Unedited Version
Middle East Policy Council
Thirtieth in the Capitol Hill Conference Series on U.S. Middle East Policy
War with Iraq: A Cost-Benefit Analysis
Speakers:
Anthony H. Cordesman
Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy, Center for Strategic and International Studies
Joseph C. Wilson
Former U.S. Chargé d'Affaires, Baghdad; Strategic Advisor, Rock Creek Corporation
Ray Takeyh
Fellow in International Security Studies, Yale University
Geoffrey Kemp
Director of Regional Strategic Programs, The Nixon Center
Moderator/Discussant:
Chas. W. Freeman, Jr.
President, Middle East Policy Council
562 Dirksen Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C.
October 9, 2002
9:30 – 12:00 A.M.
Transcript by:
Federal News Service
Washington, D.C.
CHAS. W. FREEMAN: All right, I think we probably should call this to order. It's 9:30 our time and I am Chas Freeman and it's my honor to be president of the Middle East Policy Council and my pleasure to welcome you here today.
I think those of you who are here probably all know our Council but for the few who do not it is a small, struggling organization that depends on donations for its existence and activities. We do three things: We come up here on Capitol Hill, as we are doing today, to raise questions that should have been raised by our political betters but which have not been, or questions that are considered politically incorrect, awkward or too difficult for public debate. And we provide a distinguished panel of discussants at such questions and we hope we not only illuminate the debate but we actually make some progress toward answering the questions we have posed.
The second thing we do is to publish Middle East Policy, which is a quarterly. It is, I'm proud to say, the most often cited in the field, and it always begins with a transcript, an edited transcript of the previous session like this, so this transcript will lead the next issue.
And the third thing we do invisibly beyond the Beltway and therefore utterly irrelevant for many purposes is perhaps the most significant, and that is we train teachers, high school teachers throughout the country in association with state boards of education in how to teach about Arab civilization and Islam. We thus confuse about a million high school kids with a fact or two that they otherwise would not encounter in the course of receiving an American high school education. We have trained 13,000 teachers. This effort continues throughout the country and we're very proud of the objectivity and the quality of the material that we impart.
We're here today to talk about the costs and the benefits of a war with Iraq, and I believe the premise of today's discussion is that other means of dealing with the problems presented by Iraq and the Saddam Hussein regime will have failed, never been tried or have been abandoned and there will be a war.
The question then is what's in it for us and what problems may we be creating for ourselves as we embark on this course. I'm sorry to say that we have not had much help from politicians or pundits in this regard. There has been a stunning absence of serious debate and even fewer facts than debating points have been brought forward.
Today we have with us a distinguished group of experts who we hope will frame the right questions, address them and perhaps even answer some of them.
I think the key question is, however, from the point of view of the United States and our broader interests what do we gain and what do we lose by taking the course that the president so obviously wishes to take. And I suspect the answers to this question would be very different depending on whether there is or is not a United Nations endorsement of an attack on Iraq and I suspect that will come out in the course of the discussion.
And here I will say that the panelists will each speak for about ten, maybe 12 minutes before I violently eject them from the podium and then we will have a discussion with comments, questions and equally succinct or even I should say much more succinct comments from the floor.
I think at this point there are only two questions that we are entirely sure we know the answers to with regard to war with Iraq. First is who's going to pay for the war and the answer is we are. This is not the Gulf War to be fought on other people's money. It is not a joint enterprise with the Arabs or with the allies. We cannot expect full or even partial reimbursement from the Gulf Arabs, the Germans, the Japanese, as was the case in 1990 and '91. How much will the war cost? Only God knows. That will depend on many of the factors we are discussing.
The second question we know the answer to is will Saddam attack the United States. The answer is if we attack him he certainly will attack us. If we don't attack him, we don't know whether he will or will not attack us. And there is a difference of opinion about this and if we leave him alone perhaps he will attack us and perhaps he won't. That we don't know but we do know that if we attack him and he feels he has nothing to lose he will use every weapon in his arsenal against the United States and our forces.
Beyond that, there are a lot of questions that are hanging out there in the minds of people throughout the country but not much raised here in Washington, and I'll just tick off a few of these.
Is regime change an antidote or an effective cure for the problem of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? In other words, would a different Iraqi regime see Iraq's need for a deterrent against attack by Israel, Iran, Turkey and the United States any differently than this regime has seen it? The answer isn't self-evident, although we do have the example of a regime change in South Africa, which led the South African government to give up nuclear weapons. So those who assert that any Iraqi regime would do the same as Saddam should reconsider that position.
Is democracy possible in Iraq or does thugdom inevitably succeed thugdom in Baghdad? Would a democratic Iraq see any less need for weapons of mass destruction than a democratically elected government in Israel, given that it faces many of the same security challenges as the Israelis do?
What level of effort at nation building and for how long would be required to democratize Iraq or to persuade Iraqis that they should endorse and support U.S. policies in the Middle East, especially those with regard to Palestine and Israel?
And in this regard if the U.S. makes the war and leaves the mess to be cleaned up by others, as has been our preferred approach in Afghanistan, if Americans cook the dinner and ask our allies to do the dishes, are they going to play that role in a war that they have not been sympathetic with? And if not, what are the implications for Iraq and the region of a reconstruction effort that depends primarily on American efforts?
How will Iraqis react to an invasion by Americans declaring our intention to liberate them from what everyone must agree is a very vile government? Will they welcome us, as in Afghanistan, or will they oppose us as they opposed an Iranian effort to overthrow that regime a dozen years ago?
How will Iran react? This is a question, which deserves a great deal more discussion than it has had. In 1990 and '91 we were finally able to put carriers into the Gulf because we were confident on the basis of Iranian behavior and signals that Iran would not frustrate our efforts to make war on Baghdad and to liberate Kuwait. Do we have such assurances in the current context? What is the Iranian position likely to be?
And specifically what impact would a war on Saddam in the name of eliminating weapons of mass destruction have on Iranian programs to develop such weapons? Would it cause them to abandon them or to accelerate their efforts to possess them?
These are questions that I have not heard asked really in public and they need an answer. What will the Israeli reaction be? We've already been told by the Israeli government that if it is attacked it will counterattack, but that is shorthand for a much more complicated situation.
What will the reaction of the Arabs be to an attack on another Arab country? How will the Iraqi reaction shape reactions in the Arab world and what will the reaction of Arabs be to the perceived collusion, if indeed their governments do collude with the United States in an attack on Iraq, perceived collusion of their governments in an endeavor that they almost universally oppose? If governments in the region, in other words, faced with a choice between their own people and their strong opposition to war with Iraq and the imperative of maintaining good relations with the United States, hide behind a UN resolution to say to their own people we had no choice, will this political cover be effective for them and what are the implications?
How long will a war with Iraq take? And if it is not quick but long and dirty, how much can we count on our allies and friends in the region in terms of their willingness to tolerate our staging troops, munitions and aircraft through their territory?
And this raises sort of a broader question, I suppose, and that is how would a U.S. war on Iraq from bases in countries that oppose such a war affect our relations in the long term? How would it affect our prospects for maintaining bases on the soil of allies, Germany and Japan, for example, and being able to use those bases on an unrestricted basis to do things that those governments oppose?
What will the war with Iraq do, in short, to our broader pattern of alliances and our ability to project power from forward bases in Europe and Asia? Where will a war at, if that's forced on our friends, leave us with those friends after it's over and what implications would a war have for OPEC oil process and the like? Can we count on Saudi Arabia to bail us out from a spike in prices this time by ramping up production for that purpose, forgoing then profits in the process as they did in 1991, or this time will there be a different outcome?
And what sort of international or regional order are we really aiming to create and what will our relationship be with the United Nations when all this is over?
Lots and lots of questions and I've not even begun to exhaust them.
Now, here to discuss these and no doubt other questions and probably to dismiss some of the questions that I have asked as irrelevant or unworthy of discussion are, as I said, four distinguished panelists, and we're going to proceed in the order on the program, which is Tony Cordesman, Joe Wilson, Ray Takeyh and Geoff Kemp. And I think you all have the program; therefore you have the bios of the speakers and I will not dwell on them.
I'll just say that Tony Cordesman is a national asset in the sense that he is one of the very few people in this country who has seriously studied the security constellation correlation of forces in the Gulf and the military establishments in the Gulf. He resides at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on K Street. He came there via service in Senator John McCain's office and he is a frequent commentator in books and in articles and on the electronic media on the issues in the region.
I will not run down everyone else right now. I'll just very briefly introduce the others as they're called to the podium.
And I'd like right now, Tony, to ask you to come up and answer those questions or dismiss them. You have ten minutes or 12, let's say, after which I will move menacingly in your direction and we'll see if I can throw you off the panel or not. You look like a tough guy.
ANTHONY H. CORDESMAN: You will note that I have been threatened with an act of naked aggression. (Laughter.)
CHAS. W. FREEMAN: I'm clothed.
ANTHONY H. CORDESMAN: Seriously, I think we do face questions and let me try to illustrate the ones I think are most important and provide at least a few of the answers or at least issues we need to raise.
Perhaps the most important question is still do we need to fight this war, and that is an answer, which I think has to be given very tentatively. The arguments for and against are actually relatively well balanced. I would say that personally and with great reluctance I would say that we probably do have to fight this war. I have simply watched what has gone on in Iraq too long and I think that what has been uncovered, provided in the British white paper and to a lesser degree the new CIA white paper documents far more of an active process of proliferation than people seem to realize.
I have read a great deal of commentary on the British white paper as sort of repeating the past. If you have no background in intelligence or analysis in these issues you may have that impression. You may particularly have it if you don't bother to read it, but strategic illiteracy is not analysis, and that paper documents a great deal of content, which has not been released before and it necessarily omits a great deal of additional content about supply, facilities and activities not only for intelligence reasons but because, frankly, they have to be reserved as potential targets.
I think we need to go back, too, to 1988. The biological weapons that UNSCOM found in 1995 were not being stockpiled for theory. Had the war gone on late into 1988 or into 1989 it is virtually certain that Iraq would have launched a massive biological campaign against Iran and that campaign could only have been targeted at population centers. What they were developing was never suited in weaponry or structure for use in classic military terms.
Since that time, since 1991, there has been an unremitting process of proliferation, concealment, cheat and retreat. It is possible that had the Clinton administration been firmer, an organization like UNMOVIC or UNSCOM could have succeeded and containment might have been safe. But I do not see the evidence today and what I do see is a power that has two priorities: the role and survival of Saddam Hussein and leverage and power through the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction.
But having said that, having a cause for war is not enough to go to war and I would ask eight questions of my own and briefly try to answer them. They are more pragmatic and more narrowly focused. I have never really felt that we can ever approach a real world decision in the context of the world we would like to have; we have to deal with the world we already have.
The first issue is have we made the case publicly for war, have we convinced people that we need to do this. I think the answer quite clearly is no and it is a serious problem in war fighting. We never had a meaningful effort at public diplomacy to deal with Iraq and the Gulf in the Clinton administration. Two shallow, little white papers in eight years, written for a Beltway audience, no public diplomacy, no support of the ambassadors, military adventures, which were pointless ending in nothing like Desert Fox. We are here partly because we had a vacuum of leadership by a prior president.
We have come far too late in convincing the world that proliferation exists. The British white paper, the CIA white paper, which have been in draft for at least six months and should have been released early were not. We have a chronic over-reliance on arguments from authority but nobody is quite clear in the Bush administration who is the authority and we have a great deal of blustering.
The fact is we are dealing not with an imminent threat but a proximate one and it is a reality that we if have not made the case, we cannot at least try UNMOVIC, but I do have to say reality it is awfully late to have UNMOVIC. And if we do this it will be on the understanding that at the first barrier to any activity in disarmament, whether or not it is publicly recognized by UNMOVIC, that will be a declaration of war.
