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| Speaker: | Gerald Martone, director of emergency response, international Rescue Committee |
|---|---|
| Moderator: | Michael J. Elliott |
| Speakers: | William L. Nash, director, Center for Preventative Action, Council on Foreign Relations |
| Yitzhak Nakash, Associate Professor of Modern Middle Eastern Study, Brandeis University; Director of the Middle East Program, Brandeis University |
April 8, 2003
Council on Foreign Relations
Washington, D.C.
Michael Elliott [ME]:…to that we’ll throw it open to you to ask questions of the panelists. So we’ll have a word I’ve just coined, a multi-log. Not a dialogue, but a multi-log. You really are important participants in this sort of meeting. This is not just us up here talking to you, but we very much want to get you involved as much as you can. Now I’ve been warned, and I suppose I should know this because I’ve chaired many meetings for Les, but I’ve been warned again that those who attend Council meetings, particularly in the evening, have a disheartening habit of being polite and gentlemanly. We don’t want you to be polite and gentlemanly this evening. We’ve got an absolutely fantastic panel of people and we want you to pepper them with as many questions as you possibly can.
I’ll get the other essential bit of Council business out of the way before I introduce the three panelists. This is a classic Council, not-for-attribution meeting. This means the participants are welcome, participants that’s you, are welcome to make use of the information received in the meeting but neither the identity of the speakers nor that of any other participant may be revealed, nor may one cite the Council as the source of the information.
On my far left I have Gerald Martone, the Director of Emergency Response at one of the world’s great NGOs, the International Rescue Committee, based in the headquarters here in the city. Gerald is responsible for implementing emergency start-up operations, maintaining the IRC’s readiness to respond rapidly when conducting assessments of complex humanitarian emergencies.
Next to Gerry is Yitzhak Nakash, Associate Professor of Modern Middle Eastern Study at Brandeis University, Director of its program in Islamic and Middle East studies, author in particular on the Shi’as of Iraq, and as we’ve been discussing in the last half hour, with fascinating insights to Iraqi society more generally.
On my immediate left, William Nash, Director of the Center for Preventive Action here at the Council. Bill Nash is a retired Army Major General, commanded an armored Brigade in Operation Desert Storm, which I suppose we can call Gulf War I now, and led US troops into Bosnia after the Dayton Accords, and a former Regional UN Administrator in Kosovo.
So we’ve got a fantastic trio of people up here with wonderful expertise across the range of military and security topics, of humanitarian and reconstruction topics, and of political and Arab society topics. When we were discussing how we might handle this just before the meeting, I suggested that we start our remarks with what I call a one-week, a one-month, and a one-year perspective. So I’m going to turn to Bill first and say a week-out where do we look, how do things look, and what are the issues?
William Nash [WN]: Okay. Thank you, Michael. Well, I think as we look to next week, and if I may, maybe a week after that ...
ME: Sure.
WN:…just not to be too certain on my predictions, we’ll start to see the downturn, if you will, of the combat military operations that we have experienced the last three weeks. Baghdad operations will continue but we’ll start closing the gap between Baghdad in the Kurdish enclave, to the northern third of the country. And in between lie three key cities, Mosul, Kirkuk and in Tikrit.
Tikrit is where I think eventually everything will kind of join. New forces will be introduced in the next week. Some have already arrived and are working the lines of communications, but the 4th Infantry Division, the one that was supposed to go to Turkey, most of the division soldiers are in Kuwait, many of the ships have been unloaded, and that process is ahead of what they thought it might have been a couple weeks ago. And so we’ll see the introduction late next week possibly of the lead elements in the 4th Infantry Division. I would imagine they will go around Baghdad and head to and start filling up that area around Tikrit. And that process will continue.
But what we’re really going to see, quote, “next week,” is more and more of the transition to the post-war situation. When I say post-war I don’t mean the absence of violence and I don’t mean the absence of death and great confrontations, but the transition from military combat to the establishment of public security. That task will be as difficult to accomplish, not in terms of violence, but in terms of presence and operations as we’ve seen to date.
We are already seeing signs in Basra, Umm Qasr, Safwan, Nasiriyah, and you work your way up following the attack of the towns that have been liberated, the evidence of chaos, looting, revenge killings, and I would predict that the beginnings of political intrique, actually, they probably started long ago but we’ll see more evidence in the next week or two.
So the military forces who have put their whole heart and soul, minds and body into the fight will now start having to transition from that perspective to the one of establishing public security, which is the enabler for all else in a post-war Iraq.
ME: Bill, are you worried that there will be a fairly long period of hit-and-run attacks by regulars, by Fedayeen, by guerillas, what have you?
WN: I am. I think that despite the status-known or unknown-of Saddam Hussein and his inner circle, there will be pockets of resistance that will remain, using the guerilla-type raids, terrorist-type activities, and just to throw more concern into it, and this is a typical military guy who is trying to worry about everything he’s supposed to worry about, I see the potential for an intifada-type resistance to our presence over time.
ME: Gerry, one month out, one month, two months, what have you, what are the humanitarian, the reconstruction essentials? What are the demands?
Gerald Martone [GM]: In the short term obviously there is a real need to respond to the immediate physical needs of Iraqi civilians, particularly civilians in flight. But that is a very short-term objective. Very shortly after that the more paternalistic kinds of aid that you’re seeing now, which is hand-outs of food and giving of water, really has to change into a system that really emphasizes self-reliance and restoration of livelihoods.
The challenge for us will be that Iraq is a different environment. We can’t use Afghanistan as the biopsy for the lessons of how we should respond to this particular crisis. Iraq has far more assets and resources available to it. Tikrit civilization is very high, rates of literacy, high rates of matriculation from colleges and universities that is one of the godfather acts of Saddam Hussein was to get people university educations.
