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Council on Foreign Relations
New York, N.Y.
RICHARD HAASS: Let’s get started if we might. Good afternoon. Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations. One of two items of housekeeping before we get onto the event; this is on the record, by the way. And not only is it on the record for those in the room and those who will read about it on cfr.org, but we’re also being joined by some 70-80 Council members around the country, thanks to the modern technology, almost modern technology, of teleconferencing.
The subject today could not be timed better. It is April 2005, roughly exactly to the month two years since the statue of Saddam in Firdos Square came down. And it’s three months tomorrow to the day since the elections in Iraq. A number of statistics also help add to the background. Roughly 1,500 U.S. soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq since May 1, which was the end of the major military operations. More than 1,560 U.S. soldiers have lost their lives overall. More than 12,000 casualties—still over 140,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
On the economic side, over 2,000 projects have been green-lighted or started to some extent in the lifespan of the so-called Project and Contracting Office. Of these more than 2,000 projects, less than 350 have actually been completed, and less than $2 billion of work is in place out of more than $18 billion in resources that has been allocated by the U.S. government. Oil production is just over two million barrels a day, which is down from a year ago slightly, and down considerably from pre-war levels, which [was] closer to almost three million barrels a day. Electricity production is slightly above where it was a year ago, but slightly below pre-war levels. Unemployment rates, while hard to measure, are somewhere in the 30 [percent] to 40 percent range, mostly recently slightly down, perhaps from where they were a year ago, and considerably down, though, from where they were two years ago. One interesting positive statistic: Internet subscribers estimated at being at just over 10,000 before the war, close to 150,000 now. One could go on, but obviously a mixed picture.
Our speaker today, fairly well known to this group, Mr. Leslie Gelb, not Ambassador Gelb, however. He’s particularly well qualified to address the topic, having spent 10 days in Iraq. He’s an expert by Council standards. [Laughter] Les has emerged, whether you agree with him or not, as an important voice in the Iraq debate. And I would even go so far as to say he’s been an important voice in the American foreign-policy debate, not simply in his two-year tenure as president emeritus, but over the last four decades.
As I got ready for tonight, I took a poll of members of the Council. And there was a consensus that Les has been really one of the 14 best presidents of the Council on Foreign Relations in our history. And I mentioned this to [Council Chairman] Pete [Peterson] before the meeting, and Pete said that was a bit unfair, that I hadn’t gone far enough, and wanted me to state that he thought he was one of the two best presidents during Pete’s time as chairman. [Laughter]
It’s a pleasure on every level, personally and professional, to welcome you. I was awfully lucky in my choice of predecessors. Indeed, I find it hard to imagine how I could have done better to have inherited this wonderful organization and the wonderful shape that it was in. The only problem is fulfilling or living up to the inheritance is at times tough. It’s great, though, having Les back here. Les, as part of his gesture to me, he basically said he was going to be scarce for a while, and he thought he should give me some space, which I appreciated. But in some ways, his coming back here tonight I feel, and I hope he feels, marks the end of this self-imposed purgatory. And I hope that we see more of Les, whether from the platform or from the audience, from here on in. Because he is part of, as much as anyone else in this room, or anyone else, part of this organization.
What he’s going to do tonight, he tells me, is talk for about 20, 25 minutes, give or take, 30 to 35 minutes? He’s going to talk for as long as it takes about his impressions of Iraq. And then depending on how long he talks, I will have time for maybe one or two questions, and then if not, we’ll also reserve and preserve the rest of the time for your questions. Again, it’s on the record. Mr. Gelb, the floor is yours. [Applause]
LESLIE GELB: As Richard said, I wanted to give him the pleasure of my absence for two years. And he’s taken very good advantage of it. I couldn’t have left the place in better hands. He’s done a terrific job. Sitting in front of me is my partner and friend here for 10 years. And every time I think of those terrific 10 years for me, I think of Pete. I think of the Pete microphone, the Pete podium, the Peterson hall, the Peterson building. My Peterson share of [inaudible]. I’ve not lost the connection to Pete Peterson, and he’s not lost the connection to this place, which is one of the reasons why it remains so terrific.
I’ve had a strange, moving, energizing experience, and the most so of my life. I went to Mars and they brought in the Iraqis to see me. [Laughter] What do I mean? We flew in from Jordan. Fouad Ajami [director of Middle East studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University] was with me, by the way. So I was out there for a debate in Qatar, which he lost by a vote of the audience, 73 percent to 27 percent. He was very proud of this. We flew in from Jordan, and glided into Baghdad airport. Unlike going into Sarajevo in 1992 in a C-130, where the situation was so dangerous that the planes flew over the airport and then landed at 90 degrees, here we glided in. They must have felt very safe. It was very reassuring to me.
You come out of the plane, there weren’t many passengers, and you find yourself in the midst of American soldiers waiting to be transported either out of the country or back to duty. And you talk to them. In fact, wherever you go in Iraq, you talk to Americans. And when you get a chance and they’re brought to you, you talk to Iraqis. And it became very clear one of the ways that these Americans—all sizes, shapes, forms, backgrounds—were there for the best of reasons. And right away you felt you wanted this to turn out well for them, and for the Iraqis, especially, as well.
