Toward A More Successful Strategy In Iraq

Thursday, April 27, 2006

A CNP Conversation With Anthony Cordesman

Summary

On July 6, 2005, Dr. Anthony Cordesman, Arleigh Burke Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, addressed the question of how to construct a more viable strategy for success in Iraq.

Transcript

Tim Roemer: Tony Cordesman is a truly preeminent military strategist. He currently serves as Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Prior to his time at CSIS, he served as national security assistant to Senator John McCain of the Senate Armed Services Committee, as director of intelligence assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and as civilian assistant to the deputy secretary of defense. We’re very lucky to have him here today, and we look forward to his comments about security, political, economic, and strategic things that we can do better, to try to make sure that the situation in Iraq turns around and doesn’t spiral down into a low-grade or a high-grade civil war. Tony, thank you so much for coming today, and I hope you’ll take some questions and comments at the end.

Cordesman: Thanks very much for the introduction. I first visited Iraq in 1971. I was in and out of Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. I visited briefly in 1991, in the far southeast, which was already liberated, and I was in the Kurdish areas. I’ve now just come back from one of several recent trips to Iraq, and as a result I may have an involvement in this country that leads me to see it somewhat differently from people who look at it from the outside and who have not watched it develop over time.

One thing that strikes me about the American presence in Iraq is that sometimes we look at our interests there and not theirs. This is a country of 27 million people, and whatever we might or might not have done, whatever extent we can be seen as having liberated Iraq – and many Iraqis do not see us as liberators – the fact is that we went in on a basically broken down structure which had been created some eighty years ago, which already had artificial inheritances from the Ottoman empire, and we unleashed a set of ethnic and sectarian forces which simply we were not prepared to deal with, as well as a major debate among Iraqis over the role of religion versus secularism at a time that Islam itself is deeply divided.

As Tim Roemer pointed out, we imposed the war but we did not have plans and a process for stability operations, we did not have plans and a process for nation-building. As we look at Iraq today, you can in some ways say that it has benefited, but it has benefited largely from a war-time economy, which has gone to a relatively small part of the population. The average Iraqi is definitely worse off in material terms than before we invaded. And if the test of governance is not democracy but it is security (the ability to get through the day, knowing that you and your family will not be attacked), the fact is that the quality of governance is distinctly worse than before we invaded for most Iraqis.

We destroyed a tyranny that attacked the few, and what we have left is an insurgency and a pattern of crime that attacks the many. This is not a country that has a national insurgency, but it is a country which has a major insurgency in four of its provinces, significant security problems in two to four others, and almost universal problems with crime and corruption, which have grown worse since the fall of Saddam Hussein. I think that we need to remember that, because we have a moral and ethical obligation to find a solution that will help this country if we can.

I’d also point out that there is almost a state of denial at times about our strategic motives. Iraq is located in a region which has 60 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves, and about 40 percent of its proven gas reserves. And for all the energy bills which are now up in the House and Senate, neither of which I frankly can see will have any strategic impact whatsoever – the best forecast that I have seen is that we would, if we really had a crash energy policy much more demanding than either bill, keep our energy dependence at roughly 60 percent of imports through the 2025, rather than see it increase by another ten percent. These are realities we are going to have to live with, not simply in Iraq but in the Gulf for a long time to come.

I don’t wish to, in saying that, minimize the risk. I want to describe four areas where I think we can make improvements, but the odds are probably at best fifty-fifty that this country will hold together long enough to create something approaching a stable political process, and largely defeat the insurgency or contain it to the point where it can be dealt with largely by Iraqi forces. I’ll get into the reasons in a moment. I do believe that we can over time reduce the U.S. military presence. I think it is dangerous to talk about eliminating it, when having come back from Iraq I can say we have no plans as yet to do so. We do not have plans to create the kind of Iraqi forces which could totally replace U.S. forces. We may develop them, but we don’t have them yet.

It is a country where the calendar is really no longer ours to control. It in fact hasn’t been even before the time we turned power over to the Iraqis formally or sovereignty in June of 2004. Iraqis politics is now in the hands of Iraqis, and the success of those politics will determine in many ways our success.

The economic problems in this country are not a matter of reconstruction. They have an economy which has been declining in many ways since the 1980s and where the issue is construction not reconstruction, where expectations tend to be middle-class by the region’s standards but the resources are not. No matter how we deal with this we are not going to create some kind of example which transforms the region. To start with, the impact of nations on their neighbors is always remarkably limited everywhere. The best we can hope for is to get a government which is significantly better than that of Saddam Hussein, which can work its way through some five to ten years of political and economic problems and hopefully become far more successful.

