Occupied Iraq: one country, many wars.

Eland, Ivan ; Newman, Robert ; White, Jeffrey 等

The following is an edited transcript of the fortieth in a series of Capitol Hill conferences convened by the Middle East Policy Council. The meeting was held on June 17, 2005, in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, with Chas. W. Freeman, Jr., moderating.

CHAS. W. FREEMAN, JR., president, Middle East Policy Council

Today's session was sparked by a comment by a very senior U.S. military officer to the effect that the strategy of the insurgency in Iraq did not make sense to him. He couldn't figure out what this insurgent movement was attempting to accomplish. And, in the spirit of Sun Tzu's aphorism, "Know yourself, know your enemy, and you will win a hundred victories in a hundred battles," it occurred to us that it might be worthwhile examining what is actually happening in Iraq to determine whether there is an insurgency. In fact, is there anyone with whom we could negotiate a comprehensive settlement of the violence? Is there anyone who could call it off?

I will give you my own impression at the outset, which is that there are at least three insurgencies going on. One is a secular-nationalist resistance to the Anglo-American occupation, led by ex-Baathist elements of the secular movement. The second is a religiously inspired resistance to the occupation, which draws on people who feel their honor has been offended in some manner by the occupation forces and who seek revenge. Third, there are international jihadis who are attempting to exploit both of the foregoing and are adding their own agenda to the mix.

But this doesn't explain the whole picture. We are, of course, trying to build an army that would provide a new Iraqi state with a monopoly of force. And it is dealing not only with these insurgencies, but increasingly with what appears to be a low-intensity civil war or wars between different Iraqi factions that have become part of the general anarchy and insurgency.

There are Sunnis resisting the prospect of Shia majority rule and resisting the legitimization of their own disempowerment by attacking the Iraqi armed forces or attacking Shias, whether militias or civilians. There are Arab Shias avenging themselves on Sunnis. There are Kurds seizing Arab property and expanding Kurdish control of parts of Iraq using our presence as a screen for their dream of an autonomous or independent Kurdish state on Iraqi territory. There is an Iraqi army hired by us, trained by us, which is trying to deal with all of the above.

Perhaps the situation is neither as complex nor as dire as the description I have just offered. In any event, it is not a simple situation, and I have no pretension to be an expert on either Iraq or guerrilla warfare. That is why we have what I think is an extraordinary panel assembled to address some key questions.

Has the mix of' factors and forces that constitute the so-called insurgency in Iraq been changing, or is it more or less as it was from the outset? Is this a dynamic or a static situation? If it is changing, how is it changing and in what direction? If there are indeed civil wars, incipient or low-intensity going on, do the famous three rules for intervention in civil war apply? Those three rules are, one, don't; two, if you do, pick the side that will win; and, three, help that side win last and win big. Is there anyone in Iraq who can win? And is there anyone who could sustain such a victory? Does this advice apply?

What are the implications for American policy? What is the policy? It is not entirely clear. Some people are arguing that we are militarily getting better and better at implementing a policy that may be counterproductive. So, is the policy, whatever it is, likely to work? If not, what are the alternatives?

IVAN ELAND, senior fellow and director of the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute; assistant editor, The Independent Review

I notice in the program we're going from talking about the groups that are the most friendly to the United States to the least friendly. So I'll start off by saying that even though the Kurds are friendly to us now, that may not necessarily hold. There have always been two Kurdish militias or peshmerga, meaning "those who face death." They are largely controlled by the parties and the security forces have been heavily influenced by these militias. The first one is Mustafa Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic party (KDP). The number I have found most often is about 35,000 fighters. They rule Western Kurdistan, and Barzani has been elected to the presidency of Kurdistan.

The other militia is Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). The number that 1 have seen most often there is 25,000 fighters. Talabani's party rules eastern Kurdistan. He has been elected to the presidency of Iraq. Now, together with the irregulars, the Kurdish militias probably have about 100,000 fighters, but, of course, that figure can be contested.

The Kurdish militias are first loyal to their party, then to Kurdistan, and only thirdly, and lukewarmly, to Iraq as a whole. Since the Gulf War in 1991, the coalition no-fly zones have made Kurdistan essentially independent from Iraq. There is a separate flag, police force and budget, all of it guaranteed by the recent Iraqi election. Barzani has been quoted as saying, "'What we really need to work on in the parliament of Kurdistan is that the region of Kurdistan should have its own special constitution and laws. There is absolutely no need to have a link that whatever is done in Baghdad should be done here too."

So what the Kurds really want is nominal control of the militia from Baghdad real control in their region. The militias have the trappings of separate military: officers' college, training camps, and armor and artillery units operating independently from the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF). Kurdistan is essentially a semi-state that has a kind of bunker mentality. There is a lot less violence there than in the rest of Iraq, but they are very wary about that violence coming to their doorstep.

The Kurds have accepted a unified Iraq in rhetoric, but I think they are hitching their wagon to the U.S. occupation in order to get an independent Kurdistan eventually. They have a lot of large demands that may not be able to be fulfilled under the current negotiations.

Barzani has also been quoted as saying, "All the Kurdish parties have agreed that for now we are living with a federal regime in a democratic Iraq." "For now" are the operative words here. I think if Kurdish interests diverge from those of the United States, they will not be loyal allies. The Kurds are famous for having shifted their loyalties over the years when their interests have changed. The two militias even fought a civil war in the mid-nineties that killed 3,000 Kurds.

One Kurdish militia also allied with the Iraqis against the other Kurdish militias at one point. And Chemical Ali, the Iraqi general who gassed the Kurds, was warmly welcomed by the KDP even after he had gassed the Kurds, an indication that alliances are changeable. Now the two Kurdish militias are cooperating more closely, and they are worried about the Turks. They want to broaden the call to Germany and Syria and Iran and Turkey to try to recruit Kurds to come to Kurdistan to potentially fend off any Turkish challenge.

Both militias helped the Turks against the Turkish Kurds, the PKK, across the border in Turkey. These alliances are changeable. We have to realize that the Kurds are after their own agenda, and, like many of the other groups in Iraq, they are playing the United States for their own reasons.

Before the Iraqi elections, the Kurds seemed to be willing to get rid of their militias, but that has changed now. They did well in the elections. And they no longer trust the United States to bring peace and stability to Iraq and ensure their interests vis-a-vis the other groups. And I think the United States has no choice but to allow them to keep their arms. We are using them as a fighting force to battle the Sunnis. We're also using them to provide the intelligence that we sorely lack.

I think there is no choice but to leave the Kurds with their arms, just as some of the Shia have been left with theirs. And of course, we have the Sunni insurgency. So all of these groups are running around with weapons, which will be a problem in the future. It's going to be very hard to disarm all of these groups.

The Kurds have helped in the fighting in Fallujah and Tal Afar, and also in Mosul, which has been divided into a Kurdish east and an Arab west. The coalition has asked the Kurds to control the western half of the city. This is going to increase tensions between the Kurds and Sunnis; as Chas. has mentioned, there is already a low-level civil war going on there.

The peshmerga have raised the ire of the Sunni community by helping the Americans against the Sunnis. And the situations in Kirkuk and Mosul are both explosive with the daily ambushes, assassinations and car bombings. In Kirkuk, the local battlefield centers on a critical oil pipeline that is often blown tip. The Shiites might try to block the autonomy of the Kurdish militias from the Iraqi Security Forces, but they too have militias they want to keep, or at least have them incorporated into the ISF as whole units. For example, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution has the Badr Brigades. So the Shia might decide that they don't want to press the Kurds to disarm because they might have to do it as well.

The official U.S. policy is that none of these groups should have their own militias. But the U.S. government tried unsuccesfully to disarm the militias before turning power over to the Iraqis last summer. So now the U.S. military is saying that the Iraqi government must figure out what to do with these militias. Well, if the U.S. military can't disarm them, the Iraqi government certainly isn't going to be able to disarm them either. Larry Diamond, the former adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority, sees a drift toward warlordism and potentially a Lebanese-style civil war.

Now, Kurdish militia are some of the most potent in Iraq. They seized thousands of armored vehicles and weapons from Iraqi forces alter the second Gulf War. They have been trained by the United States, South Africans and Israelis. According to investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, Israel concluded that the United States had already lost the battle against the Sunni insurgency as early as mid-2003 and hitched their wagon to the Kurdish forces to defend Kurdistan. And the less well-equipped peshmerga actually fought well against Saddam's army, both in rural areas and around the major cities.

Kirkuk is an interesting case. The U.S. occupation and the new Iraqi government are supposed to be ruling it. In fact, the Kurdish militias are ruling this important oil city. The Kurds want Kirkuk because it will allow them to have the oil to provide revenue for an independent Kurdish state. Possession is nine-tenths of the law. Because Saddam had cleansed the Kurds from Kirkuk and replaced them with Sunni Arabs, the Kurds are, as Chas. mentioned, seizing Arab property and territory and using it tinder the U.S. screen.

