American Enterprise Institute

January 5, 2007

[Edited transcript from audio tapes]

10:45 a.m.	Registration
11:00		Panel I: Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq
	Panelists:	Frederick W. Kagan, AEI
		General Jack Keane, U.S. Army (retired)
12:00 p.m.	Break
12:15		Panel II: Reports from Iraq
	Panelists:	The Honorable John McCain, U.S. Senate
		The Honorable Joseph Lieberman, U.S. Senate
1:30 p.m.	Adjournment

Proceedings:

[Panel I:  Choosing Victory:  A Plan for Success in Iraq]

Danielle Pletka:  Good morning everybody.  Welcome to the American Enterprise Institute.  Happy New Year.  I’m Danielle Pletka.  I’m the Vice-President for Foreign and Defense Policy Studies here AEI.  Welcome to the first panel in our event, “Iraq:  A Turning Point.”  It is a great pleasure to have you all here today. 

In October of 2002, AEI launched a series on post-Saddam Iraq.  In month after month of events, we talked in great deal with Iraqi and American experts about how to contend with the challenges of stewarding a nation into democracy after 30 years of dictatorship.  But many mistakes, avoidable mistakes, were made in the crucial months after Saddam fell, and some of them have landed the United States in the difficult situation we face today in Iraq.  Because of those mistakes, whether political or military, there are some who suggest that we have lost, that we never should have invaded, and that somehow, having sacrificed 3,000 precious lives, America should now declare itself beaten and withdraw, clinging to our snug and secure shores. 

This embrace of defeat is wrong.  Like the war, hate the war, believe in it or not, America is now in Iraq and we must win.  It is a simple as that, because the price of failure is not ignominy for George W. Bush or egg on the face of Dick Cheney, it is the victory of terrorists and their sponsors and the creation of a national homeland for extremists bent on killing Americans. 

Understanding that fact, AEI’s resident scholar, Frederick Kagan, brought together some of the finest military practioners and thinkers in an Iraq Planning Group to discuss how we can win.  The suggestion that victory was unachievable was dismissed from the outset.  The idea that the world’s greatest economic, political, and military force with more than a million men and women under arms can be trounced by the likes of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and Iranian-sponsored Shiite fire breathers is ridiculous.  We can lose only if we choose to do so. 

The question before the Iraq planning group was instead choosing victory and how to do so.  With General Jack Keane, a four-star general who completed 37 years in public service in December of 2003, culminating as acting Chief of Staff and Vice-Chief of Staff of the United States Army, Fred brought together an incredible group of people, some named in our report, and others, in active duty, necessarily anonymous, to forge a plan.  Fred and Jack briefed the highest levels of our government and military leaders on this plan and are here today to lay out in full the results of Phase 1 of the Iraq Planning Group’s report.  Additional reports from the group will follow in the coming months. 

Before I turn to Fred and Jack, let me just say a word of gratitude to both of them and to all the members of the group.  They have done amazing, thorough, and groundbreaking work.  Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman will be with us at 12:15 to talk about their views on Iraq and their sense of how victory can be achieved.  But first let me turn to Fred Kagan and Jack Keane.  Thank you.

 Frederick W. Kagan:  Dani, thank you very much.  It was very fortunate for me to be at an organization where when this idea was developed - and it was actually Dani’s idea, she does not take public credit for it, but she should - when an idea like this came up we could react rapidly, pull this group together and make this happen.  I do not think there are a lot of other organizations that could have done that, so it was a wonderful opportunity to be able to do this, and wonderful to be able to work with Jack Keane and get his advice as well. 

I do not need to repeat that this is a critical moment in Iraq and America’s history and the history of the world, in fact.  We really, over the past months, have come through a moment of bifurcation in world history.  If the United States embraced the proposals to withdraw and lose in Iraq, then world history would move very sharply in one direction.  It is very, very clear that the civil war in Iraq would expand, would explode, and would come to involve other countries in the region, and the United States would find itself committed to dealing with the consequences of that explosion for years and decades to come. 

If, on the other hand, we can reverse the current slide toward full-scale civil war and sectarian conflict in Iraq and move Iraq in the direction of security, stability, and freedom, then the world will move in a very different direction.  The region will not be destabilized.  In fact, the region will see a new force for stability arise.  So there really is nothing less at stake than a fundamental divergence in future history.  That is why we thought it was very important to put together a report that considered an option that most people had dismissed by early December. 

It had become common wisdom that any military attempt to bring security to Iraq would fail; and that not only would it fail, but that it was inconceivable for us to even to try.  People were tossing around numbers of forces that would be required to achieve security in Iraq that were, based on the situation there and historical precedent, frankly silly.  But they were not being challenged.  There was no alternative view laid out, so we set out to develop that alternative view and to lay on the table for the administration and the American people to think about. 

The result is (Choosing Victory:  A Plan for Success in Iraq), our Phase 1 report.  Let me emphasize that this phase one and let me emphasize that we, in the group, did not imagine that Iraq’s problems can be solved by military means, do not imagine that bringing security to the districts of Baghdad that we recommend clearing and holding will solve Iraq‘s problems by themselves.  We are fully cognizant of the fact that there has to be a significant change and improvement in the way that we train Iraqi soldiers and police, that there has to be a significant reconstruction and economic development program that accompanies this, that there are going to have to be important changes in the Iraqi political process – the Iraqi political system. 

We do not slight those aspects of this report, but we have chosen in Phase I to focus on security for one simple reason.  The security situation in Iraq, and especially in Baghdad now, is bad, and it is deteriorating.  It is eroding the will of the American people to continue the fight and it is polarizing Iraqi politics to the point where it may become impossible to imagine bringing Iraq back together in an acceptable way and in an acceptable cost, if we do not get this under control, quickly. 

The basis of this plan from the outset has been fundamentally, “In case of emergency, break glass and execute this plan.”  We think we are there.  And we think what needs to happen now as a first order of priority is that we need to bring security back to Baghdad, security that it really has not had since the end of the invasion.  Because only when there is actually security on the streets, a basic level of security, can you have political development, can you have the sort of political compromises that are going to be essential to resolving these problems, can you have economic development and social development. 

These things cannot happen if most of the population has to wake every morning wondering if it will survive till the evening, wondering if its family will survive, wondering if it will not be brutally tortured and executed.  That kind of thing going on destroys any prospect of normal political life or development.  I’m always shocked at people who imagine that with the level of violence as it is in Baghdad, the thing to do is to try to get Iraqis talking to each other.  People in that situation do not talk to each other.  We have gotten into a situation a where too many Iraqis are saying it with AK-47s.  We need to take that away.  We need to get the violence under control.  Then we can move forward with these other initiatives. 

We will be addressing these other problems in subsequent phases.  In a few weeks, we plan to convene another group to address our Phase 2 issues which mostly focus on transition, training, reconstruction, economic development, and various other aspects of this, and we will put together other phases as appropriate over the next few months of our project, trying to come to a holistic understanding of what needs to be done in Iraq and trying to offer a series of recommendations as we move forward. 

Now, I want to take just a moment before I turn this over to General Keane, to emphasize a few aspects of our plan which has been a little garbled sometimes in the way that the media has reported it, and to highlight a few common criticisms and address those as well. 

We are saying that we need, in the first instance, to send sufficient American military force into Iraq, into Baghdad so that we can, working with such Iraqi forces as are available, not relying on Iraqi forces to appear magically when we know that they will not, that we can clear and hold certain critical areas in Baghdad.  We have identified a critical terrain in the city which we think has to be under control and could be brought under control with reasonable levels of force. 

We have very adamantly opposed the idea of starting the operation by going after Muqtada al-Sadr, or attacking Sadr City.  It seems to us that when you look at the complexities of Iraqi politics and especially Shia politics, we have an opportunity now to keep the Shia parties separate and to avoid a full-scale military conflict with them.  If we go into Sadr City that will not [sounds like] be the case.  We will find ourselves in a full scale, very bloody operation, which probably will look something like Fallujah in my guess. 

We will win.  We will certainly clear Sadr City out and destroy the Mehdi Army, there is no question about that, but the political price of undertaking that would be very, very high – the political price in Iraq.  We really do run the danger of driving all of the Shia parties together to oppose us, which is not currently the situation and would be unwise.  We therefore propose to focus on the Sunni and mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhoods in Baghdad around the Green Zone, between the Green Zone and Baghdad International Airport just to the east of the Tigris near the Green Zone as well where a very large proportion of the violence has been occurring, where a very large degree of sectarian cleansing has been going, where Sunni militia groups are based that are attacking into Sadr City, where Jaysh al-Mahdi fighters from Sadr City are coming to attack Sunni populations. 

We think this is the critical area of Baghdad and we think that it is an area that we can bring under control using an improvement of methods that we have tried in the past which primarily failed through lack of resourcing.  We want to emphasize that this plan embodies a change of mission for what the US military will be doing in Iraq.  This is not simply a surge of more troops to do something like what we have been doing.  The US military has never set itself the task in Iraq for providing security for the Iraqi population. 

From the outset we have worked hard to train Iraqis and our mantra has been, “The Iraqis must solve their own problems.  We cannot do it for them.”  That has always been unrealistic in the realm of security.  To build an Iraqi Security Force, an Iraqi Army of 130,000 troops from nothing in the course of a couple of years is an astonishing accomplishment.  To expect that force then to be able to maintain peace or bring about peace in a growing sectarian conflict, considering that every single soldier in that army belongs to one sect or another, is silly.  It is unrealistic.  Of course, it is not working.  It is also counter to the fundamental tenets of counter-insurgency. 

