American Enterprise Institute

April 25, 2007

[Edited transcript from audio tapes]

1:45 p.m.	Registration
2:00	Presenter:	Frederick W. Kagan, AEI
3:30	Adjournment

Proceedings:

Frederick Kagan:  Good afternoon, everyone.  Thank you all very much for coming.  I always appreciate anyone who wants to come out and talk seriously about this extremely important subject and I hope we can have a good interchange this afternoon about Iraq free of polemics, free of some of the heat and some of the hyperbole that is increasingly, unfortunately, undermining the quality of the debate, I fear, on this topic.

I’m here today to release the second phase of the Iraq Planning Group’s report, which we call “Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq.”  Before I do that, I’d like to just do two things quickly.  One is to recognize and thank Colin Monaghan and Jonathan Bronitsky and Adrian Myers for their magnificent assistance throughout this project, which has really been quite a significant undertaking.  We could not have done it without their terrific support.

Second, before I get into some of the details of the report, I’d like to offer you a few thoughts about where we are in Iraq right now and what I think the prospects are.  After all, this set of proposals that we have, which is designed to support the ongoing security effort in Iraq, is only significant if there’s really a prospect for success.  We think that these efforts will contribute to that but I do think it’s a valid question, how are we doing right now, as we think about what else we should be doing to move forward.

The short answer to that question is that I’m confident that victory still is possible.  I’m confident that success is still possible in Iraq and I believe that we are measurably closer to it today than we were in December 2006.  Above all, I think that whereas in late 2006, all or most of the trend lines were bad and things were getting worse, now we have had a number of very significant improvements in the situation and some of the trend lines have started to turn around.

In particular, I think that it’s worthwhile recognizing that the situation in Al Anbar Province and within the Sunni community in Iraq in general has been transformed from what it was six months ago.  You may recall that in the middle of last year, the Marine commander in Anbar pretty much wrote the province off and said pretty much it’s hopeless and we just don’t think we’re going to be able to get this under control.  He said it was out of control and he did not see any way of really reversing that.  That made big news.  We should also remember the importance of this, because from late 2003 through early 2006, we believed that the Sunni insurgency was the most important thing that was going on.  It was based in Anbar and we really were getting no traction there.

That situation has turned around very, very dramatically.  There is now an organization of Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar Province who have come together to oppose Al Qaeda, that have reached out to the Maliki government, and that have – and this is the most important thing in many respects – begun to send their sons into the local police forces and even into the Iraqi Army for the purpose of fighting Al Qaeda. They have been fighting and dying against this terrorist organization.

That’s incredibly important.  The Sunni insurgency has always been one of the most important elements of the problem in Iraq.  It’s not separable from the sectarian violence because one of the reasons why you had Shi’a attacks on Sunni populations was because of fear of the Sunni insurgency as well as the atrocities that Al Qaeda has been committing.

The other thing that’s very important about this is that Al Qaeda had been serving de facto as one of the most significant militia arms of the Sunni insurgency.  To the extent that the Sunni Arab community in Iraq was seeking a military solution to its problem, either to regain control of the country, as some Sunnis wanted and believed they could do, or simply to gain a better bargaining position, Al Qaeda played a very important role in providing them with the muscle to do that.  Turning against Al Qaeda dramatically decreases the military option that the Sunni community in Iraq actually has.  It means de facto that increasing numbers of Sunni leaders are basically committing to trying to make the political process work.  That’s an incredibly positive development.

The tragic irony of this is that of course Al Qaeda is not interested in losing.  It has responded to these developments in Anbar and they have also begun to occur in Salah-ad-Din and Diyala provinces as well.  It has responded with a campaign of spectacular attacks aimed against the Sunni population.  So we have seen increasing numbers of Al Qaeda attacks in Anbar Province directed at Sunni leaders and Sunni civilians for the purpose of attempting to re-terrorize them into supporting Al Qaeda and reestablishing a base in that area.

The other thing that’s happened is that a lot of Al Qaeda fighters have had to flee Al Anbar because Anbar is becoming increasingly inhospitable terrain for them.  So we’ve seen a flow of Al Qaeda fighters through the southern belt south of Baghdad, a little bit through the northern belt, and into Diyala Province, which has led to increases of Al Qaeda violence in those areas as well, as the Al Qaeda fighters who are – and most of the suicide bombers, almost all of the suicide bombers are - in fact foreigners, as they try to reestablish bases elsewhere in the country.

The violence has also gone up because General Petraeus and General Odierno have been targeting Al Qaeda very aggressively throughout the country and Al Qaeda reacts to being targeted the way military organizations do - by attempting to launch a counterattack of its own.  What we’ve seen, and this is a negative trend, is a dramatic increase in Al Qaeda attacks across the board, against Sunni, Shi’a and Americans, as part of what is really a counter-surge, the objective of which on the one hand is to break up the growing political consensus in Iraq against Al Qaeda, and on the other hand to break our will and persuade us to call off the surge, which has been hurting Al Qaeda pretty seriously.  So that’s one part of the situation which I have been observing from here and which I observed close-up on a recent visit to Iraq.

Another part of the equation has been the sectarian violence.  Since the destruction of the Al-Askari Mosque in Samarra in February 2006, obviously one of the lead stories in Iraq has been the growth of sectarian violence, especially the participation in that violence by Shi’a militias. 

We have seen a dramatic decrease in that kind of violence since January.  The Multinational Forces Iraq Command just reported that so far April has the lowest rate of murders in Baghdad – in the past six months, it’s down I think about 20 percent from March and it’s down 65 percent from November. 

That fact is significant in a number of respects.  That drop began in January 2006 [sic] – that is to say, before we really had any additional forces in country and before we’d been able to do very much militarily against the Jaish al Mahdi at all.  Why did it start?  It started because almost immediately after the president announced his new strategy, both Moqtada al Sadr and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim called upon their supporters to support the Baghdad security plan and stop killing other Iraqis.  What we saw was a drop in sectarian murders following those calls.

What that tells me is that those murders were not in fact, as some people have been portraying them, reflections of centuries-old Sunni-Shi’a hatred which had become ungovernable, uncontrollable and unmanageable, but that they were in fact at least partially responsive to political directive by political actors who had been using them for political purposes.  The fact that they’ve dropped tells me that there is some prospect for keeping control of that situation if we adopt the right strategy.

