Thomas Ricks interviewed by Tom Ashbrook on On Point, 4/2/07, about the fate of the Iraq war. Tom Ricks is Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the Washington Post and author of "Fiasco."
Tom Ashbrook: We're going to go straight to the "surge," and we're going to go just as big from there as you and our listeners want to go in our consideration of this war and where we stand in it. ...Here's John McCain, presidential candidate, Republican Senator from Arizona, in Baghdad at a news conference yesterday saying the situation there is improving and the security plan is working:
John McCain: I believe that we have a new strategy that is making progress. That's not to say that things are well everywhere in Iraq. Far from it. We have a long way to go. We read every day about suicide bombings, kidnapings, rocket attacks and other terrible acts. And I'm not saying that mission is accomplished or "last throes" or "a few dead-enders." But what we don't read about every day -- and what is news since the surge began -- is a lot of the good news.
TA: "A lot of good news we don't hear about, " says Senator John McCain in Baghdad. Tom Ricks, what do you make of Senator McCain's assessment of the surge: "it's working."
The "surge"
Tom Ricks: I was kind of sorry to hear him say it because I have a lot of respect for him. He does have a feel for the military situation, I think, more than most members of the US Senate. I think it's simply too early to call the ball on what's happening in Iraq right now. There's a lot of counter-intuitive signs. For example: a sharp increase in US casualties would not necessarily be a bad sign.
TA: Because?
TR: Well, because General Petraeus, the new US commander in Iraq, is putting all these troops out in these outposts across the city instead of having them behind big walls of forward operating bases. If those new combat outposts are effective, they will be attacked. So one sign of this changed strategy being effective would be increased attacks on American troops. If you're ineffective, if you're irrelevant, the enemy doesn't attack you: he likes where you are. If you are having an effect, if you are changing the security situation on the ground, he will respond. I think, and General Petraeus would agree, I think, it's much too early to say this thing is working. The important thing about the surge, by the way, is not the increase in troop numbers -- because it isn't really a "surge," it's a slow trickle. A surge is a big, fast change like putting in an extra brigade a month, like 5000 troops a month over the course of six months is not a surge. In fact, once you increase to that level over the course of six months, we will not even have as many troops as we've had in Iraq in previous times when we were up to 160,000 troops. What's really significant here in Iraq, and what I think Senator McCain is focusing on properly, is the changed posture that General Petraeus is having the troops have. Getting them out of the bases. Getting them out among the people. And it's much too early to say if that's working or not working.
TA: Higher casualties in Baghdad you say may be a sign that something's working. But of course the casualties are up right around the country. The US military leadership in Baghdad talking about action being squeezed out. Big bombings in Kirkuk over the weekend. We saw last week, in Talafar, huge bombings and slaughter -- biggest bombing in the four years of the war there.
TR: What happened in Talafar is really worrisome and, I think, much more serious than what we see happening in Baghdad. Talafar is a city up in northwestern Iraq. I was there almost exactly a year ago. And the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment had done a terrific job of bringing security to that city, taking it back from some really nasty terrorists. Unfortunately, the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment rotated out under US military policy -- people go out for a year and come back. A smaller unit was put in and we seem to have lost control of that situation. A year ago President Bush hailed it in a speech, with Talafar as a model for what we want to do in Iraq. In many ways what we're doing in Baghdad now is a bigger version of what we did in Talafar. But what we've seen in Talafar with that huge bombing -- actually a couple of bombings that killed at least a couple of hundred people, it looks like, was that Talafar has gone from being an example of the best we can do -- which is "clear, hold, and build" -- to the worst we can do -- which is arming Iraqi security forces to then use those weapons against other Iraqis.
TA: That's what happened after the bombing. It appears as though Shia police went from house to house, dragged out Sunnis, killed them...
TR: Exactly. So it's gone from being the best we can do to our worst nightmare, which is that we are simply adding fuel to the fire.
TA: There are so many questions here and America is now being asked to judge between starkly different views of the war. Democrats are saying we've got to set up a timetable to get out of there, for Iraqis to step up; Republicans saying we have to hang in there. Your judgment last year famously was that the military effort to that point was a "fiasco." Has that judgment changed? Have we learned? Have we turned a corner? Are we doing things better or not?
