February 1, 2002

Speakers:

Ahmad Chalabi, Co-Founder of the Iraqi National Congress

Sharif Ali Bin Alhussein, Official Spokesman of the Iraqi National Congress; Head of the Constitutional Monarchist Movement of Iraq.

Sheik Mohammed Mohammed Ali, Co-Founder of the Iraqi National Congress.

Latif Rashid, Co-Founder of the Iraqi National Congress; European Representative of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

Presiding:

Judith Miller, Senior Writer, the New York Times.

MILLER: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to an on-the-record session of the Council on Foreign Relations. Back in the early '80s when I went to Iraq and decided that I did not like the regime of Saddam Hussein, no matter which way our government was tilting at the moment, I kept asking around, well, who is opposed to this man? People rolled their eyes and said nobody who wants to live. Then I began hearing one name again and again and again, and it was Ahmad Chalabi. After the Gulf War, some of us expected to see Dr. Chalabi back in Baghdad and Saddam Hussein gone. That has not happened, but I am delighted to be sharing a platform with him today and to be moderating this session. I will introduce our speakers from the INC, our panelists. I will ask some pointed questions, I know the kind of questions that the State Department would ask you, Dr. Chalabi, and then I will throw the floor open for questions from you, because I know looking at those of you in this room that there is enough expertise to last this session and many others. In case those of you don't know our panelists they are Dr. Ahmad Chalabi, who is from a prominent Shiite family in Baghdad. He is a former university professor and banker, one of the founders of the Iraqi National Congress in 1992.

Sharif Ali Bin Alhussein is a Hashemite Royal Family of Iraq and the head of the constitutional monarchist movement of Iraq. He is a former investment banker and he serves as the official spokesman of the INC.

Sheik Mohammed Mohammed Ali is a religious scholar and a well-known Islam opponent of the Iraqi regime. He too is a founder of the INC, 1992.

Dr. Latif Rashid is one of the most prominent Iraqi Kurdish leaders. He is European representative of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and a founder of the INC. I'm delighted to have these gentlemen here with me and the other members of the INC in the audience.

I think we should begin appropriately enough by saying something that was said earlier in this room. In fact some of you in this room were there when Richard Pearle debated Leon Firth about Iraq and what should be done, and I think the consensus in the room was that everybody wants Saddam Hussein gone. The difference is over tactics and strategy, how is that accomplished. We read in the New York Time today that although President Bush has vowed to take tough, if unspecified, action against those countries -- Iraq, Iran and North Korea -- that are pursuing weapons of mass destruction, the review of Iraqi policy in his own administration is not complete and the State Department and the Defense Department have very different views about the credibility of INC. Dr. Chalabi, if you would start please by saying, by answering the question, how do we get rid of Saddam Hussein and what do you see as the INC's role in this enterprise? Is the wind shifting in Washington based on the talks you've just had there?

CHALABI: Well, thank you very much. I first want to thank you in the Council for inviting us to lunch is this lovely room, which is very far away both from the killing fields of Saddam and the corridors of power in Washington, where I'm afraid we have to wage our battles. Getting rid of Saddam is a problem that has bedeviled the United States for over a decade now. The wounds that the United States have suffered in this battle, I believe, are mainly self-inflected. The issue of fighting Saddam was not addressed properly even when the United States had half a million troops in the Gulf that waged the battle to liberate Kuwait. Although the military planning was impeccable and brilliant, the political planning was almost non-existent. The consequence was that Saddam manipulated the situation to his advantage and surprised all the experts who were advising the government at the time. The predicted coup d'état that was supposed to follow right on the heels of the defeat of Saddam did not materialize and it now transpires that Saddam was encouraging people that a coup was in the making, all the time controlling the people who were supposedly doing the coup. This problem persisted and continued and it played right into the hands of Saddam because the convention wisdom was that Iraq is a society which is violent and dictatorial and that the Iraqi people are querulous and the cannot produce a civilized political process. Therefore, change has to come about by people who are almost as bad as Saddam, who are close to Saddam, and therefore who work in the dark and produce assassination attempts and coups.