The last question of course has been, what is the attitude of the Maliki government?  This had been a major issue in 2006 when as we had tried to conduct security operations in Baghdad on a much smaller and limited scale, Maliki had resisted and had not allowed us to go after Shi’a targets and so forth.  We haven’t seen that in this plan.  The Maliki government has been incredibly supportive of MNF-I’s efforts to go after Shi’a targets.  We’ve picked up more than 700 as of a couple weeks ago - I don’t know what the current figure is - captured or killed more than 700 Jaish al Mahdi fighters, including a significant number of leaders and key facilitators.  We’ve seen that organization start to fragment.  We’ve seen sweeps of American and Iraqi forces through Shi’a-dominated neighborhoods in Baghdad, including Sadr City itself, where there’s a joint security station being established – something that when we issued our report initially in December, we thought it would be unwise even to try to do that because we feared that it would turn into a frontal confrontation with Sadr. 

That’s not what happened.  Recently in fact, we were even allowed to launch – in fact requested to launch – an operation into Diwaniyah in the Shi’a south against what are called rogue elements of the Jaish al Mahdi, which is basically how Sadr describes elements of his force who are continuing to engage in sectarian violence despite his orders.  All of which is a positive sign.

Positive signs are a victory.  The Al Qaeda surge is very serious, it’s very significant.  It’s altering the situation in Iraq in unpredictable ways.  It’s clearly further eroding America’s will to stay the course here and continue to try to win this war.  But it’s not decisive yet either.

The basic conclusion I would offer you is that victory is still up for grabs.  Those who would say that the war is lost definitively, I don’t think there’s support for that statement in Iraq.  I think it’s hard.  I think we may lose.  I think we may win.  I think it depends a lot on what we do and it depends a lot on what the enemy does.  But I don’t think anyone can predict for certain the outcome of this fight at this point, which is the normal lot of most wars, most of the time.  Most of the time in a war you don’t know who’s going to win until you get a lot closer to the end than we are.

So that’s a brief overview from my perspective of the situation and the prospects.  I’ll be happy to discuss it in more detail in questions and answers, if that’s what interests you.  But now I will turn to our report.  Obviously that preamble was necessary to say, yes, I think it is worth our while considering what non-military measures we should be taking to assist the effort to establish security in Iraq on a stable basis that will be able to persist and survive even after our forces have begun to withdraw, as of course they eventually will.

We took a hard look at – I’m going to keep saying “we” because it’s a habit.  This was a group enterprise in its thought, but as you will see from the summaries that you have in your packet and also from the longer version that is now available online, the authorship of this is mine and I’m the only one who takes responsibility for the particular verbiage of this.  But obviously a lot of people were involved in providing input to this and that’s why I tend to say “we.”  But the responsibility for anything that is being said now is simply mine. 

Since this question has come up before, if you have any questions about whether the people who are listed in this report actually support any of these assertions, I encourage you to reach out to them and ask them specifically to say yes or no.  This was done simply so that we wouldn’t have to come up with a consensus document but so we could come up with the strongest possible recommendations.  Also, because some people work for groups that would be very uncomfortable having them associated directly with a particular opinion.

We looked at a large number of areas, basically as much of the realm of non-kinetic activities as we could get our hands on.  We focused on the question of what had been called reconstruction and what we are now calling economic assistance in our report, for reasons that I’ll come to in a moment.  We looked at questions of governance and building the capacity of the Iraqi government to function on its own, which is an incredibly important topic.  We looked at the problem of training and developing Iraqi security forces, both army and police.  We looked at the problem of measuring progress and offer a new set of metrics for how to see the effectiveness of the programs that we recommend.  Lastly, we looked at the problem of how to get the American people more directly involved in this war and get them on the one hand supporting it and on the other hand understanding it better.

I’m not going to go through all of this in tedious detail, and I assure you that the detail is tedious.  If you want to wade through the long version of the report that’s online, we’ve condensed it in the executive summary to something that I think most people might be willing to look at.  But the rationale, explanation and some of the background which we thought was useful is presented in the PDF version that’s online and I encourage you to take a look at it.  There is a lot of historical material in that report because I think people don’t always remember how we got to where we are on a lot of these issues.  I think that’s terrifically important.

There are two important points to make.  First of all, very little of what we are actually saying in this report is totally new, in the sense that it’s not being done or it hasn’t been considered or anything like that.  One of the things that we discovered was that in the realm of non-kinetic activities, there’s really nothing new under the sun.  Nevertheless, we thought it was worthwhile to try to package a number of ideas that have already been out there into a coherent strategy that has as its aim supporting the effort to establish stable and sustainable security in Iraq.  Because one of the things that we saw was that in the early years and even to a certain extent now, the non-kinetic approaches to this conflict didn’t necessarily directly support the kinetic part of the problem as they should, didn’t necessarily reflect certain degrees of reality. 

The development community in general, excellent though it is and excellent though its work has been, tends to focus on long-term sustainability in projects.  When you’re talking about trying to get an insurgency under control or trying to get sectarian violence under control, the long-term sustainability of projects is not always the priority.  That’s not always the best way to decide what exactly you should be doing.  Sometimes there are short-term, unsustainable projects that should be undertaken because if you don’t get them in place, then you are not going to be alive to deal with the long-term situation.

So what we’ve tried to do is to provide a notional strategy for coming up with non-kinetic approaches that would deal with the situation as it is today and would support the efforts of the kinetic approach, of the approach to try to establish security.

In particular, it seems obvious but I don’t believe that it’s been done yet, to say that the security approach is described in three phases – clear, hold, build – but there’s no parallel three-phase strategy for the economic approach that I’ve seen, that says, what do we do in terms of economics and capacity-building and so forth in the clear phase, what do we do in the hold phase, what do we do in the build phase.  We’ve tried to lay some of that out, and we’ve tried to explain what we think the purpose of economic activity or political capacity development or training development and so forth should be in each one of those phases.  Not so much because we imagine that anyone’s going to pick this up and execute it, but so we can try to move the discussion forward in a positive way and say this is how the security situation is evolving – let’s think about how the non-military aspects of this should be evolving coherently with it.

So a large part of our effort is to take a number of projects that are underway and fit them into appropriate categories, tracking with the military undertaking, so that there would be synergy between these rather than tension between these two approaches.

