And you never knew when the sanctions might slip and Iraq might crank back up its production. If you're in the petroleum industry, what you'd like is have a ten-year timeline for what the future's going to look like. What if Iraq was able to produce 5 million barrels a day? That would have an impact on prices. It would have an impact on the plans you might like to make. But you couldn't predict that. It was completely unknowable.

So Iraq was like a treasure in a strongbox. You knew exactly where it was; you knew what the treasure was; but you couldn't get at it. The obvious thing to do was to take a crowbar and strike off the strongbox lock. My suspicion is that, for someone like Cheney, such considerations had a lot to do with his support for an Iraq war -- and he was willing to take a chance on the rest of it, including the Shiites.

TD: The rest which he, unlike many of the others in the administration, already knew?

JC: Oh, he knew it very well. Among all those people who planned out this war, Cheney and [Secretary of State Colin] Powell were knowledgeable about the situation on the ground in Iraq.

TD: What do you make then of the rest of them, their motivations?

JC: When we as historians get access to all the documents and can figure out how this thing was planned and who supported it, I think we'll find that the Bush administration was a coalition of various forces and each part of the coalition had its own reasons for wanting to fight this war. The group most explored has been the neoconservatives, but I suspect they will bulk less large in our final estimation of the promotion of the war. They weren't in command positions for the most part. They were in positions to make an argument. They may also have been fall guys. When things started going bad, more stuff got leaked about what they had been saying than about others.

I suspect it will come out that George W. Bush had wanted an Iraq War since he was governor of Texas -- "to take out Saddam," as he said. The various reasons he might have wanted this are undoubtedly complex. He had connections to the energy sector and so would be influenced by Cheney's kind of thinking, but there was a personal family vendetta too. You know, George Bush senior expected Saddam to fall after the Gulf War. By his own admission, he was very surprised when Saddam survived. I think he expected the Iraqi officer corps to -- quote unquote -- do the right thing, which tells you something about the American WASP elite, what their expectations are about politics. When someone fails miserably, they expect the rest of the elite to step in and remove the person. It didn't happen in Iraq and I think that was a blow to Bush family prestige. It may have been important for W to vindicate the family in that regard.

There were probably many motivations for the war, but the degree to which Bush himself has been a central, policy-making player somehow gets elided in American discourse. It's not as if he's a leaf blown by the wind. When the Bush presidency is finally examined from the primary documents, a lot of the things that are attributed to the number three man at the Pentagon may actually turn out to have been Bush's idea from the beginning, and something he pushed hard for.

His personal style is to play it by ear. He doesn't have patience for a lot of details. In Texas, he was used to calling together the Republican and Democratic state representatives to work out deals about this or that as they came up. That's his background as a policymaker, but the world is not like the Texas legislature. It's not a chummy club in which you can find compromises and go forward. The world is a much more complex and vicious place, and there are often incommensurate issues for which there is no acceptable compromise. Trying to run the world the way you run Texas is a big mistake.

As a set of organizations, the U.S. government has actually had a lot of experience in post-conflict situations. Bosnia. Kosovo. This is what a lot of people in the State Department and the Pentagon have been doing for the last twenty years. There are functional experts who may not know Bosnian or Arabic, but know about the need for policing after a war or about the need for sanitation and garbage collection. These people were giving advice about Iraq. I know for a fact that they were. But they were simply ignored in the actual event. Somehow, the civilians in the Department of Defense sidelined all those experts and so the U.S. military was given no instructions about how to put Iraq back on its feet after the war.

TD: Just to return to your strongbox image, the lock was busted in March of 2003. Now, two and half years later, I'd like you to take us on a little tour of Iraq as best you understand the situation there.

JC: Okay, let's start from north to south. Three of Iraq's 18 provinces were heavily Kurdish and formed a confederacy called Kurdistan under the [post-Gulf War I Anglo-American] no-fly zone. They were a kind of mini-state with a regional parliament and prime minister. The U.S. military never had much of a presence in the far north. The city of Kirkuk was actually taken during the war by Kurdish fighters with close U.S. air support -- rather as [in 2001] many cities in Northern Afghanistan had been taken by the Northern Alliance. So the northern part of Iraq looked much more like the Afghanistan War.

TD: Air support, the CIA, and tribal peoples, this had been a basic style of American warfare since Laos in the 1960s.

JC: Yes, that's how Kosovo was fought. That's how Afghanistan was fought too, but it was especially significant here because the Kurdish militia, the Peshmerga, which took Kirkuk, then formed the police force for that contested city whose population includes Turkmen, Arabs, and Kurds. The Kurds are probably close to half now. A lot of them had been expelled by Saddam, but they're coming back in large numbers. From all accounts I've been able to get from people on the ground, the three provinces that are heavily Kurdish are doing very well.

TD: And are unoccupied?

JC: There aren't many American troops there. Behind the scenes there have been some battles between the Kurdish forces and the Americans from time to time, some bombing of Kurdish positions when the Americans feel they're going too far, getting out of hand. But those have not been reported publicly. I've heard about them from people in Iraq. By and large, though, Kurdistan has not been occupied by the United States and economically seems to be doing very well. There's low unemployment and a lot of construction work.

On the other hand, the province of Kirkuk is potentially a powder keg. It could explode in a way that might have unfortunate consequences for all of Iraq and the region. Oil fields are around Kirkuk and the Kurds want those fields and the city for their Kurdistan federation. The Turkmen, traditionally dominant in the area but recently overwhelmed by the Kurds, resist this idea, and the Arabs Saddam settled up there are not happy about it either. The Kurds would get their way under ordinary circumstances, but the Turkmen are supported by Turkey; and northern Iraq is a mirror image of Turkey itself where the Kurds are a minority and the Turks a majority. If a kind of communal war broke out -- and there is a lot of terrorism, people are assassinated almost every day -- it would inflame passions of a regional sort. So one worries about Kirkuk.

And then you come to the Sunni Arab center. It's not true by the way that the problems in Iraq are only in four provinces. I figure, including Baghdad, about half of Iraqis live in the troubled parts of the country. The seven or eight provinces especially affected are in a condition of unconventional, low-intensity war. People who haven't lived in such a situation find it difficult to imagine what it's like, because the tendency in any reporting is to focus on the specific violent events that occur. But you're talking about an area in which maybe 12 million people live and most of them get up every day, go about their business, and don't encounter any violence. If you were living in Mosul, most days you might not see any violence with your own eyes. On the other hand, quite often there would be machine-gun fire in the distance. From time to time, there would be the sound of a bomb going off. This is how it is in Baghdad. This is why it's so wrong for Western reporters to parachute into Iraq, often embedded in U.S. military forces, and say, well, I saw the markets bustling and things seemed to be going on just fine. It's the constant drumbeat of violence over time that produces insecurity and fear, that affects investment, the circulation of money, the ability to employ people, people's willingness to send their children to school. This is something that's not visible to the naked eye.