We of course reject that. We think that this was a wrong assessment of Iraqis and we think that Iraqis can actually work together to produce a credible political movement which can be seen with civilized and clear values that are great for Iraqi society in the modern age and which are perfectly acceptable to the rest of the world. That is why we formed the INC. Our platform, which still stands and which still is the main political platform for all the Iraqi opposition, despite all the tribulations and difficulties that we went through are rooted in these principles. We are for overthrowing the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, the establishment of a democratic, pluralistic system of government. We support a federal system for Iraq, so that the Kurds can have their own identity and the rest of the communities can feel safe. We renounce weapons of mass destruction. We renounce terrorism and we renounce the use of force as the main or the instrument of national policy. This has been our consistent platform. We have taken on Saddam Hussein's dictatorship with a quasi-democratic structure. The INC is composed of a national assembly which has now 311 members. This assembly elects a central council of 65 people, who in turn elect a leadership. We have a collective leadership for the INC. You see them sitting here in the main(?) and we also have regular meetings of our central council. The leadership is answerable to the council on all issues with very lively debate and with reports about progress, about finances, about political contracts and about administration. This is how the INC is.

You may ask, what is the role of the INC in getting rid of Saddam. It is clear to us that although the Iraqi people have demonstrated their readiness to die in the hundreds of thousands to get rid of Saddam, this task is difficult, very difficult, if the Iraqi people do not get the support of the United States. The United States has been at war with our country for the past decade. There are now weekly bombings of Iraq by United States forces. U.S. aircraft regularly bomb Iraq. We think that the United States has inserted itself in Iraq out of its national security concerns. That is why the United States is involved in Iraq. I don't think that the United States has been in such an open warfare for this length of time with any other country in its history. This war goes on under the guise of maintaining the non-fly zones and protecting American aircraft. We don't think that this is either a normal situation or a situation given to perpetuate itself. I think that this situation is unstable and must be finished. The United States, I believe, cannot pull out of this strategic conundrum with Saddam in power, and therefore I think the United States should make up its mind to get rid of Saddam. The best way to do it is by helping us to get the job done.

The Iraqi National Congress put forth a proposal in Congress in 1998 that subsequently was legislated, made into law. The law is called the Iraq Liberation Act, which mandates that the United States policy should be to help those Iraqis who want to overthrow Saddam and establish democracy in Iraq. It further specifies that the president has authority to draw down a certain sum of money from the resources of the Pentagon for training and supply and equipping Iraqi democratic forces to get rid of Saddam. When you say, how can the INC play a role? My response is implement the law. What we want to do is we want to mobilize the forces of Iraqi society, which are considerable in Iraq, and to confront Saddam with U.S. assistance. We believe we were the authors of the Afghan model. What the United States did in Afghanistan is something that we proposed several years earlier for Iraq. Many US military leaders -- one of them now currently stars in the movie, Black Hawk Down, General Garrison(?) -- went through the plan that we proposed and said to Congress that they would stake their military reputation on its success. That plan calls for the United States to train a limited number of Iraqis, integrate that operation with its air power, and confront Saddam on the ground with the Iraqi forces, the opposition forces, who would draw the Iraqi army to them and defeat Saddam. [That's] what we could do.

MILLER: Has the administration agreed to this?

CHALABI: The administration has agreed to some training for the INC, non-lethal training, in the Department of Defense. They have not supplied us with much equipment yet, but there is, as you say, a raging debate. We have more and more friends and what happened in Afghanistan from a military standpoint has been of important use to us because it's shown that actually can happen. You don't need massive forces from the U.S. on the ground to achieve victory and it is, I am told -- of course, I'm not privy to this -- that many of the people who oppose what we had suggested also opposed the process that happened in Afghanistan. Fortunately for the United States and for us and for the Afghan people foremost, they were proven wrong.

MILLER: I want to ask a couple of other panelists a question. Dr. Latif Rashid, what Americans have seen of the Kurdish and since many of the INC forces, I am told, are Kurdish, under the control of Mr. Talibani and Barzani. How do you get them to stop quarreling with one another? One key to an effective fighting force is cohesion, and from what we have seen that does not seem to be much in evidence. Is this problem resolved? How can you assure us that the trained forces would actually not turn on one another and turn on the enemy?

