Here is where you can
download the Iraqi Perspectives Project everyone is talking about. It's a little hard to find on the internet for the moment, at least as of writing this it was. It is a 7.5 meg download, so I hope you don't have dial-up.
This report, on "Military operations conducted in Iraq, reflecting the Iraqi civilian and military leadership’s perspective of events" was published by the United States Joint Forces Command. If the above link for downloading does not work. Try
this one.The report is some 200 plus pages and is the unclassified version.
The transcript of the Pentagon media roundtable can be read below in its entirety or also found
here:
Media Roundtable on the Iraqi Perspective Project
Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Cucolo
Director, Joint Center for Operational Analysis Army Lt. Col. (Ret) Kevin Woods
March 24, 2006GENERAL CUCOLO: I'm from Joint Forces Command and I have no slides, so I hope that's a good start. [Laughter]. And I'm proud to say that the lead researcher and lead author, Kevin Woods, is a recently retired Apache helicopter pilot, lieutenant colonel, United States Army.
I would like to go through just a very brief opening statement.
The Iraqi Perspectives project is a research effort conducted by United States Joint Forces Command, Joint Center for Operational Analysis. It focuses on Operation Iraqi Freedom and specifically the time period from March to May, really the first of May, 2003.
Using information gathered from dozens of interviews, with senior Iraqi military and political leaders during the fall and winter of 2003, 2004, and making use of thousands of official Iraqi documents we have a comprehensive, historical analysis of the forces and motivations that drove our opponents' decisions.
To accomplish this, the project leader, Kevin Woods, led a small team of professionals in a systematic two year study of the former Iraqi regime and military. This book is the first major product of that effort.
Essentially, Kevin and his team have crafted a substantive examination of Saddam Hussein's leadership and its effect on the Iraqi military decisionmaking process. Moreover, it goes a long way towards revealing the inner workings of a closed regime from an insider's point of view.
The overall objective of this of this project was to learn the right lessons from Operation Iraqi Freedom, and while the practice of self-critique and gathering lessons are distinguishing features of the U.S. military, in almost every past instance our understanding of events remained incomplete. That's because any assessment was limited to the Blue view, the friendly view of what happened.
While we often had a relatively complete picture of what our adversary did, we were left only to speculate on which of our actions were causing specific enemy responses and why. Expert analysts and Red Team assessments, that would be an American, for example, putting on an Iraqi point of view. They make the speculation as informed as possible but because of the impenetrability of closed regimes, the usefulness of a Red Team assessment is even limited.
In this case, however, by shedding light on the actual Red Team's view, this study helps contribute to a more fully developed history of the war.
Now it should be noted this is the first such effort by the U.S. government since World War II, at least certainly of this scope and scale, when the U.S. conducted a comprehensive review of recovered German and Japanese documents, as well as interviewed key military and civilian leaders from our former enemies.
Although this project is an important first step, we acknowledge our understanding of Operation Iraqi Freedom is incomplete. It's in the interest of getting as much accurate information as possible into the hands of those already studying Operation Iraqi Freedom that we release this report today.
With that, Kevin and I will take your questions.
MEDIA: General, can you explain why the Russians were so eager to help the Iraqis? And could you also assess the quality and the effects of the intelligence that they provided?
GENERAL CUCOLO: If I could focus on this particular project, that was only a small part of Saddam's calculus of the decisions he should make and the actions he should take in the events leading up to the conflict. It was counting on other members of the international community to assist him in any way that he saw fit to get what he wanted.
I can't comment on the quality of the intelligence because what the study focuses on is what Saddam, how Saddam worked the international community to get what he wanted.
Kevin, do you want to comment on that?
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: No, other than that the study focuses on what Saddam's regime understood the operational strategic level, and does not focus on what anybody else outside of that knew, understood, or what their motivations were. So I don't think the study addresses motivations outside the group that we studied. So Russians or anybody else, it's outside the scope of what we actually looked at.
MEDIA: As a military person what would you highlight as the main misconceptions that Saddam had about us and the main misconceptions that we had about Saddam?
