Journalist Thomas Ricks

DATE June 10, 2003 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Thomas Ricks discusses his recent three-week visit to
Baghdad
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

My guest, Thomas Ricks, covers the military for The Washington Post. Last
week, he returned from Iraq after having spent most of May covering the
emerging shape of the occupation. He was what he describes as loosely
embedded with the 1st Armored Division, the replacement force for the 3rd
Infantry Division, the unit that took Baghdad in early April. In addition to
spending time with the division and getting briefings at headquarters, he
broke away from the military to investigate stories on his own.

Tom Ricks has covered military activities in Somalia, Korea, Bosnia, Kuwait,
the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan. He wrote about the military for The Wall
Street Journal before joining The Washington Post. He was part of two
Pulitzer Prize-winning teams of reporters, covering military preparations for
the 21st century and the war on terrorism.

Members of the intelligence community have said that the Bush administration
pressured them into cooking information and that the Bush administration
cherry-picked information to support its case for war against Iraq. The same
thing is happening to the Blair administration in England. Do you have any
insights into that issue from covering the military or from having recently
been in Iraq?

Mr. THOMAS RICKS (Journalist, The Washington Post): Yeah. Having knocked
around Iraq recently, and especially having visited a couple of the--the two
places in Baghdad that were specifically bombed in order to kill Saddam
Hussein, one thing that really struck me is that the US intelligence community
appears to have vastly, I think, overestimated Saddam Hussein's capabilities.
And while most of the intelligence discussion has been about his weapons of
mass destruction capabilities, I was out looking for tunnels and bunkers,
which we kept on being told were built across underground Baghdad, that there
were all sorts of escape tunnels and bunkers.

Yes, there are some bunkers, but they're pretty noticeable. I mean, they're
visible. There's one right near the hotel I was staying at. But I went out
to Dora Farms and to the Al-Sa'ah Restaurant, the two places that were bombed
in order to kill Saddam Hussein, and at neither place was there any evidence
of tunnels or bunkers. And locals I talked to at both places said, `Look,
we've lived here for years. We would have seen tunnels being built. There
would have been some evidence of that. You would have seen workers.' I
talked to a farmer at the Dora Farms site who said, `Look, I've been out here
turning the soil every day for 20 years, and I've never seen any evidence of
tunnels or bunkers.'

GROSS: So what does that say to you about US intelligence, about what the
Pentagon said about his bunkers?

Mr. RICKS: It seems, in retrospect, that they may have taken counsel of their
fears. Also that evidence that supported the administration's view probably
was given far more credence and weight than evidence that disputed the
administration's views. And, in retrospect, I think there probably was a real
problem with the intelligence, that it got skewed toward supporting the
administration's arguments rather than a kind of neutral sifting of the facts.

GROSS: Do you think that it's possible that Saddam Hussein wasn't quite as
powerful as the Bush administration built him up to be?

Mr. RICKS: Yes and no. In terms of weapons of mass destruction, obviously
yes. I mean, from the Iraqi government own admissions, at some point he did
possess weapons of mass destruction. In fact, he used weapons of mass
destruction, chemical weapons, on people many times. He had VX nerve gas. He
was interested in having nuclear capabilities. So he had possession. He had
intent. The only question then is: Did he still have it? And he may have
very well have tried to get rid of it in order to get the US to stop bothering
him.

I think ultimately they probably will find some chemical or biological
weapons. If you go hunting in northwest DC, where I live, you will find old
mustard gas cannisters left over from World War I. Similarly, probably across
Iraq there's old buried stuff that people either forgot about or hid or the
guy who hid it for the Iraqi military was killed subsequently. For example, I
was told at the end of the Gulf War, in 1991, that they took out some weapons,
nerve gas and chemicals, and buried them in sections of highway and then
repaved the highway. Now that stuff is probably still there, and ultimately
it probably will be found, and that will be put out by the Bush administration
as supporting its case.

The response will come back from the doubters that, well, this was old stuff,
maybe even inert, if it was old biological weapons, maybe even falling
apart--they chemically decompose if it were chemical weapons--and that he was
not going to use it. And I think we'll probably never really resolve it in
one way or the other way. Some stuff will be found, but it won't
dispositively answer the issue of whether he intended to use it in this period
now.

GROSS: We were talking for a couple of minutes before the interview started,
and you compared Saddam Hussein to Tony Soprano. Would you make that analogy
for us?

Mr. RICKS: I'm a big fan of "The Sopranos" TV show, and I hadn't really
thought about this until I was in Iraq. I'd not been in Baghdad previously.
And when I got to Iraq--and you start going around Saddam Hussein's old
palaces looking at his approach, looking at his capabilities--it really struck
me that this guy was not so much a kind of Middle Eastern version of Hitler or
something or a modern sort of Soviet Stalin type; that more, he was Tony
Soprano. This was a `thugocracy.' I think the way he ran the country, his
values, his ascetics and his administrative abilities, all were much more like
that of a Mob boss, and the Baathist Party basically was like his Mafia
family.

