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Transcript: AEI Scholar Gives Impressions of Iraq after Visit There
(Pletka videoconference with Spanish journalists Oct. 10) (4500)

Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative
public policy think-tank, spoke with Spanish journalists during a video
conference October 10 from Washington, D.C., about the impressions she
gained from a recent trip to Iraq.

Pletka, who is AEI's vice president for foreign and defense policy studies,
said she spent three days in Iraq, visiting several towns, "as a guest of
the Coalition Provisional Authority and the United States military," and
another week staying with friends in Baghdad.

The international press is not giving a balanced picture of what is going
on inside Iraq, she said. "If you stay in the Palestine Hotel [in Baghdad],
you can talk to a lot of other reporters who will reinforce preexisting
notions, but they are all behind barbed wire and it's not a very natural
environment, and it's hard to talk to people."

"The more you get out, the more you realize that there is an enormous
openness in society, one that I think is all the more enthusiastically
embraced by Iraqis because of the years of dreadful oppression that they
were under," she said.  "And I found people to be incredibly pro-American,
pro-Western, open to ideas, open to suggestions, open to help.  Any of us
who expected unmitigated gratitude are going to get the shock of our lives;
but that said, they are very positive and very hopeful about their future,
notwithstanding some of the difficulties."

The media seems to ignore positive stories, Pletka said, citing the example
of the peaceful funeral following the assassination of Ayatollah Baqir
Hakim, the spiritual leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic
Revolution in Iraq.  "Three hundred thousand people turned up at his
funeral.  Can you tell me how many people were killed in rioting at the
funeral?  Can you tell me how many calls for vengeance there were against
Sunnis or Americans or, indeed, anybody at that funeral?  Can you tell me
whether there were demands made for Americans immediately to leave that
were taken up by the masses?

"Because I can tell you that none of those things happened. And that, in
and of itself, is an unbelievably great, positive story about the people of
Iraq and the people.... And I honestly believe that [Iraq] is unfairly
represented by the press."

Despite the loss of electricity and other services, the security problems,
the loss of government, Pletka said, she was "amazed by the order, by the
decency of normal people, by the way that people stand in line...talk to
the people behind them, deal with each other, deal with us.  This is really
a 95 percent positive story about Iraqis."

She answered a variety of questions from the Spanish journalists: successes
and problems in the reconstruction effort; U.S. mistakes, including
communications failures within Iraq and with the international community;
security and communications difficulties for multinational forces; and a
timetable for Iraqis to write a new constitution and achieve sovereignity.

"The United States has to walk very carefully in understanding that at the
end of the day, although Iraqis are very happy to be rid of Saddam, they
would be very happy to be in control of their own lives," Pletka said.

 "Right now, in the post-Saddam Iraq, the issue is what can be done for the
people of Iraq. This isn't about the United States, Spain, Brussels, Bush,
Chirac or anything else.  It's about Iraq and it's very important that we
remember that."  Bickering and "pettiness," she said "only hurts them, and
that does them an enormous disservice."

In conclusion, Pletka said, "What do we want for Iraq?  Do we want Iraq to
fail or do we want Iraq to succeed.... It seems to me that we take very few
opportunities to step back and ask ourselves those very basic questions."

"While there are things that we could all do better, this is a worthwhile
endeavor because it is for the Iraqi people and because their lives have
been hell for the last 30 years and surely they deserve something better;
surely we who have more owe them a little bit of help in doing that."

[Note: An international Iraq Donors' Reconstruction Conference is scheduled
for October 23-24 in Madrid.]

Following are excerpts from a transcript of the videoconference:

(begin transcript)

U.S. Department of State
Office of International Information Programs

Excerpts from Digital Video Conference:
Danielle Pletka, Vice President for Foreign and Defense Policy Studies,
American Enterprise Institute, in Washington, D.C., speaking with
journalists in Madrid

October 10, 2003

MODERATOR:  Ms. Pletka, tell us everything we need to know about Iraq.

