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Pulitzer Prize-winning military affairs reporter says that President Obama will not be able to get out of Iraq as quickly as promised. (1:15)
 

Full interview. (11:14)
 

Tavis: A quick programming note here first. Tomorrow night on this program an exclusive conversation with Defense Secretary Robert Gates on his decision to stay on with the Obama administration and the challenges ahead for the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond.

In advance of that exclusive conversation tonight, though, I'm pleased to be joined by the long-time military affairs correspondent for "The Washington Post," Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Thomas Ricks. His bestseller about the Iraq war, "Fiasco," is well-known to viewers of this program, but he's out now with a follow-up to that book called "The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006 to 2008."

He joins us tonight from Washington. Tom Ricks, nice to have you back on the program, sir.

Thomas Ricks: Glad to be back, thank you.

Tavis: Let me start by asking specifically about the subtitle. You refer to our engagement in Iraq as an adventure. I assume you chose that word deliberately and carefully. Why an adventure?

Ricks: Well, I think the whole thing is a misadventure, really. The subtitle of "Fiasco" was also about a military adventure. I think that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was probably the biggest mistake in the history of American foreign policy, and so while I'm very admiring of what Petraeus and Odierno and the troops did over the last couple of years, I still think it's all fruit of the poison tree - that is, nothing really good can come of this.

So it kind of leads to where I'm at now in Iraq - I think that leaving Iraq is immoral, I think that staying in Iraq is immoral. I don't think there are any good moral solutions left. The question for us is what's the least bad, what's the least immoral thing we can do.

Tavis: You regard this as the worst adventure or misadventure we've ever had, militarily. I assume that means, if you call it the worst, that means you're saying it's worse than Vietnam.

Ricks: Oh, absolutely. Vietnam was fairly easy for us to get out of. At the end of the day, it was at the periphery of American interest. I think we're going to find it a lot harder to get out of Iraq than people understand or imagine right now.

People back here think the war is over in Iraq. The war is not over. It has changed several times from an invasion to an occupation to an insurgency to an American counteroffensive. But just because it changed doesn't mean it's over.

I worry that President Obama, talking about getting out of Iraq quickly, is not departing from President Bush but repeating the mistake Bush made of being over-optimistic. So Obama says he'll end the combat mission by next summer - August of 2010 - but Bush didn't invade Iraq saying, "I've got a great idea - let's go get stuck somewhere for 10 years."

Bush also thought he could get out quickly, and I don't think that Bush was right in thinking he could get out quickly, and I don't think President Obama is going to be able to get out half as quickly as he thinks.

Tavis: He ran a campaign that was based upon getting out of Iraq and getting out quickly. There are millions of Americans who voted for him precisely because of that pledge. There are many of us who believe that promises made ought to be promises kept, but that's another issue.

To your point now about it not being as easy as he thought it was going to be, what, then, will happen to those millions of Americans who will feel disenfranchised, disappointed, let down - some maybe even lied to - if he can't get out, to your point, as quickly as he promised he would?

Ricks: Well first of all, he's already broken a promise because he said he was going to get out one combat brigade a month over the course of many months. Well, now he's stopped that. He's going to keep the troop levels more or less the same. By the end of this year, he'll be down to maybe 130,000 troops, which is we're we've been, in rough average, for the last five years.

So he's planning on making his big troop withdrawals next year. Whether that happens or not, we'll see. But after that, he said after August 2010 it'll stop being a combat mission. Well, the war doesn't end because one president hangs "mission accomplished" up on an aircraft carrier. It doesn't end because the president says the combat's over. Our war ends when American troops stop dying there.

After President Obama gave his Iraq speech a while ago, I was at the White House that day and I said to a military official, "Will American troops stop dying in Iraq in August, 2010?" And he said, "No, they will continue to die then." So I think the war goes on, probably for many more years.

In fact, the last line of my book is a quite from Ambassador Crocker, who is our top diplomat out there over the last couple of years. He says, "The events for which the Iraq War will be remembered have not yet happened."

Tavis: So forget what Thomas Ricks, Pulitzer Prize-winning, number one "New York Times" best-selling author has to say. "I'm going to pull these troops out because I told the American people I would. I want to run for reelection and I know I can't run for reelection if I'm not going to be accountable to what I said I was going to do, so I'm going to pull them out anyway." And then what happens?

Ricks: I don't think that's going to happen, first of all, because Obama has also promised Iraqis he will not abandon Iraq. I think he will get the troop numbers down, probably close to 50,000 sometime in 2010, but I think he's going to find that it's much harder to actually get the last 50,000 troops out. That Iraqis are going to say, "We all want you to leave, but not yet."

And I think he'll say, "We can't abandon Iraq and so we're going to have to continue this mission a while longer than I hoped."

Tavis: During the president campaigns, since we're talking about presidential politics, for the moment, at least, John McCain - Senator John McCain, in every debate, you'll recall, kept chiding Senator Obama for not being willing to say that the surge was successful.