There have been lethal clashes between the pershmerga and the Turkoman and Arab residents of Kirkuk in the northern Sunni triangle for some time. The pershmerga checkpoints are designed to keep Arabs out. These Kurdish military were in the paper two days ago for kidnapping Turks and Sunnis. They have used rough tactics in the past. This is nothing new in Iraq, and we need to realize that these militias are not any more humanitarian than other ones in Iraq. They are our allies, so we tend to make excuses for them sometimes.

There was a proposal at the Pentagon to have them do snatch operations, but I don't know if it went anywhere. The U.S. military is saying that they are trying to stop it. But I think this was a widespread initiative by the Kurdish political parties to exercise authority in Kirkuk in an increasingly provocative manner.

AMB. FREEMAN: An admirable introduction to the entire subject, reminding us of the longstanding existence of armed political movements and militias in Iraq. Although Colonel Newman's experience with Iraqi Shiia goes back at least to the first Gulf War and our special forces in Southern Iraq, where the Shia rebellion occurred, I don't believe that there was such a depth of history to the Shia militias. Clearly with 60 percent of the Iraqi population being Arab Shia, what happens among Shia and between Shia and others is absolutely vital.

ROBERT NEWMAN, colonel, U.S. Army

I promise to be candid, but I ask you to understand that I will not discuss any classified information or respond to questions on policy issues that I know have already been answered by the chain of command.

My perspective has always been that of the guy in the field, whether in an embassy or a unit. I have worked in a series of headquarters recently in Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, mainly as a liaison officer dealing with their militaries. That experience has given me an abiding respect for academics, diplomats and intelligence officers who are the real subject-matter experts on Iraq and the Middle East.

As a soldier who returned from Iraq three months ago and who will probably return next year, I have to be both optimistic and profoundly realistic about the challenges that the United States, its allies and the Iraqis face. My perspective on Iraq and Iraqis is a very personal one, and it is heavily influenced by the fact that my friends, both Americans and Iraqis, are getting killed there on a daily basis.

On the topic, "Occupied Iraq: One Country, Many Wars," it probably should be one country, many peoples, many wars. I am addressing the Iraqi Shia militia groups, as I feel that they and the political organizations that they are tied to are key to the reconstruction of Iraq, whose major goal now is the process of transition to majority rule and the Iraqi Shia coming to power.

Twenty years ago, Professor Phebe Mart wrote: "If one can speak of an Iraqi state, it is not yet possible to speak of an Iraqi nation. Iraq's present borders incorporate a diverse medley of peoples who have not yet been welded into a single political community with a common sense of identity. The process of integration and assimilation has gone on steadily since the inception of the mandate, but it is by no means complete."

Ivan has just talked about the Kurdish component to that, and I agree with largely everything he said. The current elected transitional Iraqi government dominated by Shia and Kurdish parties, but especially by Shia of the United Iraqi Alliance, is a significant step forward in that process. The bottom line of my remarks will be that in the near future, Iraq's political leadership and the United States and its allies will make a series of difficult decisions with regard to the "DDR"--disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of these militias. Those decisions will determine whether the political process that has been ongoing will continue to move forward or be delayed, which has big policy consequences for the United States.

As Ambassador Freeman has mentioned, I have had some close personal contacts with the Iraqi Shia, beginning in 1991. At that time, most of the other panel members all had a much larger worldview. And at that time, I was particularly knowledgeable, or so I thought, about Iraq and Iraqi Shia, as I had just finished two years of graduate study at an outstanding Ivy League university. I first got to watch the March 1991 Shia intifada from the perspective of the Safwan/Abdali border crossing into Kuwait.

I was able to talk to a lot of Iraqi Shia. For the record, none of them were claiming that their uprising was due to President Bush's call for an uprising. Then, later that year, while at the U.S. embassy in Riyadh, when I went tip to the Iraqi refugee camp at Rafah in northern Saudi Arabia as a translator/notetaker, the ambassador was quite clear that I shouldn't exceed that role. I was amazed to find the Iraqis organized into a sort of congress. This was a group that I was expecting to be mainly Iraqi Shia from the three southern provinces. But they were from all 18 provinces, and from every group, class and interest described by Professor Hanna Batatu in The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, the classic book for anyone who is studying Iraq. You need a small red wagon to carry it around. Everything that he had described was present in the tents where we listened to hours and hours of discussion. All of those Iraqis said that their uprising was a direct response to President Bush's call. Afterward, I got to spend most of the subsequent period in the Arab world meeting Iraqi expatriates and dealing with the issues of Iraq from the countries that border it.

I was also present at the first Iraqi people's meeting on April 15, 2003, at Ur, the birthplace of civilization near Nasiriyah. That meeting was very similar to what I had read of previous Iraqi opposition conferences. There seemed as much, if not more, disagreement among Iraqis--especially among Iraqi Shia--on the nature of their future state as there has been in any period since the end of the Ottoman Empire.

There are primarily two Iraqi Shia militia groups, even though officially they all ended last summer, as Ivan explained. He mentioned the Badr Organization, previously known as the Badr Corps or Badr Brigades or Badr Force. Then there is Muqtada Sadr's Jaysh al-Mahdi. Then, there are a lot of other guys with guns. They are linked to the Islamic Dawa party, to Ahmad Chalabi, to Abdul Karim Mahoud al-Muhammadawi, a.k.a. Abu Hatim, the "Lord of the Marshes.'" Then there is a host of others at the local level, including the Shia and Turkoman and tribal militia up in the Tal Afar area who have been clashing with the Kurds as well as with the Sunni Salafi Jihadis.

I will not discuss the Iranian opposition militia, Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), but they are also a complicated part of this process of dealing with the Shia militia. The issue of disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of party and tribal militias, as Ivan says, has been recognized from the beginning as an important one. The CFLCC (Coalition Forces Land Component Command) military headquarters in Iraq, and the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), General Garner's predecessor to the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority), all issued proclamations: and the CPA's Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), in article 27, specifically prohibited militias not under the command structure of the Iraqi government. The reaction at that time by those militia groups was to officially go away. The contradictory announcements by many senior Iraqi government officials on this subject in the last several weeks are particularly perplexing and frustrating.

The Badr Corps, or Fayliq Badr, as the Iraqis continue to call it, officially became the Badr Organization and a political force, not a militia group, following the issuance of the TAL. This occurred probably as a response to the KDP-PUK position that the peshmerga were not militia, but the official security forces of the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG). It was notionally under the control of the central government, even though, as Ivan pointed out, there has been some discrepancy in those comments by senior Kurdish officials.

The Badr Corps members have been playing significant political and security roles in all of the provinces of southern Iraq. There are senior Badr Corps members throughout the Iraqi government tinder both the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) and Iraqi Interim Government (IIG), the predecessors to the current Iraqi Transitional Government (ITG). They have assumed significantly more responsibility with the election of the ITG. There are probably significant numbers of Badr Corps members in the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF), but there is a tendency not to admit them to coalition forces.

The Badr Corps officers in the ISF that I have worked with were previously field-grade officers in the Iraqi army. They claimed to be Iraqi patriots and not to be under Iranian influence. That said, they seemed to me to be concerned only about former regime elements, Baathis and Sunni Jihadis, and not about the Sadrists or about Iranian influence. The issue of Iranian ties is central to all of the Iraqi Shia militia, but especially to the Badr Corps, who were originally formed around the cadre of former Iraqi army Shia Enemy Prisoners of War (EPW) from the Iran-Iraq War. They were reportedly trained by Iran's IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps or Pasdaran) on an IRGC base and had IRGC advisers.

The presence of revolutionary guard and intel guys, agents from Iran, as well as Iranian weapons, continue to be an issue. Muqtada Sadr's militia was reportedly formed in 2003 and clashed with coalition forces in April and August 2004 at multiple locations, especially in Najaf and Sadr City. Jeff White has written a series of excellent articles identifying those clashes as well as their impact.

By and large, they were tactically defeated by the coalition forces in all of those engagements and forced to turn in weapons and dismantle an incredible web of Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) and their sanctuary of Sadr City. Muqtada Sadr has become a significant force in Iraqi politics and may also have suffered some operational strategic defeat as his movement was forced to morph. Muhammad al-Yaaqubi formed the Fadilah party, which has been described by Professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan and Professor Faleh Abdul Jabar of the University of London.