MS. PLETKA:  I'm the vice president for foreign and defense policy studies
at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.  I've been with AEI for
about a year and a half, and prior to that, for ten years, I was the senior
Middle East staffer for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee I just got
back from Iraq on Saturday; I was there for three days as a guest of the
Coalition Provisional Authority and the United States military, and there
for a week in Baghdad staying with friends

We all seem to forget this is actually a story about Iraqis; this is not a
story about Spain, it's not a story about Washington, it's not really a
story about Europe and America; it's a story about what we can do in Iraq.
And the big question as we are in the run-up to the donors conference is:
Is the ground ripe in Iraq for investment, is it ripe for reconstruction,
is it ripe for political change, and how receptive are the people to what
we propose to do?  And when I say 'we,' I mean that in a very global sense,
although financially, clearly, the burden is going to be borne by the U.S.
taxpayer.

First of all, attitudes.  One of the things that I found as a consumer, an
avid consumer of the American press, and also of the international press to
a certain extent, is that you really don't get a very good picture of
what's going on inside Iraq by reading the paper or certainly by watching
TV.  If you stay in the Palestine Hotel, you can talk to a lot of other
reporters who will reinforce preexisting notions, but they are all behind
barbed wire and it's not a very natural environment, and it's hard to talk
to people.

The more you get out, the more you realize that there is an enormous
openness in society, one that I think is all the more enthusiastically
embraced by Iraqis because of the years of dreadful oppression that they
were under.  And I found people to be incredibly pro-American, pro-Western,
open to ideas, open to suggestions, open to help.  Any of us who expected
unmitigated gratitude are going to get the shock of our lives; but that
said, they are very positive and very hopeful about their future,
notwithstanding some of the difficulties.

You have to remember, if you think about Baghdad -- if you think about the
possibility of a major city, a major city losing its government, losing its
electricity, and having every single hardened criminal let out of prison at
the same time.  And then you look at Baghdad.  You are amazed by the order,
by the decency of normal people, by the way that people stand in line,
whether it's in a gas line or a payment line or a job line, and wait for --
you know, wait, talk to the people behind them, deal with each other, deal
with us.  This is really a 95 percent positive story about Iraqis.  And
there are definitely problems, but these things are, in context, really
incredible.  If this happened in Los Angeles, there would be riots, there
would be unbelievable looting, and this is not happening.  There are still
minor periods without electricity, and we just don't see that -- not in
Baghdad, not anywhere.

Also, I was really struck -- because I know that many Americans think of
Iraq as a brutally sectarian, ethnically-racially divided country.
Certainly, there are latent suspicions, particularly among extremists of
all parties -- but the general ambience between Shia and Sunni, and between
all of them and the Kurdish population, is remarkably positive.  These
people recognize that their religious and their ethnic differences were
manipulated by Saddam in order to divide and conquer the country, and they
are not going to be made tools again.  And they are really quite adamant --
and I spoke to a number of clerics as well -- quite adamant that this is
not going to be something they are going to allow to be manipulated in
order to hurt the well-being of their country and their own future and
their children's future.  That's a very positive thing and it's a very
enlightened thing.

Reconstruction is difficult because what we're doing is we're starting with
a country that is basically put together with spit and chewing gum.  And
the attitude of the United States is that we don't believe that we should
go in and just give you better spit and better chewing gun and stick it all
back together again.  We believe that when we rebuild and when we help to
rebuild, we want to rebuild you according to 21st century lines, just like
we would rebuild New York after September 11th.

I think that's probably a little excessively ambitious for Iraq because it
means that we have lengthened delivery times, it means that we're starting
from zero trying to get to a hundred, when all the Iraqis are really
expecting is that we get things working again.  And a little bit of
expediency goes a long way in this regard.  Perhaps that is an area in
which I think we really can criticize the initial efforts of the United
States.

Ironically, the military, which has far less money with which to operate
and can only do grants up to $100,000, is far more efficient because it has
to use its money more efficiently.  And so what you see is that they're
able to work with local engineers and Iraqis and really get projects up and
running, not necessarily with the transparency that we require here in
Washington, but with efficiency which goes a long way in answering the lack
of transparency.

So, you know, as we move forward, those are things to think about and they
are realistic necessities.  We need to deliver something decent, but we
also need to deliver something quickly.