This is not to excuse him at all. I think he was a thoroughly evil guy, and
you see this talking to Iraqis constantly, the stories that are just coming
out now. People who for years had told their neighbors, `Oh, my son died in
the Iran-Iraq War' are now confessing, `No, my son was executed,' or now are
finding out that their son was executed. Their son disappeared in 1986 or
something. And now, as the papers are being gone through, the documentary
evidence, they're finding out that their son was indeed executed. So even
Iraqis are now just finding out the depth of evil.

But it was not this Soviet style or Stalinist evil, was my impression. It was
much more a small-minded, grasping, greedy, Mafia-style evil. And this seems
facetious to talk about it, but I don't think it is: the aesthetics of the
place. You look at his palaces and they're kind of cheesy. There's a lot of
money thrown in it, but it's not very nice. It's kind of...

GROSS: Gaudy, right?

Mr. RICKS: The soldiers will talk about this. Just sort of--they'd say,
`This is kind of chintzy.' You know, there'd be a lot of gold paint and
marble thrown around but not particularly to any pleasing effect. And the
big heads--I hadn't known this. There are two palaces. Two of his more
modern palaces in downtown Baghdad have big Saddam heads on them. One has
four of Saddam's heads, probably 15 foot tall. And actually the soldiers, in
their humor, refer to it as the four-head palace, which now starts sounding
like a forehead. But they call it the four-head palace. And then where
Orha(ph), the American Civil Occupation Administration, is referred to as the
big-head palace because it even has more big heads on it.

But this was a guy, the only way he could really celebrate himself and his
regime was by making things bigger. So you've got these huge crossed swords
downtown, probably 100 feet tall, and big, dumb stuff. But it's a shame,
given the beautiful history of Arab architecture, the stuff that he built.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Tom Ricks, and he's just spent
three weeks in Baghdad. He returned about a week ago. He covers the military
for The Washington Post.

So are the troops who are now charged with peacekeeping actually trained for
that?

Mr. RICKS: Yes and no. They contend they are. The Army contends they are.
And I think from the company level, captains, sergeants and privates, yeah,
they are trained for what they're doing, and they're doing a very good job of
it. They are bringing a lot of energy and courage and skills to the job of
peacekeeping.

I did come away with some questions about the institutional Army, how the
generals think about peacekeeping, how they approached it. It is an opinion,
it's not a fact--but my opinion, having looked at the US peacekeeping in Iraq,
is that the Army didn't bring to the peacekeeping mission the same sort of
boldness and audacity and decisiveness that it brought to the war. That war
plan was a brilliant war plan executed with great audacity and decisiveness.
And they took Baghdad in 21 days, very impressive. That's a campaign that
will be studied for years to come. And they took real risk in how they
approached it. I don't see that kind of audacity and risk-taking in the
peacekeeping, partly because the way the Army thinks about peacekeeping.

The Army decided about 10 years ago, when it first started taking on
peacekeeping missions in Bosnia and Haiti and so on, that peacekeeping is what
they called a lesser-included case. And that means if you can fight, if
you're trained for high-intensity combat, then you can do things like
peacekeeping because they're slower, easier and rather smaller. I don't think
that's the case. It may be true for the individual soldier who needs those
combat skills, who needs to be able to escalate quickly to protect himself and
his unit and to execute his mission, but I think it's different at the large
unit level.

One example. The US Army is great at communicating with itself, which is what
you need when you're fighting a war. You need to be able to move information
quickly up and down and across units to deal with the threat and to attack.
The US military is not very good at communicating outside itself. And for
peacekeeping, unlike war fighting, you really need to communicate outside
yourself. You need to plug into a society. You need to be talking constantly
to locals in Baghdad, to local police, to foreign reporters, to Iraqi
reporters, to local clerics, to schoolteachers. And the US Army doesn't do
that very well.

Ask for a phone number in Baghdad, and it's funny. Everybody in Baghdad of
consequence has a Thuraya satellite phone. That's how that society operates.
The US military doesn't have very many. It probably has 10 Thuraya telephones
inside Iraq. They don't have, as best I could tell, the list of Thuraya phone
numbers, which is how you would plug in to Iraqi elites.

One day my translator turned to me and said, `Why isn't there a hotline in
Baghdad so that if my neighbor sees somebody running down the street with
rocket-propelled grenades,' which is not a weapon of self-defense--it's a
weapon of attack; they can be used to attack the US military--`why isn't there
a hotline that we can call?' When I asked generals...

GROSS: Like a 911 equivalent to get to the Army.

Mr. RICKS: Yeah. I mean, and when I asked generals about this, they'd say,
`Oh, that's a good idea.' Well, fellas, it's a little bit late to be having
good ideas. I mean, that's not the way they go in to fight wars. They go in
having thought through these things.