We addressed some of Iraq’s major economic problems in considerable detail – the oil industry in particular received a lot of attention.  The reason is very simple.  Iraq relies on oil income for the enormous proportion of its revenue.  Furthermore, corruption of one form or another siphons off a lot of that revenue and is being used to support the insurgency, both Sunni and Shi’a. 

So this is clearly an area that requires considerable attention from us and from the Iraqis.  It’s something again where I’m not sure that we in the past have always tracked as well as we might have on what’s appropriate given the security situation.  When you have oil pipelines running across Sunni territories in the midst of a Sunni insurgency and you are not able to provide security for those pipelines, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to focus on refurbishing them, because the Sunni insurgents will blow them up as soon as it suits them and you can’t really stop them from doing that until you’ve established security.  Oil pipelines are by their nature very vulnerable because they run for long distances through empty lands.

So we’ve had a problem.  If we’re going to measure success by how much oil we can get through the Iraq-Turkey pipeline, this is probably not the moment to be measuring success in that way and it hasn’t been for some time.  Perhaps in the future we’ll be able to do that.  But that’s something where you want to track your investment in accord with what you can actually defend.  Those need to be coordinated.  There are other, more technical issues that some oil experts who’ve been involved in this provided to us, recommendations that we made along those lines.

We tried to put the issue of the hydrocarbons law in context.  There’s been much discussion of the hydrocarbons law as evidence of the degree to which reconciliation is possible in Iraq or even as a precondition for reconciliation.  The truth of the matter is that I think the Sunni insurgents have been fighting only very secondarily because they’re concerned about the distribution of oil revenues in the country.  The Sunni insurgency so far has been fueled by a refusal to accept the notion that Iraq was not going to be a Sunni Arab country.  I’ve long believed that you could pass all the hydrocarbon legislation in the world but this wasn’t fundamentally an economic dispute to begin with and it’s not going to be resolved in that way.  It would be a positive step but that’s not why it’s important.

The reason why the hydrocarbons law is important is because until you have a hydrocarbons law that specifies who is empowered to make binding contracts in Iraq, you’re not going to get a lot of foreign investment.  People will say you’re not going to get foreign investment until the security situation is better – that’s not really true.  The security situation in parts of Nigeria, in parts of lots of other places where there’s lots of oil investment, isn’t very good.  Oil companies will take care of that.  They will come in and invest even in fairly dangerous places if they can make binding contracts that will assure them of profits that will cover the cost. 

So we think it’s very important to get the hydrocarbons law through primarily to set the basis for foreign investment, which is urgently necessary because the Iraqi oil infrastructure was allowed to run down very badly under Saddam, has been harmed by years of insurgency and the incapacity of Iraqi governments to spend money on it.  It needs a lot of investment – shows a lot of potential.  Interestingly, there’s more and more evidence that there are significant oil reserves in the Sunni Arab territories but we need to have legislation in place so that we can get investment in there to actually take care of it. 

For those of you who are concerned about the question of the accusation that this is all about America getting Iraq’s oil, the only oil companies that we list as being appropriate to encourage to invest are not American oil companies.  I think it would be much better in fact if the European oil companies or if some of the oil companies from Muslim states would invest.  I’m even willing to open the door to Lukoil and then the Chinese oil company too.  Oil is a fungible commodity.  It doesn’t matter who owns the hardware.  But I think the optic of having a lot of American oil interests in Iraq is not a good optic and not something we should be encouraging if we can find another way to do it.

So that gives you some sense of some of the detail we went into on some of the issues that we drilled down on.

As far as Iraqi governance, we’re already seeing some pretty significant improvement in the ability of this government to spend its own money.  There have been a number of reasons why they have not been able to do that so far, including tremendous inexperience on the part of those who are in office, the lack of a professional civil service.  People talk about de-Baathification as a solution to the civil service problem. 

I’m fairly skeptical of that, frankly.  Saddam didn’t have the best civil service in the world to begin with.  Senior Baath Party members were not necessarily great bureaucrats.  That’s not how parties like that tend to work.  How many of them would you want to come back, given what their roles were, how many of them would come back, I don’t know.  Iraq, at the end of the day, is going to have to develop a balanced professional civil service on its own.  That’s going to take time.  But it’s something we can assist with and something that we should be assisting with dramatically.

Another problem – this is the fourth Iraqi government since the invasion.  These guys have been in power for a year.  They are just basically learning how the telephones work.  And they are starting to learn how the phones work.  A variety of interesting stories have emerged.  We’ve had a lot of complaints throughout 2006 that reconstruction money promised to Tal Afar after the operations there in September 2005 wasn’t getting there, didn’t get there throughout 2006, just got there.  In fact they’ve had ribbon-cutting ceremonies and soccer fields built.  They just had a soccer game played the local Iraqi security forces and some local inhabitants, with much fanfare.  Which may not seem like much but it’s actually very significant as evidence that the Shi’a government in Baghdad is prepared to actually get cash to support reconstruction projects in Sunni areas, as promised, even if delayed.  So that was a very positive development.

A recent meeting between the defense and interior ministers and the national security advisor of Iraq with the provincial council in Ramadi to talk about reconstruction in Anbar is also very promising.  We’ll see when the money gets there.  This is something that we’re going to have to watch very closely and something we have to help with.

In some cases we’ve found work-arounds and we’re using work-arounds.  The Foreign Military Sales Program is a program that is designed to help countries without a whole lot of governmental capacity purchase and use American military equipment.  The Iraqis have started to use this program also as a way to spend their defense budget in a reliable way that lets us worry about auditing and helps them ensure that too much won’t be siphoned off in corruption and so forth, and will actually get to where it’s supposed to get to.  That’s a work-around.  Over the long term, obviously they’re going to have to develop their own mechanisms for doing this.  But I think this is part of a sound program that balances short-term work-arounds with long-term solutions.

Another case in point; people talk about electricity in Baghdad.  The sort of standard number is anywhere from seven to eight hours of electricity in Baghdad a day, which can give you a misperception of what the situation is.  It makes it sound like for sixteen hours a day they don’t have power.  That’s not true.  Most Baghdadis have power most of the time; they just don’t get it from the national grid.  They get it from local generators, which was true even under Saddam, although to a much lesser extent.

