AEI - Events - Transcript

The first misperception I think is that violence in Iraq occurs primarily because we�re there.

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Well, I think what�s happening and this is one of the fundamental changes, is that the true intentions of Iran had been exposed and are more easily understood not just by us but also by the Iraqi people as really offensive in nature and really trying to keep Iraq deliberately weak so they have a weakened dependent government that has to look to them for support while at the same time they create organizations external to the government, political movements and especially militias, that can be turned against the government they ostensibly support, the Iranians ostensibly support, if the Iraqi government turns hostile to their interests.

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So what has changed since that time?  And this is usually the topic that I just like to introduce.  I think what had happened, the situation that we confronted last year and people like Doug Olivine here was the chief of plans in Baghdad and did a brilliant job in integrating the additional forces into the Baghdad area.  It was a conflict that had evolved beyond the strategy that we were pursuing at the time. 

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So what’s changed?  Iraq’s communities have largely stopped shooting at each other.  That has been an achievement of the physical security efforts of our forces and I would highlight very courageous and determined Iraqi security forces who took extraordinary risk to make that happen and have fought in a determined way to make that happen.  What we have seen is a result of people stopping shooting each other, which is the first step in getting people to talk to each other, I guess.  There has been some real bottom up movement toward the political accommodation I mentioned just a moment ago. 

And what we are seeing now I think is some top down movement toward political accommodation as well and we could talk specifically about how some of the political dynamics over the last couple of months have created a condition from maybe movement toward political accommodation at the national level.  But what has happened and I think we can see this now in retrospect is that political accommodation at the local level has placed some social pressure on the Iraqi government to move in the same direction or key actors within the Iraqi government who represent portions of the communities who were fighting each other.

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But what effect that has on reducing the justification for militias is immensely important. 

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Point number five would be the militias are increasingly discredited, its linked to the point made earlier just like Al-Qaeda was rejected from the communities in which they were operating, we are now seeing militias rejected by the populations in which they had been operating.

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When I traveled through the south on a last couple of visits, what I heard � and this is again on the point of militias being increasingly discredited, and this is from Iraqi Shiite leaders who were saying things like Iran is the true occupier of Iraq.  They would say jokingly that the Iranians are now all Iraqi nationalists, which is a thinly-veiled swipe at some of the militias in some of these areas. 

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Now related to that, point seven is that U.S. intentions are much more clear to Iraqis.

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Some quick ones, those are great observations.  In terms of the perishable conditions, I think it is related to the point I made in the beginning about the misperception.  The war in Iraq doesn�t end if we leave prematurely.  It gets worse.  I think we�ve got a glimpse of that before.  The key is answering the question how resilient is it?  Can it be maintained?  Have we sustained the effort and are stabilizing efforts in Iraq long enough so that that kind of confidence building from the top down reinforces the kind of bottom political accommodation that has occurred. 

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The war in Iraq doesn’t end if we leave prematurely.  It gets worse.  I think we’ve got a glimpse of that before.  The key is answering the question how resilient is it?  Can it be maintained?  Have we sustained the effort and are stabilizing efforts in Iraq long enough so that that kind of confidence building from the top down reinforces the kind of bottom political accommodation that has occurred. 

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In terms of credit going to the U.S. and how there is a concern, there is definitely a concern.  Where you typically found that happens is in areas that have been or where communities have been pitted against each other in sectarian or ethnic violence in particular, they will say American army can come in, no Iraqi army, no police because they fear that the Iraqi army and the police will be agents of one sect or another and will make the situation worse.  Once U.S. forces come in alongside Iraqi army and they build confidence in the Iraqi army, then people will say, Iraqis will say at that local level, bring on the Iraqi army but keep the police out. 

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Also, I would focus on not disengaging prematurely as Michèle mentioned from the beginning before the kind of confidence has been built between Iraqis and their government, Iraqis and their own security forces.  And I would also focus on really what are the key conditions for having sustainable stability within the country and we can list those if everyone wants to talk about those more in the future and work with Iraqis to develop specific plans to achieve specific objectives that deal with governmental performance, security sector reform, rule of law, and so forth and begin to work on some of the things together and with key international community actors who are willing to assist more as well.  And they’re doing quite a bit that doesn’t get publicized already.

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So one of the key things I think that will be important to watch over this year is the development of newly elected provincial governments and how that helps increase social pressure on the Iraqi government at the center to provide better services for those provincial governments.  We�ve also seen that work very in places like Anbar, where there was improved security, a functioning provincial government that then lobbied successfully its own government to get the resources it needed to begin the capital spending and improve basic services, improve the lives of their people.  So that could be something we could facilitate more, it�s that kind of pressure from Iraq�s own people toward political accommodation.

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But this sometimes happens in the media when you see the word �alleged� in front of when you know in line of Iranian activity, I was just want to say, come on, man.  Because you know if I was, as an Army Colonel to say something, to make a statement about that, there would always be some sort of effort to confirm what I�m saying. 

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In the case of what Iran is doing in Iraq, it is so damn obvious to anybody who wants to look into it, I think, that is drop the word �alleged� and say what they�re doing, which is, we know for a fact organizing and directing operations against the government of Iraq and against our forces

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And we know that they have been sort of backing all horses to destabilize the situation

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it�s very clear that what Iran has done over the last year is try to develop a considerable latent capability that it could turn on in short notice

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And I think that it may have been that this bold and very quick action by the Prime Minister in Basra foiled what was to be perhaps a much larger and coordinated effort, maybe even coordinated with efforts in other places in the region, like what we�re seen happening right now in Lebanon.

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