And the really striking thing to me was the 1st Armored Division, the Army
unit sent in to replace the 3rd Infantry Division and become the core of US
peacekeeping in Baghdad, did not do a mission rehearsal exercise for
peacekeeping. And a mission rehearsal exercise is key to the Army saying,
`We're ready to go and execute a mission.' I don't think they would send a
unit into combat that had not done such a mission rehearsal exercise. But the
1st Armored Division did not have a peacekeeping exercise before it went into
Baghdad.

GROSS: But when you walk through the streets of Baghdad, is there much of a
visible presence of US soldiers?

Mr. RICKS: When I first arrived in Baghdad in early May, there was not. The
3rd Infantry Division, which took Baghdad in early April, kind of hunkered
down and went into a war-fighting stance, even in Baghdad, which is
proper--they'd fought their way into Baghdad--that they didn't transition to
peacekeeping. This is not my critique; this is something I heard frequently
from soldiers and officers in the 1st Armored Division, their replacement
unit.

And so for about a month there in Baghdad, the US Army was there but wasn't
really visible. And if you talk to people who were there in Baghdad during
that period in late April, it was then when a lot of the looting occurred and
I think also when a lot of the sabotage by members of the old regime occurred,
when they realized that the Army was there but wasn't going to stop them. And
so a lot of the damage to the infrastructure--to electricity, to trains and so
on--occurred, I was told, in late April when they realized the 3rd Infantry
Division was going to stay inside its compounds and behind its walls and not
come out and stop them.

By late May, the situation was very different. In late May, the 1st Armored
Division took over brigade by brigade, sector by sector across Baghdad with
the intent of really getting a lot of patrols out and a lot of presence out.
And that really did occur in late May, and I think it notably changed the
security situation in Baghdad.

I was out on a foot patrol with a unit from the 1st Armored Division one
afternoon in southeastern Baghdad, and it was a very typical patrol. They
were walking along, and a guy came up and said, `We have two Ali Babas,' which
is how Baghdadis refer to looters. `We have two Ali Babas. Would you come
and get them?' So they went around the corner. Sure enough, they were there.
These were looters. They'd been stopped, caught and beaten by the people in
the neighborhood. And the patrol's wondering what to do with them. And
suddenly around a corner came a bunch of MPs in two Humvees from the Illinois
Army National Guard, and the foot patrol I was with was really pleased. `Oh,
good, we can get rid of these two looters we just detained.'

And so off we went on our foot patrol, continuing it, and ran into another
foot patrol, this one from the 3rd Infantry Division. So in this one little
neighborhood three different US patrols are going on. Also, US helicopters
clattering overhead. So the presence of the US Army really sharply increased
in late May in Baghdad, and I think that really did improve the security
situation.

GROSS: My guest is Tom Ricks, military correspondent for The Washington Post.
He returned last week from three weeks in Baghdad. We'll be back after a
break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Tom Ricks. He covers the
military for The Washington Post, and he returned about a week ago from having
spent three weeks in Baghdad.

Now we're talking about the US military's new role as peacekeepers in Iraq.
You said that there's a fair number of US military on the streets now, that
they're a visible presence. What about the old Iraqi police? Do you see any
of them around? And how many of them have actually, like, stayed in their
function as police officers?

Mr. RICKS: When I first got to Baghdad in early May, you didn't see any of
them. And I actually went to a meeting. They were trying to talk to their
commanders to get them to get Iraqi police back out on the streets. And by
the time I left actually, you were seeing quite a lot of them, frequently with
American MPs behind them, literally, almost pushing them along. You'd see an
Iraqi police car with a US Humvee behind it pushing it, sort of.

There are some problems with Iraqi police, which is a lot of them, I think,
were seen as the rather thuggish enforcers of the regime. And so there's a
lot of public distrust of them, and they're very conscious of that. And so
the Americans are kind of a guarantor in both directions, not only that the
Iraqi police will go out and enforce the law, but also the Americans are kind
of protecting the Iraqi police from the people of Baghdad who distrust them
and sometimes violently hate them.

GROSS: Police always have to make tough judgment calls about who is a
potential danger and who is just, like, making a mistake. Were you with the
US soldiers when they had to make a difficult judgement call about whether to
fire on somebody--about whether this was a major crime or a hostile act that
was under way or just, you know, something that they were misinterpreting?

Mr. RICKS: It's actually something I find hugely impressive about US troops.
Remember, most of the troops out there are guys 19 to 22 years old, generally,
who have maybe two, three years in the military. Some of them are just a
couple of months out of boot camp. And they're constantly, every one of them,
making these very tough decisions.

