Last night The News Hour with Jim Lehrer featured a discussion on the situation in Iraq between Zbigniew Brzezinski and Walter Mead. This is currently their top item, with a link to the
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I found myself obsessed for some reason with this interview, saw it on broadcast and wished I'd taped it, couldn't find a repeat, listened to the audio and finally transcribed it myself. I hope you'll find the read worth it.
There is a lot here. The contempt for the "photo op" approach of this administration, the insistence on a realistic assessment of the situation, the proposal for an actual way out, the use of battling metaphors - one to Algeria, one to ... reconstruction in South Carolina after the US Civil war?
If anyone needs hard words to back up the charge that this whole "good week" for Bush is a stage managed set piece, here you go.
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My transcription follows.
Jim Lehrer: Bush ended his press conference saying going to war in Irag was worth it, necessary, and it will succeed - do you agree?
Zbigniew Brzezinski: No, I do not. I don't think it was worth it, I don't think it is succeeding, and I think we ought to think very seriously as to how we can extract still some degree of success from what obviously has been a major misadventure.
JL: You did not hear the President say anything today that gave you confidence that success was still possible under his way of doing it?
ZB: Well the President opened his press conference by making a statement which I suspect most Americans didn't quite fully interpret correctly. This is what he said: "I've just returned from Baghdad. I was inspired to be able to visit the capital of a free and democratic Irag." (Holds up photo). Now this is what the President actually visited. This is an aerial map of Baghdad. Within it viewers can see a small spot. That is the so called green zone, a fortified American fortress housing the American Embassy, the American High Command, and all the major institutions of the Iraqi "Free and Democratic Government" in an American fortress. This is worse than in the bad days of Vietnam, when the South Vietnamese regime was operating from its own palaces, had its own army and so forth. We do not have in Iraq a free and democratic government that is functioning.
JL: Walter Mead, what do you think of that?
WM: Obviously there is some truth to it, but I wouldn't be quite so grim about it, particularly making the comparison to South Vietnam. The big difference in South Vietnam was we had a government but we could never quite find enough people who wanted to support that government. In Iraq it's very clear that the large majority of Iraqi's want this government to work. Now whether they'll be able to succeed. I don't think the president made anybody think it was a sure thing that we;re going to win in Iraq, but I look at some slow changes and I do see some encouraging. I mean, uh, yes it is true the government is meeting in the green zone, but the government is meeting. You know just a few weeks ago there were a lot of people saying the government would never be able to assemble a national unity government then when the key security ministries were left unfilled they said well you see they could do the easy part but not the hard part and now they've done that. The strategy that they were discussing to begin to use 75000 troops to pacify Baghdad, that is a strategy that a lot of critics have been pressing on them for some time. And interestingly, in that strategy, their calling for that effort to be led by Iragis with only about 10% of the forces being coalition. None of this would have been even remotely possible a year ago. That's not to say that Iraq is paradise or that somehow the end is just around the corner. But if you look at it over time, I think you do see some very positive changes in the balance of forces.
JL: Do you see the same changes, Dr. Brzenski?
ZB: I would have to have an enormous magnifying glass to be able to see them that way. The fact of the matter is the government is meeting in an American fortress. If it is meeting in an American fortress it is because it not able to operate outside of an American fortress. That tells you a lot. The notion that a new plan is being put in to enhance security in Baghdad makes me think of a person in the midst of a huge fire in a house who all of a sudden announces that he has a new plan for the installation of air conditioning.
The fact of the matter is that three years after the occupation of Baghdad the authority we have installed is besieged and relatively helpless. And a civil war is beginning to mushroom under the occupation which is unable to crush the insurgency because it is a foreign occupation.
And last but not least we have to get rid of the mind set, which is by now totally ahistorical, we no longer live in the age of colonialism, we no longer have to assume the "white man's burden" in order to "civilize" others. The Iraqis are a historical people. They are quite capable of handling things on their own, provided their leaders are real leaders of the country, and not essentially protoges of an occupying power, hiding in an American fortress.