I think we need to pay a lot more attention to the origins of the Sadr movement in order to understand how that organization and its related organizations are evolving and playing an increasing political role. I have never personally observed any militia forces clearly identified with the Islamic Dawa party, just personal security forces, but they were identified with assassination attempts in Iraq and Kuwait in the '80s. Ahmad Chalabi was reportedly accompanied by a 742-man militia when he flew into Tallil and Nasiriyah from Kurdistan in late March 2003. However, that force was officially disbanded by an order from CFLCC and ORHA in late April or early May 2003.

Abu Hatim is one of the Shia leaders who incites strong reactions in many Iraqis. Whether he is a popular hero, the Lord of the Marshes, or a murderous criminal depends on your perspective. His role since April 2003, as well as that of his brother, the former governor of Maysan Province, and his militia also incite debate. He is currently supposedly promoting a Shia federalist alternative revolving Shia provinces under the name of Sumer. This seems to be much at odds with what many would perceive are Iraqi Shia interests, as well as the recent proclamations concerning the Badr Organization.

The process of transition to Iraqi or to Shia majority rule has resulted in insurgency over the past two years, making it very difficult for the United States and its coalition to establish a secure environment for the reconstruction of Iraq. Coalition forces are currently working hard with the ministries of defense and interior to equip and train Iraqi security forces in order to facilitate resolution of the more complex political problems. There are multiple challenges associated with the establishment of those forces, but progress will largely depend on the decisions made by the current Iraqi political leadership, especially the Shia.

If both Shia and Kurdish leaders continue to feel the need to maintain large armed militias, coalition forces will again be faced, as we were last year, with major choices in terms of confrontation or accommodation. The United States and its allies must continue to work hard to engage Iraq's neighbors to play more positive roles in this process to achieve regional stability. In particular, in order to influence the Shia parties and their militia, the United States and its allies may wish to increase our engagement with Iran.

A long-term multilateral approach to disarmament of the Iraqi Shia militias, as well as the other militia forces in Iraq, is going to be necessary if we are ever going to develop a well-trained and competent Iraqi Security Force.

AMB. FREEMAN: What you have lust heard, which was an extraordinary presentation, demonstrates the level of complexity on the ground in Iraq that is not made visible to most people in this country. It illustrates something that I observed in the course of my 30 years in government: intelligence failures are virtually invariably failures of the intellect, not failures of people in the U.S. government to have the necessary information to make correct decisions. It's clear that we do have experts in the U.S. Army who understand a lot about different elements of Iraq, and I'm proud to have spent a short time serving with Colonel Newman in Saudi Arabia.

I wonder, as we turn now to Jeff White and begin to talk about the Sunni insurgents, whether the two previous presentations shouldn't have reminded us of this alleged report of two Sunni groups coining forward to propose negotiations with the coalition forces on two agendas: a date certain for American withdrawal and assurances against excessive Iranian influence in the future Iraq. I wonder what is wrong with this agenda and why it has not been picked tip. Perhaps Jeff can, in the course of his presentation, explain why that shouldn't be taken seriously.

JEFFREY WHITE, Berrie Defense Fellow, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy

The Sunni Arab insurgency in Iraq is at least as complicated as Ambassador Freeman mentioned in his remarks, maybe even more so. What I want to talk about is why it's so hard to deal with. Why are we finding the insurgency in Iraq such a profoundly difficult military and political problem?

Before that, though, I want to say there are some things that are going right in Iraq. I don't want to be accused of just looking at the empty half of the glass. From the start, we have had a lot of things going for us. We have the will, it seems, at least for now, to persevere in Iraq, to accomplish our objectives there. That is increasingly in question now maybe, with the talk of U.S. withdrawal on a certain date, and so on. Reconstruction is making slow, difficult progress, but it is going forward. It is not a win yet, but it is a positive overall in the country.

And we have a lot of resources in Iraq. We have 138,000 troops, 150,000 coalition troops. That is a lot of troops. My view is, it's not enough troops, but there are a lot of troops there. We have a lot of money we're pouring in there. We have a lot of skilled people and so on. The Iraqis now have an elected government. The political transformation process is proceeding, if haltingly slowly. They always make the gates. They move forward.

The Iraqi security forces--military and police have massively expanded: 169,000 more or less at last count. The key issue there is: how many of them are any good? How many of them are capable of operating independently? But they are expanding, and the U.S. military knows how to train people. So over time--I think it's years, not months-those forces will come on line.

Just as important as these sorts of factual things, there are a number of processes and dynamics in Iraq that are also going well from our standpoint. The elections created pressure on the Sunnis to make decisions about their future political life. The secretary of defense stated the other day that what we want to do is push people toward collaboration with us. That is our objective, and I think the elections did accomplish that.

We have also made intelligence gains in Iraq. We're getting better information on the Sunni Arab insurgency. There has been a lot of attrition to the Zarqawi network, even in the last few days. And a number of stresses have developed on the insurgents that are making their lives more difficult. There have been calls for amnesty, and there is some tribal fighting out in the west, indications that at least some of the insurgents are under stress.

Against that, though, we have to set what I call the elements of intractability, the bad side of the situation. I can count at least 11 of these. You have to start with grievance. The Sunni community sees itself as seriously aggrieved for a number of reasons. They are the big losers of the war. They lost power, they lost position, they lost influence, and no jobs program or provision of electricity can compensate for that. So there is a definite and serious loss there. But they were not the defeated, in a sense. They didn't have a military catastrophe visited upon them like Japan and Germany did at the end of World War II to fundamentally change their outlook about the political situation. The war really passed by most of the Sunni Arabs in an important way.

A second area of grievance is the coalition and Iraqi Security Forces actions that have antagonized the Sunnis. There is the sense of an emerging war against the Sunnis. That is, the complex of actions produced by the government, the security forces and the coalition focuses on the Sunni population. So there is this notion that it isn't just war against the resistance or the insurgents. It is a war against the Sunnis themselves.

A second intractable factor is the early onset of the insurgency. This doesn't get a lot of attention, but the insurgency emerged very quickly. By the end of April it had already started: by November 2003, it was well underway and serious. We were caught on our back foot on this issue, and we never caught up. The insurgency is pervasive now; it exists in a wide geographic area. There are now what look like zones of resistance--the area from Tal Afar to Mosul, the Euphrates Valley from Hizbaya on the Syrian border down to Fallujah in the northern Babil Province. It is not just one little town here or there. These are beginning to look like actual zones of resistance.

The insurgency or resistance also pervades the Sunnis in a psychological sense. Notions of resistances and jihad are in the Sunni Arab mind. There are lots of myths now that have developed about insurgency and resistance: the sniper, virgin soldiers, bloodless or woundless death. These are things that are talked about within the Sunni community.

The insurgency is also persistent. It has gone up and down, but basically it persists. There was a falloff in activity alter the elections, and then in March, April, May, June you begin to see peaks of activity again. It also persists in individual places. It has proven very difficult for us to secure any area on a permanent basis. The oil-spot theory of counterinsurgency doesn't seem to be working. It is also imbedded. In the Sunni community it is hard to say how deeply it is imbedded. There is some level of popular support. It has penetrated a number of Sunni Arab institutions. It is decentralized. There seem to be at least two major elements functioning, the Baathists and the foreign jihadis, and they are cooperating with each other.

On the jihadis themselves, I think they have captured the attention and the imagination of people more than they deserve, but that can be argued. There are some issues about numbers. The effects are there. They produce lots of casualties, horrific images and so on. But they also provide a hard edge to the insurgency. They are a stiffening element. They set the benchmark for pure resistance against the coalition.

The insurgents are also adaptable. They match weapons to targets. They attack ministry of defense troops using explosive devices or small arms. They use different weapons to attack police forces and coalition forces. They don't attack everybody in the same way. They match their efforts to the target, for best results.

The insurgency is lethal. One of its main products is death. They kill lots of people, quite a few Americans and many more Iraqis. This lethality is the handmaiden of intimidation. They have an intimidation campaign that has operated since the earliest days of the insurgency aimed at undermining the transitional government and holding the Sunni population in thrall. The killing supports that.

They also do a lot of things to contribute to instability. Figure 1 shows the track of the spring bombing offensive. There is always some level of bombing activity. And these are car bombs or suicide bombs of any type. It begins to peak at the period of the formation of the new government and has continued along since then.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The insurgents carry out a lot of attacks on collaborators. This is one of their main lines of operation. You can see the peak [Figure 2]. There is a peak representing the fighting at the time of the Mosul and Fallujah events, another in the buildup to the election, and others representing attacks on government forces, government individuals, people supporting the government. You get a fall-off after the elections, and then it begins to build back tip again as you go into April and May.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

We think that the insurgency will persist in its activities over time. Figure 3 shows what we call their five lines of operations: counterstability; counterelection, which was the sixth line they added just for the election period; counterreconstruction; countermobility; countercollaboration and countercoalition. All insurgent activity fits into one of these categories, and you can see how it evolves and changes over time. The bottom half shows how it has been conducted since the election. And we think they are going to continue along those lines.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

The first thing we have to remember and always keep in mind here is that this is, in fact, a war, a contest between at least two sides. And their side holds a lot of cards. They are not simply responding to our actions. They have a lot of resources and the capability to employ those resources. Critical for the future is that at some point the Sunnis as a whole have to see the futility of resistance, the futility of the insurgency. They have to recognize that it is a dead-end street, that they can't win. Closely related to that is the level of U.S. forces and coalition forces in the country. We have to have enough troops there to do the job. This means suppressing the insurgency to a level consistent with our other objectives, giving the ISF time to grow and become effective, extending governance into Sunni areas and allowing the political process to go forward.

