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• About Losing Iraq

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Tavis: David Phillips is a former senior advisor to the State Department and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2003, he resigned his post at State due to his belief that President Bush was ignoring the State Department's plans for post-war Iraq. His new book is called "Losing Iraq: Inside the Post-war Reconstruction Fiasco." David Phillips joins us tonight from New York City. Mr. Phillips, nice to have you on the program.

David Phillips: Thanks very much.

Tavis: I mentioned twice now you resigned your post at State a couple of years ago. One, I guess, could call you then where Iraq is concerned, a conscientious objector. If one happens to be not a foe necessarily of the war in Iraq or a foe of the Bush administration, tell me why one would read this book?

Phillips: If you're going to move forward with military action for regime change, you better have a plan to win the peace as well. The fact of the matter is that the U.S. is more than capable of fighting and winning wars. But if we don't focus on the post-war period and on nation-building, then all of that blood that is spilled is spilled for no reason. We really betrayed the Iraqi people. And because we misled the American public, there are some serious doubts about the Bush administration's credibility and its capability.

Tavis: Let's take both of those one at a time. When you say we misled the American people and betrayed the Iraqi people, take them one at a time.

Phillips: There was lots of talk about being welcomed in Iraq with flowers, about an Iraqi security service that would stand up and help us secure the country. We had U.S. officials go before the Congress and indicate that we'd be in and out of Iraq in 90 days and the full cost of the post-war reconstruction period would be $1.3 billion. It's now two years later. It's cost us $230 billion. We're close to 1,600 Americans dead, almost 15,000 maimed. And according to the "Lancet Medical Journal," 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed. The American people supported the war because they were sold a bill of goods by the Bush administration, and the Iraqi exiles supported military action because they expected that we would hand over sovereignty. We just didn't have enough confidence in Iraqis, and we suspended the process of Iraq's political transition.

Tavis: Should we have had more confidence in Iraqis, given what we thought we knew or at least were told that we knew at the time? Should we have more confidence in anybody who was from Iraq?

Phillips: We were told a lot by Iraqi exiles, namely Ahmed Chalabi, who was always the pick of the neoconservatives and the office of the secretary of defense and the vice president to run Iraq. It was entirely understandable that he would tell us exactly what we wanted to hear, because his agenda was to get the U.S. military in. Once we were in Iraq, he knew full well we'd have a real mess on our hands. He expected that we'd turn to him try to unravel that Gordian knot. When we got on the ground, we discovered there was no support for Ahmed Chalabi and there was this whole seething mass of Shi'ah polity in the south, about which we knew nothing. Instead of running the risk of allowing Iraq to look like Iran and become an Islamic republic, we decided we were just gonna freeze the process.

Tavis: Mm. I get the sense reading your book that one of your tenets, one of your beliefs, is not that we did not have an exit plan. We hear all the time when we try to analyze what has gone wrong in Iraq, I hear these talking heads and pundits all the time suggest--and in fact, I've even said on occasion that it seems to me that we really don't have an exit strategy. Your point, in part, is not that we didn't have an exit strategy, but that those at State who were trying to offer that were ignored.

Phillips: It wasn't just the State Department. There were 17 federal agencies that were involved in something called the Future of Iraq Project. It happened to be led by State, but the U.S. taxpayers supported it to the tune of $5 million. Hundreds of Iraqis were involved, representing the whole spectrum of ethnic and sectarian groups. It produced thousands of pages of recommendations. Because those recommendations weren't ideologically compatible with the new Iraq that the Bush administration envisioned, there was a deliberate effort made to undermine the work of the Future of Iraq Project. When the president gave the responsibility to the secretary of defense for post-war civilian administration, he shelved those plans, and all of the officials who subsequently took over didn't have the benefit of almost two years worth of extensive planning.

Tavis: Let me ask you to tell me where...at this moment as we speak, where the White House is in perhaps now starting to embrace some of the ideas, some of the recommendations that were shelved, for lack of better word, at the time?

Phillips: The irony is that we came full circle in embracing many of those recommendations, but only after the Bush administration failed at everything else it had tried to do. If we had only followed this plan of handing over sovereignty to Iraqis, letting some national assembly designate a constitutional commission, to draft a permanent constitution, and then hold early elections, we might never have gotten to the point where we see this intense insurgency. The primary reason why Iraqis are involved in military action against the occupation is because they lost confidence in our ability to deliver on our pledge of liberation.

Tavis: Let me ask you a simple question, but I'm fascinated to get your response to it. For those who really don't follow the politics of this like you do--you do it more deeply than I do, but I try to stay on top of this, given what I do every night on this program. But for those who see the news, you know, and know that we are still having problems inside of Iraq, what is fundamentally behind the massive loss of life, this ongoing insurgency that we continue to watch every single day on the other side now of elections in Iraq? What's behind this?