The second issue is have we dealt with the problems and tensions of the second Intifada. Clearly not and we cannot. This is something that will go on for probably years regardless of American action and leadership. You cannot time a war on Iraq to deal with the end of the second Intifada, but we have badly misshaped this battlefield in terms of perception. The president has sometimes set the right goals but he has then referred to Sharon as a man of peace. The Congress passes a resolution on Jerusalem for domestic political purposes precisely at the moment it does the most damage to our cause overseas. From day to day I think it is almost impossible to see whether the United States is committed to the peace process, and it is this issue, not Islamic extremism, which alienates the Arab world and the Muslim world.
Have we prepared the Congress and the American people? The Congress clearly; the American people no and for the reasons I've outlined. The American people do not know where we are going.
Fourth, have we really created the military climate we need to act? I think the answer to that is probably yes, and I have great faith in people like Tommy Franks and the American military, but let me make the point there is no room here for adventures, the use of special forces, air power to the exclusion of land power, innovative new concepts from people in the Defense Policy Council, well meaning civilians, military retreads or for that matter civilian analysts. And the key to success will be the use of sudden decisive force as quickly as possible. That reduces the political damage, it minimizes real world collateral damage and it also reduces the risk of use of weapons of mass destruction.
Fifth, have we consulted our allies in the UN as much as possible? Clearly not. We are reacting to pressure now, not leading. Do we have a critical minimum of allies to actually conduct the operation? Yes, not because they love us, not because they care about our national goals, not because anyone in the region pays the slightest attention to promises of democratization but simply because as the world's dominant superpower, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Turkey will probably support us and Saudi Arabia will tolerate us and has already said at the ministerial and cabinet level that it will increase oil production to compensate for Iraq. But we have not, as Chas has pointed out, dealt with Iran and we have not defined the role for Israel.
Are we prepared, and this is the seventh issue, for the worst case in weapons of mass destruction? No, we can't be. We don't have the resources but we are strengthening things like missile defense, passive defense. We are trying to create a pattern of deterrence. It is virtually certain that our air war is sized for the immediate attack on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction facilities virtually from the initial moment of war.
And it is also probable at this point in time that Iraq's military resources are too limited to produce large catastrophic casualties, but can you eliminate the risk they have such abilities, that some kind of proxy or terrorist or covert attack might work or that you might trigger a process of Israeli retaliation, which would not be controllable? These are real risks. I think the reason that I am willing to deal with them is the risks will be greater a year from now, two years from now or three years from now. Deferring this war and this confrontation solves nothing; it simply relies on hope.
Finally, do we have a clear nation building and conflict termination plan? And this to me is the issue really most critical from an American viewpoint. We will not be judged by how we go to war, we will not be judged by how we fight this war; we will be judged by what happens after this war and by the way we deal with Iraq in the region once the war is over. The president as yet has provided absolutely no indication or leadership on this issue. The most that he has done is make reference to words like democratization, which has become a four-letter word in the region, a synonym for imperialism, for potentially seizing control of oil, for going on from Iraq to other countries and for dictating the political future of the region. It has become a symbol for alienation of the nation's we need most, a case where neo-con fantasy has been transformed into neo-crazy.
I would have to say, frankly, that if we go on without more leadership, if we do not say the obvious that we do this to allow the Iraqis to create their own government, that we go in as partners not as occupiers, that whatever happens here we will not dictate the future or control of Iraq's oil.
If we do not deal with debt reparations and contracts, if it is not clear that there is a moral and ethical goal to this war that serve's Iraq's needs and not our own, and we are not prepared to act on that from the day we go in, in terms of peacemaking, humanitarian relief and other activities, all of the other issues are moot. Our military victory will be a grand strategic defeat. Thank you.
(Applause.)
CHAS. W. FREEMAN: Thank you very much, Tony. That was both eloquent and powerful.
Before I introduce the next speaker, however, I'd just like to raise a question for later discussion and perhaps the next speaker might wish to address it, because Ambassador Wilson, Joe Wilson served twice as ambassador in Africa and was the senior National Security Council advisor on Africa, but that's not why he's here. He's here because he served as chargé d'affaires in Baghdad during the whole period of Desert Shield and was the last American executive branch official I believe probably to meet with Saddam Hussein. He succeeded in obtaining the release of hundreds of American and other hostages from the Iraqi regime and therefore has a kind of firsthand familiarity with it that not very many people frankly have.
And, Joe, you may wish to address the question in the course of your remarks, which I will simply pose as follows: Is Saddam so stupid and autistic that he hasn't noticed that for several years the United States has been declaring our intention to come and get him and especially this president? And if he has noticed, do you think it's out of the real of possibility that he has, in fact, prepositioned retaliation against the United States here in the United States?
I note in this regard inspectors can find and eliminate nuclear programs because they're bulky, consume a lot of power and the like and maybe they can do the same with chemical programs, but biological programs can be cooked up in the basement of relatively small houses.
So I just wonder again, as we look at the possible benefits, and Tony I think has made an eloquent case that great as the risks are the benefits are substantial and waiting increases the risks, do we have a risk that we might experience an attack on our own homeland by unconventional means from this regime as it goes down? Joe?
JOSEPH C. WILSON: Thank you. Thank you, Chas.
I'm still trying to ponder one of Tony's remarks in which he said democratization has become a four-letter word in the Arab world. I'm wondering what four-letter word that is. I suspect it can't be repeated in polite company but maybe you can whisper it in my ear afterwards.
Chas and I go back to the mid '80s when Chas was actually deputy assistant secretary of African affairs and he called me one day as I was en route to Baghdad and he said, "You know, we've got this little problem of genocide up in northern Burundi and you served there with Ambassador Cook. Wouldn't you like to go back there and help us out with it?" And I declined, because, of course, there was a little problem of Iraqi chemical weapons use in Kurdistan at that time in Halabja and whatnot and that seemed to be an issue that was really I had been assigned there and one that I wanted to go and tackle, little knowing, of course, that a couple years later Chas would find himself down in the kingdom and I'd be in Baghdad and we'd be sort of working various aspects of the Gulf War, Chas with great courage, which no doubt pissed off Jim Baker, which it did piss off Jim Baker to no end, but in effect his were some of the best reporting and most insightful analysis that we read when I was in Baghdad and I thank you for that and for your courage.
I want to build a little bit I guess on one of the things that Tony said, which has actually been the basis of some of the things that I have been trying to say in the run up to this particular Gulf War. Most of you probably haven't heard it because I find myself on these programs that typically occur right about the same time that Steve Spurrier's first football game in Washington, DC is kicking off. I'll be on another channel. I was on Hannity and Colmes last week suffering great abuse at the hands of Sean Hannity. Fortunately nobody saw it because it was the opening night of West Wing.
But nonetheless there are some things that I have tried to think through as I've been drawn back into this Iraq issue, on that I had left behind really at the time of the Gulf War.
But Tony said that Saddam's regime has two principle priorities. One is the survival and power of Saddam Hussein and the other is the leveraging of that power in the region to assume really hegemony within the region, which has long been an ambition of Saddam Hussein, one that I think is fueled largely by his own personal character, his own finely defined sense of Iraqi history, Saladin, the great Kurdish conqueror came from his home town of Tikrit, for example, and by Ba'ath Party philosophy of one greater Arab nation, if so why not Saddam as the leader.
It seems to me as we look at this that we share one of those priorities or we have one principal priority that we want to combat Saddam on, and that is the utilization of his power as leverage within the region for hegemony in the region.
At the time of the Gulf War we left Saddam in place. We left Saddam in place for a number of reasons, most of which you all know, but essentially at the end of the Gulf War we left him in place not as the major league hassle that he had been to us in the run-up to Gulf War but as a minor league potentate whose military had been absolutely smashed and who posed in the short and medium term limited threat within the region.
I think that it is unfair to say that the implementation of a number of the UN resolutions and particularly the resolution related to weapons of mass destruction was ineffective. For six years inspectors found tons, literally tons and tons of chemicals and biological precursors and were pretty effective at a minimum if not finding everything of keeping Saddam's programs on the run, which is probably as best we could ever hope to do even in another disarmament or regime change scenario.
My feeling on this, and I share Tony's -- I think -- conclusions on this, is that we really do need to do something against the threat of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and I would concede to this administration the possibility that one of these days these weapons might move from the tight control of the Iraqi regime into the hands of organized terrorist groups who would, in fact, want to act against United States interests either abroad or in our homeland.
I discount to a certain extent the assertions that the links between al-Qaeda and Saddam's government are operational in nature. It does seem to me entirely possible and likely that Saddam's intelligence services may have had ties or may have had links or may have had contacts with al-Qaeda. That would be prudent. Most intelligence services that didn't have their hands tied behind their back would welcome the opportunity to have contact with enemies of their enemies so as to know what was being planned.
It does not stand to reason, however, that the operational links would have been such or any links would have been such as to be operational and particularly with respect to September 11th as was being asserted, as, in fact, was the first of the assertions that were made by the neo-conservative crazies, as Dr. Cordesman likes to call them. After all, on September 10th the Iraqis had won pretty much everything. Saddam was pumping as much oil and getting as much revenue as he ever needed. The Iraqis were being welcomed back into the Arab world. Trade was going on, sanctions had been revised to the so-called smart sanctions. There was absolutely nothing to be gained and everything to be lost by involvement in September 11th. So the real problem then, it seems to me, is how do you deal with the weapons of mass destruction.
Now, at the time of the Gulf War Secretary Baker went and met with Tariq Aziz on January 9th of 1991 and he said to Tariq, he said, "Look, we're going to expel you from Kuwait. If you will leave, you can leave peacefully and you can keep your army intact. If you don't leave peacefully we're going to expel you militarily and we will succeed in doing that. The choice is yours. Should you, however, decide that you're going to use weapons of mass destruction against American troops we will destroy your regime," and implicit in that threat was that we would use nuclear weapons to combat chemical weapons that Saddam might use.
Now, in his book Baker said that the Bush administration had already decided not to use nuclear weapons in the event of a chemical weapon attack on us. That's, I'm sure, true. Nonetheless, that particular threat is still pretty much on the table.
Now, Saddam did a lot of terrible things during the Gulf War. He lobbed scuds into Israel, he lobbed scuds into Saudi Arabia, he burn the Kuwaiti oil fields on his way out, but he did not use chemical weapons against American troops.
I conclude from that that there is, in fact, a deterrent value and trading Saddam's life, diminished as it may be, against his use of weapons of mass destruction and I think that it is worth considering because at the end of the day one of the things we want to avoid either in the region or in the United States is a counterattack against our interests, our troops or our homeland involving the chemical weapons, biological weapons that he clearly has in his power.
So let me leave that as a thought and say that it seems to me that as we go forward in this that our military action, which I think is really something that needs to be carefully considered, should be directed at supporting a disarmament policy. That policy can either be through a new UN resolution or, as some have suggested, it seems to me not unreasonable for us to assert that we already have sufficient authority under existing UN Security Council resolutions to enforce disarmament in a more robust fashion.
I would then make it clear then to Saddam that we are going to disarm you. However, should you in the course of resisting our disarmament efforts, whether it be through a UN inspection regime or whether it be through U.S. led military action, should you attempt to use weapons of mass destruction against our troops or should you attack any of your neighbors, then we will see that as an attack against the United States and we will then respond by destroying your regime, so that the bet for Saddam or the decision for Saddam is not whether or not he will lose his weapons of mass destruction, because he will, but whether he uses his weapons of mass destruction if he loses all; essentially playing to what Tony suggests is his first and highest priority, survival in power, albeit diminished.
