Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)

DATE=10/09/2003

TYPE=ON THE LINE

NUMBER=1-01406

TITLE=IRAQIS REBUILDING IRAQ

INTERNET=Yes

EDITOR=OFFICE OF POLICY 619-0038

CONTENT= Transcript for OTL released Friday UTC

THEME: UP, HOLD UNDER AND FADE

Host: Iraqis rebuilding Iraq. Next, On the Line.

[music]

Host: The first battalion of the new Iraqi army graduated from basic training this month. The seven-hundred soldiers will go to work within weeks to help provide security and guard Iraq's borders. The Iraqi army will eventually number forty-thousand men. Iyad Alawi, the current president of the Iraqi Governing Council, said the new army would not be like the one Saddam Hussein used to impose his rule. "Our army," said Mr. Alawi, "will be the defenders of our nation as well as of its citizens." The U-S-led coalition is working to place Iraqis in charge of rebuilding their country. Iraqis are now doing most of their own police work and U-S Secretary of State Colin Powell has called for Iraqis to write a new constitution within six months. According to U-S Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, "We are not in Iraq to engage in nation-building. Our mission is to help Iraqis so that they can build their own nation." How go efforts to put Iraqis in charge of rebuilding Iraq? I'll ask my guests: Leslie Campbell, regional director of Middle East programs at the National Democratic Institute; and Pam Hess, Pentagon correspondent for United Press International. Welcome and thanks for joining us today.

Les Campbell, we hear a lot about how in localities around Iraq the majority of cities have their own governing councils that are running the day-to-day affairs of their cities. Are they robust organizations that are really sort of running their cities' day-to-day affairs?

Campbell: It depends on the region, but overall, yes. In northern Iraq, particularly the part that was part of the no-fly zone for the last decade under the sanctions, the Kurdish population in the north has been running their own affairs quite nicely for a long time and they continue to do so. In the south, which is primarily a Shia population, they're bound together by clan, by tribe, by religion, by other things and they have generally speaking managed to get together, put together councils with help from the U-S military and they're functioning reasonably well. A lot of the news that we see that shows Iraq looking a little bit chaotic emanates from in and around Baghdad where the situation isn't as orderly.

Host: Pam Hess, what do you think? Is Baghdad or the rest of the country more representative of where things are headed in Iraq?

Hess: I spent three weeks in the south and four weeks in Baghdad and I think anecdotally, probably the south and the north are more representative of the country, but the problem with Baghdad is that it's five-point-five [5.5] million people all concentrated in one place. It's the center of so much that wither goes Baghdad, goes the rest of the country. In places where it's demographically less challenging, where you have more uniform groups, it's easier for them to work together and it's easier for them to be at peace, especially in the south, where I have experience. These were people that were brutally repressed under Saddam Hussein and so they had an interest in helping the U-S military and making sure that his henchmen didn't come back to power. So, I would say, geographically, the majority of the country is a lot calmer than we see on the news, but you can't ignore how important Baghdad is.

Host: Les Campbell, what's going on in Baghdad in terms of efforts to put Iraqis in charge of running day-to-day affairs?

Campbell: Well, there's a lot going on. In the introduction to the show, you mentioned the building of an army, of a police force. This is happening, I think it's going to be a slow process. You don't come up with a brand new army over night and in a sense almost retrain people, almost un-brainwash people who may have worked under Saddam in some capacity, but that is happening. There are local councils, in fact there is a Baghdad city council and there are neighborhood councils that are set up literally at the neighborhood level. They are functional, but one of the problems is that Iraqis have absolutely no experience of local government. The U-S military and the coalition authority set up these councils, but a lot of Iraqis are saying, "Well, do they have real power? What can they do? Do they have any money? Do they have decision-making authority? And Iraqis tend to ignore -- in Baghdad -- tend to ignore these local councils, thinking they're not that legitimate. And they still think the only way to get anything done is to go to the gates of the Republican palace where Ambassador Paul Bremer sits, and they almost want to treat him, the U-S administrator as some kind of sovereign. They want to go and petition him. And that reflects, I guess, a misunderstanding is wrong, because we have to give Iraqis some credit. They haven't had any experience with decentralized, local democratic government. So it's going to take time for these very nascent local council structures to work.

