Council on Foreign Relations
New York, New York

MICHAEL DORAN: My name is Mike Doran, I’m an adjunct fellow at the Council, and an assistant professor at Princeton [University], and I really want to start, if you’ll indulge me for a moment, I just want to engage in a fantasy of mine.

Les [Gelb], I’m in charge. Les, these are my remarks. Thank you.

Now, I have a few things that I have to say to you. First of all, I have to remind you that this meeting is on the record. So, if you go into a tirade, remember that it might be in The New York Times tomorrow morning. Secondly, I have to ask you to take a solemn moment of silence, to join me in a solemn moment of silence, during which I would ask everyone with a cell phone to turn it off.

Okay, now, sorry. I’m in charge. Now, as I was coming up on the train, as I say, I’m halfway between academia and the council, and so what happened, I’m actually a self-hating academic, and as I come up on the train to the council I always think about what it is that I love about the council, and it’s really moments like this, which we don’t get in academia. Academics are great systemizers, and great at building theories, but the field of international politics is resistant to theories. There are too many different elements moving around all the time.

So, to understand it, we need people who have incisive, analytical intelligence like we get from academics, but we also need men of the world, we need people who are capable of dealing with all of the contradictions, all of the changes, and so there is a kind of combination of intellectual excitement in this, and real engagement in the world. And I can’t think of two people that better exemplify that particular cast of mind that I’m talking about than Ken Pollack and Walter Russell Mead, but they’re not here tonight. But we do have two people who are every bit their equal, absolutely. Really, they do need no introduction.

On my left, actually, the man who we’re here to debate with, I think, is Les Gelb. You all know Les. Les is a man of the world. He started out as an academic, then he worked in government, worked as a journalist, and then for about 78 years he was the head of the Council here, and he’s just left us, and we’re happy to see him back so soon, and we’re happy to see you so healthy. Apparently, Martin got a pop in before the thing began here.

Then, on my right, Martin Indyk, also a man who could have written his own ticket in academia, but he was a man of the world. He could also have had a very easy life in Australia, I’m sure, but he decided to leave Australia, come to the United States, and put himself between the Arabs and the Jews, which is a very strange thing to do. A good friend of mine, Gideon Rose, you all know Gideon Rose, he’s the managing editor of Foreign Affairs, he says that Martin Indyk is absolutely the smartest man that he knows in international relations. And since Gideon Rose is the managing editor of Foreign Affairs, a magazine that I want to publish in, I have no choice but to agree with him about that. But, also, it’s very easy to agree with him about Martin.

Martin invited me to Qatar, where he runs this incredible conference on the relations between the United States and the Islamic world, and it is an unbelievable event. It brings together academics, businessmen, policy leaders, and people with radically different viewpoints. We had anchors from Fox News and anchors from Al-Jazeera sitting together, and nobody else could pull that off. And somehow Martin does it and still remains Martin. He’s a consummate diplomat. He has his own very clear position, he doesn’t shrink from it, but yet he can also bring all these people together at the same time. So, really, two remarkable individuals.

Now, I’m already going over my time limit, which is three minutes. So, let’s get on to the debate. The debate is about Les’ article, ’The Three State Solution’ that was in The New York Times. Here is how it’s going to go. My opening statement’s 3 minutes, then we move to their opening statements, 8 minutes each. You will see, gentlemen, when the yellow light goes on, that means you have one minute. When the red light goes on, I stop you cold. Then, you get, Les, you go first, you get eight minutes. Martin, you get to put your side out for eight minutes. Then we have rebuttals, five minutes for you, Les; five minutes for you, Martin. Let’s get to it, you’re off.

LESLIE GELB: Thank you, Michael, your introduction took only five minutes, but it seemed like 45. [Council] Chairman [Peter] Peterson, the inestimable Chairman Peterson, in absentia. Pete still isn’t here, is he, so I’m not going to tell any jokes about him; [Council] President [Richard] Haass, who is doing an absolutely terrific job lo these six months or so; the esteemed Martin Indyk, Ambassador Indyk, with who I am honored to debate this very important question; friends, and foreign policy experts, I was worried about my idea about the future of Iraq until after its publication, when every foreign policy expert in the United States and around the world, every Middle Eastern expert, thought it was the dumbest thing they’ve ever read. That gave me new heart.

