April 11, 2003

GWEN IFILL, host:

Tonight, the fall of Baghdad and a host of new questions.

Unidentified Man: USA! New York! USA! USA!

IFILL: The images, astonishing; the victory, at hand. And now the questions, some of them unanswerable: What constitutes final victory? Where is Saddam Hussein? Where are the weapons of mass destruction? Who takes over from here? Does the United Nations have a role? And what about Syria, Iran, North Korea?

We tackle these questions, and others, with the reporters who've been all over this story. From Baghdad, John Daniszewski of the Los Angeles Times, and here, Tom Gjelten of National Public Radio, Dana Priest of The Washington Post, Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times and David Sanger of The New York Times.

Announcer: Here again is moderator Gwen Ifill.

IFILL: Good evening.

Analysis: Latest on fallen Iraqi city of Mosul

It's not over. Fierce fighting still continues tonight throughout Iraq. There is no functioning government. Hospitals are overwhelmed. Looters are roaming the streets, but this was still, unquestionably, a good week for US forces who aggressively punched their way into Baghdad, effectively ending Saddam Hussein's regime. I spoke earlier today with John Daniszewski of the Los Angeles Times, who's been on assignment in the Iraqi capital.

John, it's good to see you. Thanks for joining us. Two days after the fall of Baghdad, tell us what you're seeing on the streets now.

Mr. JOHN DANISZEWSKI (Los Angeles Times): Well, we're still seeing a lot of looting as we drive around. The new development today was we were seeing a lot of neighborhoods coming out and organizing themselves, often with arm patrolled or holding metal rods or--or clubs and putting barricades up on their streets to keep the looters out and away from their homes.

IFILL: You have written extensively in your stories about the lawlessness now on the streets here. At the Pentagon, they say it's not as big a deal as--as--as the people on the scene are saying. Just give us some details of the kinds of lawlessness you've been watching.

Mr. DANISZEWSKI: Well, you know, first they attacked government ministries and sort of ransacked them and took out everything of value, set some of them on fire. Then they turned to other places like embassies or UN facilities. Today, I watched for a long time as a crowd of people worked their way through the--the petroleum club here, pulling out furniture, lamps, a chandelier, air conditioning, fans.

It was actually sort of interesting. You would see, like, an old, beat-up taxi, orange and white, and it would pull up to a stop and a bunch of women would get out in their long, black shadores and literally run in there to see what they could get and bring it out and pile it into the trunk and on the roof of the car and drive away holding it--holding on with their hands up through the windows.

We also saw shooting. In some cases, the looters are shooting at each other. In some cases, people are being shot as they try to defend their property.

IFILL: La--this time last week, it--American forces were at the--at the borders of the city about to go into Baghdad. Now just a week later, at least it's all over but the shouting and quite a bit of the fighting in other parts of the country. Could you contrast how different this week is from last?

Mr. DANISZEWSKI: Well, it's a different sort of anxiety here. Last week, many of the people were afraid of the US bombings and what street fighting would mean for them. In fact, the street fighting was sort of limited to a few areas and didn't attack the maj--didn't affect the majority of people here. And then that--we had that brief period of celebration, followed during the last 48 hours by these growing fears of--of anarchy and chaos.

I think it'll settle down. I know the Marines and the Army soldiers here are starting to take a more active role in trying to quell the looting, but it's the major topic on the minds of most people here.

IFILL: Now when we--you talked about the brief period of celebration. That was pretty widely documented here, as you can imagine, that scene of the Marine going up on the statue in--in the center of Baghdad and putting an American flag briefly and then a--then a pre-Gulf War Iraqi flag over the face of the statue of Saddam Hussein. You--you went out to the square to witness this. Tell us what you saw.

Mr. DANISZEWSKI: Well, it was just a wonderful scene. It was like a block party; people mingling, going up, embracing the American soldiers, kissing them, handing their babies to them. And the sol--the--the Marines, I should say, were--were so happy, too. They felt they'd slogged it up. They fought all the way up here to the north, and they finally reached their destination. And they, too, were beginning to think, `Well, we can go home pretty soon,' and they felt proud of what they'd done.

IFILL: How much of that euphoria is still going on? Or is it--has it changed now?

