PBS: Think Tank: Transcript for "The Unknown Iraq"

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The Unknown Iraq

Opening Billboard: Funding for this program is provided by the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

WATTENBERG: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. The news from Iraq seems to get worse by the day, but is that the whole story? Is there another Iraq behind the scenes, where long-term stability and peace are being established? And has the war in Iraq affected the prospects for democracy in other countries? To find out, Think Tank is joined this week by Karl Zinsmeister, J.B. Fuqua Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of several books on Iraq, including “Dawn Over Baghdad: How the U.S. Military is Using Bullets and Ballots to Remake Iraq.” He is one of the leading younger intellectuals of our time, and also my first research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute. The topic before the House: The Unknown Iraq -- and more, This Week on Think Tank.
WATTENBERG: Karl Zinsmeister, sir, my first research assistant who I describe as a Renaissance man. Now, you specifically have done what, four books on Iraq?
ZINSMEISTER: Yes.
WATTENBERG: Tell me, you were an embed?
ZINSMEISTER: I was one of the embeds, yep, and I tell you Ben when they first announced the whole embedding experiment, I was just amazed and I would not have not gone to cover the first Gulf War, for instance, where it was 80 guys sitting around in a conference room with Norman Schwarzkopf taking quotes and watching video. That’s just not my kind of reporting, but when I heard that we are actually going to be allowed out on the squad level with, you know, sergeants and privates and corporals and actually see history first hand, that’s my kind of reporting and so I jumped at the chance.
Now, none of us really know exactly what the criteria were but you know the end result was that about 450 different observers got embedded right with troops. This included not only Americans and big media, but al-Jazeera had 13 embeds. There was French TV with the 82nd
Airborne with me. There were Germans.
WATTENBERG: Al-Jazeera was with American units?
ZINSMEISTER: Yeah, and that was very controversial even among journalists as to whether they should have been there but my point is it was...
WATTENBERG: Well, you know, al-Jazeera, despite itself, I mean, is very sort of pro- the bad guy, but when the people with the purple finger on the elections, they had to run it and it was revolutionary.
ZINSMEISTER: By the way al-Jazeera’s very unpopular in Iraq. They remember that al-Jazeera was an apologist for Saddam and it’s not a popular network so... But anyway my point is the embed experiment was just this huge open process that I was just among other things very proud to be from a country where there is nothing to hide. The military feels like it can let in outsiders, including hostile outsiders like the al-Jazeeras and French TV and say, “Look, you welcome to see all of our dirty laundry. We have nothing we’re ashamed of.” And I thought to myself the other day when we were thinking about the New York Times plagiarism scandals, I said, “Boy I’d love to go to them and say, you know, this is a moment of national importance. I’d like to embed in your newsroom...
WATTENBERG: (Laughing)
ZINSMEISTER: ... and I’d like to read your secret memos and I’d like to look into your computer files and I’d like to watch your evening briefings,” which is all stuff I did.
WATTENBERG: It’s a remarkable program. It would be nice to say it really worked and we were getting all this great ink, but that’s not what’s happening.
Karl, on this program we had James Fallows. You know him. Not of your persuasion generally but a very intelligent guy -- he’s been a critic of the war, as he was of the Vietnam War and one of the things he said was Iraq has no army. That’s what the criticisms you hear all the time is they got to take -- a sort of Vietnamization of the old sort. They got to protect themselves or they’re out of business. Are they doing it?
ZINSMEISTER: Ben I couldn’t disagree more. I’ve had four different embeds of at least a month long. I spent a lot of time in the country including wandering around the streets of Iraq with Iraqi army soldiers. And I’ll be the first to tell you that, well, for instance in my first embed there was no Iraqi army or police, just none. My second embed there were nascent army units and police units and they were a joke. I literally saw them throw down rifles and run in fights.
The third time I embedded though, by the third time there was an Iraqi army and it was actually more numerous than the U.S. forces.
WATTENBERG: An army or police force or both?