Then the Special Forces people who take care of you, the contact personnel, come and collect you, and they bring you to a Black Hawk helicopter. You put on a 30-pound flak jacket and a helmet, and you’re loaded in. The Black Hawk flies low from the Baghdad International Airport into Baghdad. It flies about 100 feet off the ground at about 200 miles an hour. And the reason they fly low is that it’s harder for the bad guys to see them coming. They’re high in the air, it’s about some miles away, and get ready to fire. But they fly low, they zip along the ground. And you see Baghdad unfolding before you, a low-slung city, one and two-story homes, very few business offices, high rises. The houses fading into the desert.
And then the helicopter flutters, and you’re on Mars. You land in the Green Zone. The Green Zone is in the heart of Baghdad. That’s where Americans who make policy on Iraq on a day-to-day basis live and work. It’s Mars. We get off the helicopter, and whenever you’re not in the palace grounds, the innermost circle of the Green Zone, you’re wearing the flak jacket and helmet. You get off the helicopter onto what became the usual three-car convoy, these SUVs [sport utility vehicles] that have been doubled in weight for armored protection. And then you begin to crawl toward the inner sanctum of Mars, toward the inner sanctum of the Green Zone.
First checkpoint, a second checkpoint, each look at a different part of the vehicle, look at your credentials more closely. By the time you get to the third checkpoint, and it’s four-mile by four-mile extent, the Ghurkas are there. And the Ghurkas only understand, “Show me this document, show me that document. Where is your export pass?” They know no other English. They make no compromises. The Marines, the Army, all those guys make compromises. The Ghurkas make none. And of course you have your first experience at that point with the Army, which is, you can’t get past this last checkpoint into the palace grounds, inside the Green Zone, without a pass. And you can’t get the pass unless you’re inside the Green Zone.
But somehow they figure it out. Meantime, we were negotiating, I was negotiating with our Special Force protector. And I said, “If on this trip we get surrounded by the bad guys, plan B is to give up Dr. Ajami.” [Laughter] And they said, “We don’t want to get between you two doctors.” And I said, “It’s not getting between the two doctors, it’s plan B.” Fouad and I argued our way through Iraq.
I say we went to Mars, and the Iraqis were brought in to see us. The procurers for the State Department [inaudible] the guests of the State Department with a program initiated really six months ago by [former U.S. ambassador to Iraq and current Director of National Intelligence] John Negroponte, but he never had the chance to carry it out. He left. I was invited back then, and accepted now.
And they set up the most incredible trip imaginable. We saw a good chunk of the National Assembly, most of the leadership of the Iraqi people, leaders of provisional councils, city councils. We went from Baghdad to Kirkuk by helicopter, from Kirkuk by motor convoy [to] Sulaymaniya in Kurdistan, and then on another day motor convoy to Erbil in Kurdistan. We saw well over 150 Iraqi leaders, maybe upwards of 200, and we saw all the American leaders. I couldn’t have gotten a better sense of information from the people who had the information.
I came away from there feeling I didn’t know what was going on, and they didn’t know what was going on, either. We were locked in Mars, and everyone there was locked in Mars: the Americans, the Iraqi leaders. And the information seeped in through agents, through incidents, to the occasional reporter who had risked his or her life to actually go out in the countryside. But it was all the information that seeped in to this Green Zone, Mars, four miles by four miles, in which not only Americans lived and worked, but the Iraqi leaders lived and worked. They all live there, on Mars, in the Green Zone.
We—first night there we had dinner with the active ambassador, Jim Jeffrey—he was chosen by John Negroponte; and [General] George Casey, the commander of all U.S. forces, coalition forces; and [Lieutenant General] Dave Petraeus, who is the three-star in charge of training. And from that point on you could see that our people there have their heads screwed on right, they’re good people, good, strong people. Jim Jeffrey is a career Foreign Service officer, background in Europe, but who had learned about Iraq. He learned about it inside that Green Zone. But he knew the history of the place, and he knew the Iraqi leaders. He’d made a real effort.
General Casey, four-star, who was seeing his first year in combat. He had been one of the best staff officers the Army had ever produced, and he was now out there to try to organize the overall military effort. A Gary Cooper kind of personality. He said very little. I don’t think I ever heard him utter more than two sentences at any one time. General Petraeus, lieutenant general, Eagle Scout, the best of the can-do military, with the can-do job, creating an Iraqi armed force. And as I said, their heads were screwed on right. They were not talking about corners, turns, on the road to victory. They were talking about a long, hard pull in that country.
It was interesting to see then and thereafter the gap really between those who work there, who were really careful of every word they uttered of prediction or analysis, and the expansive, sometimes, I think, totally unrealistic optimism you hear from people back in Washington. But it doesn’t come from these people.
