E-Mail This Article to a Friend What will it take? (continued)

John Pastore, president, Physicians for Social Responsibility

The United States is really not at war. It’s a small segment of the United States that’s at war: the military and their families. For the rest of us, people that are watching Desperate Housewives and trying to decide whether to buy a hybrid vehicle or not, it’s as though this death and destruction is not really going on.

There is this missing link of reality as to what is really happening on the ground, that has been kept from the American people. It’s sort of a collusion between the military and the media, and I don’t know how to solve it. It’s taken the form of an ethereal political debate between conservatives and liberals that is all BS, because what is really happening is tremendous suffering on the ground. It’s happening to innocent civilians in Iraq, but it’s also happening to our own young people over there, and most Americans are not being forced to see it.

Young bodies are being split apart. Those who are winding up in our VA hospital system, or who are winding up back home with life-altering physical and psychological disabilities, are paying the price for what many of us feel has been political folly all along. The injuries are devastating: traumatic amputations of both legs, incredible head injuries, injuries to the thorax and abdomen so that somebody’s got a scar that’s three feet long running the length of their whole body. Even for somebody who’s a trained physician, this is very hard stuff to look at. If members of Congress and the general public saw stuff like this, we would be getting out of Iraq at a much faster pace than we’re getting out right now.

In my opinion, what we need is an incredible act of diplomacy to bring countries together in the UN framework, or in some similar internationalized framework, to help extricate ourselves from this situation and preserve the only kernel of good that could possibly come out of it, which is a more stable Middle East. But the problem right now in this country and with our leaders is that there is so much hubris about our being able to do this by ourselves, and blowing off other nations if they don’t go along with every aspect of what we want to do. We elected a group of people who think that appointing John Bolton to be UN ambassador from the United States is a smart thing to do; it boggles the mind.

Done the right way, if we can tone down the violence, we can start focusing on giving medical, educational, and other forms of humanitarian aid to the population there. But I’ve talked with many of the aid workers who have been over there, and it’s a war zone. You cannot deliver assistance effectively in a war zone. The first thing we need to do is bring stability in a military sense to the situation there. Once we’ve done that, we need to divert a lot of the military expenditures into direct assistance to the people. I wish I could tell you that the gang in Washington could get their act together to do that, but I’m pessimistic.

Peter W. Galbraith, senior diplomatic fellow, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation

The problem in Iraq is not the insurgency, which is not an Iraqi insurgency, but a Sunni Arab insurgency. The Sunni Arabs are a small minority who can be defeated militarily by the Kurds and the Shiites, who after all constitute 80 percent of the country. There’s no Kurdish support and no Shiite support for the insurgency at all. So in that sense the United States should be able to get out relatively soon.

The problem is that there is no Iraq. The striking thing about the Iraqi elections is that nobody voted as an Iraqi. Kurds voted for the Kurdistan list. Sunnis affirmed their identity by not voting at all. Shiites voted overwhelmingly for a Shiite list. The best you could say is that the Allawi list, which I think got about 10 percent, was an Arab list, in the sense that it got some Sunni and some Shia support.

It’s entirely appropriate to view the writing of the constitution as the bargaining on a treaty among three different groups.

The Kurds have no desire to be Iraqi at all — at the time of the Iraqi elections they had a referendum in which 98 percent voted for independence. There is a separate government in Kurdistan that has its own army and is not going to agree to any Iraqi government control. Kurdish leaders are playing a role in Baghdad because they figure that’s the best way to promote their larger objectives.

The Sunni leaders that are being reached out to, it’s not clear whether they have any support or not. Adnan Pachachi, the man that Paul Bremer desperately wanted to be president of Iraq, his party could not get a third of one percent of the vote, so he couldn’t even get into Parliament — and now of course he’s one of the prominent Sunni leaders. He’s a nice man, but it’s not clear that he can deliver anybody.

The southern part of Iraq is being turned over to Shiite Islamic parties, who look to Iran as their model — it’s basically being administered by a party, Dawa, that 15 years ago was on the US terror list. That group unfortunately would like the whole country to be Islamic and pro-Iranian. Another part of Iraq looks to the West for its model.

I’m skeptical that an agreement can be reached on a constitution, although it’s possible that it can be reached by simply continuing the transitional administrative law.

One cannot underestimate the degree of growing enmity among these groups. It’s not just that Kurds don’t want to be part of Iraq, it’s that they hate Iraq, and they really don’t want to have anything to do with Arabs. There is now growing sectarian violence between Shiite and Sunni Arabs, including tit-for-tat killing of religious leaders.

With different American leadership, the Iraq problem is solvable and the US can get out. There are very competent Iraqis who are the government, who know how to spend money and do things. Over time they should be able to run their own country, or countries.

Much of what’s happened in Iraq was preventable. I was there on the 13th of April 2003, when in fact people were greeting the Americans with flowers. This wasn’t a myth. But then we negligently failed to prevent the systematic looting of every public institution in Iraq. Once that happened it was impossible to get essential services going. We allowed the insurgents access to huge stores of unguarded armaments — I saw this all over the place. And then we had an occupation that was staffed by political hacks, young people that were recruited from the job-application lists of the Heritage Foundation, that had a 20-billion-dollar congressional appropriation and managed to spend about two billion dollars of it. And now of course we have an endless amount of scandals about how they spent whatever amount of money they did spend.

The extreme incompetence of the Bremer administration has passed, and it’s been turned over to professionals in the State Department who have some ability to do these things. But it’s too late. You never get a second chance to make a first impression.