<html><body>Operation Iraqi Freedom: A Strategic Assessment September 7, 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%">Presentation:</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="50%">Thomas Donnelly, AEI</TD></TR> <TR> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%">10:00</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="25%">Discussion:</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="50%">Eliot A. Cohen, Johns Hopkins University, SAIS</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%">Gen. Jack Keane, U.S. Army (retired)</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%">Col. Robert Killebrew, U.S. Army (retired)</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%">Michael O Hanlon, Brookings Institution</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%">11:30</TD> <TD vAlign=top align=left width="75%" colSpan=2> Adjournment</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE> Proceedings: MR. DONNELLY:  Ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to set new standards for slovenliness and informality in what used to be called AEI's Black Coffee Briefings in Iraq.  We don't call them that any more, but I assure you the spirit is as bitter and as unleavened as they used to be.  Instead of doing the absence of television cameras and the late arriving crowd, I commend everybody for their early rising habits on this first day back to the fall work season in Washington.  So we should take advantage of the opportunity of having a small crowd and a really fabulous panel and do this in as informal a manner as possible. I was going to take a few moments for shameless commerce to promote the AEI book that's just been released.  Everybody certainly will be quizzed on this later in the session, but they're available.  Operators are standing by, web mistresses able to take your order over the Internet.  Really great reading.  I recommend it to you. What I'd like to do before I retire into the role of moderator and let my colleagues and friends speak, is try to introduce and frame this discussion a little bit beginning from where we are in the political season now, and also trying to tie in some of the themes that I address in the book.  So before we get to the particulars of what's happening in Iraq today there's been actually quite a bit happening since we last convened this, the Sadr uprising and retreat from Najaf, Ayatollah Sistani's illness and return, and of course, even today we have now the, I guess, reconstituted Mehdi Army taking to the streets in Eastern Baghdad and Sadr City, and of course, the fighting in Fallujah and sort of on the Sunni front, as one might say.  So we've got a lot of ground to cover, but that's really what I would like to leave for the second part of the program, so again, apologies for the sales pitch related to the book. And I hope--this is not meant to be a commercial for the Bush campaign, but rather an analysis of how the Iraq issue is being framed in the presidential debates, so pardon me and please bear with me. We come out of especially the Republican Convention I think with relatively clearer political lines drawn about what the global war on terror, so called, means, and what the purpose of the fighting in Iraq is.  President Bush is very much sticking to his broad interpretation of the war on terror, that is, it's not simply al Qaeda and terrorist groups, per se, but it's a question of the political order or the broader political order in the greater Middle East, and that this long term, long hard slog, to quote Secretary Rumsfeld, is beginning to become the driving force in American military posture.  No doubt, as is always the case, this will be a slow and agonizing process, but it's beginning to cause some reappraisal within the Pentagon about what the primary missions of our forces are. John Kerry, on the other hand, very much wants to stick to a narrow interpretation of what the war is, but a fairly, if not entirely exclusive focus on sort of non-state terrorists, if I can get social sciencey [ph] for a minute, and with the broader strategic goal of trying to restore stability in the region.  Just quoting from candidate Kerry yesterday, "We do not have long-term designs to maintain bases and troops in Iraq."  Again, to me, that's not just simply a question about what the number of folks in Iraq is going to be, but about the broader military posture in the region and its prominence of lack thereof. This broader divide over the larger war is also reflected in differences over Iraq, as you shouldn't be surprised.  George Bush doesn't talk so much about Iraq being the central front as he did maybe six months ago, but I think the spirit of that phrase is still very much alive.  The President's rhetoric says that it's unwise to set a deadline for a pullout, and that we'll come home, quote, unquote, "as soon as the job is done."  Again, that's a pretty ambiguous phrase in one sense, but I think the meaning of it is fairly clear that will be there for a long time in large numbers. Again, by contrast, John Kerry, particularly yesterday, with his "W" stands for wrong riff, wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time, I would say that the President's critique that he has flip-flopped is not nearly so important as the fact that I think we have to believe John Kerry when he says that the states of the region, the governments of the region are a less important problem in the war on terror, and that the American presence in Iraq in particular is making the situation worse.  Not only has it antagonized our allies, but it's prolonged the insurgency, and he wants to get, as he said yesterday, forces out of Iraq and home within the span of his first administration. Morphing really quickly into what I have to say in this vis-a-vis the book, the book is divided into four essential parts.  One is a description of the planning for the invasion, which to my mind reflected, even in the planning for the invasion, a view of what the post-invasion situation in Iraq was going to be.  It turned out to be off-base a little bit, a discussion of the counter-insurgency, which again I would like to leave for the later discussion, but my argument is that sort of by relative standards of the art, it's pretty good.  Of course, there are the obligatory policy recommendations to come out of it, but relevant to what I'm trying to do or my part in this panel is an introductory chapter which tries to set the Iraq War in a broader, strategic context. And a couple other points that I think that at least were clear to me when I was writing the book, beginning about a year ago, was that the situation really reflected not only in Iraq but across the region a collapse of the status quo order, a set of events that began essentially in 1979 with the overthrow of the shah, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the seizure of the mosque in Mecca by Sunni radicals, and of course, the rise to power of Saddam Hussein.  To me what tied those events together, those indicative events, was that the post-colonial order, which really still had a foot in the--or origins could be traced to the post World War I settlement of European interests in the region, was that that order had lost whatever--or had begun to lose significant claims on legitimacy from its own people.  The regions' governments are more or less autocratic depending on what year you're looking at and what place you're looking at, but it's not a surprise to anybody to suggest that the governments of the greater Middle East are among the least free governments on the planet.  That remains the case even as other regions have begun to experience the growth of a liberal democracy, and the attitude that sort of framed the breaking up of the Ottoman Empire was that these were people, cultures and a people whose history did not suit them well for self-government, curiously, a European attitude that persists today. So in some ways the radical movement is, I would say, a reaction to that, and in its anti-American dimension, a hatred of the United States that springs from the United States having substituted in some ways for the European powers in sponsoring a variety of autocratic governments across the region, European powers having been too weakened to play that role, but the United States having sort of substituted in that way. As a result, certainly since 1979, our strategy and our military presence have already gone through pretty significant de facto changes, and if you just simply chart the number of troops in the AOR, in the region over the course of time, it's been constantly on the rise.  Since then we created what has become U.S. central command, nominally in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian hostage crisis.  But I think out of a broader recognition that this was an area of great strategic interest and that we were going to have to pay attention to is, not simply as a secondary theater in the Cold War, but over the course of time, and certainly today in the post-Cold War environment as a, if not the, central theater of concern. And again, just measured by troop presence, we went from almost nil to an average of 25,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines a day, obviously with spikes at an even higher level during Operation Desert Storm and the various Iraq related crises in the 1990s. To try to wrap up very quickly, the American strategy for the region has really changed fairly profoundly in my judgment and as I argue in the book, going from a classic kind of offshore balance or attempting to act through local autocrats and governments to maintain stability, to now as a change agent in the region, actually a revolutionary change agent, opposed to what passes for stability in the region, a transformer, to use the President's rhetoric, seeking political change and with wildly changing strategic and military purposes in the region. I guess I will try to conclude there.  That is a speed version of Chapter 1 of the book, but my way of trying to twist our subsequent discussion for my peculiar and I hope not partisan purposes. With that, I'll again retreat into the role of moderator.  We're going to go just down the panel.  I will introduce our panelists very briefly all at once right now. Bob Killebrew is a long-time friend, now a widely-published writer, but kind of the classic paratrooper-- COLONEL KILLEBREW:  Curmudgeonly is the word you're looking for. [Laughter.] MR. DONNELLY:  I was looking for a euphemism, but a very fine soldier and a very fine intellect as well, and a person to whom I owe a great deal of my own military education. Mike O'Hanlon is a resident scholar or whatever they call him over at Brookings, a permanent fixture at Brookings, and in my mind, though we disagree on some political issues, a very savvy military analyst who's done a lot of very profound work through the course of the years, and I'm delighted to have Michael with us. Eliot Cohen from Johns Hopkins, SAIS, known more affectionately as the hall monitor for certain disciplinary qualities that he may have, but also most recently author of Supreme Command, a collection of very fine case studies of strategy making at the very highest levels. Finally, Jack Keane, most recently Acting Chief of Staff of the Army, also a paratrooper and light infantryman by trade, but like Bob, a very fine soldier and a very serious student of the military art.  Those are not necessarily one and the same, but I don't think we could have had four more sagacious commentators to join us today, so I will now turn the microphone over to Robert. Again, my role at this point is going to be that of hall monitor a little bit.  We will get to the question and answer session, and I will remind everyone that questions are meant to be questions.  There are no cameras to grandstand for, so maybe we can actually learn a thing or two today, but anybody who steps out of line, I will terminate your question with extreme prejudice. So, Robert. COLONEL KILLEBREW:  Thank you, Tom.  