Unedited Transcript
Middle East Policy Council

Thirty-fourth in the Capitol Hill Conference Series on U.S. Middle East Policy

Imperial Dreams: Can the Middle East Be Transformed?

Speakers:

Kenneth Pollack
Director of Research, Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Brookings Institution

W. Patrick Lang
President, Global Resources Group, Inc.; formerly the Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East

Amy Hawthorne Associate, Democracy and Rule of Law Project, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Philip C. Wilcox, Jr.
President, Foundation for Middle East Peace

Moderator/Discussant:

Chas. W. Freeman, Jr.
President, Middle East Policy Council

2167 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C.
October 3, 2003

Transcript by:
Federal News Service
Washington, D.C.

CHAS W. FREEMAN, JR.: Let me welcome you all here this morning. I'm Chas. Freeman; I have the honor to be president of the Middle East Policy Council. Most of you know us, I'm sure, but for those few who don't I'll just say a word. We are a small educational organization. We do three things. We hold conferences up here on Capital Hill of this sort to discuss issues that are timely or neglected or politically incorrect and otherwise going unaddressed. We take the transcripts of those sessions and we publish them as the first item in Middle East Policy, which we're proud is the most often-cited journal in its field of contemporary policy issues in the Middle East. And third, invisibly and perhaps most valuably, outside the Beltway we teach teachers, high school teachers, how to teach about Arab civilization and Islam. We've trained some 14,000 such teachers and we reach about a million kids a year, confusing them with a fact or two they otherwise would not encounter in the course of their splendid public school education. So that's who we are.

We are here today to talk about the impact of Iraq -- as it is under the American occupation and as it will be under a future Iraqi regime -- on the region as a whole. The title of the session is "Imperial Dreams: Can the Middle East Be Transformed?" It may seem a little early to be asking this question because in fact there are only two clear accomplishments to date of the American conquest of Iraq.

First we have -- to the applause of the world and the delight of most Iraqis we have ousted Saddam Hussein and his regime. We have not replaced that regime so we have not accomplished regime change, but we have accomplished regime removal. And second, of course, we have proven that the inspectors did a vastly better job of rooting out weapons of mass destruction than even they imagined they had. Now, these are two notable accomplishments. But at the same time, we have not repaired the rifts with our allies around the world and with Iraq's neighbors over our presence in Iraq. We have not restored basic services in Iraq and we now find ourselves being shot at because we didn't perform - we didn't restore basic services, and because we're being shot at we can't restore basic services. Bechtel, which was to survey and set priorities, remains in the Kuwait Sheraton rather than in Baghdad, and a lot of work that should have been done clearly has slipped.

How reconstruction will go is a major question mark in these circumstances. The U.N. has withdrawn to Jordan because of security concerns. An October 23rd conference in Madrid to pledge money for the reconstruction of Iraq has so far drawn a contribution of 200 million euros -- $234 million - from the European Union, and very little else. As we debate this morning, the Congress is also debating the question of whether to appropriate funds or loan them to Iraq for its reconstruction, contrary to the administration's, I think, intelligent approach to the issue.

So some would argue that in these circumstances, Iraq is simply a rather badly managed Pentagon-operated theme park and there is no need - or it is not timely to raise the sorts of issues we are discussing today.

There has clearly been some political progress in Iraq. A process of de-Ba'athification is going on, local government institutions are growing up, and the Iraqi Governing Council has been named and has been seated at the Arab League and heard at the United Nations. So all is not dark. Still, many questions are outstanding, and it's clearer and clearer that how Iraq turns out matters.

Proponents of this war argued that the removal of weapons of mass destruction from Iraq would facilitate the removal of other such threats elsewhere, for example Iran and North Korea. They argued that a U.S. presence in Iraq would generate leverage on countries like Iran, Syria or Saudi Arabia to reform. And they argued that democratization in Iraq would inspire democratic revolutions or change in regimes elsewhere in the region and throughout the Muslim world. Finally, more recently Iraq has been named as the central battleground in the global war against terrorism; I suppose a sort of super-Cuisinart where terrorists will be sliced, diced and shredded and al Qaeda will meet its doom in direct confrontation with American forces.

Those on the other side of this issue would argue that what has happened in Iraq is a stimulus, not a deterrent, to the development of weapons of mass destruction in Iran and North Korea; that the occupation has immobilized a large portion of the U.S. military worldwide rather than added to our leverage and flexibility; that democratization may well produce de-secularization, a turn toward religious, faith-based politics in Iraq and anti-American policies that would undermine the ability of rulers elsewhere in the region to continue to cooperate with the United States. And finally, some argue that Iraq is becoming not the death ground of terrorism but a magnet for terrorists, a training ground for jihadis and a place for target practice on American G.I.s. These are rather different views, and what happens is clearly going to be very consequential.

We have with us today four panelists who I think are very well qualified to take up the issues that I've outlined, and many others that are implicit in this situation. I'm not going to read their biographies, which you have before you, but I will just note that in order of speaking we have Ken Pollack, who's book, "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq," and whose other book, "Arabs at War: Military Effectiveness," were widely cited, I think probably more by their titles than their contents - people should read them, because they were actually quite nuanced and not what they appeared to be -- but in any event, widely cited in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq and the current occupation. I should say Ken is a senior fellow in Foreign Policy Studies and he's director of Research for the Saban Center of the Middle East at the Brookings Institution.

Pat Lang, who many of you know from appearances here, is a retired colonel from the U.S. intelligence side, worked in many places in the Middle East, continues to be active there. He is president of Global Resources, Incorporated in the Future Millennium Foundation, a commentator of great distinction on events in the region.

Amy Hawthorne, who I think is joining us here for the first time in a program, is an associate in the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace where she focuses on the Middle East. And she's the editor of Carnegie's new publication, the Arab Reform Bulletin. She travels frequently in the region and knows it well, and her focus is democracy promotion.

And finally, Phil Wilcox, a colleague of mine in the Foreign Service for many years, whose last position in government was consul general at Jerusalem, and who is now president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, has spent a great deal of his career dealing with the issues of peace and war in the region and with terrorism, and I think will address that aspect of the question.

So with these few introductory remarks, which I hope have angered the panelists sufficiently to generate some interesting discussion, I will open the session. Following the four panelists, who will speak for about 10 to 12 minutes on pain of being brutally removed from the microphone, we will open the discussion for all present. If you raise your hand and identify yourself I will note that down and take your in order, and there will be people with microphones who can hand you a mike so that you can identify yourself and give us your succinct question or comment.

With these few introductory remarks, I invite Ken Pollack either to mount the - do a sort of Patton-type thing up here or sit where you are and talk about Iraq's political implications and the regional implications of what is happening and why we should be hopeful, if you believe that about the transformative potential of Iraq in the region as a whole.

Thanks.

KEN POLLACK: Thank you, Chas.

It is my lot once again to deal with the issue of Iraq. It's my bed; I guess I need to - I've made this bed so I guess I'd better sleep in it. That said, I think that talking about Iraq now is even harder than it was talking about Iraq before the invasion because Iraq is an extraordinarily complicated situation. It is moving fast, it is moving in a whole variety of different directions, and I don't think there's anyone out there who really has a lock on ground truth. So all I'm going to do is offer you my opinions based on the wide range of information and people that I've been talking to over the course of the last several months.

I think it is important to start with Iraq because whether we like it or not, for good or bad - and probably both - what happens in Iraq, the success or failure of our efforts in Iraq, I think will have a tremendous impact on our larger efforts toward the region and on the future of the region itself. So let me start with Iraq itself.

The first thing I'd say is I think the picture that I'm seeing emerging right now is an extraordinarily complex one. I will offer up a truism: the situation is not as bad as the press is making it out to be; it is not as good as the administration is making it out to be. I see indications of all of the above in Iraq: good, bad, indifferent, or in many cases, just to be determined later.

There are a number of things that seem to be going right in Iraq, and it is important to keep them in mind. First of all, you know, God bless the United States military, and the Army and Marines in particular, who are doing an extraordinary job over there. When they got there they sat on their hands for about six weeks after the fall of Baghdad because they assumed that the new provisional authority in Baghdad would tell them what to do. And so they sat and waited for the provisional authority to do something - to tell them to do something. Well, after six weeks they figured out that nobody was going to tell them what to do and they better do it themselves. And they've been doing that.

Two weeks ago I spent a week in Germany with about 3,000 members of the U.S. Army, many of whom were stationed in Iraq and had just come back for this one conference. And I heard story after story after story about what they are doing at a local level. I mean, these are stories that have been confirmed by other sources. And they're doing remarkable things at a local level. You've got company commanders and battalion commanders who are going into Iraqi villages and turning on the water and getting generators running and forming up local councils and doing all kinds of extraordinary and wonderful things that are having a real impact on the daily lives of lots of Iraqis.

A second positive to point to, so far there's been no civil war. That's important. There are a lot of people who were predicting right from the start that it would be impossible, that you'd have Shi'a going after Sunnis, Sunnis going after Shi'a, all the Arabs going after the Kurds. It hasn't happened so far, and we have had provocations. The assassination attempt of Baqir al-Hakim was, to many people, the first shot in a civil war. It, too, hasn't happened - and that's not to say it can't happen; it's simply to suggest that in fact the ethnic differences I think have been exaggerated by a lot of people. In fact, what you're seeing is the vast majority of Iraqis want this to work and they seem willing to give us quite a bit of time to try to make it work, and they seem willing to kind of sit on their hands about a lot of things that they're unhappy about, including the assassination of a Shi'a leader who in death has become far more important than he was in life, but nevertheless could have been a major provocation, a trigger for a civil war if you had lots of people who were sitting around just looking for the excuse to do so. So I think that's also, I think, a positive.

The economy is starting to revive. People who are going to Iraq are saying that goods are more and more readily available. In particular, the repeal of all taxes inside Iraq seems to have had a real impact in terms of bringing in imports all over. So the prices have fallen very significantly and it is easier for Iraqis to get certain things.

And another point to make is that it does seem to be the case that Baghdad, where most of the media is located, in some ways is the worst of what's going on. The situation in the south and the north does seem to be calmer than in Baghdad. And then particularly you've got a real disparity in Baghdad because Baghdad was Saddam's jewel in the crown. Baghdad always had energy; it always had everything that it needed. Now the CPA is trying to divide energy, water, food, everything else more equitably across the country so that while the rest of the country is doing somewhat better, Baghdad is doing much worse and the Baghdadis are complaining very loudly. That's obviously a problem because ultimately Iraq is Baghdad, but it's also a way of saying that things aren't as bad as they're painted to be because a lot of this is being distorted by what's being seen in Baghdad.

Now, that said, there's also a lot going wrong, and I don't want to try to paint a very rosy portrait because my point is it is a very complicated picture in Iraq right now. We don't have security under our control. And I'll be very honest with you: I care very little in terms of the stability of Iraq about the terrorist attacks. Obviously they are a problem for us, obviously we want to make sure that our soldiers aren't being killed, but in terms of the future of Iraq they are not the determinative security issue. The determinative security issue is the fact that Iraqis don't feel safe in their homes yet, that most Iraqis still don't feel like they can allow their wives or their daughters to go out after dark. That is the central security problem that we face, and it is a security problem that we don't yet have a solution to.

Even within the counter-terrorist strategy - you know, I'm really struck by all of these claims in recent days that everything's going well, we've got the right strategy; we just need better intelligence. Pat and I are former longtime intelligence analysts, and I'll be interested to hear if he shares my view, but my feeling has always been that anytime I hear a general say that we have the right strategy; we just don't have the right intelligence, is another way of saying we have the wrong strategy, okay? Saying, I need more intelligence, I need better intelligence, is like saying, I need a magic bullet; why won't you guys come up with a magic bullet and give me the magic bullet, because if I had a magic bullet I could make this all go away.