The problem is that power from the national grid in Iraq, as in many oil-wealthy countries, is free.  But if you want power from a generator, then you’ve got to pay the guys who own the generator for the fuel, and so it’s not free.  So if you fly over Baghdad at night, as I just had the occasion to do a couple of times a few weeks ago, it’s lit up like any city.  There’s lights from horizon to horizon.  But they’re powered by local generators and that annoys people because they don’t want to pay for electricity.

That’s a problem and it’s something that needs to be dealt with, but it’s a little bit less of an emergency than is often made out, and as a metric of success I’m not sure.  The one area in which it is key, and this is something that we do need to focus on, is that you can’t run heavy industry from generators.  So as you want to restart Iraqi heavy industry, you need to get the power grid working reliably enough so that industries can draw power from it at appropriate levels and so forth, reliably enough. 

So there’s a lot of complexity in here in a lot of things that we looked at, trying to identify ways to make this better, what’s really important, what are appropriate resources to throw at the problem, and how to decide whether we’re doing it well.

A couple of other things I’ll mention briefly.  We talk about training of Iraqi security forces.  We talk about training of the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police.  Frankly, that’s going pretty well and most of the things that there are to say about that are already being done one way or another.  Big debate in town for the past few months has been should we increase the number of Military Training Team (MITT) advisors embedded with Iraqi units.  Some have suggested that we should do that at the expense of using our own combat forces directly to establish security.  Most of the people involved in this planning effort have believed that that was not a wise way to go.  I certainly don’t think it’s a wise way to go because I don’t think we can afford to wait for the Iraqi army to be able to undertake establishing security in the current context on its own.

I also think the Iraqi army is too small.  We recommend an increase in the size of the Iraqi army, which is currently about 135,000.  It has been effective at deploying forces as requested into Baghdad.  It’s been a little bit less effective than desired at sustaining appropriate levels of those forces as they suffer losses through casualties and desertion and so forth.  We’ll see.  They’ll do another rotation of forces into Baghdad sometime soon and we’ll see how that works out.  This force is too small to maintain order so they need to increase the size of this force.  There are plans already underway to do that in a limited way.  We think they probably need to do it even more.  I think they need to do it even more.  But there are restrictions.  We need to address how to overcome that.

The Iraqi police has also been a very significant issue, primarily because of the problem that it was heavily infiltrated by militias and that Iraqi national police have been involved in death squad activities and so forth. 

Partnering U.S. forces with Iraqi army, with Iraqi police, down to the lowest level – again, something that I saw up close when I was in Baghdad recently, and it is amazing the level at which they’re working together – tends to mitigate that right from the outset, because the Iraqi police don’t commit death squad activities when our forces are around because they know that we don’t tolerate it.  But that’s not good enough. 

We obviously have to establish an Iraqi national police force that isn’t going to do that even when we aren’t around.  We’ve been working on that.  The partnership helps with it because it allows us to get to know these guys, identify who some of the bad players are, and vet these units.  In some cases we’ve taken whole Iraqi police units offline, vetted them and retrained them from scratch and then put them out into the field.  So this kind of interaction that we’re having actually facilitates also the process of clearing out one of the major problems that we’ve had.

The withdrawal of the Sadrist ministers from government may help with this.  Depending on whom Maliki replaces them with, it could be a real opportunity to reduce the influence of the Jaish al Mahdi in the government in general, which would also help us deal with the problems in the Ministry of Interior and so forth.  So that’s another positive prospect if we can manage to capitalize on it.

One recommendation that I want to highlight is the need to encourage the Iraqis to hold local elections on the basis of districts rather than national lists.  I think it was a very serious mistake we made in allowing the initial elections, the elections that chose this government, to be conducted on the basis of national lists rather than districts, because the national list system tended to enhance the number of extremists in government, tended to drive out the moderates, and tended to mitigate the effects of local politics.  What we want to do is get back to a situation in Iraq where high politics is governed by low politics, as it is in most democracies, to a greater degree and where people are worried about issues rather than about sectarian allegiance.  One of the ways to do that is to go back to a districts-based system of election.

This is going to be very difficult and I make no bones about that, because you’ve got a government in power in Iraq that’s going to make the decisions that was elected on a list-based system that by default is going to want to continue to have elections on a list-based system because it favors these guys.  I don’t have any notions that this is going to be an easy thing to do but I think it’s an incredibly important thing to do and it’s something we should be working on continuously from now until it actually happens.

We do propose – I’m not going to go through them because this sort of thing is incredibly tedious, and I’m already speaking for too long.  We do propose some specific new metrics for measuring the effectiveness of the non-kinetic portions of this program.  The point is simply to say that hitherto we have tended to measure our inputs into programs – how much money have we allocated, how much money have we spent.  We’ve had this very effective office in the Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction (SIGIR), Stuart Bowman, measuring the efficiency of that expenditure. We’ve been measuring the outputs in some cases – how many Iraqi police are there trained and vetted, how many Iraqi army soldiers are there trained and vetted, how many hours of power are there in Baghdad in aggregate. 

Okay, those are all good numbers to have and we should continue to track them.  But they don’t really measure the effect of our programs on the situation in Iraq.  What we’ve tried to do is come up with some suggestive metrics for how to do that.  So if you’re concerned about healthcare, for instance, it’s not really helpful in the end to know how much money you’ve spent on it and it’s not really helpful in the end even to know necessarily how many hospital beds you’ve built.  What you need to know are things like what’s the average waiting time in hospital, do Sunni and Shi’a seem to have equitable access to healthcare – and there are a variety of ways you can go about measuring that.  What’s the response times?  These are the sorts of things – if you’re going to ask what’s the effectiveness of the healthcare system in Washington - these are the sorts of questions you’d really want to know the answers to and people care about.  What’s response time?  If you make a phone call, how long does it take before the ambulance gets there and how long does it take before you’re treated in the emergency room?  These are basic metrics.  These are things we need to start focusing on.

So we provided a list of things.  Again, these are notional.  We don’t imagine anyone is just going to take this list and run with it, but a way of starting to get people thinking on the right track.

Lastly, getting the American people involved in this war.  This is something that the current administration has been, in my opinion, very poor at and very uncreative about.  Americans are tremendously generous and donate to people in need and in trouble and in danger and in pain and suffering far more than people in almost any other country in the world.  There have been people who have been on their own setting up programs to help Iraqis as best they can. 