I think one of the problems we’ve faced from the beginning is that the Middle East experts and the foreign policy experts have been unwilling to face realities in Iraq and to think out of the box, and what I’m proposing tonight is not any kind of solution that makes me terribly happy— given where we are now, there are no happy solutions. But it is one that faces reality. My goals are very simple: they are to make Iraq a better and safer place for Iraqis, and to get U.S. troops out of Iraq. I don’t want to own Baghdad.

I know this is far short of a goal espoused by the Bush administration and by a number of people in this room to make Iraq into a democratic free market paradise. I just think that is overreaching somewhat. It took us, after all, 200 years to reach our current state of perfection, and I think we should give the Iraqis at least 17. We have to face facts: the approach to doing this is simple and is based on those facts. First, it means the United States has to move away from the idea of protecting Iraq as a single unitary state. We have no strategic, vital national interest in keeping Iraq a unitary state as it’s been in the past, just tell me what that might be. Secondly, we’ve got to get our troops out in a way that people feel we’ve done our business as best we can and we’ve made Iraq a better and safer place.

This approach, I think, commends itself mainly by comparison to what’s being done now and the alternatives on the table. President Bush’s policy, I think, is leading us to disaster. It calls for winning a military victory against the insurgency and bringing democracy to Iraq. Now, our troops are doing very well, but an insurgency is about politics far more than it is about the military. And I doubt we’re going to be able to bring that insurgency to a successful conclusion. As far as bringing about democracy through these endless series of caucuses and little loya jirgas, there’s a little loya jirga for [Grand Ayatollah Ali al-] Sistani, a little loya jirga caucus for [Ahmed] Chalabi [Iraqi Governing Council Member], a little one for Paul Wolfowitz [United States deputy secretary of defense]. There even could be a little caucus loya jirga for Richard Haass if he continues to praise President Bush’s State of the Union Address. Everybody can have his or her caucus or loya jirga. And then we’re coming to a situation where by June we’re going to have political sovereignty back in the hands of the Iraqis and military sovereignty in the hands of the United States, two conflicting, opposing sovereignties; it can’t work.

Nor can the alternative being talked about by very sensible people of turning it over to the U.N. That might have made some sense months back, it’s not going to happen now. I doubt very much [U.N. Secretary General] Kofi Annan will undertake it, and President Bush’s deathbed conversion on this point only convinces me that Secretary of State Karl Rove [President Bush’s chief political advisor] is more worried about the situation than I thought.

The third alternative is more troops, foreign troops, and our troops win the war. As our children would say, “Yeah, right.”

Let’s look at the realities. The realities are that Iraq is today, and has been for hundreds of years, not really one state, but three separate regions, three separate regions. And we can’t expect the three parties to handle this situation by themselves. The Sunnis, they want a single Iraq, a unitary state, because otherwise they’re left in poverty, they’ve got no oil, little oil, little oil refineries, no wealth, no military punch, no power. They want a state, they still want to run it, but nobody else wants them to run it.

The Shiites, they want a single state, too, governed by democratic elections, one man, one vote. I wonder where they got that idea, maybe from the California Ninth Circuit Court. Nobody is going to let the Shiites run all of Iraq. The Sunnis will resist. The Kurds will resist. They don’t want to take the chance of Islamic rule and order. The Kurds are in favor of a single, unitary, Iraq state in name only— in name only— because they’ve had autonomy for more than 10 years, and they want at least that.

So my approach, really, is to move in stages toward three states, but as a bargaining stance— as a bargaining stance— and preferably to stop at a confederation, or a federation of largely autonomous, self-governing regions. I would do that in three stages. First stage, U.S. forces get out of the Sunni triangle. We can’t keep fighting that insurgency the way we have. Phase out over six to nine months, see if we can get the U.N. to come in and handle that transition for a brief period, help the good Sunnis deal with the bad Sunnis, and essentially put the issue to them— put the issue to them: do you want to continue fighting and isolating yourself, thus making it impossible to have a federal— or confederal Iraq— or do you want to play the good middleman role, use Baghdad as the center of that country, and in this way retain some power by virtue of your importance as a middleman between Kurds and Shiites? In that phase, as well, we would redeploy many of our forces North and South, and redeploy a lot of our economic aid North and South. The one last sentence is, wait until the rebuttal, so you hear the really good lines.

MARTIN INDYK: Thank you, Mike. I won’t take up my time commenting on your introductions, except I was impressed by how you managed to insult just about everybody in the room, except me.