I fear greatly that a regime change approach essentially means a ground invasion into Iraq, which I am quite sure that our military forces are fully capable of executing and executing well, a pacification, an occupation and rebuilding exercise in Iraq, which is far more problematic given the makeup of Iraqi society and its own history.
This is not going to be Grenada, as Caspar Weinberger testified, and it is not going to be a revolution like Portugal with the Iraqi citizens cheering wildly from the rooftops and putting flowers in the guns of the Sunnis soldiers who are still around.
The likely outcome is that it will be a very, very nasty affair. There will be vengeful killings against the Sunnis, against the Tikritis, against the Ba'aths. There will be Shi'ia grabs for power in the south and probably Baghdad. There will be Kurdish grabs for at a minimum Kirkuk as well as likely a rekindling of their historic ambition for an independent Kurdistan, which raises a whole other can of worms. And in the middle of that will be an American occupation force.
I submit that a disarmament strategy, an aggressive, robust disarmament strategy will, in fact, set the stage for what should be an Iraqi action of replacing Saddam themselves and with the absence of American occupation forces in place we will then at a minimum be able to assist with an international community in a more benign environment in which we are not the occupiers, a nation rebuilding exercise.
And he is bigger than me so I am getting off. Thank you.
CHAS. W. FREEMAN: Thank you very much. I think you raise a couple of questions implicitly that we'll want to kick around in the session following the next two speakers.
There was one question that, Joe, I'd like to hear your response to when we get into that, and I'll state it simply: Let us assume for the sake of argument that you are an Iraqi, senior Iraqi military officer and you are confronted with demands from the United States to surrender rather than continue to support the regime. Doesn't the cost benefit analysis look to you pretty clear? If you fail to resist the American invasion and Saddam is able to hang on long enough to work his will, you know that your wife will be raped and murdered, your mother, your children, your nephews and nieces and aunts and uncles but if you're captured by the United States the worst that could happen is you get a vacation in Guantanamo.
I mean, I'd really like to hear in terms of your understanding of Iraqi psychology whether the choice evaluated in that manner nonetheless leads to the desired outcome, which is surrender.
And second, and I think this, Geoff, I hope when we come to you you'll address this, I think both Joe and Tony referred explicitly to the need for a war termination strategy. Joe referred to a process of war termination after a victory. Obviously Saddam is there because we didn't have a war termination strategy in 1991 -- (audio break, tape change) - the question that, as I said at the outset, has been very inadequately address, and that is the reaction of Iran, that other point in the axis of evil, to the proposed assault on Iraq, both in terms of Iranian policy, Iranian calculations, Iranian reactions to an American military operation in Iraq and Iranian reactions to what happens after what I think is most likely, although nothing is inevitable, an American military victory, hopefully a speedy one?
And to address this, we have with us Ray Takeyh, who many of you know from his time here in Washington at the Washington Institute of Near East Policy but Ray has now moved onward and upward both geographically and in terms of prestige and is an international security fellow at Yale University. He is the author of quite a number of interesting books listed in his biography and he is a genuine expert on Iran and I'm pleased to have you here, Ray.
RAY TAKEYH: And a national asset.
CHAS. W. FREEMAN: A national asset, definitely.
RAY TAKEYH: At least.
CHAS. W. FREEMAN: Or a regional asset anyway.
RAY TAKEYH: A tri-state asset. A rising asset.
CHAS. W. FREEMAN: An asset for Connecticut.
RAY TAKEYH: Well, I mean, in West Haven my name carries a certain degree of prestige.
Well, as Chas mentioned, my mandate is a narrow one and deals with the more specific issue of the ramifications of this presumptive war on Iran's international policy and its possible relations with the United States. For Iran, I should say, as apparently for the Bush administration Iraq is an existential threat in the sense that despite the fact that the Gulf War, the first Gulf War ended many years ago, Iran and Iraq, the hostile legacy remains, has festered and has developed its own sort of a history. The border between the two states remains unsettled. Both parties tend to finance proxy war against one another. And at the same time the relations have failed to warm up to a significant degree. The bitter memories of the Eight Year War for Iran where its population was terrorized, its territory occupied, and Iran, of course, is one state that was subject to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction where approximately 20,000 or so Iranians perished.
So Saddam Hussein, his weapons of mass destruction and the sort of attention of the Iraqi regime toward regional assertion of his predominance if not preeminence has been a perennial threat for the Iranian leadership, demonstrating on the surface a degree of coincidence of strategic perspective between the United States and Iraq.
So why is that strategic coincidence not yielding any degree of an alliance or at least some sort of tacit cooperation? It should be remembered that while Iran may stand to benefit from the American war against Iraq it also faces a series of problems, quandaries, opportunities and challenges, not that dissimilar to the set of concerns that Iran had during the Afghan campaign. This sort of mirrors that in a sense that Iran will come to the demise of the Taliban, which had a very tense relationship with Iran, but at the same time anguish about the projection of American power where it had not been before. Today the United States has forces in Central Asia, has forces, of course, in Afghanistan.
So what Iran hopes, and I think it may hope for a similar thing with Iraq, a quick American military strike contributed to the demise of the Taliban and then Americans go home and then the regional state can craft some sort of a platform and some sort of framework for post-war relations.
In Afghanistan, of course, we know that didn't happen, that American forces have continued to linger and therefore you see a bewildering paradoxical Iranian policy, when Iran actually contribute to the war effort but then once it became apparent that American forces were not about to leave Afghanistan it began to consolidate its alliances and even embark on policies that could constitute a destabilization of the Afghan regime.
A similar bewildering mixture of pragmatism and competition with the United States may illustrate Iran's approach to the Iraqi campaign.
Well, what are the advantages for Iran? First of all, an American invasion and emplacement of a new regime in Iraq will inevitably mean that the post Saddam regime will at least for a period of time adhere to its international proliferation agreements, which for Iran will remove and nearly as I mention an existential threat.
Second of all, if you look at the long span of Iraqi history, we begin to see two specific foreign policy orientations, one that can be more easily identified with the Sunnis minority has always been predicated on transnational ideologies, Arabism, Baathism and so on, which has essentially called for Iraq to become the prominent, if not the preeminent power in the Middle East.
But there's a second sort of Iraqi foreign policy orientation that is identified rather easily with the Shi'a and Kurdish majorities, in which calls for Iraqi foreign policy to be predicated not so much on grand ideological postulations but on national interest calculations, mandating a better relationship with Iraq's non-Arab neighbors, Iran and Turkey.
So if the United States succeeds in putting together a power in Iraq, which is inclusive and unitary, then ultimately the Kurdish and Shi'ia population may have a greater say in Iraq's foreign policy and conceivably a more stable relationship with Iran, not necessarily suggesting an alliance between Iran and Iraq but certainly a better set of relationships than Iran has had with the current Iraqi government or I would suggest with any Sunnis successors to the Saddam regime.
So given all these advantages, why is Iran not becoming more forthcoming with the United States? Well, part of that has to do with this unresolved relationship with the United States. At the time when the Bush administration is beginning to talk about regime change and a doctrine of preemption and so on, there is a limited incentive for the United States and Iran to cooperate with each other and cast a long and ominous shadow over the prospective American war in Iran's periphery.
So what will Iran do? I think there are two possibilities to the outbreak of the war. The perennially faction-ridden Iranian government has yet to offer a coherent response but I think we begin to see two if not three set of responses emerging.
The first is the one that is the most extreme and it tends to be identified with the hard-line elements within the Iranian right, people such as Ayafwi Azdich (sp), Ona Ati (sp) and so on, and they suggest that war with the United States is inevitable. So what Iran has to do is have some sort of a not only active belligerence toward the United States but some sort of a relationship, a tacit relationship with the targeted regimes. Now, we saw similar calls during the Afghan campaign with the Taliban of Afghanistan and Saddam's of Iraq. In a sense the hope would be the rationale behind this particular approach, assuming that there is one, is that hopefully the United States invasion will slow down in the targeted regime, therefore exempting Iran being targeted by the United States. I would say this is an extreme view and has largely been dismissed by Iranian political elites, including most persistently and recently by the Iranian defense minister.
The second approach that is beginning to crystallize recently that can be identified with both reformists and pragmatists and they're two different categories, and most directly by one of Iran's most pragmatic and most corrupt politicians, Ayatollah Rafsanjani, suggests that perhaps Iran can use this occasion to have some sort of a relationship with the United States, some sort of a rationalization of this relationship with the United States, namely that if any Iranian cooperation is going to be forthcoming, sharing of intelligence and so on and so forth, it has to yield to tangible benefits in terms of Iran having a role in post-war deliberation and perhaps even dealing with the bilateral issues of concern between the United States and Iran in terms of sanctions and so on.
I would suggest that whatever audience this view may have in Teheran it has a diminishing and limited view in the United States. I don't believe, and others can comment on this themselves, that the Bush administration is not looking at the Iraqi campaign as a potential avenue for warming up relations with Iraq at a time when the president talks about sort of regime change and the preemptive doctrine, preemptive and prevention, which are two very different concepts. Any freshman political science student will tell you, but the president tends to conflate them into one. So its unlikely that this war as with the last one on Iran's periphery will lead to a better relationship between the two antagonists.
So I think Iran will do at the end what it did during Afghanistan, hope that if there is going to be an American invasion it's going to be a multilateral one because Iran, as with most countries in the region, is looking at the United Nations and the multilateral framework as a means of restricting and regulating the projection of American power. And if the war is conducted through the United Nations at least it will offer Iran a platform, given the absence of relationship with the United States, to have some sort of a say in the post-war deliberations.
So barring anything that happens I think Iran will remain on the sideline and I hope that the international community will somehow impose a certain degree of constraints on the American power.
I would end by suggesting that the long-term beneficiary of the Iraq campaign may, in fact, be Iran, given the fact that it removes the weapons of mass destruction calculus from the strategic planning, it will potentially remove a Sunnis dominated regime, given Iran a greater degree of influence in Iraq, but given all these benefits Iran is unlikely to become a material player in bringing about those regime changes in Iraq and is unlikely to be a significant player in adjusting the post-war demarcations of the Iraqi space, given its poor relationship with the United States and limited incentives on both sides to improve those relations.
I'll stop here.
CHAS. W. FREEMAN: Thank you, Ray. You're on the way to becoming a national asset clearly. I thank you for the insight that there is another question we know the answer to, which is that this war is likely to be very good for Iran and I thank you for that insight.
We now turn to the dessert that you've all been waiting for as we've eaten this difficult meal so far. Geoff Kemp, who is the director for regional strategic studies at the Nixon center, who was in charge at the National Security Council staff of Near East and South Asia during the Reagan administration, and who, like the others, with the exception of my friend Joe Wilson, who after a distinguished diplomatic career, like me went straight and is now in business, Geoff is also the author of numerous studies and papers and a frequent commentator at the national level on policy issues. And, Geoff, I invite you to take account of everything that's been said or ignore it and present your view.
GEOFFREY KEMP: Well, thank you, Chas. Dessert? I mean, actually after four excellent presentations of meat I'm the fifth and I feel like Zsa Zsa Gabor's fifth husband. I know what I'm meant to do but how do I make it interesting.
And firstly I thought I'd have some handouts to try to speed this up but I don't know that there's enough to go around, but you can share if you don't have enough.
What I'd like to do is to essentially try to deal with the broader issues about how this war could go and what the real benefits and cost are likely to be internationally, and what you will see in this handout is essentially a very simplistic breakdown of four ways I think this war could go, and the assumption is on the one hand that we have UN support, there's an endorsement by the Security Council that the use of force is necessary, and the second case is there is no UN support and the United States goes it alone possibly with Tony Blair, possibly not, and then each of these two conditions measured against a quick victory a la Afghanistan with very few casualties and quick termination of the regime; other case a protracted conflict, the war does not go so well, we get bogged down and it's a murky conclusion. We'll have victory in the end, believe you me, but it might take a long time.