Now, who are we out there? Who are we? Who are they? What’s going on? And what do we do about it? I’m going to give you a kaleidoscope of a report, because I realize now that I’m talking about this for the first time in any detail in the weeks since I’ve been back. And I could talk forever. My head is just filled with information—not understanding, information.
Who are we out there? You go into the cafeteria in the palace. The palace is one of the ugliest buildings in creation. I wish I had been one of the contractors. I wouldn’t have to have taken this job, and become one of the 14 best presidents in its history. The palace is a huge, ugly place in which some 4,000 Americans, civilian and military, work. And they work 16, 18 hour days, because there is nothing else to do, and there is that much work to do. And when you go into the cafeteria in the palace’s sprawling, open reception rooms, it’s almost—it seems as if there’s about half a mile of cafeteria, one way and the other. Wherever you sit down you can be joined by a private, a general, a contractor, an Iraqi, or whoever. It is the most democratic experience you can imagine.
One of the early meals, I sat down at the table with an Army major. His name is [inaudible]. And he was reading Janet Wallace’s book on Gertrude Bell [who played a major role in creating modern Iraq]. And he wanted to talk to somebody about this book. He couldn’t find any of his fellow army officers who wanted to talk about Gertrude Bell. And he starts talking about Gertrude Bell.
On my other side sits down this young man, extremely articulate, and he starts bitching about the fact that he’s a politician back in Maryland, and he sent in this speech to be read on one of the Maryland celebratory days, and the Army wouldn’t let the speech be read, even though it was totally nonpolitical. They wouldn’t let it be read. So I said, “Well, what were you back in Maryland?” He said, “I was the majority leader, the Democratic majority leader, in the Maryland House of Delegates.” And sitting across from him was a retired judge from Idaho and so forth and so on. Incredible democratic experience.
And where they talk very freely to one another there, and where they tell you they’re there, for the most part, not to turn Iraq into a democracy. They’ve thought about it. They think that is an over-reach from what they’ve seen. But they want to make it a better place, a better and safer place. They want to do good for the Iraqi people. There is no bitching from them about being there. The Americans are also people like Mario Fernandez and Robbie Gonzales, two political officers I met in Kirkuk, both from Texas. And I asked Mario Fernandez: “Why are you here?” And he says, “There’s no doubt in my mind why I’m here. I’m from a little town in West Texas. The public sent me to college. The public sent me to law school. I got a terrific job in the Department of Labor in Washington. My wife and I bought a home. So when this war started, this to me was an opportunity to give something back.” And he said, “You may be surprised that there is a disproportionate number of Hispanics who have volunteered for service here in Iraq because they want to give something back.” I saw it all over the place. That’s who we all are there.
Who are they? Who are the Iraqis? The leadership group that I met—and I guess we met something like 75 percent of the senior leaders, ministers, National Assembly members—they’re good. And I wouldn’t wax so eloquent as to compare them with James Madison or Ben Franklin, but they’re good. They’re a good leadership group. And they know how to do politics. And they take a joy in the public.
The new speaker of the National Assembly [Hajim al-Hassani] is a very Tip O’Neill-like figure [former Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives]. Spent 25 years in the United States, taught economics at the University of Connecticut, has scored, went out to Los Angeles and failed in business, then succeeded in business. Then like a good Kurd, seeing a chance for something to happen in Kurdistan, he came back. He was elected the speaker there. And just the kind of personality that, Kurd or no Kurd, they wanted him as a leader in the National Assembly. And he was very clear-eyed about what he was there to do. He was one of the few people I met who was clearly part of the—one of the ethnic religious groups, the Kurds, who saw his first obligation to keep the nation from totally splitting apart.
We spent the better part of a day in the National Assembly. It was one of the most thrilling experiences of my life, thrilling because of the politicking that they did with such enthusiasm, and thrilling because they knew what a high mountain they had to climb to make this all work, and they were at it, 275 members. Most of them were in the delegates’ lounge. Of the 275, 87 were women delegates, the highest percentage of women in any parliament anywhere. And these women were full political beings. They were going across ethnic and religious lines to form a women’s bloc, and they were the most energetic of all the people in this delegates’ lounge. Because it’s very hard to get the Shia women together with the Sunni Arab women together with the Kurd women, the secular with the religious. But they were determined to do it. They understood that whatever is going to happen to this country, their chances of leading a decent life and avoiding the oppression of women throughout the Arab world, was going to depend on how good the politics is. And that was their moment.
One of the women, heavily cloaked and covered, from the Basra area, Shia, made a mistake, reaching out to my hand to shake hands, which is what you do with everybody there. And she cupped her hand inside her sleeve, and shook my hand with her sleeve. She was going to shake it; she wasn’t going to touch it. Lots of Westernized women in business suits, very eager to give you their email address, very eager to connect because they sense their survival is at stake down the line, and they were creating a lifeline. They were reaching out through this email, they wanted connections outside.
