<html><body>Winning Iraq: A Briefing on the Anniversary of the End of Major Combat Operations May 4, 2004 Unedited transcript prepared from a tape recording <A class=documentLibrary title="Winning Iraq (Downloadable Transcript)" style="TEXT-DECORATION: none" href="javascript:viewFormat('4625', '0')"><IMG alt="Download file" src="http://www.aei.org/images/icon_download.gif" border=0> Transcript available in PDF format</A> <TABLE width="100%" border=0> <TBODY> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%">9:45 a.m.</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="75%" colSpan=2> Registration</TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="50%"> </TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%">10:00</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%">Presentation:</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="50%">Thomas Donnelly, AEI</TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%">Remarks:</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="50%">Andrew Krepinevich, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments</TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="50%">Steven Metz, U.S. Army War College</TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%">11:30</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%">Keynote Address:</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="50%">Douglas Feith, under secretary of defense for policy</TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="50%"> </TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%">12:15 p.m.</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="75%" colSpan=2> Adjournment</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE> Proceedings: MR. DONNELLY:  [In progress] --this is actually part of a larger project, the first product of a larger project we've been engaged in here at AEI for the past year or so, trying to sort out what happened in Operation Iraqi Freedom in the lead-up to the war, during the war, in the counter-insurgency campaign that's been conducted over the past year--what it means strategically and militarily for the United States and for the world. I would mention also that there are two parallel companion projects that are nearing completion, one on the state of the governance of Iraq in the future by my colleague and my boss Danielle Pletka, and also a fascinating report on the state of internal politics in the Shia community by my colleague Reuel Marc Gerecht.  So stand by for those events in the future.  Today's proceedings are going to follow the fairly standard AEI procedure.  I've asked--you have a draft copy of the report that will be released very shortly.  Journalists in the audience, will you please be so kind as to clearly state in whatever quotes you use that this is a draft.  I don't expect too many material changes, but my editing skills are atrophying so there may be some grammatical and punctuation errors.  So please do mention that it's a draft. But I'm going to, essentially, summarize the report and try to connect it to the events of today.  I've asked two very good friends, Andy Krepinevich and Steve Metz--Andy directs the Center for Budgetary and Strategic Assessments and, perhaps fortunately for today's proceedings, was the author of perhaps the definitive book on counter-insurgency campaigning in Vietnam.  The title of the book was, "The Army in Vietnam," if I recollect correctly.  It is really a seminal work. Steve is on the faculty of the U.S. Army War College in the Strategic Studies Institute and has led their investigations both of the conduct of the war in Iraq and of the counter-insurgency campaign.  He's been to Iraq a number of times.  Probably he's planning to go again.  Really, while I count both Andy and Steve to be friends, they are both scholars of the first order and I expect a thorough grilling from them.  So after I speak, I will turn the microphone over to Andy first, some brief remarks, and then to Steve.  I will then rebut whatever minor criticisms they have, also very briefly, and then we'll go to the Q&A. We will continue up until the arrival of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith.  So we will try to have essentially a seamless transition from the panel to Secretary Feith's keynote speech, both so we can make for good television and for a lively discussion with you guys.  So there will be a chance to ask Secretary Feith questions as well, after his remarks are complete. And I have prepared testimony that I'd like to stick to in talking about the report. We're now about a year after George Bush celebrated a mission accomplished aboard the USS Lincoln.  And certainly, at the time, it did seem to be a mission accomplished.  The invasion of Iraq was extraordinarily successful--a lightning war, a blitzkrieg that brushed aside Saddam Hussein's army and toppled the statues in Baghdad in, really, a record time.  Tommy Franks's forces moved as far in three weeks as George Patton's did in three months in 1944.  Yet even as the president savored a moment of triumph in removing Saddam's regime, the president had no illusions that the victory is complete.  The event on the aircraft carrier has been caricatured pretty endlessly since, but if you look at the president's remarks, he spoke of the battle of Iraq, which he said was just a single victory in a larger war.  And he concluded his remarks by saying the war still goes on and our mission continues. I took his remarks to be reference to the greater mission to change the political regime not only in Iraq, but in Afghanistan and elsewhere throughout the region that we've come to call the greater Middle East.  This is a huge swath of the planet which extends from West Africa to East Asia, often referred to as the Islamic world, and clearly, our mission in trying to introduce a more decent and democratic political order throughout that region is far from accomplished, either a year ago and still today. The fundamental question in my mind is less that of tactics, which is, unfortunately, what our debate focuses too closely on--things like what precisely the form of the Iraqi interim executive authority will be after June 30th or how many international peacekeepers may or may not be deployed to Iraq and under what circumstances, and on and on and on.  The larger question in my mind is whether the United States will sustain the level of effort needed to accomplish these admittedly ambitious goals.  This is a question, and my remarks today will be an attempt to frame the fundamental question of whether we have sufficient means to achieve our ends.  And I would suggest that, in this political season, this is certainly a question for the president, but is also a question for the Kerry campaign. One of the tropes of Iraq war analysis has been that this was a war of choice.  If you read the paper, I think you'll see pretty clearly that I think that it was not really a war of choice, but rather a reaction to a long-term process of political disintegration in this region that's probably best marked by the events of 1979.  That really was a watershed year.  In that year, we experienced the fall of the shah and his government and the rise of Khomeni in Iran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the occupation of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Islamic extremists, and, perhaps most significantly, the direct seizure of power in Iraq by Saddam Hussein. The pattern of American commitment to the region since that time, if you chart it simply as a measure of military forces deployed to the region, is an uninterrupted and steady rise punctuated by wars both large and small, beginning with the creation, under Jimmy Carter, of the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, the forerunner of U.S. Central Command, and by--certainly if by that measure, the role and presence of American military forces in the area has been steadily on the rise ever since and certainly has been marked by both wars in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, and continuing military presence, and expanding military presence, in the region. This presence is also a response to the accumulating failures of traditional American policy in the region, which, really, throughout the late Cold War, could be described not unfairly as simply keeping the Russians out and keeping the oil flowing.  Our search for stability in the region has been elusive and the legitimacy of the regimes with which we have tried to work has been increasingly weakened in the eyes of their own people and certainly, especially today, increasingly weakened in the eyes of the outside world, not least the American people. So this balancing act, the traditional balance-of-power approach to the region, wherein we work through the local autocracies to try to keep enough stability that will allow the energy resources to keep flowing, has become increasingly precarious.  And our strategic partnerships with, say, the Saudi royal family or the Mubarek family in Egypt seem far less attractive as time passes. I would say that the policy of containment or stability in the region was, as much as anyone else or anything else, also a victim of the attacks of September 11, 2001.  Since then, we have come to comprehend the scope of what we call the war on terrorism--which is, after all, not really a war on terrorism per se.  We don't do that much more about narco-terrorism in Colombia or Irish Republican terrorism than we did prior to 2001.  But it has its true meaning and certainly its political meaning in the Greater Middle East. And arguably, a president other than George Bush might have been content simply to invade Afghanistan.  But I would say that it's a delusion to think that our enemies in the region would have been any happier with our occupation of Kabul than they are with our occupation of Fallujah.  And especially, given the centrality of the Afghanistan myth, if you will, to the jihadist wing typified by Osama bin Laden, it is almost certain that if we were there only, we'd be faced with something much more like the resistance we're facing in Iraq.  And to have obsessed ourselves with an evermore detailed and intricate global manhunt for Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar would have been, I think, to relinquish the strategic initiative.  And understanding, again, that at least our stated purpose is to revolutionize the political status quo in this region, the price of stability would have been, and would be in the future if we tried to recover that, simply a longer and harder slog than we already face. I think this is a truth that the American strategic community and military community and policy making community has been rather slow to grasp.  As Bob Kagan wrote in Sunday's Post, it's beginning to look like President Bush has been too tolerant of lieutenants who have not really shared his goals.  The scandal, in my mind, is less the Bob Woodward scandal--that we started planning for the invasion of Iraq shortly after the war in Afghanistan--but, to my mind, the real problem is that the war plan proved to be so at odds with the strategic goals set by the president.  To oversimplify for the purposes of clarity, to my mind, the Pentagon essentially planned to win the battle of Baghdad, not the longer war in Iraq or the Middle East. Now, I want to be fair to people in the government, and especially to folks in the Pentagon, because no government bureaucracy adequately addressed this--not the State Department, not the CIA--and none of those agencies has really embraced the idea of remaking the Middle East into an oasis of democracy.  But the mistakes of the diplomacy--miscalculating at the U.N. or what the traffic in Europe was going to bear--or the mistakes of the intelligence community in estimating Saddam's WMD programs or the strength of resistance in the Sunni heartland, in my mind, are second-tier issues when compared to the failure to understand the nature of the war. I would say--and I mean this pretty literally--that the mistakes of planning were mistakes that no staff college student would have made and, in fact, many of the iron majors who did the planning or were involved in the planning would not have made.  These violated not only traditional American war planning doctrine but, I would say, the most essential historical tenets of campaign planning. Well, let me gloss that a little bit.  I won't go into intense detail, because a lot of this is in the report.  The decisions made to limit the size and the capabilities of the invasion force had unintended, but at least predictable, consequences.  Almost from the start the desire to fight a just-in-time war meant that even small surprises--the resistance of the Saddam Fedayeen or even the terrible sandstorm of late March--sapped the strength of a force that was just large enough to, essentially, conquer Baghdad.  And in particular, disrupting the normal deployment procedures deprived the force of the logistics wherewithal necessary to continue operations beyond Baghdad.  By the time that force got to Baghdad, its reserves had been committed, it was fully absorbed in trying to pacify the capital itself.  And the question of whether the force had the necessary means, the strength, to push out beyond Baghdad, and particularly into the so-called Sunni Triangle, I think, is a very debatable proposition.  In my judgment, to use a military term of art, the attack essentially culminated in and around Baghdad. I also want to say in making this critique that it's hard to fault the Pentagon leadership directly for miscalculating the nature of politics in Iraq and the nature of the competition between the various factions in Iraq.  But again, I would fault them for, essentially, forgetting the fundamental nature of war and its inherent uncertainties.  Rightly, they planned for success.  They had excellent plans for exploiting the dominance of American forces and the rapidity of the campaign they intended to conduct, but I would fault them for planning only for success.  