Interview with Lt. Gen. Jay Garner Former Director, Reconstruction & Humanitarian Efforts in Iraq, 2003

Humanitarian Efforts in Iraq
Our guest this weekend on Q&A is Lt. Gen. Jay Garner (Ret.) Fmr. Dir. Reconstruction & Humanitar-
ian Efforts in Iraq. He discusses Iraq, the obstacles he faced then, the current situation in Iraq, and his opinion for reconstruction. You can always watch previous pro-
grams and read guest bios in the.

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Host: Brian Lamb

BRIAN LAMB, HOST: General Jay Garner, why did you take the job as director of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in January of 2003, in Iraq?

GEN. JAY GARNER, FORMER DIRECTOR, OFFICE OF RECONSTRUCTION AND HUMANITARIAN ASSISTANCE FOR IRAQ:

Well, let me say this - if I had it to do over again, I’d do the same thing again.

But how do you say ”no” to your nation when it asks you to do something? I mean, I don’t know how to do it. Nor would I do that.

LAMB: You were running a company with 1,000 employees at the time.

GARNER: I was, I was. But I got permission from our mother company to take a four week - excuse me, four month - leave of absence. And if they hadn’t given me that, I probably would have quit the company and done that, because you just don’t say no when something like that …

LAMB: How many years did you serve in the military?

GARNER: Well, if you count everything up, I had 42 years, because I was an enlisted Marine. I went to college, but I stayed in the reserves during that time. Then I came in the Army, got commissioned in the Army, and I was in the Army for 35 years.

LAMB: Who asked you to be, as some people called you, the ”viceroy” for those first couple of weeks?

GARNER: Oh, I don’t think it was viceroy. But the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld.

LAMB: What was your attitude about the war at the time?

GARNER: Yes, Brian, I have always been a proponent of taking Saddam Hussein out, and people don’t agree with me.

But I think, when you’re the greatest nation in the world, and you stand for the things that we say we stand for, is you don’t allow regimes like that to brutalize their people and practice genocide, and things like that. So, I think it’s - I think we have kind of an ethical responsibility to police the world.

Now, you can come back at me and say, ”OK, Garner, if you have such lofty goals, how are you going to solve Africa?” And I don’t have an answer for that. But where you can go in and make a difference, I think you should.

My only problem with the war was the timing. I thought it was a little bit too soon, because we had al Qaeda on the run in Afghanistan. It looks like that was going - like the next thing to do was take on really the global part of terrorism and go after them elsewhere. And this kind of disrupted all of it.

But I didn’t have a vote in that. You didn’t have a vote in that. And it happened. So, they asked me to do that, and I did.

LAMB: When did you - where did you serve during the ’91, previous Gulf war?

GARNER: I was the commanding general of an organization we call Task Force Bravo in northern Iraq. And it was an organization comprised - a great organization. It had the toughest guys in the world.

We had the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, commanded by then-Colonel Jim Jones, as you know, who is now the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe.

We had 3-325 Airborne, which was a parachute rifle battalion from the Army, commanded by then-Lieutenant Colonel John Abizaid, who is now the CENTCOM commander.

And we had the 3rd Commando Regiment from the Brits, the heroes of the Falklands. We had the 8th Parachute Regiment from the French, the parachute regiment that was in Vietnam, and then was in Algeria, who (ph) got in a little trouble with big (ph) oil (ph) in Algeria, but a very professional regiment.

We had the 3rd Parachute Regiment from the Spanish. And it was the first time they had deployed outside Spain on a military operation since the Spanish-American War. It was the first military unit deployed outside of Spain. And then we had the Folgore Brigade, which was a composite special forces parachute brigade from the Italians.

So, it was a masterful - and we had the Dutch marines - so it was a masterful organization with great leaders.

LAMB: Would you have gone all the way to Baghdad?

GARNER: From there?

LAMB: The first time.

GARNER: No. If I’d been …

LAMB: Why not?

GARNER: If I had been Schwarzkopf or Colin Powell …

LAMB: Yes.

GARNER: … or the president?

First of all, I don’t know how you do that. I had the same reservations they did.

I don’t know how you - I don’t know how you make all your planning and all your force developments and your deployments to push somebody out of Kuwait, and then you take that another 500 to 600 kilometers into really hostile territory.

And then, how do control the - how do you control 24 million people in something like that? So, I don’t think we could have done that then.

And I agree with what the first President Bush did. I don’t think we should have done that.

The only criticism I had of that operation is, when we didn’t go there, and then we came back and we incited the Shia and the Kurds to rebel, and they did - and they did a pretty good job of it - that when we released the Iraqi army, instead of killing all of them on the road to Basra, when we released them, then they were able to go and take on the Kurds and take on the Shia.

And, of course, they killed hundreds of thousands of Shia. And they killed a lot of Kurds, too. The Kurds were lucky enough to be able to escape up into Turkey and Iran.

And so, when we didn’t support them, after we had we called them to rebel against Saddam Hussein, then we pulled support back from them, I thought that was a mistake.

LAMB: Why didn’t we support them?

GARNER: I have no idea.

LAMB: Now, you spent some time with the Kurds.

GARNER: Oh, yes. I deployed to northern Iraq in April, and I stayed there until almost August.

LAMB: Who did you get to know in the leadership the most?

GARNER: The two current leaders, Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani.

LAMB: What do think of them?

GARNER: Well, they’re mostly (ph) two different people.

Talabani is a very skilled diplomat, superb politician. Barzani is a wonderful human being, who is absolutely a guerrilla fighter.

Talabani is very outgoing, very open. Barzani, very intelligent, cards close to his chest.

LAMB: Why have they done so well in all of this?

GARNER: I think for a couple of reasons. Number one is, they’re as democratic as you can be in that part of the world. They have elections now there, and you can question how valid their elections are.

But, hell, their elections are as good as ours were in Chicago in the ’60s, and probably as good as ours was down in Florida in this century.

They have their own constitution. One of the first things written in their constitution is minority rights. They’re secular.

They promote women. About 20, 25 percent of the ministry leads up in northern Iraq are women. They’re making their schools coeducational. Their economy is good.

They’re smart people. They’re not a Third World country at all. They’re very smart, ambitious people who have a good work ethic.

LAMB: Should the country of Iraq be separate - three separate countries, three separate units?

GARNER: Yes, I think - let me go into that. Let me back off that just a little bit.

When you say ”separate,” that connotes, should we have three different - three separate, autonomous governments? I’m not sure I agree with that.