But this is a country where I think we have a moral responsibility to help Iraqis who are suffering more directly than we do in other countries, because we have been so directly involved in their fate.  I believe that the process of helping Iraqis will also give Americans a better understanding of the human dimension of this conflict.  I think that would be a very positive thing to do.  I’m distressed sometimes by the willingness of people on both sides of the equation, arguing a variety of different opinions, simply to dismiss the prospect of widespread killing in Iraq and say either, oh well, we can’t do anything about that, or that’s just too bad, we have other priorities.  That troubles me a great deal. 

I’m more than willing to talk about whether the particular strategy I’m advocating or have advocated in the past is appropriate or not appropriate or will succeed or won’t.  But I’m very uncomfortable about having a discussion that says it’s okay to turn a blind eye to the suffering that’s going on in Iraq.  I don’t think the American people would feel very good about that either if they had a good sense of it.

So I think it would be very helpful for the administration and for Congress to make some efforts to facilitate interchange between the American people and the Iraqi people on a variety of levels.  We need to be careful with this though.  Iraqis are a proud people.  They really are.  They’re getting more and more excited about sovereignty every day, which I think is a good thing.  But it means we need to be very careful not to be patronizing in the sort of assistance that we send.  We need to be careful to make it clear that it’s not that we think Iraqis are sort of hopeless, poor people who don’t know how to take care of themselves, but this is a proud, strong nation historically that needs our assistance at a moment of great crisis and that we’re willing to do that.

I also think it would be helpful for the administration to find other ways of allowing the American people to interact with American soldiers. 

There is a lot of discussion within the military, which has been reported frequently in the press, that the military is frustrated that it’s not being supported by other elements of government.  So far in this war we have not seen, and I’m very grateful we have not seen, the American people turn against the military in any way, even though the war has not been going well.  I don’t think we will see that.  I think the reason you saw that in Vietnam was because of the draft.  Since this is a volunteer force, I think it’s very unlikely that we’ll see that in this case.  I hope we won’t.

But I do think it would be good for the American people and good for our soldiers if there was more direct assistance and more direct interaction that people could have with soldiers on the ground.  It would also help the American people gain a more realistic appraisal of what’s going on, unfiltered either by the administration and its spokesmen or by the media or by opponents of the war and their spokespeople.  Let’s try to find ways, and in this internet age it’s much easier to do this than it ever has been before, to allow the American people access to the information they need to make their own decision.  Because at the end of the day, the American people do have to keep making decisions about this war and the more we can ensure that those decisions are based on a real and realistic appraisal of the situation, the better – I’m confident – that they will be.

So that’s a sort of quick overview.  That gives you a flavor of what sorts of issues we’ve addressed, some of the proposals that we’ve made.  You have the executive summary in your packet.  The long version is available on PDF online.  You’ve been very patient with me, as I’ve spoken for far too long, and I’m very grateful.  I will be happy to turn it over to your questions.

Question:  I’m having trouble.  You’re not proposing formal U.S. economic assistance but you’re making very serious proposals over a wide range in the summary, which I’ve read, and you’ve just expanded it to pitch for more interchange.  I am afraid I don’t understand how either your recommendations or change and your plea for American contributions, because you don’t mean economic assistance, you don’t mean vote up a big aid program.  How do you expect your arrangement, your plan, to be adopted?  What influence would the U.S. have in getting this adopted?  Please, if you can, give us some examples of assistance directly, what the U.S. and the American people could do.

Frederick Kagan:  We still have a great degree of influence with the Iraqi government in certain issues because we can provide them with certain kinds of assistance other than cash.  We are still spending cash in Iraq.  We’re not proposing increased economic aid to Iraq because it’s not necessary.  The Iraqi government has a lot of cash of its own.  We’ve put $18 billion into reconstruction one way or another, a lot of which has been used well and had a positive effect.  That money is going to run out this year.  The president has indicated that he doesn’t want to ask for any more.  We don’t think it’s necessary.  Iraq has a lot of cash.

The issue is how does Iraq spend that cash?  Most of the direct involvement that we can have at this point is in helping the Iraqis to develop ways of spending their money intelligently, help develop with them a strategy for doing that that will be helpful, and then work with them in the execution of that strategy to try to see to it that it actually happens and it actually happens in a productive way.

So that’s most of the leverage that we have, but it’s very significant.  The Iraqis know that they need to spend their money.  They’ve made this clear on a number of occasions.  They know they need help in doing it and they’ve made that clear on a number of occasions.  We can do that.  But we need to know what we think needs to happen first.  That’s part of the problem that I saw when I looked at this, is that if you ask the aid community in general, the people who are involved even in advising the Iraqis, what are we trying to accomplish here?  What’s our strategy and how does it fit in, even as we try to help them spend their money?  We didn’t get a lot of very clear answers.

So what we’re trying to do is say this is what we think they ought to be doing. This is what we think we ought to be helping them with and this is why, and this is how we think it ought to be happening.  So that’s what we’re proposing here.

In terms of interchange, in terms of what the American people can do, there are a lot of situations in Iraq where the sort of charity that we regularly provide to nations in distress could be very helpful.  You want to get schools going in certain areas, school supplies drives – stuff even as low level as that could be very helpful and locally can be very important.  We can do some of that stuff with reconstruction money but that’s increasingly drying up and it’s not easy to do. 

We have recommended, as the president did, increasing the funding of the Commanders Emergency Response Program, which is a way that gives the local units direct cash that they can spend in a variety of ways for reconstruction to support what’s going on there.  We think that’s an important program.  But beyond that, there are things that the American people could contribute if we could work out a few legal issues about how to make that happen and let them know that it would be helpful. 

Above all, let them know what is needed and where.  This is the information that we most need to get back from Iraq and that the administration needs to facilitate.  One of the things we proposed was setting up a sort of military or State Department-run or USAID-run Craig’s List, where local Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) could talk to local Iraqi leaders and say, what would help you?  What could people do for you that would help you in your situation as it is?  Put that on a website that people who are interested in donating or assisting in any way could go to and say, okay, the mayor of Baqubah says that he needs such and such, let’s have a drive and see what we can do and get it in there.

Things like that – each individual proposal seems very small but at the end of the day I think that’s really the only way to do it, to try to identify small, high-leverage proposals that we could work out.  Those are the sorts of things that we have in mind in general.

