And the Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome back to Conversations. I'm very pleased to have with me today.

General Jack Keene, retired in 2003 after a very distinguished

37-year career in the Army. Welcome, General Keene. Great to be here. So you retired

in 2003 but then in late 2006 I think when we first met

maybe we met once before but when we met and spent more time together you were

in the middle of planning a surge in Iraq how How did that happen three years after you left

behind your heavy duties after a very distinguished career? Well as everybody

recognized we had a very successful invasion in Iraq in 2003.

It just took actually a matter of weeks.

And then very quickly, an insurgency developed and we developed a strategy to deal with that and frankly I knew I was on active duty at the time and I knew that the Army, the Marine Corps, the ground forces in particular were ill-prepared to deal

with that kind of war.

We hadn't fought a war like that going all the way back to Vietnam and while we were successful

in defeating the insurgency in Vietnam, given the way the war ended,

I know the Army purged itself of the lexicon of everything to do with counterinsurgency. So none of our officers in certain Mexican had any

everything to do with counterinsurgency.

So none of our officers and certainly none of our generals

had any skill sets to deal with counterinsurgency.

And that's what was beginning to develop in 2003.

It got worse in 2004, and by 2006, actually Iraq was heading

towards a failed state.

The new government was fractured before it got started.

There is a bloodbath in Baghdad.

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