It’s a secular society, it’s industrialized. For the most part, for us, in terms of our staffing of humanitarian programs and recovery programs, we’re finding that Bosnia and Kosovo are a more likely precedence of what kinds of places, what kinds of former precedence we have for how we should react to the crisis in Iraq. We really have found lots of professional staff with professional degrees who are well-educated and fairly progressive. It’s a really different environment than what we’ve seen in Afghanistan.
ME: How easy are people finding it to get stuff in, insofar as stuff needs to be got in?
GM: Well, first of all, in almost any war situation, any of you who have been in a conflict zone know, there’s never been a war where you couldn’t buy beer and cigarettes. There is a notion of a war economy, in fact even when the war is not won there are winners. There’s thriving commerce, there’s black marketeers, there are people who profit. There are ways of smuggling. Iraq, after 12 years of economic isolation and economic embargo the country has a lot of expert smugglers.
When I was in northern Iraq in October, we were pricing supplies. We were able to get Dell hard-drives, computers, for a price less than what we’re paying here in New York for them. (Laughter) Some of the specialty humanitarian equipment that we require, pumps, generators, water tanker trucks, were all readily available in the markets of Salamannia. It was really quite striking.
Last Friday, our team had just done a day trip into Umm Qasr, went across from Kuwait into the City of Umm Qasr to do a quick am. And one of the things in addition to this quick survey that they were doing was they had a…they were doing a beer run. (Laughter) They basically had a supply list of alcohol that you couldn’t buy in Kuwait City that was readily available in Umm Qasr. So it’s not a resource poor environment. There are things there, and we have to learn to sort of tap into that.
ME: Yitzhak, a year out, what are the key elements of Iraqi society that we should keep an eye on in terms of how the politics and the government of Iraq’s likely to develop?
Yitzhak Nakash [YN]: As most of you know, the three major groups in Iraq are Sunnis, Shi’ites and Kurds. Sunnis are about 17 percent of the population. The Shi’ites are 60 percent. The Kurds are about 20 percent. There are other groups, smaller groups. Since 1921, it was the Sunni minority that dominated the Shi’ites and the Kurds. I suspect that this relation of power is going to change in a post-Saddam Iraq.
The United States would need to reach out to the Shi’ite majority, which it hasn’t known or trusted. And at the same time take measures to insure that there won’t be revenge and tyranny against the Sunni minority. The United States would also need to guarantee the socio-political rights of the Kurds within a reunified Iraq.
Now, in the next coming months we would see U.S. officials assisted by Iraqis beginning the process that some have termed as de-Ba’athification. Although we may see a level of de-Ba’athification, I think it is very possible, and in fact desirable, to leave as many civilian technocrats as possible in their current positions. This would not only ease the task of reconstruction, but signal to the Sunni minority that the downfall of the Ba’ath regime was not intended to strip them of power.
In the coming months the United States would also need to continue to pressure Turkey to limit its activities in northern Iraq. The more leverage Turkey has inside Iraq, the more leverage Iran would seek by attempting to interfere with Shiite affairs in the country. And the more involved Iran becomes, the more involved the Arab states would want to be, by claiming to safeguard the interests of the Sunnis. Obviously there would have to be pressures on the neighboring countries not to interfere in Iraqi affairs.
As far as the government system: there is a lot of talk about full-fledged democracy in Iraq. In my book there are other possibilities for success short of a full-fledged democracy. Until such time when Iraqis are ready to form political parties and elect their own national leaders, we may see a government that represents proportionally the major groups in the country. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Shi’ite president, a Sunni prime minister and a Kurdish speaker of parliament. That’s one possibility. In any case, the criteria for measuring success will be the degree of stability and openness of the political system that would take shape in a post-Saddam Iraq.
In a new Iraq, we may see a shift from Pan-Arabism, the nationalist ideology that has been preferred by the ruling Sunni elite, to Iraqi nationalism, the type of nationalism that has been preferred by the Shi’ite majority.
Finally, I think that in the coming months we will see the beginning of Shi’ite religious revivalism in Iraq. This would manifest itself primarily in Najaf, which until 1946 acted as the center of Shi’ite scholarship before it was eclipsed by Qum in Iran. This is of course something that would not be achieved overnight. It’s a process that will take many years to mature.
ME: Now, it seems to me that it is impossible to kind of break into neat compartments military and sub-military and security concerns, reconstruction, economic development and humanitarian concerns, political and social concerns. But I want to ask all three of you this question. From the standpoint of each of your specialties, military and security, reconstruction, humanitarian aid, politics and society, how long do you think a substantial number—you can define that as you like—of American or other coalition troops will be needed to stay in Iraq? To maintain security, Bill, what would you say?
WN: I would start at a one-year mark. By that I would make the initial plan not unlike we did in Bosnia, (for different reasons) but I would look at a one-year mark and then make six-month re-evaluations after that. I mean, in my gut I think two years is about right and then sometime over, with a major determining factor, is the ability…you know, I was talking to, Gerry, one of your compatriots today about the police issue, in other words how we can…how we will do in developing the local police, how we’ll do with the army and the restructuring and refocusing of both the police and the military. They could then bring that number down faster.
That’s why if, just to conclude, I am very interested in internationalizing that security role as much as possible. Because that’s a major commitment for a long time.
ME: Right. Gerry, in terms of reconstruction, humanitarian assistance, how long do you think Iraq is going to need a degree of outside security forces, external security forces?
GM: Thanks, Michael. I don’t know if I could even give a credible guess on that. I’m really not sure. Unfortunately, some of the previous situations that we might find analogous, the other manhunts that we’ve been in, such as Afghanistan, Serbia, Panama, Haiti, if we looked at those as a picture of the future of Iraq I think the prognosis would be somewhat grim. They are unsuccessful in terms of ushering in democracy and stability for most of its citizens. And one might expect the same to be the case in Iraq. I think Bill correctly predicts that some of the worst of the crisis is yet to come. And certainly that’s what we’re seeing in Afghanistan right now. If you read daily the attacks on US forces and the kinds of deterioration of security for the average Afghan it’s just astounding. It’s far worse than during the days of the Taliban for sure.
