<html><body>The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Transfer of Sovereignty, the Future Iraqi Leadership, and the Real Meaning of Re-Baathification May 14, 2004 Unedited transcript prepared from a tape recording <TABLE width="100%" border=0> <TBODY> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%">9:15 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%">9:30</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%">Panelists:</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="50%">Bathsheba Crocker, Center for Strategic and International Studies</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%">Hassan Mneimneh, Iraq Foundation</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%">Entifadh Qanbar, Iraqi National Congress</TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%"> </TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%">Moderator:</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="50%">Danielle Pletka, AEI</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%">11:00</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="75%" colSpan=2> Adjournment</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE> Proceedings: MS. PLETKA:  Good morning.  People are going to be filtering in as we talk, but we thought we ought to start.  Please forgive my voice and my coughing and wheezing. I'm Danielle Pletka.  I'm the Vice President for Foreign and Defense Policy Studies here at AEI.  We're very pleased to be having this event during an important week in Iraq, an important and not terribly good week. The reason that we wanted to go forward, other than the fact that we try to have periodic briefings on Iraq, is because I think that for those of us who were strong proponents of the war and of the removal of Saddam Hussein, there's a lot of concern about how things are moving forward.  And I don't just mean the scandal at Abu Ghraib. Doug Feith, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, was here with us in this very seat a couple of weeks ago, and he indicated very strongly that things were going a lot better than they appeared to be going.  And I think in terms of infrastructure, I think in terms of most of the areas of Iraq, that's probably true. But, notwithstanding, there are some very worrying signs about the future.  One of them was the appointment and then removal of General Saleh in Fallujah.  Another has been negotiations with Muqtada al-Sadr's forces and their possible integration into Iraqi forces.  Then there are all of the questions about the Brahimi plan.  What does it mean?  What is it?  I haven't found anybody who can explain that.  What is it?  What does it mean?  And does it potentially mean the elevation of a Sunni leader to the leadership of Iraq, a country that is majority Shi'ite?  These are all questions that I think are troubling a lot of us. We're joined by a distinguished panel of friends and colleagues today to discuss these issues, and I'm going to introduce them in alphabetical order, although they will not be speaking in alphabetical order. Bathsheba Crocker is the co-director of the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and last year in July, she was a member of a CSIS-led Iraqi reconstruction assessment team, which I think put out a very interesting report. Hassan Mneimneh is the executive director of the Iraq Foundation and director--I should know this by heart, Hassan--and director of the Documentation Project for the Iraq Memory Foundation.  He was previously the co-director of the Iraq Research and Documentation Project at Harvard University, and he spends most of his time, although not so much lately, in Baghdad. Entifadh Qanbar is the spokesman for the Iraqi National Congress in Baghdad.  He was previously the director of the Washington office until the collapse of the regime, and he is a veteran of the Iraqi Air Force and fought in the Iraq-Iran war. In any case, what we'll do is actually start with Entifadh, go to Bathsheba, and then wrap up with Hassan, and then turn to questions and answers from our audience. So, with that, thank you very much, Entifadh. MR. QANBAR:  Good morning.  Thank you for having me here.  I'm going to talk about things happening on the ground in Iraq, and I'll try to explain it from what we know. The first thing I would like to talk about is the situation in Fallujah.  The Fallujah thing is a national security issue, and it's a major national security issue for Iraq.  And I think it should be also for the United States of America. Seven thousand fighters have gathered from all over Iraq.  Most of them are Special Republican Guards and special security and some of them Iraqi intelligence gatherers and entered Fallujah before the whole problem started.  And half of them left when the siege was in Fallujah, so there are about 3,000 inside while the siege on Fallujah was occurring.  And they were divided into four brigades, and each brigade was in one of the major neighborhoods in Fallujah.  Each brigade was divided into 20- to 30-man cells.  It's very well organized.  They are sophisticated fighters.  I've talked to some officers, American officers on the ground, and one of my bodyguards is from Fallujah.  He was telling me the inside story.  And they are really well organized, well prepared. What I noticed in Fallujah, and that's something--I think what happened is the killing of the four Americans in Fallujah was basically staged out.  And I think the Baath, which is leading this effort--and there's a reason why we think the Baath Party is leading the effort in Fallujah.  It's a national Baath war headquartered in Fallujah. The killing of four Americans was staged out, we believe, and we believe that there was an attempt to bring the Americans to Fallujah because they have all other--I mean, Marines are definitely militarily more capable than the terrorists inside Fallujah.  However, terrorists inside Fallujah, they had a plan; they had a very sophisticated political plan, not to mention they had prepared very good media for this situation. As known, there is basically no pro-democracy TV station functioning until today in Iraq.  The only one that is there is Al-  (?)  , which is basically run by the Coalition Provisional Authority.  By all accounts it's insufficient and it doesn't provide the right message, especially facing sophisticated satellite Arab TV such as Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya. Al-Jazeera, for example, dispatched their top commentator--his name is Ahmed Mansur (ph)--who never leaves the studio, to inside Fallujah to report three days live 24 hours on what's happening inside Fallujah.  And they've done a really good job to conduct sophisticated psychological war against the U.S. Marines. The thing doesn't look to me like it's a random effort.  It is a coordinated effort, and I don't know how deep this coordination is, but apparently what happened, the Marines were completely exposed to the media.  They were completely exposed politically.  There's no political support for them.  And the other sad part is there was another troubled situation in southern Iraq, but the outcome of what happened in Fallujah and in southern Iraq is the collapse of the security theory that the Coalition Provisional Authority established.  The recruitment of the Iraqi police and the Iraqi army, which we basically opposed vigorously from day one, proved to be insufficient and did not work.  The training of the Iraqi police in Jordan did not pay off.  It was counterproductive, as we predicted. Let me explain to you one thing.  Iraqi people are three categories: The first category are Baathists, Saddam's loyalists who are well funded, well trained, sophisticated; they have a plan and they have a motive, and they can kill, and supported by many Arab countries. The second category are those who fought Saddam in the opposition period for decades.  They are not intermediated by Baathists.  They are good fighters, but they are not well funded and they don't have any support from the region at least, or little support from the region, if nothing. And the third category, which is the major part of Iraqi society, are people who are mostly against Saddam, but they are basically watching and waiting to see what's going to happen. Unfortunately, the policy of the CPA was set in a way that the category of those people who fought Saddam were completely excluded from day one.  