ZINSMEISTER: I’m mixing, but Iraqi Security Forces, ISF, which is both. There were actually more of them than there were of U.S. soldiers. And at this point there are a lot more army and police than there are U.S. soldiers and they are doing most of the heavy lifting. For instance, I think it’s over two thirds now of Iraq is policed entirely by Iraqis. The U.S. doesn’t even go in those districts. And then you go outside of Baghdad into the southern districts for instance, the north, these are entirely looked after by Iraqis.
WATTENBERG: (Unintelligible, cross talking)
ZINSMEISTER: So, I mean, Jim Fell’s article...
WATTENBERG: There’s no big secret that they want to be a nation of their own.
ZINSMEISTER: Right.
WATTENBERG: And have been for a couple of millennia but anyway, yeah.
ZINSMEISTER: But even in the south where I spent a lot of my time among the Shiite district, those districts are entirely policed now by Iraqis and, you know, Jim Fallows’ article was literally titled as you said “Iraq Has No Army” and it’s just ludicrous. And I just have to say Jim is a smart guy, but he has, to my knowledge never spent a minute in Iraq. This is not a guy who has a lot of firsthand experience with the military and my point here is that, this is emblematic of one of the big problems I think of a lot of American reporting is that some -- many of the good reporters are so disconnected culturally from military life, from military virtues, from military necessities that they are unable to make good calls. They just do not get this life. They don’t understand what’s happened. They don’t understand what’s needed and it’s so easy to wave your wand and say, “Oh, there’s no Iraqi army.” As I said, I’ve been on the trucks with them. I can tell you there are some very brave men doing very hard work on behalf of Iraq.
WATTENBERG: Let me ask you a question.
Let me put this as bluntly as I can.
You were not only in combat but in kind of the worse kind of combat where just guys can take potshots at you from nowhere. Were you scared?
ZINSMEISTER: You know, Ben, you never know till you get there and I’ll tell you honestly not. The reactions -- you kind of wonder in advance what your reactions are going to be. I tell you, my personal reactions whenever things got hairy, and they got hairy plenty of times, is your mind kind of just really focuses and I became actually kind of quite cold and concentrated and I would say “okay, now this is a bad situation and this is -- I have to be careful here. What do I do next?” And you kind of find yourself -- I found myself at least just kind of almost on auto pilot and not at all fearful. It’s only later, you know, 24 hours later you’re laying in bed staring at the ceiling thinking how close a call that call was and then you get nervous.
WATTENBERG: Was your wife and children terribly anxious?
ZINSMEISTER: Yeah. My reporting is not popular with my family and, you know, I kind of promised them I’ll probably try to avoid going back in addition. My last reporting was my closest call yet so… this is a tough part of the world. I’ve never actually said this to my family so I’ll have to think about whether they should watch this, but they don’t want to know the details and I’ve never told them any details; that’s kind of our bargain. But I have been caught in a couple of roadside bomb attacks which are the thing that the soldiers fear more than anything ‘cause they’re so random and they’re so huge at this point and there’s nothing you can do to protect yourself or anticipate them. You can’t fight back. And this last embed we were in a roadside bomb attack in the vehicle -- it went off right in between my vehicle and the one behind it and the vehicles were disabled and all the soldiers piled out. A couple of soldiers were injured and you instantly of course try to find -- acquire the triggerman so they started searching the buildings on either side.
Now the insurgents have become very smart and very nasty and they realize that once you have one bomb and everyone stops to defend themselves, it’s time for a second bomb. So -- and I was aware of this and everyone knows the risks, but I was there to report. I had a job, so I was out running around looking at the bomb crater and I turned my back and started to walk back to the truck and there was a secondary explosion. Knocked me off my feet -- quite, quite close, so you know that’s the thing you have to kind of cope with. It’s just arbitrary -- I always say to myself, is I am here, you know, for a month or so and I’ve only done this four times at this point.
WATTENBERG: Only four times.
ZINSMEISTER: But you know, the guys I’m with, they’re there for a year at a time and I’m the fifth guy in the building. They’re the first guy in the building. The risks for them are so much more serious that I feel like, you know, it’s not a problem for me.
