CSPAN Book TV

NG: Let me first of all apologize I did not realize that the local time for this was 7:00 we thought the local time was 8:00 and as a consequence I was actually still sitting at Comedy Central doing the Daily Show at 7:00.

So we rushed out here as quick as we could and but for those of you who got here on time I really apologize. We occasionally run a little bit late but we try not to schedule an hour difference between when you get here and I get here.

But I know Bill was already talking a little but and we are going to get around to book signing but since we do have a chance and we have a reasonable size audience to have a dialogue for a few minutes. I have a hunch Bill covered the general principles on what we are trying to do with active history. Why don’t I just toss it up for further questions and let you direct it where you want to.

Q: The way you collaborated on these books the few months back people were encouraging you to run for President I was wondering what your understanding what would have happened to this series had you become President.

NG: Well as a practical matter since that’s a pretty full time job we probably would have picked the series up after we were done. You know Churchill had a contract to write the history of the English speaking people before WWII and there is actually a scene in December of 1939, and this was before the big attack and things were fairly quite, but he was first Lord of the Admiralty.

And they were at war and there is a moment if you read Gilbert’s multi volume very detailed biography where Churchill is doing the Navy’s business until about 5:00 in the afternoon and then he is dictating until about midnight.

Because back then they didn’t pay British parliamentarians and they expected them to be independently wealthy and Churchill wasn’t. And so the money he could earn delivering the book on time was a significant part of his ability to pay for his house and to live. And so he is literally is doing the countries business and then turning at night and doing that.

That would probably be relatively impractical in the presidency although a lot of what we do is have very intense meetings and then do a lot of writing by computer on the airplane. You could probably have a pretty good office on Air Force One so I had never thought about it; you would probably get a fair amount done there.

Q: An earlier question was why the Japanese think that American was a push-over and didn’t have the stomach for a war. And I wonder is it something about our culture, and Mr. Forstchen answered that well.

I wonder is there a corollary with the groups we are fighting today in the Middle East and other nations that think we, correctly or incorrectly, are still a push over or as a cultural change have become so.

NG: Well I think that first of all the Japanese experience had been in a very brief war with China in 1895 which they had won very decisively. And then a surprise attack on the Russians in 1904 and an alienation of the empyreal Russian fleet at Sashimi in the most complete one-sided victory in naval history in the 20th century.

And then defeating the Russians all though it was a very close run thing and they were financially on the verge on bankruptcy when Theodore Roosevelt negotiated a truce.

So the two occasions they’d seen they had been able to outlast their opponent in the modern period. After 1868 when modern Japan evolved out of the Magi restoration and then I think they were very sensitive to watching the Western democracies become demoralized. And some of this comes from the reaction to WWI to things like Erich Maria Remarque remarks All Quiet of the Western Front and the anti-war movies and the anti-war movement.

And they’d watch the Americans adopt a whole series of very very anti-war acts the neutrality act and so there was this psychology and then they watched the rise of the European fascists and Nazis powers and they’re looking at a situation where when Italy goes into what was then called Absinthial, what we call Ethiopia, democracies didn’t do anything. It was all talk and no action, when they themselves went into Manchuria the democracies didn’t do anything.

When Hitler remilitarized the reign land in complete violation of the Versailles Treaty the democracies didn’t do anything. When the Communists, and the Fascists, and the Nazis fought in The Spanish Civil War the democracies didn’t do anything and so they’d been through this long cycle.

And remember that by the time they’re war gaming this they’ve watched France collapse, Holland collapse, Belgium collapse, Denmark collapse, and Norway collapse and they’re sitting there thinking and they watched Finland get beaten by the Russians. The Fins didn’t collapse but they were exhausted by a huge country and they watched Poland disappear, and Czech la Slovakia disappear.

And so they’re thinking to themselves the democracies are collapsing, they are down to the British and the Americans are still tied up in their own neutrality legislation and so why would we be afraid of them.

And they want to take the Dutch East Indies, what we now call Indonesia and Holland had been occupied by the Germans they moved into French Indo China where the Vesey French couldn’t have resisted if they wanted to and frankly I don’t think wanted to all that badly. Because Vesey French were in many were more anti-English.

When we land in North Africa we spend four days fighting the French Army, which is responding to the orders of its government to oppose the Anglo-American invasion. They have watched all this go on and it really affected both Hitler and I don’t know if it affected the Japanese, Bill might know, but it clearly affected Hitler that Roosevelt was in a wheelchair.