I served in Centcom for 30 days during the war as a liaison between the INC and Centcom.  They call it J5.  And when I first met--the first day when I met a bunch of American officers and British officers, they were shocked to know there is something called Iraqi opposition.  They were told there is no Iraqi opposition presence, and they were completely disappointed that they had no--and they were telling me stories and stories about the 58--they only had 58 FIF, the Free Iraqi Forces, who were trained in Hungary, how much they were useful to their battalions, and they wished there were thousands of them instead of dozens of them. So the Iraqi aspect of liberation was removed from day one, which I think it was a strategic mistake, and it continued along.  And I think, to their defense, U.S. commanders on the ground were given very limited choices.  They were given the choice to recruit from the general public, walk-ins, or from Baathists.  And I think they were forced in a situation to make bad decisions sometimes, and I think the fault is the fault of the planning and the political--and policy way of doing it. However, we pushed very hard to establish a battalion of part of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, ICDC.  This is called the 36th Battalion.  This battalion was formed from five parties--the two Kurdish parties, the INC, the INA, and the Supreme Council Islamic Revolution.  This battalion has proven great discipline, and they have proven to work very well.  The first few weeks of the formation of the battalion, they captured more than three tons of ammunition, munitions, and three dozens of terrorist cells, and they basically are the only battalion who fought with the Marines in Fallujah.  There were some of the battalion people killed.  However, the battalion was under-supported.  The military support and military aid to the battalion was very limited, in spite of their fighting inside Fallujah.  And, again, they felt they were exposed to the media, they were bashed, but nothing to support them and to help them. And, again, I repeat, there is basically no pro-democracy media in Iraq that is owned or represents any Iraqi pro-democracy group or Iraqi--or at least the Iraqi Governing Council itself. So the situation did not look good.  We came to the situation of cease-fire.  We saw a retreat from the goals were set ahead of this Fallujah thing.  And what made it worse, to bring several offices from the Republican Guard with General Saleh to head a Republican Guard battalion to guard the city.  Now we have a political Baath Party inside the city, and we have their own chosen, handpicked army, which they like. Many Iraqis view what's happening in Fallujah as creating an autonomous little town or state of Baathists inside Iraq. Now, why do we think the Baath Party is leading this?  There are proofs on the ground.  Several Baath Party members, senior Baath Party members, killed in Fallujah, had their funerals in cities in southern Iraq and all over Iraq.  At least two branch members and one division member was killed in Fallujah, had their funeral in the city of Amarah, and several, like about six, in Basra, there in Nasiriyah, and three in Kut.  And this is a sign that this is not necessarily a Sunni war, as was presented, or a war of people to the west of Iraq against the rest of Iraq or against the Coalition.  This is a gathering of Baath Party forces with a well-planned strategy to start from Fallujah. The situation in Fallujah to us is very troubling.  We have protested the assignment of General Saleh to head the battalion in Fallujah.  I want to tell you one thing about him.  In 1991, he was the commander of a Republican Guard brigade in the city of Karbala, and you know what happened in Karbala in 1991 during the uprising. However, another person was assigned to replace him, General Latif, whom we think he's a good person; however, we're still getting information that General Saleh is the one who is making decisions, and General Latif basically has very little or no authority on the ground. The Iraqi Minister of Defense refused to include this battalion within the Iraqi Army, and this battalion is an auxiliary to the Marines in Fallujah. I always ask people here, What did you thin?  What happened to the terrorists inside Fallujah?  Did they evaporate?  Did they go away?  Absolutely not.  Why Fallujah has come, because they got what they want.  And it's clearly--I'm getting a lot of intelligence information from Iraq, from our INC operatives, that the operations in--terrorist military attacks in Baghdad and the rest of Iraq increased dramatically after the Fallujah thing stopped, and clearly there is--terrorists are headquartered in Fallujah now and practicing terrorism against the rest of the Iraqi people. This is the situation in Fallujah.  Now we go to the situation in Najaf. The situation in Najaf and the south is not a national security issue, and it is not a difficult, major issue as the one in Fallujah.  The situation in Najaf is more of a law-and-order situation.  We think this could have been handled and should be handled by Iraqis.  We advised the Coalition not to enter Najaf, and we thank the Coalition for being patient not to enter Najaf.  And I think the situation, as I said, should be handled by Iraqi courts. The last thing--and I have one minute to talk about it--is the transition.  The transition to the new sovereign government in Iraq must be led by Iraqi people.  The political process must be led by Iraqi people.  Assigning technocrats, although Lakhdar Brahimi apparently retreated from this idea, is counterproductive.  It is exactly the problem that the Iraqis want to feel they want to lead their country politically.  And also what Lakhdar Brahimi wanted to do is in contradiction with the transition administration law that basically calls for the Governing Council and the Iraqi people and the CPA to discuss matters and come with a solution for the caretaker government.  I don't think it's a good idea to start a new Iraqi sovereign government by violating the same law which was approved unanimously by the Governing Council and the Coalition Provisional Authority. Thank you. MS. PLETKA:  Thank you very much. Bathsheba? MS. CROCKER:  Thank you.  Thank you very much, Dani, for having me here this morning.  I have not been back here since you ran your excellent conferences before the war, so it's nice to be back.  And I'm honored to be on a panel with Iraqis, and I will not presume, I hope, to speak on behalf of the Iraqi people, because I obviously cannot, but maybe I can give a little bit of a different viewpoint from here in Washington. And I think I will pick up where Entifadh left off and talk about the transfer of sovereignty issue.  I made a few notes on the basis of the title of today's talk, so I may try to stick to those issues. The picture, obviously, as Dani said in her opening, I think is still very unclear.  We don't yet know what is supposed to happen on June 30th, and I'm not sure we have a good idea what is supposed to happen after June 30th and in the lead-up to elections. I think, unfortunately, some of the confusion we have today stems from the confusion in the policy of the CPA, and some of these are things that Entifadh touched on his remarks.  But what we have is a situation in which not only do the American people and those of us up on the panel maybe not have a good idea of what's supposed to happen on June 30th, but I don't think the Iraqi people probably have a very good idea either of what is supposed to happen on June 30th. We've seen a lot of flip-flopping in plans, and we may quibble about whether the original plans were better than the new plans.  But I think, unfortunately, the flip-flopping has led to a situation in which there is just a lot of confusion and lack of clarity, and we don't have a lot of time between now and June 30th.  And I think that lack of clarity is probably worrying all of us. It seems clear that we won't have a transfer of sovereignty in the way we may originally have been thinking of it and in the way at least that some may still want it.  