Rolling through the delegates’ lounge was a man who caught everyone’s attention—6’3“, 6’4”, in flowing Shia robes of a great shape. He was pointed out to me as the Robin Hood of the marshes, the man Saddam pursued and pursued, and never captured. And he came over to talk about the rebirth of the marshes. They had broken down the dams that Saddam had built. The dream had been to drain the marshes. And now life is coming back. The fish are no longer this size, they’re this size, but the fishermen are there to collect them. And the Robin Hood of the marshes feels very good about it.
[Deputy Prime Minister and Acting Minister of Oil] Ahmed Chalabi, the man who has caused so much talk here in the United States for what he may or may have done with Iranians, what he may or may not have done in horn-swaggling President Bush about weapons of mass destruction. Sitting there, holding court, having more people come over to him for chatter and back-slapping than any of the other delegates. A Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT, a man who absolutely relishes politics, and has the money and the personality to count in the future of that country.
But here they were, 275 delegates, playing politics, trying to form a nation. It was even starker, more than identity, when you went north up to the Kurdish land. It was astonishing to me to see what they’ve done there in 14 years under the protection of the American umbrella. They have a thriving democracy and a thriving free-market economy. There is building going on all over the place. There are newspapers with contending points of view. They’ve made themselves the only island of real democracy in that whole part of the world, an extraordinary achievement. And they’re feeling their oats about it.
In Kirkuk, where they had been the bottom of the political barrel, almost forever, since they ceased being the soldiers of the Ottoman Empire, they are now pushing the others around, and the others don’t like it, but the Kurds like it a lot. They are showing their muscle, they are feeling the power that comes from success.
We even met members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Sinn Fein of the Sunni Arabs [inaudible]. And they were, how shall I put it, they were flat-earth people. And the leaders had this way of expressing themselves. He said, “Well, what I’m about to say is only my opinion, and I might be wrong, but the earth is flat. I could be wrong about it, but that’s what I think.” He had everything crystallized, but interestingly, very interestingly, no more talk about immediate American withdrawal. It was the hallmark of what the Sunni Arab leadership, the Muslim Brotherhood, had to say. But there was none of that. What he was saying is, “Hey, we want some American withdrawal, American forces withdraw from the cities, reconstruction, so forth”—very different line. But he says, “You know, the thing you have to worry about, the thing that is really wrong with American policy, is George Bush is an evangelical Christian. And he is in a league with the Israeli Zionists. And the plan is to divide and conquer the Arab world. That’s what’s really [inaudible]. You know that. And yet as I say, primarily, the earth is flat.” [Laughter]
They—Iraqis, and I use the term advisedly—have enormous political skills. I met people there who would be first-class operators in this country. But at base, most of them do not consider themselves Iraqis. A question I asked in every conversation, every conversation, “What are you?” The elite in Baghdad would say, “I’m a Shia and an Iraqi,” “I’m an Arab Sunni and an Iraqi.” One guy in the Foreign Ministry, when we spent the morning in the Foreign Ministry, said, “Who am I? You know, you talk about a federal Iraq. Who am I? My mother was a Shia, my father was a Sunni, half Kurd, half Arab. Who am I? I am an Iraqi.”
At least they consider themselves Iraqis. The Foreign Ministry people consider themselves Iraqis. You ask the others, the Shia, the Sunni Arabs, the Kurds, the secular Kurds, the religious Kurds, but they’re Kurds first and foremost. The tribal pull is enormous. Some would say, “I’m a Kurd and I’m an Iraqi,” “I’m a Sunni Arab and I’m an Iraqi,” but the ethnic religious tribal affiliation came in first. And it was interesting to me, as you know, more than a year-and-a-half ago I was saying Iraq ought to in effect be divided into three states like our original country, as a federation or a confederation, with a central government with limited powers.
A third of these leaders have been in that place for some time themselves. This is what they talk about is the only viable solution. We’ll talk more about that later. But I was fully prepared, given the reaction to the articles that I wrote on that, to hear that I was wrong. I assumed that our Middle Eastern experts actually knew something. But I don’t know what country they’ve been in. It wasn’t Iraq.
Essentially, Iraqis gave me some hope, given their skills, given their ability to make—their willingness to make deals. Now what’s going on in that place? Fully [inaudible]. If you look at the data, and Richard gave you some of that data in his 30-minute introduction of me, the electricity is up, oil production is up, all compared to last year, or two years ago, but still well below what it was under Saddam—still well below what it was under Saddam. The lives of most of these people in most of the country [are] still awful. Unbearable. The military situation—that doesn’t count the Kurds. The Kurds, as I say, are in the midst of real economic prosperity, building all over the place. In fact, in Sulaymaniya, as we’re driving around the city, we could actually drive around the city, there was a place that looked vaguely familiar. And as we approached it, I could read its name: McDonald’s. I’m not kidding. This is their version, the Kurdish version, of the rip-off. And McDonald’s, of course has been sued, but it’s still there making bad hamburgers.
