After the Kosovo operation was finished, and NATO was victorious, you were relieved of your command a few months early, seen by many as a slap in the face. In your book, you say that you have no idea who was behind it or why. But the book came out in 2001; have you figured it out yet?

You know, I never have. I never went back and I never asked. You know, that's all in the past. You've got to move on in life.

[Editors note: The following portion of the interview occurred Sunday.]

So obviously there's been a lot of bad news in the last day or so. How do you think Operation Iraqi Freedom is going?

Well, despite the fact that we've had some rough days, it's still going to be a military mismatch. In any military operation -- even the ones without an adversary -- you have accidents, you have mistakes made.

Our dash across the border was in largely unoccupied territory. But now's the time we're really going to depend on our troops. And my heart's with the troops -- the men, women, their families. They didn't ask for this mission but it was given to them.

How long do you think the fighting will last?

Well, I said two to three weeks. But that was all premised on our having our force there and being ready to go at the outset. Of course we weren't. The 4th Infantry Division was in ships off the coast of Turkey. The 1st Armor Division was still in Germany. The First Cavalry was still at Fort Hood.

Why would the Pentagon start the war if not all the troops were in place?

I can't explain it. I can't defend it; I've never seen the plan. This is the decision that was made. It might work out; then again, it might not.

Does this mean you'll change your prediction from two to three weeks?

It may be longer than that, but it's still early. So I'm not changing my prediction at this point.

There was a story in Sunday's New York Times about hand-wringing in the CIA about the White House's use of documents that the CIA didn't trust, ones that bolstered its argument that Iraq was seeking to make nuclear weapons. And apparently even though the CIA suspected that some of the materials supposedly proving that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger were forged documents, President Bush continued to use them to argue for war. What do you think about all that?

I didn't see the article, but I'm familiar with the case of the documents. I think there's been an extraordinary effort by the government to try to pull together all the facts and analyses it can to justify taking this course of action.

And if the facts and analyses are forged and discredited by our own intelligence agencies?

Well, I wouldn't support putting stuff in there that was fraudulent. I'm not sure who knew they were fraudulent and who knew of their use.

As a retired general, and as someone whose son has served in the military, don't you find it a bit odd or disconcerting that of all 535 men and women in Congress, there's apparently only one -- Sen. Tim Johnson, D-S.D. -- who has a son or daughter fighting in this war?

I think it's a function of the system we have for manning our armed forces, which we in America approved of, which is a volunteer force.

Last Thursday, in an interview with Newsweek/the Washington Post, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that he told Secretary of State Colin Powell that Turkey "would like to see Turkish troops in northern Iraq and they approved that." Are we selling out the Kurds again?

The Kurds have been pawns in power struggles for over a century. They've suffered enormous casualties in one conflict after another. They've lived in the worst of geopolitical neighborhoods. But Turkey has denied that their soldiers have gone into northern Iraq.

On Thursday, I spoke with Lawrence Korb, a former assistant secretary of defense under President Reagan, as well as with a former senior military officer during Operation Desert Storm, and both expressed chagrin that the White House was comparing the "Coalition of the Willing" for this war with the truly multinational effort of Desert Storm 12 years ago. Some 32 countries provided troops in 1991, compared with three this time around, yet the Bush White House is actually arguing that this coalition is bigger.

Well, as I told you, I don't think the president built the case and developed the coalition. I've always been concerned -- and you know from my writing -- that there wasn't evidence to justify the urgency to justify moving against Saddam Hussein right now. Rather than presenting the international community with a problem and asking its assistance in helping to resolve it, the United States government effectively presented the solution and asked for countries to agree with its views. And too many didn't.

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