One that really struck me was I was watching a private named Sean Jones, who
told me he had graduated from boot camp on Valentine's Day, say three months
ago. And he was over in Sector 37 North. It's a neighborhood in west Baghdad
that's considered hostile by the US military. And an Iraqi who was drunk came
up and started yelling at him, and Jones first motioned him away with his
hands. `Back off,' he said. And the guy kept coming at him very
aggressively, only a couple of feet away. Jones took a half a step back and
raised his weapon up to the ready position, not pointing it directly at the
guy, still looking over the weapon rather than along sighting over its barrel,
maintaining eye contact over the weapon. And at that point the guy backed
off.

And I was talking to his platoon sergeant about it, and he said, `That's very
impressive, a private doing that kind of measured escalation.' But it's still
escalation. It's escalation at the smallest possible level, which is one
human being with another human being. They constantly have to deal with that.

One day I was at a gate talking to some soldiers, and they said earlier today
a kid came up and pointed a Colt .45 weapon. It looked like a Colt .45
pistol. It turned out later to have been an air pistol. And the soldiers
dropped to the ground and yelled at the kid to drop it, but they were ready to
shoot if the kid started shooting at them. And it turned out later he was a
local kid who wanted to play soldier, and they were very pleased with
themselves that they hadn't fired at him. They were actually very angry with
the kid and took him to his mother and said, you know, `We nearly shot at this
kid. You've got to tell this kid to not point weapons at American troops.'
Every soldier's constantly dealing with that.

The other thing that worries them a lot when they're out on patrol is people
will come up with tips, and they're very wary of the tip that sounds too good,
like, `Oh, there are some Saddam's Fedayeen around the corner with a lot of
weapons.' They're worried about being led into ambushes, and so that they're
constantly `Oh, that's good. This guy sounds friendly, but is he actually
leading us into something?' And these are kids usually a year or two out of
high school who are making these decisions and being judged by the world media
every day about it.

GROSS: What are the living conditions like for the US troops in Baghdad now?

Mr. RICKS: They vary enormously, the living conditions. Some of the 3rd ID
guys who have been there a while actually had surprisingly nice conditions.
They were in some of the palaces downtown that still had electricity and
running water. The conditions of US troops out at the airport I think were
shockingly bad, especially for an Army that's been present there for a couple
of months. Troops out there were sleeping, really, in crowded conditions, no
air conditioning, no running water, no electricity. I'm surprised at how bad
it was. It didn't seem to me that it was necessary.

Now part of the problem was they had suddenly doubled the number of US troops
in the area because they kept the 3rd Infantry Division there and added in the
1st Armored Division. Even so, it seemed to me that there probably would have
been ways of giving the troops better conditions. At the same time, part of
keeping the morale steady over a long mission of several months' duration is
to steadily improve the conditions of troops, so that may be part of the US
Army's calculation. If the troops come in and they have everything, then they
kind of expect more. If they come in and have nothing, then they're very
pleased by each addition as you give them electricity, air conditioning and so
on.

And they're going to need air conditioning. I was astonished at how hot it
was in May. Temperatures of 110, 115. And I'm told that in July and August
it will get up to 125 in Baghdad.

GROSS: Tom Ricks covers the military for The Washington Post. He'll be back
in the second half of the show. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with Pulitzer Prize-winning
reporter Tom Ricks. He covers the military for The Washington Post. He just
spent three weeks in Baghdad covering the emerging shape of the occupation.
He says he was loosely embedded, reporting on this own, as well as traveling
with the 1st Armored Division, the replacement force for the 3rd Infantry
Division, the unit that took Baghdad in early April.

You were traveling with Anthony Shadid, who writes for The Washington Post and
was in Baghdad during the war. You decided to divide up, and one of you
traveled with the US troops and the other stayed behind and talked to the
people who had been interacting with the troops. And your goal was to get the
perceptions, the military perceptions and the civilian perceptions, about how
the occupation was going.

Mr. RICKS: Well, the situation was this: I said, `We have a unique
opportunity here. We have two Washington Post reporters,' Anthony Shadid, who
speaks Arabic fluently, and me; I speak military fluently.

GROSS: Oh, got it, sure.

Mr. RICKS: `So why don't we go out on one patrol, and I'll be with the troops
and Anthony will trail along in our wake? Then at the end of the patrol we'll
compare notes.' And it was really astonishing.

We did this actually a couple of Sundays ago. Again, it was over in sector 37
North, which I'd picked because it was considered a hostile neighborhood by US
military intelligence, and actually a soldier had been killed there a few days
before. And so we walk along on the patrol, and the soldiers on the patrol
were telling me generally, you know, how much they liked the neighborhood,
people came up and liked them. Their assessment was somewhere between 50 and
70 percent of the residents appreciated their presence and liked having them
there and understood that they were there just to help out and the US would go
home when their help was no longer needed.

And Anthony Shadid, the other Post reporter, tread along behind and actually
came up to me a couple of times during the patrol and said, `You won't believe
how different the perceptions are.' Even as one soldier was telling me,
`People here love us,' Shadid was interviewing a local who said, `When I see
the American patrols go by, it's like they're walking on my heart. It's
crushing.'