JL: Walter Mead, what about this new regime of Prime Minister Maliki? Are they more of the same, or do they fit the definition that Dr. Brzenski laid out, essentially installed, protected and given power by the United States?
WM: Well certainly the US overthrew Sadam Hussein, but the Iraqi leadership emerged first of all from a constitutional process, then from elections, then from a political process that the US did not control. So it seems to me that if the US was trying to be a colonial power in Iraq, we would have made an alliance with a minority (that's what the British did when they brought in the Sunnis into power in Iraq) in order to overawe the majority, and also becausethe minority is dependent on the outside power the outside power can protect its positions. Actually what the US has been doing in Iraq is quite different. Whether we can succeed or not is very difficult, but we have been putting the majority of Iraqis in charge, and I think that this will not be a puppet government, and you can already see in some ways it is an Iraqi government acting out of Iraqi politics.
I would also say that the situation in Baghdad, at one level you look and you see that there are people getting killed all the time there, and that is true. But you have to look a little further to really follow the currents that are going on there. If you go back some months and almost all the killings were Sunnis killing Shia, basically people defending the old regime or wanting a jihadi regime trying to prevent a new regime from taking root.
Now what you are seeing, unfortunately, is roughly the same number of people being killed, but its more Shia killing Sunni, and the problem now the governor has to reign in militias, death squads, and its not going to be easy. But it also suggests that the new order in Iraq, while far from perfect, but one based in the aspirations of the majority of Iraqis, is gaining ground, on the ground.
JL: Gaining ground on the ground, Dr Brzenski, in terms of the Iraqis themselves taking control as you say they should?
BZ: (Laughs bitterly) You know, I don't understand the definition of progress if progress is movement from Sunnis killing Shias to Shias now killing Sunnis in addition to Sunnis killing Shias. What kind of progress is that?
I'll give you another example. Until recently Basra which is in southern Iraq, occupied by the British, was been relatively quiet. Now it is becoming violent. I'm afraid that the sense of resentment against
the foreign occupation is spreading. And to the extent that we can gauge by public opinion polls, and of course we have to wonder how reliable they are, a large majority of the Iraqi people now resents the foreign occupation.
And last but not least there is the fact that the Iraqi government, three years after the occupation, still sits in an American fortress; it cannot venture outside of it. To call it a government is to misuse the word government. It is not governing, it is sitting there, it is receiving American visitors, but is not operating. Now the Kurds are running the north. There is no doubt there is a Kurdish authority, that is established. But in the Sunni and Shia regions I'm afraid we do not have a viable political entity operating independently of us.
JL: Alright. Walter Mead?
WM: Well what I'd say there is first of all that the uh, the government is not three years, the government has not been trying to establish itself as an operating entity for three years, the government is just a couple of weeks old as an actual unified government operating constitutionally with an agreed upon program. So if three years from now or even a shorter time than that what we still have is a group of politicians operating inside protection I'd start moving over to Dr. Brzenski's position, but I want to see what they do first. The fact that they are planning the largest security effort ever mounted in Baghdad and that Iraqi troops are leading it is very significant. I mean here's a government that says the first thing we have to do is secure the capital. Now we'll have to watch to see how well or how badly they'll do, and I'm not going to sit here and tell you I know because I don't. But to say that its over, that if failed that this government will never work because its been trying for three years to work, is just not right. Let's wait and see how it goes and see where we are.
One way to compare this situation is that after the US civil war the minority in states like the one I was born in, South Carolina, was white, and the blacks tried to set up an independent government, a democratic government, after the war, and the Ku Klux Klan organized a terror movement which ultimately suppressed the black government in SC and drove blacks from the polls.
What has been happening is first of all we've been working to keep the Klan from taking over again and from reimposing minority rule. That's work. Now comes the much more difficult and ultimately decisive question, can the newly empowered formerly oppressed majority form a government. They don't know how to do it, they haven't been doing it, they've been excluded from policial power. It's very hard, there are extremely high hurdles for them, but is worth the try it seems to me, it really is worth giving these people a chance for the first time to genuinely govern themselves.