GENERAL CUCOLO: I'd like to stick with the misconceptions Saddam had about us. I'll throw one out and I'll have Kevin pile on.
I think Saddam believed that the United States was casualty averse, to an absolutely incredible degree. When after the Stark incident all he received was a demarche, a diplomatic note. He watched the Kosovo conflict and the absence of land forces. Prior to that, of course, he watched the conflict in Somalia. He highlighted to his lieutenants, I call them lieutenants, to his primary military assistants, that in Somalia America loses 19 soldiers and then leaves. Black Hawk Down was a favorite movie that was almost required watching. And so on. So casualty averse was one significant misconception. There were many
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: I think that was a really large one. But Saddam spent a lot of time with the generals talking about the primacy of the spiritual, political aspects of war, with a very straight face, very seriously, convincing the generals after they completed a serious after-action review of Desert Storm, with Saddam correcting their assessments to point out how Desert Storm was a victory for Iraq in many many ways. Standing up to 33 nations, not backing down in the face of the world and the world super powers was seen as a great victory. Over time, and he looked at these things in much longer time scales than we probably give him credit for, over time it was proving itself out regardless of what the generals calculated his losses, be it tanks or troops or terrain.
MEDIA: Doesn't it also show our misconceptions about him in terms of weapons of mass destruction, in terms of his plans for the oilfields, use of chemical weapons on the battlefield, et cetera?
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: As we said in the other case, the study specifically doesn't go into our misconceptions or non-misconceptions on the point of the war. We really focused on trying to articulate what we think the Iraqi senior staff, senior military, senior leadership in the regime was focused on. I think it's best left to others to try to calculate that from both sides of the street.
GENERAL CUCOLO: Absolutely. That's a really good question, and you started off by saying as a military person. The value of this is you get to see their view. As absurd as it may seem to a Western military thinker -- Some of Saddam's decisions may seem incredibly absurd to a Western military thinker, but if you take it in the context of this closed regime they make imminent sense to the Iraqis. That is the value of this.
You read a document in 2002 or 2003. You cannot understand that document without understanding the people writing it and executing it and what they faced in '87, in '91, in '94, in '99, and so on. That's the key.
This is a triangulation, if you will. We think it's valuable analysis because of the way the analysis was done. It's a mix of oral history, the interviews with the senior leadership. Oral history. It's a mix of document analysis. And then it's putting it all in the context of contemporary history. If you can triangulate all three you can get a better understanding of what happened. So that's where we went with it.
MEDIA: I assume the interviews that you did were with some of the leaders [inaudible]. How forthcoming were they? How willing to talk were they? Did they require much prodding?
GENERAL CUCOLO: Great question.
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: In all cases they were under different circumstances, but when we went in to ask questions we asked the questions as a matter of historical inquiry and really, for many of them, it seemed to resonate. It was an opportunity to tell their story. As opposed to answer questions. So a lot of them were fairly extended in a sense. For some of the generals I would put a map on the table, 1/250,000 scale military map. It's a generic map of the terrain, and ask them to speak in general on what it is they did, what it is they understood, to allow them to kind of give their story.
For some of them this was an outlet for giving their story as they saw it. Since I wasn't there to try to validate specific Q&A in any interrogation sense because I'm not an interrogator, just to ask the question gave them an outlet, so a lot of them took it and really opened up. Some of the generals even noted, one noted to me specifically that since usually history is written by victors, they were very appreciative of the opportunity to get their story on paper. And they wanted to have it out. That was --
MEDIA: Did many of them think that America was risk averse? Were there divisions among the leadership on that point?
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: As we note in here, we noted, there are probably other ways to look at this, but from the standpoint of those of us doing the study there was a professional cadre of general officers that we interviewed. I articulated, they kind of understood the basics of the art and science of war at the operational level, they understood the differences in the quality measurements of the coalition force, the Iraqi force. They understood the strategies and those issues.