This is not how you fight counter-insurgencies.  If you go back and look at the historical record, one of the core requirements of any counter-insurgency undertaking is to bring security to the people, to protect the people and give them as much of normal life as you can.  When you have host nation forces that are capable of doing that with support, it is better to work with host nation forces.  When you do not, you cannot simply decide that you are not going to do the mission.  We have to step up now and buy time so that we can bring the Iraqi forces to the level that they need to be at to control the violence, but we also need to bring the violence down so that it is within their reach. 

This is something we have not been doing all along.  We have focused so much on increasing the capability of the Iraqi forces and that line has gone up dramatically.  But what we have not been tracking is that the line of violence has been going up even faster.  And we have gotten ourselves into a situation where our current strategy has us growing capabilities in the Iraqi forces, chasing but never catching growing violence.  This is not going to work.  That is why we need to change our strategy to one of providing security for the population.  This is a traditional counter-insurgency mission.  It is a measurable counter-insurgency mission.  It is an achievable mission. 

I want to emphasize that because there are people running around saying, “This is a political surge.  There is no mission here.  What is this all about?”  It is an argument that has no foundation in reality.  If you look at the proposal that we have actually laid out, that we have laid out a very specific measurable, achievable, definable mission, and it is one that any counter-insurgent force should undertake.  Other people have argued that force ratios are simply too low.  It is absurd; we would need hundreds of thousands of troops. 

There are a number of ways of dealing with that.  The key is to say, “What do you think you are doing?”  If you think that you need to provide security at the same level for alls of Iraq’s 25 million people, then yes, the force ratios required are unrealistic.  Most of Iraq’s people do not need and would not want to see a lot of American forces deployed in their regions.  Kurdistan is peaceful.  Most of the Shia south is under control.  It is not necessary to factor those populations into the force ratio requirements as some people do to come to figures of a million-and-a-half soldiers who would be necessary.  Even in Baghdad, a city of six million people, historical force requirements would be high. 

We have already explained why we think we should not do Sadr City to begin with, and we have defined the critical terrain that has a population that is manageable.  This is what you do in military operations.  You do not start by trying to do everything all at once.  You identify the most important task and you put adequate resources against them and then you prepare for subsequent phases of the operation.  This is what we are doing. 

I want to emphasize two more things and then I will turn it over to General Keane.  First of all, the surge must be adequate.  It must be large.  We believe that we need to send an additional five brigades of American combat troops into Baghdad, depending on how you count the brigade, which is anywhere from 3,500 to 5,000 troops.  We are fundamentally talking about 20,000 to 25,000 additional combat forces into Baghdad. 

In addition, we think it is very important to have additional forces in Al-Anbar province, which is the hotbed of the Sunni insurgency is likely to see an increase in violence as we start to clear and hold in Baghdad.  We may need to deploy those forces on but we may need to deploy them to Diallah, which is also becoming a hotbed of Iraqi insurgency, and we need to have flexibility in this plan. 

Above all, we need to have reserves.  One of the mistakes from a military perspective we have been making all along in this war is to try to send in just enough force to do it if everything works out right.  That is a recipe for losing war after war.  We need to send in more force than we think is necessary because we are facing an enemy and it is a thinking, adaptive, and reactive enemy who will try to defeat us.  We need to be able to respond to the enemy’s counter-moves, and that means that we need to have forces available in theater that can react immediately to what the enemy does. 

We must not lowball this.  We must not send a few forces and then see what is going to happen.  There were reports, Michael Gordon’s excellent article in the New York Times today describes a plan that would feed forces in and get a rolling start we will see how many forces we need.  That plan, in my view, would be very unwise.  What we should do is send as many forces into the country as we think might be necessary in worst cases.  And then, if we are wise, we would send a little more. 

Now, we have looked hard – and this is one of the things we have been criticized about.  Well, the forces do not exist.  They do exist.  The forces exist to execute the plan that we have developed.  We have looked carefully at the brigade flows that are already planned to go into Iraq for this year.  We have looked carefully at the requirements for sustaining them over time.  It is possible to do this.  Doing more would be very hard.   If it were possible, it would be desirable.  But this is something that is doable, and we believe that this is something that will succeed, and we believe that it is absolutely essential at this moment to turn the cycle of violence around in Baghdad and start getting the situation under control. 

One last point, this is not going to happen quickly.  The enemy always expects us to surge and leave, and they have designed all of their strategies and doctrines and tactics to deal with that approach.  If we surge for three or six months, and then pull our forces back, the enemy will be right there waiting.  They always are.  This is a surge that has too last, in my view, at least 18 months.  It will take us through all of 2007 to get Baghdad under control, in my view, and then we will have to conduct operations in Anbar and elsewhere.  We have to be prepared for a bloody year because the enemy will fight us. 

But I will leave you with this thought:  2007 in Iraq is going to be a bloody year whatever strategy we adopt.  If we continue with the current course of action, violence has increased in Iraq every year under this strategy.  It will increase again in 2007.  We have seen intelligence estimates that it will.  If we withdraw, violence will increase by orders of magnitude.  If we conduct this plan, violence will increase initially as the Iraqi enemies attack us and try to make it fail.  If we are successful and determined and have adequate forces, violence will then begin to drop; and furthermore, the tragic deaths that we suffered in this conflict will then have gained meaning by moving us forward to victory.  Jack.

 Jack Keane:  Thanks, Fred.  Good morning everybody and also, Happy New Year.  A couple of points to emphasize:  I want to go back to the security issue.  First of all, security subsumes everything else that is taking place in Iraq.  It really is the pre-condition for political, social, and economic development.  So when people say, “Let’s get a political solution,” you cannot get a political solution if the mainstream insurgents believe they are winning the war and the evidence is out there that they are probably right. 

So how does (Iraqi Prime Minister) Malaki get the mainstream insurgents to come to the reconciliation table when they believe they are going to destroy the state and fracture it and create an all-out civil war, which they are well on their way to doing?  The political solution is not available yet because we have not brought the mainstream insurgency to heel, in order to take away what they believe is a very realistic option for them - using armed violence. 

The way you defeat insurgency is you secure the population.  They isolate the insurgents and the insurgents have the choice to leave the battlefield and seek a political accommodation.  That is what we are trying to force here.  You have to stay focused on what is the main enemy.  The insurgents, the mainstream Sunnis, made a decision not to surrender power and to destroy the new Shia-dominated government that eventually evolved after the CPA and the other interim governments.  That was their conscious decision.  They were enabled by the Al Qaeda. 

After the October referendum, the constitutional referendum in October of 2005 and the general election in December of 2005, the mainstream Sunni insurgents made a conscious decision to provoke the Shia.  They did it -- enabled by the Al Qaeda with the mosque bombing in February and the assassination squads that they sent forward, and they got what they wanted; a predictable overreaction on the part of the Shias to what they were doing.  So when people looked at this -because now we have Shias killing Sunnis, Sunnis killing Shias, and the Al Qaeda is in the middle of all of it, and there are factions on each side in the Sunni insurgency as well as factions in the Shia side - you have a tendency to look at that and say, “This is very complex.  This is just too hard.  It is hopeless.”  And we start wringing our hands and say, “Let us walk away from it.”  What you are actually or fundamentally doing is you are choosing to lose.  That is really the issue when you say that.  When you say, as the Iraqi study group said, “What we really need to do is just strengthen the Iraqi security forces so they can handle the problem.”  When you make that decision, you are choosing to lose because the Iraqi security forces are not capable of doing that now and they will not be capable of doing it in the near term. 

That is basically the problem.  The government will be fractured before the Iraqi security forces are able to protect its people.  They are on their way to having that capability, and I think one of the remarkable things that the United States military has done is bring them up to an acceptable level of capability.  But listen, the problem in Iraq has always been that the enemy has a vote.  And they voted on the 2004 strategy which we selected, which was a short war strategy, a rush to a political objective before the people of Iraq are able to cope with the reality of a democracy and we have seen the problems with that.  The military strategic objective has always been transition to the Iraqi security forces. 

That has been the centerpiece of the military strategy.  It has never been defeat the insurgency.  Understand the distinction I’m making here.  We have never had a strategy to defeat the insurgency.  If we had a strategy to defeat the insurgency, then the number one military objective would have been protect and support the population.  And that is what this plan is all about.  This plan is about protecting and supporting the population and securing that population, bringing in economic packages to assist them. 

Let me just take you through a little bit of it so you understand how it is a fundamental change of mission.  These brigades that would surge into Iraq and the others that would be also who are there, their deployments would be extended, and that is getting lost in the translation here in terms of the amount of troops that would be committed to those operations. 

We have had two bites of this apple before in Baghdad.  You are very familiar with them.  Both of those operations failed.  They failed for a very important military reason.  It is while we had the forces to clear Shia death squads and Sunni insurgents and Al Qaeda out of neighborhoods in Baghdad, we did not have the forces to protect the people.  So they did in Baghdad what they have done in Fallujah, Ramadi, and Samara.  They returned to terrorize, intimidate, and assassinate those who were cooperating with the military forces during the clearing operation.  That is the harsh reality of it. 