TR: We are doing things better. Strikingly, what you have now is the dissidents of '03-'04. General Petraeus, the new ambassador Ryan Crocker. These are the people who argued for different ways several years ago and have now been put in charge. We are operating very differently. As I said, the troop numbers really don't matter but the different posture does matter. The problem is, it's probably too little too late. If you'd done this in early '04 and said, "General Petraeus, what you're doing up in northern Iraq with 101st Airborne is great -- come and do it for the whole country!" But this war has now gone on longer than our involvement in World War II. The enemy has learned a lot from us. It's a very smart and almost devilish enemy in some ways. And in many ways all we're still doing is squeezing the toothpaste around the country. As the situation in Anbar province gets better, so Al Qaeda moves to the northern Sunni triangle, into Kirkuk, Mosul, and Talafar. The situation in Baghdad gets better, but you see more violence east of the capital in Dyala province. So I actually still think we're still in a one-year period where all the other players are watching Uncle Sam play his last chips. They're all kind of taking a deep breath, standing back, and watching this major player expend his resources. I think this fall is when we'll really begin to understand what's happening, right around the month of Ramadan which has historically see a spike in violence every year. If this thing is really working, we'll know that by, say, mid-October.
Any chance of success?
TA: You've talked with a lot of people inside the military. Give us a sense of the chatter there. Are they saying, "Hey, maybe General David Petraeus can pull this out" or are they saying "He hasn't got a snowballs's chance..." And what would "pull it out" mean? How's it being assessed on the inside?
TR: What you hear again and again is if anybody can do this, General Petraeus can. But I say, "Do you think he can?" And generally what you hear is 10% chance... 20% chance. What "doing it" would mean would be changing long term trends in Baghdad and in Iraq so that violence appears to be going down generally and people start feeling secure. And people turn to Iraqi forces and their American allies for protection. Right now people turn to the militias and the insurgents for protection. Iraq -- and especially Baghdad -- is a pure Hobbesian state. Baghdad today is a series of armed camps of five or six square blocks where they pulled up rubble and dead cars to block off all access except for one. And there's one guy sitting out there in blue jeans and a red flannel shirt holding an AK-47. He's a security guard or he might be the militia or both. But he's protecting that little neighborhood. One of the problems is, the Shiite-dominated police sometimes go into the Sunni enclaves and say, "We're the police and we're here to clear out all the heavy weapons," and they aren't very polite about it. Then that night the Shiite militia shows up and kills all the men.
TA: Comes in behind the disarming.. You described this war last year as a "fiasco." The word I hear more from you these days is "tragedy." But yet you're describing here potential improvement, potential signs of hope. Yet you use the word tragedy. Tragedy's a very big word -- national tragedy. Why that one?
TR: It's very difficult to find examples of losing the strategic initiative and then regaining it. Once you've lost the initiative in a war, the hardest thing is to regain it. We lost the initiative in the spring of '03 in the two or three months after the fall of Baghdad, the fall of the statue, when the Secretary of Defense dismissed the looting as "stuff happens," when he refused to recognize the insurgency was being created, and when the generals used extremely counter-productive tactics that inflamed Iraqi public opinion against the Americans. It really helped create the insurgency -- helped with its recruiting and financing and arming problems which any new insurgency has. I still think it's a tragedy. It's hard to see a good outcome in this. Shakespearian tragedies are in five acts. I think this is Act III. Act III is the betrayers' phase. Act IV will be -- probably -- the American draw-down in some form. I don't think we'll get out, but I think we'll draw down our presence in '08. And Act V probably will be the regional consequences. And I don't think they're going to be good. They're not good right now. It ends in a five-act play like Hamlet or Othello or King Lear, which is to say bloody, messy, and difficult. It's a good thing to understand it as a tragedy because it tells you there really are no good options. Once you grasp that, you say, Okay, let's talk about least bad options, none of them particularly palatable. But which is the least damaging to the Iraqi people, to the region, and to the American interest.
TA: Tough, tough picture. ... Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was along with Senator McCain at the same news conference yesterday. Senator Graham said it would be "a grave error to set a deadline for pulling US troops out of Iraq."
Lindsey Graham: I think you see four people here who believe now more than ever it would be a huge mistake to set a deadline. Because it is working! There are signs of progress. We're doing now what we should have done three years ago. And if you set a deadline now, it will undercut everything positive that's going on. That's not me saying that, that's every soldier I've talked to today. That's the Iraqi police commander who said "Please stay with us. Things are getting better."