I have seen progress in Iraq, and some of it more progress than I had expected. It was very uncertain what the first group of real Iraqi political leaders would be. They have shown that they really have a commitment to [being inclusive, to bringing the Sunnis into the government, that they understand the risk, at least at the top. These ministers are better than the ministers in the interim Iraqi government, particularly the ministers of defense and the interior. There is a more practical understanding of a lot of the financial issues, less tendency to assume that they will be solved from the outside. There is a real effort to avoid having the ministries purged, to having the Shiites and Kurds take over in totally disproportionate ways. The [political] success is mixed but the leadership is there and it is pushing to resist these kinds of problems.

I think that you do see serious progress in creating effective Iraqi forces. I’ll explain that in more depth in a moment because I think Americans often have very strange ideas of how long it takes to create effective forces and what is really involved in creating effective forces. What I don’t see is a matching dimension of meaningful economic progress or working aid progress, and this is one of the, I think, great failures of the bipartisan debate over what is happening in Iraq. It is so easy to argue over the development of the military and politics that the almost total failure of our aid effort is almost completely ignored.

And there is a failure in public diplomacy in Iraq, as there is in our efforts in dealing with virtually every country in the Middle East, because the issues in Iraq that dominate Iraqi perceptions are not a lack of understanding of democracy or American culture, they’re a set of very focused theories, problems, and fears – fears that we are in there to seize the oil, that we are going to be occupiers that stay, that we will create military bases (and here the spread is whether we are going to have four permanent bases or eighteen). These are issues we have not dealt with because we talk so broadly about democracy and reform rather than the issues that really concern the people and the countries of the Middle East.

Now having said that, let me talk a little about the political process. There is no doubt that this is a very delicate and uncertain structure. The leadership may understand the need for inclusiveness. Many people in the Shiite political parties and the Kurdish political parties do not. They see this as the time to get even, as the time to get the resources they have been denied. They fear any kind of resurgence of Sunni influence. Many people want to purge the ministries and local governments and provincial governments. They want to purge the police and armed forces. It is a real struggle, day to day, between people from the outside, and here I give the Bush Administration credit for pushing for inclusiveness, and leaders on the inside. It is a delicate balance where if it was not for leaders outside the government like Sistani, we would be in very deep trouble.

We are watching a major shift in the insurgency which is specifically designed to cause civil war. It is deliberately designed to provoke open fighting between Shiia and Sunni, and Kurd and Sunni. And it is effective enough to present a real and continuing threat. Even without that there would be a problem. My guess is that Islamist extremist groups outside of the Sunni insurgents at most make up about ten percent of the insurgency. Most of the insurgents are Iraqi Sunnis who have opposed our presence since the day we entered. The public opinion surveys in Iraq that were conducted after the war show that in Iraq, seventy percent of Arab Sunnis opposed the war, and early on as the level of violence began to develop, something around thirty three to thirty nine percent expressed sympathy, which is not the same as supporting actively, but sympathy for attacks on coalition forces. The figures for Arab Shiites, who we assumed would see us as liberators on a much more universal level, show about a third of Arab Shiites opposed to war, and about eleven percent supported violence. The Kurds were a very different group.

I say this because we need to understand that as we look at what is happening here, we are not dealing with outsiders or foreigners, we are dealing with a significant Sunni insurgency with real popular support. We also have a very unstable single-party Shiite coalition that may or may not hold together over time. Once again people are showing more judgment than I expected. Having met many of these people in exile, I frankly thought they’d fragment much more after they succeeded in gaining power, than they have. Perhaps again this is a tribute to Sistani, but it’s also a tribute to the leaders of the Shiite parties that make up the coalition. There are real risks here; one is obviously Sadr, another is simply Islamic politics in general.

For example, Basra right now, even though the majority party elected was the Shiite coalition, it is effectively governed by a much more radical Shiite Islamic group. This is of course in Iraq’s third largest city where they have effectively been able to displace the national police and take over the city, and which shows an interest in a kind of regionalism which calls for having the oil resources of the south devoted more to Basra, and much less to national control. Without Sistani, and that is one man, and one successful assassination attempt, we would be in deep trouble.

We have great uncertainties about the Kurds. It is an axiom of politics in Iraq that the Kurds have no friends. It is a historical reality that you have to add the phrase to that, “including the Kurds.” Every Kurdish uprising in the last century has been accompanied by a major division in the Kurds in the course of the uprising. We need to remember that Barzani invited Saddam Hussein into the Kurdish security zone. There are still deep divisions between Barzani and Talibani. There are serious political problems that are going to grow out of the fact that oil for food and smuggling kept this alive before the fall of Saddam. The remnants of oil for food and aid money keep this structure alive now, but this is not a viable economy, and it is a serious question as to what holds this together the moment outside money puts pressure on Barzani and Talibani to compete, as it did during the 1990s.