ME: Literally worse, you think? Literally worse?
GM: Yeah. I mean, if you read the kinds of attacks that are happening in Iraqi grenades daily launches into the fortresses where your forces are staying. And then also look at in 1991 Desert Storm, the bloodletting that occurred after the war. You know, I just looked at some mortality statistics of one year out after Desert Storm, and we were very much concerned with sort of the civilian death toll. There were about 35 hundred deaths, 3,500 deaths due to bombing in Desert Storm; 14,000 deaths of civilians, I’m talking about, due to water-borne diseases. That’s where we focus a lot. But 35,000 deaths due to retribution and acts of vengeance afterwards, one year out. That’s ten times more than died in the bombing.
So a lot of people look at the current bombing now and say, Wow, the internal displacements and the refugee flows across the borders have not been so great. We expected worse. It’s true that the planning figures were much higher. Although we forgot precedence. Right? People don’t flee during bombing. It’s after bombing that populations tend to move. So if this is the case, I would be somewhat pessimistic of the future once the cameras turn away, once the robust military presence and the robust humanitarian aid presence is no longer there, what would be left?
ME: Yitzhak, you and I were talking an hour ago about how long you thought American or other external forces would be needed to guarantee a kind of smooth transition to some eventual moment of stable, I don’t know whether one wants to use the word “democratic,” but stable, pluralistic society. Give us a time frame.
YN: It’s hard to really nail down the number of years, but I think that in pursuing the current war, the United States has undertaken to deal with power relations in Iraq. We also hear talk every now and then about Iraq being a U.S. base that might replace Saudi Arabia. But we don’t know to what extent this is true or not. There would be conditions on the ground as well as international constraints and domestic constraints here in the U.S. that would influence the actual number of months or years that the United States would stay. My sense is that it is going to be longer than shorter.
The parameters, or the criteria that I would use to measure success in Iraq, would be how decent the civilian government is by the time the U.S. is contemplating leaving the country. What would be the role of the Iraqi military in a post-Saddam Iraq? What would be the relationship between the military and the civilian politicians? All these are important factors. I suspect that it is going to take perhaps two years before we see some political stabilization. But even then, it may be that there will be less of U.S. presence in cities and more in military bases. The question when Iraq would be free from American soldiers is a completely different story.
ME: Bill, you’re nodding your head and of course you have a lot of Balkans experience. I wondered if you could bring that perspective to this here.
WN: Well, the art in all of this is to balance the presence of American forces in the cities, as a police force, preventing these cycles of revenge and the like from taking place, with the need not to appear as an occupier. And it’s ...
ME: It’s tricky.
WN: It’s damn near an oxymoron, right? (Laughter) And I think Yitzhak brings up a good point, if as we’ve done in Bosnia, as we draw back and get…consolidate camps and get out of everyday presence and maybe, you know, you go from a soldier on the corner to a soldier on patrol, to a soldier on patrol every now and then, to coming by once a week and seeing how it’s all going, to just knowing that if there’s a lot of shooting those guys are going to come back from over the hill and deal with it.
So there is a balance there. And again, what I had not read about, what I have not understood, despite asking questions about it, has to do with what’s the program to develop the indigenous police, the Iraqi patrolmen who are going to help establish public security.
YN: There is another point that I think we need to start paying attention to. It would be very interesting to see what would be the nature of Iraqi nationalism, the way it’s going to develop. Is it going to be anti-American or pro-American? I suspect that one of the reasons why the Shiites have not rebelled against Saddam Hussein during this war has to do not only with their fear of the regime, or with feelings of betrayal by the United States in 1991, but also one of the major factors has to do with the strong Iraqi national identity of the Shi`ites.
Shiites did not rebel because they didn’t want to be in a situation where they are accused like in the wake of the Gulf War of being a fifth column in Iraq, and collaborators with Western powers. Also, the Shi’a are not sure yet about long-term U.S. interests in Iraq. So the issue of Iraqi nationalism is one to look for because if it is going to have anti-American tones, this would have an influence on American presence in Iraq.
ME: Gerry, if you look at some of the other complex situations where IRC has been…ICG, sorry…IRC has been (Laughter)…right the first time, yes.
GM: Yeah, one of those (Overlap)
ME: ICG are the guys in Brussels, right…has been involved, is this question of the outsiders gradually becoming a focus of resentment and let’s get them out of there, let’s run this ourselves, they’ve stayed too long? Is that a problem? Is it a problem in Afghanistan? Has it become a problem elsewhere?
GM: Well, nobody likes handouts and I think we’re starting to see evidence of that in terms of the very crude methods of food distribution that’s currently being done in Iraq, where things are being tossed off the back of trucks and there are young men elbowing for those commodities. This is a bit of a misdiagnosis in terms of what Iraq needs. And as I first said, it’s a very well endowed country, in fact, with the exception of the fact that it’s been somewhat strangled by the past decade of sanctions.
In most of the countries we work there’s, in my particular guild of humanitarian aid, we’re evolving, a methodology, a way of thinking, our technology is really changing. Conventionally, we very much had a charitable notion of who is harmed by war and how can we help them. We’re getting more intelligent about it. Now we’re asking who is harmed by peace. Who is it that’s winning? Who is it that’s profiting? How are they undermining the peace dividend? How are they undermining what we’re trying to achieve?
