American Enterprise Institute

May 17, 2006

[Edited transcript from audio tapes]

Noon	Registration and Luncheon
12:15 p.m.	Panelists:	Cpl. Richard Gibson, U.S. Marine Corps
		Lt. Lawrence Indyk, U.S. Army
		Sgt. J. D. Johannes, U.S. Marine Corps
	Commentator:	F. J. “Bing” West, author, former assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs
	Moderator:	Danielle Pletka, AEI
2:00	Adjournment

Proceedings:

Danielle Pletka:  Please be seated.  Before I even start with introductions, let me ask everybody to ensure their cell phones are off or are on vibrate – especially our speakers and my own.  It happens all too often.

Good afternoon everybody.  I’m Danielle Pletka; I’m the vice president for foreign and defense policy studies here at the American Enterprise Institute.  I’m really that we’re all here today for this event.  It’s a unique and important opportunity for AEI, and I hope for our audience as well.  We’ll hear from people who actually have been on the front lines and would like their voices heard, and for whom I think it has been struggle to have their perspective heard on the Iraq War.  Is the Iraq War nothing but a series of insurgent attacks, terrorist bombings, American deaths, and nonstop bad news?  Or is there more nuances?  There is certainly bad news, and I think enough of it to go around.  But is there something else?  Is there a deeper story?  Do the Iraqi people have more than just a violent dimension?  Are there achievements and what part have the Americans played in them?

America’s Majority is an organization that is dedicated to bringing these voices to the forefront.  Let me give a shout out, which I normally don’t do, to Rich Nadler in the front row.  He is the President of America’s Majority and has put this together.  He does a lot of other important things.  The America’s Majority daily dispatch is an interesting and useful daily email that the group puts out.  I really commend you.

Let me introduce our panel now.  I’m going to go out of order.  Corporal Richard Gibson joined the Marine Corps in June 1999 as a recent high school graduate.  He went to the Camp Pendleton School of Infantry, where he trained as a mortar man.  Then he was assigned to the Marine Security Forces School in Chesapeake Bay, Virginia.  Following stints in Bahrain and Okinawa, Gibson was stationed in Kuwait prior to the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom.  As a 3-5 Marine, he was at or near the front lines from the beginning of the invasion through the overthrow of Saddam’s regime.  His unit fought its way up to Samarra, and was back in Baghdad in time for the first suicide bombings.

Most of you who have been here before know that I don’t normally read out peoples’ biographies, but I think we have a very impressive group of people who deserve their credentials read out.  Most of them are young enough that it doesn’t take all that long to read them out.

Lieutenant Lawrence Indyk spent most of his active-duty career in Iraq as the leader of the chemical platoon of the 3-2 Striker Brigade combat team.  After a twist of fate kept him from visiting the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Indyk enlisted in the U.S. Army.  Lt. Indyk went through basic training at Fort Sill, then officer training school at Fort Benning.  In Iraq, his principal posting was at Talifar, a city of 250,000, roughly eighty kilometers equidistant between Mosul and the Syrian border.  Indyk earned a Purple Heart during action on May 29, 2004, when a roadside bomb upended his vehicle as he drove security for a convoy headed from Talifar to Mosul.

Sergeant J. D. Johannes joined the Marines one week out of high school in 1991.  His superiors sent him to combat correspondent training, then to military journalism school at Ft. Benjamin Harrison, Indiana.  During Johannes’ active-duty career, he served as a public affairs officer, a combat correspondent, and a platoon leader with the Twenty-Fourth Marine Regiment out of Kansas City.  He was transferred to the reserves in 1994, and discharged as a Sergeant in 1999.

As the Iraq War approached, Johannes found his way back to his old unit as an independent newsman, providing feeds for local news stations in Kansas and Missouri.  By 2005, he was in Iraq covering the Twenty-Fourth Marines out of Camp Fallujah.  Johannes accompanied them on ambush operations, ordnance searches, snatch and grab, and security and stabilization operations.  He was also present in Baghdad when the members of the Iraqi national assembly finalized their new constitution.

Last, but not least, we have someone who is an old friend to AEI.  F. J. “Bing” West served in Marine infantry in Vietnam and as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs in the Reagan administration.  He is currently president of the GAMA Corporation, which designs war-games and combat decision-making simulations.  West is the author of several books, including Small Unit Action in Vietnam, and a large number of others.  The March Up was awarded the Marine Corps Heritage prize for nonfiction, as well as the Colby award for military nonfiction.  No True Glory will be published in late September.  He has also just returned from three weeks in Iraq.  It is the fourth year in row that he has spent time there.  He’s going to have an important perspective for us.

Let me see if I can remember how we’re going to start.  Each of our panelists is going to give a short presentation.  We’ll get some commentary at the end, and then we’ll open up for questions and answers.  Richard?

Richard Gibson:  Thank you, Danielle.  I’d like to thank AEI for hosting this event, and Rich Nadler and America’s Majority for bringing us together in the first place.  I’m here today representing the War of Words Project.  The Project produces a daily dispatch of conservative commentary on the war and the media’s coverage of it.  The Project has developed its own methodology.  We collect metrics of coalition progress, or lack thereof, reported by the various agencies and think-tanks; the operational reports of the MNF; the assessments of security by the Department of Defense; the reports on reconstruction by the Iraq Inspector General; and the Brooking Iraq Index.  We then cross-check the objective metrics against the best available subjective metrics, and the polls of the Iraqis themselves from Gallup, Zogby, Oxford Research, and the International Republican Institute.  If what the objective metrics are telling us is true, they should be reflected in what the Iraqis say regarding their own situation.  If what the media is telling about the war is true, its reports should reflect both. 

The War of Words Project predated its formal organization.  Here is how it started.  A number of Iraq War veterans from Kansas and Missouri were irritated by the media coverage and started speaking out.  We’d talk pretty much anywhere – civic clubs, political gatherings, rotaries, and local newspapers.  We didn’t know each other at the time, but we all shared some common opinions.  We believed that the removal of the Baathist Regime was justifiable as national security, international law, and simple humanitarianism.  We believed that it was a good thing to eradicate the murdering, expansionist, and WMD-obsessed regime of Saddam Hussein, and replace it with a democracy in the Arab heartland.  As warriors in the greatest fighting machine in human history, we contributed to that mission and we are proud of that fact. 

Fresh from our tours of duty in Iraq, we got back home and turned on our TVs.  Frankly, what we heard on the nightly news amazed us.  The war we fought was different from the one the American people saw.  In the war on TV, American troops regularly tortured and slaughtered civilians.  But in the war we fought, American forces consistently restrained our overwhelming firepower superiority in order to save lives, even at our own risk.  In the war on TV, Iraqis detested the American military and treated us as hated conquerors.  In the war I fought, the streets of Baghdad were thronged with cheering crowds at the spearhead of the invasion.  There were sixty miles of Iraqis clapping, carrying flowers, holding babies, and grown men crying tears of joy.

I don’t want to put too fine a point on this.  I’ve seen Marines cut down by enemy fire right next to me.  The guys shooting at us were Iraqis too.  When an army invades a country, the relationship between soldiers and citizens are complex – not simple.  Every time I hear some commentator sneer at Vice President Cheney because he said we’d be greeted as liberators, I have to smile.  I know what I saw.

In the war on TV, the Iraqi security forces do little more than get blown up at recruiting stations.  In the real war, the Iraqi army and police are now the most highly respected institutions in the country.  They outnumber coalition forces by two to one, and are involved in roughly sixty percent of anti-insurgent operations.  In the war on TV, Iraqi insurgents are portrayed as triumphant heroes.  In the real war, they are unable to operate effectively in 14 of 18 states.  They are hated everywhere, and their internal correspondence is filled with despair.