RASHID: Thank you very much. Like Mr. Chalabi I am grateful for this opportunity to talk to this distinguished program. Please, let me go back a little bit even before the INC. The Kurdish political groups, the Kurdish people in general, have been fighting dictatorship in Iraq for over 40 years. Since the generals came to power the Kurdish people have resisted dictatorship in Iraq. Unfortunately, for many years we were left alone. Even we were not joined by the Iraq opposition groups, and we suffered. We have suffered chemical bombs. We have suffered the killing and burying well over 200,000 civilian recruits. We have faced oppression, depression, whatever you call it, and without any exaggeration well over 4,000 Kurdish villages were raised by the present regime. The economy was destroyed. The welfare of the people was totally devastated. Most of the villagers were transferred from their original land to almost concentration camps. Then we have always considered ourselves to be Kurdish people, part of the Iraqi people. Our demand has always been the Kurdish rights plus a democratic regime which can treat Iraqi people fairly and squarely. That always has been our slogan. The two major political parties, plus other political groups within the Kurdish area, have always asked for a democratic regime within Iraqi framework plus the Kurdish national rights and in the first opportunity they did have to express their feelings, they asked for a federal Iraqi new regime.

MILLER: If I could get to [answer the question(?)] because we have very little time. Thank you.

RARSHID: I'm coming back to this. We did have some conflicts among the Kurdish political groups but this is really an old question. It was solved well over four years ago. Both sides came to Washington and signed an agreement which we called the Washington Agreement. Most of the agreement has been implemented, although unfortunately some clauses of that agreement have not been fully implemented. Both political parties are members of the INC. Both political parties are for a genuine change in Iraq. We have declared our support for a genuine change in Iraq and we are cooperating. We are working with the INC on a daily basis. The Kurdish conditions for using the Kurdish area to undermine the regime is a protection for the civilians. We have about half of the Kurdish region under the regime of Saddam Hussein. The rest, about a third of the total area of Iraq, is free under the regime, and we call it the liberated area of Iraq. In that liberated Iraq, if protection and commitment by the Allied Forces is given to protect the civilians, I think the task of the INC and the task of all the opposition groups will be much easier to undermine the regime and bring about a genuine change.

Let me tell you, what the Kurds did to each other does not compare to what Ahmad Shah Mossaud did to the Hazaras and what the Tajiks did to the Uzbeks in Afghanistan. They came together because the United States [has] shown leadership in getting rid of the regime.

MILLER: I'd like to ask Sheik Mohammed Mohammed Ali about what he sees as the relationship he would like in a free Iraq with neighboring Iran, because many of us have some concerns. Certainly during the Gulf War there was tremendous concern, misplaced I felt, about whether or not Iran would seek to capitalize on the instability within Iraq. Could you address that and those concerns in the context of the INC?

MOHAMMED ALI: Thank you for receiving us here in this opportunity. I think maybe your question relating because the Shiites of Iraq are the majority and because Iran are Shiites, so there would be a solidarity or something like that. But I think the Shiites of Iraq are Arabs. Most of them are Arab tribes. The come from the Arabian lands and they have their own role in politics establishing Iraq as a state since 1922. They played a role within the government, within the democratic government, since 1922 until 1958. They continue their role in the Iraqi politics. I think the aggression against the Shiite in Iraq by the ruling government is a political aggression, but you can see that the Iraqi Shiite within the Iraqi Sunnis or the Arabs and the Kurds and the Turkmen, there were no problems in the past and still there are not any problems coming from the government in the past and still continued by this regime. I don't think that there will be any sort of [problem], the sect, the Shiite sect, with the Iranians to affect the stability in the region because the Iraqi Shiite want to play its role within its state. They want to have good relations with the neighboring countries and they are seeking democracy in Iraq. If you see, for example, the Shiites, they play very much a non-role within the Iraqi opposition, from the '80s until now. The Shiites were at the Vienna conference and Salahaddin conference, which were the most important conferences for the Iraqi opposition inside Iraq. Most of them were there. We all agreed on the principles of the INC for democracy, for elections, to have a parliament, and I don't think that the Iraqi Shiites would have some sort of affect on the region or some sort to be with Iran because they are Shiites. I think there are a lot of differences and I think they will play their role within the Arab countries.

MILLER: One last question. What Americans have heard recently about the INC is that your accounting was so questionable that the State Department did not recommend that the money Congress appropriated should be given to you. Could you answer that, please, and talk about the way you feel the INC is perceived here?

