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• Mr. Ricks on Learning from Our Mistakes in Iraq
• Mr. Ricks' article on CIA director Hayden
• Mr. Ricks' bio

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Tavis: Thomas E. Ricks is the military affairs correspondent for the 'Washington Post.' In 2000, while working for the 'Wall Street Journal,' he earned a Pulitzer Prize for a series on U.S. military deployment. Now, some may not consider this kind of book traditional summer reading, but it is one of the summer's most talked-about books. In it, Ricks does not mince words, beginning with the title.

'Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq.' He joins us tonight from Washington. Tom Ricks, nice to have you back on the program, sir.

Thomas Ricks: Thanks for having me back.

Tavis: I mentioned at the top of the program, this is without question, at least to my mind, the most comprehensive book written to date about our involvement in Iraq. Let me start by asking you what you did to research for this book, because the minute you crack it open, I suggested earlier, it may not be considered traditional summer reading, because it is painstakingly researched. Tell me about what you did to put this text together.

Ricks: Well, I went out and did about a hundred interviews with senior officers. I also took all the notes from my five reporting trips to Iraq over the last three years. But I think the single biggest bit of research was that I read over 30,000 pages of documents, many of them internal Army U.S. reports, some of them court martial transcripts, sworn testimony, investigative evidence, emails.

One guy at the end of an interview said, you didn't ask for it, but here is a CD-rom with every email I sent to Ambassador Bremer when I was in Iraq. I sat down and read all that information, and tried to write a book that explained what happened in Iraq, how it happened, why it happened. It's not a book of my opinion, really, and I think that puts it aside from other books.

It tries to explain the history of this thing, what we did there, and also, I think it's different from other books in that it takes off in the summer of 2003, which is where other books, until now, have ended.

Tavis: So, my complimentary preface notwithstanding, let me now insult you by asking you so what's new here? Tell me something I don't already know about Iraq, typically. Namely, that what we are experiencing is, in fact, a fiasco.

Ricks: Sure. There's lots of little new information here and there that explains more about events, gets insiders' accounts, and so on. I'd say the single biggest difference from other books, though, is it doesn't dwell on the run-up to the war. It begins by saying sure, the Bush administration made big mistakes in Iraq during the run-up, and also there.

But that you don't get a mess this bad just by having a few guys, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, make errors. That in order to get a mess this big, you really need to have a systemic breakdown. And I look at all the problems, and I look especially at the U.S. military. And I conclude, based upon evidence and interviews, that the U.S. military bungled the occupation, and intensified the insurgency through using bad tactics.

And I think that's very different from other books, and even from the U.S. Congress, which has not ever held a significant hearing on the conduct of the occupation, calling in division commanders to ask about their operations.

Tavis: And yet, Thomas, as I read the text, part of what jumps out at me is that there were a number of folk in the military chain of command, all the way up to the Pentagon, in fact, who were out of touch and out of control. My phraseology, not yours.

Ricks: Yes. But I think you're characterizing it accurately, that there were a lot of people in the military leadership who really didn't get this. And while there were abuses by soldiers, and what they did was wrong, I don't really blame that 21 year old soldier put in an impossible situation. I blame the leadership that put them out there without understanding what kind of war they're getting into.

Without training those soldiers to deal with it. For example, some soldiers in the first armored division in Baghdad in the summer of 2003 decided that the best way to deter looters was to make them cry. So, some soldiers in the first armored division decided the way to make one looter cry is to take him and his two sons, caught looting, and say, which of your kids do you want us to shoot?

The father said, as most would, shoot me instead. The soldiers said no, you don't get that choice. They took one of the sons around to the other side of the truck, fired off a weapon next to this kid's head, and they made them cry. Why did they do this? Because they weren't trained, they weren't prepared, they weren't given the conceptual tools to handle the job.

Tavis: So if we're not going to - and I hear the point you're making here. If we're not going to blame any number of 21 year olds who put their lives on the line in this fiasco, who are we blaming here?

Ricks: The military leadership that didn't prepare, that didn't train, that didn't understand, and the people above them. The number one job of the top leader is to understand the nature of the war that he is fighting. What is it? What is he trying to do? And we really have people who didn't answer those questions very well. Good strategy will fix bad tactics.

Bad tactics will not fix or account for, help out in an absence of strategy. And that's what we had. We had great frontline soldiers, but without much leadership to tell them what to do. That's a little bit like having a Ferrari without a steering wheel. It'll get you somewhere, it'll go fast, but it's probably not where you wanna go.

Tavis: Let me back up for a moment, Thomas, and ask you how this happened. And I ask this question against the backdrop of all the hype that we heard, you'll recall, back in the day. You made the point earlier, you don't talk about the lead-up to the war, and I understand that distinction. But you gotta go back to that point, it seems to me, because there was so much hype around this whole shock and awe notion.

We were absolutely bragging about what we were going to do with regard to shock and awe, we were bragging about how, the administration was, bragging about how we were gonna be greeted and welcomed and loved and hugged and kissed in the streets as liberators. How, then, did this happen? Juxtapose these two realities for me.

Ricks: Well, I think the biggest problem there, in fact, was the civilians. There are a lot of military people saying hey, it's not gonna go the way you're predicting. General Shinseki most famously said, we're gonna need several hundred thousand soldiers to conduct this occupation. He was slapped down publicly by Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz, who called it hard to imagine, wildly off the mark.

What it came down to is there were a lot of people before the war. Strategists, military experts, officers, warning that this thing was not gonna go the way the Bush administration thought. Their advice was not only ignored and neglected, it was treated as disloyal. People who raised questions, who had problems with the war plan, were not invited back to the next meeting.

