American Enterprise Institute

December 14, 2006

[Edited transcript from audio tapes]

8:45 a.m.	Registration
9:00	Discussants:	Frederick W. Kagan, AEI
		General Jack Keane, U.S. Army (retired)
		Kenneth M. Pollack, Brookings Institution
10:30	Adjournment

Proceedings:

Christopher DeMuth:  Gentlemen, good morning.  My name is Chris DeMuth.  I'm President of the American Enterprise Institute and I want to thank you all for being here this morning for this important session at which we are releasing a new AEI report entitled Choosing Victory:  A Plan for Success in Iraq. 

Last week, AEI convened a working group of a considerable number of retired military officers and other military experts and political experts with the task of attempting to draft a detailed blueprint for a new military strategy in Iraq, a strategy that, in contrast to the current strategy, would actually aim to achieve stability and reconstruction in that nation and it would have a reasonable prospect of success.  They met for four days in this room and the fruits of their labor are in the form of a report that we are releasing this morning and that is being posted on our website.  It will be presented this morning by two of the leading participants in the exercise of the past week, my colleague Fred Kagan, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and retired General and Army Vice-Chief of Staff Jack Keane.  Delighted to have General Keane with us this morning. 

After the presentation, Fred will call on Kenneth Pollack, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution for commentary and we will then have a general discussion.  I will now turn the proceeding over to Fred Kagan.  Fred.

Frederick Kagan:  Chris, thank you very much.  Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all very much for coming.  This is, of course, the topic of the day which is as it should be.  This is the single most important foreign policy challenge of this moment and perhaps of the age.  I think that it is very easy to lose sight of that fact sometimes, although now I think our attention has sharpened on it with various subsidiary debates about the role of Iraq and the war on terror, and so forth.  None of that is very important right now because, as Ken will explain and as we have long known, the consequences of defeat in Iraq will be catastrophic and unacceptable, and terrorism is only part of it. 

Frankly, the prospect of regional war and instability throughout the Middle East and violence throughout the Middle East is intolerable, even without the threat of terrorism.  So I myself am much more afraid of defeat than I am of the danger of difficulties in the institutional military than I am of just about anything else.  I find the prospect of defeat harrowing, and so we have undertaken to try to figure out what could be done.  And we have tried to do that by moving outside of the current construct that the US military is relying on in Iraq. 

And this is very important, and I cannot possibly stress it enough.  This is not just a debate about troop strength.  This is not just a debate about numbers.  In the first instance, this is a debate about strategy.  It has never been the primary strategy of the United States military in Iraq to establish security to protect the population of Iraq.  That has never been the primary mission of multinational forces in Iraq, a multinational corps in Iraq of CENTCOM.  From the very beginning of the post-conflict phase of this war, the military mission of those military commands has been to train the Iraqis and turn the problem over to them.  There was a significant hope that the problem would be resolved politically, and we placed great reliance on the development of the Iraqi political system that we hoped would draw away the violence. 

I think it is very clear that that approach has failed.  I think it is equally clear that the approach of turning over responsibility for security to the Iraqis at this stage is failing, and if it is accelerated I am confident that it will fail.  So the question really becomes is there something that we can do to secure Iraq now within the resources that the US military can make available?  And our feeling was, and what prompted the formation of this group, was that people have not really looked at that in a lot of detail. 

There has been a lot of hand-waving about, well, it would take 500,000 troops and we do not have 500,000 troops so we cannot do it; if you look at the population of Iraq, Iraq is a country of 25 million people; put 1 to 100 standard stability ratio in Iraq, that is 250,000 troops.  We do not have 250,000 troops so we cannot do it.  And the Iraq study group tosses this off in a paragraph in which they say, “Well, it would take 200,000 troops to secure Baghdad, and so obviously we cannot do that.  We need to find something else to do.”  And we thought, “Gee, those numbers do not sound right.” 

Furthermore, no one has ever given us a basis for why we should think that those, in fact, are the numbers that will be required.  And so we brought in experienced military planners and said, “Let’s look into this.  What would it be?”  And the real purpose of this is we are going to propose a plan of action that we think is feasible.  We are going to recommend that the leadership of this country look at this plan and adopt the appropriate variant of it as the right course of action.  But the key thing was also to inject an element of military realism into this debate so that we could actually have the conversation about what would or would not be required and see how we felt about it at the end of the day with that military realistic basis behind it. 

So to begin with, the population of Iraq is not what is relevant in considering the security metric.  As the administration has been saying in a failed propaganda line for a long time, most of Iraq is actually relatively stable; and we certainly would not, as a matter of strategy, want to flood Southern Iraq now with American troops.  That would clearly not help the situation.  In addition, Kurdistan is stable and the Kurds have it under control and there is no need to flood Kurdistan with American troops. 

The problems in Iraq are primarily Baghdad, Al-Anbar province, province in Diyala and a few problems in Mosul, although Mosul is doing relatively better.  Now, once you look at it that way, you say the problem in Iraq is much more manageable.  Then how do we control a country of 25 million people?  But I would argue that the center of gravity of this fight within Iraq at this point is actually even more restricted than that; it is a given number of neighborhoods within Baghdad. 

And I will talk to you about why I think that is.  This is a map of Baghdad showing the ethnic distribution of the sub-districts of Baghdad.  The large labeled areas are neighborhoods.  The smaller areas are the districts.  The pink are in some respects the most important; these are mix Sunni-Shia neighborhoods, excuse me, the red are Sunni neighborhoods predominantly; the blue are Shia neighborhoods predominantly and you note Sadr City, of course, and the two extremely important Shia neighborhoods right next to it, Shaab and Ur, which are not labeled for ease of viewing here. 

Note the green zone; reporters, diplomats, foreigners who go into Iraq go to the green zone.  Given the current level of insecurity it is quite natural that they rarely venture forth from the green zone and that is not a criticism of any one.  Of course, they rarely do; it is extremely dangerous.  They land in the airport, which is labeled here BIAP, Baghdad International Airport.  And they follow -- if you see this curved line which actually marks the boundary between neighborhoods is Route Irish  which is the road that you take from BIAP to the green zone, except I understand that they have taken people by helicopter rather than driving along that road because it is not very safe. 

If you look in there, if you look in that area you will see two things.  First of all, most of the mixed Baghdad and neighborhood are right around there.  That is critical terrain because in the mixed neighborhoods where you have Sunni and Shia living together, that is where the death squads are operating right now most aggressively.  That is where the ethnic cleansing is going on most aggressively.  You can see that when I put up the charts representing the violent incidents that have occurred in October and November.  And we have tried to draw circles to indicate the larger areas around these problems.  We recognize that we have not captured all of the incidents. 

Now, there are a number of problems with the fact that the violence is the way that it is, including it is all around the green zone.  And so it is going to be -- as long as that is going on, everyone in Iraq, everyone in the United States, everyone around the world watching what is going on in Iraq - and the reporting is based on the green zone - will see that there is this sea of violence surrounding them and will imagine that the entire country, the entire city is in flames. 

Now, as you can see from this map, in fact, the entire city is not in flames.  There are neighborhoods that are doing relatively well.  There are neighborhoods that are relatively peaceful.  Unfortunately, you would not be able to see that if you had to travel out from the green zone because to do so you would have to move through some incredibly dangerous areas.  So the premise of our plan is to say, “You do not have to talk about the force ratios for controlling the entire country.  You do not have to talk about the force ratios in controlling the entire city of six million people all at once.  You do have to talk about force ratios required for controlling what is in fact critical terrain in Baghdad right now.” 

Now you may ask me what about Sadr City, and what about the Jaish al Mahdi, the Mahdi army, that is supposedly under the control of Muqtada al-Sadr?  What about the Shia Badr corps?  What about the Shia militias?  Well, I would recommend, and every expert that we spoke to recommended, not going after the Jaish al-Mahdi to begin this struggle.  And to do that… and you will find this in the slides which are posted on the website.  I should mention if you want to get these slides you can get them off the AEI website. 

