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home > by publication type > transcripts > Iraq: The Way Forward Series [Rush Transcript; Federal News Service, Inc.]
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| Speakers: | Robert Fisk, Middle East correspondent, the Independent; Author, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East |
|---|---|
| F.J. “Bing” West, Author, No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah | |
| Presider: | Jane Arraf, Edward R. Murrow press fellow, Council on Foreign Relations |
November 8, 2005
Council on Foreign Relations
New York, NY
JANE ARRAF: Well, everyone, thanks very much for coming. We’d like to welcome you to today’s Council on Foreign Relations meeting. And we’d also like to welcome our national members who are joining us by video conference, we’re told. I’d like to ask you as well to please turn off your cell phones and your BlackBerries. This meeting, as I’d like to remind you, is entirely on the record. Trust me, it’s much safer that way.
We’re lucky to have with us today Bing West, Marine author. The title of his latest book on the battle for Fallujah, “No True Glory,” speaks volumes. And we also have with us Robert Fisk, a journalist who has logged thousands of miles and thousands of pages, interviewing people like Osama bin Laden and traveling to some of the nastiest places in the world.
And I want to rely on a habit on reporting from the field, where we get to the essential question first because you never know whether you’re going to get another question.
So essentially this series is “Iraq: The Way Forward.” So if we could start with that. Bing, you write that to walk away from Iraq is out of the question. You also acknowledge in your book as a key to this is Iraqi forces. Now, with growing pressure, it seems, to pull those U.S. forces out, does the U.S. have enough time to wait for Iraqi forces to get up to speed?
F.J. “BING” WEST: Well, I think if you watch what General Casey is doing — and I admire him, and he keeps his mouth firmly shut. But if you watched what happened in Fallujah, and then what happened in Mosul, and now what’s happening today in Husaybah, you can see that he’s pursuing a strategy that’s sometimes called “the oil spot strategy.” He’s going into one city, he uses the tough troops like the Marines to go through it, then he floods it with the Iraqi troops. He bottles up that city, he puts it under martial law, moves on toward the next city. So you can see that he has a strategy in mind. He has 13 cities to work. He’s probably worked three or four. But you can see that he has a strategy in mind.
ARRAF: So the short answer is do you feel there is enough time?
WEST: Yeah, because the option would be a disaster.
ARRAF: Robert, if I could ask you — one comment that struck me from you is that “Iraq’s war of liberation from the Americans is about to begin. The real and frightening story starts now.”
How do you see that story unfolding if we’re talking about the future of Iraq?
ROBERT FISK: Well, I wrote that in April 2003, one day after the Saddam statue came down. Look, the Americans must leave Iraq, and they will leave Iraq, and they can’t leave Iraq. That is the equation that is turning sand into blood. I think the war is finished. I think all the dreams, the project of democracy, of hope for the future of new freedoms across the Middle East, is probably dead. From Mosul right down to Basra across the roads and highways and countryside are in the hands of armed men, armed tribesmen, insurgents. It’s gone. There are armed men half a mile from the Green Zone in Baghdad, as we know in the Haifa Street area. Large areas of Baghdad are slowly slipping out of government control now. There are areas of Baghdad I cannot go to which I could go to a year ago.
I think that what we need to look for is some way in which the unreality of what we hear in Washington and London and Paris, and the reality of 1,100 Iraqis dying by violence every month in Baghdad alone, needs to married up. And we need to find a way in which — without dishonor or humiliation, the Americans and the British can leave. And I imagine that we’ll need eventually the help of Iran and Syria, the two countries which, at the moment, we’re pointing our guns at. I think that is, unfortunately, probably the way forward.
ARRAF: How do you rely on those figures? You just quoted a figure of —
FISK: Well, I’ll tell you, in July — in August, rather, I went to the central mortuary in Baghdad, as I do twice every month I’m there. On a Monday morning, there were nine dead by 9:00. There were 26 by 12:00 — and I was counting the bodies as they came in, including a young woman, hands tied behind her back, shot three times in the brain, a baby shot in the face. There are death squads in Iraq. I got onto the computer, with the help of some morticians in the mortuary and the mortuary attendants and the senior people there, and they pulled out the actual statistics of the Ministry of Health for that mortuary — the largest figure of dead at the central medical center in Baghdad ever, and the figure was 1,100 dead Iraqis in Baghdad alone just in July, and there were names of most of them.
Now, if you — if you — I don’t like this extrapolation system of doing statistics, but if you then include Mosul, Najaf, Karbala, Baqubah, Ramadi, Fallujah and all the other cities, you must be talking of 2,000 to 3,000 minimum a month being killed by violence; 36,000 a year. That makes even that 100,000 figure begin to look realistic.
And the real — for me, as a journalist on the ground — the greatest tragedy in Iraq is that I don’t think we care about the Iraqis. We don’t care about these figures. We give identities — rightly so — to our dead, to our dead Americans and our dead British soldiers, and they deserve their identities, and they deserve the honor of being remembered and identified. But we don’t want to do that with the Iraqis. In fact, there are systems in place to prevent journalists trying to find out how many Iraqis are dying each day, each month, because they are paying the price for this huge tragedy.
ARRAF: This is something you keep coming back to, and something I’d like to ask both of you about. Understandably enough, one of the central themes of both your writings is about death and about killing. And, Robert, you say war is not primarily about victory or defeat, but about death and the infliction of death. As a journalist, we know that if you are going to get readers, viewers to care about an issue, you have to get them to — you have to get them with emotion. You have so many graphic details, so much time devoted to the dead and wounded. Is that all there is?