But I agree with what I think Senator Biden calls partitioning.

And the way I would do that is, I would have - I would keep the Iraqi government in Baghdad as it’s structured right now. And then I would have a referendum where the people were allowed to vote on if they want their geographical area to be Shia, Sunni or Kurd.

And then based on that vote, and based on what the majority was on that vote, I would redraw the lines. I’d gerrymander everything but Baghdad.

And we ought to be able to do that, because in this country we’re pretty good at gerrymandering. We know how to do that.

And then I would have those areas set up regional governments. And they’d have a prime minister. They’d have a government.

Take the militias that they now have, that we’re so concerned about. Let that be their internal security forces, or whatever they want to do with it.

And I think the value there is that, I don’t believe in our lifetimes, that you’re ever going to find one man that all the factions can coalesce under. But I think in each one of those regions, you will find a man that they can all pull (INAUDIBLE).

And if you did that, then first of all, I think the velvet fist of government would be felt from the region and not from the nation, or not from Baghdad.

Number two, you have them all now in sort of a comfort zone of their own ethnicity, their own religion and their own tribal relationships. And you - the Sunnis, I don’t think would - would no longer feel threatened by the Shia.

So, in those regions, I’d let them have their own security forces, their internal security. I’d let them, if they want to have a state language, a state religion, they can declare that; they have their own taxation system, they elect their own government, they have governors or prime ministers.

And then the federal government, which sends somebody to OPEC, sends somebody to the U.N., have a small army for external security. Delineate the taxation system. Have minimum standards for education, for welfare and things like that.

Then the only other thing I think you do - and by the way, the constitution allows this, the current constitution - the other thing, though, I think is necessary is that you go back into the constitution and put an amendment in there that really locks down the sharing of oil revenues into these regional governments, based on their population; that is, a percentage based on their population.

That way, you can guarantee the Sunnis that they will always, they’ll always get part of the oil revenue, although, you know, the Sunnis may have oil, too. We don’t know what they have (INAUDIBLE) down there.

But I think that would work. I think that, at least we ought to try that.

LAMB: What year did you get out of the service?

GARNER: Ninety-seven.

LAMB: When did you go to work for SYColeman?

GARNER: In ’97.

LAMB: And what does that company do?

GARNER: The company was a technology company. It provided engineering services. It doesn’t make anything.

LAMB: But it had something to do with the Patriot missile.

GARNER: Very little.

In fact, when I went to work for SYColeman, I don’t believe they were doing anything for the Patriot missile.

There’s a lot of - there was a lot of - Al Jazeera put out a lot of stuff that I was in a defense contractor that produced missiles, and all that.

But SYColeman was an engineering technical services company. And what we produced were people who did studies for you, who did staff work for you, and things like that. We didn’t have a hardware product at all.

LAMB: You were over in Iraq in 2003. What have you been doing since?

GARNER: Well, when I got back from Iraq, I went back to work for my company. I stayed there another year-and-a-half, and then I retired from it. Since that time, I’ve been kind of an independent guy.

LAMB: Why did you go in the service in the first place? And what year was it?

GARNER: You mean the first time?

LAMB: I mean back then, yes.

GARNER: Yes. I was going to a little college in Florida called Florida Southern College. I wasn’t very regimented. I wasn’t very motivated. I didn’t know what I wanted to do in life, and I got in a lot of trouble.

And so the dean called me in one day and he said, ”You know, Jay, you ought to probably go straighten yourself out. And then if you ever do that, come back and see us and we’ll think about letting you back in.”

And so, I joined the Marine Corps.

LAMB: What kind of trouble did you get in?

GARNER: Oh, I just didn’t make my grades. I partied all the time, did what, you know, what any other unintelligent freshman male does.

And so, I went into the Marine Corps, and they made a Christian out of me in boot camp. And they regimented me. I was a Marine Corps (INAUDIBLE). And when I got out of the Marine Corps I went back to college, and I was an A student from that point on.

LAMB: Where do you go back to?

GARNER: I went back to Southern to make up all the courses that I didn’t do well in. And then I transferred to Florida State University, and I graduated from Florida State.

LAMB: Then how did you get in the Army?

GARNER: I got married after I got out of the Marine Corps to my childhood sweetheart. And after we had been married a couple of years, just before I graduated, we had our first child and our only child. And she had a lot of medical complications.

And so I owed a lot of - I was going to go to law school. I wanted to be the governor of Florida. Of course, I didn’t know as much about politics then as I do now.

So, I was going to go to law school, but I owed so much money, that I needed to pay off my debts. And so, I could make more money coming into the Army, and I had taken advanced ROTC. So, I could make more money as a second lieutenant in the Army, because I had all this longevity built up from the time I was 17 years old.

So, I came in the Army. I was in the Army for almost three years. Paid off all my debts, got a little nest egg. Served in Germany, got out of the Army.

Got accepted into law school at the University of Florida. Taught school in Florida while I was waiting on the semester to start.

Lyndon Johnson put the 173rd Brigade in Vietnam. I felt guilty. I got on the phone, called mobile tank commander in the Pentagon and said, ”Get me back in the Army.”

Two days later they had me back in the Army. And he said - he called me up and said, ”I got you back in the Army. Now, do I now have to send an American flag for you and Connie to put at the foot of your bed?” I said, ”No, sir, I’ll never make that mistake again.”

So, that was ’64.

LAMB: When did you go to Vietnam?

GARNER: I went to Vietnam ’67 to ’68, and ’71 and ’72.

LAMB: Looking back on that, is there any comparison between what happened there and what’s going on in Iraq right now?

GARNER: You mean from a military context?

LAMB: Just from your experience and what you saw over there, and the debate in the society and all of the things that …

GARNER: Well, it was - you know, it was a lot different. I mean, I was an infantry adviser in Vietnam, both tours. And so, I never served with a U.S. unit. I was always with the Vietnamese unit.

But our - the fights we got in were always with units, unit-to-unit. You were fighting with a squad or a company or a battalion, or something like that.

You knew where the enemy lived. They lived up there in North Vietnam, and they were hiding around in the jungles.

They represented a coherent government, whether you agreed with that government or not.

I don’t - you don’t have any of those factors in Iraq.

You also, like Iraq, you never knew exactly - your enemy looked the same, unless they were wearing a uniform.

But I think the only - the only common thread is, to a (ph) degree (ph), the media. I mean, the media has been pretty tough on this war. They were pretty tough on that war.