One of the things that we did was to go carefully through the various groups that we are fighting in Iraq right now and evaluate their goals, their intentions, how they interacted with one another, and paid a lot of attention to the courses of action that they might take in response to the plan that we are laying out here.  And I want to take a moment to emphasize that, because I do not think we see that quite often enough, looking at the enemy in a lot of detail and even understanding that there is an enemy. 

One of the problems with this war is that we have been reporting it in the passive voice, and we will say, “Bombs went off in Baghdad, killed 53 people.”  Well, bombs do not go off.  Bombs are placed by an enemy who is trying to do something.  And I think we are too easily seduced into seeing the violence in Iraq as an elemental force of nature which is not guided by anything and which is, therefore, so much harder to control.  That is not in any way the truth. 

There are a number of distinct groups who are conducting violence for their own purposes and those are the groups that we need to deal with.  But we must not lump them all together because some of them, they have different purposes from one another.  The Shia groups in Iraq largely believe that they are winning, will win and have almost already won.  And in fact, a lot of these guys are about ready to do their “victory dance” because they think that we are leaving and that we are on the way out and that they will get the country. 

But there is a rivalry between the two principal Shia groups and their armed forces; the Mahdi army and the Badr corps are very interested in conserving their fighters so that they will have leverage against one another in determining who will run the country after the war.  For that reason, we think that they are very unlikely to want to seek a full-up confrontation with the US military.  Remember what happened to them the last time they did that in Karbala and Najaf in 2004 - we killed a lot of them.  They were not able to inflict a lot of damage and they were not able to control territory.  That memory seems to be “green” in their minds.  These guys are not going to come out and fight us in force if we do not invade their territory, Sadr City. 

Obviously, down the road we will have to deal with this.  We will have to make sure that these militias are disarmed and reintegrated, but that is not the thing to do right now.  What we can do and what we should do is focus on the mixed neighborhoods where the sectarian cleansing is going on, where the violence is intolerable, and secure those.  Most of the attacks that you see in Sadr City are not generated by people from Sadr City; they are generated by insurgents who are living in the areas where the other violence is occurring.  [Indiscernible] basing in those areas.  If we control those areas, a lot of those attacks in Sadr City will not be happening. 

Some of the attacks in Sadr City are coming from Al Qaeda in Iraq, which is based up the Diyala River.  We will probably have to interdict some of those routes into and out of the city as well, but all of this is a manageable problem without going into Sadr City and uniting two Shia groups that right now are rivals in battle against us; that is the worst thing that we could do right now, in my view.  Using this approach allows us to look at the problem in a way that generates realistic force requirements.  We looked through here; we identified about 23 of these districts that we think we would need to clear and hold in the first instance. 

And we looked at what the force requirements would be generously.  We did not try to figure out what is the minimum level with which we might be able to do this.  What do we think we need to do – are we going to add more in the plan?  And we are going to add a little more over that, and we are going to have a theater reserve as well, because the purpose is not to use just exactly the right amount of force, as Rumsfeld tried to do over the years.  The purpose is to go in with enough force that you can be confident that even if things do not break your way, you can make it work out. 

Right now, there are a total of four American brigades in Baghdad; a brigade is a force with anywhere from 3,500-5,000 soldiers in it.  It has at this point three battalions; battalions can have anywhere from 600-1,000 soldiers in them, and battalions are broken down into companies.  We are not going to work at that level.  There are five brigades operating in Baghdad.  Right now, they mostly are based in forward-operating bases - FOB’s - like Camp Victory at the airport, Camp Liberty in the green zone, Camp Falcon and other forward-operating bases around Baghdad.  That means that when they want to go into the city, they form up on their FOB; they drive in to the areas that they are going to be operating in; they patrol and do whatever they are going to do for a while and then they drive back to the FOB. 

And it is perfectly understandable, but as a counter insurgency approach it is unwise because it means that they do not have any permanent presence in the city and whenever they are not there, bad things are happening.  There are some units that are not doing that.  In the Dora neighborhood, which is, if you see Rasheed, the bend in the river just to the northeast of that label is Dora; it is a very, very difficult neighborhood.  There is a battalion of American forces there now; a lot of them are living in the city.  It is a tough fight but they are doing pretty well at it and their sense is that they have got that pretty… precariously but under control.  But they are an island in a sea of violence because they are not surrounded by units that are doing the same thing.  We are proposing to change that.

General Keane:  Okay, Fred let me say something.  We have tried operations in Baghdad twice and we have not succeeded, and there are basic reasons for that:  Number one is we never had enough forces to do what we are suggesting.  This is an important distinction so you understand because sometimes we just talk past each other; even military people talk past each other on this issue. 

And the issue is this:  You have to accept the fact that the basic mission is protect and support the people.  The basic mission is not to kill insurgents or to kill Shia militias.  The basic mission is to protect and support the people; that is primary.  And as Fred pointed out, that has never been our mission in Iraq since day one.  The basic military mission has been transitioned to the Iraqi security forces - kill and capture insurgents, Al Qaeda, and protect ourselves.  And, probably, the byproduct of that is protect the Iraqi people.

Now I'm talking about how we allocate forces.  So what we are attempting to do here is to protect the support mission.  How does that actually play out on the ground so you can understand the difference?  In every successful counter-insurgency the basic premise for success has always been protect the people; implied, support them as well economically.  And you do not focus on the enemy; you focus on the people.  The enemy contests your protection, then they become a focus why you are doing it.

 Even in the Vietnam War, if you remember what happened there, conventional operations for the first few years, large conventional operations against an insurgency; and then when General Abrams came in he changed the mission.  It was to protect the people -- and defeated the insurgency.  We lost the war in the long-run, obviously, because the North Vietnamese army divisions were still present, et cetera, and you know what took place.  But in terms of the insurgency, I mentioned it to you because some of you have it as a frame of reference.  What happens is different here on the street.  You clear an area and by clearing an area you have to go house by house; you do that Iraqis and US and you have to make certain that there are no insurgents or militia or Al Qaeda in the area that you have responsibility for. 

Some of them will contest you and so be it; you fight them.  Some of them you will detain because you have information or the Iraqis are helping you “eyeball” them right on the spot that they strongly suspect that there is a potential threat here; and that will take time.  And then you put a protect force in that lives in the neighborhood.  Understand the distinction; they stay in the neighborhood 24/7.  They use empty houses; they use government buildings, schools that are not being used which is… they are probably a building of last resort, obviously, but if it is not a usable school, any facility that would be able to accommodate them.  It is very decentralized; it is Iraqi and US.  They stage 24/7 to protect the people. 

That peace that I am describing right now is the peace that we were never able to execute in the past in Baghdad.  Ran the insurgents out.  They were able to come back in over time, intimidate, terrorize, and corrupt the economic assistance packages that we are going in there.  So this is a very important distinction to understand this.  It has been done successfully in Iraq, however.  It has been done in Tal Afar by Colonel H.R. McMasters and is being done right now by a US brigade with some degree of success in Ramadi, but it never has been applied as a basic mission of our forces in Iraq.  So that is what would have to change here.  If we did not make the commitment of that second piece, this operation would fail as well. 

And then the third piece is very important because it is an economic package; and Fred will talk to some degree in specifics about it.  But if the economic package is not there we do not succeed either because the basic issue is it is not the forces that are isolating the insurgents; it is the people themselves.  And what gets them to isolate it, one is you are protecting them for the first time; two, you are providing basic services to them and, three, you are beginning to enhance the quality of their life experience through humanitarian and economic assistance being administered to them by their own people, their district leaders, their community leaders and, by extension, a central government. 

All of those are necessary ingredients for success, all very doable because this is a military operation in support of a political objective and it is definitely definable.  It is definitely achievable, and certainly, we have the capacity to accomplish the mission here.  So I wanted you to understand the underpinning for this because many times we talked past each other in military words that were used and that these words are very important that we are using in terms of the tactical application on the ground.  Go ahead, Fred.

