U.S. Policy in the Middle East Revisited Following Iraq Study Report

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• RAY SUAREZ:

  The Iraq Study Group report has provoked reactions around the world and across the American political spectrum. The report is starting to raise new questions about the American role in the Middle East, whatever the Iraq outcome.

  We get some of that reaction from analysts who've written opinion pieces in the past few days. Eliot Cohen is a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He was among those meeting today with President Bush. His critique in the Wall Street Journal is called, "No Way to Win a War."

  David Rothkopf is a Clinton administration official, author, and scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His article in the Sunday Washington Post is called, "We'll Be Back: Anticipating a Third Gulf War."

  Eliot Cohen, no way to win a war. You were scathing about the process that arrived at the report. What was the problem that you saw?

  ELIOT COHEN, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies: Well, the problem with the process was — first and foremost, it was driven by consensus. And intrinsically this is an extraordinarily difficult problem, which serious people are going to disagree.

  I think the commission would have done a much better job if they had laid out several different options and explained to the American people the strengths and the weaknesses of each. They decided not to do that. Consensus, which is another word for group-think, instead took hold.

  The other thing was I think simply that the procedures that they used to try to dig into the problem were terribly flawed. They spent all of four days in Iraq, all of those inside the Green Zone, this little bubble of palaces and offices in Baghdad. Only one member of the study group, Chuck Robb, Marine combat veteran, went for one day to Fallujah.

  I don't see how you can really come to grips with the war unless you're willing to go out there and see it. And even in terms of their consultations, talking with some members of the military, their senior military advisers, well, they had one two-hour session with them and never talked to them after that.

  So, as a way of really getting to the heart of what's going on in the war, I thought it was a deeply flawed way of going about it.

• RAY SUAREZ:

  Well, Mr. Rothkopf, you're less critical of the Iraq Study Group than Mr. Cohen, but concluding "we'll be back," even if we get out, based on…

• DAVID ROTHKOPF, Former Clinton Administration Official:

  Well, I mean, based on history, based on the fact that this has been a region in tumult for decades, based on the fact that we've already been there in another gulf war once before with another president named Bush, and that we've been involved, in one way or another, in the conflicts of the region for decades.

  I think, regardless of the flaws within the process of the ISG, one of the flaws within the debate in the United States right now is that we're very short-term focused. We're very focused on action by the United States, and we're not looking at the longer term.

  If Iraq was a mistake to enter or it was not, it's certainly not the whole picture. And to focus on pulling out and not focus on all the other issues, whether it's terrorism, or succession struggles in other countries, or Iranian nukes, or the Arab-Israeli issue, is to make a mistake, and to lead to deterioration in those over things, some of which, by the way, is caused by what we've done in Iraq.

  We've inflamed a number of these situations in Iraq, and that inflammation and the problems caused by that inflammation is not going to evaporate simply through the redeployment of American troops.