President Bush asked for regime change, and what he got was a plan for regime removal.  And that is an important distinction. Now, I'm not complaining about the outcome of the war.  I think a world without Saddam, Uday, Qusay, and the rest of Saddam & Co. is no small blessing indeed.  We don't have to fear--Iraqis no longer fear mass murder directed from Baghdad.  Iraq's neighbors no longer fear Saddam's tank armies.  And Americans are not, at least, risking their lives simply to contain the petty hegemonic ambitions of one of the regions fascists.  We tend to undervalue the invasion because it was so successful, so swift, and so humanely fought.  There were many good reasons to fight the war as rapidly as possible.  So much of the story of this war is the story of dogs that did not bark.  I won't go through them all, but there has been no wider war, no regional war.  There were no attacks on Israel.  There was no environment catastrophe, no humanitarian crisis, no Stalingrad-like siege of Baghdad, and on and on. And--saints be praised--we found no weapons of mass destruction.  That Saddam had, for whatever reason, decided to purge his stock of these commercial and nerve agents and put his nuclear program more deeply on hold was an unmitigated blessing.  We feared those weapons for the absolute best of reasons--he had them in the past, he'd used them in the past, he still wanted them, and he still had the means to acquire them.  It's good to be lucky, but it's not the basis for strategy. But the need for speed had to be balanced against the need for decisiveness, for a combat campaign that would set the right conditions for reconstruction.  Saddam's power, which, after all, he maintained for nearly 30 years, was hardly a fragile thing.  It drew not only from his own ruthlessness and the perversity of Baath Party structures, but also from more traditional sources of tribal and clan ties and, it increasingly appears, from the deepest fears of the Sunni community in Iraq.  And we certainly have yet to complete the task of removing these factors from Iraqi life and society, let alone replacing them with something better and more representative. Just the centrality of winning the war in the Sunni Triangle appears, certainly from this vantage point, to have been what a campaign planner would describe the center of gravity.  This was a goal that was not conceived in the war plan and, I have argued, was beyond the abilities of the invasion force as it found itself in early April.  You can only speculate about what effect the 4th Infantry Division might have had if the Turks had permitted an attack through northern Iraq.  There's no guarantee that there wouldn't have been an insurgency of some sort--Moqtada al-Sadr and his Iranian sponsors would still be a problem, jihadists everywhere would still be outraged and just as willing to kill Americans as they have proven otherwise.  But you have to say that the Sunni heartland did not feel the full shock and awe of the invasion, and the problem there persists. I'd like to move on to the counter-insurgency campaign.  Those disappointed with the invasion itself for not producing the anticipated quagmire have found a little more food for speculation in the fighting of the past year and certainly the fighting of the past month, and especially in Fallujah.  But I have to confess that, in my analysis and, I would say, by pretty much any historical standard, this has been a pretty successful counter-insurgency campaign.  And I measure that in two fundamental ways: First, it does appear that insurgents in Iraq, the rejectionists, have had very little luck in shaking American political resolve to stay the course.  I take that to be, again, the strategic center of gravity for the war that we are now fighting.  It's not that everybody shares President Bush's incredible clarity on the issue or that various polls don't express the American people's uncertainty about our strategy or about the course of events in Iraq or what to do next, but I'd say a better measure is actually the John Kerry campaign and the Democratic Party more broadly.  They clearly have no love for President Bush, but they're more anti-Bush than they are anti-war, at least in their official rhetoric.  And I would say that's a better measure of American's public opinion and political will.  John Kerry does disagree with pretty much every aspect of the war, and while his plan for internationalizing the conflict, I think, is more or less a fantasy, at least thus far his argument is that he knows better how to win the war than George Bush does.  His argument is not that he wants to withdraw immediately.  The Howard Dean moment has passed. Secondly, the insurgents have also failed to provoke a civil war in Iraq, which, to listen and to remember the expert commentary prior to the war, sounded like the easiest thing in the world to do.  And journalists are constantly discovering that civil war is about to happen, but, at least in my eyes, it hasn't happened yet.  And in fact, for all our blunders in Iraq--and just in the past week we've managed both to reinforce Iraqi fears that we'll leave and also their fears that we will be no better than Saddam when it comes to imprisoning people and exacting intelligence from them--you have to say that they understand, however grimly, that their hope lies with success by the United States and by the coalition in Iraq.  So as long as our will holds, I reckon that their will will generally hold as well.  After all, we can leave and they cannot. Now, the insurgency has had one notable strategic success.  I can't say quite what it's bought them, but you have to grant them that they've fractured the international coalition that backs the United States in Iraq.  They've driven the Spanish, the Hondurans, and--can't quite figure out what Thailand's policy exactly is.  And of course the French and the Germans never got back into Iraq.  But, on the other hand, even the United Nations has returned after devastating attacks, even if it's only in the form of the interlocutor Lakhdar Brahimi.  And certainly, Kofi Annan is anxious to prove that the United Nations does have a relevant role to play in post-9/11 international politics, so the U.N. is at least leaning forward in the saddle. Now, if I sound like the guy who just proved that we won the Vietnam War in 1968, I make no apologies.  Vietnam analogies are the opiate of the chattering classes and, judging by commentary on Iraq, there's not much hope of a full recovery anytime soon.  The biggest problem with the Vietnam analogies is their distorted perspective.  After all, that war was a paradoxical defeat within the larger context of the Cold War, which was an epic-defining victory for the United States and its allies.  And as I suggested at the beginning of my talk, any assessment of this war really can only be considered in the larger context of the larger global war on terrorism, so-called, the struggle to change the political order in the Middle East.  And like the Cold War, this larger war is going to be a long-term struggle, which is really only beginning.  We have no idea how it will end, there's no guarantee of victory.  And President Bush, to be absolutely fair to him, has acknowledged this ever since September 11th. The problem, as I see it, the largest problem and the thing that most disturbs me, is that there remains a dangerous gap between the rhetorical goals and the strategic goals that the president has set and the performance of this administration, and in particular, the gap between our strategic ends and our military means.  The U.S. military--its forces, its plans, its budgets, its weapons programs remain fundamentally unchanged from the world of September 11th, nor has there been any fundamental change even over the past year, when it has become devastatingly clear that our commitment in Iraq is going to be an open-ended one. Now, I want to talk about this larger question.  I don't want to get, I hope, too much into the nits and bits of exactly how many troops we ought to have in Iraq at the moment--although my recommendation is that it can't hurt to have a few more.  But there's an even greater need to make the long-term preparations necessary to conduct this larger mission.  We're not just embarked on a process of nation building; we're trying to build an entire region, or rebuild an entire region, at least in the political sense.  And the measure of victory or the measure of success in these wars is not going to be measured so much by how rapidly we deploy or how swiftly we fight, although I think those are all good things.  But the real measure of success is how long we will remain engaged. So the Bush doctrine, the forward strategy of freedom, is not an exit strategy.  The rising casualties of this past month have again made us anxious and searching for either a policy or military silver bullets that might lower the cost of success in Iraq.  I mean, some of that is just a natural human reaction to the situation.  Frustration in Fallujah has even made us turn to a guy who's willing to wear his Republican Guard uniform while walking down the streets. But since it's impossible for any academic to--they'll take my license away if I don't use a Clausowitz quote.  I want to close with one of his maxims that I think is appropriate.  War, he said, does not consist of a single short blow. Not even the really quite magnificent march to Baghdad, shocking and awesome as it was, was sufficient to compel all our enemies to accept defeat.  I think our basic strategy is correct, the strategy of liberating Iraq and liberalizing the political order in the region.  It's a sound one.  IT places our greatest strategic strength against our enemy's greatest weaknesses.  And it will require many tools of American statecraft and American power.  But my purpose in this report is to talk about the military dimension of that, and I don't think it's possible to achieve our goals without a sustained restructuring and expansion of our military strength. If we don't win these wars, we won't win the peace because there will be no peace.  And if we don't prepare ourselves for this war, instead of simply preparing for battle, then there won't be a victory. Thank you. Andy, tell me how I'm wrong. MR. KREPINEVICH:  Thanks, Tom. I guess the first, perhaps most important, thing to say is that a definitive assessment, of course, of both the major combat operations and the ongoing insurgency is going to have to wait awhile.  It always takes awhile to write the definitive history.  On the other hand, we're all here because we realize that we need some good, solid analysis of the events in Iraq right now.  I think Tom's work here has given us a good first draft of that kind of analysis and I think it's one that's well worth reading beyond the executive summary. I'm not going to spend my time primarily critiquing Tom's report.  Rather, what I'm going to do is provide you with a few observations of my own and tangentially talk about Tom's report in that sense.  I want to talk about two things to parallel Tom's efforts.  One is major combat operations, and the second is the ongoing insurgency. In terms of major combat operations, I'd like to make six points.  First, I think if you look at the second Gulf War, if we can call it that, you realize that the first Gulf War was very much an anomaly when it comes to the idea of the global community going off arm-in-arm to take on some threat to the international order.  Neither the Balkans nor other operations such as the second Gulf War really reflected the kind of unanimity that we saw back in Desert Storm in 1991. Second, I think you can safely say that, looking back over the last 14 years, the United States is in the regime-change business--which is probably a euphemism for overthrowing governments, but regime change sounds a lot better to me.  Panama, Haiti, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq.  If you just do the math, on the order of about once every three years, the United States goes and changes a regime.  And that, I think, is a significant observation.  Of course, prior to 9/11, if things didn't work out as well as we would like, whether it was in Haiti or Somalia, we could walk away.  After 9/11, it becomes much more difficult to walk away, as we're seeing in places like Afghanistan and like Iraq.  So there are consequences to regime change, even as it becomes in the eyes of both Republican and Democratic administrations more of a necessity. Third, I think it's fairly safe to say that U.S. and allied militaries are diverging in terms of their military capabilities.  The allies aren't catching up with us, the allies are falling further behind.  And there's a certain irony in all this.  At time when we're likely to need our allies more, at a time when our forces are increasingly stretched, we find that, in a relative sense, our allies are less capable and also that they're less reliable.  And of course this poses a number of challenges for us. Fourth, I think you can make a strong argument that precision warfare, which really made its debut in a significant way in the first Gulf War, has really come of age.  Entire families of precision weapons, the ability to put small units such as Special Forces really out there on a limb and rely on the fact that a few aircraft, for example, can protect them because of the accuracy of the weapons that they employ, precision warfare really has come of age, as have efforts to offset it, what we might call counter-precision warfare--mobility, the use of deep underground facilities, discrimination problems, how can you tell the difference between the Fedayeen Saddam and innocent civilians, resort to sanctuaries.  We're still complaining about insurgents, just as we were during the major combat operation period, hiding or placing weapons in mosques and in schools, which, according to our way or war, offer sanctuary.  