My own view is that we don't have enough troops there to do that. So instead of talking about withdrawal, we ought to be talking about getting enough forces into Iraq to create the conditions that support our objectives.

AMB. FREEMAN: Thank you for the superb presentation. The last time we discussed Iraq, Colonel Lang concluded the discussion by noting that, while many of the panelists saw problems in our operations in Iraq that would justify withdrawal, the American public did not see things that way, and that proposing solutions to a problem that is not perceived as a problem is an exercise in political futility. My sense is that people do now see a problem in Iraq, and Jeff has helpfully reminded us that, to the extent that the problem has a military solution, it may require greater investment of resources. That raises the question whether it's politically viable, even with a greater investment of military resources, or whether we have so much at stake in Iraq that we are willing to make that investment.

W. PATRICK LANG, president, Global Resources Group, Inc., formerly the defense intelligence officer for the Middle East

I'm struck by Ambassador Freeman's statement about grand intelligence failures being failures of intellect rather than data. In many cases that really is true. You could probably argue that that wasn't the case with the 9/11 attacks, but in the really big strategic questions, I think that is true.

You always come back to this business of whether the glass is half full or half empty. I have been a winner and I have been a loser in the great game of counterinsurgency, and it isn't at all clear to me that the present state of affairs indicates how this business is going to end in Iraq. I would easily concede in fact that the glass is half full. I don't have any problem with that at all. A great many things have been accomplished on the political side: all of the milestones have been met, and forces are in the process of being trained. As was observed, the U.S. Army knows how to train troops--we get it right eventually-so there will be a substantial force there. There have been a lot of civil-affairs achievements, a lot of infrastructure created, and it's hard to argue with the fact that this has done a lot of good.

On the other hand, I am afraid I have the conviction in my heart that what has happened so far is largely irrelevant to the eventual outcome of the war in Iraq. I believe a basic intellectual failure occurred in the process of deciding what and where and how much we were going to do in Iraq. You have heard the essence of this problem explained here this morning. But the problem with this place--Iraq--as in all the other states in the region except one, is that these places are not nation-states. The assumption we went into Iraq with was that Iraq was a nation-state, that Iraqis were one people, and that they would perceive their interests as being aligned in such a way that, once they were released from the tyrant's grasp, they would move forward into a bright new dawn. This was not correct, in fact. It isn't true of any of these places out there.

It is very easy to fall into that idea. These places have been in the process of becoming nation-states ever since the end of World War I or the end of the Ottoman Empire and the various machinations of the colonial powers. They have been in a kind of pressure cooker trying to become nation states inhabited by a single people in each case. But this hasn't been completed anywhere, and Iraq is certainly an exemplar of that.

By demolishing the national government of Iraq and its national institutions--the army, the civil service, even the much-despised Baath party--we screwed the lid off the jar and released all of the inner pressures. I say this at some risk, because somebody will come up to this microphone and say that I am following the path of the colonialists in seeking to divide the people of this region so that they can be more easily ruled. But the truth is that these people are much divided.

This leads back to what the general officer said, the comment that Ambassador Freeman referred to. If he really meant that, he just doesn't get it. What you have in Iraq are a number of different peoples, factions, ethnic and sectarian groupings of one kind or another all having been released from the coercion that had held them in a kind of stasis. The Iraqi people are now striving to achieve whatever it is they think is in their best interest. Do many of them believe in fact that they should be Iraqis? Of course. We all know what our higher aspirations ought to be. But what we really believe in our heart of hearts, as to where our real interests lie, is another matter.

So we have the Iraqi insurgency or insurgencies. It appears to me, after having talked to folks who have come back from there and who work in the business of trying to figure this out, that there was a stay-behind operation with regard to resistance to foreign occupation. There was a plan, there were caches of materiel around the country, and certain institutions were given the mission of handing out weapons to people, which they did.

A young woman who is a military intelligence officer asked me recently why it is that every house they go into in Iraq has at least one or two AK-47s and a case of ammunition. The answer is that the previous Iraqi government issued them to people because they were setting up a program for resistance to occupation. By the way, I think it's not a good idea to keep calling them Baathists all the time. This is a term of denigration that minimizes how substantial they really are.

If you look at these many different groups that are centered around a personality, a region, a tribe or a former military unit, you find that at the heart of each there are one or two men who used to be officers in the Iraqi Army. On a rough kind of basis, they coordinate the actions of these groups in such a way that you can see shifts in targeting strategy and trends in their operations. It cannot be altogether happenstance for this to occur in that way.

I would say to you that these are early days yet. If you want to make the analogy to the great Vietnam thing, probably the greatest insurgency of all time, it wasn't until about 1949 or '50 that the Vietminh sorted out everybody in the country who was fighting the French and unified them under communist command.

We are into the second or third year of the war. Give them two or three more years and you'll probably see them under the hammer of our pressure unified more and more, with the jihadis standing off to one side. They are going to go in that direction; it is almost inevitable. And the reason the thing got started so last was that there was, in my opinion, a plan for the generation of resistance throughout the country.

My old friend and colleague Jeff White thinks we ought to have more troops in the country. I would say that, if we are going to prevail there, that would certainly be a good idea. I just don't know where we are going to get them. I have a difficult time with that, and I'm sure he does too. How much more can we use the National Guard? How many more rotations can we have, with shorter tours of duty, of regular army and Marine Corps units? There is a limit to what you can ask people to do under these conditions. The return to a draft is politically impossible, and you don't get much out of a draft anyway. You get a lot of semi-trained privates who are 20 years old and you have to borrow from your other units to get leaders. You would have to spend another two or three years at that in order to generate a brigade or a division. This is a long and slow process.

On the other hand, some people want to talk about a quick withdrawal from Iraq. I am against setting a timetable because that would telegraph your intentions to the insurgents. You have to consider the fact that we have done this thing, and that when we withdraw, we will have to live with the consequences of what we have done. Anybody who knows what happened in Vietnam, what happened in Algeria, what happened in this place and that place knows that a great many native people who sided with the foreign army suffered horribly as a result of that allegiance. Think of how many millions of Vietnamese left: think of all the hundreds of Algerian dock workers who were put to the sword by the FLN when the French Navy left its base at Oran. Think about that. You have to start dealing with the thought of what you would do with refugees if you pulled out all of a sudden.

Another thing you should consider is the extent to which the Iraqi example is typical of every other place in the region. Ambassador Freeman likes to quote my one inspired moment in which I said that we have probably not invaded the real Iraq, that we have invaded the Iraq of our dreams. If you look around at these other places, to what extent are we doing the same thing? Look at Lebanon. Look at the incredible claims that have been made in the aftermath of the Rafik Hariri's assassination--that everything would be wonderful, a democracy, a completely new system of government would exist, and all of that. In fact, what is emerging from their political process is simply a reshuffling of the deck with the same players coming tip with very substantial control of the government and with Hezbollah having an even larger role.

You can look around at other places in the region. Are they that much different? Look at Iran. We have had in mind that a youth-led revolution was about to occur in Iran that would bring to power a pro-Western government that would probably ensure the good behavior of the Shia Iraqi government. Is that what it looks like today in the election? I don't think so. We ought to stop projecting ourselves onto these people and start trying to understand them as they are.

AMB. FREEMAN: One of the major concerns in the region, which I have just returned from, is that the large number of jihadis going into Iraq are receiving the world's best training from the world's best armed forces about how to conduct urban operations and will in time go home or re-deploy elsewhere in the Islamic world or perhaps even to our homeland. Do we really have the option of hanging on? This question of where additional forces, if they are required, would come from is crucial. Do we have that option? If we don't, we're probably wasting time talking about it. My final point on the tact that we will be held accountable for the consequences of our intervention in Iraq is unassailable. So the question is, since that intervention presumably will not last forever--it will end somehow, sometime--how do we mitigate those consequences? How do we reduce them so that we can live with ourselves morally?

I'm delighted with the quality of the presentations today. I don't think you can solve a problem if you don't understand it, and the level of expertise on the military level that has been demonstrated here is a prerequisite to beginning to consider what we do in a situation that clearly is not getting better. But this brings us to reality-based analysis, which is out of favor in Washington. It reinforces the political incorrectness of this entire gathering, I suppose.

