Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)

DATE=05/23/2003

TYPE=ON THE LINE

NUMBER=1-01334

TITLE=WINNING THE IRAQI PEACE

INTERNET=Yes

EDITOR=OFFICE OF POLICY 619-0038

CONTENT=

THEME: UP, HOLD UNDER AND FADE

Host: Winning the peace in Iraq. Next, On the Line. [music]

Host: The U-S-led coalition that liberated Iraq from the regime of Saddam Hussein is now trying to help the people of Iraq get back on their feet. Coalition forces are cracking down on looters and thieves and efforts continue to expand supplies of water, electric power, and other necessities. Paul Bremer, the new civil administrator for Iraq, is focusing on restoring order and protecting public safety. As a first step, Mr. Bremer said that the coalition will root out members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party regime.

[SOT]

Bremer: Shortly, I will issue an order on measures to extricate Baathists and Baathism from Iraq forever. We have and will aggressively move to seek to identify these people and remove them from office. We have hunted down and will continue to deal with those members of the old regime who are sabotaging the country and the coalition's efforts."

Host: The U-S-led coalition has promised the Iraqi people that it will help them to create conditions that will allow them to build their own democracy. President George W. Bush said, "Our coalition will stay until our work is done. Then we will leave and we will leave behind a free Iraq." How goes the coalition effort to win the peace in Iraq? I'll ask my guests: Sydney Freedberg, a correspondent with The National Journal magazine; Stephen Hayes, staff writer with the Weekly Standard magazine; and joining us by phone from Kuwait is Safia Taleb Al-Souhail, a member of Women for a Free Iraq. Welcome and thanks for joining us today. Sydney Freedberg, how's the situation in Iraq right now?

Freedberg: Well, the last report I got was that electrical power is back to about half the city of Baghdad. Given the fact that a fifth of the population is in greater Baghdad, you really have to focus on that city in particular, it's a very centralized country. Water to about seventy-five percent of the city. This is behind where people certainly hoped they'd be at this point a number of weeks after the war, but of course the public order problem that Ambassador Bremer was talking about in the clip has really been a stumbling block that's gotten in the way of everything. And additional troops are being moved in really as we speak, in the thousands, including specialized military police units precisely to help tamp those public order problems down.

Host: What's the relationship, Stephen Hayes, between these issues of public order and the kind of basic services like water and electricity? Is the lack of water and electricity contributing to the lack of public order? Or is the disorder making it harder to get the electricity and the water up.

Hayes: Both. I think they feed off one another. I think certainly as a very, very beginning point we need to have restored order in Baghdad and then throughout the country. And from all accounts, that has not yet happened. And despite the fact that things have gone better under Paul Bremer, who's been there for a week, I would say the situation on the ground is still somewhat uneven with respect to looting and general order.

Host: Safia Al Souhail, are you there by phone?

Al Souhail: Yes, I am.

Host: What's your perception of the situation on the ground in Iraq?

Al Souhail: Actually, I would like to start by saying that the war preparation was excellently done, but there were gaps in terms of political, administrative, and security preparation for the day after. Right now we really need to concentrate on many things in order to have stability. First of all, what I do believe is the most important thing is to destroy the security apparatus of [the old] regime and the Baath organization because it is still around and it's disguised. The Baathists are covering themselves under the mantle of religion right now and also under the name of democracy. They are very active and they are working together with some mullahs, you know, mullahs -- which are religious personalities -- from both sides, Sunni and Shia, who were on the payroll of Saddam Hussein in the past. And the best way, actually, is to start thinking of arresting those. And the other thing is gathering the weapons from the people of Iraq. Weapons have to be gathered. And we really have to concentrate on many different issues such as you have just mentioned, which are the public services must be restored rapidly. Again, we need to concentrate on reorganization of the police corps, which is very important. We have to choose or to elect, whatever, a mayor for Baghdad with a strong personality and a good reputation, for example. And clearly many things have to be done for the near future.

Host: Let me ask Sydney Freedberg about this issue of the Baath party holdovers and one would have thought that getting rid of the Saddam Hussein loyalists and the people who populated his regime would have been the first order of business. Why didn't that happen?

Al Souhail: Actually, everybody has asked me this question inside Iraq right now. Everybody is asking why they are there. And they are still active and I think they are doing whatever, I think. They are very active right now and this question is really in the mind of all Iraqis right now.

Host: Let me ask Sydney Freedberg if there's an answer for it.