CHALABI (?): Yes, of course. In fact if you go back to the history of the situation, since the end of September we have refused to sign any agreement with the United States for funding because we were in a hot debate about the seriousness of their efforts to actually support the INC. They wanted to insist that our activity would be really condensed to PR and in a sense to support U.S. policy, which we refused to do. We are a coalition of the most important political forces inside and outside of Iraq fighting Saddam Hussein. We are talking casualties inside Iraq. We are making the government take casualties. We are in fact a revolutionary movement. During that time since the end of the September the State Department unilaterally continued to fund the INC without our consultation. They just transferred money into our bank account and they decide the amount, pending our negotiations, which we refused to have. We were really deadlocked. The last amount we received was on December 31. Three days later they sent us a letter saying, well, we're not going to fund you at our previously decided level, unilaterally decided by them, and we're going to bring to $500,000. I mean, it was their decision how much they were going to fund us anyway.

Also, they then began to bring up the issue of the audit report, which was in early summer, which we welcomed. We have no problem with audits. It's part of the procedure of an important organization. In fact, Mr. Mark Grossman in our meeting here in New York in November congratulated us on passing our audit report. So, we were very happy with that. There were some recommendations in the audit report as in every report, which we were very, very grateful for, and they said can we have a response by January 15. We were all setup for that response on January 15 and this letter comes on January 3 jumping the gun basically, which we were all very shocked by. Unexpected. There was an infamous report in the LA Times, which was totally untrue, based on gossip and hearsay. I'll just give one example. They said tens of millions of dollars went missing. In fact, at the time of the report the total amount the INC had received was $4.3 million. How tens of millions of dollars went missing when we didn't each get even close to that amount is a mystery to us. We did in fact his the timetable of January 15 and we presented a 173 page report, which I don't recommend anybody reading because it's extremely boring, and I'll leave it up to smarter people than me to implement and to understand.

Having said that, we do regard the United States as a very, very important friend of the Iraqi people. They have been our most stalwart supports in our struggle against Saddam Hussein. Of all the nations in the world, the United States is the only country that comes out and says we support the regime change. This really is sort of an issue between friends. We came here this week to meet with the State Department, to meet with all our friends in the US, and we easily, I think, easily resolved all that. There is no problem anymore with accounting. It's really boiled down to things like we didn't realize you had to have timesheets for employees. There were issues about fly America and we didn't provide the proper fly the flag. We didn't provide the proper documentation for some of the tickets that were coming through from Kurdistan via Istanbul to London to Washington to say that there are no direct flights from Kurdistan to Washington. Things like that. That's the job of the auditors and fair enough. We'll get the system going. I'm glad to say that we feel that all that has been resolved and, as you may have seen in the press, full funding has been resumed.

MILLER: A further question about arming your forces, and I assume you're talking about training and arming the Kurdish forces in what is free Iraq, free Kurdistan at the moment. Why should Turkey ever accept this? Have you had conversations with the Turks, who fear any kind of armed Kurdish presence near their border?

CHALABI(?): Can I answer that? Unfortunately Turkey's view of Iraq is one- dimensional. That one dimension is also schizophrenic. In the first place they say that they see only Kurds in Iraq, but when they say that they fear the Kurds they continue to treat the Kurdish leaders and their structures as sovereign states. The president of Turkey, the prime minister of Turkey and the Turkish general staff receive the Kurdish leaders with great ceremony. They equip them and they fund them and give them weapons themselves in order to go fighting on behalf of Turkey against the PKK. But when it comes to dealing with an Iraqi opposition, democratic opposition, which encompasses the Kurdish parties within it, they refuse to do it. They put forward that they are concerned about Kurdish independence. Now, this concern of Turkey will be a self-fulfilling prophecy, if they continue to on the one hand treat(?) with Saddam and on the other hand enhance the structure of the Kurdish region on its own. Then it is a no-brainer that the Kurdish area will become independent. We do not understand this position of the Turks and we are urgently seeking dialogue with them. We've had relations with their intelligence service at the highest levels but as all intelligence services are they view this as a secret contact and not a political contact. We continue to seek political contacts with Turkey to explain our situation and so far they have not come through. Of course, it is in their great interest to help us get rid of Saddam because it will be of great benefit to Turkey, as Turkey would be the first and most important partners in the reconstruction of Iraq. The level of industrialization and development in Turkey now is suitable for participating heavily in the reconstruction of Iraq and we are going of course to deal with this on an open basis. In addition to this, Turkey theoretical concern for the Turkmen(?) community in Iraq will be realized through the political rights of the Turkmen who participate with us and who are members of the INC and INC has been the first political organization in Iraq to recognize the political rights of the people.