Over the last year, actionable intelligence from ordinary citizens increased from under 500 per month to over 4,000 per month.  The most popular shows on Iraqi TV center on the apprehension and punishment of terrorists by Iraqi police.  Al Qaeda and Iraqi are being dismantled by the Arabic equivalent of the TIPS hotline. 

But I think the thing that bugged us veterans the most was that on the war we saw on TV, America and its Iraqi eyes were losing the war.  We were in a quagmire, and that’s just simply not true.  The Iraq conflict has gone through several phases and we’ve won them all.  First, we flattened the military opposition.  Then, with the growth of the Iraqi security forces, we destroyed the ability of the insurgency to hold territory.  And now, with the help of the Iraqi people themselves, we’re destroying the ability of the insurgence to wage a civil war.

In the war on TV, pro-democracy Iraqi politicians are portrayed as incompetent amateurs, incapable of reaching agreements or as ideological fanatics pursuing a theocracy or as partisans of gun-mad militias.  In reality, Iraq’s new leaders have progressed steadily towards a genuine democracy, crafting a constitution that protects minorities, conducting high turnout elections, and just recently formed a unity government to negotiate the really big problems that they face.  Given these solid accomplishments, one wonders why they get such dismal press. 

On April 5, Senator John Kerry summed these attitudes up nicely.  He wrote in the New York Times and I quote, “Our valiant soldiers can’t bring democracy to Iraq if Iraq’s leaders are unwilling themselves to make the compromises that democracy requires.  No American soldier should be sacrificed because Iraqi politicians refused to resolve their ethnic and political differences.”  He continued, “If Iraqis aren’t willing to build a unity government in five months since the election, they’re probably not willing to build one at all.” 

Five months.  Hmm. 

Democracies aren’t formed by groups that are resolved all of their ethnic and political differences.  Rather, they are entered into by groups – generally armed groups - that agree to limit their independent exercise of power in order to confront common problems.

Let me site an example from our own history.  Addressing the state legislators during the Revolutionary War, the leaders of the Second Continental Congress wrote, “These articles must be candidly reviewed under a sense of the difficulty of combining in one general system the various sentiments and interests of a continent divided into so many sovereign and independent communities.  The document in question was American’s first constitution, the Articles of Confederation.  The authors knew perfectly well that the units from which their confederation would be born had separate interests, sentiments, and sovereignties.  Nonetheless, they urged, and I quote, “The absolute necessity of uniting all our counsels and all our strength to maintain and defend our common liberties.” 

The Articles of Confederation took 16 months to formulate, then another 3¼ years to ratify.  There was a shooting war going on the whole time, the American Revolution.  Contemporary historians believe that roughly one-third of the population leaned to Tory in sentiment.  Had the French based their naval alliance with the Continental Congress on John Kerry’s principles of five months and out, we’d all be singing “God Save the Queen,” having lost the battle in Yorktown.

It’s instructive to look at some of the issues Iraqi democrats struggle with in the like of our history.  Iraqis argue over boundaries.  The Kurdish party wants Kirkuk to be included in one of the Kurdish governments.  The oil of the region is an obvious motivator and so is history.  Following a pattern of Mesopotamian autocrats, Saddam resettled strategic areas in the north with populations loyal to him, particularly Sunni Arabs.  Hundreds of thousands of Kurds were made refugees in the process.  The other groups in northern Iraq included sizable minority populations in Kirkuk itself, which were unenthused about Kurdish dominance. 

Iraqi democrats have already framed the basis for compromise.  There will be a vote; a referendum over the status of Kirkuk.  Important details remain at issue.  Who will monitor the election?  Who will be permitted to vote?  Then the border will be established.  Would our founders have allowed such minor sticking point to interfere with the establishment of representative government, equal rights before, and the provision of a common defense?  In fact they did.  The Articles of Confederation, submitted to the states late in 1777, were not ratified until March of 1781.  Maryland, the last hold out, refused to sign until Virginia and New York relinquished their claims to lands in the Ohio Valley.

Let’s look at another controversy:  resource allocation.  More than 90 percent of the distorted federal budget of Baathist Iraq came from oil revenues.  Under democracy, will this revenue be controlled by the provincial, regional, or federal government?  The Iraqi Constitution establishes all three principles as legitimate, but defers the decision to the National Council.  It is true that our framers engaged in no such disputes.  That is because the national legislature they established had no powers of tax collection whatsoever.  General Washington, tasked with keeping the Revolutionary Army in the field without money to pay it, commented on this more than once in his letters.  It doubtlessly influenced his later decision to accept the Presidency of the Constitutional Convention.

Here is another matter about which Iraqis quarrel:  the ongoing role of extra-governmental armed groups.  There are four sizable militias operating in Iraq – two Shiite and two Kurdish.  The necessity of integrating them into a national defense force is generally accepted, but the terms and pace of that integration are still open questions. 

Americans had this problem too.  The Articles of Confederation depended solely on the states to muster troops.  Article Seven mandated that the entire officer corps below colonel must be selected by state authorities.  This was no fun at all for the high command.  The supremacy of government over militias was not clearly established in law until the Militia Acts of 1792 and 1795, or in fact until the suppression of Whiskey Rebellion in 1794.  The subordination of the states and the raising of militias were unsettled until the disillusion of the Confederacy at the end of the Civil War.  John Kerry wants Iraqis to resolve these things in five months; it took us more than five decades.  That did not seal the fate of our democracy.  The establishment of our republic did not await the final disposition of these disputes.  Long before these issues were resolved, our democracy functioned, and our nation flourished.

The relation of religion to state is another problem that Iraqis, like Americans, continue to argue about.  It was the New England clergy who formed the core opposition to the British Monarchy.  It was the Shiite clergy who formed the core opposition to Saddam Hussein.  Theology and democracy converged in anti-Baathist revolutionary activity.  We all know about Ahmed Chalabi, Alawi, and the Iraqi liberals.  The Shiite Dowa party, whose adherents include Prime Ministers Jafari and Maliki, also favor democracy.  The Dowa platform asserted that the people as vice regents of Allah should hold legislative authority.  It is in this light that we should understand Article Two of the Iraqi Constitution, which states that no law that contradicts the principles of democracy may be established.

Neither the issues that exercise Iraqi democrats, nor the pace of their resolution are unique.  The project of planting a democracy at the heart of the Arab world, with all the good that it could bring, is neither simple nor certain.  Powerful forces, internal and external, oppose the effort.  But I would point out one more characteristic that democratic politicians of Iraq share with the founding fathers of our democracy.  Their struggle like those of our forces, should command our respect not glib chastisements from the Congress and the press.  Thank you.

[Applause]

Lawrence Indyk:  Hello everyone.  My name is Lawrence Indyk.  I’m going to talk about the objective metrics that Richard mentioned.  You’re going to hear me repeat some of the figures, but hopefully we will discuss them in more detail.  I’d like to thank Danielle Pletka and the rest of the staff at AEI for giving us this opportunity to air our views on Operation Iraqi Freedom.  Most of the men and women who fight American’s wars never get that.  Many wish to tell the full story of what they saw and what is happening there. 

You won’t find an Iraqi veteran who doesn’t have strong opinions about his service.  His opinions are colored by their experience, and I’m no exception.  I was stationed in northern Iraq in areas that were predominantly Kurdish.  My experience there influences how I think about the war.  Even since the U.S. and U.K. secured a no-fly zone after the Gulf War, the Kurds have been developing their own vigorous democracy and economy.  The Kurdish north of media fame is quite a bit more complex and diverse. 

From ancient times, the various and dominant populations of the Tigris-Euphrates basin have displaced conquered peoples and replaced them with groups loyal to the government.  Saddam did this to a large scale, just as the Turks did in a previous age.  The result is a highly heterogeneous population predominantly Kurdish but with many Arabs, Syrians, and Turkmen as well.  Some of these groups enjoyed special favor under Saddam and are, therefore, permanently ill-disposed to the American-led coalition that destroyed the old order.