Intelligence is what it is: it is a hit-or-miss business. It is an art; it is not a science. Our intelligence system has been crafted over 50 years. It's actually very good. If that intelligence system isn't producing the kind of intelligence that we need to make this strategy work, we're not going to be able to twist the intelligence system to get the better intelligence. It will take 20 or 30 years to make significant changes to the intelligence system to create a system that will produce measurably better or measurably more intelligence. We have the system that we have. And the great commanders of history are the ones who recognize the limits on their own intelligence capabilities and designed their strategies accordingly, not designing the ideal strategy and then beating up on the intelligence and saying, why can't you tell me what the other guy is thinking before he thinks it?

We have a lot of problems in terms of the chain of command in Iraq. I'm struck by the fact that just talking to the troops, talking to the aid workers out there, talking to the NGO personnel, we have this weird combination of micromanagement and no management. On the one hand, both Washington and Baghdad seem to be trying to micromanage all kinds of little things; on the other hand, the troops out in the field constantly complain of the fact that the CPA doesn't seem to pay any attention to them, so that all of these local successes that I was talking about just a few minutes ago often go for naught because they can't marry them up; they can't take local successes and turn them into larger successes. They can't get resources from one place and move them to another. They're jury-rigging solutions; they're ad hocing solutions. And oftentimes those solutions will work for a period of time, but unless a higher authority comes in and provides a more systematic approach, a more systematic solution to the problem, those jury-rigged solutions break down over time. So that's also another problem we have.

The Governing Council, we have enormous problems with that. I'm not going to get into too much detail there. I will simply say that there is the typical Iraqi exile politicking going on within the Governing Council; there is, I think, an enormous problem with the representativeness and therefore the legitimacy of the Governing Council, and it's just not clear that the Governing Council is actually going to produce a result that is good for Iraq as opposed to a result that is good for other members of the Governing Council. And then a final and obvious one: we have no international support yet. The administration can tout its long list of clients as much as it likes, but until we've got countries that are willing to put up thousands of troops and not dozens, we can't really say that we have real international support.

Now, what all of that means to me is I can see Iraq moving in a whole variety of different directions. I can see Iraq still moving in a very positive direction. I think that if we changed our way of doing things, if we were willing to do some things very differently, I can see Iraq moving in a very positive direction because I think that some of the things that are going right do lay the foundation for real progress in Iraq, and I think that it is conceivable that over a 10 or 12 or 15-year period you could see a very progressive Iraqi, a pluralist society with a stable polity and a thriving economy emerge. Iraq does have all the prerequisites, it does have all the tools; there's no particular reason it can't happen that way.

I can also see Iraq sliding into chaos. I think that many of the negative trends that we're seeing are the kind of trends which, if they persist, we could see Iraq looking not like Poland but looking like Lebanon of the 1970s and '80s because, as I said, right now a lot of Iraqis seem very willing to give us time and to excuse a whole lot of things that they're unhappy about to try to have all of this work. But that's not going to last forever, and if things continue to go wrong and they don't see progress, I think that people are going to begin to take matters into their own hands, and that could be a recipe for chaos.

I can also see a middle scenario. And I'll be honest with you: I think where I'm seeing things going right now, we're probably likely to get that middle scenario, and that middle scenario is kind of Iraq as Bosnia. Bosnia today is certainly a lot better than it was in 1994, but it's also nobody's idea of a great success story, and I think that that's kind of where we're headed. If we continue to pump tens of billions of dollars into the Iraqi economy every year and we're willing to keep a hundred thousand or more troops in Iraq, I think we can prevent it from sliding into civil war and keep a nascent economy going. But it's going to be an economy probably that's mostly on life support, propped up by us, much as I would say where we are in Bosnia. And I think that's kind of where we're headed.

Okay, let me wrap up by talking about what the implications are for the region because, as I said, I think the implications are profound.

Right now the whole region is watching what we are doing in Iraq very, very closely, and I think that the outcome, the ultimate outcome in Iraq will have a tremendous impact on what so many governments do and what so many people think. If we succeed in Iraq, we will have done something remarkable because if we succeed, with our own definition of success, we will have built the first Arab democracy. And I'm using the term democracy very loosely, but we will have built the first Arab democracy. That is extremely important because so often, at least when I talk to Arabs, what I hear from them is a fear of democracy. They don't like democracy; they don't like that word. But when you ask them what they do want, what you hear are things like, a government that's representative of the will of the people, a transparent process, government officials who don't fleece the people but actually are there to help them and are accountable to the people; all of the things that we would consider democracy.

And I think one of the greatest problems right now is that no Arab can imagine what an Arab democracy would look like. When they think of democracy, they think of the United States and Europe and Japan and other countries that look very foreign to them, countries that they don't particularly want to emulate. But of course this is the problem. European society has built democracies that fit their culture and traditions, East Asian societies built democracies that fit their traditions and cultures, we built a democracy that fit our traditions and cultures. No one has built one to fit Arab traditions and cultures. So if we get it right in Iraq, we will for the first time have shown other Arabs that you can build a state that is both democratic and consistent with Arab traditions and history and culture and all of the other important values of Arab society.

And I think that if we can get it right in Iraq, then over time, very gradually, I think that you will see a move in this direction because I think increasingly you will see Arabs saying, that is a good alternative to the choices that we have today, which are basically autocracy or Islamic fundamentalism. This will be a third way. And if we can demonstrate that it can work, I think you will see people gravitating slowly, very slowly over time - and here when I say slowly I'm thinking of the Japanese model where East Asian specialists will say that it took 20 years to really build democracy in Japan, but having established a democracy, it had the same transformative effect on people's psyches in East Asia. For the first time, East Asians could look at a democracy that didn't look European, that was consistent with Asian culture and tradition, and said, you know what, that is something I think I could live with. And therefore Japan was critical ultimately in the transformations in South Korean, Hong Kong, Taiwan, ultimately Indonesia, Malaysia, et cetera.

On the other hand, if Iraq goes wrong, we will destabilize the entire region. One of the things that is absolutely striking to me about -

MR. FREEMAN: You have to wind up.

MR. POLLACK: Okay - about some Americans and Europeans is this idea that we can walk away from the problem of Iraq. We can't. Remember what Lebanon did to Syria, to Israel, to Jordan, to Egypt. The instability in Lebanon spread and Iraq is a lot bigger, a lot more important, borders a lot more countries and a lot more important countries than Lebanon ever did. If we allow Iraq to slide into chaos, that chaos will spread to all of the countries on its borders; it will destabilize the entire region. And what's more, every Arab will look at it and say, you tried to build democracy, it failed, therefore it's clear: Arab states can't be democracies.

MR. FREEMAN: Thank you very much. That's an inspiring vision of Iraq as a transformative model, but it raises a number of questions in my mind, which I think we'll come back to: would a democratic Iraq in fact adopt policies that would be congenial to the United States; would it not pursue weapons of mass destruction as a deterrent against others in the region who have such weapons; would it adopt a favorable stand on Israeli-Palestinian issues, from our point of view or a different one; and what would its attitude be toward our military presence in the region, if any?

At any rate, I think you've raised the -- very eloquently stated the possible upside of success in democratization in Iraq, and I think we'd all hope that that could happen. For that to happen, we're going to have to stick it out in Iraq, and $87 billion this year is going to be followed by some similar amount next year and the year after, and for some time to come. If there is donor fatigue internationally, there is a lack of donor enthusiasm apparently in the United States - and this is of course where we get into the impact of a military situation. Ken, you said, I think quite correctly - said it wasn't very interesting from a military point of view. If one soldier is killed every day, at the end of the year that would be about one half of 1 percent, I think, of the total force, maybe less than that. From a military point of view I think it's hard to argue that that is consequential in any sense, and yet politically it has a great impact.

It's often said that all the guerillas have to do to win is not to lose, and the arena in which that fight is fought is not the battlefield per se, but the halls of Congress and the corridors of public opinion in democracies like our own.

So with that sort of statement of what I think it at stake militarily in Iraq, I'd like to turn to Pat Lang for his appreciation of the military situation and its implications.

W. PATRICK LANG: As I understand the part of this that I'm supposed to deal with, the question is, what is the leverage that can be exerted by U.S. military forces upon the general transformation of the region, based on our present commitment to Iraq? This is an interesting subject in fact because it has a couple of different aspects to it. One is that to consider what the direct impact of conventional U.S. forces are on the countries in the region, and the other is the ongoing insurgency in Iraq. I don't think you can call it anything else.

With regard to the first thing, I think that if there are still people in the Arab world, of perhaps anywhere in the world, who do not understand that the armed forces of the United States can inflict grievous damage on them to the point of bringing down their governments and occupying their territory, they are not paying attention, in fact, because it is clearly the case that that is true.

The fact that Arab networks such as Al-Jazeera and Al Arabiyah, people like that, maintained the position throughout the very short Iraq war that this was going to be a long, protracted thing, there was going to be an effective defense of Baghdad, or things like this, are really instances of mass delusion, which I hope are not going to be repeated because it leads to real distortions of policy.

So, in the belief that people aren't as foolish as that anymore, I think that there is no doubt in anybody's mind that we could, in fact, do the job on anybody in the region if we really became determined that this had to be done. But in a way that kind of begs the question of what is really going on here, because the difficulty is that what the United States really has to be able to do in order to make the implied threat of the use of its forces effective in the region is that it has to show, firstly, that it can in fact destroy governments and occupy territory, but it also has to prove that it can then pacify the territory then occupied. And that is the second part, which we are now involved in and which is still up in the air.

One thing that gets ignored a great deal these days is the fact that for some reason people are treating this thing in Iraq as though it were a sort of unique artifact of history, you know, as though nothing like this had ever happened before. In fact, you know, the 20th century was filled with the guerilla resistance wars against various occupying powers and governments, and we've participated in a great many of them. There is a widely held body of experience and belief about how this occurs and what should be done in situations like that. We were in so many of these things in Latin America in the first part of the 20th century that the Marines got around to writing a book about it, which is a very good book called "The Marine Corps Small Wars Manual," I think it is, which is still worth anybody reading. And in the period of the Kennedy administration it was widely believed in fact that the principal threat, below the level of thermonuclear exchange, to freedom in the world was the idea that the Soviets and the Chinese were going to sponsor wars of national liberation across the world. And based on ideas put forward by Maxwell Taylor in his book, "The Uncertain Trumpet," the Kennedy administration became almost religiously wedded to the idea of counterinsurgency.

So a whole generation of officers - and here I risk being self-referential - was raised to do nothing more than to fight wars of counterinsurgency all over the world. And it was a very highly developed doctrine, which was applied widely and with a good deal of success in places like Latin America and Southeast Asia. And this worked in ways which were wondrous to behold. So the answer really to what we're doing in Iraq, folks, what the Army is now doing in Iraq, is that we've been there before. I mean, this isn't the first time we ever did this, and we have won some of these things. It is possible to win some of these things.

I would point out that in the basic underlying doctrines of the theory of counterinsurgency is a wondrous little book by a French Colonel, a guy named Trinquier, called "La Guerre Moderne," modern warfare, about his beliefs about how these things have to be fought. And his essential point in this book is that wars of this kind should not be - you should not expect to obtain a result based on how many soldiers died and how many feet of ground are occupied, that kind of thing. The issue of whether or not you are losing men is actually secondary to the issue of where the political process is going. This is a political process. And the war is fought out in the minds of those people who make up the body politick, in this case in Iraq among the Iraqi people. When a general says -- as Ken says -- that, well, we need better intelligence, what he's really telling you is that nobody is willing to tell him anything. And the question then is, well, why isn't our people willing to tell him anything? And at the same time, in these hallowed halls here you have processes going on which indicate ongoing struggle as well.

