When addressing U.S. Army troops shortly before the Iraq war,
                        V Corps commander Lt. Gen. William Wallace frequently noted
                        his Scottish ancestry, drawing inevitable comparisons to his
                        namesake of Braveheart fame. Yet his highlander fortitude was
                        tested when the campaign seemed to sputter after the first week.

                        Comments Wallace made to a reporter that Iraqi resistance was
                        fiercer than expected, and that the war might take longer than
                        anticipated, became the center of a whirling controversy over
                        Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's war plan. As the
                        commander of Army maneuver forces and of the battle for
                        Baghdad, however, Wallace was a key leader in a campaign that
                        defeated the Iraqi army and toppled the regime of Saddam
                        Hussein in roughly three weeks. Embedded with V Corps
                        throughout the war, National Journal Correspondent James
                        Kitfield spoke with Wallace at his headquarters in Baghdad on
                        April 20. Edited excerpts follow.

                        NJ: In recent comments to U.S. troops in Baghdad, you
                        commended them for "traveling farther in less time, and fighting
                        more decisively, than any army in history." In general terms, what
                        do you think were the key ingredients to this Iraq victory?

                        Wallace: My overriding impression is one of admiration for the
                        bravery, heroism, and aggressiveness of our young soldiers.
                        Unless they were in an advantageous position to defend, they just
                        constantly attacked throughout the whole campaign.

                        The other aspect of this campaign that really impressed me was
                        the ability of my young field-grade officers to employ combined
                        arms—direct fire, indirect fire, close air support—in the right
                        balance on the battlefield, and to great advantage. I would also
                        note that this war was executed almost exclusively at the battalion
                        level and below. The divisions moved guys around the map, but
                        the guys who really did the fighting were the lower echelons, at
                        battalion and below.

                        I was also very impressed with the way our young leaders in
                        those units got out in front and led when their troops were in
                        harm's way. I gave out 26 Purple Hearts the other day, and many
                        if not most of them were to young sergeants and lieutenants.
                        That's different from a Desert Storm type of campaign.

                        NJ: When we talked shortly before the war began, you stressed
                        that there would be several different fights going on
                        simultaneously within the overall campaign, and I would like you
                        to comment on how each of those fights went. The first was the
                        fight to get your forces deployed and ready in a theater halfway
                        around the world. From my perspective, it seemed that forcing all
                        of those troops and equipment through the eye of a single needle,
                        in terms of the Kuwaiti port and airfield, was very constraining.
                        Was it?

                        Wallace: First of all, I think we were right to characterize the
                        fight to get here as a critical part of the equation. Certainly the
                        fact that we only had a single airport and port through which our
                        entire formation had to flow was a limiting factor in our
                        operations. I think we did pretty well in adapting ourselves to that
                        reality, but in hindsight, I might have made some different
                        adjustments in terms of what flowed into the country, and when.

                        For example, early in the flow we were very concerned about
                        fuel. There was a company's worth of 5,000-gallon tankers sitting
                        in Kuwait, but the truck drivers weren't due into the theater for
                        weeks. Ultimately we asked for and received permission to fly in
                        truck drivers from V Corps to fall in on that equipment, in order
                        to get our truck companies moving. Those kinds of decisions and
                        adjustments were being made virtually every day by our
                        logisticians and leaders in the rear area. And ultimately, it
                        worked.

                        NJ: In retrospect, do you believe this "rolling start," with its
                        necessary focus on deploying new forces even while the war was
                        being fought hundreds of kilometers away, and delivering "just-in-
                        time" supplies, was the best way to go?

                        Wallace: Well, it's hard to argue with success. All of us would
                        like more predictability in our lives and jobs. But we made this
                        work—that's how I would phrase it. We had some very talented
                        people who made it work.

                        There are also advantages to a "rolling start," because it allows
                        you to get into the fight quicker. You gain some strategic as well
                        as tactical advantages from that fact. The impression we have
                        from talking to some Iraqi officers, for instance, is that some were
                        expecting a Desert Storm-type campaign preceded by a long
                        period of aerial bombardment. As you recall, instead we actually
                        started the ground war before we started the air war. That
                        decision was made for a number of different reasons, but I have
                        to believe it surprised some Iraqi military officers who found
                        themselves confronting U.S. tanks very early in the war.