The administration likes to say that the security situation in Iraq is really pretty good overall, that it’s quiet in the north—and it is in the land of the Kurds. And it’s quiet in most of the south in the land of the Shias, and it is. And they say, the trouble is only in the middle 20 percent of the country, to which all you have to do is to hear from the people who live there what that middle 20 percent means. The middle 20 percent is somewhere between 35 and 40 percent of the overall population. The middle of Iraq is where most of the pipelines go through. The middle of Iraq is where Baghdad is—is where Baghdad is.
The middle makes its way up north with the terrorism into cities like Kirkuk. Kirkuk is as bad as Baghdad. Mosul, north and east, as bad as Baghdad. The middle makes its way south into villages where Shia and Sunni both live, and it’s hell there as well. It’s not just 20 percent, as if it’s isolated from the rest of the country; it is 20 percent of the territory in the belly of the country. And it’s hard to imagine the place coming to peace with terror in that belly of that country.
Getting the information is all from the people who venture outside Mars, outside the Green Zone, and you tend to get statistical abstractions. It’s very hard to know how people are living because none of the Iraqi leaders go there, and Americans only go there with 25 tanks. You don’t go there and see how people are living. You don’t interview them.
Basic intelligence is in very short supply. There is a guy there working for the CIA whose brother is [inaudible]. And he himself is one of the great Arab linguists in our country, having translated one of the greatest Arab works of poetry. And he can lay his hands on any one of the newspapers, any one of the over 200 daily and weekly newspapers—over 200—and read them and understand them, and still not be confident he knows what’s going on. We’re not even sure how many Sunni Arabs there are, how many Shiite Arabs there are, how many Kurds there are, how many Turkmen in Kirkuk. They’re sure. You go up to Kirkuk and talk to people on the provincial council, you say, “How many Turkmen?” “Thirty, 40 percent, we are.” “How many Sunni Arabs?” “Well, we’re 60 to 70 percent.” “How many Kurds?” “We’re 90 percent.” [Laughter] Everywhere we went, there was roughly 270 percent. [Laughter] We can’t go and check this. The information seeps in, and you wonder [about] its reliability, you wonder if you really know what’s going on. Because, essentially, what you have are the statistics. It reminds me so of the Vietnam days.
What about the ability of the Iraqis to take over their own security, to stand in for the incredible American soldiers who are there, who really know what they are doing? Let me tell you what I heard. You’ll see what you think. We now have trained about 154,371 Iraqi troops. We keep very good track of this. The training for a border guard is three weeks. The training for the regular Iraqi army is five weeks. The training for an Iraqi [laughter]--I know you’re laughing. I had all I can do to keep a straight face. The training for an Iraqi commando, 12 weeks.
If you ask any Iraqi leader, they will tell you these people can’t fight. They just aren’t trained. And yet we’re cranking them out like rabbits. I’m going to leave the names out of here because I really do admire the people involved, and I know what political pressure is. I said, “Well, where is all this heading?” And no kidding, he said to me, “A 10-division Iraqi armed force.” And I lost it at that point, the only time in the whole trip I just lost it. I said, “Ten divisions! The United States Army has 10 divisions!” And he said, “And two mechanized divisions.” I said, “We have two mechanized divisions! You’re going to create an Iraqi army as big as the American Army? Are you nuts?” And then the next PowerPoint chart comes up: “Well, we need a division here and we need a division here and we need a division”—it became very apparent to me that these 10 divisions were to fight some future war against Iran. It had nothing to do—nothing to do—with taking that country over from us and fighting the insurgents. It made no sense to me. It was the single-most disturbing conversation I had because our ability to turn over responsibility to them in a phased and responsible way and leave as we should at some point hinges so directly on that.
What do we do about all this? I said I didn’t know how long I was going to talk. Stuff is just in my head and pouring out. What do we do about it? You know, I came back neither an optimist nor a pessimist, but came back very skeptical. These people, the leadership, have the skills to do it, and we want to help them do it. But the mountain is so high to climb, it’s so hard to put it all together. The corruption just weighs everything down that you try to do. The wall that exists between Americans and almost every foreign culture, despite the nobility of so many of our people there, prevents us from connecting. It’s hard not to be skeptical.
I would recommend just two things. Not any fundamental change in policy, but two things. One is, we’ve gone from the [former Iraq administrator Paul] Jerry Bremer policy of telling the Iraqis every single thing to do—what political deals to make, and when to clean their ears—to the John Negroponte policy of telling them nothing at all. And neither makes any sense. They want to make deals, the Iraqi leaders. We need to help facilitate those deals with economic goodies and with political pressure. And we’ve got to make that adjustment and make it very quickly. They’ve been at the business of even trying to make a government, let alone drawing up a constitution, for two months now without success because we’re totally hands off. I’m not saying tell them what to do; I’m saying help them do what they want to do.
