Iraq: What Now?

JIM LEHRER:

For more on the military situation and options in Iraq right now, we go to: Retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Bernard Trainor, an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations; retired Army Col. W. Patrick Lang, a former Special Forces officer and Middle East analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency; John Mearsheimer, a former Air Force officer, co-director now of the program on international security policy at the University of Chicago — he's written extensively on security issues; and retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner, who teaches military operations and planning and is a longtime consultant to the Defense Department.

So, Colonel Lang, is there a way for U.S. forces to quickly end this violence?

COL. W. PATRICK LANG:

No, I don't think there is. In fact, it's understandable that the Defense Department doesn't want to build this up to look bigger than it really is. But in fact what you have around Fallujah and Ramadi is you have quite substantial numbers of Sunni Arab fighters using reasonably sophisticated weapons to try to get us to back away from them out of that town so they can declare it to be a liberated area. This would have a tremendous political effect in Iraq and across the Arab world.

And now have you the Shia starting to say well, we don't want to be excluded from this process of fighting the occupier because it might damage our political prospects. So you have that going on. This is a serious matter. Your introduction said ten cities. My information says more like 14 cities were engaged today. This is a large scale thing and it will go on for a while.

JIM LEHRER:

But from a military standpoint, General Trainor, well you heard what the reporter said he was with the Marines in Fallujah. Just on that point, to begin with, are the Marines going about this the right way, in general, are the U.S. forces going about this whole operation in the right way?

LT. GEN. BERNARD TRAINOR:

Jim, any time you get involved in fighting in urban terrain, it's going to be pretty messy and there's going to be a lot of bloodshed. But basically what the marines did was to cordon off Fallujah. Nobody could get in or get out without their okay. And then they divided the city into sectors and then they designed sub-units of the battalion and division to go in there to take control of it and that's what they're doing and they'll do it block by block and apartment and building by building if necessary.

And, of course it makes it very difficult but they're fighting an irregular organization that does not wear uniforms, that does not subscribe to the laws of war and are mixed in with the population, and this makes it rather difficult in distinguishing good people from bad people.

If I can go back to something that Gwen Ifill raised, the business of attacking mosques: Mosques, hospitals, churches, schools, places like that under the laws of war, international law are protected places that you are not allowed to attack. However, the laws of war also say that people who use those institutions — those buildings for military purposes — that does away with the protection, the sanctity of that particular organization and those who use it are violating the laws of war and are basically war criminals.

JIM LEHRER:

Mr. Mearsheimer, in general terms, is this going to work?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER:

No, the United States is basically in a situation where it's damned if it does and damned if it doesn't. If we get tough on the Iraqis as we're doing now, tough on the insurgents, it's likely to backfire on us. What it's going to do is it's going to enrage more of the population and make them more sympathetic to the Iraqis. And even if we shut this down in the short-term, we still have the long-term problem that we have no political institution inside Iraq that we can turn power over to on July 1. We also suffer greatly from the fact that the Iraqi security forces that we have been building up over the past year are effectively melting away and many of those forces are joining insurgents.

It's very hard to see how getting tough with the Iraqis is going to solve the problem. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to me that it is going to work if we back off either because then we'll show weakness and the Iraqi people will tend to bandwagon with the insurgents. The insurgents will grow stronger. So we're in a hopeless situation. Either way we turn we lose.

JIM LEHRER:

But a hopeless situation still has … somebody's got to do something. So somewhere in there, do you see a combination of toughness and a soft approach working at all?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER:

I don't think you can combine the two. I think you have to either be tough, you have to increase the number of forces there and get tough, or you have to keep force levels regards low and back off. Those are the two broad choices. And the problem that you face is no matter which one you do, you lose. It's just a matter of choosing your poisons here.

We have got ourselves in a situation where there doesn't appear to be any solution. This is a lot like the spring of 1968. It's as if LBJ called you on the telephone and said we just had the Tet Offensive, what do I do? I don't know what I would have told LBJ at the time, and, in retrospect, I don't know what I'd have told him, and I certainly don't know what I'd tell George Bush if he called me.

