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Journalist describes the legacy recently deceased former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara left behind. (2:10)
 

Full interview. (13:48)
 

Tavis: David Ignatius is a widely read columnist for "The Washington Post" and a bestselling author whose previous books include "Body of Lies." His latest is called "The Increment" and like "Body of Lies" this too will be turned into a feature film with Jerry Bruckheimer, recently acquiring the movie rights. David Ignatius joins us tonight from Washington. David, nice to have you on this program, sir.

David Ignatius: Great to be back with you, Tavis.

Tavis: I want to get into the book; let me start, though, with the news of the day, where there's so much news of the day, the news of the day specifically regarding the president being in Russia.

You wrote in yesterday's column in "The Washington Post," and I quote, "The Obama magic so evident in his other trips abroad isn't likely to work in Moscow this week. A real reset of Russian-American relations will require intense discussion and some serious give-and-take - something that neither side is ready to offer." I think I understand that, but why don't you unpack that some more for me?

Ignatius: All right. I was in Moscow last week, Tavis, so I had a chance to talk there with Russian officials who were close to Prime Minister Putin and President Medvedev, the people that President Obama's meeting with, and I came away with a sense that the Russians are really angry. There's a chip on the country's shoulder, a sense of resentment that's left over from the end of communism.

They feel that they were beaten up during the 1990s, the United States didn't do anything to help them. They think that we keep pushing NATO right to their borders and they protest and we don't listen to them. They're upset about our efforts to encourage what they think of as anti-Russian feeling in their neighboring countries, Ukraine and Georgia. So they're just - they're angry.

As a result, they're really not prepared to talk about the things that we care about. At the top of our list is Iran. We take Iran really seriously and one Russian official said to me, "We think you have a mania about Iran. Maybe you're still worried about the Indians. But that's your problem, not ours." It was very dismissive; almost a vulgar comment, I thought.

So I came away thinking that this is not an easy problem. President Obama in his earlier trips, just the force of her personality, his charisma, his ability to use words, his youth I think have really created excitement overseas. The Russians are in a more ornery and resentful mood. It's going to take more than his charm and charisma to break through it. If we really want to make progress we're really going to have to sit down, listen to their problems, tell them about ours.

Tavis: Tell me more, then, about what that strategy, that process ought to be, and that assumes - and I don't want to make that assumption - that it can be done. That is to say that progress can be made here.

Ignatius: Well, I think it can be done. We got in the habit, during the 1990s, when Russia was so weak after the fall of communism, of thinking that we really didn't have to take their views very seriously, and we didn't. We just ignored their - they said, "We're not happy about NATO expansion," we said, "So what?" They said, "We're not happy about Georgia and Georgia's provocations, as they see them," and we said, basically, "So what?'

We don't have that luxury anymore. I think that if we want Russia as a partner on issues like Iran and North Korea, there's really no way to make progress without having them as a partner, then we're going to have to listen to them and we're going to have to take - when they say, "This is an important security concern for us," we've got to listen, we've got to respond. We're not going to get it for free.

Tavis: I don't know that I need to color this question or fill it in any more. There are two big guns, two big guys in Russia. The question is whether or not President Obama's talking to the right one.

Ignatius: Well, I think President Obama made a mistake, to be honest, Tavis. He's been so sure-footed he doesn't make many mistakes, but he made one, in my judgment, in trying to play the two Russian leaders off against each other. He spoke of the president, Dmitry Medvedev, who like Obama is trained as a lawyer, is a younger man like Obama, spoke of him as a modern figure, a person with whom he had a very good relationship, he said.

And he spoke of the prime minister, Vladimir Putin, as a man who still has one foot in the old days of the Cold War; he was almost dismissive of Putin's way of looking at the world. The problem is that the real power in Russia is Putin, not Medvedev, and Putin's the guy calling the shots. If the two disagree, instantly it's Putin who wins.

And the second problem is that Putin is the real ruler because Russians like the way he puts things. They like his toughness, they like his anti-Americanism, unfortunately. So I think that Obama was kind of trying to sweet-talk the Russians a little bit and while we like this one, we don't like this one - that's not going to work.

Tavis: How does he solve that problem?

Ignatius: He solves the problem by recognizing - by not trying to play the two off against each other but by recognizing that they basically are a unified leadership - they are - and really, he makes progress by listening to what they both tell him about Russia's security concerns, and then trying to respond creatively.

Tavis: Let me shift now to the book, which isn't that difficult a shift because we've been talking about Iran already, and the book, of course, is about or connected certainly to Iran. Give me the top line on the book.

Ignatius: Tavis, in this new novel, "The Increment," I imagine an Iranian nuclear scientist who, for complicated personal reasons but really because he detests the regime that's running Iran, decides that he's going to share information with the CIA - decides to drop a dime on the Iranian nuclear program.

He does it by communicating with the CIA on the Internet. If you go to the CIA's website you will find that there is an invitation to people overseas to commit treason, to send us secrets. And I'm told by my sources that this is used quite a lot, people do send us things on the Internet. And so I'm imagining an Iranian who does that.