As we know, the Iraqis will not have control, at least as the discussions are currently going, will not have control over the security forces and the military decisions in the country, although it seems that they will have some impact into how those decisions are made. Interestingly, I think people are focusing on the fact that the Iraqi interim authority will not have control over the security forces post-June 30th.  But if one reads the transitional administrative law, it actually seems that that state of affairs will continue even after the elected transitional government comes into place.  In the transitional administrative law, there is a provision that says that the Iraqi security forces will remain under the command and control of the coalition forces until the end of 2005, until a permanent elected government is in place.  So for those people out there who are concerned about this issue of the lack of control over security forces, I think it's important to recognize that if that provision holds in the transitional administrative law, that might actually be the state of affairs in Iraq from now until the end of 2005. There seems to be now some consensus on the idea that the interim authority will not have the authority to make laws, to pass laws in Iraq.  U.S. advisers, as we have found in recent days, will continue to be embedded in Iraqi ministries as technical advisers and carrying out other duties. There are some committees that are being set up now, media and other oversight committees that also have very long-term tenures.  Bremer is appointing people onto these committees, and some of these committees have tenures that are as long as five years.  So, again, I think it's important to recognize that some of what we're seeing here doesn't only relate to what happens between now and June 30th, but actually will have continuing impact after that. I think we're also seeing a situation in recent days, hearing from the French and the Russians, that we may actually have more difficulty up at the UN with the passage of a new UN Security Council resolution than we were originally expecting.  I don't know whether they will dig in their heels about this idea that they do not at least buy into the notion that the Iraqis should not have control over their security forces.  But if they do, we may have more difficulty up at the UN in coming weeks. There are some warning signs about the elections as well.  As most of you probably know, the UN elections team has said that in order for elections to take place by the end of this year or by the end of January 2005, we need to have an electoral law and an independent electoral commission in place by the end of May.  And the security situation on the ground being as it is right now is making it quite difficult for the UN to go forward with its plans.  Five of the 18 electoral districts in Iraq are currently too unsafe for--too dangerous for nominations to be taken, so they are trying to come up with other means to get nominations from those areas onto the electoral commission.  But the UN has said that eight months is the absolute minimum it needs to hold free and fair elections, and so we have to hope that these things are in place by the end of May. I think there are also other outstanding questions in addition to the security situation with respect to what will be decided at the UN.  There are some very important questions and things, again, that I just don't think we've heard enough about, either here--I don't know if there's more discussion going on up in New York or in Iraq about these issues.  I assume there is at least some in New York.  But questions like what happens with the oil revenues, what happens with the Development Fund for Iraq, and what happens with Iraq's debt and how the new UN Security Council resolution will handle those issues. As you know, currently the Development Fund for Iraq, Bremer has control over how those funds are spent, and that's how it was set up in Resolution 1483, which was the first post-war resolution dealing with Iraq.  And that resolution doesn't spell out what happens when the occupation authority goes out of business.  So this will be an issue that the UN Security Council will have to deal with again. As Dani mentioned also in her opening, Brahimi's plan I think seems to be changing before our eyes, and also as Entifadh touched on, there was at first a notion of a technocratic government.  We now seem to be moving back toward a notion of including members of the Governing Council and perhaps including some groups that are not represented on the Governing Council in the interim body. But this has been a very closed process, both from the perspective of what we're hearing here in Washington from the administration and also from what we hear out of the UN.  I just don't think we yet have a clear idea of how this body is supposed to be formed, although people are saying that we will know within two weeks what this body will look like. The important thing, I think, is for us to think about what will give this body enough legitimacy in Iraq going forward, and I think obviously as we've seen, we've had some problems with the lack of legitimacy, and particularly I think now.  A recent poll that was reported on in the Washington Post yesterday reported that even before this current round of violence and the difficulties that we've ben seeing began in April, so that--at the end of March, that is, 80 percent of Iraqis didn't trust the Coalition; somewhat more than that, about 82 percent, didn't trust the Coalition military forces on the ground.  And when asked the question who should pick the members of the interim governing body, very few people chose the Coalition Provisional Authority.  One-tenth of 1 percent chose the Governing Council. So we're in a situation where it's very difficult to tell what it is that will actually work for the Iraqi people in terms of giving this body legitimacy.  And I think that's what we all have to be quite concerned about because, for better or worse, whatever differences people might have about the CPA, the one thing you can say about it is that for now, anyway, it is controlling Iraq.  And I think we have to have a little bit of a worry about what happens if there's a vacuum post-June 30th.  If there is a governing body put in place on June 30th that does not have legitimacy in the eyes of the Iraqi public, and we have a situation on the ground that Entifadh was talking about with different--with problems in different cities, different militias, different political and military forces, we could have some serious difficulty, more serious difficulty even than we're seeing now. The participation of Iraqis, I think, again as Entifadh touched on, is obviously the key to getting that legitimacy, but the question is how in the short span of time between now and June 30th we get to that legitimacy, we get to that--sorry, to that participation.  And obviously, as we've seen, the prospect of caucuses was thrown out the window.  We're not going to have elections between now and then.  And although Brahimi is talking about the idea of a national conference, he's talking about that taking place in July rather than before June 30th. And I think, again, the point that Entifadh was making about the lack of adequate TV stations, the lack of adequate pro-democracy media in the country is a very important one, because I do think that part of the reason that we've had a sort of failing so far in our ability to gain legitimacy for the U.S. plans, to gain legitimacy for the Iraqi Governing Council plans, has to do with the real failure on the communications front.  I don't know whether that's something that can be turned around between now and June 30th.  But I think at the very least what we can hope for is that we get Iraqi public buy-in to whatever the plan is for June 30th. One important missing piece of this so far is we don't yet know how Sistani himself is going to react to Brahimi's plan.  He hasn't, at least publicly, as far as I've seen, said anything about the plan.  And, of course, we don't exactly, as we've said, know what that plan is yet.  