                        NJ: One of the other major fights involved in this war was against
                        tough and variable terrain, from the dusty desert of western Iraq
                        to the fertile farmland between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers,
                        with its many canals and waterways. How well did your forces
                        cope with that?

                        Wallace: I was certainly happy with the way our forces handled
                        the terrain. We captured a map that an Iraqi reconnaissance
                        battalion commander in the Republican Guards was carrying, and
                        it showed they were anticipating our forces to go exactly where
                        we decided not to go, largely because the terrain between the
                        Euphrates and Tigris Rivers was so difficult for maneuver forces.

                        Having said that, we were surprised by the texture of the desert
                        terrain. The dust problem in those areas was orders of magnitude
                        worse than any of our terrain analysts had predicted. That caused
                        us a number of problems. It caused us a problem in terms of
                        convoy movement, and in terms of aviation assets. Anytime
                        anything moved out there, it kicked up a dust cloud. It was like
                        driving through talcum powder.

                        NJ: You said from the beginning that maintaining a fast pace of
                        operations would be crucial to this campaign, which brings us to
                        the question of the so-called "pause" in offensive operations that
                        began with the sandstorm near the end of the first week. That halt
                        to your forward progress obviously sparked some controversy
                        back in the United States, didn't it?

                        Wallace: I would suggest to you that "tempo" can be fast or
                        slow, either of which is OK as long as you are in control of the
                        tempo, and the enemy is not. When we slowed our forward
                        progress and tempo, it was for a very deliberate, two-fold
                        reason. First, we wanted to build our logistics stance prior to
                        moving into the battle for Baghdad. Second, even though we
                        weren't moving forward, we were attacking the enemy every day.
                        We had three fights going on nearly simultaneously around Najaf
                        in that time frame, and a very serious fight down in Samawa. The
                        fact that we weren't advancing through the Karbala Gap didn't
                        mean that we weren't fighting. We continued to fight, we
                        continued to secure our [logistics] lines, and we continued to kill a
                        lot of bad guys.

                        NJ: At one time, you were dealing simultaneously with a dust
                        storm of near-biblical proportions, unexpectedly fierce fights with
                        Iraqi paramilitaries, and the distraction of the controversy back in
                        Washington over your comments. What was that period like for
                        you personally?

                        Wallace: Personally, the period during the dust storm was the
                        low point of the entire campaign for me. That was definitely the
                        hardest part and the low point of the war. You have to remember
                        that the 3rd Infantry Division crossed the line of departure to
                        open the war with about five days of supplies in terms of water,
                        food, and ammunition. Then the dust storm hit on the fifth day of
                        the fight, and lasted for most of three days. During that storm, our
                        convoys took three to four days to reach our forward forces, and
                        they were carrying two days of resupply. So the math didn't add
                        up at that point, which concerned me. Not that we couldn't hold
                        on to the ground we had gained, but we couldn't advance a lot
                        further in our plans until we had solved the logistics issue.

                        The period of the dust storm was also tough because we were
                        fighting our tails off. There was all of this discussion on the lack of
                        progress, but in actual fact, we were still maintaining a high
                        operations tempo. We just weren't gaining ground. What we
                        were doing was setting conditions for a decisive fight to follow.

                        NJ: The period of the dust storm also revealed the other great
                        surprise of the war, which was the suicidal fanaticism with which
                        the Fedayeen Saddam and some other paramilitary forces fought.
                        How did you react to that?

                        Wallace: At the time, we simply couldn't discount the fanaticism
                        with which those paramilitaries fought. I was not willing to ignore
                        the threat it posed, or to expose my critical logistics train to it.

                        In terms of forces to meet that threat, I had a very strong point of
                        the spear with the 3rd Infantry Division. What I didn't have was a
                        heavily mobile secondary force. The ability of the 101st Airborne
                        Division to move itself around at that time was limited, quite
                        frankly, because some of the trucks they rely on for mobility
                        hadn't arrived in theater yet. So I was constrained in my ability to
                        get one of the divisions around the battlefield. That led to some
                        really tough calls on where to employ the 101st Division.