Latif Rashid: I have one or two points. First, just let me make a small comment. What Dr. Chalabi says as I'm a member of the organization PUK, we have never received ammunition from Turkey to fight PKK. I wanted to correct that part of it. I don't know who they have given ammunition to or fighting power to fight PKK. Secondly, our relationship with Turkey is normal. We are trying all the time to explain that the Kurds in Iraq are not seeking independence. They are not seeking a partition of Iraq. On the whole they want to be part of the Iraqi people and live in a democratic state. That on a daily basis we are pursuing that idea. We hope that Turkey will realize the democratic forces in Iraq, which is under the umbrella of INC, if they come to power it's for their benefit. It's for the stability of the reason and for their advantage. Finally, I think the Turks have made some claims that they are worried about the future of Turkmen in the Iraqi society. We have reassured them that Turkmen is a part of Iraqi society and it's part of the Iraqi people, and they're represented with our organization at the highest levels. So, we hope that these messages will get through to Turkey and come to appreciate the worth and ambition of the INC.

MILLER: One more or perhaps one and a half more questions before I throw this open to the floor. The last time the United States invaded Iraq to free Kuwait, Iraq struck back with an attack on Israel. Many people in this room probably assume that Saddam Hussein -- and I know you do, Dr. Chalabi -- has not parted with at least some of his weapons of mass destruction. Should the United States corner him and arm and train your forces and launch an attack against him, do you believe that he will strike out against Israel? Have you had discussions with Israelis about this prospect? What do you think he is likely to do when and if he is cornered?

CHALABI: I believe that Saddam has an ambition, which is becoming more and more clear to us as he gets on in years and as he gets more powerful with weapons of mass destruction. Saddam wants to go down in history as the modern Saladin. Saladin destroyed the Crusader states; Saddam wants to destroy the Jewish state. He believes he can get it done. Saddam believes that if he kills 100,000 Israelis in a day, then there will be no more Israel. This is something that is very serious and this will bring total destruction and devastation in Iraq because there will be nuclear retaliation, but he really doesn't care about that. Deterrence does not work with Saddam. He is working to do this. It's a question of whether he's cornered or not cornered. Saddam must be stopped. We propose a way to stop him. We have plans which we can put in operation in coordination with the United States that which will reduce the threat of his actions against Israel and his use of non-conventional agents in war in the region. We have been talking about this and we want to put those mechanisms in place. As you know the Iraqi people have been the first and the most serious victims of Saddam's use of weapons of mass destruction. In the Kurdish region he destroyed the Kadaraf(?) Halabja with chemical weapons. We were glad to see the president refer to this in his State of the Union speech. He has used chemical agents elsewhere in Iraq. We have no illusions about Saddam's capability and sometimes willingness to use those weapons. We continue to warn people that he will use those weapons when it suits him.

MILLER: Have you had discussions with the Israelis about this?

CHALABI: No. The Israelis continues to brand us as ineffective and useless.

MILLER: I'd like to throw open the floor now and just remind the questioners -- because I'm sure all of you have heard something you'd might like to follow up on -- just to state your name and your organization and your question.

QUESTION: Jim Hoge from the Council. Since the Gulf War, Saddam really has not made much use of his weapons, particularly weapons of mass destruction. Let me sketch for you very briefly a scenario you can hear in Washington, by no means the only one, and then ask you what might be America's interest if this scenario is anywhere near close. It goes like this. Number one, Saddam's army has been vastly diminished since the war. It's about a third of what it was. His military equipment is in rather serious disrepair. His economic is also impacted mightily and the country as a whole is very poor and couldn't sustain major actions such as an expensive war. Lastly, that containment, while it is more porous, it still not without its effect in terms of material of dual use, and that they could be tightened. The final point would be that Saddam in recent years has showed himself to be very much a dictator but a cautious one and not one who is moved to act on the basis of some radical ideology. If that is a reasonable scenario of what it looks in the region, why would it not be less risky, and therefore more in America's interests -- maybe not yours but America's interests -- to continue to try to keep him tied up in the box he's in right now rather than to launch some very risky intervention? Thank you.