DORAN: Time will tell.

INDYK: I’m --

DORAN: Time’s up.

INDYK: I’m very honored to have the opportunity to appear on this platform with Les Gelb. I have tremendous admiration and respect for Les, and for that reason I feel somewhat awkward on having to debate him on this particular proposition, especially because not only have I always agreed with him in the past, but the people who disagree with him on this proposition are people who usually disagree with me. So I find myself in a strange position, but I will proceed, nevertheless.

I think at the outset we can agree on two things, Les. The first is that Bush is, indeed, leading us to disaster. And the second is that our objective should be to leave the place better and safer for the Iraqi people. The problem with your proposition is that it compounds the disaster, and far from making it better and safer for the Iraqi people, it will make it far worse. In fact, what you’re proposing is a very simplistic solution for a very complex problem.

You, yourself, point out in your op-ed piece, that it was Churchill and the British who cobbled together this state of Iraq, in an imperialist mode. But what you are proposing is to be the anti-Churchill, to disunite the country, and in a quite counter-imperialist way. Instead of divide and rule, which the British were expert at, and I think we could take a leaf out of their book in terms of dealing with Iraq now, you propose to divide and leave. And the result will be much greater instability within that country, spreading to the region beyond, sectarian strife, which, interestingly, doesn’t exist at the moment.

You do not have Sunnis fighting Shiites and Shiites fighting Kurds, but the consequences of your proposal is that’s precisely what we’ll end up with. And you didn’t have a chance to expound on it, but your proposal for dealing with the problem of Baghdad is going to put us in the position of, in effect, sponsoring a process of ethnic cleansing, not to put too fine a point on it. And there will be profound regional consequences. The neighbors, particularly Iran and Turkey, will not stand idly by while Iraq disintegrates into these three separate states. They will interfere, and this will, indeed, complicate our situation. And the instability generated by the proposal will turn Iraq much more into a safe haven for extremists than it already is becoming under our misguided policies of the moment. And all of this is unnecessary in terms of your particular proposal, because you posit that there are three separate nations here, as it were. I think that’s a fundamental misread of what Iraq is about.

Sunnis and Shiites are Arabs, they are not ethnically distinct. The Kurds are ethnically distinct. But the Sunnis and Shiites are not looking to set up their own nation, their own states. The Kurds would like to, but they are realistic enough, over the decade of suffering, to have learned that their interests are better served by being part of an Iraqi federation, in which they have a federal arrangement, than they would be to separate. Now, I know that you also propose a kind of federal status for everybody, but I think it only really applies in the case of the Kurds, where I think they’re already ready to accept that, and the others are ready to concede it to them.

You, in your op-ed, make the argument that Iraq is, in fact, a Yugoslavian model, but it’s not precisely, because you do not have this sectarian strife. I mean, Shiites have suffered horrendous terrorist attacks, suicide bombings, lost their leader and, I think, 60 other people. Kurds have suffered the same kind of thing. But these terrorist attacks are not being undertaken by Sunnis against the Kurds, or Sunnis against the Shiites. And you don’t see a retaliation by any of them. This is not Pakistan and India, the Muslims and Hindus in India fighting each other. On the other hand, by coming in and dividing them by these sectarian lines, you’re going to promote that kind of strife.

Why? Because, first of all, you’re going to turn all the Sunnis into the enemies. You actually proposed that you just kind of leave them to suffer their own fate, even without oil for themselves, whereas the Kurds and the Shi’as would have their own oil. You say that the U.N. should come in and take over the Sunnis, but you can’t have it both ways. You say the U.N. won’t come in and take over responsibility from us, but they’re going to come in and take responsibility in the worst part of this area, the Sunni Triangle.

There’s a problem of how you draw the boundaries. The Kurds want [the oil rich city of] Kirkuk, but the Sunnis will not accept that, and more important than the Sunnis, the Turks won’t accept it. And so instead of an independent Kurdistan, or a federated Kurdistan, the Turks are going to come in and take it over, and you’ll have Turkistan, instead.

In Baghdad you have a serious problem with your proposal, because Baghdad presumably would be part of the Sunni state, but Baghdad now happens to have 60 percent Shiites. So what are you going to do? Are you going to move the majority of Shiites out of Baghdad? Have you any idea what that would involve? We’re talking 2-1/2 to 3 million people. And finally, I think the critical issue comes down to the question of our own interests, leave aside the question of how the Iraqis are going to be worse off as a result of the proposal.