Now, dependent upon which case you'd pick, and there are obviously variants between these four models, you can make some on the one hand pretty optimistic predictions, what I call the best case. On the other hand, you can be extremely gloomy and talk about a worst case.
Now, let's just quickly go through what I regard as these four alternatives and the first would be with the support of the United Nations we have a quick victory. Now, what is likely to happen under those circumstances? Certainly the four issues this administration has to worry about once Saddam Hussein has gone is how to assure the security of Iraq, how to establish good, effective governance in Iraq, how to establish a legal regime, which all the key parties will adhere to, and how to rebuild the social infrastructure and develop the economy. Those, if you like, are the four templates that any post regime scenario has to take into account.
And I would argue that if the victory is quick and has international support it will ease the transition from the Saddam regime to a new regime with relative safety. Now, of course, there's going to be recrimination and we really should look at history in this regard. When the allied forces were greeted with cheers and flowers in August 1944 at the liberation of Paris, 9,000 French were being killed, ex judiciary killings on the streets of Paris and other cities. There was a violent bloodletting. And to think that's not going to happen even under the best circumstances in Iraq I think is sort of wishful thinking. So we have to be prepared even under the best cases for some nasty violence. There are a lot of scores to settle, and most cases of liberation bring that out.
Secondly, however, in this first case it will have been endorsed by the international community and therefore presumably there will be much greater support in the international community to help the United States and whoever else is involved with us to set up a new government that will have respectability. It will make the issue of economic recovery easier. There will have been presumably very little damage because the war will be over quickly and Iraq has enormous assets that have been discussed, and developing those assets will require a lot of international investment but in this sort of environment it could happen fairly quickly and Iraq is after all potentially extremely rich with the world's second largest proven oil reserves and large amounts of gas that have not yet been developed.
This case could be seen, and I'm certain the administration would put that spin on it, as a great victory for the UN and multilateralism. After all, this is what the president said when he went to the UN, "You've got to prove you can do it; well, under these circumstances we may have done it." And my guess would be under this best case there will be enormous pressure on regimes such as Iran and Syria and those elements of the Palestinian community that still engage and still dream of terrorism and the violent overthrow of Israel to pipe down, that the so-called low-hanging fruit will become more vulnerable and that my guess would be that under these circumstances Iran will become more cooperative on many issues, including possibly the Arab-Israeli arena.
Now, the second case where we have support of the UN but the conflict does not go so well, this is more complicated. Here we're talking about high casualties or higher casualties both military and civilian. Here we're talking about obvious tough decisions about military escalation if the war gets bogged down. Here we're talking about the potential disruption of Iraqi society and the possibility of refugee flows either to the north or to the east. And believe you me, the Iranians are already building refugee camps in the west of their country anticipating that this might happen. And we know what happened in '91 concerning the Kurds in the north.
The protracted conflict clearly has enormous implications for the oil markets, dependent upon how much destruction there is and depressed oil markets can either lead to spikes in prices at a time when our economy is on the brink. There would clearly be mounting criticism of Bush and the gung-ho, cakewalk advocates in the Pentagon, the civilians in the Pentagon I might add, who believe this could all be done in a matter of hours.
Nevertheless, I think under those circumstances we would muddle through. Interesting issues we'd need to discuss are would the Israeli issue become involved in the protracted issue, would weapons of mass destruction actually be used by Saddam, how would that affect the broader war on terrorism and our own responses, and we can talk about those in the Q&A.
Now let me quickly get to those cases where we have no UN support. We're going it alone but we do it quickly, and that's what, of course, some people have been advocating. Keep the UN out of this, forget about the allies; they only get in the way. Nice to have Blair but not necessary. We'll do it alone and then we will prove that we really are the top dog. It will be early triumphalism. It will be spouted by the unilateralists. It will be used by this neo-con Christian evangelical coalition, which is terribly powerful and important in this country, to make even tougher demands on the neighborhood, particularly Iran, Syria and the Palestinian authority, and ultimately maybe Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
Under these circumstances reluctantly there will be international acknowledgement that this went very well and that the world has to accept the fact that the United States is truly a superpower, but under these circumstances clearly the legitimacy of this operation will be questioned and will be questioned most particularly in the region where any idea that a unilateral U.S. regime change imposing a new government on an Arab country will sit very badly not just in the Muslim world but in many areas as well. The Europeans will not be happy. People will be waiting for something to go wrong. There will be an obvious reaction to the glee that will be seen in many quarters in this country.
So let me in the last five minutes then come to the worst case. Now, the worst case is a pretty obvious one; we've got no support and the war goes badly. I don't think I need to spend a lot of time on this. My judgment, having just come back from a fairly protracted trip to Europe, is that if we ignore the UN, the war goes badly, there will be, I hate to say it, a lot of glee around the world that we had it coming to us, we were warned. Brilliant people like those on this panel all said, "Look, no cakewalk, got to get support." The Europeans pleaded with us to get support. So there will be glee if it goes badly in certain quarters and there will be huge fear in the region because here under these circumstances the possibility of chaos and escalation are extremely high. The possibility of Israel getting involved grows under these circumstances. The financial costs to this country will be enormous. Our markets will go south. And I believe that under those circumstances the Bush presidency will be on the line.
I have no idea which of these scenarios will pan out, but I do think, and I agree with my colleagues here, that there has been an overtly deliberate emphasis on the easy case, the best case, and far less analysis of the worst case. In the real world, of course, it's likely to be somewhere in between, but I do think it is worth looking at all cases including the worst case.
Thank you.
CHAS. W. FREEMAN: Thank you very much, especially for returning to the original framework of the discussion, which is a comparison of risks and advantages or costs and benefits here, and I think that was a very useful way to present four possibilities and I think it was clear even without the chart, which was helpful to those of us who had it.
We turn now to your moment; that is, a moment or actually more than a moment, about an hour and three-quarters in which we can talk about any subject that you wish that is related to the topic of the day, and you can have the benefit of interaction with these four I think very brilliant experts on the region, as well as some comic relief in the form of a comment or two by me.
Please. If you would come to the microphone so that we know whoever it is, just -- there's a microphone there. Please tell us who you are and if you can succinctly phrase the question or comment and direct it to someone, that's helpful.
Q: Larry Bruser with Mitsui USA. I guess this question would be - well, I'm not sure who it would be for - whoever wants to take a chance at it, but with regard to the prospects for U.S. military success - just prospects for the actual outcome of the war, what would be the impact of two factors: number one, the factor raised by Mr. Kemp, especially if there is no U.N. support, if Bush decides to invade under a scenario where Saddam is complying and he can't get U.N. to support, for example. To what extent would the lack of international support impede the success of the war effort?
And the other factor is - just more of a question - is what are the odds of the Iraqi army fairly quickly just caving in or would they put up much of a fight?
MR. FREEMAN: Two very good questions. Tony, do you want to start out on these, and I'm sure Joe and Geoff and Ray, you may have a comment as well.
MR. CORDESMAN: First, let me note that U.N. support, to me, is far less critical than whether you have the support of the allies in the region you need for basing and operations, and one of the things to remember - and I'd slightly modify Geoff's scenario here - is if this goes well, there will be an awful lot of people rushing in to try to deal with the peacemaking, and we may be surprised at how much international support we suddenly acquire. A lot of this depends, really, not simply on how the war goes, but how the aftermath goes and how things are perceived in the region. The attitudes of every member of the Security Council and the General Assembly are not really what is at issue.
The second aspect with the Iraqi army is that people sought to see collapse throughout the Iran-Iraq War. Units were occasionally defeated, or poor-quality units. The weakest units during the Iran-Iraq War were the units recruited out of Ba'ath loyalists. No Shi'ite units, no Kurdish units experienced a major defection during the course of eight years of war.
During the result in Kuwait, we saw the Republican Guards retreat in good order, with the exception of one unit, which basically fought an intense combat after the cease-fire. They did a very good job under orders of maintaining cohesion to the point where they got north of Basra. Most of the heavy regular army units - mechanized and army - retreated under orders. They were never confronted with combat, so we don't know what they would have done, but they didn't disintegrate, and they didn't participate in the riots or uprisings with the exception of one brigade.
You did see low-grade conscripts collapse, but low-grade conscripts were used throughout the Iran-Iraq War and long before the Gulf War essentially as speed bumps. The Iraqi army was always willing to take high casualties, and that's why many of them were Kurdish and Shi'ite.
I think that it is possible they'll collapse quickly. A lot will depend on how they perceive the course of the air attack, how serious we are, how successful we are in targeting. It is also possible you'll get serious pockets of resistance, particularly around Baghdad and loyalist areas, but this is purely speculative. Quite frankly, anybody who claims to be able to predict this on the basis of the past simply has no basis for doing it.
MR. FREEMAN: Let me just buttress that point before Joe comments with the observation that the Iraqi army at the time - February 23, 1991 - that ground forces crossed the border into Iraq and Kuwait, had been subjected to round-the-clock bombing at the rate of one bomb per minute for 37 days, which does something to you. In the absence of that kind of saturation bombing campaign, but rather the quick and successful campaign that it the optimum case that we're discussing, you have even - we have even less grounds for anticipating the behavior of the Iraqi armed forces.
MR. WILSON: I think - first of all, on the first question on U.N. support, it strikes me increasingly likely that we will get some U.N. support for some piece of what we anticipate doing. It's not likely that you're going to get U.N. Security Council support for a regime change option. But I think that at the end of the day this is a challenge to the United Nations as well, and there are those in the United Nations who will not want to have the United States go alone because, as was said earlier, there are a fair amount of countries that see the United Nations as an opportunity to restrain or, in other words, modify the way the United States might act in some of these events. So I think it's probably pretty likely there will be U.N. support.
On the odds of the army caving in - and this gets back a little bit to Chas.' question about a general faced with Guantanamo versus a cruise missile or American tanks, what would he decide to do - there are those who have argued that thousands, just like in the Gulf War, will capitulate as soon as they see Italian photographers - was the famous line that somebody used - and that was after a sustained B-52 bombing campaign along the front line. Even if the army does decide not to overtly fight against an American assault or an American invasion, this war is not going to be over when we get to Baghdad. In fact, the war will have just essentially begun. The pacification and the occupation and the rebuilding of Iraq is going to be a much more timely, time consuming and difficult task, and it will be conducted in an environment that is essentially not benign. And we will see, in the bloodletting that occurs afterwards, that among those who are most at risk will be those who are tied to the old regime, including its military and security apparatuses. And so even if they are not prepared to fight for Saddam, ultimately when the guns are turned on them, or when the Shi'ia and the Kurds come after them, they're going to fight for their own lives, the lives of their clans, the lives of their tribes, the lives of the Sunni. In the middle of all this will be inserted 50,000, 250,000 - however many American occupation troops trying to adjudicate what could be a really profound blowup of a country that has always been very difficult to hold together.
MR. FREEMAN: Geoff?
MR. KEMP: Oh, I'm - I'm -
MR. FREEMAN: You're happy with that. I'd just note, before Sandy, please come up to the microphone - I'd just note on the issue of U.N. resolutions that as both Joe and Tony implied, this question is linked to the issue of logistical support by friends in the region. For example, Saudi Arabia has said that it would support a U.N. resolution by offering use of its bases and air space for an attack on Iraq. Turkey has said the same. Neither has said whether - that they would offer such support or use of their air space in the event of no U.N. resolution. And if you imagine a map, you can imagine the difficulty of funneling an attack through Kuwait or maintaining temporary bases inside Iraq without the use of these air spaces. Therefore, the U.N. resolution and the political cover that it provides to allies and friends is a rather crucial issue.