WATTENBERG: What would it mean in your judgment for America if we lost in Iraq?
ZINSMEISTER: It would be a disaster. It really -- and I worry about this. I do worry that the stamina of the public, the sort of -- the pain threshold is so low today that if any opponent figures out that they can just bloody our nose for a couple years and hang on that long, we’re going to quit.
WATTENBERG: You know, the story is that President Bush and Vice President Cheney had many discussions and the one thing we have to prove is that we don’t cut and run. In my judgment that means win or lose and because Osama is quoted as saying, I mean we have tapes of him saying, you know, “they’ll only hang around for a little while, they’re really not a threat”.
ZINSMEISTER: And he may be right. I mean this is really, that this is the Achilles heel of our society is that we...
WATTENBERG: Of all democracies.
ZINSMEISTER: Of all democracies. We have this instant gratification, this low pain tolerance, you know, and if our enemies figure it out, I think it’s very important for Americans to remember, we live in a world, we’ve always lived in a world where there are barbarians and samurais and mujahideen and very tough, very mean, very nasty people and if the good guys can’t be just this tough and occasionally just this nasty, then you are in a very unsafe situation. So I think this is a tremendous character test for the nation to see if we are able to gut through some very difficult things and bear some losses.
WATTENBERG: Are other nations in the Middle East, in your judgment, because of Iraq, moving toward democracy? I mean you just had Hamas which -- there was a government that was prepared to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, Hamas doesn’t but, I mean et cetera.
ZINSMEISTER: I believe there’s a real and terribly important Arab Spring taking place. I think it’s important to moderate expectations. I have a very low set of expectations for the Arab world. I think it has the real cultural baggage that makes it an ugly place for probably most of my lifetime, but I do think that important changes are happening. You look in the Gulf States where there’s been a real move toward female emancipation, a real opening of the process. Obviously, what’s happening in Iraq...
WATTENBERG: There are little pinprick states. (Unintelligible)
ZINSMEISTER: But they’re very rich and they’re very influential because of that. And you look at what’s happening in Iraq, which is not a pinprick state, and Afghanistan, which is again, a very interesting, mixed ethnic state and you have politics breaking out, real politics.
WATTENBERG: You know what I think the clearest cut of what happened was Libya. They had a nuclear program (sic), a terrorist program and they just said “we’re out of it.”
ZINSMEISTER: And Lebanon maybe too, that’s another one.
WATTENBERG: And Lebanon, too but that’s terribly complicated. But Libya, you got a dictator method, Qaddafi, and they just said “out,” and apparently it stuck. So, there has been a nice domino affect.
ZINSMEISTER: Even in the case of Hamas, you and I might differ on this, but I actually don’t think the Hamas election is a disaster. In fact, in some ways I think it’s almost a good thing. Fatah was rotten to the core and they were “more moderate”, but they were so corrupt they were actually giving moderation a bad name. And the fact that Hamas is now going to have to deal with and bear responsibility for people’s lives, I think it’s going to take some of the mythic poetry out of it. Whenever sort of shadowy warriors in the background you could...

WATTENBERG: And what’s interesting is even the Europeans and the French are saying we’re cutting of money until you change. I mean, for the French to do that it’s one thing; for the Americans it’s not exactly...
ZINSMEISTER: Exactly. It’d be a reality test for Hamas. They’re going to have to either moderate and become reasonable and responsible, or they’re going to whither on the vine and so I think this actually will housebreak them in some ways. Being forced to carry power moderates all parties, even in this country, and it is a good thing, not a bad thing, even if you have to hold your nose in the short run.
WATTENBERG: Now, the argument is made that we either have or were just about to have or we will have a civil war and we’ll end up with three states. The Kurds have always wanted to be separate; we’ll have a Shia state and a Sunni state. Two questions -- is that happening, and what would be so terrible about that? I mean we’ve been through that in cross blood, but every nation was born in blood, I mean India, Pakistan... Bangladesh is a classic case in point, and America and Canada I think is that kind of a case, I mean historically. So is it happening; would it be so terrible if it happened?