Q&A

Q: I'm confused about what the objective of the occupation is. Some people seem to think that there's an element of a permanent or semipermanent military presence to secure the oil fields. Others say that we want to bring stability and leave. It seemed at one point that we were pursuing a kind of traditional occupation, utilizing the nationals and much of the existing governing infrastructure to put things together quickly. Then we de-Baathified and reduced the military to nothing and seemed to adopt a sort of Shiite-only strategy with a Kurdish corollary to it. In the recent period, it seems that Rumsfeld, Rice and Zoellick have been running over there to make sure that the Sunnis get a greater share of the action. I wonder whether that's going to produce the long-awaited other shoe dropping, namely, some kind of much more substantial Shiite opposition to the U.S. presence. And there's an overt American and British component to the occupation. I'm not sure that American and British interests are identical there. Then there's the issue that Ivan raised about the Israeli presence--they're a regional power as well with their own interests. I'm hoping for some clarification on what the actual U.S. objectives are.

AMB. FREEMAN: This brings us back to the statement of the president that we don't have an exit strategy: we have a success strategy. But if you don't define what success is, it's pretty hard to know what that means.

COL. LANG: YOU can't go back a few years and insist on what you think we ought to have done about something like this, because you actually are in the situation. What we have to try to do now is to influence all the different kinds of Iraqis to create a sufficiently stable situation so that we can justify our own withdrawal. I don't think our presence there has anything to do with strategic basing. If anybody ever had that fantasy, they gave it up a long time ago, probably at one of the crests in Jeff's charts. And I don't think it has to do with our wanting to own their oil. We just want them to sell their oil--the more oil in the market, the cheaper the price--and it's much too expensive now. So the only thing I think we could possibly have as a goal is to achieve sufficient stability so that the resistance dies down to a level at which we are justified in withdrawing our forces.

DR. ELAND: I'm a radical on this. I think we lost the war a long time ago and we just don't know it yet. But I think the president actually could get out of this by realizing that Iraq is a fantasy and that he should encourage the groups to form a loose confederation or maybe even partition the country. There are a lot of problems with that, too, but I think we're so far in the hole that that's about the only thing that can have a chance of achieving long-term stability in that area. The real problem is that everybody wants to control the central government in Iraq because traditionally whichever group controls it oppresses the other groups. It's been the Sunnis that have controlled the government, but now the Shia and the Kurds are trying to control it.

But I don't think any group is going to be able to achieve that. There are so many militia running around, it's going to be impossible to get rid of them. No one has confidence that the Americans are going to stay long enough to do this. What the insurgents want to do is what the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong did: outwait the stronger party. And when there's talk of withdrawal in Washington, the Sunni guerrillas are emboldened. All the other groups start thinking, I wonder what we do when the Americans pull out and popular opinion tanks, which it already has? Well, we keep our militias.

The South Vietnamese government had a problem dealing with the Viet Cong when they had a standing force available. We dismantled the Iraqi army and are now trying to create a security force while the Sunni insurgents are actively attacking the recruits to discourage people from signing tip. I don't see this getting any better. The president could say, if he were to be able to reach some sort of agreement on a confederation or partition, that he had genuinely dismantled the Saddam Hussein regime and given the Iraqis the best chance for stability and prosperity. It would give him an interesting way to get out of it.

I think security could be provided on a local basis by the militias and, of course, in the Sunni areas by what is now the insurgency (excluding foreign jihadists). You could have an economic confederation so that you still have a large market, et cetera. And maybe if people weren't scared that the central government was going to oppress them, and if they had local autonomy, some sort of a confederation might be the best thing. There would be less of a problem with groups falling on the other side of the border.

AMB. FREEMAN: I think the question of confederation misses the key point. What is the basis for stability in Iraq if it's not based on a majority? And the majority is Shia, and they want control of Iraq. The issue is how many rights they are prepared to grant to others. So the question then is, to go back to Jeff White's formulation, if the answer is a Shia-majority-controlled regime in Iraq, at what point do Kurds or Sunni insurgents conclude that resistance to that is futile? If they don't, you're there preventing a civil war or participating in one.

COL. LANG: I don't know in what sense we're not already involved in civil war there. I think we're avoiding the term civil war because it gives a sort of dignity to the insurgents, who would then have the status of belligerents. If you look in the dictionary, it says quite clearly that civil war is "war fought within the boundaries of a state by ethnic or religious or political factions for control of the state." I think we're avoiding the word because it's politically inconvenient. The news media, astonishingly, go right along with that.

Confederation is probably a lovely idea, but I don't think it is very well received in the Arab or Islamic world, where the ideal is unity, not that sort of distributed authority. If you look around in the history of the Arab world, you don't see too many confederations. There was the Federation of South Arabia, which the British tried to set up, and which tell fiat on its nose very quickly. Then, there is, of course, the UAE, which is a federation of more-or-less absolute monarchs, one of whom is appointed to be president of the federation. I don't think that's a good example either.

Lastly, I think you need to be careful about the South Vietnamese example, because there were two wars going on in Vietnam. One was the war against the guerrilla militias and terrorists, which was analogous in some ways to what's going on in Iraq. Then there was a war of the main-force units out in the bush, where they had regiments and divisions with armor and artillery. These are the people who defeated the French forces at Dien Bien Phu and gave us one hell of a run for our money. You don't have anything like that in Iraq and are unlikely to have it, in my opinion. So we're talking about the government being able to overcome the guerrilla enemy rather than the main-force enemy.

AMB. FREEMAN: There is one often-missed analogy between Vietnam and Iraq, namely, the majority of French casualties were caused by suicide bombers in the period leading up to Dien Bien Phu. So this is not a new invention of the weak. It is something that occurs repeatedly throughout history.

COL. NEWMAN: I'm aware of no hidden agendas or plans for the creation of strategic military bases or occupation of the oil fields, and I agree with Pat Lang that only a madman would think that would be a feasible course of action. There have been others who thought that we could have massive facilities in the heart of the Arab Middle East for long periods of time. After the first Gulf War, there were a lot of people who thought there had been a paradigm shift with our relationship in Saudi Arabia. That was a very difficult period. As I remember, our ambassador [Chas. Freeman] had great difficulty in convincing a lot of people in Washington that that wasn't the case.

MR. WHITE: Pat Lang's formulation of the strategic dilemma the United States finds itself in right now is quite accurate, and Bob agreed with it as well. In my mind though, there's always been this tension in the American approach to Iraq between winning and getting out. Gen. Conway said that our objective is to win in Iraq and not to withdraw. If that's true, there are certain conditions that have to be met for winning. Equally, if our overall objective is to get out, as Pat suggested, there are certain things that we ought to be doing. But I don't think the dilemma between winning, however you define that, and getting out has ever been fully resolved, and that has led to a lot of the problems we have experienced in Iraq. It relates to issues of how many forces, the political solution, the transfer of sovereignty, all connected to that unresolved contention in our policy.

AMB. FREEMAN: I think it is very clear in any event that it's not about oil. Ironically, of course, Iraq was a secure and reliable supplier of oil under Saddam, but has not been since Saddam was overthrown.

Q: Do we know of any Shia militias that are loyal to Ayatollah Sistani, and, if so, how organized are they? Second, do we have any information on Iran's aiding directly people like Muqtada Sadr and Abu Hatim? Also, do we know of direct links between Hezbollah and the Sadrists?

COL. NEWMAN: Ayatollah Sistani does not have a militia, because militias are, number one, illegal under the TAL, and he would not directly violate the TAL. But he does have a bunch of guys with guns in Najaf, who were key in ensuring his safety and that of his family during both of the serious bouts of fighting. But they are few compared to rumored numbers of Jaysh al-Mahdi of Sadr or the Badr Brigades, who also at different times have come to his assistance when necessary. On the issue of Iranian presence and assistance, it has been reported on several occasions that we have found Iranian-made arms inside Iraq. It is very contusing to me what the goals of the Shia militia groups are, particularly the Sadrists, and again, I am not sure of ties to Lebanese Hezbollah. At different times, there were claims that they (Lebanese Hezbollah) had ties to Iraqi Hezbollah, led by Abdul Karim Mahoud al-Muhammadawi, Abu Hatim (a current TNA member), but I'm not sure about that because his political agenda is simplistic at best. As to the ties between Lebanese Hezbollah and the Sadrists, there should be a lot of them. Muhammad Baqr Sadr, another kinsman of Muqtada Sadr, who was killed/martyred in 1980, is a spiritual father not only of the Dawa party, but also of Lebanese Hezbollah as well as Musa Sadr, the godfather of Lebanese Hezbollah. There should be ties with Lebanese Hezbollah, but I don't know that we've seen those.