And concern about down the road, what will happen when adversaries get precision capabilities, and the risks to our ability to operate out of major forward bases. Fifth, I think, in terms of the major combat operations, we saw significant advances in the ability of the United States military to field distributed, networked forces operating on a nonlinear battlefield.  This was very different than what we saw in the first Gulf War.  This really does speak to, in particular, the Army's vision about a transformed battlefield.  And this was accomplished with remarkably few, in my estimation, friendly fire casualties, which, again, speaks to the skill and proficiency with which this kind of military operation was conducted. And the sixth and final point I'll make about major combat operations is that certain legacy forces, as the military calls them, do seem to have become victims of their own success.  For example, it's well known that the Army used only one heavy division in major combat operations, whereas the war plans called for at least several more.  It's less well known that the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps used only 40 percent of the strike aircraft that they did in the first Gulf War, and that's a consequence of the proliferation of aircraft that can use precision weapons.  There's an irony here, too, in that that effect seems to have been lost on the Pentagon, which is still planning on producing the same number of tactical combat aircraft as it did before the Gulf War, in terms of the F-22s, the Joint Strike Fighter, and the F-18. In terms of the insurgency, the U.S., the Bush administration has set out a very ambitious objective, as Tom points out.  It is an attempt to help establish a democracy in Iraq.  That is certainly very different from what I would say the British and Roman approaches were to managing or policing their empires--and I use the word "empire" here, of course, loosely.  But the notion of trying to put into place a Wilsonian-style democracy or even something that would vaguely resemble it in a country in which security is viewed not as coming out of institutions and the ballot box, but rather by force of arms and in a mad scramble to see who comes out in a forcible conflict to achieve power, that is going up against some strong cultural norms. And that kind of challenge certainly demands a very innovative strategy, it involves a very long-term commitment, and the president has said this on numerous occasions.  I'm not sure whether the American public is really listening when he says that, but it seems to me this is a job that requires at least a decade and probably multiple decades to bring about a sustained high level of commitment.  To quote Secretary Rumsfeld, it involves a long, hard slog. Unfortunately, we have a military that has been built for sprints, not marathons.  We like short wars.  We're--you know, tell me about your exit strategy; look at the Powell doctrine--overwhelming force and then we're outta here.  The military essentially got out of the counter-insurgency warfare business after Vietnam.  The ringing cry was No More Vietnams.  And not only did it come from the political leadership, not only did it come from the American people, but it came as a welcome call for the American military leadership as well.  Insurgencies and counter-insurgencies tend to be manpower-intensive.  We are the world's most capital-intensive military. The fact that we are not optimized for this kind of conflict shows.  It shows in terms of the difficulty we are having now in establishing a rotation base, a rotation base that will allow us to sustain a certain level of force in places like Korea, Afghanistan, the Balkans, and Iraq for a protracted period of time.  It involves doing that in such a way that the force is not broken, that people don't begin to vote with their feet.  And it's interesting--as Tom said, people make a lot of comparisons with Vietnam, a lot of poor comparisons.  In Vietnam, when you talked about personnel issues, the pressure really was on the American people--would my son be drafted, would the draft call increase.  In this war, the pressure's on the generals, because they have to induce people to join and to stay in the military.  And if that job environment, if we can use the term, becomes too hostile, then people begin to vote with their feet. As Tom said, everybody, I think, would like to see more troops in Iraq.  I think it's fairly clear more troops are needed.  But the fact of the matter is, it's a tradeoff.  If you want more troops now and you cannot drive down the numbers within the next 6 to 12 months, then the perception may be that the job environment has changed and people will start to vote with their feet. So how do you balance that?  The notion that somehow NATO or the United Nations is going to be able to ride to the rescue and solve our manpower problems for us in Iraq, I think, is wishful thinking as an alternative to where we are today.  I just came back from France and, in some discussions with senior French defense officials, talking hypothetically, of course, they said even if our government were to totally change its position, the fact of the matter is France really has no more troops to deploy--we're in Haiti, we're in Ivory Coast, we're in Afghanistan, we're in the Balkans, we have 40,000 troops deployed, our military's not that big, we're at the bottom of the barrel.  And of course the British are already in Iraq.  The Italians are already in Iraq.  Where are the great powers, the great NATO powers that are going to solve that problem?  It's just not there. If strategy involves linking ends and means, then I think we really need to look at all three elements.  Tom talked about the issue of means, but there's also the issue of objectives.  Are the means not only sufficient to accomplish the objectives, but is the objective realistic?  And if it's not, what's Plan B?  And of course my commentary is that this objective is extremely ambitious.  It's high-risk.  It's something you would expect, perhaps, from a Texas oil man.  It certainly has a high payoff if it comes to pass, but how do we plan to apply our limited means to a rather ambitious ends? Of course, there are issues with respect to the fundamentals.  For example, in every conflict, as Tom would say, the officers at the staff college would say, well, what's the center of gravity, what is the thing that if I deny my adversary, I will win this conflict, they will not be able to sustain their opposition, they will not either have the capability or the will to do so?  Rumsfeld, in his somewhat famous October memo that was leaked, asked the question in a different way:  he said we know we're killing a lot, capturing a lot, collecting arms; we just don't know yet whether that's the same as winning. Well, it's not the same as winning.  In a counter-insurgency, the center of gravity is the American population and the Iraqi population.  It's not the insurgents.  If we have the support of the American people, as Tom mentioned, if we have the support of the Iraqi people, there's no way we can lose this war.  On the other hand, there seems to have been a significant erosion in the support of both the American people and the Iraqi people for our objectives in Iraq in recent months. So what is our strategy for winning the population over?  The biggest concern they seem to have is security.  How do we propose to provide it?  If we can provide security, we have the opportunity to improve the quality of life of the Iraqi people and to obtain the intelligence that is really the key to defeating the insurgents.  If we know who these people are and we know where they are, we certainly have more than enough military capability to defeat them. So how do we get that intelligence?  And that's a derivative of how we provide security to these people.  I think there is a point to be made, especially with all the talk about Tet offensives, that there was no national uprising in April.  It was sporadic.  Iraqi people en masse did not take to the streets.  It was fairly localized.  Not something to pat ourselves on the back about, but again, there is this sense that--again, to go back to the Vietnam era--there may be a significant silent majority that we can draw upon. But to refer to another one of Tom's points, he said we can leave and they cannot.  That's the problem.  It's one of the principal problems.  If I were an insurgent, I would say the Americans not only can leave at some point, they will leave--and then you're stuck with us.  Then you'll have to deal with us.  Do you really want to cooperate with them?  Do you really want to collaborate with them?  And I think we've sent some very mixed signals about our willingness to stay the course, to use another familiar phrase. How many troops will it take?  Well, the rule of thumb--and rules of thumb are typically bad, but let me use one anyway--is that counter-insurgency typically requires a counter-insurgent force to be 10 or 15 times the size of the insurgent force.  If you have 160,000, roughly, coalition troops in Iraq, that equates to 10-, 15,000 insurgents.  That might have been a good estimate about four or five months ago; I doubt it's a good estimate now.  The strategy, such as it was, seemed to rely on a quick turnover of security to indigenous Iraqi forces, and yet in the recent uprising, as one American general said, 10 percent of the force turned against us, 40 percent quit, and I suppose the other 50 percent was of marginal effectiveness.  So how many of these people can we really count as part of the counter-insurgent forces?  If it's not possible to field a force to provide security in all areas, then what areas take priority, and how do we come up with a strategy that secures priority areas and then expands that security to the rest of the country? Tom made another interesting point--how do we know we're making progress?  That's something that ought to be asked of this administration.  This is particularly a Pentagon and a secretary of defense that is very enamored of metrics, how do I measure things, how do I know that I'm achieving results?  Well, what metrics are we employing?  How do we know that we're achieving success, especially if the population is the center of gravity and security is the number one concern of the population? Tom pointed out that the U.S. population, despite the recent events, still supports generally what we're doing in Iraq.  That's the good news.  The bad news is that that popular support is a snapshot.  It's a snapshot in time.  Insurgents win insurgencies by not losing.  They win by staying in the game.  They win by assuming, correctly, that time is on their side.  And as long as they can hold to that assumption and it proves true, there's always the opportunity to erode popular support of this country and to weaken support of the Iraqi people in Iraq. To sum up, then, in terms of major combat operations, I think we get close to an A+.  Unfortunately, the enemy we saw in Iraqi Freedom is an enemy that we are not likely to see again anytime soon.  That's the bad news.  In terms of the insurgency, I think you have to give us an Incomplete right now.  The early returns are discouraging, but not surprising given that we've got that military built for sprints and not marathons and that, as one Army general recently told me, what we're trying to do right now is like trying to change out of a track uniform into a tuxedo while running the high hurdles.  It is a very difficult proposition.  It is also, quite frankly, this insurgency, part of, again, what Rumsfeld calls a long, hard slog in a global war not against terrorism, I would say, but against a radical, transnational, theologically based Islamic insurgent movement that seeks to topple governments and seeks to remove U.S. influence from key parts of the world. Let me just conclude by saying I think Tom's report serves to stimulate better thinking on these issues, and for that I'm most appreciative. MR. DONNELLY:  Thank you very much, Andy.  I should mention that I was once a student of Andy's and I'm still pissed off that he gave me the lowest grade of any teacher in my graduate school experience.  And I'm not sure whether I managed to bump my grade up, but-- MR. KREPINEVICH:  I'll give you a re-grade, Tom. MR. DONNELLY:  Okay.  Thank you very much.  Steve, over to you. MR. METZ:  Like Andy, I approached the monograph as an early salvo in a debate over what Iraq means and where it fits into our strategy that I'm sure will last four years and probably decades.  So I think probably the true enduring value of Tom's monograph is whether it does point us at the questions that still need to be answered.  And so the way I approached it in terms of criticism was not to kind of go down the list and say I agreed with Tom on these points and disagreed with him on these points, but as I read it I tried to make a list of the things that grew out of it in terms of issues that needed further explanation--you know, when I finished reading it, what was I left still wanting to think further about and to explore in greater detail. So what I'd like to do during the few minutes I have is to go over those with you and to really divide those into a couple of broad categories.  Because of time, also what I'll do is sort of stick to the conceptual rather than the specific.  Specifically, what I'll talk about, like Andy, is a little bit about the last year of the conflict, the insurgency phase, rather than the war-fighting. But second of all, I'd like to talk a little bit about the general strategic framework that led to American involvement in Iraq.  And specifically, what I would like to do is to approach this from this perspective:  I'd like to approach it from the perspective of questions and assumptions.  I'd like to ask whether we're asking the right questions that lead us to craft good strategy in Iraq and the world in general, and whether we're approaching Iraq and the world in general with the right assumptions.  