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Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq

This weekend marks the third anniversary of the launch of the Iraq invasion. On March 19, 2003, the United States began dropping bombs on Iraq, while thousands of U.S. and British forces began pouring across the country's borders.

Three years later the occupation continues - with no end in sight. The U.S. military announced Thursday it launched its biggest air offensive in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. Over 130,000 U.S. troops remain deployed with no clear plan for withdrawal. The country is wracked by daily bloodshed and violence and the prospect of an all out civil war is more real than ever.

Now, almost three years to the day after the war started, a new book titled "Cobra II" details the inside story of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The book is written by Michael Gordon, chief military correspondent for The New York Times, and retired Marine general Bernard Trainor.

Gordon was in the war room with Tommy Franks, Donald Rumsfeld, and various field generals during the planning and execution of the invasion. The book combines this firsthand experience with classified military documents, interviews with a wide range of officials as well as findings from a classified report on Iraqi views on the war prepared by the U.S. military's Joint Forces Command. The report is based on interrogations of more than 110 Iraqi officials and officers as well as over 600 Iraqi documents.

Among what Gordon and Trainor found was that Saddam Hussein was convinced President George W Bush, like his father, would not go to Baghdad and they lay out how the Iraqi leader escaped from the capital.

The book also finds that Britain's top envoy in Iraq, John Sawers, expressed major concerns about how the U.S. was handling the occupation of Iraq as early as May 2003, just four days after arriving in Baghdad.

And "Cobra II" exposes that the tapes that then-Secretary of State Colin Powel played within his speech before the UN of recordings of Iraqi military officers in which one said, "I'm worried you could have something left" was not referring to WMDs as Powell alleged.

• Michael Gordon, chief military correspondent for The New York Times. He is co-author of the book "Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq." Gordon has covered conflicts spanning Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Chechnya and Panama.
• Gen. Bernard Trainor (Ret.), a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general. He is co-author of the book "Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq." He was a military correspondent for The New York Times from 1986 to 1990 and director of the National Security program at Harvard University from 1990 to 1996. He is currently a military analyst for NBC.

AMY GOODMAN: Today, we're joined by both authors of Cobra II, Michael Gordon of The New York Times and Bernard Trainor, retired Marine general and former military correspondent for the Times. They join us in the studio in Washington, D.C. We welcome you both to Democracy Now!

GEN. BERNARD TRAINOR: Good morning.

MICHAEL GORDON: Good morning.

AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you both with us. If you, General Bernard Trainor, can lay out what you think were the five problems with the invasion, as you lay them out in the book.

GEN. BERNARD TRAINOR: Well, these -- I think it can be generally stated that there were erroneous assumptions made upon which the planning floundered. The ground attack went to Baghdad in record time. However, along the way they ran into the sort of resistance that they had not expected. But if you're looking for the weak link in the process, it wasn't the operation itself, the invasion itself. It was the plan for the end of the invasion. And I use the term "plan," because a lot of people say that there wasn't any plan after Saddam's regime fell.

But there was a plan. And the plan was for the United States military to get out of Iraq as quickly as possible, turn Iraq over to a U.S.-supported Iraqi government, on the assumption that the infrastructure, both the political and economic infrastructure, would be largely intact, and that the international community, the U.N. and others, would get involved in the post-Saddam period. That was a fatally flawed assumption, and as a result, a fatally flawed plan.

So, if you're looking for the problem that emerged with the insurgency, that would be kind of the fundamental principle. There were lots of other little mistakes that went through it, which turned out to be very large mistakes: disbanding the Iraqi army, not having sufficient American forces to follow on the invasion -- as a matter of fact, cutting back on the forces that were involved in the invasion -- and all of these things closed a window of opportunity of reasonable stability that existed immediately after the fall of Baghdad. But that window of opportunity only stayed open for a short period of time, and it slammed shut, and the insurgency emerged.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Gordon, do you think the invasion itself was a mistake?

MICHAEL GORDON: Well, that's a policy judgment and a political judgment that’s really beyond the scope of our book. Our book is not about whether we should or should not have gone to war. The book is about how we went to war. And one thing that our analysis and reporting shows, as General Trainor said, is in the summer of 2003 -- and I was embedded throughout this period in Baghdad then -- I think most of the U.S. military commanders there thought that there was a chance to put Iraq on a better course had we done some things differently, had we had more troops, had we had effective nation-building policies, had we not disbanded the army. And it was the combination of these errors that created an environment which allowed the insurgency to gain some traction.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Michael Gordon, your book is especially critical throughout of the role of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. You talk about a variety of ways in which he directly participated in the planning and even when troops would be deployed, micromanaged the military at a level unprecedented. Could you talk a little bit about that and why you were so critical of Secretary Rumsfeld?

MICHAEL GORDON: Well, you know, in our book, General Trainor and I, we didn't set out to do an investigation of Secretary Rumsfeld or General Franks. We just laid out the facts, and we had a lot of documents and a lot of interviews. And what the facts show is that Secretary Rumsfeld came to the Defense Department with an agenda. The agenda was to transform the American military. There's some good in that. We're not saying that's all bad by any means. But he wanted to create a force that could be basically lean and mean and carry out operations that were far smaller than, let's say, an invasion force that Colin Powell would put together. I think the force that he put together -- and he didn't actually order the generals to do it this way or that way, but he guided them, through suasion, as one of his aides put it, by asking the appropriate questions, by demanding certain briefings, by sending down papers that he wanted the generals to read.

But basically, the force that he essentially established for the invasion was adequate for the task of taking Baghdad and getting there, although there were a few hairy moments along the way, but utterly inadequate for what followed, you know, the so-called -- what the military called "Phase IV” or really the post-war operations. He was really a dominating presence. But, you know, General Franks, I'd say, was very much on the same wavelength, and the two, you know, basically collaborated to put together the plan. You know, one very interesting thing is that the joint chiefs of staff were largely marginalized in this process, and in certain respects, the National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, and Secretary of State Powell were pretty much cut out of it, too.

AMY GOODMAN: General Trainor, you talk about the troika -- President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Rumsfeld -- making the decisions?

GEN. BERNARD TRAINOR: That's correct. That's a correct -- the three of them were joined at the hip, if I can use that expression. They all thought basically the same way, and their perceptions became reality. I think the President, I would describe it as the man who presided over the troika. I think Vice President Cheney was very influential in terms of the policy. And certainly, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was a man in charge of the execution of the policy. Everybody else was what I would describe as in the outer circle. The National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, and even the neo-cons, which gained so much blame for things going wrong. But those people were -- they were in the outside of the private sanctum of the President, Vice President and Secretary of Defense. Those three thought alike and acted in unison.

JUAN GONZALEZ: But interestingly, in terms of Secretary Powell, while he wasn't as much in the loop, according to your book, it wasn't so much that he opposed going into Iraq. According to some of your, I guess, interviews with Richard Armitage, the secretary's thoughts were the invasion of Iraq should wait until President Bush's second term, after he had built more international support, and that he saw it as totally -- something totally acceptable perhaps in the second term.

GEN. BERNARD TRAINOR: Well, I think you have to step back and look at the situation as it existed. The international community, all the intelligence agencies were all convinced that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. And this administration saw that as a threat that required preemptive action, because -- not that Saddam Hussein was going to pop a nuclear weapon or chemical weapon here in the United States -- but he saw that after 9/11, the threat of amorphous terrorism, with terrorists getting chemical, biological weapons and ultimately nuclear weapons without any national fingerprint on it. And how do you deal with something like that?