So this plan has a basic factor in it.  Yes, forces to clear out neighborhoods and, as Fred said, it makes sense to go to the Shia-Sunni neighborhoods.  Demonstrate to the people in Iraq the evenhandedness of this military operation.  That we are going to protect going to protect the Shias and the Sunnis at the same time.  That is an important distinction.  Those neighborhoods, when you look at a map, are east of the Tigris and west of the Tigris.  They are Sunni enclaves all the way to the west, and there is Sadr City, as you well know, over to the east which is a Shia enclave, but you go to the mixed neighborhoods first. 

You clear those neighborhoods.  And that is house-by-house, just as we have done in the other operations.  But what is different is you bring in a 24/7 force, and they stay in those neighborhoods and they do not go back to their bases.  They stay in the neighborhoods and that force is US and Iraqi combined, and they protect the population.  That is the peace that we have not executed -- any place I am aware of except in Tal Afar by Colonel H.R. McMaster. 

In addition to that -- and this takes weeks and months to achieve this -- this is not accomplished overnight.  In addition to that, there are two reconstruction economic packages that are brought in.  One is to provide basic services to the people.  The second one is what we believe is an important distinction, is it is incentive based on the people’s cooperation with our forces in their willingness to isolate Shia death squads, Al Qaeda and Sunni insurgents. 

You deliver an enhanced quality of life package based on that cooperation.  The economic package is as important as the military operation itself.  They must go hand-in-hand to succeed because you would have to get the willing cooperation of the people and to understand that we are changing the basic ingredient of the quality of their life, get them connected to their local officials and indirectly to a central government. 

This takes time.  Those who would suggest that we can surge an operation for three to six months makes no military sense to me whatsoever because what the enemy will do -- and we already know this, what the enemy is talking about right now.  They are very conversant in being discussed in the United States, is they will go to the neighborhoods we are not in, raise the level of violence, and not contest us in the neighborhoods we are in and just wait us out.  That is what they will do.  Therefore, we would fail again. 

So the operation has to be long enough to change the attitudes of the people in those neighborhoods to convince them that they are doing it.  It would seem to me that once you are truly protecting hundreds of thousands of Shias in this mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhoods, then for the first time you have given Malaki a political instrument to use with the Shia militia leaders.  For the first time he has something to talk to them about.  He can go to them and tell them, “I want you to stop offensive operations.  I want you only to be on the defense.  I am protecting our people here and we are going to continue to protect Shia people as well Sunnis.  You do not have to be running around the rest of those Sunni neighborhoods inflecting this pain and horrific suffering on them.” 

He has finally, a political instrument to use.  Right now if we flog Malaki -- the work with the Shia as many of you are suggesting, “Why cannot he get a political solution?”  They waited two-and-a-half years for the United States and for the ISF to protect their people.  It was very evident in 2006, after the mosque bombings and the assassination squads, that we could not do it.  So they conducted offensive operations. 

Admittedly, those leaders are seeking political advantage for their own purposes.  What they are doing is horrific in terms of the scale of killing.  None of that is justified but the harsh reality is this is a definable problem.  If you stay focused on the strategic objective, which is defeating the mainstream insurgency which started all of these, you can start to brake down what is a complex problem into definable terms so that you can set objectives against those, both military and political, and you can start to accomplish something. 

I will stop right there and we will take some questions.

 Danielle Pletka:  I’m going to moderate for the questions and answers.  If I could ask everybody to abide by our rules to raise your hand, and I’ll do my best to try to see over there as well.  When you receive the microphone from one of our people, please identify yourself and do please ask your statement in the form of a question. 

Let me start right here.  Yes?  Thank you.

 Peter Spiegel:  Peter Spiegel of Los Angeles Times. Can I ask both of you to comment on the imminent employment of General Petraeus because obviously, the work he has done at Leavenworth dovetails quite nicely with the stuff you are proposing and that the counter-insurgency field men in particular advocate some of this stuff that you are recommending here?  To what extent do you think that his leadership in Iraq will change the way things are and move towards your recommendations?

 Jack Keane:  Well, I think General Petraeus is absolutely the most qualified general officer we have to undertake a change of mission strategy in Iraq.  Irregular warfare is different than conventional campaigns.  I believe the attributes to cope with that are different as well.  Intellectual adaptability and flexibility, you have to have a sense of imagination yourself.  Not that you are going to be necessarily creative everyday, but you want to tolerate that creativeness and imagination in others.  You have to deal with a very high degree of uncertainty. 

Conventional campaigns, we rationalize the enemy very well.  We have a lot of overhead imagery that kind of put them in boxes and groups.  We can take a very methodical deliberate approach to dealing with that.  As you grow up intellectually, in that environment, it has certain predictability to it.  I’m not suggesting that is simple; it is not.  You can understand what I’m saying.  Irregular warfare is very different.  There is not a lot of predictability and there is a lot of uncertainty. 

So the personal attributes, I think, are unique and Petraeus brings a whole kit bag of those unique personal attributes to do this job.  He is well-schooled, as you indicated, in proven counter-insurgency practices and techniques.  If you have not looked at the joint manual that the Army and the Marine Corps -- it is actually a very worthy work, Petraeus actually saw that through from start to finish.  He had lots of help doing it as any army product would.  But certainly his intellectual range is embedded in that manual.  His experience in Iraq, two tours - one as a division commander, also training the Iraqi security forces - he is well-versed in who all the generals are and the political leaders as well and he certainly understands the environment, so I think it is an absolute great choice.

 Frederick W. Kagan:  I would just add to that.  I also think that it is a wonderful choice and I’m very enthusiastic about seeing General Petraeus take the reigns.  I hope he will take them as rapidly as possible.  I hope the administration will work with Congress to make that happen. 

Another positive development here that is worth commenting on is that the president has re-taken control of Iraq strategy.  I know there has been some discussion about -- he said he would listen to the advice of his generals.  But clearly, Casey is not giving him the advice that he seems now to want to hear, to pursue.  For too long, I think, the administration has allowed military leadership that was clearly on the wrong track to continue driving in the wrong direction. 

Of all of the things that have happened in the past month, perhaps the best is that the administration has made itself more independent of its generals and is looking at this problem independently, trying to think about what are the real challenges.  What should we really be doing?  I think that is a healthy thing from the standpoint of civil-military relations.  It is a very healthy thing for the country and I think it is likely to lead to a much more successful strategy for Iraq. 

 Joe Massey:  Good morning, I’m Joe Massey with the Naval Intelligence Professionals, and the question I would like to ask you, your report outlines the cause and problems with defeat.  I would like you to explore or comment a little bit on the cause and factors of victory.  In particular, here obviously, there are issues of money, casualties, you have alluded to that.  But more importantly, what if we do in fact achieve victory, get a secure Shiite democracy in Iraq, and it aligns itself with Iran?  Then where are we and could we justify the cost of those American lives and treasure to have that kind of situation turn on us as we already have seen in Iran? 

 Frederick W.  Kagan:  Well, there is a lot of simplistic discussion that goes on about the likelihood of Iraq’s Shia to put themselves under the thumb of Iran and become an Iranian client state.  It is important to remember that Iraqi Shia are Arabs; Iranian Shia are Persians.  That is a significant divide that all are aware of.  It will always be rather difficult for a Shia Iraq simply to put itself in a position of taking instruction from Iran. 

This region is more complicated than these simple sectarian affinities would suggest.  But in addition to that, I would turn it around and say if we do nothing and fail, one outcome is extraordinarily likely.  Iran will become the regional hegemon.  That is virtually certain if we fail in Iraq because the principle force in the region balancing Iranian power -- and Iranian power is very great.  Remember, Iran is one of the most populous states in the region.  It is powerful.  It has significant oil resources; it is developing a nuclear weapon, apparently. 

If Iraq descends completely into chaos, then there is no checking mechanism against Iranian hegemony at all.  I suspect that in the wake of an American withdrawal, what you would find is that a lot of countries in the region, which to this point have been hedging their bets, countries for instance that have large American headquarters on their soil but that are also basis for Sunni terrorist television.  Those are states that are hedging their bets because they are not sure who is going to win this contest. 

If we pull out, the victor will be clear, and the victor will be Iran.  Although there are various nightmare scenarios that we could discuss where a Shia Iraq throws itself to the Iranian camp in a bad way, those seem to me unlikely.  Whereas Iranian hegemony in a wake of an American defeat in this region seems to me virtually certain. 

 Male Voice:  What about a Shiite [Inaudible]?

 Frederick W. Kagan:  There already is a Shiite country on the northern border of Saudi Arabia.

 Danielle Pletka:  I cannot allow follow-ups from the audience.  Too many people -– did you have a comment and a response?  This lady here.

 Sally B. Donnelly:  Hi, Sally Donnelly from Time Magazine.  The president has not yet decided what the final troop number will be, so can you tell me what your minimum would be?  What number would worry you?  The second part is, is not your focus on the military solution just continue what some people criticized the administration for as a failure of an inter-agency process anyway, that they put this on the backs of the military, and they have failed to make this a full scale national effort.

 Jack Keane:  Yes, Sally, you are absolutely right.  One of the things that we have said from the outset is that we need a change of strategy.  That strategy should have a political and economic and diplomatic component to it as well as a military.  

