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AMY GOODMAN: Today, we're joined by both authors of Cobra II, Michael Gordon of The New York Times and Bernard Trainor, retired Marine general and former military correspondent for the Times. They join us in the studio in Washington, D.C. We welcome you both to Democracy Now!

GEN. BERNARD TRAINOR: Good morning.

MICHAEL GORDON: Good morning.

AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you both with us. If you, General Bernard Trainor, can lay out what you think were the five problems with the invasion, as you lay them out in the book.

GEN. BERNARD TRAINOR: Well, these -- I think it can be generally stated that there were erroneous assumptions made upon which the planning floundered. The ground attack went to Baghdad in record time. However, along the way they ran into the sort of resistance that they had not expected. But if you're looking for the weak link in the process, it wasn't the operation itself, the invasion itself. It was the plan for the end of the invasion. And I use the term "plan," because a lot of people say that there wasn't any plan after Saddam's regime fell.

But there was a plan. And the plan was for the United States military to get out of Iraq as quickly as possible, turn Iraq over to a U.S.-supported Iraqi government, on the assumption that the infrastructure, both the political and economic infrastructure, would be largely intact, and that the international community, the U.N. and others, would get involved in the post-Saddam period. That was a fatally flawed assumption, and as a result, a fatally flawed plan.

So, if you're looking for the problem that emerged with the insurgency, that would be kind of the fundamental principle. There were lots of other little mistakes that went through it, which turned out to be very large mistakes: disbanding the Iraqi army, not having sufficient American forces to follow on the invasion -- as a matter of fact, cutting back on the forces that were involved in the invasion -- and all of these things closed a window of opportunity of reasonable stability that existed immediately after the fall of Baghdad. But that window of opportunity only stayed open for a short period of time, and it slammed shut, and the insurgency emerged.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Gordon, do you think the invasion itself was a mistake?

MICHAEL GORDON: Well, that's a policy judgment and a political judgment that’s really beyond the scope of our book. Our book is not about whether we should or should not have gone to war. The book is about how we went to war. And one thing that our analysis and reporting shows, as General Trainor said, is in the summer of 2003 -- and I was embedded throughout this period in Baghdad then -- I think most of the U.S. military commanders there thought that there was a chance to put Iraq on a better course had we done some things differently, had we had more troops, had we had effective nation-building policies, had we not disbanded the army. And it was the combination of these errors that created an environment which allowed the insurgency to gain some traction.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Michael Gordon, your book is especially critical throughout of the role of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. You talk about a variety of ways in which he directly participated in the planning and even when troops would be deployed, micromanaged the military at a level unprecedented. Could you talk a little bit about that and why you were so critical of Secretary Rumsfeld?

MICHAEL GORDON: Well, you know, in our book, General Trainor and I, we didn't set out to do an investigation of Secretary Rumsfeld or General Franks. We just laid out the facts, and we had a lot of documents and a lot of interviews. And what the facts show is that Secretary Rumsfeld came to the Defense Department with an agenda. The agenda was to transform the American military. There's some good in that. We're not saying that's all bad by any means. But he wanted to create a force that could be basically lean and mean and carry out operations that were far smaller than, let's say, an invasion force that Colin Powell would put together. I think the force that he put together -- and he didn't actually order the generals to do it this way or that way, but he guided them, through suasion, as one of his aides put it, by asking the appropriate questions, by demanding certain briefings, by sending down papers that he wanted the generals to read.

But basically, the force that he essentially established for the invasion was adequate for the task of taking Baghdad and getting there, although there were a few hairy moments along the way, but utterly inadequate for what followed, you know, the so-called -- what the military called "Phase IV” or really the post-war operations. He was really a dominating presence. But, you know, General Franks, I'd say, was very much on the same wavelength, and the two, you know, basically collaborated to put together the plan. You know, one very interesting thing is that the joint chiefs of staff were largely marginalized in this process, and in certain respects, the National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, and Secretary of State Powell were pretty much cut out of it, too.

AMY GOODMAN: General Trainor, you talk about the troika -- President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Rumsfeld -- making the decisions?

GEN. BERNARD TRAINOR: That's correct. That's a correct -- the three of them were joined at the hip, if I can use that expression. They all thought basically the same way, and their perceptions became reality. I think the President, I would describe it as the man who presided over the troika. I think Vice President Cheney was very influential in terms of the policy. And certainly, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was a man in charge of the execution of the policy. Everybody else was what I would describe as in the outer circle. The National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, and even the neo-cons, which gained so much blame for things going wrong. But those people were -- they were in the outside of the private sanctum of the President, Vice President and Secretary of Defense. Those three thought alike and acted in unison.

JUAN GONZALEZ: But interestingly, in terms of Secretary Powell, while he wasn't as much in the loop, according to your book, it wasn't so much that he opposed going into Iraq. According to some of your, I guess, interviews with Richard Armitage, the secretary's thoughts were the invasion of Iraq should wait until President Bush's second term, after he had built more international support, and that he saw it as totally -- something totally acceptable perhaps in the second term.

GEN. BERNARD TRAINOR: Well, I think you have to step back and look at the situation as it existed. The international community, all the intelligence agencies were all convinced that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. And this administration saw that as a threat that required preemptive action, because -- not that Saddam Hussein was going to pop a nuclear weapon or chemical weapon here in the United States -- but he saw that after 9/11, the threat of amorphous terrorism, with terrorists getting chemical, biological weapons and ultimately nuclear weapons without any national fingerprint on it. And how do you deal with something like that?

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.

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