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| Authors: | Rick Atkinson |
|---|---|
| Todd Purdum | |
| Barton Gellman | |
| Max Boot |
March 16, 2004
Council on Foreign Relations
Speaker: Rick Atkinson, The Washington Post, author, “In the Company of Soldiers”
Speaker: Max Boot, Olin senior fellow, national security studies, Council on Foreign Relations
Speaker: Todd Purdum, political correspondent, The New York Times; author, “A Time of Our Choosing: America’s War in Iraq”
Presider: Barton Gellman, national correspondent, The Washington Post
Council on Foreign Relations
New York, New York
Tuesday, March 16, 2004
BARTON GELLMAN: I'm going to start the meeting now. I'm Bart Gellman. I heard the new British perm rep [permanent representative] to the U.N. say recently that it appears to be traditional in America for the introductions to take up 60 percent of the meeting. And I'm going to try not to live up to that tradition.
The panel hardly needs introduction. Max Boot is familiar to many of you as a fellow here now at the Council, and former editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal. He's also written, among other books, "Savage Wars of Peace."
Rick Atkinson, my colleague at the [Washington] Post, has also left mere journalism behind for history, and won a Pulitzer in history last year for his— the first of three planned volumes on World War II. He's recently taken a busman's holiday from the Second World War to write a book on the [Army] 101st Airborne [Division's] experience of this Iraq war— oh, I see I've even got copies here— “In the Company of Soldiers." Signed copies available in the lobby.
And Todd Purdum, my college classmate, from The New York Times, has also written a book on Iraq, "A Time of our Choosing." I won't tell his college secrets if he won't tell mine. [Laughter.] A reminder on cell phones, beepers, noisemakers of all kinds. And I'm instructed to tell you that this meeting is on the record, and to warn you that there are members of the press in the room. [Laughter.]
UNKNOWN: In fact, on the stage, I believe.
GELLMAN: Yeah. So I think I'm just going to start off the meeting with a question for Rick. And we've heard a lot about the manner in which the war was fought, the brilliance of the plan to take down the old government, and the flaws in the plan to take over for it. Tell us some of your observations about the 101st's war.
RICK ATKINSON: Well, the 101st spent most of its efforts before the war began just getting to Kuwait. The division was not notified that it was actually going to be deployed until the beginning of February of last year. The war, you'll remember, started on March 20th in Middle Eastern time. So that intervening period was spent just trying to get 17,000 soldiers, 256 helicopters, 5,000 vehicles, and so on, from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to Kuwait and then out into a desert staging area. My observation was, first of all, that they were so preoccupied with trying to get there. And then, once the war began, the divisions' responsibilities were to go up the western flank and Euphrates River valley, basically in train with the 3rd Infantry Division. The plan was to isolate Baghdad, to form five fire bases around Baghdad and then take down the city.
The plan did not survive contact with the enemy. The generals anticipated that, as good generals do. What they did not anticipate was that they would take down a country the size of California in three weeks. And so I was with [Major] General [David] Petraeus, the commander of the 101st, every day, all day long, and I almost never heard discussions— either by Petraeus with his subordinates or Petraeus with General Scott Wallace, who was the corps commander— almost never heard discussions about what do we do after the shooting stops or at least ebbs. There had been very little thought given to occupation. In fact, they referred to it as the o-word. There was so much anxiety about being stuck there, about a quagmire, a morass, that they didn't even want to use the word, much less think about the concept. So that's sort of a launching pad for where we are today, I think.
GELLMAN: Is the model of small force, precision strike, synchronized power, allowing you to conserve manpower resources— in light of the postwar experience, is that likely to be repeated?
ATKINSON: Yeah, I think it's likely to be repeated because, as a point of fact, it was militarily successful. The issue is whether you've won the war and lost the peace, and that obviously is very much in the balance. We saw the special forces, the OGA forces— other government agencies, CIA— a lot. They were in Najaf, in Karbala, in Hillah, on into Baghdad. And they were obviously quite effective for what they were doing. The difficulty was that all of the follow-on forces that should have been right on the tail of the combat forces— the military police battalions, the civil affairs battalions, all of the people that you needed to impose order on disorder instantly— was not there. And there's a long, somewhat tawdry string of reasons for that, but they weren't there. So my guess is that when it happens again, there will be more of an effort to keep that tail up tucked in tight with the teeth.
GELLMAN: Well, a bigger tail, though, right?
ATKINSON: It depends on the size of the country, I would think.
GELLMAN: I was there just after the fall of Baghdad, and the word "looting" doesn't do it justice. It was really a systematic destruction of the country's infrastructure. And it wasn't just that they hadn't planned for it; even if they had, they just didn't have nearly enough people to stop it. I mean, is that a lesson learned here that you think they will apply in the future, or they can't afford to?
ATKINSON: I think the decision's going to have to be made or should be made early on about what you're going to do with looters. It was made very much ad hoc. As the looting began in Baghdad in earnest, I was there when Petraeus told his brigade commanders, "We're not going to get in between a mob and a bunch of mattresses." You have to make the decision early on, I think, whether you're going to use deadly force to stop looting. Because clearly, as you saw, Bart and I saw, that was the only way it was going to be stopped in Iraq. You were going to have to shoot people to stop them from stealing. And that's a slippery slope. In fact, there were shootings. The Marines shot some people in Mosul in late April, and the bad feelings that engendered lingered for months and perhaps to this day.
So I think there's got to be almost a national command authority decision about whether or not you're going to use deadly force to impose order on a situation that's so rife with chaos. And it ought to be made in advance in addition to all the things you need to do to put the military police battalions, the civil affairs battalions and so on into place.
GELLMAN: Max, since you've looked back at previous savage wars of peace, I wondered if you could imagine for us how history will see this war 50 years from now, 100 years from now, what its sort of larger meaning and consequences will be seen to have been.
MAX BOOT: I get the easy questions, Bart. [Laughter.] Well, I hope that history will look back upon it the way Bob Kerrey suggested recently, the former senator and president of the New School University, who said that 10, 20 years from now, people are going to think it's crazy that there was anybody opposed to the liberation of Iraq and the establishment of the first Arab democracy in the Middle East. I hope that that is indeed the way that history looks at it, but of course it's way too early to tell. I mean, I think we are more or less on a rickety course. There have been a lot of problems along the way, but I think we are making progress.