Frederick Kagan:  Thanks, General Keane, that you put extremely articulately what our problem was going to take far too long to say.  And so I will try to move quickly through a little bit of the details.  The plan is available online and I do not need to run through all of it.  Basically, as far as military forces are concerned there are five brigades operating in Baghdad.  There is one brigade to the north at Taji; there is one brigade to the south at Kalsu.  They are operating in a very important belt of villages that surround Baghdad and that provide safe havens to fighters so it is important that they not move around.  This plan we are proposing is to put an additional four combat brigades into Baghdad. 

Now this is all notional; I want you to understand if we had to run this plan right now and the information that we were able to derive from open sources was accurate, then this is what we would do.  But this is something that is not going to happen until spring at the earliest and the commander on the spot is going to have to make the decision about where exactly he wants to put forces.  This was just an exercise in showing that this is feasible.  We would add four brigades into Baghdad.  That would give us a total of nine American combat brigades in Baghdad, something on the order of 40,000 combat troops in Baghdad. 

As by a point of reference, Operation Together Forward, the recently failed experiments in clearing Baghdad brought into the country in the first phase an additional two brigades or about 7,000 troops; in the second phase, only one.  The phase that began in August and that has recently pretty much petered out only brought in one brigade, about 3500 soldiers additional, into Baghdad; we are proposing to bring in an additional 20,000.  So it is quite a significant increase over previous efforts and the reason is exactly as General Keane identified, because we plan to clear and hold.  We plan to stay in these neighborhoods, and so the force requirements are based on what would be necessary actually to do this right rather than sweeping through.  We intend to bring more brigades than that into country. 

We think we need to be concerned about Al Anbar.  Right now there are three American brigades, perhaps anywhere from 12,000-15,000 troops; that include two Marine regimens which we treat pretty much interchangeably with army brigades for purposes of strength.  Al Anbar obviously is not doing very well right now.  What we do not want to do is make the mistake of previous operations and pull force out of Al Anbar to do Baghdad because then we know that Al Anbar will deteriorate even more. 

We are also concerned about the possibility - the likelihood, in fact - that the insurgents in Baghdad that we attack will flee into Anbar and further destabilize it.  So our plan recommends taking an additional two Marine regimental combat teams and adding them to the force in Anbar, effectively doubling the Marine contingent there.  One of the reasons again is to protect the province from overflow from Baghdad.  Another reason is because in this war we have never yet pressed the enemy in two locations at the same time.  We think that might be a good idea.  It puts a lot more pressure on the enemy.  It will take them by surprise.  It will have them running around and will give us a greater opportunity to identify and capture or kill them.

General Keane:  Let me add something there.  The mission at Al Anbar is different than the mission in Baghdad.  The mission in Baghdad is to protect the people, which is very heavy on resources and it is a very decentralized operation and along the lines I just previously discussed. 

The mission in Al Anbar would focus on the enemy.  Because we are not provided enough troops there to protect the people, we would do that subsequent to the successful operation in Baghdad.  But the initial mission would be an aggressive containment of the enemy so that the mischief that they are capable of doing in that province, given the base of operations that the Al Qaeda have there and the Sunni mainstream insurgency base of operation that is there, that is were their strength is.  That is where the logistic bases are.  That is where their finances come into.  You would not want them to be able to counter the Baghdad operation and exploit that information around the world in terms of our capacity to, on the one hand, do something meaningful in Baghdad, but, on the other hand, have a dire situation in Al Anbar province and show up our vulnerability and our inability to do something there. 

So in our view, the supporting operation -- main effort is in Baghdad but the supporting operation in Al Anbar is a necessary ingredient for the Baghdad operations to succeed.

Frederick W. Kagan:  Absolutely.  Just moving quickly along so we can get… I want to get to Ken’s presentation and to questions.  Can we do this?  We took that question very, very seriously and we began with -- this slide looks terrible because it is an army slide.  This force flow, the arrow on top, is what is called the ARFORGEN model, how the military plans to move forces into Iraq overtime.  We got this, amusingly, off of Wikipedia; if you can believe that someone posted it but we did verify that this is in fact the plan.  The enemy can get just about anything they want off Wikipedia; fortunately, they do not have computers or anything like that. 

So basically each one of those symbols on this arrow represents one brigade and the army is basically planning to flow into Iraq - three brigades in the first quarter; four brigades in the second quarter; six brigades in the third quarter and three brigades in the fourth quarter.  Now the purpose of this ARFORGEN model is to keep the level of force in Iraq constant.  And so the military's plan is that for every brigade that goes in, one brigade comes out.  Well, if you want to generate a surge you can do one of two things.  You can either accelerate the deployment of some of these brigades or you can extent the tours of some of the brigades that have already gone in. 

We are proposing to do both in a relatively gentle fashion.  The four brigades that are scheduled to come in between April and June, in fact, most of them are required to be ready to deploy on the early part of that period.  We are proposing to accelerate them by a matter of a few weeks, so that instead of coming in that window they come in by mid-March when we want to begin this operation.  There are reasons why it is relatively easier to move at least two of those units forward - they are airborne units; they are lighter; their equipment sets are easier to recapitalize and they have been there.  But three of those brigades have been in Iraq before and so they do not need to get all -- if we need to hasten their training and stuff, that is not going to be a disaster; people are going to know what they are doing. 

And then you extend the tours of units that are already in country.  Army units currently serve a planned 12-month tour in Iraq.  We note that if you would increase those tours from 12 to 15 months in country, you could generate a surge and sustain it throughout 2007 of seven additional brigades coming in, in the first part of the year, and then there would be another smaller surge in September, another net two brigades.  More brigades than that would go in in September but we want to support a rotation as well; we do not want to keep people there forever. 

The 15-month tour is what we are aiming at.  The Marines are currently doing 7-month tours in Iraq and that is driven by the Marines’ desire primarily to maintain a match-up between their units and their ship deployments because the Marines see themselves fundamentally as an expeditionary force.  We think that it is more important to win in Iraq right now than to maintain that capability in that way in the short-term.  And so we propose Marine tours extended from 7 to 12 months, which is what the army is now doing.  These extensions are not unprecedented; three brigades have had their tours extended in recent memory.  Two of them have been extended for as long as 16 months; we are proposing to do it for 15 months.  This is the mechanism for generating the surge. 

There are a variety of other complexities.  If people are aware of them, want to bring them up, I am happy to talk about them in questions.  But this is definitely something that is doable if we chose to do it.  Let me just speak quickly to the question of reconstruction.  Reconstruction is vital.  I agree completely with General Keane; we all came to this conclusion.

 We are proposing a two-tier reconstruction package.  The first tier is that every time a unit goes through and clears a neighborhood, it works with the local leaders to identify what are the essential services that need to be provided, and then we work with them to start bringing those essential services to bear.  Military commanders will need to have the authority to spend money; we will need to put a lot of hard thinking into how to develop reliable audit trails to combat the endemic corruption in Iraq, but there must be an Iraqi face on this. 

We have the problem that organizations like the Badr Corps and the Mahdi Army are trying to use a Hezbollah model to establish their legitimacy.  They provide a very minimal level of services in places where people are providing no services and then people look to them as legitimate and owe them loyalty.  We need to get Iraqis accustomed to looking to their local government for providing services, and so we need to find ways of doing a reconstruction program as we clear these neighborhoods that will go in and do that. 

In addition, one of the worst things in my view about the way that we have been dealing with Iraq is that when we talk about incentivizing Iraqis we are using sticks exclusively - we want to threaten them; we are going to compel them; we are going to demand of them that they do things.  I do not think we are moving into a positive relationship with them. We would propose, therefore, a second-tier reconstruction program that focuses on positively incentivizing them. 