So it is often said, you know, that you can't win a struggle like this militarily, that a government or an occupying force can never win a thing like this militarily. Well, you know, it depends on what you call by militarily I supposed. In my experience of this I have seen wars of this kind won by the government or the occupying force in two ways. This first is a way we will not do, which I saw applied in Latin American several times in the 1960s in which government simply adopted policies toward the inhabitants which were so genocidal and brutal that in fact the population and the guerillas came to the conclusion that annihilation was going to be the outcome - physical annihilation - and so they lost heart and gave up. We're not going to apply methods like that.

The other way to do it is to try to apply a strategy that involves political reform at the national level: installation of good government, counter-guerilla operations on an effective but restrained basis throughout the country -- what we used to call civic action and special forces, the Latin American Special Action Force, when I was assigned to that outfit in the '60s, in which you go into villages and you create village councils and you do local education, you do local medicine, you do local agricultural support, you do all those wonderful things. And you know what? People are always pleased to have you do that. They're always very happy; they think you're not such a bad fellow. It may be 80, 85 or 90 percent of them that think that, you know, this isn't such a bad thing having the occupier there, at least for a short period of time; maybe the government really isn't so seriously bad. But the problem is that other 10 percent -- the other 10 percent who are not happy about this, who have another cause.

And if, as Trinquier suggests, that guerilla war is really a political process about control of the population - the population there, the population here - then in fact it's that other 10 percent who is waging war against you on the ground for control of the population that you have to worry about. And if, in fact, those people succeed in achieving a situation such as the one which Ken describes in which people do not feel they're safe, their women cannot go out on the street, if they cannot conduct normal business, if they don't think the Americans and the new Iraqi force can protect them, then slowly, slowly, slowly they start to erode your position.

Now, as I said before, I've seen people win these things and I've seen people lose them. In Latin America, we tended to win them. And the difference was really, in places like Bolivia, where I served for a while, is that the Cubans tried to raise the Indios of the Altiplano against the government on a very serious basis, and they miscalculated in several ways. The first most basic one was that the caloric intake of these Indians was not high enough to make them good military material. That was a very basic mistake. And the second was, in fact, that the Indians were not, in fact, as unhappy with the government as they thought they were and not as committed to the idea of the revolutionary change, and so when the American-type theory of counterinsurgency, like the one being applied in Iraq today, was applied, the Indians eventually quit on the guerillas when Guevara was killed there, because the Indians around Cochabamba turned him in and an American-trained counter-guerilla battalion ran him down and captured him, and then the Bolivians chose to kill him.

So that's how that worked. And that happened in a number of places in Latin America. The same theory of counterinsurgency didn't work at all in Southeast Asia because what we found there - and in the early stages of this we tried to apply exactly the same doctrine - exactly the same doctrine; don't kid yourself that we didn't. It was only after we found out that it didn't work that the situation tended to escalate toward something which was more and more like conventional war in the field, and the army, in particular our Army, chose to do that because it found itself trying to do counterinsurgency in a situation in which the population would support battalion-size attacks against little villages, you know, so you couldn't do that.

So the difference was in Vietnam that the Vietnamese people - this runs contrary to the great stab-in-the-back theory involving the American press. The Vietnamese people, in fact a lot of them were quite sympathetic to the insurgents and they provided a base of support which we couldn't overcome. We could always defeat the guerilla forces in the field no matter how big they got, but the early part of it was more interesting, and we could always do that, but the problem was because there was this base of support and resentment against foreign occupiers, neocolonialists, whatever they thought we were, in the population, no matter how many of these guys we killed in the field there were always more. The population of Vietnam grew every year, both North and South, throughout the war - every year, sort of interestingly -- so no matter how many people you captured, killed or dragged away, there were always more of them.

So the question really is, I think, in Iraq, the one that has to be resolved is - the big question is who is on the other side? Now, if in fact the situation is is the administration says that this is a handful of Saddamist holdouts and the soreheads are mad because they're lost their retired pay - I'd be mad - and things like that, in a fairly small group of foreign Islamic terrorists who come in the country, then I would predict that our effective counter-guerilla operations and civic action stuff of the kind Ken was talking about will in fact erode this base of support and the problem will disappear before next summer. In other words, it won't be a factor in our election. If, on the other hand, you have a situation which what we're fighting here is a situation which a fairly large number of Sunni Arabs - which is what we're talking about right now - in the population at least passively support the guerilla fighters on the basis of their resentment and dislike of us and what we're doing in their country and they continue to support them, then this situation will not clear up and it will go on and on an on, and we should brace ourselves for the long haul.

And I agree fully that Iraq is not someplace we can walk away from, having committed ourselves to this course of action we have no choice but to see it out to the end, and I only regret that I'm not in a position to go and help out there. But in fact, you know, I think this is such a serious situation and the issue of which of these two possibilities exist is so real that in fact we should wait until this is resolved in such a way that we understand really what we're doing before we consider in any way committing our forces anywhere else in the region, because one commitment too far can be a very bad thing.

MR. FREEMAN: Thank you very much, Pat. I want to just underscore, from a personal point of view, one thing that you said. As someone who thought that our journey into Iraq was great mistake, I have to admit we're there. We're there. What's done cannot be undone and we need to make the very best of it. And I don't think rehashing tall tales about WMD or whether there were or were not tall tales about WMD or reliving political battles across the Atlantic is a very helpful thing to do in this context. We need to move on; we need to try to make the best of a situation that may, as Ken suggests, yield major dividends if it goes well, and clearly will cause major damage if it goes badly.

I wonder - we've heard a dream of democracy and the nightmare of guerilla warfare; now we come to the question whether, while you're engaged in low-intensity conflict, you can both build democracy within Iraq and extent democracy in the region of which Iraq is a part. And, Amy, I invite you to enlighten us on theses subjects.

AMY HAWTHORNE: The question that I'm going to address this morning very briefly is the question of whether democratization in the Arab world, in Iraq and in the rest of the region, would lead to secularization, because I really believe that this expectation is at the heart of the Bush administration's transformative vision for the region. The Bush administration doesn't talk about this openly and directly, but I really believe if you analyze some of the statements made by the president and by other senior officials and you really try to dig underneath the rhetoric, I think a big part of the transformative vision for Iraq and for other Arab countries is the idea that democratization can and should produce what the administration refers to as "modern systems," which are implicitly understood here in Washington to be secular and pro-Western systems; in other words, governments that are secular and do not give any succor or any ideological or other kinds of support to political Islam that the administration believes would feed the ideology and operation of terrorism against the United States.

Now, can democratization in the Arab world lead to secular systems of governance? I would argue, yes, they can, because in my view, democracy inherently requires secular systems and values. The separation of church and state is required for democracy. However, there are lots of versions of democracy; there are lots of different values and ideas that can factor into how governing systems are shaped. And I also want to point out here that is this is an outcome of the democratization process, it will be in Iraq and in other Arab countries it will be an extremely long, messy and very difficult process to reach that endpoint.

I think it's important, when we think about this question of political transformation, the possibility of democratization, the role that religion plays, in this case the religion of Islam, in shaping governance systems and government. What is the lay of the land in the region at present? It's extremely diverse. As I look across the region we see the country of Saudi Arabia, which is currently where governance is heavily and primarily influenced by a particular interpretation of Islam. We see countries like Egypt and Morocco, where Islam plays an important role. It's used to legitimize certain actions of government, yet these are also secular systems in some respects. We see the example of a country like Tunisia, which has formerly a very secular system of government, and then we see Iraq, where there is no system of government. There is a political vacuum and forces from below are now emerging to shape, in a very long-term process I believe, what that country's new government and political system will look like.

Now, of course the conventional wisdom espoused by many in Washington and in the region is that if there is a genuine political opening, if a democratization process were to occur, or in the policy parlance, if elections were held tomorrow, Islamists would be the forces who would become ascendant through that process, and it's expected that they would use their political empowerment to advance and encourage the development of a system of government that would primarily be based on Islamic law. So this would contribute not to a secularization process, but to the greater influence of religion on politics.

And I think to a certain extent, there's an element of truth to that expectation. What we've seen in the very limited examples of political liberalization that have occurred in the region so far, various forces of political Islam are the best organized. These are the groups that have the greatest grassroots support, and most important, I would underscore, they have the greatest ability to speak in a discourse that has authenticity and legitimacy to large numbers of people in the region.

In Iraq, what we see as the empowerment or the emergence, it seems so far of both Shi'ite religious forces playing an important role in politics. And we also, by some account -- it's very difficult to discern this from afar - the growing influence of Islamism and political Islam among certain parts of the Sunni population. I think that this concern about what might happen if people in the Arab world are truly politically empowered to choose their own system of government contributes to a very deep what I would describe as U.S. schizophrenia about democracy. The U.S. proclaims the desire for a democratic transformation of the region, yet - in Iraq and elsewhere - yet it continues to be extremely hesitant about what that outcome might bring.

Now there are also other outcomes that are possible, if a democratization process were to occur in Iraq or in other Arab countries. There are liberal forces throughout the Arab world. These have been oppressed and repressed by regimes harshly in a democratization process, which creates a more open political space and the ability for new forces to organize and compete. The forces, too, could organize and compete against others and present their own vision of society, which would perhaps be very different than what various Islamist forces are encouraging. We've never seen this happen in the Arab world; we don't know what might occur.

It's also possible that the political opening in Iraq or in other Arab countries could lead to the closure of a democratization process, as we've seen as happened in Algeria in the early '90s. Secular and liberal forces in that country banded together with the regime to basically back the Algerian government's blockage of a democratization process, to prevent Islamists from coming to power. That could happen again.

I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that democratization is a fundamentally unpredictable process. It really involves the empowerment of people in their own societies to determine what kind of government they want to live under and what kind of political rules they want to have in their society. And by its very nature, that is a process that's impossible to predict.

I think it's important that we keep in mind that fundamental political change does not necessarily or inevitably lead to the establishment of democracy. And here I would be a bit skeptical on what's going to happen in Iraq. We're at the very beginning of a transformation process there. We need only to remember the example to the east of the Iranian revolution, which demonstrated that political empowerment and social transformation doesn't necessarily lead to the establishment of democracy. Other outcomes are possible.

I think that in Iraq and in other Arab countries, if a process of democratization were to occur, it's going to fundamentally involve the shaping of new national identities. And this will be done very much in reaction to how the United States is perceived, and to the extent that religion, in its many forms and its many interpretations, is seen as the most effective and authentic vehicle to shape an indigenous and authentic local identity, than I think we should be prepared to expect the rise, the influence of religious values and ideas in shaping governance.

But I would also note here that democratization is a very long and messy process, and we may see outcomes that are not permanent. We may see tacking forth and back decisions made that are later reversed. This isn't something that's just going to unfold overnight and be created and exist and last.

I also believe that the possibility for the development of more liberal interpretations of political Islam, of the role of Islam in government, are indeed possible. I think these forces are very weak in the Middle East, but they do exist. There are people who are trying to figure out how the practice of Islam and the creation of a genuinely Islamic society is compatible also with Western notions of democracy.

What does this mean for the United States? I think the U.S. has been remarkably superficial in how it thinks about how democratization might unfold in the Middle East. There's been very little analysis in my view done about really what factors social, economic, political, regional factors would give rise to a democratization process, as opposed to some other kind of political -

(Audio break.)

MS. HAWTHORNE: (In progress.) - the trajectory of politics in this region that the United States needs to keep very close in mind.

