'Seven Steps Toward a Last Chance in Iraq'

LIANE HANSEN, Host:

Kenneth Pollack is the director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. His article "The Right Way: Seven Steps Toward a Last Chance in Iraq" appears in the March issue of the Atlantic Monthly.

The article is based on a set of recommendations by the Iraq Policy Working Group, a team of experts brought together by the Brookings Institution, and Kenneth Pollack joins us in the studio. Welcome to the program.

KENNETH POLLACK: Thank you. It's great to be here.

HANSEN: You write in the article that we have a unique window of opportunity in Iraq now and that, this year, 2006, is decisive for the future of the country. Why?

POLLACK: Well, there are obviously two reasons, only one of which we dealt with. The first reason, the one we really didn't deal with, was American public opinion. It's very clear that the American public is losing faith and losing patience with the reconstruction of Iraq, but of course the Iraq Policy Working Group that we brought together was a group of non-partisan experts on Iraq, on reconstruction and military affairs.

We didn't deal with American domestic opinion, and so the main thrust of that point, for us, was that we felt that Iraqi public opinion was equally fragile; that for the last three years, the Iraqis have faced disappointment after disappointment from the reconstruction. We know that there is a low-level civil war burning; that there is ethnic cleansing going on. They're putting up with it because they all know that civil war would be disastrous for them. They want reconstruction to succeed, but as time goes by and their hopes are not satisfied, more and more of them are turning away from the process of reconstruction altogether, and we just didn't think we had that much more time to get this right.

HANSEN: The strategic emphasis in Iraq has been offensive. Target the insurgents of the militias, you know, find them, get rid of them. But in this report the argument is that this strategy should be changed to defensive military operations. First of all, explain what you mean, and then how is that going to help?

POLLACK: Sure. First, I should say this is something an increasing number of U.S. military officers also recognize. Our troops in Iraq typically think of their mission as killing and capturing bad guys, but when you actually read the history of counter-insurgency operations and stability operations, the operations designed to deal with failed states, what you find, overwhelmingly, is that the most important job of military forces is not catching and killing bad guys. It's protecting good guys.

It's making the streets safe. We've not done that in Iraq. This is something that Major Peter Chiarelli, who is now Lieutenant General, going back to Iraq to take over ground forces, something he did in North Baghdad, something that General David Petraeus did up in Kirkuk. Wherever we have had commanders who've done it, it has worked marvelously.

And the problem has been when we've ceased doing it or when we've typically made our bigger strategic emphasis which has been on going after the insurgents in Western Iraq, where, frankly, our military forces don't do very much good because the population isn't supportive of us there, and in concentrating our troops there, we have denuded the south and center of the country, which has created the security vacuum, which allowed the militias to come in and backfill us and take over those parts of the country.

HANSEN: So if American troops are needed to provide security in these places in Iraq all over the country, are more U.S. troops going to be needed, and will that happen because the sentiment in the United States is not only don't send anymore, but bring the ones we have back?

POLLACK: We've a very strong historical basis that says that the number of troops that you need to really bring security to a country or to an area is a ratio of 20 security personnel per thousand of the population. Now, if you take Iraq's population, that means you need 450,000, roughly, security personnel. That said, I am enough of a political realist to know that it is going to be very difficult for the United States to deploy more troops to Iraq.

So we need to think about it this way. At some point in time, we need to have 450,000 fully capable security forces. Most of those ought to be Iraqis. What we found in Iraq is that it is much better when the bulk of the forces is Iraqis. We're doing much better training Iraqi forces, but it is still a very slow process, and we are still far from where we need to be.

HANSEN: You say the United States is getting better at being able to train Iraqi forces, but in the article, you point out that the United States believed it had adequately trained and prepared them at least twice since the fall of Baghdad, and these forces collapsed in combat. What's not working?

POLLACK: The biggest issue out there is giving the Iraqis the time that they need to actually create capable military forces, and the issue here really isn't so much the training, but what you need is you need troops who are actually committed to the mission, who are confident in their ability to do so and who are led by junior officers who actually know what they're doing and are able to command troops, and that's where we've had the problems.

We've tried to rush training. We have tried to take troops right from basic and throw them into combat. We need to give them more time; to give them processes of informal training and exercises and give them the time to build up unit cohesion, command relationships and also give us the time to train capable leaders. Any military officer will tell you, it takes two, three, four times as long to train a leader as it does to train the unit he is to lead.

HANSEN: Iraq now has an elected central government, although they have yet to meet. Meetings have been postponed. But in the article, you're writing about this elected, it's an elected parliament, it's a government, but it's essentially powerless. Why is it so powerless and then what can be done to make it effective?

POLLOCK: There are a variety of different reasons why the Iraqi government, the central government that now exists, is powerless. Part of the problem is that the people who we put into power and we need to recognize that, we enabled this group of people to take power. These people are by and large exiles who had very little political basis in the country. But beyond that, you've got a number of problems which I'll just tick off a few of them.

Massive corruption: you put in power some unsavory characters and we shouldn't be surprised that they turned out to be more concerned about stealing Iraq's oil wealth than about providing for their people.

Overcentralization: Iraq has been overcentralized society at least for the last 80 years and arguably for longer. And of course this problem was massively exacerbated under Saddam who wanted every decision made from Baghdad. We have played into this because our own people tend to focus inside the Green Zone in Baghdad, and so the only people they tend to work with are the other people, the Iraqis, who are inside the Green Zone. That's also been a problem.

And then beyond that, you have just a whole series of problems that have existed for a long period of time: an infrastructure that is broken, a national food distribution system that is broken and that rewards or creates incentives for bad behavior as opposed to good. And at every step, we're going to need to start to dismantle this. And the great shame is that we didn't start to do it right from the beginning.

HANSEN: Are you optimistic that these recommendations are going to be taken up?

POLLOCK: We've seen the Bush administration be unwilling to take on board some of these more dramatic shifts in the past. This is not the first time that either I or other people have made calls for similar things and they have been very sluggish to do so. And in speaking to some of the more senior officials of this government, I found a much greater reticence to recognize the problems, let alone embrace the solutions.

HANSEN: Kenneth Pollock is the Director of Research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. His article, The Right Way: Seven Steps Toward a Last Chance in Iraq, appears in the March issue of Atlantic Magazine. Thanks so much for coming in.

POLLOCK: Thank you very much for having me.

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