And then I'm imagining the American CIA officer, whose name is Harry Pappas, who receives this information and it's sensational stuff - the kind that could push us toward a war with Iran. Details about their program that the hawks, people who want a war, seize as a reason for taking action, very much like Iraq, where as we all remember arguments about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction provided a rationale for going to war.

And the hero of my story, Harry, is determined not to let that happen again. He's lived through the mess of Iraq, he has a deep sense of guilt that he didn't stand up to the pressure before and try to tell people the truth. He's lost his own son, who was a Marine in Iraq, so he has a deep extra burden of guilt.

So he decides that he's got to find out what's at the bottom of this, and the only way he can do that is by finding this person, this Iranian scientist who sent the anonymous message, and getting him out so he can talk to him.

And that's really what happens through the course of the book - the effort to find this young man, to talk to him at enormous risk. He has to use help from the British, who have resources in Iran that we don't, to do this. But it's really the story of these two people, and each of them trying to do what they think is right and in the process betraying the usual patriotic definitions of what's right and wrong.

Tavis: I can see why Jerry Bruckheimer might like something like this. (Laughter.)

Ignatius: I hope so.

Tavis: Yeah, yeah. That said, a couple of follow-ups come to mind immediately, in no particular order. Number one, tell me more about - which I learned something because of the book and in this conversation of course about this open invitation by the CIA to rat out certain people or certain institutions. I never knew that existed. I further did not know that people actually make use of that.

As a writer, as one who's inside the Beltway covering these issues every day, what do you make of the fact that our CIA has a place on their website for people to rat?

Ignatius: I'm all for it. We live off of people who were willing to drop a dime to tell us the secrets that matter. In the old days, these people were called walk-ins because often they would just walk into our embassy or our consulate and ask to speak to -- in hushed tones ask to speak to an official and they would begin a relationship.

Today, in this new world of the Internet they're known as virtual walk-ins. The CIA calls them VWs and these virtual walk-ins come across the transom all the time, sending us information. As you can imagine, Tavis, it's very difficult to k now whether you're being set up.

When something arrives, is it real, is it fake, is it designed to trick you and lure you into a trap? All the usual problems of counterintelligence exist with this Internet information, but on the basic question, how do I feel about inviting people to share our secrets? Hey, man, I'm for it. That's how we're going to stay alive.

Tavis: Secondly, and I think I get this as well but I'm curious as to your take on it, we know why Iran is so interesting for us as a news story every day, for all the obvious reasons. What makes Iran such great fodder for novels, for fiction?

Ignatius: I visited Iran in 2006 as a journalist, and wrote columns from there for "The Washington Post," but I found the place absolutely fascinating. It's so different from what you imagine it's going to be, and we've seen what interested me when I was there over these last several weeks. It's a surprisingly open society.

It's a place where people can be very critical of the leaders. When I went to Qom, the holy city of Qom, south of Tehran, I heard ayatollahs there denounce the leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, say that he was on the wrong path, he was betraying the Islamic revolution.

These are things that we're now hearing in the aftermath of the stolen Iranian election from these same ayatollahs. One of the men that I went to visit has been a leader in denouncing the regime for what he feels are its mistakes. So it's a place where there's much more debate and ferment.

I have to say I have been so moved watching these Iranians in the streets, risking their lives. It's been tragic to watch that protest be suppressed, but I think it's going to continue. I think that something now has really broken in Iran that can't be fixed. The regime has lost the trust of its people, and once that happens then you have change.

Tavis: One last shift here, given that we've been talking about war; certainly countries who have been at war or are at war with us and others, for that matter. So Robert McNamara, the Defense secretary, is now dead at the age of 93. To your mind, is McNamara a hero for acknowledging he made a mistake in Vietnam, a villain for what he did in Vietnam, or is that oversimplification?

Ignatius: I think as with any really powerful human story you can't sum it up in an either-or, hero or villain way. I wrote something about McNamara that is online tonight and will be in the paper tomorrow, in "The Washington Post." I grew up in Washington. My dad worked for McNamara at the Pentagon. And so this story of McNamara, his intelligence, his toughness, in some ways his arrogance, and then the terrible, terrible mistakes of the Vietnam War.

I watched very close up. I knew McNamara and his family as a boy. And so I think my own personal feelings are what gifted people they were when they came to Washington working for Jack Kennedy. They believed that they could really create a new country. They had such big dreams. They got caught in the Vietnam War and McNamara himself, so confident that he was - through his intelligence he could figure everything out.

He couldn't figure this one out and he got deeper and deeper in this tunnel of Vietnam. And I did watch as a young man the burden weighing on him and all of the fathers that I knew, and so when I think about McNamara's death I think human beings make mistakes, and McNamara made a tragic one - he tried the rest of his life to understand what had gone wrong and to expiate it, to atone for what he'd done.

Tavis: Comments for "The Washington Post" and the author of the new novel, "The Increment," David Ignatius. David, as always, a joy to talk to you. Glad to have you on the program.

Ignatius: Great to be here, thank you so much.