I think the interim constitution that was approved just recently is a good one. Of course, there are a lot of good constitutions in the world. The question is, is it going to be upheld? Are the rights that are enshrined in there going to be enforced? And it's obviously way too soon to tell.
I mean, I think there are a lot of positive— as I said, I think there are a lot of positive developments, some of which don't receive nearly the attention they deserve. I mean, the fact that electricity generation and the fact that the oil output are both up to prewar levels; the fact that Iraq has a kind of freedom that's not really enjoyed by any other country in the Middle East other than Israel. Iraq is a place where all sorts of different political viewpoints are free to compete in the marketplace of ideas; where hundreds of publications can express any viewpoint they want and seek readers in a peaceful way; the fact that we're now seeing on the governing council and among the other Iraqi elites the slow process of political compromise, of learning to settle their differences through— you might call it peaceful camel trading instead of by shooting each other. I mean, I think these are all very positive steps, but you know, it's been a year. You know, let's keep things in perspective. And the fact is that we were in occupation of Germany after World War II for five years, of Japan for seven years. To expect that, you know, Iraq would have already turned into a fully functioning democracy is just unrealistic. I mean, I think we're making slow progress, but to get back to your question, Bart, I think it's— you know, who on Earth can say how things will look 10 or 20 years down the line?
GELLMAN: Your answer, of course, didn't mention what was the primary justification for the war: the weapons of mass destruction [WMD]. And I wonder whether the war will be seen to have been relevant at all to the questions of proliferation and the threat of WMD, and as part of your answer maybe you could address a revisionist view of the U.N. inspection agencies. Do you think that, in retrospect, they were more effective than the Bush administration gave them credit for?
BOOT: Well, I think it's easy to say that, you know, that the WMD were not there, as appears to be the case. But we don't know what would have happened absent the American-led invasion. And in fact, even [former head U.N. weapons inspector] Hans Blix himself says that the reason why the inspections started to become a little bit more effective towards the end was because the United States had amassed hundreds of thousands of troops on Iraq's border, and that does tend to concentrate the mind. The question you have to ask yourself is, what would have happened if we had not had this buildup to an invasion and the invasion itself? Because remember, that when the Bush administration came into office, all of the talk was about lifting or relaxing sanctions. It was all about smart sanctions. That was the dominant scenario that the administration was looking at in its early days in office. And all these people, the French and the Russians and others, who a year later were saying, "Oh, sanctions are the most wonderful thing; let's keep the sanctions in place, let's keep inspections in place," when there was no serious threat of an American-led invasion, what they were arguing for was relaxing sanctions. They weren't prepared to take military action to get the inspectors back in there.
And I think you have to anticipate that Saddam would have been out of his box within a few years, in all likelihood. We know this is a guy who had used weapons of mass destruction in the past. He had certainly kept some of his infrastructure, even though, as— Bart, as you revealed in your articles, we haven't found the actual stockpiles. But clearly he kept some of the infrastructure. He was still trying to acquire long-range ballistic missiles. He kept the expertise to manufacture chemical and biological weapons. And so, based on his past track record, I don't think there's any reason to think that once he was out of the box— and I think he likely would have been— that he would have acted in a benign manner. I think there's every reason to assume the worst about this guy, who had invaded his neighbors on numerous occasions, who had practiced genocide against his own people. So I think that yeah, the world is a safer place because Saddam Hussein is no longer in power, because at least one thing we can guarantee is that Saddam Hussein will not be developing weapons of mass destruction in the future.
GELLMAN: We'll concede that the buildup got the inspectors back in. The question really is whether the war meant anything for WMD— inspectors got back in. They learned what they learned. What they said they learned appears to hold up. And if in fact the weapons weren't there and the infrastructure itself was much diminished, can you say that the war is a victory for counterproliferation?
BOOT: I think we can say that. I mean, let me just back up and talk about the inspectors for a second. I mean, keep in mind that Hans Blix, right up until the very eve of war, was saying that Saddam Hussein was not fully cooperating. In fact, we know that Saddam Hussein violated [United Nations] Resolution 1441, where he didn't make the full accounting that— as even Hans Blix himself said at the time, it was not a full accounting of all of his programs. Now what Saddam Hussein was actually up to, I think, is still shrouded in some mystery. But if you look at the [former head U.S. weapons inspector] David Kay report, what he basically suggests is that Saddam may have been a victim of a massive self-deception; that Iraqi generals believed they had weapons of mass destruction, which is why American soldiers found all those gas masks ready for use, why they anticipated they would be— that chemical weapons would be used against them on the battlefield; that even Saddam Hussein may have thought that the WMD program was more advanced than it actually was. And if that's the case, you know, if Saddam Hussein himself was deceived, it's very— it's hard for me to see how you can blame [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair or George Bush for basically taking Saddam Hussein at his own word, in essence, about what he had.
So you know, just very quickly, I mean, I do think that, as I said, the fact that Saddam Hussein will not be developing weapons of mass destruction in the future is no small thing. I mean, there are not a lot of dictators in the world who have actually used chemical weapons in an attempt to commit genocide. Saddam Hussein is one. So I think the world is a much better place with him out of power. And I think you're also seeing some deterrent effect, with [Libyan leader Muammar] Qaddafi giving up his WMD program. You can argue about why that happened, but I think it's implausible to entirely deny that the invasion of Iraq had something to do with it. I think we're making some progress on proliferation with Pakistan. I don't think we'd be making any progress— any more progress now if we hadn't gone into Iraq.
GELLMAN: Todd, your primary focus now is politics. And I wonder if you can describe for us how Iraq is playing out in the political arena and in the presidential campaign. If you want to hazard a prediction, that's fine, but I think that the discussion of how it actually is happening now could be more subtle than it often is in public.