We’re going to be worse off, because what we’ll be doing is taking an unstable situation, which is not yet hopeless, and turning it into a profoundly unstable situation, which will project out to the region, which is not just Micronesia we’re talking about here, we’re talking about where the majority of the world’s oil reserves are based. We already have a problem with Saudi Arabia, where that could easily become an unstable situation. We need Iraq’s oil production to come online and be boosted so that we have an alternative swing producer. Under your proposal, I suspect that oil production in Iraq will decline very rapidly, and it’s all unnecessary.

We can promote a pluralist model of Iraq, if we are prepared to stay the course, in which there will be majority rule, of the Shiites, they are the majority, but minority rights will be protected for all of the other communities. Thank you.

DORAN: Les, you get five minutes to rebut.

GELB: Martin, I think that there are several things you said that are very revealing about why the alternative that you did not really offer won’t work. One is divide and rule, and the other is prepare to stay the course. Divide and rule, there’s an interesting idea, we’re going to divide, and we’re going to rule Iraq? I just don’t believe that that’s a manageable proposition at all. We’re not going to be there for that indefinite period of time, and they know it. And we’re not so skillful, as we’ve demonstrated, lo these past two years, in handling lesser problems, let alone dividing and ruling. And stay the course, what exactly does that mean? Start pumping the oil wells, running the government, keeping our troops there indefinitely? It’s totally unrealistic.

Third, this country is on the verge of civil wars. I think if you don’t see that, and if you think that everybody considers themselves a happy Iraqi and there’s no ethnic strife, then you’re missing what’s really happening in that country, and you’re missing the tidal wave that’s about to hit us. That’s what I’m worried about. I want to act, based on these ethnic realities, and they are the underlying realities, before that tidal wave hits us. As soon as we begin to get out, these folks will start killing each other, unless we prepare for it in the way I describe.

To finish my proposal, in the second stage we would use our military and economic aid to wrest concessions from the parties to accept a confederated Iraq, to live with that, and to get the parties in the three regions to protect minority rights, and to really use our leverage to that end, not to just leave them cold with dividing and ruling. That’s nonsense from a colonial era. In the third stage, we would do regional diplomacy, we would get the neighbors to say they weren’t going to meddle in Iraq, or make any territorial claims. And then we would get the three regions to say they would not declare independence, and statehood, and sovereignty, as I say in the article, without the approval of their neighbors.

We’re moving in the direction, as Martin himself said to me in our conference call before this meeting, we are moving in the very direction I’m describing to you, he’s acknowledged that. What I want to do is move with it in the policy way that prevents the deluge.

Some people feel that I’m trying to have it both ways, that I’m trying to argue for statehood, and for confederation, and I know the idea of trying to have it two ways will be novel to some people in this room. But, that’s what a strategy is all about. The key problem that we have is the Sunnis. We’ve got to get the Sunnis to make the choice. I don’t want to abandon them, I want to be tough with them. I want to say, if you’re going to continue doing what you’re doing, then you’re going to get screwed. But, if you play a natural middleman role you have an important position in the future of a confederal Iraq, and you don’t have to be poor cousins. That’s using the prospect of the three-state solution to bargain with them. They live in a tough world. We’ve got to treat them accordingly.

We can’t act as if the Iraq that was held together for 150, 250 years by power from the outside, is going to be held together in the same way by our outside power for the next several years. That’s the kind of unrealism that will lead to a real disaster for us in Iraq. That’s what I’m really worried about.

DORAN: Okay. You have a minute to spare. Martin?

INDYK: Thank you. Let me start where you left off, Les. I think it’s a fundamental mischaracterization of Iraq to say that it’s been held together. The Shiites identify themselves as Iraqis, they fought Shiites in Iran, loyally, as Iraqis, for 10 years, and died in larger numbers than the Sunnis did. Yes, this was a state created by outside powers, as just about every state in the region has been created by outside powers, with the exception of, I think, Egypt. But, it’s just a fundamental mischaracterization to say that this has only been held together by a strong man, and now we should basically take it apart, and return it to its natural state. The natural state that you seem to be describing never existed before.