AMB. FREEMAN: Recently, the foreign minister of Iran, Kamal Kharrazi, drove from Tehran to Baghdad, apparently without much concern for his personal security, through zones that we can't travel without heavy armored contingents. That really got the attention of people in the region, in terms of driving home the extent to which Iran has made political gains in Iraq. It has led to a rising concern in the Sunni-dominated societies of the Arabian Peninsula that somehow the United States may either deliberately or inadvertently be creating a Shia crescent stretching from Lebanon to Syria and Iraq to Iran. If one imagines the war going on in Iraq for some time to come, there is this interesting prospect of the civil war between Shia and Sunnis internationalizing itself, somewhat on the model of Spain in the 1930s--not a pleasant prospect, but one that should be looked at.

COL. LANG: There are a lot of people around who are apologists for the Islamic Republic of Iran. I am not one of them and have never been. In fact, it is very clear to me, having followed this subject for a long period of time when I was in government and afterward, that if you want to look around for a government that stands at the very heart of support to jihadi groups, Sunni and Shin both, often as a kind of equal-opportunity assistance base, you should look to Tehran.

I don't think you have to think about whether Sadr or others in Iraq are connected to Hezbollah. That's unnecessary. Hezbollah's external communications lines run up their Ho Chi Minh trail through the Bekaa Valley, over the mountains, through Damascus International Airport to Tehran. Even if we now like to talk about the Syrians running Hezbollah, they don't; they never did. They have tolerated Hezbollah and sought to use it as a lever against Israel and others. But the Iranians have always been right at the heart of the matter.

Why should we be concerned about what Ambassador Freeman just said concerning the Sunni/Shia strengths? Everyone talks about the Iraqi Shia being the majority in Iraq. It may well be so. But if you look at the Islamic world as a whole or even the Arab world, the Shin are a rather small minority surrounded by masses of Sunni Arabs, Pakistanis, Turks and others of one group or another. There's a great deal of concern in the Sunni Islamic world about the fact that these Shia Arabs are now going to rule Iraq, a place where they never ruled before, and one of the risks is that of unending tension between these sects, which could degenerate at any time into a really bad situation.

An Iraqi Shia government will have no choice but to move in the direction of Iran. For the Iraqi Shia, Iran is the only show in town, the only real source of external support. It's almost inevitable that an Iraqi Shia government will be pushed by external and internal pressure to align itself with Iran.

MR. WHITE: There are a lot of stories about who is working with Muqtada al-Sadr and helping him, and the Iranians are frequently named in these stories. There's no proof that I know of out there at the moment. But it fits the situation, as Bob Newman said. Muqtada al-Sadr suffered significant defeats, first in April, and then in August of '04. Usually when you get defeated, you go out looking for help. And we do see some increase in Muqtada al-Sadr's military capability and capacity. Between the April and August uprisings, there were even rumors that he was getting help from the Baathists. So the fact that there may be some Iranian assistance going to him would not be at all surprising.

One thing I'm more concerned about than that is the possibility of an emerging connection between Muqtada al-Sadr and the Sunni Arab resistance. Politically, it's already there, to some extent. Muqtada al-Sadr has said a lot of things that support the Sunni Arab insurgency and the Sunni Arab position in Iraq over time. I suspect there is some kind of covert military or assistance component that we can't see. Sadr and his group established a connection with the Sunnis very quickly after April 2003 through Mohammed al-Kubaisi. Something has been going on there for a long, long time.

DR. ELAND: The Shia definitely do want a strong, central government in Iraq. But I think they're going to find over time that they can't control all of Iraq without the United States. So I think there's an incentive for them to compromise on some sort of a confederation, which may eventually lead to partition. Going back to what Patrick Lang said, Iraq is not really a nation. We have these groups that really don't want to be a part of it; certainly the Kurds don't want to be a part of Iraq.

We also have the problem that there's no rule of law in Iraq, so majority rule is something of a nonsensical concept. The key thing that you want to have in any liberal democracy is rights for the minority. That's what they're fighting for. The Shiites will be fighting for it too, if they can't control a government. All the groups will want control of a strong central government if there is one. That's why I say that people may not want to accept my solution at this point, but I think the only viable long-term solution is some sort of fundamental dismemberment of Iraq.

As for whether Shiite Iran will have influence over a rump Shia state in Iraq, I think that we're probably just going to have to live with that. We're too far in the hole. And I don't think that's completely catastrophic.

AMB. FREEMAN: AS I think Colonel Newman pointed out, Iraq's neighbors might have something to say about that sort of outcome, but I thank you for laying that possibility out in the open.

Q: Regarding a possible Shia are from Lebanon through Syria, Iraq and Iran, what are the implications for Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia and U.S. interests? We're talking about the jugular of parts of the world economy. Secondly, what about the Kurds' de facto veto over the constitution? And what might be the implications of the Downing Street memos? A new Watergate?

COL. NEWMAN: We've not had an Arab Shia state. Juan Cole has described the very nascent stage of Arab Shia politics as being minority politics. He says that it's very difficult to know what an Iraqi Shia majority state will do in the future. Their militia, like their politics, are at a very nascent stage compared with the Kurds, for instance. Prior to 1991, many people doubted that the Kurds were capable of self-rule. We've seen what they've done over the last fourteen years. Every Iraqi Shia that I talk with stresses that they are independent of Iran. That said, there are going to be all sorts of cultural and other fallout in the reactions of all these other Arab governments. We're going to have to continue to heavily engage, because that's going on right now with the rest of the Arab world. We've also got to find a different paradigm for dealing with Iran on low-level tactical, operational issues that we face right now because of our presence in Afghanistan and Iraq. We are extremely vulnerable to misunderstandings, and that makes it much more apparent to me that we have to have a multilateral approach.

The de facto Kurdish veto is one of the most difficult issues that the constitutional drafting committee is facing. Reportedly, Ayatollah Sistani was against it initially. The Kurds insisted upon it. That's one of the many, many issues that they've got to resolve.

COL. LANG: It's been much written about that the interface between strategic intelligence and policy decision making was completely out of whack in the period before we made the decision to go to war. It's been written about by a lot of people including me, but I think it just isn't useful anymore to talk about it very much. We're committed to what we're doing. The thing to do is to try and ensure that we don't make similar mistakes--go into countries on the basis of a projection of our own ideas that don't really exist in the real world. If we do that, we'll end up over and over again fighting not in the real place, but in some imaginary one. When that happens to you, you have very severe problems, and they go on for a very long time. The only Shia-ruled state in the Arab world that I can think of was the Fatimid Caliphate in the Middle Ages. It has been awhile since then. As I recall, they weren't treated with great friendliness by the Sunni powers around them.

AMB. FREEMAN: The domestic American political part of this is, at this point, imponderable. There has been implicit in this situation, however, from the beginning, the possibility of some reenactment of the Vietnam divisions in the United States over this question. So far we have been spared that--by the absence of debate rather than by an intelligent debate conducted in a civil fashion. What I am concerned about is that the suffocation of debate may be succeeded by an explosion of emotion; and that issues like the Downing Street Memo will in fact be seen as so discrediting the credibility of our government that we will--as in the case of Vietnam--suffer a severe national trauma. But we're not there yet.

Q: If resistance continues primarily among the Sunni community, what implications does that have for long-term stability, not just in Iraq, but in the region? Could a situation arise where groups that are now cooperative in the occupation, the Shias and the Kurds, turn against the occupation if instability persists?

MR. WHITE: I don't want to be mistaken for being an optimist on the situation in Iraq. I prefaced my remarks with the comment that there were a number of things going right, but there are all of these elements of intractability in the situation. We have to try with the Sunnis. If we're going to have a stable Iraq, somehow the Sunnis have to be brought into the process. Not all of them; some element of the Sunni resistance is going to continue forever, I think. Iraq is going to have a long and violent political future ahead of it. It could look something like Weimar Germany over time, with opposition groups even in the political process, but fundamentally opposed to the nature of the state. That's the best future we can hope for in a lot of ways. But we've got to try and bring the Sunnis in.

You have to convince them that they can't win the other way, and they've got to have that psychological transformation within the Sunni community, not among people who are already in the government, supporting the government, involved in the spoils system, having jobs and positions, but other people, who actually represent the insurgency, represent resistance. They need to be brought in somehow. An analogy I've used is that in 1942, the French people made a decision that the Germans were going to lose the war; it effectively undermined the entire structure of collaboration and gave great strength to the resistance in France. We need to bring about a conversion like that if we're going to succeed. I'm not sure we can do it.

