American Enterprise Institute

March 24, 2008

[Edited transcript from audio tapes]

1:15 p.m.	Registration
1:30	Presenter:	Frederick W. Kagan, AEI
	Discussants:	Michael O’Hanlon, Brookings Institution
		Kenneth M. Pollack, Brookings Institution
3:00	Adjournment

Proceedings:

Frederick Kagan:  So I’ll begin by highlighting a few of the key features of the situation in Iraq as we see it -- as I see it, and a few of the key policy issues and conclusions that I think we need to have in mind as we move forward.

 The first thing that I want to say is that the civil war in Iraq is over.  And until the American domestic political debate catches up with that fact, we are going to have a very hard time discussing Iraq on the basis of reality.  What I mean by that is that by the end of 2006, the sectarian tensions within the mixed sectarian areas of Iraq, which are principally Baghdad, Diyala and the southern belt of Baghdad were so great that you actually had local groups springing up as vigilante groups to not only defend themselves and their neighborhood, but also to exact vengeance on their sectarian opposites in other neighborhood.  In other words, you had the beginnings of the real mobilization of Iraqi society for full-scale civil war. 

And that was probably the thing that was most distressing to those of us who had been watching Iraq very closely because before that, what you had seen was the actions of organized groups that were driving violence for their own reasons, for political reasons, often by targeting civilians.  And they had succeeded in some areas, particularly in Anbar, in mobilizing the population in support of them periodically.  But actually, when you started to see a self-generating, self-sustaining popular movement toward full-scale conflict, that was horrifying and terrifying and it was one of the things that drove the original determination to recommend the surge to make sure to try to nip that in the bud.

The surge succeeded in doing that.  On a recent trip to Iraq in all of our studies what has become very clear is that the Iraqi populace is not mobilized for civil war. On the contrary, increasingly the Iraqi populace is mobilized to stop violence.  And that is what the concerned local citizens and that is what the Sons of Iraq movement are fundamentally about, particularly, the not-insignificant portion of that movement that does not consist of former insurgents.  And even among the former insurgents, one of the driving factors behind the formation and the sustainment of those groups is a sense in many Iraqi communities that they have had enough fighting.

 So that is a very important data point.  Now, you still have organized groups that are attempting to foment sectarian strife on both sides.  On the Shia side, you have Iranian-backed special groups that are attacking American targets, Iraqi targets, Sunni and Shia, for a variety of reasons; some of them I think probably want to stir up sectarian violence.  And of course, al Qaeda in Iraq continues its efforts to stir up sectarian violence.  But increasingly, the reaction of Iraqis to horrific attacks that in the past would have generated tit-for-tat vengeance attacks has been discussed that the perpetrators and public avowals of the determination to resist future attacks and very few tit-for-tat attacks, in many cases none at all.

 So that is a dramatically different situation from what we had been seeing in 2006; that trend toward civil war has been reversed.  But that is not to say that we cannot have a civil war in Iraq in the future.  Certainly, if things go badly -- the bad news from this perspective is that the sectarian areas of Iraq are still mixed.  The good news is that the mixed sectarian areas of Iraq are still mixed and there is a myth out there that the violence has fallen because all of the cleansing is done.  That is absolutely not the case.  There has been a consolidation in many areas along the sectarian fault line at a micro-level and sometimes even at a macro-level where entire villages have shifted from one sect to another.

But Baghdad remains a mixed city.  Both the Eastern and the Western sides of Baghdad have both Sunni and Shia populations.  The traditionally Sunni areas in Baghdad, in Rashid, Mansour and Ameriya are still predominantly Sunni areas and there are still Shia areas in Western Baghdad as well.  The demography and the precise borders in each of these areas has shifted but they continued to be mixed.  As I said that is good news and bad news; it means that if there is a prospect for the renewal of real sectarian strife, there are many rough edges where it could get going.  The situation in Iraq has not stabilized along any dividing line that is, in fact, stable-defensible, mutually acceptable in the context of real sectarian cleansing.

 So not only is the civil war ended but it has ended without the completion of a sectarian cleansing process, and with a renewed vocal commitment on the part of Baghdadis, especially, to preserve the mixed heritage of their city, which, increasingly, is held up as one of the distinctive characteristics of Baghdad.  So that has been tremendous progress, and for those who were worried about Iraq breaking up, for those who were worried about having this sectarian cleansing run all the way to the end, I think that we are moving steadily and at an accelerating rate away from the likelihood of that happening.

Al Qaeda in Iraq -- the Command is extremely reluctant ever to say that we have defeated al Qaeda in Iraq and they are right.  This is not the sort of war where you ever defeat an enemy like that and their leader hands you his sword and you sign the treaty and that is the end of it.  Nevertheless, I think it is fair to say that al Qaeda in Iraq has been defeated in this sense - that there is no measurable likelihood that it will achieve its aims of taking over Iraq and establishing an Islamic State of its liking.  And the reason for that is because the Iraqi people, both Sunni and Shia, have overwhelming, actually, turned against al Qaeda and are rejecting it.  And I do not think that they are going to change their minds any time soon.

 You may see various returns of terrorist groups; you may see returns of Sunni insurgent groups.  I’ll come back to this any moment.  But I think you are very unlikely to see Iraqis willingly or enthusiastically turn back to al Qaeda and its ideology, having rejected it so decisively.  And this is something I do not want to go into much detail here; I described this some in our report.  But one of the ways that you can tell this is when you walk around and talk to Iraqis, concerned local citizens, particularly those who were former insurgents, there are a number of myths that have been created by these guys to explain how it was that they were really the victims and how they have liberated themselves from al Qaeda with our assistance and so forth.

 In other words, the narrative on the ground increasingly is supporting the honorable movement from insurgency to cooperation with the Americans and the Iraqi Government, and will make it increasingly hard for these same people to come up with a narrative that goes back to the same group.  Now, that is not to say that they would not be able to come up with a narrative that would support going back to resistance of some form but the vitriol with which they are now attacking these al Qaeda guys and the narrative that they have created will make it hard.  And it is a good sign in my view that they feel themselves so invested in moving in this direction that they are worried about explaining how it is really okay that they are now cooperating with us.

 Al Qaeda -- it is worth mentioning that this really is al Qaeda, and this issue keeps coming up and I always find it bewildering.  But there seems to be a debate still to be had about whether al Qaeda in Iraq is actually connected to the global al Qaeda movement and whether this is a front in the war on terror or anything like that.  And I just want to tell you that, first of all, if you go down to Camp Bucca where we keep the detainees that coalition forces have seized who are majority Sunni, many of them al Qaeda, and you talk with the guards there and you talk with the detainees what you can do and it becomes very clear these guys see themselves as part of an al Qaeda movement.  The al Qaeda movement sees them as part of an al Qaeda movement. 

The New York Times recently ran a list of Osama Bin Laden’s speeches since 2001 - speeches and videos that have come out - and the overwhelming plurality of those speeches were directed at Iraq.  And a large number of them emphasized the importance of Iraq in Bin Laden’s struggle and most recent speeches have done that as well.  So there is really no question that Bin Laden sees Iraq as a central front that many other al Qaeda leaders, including Abu Yahya Al-Libi, who we killed in Waziristan not that long ago, Ayman al Zawahiri and various others also see it as a central front and part of the larger movement, and the al Qaeda movement in Iraq itself sees itself as part of this larger movement.  All of which is very important because the global al Qaeda movement has registered a defeat in Iraq.  And it feels that it has been set back and we have seen a significant shift in its strategy.  Part of that shift is focused on regaining ground in Iraq and there is a significant struggle now going on in Ninewah Province, particularly in the city of Mosul, as coalition and Iraqi forces work to clear out the last urban stronghold of al Qaeda in Iraq. 

And as al Qaeda in Iraq has made it clear, this is, if not a last stand, at least something that they regard as a must-win.  And they are right.  When they are driven out of Mosul, they will be in a much more precarious situation.  They will never go away; just as they have never ceased trying to reverse their 2001 defeat in Afghanistan, they will never cease trying to reverse their defeat in Iraq.  And it will be some time before the Iraqi Security Forces are able to ensure the security of the country against al Qaeda, particularly ensure that al Qaeda is not able to establish safe havens anywhere in the country.  That will be some time and we have got some fighting ahead of us and I do not want to minimize that.  But I do think we have to recognize that we have also reached a very important inflection point in terms of al Qaeda in Iraq and also in terms of the global al Qaeda movement.