Let me start with the insurgency part of it. We all know that good strategy is based on a clear understanding of the conflict.  That's true of any kind of conflict, whether a conventional war or an insurgency.  But I think that's probably more true in insurgency than anywhere else.  So I think as we think about the insurgency in Iraq today, what we need to ask ourselves more than anything else is do we have a clear understanding of the nature of the conflict.  And as I read Tom's description of it and as I thought about what's going on in Iraq today, the way I tried to straighten this out in my mind is, I said are we really asking the right questions that will allow us to understand this conflict and to build our strategy on it? Let me just give you an example of the type of thing I'm thinking about.  One question I think is very, very important for us to ask ourselves and to keep asking ourselves is do Iraqis see this conflict-- [change tape].  In other words, is our strategy in Iraq, with the insurgents today, built on a particularly American understanding of the conflict--of what's at stake, what the issues are, what's being debated--are we building a force, a strategy based on our understanding, and does that lead to the appropriate strategy?  And that leads to a very different conceptualization of the counter-insurgency than if you try to understand this conflict the way an Iraqi would understand it. For example, I think we're kind of perplexed today that we're not getting more overt, enthusiastic support from the Iraqi street than we're getting.  When we think about what's at stake in Iraq today, we approach it the way an American would.  When you think of kind of the essence of American politics, when we have an election, for example, kind of the key question is what do we want the future of our state, our city, our country to be like.  That's kind of the question we ask ourselves--you know, what do we want the future of America to be like--and then we vote based on that. So when we approach Iraq today, we kind of assume that that's the way Iraqis think about politics as well.  You know, what do they want the future of Iraq to be like?  And we say, well, if Iraqis asked themselves that question, then logically they should be on the side of the Americans, the coalition.  Because clearly the future that we're offering them, a future of democracy, of integration into the global economy, is clearly better than the future that the insurgents would offer them.  Whatever that might be is a future that looks something like the past.  So that would be kind of a no-brainer choice. But I would suggest to you that those aren't really the questions that most Iraqis are asking themselves.  They're not sitting down and saying what do we want the future of Iraq to be like, because those aren't the most salient questions to them.  The most salient questions to Iraqis in their lives are, first of all, as Andy suggested, who is more likely to still be here five years from now or 10 years from now?  Is it going to be these insurgents, or is it going to be the Americans and the guys associated with the Americans?  That's a much more fundamental question than what do I want this country to look like five years from now, is who is still likely to be here five years from now and to have a gun? You know, another question--and again, Andy alluded to this one--is who is more likely to be able to bring a modicum of stability to this place?  Is it the Americans, the American allies, the government the Americans might create, or is it the insurgents?  You know, it's kind of a Maslow's hierarchy of needs here.  They need stability before they need anything else.  And unfortunately, because of the means that the insurgents have been willing to resort to and given conditions in Iraq today, the bottom line is--it appears, I think, to a lot of Iraqis that the insurgents could turn off the instability while, at least given conditions today, the Americans have yet to be able to demonstrate that they can turn off the instability. So what I'm suggesting here is that if we think about the insurgency and the counter-insurgency in Iraq, as Americans, as a choice between this future or that future, which is the way that we think about politics, then we're never really going to understand the essence of it and we might not be able to craft the appropriate strategy.  If we think about it the way an Iraqi would think about it, not as a future shaped by preferences but by predictions, then we look at it a little differently and we might come up with a different strategic conceptualization.  And that might lead us to a less optimistic assessment of the insurgency than Tom developed in his monograph. You know, and one example of that is the point about the fact that there's not been a popular uprising in Iraq.  Both Tom and Andy made the point that there hasn't been a popular uprising, and that's a good thing.  I would agree that's a good thing, but I also would point out that, at least in my history of insurgencies, there have been a lot of insurgencies, including successful insurgencies, including the American Revolution, where there never really was a popular uprising.  I think that a lot of the histories of insurgencies suggest that what insurgents need is only really a small percentage of the population to actively support them.  What they need is most of the public either to be so afraid of them or to dislike the government so much that they're willing to just be passive.  That's what insurgents really need.  They don't need the mass of the public to actively support them.  They need the mass of the public to just be interested in staying out of the whole thing, kind of to take the attitude of a pox on both your houses.  And that, historically, can be an equation for insurgent success.  So we need to ask ourselves, is that in place in Iraq today? One other question I think we need to ask ourselves about the insurgency in Iraq as we kind of decide if we've conceptualized it right is what is the likely outcome there.  Because, I think, you know, as Tom described the insurgency there, he painted it as a choice between kind of clear, unambiguous outcomes.  In other words, he talked about either an American victory, a coalition victory, a democratic Iraq, or at least the possibility of an insurgent victory, a return to the bad old days. What I would like to at least suggest here is that the outcome in Iraq might be something a lot muddier or more ambiguous than that.  In other words, there might be something like a pro-U.S. government in Iraq that only controls part of the country.  There might be something like a "government of national unity" in Iraq in the future that brings insurgents into it.  In other words, I think there is a whole array of outcomes there that are somewhere in-between the pro-American, democratic outcome and the insurgent victory, and that it's very likely that something in-between is the outcome.  And as we kind of further develop our strategy--and again, I don't mean this as a critique of Tom, since I really do see his as the first step--that as we further develop our strategy, we need to think about these outcomes in the middle--which of these are acceptable and which of these are unacceptable. Let me just briefly switch gears from the insurgency to the broad strategic framework that led us into Iraq in the first place.  I certainly fully agree with Tom and with the president that a democratic Middle East would represent a bold strategic transformation of great benefit to the United States and to the world.  I certainly would also agree that a democratic Iraq could play a role in helping put this in place.  You know, as Tom pointed out, this president certainly has no shortage of vision. What I'd like to suggest, though, is that as we move toward this vision, what we've done is we've moved very quickly into this strategy and built it on assumptions.  I mean, any military planner knows that a military plan is only as strong as its assumptions.  And I'd like to suggest that we're right now in the midst of an historic, bold, strategic transformation in American policy that is only as strong as its assumptions.  I'd like to point this out because I think what we need to have take place in the next few years in the United States is an airing, a teasing out, a debate on these assumptions.  We need to move beyond a strategy that's built purely on assumptions and one that's built more on analysis.  Let me just very quickly kind of tease out what I think are the key assumptions undergirding our strategy and just sort of kind of open them to the light of day so that we can see the assumptions on which our strategy is built.  I think assumption number one of this current vision or current strategy is that an outside force, the United States, can play a decisive role in removing the obstacles to democracy in the Middle East.  This is a very important idea.  But if you look at the great regional waves of democracy that have taken place in the last 30 years--Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East--I think most analysts, most historians would hold that outsiders like the United States played an important role but not a decisive one.  We tipped the balance, but we didn't create the conditions. So what's happening with our strategy for the Middle East today is that it's based on the assumption that we can really have a break with recent history.  Recent waves of democratization were based on outsiders playing an important role; we're saying this wave of democratization can be based on outsiders playing a decisive role.  That's a very, very important shift, and I hope it's possible.  I hope the president's right.  But I don't think we've yet had a full-fledged national debate that says does that actually make sense. Second assumption of our current strategy is that the ultimate strategic benefits gained by creating democracy in the Middle East will be worth the cost.  And I think there are a couple of sub-assumptions here.  One sub-assumption is that democracy in the Middle East will undercut what is called sacred terrorism.  Another sub-assumption is that a Middle East dominated by democracies will be more amenable to American interests, that these democracies will be pro-U.S. Let me just suggest that, again, I hope that's true, but I think it merits debate.  Because I think it's equally possible that new, fragile democracies would define their legitimacy by being anti-American, that they would pander to their publics, they would even pander to their own radicals by taking an anti-American position.  So again, what I think we've done is that we have assumed that the creation of these new democracies in the Middle East would create a more stable and a more pro-U.S. world.  And that may be true 50 years down the road, but I don't think we fully had an open debate where we fleshed out all of the implications of this assumption. The third and final assumption is that a democratic Iraq will serve as a catalyst for a wider democratic revolution in the region.  You know, again, I think this is one that is crucial to the administration's strategy, and Tom incorporates it into his analysis and it's one that I hope is true, but I don't think we've yet fully debated exactly the mechanics by which that's going to happen.  I mean, there is analysis out there and, you know, there's a whole history of how democracy spreads in regions.  There's theory on that.  So there's analytical tools out there to look at how one nation can serve as a catalyst for democracy.  But we haven't yet really applied that to the Middle East and to Iraq.  We've just sort of gone barely into this based on assumptions. So what I'm suggesting here is that we take these assumptions that Tom has incorporated into his monograph and we begin to explore them in greater detail, have debates on them, and to really flesh them out, tease them out so that we can take the strategic vision and build it into a more cogent, coherent strategy. You know, again, just to summarize, the key to sound strategy is always asking the right questions and building the minimum number of assumptions.  I think Tom has done us a great service by outlining the strategy, summarizing it in one point.  There's still a lot of discussion and debate to be undertaken, and I think Tom's study will be an important first salvo in this ongoing debate. MR. DONNELLY:  Thank you, Steve.  Thank you, Andy.  I'm particularly appreciative of the fact that you understand my past life as an unreconstructed journalist and I'm addicted to trying to get the story out first and fastest, and if Bob Woodward beats me, that's not fair. I would like to take the opportunity just to make some brief comments about the commentary and just, really, I guess, to underscore a couple of points that I tried to bring out in the report. One, I think significant, piece about both the combat portion of the war and the counter-insurgency is that I did try to write this particularly integrating the experience of the British armed forces in this conflict.  One of the weaknesses of, you know, war lessons learned study is that it's very politically delicate and intellectually difficult to produce a real combined effort in this regard.  So I did take a certain amount of pain to try to explain the experience from the British point of view and to understand how actually having an important coalition partner--there's been a lot of criticism of the coalition for being much more smoke and mirrors than substance, but there's no question that the British army played a really key role both in the invasion and continues to play a key role in the counter-insurgency campaign, and also played a significant role in the planning for the war.  