I can’t minimize either attitude.  I saw the gratitude of Iraqis who greeted us as liberators – and I witnessed open antagonism and experienced many insurgent attacks from the Iraqis who didn’t.

But this war isn’t about my personal experience.  Iraq is a big place and people who have been there will tell you in good faith a wide spectrum of seemingly contradictory things.  So how do we assess the truth of the situation for our essential democratic discussion?

U.S. policy in Iraq aimed to replace an ultra-aggressive, terror-harboring tyranny with a stable, constitutional democracy at peace with its neighbors.  And to assess our progress on that track we need the metrics that are not personal or anecdotal.  We require criteria that we can measure.

One set of metrics relates to security.  Is the insurgency growing or declining?  And are the Iraqis safer or less safe under the new regime than they were under Saddam? 

The second set of metrics is institutional.  One goal of U.S. policy is no less than to create the civic institutions of democracy:  a constitution, a free press, political parties, minority rights, and democratic elections. 

A third set of metrics is economic.  How are the Iraqis living?  How is business faring?  Are vital services like healthcare, transportation, education improving or declining?  And what of the infrastructure:  roads, electricity, water supply, and oil? 

Now the overwhelming bulk of statistical metrics available in Iraq necessarily come from the coalition sources:  the multi-national force headquarters, the Iraqi inspector general’s office, U.S. aid, and the Department of Defense.  This is true regardless of whether the reporting body is inclined to support administration policy or criticize it. 

At America’s majority, we decided that the most reputable polls of the Iraqi people to cross-check these metrics.  Whether we’re discussing security, democracy, or economics, if circumstances are really improving, that fact will show up in the attitudes of the Iraqi people themselves.  The polls will either confirm what the official statistics tell us or they will contradict those statistics, and often they help explain.  In this end, like Richard said, we have used polling by Gallop, Zogby International, International Republican Institute, and all covered research to elucidate what the raw numbers are saying.

Now I’ve got a lot of ground to cover and too little time to do it, so I’ll summarize our conclusions regarding America’s process toward policy goals in Iraq.  If you want more detailed analysis, I encourage you to go to the America’s Majority website.

Regarding security, the first set of metrics, despite great cost and steady but slow progress that Iraqi democracy and its coalition allies, are clearly defeating the two major insurgent groups, which are the Jihadists and the Baathists.  The first critical turning point occurred last month when the numbers of Iraq security forces on the group surpassed those coalition troops.  Today, IDF forces outnumber the multi-national force two to one, and besides quantity, their quality is improving dramatically with their experience.  The elected Iraqi government, aided by the multi-national force, now has the capacity to “clear, hold, and build,” as the generals put it. 

The second tipping point occurred on December 15, 2005, when Iraqis elected the first national four-year legislature.  With a high turnout even in the majority Sunni areas, this obviously strengthened the government, but more subtly, it splintered the insurgency.  Faced with the rapidly increasing force capability of a popularly-elected government, the strategic plans of the two chief insurgent groups diverged sharply.  For the Baathists, which are the numerical core of the insurgency, anti-government and anti-multi-national force terror became a negotiating tool to be employed to win favorable terms and amnesty for any past misdeeds or for entrance into the government going forward. 

And for the Jihads, the new government became the primary target.  Horrendous assaults against unarmed Shiite civilians became the operation of choice and the destabilizing objective to excite retribution of Shiite militias, or better still, Shiites in the Iraqi defense forces, thereby radicalizing Sunnis both inside Iraq and out.  The paradoxical impact of the decision:  that it kept the insurgent troops by constantly alienating its own base.

Anti-civilian terror has generated an explosion in actual intelligence.  The pro-government forces received from the Iraqi population themselves, from 483 tips in March 2005 to over 4,000 per month in 2006.  Al Qaeda in Iraq is being dismantled by the tips hotline, which in the end is by the Iraqis themselves.

The objective metrics of security on the ground are confirmed by polling data.  Anti-civilian terrorist outrages are loathed almost unanimously by Iraqis of all ethnicities and all religions.

An interesting aspect of the Iraqi polls on security is that where the right way-wrong way assessment has varied in different phases of the insurgency, most Iraqis consider their personal security in their own neighborhood to be good.  And a plurality consistently rates both security and freedom from crime as better post-Saddam than under the Baathists. 

That doesn’t mean security is good, unfortunately.  It’s not.  It means that the baseline under Saddam’s rule, 75 to 125 regime-caused deaths daily was abysmal.  In vast swaths of Iraq, especially the northern and southern governance, the overthrow of the regime has improved public safety according to the people who actually live there.

The metrics on the progress of Iraqi democracy are also positive.  They include massive turnouts for the elections of the transitional national assembly, the local and provincial assemblies, the new constitution, and the national council elected under that constitution.  A free press has also thrived since the regime change.

What do Iraqis think of their new freedoms?  Seventy-seven percent of Iraqis support the regime change that has occurred.  The majority wants a strong central government, democratically-elected, but they want it to be a unity government, one that includes all the major factions of Iraqi society.

Surveying the metrics of Iraq’s economy, the progress is less certain.  Real GDP grew 3.7 percent last year according to the World Bank, which isn’t bad, but there are powerful crosscurrents, some building the country up, others – mostly insurgent-related – dragging it down.

The latest reporter of the special auditor for Iraq records that oil and electricity productions, though improved, have yet to equal the pre-war peaks.  And with the wait for security forces to come on line to secure that oil infrastructure, it’s cost the government billions of dollars.

On a brighter note, Iraqi oil experts earnings hit $3 billion in April, one of the highest ever.  You’ve heard a lot about the blackouts in Baghdad; you’ve probably heard less about the forecasted resolution in the future and the vastly increased mega wattage available outside of Baghdad to those who were energy-starved under Saddam. 

There are countless tales of roads, clinics, and schools being built, of rampant corruption in subcontracts but heroic efforts in others.

But I’m being told to wrap up, so I’ll get to the bottom line.  The Iraq situation is not a fundamental catastrophe failing on all fronts, with everything being bad and everyone in Iraq hating the United States and everything we do.  It is much more balanced and, in fact, in the final analysis of these objective metrics, it’s overwhelmingly overall positive.

Americans expect the opposite.  By 49 to 31 percent, our citizens expect the situation to deteriorate.  But Iraqis think differently.  They don’t draw their conclusions from American press coverage.  They actually live there.

Thank you for your attention.

Danielle Pletka:  I’ll tell you why I wanted to wrap up, and I’m going to ask J.D. ask well prior to Bing’s commentary.  To keep it succinct, I think one of the valuable things that you all offer other than the important perspectives that you bring is the ability for people to ask you some questions that you can answer from your own experience.  And I want to give them that opportunity, especially since we ate into so much with our sandwiches.  So, J.D.?

J.D. Johannes:  I’m not going to talk about any metrics.  I’m just going to run through something really quickly here – something I have a little bit of experience with and Bing and these gentlemen up here do.

Now don’t raise your hands when I ask these questions but just think about them for a minute.  We all have to leave this room sometime today.  But what if that door is wired and is going to explode as soon as someone opens it.  How many people in this room are going to go through that door?  It might be one, it might not be.

Just maybe there’s a chance there’s somebody on the other side of that door with an RPK machine gun.  The first ten people through that door are going to get gunned down.  How many people in this room are going to go through that door?  Now there may be a guy with a machine gun, there may not be.  We don’t know.  Think about it.

Once you get through the door, there may be several guys with AK-47s down the hallway.  There may or may not be, but you don’t know until you get through that door.

And then once you get out onto the street, there may or there may not be some snipers out there.  Who’s going to go out on the street?

And then we all have to get into a cab or a car or maybe a metro and we have to ride somewhere.  Now there’s a chance that you could get blown up by an IED on your way home.