Hess: I think that actually Les brings up something, a very central problem that I saw in Baghdad, which is, folks did want to bypass their Iraqi governing councils and go straight to Bremer, but they can't get to him. It's almost impossible for them to get anywhere into the C-P-A [Coalition Provisional Authority] and so what you have are a whole lot of needs that are going unaddressed and no one knows quite where to go to get them addressed. There's no town meetings. There's no way for people to be heard by the C-P-A and the military.

Host: Well if the coalition authority is trying to get resources out for people to do rebuilding, how are those resources getting distributed? Are they trying to get them through the local councils or what's the process?

Hess: If you're talking about the reconstruction contracts, those are being centrally administered in a very impenetrable way. I haven't quite been able to figure out who's in charge of all the money. But I think there's been something on the order of fewer than twenty contracts that have been issued, all of them to American companies except for one which is the currency contract that went to the Brits. And then those American companies are responsible for sub-contracting and there is some small number of Iraqi firms that have managed to get some work under that. So, the money is still pretty heavily in the hands of U-S companies. Iraqis that do day work for them or that manage to get on the payroll -- there's not that many of them -- that's how some of the money is getting forced down. They're also trying to do larger programs. There's a hundred thousand people -- Iraqis -- working for day wages getting the sewage back on line and working on water programs, but again, this is a country with probably sixty to seventy percent unemployment after the war, and not a lot of cash is flowing towards them.

Host: Les Campbell, how do you build institutions in Iraq if contracts are going to American companies and where is the room for Iraqi companies to get going?

Campbell: Well that's a good question and it's not just Iraqi companies, and there are a number of those. One thing, several things, I think, that don't seem obvious from watching the news that people may not think, is that there were a number of private sector companies and individuals who worked in the private sector, even under Saddam, even under the sanctions. For example, there was a lively trade back and forth to Amman, Jordan, which is not too far away. [There was] a big highway between Baghdad and Amman. And there was trading in consumer goods; a lot of commerce over the Turkish border as well. So there are a lot of Iraqis who are in business and could be called upon. Some of them, as was mentioned by Pam, are participating but not that many. But another thing which is going on which is counterintuitive is what I term as an explosion of politics, in the sense that not only do Iraqis want to be involved in the rebuilding the structural infrastructure rebuilding, they want to get involved in policy-making and decisions. And there are hundreds of Iraqis who are clambering for a way of getting into some type of situation where they can influence how decisions are being made. And it's really true that they can't go and see Administrator Bremer. I mean, it's basically a wall of soldiers there for understandable reasons. And what they're doing is they're meeting in kind of a, I would say I guess, unformed, kind of uneducated way. And we can't blame Iraqis for that, because they know they want to get involved, they're just not quite sure how. What does it take to get involved? What are the skills? What do they need to do? How do they organize themselves? And then once they have that down pat -- for example, it might be people concerned about the environment or children's issues or healthcare issues or about unemployment - how do you put together your ideas and then present them to the people in charge. And to me this is one of the big problems right now in terms of getting Iraqis involved. Iraqis don't particularly think that their local representatives in Baghdad. And I think again, as we said in the beginning, we have to draw a distinction between Baghdad and the rest of the country. They don't think that the Iraqi local representatives are the people that make the decision. They can't get at Ambassador Bremer. They're full of ideas and they want to move forward, but they're not sure quite where to go. So, I think the issue at hand, to a large extent, is education: education about democracy, about civics, about government, about constitutionalism, about rule of law, about how a governing system might work. And once you've got that sort of basic education, you can build structures that allow people to get involved and effect their decisions. And to me, these are the basic building blocks of getting Iraqis involved in every step of the rebuilding process.

Host: Pam Hess, does the governing council fill any of this role, the national governing council, of being someplace where people can go to make their voices heard?

Hess: Yes. The twenty-five member -- minus-one after the assassination -- Governing Council was appointed by Ambassador Bremer and the U-S government. They are a repository for some of this, but their power is still fairly undefined and it's unclear what it is they can actually do. They are a lot of the time issuing statements and opinions, but what they're doing is unclear. So I think the problem with what Les is describing is that there are all of these actually very well educated people in Baghdad that have all of this energy and all of these ideas. And with it going nowhere it's turning into frustration and it's contributing to this sense that the U-S is an occupier as opposed to a liberator. I don't know if that's actually the case and it's certainly not how the United States wants to be viewed, but that disconnect, that frustration is, I think adding to the problems that they had in Baghdad.