ZINSMEISTER: I‘m kind of on your side. First of all, on some level, of course it’s a civil war. It’s been a civil war from the beginning. You have a minority that was privileged for a long time that’s lost their privilege and they’re kicking and screaming and doing everything they can do to drag down the rest of the country, so that’s a civil war, I guess. So what does that mean?
I have a different view, though on the three groups. And people say there’s not one Iraq; there are three Iraqs and this is an untenable country. I think the opposite actually. I think in the long run, even though it’s tough in the short run, in the long run it’s a great advantage to Iraq that they have these three roughly equal weight groups because there is a check and balance, there’s a natural...
WATTENBERG: Well I thought that the Shia are really almost a majority.
ZINSMEISTER: Demographically they are, but in terms of education and access to wealth and those sorts of things, the Kurds and the Sunnis, even though they’re smaller close to or at least...
WATTENBERG: Are the Kurds Muslims?

ZINSMEISTER: They are, yes. And there are different kinds of Muslims, some of them are Shia; some of them are Sunni but these three...
WATTENBERG: They’re very nationalistic and...
ZINSMEISTER:: Very.
WATTENBERG: ...and to put it bluntly, in the past we have screwed them on a number of times.
ZINSMEISTER: Yes.
ZINSMEISTER: To get back to the point that these three roughly equivalent groups I think could be a tremendous advantage. I mean, Americans of all people ought to understand the political advantages of “gridlock” of checks and balances. We think it’s good when one group prevents another group from swinging too wildly.
Now you take a country like Iran or Saudi Arabia. Very homogenous, everyone agrees; is that a good thing? I don’t think so. That means they all go off the cliff at the same time.
The advantage in Iraq is if the -- for instance the Shia want to have a theocracy, the Kurds and the Sunnis are going to say “Oh, no you don’t”, and if the Kurds want to nationalize all the industry and set up a socialist crazy economy, the Shia and the Sunnis are going to say “Oh, no you don’t”. So there’s this kind of natural check and balance if you can get this three groups at the table that I think in the long run is likelier to make this a more moderate and democratic and politically balanced state, so I’m not at all hopeless about this tri-partite division of Iraq.
WATTENBERG: What do you think were the mistakes -- everybody talks about the mistakes, but it’s all hindsight -- that the U.S. military made?
ZINSMEISTER: You know, Ben I have to tell you. I kind of...
WATTENBERG: Even I have one, but I’ll...
ZINSMEISTER: Sure. I have to giggle when I hear these people talk about there was no plan, why didn’t we anticipate the IEDs; why didn’t we have the right armor? Again, these are these are people who never read history. There’s a lot of journalists in Washington who, again, partly because of what we talked about earlier, they’re so separated from the wars and war-makers and war-making that they think of this like a soccer match. You know, you go in there and you work for awhile and then the referee blows his whistle and you go home to suburbia. That’s not the way wars ever have ever worked. Every war has been a mess. You read World War II history; Okinawa was a bloodbath’ Midway, one of the great triumphs of the American Navy -- which a fascinating book’s just come out pointing out that they basically slaughtered all of the torpedo plane bombers in the battle of Midway.
WATTENBERG: Except for 8 planes and 4 carriers and...
ZINSMEISTER: But the bad technology, bad planning, poor leadership, it took five generals before we got Grant as a commander-in-chief in the civil war. Screw-ups, blunders, mistakes are the norm in war.
WATTENBERG: And Grant was regarded as the world’s greatest mass murderer.
ZINSMEISTER: A butcher. Yeah. I mean, this is the way wars are fought.
WATTENBERG: He became President.
ZINSMEISTER: They’re ugly, they’re nasty, they’re uncontrollable, that’s why we hate them -- but when you get involved in one, you cannot expect it to proceed as according to some pristine plan. That’s not the way wars are fought or won.
WATTENBERG: Okay, what about all these generals who asked for more troops?