Now, wars are disastrous for the poor, but they’re truly opportunities for the rich. There are people who profit enormously. As you know, most wars in the world are not ideological confrontations, it’s not a fight for ethnic identity or political participation or democracy. They’re really more organized crime than war. It’s about control of mineral wealth, petroleum reserves, titanium, cobalt, diamonds, hardwoods. If you look at any war in the world right now you’ll find ultimately it’s driven by resource. It’s really greed not grievance. So we need to start to look at that.
Now I mentioned the impressive opportunities for material support, what logistically is available to us as humanitarian aid providers and how thriving the markets are in Iraq where we can actually get the supplies we need. We need to start buying things locally. Now the UN Oil for Food program is a great example. The problem with that program is they were not allowed to buy wheat from Iraqi farmers or any commodities. It had to be imported. So everything that was bought under the multi-billion dollar food program was not purchased locally.
Now Iraq is the most fertile country in the Middle East. It is the fertile crescent. It is copiously irrigated by two major rivers. At this moment Iraq is a net exporter of produce, of dates. And if you’ve ever seen some of the photographs on television you’ll see the markets do have food, fresh food as well. So what’s not needed is massive imports of food from the outside. In fact the effect of that, as we’ve learned in Afghanistan, in Somalia, and many other famines around the world, is large importation of foreign produce tends to drive prices down for local farmers, so they stop growing. It becomes a disincentive. They leave their farmlands, or they convert their croplands to some other more prosperous cash crop, which in Afghanistan right now is ...
ME: Is heroin, yeah.
GM:…opium, yeah. So we really need to look at restorations of livelihoods, putting people…more Iraqis earn a wage from farming than through the petroleum industry. Agriculture is really going to be the promise for recovery and rehabilitation of Iraq. We need to concentrate on improved farming techniques, irrigation techniques, fertilizers, seeds, animal disease controls. We need to help restore the agricultural sector.
ME: All things that the Department of Defense is expert in. (Laughter) Sorry, that was a cheap shot.
GM: No, a good shot really.
ME: Time to open this up here. Gentlemen in the back, please identify who you are and your organization, if you could.
Audience: A question to all the panelists, particularly Professor Nakash. You talk about the theory of revenge, retribution. I’m interested in the justice issue, amnesty, war crimes, (Inaudible) commissions, what should be said now at the forestall of possible disaster, in ten to one, or hundred to one ratios?
YN: What should be said or what should be done?
Audience: What action should the US be taking now, announcements should be done now in terms of amnesty, possible war crimes issues—commissions, to set the stage for the next six months and after that?
YN: Well, I read in newspapers that a lot has been done in the pre-war period by Iraqis working with the State Department. So there is a certain thinking already in place for the post-war period. What I think is important though at this point is to decide how deep de-Ba’athification should be. Some people speak about purging. How many Baathists should the U.S. attempt to purge? Should it focus only on the top echelon of the Baath or should de-Baathification go deeper? All these things have to be clarified. I am not sure when it would be the right time to declare it. I suspect that once the fighting is over that’s the right time.
Remember, de-Baathification is a complicated issue. It has to be done by U.S. officials in cooperation with Iraqis. Again, we hear about short lists and long lists and someone has to decide. I’m not going to give you the answer how deep you want to go with that process. But the deeper the process is, the longer America is going to be committed to staying in Iraq.
ME: I very much want to bring Bill in. You were in southern Iraq in 1991 when a sort of people’s justice took place, and it was pretty horrible, right?
WN: It was horrible. I think the United States has to take two approaches on the issue of transitional justice. I think we have established the fact that we have a list and I would just advocate that that list be as short as necessary to make us feel better. Okay? And I mean that very seriously. In other words, it should be a fairly short list of folks that we want to impose from the outside that are taken out, face trial, face justice, et cetera, et cetera. And then we have to establish the fact that all other takeouts will be done in a due process manner. That is far more an Iraqi decision than it is an international community decision.
What happens though, and it happened in Iraq in ’91, it happened in Bosnia in ‘95, ‘96, and it is still happening in Kosovo, is the accusation of criminality becomes a political act as much as it is for any past behavior, so what you believe in can become a crime. And it gets intertwined there. I think that’s where we just need to make sure that there is a reasonable degree of due process in following all that and not trying to get too involved.
GM: And if I (Overlap)
ME: Yeah, please.
YN: There are two important issues here. I think that one of the things that Iraqi society would need after the war is healing. The deeper you go with purging, the farther you are from healing. That’s number one. Number two…and that’s a pragmatic thing. If you look at Russia, the former Soviet Union, some of the leading politicians today are ex-KGB officers. So I’m putting it to you that it may very well be that in a new Iraq some people who have been affiliated with the regime may still play a role in the new country. That’s very likely.
ME: Yes, the lady in the front here?
ME: Can you say who you are? And speak up. Yes?
Audience: May I ask the professor, what role do you see of dissidents who’ve lived abroad, some of whom are already back? How is it best to incorporate them and not have them disrupt—
YN: The issue of Iraqis in exile is a complicated one. I suspect that a majority of those who live in Western countries are going to stay there, whether it is in England or in the United States. But a lot of those who are in Iran and in Jordan and maybe in Syria would probably go back.
Now, I have said all along that you have an excellent group of dissidents, intellectuals, businessmen. They have a role to play in the reconstruction of Iraq after the war is over.
ME: Right, right. Hakim who is the Shiite—
YN: The Shiite Ayatollah, and it would not be a wise thing to leave him out. Having said that, I think that we have…when we talk about the exiles we have to look at a period which is longer than a year. Maybe the initial Iraqi civilian authority would include a proportionally high number of exiles. In the long run the number of exiles in Iraqi governments will probably be smaller than in the short term.
ME: That’s very interesting. Very interesting point. I spent a couple of weeks in London earlier in the year talking to lots of the Iraq exiles, representatives, leaders, whatever you call them. And one…two phrases stuck with me while I was talking with people. One from an old UN diplomat, who after talking to me over a long and delightful morning about what was going to happen in Iraq, just kind of paused and said, The idea that we are going to ride into Baghdad on the top of an American tank and say “democracy now” is so absurd that it makes me ill whenever any of us comes close to saying it. I thought that was wonderful.