Mr. DANISZEWSKI: I think in their hearts most people are still happy and--and really trying to come to the grips with the fact that they no longer have to fear their own government, they no longer have to worry about informers, Mukhabarat. They have an--an--a sense of hope and opportunity.

But for the moment, that's eclipsed, as I said, by their worries about who will govern them, what life will be like, will--will Iraq remain a sovereign country or will it become a--a--a colony of sorts of the United States and, of course, how--how long will it take to restore order. And not only order in the sense of law and order on the streets, but they'd like to get their electricity back to normal, the water supply back to normal, telephones back to normal.

One thing--everywhere we go, people are begging us to please use the telephones to contact their relatives in the States or wherever they live to say that they're OK.

IFILL: Well, as many questions there, it sounds like--at least as many questions there as there are here. John Daniszewski, thank you very much for joining us.

Mr. DANISZEWSKI: Thank you, Gwen.

Analysis: Pentagon briefing on Iraq war

GWEN IFILL, host: No question this has been an amazing week. The Pentagon still isn't claiming victory. Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Myers today s--quoted Churchill, saying, `This is the end of the beginning,' which means there are a lot of questions left to be answered. And we'll start with Tom Gjelten, who spends his days at the Pentagon.

Today at the Pentagon briefing, General Myers and r--Secretary Rumsfeld...

Mr. TOM GJELTEN (National Public Radio): Secretary Rumsfeld.

IFILL: ...were very dismissive of these reports of widespread looting.

Mr. GJELTEN: Boy, that's an understatement, Gwen. Donald Rumsfeld was at his most combative.

What--what set him off was a question of whether these images of looting were taking attention away from the much more inspiring images of liberation from a couple of days ago. Clearly, Donald Rumsfeld thought that the story of Saddam's stunning defeat should be worth more than one day. He'd like to see it last for a--for a couple of days. And I think one of the things that that shows is how much--again, throughout this entire war, so much has been at stake with images and with the way events have been portrayed.

Remember in the beginning, we had the people who were convinced this was going to be over with in a couple of days, the cakewalk crowd. And then along came the retired generals and the skeptics who s--saw when things weren't going that well that--that maybe this meant that we were--we didn't have enough forces over there. And then the rush to Baghdad--the cakewalk crowd--crowd is back on top again. And then we have the looting again. So it's been this real back-and-forth competition of how should we understand what's going on.

Mr. DOYLE McMANUS (Los Angeles Times): Tom, the other thing we've--we've heard all week from Don Rumsfeld is that General Franks' plan is a splendid plan, it's a brilliant plan. Did General Franks' plan have anything in it to take care of looters and police problems on the street?

Mr. GJELTEN: Well, again, la--last week the problem with General Frinks--Franks' plan was that there weren't enough armored divisions--armored troops in there to deal with the--the resistance. This week, what's clear is: The problem with General Franks' plan is that there weren't enough military police planned for this moment, because this moment really was foreseeable. This is--as--as Donald--as Donald Rumsfeld himself said, `This is what happens when dictatorships collapse,' and yet there's a real shortage of military policemen.

IFILL: Well, you're talking about dictatorships collapsing, but we haven't seen evidence that the dictator himself has collapsed. Let's l--ask Dana Priest about that.

Dana, where is Saddam Hussein?

Ms. DANA PRIEST (The Washington Post): They don't know. It is the big mystery, something we all want to know about, but it's also something, obviously, the intelligence community is working very hard on. We know that they've had teams of CIA and para--paramilitary units working on that. They have unmanned drones flying around trying to find them. We know that they got so frustrated this week that they actually issued these set of 55 playing cards to US troops to get them to help out. The fact is that while the US forces made great progress in securing and--and conquering a lot of territory, the same cannot be said for US intelligence apparatus that has been trying to find the regime. In fact, they've only--really can say with confidence that they've killed one of them--one of the high-ranking s--officials. That would be Chemical Ali, known as, and that perhaps they killed three of the others on the most-wanted list. And other than that, they really don't have a lot of people that they can point to.

The other--part of the mystery is they all just seemed to vanish at once over the last several days. A lot of the communications that they had been picking up before, gave them some hint of where people were, just stopped, which leaves you to think that there was at le--if the Iraqis didn't have a--a well-conceived war plan, they had a well-conceived escape plan and that's why you have troops now burrowing into those tunnels which are sort of endless, dark, dank areas under Baghdad where they're going to be looking for not only weapons of mass destruction but also potentially elements of the regime that are--that are under there.