 In this context, let me make a brief comment about the current plans for the withdrawal of the remaining surge brigades.  My analysis, based both on my trips to Iraq and on our planning group exercises, is that in reality there continues to be a requirement for anywhere from 17 to 20 brigade combat teams in Iraq.  The Command has chosen to continue with the withdrawal of surge forces back down to 15-brigade level and I’m not here to dispute that decision.  The point that I want to make is that the drawdown that is already planned accepts considerable risk and will make the task of moving forward more complicated, harder and a little bit slower. 

I do not want to speak for anyone but I believe that it was made because of an understanding of the strain that would be imposed on the Army and the Marines of extending the surge units farther into 2008, which is what the Iraq Planning Group had originally recommended in December.  We anticipated that the surge would last through this year.  And I think that the risks that are entailed are not mission-jeopardizing; that is to say, I think that there is every reason to believe that we will be able to succeed at a lower force level.

 The reason I raise this is to say that there is a lot of discussion in America about the need to continue to draw down beyond 15 brigades in order to relieve the strain on the force and in order to worry about other geo-strategic issues.  And we have to recognize that the decision to go from 20 to 15 already factors that into account and already brings us down to a point where it is very hard to imagine how we could go below the level of 15 brigades this year without actually beginning seriously to jeopardize the prospects for success in Iraq.  So I want to highlight that. 

And, lastly, before I turn it over to my brothers from Brookings, I would like to spend a few minutes talking with you about the political situation in Iraq which, of course, has received a lot of attention.  And here, again, it is very important that we actually keep score of what has gone on in Iraq.  And if you will forgive me, I would like to go through what the benchmarks actually were because we keep hearing in the public debate the assertion that the Iraqis have not made political progress and they have not met the benchmarks and that the military progress of the surge has not been met by political progress.  And I have to tell you that that is absolutely false.

There were 18 benchmarks that Congress legislated last year; most of them actually had to do with supporting the surge; some of them had to do with legislation.  I’m going to go quickly through them.  Forming a constitutional review committee and then completing the constitutional review -- I’m not sure that the Iraqis have done that formally, but all of the benchmark legislation is actually aimed at addressing the key holes in the constitution so that process is kind of underway.  But I will give that a yellow rather than a green. 

Enacting and implementing legislation on de-Ba’athification, done.  Enacting and implementation on hydrocarbons, not done; we will give that a red.  The truth is that the 2008 budget that was passed encompasses a compromise among Sunni, Shia and Kurds over the distribution of oil revenues.  It was delayed working out that compromised, and it is seen generally as a path on the way to the negotiations for a natural hydrocarbons law.  However, in the interest of being a fair and strict constructionist here, we will say that is not done. 

Enacting and implementing legislations establishing an independent high electoral commission, provincial elections law, provincial council authorities and a date for provincial elections, done.  Enacting and implementing legislation addressing amnesty, done.  Enacting and implementing legislation establishing a strong militia disarmament program to ensure that security forces are accountable only to the central government and loyal to the constitution of Iraq -- well, the legislation has been passed and the government has repeatedly stated that there are no legitimate forces except the Iraqi Security Forces; nevertheless there are militias.  I’m willing to give that one a yellow. 

Establishing supporting political media and economic and services committees in support of the Baghdad security plan, done.  Providing free-trained and ready Iraqi brigades to support Baghdad operations, done and overdone.  The Iraqis have in fact gone through several rotations of forces through Baghdad successfully and are now standing up an additional permanent division to be in Baghdad.  Providing Iraqi commanders with authority to execute this plan and to make tactical and operational decisions in consultation with U.S. commanders without political intervention, including the authority to pursue all extremists including Sunni insurgents and Shia militias, done.  And the Iraqi Security Forces have been aggressively fighting both al Qaeda in Iraq and Iranian-backed Special Groups throughout the country. 

Ensuring that the ISF are evenhandedly enforcing the law -- I’m not sure how to measure that and I’m not sure how many Americans would agree that American police evenhandedly enforce the law.  So I am going to give that a yellow; it kind of depends on where you are in Iraq; some Iraqis will say “Yes” and some Iraqis will say “No.”  More clearly needs to be done on that. 

Ensuring that the Baghdad security plan will not provide a safe haven for any outlaws -- what was really meant by that was code for “Sadr City will not be allowed to be a festering Shia militia support base.”  It has not been; we have been conducting operations in Sadr City regularly; we have been targeting JAM and Special Groups consistently.  There are no areas in Iraq now where the Iraqi government will not allow U.S. forces to operate with proper coordination. 

Reducing the level of sectarian violence in Iraq, done.  Establishing all of the planned joint security stations in Baghdad, done.  Increasing the number of ISF units capable of operating independently, done.  Ensuring that the rights of minority political parties in Iraqi Legislature are protected -- again, its kind of hard to measure that but considering that the three most recent benchmark laws were passed unanimously, I think it is fair to take a flyer and say that the Iraqi minority parties and the CoR think that they have a role to play and that their rights are not being trampled on. 

Allocating and spending $10 billion on Iraqi revenue -- they have been spending the budget but we can only give that one a yellow.  There is no way we can give that one a green and there are some ways to go on that.  Ensuring that Iraq’s political authorities are not undermining or making false accusations against members of the ISF -- again, there has been progress here but challenges remain.  I think that is a yellow.

 That comes up, by my tally, as 12 benchmarks accomplished, progress being made on five and no progress being made on one.  I have always hated the benchmarks; I have never supported them. And in a certain sense this was a self-flagellation exercise for me to go through and even talk about the benchmarks.  But if we are going to keep score along these lines then let’s keep score.  This is what the situation actually is. 

Now, in reality, if you follow Iraqi politics very closely what you will see is that we are at a period of very unusual fluidity in Iraqi politics.  It is a kind of fluidity that we have not seen, certainly, since the Maliki government receded and I think probably for a long time before that.  And the fluidity is caused primarily by the fact that the falling violence has led to local individual Iraqi citizens starting to care about other things than whether they are going to live or die that day.  And that means that they are starting to care about other things than whether or not a given leader is Sunni or Shia.  And they are starting to care about things like are their leaders actually providing services; is the government actually functioning; is there sewage in the streets, and so forth. 

Now these have always been issues.  But my first trip to Iraq was on April of 2007.  I went in May and I went in July and in each one of those trips, when we went in to some very bad neighborhoods, the first conversations we would have would be about security.  And the Iraqis would say, “You have got to get this under control or nothing.”  And then you would have the conversation about the sewage in the streets.  In this last trip, I had the pleasure of getting to 10 out of Iraq’s 18 provinces.  In not a single meeting did we start off talking about security. 

And every occasion in both Sunni and Shia areas the language was very familiar to me as someone in Washington: “The central government stinks.  It is not representative of our interests; it is not responsive; it is discriminating against us and it is not doing its job and we are mad.”  And I heard exactly the same thing from the governors of Karbala, Babil and Qadisiyah provinces, which are on the Shia heartland as I heard from the Business Improvement Committee in Fallujah.  And I took the Business Improvement Committee in Fallujah a little bit aback by telling them that I had heard the same thing from the governor of Karbala which they taught was a little weird.

 That is the way it is.  The net result of that is that for the first time in a long time, you actually have Iraqi politicians thinking like politicians.  And the key event that is driving that is the general agreement on the need to have provincial elections with the date for which is now set for October 1, 2008.  And Council of Representatives’ elections are scheduled or required to be held by the end of 2009.

And this is what I want to finish with.  This bracket from now until the CoR elections offers the possibility of being a truly transformative moment in Iraqi politics.  It need not be; there is nothing inevitable about this and I recognize that we have heard that kind of language before in reference to Iraqi elections.  But the truth is that when you speak with Iraqis on the ground, when you speak with the Iraqi leaders at different levels - governors, central leaders, people in the military, people in the police - there is an understanding that things are changing and there is an understanding that the nature of Iraqi politics is changing. 