Question:  Brian Marshall, I served as an elections security advisor in 2005 with the State Department’s Iraq Reconstruction Management Office.  Question regarding the constitutional referendum in 2005 that took place that October.  Sunni participation in that referendum was only gained with the understanding that there would be further revisions to the constitution.  We’re not hearing very much about that status now.  Can you report anything on what’s happening there?

Frederick Kagan:  The hydrocarbons law is an element of that.  The question of de-Baathification is another element of that.  The issue of local elections.  These are all things, as you’re well aware, when you go through the constitution there are a number of issues that are basically listed as TBD.  A lot of the things we’ve been talking about in terms of prominent legislative developments fall into that category of things that were agreed upon that would be changed or filled out.

The hydrocarbons law, this legislation at this moment is not moving forward as rapidly as we would like to see.  No question about that.  I’m not myself terribly surprised by that.  I think in the situation as it was going into the beginning of this year, of course you weren’t going to get people to agree.  You were moving toward civil war.  You’re not going to get people to make legislative compromises in the context of that kind of security situation.  We’re still working on getting the security situation under control.  I don’t know that you’re going to see significant political progress along these lines until well into this year, until you’ve seen the violence subside enough that people really believe that what matters is making the political compromises to make the political system work.

My view has always been that security is the prerequisite to political reconciliation and not the result of political reconciliation.  So I’m not particularly surprised that this stuff isn’t moving forward as rapidly as we would like to see.  I think it’s a mistake to evaluate our progress in Iraq based on which specific laws they pass when.  To me, when I ask the question about reconciliation, it’s much bigger that Maliki went to Ramadi and it’s much better that the provincial council in Anbar met with the defense and interior ministers to talk about reconstruction.  It’s much better that Sunni sheikhs throughout the country are reaching out and saying, how can we participate?  That there’s a groundswell within the Sunni community that is saying, boy, did we ever make a mistake in not participating in the political process earlier.  You see this in places like Diyala, which is an overwhelmingly Sunni province that has an overwhelmingly Shi’a government.  The Sunnis in Diyala are saying we really want local elections and we really want to play.  Those are all positive signs in my view. 

The legislation I think will follow but we have to remember that this legislature was elected not on a good basis and it’s not really representative of the Iraqi people at this point.  The Sunni leaders in this legislature are not really representative of the tribal sheikhs that we’re seeing stepping forward in Anbar and so forth.  The Shi’a leaders that we see are representative of the extreme wings of most of their parties.  So it’s going to be a long slog to get this council of representatives to pass legislation that we want.  I myself would not prioritize that in measuring progress, as long as we are seeing continued efforts at reconciliation at the lower level.

Question:  Giuseppe [indiscernible].  You spoke basically only about the relationship between the U.S. and Iraq, as if this was almost like a private business relationship between Iraq and the U.S.  You didn’t say anything about the role of the rest of the international community.  Do you think that the neighbors or the European countries can play an important role?  Can they really contribute to the stabilization in Iraq and if so, how?

Frederick Kagan:  It’s in the nature of this sort of product, which is aimed at informing the current American policy debate, that it focuses on what America can do.  If I were going to publish this paper in Europe it would look very different, of course.

There are European countries, as you well know, that are playing a very important role in this – Britain most prominently but many, many others at various other levels.  The EU has been playing a role. NATO is playing a role.  The UN is playing a very significant role.  All of that is very important.

I can sit here and say that the United States government needs to adopt a coherent strategy of economic assistance and needs to impose it on the U.S. government across the board.  I would be a lot less comfortable sitting here saying that the U.S. government needs to impose a strategy for doing all of this on the international community, which is the other part of the problem.  The purpose of this exercise was to say this is the strategy we think we should follow.  But I’m not going to stand up here and try to dictate to the World Bank or to France or Britain or other countries what they should do.  So the focus on American policy here was not in any way meant to denigrate the importance of the international community but just to say it’s in the nature of the recommendations we were making that we would focus on this.

What can they be doing?  Obviously the British have been playing a very important role in security.  British, Japanese, a number of other countries have been playing an important role in economic reconstruction.  We do say and I did mention this, when you talk about reconstruction in the oil industry, I would like to see Totale in there, I would be willing to see Lukoil in there, I’d be eager to see European and especially Western European oil companies most directly involved in the reconstruction of Iraq’s oil industry.  I’d be eager to see European electrical groups, power groups, most directly involved in helping Iraq rebuild its infrastructure.  I would love to see a lot of European economic involvement in the reconstruction of Iraq.  What this is about is how do we create the preconditions to make that kind of investment possible?  If there was going to be a sort of Phase II-B, which there won’t, then one element of that could be what sorts of programs might we like to see European companies being involved with?

But I would absolutely like to see all of this kind of involvement.  The World Bank is by definition involved in this and the International Monetary Fund is by definition involved in this.  We’ve got NGOs working from all over the world on microfinance, which is another thing we emphasized in this report.  I would love to see more NGOs come in, especially non-American NGOs, and do this.

I do think it’s important to put something beyond an exclusively American face on this.  We indicated that in a number of ways.  I would love to see involvement on the part of the international community.  Hopefully by the end of this year we will have gotten the security situation sufficiently under control that people will feel more comfortable coming in and undertaking reconstruction in the center of Iraq and especially the Sunni areas, where it’s most badly needed.  I think that would be a tremendously positive development and I would do everything in my power to encourage it.

Question:  Margaret Rogers, I’m a consultant and I’ve worked in Iraq.  Two questions.  While you’ve spent a great deal of time talking about security, I want to ask you: given the current government in Baghdad, why are you optimistic?  Most characterizations of it are that it’s totally weak and totally ineffective.  The second thing is, there are many Iraqis in town who tell me that security can never get better until some kind of deal is made with the Saudis and the Iranians, who they say are funding all of the insurgency and the militias.

So you’re optimistic but can you help me be a little more optimistic in dealing with those two major problems?

Frederick Kagan:  I’d love to.  I’ll certainly try.  On the second point, actually what I’m hearing is that the Saudis are starting to be helpful and that the Saudis actually have been encouraging quietly some of the tribal sheikhs to turn around and start fighting Al Qaeda.  The Saudi government understands that Al Qaeda is a major threat to its existence.  There have been a number of public indications that the Saudis are very concerned about Al Qaeda spreading and about the growth of Al Qaeda and that they recognize that this is a problem in Iraq and that they need to deal with it. 