Second was from a younger man who said…and I’d be interested in any of you responding to this. He said, ’Don’t forget, all of the external political parties combined have less authority in Iraq than one significant tribal leader.” And I thought that was an interesting observation. Do you disagree?
YN: I think that the best way is for the U.S. to build bridges between those Iraqis outside and those inside the country. The best way to build those bridges is not by bringing Iraqis under the banner of the INC or the banner of SCIRI, the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution, but to bring them simply as Iraqis.
All the dissidents who would come to Iraq and would eventually stay in Iraq after a year or two, would have to reconstitute themselves. They would have to become part of the new political system in Iraq.
ME: Let’s get some more questions. Oh gosh, Lords, the gentleman here, yeah?
Audience: It’s a comment and a question, mainly to the last question and your throw-away remark earlier about defense. The D of D and State have a strong opinion of what should happen on...and they have a strong view...Chalabi. I don’t know how many people are aware but Chalabi was involved in a—financial institution...Bank. And I think it goes back to…so it goes..out of character. Then this morning on CNN you see him there in Iraq, someone’s—
(Overlapping Voices)
Unknown: No, in Nasiriyah (Overlap)
Unknown: In the South. In the South (Overlap)
ME: Nasiriyah, yeah.
Audience: The South, okay. Well, do you think those aspects—in the North...so their institute and so forth...of Iraq. And with that background, what they think—therefore—I would like your comment. (Laughter)
ME: Well, actually, I mean, I wonder if there’s anyone in the audience who would like to make a case for the INC. The gentleman over there, yeah. Yeah, please.
Unknown: Bob... not a statement about it, but there has never been in any large exile community a large movement of people backing—hostilities. Everyone talks about going back, but when it comes down to it, it’s their children who make the decision.
ME: And their children are in Kensington and (Laughter) I’ve met those children incidentally. Any other…yes, the gentleman there, yeah?
Audience: Director Martone, I’m very curious whether you have any opinion on the rest of the population going forward on the use of depleted uranium and the weaponry you’ve been using, whether there have been any epidemiological studies as to the effect of depleted uranium... on the population?
GM: Okay. Thanks. Can I have multiple choice? (Laughter)
Audience: (Inaudible)
GM: Yeah, yeah. Now, I don’t know a lot about it, and I know that there’s various opinions about whether depleted uranium…its persistent threat to civilian populations. Obviously there’s a political corruption of any statistics or data that comes out, according to who is quoting it, or there’s a military source over a civilian source. So I don’t know a lot about it. That’s not the only types of munitions obviously in Iraq that will be a threat. They’ll be enormous amounts of unexploded ordinance, just from this bombing. There still is leftover from 1991. And Iraq’s other internal wars and its international war with Iran.
So it’s really…some of you may…well, you probably don’t see this. But there are maps released by the Humanitarian Operation Center in Kuwait of areas that are mined and known routes to be of danger, and it’s just striking how much of the most densely populated centers of Iraq are in fact the places of the greatest congestion of ordinance.
ME: Bill, you wanted to say something?
WN: I just wanted to comment. The science of depleted uranium has been politicized. But soldiers…well, first of all if you’re a soldier inside an M1 tank and you are surrounded by depleted uranium in the body of the tank and in the ammunition there, and you close the hatch on the tank and you’re sealed inside with this DU all around you, you have less…you are exposed to less radiation than if you’re standing in the sun. But again, so I would just argue that the science is politicized but there is also some good evidence that there is less impact.
The unexploded ordinance, not so much from cluster bombs but from some artillery that’s been used, will be an issue, but not near the rates that we’ve experienced before because the precision munitions that are being used are largely one big explosion. Most of them are single warhead type devices.
ME: Interesting. Yeah, the gentleman there.
Audience: I live in Greenwich Village and it’s... totally democratic and somehow you seem to have enormous factions within our little community. (Laughter)
Audience: People talk about the Shi’as, the Kurds, the Sunnis, are they different from people in Greenwich Village? (Laughter)
ME: If we ran a competition, the question of the year (Overlap/Laughter)…which we should probably. That would so far be a leading contender. So what’s the…are they different from Greenwich Village?
YN: Probably not, but anything I would say would just spoil the question, so…(Laughter)
ME: Let’s just pursue it a little bit. Again, when I was talking with all the exiles in London and elsewhere in Europe earlier in the year, one of the things that they all insisted on saying, I suppose because their political consultants had told them that they had to say it, but we are Iraqi. I mean, we’re not Shi’a, we’re not Sunni, we’re not Kurdish, by God we’re Iraqi. Now, true, false?
YN: Well, I think one should not ignore the fact that there is, as I said, a very strong sense of Iraqiness. There is such a thing among the Arabs. We have to make here a distinction between Sunnis and Shi’as who are predominantly Arabs, and the Kurds, who are a distinct ethnic group. The Kurds have their own nationalist identity and aspirations. Among the Arabs, there is a sense of Iraqism. And in fact we still see it at play today. So this is true. You have to remember when we talk about Sunnis and Shi’a in Iraq, there is a large proportion of mixed marriages between the two sects.
ME: Well, that’s like Greenwich Village too. (Laughter)
YN: So that’s an advantage. The sectarian animosities, the tension between Sunnis and Shi’ites in modern Iraq is not cultural or ethnic. It is primarily political. It reflects the competition of the two groups over the right to rule and to define the meaning of nationalism in the country. That’s what at stake here.
