Description: When things don't go right, it's okay to change the equation.

Question: What is the legacy of the Iraq war?

Transcript: You have to make sure that the intelligence community does a better job. You have to ask them more questions and really probe how much . . . how well they know something is true.

Number two, you have to have a mission goal. And the mission of a . . . someone like Tommy Franks is not just to overthrow Saddam Hussein, but it’s to leave Iraq in a situation where it’s going to be a governing state. So a bigger perspective.

And number three. It is fine in any human endeavor to take in new information and to change the equation, and to keep improving things and not just a be a cheerleader. And I think that there is really no appreciation by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Vice President Chaney, or President George W. Bush to – things are getting worse in Iraq – change what we were doing there. Take this new information and deal with the realities. They were up in the clouds.

Recorded on: 7/2/07

Description: The fear of intervention, says Roth.

Transcript: And I fear that one consequence of the Iraqi debacle is that we are much less likely to intervene. On the one hand there’s just a shortage of troops. You know everybody’s preoccupied in Iraq, or to some extent with Afghanistan. On the other hand there is a . . . no more stomach for military action. I think people have just had it with . . . with these adventures overseas, want the troops home, and are not about to launch into another one. And . . . and . . . And in a third respect, the Bush administration has discredited the concept of humanitarian intervention by trying to justify the Iraqi war after the fact as a humanitarian intervention, when we all knew at the time it was supposedly to find the non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Or it was to attack the non-existent links with international terrorism. But if . . . if we knew that there were no weapons of mass destruction; if it was clear there was no Al Qaeda connection, Bush would not have gone in just because Saddam was a tyrant. But after the fact by trying to justify the Iraq war as a humanitarian intervention, one that I don’t think is justified; because bad as a tyrant Saddam was, there was not the mass slaughter at the time that would have justified humanitarian intervention. Bush has given the term . . . given the concept a bad name. He’s really tarred what is, I think, a very high-minded concept with his fairly base political needs. And in the process, I think it’s people say like the people in Darfur who are paying the price. Because, you know, why is the international community only willing to go into Darfur with the consent of the Sudanese government? You know consent that has been withheld for a very long time. It’s because there is no more, you know, stomach. There is no more capacity to . . . to use military force; but also because people are now skeptical of this concept of humanitarian intervention. And so in that sense, the people of Darfur, or of Eastern Congo, or of others facing mass atrocities are very much paying the price of this . . . this cheap resort to war in an effort to justify it after the fact as a humanitarian intervention.

Recorded on: 8/14/07

Description: It will take us another forty years to get over the Iraq syndrome.

Transcript: I also think that we are gonna look back on these years of the Iraq war as a huge national mistake. Now we have had leaders who have brought us into it; but the fact of the matter is that the country ended up endorsing the Iraq invasion. Now it was bad information and all that. But we agreed and we re-elected the president on it. And I think we are going to pay a price for 20, 30, 40 . . . a whole generation. It took us what . . . 40 years to get out of the Vietnam syndrome? It’s gonna take us 40 years to rebuild the military, get out of the Iraq syndrome. And maybe at the end of those 40 years we’ll have won back the world’s good will. A terrible tragedy.

Recorded on: 7/5/07

Description: We're never as strong as we think.

Transcript: it’s not really just the Iraq war. It is how are we as the “we” – United States of America, Americans – who are right now situated as the most powerful country in the world . . . We’re never as powerful as we think. On the other hand we’re pretty powerful. How is the most powerful country in the world actually going to demonstrate leadership as we move from nation state to a more globalized world in which those boundaries . . . We can build all the walls we want; those boundaries are going to be more permeable than any human being in the human community ever could have imagined them. And that’s very unnerving. And how to function in that environment without a kind of . . . without simply returning to a kind of primal, flight-fight response.

Recorded on: 8/15/07