Mr. DAVID SANGER (The New York Times): Dana, th--the White House--the pitch all week has been, `This is not about one man, it's about a regime.' But, of course, from the start, the objective of this war has been, as they've said, to depose Saddam Hussein. Can they really declare the war over and won if they don't know where he is?

Ms. PRIEST: Well, I don't think that even though the rhetoric has been that, trying to stand down th--or diminish the expectations that they will find him--on the other hand, they really are telling us, both administration officials and intelligence officials who analyze the situation, that they need to find him, they need to bring closure to the situation, if for no other reason than to assure the Iraqi people that he's not coming back. And added to that, it's Saddam Hussein and his inner circle who have the resources, the capability, the knowledge and potentially the weapons to organize a low-level insurgency that could be very bothersome to US troops. So they really do want to find him.

IFILL: Tom, I'm really curious about one thing, which is that you--you can understand some of Donald Rumsfeld's frustration because there were a lot of naysayers early on...

Mr. GJELTEN: Of course there were. Yeah.

IFILL: ...about the war plan. And--and how did it go from last week where they were s--we didn't know whether they were going to squeeze Baghdad and circle Baghdad, drive to the middle, as they ended up doing, to this week where they could arguably say they--they accomplished what they set out to do?

Mr. GJELTEN: Well, Gwen, I think the--the key feature was that there was so much resistance in the south, but much of that resistance was from these irregular paramilitary forces, the so-called Fedayeen. What we did not see in the south was the resistance from the Republican Guard and the Special Republican Guard which were their more professional militaries. And we were expecting that, if--if we--if there was that much resistance from the irregular forces, imagine what it was going to be like when the US military went up against the professional forces. What happened was that there was no resistance from the professional forces. The professional--the Republican Guard, the Special Republican Guard basically either just disappeared without a fight or were so pounded by US air strikes that there was really nothing left of them.

So once US forces began this probing move into Baghdad, they found that there was very little resistance. There was really nothing to stop them from going in. In the end, it was a stunning military achievement that showed the professionalism of the US fighting forces, the--the fact that they are the best-trained fighting forces in the world, without question, and also the utter ineptness of the Iraqi military and the very--the shallowness of that regime. Once you got below that top level of sort of crazy guys, there was really no support for that regime and no will to fight.

IFILL: Dana.

Ms. PRIEST: You know, I think Tom is right on another issue which is the looting is not something they didn't predict. In fact, I've h--talked to officials who believe that really there needs to be a self-purging of the worst elements and that's what you're actually seeing. It's a--it's a conscious decision by the administration not to get involved in it and that would extend, I would predict, to--to--to cleansing of the worst elements as well, perhaps some executions even and that they don't want the military yet involved in that and that's why the plan doesn't have them involved in it yet. So--so it's a very precise decision on their part not to get involved at this stage but to let things sort of die down and then get involved.

Mr. GJELTEN: And it's a very tricky balance, Dana, because on the one hand, they are worried that these scenes of looting and lawlessness are going to tarnish what has been accomplished. On the other hand, you're absolutely right. If you get a heavy hand by the US military right now, arresting people or--or, God forbid, shooting people, it's going to play into all the fears in the Arab world that the United States really is an occupier.

IFILL: Any question--either of you know what conversation is being had about what's happened to the POWs, the people still being held?

Mr. GJELTEN: The...

Ms. PRIEST: They'd to put that alongside the big mystery. I don't think they have a lot of information quite on that. But they have teams out there. There are search and rescue teams, there are agency teams, and there are Special Forces operations--Special Operations teams working on that. They don't want to discuss it much except to say that Iraqis who help them and help turn them in will benefit from that. And you saw in--in Jessica Lynch's case, they offered asylum to the Iraqis who did that.

Mr. GJELTEN: The problem is there's nobody to negotiate with. There's nobody to talk with. There's no--there's no longer an Iraqi government. There's nobody that they can meet with and ask that question of.

IFILL: So as long as there's anarchy abroad, there's no way to say what's the conclusion here, at least for them, at least for these POWs.

Mr. GJELTEN: For the POWs, that's right.

IFILL: Yeah.