I would like to start by saying that it's a pleasure to be here, a little daunting to look out at the intellect in this room. Those journalists present who have worked with me before know I always ask for the 10-second rule.  I'll be on the record, but anything I say that's really stupid, I have 10 seconds to take it back, please. [Laughter.] COLONEL KILLEBREW:  I am a retired soldier, and I get up in the morning and I still sing the company song.  I'm an optimist by nature, so what I'm going to talk to you about, I think, is how I see at least this war going down, both the way it started, how we're doing now, and where it's going to go. The pessimistic parts of my talk come with a great deal of strain because my impulse is to follow in ranks smartly and agree with our strategy, and I do in a large degree.  I'll recommend to you, those scholars out there, three books that are right now informing my thinking and those of others I think, at least on the e-mail circuits.  One is new, of course, and most of you have read it, Imperial Hubris, which is really good, and I'm happy and proud to say I formed most of my ideas before I read the book, so it's nice to be a little ahead.  A very good book talking about al Qaeda and the real strategic dimensions of what we're facing. The second is a book that's kind of out of print now by a retired army colonel named Harry Summers called On Strategy:  Vietnam in Context, written at the end of the Vietnam War when the Army was trying to sort itself out about what had gone wrong.  It is an absolutely excellent primer when you're trying to sort through strategic issues and really ambiguous situations we are today.  Harry's dead now, but he wrote a classic that soldiers and scholars should read. The third will surprise you a little bit, but it's worth going back and reading again, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by T.E. Lawrence, for an insight into the Arab mind, and aside from a great work of literature, it at least says that conflict between Church of England officers leading an Arab revolt and Muslims is not inevitable.  You come away from that with the feeling and the understanding that what we're going through right now with radical Islam has not been there.  This is a fairly new phenomenon in its present manifestation. On to the war.  I kind of sort the war into six phases, and I'll talk briefly about each one.  The preliminary phase, lest we all forget, started with a problem called Saddam Hussein, and I would put to you that whoever had won the election, the last one we had, either Mr. Bush or Mr. Gore, would have had to do something about Saddam Hussein in his first term.  He was the biggest foreign policy problem we had visible on the horizon, although al Qaeda certainly was there, and people weren't paying attention to them. Even after 9/11, the event that kind of warps everybody's thinking about this, Saddam Hussein was still, I would argue, a threat and a problem we had to deal with one way or another.  You can disagree with the manner in which the administration did it, but I would put to you that nobody can disagree that Saddam Hussein was a problem that was going to have to be addressed. The issues of weapons of mass destruction and the issue of terrorist involvement in Saddam Hussein's regime, I would put to you, has not yet been quite sorted out, and won't be for some time, and this is the optimist in me, if you can call it optimism.  I am not ready to throw in the towel on weapons of mass destruction because an awful lot of stuff strolled out the back door into Syria as we were coming in the front, that was not blocked.  So I think we're going to have to wait for history to judge that. One thing we can judge though was Saddam Hussein was a destabilizing influence in the Middle East.  And at the same time, Mr. Wolfowitz's grand view of how we were ultimately going to defuse terrorism by spreading some kind of modernistic liberalism across the Middle East was probably--and history will judge--was probably the right strategic vision.  Probably the only way we're ever going to get Islamic fundamentalism and radical Islam back in the box will be to achieve some kind of a moderation of those forces across that wide swath of Muslim countries ranging from around the Mediterranean literal and down through what is now Iraq and the Persian Gulf. The manner in which we chose to plan the war against Saddam Hussein bears some criticism I believe.  It was marked by a number of things that in retrospect now I'm fairly confident we can say were major flaws.  The first one was a misreading of the center of gravity of what we were trying to do.  For a soldier, the center of gravity means that thing you have to attack, that if you can attack it successfully, everything else crumbles.  I used to teach this stuff.  Put up with me for a minute. I think we misread the center of gravity.  Clearly the objective was the weapons of mass destruction with terrorist links in Iraq, but if you believe Mr. Wolfowitz, and I do and did, then the center of gravity was the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people and their willingness to assume a moderate secular government in Iraq.  And we had good indications that they were prepared to do that. So the first fault in the planning that I would say was not necessarily a military fault alone, it was that we designed our attack in a very, very symmetric way to go after Saddam's military and security infrastructure, believing that the secular rule would fall into our laps afterward. A broader reading of the strategic posture of the region would indicate that probably wasn't going to happen.  Now you know in retrospect that when we went into Iraq, al Qaeda and his like-minded people where very thankful we'd done it because it gave them a chance to enter into Iraq and enter conflict with us, and radicalize those Iraqis who didn't like being invaded, and that's what happened. So the first problem with the invasion I would say was we designed it against the wrong target, strategically against the wrong target.  Operationally probably the right one, but strategically wrong. Second, we were gripped, and still are gripped, in the Defense Department here by an expeditionary mindset that has the idea that you take down your opposition with small highly precise forces tailored to do one or two specific things, which is simply not the way you enter a country and take the government down and settle it out as you've done before.  And the spectacle of the largest, richest country on earth going with minimum force into a war is something I still can't quite adjust to. A young friend of mine was an armor captain who led the attack across the berm on the first day, and he was towing two tanks in his company because they were down for spare parts because the logistics stream couldn't keep up with the Army.  I would argue too there is something wrong with that when the United States decides we're so poor we can't afford good logistics. The third piece, I would argue, is the one I just alluded to, and that was the planning was terribly symmetrical with the exception of the use of, the imaginative use and the good use of special operations forces and airborne forces up in the north to compensate for the Fourth Division not getting in.  This could have been designed by Rommel in 1940 using updated equipment.  It was designed to drive deep into the heart of the enemy, seize a critical objective and then wait for the enemy to capitulate and everybody to go on about their daily business. It was a well-executed, bravely carried out, technically great piece of work by the Army and the Marine Corps, but it was pitched into the wrong context.  So when it was over, and Dave Petraeus, the 101st, and the guys in the Third Division sat back and waited for the country to resume normal life.  It just didn't happen.  It just didn't happen.  I heard at that time a very smart four-star general named Keane say, "We were not prepared for what happens to a country that has been so traumatized when the controls were taken off."  That was very true, and we're living with it today.  That's the first phase. The second phase is the attack itself, as I've just said, brilliantly executed, technologically good.  If you were a soldier watching that, you had to be very, very proud of what the guys were doing.  Underneath it though, a nagging concern about logistics all the way through.  Now that the history is beginning to come out, like my friend towing his two tanks into combat, you're beginning to see how guys were even then, even as the war started before the first contact, were beginning to scrimp on logistics because they just didn't see it powering up behind them.  Whether or not that's a--we just got to pause before we can design a better logistics system or whether that just can't be fixed, or we should be putting in mounds of logistics behind attack is something we're going to have to sort out and sort out soon. I would argue that the next phase of the war is the one we're in now--I'm sorry--is the one that ended when the Iraqi Provisional Government stood up, and that was this period of confusion that went on for about a year while we tried to recover ourselves from bad initial dispositions and get back on our feet and put an Iraqi Government into place that can start governing Iraq.  Clearly, the Provisional Authority was not it.  And I would offer to you that one of the debts the United States owes Ayatollah Sistani was that he insisted that there be a provisional government stood up about a year, I think, before Paul Bremer wanted it done.  If that hadn't happened, we would still be trying to govern Iraq now under much worse circumstances in my view. So the second phase of the war existed from the end of major unit operations until the stand up of a interim Iraqi Government and it's marked by the occupation of U.S. forces, and an attempt to sort out what we had to understand the problem, and in that period, I would argue, the other side had the strategic initiative, took the initiative away from us, started building their forces, and by the time the interim government stood up, it seems to me we were clearly on the defensive. The next phase begins with the stand up of the Iraqi Provisional Government.  The Iraqis now have a flag again.  They have a government.  They have an army that's fighting for their own government and not us.  And fortunately, I think, you see a very vigorous government in the person of the Prime Minister, the President and the other people, who are carrying out, I think, under a great deal of strain, setting up and running an Iraqi Government, democratic, reasonably democratic for the first time ever that I know of.  Since I'm a Vietnam guy, I compare this to the task the South Vietnamese had of trying to set up a government under attack, and I have to tell you, I think the Iraqis have got a tougher job, and they're doing much better than I thought they would when they first stood up. The Iraqi Government and the Iraqi Army forces that have been involved in the fight so far seem to be doing okay.  Some are good, some are bad, but okay.  The government is spreading its influence where it can minus the areas that had to be ceded to rebel authorities before they took over, and I think we have reasons to be optimistic with the progress of the interim Iraqi Government so far.  That's where we are today. The next phase, I will argue, begins with the elections or the run-up to elections.  At some point around the elections, the people who do not want this government to succeed are going to have to start staging a counter-offensive.  I think the reason number of American deaths we've seen over there this week are not keyed to that.  I think these deaths and this offensive are keyed to trying to influence the U.S. election.  That, to me, is just a no-brainer.  We can expect that to continue through November until they see how the elections come out. Then there will be another offensive keyed to disrupting the Iraqi elections to be held, I believe, in January.  When those elections take place, there will be significant disaffected minorities left in the country.  