PURDUM: No predictions. There's no percentage in those. But I do think it's fascinating that for the past year, the Democratic candidates, particularly, wrestled with how to deal with the whole question of the war. Because the great bulk of them, of course, had supported the resolution authorizing the president to use force. And the— and [Democratic presidential candidate Senator] John Kerry [of Massachusetts] and others made no apologies. They made a lot of long explanations, but no apologies for that decision, and they said they would do it again. It really took [former Democratic presidential candidate] Howard Dean coming in and sort of focusing the attention of the Democratic left and certain aspects of the party on that question to get the other candidates on the defensive about it.
Now, of course, it's a complicated reality for them day-to-day, because the war's not— the postwar peace is not going as well as one might hope. It is going better, as Max pointed out, in some ways. But they're at pains to really make too much hay over it, I think, because they were there on the going-in. And in the case of John Kerry, it's all well to say he wouldn't have messed it up, as he once said, in the same way, and that he voted for the resolution because he couldn't believe the Bush administration would mess it up so badly. But the truth is, he was part of the broad consensus that war might be unavoidable. And now it's all about saying what he'll do next. And frankly, I think all the Democrats have been at great pains to say, in any creative or interesting way, what they would do differently, and what they would do now. Howard Dean talked about internationalizing the force; that's all well and good. John Kerry talks about returning, you know, the support of allies. But the recent domestic situation in Spain [opposition party election victory following a March 11 terrorist attack] shows the challenge he'd face in doing that. I mean, the worldwide opinion about the war is no different than it was before the war. It was that the war was a mistake, and now that the challenge is to make the best we can of the peace. But any new president, if it's John Kerry, will face enormous international challenges in getting cooperation in the occupation in postwar Iraq.
GELLMAN: I want to get to Spain in a minute, but let's talk a little more about the domestic politics. You've focused mainly now on a national debate, but elections are decided, as you know better than I, in battlegrounds. What do voters in the battleground states seem to think of Iraq and how much do they care? How much of an issue is it? Or is it mostly other things?
PURDUM: I think the latest polls show that they continue to focus on it as an issue, but their support for the president's stewardship of it is, on balance, declining. But I don't think it necessarily looms as the decisive issue that some people might have thought it was going to be a few months ago. In places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, the whole question of the economy, jobs, outsourcing, trade, those seem at the moment to have more power to move the voters who will help decide the election.
GELLMAN: There was a conventional wisdom for a time that American voters won't tolerate a steady flow of casualties in some far-off place. How's that working?
PURDUM: Well, you know, you have to remember what a steady flow of casualties really constitutes in political terms. I mean, as Max pointed out, this is still a novelty. We've lost something approaching 600 American lives. That's not a large number, given the scale of the operation, given the ambition of remaking a country. It took many, many years and many months and many tens of thousands of casualties in Vietnam to turn public opinion significantly against that war.
GELLMAN: It took 18 [casualties] in Somalia [in 1993].
PURDUM: Fair point, but I think maybe the post-9/11 reality colors that and maybe, in fact, there's some thinking now that the whole handling of Somalia was a mistake, not because of the loss of life but because of the kind of effect it had, the corollary effect of making people sort of pull out and not stick. So I think there is— polls show patience on this point. And all during the war, even as we in Washington were, you know, wringing our hands about the pause and the sand storm and all these other delays— and there was a great deal of discussion in Washington about that— polls showed that the public support for the war was not diminishing even during the height of the negative publicity about it. And I think there's every reason to think there's some patience on that point. I think what gets more interesting is if there's a new Iraqi government, American troops are garrisoned sort of over the horizon in billets in Iraq or in other regional areas—
GELLMAN: Over the horizon is behind these huge walls.
PURDUM: Behind these huge walls. But if Americans are called without any active role in the administration of the government, if they're called on simply to provide peace and order at the behest of a new Iraqi government, and they get into all kinds of messy firefights and, you know, people die, that, I think, is another question. Because it goes to the issue of whether Americans feel that their troops are being, you know, sensibly deployed in a mission that the American government's in control of, or they're being exploited on behalf of a still formative government whose bona fides we're not sure of.
GELLMAN: One more thing on politics. Just as a reader, I've been fascinated by the analysis I sometimes see that this election is not traditional, in which the candidates return to the center for the general elections; that it's more about energizing your base than about finding that middle ground. How does the war play in that sense? It clearly seems to have energized Democrats against the president. Is it working as well for him, for his base?
PURDUM: That's an interesting question. I don't know that it is working as well for him with his base, although support for the war is sharply divided along partisan lines, a huge gap between the base view on each end of the spectrum. I'm not one of those ones who believes that the election can essentially be won by ginning up the base alone. I mean, call me sentimental or whatever, but I still think there might be a diminishing number of true swing voters in the country, but elections are won necessarily in America, I think, in the middle. And one way or another, the president's acknowledging that by all his trips to Ohio and Pennsylvania. He is, yes, definitely tending to his base, and he's tending to his base early in a way that I think a lot of people thought he wouldn't. And he is running much more openly now as a conservative who happens to be compassionate rather than as a compassionate conservative. But I don't think he's in any way— he can't afford to abandon the effort to appeal to moderates, and John Kerry certainly can't either.
GELLMAN: Rick, Max brought up the question of postwar occupation of Germany and Japan. And one striking difference to me between my April/May and my December visits to Iraq was the erection of these enormous walls everywhere around the American and other Western compounds. The Green Zone [the fortified area where occupation authorities are headquartered] we keep hearing about is four square miles of America sort of gerrymandered into Baghdad. I've been trying to get my colleagues in Baghdad to call it the Emerald City. [Laughter.] My prediction is that [head of the Coalition Provisional Authority] [ L.] Paul Bremer leaves on a balloon. [Laughter.] But I guess— I mean, that's one striking difference with the postwar— post-World War II occupation, but I wonder how those two situations compare in your mind. I sort of imagine that carping correspondents about a year into the German occupation would have been pointing out all kinds of problems.