FISK: Well, I think that war represents the total failure of the human spirit. And we didn’t need to go to war in 2003, and we shouldn’t have gone to war, and we’ve — it’s cost many innocent human lives. I’m afraid that we shield you from death and war. Most people in this room have not experienced war. Some of you have. Bing has, of course, and I have. If you saw what we saw on the battlefield, I think very few of you would ever support a war again. Over and over again, I’m with film crews who can’t film what we see because it’s too gruesome to show on television. I think you should be allowed to see it, if you support wars. I think that when I have to watch dogs tearing the bodies of men and women to pieces and eating them in the desert north of Kuwait City in 1991, that’s what —that’s what actually happened. On television, you’ll put on a dead body if an Iraqi, for example, has been obliging enough to die in a romantic position — the face of war, the dead, et cetera. But the actual, terrible, poisonous facts and details of war are largely kept off the television screen. Although oddly, you can watch it on the cinema screen. “Saving Private Ryan” showed you war as we — a little bit — do see it, whereas the very homogenized version that goes on British television screens and American screens doesn’t represent what we see. And I think you should know what’s it like. You should.
ARRAF: Bing, I wonder if you’d comment on that.
WEST: All wars kill the innocent. And that’s — therefore, the burden is on the policymaker before he goes to war to calculate his own costs and those of the country. In the Iraqi case, we went in for different reasons. But the one thing that we did was we upset the order that was in that country, which was the Shi’ites — five million of them — dominated everybody else. And the reason people are dying in Iraq today is because — I’m sorry, the Sunnis dominated — the reason that the — why they’re dying in Iraq today is that the Sunnis have not accepted the concept that they are not the dominate force. This is not an insurgency, a war of national liberation. This is an insurgency that is fundamentally the Sunnis believing they have not been defeated and still determined that they will rule Iraq, and they haven’t bought into the concept of a democracy. And so they are the ones doing most of the killing against the innocents. And we’re locked into this conflict against them. And this conflict gradually metastasized so that the leaders of the insurgency today are the genuine jihadists. They’re the toughest, they’re the best organized, they’re the most ruthless. And we’re going to fight this out with them, and we’re going to fight it out to the death, and there is no option with those people. And gradually, we will take over those Sunni cities. Those Sunni cities will be occupied by a Shi’ite army, much along the lines that from 1865 to 1878 in the United States the Union Army occupied the South because the Confederacy had not decided in 1865 that it was defeated, and it had to be occupied for quite some time. So we’re into this war, and we have to prevail in this war because the consequences against those jihadists are far beyond Iraq.
ARRAF: I get the feeling that you believe this can be won with blunt force.
WEST: Excuse me for smiling that way, but I agree entirely with Robert that war is about killing. I mean, war is killing. When you let loose those dogs of war, that’s exactly what you’ve done. And the two sides come together, and they kill until one side or the other says enough. And blunt force is the definition of war. These jihadists are not going to give up. They are not. And it is going to take blunt force.
ARRAF: This is not a typical war, though. Does that matter? This is not a typical war you are fighting in Iraq in those towns and villages.
WEST: Not a typical war — you know, I’ve been in two wars myself. But if I look at the history of warfare, I’m not sure there is any typical kind of war. What is occurring now in any Sunni city is that among the Sunnis, they will know who probably is an insurgent, and they keep their mouth shut about that, both through intimidation and also because they’re sympathetic. So you’re in an insurgency that is Sunni-based, and ultimately, only the Iraqis — and it will be basically the Shi’ites and hopefully bringing over more of the moderate Sunnis when they’re convinced that they have been defeated and cannot gain power again — only the Iraqis can win that.
ARRAF: Just — if I could just jump in, and then you get to talk.
FISK: How did you know I was going to say something, Jane? (Laughter.)
ARRAF: Just a funny hunch!
One of the things that really comes through in your book is what many would say is a justifiable pride in the Marines as a fighting force. The other thing that comes through is an almost complete lack of recognition on the part of those men, I think, that they’re dealing with a separate culture, a separate country. Parts of it — just so that doesn’t sound gratuitous — for instance, an old man introduced himself as a sheikh to one of the officers. He was flexi-cuffed and led away. An incident where people thought to be insurgents — although I’m not sure how you can tell — screamed, “Help us! Help us! Family! Family!” from a house. They rolled up their tanks and flattened the building.
My question is, would it not be a more effective force if they could recognize and find and realize that there are people there who would help them rather than just see them all as enemy targets?
WEST: Well, but you — the first is that any British soldier or any Marine or any American goes into war with his own conscience. And if we believe in our own country, and we do believe in our own youth, and we don’t believe that we’ve just let loose willy-nilly killers.
The quote that you took, “Help me! Help me! Doctor, doctor!” was taken in the middle of the battle for Fallujah when they had seen insurgents go into the house and the insurgents were trying to ensnare them into coming in.
War is a brutal —
ARRAF: I know that did happen in places. I’m just curious as a journalist, how do you know that happened in that case?
WEST: Well, because I was there. I was there in both battles.
ARRAF: You were —
WEST: In the November battle and in the April battle.
ARRAF: Were you there in that particular incident?
WEST: No I wasn’t. But — no, no, I wasn’t when they were yelling. But I can tell you many other times when I was when they were yelling.
But what you’re dealing with when you get on the battlefield is that it’s a battlefield. Now, you do try your best as a human being to distinguish, and most civilians get out of the way, but you’re out there to fight. And if you’re sent as an American to Iraq, you’re an American in Iraq and there are going to be some subtleties that you don’t get. And that’s true if you’re sent to Germany. That’s true if you’re sent to Italy. That’s true if you’re sent any other place.
ARRAF: Thank you.
Robert?