And then once you’re at home, there’s a very good chance that somebody’s going to lob some mortars or some rockets into your subdivision. 

So maybe it’s just better that we stay in this room.  Because you’re going to go through the door, down the hallway, out onto the street, go home, and do that.

Now, if you said, that sounds like a lot of fun, no big deal, let’s do that:  let’s go to Iraq next fall when I go back.  If you said no thank you, congratulations, you’re normal.

Most people don’t want to do that, but that is the life that it takes to be an infantry man, an infantry marine in Iraq back in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and probably into 2007.  And that’s what it takes to be an imbedded reporter traveling with an infantry unit covering the war.

The thing is, most reporters are normal.  They’re not in a big hurry to go through that door that may be booby trapped, that may have a guy on the other side of it.  So what happens is you get a little different perspective on the coverage.

Last year I spent five months living with a marine infantry platoon, walking the streets of places like Karma, Faris, Ah Maria [phonetic].  I spent days and weeks outside the wire, sleeping in the dirt, all those days and nights punctuated by the call to prayer.  I drank teas, smoked cigarettes, and ate with imams and sheiks. 

And what I saw was a war that is completely different than the one I would see on the chow hall when we got back to camp after about a week out.  Day in and day out, the war that I saw was one of boredom, one of gathering intel, one of hunting people down, and one where I never got blown up and only got shot at a few times. 

In fact, we spent most of our operations trying to get shot at.  Now that sounds kind of strange, but that is exactly what you have to do in Iraq now – you have to go and make yourself a target in hopes that somebody will engage you.  And you have to be very quick in response, because that is your only chance to get the enemy.  They learned, after 2004, that you don’t get into a shoot-out with Marines.  You don’t try to hold down a house or a city block going up against the Marines, so now we have to bait them out.  We spend weeks trying to do that.

In fact, the only time we got into a real shoot-out was on April 1, 2005, near Abu Ghraib prison, which is where the last major assault Al Qaeda ever attempted on a military installation in Iraq.  About 80 insurgents attacked the prison at Abu Ghraib.  We were rolling down Highway 10 right into the fire fight.  The fire fight lasted about 45 minutes.

I was the only reporter who was actually there inside.  Now, it’s pretty intense for the guys in the guard towers.  We were on the outside of the CAD team as QRF, so we just stayed up all night chasing guys through the canal country.

Four days and a couple of dead insurgents later, we finally get back to Camp Fallujah, I’m eating breakfast, watching CNN on the big-screen TV, and I realize that I was in the middle of the war in the hottest insurgent hotbed in Iraq.  We were all rather shocked, because we didn’t think that much of it.  The reporters showed up four days after the fact.  And that is what you are seeing with Iraq now. 

At the height of the Michael Jackson trial last summer, does anybody have idea how many credentialed reporters there were hanging around the courthouse in southern California?  Two thousand two hundred.  At the height of the invasion of Iraq, do you know how many credentialed reporters there were in Iraq?  Four hundred and fifty.  Do you want to know how many credentialed reporters there are running around in Iraq right now?  Probably less than 200.

When I was in Camp Fallujah, Iraq, I actually met more radio talk shot hosts come through the Press tent than I did journalists from major media organizations.  Bruce Kessler, editor and publisher, asked the question:  “Is the American media covering Iraq on the cheap?”  He responds yes, and so would I.  He also says, “Ironically, the same media that criticizes the U.S. for sending too few troops to stabilize Iraq is instead too few reporters to cover much more than the dramatic bombings around Baghdad.”

And what this has resulted in is a country in war that is a great, big canvas, but what we’re seeing is just small slices of it in the media.  Is the reporting from Baghdad on the daily car bombing accurate?  Yes.  Is what the CNN reporter says standing on the hotel balcony accurate and correct?  Yes.  But that is just one little slice of the war.  One very small slice that then, because that’s all we get, is expanded into the major picture.

Paul McLeary recently wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review, “Iraq is unquestionably the biggest story of our time and one which will affect American foreign domestic policy for the rest of our lives.  But if news organizations won’t invest the money and manpower to cover it from top to bottom, it will end up becoming a story told only through its major disasters and victories without many of the small, personal narratives, the struggles, to give the story its humanity.” 

McLeary is right.  News is important.  News is very important.  News is how people decide how they’re going to vote, how they’re going to live their lives, what investments they’re going to make in their time and effort.  The news reporting on Iraq is shaping and will shape American foreign policy for two generations.  And that is too important to be done on the cheap.

There always seems to be a cameraman on the site of the daily car bomb.  But there never seems to be a cameraman around for the takedown of a terrorist cell, which happens daily.  I was the only cameraman running around Fallujah the summer of 2005 long-term. 

Covering the war is important.  That’s why I’ll be going back to Iraq again soon to cover another unit in the future.  Thank you for your time.  [Applause]

Danielle Pletka:  Thank you, J.D.  Let me ask you to turn off your microphone - and if I could ask Bing for his commentary.  Just a second because you need a microphone.

F.J. "Bing" West:  Let me make three overall observations then run through some slides, because I was just back from Iraq, which try to make my point.

My first point is a terrific congratulation for doing this.  What happened in Vietnam is that we didn’t do this and we got our fannies handed to us, those who had fought there, by a lump group who claimed they represented us.  And you do represent us and I urge you very strongly to continue with this.  I don’t care what the politics of it are in the end, but the fact that you are getting your own leadership of your own veterans for the next 40 years is absolutely vital.  And I say that as an old fart who watched us miss that in Vietnam, and it is this kind of group that we absolutely need, period.  Absolutely need. 

[Applause]

Let me then shift to Iraq.  And I’ll start with what General Casey told me when I was over there, and I’m not name-dropping about that.  I’m saying it because that general is terrific.  And he has a plan; he knows where he’s going.  He summed it all when he said, “Bing, it’s not about us.” 

It’s not about us.  Therefore, we have to be able to distinguish between the veterans, who should be able to articulate for the future long after Iraq and what’s occurring in Iraq because it’s not about us anymore.  We passed that point.  We would like to make it conditions-based, which is you stay in these conditions until they’re satisfied; then you move on.  But the politics of the United States do not permit us to do it, so we have begun the handoff in Iraq. 

So the question then becomes how does is it going to end up, and I’ll stop by ending where I am:  I have no idea, because it’s not about us.  Look at the amount of combat experience you have sitting up here.  If I put any one of you in charge of an Iraqi battalion, I’d be satisfied tomorrow – to know that battalion was going to carry that fight.

The problem is that the way we develop a leadership, we don’t know yet whether the Iraqis are going to be able to do it.  So the basics are that, look, we have about one more year left in Iraq.  And I’m just going to say I’m not going to give all the reasons why.

The Iraqis as a society have the intelligence and the knowledge of organization to carry it through.  They lack leadership and teamwork for the common good.  Fortunately, the enemy is equally divided, so when you get finished racking and stacking that, I come out and say this one is too close to call yet.  Because it’s not our fight.

As J.D. was just saying, we can’t get into the fights anymore.  They stay away from the Americans, so it’s not our fight even if we wanted to win it for them, and we can’t win it for them.

What are the key ongoing efforts right now to keep an eye on?  Right now, we’ve said that the battalions on the bottom have been built pretty well over the last two years.  Now we have to institutionalize it so their pentagon, their people in Baghdad shelve the supplies down the chain of command and take care of those troops at the bottom and don’t act selfishly.  And that’s about 75 percent of the effort that our senior generals are now giving.  They’re giving to say to their senior generals, don’t act the way you did under Saddam.  Get the hell out there.

And that’s what they’re doing.  They’re kicking them in the fanny to get out there. 