JIM LEHRER:

Colonel Gardiner, do you see this as hopeless a situation as Mr. Mearsheimer does?

COL. SAMUEL GARDINER:

I don't think I'd go that far, Jim. I think we've got three problems: We have got an immediate problem, a mid-term problem and a long-term problem. The immediate problem we have to remember is we started this. In both cases the aggressive policies towards Sadr that came from us, shutting down his press.

JIM LEHRER:

The reason we shut down his press is because it was calling for violence and anti-American…

[Editor’s Note:

Jim Lehrer later apologized on air for this comment, saying "I should have said that was the reason given by the coalition, but those unning the paper strongly denied it."]

COL. SAMUEL GARDINER:

Sure.

JIM LEHRER:

I just want to get that on the record.

COL. SAMUEL GARDINER:

But we went there. And the other thing is we went into Fallujah for the purposes of revenge against the attack on those four civilians. Again, that was our choice to go in there and start this.

Now in the immediate thing, I think in both cases, there's a possibility for us to soften. We need to do that. We need to have a week without 20 casualties. We need to have a week where the press isn't covering it both in the United States and in the Middle East. This needs to be calmed down a little bit and we can do that. Mid-term, we have to deal with the control of the situation. A serious thing happened since Sunday, and that is we lost more than half of the coalition.

JIM LEHRER:

Meaning?

COL. SAMUEL GARDINER:

The coalition consisted primarily of the Iraqi security service. The lesson of the last four days is you can't count on them. We've lost a number, probably in the neighborhood of five coalition partners of other countries. So the situation, with respect to that, has changed significantly since Sunday.

JIM LEHRER:

But do you see, in Mr. Mearsheimer's equation there that you are damned if you do, you're damned if don't, if you go tough you lose, if you go soft you lose — where do you come down on that?

COL. SAMUEL GARDINER:

I come down on we have to go through a transition period of softening. Back off now, put the cordon around Fallujah, which is what we had thought we were going to do before. And I think that may have been what the Marines had planned up until this attack on the four contractors when then we decided for what reasons, it would be interesting to find out, that we had to go in there and do revenge. We had to find these people.

JIM LEHRER:

But that resulted, did it not, Colonel Lang, from a decision of the part of the U.S. leadership that we could not sit back and let those four Americans be killed and their bodies be mutilated in such a way. We had to take action, correct?

COL. W. PATRICK LANG:

Yeah. I think that's right. I think the decision essentially was that we were losing control of the city of Fallujah — most places in the Sunni Triangle, and that you can't afford to do that. You can't afford to show that kind of weakness.

In the Arab world if you show weakness, you're just prey, in fact. People will decide to move against you. If — there may be people who think that the Iraqis like our occupation of their country but the Iraqis, the vast majority of them, know that's not true.

JIM LEHRER:

Whether that's Sunnis or Shia.

COL. W. PATRICK LANG:

That's right. Any of them. The military — the only people that like having us there probably are the Kurds because they expect we're going to protect them from the rest of them. But if we start to show that we are not going to resolutely stand up to them with the forces available, they're going to start to move on us everywhere.

JIM LEHRER:

You advocate the tough approach?

COL. W. PATRICK LANG:

I think what the Marines are doing in Fallujah is exactly right. I think you are going to see more of it around country. With all due respect to my friend Sam, I think that in this situation, to reel off some slack off the pile of rope to these people is probably to ask them to try to hang you with it.

JIM LEHRER:

How do you feel about that, general? Do you think that the tough approach will do it, or do you think it has to be a little bit of both or where do you come down?

LT. GEN. BERNARD TRAINOR:

Jim, this is a culmination point. Fallujah, we had the ambush. Ambushes were fairly common. But what happened was the desecration of the contract workers that were in there and the mob violence that followed it. These weren't the people that ambushed the vehicle, but this is kind of a mob mentality. It's at this particular point I think the judgment was made: We are losing control of the area and we had better crack down on it.