But the Iraqis are ready, they're willing, they're able.  They want a
better country.  And I think the story is not in any way one of failure.
It is one, if you want to be negative, of missed opportunity, but one also,
if you want to be positive, of enormous potential.

QUESTION:  You brought from Iraq very good impressions, but if you read the
newspaper, you see television news, we have another vision about what's
happening in Iraq.  Is there a problem with the mass media, or is the
problem that the North American government is not able to tell what's
happening really?

MS. PLETKA:  Well, forgive me if I don't choose Option A or Option B.  I
think there are a lot of problems on both sides.  I think the media has
done an enormous disservice to the Iraqi people by telling only the
negative stories that you see.  There are positive stories absolutely
everywhere that deserve to be told, whether they are in the functioning of
the Governing Council, the functioning of ministries, the Iraqi
participation in OPEC, in the World Bank-IMF meetings in Doha.

Let's just pick a really simple fact.  Ayatollah Baqir Hakim, the spiritual
leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, was
brutally assassinated.  It was a terrible thing that happened, and many
other people were killed at the same time.  I think there's probably a good
deal of criticism to go around about the security environment and about how
it happened, but let's talk about his funeral.   He is an emblem of Shia
resistance to Saddam, the spiritual leader of a significant political
movement, and 300,000 people turned up at his funeral.  Can you tell me how
many people were killed in rioting at the funeral?  Can you tell me how
many calls for vengeance there were against Sunnis or Americans or, indeed,
anybody at that funeral?  Can you tell me whether there were demands made
for Americans immediately to leave that were taken up by the masses?

Because I can tell you that none of those things happened.  And that, in
and of itself, is an unbelievably great, positive story about the people of
Iraq and the people who are involved in this.  And I honestly believe that
it is unfairly represented by the press.

Yes, absolutely we need to cover terrorism, we need to cover Baathist
resurgence, we need to cover the deaths of coalition soldiers.  But that's
not the only story in Iraq and it is, I would argue, only a very small part
of the overall picture.

Do you ever read anything about what's going on in the Kurdish areas?  What
about the predicted fighting between the KDP and the PUK?  Is that going
on?  Where is it going on, if it is going on?  In fact, it's not going on.
And things are enormously positive.  In fact, the Kurds have worked really,
really hard, notwithstanding historical ambitions for independence, to
integrate themselves and to cooperate inside the Governing Council.  The
new foreign minister, interim foreign minister, Hoshiyar Zebari, is a Kurd,
someone I've known for many years.

You know, these are great things.  Now, that doesn't mean there aren't bad
things.  Why is this message not out?  Well, partly it is because the media
wants to tell one story.  And the same is true in every country.  This is
the way it is, and it is something that is very hard to control.

The second is that you can very easily criticize the government of the
United States for failing to make clear:  (a) what our long-term mission
is; (b) how proud we are of a lot of these accomplishments; and (c) where
we're going.

So, you know, I wouldn't lay the blame wholly in one court or in another
court.  All I would say is it is important to get a grip on what reality is
because, as I am sure you all know, it's not always exactly what you read
in the paper.

QUESTION:  So, are you really losing the propaganda battle?

MS. PLETKA:  Well, it's a very hard question to answer.  You know, I will
continue to believe, as a person who values substance over propaganda, that
it is more important to win on the ground than it is to win in The
Washington Post.  I think we could do a lot better.  I think we could do a
lot better not just here.  I think we could do a heck of a lot better
inside Iraq.

I alluded to some of the things that we have done badly.  One of the things
that is absolutely pathetic is the way that we have been able to work with
the Iraqis on the so-called Iraq media network, which has not exploited the
enormous talents not only of Iraqi expatriates who have plenty of media
experience, but, frankly, as it seems incapable of covering stories inside
Iraq.  They only got equipment a few weeks ago.  They only received a
teleprompter last week, so all of their reporters were spending their time
looking down at the page in extraordinarily unprofessional fashion.  These
are real problems.

You know, it's important to remember, America is not a former colonial
power, we're not especially good at doing this kind of thing, and there's a
lot of learning that needs to take place.  I would argue that most of it
isn't in the area of propaganda, but that, too, is an important aspect
because people need to feel good about what they're doing.

