PBS Frontline – Robin Wright, the Washington Post’s diplomatic correspondent, has reported on the Middle East for almost two decades and is the author of four books, including Sacred Rage: The Wrath of Militant Islam and Flashpoints: Promise and Peril in a New World. In this interview, she discusses how the Islamic world has viewed Saddam Hussein and U.S.-Iraq relations over the decades and the unintended consequences of America’s invasion of Iraq. Addressing the larger picture, she says the U.S. has “profoundly” misread what was happening in the Middle East and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the ’80s and ’90s.

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PBS Frontline – Thomas E. Ricks, the Post’s Pentagon correspondent, has long covered the Pentagon and U.S. military. Since the war’s official end in spring 2003 he has visited Iraq several times. In this interview, he discusses Rumsfeld’s personality and leadership at the Pentagon and his push to transform the way the military thinks and fights. Ricks also talks about the many ways it went wrong for the U.S. in the aftermath of the Iraq war. “I think in one way or another, we, the United States, are stuck in the Middle East in a way that few of us anticipated,” he says. “Ö We are the dog that caught the car. ??? We may just be there for decades.”
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PBS Frontline – As staff writer for The Washington Post, Dana Priest covers intelligence and the Pentagon. She is the author of The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace With America’s Military. In this interview, she talks about Donald Rumsfeld, his management of the Iraq war and its aftermath, and the challenges confronting the military in a post-9/11 world. Says Priest,”The military is incredibly overstretched. Barring a miracle and some unforeseen trend, you have great instability and the Iraqi government trying to get on its feet. And the last thing the United States would want is some pocket of that to become a safe haven ??? that allows an Al Qaeda-like organization to live and organize in.”

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PBS Frontline – Walter Slocombe is former director of national security and defense in the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. organization charged with overseeing Iraq’s reconstruction and transition to democratic rule. He also served in the Pentagon as under-secretary of defense for policy,1994 to 2001. In this interview, he talks about what wasn’t planned for in the aftermath of the war and describes the challenges in training Iraqi security forces following the almost total disappearance of the Iraqi Army. “I wasn’t completely surprised,” he says. “I think the central issue why the army disappeared is that it was a conscript army. Ö The officers lost most of the control of their troops, and sometimes the will to try to control them.”
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