Experts Still Divided After Iraq Study Group Recommendations

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• RAY SUAREZ:

  Several weeks ago, the NewsHour ran a series of discussions on ideas for Iraq. Now that the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group has issued its recommendations, we've brought back our discussion participants for their thoughts.

• They are:

  Phyllis Bennis, who advocated an immediate U.S. withdrawal; Peter Galbraith, who proposed decentralizing Iraq; Michael Vickers, on training the Iraqi army; Eric Davis on bolstering reconstruction; Frederick Kagan on sending more American troops; and James Dobbins on the use of diplomacy.

  And one of the subtitles of the Iraq Study Group's report is "The Way Forward." Ambassador Dobbins, did it offer a way forward?

  JAMES DOBBINS, International Security and Defense Policy Center: I think, if you were looking for this group to come forward with some bold, new program that nobody had thought of before, you're going to be disappointed.

  If what you were looking for was a group of wise and experienced people to apply commonsense realism and a certain pragmatism to the problem and try to come to a common bipartisan decision, you're going to be pleased with the result.

  It is a way forward that can be supported across the political spectrum, which has some hopes of improving the situation or at least retarding the deterioration that we've been seeing continually for three years.

• RAY SUAREZ:

  Phyllis Bennis, did it offer a way forward?

  PHYLLIS BENNIS, Institute for Policy Studies: It didn't offer a way to end the war. It was not designed to end the war. The goal of the Iraq Study Group was not to end the war.

  What it did was to propose a bipartisan consensus of what we might say is the economic and political elites of the United States, to say, "This is how we can take the issue off the agenda for both parties, make it not an issue for the 2008 elections, and have the current crisis in Iraq, that's so much dominating the news and the front pages, be transformed into a long-term, maybe even permanent, sustainable, less obvious occupation."

  That's not an answer; that's not what the American people voted for this last November when they voted to end the war.

• RAY SUAREZ:

  Ambassador Galbraith?

• PETER GALBRAITH, Former State Department Official:

  The strategies that were recommended for Iraq were wildly unrealistic.

  The report recommended centralizing Iraq, a country that basically has a constitution that creates powerful regions, is a road map for partition. They imagined that could be undone, as if the people who voted for that in the first place would wake up and change their minds.

  Secondly, they proposed training Iraqi army and police, overlooking the fact that Iraq is in a civil war. In fact, the words "civil war" do not appear in the 98-page report.

  And, of course, in circumstances of civil war, the Iraqi army and police are not, as the report imagines, neutral guarantors of public safety. They are fighters in a civil war. We can train them to be more effective killers, but we cannot train them to want to have a more inclusive Iraq.

• RAY SUAREZ:

  Michael Vickers?

  MICHAEL VICKERS, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments: I think the report largely is headed in the right direction, in the sense that it takes account of American politics. It takes account of Iraqi politics, and it adds this external dimension.

  One doesn't have to agree with all the recommendations in the report, but if there is to be a unitary state in Iraq in the future, then you have to have a sustainable strategy. And it has to be one where you build national institutions.

  And there may be a debate about whether Iraq is going to remain whole, but this is at least a plausible way forward.

• RAY SUAREZ:

  Professor Davis?

• ERIC DAVIS, Professor, Rutgers University:

  Yes, well, I think there's much to commend the report, from a political and diplomatic standpoint, but it still doesn't deal with the elephant in the room as it were.

  The Iraqi economy is devastated; there's large-scale unemployment. On page 23, the report admits that unemployment may be as high as 60 percent.

  And I was happy to see today in the Washington Post that the Defense Department has finally recognized the contribution that unemployment makes to the ongoing insurgency. And it was interesting, recently talking to an American officer who spent a lot of time in al-Anbar Province, he said that, when he went to local notables to ask them what was necessary to quell the insurgency, invariably they always said, "Find jobs for angry young men."

• RAY SUAREZ:

  And finally, Frederick Kagan?

• FREDERICK KAGAN, American Enterprise Institute:

  We've done a good job of putting together a panel where every one of us has a different elephant in the room. For me, the elephant in the room is security.

  The fact of the matter is that it's never been the primary mission of the U.S. military presence in Iraq to establish security for the people of Iraq, and that's a fundamental failure. When you go back to Counterinsurgency 101, establishing security for the population is key.

  And I absolutely agree that the unemployment is a major issue. I absolutely agree that the political situation is a major problem. There is no prospect for having forward progress on any of that until the violence can be brought under control.

  I believe that we can do that. I believe that the ISG report offers a way not to do that, because the problem is: We can embed a lot of trainers and we can work on training the Iraqi security forces, but there is the problem that they're operating in the context of a civil war, which is going to make them less effective, and there's also the question of time lines.

  You don't just train people up overnight. There's going to be a gap. And if we pull forces out of their tasks of patrolling and providing minimal security that they're doing now and embed them as trainers, violence is going to increase. I don't think we have time to allow this process to go forward.