And so there was this real contempt and this real sense that their weak. And the Japanese I think believed that we would negotiate and they had designed it.

There’s a pretty good book which is a study of the rise of Japanese military doctrine and naval doctrine and it’s very clear when you look in this period that from about 1880 on the Japanese are thinking about how do we defend the home islands. And they had designed this entire model of a battle of attrition because in their era they thought it was so far to go.

If you think about projecting power from San Francisco and Las Angeles and San Diego all the way across to Tokyo their model, they had seen this happen with the Russian imperial fleet which had to come all the way around Africa from St. Petersburg and was literally exhausted by the effort of getting there had ships breaking down.

And they under estimated our capacity to develop refueling and resupply at sea. And so their model was ware Americans down, will finally have a great annihilation battle close to the Japanese home islands just like Sashimi was, and then the Americans will negotiate.

Now there is another thing going on here which is important to remember they’re desperate, they’ve seen China conquered, they’ve seen India conquered, they’d seen Indonesia conquered, and they’ve seen The Philippines conquered, they are some ways the last stand of a independent non-white nation. And they are saying to themselves this is about annihilation the American’s are going to straggle us economically until we cease to de independent.

This is a total roll of the dice and on some level they are saying I hope it works because I can’t figure out a new strategy, and if this doesn’t work I don’t know what to do. And I think looking back if they had said in 1940, 1941 that generation would have said this was the right gamble even if we lost.

But we have to remember that when we are dealing with people who have a different value system than you do, have a different identity than you do, what we think is rational they may think is crazy and what we think is crazy they may think is rational.

And so you can’t just project our values on them and assume somebody else is going to take the gamble you’d take they may take a gamble you think is nuts, but they thinks reasonable.

Q: (Unknown) 

NG: There could be some I worry a lot about Iran in that sense. I worry about North Korea in that sense I don’t think we have a clue how Kim Jong-Il thinks and I don’t think we have much an idea how Ahmadinejad thinks.

Q: You guys did the Civil War series which was great, you’re doing WWII so you sort of McArthur island hoping through the wars, Vietnam next maybe the current Gulf War just to show us how certain decisions were made differently. Not to put any pressure on you for more books.

NG: We have a live audience here we can test this out on, Bill and I have not even discussed this in any detail. We had a brief conversation today so let me tell you my favorite, you have to come up here and get in the middle of this [Bill], and we will negotiate with all of you before we go talk to our publisher.

My personal passion is to ultimately write probably between 12-15 volumes on the Pacific because I think that when you get into the Philippines and then you get into Moyle and then you get the Australians and then you get into Burma, and then you get the Indians and then you get into China that its a wonderful opportunity, in a novelistic format, to really introduce the American people to understand how huge, how complex, and how different Asia is. And how many different kinds of Asians there are, it’s not like there’s one Asian.

So my real passion, in terms of the fictional side of my career, is to write a really substantial body of work on Asia. Now having said that, so my current goal is to get the next couple of volumes out, and probably not the next volume but the volume after I hope to make a very big book, maybe 700-800 pages that really gets you into the Philippines. Because people don’t realize in the 1930’s you have McArthur trying to develop a Philippinal army, and his top assistance is a guy named Eisenhower.

And you have very interesting personality conflicts and you have a very interesting setting. And you have the Philippines’ who want to get independent and they don’t critically trust McArthur and neither does Eisenhower and so there are a lot of personality things here that are really fascinating so that intrigues me.

But there is a little book that we started talking about today that I’m tempted by, which came out of a couple of interviews with various reporters that said would you consider writing an alternative history of the last 6 years. Now I gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute where I outlined this, you can go to Newt.org and you’ll see the speech which was on the sixth anniversary of 9/11.

And I used some of our techniques to describe in non-fiction terms what might have happened. But what I am really intrigued with is an alternative Iraq War in which we listen to Khalilzad and Petraeus in the spring of 2003.

Because if we had listened to them, we would currently be out of the war and history would be stunningly different because they knew what to do and the guys who ended up being in charge didn’t know what to do and it got to be a total mess. So I am a little intrigued with either a history of the entire period or just a history of Iraq. What’s your thinking (Bill)?   

Bill: Newt, are you the top 500 in Amazon for reviewer?