I also think that, as I said at the beginning, if the United States is truly interested in supporting the process of democratization, we have to be extremely flexible and extremely patient, because the outcome of those indigenous choices may be not to our liking. But I believe that over time, if democratization really does occur, there will be a long working out of these issues within Arab societies, these issues that have been repressed and suppressed for so long. And any attempt on our part to block that process or to try to interfere with it may in the short-term produce governments or policies that we believe are amenable to our interests, but it will not facilitate the genuine unfolding of this process in the region.

And I would just conclude by saying that in both Iraq and in the rest of the region, it's unclear to me whether the United States is really ready yet to sit back and let that process unfold, for obvious reasons. It's going to produce some very possibly difficult outcomes for us. And in Iraq, I believe we're at the very beginning of what is going to be a very messy and complicated process of shaping that country's new system of governance. We haven't even gotten to the point - or the Iraqis haven't gotten to the point of figuring out how they will draft their constitution. The next two years we're going to witness these arguments and debates taking place within Iraq, and so we're just at the very, very beginning of a long and what I think will be messy process. Thank you.

MR. FREEMAN: Thank you very much, Amy. I think you remind us, as Ken did, that the notion of a genuinely democratic government in the Arab world is a novelty, and we are therefore engaging in an examination of hypotheses and speculating, rather than speaking on firm ground about what such a society or political system might look like.

As you spoke, I was reminded of the existence of a secular democracy next door to Iraq, in Turkey. And there, the military, the Turkish general's staff, have emerged as the custodians of secularism, not exactly a model which many find appealing. And I would say generally in the region, the Turkish model is viewed as anathema, rather than as an attractive thing. But the issues that arose in Turkey, as you discussed, arise also in Iraq.

I hope as we get into discussion, we could talk a little bit about some issues that trouble me. Is de-Ba'athification, removal of that element of Iraqi society, which was most avowedly secularist, from political participation likely to aid or impede the emergence of a more democratic and secular Iraq? And if Iraqis in fact cannot agree on the source of law, whether it is legislation by secular legislature or a constitutionally empowered process, how are they going to get to write a constitution in time for such a thing to be useful?

Anyway, I think they're - I think you raised a love of very interesting questions, both explicitly and implicitly and giving us a great deal to discuss. We come now to the other remaining issue, which is that as Iraqis debate the future of their society - and by the way, I thought one of the things that you were saying - maybe I misunderstood you, but it's an important point, if it is what you were implying - is that the future of democracy is not going to be decided in Iraq. The future of U.S. relationships in the region well be decided there, but if the democratic experiment in Iraq fails, that's not the end of the issue. There are many, many other societies in the Middle East evolving in their own toward more democratic forms of government. And therefore, while it would be lovely if Iraq were to emerge as Ken suggested, as an inspiration for the region, that isn't the end of the issue necessarily.

We come now finally to Phil Wilcox, who I believe is going to speak about the implications of asymmetric warfare in Iraq against the occupation and the broader nexus of connections to terrorism the Middle East and elsewhere. Phil, is Iraq the central battleground in the war against terrorism? Should we hope it becomes that? Or should we fear that it may become that?

PHIL WILCOX: Thanks, Jess. Iraq is only one aspect of a much broader problem. Terrorism of course -- 9/11 and this history of terrorist attacks against the United States were the main impetus for the central theme of the administration's foreign policy, the war on terrorism, the goal of transforming the Middle East. And terrorism was obviously a main rationale for our attack on the Saddam Hussein regime. It's much too early to try to drop a balance sheet on how we're doing, but there are some friends which bear noting.

Major terrorist attacks around the world, which emerged from the Middle East and from Islamist extremist elements, have continued on a large scale in the Middle East, in South Asia, in Africa and in East Asia. The number of casualties from these attacks in the last two years has been greater than casualties in those two or three years preceding 9/11. That's a very worrisome trend, although it's extremely difficult to try to draw confident trends in terrorism based upon statistics.

Second, there's been a horrific escalation of terrorism in the Israeli-Palestinian arena following the collapse of the peace process in the year 2000. Third, as others have said, all is not going well in Iraq, and a new terrorist threat there has emerged. Fourth, and maybe most ominous, there is rising hostility and anger against the United States throughout the Middle East and the Islamic world. And this threatens to cripple the cooperation that the United States needs in opposing and reducing the threat of terrorism. The president's own study team, having just returned an initiatives report, described this level of hostility as shocking, that very large majorities in virtually all Arab and Muslim countries oppose our war on terrorism. They oppose our presence in Iraq, and they vehemently oppose our policies toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

On the plus side of course, we have defeated the Taliban regime. At least, we think we have. We've installed a friendly government in Kabul. We've arrested hundreds of al-Qaeda leaders and operatives, and we've disrupted plots, and we've stopped some financial flows.

But the overall balance sheet I think is hardly encouraging. Well, what has gone wrong? There's been a tendency in the administration to focus on the destruction of terrorists and terrorist groups as the solution to the terrorist problem. Certainly, one must do this, but terrorism is a symptom, needless to say, of deeper conflicts. You have to destroy terrorists and terrorist groups, but that's only part of the problem. And if this is all we do, it's only a palliative. Unless we understand, try to eliminate and at least contain those problems which breed terrorism, we're going to fail, and the virus of terrorism will continue to emerge and spread. Some have called this approach appeasement, but it's not. It's simply common sense.

Unfortunately, our attention to addressing understanding the basic causes of terrorism has been secondary to our focus on military remedies. The lack of human rights, the lack of democracy, the lack of democratic economic development in the Arab and Muslim world, which have bred anger and despair, hostility and violence in those areas, has not been high on our agenda, in terms of diplomacy and resources.

We have tended, I think, to exaggerate the efficacy of military force as our primary counter-terrorism weapon. Military force is essential in some cases, but its uses are still limited. It's very hard to engage terrorists militarily. Needless to say, Osama bin Laden and his lieutenant are still alive; so is Saddam Hussein. By and large, military force, if it's used unilaterally, tends to frighten governments in other societies, who fear American hegemony. It kills innocent civilians. It encourages those who seek holy war and probably generates new recruits.

We've also, I think, lost some of the focus toward the war on terrorism with the huge effort we're making in Iraq. And as others have said, Iraq is emerging as a new breeding ground for terrorism that we hadn't anticipated.

Fourth, we have failed to use our massive influence in addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one that has bred huge terrorism over the decades. And this, I think more than any other factor, has enflamed opinion in the Arab and Muslim world against us, our perceived failure to address this, our perceived pro-Sharon policies. I say pro-Sharon because I don't believe they are pro-Israel. We have not used the influence that we have, I think, to bring it to bear on that problem.

Fifth, we have not appreciated the importance of friends and allies. The essence of fighting terrorism is to generate support and sympathy for the United States, for American policies, and we've been unable to do that. In the Palestinian-Israeli arena, for example, we have tended to focus on terrorism as the problem. We have demanded, at least implicitly, sometimes explicitly, that it must stop first before the larger and underlying causes can be dealt with - the problems of settlements and occupation, which are the basic causes for violence and conflict there -- even though our own president's own road map has called for simultaneous attention to security, fighting terrorism and ending the occupation and the policies of settlement.

Speaking of the policy of eliminating terrorists through assassination or other means, the former speaker of the Israeli Knesset, Avraham Burg, said last week, and I'll quote him, "We could kill a thousand ringleaders a day, and nothing will be solved, because other leaders come up from below, from the wells of hatred and anger, from the infrastructures of injustice." So if we are really serious about stopping terrorism, and I'm sure we are, in bringing security for Israel and justice for the Palestinians, we need to turn back to bold, active mediation. No single American policy in my view would be more effective in turning the time toward sympathy for the United States, the kind of sympathy and support we must have, if we're going to effectively deal with terrorism.

There are certainly global links to terrorism. The impact of what we do in one country has - can have a major effect elsewhere. But we also have to look at the internal dynamics of each conflict, and in this respect, the Palestinian problem is not a problem of terrorism in Iran or terrorism in Iraq. It is an indigenous problem, and we have to deal with it on the basis of its unique characteristics.

The underlying causes of terrorism, needless to say, are vastly complex. We can't solve them entirely. We're not going to win a permanent victory against terrorism. Terrorism is a phenomenon of human life and human history. But we can bring our influence to bear on the causes of terrorism. We can reduce the danger to our country and to others, and we can contain it. We cannot do this through some rapid, cathartic process. It's going to take a much more sophisticated and broad gauge attention to all of those factors, which generate terrorism. We must find a way to eliminate the anger and hostility that other nations feel toward the United States. Unless we do that, we cannot succeed in mobilizing their help, and we desperately need their help to reduce this threat and to protect ourselves.

MR. FREEMAN: Thank you, Phil, for that very eloquent statement. I think we've had four exceedingly thoughtful presentations, and we turn now to the most interesting part of this program always, which is an opportunity for those of you who have come here to interact directly with the four panelists. As I listened to the presentations and I'd urge you to - those of you wanted to ask a question to now give me a signal that you do. All right? We'll start with you, Michelle, over here.

But as the microphone is coming to Michelle, I will say that listening to these four presentations underscored to me in a way that I hadn't expected the importance of the issues that Congress is now debating, with respect to the $20 billion in contributions to reconstruction. Because clearly, an occupation which is not accompanied by reconstruction, which has no material benefits for those who are occupied, will blight all hope of the emergence of the sort of Iraq that we can hope for. It will blight Amy's - Amy Hawthorne's vision of an evolution toward democracy in Iraq. It will lead to, at lengths, guerrilla warfare, and it will entice the world's terrorists to come where the targets are. And so the impulse to try to do Iraq on the cheap is perhaps the greatest enemy of American interests that one could imagine, in my view as I listened to the panelists. Michelle?

Q: Thank you, Dr. Freeman. I'm Michelle Steinberg (sp) -

MR. FREEMAN: We can't hear you.

Q: Can people hear me? Now you can, yes. I'm Michelle Steinberg from Executive Intelligence Review. I have a question for Mr. Pollack, and then if anyone else would like to comment on that.

It's about assumptions. And I think that the statement that "if we get it right in Iraq" glosses over a central issue in this Iraq war, which is that the United States embraced the doctrine that is in the words of the neo-conservatives, a doctrine, that unilateral aims to remove a regime is justified. It's kind of a shoot first and ask questions later type of approach.

My question is, Dr. Pollack, do you say that that is justified to impose democracies when we have not been attacked and when we have not been invited in by a government, and is that going to work? In particular to Colonel Lang, who in this question of counter-insurgency, the United States has participated in some of these wars, but there also have been many other wars by countries which had empires, and it seems that they eventually had to lead. So those are the two aspects of my question.

MR. FREEMAN: Thank you. Ken?

KEN POLLACK: Sure. My views on whether or not the United States should have gone to war in Iraq I think are very well known. They're also very complicated. I don't want to spend a whole lot of time talking about them. I will say briefly that I believed that the threat, the problems caused by Saddam Hussein, both for his own people and for the region, were grave enough that it will probably require a war to deal with them. But I had a whole range of conditions under which I wanted to see the United States go to war, including building a large multinational coalition and making sure that we knew what we were doing, in terms of a post-war reconstruction, before we got in - a whole range of conditions that unfortunately were not satisfied before the Bush administration chose to go to war.

As far as imposing a democracy, my feeling is that having gone into Iraq for a variety of reasons, and I did not that necessarily imposing democracy in Iraq was the right reason to go in, and so I think that there were other reasons out there. I think that it is pretty clear that the majority of Iraqis want something like a pluralist system. I also think that it's very clear, just as an Iraq expert, that no other system of government in Iraq will produce stability and prosperity for the Iraqi people. I will also tell you that I am an advocate of democracy in Iraq simply because having looked at all of the other alternatives, I think that they are much, much worse for Iraq. I think that pretty much, every other alternative for Iraq would produce chaos.