And Shadid's very sensitive to this, the loaded sense to the term
`occupation.' He said, `The US occupation is actually a fairly benign term.'
And we talked about how in the US culture occupation brings back memories of,
you know, postwar Germany, postwar Japan, democracy growing, you know, even
cheesy stuff like the "Sayonara" song, which was a hit that came out of Japan
at the time of occupation.

To the average Iraq, occupation is a loaded term that evokes the Israeli
situation with Palestinians, and they really are coming to identify with that.
A lot of those people in the neighborhood would say, `Oh, we're being occupied
just like Israel is, and the Americans are here for our oil. They're not here
to help us.' And there really was a sense that this was just ships passing in
the night. The American soldiers' perception of what they were doing there
and the local Baghdadi perception of what the American soldiers were doing
there was vastly different.

GROSS: Did you tell any of the soldiers or any of their leaders about the
general population's perceptions about the military and the occupation?

Mr. RICKS: We did. And it really turned on one point in the patrol. The
soldiers were very eager to take us to a school they really were trying to
help. It's a school for autistic children and apparently the only such school
in all of Iraq. And the company, Bravo Company of this one battalion, had
adopted the school and really was looking out to protect it and help it. And
it had been subject to some shooting and some attempted looting.

And when we got there, I was very impressed by how the soldiers were very
sensitive to the issues with autistic children. All the soldiers were wearing
sunglasses and carrying weapons, obviously. And they all took off their
sunglasses outside and then stacked their weapons, left a couple of soldiers
there to guard them and then went inside and were very gentle with the
children, got down on their knees, talked to them, tried to evoke responses.
One soldier in particular made sure he went to every classroom. There are
certain kids he's come to know and talk to. And it was a moving moment to see
these young soldiers dealing with these kids.

And Anthony Shadid stayed outside and talked to some of the neighbors. And
the neighbors were telling Anthony, `Oh, we think the soldiers are going in
there and having sex with the women who run the school.'

GROSS: Whoa.

Mr. RICKS: Just an astonishingly different perception. And at the end of the
patrol it was quite hot. We found a shady spot in the corner where the US
troops were basing out of and sat around to have some cold sodas and talked.
And Anthony told them of this, and you could just see them visibly sag. The
lieutenant, who was the platoon leader, said, `Oh, I just hate hearing that,'
'cause he'd been so proud of what they've been doing with the school. And to
have that Iraqi perception just, first of all, stunned him, and clearly it
really bothered him. And I think the soldiers didn't know quite what to make
of it.

GROSS: What do you make of it, about this gap of perceptions, and what it
says about the larger mission and its ability to succeed?

Mr. RICKS: I came away with a couple of thoughts. First, I think the US
military is going to be there for a while. The Army's going to be there for a
while. And the sooner the US government sort of fesses up to that probably
the better.

My second thought was, `They're not going to love us. They're not going to
like us. They're not going to welcome this presence,' the Iraqis. Even those
people who felt it was necessary for security or to prevent a civil war
between Sunnis and Shiites really are not pleased to have it there. They find
it kind of humiliating, especially men in their 20s and 30s really seem to
kind of bristle around US troops. And I think the US public and the US
military should probably face the fact that we're not going to be welcome
there, despite probably needing to be there for a while.

GROSS: How's the morale of the soldiers? Could you tell?

Mr. RICKS: Kind of all over the place. The 3rd Infantry Division has a real
morale issue, I think. You know, these are guys--some of them deployed out to
Kuwait last November; set several months preparing for war or training for
war. They weren't just sitting; they were working hard to prepare for it.
Then fought a war that, in retrospect, may seem easy but was not an easy war.
It was a hard-fought campaign. And then sat in Baghdad, not really
peacekeeping, but in a combat stance for a couple of months and thought they'd
be going home when the 1st Armored Division came in. And, instead, the 2nd
Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, when I was there, was shifted west out
to the town of Fallujah, about 50 mile west of Baghdad, where there's a lot of
fighting still going on. And so these guys, they're kind of wondering are
they ever going to go home, and I think they probably will but probably not
for a couple of months.

The 1st Armored Division, I thought, was in better shape moralewise. They
came in knowing they were doing a peacekeeping mission and went out to execute
it and could see themselves having an effect pretty quickly on security in
Baghdad.

My two measures were the amount of automatic weapons fire I heard at night
outside my hotel, which went from early May quite a lot to the time I left in
early June, very little and, also, adolescent girls in the street. When I
first got there, you did not see adolescent girls in the streets. Their
families were just afraid to have them out because of fear of kidnapping and
rape. And by the time I left, you actually saw quite a few, especially in
middle-class neighborhoods, quite a few adolescent girls out on the streets
always with somebody else, with a parent or with an older brother, but still
present. And so clearly Baghdadis felt the security was better. And I think
the 1st Armored Division guys kind of could take some pride in saying that,
`We actually have helped this place become more normal, more secure.'