FISK: Well, I was going to quote the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo to you, Bing. And I’m putting you in the position of his reference to the British Army. “I don’t know if you frighten the enemy, but by God, you frighten me.” (Laughter.)
When we’re talking — when we’re talking about a country which we allegedly went to liberate and give democracy to and make it a shining beacon of freedom throughout the entire Middle East, we find that more than two years after we’ve illegally invaded that country, we’re talking about General Casey’s brilliant plan of smashing his way into cities, sending the Iraqi army in — most of whose fighters are, unfortunately, Shi’ite, so they have their own scores to settle, and then we’re going to put martial law, and we’ve done three cities and we’ve only got 10 more to go — something has gone wrong in Iraq. Something has gone plausibly wrong.
We talk about the battle of Fallujah in November. That was the third time we — the West — liberated Fallujah. Then we have to go and liberate Mosul for the second time. We’re constantly liberating cities.
Let me just give you a very short answer now to my final sort of response to Bing. And I found all this out when I was researching my book on the Middle East, “The Great War for Civilization,” which is what was written on the back of my father’s First War World Campaign Medal, he was in 1918 on the third battle of (Aisne ?) — much older than my mother of course.
I discovered that in 1917, General Angus Maude invaded Iraq on behalf of the British, put up a big proclamation on the walls of Baghdad that said “to the people of the governorate of Baghdad, we come here not as conquerors but as liberators to free you from generations of tyranny.” This is 1917. 1920, insurgency starts against the British. What do we do in our first retaliatory attack? We bombard the city called Fallujah. We then surround a city called Najaf in 1920 and demand the surrender of a Shi’ite cleric called Badr, not Sadr. British intelligence sent a telegram in 1920 from Baghdad to the British War Office saying that terrorists are crossing the Iraqi border from —
MR. : Syria.
FISK: Quite right. And then — (laughter) — Lloyd George stands up on the House of Commons in London — he was the prime minister at the time — again in 1920, and said, “If British troops leave Iraq, there will be” —
MR. : Chaos.
FISK: — civil war is what he said, actually.
So there is surely here — and I’ll ask Bing his reaction — isn’t there somehow an almost fingerprint parallel and a similarity in history? Haven’t we been through this before? The British screwed it up, and we did exactly the same thing. We ended up bombarding from the air because we were losing too many soldiers.
Bing.
WEST: Thank you, Robert. (Laughter.)
ARRAF: I’m moderating.
WEST: As I recall the history of Europe, we had “the war to end all wars” against Germany, and we fought that from 1914 to 1918. And my goodness, we went back and fought the Germans again in 1941, and we won in 1945.
So what is the point? The point seems to me that sometimes you get it right, sometimes you get it wrong. History goes along, different things change, you keep reacting as policymakers to what’s going on. Sometimes you win a little bit, some days you get the bear, some days the bear gets you. But you don’t stop history and say, “Look what happened in 1920, and therefore, we should have known better.” If we had done that, we wouldn’t have had to fight the Germans twice.
FISK: America fought Germany not from 1914 to 1918 — you came in late again, then, Bing. But —
WEST: Quite right. (Laughter.) We did let the Brits go first that time.
ARRAF: If I could, before we take questions, I’d just like to spend a couple of minutes talking about the images that we’re seeing out of Iraq. You both have been there, you’ve contributed to the impression that people have of what’s going on there.
Robert, you’ve gone to places a lot of other reporters wouldn’t and you’re —
FISK: And shouldn’t going to.
ARRAF: And shouldn’t, perhaps. You’re quite harsh in your criticism of reporters doing what you call “hotel journalism” and “mouse journalism.” Is that not better than nothing? Does that mean not to go there?
FISK: Up to a point. Look, if you’re going to spend your entire time in a hotel room — and in many cases ordered by your editors or your security advisers to do so, I don’t blame a reporter for doing what he’s told to do, and in many cases, if he has a family, why should he risk his life on the streets of Baghdad?
What I do object to is seeing the reports on television, on the radio, in the papers where the reporter does not tell the reader, the viewer or the listener that he doesn’t or can’t leave the hotel, thus giving the impression he’s taking a tour de raison (ph), checking out the facts on the streets, comparing it to the official version. But in fact, he can’t do that. So he might as well sit in New York and use a mobile phone and call the Green Zone or whoever in Baghdad. That is a problem.
On the other hand, I now practice what you just said, I practice “mouse journalism.” I’ll give you a practical example in 30 seconds. A bomb goes off in bus station in August, I drive there, report from the scene, street reporting; jump out of the car, take two pictures, one of a baby burning next to a bus; 20 seconds of an eyewitness talking to me before there are 40 Iraqis banging their hands on the roof of my car and I race away — mouse journalism. I’ve got 600 words maybe there. But is it worth it to do that? Is that really reporting anymore? Is it is worth the risk to one’s life, even if one can get on the streets for a couple of minutes? I don’t know. Certainly for the first time in 30 years in the Middle East I’m wondering if we can go on reporting Iraq at all.
ARRAF: Bing, you said in your book that you’ve never met a platoon that wouldn’t welcome having a reporter along with them. I found that to be the case as well. But I have found quite a few brigades and divisions, the higher you go up the chain, that don’t want reporters there, that bar them from coverage, that would prefer those images not get out. Why is that, do you think?
WEST: I don’t know. At the higher levels, I don’t know. But I do know at the platoon level, because our soldiers have confidence in their own humanity, they welcome the reporters to be there. And the caution that I have about it, and the reason I wrote an entire book about this battle that went on for 20 months — and I was over there with them 8 times with 17 different battalions — I called it, “No True Glory” because 75 percent of our young men 18 to 21 years of age that are fighting over there get out when they get back home. They don’t stay in. And the only thing they have to say when it’s all over was, “I fought at Najaf, or Baghdad or Fallujah.” And they hoped that eventually people would credit them for their valor the way if they said, “I fought at Iwo Jima” or “I fought at Hue City.”