Sandy?
Q: Chas, I have sort of two things I want to -
MR. FREEMAN: Please tell us who you are first.
Q: I'm Sandy Hallenbeck (sp). I'm with SAIC. I'm a consultant on defense matters.
Tony, the - I was struck by your conclusion that we really did need to go to war, and the part that struck me is that everybody talks about weapons of mass destruction, and I will admit up front that I haven't read the British paper - I have read the news releases on it. If you boil it down, I mean, most military people are not that tremendously concerned about chemical weapons, and given the bulk of them, they're not really super good terrorist weapons. You didn't mention nuclear, and my understanding is that a lot of nuclear capability has been dismantled and probably hasn't been rebuilt. So that leaves us with the BW capability, and I would argue at least that you can't have it both ways. I mean, you can't talk about going to war in order to eradicate BW, on one hand, and then suggest that anybody can make it in their basement, on the other hand. In fact, I know of no country that this nation has recently put on its enemies' list that we don't claim they have a BW capability of some kind.
So the question really is about this massive use of BW. What are we really worried about? Why is it so imminent that we need to go to war right now?
The second issue is more political, and it strikes me that Joe has done a good job of talking about what's going to happen potentially in Iraq if we invade, and as I suspect will happen, the military part of it will go probably fairly swiftly and at least successfully from the U.S. point of view.
I'm less certain not only about what happens in Iraq, but the question I have is what happens within the rest of the Arab world? We're not exactly popular today, but assuming we even have a successful invasion of Iraq, does that make things worse? Does it maybe cause a cataclysmic kind of event that actually ends up making things better - people decide to - let's let it lie low. And I'd like some expert opinion on that, please, from whomever.
MR. FREEMAN: Tony, please start off.
MR. CORDESMAN: Let me begin with the biological. There is no question -
MR. FREEMAN: You need to talk a little more into the mike, I think.
MR. CORDESMAN: We face a future in which low-level biological attacks by individual groups, or individuals, or nations cannot be deterred or prevented. It doesn't matter whether it's Iraq or someone in the right-wing militias, or somebody in a place we've never heard of with a cause we do not know. That, I think, is one of the reasons why, when everybody looks at homeland defense, we are looking at biological programs which may be able to address some of these issues and risks, but they will at best do it over a period of five to 15 years. There is no imminent capability to defend. But we're not talking about small, isolated attacks.
Biological weapons - to really achieve true lethalities, are very difficult to manufacture. To get the kind of lethalities which many of the books and papers use requires extremely advanced technology. And what makes Iraq different here is that it is not simply a matter of an R&D program, but like North Korea, it has a massive weaponization program. UNSCOM did not destroy that program. By the time it uncovered it in 1995 to 1996, most of the key elements were already missing, and these included developments like sprayers, three quarters of the growth material, most of the weapons, most of the actual devices to be used. Over 70 percent of the weapons casings and designs are still missing, and that's using UNSCOM figures. It is not some recent U.S. release.
If Iraq can go from potential devices which might kill a couple of hundred Americans to dry-storable micro-powders to easily disseminated agents, it can bypass the nuclear dimension entirely because those warheads will be at least at lethal as theater nuclear weapons. So we really are talking technical issues, we are talking threats of a very different order of magnitude, and we are talking about one of the only countries we know of, aside from North Korea, that has any current commitment to this kind of weaponization, and that kind of weaponization simply does not make sense in any kind of normal defensive terms. I also think that from the evidence they aren't ready yet, but they have probably a year to two years to three years before they'll have these lethalities.
Let me just address the other issue of Iraq. You know, I have been visiting Iraq since 1973; for obvious reasons, not since 1991. It is a deeply divided country, but there are a lot of elements which could also hold it together. A lot, to me, will depend not so much on, necessarily, the internal divisions in Iraq that might occur, but whether when we go in we are prepared for a nationwide peacemaking effort, and we have given the Iraqis a clear vision of the future. And a clear vision of the future is not the ability to serve under the INC; it is whether there is a clear economic program, whether there is a clear program for nation building, whether they're convinced we're going to be there as partners rather than occupiers. And that, to me, is the real issue here; not simply a matter of how you structure the political healing or ties between the various factions.
MR. FREEMAN: I'm going to call on Geoff and then Ray and Joe.
MR. KEMP: I want to sort of build on your question about how the broader region will respond to these various scenarios by first suggesting that one thing none of us talked about was the environment in the region that's in place if and when this war takes place, and one of the things I think that the administration has to be very concerned about is that there could be a serious escalation of the Arab-Israeli conflict in parallel to a war in Iraq. The president of Afghanistan is one bullet away from plunging that country into chaos. The India-Pakistan issue is not resolved. Another December 13th-type event -- that is to say Pakistani terrorism against India -- could well put the Indians into a preemptive mode.
So, I mean, the - it's - you know, we really do face the possibility that there's - all sorts of other horrible things could be going on at the same time that we go to war with Iraq, and I think this is particularly serious in the case of the Arab-Israeli conflict. There have been in the last six weeks two cases, to the best of my knowledge, where the Israelis aborted or were lucky in aborting two potential mega-terrorist attacks in Israel that could have killed hundreds of civilians, which translates into thousands by American terms. Even Shimon Peres was on record as saying that if this had happened, it would change politics as we know it, and there are some very scary scenarios about escalation on the Israeli-Palestinian front.
There is also a very serious question about what Hezbollah is up to South Lebanon with a vast quantity of weaponry that clearly Iraq, Iran and others might be anxious for them to use to start essentially a second front to make life much more complicated for us because we know the one thing the president does not want to have is the Arab-Israel conflict on the front pages and on the TV at the same time we are bombing Baghdad.
And a sort of third point I would sort of just raise on this is that the reaction in the Arab world - well, others will want to talk about this, too. My guess is that the - most of the regimes will survive. I mean, the one regime that I worry about under these sort of complicated circumstances is Jordan, but Chas. and Co. can talk about Saudi Arabia. My sense is that the Saudis are quite capable of surviving, as indeed are the Egyptians and the Syrians in the short run, but I would say that if things would go in the direction of the best-case analysis, I think this could accelerate the growing pressures in the Arab world for reform, which I think very beneficially now are coming from the Arabs themselves. It's very encouraging that in the last months, certainly since the president's speech in June, the Palestinian elite has become much more active in pressing for reform of the Palestinian Authority, and had it not been for this recent sort of incursion that Sharon made Arafat an icon again, Arafat's days truly looked numbered, and that would be good for progress in that arena. So there are some, I think, positive trends coming from the Arab societies who know they must have reform irrespective of what's going on in Iraq, and that could be built upon if things go well rather than badly.
MR. FREEMAN: Ray?
MR. TAKEYH: I think the confusion that you pointed out is sort of essential because what I noticed -- just as sort of a less-informed observer of this than some other panelists - is that there are two specific Iraqs emerging in the debate regarding Iraq. The first is a country that merits immediate American military intervention. Then when there's a discussion regarding the costs and burdens of the war, there's sort of a low-balling of the estimates given the fact that Iraqi weapons programs and so forth have eroded for the past decade, which in my view is at least an implicit acknowledgement of efficacy of the sanctions and containment policy.
So it seems to me that the president would have to pick one of these narratives or at least in - somehow reconcile them. I think there are compelling arguments for military intervention and regime change in Iraq. There are less compelling arguments for immediate military intervention and regime change in Iraq.
As far as your question regarding how this is going to be embraced by the region, in addition to what Geoff said about the environment that the war takes place is how this post-war reconstruction will go. It depends on what happens in Iraq internally. If the administration manages somehow to create a sort of inclusive democratic polity, then I think that's going to be embraced, at least by the populace, in a reasonably positive light. So far there have been no specific plans. To the extent that the plans are in focus - so suggesting that the United States succeeded in Japanese occupation, as John Dower (sp) and others have said, that Japanese occupation succeeded because the Japanese viewed it as an agency for assertion of their regional power. So presumably the Japanese case is not applicable to the Iraqi case, which is a largely fragmented society along ethnic and confessional lines.
So I - you know, how this is going to be embraced, as I said, depends on how serious American commitment is to Iraqi reconstruction and how successful it is.
MR. WILSON: On September 10th of last year, regime change was the accepted American policy towards Iraq. It was a noble policy objective, just as - and it was enshrined in law, just as it was the policy objective of successive administrations to support regime change in Libya, Cuba -- and the policy objective of this administration to support regime change in California.
On September 12th, with the emergence right after the World Trade Center, and the appearance on television of the neo cons - the right wing-nuts, as Brent Scowcroft calls them - it became a rationale for a military invasion, and the argument on September 12th was really rather simple. September 11th was a bad event, Saddam is a bad man; therefore, two bads mean we should go and kill Saddam. And we have been working from the premise ever since, essentially.
Now it came about that it was very difficult to pin September 11th on Saddam Hussein, and therefore, we've been scrambling because the president essentially found himself backed into a corner. We've been scrambling for an argument to justify an invasion of Iraq ever since, and weapons of mass destruction or, as I would suggest, the enhanced enforcement of the U.N. resolutions related to weapons of mass destruction, provides the, you know, rationale for doing it at this time.
Again, I think that, as was said earlier, there's a little dichotomy that the problem is separating out disarmament from regime -- (audio break, tape change) - though when he appears at fundraisers, he still tends to blur the distinction between disarmament and regime change.
Now on - let me just make one point about the Arab world reaction. When we did the the Gulf War and the run-up to the Gulf War -- I remember this very vividly in Iraq -- the deepest concern in the Arab world was that while they understood the need to expel Saddam from Kuwait and reverse that invasion, their biggest concern was that the United States and the West were in fact embarked upon a regime-change strategy to take out an Arab regime just because we didn't like it. And that was their worst nightmare, that they were going to suffer yet another in a succession of foreign invasions to overthrow Arab leaders because we just simply didn't like them. When we did not do that, when we stopped at the Kuwait border, and when we withdrew, largely, I think our credibility was extraordinarily high because those worst nightmares were not realized. And I suspect right now, in the Arab world, that those nightmares are back; in fact, that this is the beginning of another period of foreign domination against which they will resist.
Also at the time of the Gulf War, as in the run-up, I remember that there were -- in the Arab street there were an awful lot of Palestinian kids and other Arab kids being born who were named Scud Hussein. There weren't a lot of kids being named George Bush. Now, I suggest that if we proceed with something akin to the worst-case scenario, you will end up with a lot of kids who grow up in this demographic within the Arab world, of under 21 now, who will end up being disaffected, being brainwashed into thinking that this is in fact - this war is in fact an Iraqi defense of the Arab world against a modern Judeo-Christian crusade, and you will have an entire new generation of terrorists who will die with Saddam Hussein on their lips.
MR. FREEMAN: I think that's not an impossible scenario, and I'm grateful to you, Joe, for stating it so starkly.
Before we get to the next question I want to make two very brief remarks. First, on Arab reaction. Two dimensions of this in the immediate term need to be considered. The first is that particularly among those Arabs who would be called upon to facilitate the U.S. attack, that is Arabs in the Gulf, opposition to a proposed American attack on Iraq among the public, including elites, is nearly 100 percent. And I repeat, therefore, what I said in my introductory remarks, namely the dilemma for governments in the region is that they on the one hand have an imperative of retaining good relations with the United States for foreign policy and national security and regime survival reasons, and on the other hand they face publics who are fundamentally opposed to U.S. policy. And I leave it to those of you in the audience to make your own speculation about the implications for a regime that ignores its own public opinion in favor of the opinion of a foreign ally.