Now, as far as what that democratic, what that pluralist system looks like, I think that really does have to be left to the Iraqi people. I think that the U.S., the international community - I'd much prefer the international community rather than just the U.S. - should impose broad parameters. And I think that we do need to learn from the lessons of the last 15 years, of everything from Panama to Haiti to Somalia to Cambodia to Kosovo to Bosnia to East Timor, which all I think illustrate that many of these countries, many of these peoples, while they may aspire to these things, often don't know the best way to get there.

And while the international community has not always done a brilliant job, I think that they've done a better and better job over the course of time. And I think that there is real expertise out there in the international community in terms of helping a nation to move into this direction, so my goal would be to have a combination of Iraqis working with international personnel very well versed in these subjects to help the Iraqis to move into their own direction toward a pluralist society.

MR. FREEMAN: Pat, your part of the question? I have a comment also, and then we'll go to Professor back here.

PAT LANG: Well, I think that you have to be careful about not just limiting wars of this kind to wars waged against occupiers or colonial powers. You have to consider unpopular governments as well, some of them well established. Because the methods - when you start talking about the methodology of warfare on both sides, and the dynamic of the thing, you can look at these situations over the last 150 years or so, and see that it is possible for governments to win wars like this. It depends on what level of brutality you're willing to sink to and what level of resources you're willing to commit to the process.

But even in our time, if you look at the Philippines after World War II, the Magsaysay government very successfully applied a counter-insurgency doctrine, which was probably the ancestor of our counter-insurgency doctrine. It was quite successful in the Philippines. So I don't think you can just say automatically that these things cannot be won. The question is what sort of price are you willing to pay, both in what it does to you and what it does to the locals, in order to win them?

MR. FREEMAN: This question about preemptive or preventative warfare - it does seem to me, however, it leads back immediately to some of the points that Phil Wilcox was making on terrorism. If the answer to terrorism is to criminalize that behavior, to deal with it through international cooperation, the rule of law and law enforcement, which is I think coupled with military action, which I think is the only answer to it, then if you assert a right to act outside the rule of law or without regard to the institutions like the United Nations that administer the rule of law, and if you alienate your allies and friends, and if you insist on the right to conduct lynchings when courts, like the Security Council, refuse to find in your favor on issues, then you fundamentally undercut your ability to combat terrorism. And that it seems to me is one of the main issues at stake in unilateralism versus a more respectful approach toward international law. Professor?

Q: Yeah, Robert Freedman, Baltimore Hebrew University. Chas, thank you for an excellent panel, though I might disagree a little bit with Phil, in terms of his perspective on the Arab-Israeli conflict, in terms of if Hamas is dedicated to the destruction of Israel, then, you know, it's a little hard to talk until that group is finished. However, my key question goes to Ken and Pat, and it deals with, how do you deal with the guerrilla warfare? Since about 80 percent of the Iraqi population appeared to be, at least for the time being, on our side.

That is, the Shi'a and Kurds who don't want to return to Sunni Ba'athist rule, and almost all of the military problem seems to be in the Sunni triangle, why not do two things? First, impose martial law on key cities, like Tikrit, and do a thorough search for arm caches, leaders, et cetera. And at the same time, have the local councils, which we had been successful, as Ken mentioned, in helping to develop, including those in Sunni areas, quickly select representatives to serve on the constitution-making commission and move ahead with a constitution and with a turnover of power as soon as possible to the Iraqis themselves.

MR. LANG: Well, I think you're quite right. I mean, at the moment, Kurdistan and the Shi'a south are quite quiet. Whether they'll stay that way, nobody knows, but for the moment, it's certainly like that. But I think there's a return to what I said before, is that - and what Ambassador Freeman referred to earlier, is that guerrillas and the resistance war like this, in order to win, only in the long run has to avoid being defeated. I mean, they have the situation in which if they can deny stability to the country and to induce a feeling within the population of large parts of the country, including large parts of Baghdad in this case, that in fact that American gestures of good will, in terms of good government and economy and health and education and everything else, are futile because they do not provide security. And if they can do that, then they create a political situation in which in fact their will is opposed to our will. And as Clausewitz said, "War is a matter of opposing wills."

And as long as they keep inflicting casualties on the United States Army there, the issue is not how many soldiers we lose. I hate to admit this, but I think - (inaudible) - is right about this, is that that is in fact an irrelevant statistic, in terms of who's going to win the war militarily. Where it is relevant is the fact that it had a direct political impact on the United States. Of all the kinds of warfare, resistance warfare involving guerrillas are the most clearly political. This is clearly an extension of the political process into armed conflict, and that fighting is being carried out. As long as these people continue to resist and continue to create an aura of insecurity, it's going to be extremely difficult to do the things that the questioner brought up. Because people who adhere to that process will be targeted, they'll threatened, they'll be made to be afraid, if that's possible, and the only way you'll be able to avoid that is to do the kind of things that happened in the West Bank, which is to lock these villages down and put the screws down on them until nothing functions. And then you're not getting anywhere basically, politically.

MR. FREEMAN: Ken?

MR. POLLACK: Let me add a couple of comments on that political side. I actually think the solution that you're pointing at is a pretty good one. It's similar to something that I've been thinking about as well, in terms of, in an ideal world, you would have good local government, but effectively appointed members to a constitutional convention that they could then draft to convention.

The problem that we have right now is that while as I said and you echoed, we do have a lot of local success stories. It's not uniform across the country, and it's also unclear at just exactly what levels those successes are at. So for example, I've heard a lot of instances where you have tiny little villages, where they've organized a council. If that's the level that you're going to start drawing constitutional convention members from, you may have several thousand members, which would make it incredibly unwieldy. You've got to build up to a slightly higher level, and we're not yet at that level.

And beyond that of course, the successes that I was talking about are also uneven across the country. They're - you know, you can have a village in one place, where there's a good, smart U.S. commander, and you know, he's done the right thing, and they formed up a local council. And there's another village next door, which we just haven't really gotten to. We just haven't really engaged with them, and they don't have that kind of a situation. Or it may be that it's a problem town. You've got a really nasty local tribal sheikh, who runs the place with an iron hand, and as a result, the Americans have basically said that's in the too hard category for the moment. Let's deal with this other village that seems to be working well. We'll get to these guys later.

So again, it's a matter of time, and for me, that really is the critical element. I'm very, very wary of all of these go-fast schemes, whether that's - I think the French position is outrageous. But I'll say that I think even some of the positions being advocated by some Americans, that we might do this in six months or 12 months or 18 months - that strikes me as too fast. The lesson that I learned from Bosnia is that moving too fast to this sort of national level government basically just empowers the old elites and doesn't help the process of democracy. It undercuts it.

MR. FREEMAN: Both Phil and Amy want to comment. I'll just say, Ken, in response to your last comment, because there is a political process in the United States, and there will be increasing pressure to declare democracy and withdraw, regardless of the realities on the ground, we might be well advised to seek speedy as possible movement in the direction of the objectives we are trying to pursue. Phil?

MR. WILCOX: A comment on Professor Freedman's remark about Hamas - it's a very good example of the critical importance of public opinion as the most important element in fighting terrorism. There will be no success in defeating Hamas and the other terrorist elements in the West Bank and Gaza and in Israel unless Palestinian public opinion is mobilized against them and is willing to allow Palestinian armed forces to move against them, to marginalize them, to create them as pariahs rather than heroes. That hasn't happened now. There is no prospect that any Palestinian leader - Yasser Arafat or otherwise - is going to conduct a civil war against Hamas, unless he has the support of his own society. And he doesn't, and he doesn't because there hasn't been any corresponding effort on the part of the Sharon government to address the basic causes for the violence.

Now, I acknowledge that some elements in Hamas will use violence whatever happens, because they want to destroy the state of Israel. But by and large, the terrorism there is a function of a rising conflict, a dispossession of Palestinian land, the settlement, and the creation of absolute hopelessness among Palestinians. That is what must be a tactic and only be attacked though a political solution on the part of the Israelis and I would add the Americans.

MR. FREEMAN: Amy?

MS. HAWTHORNE: I just wanted to follow up on Ken's comments about the speed or the quickness by which a constitution is drafted and power is given over to the Iraqis. I couldn't agree more with Ken's comments. Basically, the U.S. is in a very difficult position, because our presence in Iraq obviously is engendering hostility and resentment and possibly giving rise to new political ideologies that may not be to our liking.

On the other hand, the solution is not to rush through a constitution-drafting process and the holding of elections. That would be a disaster. Basically, the way in these kinds of situations that you can have a constitution that will hold - and I underscore not just a constitution for the sake of having something on paper and saying, well, that's done, and checking that off the list - but really, a document that ideally will give the core shape to how a new Iraq will be governed, how citizens will live in that country, what the relationship of other religious, ethnic, sectarian communities is to one another, something that is truly meaningful.

That takes time to develop. It either comes from a top-down process, where by those who are creating the document have legitimacy and credibility among the people of the country, so that they can draft something and then effectively sell it, if you will, to the larger public. Or it comes through a bottom-up process, by which citizens hash out and begin to work through some of the issues that they would like to see reflected in a constitution.

This takes time, particularly in a country like Iraq, which has no history of ever having done anything like this before. What the United States needs to be focusing on is not rushing to create a constitution, but thinking analytically about and strategically about how to create the conditions under which either an effective top-down or bottom-up process can occur. And that will take a lot longer than six months. We will probably rush it, because there's also the timing of the U.S. presidential election that's driving a lot of this, and we will end up with something that will crumble very, very shortly, and then we'll have the same problem on our hands just a few years later.

MR. FREEMAN: Yeah, this may not be the only situation where the best is the enemy of the good. Mr. Pelletreau? Oh. Sorry. Apparently, on this side, the mike doesn't go back very far.

AMB. PELLETREAU: Bob Pelletreau. I note that Pat Lang did not respond to Ken Pollack's question about whether he agreed that our intelligence collection services and capabilities were not responsible for the current situation we're facing on the ground. And I wonder if Ken hasn't absolved our lionhearted collection intelligence services a little too quickly. It seems to me that what we're lacking - or one of the things we're lacking in Iraq is those 20 or 30 Arabic-speaking and Kurdish-speaking case officers and political officers who can get out around the country on the ground and sort out the clerics that one can work with and those one can't, and identify who are those potential secular leaders who might be encouraged to come forward but who are not on their own coming forward.

I admit the pucker factor for such activities is very high and also that Jerry Bremer is really trying himself to get out and meet with the different groups in rather set-piece settings, but we went into this war without a stable of real Iraqi experts, people who had lived in Iraq, been on the ground, had the touch and feel for the political culture of the community. Perhaps the best we have is Dr. Phoebe Marr, who is sitting right here and is not - and hasn't been in any Pentagon planning rooms or with our people in Baghdad.

MR. FREEMAN: Bob, I think both Pat and Ken will want to respond to that.

MR. LANG: Well, I tried to stay away from this because the issues involved are so large that it doesn't make for a convenient, short answer, you know? In fact, as Ambassador Pelletreau knows, there are longstanding structural problems in the U.S. intelligence community - not just CIA, but the military as well - with regard to issues like this, in which there has been consistent underinvestment in the production of people with real regional expertise and linguistic ability. And there are only a handful of people around who can fulfill that role, and they have never - certainly in the military have never been rewarded - which is where it really counts at the moment - never been sufficient reward given into their careers, in order to make sure these people would stick around, the ones that we did produce.