So he doesn't right now have anything to react to, but obviously that will be a very important piece of this. In terms of the question of the new Iraqi leadership, again, we haven't seen the names yet--at least I haven't.  Some have been floated around in the press.  Brahimi says he may announce them within ten days.  But I think this raises a question:  Are we really talking about new Iraqi leadership, or are we talking about the same Iraqi leadership?  Because if we are going with members of the Governing Council, we may not, in fact, see new Iraqi faces. I think, again, the important thing is this period between June 30th and the elections that take place.  There does need to be some time for new political talent to develop in Iraq, and part of that, I think, will have to happen at the local level and in some of the local political councils and other things that have been set up.  Certainly democracy is something that has to be built from the ground up.  So far, we're very focused on the top-down level.  But we do need to be focusing on building from the ground up in order to really talk about building democracy long term, but even in the short term to be thinking about building up some new political talent and some new political Iraqi leadership. Also, of course, it is on the local level that the Iraqis themselves will interface most directly with their government on a day-to-day basis.  And I'll just touch very briefly on this question of re-Baathification.  I think obviously this is a very difficult area, a very touchy subject, and something that needs to be handled very carefully.  And it gets back to my opening point about the sort of confusion.  I mean, part of the problem with what we're seeing right now is that there was a decision made at the beginning.  It may turn out that that was not the right decision to have been made, at least with respect to certain issues like the disbanding of the army.  And now we have had to walk back from that plan, and I think it's the walking back in some of these cases that is almost causing us more difficulty than the original plans did.  So that, in other words, when you have a situation in Fallujah and we have a situation now with Muqtada al-Sadr, that we say one thing, like we're going to go into Fallujah and we're going to find the guys who did this and we're going to take away all of the heavy weapons, and then we walk back from that, we look weak and we look like we've lost, and it enables the people--it enables those who we've now put in power militarily in Fallujah to basically claim that they've had a military victory over the United States.  And there's a similar worry with respect to how al-Sadr is being handled, because we have said one thing about we're going to arrest him and we're going to take him out, and we now seem to be walking back from that.  We have to obviously calibrate those kinds of decisions very carefully. I'm not a military tactician, so I'm not going to claim to know what the military should be doing in these situations.  But I think right now what we're seeing is a lot of focus on short-term solutions in part because we're very interested in trying to get greater stability between now and the end of June 30th.  But I'm not sure in the longer term that some of these decisions are going to turn out to have been wise. Obviously, with the question of bringing people back into the government, we have to be very careful about bringing people back in who have particularly bad records.  But having said that, I think that at least in terms of things like rehiring teachers and civil servants and judges that this is probably the good way to be going for now, if for no other reason than there is also a huge unemployment problem in Iraq.  And for some, this is just a means of getting an opportunity to make a living again. The important question really is how the Iraqi people, again, feel about all of this and whether there is some means of reconciliation among the Iraqi people so that questions like re-Baathification, de-Baathification, there's a mechanism for dealing with those things in such a way that doesn't cause long-term damage.  And in other countries, people have addressed past wrongs in different ways.  In South Africa, we had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  I'm not sure whether things like that are being talked about for Iraq right now.  But that will, of course, be the question going forward in terms of the reconciliation that needs to take place in order for Iraq to move forward as one unified country. I think I will just close by saying again, this is a very uncertain process.  I'm quite worried.  I have to say about what happens between now and the end of June 30th and, in fact, even what happens after that, we need some clarity and we some Iraqi public buy-in.  And we really need it now.  We are running out of time between now and June 30th.  And we were all sort of saying when there was 90 days left, there's only 90 days left before June 30th and we don't know what's going on.  Well, now we have less than 50 days left before June 30th, and we still don't know what's going on.  And I think we all have--we all can rightfully worry about that. I'm also, you know, starting to wonder whether we, in fact, will remain serious about our stated goals in Iraq.  We've said various things about what we're going to bring there.  I think we're past the time at this point, frankly, where we need to be doing things like fiddling around with names, going back--and I'm talking about here in Washington, going back and forth about whether we'll support Brahimi's plan.  Frankly, it may not be the best plan, but it's the only one we've got right now.  And the U.S. is unlikely to come up with a better plan between now and June 30th if for no other reason that I think, as we've all discovered, we sort of lack the legitimacy to do that at this point. I really believe that to turn Iraq around, we need to see a fundamental change in course, and I'm not sure that the U.S. is yet committed to that idea.  But the first important thing from the U.S. perspective is that we need to come to some sort of internal agreement about what it is that we're now sort of gearing toward in Iraq, what our goals are.  Are we there to stay the course for democracy?  Are we there to stay the course for stability?  And what does staying the course even really mean?  And we have to come to some agreement on what we mean in terms of things like what the UN role will be.  I think it needs to be more than a pro forma role, and I think we need to remember that this is not about the U.S. throwing other countries a bone in terms of bringing the UN in, but it is, in fact, about getting other countries in the UN to come and help us get back on the right track in Iraq. Thank you. MS. PLETKA:  Thank you, Bathsheba. Hassan? MR. MNEIMNEH:  I made five trips to Iraq in the past year, and the one thing that is noticeable--I mean, the one advantage of having made so many trips as opposed to having stayed a longer term is that I do not get habituated to the degeneration that was taking place and, therefore, I can see it discretely month after month after month. Definitely what I can say--I mean, the last trip was in April--is that between July 2003 and April 2004, a distinct retreat in optimism had taken place in Iraqi society at large.  And the signs of that were noticeable everywhere.  Yes, you always had the hard-core optimists who basically see beyond the current storm and expect brighter days to come.  But, nonetheless, checkpoints were all over the place.  The green zone became like a fortress.  Anti-American graffiti because more and more daring.  Newspapers became less and less accommodating to the promises and more and more prone to adhere to conspiracy theory approaches.  There was a distinct degeneration in optimism, and I think it's--just before the transition happens, it's important for us to recognize this and try to see how and why it happened and what lessons we can get moving ahead. We can here point to three allegations, or at least three areas that we can talk about.  One is a failure of public diplomacy.  Another is a failure of policy.  And the third is a failure of principle.  At least, these, again, are matters that--they are allegations.  