                        NJ: Also at that time, some of your commanders characterized
                        the fighting taking place around Najaf and Karbala as a preview
                        of the battle of Baghdad. Did it turn out that way?

                        Wallace: That may very well represent the single most significant
                        adjustment we made in this entire war. We never had any
                        intention of fighting in those southern cities, because we felt that
                        would put us at a disadvantage; so we intended to bypass them.

                        As it turned out, the enemy was so aggressive in coming out of
                        the cities and attacking us that we had to counterattack, first to
                        secure our lines of communication, and second because the
                        enemy was going to keep coming at us until we went into the
                        cities and whacked him. So we had to make an adjustment to our
                        battle plan and tactics to compensate for that aggressive tactic by
                        the enemy.

                        I think Saddam's forces were trying to draw us into the cities,
                        where they thought they had an advantage. Instead, we turned the
                        cities into a disadvantage, with our armored raids taking out their
                        heavy equipment, technical vehicles, and bunker complexes.
                        Once we did that with our heavy armored forces, we switched to
                        light infantry, backed by heavy reinforcements, to do the more
                        detailed clearing operations. In the process of those fights, we not
                        only secured our lines of communication and diminished the
                        enemy's capabilities, but we also began to take control of
                        population centers that we had anticipated addressing later, in
                        Phase 4 stability operations. We just ended up confronting that
                        issue earlier in the campaign than we anticipated.

                        NJ: Once you went back on the offensive at the start of April,
                        and pushed your forces successfully through the Karbala Gap,
                        the campaign seemed to come quickly to a head. Why was that?

                        Wallace: For nearly a year, we had recognized collectively that
                        once we were through the Karbala Gap, the fight would not be
                        over until we seized the international airport in Baghdad. The
                        entire fight from Karbala to the airport was considered as one
                        continuous assault, because once we crossed through the gap, we
                        were inside the range of all the artillery that was in support of
                        Baghdad and all the Republican Guard divisions around
                        Baghdad.

                        We were also obviously worried about if and when Saddam
                        would use chemical weapons. If you got 10 people in a room,
                        you'd get 10 opinions on the subject, but clearly Karbala Gap
                        was one of those choke points where Saddam could have used
                        those weapons to some effect in terms of slowing us down. So
                        the judgment I stated to my commanders was that once we
                        crossed through the gap, we would be within Saddam's red zone
                        in terms of defenses, and we had damn sure better be ready to
                        continue the fight all the way to the encirclement of Baghdad.

                        NJ: At what point in that offensive from Karbala Gap to
                        Baghdad did you sense that you had your enemy defeated?

                        Wallace: When we seized the bridge over the Euphrates River at
                        what we called Objective Peach. At that point, I was pretty
                        confident that we had Saddam by the balls. If we hadn't seized
                        that bridge, we were prepared to put our own bridges in the
                        water, but that probably would have added 24 hours to our
                        operations. If he had the capability at the time—and it's not clear
                        to me now that he did—he could have used that 24 hours to
                        reposition forces and mass artillery, making life a lot harder for
                        us. So when we got the main bridge across the Euphrates, I knew
                        we were essentially home free.

                        NJ: Before the war, you targeted the Republican Guard Medina
                        Division, which defended the southern approaches to Baghdad,
                        as the center of gravity in the campaign. Yet the Medina never
                        seemed able to fight as a coherent division-sized force, did it?

                        Wallace: No, it never did. As I look back, I think it fell victim to
                        a successful, joint, combined-arms fight. I'm about 95 percent
                        convinced that when we crossed the Euphrates in a series of
                        feints just after the dust storm hit, it forced the Medina to start
                        repositioning its forces to counter an advance between the rivers
                        that was never our main intent.

                        We had beautiful weather with clear skies at that point, and we
                        started getting reports of enemy armor moving on trucks, of Iraqi
                        artillery forces repositioning, and of attempts by Medina brigades
                        to occupy what they believed would be optimum defensive
                        positions. All that happened in the full view of the U.S. Air Force,
                        and they started whacking the hell out of the Medina. So that was
                        a pretty good feeling, knowing that the enemy felt he had to move
                        his forces under conditions that were of great advantage to us as
                        the attacker.