The second thing, we have to get control of those police.  The police are split two different ways.  The Shiites for too long have been dealing with those secretive societies, the militia.  But the Sunnis – what’s the inherent problem with the Sunnis is what J.D. said.  If you live in a city – and that’s what they do, they live in a Sunni city – and everyone knows where your family lives and you have to go home to your family every night, we have not found a model for how they can be effective under those conditions, because they and their families would get killed.  And that’s an essential element that has to be taken this year that they’re trying for.

The third is the point that Lawrence made.  There’s a big effort right now - and both Lawrence and Richard were articulate on this – to split away the mainstream – I call them rejectionists.  And we’ve done this.  Some colonels have watched them over there saying what the hell are you fighting for?  You’re fighting against the Americans?  You know we’re going to leave eventually.  We don’t want to stay here any more than you want us here.  You’re fighting against your own government?  Give it up.  Everyone else is voting.  So, hey, dummy, what are you fighting for?

So they’re trying to say to the mainstream, get away from Al Qaeda, because Al Qaeda is going to kill you.  Get away from them.  But how do you do that is going to fascinating.  What model do you have from other wars that enables you to take some people in a civil war and pull them out from the others that they’re fighting with?

The next thing is, and Richard touched on this, but it drives me bananas and it should drive Lawrence bananas.  Lawrence was hit something like 14 times, Purple Heart, knocked to hell by these IEDs and we let those killers go.  And if there’s one thing I want to see our Congress do, it’s instead of complaining about us at Abu Ghraib, it’s to say break something like 90 percent of the people who are out there trying to kill us when they’re put in prison and let go within six months.  Hello!  How far have we gone with this, and it’s time that basically we say, hey, that dog shouldn’t hunt.

We’re trying to get money on the street. 

And last, we have to control Ramadi.  Look, this is the basic problem:  40 years under a regime that said you promise to stay out of politics, I’ll give you something to eat and keep your mouth shut wrecked the society in terms of the societal cohesion.  This could be an example of Darwinism, too, but people try to pluck as much of a free good such as electricity as they can, and it’s kind of an every-man-for-himself society that’s going to have to change.  And it’s going to take basically, as was pointed I thought articulately by Richard, it’s going to take a long time to get there.  You’re not going to get there overnight.  We didn’t get there overnight.

Bombers [sounds like] really get me angry about the tribal religiosity.  When I do not see imams having the nerve to stand up and say that is murder and you’re not going to go to heaven, then there’s something wrong.  And there’s something wrong with the lack of societal outrage and the lack of penalty for walking around carrying explosives.  You’re caught, read your rights, and within six months they will let you go again.  Until they get it together about being angry at people just blowing them up, it’s not a problem we can something about.  They’re not coming after the Marines or the Army; they’re coming after their own.

We are still in the case – this is typical of what these two Marines and a soldier, they’re all cousins together, of what they would face.  You could take one look when you drove down a street like that, which I took about three days ago, and you know you’re going to get into it.  It’s like Clint Eastwood riding down – you know when everyone has left what’s coming.  And here’s what they see every day.  That’s an IED you’re all looking at.  None of you would see it, but every one of these young men would say, “Uh uh, Ben, stop right here.”  That’s how it looks when I blew it up to a telescopic site.  You see that package?  It was getting dark and they dumped it right next to the curbstone because they were hoping it would go 30 miles per hour and wham.

So that’s what they do all the time and that’s what they face every single day over there.  Imagine the psyche of these three soldiers that are sitting up here that every single day they took that risk. 

Okay, I just thought I’d show you this because it’s kind of funny.  We called up the IED demolition’s team and every demolition’s team has the R2-D2 robot that they send out to destroy it.  And everyone is saying, “Sons of bitches are going to blow.  They’re going to blow it.”  And I say, “What?”

They tell me that somewhere the trigger man is looking at us.  He’s going to get the robot if he can’t get us.  The robot is worth $170,000.  The explosive guys out there with us are telling the Marines with us to get their asses into those buildings and find that guy before he blows up the robot.  I’m watching this argument going back and forth.  The Marines are looking all around and telling us to do something.

Nope, we couldn’t do a thing.  As soon as the robot got close, he shot at it.  In this particular case, he didn’t get the robot.  They pulled the robot in.  They’d done their job and were out of there.  The corporal of ours said that we had to keep going.  Sure enough, we got into a fire-fight.  The problem is, when they surrender to you, they do it knowing that 90 ninety percent of them are going to be released.  That hasn’t changed.  This is just the ugliness of combat in which they have to deal everyday.  There’s no such thing as a real tough Marine or soldier in the end.  They’re tough, but they understand the human cost in a way that the rest of us don’t.

We’ve also worn out our welcome in Iraq.  If we know that anyone can shoot us at any given time and we have to search them, eventually people get tired of this.  At some particular point our time is over, and I think we have about another 12 to 18 months.  It is time to be turning it over.  About 75 percent of our time over there now at the senior level is dedicated to exhorting the generals – not the Jundis who are out there with us.  If you give them Marine and Army leadership, they are terrific.  We have to get their own senior level people to say that being an officer is not a badge of distinction; it’s a badge that you wear because you owe the other person.  That is a different mindset than they are used to.

Take the case of General Casey.  I’ve seen that he knows every single battalion commander; he visits every single battalion every quarter.  We’re trying to get the Iraqi generals to do the same thing.  We can’t compare them with our founding fathers right now.  We were winning a war at the same time we were carrying changes to the Constitution.  They have to get on with winning the war.  That has to start with Rahmadi; they have to stop whining about Rahmadi.  Then they have to make some radical changes in the police.  And we have to identify the population.  Did you know that the population of Iraq is still without identification cards, four years later?  We’re doing over there what we’re doing over here.  We don’t dare issue identification cards for a lot of political reasons.

Finally, they have to start locking up the killers and IED makers – stop letting them go.  Overall, that is a wrap-up.  When I get finished and look at Iraq today, I make a huge distinction between our veterans and theirs – they should be the ones leading for the sake of themselves for the next forty years.  They shouldn’t allow someone else to shape Iraq for them.  Iraq is now up the Iraqis.  What we think of our country and traditions is up to you.  If you’re not out there shaping it, someone else is going to shape it for you.  It will be someone like Congressman Murtha or anybody who says they speak for the veterans.  I applaud you.  Only you can speak for yourselves, and you should.  It shouldn’t just be on Iraq; it should be what you have done for the country and where you are going to go.  That’s it.

[Applause]

Danielle Pletka:  All I can say is that we really need to have more events in which people are exhorted to stop whining.  Now we’re going to open up the floor to questions.  We have a young man here with a microphone.  Let me ask you to identify yourself, wait for the microphone, and ask one brief question.  In that vein, I’m going to ask the first question because I’ve got the mike.

You all talked a lot about history.  You gave good and idealistic presentations.  These are the things you believe in, but one of the things I didn’t hear I’m interested in because you were just there talking and working with people.  Were you were animated by all of these ideas that you laid out when you went in?  Is this something that you came out with?  Whether the answer is yes, no, or something in between, how would you personally assess the morale and attitude of the soldiers you’ve served with?  Any of you can answer.

Lawrence Indyk:  One of the most interesting things that I found:  last summer David McCullough released his book 1776.  Among the regimental combat team 8 staff there in Camp Fallujah and even the battalions around the area that was one of the most widely circulated historical books running around on base.  All of the senior officers were reading it; all of the company-level officers were reading it.  There were a lot of the great parallels to it and they could see the historical context – this is not a unique situation of building a country out from scratch in the midst of turmoil.  It has happened in the past.

And you would always hear the colonels and even majors and captains and senior staff NCOs – many of whom have a bachelor’s degree or master’s degree have been reading that book – and say, “Hey, it took us X years.  Why are we demanding they write a constitution in six months?”

So there was quite a little bit of historical analogy among the grunts, among the Marine infantry platoons and the Marine infantry battalions, surprisingly enough.