There was another that were much more political, much more their positions related to the tribal or family connections or the loyalty connections to a very narrow group of Ba'athist officials. Their answers on the military issues didn't carry much weight. They either didn't answer them very well or didn't answer them completely or didn't answer them at all. So we distinguished between the professional cadre, if you will, --
MEDIA: Did they believe that the U.S. would attack, or did they tell Saddam that?
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: A lot of the political military kind of parroted the general line that we're really not sure about where the boss is taking all of this, but they believed the U.S. would not go all the way which was Saddam's belief. Some of the professionals, some of the core commanders were pretty sure that once the U.S. made the effort to go across the border, not an air war, when it became a ground war, they anticipated a long air war. But once they saw there was a commitment to ground war they were pretty convinced that it was going to --
MEDIA: Did they tell Saddam that or did they just keep quiet?
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: In one case one of the generals tried to make the case, but in most cases most did not raise the issue to Saddam or the Minister of Defense or the senior leadership. They did not carry that --
MEDIA: Did you ask Saddam to participate in this at all?
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: No. Saddam was not --
MEDIA: Did you ask him?
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: Most of the interviews were conducted right before he was captured, and Saddam at the time he was captured was a one of one category detainee, so he was not available for this history project.
MEDIA: In your report you seem to say two things. One, that you [inaudible] Operation Iraqi Freedom; and the second is that most of the contents of this counter currently accepted wisdom. I'm wondering if each of you could pick out the one thing that you thought really [inaudible] for this report. And if you would speak on the lessons, the right lessons to learn. I think we're all struck by the double backwards [inaudible] about the WMD campaign. What is the United States to do in a particular situation [inaudible] when a question like that comes up? It was a Rubic's Cube of trying to figure out [inaudible]. So how do you learn the lessons and find what really [inaudible] on the ground?
GENERAL CUCOLO: I think embedded in your question is part of the answer. Being aware of the nature of closed regimes and what those closed regimes can do in a military strategic construct, what the real options look like from their side of the hill, given the way they set themselves up, the way they control their societies. Just having an appreciation for that may be one of the lessons that you can take from this kind of study. It's very rare to have this kind of access. So how do you advantage that? It's not the specific points but maybe more the general points. And it's like the way you asked the question, you kind of have the answer, being aware of those kinds of environments, conditions.
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: I've got to reinforce. Again, everybody has to understand that this study was started after -- I was asked why does it only go until 1 May or 9 April, so to speak. The study was started after we had completed, after Joint Forces Command had completed a lessons learned analysis of the major combat operations phase. And after briefing that to senior leadership the question came back, well would our lessons learned be any different if knew what the Iraqis were thinking? If we knew the Iraqi decisions, how they were made. So that was the spark that started the study.
Here's one example, to get at your question, the nature of the closed regime. Learning the nature of a closed regime. Multiple chains of command that are compartmented reporting up. How that translates on the battlefield. A popular force like Al Kuds or the Fedayeen Saddam in a defensive position in a builtup area being bypassed by coalition forces, and telling Saddam, Saddam, what a great victory. We have defeated the 82nd Airborne, they are going away, and Saddam believing that. And quite frankly, anecdotally, remember Baghdad Bob? Baghdad Bob believed, pretty much believed, he was parroting what the command actually thought. Now just to finish up, then we'll take another question.
This type of analysis, well, let me ask this question. How do you get to 20/20 hindsight? I don't think you do. That's perfect hindsight. But you can get close by doing this. Having a Blue view, adding a Red Team view, and then getting Red's view. By improving hindsight and studying it, you sharpen your ability for foresight, and that's key.
MEDIA: [inaudible] one thing that stuck out to you that wow, [inaudible]?
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: I'll throw one out, but again, one of the purposes of this thing was to create a more accurate, or the basis for a more accurate case studies. So the right lessons, I wasn't going to be specific in this because lessons are something the Blue, the Coalition needs to learn. The purpose of the study was to establish the basis for a coherent case study. It's more complete. Now start thinking about what it is we need to learn and how to learn it.