NG: I think so, yeah

Bill: Newt is an incredibly fast reader. I’m actually dyslexic, I’m a slow reader. I dread when the FedEx truck comes up the driveway and I see a box from the office of the Speaker because it’s four more books in there annotated by him, as I’ve been thinking about this.

So I do sometimes get a foreshadowing of where he’s thinking by the books that arrive. And we have both talked about 12-15 books the publisher’s rep is here someplace you can carry that back to the publisher. Also, yeah, we did have that conversation this morning I do have one personal favorite that goes back some distance.

I’ve had a fascination with Mongolia for my entire life; I’ve spent four summers over there doing research. I keep trying to convince Newt to go over with me but when he heard about the cuisine and when I came back with three broken ribs, which we’re not going to talk about, he said he’d think about it so. There is a remarkable turning point though in the history not just of Western Civilization but also the Middle East and Islam as well with the Mongolian conquest of the 13th Century.

But for a couple of rather unusual moments we would have a very different world today. Closing point on this a couple of weeks back I was listening to an interview with Newt and he said well maybe if we have 200 years Forstchen and I might finally scratch the surface on what we want to cover so…

NG: Other questions? Yes sir. They want you to stand up; I think it’s for TV or something, so you can be famous. Although both are going to be shooting the back of your head so I’m not sure how it’s going to help but.   

Q: My question is repeating history if you read about what Nazi Germany did to the Jews during the 1930’s leading up to the Holocaust and now you see all the redirect coming out of Iran and the Middle East aren’t we repeating history.

We’re letting Iran develop a bomb; this is a lot more serious than I think it was in the 30’s when we had the Nazi Germany. These people now have nuclear weapons, or are going to get nuclear weapons so what are your feelings on that?

NG: I think, I have two views, one is I think that we live in a much, much more dangerous world that our political discourse and our news media describes and I think that we are. Senator Lieberman said this about a week ago after he had a hearing and he said the danger of us loosing a city to a nuclear of biological vent is so much greater than we understand.

And I’ve been trying to encourage them to pass a bill that would require the Department of Homeland Security to do two nuclear exercises a year and one biological exercise a year for real.

And the first time we identify a city and we go in and say okay this is the part of the city that will be missing. Its 10:00 tomorrow morning we just closed down the following 60 square blocks because there gone.

And we’re now going to have evacuation of the wounded from the next 150 square blocks, and by the way half of our major hospitals were in the zone that was wiped out. Which means we are now going to start using veterinary and clinics in the suburbs, and people don’t understand how bad this will be.

And then someday it’s going to happen, we went through this in 9/11, I was warning about 9/11 for six years before it happened. I helped co-author the Heart-Rubmen commission in March 2001 that said the greatest single threat to the United States is a weapon of mass destruction going off in an American city probably from a terrorist.

And I said and we need a real Department of Homeland Security, we don’t need the current bureaucratic joke. We need a real Department of Homeland security which means you need an institution which could respond to a nuclear event fast enough to minimize the loss of life. You saw in Katrina we are no where in this world.

Q: Why can’t we get it?

NG: Because I think it is very hard for your news media and your politicians to take it seriously. We have a huge cumbersome incompetent bureaucratic mess that we call the government.

If you want to see, my version of this is a YouTube video called FedEx vs. Federal Bureaucracy it runs 3.5 minutes and about 1,400,000 have seen it and if you get a chance go look at FedEx vs. Federal Bureaucracy and you’ll see the gap between what we should be capable of and what your government is currently capable of and it’s a very serious political problem.

So point one is, yeah, the war is a lot more dangerous than we think it is and we out to be preparing for it. Point 2 is the number 1 rule of history is simple when you have a truly evil person saying really bad things believe them.

And you look at Rwanda where we were warned, you look at what happened in the Balkans where we where warned, you look at what’s happening in Darfur, you look at what’s happening with Mugabe in Zimbabwe and you look at the utter fecklessness of the civilized world in doing nothing.

And then you watch today’s video of Ahmadinejad walking around the nuclear facility to prove to the entire planet that the Western allies are useless, that our threats mean nothing and they are building the capability to build nuclear weapons.

And you look at all this and you just think, where is our leadership, and where is our capacity to have an honest conversation about the threats we face. And then you get immediately into Bush, Anti-Bush and it become trivialized into red vs. blue, liberal vs. conservative, personality bologna and then you finally end up with whether or not Rev. Wright and Senator Obama did.