So that's a major issue in fact, and the issue of whether or not we have enough people who understand Iraq is almost ludicrous when you consider the fact that there has never been any really serious effort to develop clandestine intelligence in Iraq either, for as long as I can remember. And as a result - so, the - in the lead up to the war, it was necessary to result - to rely on third-hand reports of things going on from people who are obviously interested parties, and all kinds of inferential judgments about issues of really global significance. So that strategic position was always a very defective thing, and now on the ground in Iraq, you have a bunch of guys who are trying to do the job which, in the days of colonialism, were fulfilled by people like these - in a Morocco, these Officers des Affaires Indiennes, these French officers who devoted their whole lives to understanding local tribal politics and religious politics, things like that. We don't have anybody like that, and we have never made any effort to develop them.

So we're trying to do something without the basic kit bag of tools that you would need to use in order to make the kind of contact you're talking about, and it's part of - it reflects the fact, in fact, that the United States is not interested, as a people, in adventures of this kind overseas, and we have tried it a number of times and we have, in the end, rejected it in every occasion. But now we're committed to this and there's no way to get away, but we have very serious structural problems.

MR. POLLACK: I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt on this one, say that I misspoke, but you may have misheard. My point was not to suggest that the U.S. intelligence services were blameless, and I certainly agree with Pat's point. And I'm the first one who - you know, if you're ever interested, I will be glad to take you out. We can have a cup of coffee, and we can spend four hours talking about all the problems in the U.S. intelligence community. It's not to suggest that the U.S. intelligence community is perfect. Certainly it's not; certainly, there's always room for improvement.

A few points are, I think, in order - (unintelligible) - I was trying to get. First, we do actually have a very good intelligence service, and my point was that Napoleon would kill for the kind of information that our intelligence services are able to produce on a regular basis. The same is true for the Wehrmacht, you know, pick your army, pick your nationality. There is no nation that has ever gone into wars as well equipped in terms of an intelligence service as ours have. And again, that's not to suggest that ours are perfect, it's just that they are actually quite good in terms of giving - the available information.

Second point: great commanders recognize the limits of their intelligence and their intelligence services. And that was my fundamental point, is a commander doesn't come up with a plan in an abstract and say now I just need the intelligence to make this work. A great commander takes the intelligence at hand, understands the limits of his intelligence, and comes with a strategy accordingly.

A third point, and this is a point that Pat was getting at before. In this kind of war, getting the kind of intelligence that you would need to win it through intelligence will never happen. I mean honestly, Bob, your point that we need 20 or 30 good case officers to get - as my friend, that is ridiculous; twenty or 30 good case officers are a drop in the bucket. And to get the kind of information that the U.S. military is looking for in terms of targeting these tiny little groups who are operating all across not just the Sunni triangle, but even into Central Iraq and into even Eastern Iraq - and there are even some cells in Southern Iraq - that would require thousands and thousands of good case officers, able to mingle. That never happens, and it's why, as Pat said before, the way that you get intelligence in a guerilla war is you have the people coming to you. Rather than sending case officers out there to try to extract it, it's the people coming to you and saying, hey, there's a guy five doors down that, you know, is building bombs out there; I think you guys ought to take a look at it. When that happens - when the people are on your side, the intelligence all falls into place.

If the people aren't on your side, you are never going to manufacture the intelligence that you need at that tactical level, and that's why Pat's point - which was also piggybacking off of my point - is so critical; which is, winning guerilla wars is about hearts and minds, it's about removing the underlying political and economic grievances that give rise to the guerilla movement in the first place, about taking popular support away from the guerillas, not about whether you can have a thousand great case officers, all of them level five Arabic speakers, who can pinpoint each of these groups, because that will simply never happen.

MR. FREEMAN: I don't think we want to get off too much on the intelligence community in general and it's capabilities or lack thereof, but I do feel moved to comment that you don't really need thousands of people, you need dozens. We don't have them. The latest figures I saw on the Foreign Service suggest that there are 54 fluent Arabic speakers in the Foreign Service; some level of fluency, probably not very fluent. There were, some years ago, nine Americans who graduated with a major in Arabic in the entire country a couple years ago. The population of case officers in the intelligence community outside the Foreign Service who are comfortable with Arabic is on a par with the numbers that I have given. We are very good at spotting military formations from space or with intercepted communications, and we are very poor at fielding agents who will collect information under conditions of constant diarrhea while being kissed by people with beards. This is not something that many people volunteer for, and certainly not Americans.

But I think the larger point here is that this effort in Iraq is not being conducted in any way consistent with the lessons of the various examples that Pat cited. This is a case of nation building being managed not just by the Pentagon, but specifically by Office of the Secretary of Defense himself; micromanagement of a viceroy in Iraq who reports directly to the secretary of Defense. Whatever the Pentagon civilians are good at, nation building, manifestly, is not among those things, and I think George Bush was quite right when he said the military should not be tasked with nation building. They are not gendarmes, they are not social workers, and they are not effective - unfortunately or fortunately, we have not built the civil affairs function to the level of political officers in the British colonial army. So we are attempting to conduct the war after the war in Iraq from the wrong place, with the wrong degree of micromanagement from Washington, with the wrong people in charge on the ground, and it's not surprising that the results so far have been somewhat lacking in inspiration. Please?

MR. LANG: Actually, the proof of what Ambassador Freeman says about how little we have taken this kind of thing seriously is the fact that the civil affairs function, which is the function of interaction with local government in the U.S. Army, has disappeared entirely from the regular Army. This has become entirely a function of the U.S. Army Reserve, so that you - what you have committed to doing, all these really great things and all these little towns backed up by airborne infantry and armor and things like this, are guys who come from Boise, Idaho and Santa Monica, California, and who are essentially civilians. We have never taken the time to develop the kind of in-depth expertise that would enable us to conduct a revolutionary occupation, which is what we're aiming at, in this way. Instead, we have got guys who are hoping to go back to being a lawyer or running their hardware store, wherever it is they were. So, this is - this does not indicate a level of prior commitment which ought to inspire confidence anywhere, you know. I mean, this is a long term - if you're going to really try to revolutionize Iraq in the way that people are talking about here, this is a really long-term commitment, and we have not been very serious about it, really.

MR. FREEMAN: David, and then Phoebe. If we can get a microphone over here, please? Second row, right here. Lindsey (sp)? Okay.

Q: David - David Ransom. Is this turned on?

MR. FREEMAN: It doesn't seem to be.

(Laughter.)

Q: This seems to work.

MR. FREEMAN: Right.

Q: The -

MR. FREEMAN: Speak directly into it, if you would?

Q: -- Coalition - the Coalition Provisional Authority seems to be committed to a process of writing a constitution, holding elections, and then turning over authority, despite the suggestions of some people that this process might be reversed. What I would like the panelists to do is speculate on the process - on where this process might be in the six months -

MR. FREEMAN: Hold it closer to you.

Q: -- before our election next year. If the constitution writing process takes six months, and nobody seems to think that possible, at least on this panel, what kind of a forcing event will the elections in the U.S. be? Will it lead us to look for Sunni or Shi'a ex-generals - strongmen - who might take us through a difficult process rather than continue on the process of constitution-making, and how will this play out in terms of the Iraqi people? Somehow, Sunnis, Shi'a, and Kurds, in the end, are going to have to agree to rejiggered roles in the national economy, in the national defense, and national decision-making, and the Sunnis are going to lose their monopoly, and the Shi'a and Kurds are going to gain some new powers. How is that going to play out in the six months before our election?

MR. FREEMAN: Who would like to take that? Ken, I think you deserve that question.

MR. POLLACK: Thanks, Chas. It's an interesting question, David. Again, I will preface it by saying I think it could go in any number of different directions. It really does depend on us. You know, if this administration reverses itself - which it doesn't seem interested in doing now, but I note it has done in the past on other issues, so it's not impossible. You know, I will just say given the current course, I think that what it is likely to produce is not necessarily - first - actually, only two points. With regard to your point about the complete change in the political structure inside of Iraq among the different ethnic and religious groups, I think you're right that there will definitely be changes. What I would say is that right now - I stress right now - you don't see a huge amount of popular resistance to that.

Obviously, the Shi'a are very pleased by the idea. The Kurds seem comfortable with it, but they have got their own particular agenda about Kurdistan. And most of the Sunnis, as best we can tell, and obviously the public opinion data is very poor, but it is consistent, and what it suggests is that most of the Sunnis are comfortable with it. The problem is that you do have a group of very vocal, very violent holdouts: tribal groups, former regime loyalists; a small group of people, but a group of people who are making a lot of trouble. If that holds, then I think that, you know, that the situation in six months will not be terribly problematic. The problem is the point that both Pat and I made, which is we don't know how long that situation will hold, and I think it is very much predicated on whether they see real progress.

You know, for so many of the Shi'a in particular, they're very unhappy with the current situation because of the security problems, because the lights aren't on, because they don't yet have fresh water, because of all the other basic problems. But for the moment they have been willing to give us the benefit of the doubt, and they're angry and they're frustrated, but they're hoping we're going to get our act together and change these problems soon. None of us knows what soon means. If soon is before that six months before the election, your time window, and they start getting very angry, then you could see things really coming apart, and you will have a real problem there. On the other hand, if we make some progress, enough to keep people satisfied, you might see the situation - the current situation obtaining, and under those circumstances, that won't necessarily be an issue.

With regard to the constitution, yeah, I think that the current course that we're on is a very problematic one. I don't necessarily see the scenario that you are posing, which is that we start looking for a general who can run the place. I see it probably going in a different direction, which is that we basically try to ram the constitution through. You will have members of the Governing Council who are going to be very much in favor of doing that. They will become our willing accomplices. We will increasingly defer to them. You will have people like Ayatollah Sistani opposing it and increasingly throwing out roadblocks.

My guess is that they will do it very gradually because Sistani seems to want to see - and the other moderate Shi'ite clerks want to see the process work. But the more that we push in this direction, the more that we demand that the constitution be put together - enacted so that we can transfer power, I think we will wind up narrowing our base of support enormously, to the point where we're probably relying on a small number of members of the current Governing Council to basically act as our surrogates. And under those circumstances, I think you will see Sistani and a whole bunch of other moderate Shi'a basically jumping off the wagon and saying the Americans are driving this in a direction that we don't want to go. And then if we get those problems that I was just referring to before in terms of the different ethnic and religious groups as well, then you could see things really starting to come apart.

MR. FREEMAN: Let me actually rephrase David's question in what I think is a nastier and more pointed way than he put it, and that is next year, when the president goes up for $87 billion for fiscal 2005, what is the politics of that going to look like? That's really the question.

MR. POLLACK: As an old intelligence analyst, I hate making predictions, especially about the future, especially about a situation as fluid as Iraq.

MR. FREEMAN: Well, I was speaking of us. You know, some people here are looking for a general to take over, too, apparently.

MR. POLLACK: (Chuckles.) Yeah. Next year, assuming this is right before the election, the president goes right back up to the Hill - I just - I think it is very unclear what we are going to see. If we do pump $20 billion into Iraq, Iraq's economy may actually be quite good, if only in a temporary sense. Last year, before the invasion, Iraq's GDP was about $18 billion, so if we're going to pump more money than their GDP into the country, it will be a wash in dollars, and that will simply keep the economy floating very nicely for that year. It will be short term, it won't be sustainable unless we inject another however many billion dollars in to keep it afloat, but a year from now, the economy may not be doing terribly.

I think the real problem is the point that David was getting at, is the potential train wreck over the constitution, and there I just - I think it's unclear exactly what's going to happen. My fear is that if the administration is absolutely determined to push through a constitution, that you know, if you want it bad you will get it bad. And they will wind up looking to a few - a few people on the Governing Council who are willing to be their tools, and increasingly will put their trust and their efforts behind those people, and those people will become increasingly isolated within Iraqi society because they won't reflect the vast majority.