One of the ones I'll throw out is on the nature of the events that took place after the regime fell and the conditions that were set. We used to call it the petri dish for the insurgency. The nature of how the regime dealt with the uprisings in 1991. You could almost draw a straight line by listening to their conversations, reading their documents and their studies, that that was the number one security threat to this regime was the event of an internal uprising. In Saddam's mind the uprising in '91 was the closest thing to almost end his regime. It was much more important to him than the Iran/Iraq war, Desert Storm, and all the sanction periods. According to his own calculations he lost control of all but one province, Al Anbar. That he counted uprisings in all provinces, to include Baghdad.
So the measure they took to prevent that from happening again included things like the Ba'ath emergency plans which were essentially localized counterinsurgency concept plans. Counterinsurgency against their own people in localized areas. You had the lies of the Fedayeen Saddam and the empowerment of the Al Kuds which again was to try to prevent what happened which was the Coalition in '91 disrupted, by bombing bridges and interrupting roads, especially in the south, facilitated the uprising because the army couldn't get back into place to put down the uprising. You had the army evacuating out of Kuwait, some of which rebelled, the regular army forces rebelled. They couldn't get down to put it out, and that's what almost unhinged the regime.
To prevent that from ever happening again, Saddam refused to drop the bridges. As late as the 2nd of April, we're on the verge of capturing the airport of Baghdad. He's refusing desperate pleas from commanders in the field to drop the bridges. Saddam was worried about an uprising as late as 2 April.
That's the kind of thing that when you start to get the rest of the case study then you can start asking other questions based on Coalition conceptions of what occurred and how they might occur.
MEDIA: Given the level of duplicity among the Iraqi leadership, how much confidence do you have in the voracity of what you were told? Also, before you started this study did you have any idea of the degree to which Saddam had miscalculated?
GENERAL CUCOLO: Here we are talking to the Iraqis. Are we taking every word at ground truth? Absolutely not. I'll let Kevin talk to how we tried to, actually he did already a little bit, but I'll have you cover it again.
I would commend off of that question, folks normally don't read annexes in books. But there's a 13 page annex in the back that covers methodology of the study. And it talks to your question. We certainly recognize that some of the Iraqis we talked to were talking to us to save their own skin or curry favor, to convince us that they were not criminals of some kind, or as Kevin said, just get history right. So Kevin, talk about some of the techniques.
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: We tried to triangulate it. So for every senior interview, we were focused on the military operational view, not the larger strategic view or the tactical view. So if we interviewed, for instance, one of the corps commanders we worked very hard to find a division commander in the same corps. So if we're going to talk about an event on a certain day, I interviewed these people all separately. I never did any group interviews. So they're all interviewed separately. It's like anything else, I just tried to find multiple ways of viewing that day or that series of events. The more we spend time in the documents the more we're finding situation reports, battlefield logs and orders, that help us then again put dates and times and specific actions.
But it's like any other contemporary history problem. There is a lot of material. How do you sort all this out and find out? So we started with the oral histories to provide kind of a framework of investigation. Then we went into the documents and tried to find documents that refute or corroborate.
Some things we did not use in the study because we could not find multiple ways of identifying was it true or not true. We explicitly excluded them. Some of the more outlandish things. Because I don't know. I don't know where it fits and I've got no other data to back it up, so we attempted in most cases to find multiple interview sources or multiple document sources to build a story.
Then there's the plausibility factor of does it make sense militarily, is this possible the way they described it? Some of the stories were not so we left those off.
MEDIA: And the second half of my question, did you know before you started the study the degree to which Saddam had miscalculated?
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: I'm not sure how to answer that. I was part of the Blue lessons learned so I was in Kuwait and Iraq during the major combat operations, so the fact that the war ended, in the major combat operation phase ended the way it did, I can't say --
GENERAL CUCOLO: We were immersed, you've got to understand, we're immersed in the operational level of war. We wander into strategic in trying to understand about what happened, but so we would not have, at least our team, our analysis group.
MEDIA: [inaudible]? I don't find anything about. That was it never in the report? [Inaudible]?
GENERAL CUCOLO: It's not in our book, and as you know I'm not allowed to talk about classified information.
MEDIA: But you don't speak [inaudible]. You don't [inaudible]?
