enemy, disrupt its plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge. it is not complicated. how do we prevent the next attack? and since we had adopted this wait until you re attacked and then send in the law enforcement folks, the president understood that this dynamic had to change. march 20th, 2003, the u.s. invades iraq. baghdad fell in three weeks. but the insurgency would continue for years. meanwhile, bush was reelected and his doctrine continued to evol evolve. the survival of liberty in our land increasing depends on the success of liberty in other lands. the best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world. this is the capstone of the president s freedom agenda. the president essentially said that tyrannies, dictatorships
you welcome back. after nine long years. the iraq war officially coming to an end this week. now one question remains. can we claim victory there? and can presidepresident obama victory. alisyn: joining us, colonel oliver north. how do you answer? claim victory in iraq. americans people sent over one million of their sons ands daughters, they can claim victory. i don t know if the administration can. they have he proved inept in dealing with how the war is going to end. no doubt we have an iraqi army on our side. in march 20th, 2003, it certainly was. 750,000 of them had volunteered to join us in preventing al-qaeda from gaining a toe hold in me mesopotamia. they re on our side, they
near future in terms of deployment options. so how we think about this going forward and what that means for not just the soldiers, but the families and these soldiers coming back is i think a very real question right now. and we have seen on this set day in and day out the volatility of the middle east. we ve seen how it s really impossible to predict what s going to happen next month let alone next year, next decade. so it s really hard to make a clear-eyed assessment of exactly how this war is going to have a long-term impact on the middle east and the world, isn t it? yeah, it s probably too soon to say. i do hope one of the lessons, though, the country takes war more seriously than it did ten years ago. i remember sitting on the night of march 20th, 2003, watching those bombs fall over baghdad and it looked like a video game. it was a war that was happening on tv. and that s actually what it turned out to be, 1% of our country fighting a war that the rest of us watched on tv.
the largest single block in parliament, a radical anti-american cleric, with a militia group. the political system here is the one that s probably going to create the biggest challenge, a political system that feels in many respects an affinity to ir iran. the security services, yes, they have been trained in the u.s. military as a military was very good at teaching iraqis how to fight, how to clear apartments, but far less good at far less effective at teaching them how to run a country. richard, if you don t mind sharing, i remember certainly where i was on march 20th, 2003, as i watched on cnn and msnbc the bombs falling over baghdad. had no idea we would be in this for something like nine years. what does this day feel like to you, for someone who s been there covering it for so long? i was here in baghdad during that period and then for a long period after that, so watching the arrival of u.s. troops, watching those first bombs come
we were faced with a different situation. all of a sudden what was going on in that part of the world would impact home. bret: iraq, vice president cheney said he felt that you werezfz worrying too much about united nations approval. yes. bret: the vice president asked at one of your private lunches, are you going to take care of this guy or not? yeah. there was an impatience. i was doing everything i could to avoid the use of the military. bret: march 20th, 2003, the u.s. invaded iraq. three weeks into the war, saddam hussein fled baghdad. dramatic success on the battlefield kept the public behind bush s global war on terror. that included a host of nonmilitary measures to protect america from further terrorist attacks. eavesdropping on terrorist phone calls. tracking their money.