ATKINSON: Well, there are benefits to censorship, aren't there? [Scattered laughter.] Well, I'm a little out of my depth about occupation in Germany in World War II. My study of World War II has proceeded through North Africa and now I'm working on Italy, and I'm not yet to 1945 in Germany. But I do know— interestingly enough, my father was in the constabulary as a young lieutenant, and the constabulary was the force formed basically from cavalry regiments to occupy, in his case, Bavaria, and he was there in '45 and to the end of '46, and I've talked to him about it. I think there was quite a significant difference on several counts. First of all, Germany was so smashed and, you know, they'd lost more than 7 million people out of a country of just under 80 million. The country was rubble-ized. There was not the residue of a large army, as in the case of Iraq where you had 500,000 soldiers, 7,000 of whom were captured. The rest disappeared into the political landscape ultimately; whether to await the flowering of a new, democratic Iraq or whether to participate in a well-armed insurrection was hard to say last April. Now it's clear that some of them have gone in both directions. And in the case of Germany in '45 and '46, yeah, there were bases. There were caserns. The United States Army took over caserns that had been occupied by the Germans, but the American force was also much, much bigger than we see in Iraq. The American Army—
GELLMAN: How big was it? I don't remember.
ATKINSON: Well, the American Army was 8 million [troops], and in Germany, there were probably 2 million [troops]. So when you're talking about force projection and the capacity to tamp down any semblance of insurrection— and my father talked about shooting people— the decision had been made, I think, early on that looting— he told me, I can remember as a boy him telling me about shooting a looter. The decision had been made early on that a victor's justice was going to prevail, and that whatever Germany was going to look like in the long run, Germany in the short run was going to be defeated, utterly defeated, and we were going to treat it that way. So that's a quite different landscape than we see in Iraq. And I think that that kind of imposition of force wouldn't have worked in Iraq for a variety of reasons.
GELLMAN: Can one get away with that sort of thing in the modern age?
ATKINSON: I don't think so. I don't think you can, you know, have Boston massacres in Iraq without paying a big political consequence. I think that, you know, if Petraeus, instead of saying we're not going to stand between a mob and a bunch of mattresses had said to his brigade commanders, use deadly force if necessary to protect the Al Qadissiya state establishment [a small arms factory]--you were there after we left.
GELLMAN: His headquarters in Baghdad was at this arms factory, and he not only didn't stand between looters and mattresses, but he didn't stand between looters and mortars, rifles, and Kalashnikov parts.
ATKINSON: It was a munitions plant in south Baghdad, and the 101st was there for a while. And then, when they moved to Mosul in northern Iraq, there was a lack of communication, I'd say, among the occupation forces. And the looters swept through and walked off with— I think you wrote that an Al Qadissiya state establishment AK-47 [assault rifle] went for $83 on the street. So, if Petraeus had said, “OK, we're not going to stand between looters and mattresses, but we are going to shoot anybody who tries to steal anything,” I think the ramifications of that, not only throughout Iraq and throughout the Arab world, not to mention Europe and the United States, would have been insupportable.
GELLMAN: I'll do one more quick question and answer up here and then bring it to the floor. Do you want to add something there?
BOOT: I just wanted to pick up on a point Rick made, which I thought was a good one, about how Germany had been rubble-ized, as you put it. And, of course, that was the case with Japan as well, where pretty much every large- or medium-sized city in Germany and Japan was leveled. I mean, people forget, in 1945, even before the atomic bombing at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, B-29s [bomber aircraft] killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians and reduced everything to burning ashes. Now, if we had done something similar to that in Iraq, we probably wouldn't be facing as much resistance as we are today. If we just leveled everything in our path the way we had in World War II we would probably find the postwar occupation a lot easier. But I think everybody would agree that's not what we want to do because we have a different ethic about how we operate these days. And there's a more humanitarian approach to warfare, which has been in part enabled by the technological advances which don't make our ordnance so indiscriminate as it was in World War II. And so, in some ways, we're paying a price right now for the fact that we are much more discriminating in our application of violence. But you know, I don't know what the alternative would be. I don't think anybody in this room would say that we should have instead just gone in and just leveled every city in Iraq.
PURDUM: The only thing I'd say about that is that I do think one of the things that we journalists tend to miss sometimes is that this effort in Iraq is really the biggest American effort since World War II about building a nation and creating something out of— something that was not at all like what came before. And I think that the issue is not whether we leave Iraq, you know, on June 30th, but how much longer American troops and American will and American determination and American involvement will be necessary in Iraq to produce the result that we want. And the experience with Germany, Japan, and the Korean Peninsula indicates to me that it's really unrealistic to talk about wrapping this up and coming home and being done with it. And I think the one thing that is still not at the forefront of public discussion in anybody's mouth is what a long and important, but potentially grinding and demanding, effort this is. And I think that's something the administration is not very willing to talk about. And I don't think it's something that any of the Democratic candidates have really been willing to talk about either.
GELLMAN: We had help in the postwar occupation of Germany. How much does the loss of the ally Spain matter to Bush? And what if Blair is next?
PURDUM: Well, I think that's what matters. I mean, it matters if it's a harbinger. It matters if it's an indication of how hard it will be to hold together the parts of the coalition that are already, you know— the truth is the Spanish public was overwhelmingly against the war. So was the British public. But the publics of the countries that helped us by and large were against it. So in President Bush's view those were brave leaders who did the right thing. In the end, no leader, however brave, can survive his own public's scorn on a question of such importance. And, you know, President Bush ought to be aware of that.
GELLMAN: I'll go to the floor now. Please identify yourself and let's try for short questions and answers. We'll get more of them in that way. I think there are mikes around the room. Please?
QUESTIONER: I'm Inger Elliott. I am— [inaudible]. I have two very brief questions. One is— and I may be wrong exactly on the timing on this, but I understand that around 8:00 the news came over about the bombing in Madrid on CNN. And I remember the reporter saying, “Oh, we don't have very much news,” and they showed a few film shots. And then I switched very quickly to CBS and NBC, et cetera, and there wasn't very much there. And it wasn't until about 8:30 or 8:45 in the morning that indeed there was more news about the bombing from CNN, in this case. And, of course, I had thought the bombing had just happened. And then, of course, when I figured out the difference in time between Madrid and New York, I thought, “Gee, why is there such a lag in— “
GELLMAN: So why the delay?
QUESTIONER: Pardon me?
GELLMAN: Why the delay?