Second thing we have to do is to scale way back the number of forces we’re training to half, and train them, make them good soldiers so that they can responsibly replace ours. In the many conversations we had, I would tell them, sort of uncharacteristically for me, something I didn’t quite believe. I said, “Don’t worry about us; we’re not going to run out on you.” But I’m worried about running out. I’m worried about running out on them, on our people’s sacrifice, our interests in the area. And we’ve got to plan more for the next two years than for the next five. We’ve got to help them take care of themselves just in case we don’t see it through or it becomes unwise to see it through
And on the 11th day, we left the country and flew back to Jordan. And when we landed in Jordan, I was reminded of a conversation I had with the man who picked me up 12 or 13 days beforehand. He worked at the embassy and got me through customs. And when we started the drive in to the hotel 13 days before, I said to him, “How long is it to the hotel?” And he said to me, “A half hour driving at this time of night, a day walking.” A smile crossed his face. He was setting the boundaries between his world and our world. He was telling me Arab time and American time. I was going back from Mars to Pluto. We’re on Pluto. That’s how far we are from the reality that even I didn’t see in the incredibly long 10 days that I spent there.
Congressional delegations go for half a day. Most Americans are in and out of there in two days, sleeping in Kuwait each night. And I had over 150 conversations with them. I spoke to all of our people. And I still didn’t know what’s going on. And from this distance, I don’t think we gain perspective. I think we lose even the sanity and the realism of our very good people there. Thank you for indulging me. [Applause]
HAASS: Let me just ask one or two questions, then we’ll open it up, Les, if I may. You had written a lot about Iraq before you went. Is there anything that you saw there/heard there that you basically said, if I had to write it again I’d do differently? Were there any areas that you could point to where you really changed your thinking?
GELB: I think it changed my thinking about the quality of the Iraqis and how much I would leave in their hands. I was very impressed with them. I had, from the statistics and anecdotes that seep into the Green Zone, something that cut away at some of my pessimism, and believe that if a number of things were done right we had a decent chance at making this work. In the basic proposal I made for a highly decentralized Iraq with a weak central government, I was more than confirmed in my guesswork, based on Iraqi history and common-sense politics. It surprised me.
HAASS: In order for that proposal to work, it doesn’t simply have to reflect what I call the desire of the Kurds, in particular, for tremendous autonomy; it also has to reflect the willingness of the Shia majority to essentially decentralize things to that extent. Do you sense, that if we ever do get a government there, as we begin the constitutional process—in your talks in particular with the Shia political leaders, did you sense a willingness to be specific to amend the Transitional Administrative Law in ways that really would shift the power towards the periphery?
GELB: There are some Shia who still want to have a strong central government in Baghdad run by them, and [Prime Minister Ibrahim] Jaafari is, or may be, one of them. And Jalal Talabani, the president of Iraq, who I spoke to on several occasions, said about Jaafari, he seems to be a moderate. And then he allowed as he was speaking for the peanut gallery.
So there are people like Jaafari, who do still imagine holding sway not only over the Sunnis in the center, but the Kurds. It’s hard for us to know because the American papers don’t cover a lot of this, but one of the things they told me out there was that there is a major movement based in Basra—Basra—for a regional government comparable to Kurdistan. And in fact, it is the single-most powerful movement in the Basra province and the neighboring provinces. And there’s a lot of published documents on this which I’d be happy to give you, given your skepticism.
HAASS: [Laughter] Let me ask one question from a national member, from Barbara Crossette, about what role you see for the U.N. in Iraq. You talked a little bit about the American role. What about the U.N. and the international role more generally?
GELB: Can Barbara hear us?
HAASS: Yes, sir.
GELB: Hello, Barbara. A former colleague of mine at the New York Times. The U.N. has almost no role to play in the foreseeable future there. It’s too dangerous. They won’t come, and we can’t protect them. I wish they would come. I wish we would be able to protect them because they would be better received than Americans in doing a lot of things.
You know, it’s interesting. You know, I didn’t write this all out, but I’ve really got to dictate almost every day that happened. But one of the things that struck me in my conversations with the Iraqis, which—it was how they were angry and frustrated about us, but they hated the terrorists. They hated them. I saw no sympathy, even from the Muslim Brotherhood people. These terrorists are wrecking all their lives. That’s another thing, by the way, that surprised me and gave me a sense that maybe there is a chance of doing it the right way. But for the U.N. to come in there at this point, no. Our allies, they like to train the Iraqis in Jordan or in Venus. It’s all right if we go to Venus to train them. But they’re not going to help us.
HAASS: Well, Les, just to make sure I understand, when you say the Iraqis hate the terrorists, did Iraqis distinguish between, if you will, “homegrown” Sunni terrorists, quote/unquote, and the [terrorist leader Abu Musab] Zarqawi types from the outside?
GELB: Yeah, they sure did, and the gangsters. They all said there were these three groups. But most of them there would hasten to add they had no idea how many of each there were, who was doing what exactly, how much coordination there was among them—although they assume, given some of the activities, there has to be coordination. They said one thing that was clear: there is no shortage whatsoever of money and arms. We’ve confiscated an enormous amount of money and arms there, and they say that it never stops flowing in. But they have a very weak feel for the real nature of the—what some people call the insurgency; what I call gangsterism and terrorism.
HAASS: Let’s open it up. Again, if people could keep their questions short, wait for a microphone, and we’ll do it, sure.
