So the policy was, we have legitimate right to defend the United States. We have the responsibility to defend the United States. And in this instance, we have to preempt the Iraqis from providing the wherewithal to terrorists. And so, that convinced a lot of people. It convinced the Congress. And it convinced the average man on the street that this was something that should be done. Obviously, there were certain people that did not agree. But the fact is, the Congress supported the whole thing.

The Secretary of State's position wasn't quite as crude as you describe it, as waiting for a second election. He wanted to give diplomacy a chance. It wasn't that he was opposed to going into Iraq. It was a matter of timing. And that's what he was insisting on. See if we can't build up a coalition, whereas the troika felt that they could pretty much act independently and a coalition would follow after the defeat of Saddam Hussein.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to General Bernard Trainor, who used to the write for the Times, now is an NBC military analyst. And we're talking to Michael Gordon, chief military correspondent for The New York Times. They have written a new book. It’s called Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq. We’ll come back to them in a minute.

 We continue our conversation with the authors of Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq, Michael Gordon, of the New York Times and General Bernard Trainor, who was with the New York Times, now an NBC analyst. You have a piece in this past Sunday's New York Times, where you talk about what Saddam Hussein understood before the invasion. I want to ask Michael Gordon this question. What was the understanding before the U.S. invaded? How did Saddam Hussein prepare for it? And then, the first attack of the United States on Iraq, being a site where the U.S. had hoped they were taking out Saddam Hussein.

MICHAEL GORDON: Well, you know, one thing that's really fascinating is the extent to which each side misread the other. I mean, Saddam and his regime utterly misread the United States' political and military strategy, and vice-versa, as we now know. So these two sides, which miscalculated so greatly, kind of produced an outcome neither side anticipated. But Saddam was the ultimate survivor, and his primary concern was internal security.

He was afraid of a Shia uprising with some cause. There had been a Shia uprising right after the end of the Gulf War, and he wanted to keep a lid on that. That was his major worry, and he took a whole – a number of measures to try to keep the Shia in line, which actually turned out to be completely counter-productive when the Americans invaded. For example, under penalty of death, he didn't allow his military commanders to destroy bridges in southern Iraq, without his explicit permission. Why? Because he wanted to use these bridges to put down the Shia. This was very convenient for the Americans, because they used the bridges to go to Baghdad.

And to extent he was focusing on an external enemy, he was worried about, somewhat ironically, the same enemy that President Bush highlighted in his recent national security strategy: Iran. I mean, Iraq had fought Iran in eight years. Each side had used chemical weapons against each other. They had fired missiles at each other's cities. They were worried about Tehran. That was really their principal thing, and the Americans, for the Iraqi regime, were really kind of a third-order threat. They certainly expected that there would be air strikes; they thought the Americans might invade the south, maybe sit on the Ramallah oilfields, but what they really didn't anticipate, we now know from debriefs of the inner circle, Saddam's inner circle by the U.S. military, they didn't anticipate the U.S. was going to drive all the way to Baghdad.

AMY GOODMAN: And then, the U.S. attack and what happened, that first attack?

MICHAEL GORDON: Yeah, that’s really, again, a fascinating episode, and you know, apart from all the policy stuff that we have in this book, really a large part of the book is just a group of very interesting stories and accounts of what actually happened that we don't really know, because in large measure this war was widely covered, but not well understood. Well, on March 19, George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, came to the administration, to the White House, and he said, “The C.I.A. is 99.9% sure they've got Saddam and his sons located at a site outside Baghdad called ‘Dora Farms.’ This is the minute to strike,” and so the President had to make the call. You remember, there was a 48-hour ultimatum for Saddam Hussein to get out of dodge, so to speak. Hadn't quite yet expired. They were waiting for it to expire, and so the White House was very interested in striking at Saddam, what they would call a “decapitation strike” to kill Saddam and, they thought, end the war in one blow.

Well, the White House decides to do this. The F-117 pilots at al-Udeid scrambled to carry out this short-order mission, in a matter of hours, to carry out a mission you normally plan for for days, and they got to the site near Baghdad. It was a bit of a hazardous mission, because dawn was beginning to break, and these stealth fighters, they're low-observable on radar, but they're not invisible in the sky. And they hit the exact place they were supposed to strike, you know, on the button. And they got back. Everybody thought, “Hurray! We got Saddam! The war is over.” And then, about a couple hours later, this mysterious figure emerged on Iraqi television, wearing these thick pair of glasses, reading some kind of speech.