And my objection about the reporting, for a lot of different reasons, is that the true nature of how valorous these young men have been has gone unreported. In Fallujah, for instance, there were 200 fights inside houses. Now, in the entire history of all the SWAT teams in the United States, there have never been 200 fights inside houses. And this one young man — just to take one little example — Corporal Connors (sp), and he fought for four hours inside a house against Omar Hadid, who was the general in charge of the Fallujah insurgents. And Hadid was in there believing that Americans would never come in. And this 20-year-old corporal, and he said, “I’m only going to take the corporals in here because this one’s a real tough one” and he gathered up four other corporals — he didn’t want, as he said, the young kids, the 18-year-olds, in this fight. Fought for four hours in a room smaller than this to finally kill Hadid.
And we all know who Audie Murphy was, we all know who George Patton is. But no one has ever heard of Tim Connors (sp) or Jim Mattis (sp). I mean, we’re going through a war where the only things we hear is that they’re victims, or that they do something wrong. And I think we pay a price about 10 years later when we do that, because the only thing they want is for their valor to be validated by the American public.
ARRAF: Thanks very much.
I think we’ll move to questions now from the audience. Just a couple of rules. Please wait for the microphone to come around, and when it does, speak directly into it. And once you have the microphone, we’d be grateful if you’d stand and tell us your name and affiliation.
We have about 30 minutes for questions, so we’d be grateful as well if you would keep your comments concise and your questions brief.
Please.
QUESTIONER: Thank you. My name is Michael Shamberg. I’m actually producing a movie about the last two men pulled from the rubble of the World Trade Center. In the course of my research, both the police and fire commissioners said this was an act of war. Isn’t this unique, in that the people we’re fighting in Iraq have attacked you in London and us here? So therefore, if you abandon Iraq, how do you risk — how do you deal with the fact these people are going to keep attacking us? In other words, if we don’t stop them there, to use the cliche, isn’t it going to be a disaster?
FISK: Because of “you in London,” you’re asking me — this is me — aren’t you?
Look, the attacks of September 11th, 2001, were an international crime against humanity, and I always refer to it as that in my newspaper. I always talk about the need for justice over these crimes against humanity, which was also what occurred on the London Tube on July 7th. I remember it, because I was two trains in front, on the way to Heathrow, on the Piccadilly line.
I think you’ve got to realize, though, that in the — ever since the Second World War, we formed the habit — we in the West, British first and then the British and Americans together — of taking our wars far away from home and believing there will be no effect on us in our own homeland. We will go to Korea; we went to Vietnam; we went to Aden, South Yemen; we were fighting in Kenya; we were fighting in Palestine; we were fighting in Cyprus, all for different reasons and all for different backgrounds, because we were trying to preserve an empire, and America was building an empire, even if it didn’t know it at the time.
And in all these cases, I think that what was happening was that we came to a belief that we would never be touched.
Now September 11th, 2001, was before the bombardment of Afghanistan, of course. It was before Iraq. But the fact of the matter is that for decades now, there has been a system of oppression laying like a blanket of the Middle East, most of whose occupants, most of whose citizens are Muslims. And we in many cases have been responsible for either supporting or putting into power some of the worst despots of that region. And reaction to those despots could not take place in a democratic world. There were no democracies out there. There aren’t any now. So the reaction was always going to be violent within those countries.
But the more we exerted our foreign policy over the region, the more we sent our soldiers out constantly to “liberate” people — we were going to liberate the Egyptians in 1956, because we wanted the Suez Canal back, remember — the greater the chance that eventually some of them want to strike at us. And this is the great danger.
On September the 11th, 1992, I took a film crew into a burning mosque in Bosnia. And if you listen to the soundtrack — and I didn’t know it was September the 11th till I looked it up the other day — I walk in the mosque on fire and say, “When I see things like this, I think of the Middle East, and I ask what the Muslims of the world have in store for us. Maybe I should end each of my reports with the words ‘Watch out.’”
And in subsequent years, I’ve noticed, going back from my books, through my own archives, I’ve referred to the explosion to come. I didn’t know what was going to happen. But clearly, in the Middle East there was a feeling that something was going to break.
Now unless we deal with this matter ourselves by pulling back from this blanket of injustice, which we have helped to perpetrate in the Middle East, we will not be safe.
Yes, I think the Middle East people — I think Arabs would like some of our democracy. I think they’d like a couple of boxes of free speech and indeed women’s rights off the supermarket shelf from time to time. But more than anything else, I think they want freedom from us, and I think they also want justice, which I think you can’t — you’ve got to put in place before you try to build democracy. That’s the only way to protect ourselves, not leveling towns.
ARRAF: Thanks for that.
WEST: The — if I could —
ARRAF: Please.
WEST: My view is a little bit different. The jihadists are out to kill us. They may have all kinds of complaints up one side and down the other, but in the end, they are murderous — and I’ll stop what — stop it there — murderous suiciders (sic). And anyone who believes that Zarqawi will say, “That’s cool. I have Iraq, and now I’ll become an agrarian farmer,” doesn’t know Zarqawi.
They will — they are locked into this as a death struggle. For whatever reasons, that’s what it is. And “coulda, shoulda, woulda,” there we are, fighting them today. And we better prevail over them, because they intend to prevail over us.
ARRAF: Thanks very much for that.