And I think, I thought that we had that war pretty well in hand after Tet Off (ph) ’68, until the Congress decided to pull the funding. And I hope they don’t do that this time, because I think the results of walking away from this one, as we walked away from Vietnam, would be far more devastating than that was.

LAMB: Go into more depth about the media and what impact you think they have, both there and …

GARNER: Well, I just think that - and I’m - this isn’t - I’m not trying to bash the media at all, because I realize this is a tough job. You’re out there. You’ve got to get your story in. And sensational things get your story written, and less sensational things probably don’t.

But I think there is an awfully lot of good things that happen - maybe not an awful lot of good - but there are some very positive things that happen over there that we don’t know about. Not all we read is the terrible stuff. And God knows, there is enough terrible stuff.

But I’d like to see a little bit more reflection on the positive things and the good things that our soldiers and marines do over there.

LAMB: Give me an example.

GARNER: Oh, where they - in places where they’re working with an Iraqi unit and they’re highly successful in that unit. Or places where they’ve gone in and restored schools or hospitals. And places where they’ve integrated themselves with the people, and they get along well with the people, and places where the people like them there and want to see them there.

I think there’s a lot of stories like that, that we shall succeed - that side of it.

I don’t have anything - I don’t have anything against the media asking tough questions. And I don’t have anything against the media reporting when we do something wrong - Abu Ghraib and things like that. I think, absolutely, that has to come out.

But I’d like to see, also, a tendency to look for good things that our soldiers do, and our people do.

LAMB: Would you blame the media for the general attitude in the country?

GARNER: No, I don’t think so.

LAMB: What about Vietnam? Would you blame them for losing the Vietnam situation?

GARNER: I never blame - I think we lost the Vietnam situation because we pulled the funding. We had no more money. I was there in ’72 when that happened.

LAMB: Why did we pull the funding, in your opinion?

GARNER: I have no idea. Have to cross the river to ask all those guys over there why they did it.

LAMB: Has it been worth, whatever the figure is - $300 billion, 3,000, almost, deaths, 10,000 people maimed and wounded badly, another 10,000 that went back into combat over in Iraq - has it been worth that?

GARNER: We won’t know until this is over. I mean, that - if you look at warfares of our history, the casualty toll we paid there is not as great as in other wars.

But if you’re like me and you’ve been going to Walter Reed every day, and you see all the troops in Walter Reed missing hands, arms, legs, it breaks your heart. So, you say - and you say to yourself - even though I’m military, I say to myself, is it worth it? I mean, is it worth that this kid’s going (ph) to be like that the rest of his life?

It brings tears to your eyes. So, that’s a hard thing to judge. I don’t know what the answer to that is.

LAMB: You sat for several hours with Bob Woodward. He says that in his book.

GARNER: Yes.

LAMB: He said he came down to see you in Orlando, and you had breakfast with him up here in Washington and talked to him. Have you read the book?

GARNER: I did, yes.

LAMB: Were you quoted accurately?

GARNER: Yes.

LAMB: What did you think of the book?

GARNER: Well, first of all, I thought he did a masterful job of writing it. I think he’s a masterful journalist and a masterful writer.

But I was a little sad - in fact, I was very sad - that the further I got into it, because of the blunders we’ve made. And I just, you know, this great nation just doesn’t mess things up that much.

LAMB: There’s a quote in there from you. And you were supposedly at the time - it was May 16th of 2003, and it was after the decision was made to do the de-Baathification. And you were talking to John Abizaid, General John Abizaid.

”John, I’m telling you. If you do this it’s going to be ugly. It’ll take 10 years to fix the country, and for three years you’ll be sending kids back home in body bags.”

GARNER: Well, let me go back into that.

Yes, I said that. But I wasn’t meaning that John, if you, John, do this.

LAMB: I know.

GARNER: It was, John, if we do this, if we let this happen, the de-Baathification - the depth of the de-Baathification.

And John Abizaid agreed with that.

John Abizaid is extremely adept in that part of the world. He’s probably - in my mind, he’s the best general we have in the Army.

But John Abizaid, he listens to Al Jazeera. He reads the newspaper. He speaks - I took him up to Mosul one time. And after he talked to everybody, they wanted to elect him their mayor. He’s the right guy at the right time to be there.

But early, in April, John Abizaid told me, he says, you know, ”I think we’ve got a guerrilla war brewing here.” So, he recognized that. I think he’s the first person to recognize what was going on.

So, when I said that to him, that wasn’t giving him a piece of information he didn’t already have.

LAMB: But what I - the reason I asked, though, I mean, basically, what you predicted so far is accurate.

I mean, we haven’t gotten to the 10 years yet, but we’ve had three years of sending kids back in body bags.

And you were there first after the war was over as a civilian representative of this government, and you didn’t want a de-Baathification …

GARNER: I wanted …

LAMB: … plan.

GARNER: No, what I - well, you had to have some sort of a plan, but I didn’t want one that went very deep.

I wanted what I called a general de-Baathification. As we brought the ministries back in, the government back in, the colleges and universities back, I wanted to not bring back the top person, because you knew he was a Saddam Hussein groupie. And I didn’t want to bring back the personnel person, because they were the same thing.

But I wanted to bring everybody else back. And then, as the people in the organization began to point out that they were bad guys, we would vet that. And if that’s true, we’d take them out on a case-by-case basis.

LAMB: You had three things that you called tragic decisions. And you had a meeting with Donald Rumsfeld and you told him this.

GARNER: I did, yes.

LAMB: When, what was that? What timing would that have been?

GARNER: It was in June after I got back, late June.

LAMB: You were totally involved in this …

GARNER: Middle of June.

LAMB: … for how long?

GARNER: Well, I started putting the team together in the Pentagon in the last week of January. Went to Kuwait the second week of March. Went into Baghdad the beginning of the third week in April.

And then I left the first week in June.

LAMB: Circumstances when Don Rumsfeld called you and told you that Paul Bremer was going to take your place.

GARNER: Well, let me go back in time.

When I was called by the SecDef’s office and asked to do this in January, mid-January, I was told that they wanted me to put together a - the words were, we want you to put together a post-war staff that can go to Baghdad and begin to put together a functioning government and do the things that has to be done, in case we go to war.

And the fact of the matter is, you probably won’t deploy with them, because there’ll be a presidential envoy that has name recognition in the United States, more than likely a retired governor.

