Revenge is a dish best served on Frontline.

(pause)

In all seriousness, do watch these videos and read some of the interview transcripts if you have the time. They've somehow gotten a lot of people who I suspect have been leaking anonymously to speak on the record and on camera.

A figure that I was heretofore unaware of makes a surprise appearance: a former tank commander and author named Douglas Macgregor. Macgregor, who seems to be the Rumsfeld equivalent of Clinton's Dick Morris, was the genius who proposed we attack Iraq with a mere 50,000 (!) troops. Apparently he doesn't like Ric Shinseki very much, accusing him of being some kind of having political aspirations and being in cahoots with the Democrats in the Senate. But the interview gives a window into the kind of debates and rivalries that raged within the Pentagon in the runup to the Iraq war, and still do.

Macgregor also gives the following war rationale:

9/11 comes along, and it seems reasonable to assume that this unfinished business in Iraq is something that will be taken care of. And people should also not lose sight of the fact that you're in the strategic jugular of the Western world, the Persian Gulf. Iraq is sitting on top of some of the finest crude oil in the world. And there has always been and there always will be a concern that these oil resources could fall into the wrong hands and suddenly create enormous surpluses of cash that can be used for the wrong purposes.

So we have a permanent interest there that goes well beyond just what happened to us in 9/11. The other thing is, keep in mind, 9/11 shouldn't have been a dramatic surprise, even though it was, because we'd been at war with the kinds of people that inflicted that damage since the 1970s, when our embassy was seized in Tehran by the first radical Islamic state that emerged in the region, Iran.

So I didn't see any of it as surprising. ... I never heard any other sinister agendas that suggested that this was some sort of secret conspiracy to go after Iraq using 9/11. Iraq was always there. It was always a problem. It was always a sore point because we had failed in '91 -- something that nobody wants to stand up and admit, but we did. I was there. I remember it vividly.

That tracks well with the "strategery" case I've been scrounging around for, which is probably the most defensible argument. He offers some pro-forma chatter about WMD, then goes on to say that the Iraqi Army was "absolutely of no consequence whatsoever." There's lots of discussion about the Army and its foibles, force levels, the decision to disband the Iraqi Army, the insurgency, etc.

One thing that jumps out at me after reading this interview is that the force level was destined to be too low from the beginning. Macgregor went in from day one with certain assumptions that didn't seem to make it into any sort of postwar plan. Aside from the weakness of the Iraqi military, Macgregor says that the main reason to go in light was that "the whole solution in these kinds of operations, if you go back and look at the British or the French or anyone else who's operated in the Arab world for any length of time, is to rapidly back out, that is, with your own force; to move into the background and to push forward the local capabilities that are there; to work with the local people, the tribal sheiks, the clerical structures, to work with them and ultimately to pay them, to subsidize them, because they have no other means of support." But, er, the Americans never actually did that at first. The Iraqi Army melted away, and somebody--and nobody seems willing to own up to this, although I have my suspicions--made the decision not to recall it and use it for security. See what I'm getting at here?

Look at Walt Slocombe's interview:

So I think it's a practical matter that it was never an option of calling back the Iraqi army. I think also there would have been very serious political problems, because in practice, what you would have gotten would have been Sunni units. ... I think it would have been a political disaster in terms of how it would have been responded to by the population.

Was there nobody around to remind everybody what the operating assumptions were? Why the freelancing? Who was in charge?

Maybe the answer is buried in Slocombe's rambling: "the channel was from the president to [Donald] Rumsfeld to Bremer." After reading these interviews, how can anyone believe that (a) process doesn't matter, and (b) it's a good idea to have a guy like Bush calling the final shots?

UPDATE: [10:34 PM 10/27/04] by praktike: One more thing.

Take a look at this Army Times interview with Schoomaker, Shinseki's replacement as Army Chief of Staff and a Rumsfeld loyalist:

The level of operational tempo that we have is being paid for with the supplemental. The increased consumption of repair parts and ammunition are all being funded by the supplemental. But the issue is that, from a strategic perspective, we have a war to fight and we're receiving increased dollars. I call that the window of opportunity — these dollars that we're receiving. And we have an Army to transform. So what is important to understand and I think what really is the extraordinary window that we have here is that we can combine these two. Combine this momentum - the momentum from the focus that war gives us, the funding that we're getting from the war, and our transformational effort. So as we go through the POM, and you can imagine these being different fiscal years, we don't know how long this will go long or how long supplemental funding will continue to support our wartime effort. But it makes sense to us to leverage the momentum and the additional funding we have so that where we go forward to a transformed force for the 21st Century.

We should not think about these as two separate efforts. In other words, Transformation should parallel what we're doing and we shouldn't be resetting our forces back the way they were. We should be resetting them forward. It's a two-for. It's two birds with one stone. It's good for the taxpayer and it's good for the Army and it's good for the nation and what we're doing.

Emphasis mine.

That tracks with Noah Schactman's observation from yesterday:

This is another case of Rumsfeld refusing to make a choice between the military's current needs and its future, of trying to have it both ways. He needs to get gear to the troops in Iraq. But he doesn't want to sacrifice any of the military's big ticket items in order to do it. So he pulls a little trick on Congress. First, Rumsfeld sends lawmakers his main Pentagon budget, which has lots of line items for projects like the hulking, $117 billion Future Combat Systems. And then, crying poverty, Rumsfeld asks for body armor money – which there's no chance in hell that Congress will deny.

It's a very, very slick Washington maneuver – one you'd be tempted to call a form of blackmail.

Hmmm.

UPDATE [4:33 PM 10/28/04] by praktike: via TAPPED, I'm reminded of this silly Barbara Lerner apology for La Guerre a la Rumsfeld.