GENERAL CUCOLO: Sir, I can't confirm or deny.
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: It's not in the report.
MEDIA: [inaudible] in Baghdad?
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: It's not part of the study. Honestly, it's not part of the study.
MEDIA: My question is, did you come across information that suggested that they did?
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: It's not part of the study. The way you asked it is the Iraqis had no knowledge of it so I didn't study it. It's not part of the study.
MEDIA: What about the Russian spy that was in CENTCOM? [Inaudible] about that?
GENERAL CUCOLO: I think it refers to an Iraqi document which I think is also available on the DNI web site, one of the documents they released. Again, that's a document that the Iraqis wrote. So to go beyond that document is not something I can do.
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: You have to be very careful about documents. Again, the Iraqis may translate something that was written by someone else but now it's an Iraqi document. So you really have to study the documents and take them in context.
MEDIA: Do you believe it was credible? Accurate? Or do you doubt it?
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: I have no reason to doubt the Iraqi document, but I don't have any other knowledge of that topic beyond the document.
MEDIA: If I could just [inaudible]. [Inaudible] these Iraqi documents that lead to the production [inaudible]. The document was [inaudible] document?
GENERAL CUCOLO: I don't want to mislead you. I was talking about documents in general.
MEDIA: Can you describe the document that you're talking about?
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: I do this so much, I can't describe the specific document. I know it is part of one of many, one of thousands of documents, and it was either a battlefield log or it was a specific document in the Iraqi military intelligence.
GENERAL CUCOLO: And if we can't be accurate with you right now, we want to refrain from commenting about it. We've got to give, more so Kevin than me, a little bit of a break on the, and I don't mean to ask for a break. Here's the deal. This is not new. As soon as Kevin and the team came up with a product which of course was classified, we started, Joint Forces Command started applying it like we do all of our lessons learned, as quickly as possible and through joint professional military education and into the profession of arms. Where possible coalition, but certainly within the United States. We take lessons learned.
Joint Center for Operational Analysis, my little outfit, does that. We're embedded in locations in Afghanistan and Iraq and we observe and we pull those observations, best practices, things we need to fix, and we try and turn them as quickly as possible back to the force.
The Iraqi Perspectives is no different. This has been, the classified report has been a part of professional military education for almost two years. And Kevin has been just awash in the report and the documents. So if we cannot answer an accurate question about what we're putting out today, which was an effort started last May. We saw the Joint Forces Command leadership, the commander at the time, Admiral Giambastiani, saw the history of the war being written without context, without the context of the Iraqi view that we had. And so he directed that we declassify everything we could and put it in a narrative that would add to the discussion. That's what we did.
MEDIA: I know you touched on how you're applying the information, but can you talk about how much of the information is deleted from the classified version? Also generally the type of information that was taken out
GENERAL CUCOLO: I sure can't. Let me offer you this.
A general approach to declassification is if information, and this is a general approach, you'd apply this to anything. If information either shows a strength, a U.S. Coalition strength that we'd rather not have public, a U.S. Coalition vulnerability we'd rather not have public. Or a technique or a source that we'd rather not have public. Those things are generally what we don't declassify. That's one piece of it.
Another piece of it is most of these documents as I'm sure you'll see for anybody that does the document mining of what DNI is putting out now, they come from different sources. The source who owns the document or the information gets to call the classification. So there's a lot to it. It's very complex.
MEDIA: [inaudible] organizationally?
GENERAL CUCOLO: Sure.
MEDIA: The [inaudible]?
GENERAL CUCOLO: I can't talk about them. I'm sorry.
MEDIA: I wonder, I haven't had a chance to look at the report yet. I didn't have a hard copy. But after interviewing all these people, what's your conclusion about the absence of WMD? What is the conclusion about what happened to the WMD?
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: Again, my role in this was to put together a case study in what the Iraqis thought. Not to draw larger conclusions which I'll leave to people like you and others who can use this as a source document to draw your own conclusions on that.