We're not yet talking necessarily about substance yet. In terms of public diplomacy, I mean, clearly as Entifadh pointed out and as Bathsheba concurred, there was a distinct lack of pro-democracy, liberal media in Iraq while the other media was flourishing--the other media meaning whether it's Islamist or neo-Baathist of one sort or another, or, for that matter, nationalist and anti-American in its content, was flourishing without any inhibition while, on the other hand, the liberal media seems to be, at best, constrained and, for that matter, very often non-existent and being reduced ultimately in the few outlets that were there, by budget considerations, by talent considerations, the others having better money to offer and, therefore, lots of--meaning institutions that were promising at first, end up not delivering because they could not. So that's at the level of Iraqi society per se, but even beyond, meaning in terms of the efforts that were conducted, whether it's the TV station Al-Hurra or Radio Sawa or other efforts at American public diplomacy, they seem to be generous--clumsy compared to the competition.  Al-Hurra was very slick in terms of appearance, still is very slick in terms of appearance.  But in terms of content, people tend to snicker.  I mean, they watch it for a little bit--actually, someone told me that the most interesting thing about Al-Hurra were the promotional segments in which it shows horses running.  In terms of content, very little, I mean, lots of accusations of it is propagandistic, it is not thorough enough, it's not deep enough, it's apologetic at times.  In any case, so we do have meaning we have to acknowledge the fact that there is a serious failure in public diplomacy and in the efforts at communicating a message to Iraqi society. This is important because, I mean, if we go back to July, one could immediately notice good will on the part of a majority of Iraqi society, let's call it a middle ground, with Islamists and neo-Baathists on the fringes trying to make some room for themselves, but, nonetheless, the middle ground being very much so distinctly willing to listen.  Is it liberation?  Is it occupation?  It does not matter.  What's important is go ahead and deliver. And here is the problem:  We cannot restrict the matter to public diplomacy.  The second level of failure that is a failure of policy, we have to, again, look at it carefully and realize, recognize that what Iraqi society, whether unrealistically or not, but what Iraqi society expected was not delivered.  It is from the point of view of many, and this is the main complaint.  It is not permissible that a year after the liberation/occupation basic services are still not the way we expect them to be.  And here I'm focusing on perception, and here we're mixing again policy and public diplomacy, because numbers can show that indeed the levels have been--are back to what they were before the fall of the regime, and in many cases much better.  Nonetheless, the perception remains that we have not gotten what we were promised. It's not a matter of instant gratification.  It's a matter of expectation that was actually, to a larger extent, provided by the Coalition itself, meaning there was the implication that democracy is coming, services are coming, the bright future is coming and it's coming soon.  And that bright future did not seem to happen. In here, when we talk about failure of policy or at least errors in policy, I think it's important, meaning I would like to stress the need for them to be recognized, because if they are not, it leads to a strengthening of the argument about a failure in principle.  As long as we insist that the whole project is in its totality a success, we expose the whole project to being attacked and described in its totality a failure. I think it's important to make a distinction in terms of what comes next between policy and principle.  The principle in question is that, regardless of all other considerations that include real politik, that include national interests of the U.S., that include national interests of the world community, nonetheless, the project of the new Iraq contained components that were stressed at the very beginning and highlighted, and today these components are being threatened, are being in a certain sense underlined as being not valid.  The component in question is that this is a project of democratization, this is a project of de-Baathification, and let us clarify what de-Baathification means in here. Very often, de-Baathification is understood as being the removal of people who were involved with the Baath at one level or another.  Actually, it goes far beyond that.  The Baath was not a standard political party.  It was an instrument of state control.  De-Baathification meaning basically restoring back to Iraqi society the notion that a political party is supposed to be part of civil society and not part of the state, not an instrument of control. The insistence on dismantling the Baath is not an insistence on removing an ideology or fighting ideas.  Ideology will live and die in the marketplace of ideas.  Ideology can be confronted by other--by thought, by discussion, by intellectual debate.  De-Baathification was not supposed to be about that.  De-Baathification is an insurance of sorts that the previous patterns of control are not there. So the principles that we're talking about are democratization, de-Baathification, and reconstruction.  These principles, if there is no recognition of the fact that the principles have to be, meaning in terms of the presentation, dissociated, at least on a temporary basis, from policy that led to errors--not just in policy, actually--errors in policy, errors in operations, and errors in procedures.  I'll just mention a few of them. The errors in policy stem from the fact that there seems to have been more than one plan for getting to implementation of those goals, getting transition, transformation, whatever it is, more than one plan.  But, however, whether it is because of lack of leadership or otherwise, there has been waffling, and instead of one plan being implemented with all its benefits and disadvantages, what we have had is a policy that goes back and forth and, therefore, negating the potential benefit of either plan or of any other plan that can come across.  This is what--meaning this is an error in policy that I think needs to be acknowledged. Error in operations.  Muqtada al-Sadr is a problem.  Fallujah is a problem.  However, was the way it was dealt with really the--in both cases, was it, is it the way that causes the least damage to if not the image, beyond the image, even the principle? For example, to have in Fallujah a long battle as opposed to a swift one that gets rid of the problem, and a long battle that ends up exposing not just the Coalition to all sorts of accusations, but actually ends up causing a thousand people dying, regardless of what's the percentage civilian or not.  That's a problem, an operational problem, but, nonetheless, we have to acknowledge that there was an error, there was a problem there. Another type of problem, another type of error that needs to be acknowledged has to do with procedures.  The so-called prison scandal is a good example of that.  It's a blatant example of that because what we have in here is what might be standard operating procedure--I'm not talking here about the excesses.  I'm not talking about the perversion in the excesses.  I'm simply talking about, for example, the fact that relatives of Baathists are being detained.  This is the type of procedures that Saddam used to apply.  This is an error.  We have to state that this is an error, and we have to retreat from it.  We have to correct it.  Again, in order--recognizing it as an error is in order to save the principle, to save basically that the mission in question is not a cynical mission, a hypocritical mission that aims at something that is basically just short term.  It is really a long-term project of instilling, injecting democracy into a culture that has plenty of components to use in democracy, but that currently does not have it. So this dissociation is extremely important, and what is also important in recognizing the failure in policy is to realize that there has been an abdication of the project.  