QUESTIONER: Why the delay in a large international city where there must be a thousand journalists crawling around from all sorts of places. And I thought that was— I didn't know who had put the lag on, the United States, Spain, or who knows. That was—
GELLMAN: We may not have the expertise up here. I'll check with my colleagues. We may want to ask Tom [Brokaw] about that. [Laughter.]
BROKAW [from audience]: Well, there was just great chaos in Madrid and we were all scrambling. We didn't have— I don't think anybody had anybody on the ground there at the time of the explosion. And in that case we rely on what we call agency pictures, which is Spanish television, to give us what they know, and the Associated Press, and so on. But there was no conspiracy. Don't look for one here in the shadows, because it didn't exist.
QUESTIONER: I wasn't looking for it—
BROKAW: We were trying to get there as quickly as possible and to cover it as completely as possible we could. But there was just utter chaos in the capital itself, and getting the video back to the feed point— they were worrying about their own distribution within Spain and then we were picking up their satellite feeds and getting them relayed to this country. That's what happened.
QUESTIONER: I didn't mean to pick out Tom.
GELLMAN: Thanks. If I could just— why don't we try one question— sorry. And I'll try to get back to you, if that works out. Wait for the mike, please.
QUESTIONER: It won't be about WMD. It seems that it's the liberal side of the American political spectrum that's so much against the war, and the conservative side is for it. What I don't understand, and maybe the political analysts here can answer it, is why not the fact that we clearly removed a dictator over 25 million people, even though it clearly wasn't the reason we went in, why doesn't that get more credit on the liberal side of the American political spectrum? [inaudible]
GELLMAN: Who wants to—
BOOT: Well, that's a very good question, one I've asked myself numerous times. When you look at the record of [former Yugoslav President] Slobodan Milosevic versus the record of Saddam Hussein, Saddam Hussein was incomparably worse. I mean, Slobodan Milosevic was a bad guy, and I supported the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo and wish we had actually been more assertive in stopping his ethnic cleansing. But he did not commit the scale of mass murder that Saddam Hussein committed, with 300,000 people found in mass graves alone, and the gassing of the Kurds, and the invasion of Kuwait, the invasion of Iran.
GELLMAN: I mean, let me just try to clarify this. We know what you think on the merits. Why do you think the left isn't buying it? Do you have any sense of what the real motive is, in your view?
BOOT: Well, I think the cover explanation is that the U.N. is not behind this one. But I think that falls apart pretty quickly because the U.N. was not behind the Kosovo intervention either. I think a lot of it can be ascribed to just crass partisan politics; the fact that I think that if Bill Clinton had been in office— [boos from the audience]--I see some people disagree.
GELLMAN: What— yeah, let me try—
BOOT: No, let me— can I finish my thought, please?
GELLMAN: Yeah, sure. What if—
BOOT: Can I finish my thought please? Thank you. [Laughter.] A lot of Republicans were guilty of the same exact partisan politics in the 1990s, when a lot of Republicans opposed our interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo essentially, I think, because Bill Clinton was in office. And we had very close votes in the House [of Representatives] over whether we were going to support these interventions. And I think Republicans were guilty of the worst sort of crass politics in that case. Now in the case of Iraq I think you've had something similar on the left, although a lot of Democrats were in favor of the war in Iraq. But I think you would have seen a huge shift the other way if this had been President Clinton. I think a lot of Republicans would have opposed it; a lot of Democrats would have supported it. I mean, I wouldn't overlook the obvious partisan hypocrisy that goes on on both sides.
PURDUM: I was just going to say that I think [former Democratic presidential candidate Connecticut Senator] Joe Lieberman would certainly second your question and wonder why. But I think it's one thing to see how this played out in the Democratic primary race among the more left side of the party, but I don't think in the general election it really is going to have traction for the Democrats for precisely the reason you suggest. Because nobody could really stand up there and argue that it's a bad thing that Saddam Hussein is gone. And John Kerry's not going to try to do that, and I think ultimately it gets to a point where it's very hard for him to make a lot of political hay on that. He can make hay about the rationale. He can make hay about the execution of the postwar planning and so forth. But he can't really say that it's a bad thing that Saddam Hussein is gone, and I think, as we get closer to the general election, that will probably recede as an issue.
GELLMAN: I want to do one more thing on that, and maybe Rick would address this. I'd say probably among the strongest arguments on the merits against the war that the left makes is damage not so much to the U.N. as to international alliances and to potential allies. Spain's a case in point, but necessary cooperation in the Arab world is another. How do you address that?
ATKINSON: Well, I think, to go back to the original question, first of all, one of the reasons why people have not embraced the ouster of a clear tyrant was that that was not the casus belli to start with. When those 130,000 soldiers were sent into Iraq for war, it was not to depose Saddam Hussein because he was a bad guy. So you take that into account and you take the number 566 into account— that's how many dead soldiers there are— and you say, is that legitimate? Can you retroactively re-jigger the cause of war? I have a problem with it myself. A lot of soldiers have problems with it.
To Bart's question, I think there's also an unease about uncoupling ourselves from alliances in general, and a feeling that the sometimes gratuitous thumb in the eye to our closest friends is going to come back to bite us in the long run. I think that that is an unease that's not just the province of political liberals; it's the province, I know personally, of many generals, who say, OK, we've got 10 active-duty divisions in the United States Army and we are wearing them into the ground.
GELLMAN: Trying to do everything ourselves.
ATKINSON: Right. If you're going to flight a global war— we fought two in our history, World War II and this one— you've got to have an alliance. That's the great lesson out of World War II. And smart-thinking generals, General Petraeus would be one of those, say, “OK, where is the alliance here? What are we doing to ensure that we have the better team?” Because that's the great vision that I think the man who orchestrated victory in World War II had, and it's what we should take out of that last global war. So, you know, I don't think it's just a political liberal-conservative split.
BOOT: Can I just pick up on something?
GELLMAN: There will be a chance to come back to it, I'm pretty sure, but I really want to get more questions in. There's one over there.
QUESTIONER: Can we go back to the casus belli question? I haven't heard much about your views on whether that cause has been justified, whether it is the reality or the American public's perception that any inroads have been made in the control of terrorism by what we've done in Iraq. And I'd like to hear that discussed.