So it’s hardly fair to claim that this will somehow be a natural state. When you start to describe how you’re going to bring this about, your criticism of my offhand suggestion about dividing and ruling, I think, seems a bit ludicrous, given what you’re proposing that the United States is actually going to do here. We’re going to use our leverage on the Sunnis, to stop them from fighting us, and to recognize that they have a better stake in having their own state, that presumably doesn’t have Baghdad as part of it, and it’s going to have very little oil, according to the way that you would divide it up.

You’re going to use regional diplomacy to prevent the Iranians and the Turks from interfering. Again, given our track record, the idea that we’re going to be able to somehow persuade these countries that their national interests don’t need protecting, when we’re going to be actually doing something that will be recognized by them as directly adverse to their national interest, is beyond anybody’s diplomacy, let alone this administration’s diplomacy. So I just think that when you get down to the details, your proposal begins to fall apart. It’s a wrong concept, but it’s unimplementable, as well. So what do we do? And your criticism of my suggestion in this regard- I think I need to elaborate a little bit on why I still see that there is a possible way out of this.

It’s not going to be the democracy that President Bush paints, by any means, but we can improve the situation of the Iraqis, certainly since the rule of Saddam Hussein, and create a circumstance which is more like a kind of Bosnia, muddling through solution, than the utopia that we’ve tried to paint for everybody. And that would be better than the disaster that our policy would lead us to. What does it mean when I say staying the course? It means we need to stay there, we’re in there, we took out Saddam, we have a responsibility, and an interest, a strong national interest in making sure that what we leave is better and more stable. And so the idea of cutting and running is simply not an option for us. Even under your proposal, I presume, we’re going to be there for another two or three years.

GELB: That’s right.

INDYK: So if we can agree on that, then it’s a question of what you do in those two or three years. I believe that it’s possible in those two or three years, with retaining our presence, with bringing the U.N., and I think you’re wrong on that, that it will not be possible to bring the United Nations in, and bringing NATO in, which will begin in June, that we can spread the responsibility, reduce the impression of an American occupation, make it an international effort that would take a lot of the sting out of the resistance of the moment. And in that way we can hold the ring, while we establish a process of a pluralistic government that will protect the interests— that will represent the interests— of these three communities far better than these separate states.

DORAN: There we have it. Martin says, wrong concept, can’t be implemented, and Les says, this is the direction of history anyway, we might as well get in the direction the history is going.

Before I turn it over to the audience, I’ll just ask one quick question. Les, I think the real value of your piece is that it forces us to think seriously about these ethnic divisions. There are all kinds of reasons why we don’t want to do that. It seems to me there are other options than the one you mentioned. If the problem is the Sunnis, why not go -- if I look at the British, what the British did is they didn’t divide and rule, they unified and delegated, and they delegated to the Sunnis. Why don’t we unify and delegate to the Shiites? That’s the direction I think we’re groping toward. Why don’t we do that?

GELB: I don’t know that we are groping toward it. I think we’re afraid of it. I think the Sunnis and the Kurds would positively resist it, because they think with the Shiites would come a level of Islamic rule and order that they couldn’t tolerate. I think they think it’s fine if the Shiites want to live according to Islamic law in their area, but not for the rest of the country. The whole issue of ethnicity, which Martin thinks is manageable, that they’re all Iraqis, Kurds consider themselves Iraqis, I think is mostly for show. I don’t think it’s real. And I think it will become less real as the tension builds in those regions. They’re not communities, in any sense, and Saddam made it more difficult by implanting Sunnis throughout all of Iraq. He did make the situation worse.

These communities, as Martin would have it, they’re not going to tolerate that as time goes on. They’re going to push in the same way as happened in Yugoslavia. I heard Martin’s arguments for years over Yugoslavia, the same thing, let it be, the Serbs will keep the place together, they can work it out in a new pluralistic way. They didn’t. And the Serbs tried to hold it together, when push came to shove, by force. Then it was about as ugly a situation as you can imagine. In Bosnia, it happened because the circumstance there, the [1995] Dayton [Peace] deal that was made, allowed for the flowering of ethnicity. Essentially the different communities in Bosnia governed themselves, and to the extent that there is a single government, there is a rotating presidency, and every other aspect of a centralized government that doesn’t interfere much in the lives of others. In Kosovo there’s autonomy, you can’t keep the Kosovars together just by letting the Serbs enforce central government rule. It won’t work.