And so, I said, well, I’ve got to check with my wife and my company.

And I got a call back a couple of days later saying, ”Hey, are you going to do this?” And I said, ”OK, let me come over there.”

And I went over and talked to Secretary Rumsfeld, and I agreed to do it. And that was probably (ph) the third week of January.

And then there were a couple of articles published in the ”Post” about how I was putting this organization together, but there would be a man of stature replace me very early on. So, I just didn’t think it’d be that quick.

So, what happened to me, I went to Baghdad on the 21st with eight people to see really what - to get my own view on how good or how bad things were.

And then on the 22nd I went up north to see Talabani and Barzani. And the reason I went up north is because I had a retired major general, Bruce Moore, and a guy named Dick Naab, who was with me when I was in Kurdistan the first time. They - I had put them up there a month before that.

And they called me up and said, ”Talabani and Barzani here are getting ready to form an interim government to run everything.” I said, ”Well, I think - can’t let them do that.”

So I said, ”I’ll be up there. You tell them I’ll come see them.”

So I went to Baghdad and made an assessment. And the next morning early I flew up to Kurdistan, and greeted Talabani and Barzani, and we went and had a meeting.

And I said, ”Look, I can’t let you guys put together an interim government.” And Talabani said, ”No, we weren’t doing that.” He said, ”No, we’re not putting together an interim government.”

He said, ”We’re going to put together some leadership for you, to help you in Baghdad, so you can have an Iraqi face of leadership with the people, and it’s not your face.”

And I said, ”I think it’s a great idea.” I said, ”Who are you thinking about putting together?”

He said, ”We’re going to put together the leaders that Zal has been dealing with.”

See, now Zal Khalilzad had been dealing with the expatriates and Talabani and Barzani for about a year-and-a-half before the war. And Zal had done a good job …

LAMB: He wasn’t over there yet.

GARNER: No, he wasn’t over there.

LAMB: Was he on the National Security Council staff?

GARNER: He was working for Condoleezza, yes.

So, he was - I guess he was sort of a quasi-envoy to Afghanistan at the time, but he was also working the expatriates and the two Kurdish leaders. And he’s had several meetings. We had a meeting with him, I think, at Langley. And he had one, at least one in northern Iraq right after - at the beginning of 2003.

So, I said, ”OK, who will that be?” And Talabani said, ”Well, it’ll be the two of us. And it’ll be Chalabi, be Allawi. It’ll be Pachachi and Hakim.”

And I said, ”I’m a little uncomfortable with Hakim, because he’s a little bit too Iranian for me.” And Jalal Talabani just reached over and patted me on the knee and he said, ”Jay, it’s better to have Hakim inside the tent than outside the tent.”

And I said, ”You know, I think you’re right.”

And then I said, ”Hey, that’s a good group.” But I said, ”the problem with that is, everybody in that is an expatriate except you two guys, and you’re Kurds.” And I said, ”Where are some Arabs that have been here? We need that.”

And they said, ”we’ll bring in a couple.” Al-Jafari was in that also.

And they said, ”We’ll bring in another Dawa and a Christian. And we’ll give you their names.” And I said, ”OK.”

And they said, the second thing we want to do is, as soon as possible we want to have what they called a ”big-tent meeting.” And they said, ”We need to have a big-tent meeting,” and ”we need to start talking about writing a constitution.”

And I said, ”I’d like to do that as soon as possible.”

And he said, ”When would you like to start?” And I said, ”I’d like to start the first of July.”

And he said, ”All right, we’ve already - we’ve already made a list of people we want to do that.”

And I said, ”Yes, but it’s got to be a list that represents everything.”

And Talabani said, ”It will be a mosaic of Iraq. It’ll be all ethnicities, all tribes, all religions, all professions.” And he said, ”We will give you the list. You can look at it and you can add anyone you want, and you can take anyone off that you want.”

So I said, ”OK. Here’s what we’ll do then. You bring these leaders to Baghdad. I want them there in one week. I want you to all have your deputies set up in a deputies’ committee. I want that deputies’ committee to report directly in to my staff, so I can get hold of any of you any time. And daily, I want you to talk to the Iraqi people.

”And if this works, then I’ll make you an interim government, but you will still come under us. And we’ll start writing a constitution the first of July.”

So, they did. A week later they were in Baghdad, and we started doing it.

LAMB: One of the things that comes out here in Bob Woodward’s book, one of the interviews you’ve done, is a quote, something to the effect, I did not like Chalabi and he did not like me.

GARNER: Oh, we didn’t like each other. Still don’t.

LAMB: What was the reason?

GARNER: You know, I can’t give you a bunch of empirical data on why I didn’t like him. It’s just when you - when you meet somebody and you have that feeling - and he met me and instantly didn’t like me. And I met him and instantly didn’t like him.

And I didn’t believe him. I didn’t trust him. I didn’t trust him at all. I didn’t trust anything he told me.

It wasn’t that way with, like, Allawi. Most of what Allawi advised me on and told me, I could see. And even Hakim. But Chalabi, I just never cared for.

LAMB: Why do you think those in the Pentagon - the Feiths and Vice President Cheney, who like (ph) is (ph) supposedly like him …

GARNER: I have no idea.

LAMB: Had you gotten the message from anybody that he’s the chosen one?

GARNER: No, not - I never got any direction that he was the chosen one. And I’d heard Rumsfeld say on more than one occasion, that he - Rumsfeld said, ”I have no candidate. I don’t have a candidate.” That will all sort out as we go down this road together.

So, I knew that - or at least I thought - my strong feeling was, he was not the - he was not the candidate of Rumsfeld. But I knew Doug Feith favored him heavily, Richard Perle did, the vice president did, Wolfowitz did.

LAMB: Back to this meeting you had with Don Rumsfeld. And you said there were three tragic decisions that had been made while you were - after you were relieved of your responsibilities.

One was de-Baathification; two was getting rid of the army, and you can tell us the differences; and three was dumping the Iraqi Leadership Group.

Why are those - why were they tragic?

GARNER: Well, one, I think the depth of de-Baathification, at that point in time put a halt to bringing back the Iraqi government to function, because it was too deep. It went down too far.

On the army, you know, we had - well, let me go back to the de-Baathification. The other thing about de-Baathification, you’re talking about, oh, I don’t know, Brian, somewhere between 25,000 and probably 50,000 Baathists that we put out of a job when we issued that decree - most of them in Baghdad. And that’s not good.

LAMB: And they’re all Sunnis?