TA: We'll talk about that. I want to get a listener in here. Dorrie is calling from Fairfield, Iowa.
Dorrie: Your guest, Mr. Ricks, did kind of answer my question a little bit. I live in a community with many people living here from all over the world. One of my close friends and I have a running debate. He thinks the whole antiwar cry of "bring the troops home" is very disrespectful to the Iraq people. When I heard about this so-called surge, I thought, well, if they could pacify the country and bring an end to the suffering of the Iraqi people I'm all for it. But it sounds like you guest is saying that's not what's happening. My thought is that the American troops should leave the country and somehow rally an international force led by the Arab states and I'd like your guest's outlook on that. How do we stop the suffering of the Iraqis?
Alternatives to military action by the US
TR: It's a good question. A lot of people talk about this -- why don't we put in a UN force or an international force? The answer is that most of the Arab world vigorously opposed the US presence in Iraq and a UN force is likely to be ineffectual. The UN doesn't like what's happening in Iraq. They just got bombed again recently . The UN was bombed severely in 2003 in Baghdad when their headquarters was knocked down. Inside the UN, that's viewed as their 9/11. So the UN has really felt burned by the situation in Iraq. I don't think you're going to see any sort of effective international force. Anything that happens militarily will have to be done by the US. It leads to a good point, I think, which is people talk about "why don't we just get out?" Well, if you get out, you are going to have consequences in Iraq and those need to be thought through. Or: why don't we just break up the country in to three parts? Okay, but what does that mean? You're going to have to have some sort of no-man's land between those areas to keep them separate, to keep them from fighting each other.
TA: ...The idea of a Sunni area, Shia area, Kurdish area.
TR: Exactly! Who patrols those? Do American troops patrol it? Well, then you're going to have American troops in a more difficult situation. I think we're probably going to wind up in some sort of containment posture where we pull back to the borders and try to keep Iraq's civil war from becoming a regional war. But if you do that and just stand back and let Iraqis slaughter each other, as one general said to me "What a great recruiting poster for Al Qaeda!" Secondly, if you don't like the Iraq mission, you're going to hate the containment mission! It's a messy, difficult situation where American troops are dying in an ambiguous, open-ended, difficult mission. So that's what I mean in saying there are no good options here but there are bad options and we need to think through what each of them means.
TA: So take us from there, then, and the debate that Dorrie has with her neighbor -- you're describing a kind of damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't. Lindsey Graham says "if you set a deadline now.." -- and of course this is the debate now in Washington -- it will undercut everything positive that's going on. How do you look at the debate over timelines, deadlines, withdrawals, schedules?
TR: I look at the Congressional debate and the White House response as ants on a log floating down a river arguing which way the log should go! They're having no effect on it. The log is going to float down the way the river's carrying it. We in many ways are not controlling events in Iraq. Events are controlling us.
TA: But the US troop presence -- that surely is something that Washington can make decisions on, good or bad.
TR: Sure. It can be in or out. But -- okay, how many ants do you want to put on the log?! Or -- how many ants do we want to take off the log? The log is still going to go in the direction the log is going in.
TA: It doesn't matter whether the US is there or not?
TR: It may not. You hear the argument from some US officers which is, Look, a big civil war here is inevitable. If you believe it's inevitable, then all we're doing is postponing the inevitable and having suffering and losses of American troops during that period. So the moral thing to do is to stop trying to postpone the inevitable.
TA: These are US military officers saying that?
When will we know if the surge is working?
TR: Oh yes. I've heard that argument! "We should just step back and let this thing happen." There are other people who say No, let's stay in there. My point is that the Congressional debate about something happening in 2008 is like talking about the next century. Events are moving so swiftly on the ground in Iraq. As things change, as political line-ups move, as militias realign themselves, if Sistani dies -- all these things are out there. To talk about '08 is almost irrelevant. We're going to know, I think, by this fall the direction and outcome of Iraq.
TA: How will we know? What might we learn?