You know, in the United States -- I was in the theater then -- but in the United States, people thought and the C.I.A. thought and the Bush administration thought, well, this is probably a double. It doesn't look like Saddam. Saddam was obviously killed or wounded in the attack, and that was what the American government thought for a while. Well, we now know, because Saddam's personal secretary was captured and interrogated, that it actually was Saddam. He was nowhere near Dora Farms at the time of the attack. In fact, hadn't been there for years, and then he went to his personal secretary's house. He wanted to prepare a speech to the Iraqi people. He wrote it himself. There was no teleprompter, no cue cards, no printer. So he had to read it in his own hand, which he didn't normally do. He stuck on his pair of glasses, and so that actually was Saddam, very much alive and nowhere near the point of impact when those bombs fell. In fact, not only was Saddam not there, when Americans troops later got to the site and dug it up to investigate it, there was not even a bunker there. There was nothing there.

AMY GOODMAN: Who died?

MICHAEL GORDON: Well, if you bomb an empty field, the results probably aren't very satisfying from a military perspective. They did totally obliterate the site with cruise missiles. I don't know who would have been there at the time, but if they were there, they undoubtedly didn't survive.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, one of the things that you raise in the book, I'd like to ask General Trainor about this, is that there was a decision in terms of a willingness of General Franks to accept collateral damage or civilian casualties, but that the rule was that if the expected casualties were greater than 30 civilians, that it required the approval of Secretary Rumsfeld himself?

GEN. BERNARD TRAINOR: Yes, Juan. You know, this really isn't unusual. When you draw up a target list, you have to prioritize it and put a value on it, and you have to match that value of the target against other circumstances, which include collateral damage in terms of both structural damage and human loss of life, and you then make a decision on whatever metrics you want to use and established in this instance, they used the 30 civilian casualty metric for very high-value targets, and then you apply it with judgment at a specific time.

This is not -- this is not unusual, and let’s – I mean, just for the purpose of taking out of the context of a disputed war, going back, and say we had a high-value target named Adolf Hitler, and we knew he was going to be at junction x at a certain date and a certain time, and there were going to be a lot of school children there waving swastikas at him. A decision would have to have been made by the president, President Roosevelt or Winston Churchill, as to whether or not the – getting assured destruction of Adolf Hitler was worth the life of the innocents. This is a judgment call that only policy-makers and their conscience have to make. So the set-up for high-value targets in Iraq has to be seen in that sort of light.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And what about the whole issue of Paul Bremer's role and the provisional authority, the decision to dismantle the Iraqi armed forces? To what degree -- and to purge all the Baathists. To what degree was that Bremer's policy? Was that fully supported by the White House or President Bush?

MICHAEL GORDON: Is this for me?

JUAN GONZALEZ: This is for General Trainor, sorry.

GEN. BERNARD TRAINOR: I'm sorry. I thought it was over to Michael. Yeah, the basic policy was to make use of the political, but non-Baathist infrastructure, the civil service in Iraq, the police and the army. Police to maintain stability and security in the country, the civil service to keep things operating, the military to protect and defend the sovereignty at the borders of Iraq and also assist the police in stability and security. This was all part of the thinking of the U.S. military when they went in there, and indeed, also part of the administration's thinking. But then the decision was made by Paul Bremer, with kind of the amorphous approval of the Secretary of Defense, and I’m not – we’re not even – there's no indication that the President and he ever signed a piece of paper for the disbandment of the army.

The administration says, in effect, that the army disappeared itself, that it dissolved, there was no army. So the business of getting rid of the army was simply putting a cap on what already existed, and to a certain degree, that was true. You know, the troops went AWOL, deserted when they saw the war was over. But they could easily have been called back.

As a matter of fact, they didn't even have to be called back. They returned for their paychecks, and they didn't get their paychecks, and they were pretty disgruntled. So now you have 300,000-plus, with AK-47s out on the street, unemployed and pretty angry about things. It was a bad move, but it was done with the idea of eliminating the Baathist influence within the emerging post-Saddam government. And it turns out that with -- after the studies of the makeup of the military at the time of the collapse, that there were relatively very few hard-line Baathists that were in the chain of command, and they were clearly at the top and had been eliminated.

So that was -- it was a terrible mistake, one of the major mistakes that went along with the others that upset the apple cart and prevented stability and security and services being restored, restored in Iraq. And the invincibility of the Americans who could get to Baghdad in a couple of weeks against Saddam Hussein's army, could put a man on the moon, now could not prevent looting and could not restore services like electricity and the flow of clean water or protect national treasures. This was seen as a chink in the armor of the invincible Americans, that they were not invincible, in fact, and prompted the growth of the insurgency, and a lot of people who were either in support of the Americans when they first arrived and liberated them from Saddam Hussein or were sitting on the fence to see which way it went, they were greatly influenced by the ineffectiveness of the Americans, largely because of the ineffective post-war planning policies, including the dissolution of the Iraqi army.

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