It's worth remembering that the British were the ones who wanted to lead the attack through Turkey. So the experience of the British, who, alone out of all our traditional allies, have made fundamental changes in their defense planning and defense strategy over the past years, particularly for the kinds of purposes that Andy underscored, explicitly in their desire to want to be able to continue to operate in conjunction with the United States as we expand our capabilities, I commend that to you, and there are a number of British documents that I cite in the study which would reward further investigation. I guess the one thing I wanted to talk about regarding Steve's comments, I don't take Steve's criticisms as being really contradictory to what I say.  I recognize that these are open questions about our understanding of the war and what it is and what the outcome is going to be and what our strategic assumptions are.  I would try to gloss that simply by saying, especially in regard to our assumptions, that these are choices that we are making.  It is essentially a choice between making some effort to create a strategic order that does not exist and reverting to our past strategy which the events of 9/11 have kind of rendered no longer tenable.  We have a choice between trying to continue to prop up the status quo in the region or figuring out some way to try to change it for the better.  And certainly, the alternative that Steve described of radical Islam and the jihadist view of what the outcome of this war should be is the least palatable one. I would also say that we should really look at this idea of what is an acceptable outcome and whether there really are that many shades of gray between anything we could reasonably describe as a pro-American democracy and an American victory, and whether the real choice is between whether we achieve that and all the other possible outcomes.  It is certainly possible that--you know, people in their frustration in the last couple of weeks talked about dividing up Iraq into separate entities and, you know, that is at least a logically possible outcome.  But whether that would be something that would long survive, be stable, and be functionally equivalent to anything that we can call a success, I think, is really quite open to debate. Before I go to the Q&A session, I want to pass along one piece of administrative bad news for the employees of AEI and particularly the interns.  As you can see, we have a full house and we have, I think, people stacked up outside waiting to get in, so AEI, in an act of incredible public generosity, is requesting that interns and even AEI employees consider relinquishing their seats so others can come in and hear Secretary Feith's remarks. With that, we've got about 20 minutes or so for questions.  I would like to remind everybody very strictly of the ground rules, that A) you identify yourself and your affiliation before you ask a question, and B) that you ask a question and refrain from making a long political statement masquerading as a question. And with that, I'll recognize Jim Kitfield first.  Wait for the microphone, please.  That's James Kitfield from National Journal magazine.  Stand up and yell. QUESTION:  [Off microphone, inaudible.] MR. DONNELLY:  Look, that is the--if you had to summarize my critique in one sentence, I think that would essentially--it would boil down to that.  It's important to try to distinguish between, you know, kind of tactical blunders, which every commander and every wartime leader is prone to in a conflict, and things that really matter.  Again, I think it's very difficult to second-guess the actions of people on the ground in Iraq from this distance, especially the guys who are actually going out and doing patrolling and the really dangerous stuff--and again, my judgment about our overall general strategy is that it is the correct one.  Any tactical improvements that we can make would be great, but if you accept that the strategic approach is fundamentally sound, then the question is are you going to really, you know, put your money and your effort where your rhetoric is.  And, in my judgement--and again, it's not so much about the immediate level of forces in Iraq or anything like that, but, as Andy suggested, whether the right number is 100,000 or 150,000, our ability to sustain that over a long haul.  And also to do the other strategic tasks both in the region and elsewhere in the world that we ask our military to do, I think, is, again, just fundamentally out of whack. And I'll ask for glosses from you guys. MR. KREPINEVICH:  Just a quick comment.  I think, as you said, Jim, the resources seem to be lagging the vision.  In order for a lot of these resources to be applied effectively to help rebuild Iraq and provide a better quality of life for the Iraqi people, security, as the Iraqi people have identified in poll after poll, is the first prerequisite.  In terms of providing security, we, in my estimation, may have been over-ambitious, first of all, in trying to provide security everywhere with the size force we have.  And there's an old military aphorism that he who tries to be strong everywhere is strong nowhere.  And so there's that concern.  And there's also, quite frankly, another old statement from the Pentagon, if you want it bad, you get it bad.  In a sense, we probably tried to force Iraqis into the security role before they were really ready.  And certainly I think the evidence of some of the problems there is clear from the uprising we saw a few weeks back.  But again, that money cannot begin to flow in a productive way without security.  And of course that security is dependent upon these things which are going to either take time or additional resources. MR. METZ:  I just wanted to say I completely agree with your point.  Just the way I've been phrasing that in stuff I've been writing and presentations I've been giving recently is I think, in terms of our global strategy--and I completely subscribe to Andy's point that the way I see our global strategy is the world's first global insurgency and counter-insurgency--is I think that we have adopted a strategy of victory, but we have a level of national mobilization and resource allocation that's really more appropriate for a strategy of management, of managing problems rather than really attaining victory and decision and decisive outcomes and transformation.  And I think that, really, Iraq is making us aware of this kind of disconnect, that the president has stated a global strategy of victory but we haven't yet fully mobilized to that level. What the outcome will be, I don't know.  It just seems to me, you know, in my simple mind that you have two ways of reconciling that.  You can either mobilize to a level commensurate with a strategy of victory, or you can downgrade your objectives to the level of a strategy of management.  And whether at some point in the future we'll have to deal with that or not, I don't know. MR. DONNELLY:  We'll try again with the microphone. QUESTION:  David Corn from The Nation magazine.  Steve's presentation seemed to center on his belief that the key assumptions behind Bush's bold strategic vision have not even been debated let alone answered.  If you read Bob Woodward's book, and presuming it to be accurate, you see very little conversations in the White House of that nature before the war.  Tom, you said that the Pentagon gave a plan for regime removal, not one for regime change, in addressing some of your assumptions for the bold strategic vision.  So I've got to ask, did we go off on this war half-cocked? MR. DONNELLY:  Yeah, to some degree, we did.  But such is the nature of war, especially the American experience of war and especially this is a habit that democracies are prone to.  I don't make that critique lightly, nor do I want to, you know, get too wrapped around the gap between what we thought we were doing and what we have ended up trying to do.  Again, this is typical of all leaders in all countries across time, and I'm not sure that the misjudgments are quantitatively or qualitatively any worse than, say, that American leaders made at the beginning of World War II or World War I or the Civil War or, really, any previous American experience of war.  The question that I'm trying to frame is whether, now that we are a year into this, whether we're willing to take the steps necessary, as Steve says, to successfully achieve our strategic goals, or whether we're going to walk back from the vision and begin again to accept something like the management or the containment or the balancing of the various powers in this region that arguably, or at least in my argument, led to the events of September 11th. MR. KREPINEVICH:  The war in Iraq, the second Gulf War, was a preventive war.  It was a war of choice.  And therefore it's a war of judgment.  It was not a war that was forced on the United States, say, similar to the attack on Pearl Harbor.  And so there's judgment involved--assumptions, as Steve might say.  And I think the assumptions at the time were that the U.N. sanctions of Iraq were fraying, beginning to fail; the only reason that they had a second life was the U.S. threat to use military action; that if those sanctions failed, the danger was that Iraq--the second reason which intelligence communities, not just ours, but others, were telling us--either possessed weapons of mass destruction or certainly were bent on getting them, would be in a better position to pursue that course of action.  And third, that there was a risk that at some point the Iraqis would begin to view terrorists as an extension of their ability to cause problems for the United States. Now, I'm not saying these assumptions were right or wrong.  Obviously, we have the benefit of hindsight now.  But preventive war is always a judgment call.  And the central question is, is time on your side.  And I think the Bush administration concluded that time was not on its side, that it could not await developments, it could not take that risk.  And so it viewed the lesser risk as the risk of going to war and regime change. MR. DONNELLY:  Let's get this gentleman right here. QUESTION:  Eli Lake with the New York Sun. To what degree is America's reliance on the security services of undemocratic regimes in the Islamic world undermining the president's goal of trying to bring democracy to the region? MR. DONNELLY:  The security services versus the broad governments?  I mean-- QUESTION:  I'm saying in the fight against al Qaeda, the United States is relying more closely than ever on a partnership with the Saudi and Egyptian muhabarat, which are the arms of those states that essentially are propping up what are undemocratic regimes.  To what extent is the United States undermining its own goal for democracy in the region in its fight against this non-state actor of al Qaeda? MR. DONNELLY:  Well, you could also say that in some sense the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's haven in Afghanistan were products of a Pakistani ISI.  But look, these are kind of the facts of the situation.  The fact that we now think we have a different strategic goal in the region doesn't absolve us, unfortunately, from the practice of strategy and statecraft.  I think that we need to reevaluate, as argued in the paper, just what the nature of our strategic partnerships in this region is, is capable of becoming, and probably most important, what we want it to be. Yet at the same time, these are the choices that any mature leader faces in the course of wartime.  We had an alliance with Josef Stalin in World War II.  But in this case, we do not have the broader justification of trying to fight a cold war, and we should develop--we've talked a lot about metrics on the panel--we need to develop a new way to evaluate just what our partners bring to our efforts in this regard. I should say, too, this is a question for our allies elsewhere and the way we approach our alliances elsewhere.  You know, at this point, we ought to take the French and the Germans at their word; they're not especially interested in a long-term commitment to trying to restructure the Middle East.  There may be others--India, for example--who are more interested and more willing and, importantly, more able to make positive contributions to this longer-term war.  I can't--again, I don't want to judge tactical-level decisions from a distance.  The purpose, as Steve suggested, is to try to ask the right questions to prepare ourselves for this long-term struggle. Do you guys want to-- MR. KREPINEVICH:  Well, I'll just add to that, I think there's an important principle here, conservation of enemies, as we in the--[Laughter.] MR. KREPINEVICH:  We already seem to have our hands full with what we have on our plate right now.  To reinforce what Tom said, Churchill, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, said that he would make a pact with the devil if that's what it took to beat Hitler.  I think certainly most people would agree that failure in Iraq would cause serious harm to our security interests.  And if other countries in the region who don't meet our standards across the board in terms of democratic principles and human rights are willing to help us defeat that enemy, just as the Soviets did in World War II, we'll sort of turn to that problem when the immediate danger passes. MR. METZ:  Yeah, just to make a very brief comment on that, I think there's also a longer-term strategic issue that grows out of the more specific problem, and that is that democratization, the transition to democracy in societies that have never known it, is going to be extremely destabilizing if al Qaeda still exists or something like al Qaeda still exists that's going to take advantage of this destabilization.  So we certainly do have two contradictory interests.  Even though we realize that in the long term democratization may be the key to undercutting terrorism, in the short term democratization is going to open the grounds of opportunities for terrorists.  And, you know, that was kind of what I was getting at.  