COL. LANG: I don't think it's possible to convince them that they can't succeed in this way; the evidence all runs in the other direction. If the greatest power on earth has not succeeded in subjugating them thus far--and they are really ill-equipped, fairly few, a group of people with not a lot of weaponry--there's no reason they shouldn't think that, as long as they have some support in the Sunni Arab population, they can go on forever. It isn't inconceivable that, whatever government sits in Baghdad, it will not really control all the territory in the country. I lived in Yemen for a number of years and I know the government there does not control the whole country and never did. There were large parts of the country that were effectively places where the government's writ didn't run unless they went in with a battalion of troops and some tanks.

You could very easily have a situation in which a large part of Iraq just remains what Ibn Khaldun called the "land of insolence." That could go on for a long time. What I'm afraid of is that this situation will translate itself to other places as well, like Lebanon, where we may, by our very well-meaning efforts, destabilize the situation and create an analogous state of insurrection in the country as the various parts of society vie with each other.

DR. ELAND: I think that the Sunnis won't participate in the political process, because they think American credibility is low. But I also think it's because they think that after the Americans leave, whatever system is set up will disenfranchise them, and there will be paybacks for what they did when they ruled Iraq. The key problem in Iraq is not to establish a majority vote. That's somewhat of a joke. The key thing is to stop an armed minority from fighting. And the only way you can do that, in my view, is to make them feel more secure about their eventual fate. To me, confederation or partition is the only way to do that.

As for Iraq's neighbors, Turkey certainly would not be for something like that. But the Turks are trying to get into the EU, and even the Turkish Kurds might be less willing to join any sort of Kurdish state, simply because if Turkey does get into the EU, they'll be more prosperous than the neighboring Kurdish population. So there are things to quiet down the neighbors on the partition issue as well. If Turkey does anything rash, they certainly won't get into the EU, and that's a major goal for them.

So I think you have to put yourself in the Sunnis' shoes. I don't think you can dismiss them as just a bunch of thugs. They did rule Iraq, and they did it in a very brutal fashion. Now they are scared of payback. I think that the Sunni interests are going to have to be looked after because right now, they're the principal insurgents.

Q: I wanted to come back and ask the panel about the so-called Downing Street Memo, not because of the past, but because of the current situation. The idea that the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy is something I've written extensively about over the last four years, including the Pentagon's so-called Office of Special Plans and all of that. The kind of pessimism we're hearing today is certainly not reflected in information or statements coming out of the White House or the vice president's office and others. The question I'm therefore asking is, are the intelligence and facts being fixed around the policy still? What accounts for the contrasts between what I've heard today and the optimism that's coming from the White House? We have a new director of national intelligence. We have a new CIA director. We have new people in place. Wolfowitz and Feith are gone. Is information about the reality that we're facing in Iraq getting to the policy makers? Maybe the question is, are the policy makers still able to intimidate and politicize the intelligence system enough that this information simply gets quashed or left undelivered? Where do we stand on that? Is there any chance that this reality might penetrate the brains of the seemingly impenetrable people who are running the White House?

AMB. FREEMAN: So your question is, is there a cure for political autism? The answer is yes, there are elections in this country. But we just had one, and this issue wasn't really discussed, which is fairly amazing. My own sense from many years of dealing with the intelligence community in the U.S. government is that it is composed of people with a very high level of intellectual integrity who do not make a habit of mincing words when they do their analysis. So to the extent that we're describing the reality that is objectively verifiable, I have a very high level of confidence that this reality is also being described in the intelligence analysis and reporting, which brings me to a number of observations.

Various professions have various attributes. Courage is very important for soldiers. Optimism is very important for diplomats. Autism may be very important for presidents. This is not an administration that has ever admitted an error, as far as I'm aware, maybe because they never committed one. It remains to be seen, so I'm not sure that there is an answer to your question. But in terms of what is going on inside the U.S. government, I continue to have a very high level of respect for and confidence in the people who do the reporting and analysis.

COL. LANG: TO some extent, the presence on this panel of Jeff White and Colonel Newman distorts slightly the viewpoint because they are two of the best, in my experience. I know them both extremely well, and the quality of their effort and intellect is right at the top of what's available to the U.S. government. I would maintain that policy makers, whether they are autistic or not, have a right to formulate their own policies as they wish. But, if policy makers insist on making policy decisions without regard to the judgments of the intelligence agencies, I do object to people trying to maintain that they formed those policies on the basis of advice given to them by the intelligence community.

But there also is room for a good deal of blame to assign to the intelligence community. I've been trying to say this for a couple years now, but it's not something most people want to hear. In my opinion, there was a real failure, and perhaps a continuing failure, of leadership in the intelligence community, because it is a function of the leaders at the very top of these agencies at the national level to back their people. I've been in many situations in which the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency or some other senior officer has told the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the secretary of defense or some powerful senator, "We will not say that. We know what the truth is. We will tell the truth. It is our duty." You can't tell me that that's what happened in the run-up to this latest war in the ranks of the leadership of the intelligence community. If these people had stood their ground and refused to allow their people to be pushed around, we would not have gone into a situation in which we completely misinterpreted the realities.

Whether or not that's been corrected, I don't know. I don't think it looks all that much as though that situation has been thoroughly fixed. Drawing a bunch of boxes on a line-and-block diagram showing how you reorganize this or that doesn't mean a thing to me. What counts is the quality of the integrity in the people who have to back the analysts and the field collectors and approve operations that are dangerous. So far, I haven't seen it. I hope it's there.

AMB. FREEMAN: Pat said that nobody would publish his view, but Middle East Policy did publish an article by Col. Lang called "Drinking the Kool-Aid," which was precisely on this issue.

MR. WHITE: I was out of the intelligence community before the war began. I left in October of '02. Quite frankly, until that point I had seen no distortion of the information going forward. I didn't see everything, but I was not seeing any distortion of the information. A lot of uncertainties, things we didn't know enough about and so on, but I did not see distortion of the information up to the point I left the government.

One of the problems in Iraq, of course, is that lots of things are open to interpretation. Because of difficulties in information collection, analysis and so on, there are a lot of things about the insurgency and the situation in Iraq that are poorly understood and controversial, or where there are differing well-founded points of view. So it isn't as though everybody in the analytical community really knows what's going on and they're all telling the decision makers the same thing. So those people are probably getting some conflicting views on the situation.

That said, though, I think what's happening now is that the harsh realities of Iraq are becoming more and more apparent to a broader and broader sector of people interested in Iraqi affairs. It's driven home by casualties, by debates, and so on. And you can see, in the open-source reporting, a lot of very good stuff is being published in The Washington Post, in The New York Times, and so on, some very interesting comments from soldiers and officers in the field about the difficulties of the situation. My sense is that overall-whether or not this has reached into the White House, I can't say--there is an increasing sense of the harsh reality of the situation in Iraq and the long-term intractable difficulties that we face there.

AMB. FREEMAN: There is the beginning of a debate, probably about the wrong issue, which is setting a date for withdrawal. Like everyone else on the panel, I have severe difficulty with that approach. But at least it has the merit of providing an excuse for a hearing or two and the discussion of what is happening, which have been notably absent. We're in the halls of Congress. This institution has essentially defaulted on its war-making authority. Perhaps it will discover a means of reasserting it.

Q: Is it fair to say that we have effectively placed ourselves now in a position where we have taken the control of the future out of our hands? Secondly, it is constantly overlooked that the Kurds are mostly Sunnis. Has there been any movement to try to create a broader Iraqi identity, or create some kind of cooperation or some kind of system based on an identity that's less sectarian?

AMB. FREEMAN: In other words, returning to the situation before the invasion, in some respects.

MR. WHITE: I'd focus on the issue of the control of our future. To an extent, it is out of our hands; we passed sovereignty to the Iraqis almost a year ago now. It has increasingly passed out of our hands as the political transformation process went forward. We're no longer in a position where we can simply dictate what goes on in the country, if we ever were. We were never in that position. But our ability to shape, influence decisively, direct matters in Iraq has declined. We now have to deal with an entity that has some kind of real legitimacy, even if it's legitimate only in two of the three major parts of Iraq. We don't have the forces there to bring about anything remotely like a decisive military end, even if that's possible against an insurgency. We don't control the future. We can shape it; we can help influence it; we can try and push it in the direction we want. But that's now a contest. There are four sides involved in addition to us. So it's a game that's being played, a grand game, and we don't control that game completely anymore.

I'd just say one thing on the issue of Sunni versus ethnic identity. I think there is little prospect of a Kurdish-Sunni-Arab alliance against the Shia. The Kurds have cast their fate with the United States, and they're going to hug us to the end. There are conceivable circumstances under which they would break that connection, but they're just conceivable. I think they are going to stick with the Shia as long as they can. It's one of the major problems in Iraq that there is no grand strategic bargain among the players. There is no strategic view of the future of Iraq and what it should look like.