J.D. Johannes: Whenever I was sent in, I honestly didn’t know why I was going.  I didn’t really have any motivation behind it until I did see those 60 miles of people lined up on the side of the roads and listened to the stories of how families would be shot at and tortured because somebody else did something the Baathists didn’t agree with it.  That motivated me beyond no end, but if you study history and the failures of history and the successes of history, everybody wants to succeed. 

There are general guidelines that you need to follow, not to mirror or become that democracy that has succeeded, but to follow the same guidelines that have worked for them in the past so well.  And that is what the Iraqis now understand; that’s what they’re going after.  The majority of the troops over there understands it and is extremely supportive of it. 

You see and hear so many stories of the wounded wanting to go back.  It’s just we support our mission.  Why?  Because we’re over there; we don’t rely on what the mainstream media is saying – we get to experience it firsthand, and we know the bottom line truth of everything.  And it’s a good thing what we’re doing over there.

Richard Gibson:  Yeah, I’d just to comment quickly about your question about morale, because people talk to me about morale all the time.  It seems to be the first question:  what’s the morale of the troops? 

I would say that the morale of the troops that I knew when I was there was about as high as it would be for anybody doing something very difficult and very dangerous in 125-degree weather. 

The fact that anybody elects to stay in an organization where you’re very likely to get put back in that situation is an amazing thing and the fact that the Army does it – and I believe that the Marines are doing it - at a very high retention rate shows the kind of dedication and the kind of ethos that the people who do this job have.

The other question I’m asking about morale is:  what do you think media coverage is doing to the morale of people in the field?  They see all this negative media coverage.  And my experience with that is kind of anecdotal.  To the people who are actually in the field it does practically nothing because they know the truth.  They actually see and they’re doing it and they know what’s going on in Iraq to a certain extent.  If the media coverage is accurate, they’re fine, and if it’s not, they say, well, it’s not accurate. 

The one effect on morale not in the military that coverage can have is on recruitment, because if people who are in high school or college and thinking about going into the military and their impression is that this organization just can’t seem to do anything right, it’s incompetent, and everything is a big disaster, well, of course, that’s going to hold back people from wanting to come into the organization.  That is the most inaccurate thing possible, in terms of the incompetence of the military and the basic challenges that we face in Iraq.  That’s one thing that concerns me and animated me to become part of this organization.

F.J. "Bing" West:  Just quickly, the re-enlistment rates in the Army and the Marine Corps infantry in Iraq are much higher than they are here in the United States for a very simple reason:  those nuts who have chosen to be grunts to begin with, and I say that because I’m one myself, they are self-selected anyway.  And they are out there doing what they want to do.  Their reenlistment rates are actually going up.

That is quite different from those volunteering for the first time.  The recruiters tell me that the pivotal person there is the mother.  The mother in the family is tremendously influenced by hearing about the casualties every night.  There is a distinction between the reenlistment rates, which are up, and the first time volunteers.

Male Voice #1:  My name is [indiscernible].  I am an Iraqi-American journalist.  I must honestly tell you that this is the very first time I’ve attended a forum on Iraq that feels and sounds like it is being held in Baghdad, rather than Washington D.C.  Secondly, it is also the first time I’ve attended a forum on Iraq in which the panel members have not only said things that are true, but also dramatically understated.  The third thing is a question.

There are people in Iraq who are completely unaware that Iraqi policies are much more opposed in the United States than they are in Iraq.  My question is how did that happen?  Why did the United States lose the minds and hearts of the American people?  Why did it lose the Iraq war at home?  Can the panelists address that?

J.D. Johannes:  I’ll take that one, as the former Marine and resident journalist/film maker of the bunch.  Most everyone in this room is from Washington.  You’re all politically savvy; you know what earned media ratings points are. 

I’ve done a study on this.  I did this with the coalition last summer.  There are probably 60 – 65 pessimistic stories to every 25 – 30 optimistic stories about Iraq.  Look at the total breadth of the coverage over the course of many months.  I calculated it out last summer.  There were only 31,000 positive gross ratings points for any sample, versus almost 60,000 negative gross ratings points for any sample over that period of time.  That many negative messages have soaked in over time. 

When we talk about 30,000 and 60,000 ratings points, it is the level of advertising for an ad we could all sing along with – like the Oscar Meyer wiener song.  That’s the gross ratings points.  In Iraq, they don’t have that level of gross ratings points coming back at them.  Even though everyone has a satellite dish, they also have another input.  They actually get to see it on the ground.  Their contact with U.S. Marines is not always a violent interaction.

Phil Dine:  Hi, I’m Phil Dine from the St. Louis Post Dispatch.  I thought all of your presentations were excellent.  I think your central point was the contrast between what is actually happening in Iraq and what is being reported.   That, in your view, is explaining a lot of the decline in public support for the war.  I’d like to ask you about a second set of contrasts and see if you could comment on how that’s affecting the decline of public support.  And that’s the contrast between what the American public has been told and what the media has been told was happening in Iraq and what in fact has happened.

The public was told before the war that it would pay for itself.  They were told by the Secretary of Defense as the insurgency was starting that there was no insurgency, that it was a few dead-enders, maybe one guy doing it 20 times a day and being captured by TV.  There was really beyond.  It was freedom and stuff happens.  We were told that three years ago the mission had been accomplished.  We’ve been told about a dozen times that this or that event is the turning point and that there’s a spike in violence.

Danielle Pletka:  Phil, you could probably go on for the next—

Phil Dine:  And the last one, we’re told that the insurgency is on its last legs.  Not to mention the reason that we got into the war, not being borne out.

So while I think that probably everything you’re saying is true in terms of what’s happening in Iraq, don’t you think the contrasts between what we’ve been told and what’s happened also feeds into the failing of public support?

J.D. Johannes:  Have you been to Iraq, and how much time have you spent there?

Phil Dine:  I’ve been to Afghanistan and—

J.D. Johannes:  Okay.  This is the amazing thing:  I never saw a car bomb once in Iraq.  Does that sound impossible for a guy who spent five and six months there?

Phil Dine:  Yeah.

J.D. Johannes:  Yeah?  Amazingly in the rest of Al Anbar, Fallujah, Ramadi, I never saw a car bomb once.  So when you said that the original talk about the insurgency could be one guy doing it 20 times and just doing it for the media cameras, why do you think all the car bombs go off in Baghdad?  Because that’s where the cameras are.  The car bombs don’t go off in Karma because there’s no cameras there to capture it. 

This is a media war they are engaging in.  And the sooner that you realize that, the sooner you realize that you are being played by people who would gladly cut your throat who I have looked into the eyes, who have told me to my face that they will not stop Jihad until the shriya [indiscernible] is the only source of laws on earth.  Then we’ll have a clear picture of what’s going in this war.  Thank you. 

[Applause]

Danielle Pletka:  Hang on.  While I respect your answer, I respect Phil’s question as well.  It is, in fact, true.  Everybody knows where I come down on this issue.  But it is in fact true that a lot of things have been suggested over the last few years, perhaps in good faith, depending on where you stand in the political spectrum.  No matter what, the problem is that expectations weren’t met.  There were suggestions to Reservists that this might have been a short war – not a weekend war, but certainly not something that was going to take them away from home for three years.  The climate created by our own leaders was one that led people believe that it wouldn’t be of the scope that it is. 

It’s natural that things change, and you would hope that it would be a learning experience for politicians.  On the other hand, all of you guys were on the ground.  The question is how widespread do you think the perception is, in the military, that we were taken on a ride?  Answer it in a straight forward way.

Lawrence Indyk:  I’d like to comment on this.  I guess there is a bit of outrage that a politician “rosied up” an objective assessment of the situation.  But more to the point, let’s think about the nature of objectively predicting these kinds of things.  That’s were the gap is.  If you ask someone in the professional military, an officer of rank and experience, to predict exactly how the war is going to go, how many casualties there’s going to be, how long it’s going to take, how far you’re going to get in what amount of time, that person will look to you honestly and go, “You’re out of your mind.”  There’s no way to know. 