And what we would say is when the military commanders go and talk to local leadership about what is necessary in the first wave, they say, they will also ask “What would you want beyond that?  What is the next quality of life increment that we could help you with?  If you cooperate with us in maintaining security after the clear-and-hold operation then we will release that to you as well as a reward.”  That also helps you get around the problem that if you do not happen to clear a neighborhood, then it does not get any reconstruction program under the original plan which basically punishes neighborhoods for being good.  This gets around that because tier two could go into any neighborhood where there is basic security and then promises to keep it up.

General Keane:  Let me add something there.  If the military commanders in Iraq were here they would tell you that things have been disproportionately military in terms of applying all the elements of national power to the problem we have in Iraq.  And one of the real challenges that they have had is the lack of economic existence that truly makes a difference in people's lives and begins to create jobs and reduce the unemployment, the catastrophic unemployment that is in Iraq.  All of you who have been to Iraq know even visually what that looks like as you move around the country and see literally thousands and thousands of men at various ages from teenagers all the way to people in their sixties standing around idly.  You have got to get economic investment.  You have got to get small businesses created. 

All of this is doable.  We have to make the national commitment to do this.  This reconstruction piece, economic piece, if the government does not do this, this program cannot succeed militarily because it is the people that isolate the insurgents.  It is the people that isolate the enemy among them and to do that, they have to have the confidence that the government will be there for them.  The manifestation of that confidence is, one, their security, but, two, is the economic assistance to change the quality of their life experience.  And if this does not happen economically, then we will not succeed.

 And it is very important to understand that harsh reality.  Our government, along with the Maliki government, would have to make a genuine commitment for this program to succeed.  And to be quite frank about it, I think the only people that could administer this under the kind of crisis we are facing today would be the military.  You have to give them the resources to do it and let them administer the program and stop arguing with the State Department who is going to do this because the program we have now has not succeeded; it has failed.  And if you want some success put the resources in the hands of the commanders and let them execute it.

Frederick Kagan:  I’m going to run just quickly through another couple of points and then I'm going to turn it over.  One thing that I want to address is the issue of training.  We believe in training.  At the end of the day, the only way that we can leave Iraq is when Iraqis are capable of maintaining order in their own country; there is no question about that.  We disagree with many of the proposals that have been circulated around town for how to do training. 

The argument about embedded trainers misses a very important point.  The single best training that Iraqis in Iraq can get is operating together partnered with American units conducting operations; there is no substitute for that.  And it is the difference basically between being in a schoolhouse, which is what embedded trainers will do for you, and seeing what excellence and professionalism and restraint and skill looks like in a complicated environment.  That is what happened in Tal Afar; it is what is happening in places like Dora and a few other places.  It is an incredibly important component of training.  It will actually, in our view, it will accelerate the training and preparation of the Iraqi security forces the more we have them going out together with our units. 

And that is what we are proposing.  And we would like to bring in as many trained Iraqi units to Iraq into Baghdad to do this as we can.  We are not counting on that.  We are going to do the clear-and-hold even if they are not there but we believe that this will accelerate training and that that is a terrifically important element of this.  The objective is to get Baghdad outside of Sadr city largely under control by the end of 2007.  We think that that is feasible.  We think that it will be a bloody fight in the early part of the year.  The insurgents will try to stop us; the enemy will try to prevent us from doing this; we are confident that we can defeat them, and we have defeated them many times before.

 The problem is we have never exploited our success by securing the territory that we have cleared.  And that is, as General Keane has said, the critical difference here.  We think that we can do that and we think that by the end of 2007, we can have a very, very significant improvement in the security situation in Baghdad, which is vital.  After that, there are branches and sequels to this operation.  We can roll toward in to Anbar; we can roll in to Diyala; we can roll into Sadr City.  At that point if it becomes necessary to do that, there are lots of things we can do or if we are fortunate, we can begin drawing down. 

What we are trying to do is to train the Iraqi forces… continue training the Iraqi forces but also to bring the security situation of violence down to a level that the Iraqi forces will be able to maintain.  And that is a big problem with the Baker plan and with a lot of other plans; they address only improving the capabilities of the Iraqi forces and not managing the challenge that they face.  The danger of that is that you improve their capability but their capabilities are endlessly chasing a worsening security situation.  This is a plan for bringing that security situation within their reach. 

We think this is an incredibly important thing to do.  We think this is a decisive moment in the fight in Baghdad.  I think that we are going to have to find a way in the coming few months to begin to turn around the spiral of violence that we are looking at in Iraq, and the only way that that can happen in a timely fashion, the only way that it can happen reliably is if we use our forces and make a national commitment.  We are also calling on the president to increase the size of the ground forces.  We think that is an important component here to offset the morale effect of asking greater sacrifices from our soldiers.  I think that is an issue independent of Iraq.  We have needed to increase our ground forces for a long time.  Even if we were not in Iraq, they would be too small in my view.  I am happy to discuss that at greater length, but we are going to have to re-commit to winning this war with the recognition that the consequences of failure are intolerable. 

And I will turn it over to General Keane.  He would like to make a few remarks, and then Ken.

General Keane:  If you do not believe we are in a crisis, and the crisis being defined by the enemy and what they are doing and the explosion of violence in Iraq and particularly in Baghdad, then the mission that we allotted to ourselves could possibly work.  We began in 2004 with a change in campaign plan; 2003, we focused on the enemy; 2004, the campaign plan had six to seven lines of operations.  You are familiar with it and it had a stated political objective to establish a government duly elected by its people and the major military mission was to transition to the Iraqi security forces.  The problem with that -- the enemy voted on that plan in 2004.  And they increased the violence of 2004 over 2003 and they did the same in 2005 over 2004 and they did the same in 2006. 

It was a Sunni-based insurgency assisted by al-Qaeda that made a strategic decision after the establishment of an elected government that they had to fracture that government.  And that is why you see the violence in Baghdad.  They chose Baghdad as a center of gravity to fracture the government, to separate the people's confidence from this institution and to provoke what they believe would happen is an over-reaction on the part of the Shias, thus, the mosque operation in February and the follow-on violence in the Shia neighborhoods.  The Shia militia accommodated them with that reality and they are well on their way to fracturing this government. 

If you believe that that is not the case, that somehow the Maliki government can survive and we can train the Iraqi Security Forces with all sorts of assistance and we agree with many of the suggestions -- in terms of assisting that force - certainly those make sense - and you believe that the Maliki government somehow can hang on despite this ever-spiraling increase in violence and we are not in a crisis, then the old strategy may, in fact, work.  But I believe when you look at this through the harsh reality of the lens that is available to us day-in, day-out in Iraq and in Baghdad, that we have a very short time - six to eight months - to solve this problem. 

And in my mind, the political situation in and of itself cannot solve it.  They are not capable of stemming the violence.  No amount of flogging Malaki will give him -- he has no leverage with the Shia militias, whatsoever.  One of the things you have to realize, two-and-a-half years, the Shia militias by and large stayed behind their fences and, one, expected us to protect the people assisted by the coalition and the Iraqi security forces; the harsh reality is we did not.  And now they are out on the streets provoking the situation for political gain, to be sure, under the guise of protecting their people.  But they have no issue…they have no issue whatsoever if we were protecting their people.  It is not that they would not be jockeying for political advancement by Sadr and others; they would be but you would not have thousands of militia on the streets because there would be no justification for that. 

So it is very important to understand that distinction and that is why I do not believe you should be distracted by what the Shia militias are doing, and right now we are completely distracted by it.  You focus on what caused this.  What the cause here is the Sunni mainstream insurgency; it is not the al-Qaeda.  The Sunni mainstream insurgency wants to destroy this government and they have different motivations, as you know.  We will get into all of them but they are different in terms of the formal regime elements in the Sunni mainstream. 

And what you have to do is force a political solution through military coercion.  You want the mainstream insurgents to recognize that they cannot win.  We knew as late as 2004 that they believed that they were winning.  And what is to stop them in 2005 from thinking that and certainly in 2006?  They believe they are well on their way to winning and the only way you have to change that is you have to show them that this government can succeed; therefore, you want the mainstream insurgents to seek a political accommodation.  Why would they do that now, given the fact that they believe they are winning, the political will is eroding in the United States, lots of people are talking about when the United States will pull out?  These are all strategic objectives that they wanted to achieve:  erosion of the American people's will and the eventual pullout of the US forces. 