We have strange ideas about the role constitutions can play in Iraq and the region. In most of the world, constitutions have never meant anything in particular. And Iraq actually had a pretty good constitution before we thought of rewriting it. It never had much impact, nor did the draft constitution that was supposed to replace it and deal with autonomy. Ultimately, if the new constitution is to have any meaning, it has to do three things we don’t normally think of as being part of a constitution. It has to divide up the oil money, and oil resources in ways which are equitable and hold the country together. It has to create a central structure of political power that is acceptable to the Arab Sunnis, the Arab Shiites, the Kurds, and other minorities. And it has to find an answer to some form of regionalism or federalism which makes these people feel more secure. It is not a matter of human rights, or democracy, or the role of women, or goals which require a much more advanced political structure than Iraq has today. And the deadline is artificial.

It is August fifteenth for issuing the draft of a new constitution and October fifteenth for a national referendum on that draft. If three provinces vote against the constitution, it is defeated and there is nothing in the TAL (the Transitional Administrative Law) that says what happens next. If the constitution is accepted, there is another election at the end of December. That means that this government, potentially, will only govern between April and December, and then all of a sudden the jockeying for power will start again. The next election, people will probably begin to have real political parties.

We talk about the past election as if it accomplished a great deal, and it did in one sense. It made Iraqis feel the government was theirs. But there weren’t real political parties. There was one ethnic party, the Kurds, and one sectarian party, the Shiites. People didn’t run for anything because there were no names on the ballot, only you checked one symbol for the party. It was a nation-wide ballot; no regional issue could be expressed in the national ballot. The next time around people are going to be struggling for power, one way or another, with a significant amount of Sunni opposition, probably with no ability to paper over Kurdish demands for oil resources in Kirkuk, very probably with Sunni debates over the role of religion and government, and that is a different game if it happens. This can slip, as many of you know, by up to six months. But only after six months in the exact way that slippage plays out is something no one as yet has described. And what you cannot have is a situation where the constitution is presented to the legislature and the legislature then takes time to reject it because the way the law is written it has to meet another deadline to extend things by six months.

Now let me note, that is the national level, and Americans love the national level. The problem is that there are 18 provinces here, three of them are Kurdish, four are effectively in chaos, particularly Al Anbar, but Mosul and Baghdad do not have effective governments. Those have to be resolved as well. I mentioned the problems in Basra, in Kirkuk there is not a functioning government, in Mosul there is not a functioning police service much less government, but things are slowly building up. In Basra there are two governments, there are two mayors and two local counsels. And at some point in the course of this a city which has something like 4-6 million people out of 27 million people has to have a government.

We tend to ignore all of these issues; for obvious reasons Iraqis don’t. And the problems are going to be compounded by weak ministries, the fact that people now have to decide how to allocate money much more seriously, by the fact that as ethnic and sectarian parties grow, what we call “service political parties” grow. Throughout the Middle East, the experience of democracy in countries where it has not previously been used is generally to create religious or Islamic parties as the natural symbol of authority and then narrow, selfish, special interest parties for representatives. That’s very likely to happen in Iraq.

We have another problem here that is critical too. There are roughly a million civil servants or government employees in Iraq, out of 27 million people, and out of a labor force, which, depending on how you define it, is 4-6 million people. Government is the occupation for most Iraqis – not most, but it is the most important single job, or source of jobs. And this is a government which is based on thirty-five years of history of demand kleptocracy. It is a survivalist system. You got power by favoritism, you used power while you had it to protect yourself and your family, and you tried to figure out an exit strategy where you would not threaten others so they would not threaten you. Now this is something we have a lot of trouble with. Americans always talk about eliminating corruption. We have never had a case example in which we have succeeded in doing it overseas, but it is always nice to talk about it in policy terms. Corruption will not be eliminated. The question is how to reduce and channel and moderate it.

These risks I hope will give you one side of this. On the military side, I don’t want to go into the problems, but effectively we really did not begin this effort till June of last year. That was roughly now a year ago. We had one operating battalion in the Iraqi regular army. We had about two battalion equivalents of special police forces; none could operate independently, but none can operate fully independently now. We built that up to the point where there are now roughly 170,000 people who have gone through some kind of serious training in equipment. Out of those, about 70,000 are in the army, and about 31,000 are in the special police forces. We’ve done this extraordinarily rapidly, and to put it in perspective, we are supposed to go to 200,000 men by September, 230,000 in December, and 270,000 by July 2006. We essentially are going from scratch, one battalion last year in July, 27 battalions in January, 37 battalions in June to what is supposed to be a ten-division force by the end of 2006, October 2006 to be precise.