Some of those will bow to democratic pressure.  My prediction is that after the elections at some point there will be a civil war in Iraq.  That civil will be obviously supported and abetted by the Islamic fundamentalists who do not want to see a secular government.  I suspect we'll have an awful hard time sorting out exactly who is on the other side, but the issue will be secular government, democracy of some form, versus the people who want an Islamic state.  And I predict that that civil war will probably take all the resources of the Iraqi Government up to that point, the Iraqi Army, certainly all the forces we still have in country, and possibly more to settle out. Following the civil war, which may go on for as long as it takes to settle out a civil war--we're still fighting ours--but my guess is probably about 6 months. After the civil war, in the final phase, you'll see the consolidation of the Iraqi civil authority and the settling in of some form of civil government in Iraq.  I'm a soldier, not a politician, but if I had to pick right now, I'd say we probably will wind up with some kind of a federated arrangement in which the Kurds in the North will have some kind of a state and a fair degree of autonomy, and there will be some split-out between the Shia and the Sunni in the South. The nature of the government will probably be anti-American in orientation simply because I don't believe a government can survive over there today if it's pro-American.  I think the best we can hope for is an Iraqi Government that emerges by the summer of next year with a neutral stance, good relations with its neighbors, some control but probably not much over its borders, and making accommodations with Iran and Syria as fast as it can to survive as a state. I think probably by next summer, summer or fall of next year, they'll probably start making noises about, well, it's been nice to have the United States here; now you can start to withdraw, if we haven't withdrawn already. MR. DONNELLY:  Bob, thank you very much.  The remarkable thing is you think you're still an optimist. [Laughter.] MR. DONNELLY:  Michael, over to you.  Rescue us from our misery. MR. O'HANLON:  I don't know.  It's a great honor to be here and to follow Bob, who laid out a very clear way to think about this, and I guess my bottom line is I'm not too far away from where he is.  Let me--since I'm the No. 2 hitter, I'll just try to sacrifice him over the second and leave the big guns, Tejada and Mora, to try to clean up. But what I really want to say is in the spirit of what Bob has said, and so I'm just going to make a couple of very short comments, and pass things along. I want to divide how things are going in Iraq today into three main categories:  politics, economics and security, and simply assess how I think things have been going through the spring and summer on each.  I don't think we've been thinking very strategically, even about these last three months as a collective entity.  A lot of the attention in the United States media has been lost since the transfer of sovereignty, and then the American political conventions, they've take on more of the focus.  I think that's unfortunate.  I think we have to look at how the summer's gone.  The bottom line is it's been a long, hot, ugly summer in Iraq.  Things are going worse. I say this as a person who's tried to be an optimist.  Admittedly a Democrat, and I know it's becoming a partisan issue and it's irresistible for people that want to make political hay.  I don't think this was necessarily the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.  I tend to think of this more the way Tony Blair talked about it, that I focused on the weapons of mass destruction, and I wanted to see those eliminated, but if we had to eliminate the regime in the process, that was a bonus, not something to be apologetic about or regretful about, and therefore, I agree with Bob's point as well. But having said that, and therefore having distanced myself somewhat from most in my party these days, I do want to say I think things are not going very well, and let me just again go through these three main categories quickly. On politics, I actually think we've handled the politics pretty well in the last three months.  This is my most optimistic bin of developments.  I think the transfer of sovereignty was expedited correctly, as Bob has argued.  I think Prime Minister Allawi is a dream candidate from our point of view.  I think he's handling things very well.  And following up on that, I think Najaf was actually handled well for a couple of reasons. One, Allawi worked with us, and yet he maintained a certain distance from us.  He seemed to be, at least to my mind--I hope to Iraqis as well--making many of the decisions, not simply following our demands.  He continued to offer this amnesty every beyond when most American commentators thought it reasonable or productive, which had the benefit, I think of distancing himself from the United States, which is a requirement for his success. I also think it was the right way to handle the insurgency in that context, even if we didn't have the ultimate tactical victory against al-Sadr in Najaf, I don't think there was such a thing that was strategically meaningful to be had anyway.  It's not as if the core base of the al Mehdi Army was inherently in Najaf, and if you had seen simply kept fight going in some tactically logically self-consistent way, you would have eliminated the problem.  I think you would have probably reinforced the problem by appearing indifferent to the well-being of Muslim populations and possibly destroying mosques and the great Imam Ali Shrine, and I think we were therefore correct to have the carrot and stick and for Allawi to show patience all throughout that process. So that's the good news.  I think Allawi plus Najaf basically good news on the political front this summer. Economics, I'm a little bit less happy.  I'm less happy than I expected to be at this point after an $18 billion appropriation last fall, after hearing American officials in the Bush administration promise through the winter and spring that if anything, we'd be importing labor from outside the region because there would be so much work going on in Iraq by this point in 2004 that we would actually have to look for spare hands because Iraqis themselves would be busy working.  We have an unemployment rate lower than our own perhaps, and be bringing labor from outside Iraq to do all these jobs.  That was the kind of promise I heard.  That has not happened. As best we can tell at our Iraq Index Project at Brookings--and since we're in the spirit of advertisements--Brookings.edu/Iraqindex.  What we've managed to discern--and it's hard to do this well, but we've tried--unemployment rates seems to be in the 30 to 40 percent range still.  Now, that's better than a year ago, but it's also poor overall, and it's probably worse than under Saddam Hussein. Crime rates in Iraqi streets--just presaging where I'm going on the security front--also haven't much improved and are probably worse than under Saddam Hussein.  But on the economics, unemployment is high.  I think we're focusing too much on the big infrastructure projects.  We should probably do those but also use more of these commander discretionary fund sorts of projects.  We should have had development experts doing more of that to go along with the commanders from the start, starting last summer when conditions were somewhat more benign. As a result, because we haven't done those sorts of things, we waited for the big projects to get under way, they've consistently been delayed by red tape, by various problems with security.  We've only spent about a billion out of that 18 billion from last fall's supplemental.  Thankfully, we've managed to spend the Iraqi's money a little more quickly as well as the previous supplemental appropriation we passed last year. But the bottom line is the Iraqi economy is not being rebuilt very fast at all, and I'm surprised at the lack of progress.  So unemployment remains high.  Quality of life indicators are for the most part stagnant.  Electricity, for example, every so often you see a story about how electricity levels are now higher than they were in terms of peak production.  Unfortunately, the average number of hours per day when the power is on has gone down.  That's the sort of story you get when you look at the economics in Iraq.  I won't go through a lot more examples, but for every good news story there's bad news.  The bottom line is things are not horrible, but they're only about as good as they were under Saddam in his latter years.  That's not a very high standard of success, and they're not getting better very fast. Now moving to security, this is where the news, to my mind, is tragically almost all bad.  For one thing, from what we can tell, typical Iraqi citizens don't feel very secure in their daily lives.  Street crime remains a big problem.  That's not what gets the headlines in the United States, but for Iraqis living their lives that's a big part of their problem, and that's now of course been reinforced in recent months by much more in the way of truck bombings and car bombings.  That's been a development that really began in the wintertime.  Iraqis are increasingly worried, if you look at the opinion polls, about these sorts of trends, and it's not just the crime any more, it's also the insurgency is starting to have an effect on their lives because it's grown.  And then making the transition into that point, the insurgency versus American-led stabilization forces.  The news here is almost all bad, I'm afraid to say.  I don't find much good news to see in the data whatsoever, or in my more sort of interpretive, subjective views as I step back from the data. But let's just go through very quickly American troops in August were in the mid 60s or close to 70.  We've now lost close to 10 people in September.  We've had more Americans wounded in August of this--just this August, than in any other month in the entire period since the invasion with the possible exception of one month.  The data is a little murky on that.  The number wounded was about 1,000 in August, a very high number.  The insurgent attacks are up by roughly a quarter in daily terms relative to the spring.  Spring levels were already at an all-time high relative to the previous winter and fall. The U.S. official estimate of the size of the insurgency used to be about 5,000 hardened fighters.  If you asked CENCOM [ph] last fall and winter how many hardened insurgents there really were in Iraq, of course the first answer was correctly, "We really don't know," but the second answer was, "If you press us for a number we'll say 5,000."  That was the party line all through the winter and spring.  Now the party line isn't given out any more, but in the most recent interview given by an American military intelligence officer on the record in Iraq to a reporter named Jim Crane [ph] of the Associated Press, the guy said "20,000 is our estimate of the size of the hardened insurgency." Now, if people on this panel like Eliot Cohen and Bob and General Keane, I know very well a lot of people with great expertise in understanding insurgencies, and the first thing we all have to say is the data's all garbage, we don't know, we never knew.  So I don't want to claim that the insurgency is really four times bigger today than it was last winter, but I'm still troubled by the trend in our official estimates or even our unofficial estimates. So I've covered casualty rates, size of the insurgency frequency of insurgent attacks.  I could mention things like sabotage against infrastructure.  These numbers are up as well.  The bottom line is I'm a little bit at a loss to fully understand the trend, but I don't have any positive things to say about it, and I'm inherently very worried. There's a lot more to say about the future.  There's a lot more to say about strategy and other questions that Tom has on the event roster for today, so I won't go into much more detail now.  