well, mr. d'souza, you and your hawk friends have been found not guilty and, therefore, you're free to enjoy a night in the city of las vegas, the most lascivious and secular entertainment center in the world where you are free from the taliban, you may enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in its many forms. congratulations. >> thank you. >> case closed. thank you all very much for attending, and thanks to both of our attorneys. >> thank you. jury, you are excused. [inaudible conversations] >> sorry, a cockroach on here. all better. [inaudible conversations]

♪ ♪ >> c-span2, providing live coverage of the u.s. senate floor proceedings and key public policy events. and every weekend booktv. now for 15 years the only television network devoted to nonfiction books and authors. c-span2, created by the cable tv industry and brought to you as a public service by your local cable or satellite provider. watch us in hd, like us on facebook and follow us on twitter. >> retired general tony zinni proposes way to make our use of force around the world more effective. he argues that the u.s. should rethink its role as the world's police and be more skeptical about using force to solve our problems. this is about an hour. [applause] >> thank you. thank you. i wanted to talk a little bit, first, about how the book came

about. i often get accused of maybe setting the stage for events today, you know? i guess for an author watching what's going on now and having a book like this, you know, it seems like perfect timing, unfortunately. i started out to write a very different book than this. i was, you know, really thinking about the way conflict goes today compared to wars and military interventions of the past. i think all of us know we talk about the greatest generation, world war ii, the good war, you know? we were attacked, you know, we as a nation came together. we had clear objectives, there were men like marshall and fdr and others that were in the leadership positions. and we managed to handle it in a way that seemed very satisfying in the end. it was the first time in our history that the winner paid reparations when you think about it. i mean, up until that point it was unheard of. the loser had to pay for the war. but when you think about the marshall plan and everything we

did, it was the winner that took our adversaries and raised them up, germany and japan. and i think in many ways that's always been our model. when we think about committing our military, that's the good war. no wars are good, of course, but it's a good war in the sense that it seemed just. everything we did seemed on the, from the perspective of the moral high ground. the leadership was in place. we had a strategy, we had an end state. and so these sorts of things were sort of set in concrete as the way that we would commit our military. but think what's happened since then. the korean war, vietnam war, iraq, afghanistan, somalia and many other maybe smaller commitments. they're very unsatisfying. they didn't have those sorts of clean lines. the reasons we went in might have been very vague or difficult to understand. the way those wars were handled and the decisions were made, you know, just didn't seem to kind of fit that model. there is an american way of war

which, basically, is relatively straightforward. but the kinds of conflicts we're into now seem not to fit that. the book i started out to write was basically oriented through the battlefield. you know, what do our troops go through having to adjust to that. they find themselves in murky objectives, they're on the ground trying to rebuild nations in strange environments. so i started it from the point of view of the soldier, marine on the ground. something i'm very familiar with. but as i went along and did the research for the book, a couple things struck me. one was that, you know, the troops when you're out there and you're with them on the ground, they get it. if you go down to the village level, they understand what's happening on the ground. and most of them -- not all of

them -- adjust, adapt. it's the decisions that get made somewhere else that cause the problems. and the more i started to look at this somewhere else, i found how far removed from the battlefield that was. it's the, all the political decisions that are made and analyses that are made before we even put boots on the ground, it's all the decisions and political machinations that go on while our troops are out there and in the midst of these kinds of conflicts. that's why the title of the book, "before the first shots are fired." oftentimes we get our troops in a position where they're at a disadvantage before they even, in the military term, cross the line of departure in some way. so i sort of switch my focus to all these things that go on off the battlefield and before the commitment of troops, the political pieces of this, the decisions about strategy, the she setting or -- the setting or

non-setting of objectives. and right now you can see what's happening in terms of what seems to be indecision, you know, reluctance, trying to get a grasp on what's happening. we've become a nation that is transactional and reactive to crisis as opposed to having some sort of strategic design and understanding where we want to go, how we want to employ force. secretary clinton and secretary gates had said that our foreign policy is overmilitarized, and something that might strike you as maybe odd is that most of the generals and admirals, the vast majority, feel the same way. our military gets committed to nation building, it gets committed to missions that are unclear, we get bogged down and mired down. we find our military personnel trying to rebuild ninth century societies into jeffersonian democracies and free market economies, you know? we don't have a whole-of-government approach. and this just seems to get worse

and worse as we go along. the moment i decided to shift off that battlefield and into this part of what goes into dealing with conflicts is a statement made by then-secretary of defense donald rumsfeld. he was, we were into iraq, and things were not going well. a reporter asked rumsfeld doesn't this look like vietnam? and he bristled at that statement. and he said no wars are like the last wars, no wars are like the next wars. every war is in its own, and it's very different. and i said, you know, i've been in the military 40 years, i see similarities. i see patterns. so that sort of triggered me to look at the patterns. what is it that you can use as a framework to examine this and look at this? well, you know, first of all you can look at reasons we interveeped, you know? we would -- interveeped. we would like to think we

intervene if attacked, if our interests are threatened in some way. not so clear. you know, the wmd in iraq that wasn't there, the gulf of tonkin incident that didn't happen. we've had some manufactured reasons for going to war. you know, back in the '20s and '30s, the banana wars in the caribbean were to promote our business interests in there. there are times we've gone to war for territorial expansion back when we were filling out the united states. so the reasons aren't very clear. the first part of the book talks about what i call triggering events. what are the events? sometimes our leadership actually creates the reason for going the war. remember the red line in syria? we have had presidents that have drawn red lines. we have had had presidents that have articulated presidential dock trips that basically says -- doctrines that basically says we will fight here. that's all well and good when you say it publicly, but there's sort of a nuance to this. you sort of tell your adversary under what conditions you would

fight. that adversary then, if the advantage is to him, can create that situation to call your bluff or to force you to do something. you know, presidents need to be much more careful about red lines. i think our current president has probably learned that lesson, you know? sometimes we have created the situation or set the condition under which we have fought. so the first part of the book kind of deals with these areas. it's not as cut and dried as you might imagine. the second has to do with how we've analyzed, how the president, our leadership, our political leadership then says, okay, we have a crisis, we have a triggering event. help me understand it. we're watching our president go through that now, you know? tell me about what i need to know. what are my options? here it's critically important to look at where does the advice come from? it's not as clean as the intelligence guys coming in and laying it out. i talk in the book about how different presidents have hand