The second point is that the neo-conservatives, or neo-crazies as the case might be, are fairly open in saying, you know, today Iraq, tomorrow, you name it, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Libya. All of them are on the Krauthammer list to be hammered. So this, at a minimum, is not a very persuasive argument, if you're a supporter of the Saudi regime or the other regimes in the Gulf, for signing on to the American crusade, jihad, I don't know what it is - struggle against Saddam.
The second comment is simply this: When the United States carried out an occupation and reform of Germany and Japan, it had two major advantages. Both those countries had democratic traditions. In the case of Germany, the Weimar Republic, which had proceeded the Nazi regime, was very much alive in people's minds. In the case of Japan in the 1920's, there really was a parliamentary democracy, and the United States was able to revive these traditions. In the case of Iraq, which - perhaps the modern regime was cobbled together by the British, as it is often said, but there has been a strong central government in that region for 5,000 years. The last time that region enjoyed the rule of law was under Hammurabi, which was a while back.
So, a second distinction is that when Germany and Japan were reformed, this was done with broad regional support in Europe and international support generally of the entire venture. I don't believe that any Arab government or any Arab intellectuals have so far signed on to the idea of the United States dictating the future contours of the regime in Iraq. So the question of whether Iraq can be democratized and reformed by conquest does not have an obvious answer.
Sir.
MR. WILSON: Can I just say one other thing about the neo-conservative piece of this? I was struck on Friday night when Jerry Falwell appeared on "Crossfire." I don't know how many people saw it, but you might go back and take a look at the transcripts. He made three points: the prophet Mohammed was a terrorist, there are no Palestinian territories, and the Israeli patrimony is Judea and Samaria. And it seems to me to keep in mind that he is - this is what he is now saying as part of this evangelical, neo-conservative alliance, and what that portends for the region, if in fact that is a vision of this crowd and not just Jerry Falwell misspeaking.
MR. KEMP: The "60 Minutes" program on Sunday was even more terrifying, by the way, because that talked to others who believe in this sort of doomsday scenario that increasing violence actually is going to hasten the Second Coming.
MR. FREEMAN: On that cheery note - (laughter) - yes?
Q: My name is George Hismi (ph). I write for several of the newspapers in the Arab world. My first - well, I've got two questions. The first question is, I'm curious, who is supplying Saddam Hussein with the means to produce these weapons of mass destruction? Are they all homegrown or are they -- these aluminum tubings that he's been getting through Jordan, why aren't we policing this thing better?
The second question is, I, two days ago, read an interesting comment by a senior official of the Department of Commerce in Warsaw, who said the war in Iraq would be beneficial for the world's economy. We'll control the oil; the price of oil will drop down from $30 to $18. Is this the U.S. policy or is this - how true is this, our control of oil? Which brings my comment on Chas.' remark. I want to remind the audience that we still have troops in Germany and Japan, something that scares many in the Arab world.
Thank you.
MR. FREEMAN: Fifty-seven years of occupation, yes.
MR. KEMP: Consensual occupation.
MR. CORDESMAN: Let me make two points. One, you have identified a number of suppliers that have smuggled things in over the last 10 years. Precursor chemicals have come in through India. It's really very difficult to stop every bulk shipment of liquids. You have people with some 21 purchasing agencies and cover fronts that Iraq maintains globally constantly buying things. You are always trying to stress the Oil for Food program and include dual-use items for which Iraq has no domestic need, or where claimed, for example, outbreaks of foot and mouth disease are used as the excuse, which we know never occurred. And then the imports get through.
That pattern is very consistent, and it means that you have a number of European suppliers with key technologies when you can use third countries or you can use third parties. You can bribe people to get key technology flows in. And you had, in 1991, a great deal of a technology base. Understand, UNSCOM destroys dedicated facilities. UNSCOM did not destroy dual-use items, which in theory were reassigned to other functions but which can now be shifted back. Now, these are described -
MR. FREEMAN: It did not administer frontal lobotomies to scientists.
MR. CORDESMAN: No, I mean in the basic technology, which is why, for example, in the nuclear case you can very rapidly create nuclear devices because you couldn't destroy, under UNSCOM rules, the basic technology for high explosive lens design or neutron initiators or, for that matter, the fact that we found they had two workable implosion designs.
We have a policy, rightly or wrongly, that we do not identify suppliers normally. We do in the case of some Chinese firms and Russian firms, but it's rare. And the reason is with most friendly governments we can shut the supply off better using a friendly government than we can by publicly embarrassing the supplier. But this is a constant struggle and they only have to win occasionally to move forward.
Now, on the oil issue I sit and listen to this all the time. You know, there are people who earn a great living in Washington predicting oil prices, just as some of us do predicting the outcome of wars. Let's get real. We have no idea of what the oil market is going to be. We don't know how quickly Iraq can come back online. We don't now what level of surplus production will exist. We don't know how OPEC will respond. About the only thing we do know is that major increases in Iraqi oil production, if Seibold (sp) is even approximately right, are going to take a matter of years not a matter of months, simply because the field development needs to go at that rate. But this business about it being better or worse in manipulating global oil prices on the part of the Bush administration running the war, the market, it's sort of like steering the iceberg with the Titanic. Regardless of what the captain wants to do, it isn't going to happen.
MR. FREEMAN: I'd add the obvious point that no Iraqi regime that served the interests of North American consumers of energy at the expense of Iraq's national interest and the welfare of the Iraqi people would have any hope of legitimacy at all. And therefore, whatever government is in Baghdad will want to maximize the long-term profit to Iraq of Iraq's energy resources or it will be, by definition, illegitimate.
Joe.
MR. WILSON: Yeah, I was going to say pretty much the same thing. I'll say it a little bit differently. Most governments act in their own national interests, and any successor government to Saddam's government can be presumed to do exactly the same thing. And they will probably find it difficult to act in a way that alienates not just their own population but also their neighbors on oil policy, and they will also act to maximize their revenues on oil. So it's not likely that they're going to be, over the medium to long term - over the time that Tony points out that it will take to open up new fields and open up new transport facilities it's not likely that they will serve as tools of an American effort to maintain a stable oil price.
MR. FREEMAN: Geoff.
MR. KEMP: This raises a very interesting question about the degree to which, in order to maximize Iraq's revenues and development of its oil resources in the post-Saddam era, you need to have a strong central government that is essentially dealing with this one huge asset they have. That tends to run counter to a lot of the voices you're hearing now in the Iraqi opposition that essentially say some loose federation is the only way to hold Iraq together because you have these competing factions that have been mentioned before. And there's a certain, therefore, you know, inconsistency between how you maximize the economic development of Iraq while taking into account the need for a loose federal system.
MR. FREEMAN: Sir, tell us who you are.
Q: Thank you. My name is Mohammed Ektidoria (ph). I'm from LTC. It's a local consulting firm. I'm originally from Iran. I have a comment and a question. My question is in regard to, you know, basically what exists between Turkey and Iran. Their worry about the, you know, American attack on Iraq is the creation of a Kurdish democratic state of some kind. I mean, Prime Minister Ecevit said that in the next excursion by the Turkish into Iraq it would be not just about 50 miles or so, it goes to Mosul and Kirkuk, and that's about 200 miles or kilometers into the northern part of Iraq.
Why? Because they fear that a unified state that President Bush is talking about is going to be in the guise of a federalism for which they think federalism is the first stage for this operation of the northern part of Iraq into creation of a Kurdish democratic republic. And as such, then you will have a long-term war in the region. Iran, Syria, Turkey and of course even Iraq itself does not want to lose, say, a part of its territory, and those things are very, very much valued in that part of the world, as you know. And therefore we will have a long-term war in the region, in that section of it -- not the United States, but regional wars in that place. So what is your view of the aftermath of Iraq in this respect?
The other point that I wanted to say, it was alluded that why Iran is not - you know, has clarified its position as regards to what the United States might do in Iraq. Well, I think that the position - I should say this: well, I'm not for the Iranian government. I'm in fact an Iran National Front Opposition member. They are thinking that since they themselves are considered to be a religious state and therefore they constantly talk about, you know, overall Muslim countries' unities and so on, and here the United States is coming - attacking a Muslim country, therefore they cannot come out and say that they support the American attack on Iraq no matter what, because even though that they have a lot of differences with Iraq and they really like Saddam to go anyway, I think a quick resolution of that, they have no problem with it. But as they have stated in the paper recently, as far back as a couple of days ago, they seem to be indicating that they have opposition to use of the airspace flight by the United States Air Force, but they will not have anything for humanitarian - in other words, you know, an airplane being shot or something like that, pilots landed inside Iran. They will not have the same thing such as what happened in Afghanistan.
MR. FREEMAN: I take it there are two questions or comments that you would like to hear from the panel. I'm going to call first on Geoff. And the questions are with regard to the Kurdish factor, and second with regard to Iran's ability to tolerate either protracted warfare in Iraq or long-term American presence there.
Geoff, you want to start?
MR. KEMP: Yes. I think this is a very important point you raised because, to oversimplify it, as I understand it, the two major Kurdish groups of the North, PUK and the KDP, are sort of united that if they are to be part of a loose federation they would like to control the oil resources around Kirkuk, which is outside their control at the moment. Unfortunately, the majority of the population of Kirkuk are Turkomans, and for Turkey this is a red line in that the Turks are very explicit that they will not permit the Kurds to control Kirkuk.
So whether or not the United States has negotiated an agreement between the Kurds and the Turks on this issue before the war is a very important question. And if it has not been resolved, then it does open up exactly the scenario that you, I think quite ably, laid out. This problem ain't going to go away when Saddam has gone. In fact, I think all of us have tried to suggest that there are a lot of problems with Iraq and its neighborhood that are not related to the Saddam Hussein regime: the access to the Shatt al-Arab, the whole Kurdish question, the relationship with Iran. These questions will be there even if you have a democratic, united Iraq.
MR. FREEMAN: Ray.
MR. TAKEYH: Just to briefly comment on your second question. I'm not quite sure if the religious issues are as important. I think national interests will become more significant and religious issues will be subordinate to that. But I think there is a consensus within Iran that Iran missed an opportunity during the Afghan campaign in terms of having perhaps a better relationship with the United States. And I think Iran will do just what you said, try to stay out and offer some sort of cooperation. But I don't think there is that much incentive on the United States' side to become that engaged with Iran over these issues. I mean, if you talk to some Iranian officials, there's sort of nostalgia for the Clinton years. (Chuckles.) I mean, no one was talking about preemptive war and so on.
And I think there is a lot of concern in Iran that they're going to be a target. I mean, the president has already made his regime-change speech in the sense that he's hoping that regime change will be facilitated by the Iranians themselves, and whether that comes about - but I do think there is a possibility of a greater degree of Iranian constructive cooperation if the United States was prone toward that kind of diplomacy with Tehran, which at least I don't see that much incentive on the Washington side.
MR. FREEMAN: Joe.
MR. WILSON: I'd just talk briefly on the Kurds. My understanding, in my discussion with Kurds when I was out there, was that Kirkuk, in their assessment, was truly a Kurdish city that they were driven out of and was repopulated by Arabs. And it is, in fact, an objective of the Kurdish groups to regain control of Kirkuk and the oilfields that are in that area as Kurdish territory. One of the problems the Kurds are going to have is maintaining a cohesive and coherent identity, and the differences between the three main factions - there's the PUK, the KDP and then the Surchis, basically, the Surchi clan, which has always been, or has been periodically tied closely to Saddam Hussein. How that falls out and how Kurdish unity falls out is something that's going to be interesting to watch.
I think the other thing that needs to be taken into account is that they have had a vision, that has actually been on the table of international relations for 70 or 80 years, of an independent Kurdistan. And that is what also implicates not just Turkey but also Iran and Syria, which have significant Kurdish enclaves that might also seek to have that autonomy/independence. So that is something I think also very much concerns some of the neighbors.
MR. FREEMAN: Tony.