Now if you look at this one way, only a handful of these battalions are described as having full mission capability. Another way of saying it is, that if you throw in the national guard units and special police units you have well over a hundred battalion equivalents, this is about seven hundred men each, and about twenty percent of these forces now have some form of limited or meaningful mission capability, and another 40 percent could be used in very limited security protection missions. This is a truly very radical change, not only over a year, but over a six-month period. These forces have almost negligible armor, they are just beginning to get protected vehicles. Remember, we find the armored Humvee inadequate in high threat areas, they have unprotected Toyotas, aside from a limited number of armored cars and vehicles in three battalion equivalents.

People criticize the Iraqi forces for breaking (they haven’t broken since November incidentally), but who on earth is going to actually deal with insurgents when most police posts are not in protectable areas, they’re in the old police station, they can’t move in protected vehicles, and most of them are just acquiring light machine guns for the first time. The other key issue here that I hope all of you understand, because it seems to be totally lost on many people: training and equipping military units does not mean they have any mission capability. You have to develop unit integrity, you have to have experienced leaders, you have to have a sense of manpower where people have an identity in the unit. There’s nothing new about this, it’s a basic lesson of military history.

For the first year of this effort we were only concerned about quantity not quality. It was this April that we really began to put U.S. teams of ten men in each battalion, and put U.S. teams in each of the major headquarters or operating centers. That wasn’t complete till June for the army, National Guard and most special police units. It won’t be complete until the end of the year for the regular police. Without that stiffening and in-unit training, there is almost no chance that these new units could hold together. Whether this will work or not I can’t honestly tell you; I think it will in a lot of cases but some units will break. But to make judgments about manpower on the basis of how many people went to school, and how many people got body armor, is simply ridiculous.

With luck, we will watch this process work and have significant impact by the end of the year. With luck, you could make really meaningful U.S. troop withdrawals by some point in mid-2006, but there are no current plans to give Iraqi military forces the kind of artillery, the kind of armor, the kind of air support, the kind of intelligence support that will allow them to operate on their own. Those plans may come in time, but they at this point are probably premature, and they certainly as of June 18th, did not exist.

Developing a Functioning Economy

Let me talk about economics and aid. I was in Iraq when it ran out of money in 1983, during the war with Iran. If it had not borrowed from the Saudis or from the Kuwaitis, it would have lost the war by the mid-80s. To fight the war it basically began to take away money from education, from infrastructure, from housing, even from military benefits for war widows. By 1987, things were so bad in the civil sector that they were actually firing civil servants to save money. That is something governments in this part of the world do not do, unless they are pushed to the edge. As a result, this country is in many ways sized for an infrastructure for about 18 million people in a country with 27 million residents. That’s what I mean about reconstruction is not the term to use; it is construction, and that is why it is going to take years to deal with these issues.

The agricultural sector basically was seen after the fall of the monarchy as a way of keeping Iraq backwards, and a way of imposing the monarchy’s power on the political system. As a result the agricultural sector was never given meaningful development, till the early 1990s, at which point the government threw immense amounts of money into water and irrigation. But it also used the Russian style system, where it decided what would be grown, gave the seed and fertilizer and then bought the crop to the extent crops were legally sold by weight, regardless of edibility. That is part of the command economy that we were totally unprepared to deal with and in many ways still are.

There’s no modern financial sector. There are symbolic credit cards in Iraq, the government leaders have them, a few businessmen have them. Almost everything else is a cash economy, the first banks are just beginning to operate. The service sector is based on subsidies and profiteering, 14-cent gasoline, free food. We kept up Saddam’s approach to subsidies and left the distortions. The state industry sector is what dominated employment after government. Arguably there are about fifty key state industries, 250-odd in total, but only a handful, cement and others have any meaningful operating capability to compete. But they are creatures of a command economy, they have no market.

We have no examples of privatizing anything on this scale. We can talk about it in terms of religious doctrine, the idea that capitalism should somehow have a mystic power that transcends practical planning, but the fact is what we don’t have are any examples where we made this work. We have lots of cases where we inspired people, but most “privatization” consisted of watching the thing collapse, and having it replaced by the private sector, or essentially transferring part of a state function.

The infrastructure, weak as it is – the most recent survey for example shows that 30 percent of Iraqis now get running water, that’s a municipality survey from the ministry about two months old – it’s also about how many get electric power – it’s a warning as to how much needs to be done there. We don’t know what we are doing. We didn’t know under the Coalition Provisional Authority, when we brought in a large range of people with different views, as Neocons. We didn’t know what we were doing after Ambassador Negroponte came, and we were forced to reprogram aid to meet short term needs on a political and counter-insurgency level.

If you look into the USAID approach, all they have are project numbers and project completions. There are no surveys of requirements, there are no surveys of the extent to which services are being met. There’s no way at all to know what we are accomplishing. We insist we don’t know how much we are spending on security, and every time anybody puts congressional pressure on there’s another figure. The flow of aid is remarkably weird when you look at the actual numbers.