Let me simply say I don't think we're necessarily in line for a strategic defeat in Iraq, but I do think the most likely scenario is we muddle along for two or three or four years until we can finally turn this civil war over to the Iraqis to do more and more of it on their own, and we leave a country that remains one of the most violent countries in the region probably looking a fair amount like Lebanon.  I just hope with the transition towards a fairly centralized and in-control government happening fast instead of taking 5, 10 years of ongoing civil warfare to achieve. I'm afraid I can't give a much more optimistic assessment than that right now.  The only good news I'll leave you with is I've been wrong on this before and let's hope I'm wrong again. [Laughter.] MR. DONNELLY:  Hear, hear to that, Michael.  I was hoping I would get two half-full glasses out of the first two of you so I could declare victory, but I clearly think that I'm short of that mark.  So, Eliot, help me out. MR. COHEN:  That makes me feel a lot better.  These guys were really kind of upbeat. [Laughter.] MR. COHEN:  It's--actually this is--I want to congratulate Tom.  This is a great panel, and it's a little bit daunting to follow two friends whose opinions I very much value, and I want to throw a bouquet at Michael in particular for the Iraq Index Project.  I think in this kind of war, a war without fronts, even when the numbers are as slippery as indeed they are, and Michael's been very forthright about just how slippery they are, it really is important to look for some of the things that you can quantify and measure.  Being always skeptical and careful, which he is, that's a very, very useful project. I agree with much, in fact, just about everything I've heard.  I thought what I would do would be to say something perhaps a little bit different, putting on my hat as an historian and trying to put the war in some larger context, not just of how we got here, but what it may mean, and in fact looking back a bit.  And in fact, I just want to break it up into four pieces, talking about the enemy, the American military, American society and the region. Let's begin with the enemy.  You know, if you go and look at all the counter-insurgency textbooks and field manuals, most of which are either Vietnam or derivatives of Vietnam-era wars, you realize that the kind of problem that we're facing is not the one that the doctrine writers and the military thinkers really were focused on.  If this was an insurgency that fit the right models, we'd be waiting for the third phase, in which Musab al-Zarqawi would raise half a dozen divisions and begin a march on Baghdad.  That's clearly not going to happen.  The reason why I point this out is it seems to me this has made our adjustment to dealing with this war much more difficult.  This is a different kind of insurgency problem.  We have not thought about insurgency in a very long time.  There was a kind of self-inflicted amnesia on the part of the military.  Civilian historians tend not to be terribly interested in it, and so we are--we're left without conceptual frameworks.  We are not up against a classical kind of opponent with a centralized structure, in fact, even with a coherent ideology.  This is a collection of different kinds of groups with different kinds of motivations. We don't even, with the possible exceptions of Sadr and Zarqawi, and maybe not even then, you know, it's not as if we're up against an Aguinaldo, a kind of a charismatic nationalist leader.  It's something very different than that.  And we're also not up against an opponent who has a single coherent vision of what they want to achieve.  So that's actually a source of optimism in some ways.  The other side doesn't have a single program.  It also makes it much more frustrating. I would be a bit harder on our friends in the military and in the Pentagon about this 5,000 fighter stuff.  I think we were unfortunately fooling ourselves for a long by, or trying to comfort ourselves by repeating this mantra of, well, there are the criminals that Saddam released from the jails, there are the foreign jihadis, and there are 5,000 hard-core, die-hard, bitter-ender Saddam loyalists.  And that canned phrase got in the way of a serious analysis of what the opposition really is, which is a formidable intelligence and intellectual problem. The second thing, to put the American military into a bit of context, the first thing following from what I just said, although it has been tactically, tremendously adaptable and definitely heroic, and tremendously impressive and resilient, all of which I feel very strongly about, it is also clear that it has strategically been woefully unprepared for the kind of war that its facing, and without meaning to be harsh on commanders who have done their best in very difficult circumstances, there have been a limited number of senior military commanders who clearly are right for this kind of war.  I mean an example is somebody who very much is, is Lieutenant General Dave Petraeus, who thank goodness, is over there now training the Iraqi military.  But I think you'd have to say most America generals weren't thinking about this kind of war. The result is, I suspect, a lot of thinking which has been very tactical and short-term, and so things which, in the context of insurgency are operational or even strategic level decisions--I have particularly in mind the attack on Fallujah and then the decision to stop the attack on Fallujah--were made without a kind of a larger context of a campaign plan and a view of how this war was going to unfold, so that's one rather troubling thing. Two other things about the American military.  The first is I think this war will seed the--in part because of just-- [Tape change.] MR. COHEN:  [In progress] -- the Vietnam generation, the American military.  This military is now filled with veterans, with combat veterans, which is in itself a very important fact.  Veterans of multiple conflicts, most notably Iraq, but not only Iraq, and with a very different set of experiences than the Vietnam veterans, although a very high-level of frustration nonetheless.  And it would be interesting to speculate on what the long-term consequences of that will be, but I think there is a kind of a generational shift that's going on here, which will be tremendously important for the future of our military 20 or 30 years out. Last point I would make is there's always a lot of talk about the National Guard and Reserves.  I believe the Guard and Reserves are now about 40 percent of our strength in Iraq? MR.          :  [Inaudible]. MR. COHEN:  40 going to 50.  And people talk about that in terms of retention, and you know, lots of other things, but I think there's another thing.  Maybe this is just me.  We are really profoundly changing our understanding of what the citizen soldier is, and again, maybe this is the romantic military historian in me, but the idea of the citizen soldier, the Minutemen and all that, is something that's profoundly important in the American military tradition, and we are not being self-conscious about what we're doing to that.  We are basically treating these people as part-time professionals who can be used the way you use part-time professionals, that is, you pick them up, you send them to some dirty little war that's far away for a rather extended period of time, the same length of tours as their regular counterparts.  That is very, very, different from centuries of understanding of what it means to be a citizen soldier, and again, long-term consequences. American society.  One thing that's quite interesting that's really rather different from what people expected, American society has shown a remarkable willingness to tolerate casualties.  If we go back to what some of the discussions were in the 1980s and 1990s about American society, what was assumed about what level of casualties the American public could sustain, the picture that was frequently painted, which some of us at the time thought was wildly exaggerated, was of a society which simply would not tolerate casualties. Well, we've now had 1,000 people killed, something on the order of 7,000 wounded.  To the extent that people have turned against the war, they have turned against the war not simply over as a result of revulsion at casualties but revulsion at what looks like incompetence or failure, which is a very traditional kind of American revulsion.  It's much less about casualties, per se.  That's an interesting thing, that could change, but it's important. The other thing that's striking is there remains a great deal of support for the American military as an institution, and that's despite the real body blow of Abu Ghraib, and again, that's rather different from what you saw during Vietnam, what we saw during the Philippine War, perhaps other conflicts in our history.  The American military remains a remarkably popular institution. The last thing that I want to say, and this is just a kind of a comment.  It's not so much a comment about history as from a historical perspective.  I was also in favor of the war I think in many ways much along the lines that Michael was, but I also bought the basic vision that Bob laid out.  I felt--and I feel even more strongly--that there would have been unimagined consequences from not going to war, but there will clearly be unimagined consequences from going to war.  When you go to war there are large second- and third-order consequences which are unpredictable, and I think we would be kidding ourselves if we don't realize that will be the case, that there will be things which none of us on this panel can anticipate, which may very long.' And I'll just conclude by saying that one of the things that has struck me over the last few years, a period of, after all, tremendous discontinuities and major shocking events both for ill and for good, that somehow after each one we think that the world has settled back into some kind of groove and we're back on some more or less linear path, and I don't think that's the case at all, and so I think we could be up for all kinds of shocks and surprises, some pretty bad, hopefully some pretty good over the next 5 to 10 years. MR. DONNELLY:  Eliot, thank you very much. I reserve the right of the moderator to ask the first question, so rather than say anything now, General Keane, please take the mike. GENERAL KEANE:  Notice he gave up his charge that he would get somebody optimistic to talk to you.  I think he's given up all hope here. [Laughter.] GENERAL KEANE:  Anyway, I probably will put some of the water back in the glass. To establish where I'm coming from, I do believe that prior to 9/11 and since what took place at 9/11 we're probably in if not the most dangerous period in our history, certainly one of the most dangerous.  We really are up against a political ideology with political objectives, and they've taken hostage one of the world's great religions, and it's fundamentally a clash of ideas and values because they're so opposed to capitalism which redistributes wealth, and democracy which protects individual rights and guarantees the rights of the minority, and they're opposed to universal suffrage, separation of church and state, personal freedoms and the like.  These are big ideas, and that is what we're up against.  Big ideas are difficult to defeat. We defeated Nazism with brute force, and it took a better idea for most of the 20th century to defeat communism.  I think what we're up against, radical Islam, will define the 21st century  in terms of the United States and where it's going to spend its intellectual energies, and also, unfortunately, its treasures in terms of its youth.  It's not going to go away with bullets alone, that's for sure.  What we seem to be able to do is regenerate just by shooting them. I also believe that Iraq is a subset of this, and I'm not going to get into the arguments pro and con.  If you want to ask me about them, I'll certainly give them to you in questions and answers. Within the last month I spent better than a week in Iraq doing an assessment of where we are, and I'll give you some benefits of that.  