MR. FREEMAN: Amy?

MS. HAWTHORNE: It is impossible to predict what's going to happen over the next year because - in terms of the constitution-writing process and really the what I would call the political construction process - not reconstruction because we're not reconstructing something that existed and then disappeared, we're trying to foster the creation of something totally new. But it seems to me in looking in Iraq that Iraq has really, in large part, been in a political holding pattern until now. I think in part that's because of the security situation, it's because of the emergence of the insurgency or the resistance or however we term it, and it's also because key political actors are, in my view, waiting for the process of constitution drafting to be able to stake their claims and assert their vision.

So things have been not so messy up until now, but once this process starts - and already there are huge fights emerging, even within the Governing Council - who knows what's going on in the broader political society outside of that enclave - about not what should be in the constitution, but how it should be drafted and who should draft it. That's the first hurdle that has to be gotten through. So once this political process begins to kick in, it will make things potentially messy, but that's a messiness that I think the Iraqis have to go through.

In terms of the American political process, I could see two scenarios. One is that the security situation deteriorates considerably - gets worse - and that will put pressure on actually us pulling out very quickly because if more people - if more Americans are getting killed and the situation looks, from Washington, really bad, it's going to be very hard for the administration to argue why we need to stick it out. On the other hand, if things improve, that may give some leverage to those within the administration - and I believe they are in the minority - who actually would like to stick it out a little bit longer and give adequate time for a constitution-writing process, elections, et cetera to unfold. So we don't know.

MR. FREEMAN: I think it's fair to say that there are - we do need to keep reminding ourselves there are a lot of people, including some in Iraq but certainly many in the broader Arab and Muslim worlds - who don't want that constitution and who are going to do everything they can to make the situation even messier than you - then you correctly point out it will be. Phoebe?

Q: Is this on? Can you hear? Phoebe Marr, who hasn't been in the Pentagon offices in any event. I wanted to thank the panel because I thought it was an extremely thoughtful and interesting presentation. I have one brief point to make, and then a question to the panel, whoever wants to answer it.

Someone says that Iraq has never gone through a constitutional process before. That's not quite right. If we can stretch our minds back to the British, who were in exactly the same situation under even more unfavorable circumstances than we are back in the 1920s, they did go through this process, with many of the same difficulties: how do we get a constitution, how do we get a group of people who are going to sort of side with our interests but make it look democratic, and so on. And suffice it to say that it took them a good two years to get through this. There was one constituent assembly that had to be canceled. Religious leaders had to be exiled to Iran to get it through, and they just go it - they just squeaked through a - with a very short vote, finally, and the constitution came in in 1926. This was several years after they first got in. So it is - it is long and messy, but there has been some experience with this.

However, I wanted to raise another issue here that really hasn't been considered, and it follows on this: the $20 billion that we're going to spend in priming the pump on the economy. If we assume, as I do, that part of the hearts and minds is to get the economy going, get employment going, and to provide, you know, these services that the bulk of the population wants, and that this would, you know, ease the situation with which I fully agree, it seems to me how that money is spent is very important. We have made a number of mistakes that we have all outlined in this, and I hope we're not going to make yet another one that we could stop. I'm a little concerned about the way in which we privatize. I certainly agree with establishing a market economy and so on, but the critical issue seems to me to get Iraqis employed, to get a market economy going in Iraq, with Iraqis, and presumably with a fairly level playing field.

And I would like to hear from the panel how you think this is going to go because I read a lot of things in the press - I don't want to point the finger at Bechtel or Halliburton, that isn't the issue, but are American companies going to come in and swallow up a lot of this money rather than laying the basis for a market economy in Iraq? Here's one of these cases where it seems to me the short-term aim, particularly with the election coming up, may undermine a long-term goal and lead to unintended consequences. I would just like some information on how you think that's going to go, and any, you know -

MR. FREEMAN: Who would like to start on that?

MR. LANG: I would.

MR. FREEMAN: Pat?

MR. LANG: Well, you know, I'm not in the government anymore, as we all know, and business is my business. And so, I have been looking at this and visiting with some of these folks that you mentioned, and you know, you have to take a sober look at this and wonder how people are going to get their hands on a lot of that money because its' going to be really difficult to operate in Iraq in the context of the kind of security situation you have now. There aren't but so many large corporations that are willing to expose their folks to that kind of danger, and there are other issues. So far as I know, there isn't any commercial service - air service into Baghdad as yet, and I don't know when that will begin. There's, you know, antiaircraft fire threat around the airport. It's going to be really hard to conduct the kind of business we're talking about in that context, and that will affect where the political process by next summer, which is I guess what we're essentially talking about.

You have to remember all the time that this is not kind of like a blackboard in Iraq, where we write upon it and our words remain engraved forever. You know, there's somebody coming along behind us and erasing the words, you know, as we go. And as long as they keep doing that and screwing things up in that way, it's going to be hard to carry out some of these schemes for writing a constitution in the context in which people can't even agree whether Swiss law or Sharia are going to be the basis of what the law code is going to be like. It's going to be very hard to move forward with that. At the root of all this problem lies the security issue, and that has to be solved.

MR. FREEMAN: Well, I think it - I also am in business and do things related to this, and I would say that - several things. First, there are quite a number of Iraqi merchant families who left Iraq during the tumult of the last 30 years who are preparing to return with foreign partners in tow, so there's an exile community that is, if anything, more relevant and well rooted in the economic sphere than the exile community is in the political sphere, and one shouldn't forget that.

Having said that, there is an absence of decision-making authority in Iraq at the moment. There is nobody who can bind a future Iraqi government to any decision, so decisions are not being made. Without naming the government concerned, I have had for four months about a half a billion dollars to give away in Iraq - give away in the sense of fund projects for power plants, wastewater management, water treatment and the like, exactly the things that are most required - and we have not been able to get anybody to make a decision in Iraq about what priorities should be addressed by this particular set of foreign governments.

So we're starting with a very, very low base in terms of privatization. In fact, I would say the greater risk is not that Iraq will be pillaged by multinationals, but that multinationals, for the very reasons that Lang mentioned plus the absence of an effective decision-making mechanism in Baghdad, will turn up their noses at the place and it will go - it will get worse rather than better. Privatization doesn't work if there aren't people who are willing to buy assets. Ken?

MR. POLLACK: I will be brief because I'm getting tired of hearing myself speak. A few - I share your concerns, and I actually will make a point about the pillaging, which is that I am nervous about how a lot of these contracts are being let. This also gets to Chas' earlier point about the Department of Defense perhaps not being the best person to do nation building because they really don't know how to do it.

I have - it's clear that if you spend $20 billion in Iraq, you can probably do a lot of good things. You can also waste a lot of money. There's enormous potential for corruption and graft, and obviously this is a country which, at least for the last 30 years and arguably for the last 80 years, has been built very heavily on graft, but especially in the last 30 years. It's what - it's what a lot of people there know best.

And beyond that, I am hearing very disturbing stories - and they are only stories, I have no proof of them, so please don't take any - no one take this to the bank. But I am hearing very disturbing stories that a lot of the big projects that are being let to some of these multinationals, the multinationals are planning on importing all the labor. And if that's the case, that would be disastrous, because at the very least we have got a lot of unemployed Iraqis out there and we need to put them to work, and we need to get them off the street, doing constructive things, and be able to actually pay them salaries for work that they have done. If we start importing tens of thousands of Filipino laborers to do this stuff, it will make the situation worse, not better.

MR. FREEMAN: Sir?

Q: Mustapha Malik (sp) is my name. I'm a journalist and researcher. My questions are two. One is that can democracy flourish under American watch; or in other words and for the other reason, can Iraq survive democracy? Long before American neo-conservatives discovered - found out that democracy can work there, the British tried. They gave a constitution, 10 elections were held between 1923 and 1958, more than 50 cabinets. They found out that the chimera they created out of Kurdish area and Shi'ite area and Sunni area cannot be held together with democratic system. This is why you had dictators. Most destabilizing factor was British imperial hegemony. They were not present, but Iraqis did not like the British. This is why, in spite of the democracy, they overthrew. Why should they love us more than they loved the British?

Second question is that can secularism flourish under American watch? The most Islamizing factor in the Muslim world, particularly in Iran, was the American hegemony. Only the Islamists could sacrifice and throw out the shah because Islamists are empowered. And it is the Shi'ites in Iraq who were in the vanguard of anti-British movement. So what I am saying is, can - questions are two: can Iraq survive in one piece with democracy, or if they give them both, like Bangladesh and Pakistan, they will fall apart? And secondly, is not American presence itself is most destabilizing, Islamizing factor? Thank you.

MR. FREEMAN: Two very good and not very easy questions. Amy, you get to start.

MS. HAWTHORNE: Those are excellent questions. They sort of dovetail with some of the points that were underlying my presentation in a sense that I think at least in the short term - it's my view - in Iraq and in other parts of the Arab world as well, a democratization process that empowers citizens - people who have long been excluded from affecting public policy, from making decisions, from making their voices heard about how their society is run - it's very complicated, but just to oversimplify it, I think the relationship with the West and the role of the United States in these societies will become a political issue in and of itself in this democratization process. In other words, I believe that in Iraq and in other countries, new political actors will seize on this issue as a way of - seize on anti-American sentiment and even maybe nationalism as a way of defining and empowering themselves politically in this new process. And so that's sort of - in the case of Iraq, the irony of it - the United States has prompted this situation, yet there may be a backlash against the United States that may define Iraqi and other politics for some time to come.

But I'm not sure that those sentiments are going to be lasing and fundamental. There may be a phase that countries have to work through: the relationship with the United States, whether Islam is understood as a religion or whether it's a political vehicle for determining national identity in relation to the United States, all these questions are very complicated. But can democracy flourish under the American watch in Iraq? Well, I think we're a big part of the solution and we're a big part of the problem, and if we remain engaged in that country, that's just the reality of how our presence will be felt. We can do many positive things, but our presence there is also going to provoke antagonism and nationalist sentiment, so I think these two strands will coexist in Iraq as long as we're present in the form that we are now.

MR. FREEMAN: Pat and Phil both wish to comment.

MR. LANG: There's a kind of assumption in a lot of discussions around time here which I do not share, that in fact that the indigenous culture of the Arab world, and in this case particularly Iraq, is just a kind of obstacle to be overcome, and that if we persist at it and we set up enough schools and have enough water piped into villages that these folks are going to stop being who they are and they will be somebody else who we can get along with easier, you know? I don't accept that idea at all. I mean, I think it is not in fact true that education will lead to Westernization of the Arab world. I think that isn't necessarily the case at all, and by - and in believing that that is true, we're probably setting ourselves up for a great disappointment in the future, when after - if we succeed in getting a constitution created, which probably doesn't reflect their own values very much in a lot of ways, then in the end they will either just let that constitution exist as a kind of false front, or else they will in the end go back to whatever it is they really are.

So I think, you know, when you start messing around with the basic values and life - deeply held beliefs of people, you're into something really serious, and you shouldn't think that you're just going to blow through this and come out the other side, and there will be a lot of McDonald's in Baghdad and everything will be great. I don't - I just don't think it works like that.

MR. FREEMAN: Phil?

MR. WILCOX: Speaking of American influence, democracy building in the Arab world, the credibility of our commitment to this worthy goal depends in part on how we approach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ironically, the Palestinians are far better equipped, historically, for the emergence of democracy in the relatively short term than almost any other Arab society because they are a Mediterranean people and especially because they have lived next to and among Israelis, who at least for Israeli Jews have created a vibrant democracy, and the Palestinians admire that and want it for themselves.