The UN is probably a great organization.  At least it has done great work all over the world, hopefully.  However, the UN interest is one of stability, not of democracy.  The moment we have an abdication of the leadership from U.S. to UN, we're immediately moving from a focus or from a desired goal of democracy to a desired goal of stability.  Stability comes in very many shapes.  Even if the UN purpose is completely--I mean, not only benign but is fulfilled, this is not what this war was about, or at least--I mean, those of us who wanted this war to happen in order to remove the dictatorship were not interested in simply replacing a dictatorship by a situation of stability, whether it's controlled chaos or whether it is a benign dictator or whether it is someone inclined to think towards democracy down the line. That said, in what comes next, the way out of this is an acknowledgment of what was and a resumption of leadership.  And here the question, the resumption of leadership is not just from Washington, also from Baghdad, meaning the counterpart of the criticism that we have to direct at the American administration is a criticism that we have to direct at the Iraqi leadership and, in particular, liberal democrats.  We need a resumption of leadership.  We need to see a plan that is basically a plan that parallels, maybe complements what is currently being run by Lakhdar Brahimi, but definitely moves in the direction of restoring a little bit of hope.  Legitimacy in a certain sense will come once this plan is proposed, not the other way around. MS. PLETKA:  Hassan, thank you very much.  Thank you all, very good presentations. I'm going to ask a mundane question, but it's something that bothers me, and I want to hear what you all think about it. The consistency that comes out of what everybody has said, even if we disagree about certain aspects, is that we're having a problem with leadership, but we're also having a problem understanding Iraqi leadership and how to move forward in not just--either picking Iraqis, enabling Iraqis to pick Iraqis, or simply empowering any Iraqis to lead themselves. As we move forward and we make a transition, on June 30th the CPA is going to disappear, and we're going to have an Ambassador--Ambassador Negroponte--there.  We're talking about having a 3,000-man embassy in the green zone, and I wonder, not a lot of talk has been--not a lot of people have talked about this as much as they ought to, because given all of the themes that we've pulled out, does that really send the right message?  And maybe anyone of you would like to address that. MS. CROCKER:  Well, I'll start with that.  I think the short answer is no, and it looks like the embassy is just taking over from the CPA.  And, you know, I, in fact, remain very worried about it.  I honestly also remain worried about whether we are really geared up to transition from the CPA to that large an embassy in this short of a time. I know for one part that some of the money that was pledged, the $18.6 billion--I mean, I'm not saying huge proportions of it, but some of it has actually had to be shifted to pay for embassy costs for setting up this new embassy.  And on top of all of the other things that we're losing that money to, like increased security costs for the contractors and corruption and other things, we're talking about a significant proportion of the money if you add up all of those things.  But that's sort of a separate point. I think, again, it just gets back to sort of what are the plans going forward and will we really see much of a change after June 30th.  And I think the worry is, what can we create on the Iraqi side to provide the right kind of counterpart so that we don't, in fact, just see Ambassador Negroponte in effect taking over for Ambassador Bremer? MS. PLETKA:  No questions?  We can continue talking amongst ourselves if you have no questions. Ah, the old reliable.  Make it nice.  Please identify yourself and your affiliation. MR. DREYFUSS:  I'm Bob Dreyfuss(ph) with the American Prospect.  Someone mentioned--I think it was Entifadh or Hassan--that in 2003 there was a big middle, and then there was Islamists and neo-Baath kind of on the fringes.  Lately, over the last six, eight months, it seems like we're seeing more and more the Islamists come to the fore, to the point that Ayatollah Sistani is now being seen as sort of the uncrowned king of Iraq.  And Ahmed Chalabi has sort of built, tried to build an alliance with Sistani.  And the Islamists on the Council have staged walkouts to get what they want at different points or try to get what they want. I mean, do we see a danger of--does Shi'ite majority in Iraq mean Islamist majority in Iraq?  I remember, Entifadh, you saying that most Iraqis were secular and didn't believe in all this obscurantist Shi'ite, you know, Islamic revolution. MR. QANBAR:  Okay.  First of all, Ayatollah Sistani comes from a school that do not believe in  (?)  , do not believe in a religious state, and do not even believe in political Islamic parties, which is something played very good for Iraq now. I think there is no automatic political majority in Iraq.  The Shi'a are acting as a political majority now under pressure, under oppression, they do that.  I think if we have an Iraqi government in Iraq that represents or is a mirror of the Iraqi society, I think the Shi'a, you will see different types of political majorities on different lines.  People will--some of the Shi'a will start to make alliances with other parts of the Iraqi society and will build coalitions dependent on their interests or local interests or political interests for this specific group or the other group. Therefore, there is no--and I see that in the Governing Council.  There are 13 members, Shi'a members in the Governing Council, and they have different ideas about things, and they differ with each other about different things when they are now in the Governing Council. But the perception that when they see the thing in Fallujah is happening, when they see there's somebody who--Lakhdar Brahimi is coming and they feel there's probably a conspiracy to restore the old order, they will go back and act as one political majority. MR. MNEIMNEH:  I would simply add to that, nonetheless, there is an organic faction and segmentation in Iraqi political culture, not necessarily in Iraqi society.  And this can be felt, meaning already we have in the Governing Council -- [tape ends]. -- we have 76 majority [inaudible] and within that we have four to seven majority for Siri(ph) and people close to Siri.  And, therefore, we almost had the impression that Siri can claim to be being the majority of the majority of the majority, being the natural--how shall I say it?--heir to power in Iraq. I think it's extremely important to work on preserving to the extent that it exists and developing to the extent that it does not a distinction between communitarian majority and political majority.  And underlining, for example, slogans such as, which one sees in Baghdad and elsewhere, We are the majority and we will not accept the rule of the minority from here on, to underline the fact meaning to question what majority are we talking about.  If it is communitarian majority, it does not translate automatically into political majority.  And while as Entifadh is saying, this might be a fact in reality, but at the level of political culture this distinction is not always there, and it needs to be stressed. MS. CROCKER:  I might just add briefly to that because I think this whole question of the silent majority is a very interesting one and one that has been talked about throughout this whole process.  And I don't know what the other panelists think about whether there is still time to sort of win over that silent majority to what we had originally said we intended for Iraq, and presumably what the majority if Iraqi people have said that they have wanted in various polls that have been taken and things like that. But I think the worry, again--and I keep getting back to this point of the notion of a vacuum, but we've seen two kinds of vacuums in Iraq since the end of the war:  a security vacuum, at least in certain parts of the country, and a political vacuum.  And the worry when you have a political vacuum is that people can tend toward extremists.  