I’m just struck by the blanket statement that we’re fighting people over in Iraq who did this to us. I think those of us — a lot of — the jury is out on that. I have not seen —
WEST: No, no, no, I didn’t mean to be that blanket.
ARRAF: (Inaudible) — referring to the —
WEST: I did specifically say I do not believe Zarqawi would stop.
ARRAF: The question —
WEST: I did not believe Zarqawi would stop in Iraq.
ARRAF: Yup.
There was a question over here.
QUESTIONER: Thank you. John Temple Swing. This question’s for Mr. West. It concerns Fallujah but also some of the offenses that are going on now.
My main impression of watching what little we could see of what was really going on television — that Fallujah as a city was pretty well destroyed and that the — when we went in — as we occupy it, there was really no city there. We saw a little story about civilians trickling back in, but it certainly is not — going to be a long, long time before that city can become a viable — people — for the residents who had lived there, not the insurgents, but the people who were there.
I also noted in the news recently that some of the civilians are sympathetic to the insurgents, perhaps precisely for these same reasons. So is it really a wise tactic to go into a city and then destroy it on the grounds that you’re restoring liberty?
WEST: No. But if the — and you’re quite right. Fallujah had 30,000 buildings. There were two fights in Fallujah, in April and then when the — the Marines did not want to go into Fallujah. When the four contractors were killed and mutilated, the White House, the secretary of Defense, General Abizaid and Ambassador Bremer ordered them in again, and they said, “You’re sure you want us to do this? We don’t want to do it.”
Once they got going, Al-Jazeera painted it in such terrible way that Ambassador Bremer said, “You have to stop. We need a cease-fire.”
We had two chains of command, which I think was nutty, in Iraq. We had a civilian chain of command under Ambassador Bremer, military chain of command under General Abizaid, both reporting up. It was like trying to run corporation with two entirely separate chains of command.
Then they turned the city over. The Ba’athists came to them and said, “Look, we’re Ba’athists. We’re major generals. We worked for Saddam. We’re respected. We’re Sunnis. They’ll understand us.” They went in and said, “We can get law and order here. You just stay out.”
The Americans said, “All right. It’s your city.”
Within three months, the jihadists had ridden them out of town on a rail, and that city descended into hell. And that’s when the Marines went back in the second time. You go back into battle where they’re hiding in the individual buildings, there’s going to be a lot of destruction.
Absolutely, I’d say, if you took a vote of — well, the Sunnis did take a vote. I’m just back from Fallujah. They took a vote. Ninety percent said no to the constitution in Fallujah.
The Sunnis have not accepted the concept of the democracy. And so you are going to have to occupy them, because it’s a war that’s still going on.
ARRAF: That’s an extraordinary statement to me. Are you talking about — what are you talking about exactly, you have to occupy them?
WEST: You’re going to — the idea that you could stay out of the Sunni cities and not occupy them with Shi’ite — the Iraqi army is basically Shi’ite. When they go back into these Sunni cities, they’re not going in “Kumbaya.” They are basically going in like the Union Army went into the Southern cities in 1865. They are an occupying army in the Sunni cities.
ARRAF: And how long do you occupy them for?
WEST: In my judgment, the Shi’ite — I have no way of knowing what’s going to happen between the Shi’ite and the Sunnis, but it wouldn’t surprise me if this was 10 years that they were basically — you had Shi’ite army in Sunni cities would not surprise me.
ARRAF: And what about the thought of bringing up the Sunni part of the army or integrating them, as they’ve attempted to do for the last two years?
WEST: Wonderful idea. Wonderful ideas. Will they come to fruition? I don’t know. We’ll just have to wait and see.
ARRAF: Just —
WEST: But the lesson that happened in Fallujah was that when that was tried, the city slipped right under the control of the jihadists.
ARRAF: Questions? Nancy? Sir, if we could call on Nancy, who — yeah. Nancy Bird.
QUESTIONER: Thank you. Nancy Bird, Council on Foreign Relations. I’d like to ask Mr. Fisk about an exit strategy. How specifically do you think the U.S. could get out of Iraq, since that seems to be what you’re espousing?
FISK: Look, first of all, I can’t see a U.S. administration leaving Iraq in a state of humiliation. All around the world at the moment — I was having dinner in Canberra, Australia, the other day, and talking to some very senior officers in the Australian Army who are actually thinking of doubling the size of the Australian military to defend themselves in the Pacific, because they thought that after America does withdraw from Iraq, which it will, America may lose its interest in protecting its allies in the Pacific area as well. So already the ripples are going on of what this exit strategy will mean.
Look, I think that the Americans will need the Da’Wa and the SCIRI parties in the government, who effectively are Iran in the government. They were nurtured in Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. Most the leading figures in the government are, in effect, linked with Iran. They will need the Iranians to help control the Shi’ite population and indeed keep under control murderers — and there are death squads — within the Iraqi army, which we’re now putting into the Sunni cities.
And they will also need the help of Syria, first of all to close that frontier, because there definitely are Arabs from other Arab nations passing through Syria. That’s not a myth, though the numbers are not as large as were claimed. And they will need the help of the Syrians also with the Iranians, because they’re allies.
I think eventually what we’re going to see is the council of ulema, the Sunni and Shi’ite clerical leadership, those elements which represent Iran within the government, and I think at the end of the day we’re going to see former officers in the Iraqi army who were colonels and captains and fought suicidal battles against the Iranians between 1980 and 1988 and who are now leading the main part of the insurgency, the Iraqi part. We’re going to have to see talks between the Iraqi generals and senior American officers before we actually have a real cease-fire. But we — those people do exist.