These things are beginning to happen.  So the Sunni mainstream insurgents believe they are winning and all the evidence points to the fact that they are correct.  So the issue is is there something militarily we can do to change this situation?   And the answer to that is a resounding yes.  This is definable in Baghdad; it is achievable.  And by that you start to have some success.  You enable Maliki to have leverage with the Shia militia to pull them back.  It will not happen immediately because these guys are not going to believe that we are really going to protect the people because we have not done that in the past.  It will take a number of weeks to demonstrate that to them. 

A couple of other realities are that this will not break the army and the marine corp.  I'm not suggesting it is not hard; it is.  And we are not talking about something that we should talk about, and that is the human dimension of this.  I do not know, except at the very beginning of our nation, when a small group of people fought against a much larger force to establish this great nation.  When we have asked so much of so few to do so much for the rest of us -- and that is what is happening with the United States military here.  And despite the frustrations that they have in dealing with this problem, their morale, their dedication… they are willing to sacrifice and they are willing to give up everything they care about in their lives for the sake of mission and the sake of duty is truly remarkable. 

So we have to help them and we have to help grow this military because it is much too small.  The Army and the Marine Corps have to grow and we have to start now.  The Army has an authorization to grow temporarily; we should make it permanent and extend that to a much larger force.  The sooner we start growing it, the sooner we start… able to take advantage of that and provide some relief to the forces that are committed.  The United States army, in particular, needs access to the Guard and Reserves. 

We have a policy right now that states that once a unit is committed and the people in that unit are committed, they are not going to be called again, unless they are volunteers.  As a result of that, the Guard and Reserve participation, which peaked in 2004 and 2005 at 45 percent of the ground strength, is now down to 20 percent or less.  And I would suggest that would have to increase to some degree.  The Chief of Staff of the Army needs access to the Guard and Reserve in a way that he does not have access to now because second tours are volunteers only.  And it is much more difficult to put those organizations together coming from fifty states as it is coming from a few states because that is what we are currently doing.  I mean, figuratively speaking; I'm sure it is not 50 states for every unit but you understand the call goes to everyone.  If you want to come and participate with a unit that is leaving from Utah that is going back on a second tour, it has to be volunteers. 

We cannot run an operation of this magnitude and scale in terms of importance to the nation based on that.  We have to be able to use the Guard and Reserves who are volunteers in their service and deploy them on a required basis as volunteers to their service, not on a mission-by-mission basis; we have to stop that.  And those are some of the additional realities that are necessary here for us, I think, to be successful. 

The equipment challenge in the Army is real, and some of you out in this audience are very knowledgeable about it.  That is a serious problem.  It is beginning to be addressed in the supplementals in a comprehensive way and also in the 2008 budget.  But even with that, as you well know, the army got $121.8 million, I think it is, out of $138 million that is required, so they still did not get all that money.  That has to stop.  They have to get fully-funded to be able to assist with the problems and challenges that they have.  Now this will strain them, equipment-wise; but if we have to do it, it can be done.  Now, we have to move equipment around; we may even have to use some Guard equipment that is not being used to do it.  But it can be done. 

I'm not saying it is not challenging and it will not break the service in my view, as well.  The fact of the matter is the United States military exists to protect the national interest of this great nation of ours and this is certainly in our national interest.  Thank you.

Kenneth Pollack:  Thank you, Fred.  Thank you, General Keane.  It is a great pleasure to be back here at AEI, something I'm not certain I ever would have expected myself to say.  I'm here to give kind of an oblique endorsement to this plan;  “oblique,” because it does not come exactly from the direction that I think you are going to expect, although let me start with a somewhat more direct one.  As I think at least a number of you are aware, at the end of 2005 I led a team at Brookings, a totally non-partisan team made of people with expertise in military affairs, Iraq, reconstruction, nation-building, etcetera.  We put together a 150-page report in February of this year which looks remarkably like the plan that Fred’s team put together.  The main thrust is effectively the same - the emphasis on traditional counter-insurgency and stability operations; the emphasis on tying economic and political development with military operations, and virtually all the tactics are the same. 

There are some differences in different places but, in all honesty, even at the level of the details, the plans are far more similar than they are different.  And I think that it is just striking that you could have two different groups of people coming from two very different institutions with two very different sets of membership both coming to effectively the same set of conclusions about what can work in Iraq, what would be the best course of action if we could do it.  So that is the first point that I think is worth making. 

And again if you look at ours, look at Fred's, you will see some differences in particular.  We put a little more emphasis talking about the political…just talking about it; I'm not saying we emphasized it more.  We just spent more time working at the details on the political and economic side.  What Fred has really… and his team has really brought to this, and I think is a very useful contribution, is doing a lot more work on the side of the ability of the United States to sustain forces in Iraq and in fact, to sustain a larger presence in Iraq, which I think is an extremely important contribution to the debate. 

And it is the debate in many ways which drove my work after that report, which is called “The Switch in Time,” came out because after the report was done -- and we have put it out there.  It was a monumental effort which required an enormous amount of work, including some trips to Iraq and Tampa [phonetic] by myself.  I kind of look at it and said, “Well, I'm very comfortable with this.  I think if we were ever to do it, we would have a pretty high chance of succeeding, but we do not have a whole lot of confidence to go and actually do it”. 

And so at that point in time in February I turned to a different part of the Iraq problem, which was the consequence of failure.  And that is really why Fred asked me to come and talk to you because my work on that with my good colleague, good friend, colleague Daniel Byman is pretty much done and we will come out with a report from Brookings in January, which will be the basis of our work over the past ten, eleven months. 

What we did was a pretty traditional academic study.  We looked at about 12 different cases of recent civil wars and we simply asked a few questions:  How did they start?  What was the impact that they had on their neighbors and on the rest of the region in which they were fought?  And how did they end, with an eye toward trying to assess what a full-scale civil war in Iraq… what kind of impact a full-scale civil war in Iraq could have on the region?  And, really, we were asking that question because where we saw the debate going and, unfortunately, where we saw US operations in Iraq headed toward was toward greater and greater irrelevance and to greater and greater violence and further and further toward all-out civil war in Iraq.  And if that were the case, we recognized that we would certainly have a humanitarian tragedy on our hands. 

But we also recognize that one of the most important things at that point in time would be what would the damage to American interests be?  And I think for me, again, this is where I have been most disappointed in the public debate over Iraq, with a lot of the people who oppose continued involvement in Iraq particularly but not limited to many in my own party, basically assuming, asserting that there would not be any consequences from withdrawal in Iraq.  We wanted to look hard and ask the question of what could the consequences from withdrawal in Iraq be.  So we looked at about a dozen different cases of civil war and we, in particular, focused on what we call… typically, it is called “spillover,” which is the ability of civil wars… the impact of civil wars on countries in the neighborhood. 

Now I'm going to go through this very quickly.  As I said, our full report will come out next month and when that report comes out, I promise you will all have much greater opportunities to question me about it and see the report, et cetera.  But what Fred really wanted me to do was to kind of sketch out very briefly, as a way of putting on the table what the potential consequences of our failure in Iraq could be.  What I say about spillover is that spillover is a constant in civil wars.  We were very hard-pressed to find a civil war where there was no spillover. 

Now the intensity of spillover can vary very significantly.  It can vary from consequences that are painful, that are irritating, that are unpleasant but bearable; at the other end of the spectrum, they can get up to the point where they are truly catastrophic.  And one of things that we found that was most frightening about civil wars is that civil wars often degenerate into regional wars and civil wars spread.  A civil war in one country can cause a civil war in another country.  And just to give you a quick example of that, the one that comes most readily to mind because it is a part I worked on all the time is the civil war that broke out in Mandatory Palestine in about 1929 between the Jews and the Palestinians living there; and, of course, that is a civil war which we have to this day. 