QUESTIONER: Thank you. My name is Glen Lewy from Hudson Ventures.
GELB: Hi, Glen.
QUESTIONER: Hi. How are you, Les? If Fouad Ajami were here tonight instead of you, what would he say that’s different from the report you just gave?
GELB: He’d be much more optimistic. And one of the things we argued about was how well things were going in Iraq, and more so, how things were going in the rest of the Middle East. Fouad, whom I adore—he’s one of my closest friends, and he is one of the great Middle East scholars and a rock star there, an absolute rock star in that country because he’s been saying get rid of Saddam by hook, crook, or force forever, and they love him there. And just before we arrived, he was in this debate in Qatar with one of these pan-Arab nationalists, debating whether there is the spark of democracy all throughout the region, with Fouad taking the yes and this other guy taking the no. As I told you, the other guy got 73 percent of the audience, Fouad 27 [percent].
When we were coming down the elevator in the hotel in Amman on the way home, there were these two young Jordanians in the elevator whispering to each other. And one said to the other, “Isn’t that the guy who got creamed in Qatar?” [Laughter] And Fouad very proudly says, “Yes, but I had expected to lose by more.” [Laughter]
We had lots of arguments about this. He is very optimistic about what’s happening in the region. I’m not. That’s a whole other story. And he likes to think that the—that the Iraqis, the different groups, have a much better chance of making this work than I. But there our differences, I’m not even sure about them at this point. You know, I guess he’s skeptical, but more optimistic than I am, something like that.
HAASS: Mr. Janklow?
QUESTIONER: Mort Janklow, Janklow and [inaudible]. I’m curious about one thing. You seem to be laying off on the American military failures in the training of Iraqi troops, and citing for example the five-week period to train a soldier. Traditionally in the American Army, the infantry training period is eight weeks. We send guys into combat directly from an eight-week training program. Now does this indicate that the last three weeks are just critical, or are you really thinking that there is something endemic about the ability of the Iraqis or the willingness of the Iraqi soldiers, the newly trained soldiers, to actually take up their defense?
GELB: Well, there are people here who may know the training periods better than I. But in World War II, I think you’re right. In subsequent wars, we weren’t sending people into combat with that much training, and there was follow-on training after they did their basic training.
Here, the Iraqis passed from our training command to their own commands, and I don’t think there’s much training that occurs. And yes, I would say in a situation where you’re getting volunteers into the armed forces, where it’s very hard to vet them, whether they’re Baathists, former Republican Guard people, who knows what, that you’ve got to have a much more stringent, lengthier operation. And yes, you’ve got to do a much better job of training them, especially where the forces are integrated, where you have Sunni, Shia and a few Kurds in the package. It requires much more training. And I think you’ve got to pair them with American troops in combat in the beginning. Where that has been done, the performance has been better. Where it hasn’t been done, the performance has been quite poor.
Now, mind you, I wasn’t knocking our military guys. I was frustrated at the pressure I believe they are under. I don’t know this for a fact; I’m just surmising it based on my life [laughter]--the pressure that they’re under to turn out as many Iraqi armed forces as quickly as possible. The Iraqis would like to believe these forces are capable. They would like to have that pride/confidence in their own troops. They are the ones who made the most serious criticisms, not I.
I don’t think you need 10 divisions to go hunt down these insurgents. You need a government that engenders loyalty, and I think basically you need regional governments to do that. You need forces that are capable of fighting. You need good intelligence. Ten divisions is a huge undertaking. That, we alone among all the countries in the world, Mort, do. Are there are some Army people in this room who want to speak up and talk about this?
HAASS: Actually, I want to say no because I want to get one or two more questions in just because of the time.
GELB: OK.
HAASS: Mr. Peterson, you had your hand up?
QUESTIONER: As a follow-up on Mort’s question, presuming for the moment that our military knows that the training is inadequate, it doesn’t take a total cynic to conclude that one of the possible reasons that that’s going on is the administration is playing a kind of a numbers game in which they want a rationale or a rationalization to pull out American troops. Do you think the military knows and agrees with you that the training is inadequate? And if they are doing it in spite of that, elaborate further on what you think the administration’s motivation is.
GELB: These are very smart guys, the senior military officers we have there. Very able people—I think some of the most able people we have in the armed services. Whether they think they’re doing the right thing in the right way and that the training will take place subsequently, I can’t tell you they don’t believe that, Pete. All I can tell you is that my experience is that when you, in a revolutionary chaotic situation like this, try to turn out that number of troops, it has been my experience that it’s under political pressure.
Now, if that is correct here, and I’m stating it in the subjunctive because I don’t know—but if that’s correct here, then there are people in the administration who are preparing for the contingency or possibility of laying the groundwork for a withdrawal—a substantial withdrawal of U.S. forces in about two years, before—and certainly before the next presidential election. Now the—I’ll stop there.
HAASS: You’ve had your hand up for a while.