And you think about it we have now degenerated from a world-class problem that threatens our children and grandchildren with the very survival of their civilization to a pathetic inability to have a national dialogue as adults, and that’s where we currently are.

Q: What Civil War battle fields did you visit when you wrote your Civil War series of books?

NG: Well Bill may want to join this because he was a Civil War enactor. We have a lot of different talents between the two of us and he is actually wandering around in uniform and doing the stuff, where as I went wandering around watching people wandering around in uniform.

Bill: You dressed once.

NG: Yes, I dressed once at the end of the book. Let me just say we did Gettysburg very carefully and if you read our version of Gettysburg and one of the things we would love to do is get schools to teach Sayers, which is a terrific book on Gettysburg, and our book on Gettysburg, and probably Killer Angles which I think was the best novel of the war. But you can literally take the decision points and you can physically go and walk the territory and you will see how we did it.

Then when we got down to writing Never Call Retreat we went to Frederick and we looked at the battle field which was a real battle field in 1864 and we developed back from that battle field to how we fought the battle that is the culminating event.

I remember at one point we physically drove up the old US National Highway and were able to go to the top of the pass so there’s a scene where Grant’s army’s coming across and down into Frederick, we literally stood where that road was at that time and looked it had a panoramic view. Do you want to comment again about battle fields?

Bill: Sure, the research involved in this we actually started in I believe it was 1999 and we spent three years developing the Gettysburg series. We had wonderful help from the retired comedown of the war college at carnavio Major General Bob Scales who you occasionally you see as a consultant on Fox News. And got a primitive GPS, got out there, got the computer mapped, measured.

One of the great things Bob Scales was able to point to us was which roads were macadamized and which were not. Which becomes a very crucial plot point at the end of Gettysburg in terms of troops trying to get out on unpaved roads verses the victorious army advancing on what were paved roads of the    19th century. 

I’d say we explored almost every original back road from Westminster, MD all the way out past Frederick, zigzagged back and forth. Wonderful gentleman, Tom Legore, who is a county historian for Carroll County, he is the expert.

He took us where the Union Army wished to fight its battle known as the Pipe Creek line and at one point Tom was walking us around and I will never forget when Bob Scales exclaimed “Good Heavens I could see it, it would have been a debacle if it had it happened here.”

So we did intensive searching from, as I said, from Westminster and the way out to Frederick and beyond. And the same way with some of the things related to Pearl Harbor. I flew the Japanese attack route; I spent time on a carrier at sea actually doing operations and did a drill.

NG: Tell them about the Missouri

Bill: Oh, that’s actually a bit upsetting I went to the Missouri. How many have been, how many have toured the Missouri? If you ever get the chance to go again it wasn’t anything special just because we were working on the book, you can get an additional tour, where they took us all the way down into the inner citadel almost down to the keel of the ship.

I asked my guide at one point okay were down here, the Missouri is anchored precisely at the spot where the Oklahoma was. To me the Oklahoma and the loss was emotionally more horrifying perhaps than the loss of the Arizona.

The 1,200 young lives that were snuffed out of the Arizona died like that. The Oklahoma rolled over 400 men were trapped inside, on Christmas Eve, which was 17 days later, they were still hearing tapping noises from the inside. They couldn’t get theses boys out.

So I asked my guide if we’re down here how do we get out if she starts to roll, he said try it. And it’s a series of escape hatches that you have to go through, I got up to the first escape hatch I’m a big guy I’m not a nineteen year-old sailor and I had to jack-knife to crawl through the ladders were off-set so a plunging shot can’t go through.

I’m trying to open up the next hatch, I will unashamedly admit I was in tears because I could imagine the terror because what’s up is now sideways and the lights have gone off, and now what’s up is now down and we weren’t drilled for this, and the water is coming in from the wrong direction.

And terrified men are screaming to keep moving and there’s no place to go, and when they rolled the Oklahoma over finally in 1943 and cut it apart for salvage they found the skeletons of these boys curled up in these escape hatches trying to get out.

Those of you who read Pearl Harbor recall, we wrote that scene in fact as I stood on the dock next to the Missouri with a pretty chocked voice I called up Newt and I said I have just experienced something I have to share it with you, so that’s the type of research we do.