TR: Right about the end of Ramadan, the holy month, which is mid-October, I think we'll have a sense of: has this changed American posture had any effect? has the Iraqi government been able to achieve any sort of political reconciliation? And those trends are not particularly good. We see no real indication of reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites. Rather, we see Sunni ministers leaving the government. We see a real hardening of positions. We see Shiites saying, "We have won this war. The Americans are useful chumps to keep around while we sort out our internal differences and consolidate our hold. This is now a Shiite government and Sunnis can like it or lump it!" So I think you're seeing a hardening of positions rather than a reconciliation. If it's going to change, we'll see it in the next few months. If anybody can do it, it'll be this team of General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. But I don't hear a lot of people putting any better than 50/50 odds on that.
What accounts for our failure?
TA: And there, then, you see the debate in Washington as kind of irrelevant.
TR: Basically fiber-free! I was asked by one of my bosses to "truth-squad" a recent Congressional debate -- "sort out of the facts!" And I didn't find a toe-hold! There weren't really a lot of facts to work with. It was a lot of opinion back and forth. One reason is that the last four years Congress essentially abdicated its responsibilities. It didn't act as a co-equal branch of government, hold hearing, put out reports to establish a fact-base for discussion. And so it really was a content-free debate in many ways -- on both sides. Because it was just opinions flying back and forth without anybody being able to say, "As we held hearing on x, we saw that..." For example, nobody can tell you exactly how much this war costs. The best estimate is around $2 billion a week. But the last time I looked, the Pentagon still wouldn't sort out Afghanistan numbers from Iraq numbers. And so we don't really know for sure. I don't know how many Americans have died in Iraq. I can tell you how many American troops have died. But we've never been able to pull out solid numbers on contractors. And there are a lot of American contractors there. There are almost as many civilian contractors in Iraq as there are US troops, although many of the civilian contractors are Iraqis. The key program in Iraq -- training and equipping Iraqi security forces -- Congress has never held a series of hearings on that. Only recently it started to look at that. A fact-base would show, Here are the long-term trends, here's how this works, here's how many Iraqi battalions are effective right now. It's very difficult to pull that information out...
TA: ...This goes to your bigger theme, your great theme of a kind of systems failure in the US behind this war from the conception and certainly behind its prosecution. Do you see the country turning the corner on that? You've pointed out the military failures -- General Franks' and others' -- and the congressional failures. Of course there's the White House failure with the basic conception and the attitude. Are we rounding the corner on those? Have we begun to learn those lessons or is it going to take the full five-act tragedy to bring that about?
TR: I would add the media failure, and the intelligence failure. I think Iraq happened because of 9/11. Not because there was any connection between 9/11 and Iraq but because 9/11 knocked this country off balance. It's only now, five years later, that we're beginning to regain our equilibrium somewhat, especially in our political system. But I don't think we've fully regained that equilibrium. There are structural problems in the Congress. The Republicans have not wanted to criticize their own president. The Democrats don't seem intellectually equipped to really discuss the war in serious terms. They were very hesitant, for example, about criticizing generals because they'd think they're not supporting the troops. They don't understand that one way to support the troops is to criticize the generals!
TA: And in previous wars, generals have been tossed out one after another.
TR: People would say that my book is a book of liberal opinions. I'd say hardly. In many ways it's a book of conservative fact. It's conservative in the sense that it's a call for a return to American traditions and values. The Iraq war is a really untraditional war terms of...
TA: ...a war of choice, a war where generals stay even when things are going badly...
TR: Exactly. A war also launched preemptively, on false premises. The first ever American occupation of an Arab state. The first ever extended ground war overseas using an all-volunteer force. And also the first war I can think of where Congress really has withdrawn entirely for several years from examination of the war. During the Civil War, there was a committee in the Congress so intrusive that it antagonized President Lincoln.
TA: Was it of the opposite party? Was there a divided Washington...?
TR: Much of it was, but actually sometimes it's in the same party. Harry Truman, during World War II, a Democratic senator, made his name by holding hearings on defense contractors. Fulbright, in the Vietnam war, famously a member of the president's party, held extensive hearings on the conduct of the war.
TA: And the Republican Congress under the Republican President George W. Bush? In this war? Not there?
TR: No. Really AWOL. As was, in many ways, the military leadership. I don't want to just bash Congress, though I think in many ways Congress is the hidden villain of my book. The military leadership kind of put itself off limits to criticism and the political people were afraid to attack them. So you've had these generals really go unexamined. When the generals don't ask themselves the tough questions -- another American tradition, by the way -- it's the role of Congress to step in and ask those tough questions.