I hate to use this phrase, but it’s become common language: the unknown unknowns.  There is no way of knowing all the things that are going to happen, and I’m not dismissing the idea, but the very idea that there can even be realistic estimations of how bad or good something is going to be – that it is as complex and chaotic as warfare and post-warfare management, there is no legitimate good prediction, and if you complain that you don’t like the fact that they have you the rosy assessment, maybe the complaint is the fact that anyone believes in assessments at all.

The fact is, when someone says we’re going to war, assume the worst, because it could very well be like that.  That’s what the decision to go to war about.  No one in their right mind is going to give you a very good, solid prediction, unless they’re not really being honest with themselves.

F.J. "Bing" West:  The administration as well as the military flailed for the first 18 months.  And throughout the ranks of the military that is known.  It’s harmed the trust on both sides. 

There is plenty of blame to go around.  Fallujah was a disgrace.  It wasn’t until General Casey got over there that some order was put into this whole thing.

Danielle Pletka:  Of course, Fallujah was a political decision, not a military decision.  I remember who made it:  Ben.

F.J. "Bing" West:  Fallujah was handled straight up the military chain of command and General Abizaid made the final decision.

Danielle Pletka:  We’ll fight this out afterwards.  Ben?

Ben Wattenberg:  Ben Wattenberg of AEI.  I do have a question, but I suggest to the gentleman from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that you read President Bush’s second inaugural, which lays out very clearly the rationale, what has happened, that it’s going to take a long time.  It’s a most remarkable speech.  But I do have a question.

First, I want to salute the panel.  You’ve done a wonderful job.

If you look at this as a media equation – and I’ve been in and around the media for too long – there’s a standard line, “When all the planes land safely is no story.  When a plane crashes, there’s a story.”  What you’re describing is something where the bad guys can send word to the media and say be at the corner of Sixth and Elm at 9 p.m. and you’re going to see something.  What you guys are saying is you sit around for weeks and months of boredom until you can find a guy. 

Well, a media organization can’t send a cameraman to sit with you for a month to wait for something to happen.  My question is, is there some way around this?  Do your units carry on their manifest cameramen?  You can shoot video with a cell phone today.  It’s the kind of thing that you have to engage in to counter media warfare.

J.D. Johannes:  Yeah.  When I was over there, I was freelancing.  What I did was I went to a bunch of TV stations and I told them that I could do in Iraq whatever costs them X dollars for half the price, because I was doing it for five of them, for the ratings cycle.  And it worked out great, because look at television news, you only get three or four different story samples, but you never get on local news the local boy in Iraq.  They were paying me for that, so I got to cover it.

Now as for the military aspect, yes, there are outfits called Combat Camera.  Each battalion around Fallujah – Bing, you’ve probably seen these guys work, even – had a combat cameraman.  They even had a KU band satellite transmitter that beamed images, interviews, footage of what happened in Baghdad, back to a group called DVIDS, Digital Video Image Distribution System, where television stations can download the pictures and moving video and interviews and re-use them for free. 

In fact, I even saw an example of DVIDS being used two nights ago on the show “Let’s Make a Deal.”  I think that’s the name of it.  It had a young man, a staff sergeant in Fallujah, on the game show with a satellite transmission hook up.

And every major base has one of those.  So the product is out there.  I’ve read newspaper articles that think that DVIDS is a propaganda tool and therefore refuses to use it.

Lawrence Indyk:  I’d like to add one thing about the media:  our understanding of what the insurgent’s view of the media is.  I’m not an expert on the media like J.D. is, and thank God, because that gives me brain space for almost everything else that’s more important in the world.

[Laughter]

The thing is, we tend to make the insurgents into demons, and they are sort of inhuman – but they are human beings and they’re actually smart a lot of them, especially the people who are planning a lot of these operations. 

They’re not dumb when it comes to the media.  They know what plays in the American media.  They can see it on the internet.  They have many resources, and they watch it.  We know from Osama Bin Laden tapes that they pay attention to the media all the time.  They know what is going to be covered in the American press.

We also know from intercepts that this knowledge is being exploited by them.  Essentially it’s a strategy on their part.

Their thinking is:  We’re going to do this.  We’re going to do it at this pace, and that will guarantee us a regular stream of this happening in the American press, which we then know – because there again they’re pretty smart – that the poll numbers will drop from here to here and that’s how you win the war.  Because we can’t win it on the ground.  We’re not going to, like Bing said, attack the Army or the Marines directly anymore, because the attrition level was so high we’re eventually going to just fall off the face of the Earth.  But if we can just depress the public attitude in America again and again and again, because we know what their media is going to do, we know the incentives and everything like that, then that’s how we’ll win, because then they’ll leave.

We know that’s what they believe.  So now you’re in the media.  Now you know that they know what you’re going to do.  If you still do it, if you’re playing into their hands, if you’re doing what they want you to do, that’s the great disaster.  That’s the great defeat from America.  It’s people who are free and have free-thinking who know that they’re being played, but because of ratings and because of the incentives will still do it and will play into their hands.  That’s a great disaster.

Danielle Pletka:  You all remember the debate about whether or not the headings on the internet and on video was good for the organization between the Al Qaeda headquarters and Al Qaeda and Iraq.  That was a good example of that. 

This gentleman here, and I think we only have time for a couple more questions.  You are next.

Brian Bender:  Brian Bender with the Boston Globe.  I just want to thank you for doing this.  I really was impressed, and I think it adds something that we don’t have in Washington enough.

One quick sort of defense of the media, and I’d like your take on this – and I have been over there, certainly not as long as you all:  we have the job of covering both the military aspect of the war as well as the political leadership.  You are over there in uniform and you’re paid not to think about politics, or at least not to speak about it. 

I’ve covered the military a long time.  I’m always impressed with folks like yourself from the lowest grunt to the general officers.  What is your take on the political leadership that’s overseeing the conflict in Iraq?  Now that you’re out of uniform, you can presumably can speak about that.  I’d be interested in your take. 

And also, one last note, the media needs people like you.  I was so impressed that I would ask you to look for work in the media.  We need people with military experience.  We don’t have enough.

Richard Gibson:  As a young Marine, I was instructed to never make a political statement on camera because I accidentally did once and looked like an idiot, basically.  But now that I have gotten out and looked at it...  Luckily, I was an anti-terrorism specialist for my first year in Bahrain.  I have an innate knowledge on what it takes to fight terrorism.

With the politics of this situation, I agree fully in the war, taking it to Iraq, because it’s the number one thing that you have to do to ensure that a September 11 doesn’t happen here again.  You have to take the fight to them.  It is a brilliantly-staged move by America to take the fight to them. 

Why?  Like I said before, the number one most important, best thing you can do to ensure that terrorists stay occupied in their country instead of coming over to ours is go to them.  Fight them on their land.  Do not allow them to come over here. 

Why?  Because they go to the soft target.  There are two types of targets:  hard and soft.  Hard targets are us over here, they now have to get through the borders, they have to get through immigrations, and we’re looking for them, so it’s incredibly tough.  We’ve all stood in the lines at the airports and we’re just looking for them.  So we go over there; they’re not in Iraq.  They’re throughout the entire Middle East.  Americans go over there.  We’re fighting. 

It’s easy to kill the Americans; all we have to do is throw a tank of gas in the car, a couple of RPGs, a couple of AK-47s, and we’re off through the Syrian border, into Baghdad.  Hey, Sunnis, I’m here to fight the Americans.  Whose house can I stay in?

That is the essential reason for me and is the best benefit, immediately to keep terrorism away from American soil, is to entice them to fight us on their turf. 

With politics, it’s an absolutely brilliant move.  I support it.  The majority of the troops – not all of them – support the war in Iraq as well on that political level.