Freedberg: There's a bit of a paradox thrown in because, obviously, there is a great desire to get rid of essentially the Mafia, the Tikrit Mafia that is the real hard core of the Baath party. But there is also a very firm desire not to pull out so many rank and file Baathists, that is to collapse all the old institutions of government. This is a country with a command economy, a very centralized country. And like the former East bloc countries, there really was no way to get ahead in a lot of areas which we wouldn't think of as normally political areas without being a party member. Originally, the hope was in fact that large elements of the army would stay intact. That the municipal police, this was the political security police, would very quickly return to their beats in Baghdad and other countries. I think frankly the team under the former civil administrator [Jay] Garner was really taken somewhat by surprise in that the apparatus of the Iraqi government went home. The army dissolved. The civil police are still really not back in the streets, whereas, for example, in the Kurdish areas, when there was the revolt in 1991, the Kurds actually got the local cops back on the street fairly quickly and fairly intact as an institution. The degree to which this regime is brittle and to which even ordinary day to day functions simply collapsed and you had things like looting -- you had people like, people who were managers of electrical plants that were often more or less functional, but did not want to move, did not want to flip that switch back on without a specific order from the Americans because of the entrenched habits of "unless the man in charge tells you to do it, you'd better not do it."

Host: Steve Hayes, as Safia Al Souhail raises this issue that Iraqis are asking themselves: Why didn't the U-S come in and immediately get rid of anyone who had any relationship to the regime of Saddam Hussein? And I've read accounts that people in asking those questions start to wonder conspiracy theories. Is there some effort to try to keep Saddam's people in power? What's the answer for all that?

Hayes: I think that's a very important point and this is the first and largest mistake that the administration has made in post-war Iraq. I was in Um Qasr a week after the town fell, the war was still going on and you'd walk around the town and people could point out the Baath party members. And there would be fights intermittently between the rest of the population and the Baath party members. And they would say, why are you not arresting them? These are people who killed our relatives. These are people who tortured us. Why are they being allowed to run free? And unfortunately, I think in the five weeks since I was there, the problem's gotten worse and when you get to a city like Baghdad, which as Sydney pointed out is really the central -- not only the capital, but the center geographically and certainly with the most people -- when you have Baath party members running around freely without any sort of sense that the U-S government or the U-S military is going after them, it creates this mistrust or feeds conspiracy theories. And the extent to which there are conspiracy theories that are current in Iraq today is extraordinary. I mean, even before the war, I was meeting with Iraqi exiles in Dearborn, Michigan and they were talking about how the U-S supported Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. And how the U-S government promised to remove him after 1991 and then failed to do so. So there are lots of conspiracy theories. And so, it's fair to say that there are a number of people, a good number of people in the country who believe that we are in some way supporting the Baathists.

Freedberg: Just a caveat though, by some estimates there were about two million people in the Baath party at one or the other level. Bremer's recent declaration focused on the top thirty- to fifty- thousand. That sounds like a large number, that's actually not by any means the majority of people with Baath party cards. And just as in the East Bloc today a lot of people, perfectly respectful politicians, center left politicians and administrators are ex-communist because there is no way to avoid being a communist if you want to have some role in government and some role in public life. We will almost certainly have to see a new Iraq that at least draws on the rank and file kind of going along to get along Baathists. Now, weeding out, as we both said, the hard-core, the torturers, the murderers, the black marketiers, is a pressing challenge. And that's an extraordinarily difficult one that Bremer has obviously been focusing on.

Host: Safia Al Souhail, to what extent has the coalition not taken as strong a hand as you would like to see because the coalition perhaps has not wanted to appear heavy-handed in occupying Iraq?

Al Souhail: You know, I think that they did a great job. You know, they did a great job and the outcome of this war was great. Getting rid of the most brutal dictator who was Saddam Hussein and having more than twenty-four million Iraqis liberated and free is something really great. But we need a real democracy for our country. We would like to see real support from the United States and the rest of the civilized world for having a real and a strong democracy in our country. And we really should work together in order to have democracy in our country. And this really means a lot of work together. When I say together, which is, the Iraqi people who have never participated in the Baath regime party before. When I say never, I mean those murderers who were responsible for the repression of the Iraqi people, not the two million Baathies who were in the Baath party.

Host: Well, Safia Al Souhail, you mentioned the efforts to get started on the road to democracy. What's happening right now in Iraq among Iraqis to make that progress toward the basics of democracy?

Al Souhail: You know, let us not forget that the liberation of Iraq has been only weeks ago and we still have to do a lot of things in order to have democracy in our country. First, to have democracy we should let our people, the Iraqi people choose their own representatives. And I believe to do so, they need, our people need to be helped or assisted, particularly for the elections. And I think that we need at least two years preparation time for this election in Iraq. A lot of things need to be done with the Iraqi people, with the assistance of the Americans and others, like having a new census of the population because of the elections. We have to, for example, we need international observers for elections to make sure that it is a free and a fair election. Many things have to be done together and we have to start from zero, as you know, in developing our country right now.