I mean as articulated in the book, I never met an Iraqi general, I never interviewed an Iraqi general, who ever said I know of WMD. They all were adamant, they personally have no knowledge of WMD.
MEDIA: Even Chemical Ali?
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: Even Chemical Ali. However, and the however is important. Go back to the first thing General Cucolo talked about, the nature of the regime and the way this place operated. A significant number of them would offer "but it is possible that it exists and I not know about it", and they articulate it in various ways, but one of them is the compartmented nature of the regime. They all were very aware of the nature of how this organization ran. Again, they articulated it in different ways but they can all say with a straight face, yes, it's possible. And a third one that was offered, which I found almost too ironic to believe, was that it might be possible because the rest of the world seems to think it's so. [Laughter].
MEDIA: What did Chemical Ali say about it?
GENERAL CUCOLO: Talk about Chemical Ali just for a second.
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: Well, he's an interesting case because he is not considered by the team as we did the interviews and talked to others who spent a lot of time with him, to be the most honest of individuals when it comes to things that he was involved in. Let's put it that way.
He's very articulate; he's got a very sharp mind. He can remember a lot of detail. Just don't ask him any detail that he was involved in.
But given that --
MEDIA: He was convinced Iraq no longer had WMD. What did he say on that point?
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: In one area he said he's not convinced that everybody believes him, being the other members of the senior regime. It's possible they don't believe it. But again as we articulate, there was, I don't know how else to describe it is, Saddam needed to get out from underneath the WMD question to satisfy one problem, which was the sanction in the international community. He wanted to keep mystery about WMD because he saw himself in a very dangerous neighborhood. That very fine line between how do you do both simultaneously, combined with the nature of the regime, the compartmented nature of the regime, the way it maintains power. It makes a very very interesting skew of personalities, actions and motivations at the top. We try to articulate that in the book and I think there's a lot more to learn as history unfolds here and we get more insights.
GENERAL CUCOLO: I think out of fairness too, in answering the question, we did not find anything different from the ISG report.
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: I'm a big fan of the ISG report. For those who haven't read it, all 1600 pages, I don't recommend you read it at one sitting, but -- [Laughter]. The first 99 pages of volume one are fantastic. They really do capture the nuances here and this really frustrating box, Rubik's Cube as it was described a minute ago. It's a great way to describe it. You turn it one direction and you think you understand it; but you turn it over and you're not lined up again. That was a very real aspect of how that place operated.
MEDIA: Can you speak a little bit about the occupation, that Saddam threatened Iran and Turkey with internal instability. Did you find anything to suggest that in Saddam's mind he saw himself as a man who threatened Western countries, he sought to build a capacity to threaten Western countries? In short did he see himself [inaudible] threat to the West? That's what we were told.
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: I want to stay within the context of --
MEDIA: It should be.
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: Saddam had grand visions of where Iraq or as he said the Arab nation that you saw as not Iraq, but this larger kind of pan-Arab Ba'athist vision that's been around for a very long time, as an up-and-coming serious power and it was his historical role. He used to talk about things in terms of pages of history. He wrote the page of history to defend the Arab people against the Iranians in the Iran/Iraq war. He wrote the page of history to beat back the colonialists in 1991. He actually calls the uprising [inaudible] treason and treachery. It didn't work out the way he wanted it, but he captured that in history.
So he was going through this very large series of processes in his mind, all with a very serious, historical view. If that meant dealing with the West by pushing them out of the Middle East or in that way, then that was part of that equation.
MEDIA: Did you find anything that indicated that he looked operationally for proxies who could fight a war for him like terrorists or al-Qaida?
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: You'll find in the book Saddam was not shy about dealing with actors who could help his cause. Those cases are specified in the book.
MEDIA: Speaking of actors who can help his cause. The first question was about Russia and strategic intelligence on page 144. It's going to get a lot of attention around the world. I need to ask you straight up, was this an example of what was going on repeatedly between Russia and Iraq during the conflict or an aberration based on the documents you saw, and the generals you talked to?
GENERAL CUCOLO: I think essentially it's driven by economic interests as outlined in the book. So to answer your question, I don't see it as an aberration. I see it as a follow-on to economic engagement and economic interests.