We have this assumption that democratization is a solution to terrorism.  And yes, that may be true in the long term.  But in the short term, it's also going to provide greater opportunities for terrorism, and we haven't quite worked that through. QUESTION:  Will Englund from the Baltimore Sun. All three of you have talked about the need to keep American public opinion in favor of the American engagement in Iraq, but I wonder, if the war had been portrayed from the start, or before the start, as a war to remake the Middle East, rebuild the Middle East, and establish democracy there, would American public opinion have supported that war.  And as it becomes clear what the ultimate objective is, can American public opinion be kept in favor of it? MR. DONNELLY:  That's a very interesting question which is, of course, unknowable and therefore I feel totally qualified to give an answer to it.  Certainly--look, I'll just speak from my own experience.  I have always thought that the sort of liberation argument, if I can just sort of use that shorthand term, was bound to be the most convincing and the most durable strategic argument in the long term.  It's also the most complex.  It is the job of a wartime leader to mobilize popular opinion for the sacrifices that must be made.  And, you know, to--I've spent way too much time parsing the speeches made by this president and part of the problem is that a lot of the policy was made through speech-making and not through traditional means of strategy-making.  But the president always advanced a multiple-choice rationale, if you will, for why this was a necessary war. My own analysis was that the decision to try to win support through the United Nations was one of the things that distorted what I would regard the natural course of argument prior to the war, in that the United Nations could only deal with this as an arms control violation question.  So the choice made by this administration to try to win the support of the United Nations tended to divert attention away from the liberation argument because, simply, the U.N. could not deal with that argument.  Being an organization premised--that grants legitimacy based on sovereignty rather than, you know, actual human political rights, there's no way the United Nations was ever going to be able to deal with that argument. So, you know, again, it's hard to say what was determined by the course of events and what was determined by choices made by the administration, but I would say that we find ourselves now in a situation where making sense of the costs of Iraq is only measurable in terms of these long-term goals.  You can't say it's a war for oil.  I mean, the cost-benefit analysis doesn't support that.  There's not a heck of a lot more oil coming out of Iraq, oil prices are higher, and our costs in both treasure and blood are immeasurably higher than they would have been had we not chosen to go to war.  So again, I would just say that the only argument that's going to withstand the test of time is this transformation/liberation argument. MR. METZ:  I certainly agree with what Tom said.  And another problem with making that the bedrock of your public argument is that that places a whole lot of public support on the activity of Iraqis.  In other words, if the basis for American engagement is the liberation argument, then the fact that we see lots of Iraqis saying Americans out and not lots of Iraqis demonstrating saying Americans stay in, then the American public is going to say, okay, they don't want us there anymore; if the whole justification was to liberate them and they don't want us there, then let's get out.  So that, you know, kind of becomes problematic in terms of sustaining engagement until the job is done, as well. QUESTION:  Tony Alamose [ph], London Sunday Times. How can a strategy of transformation and democratization possibly succeed when almost the entire Arab world believes that America is beholden to Israel and is doing nothing to secure democracy for the Palestinians? MR. DONNELLY:  Well, there are so many assumptions embedded in the question that I will try to deal with just two of them.  First of all, it's a mistake to confuse support for the Palestinian Authority or, really, for any other existing organization within the Palestinian community, and American support for Palestinian democracy.  Certainly, one of the--President Bush has done two very significant things to transform the nature of--actually, there really important things to transform the nature of American strategy in regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. First of all, he's put it in its proper strategic perspective.  As tragic as the conflict is, it is, despite all the rhetoric, unlikely to really strategic shift the correlation of forces in the region.  There are at least a handful of things, beginning with the question of Iraq and Iran and Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and Egypt, that have more fundamental strategic weight in the region than the Israeli-Palestinian question does. And secondly, to sort or reiterate where I began, the president, in being the first president to acknowledge the legitimate of the Palestinians to a state, has also quite rightly insisted that that state be a decent state, that it be held to standards that Americans and other democracies would recognize as a fellow democracy. And finally, you know, we'll see what happens with the so-called Sharon plan in regard to pull-backs and settlements and stuff like that.  But that is, if nothing else, certainly a bold move to try to change the--or get off dead center in solving the Israeli-Palestinian problem. I've been slipped a note by my producer telling me that Secretary Feith has arrived.  So with that important information, the panel will retire and Chris DeMuth, president of AEI, will introduce Secretary Feith and we'll keep right on rolling. Thank you very much for your patience.  And for those of you who haven't gotten a copy, I believe there are more in the lobby. Thank you both. MR. DEMUTH:  We're delighted that Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith could address this conference this morning.  Doug Feith has been one of Washington's most energetic and talented defense policy intellectuals in and out of the government for 25 years.  Anyone who practices that calling for a quarter of a century is supposed to be wizened and haggard and worn down, and it's a great inspiration and something of a rebuke to the rest of us that, after 25 years, he still remains so youthful and young-looking and energetic. He's a graduate of Harvard College and Georgetown Law School.  He worked during the Reagan administration at the National Security Council and at the Department of Defense.  At the end of the administration, he was deputy assistant secretary for negotiations policy.  He practiced law at his own firm for 15 years, and when the new administration came to town in 2001, was one of the first of the very able group that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld assembled around him at the outset. He is, as I said, under secretary of defense for policy.  Having made counsel with us and participated in our research and conferences for many years as an outsider, we're delighted that in his important responsibilities on the inside he would return to speak with us today. Please give a warm welcome to Under Secretary Doug Feith. [Applause.] MR. FEITH:  Thank you, Chris.  I'm pleased to be here at the American Enterprise Institute.  I have some long-time friends here, as you know if you've studied the published wiring diagrams that purport to illuminate the anatomy of the neocon cabal. This AEI conference is being held to look at Iraq now that a year has passed since the coalition forces overthrew the Saddam Hussein regime.  At the beginning of May last year, seven weeks or so after the war started, major combat operations ended.  Iraq has changed greatly over the 12 months, largely for the good, though the intensity of the fighting in recent days tends to overshadow the progress.  It is true that the past weeks have been as costly to us as any since March 19th of 2003.  We're in a difficult period now.  So sober reflections on where we stand and where we're heading and why Iraq is important should be at a premium.  This conference is timely. Iraq has been transformed since last May.  First and foremost, the Saddam Hussein regime is gone and is not coming back.  The threats that he posed to us and to his region have been eliminated and 25 million Iraqis have been liberated.  Economy, Iraq is recovering, though the ruinous results of the Baathist decades continue to impede progress. Given its oil resources and the education of its people, Iraq should have been a wealthy country.  Under Saddam, however, its infrastructure became pathetically dilapidated.  Coalition forces managed to spare most of that infrastructure from destruction during the war, and over the last year the coalition has worked to repair and upgrade it.  Electricity generation has surpassed pre-war levels and is more evenly distributed.  Iraqi schools have been repaired in large numbers.  Health care spending in the country is 30 times greater than its pre-war levels.  Unemployment has fallen by nearly a half over the past year. Inflation is a quarter of what it was before the war.  A large-scale currency exchange was conducted successfully at the end of last year.  The new currency has been remarkably stable and its value has risen lately by 25 percent or so over its value last fall when the conversion was under way.  Iraqi marketplaces are filled with consumer goods for the first time in decades. Policy, too, Iraq has moved forward.  At the national level, the major achievement has been the unanimous approval by Iraq's governing council of the transitional administrative law, the TAL, which is going to serve as an interim constitution until an elected assembly drafts a permanent constitution to be ratified by the Iraqi people.  The TAL is the most liberal basic governance document in the Arab world, with assurances of basic freedoms and equal treatment of all citizens before the law. As you may remember, the status of Islam was one of the more controversial issues in the drafting of the TAL.  The result was a compromise that includes protection of freedom of religious belief and practice and a provision that no law may contradict "the universally agreed tenets of Islam, the principles of democracy, or the enumerated rights cited in the TAL."  This latter provision's precise meaning is going to have to be worked out over time, as is often the case with constitutional principles, but it's noteworthy that the TAL assumes compatibility among individual rights, democratic principles, and the universally agreed tenets of Islam. The TAL's text is important, but the process by which this interim constitution came into being may be even more so.  After all, non-democratic regimes often have high-minded constitutions decreed by the dictator that are belied by the actual practice of officials, who are above the law.  By contrast, the TAL emerged from vigorous bargaining among diverse Iraqis--men and women, secularists and Islamists, Sunnis and Shia, Arabs and Kurds.  It was not decreed by a cynic from on high; rather, it was debated, crafted, and approved by the most representative governing body Iraq has ever had. There have been welcome political developments at the local level, too.  Over 90 percent of Iraqi towns and provinces have local councils.  More than half of the Iraqi population is active in community affairs.  A number of Iraqi towns have held popular elections for local officials.  Here's a press report about some successful local elections in Dhi Qar province.  It comes from The Guardian, which, no doubt gritting its teeth, reported as follows on April 5th: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> "Hundreds of would-be Iraqi voters pushed into a sparsely equipped school to cast their ballots for the local council of Tar.  Deep in the marshlands of the Euphrates, the town of 15,000 people was the first to rise against Saddam Hussein in 1991.  Now it was holding the first genuine election in its history.  The poll was the latest in a series which this overwhelmingly Shia province has held in the past six weeks, and the results have been surprising.  Seventeen towns have voted and, in almost every case, secular independents and representatives of non-religious parties did better than the Islamists."</BLOCKQUOTE> This good has been wrought collectively by a large number of people--Iraqis, Americans, and coalition partners, military and civilian government employees, and others who have served in Iraq during the past year.  They have been self-sacrificing and brave.  Iraqis in this effort have risked assassination and refused to be intimidated as they committed themselves to building a new, free Iraq.  Coalition troops, our own and from our partner countries, have borne the brunt of the fighting and are making sacrifices every day.  Our forces deserve praise and gratitude for their bravery, resourcefulness, high-mindedness, and devotion to duty.  It's especially important to make this point now, as the horrific stories are told of the abuses of some Iraqi prisoners.  The Defense Department leadership will continue to ensure that the ongoing investigations are completed properly and remedial action is taken.  Individual accountability is crucial. Let me add, no country in the world upholds the Geneva Conventions on the Laws of Armed Conflict more steadfastly than does the United States.  This is true not only because Americans recognize a moral obligation to be humane and because Americans are law-abiding by nature and in practice.  It's true also because no country in the world has a greater practical interest than the United States in respect for the laws of war.  We'll deal promptly and properly with the terrible abuses.  