GELLMAN: That's true, the terror link we haven't talked much about here. Anybody want to take that? Did you want to?
BOOT: Well, let me— I'll come to that in a second. I wanted to pick up on the— [laughter] --
GELLMAN: I'm powerless as moderator. [Laughter.]
BOOT: I'm sorry. I've always been told you want to answer the question that you want to answer, not the question that's actually asked. [Laughter.]
GELLMAN: When you're running for office. [Laughter.]
BOOT: No, let me just pick up on something that Rick was talking about. I mean, two points: One is, I mean, I think he passed over what I think is a very important point, which is that we're trying to do way too much with a 10-division army right now. I mean, the Army's gone from 18 divisions in 1990 to 10 today. The number of missions has tremendously increased. I think this is one of the biggest failings of the Bush administration, that they haven't pushed for an expansion of the Army, which was absolutely essential.
But the other point, getting back to the casus belli— it was suggested that it's been re-jiggered. I think that's true to some extent, but keep in mind that it's rewriting history to say that there was only one casus belli that was ever set forth by the Bush administration. In fact, a year ago around this time The New York Times was criticizing the Bush administration for not having one casus belli, for having too many different reasons for going after Iraq. Now I think that they did tend to emphasize the WMD concerns, largely because they thought that's what would play well at the U.N. and they wanted the support of the U.N. But there was also this whole other agenda, which was not kept secret, was not kept hidden. It was right out there and President Bush talked about it all the time: about promoting democracy in the Arab world, about trying to shake up the terrorism equation that had been plaguing us for so many years in the Arab world, trying to get at some of the root causes of terrorism as so many people think that we should. And that—
GELLMAN: Back to terrorism, though, for a second.
BOOT: Yeah.
GELLMAN: The implicit and explicit links to the global war on terror and even the [inaudible] of 9/11.
BOOT: Right.
GELLMAN: How's that been justified or not since the war?
BOOT: Well, I think it's pretty interesting that a lot of people claim that there is no link between Iraq and al Qaeda. And yet what you see in Spain is an al Qaeda attack carried out specifically, they said, to avenge what Spain helped to do in Afghanistan and Iraq, which was to liberate those places. Now obviously al Qaeda is pouring a lot of resources into Iraq right now; they're probably behind a lot of the suicide bombings. I think it's still unclear what the level of connection was prior to the U.S. invasion. There was certainly a lot of evidence that there were links: the fact that Saddam Hussein had provided refuge for terrorists like Abu Nidal, that he had paid bounties for suicide bombers attacking Israelis. There are also a long line of links between Saddam Hussein's government and various elements of al Qaeda, especially up in the north, in the Kurdish region, where [terrorist group] Ansar al-Islam was operating apparently with the support of Saddam's secret service, which is certainly part of the Islamist terrorist network. But I don't think that we have a full accounting of all the links there. But I certainly think that right now Iraq has become a leading battleground in the war on terrorism. And it would be disastrous if we were to run up the white flag, as the Spanish seem to be doing right now. I think that would send a message that would reinforce the message of [the 1993 U.S. withdrawal from] Somalia, reinforce the message of [the U.S. withdrawal from] Beirut in 1983, which is that we can be rolled pretty easily by a few suicide bombers. And so I think now, whatever the reality before the U.S. invasion, the fact is that now, I think, the war in Iraq is inextricably linked up with the war on terrorism. But I think it was before that as well.
GELLMAN: Todd?
PURDUM: I just would say that, I mean, the thing that Max kind of leaves out of his equation is that by saying whatever the situation in Iraq before the war— and it is in dispute, and it's not exactly clear— it's quite clear that our action in Iraq, the invasion of Iraq, has stirred up the hornets' nest, has made all kinds of problems and has created a casus belli for, you know, international Islamic terrorist organizations to find a pretextual basis, you know, to strike us back. So yes, I'd quite agree that you can't cut and run. But it's a real question— and I think it should be a question in the American public's mind— as to whether we stirred it up or made it better. And I think the jury is hugely out on that question.
GELLMAN: Yeah, I mean, well, I would just note that al Qaeda previously has given prominence to the plight of Palestinians in its justification for attacks, which doesn't imply a link between Palestinians and al Qaeda terrorism. In the prewar—
BOOT: Well, there are links between Islamic Jihad and Hamas and the Islamist terrorist network. I mean, I don't think it's totally— but I mean, on the question of al Qaeda justifications, their justifications are ever-shifting. I mean, remember one of their biggest complaints was that U.S. troops were in Saudi Arabia. Well, now U.S. troops are out of Saudi Arabia, but they're not saying, “Hey, that's great. Good job, guys. So we're not mad at you anymore.” I mean, they always come up with new justifications for their violence.
PURDUM: Well, so do we, though.
GELLMAN: All right. Next question, please. Please. There's a mike on its way.
QUESTIONER: Roger Altman. Leaving aside who supported the war initially and who didn't, and leaving aside, for that matter, who's responsible for the intelligence failure and who isn't, do you think it will take a long time or a short time for the obvious decline in American influence and authority— and, for that matter, integrity— surrounding the disconnect between the universally perceived reason we went to war— WMD, and the now reality— do you think it will take a long time or a short time for us, internationally speaking, to overcome that?
GELLMAN: Rick, you want to take a crack at that?
ATKINSON: I think, like with most prognostications, it's unknowable at this point. I think it depends in part on what happens in the world over the next several years. To the extent to which the disagreements of the past 12 months are put aside, I just— I think it's hard to know. I don't pretend to have a crystal ball on that. I do know— I spent— I lived in Berlin for three years in the '90s. And talking to my friends who are there— I was back there again not long ago— the depth of anger at the United States— and it's not just over Iraq, it's over a sequence of things that are seen as part of that thumb in the eye referred to— is very, very deep. And it's trans-generational and it's across the political spectrum. You hear CDU people talking about the United States in ways that you never would have heard—
GELLMAN: Christian Democratic Union.