The guys who are not being as helpful are the Syrians.  There are a lot of reasons for that, including, I think, we need to remember that the Syrian government, the Alawite government, the Shi’a government of Syria, represents about 11 percent of Syria’s population and has put down rebellions by the Muslim Brotherhood in the past quite brutally.  I wonder if Damascus isn’t concerned that if it actually clamps down on the foreign fighters moving through Syria that they won’t start attacking Damascus.  In other words, I think their problems go beyond a question of their willingness or desire to help in Iraq.  I’m not sure what we can do about that.

I think the Iranians are a negative player in Iraq.  I don’t know how we stop that.  What’s interesting though along those lines is as you see increasing enthusiasm for Iraqi sovereignty and Iraq-ness in general, you see it becoming more embarrassing for some of the people who have been close to Iran to continue to function prominently within the Iraqi political system.  Hakim, who is most closely associated with Iran, has been keeping an incredibly low profile.  He has been publicly supporting this plan.  His younger son – not the one we picked up – published an article in an interview in an Iranian newspaper in which he said that the Baghdad security plan was their idea and so forth.  They’re trying to tack in the direction of being more Iraqi and less Iranian. 

Sadr fled to Iran and it hurt him.  We’ve seen that movement start to fragment, partly because he’s not there, but you’ve also seen statements from Sadrists saying what’s up with this?  This was supposed to be an Iraqi nationalist movement and now he’s in Iran – that doesn’t work for me so much.  If you look at the pictures of the big demonstration in Najaf that Sadr called for on April 9, you see a lot of Iraqi flags.  You see very few pictures of Sadr.  You don’t even see many pictures of Sistani or other prominent Shi’a figures. 

I got this sense very strongly when I was over there that the feeling of Iraq-ness is growing, and it’s being fueled by the turn against Al Qaeda, because the Iraqi line all along has been that Iraqis aren’t suicide bombers.  The weird thing is it turns out to be kind of true actually.  They’re not.  The overwhelming majority of the suicide bombers are foreign fighters.  On the one hand, that gets at the issue you’re raising – how do we stop them from coming in?  That’s a very hard problem.  But there are other ways of solving that problem, including getting the Iraqis to stop facilitating that.  There we’ve seen a lot of progress.  As the Anbari tribes and the tribes in Salah-ad-Din and Diyala turn against Al Qaeda and say we’re going to fight them instead of helping them, Al Qaeda is going to have a much harder time bringing foreign fighters in. 

When a foreign fighter comes into a country, he’s got to have a safe house to go to, he’s got to have someone’s name who’s going to take care of him, he’s got to have someone who’s going to move him from one place to another and get him ready.  There’s a whole trail that’s required to take a foreign fighter and turn him into a suicide bomber.  If you start to break up the support of the locals for this kind of thing, then those trails will start to break up in the long term.

The Maliki government has actually been pretty good in most of the most important aspects of the plan so far.  They’ve gotten all of the units that we requested to Baghdad, got to Baghdad, and are serving in Baghdad.  They’re taking casualties and they’re continuing to fight.  That’s measure number one.  They didn’t do that before.

We wanted to go after senior leaders in the Jaysh al Mahdi.  Last year Maliki wouldn’t let us do it.  This year he’s let us do it and we’ve taken down a lot of very bad dudes who were very prominent, including the deputy health minister, who was a Sadrist, who set up a huge scream and the health minister set up a scream and Maliki told them both to stop it.  That guy was fired.  They purged thousands of people from the Ministry of the Interior.  Again, the Sadrists were very unhappy about that but it happened and they’ve stayed fired.

Sadr called in this demonstration on the 9th for a timetable.  The next day Maliki repudiated that and said he didn’t want to see a timetable.  He said we’re working as fast as we can and we all want the Americans out but it’s not time to set timetables.  Sadr was furious, threatened to withdraw his ministers from the government.  Maliki said go for it.  Sadr withdrew.  The government is still ticking.  There are signs that Sadr is beginning to waver again on some things.

That doesn’t look like a feckless, hopeless, weak government to me.  That looks like a government that is recognizing that it may have options other than relying on the Sadrist militias and it may even have options other than relying on the Badr Corps to keep itself in power.  Those options in the first instance are the Iraqi army, which is fighting pretty well, and the American support that we’re providing.  So I think, again, trends are not accomplishments and the fact that things have turned around from a very bad point doesn’t mean that we’ve won.  But I do see signs to be optimistic about those issues.

Question:  Norm Olson, Achievable Solutions.  Very good presentation.  I listened to you before, you always sound reasonable and rational and persuasive and I leave sort of encouraged.  Then I read the New York Times and CNN –

Frederick Kagan:  That’s where you make your mistake.

Norm Olson:  That’s probably true.  I think the key point in your presentation for me was you said this is going to be a long, hard slog.  I would agree with that.  If we were prepared for the long, hard slog, there might be reason for optimism.  At the same token, the most optimistic Democrat is saying they want to see huge progress by August, which is not that far away.  In your article in the Weekly Standard [indiscernible] I think very accurately both parties for being irrationally optimistic or pessimistic.  But that’s a fact of life in the American political environment.  The changes are all – I shouldn’t say all, but predominantly negative about sustaining this fight.  What do you do about that, if anything?

Frederick Kagan:  We hold events like this and publish articles and put out reports and try to get out a more balanced sense of what’s going on, and try to reach the American people and the American political elite.  Polling data is kind of complicated.  I’ve seen rising numbers until very recently – I haven’t seen the most recent polls, which may be down because of the violence – suggesting that more American people think success is possible than thought it when we started this whole business. 

I think we have a problem right now that Al Qaeda is in the midst of a major surge which is generating daily violence, which is often conflated with sectarian violence.  I’ll take the opportunity to say this right now – one of the things that bothers me the most about the way especially that the New York Times covers this is that it continually describes Al Qaeda attacks as sectarian violence.  Most Al Qaeda attacks are not sectarian violence.  In fact, many Al Qaeda attacks right now are targeted at Sunnis.  When you’ve got a Sunni organization killing Sunni civilians, that’s not sectarian violence.  But it’s linked in that way because it’s part of the narrative that we’ve been having all along, the defeat narrative that says that sectarian violence is spiraling out of control.