The interests and dignity of our numerous admirable military forces must not be undermined by the reprehensible actions of a few individuals. Now, I'd like to shift to some comments about the current security picture.  There's been great interest in whether the fighting in Fallujah represents a widespread insurgency.  It is not one now.  Coalition forces, Iraqi authorities, and the coalition provisional authority are working with Sunni tribal leaders to try to ensure that it doesn't become a broad-based attack that could threaten the progress country-wide toward Iraqi self-rule.  They're working to prevent the other major Sunni cities from erupting in sympathy with Fallujah.  In the Shia community, Moqtada al-Sadr's power grab has not succeeded.  According to all reports, support for him continues to decrease as the major Shia religious figures influence their community against him.  Our desire to avoid fighting in the Shia holy city of Najaf has given Sadr something of a sanctuary for the moment, but the Shia community continues to pressure him to agree to a peaceful resolution of the situation. So neither Sadr nor the Fallujah anti-coalition fighters represent a broad movement of insurgency in Iraq.  Unlike in other historical guerilla or terror campaigns, hardly any bombings in Iraq have been accompanied by a claim of responsibility.  The Baathists and terrorists behind the bombings know that they have no philosophical or political basis on which to appeal to the Iraqi people.  Their only hope is that we will lose heart and depart and that they will then be able to impose their rule on the Iraqis.  This is not going to happen. This AEI conference is a good opportunity to remind ourselves of why we went to war in the first place.  The controversy concerning our failure to find stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons in Iraq has obscured the actual strategic rationale for the war.  The public debate lately has focused on questions relating to the intelligence failure--were the assessments cooked, was there political influence on the intelligence process, and so forth.  The intelligence failure and the blow to U.S. credibility that it caused is a serious matter.  We should get to the bottom of it, and the president's decision to appoint a commission on WMD intelligence reflects his desire to do so. But that shouldn't blind us to the larger point.  The strategic rationale for the war didn't actually hinge on classified information concerning chemical and biological stockpiles.  Rather, it depended on assessments about the nature of the Saddam Hussein regime and its activities.  The relevant facts were available to the public.  Intelligence can play a crucial role in operational decision-making, but it should surprise no one that the grandest strategic considerations of statesmen in democratic countries are commonly based on open rather than secret information.  Such statesmen, after all, would have a hard time arguing that their country should go to war, for example, but the reasons for the war cannot be shared with the public. President Bush made no such argument.  Rather, he explained to the American people and the world the reasons that it was necessary to oust the Saddam Hussein regime.  Saddam's regime was recognized widely as a threat to world peace since at least 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait.  Saddam had launched aggressive attacks against a number of countries in his region, his military was the first in history to use nerve gas on the battlefield, he was outspokenly hostile to the United States and defiant of numerous attempts by the U.N. Security Council, over a dozen years or so, to constrain him and compel him to account for and destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Saddam had ties of various types with various terrorist groups.  For example, the terrorist Abu Midal lived in Iraq for years, as did Mahmoud Abbas, who was responsible for the hijacking of the Achille Lauro.  In addition, Iraq maintained links with the Palestine terrorist groups responsible for suicide bombings, and Saddam famously boasted of paying $25,000 to each family of a suicide bomber.  Iraqi intelligence also carried out its own terrorist actions, notably the assassination attempt against former President Bush in Kuwait in 1993. All of these points were known to the public.  The 9/11 attack compelled U.S. policy makers to reevaluate the known dangers posed by the Saddam Hussein regime.  It was clear that the terrorists responsible for 9/11 would have gladly killed a hundred or a thousand times the number of their 9/11 victims if they had had the means.  The principal strategic danger to the United States in the war on terrorism is the possibility that terrorists could get their hands on chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.  That was, and remains, the focus of our attention.  Given Iraq's record of hostility, aggression, WMDs, and ties to terrorists, and given Saddam's frustration of a dozen years' worth of efforts by the U.N., the U.S., and others to contain him, President Bush concluded, in light of the 9/11 attacks, that it was necessary to remove Saddam Hussein by force.  The danger was too great that Saddam might give the fruits of his WMD programs to terrorists for use against the United States.  This danger did not hinge on where Saddam was actually stockpiling at the time commercial or biological weapons. President Bush told the American people and the world that the removal of that regime would make the world safer, would free the Iraqi people, and would open the way for the development of democratic institutions in Iraq that could inspire the growth of freedom throughout the Middle East.  If Iraq built democratic institutions, it would not only help ensure that Iraq remains off the lists of terrorism supporters, but it could help us in the crucial task of countering ideological support for terrorism.  It would be of great practical benefit if Iraq became a model of moderation, freedom, and prosperity.  The terrorists of al Qaeda and other organizations know how devastating that would be for their interests, which is why they're doing what they can to fight the coalition in Iraq. It bears stressing again--what I have summarized here was the strategic rationale for the war.  Those were the considerations that moved the key U.S. policy makers.  On that basis, the president appealed for support to Congress and to the American people.  On that basis, the president obtained the support of our coalition partners. As interesting as the intelligence questions are, assessing the strategic rationale for the war did not require anyone to have access to any secrets.  Reasonable people did and do dispute whether that rationale justified the coalition's military action, but I think no one can properly assert that the failure so far to find Iraqi WMD stockpiles undermines the reasons for the war. Accordingly, the coalition's strategic goal has been a unified Iraq that's on the path to democratic government and prosperity, forswears WMD, doesn't support terrorism, and seeks to live at peace with its neighbors.  We aim to achieve this by transferring power to a government in Iraq that will govern by compromise and consensus among the various ethnic and sectarian groups--that is, the means used to produce the transitional administrative law--rather than allow one group to oppress the others. The creation of such a government not only serves our  strategic purposes, but it's a key to managing Iraq's current security problems.  We have a security interest in Iraqis understanding that the U.S. and the coalition have no desire to control, much less exploit, Iraq or its resources.  We want Iraqis to run their own country.  Our strategy is to encourage and enable Iraqis to assume responsibility for their own affairs in all fields--economic, political, and security. That's why the upcoming restoration of sovereign authority is so important to achieving our objectives in Iraq.  I would argue that those who say that the current security problems will or should lead to a delay in the transfer of sovereign authority to the Iraqis have the analysis backwards. First, an early end to the occupation is essential to the political strategy for defeating the anti-coalition forces.  A sovereign Iraqi government will be better able to marginalize its extremist opponents politically while coalition forces defeat them militarily.  As the captured letter from Zarkawi to his al Qaeda associates demonstrates, such a transformation is the worst possible scenario for those who oppose the emergence of democracy in Iraq.  Zarkawi wrote, and I quote:  "How can we kill their cousins and sons, and under what pretext, after the Americans start withdrawing?  This is the democracy.  We will have no pretext."  The Baathists and terrorists fear the return of sovereignty to the Iraqi people, and that's why they're trying so hard to derail it. Second, Iraqis have shown reluctance to take responsibility if the coalition appears intent to remain in charge.  This is understandable.  Anybody who demonstrated leadership and initiative under Saddam's tyranny more likely than not was quickly killed by the regime.  Consequently, without the sense of urgency and accountability that a fixed deadline imposes, Iraqi leaders have been unable to resolve the difficult issues required to conduct elections and shape a new government.  But when such a deadline is established, as it was with the transitional administrative law, Iraqi leaders have shown that they can come up with the compromises necessary for the Iraqi interim government to take shape. The situation in Iraq isn't easy.  There's value in thinking calmly and comprehensively about our strategy--assessing the facts, updating assumptions, reviewing the formulation of our objectives, and deciding the ways to achieve them.  Strategic thinking aims to see the important connections among ideas and events that may appear superficially to be unconnected and it aims to think ahead many steps into the future.  Strategy takes a long view from a high elevation.  It's well known that no pre-war prediction will unfold perfectly, and there will be setbacks that require adjustments in both objectives and courses of action.  In war, plans are, at best, the basis for future changes. This coalition has the benefit of leadership and strategic thinking, but it's also shown that it can be flexible, as necessary.  Examples of flexibility include: <UL> <LI>Requesting a large amount of supplemental funds when it became clear that Iraqi reconstruction was going too slowly, in part because the Iraqi infrastructure proved to be in much worse shape than we expected.</LI> <LI>Creating a new type of indigenous force, the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, to fill the gap left by the Iraqi police service, many of whose members turned out not to be as well trained as we had supposed.</LI> <LI>Responding to Iraqi demands for an earlier resumption of sovereignty by developing the idea of a transitional government that could take power before a permanent constitution is ratified.</LI> <LI>Dropping the caucus plan for selecting the transitional government when it turned out to be unpopular with Iraqis and substituting a two-step process involving an interim government that can take power before legislative elections.</LI> <LI>And revising the mechanisms for implementing the de-Baathification policy to address complaints that the appeals process was not working as intended and to respond to the Sunni minority's fears of marginalization.</LI></UL> Throughout all these changes, we have retained the strategic objective of Iraqis stepping forward to run their own country under a proper representative arrangement that can win broad-based support.  A challenging mission such as Operation Iraqi Freedom requires steadiness.  If the basic strategy is correct, then steadiness in the face of setbacks is required.  Even as tactical adjustments are made, the essence of the strategy continues to provide direction. Having a strategy means not being buffeted by the news of the day, not allowing fluctuating polls to determine what we do.  History teaches that steadiness is a gem-like trait in wartime leaders.  Yet when a president is steady, as President Bush has remained throughout Operation Iraqi Freedom, some folks inevitably will describe his steadiness as unapologetic stubbornness.  One can only imagine what today's news media would have said about Winston Churchill in the face of his dogged refusal to change his strategy in the face of repeated setbacks.  Steadiness, so long as one is willing to--as we have been--to revisit assumptions and demonstrate tactical flexibility, is a virtue. One year after the end of major combat operations we are still at war.  As our target date for the handover of sovereign authority to the Iraqis draws close, we must expect that enemies of a free Iraq will become even more violent.  They know that the establishment of a sovereign, credible, representative Iraqi government, a government that builds democratic institutions in Iraq, would be a major defeat for them, and they are determined not to let it happen.  The struggle against them will not be easy, but they offer nothing to the Iraqi people except a return to oppression. The coalition has the will, the forces, the resources, and the strategy to succeed.  And what we're fighting for is important and right. Thank you. [Applause.] MS. PLETKA:  Good morning, almost good afternoon, everybody.  I'm Danielle Pletka.  I'm the Vice President for Foreign and Defense Policy Studies here.  I'm going to moderate our Q&A. Let me ask you all, as I always do, to remember that you, like Doug, are guests in our house.  Please behave courteously.  Identify yourself, identify your organization and, as always, put your statement in the form of a question. The gentleman over there.  Someone will bring you a microphone.  Please wait. MR. RUPPE:  Thanks.  