Plans for a Post-War Iraq

RAY SUAREZ:

Two top officials from the Bush administration today gave the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a broad sketch of their plans for a postwar Iraq. From the start, it was clear they faced a skeptical crowd. Chairman Richard Lugar:

SEN. RICHARD LUGAR:

How long might U.S. troops conceivably remain? Will the United Nations have a role? And who will manage Iraq's oil resources? Unless the administration can answer these questions in detail, the anxiety of Arab and European governments, as well as that of many in the American public, over our staying power will only grow.

RAY SUAREZ:

The top Democrat, Joe Biden of Delaware, said the administration has been slow to provide details of its Iraq plans.

SEN. JOSEPH BIDEN:

The one lesson universally learned from Vietnam is that a foreign policy, no matter how well or poorly articulated, cannot be sustained without the informed consent of the American people. The American people have no notion what we are about to undertake. This is a gigantic undertaking in what the word that we don't like to hear: nation building — nation building.

RAY SUAREZ:

Marc Grossman, the State Department's undersecretary for political affairs, said priority one, even after a war, will be to find and destroy weapons.

MARC GROSSMAN:

And we'll focus on weapons, delivery systems, agents, related infrastructure, dual-use infrastructure, and Iraq's technical and scientific expertise. And Undersecretary Feith will have a little more to say on this. But…

RAY SUAREZ:

Humanitarian relief plans are also atop the list.

MARC GROSSMAN:

Those who have flee their homes in fear will have to be cared for. Essential supply lines for food, for medicine, water, and fuel will have to be restored.

RAY SUAREZ:

Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense, addressed the oil issue.

DOUGLAS FEITH:

The U.S. and its coalition allies may face the necessity of repairing Iraq's oil infrastructure if Saddam Hussein decides to damage it as he put the torch to Kuwait's oil fields in 1991. Indeed, as I'm sure you know, we have reason to believe Saddam's regime is planning to sabotage Iraq's oil fields.

RAY SUAREZ:

Addressing war critics who say the administration is simply after oil, Feith said all Iraqi resources will belong to the Iraqi people.

DOUGLAS FEITH:

After Desert Storm, we didn't use our military power to take or establish control over the oil resources of Iraq or any other country in the Gulf region. Only someone ignorant of the easy to ascertain realities could think that the United States would profit from such a war, even if we were willing to steal Iraq's oil which we emphatically are not going to do.

RAY SUAREZ:

Biden said the officials left a huge question hanging: Who will be in charge of the reconstruction?

SEN. JOSEPH BIDEN:

Is that going to be an American general? Is that going to be like we have in Bosnia, the E.U. and some European? Is it going to be the United Nations? Those decisions I can't fathom when we're three weeks away from war or five weeks away from war possibly, you don't know.

DOUGLAS FEITH:

If there is a war, that entire range of responsibilities falls to the military commander. It would fall to Gen. Franks.

RAY SUAREZ:

Republican Chuck Hagel of Nebraska asked which countries have committed to help rebuild Iraq.

DOUGLAS FEITH:

I'm reluctant to get into the who because of the political realities and diplomatic realities with which you are….

SEN. CHUCK HAGEL:

Excuse me, Mr. Secretary. If you're having a problem now getting into it, what the hell do you think you're going to have a problem when we get in there?

RAY SUAREZ:

Pressed several times on how long the U.S. would stay in Iraq, Grossman offered a guess of two years. That's optimistic, said retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, the former head of U.S. Central Command led relief efforts after the 1991 Gulf War.

GEN. ANTHONY ZINNI (Ret.):

The Gulf War may have ended in 1991, but CENTCOM for 12 years after was in Iraq, flew it over, no fly zones, no drive zones, maritime intercept operations, occasional bombings, an average presence of 23,000 troops from all services. The war never ended. We aren't going to go home from whatever we do in Iraq.

SPOKESMAN:

The hearing is adjourned.

RAY SUAREZ:

Zinni said a key lesson from the Gulf War is that post war plans must be in place before the first shot is fired.

RAY SUAREZ:

For more on the military, political, and humanitarian challenges of rebuilding Iraq, we get four views. Retired Army Gen. William Nash is the director for the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. He served as the U.N. civilian administrator in Kosovo, and commanded a brigade in southern Iraq that did humanitarian work after the Gulf War.

Rashid Khalidi is a professor of Middle East history and director of the Center for International Studies at the University of Chicago.

Mary McClymont is president of Interaction, an umbrella organization of over 160 American-based humanitarian and development organizations.

And Dr. Mahdi al-Bassam is a board member of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, and a founding member of the Iraqi National Congress, an umbrella organization of Iraqi opposition groups. He was born and raised in Baghdad, but left Iraq to study medicine in the U.S.

Well, Gen. Nash, is planning for after the war a standard part of war planning and what do you hear about how this planning is going?