JL: Worth the try Dr. Brzenski? You're saying no?
ZB: Well, its worth a try, but the question is how long do you continue trying? Now Walter says, if I understand him correctly, he's willing to wait three more years to see if the present government leaves the green zone, the American fortress.
Well, how many thousands of Iraqis will die in the mean time, how many hundreds or maybe thousands of Americans will die in the mean time, how much will or prestige internationally decline, how many billions of dollars will we spend on this?
You know, analogies are not always very helpful, but far fetched analogies are really misleading. I think the analogy to the American Civil War is far fetched. If you want some analogy, I'd say a closer analogy is that of Algeria in the waning days of the war the Algerians were waging against the French.
Until DeGaulle came to power the government was getting all the time the same kind of advise we now are hearing about Iraq. It may get better. Yes, three years have been wasted, but maybe we can go on for three more years. And we're going to do better, we're going to control Algiers.
There's a wonderful movie called the Battle of Algiers which shows what happened when the effort was made, finally, just to control Algiers. I'm afraid the Battle of Baghdad is in many ways reminiscent of the Battle for Algiers. And then a man came along, DeGaulle, who instead of listening to the same degree of timid consensus, "Gee we're stuck, but we don't know what to do, so let's continue being stuck and maybe we'll win.", he realized that this is a wrong war, an ahistorical war, a war that France cannot win because the age has past. And we have to realize we cannot do now in Iraq what the British did in the 20s. This is a new age and an imperial war in the name of tutelage is just not going to prevail.
JL: So pull out Dr. Brzenski? Now?
ZB: Pull out in an intelligent fashion. I have been advocating a four point program which in a nutshell is the following. Talk at length with the Iraqi leadership as to when we have to leave. Those who say we don't want you to leave are those will leave when we leave. The real leaders, probably not living in the green zone, will say yes, leave. I suspect Sistani is among them. Second then announce a date, jointly, set jointly. Third, let the Iraqi government convene a conference of all of Iraq's muslim neighbors about stabilizing Iraq, and helping it to stabilize. Most of them will want to be helpful, maybe even the Iranians. Then fourth, we then announce as we are leaving a donors conference of interested countries in Europe and the Far East who benefit from Iraqi oil on helping to rehabilitate Iraq.
I think this would enable us to leave and still say we achieved basically what we wanted, the removal of Saddam, though not a secular, stable, united Iraq under a perfect democracy, because that frankly, is a fantasy.
JL: Walter Mead I take it you would not endorse the Brzenski plan?
WM: I think the point where Dr B and I differ the most is this. He seems to think the jihadis and the Baathists represent a genuine national movement in Iraq that reflects the will of the Iraqi people. While all analogies are imprecise, I think my South Carolina analogy is better than his Algeria analogy because in Algeria it was the French settlers and just a tiny fringe of Algerians that supported the French in that war, the overwhelming majority of Algerians wanted independence.
What you have in Iraq is the overwhelming majority of Iraqis, both the Shia and the Kurds, want the new state. We are not actually fighting a war against the forces of national liberation in Iraq, and I agree with Dr. B that those wars should never have been fought, and the time for them is past now and they are futile. But in Iraq, the forces on our side, the elected government and the Kurds, are the voice of the majority, they are an Iraqi nation that has never had a chance to be free before. And will it work? Its a hard thing to do. At one point the Bush administration said well we don't do nation building and they've discovered I think somewhat to their chagrin that's what they are doing and it isn't easy. But we are not working against the Iraqi nation, we are working for and with an Iraqi nation that is trying to achieve for the first time real political representation.
JL: Alright gentleman, on that note of profound disagreement we will leave it. Thank you both very much.
ZB: Nice to be with you.
JL: Thank you.
WB: Good to see you.