DAVID BROOKS: Well, the book (Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq) is gripping reading, infuriating reading. You want to throttle Donald Rumsfeld and -- and Tommy Franks in particular, but a lot of other people, including the president and the vice president.
What you see is, first of all, how much they stifled debate. There were a series officers who knew better, knew what was going on. And, as -- as Gordon mentioned, one of them was -- they tried to fire. A lot now regret they didn't say something in meetings, because the atmosphere was so stifling of free debate.
And then the other thing you're -- you are furious about is that, as -- as the authors said, March 24 comes along. They are hitting resistance in Nasiriyah. They -- it's time to adjust. They never adjusted. It is not only people in the military who knew they had to adjust. I went back and looked at the punditry from columnists.
Everyone was saying: This is a guerrilla war. It's no longer against the Republican Guard. We need more troops. The colonels who sat at this table, sitting here, thousands of miles.
JIM LEHRER: I remember that. I remember that.
DAVID BROOKS: Colonel Lang, Colonel Gardiner. I think Anderson was here.
JIM LEHRER: That's right. That's right.
DAVID BROOKS: And they -- I went back and read those transcripts. They were saying it.
You didn't have to be some super-secret agent to know what was going on. It was in the papers. It was on TV. Everybody knew it, it seems, but Rumsfeld and Franks, because they had some preconception of the war they were going to fight, and they didn't adjust to reality.
TOM OLIPHANT: And the reason it's so important, because there are going to be more books than this, as this -- these -- this and other -- these and other questions get examined more -- is that -- that the feelings that Andy Kohut was talking about, with regard to the war, people are going to be able to find morsels of information that are very likely to solidify these feelings, rather than to question them.
David is absolutely right. Before, during and after the invasion, you can find the dots, not connecting them. There is no question that David is right about the fault at the top levels of the administration, but, frankly, what I find most interesting is how you can apply this analysis to our own conduct in the press.
And there's no question in my mind that we got sucked along in this atmosphere and didn't really do the kind of questioning job we are supposed to do.
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JIM LEHRER: About the point that General Trainor just made to Margaret, that the -- the military just saluted and did not -- Shinseki, for instance, General Shinseki, became a kind of a folk hero.
We pleaded with General -- everybody in the press pleaded with General Shinseki to come and do an interview. And neither none of -- neither he, nor any of the others in the military would ever speak out publicly.
TOM OLIPHANT: However...
JIM LEHRER: OK.
TOM OLIPHANT: And -- and there was a -- a tip-of-the-iceberg quality to some of this information, including the -- the punditry that David is citing.
The follow-up job that the press exists to do and that we did not do in this war involves -- you hear the number 400,000 troops, for example, which General Shinseki did not say in open session, by the way. It was in a closed session.
JIM LEHRER: He just said -- he just said several hundred -- several hundred thousand.
TOM OLIPHANT: Several hundred. But he actually used a number in closed session...
JIM LEHRER: In the closed--
TOM OLIPHANT: -- I'm told.
And it didn't come off the top of his head. It came as a result of almost formulas that are used in the military to calculate what you need after something like this.
JIM LEHRER: As they just went through--
TOM OLIPHANT: And there -- that is just one example of an opportunity that we in the press had to develop a story from a tidbit, which, after all, is what we -- what we do in this business.
Humm.... Food for thought?
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