If these two elections capture those changes in a positive way, then I think that there is a real possibility that we can actually achieve something very close to our original objectives in Iraq of having a country that is peaceful, stable, secure, unified and an ally on the war on terror.  Iraq so far has been our best ally in the war on terror.  There is no state in the world that has put as many soldiers into the frontlines against al Qaeda and Shia terrorists than Iraq.  And there is no country in the world that has taken as many casualties in that fight as Iraq.  And there are still no gaps in the lines at Iraqi recruiting stations to continue to carry this fight on.  And there is still no weariness on the part of the Iraqi leadership or people to continue the fight against terrorism. 

What I saw increasingly on the ground that was new is there is a growing sense of Iraqi-Arab nationalism and anti-Persianism even among the Shia, which is also having a profound effect on Iraqi politics and also, obviously, has significant consequences for us if it is something that we can capitalize on.

So in short, the planning horizon in Iraq now needs to be thru the Council of Representatives’ elections at the end of 2009 and we should be planning backward from that event, fundamentally.  And the questions we should be asking are:  What is the outcome that we desire in general terms?  What are the things that we can do -- and I’m not talking about rigging elections obviously but what are the things that we can do to help ensure that the Iraqis have the opportunity, if they want to move in direction of that outcome, actually to do so and that those who are trying to use violence or the threat of force to prevent those things from happening will be stopped?

That is what we need to be thinking about right now and we need to move beyond this extremely sterile debate about whether the war was a good idea or not a good idea and how rapidly we can draw down our forces and wrap up this supposed mistake.  We need instead to ask ourselves how to move from here to some place that I think actually would improve our security situation in the Middle East very profoundly.  If we can work with the Iraqis, they can work out.  Thank you.  And with that I will turn it over to Mike.

Michael O’Hanlon:  Thank you, Fred, and congratulations on an outstanding report.  And it is nice to be here with all of you today.  I want to say it is a real treat to be on this panel with Ken and Fred.  I think those of you who remember the Bush administration coming into office eight years ago remember the term that was coined to describe a lot of the foreign policy advisers of that group - the Vulcans. 

And I feel honored to be among two people who I would say make up a different group.  I’m still searching for the right word but I wanted to call them the Lombardis of this war because they have done two things and, in addition to Fred and Ken, who have been two of the most important people, Andy Kraponevich [phonetic] is another important think-tanker; Retired General Jack Keene from the outside; a small group of people inside the administration, smaller than it should have been.  But people like Meghan O’Sullivan and a small but important group of people inside the military like David Petraeus and General Corelli. 

These people did two things that I think would have made Vince Lombardi proud.  One, they stuck with it and they persevered through difficult times and, two, they stayed focused on fundamentals.  And the fundamentals always said if you deployed a substantial enough number of American forces and juxtaposed that with a sound political strategy, you should have a good chance in this sort of a situation.  And I think they have been vindicated even though we all know we are not out of the woods. 

And along those lines and on a somewhat more serious note, although the term “Lombardis” is one I may come back to so it is not meant entirely frivolously.  But on a more somber and serious note, I’m sure everyone here wants to acknowledge the tragic milestone of the 4000th American fatality in Iraq.  And I’m sure Ken and Fred join me, as I’m sure do all of you, regardless of your views on this war, in admiring the service and thanking our men and women in uniform for what they have done throughout this conflict.  And the sacrifice has been tremendous and it continues, and everything we are talking about today will guarantee that it continues for some time to come if the kind of policies that I support that are in this report are advocated and continued.

I want to focus in my brief remarks on what might be a trajectory for our combat forces in Iraq over the next few years.  And I just to sketch out something that I believe all three of us are thinking about and that Fred certainly has just written about, which is how do we begin to think about a time horizon for the gradual American downsizing here in Iraq that would be consistent with the logic of the surge even when the surge is over because the surge soon will be over, as Fred has just acknowledged, in the sense that the numerical increase will have run its course by this summer.  We will be back down to about 15 combat brigades in Iraq, which was the norm throughout the first four years.

So the surge, numerically, will be over but the concept behind the surge will and must continue, and that is protecting the Iraqi population.  And so if you are going to have an image for what this strategy is beyond that phrase of protecting the population, I would encourage you to think of the image of something that the three of us have been privileged to see in action, which is a joint security station or a combat outpost in Iraq.  And these are places where Iraqi police, Iraqi army, and American military army come together, live together, patrol together, respond to difficulties together, risk their lives together and put forth the kind of focus on proper counterinsurgency doctrine that we desperately have needed in Iraq.  That is the image that has to continue.  We have to find a way to make that possible even with fewer American forces present.

Fred has mentioned that one important short-term political horizon in Iraq has to do with this fall’s provincial elections.  There is also, as he said, national-level election scheduled for the end of next year and then we have a gradual process of seeing that second elected Iraqi government get on its feet thereafter.

I want to begin this brief discussion by encouraging you to think in terms of that second election and that second government at the national level.  Because while we do not have theories or rules of political science that tell us how long it takes to end a civil war or rebuild a shattered nation, we do have a constant emphasis in the literature on the second election; the importance of having that election occur, be successful, and then gradually lead to politicians behaving in a way that is less sectarian than in the past, less informed by the realities of the conflict they are emerging from than in the past.  You have to work to make that second election successful and give the government formed by that second election a real chance to get on its feet.  That is the time horizon I want to speak about today.

Let me just make, really, four points as I argue for what is in the end a policy of gradual reduction.  I think the way to think about the logic of the surge is that while we can reduce, we should be accustoming ourselves to the notion that it is going to be at a gradual pace of maybe three or four brigades a year in the next president’s term, meaning that it will take that entire term to get down not to zero, by the way, but to a level that is perhaps in the 30,000 to 40,000 range thinking very notionally, maybe a little more.  I’m not presuming here to speak for Fred and Ken but just in terms of how I’m beginning to sketch out in my own mind the logic of the gradual drawdown.

I think this is the kind of thing you might be able to envision.  I’m not sure, by the way, you should have any immediate further reductions below 15 brigades for a year or more, a point that Fred and Ken and others have been sensitizing me to.  And then when you think through the politics of all that has to happen in Iraq in the next 18 months politically, and the fact that we are already cutting 25 percent of our combat forces by the end of the surge, I think we might want to be fairly cautious about the reductions we make from that point through the end of 2009 and thereafter think about a reduction path that would be roughly 25 percent a year.

 That is very notional; I do not plan or suggest that anyone plan to set a path that is firm and binding on that.  But that is more or less the kind of commitment I would suggest.  And by the way, as some of you in this room have written and I have argued, too, I think this needs to be conditional on the Iraqis still doing their fair share maintaining the kind of new political momentum that Fred has just ticked off point by point.  I’m not quite as sanguine on that list as he is but I would agree with him.  The progress has been quite a bit more rapid in the last four to six months than it had ever been before.  I think the Iraqis need to keep hearing from us and our collective political system the message that our commitment is conditional.

 So, provided that Iraqi political progress continues, that Iraqi Security Forces continue to fight with us as they have been doing, taking the majority of the burden, frankly; taking also the majority of the casualties, provided these sorts of things happen on the battlefield and in parliament, I think this is the kind of a path for American reductions we should envision.

 Again, there are four points I want to make.  One is as you think about reductions, should you think in geographic terms?  This is just a question that I want to posit.  Should we be thinking that the way you get from the 15-brigade level we are about to reach this summer down to twelve or ten or eight or six is by gradually seeing more and more provinces in Iraq become like Kurdistan has been for so long and that Al-Anbar is becoming, which is a relatively stable area?  Well, of course, geography has to be part of the calculation; I don’t want to deny that.  But I do not think that is the core way to think about the drawdown schedule because we have all seen whack-a-mole before in Iraq.  And as Fred has rightly pointed out, even as you make big progress in one place against al Qaeda and other groups, you still run the risk there and where these sectarian fault lines still exist of seeing a re-ignition of conflict. 

So I think we have to think less in terms of pulling our forces entirely out of more provinces, and more in terms of thinning the presence gradually in most provinces where we still are and in most provinces, where we are going to therefore have to continue some level of presence.   So that is point one - be wary of a conceptual notion that we can just cut out of big parts of Iraq and just stay in two or three or four places.  I think it is going to have to be a little more complicated than that.  If you think about that joint security station, it is going to have to be a gradual process of having Americans no longer take one of the three floors in the building but just take two-thirds of the first floor or -- and then half and then a quarter of it or whatever your metaphor is or whatever your visual image might be.  It is that sort of gradual process. 