And in fact, there were so many doubts inside the U.S. military in the fall of 2002, that an official order went out from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ordering commanders, saying to them if there is a war with Iraq, it will be considered part of the war on terror. They had to be told that because so many of them didn't believe it.

Tavis: I was fascinated how you actually got the information, we talked a moment ago about the kind of research you did. But there are a number of names, individuals who you cite in this text, who, in fact, did offer all kinds of suggestions, and were, in fact, slapped down. What kind of drama gets created, you think, when Thomas Ricks writes a book specifically detailing who said what, and when, and where? That, in retrospect, would have been good ideas, had they been listened to?

Ricks: What I'm trying to do there is provide some accountability. This is what Congress should have been doing. In other wars, you had hawks and doves. In this war, you had the silence of the lambs. They simply didn't ask these questions. So I kind of went out in my own, meager, under-resourced, inept way, and asked those questions. For example, Gary Anderson, smart Marine colonel, is sent out by the Pentagon to look at some issues.

And he goes to Ambassador Bremer one day and he says sir, here are some of the things that I remember we did right in Vietnam. And Bremer explodes. Vietnam, he says, Vietnam? This isn't Vietnam. I don't wanna hear about Vietnam. Throws him out of his office. There's a guy with some good advice, ignored. I don't wanna be entirely negative here, though.

There were heroes. There were guys who got it right. Colonel H.R. McMaster, up in Tal Afar. I was embedded with his unit earlier this year. Third armored cavalry regiment. Had a lousy first tour in Iraq, that unit. They killed a prisoner in interrogation, beat him to death. They had an officer who carried a baseball bat he called his Iraqi-beater. And he used it.

McMaster took over the third armored cavalry regiment, and went to every one of his soldiers, looked him in the eye, 3,000 soldiers, and he said, every time you disrespect an Iraq, you're working for the enemy. That's classic counterinsurgency doctrine, explained in a way that a 21 year old soldier can understand. Then McMaster gets out to Iraq, to Tal Afar, with the third armored cavalry regiment, and he sets up a program called ask the customer.

It was a brilliant program. It was for detainees. Every detainee, upon being released, was asked, how were you treated? And by the way, what makes you anti-American? This is a way of making sure that your soldiers aren't abusive, and also showing some respect for Iraqis. And respect is a core value for Iraqis in a way I think we don't understand. Dignity, personal dignity is huge.

It is the core value, I would say. Finally, McMaster, understanding this culture of dignity, honor, and respect, goes to the local leaders who are involved with the insurgency, which would be Sunni clerics, tribal leaders. And he says, in the form of an apology, this statement to them. He says, when we first came to Iraq, we were like blind men, stumbling around the room.

But now, there's a new Iraqi government that's turned on the lights for us, and Americans are no longer stumbling around here. So, he said, the time for honorable resistance is over. That is the most polite way I've ever heard of threatening to kill someone.

What he said there is I'm apologizing, I'm giving you honor, I'm giving you respect, but the time for this is over. Now, translated into American, what he said is I know who you are, you better knock it off. And if you don't, I'll kill you. But he's put it in their cultural terms, and it's a scary message for them, 'cause here's a guy who understands them.

Tavis: Let me ask you two other questions right quick, Thomas. One, how do you process, what do you make of the fact that you asked these questions and got the kinds of answers you've just shared now, and to your earlier point, Congress, as yet, has not?

Ricks: One thing that's really struck me is the book has been pretty controversial. Lot of attacks on me from right wing and left wing bloggers alike. The one place I have not had a negative response from is Iraq. Every single email I've had from soldiers in the field has thanked me. These are from some guys I know, some guys I don't know, saying I'm glad somebody's asking these questions.

I'm glad we're looking at the leadership issues that the Army refuses to look at, and the Congress won't make them. So what I'm hoping here is people might say there's still some hope here, we could do better. But we're gonna have to do it different, if we're gonna prevail in this situation.

Tavis: Finally, I think it was Frank Rich who I was reading this past Sunday in the 'New York Times' who argued in his column that we, at this point, do not have either the money or the manpower to complete this mission. You agree or disagree?

Ricks: I disagree, but I think we don't have the brains, the way we've been doing it, to complete the mission. We'd have to do it a lot smarter, a lot better, and a lot more thoughtfully in order to win. We're spending a lot of money out there, one point five billion dollars a week. Think of what you could do with that money for foreign policy elsewhere, or even here at home.

Tavis: Any idea of what mission accomplished in Iraq would mean at this point in time?

Ricks: I suspect it might mean simply keeping a lid on a civil war there for another 10 years. That might be not a bad mission for us, because my biggest fear is that we go from the low-level civil war you have now to a more intense, very bloody civil war that then spills over the borders of Iraq. And suddenly, we have a regional war on our hands, and that would not be a good thing for the region or for us.

And this is one thing, when people talk about leaving quickly and getting out, like on a timetable, I think they also should then answer the question, what happens to Iraqis? What happens to the region? And are you willing to pay $10 a gallon for gas? 'Cause I think those might be some of the consequences.

Tavis: It's the most controversial book out now about the war in Iraq. The most comprehensive one written to date. 'Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq,' by 'Washington Post' writer and Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas E. Ricks. Thomas, nice to have you back on the program, nice to talk to you.

Ricks: Anytime, thank you.

Tavis: My pleasure. Up next on this program, Emmy-winning TV producer John Wells. Stay with us.