Phillips: You're never going to defeat this insurgency through military means alone. Iraq was never the central front in the fight against terrorism. But when we invaded the country, didn't secure the borders, we allowed 5,000 Jihaddists to come into the country. They found common cause with these former regime elements and common criminals in order to compose the backbone of the insurgency. The only way you're going to be able to defeat the insurgency is if Iraqis feel as though the political process is credible and they have confidence in their own government and in their own democratic institutions. If they feel that way, they will stand in defense of them. If it looks as though this process is somehow being manipulated by the United States or if Iraqi political leaders don't step up to the plate and demonstrate an ability to really prove progress, then the insurgency is going to be able to step into that vacuum and continue with the chaos and mayhem that it's creating today and will continue to in the future, absent real political process.

Tavis: I am not, but one could argue that what you've just suggested is exactly what the Bush administration tried to do, allow the process of free and fair elections to go forward in Iraq, to let the Iraqi people self-govern, to let the Iraqi people pick their own leaders. One could argue, could he not, that that's exactly what the Bush administration has done?

Phillips: That's exactly what they're trying to do now, but the problem is that we waited for two years, and in the process of waiting, we deeply embittered Iraqis against the United States and also against this new cadre of political leaders. The Iraqis just couldn't understand why it is that the United States military was able to vanquish Saddam's Republic Guard, but they couldn't keep the country from being looted after April 9, 2003, when we tore down the statue of Saddam in Firdos Square in Baghdad. We finally have come full circle. We're trying to pick up the pieces and get this political track moving, but the reality is that there's blood in the water, and the Iraqis don't see us as a legitimate partner.

Tavis: All right. Let me ask you then, trying to advance this, what ought to happen at this point? How do we--if the book is called "Losing Iraq," how do we save Iraq?

Phillips: Well, Iraq is not lost yet. If Iraqis are able to look over the horizon and work together through compromise and consent to draft a permanent constitution, then in spite of the ignorance and the arrogance and the incompetence of U.S. officials that were behind this policy, they might yet prove that Iraq can remain whole and free. In order for this to happen, Iraq needs a constitution. After the January 30 elections, it took more than 90 days to form a government. That eroded any momentum coming out of that electoral process. The Iraqi government needs now to designate a constitutional committee. They have to draft a constitution, debate it, and ratify it before submitting it to the public for a public referendum. Then once there's a constitution defining the limited powers of the central government and the extended powers of federal Iraqi states based on this principle of decentralization and democracy, they'll move to elections, and new Iraqi leaders will emerge for a five-year term.

Tavis: Talk to me about the role that you think women in Iraq can and ought to play in that process.

Phillips: I mean, one of the big issues has to do with the role of Islam in Iraq's constitution. Ultimately the constitution will make Islam the official religion of Iraq, and it will include some language that laws adopted by the national assembly within its competence need to reflect the central tenets of Islam. But what's important here, Mr. Smiley, is that you don't have Shiria law governing basic law concerning family, marriage, divorce, inheritance. That's where women really get short shrift in Islam, and if you institutionalize that throughout the country, you're going to see amazing push-back by Iraqi women, particularly in the north, where the Iraqi Kurds are committed to secularism. Ultimately, Islam plays a very important role, but if you try to impose Shiria law or reinvent Iraq so that it looks like the Islamic Republic of Iran, that's going to cause more dissension and sectarian conflict in the country.

Tavis: Let me offer this as an exit question. Can you--how might I phrase this? Can you disabuse me of the notion that I have and I suspect many other Americans have that given the change in our policy and how we engage militarily--that is to say we used to go into war as a last resort. Now it appears that if we think you have something, if we think you might hit us first, then we preemptively strike you. If I'm to believe that that might very well be the policy in this country for many years to come, can you disabuse me of the notion that we won't have, or that there will be other Iraqs where we'll get in and don't know how to get out?

Phillips: In the doctrine of preemption, according to the neoconservatives in the administration, included the right to initiate military attacks against the country in order to go and seek weapons of mass destruction, in order to then justify military action. It seems to me like we're running around this circle back--backways. What needs to happen is we need to work with our allies. We need to work within international law in order to deal with rogue regimes and get rid of tyrants who are oppressing their own people and represent a real security risk. I have no doubt that if the military action in Iraq and the political transition had gone smoothly, that there would be U.S. forces in Syria today and that we'd be intensifying both diplomatic and military pressure against the mullahs in Iran to make sure that they don't develop a nuclear weapons program.

Tavis: David L. Phillips is former senior advisor to the U.S. State Department and author of a new book entitled "Losing Inside--" "Losing Iraq," that is. "Losing Iraq: Inside the Post-war Reconstruction fiasco." Mr. Phillips, thank you for your time. I appreciate it.

Phillips: Thank you, Mr. Smiley.

Tavis: Glad to have you on. Up next on this program, actress Tracee Ellis Ross from "Girlfriends." Stay with us.