Hi.  David Ruppe, with Global Security Newswire. The President has said that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction still might be hidden in the country or have been moved out of the country.  So, to degree, do you consider it a defeat for the U.S. that we have been unable to secure those weapons, if they exist, and to what degree is the administration concerned that those weapons still might be in the hands of al Qaeda, might get into the hands of al Qaeda or into the hands of insurgents and be used on our forces or civilians at home? MR. FEITH:  Well, we are still in the process of finding out exactly what the situation is, what happened with Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, which we know Saddam had, but we don't quite know what became of them.  That work is going on by the Iraq survey group, and when it's work is completed and its report is done, we will announce it publicly. One of the great problems with proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is precisely the one that you called attention to.  There's always the danger that they could get into the hands of terrorists or other people that you don't want to acquire them, and it's a serious problem worldwide, and it's obviously a problem in Iraq, but as I said, we have not completed our work on the subject yet. MR. RUBIN:  Hi.  Michael Rubin from AEI. Looking ahead, the United Nations, the United States, the Iraqi Governing Council and the transitional administrative law have called for elections before the end of January 2005.  There's two ways to do direct elections.  One is a constituency-based system, and the other is a party slate system, and they would have very different results.  I'm curious about what the position of the U.S. Government is with regard to what direct elections mean and how they should be carried out. MR. FEITH:  It's an important question.  We haven't resolved it yet.  It's something that we've been discussing.  It's a decision that I think is one that the Iraqis will take the lead in making, but it's one of those great questions that states face when they organize themselves, they either organize themselves as a new democracy or reorganize themselves through a constitutional process.  There's a lot of experience on this subject in the world, and it's being reviewed right now in different countries, and different countries experience and what's suitable, given the nature of Iraq and its history and culture. One point that I would make that is important, whenever one approaches a subject as awe-inspiring as laying the foundation stones for somebody's government, it's important that these institutions be well-rooted in Iraq and in their culture and world view.  Their chance of success goes up a lot if it is produced by Iraqis, with a proper appreciation of who they are, and what their history is, and what their experience is, and is not something that is, something that people from the outside attempt to engineer without due respect for the people in the country. MR. LAKE:  Thank you.  Eli Lake, with the New York Sun. In an article in today's Salon, your old law partner, Marc Zell, is quoted as saying that Ahmed Chalabi had betrayed him in a promise to try to secure better relations with Israel and a free Iraq. Do you have any comment on this?  I know that it's just hit, and I don't know if you've gotten a chance to see it-- MR. FEITH:  I know nothing about it. MR. LAKE:  As a broader question, there have been a lot of stories that said that the administration at this point have basically tried to distance themselves at this point from Ahmed Chalabi in a future transitional government.  You have been an ally of his before you joined the administration.  Can you comment on some of those reports? MR. FEITH:  I know nothing about the first question that you asked. Iraq has a number of people who have been playing an important role in the Governing Council.  Chalabi is one of them.  The process by which the Iraqis are ultimately going to pick their leaders is being developed right now, and it's going to be an electoral system, and the leaders of Iraq will be the people who emerge from that process with support from the Iraqi people. MR. ALI:  Mohammed Ali, with Al Jazeera. Sir, you mentioned Abu Ghraib incidents.  Is the Pentagon waiting to accept an independent investigation in that and the other allegations from some former detainees from Guantanamo, as well, are saying they were subject to abuse?  That will be my question. Thank you. MR. FEITH:  I think I've said everything that I want to say on that subject.  I know that Secretary Rumsfeld, and I believe General Casey and maybe some others are going to be speaking to the press today, and I'm sure they'll address those questions. MS. PLETKA:  I'm going to exploit the ownership of the microphone for a second to ask a question, if I might, Doug. Other than the question of WMD in Iraq under Saddam, one of the things that troubled so many was the brutal history of the regime and the record of the Ba'athist Party over so many decades, although flexibility is a virtue, I wonder if you can just give us a little more insight into the decision to reverse the de-Ba'athification process, and more particularly perhaps, to the question of this general, General Sallah, who was picked and then unpicked, I gather, to head the force outside Fallujah.  Can you just explain a little bit your thinking on that. MR. FEITH:  It's good to have the opportunity to say that we haven't reversed the de-Ba'athification process.  I think that's a misconception. As I mentioned in my remarks, the de-Ba'athification policy was crafted with a number of ideas in mind.  One of them was the importance of communicating to the Iraqis that the Ba'ath regime is gone and is not coming back.  Another important consideration was justice, that the people responsible for the regime's crimes would be brought to justice. But another consideration was clearly that it was important to be fair, and it was important to make sure that broad policies don't have unfair effects on people in the country who may not, although they may have been compelled to be Ba'ath Party members, were not tainted with the crimes of the regime and had renounced the Ba'athist ideology, and we didn't want to be in a situation where the country couldn't work together or couldn't come together. So the de-Ba'athification policy was attempting to strike a proper balance among various considerations.  One way that it was set up to strike that balance was to provide for an appeals process that would allow people to, who might otherwise be eliminated from government employment, to come in and explain why they should not be excluded. We have not changed, in essence, the de-Ba'athification policy.  The Coalition Provisional Authority has not.  What it did, though, is recognize, after a lot of complaints, that it was not being implemented as it should, and this appeals process, in particular, was not working as it was intended, and so adjustments were made there. Now, on the question that you raised about this former Iraqi general.  One of the biggest challenges in a situation like Iraq today is vetting people, and Secretary Rumsfeld has spoken on this publicly a number of times, that you do the best you can in vetting, but part of the vetting process, kind of one of the checks on the vetting process, is after you're finished vetting people, and you go public with somebody, if you've made a mistake, you hear about it, and that allows you to take corrective action.  And that's what was done in that case, and it was a mistake. AUDIENCE PARTICIPANT:  [?], Turkey [?].  There will be a NATO Summit in Instanbul next month.  What kind of a role in Iraq does the United States expect from Turkey and NATO? MR. FEITH:  The United States is encouraging NATO to assume more responsibility in the war on terrorism in general in both Afghanistan and Iraq.  NATO is playing an important role in Afghanistan, having taken over the International Security Assistance force, and NATO played a more limited role in Iraq in assisting the Polish multinational division. Any contribution that NATO is willing to play and has the resources to effect I think is in our interest, and we're working with--we're talking with a number of our NATO allies, and it's going to be undoubtedly an important topic of conversation in the Istanbul Summit.  We're talking with them about the best role for NATO to play to support the Coalition's efforts in Iraq and to increase NATO's activities in Afghanistan. Turkey itself has obviously a very important relationship with Iraq and has all kinds of roles to play.  As one of Iraq's important neighbors, one hopes that Turkey will increasingly play a role in the economic reconstruction of Iraq and participate in commercial relations with them.  There's obviously a Turkish interest in the effort to create, as I said, a unified Iraq, an Iraq that preserves its territorial integrity and creates a government that can get the active cooperation of all of the major elements of the country, including the Kurds in Iraq, so that the unity of Iraq can be preserved, and therefore the broader regional stability that Turkey cares so much about can be preserved. MR. GALLOWAY:  Joe Gallow, Knight Ridder Newspapers. Our panel, before you arrived, dealt at some length with planning for the war and the postwar or the lack thereof, and I believe your job is being in charge of the Office of Special Plans.  So, if there are failures--and clearly there were--would you care to address the actual act of planning, how you conducted it and what went wrong? MR. FEITH:  Well, there was a great deal of planning done throughout the U.S. Government.  I think that your question reflects a theme that is rather common in a lot of reporting on this subject that kind of implies that people in Washington were somehow responsible for all of the planning regarding Iraq or postwar Iraq, and I think that's a rather wild oversimplification. There was a lot of planning done interagency here in Washington at the strategic level.  There was also, among the White House, the State Department, the Treasury Department, the Justice Department and the Pentagon, there was also obviously a lot of operational-level planing done by CENTCOM.  And it's a very complex subject to evaluate the quality of the planning.  Some of it was very good.  Some of it was a lot less good. I think that it's something that is best left to historians to sort out, rather than ask the people, in the middle of everything, to step back and evaluate their own work.  I'm perfectly comfortable to say that we live in a democracy.  The records will be available to scholars, and they'll look over and decide what went right and what went wrong. We are in the process of addressing, as a department and as a government, certain things that we think we've learned from the process.  For example, the value of having a standing organization that can do the kinds of things that the Postwar Planning Office, which was put together just a few weeks before the war, was intended to do.  The United States has done stability operations or peace operations for a number of years in a number of cases: in Haiti, more than once in the Balkans, and in Afghanistan, and now in Iraq.  And yet every time we did it we had to organize a new effort, and I think there's a good argument to be made that having that capability and that expertise in an office that functions, in effect, as a standing task force, is probably a smart thing to do and could make those kinds of operations go better in the future. But that's the kind of example of things that we're doing currently to try to assess recent experience, but the ultimate kind of judgment that you're asking for, as I said, I think is better left to historians. MS. PLETKA:  We can take one last question.  The gentleman right back there.  We've ignored the far back corner. MR. SWISHER:  Mr. Feith, I was wondering if you could comment-- MS. PLETKA:  Excuse me.  Can you identify yourself. MR. SWISHER:  I'm sorry, certainly.  Clay Swisher, and I work for CNO Resources. I was wondering if you could comment what effect you think Israeli settlement construction and occupation practices in the West Bank and Gaza strip, the effect that that is having on the ability of our troops to convey to the Arab and the Muslim World that the United States stands against oppression and they stand for freedom. MR. FEITH:  Well, the specific focus of your question is outside of my lane.  But on the general point that there is a lot of criticism of Israel, it will not surprise you to hear, throughout the Middle East, and there's a lot of criticism of the U.S. relationship to Israel throughout the Middle East, and that clearly is one of the conditions that we live with as we work with people throughout the Arab World, and it's a constant subject of conversation, and it, as I said, it's one of those conditions that we have to deal with. We have, nevertheless, I think established with a lot of people in Iraq, despite various differences about policy issues, important relationships of trust.  What is important, as I said in my prepared remarks, is the main thing the Iraqis want to know is what is our attitude toward them and their country, and are we really sincere in our desire to leave them to run their own affairs and to help them get into the position where they can provide for their own security, set up their own government and be on a path to independence, and to freedom, and to a functioning economy. And on that, I think we've made progress.  We have a lot more to make, and as we make that progress, I think we'll help ourselves on the political track, as well as the security track, in our work in Iraq. MS. PLETKA:  Doug, thank you very much for a thoughtful presentation, and thank you to the audience. Bye-bye.  We're closed. [Applause.] [Whereupon, the proceedings were adjourned.]</body></html>