The body count
TA: Kelly from Northampton:
Kelly: I have two questions. The first is: We're not really willing to set a deadline to [inaudible] whether we're making progress. What key milestones do you feel we need to achieve to have our soldiers return home? I don't think the country has a common, collective appreciation of what needs to happen next. And my second question is: You mentioned briefly that we know the body count for US soldiers. We don't know them for US contractors. On the news we never hear the body count for Iraqi soldiers and civilians. Why is that?
TR: A bunch of good questions! You can't rely on broadcast media to tell you anything -- you really have to go to the print media! (I'm teasing Tom here!) The Washington Post carries that data every Saturday.
TA: Iraqi deaths? Civilian?
TR: Yes. We carry the best estimate of Iraqi deaths.
TA: What are the numbers now?
TR: I don't know. I kind of wince every time I look at it... On the question of the key metrics to pay attention to, I think we'd generally settle on these three: First, political reconciliation. Second, the decline in violence and especially the decline in sectarian violence and most especially a decline in official violence where people in uniforms and especially police carry out militia-like actions. Third -- and this is something the American government doesn't talk about much -- I would look for a return of the Iraqi exiles. There are now an estimated 2 million Iraqis who have fled the country in the last five years. And it's especially worrisome because these disproportionately tend to be doctors, lawyers, professionals, journalists -- which is to say, the middle class types who are the glue of the new democracy. They have left the country. The people who are left are the men of the gun.
Getting out of Iraq... finally
TA: I think Kelly is reaching there for some notion, your notion, of when an exit would be possible. Let's say by some miracle all three of these things happened: the flow went the other way, the violence declined, there's a reconciliation, peace, and love. But you're saying those are not likely. So, given the unlikelihood, where's the withdrawal point?
TR: I don't think there is one given the US goals and strategy. I think we're going to have troops in Iraq for a long time.
TA: What does "long time" mean?
TR: A decade or two.
TA: At scale?
TR: No. I think we'll get them down to about 40,000 probably within the next few years, but we'll find it very difficult to get fewer than that. When I was writing the book, I looked out the window every day at the kids who'd march up from the kindergarten near my house, from a daycare center around 3:30. And I would look at them and think, "One of those kids is going to fight and die in Iraq."
TA: ...That long. You think the American public will support it? We saw over the weekend this big story on Matthew Dowd, the former Bush supporter who headed up the 2004 campaign and who's now broken with Bush. He was quoted saying, "If the American public says they're done with something, our leaders have to understand what they want. They're saying 'Get out of Iraq!'" So you watch the military, but politics do factor in here. How do you see that?
TR: Absolutely! What's striking to me is that one of the things that seems to have really spurred the change of heart in Matthew Dowd is the fact that his son is a soldier deploying to Iraq... And I really give credence to those parents. I'm friends with some people like that, and they pay very close attention. They really have a feel for this. They are putting their flesh and blood on the line in this terrifically difficult situation. I have a lot of respect for people who are going through that and thinking through that.
TA: But do you think the American public at large is going to stand for those kindergartners going to Iraq, ten, twenty years from now?
TR: If you can get it down from six a day to six a week to six a month -- of US killed in action -- I think the American public would. If you're down to 70 KIA a year. I think the American public would. What I see, when you talk to members of Congress, is there's not a lot of stomach for increasing the troops -- nor are their troops available. There's not a lot of stomach for getting out immediately. And so there's sort of a kind of flailing around for the middle ground, for what other options there are. I think we're going to back into some sort of containment policy ultimately where you might see a mechanized brigade of about 5,000 troops left in downtown Baghdad kind of as a guarantor for the Iraqi government. And then other troops on the borders trying to keep this war from spilling over.
TA: And a civil war inside the bucket?
TR: Well, that's what you have now.
How the commanders messed up
TA: Maria is calling from Iowa City, Iowa.
Maria: ...I read your book. I absolutely loved it -- it's an extremely fine book and I've been recommending it to everyone! One question puzzles me. ...Why on earth do we have the best general, David Petraeus in Iraq managing the surge or the troops, and we've got the worst general backing him up -- Raymond Odierno. You said he was not just bad but counterproductive in the way he managed his troops.