The continuation of that is the Israeli-Palestinian struggle which we continue to see played out.  It is worth pointing out that that civil war in Mandatory Palestine temporarily resolved by the U.N. Partition and then the Israeli victory in 1948, then caused a civil war in Jordan in 1970-1971, which then caused a civil war in Lebanon in 1975, which then caused a civil war in Syria in 1976.  And, again, there are other examples of this around the world.  So civil wars at the far end of the spectrum really can be catastrophic.  And what is more, we found that the intensity of spillover does seem to be directly correlated with the intensity of the civil war, so the worse the civil war, the worse the effects of spillover. 

Iraq seems to have all of the trademarks of being a very bad case of spillover.  When we looked for factors that enabled spillover, that made spillover bad, Iraq seemed to have them all in spades, things like a history of cross-border conflict, ethnic and religious groups spanning borders, similar ethnic and religious compositions in neighboring states and a range of other factors; Iraq has got them all.  And that is just a way of saying that I cannot promise you that if we pull out of Iraq and Iraq collapses into civil war that the entire neighborhood is going to go up in flames.  But it is a way of saying that the evidence does not look good, that it will not. 

Now the spillover itself, again, I am not going to go into too much detail; I will just tick off some of the most important manifestations of spillover that we identified, the first of which is refugees -- are six basically.  Refugees are the first, and here, again, we were thinking of refugees not in the humanitarian sense; refugees are a major humanitarian issue but from a purely strategic perspective we need to recognize that refugees can be a primary element of the spread of civil wars. 

Large numbers of refugees can change the ethnic or religious makeup in the country to which they emigrate.  Refugees are also the primary pool of recruitment for groups still within the civil war.  Refugees constitute an enormous group of extremely embittered people.  That is where the insurgents, that is where the militias, that is where the terrorists go to recruit.  And so as result, the host government either has to protect the refugees from groups coming back across the border out of the civil war, or disarm them, neither of which is a very attractive option for them, both of which can cause all kinds of problems.  And again it was the Palestinian refugees coming out of Mandatory Palestine which are what spread civil war from Mandatory Palestine to Jordan to Lebanon. 

Another good example of that is how the Rwandan civil war spread to Congo; and Congo now, as you hear many people talk about, is kind of a world war in sub-Saharan Africa.  The Congolese civil war has been absolutely catastrophic for sub-Saharan Africa and it began largely because of refugees from the Rwandan civil war. 

Another form of spillover, terrorism.  Terrorism seems to go hand-in-hand with all-out civil wars; that is not to say that every nasty terrorist group in the world was born of a civil war, but it is kind of remarkable to think how many have - the GIA of Algeria, the IRA, the PLO, Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda, all of them born of civil wars. 

And there are more examples - the Tamil Tigers - you can keep going on and on. 

Now, not every nasty terrorist group out there but a surprising number of them, a third form of spillover, radicalization of populations.  This is a really amorphous one.  It is hard to get your arms around but it is one that we found was very consistent and in [indiscernible] cases, could be the most dangerous of all, one of the most dangerous of all.  And it is basically the ability of civil wars to cause neighboring populations to become highly agitated and highly mobilized by events in the civil war. 

Typically, we see it in two different forms.  I'm just going to go through this very quickly.  In one case, the fight within the civil war gets transferred to another state.  So if for example, the Sunni-Shia fight that you are seeing in Iraq is being transferred to states in the Gulf; Saudi Sunnis, Saudi Shia are experiencing all kinds of tensions.  So is the case in Kuwait, so is the case in Bahrain, and in recent days, if you have been paying attention to the newspapers, you have been seeing officials from all of these countries warning of exactly that danger.  The other manifestation of this is that one or another of the group, typically the group that runs the country, demands that the government intervene in the civil war, to do something to protect their co-religionists, their co-ethnics in that country; again, something that you are seeing already played out in the Gulf. 

The fourth manifestation we call “secession breeding secessionism.”  You often hear this from governments; you will have a group that wants to split off and the government will say, “My God, we cannot let that happen because if these people go, everyone will want to go.”  Well, what we found when we are looking at these civil wars was that that actually does happen and you do see these patterns; in particular, if the first group to start to secede [indiscernible] declare independence seems to enjoy success, it really does encourage copycats. 

The best example of this was Yugoslavia where, after 1991, the Slovenians declared independence.  The moment the Slovenians did that forced the Croats to do so.  When the Croats did it that forced the Bosnians to do it.  And after the Bosnians and Croats and Slovenians had done it, it eventually convinced the Kosovar Albanians, and their degree of success then convinced Macedonian Albanians to try to do the same thing.  So you literally did have a domino effect of secession and there are other places as well in Caucasus, where Chechnya, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh all influenced each other as well. 

The fifth form of spillover, well obviously, the first four caused real problems for the neighboring governments.  And frequently, what you see, almost invariably what you see, is that the neighboring governments start to intervene in the civil war itself, and that is how civil war goes from being civil war to becoming regional war.  Now in almost every case they tried to do it clandestinely; they tried to do it covertly through their intelligence services.  Typically what you find is that does not last because either one group starts to win, and that convinces the other countries that they need to actually ratchet up, escalate their involvement, typically to conventional levels to actually make up for the success that their enemy is having; or their proxy fails, and this is just as frequent. 

The proxy cannot do what the country in question wanted.  The proxy does not have the strength to do so, or it is too independent. Moreover, these proxies - and we should keep that in mind when we talk about the Shia militias in Iraq - typically are not the puppets of the governments that are backing them and they typically do things in a fairly independent fashion.  And so what you frequently see is groups who are funding different groups within the civil war for one reason or another; they move… they shift to conventional invasions.  Best example of that, again, the Lebanese civil war, where the Syrians initially began with proxies. 

When they realized their proxies cannot do it, they invade.  That triggers the Israeli interventions, again, first using proxies.  When that becomes impossible for them, first they move in Operation Litani; most of it deals with the terrorism threat.  Later in 1982 they invade the country to try to push out the Syrians and re-order Lebanese society.  Again, this is something very, very common in it. 

Again, to go back to the Congo example, where 7 African countries invaded Congo at different points in time.  And then the final, the last form of spillover that we identified… and this seems almost anti-climactic, but it is worth keeping in mind, are economic problems.  Civil wars are really bad for business, okay?  Civil wars’ instability drives away trade.  They disrupt supplier relationships.  They drive away foreign investments.  They impose all kinds of costs on the different governments who are trying to do all these things - deal with refugees, fight terrorism, placate their population, intervene in the civil war.  And beyond that, there are second-order effects in terms of over-all damage to the regional economy, difficulties with international trade organizations, and the list goes on and on. 

Now as I said, I cannot promise you that all of this is going to happen in Iraq, but what is noteworthy, what Dan and I noticed as we were doing this was all of this is already happening to a greater or a lesser extent in Iraq.  You can find… we have found - and it will be in our report - examples of every single one of these problems with Iraq.  Refugees, we got 2 million Iraqi refugees out there; terrorism, Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia right now is only one among many, and we now have reports that Hezbollah is becoming active in Iraq.  We should assume that they are going to get Sunni groups, Shia groups.  And let us not forget the PKK, which was dead 3 years ago, and has now made a major resurgence in Northern Iraq. 

I talked about the radicalization you are seeing all around the region.  The secession movements, we all know where that starts from; that starts with the Kurds.  Fortunately, the Kurds are actually behaving in the most statesman-like fashion you could have imagined because they understand this problem and they do not want to move precipitously.  And the intervention, we are already seeing it.  The Iranians are in there supporting a variety of Shia groups, the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, the Jordanians are in there supporting a variety of Sunni groups and you are getting increasingly vocal statements, in particular from the Saudis, saying, “If you Americans do not get your act together, we are going to do it for you and we are going to back the Sunnis because we are not going to let the Iranian-backed militias take over.” 