And, again, I'm not saying that I'm predicting it's too late to pull that back and that there may still be that sort of silent majority that hasn't yet committed to one way or another, but you have to hope that that vacuum gets filled with something else before too long, because I think that you do really run the risk of getting more adherence to the more extremist and radical elements. And we've seen that in other countries as well, and I'm not meaning to suggest that Iraq looks like any other country, but I will just point out an interesting fact, that in Bosnia, you may not have had that same kind of vacuum created, but there the problem was more that you went to elections too early, and the election results came back for the ultranationalists in that country.  Because, again, if people don't know where else to turn, they will tend to turn to things--turn to people that are speaking to them in some way that sounds strong and sounds compelling, even though it may not be where they felt they were at the beginning. And so I have to hope that there is still--that we haven't sort of lost the ability through our commission failures or whatever else, policy failures, principle failures that we've been discussing today, that that silent majority will actually go in the direction that they would, I think, have naturally gone at the beginning of this process. MR. QANBAR:  I just want to add one more thing.  Baath Party ruled 35 years.  There is absolutely no civil society organizations or structure in Iraq.  I think Sistani represents today the biggest civil society leader in Iraq, and any person who believes in democracy, any politician in Iraq who believes in democracy, I think it makes a lot of sense to deal with the biggest leader of the civil society in Iraq.  Specifically, he's a person who has no interests in power and who is working as an honest mediator between the political process in Iraq and the masses who support him. MS. PLETKA:  You've all developed questions.  I'm impressed.  This gentleman back here? MR.           :  Thank you.  I'm Ashok  (?)  from the Indian Embassy here.  I had a question, basically a question, two parts.  One is the comment made by Mr. Hassan Mneimneh about resumption of leadership.  It's very relevant, very valid, very particular at this stage.  But at this moment, I think as has been also pointed out, it is Mr. Lakhdar Brahimi who has put forward a plan.  There might be some members, like the CPA, like IGC, Mr. Chalabi, might have some difficulties or whatever.  But CPA at the moment does not have either the credibility of the legitimacy to come up with a plan. Do we have anything else which in this short period can sort of, you know, come up?  You might sort of tinker a little bit with a plan or whatever.  But is there something else on the ground in Iraq which can sort of bring out another sort of leadership except the plan that Mr. Brahimi is following, having consultations and getting a cabinet of 25 or 30 people? The second part of the question is, you know, there is--from the IGC particularly, the Iraqi Governing Council, some members have raised doubts or misgivings about Mr. Brahimi himself and about his plan that he has put forward.  In the IGC, what is the level of support for Mr. Brahimi and his plan?  Because only two or three members we have heard who have opposed whatever he's proposing. MR. MNEIMNEH:  With regard to the CPA and to the American administration, I think it's not accurate to try to gauge--to measure legitimacy in terms of public opinion in Iraq.  This is, after all, meaning the legitimacy here is legal, meaning legal in the sense that as the occupying power, the Coalition has an obligation and, therefore, part of the obligation is to have a leadership role.  That said meaning it does not matter that for the time being 80 percent of the Iraqis would rather see the Coalition gone.  The plan in question is a plan for transition.  It's not a popularity contest longer term. The reverse applies for the Iraqi leadership.  I think this is the point that I made at the end.  I'll remake it because it's important.  I think it is, to the extent that local Iraqi leadership presents a plan, it will gain legitimacy.  It is not--meaning it's not the reverse.  We should not--we could not wait for a group to have legitimacy in order for it to be able to propose a plan or to take a leadership role.  These need not be in contradiction or in conflict with Lakhdar Brahimi's plan, which is, if you'd like, a least common denominator, like most UN sends, along the lines that let us see what we can agree upon, all of us, meaning international parties, local parties, regional parties, and let's make it work to where it's achieving the goal of stability.  It might be a good base, but it is not sufficient if really the intent is to get to a democratic structure down the line. MR. QANBAR:  On the issue of a plan, I'm surprised that people say there is no plan.  There is a plan.  The Governing Council has made a traditional administration law, a special clause about the caretaker government.  The Governing Council has met with the Iraqis, and there was an idea for the Governing Council to expand itself and add more political powers.  I don't think it's going to get the legitimacy, short of elections, but for a caretaker government, this is the best thing we can do now.  And this could become a provisional national assembly which will elect a government. But the thing that's happening is as follows:  The CPA considers any Iraqi role as a threat sometimes.  Any Iraqi significant politician becomes almost a threat to the CPA.  There is an intentional, sometimes, attempt to remove the Iraqi political role, which basically this contradicts the idea of liberation.  The CPA works as an occupier, wants to continue as an occupier.  I mean, there are many signs of that.  They are very reluctant to discuss the issue of the DFI, the Development Fund of Iraq.  They did not want to discuss--to have a treaty for the status of forces in Iraq which will solve the security issue which Ms. Crocker said. So there are--the Governing Council was very early on suggesting to discuss the DFI, the status of forces, the issue of expanding the Council.  The U.S. Government knows about it, but, however, every time there is time for a significant political Iraqi role, somebody will step in and say there is no solution, let's bring somebody else to make a solution.  And that's the problem.  The removal of the Iraqi role is the biggest problem which contradicts the issue of liberation. MS. CROCKER:  I didn't come here today to be a defender of the UN, but I find myself in the position of just having to respond to one thing that Hassan has said, which is that I don't think it's completely fair to characterize the UN as being an organization that is not interested in democracy and only interested in stability. In fact, as we all know, the UN tends to be really not that great at security things, but one thing that the UN does all over the world is actually democratization programs. I think the question here really is whether the UN Security Council members in particular are on board with what the U.S. has said that it wants for Iraq and what the U.S. has said that it wants for the greater Middle East.  And I think that is the question that the U.S. administration needs to discuss with its European partners, in particular, but with the permanent five members of the Security Council, because it may be that on that question there is disagreement among the members, among the member states.  But I just don't think that it's quite fair for us to assume that if the UN were to somehow take over in Iraq, which, anyway, no one is really talking about, that the UN would not be a pro-democracy force there. MS. PLETKA:  We've spent a lot of time over the last year and a half having meetings on Iraqi and talking about it.  One of the consistent themes that comes up that I notice is the issue of legitimacy and the question of somehow the ability of the United States to confer legitimacy, and even here I think we've talked a little bit about this. At the end of the day, the only people capable of conferring legitimacy are the Iraqi people, which is why we--why I--there's no "we" here, unfortunately--why I certainly was an advocate of simply picking a representative group and putting structures in place.  