Q: Gentlemen before I get to my point don’t forget to write about the Korean War, nobody’s mentioned it tonight. Talking about the extreme danger that we are in right now and I think constantly about the huge country which is 3,000 miles wide and 1,500 miles high how can you possibly know where the attack is going to come is not still the best defense a good offense and keep the enemy over there in their caves and all that so that they don’t come over here and do their damage.

NG: First of all you mentioned the Korean War where my Dad fought in the infantry in the US Army. If you have never read it I want to recommend strongly that you find a now probably out of print book by Pat Frank called Hold Back the Night which was written during the war published in 1951 and is a story of a Marine riffle company in the Coshin reservoir and the fight to the sea and it is poineint. I re-read it last year, I first read it in the mid-fifties when my dad came back from Korea and then I re-read it.

It is extraordinary in his communication of why reservists went back in and their whole attitude that they weren’t going to tolerate another period like the 1930’s. And if we had to fight lets get it over with lets prove we are prepared to stop them and lets make the world safe to raise a family because they didn’t want the communists to go through the cycle that lead to WWII and have an even bigger third world war.

And they saw fighting in Korea as absolutely related to stopping the Soviet Empire and creating an environment where you could have genuine containment. It’s a very interesting novel very personal and he wrote it in a very poineint kind of way I’d recommend it very highly.

I think there’s a balance; I’d say three things about what you just said. The first is I don’t care how good your offense is you’re never all that smart and you need a defense against the moment when you’re either surprised or you fail because you can’t be 100% certain that you’ll never get hit and the difference between being prepared if you get hit and not being prepared could be the life and death of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people.

So I think we need a serious robust Homeland Security defense capability just in case we get surprised.

Second, I think that when you are certain of what you’re doing it makes sense to be on offense. I personally believe we ought to have a regime changing strategy for Iran but it out to be designed on what Reagan did in Poland.

Which was a peaceful process of using economic, diplomatic, psychological information, political pressures to change the government because you don’t have to be military in order to have a decisive impact if you are the most powerful country in the world and your dealing with a relatively week government.

And I think the Iranian government is not a strong government, it’s just a brutal government and I see no future where we have any positive future with either the Syrian, Iranian, or North Korean dictatorships and we ought to be honest about that.

Just as frankly we ought to be actively trying to replace the dictatorship in Zimbabwe which is not gonna get any better and people can ring their hands all they want to, these are evil racemes that do evil things to use the language of Ronald Reagan but I think you want to do it carefully and you want to do it with minimum American use of force and you want to do it with the understanding of limitations of reality.

The other point I’d make is it is still in the end a very complicated world and we are only one country. I mean there’s a reason that Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill kept meeting with Stalin they needed him as an ally.

It wasn’t that they were gonna become communists and it wasn’t that they approved of a totalitarian racemes, but given the realities of 1940-1945 they were not prepared to take on communism and Nazism and fascism and imperial Japan.

Well, we’re in the same boat I mean China’s a fact for the moment the Chinese dictatorship is a fact. As long as they are a fact there’s a danger beyond our ability to offensively change it, and if your gonna live in a world that has China you better have a Homeland Security Department.

And so I think you’ve got to be constantly be balancing what can you practically get done and what can’t you.             

Bill: Something Newt and I have talked about repeatedly while doing our researching on the WWII series; I believe the number of FBI agents on active duty in 1941 was about 5,000 they increased the number by what about 3,000. Think about this 10 months 11 moths after we enter the war we send a transoceanic invasion fleet the largest in history up to that time departing out of Boston, New York, Norfolk and others to head to North Africa.

I helped a general write is autobiographical account some years ago and he said as we were pulling out of New York Harbor we were looking at all the skyscrapers and lower Manhattan going good heavens there’s got to be at least one Nazi agent up there telegraphing the information, no there wasn’t. The FBI had gotten all of them at the very start of the war and did it effectively without violating the civil rights of American citizens.

There were very few attempts made by the enemy during the war to get into out country without side agents well some of them were picked up right on this island here you people most likely know the history better than we do we did it very effectively in 1941-1945 the question is why can we not be as effective today, I think that’s a very important to be asking in this election year.

NG: Let’s take two more questions, if that’s okay.

Q: How do you answer the argument that the doctrine of preemptive striking would threaten world security if every nation were to follow that particular philosophy? In other worlds, the United States historically believes in clear and present danger if we agree that other nations have that same right how does world civilization survive with that notion?