Audience: I think the really fascinating…one of the last books(?), that if I were vicelord, which they wouldn’t settle for anything less than Lord but... if I were vicelord, I still wouldn’t know how to put together a government based on what (Inaudible). You’ve got several Kurdish factions, so you can’t pick one of them to be speaker of the House of Representatives. You’ve got a lot of Shi’ite factions so you can’t pick one of them to be president, or whatever. So if you’re facing the practical ....General Garner or Admiral Garner.
ME: Who wants to go? Bill, you go first?
WN: Well, I mean, my first reaction is if you can’t figure it out, what chance does Jay Garner have? (Laughter)
WN: But there’s more seriousness to that than my comment may seem at first light. This is chancy work and there is not a solution, okay? You cannot tell Jay Garner what to do, okay? And that’s what’s not understood. And now I’m going to take the first shot at this question, is this is not a precise science and to try to go in with a plan, and this is where you’re going, and okay, we’re going to do this and we’re going to put this mix in and this is our plan, you can’t write the equation. It’s too complicated.
You know, I, young and naive and got sent to Bosnia with a whole bunch of tanks and a whole bunch of guns and boy, I mean, we had it. I read annex 1B of the old…1A I guess it was, of the old Dayton Peace Accords and boy, we had our checklist and we’re going down, get them old no-goodniks to do this stuff. (Laughter) And we’d been there about two weeks and said, This military stuff is easy, it’s all this other stuff you’ve got to do. And you start all the intertwining between civilian and military tasks.
I’d like to say a few words on behalf of the United Nations. There is a certain advantage to the United Nations muddling through on these kind of things (Laughter). Because it’s a muddling through kind of exercise, and it is not clean. And no matter whether we do it Secretary Rumsfeld’s way or Secretary Powell’s way it will never be the way that the Iraqis want it. And the art here is to balance—and I mean, it is art—the security issues, balance the short-term organization of the diaspora organizations, while giving time for 18 million indigenous Iraqis to surface with their political views, which they have not had a chance to do in a long time.
ME: Gerry, can you…No, go ahead. Argue with him, yeah, yeah.
Audience: (Overlap)…we’ve just sent you off to see Garner, and you say, First I’ll have a plan and second have the UN muddle through. And the third thing…the next thing he does is send you back to the Council on Foreign Relations (Laughter) for that advice. He’s not going to give it to the UN to just muddle through. You know as well as I that isn’t going to happen. Because you’re going to make some moves there to put together political coalitions based on some principles or whatever. And maybe the UN will come in at some point. It probably should. But to think that the UN is going to step into this situation in the next weeks or months, and begin muddling through, it doesn’t sound terribly—
WN: Okay. And…and ...
Audience:…or artful to me.
WN: Right. I understand. I would say to you that what we’ve got to do now, not getting to play a Mulligan on this exercise (Laughter), what we’ve got to do now is not…is to bring the stability and the basic services to the Iraqi people and try to have a sense of calmness come to the country, which is going to be hard enough, oh, by the way, to get the water running, to get the trains running, and all those type of things, and then start gathering these people and take the time for the deliberations, okay? That’s why I say that Garner doesn’t want a political plan…whether he knows it or not, he doesn’t want a political plan right now, and he wants all this stuff to bubble. And let me get off the hot chair.
ME: But Gerry, can I…is the UN…I’ve slightly thought in the last ten days that this whole UN debate was a bit of a red herring and that I didn’t want to get interested in it and I didn’t want to brag about it, because it seemed to me that in fact the positions that various people were adopting were actually pretty close to each other. And I think that’s what Bush and Blair essentially said today. But in your experience, how significant, how important is it to have a UN stamp, to have the UN agencies in there early on?
GM: It’s a nonstarter to do anything otherwise. I can’t speak for the UN. I work for non-governmental organizations. But from my perspective, it’s absolutely critical. It’s just not a conversation that can be had otherwise. I think all the neighboring countries support that position. I think in terms of this not appearing to be a conquest, or a unilateral takeover of Iraq, it’s really crucial that it be multilateral.
I think the other thing, Les, just to build on your question, is we’ve too prematurely categorized Iraq as an ethnic problem. So we’re talking about ethnicity of its leaders and its makeup and I think that’s a little premature. I’m a bit mystified and I’m just now learning a lot about Iraq, as everyone is. But it really is a labyrinth of class, ideological, historical, cultural, religious bifurcations. It just boggles your mind. It just doesn’t neatly fit into categories that we can quickly understand. And that’s understandable if you consider historically.
I mean, the country of Iraq is a geopolitical fiction. It was drawn in Versailles in 1919 by the British and French. It’s not a natural entity in itself. So it is an awkward fit. And the next step of presuming that the remedy is multi-party democracy I think is again perhaps premature.
ME: Yitzhak, you want to come in?
YN: Are you [audience] willing to step into Garner’s shoes for a minute for the sake of the debate? And I guess my question to you: you’re there on the ground, what are your goals in Iraq? What is President Bush telling you? Is he telling you: I want you to wrap up the whole thing in six months, a year’s time, or I want you to really do a thorough job? Are you trying to achieve a full-fledged democracy? Or are you willing to accept a political system that would not be fully democratic, maybe even a little bit hostile toward the United States? What can we learn from the British experience in Iraq?
It is Britain that created Iraq as a country ruled by a Sunni minority elite. It is Britain who brought a ruling elite from outside Iraq to rule Iraq. King Faisal, and the Sharifians around him—they were not Iraqis. They came from Arabia via Syria to Iraq. The question is whether you, as Jay Garner, are willing to go the extra mile and try to understand the local people, to get to know them and also to work with them? Are you willing to do that? Do you have the time? Do you have a mandate from your president to do that?