GARNER: They’re all Sunnis, yes. That’s not good.

Then on the army, we had always planned to bring the Iraqi army back and use them in the job of reconstruction and use them in the job of security, because they had the skill level to do the things we needed them to do.

I mean, they could work on roads, they could move rubble. They can guard buildings. They could seal the border.

They could do the - they were in organizations. They had a command and control over them. They had vehicles you could move around in.

So, it seemed like a good idea to us to bring them back and use them in places where we needed them to do work.

Plus, it kept them employed. And there’s all different numbers, but somewhere between 250,000 and 400,000 of them. So it didn’t make sense to us - the group I had - to put them out of a job.

LAMB: Were they all put out of a job?

GARNER: Yes, I think they were, because, you know, this war was unlike the first Gulf War, where they surrendered. In this one, they just put on civilian clothes. Hid their weapons and went back to their families.

So, in my opinion, the day we made the decision not to continue to try to bring back the Iraqi army, well, we made enemies out of about 250,000 foreign soldiers.

LAMB: And you also had …

GARNER: Who were still armed.

LAMB: And you said that 50,000 Baathists also were out of a job.

GARNER: Yes.

So, and then the third thing is disbanding the Leadership Group, because whether you liked them or not, they talked to the Iraqi people all the time. They were on television a lot; they went out on the radio a lot.

LAMB: You’re talking about your group that you just talked about earlier.

GARNER: Yes. Yes, that might not have been the best group, but it was the best we had.

So, what happened at the end of all of that, the end of that three or four days, we had somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 enemy we didn’t have when we started, and we had no Iraqi face of leadership to talk to the Iraqi people.

LAMB: What was Mr. Rumsfeld’s response to you?

GARNER: Well, you’ve got to realize now, all this had happened at least a month before, OK. So we’ve had a month since all this happened.

And he said, well, you may be right, Jay. But he said, right now, we are where we are, or something - something to that effect.

LAMB: You mention Barzani and Talabani, Jafari, Allawi, Pachachi, Hakim.

GARNER: And Chalabi.

LAMB: And Chalabi. Most of those gentlemen had some kind of leadership position at one point. But you haven’t mentioned Maliki. Where did he come from?

GARNER: I didn’t know Maliki.

LAMB: Where did he come from?

GARNER: I don’t know. I don’t know.

I don’t ever remember meeting Maliki.

LAMB: Do you have any idea why the others didn’t succeed? I mean, Talabani has. But, I mean, the others in leadership positions, like Jafari and Allawi and …

GARNER: Well, I think - I think it was apparent that Jafari just didn’t have the tools to do that. I think Allawi didn’t have a strong enough base.

And I think what Maliki had, he’s got - he had a strong enough base, and he’s bolstered by al-Sadr’s militant organization.

LAMB: You didn’t write a book?

GARNER: No.

LAMB: Why not?

GARNER: I have no need to write a book. I have no desire to write a book.

LAMB: But let me just suggest this to you. You could go to West Point at any time and go to a classroom and teach them a lot about your experience. Wouldn’t it be worth it to have it on the record?

GARNER: Well, we’ve got - we’ve got it on the record in a lot of places, you know. There’s a military history. Our historian’s writing a book right now. He’ll write a far better book than I ever would.

So, all that - all that stuff gets captured somewhere.

LAMB: Well, let me put you in the classroom for a minute. You’re in there and you’re talking to some West Point cadets. And they start to ask you about your experience.

And what would you tell them that you would do differently? Or what would you warn them about, if they ever found themselves in the same position you were in?

GARNER: From a military standpoint.

LAMB: Either one. Military, or just the politics or …

GARNER: First one, I’d tell them that, you know, you guys only do good at those things you’re tested in. If we don’t test you in it, you don’t care anything about it.

And we don’t test nation-building in the military. We don’t test stabilization in the military. We don’t test putting a government together and running governmental organizations and handling the quality of life for civilians, and that type of thing.

And until we make that part of our institutional training and part of our evaluations, we’re never going to do that very good.

The other thing I’d tell them is that, you know, you have to - I think you have to absolutely be forward on speaking your mind. And if you think it’s wrong, you’ve got to come out and say that, even if it’s - even if it costs you.

LAMB: And when you came back after your experience and you went in to see the president - they invited you over to see the president - you didn’t tell him what you really thought.

GARNER: I went in and saw the president, and I think he was just - he was just being very gracious, having me back. He spent about 45 minutes with me.

And he - I sat there and told him some stories about - I never told him what I told Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld was my boss; I told him.

And Woodward’s been critical of me on that, and I understand that.

LAMB: So, you didn’t feel any need when you walked in there to tell the president what you really thought?

GARNER: No, I didn’t.

LAMB: What’s the Darth Vader story?

GARNER: Darth Vader?

Malcolm MacPherson, who you may or may not know, Malcolm writes for ”Time,” and he’s written several books. He was over there, and I asked him one day, I said, ”Hey, you want to go with me?” And he said, ”Sure.”

So, we went down to Al Hillah. And in Al Hillah, I had a team down there under a retired brigadier general named Buck Walters, a great guy.

And so, we were down there looking at things, and Buck says, ”Hey, Jay. Before you go back, I need to take you to talk to Darth Vader, because he wants to talk to you.”

And I said, ”Who’s that?” And he said, ”Well, he’s a pretty powerful player we got here. He runs things, and I need you to talk to him.” I said, ”OK.”

I said, ”Why do you call him Darth Vader?” He said, ”You’ll understand that when you see him.”

So, we go to the mosque and walk in, and the lesser clerics bring us, and they bring us in the room to sit down. And then Darth Vader comes in.

Now, this guy’s about the size of Shaquille O’Neal. I mean, he’s a huge man. He’s got his big, black turban on.

And he shakes my hand and just - a big old hand just wraps up around my hand. And he says, ”Please sit down.”

And so, I sat down, and he said, ”I’m glad you came to see me.” He said, ”Do you have any questions?” I said, ”Yes, sir, I do.”

I said, ”there’s a lot of things” - we’d been here now about a month. And I said, ”there’s a lot of things we’ve done, and I think we’ve done well. And there’s a lot of things we’ve done that I don’t think we’ve done so well. And there’s a lot of things that we haven’t done, because we haven’t known to do that.

”And so, I would like for you to take some time, if you will, and tell me what we’ve done well, what we’ve done poorly and some things that we haven’t done yet that we should do.”