I can't talk about all of it because some of it's classified.  I'm not hiding behind that, but that's the reality of it. But I came away enormously encouraged by the national and political leadership of Prime Minister Allawi and what he is attempting to do, and the team that exists there among Allawi, Negroponte and General George Casey.  They work very well together, and they have a common understanding of the enemy which they have agreed to, and that's not the easiest thing in the world to do, and also where they're going, and that's not easy to do because all of them are coming from different perspectives, but there's enormous amount of communication that's taking place among them, and we should be encouraged by that. Allawi is what you see, strong leader, very direct with his people.  We don't get a lot of that here, but he talks to his people very directly, and I will use American words to describe it, but you know:  The Americans have opened the door for us and given us an opportunity and we have to take charge of ourselves here.  You have to get off the fence, and you have to be willing to support a free Iraq, and you have to do things for yourself, and you cannot expect the Americans to be doing them for you.  We should be thankful to the Americans that lost almost 1,000 people here in helping to gain our freedom for us.  And that should provide us inspiration to move ahead, and we've lost thousands of Iraqis as well in trying to obtain this freedom for ourselves. So just straight talking.  He understands that the Iraqi people by nature, after 35 years of Saddam's repression, many of them are sitting on the fence.  And while we saw this in some of the former Soviet states, it didn't exist in all of them certainly.  Some of them just, with enthusiasm, reached out for capitalism and democracy.  Some of this is certainly understandable when you see people that are used to government doing so much, and now all of a sudden initiative, innovation and opportunity is yours, and it's in your lap to take charge of.  So he understand this, and he's attempting to motivate his people in that direction.  The only frustration you get about that that I have had is, my God, I wish we had had this so much sooner than what we have had it.  I mean that's one of the tragedies. The other thing is the Iraqi security forces.  This has been a mixed bag to be sure, and I think early on we expected too much and we probably promised too much, if we're honest about it.  But the Iraqi security forces are now being properly resourced, and it's taken time for those resources to arrive, and they're arriving--they're not all arrived--and they're being properly trained and they're doing a pretty good job of vetting the leaders so we need properly-led, properly-equipped and properly-trained forces if they intend to be effective.  And after all, the United States' presence will probably be there until these security forces are effective.  So this is very important to whatever exit strategy we have, and for the Iraqis to be able to protect themselves. One of the things that I wanted to make sure of myself is would they fight, would they really fight under stress?  And I think they will.  The vast majority will fight for their country, and that's something to be encouraged by, and I wasn't sure of that for sure.  I mean you think most people would do that, but if you're not properly trained and you don't have the proper discipline, you don't have proper leadership, people aren't going to fight effectively. I don't know if you know SLA Marshall, when he did a study of World War II, discovered that in most infantry soldiers the majority of them never fired their weapons at the enemy because they weren't properly trained.  If you don't think you can hit something, why would you raise up your body and put it to physical risk like that if you didn't have any confidence that you could hit something.  That's the reality of it.  So that's how serious the lack of proper training is to a military force because then you're asking every day for acts of bravery.  And a military force should not run on bravery.  It runs on proper training, proper discipline and proper leadership, and bravery should be the exception. So the Iraqis are being properly trained by our Special Operations forces and also by conventional U.S. forces, and I think that what the Kind of Jordan is doing in opening up his police academy to two months of training for the police in Iraq is certainly very commendable.  On average in the United States a policeman gets four to six months of training, but the two months that they're receiving there certainly goes a very long way to adding a degree of confidence, and also, the indoctrination has to take place because the Iraqi policy by nature were corrupt.  If you wanted to have--if a crime was committed in your neighborhood and you wanted somebody to do something about it, you had to pay for it.  They didn't police your neighborhood.  They only came if you were willing to give them a couple of bucks for it in our currency. So we have to vet the police force as well because even the youngsters who were joining it who never were a part of the police force, that's their image of a police force, and there probably will always be some degree of corruption in the Iraqi Police Force, I guess to some degree, but we can get it down to something that's very manageable and hopefully by exception.  But that's encouraging.  I saw police every place; every town and city I went to the police were prevalent.  They were all over the place, and all of them armed.  When I had been there before there was not that many police and a lot of them were not even armed yet. So the Iraq security force, the largest--police are going to be about 90 to 100,000.  The Iraqi National Guard will be the largest part of the military force, and this is stated to be about 250,000, but I suspect the whole police, military force and army will grow.  The army is the smallest part of that force, and this is being together for external threats, but I think that will grow as well. And the border police and the facility protection police are the other part of this force, so on the police end of it you have police, as we traditionally understand it, you have facility protection police, you have the border police which are must like our border patrol, you have the Iraqi National Guard, which is really fighting the lion's share of the insurgency.  And then you have the Iraqi Army, which will also fight the insurgency, but ostensibly is being organized to deal with external threats. In terms of the enemy itself, I think one of the good things about it is I don't believe the foreign terrorists are going to increase.  I believe Zarqawi's memo that he wrote months ago.  Many of you I'm sure read it.  He felt the death knell for him and his people was the movement towards a free Iraq and towards free elections, and they would have to take the jihad someplace else.  I believe that to be the case. So in time they will leave Iraq in my view.  In time, the real issue deals with the Iraqis themselves, and the challenge that we're facing with them because even a simple analysis of the situation, despite the numbers that we've killed, the numbers we've captured, the enemy we're fighting at best is the same in terms of numbers.  So what that tells you obviously is that they have a capacity to regenerate, and maybe they've had the capacity to increase. And that leads you to one of the real challenges that we're facing on the security side, and that deals with--the recognition on the leadership now is that economic development, physical reconstruction and security go hand in glove, and there was tension between those issues in the past, if you remember.  There's no longer any tension.  Everybody recognizes that they are complementary to one another and you have to do both at the same time. I also agree with my colleagues here who were saying that what we have to do is push some of this economic development down into much smaller projects as the commanders are demanding so that they can do what?  They can get jobs for those youngsters.  These 15- to 24-year-olds who are rather aimless, frustrated by American presence and easily persuadable for a few bucks to shoot an RPG or to blow up an IED.  And get that youngster off the street and get him working to be a part of that society there. And that economic development is a huge challenge that we're facing, one I think that the leadership clearly understands and is moving towards--and you saw Negroponte's request to rearrange the priorities to deal with this reality.  I think that's a huge step in the right direction. I don't want to minimize the challenges of security, but you get such a disjointed view of what is really going on in Iraq.  I mean it's astounding.  If I could just take you all, cart you off, take you all to towns that I saw, what you would see is--the sense of normalcy would astound you I think.  At times you say, where's the war?  Because marketplaces are teeming with people.  Traffic jams are all over the place.  Kids are on the street.  Women are going about doing the tasks that they do in that society.  When school is in, everybody's going to school, little kids in uniforms, backpack on their back and the rest of it.  Unemployment went from a staggeringly high 60 percent to something down to 30 percent. So what I try to do is put this in context and see it for what it is, and balance the negative against so much of the position that is taking place as well.  That doesn't mean that Iraq is not a dangerous place.  It is, in certain places it is.  I mean where the Kurds are there's a fledgling democracy.  Up in Mosul and other areas up there, there is sporadic fighting that takes place, and in Basra it's almost benign, and there's an occasional outburst of violence.  And the real issue is as we know it is.  It's in the central part of Iraq and the south central part dealing with the Shia's but with Sistani's capable leadership ably demonstrated here recently, I think he'll be able to keep that under control. Even in Baghdad, as you move around the Baghdad the sense of normalcy in Baghdad is stunning to me.  While I was there I was rocketed, I was murdered and we were shot at, all right?  That the reality. MR.          :  That's normal. [Laughter.] GENERAL KEANE:  But those things took place on big bases where I was with thousands of other people, and the meetings I was at didn't even stop, all right?  Nobody made a fuss about it. The fact of the matter is that there is a serious security challenge.  I don't want to minimize that.  And the United States military, what you never see is the operations they're conducting daily dealing with this security thing which also has to do with casualties.  They're not just sitting there being shot at.  Every single day they're conducting operations and very little reporting takes place on that, tragically so I think. I'll also tell you that my hair is longer, I wasn't in a uniform, and I was pulling on these kids to get information out of young soldiers, sergeants, young officers.  They're doing patrol 7 days a week every single day, 130 degree heat when I was there.  And I was giving them the bait about how tough this is 7 days a week, God, what a bore it must be for you; I know you're just dying to get home, et cetera, et cetera.  You can't get it out of them, you know?  "Hey, sir, what we're doing here is important, know that?  I'm seeing my buddies killed and we know we're making a difference here." I have noticed this about--I noticed this the second visit of the five I made to Afghanistan.  Something happened to the United States military post 9/11.  In my 37 years not one time prior to 9/11 did we ever do anything directly for the American people.  It was always to help somebody else.  And it certainly had strategic, national, geopolitical interests for the country, but it was always to help somebody else.  Post 9/11, it's all about the American people, the soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines, they get this.  