I met three leaders of the insurgency, not inside Iraq, but in a neighboring country — not Syria. Indeed, I met one of them who was commanding the insurgency forces, being with fighting in Fallujah. He entered the room and said, “Ah, Mr. Robert, we meet again.” And I said, “We’ve never met before.” He said, “Yes, we did.” He said, “You were on the Iraqi front line in 1980 under fire outside Basra, and you interviewed me because I led the first Iraqi tank column across the (Kalar ?) River into Iran.” All these leaders of the Iraqi side of the insurgency are former officers in the Iraqi army from 1980 to 1988. Some of them were trained in America, some in Britain. They speak English; they can be talked to. And eventually, we will have to do so.
ARRAF: Speaking of a neighboring country that’s not Syria, what do you think of the influence of Iran? How prevalent is that?
FISK: I was talking about Jordan, actually, but still — (light laughter).
Look, Iran is effectively inside the Iraqi government. Al-Ja’afari is Iran’s man. When we keep hearing about, oh, the Iranians are helping Shi’ite insurgents in Basra, they don’t need to. Iraq is thick with weapons. It — all the Iraqis know how to fight; they don’t need advice from the Iranians. They fought the Iranians for eight years. They know what the Iranians can teach them. They’ve learned it a long time ago.
But with the — remember, the Da’Wa Party, which is a linchpin of the new government which is in constant negotiation and talks with the Americans, with the British and everyone else, the Da’Wa Party were the people who were behind all the kidnapping of Westerners — Islamic Jihad — in Beirut in the 1980s, including my friend Terry Anderson, who was held for seven years. The Da’Wa Party attacked the American and the French embassies. In Kuwait, the Da’Wa Party tried to kill the emir of Kuwait to get its prisoners out of Kuwaiti jails. Now the Da’Wa Party is in the government. That is Iran in Baghdad. They’re there.
ARRAF: Thanks very much.
We will hopefully actually get to quite a lot of you, so the gentleman sitting next to Nancy?
FISK: A microphone —
QUESTIONER: You started my question. I mean, you — first —
ARRAF: I’m sorry, if you could just identify yourself.
QUESTIONER: Nicol Acuri (sp).
ARRAF: Thank you.
QUESTIONER: You used — you talked about Europe. But when you talk about Europe, you talk about Germans, French, you didn’t talk about German Protestants, German Catholics and so on. You lost your argument when you started saying Shi’a, Sunni. You didn’t mention what the religion of the Kurds are. And — and that is your — it seems as if you’re assuming that the only jihadists are Sunni. That’s really not true, because the first suicide bombers started with Hezbollah in Lebanon. That’s where the Palestinians learned it, that’s where the Sunnis learned it. And how — I just cannot believe how you assume it is the Shi’a, the group that is now dominating part of Iraq or southern Iraq, if they win, that we are going to have peace and democracy there.
ARRAF: Thank you.
Bing —
QUESTIONER: I just don’t see how that follows.
And the next question I have —
ARRAF: I’m sorry, but we’re going to have to stick to one question. Thanks so much.
Bing, how would respond to that?
WEST: Losing an argument is in the eyes of the beholder. What I tried to say is very simple, that the Sunnis were dominant for generations in Iraq. For whatever reason, the United States decided they were going to change that, and we went to Baghdad. We said by definition of a democracy the Shi’ites would end up being dominant because they’re 65 percent of the population. The people who are doing most of the killing are those who support the insurgents that are Sunni-based killing the Shi’ites in much larger numbers. I mean, that’s just the fact of how it is. And until the Sunnis as a whole accept that they will be a minority inside a democracy, they are going to continue to support the insurgents among them. And the way that that has changed is basically by force. And the mechanism of the force is called the Iraqi army. But the majority of the Iraqi army are Shi’ites.
So I was trying to be honest when I said if you send Iraqi Shi’ites with rifles into Sunni cities, you are occupying those cities. And that’s just a fact.
ARRAF: Thank you.
Next question? The head table? Mm-hmm.
QUESTIONER: Hi. I’m Fritz Link (sp). The — you have said something that is really distressing. I’d like you to expand on it a little bit. You said that, as you just did, that the Sunnis think that they are the bosses, and they think that because they have ruled for 75, or a hundred, or maybe even longer, even though they are a minority. And you also said that the Shi’a believe that the Sunnis are their bosses and have been their bosses, and that they fear that they will come back. And you made an allusion to the occupation of the South under Reconstruction, an occupation that used portions of the population that were in the majority, but within 10 years lost everything, and essentially the South went back to the way it was. Are we — are we sort of nourishing an impossible dream in this constitution of a Shi’ite government?
WEST: I — I do not know. I mean, I watch the battles. I mean, I — I come out of a military background, and I’m watching how we fight. When you go into that — but I do know that underlying that, the moral is to the physical as 4 to 1. And you watch the Sunnis in small groups, and they’re tough. And they believe that they’re much tougher than the Shi’ites. And they have a history to show that they are, because they dominated the Shi’ites.
Now, we come along, and we threw out the army, okay. But we did it. And now we’re starting all over again, and we’re trying to get Shi’ites, and we’re trying, really, to say to them, You’re as tough as these others. But, you know, you look back, and for all those years they were dominated by the others. Do they really believe in their hearts that they’re as tough? I can’t answer that, but I can say that if you gradually build up a large enough force, you can make for in quantity what you lack in quality. But I cannot answer your final question.
ARRAF: Robert, let me ask a related question from one of our national members, Nuri Yarman (sp) from Harvard University, who asks: Is it possible to have relative political stability in the Arab Middle East with the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq?
