months until the invasion, attention turns to who will run iraq in the immediate days and weeks after the fall of saddam. retired army lieutenant general jay garner, a man with deep experience in the region, gets the call from donald rumsfeld. he said what we need right now is somebody to come in, put a staff together and operationalize the plans we put together. you know, you think if you re going to put that together, you d have office space and desk, computers, telephones and all that. i didn t even have a chair. inside the pentagon with just weeks to go until the invasion, planning for how to actually stabilize iraq. that planning had taken a back seat to something else entirely. something we are only now learning about a little more than a decade later. we can now not only explain what that was that was really going on, we can show it to you. the reporting and researching for this documentary is one of
every crisis we face internationally, every big national security decision we make, all of these decisions are made and all of these crises are confronted in the shadow of the last ten years. we are a country that is really quite desperately weary of war after simultaneously fighting two of the longest protracted land wars and foreign occupations in american history, and we are newly and legitimately wary of what gets us into wars in the first place and we come by that wariness honestly. that wariness is earned. we earned it the hard way under the last presidency. last year we teamed up with nbc news investigative reporter michael isikoff and david corn from mother jones to produce a documentary called hubris, selling the iraq war. it was the most watched documentary on msnbc in the last decade. that documentary was based on their reporting and told the
the more disturbing things i have ever worked on since i have been here at msnbc. honestly i think this is going to be upsetting to a lot of people when we air this documentary, but i also think that we have documented and found out some things that are really important. as the u.s. government considers our options and makes our case to the world in the middle of another international crisis right now, i feel a real sense of urgency that we ve got to get this out there now, for the sake of clarity. for the sake of finally being honest for the first time about what really happened. thursday night, 9:00 p.m. eastern, that s the plan. i hope you will watch it and we will be right back. [ girl ] my mom, she makes underwater fans
the american people based on a pretext, based on evidence that in many cases was known inside the government to be false. that documentary, hubris, answered the question of how, how that war was sold to the american people. but there remains the question of why. what was behind that public case for war? if what they were telling us was false, why did they really think we needed to go to war? if the case made to the public was a false case, what was the true case? why did we really do it? for much of the last year we ve been working really hard on trying to answer that question, and this week, this thursday night, we are going to present what we have found. thursday night at 9:00 eastern, we re going to premiere a brand new msnbc documentary called why we did it. it s the result of months worth of reporting as well as interviews with a number of people directly involved in the war effort. here s a little piece of it. at the pentagon with just two
selling the iraq war. it was the most watched documentary on msnbc in the last decade. that documentary was based on their reporting and told the story of how the bush administration sold the war to the american people based on a pretext, based on evidence that in many cases was known inside the government to be false. that documentary, hubris, answered the question of how, how that war was sold to the american people. but there remains the question of why. what was behind that public case for war? if what they were telling us was false, why did they really think we needed to go to war? if the case made to the public was a false case, what was the true case? why did we really do it? for much of the last year we ve been working really hard on trying to answer that question, and this week, this thursday night, we are going to present what we have found. thursday night at 9:00 eastern, we re going to premiere a brand new msnbc documentary called why we did it. it s the result of months