This Phase 1 report deals with the military part of it because it is so pressing.  The surge, unfortunately, because it involves a human dimension which is very critical to all of us in terms of more troops being committed to a war, it has a tendency to preoccupy the discussion, but I think some of the concerns that military leaders have -– the Washington Post has never had that story right about the senior military leaders – t¬he real reality is that their concerns are that the other elements of national power, the political, the economic, and the diplomatic piece, a lot of that has been ineffectual. 

If we are going to make more of a military commitment here, they want those other components to start to take effect and make a real commitment to them.  I’m convinced that the administration is working very hard on those other factors, those realities.  They will be a major part of the plan and I would hope that the media would not ignore them and just focus on the military component, which is what we have been doing so far.  We have stressed right from the beginning that the political, economic and diplomatic piece of this is as important as the military component to be successful.  Those conditions are going to enable the military operation to be successful, and they obviously will be complimentary to those conditions as well. 

 Frederick W. Kagan:  Sally, let me address the first part of your question which what would be the minimum force that we would be comfortable with.  The answer is the one we have put in the report, five brigades into Baghdad and two into Al-Anbar.  We are going to be very uncomfortable with any force level that is below that. 

We are also with the prospect of beginning operations in a rolling fashion, just sort of throwing forces into the fray as they become available.  This is an enemy that does react.  He will hit us where we are not and the problem with the clear and hold operation from this perspective is that once you have started clearing and holding the troops that you send to the neighborhood to that, you have to stay there.  If you start moving them around in response to enemy actions, then it defeats the whole purpose of what you are trying to do. 

So it is very important to go in with adequate forces and really make this a decisive operation and not nickel-and-dime it to see “Well, maybe we can get away with three.  Let’s see if we need another one.  We can send another one and stretch this out over a longer period of time.”  It is going to take time to get the units into country.  There is no question.  It will take several months to get the forces into the country really to launch this operation in a decisive fashion.  But we are confident that that is necessary and that we should go in with all these forces.  We are not really prepared to compromise on that.

 Tim Sullivan:  Hi, Tim Sullivan from Boston College.  If implemented, what would you say are the most meaningful measures of effectiveness for judging success or judging progress and achieving your strategy’s goals?

 Frederick W. Kagan:  Well, Tim, the measures for success are something that you are going to have to look at over the course of the year, over the course of the operation.  Ultimately, the level of violence is going to have to go down.  I’m not sure that I’m prepared to put metrics on that.  I think anytime you start trying to put metrics on military operations it is a swift road to defeat and confusion. 

I have a more of a sort of touchy-feely way of looking at this.  We need to get the violence down by the end of the operation to the level where normal political process can start functioning again, where normal economic development can go in, where we can have reconstruction projects, and we do not have to devote 30 percent of their cost to security.  We need to have the level of violence down so that there are significant areas in Baghdad where people can walk around not worry about being shot at all the time.  It is a little bit we will know it when see it, but we will know it when we see it. 

The truth of the matter is Baghdad now looks like an extremely dangerous city because it is an extremely dangerous city.  As we go in and get these neighborhoods under control you will see that it will become much safer.  We have seen this before in Tal Afar, when H.R. McMaster conducted the clear-and-hold operation.  After that operation, he was able to take part of his command team and walk into downtown Tallafur and go to a teahouse.  That is a pretty good measure of success. 

In Ramadi, the commanders there say they are doing pretty well.  There was a street that insurgents had been staging military parades on, their aim is to have Iraqi and American security forces stage a parade on that street.  There are little measures like that.  The less you know that you are bringing the violence under control to a point where processes can start again.

 Male Voice:  [indiscernible], NTV Television.  Something that you not talked about yet, do you support the redeployment of some US forces into Iraqi Kurdistan?  Do you think delaying the Kirkuk referendum will be a good idea and do you think Iraq should be partitioned into a three-statelet [sounds like] states?  Thank you.

 Frederick W. Kagan:  I would hope that from our report, the answers to those questions are apparent and self-evidently no.  I do not think we support any of those things.  I certainly do not see what the purpose would be of redeploying American forces into Kurdistan, unless you simply want to give up on the rest of Iraq, let it collapse, and let the regional maelstrom begin. 

I do not really think -- I hope that the Kurds do not think that it is in their interest.  It certainly is not in their interest for that to happen.  Whether it is in their interest or not, it is in no one else’s interest and it certainly not in the interest of the United States.  It is also militarily infeasible for a wide variety of reasons that I find.  It is disturbing how easily people simply dismiss the problem of actually sustaining American forces in Kurdistan with all of the rest of Iraq in flames.  I cannot imagine why anyone would that that is okay. 

As for partitioning Iraq, this comes up periodically.  It is very important to make the point that Iraq does not naturally fall apart into three areas.  One of the characteristics of Iraq for a long, long time is that a very large proportion of Iraqis live in mixed areas.  They live in ethnically and sectarianly mixed neighborhoods and mixed cities - Baghdad, Mosul, Kirkuk, Tal Afar, Ba’quba - these all have historically been mixed cities. 

If you are going to try to partition Iraq, what lines would you use?  Who would get Baghdad?  Baghdad is one of the most mixed cities of all.  How would you divide it?  Well you cannot divide it along the Tigris because you have Sunnis and Shias enclaves on both sides of the river.  Shia death squads now have their solution to the problem.  They will drive all of the Sunnis, all two to three million Sunnis, out of Baghdad and then they will take the city. 

How can anyone imagine that will be stable, even if you were willing to accept the humanitarian consequences of such a thing?  Why would the Sunnis, what incentive would a Sunni Arab population that has lost Baghdad and that does not participate in Iraq’s oil wealth, what incentive would they have to be peaceful and stable?  It is a recipe for perennial Sunni Arab insurgency.  And it will lead to larger regional consequences. 

I do not believe that there is any convincing case to be made that partitioning Iraq would do anything other than exacerbate the problems and lead to a widespread regional conflict.

 John Dickerson:  Thank you, John Dickerson from Slate.   You have been very candid about the timeline and the cost.  What would you want to see from the president next week as he outlines this in terms of his defining the cost and the timeline so that this plan has a chance to succeed domestically? 

Fred Kagan: I think the president needs to be very upfront about a number of things here.  This is going to be surge of American forces into Iraq.  It is going to be prolonged.  It is going to be necessary to sustain this surge into 2008. 

To do that, it is going to be necessary to call up National Guard Brigades.  The president has the legal authority to do that.  The Secretary of Defense, as a matter of policy, thus far, has resisted doing that.  That has to change.  It is going to cost a lot of money both to send these forces into Iraq and sustain them and also to conduct the economic reconstruction packages and so forth that we think are very important.  It is going to take time and it is going to be a hard fight.  We are dealing with an enemy who thinks he is winning and with actually several enemies that all think they are winning.  It is a very bad position for us to be in. 

Turning that around is going to require a significant effort.  And it is going to be protracted -- as I said at the end of my comments -- 2007 is going to be a bloody year whatever we do in Iraq.  The president needs to be very clear to the American people that he is committed to this. That he is going to call on them to make a slightly higher level of sacrifice than he has been asking for. 

Do not read into any notion that we think we need to return to the draft or any such thing.  We are absolutely opposed to that and it is not necessary.  But we will have to spend more on this war.  We will have to tolerate very unpleasant scenes and the tragedies of lost service members.  I do not see any course of action that we could take in Iraq now that would not lead to that, in one form or another.  The question is, “Are we going pay that price and win?” or, “Are we going to pay a similar price and lose?”  But I think the president needs to be upfront about all of that.

 Jack Keane:  The president has already taken a necessary first step by calling for the increase in the size of the United States Army and the United States Marine Corps.  That increase in growth will not be in time to deal with this operation.  But certainly, the fact that we are in a protracted campaign in Iraq, at some point they are going to start to provide some relief here and as well in Afghanistan and other places in the world.  So you have to be encouraged by the fact that he is taking that important first step as well.

 Kate O’Beirne:  Kate O’Beirne, National Review.  I understood you to explain that a larger force would be desirable but it is simply not possible given our resources.  Five years after 9/11, why is the active duty army not larger and how large do you think it should be?

 Jack Keane:  Yes, that is a great question.  In my own analysis of it, it needs to grow about 60,000 larger than what it currently is and it is a little over 500,000 now.  There has been -– first of all, the army never proposed the force be larger even after 9/11. 

I was there at that time.  So there was never a proposal to grow the size of the army.  It was not a question of Secretary Rumsfeld, who did not want the army to grow, that is true, but the army never proposed and never put in its budget, never got into the intellectual contest to fight over it like you do with any new idea or any new proposal that is going to be costly. 

Many of us who have looked at this over time have believed strongly that the army needed to grow in size to meet all of its global responsibilities.  And most of you, some of you are reporting on the fact that the army and the Marine Corps are both stressed and strained by a commitment in Afghanistan and a commitment in Iraq, which is not a very large commitment when you add up the size of this.  Yet, those services are strained by that which tells you that they are not large enough to cope with it. 

And the other thing about it is, if the active duty army is larger in size and there is less of a burden on the garden reserves, the reason why the burden on the garden reserve has spiked to the degree that it has is because the active duty army is not large enough to cope with most of this responsibility.  So it has to go to the garden reserves and at high points, in Iraq the garden reserve is, as you well know, is up to 45 percent.  That is probably much too high, to be frank about it.  We have to get it back down to something around 20-30 at the most, and the way to do that it so to grow the size of the army. 