And he - this guy speaks perfect English. And he said, ”I’d be glad to do that.”

And he talked to me, and he said, ”Do you mind if I speak Arabic?”

And I had with me a State Department Arabist named Mike DeFoe (ph), probably the best language expert they had. And I said, ”Absolutely. You can speak Arabic and Mike will translate,” which he did.

So, for the next hour he talked. And he talked about this, we need to have a democracy, we need to write a constitution. Their constitution has to spread across Iraq and take in everybody. It has to have minority rights, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So, when he got through, he broke back into English, and he said, ”Let me” - he said, ”I apologize for taking so long.” He said, ”I just feel so strongly about this.”

He said, ”let me summarize for you what I said.” He said, ”we have to write a constitution. And that constitution has to be a constitution for all the Iraqi people.” And it has to be - it has to have minority rights in it. You have to protect everyone, and it has to represent everyone.

And he said, ”That constitution has to be based on the principles of Jesus Christ.” And he said, ”Once we’ve done this” - once we’ve done this - and he began to get very (INAUDIBLE).

He said, ”Once we’ve done this and we have this constitution, and it’s based on the principles of Jesus,” he said, ”then you can bring us in as the 51st state.”

And I said, ”Well, that is really unique.” I said, ”Let me think about that. Let me see where I can go with that. And I really appreciate your time, and I’ll come back and see you again.”

And he said, ”I wish you would.” So I shook his hand.

We walked out and we got in the van, and Malcolm MacPherson said, ”Wow.” He said, ”What are you going to do with that?”

And I said, ”I’m not going to do a damn thing with it.” I said, ”that’s your problem. You’re the guy that’s got to write it.”

He said, ”I’m not writing that. No one would ever believe it.”

LAMB: What about trust?

Could you - is there a way to describe whether you could trust the Shias, whether you could trust the Sunnis, whether you could trust the Kurds?

As you’re dealing with these people, any of them - I mean, you said you didn’t like Chalabi and he didn’t like you. But what about the rest of them?

Were they straight with you?

GARNER: Well, you don’t - you never know. You have no way of knowing.

I don’t think - I don’t think one Shia knows if the other Shia is straight with them.

But trust is probably too strong a word, because I think what we were really groping (ph) for is the ability to have everybody compromise what they believed in order for us to put together a unity government to make things start working. And that’s what we haven’t been able to do so far.

LAMB: You did an interview with the BBC back in 2003. There’s no date on what I found, but I’m going to read you a quote just to get your reaction to it.

And the interviewer said, ”The world is watching and that includes the Arab world.” This is early.

And you said, ”I hope they do watch. I think they’ll be pleased with what they see.”

GARNER: Yes, I thought they would in 2003.

LAMB: So, what happened?

GARNER: Well, you know what happened. We just kind of - we kind of lost control. We got some sort of a - whether it’s a civil war or not, we got a lot of sectarian violence going on over there, and it’s just crumbled before us.

LAMB: If you hadn’t had de-Baathification, hadn’t …

GARNER: Oh, I don’t know whether that - certainly, I believe in my heart of hearts that’s a contributor, but I’m not sure that led to exactly where we are right now.

LAMB: And another question he asked you about, the Geneva Conventions and whether - the Hague Conventions and whether or not you intend to follow them.

You said, ”Well I think the coalition is bound by the Geneva Conventions and the Hague Conventions. We’re a very moralistic society and a very honorable society.”

GARNER: I believe that.

LAMB: You’re talking about us.

GARNER: I believe that.

LAMB: Explain that. Why do you think that?

GARNER: I have no reason not to think that. I mean, I think we are a very moralistic society. I think we’re a compassionate society. I think we - we’re also a very hard society, and we’re tough when we want to be.

But I think the basic American spirit is one of compassion and is one of morality, and one of trying to do things good.

Now, we slip up from time to time, and we make mistakes. But we’re quick to recognize our mistakes, and we’re quick to admit them.

And we open our arms to everybody else, so I believe that about our country.

LAMB: What has been your philosophy since you came back? And it’s been three years. But what has been your philosophy about your public posture versus your private posture, and how you really feel about people involved?

Because when you read the Woodward book and all these other books, you read nothing but backbiting and people undermining each other in the United States government. And people are talking, so some of that had to happen.

GARNER: Well, that’s why I said, the more you read it, the sadder you get.

LAMB: Why is that? What’s the cause of that, in your experience? You spent 42 years in the military.

GARNER: Oh, I don’t think it’s a military problem.

LAMB: No, but I mean, you …

GARNER: It’s a political problem.

LAMB: You spent 42 years watching the American political system interact with the military.

GARNER: I think that over the course of the last probably, I don’t know, say three decades, we’ve lost in this country, politically, we’ve lost the ability to be bipartisan.

And I think that you’re either red or blue, and if you’re red you really lean way over to your base, and if you’re blue you lean way over to your base. And there’s very little ability, then, to compromise in the middle. And I think we’ve lost that.

And how do you get that back? I have no idea. But I wish we could.

LAMB: There’s a lot of conversation about you wanted to get in and do your job faster than they let you in. Tommy Franks wouldn’t let you go there, to Iraq from where you were sitting …

GARNER: Yes, but you’ve got to walk a little bit in his boots on that.

I mean, what he told me is, he said, ”Look, Jay, there’s still a lot of shooting going on there.” He said, ”We don’t have everything secured.”

And he said, ”be in my shoes.” He said, ”I’m going to put 350 civilians in there.” And he said, ”What happens if you get a bunch of them shot up?” He said, ”We’re not ready for that.”

And I said - and Tommy Franks and I are friends, and we were battalion commanders together in Europe in the early ’80s.

I said, ”Yes, but what we’ve got right now, I think, is we have some vacuums filling up with things that are going to be hard to remove, and things that we want to happen. So, I think you need to get me in as soon as possible.”

And he said, ”I really don’t want to do that.”

And I said, ”I know you don’t, but I think you have to do that.”

And he thought a minute. He said, ”OK, let me call Dave.” He was talking about Dave McKiernan. He said, ”let me call Dave and talk to him.”

LAMB: General McKiernan.

GARNER: And he said, ”I’ll get back with you.” And he said, ”We will do what we can.” I said, ”I know you will.” And I left, flew back to Kuwait.

And late that night he called me and he said, ”OK, Jay.” He said, ”I talked to Dave, and he said he’s pretty strapped right now. He doesn’t have a lot to give you, but he’ll give you everything he can.” And I said, ”I know he will.”