GROSS: My guest is Tom Ricks, military correspondent for The Washington Post.
We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Tom Ricks. He covers the
military for The Washington Post, and he just returned about a week ago from
having spent three weeks in Baghdad.

The US military is undergoing a major restructuring and realignment of forces
around the world. What are the reasons for this major realignment?

Mr. RICKS: Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense secretary, has made the assessment
that the US military, especially Army, hasn't changed enough in response to
the end of the Cold War. And he's asking a lot of tough questions, which, for
example is: `Why do we still have so many troops in Germany? Germany's not a
front-line nation. It no longer has a Warsaw Pact organization facing it
across the East German border. Why do we have those troops there? Why not
move them somewhere else?' And so they've been looking at things like: `How
about moving troops out to the new NATO countries--Poland, Hungary? How about
having troops in Central Asia? Do you want to have troops based there
permanently with that large structure of Defense Department schools and PXs
and hospitals, or do you want to rotate troops out for six months at a time?'
So he's asking a lot of questions and forcing a lot of change.

GROSS: And does he have any opponents in this change?

Mr. RICKS: Large number of opponents, I'd say, from two basic schools. One
is a large part of the US military, especially the Army, is very skeptical of
Donald Rumsfeld at this point, despite the fact that he's overseen the
successful execution of two wars in two years. They kind of see him as being
a Robert McNamara-like figure, the sort of corporate wise guy who comes in and
doesn't understand how they do things or why they do things but just demands
change.

There's also a minority in the military that's skeptical of Rumsfeld because,
while they agree with some of the changes that he's trying to make, they think
he doesn't understand the fundamental problems. For example, the Army is
really going to be strapped by peacekeeping in Iraq at the same time that it
continues to have troops in Afghanistan, faces a hostile North Korea, and
they're being told by Rumsfeld to deal with all those missions and to change
itself radically. And they feel that, A, they probably need more money if
they're going to do that, and, B, they almost certainly need more troops if
they're going to do that.

GROSS: In the meantime, Donald Rumsfeld is replacing some of the people at
the top of the military. Who has he recently replaced?

Mr. RICKS: You've got a lot of changes coming, especially in the Army. In a
very unusual move, he fired the Army secretary, Tom White, a couple of months
ago and then moved in the Air Force secretary, a guy named James Roach, with
an unusual background. He was a career Navy officer, and then he was a
Democratic staffer on Capitol Hill and then was a defense industry executive
and then was head of the Air Force, the secretary of the Air Force. So this
is not somebody with an Army background and clearly, though, has a background
that Rumsfeld liked, and Rumsfeld has put him on top of the Army with the
message to change the Army.

The other big change coming in the Army is this week General Eric Shinseki,
the chief of staff of the Army, retires. And unusually, they don't have a
replacement on hand. Tommy Franks, the US commander for Afghanistan and Iraq,
was offered the job, and, I am told, turned it down. And they're looking
around--Rumsfeld's people are looking around. There's not a lot of other
senior Army officers they like. They originally had wanted the vice chief of
staff of the Army, Jack Keane, a really widely admired officer to take the
job, but for personal reasons he feels he can't and he wants to retire. So
they're looking around, and they haven't come up with any other replacements.

This is a really startling situation that here you have the US Army, having
just fought a war, still engaged in a major mission in Iraq, and it has a new
civilian service secretary coming in with no Army background, and they don't
even have a general to lead the Army right now.

GROSS: Is Donald Rumsfeld a particularly powerful secretary of Defense?

Mr. RICKS: I think he's an astonishingly powerful secretary of Defense,
probably the most powerful secretary ever, both within the Pentagon and his
influence over how the military does what it does and outside the Pentagon on
things like foreign policy. As a Defense secretary, he was unusually involved
in the formulation of the war plan for Iraq, in personnel choices, which is
really what drives the military--promotion and personnel picks. He's very
involved personally reviewing selections of top officers, interviewing them
and sometimes turning them down, saying, `This guy just doesn't have the
qualities that I'm looking for.' And outside the Pentagon, I mean, arguably,
he's had more influence over US foreign policy than Colin Powell, the
secretary of State, has had in recent weeks and months. And that's kind of
astonishing because Powell came in the only superstar in the Cabinet and I
think probably has been eclipsed by Rumsfeld.

GROSS: Of course, Powell is the career military guy. Rumsfeld is the
civilian.

Mr. RICKS: Yeah. And it's kind of odd because Powell does still have a lot
of connections to the military. I remember one officer telling me that when
you go into a Cabinet meeting, he said, you just naturally gravitate towards
Powell because he knows the lingo, he knows the talk in a way that Rumsfeld
and his people don't. Nonetheless, Powell has really kept out of the military
affairs and has not interfered with the Pentagon, at least publicly, while
Rumsfeld has just run all over the foreign policy, making pronouncements,
changes, sort of unilaterally laying down policy in certain areas.

