Kirk on Bush’s War

The WaPo has PBS Frontline’s Bush’s War producer Michael Kirk for an interview:

Cincinnati: Why don’t you show the very, very clear ties between Iraq and bin Laden? It’s all there, but the liberal media will not report on it!

Michael Kirk: Is it all there? That’s not what many, many of the people who we trust told us. If it was there–you can bet someone in the media would love to report it–by now, with all the venues for information, liberal, conservative and every shade in between–surely someone would have dropped that bombshell….

Grafton, W.Va.: Mike, I hace been reading Unger’s book “The Fall of the House of Bush.” Your piece follows his closely. Do you believe, as Unger relates in his closing chapter, that Bush and the neocons will attack Iran before he leaves office? After viewing segment one, I asked a number of friends to tune in on Tuesday evening for the second part. My statement to them was that if the things I heard were lies, then a number of people were guilty and should be sued. If their statements were correct, then a number of officials such as Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and President Bush should be in jail.

Michael Kirk: I don’t know about attacking Iran. My sense, from talking to many American military leaders, is that our army is in pretty desperate shape–perhaps broken by the Iraq experience. A good question to ask is whether they even could deploy to Iran if the president asked them to…

Alexandria Virginia: Thanks for producing such an engrossing film. One item you touched on that came as news to me was the thin resumes of both Sanchez and Casey. Can you elaborate on why each in turn was chosen to command the Iraq effort? Were there other, possibly better choices passed over?

Michael Kirk: The way we were told the story–the Pentagon did not believe U.S. forces would be in Iraq for very long when they picked General Sanchez. At the time, remember, they had not even anticipated an insurgency (see what General Jack Keane says in our broadcast last night). By the time General Casey takes over, the way people told us the story, Secretary Rumsfeld really wants a competent logistics guy (one of Casey’s strengths was procurement) to handle training the Iraqi army and keeping our troops safe on the bases–”light footprint” until they could return home.