Not only are we months behind the scheduled flow of aid, but when you look at the latest numbers and you start seeing it, we tout our success in electricity where in Baghdad for example about seventy percent of the power now comes from private generators. We allocated 4 billion dollars and we’ve been able to spend 1.2 billion. We’ve put 1.7 billion into rehabilitating the oil sector, we’ve been able to spend 3.5, almost all of it to deal with wartime damage and sabotage. We count our progress in water, but out of 2.2 billion dollars in aid funds we’ve spent all of 210 million. And you look at health and we talk about our progress there, and we spent 120 million dollars to deal with a health system which began to fall apart in the late 1980s. The truth is, this is an incredible failure by the United States government, and it is compounding the fear or feeling by Iraqis, why are we doing this? We are the richest country in the world, why can’t we make this work? If we’re really spending all of this money we claim, where is it? Why don’t they see the services day to day.

Remember, many of the Iraqis are outside the areas which are secure enough for aid to operate. How do you deal with this? Here I’d make a very clear recommendation; you take the money out of USAID and out of the defense contracting effort just as quickly as you can. You decide what you need to actually have programs at the embassy by way of short term aid, because you’re going to need a lot of it to buy your way into the areas, after a counter-insurgency campaign works to create stability. You turn other money over to the Iraqis and you make them do the planning. You vet the projects at the embassy, you do not let members of USAID, or the army corps of engineers, into the project in any way shape or form, unless they are people actually working in Iraq, on the scene who know what they are doing.

You get American contractors and non-Iraqi contractors out of the act, and you tell the Congress no matter what happens, you’re still going to say at least 20 percent of this money disappeared. There is simply no option. If you account for the money you will never be able to spend it. You want to do something? Or you want to account for it?

More Effective Public Diplomacy

The last point I’d make before I close is just one about public diplomacy. As a general point, I see what happens when we try to do something like Al Hurra. Nobody cares about what the IRI, or its Democratic equivalent do either. Not unless it’s done in-country and it relates to country expectations and need. Nobody needs to be taught about American values and American society. They already see it, like it or not, through television, through something like 700 satellite channels. Anything we say is in the noise level of what people see day to day in the Arab world. We can reach out to leaders, we can reach out to the Arab media, we can bring religious, educational and political dialogue, but that again has to be national, not just some broad regional solution.

And there are some things that we really do need to say. President Bush almost said it when he said we are going to take all our armed forces out, but the truth is we aren’t, not unless we lose. We’re gong to need to keep a very strong advisory presence and probably some kind of backup, combat forces for some time to come. But we should say no permanent bases; we should explain what those bases are, that they are temporary, and they will be transferred to the Iraqis. We should make it quite clear that the future of Iraqi oil is up to Iraq to decide and we will not intervene. We should get aid out of our control and put it in Iraqi control so people can see that the aid is legitimately being used, know where its going, and honestly assess the results.

These are things which can work out, but its going to also be a fact that that’s why I talked about five to ten years, because even as you get the insurgency problem solved, to get back to the educational levels, the infrastructure, the investment structures and so on you need, is going to take time, and the first three years after the fighting is over are probably going to be the worst. It’s going to take time to get oil output up, it’s going to take time to really fix the infrastructure, it’s going to take time to open up the financial sector, which not only has to deal with problems like Baghdad, but it’s got to get out into the smaller towns and it’s got to get out into provinces. That can be done, but it’s got to be done by Iraqis.

And I’m not sure how much aid we’re actually going to be able to implement there, because one thing that’s very clear right now in Iraq is that even if we knew what we were doing, we have so few people on the ground that aren’t in uniform, that we really can’t deploy the expertise. I have nothing but admiration for the people who are there, but the one thing that I should have mentioned is that about half the civilians in Iraq are State Department short-term contract employees because regular FSOs haven’t got the guts to volunteer; about half of them are the FSOs that did volunteer. But you’re not going to perform any miracles with the kind of staffing we’ve got, and we have to understand that. Nor do I believe you’re going to get any NGOs in there. Let me say it took four people to protect me going into the Red Zone in January, and it took six to protect me going into the Red Zone in June. I’d think long and hard about being a local volunteer from some NGO that’s going to get zero protection.

Question: Could you expand on that a bit, because I found your analysis to be fascinating, plus a little bit about where you were able to go, how long you were there, and the difficulties. I’m trying to get a sense for where can you go, where can’t you go, what can you see?

Cordesman: You could get into, pretty easily, the southern Shiite provinces, you could get into the Kurdish areas very easily and very securely. Security in Basra is now not particularly bad for Westerners but you’ve got to be lots more careful, because this whole series of Islamist tensions is a problem. With introductions you can go anywhere south and east of Hillah; I wouldn’t want to wander around with zero personal contacts or introductions. If I was an American official I would be protected in all of those areas, simply because you stick out like a sore thumb.