Host: Stephen Hayes, how does the coalition balance these needs of trying to leave room for Iraqis to develop their own institutions and get democracy rolling and yet at the same time have a strong enough presence that chaos doesn't take over.

Hayes: That, again is a great question and the things that Safia reminded us of is, look, the baseline is that the Iraqi people are a lot better off now than they were under Saddam Hussein. I don't think very many people would disagree with that. As far as moving forward, what we saw in the first five weeks was essentially that sort of detached, kind of go at your own pace, we'll help you if you need it [approach] doesn't work. It hasn't worked. People were frustrated and most importantly, the Iraqi people were frustrated. And the two meetings they had between U-S government representatives and representatives of people inside Iraq didn't go as well as U-S government folks had hoped. And, in the second plan, in one instance, Zalmay Khalilzad, who was the envoy to the meetings was questioned aggressively by the Iraqis who basically said: "Look, what is the plan? Give us a plan." And finally, somebody said, "Do you have a plan?" And his response was no. That's not the kind of answer you need to give at this time. And, I understand the concerns about appearing heavy-handed or appearing authoritarian or what have you. But I think the fact that Paul Bremer's in and he's signaled quickly that he will be much more aggressive with respect to security, with respect to moving the democratization process along, is sending the right signal.

Host: Sydney Freedberg, does the coalition have a plan now?

Freedberg: There is, it's hard to have a strict timeline for these things, but the problem is to some extent, there's a lot of reinventing the wheel here. And there have been some lessons, for example from the Balkans that people didn't really incorporate fully. For example, rule of laws and dealing with basically a black market, mafia-type organizations, which essentially the Baath party is becoming, was a big issue in Kosovo, in Bosnia, one that was actually very badly mishandled because of a gap between the NATO military side and the U-N civilian justice side. To some extent, after eight years of trial and error, the Clinton administration had worked out a fairly elaborate process. There was an official, something called the presidential decision directive modeled on the intermission for Haiti, actually. You know, there were hundreds of page-long checklists for all the tasks you could think of. Obviously, there was always something you would miss in those checklists, but there was actually a formalized procedure for bringing all the different agencies, state department, commerce, agriculture, not just defense to the table and really working through, in a bureaucratic way, at a level below the highest political people -- all the sort of grunt work of the plan. The Bush administration actually looked at that process, thought it was too bureaucratic also, of course, it was a Clinton process -- and actually basically revoked it. A lot of people on sort of the mid-level, working level were very worried that this would cause problems, the next big intervention. And to some extent the problems we've seen have reflected getting rid of that check list, getting rid of that bureaucratic process. And to some extent, I mean, I was very personally impressed with General Garner. I did not meet him but I spoke to a lot of people who knew him and he certainly had a very strong record in the Kurdish areas in 1991. But putting this responsibility so heavily on the military on a person with strictly military background is in some ways a step backwards from the inter-agency process, the civilian military coordination. That was laboriously worked out in the last administration. Moving someone like Bremer who has both ties to the Pentagon, to the neo-conservative circles there, but also has a State Department background, has an intelligence background, really represents, to some extent reinventing the very necessary wheel of inter-agency processes. And you're also seeing your consolidations in the headquarters over there, a shift from the war-fighting focus, towards the military supporting the reconstruction effort, moving along in this process.

Host: Let me ask Safia Al Souhail in Kuwait to tell us a little bit. The most visible instances of politics in Iraq right now are the protest marches being mounted by Shiite groups. And I'm wondering if that is actually reflective of wide-spread sentiment in Iraq or if your sense is that that is something that just reflects the organization of those particular groups?

Al Souhail: Yes, of course, it reflects on the organization of these groups and I think that those people, the ones that are demonstrating right now, in the streets in Iraq are representing a fewer number of people. Iraqis really are welcoming the alliance forces and are grateful for all those who helped them. And I think they need some time to start thinking differently for their future. They need help of all the international community. And I think that what is reflected right now by the media, covering all these demonstrations, it's really not giving the real picture about what's happening inside Iraq right now. They've been silent for many, many years and they want someone to hear them. They want really to let their voice be heard. And this is something that we expected from the beginning. This is what I believe. And I would like to add something about if the United States, I mean the Americans have a plan for the Iraqi people or not. I met with Mr. Zalmay Khalilzad and Mr. [Jay] Garner and others who are responsible for the Iraqi file right now. And I think they did a great job.

Host: I'm afraid I'm going to have to cut you off because that's all the time we have for today. But I'd like to thank our guests for joining us today. Sydney Freedberg of the National Journal magazine, Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard magazine, and joining us by phone form Kuwait, Safia Taleb Al Souhail of Women for a Free Iraq. Before we go, I'd like to invite you to send us your questions or comments. You can e-mail them to Ontheline@ibb.gov For On the Line, I'm Eric Felten.