TR: That's a great question! And thank you for reading the book! This goes to the general question of how Army generals have handled this war. They have operated almost as a club in which, sure, they might criticize each other eternally but they don't really like external discussion of that. There's also a sense of almost fairness: everybody has to have a turn. I've had some screaming arguments with friends in the military about this. Talk about kindergarten! For example, I was just doing a big study of the US in Sicily in WWII. It's quite striking that Eisenhower, Patton, Lucien Truscott made a series of rather great mistakes in handling the invasion of Sicily, but it was absolutely necessary for them to learn this way so they could do D-Day a year later. If we had current policy in place after Sicily, they all would have gone home to the War College and somebody else would have gotten a turn to handle D-Day, and D-Day would have failed!
TA: Robert Gates has fired people over Walter Reed, why would he be playing musical chairs or take-your-turn in Iraq?
TR: Well, there's a bit of a change there because Gates is new. We have had a total changeover in Iraq recently. We've had Petraeus put in, Odierno put in, the new ambassador, new Army chief-of-staff coming in. We even have a new Army Secretary destined to come in. And of course since December we've had a new Defense Secretary. That said, the Army is kind of in lock-step. One of the warning signs of a military in wartime is that it continues peacetime processes, peacetime promotion. And so you see guys pulled out of Iraq because, "Oh, he has to go to the War College now." My attitude is no, let's get the best people out there and keep them out there. Tell them "You're there for the duration. You're an effective commander. You've demonstrated it. Stay out there." You've kind of seen that with Petraeus. He's pulled in some of the most experienced, best commanders. People like Pete Mansoor and H.R. McMaster -- very adept and effective colonels. So we are seeing a bit of a change. But Odierno's presence is the result of the Army saying, No, it's his turn and we're putting him out there.
TA: Tom, if this war and its experience has not been enough to whack up upside the head and wake us up to the necessities of war and changing process, what will? Does it take Act IV and V of your tragedy to do that? What's the problem here?
TR: I think it probably does. What you have is a lot of the post-Vietnam strength of the military, the rebuilding, turn out also to be weaknesses in different circumstances. The post-Vietnam army made battalion command the measure of generalship. So guys who were good lieutenant commanders were presumed to be good generals. In many ways they're the opposite. And also they really had not had the help they need from Congress -- of oversight, of asking tough questions of these guys. And they didn't want to ask themselves a lot of the tough questions. One of the things we've seen again with the Army in Iraq is rash optimism, unjustified optimism in their assessment of events. Remember the original US Army war plan for Iraq had us down to 30,000 troops by the fall of 2003. Well, here we are nearly four years later and we're still at 140,000 troops. Again and again, the Army had thought "we'll be out of this in a couple of years." I think they've never really been able to grasp some of the realities on the ground. I think they're doing much more of that now.
TA: Is that rash optimism something unique? something new to this war? Do Americans not historically operate on a sense that the power will do it? Was there some fundamental world view that shifted a little bit, that leads to that?
TR: I think it was kind of built in to today's army. They'll never tell you about problems -- there are only challenges. They'll tell you "Failure is not an option." Guess what! Failure is an option! And especially if you don't think it is. You really need to think soberly and seriously. Klausewitz says the only job of the supreme commander -- of a top commander in a situation -- the only job is to understand the nature of the conflict in which you are engaged. Top US generals repeatedly failed in that sole task -- to understand the conflict that you're fighting. Petraeus, I think, understands very well the nature of the conflict in which he's engaged. He demonstrated that back when he had the 101st Airborne up north in Iraq in '03-'04. But we've had a lot of generals who basically didn't understand the situation they were in because if they had, they wouldn't have used tactics that were counter productive.
What a military commander needs
TA: Let's go to Mike in Simsbury, Connecticut:
Mike: I just have a quick question for your guest. And that is, to what extent does he believe we are in the present situation overseas -- in Iraq and in the world in general -- due to the fact that Americans have a very poor grasp of history, our own history as a nation as well as world history? Which, of course, extends to current-day policy-makers because they were part of the American educational system?
TR: I think it's certainly part of the problem, the failure to understand quite what we're getting into. The really striking thing about the current commanders, the senior people in Iraq, is that they do understand this history. There's a really unique bunch of guys out there right now. It's probably the most exclusive club in the world -- people who have served a tour or two in Iraq and usually commanding battalions and brigades who also have PhD's from very good universities. Many of them in history. So, for example, Petraeus's adviser on economics is a Col. Mike Meese -- son of the former attorney general, by the way -- a PhD from Princeton. Col. H.R. McMaster, one of the counter-insurgency advisers, PhD from the University of North Carolina.
