had dissolved the Iraqi military. We left those dumps totally unguarded. Anybody who wanted some weapons could just walk down and get them. We didn't even blow up the dumps because our military had been told they had WMDs. I asked one commander why he didn't blow up the dumps as he passed them. He said, "Sir, we thought there could be chemicals in there, I didn't want to be the guy who sets off the plume of chemical weapons that kills 10,000 Iraqis." So the false information about WMDs was one of the factors that helped create the insurgency. This is how mistakes can bite you again and again and again if you don't admit them...

That's step 3. Financing. One of the classic things they say in counterinsurgency doctrine is close the borders. We didn't have enough troops to close the borders. We didn't seal the borders. And so people could go back and forth. Syria. Baathist leaders. Keep a villa there. Keep your gold there. And you have your financing when you need it...

There was overhead satellite imagery that showed a lot of trucks going up to Syria. And there are still some true believers--flat earthers--who believe that was WMDs being trucked up there. I think the evidence is no. It was valuables, cash, and documents that became an essential part of the insurgency.

Michael Krasny: "An email saying: 'Brad DeLong complains that your reporting during the war did not say that administration officials were saying things that we're not true--let's not say they lied, in particular with respect to Mr. Wolfowitz's testimony before Congress. How do you justify this?" Ricks: "I'm a reporter. One of the parts of the job of being a reporter is to accurately report what people say. It doesn't mean that I agree with it. One of the things in fact you do as a reporter is that sometimes somebody will say something and you say, 'I can't believe he said that. I'm going to write a story about that to get it on the record in the paper'."

There was a small group of people--most notably Wolfowitz--who had long wanted an invasion of Iraq. I think they had despaired of getting a U.S. invasion of Iraq and thought you'd have to do it with Iraqi exiles, perhaps with U.S. airpower. I do think that changed with 9/11. The Bush administration privately realized that it had really been taken by surprise and ignored important information and been taken with its pants down decided that we're not going to be taken by surprise again. But even that doesn't explain Iraq. If you are really focused on the war on terror, why not do what the number 2 man in the U.S. army Kean wanted to do at the time. Put two divisions on the Afghan-Pakistan border and catch Osama bin Laden. I think they talked themselves into it. People say Bush lied. I think it's scarier than that. I think they deceived themselves...

There was no new evidence on WMDs, after Desert Fox in 1998. Yet, despite that lack of new evidence, the Bush administration persuaded itself that Iraq was a threat. What we know now is that there was no threat. Not only was Saddam Hussein not a clear and present danger, he wasn't even the biggest threat in the neighborhood. Iran was a bigger threat, and remains a bigger threat...

There's a lot of talk [about invading Iran]. I don't think it's going to happen. I've been surprised by this administration before. Samuel Goldwyn said never make predictions, especially about the future...

I don't think Iraqi factions want to talk to each other. They want to kill each other. They are killing each other on a daily basis. And--it's not an easy situation. I don't consider myself a supporter of the occupation. I'm just trying to point out that the alternatives aren't real appetizing...

I don't think there was a serious discussion of the consequences of dissolving the Iraqi army. I know a lot of people in the U.S. military opposed it and thought something very different was going to happen. I've seen the official planning. The planning was to retain the Iraqi army and use it for reconstruction. Another hidden problem that I hadn't really focused on until recently was we had been leafleting the Iraqi army from the air for years--telling them not to fight us, that we would take care of them, and once we were into Baghdad we said "Get lost"...

They were about draining the swamp, fundamentally...

You point to the circular problem. You can never have a military solution. It's a political problem. But the military needs to keep alive your politicians. Right now it's an extremely dangerous thing to be an Iraqi politician, whether you are Sunni or Shiite somebody is out to kill you. So you do need to keep them alive. You need to keep the government up and running. It's not clear to me how far the writ of the Iraqi government extends beyond the walls of the Green Zone...

It's something that always worried me stopping at checkpoints in Iraq. You see these guys in uniform. Are they criminals in uniform? Are they militia? Are they corrupt guys who are simply going to whack me? I remember mentioning this once to an American general. He looked at me in shock and said, "You stop at checkpoints?" I said, "Yes, I'm a civilian. I don't have a helicopter to fly over them." This is the key question about the training effort: Are we training Iraqis to support the government, or are we training them to fight in a civil war?...

There is a fundamentally irreconcilable division here between the two sides. Shiites look at Iraq and say "We're a majority. We should be running it." The Sunnis look at the country and say "We're a majority in this region, and if you try to run things we have the power in this region." From such irreconcilable differences democratic politics are rarely born...

It's very difficult to be in the minority [in Congress], especially if you look at today's Democrats, who aren't used to being in the minority and who act as if it is all a bad dream that is going to go away soon. They haven't learned how to be in the minority. It's especially difficult when you don't have the executive branch on your side. The Republicans used to be in the minority in Congress but had the executive. They really are wandering in the wilderness. That said, it is possible to be far more effective. You can conduct independent inquiries. You can put out reports. You can independently gather information. That's essentially what I did with this book. I got 37,000 pages of documents and I read them. I looked at the patterns that emerged. And they were surprising to me, a lot of them. I've covered the military for a long time. You don't cover the military as long as I have--seventeen years--unless you like being around the military. But I went in and was really shocked by some of the things that I found, like the pervasiveness of abuse in 2003 and 2004. And I tried to ask questions about it and figure out what happened. And--you can have a congressional staffer do that, probably far more effectively, because the Pentagon really didn't want to talk to me for my book. But they have to give Congress some information...

I do think the American people need to look in the mirror and say, "How did we get to this situation?" There's a song from a new album by Josh Ritter, young good singer, that I listened to a lot. The refrain to it is, "What is it that we've done?" It's about Iraq. What have we done here? I think we are still grappling with that. You don't see people marching in the streets. But I do think that there is a broad frustration and anxiety with what we are doing out there that runs much broader and deeper than during the Vietnam War when you had a vocal minority but still majority support for the war until very late in the war...

About diplomacy and trying to shoot your way out of problems. One thing that strikes me about Iraq is the opportunity cost. We're spending $1.5 billion a week there. $250 million a day. Think if you took one week of spending in Iraq and you spent it instead on schools in Pakistan that taught tolerance and democracy in a Pakistani context to help educate these kids...

Franks was really proposed by Anthony Zinni, his predecessor at Central Command, surprisingly because Zinni is a very bright man and a good strategist, and I don't think Franks has shown either of those qualities, particularly. Sanchez was an even stranger pick. Here he was, the most junior lieutenant general in the army, who had never commanded anything bigger than a division--say 15,000--and suddenly he's commanding 150,000 people. He's not given enough staff. He's put into a terrible position, and this is a genuinely stirring story about a guy who rose from deep poverty along the Rio Grande valley to become a senior general. But I think nonetheless that he was not equipped for the job...

It's something I've heard a lot in Baghdad: that it was a mistake to go to elections so quickly. As Yeats said, "the center cannot hold, and the worst are full of passion and intensity and the best lack all conviction." The glue of democracy is the middle class: doctors, lawyers, journalists, and so on. They are fleeing Iraq right now. So what you have is a democracy of the hard men, a democracy coming out of the barrel of a gun...