A Conversation With John Kerry

ON POSTWAR PLANNING

[I]t wasn't really until three months before the war starts that Bush got involved in aftermath planning. And the question is, when do you start, even if you're contemplating war, which clearly they are, when do you start the ball rolling on aftermath?

Day One. And that is not a Monday morning quarterback comment. That is such a fundamental prerequisite to the concept of contemplating going to war, particularly where you are going to occupy another country. One of the first questions, I'd sit there with a bunch of people at the table, I'd say, "Okay, assuming we go into Iraq, what happens after?" Nobody ever doubted this was going to be short and we were going to win. So we knew we were going to win, so once we're in Baghdad, what happens? Who's going to run the country? Will there be electricity? What are the war plans? Can we protect the pipelines on the oil? What's the ability to make sure people have food? Are you going to guard the ammo dump so you make sure there isn't looting?

Remember when Rumsfeld said, "Oh, looting happens."

"Stuff happens."

I was stunned by that. And I said they're going to rue the day that they allowed this stuff to get out of control because they sent a message, "No control." And our kids were being blown up by the very weapons that they didn't even think about securing on the way in. There should have been an elaborate -- in fact it was an elaborate plan and they chose to ignore it. Colin Powell and the State Department had a fairly elaborate plan and I've talked to people who are involved in the making of it.

ON DONALD RUMSFELD

In November-December '02, Rumsfeld's making major force deployments to the area but he says we can't do a big one because it will tell the world diplomacy is over. And he said, "We're sending these forces and they're going to be in top fighting shape for about two or three months but then it will start to degrade." Your reaction?

One of incredulity that a president would even allow that argument to be persuasive and that a secretary of defense would make it in the first place. And shame on all of them for that. That is insulting to Americans and to all of us, the notion that you have to send people to war simply because you put them there. This is just, you know, it was their rush to war.

And then when Rumsfeld in January started telling the president, "You're losing your options." And you know, you get to a point where we're asking our allies, particularly the Saudis, to make commitments and it's not feasible to back off.

Well, you could always back off it if you haven't committed the troops and there's a reason to back off. I mean, if you don't have intelligence to go to war and you go to war for weapons of mass destruction, you damn well can say, "I'm not giving the order to fire." What is the shame in going back and saying, "We have new intelligence that indicates something different and I intend as president to exercise my responsibility to the world and to our troops to make sure we've exhausted that."

Do you get in a bind, though, where to credibly threaten force you have to deploy all kinds of troops and then once you've deployed them you get into --