Now, as kind of a final point on my recent work, what would I say is that, first, the purpose of all this was not simply to talk about, “Gee, Iraq could get terrible if we left;” it was actually to look at the question of what could we do about it.  Was there a third alternative?  Typically, people have posed two choices.  Tom Friedman, most recently, that we have a choice of either staying or leaving.  Well, what Dan and I wanted to look at was could we come up with a third alternative?  Could we come up with an alternative of containing?  That is, we would pull out of the cities, but find other ways to prevent the spillover from a civil war in Iraq from affecting the other states of the region. 

Effectively saying, we have failed in Iraq - it is a humanitarian tragedy, but the strategic catastrophe would be allowing it to affect the rest of the region.  And again, much of the report, which will come out next month, talks about how you might try to do containment.  I am not going to walk you through any of those steps.  I will simply say that while I think containment may end up being our least bad option, it is a bad option, okay?  We came up with a dozen different things that the United States can and should try to do if we are stuck with this situation. 

Honestly, all of them are deeply problematic.  And there was another thing that emerged from this study of recent civil wars, was that other countries had tried to contain the spillover of civil war and had invariably failed.  It is very hard to contain spillover when spillover gets intense.  And that is why it brings me back, as kind of my conclusion, to the work that Fred and Gen. Keane and his group have done because when I look at this containment option, it really does not look great to me.  It looks better to me than simply walking away from Iraq and hoping that there will not be spillover or hoping that the spillover really will not have much of an impact on the region, but it is not a great option.  And it is what keeps driving me back to this question of can we stay?  Can we actually make this work?  Can we do it better so that we do not ever have to get to the point where we are asking can we make containment work? 

At the end of the day, walking away from Iraq or even trying to contain it would be a grand social science experiment.  Given the history out there, again, I cannot demonstrate… I cannot prove to you that social science experiment would fail catastrophically.  But the risks, the warnings of history are stark enough to me, that I would really prefer not to find out.

Frederick W. Kagan:  Thank you Ken, thank you General Keane.  This is a defining moment in American history, I believe and I think we all believe.  I think that there are a lot of people who are seeing the pains that this war is imposing on the military and I see them and they upset me gravely.  There are a lot of people who are seeing the pains that this is imposing on the nation, at least, in the form of political debate that is getting increasingly anguished, and there is a lot of desire to end the pain. 

Some people are imagining that if we simply leave, then we can end the pain for ourselves, at least for now.  And I think what Ken's work shows is what we have long felt, looking at this, that it will not end the pain, that there is simply -- it is a mirage; it is an oasis that is not there.  We simply -- leaving is not going to make the anguish stop.  What we must do now is not to choose defeat because it seems, wrongly, to be more palatable, because it will end the pain.  We must instead do something which we really can do and we are more convinced of that than ever having gone through this exercise, which is to choose victory.  And with that, I will take a few questions.  Please, our rules are please wait for the microphone, identify yourself and actually ask a question.

Michael:  [Inaudible] reports in which the United States would not withdraw but that this would be a year of transition to the ISF and some significant number of the brigade combat teams in Iraq would essentially be broken apart and used as trainers for the Iraqi forces.  The residual of these 15 brigade combat teams would remain in the country and carry on tasks and we begin to draw down in 2008, but the emphasis would be on enabling the Iraqi forces this year not on bringing additional American combat forces to Iraq, with the ultimate goal of pulling out of Baghdad to the periphery. 

What would be your assessment of this approach, which is again, not a withdrawal model, but a transition model as put forward by Gen. Casey? 

And to Fred Kagan, just an administrative question:  All those participants that are listed in the final slide, the retired military, in addition to Gen. Keane, did they endorse the report, or did they not endorse it?  There is a little asterisk on the bottom saying not all the participants necessarily endorse it.  Did the retired military listed there are all endorse it?

Frederick W. Kagan:  Let me deal with the first part of that and then I will ask Gen. Keane to deal with the second part.  Some of these people are continuing as service contractors for various different agencies and so it was not felt that it was appropriate to put their names on this report, which might create difficulties with their agencies.  They do, in my view, support this; this was not a document where we required consensus to do it, but we had consensus as we did it.  I invite you to ask any of them how they felt about this, but, yes, the military planners were the people who came up with this plan - Colonel Armstrong and Major Dwyer.  General Keane can speak for himself about whether he endorses it.  I will leave to Gen. Barno to speak for himself on that matter as well.  But I have said that to you with a great deal of comfort and confidence.

General Keane:  Michael, getting back to your question, you know, at the heart of that is probably a disagreement in terms of how large is the crisis we are dealing with, and then what the solution is for it.  In my own mind, the crisis we are in is very serious because it is leading to the fracturing of the government.  I have always applauded the strategy to strengthen the Iraqi security forces to bring them on as quickly as possible.  But after the strategic decision that took place in the beginning of this year in 2006 all of my views changed because Baghdad was exploding. 

The Sunnis and the Al-Qaeda drove it; they brought the Shias out, and it put all of that strategy at risk.  And therefore, anyway that we are just trying to strengthen the Iraqi security forces in the near term will not solve the basic problem.  That is my issue with this, is that we can strengthen those forces and there are a number ways to do it and that is a way to do it.  I think the best way to do it is to select quality advisors who have experience, both as officers and NCO's.  They are some of the very best that we have in our services; this is the Marine Corp and the Army.  We are selecting people who are not promotion risks.  They are going to be advanced because we hold their service to be valued.  They have experience in Iraq, and then we put them through a training program that has some degree of sophistication to it in transitioning from being a fighter to an advisor. 

 We have found, based in our experience in the past that we had an eight-month long training program for our advisors going into Vietnam with some language familiarity as well.  So I think that is the best program.  I would rather vote for more advisors, better trained, better selected in the long-term health of the Iraqi security forces than that operation, which I think is a rush to do something that probably will not be done that well. And it does not deal with the basic issue; the basic issue is insecurity and instability in the country, manifested in Baghdad, that those Iraqi forces in and of themselves will not be able to deal with. 

Look at the reality of it - we have 157,000-plus coalition forces assisted by 300,000 Iraqi security forces, combined 450,000 and we have not been able to stop the ever-increasing level of violence each succeeding year from the time that we arrived there in the spring of 2003.  That is the basic issue and dilemma we are dealing with, and so it tells you that we have a numbers problem for sure with the Iraqi security forces; they have to grow much larger in size in my view.  And we also have a quality problem with those forces as well.  And underpinning that, as you well know -- many of you are conversant on this. 

At any given day in an Army unit, which is the strongest of the Iraqi security forces, on average, we have about 35 percent attrition in that unit, people who are not there because they are absent-without-leave and those who are absent-with-leave; and it numbers, on average, about 35 percent.  That is a harsh reality that we also have found has become an unwelcome standard, and that has to be realized also when we are trying to quantify this problem.

Frederick Kagan:  It is really important to think about timelines and [audio glitch] to do, someone used to go back to General Casey and ask him this question:  What is the timeline, if you embed, for the improvement in the capability of the Iraqi Army?  How long is it going to -- because, you know, it is going to take time to break up BCT's.  It is going to take time for them to get to their units.  It is going to take time for them to start training, especially because they have not been trained to do that.  It is going to take longer for them to make a significant impact. 

This is just a matter of throwing numbers at a problem, but these are not, these are great fighters that we are sending out there, but they have not been prepared for the mission, so it is going to proceed more slowly and less effectively.  How many months is it going to be until you start to have Iraqi army units that are actually performing better?  And in the meantime, you have taken our combat soldiers off the streets so that they are not patrolling and they are providing less security even than we already are. 

Why would not the security situation get worse?  Of course, it will.  So you need to look at those two timelines and what I do not see in this plan is any honest appraisal of how those timelines mesh, because it looks to me as though this is a recipe for letting the violence get a lot worse over a matter of months.  Months later we will start to see an improvement in the Iraqi forces, which I think will be much more gradual than everyone imagines.  And I do not see how these two catch up to each other.  In the meantime, I fear that the rising violence in the short-term may break the last will that this country has, and that Iraq has, to continue this fight in this way.  I just think it is a matter -- it could have been -- we could have worked at some point, but at this stage, the timelines simply do not make this feasible.