GROSS: How are things between Rumsfeld and Powell right now?

Mr. RICKS: I don't know. You know, their public line is, `We get along. We
see each other all the time.' I just don't buy it. It's just the body
language and what you hear from subordinates is a real friction and a very
different view of the world and what the US military and what the US
government should be doing right now. I do think they fundamentally agree,
though, on the goal, which is to fight a global war on terrorism in a way that
makes the United States more secure than it was on September 11th, 2001. But
I think there's fundamental disagreement about how to get there.

GROSS: You know, from the outside it's so hard to tell how much disagreement
there is because Powell, who resisted the war in Iraq, you know, when he
addressed the UN seemed to kind of change gears and to get behind it, and I
think a lot of people are confused about what changed in his mind.

Mr. RICKS: Well, you mentioned that Powell is a career military guy, and the
thing to remember about him is he is a good soldier in the sense of duty and
loyalty. And more than being a good soldier, he's a good infantryman. And
the infantry more than any other part of the military you really need to make
sure you're tied in on your flanks, that you don't get out way ahead of the
people on your left and right, the units on your left and right, 'cause if you
do you're going to end up getting soldiers killed. You're going to be too
exposed in your flanks or the people in your flanks are going to think you're
the enemy out in front of them and shoot you. So Powell really does place a
premium on being tied in on his flanks.

Remember, early in the administration he got in some sort of problem on Korea
policy and said some things that seemed to get him out ahead of the
administration. And he told reporters a couple of days later, `I was wrong.
I wasn't tied in on my flanks.' And I explained to our diplomatic reporters
how significant a statement that was, which was his point was: `Even if I was
right, I was wrong 'cause I got out ahead of things.' So Powell really more
than most people, I think, does value being tied in and being supported and
being part of the team and I think will probably go to his grave keeping a lot
of his differences with Donald Rumsfeld private.

GROSS: The US won the war in Iraq pretty swiftly, but now it's a question of
what happens with the peace and the peace hasn't been all that peaceful. And
there's a lot of troops that will have to be stationed in Iraq for a
comparatively long time to make that transition to a new Iraqi government. In
the meantime, the Bush administration is talking in such a way as to lead many
people to believe that they might make a similar move in Iran or possibly in
Syria or--Who knows?--maybe North Korea. I'm wondering what you're hearing
from, like, your military sources about how the military would feel about
taking on another country.

Mr. RICKS: The US military feels pretty strained right now, especially the
Army. This is always a problem for the Army is we that have these three- or
four-week wars in places like Kosovo or Afghanistan or Iraq and everybody high
fives each other and goes home except for the Army. The Navy, the Air Force,
the Marines all leave. Although the Marines are still in southern Iraq right
now doing peacekeeping, they expect to get out pretty soon. The Army stays.
For the Army, these small modern wars are kind of the `roach motels' wars;
they check in and they don't check out.

One phrase you used, `the war is over'--I think a good part of Iraq isn't
persuaded of that, especially this area west of Baghdad from Fallujah up to
Tikrit, which is kind of the Sunni heartland. These are people for whom the
US in no way or form a liberator. All the US is doing is knocking these
people out of positions of power, out of really the top of the `thugocracy,'
the pyramid of power in Iraq, and that's where you're seeing a lot of fighting
still going on and US troops dying, one or two every couple of days. I think
so there's a small-scale war still going on in that crescent north and
northwest of Baghdad. So the notion of taking on any other big jobs, I think,
is quite frightening to the US military and especially the Army.

I don't think Syria is likely--the word in the ground from, I guess,
intelligence officers in Iraq was that Syria really had shaped up after the US
threats right at the end of the war. And also, even Iran, they had said, is
really on its best behavior right now inside Iraq; that, yes, there is an
Iranian presence--they monitor US operations--but it's kind of seen as
legitimate interest of a neighboring country.

The big worry in the US military is North Korea. The United States nearly
went to war with North Korea in the mid-1990s, and that was with an
administration that did not have a policy of pre-emption. Now you have an
administration that does have that policy, and North Korea is acting friskier,
more provocative than they did back then. So it seems to me that's the recipe
for hostilities to break out, and that really worries the US military right
now.

GROSS: So just one more thing. You know, you reported from Baghdad for three
weeks. What was the experience like for you?

Mr. RICKS: I loved it. It was a little bit scary. You had to be careful.
One of the rules we had was to get back to the hotel room by dark and not go
out after dark because of AK-47 fire especially when I was first there. But
you'd walk out of your hotel room in the morning or you'd go out driving and
there's just news stories all over the place. It's what the military would
call a lucrative environment. You'd go out with one story in mind, report it
and trip across two others, and it was fun reporting. And for a Washington
reporter, it was such a relief to have everybody on the record. Now look at
my notebooks. Every single soldier I talked to, every single Iraqi I talked
to--everything's on the record.