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: And the documents that are cited in the gook are there, and there are more on the DNI web site.
MEDIA: Did you pass any of this stuff into the State Department the last couple of years for a potential demarche against the Russians? As you say it's been around for two years [inaudible].
GENERAL CUCOLO: We briefed all kinds of folks. You'd have to check with State.
MEDIA: Were you surprised at the tactical intelligence you were given from the Iraqis as part of cooperation in general? This is kind of shocking, actually.
GENERAL CUCOLO: I was.
MEDIA: [Inaudible] the general.
GENERAL CUCOLO: I am the general. [Laughter].
Certainly. I was surprised.
MEDIA: Going back to the military commanders again, given the fact that many of them must have been terribly afraid of Saddam Hussein, did you notice any evidence of double book keeping? They were keeping certain military logs that their superiors could take a look at that reflects party line? And then what was really happening for maybe historical reasons, reasons of their own type of honesty --
GENERAL CUCOLO: How about knowing about the spies you weren't supposed to know about?
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: There was a lot of dishonest reporting in the readiness system, let's call it that. All kinds of very strange, sometimes trivial, sometimes significant areas.
One of the corps commanders described what it was like to be a part of a corps -- I wanted to understand from the military how did you plan? How did you think through the problems that you were handed every day? They described corps planning meetings, where you bring all your division commanders together and the chiefs of staff, then you have all the official spies in the room. The description of an official spy, it may have been a translation issue, but it was really the intel staffs. So you had the general Military Intelligence Directorate staff, the Director of General Security, the Special Security Office Representative. Those are the generic offices that would all be there. They made an off-hand comment about "the spies I wasn't supposed to know about" had to be there. Those were personal representations of senior members of the inner circle.
So all the military staffs, there was a parallel reporting chain, and this core commander described one of his major duties for his chief of staff was to keep up with this unofficial reporting chain. You had to really worry in Saddam's Iraq if you were doing military planning with more than one general in the room and it was not an officially sanctioned meeting. Just the hint that it might not be an officially sanctions meeting would cause a lot of headaches for senior leaders. So they would work very hard to have people who otherwise wouldn't be normal attendees be there because they know that the individual's going to walk out and call a member of the inner circle and describe the meeting.
MEDIA: So no one could actually get anything done. Was there almost like a black market sort of thing where you had, this is what the whole song and dance and fire and light, and then here's, underneath what we're doing [inaudible].
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: Again, the two types of generals I described before, I found them at all levels. So one of the core commanders specifically I thought was very professional. He worked, he did all kinds of interesting things to make the system work for him and his troops, the way he described his mission.
Anther core commander was almost the opposite. I didn't do that because I wasn't told to do that. Even if it was something as fundamental as coordinating a major boundary with another unit on your flank, and in defense of warfare that's a very important task. But he wasn't ordered to do it, so he didn't make the call. That's the kind of split I think along those professional and political lines.
MEDIA: Sir, could you tell me, you say this is the first major product that you've [inaudible]. Why else do you have planned?
GENERAL CUCOLO: We've got to see where the data, the documents and the analysis takes us.
MEDIA: Where are you now? Are you coming to a fork in the road?
GENERAL CUCOLO: We're working through documents primarily, and just seeing what's rich enough to follow. That's the best way for me to put it.
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: A lot of documents.
GENERAL CUCOLO: A lot of documents, and there are so many ways to go with it.
MEDIA: Would you like to interview Saddam at some point?
GENERAL CUCOLO: I'd love to interview Saddam at some point.
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: I would love to.
CUCOLO: Who wouldn't? But the effort continues. And I really have to reinforce. This, I hate to call it limited because there's so much work that went into it, but it's because of the volume of data out there. This is the first step. And we wanted to get it out so it could become a part of the discussion.
MEDIA: Could you characterize the volume at all, of building [inaudible]?
GENERAL CUCOLO: It's actually in the book. There's a picture of one of the warehouses. But rough order of magnitude of documents, Kevin?