Gary Mitchell:  Thanks.  Gary Mitchell from the Mitchell Report.  I want to start by saying to Fred that this has been as helpful and comprehensive a presentation, yours and Ken’s, as I have seen on this subject matter.  It is really helpful, but I think about the corporate model.  Corporation is in deep trouble; it calls in McKinsey, Bane or whoever.  They perform a service much like the one that you just performed and it recommends a series of strategic steps that the corporation needs to take in order to save itself.  In the corporate model, when you are in this kind of trouble, the first thing that goes is the Chief Executive Officer.  

I have a two-part question.  I mean it seriously.  First, in your discussions, was there any discussion about whether, no matter what plan is developed, the leadership team that is in place today is capable of pulling this off?  Because there is absolutely nothing in their background in the time they have been in office, nothing that suggests that they can, or they will.  So, I am interested in whether you dealt with that question.  And second, Gen. Keane, you said that it has not been the mission of the military to do this secure-and-hold, whatever the right terminology is.  I could swear that at least a year ago, I remember Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and others in the administration saying that is precisely what we were doing.  Which brings me to the two components of this question as far as I am concerned, which is the strategy is interesting.  But it is not relevant if the leadership team cannot pull it off, and it is also at risk because of a credibility issue that I think is staring us in the face.

Frederick Kagan:  Condoleeza Rice said that; Rumsfeld at various points in public and on private comments made it clear that that did not reflect his view.  When you looked at what was going on the ground militarily, it did not reflect US military practice.  The president keeps talking about Clear, Hold and Build; he just did it again, which shows to me that he understands what needs to be done and it shows to me that there is a breakdown somewhere in the chain where his desire for what should be happening is not being implemented in the way that I think he would like it to be. 

I am not going to stand here and make a call for what one particular individual should do in leadership positions.  I would note that, in general, such calls during this administration have been spectacularly counter-productive, and so I am not going to stand up here and say the president needs to fire this guy and that guy and replace him with this guy and that guy.  What I am going to say is the president needs to make his own independent evaluation - listening to the military, listening to other people, listening perhaps to more people than the military than he has in the past, soliciting a lot of professional opinion about this.  He is going to have to make his own evaluation about what strategy we need to pursue.  He then has to have a conversation with the commanders that he has and the other commanders that he might choose and from among them choose the team that is the best for this mission.  That is what he is going to have to do. 

But to begin with, he is going to have to decide what strategy he wants to follow and put together a team that can do it.  That is the only way these things can work.  General Keane?

Peter Spiegel:  Peter Spiegel with the Los Angeles Times.  Both of you mentioned Tal Afar.  A lot of us who covered the Pentagon have gone around and asked people in the Pentagon about that.  Why is that not repeated elsewhere?  The answer you get back frequently is how many H.R. McMasters are there in the US Army?  And that kind of operation is so complex and so difficult that there may not be the caliber of leadership at that level, at the brigade commander level, at the battalion commander level to execute what you guys are talking about.  Can both Gen. Keane and Fred Kagan address that?

General Keane:  Well, first of all, what McMasters essentially did in Tal Afar is now rapidly becoming the doctrine in the United States Marine Corps and the United States Army in terms of how to conduct counter insurgency.  I think that document is in final draft now.  It is a joint document in the sense that the Marine Corps and the Army are developing it together.  Quantico and Fort Leavenworth have both participated in it.  Some of you probably have seen advance copies of it.  And it is much more than what McMasters did in terms of understanding how to deal irregular warfare, and in this case, how to deal with insurgencies. 

So, one is becoming the doctrine of the United States Marine Corps and the United States Army, which means that officers and NCO's will be educated on that doctrine because we take it seriously in a way that we have not educated them since the end of the Vietnam War.  Secondly then, training will be done to practice those techniques and those procedures as well.  Some of that is being done now, obviously in train ops before people go to the conflict itself.  So I have great confidence in the quality of the people who are there once they are educated and trained to conduct the operations. 

Certainly, I think if you are talking to many of the officers in the Marine Corps and the Army, this has more to do with what the mission is than whether they have the skills and how to do it.  I am convinced the force that is in being right now can execute it.  It has to do with the mission, not with the quality of the leaders there. 

Now, with McMasters, I mean, he just through sheer force of will, he did something he thought was right despite the fact that the overall mission was not that.  And so he worked on training the Iraqi security forces, but also he was determined to protect the people because he felt that was the issue.  And he got some rather extraordinary results as a result of that.  He did both; he accomplished the mission he was assigned, but he also took on the additional mission of protecting the people and got some remarkable results as a result of that. 

Frederick Kagan:  And you know, just to point out, I will take nothing away from H.R. as a genius; I think he is a military genius and also a good friend.  There is the genius that is required to figure out how to do something that no one has figured out how to do before in a given war [sounds like]; and then there is the level of skill required to execute that once you know what to do.  I think H.R. and other commanders have already blazed a sufficient trail here that not… it is being written into doctrine, but also there are a lot of commanders on the ground that I have talked to and that I hear from who want to do this.  I mean, they get it and it may not be executed to the quite the same level of skill that H.R. executed.  It is because a few people can reach that.  But this is not something that requires genius and perfection in order to succeed.

Yasmine Rassam:  Hi, I am Yasmine Rassam from Independent Women's Forum, I have a question for Mister Keane.  I think… just to clarify that you said that the first mission would be to clear and hold the areas in Baghdad and then to also fortify the forces in Al Anbar and to contain them at the same time.  Why would we not go [indiscernible] Iraqi.  I do not understand the term “mainstream insurgents.”  We call them “terrorists,” actually, Sunni Terrorists.  Why not go in and take them out at the same time, thereby cutting out all their supplies and all of the support to the Sunni Terrorists in Baghdad?

General Keane:  Because killing insurgents is not enough. When you look at the history of counter-insurgency, you take on the primary mission to kill insurgents; that is, kill or capture them.  The difficulty is who are they and where are they is the problem; and identifying them for what they are, so that you could kill or capture them.

 And in an urban insurgency, which I believe is the most challenging kind of an insurgency to deal with because they live so much among the people -- they are not in an enclave removed from people, up in a jungle some place or in a mountainous region where you could begin to isolate them.  They are living every single day.  I mean, they are a merchant one day, another person another day, and then at night they are an insurgent or during the day they are.  So the only successful way to defeat insurgents who are living among the people is for the people themselves to reject them. 

That is the basic premise.  Not that you do not hold their behavior liable; you do.  You kill and capture them whenever you can.  But the basic premise is they get isolated not by you, the military force; they get isolated by the very people who are supporting them.  You have to turn the people to the goals and objectives that the government is trying to achieve, at least to see that this government is going to stay; it is not going away.  And then the insurgents themselves, they have a couple of choices.  They can just fade away and leave the battlefield, which has happened; they can make a political accommodation, which has also happened.  In either of those, they lose in the sense that the insurgency is no longer being prosecuted and the people are no longer suffering. 

So in Al Anbar, why do we not just go into Al Anbar and deal with this?  The problem is -- I agree with you.  If the Sunni-based insurgency did not decide to provoke the operation in Baghdad that we have all been witnessing since February, the logical place to do what we are suggesting here would have been Al-Anbar; I completely agree that is the place to go to start.  But the enemy has chosen Baghdad as the center of gravity and we are where we are.  And we have that problem and we cannot ignore it.  So, then it becomes a question of how much resources do we have to apply against the problem? 

So we go to Baghdad first and do it there, and we have a supporting operation at Al-Anbar, just to keep the level of mischief down - and that is an understated term there - and then turn our resources on Al-Anbar after we are able to deal with Baghdad successfully.  If we had a choice and this was January of 2006, Al Anbar would have been the place to start.  I agree with that.

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