QUESTION:  Mrs. Pletka, do you think that in Iraq the most important thing
is what happened in international relations between the other countries in
the world?

MS. PLETKA:  International relations have nothing to do with the day-to-day
well-being of the Iraqi people, and I think that those of us who spend all
of our time looking in the mirror and talking about "What do you think of
me?" are confused.  This is about Iraq.  We assessed that Iraq was a threat
to the United States.  Your government [of Spain] agreed.  There was a
coalition that went in.  That really is not the issue right now.

Right now, in the post-Saddam Iraq, the issue is what can be done for the
people of Iraq.  Right now, there are representatives from several dozen
nations inside Iraq.  They are working hard for the well-being of the Iraqi
people.  If there were more nationalities, that would be fabulous, and I'm
sure the Iraqis would be really excited.  But this isn't about the United
States, Spain, Brussels, Bush, Chirac or anything else.  It's about Iraq
and it's very important that we remember that.

Any fighting, any bickering, any pettiness -- if I may use that word --
which I think has characterized a lot of the debate, any pettiness about
this doesn't really, at the end of the day, hurt us.  It only hurts them,
and that does them an enormous disservice.

QUESTION:  Do you think reconstruction process will be easier with United
Nation troops or United States troops?

MS. PLETKA:  It's always been unclear to me what virtue United Nations
troops bring.  I think this is something that's far more appealing in
Western capitals than it is on the ground.  When someone rebuilds a road
for you, do you check what color their hat is?  I would argue that the
answer is no, and that legitimacy derives from what you deliver, not from
the hat you're wearing.

I can tell you from my own perspective that I think that a lot of the
logistical problems that come from an international operation outweigh the
potential benefits.  In Iraq, we have some peacekeeping operations.  The
vast mass of the country is fairly peaceful and peacekeeping operations
naturally lend themselves quite well to international coalitions, largely
because rapidity of action, smoothness of coordination, are not necessarily
at a premium.  But in a situation where you need to contend with combat,
hostilities, low-intensity warfare, then having six different divisions
speaking ten different languages is a major problem.

In Hilla, where I was a couple of weeks ago, the Poles are in command.
Under them are El Salvadorans, Nicaraguans.  I think there are some
Italians.  There are some Southeast Asians.  And almost none of them speak
the same language, including, by the way, English.  That's fine when
everybody is in the mess tent trying to figure out whether to have a hot
dog or a hamburger.  It's really not fine if there's a problem, because
each particular nation has different rules of engagement, and that is true
whether you operate under a blue hat or under a so-called 'coalition of the
willing.'  It's a problem.  And so I am not a proponent of the virtues of
internationalizing this in any way.

QUESTION:  How much time is needed for the Iraqis and the government to get
a federal constitution?  Six months, one year?

MS. PLETKA:  It's a great question.  And I think that we are feeling rather
overwhelmed with a desire for deadlines right now, which I'm not sure serve
any of us really well.  We want to do a good job, and a timely job, but the
good has to come before the timely.  How long do I think it will take?

Let me be blunt with you.  I have been very disappointed in the failure of
our own administration to devolve more power and sovereignty onto Iraqis.
I think that we have a very important role to play.  I think we and all our
allies have a very important role to play.  But the truth is that the
longer that we seek to control, seek to take credit for things that happen
-- which is something that really appalls me -- seek to exercise overt
authority in a whole variety of places, in a way that doesn't necessarily
relate to security, the more we discredit the Iraqis with whom we had hoped
to partner in leaving Iraq, and the more we discredit ourselves.

When you liberate people, you liberate them to govern themselves; you
liberate them to have control over their own lives.  You don't liberate
them to a better autocrat.  You know, this isn't about 'Saddam Light,' or
Saddam with a different mustache.

And the United States has to walk very carefully, I think, in understanding
that at the end of the day, although the Iraqis are very happy to be rid of
Saddam, they would be very happy to be in control of their own lives, even
though they may make a lot more mistakes, potentially, than we would make
going forward.  And that's something that we have to accept.

