MG: Well, in the Gulf War the Joint Chiefs of Staff played an important role, and the chairman was Colin Powell, and he and [then-Defense Secretary Dick] Cheney did not see eye to eye — there’s a lot about that in The Generals’ War. However, even though they had their differences, including over the advisability of going to war, Powell was a real force in the Pentagon in terms of shaping the war plan. In this war, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were largely marginalized and [Defense] Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld was really the dominant person. He worked things out with General [Tommy] Franks [chief of the United States Central Command during the invasion of Iraq], and these two individuals were really the key people in putting together the plan. The whole style of the operation was different. Powell favored the use of overwhelming force, while Rumsfeld favored the so-called “lean and mean” military.


PM: You write about guys like Doug Macgregor in the Pentagon and the war plans he came up with that Rumsfeld seemed to love. One of Macgregor’s plans was to invade Iraq with about 16,000 troops and bring in another 16,000 to secure the country once the bulk of the fighting was over. Have you had any feedback from people like that, or General Franks, who don’t come off so well in the book?


MG: I’ve had a fair amount of feedback from military officers who were involved in the war one way or another. So far, it’s been favorable. I mean, they lived it, they were there, they were the people that were on the ground and had to make it work, despite the erroneous planning assumptions in Washington.


I have not had any feedback from Rumsfeld or Franks or Cheney, but you know, Trainor and I made a sustained effort to interview Rumsfeld over many, many months. He was actually promised to us as an interview at one point, and it got to the point where we were supposed to see him on a specific day at a specific time, and then they postponed it. To our surprise, at the very end they cancelled it, and it was Rumsfeld himself who decided he didn’t want to do it. So it wasn’t for want of trying. I had interviewed general Franks in 2004 for a Times series on postwar problems, and that became an element of the book. But then I tried to interview him after that for the book, and he declined. None of this really hampered our research because officials who interacted with these people and worked with them were available, including people who attended meetings with them and had notes from these meetings.


But we really did want to give them their say in the book, and I wrote letters and emails, and I really made appeals over a long period of time for both these guys. I also tried over a sustained period to interview Dick Cheney because I interviewed him at some length for The Generals’ War and he had been helpful to me…I thought for a while that might happen, but then there was a change of staff in Cheney’s office, and I understand [Cheney’s Chief of Staff] Scooter Libby got involved in the decision — I don’t know exactly what happened — but, anyway, after months and months of importuning, he decided not to do it. But I would say most everybody else was cooperative.


There is a big debate among journalists over anonymous sources and how to handle those — and certainly we have that at the New York Times. Obviously there’s a great deal of material in the book that comes from [such sources] because of the sensitive nature of the episodes we recounted, but at the very end of the book, we quote all of these senior generals on the record about how the “window of opportunity” in the summer of 2003 closed — General [James] Conway, General [David] McKiernan, General [“Buff”] Blunt, General [James] Mattis, General [John] Kelly, the acting Army chief of staff Jack Keane, General [Raymond]Odierno — these were key figures in the war, and they’re quoted on the record as being unhappy with [Coalition Provisional Authority head] Jerry Bremer’s policies, like the decision to abolish the Iraqi army, the decision to cancel elections in Najaf and some other matters. Spider Marks, McKiernan’s chief intelligence officer, says there weren’t enough troops, also on the record. I’m a little surprised people haven’t taken more note of that, because you have really the senior military leadership from that time — on the record — giving their views on some of the things that could have been done better during the war.


I tried to put as much as I could on the record, but it couldn’t be done in all cases, but at a time when people are questioning what your sources are and how you know things, we tried to establish that. That’s because I was trying to establish a historical record here, because there isn’t a historical record of this war. There isn’t a good after-action assessment that the government has issued on this war. The Army has given a pretty good account of their operation and the Marines of theirs, and the Pentagon has given itself a high grade in a “lessons learned” report, but there hasn’t really been a good official government account of this. So I feel we were not just writing about the war, but we were laying down a record of the war and the history of the war.


PM: In writing about some of the battles during the military’s race toward Baghdad, you show that much of the fighting was much more vicious and back-and-forth than many earlier accounts have led people to believe.