I do not yet know how to do that.  It is a question of micro-military planning.  Thankfully, we have such good captains and majors and lieutenants and NGOs in our military.  They are going to figure this problem out, I believe, pretty well.  We have to help them, and the strategic debate has to link to that micro level reassignment of our mission or redefinition of our mission.  That is point one on geography.  These are not all completely parallel points but I just want to make the four.

 Point number two is also a geography-related one and it is one that Ken and others have continued to drive home, which is do not forget about the south; we are not out of the woods yet in the south.  There are other parts of Iraq where we may still see things get worse before they get better.  When Ken and I were in Iraq last summer, the Mosul area looked relatively good.  And then it has turned out to be one of the relatively most enduring difficulties for us six to eight months later.  This just reminds us of the need to be responsive to the possibility of things getting worse here or there.  And, of course, we have done very little in the south.  I’m not suggesting we have to do the exact same thing in the south that we have done in the Baghdad area; we may have to do more than we have been doing.  And they require a brigade or two of American forces before we are done.

 A third point is - and it builds on, again, what Fred has said - as we think about our role in these combined military operations, you have to think about the nature of the Iraqi Security  Forces.  They have come a long way; they show a lot of bravery; they are losing over a hundred people a month still.  They were losing over 200 people a month in the period of 2006, much of that time period.  There are a lot of good people, a lot of dedicated patriots in that force.  But let us also remember some thing that many of you have heard before.  Ken and I saw a briefing on this point last year in Baghdad in July.  We’ve had to work with the Iraqi government to purge a lot of people out of the leadership roles in this Iraqi Security Force. 

My memory is -- the details and the names were, of course, sensitive and classified but the overall picture was very straightforward.  We, together with the Iraqis, made sure that at least three-fourths of the battalion and brigade commanders in the Iraqi Security Forces in and around Baghdad were reassigned in the last couple of years.  That is a tremendously high number and what it tells us is most of the leadership is new.  Now, I have no doubt it is already better than what it replaced but we have not yet seen it really perform in truly tense circumstances when there has been doubt about the American commitment politically.  They have handled tense circumstances in terms of danger to themselves very admirably but they have not yet really had to deal with this process of a gradual American downsizing. 

We have to see how they perform.  We have to see whose mettle really is dependable and whose commitment to the nation really does exceed their commitment to their own sectarian group or their own militia.  In some cases we know with high confidence; in other cases we are just going to have to watch and maybe even give people time for their attitudes to further modify and further focus on their country as opposed to their militia or their sectarian group.  That process is going to be gradual. 

So the third point:  Do not forget about the newness and the rookie stature of a lot of these Iraqi security force leaders.  And I think we would be ill-advised to assume that their commitment to the nation, as impressive as it is in many cases already, has really become dependable enough that we can leave them entirely on their own.  The over-watch mission has to continue.  So in a way I’m just reiterating point one but in different terms that we are going to have to stay involved, neighborhood by neighborhood, street by street, province by province.

 And that leads me to my fourth point which I’ll finish on, and this is really trying to critique an idea that often exists in the American debate, which is that somehow we could in the short term modify our role to be just protection of the green zone, training of Iraqi Security Forces and - here is the kicker - over-the-horizon counter-terrorism where we put our forces out in the desert or even in Kuwait and we wait.  And just in case al Qaeda in Iraq or some other group tries to establish a big sanctuary the way that Bin Laden did in Afghanistan in the ‘90s, then we strike. 

Ladies and gentlemen, this does not work in Iraq; we already in fact tried it for four years.  We were not way out in Kuwait or in the distant desert; we were in these big forward-operating bases essentially hauling up, securing our own forces, just doing quick motorized patrols most of the time, not focusing on population security.  And it does not work in Iraq because al Qaeda then infiltrates the cities.  They do not create some big camp that we can see on the satellite imagery that we can then wait for a juicy target and go attack it.  They have become so interspersed in the fabric of the populations that you cannot find them any longer. 

And so over-the-horizon counter-terrorism is an oxymoron in Iraq.  You cannot do counter-terrorism meaningfully, in my judgment, from any kind of distance.  You have to be part of the population.  If nothing else, you have to protect the informants who tell you where the al Qaeda are, so they do not get killed the next day after you have gone in, done your strike and then pulled back.

 So these are the kind of arguments that lead me to believe we are going to have to build on the 75-percent reduction of violence that we have seen in Iraq remarkably in the last year.  We are going to have to only phase out very gradually and it is going to take the entire first term of the next president to get to a point where we have a much more modest U.S. presence in Iraq, if we stick with the logic of the surge as I hope very much that we will.  Thanks.

 Kenneth Pollack:  Thank you, Mike.  Thank you, Fred.  As always, let me echo your own remarks in saying what a pleasure it is to be on this dais with the two of you.  Throughout the entire time of our occupation of Iraq, in our debate over Iraq, I think, as you both know, it has been a real pleasure to agree and disagree with you guys on a regular basis, if only because I think we have been able to do it in an intelligent and non-partisan way.  And I think that has been to all of our great advantage. 

In that spirit let me also congratulate Fred on this report.  Fred, I cannot say that I have read all 88 pages; I have been traveling the last few days.  But what I have read I found to be really quite good, in fact, first rate.  And I would certainly commend all of the pages that I read to everyone out there.  I think that they really are quite good.  And I think that they give a very subtle and sophisticated picture of the situation in Iraq.  And in particular, I wanted to, like Fred and like Mike, focus in particular on some of the inter-relationships, the synergies that I think the report portrays very nicely between the political and the military circumstances.

 I’ll start by saying that as a military analyst -- and I think many of you know, I actually come to Iraq as a military analyst.  Twenty years ago, I joined the CIA as a military analyst and they assigned me to the Iran-Iraq account and that is how I got interested in Iraq.  As a military analyst, for me it is just kind of fascinating over the past year to see the development of a strategy in Iraq working almost exactly as expected, as predicted; I mean that is something that you rarely see.  Military operations deviate from the plan from the moment that you cross the start line.  And it really has been remarkable how closely to the predicted model you have seen things unfold in Iraq.  That in and of itself always gives me some pause; I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

But you are seeing it move exactly in the expected -- the way that the model would predict in terms of security improvement and the security situation allowing for the provision of basic services at the local level - at least, some of those basic services - and also simultaneously, putting pressure on the central government to deliver the rest of the services.  Everything else that is out there -- this pressure from the bottom up, then unlocking the top-down political process to the point where you now have a situation where the paralysis in Baghdad that was a critical element in the deterioration of the situation of Iraq in 2005, 2006 slowly being opened up because the chauvinist militias that were controlling the central government, again as Fred’s report very nicely points out, are now under tremendous pressure from the bottom. 

They are losing support left and right and that is forcing them to be more reasonable and to make compromises which they never intended to make, which they never wanted to make in that 2005-2006 time frame.  It is also important to understand this for a variety of reasons but one of which is one of my own personal bugbears -- you are hearing a lot in the public discourse right now people making use in this refrain of, “Well, we all know that there is no military solution in Iraq.”  And of course, that is a true statement. 

But, unfortunately, people are using it to dismiss all of the progress at the security level.  You are having people say, “Well, you know, there is no military solution in Iraq so it does not matter that there is progress in the security side.”  And, of course, that completely misunderstands how these strategies work, how these situations get resolved, and what is actually current in Iraq.  Because, of course, while it is certainly true that the military is not going to be the final word in Iraq, security progress is an absolutely critical element in creating the conditions for that political solution. 

It is certainly true that without progress on the security side, there is no hope for a political solution.  And what is more, as I have just described it, the way that these strategies work when properly implemented, and as we are seeing it work in Iraq, success in the security field creates pressure on the political side.  And again, that is exactly what is going on.

And what I think you are seeing - and this is reflected not just in Fred’s work but even in the work of our curmudgeonly colleague Tony Cordesman - is that the realistic best-case scenario -- and if you would ask me as my friend Pietro Nivola and Bill Galston used to when we got started on this, what is the realistic best-case scenario, I would lay out a realistic best-case and say, “But understand this is absolutely the best case and I would not bet money on it.”  That realistic best-case is now a very real possibility in Iraq; it may even be a probability in Iraq.