Now in terms of timing:  the constitution.  The Constitutional Preparatory
Committee submitted their recommendations to the Iraqi Governing Council
last week.  It didn't exactly pick a preference, and it threw the ball
right back into the Governing Council's court, which will mean a lot of
debate and a lot of difficulty, and I think this process will take a while.
I don't think it will take six months; I think it will take longer than
that.

Don't forget, it's not just about finding the right constitution.  I think
in many ways, that will be the least difficult part.  It's also about a
census in the country, it's about adequate representation, it's about
figuring out how to have a constitutional convention.  All of these things
are not simple, and we don't want to make the mistake that I think we've
already made in a whole number of areas, of picking people by quota --
"Well, let's have six Shia, four Kurds, two Sunni, a Turkomen, and a
Syrian."  We want to make sure that Iraq is represented, is
well-represented as Iraq, rather than as one particular sect of Islam
versus another, one particular ethnicity versus another.

A constitution will take at least a year, and it could take more, and we
may not see the kind of government that can have a good handoff for some
time after that.

QUESTION:  Which do you think are the main mistakes that America has
committed, starting from the end of the war?

MS. PLETKA:  If I had to pick the A number one worst thing that we have
done, it would be communications.  It would be the fact that we have set up
one of the lousiest cell phone networks to serve solely the Coalition
Provisional Authority, and a few Iraqis and those who have managed to take
them from the Iraqis that they know in Baghdad, and that basically,
otherwise, communications in the country don't work.  Some phone exchanges
in Baghdad are back.  International calling isn't possible.  It's often
difficult to call from one exchange to another.  You certainly cannot
communicate from Baghdad to the provinces.  And the fact that we have been
incapable of prioritizing this, incapable of moving forward more quickly on
this, would be to my mind, the A, number one worse thing we've done.

It's not just a source of enormous frustration to Iraqis just in the
conduct of their everyday lives.  It is also a source of disconnection
between the capital and the provinces, which means that the whole vision
that I think most Iraqis share of a federal Iraq, is running on empty at
this point, because in fact there's zero connection between Baghdad and
anywhere else.

This lack of coordination has enormous political and social consequences.
It has huge economic consequences.  You want to talk about contracting, you
want to talk about transparency and opportunities for Iraqis.  Basically,
only someone with a cell phone or Internet has access to bids.  How do
Iraqis get involved in bidding for contracts?  How do they have a piece of
the reconstruction of their future?  They don't.

So this has sort of this shockwave effect throughout Iraqi society that I
think has been so deleterious that we should have solved that problem right
away.  The fact that we have not been able to do it until now, the fact
that we, last week, cleared the cell phone contracts for the entire country
after several delays, is to my mind a sign of a problem that we had in
focusing and in prioritizing.

QUESTION:  How would you assess the permitting of the looting in the first
days?

MS. PLETKA:  You know, I think there's been a lot of misinformation about
that.
You really do see that a lot of the major looting -- I mean a lot of the
torching of buildings -- is not random.  It is clearly organized burning
and looting and, frankly, destruction of evidence against the regime.

So a lot of the very, very dramatic evidence of looting was that.  And
then, of course, there was just a lot of opportunistic looting against
targets of opportunity.  Should we have let that happen?  No.  Absolutely
not.  It was a mistake, it was the wrong thing to do, it was a
misunderstanding of what our role should be, and I think that we have
learned from that.

Finally, I would simply remind people to ask yourself a very basic
question:  What do we want for Iraq?  Do we want Iraq to fail or do we want
Iraq to succeed?  Do we want Iraq to be a vibrant representative democracy
that serves the interests of its people and serves as an example to the
region, or do we want Iraq to slide back into Baathism, or Shia or Sunni or
Islamic extremism?  Do we want Iraq to be a place of internecine conflict
or do we want it to be a place where people live in harmony?

Those are very simple questions, but it seems to me that we take very few
opportunities to step back and ask ourselves those very basic questions.
And the answer from almost everybody is that we want to see it succeed.

And so while there are things that we could all do better, this is a
worthwhile endeavor because it is for the Iraqi people and because their
lives have been hell for the last 30 years and surely they deserve
something better; surely we who have more owe them a little bit of help in
doing that.

(end transcript)

(Distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S.
Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

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