With Serbia and Montenegro, they now have separate presidents, separate parliaments, in addition to this overhanging presidency. So they call themselves Serbia-Montenegro, but in fact, they’re different, and if you try to weld them together in the way Martin is talking about, through this deft diplomacy, that I think goes way beyond the demands of the diplomacy I’m talking about, then you’re asking us to ride the wave of civil war, just as we did in Yugoslavia.

DORAN: Okay. Let’s turn it over to the audience now. Let me give you a couple of instructions, please. Wait for the microphone, speak directly into it, and please identify yourself and your affiliation. Gary Sick, I identified you.

QUESTIONER: Gary Sick, Columbia University. Les, there are two things. One, I’ve been struck by the fact that no Iraqis anywhere have picked up on your suggestions. They all seem to dislike it very much.

GELB: Are Kurds Iraqis?

QUESTIONER: Everybody.

GELB: Are Kurds Iraqis?

QUESTIONER: Yes, they are.

GELB: I think they’ve picked up on it, and for good or bad, Gary, they like it.

QUESTIONER: Not the Kurds that I’ve been talking to. Anyway, my real point is you never did address Martin’s question about Baghdad, and how do you deal with the fact that it is in the Sunni area, but it is not a Sunni city.

GELB: I deal with it in two ways. It’s a very difficult problem, and it’s going to be a very difficult problem, Martin, after you and I pull the troops out in two or three years. It’s still going to be a difficult problem. It’s not going to go away, with your proposal or with mine. You can’t wish it away. I would deal with it in two ways. First, I would use whatever economic and military leverage we have in stage two of my proposal, to bargain very hard for protection of minority rights, women’s rights, and the like. We do have leverage in that regard, the outside world has leverage in that regard. We ought to use it. That’s not deft diplomacy, it’s something we can do, real hard power.

Secondly, and this is a hard headed thing to say, but I think it sells. There are ethnic groups in every one of the regions that are minority. They are mutual hostages, in every one of the three regions, they’re mutual hostages. And with mutual hostages comes mutual deterrence. We have a chance just through hard nosed, power politics to see that they don’t go crazy again.

DORAN: The lady right next to Gary Sick. And afterwards, Martin, I’ll give you a chance.

QUESTIONER: I’m Ragida Dergham, Al Hayat. Les, yes, I also have been speaking to several -- I’m sure they are just as credible as the Kurds you’ve been speaking to, and are very afraid of a landlocked Kurdistan independent state at this point, in a very unfriendly neighborhood. So my question to you is, you must be aware of the fact that this idea of dividing Iraq into three states really has been going around in the last few months, from different circles. The fact that you put it in writing gave it a different dimension, in fact, a harmful one amongst Iraqis, they are interpreting it as, this is what the United States is going to do to us. And I’m wondering if you have given this a thought, knowing that the idea came from the neo-conservatives, extremists amongst them, you put it out there, and as a continuity of what has been heard in the Arab world, that Saudi Arabia will be next to be divided. This is what I’d like you to address, why on earth did you do it?

GELB: I actually did it as part of the neo-conservative, Zionist, Jewish conspiracy.

QUESTIONER: That is not a serious answer, Les, this is not --

GELB: Why did I do it? Because I saw the e-mail messages going back and forth on the Middle East Web sites, the kind of typical hysteria that I’ve seen come out of that part of the world, and Middle East experts, when they see any proposal that doesn’t accord with their prejudices. Where were all these experts when Saddam was killing his people? Did they say anything about that? Which was worse, what he was doing to his own people, or my thought that a way of trying to get these folks to live in peace with each other in the future, after we leave, is to try to work out something that allows them, essentially to govern in their own ways, to their own customs and traditions, and to protect the minorities? You know, Ragida, it’s so goofy to think that Karl Rove called me up to say, why don’t you float this one? I may be among the last people, even though this is very common on your Web sites.

DORAN: Excuse me, I have to keep it to one laser-like question and a response. It was an interesting question.

QUESTIONER: Les, I was not accusing you of working for the administration, but in fact, the impression that America wants to divide Iraq. And my point to Martin --

DORAN: I’m sorry. One question, we’ve got a lot of people who want to ask.

QUESTIONER: It was a question to Martin.

DORAN: That’s okay. Martin has got plenty to say now. We’ve got to keep it to one, otherwise it will become a debate between you and the speakers. But, Martin, do you want a moment to rebut?

INDYK: Yes, quickly, just on the Kurds. The Kurds I speak to are not pushing for independence, because they understand that the Turks will not abide by it. What they want is a federal arrangement, they’ve already actually negotiated it with [Coalition Provisional Authority head] Jerry Bremer, and it will be announced soon enough.