Now all that said, success in Iraq is not guaranteed.  And we should not believe for a heartbeat that we are now on a glide path to something called success in Iraq.  There are a lot of very serious hurdles to overcome.  As you have heard myself, Mike, Fred, everybody else who talks about this, who actually knows something point out, all the progress that we have made in Iraq is very fragile.  It is new.  It is heavily dependent on the circumstances that have been created over the last year.  And if you change the incentive structure, if you take away those sets of circumstances, this progress could go away very, very quickly.

In addition, there are still a number of hurdles that simply have to be overcome.  We have made good progress so far but there are still a lot of things that need to happen.  One of the ones that I think is most important and increasingly pressing and that Mike has referred to and that Fred’s report deals with very nicely is this fundamental question of whether the surge strategy -- if you want to call it a counterinsurgency strategy, but that is not quite right either.  The strategy is actually a hybrid of a whole variety of things, but it does come out of the broad school of counterinsurgency strategies and that is why it typically gets called that. 

But the strategy that has been developed in Iraq, whether that can survive without the surge brigades -- and, Gary, you and others will pardon me; you have heard me on this before but I am going to picture it slightly differently.  So at least keep tuned for the twist at the end.  The surge strategy has worked in part because of the number of forces present in Iraq.  Again, as you have heard all the experts say, it does require some bare minimum number of troops.  Now, no one is entirely certain what that bare minimum is and as my friend Mike always likes to remind me, it is very circumstance-dependent.  The canonical number is 20 security forces per thousand of the population, and that is a number that seems to work all over the place.  But, again, it is very situation-dependent, and the true number may actually be a range of somewhere between 10 per thousand to 50 per thousand or maybe even higher, depending on those different circumstances.

But all I want to say is, again, there is some number out there; there is such a thing as too few troops.  We certainly saw that in the period immediately after the invasion.  And it is clearly the case that where we have had success in Iraq, it has been, at least in part, because at different points, critical points, we have achieved the right ratio of forces.

As a result of the surge, we have been able to deal, we have been able to pacify, with very large stretches of the country, and that has been important because it has taken away safe havens from the more militant groups that have been problematic.   It has also allowed us to help stabilize large parts of the country, which as Fred has pointed out and the report does a very nice job pointing out, have been increasingly interested in coming over to our side.  And that has created something of a benevolent cycle with people wanting American assistance and being able to receive it and other people seeing that those people are benefiting from it and them wanting it as well.  And this, again, is a critical element in this kind of strategy; it is part of what success tends to look like.

The big thing that is lying out there, as Mike has already alluded to - and he has also alluded to the fact that I like to carp on this because I think it is very important - is the south of the country.  Our success has largely been in the northern half of Iraq.  We really do not have very many forces at all in the southern half of Iraq.  Once you get out beyond the southern belt of Baghdad, once you get out beyond Babil province, we really do not have much force structure there, nor is there a very heavy coalition presence in the south of Iraq.

And there are certainly some things that are going on in the south of Iraq that are positive but there are also a number of things in the south of Iraq that are quite negative.  And I think at this point in time, at least I -- I do not know how Fred or Mike would but if I had to weigh them all, I would say in the net the south of Iraq is moving in the wrong direction, whereas the northern half of Iraq is by and large moving in the right direction.

What this creates is the possibility of overstretch from our forces in a very different way than in the past; it creates the possibility of overstretch from success.  In the past our problem with overstretch, the fact that we have not had enough troops, has largely been a problem of overstretch from failure.  We were not applying the right strategy, the situation in Iraq was getting worse and worse, and we did not have the number of forces able to deal with that problem.

The situation that we are getting into now creates an opposite situation where the north of Iraq is moving in a good direction but because of the fragility, which I talked about earlier, we are not really in a very good situation and simply start pulling large numbers of troops out of the northern half of Iraq.  It is still fragile.  It is unclear what would happen if we suddenly pulled five, six, eight, 10 brigades out of the northern half of Iraq.  It is just not clear that the progress that has been made, that the gains that have been secured in the northern half of Iraq would be able to be maintained as a result of that much lighter force structure in the north.

But because of the success in the north, as Fred’s report very nicely details, we are creating circumstances in the south where there are new opportunities for the United States.  You are getting more and more Shia communities who want what they see in the north, who are inviting the Iraqi government and the Americans to come into their communities as well and to help them do what we have done in the northern half of the country.

The surge all across southern Iraq, again, as the report very nicely describes, is changing the politics in the south.  It is creating this fluidity in Iraqi politics, including in the south that Fred talked about.  And it is weakening the chauvinist militias that have dominated the south for the past three or four years, again, in exactly the fashion that we wanted it to. 

But there are risks; there are problems in those changes as well.  The problem, of course, is that you have communities that are now reaching out to us who desperately want our help.  And if we do not send them the resources to allow them to secure the same kind of gains that we have allowed in the north, it opens up the question of what is going to happen to them.  Will they suffer retaliation from various militias in the south when we are not there to help them after they have asked for our help?  Will they simply turn their backs on us and decide that we were never interested in helping the Shia the way that we claimed, that we were only really interested in helping the Sunnis and the Baghdadis and, maybe, the Kurds?  Can they simply go back to the life that they had and be patient and wait until the point where the situation in the north has been consolidated enough to allow us to free up brigades to move into the south?

Now, it is also worth pondering the fact that these opportunities in the south are also important for a topic that I try very hard to avoid, and that is American domestic politics.  Because these opportunities in the south create the possibility - and, again, I think Fred’s report does a very nice job in talking about the opportunities in the south - these opportunities create the possibility that we could actually move much faster in Iraq than originally thought.  And the truth of the matter is -- and, again, from a purely military analytic point of view, the whole thing has moved much faster than the historical norms, than previous conflicts would have suggested. 

And my own mind -- there is an interesting question for scholars and military analysts to pursue of why is it that things moved so much faster in Iraq than they did in a place like Northern Ireland.  I think it is something that scholars need to wrestle with but that is not a question for Iraq today; it is simply to say that we have moved faster and these opportunities in the south create the possibility to move even faster.  And that opens up the prospect that we might actually be able to mesh progress in Iraq with the demands of the American domestic political agenda, which would be a tremendous thing.  And then Bill Gaulston and I could stop having these awful conversations where we try to figure out if it is possible to mesh the needs of the strategy in Iraq with the demands of the American domestic political agenda.

As I said, there are also these possibilities out there, these less felicitous possibilities that if we do not take advantage of these opportunities that it will actually create problems in the south.  And this sets up a conundrum for the United States, and I think that it is going to be the central tension of American strategy in Iraq moving forward over the course of the next year, which is how much can we do for the south without jeopardizing the progress in the north. 

In other words, we have made great progress in the north but we need to consolidate those gains.  And the requirement of consolidating those gains would suggest that we not start pulling large numbers of troops out of the north so that we can move them south, let alone move them home.  But if we cannot pull large numbers of troops out of the north and move them into the south, what can we do for the south?  Can we pull some brigades out?  And Fred’s [audio glitch] in the report has done a nice job at looking at some possibilities of could we pull a few brigades here and there out of the north and still, nevertheless, take advantage of some of the opportunities in the south. 

And if we cannot even do that, what else can we do?  Are there other military assets?  Are there other political assets?  Are there other economic assets that we can employ to provide some degree of sustenance, of succor, of support to those in the south who are so desirous of moving in that same direction without jeopardizing the gains that we have made in the north?  I think that, as I said, is going to be the central question moving forward. 

In my mind, again, it reinforces a point that Fred and his team made in the report, which is that from a substantive perspective there is no justification for pulling any brigades out of Iraq.  It would really be nice to have all 20 of them, if not five or 10 more, so that we could consolidate the north and start to deal with the south and take advantage of all the opportunities down there and not have to be able to trade off one to get the other. 

Unfortunately, I do not think that politically that is very realistic.  That is why I think that it is critical that as we begin to move forward we begin to think about this.  And we ask ourselves the question of to what extent do we want to take advantage of the opportunities in the south?  To what extent do we have to?  Because failing to do so could create a situation that might jeopardize not just the south but even the north itself.  And then what level of forces is absolutely required in the north to sustain the progress that has been made there, accepting everything else that is going on and recognizing that we have these other demands on our troops, both to expand the ink spot into the south and to pull them home for American domestic political reasons.  Let me stop there and open up the questions.