And he said, ”Well, God bless you. I wish you luck.” And that was it.

LAMB: When did you go in?

GARNER: I went in - that was the 19th - I went in on the 21st, and the rest of my team road-marched - there was about 350 of them - road-marched from Kuwait City into Baghdad on the 23rd, and arrived on the 24th.

LAMB: What did you do as a military career officer, a general, that you think got the attention of people that said you’re the guy to come in right away?

GARNER: Oh, I don’t know why those chose me. I think probably it was a couple of things.

I think - I had been the guy on the ground in northern Iraq in the first war and after the first war. And that had gone very well. It was a highly successful operation for a lot of reasons other than me.

And then the second thing that happened was, I was one of the commissioners on the congressionally-appointed Space Commission that Rumsfeld chaired, and so he knew me. And so, I think, as they were looking for somebody to come in to try to put together a staff that could do post-war work, my name just popped up. And Rumsfeld was probably comfortable with me, since he knew me from that. And then I had some background in it, (INAUDIBLE).

I mean, that’s what I think. I’ve never been told.

LAMB: One of the things that also comes through is that people weren’t telling you the truth, including Don Rumsfeld.

And when he called you and told you that the president wanted to make Paul Bremer the head, in-charge civilian over there, and then you ended up going in the Oval Office, made a comment to the president. And the president said, I didn’t do this.

GARNER: Well, what Rumsfeld said, he called me up and he said, ”Hi, Jay.” This is the day I got to Baghdad. The day I got to Baghdad from up north is the 24th.

And he called me and said, everything’s going great. We’re (ph) pleased at what you’re doing. It’s a good job. You’re doing exactly I knew you’d do, and all that kind of stuff.

Rumsfeld was very - well, people that really don’t know him don’t know that he’s a very gracious man. And he said, ”By the way, Jay,” he said, ”I want you to know that today the president chose as his presidential envoy Jerry Bremer, ambassador Jerry Bremer. Do you know him?” I said, ”No, I don’t know him.”

And he said, ”Well, I want you to call him.” I said, ”Fine, I’ll call him.”

And I said, ”I’m going to come home.” He said, ”No, I don’t want you to come home; I want you to stay there with Bremer.”

I said, ”No, Mr. Secretary, it doesn’t work that way.” I said, ”You can’t have the guy that used to be in charge hanging around while the new guy that’s in charge is there, because you divide the loyalties of all the people.” I said, ”So, when he gets here, I need to leave.”

He said, ”Well, I need you to transition him.” And I said, ”Well, I’ll be glad to do that.” And I said, ”It won’t take very long.”

And he said, ”OK, well, I’ll be in Baghdad in a week, and I want to talk to you about this.”

So, he came back to Baghdad about a week later, and we talked about the plans - about a variety of things, but that was one of them.

But then when I went to see the president before I left, I said, ”Mr. President, I just want you to know that I’ve had three or four weeks here to work with Jerry Bremer, and I want you to know he’s one of the hardest-working men I’ve ever seen.” He’s a very bright, intelligent guy. He’s a take-charge guy.

And I said, ”You made a good choice here.”

And he said, ”Hey. I didn’t choose him. Rummy chose him, just like he chose you.”

So, you never know where the truth is, you know. That’s politics.

LAMB: How much of that, though - I know that one incident isn’t enough - but how much of this is kind of a microcosm of why the American people don’t believe a lot of what they’ve been told about the war?

GARNER: Oh, I don’t know, Brian. I can’t answer that.

LAMB: I mean, have you had that experience yourself, watching all the language that comes out of the administration and the Pentagon?

GARNER: Well, yes. Sure. I mean, you see repeats and you see reversals all the time.

LAMB: We also got a little insight about an event that you were involved in when you were having a meeting over in the palace, I guess. And you were right down the hallway from Paul Bremer after he’d gotten there, and he kept calling people out of the meeting.

GARNER: Well, what we had was - immediately after we got to Baghdad, we came up with 10 things we thought had to happen right now in order to change things (ph). And I don’t know if I remember all 10.

But one is, we need to pay all the civil servants - the military, the police and all the civil service - pay them not only their current pay, but their back pay, which was about three months of back pay.

We needed to buy the harvest. The barley and the wheat and all that, we needed to buy that. We needed to solve the fuel crisis that they had there.

We needed to prevent the spread of any serious diseases like cholera, or anything like that. We needed to get the schools back in session. We needed to start all public works back and bring the ministries back.

We needed to delineate what the currency was and start that going. So, we had 10 or 11, and we needed to bring the police back, the court system and the prison system.

So we had about 10 major muscle movements. And I drew those up. And I went to see Dave McKiernan, General McKiernan, who was the land forces component command. And Dave controlled everything, and was a great guy.

And I said, ”Dave, here’s what I think we have to do to make an immediate impact.” And he looked that over and asked a couple of questions and said, ”You know, I agree with you.”

And he says, ”Here’s what I’ll do,” he says, ”if you’ll put one of your top civilians on each one of those, I’ll put a general officer for each one of them.” And I said, ”That’s great. That’ll make it happen.”

So, a few days later we were having our first meeting. And all of this stuff had already started working. We’re having our first meeting where the two of them would come together, the civilian and the general, and they come in and they would brief myself and McKiernan.

And Abizaid flew in for that.

So, just as we’re getting started, Ambassador Bremer’s consigliere came in, and he got hold of Abizaid. And he said, ”Hey, the ambassador needs to talk to you.”

And Abizaid, ”OK, I’ll be there after I’m through with this meeting.” And he said, ”No, he needs to talk to you now.”

So, Abizaid turned to me and said, ”What do you want me to do?” I said, ”If he needs to talk to you, go see him.”

And so, Abizaid left, so they started the briefing. Within five minutes they came and got McKiernan. McKiernan said, ”You want me to go?” I said, ”Yes. If he’s calling for you, do it.”

So, when he left Fuzzy Webster, a major general who’s now the commander of 1st Army Division, says, ”Do you think we need to go on with this briefing?” And I said, ”Yes, Fuzzy, I think we need to, because everybody’s worked hard on it, and let’s you and I see where we are on all this.”

So, we (INAUDIBLE) briefing. I think that’s the story you …

LAMB: That is. But then you went in and saw Mr. Bremer.

GARNER: Yes, we had - yes, Bremer and I talked about it.