He kept chiding him for not being able to say that the American troops have done their job; that the surge worked. McCain's point, of course, that I am better suited to be commander-in-chief because I told y'all this surge was going to work. It has worked and Obama won't acknowledge that. Here comes Thomas Ricks in "The Gamble," saying the surge failed.

Ricks: Well, you have to judge the surge on its own terms. What was the surge about? The president said it will be to improve security in such a way as to lead to a political breakthrough. Well, that didn't happen. Yes, it improved security, but that doesn't mean the surge worked because its purpose was that larger purpose.

All the questions that vexed Iraq before the surge were still there after the surge ended, most notably how did they divide up oil revenue? What's the relationship between Suni Kurd and Shia? Whether the government's going to be a strong central government or be a loose confederation. What's the role of Iran?

All these questions have led to violence before; all could lead to violence again. None were solved by the surge. So in that sense, McCain is dead wrong - the surge, yes, it improved security, but the surge failed in its purpose.

Tavis: Immoral to stay there, immoral to leave; no good choices, by your own admission. So what to do?

Ricks: Well, my worry is that if you do leave - I think it's more immoral to leave because the risks are great. We have gone in and created a situation that if we walk away from now could lead to a civil war, could lead to a regional war.

So while I don't think that we're going to like, eventually, what happens in Iraq, I think the risks are huge. And I think you have an obligation if you go in and create a problem to try to deal with that problem.

I know a lot of Americans want to get out of Iraq. I want to get out of Iraq. Everybody wants to get out of Iraq. The question is, when and how? People who say, "Let's leave now, I don't care, let's just forget about it" - it seems to me that's like someone who gets drunk, drives a car down the highway at 150 miles an hour, clips a few, crosses the median, hits a few more, and then smashes into the front window of a business, hops out, and says, "Man, I wish I could help you out here, but I'm bored and out of money, so I can't help you. Bye."

Tavis: I want to go back now, because you've written not one but two "New York Times" bestsellers around the issue of Iraq - how we got in, why we're there, how we're going to get out, et cetera.

I want to talk about accountability here. What could the American people have done on the issue of accountability to have stopped this, if anything? What could the American media have done to raise better questions, to ask more intelligent and deeper questions?

I'm just trying to figure out - I know what the White House did, I know how the Congress got rolled by the president. I'm asking now specifically about the American people and the media. Of course, two different questions - what could we have done, if anything, to have kept them better in check so we wouldn't be in this mess now?

Ricks: I think we all panicked after 9/11. Nine-eleven was horrible, it was a tragedy, but it was not a threat to the core of this nation. As President Obama said in his inaugural address, this nation has faced bigger problems before than 9/11 and didn't abandon the Constitution, didn't start panicking in the way we dealt with other countries, didn't drag this country's name through the mud of torture.

I think we all got knocked off-balance. I think we have recovered our balance and now we're kind of all waking up and saying, "What did we do?" Well, what we did in the last seven years is create a lot of problems that we're going to have to pay for, for the rest of our lifetimes. George Bush's invasion of Iraq is a gift that's going to keep on giving, whether we like it or not.

Tavis: And the media?

Ricks: I think the media actually did a pretty good job in raising the right questions.

Tavis: You think so?

Ricks: Yeah. The problem was nobody wanted to listen. Nobody - we wrote all these stories about all the problems that might lead - might be the consequence of an invasion of Iraq. People kind of shrugged - "So what? It's going to happen."

So while yes, "The New York Times" did screw up with its coverage of weapons of mass destruction, that was not the media in general. That was one city's newspaper that got it wrong, that was very influential in getting it wrong. But I think the American people had the information available, but the people didn't want to hear it, the Congress didn't want to hear it, and so the invasion of Iraq happened and now we all regret it.

Tavis: Here's the exit question, Thomas. If the president doesn't find an honorable way, whatever that is, of extricating us from the drama that we are now engaged in in Iraq, it's not just a promise broken to the American people, it's letting down many countries on the world stage, billions of people, millions of people who were excited about his election as Americans were domestically, of course.

What would happen then? What happens to our reputation around the globe if after all the enthusiasm, excitement, and euphoria around his election he can't find an honorable way to exit us from this situation?

Ricks: I trust Obama strategically. He strikes me as a good strategic thinker. I think he will try to find as honorable a way as possible to handle it, and how people react I think will turn on not just what he does, but how he does it.

I've been very impressed by the way he handles problems. I think he and his people are going around dealing with the Afghanistan-Pakistan war in the right way - first of all by talking about it as a regional war, as a regional problem.

So I think Obama might surprise us in how he handles it, but I think Iraq is also going to surprise him in proving to be a far more difficult problem than the way he talked about it on the campaign trail.

Tavis: And nobody's writing better about it these days than Thomas Ricks, the number one "New York Times" best-selling author of "Fiasco," winner of the Pulitzer Prize, back now with the follow-up, "The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006 to 2008." Thomas Ricks, as always, an honor to have you on the program. Thanks for your insight, sir.

Ricks: You're welcome.