ME: I’d just like to say one thing on the British experience in Iraq (Laughter), if I may. As I think one says in politically correct terms these days, my birth country. My father-in-law, who was an RAF officer, served in Iraq for five years in the late ’20s and early ’30s, he had splendid adventures in the service of the British empire, throughout the world, from Central Africa to the South China Sea and had a wonderful, glittering career. He always looked back on his five years spent in Iraq as the most enjoyable bit of soldiering that he ever did in his life. This was partly because he got to fly very exciting biplanes from Baghdad up to the Kurds, who were then bombed. (Laughter) Although my father-in-law always pointed out that they would fly up on a Tuesday and drop leaflets down saying, We’re going to come and bomb you tomorrow. (Laughter) The thing is I always suspected the leaflets were written in English (Laughter), which ...
But the real reason that he enjoyed his time in Iraq so much was because he learnt the noble art of pig sticking there, which he always…pig sticking is kind of like playing polo but you’re chasing a pig, rather than trying to hit a ball—a wild pig. And he always said that pig sticking was the most manly and challenging of all horse sports. (Laughter) And spent an exciting five years doing it. Yes? No, gentleman here, that’s been trying to get in for ages.
Audience: This question is for Bill Nash. It goes back to the discussion, I think there was a reference to a tone of due process, in the post-war period. In that context, is there a moral or legal difference between targeting a head of state in his bunker with a bomb or sending an assassin with a gun to his office?
WN: You didn’t tell me I’d get these questions
ME: That’s a good question, I’d say.
WN: The targeting of a military leader I believe is a legitimate technique, a legitimate act. And it has precedence over history on a number of occasions. For all targeting of military objectives, it is necessary to evaluate whether or not the damage in excess of the death or destruction of the military objective would be so spread that the cost to noncombatants, noncombatant structures, would be in excess of the gain in destroying the military objective. Therefore, the decision that was made last night, that the belief that they could kill the leader of the Iraqi military and his principle deputies could be argued to be a legitimate military target and that the associated extra damage to civilian, noncombatant people and structures would not outweigh the gain in that. If you could do that with an assassin on a military target it would seem that the opportunity for collateral damage would be less. (Laughter)
ME: Very interesting. Yeah, the gentleman here.
Audience: For 45 years every political faction contending for power in Iraq has been a secular, nationalist and fundamentally suspicious of America perspective, whether they were competing for power or in power. And my question is was this largely just playing to a political relevant class of one percent of the population, or the very consistency of this kind of politics, could that reflect a larger sense within the population at large, that factions were trying to muster political support among—? And if it’s the latter, how long do you think the US can on its own continue as the kind of determining factor in Iraqi politics, or had it better very quickly, as Bill was seeming to imply, get in Egyptian troops or Jordanians or others to take some of the heat off of what would very quickly become a resumption of a fundamentally suspicious of America streak in the Iraqi population?
ME: Yitzhak.
YN: I think that the issue of suspicion is already there. It’s already part of the equation. And America has no choice but to work with this reality. That’s my sense. You know, as a historian of modern Iraq I always go back to the British experience. When Britain occupied Iraq in 1917 it was feared but respected. Now, right now, the situation is that among certain constituencies in Iraq, and more so in the Arab world, America is being feared and hated.
In order to win the peace in Iraq the U.S. would also need to win the hearts of Iraqis. There is a potential for a breakthrough here but there are so many risks. I’ll give you one example that is very close to my mind as someone who has worked on Shiite Islam. The City of Najaf for many years has been the center of Shi’a scholarship. And we hear talks recently about the prospects for the revival of Shiism in Najaf, which is an excellent thing in itself because it may generate healthy competition between Najaf and Qum in Iran for the leadership of the Shiite world.
But if the U.S. is going into Iraq, and bluntly tries to undermine the position of certain senior clerics, and at the same time reinforce the position of less senior clerics, or if you try to interfere in the working of the Shiite religious circles, or use Iraqi Shiism to undermine Iranian Shiism, you’re going to acquire enemies in no time, not only in Iraq but also in Iran and in the Arab world. So the question is how you play your cards. There is a potential for success in Iraq. It all depends on how the United States is going to play its cards.
ME: I want to put on the table something that often seems to me to not come up when we have sessions on Iraq, even though at real bars you hear people talking about it a lot. And that’s oil. Gerry, what is the right way to handle a resource like oil in a situation like this?
GM: Again, you keep asking me questions that are beyond my scope. But I’ll venture I guess, and I think it builds on Jeff’s question and your previous question as well, Michael, about the multilateral approach. Iraqis are very smart. I don’t think we can fool them either way about what the intentions are. There is a presumption I think among most Iraqis of what this war is really about. And I think certainly after Desert Storm and then a lot of false promises to ethnic minorities to uprise against Saddam Hussein in the early ‘90s, then 12 years of crippling sanctions against the country, to now suddenly say we will risk our young men and women to liberate you, is a bit inconsistent. And understandably the average Iraqi will be somewhat suspect of that.
So I think the true measure of the US’s interest in this very robust engagement with Iraq will really be in the long term whether it is in fact exploitation of their natural resources and the opportunity for American corporations to prosper, or is it truly a humanitarian gesture and a political gesture and one that’s striving for stability in the Middle East.
ME: Right. Good.
WN: Could I ...
ME: Yeah, come on in?
WN: The easy part of the oil issue of course is the transparency of the revenues and then the spending of those revenues for the betterment of Iraq. The hard part I think is the discussions and decisions on production levels and how that impacts Iraq vis-a-vis other producers. I just keep having this vision of Jay Garner going to the OPEC meeting. (Laughter)
ME: Well, let’s go—eventually. (Laughter) Right.
YN: OPEC is better than the Arab League.
WN: Yeah. (Laughter)
ME: That I’d pay for. That I’d pay to see. Yes.
YN: Or the conference of Islamic States.