FISK: Well, it might be possible to say that if they were only in Iraq. But as an Iraqi pointed out to me in Baghdad in August, why are the Americans in Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan — and Iraq, of course — and in Jordan, and in Israel, and in Turkey, and in Egypt, and now Special Forces near Taman Rasset in Algeria, and in Yemen, and in Oman, and in Bahrain, and in Kuwait, and in the small part, still, of Saudi Arabia? There is a curtain of American forces from the Greek frontier right down to Somalia. As long as they’re there, there will not be an opportunity to create a new sense of modernism and justice in the Middle East. They’ve got to go, because it’s not their land. And if you had a similar number of Arab armies spread across the American continent all the way from the Panama Canal to northern Canada, I think you’d probably agree with that argument again.
Actually, the Iron Curtain which I’m talking about starts up in Greenland, Iceland, Britain, Germany, Italy, Greece, and joins up with a bit of Turkey and carries on down through the Middle East. What’s that Iron Curtain there for?
ARRAF: Thank you.
Let me take a question from the back, perhaps. The gentleman over there in the back.
QUESTIONER: Gary Rosen from Commentary magazine. Mr. Fisk, you’ve achieved a degree of immortality in the blogisphere, where these online commentators the verb “to fisk” now means to take a piece of journalism and to respond to it point-by-point for its ideological biases and factual unreliability. I’m wondering, do you — do you take pride in this coinage? Does it fill you with indignation? What are your thoughts on it? Is it justified?
FISK: I don’t waste my time with blogs, I don’t use the Internet, and I don’t use e-mail. I work.
Thank you. (Laughter.)
ARRAF: Well, that was concise. Thank you.
Over there.
QUESTIONER: I’m Claude Erbson (sp), Associated Press, retired. Nice to see you again. I’d like an answer from both of you, if I may, and I’m not trying to draw any moral comparisons. But during World War II the partisan and underground movements sprang up after the occupation by the Germans. I don’t think there were contingency plans in place beforehand. Do either of you believe that there were contingency plans of the old Iraqi army to regroup and fight again after the U.S. entered the country?
FISK: Bing?
WEST: Saddam’s regime was so fragmented and so riddled with its own paranoia that I doubt if anyone could say there was any real plan of any sort — do know that the only thing that happened in Fallujah was that since it was the largest major Sunni city outside of Baghdad, that over 10,000 Iraqi officers and intelligence apparatchiks fled to that city.
But the interesting thing is that for the first six months, the 3rd Infantry Division that was in the city, a battalion that was in Fallujah, thought things were going very well and did not recognize that beneath that, something else was building. I think if there had really been a plan as we would know a plan, things would have started earlier.
FISK: I’ll make this very quick and put two things. Five weeks before the invasion, bin Laden issued an audio tape which no one listened to or read. We journalists didn’t, military intelligence didn’t, the Pentagon didn’t, the British didn’t. In this audio tape he addressed what he called Muslims in Iraq. He was obviously talking about the largely Sunni community. He said that they should hide and store their weapons to fight the new crusaders.
He then said that just as the followers of the Prophet in the original Crusades had done no harm to themselves by allying themselves with the Persians — who were not Muslims then, they were Zoroastrians — so in this new battle against the crusades, he said, it is not a bad thing for the Muslims of Iraq to ally themselves with socialists. He meant Ba’athists. He said socialists remain infidels, but it is in our interest to ally ourselves with them.
So there was bin Laden five weeks before the invasion making the critical detonation between an army of the shadows and the Wal-Mart suicide bombers we see today, and we missed that critical bit of intelligence. We didn’t read it or listen to it because we are working on an ideological war; we were only looking for those bits of information that fitted what we wanted to see.
Right. Part two. I am in Ramadi three months before Saddam is captured, and a young man walks up to me and says, “My parents were shot at an American checkpoint, and last night the resistance came to my house, the Macallana (ph), and asked me to join, and I said no because,” he said, “as long as Saddam remains free, if we win against the Americans, we’ll get Saddam back. But,” he said, “if they capture Saddam or kill him, I’ll join the resistance.”
And you’ll remember the day Saddam was captured and Bremer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we got him!” and everyone thought that’s the end of the dead-enders, remnants, die-hards. Remember the phrases we used to use? And that was the moment the insurgency began to go off to the stratosphere.
I think there was planning beforehand, but not very coherently. There was certainly ideological planning for this resistance beforehand, but we only saw it take off once we’d captured Saddam. What would happen if we captured Osama bin Laden, I ask myself.
ARRAF: Thank you.
Person at the front here?
QUESTIONER: Samir Sumaidaie. I am the Iraqi ambassador at the U.N. I was, in fact, minister of Interior during April of 2004 when the operations in Fallujah took place.
I am disturbed by the black-and-white nature of both presentations, frankly. Mr. Fisk, a very learned and acknowledged journalist, has presented us with a vision which almost is immutable. He referred to the example of a gruesome dead body on the way from Kuwait to Basra to prove that war is awesome and should never be entered by any responsible politician. Yet the responsibility for that war could be laid squarely at the door of Saddam Hussein and his regime. And he had to be removed, and there is, I’m afraid, such a thing as a just war, as was the war in Germany and the Second World War. So certain theses here are doubtful.
I can tell you as an Iraqi that the majority of the Iraqi people were praying the week before the attack on Baghdad that Bush and Blair will not change their mind. They were extremely disappointed and let down in 1991 when Bush the elder decided not to go in. I have a different perspective, I’m afraid.
And the other distinguished speaker has presented us with everything in sort of very neat and tidy black-and-white, Sunni, Shi’a, Sunni dominated. I am, sir, from a Sunni family. Yet I fought Saddam and his regime for as long as I remember, from at least 20 years ago, was active in the opposition. Now I am proud to take part in building an Iraq not on sectarian basis, as you present us, but hopefully, on a basis that will move gradually towards the releasing of the tensions and the reactions to the polarizations that took place.