COL. NEWMAN: I think it's very difficult for the United States to have the political role of trying to build a new consensus or some sort of confederation. There are definite limits on the roles in which we are acceptable to the Iraqis. As many of you know who are familiar with the Arab world, there are limits to the amount of legitimacy that we have. We can certainly impact the training of their security forces, but even in building their institutions, there are limits to what we can do. We also need to continue to look for more options to bring in others, to get a much stronger UN involvement in the ongoing constitution-writing process, to get the EU involved in everything, to get NATO involved in the military-training process.

I can't comment on the issue of troop strength, but I can comment on the presence of other government agencies there. We need to look at the quality and quantity that we have there assisting the military effort, particularly as the security situation improves, and I think it will improve. Much more of the violence now is directed against Iraqis. We need to get the right sort of American presence there in terms of specialists to help in the institution-building process. I think that's a key aspect of the way ahead, as well as the other ongoing efforts for Sunni engagement and enfranchisement. But the timeline for that will be dependent on a host of Iraqi decisions, as well as insurgent decisions.

AMB. FREEMAN: This panel may be somewhat misleading in the sense that it might give the impression that there is a significant number of Americans who have real expertise about the subjects we're talking about. But you're looking at a substantial part of the American expertise right here at this table. We are paying a price as a society for our neglect of Arab studies, the study of Islam; and we are having to scramble after the fact to develop expertise that we should have been developing before we ever got into this.

COL. LANG: I think the Middle East Policy Council has done a tremendous job of publishing controversial views on these subjects that fall properly within its sphere of interest--that is, the Middle East. But what I was referring to earlier was something I'd like to get published on the intelligence community, which I haven't had much luck with yet.

With regard to Iraq, the point is well taken that we have cornered ourselves in an application of what you could either call Hobson's Choice or Morton's Fork. We face a couple of possibilities that are both undesirable, but which we are going to have to live with one way or another. Are we going to stay and fight it out, try to involve NATO and other allies, bring in more forces and stick it out until we've got a government that can at least partly rule Iraq, or are we just going to pick up and leave? Either one of these things has really bad consequences. In the end, I suspect that what it's going to come down to is that we--the military, the State Department, USAID, everybody else--will do our very, very best. And at some point down the road, if it goes on too long and there are too many dead, the American people will just run out of patience and pull the plug.

DR. ELAND: I agree with Pat. U.S. public opinion, which is the key strategic factor, has already flipped on the war. This happened in Somalia, Vietnam and Lebanon, and the insurgents know that. So if they just keep doing what they're doing, eventually the big guy is going to go away. In a sense, we don't have any control; we can't withdraw and we can't escalate. We could escalate, but I think it would be folly, as it was in Vietnam. I don't believe in a date-certain withdrawal, but before we withdraw--and I think we should withdraw fairly quickly--we need to negotiate among the groups and leave something viable behind or at least create a chance for that. I'm not sure anything can guarantee a peaceful and prosperous Iraq, however.

I think it's a little late to try to create an Iraqi identity. Scholars who have studied federations in various countries have found that they don't usually work where there are ethnic or religious tensions that tend to pull them apart. Those types of things are stronger than any institutions that you can build. The key thing right now is to make the Sunnis quit fighting, and I think we're going to have to take their concerns into account. Like Chas., I think this can only be solved politically.

MR. WHITE: One of the problems we face is that the nature of the war and the nature of our forces in Iraq have changed over time. We defeated the regime with the professional full-time military. But we're fighting much of the counterinsurgency with reserves and National Guard units, so the casualties and their stories are visited upon local communities. Little towns in Louisiana, Iowa, West Virginia and so on see the casualties to units that are drawn out of those areas. That is a much more personal type of impact on the American citizenry. I think that's part of the process that's driving changes in attitudes. The war has come home. It's not our professional army fighting overseas like a French or European army in the past. If you go on the web, almost every state now maintains a state casualty list. Because of the way people get killed in Iraq, sometimes there are spikes in casualties, and it gets the attention of people.

Q: Can anyone comment on the broader strategic and tactical question of the linkage of Iraq and the global war on terrorism, and how our involvement there has either helped or hindered our fight against al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda types?

COL. LANG: It won't be a great surprise to hear that I don't think that, in the beginning, there was a lot of connection. The war was just something we decided to do for various policy reasons. But now the situation has changed. The jihadists took us at our word. They said, "You want to come and fight us in this place in the heart of the Arab and Islamic world? Good, it's convenient to us, more convenient than New York City. We will come to Iraq and fight you there." So, these men are pouring into the country with one thing in mind, which is to earn their place in paradise. And, they're working at it very hard. So, whether or not it started out that way, it has become for the jihadists the major theater of war against us, the great enemy. The Iraqi insurgency against us over the issues of our occupation of the country is related, but not the same phenomenon at all. This certainly is now a considerable part of the war on terror.

AMB. FREEMAN: And a principal training ground for problems in the future.

COL. LANG: There's no doubt about that. As Clausewitz said, war is the great school of war, not a service school somewhere. The best way to learn to fight well is to fight a good army and survive. That's the experience we're putting them through.

Q: Is there a positive incentive we could give to Iraqis who sympathize with the insurgents, as opposed to simply the removal of the risk of being shot by the coalition or Iraqi forces?

COL. NEWMAN: I think the election process is the main incentive. The challenge, which we're working on, is to show that the Sunnis have a future in the political process in Iraq. So, even though they didn't vote and weren't elected, they can have a place at the table, that they're going to be included and that their voices will be heard, that they have a chance for advancement in the government--the great employer--and in the Iraqi security forces, the police and the military. Of course, these are Iraqi decisions, and there's a tendency to not want to compromise, to go for zero-sum gains in this part of the world. There is a difference between terrorists and insurgents--those who are going after Iraqi civilians being defined as terrorists in the minds of many Iraqis, particularly Sunnis. They risk losing what popular support they have if they go after civilian targets. They need to understand that there is a possibility of accommodation at a future point.

DR. ELAND: It's very difficult to convince many Sunnis to get off the fence because they see us as a foreign invader, and they also know that we're going to leave. They've seen what we've done in Somalia, Lebanon, Vietnam, et cetera, and they know there is already talk of withdrawal in the United States. So if they cooperate with the us, they'll be left behind when we leave. Maybe there will be some participation in the political process, but I think the fear is that any Sunnis that collaborate with the United States will be abandoned eventually.

MR. WHITE: We've already abandoned lots of Sunnis who have cooperated with us when we've moved into an area, driven out the insurgents and then departed, leaving some sort of police force or administration in place that's defenseless against the insurgents. It's a repeated pattern in the Sunni areas of Iraq.

The issue of whether or not there can be a military solution in Iraq needs to be expanded on. Just as we say that there has to be a political solution and the Sunnis have to be engaged politically, there also has to be a military component to that engagement that suppresses the insurgency so we can allow the political process to go forward. It doesn't mean achieving an all-out victory, sweeping the area clean of insurgents, but it means creating the military conditions that allow the political things we're trying to do to go forward. You can't establish governance in a place like Fallujah unless you hold the ground, and right now the Iraqis are incapable of holding a lot of ground in Sunni areas on their own. This means essentially that we have to do it. It's a repeated pattern in Iraq.

We are offering a lot to the insurgents. The political transformation process is putting pressure on them to make decisions about which way they want to go. My guess is that the Sunni population is going to split, some moving more toward the resistance, some toward the political process. So it's not hopeless, but it's very difficult.

COL. LANG: This is an extremely complex and alien landscape we're talking about, culturally, politically, linguistically. What has been said here is obviously true. These things have to be brought together in the context of controlling the ground if we're going to "win." And "win" means a stable, at least somewhat effective, Iraqi government. This is a little bit like drawing to an inside straight, not an easy thing to do. It's going to require finesse, something that we haven't shown much of. It's going to take guys like Colonel Newman and West Point cadets learning Arabic, to go out there and try to draw to an inside straight. That's the only thing you can do.

AMB. FREEMAN: I would just note that the elections were intended to provide a basis for national consensus on the creation of an Iraqi state and government. And they may--the process has another two months or so to run. To date however, far from producing consensus, it appears the voters went to the polls to express radically different visions of Iraq. There is no agreement at all among these visions of the future of Iraq: the Kurdish visions, the various Shia visions, the Sunni Arab visions, not to mention those of other minorities. There is an absence of consensus about what Iraq is and ought to be. What is the source of legitimacy for any governing authority? Saddam's answer was, I have the bullets so don't ask stupid questions. We may end up providing the same answer to someone else as we leave, which is not desirable. But I think one thing is absolutely clear: yes, military action has to be a component of the answer, but foreign armies are not seen by people as legitimate, ever. It was Talleyrand who remarked, on the basis of the French experience in Spain under Napoleon, you can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it.