Frederick Kagan:  Ken and Mike, I want to thank you very much for your comments, for taking the time, for being the stalwarts that you have been in this discussion all the way through, and for being part of the core of analysts in this town who have managed to maintain a high-level bipartisan serious engaged debate about this issue even as the political temperature on this topic has heated up.  It has been very impressive to me that you and I and Michelle Flournoy and Patrick Clawson who is sitting over here and also participated with us; Tony Cordesman and a few others have managed to continue to have conversations even when we do not agree in a civil fashion.  And I would hope, probably vainly, that at some point it would be possible to move the general political discourse in a similarly civil fashion.

And with that, I’ll turn to your questions.  Please wait until the microphone comes.  Identify yourself and ask a brief question. 

Bob Lieber:  Yes, I’m Bob Lieber from Georgetown University.  Those were superb presentations, not least because they respond to that question, I think, which originally may have come from General Petraeus, which was, “Tell me how this ends?”  And, in fact, for the first time, really, one gets a sense of what a viable trajectory could be. 

Having said that, I want to come back to Fred Kagan’s comment about the American political nexus.  If, as of a change in the White House on January 20th, a new administration decides not to pursue the course you are doing, you are advocating, but instead decides on a very rapid withdrawal of brigades without the kind of qualifications you have talked about, tell us how that ends.

Frederick Kagan:  I did not bring my crystal ball and that is required for those kinds of estimates.  Look, the truth is no one can say with certainty what will happen if a new administration nine months from now adopts a completely different approach because the situation in Iraq is very dynamic and fluid and changes constantly.

As Ken rightly pointed out, it has changed much more rapidly over the past 15 months than any of us ever thought that it would.  And I expect it would probably change a lot over the coming year.  That having been said, I think Mike’s analysis is fundamentally sound.  It is extraordinarily unlikely that the combination of political development, development within the Iraqi security forces and attitudes of the enemy -- and we have not perhaps spent enough time talking about the enemy and the enemy does get a vote.  And the enemy -- neither Shia nor Sunni so far have decided to call it quits and give up the struggle.  And we need to take that into account because the enemy still does have the ability to generate violence, and anytime that is going on it can have unpredictable consequences.

Depending on the withdrawal strategy that would be adopted on January 21, 2009, it could range from fine to catastrophic.  I think if we move to a strategy that is a brigade out every month, then you are basically talking about U.S. military forces in Iraq are not engaged in any meaningful combat operations as of January 21, 2009 because the whole force will have to be preparing for such an immediate withdrawal.  And it is very hard for me to imagine the situation sustaining itself after that.

I think what you would see immediately is that the enemies on both sides would begin to position themselves very aggressively for significant counterattacks as soon as they felt that we had left enough vulnerabilities.  And I suspect that the various parties in and outside of the Iraqi government would also start arming themselves and positioning themselves for that struggle that would come.

I do not want to predict what the outcome would be but I think the likelihood that you would see any sort of continued political progress is very close to zero.  I think the likelihood that you would see the reestablishment and growth of al-Qaeda safe havens is close to a hundred percent.  The likelihood that you would see an expansion of Iranian-backed Special Groups efforts to destabilize the south and the rest of the country is very close to a hundred percent. 

It is not much of an extrapolation to any of those things from what is actually going on, so I think that is where we would head.  I cannot predict.  I do not want to sit here and predict the outcome of that but I think it would be pretty dire.

Kenneth Pollack:  I’ll chime in.  Bob, I’ll rise to the debate a little bit more.  As I think you knew I would in part because of all the work that I did with Dan Byman in 2006 on exactly that question.  First, as Fred says -of course, he is absolutely right - none of us can predict the future.  It is difficult to even estimate.  That said, given the circumstances now, I think that all the evidence does indicate that if the United States were to pull out before we had consolidated those gains in the north as I talked about them and created the conditions for stability, which are not there now and which right now you should not assume would be there in 12 months, under those circumstances it is very likely that you would see a return to at least the levels of violence of 2006.

Now, again, as the report does a very nice job of talking about it, that violence would probably look somewhat different because of the changes that the surge has made, because of how it has hurt some groups and not hurt other groups or hurt other groups less.  I suspect that the JAM Special Groups would actually be a much more potent force the next time around than they were in that 2005-2006 timeframe.  Again, just because of the developments of the course of time it might take al-Qaeda and Iraq longer.  It might not be possible for AQI to reestablish itself with the same kind of dominance that it did in 2006 but someone else would on the Sunni side.  I mean, that you can be certain of.

Again, as you know, from the work that Dan and I did on the book we wrote called Things Fall Apart, we looked at a whole series of cases of other civil war, and what we found was that, again, you can never predict the levels of spillover from all- out civil war in Iraq but Iraq has all of the hallmarks of being a worse-case, not a better-case.  And therefore, again, I think that you would have to go into that under the assumption that we would soon find ourselves in a position where Iraq is in a level of all-out civil war with very severe ramifications for the rest of the region, creating real internal instability in neighboring countries, possibly even civil war in neighboring countries and also, I think, most likely creating the very real likelihood of a regional war. 

And again, this is one of the commonplaces of recent history that states [audio glitch] all-out civil war with very important natural resources trigger those regional wars, Congo being the perfect example of it.  And I think that you would have to expect, given all the statements by the Turks, by the Iranians, by the Saudis, given their levels of involvement already, that there will be a high likelihood, if not even a high probability, that you would see that kind of a regional war.  And again, it is why I think that I and I suspect my colleagues and I think most of the Iraq analysts, military analysts who look at this all believe that the most important reason for the United States to continue to try to make this strategy work is to avoid the costs to Iraq, to the region, to the United States and the rest of the world that would likely ensue from that kind of a scenario.

And just to wrap it up by referring to a point that Mike made, one of the problems - and this also, I guess, plays off of Fred’s point - that you have if with some of the ideas being floated for rapid decrease in American force level is that it is hard to see how you sustain the current strategy, which, whether it works or not is the only strategy that can work for Iraq.  It is hard to see how that strategy can continue to be made to work with a very quick drawdown on forces.  I think you have to look at the kind of drawdown that Mike was talking about.   Over the course of time, with continued success, things continuing to go well, maybe even as well as they have been so far, you could imagine that kind of a drawdown.  And that kind of a drawdown would be fully consistent with making the strategy work and avoiding the kind of negative circumstances we are talking about.

The problem is if you pull the brigades out too quickly, it is going to be very hard to sustain this strategy.  And then the problem becomes it is not clear if there is any other strategy that can either keep Iraq stable or, as Dan and I were looking at, contain the violence of all-out civil war in Iraq and prevent it from engulfing the rest of the region.

Frederick Kagan:  And just to add one thing very quickly, I cannot claim to have a fingertip sense of what is going in Iraqi society, and I do not.  My hunch from the time that I have spent there and the time that I have spent talking with people who live there - by which I mean our servicemen - is that this is an opportunity now that will vanish if we allow it to collapse.  And I think what we saw in 2007 is that, as it turns out, the Iraqi population did not and does not want to have a civil war.  It does not want to have sectarian cleansing.  It wants to live in mixed peaceful communities as it has historically.  And we are seeing an identification along those lines.

If we pull out and allow it to collapse utterly, I have a feeling that that is not going to be what it returns to.  I think that mindset will be lost and I think Ken is right.  And the studies that Ken has done with Dan show that not only can these things be very big and regional but they can be very, very long.  I think they will be if we miss this opportunity.

Tom Ricks:  Hi.  Tom Ricks from the Washington Post.  It is a follow-up on the point that Ken is making but I want to address it to you, Fred.  On the logic of the surge, how confident are you that we can continue to pursue a strategy built on protecting the people with 15 brigades or fewer than 15?

Frederick Kagan:  My analysis, I think, tracks generally with the command’s analysis [audio glitch] you can do it with 15.  You cannot do it with less, really.  And I think it is important as you think about this to recognize that because of what brigades do - and brigades do more than live in joint security stations; brigades also [audio glitch] integrating functions, civil military functions, and also vertical integrated functions.  Brigades help connect local Iraqis to their own government, which is necessary because of the limitations of the current middle levels of the Iraqi government.