ANSWER (?): Just on that point, there is the impression that containment is a cost free policy. That is completely incorrect. To contain Saddam you need to have the no-fly zone, you need US forces to bomb Iraq on a weekly basis. In fact, the US is still at war with Iraq. To have that military capability to contain him you have to have military bases in the region. This overt use of US military force in the region has political and diplomatic consequences throughout the region. The Arab street resents the US overt use of force against the Iraqi people. It equates with sanctions, and they believe Saddam's propaganda that this has let to a half million casualties. This constrains US policy vis-a-vis the peace process and undermines its relationships with its allies in the region. Diplomatically, politically it is an extremely costly policy to maintain. Finally, the prime objective of bin Laden's organization, al-Qaeda is to eject these very US forces needed for containment from Saudi Arabia and the region. Therefore, the logic is that al-Qaeda attacked the United States, in this very city, and murdered those innocent civilians because the US has a policy of containment. So, there is a tremendous cost to maintain that policy. There will be an even greater cost when Saddam finally gets what he's been working for for 30 years, that is, a nuclear weapon. There can be no illusion about his intention to achieve that, to get that weapon, and there must be no disillusion about his ability or will to use that weapon, either directly or as a threat. He has committed vast resources, he has surrendered billions of dollars of potential oil revenue to obtain that nuclear bomb. You can either deal with him now or you can deal with him as a nuclear power. The choice is yours, but I can guess what the consequences will be.

QUESTION: Richard Butler, Council on Foreign Relations. I think this follows Jim Hoge's question neatly. Please interpret for us the meaning of the State of the Union speech to your movement? Does it mean that more money is going to show up in your accounts, whether you ask for it or not? The sentence in which the president said, we're not going to hang about and wait, which you just averting to in the nuclear context, but we're going to go and deal with these states at our call, our timing, when we think they're dangerous, would seem to suggest that the question of what to be done about Saddam militarily is no longer at issue. The only question at issue is when will it start. On the other hand, the notion of axis of evil, which I find simply breathtaking, would seem to equate Iraq with Iran, and far out with North Korea. The mullahs in Tehran I think are pretty happy with the concept of axis of evil because it certainly will strengthen their hand against the liberating forces at work in that society. What's it going to mean to you in those ways that I've just raised or in any other way that you care to comment? Do you feel better now at your prospects as a result of that speech or not?

ANSWER (?): The answer is what the president said about Iraq is encouraging to us. It has very many implications to us, and that is first he put forward that Saddam is not only developing weapons of mass destruction but he is also a terrorist and he has used weapons of mass destruction to terrorize the Iraqi people. This shows concern for the people of Iraq and it shows concern for the security of the region and of the United States. Then he said that we are not going to wait around for this to happen. My answer to you, regarding what they are going to do, I think what the president said will have implications on a policy yet to be developed. You read in some of the papers today, in the Los Angeles Times, that there is no change of policy. Surely, that cannot be true and we can testify to you from our most recent contacts with the State Department only yesterday that there is in fact a shift in attitudes and in behavior towards these issues. I believe that what the president said in the State of the Union will have implications of a positive nature for the future of Iraq and the future of our ability to confront Saddam. Our programs are there and we will see some positive development. As for equating Iraq with Iran and with North Korea, this is a field of landmines that we would rather not venture into at this time.

MILLER: You want to follow up quickly.

QUESTION: I hope others think this is as interesting as I do. Thank you Dr. Chalabi and all of you for being here. The obverse(?) is what will Iraq's reaction to [Bush's] speech be? I assume that to some extent it was addressed to Joe Sixpack, the ordinary person out there, and was probably very effective, maybe of the coalition and Europeans as well. But it was also addressed to Iraq. Dr. Chalabi, why isn't Iraq urgently preparing to come to the Security Council tomorrow, Monday, or to write to the Secretary General, make no reference to the State of the Union speech, but just say, you know, this problem has been going on for a long time, the Iraq problem. We want to get it solved. We want to come here straight away and have talks at the UN about everything, including receiving inspectors back in our country as an obvious means of heading off what was foretold in the State of the Union address. Do you expect Iraq to take such action or not?

CHALABI: They may well do that. Saddam is now engaging a charm offensive. He sent his daughter, Aziz(?), to Russia, although it is reported that [s]he didn't do very well. He is trying to mobilize Arab support for the Arab governments. He's made overtures to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. He received the secretary general of the Arab League and purportedly gave him a message for the UN. He is doing all those things.

RASHID (?): I think Iraq has been preparing itself. This is not news form our side, this is news from Baghdad and other places. I think they have to a conclusion that an attack on them is imminent and they have been preparing themselves. I think officially they have decided to invite UN inspectors back at some stage. I think this is well before the Union speech. Iraq is expecting some sort of attack.

