O'Reilly Interviews "Rumsfeld's War" Producer
Reported by Marie Therese - October 26, 2004 -
Tonight at 9:00 PM ET, PBS stations will broadcast a Frontline/Washington Post special entitled "Rumsfeld's War." The producer of that special, Michael Kirk, was interviewed by Bill O'Reilly on The Factor, Monday, October 25, 2004. The documentary examines Donald Rumsfeld and his role as Secretary of Defense. Here's my transcript of that interview.
O'Reilly: I'm very interested to see what you have come up with in your documentary. First of all, Iraq. The opening campaign was brilliant. You know, the lightning thrust, the shock and awe worked great and they toppled him with a hundred casualties dead, and then everything went to pieces in Iraq. Whether they can pick up the pieces, I don't know. How much of that was Rumsfeld's fault?
KIRK: In order to understand the Iraq War, you have to understand - and that's really President Bush's war - you have to understand Rumsfeld's War, Bill, which was the war inside the Pentagon to take control of the military as civilians, so they could change what has become big, cumbersome, lumbering and turn it into something fast-paced ... That's so much of what Don Rumsfeld's first years in office were about. And the Iraq War itself becomes a kind of arguing point between the old army and Rumsfeld's idea of lighter, faster, nimbler forces. He doesn't get the plan he wants - as you'll see in the program - and the army doesn't get the plan it wants and the result is what has happened, which is apparently not enough boots on the ground to do the job.
O'Reilly: What was the aftermath plan that Rumsfeld wanted that he didn't get?
KIRK: Well, I think Rumsfeld and most of the people we talked to said most of the other people around him - Wolfowitz, Feith - tended to be idealistic, ideological and believed the INC [Iraqi National Congress] and Ahmed Chalabi and others who believed that they didn't need to plan for a massive boots on the ground kind of campaign at the end. General Shinseki, the head of the army, as you'll see in the program, argued very strongly for a couple of hundred thousand more forces after the action. Almost everybody agreed that taking out Saddam Hussein was going to be relatively easy, knocking Baghdad down was going to be easy. It's the afterplan they didn't think about. They thought about other problems.
O'Reilly: Did Rumsfeld resist the larger occupation force himself?
KIRK: Oh, yes. Absolutely. You'll see in the program that he talks about checking - or they talk about the fact that he checked off whole small troop sizes and divisions, saying "You don't need that. You're not gonna need one of those" to General Tommy Franks with a kind of echo of what was happening with McNamara back, as we all remember, back in Vietnam.
O'Reilly: Is it because, that Rumsfeld thought the Iraqi people would be grateful to us and help us out more? Is that the main factor?
KIRK: "I think they believed that the might of the United States coming in quickly, decapitating the regime - they believed a lot of the INC arguments that these people were gonna hand us sweets and flowers, that it was a secular society ready for a democracy. He believed the guys around him who believed it - Wolfowitz and Feith - and I think he really is a micromanaging kind of technician about these things. He'd had - if you recall - great success in Afghanistan with a very small and mobile force. And I think he really, really did believe it ....
O'Reilly (overtalks him): He thought he could duplicate that success in Iraq. I think you're right and I think it just was a mistake. Are they gonna recover from the mistake? Say that Bush gets re-elected, does Rumsfeld keep his job and are they gonna put more people in there to stabilize, do you think?
KIRK: I don't have a crystal ball, Bill. As you know, none of us in journalism have that, even though some of us like to believe we do. I really don't know and the Washington Post reporters that we worked with really don't know. What we all fear and what the people we talked to told us was likely to happen is that the army itself is stretched perilously thin. "Nearly broken" - a term of art in the military for a force that's not able to go where the President needs it to go. Recruitment is down. It has stop-loss orders going. There seems to be a lot of concern, certainly in the army, that they're stretched too thin and they can't go where we need them to go and, if more needs to happen in Iraq, Bill, I think there's some real worry about whether it CAN happen."
O'Reilly: OK, Mr. Kirk. We'll check your documentary out and we appreciate it very much.
Comment
Change "Bush" to "Clinton" and then ask yourself if the Republicans would be defending such bumbling incompetence so vehemently or would they be calling for tar and feathers?
This war is a hopeless, horrible morass and we're stuck with it.
As of this morning, a secret document has been released showing that the Bush administration has plans - if re-elected - to ask for $70 billion more for Iraq in January.