Danielle Pletka:  Is that what you were asking about?

Brian Bender:  Well, I sort of meant:  We’ve heard a lot about the military mission.  It was based in the success in the past.  When I mean political leadership, I mean how have politicians in the administration but also in the [indiscernible] have sold the war to the American people, have built up the national support, have used their diplomacy?  I want to get a sense—

Danielle Pletka:  Okay, this is partly the question that was asked a little bit before by Phil.  May I just sort of rephrase it and see if I can get you guys to answer it?  I wonder if people pay attention to this.  I think you all distinguish between the war at home and the war in Iraq.  Bing distinguished between the veterans who speak for veterans who actually served and the people who speak for what they want veterans to think for their own political purposes.  There is a distinction, but that is very much an American battle.

On the ground in Iraq as soldiers who are now free to speak, how important was it to you that Congressman A was saying this and Congressman B was saying that and President Bush had a banner behind him that said this but gee it really wasn’t accurate.  Here we talk about this a lot.  Do you care?

J.D. Johannes:  None of us is from Washington.  I’m from Kansas personally, so that’s probably a different perspective. 

Danielle Pletka:  You’re not in Kansas anymore.

J.D. Johannes:  Thank you.  That’s the fourth time I’ve heard that today. 

[Laughter]

J.D. Johannes:  The way that I look at politics and the war is still very much that I looked at it when I was officer and surrounded by other professional officers, which is that when you’re conducting these kinds of operations and you have to plan and think, your constraints should be the constraints of reality, the situation around you, as much as you know about it.  You shouldn’t have artificial constraints that are sort of arbitrarily political and very ideologically based. 

The one thing that was always very satisfying was the idea of when a statement is made like we’re going to base the troop levels, we’re going to base the timeline, we’re going to base all this not on some artificial ideological, arbitrarily-imposed thing that is satisfactions that happened right up near elections, but we’re going to do it based on what the military commanders say that they need on the ground.

When a politician says we respect your professionalism, your experience, your years of service, and your advice.  We’re going to give you what you need and we’re not going to tell you that everything has to be done in 11 months because there’s an election coming up.

That’s the best thing that can happen politically – for the politicians to say, it’s in your hands.  We give you the mission.  Politicians in a democracy determine what we want done, but we’ll let you decide which the best way to do it is.  That’s the way that all of the professional services in the government should ideally operate with competent professionals.  That’s the view of politics.

In terms of what’s going on in Congress, it’s very complex, but when the President says we’re going to base these decisions based on what the military commanders say they need they need on the ground, we’re going to base our constraints on reality and not politics, that’s the ultimate reward a military officer can have in terms of their ability to actually accomplish their mission.

J.D. Johannes:  When I interviewed a lot of the Marines for the PBS documentary I’m producing, the biggest complaint that they would give that would be kind of a political interference complaint would be rules of engagement, i.e., when you’re allowed to shoot, who you can shoot.  You could take no initiative.  Until you were being shot at and bullets were snapping around you, then you were allowed to fire back.  Those were the rules of engagement on the ground in 2004 for lots of different places. 

In the city of Fallujah, if you fired a shot, you had to write up an incident report to this battalion, so that’s why everybody hoped they wouldn’t even have to fire a flare.  Now the Marines would say it’s political; everybody’s scared that something bad is going to happen and there’s going to be fall out.  That was the only complaint I ever heard or any talk of politics.

Danielle Pletka:  We are going to wrap up with this very patient gentleman who has been waiting to ask a question.  This is our last question.  Oh, wait.  Can you hold on one second?

F.J. “Bing” West:  It’s almost universal among the military officers that they didn’t have enough troops.  So you can anticipate that the next time, who’s the big loser on this one inside the military?  Simple, the theater commanders.  The theater commanders came out of Goldwater and Nickelson [phonetic] as the new Caesars, and they were the four stars who would speak directly to the Secretary of Defense.  General Franks wrote his book where he referred to them as Title X M.F.-ers [phonetic] and they proudly took off their jackets to show they had a tee-shirt indicating they were Title X M.F.-ers, meaning that they were kissing his rear end, that he had more power than they did. 

That’s gone.  There won’t be anymore generals – and these General Schwarzkopf or General Franks – who go directly to the Secretary of Defense and cut out the rest of the military.  Not after this one, because Franks blew it.  As a result, from now on, you’re going to find the joint chiefs speaking out very strongly in their own right and there will be more of a checks and balances.

Danielle Pletka:  Still one last question.

Male Voice #2:  Carl Nartof [phonetic], Foreign Policy Association, and also the president of the Indian Veteran Association of America.  I have felt akin with Operation Iraqi Freedom.  Together with this, we would be very interested to know, because I have served 17 years in the Middle East including Iraq, what was your feeling when you went in and what is your feeling now?  The litmus test of democracy is a man on the street, what you are feeling now.  What does the man on the street think?

Richard Gibson:  As I said before, there was a lot of confusion for me – almost getting out, I was a stop-loss Marine, they had extended me; I was a little bit bitter...a lot bitter, I guess – but when I looked into the souls of those Iraqi civilians and I got to see inside of them the joy that they now had because we were removing such a brutal dictator in Saddam Hussein.  It was a life-changing event, because it wasn’t one person. 

It was the 60 miles of people lined up on the sides of the roads the numerous times that we stopped and talked with these people, in addition to men who wouldn’t talk to me because the NBC news crew that was trying to film it and would say, “No, I can’t talk to you while the camera is rolling.  They’ll kill my family, they’ll kill my family.”

It didn’t just happen once.  The sentiment of the Iraqi civilians when we were there was overjoyed.  From all of my friends and fellow Marines who are still over there and have gone back numerous times and have just come back, I talk to them on the phone and email, same deal.  It’s just a small percentage of Iraqis who don’t want us there.  That’s the sentiments and that’s my take.

Danielle Pletka:  Thank you.  We’re going to wrap up there.  I looked around the room when you were talking about looking into the souls of Iraqis just to see how people reacted.  As you know, in Washington, that’s not a phrase that has a terribly felicitous background.  We’re not a town that has great respect for those kinds of feelings.

Male Voice #3:  Well, I’m [inaudible] for yourself. 

Danielle Pletka:  I don’t appreciate you interrupting me, sir.  Listen until the end, and try to show yourself to be ignorant.  We have a lot of contempt for that kind of thought in Washington.  I think that you saying that gives us an appreciation for how much honor people feel in the military for doing the right thing for the Iraqi people.  It’s a really important reminder for us.  When people talk about seeing into peoples’ souls, feeling respect for them and doing the right thing – that is something we all should stand for.  Thank you.

Lawrence Indyk:  I have just one quick thing on the same note.  There is a guy that works for AEI – Charles Murray.  He has a kind of famous quip.  He was criticizing socialism at one point, and someone asked him about Sweden.  You know, Sweden is socialist and they are doing great.  He said, “Almost any government system possible will do great if you’re governing Swedes.”  The point he was making was that this is a culture that, over centuries and generations, had built up a community spirit and cultural ethos that made them almost self-sufficient, regardless of the government.  It wasn’t that the government was successful; it was that the people were successful.  The government almost couldn’t mess it up.

When I went into Iraq, I had perhaps the other impression.  Maybe it was the opposite; maybe almost no government would work on a population that had been oppressed by Saddam Hussein for so long.  While I was there, I talked to a lot of Iraqis and Kurds and Arabs.  When I left, I felt the same way I feel today.  There is no such thing.  These people wanted democracy, freedom, and their basic rights.  They wanted good lives for their families, just like we do.  There is no such thing as an ungovernable population.  There is advancement and progress.  Cultural mores need to change, as does the understanding of what it means to be free.  Essentially, when you look into their souls, you see us.  You see people trying to be free.

Danielle Pletka:  Let me thank all of you very much.  

[End of transcript]