I mean they absolutely get it because I've never seen so many of them talk so openly about how important it is to them and what they're willing to risk for it, which is everything that they care about in life they're willing to risk for it.  Morale was always high when we did Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, Desert Storm, the like, because you're doing it as a group and it's purposeful, and you get a sense of high satisfaction out of it. Post 9/11, this is profoundly different because they realize that this is all about killing the American people.  When you've got bad guys that are willing to kill the American people--and they get the larger picture.  It isn't just about taking down the World Trade Center.  It's about WMD and terrorism, which makes this so dangerous, and bringing that to the shores of the United States.  One of the ways to stop it is you have to stop them, and it would be better to do it there than here.  They kind of get that simplistic but yet profound understanding of what we're all about. I just pass that on to you because it drives them.  That's why they're doing patrols in 130 degrees 7 days a week and no complaining to speak of.  I mean you can stick a microphone in front of a soldier anyplace in Iraq and get an occasional soldier to bitch about anything, I don't care what it is.  But I am talking about the vast majority of leaders and soldiers there, got their shoulder into this thing, and it's pretty remarkable.  Even though they know that there's some cowing back here in the United States--they're not insensitive to all of that--they believe in what they're doing.  And that's because they're also very well led by the leaders that are above them. I think what I'll do is I'll--the other problem that we do have is dealing with the information war or strategic communications because we lose that far too often to the Arab street and it affects the Iraqi people and certainly affects the American people.  If you believe, as I always have believed, that war is fundamentally a test of wills, fundamentally it is a test of wills, and a war like this is really a test of the will of the people because this is about the will of the American people and the will of the Iraqi people when you really get down to it. And the information war that's being conducted against us and also the Iraqi people is pretty significant, and at times they're winning that war, and that's unfortunate.  We could do that a lot better than what we have done in the past. But I was encouraged by what I saw on my visit.  I came back much more encouraged than I thought I would be despite the security and economic challenges.  The national and political leadership is very encouraging, and the military leaders to have a huge and significant grasp on what they're dealing with, and as this economic engine begins to take hold and the quality of life experience starts to finally arise for the Iraqi people, I'm optimistic. MR. DONNELLY:  Thank you, Jack.  Thank you all, not simply for your insights, but for the efficient and brief way in which we got through this.  In fact, I think, even after I exercise my moderator's prerogative, there will be at least a half hour or so for questions, so that's great. I guess I would like to not summarize so much, but toss out a couple of things that struck me in listening to all the presentations.  One is about Iraq specifically, and one that I would like to entice others to talk about is to think about beyond the immediate tactical and operational situations, and then sort of look beyond whatever level of success we're going to enjoy in Iraq, say over the next year to the longer term. To begin with, I am very much struck by the descriptions that I've heard of what's going on in Iraq, and I would accept all the critiques of all the individual tactical mistakes to include the political mistake that we're making, but on the other hand, even Michael's presentation suggested that by big political measures we're winning, and if, you know, if we are true Clausewitzians, we understand that to be the ultimate measure of success.  It's very interesting that Bob began with his reading list and mentioned Harry Summers.  The famous opening anecdote from that book is an American officer and a Vietnamese officer standing together, and in my remembrance of it the American says to the Vietnamese, "Well, you never defeated us in battle," and the Vietnamese says, "So what, that doesn't make any difference." But we're finding, you know, the paradox with Iraq is kind of the inverse of that.  We're not winning many battles.  We're not improving the economy very much, but somehow, in ways that I couldn't begin to--in ways that we still argue over Vietnam and don't fully understand it.  We may find ourselves in the future having kind of the inverse argument about Iraq in which Zarqawi or Saddam says, or some henchman or Muqtada Al-Sadr says, "You know, you never defeated us in battle," and we say, "Yeah, so what?" So if anybody thinks that's a ridiculous analogy or can shed any light on the mysterious process by which we stumble in every particular but somehow verged uncontrollably towards, again, toward success indicated by broad political process, either to explain to me why I'm optimistic or tell me again why I oughtn't to be, I'd appreciate that. But secondly, there was also a theme or an undertone of what the larger sort of implications not only of Iraq but of a larger commitment to the Middle East is to the United States and to the agencies of American Government.  Eliot mentioned that soldiers hadn't been thinking a whole lot about this kind of war.  I think that's true in large measure, although there was a community represented particularly by Bob and Jack, who have always done this kind of work, Haiti, Panama, Afghanistan in the last 10 or 15 years, but also the Balkans where a broader swath of the American military got some exposure to constabulary type duties. What I was going to ask you to speculate on, Eliot, is whether, you know, sort of above the uniform level or at the higher levels of the department, is really where some serious thinking needs to be done about this sort of fighting and military commitments and what you think the situation is there and what the prospects are for the future. You mentioned also the question of the reserve components, to look at that from a bit of a similar but slightly different perspective.  I mean from kind of a almost silly force planning point of view, citizen soldiers, reservists have been sort of regarded as the strategic reserve for the United States, you know, to be called on in the event of some huge and unanticipated crises.  They're now becoming essentially the operational reserve for forces in the field.  I mean that has a huge implication for, as you say, for American society, but also has an implication for the institution of the armed forces, and that's become actually more popular I would say, lately. A final note on that point and to pick up on--it seems to be one of the developments less discussed in the press and the media--is the question of this long-term structure for the region, for Iraq.  Even if we succeed in Iraq, internally there will be the question of protecting this nation's experiment in Arab democracy in a pretty hostile neighborhood.  General, you mentioned, (A) the figure of George Casey, whom you know, George is very well-known and trusted by the senior leadership in the Pentagon, but he's also, to paraphrase General Franks, "A Title X so-and-so," or a man with that perspective on the institution.  And I would ask you and all the others to speculate about, again, if we're going to be doing this kind of thing generally in this part of the world for a long time, what institutional adjustments needed to be made?  And finally, ought we really to be using the phrase "exit strategy" when we're again, not so much talking about how many guys we have patrolling the streets of Baghdad or Mosul or Basra or whatever, but again, this longer-term commitment? So those are the two things that struck me, the paradox of where we are in Iraq and the fact that people who respect or that actually feel they're good friend with one another can have fairly differing perspectives on where we are at the moment, and then this question of longer-term requirements of the larger mission. So with that, we can just go down the panel again, and you can choose-- MR.          :  That was the longest question I've ever heard in my life. MR.          :  I would say, Tom, do you have a time limit yourself on these things? [Laughter.] [Simultaneous discussion.] MR. DONNELLY:  I rely on you guys for brief answers to cover up my lengthy question. COLONEL KILLEBREW:  Let me give you a couple of brief answers.  First, the quote from Harry Summers was, "Remember, you never defeated us on the battlefield."  And the answer was, "That is true, but it is also irrelevant." And if I had one concern about the direction of the United States defense today, the Defense Department and all the services, soldiers tend to fall into the things they like to do best, and the thing they like to do best is winning battles.  We went into Iraq with a battle viewpoint.  Now we won the first battle.  What we have to learn to do is think about winning wars.  Winning wars is harder than winning battles, and very time that you see somebody saying, "Well, we've won the war, and now we have to win the peace," you're talking to an amateur in warfare.  This war isn't going to be over until the government of Iraq owns Iraq, secures its borders, and terrorism's reduced to a reasonably tolerable level that doesn't require large-scale military operations. We're still in war.  This is what I said, the third phase.  On the subject of how this war is going to turn out--I said I was an optimist--I have an optimistic view that there will be an independent, secular Iraqi Government in a year and a half or so.  That's a good thing for us.  It doesn't matter if it doesn't like us or not.  It matters that it's a secular Iraqi Government.  Iraqis are going to run their government, and we should want them to run their government the way their government has to run.  In the neighborhood they're in, that means they can't be violently pro-U.S.  Even the Saudis are backing away from us now because of pressure on the Arab street and the pressure from Islamic radicalism, or Islamic radicals, is against us.  That's normal.  We should expect it. The thing that will turn this war finally will be the determination of the Iraqi people themselves to run their government and to run their country.  That was true in South Vietnam.  It's true in Panama.  It would have been true in Haiti if there had been that determination, and it will be true here. The part of winning wars that sometimes some people don't get--although I think most of the American military does--is when you're trying to help somebody run their government, you have to let them run their government, and eventually they have to stand on their own feet. I'll make this my last comment, my next to the last comment.  I want to take Eliot on on something. There is a tendency on the part of the United States--and I don't mean the military especially--that says that we're going to invade your country, set your government up, and then you're going to run it the way you want to, and that simply doesn't work.  The Iraqis are going to run their government.  They have the desire.  They have the capability to do so.  And the greatest thing we can do, and I think we will, is to help them run their country and get on their feet within the next, I'd say, year and a half or so. The thing I would like to debate slightly with Eliot is his definition of the National Guard and Reserves.  In American military history most of the fighting has always been done by the Guard and the Reserves unless it was a contingency so small you can settle with a division or so.  We've had this debate before.  