MAJ. GEN. WILLIAM NASH (RET.):

Well, it is or it certainly should be a part of the whole operation — looking it through from beginning tothe end. And the end is not the end of hostilities but the conflict termination process, and in this case the post-conflict reconstruction necessary to put Iraq back together as a whole state. My judgment is that there's a great deal of planning taking place on the military side, the uniformed military side primarily in four deployed locations, in Qatar, Kuwait and of course in Tampa at the headquarters of the Central Command. The role of the Pentagon is also important. And they provide the forces that those combatant commanders will deal with. What concerns me is the lack of the allocation, from what we've seen so far, of sufficient force to deal with the follow-up, if you will, to the combat operations.

RAY SUAREZ:

Mary McClymont, what have you heard so far about what's in store for after the war?

MARY McCLYMONT:

Ray, we're extremely concerned not only about after the war but the relief efforts for the war. We're very concerned about the state of preparedness of the American government. We have not, as humanitarian NGOs who will be engaged in Iraq, been able to receive any kind of plans, even unclassified plans, concerning the humanitarian emergency.

There has been little, very little discussion about humanitarian consequences that will likely ensue from this war. We're encouraged that the secretary general, Kofi Annan will be speaking to the U.N. Security Council to try to put forward the humanitarian consequences of this war. And I think there's been so little attention from what we understand being given to that aspect of this war. That is a great problem given the very difficult state and circumstances in the country of Iraq in terms of vulnerability of people.

RAY SUAREZ:

But as of this moment you haven't had any formal consultations with the Department of Defense about how your agencies may or may not play a role in a post-war Iraq.

MARY McCLYMONT:

There has been no clear understanding of that at all at this stage.

RAY SUAREZ:

Dr. Al-Bassam, what should people in Washington, in the forward places that the general mentioned, planning for post-war Iraq know? What would you want them to know about what's waiting for them there?

DR. MAHDI AL-BASSAM:

Well, Iraq has a unique situation in that we have about four million Iraqi citizens who live outside the control of Saddam Hussein in northern Iraq that have already experienced democracy and have had elections. There are also an additional two million Iraqis who live outside of the entire country, many of them in the West who have had great experiences with democracy.

We have a set-up that is ready to go as far as trying to extend that form of democracy into the residual part of the country that's presently controlled by Saddam Hussein. The way the Iraqi opposition sees it is that we should be able to have an entity on the ground with which we can control and make civil society easily feasible and go with plans towards an election on constitution as well as in helping the average Iraqis get back on their feet from 30 years of cruelty with Saddam Hussein.

RAY SUAREZ:

Have your organizations, that you're a part of, been consulted officially or unofficially by the Bush administration about what happens when the shooting starts — stops, excuse me…

DR. MAHDI AL-BASSAM:

There has been contact between some of our organizations and the Bush administration. There have been significant amount of work that has been done under the auspices of the State Department and what we call transition to democracy — significant important documents have been produced in that area; there have been additional work that I am involved with where we have the creation of civil society documents being put together. I know of multiple organizations that are doing economic work for a market society — many opinions about oil and how it should be used, water, et cetera, et cetera.

RAY SUAREZ:

Professor Khalidi, what's waiting for American fighters after a war is over in Iraq, if one comes?

RASHID KHALIDI:

Well, I think a lot will depend on the course of the war itself, how many casualties have been in the cities of Iraq, how much damage there has been. Nobody can guess. If we're fortunate — if there's not a lot of casualties — then it will be an easier job.

But in any case, enabling the Iraqis to govern themselves and not imposing things on them from outside — as some people in the Bush administration I think are trying to do — is going to be a daunting task. Figuring out how to adjudicate between the interests of the different groups in Iraq, the 60 percent of Iraqis who are Shia, the Kurds who have had a very difficult time with several Iraqis regimes – the Ba'ath regime and regimes before it, and the Sunni minority, which will be fearful of vengeance perhaps. These are issues that are not going to be easy and the United States is going to be in the middle of all of them as well as the issue already mentioned of who will determine how Iraq's vast oil reserves – perhaps the largest in the world, certainly the second largest proven reserves in the world — are going to be employed.

RAY SUAREZ:

But this all becomes what, an American responsibility once the current Iraqi regime is expelled from office?

RASHID KHALIDI:

Well —

RAY SUAREZ:

Those intricacies that you were talking about.

RASHID KHALIDI:

You may have noticed that there are not very many other countries eager to join us in this effort to overthrow the Iraqi regime. The United States is going to go into this with very, very few allies. Certainly the well to do countries of Europe, the Germans and the French, have been I think very severely alienated in the last few days by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. These are the countries that have money in Europe. If we are expecting from assistance either from the E.U. or from the United Nations, a lot of fence building is going to have to be done. I think the United States has in effect by making positions unilaterally ensured that it unilaterally is going to have to face the consequences after the war is over.

RAY SUAREZ:

Well, you heard both Dr. Al-Bassam, General, and Prof. Khalidi talk about some of the intricacies. This is not going to be simple or clean if a war happens. How does that affect the work that soldiers and their commanders have to do?