TA: Does this serve them or not?
TR: I think it does very well. On my last long reporting trip in Iraq a year ago, I was sort of trying to sort out who were the effective commanders, and why. Asking this question, I actually tripped across a secret Army study of exactly that question -- who were the effective commanders. What you noticed was that the most effective commanders were guys who had civilian advanced degrees. I think that was because what the Army had taught commanders really didn't work in Iraq. If that's all you had in your toolbox intellectually, you would just keep on doing it because you had nowhere else to go. But guys like Petraeus -- who himself has a PhD from Princeton in International Affairs and a study of the Vietnam War -- had other tools in the toolbox. They were able to say, "Well, you know, what the Army has taught me here ain't workin'. So what else do I know? How do I think critically about the situation? How do I assess it myself?
TA: What about the broader public pointing there as well: this war occurred because a nation was convinced it was necessary. It goes on, on those terms!
TR: It is a striking question to ask. Did we really think we could go in and, with a relatively small military force, alter one of the world's oldest cultures? It's striking to me that H.R. McMaster understood this. He took his officers out on a staff ride -- a military study with Iraqi officers of a battlefield in which Alexander defeated the Persian empire. One of the lessons, I think, was -- first of all -- respect for the Iraqis, but second of all was to convey to his own people that we are one of the world's youngest cultures in the middle of one of the world's oldest. Be very careful about your ability to alter it!
Why isn't Iraqi oil paying for reconstruction?
TA: We have another Mike on the phone from Boston:
Mike: Regarding the predictions that were made before the war that, you know, we'd be down to 30,000 troops by now, one of the more impressive ones was that the oil would pay for the reconstruction of Iraq. But we never hear about the oil anymore. I wonder, do you have any idea where the oil is?
TR: You're citing one of Paul Wolfowitz's greatest hits, of which there were many! Hard to imagine you'd need more troops to occupy than to invade; occupation will pay for itself with oil.
TA: Former Deputy Secretary of Defense under Donald Rumsfeld under President Bush!
TR: Exactly. Oil has basically chugged along at the same level for several years. It's been plagued partly because the pipeline keeps getting blown up, the pipelines keep getting attacked. And it's not necessarily the insurgents who do it. There's a lot of people in Iraq who make a lot of money from illegal oil exports and smuggling fuel back and forth. The pipeline is not their friend! And so they tend to blow it up! Also the American approach originally was to pay local tribesmen to protect it, but they'd only pay them if there were attacks in the area, so the local tribesmen figured out how you get paid around here...
TA: Attack, defend! Attack, defend!
TR: So one of the things the smart commanders did was to say we'll pay you if there are no attacks on the pipeline this month. At least things started working... You do have to make some compromises with the culture. One of the things that bothers me a bit is when Americans talk about "Iraqi corruption." You need to understand that in the Iraqi context. Maybe that guy had to pay several thousand dollars to get that job. So maybe his taking a bribe is simply his deal with the economic system. Another thing is feeling that Iraqis are somehow evil because they cut deals with the insurgency. Well, sometimes a police chief is trying to stay alive and he knows his three predecessors have been killed. So maybe he'll cut a quiet deal. And sometimes we need to understand that these are the things people need to do simply to stay alive in this very difficult environment.
TA: But $2 billion a week is a lot of money by any superpower standard. You've been paying attention to that. If it's not Iraqi oil, remind us what is going on in that ledger!
TR: Well, here we have the Chinese to thank. We're not paying for this war, the Chinese are. We're fighting a war in which we are not paying taxes to pay for it, which Chinese buying American bonds are subsidizing the war and our children will be paying that back, probably for the rest of their lives.
TA: Cents on the dollar? This is not small money even spread over generations.
TR: Yep. This is a lot of money. I think your kids should look in their wallets and see the money flying out for the rest of their lives. I don't know how much it's going to be. A thousand bucks a year from each person, or something? It's a lot of money.
The PRT's
TA: David's calling from Providence, Rhode Island.
David: Mr. Ricks, I loved your book. I was in Iraq myself in 2004-2005, that winter.