                        NJ: Perhaps the place where reality deviated most dramatically
                        from your war plan was in the battle of Baghdad, which you
                        planned as a very methodical series of strikes from staging bases
                        on the city's periphery. The reality happened much faster, in two
                        successive armored assaults into the city, didn't it?

                        Wallace: Once again, you have to go back to the battle of Najaf
                        to understand our actions at that point, because that's where we
                        learned we could do better. We learned that armor could fight in
                        the city and survive, and that if you took heavy armored forces
                        into the city—given the way Saddam was defending the city with
                        technical vehicles and bunker positions—we could knock all of
                        those defenses out and survive. As a result of Najaf, I think our
                        soldiers also gained an extraordinary appreciation for the
                        survivability of their equipment. So Najaf made decisions
                        associated with being more aggressive when we got to Baghdad
                        a hell of a lot easier. We didn't have to be as cautious as we had
                        anticipated, because by the time we got to Baghdad we had
                        learned some important lessons along the way, and we applied
                        them to the Baghdad fight.

                        NJ: On the second of those armored assaults into downtown
                        Baghdad, elements of the 3rd Infantry Division captured the main
                        palace and city center, and then unexpectedly asked if they could
                        simply stay and occupy downtown. That wasn't planned, was it?

                        Wallace: No, it wasn't. And it brought concerns. Not about our
                        ability to stay in Baghdad, because we had already demonstrated
                        an ability to dominate the urban battlefield. Rather, the concern
                        was about our ability to get light-skinned vehicles in to resupply
                        those armored forces sitting downtown.

                        In the end, we were able to protect those convoys, allowing us to
                        stay in downtown Baghdad. In fact, we found that the positioning
                        of our forces around the palace downtown was actually more
                        defensible than our positions on the outside of town, because the
                        parks and broad plazas in the city gave us good fields of fire, and
                        we were in a place where he couldn't mass his artillery on us
                        because we were in the middle of his artillery forces. When you
                        got right down to it, all of that added up to making our decision to
                        stay in downtown Baghdad a good one. Third Infantry
                        commander Maj. Gen. Buford Blount called me up and said,
                        "Well, we control all the intersections, and I recommend we stay,
                        because if we stay, we have the city." I agreed.

                        NJ: In many ways, doesn't this transition now under way from
                        combat to stability and peace enforcement seem more difficult
                        than pure war fighting?

                        Wallace: We train for war fighting, but peacekeeping is
                        something that we do. If you look across our formation, I would
                        bet that 30 percent or more of our soldiers have had some
                        real-world peacekeeping experience in the Balkans. So we have
                        a lot of experience in how to deal with civil affairs, with civilian
                        populations, with establishing institutions to get civilian
                        populations involved in their own destiny. There is just a lot of
                        experience in our forces with this civil-military dynamic, largely as
                        a result of our operations in Bosnia and Kosovo.

                        NJ: Even in the Balkans, however, you didn't have to make that
                        transition from such intense combat operations, did you?

                        Wallace: The rapidity with which we have transitioned from one
                        to the other in Iraq is the real trick. One day our troops are
                        kicking down doors, and the next they're passing out Band-Aids.
                        And in some cases, they're kicking down doors without really
                        knowing if they are going to have to pull a trigger or pass out a
                        Band-Aid on the other side. And it's really a remarkable tribute
                        to the mental acuity of our soldiers that they are able to do that.

                        NJ: Other than the Fedayeen Saddam fights, were there any
                        surprises that Iraqi forces threw at you that forced you to react or
                        adjust?

                        Wallace: We should be careful at this point, because wars are
                        kind of like good wine, they tend to get better with age. But it
                        seems to me that regardless of whether Saddam still had a
                        command-and-control apparatus in place toward the end, it
                        continually took Iraqi forces a long time—somewhere on the
                        order of 24 hours—to react to anything we did. By the time the
                        enemy realized what we were doing, got the word out to his
                        commanders and they actually did something as a result, we had
                        already moved on to doing something different. For a
                        commander, that's a pretty good thing—fighting an enemy who
                        can't really react to you.