ME: That’s right. (Laughter)
WN: Very good, yeah. The poor guy was retired, doing real well, and now he’s famous anyway. That’s where you have to have Iraqi advice and consent for the issues associated with just taking production level, investment and building capacity, et cetera, et cetera. Because if you don’t, whatever decision you make, you have stolen Iraqi…you’ve either stolen the present or you’ve stolen the future by your decisions that you make (Overlap).
YN: Yeah, exactly. One point about the oil. Traditionally, although the oil wells are mainly in the North and in the South, the government did not invest enough in those areas. One way to cope with the accusation that the U.S. is In Iraq simply in order to exploit the oil is to make sure from the very beginning that there is proper investment of resources in the North and in the South. That’s very important to winning the heart of Kurds and Shiites.
ME: I think the issues of transparency and the right way in which benefits are dispersed from the oil, and the proper way in which contracts are handed out frankly, are critically important. I wish I thought that there was really hard work being done in terms of creating an institutional structure which would both satisfy the legitimate needs and interests of Iraqis, but also prove to a skeptical region that this was not about either capturing a local resource asset, benefiting American and British companies, or driving down the price of oil and wrecking OPEC. It seems to me that it is not impossible to set up the institutional structures which insure transparency and would satisfy the outside world and which meet the needs of Iraqis. But I wish I thought…I wish I could see by now that more had been done to set up such institutions and put them in place.
A few more questions. Yeah, the gentleman right there.
Audience:…there’s been some indication that the UN would be well advised to be involved in this. But we’re all aware that—that happening is less invited French permanent position on the Security Council. And the administration knows full well that the first thing they’re going to do is re-take their oil field, like before. So isn’t this an ideal time to—withdraw France from the Security Council…in favor of India or—? And if this seems like a laughable proposition bear in mind that the existing—China on the Security Council is not the original—If there’s any thoughts about how we might do this (Overlap).
ME: I don’t think it’ll happen. Though I know lots of people who would cheer if it did. Not me actually but some would, I’m sure. The gentleman…have you had a question already?
Audience: No.
ME: Oh, okay. Sorry. You look suspiciously familiar, right. (Laughter)
ME: Sorry.
Audience: It’s so often described…Iraq is often described a secular state. And my question really is has that really been a lid that’s been put on by the current regime or past government? And what are the prospects of those religions resurfacing really as a political force in Iraq? I ask that question—
ME: Good question.
Audience:…particularly with just I think yesterday the local sheik in Basra being asked to take some civilian authority in the town... harbor—as religion.
ME: We were talking about this in the room. Yitzhak, have a go.
YN: We were talking exactly about this question. I’d like to give you a very short background about some of the differences between Iraqi Shiism and Iranian Shiism. Although Shiism has been tied to Iraq from early Islamic history, and some of the formative events of Shiite Islam took place in Iraq, Shiites were not always a majority in Iraq. In fact, Shiites became a majority only during the 19th century when the bulk of Iraq’s Arab nomadic tribes settled down and took up agriculture, and subsequently converted to Shiism. If you compare the nature of Iraqi and Iranian Shi’ism, and their rituals of lament in particular, you would see that Iraqi Shiism is much more sober and down-to-earth than Iranian Shiism. In terms of degrees of religiosity, if we can talk about religiosity, yes, Iraqi Shiism is more secular.
If you look at the history of the last 24 years, since the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the large majority of Iraqi Shiites have not been swayed by the revolution. They haven’t adopted the notion of the rule of the jurist as developed by Khomeini. But this isn’t to say that there aren’t strong Islamic constituencies in Iraq.
It is very possible that in a post-Hussein Iraq we will see a degree of religious revivalism in Iraq. I would put it to you that that’s not only a reaction to the past and to the fact that they were under the lid, that’s also a reflection of the current reality where more and more people in the Middle East are comfortable expressing their political identity in religious terms rather than secular terms.
But there is another point we need to remember. The Shiites of Iraq are not a homogenous group. You have very large secular constituencies, the intelligentsia, the middle class. Shiites constitute the majority within those groups. So yes, we would see religious revivalism. But it might be offset by the secular segments within Shiite society.
ME: Now, everyone on this side of the room has suffered from the fact that I’ve had my back to them. And I’m sure lots of them have been trying to get my attention. I’ve only got time for one more question. So the lady there, yeah?
YN: De-Baathification they call it.
Unknown:…anyway, and what the effect—the reaction I’ve...
YN: It’s an excellent question. And I guess that not only Garner but Garner’s boss has to figure out what are U.S. long-term goals. Syria is irritated already. There is no doubt about it, regardless of the talk about de-Baathification. But you know what, no matter how deep de-Baathification is going to be in Iraq, Syria would stay what it is for some time to come... you know, the fact that the Soviet Union collapsed didn’t mean that Castro changed his way or that China became less communist in some of its inclinations.
So I would say that a new Iraq will increase Syria’s nervousness, but probably no more than that. But again, I suspect that de-Baathification in Iraq is not going to be as deep as some people advocate. That’s my sense. I may be wrong but that’s my sense.
ME: Any last words on anything from Bill or Gerry?
WN: The transition to the post-war stability issue I think is something that we’ve really got to watch and stay involved in. The whole question we started with is on how we do that. I would just caution that as you build the stability in these various places, maybe the advice we ought to give Jay Garner is don’t try to do a national solution before you do a lot of local solutions and build from the ground up. But I think there is a great potential there.
I would just say to you that we would be less well served…I mean, Jay Garner works for Tommy Franks, so the decision on Rumsfeld or Powell is an answered question, okay? Garner works for Franks. We do not want to build an Iraq that has a military leader. (Applause)
ME: Gerry, last word?
GM: No. Just kudos to that point though. I very much agree with him.
ME: They’ve been a fantastic trio we’ve had up here. (Applause) Gerry Martone, Yitzhak Nakash, Bill Nash, you have all been great too. Have a pleasant evening. Come back next time.
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