Analysis: World activities and the United States' role involving them

GWEN IFILL, host: So what comes next? That's the question. Does the US take over? Does the United Nations step back in? British Prime Minister Tony Blair says, `None of the above.'

Prime Minister TONY BLAIR (Great Britain): (From Tuesday) This new Iraq that will emerge is not to be run either by us or indeed by the UN. That is a false choice. It will be run by the Iraqi people.

IFILL: And another what next. Does US intervention stop at Iraq? Listen to the language employed yesterday by Deputy Depe--Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz when he was asked about Syria.

Mr. PAUL WOLFOWITZ (Deputy Secretary of Defense): (From Thursday) The Syrians are behaving badly. They need to be reminded of that, and if they continue, then we need to think about what our policy is with respect to a country that harbors terrorists or harbor war criminals or was in recent times shipping things to Iraq.

IFILL: So first, what about the United Nations? Doyle, we were just talking about who gets to do the policing? Who gets to do any of this?

Mr. DOYLE McMANUS (Los Angeles Times): Well, the United Nations, Gwen, is quite literally not in Iraq on the ground at all. They evacuated their offices. They don't have even a legal status at this point that allows them to be active. What the American and the British governments have agreed to say is that they want the UN to have a vital role but not a central role. Carefully chosen, diplomatic words. What it basically means is we aren't handing it over to the UN. If we can get the UN to pick up humanitarian aid problems, to pick up some infrastructure, to recruit people to bring in financial aid, that's fine.

There is a plan here--it's part of General Franks' plan; it was written out of the Pentagon--for a political turnover to Iraqis. It's called a quick hand off and it is going to start working early next week with political meetings in different parts of the country. It's going to be controversial in--in Iraq in terms of who gets in and who doesn't and who seems to be sanctified as a leader and who doesn't, but the UN is not being invited to play with that at all. And the idea from the American side is by the time the UN is actually formally involved, there is already going to be an Iraqi interim authority taking shape.

IFILL: OK. Let's--let's move to the other piece of the `What next?' question. It was very interesting listening to Paul Wolfowitz. He said, `They need to be reminded,' speaking of Syria, `that if they continue, then we need to think about what our policy is with respect to a country that harbors terrorists or wa--or war criminals.' This idea of harboring terrorists is a--is a theme we've heard before.

Mr. DAVID SANGER (The New York Times): Yeah, where have we heard that one before?

IFILL: Yeah.

Mr. SANGER: Everything that he said about Syria is what President Bush and others were saying about Iraq except that Syria doesn't have weapons of mass destruction. Now the good news here is that as of this week, Iraq is probably off the list of the axis of evil. The bad news is that creates an opening and there are several candidates. Syria's the name that seems to come up most often. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has--has mentioned it twice now. The president discussed Syria today, and--and you saw Mr. Wolfowitz.

Syria is a different kind of problem. It has harbored terrorists in Hezbollah for many years. We think that Syria allowed arms to come into Iraq and the most intriguing tip that people are following now is that Syria may be allowing Iraqi leaders to go out through Iraq. Of the 15 rumors about where Saddam is...

Mr. TOM GJELTEN (National Public Radio): Where he is, mm-hmm.

Mr. SANGER: ...he was, you know, seen going across the Syrian border. Well, if he wasn't then, you know, certainly that's the direction an Iraqi leader on the run would head. And so I think some of this is just an intimidation effect. But, you know, some of it also is the warning of, `Hey, look what we did here and what we could do to North Korea or to Iran if things got bad enough.'

Mr. GJELTEN: But isn't it true, David, that Syria was actually a cooperative partner in the--in the crackdown--the hunt for al-Qaida, that there actually was some pretty cooperative arrangements with the government of Syria and Syria even arrested some people, right?

Mr. SANGER: It--that's absolutely right. And part of the mystery right now is figuring out the motives of different countries after they'd seen the toppling of the statue and the toppling of Saddam. Run through the scorecard for a minute. The Syrians have acted up after being on our side, strange enough. The North Koreans, great tunnel diggers, have gone underground. We haven't seen Kim Jong Il and he hasn't done much that we can tell with his nuclear program. The Iranians have moved ahead with their nuclear program as well, but they haven't really said very much about what's happened. They can't be very happy about having us on their border.