MAJ. GEN. WILLIAM NASH (RET.):

Well it affects it greatly. First of all, I think it's important to note that the war will not be over at one moment. There will be a messy transition, if you will, where fighting will continue in parts of Iraq, where other parts of Iraq have been secured and the mission is starting to transition to the post conflict stage. The second point is – is that it's my judgment, it will take more forces to stabilize Iraq than it will be to necessary to defeat the regime. And the third point is, is that the military challenges in this transition from war to post-conflict change from military threats to public security issues. And while they talked about the four million free Iraqis living in the North and the two million Diaspora, I would say there are three or four more times that number of population in the remainder of Iraq that have to be dealt with, public security provided, ensuring that the cycle of revenge does not begin.

And the whole issue of the humanitarian support that is required, and that's why I say that as I look at even with the fervent planning that's taking place by good, honest, true servants of our nation, so far we haven't seen the necessary forces that would be required to follow and support the fighters to provide that larger security facilitate the humanitarian care and begin that transition.

RAY SUAREZ:

Ms. McClymont, Gen. Tommy Franks who is the head of Central Command said in an interview published this morning that he sees soldiers doing a lot of the humanitarian work at least in the initial period. Tell me about how that works and then whether you need a green light from military authorities to start doing your work.

MARY McCLYMONT:

Basically it's first important to note that there are very few international NGOs operating in and around Iraq. We also know that there are few U.N. international personnel. There's probably a thousand of them. They will be evacuated during hostilities. The NGOs have been… had run directly into a log jam with the United States government trying to get licenses that they need to go in to do the most basic humanitarian assessments.

The U.N. has been precluded from getting sufficient funding because of the international donor community in time to do adequate planning so we have to understand the current state of affairs in terms of getting ready to go into that war. Those NGOs and the U.N. will be ready to go in at certain times, clearly at certain moments in the conflict it will be the military that indeed must, can and should be delivering food on the spot during the direct conflict, but the NGOs and the humanitarian U.N. agencies need to be sure that they can get into territory which is secure. So we need to get in and be able to help people in that way. We must have unhindered access to do that.

With respect to the military, however, the day after, we understand that the president has put the Pentagon in charge of humanitarian and reconstruction activities. We very much object to that because of several reasons. First, it very much is not the right thing to have anybody but a civilian authority overseeing humanitarian work. That is because we are impartial, independent providers of aid. It is our job not to be under the control of the military but rather to do our work with the local population. We also very much need to be able to work freely and it is very hard to do that.

RAY SUAREZ:

Dr. Al-Bassam it is important to move to civilian administration or at least non-uniformed administration or international administration more quickly than might be in the plans right now?

DR. MAHDI AL-BASSAM:

We certainly feel it is very important to move to a civilian administration as quickly as possible — a civilian administration that would take the country towards a democratic state.

As far as the aid to the people and the distribution of humanitarian aid and medications and the water systems and the sewage system set up and so on, all of that needs to be administered through a civilian system. We have people on the ground actually a leadership council that is meeting this weekend to talk about all these plans and how to be able to move forward in the immediate days after Saddam Hussein. The civilian administration is crucial because Iraq has been only ruled by Iraqis throughout its history. And it would be much easier for the Iraqi people to follow and accept orders from an Iraqi type civilian administration, irrespective of the name given to it, than from what they would consider a foreign occupier.

RAY SUAREZ:

And, Professor, given what Dr. Al-Bassam just said, how does that fit with minority and majority tensions, ethnic tensions, religious, sectarian tensions? Is there such a thing as an Iraqi right now for the purposes of put in a civilian administration?

RASHID KHALIDI:

No, there definitely is. There is and has been an Iraqi national identity for a long type. I think it's a mistake to overstress the divisions of that country, but I would also suggest that it's a mistake to think of this as a country that's always ruled itself. It's a country which has had strong aspirations for independence. Those were foiled by foreign occupation or foreign interference mainly by Britain for decades and decades in the first part of the 20th century. That is something that a lot of Iraqis remember. They rose up against the British a couple of years after the British occupation of the country.

It is essential after this war, if heaven forbid it happens, that the United States not step into the shoes of former colonial powers. Whatever our pure intentions may be — and I'm not entirely sure that the intentions of everybody in Washington are pure — whatever they may be, how we are perceived by Iraqis will determine whether there is an occupation and resistance or whether the United States gets out very quickly and the Iraqi people are able to choose their own government.

I think they probably could figure out a way to deal with the differences among them but it will have to be the Iraqis not people who come in on the back of American tanks, not people who have been sitting in exile for decades. It will have to be the Iraqis who freely choose their own government if we are to avoid some of the worst possible outcomes in having American soldiers and American interests caught in the middle blamed justly for the things that follow.

RAY SUAREZ:

Professor, guests, thank you all.