MR. CORDESMAN: I think we need to remember that about the only aspect of policy on the post-war that the president has clearly articulated is the territorial integrity of Iraq. And I think the obvious reason for this is Turkey, as well as Arab sensitivities, and the fact that trying to create any kind of separate Kurdish entity is seen as sort of a potential disaster.
I would be very careful. Kirkuk, and the place where the oilfields are physically located, is not really Kurdish. It's a very mixed area, and there's a lot of intermarriage, and the Kurds that are in a lot of these areas were not part of the Barzani or Talibani movement. You have a very, very divided Kurdish group, and the fact they can come together for the odd week doesn't mean that they have any real unity, except out of opportunism, and even that doesn't work very well.
The other problem I think we also need to remember here when we talk about the oilfields and seizing the oilfields and all of the rest, you really need to look at the maps the CIA puts out about where those oil deposits are. You also need to remember that unlike Iran, Iraq does not have a unified structure in terms of a national oil company. It's split into two north and south sectors, but they are all oriented towards central management of the fields, with exports to the west or the south the moment they can get out of dependence on Turkey.
Moreover, nothing is going to happen, if Seibold (ph) is approximately correct, for at least a year other than basically rebuilding capacity to the levels where Iraq was already exporting. It's going to take three to five years to bring on major amounts of new oil production. And just to remind people who think, well, this is going to alter world oil prices, OPEC and the International Energy Agency and the Energy Information Agency all already estimate that Iraq will be producing, with massive new capacity, at the maximum rate of investment at that time to get to moderate oil prices. So here it really is necessary to get bogged down in technical details because otherwise strategic slogans create something that physically can't happen.
MR. FREEMAN: Jerry Siegel has been limbering up. Let's have your usual curve ball. But tell us who you are first.
Q: (Chuckles.) Jerome Siegel, University of Maryland. There are a lot of reasons that people advocate for going to war with Iraq, but when the administration defends its policy approach it's primarily in terms of the potential danger that Iraq poses to the United States through the use of weapons of mass destruction against the United States here, not against the American forces there. And the purpose of my question basically is to get Anthony Cordesman to address this more thoroughly than we have heard thus far. And I want to mention a few specifics to sort of help focus.
First of all, there's Chas. Freeman's questions, that haven't been answered, about -
MR. FREEMAN: They never are.
Q: Right, I've noticed. (Chuckles.) In the context of a war, is it likely that Iraq has pre-positioned one or another form of weapons in the United States, maybe in Washington D.C., that would be used? How do you evaluate that?
Secondly, if there is no war and Iraq hasn't been working on doing that over the last several years, given how close we will have come to a war, when does that become, from an Iraqi deterrence point of view, exactly what it would try to do in the coming future so that one day it could announce, in fact, that it does have that capability?
Third, independent of these considerations, do you believe, with respect to nuclear, that there is some serious likelihood that Iraq, not through its own enrichment programs but through the attainment of smuggled uranium or plutonium, could actually have a nuclear capability within several years? Secondly, with respect to what you were saying before about biological weapons, you seem to be saying that in something like one to three years you thought that Iraq could have a capability that would allow it to leapfrog a nuclear option. Did this include - or is it relevant, the issue of an ability to deliver that as opposed to just having those weapons?
And finally, the issue that was raised by Joe Wilson about deterrence. Iraq may have all sorts of capabilities, but the question is really whether or not, at least insofar as we're talking about the terms by the United States, not, let's say Israeli-Iraqi deterrence, which is a whole other thing, but if we're talking about the United States, are we really talking about a situation in which the war has to be fought now or fought later on less advantageous terms, which essentially means that the terms will work? Or is there some reason to believe in fact that deterrence could work, at least long enough so that this change, if Saddam personally dies, any of a variety of eventualities - it's not a question of 50 years of Cold War, it's a regime, at least as I read it, that its adventurousness is enormously affected by the personality of this one guy. If he wasn't there, the whole issue would recede into the background.
So, your thoughts on that, and anyone who would like to join in.
MR. FREEMAN: That's almost as many questions as I have.
Tony.
MR. CORDESMAN: Let me say that I don't teach anymore, but when I did I told my students if they asked more than two-part questions I'd flunk them -- (laughter) - mostly because it's a speech, not a question. But let me try to deal with some of this.
First, I think that that Bush administration has, frankly, tried to tie what it is doing in Iraq too much to the war on terrorism. And, frankly, the CIA document that became apparent, or available on the Web a couple of days ago, does not track with the president's speech, and the British assessment does not track with the president's speech. And if the president has a case for dealing with terrorism or domestic issues, it is, to date, purely a statement by Secretary Rumsfeld that there is irrefutable evidence, which is as far as he has defined the problem. If it exists, it would be important to know.
I think, though, that if you look at, in detail, the literature, I don't agree with you. I think the president has gone on to make a case against the threat to the region, to our allies in the region, and in terms of regional stability, both in his speech and in the papers issued by the government.
And on the second issue that you raised, the pre-positioning of weapons, the problem with this argument is several-fold. First, it means Iraq has to be very confident that its intelligence operations are clever and subtle. Joe may have a different view of this, but I was never impressed by the cleverness and subtlety of Iraqi intelligence, because if we found that, it would be an immediate excuse. It would give us global carte blanche to do virtually anything we wanted.
Second, that isn't an argument against going to war. The situation won't get better. If you don't deal with the Iraqi threat now, whether they've pre-positioned or not, presumably they can make the threat more sophisticated over time. The problem that I see, frankly, here however, is with biological - and let me get to nuclear in a moment. In the real world, biological weapons require you to have extremely sophisticated material. It has to be something you can disseminate in almost perfect micro-powder form, which has no static clustering, survival against temperature and ultraviolet. You have to be able to disseminate it in very high densities. None of the literature that is currently available is remotely realistic. The OTA study that people quote, for example, has a biological attack on Washington which kills 50 percent more people than actually visit Washington during peak working hours. And it never can happen.
The problem over time, however, is that we got to the point of those agents -- we had them by the early 1960s, the Russians had them, and people can produce them, and at some point Iraq will get to them. It may be there now, which I sincerely doubt; it could get them at some point in the future. And it almost certainly will, because all of the things UNSCOM could not find directly relate to this kind of weaponization, and delivery can be anything from a missile warhead to a short-range rocket to a covert device to a bomb.
MR. FREEMAN: To an aerosol can, to an envelope.
MR. CORDESMAN: Well, no, frankly - no, it can't because that kills a few people.
MR. FREEMAN: Right.
MR. CORDESMAN: And let's be clear about terrorism. The body count matters. There is a real difference between five and 50,000 people. On the nuclear side, the question about how quickly can you do it, if you really have enriched material anybody can make a large gun device in a matter of months. They have all the technology to do that. And in fact they had the designs, and we verified the designs.
Taking fissile material and putting it into an implosion device is very difficult. It's not clear they have the high explosive lens manufacturing capability, but a year is a reasonable sort of possibility. Two years is more credible. If it is a Russian-theater nuclear weapon, it is no secret that the permissive devices designed to activate the weapon are very primitive compared to ours and use exactly the same codes and mechanisms in all of the weapons. You can therefore bypass and arm a Russian weapon, if you have more than one and you have skilled physicists and engineers, in a matter of days if some of these should somehow become available.
Now, these are all worst-case scenarios, and I see no possibility at this point of these being very likely. But if you want to know the possibilities, those are the possibilities. Let me note, the CIA estimate said five years, half a decade. It didn't talk about one or two years for nuclear enrichment as the worst - or a case for actually getting to the fissile devices.
Let me just make one last point about deterrence. If I thought you could safely deter Saddam I would obviously not say that my marginal decision would favor military action. If we can somehow make UNMOVIC work -- and we don't have the time to discuss all of the weaknesses in the UNMOVIC approach -- then I would be in favor of that. But what you have to always ask is the question not simply what are the negative sides of taking action, but where will we be in three or five years if we don't act? And will Saddam disappear to Kusay (ph), to Uday (ph), to what? If people see Saddam in this region and you're an Iranian, what do you do? If you are looking at this situation of unconstrained proliferation, and if you are sitting in Israel, what do you do? If you are in Saudi Arabia and you have an obsolete Chinese missile system with conventional warheads, what do you do? And how does Pakistan play in the game?
MR. FREEMAN: Geoff.
MR. KEMP: Let me reinforce a couple of these points because I do think we should not lose sight of the fact that this is a terribly serious issue that Saddam Hussein will get nuclear weapons at some point in the future if he is not stopped. And whether it is done quickly through enrichment material coming in from outside or domestically, we can - you know, it can be either way. But I think the one thing the Bush administration is absolutely right on is that from 1998, when the UNSCOM left, there was no serious effort by the Clinton administration or anyone else in the international community to face up to this problem. The sanctions regime was collapsing, and aside from the British there was nobody else talking about this problem in a serious, hands-on way. So it has to be dealt with.
And what is ironic is that the most likely source for Saddam getting early supplies of enrichment material is the former Soviet Union. And before 9/11, the Bush administration was being very negligent on this score, and was in fact scaling back some of the programs that had been initiated before to help the Russians control their so-called "loose nuke" stockpiles. Now fortunately that has been reversed, and I would argue that this is as critical an issue - that is to say, getting security over the enrichment material in the former Soviet Union - as the actual Iraqi program itself. And thankfully I think we're now focused on that.
MR. FREEMAN: Joe.
MR. WILSON: Having run into an Iraqi agent one time in my house in Baghdad, I can attest to the fact that they are pretty clumsy and not the most sophisticated or subtle. And I think that Tony is absolutely right that if in fact they had pre-positioned weapons of mass destruction it would be a very dangerous tactic. I do think that what we need to worry about more is the potential for their using every weapon in their arsenal, and attempting to draw Israel into this broader war in the event that any military action we take against them is perceived by them as going after Saddam's head.
Now, as for deterrence, what I would like to see us move towards is not doing anything but taking the smart military action for the right reasons rather than doing something not quite so smart. And I worry that we get bogged down when we don't necessarily need to get bogged down, and that we go beyond tending to our knitting on this issue and get involved in something much more akin to our experience in Lebanon than we really want to do, and we turn the potential for victory into defeat. I will give this administration some credit for having mustered the political will to revisit the question of enforcement of the appropriate resolutions, of 687, on weapons of mass destruction. I think that's important.
I think that anything that we contemplate militarily needs to be done in the context of 687, and I would argue that the problem with regime change as a rationale for military action is that it guarantees that Saddam will do everything we don't want him to do. Disarmament is the rationale for - or disarmament or a robust military support of a U.N. inspections regime is something then that throws the onus of decision-making back onto Saddam. He can then decide whether he wishes to use weapons of mass destruction to defend against our efforts, in which case it then becomes - he then understands that it's his head that's at stake on this.
MR. FREEMAN: Let me buttress that point, if I may. One of the reasons I believe that there has not been a successful effort to depose Saddam inside Iraq, despite the many people who have reason to hate him, is that it is far from clear what benefits Iraq would derive from regime change. There is no guarantee that the goal posts would not be moved. There is no clear statement of policy with regard to what would happen for sanctions, for inspections, intrusions on sovereignty, or all of the other issues that trouble Iraqi patriots as well as ordinary, less-committed Iraqis. So the clarity, the need to have a clear statement of war aims and a statement of war aims that can be accepted by the kind of Iraqis we want to work with in the future is not a trivial point.
And I see Tony looking agitated.