Host: Well Les Campbell one of the ongoing problems they have in Baghdad, of course, is the security situation throughout the Sunni triangle, as it's called there, around Baghdad. Vivienne Walt, who is correspondent for Time magazine, a stringer for Time magazine was in Iraq recently and she wrote that there's security issues and there's violence in the city, but there's also a tremendous, normalcy as well. And she writes, "With ordinariness and violence jostling for primacy, the question is: Which will win out?" What's the sense of people in Baghdad right now about whether ordinary life is going to win out or violence of one sort or another?

Campbell: I think the sense is that no one's quite sure. And this is a topic of discussion. A lot of Baghdadis -- that's the name they use for themselves -- are longing for the days of stability. They often joke that maybe Iraq needs many Saddams and not one, sort of a macabre Iraqi joke. I think a couple of things bear us out here. One is that Iraqis are, the vast majority of Iraqis are glad that Saddam's gone. I think that's a basic bottom line that people have to remember. They are upset, disappointed, anxious at what they perceive to be the lack of progress. And as Pam said, they're sort of not sure what's going on and very upset about not being able to have an impact on what's going on. So that's leading to some disappointment. But they're happy about Saddam being gone. The other thing to sort of keep in mind is that when you watch the news, particularly the t-v news, you're seeing in essence a lot of people with cameras congregating in the morning, finding out where the latest disaster was, running over to that and filming it. And when you watch the news at night outside Iraq, you get the impression the whole place is crazy. When you're in Baghdad and in much of Iraq, you don't notice that. I've often used the analogy that anyone from any big city would understand, that you could have a rash of murders in a part of the city that you never go to, and that certainly happens in Washington, D.C. And it's awful and it's awful for the people there, but it doesn't have that much bearing on your life because that's not a place where you particularly go. Baghdad is very much like that. So it's not chaotic particularly. It's got problems, but a lot of life seems normal.

Host: Let's bring into the conversation right now, we're joined by phone from Baghdad by Mustafa Alrawi, who's the managing editor of "Iraq Today." Mr. Alrawi, are you there?

Alrawi: I am. How are you doing?

Host: Fine thanks. Tell us your sense there on the ground in Baghdad of whether a sense of chaos and violence or of ordinariness and normality is winning the day right now?

Alrawi: I was just listening to you guys comment. I don't agree that it's like Washington, D.C. I don't think that if something happens in another part of the city it doesn't affect you. I mean, trouble seems to find you in Baghdad wherever you go. I mean, there's no pattern to the bombings or the crime. It's to any area that it can stretch. That's the problem, because it's not like "It's a bad area, don't go there." It's really kind of the entire city and it's illogical and it's random and that's what scares people.

Host: Mr. Alrawi, we've been talking about efforts to get Iraqis more involved in the rebuilding efforts and what's your sense of the efforts now to restore more security in Baghdad? Is it something that the Iraqi police forces are making a real impact in or is it still primarily up to coalition forces?

Alrawi: Well, I mean, Iraqi police, their presence is being felt more and more every day. You can see their patrol cars. You can see them in the streets. And it seems that crime, if it hasn't decreased, it certainly seems to have plateaued. It's never as bad as it was about a month ago. That's what it seems like. Now the major worry is terrorist attacks, bombings on civilians at soft targets. I mean, today, you had the bombing at the ministry of foreign affairs. That's a real problem because now the bombers are saying, the attackers are saying, "We're going to strike an Iraqi target and an Iraqi government." And it's kind of a development since the assassination of Akila al-Hashimi. To [put hope in] an Iraqi government may not be truly accurate. It may be what type of Iraqi government, because if you handed over control to this Iraqi government tomorrow, there's no guarantee that they won't be attacked as well.

Host: Pam Hess, in terms of the security efforts, not only is there obviously a role for Iraqi institutions, the new army and police, but clearly in trying to fight the terrorists operating, there is a real role for Iraqi citizens. How goes the effort to enlist Iraqis in breaking down the terrorist network?