Did I answer all your questions, Kate?

Frederick W. Kagan:  I would actually say, in one point of disagreement, I think it needs to be even bigger than that.  If you look around the world, at the possible scenarios that the United States faces, bad things happening and what the force requirements would be, Iraq is actually on the low end of the spectrum.  I think it is intolerable that the force should be so strained to undertake something like this.  I’m not sure that 60,000 would cure it.  I think that the number might need to be significantly higher than that. 

Look, we have a peace time army.  It was designed in a period when everyone was talking about strategic pause and peace dividend.  It is still roughly the same size as it was when we had done that.  We are at war.  We have been at war for five years.  I think it is very likely that we are going to be in a very dangerous international era for the foreseeable future.  Wisdom suggests, prudence suggests that we enlarge the force now, because it does take time to do that.  It is not something you could do overnight, so that we do not find ourselves in the future, in another situation, where we are constrained from doing the right thing because we have not created the preconditions. 

Keep something in mind, the army is now going up to about [indiscernible] 12,000.  Jack is proposing and it is another 60,000, I would say more than that.  Between 1979 and 1990, the active army consisted of 780,000 soldiers.  We can have a larger active army if we needed, and we do.

John Walstead:  This is John Walstead, a senior fellow of Discovery Institute.  Is your plan to retake Baghdad contingent upon the full cooperation of the Maliki government, which has been wanting in the past?  And failing that, would a viable fallback plan be the withdrawal, as has been suggested from the four central provinces and secure of the other 14 provinces, if you are unable to get full cooperation for a surge in Baghdad?

Frederick W. Kagan:  The plan is not contingent on the same degree of cooperation from Maliki that previous plans have acquired.  In the past, an operation to get to forward Phase 1 and Phase 2 in 2006, which failed so lamentably.  They failed because we relied on the Maliki government providing a certain number of reliable Iraqi army and even Iraqi police forces to hold the areas that we have cleared. 

We have specifically designed this plan to avoid that problem.  We believe that we have adequate force in this plan to secure the areas together with only the Iraqi forces that are already operating in Baghdad.  We do not think we should repeat the mistake again of making the success of the plan contingent on the Iraqis doing something which is, in fact, extremely difficult for them. 

I have not looked at what the force requirements would be to try to contain a civil war in the four central provinces and keep it from spilling over.  But I would ask you and anyone who listens to proposals along those lines, to think a little bit, to paint a little bit of a picture about what that looks like.  We are going to ring an area with forces perhaps, to keep, to prevent spillover.  And those forces are going to be watching a humanitarian catastrophe that would make Bosnia and Kosovo look like picnics.  And we regarded that as intolerable and rightly so. 

I just do not see how we could tolerate, let alone encourage, sectarian cleansing on a huge scale which would probably move rapidly toward genocide.  Deaths, tortures, all of this sort of stuff, and we would just be standing on the periphery watching that?  What would that do to us in the region?  How does that play in the Arab media?  How does it play in the Persian media, for that matter?  I cannot see anything like that working.

Jack Keane:  I completely agree with what Fred is saying there.  To add to that, I think, probably, what the president is working on, I would imagine, would be to get Maliki’s willing cooperation to the additional military forces committed to his country.  And from a strategic perspective, that certainly makes a lot of sense. 

At a tactical level, though, we have been challenged by the fact that the Iraqi security forces have not been up to the task to deal with this level of violence.  And that really is the issue.  So we are going to be overly dependent on coalition, in this case US forces, to deal with that, and there would be a number of Iraqi forces committed to it, I’m sure, but as not completely dependent upon them for success. 

The second thing is that we did not choose Baghdad; the enemy chose it.  The more logical place probably to have to start at something like this a couple of years ago would have been in al-Anbar province.  For all the obvious reasons, that is where the Sunni-based insurgency comes from, that is where their strength is, and that is also where the Al-Qaeda sanctuary is.  That would have been the logical place to start, but we have to start with Baghdad because in 2006, the enemy chose it.  It is the center of gravity for many reasons, as you well know. 

In Baghdad, we are securing the population.  In al-Anbar, it is a support in operation.  It is an aggressive-offensive operation that will stop the sanctuary of the Al-Qaeda and the mainstream insurgency from undermining the Baghdad operation, which they would be capable of doing given the amount of resources that they have in that province.  But it is not a secure-the-population mission in the province because that would actually take more forces than we have available. 

So after you have secured the population in Baghdad and you have held the mischief down in al-Anbar by offensive-aggressive-offensive operations then, it would seem to me this is up to the military command to decide, but it would seem to me that you would move to Al Anbar and then begin, in that province, a secure-the-population mission, just as you had conducted in Baghdad.

Danielle Pletka:  Let me apologize to those who I have not been able to call on, but it is 12:00.  And in the interest of allowing you to get a sandwich and come back and allow the Senators both the maximum amount of time to speak, which is fairly limited, I’m going to close our first panel, thank our panelists and our audience for very provocative questions.  Do not move yet, I have one or two notes on housekeeping.  We will open some windows; I know it is a little bit warm in here. 

But let me ask you all, please, as a courtesy, to turn off your cell phones or put them on vibrate.  Certainly for our next panel, it should have happened an hour ago.  Thank you and see you back here promptly, please, in 15 minutes.  Thank you all.

[End of Panel I:  Choosing Victory:  A Plan for Success in Iraq]

[Panel II:  Reports from Iraq]

Christopher DeMuth:  Ladies and gentlemen, if we can come to order please.  Welcome to the second part of our discussion-session this morning on “Choosing Victory: New Security Strategy for Iraq”.  My name is Chris DeMuth, president of the American Enterprise Institute.  There is a tendency to think that at times of war and foreign crisis, everything depends upon decisive executive leadership, and that the legislative role is little more than second-guessing, carping or cheerleading. 

That view is deeply wrong.  When democracies face a crisis, popular resolve is indispensable, and it is Congress that reflects and interprets popular resolve.  Moreover, the essential strength of our system of separated powers is redundancy and competition in policy-making, and these are never more important than at times of crisis and uncertainty.  At many critical junctures in American history, congressional leadership has been co-equal with executive leadership. 

Time and again, a few legislative leaders have provided wisdom and statesmanship of the highest order that have seen us through dark hours.  In our current straits, none have been more important than Senators John McCain of Arizona and Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut.  Both of them could be called “independent” with a capital I.  Both have contributed thinking on Iraq, the Middle East, and the terror war that has been not only independent but deep, not only forceful but specific and detailed – the result of long, hard experience and long, hard hours of study, reflection, and debate.  Both are men of genuine courage and will be called and followed, once again, in the momentous days of decision that are now at hand. 

My colleagues and I are honored that following a fact-finding mission to Iraq, they would come to AEI today to report on their mission and share their latest thinking with us.  We will begin with Senator McCain.

John McCain:  Thank you very much, Chris, and thank AEI for their hospitality and all the great work that they do.  Of course, I would like to especially commend General Keane and Fred Kagan for the outstanding work they have done not only on this issue, but on transformation of the military and many other national security issues.  General Keane, we especially appreciate your many years of service in the United States Army, coming from a Navy man. 

I would like to also comment on what a great pleasure in my political life and in my personal life to have the honor of working with my friend, Joe Lieberman.  We have worked together on many issues, both domestic and national security issues, ranging from legislation that required the appointment of the 9/11 commission to ethics and lobbying reform on many other issues.  On a foreign trip one time, due to the fact that we were both losers, Joe described us as a government in exile.  I would never do that myself, but I do appreciate Joe Lieberman’s commitment to our nation’s security coupled with his willingness to reach across the isle for the good of the nation and future generations of young Americans. 

So again, it is an honor for me to appear with him today.  And as many of you know, we recently had a trip to Iraq and Afghanistan and Israel.  This recent trip of ours underscored both the difficulties we faced in that war and the potentially catastrophic consequences of failure.  I want to emphasize again, the consequences, the catastrophic consequences of failure I think many of us are aware of.  I believe that the war is still winnable.  But to prevail, we will need to do everything right and the Iraqis will have to do their part. 

Are we concerned about doing everything right and the Iraqis having to do their part?  Of course, we are.  There is agreement among most observers that the problems plaguing Iraq require a political solution.  We all agree with that.  But it is also a lesson of history that unless you have security, security is a necessary precondition for political progress and economic development.  Whether be it in Bosnia or Kosovo or neighborhoods in America that have been taken over by gangs, first you have to come in and establish a secure environment, and then economic and political development can take place. 

There has been no time in history that without a secure environment, the rule of law and all the other necessities for the construction of a democracy, is possible.  Until the government and its coalition allies can provide safety for the population, the Iraqi people will increasingly turn to extra-governmental forces, especially Sunni and Shia militias.  Only when the government has monopoly on the legitimate use of force, unless authority have meaning, and only when its authority has meaning, can political activity have the results we seek. 

The presence of additional coalition forces would give the Iraqi government the ability to do what it cannot accomplish today on its own:  Impose its rule throughout the country.  In bringing security to Iraq, and chiefly to Baghdad, our forces would give the government a fighting chance to pursue reconciliation.  Contrary to popular notions that US troops are getting “caught in this crossfire” between Sunni and Shia fighters and are therefore ineffective in ceasing this smoldering civil war, the track record is that when US troops in stopping sectarian violence is excellent, where American soldiers have deployed to areas in turmoil, including Baghdad neighborhoods, the violence has ceased almost immediately. 