Democracy isn't about individuals.  It's about systems. But it seems that we continue to fall into this trap of thinking that somehow we can make a good judgment about who is legitimate in the eyes of the Iraqi people, and never providing them an opportunity to make that judgment themselves. Let me turn to another question before I rant on and on.  I'm sorry.  I'm just going to catch somebody in the corner there. MR. KNIGHT:  Thank you.  Michael Knight, Washington Institute.  You've talked about the Fallujah protection army and the dangers that could be attendant to that model of providing security for individual locations in Iraq.  At the same time, we hear that there are rumors that perhaps another battalion of ICDC may be created using contributions from various political parties and militias already in existence in Iraq. What do you think the future is for Iraqi security forces until we have strong government security forces?  Which seem to be being grown very slowly now.  They seem to be ready to wait for them to come into existence.  What model do you think we're going to see in the future?  Will it be like the Fallujah protection army, separate from the government, separate from existing militias?  Or will we see more like the 36th ICDC Battalion that you mentioned? MR. QANBAR:  I think what we need to do is what works.  What worked is basically having the 36th Battalion.  If we want to defeat the Baathists in Iraq and if we want to defeat the terrorists in Iraq, we must make more replicate of the 36th Battalion.  Some people in the CPA said the 36th Battalion will politicize the Iraqi army, will politicize the Iraqi security.  I don't think that--I'm not sure that bringing Baathists will not politicize the Iraqi army or the Iraqi security. We have to be practical.  Baathists are strong.  They have money.  They have power, and they have good organization.  If you don't bring people who fought Baathists, who are not intimidated by Baathists, if you don't help them, this is not a playing field.  If you don't have those powers who fought Baathists for years and friendly to the United States of America, you're not going to win this war.  And that's what we need to do. I think we suggested early on, even before the war, we suggested that thousands of Iraqis must be trained and accompany the liberation army, the Coalition, and now we're suggesting also to form a paramilitary Iraqi force which will have a robust effect on issues of security which will solve this problem.  And I think that's the only way to go. MS.           :   (?)  , United Press International.  You all said that there's a big gaping hole where the liberal pro-democracy media should be.  Why is that? MS. PLETKA:  The question was why is there a big, gaping hole where the liberal pro-democracy media ought to be.  Good question. MR. MNEIMNEH:  I think each one of us is eager to answer that.  To a large extent, if I am--back in July it was clear that the CPA wanted to be in control of a good segment of the media, and that control expressed itself in the form of a strategy.  Unfortunately, that strategy applied a model in terms of both funding, financing, that is, and training media personnel that did not take into consideration that those who are not going to follow the same--how shall I say?  The opponents are not going to follow the same rules, and, therefore, media that--for example, newspapers that were funded by the CPA ended up being rather stale compared to the other types of newspapers that were around.  And the same with, for a long time, the Iraqi Media Network, meaning the TV station, it became almost--and someone compared it to Pravda.  They said that it's so lame and so uninformative that basically it's like a sleeping pill of sorts. But, in any case, where you needed to have--at the time when you need to have an invigorated, independent media, the approach that the CPA seems to have taken was one of a state-sponsored media that was not at all responsive to the local situation, and the end result was that--I mean, one year later, you do not have the capacity, you do not have the engine to have such a media. MS. CROCKER:  Just taking off on the sleeping pill idea, two of the 11 nights that I was in Iraq and was in the Al-Rashid Hotel for some of those nights and Iraqi Media Network was playing on the TV, they played the same rerun of a Yanni concert.  And I'm not sure that anyone in Iraq wanted to see the Yanni concern.  I'm sure that I--I know I didn't want to see the Yanni concert.  But it was just sort of indicative of the failings of that TV station, at least from the beginning.  I haven't seen it recently. But I think that essentially I agree with what Hassan has said in terms of the CPA's effort to fund media outlets from the beginning.  But I think the problem is somewhat broader than that in the sense that it's also just been a failure to communicate both ways with the Iraqi people.  And I think it gets back to Dani's question about the 3,000-person embassy in the green zone and one of the worries about that. The green zone, as we all know, is very cut off from the Iraqi people, and I think there has been limited access for the Iraqi people, again, to get into green zone, to have channels into the CPA, which, again, has been running their country for a year; and, similarly, limited ability for the CPA, for security and other reasons, to get outside of the green zone and really interact in the kind of face-to-face with the Iraqi people that I think would make some kind of a difference.  It's not only about having good TV stations, but, of course, it's not helpful if you have bad TV stations when they're trying to compete with other media that is coming in through satellite from other countries in the region. On the question of sort of--I mean, I think it also gets to the issue of the larger U.S. failings in public diplomacy in this region, and that's certainly not something that--I mean, I wish I had a good answer as to why we were failing so miserably at that, because if I had a good answer, maybe I could make some suggestions to improve it.  But it seems like there have been a lot of good heads thinking about this problem, and we haven't yet come up with a good solution to it. MR. QANBAR:  I think the failing has--legitimacy comes from the Iraqi people, and the failings are because the Iraqi people have not put forward to lead their own effort.  I'll give you one example.  Al-Arabiya--Congress have assigned money to the Iraqi National Congress to open TV Liberty, and State Department refused to pay this money because--for some reasons. Now, they open Al-Arabiya and SAIC was given a contract to run it, which is an American company.  Then SAIC I think left or was fired or something, and they gave it to LBC, a Lebanese TV station. I mean, Iraqis are outraged in the street in Iraq.  They tell me, "Why can't we run things?  Why a Lebanese station will run"--one Iraqi friend of mine was joking, he said, "Americans consider Lebanese as not a nationality; it's a profession." [Laughter.] MR. QANBAR:  Sorry, Hassan, so I'm against you.  But this gives you the idea, the feelings in Iraq that everybody could do work in Iraq, everybody could lead in Iraq, except Iraqis.  The UN could lead in Iraq.  Lakhdar Brahimi as an Algerian could lead the political process.  Anybody could become a leader in Iraq except Iraqis.  And all that we hear about Iraqis, the Governing Council is insufficient, it's bad, it's not--the people don't like it; therefore, we must dismantle it and then bring somebody from our side of the country because he must be better than Iraqis.  That's the perception in Iraq, and I think there are a lot of people in Washington who believe this way, which made it difficult for the United States of America and made it difficult for Iraq to go forward. MS. PLETKA:  I think with that we're going to actually call it a day.  I thank all of you, and I'm sorry, but my voice is giving out.  It's all about me. Thank you very much for being here.  Thank you to our panelists for excellent presentations. [Applause.]</body></html>