But I would argue to you from the point of view of a guy who used to be a professional soldier, that right now the relationship between the Guard and Reserve and the regular force is healthier than it has ever been in my lifetime, that the Guard and Reserve are doing exactly what they were designed to do, help us win wars, and they're showing amazing capability to do so.  As a fellow of the Vietnam generation with memories of the Guard and Reserve during the Vietnam years, I can only look back on the last 20 or 30 years progress with the Guard and Reserve and say we have achieved a night and day difference in the effectiveness of the National Guard and Reserve and the relationship between the regular force. MR. O'HANLON:  Do you want to go first? MR. COHEN:  Well, if Bob's going to pick a fight with me, I'll pick a fight with-- COLONEL KILLEBREW:  I've turned my mike off, but not my mind, Eliot. [Laughter.] MR. COHEN:  I think in some respects that's true, first I think as a matter of historical record I mean you're quite right, but what the Guard and Reserves are--the Guard in particular is there for is the really big war, which is a matter of vital national interest.  It's the--World War II is kind of the classic case, or the Civil War or World War I.  It is not the lesser contingencies.  I mean I was and remain in favor of this war, but this was an optional war, this was a contested war.  This was a war we didn't have to wage, but some of us thought it was prudent to wage, and I guess I--I mean I just feel uneasy about what we're turning the Guard into. I also think--my Iraq trip was in May, but judging from some of the things I saw and some of the things that I heard from the folks I was with, the National Guard performance is uneven.  There have been some units which have been terrific, and some units which have been debacles.  And for obvious reasons, that's not going to get widely reported. One of the longstanding issues in regular guard relations is for perfectly good political reasons.  It's very hard to be candid about the strengths, but also the limitations, the real limitations on some of the Guard units, and so you are always running the danger of fooling yourself, as we did before the first Gulf War when Norman Schwartzkopf had said, you know, the 48th Georgia Army National Guard Brigade is going to go off to war with the 24th Mech, and instead they spent the war at what was known as the rotation from hell, at the National Training Center, and just came back really bitter and hostile. Let me--as long as I've got the floor just respond to your thought.  One of the ways in which--I wasn't going to pick on Bob, but since he started it, I will, is there is a problem with Harry Summers, and the problem with Harry Summers is, I agree it's a very interesting book and it's very worth reading, but Harry Summers' solution to Vietnam was to conventionalize it.  So that the problem with the United States Army's response to Vietnam was they didn't think conventionally enough, which I don't think is a sensible judgment about the Vietnam War. And this is by way of segue into your point, Tom.  I think clearly there's some parts of the military, and of the Army in particular, which do think about this kind of conflict, and there are some institutions which are very much adapted to it, the Joint Readiness Training Center, for example, but overall, in terms of the larger institution that had the overall culture, and particularly the culture of the heavy army, which has tended to be dominant, they have not thought about it, and you can see that if you look at the curriculum at Leavenworth.  You can see that when you talk to people from say the 3rd ID, who when they went into Baghdad, assumed, you know, you'd beat the opposition and then battalions or brigades of the CPA, whatever that was, was going to show up and run the country, and they would go home, and a really complete failure to prepare for it. I also think, last word, yes, the United States military got a lot of experience in places like Bosnia and Somalia and Haiti, but there were two issues.  One is, those were always defined as the lesser included case or the sort of stuff we don't really want to do but we'll kind of do it because we absolutely have to, but in no case, with the possible exception of Somalia--and I think even there we weren't really dealing with a full-fledged insurgency, with a real guerilla, warfare, terrorism; you were dealing with a kind of vigorous sort of peacekeeping, which is a very, very different kind of business, and this is I think our first, this really is the first real insurgency since Vietnam that the regular forces have been in. The very last point I'll make in terms of the senior leadership, I think there is sometimes a desire among the civilian leadership and in broader circles to say, well, this is a very thorny problem.  Let's turn this over to something distinct from the regular United States Armies, whose business is to fight and win the nation's wars. And I agree with the point that General Keane was making.  This is our war the Army and indeed all the other services are going to have to fight, and so again, we run the risk of confusing ourselves if we say, well, maybe we'll begin raising special constabularies that do things like Iraq. MR. DONNELLY:  Michael? MR. O'HANLON:  Thanks, Tom.  I'll just offer one thought on your question about, I guess to paraphrase, what is the sort of victory scenario?  If I'm looking to be more optimistic, how would I spell out that story? And I think--and I can.  I just don't fully believe it, but-- MR. DONNELLY:  Such a flexible mind. [Laughter.] MR. O'HANLON:  But it seems to me that--and Eliot and I have talked about the numbers of hardened resistance fighters and how it's very hard to know who is involved in this insurgency at any point and how large it was, but I still think we can generalize and say in the course of the winter and spring of this past year, what we really saw was a large group of fence-sitter Iraqis joining the resistance or becoming more sympathetic to it.  I think that was happening in the winter and spring, and that was a big part of the problem.  We had had Ba'athists, we had had Jihadists, we had had some of these release criminals who could easily be bought off for 100 bucks to fire a weapon, up until that point. But I think by the winter and spring we started to see larger groups.  I don't know.  I haven't done polling of the Iraqi insurgency to be sure who fits into what category, but it does look that way to me.  One way you can measure it is to see that Iraqi public opinion was increasingly and increasingly in a bitter way, anti-American in the course of the winter and spring.  Even before Abu Ghraib and the Fallujah firefight of April, the polling was 80 to 85 percent of all Iraqis no longer trusted the United States military or the Coalition Provisional Authority, remarkably bad numbers. However, the transfer of sovereignty I think began to change that dynamic, and you no longer had a situation where the United States was going to be the principal focal point or at least not the exclusive principal focal point of what was happening in Iraq.  So I think there was hope, therefore, and Allawi's done a good job.  Sistani's done a good job. If we can keep the Shia and the Kurds getting along, or I should say, figure out how they get along, give them some good encouragement, they can figure it out themselves and avoid a constitutional crisis over their relationship, I think we can start to change that winter/spring dynamic to the point where it's no longer the Iraqi population in general that is essentially anti-establishment, but it becomes the Sunni Arabs who are in that category. There has been no good news in the Sunni Triangle at all, and that continues to be the reality, and I don't see how that changes in the foreseeable future.  But there is a hope that the Shia and the Kurds work together, and that someday down the road the Sunni problem is addressed. That's the best I can do for an optimistic theory. MR. DONNELLY:  Well, I am thoroughly convinced. General? GENERAL KEANE:  I'm defaulting so they can have some questions. MR. DONNELLY:  Very wise.  Again, final enjoinder to ask serious question.  We'll start in the back and we'll work our way forward. QUESTIONER:  Thanks very much.  Quill Lawrence from the BBC, and I want to thank you all for looking at the big picture.  But I want to ask you an even bigger picture question, which is, looking back, was this the right thing to do, and has this served our interests, our very large interests in terms of stability in the region we need for oil and in terms of the war on terror, however you want to define that?  I want you to answer the question, including all of the unintended consequences, including things like Abu Ghraib and whatever you think that cost us, including international relations, how this has changed dynamics, goodwill, cooperation with allies, et cetera.  Thank you. MR. COHEN:  Too early to tell. QUESTIONER:  Pretend it's a year from now. MR. COHEN:  I would say we won't really have a good--I won't feel comfortable giving any kind of answer to that for 5 to 10 years. MR. DONNELLY:  Oh, come on, you're all so spineless.  Michael, please. MR. O'HANLON:  Well, I'll show--I don't know if this is spine, but you'll like it even less than Eliot's answer. I think that given what we know now--and I acknowledge Bob's point that we don't really know for sure if there are any weapons of mass destruction--given what we know now, do I think the war was worth fighting?  No, I don't.  And I was a supporter, or at least a conditional supporter.  However, I'm not going to spend a lot of time beating up on myself or anybody else because we knew at the time what we knew at the time.  Yeah, President Bush dramatized certain threats in order to build a case for war.  He didn't make them up out of thin air.  There was a very serious reason to worry that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and even that some day he might again attack his neighbors. Eliot and I were at a panel here two years ago with people like McKea [ph] and Rendel Brahim [ph] and others, and we were talking about the attempted assassination on President Bush in 1993.  This was a man who had an over-developed sense of vengeance, and if he thought he could get away with something, he might very well try.  So there's no telling.  There were reasons to worry that Saddam still had weapons of mass destruction and he might do nasty things with them.  Given that we now know he probably didn't, I would not, if I could go back in history, support the war, but that's to me almost a pointless question to ask in one sense because no one could have been expected to think this man had voluntarily disarmed himself, given his history. So that's why I still say in the end, what we knew then justified the decision we made then.  If I could go back in a time machine, however, I wouldn't make the same decision again. GENERAL KEANE:  In my view the only legitimate argument was when you did this thing, not if you did it.  And the fact is he had weapons of mass destruction, and the fact is we haven't found those weapons of mass destruction, so something obviously happened to them, and there was no information available to anybody's intelligence service that would tell us that those weapons were not there, to include the French, the British, our friends the Russians, I mean we had even the President of Russia intervening with our own President, and encouraging him, because of what he thought the reality could be.  But the fact is, Saddam did something with those weapons, and we don't know when he did that and we don't know what he did with them.  And to me, that's a much smaller argument. The larger--I thought the administration had other arguments, at least I believe they did when they talked to us about going to war, and while central to that certainly was the connection of terrorism to those weapons was the issue.  It was never that Saddam was going to do something with those weapons that would endanger the American people directly, it was the indirect use of those weapons that was the threat, and that made compelling sense to me when I listened to that argument. But it is also other arguments.  