TA: In the service, David?
David: Correct. Yes, I'm military.
TR: Can I ask what unit?
David: I can't, because we're going to be going back and I can't for operational reasons. I'm a civil affairs guy. I was just curious what you thought about the prospects of the PRT's and specifically what you think about the fact that the State Department is trying to fill these with military volunteers?
TA: These are the provincial reconstruction teams.
David: Correct.
TA: Is it new that they're military volunteers instead of civilian? What are you pointing to there?
David: Recently, I think what's going on in the State Department is they're finding a dearth of people willing to do this on their own so they're asking military people to volunteer for it.
TR: Well actually, you can't order State Department people to do it. One thing we've all realized here is just how small the State Department is. As I understand it, there are more musical band members in the US Army than there are foreign service officers in the world. It's really tiny the foreign service compared to the US military. And also they don't want to go. A friend of mine in the State Department mentioned to me that the posts that used to be considered not really appealing -- Algiers? Tunis maybe? -- now they're putting their hands up for because it sure beats being sent to Iraq!
TA: But isn't David saying, is this a good thing? will this work? what about the reconstruction effort?
TR: This is actually a pet project of Zalmay Khalilzad who until recently was the US ambassador in Iraq. He previously was ambassador in Afghanistan and found the PRT concept worked very well there. It doesn't appear to me to be working as well in Iraq partly because most of Afghanistan mo st of the time is pretty quiet. All the fighting and bombing really is down in two areas, the Pakistani-Afghan border and the Oruzgan province area in southern Afghanistan where the Taliban really are headquartered. Iraq, I think, doesn't have enough stability for those PRT's to be effective in many places. It's just such a different situation. The other problem I have is, the US military keeps on saying, where's the rest of the US government? And when I say to the US military, are you willing to take orders from a civilian?, they say hell no, that's not my chain of command! That means they want the rest of the US government on their terms. I think until you see a brigade commander willing to take orders from a PRT leader, you're really not going to get genuine government cooperation and effectiveness. Part of the problem here is that we have never had a unified structure in Iraq. Every study says you must have one person in charge and that person has to be a civilian because ultimately decisions are political not military. Yet we've always had this bifurcated structure, a military command structure and a civilian command structure. And just because of where they sit, sometimes they have different goals. I think frequently the two command structures have been at odds in Iraq.
What if we just leave?
TA: What if we just leave?
TR: I think a lot of people want to do that. We may. I think it's a moral position to take. I think we need to talk through what the consequences of those would be. The consequences almost certainly would not be good. Yet, at the same time, the consequences of every other option I can see or have heard of, are also bad.
TA: How do you see the consequences of full departure?
TR: I think you'd have a full-out civil war, bloodier than you have now. And I think you would see regional intervention. Iran is already there in spades! Syria would be there. You'd probably wind up with a civil war, a regional war, fought on the streets of Baghdad between Shiite bodies and Saudi Arabian money. Up in the north, you'd probably have Turkey intervene against the Kurds. Remember, the Kurds are the largest nation in the world that doesn't have a country.
TA: Do you end up with a hostile or friendly government in Iraq?
TR: I think you'd probably wind up with a fractured Iraq in which western Iraq becomes a no-man's land, very receptive to Al Qaeda. Northern Iraq becomes Kurdistan, an embattled country at odds with Turkey, a member of Nato and so an ally of ours. And in the south, the Shiites create a bulwark and are forced by circumstances to really align themselves closely with Iran.
TA: And the spillover? Saudi Arabia? beyond?
TR: I think it would shake our allies in the region. It certainly would lead to higher oil prices -- much higher oil prices. It probably would lead to turbulence across the Arabian peninsula. You could see governments fall. And in many ways you probably would further the goals of Al Qaeda which, I think we have done unfortunately since 9/11.
TA: What a box we're in! This is what you call a tragedy.
TR: Yes.
Troop morale
TA: We appreciate your reporting all the way through this. Your sense of the military's spirits in the middle of this box?
TR: A little bit worrisome right now. Surprisingly good up to now. It's a small, cohesive force. But this third tour of the army, this third year of being out there and the prospect of being out there for an extended 18-month tour is really, I think, starting to worry families and we're seeing mid-career NCO's -- the sergeants who are the backbone of the force -- bailing out.
Section heads added by transcriber.