ATKINSON: --the conservatives in Germany— you never would have heard 10 years ago. And— but first of all, you find yourself defending the country, naturally. But I'm at a bit of a loss to know exactly why there's such emotional resonance. And I think it's not just in Germany; I think it's throughout Europe. And I suspect it's elsewhere in the world.
GELLMAN: Is it personal to Bush, [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld, or does Kerry face the same thing, should he take the office?
ATKINSON: I think to some extent it does seem to be personalized. The president does seem to be a lightning rod. But I think that it also— he personifies what's perceived as an American arrogance. And it runs contrary to what particularly young Europeans see as the river of history now and the necessity for Westerners to band together around a received version of values, and so on. And they see the United States as being contrary to that somehow on issues ranging from the environment to war and peace. And so, you know, I think it's not just Iraq. I think it's a string of things, and I think it has to do, in part, with the perception that the United States is arrogant. And there's a kind of schadenfreude, that's very worrisome, that you see among many Europeans when something bad happens to us. And that's not where we want to be, I personally believe.
GELLMAN: Yes?
QUESTIONER: Bill Luers. In your first exchange with Rick, there was sort of a discussion of what are they going to do next time, what did they learn from this, and how are we going to manage the next war of this type. Going to Roger's question, another version of it, do you think that there is thinking on the part of the military in this administration that if the Bush administration is back in, there will be other opportunities and other needs to use military force in this way? Or do you think at some level this has been— the bad experiences that we've had might have the effect of Vietnam, that we won't do this again?
GELLMAN: There was this perception of a list. [Laughter.]
BOOT: Well, I mean, I think it's— I mean, I don't think it was ever the case that we were planning to go around staging massive occupations of one country after another. Clearly, I think Iraq is a once-in-a-decade type of event. I think we're still going to have military interventions, because if you look at the pattern since the end of the Cold War, George Bush didn't invent American military interventions abroad. I mean, they've been happening pretty consistently every year since the end of the Cold War just because of the nature of the international system that we're now confronting the end of the bipolar stability, the fact that we have a unipolar world; the United States has so much power. We have to deal with the basic problem of the post-Cold War world, which is failed states and rogue states. And unfortunately they're not always amenable to whispering sweet nothings in their ear, and they're not always going to pay attention to what the United Nations or what some piece of paper says. Sometimes you have to use force, and I think that's a reality that any president of the United States will have to come to terms with. And I mean, remember that George Bush didn't come into office as the warmonger candidate. He, in fact, came into office criticizing our nation-building in Kosovo and Bosnia, promising a humble foreign policy, doing less, retrenching, pulling back. And of course we've done the exact opposite, and I don't think that was because he had some ideological agenda coming in. I think it's because he was reacting to 9/11 and the subsequent events. And I think pretty much any president would have to make a similar calculation, that we can't afford to pull in our horns.
But I think if we're going to undertake these types of nation-building exercises— and I think that we will, even if it's not going to be on the scale of Iraq; but I think certainly multinational ones of the scale of Bosnia or Kosovo or East Timor are much more likely— we have to be much better prepared for it. And I think one of the real problems that we've seen is that we have a lack of infrastructure for doing nation-building. And I think it's essential that we create a permanent office within the U.S. government that's devoted to nation-building, because in Iraq the soldiers have had to carry all of the burden, basically. And some of them joke that the Coalition Provisional Authority— CPA— stands for "Can't Provide Anything," because that's kind of the view out in the field, that the civilians— the CPA isn't doing anything; the soldiers have to do everything. And I think next time we have to have a civilian side to the occupation that can do much more and take on much more of this job.
GELLMAN: Todd, you've covered this administration in an active way, and it's not just one administration; there are always factions. Do the authors of the Iraq war have a list? Do they aspire to a next war?
PURDUM: Well, I think Max is right to say that the prospect of, you know, large-scale military intervention in Iran or North Korea is just basically nonexistent. And the notion that people were willing to— or for that matter, Syria— lump those countries, as the president did, in an axis of evil formulation, suggesting they'd all be treated equally, I think has proven not to be true. The one point Max made that is worth expanding on a bit is that there were elements of this administration, and very active and vocal ones, who were totally prepared— or who were much more prepared— to discuss and administer postwar questions. And they were— and those people resided in, you know, the State Department, and they were shut out of the process deliberately by the Pentagon. And—
GELLMAN: What—
PURDUM: We'll never know, I think, for pure reasons of ideological difference and bureaucratic rivalry, and I can't find any other reason. Now we'll never know, perhaps— someday we will, in history, because those documents were so extensive; they exist, they'll filter out over time. And we'll be able to judge whether they had a realistic proposal, you know. Perhaps if the administration had gotten its act together and had somebody like Jerry Bremer there in the first place and had given him six months, you know, to plan, and had designated him in the fall of 2002, quietly, you know, let him build an infrastructure, with unity behind him, it would have worked. But I think really you see in the postwar administration of Iraq the bitter fruit of what are sometimes personal, sometimes principled and always very intense disagreements about the view of the world. And I think it was within the administration's power to provide for better planning, and it didn't.
BOOT: To add a brief postscript to that, from the military standpoint, I think, there is not necessarily a presumption that North Korea is next or Iran is next. But it's worth recalling the words of General Eric Shinseki, who was the chief of staff of the army when he retired— essentially was pushed out— last June. And Shinseki said, beware a 12-division strategy with a 10-division army. And I think that that is— pretty well summarizes what all the services worry about at this point.
GELLMAN: Yeah, I'm going to go here, but I want to just take note of some questions in the back, because I'll get to you next. Go ahead, please.
QUESTIONER: Thank you. Sergio Galvis, Sullivan & Cromwell. If you could just take your journalist's hat off for a minute and turn policy adviser— not political but policy adviser— and the new president calls you up in late January next year and says, "What do we do next with respect to Iraq?" Whether it's President Bush or President Kerry.
GELLMAN: Go ahead. I dare you— [Laughter.]