Post 9/11 you had to look at Saddam Hussein differently in my view, as you did prior to 9/11, as Tom rightfully pointed out, our policy was one of stability, but our policy changed to confrontation, and also to a degree after that, transformation.  But I agree with that policy change, and I don't know how you could leave Saddam Hussein defying 14 UN resolutions, openly defying the Coalition West as a head of state that would continue to so embolden this movement that we're fighting in terms of radical Islam is what it meant to us.  You could not leave that dictator there to continue that, and also continue the relationships, I think, which were fermenting. And for some reason people aren't willing to chase him in terms of the connection of al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein.  I mean there was clearly cooperation and collaboration.  We cannot point to an operational connection, but all those other connections which sort of make sense were there.  When the head of the Iraqi intelligence service has a meeting with bin Laden, that's a fairly decent connection, and why are they having a meeting?  And there are other connections like that. So those things were reality, that I don't see how anybody responsible for protection of the American people after 3,000 already dead would be willing to deal with.  I think you have to face that responsibility. MR. DONNELLY:  Bob, did you want to? COLONEL KILLEBREW:  I'll just add two things.  One is, I'll just add this point.  The situation's not stable. [Tape change.] COLONEL KILLEBREW:  [In progress] -- Arab world.  Osama bin Laden talked a lot about it, and yet it was clear that the sanctions regime was going to really fall apart in a pretty fundamental way.  And so the idea that we would be in the same world today with Saddam just kind of cooped in but nothing much happening, I'm not sure I fully believe that. I also think when we talk about the unknowns, obviously, one unknown is where is the WMD and so on?  But one of the other great unknowns is the capability of our own government to execute what we were trying to execute.  And for me, I mean the WMD was one very big surprise, but even though I have a pretty dark view of the American Government in some ways, I was pretty unpleasantly surprised by the way in which we handled particularly the first year, which we'll never get back, and that's, that for me was one of the big surprises in all this. MR. DONNELLY:  I want 20 seconds I hope on this.  In answer to the question directly, my analysis is that there's a larger war going on in which we are caught.  Some people describe it as a civil war within Islam or in particular within the Arab heartland of Islam, a struggle between again, all the order, the autocratic status quo, political order, and the radicals, originally the Iranian Shia radicals, and you know, still get a flavor of that in Muqtada Al-Sadr, for example, but more importantly, the Sunni Osama bin Laden radical critique of the past, and the illegitimacy of a whole host of governments across the region.  So the question is, what will the United States do?  Can it side, as it has done, with the old order, with the autocrats, and are those alliances simply alliances of convenience or something of a longer-lasting strategic partnership, or can we accept a radical takeover of a region that's of vital strategic and economic interest not only to the United States but to the entire planet. And if neither of those alternatives is acceptable, how do you thread the needle promoting reform regime change by other means, if you will, by nonviolent means, by internal reform, or conversely, in cases like Afghanistan and the argument would go in Iraq, must you from time to time and in specific circumstances intervene militarily, not simply to respond to the immediate threat, but to the--and I won't even use the term imminent--but the future threat of in some cases an established government like the Iraqi Government that clearly has past demonstrated the capabilities and retains intentions to dominate the region and to be a disruptive force? So I would say that we are in this war whether we like it or not.  It's arguable that Iraq wasn't the ideal next step.  If you could give me a magic wand and ask me which three things could I fix in the Middle East, even if you dialed back a couple years, I'd perhaps rather change things in Saudi Arabia or in Pakistan.  Those states seem to me to be more strategically key even than Iraq was.  On the other hand, the risk of intervening immediately, either militarily to change the regime or in some cases even forcing the pace of reform, holds much greater risks than the invasion of Iraq. So it doesn't mean that this is the best of all possible scenarios, but I think it does represent progress.  Iraq, to use Bob's analogy, is more like a battle than it is a war.  It is an element in the larger--again, this is totally a personal point of view--in the larger war to try to fix the problems of this region that are such a danger to us. Let me do these two ladies in front.  We'll take two questions at once.  We've got about--if we can keep it brief, and I promise not to make any comments, we got about 6 or 8 minutes left. QUESTIONER:  Sharon Baine [ph] for the Washington Times.  In the civil war scenario that you gave, Colonel Killebrew, I have two questions.  Why would you expect this only to break out after the elections in January, and how do you see Iraq's neighbors acting in such a scenario?  Do you think that they would be a part of the that civil war?  Do you think they would interfere in some way, and would the threat of that war then spread to the region?  Thank you. MR. DONNELLY:  And let's also take just the one behind. QUESTIONER:  [Inaudible] of Kyrgyzstan, Washington, D.C.  Actually my question is very closely related to the question asked before.  And it--this is a question for Colonel Killebrew, but I'd be happy to hear an answer from all the panelists.  In the final, pre-final phase of the wars now you foresee, the civil war after January 2005, the election, the war between the supporters of secular democracy and those who are against it, my question would be, how knowing that, how foreseeing the war coming you think that should, can, should affect U.S. strategy in the region in Iraq?  In other words, how to prevent the things that happened in Najaf, Fallujah and possibly soon, unfortunately, in Kirtuk? The other question would be what role would you all see to be given for Kurds in northern Iraq, especially knowing their strong position on secular democracy and lasting success for democracy, of democratic experience in the region?  Thank you very much. COLONEL KILLEBREW:  Those are great questions.  I'll try to be really quick.  I don't think the civil war is inevitable, but if anything prevents it it will be the spread of the interim Iraqi Government's power between now and January.  I think that's probably going to be one of their major strategic thrusts. The civil war is likely because the elections will legitimize secular government in Iraq, and the people who have something against secular government in Iraq will see that as a chance to disrupt that legitimization. Do I think the war will spread beyond Iraq's boundaries?  It depends in large measure on what we do.  Tom's point that Iraq is a battle in a war against Islamic radicalism I think is correct, and the people who have the biggest stake in disrupting this election is not necessarily Iraqis, but the Islamic fundamentalists who don't want to see a secular government there.  So a lot depends on what we do, and a lot depends on how we and the government of Iraq, between now and the elections, are able to slow the infiltration of radical Islamics across the borders. I frankly, just as an aside, don't know what the status is right now of movement across the Iraqi border from Syria and Iran.  You hear things but you don't know anything for true. What should the U.S. strategy be between now and then?  Well, clearly it should be, in my view, to support the Allawi Government and support and speed with all possible haste the establishment of the authority of the interim Iraqi Government.  We should try to help them seal the borders as much as we can, although that's probably not practical, given the length of the borders, and we should do everything we can do to make the Iraqi legitimate government legitimate in the eyes of its people because they will be the ones who decide. I might add that I think Negroponte and George Casey have done wonderful work in that.  You hardly ever see either one in the news these days because they're clearly moving the Iraqi Government itself center stage, and that's very, very important, very important. And your last question dealt with the Kurds and I missed it.  Could you ask me again? QUESTIONER:  [Inaudible]. COLONEL KILLEBREW:  I think the Kurds in large measure are going to define their own role in the new Iraq.  I think in terms of stability they're clearly ahead of the rest of the country, and I think that the deal they will offer to the Iraqi Government and that the Iraqi Government will accept will be some kind of a federalized state within the new Iraq.  Right now I don't see any choice for the interim Iraqi Government. MR. DONNELLY:  I think if we're quick we can squeeze one more in.  Let's have this gentleman right here.  There's some different faces.  Sorry. QUESTIONER:  Jonathan Roush [ph] of National Journal in Brookings.  Would anyone care to comment on how the election results might affect the facts on the grounds in Iraq if at all? MR. DONNELLY:  Michael,  you want to take a-- MR. O'HANLON:  U.S. election, right, Jon? QUESTIONER:  Yes. MR. O'HANLON:  Gosh, I don't know.  The first thing to say is not very much, the first approximation.  I mean it's remarkable just how much both camps are trying to use Iraq in this debate in a situation where they disagree so little about future policy.  Now, sure, Mr. Kerry said, "I want to have a significant troop reduction within a year," and Mr. Bush beats him up for that.  Well, you know, the word "significant" is very carefully chosen.  It could mean a few thousand people, doesn't have to mean tens of thousands.  And I think, you know, if that's the furthest out Mr. Kerry wants to go, "My goal in my first four years is to get American forces out," you know, who could be against that goal?  And it's not crazy because it would have been a total of 6 years of a stabilization mission.  It's a little optimistic, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Iraqis asked us to leave by then anyway, and in this war there is more of a premium on getting out quickly compared to Bosnia or Kosovo, where the way you prove your mettle is to stick it out for a decade and prove your commitment. So if that's the most controversial he can be about future policy, I think, what you're seeing is two candidates presenting a very similar vision about Iraq's future.  To my mind this is to Senator Kerry's great credit, by the way, because it would have been easier in many ways to say, "I've got a radical new plan, a secret strategy to get us out," or this or that.  And maybe he would have gotten beaten up for that, but it would have had a great emotional resonance with many Americans, and he avoided that.  And I think he deserves some credit for that in terms of political courage. But the bottom line is, substantively, I don't see a big difference, and that's really the point I should end on. MR. DONNELLY:  Which is a good one because it's the most optimistic thing that I've heard today. [Laughter.] MR. DONNELLY:  I want to thank everyone for coming.  I want to thank the panelists in particular.  This is, again, I can't emphasize how pleased I am to have my four friends, and people of such high quality join us.  I hope we can do this again, and we will certainly have future Iraq events.  It is, if nothing else, a full employment scheme for think-tank types. So thanks very much.  See you next time. [Applause.] [End of program.] </body></html>