So while it was a little bit scary and difficult at times, I think a very
difficult reporting environment, it also, as a reporter, was just an
astonishingly enjoyable experience to keep on finding news stories and being
able to report them.

GROSS: Well, Tom Ricks, I want to thank you very much for talking with us.

Mr. RICKS: Thank you for having me.

GROSS: Tom Ricks covers the military for The Washington Post.

Coming up, Ken Tucker reviews Fleetwood Mac's new CD. It's their first
collection of new material in eight years. This is FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Review: Fleetwood Mac's new CD "Say You Will"
TERRY GROSS, host:

For the past decade the members of Fleetwood Mac have dropped in and out of
the group. Their new CD, "Say You Will," is lacking core member Christine
McVie, but rock critic Ken Tucker says the band's first collection of new
material in eight years still includes some first-rate music.

(Soundbite of "Say You Will")

FLEETWOOD MAC: (Singing) Something in you brought out something in me that
I've never been since. That part of me that was only for you, that kind of
romance, comes only once that kind of love, that kind of fever dance that you
love becomes you becomes someone else in an instant. Say you will, say you
will give more one more chance. At least give me time to change your mind.
That always seems to heal the wounds if I can get you to dance. Something in
you put a hold on my heart. It's hard to believe now.

KEN TUCKER reporting:

Here's the thing about Fleetwood Mac at this point in the band's existence: I
think you have to decide whether or not you're committed to being a fan of
Lindsey Buckinham's, to put up with the waywardness of his interests and his
eccentricities. This is guy, after all, who called one of his solo albums "Go
Insane." But the upside is he's one of the most creative eccentrics to ever
front a mainstream pop act. Putting up with the weird and the wayward also
gets you the concise and the cutting, thus on his new album he can include a
six-minute freak-out such as the song called "Come," which is also balanced by
a terrific piece of pop craft like this.

(Soundbite of "What's the World Coming To")

FLEETWOOD MAC: (Singing) What's the world coming to? What they say isn't
true. You can't plant no seed where there's only greed. I can walk anywhere.
I can walk anytime. But the long highway is the only way. What's the world
coming to? What's the world coming to? Everyone's gone to the moon. What's
the world coming to? Every night, every day in this house filled with
shame...

TUCKER: The next thing to address about Fleetwood Mac is where you stand on
the absence of Christine McVie, who not only provided this band with many of
its strongest, most surgingly strong vocals, but also wrote or co-wrote hits
like "Don't Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow)." I'd say she's sorely missed
here, but then again there are mitigating factors on "Say You Will," such as
Stevie Nicks' writing of the title song, which began this review, and a
vibrant tune such as "Throw Down."

(Soundbite of "Throw Down")

FLEETWOOD MAC: (Singing) He fell for her again. She watched it happen every
day, day by day. But more important, night by night, she watched it all come
into play. He held her hands. She listened to what he had to say.

TUCKER: Now granted, you can't be a sensible person and accept everything
Stevie Nicks spins out. On this album, her song about September 11th is
self-absorbed, even for Stevie, which is really saying something. And when
you write, record and then decide to include a song that Nicks has written
about what a tough time Sheryl Crow has had in her career, you really have to
worry anew about the entire group's connection to reality.

(Soundbite of "Silver Girl")

FLEETWOOD MAC: (Singing) She was a silver girl lost in a high-tech world.
She was a golden girl immersed in a hard-core world. She would have preferred
the last generation, but that's all right. She's on her way. She had the
Midas touch. She was Lady Luck. She's got a million bucks, and she looks
like it.

TUCKER: I perversely love that couplet `those papers she never signed
sometimes she remembers,' which seems to sum up the way rock musicians from
ages past to the present have too often dealt with business matters, which is
to say naively, if not stupidly.

All in all, though, this is certainly the best Fleetwood Mac since "Tango in
the Night," and I'm still holding out for another Lindsey Buckingham solo
album for some all-stops-out creative peculiarity, maybe with Mick Fleetwood
drumming on a few tracks and maybe with Stevie around for a few harmonies.
And maybe Christine could come out of retirement to chime in here and there.

GROSS: Ken Tucker is critic at large for Entertainment Weekly. He reviewed
"Say You Will" by Fleetwood Mac.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.

(Soundbite of "Steal Your Heart Away")

FLEETWOOD MAC: (Singing) All alone we go on day after day. All alone we
suffer. Oh, steal your heart away. It's the same old thing in the same old
way; all alone we suffer. Oh, steal your heart away. And the lie goes
creeping down, down, down. But we were sleeping, and suddenly we hit the
ground. So come on, let's go. Let's run away. If that's all, all there is,
oh, steal your heart away.
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