ZINSMEISTER: You know, this is a debatable proposition and I have good friends, smart people on both sides. My view is that the right choice was made to keep the footprint small. Think how we would feel if we saw soldiers with a foreign flag on their shoulder standing on street corners. No one would like it, particularly in the Arab world which is anti-American to begin with. I happen to think that minimizing our physical presence and insisting that the Iraqis take responsibility for securing the country, even though it meant for a long time there were strains was the right strategy and we -- if we had doubled the amount of soldiers I think we very possibly could have doubled the amount of backlash and insurgency so I happen to be one of the...
WATTENBERG: And, I mean I have always thought that more troops would have meant is nothing more than more targets.
ZINSMEISTER: Absolutely.
WATTENBERG: I mean, you would have had a higher number of killed. You can’t defend against terrorism. It is the classic weapon of the weak, I mean...
ZINSMEISTER: Quite so.
ZINSMEISTER: In Iraq I think the right role for our military is to be kind of the SWAT team; to be in the background and be ready to respond quickly and to insist that the Iraqis get out there. And I’ll tell you, one thing I have learned very fast in Iraq, every place you would go in the early years every Iraqi would have a long wish list -- give me this, do this for me, fix that -- and very quickly the Americans had to start saying “this is your country; you have to organize security in this block, you have to fix that, you have to repair that, you have to take responsibility”. And if we had gone in there, this kind of the welfare dependency syndrome we see in this country, if we had gone in there and said we’re the big daddy, we’re going to make everything secure and safe and fix things, I think we would have infantilized the Iraqis. I think it was necessary to sort of push them off the diving board and say “you take responsibility for these things”, or you would be stuck there for ever.
WATTENBERG: But what do you think we have done wrong? I mean, a lot of the generals and the viceroys and whatever, they are all running CYA (unintelligible) now saying, “Yeah, well, it wasn’t my fault; it was the other guy’s fault.”
ZINSMEISTER: You know generals are often the worst guys to talk to ‘cause they are politicians basically when you get to that level in the army. But here’s what I think is the biggest mistake we made early on and it is a tragic one, is that the administration and a lot of Americans really put all their chips behind the Iraqis who looked and acted like us. The secularized, non-religious, western-trained Iraqis like Ahmad Chalabi for instance. Terrible mistake. He had no constituency in Iraq. He still has none. He got no seats in the last election, not even his own
WATTENBERG: Well, it’s not America.
ZINSMEISTER: He (sic) is not America. We have to be mature enough to say let the Shiites be Shiites. Let them run Iraq in their own way and if it is a -- if it is a more sort of awkward society than we might like, tough luck; you have to take the world as it is and accept that as long as they aren’t beating up their own people and picking on their neighbors and threatening us and running a basically decent society, we can count that as a success.
WATTENBERG: One of the criticisms made -- I guess it was when Ambassador Bremer was the Viceroy or whatever, was that he disbanded the Iraqi Army and he should have kept them. But it’s damned if you do and damned if you don’t. If he kept them, we would have said all we did is change Saddam Hussein; the bad guys are still running the place.” I mean, it’s no win in terms of the public perception.
ZINSMEISTER: Right. Not only we would have said that, but more importantly, Ben the Shia would have said that. I think there would have been a civil war if we tried to keep the old security apparatus in place because the majority population, the 60% of the country who are Shia remember having their uncles dragged out by the hair and their friends tortured by that security apparatus. It just wasn’t possible to keep it. Again, I think the second-guessers on that are off track. I mean, it caused real problems to have for a year-and-a-half no Iraqi security force, but I just don’t think there was any way around that.
WATTENBERG: Alright. The polls all show that the America’s image and reputation in most places, not everywhere, has suffered. True, false and therefore what?