They create a matrix within which Sons of Iraq and other such organizations can exist and they create a logistics matrix within which the Iraqi security forces can exist.  Although the Iraqi security forces are starting to do a little bit better on that, it is going to take them a while.

I think that at 15 brigades, you can keep doing this.  We can certainly keep doing it in the areas that we have done it in.  I think, yes, we will be able to take care of Mosul and, yes, we will be able to clear the Tigris River Valley and be able to keep al-Qaeda out of the Hamrin Ridge, and all like that. 

I think the points that Ken raised, which also preoccupied me quite a lot as I was looking at this, are more significant from that standpoint.  What can we do realistically in the south at 15 brigades?  What are the opportunity costs that we will incur particularly in the south?  And by south I do not primarily mean Basra, although we can talk about Basra.  I primarily mean the five cities area that is actually the Shia heartland of Iraq, which [inaudible] around the cities of Najaf, Karbala, Hilla, Diwaniya, and Kut.  And the question is hat can we realistically do there.  And the answer is it is limited at 15; it is very limited. 

It is not zero.  I think we will be able to do things down there and I think this is where we are going to have to start being creative as the command is.  But I think the short answer is I do not think that going down to 15 brigades forces a mission change and I do not think that it brings the level of force down to a point at which mission success is fundamentally jeopardized.

I think, as Ken said from a standpoint of military analysis, thinking only about Iraq I would not be comfortable recommending pulling a single soldier out because, in fact, as you look at what else we could do, what other opportunities we have to move this forward faster, we pay an exponential price for every brigade that comes out and that exponential price starts from 20.  And so by the time you get down to the delta between 15 and 14, it is 10 to the sixth in terms of the capability that you are losing, not 10.

And that is something that I think the whole debate in Washington would be better informed if we recognized that the drawdown is from 20.  The question of drawing down is from 20; it is not from 15.  But, yes, I think we can survive this but it will be longer, dicier.  There are opportunity costs and depending on what the enemy does, we may have some significant issues with it.

Frank Fletcher:  Thank you.  Frank Fletcher.  My question is to what extent is Muqtada al-Sadr’s ceasefire a product of his will and the situation in Iraq, or that of the pressure or decisions coming from Iran?  And under what circumstances might the Iranians or he decide to reignite the conflict capabilities does he have?

Frederick Kagan:  That is a very good question.  Let me start by disaggregating two issues.  There is the question of Muqtada al-Sadr at the ceasefire and the regular Jaish al Mahdi, and then there is the question of Iranian-backed Special Groups.  Iranian-backed Special Groups on the whole do not report to Muqtada al-Sadr; they report to the Quds Force.  And this is well-documented and we know there are Quds Force operatives in Iraq who are training and mentoring them, and there are liaisons between these Special Groups and Quds Force within Iran. 

Those groups have not stood down at all.  Special Groups have never stood down.  The Special Groups have been attacking us consistently and we have been attacking them.  There was period at the end of the fall and into the winter when their attacks went down.  We assessed that that was primarily a) because we had hurt them pretty badly and b) because they decided that they needed to go into a reconstitution retraining phase [audio glitch] and saw attacks pick up again.  So that is the dial that Iran actually controls.

I do not actually think that Muqtada al-Sadr’s ceasefire decision was dictated by Tehran and I do not think that his subsequent renewals of it were dictated by Iran either.  The first one -- you have to understand in Iraq on the Shia side, one of the interesting things is that all of the major militias are attached to political parties that have a role in the government, which put them in a very equivocal position when the Maliki government actually committed to the Baghdad security plan and signed up to the principle of no militias.  And it led Muqtada, initially, to declare a ceasefire and -- it is not to declare a ceasefire, but support the Baghdad security plan.  He subsequently withdrew that support but then announced a ceasefire, and then his movement began to fragment.  And the Special Groups components became more significant and the ordinary JAM began to split among itself.

We have now reached a point -  I’m sorry but we did not stop tracking it.  We never stopped paying attention to regular Jaish al Mahdi [audio glitch] who the leaders are under the organization and all like that.  Sadr has now got himself in a box and the box is that any moment that he gives the order to his guys who are loyal to him to stand up and fight, the first thing that happens is we kill or capture most of them and the Jaish al Mahdi takes a terrible hit.  And he will be having all of the people who are most loyal to him self-identify to us as the people who are now going to stand up and then will take that organization out.  And how will that benefit him and what will he be left with?

Now, that is not to say that there is no point in which the Iranians might press him to do this although it appears that he is increasingly taking a lesser and lesser role, particularly in control of the Jaish al Mahdi, and even in the political side of this.  And Tehran’s relations with him have always been complicated and hard to predict.  Could they order him to have his boys stand up and do this?  I suppose.  I’m not sure if they would or not.  If they did, what would happen?  Violence would spike.  You would have an immediate spike of violence.  Depending on what our force posture was, it would be tamped down either quickly or slowly.

One of the things that has changed since 2006 that I think is significant is that one of the first things that would happen is that the regular Iraqi security forces would fight like heck against the Jaish al Mahdi if it stood up to do this because they already have been.  And there is a complicated reason for that.  It has to do with the fact that the Badr Corps ISCI, a group formerly [audio glitch] went into the government, took its militia with it, and so you have a lot of Badr Corps -- former Badr Corps -- current Badr Corps fighters within the Iraqi security forces. 

And the situation in the south has been moving in the direction of struggle between the Iraqi security forces, including Badr Corps and JAM such that if you had a big JAM uprising, I think you would find the Iraqi security forces pretty enthusiastically going after them.  Now, what would happen?  I do not know, but that would also be different.  I guess I will not try to sum that up.  That is the long version.  You guys want to add anything?

Doug Brooks:  Hi, Doug Brooks with the International Peace Operations Association.  A lot of our private companies are supporting the reconstruction and the security in Iraq right now.  We have seen -- reports are of attacks are way down and the companies are -- it is much safer than it has been.  My interest is is this increasing the level of confidence enough, so that you are seeing foreign businesses move into Iraq?  Are we seeing -- I guess, what would you expect the U.N. to do?  Will they be taking a larger role in this?  Will they be taking over some of this?  I would be interested in your ideas on that.

Kenneth Pollack:  I guess I’m going to start.  I suspect I’m going to steal a little of Fred’s thunder because he alludes to this in the report and I completely agree with it, which is that the U.N. has so far stepped up, and I think in a very important and very constructive way.  Staffan de Mistura is doing a wonderful job out there as the new U.N. Special Envoy.  You cannot hear enough good things about him from American personnel and other coalition personnel out there.  [Audio glitch] in Kirkuk; Article 140 has been terrific.  There are a lot of Americans who are hoping that if the Kirkuk process continues to work well that it will become a model to allow Staffan, including his team, are hoping that it will allow them to take over a larger process of national reconstruction, starting with some kind of a national dialogue.  You have a lot of Americans in the embassy who are very desirous now of allowing the U.N. to play a greater role.  And it is clear that Staffan and his team would like to play a greater role.  His team, the UNAMI team, has been wanting to play a greater role all along.

In my mind, again, this brings the question back to Washington.  It has certainly been the case that since the death of Sergio de Mello, we have not necessarily had the U.N. partner that we have wanted.  But by the same token we have not exactly given the U.N. a whole lot of reason to put their first team in Iraq.  Well, they finally have.  And so one of the question marks in my mind is given that the U.N. put their A-team in Iraq and are actually desirous of playing a much greater role, are we going to be willing to allow them to?  As far as I’m concerned, we ought to be.  We could use all the help that we can get.

The U.N. is not a perfect organization by any stretch of the imagination but it certainly has a lot of capabilities, including capabilities that we do not necessarily have.  And one of the things, I think, that Staffan, in particular, has really demonstrated is that the Iraqis actually do see the U.N. as being more neutral than the United States.

Now, it certainly is the case that you have Iraqis who are coming to us and saying, “We do not want the U.N. doing that; we want you to do it.”  But, oftentimes, it is because they think we are biased; they just think that we are going to be biased in their favor in the way that the U.N. is not.  But again, come back to my bottom line.  I think the U.N. really has a very important role to play in Iraq.  I think they are finally stepping up to the plate, and I think that we ought to take advantage of that.  We ought to give them the opportunity to play a greater role and, in fact, we ought to challenge them to play a greater role.  It can only help.