And Fallujah is very important because it's on Route 10, which is the main road between Baghdad and Jordan. And this is where the foreign fighters are coming cross. And Fallujah had become a sanctuary for these people. So they decided it is time to crack down on it. The Marines from the outset had planed to go in and occupy Fallujah. The 82nd Airborne, which they had replaced, only had about 700 troops there and they couldn't go in there but the Marines were coming in with a much larger force.

They were going to come in and they were going to show that they were taking control and that and other things were going to show that we are not going to tolerate an insurgency and put ourselves in the position of either having to back off or to be seen as being weak. And we are not going to do that because might makes right in certain mentalities in that part of the world. And I don't think we have a choice.

The alternative to backing off is to show weakness and I think the insurgency will spread like wildfire. It's a high risk strategy, there's no question about that and probably there will be a lot of people that are going to turn against us as the result of it. But I would suspect that most of the Iraqi people are sitting on the fence and they're waiting to see the outcome of this struggle between the Sunnis and the coalition. And they're going to … whichever way it goes, that's the way they're going to go.

JIM LEHRER:

Do you see it the same way, Mr. Mearsheimer? That the Iraqis are watching this as carefully as anybody else, to see where they are going to go depending on — well, you just heard what the general said.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER:

Well, I think that's true that the Iraqis, many Iraqis are watching us to see which way this one is going. But if you look at what has happened over the past year, the balance of forces has shifted against the United States and in favor of the insurgents.

Up until a few weeks ago, we were fighting only the Sunnis. Now we're fighting the Sunnis and the Shia. We are involved in a two-front war and it's hard to see what the story is that anybody in the administration can tell as to how we solve this problem.

This is a question of strategy. Everybody agrees what the basic problem is here. But what is the strategy that we are going to employ to solve the problem? And there is no strategy on the table that's workable. Even if we shut down the insurgency in the short-term, again, the problem is what do we do on July 1 in terms of turning this over to some sort of viable political entity in Iraq? There is nothing there at the moment. The day is fast coming upon us. Furthermore, the Iraqi security forces as everybody here agrees are disintegrating in fronted of us. Our allies are abandoning us. Does it get much worse than this?

JIM LEHRER:

But to take one step at a time, we can't solve the whole thing here tonight, but do you agree with General Trainor that at this stage you said there was no choice. The general said there is a choice, and there is only one, and that's to go the tough route because the other one, it's a risk — it's risky, he said, but there really is no other option. You disagree with that?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER:

I agree with General Trainor that backing off does not work for the reasons that he alluded to. However, I disagree with him in that I think that getting tough with the Iraqis and increasing the number of American forces in Iraq has the same effect. It doesn't work.

JIM LEHRER:

Okay. But, Colonel Gardiner, you feel that … well, you tell me, this whole idea of more troops, clearly you don't have to read too many nuances into what Secretary Rumsfeld and General Myers say. There are going to be 20,000 more troops in there. They're not going to call it that but that's what's going to happen. What message does that send not only to the Iraqis but also back here and to the whole situation generally?

COL. SAMUEL GARDINER:

I think I would describe what we've experienced since Sunday as a strategic event. In the course of military operations there are sometimes things that happen that cause to you refocus. And what I fear is that the analysis and judgment and assessment that we put into where we go forward from here may be in the pattern of the bad assessments that we've gotten to this point. If we think … and I must say that I really strongly disagree with my colleagues about the hard approach —

JIM LEHRER:

The hard approach you just think won't work.

COL. SAMUEL GARDINER:

Tactically it might, but the problem is within Iraq itself and the problem is that Iraq is the source of terrorism now. And the reason it's the source of global terrorism is because the argument people make about us as being an occupying power in a Muslim country. That's the al-Qaida message that sells now. So it is not just about whether or not we control Fallujah. It is about a very big strategic picture and we are at a major strategic turning point.

JIM LEHRER:

Okay. And yes, quickly, Colonel.

COL. W. PATRICK LANG:

I guess I should clarify my position — is I think that what was said about the political and strategic position is correct. I am very concerned about the safety of American forces and I think if we start backing away, we're going to have people all over us just like a blanket everywhere.

JIM LEHRER:

Okay. Thank you all four very much.