I think there is reality which, admittedly, a lot of — both presentations have contributed to, but it’s somewhere in the middle. You have left a huge gap between you, and that gap has to be filled in in concrete terms by the Iraqi people, both Sunni and Shi’a.
Don’t you agree with that? Thank you.
ARRAF: Thank you so much.
FISK: Okay. Mr. Ambassador, I think you’re right on many grounds. I also think — and I think you’ll share my view — there will not be a civil war in Iraq. There never has been a civil war in Iraq.
Just a tiny little cameo. I went to the funeral of a Sunni Muslim doctor, almost certainly shot by a Shi’ite gang because he opposed the building of a new mosque at the end of his road where his home was. He was shot in a surgery. After the funeral, I came back and sat next to his brother at the funeral feast on the floor of the home of the dead man.
And I said to the doctor’s brother, “Will there be a civil war?” And he said — (shouting) — “Why do you Westerners keep talking about civil war?!” He said, “We’re not a sectarian society, we’re a tribal society. We intermarry. My wife is a Shi’ite. Do you now want me to kill my wife?!” This is a real Iraqi talking. You’re a real Iraqi, I know, Mr. Ambassador — (laughter) — but this is a guy out there in the streets who’s in danger, which you’re not at the U.N. These people are all in danger every night and day of their lives. And I don’t believe there will be a civil war.
But as long as we’re talking about flooding Sunni cities with Shi’ite soldiers who will not behave properly, we will burn a civil war into Iraq.
WEST: Mr. Ambassador, if you were the minister of Interior in April, I believed then, I believe now, it was wrong to stop that attack once you get an attack going. I look at things from a battlefield perspective. The politics are terrific, God bless the politics, and I hope they win, and then you wouldn’t need the Marines. But the Marines are in the hard cities, and those hard cities are in Anbar. And the Marines are sent out with a mission, and that mission is to engage with the insurgents and to beat them by force, which means killing them. And if more of the Sunnis come over so that they and the Shi’ites together are fighting the war against the insurgents, then we won’t need the United States Marines there, and I would praise that day.
ARRAF: We only, unfortunately, have about five minutes left. And I’m so sorry, we (waited so long ?) to take these questions, but I’m told I have to be ruthless in enforcing the time limit. So if I could, I’d just like to ask for some brief final comments.
And first of all, I would like to thank Bing West and Robert Fisk for entertaining our questions. And I’d like to thank the Iraqi ambassador — thank you, Mr. Ambassador — and everyone else for those very thought-provoking questions.
If you could very briefly in the next five minutes give us your final comments. And one of the things is, do either of you — because as you pointed out, you’re almost polar opposites, and there must be some things you agree on. This whole issue has become so politicized that it’s almost difficult to have a legitimate discussion. Is there anything that either of you agree with from the other that you’ve heard so far?
FISK: Bing, I’ll leave the first one to you, I think. (Laughter.)
WEST: We can have a lot of arguments about “coulda, shoulda, woulda” and where we got to, but I start with, where are we today? And no good comes of quitting. And I believe that the enemy is dominated by the jihadists who go far beyond Iraq, and we must prevail against them. And my definition of prevailing is the same as the ambassador’s. It is that the Iraqis will take care of this and we are buying the time for the Iraqis to get stood up to do that. And at that particular time, you see the American and British forces withdraw.
To be honest with you, I don’t see that happening for the next couple of years. And I do see that there will be residual forces in redoubts, something like we have in Kuwait and other places, for the foreseeable future. And I do recognize that as a nation, we do tend to be very critical of ourselves. And that’s good, and one can take any position on the war. But I do hope that — and that’s why I try in my book to spend so much time just explaining the actual nature of the fighting, so that we never forget what we’re asking that 18- or 19- or 20-year old Marine to be doing out there and that we never forget to praise his valor in fighting these insurgents.
FISK: I think it’s up to the Iraqi insurgents to deal with the jihadists, but first we must find a way of getting out, because clearly we are not wanted there. There are some people, people in the government, people like the ambassador, who understandably would want a continuation, for the present, I assume, of Western forces in Iraq. But I do believe that the insurgency will come to an end when there is no more forces to insurge against. I think that then we have a real political process starts in Iraq involving some who’ve been democratically elected, involving a religious leadership. I’m afraid I’m — I’ve — perhaps it’s 30 years watching wars — but I’ve come to the conclusion that valor is not a guarantee of victory, or as Lawrence of Arabia said in 1921 with the British war, “Merit is not a condition of independence.” But we must leave and as soon as possible for the sake of Iraqis as well as ourselves.
ARRAF: We have about a minute and a half left. In one sentence could you describe what is victory for the United States here?
WEST: Victory is an Iraq that is democratic, that can look after its own security problems, stand on its own feet, and not require Americans to be engaged in the combat.
ARRAF: Robert?
FISK: Victory for the Americans?
ARRAF: And Britain.
FISK: Ah, yes, Britain. (Laughter.) I think making our prime minister accountable to his people would be a great victory, because he’s led us into the folly of war against what most British people believe should have happened. I pretty much believe the same thing applies in the United States. I think that one thing that this war has done, which is deeply tragic, it has emphasized a failing in the democratic process. More and more of my letters in my mailbag are — more than half of them are coming from the United States, the rest from Britain — are emphasizing the difficulty of being a person who wants to believe in the democratic process, sends their congressman or their member of parliament to seats of power, and then finds that they no longer represent them when they reach the seat of power. That’s a major problem in your country, and it’s a major problem in mine.
ARRAF: Thank you so much. Thank you everybody. That concludes this session. (Applause.)
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