QUESTION: Jonathan Alter from Newsweek. You make reference to an attack being imminent, or at least as perceived by Saddam. Mr. Chalabi, you make reference to indications from the State Department yesterday of a shift in policy. Can you be a little bit more specific about the nature of the shift in policy from the American end and what they may have told you in terms of timetable for that shift in policy?

CHALABI: No, you should hear it from them. It's not for us to speak for them.

QUESTION: Could I just ask a quick follow up? [...] you said there is no indication of Saddam ever responding to deterrence but in the Gulf War, Jim Baker basically sent a message to them that if they used weapons of mass destruction we would launch a nuclear strike on them, and he responded to the deterrence 10 years ago. What are your reasons for thinking he would not respond to deterrence now?

CHALABI: Not so. I don't think Saddam responded to deterrence. There was no dividend for him in using weapons of mass destruction when there were half a million American troops with nuclear weapons in the region. It would not have achieved any purpose for him and would not have on him [unintelligible] neither would it have made him achieve this final purpose. There was no strategic reason to do it. It's not because of the deterrence. It would have been futile. Nevertheless, he managed to fire 39 missiles against the Israelis with no response from the Israelis. This has been a lesson to him. Then Saddam, when he sees that it is possible to achieve his final purpose, he will do it without regard. He told American chargés d'affaires in 1990 in Baghdad after he invaded Kuwait, I am prepared to sacrifice 50,000 people in the battle in one hour as I did with Iran. Are you prepared to do that? No, he is very free with the lives of the Iraqi people. He is time and time again as demonstrated. He claims that a million died because of sanctions in Iraq. Why is that? Why as Mr. Butler said suggested that he does not come to the UN and say this has gone on long enough, let's resolve it. They are ready to resolve it. UNSCOM was ready if they found the inspections satisfactory to say that he complied with the resolution 387, but he wouldn't do it. That's why I say Saddam has no compunction about killing Iraqi people and therefore deterrence does not work on him.

QUESTION: My name is Richard Hottelet. I'm a journalist. Dr. Chalabi, you mentioned Afghanistan as a model for American help. What has the INC done that remotely compares to the fighting that the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan carried on for years before we came to them?

CHALABI: The Kurdish parties have been fighting Saddam many more years than the Northern Alliance were fighting the Taliban. The Taliban only came into existence since 1994. Saddam came to power in 1968. War has been going on since then. Furthermore, the INC was in Iraqi Kurdistan in the North and conducted a campaign of military action against Saddam. This you can read about in this new book that came out and you can read about it also in Vanity Fair. There is a chapter of this book. By and large this campaign, despite the efforts of the National Security Adviser at the time, Mr. Tony Lake, to derail it was rather successful, as you can see from this new book. The INC has conducted military action against Saddam, can challenge Saddam and continues to challenge Saddam on a daily basis on the ground and I believe we can win with US support easier than the Northern Alliance won in Afghanistan.

MILLER: The book by the way is called See No Evil. It is by Bob Bear, Robert Bear, for those of you who are not familiar with it. You soon will be. I see a hand from the back, Les Gelb(?).

Q: Thank you. Les Gelb, Council on Foreign Relations. I apologize if this question was asked before because I just came a few minutes ago. If Saddam doesn't understand now that we are coming after him, he doesn't understand anything. He may go to the UN and try to divert us, but he won't be able to do that for very long. He will have to begin calculating that they are coming after me and they're going to remove me by whatever means. The question for him then becomes, how can he stop this? As we move closer to military action, he's got some choices too, does he not? Could he not take some agents in place, assuming he has them, or put them in place here in order to be able to threaten some kind of terrorist attack within the United States? Could he not, as our troops are deployed to the area, say that if attacked he will attack Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Israel with chemical-biological weapons and the like? How do we handle the likelihood of these contingencies?

ANSWER: The issue of what Saddam will, how he views an attack is very important, as the United States prepares to take action against him. Saddam will try to do any subset of what you suggested that he can. I think he already has started. We believe from information received recently by the INC that he has already deployed operatives from his special operations group in the intelligence service of Iraq to various Western countries. He has already taken action we believe in Kuwait and there was an explosion in an oil refinery in Northern Kuwait, I think, this morning. Nobody said it was Saddam but we also believe that in fact it was Saddam. He has sent agents and is mobilizing people in the neighboring countries, especially in Jordan, and I think that he is going to take action.