Frederick Kagan:  I entirely agree, and I think that we are.  I think that the good news is that the major policy and strategy objectives of Multi-National Force-Iraq and the U.S. mission in Iraq are almost entirely congruent with the major issues, strategies, and areas of focus of UNAMI.  And that the way Staffan de Mistura -- and I agree with Ken; I cannot praise him highly enough.  He is not only a very accomplished diplomat, but he really knows how to make Iraqis work and do what they need to do, and he is terrifically skillful at that.

The alignment of our interests and focuses, I think, has never been stronger.  And the fact that we have a U.N. Special Envoy who is willing to live on a U.S. base, who is willing to work very closely with U.S. forces, use our intelligence, and push back on us when he thinks necessary -- I think there is a very good relationship that is developing between de Mistura and UNAMI, in general, and our forces over there.  And I entirely agree with Ken. 

I think 2008 stands a good chance of being the climax of U.N. influence in Iraq, frankly, because with the exploration [sounds like] of the Security Council resolution at the end of 2008.  And as we move to a bilateral relationship I think there will naturally be some pulling and tugging about the U.N.’s role.  But I think the next nine months are a real opportunity for us to work very, very closely with the U.N. and support their efforts as they are supporting ours.

The brief answer to your first question is, yes, there are some indications of foreign businesses increasing their willingness to invest in Iraq.  There are some Kuwaiti companies that are doing that, which is a good sign, and there are bids from a number of other -- particularly oil companies from outside the region to involve themselves.

The weird thing is that -- it is not a weird thing -- the problem that we have in Iraq is not primarily the level of security but the memory, the image of Iraq as a country in flames, which deters some businesses from engaging in investment in Iraq that, in fact, engage in investment in even more violent areas than the parts of Iraq that they would be going into now.  But that has to do with the fact that there is an image of Iraq as being an incredibly violent place.  So I think you are going to see a lag in that kind of investment beyond when the metrics are actually down until that image is replaced by something else. 

But, yeah, I mean there is a general understanding that there is a lot of money to be made in Iraq.  I think there is an eagerness to make that money as soon as people are comfortable that the conditions are there for it.  I think we have time for one more question.

Male Voice:  I’m [indiscernible] with the Assyrian Institute.  In all your discussions, you forgot to mention the Assyrians are the original people of Iraq and about 10 percent of the population.  But a bit of a narrow question:  Nearly 500,000 of Assyrians are in neighboring Jordan and Syria, primarily.  In our most recent meeting with Prime Minister Maliki he very strongly supported one Assyrian province, much in the model of Kurdistan, primarily so that these people can return.  Would you support that or are there some problems with that as you see it going forward, at least to bring probably a key group back to Iraq to help work for the future?

Kenneth Pollock:  I would certainly be more than willing to support putting it on the table.  My feeling is that as with all issues of national self-determination, it has to be resolved by the people themselves and it has to be resolved peacefully.  It is my feeling about Kurdistan, as well.  I think you know I’m a wild believer that the Kurds are a nation that deserves a state.  And I desperately want to see that happen, but I want to see it happen peacefully under the right circumstances.

And I think that one of the things that -- if nothing, I would say it is -- to go back to Doug’s earlier question about the United Nations, one of the things that they can do is to help as part of this process of a national dialogue leading to national reconciliation, to put those kind of issues on the table of what are the status of Iraq’s minorities going to be.  And should they get their own provinces or should they get some other status under the law? 

These are all critical questions.  They are critical not just because it is the nature of the world, but also because Iraqi history is replete with these kinds of massacres; your population in particular, oppression in general.  And given that history, these are critical questions that need to be dealt with not just because of the suffering of people beforehand but because of the potential for it to create additional suffering in the future.  And if Iraq is going to be stable, those questions have to be dealt with.

Frederick Kagan:  I think the key point is that any solution that is arrived at peacefully for a political process and that is stable and not going to generate violence -- it is not for me to say how Iraq should organize itself.  I think those are the keys, and I think what we have been working very hard to do over the past year, over the past 15 months, is to bring about a situation in Iraq where there is a general understanding that controversial issues have to be resolved by discussion and not by AK-47.  I think that as long as that continues to be the case, we can address particular issues or the Iraqis can address them within that context.  I’ll take one last question. 

Colin Kahl:  Thanks.  Colin Kahl from Georgetown and CNAS.  It is basically the same question to Fred and Mike.  But Fred, do you agree with Mike’s contention that over the long term our continued large-scale military presence in Iraq should be conditioned explicitly on continued progress on the political arena?  And to Mike, how would you actually make those conditions work?  What would the conditions be?  And if the Iraqis did not live up to those conditions, what should we do in return?  How do you put teeth in those conditions?

Michael O’Hanlon:  The main point I would make, Colin, is that I do not like the idea of overly firm or binding benchmarks.  I think this is more art than science, which, of course, is a dilemma for us because we want to keep real pressure on the Iraqis.  I sort of feel like even though it was not necessarily pretty to watch, the dynamic that President Bush and the Congress had last year created the right effect.  But it would have been a mistake to go to the next level and say, “You have to achieve a score of Yes on 13 of the benchmarks as opposed to 11 or nine or seven.”  So more art than science with the congressional willingness to cut off money being the ultimate way in which we make the threat real.  And I hope that threat will never have to be acted upon, of course. 

But I do not know how it would be much more precise because I think, again, when you watch a democracy build itself, it is a gradual human endeavor; it is a hard thing to quantify or make overly precise.  And so that is a bit of a pun to your question.  But the benchmarks give us something to keep coming back to and keep talking about.  I just do not know how to make the rules for scoring it any more precise than that.

Frederick Kagan:  And to answer the first part of your question, I think that our continued presence in Iraq is based upon our pursuit of our interests and based on the view that the continued presence of our force is doing whatever they are doing or doing something else advances our interests. 

I do not think we should be making a decision about our presence or lack of presence based on anything else.  And so if it is the case that political progress in Iraq stalls or reverses in such a way that it is no longer, in our view, productive for us to have forces at a certain level or if we have good reason to believe that drawing down will actually have a given concrete effect that will be positive, then we should do that. 

But I’m not going to give any more precise answer to that because I’m not in Iraq to help the Iraqis establish benchmarks and I’m not -- I do not want -- excuse me, that was a slip -- I’m not in Iraq.  Our soldiers are not in Iraq to help the Iraqis establish benchmarks.  Our soldiers are in Iraq in pursuit of American interests, and that is the only measure at the end of the day that matters to me.

I may disagree with Mike a little bit about how productive it has been for us to give the Iraqis the impression that we might have one foot out the door.  The effect of that varies at different levels of Iraqi society.  It may have helped push Maliki to compromise a little bit more.  It made local Iraqis very nervous in areas where there was -- in mixed sectarian areas.

You have to remember, as you know, Colin, that one of the first questions that our soldiers were asked when they went into a lot of these areas was, “Are you going to stay this time?”  And there has been a lot of heartburn generated in some fragile neighborhoods by Iraqis who watch the American political process, and they do.

One of the weird things about Iraq is when you fly over tiny, little villages in the middle of nowhere, half of the houses have satellite dishes on them.  And they watch CNN, and some of them probably watch C-SPAN.  Heaven help them; I do not know if they get that over there.  But they have opinions about the American political race.  We did a little canvass and we found one governor was pro-McCain and one governor was pro-Obama and one was pro-Clinton.  And in Anbar they wish Bush would run again.  I’m serious.  Actually, they told us that.  So they watch this stuff, and it is something to be very careful of. 

But the short version is American soldiers are in Iraq in pursuit of our interests.  As long as we think that we can continue to safeguard our security and advance our interests by having our soldiers in Iraq doing certain things, they should be there.  When that is no longer the case, they should not be there.  I think it is the case today.  I think we have made remarkable progress over the past 15 months.  I think that not only are there opportunities but momentum is moving in the right direction in Iraq as well.  I think it is a real -- I really do think that it is an opportunity that we should seize, not simply to avoid all of the devastating negative consequences that Ken and Mike and various fora have laid out in terrific scholarly detail but also to achieve some positive objectives that, I think, could help advance our security interests in the region very fundamentally and for a long period of time.

Thank you very much for coming and for your patience today.  Have a nice day.

[End of file]

[End of transcript]