So one of the big issues now is: Do these countries take the lesson that the president wants them to take, which is `Don't act up'? Or do they take the opposite lesson, which is `If you're going to challenge the United States, get your nuclear weapons first'?

IFILL: Now as usual, Colin Powell is not necessarily in the hawkish role on this one.

Mr. SANGER: Right.

IFILL: He said this week, `Hey, let's not get into this domino thing.' But he also seems to have, as far as the rebuilding issues, he fa--ceded some of his--what he had hoped to assert his control over this to the Pentagon.

Mr. McMANUS: Yeah. In the bureaucratic politics, the Pentagon clearly has--has won this war. And Powell is putting a good face on it and saying, `Well, look, they've got the people on the ground.' If you want to know who's going to do the initial policing, the initial rebuilding, the initial meetings, it's going to be even said the people who are going to recruit the first political leaders of the new Iraq are colonels in the American military on the ground. But, in fact, there is a very tenuous cease-fire between these two bureaucracies in Washington right now. If you want to know where one of the other wars is, it's between the State Department and the Pentagon.

The State Department is sending its fixer, Zalmay Khalilzad, the same guy who convened the opposition in Afghanistan, to try and do the same thing in Iraq. But he's doing it here under different circumstances. It's going to be very tough. There's--there have already been some setbacks. There was a Shiite Muslim cleric who was, in fact, one of the Americans' hopes for the new generation of--of Shiites, Abdul Majid al-Khoei. He--he went back for a reconciliation meeting on Thursday in Najaf and got chopped to bits by an enraged crowd. This is not going to be very easy for either the State Department or the Pentagon.

IFILL: Dana, would you like to get in?

Ms. DANA PRIEST (The Washington Post): Yeah. Gwen, on Syria, we asked officials this week whether the war plans for Syria, which they always have war plans on the shelves for people in countries not considered friendly--have they been updated or even been pulled off the shelf? And the answer was, `No, we still have old contingency plans.' And I think that's important because you're going to hear a lot of rhetoric from people who would like Syria to be intimidated but really no plans to actually bring forces into Syria. I would be interested in knowing what--what David or Doyle makes of Jack Straw apparently sending an envoy, the British pri--prime minister, to Damascus to state their difference with the United States over the rhetoric, at least, that they've been hearing from--about Syria and whether or not it's really a two-track policy. One is to bash them publicly, meanwhile try to get them to stay cooperative in back-channel diplomacy.

IFILL: That's the British foreign minister, Jack Straw, right.

Mr. SANGER: Dana, if I had to guess, I would say that you may be seeing now the opening of a--of a resurgence of a Colin Powell-style diplomacy for a while. The American public, I think, and certainly foreign publics have had their fill of regime change for a little bit. And I think the president you heard in his own comments today, talking about a renewed focus on the economy, his AIDS initiative he raised today--I think that was all a signal that we want to retrench for a bit; try to rebuild the alliances, not create more splits. And I think that that tells you that perhaps you're going to see diplomacy flower for a few months. And it makes sense because our military's got its hands full right now.

IFILL: Doyle, is this rebuilding idea tougher than they expected, especially with the--the--the lawlessness, where we started this conversation, and especially with the assassination of people they thought they had in place?

Mr. McMANUS: Well, that--that is turning out to be tougher. And the other front that's turning out to be kind of tough is getting international backing for the money that you want to go in. The--the administration went into a meeting with the World Bank this week and discovered that...

Mr. GJELTEN: Yeah.

Mr. McMANUS: ...the World Bank was saying, `We can't actually start putting money in until we have a UN resolution.' And John Snow, the Treasury secretary, said he was baffled. He had not expected that to happen. So we're also going to have trouble on the UN front again.

IFILL: OK. Thank you.

Dana, thank you for joining us.

Ms. PRIEST: My pleasure.

IFILL: And thank you, everybody, here at the table.

GWEN IFILL, host: Sadly, I have to close this program tonight almost the same way I ended it last week, with a salute to a fallen colleague. David Bloom and I worked together at NBC News. He was larger than life, an extraordinarily talented television journalist and incapable of not being part of the big story. He died doing just that in Iraq this week. He leaves behind his wife, Melanie, three daughters, admiring family, friends, colleagues and viewers. Our condolences go out to all of them. Thanks for watching. Be sure to check in with us again next week on WASHINGTON WEEK. Good night.