NG: I think you raised one of the great questions of our generation, I’m gonna give you an answer that some of you will find very troubling. I’m an American Nationalist, I’m quite prepared to say I don’t think the same rules apply to us and apply to Zimbabwe I don’t think the same rules apply to us and apply to North Korea.

I think we made a huge mistake in designing the United Nations so you can’t discriminate between predatory dictatorships and democracies. I think that the fact is that democracies collectively have a totally different standard of rule of law, a totally different standard of respect.

I find I have a common interest with Canada, with Japan in its post-imperial phase, with Australia, with the French, with Italy, with countries that are democracies.

And we have a bunch of predatory dictatorial racemes and we have a handful of genuinely fanatic moments and again I will use language that some of you will find a little challenging. There is an irreconcilable wing of Islam which would not allow any women to be in this meeting, now I don’t think we are going to cut a deal with them.

And so I think one side or the other is going to win and I am for modernity, I am for the modern world; I am for every person having civil liberties. I am happy to have a Mosque on Long Island, but I would like to have a Church in Mecca.

And I don’t particularly want a cleptocratic 17,000 prince dictatorial family that has stolen a country lecture me with me money that we sent them for oil.

Which is why I’d like to see a national energy strategy that allows us, the United States, to be a lot more the center of the world’s energy supply than Saudi Arabia.

But that does mean that I would apply a different standard to measuring countries that are democracies than I would apply to measuring countries that are dictatorships and I would say to dictatorships as a general principle do not threaten us we are the most powerful nation in history and our tendency is to hit you first, and so we prefer not to be threatened. Now, as I said, I think some people would find that challenging. Okay, I think we have one more question.     

Q: What do you attribute to the fact that we have not been hit since 9/11?

NG: Why have we not been hit since 9/11, which is a good question. My first answer is I honestly don’t know. I would have expected another attack and I particularly thought, I was very, very worried and I talked to the administration when we had the sniper attacks.

Because the sniper attacks were psychologically so frightening to the average person because of their randomness that I was amazed that the bad guys didn’t figure out how to send 10 or 12 sniper teams.

I think there are couple of things though that we tend, which is one of the great tragedies of the Bush administration, the more successful they’ve been at intercepting and stopping bad guys the less proof there is that we’re in danger and therefore the better they’ve done at making sure there isn’t an attack, the easier it is to say well there was never going to be an attack anyway.

And it’s almost like they should every once in a while allowed an attack to get through just to remind us. Think about it; think about the psychology why did we wrap up so many people, well we wire-tapped.

And again, I’m going to be a little controversial, I would divide the FBI into two agencies. I would have an anti-domestic crime FBI which was very cautious, very respectful of civil liberties; you are innocent until proven guilty. And I would have a small but very aggressive anti-terrorism agency and I would frankly give them extraordinary ability to ease drop.

And my first advice to civil libertarians is simple, don’t plot with terrorists. Because the only information that I would allow to be admissible by this agency would be information that was related to terrorism, but if you ask me am I prepared to be very aggressive in order to avoid a nuclear weapon going off in New York or a biological weapon going off in Boston, my answer is yeah.

I think that it is very important that we recognize the nature of the modern world; we recognize how sophisticated some of our opponents are getting and we stay ahead of them with a relentless intensity which I do not want to see any domestic police department have.

Because I think your liberties in a domestic setting are paramount I would rather risk crime, than risk losing my civil liberties, but I would not rather risk a nuclear weapon and I think its very important. And I think the greatest danger to our liberty is to actually have the country end up in the kind of attack that would lead us to favor a dictatorship for security.

And the history of human beings is simple, human beings do not like living in periods where they are deeply threatened. And if the democracy can’t protect them they will shift towards a dictatorship. So I want a democracy which is very protective of your civil liberties for crime and very relentless in pursing terrorists to protect you from terrorism.

And I think candidly the Bush administration, despite all the attacks on it and the mistakes made, I certainly disagree with how they handled Iraq after the first campaign was brilliant. And I thought had they listened carefully to Ambassador Khalilzad and General Petraeus in 2003 we frankly would have probably won the war and been over a long time ago.

But having said that on the stopping terrorism front someday 50 years from now somebody will have access to the documents and will write a history that will show that George W. Bush did a lot more to protect this country successfully than anybody knows at the present time. Thank you all very much, let’s sign books.

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