And, that’s a good solution for the Kurds, they’re not asking for more than that. But the Shiites and Sunnis are not looking for a federal solution, or confederal solution the way that you’re putting forward. They’re not looking to divide Iraq. It’s too complicated to take it apart like that. Why not, if you want to take this concept of a federated Iraq, go back and look at the idea of, I think it is, 17 governors, and develop a plan for autonomy for each one of them. Some will have Sunni majorities, and some will have Shiite majorities, and that will be a much better way of protecting the rights of all in this arrangement than the kind of sectarian division, or ethnic division that you want to create, which is unnatural and imposed from the outside. Those governors probably exist today.

GELB: You’ll have the same sort of strife in those 17 if you don’t have ethnic purity in the 17.

INDYK: No, I’m saying, you don’t. That’s exactly right. But you’re trying to create ethnic purity. Your proposal is for ethnic purity. They’ve been talking about populations.

DORAN: Let’s turn back to the audience now. I’m in charge. Over here in the red.

QUESTIONER: I would like to make a comment, ask a question of Les Gelb. First of all, I would just say that your piece is very, very important. It reminds me of the debate that’s been going on in the New York Review of Books about the possibility of a one state solution in the Middle East. It’s very important. It is easier to criticize your position because of this. It seems to me that your position, in a way, is a statement that the United States is giving up. What is the justification for going into Iraq? It’s no longer weapons of mass destruction. It was several other things. It seems that your position, your policy, would amount to saying, Americans go in, and then when things get tough, things fall apart, the United States policy changes, the credibility, as we say, of America’s policies in the world is shattered in a big way. Times change, Iraq is not what it was before when it was cobbled together, conceivably, it could be kept together.

So my question is, do you not think that your proposal is a kind of statement that America is giving up on what it went into Iraq to do?

GELB: I’m afraid so. I’m afraid so, because the aims enunciated by the Bush administration and many people who supported them I think went well beyond the realities of Iraq and well beyond our capabilities.

DORAN: This gentleman right here in the front had a question.

QUESTIONER: Herbert Levin, America’s Forum. Since the Union forces left the South through the Philippines, Grenada, Liberia, Somalia, Vietnam, Panama, Lebanon, there’s always been some discussion that troops should not have gone, or they left too early, or they left too late. So, there’s a lot of precedents for the kind of discussion that we’re having. But my question is very simple, could you both tell us in specific terms what criteria you think would have to be met for American troops to be withdrawn? You mean, other country troops are there, casualties are down to a certain rate, elections are taken? Please give us your five or six or 18 criteria that have to be fulfilled which would satisfy you for the withdrawal of nearly all American forces.

DORAN: Let’s give Martin a chance to speak.

INDYK: Well, I think we’re going to have to keep a fairly large military presence for some time to come. The criteria for their withdrawal will be a more stable situation in which we have succeeded in handing over power to a representative government that can represent the interests of all the different communities within Iraq. Yes, one of the criteria would be that, as we draw down our forces, other forces come in, as I say, to hold the circle, but that is very important, and it’s important because, at the moment, the resistance, the insurgency that is taking place is against us. It doesn’t have a positive program. It doesn’t have a leader, an identifiable leader. It’s just a ragtag group of different sorts of people who have one thing in common: they want to kill Americans. Some of them, of course, want to settle scores with those identified with Americans. But that’s the whole lot of it. We need to find a way to lower our own profile to ensure that this exercise in trying to establish stable governance in Iraq is one in which the international community takes on the responsibility, and we gradually pass it over to them. But the overall process is one that is going to take many years. And if we pull out now, having broken the situation there, we will find ourselves not only having let down the Iraqi people, but having acted in a way that will rebound very much against our national interests and our strategic interests in that part of the world. So, the stakes are very high.

It’s very interesting to see that not one Democratic candidate is calling for our troops to be brought out, brought home, not one Democratic candidate has endorsed Les’ idea either, by the way. But because there’s a recognition on their part, and I would say on the part of the American people, that we can’t just pull out, we are going to have to stay there for a long period of time in order to make sure that we leave the situation better than it is now. And Les’ proposal is going to make it worse, not better.

DORAN: Okay, Les. We’ll go to final statements in a minute, but did you want to say what your criteria is.