Similarly, the Marines in Anbar province report very positive effects in reducing the nonsectarian Al-Qaeda-based violence that is the predominant cause of instability there.  There are two keys to any surge of US troops.  To be of value, the surge must be substantial and it must be sustained.  We will need a large number of troops. 

During our recent trip, commanders on the ground spoke of a surge of three to five additional brigades in Baghdad, and at least, an additional brigade in Anbar province.  I believe these numbers are the minimum that is required at minimum.  We need more of the right kind of troops, civil affairs teams, special forces, translators, troops to conduct information operations, among others.  The mission of these reinforcements would be to implement the thus far elusive hold element of the military’s clear-hold-build strategy, to maintain security in cleared areas, to protect the population and critical infrastructure, and to impose the government’s authority -- essential elements of a traditional counterinsurgency strategy. 

We are talking about the fundamental elements of counterinsurgency strategy here.  We are not inventing new strategies.  There are numerous specific tasks for these additional troops.  They will need to establish local outposts; forge relationships with local leaders, which by the way, is proceeding in Anbar province; build intelligence networks; engage in economic reconstruction activities; oversee other employment-generating projects; and wean the populace off their alliance on militias for safety.  They would do it all in cooperation with the Iraqi forces until such time as the Iraqis can do it on their own. 

We have attempted to, so far, return the hold component over to the Iraqi military right away and it has not worked.  It has not worked.  We need you, as forces, to hold territory in Baghdad and Anbar.  I want to be clear.  And I mean this with all sincerity.  Strategy will mean more casualties and extra hardships for our brave fighting men and women.  The violence may get worse before it gets better.  We have to be prepared for this.  Our soldiers should know that.  As they face these real great dangers, they are working towards a strategy that gives us the best chance to succeed at a time when our national security is directly at stake. 

The deployment also needs to be sustained.  The presence of additional brigades should be tied to completion of their mission rather than to some arbitrary deadline.  The worst of all worlds would be a small, short surge of US forces.  We tried small surges in the past and they have been ineffective because our commanders lacked the forces necessary to hold territory after it was cleared.  Violence, which fell dramatically while US forces were present, spiked as soon as they were gone. 

A short surge would have all the drawbacks associated with greater deployments, including increased US casualties. Without giving our troops the time they need to be effective, a time-limited deployment would have, on a smaller scale, the same negative effects posed by a national timetable for withdrawal.  By announcing that we are surging for three to six months or any other fixed timeline, we would just signal to the insurgents and militias that they can merely wait us out and indicate to the Iraqi public that the enforcement of their government’s authority would be fleeting. 

This is a recipe for strengthening, not weakening, the power of the militias.  A troop surge is necessary, but not sufficient, for American success in Iraq.  By controlling the violence, we can pave the way for a political settlement.  Once the government wields greater authority, however, Iraqi leaders must take significant steps on their own.  These include a commitment to go after the militias, a reconciliation process for insurgents and Baathists, a more equitable distribution of government resources, provincial elections that would bring Sunnis and the government, and a large increase in employment-generating economic projects. 

I think it bears repeating:  Even if we send additional troops to Iraq in large numbers for a sustained period, there is no guarantee for success in Iraq.  From everything I would not stand my most recent visit, I believe that success is still possible, but it would be very difficult.  We have made many, many mistakes since 2003 and these will not be easily reversed.  Even greater than the cost thus far, and in the future, however, are the catastrophic consequences that would ensue from our failure in Iraq.  By surging troops and bringing security to Baghdad and other areas, we will give the Iraqis and their partners the best possible chances to succeed. 

I would like to make one final comment about another stop on our recent trip.  While Iraq presents our preeminent foreign policy challenge today, we must not forget Afghanistan.  Times are tough there.  With the Taliban insurgence in the South and East, and with terrorists finding sanctuaries in the border area with Pakistan, everyone we met during our time there expects a very violent spring as the fighting cease and resumes.  With NATO’s credibility on the line and our national security interest directly involved there, the stakes are very high in Afghanistan.  While this is not the time for extended discussion on Afghanistan, I would simply note that we must commit additional resources, sustain the tension from our selves and our allies in time to ensure its success. 

I want to thank AEI again, and look forward to hearing remarks of my dear friend, Joe Lieberman and then responding to any question or comments or insults that you might have, and we intend to invite the crowd outside out for a polite Q&A session.  Thank you very much.

Christopher DeMuth:  We now turn to Senator Joe Lieberman.

Joseph I. Lieberman:  Thank you very much, Chris.  Thanks to AEI for convening this discussion on a very critical moment in the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq.  Thanks to General Keane and Fred Kagan for the extraordinary contribution that you have made to the debate, both in terms of overall policy, but the combination of real on-the-ground, boots on-the-ground operational experience that, General Keane, you bring; and the sense of history and policy, Fred, that you bring - you are a powerful combination.  And at a perilous moment for our nation, you are making a very significant and unique contribution. 

I thank John for his leadership here.  He is, in this case, once again, which has been his characteristic throughout his public service, taking a position that is not based on putting his finger in the air and gauging the direction of the political wind.  He is doing what he sincerely believes is best for the national security and safety of our country.  And because of that –- may I be even more specific -– I have just finished an election campaign, if rumors are correct, he may be starting one soon.  He is not taking the easy way out here but he is taking the way that he believes is best for the safety of our children and grandchildren, and the values and way of life that America has come to represent.  And it is what makes John McCain, an extraordinary national leader and why I’m proud to call him my colleague and my friend. 

Let me offer from the perspective of the trip that John McCain and I and some colleagues made for the Middle East, four points, a couple of them I could be brief because not surprisingly, Senator McCain and I agree absolutely.  I think the first point I want to make is that we err and we do our national security a disservice if we focus on the war in Iraq separately.  It, of course, has a life of its own. 

But we have got to see it in the broader context of the war against Islamist extremism and terrorism.  And we could feel it and hear it and see it in our trip to the Middle East.  The Middle East is dividing along new lines.  And I’m speaking here about the Arab world.  And the lines are ever clearer and more intense between, what I would call moderates and extremists, dictators and democrats.  We have to acknowledge that.  And the moderates and the democrats feel deeply that how Iraq ends will affect their future. 

The fact is that we are engaged in a war against an axis of Islamist extremists and terrorists.  It is an axis of evil.  It has headquarters in Tehran and [indiscernible].  But because of the unconventional nature of this war, it also has had headquarters in cities throughout Europe and Asia and Africa and the United States of America; in cells that operate in the shadows but are prepared to strike us again as they did on September 11, 2001. 

There are people who have spoken of this moment in our history as if it was the 30s, and there are some parallels, I fear there.  Some people say that war in Iraq is comparable to the Spanish Civil War; the war in Iraq, to the larger war in Islamist terrorism, comparable to the Spanish Civil War to the Second World War; the late 30s and the failure to grasp the growing threat of fascism in Europe until it was almost too late. 

The painful irony of this moment on our history is that, well, in some sense, it is comparable to the 1930s; it is also already 1942.  Because Pearl Harbor in this war has already happened, on 9/11/01 and in the progeny of horrific terrorist attacks that have occurred throughout the world.  The enemy we are fighting is an axis of evil.  It is totalitarian.  It is inhumane.  It has a violent ideology and a goal of expansionism and totalitarianism.  It threatens our security, our values, our way of life, as seriously, in my opinion, as fascism and communism did in the last century. 

And again, in the trip that we took to the Middle East, obviously, we saw the presence of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and the terrorists in Lebanon and the Palestinian-authority areas.  But the tentacles of Iran, still designated the most significant state sponsor of terrorism, are all over the region.  And they are inviting and, at some sense, is beginning to shape new alliances that go across the previous lines of division which simplistically were seen as Arabs versus Israelis. 

Here is the central point that I want to make, and I borrowed from one conversation that I have written about with a moderate Palestinian leader who, when asked if he had any counsel on the progress and American conduct of the war in Iraq, said, of course, you would not do such thing publicly but personally, you would simply say that he did not see how American forces could leave until there was stability in Iraq, and Iraqis had the chance to self-govern, and if we did, it would affect the future in the Palestinian areas, in Lebanon, and not just there but, perhaps, in Riyadh, in Oman, in Cairo, Abu Dhabi, and throughout the region. 

So, Iraq is part of a larger conflict.  This is my second point - it is today the main and obviously, the most hostile battlefield in the larger war against Islamist extremism and terrorism.  How this conflict in Iraq ends will have a substantial effect on the course of the larger war.  I think only if one decides that everything in Iraq has been lost, that there is no hope, not just the question of whether we can win it, but whether we have lost all hope.  Will you decide that the goal should be to get out, instead of trying to make it work -- because getting out, in all the ways that you have heard recited before, will lead to Iranian expansionism, the creation of an Al-Qaeda base in Iraq. 

And even more significantly, the intimidation of the moderate forces throughout the region and a drop in confidence, in the credibility and strength of the United States of America, not just in the Middle East but throughout the world, not just in the Middle East, but throughout the world.  If we succeed, we will and what a success we can talk about in the question and answer, to me it is a stable government in Iraq that is self-governing and self-protecting, and moving in a progressive way economically and socially.  If we succeed, we will have achieved a significant victory in the overall war on terrorism.  We will have created an alternative path to the future in the Arab and Islamic world than the path that the extremist government in Tirana offers or Al-Qaeda offers, and that is why in my opinion unless you believe all is lost, we have to do everything we can to win. 