QUESTIONER: John Lamb, Sidley, Austin, Brown & Wood. I’ve recently read that I think the deadline is May 6th for Dr. Jaafari to form a government, and if that deadline passes and no government has been formed, the presidency will have to pick another candidate. Do you think some of the—do you think the negotiations are, especially from the Kurds’ point of view, that they do intend to get another prime minister because they’re afraid of the unitarian impulses of Dr. Jaafari?
GELB: They may be trying to feel that out, there’s no question about it. But all these groups—you know, I say their tribal affiliations are first and foremost. Among the Kurds there’s not just the Kurdish feeling, the Kurdish nationalism. There are two major groups, the Talabani group and the [Kurdish leader Massoud] Barzani group, and then there are other tribes, too.
And there is a huge gap besides that between the existing Kurdish leadership, symbolized by Talabani, mainly, in Baghdad, and the young Kurds. One of the many facts that have been crammed into my head is that very few of the Kurds under 20—under the age of 20—speak Arabic. Now all the Kurds above that age, they speak it and they were part of Iraq and it helped to, in a way, integrate them. But the young Kurds speak only Kurdish. And they were the strongest and are the strongest for independence of Kurdistan now.
Within the Shiite bloc, you have very religious groups who are fundamentalists down to secularists like [former leader of the interim government Ayad] Allawi. So yes, the Kurds may be looking for bargaining space there, but it’s a very dangerous game.
A lot of this comes back to what’s really going on in the head of [the Grand] Ayatollah [Ali] Sistani. The head of the Muslim Brotherhood, in our conversation—when we got to him, I said, “What do you think of Sistani?” And he said, “Well, you know, Sistani is never seen. And even the Prophet Mohammed made himself visible.” [Laughter]
HAASS: Let me just collect two last questions, and let me apologize. [Inaudible], you had your hand up, and Ted Sorensen had his hand up for a long time. So let’s collect those two, and we’ll give Les, as usual, the last word. And let me again apologize to those—the many of that we couldn’t get to.
QUESTIONER: Les, thanks for a wonderful presentation. Ted. I was actually going to ask about Sistani, but now let me ask about—to what extent—and when you talked with the Shia leadership in particular, did you sense influence from Iran?
HAASS: And Alan, why don’t you just ask yours, and we’ll give Les a chance to answer.
GELB: My memory is so bad, I won’t remember Ted’s question.
QUESTIONER: I know. We’ll fit it in. Les, where do you think it comes out in terms of how religious the government is—how much is based on Quranic law? Are they willing, do you think, to mount a secular government, or is it going to inevitably wind up being a consistent tug of war?
HAASS: Iran and how religious.
GELB: OK. How Iran—the influence of Iran depends on who you talk to. When I was up in Kurdistan talking to Barzani, we spent a lot of time on Iran because Iran is on his brain. He thinks Iran controls all the southern part of Iraq right now.
By the way, I just have to tell this story. When you go to Erbil, which is where Barzani is, you drive for a long time through the low mountains, and then looming ahead of you is this gigantic mountain with this road winding up to the top of it, enormous mountain. As you approach it, it looks like Mt. Olympus, and you think Zeus will be on top there. But it turns out not to be Zeus, but Massoud Barzani, out of a Charlie Chaplin film.
He has Iran on the brain. He thinks they run the south already. He thinks Sistani is playing what he calls the Khomeini game; that [Ayatollah Ruhollah] Khomeini, when he started in Iran, was a reasonable man, but the more he got hold of power, the more religious he became and the more of a dictator he became. He thinks the same game is being played out right now in the south, and that Sistani is just laying in wait.
Fouad Ajami, by the way, believes just the opposite. Fouad, who has read Sistani’s works for 20-some-odd years, says Sistani has a clear history of separating church and state and not wanting clergy to get involved in politics, including in the judiciary, even wanting the judiciary to be elected. So—but the Kurds don’t believe this for a minute. And that’s the political reality there.
In terms of our own intelligence, there’s no question there’s a tremendous amount of back and forth between the Iraqis who used to live in Iran, the Iranians who are moving into southern Iraq. There’s a lot of activity. In terms of control, we just don’t know. It’s another one of these things that you accumulate a lot of facts about on Mars, but you don’t understand.
HAASS: Question about how Islamic [law] as opposed to how secular?
GELB: There is a strong Islamic push from most of the Shiite leaders and from some of the Sunni Arab leaders. And if they could have a centralized unitary state run from Baghdad, they would impose Islamic law on the rest of the country.
There is—whatever doubt I may have in my mind about it, there’s no doubt in the mind of the Iraqis I talked to: Kurds, Shia and Sunni Arabs. They think that the leadership, the Shia leadership, really does want to impose Quranic law. And that’s one of the reasons they give for wanting to have a maximum regional autonomy. And they say if the Shia down in the Basra area, who are among the most [inaudible] want to have Quranic law, it’s very sad for the women there, but let them have the Quranic law in their own area, not in the rest of the country.
HAASS: Les, I think I’m speaking for everyone that it’s great to have you back safe and sound, and it’s great to have you back here at the Council. [Applause]
GELB: Thank you.
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