GELB: I would. I don’t understand what you’re saying any more, Martin, because at one point we agreed it would take two or three years to take U.S. troops out. We nodded at each other, we were ready to sign the pact. And now we have to stay in there for an indefinite period, for a long period. Which is it? Is it the two or three years? Or is it for a long period? If it’s a prolonged period, I don’t think you would be prepared to stay that course. I don’t think the American people should be prepared to stay that course. The longer we stay there, the more we are going to become the issue, more and more. That country has been held together only by power. The same way the Ottomans held the Balkans together, by power. We’re always the outsider. That will always be a fact. We’ll never be brutal enough to get the job done. And eventually they all know we have to go away.

DORAN: Okay. So, let’s have final statements. Martin, I’ll let you go, you have three minutes.

INDYK: Three minutes, okay. First of all, just to respond to Les. Look, let me clarify, because I can see I created some confusion. What I’m saying is that the international effort to stabilize Iraq and to provide for a situation in which the Iraqis are able to rule themselves in a stable situation is something that is going to be a prolonged undertaking. It does not require the presence of American troops at the levels we now have into the indefinite future as long as we can succeed in spreading the load and bringing others in. This was a huge mistake, and a totally unnecessary mistake by the Bush administration in going into the war. But it is slowly but surely making up for it. And I believe that overtime, that is an achievable objective, one that you want, you don’t believe can be achieved for the whole of Iraq, but you want for the most difficult part of Iraq, to have the U.N. take over from us in the Sunni triangle. I think my proposition is much more doable, actually, than yours in that regard.

I want to come back to this assumption, though, two assumptions that you have, that I believe are fundamentally flawed. The first is that this tsunami wave of this ethnic conflict is about to drown us. I just don’t see that there’s any evidence of that. What I think there is evidence of, there is a danger that, as the Kurds see that the Shiites are insisting on elections which would give them control over a new government, they are looking to protect their interests more. So there is a process of pulling apart. But that’s very different to arguing that this is going to lead, very soon, to some kind of ethnic or sectarian conflict. I just don’t believe that you have evidence of that.

And, the second notion that I think is a false one is that the Yugoslav example is appropriate, because it’s not. It doesn’t bear you out in that regard, and there is a potential for the Iraqis to put, especially the Sunnis and Shiites, to put Iraq first and not their Sunni or Shiites identity first. And what you’re proposing is to impose that split on them, which is inherently destabilizing.

GELB: Thank you very much. Thank you, Michael, you did a good job being in charge. And, as I said, it is terrific to debate this with Martin, because Martin is a smart guy, and he made very telling criticism.

As I said, my proposal has all sorts of difficulties, but its main force is when you look at the alternatives. We’re apparently not looking at the same country, or reading the same papers, or talking to the same people. I just read in the paper yesterday a Washington Post story with the Kurds saying they’ve just about had it with the Shiites and the Sunnis, and they want, I think this is exactly the word they used in the article, a confederation. You all read that article as well. They’re talking about it more and more. We’re fearful every day that the Shiites are going to explode, and so we’re looking for any way to make them happy to get through these caucuses so we could avoid a Democratic election that we’ve been promising so that the Shiites won’t take over. And there’s nobody in this room, nobody in this room, who believes that the Sunnis and Kurds are prepared to let the Shi’ites run the country by democratic majority rule. It just won’t happen. And yet, they’re insisting on this because they want to hold us to our word, and they want to take advantage of the legitimacy of the democratic theme to run the country, and the others won’t let them.

And, yes, the Sunnis are talking about dividing it up precisely as I said because they’re left the poor cousins unless there’s some sort of confederacy, which is why I want to use the prospect of three states to try to get them to bring themselves in line.

Now, I don’t want to make the sacrifice of Iraqi and American blood, and all the trouble we’ve caused in the world trying to cure a problem, the cause of an American disaster. So, what’s driving me in all this is, I feel that we’re moving exactly toward that, that this ethnicity is the reality of the situation there, that it is bubbling up, and that it will overwhelm us unless we formulate some policy. It doesn’t have to be exactly what I’ve put forward tonight by any stretch, but that we formulate some policy that accords with those realities and gets out in front of them to shape them with whatever influence we have before the bell rings, as we all know it will, and the pressure begins to take out our troops in a precipitous way. It was a pleasure to be back tonight, President Haass.

DORAN: A pleasure to have you. Thank you very much. Thank you all very much.

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