Question: How long were you there?

Cordesman: This time I was there for nearly a couple of weeks. Some in the south, some near the Iranian borders, some of it over in Hillah, and some of it down in Taji. I gave a couple of speeches over in the Red Zone and met with government officials there as well as in the Green Zone. Before then I’d been in the south twice for longer periods, once in the west when it was more secure, and once as a traveler with the Department of Defense. As for physical security, the preferred method is two UH60s, each with two gun-ports, and that’s the standard transportation, you don’t have an escort or armed helicopter now. It takes three cars to move as a U.S. government guest into the Red Zone with a six-man personal security detachment.

The road to the airport is traveled by a South African armored bus called the “Rhino”. I had to use it going out because of dust storms, and let me say that I wasn’t informed enough to be nervous, but the men and women in uniform were given careful instructions not to have their weapons loaded because some people had been a little too nervous previously.

Yet when you’re over-flying Baghdad and most areas you see Iraqis moving pretty freely they have to. They have to live. It’s 20 to 35 percent direct unemployment; people have to somehow cope, and let me note that in an area like Al-Anbar it’s probably percent in the cities, because not only have they lost state industry, they’ve lost the military industries. People always forget, its another weird aspect of the American approach to economics, how much of this country’s jobs and the civil sector were tied up in various security and military industries, even after 1991. It’s just amazing that you can read through all of these reports and you won’t find a word about this; you’ll find it when you talk to the Iraqis.

Question: Can I ask you a question about the bases? Because it sounds like going to the end of the problem, but I think you very nicely put long-term U.S. expectations at the front of the problem for Iraqis understanding what we’re trying to do, and it’s part of the public diplomacy effort. We just got out of the Philippines after, what, ninety years? Roughly? We’re still in Germany, we’re still in Japan, we’re still in South Korea. Is it realistic, given the history of U.S. military efforts, if as you say we don’t lose, that we won’t indeed have very strong intentions to continue to have a military presence on the ground?

Cordesman: Look, we got out of Saudi Arabia, and we still have a very strong advisory presence. There’s a difference between having no permanent military bases and having advisory teams at the invitation of the government. And saying that you are not going to establish sovereign military bases is really different from having contingencies. The other problem quite frankly is that that’s about the one thing you can get everybody in Iraq to agree on except the Kurds, and that is ‘no permanent bases.’ What is the point in saying you’re going to stay; you’ve got Kuwait, you’ve got Qatar, you’ve got access to the U.A.E., you’ve got Oman. As we learned during the invasion of Iraq, we’ve been throwing Special Forces units into Saudi Arabia, and had them attack Iraq from Saudi Arabia, and not even have people notice. It’s all a matter really of how you deal with it, but here the fact is you’re dealing with expectations, which are a lot more urgent than they are in other countries, and to sort of keep the contingency capability, to have a base, rather than talk about ‘we will always provide advisory support as long as we’re around’ is, shall we say, not a sophisticated political approach to the problem. Nor does it have any particular military rationale.

Question: You did praise ‘rush to success,’ meaning that you’ve got to get some tangible success before there is a tipping point where the American public is so against the war, that the Congress will get us out. I think I was reading polls yesterday that showed that we’re close to where we were when we got out of Vietnam. Is that a valid concern, and how long do we have, in your view, and what are our chances of winning a tangible success?

Cordesman: What we see is a war that has become less popular, particularly the President and the Congressional role in it. The surveys I’ve seen don’t indicate that there is great American pressure as yet to leave, or expectation that we’ll be leaving. I think that you can’t set a time limit. However, you’ve got to strive to bring Iraqi forces on line so you can start significant reductions towards the end of the year, or early 2006. If Americans see the troop levels going down, say after the next round of elections I’d say 10,000 every two months, then what we end up with is not 130,000 but 90, and then 70, and then 50,000, I think you’re going to see an awful lot of that pressure disappear, particularly if they hold together politically. The one exit strategy that you always have instantly is when everybody starts demanding you leave then the whole thing collapses then it is time to go. So if everything goes desperately wrong in the political process and the forces don’t hold together, then we have an exit strategy imposed on us.

The chief criticism I would have of the President’s speech is he didn’t prepare people for the political uncertainties, he didn’t prepare them for the time, he didn’t say that the U.S. would have to bear almost all of the cost, he talked about the coalition. He didn’t mention the need for new aid, and they’ll run out of money by sometime this fall, in terms of the current aid program. So I think a lot of this is simply a matter of honest leadership, and you know, also frankly I hasn’t seen that much pressure from the Congress, what I’ve heard a lot of people saying is that we need an honest strategy, we need to show why this will work, but only a few people have talked about deadlines or the need to withdraw as yet.