In - it is a - an often-cited truth - whether it's truth or not in the U.S. government that the U.S. can never concentrate on two major foreign policy problems simultaneously. But if we were to restore active leadership toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with the aim of liberating the Palestinians, supporting democracy there, in the process we would be rescuing Israeli democracy from a dreadful trap. That would do much to improve our credibility in this larger adventure of promoting democracy in the Middle East.

MR. FREEMAN: I think, sir, you are - you have been waiting very patiently, or actually not that patiently - (laughter) - but you have been waiting. Could you tell us who you are?

Q: My name is Ed Blackmore (sp). My question relates to the $87 billion, and the two assumptions that appear to underline the - first, relating to the I guess you could say the civil side, there seems to be an assumption in there that there's a fiscal capability within Iraq to take care of normal operations, and that this $20 billion is on top of something that is there, and I wonder how valid that assumption is.

And the second part of it is - relates to the military side, which apparently also includes our civilians like Bremer and so on, but anyway, whether the assumption that the military costs - this is a net additional cost of the military over there - is going to be essentially flat, at least for the near term. It seems to be an assumption at least that I read in it, maybe incorrectly.

MR. FREEMAN: Ken, would you like to start on that?

MR. POLLACK: Sure. I share your broad reservations about this question of the 20 billion, although I would - my concerns are somewhat different. My sense of the assumptions are not that the administration or the CPA thinks that this is going to be 20 billion on top of something else, but in fact what you consistently hear from them is that they didn't realize just how badly broken Iraq was before the invasion, and that in point of fact, politically and economically in terms of its infrastructure, it was in much worse shape than was realized beforehand, and therefore a lot of very basic stuff is going to happen. I think that's probably right.

I certainly agree with the notion that I think a lot of basic stuff does have to happen. I think that there's a lot of infrastructure repair that has to happen. I think they're - well, I certainly agree with Pat's point about - and please don't take this in the wrong way - I agree with Pat's point that education doesn't turn people into something different, something that we can deal with. I also do think it's the case that Iraq's educational structure has been broken over the last 12 or you know, pick you time period, 25, 30 years, and it desperately needs to be refurbished, and in many cases refurbished from the ground up, in terms of building brand new schools and coming up with brand new textbooks and all kinds of things like that.

What I'm nervous about is whether or not this group actually knows how to spend that money correctly. I think that Jerry Bremer, since he has come into office, has really done some very good things, and I think that at the very least my sense is that his heart is in the right place and the focus that he seems to have is actually quite good. My sense is that he gets thrown roadblocks by a whole variety of different people. He is forced into taking a whole bunch of actions that don't necessarily work out in the right way, but I also don't think that CPA is perfect. I think there are a lot of problems with the CPA organization. As they will say, they live in a bubble. Their contact, both with the Iraqis and with the U.S. personnel who are out in the field dealing with the Iraqis, is minimal, and I'm very concerned about whether or not the CPA actually knows how to run it.

And at a more - you know, more mundane level, having served in the government for about a dozen years, I am very concerned that the logistics of it aren't quite right. If you give $20 billion to the Pentagon or to the CPA, I don't think they know how to spend it properly. I don't think they have the actual people who know how to draw up and run these kind of programs. To the extent that ability - that capability - exists, it is resident in the State Department, which has been very much shut out of this entire process. So just as, you know, an old government bureaucrat, I'm very nervous about giving $20 billion to a bunch of people that don't know how to spend it.

MR. FREEMAN: Pat?

MR. LANG: Well once again, it's not like we never did this before, you know? In the - if you look at American history, every occupation we have ever conducted anywhere, anyplace, anytime was conducted by the - used to be the U.S. Army and then the Department of Defense. It has always been that way because the structure is there for administering the security forces that have to be there and managing large organizations. It's hard to find that someplace else.

But the question isn't so much whether that was a good idea to structure that way as it is the question is how well is it being done. And if you look at the occupation of Germany right after World War II, you find that although Defense ran everything, they were very eager to have a large number of European-oriented State Department officers assigned to the high commissioner for Germany's office of things like this, so that there was a lot of, you know, informed content in what was going on. And so, the question really is not should Defense have run the thing, but why is this being done so poorly?

I mean, my father trained for a year in England for his role in the occupation government of Germany before the invasion of France. (Chuckles.) You know, we didn't do anything like that, and I'm very impatient with people who tell me, well, we didn't have time, we didn't have enough people. Baloney. That's nonsense. This was a high priority task and it should have been taken care of, and State should have been fully integrated in it. And that didn't happen, and I think that's leading us toward - toward a very bad place.

MR. FREEMAN: This was, in fact, the point I was making far less eloquently earlier. I would like to pick up before I turn to Amy, who wants to follow up on some of Phil Wilcox's comments about the connection between the Israeli-Palestinian issue and prospects for democratization, and American influence in the region.

I would just like to say that it is absolutely astonishing to me that anyone could have been under any illusion at all about how bad things were in Iraq. The United Nations Development Programme was on the ground everywhere in Iraq, and was reporting exactly how bad it was. Some of you may recall that at one point Madeline Albright, formerly secretary of State, was asked whether - what her reaction was to the death of a million Iraqis from sanctions, and she said, well, sometimes you just have to do things like that to make a point, which was not a comment that went over very well in the region.

In any event, why is it a mystery that after eight years of war with Iran; a year of warfare with the United States and a vast international coalition in the first Gulf War, including 42 days of bombing of Iraq; followed by 10 years of sanctions and intermittent bombing; followed by three weeks of extremely well-targeted attacks on infrastructure and an advance - brilliant advance by the U.S. Army on Baghdad - why is it a surprise that the infrastructure is a bloody mess? You know, who - how could people possibly imagine that there was very much left there to be, quote, "reconstructed?" So I think the $20 billion is not on top of very much except rubble, and I think Pat's point is correct. There are people who do know how to do this kind of thing. The occupation in Germany, in fact, was the origin. We invented this function there and in Japan. We've seemed to have shoved it aside, and we need to rediscover it if we're going to have success. This is a management issue I'm talking about, not a political issue, although it's become a matter of Cabinet rivalry in Washington.

Amy?

MS. HAWTHORNE: Two comments, briefly. First of all, no one - I don't think anyone has brought up the issue of how much of this reconstruction package might be given in loans as opposed to grants. That's a debate that's taking place right now in Congress, and I believe that having any part of the reconstruction funding be provided as loans to the Iraqi people at this point in time would basically be a political disaster for the United States. It just escapes me why anyone would fail to understand how that would play out in Iraq.

MR. FREEMAN: There's nobody in Iraq who can sign a loan agreement.

MS. HAWTHORNE: (Laughs.) The logistics of it and the finances of it aside, the idea that we will - that the U.S. would have Iraqis at this stage be paying for the reconstruction after a war that we provoked I think would play out politically very poorly in Iraq.

But I just wanted to follow up briefly on the comments that Phil Wilcox made about the relationship between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and democratization in the region, including in Iraq. To me, it's not so much - or in addition to the fact that this conflict needs to be solved and that U.S. credibility in the region is damaged by its current position towards the conflict, there's also another element to this, which is very important, which is how the intifadeh itself is affecting politics and political change in Arab countries. In other words, how Arab citizens are watching, internalizing, and responding to the intifadeh as they see it, and how this shapes politics.

In my view, it's shaping politics in a negative way. Anyone who's spent any time in the Arab world recently, it's very obvious the way in which the intifadeh is creating a new kind of political discourse in the Arab world that in my view is not particularly favorable to the United States or to the possibility of liberal political change. And so how the U.S. administration would claim to invest a lot of time and money promoting democratization in the region and not take this other factor into account, how the two interact with each other, is a mystery to me.

MR. FREEMAN: I have four speakers, or commentators or questioners, and we have about seven minutes. And I will start with you, go to you, we'll go to Gordon Brown, and you, sir. Jeff, first.

Q: Jeff Steinberg (sp), with DIR Magazine. I have a question for Ambassador Wilcox. The first moment that I recall reading about this argument, that a successful overthrow of the Saddam Hussein would lead to democratization in the Arab world, was in a paper called the Clean Break, which was written by Richard Pearle, David Wurmser, Doug Feith, and several other people who've got a certain amount of clout in the current administration. At that time, in 1996, they were writing the paper as a strategy to Prime Minister Netanyahu on how to get out of the whole concept of land for peace. So I worry that the clean break policy doesn't stop with Iraq but involves follow on military operations against Syria, Iran and a lot of other places in the Arab world.

But the immediate question I've got is let's take this linkage between Israel, Palestine, and the Iraq situation from the negative. What would be the impact on our prospects of success in Iraq if we failed to prevent Prime Minister and Sharon and the Israeli military from going ahead, say, with their stated desires to either kill or exile Arafat, plans that I know exist for a early massive incursion into the Gaza Strip, perhaps in the next two, three weeks or so? How would that impact, if the administration doesn't step in far more forcefully to stop those things from happening?

MR. FREEMAN: Perfect question for Phil Wilcox.

MR. WILCOX: It would only aggravate what is very, very hostile public opinion in the entire region against the United States and in the Islamic world beyond, and I imagine among the people of Iraq, included in that group. I don't place much store by theories that Iraq was only the first strike and that we're going to invade these other members of the axis of evil consecutively. I think that's mostly talk, and it's mostly nonsense. We've hurt ourselves, I believe, in focusing so heavily on the shortcomings of Yasser Arafat, while calling for democracy. He is the only Arab leader freely elected by the public, I believe, and he's quite popular among the Palestinian people, so it reflects what most people see as hypocrisy for us to hammer on the essential need of getting rid of Arafat as a precondition to U.S. diplomatic engagement. Enough said.

MR. FREEMAN: I think maybe there is another answer, which is that if the United States, in chasing after Iraq, resembled a dog chasing a car - very enthusiastic about the chase and not thinking very much about what would happen if he actually caught the car or what he would do with it. When you sink your teeth into the tires and inhale a little fumes and get some oil on your tongue, your enthusiasm for chasing the next car is likely to be less.

Q: Yeah, I'm Captain Ben Conamol (sp). I'm one of the Arabic-speaking military officers that was actually in Iraq with the 1st Marine Division, went up from the border all the way up to Tikrit and helped establish the initial government that we had in Tikrit with General Kelly. One of the things we saw with the abandonment of the region from the local regime guys, the police, local leadership was an immediate flashback to local leadership, local powerbrokers, and tribal leaders. They basically fell back on the natural Arab structure, actually - (unintelligible) -- orthodox. The question's for Dr. Moore (sic). How do we engender the kind of sense of individual thought and a sense of personal enfranchisement in a system to establish a democracy? I don't think you can have a democracy without this. I think if we held elections tomorrow, what you'd wind up seeing is tribal sheikhs telling their people who's going to vote for who. How do we develop that, and what steps need to be taken? And I agree with Mr. Pollack. This is going to be a very long-term endeavor. We're going to be there for quite a while. How do we do that?

MR. FREEMAN: I think that is a splendidly phrased question. Thank you for - I wish we had gotten to you earlier because it deserves more time than we can give it. But Amy, that really falls first into your bailiwick and then I don't know, Ken, you might want to comment as well.

MS. HAWTHORNE: It's good that we're running out of time, so I don't have to give you a detailed answer to that question. But I think it's true that just as religion is a complicating factor for the establishment of democracy, so is - perhaps even more so is a tribal system. It's not tribal systems and democracy can't exist together, but certain things I think within the tribal system would have to evolve in order to be more compatible with a democratic system in which the rights of the individual were very prominent, and the role of the individual were very prominent feature.

How does this foster? How does it develop? It develops over a long time. There's really two ways it can happen, and the U.S. can either facilitate it or be unhelpful. One way is that society itself can change. There can be economic or social processes that change the way that tribes function in so