MR. CORDESMAN: I think that one thing that bothers me about this -- because it is a discussion most people don't have. There are two options here. One is that is UNMOVIC declares failure, and we have a pretty good idea of what happens then. The other is UNMOVIC declares success. And what success? What is success? We're going to disarm the technology? How? We're going to find all of the mobile laboratories? We're going to find all of the dispersed assets? How? Most of what we're talking about has been reengineered to have a civil use and be a dual-use facility. That represents more than two-thirds of the facilities we are now talking about that we know about. So you presumably have no excuse to disarm those at all. And everybody refers to how successful UNSCOM was -- and it was -- but let me just remind you of what UNSCOM actually came out with.
We're still missing some 360 tons of bulk chemical material, and that includes 1.5 tons designed only for VX. You've got 3,000 tons of missing precursor chemicals, 300 of which are for VX. You've got over 25,000 liters of missing growth material. And you've got over 30,000 assemblies for chemical and biological weapons that we haven't been able to find or confirm the destruction of. Now, a lot of that material is probably not active or capable, but that's things we knew about that they had in 1991, and we're going to find all of that and we're really going to track it down? I think there is a problem here in just physical, credible terms that we'd better think out a lot harder than we seem to have to date.
MR. FREEMAN: Good point.
You are the second to last commentator, or questioner.
Q: I'm always second to last.
MR. FREEMAN: Well, no, second to none, but please tell us who you are.
Q: Gene Bird from CNI. My one wish is that you all would be in the Oval Office before the Sharon visit and give the same presentation there.
MR. FREEMAN: It will be available on our website shortly.
Q: Right. I have three questions, all one sentencers.
A few days ago Colin Powell appeared before IR Committee, and he was asked a question by Brad Sherman: "If we give you a blank check, what name are you going to put on that blank check, Pearl or Powell, before you take it to the bank?" In that regard, my question is, who do you think is winning or will win the president's ear on this? I know it's a guessing game but I would enjoy your comments on it.
Secondly, Saddam Hussein, on January 2nd, 1991, according to an Iraqi-American who was a friend of his and who was visiting and telling him he should get out of Kuwait, turned and said, "Well, I guess I have two options: diplomatic defeat or a military defeat, and the military defeat is probably better." Someone I told this story to the other day said, "And the president is sitting in the White House saying, I guess I have two options: a diplomatic defeat by going through the United Nations and the inspection and waiting, or a military victory." I'd enjoy your comment on that.
Thirdly, Tom Lantos -- because I personally believe the road to Baghdad leads through Jerusalem and through the Palestinian question much more than has been said, even here -- Tom Lantos gave an interview to Eretz in which he said, "Don't worry. Israel needn't worry because we are going to install a dictator in Baghdad - our dictator. And then we will take on some of the other problems that Israel has." Syria he specifically mentioned.
Thank you.
MR. FREEMAN: All those questions are far too political for me, so I'm going to ask Ray Takeyh to start out.
MR. TAKEYH: Yeah, I'm not in Washington. (Chuckles.) Let me actually - I want to just say one thing in defense of neo-conservatives since they have been taking sort of a beating on this, and it requires sort of a dissection of American history.
Neo-conservative orientation, just as a point of view, is quite consistent with American internationalism, going back to Wilson, in the sense that the United States always had a vision of global society which was democratic in its polity and free in its commerce. And any set of states that deviated from that global civilization, that vision, often conflicted with the United States, whether it's Bismarck Germany, Stalinist Russia or Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
Now, I'm not a neo-conservative, but many of my friends are, so I always think of neo-conservatives as Wilsonians with a sort of peculiar attachment to Israel.
MR. FREEMAN: Armed evangelists. (Laughter.)
MR. TAKEYH: Anybody who thinks that Wilson was not an armed evangelist should talk to the Mexicans, the Nicaraguans and the Haitians. (Chuckles.) So in a sense it is important not just to dismiss the neo-conservative argument, but place it in a long landscape of American history, which that's all I wanted to do.
MR. FREEMAN: Thank you.
Joe.
MR. WILSON: I think, in my observations of this administration so far, as somebody who is working more on my golf game than I am on policy right now, it seems to me that every time this administration finds itself in great difficulty as a consequence of actions either beyond its control or decisions it has mistakenly made, it turns to Colin Powell to get it back - (audio break, tape change) -- bilateralism and U.N. support for anything has gained a lot of currency at the expense of unilateralism and go for Saddam's head as a rationale for doing anything.
That said, it does seem to me that we will really know only when we get to that point where we were - the same similar point as we were in 1991: do you go on to Baghdad from Basra or do you accept the terms of a cease-fire? So in 2002, it will be: do you accept the constraints that have been imposed on you by whatever U.N. resolution may be passed, or do you just ignore them and go on to Baghdad? That's I think where we'll really learn what - whose check is on it.
The - I guess I won't take the military defeat/diplomatic victory one, except to say that it's clear to me that when - in December and January, in the last days of the run-up to the Gulf War when we were looking at the visits of Aziz to Washington and Baker to Baghdad and ended up with the two of them meeting in Geneva, it was increasingly clear to all of us watching this that in fact Saddam had made the calculation that he would sacrifice his troops on the field of battle and emerge claiming political and diplomatic victory. In the event -- of course, he has survived a couple of American presidents, a French president, a couple of British prime minister, and is still out there, and again, on September 10th he was being - his regime was being welcomed back into the Arab League, the sanctions had been streamlined in a way that he might have been able to take additional advantage of, he was pumping as much oil as he wanted, so I think there is some merit in his assessment that absorbing the defeat on the field of battle ultimately was a diplomatic victory for him.
And then finally, as to sort of the Lantos comment, I didn't see it, but you know, the three strains of thought out there are - four strains - one, that we're doing this because we really - this really is to fight terrorism and the nexus between terrorism and weapons of mass destruction; two, it's all about the oil; three, it's "Finish Daddy's business;" and four, it's all about making the Arab world a more peaceful place for Israel, essentially. And - so that's all I have to say on that.
MR. FREEMAN: Tony.
MR. CORDESMAN: Let me make an important qualification. There are some very sophisticated and thoughtful neo-conservatives. When I refer to neo-conservatives crossing the line to neo-crazy, I am referring to what I hope is a relatively margin of them. And I can't resist - I do think Woodrow Wilson does fit the profile of neo-conservative in that he was the American president who formally segregated the U.S. Post Office and prevented Afro-Americans from being hired in it, but he is not a suitable new-conservative in that he was also one of the most conspicuously anti-Semitic presidents in the history of the United States. Romanticizing Wilson isn't something I would do on the basis of his real history. (Scattered laughter.)
One comment about military defeat. I think we have implied that the U.N. gives a no-go. I think Geoff made the more important point. What we will at best get is a U.N. sort of resolution sufficiently vague - as we did in the case of Kosovo - so you can act under the guidance of that, claiming Article VII. You're not going to get a mandate one way or the other. And I think probably we will be left - whether it's one resolution or two - with something sufficiently vague so it neither endorses our position nor directly contradicts us so we don't have that grim choice between U.N. or military victory.
And finally, I cannot believe that Congressman Lantos said that. If he did, I hope we make him Ambassador to Baghdad after this war because the chances of any dictator surviving in Baghdad for six months, with or without the U.S. forces, is to me negligible. But there is a point here, and again, I think Geoff raised it and I'd reiterate it: we aren't going to solve the Middle East, even in the Gulf, regardless of what we do in Iraq, and to me, I think it would be an amazing step forward if we weren't still in the middle of the second intifada a year after whatever we do in Iraq is over with all of the tensions, all of the price tags, all of the resentments of the United States.
MR. FREEMAN: Geoff.
MR. KEMP: Just one - I can't resist the question about whose name goes on the check. My prediction is the president, being very acutely sensitive politically, will turn to Karl Rove and ask exactly the same question - (laughter) - and Karl Rove will say, "Put both of their names on the check."
MR. FREEMAN: In any event, I take it there's agreement in the panel that within the ranks of the brilliant and well-pedigreed neo-cons there is a tiny band of mental defectives who put the president into an impossible situation in which he has to choose between political humiliation or a very risky war.
Sir - you're the last.
Q: John Sawyer, St. Louis Post Dispatch. I've a question on post-war reconstruction and nation building, and specifically the lessons to be drawn from our experience so far in Afghanistan. It was interesting that Monday night the president, in his speech, in his assertion that we were committed to rebuilding Iraq as a stable democracy, cited Afghanistan as a model of success, that what we had done there we would apply to Iraq. And Senator Lieberman, in a speech just after that - also Monday night - drew the opposite conclusion: that we had not done nearly enough in Afghanistan and that it would be a grievous mistake if we repeated that policy in Iraq.
Comment on that?
MR. CORDESMAN: I think a lot of people here have been in Afghanistan, and we are torn between hope and reality. The problem is there's nothing in Afghanistan to reconstruct. It was better, but it was never a real country, and we are finding out the hard way that sending in troops and a couple of hundred million dollars' worth of aid doesn't transform a society.
It's more questionable in Iraq because you have a very large number of educated people, high technocratic level, major economic resources, a reasonably good infrastructure, a lot of people who have married and crossed ethnic and religious lines, and I think that there is real hope if you do it. But the lessons that I think you would draw from peacemaking are - and here I think the U.S. military has done some, stayed others - if you're going to do it at all, get a peacemaking presence in as soon as possible so that you establish order in all of the areas before people consolidate power after you win a military victory and while the sheer shock of what you've done is still important.
Create a climate for partnership. Do not go in as an occupier. Convince people that if they move with you, there is a real future and it is their future and their goals you are meeting.
Solve the humanitarian problems thoroughly and immediately; not in token terms.
Don't wait on promises from the international community or the U.N. They're never kept. If you're going to do anything, you're going to have to spend the money right away and get the assets in right away. And be prepared to stay as long as it takes so that people can evolve a stable regime and government and make necessary adjustments in the economy - no longer, but that long, and not simply in the capital but in the country.
Now those are the lessons. If we're prepared to act on them, we have not heard a word so far from the White House.
MR. FREEMAN: Joe.
MR. WILSON: It's pretty daunting. If you project the lessons that Tony articulated, which are essentially along the lines of what we tried to do when we went into Bosnia -
MR. FREEMAN: Or Haiti.
MR. WILSON: -- and you take a look at the relative uncomplicated - or the relative size of Haiti or Bosnia and the relative population and demographics of the two countries, and you try and project that on to the map of Iraq, it is a large and daunting task. I would say those who mentioned, you know, 56 years in Germany and Japan ought to take a look at maybe the Marshall Plan for some guidance as to what it's going to take, not just in Iraq, but also to create political incentives within the region for this new, flowering democracy that Mr. Wolfowitz likes to talk about.
And on Afghanistan, it seems to me, since you are a member of the press, I guess what I would encourage you to do - you and your colleagues - is go out there and look for yourselves, make your own assessments. I think the Afghanistan - the state of progress in Afghanistan has been woefully underreported in the last several months, leaving really the administration an open field to say whatever they care to say.
MR. FREEMAN: I'd like to close this discussion by just picking up on one point that Tony made. I think there has been a total vacuum of leadership on this question from the United States, and it is odd because the one thing on which the international community does seem to be agreed is that the regime in Baghdad is dreadful and that the world would be a much better place if a different regime were there. Whether they agree that the way to accomplish that is with the use of force by the United States or not, they agree on that point. And yet we seem to be proposing, once again, that we cook the dinner and everybody else gets to wash the dishes, and I don't see any volunteers among our allies for that cleanup role in this adventure. And yet I believe a bit of attention to the problem now could begin to create the possibility of a coalition that might begin to meet Tony's very sensible criteria for addressing the problem.
Let me close this session by thanking the panelists. Even though they didn't answer any of the questions - (laughter) - they provided a very high level of discussion of a very complex issue, and I for one got a great deal out of listening to them as well as to the comments and questions from the floor, for which I thank you.
Let me ask you to give the panelists a round of applause.
(Applause.)
You can see the transcript on mep.org in a few days.
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