BOOT: Pray? I don't know. [Laughter.] I mean, I think next January we're going to be facing the deadline for holding elections. And I think basically the— what the United States has to do above all is stay the course, to keep our troop commitment there. I mean, I think Iraq will basically be on the road to democracy as long as we keep the troop commitment there. But if we start looking for a premature exit strategy, I think it's going to be on the road to the abyss. And keep in mind that in Germany and Japan, South Korea, all places where we fought wars, we've kept troops there for, you know, multiple decades, for over 50 years after the end of the wars. And in— you know, in Bosnia, we came in there in '95. President Clinton said that was going to be a six-month commitment. We're still there. We came into Kosovo in '99. We're still there. So I think we have to look at Iraq the same way and realize we have to make a long-term commitment. And hopefully we're not going to be suffering this level of casualties a few years from now. Our troops can hopefully pull back a little bit from the day-to-day policing. But I think we still have to have a troop presence there to ensure the long-term stability. And that's what I think any future president should be thinking about, is how to keep that long-term commitment.
GELLMAN: Since you're game for this, what if the question is, can the United States live with an Iraqi democracy, given a Shia majority, and that the most energized element of that majority is the more fundamentalist?
BOOT: I don't see any sign that the fundamentalists are going to win a free election in Iraq. In fact, as you know, Ayatollah [Ali al] Sistani, the leader of the Shiite community, just specifically said that he does not want a theocracy on the lines of Iran. And I believe him, because everything in his life suggests that that is— that's the tradition that he comes out of. In fact, in the Shiite areas in south-central Iraq, they've been holding local elections now for a number of months, and the winners have generally been technocrats, professionals; not mullahs, not screaming hot heads. I mean, there are some screaming hot heads. But remember, when we came in there the big concern was we were going to face this massive Shiite uprising, that they wanted some kind of Iranian-style theocracy. And it just hasn't happened. The majority of Shiites, what they're demanding is a free election. And, you know, that's something I think we can certainly support. The important part, of course, is to enforce the constitution, to have protections for minorities. I think that's going to be vital.
GELLMAN: I want to take two in succession from the back; just let's pile them up and— show me the hands again. Yeah, let's just say you two at the same table there, if you don't mind. And just ask the questions back to back; we'll try to give brief answers, and I'm afraid I'll have to end it.
QUESTIONER: I'm Charlotte Morgan from the "Charlie Rose Show." Max, you commented on the situation regarding the free press and that you said you list it as one of the signs of the developing democracy. But I've actually heard that the CPA is engaging in pretty extensive censorship. And I was just wondering if anyone can comment on the extent of that censorship.
BOOT: Well, if they're—
GELLMAN: Let's get the second question and then we'll just answer them all at once. Little faster that way. Yes, sir?
QUESTIONER: Well, I was just wondering if Todd feels that the Republicans are eventually going to be under some pressure because they are not taking the position that we're in there for as long as it takes; they're taking the position that the boys are going to be home by Christmas. There's not a dollar in the budget for the kind of painful reconstruction effort that Max was talking about.
GELLMAN: OK, go ahead, Max.
BOOT: Well, if the CPA is engaging in extensive censorship, I think they're doing a pretty terrible job of it, because all sorts of viewpoints are getting out there, in fact. I mean, I think they have— I think they have— there have been a few small incidents, I think, of censorship of people who are actually inciting violence against Americans. But, in fact, I don't think they— they probably haven't done enough to stop that kind of thing. Because there are a lot of people who are writing and printing and saying things that basically do incite violence against Americans. And that's something that we don't allow in this country; you can't incite violence with your— with what you say or write, or you can be held accountable under the law for that. And I think we've actually been very wary of trying to hold anybody in Iraq accountable for that for fear that we would look heavy-handed or trample on their rights. So I think there's a tremendous— I mean the kind of freedom that exists in Iraq doesn't exist anywhere else in the Arab world, where everybody from the Muslim fundamentalists to the Communist Party can write whatever they want.
GELLMAN: Let's let Todd and Rick give a minute each and we'll close.
PURDUM: Well, in answer to your political question, I mean, the thing that's puzzled me most about this administration is the gulf between its incredible optimism about the potential future of Iraq and the perfectibility of democracy there, and its incredible pessimism about— sorry, I said that completely wrong. Its incredible pessimism about— let me stop and start again. The problem for the administration is, if it doesn't level with us on the length of commitment, and if it doesn't explain how long it's going to take, it ultimately will face a problem. And I think it doesn't do any service, and it doesn't do any respect to the public, not to level with the size of this challenge. They should be proud of this challenge. They should take it on. They should embrace it. And the president should say to people— and I don't understand why he's never been able really to do this— this is the most important task we've done as a nation in 50 years; I'm asking for your help in all sorts of ways— and whether that means tax increases or whatever. But he's never really made a speech like that, I don't think. And it just puzzles me in the sort of annals of leadership why he shouldn't have chosen to do that, and why he doesn't think the American people would ultimately share his optimism, share his commitment, because that's in the greatest tradition of presidential leadership, and it puzzles me why he hasn't done it. There was another point I was trying to make about Saddam and I lost my train of thought. So I'll think about that.
GELLMAN: You've lost your chance for leadership. Rick.
ATKINSON: Well, the last point that I would make is that anybody who has spent any time in Iraq inevitably comes away with a sequence of images that are enduring and difficult to shake. And they have an emotional resonance. And among the images that I took away from my time in Iraq were two in particular. One was the finding of the body of a sergeant first class who had been killed during the drive into Baghdad, and seeing the great care, the tenderness with which his body was lifted and put onto a stretcher and carried head first, which is prescribed by army custom, to a humvee for eventual burial at Arlington [National Cemetery]. And that— and a kind of counterpoint to that, there were, of course, predictions that the Shia majority were going to greet the invading American forces with cheers and hosannas. And that didn't happen initially, but then it did happen. And so when we were in Najaf, for example, and then in Hillah and in Karbala, there were first a few dozen, and then a few hundred, and then thousands, thousands and thousands of people on the streets all baying with enthusiasm at being liberated. That's an enduring thing. And that helps to, I think, answer the question of, you know, what have those 566 soldiers died for, and trying to square the circle between seeing that soldier's body carted away and seeing those Iraqis reveling in a sense of liberation is part of what we're about for the next years to come, I think.
GELLMAN: I'm sorry to say we're over time. So please join me in thanking our very distinguished panel. [Applause.]
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