Look, if the opponents of the war are determined to begin pulling out soon, regardless of the situation on the ground or on the basis of a premature evaluation, and regardless of the consequences of the withdrawal, and if they actually have the power to do that, then we’re in very bad trouble in my view.  Some people really are determined to do that, for a variety of reasons.  I think some people really have decided that the war is hopeless and it’s unwinnable and we do need to pull out.  I disagree with that view.  I can understand coming to that view.  Can’t really understand holding that view and then saying but we want timelines that stretch into 2008.  That doesn’t quite make sense to me.  If you think the war is lost, then I’m not sure why you would support keeping American troops there for that long and what you think they would be doing.

I’m very concerned about the absence of responsible proposals for what we should do after we’ve done that, in a situation that we’re going to have to manage.  But if you’re asking me do I think we can turn the political consensus around enough to have a chance to stick this out – yeah, I do.  I think August is too early to evaluate this progress.  People are going to do it anyway.  It depends in part on the enemy.  How long can Al Qaeda maintain the surge and what can we do to get it under control?  What can we do to continue to get the sectarian violence even further under control than it already is?  What can we do to bring the Sunnis into the process?

I do believe that as more and more progress is made, and I believe it will be made, that will get through.  People who are now proposing defeat solutions because they’re confident in defeat will lose their confidence that defeat is inevitable, some of them.  That’s in some respects the most important thing that needs to happen.  It’s the most important message I want to put out.  I can’t promise you that we’re going to win.  I can promise you that we haven’t lost yet.  That is the message that we need to get out: victory is still in doubt.  Given the stakes, I think as long as victory is still in doubt, we need to try for it.  That’s where I’m at.  Hopefully we can get a greater proportion of people there too.

Question:  Frank Fletcher.  My question is specifically about the Iraqi-Syrian border.  I was going to ask you why the U.S. never made an attempt to put troops there when we went into Iraq, but I guess that’s in the past and probably we didn’t have enough troops in Iraq anyway.  But why now does the Iraqi or U.S. governments not attempt to improve border security?  Have you heard a proposal that was discussed to put Kurdish divisions on the Iraqi-Syrian border?

Frederick Kagan:  To answer the last question, no, I haven’t heard that.  I’m not sure how bright an idea that would be.  I can think of a lot of objections to doing that.  You want to make sure that you don’t do more damage in the cure than the disease is causing.

Why didn’t we put forces up there to begin with?  Because we didn’t have enough forces, we didn’t think through the postwar situation well enough, and I’m right with you in condemning that mistake.

We are working to improve border security.  In fact, we make an issue of this in the report, only some of which would address the concern that you’re voicing.  We have had a problem that the official points of entry into Iraq have not been run well hitherto and have been very corrupt and have been making it relatively easier for corruption, smuggling and foreign fighters to move across.  We do make proposals about how to address that.  We think it’s very important and something that should be done.

That’s not going to solve the problem, because when you’re talking about foreign fighters, they will not come in through formal points of entry and so forth.  The Iraq-Syrian border is long.  It is rugged in parts.  It’s not something where you’re going to be able to prevent individuals from coming across.  The forces that would be required to do it would be disproportionate to the effort, because they’re coming in also through the Iranian border, they’re coming in also through other borders.  Some of them are flying in.  There are commercial flights now into various parts of Iraq.  That’s a formal point of entry.  You’re not going to catch all of them.  You want to keep in mind the number of foreign fighters who are entering on a regular basis is very small.  They have a disproportionate effect because they’re the people who are willing to blow themselves up in spectacular attacks.  But I don’t think you’re ever going to get to the point where you keep all of them out.  I don’t think you want to get into the situation where you’re devoting forty or fifty thousand U.S. and Iraqi troops to get the number down from two hundred to one hundred coming across a given border.

That having been said, I think we need to address this problem very carefully.  I think we need to think about how we’re addressing it.  In many respects, the best way to do it, I think, is not so much to try to close the border, which is not really feasible for a variety of reasons, but to try to work within the local communities to eliminate support for the foreign fighters, so that when they come across they don’t have safe houses, they don’t have people who are going to pick them up and take care of them.  So that when they do come in and get picked up, there are other people who can tell us they’ve come in and we can deal with them, we can get more intelligence.

Little things can help with that.  The reconstruction efforts in Tal Afar, which is near the border, can help with that.  We’ve pushed out efforts into Al Qa’im, which is on the border, and so on.  We need to continue to work that.  The long-term solution is the turn that we’ve seen within the Sunni Arab community against Al Qaeda, which ultimately will help us a lot with this.  I’m sure there’s more we could be doing in the short term.  If I had a magic solution I would have proposed it, but the issue you raise is certainly very important.

Question:  [indiscernible]  If there’s an incursion in the north by Turkey, how will that affect the whole overall situation and the ongoing strategy in Iraq?

Frederick Kagan:  Unpredictably and probably negatively.  I am concerned about the situation in the Kurdish north.  I think Turkey has legitimate concerns in what’s going on.  I think that escalation at this point in the sense of a Turkish incursion into Kurdistan is probably not going to be productive.  We’re in a situation that’s very delicate.  Before this plan, we were very heavily dependent on the Kurds because they were the only reliable ally that we had within Iraq.  We’re starting to see that change.  We’re starting to see it change because we’re starting to see the Sunni Arab buy-in and we’re starting to see the Maliki government establish itself more independently of the Shi’a militias and more on its own footing. 

We need to have more time to consolidate progress in the Arab south.  But the process of consolidating progress in the Arab south will give us more leverage with the Kurds and will give us greater leverage with which to address the concerns that might prompt Turkey to want to intervene directly.  So I would say it’s very important for the Turkish government and the Turkish military to be very cognizant of the trends and the current situation and the timing, and ask itself very seriously how urgent it actually is to take measures that might derail progress that could lead to better solutions of the problem.  Because I think it’s very unlikely that a Turkish incursion is going to lead to a solution of the problem.  It may have local tactical effects but you’re not going to solve the problem that way.  But the regional consequences of that are very unpredictable.

I thank you all very much for coming, for your thoughtful questions, for the thoughtful discussion.  I wish you a good afternoon.

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