The way to go forward on this to stem that difficulty is to mobilize intelligence resources not only US intelligence resources but rather intelligence resources of allied states and organizations to get as much information as possible, as much human intelligence as possible and also to move rapidly forward to interdict Saddam's physical capability to move against targets. Furthermore, immediate action should be take to restrict Saddam's access to funds. Money is Saddam's fuel for terror. He has many avenues which have been neglected for far too long, and they've been permitted to fester.

Saddam is making a lot of money now. For example, the Syrian pipeline has netted him over $1.5 billion last year of free money, unrestricted. He has a smuggling operation that goes on in the OAE which he uses to fund terror. No action has been taken, although there is a great deal of evidence and the INC can supply a lot of information about the network of Saddam's financial dealings in that area. Intelligence, physical interdiction and stopping financial resources being made available to Saddam.

QUESTION: But Judy, if I may follow up, I don't see how that prevents him from threatening or actually taking the kind of action I suggest. He has SCUD missiles. Does he not have chemical and/or biological weapons that he could put on the warhead of a SCUD missile and threaten its usage as we begin to move toward attacking him? None of the steps you talk about in any way deter that.

CHALABI: Physical interdiction would deter that. Intelligence would deter that.

QUESTION: But we can't prevent him from launching SCUD missiles.

CHALABI: He may be able to launch a SCUD missile but the point is I'm not saying that this is 100 percent foolproof but it can be very effective in reducing the damage. There is now nothing you can do short of total nuclear obliteration of Iraq to stop Saddam doing some damage. The problem has been left to fester for too long. There is a consequence to this. But I think you can reduce the consequence very, very much the faster you act and the more energetic you act.

QUESTION: I'm Harrison (Inaudible). Thank you. In 1991 for the sake of the preservation of the Coalition the first President Bush persuaded Israel not to retaliate when the SCUDs were launched. What would the INC's position be if there were to be an American military intervention now on that issue?

MILLER: On the issue of protecting Israel?

QUESTION: Having Israel react militarily.

MOHAMMED ALI: I think that we would hope that they would be able to constrain themselves or restrain themselves like they did in 1991. This links into the earlier question, and that is, one shouldn't assume that Saddam Hussein will sit back and wait for the American jets to come and remove him from power. He will be plotting and conspiring to prevent that. As mentioned before he is conducting a charm offensive in the region. It will probably have very limited success because the region knows his behavior. In fact, he tried the charm offensive with the Kurds in November and part of his style was any Kurd that doesn't negotiate me I will cut his tongue out. So, that is the approach he uses. That is the ruthlessness. One should beware of what he is about to do in the region. We have to look at the options that he has. He can use delaying tactics with the UN, let the UN inspectors in and start calling in cards from all his friends and use them. But one thing that we have to careful about is an attack on Israel or an atrocity on Israel because it will be in his interest to enflame a way in the region with Israel and the Arab states will be caught on the horns of a dilemma, where they want to get rid of Saddam Hussein but at the same time they are being dragged into a way with Israel and to the benefit of Saddam Hussein. If that were to happen, one would hope that Israel would once again be able to [restrain] itself, that it would understand that this time around the objective would be the removal of Saddam Hussein and to once and for all finally remove that threat. I don't believe that the Israelis can permanently remove the threat of Saddam Hussein. They may limit his ability to strike back for a moment, but he will rearm and re attack. So, the answer is only remove Saddam Hussein, and that will be much easier if Israel doesn't get involved and much better for Israeli security.

QUESTION: Patricia Huntington, a quick question. My question has to do with numbers. Can you give us, Dr. Chalabi, a sense of the numbers of opposition forces that in place now or that you see coming into place if the United States military gets some training? What are the numbers of Saddam's forces that today they would now be facing? Do you see them part of the physical interdiction that you talk about?

MILLER: And where are they?

CHALABI: I mentioned in a talk in Washington a few days ago a figure of 40,000 armed men in organized units in the North. I immediately got a protest from one of the commanders of the forces in the region saying that this number if far too low. There are I will tell you tens of thousands of people armed and ready to fight Saddam in the North. There are now people fighting Saddam in the South of Iraq but there are not that many. There are in the low thousands. There are people opposed to Saddam and fighting even in Baghdad now in some sections of Baghdad in the low hundreds, but the potential for recruiting large numbers of people to fight Saddam in the south and in Baghdad is enormous. The people are readily available and they are in touch. Their leaders are in touch with us. They want training and they want guns.

MILLER: I want to thank our panelists very much and I want to thank all of you for joining us this afternoon. Thank you.