Rumsfeld: I suppose we may never know why Saddam Hussein made the choices he made, but we do know this. He chose war. If he had chosen differently, if the Iraqi regime had taken the steps Libya is now taking, there would have been no war.

Q: How should Americans -- as this debate about military service broadly emerges, how should Americans look back at military service in combat in Vietnam and military service in the National Guard?
Myers: And I can only do it from a narrow perspective of an Air Force pilot. And when I graduated from pilot training, there were several choices, and one was to go fly for, I think, what we called in those days Air Defense Command. I believe it was still called ADC in those days. And there were other options. And I took an option that -- took an airplane and went to Europe. And other people took the Air Defense Command option. What’s interesting is the National Guard -- a large part of their mission then and today is the air defense of this country, which I think is a noble mission. So I mean, people just kind of went with the airplane type and the mission type they thought they’d like. And I think that was the extent of the thought of it.

Rumsfeld: At my confirmation hearing, I was asked what kept me up at night in this job, what would keep me up, and I answered, "Intelligence." This is three years ago, in early January, right after the Congress came back. Why did I say that? I said it because I’ve been around long enough to know that in a big, complicated world with closed societies, people determined not to have you know something, and with the growing lethality of weapons and the increasing availability of those increasingly lethal weapons, your margin for error is less. We’re living in a time of surprise. Where it is possible to be surprised. And we were surprised on September 11th, and 3,000 people lost their lives.

It is -- you -- the question was to the effect was I -- am I satisfied or I’m -- do I feel good about it or something like that? No, I haven’t felt good about what I know most of my life. I always want to know more, and you always are hoping and praying that the -- that you’re going to be able to do that enormously difficult task of connecting those dots before something happens. Look at how -- look at the trouble these commissions and committees are having trying to connect the dots after the fact! Think how much harder it is before the fact, when you don’t have the leisure of doing it over a period of months, when you simply have to do it and establish priorities and weigh things continuously, not one thing, but a dozen things like that.