My own impression, having been there again most recently, is that it remains winnable and it remains winnable in the first case for something that it should be self-evident, but I hear it from the Iraqis we talked to, I heard it from our own soldiers who interact with the Iraqis.  The majority of Iraqis, quite understandably, are fed up with the sectarian violence and the terrorism.  They are grateful to God that we liberated them from Saddam Hussein.  They want to live a better peaceful life.  They want their kids to live even better than that. 

It does not take a psychologist a great merit, or a student of history of great substance to believe that that is true.  It is true.  The conflict in Iraq is a conflict between that majority, the terrorists, and a minority who have fallen out to sectarian violence and external powers like Iran, which are trying to extend their influence into Iraq. 

Secondly, our troops believe they can win and that is really important.  I wrote last week a conversation I had after John and I and our delegation met with our military leadership and [indiscernible] problems are tough, are brilliant, committed group of soldiers making progress there turning the Sunni sheiks in that province to our side against Al-Qaeda. 

And a colonel followed me out and said quite emotionally, “Sir, I regret that I did not have a chance to say this in the meeting.  I want you to know in behalf of the soldiers in my unit and myself that we understand why we are here.  We believe in the mission.  We are confident we can win it and we want to fight it to a victorious finish.  We need some more troops to make that happen and that is what this moment is all about.” 

John said, and I do not want going to any detail about it, there is a strange debate sometimes in Congress or some of our colleagues who I think really want to get out always focus on the fact that ultimately Iraq will be stabilized by a political settlement and economic progress.  Well, of course, that is true.  But how are you going to do that if death squads are roaming through the neighbor wantonly shooting people?  How are you going to do that if Al-Qaeda is attacking all the institutions and individuals and government and the economy, so we need to restore security to open the possibility for Iraqi politics and economy to take off. 

One encouraging fact that we witnessed when we were there, there is what I would call in American political terms, a moderate coalition within Iraqi politics coming together, trying to move the current government away from the extremists, and to create a center in which each of the ethnic groups can feel involved.  We owe them the security to enable that coalition to sustain itself, survive and hopefully grow. 

I feel very strongly as John does that this is a fateful moment and we will look back at it as a turning point in our history and the history of the global war against Islamist extremism and terrorism.  I strongly support and I just embraced comments and the excellent report done by Mr. Keane and Mr. Kagan, and Senator McCain’s comments that we need an increase and troops there now.  It will help to establish the security that is the precondition to political and economic stability, that the increase in troops must be robust, it must be substantial, and it must be sustained. 

My final point, fourth point, is this:  The president of the United States gets this.  I think he sees the moment that we are at in the larger war on terrorism and the significance of how we conclude the war in Iraq, how devastating it would be to the Iraqis to the Middle East to America if we simply withdraw.  He needs our support.  He needs the detailed kind of policy recommendations that General Keane and Fred Kagan have given.  He needs the support of people in Congress who are with him. 

The worst thing that could happen here is that there be some kind of attempt to resolve this pivotal moment with a compromise among factions in American politics and in the American Congress rather than doing what is right and has the highest prospect of succeeding in Iraq.  In other words, this moment cries out for the kind of courageous leadership that does what can succeed and when in Iraq, not what will command the largest number of political supporters in Congress.  The battlefield is in Baghdad and Anbar, not in Washington, and we need to support the President as he goes forward hopefully with exactly that kind of new initiative in Iraq. 

Dear friends, my point is this coming back from this trip.  It is easy when you watch the news, as the American people do, to grow frustrated and angry.  Every suicide bomb that goes off has taken, I think, by too many as a defeat for us as opposed to the latest evidence of the evil of the enemy that we are fighting and the necessity of vanquishing that enemy.  At this moment, we must not yield to despair or defeatism.  We have overthrown on a cruel tyrant who was brutal to his people and was a dedicated and declared enemy of the security of the United States of America. 

We should have no regrets for that noble cause that was accomplished and the noble effort that we continue to make in Iraq.  Millions of Iraqis have participated in free elections and imperfect democracy has been created, but it is a democracy and it is struggling to survive, and it is now our responsibility to rise above politics, particularly partisan politics together, Senator McCain has shown the way to forge and advance a new strategy that will lead us to victory in Iraq and to victory in a larger war against terrorism. 

Thank you very much.

Christopher Demuth:  Gentlemen, thank you very much for your impressive and, if I may say so, very moving remarks.  Our guests have agreed to take questions.  I will call on people.  We have several microphones moving around the room and I will ask that when you are called upon if you could please introduce yourself briefly before asking your question.  So with this gentleman here--

Tony Capaccio:  Tony Capaccio with Bloomberg News, for both Lieberman and McCain.  Mr. Lieberman, you talked about this time being the 1930s, 1942-ish, during those times the American public was focused single-mindedly on the war against fascism, the sense of sacrifice throughout the whole society as far as I read.  What needs to be done if it needs to be done to instill that sort of sacrifice in the American people today?  Senator McCain, if you can handle that question also?

Joseph I. Lieberman:  As you remember, while the war is gathering and expressing itself in great violent and explicit terms in Europe in the 1930s, it took a while to build a political consensus to bring America in the defense of our values and our way of life.  It is even more difficult now. 

Look, as I said in my remarks, the uniqueness -- this is an unconventional world.  When people turn on the television and neither turned on the radios as it used to or read the papers, they do not see armies, a mass on battlefields.  They do not see ships and see your planes in the air.  This is a war against terrorists who fight from the shadows against civilians, and we just have to continue to emphasize that over and over again.  To me, the frustrating part of this as I said is that it is not just the 30s, it is 1942; Pearl Harbor has happened and yet a lot of people in our country are in denial. 

The other point is that for reasons that are quite understandable, people are totally focused on Iraq and not on the larger threat of Islamist extremism and terrorism, and also have a hard time seeing the connection between those two.  So it takes leaders who speak out and try to educate the American public. 

Look, we have got to increase the end strength of our military to facilitate the increase in troops that we are talking about.  That is going to take some sacrifice and I think we have got to state it to make it clear and I believe the people are ready to respond.  If the American people could talk to the American military as we do regularly and hear their commitment to this cause, their selfless bravery, their honor, I believe, that they were to support the troops as we are.

John McCain:  First of all, I think the 1930s and 1940s, particularly the 20s and 30s, are instructional and that there was incredible view that the United States should never make a mistake of World War I again and there was isolationism and protectionist to most respected Americans in our country.  Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford, and many others were out and about isolationists. 

There were seminal events when the then-League of Nations refused to act when the Italians invaded what was then called Abyssinia, Ethiopia.  The appeasement that was practiced by the British leadership, all were, as we know now in hindsight, would have been very effective if we acted differently in preventing World War II. 

Our parallel here is that if we fail in Iraq, there is somehow the belief that I do not quite comprehend that we just come home and then it is over.  Now, the war in Vietnam we came home and the Vietnamese did not want to follow us.  I would remind you that thousands were executed.  Millions were put in reeducation camps.  Millions fled on boats.  But the fact is they did not follow us.  If you read Bin Laden, if you read Zarqawi, you read Mullah Omar, they want to follow us home.  That next target is Saudi Arabia, and the next target is the United States of America.  They want, as Joe pointed out in his remarks, a fundamental change in the world where radical Islamic extremism dominates the entire world. 

Now, do I believe that if we leave Iraq that that is the end of Western civilization, as we know it?  No.  What I do believe that we must be spending young Americans into conflicts again somewhere else.  It is not the end, it would be the beginning of the end in some respects, although that I’m of the confirm belief that United States and the West and our values and our principles are still transcendent, our best days are still ahead.  We have faced other crisis in American history, and we will prevail in this one.

Christopher Demuth:  I’m going to take a few questions over here, a few here, and then some periscopes will go around the corner, and then we will work back again.  This gentleman here.  Sir?

Tom Ricks:  Thank you.  Tom Ricks from the Washington Post.  I have a question for Senator McCain.  If a surge is such a good idea, why do you think that we keep hearing from the joint chiefs, especially from the Army and the Marine Corps, that their [indiscernible] dislike the idea?

John McCain:  May I say, sir, that your seminal work “Fiasco” was both instructive and saddening depiction, and an accurate one of the serious mistakes have been made in the conduct of this conflict, and I wish that every American could read it so that we could avoid in the future, because I agree we will have other battlegrounds with Islamic extremism in the future.  I think that there is a bureaucratic mindset amongst some military leaders that believes with some validity that we will have an overstressed Army and National Guard and Marine Corp, and that this will do great damage to their ability to continue to fight in other arenas. 

I can only say in response to that -- and there is, as you pointed out, been significant resistance to this on a part of some, particularly those that reside in the Pentagon when we talked to General Odierno and General Chiarelli, the colonels and the generals who are on the ground in Iraq, they do not share that view.  But I believe that there is only one thing worst than an overstressed military, and that is a broken and defeated military. 

I'm old enough to have been part of the military after we were defeated.  I happen to have a position of command in the late 1970s where we had endemic drug problems, insubordination, riots on aircraft carriers, and I think General Keane will tell you that the task of rebuilding the military after it was defeated was long, difficult, and extremely, extremely expensive as well in many respects.  So I respectfully disagree with those whose concerns are there because I believe that a defeated army would be a very difficult challenge for us far more than that than one that is overstressed. 