ZINSMEISTER: Did suffer, but is now on the rebound. The latest thing I’ve seen on that, Ben was some polling done by a group run by Madeleine Albright and they were in 17 different countries, mostly Middle Eastern, and the results there actually were very interesting. Yes, indeed, after 9/11 and then the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. popularity with Arab and Muslims in the Middle East plummeted, but it has now shot back very dramatically and at this point, most of the Muslim world believes we are sincere about wanting to bring democracy and thinks that that’s good for them and they used to -- the polls used to say that many Arabs and other Muslims would say “democracy is okay, but it is not for us. It doesn’t belong in our part of the world.” That’s changed. Now, they are saying, “Yep, it can work in my country, too.”
WATTENBERG: The other question that is always asked and it’s a good question, no one much was against going into Afghanistan. I mean, that’s where the bombers came from, Osama was headquartered, there was state-sponsored terrorism, but the question was, why Iraq?
ZINSMEISTER: There was a little bit of abitrariness. There were several countries in the Middle East that were as egregious in their threat to us and their human rights abuses of their own people. Syria, Iran, Iraq were not in radically different boats, but I would argue that it was -- this is part of President Bush’s vision is that you have to transform the Middle East. You can’t just get rid of one small set of bad guys.
WATTENBERG: Why do we have to transform, because of their oil reserve?
ZINSMEISTER: No, the previous experiment for all of my lifetime really was that as long as the Middle East is quiet and behaves themselves and doesn’t bother us, we don’t care what they do with their own people and I think we got bitten in the backside by that policy at 9/11. I think what we learned is that if you let these festering authoritarian governments stay in place, what you eventually get is a bumper crop of radically frustrated young men who will lash out at everybody including us and I think the new consensus...
WATTENBERG: Particularly us because we’re the...
ZINSMEISTER: Of course.
WATTENBERG: Superpower or whatever.
ZINSMEISTER: And they hate us because we sort of let their status quo exist which is a little bit ironic, but I think the new consensus is that as hard as it is and as dirty as the work is going to be, the challenge for my generation for the rest of our lifetimes is to try to transform the Middle East so it’s a place where people aren’t feeling as oppressed and so angry and so willing to lash out at the rest of the world that they become dangerous.
Now, you had to draw a line in the sand and begin somewhere and I would say Iraq was actually a very good place to start, partly because as we discussed earlier, it’s an educated place, it has oil, it has water which is gold in the Middle East, it has reasons to think that in 10 years it could flourish. So, it’s not an absurd place. It also had reason to be picked because it was probably, as I say, the worst government in the world, the worst to its own people and very much of a threat to us whether they had WMD or not. So, yeah we could have gone somewhere else, but I think it’s essential that we not stop after Afghanistan; that we had to make it clear that we are committed emotionally with our blood and with our treasure.
WATTENBERG: In your judgment, how do we win? Can we win and how do we win?
ZINSMEISTER: I think the key thing, Ben is patience. I actually think we’re ahead of schedule. This is -- this is an insurgency. This is a Guerilla war historically. It’s taken about 10 or 15 years to really master a guerilla war. That’s the verdict of history. That’s what happened in the Philippines and lots of other places where...
WATTENBERG: Malaysia.
ZINSMEISTER: ...where guerilla wars were prosecuted to a successful end. I think we have a very strong ability to proceed. The key element that will be the difference, I think, is whether the public shows the stamina to stick with it. I can tell you the soldiers want to stick with it and are ready to stick with it. The question is, will the public back them?
WATTENBERG: Most of them. I mean...
ZINSMEISTER: Well, to give an example, this is not just based on my own kind of observation, but the key factor for me is what about the guys who have actually been there and done the dirty work? What do they do? Well, guess what. In the Army and the Marine Corp. both, among the guys who have actually served tours in Iraq, the reenlistment rates are way above targets. What that says to me is the people who’ve actually put their necks at risk and gone over there and exposed themselves, don’t feel taken advantage of, don’t feel like they’re wasting their time and feel like this is something worth doing.
WATTENBERG: Karl, we will have to end it there. Thank you.
And thank you for joining us on Think Tank. Please, remember to send us your comments via email. We think it helps make our program better. And please do watch for a future episode with our guest Karl Zinsmeister. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg.

Funding for Think Tank is provided by the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

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