So I think you have the capability to leave, but the time is no magic limit, and again, I think we need to remember that if we get a lot of people out of Iraq within say, twelve months, the pressure for action is going to be far lower than if we certainly get back to Vietnam, and all of a sudden, General Abizaid asks President Bush for another 80,000 troops. Which more or less we don’t have in any case. You know, one of the problems there is that it isn’t troops on the ground, it is people with the skills to be useful, and one great problem we have is that we already have a lot of people there that don’t have the training or area expertise to perform the military mission, or the ability to interact successfully with the Iraqis. So troop numbers are not the issue in any case.

Question: The generals testified before the Congress last week that the insurgency is essentially stronger today than it was a year ago, and one of the things that I look at everyday is the temperature in Baghdad, and the other day when the insurgents blew up the water system, and so two-thirds of the city had no water, it was 114 degrees…

Tom Friedman has written what I thought to be a series of very thoughtful pieces about Iraq, and his thesis seems to be that defeat is unthinkable considering what we’ve invested and where we are and what we’ve done, and a week ago we had that column where he said “we’re going to have to double the troops,” we do not have adequate forces to bring security, the insurgency is getting stronger…

Cordesman: I don’t think its particularly thoughtful unless he knows where we’re getting another army...

Question continued: Well that was his argument, is that we’ve got to find a way to bring security to the country and we do not have sufficient forces there to do that.

Cordesman: The problem basically is you already have a relatively large number of people, and they rotate in for relatively short periods, and I don’t know how you change that politically. What you get is a lot of people who really don’t have any area or language expertise, and don’t spend enough time in the country to establish and exploit the kind of contacts that are needed with Iraqis. You have people who are basically very visible occupiers, and if you put them in and they stay, whatever they may be on the day they arrive, even if they’re popular, in most areas in where there’s insurgency they’re not, they’re not seen as liberators. The more they stay the more that lack of expertise, the ability to deal with the political issues and government becomes part of the problem. The American order of battle is such that we have basically begun to run virtually everybody up to the point that they are going to be on their second rotation; you can’t create new people quickly, and that’s part of the problem in Iraq.

If we had a draft tomorrow, then most of the people we actually need and deploy have a minimum of three years service, and usually its now an average of four to five in most specialties; they’re not draftees they are professional forces. So, you know, it’s easy to talk about total manpower, but then you need to ask yourself ‘Well what are we going to do, and why is it going to be better?’ You’re having a lot more people running around in hostile areas, being very visible, breaking down doors, in a place where any insurgent just has to walk away and leave the munitions behind, is going to do what? Well this is part of the whole issue that bothers me; there’s a rough axiom that whenever you talk about total manning levels in a military operation, you have begun to bring serious ignorance into the discussion. What we have to talk about is, what is the capability, what is the mix, what does it do, why is it better? Why is it tailored to the mission? And instead we’ve had this absurd debate, basically between Rumsfeld and Biden, over everybody versus the cadre of the very best on the Iraqi side, which is just as ridiculous as when you apply it to the American side. The other thing to remember is this is fundamentally a political war; no amount of U.S. forces can basically create a secure Iraq, only effective Iraqi governance can do that. Effective Iraqi governance means essentially Iraqi units have to be there, they can’t be seen sort of going behind the American parade.

Question: The parallel is very similar to Vietnam at the time of the Vietnamization of the war, towards the end, when people started recognizing that we had to beef up the advisory effort significantly, and really train up the Vietnamese army in a way that we had not done before. The difference between now and then is that there is not really an outside military force, i.e. a North Vietnam, to influence the situation. Could you comment on that for us?

Cordesman: Well that’s a very important point because there is limited flow of insurgents…and frankly having been on the edge of that training effort [in Vietnam], we were pushed into rushing it forward for political reasons. During a lot of it we just allowed ourselves to lie to ourselves as to the quality. The truth is when a Vietnamese unit went sour we went on to a good one; we were essentially forced to try to give these people in the better units the same capabilities as the U.S. units, which they couldn’t support or maintain. Here we’re deliberately avoiding that. In Vietnam, we didn’t have any ability to stiffen them with U.S. presence. Actually, the number of U.S. advisors in ARVN units actually went down steadily during the course of the war, because I remember in my earlier trips there, actually Green Berets were much more in the advisory role.

The other problem was that we became involved in a race to get out with a deadline to get out, all that eventually mattered was leaving enough of an illusion of Vietnamese capability behind to sooth our conscience. We also essentially lied to ourselves and claimed it was all going to work , when I think virtually all of us knew it wasn’t true. I don’t see that in this case. I think our teams in Iraq are taking Iraqi force development very seriously, and they are going to do it as ethically as they can. This doesn’t mean if there’s an order to withdraw they won’t obey it, but what I see are real military academies, real military training systems…actual readiness assessment systems which are being conducted so far with a great deal of integrity, which is something that I never saw in Vietnam or Lebanon.