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: Over half a million document files.
GENERAL CUCOLO: You have to be careful. A document file may be more than one document.
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: Yes.
MEDIA: How [inaudible]?
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: It's buried, but we've been as high as six, or four right now.
MEDIA: There have been a lot of reports before now about Saddam's military and how it had deflated since the first Gulf War, with sanctions and so forth. It sounds like the bottom line in your report is these guys are more incompetent, delusional, and dysfunctional than anyone had ever believed.
GENERAL CUCOLO: We certainly get to how the sanctions degraded their capabilities. That's in there without question.
Delusional at the higher levels, the highest levels. However -- Do you want to talk about the tactical competence?
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: Again, it's really a mixed bag. That's the thing that surprised me, was I found individuals sitting across the table describing battalion, brigade, division, corps operations that made perfect sense to me.
MEDIA: Did they have the tools to carry it out?
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: No, not in all cases. But in some cases they didn't need the tools equivalent to what the attacking force --
GENERAL CUCOLO: Imagine your General Hamdami standing there, staring at the bridge at Karbala and you know that that bridge is between the 3rd Infantry Division and your nation's capital. And you want to blow that bridge. And you give the order to blow that bridge. And the chief of staff, out of loyalty to you, General Hamdami, walks away from you, does not give the order. The bridge remains intact and 3rd ID wins.
The point there is, the reason Hamdami's chief didn't give the order is because he didn't want Hamdami to be executed by Saddam Hussein because he blew a bridge.
MEDIA: One other thing too, there was a lot of talk before the war about regular army units throwing down their weapons, maybe helping the Americans and just not fighting. Did anyone say what happened with that? Why they didn't start fighting? Why they didn't cross American lines? Did the war start too quickly and they just --
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: It's a complicated question. I'll tell you two things I learned about the regular army is that there was a mixed bag. Some of the regular army units fought very well, to our surprise. One of the contrasts is, one of the best units in Iraq by our estimates and by the Iraqi generals' was the Al Midad Division, a Republican Guard tank division. Al Midad didn't do much fighting. Most of their troops, as the chief of staffs told me, most of their troops escaped. His word for abandoning their posts.
The 16th Regular Army Division which came down to in part replace it down on the Bial River area, fought very well and almost out of character for a regular army unit compared to what we would have expected. So it was really a mixed bag and I think it comes down to local leadership. Local commanders. And individuals who stepped up in a kind of patriotic sense to defend their country. As opposed to others who just --
MEDIA: But those who wanted to give up, could they have done that? We were told --
GENERAL CUCOLO: You mean could they have done it from an Iraqi point of view?
MEDIA: Right.
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: I would guess they could have.
GENERAL CUCOLO: Last question.
MEDIA: You [inaudible] Ba'athist [inaudible]. Can you talk a little bit about how they went from [inaudible]?
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: The connection in our analysis, and again as I've said before, as contemporary history goes I reserve the right to be overruled by new evidence, but as you look at it the Ba'ath emergency plans were a way for the regime to try to prevent what happened in '91 by making sure the local Ba'ath cadres had access to weapons, had access to local security, that they identified the key terrain. So in an urban sense they knew which buildings were defendable, they knew what their order sources were, they had pre-stocked fuel and ammo. We're talking down to relatively small towns. Toward the end they actually had Ba'ath emergency plans for certain factories that were isolated, some of the big factories out west and some of the facilities. But they were designed to hold the fort until, to use the term, the cavalry arrived. So regular army, Republican Guard could come down and relieve you, which is what they couldn't do in '91, which precipitated the crisis that was the number one crisis from Saddam's point of view of his regime.
GENERAL CUCOLO: But a very important thing to close in on, after what Kevin said. That was for internal uprisings. We have absolutely no data supporting that there was a transfer, a conscious transfer.
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: A Plan B, if you will.
GENERAL CUCOLO: A Plan B. There's nothing like that.
MEDIA: But [inaudible]?
LTCOL (RET) WOODS: You got the limits of our study.
GENERAL CUCOLO: Thanks very much for your time everybody.