LAMB: I’ll make it easier on you. I can quote what at least I’ve found. I believe it’s in Bob Woodward’s book.

”Don’t ever do that to me again,” you said.

”If you ever have me in a meeting and you start pulling people out of it - you need to give me more respect than that. And I’ll tell you what. I’ll make it easy on you, Jerry. I’m going home.”

GARNER: Yes, that happened.

LAMB: But did you have some - were you getting ticked off about all this?

GARNER: Oh, I got ticked off about that.

LAMB: What was his reaction?

GARNER: I think his reaction was, ”Well, I’m not really sure I knew you were having a meeting,” or something like that. And then we talked. And he said, ”I need you to stay here. I need for you to stay for a while.”

And I said, well, I’ve got to - ”if I stay and I’m going to accomplish anything, I’ve got to have access to the staff.” And he said, ”I’ve got to think about that. I’m not sure I can give you access to staff.”

And I said, ”Well, hell, Jerry, I might as well go home. I can’t accomplish anything.”

And he said, ”Well, let me think about that.”

And I said, ”I’ll tell you what I’ll do.” I said, ”right now, what I’m doing right now is I’m trying to get - I’m trying to set up the process to get everyone paid.” And that’s real important we do that.

And I said, ”I’ll stay through that process, and then after that,” I said, ”we’ll take a day-by-day contract.”

And so, about three weeks later I left.

LAMB: How did you get everybody paid?

GARNER: It was through the State Department. State Department had - not State Department, excuse me, the Treasury Department.

Treasury Department had done an incredibly good job of planning for that. And I had David Nummy and a set of his guys, and they were absolutely masterful, probably the best team I had over there.

What happened is, it took a while to get all that started, because when we went to re-establish the ministries, about 17 of the 23 buildings we were going to use had been destroyed through looting. And I mean severely. These buildings were set on fire, and that type of thing.

So, the people didn’t come back to work. And when they didn’t come back to work, you didn’t have the rolls of who was on. You didn’t have the names of the people.

So eventually what I did, I put our people out on the street, and they just started walking through Baghdad asking Iraqis, ”Can you tell me some people that were in the ministry of trade? Can you tell me some people who were in the ministry of agriculture?” That type of thing.

And over about a week, they began to get a nucleus of each one of the ministries back. And in each case, eventually, somebody came up with a disk or the paperwork of who the employees were, and the Treasury guys took that. And then they used that as their basis to begin paying - to pay the ministries.

LAMB: Did they just fly money over to you?

GARNER: No, we had - we started with $1.6 billion that were frozen assets that the first George Bush had frozen during the first war. And they brought that money to Kuwait when I was in Kuwait.

And then when the 3rd Infantry Division took Baghdad, they uncovered $600,000 or $700,000. So they took that money and put it with the 1.6. So, we sitting there with about $2.2 or $2.3 billion.

And so, we were using that money to pay them back. And that was enough. That was more than enough to pay everybody back and pay them their back pay.

LAMB: Did you just pass the money out in cash? Or did you send it out in checks?

GARNER: Passed it out in cash. Just the old military way of paying system. You came up to the door and they counted the money out for you.

LAMB: You’re in the Oval Office now, today. The president says, ”General, give it to me between the eyes. What do we need to do now?” What do you tell him?

GARNER: I think this - I don’t know if you have enough time on this program to go all through that, but I think there’s three significant things you need to do.

Number one, I think we need to do a very professional, robust job of advising the Iraqi military. And I’m talking about a very robust set of advisers.

I’m talking about, when you have an Iraqi battalion, what I want in that - what I want is a U.S. Army or Marine Corps lieutenant colonel advising that Iraqi lieutenant colonel. And I want the American guy to have combat experience. I want him to have commanded a battalion in combat.

And under him, I want him to have everything that he needs to make that happen. I want him to have a superb logistician. I want him to have a good artillery adviser. I want him to have excellent communications.

I want him to have the medics down in each one of the companies. I want the captain down in the company to have a set of American or Marine Corps rifle platoon sergeants and a radio operator and a medic, et cetera.

And so, I want that Iraqi battalion to be advised as professionally as we can possibly do that, one.

Second thing, I want to re-equip them with U.S. equipment, because what we’ve given them is Warsaw Pact stuff that’s not as good as ours. If you give them our equipment, you give them a feeling of bondage and elitism toward us.

Plus, if everything doesn’t work out well, you can hold back the spare parts, and that stuff won’t work for very long.

So, I want to do that.

And then as we get an Iraqi battalion that’s capable, we think is capable of operating independently, but still with its advisers, I want to put them in the area of operations where you have the U.S. Army, Marine Corps or British battalion, pull them off the street, put the advised Iraqi battalion on the street, take the U.S. unit and put it in a safe haven or a 911 area where they can respond to them if they need to.

Then after three or four months and we say, OK, these Iraqis, they can hold it on their own, I want to take that battalion and redeploy it.

So my redeployment system would be two-fold. First redeployment is to a safe haven where you’re the 911 for an Iraqi battalion. The second redeployment is out of country - back here, go to Europe, go somewhere else - wherever the nation needs you.

The next thing I’d do is, I would do something about the economy. I’d jumpstart the economy. I’d give every family 1,000 bucks if they would bring in enough devices to make an operational IED or most of an operational IED, or an operational weapon.

I’d like to start something where we employ the youth over there and put them to work. I mean, where the hell do you think they’re recruiting terrorists out of? It’s the 14- to 26-year-old group, and they’re all out of work. So let’s put them to work. Let’s do what Roosevelt did and have a CCC over there.

I would like for every contractor that we’re paying over there to be able to do only 51 percent of the work, and make them hire an Iraqi company to do the other 49 percent.

I would like for us to put enough heat on the government to say, we want you to create a percentage of your oil revenues that goes to every citizen of Iraq, same as we do with the Permanent Fund up in Alaska for Alaskan residents.

And then I would - governmentally I would split the place up into Sunni, Shia and Kurd regional governments. And I think everything would begin to quiet down.

I think if you make the military professional and robust, and you stay on them - you have a set of advisers and enough of them where we know what they’re doing and we stay on them - you start creating an economy for them, and you give them a government structure that they’re comfortable with and they don’t feel threatened by, I think things would begin to settle out, and we have a chance.

Otherwise, I don’t think we have a chance.

LAMB: General Garner, thank you very much. We’re out of time.

GARNER: Did I go …

LAMB: No, you didn’t go over.

END
C-SPAN Q&A Transcript