Hess: It goes by, actually as we discussed earlier, I found a lot of frustration on the part of Iraqis who have a great interest in turning in foreign fighters that they're finding in their midst and have no where to turn them into. The U-S military has something called a C-MOC, there are seven or eight of them through town, it's a Civil Military Operations Center. But these are very hard to get into, for security reasons, and they're very difficult to find. One in the neighborhood I was staying in closed down when I was there and no one knew where the new one was supposed to be. So this place that is where you're supposed to go to turn in information that you have on bad guys -- there's nowhere to go and no way to get inside. Worse, people that I knew that did turn in bad guys -- and one guy in particular, gave information that led to the arrest of five people that were, I think, Palestinian -- they have a promised reward line where you can get twenty-five hundred dollars [$2,500] or ten-thousand dollars [$10,000] depending on the quality of the tip, and no one responds to the reward line when you call or when you e-mail. So, there's just a lot of things going on that do not lend themselves to the Iraqis really sticking their necks out and helping the coalition. They're not a really strong physical presence, they have the specific areas where they are and patrols that they run and if you don't happen to run into them, you might never see them. And the monetary rewards that are supposedly out there that they have on bumper stickers and posters, the information goes unremarked. It falls into the interior ministry and is never responded to.

Host: Les Campbell, how can the coalition do a better job of engaging Iraqis in pursuing more security?

Campbell: Well, I think they have to give up some control. I think as Pam mentioned, there are many, many fewer soldiers than you would imagine. You hear the numbers: a hundred and forty thousand, and you imagine that they would be everywhere. They're not. It's a minimal amount. I think that the coalition authorities, Ambassador Bremer and others, have to call on others to help. And it doesn't have to be military. It could be civilians. For example, and this doesn't prejudge whether or not the U-N gets involved, but many countries have deployed civilian police forces and police trainers in post-conflict situations, people who are trained at police work and not military work. And there's a big difference in terms of interviewing people, being approachable, being able to talk to Iraqis, drawing them in. So, basically throwing open the doors for help, getting other countries, other people, other organizations involved. Moving the military back into their role, which is really fighting and not kind of doing the peacekeeping as it were.

Host: Let me ask the question to Mustafa Alrawi, by phone from Baghdad, what do you think needs to be done to get Iraqis more involved in helping with the security effort?

Alrawi: Can I just respond to some of those comments? First, about the foreign fighters, I think there's such a small problem here. Iraqis don't trust other Arabs here, they like -- let's just say that Iraqis do take every opportunity to turn them in if they're suspicious of them. But I think, what I've seen, being in Iraq is that every major problem at the root of it has been Iraqi. And it's not other Arabs. It's not foreign fighters who don't have the support of the public. They cannot operate here secretly. They will get found out. Really, it's elements of the Iraqi population that are causing most of the problems. You've got to understand that. The second thing is, about these rewards and this encouragement [to give information], the problem we've had is Iraqis going for the money who've given bad information that's led to innocent people being killed. This whole culture of informing on other Iraqis or other people is not necessarily a good thing. You know, saying "We'll pay you money," is not really the right way to go about it. It should be some kind of civic or patriotic duty to do it. That should be enough. Money there is often too much of a temptation for some people to tell the C-P-A or the U-S military what they want to hear. I think that's more of a problem than anything else.

Host: Mustafa, one of the things I wanted to ask you about, we've only got a couple of minutes left in the show: you're a managing editor of a new publication called "Iraq Today". To what extent are new publications springing up around Iraq and what role are they playing in the building of new institutions in Iraq?

Alrawi: There were really, after the war ended, quite a few new publications. At the last count there were a hundred and forty newspapers. We've been around since the beginning of July. The publications have gotten less. They haven't increased because of the difficulties of operating here. As far as we're concerned, we're hoping to sow the seeds of what will be in the future. We'll be five, ten years down the line, a democratic nation, by saying there's free speech and there's an independent press. We've hired only local Iraqis as our staff writers, and I think we've given them a chance.

Host: I'm afraid that's going to have to be the last word for today because we're out of time. I'd like to thank my guests: Les Campbell of the National Democratic Institute; Pam Hess of United Press International; and joining us by phone from Baghdad, Mustafa Alrawi of "Iraq Today". 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.