And finally, I agree with Joe, and long ago both Joe and I espoused a larger Marine Corp and Army.  Even if there was peace in Iraq tomorrow, we still need, given the challenges we face around the world, a much larger Army and Marine Corp.  And some, in my view, are more interested in equipment than they are in the most expensive part of the military and our volunteer force, and that is personnel.

Joseph I. Lieberman:  I would add real briefly with everything John said- that we are now in a position now that we never should put our military in war.  I think the main reason they are reluctant about the increase in troops is their fear that will stress the existing forces and, of course, there is that concern, but John is right, that nothing stresses them more - and I could tell you that again from what we heard in Iraq - then defeat.  They want to win. 

This is a case where policy is being driven by resources, not by what people believe is really best for success and victory.  It has to be a priority to this Congress, but it is a twist of faith that has put the Democrats in a majority now.  I have the honor of replacing Senator McCain as the Chairman of the Air-Land subcommittee.  He is rising rapidly, however, to become the senior republican and the overall committee.  But we are going to make it a priority of our work together to authorize a rapid increase in end strength for the Army and the Marines.  We do not want to put our military command in a position where their deciding questions of our national security based on what is available rather than what is best for our country. 

Final word, not used much in this regard, not so long ago, we used to have something called the Powell Doctrine.  It said that when you go to war, you should go to war with the forces necessary, overwhelming if necessary, to win it.  We have had underwhelming forces in Iraq, and it is part of why we are in the difficult we are at now.

John McCain:  Senator Lieberman must give me a better treatment now that I’m in the minority than I gave him in the minority.

Joyce Neu:  Joyce Neu from the Joan Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice in San Diego.  I want to thank both senators for your presentation.  With this shift in strategy moving to protection of civilians in Baghdad and kind of going back, I think five years, to winning the hearts and minds more generally so that we have Iraqi cooperation.  I'm wondering what the plan calls for in terms of simultaneous, economic justice and handling of refugee issues.  The economic side instead of working with private contractors to whom we pay a lot of money, is there a job creation plan for Iraqis to have them taking over more of the interpreting positions, more of the basic positions that the US army and military need? 

Secondly, are people going to be tried fairly for human rights abuses both on the part of the US military?  Is there going to be a statement from the US leadership condemning abuses that continue to come out by the military, and also by the extremists in Iraq? 

And as a side thing, I would be interested in your opinion on the recent of execution of Saddam, how that may complicate things?  Finally, are we going to be admitting more refugees into the United States from Iraq?  Thank you.

Joseph I. Lieberman:  Incidentally, I do not see this – the talk about an increase in our troops as a shift of position.  I see it as finally implementing our position with adequate and necessary personnel.  I mean our position for some period of time has been to clear, hold, and build, to create the security along with the Iraqi security forces where we can have the space for the government to grow and for us to train them and I think this increase will make that possible.  But alone, it is not enough. 

I know that General Keane and Fred Kagan had recommended increases and economic reconstruction funds.  I totally agree with that.  I'm optimistic that we may hear that from the President next week, I certainly we hope so.  Incidentally, insofar as there really is and I believe there is a new dividing line in the Middle East between moderates and extremists, it is time for some of the moderates who have money in the Arab world to put that money into the economic reconstruction of Iraq, and I hope that will be [indiscernible]. 

I just say one word about the trial of Saddam Hussein.  I was thinking as I listened to the debate about the questions of what was said, it is execution.  My late father had a phrase where he said, “In life, you should always try to major in the majors.  Do not major in the minors.”  And it seems to me, of course, I would rather that people who are executing Saddam Hussein had shouted, “long live free Iraq,” than invoke the name of a current controversial and one case extremist leader. 

But the fact is this was a brutal dictator.  He was overthrown.  He was tried according to rules of law and he was quite appropriately executed.  Let's not major in the minors here.  Let's work our way to a better place, but let's also have some pride about the extraordinary opportunity we have opened up there in the way in which in a very difficult situation the Iraqis themselves are handled it in that trial.

John McCain:  I would just like to add a couple of comments.  One, yes, the nations and the regions have got to step up.  That has got to be part of this solution.  We continue to puzzle why they have not.  One of the explanations is that some of them figured that we may leave.  They will be stuck in the neighborhood, but clearly other nations in the region should step up in a variety of ways. 

Human rights obviously are vital part of the construction of any democracy.  We all know Abu Ghraib and other instances were enormous blows to everything we have tried to achieve.  I do believe that it is well to point out that America and a handful of other nations are probably the only ones that would put our own servicemen on trial as is happening today for the wanton execution of innocent civilians, or allegedly the taking of innocent life.  I think that is a testimony that at least attempts are being made to enforce our respect for basic human rights. 

And could I just finally say, I believe that the initial invasion was going to be easy.  Most of us did.  I believe that we would be welcomed.  We were.  We were welcomed once Saddam Hussein was overthrown.  But it was shortly thereafter that many of us began to believe that it was being very badly mishandled, and that has been well-chronicled by many.  And so it has been for the last three years that I have said we got to have more troops over there if we are going to get it under control. 

It is not a new position that either Joe Lieberman or I are taking.  I believe that this may not be our last chance, but it is as near to the last chances anything I can think of.

Christopher Demuth:  We have many patient people waiting over here.  I want to call on a few folks.  This gentleman in – no, no, no.  Thank you.  In this section, move around the corner.  We will try to get back.  Yes, sir.

Colonel Datta:  Colonel Datta, Foreign Policy Association.  My question is meant for Senator Lieberman.  As viewed from Washington, what is being done by the Maliki government to win the minds and the hearts of Sunnis, and especially areas like Anbar, separate down from Al-Qaeda which has been rarely been professed that Al-Qaeda is the main enemy after special circumstance unleashed by the execution of Saddam Hussein?

Joseph I. Lieberman:  Right.  It has always been a centerpiece of what we should be doing and in Iraq that we wanted to reconcile the people.  I do not see the troubles there at this moment as an inevitable result of age-old conflicts between different ethnic groups. 

Yes, there is some history but there is a great amount of intermarriage.  This was intentionally stimulated and flamed by the terrorists and clearly, the death of Saddam Hussein creates both anxiety and a sense that the old era is over, and now there ought to be a very aggressive outreach to the Sunni leadership and there is a Sunni moderate leadership that has come together with leaders of the Shia community, and of course the Kurds, who are playing a very critical role and mediating those discussions. 

Just bottom line on Anbar, is that it is the  one area where we are actually having some success and building linkages with the Sunnis.  Probably the most encouraging part of our trip was that meeting we had in Ramadi with our military command there, and the discussion on how the Sunni sheiks have now turned to our side, seeing that if the Al-Qaeda in Iraq is really their enemy without either a clear Sunni interest or an Iraqi interest, but a larger Islamist, ideological extremist interest.  I think more troops will helps in Anbar, and I know that Jack and Fred have talked about two more regimental combat teams would make a tremendous difference. 

I think as much as one can win a victory in the war on terrorism against an enemy that is not on a battlefield and will not come to a battleship and sign a peace treaty, we can win a victory with those -- additional to marine combat teams in Anbar that will be critical to our success overall in Iraq.

John McCain:  Too often, the light at the tunnel has turned out to be a train, but I really believe that there is a strong possibility that you may see a very substantial change in Anbar province due to these new changes in our relationship with the sheiks in the region, and I pray every night that it will succeed.

Sharon Behn:  Sharon Behn, The Washington Times.  I was hoping both of you could comment on President Bush’s decision to change the military leadership now in Iraq.  How do you think that is going to change the situation on the ground?

John McCain:  I'm for General Petraeus, who is one of those whose coming was regarded by one and all as one of the most successful during the initial stages.  He got a hold of a pot of Saddam Hussein’s money and he did exactly what our previous question or thought we should do, gave up money, local projects, people could buy generators, et cetera. 

So we are very –- I'm enthusiastic about General Petraeus’s appointment and Admiral Fallon is coming from the Pacific command where in the view of one and all he has done a superb job.  So I'm very pleased in my view to hear that -- I do not mean to be sarcastic, but for once virtue is rewarded.

Joseph I. Lieberman:  Well, I agree totally.  If we are starting and we certainly appear to be a new initiative to interact to achieve success, it is appropriate.  Well, thanks to General Casey and I might say General [indiscernible] for the extraordinary service given over a long period of time.  General Casey already had stayed a year longer than he had intended to. 

It is time for a new leadership there.  General Petraeus, I know, and I know Admiral Fallon a little bit.  They are excellent.  General Petraues has a combination of a sense of history, extraordinary experience, and a real passion about what we are doing to interact.  He believes we can win and he knows how important it is that we win and I think he will infuse that spirit into our forces there, and I think we will make a measurable difference.

Ken Joseph Jr.:  Ken Joseph with the Assyrian Christian Institute.  There has been no mention of the Assyrian Christians who are about 10 percent of the population, and the Iraqi government publicly a while ago offered to set aside one province for the Assyrian Christians and some of the minorities.  What advice would you give to the Assyrian Christians and then other minorities that are being marginalized in many ways?  Nearly half the population already left.

John McCain:  My only advice is that if we can get a functioning government, they will then receive the same protections as other citizens in a stable environment.  W