Question: In building democratic governments in Iraq, or effective governance in Iraq, should we be striving towards stability with what that implies versus building civil-society and democratic institutions?

Cordesman: It’s an interesting question because I think that’s the way many Americans look at it. Let me go back to the need for mapping and detailed assessments. Iraq is a hyper urbanized country essentially, so first, you need to map the cities and figure out politically what is it that will really work, and to what extent can we influence it? Your maps should warn you of what is really happening in territories like Al-Anbar, for example, or so called Sunni triangle, or “Triangle of Death.” The fact is that we really need to know what’s going on in those areas in detail. There’s limited consistency in such areas; some areas are tribal, some of them are ethnic or sectarian dominated, and so on. I think what you really need is a strategy, and again this is why I put the emphasis on the Embassy, because that’s the only place that you’d really want it with the level of detail or your local demand.

You don’t worry about whether its stability versus civil-society, you worry about what is it you can actually influence in a high threat area, and what is it that you can do to secure a secure area – as long as you’re meeting the expectations of the people, where you are getting something approaching an inclusive Iraqi government in the field, even if it’s a police unit you can trust to operate as police, and not some ethnic/ sectarian outsiders. But if we’re not prepared to be that pragmatic then this whole stability versus civil-society, that’s where you should get all of the experts together in some convenient place like Williamsburg or maybe even the Bahamas, where they can’t have any impact on public policy and do any damage.

Question: I’d like to return for a moment, if you don’t mind, to the important subject of American public opinion, and your answer to that. I wondered if you’d hazard a guess as to why, when the Administration created an opportunity to explain clearly to the American public what’s at stake, and with the opportunity also arising in connection with the Prime Minister’s visit here, why do you think the Administration shrank from that, why the President didn’t meet the points that you raised, when in fact he could have done so in his speech, and…is there an alternative way of getting an adequate message to the American public which is somewhere in the range between a “hard work, complete the mission, and a presentation of the sophistication that you were kind enough to make for us today.

Cordesman: Well, let me give you a rather strange bipartisan answer. My father was so disgusted with the last two Presidential candidates, that he had a write-in vote for Nixon, and while I tried to persuade him to vote for one or the other, I really had to sympathize with him, because neither of them, as far as I could see, was forthright and honest on anything. It was a remarkable shallow campaign, and struck me as sort of, why you buy a Tivo. I don’t like what was done…but that’s politics in our society. There are the examples of courageous integrity, all the while there are examples of posturing and most of its pretty-short term, and its remarkably bipartisan in character. How do you get around it? First I do know that Republicans have always argued very strongly against the approach used in that speech, and then they actually helped influence it to make it a little bit more positive.

I think we need to see more pressure from the Congress for some kind of coherent strategy. Some of that has been raised by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but somehow it never gets pushed to the point where there is actually the demand, even the demand for a credible explanation of what our foreign aid policy is…I think that for those of us who look at this from a sort of pragmatic level, you can always lose, defeat is always a thinkable option here, simply because you’ve got a bunch of cases which you can’t deal with if they occur. But it is very important to avoid it. It would be a lot better if we didn’t oversimplify, it would be a lot better…if we focused on what needed to be done, but short of a lot of dialogue, and an amazing shift in the character of American politics, I think we’re going to have to muddle our way through expedient speech by expedient speech, whether it is in the White House, or on Capitol Hill.

Question: I’ll come back to the concept of defeat. We seem to be able to accept it, and it’s hard to accept it, but we do accept it for doctors in human life, we do accept it in industry when sectors fail, we do accept it…and we do have to accept it. What criteria would we use, if we were to say to ourselves “this didn’t work, and lets move on to something else”? How would we define defeat? How would we define victory? How would we define defeat in this?

Cordesman: If you have civil war, you’re going to have to leave. If you’re asked to leave by an elected Iraqi government, you’re going to have to leave…whether you think what you have left behind is stable. If you can’t pull an Iraqi police and military together to the point where they can really perform the mission, then the test is not really whether we can reduce our troops, that’s a side benefit, it’s whether they can perform the missions. You get it down to the existing methods, we don’t have any alternatives, at that point you’re going to start figuring out how you deal with defeat. If you watch this become part of a deep, growing, theological tension, which you see building up in the region between Sunni and Shiite, if for any reason the government turns to Iran, those don’t have to happen, but they can happen. And that is when you really have to accept the fact; there is a point where a sunk cost is a sunk cost, but we’re simply not there yet, and I think these are avoidable, but not with any great assurance.