Prometheus 6

From the roundtable run by Jim Lehrer:

So, Colonel Lang, is there a way for U.S. forces to quickly end this violence?

COL. W. PATRICK LANG: No, I don't think there is. In fact, it's understandable that the Defense Department doesn't want to build this up to look bigger than it really is. But in fact what you have around Fallujah and Ramadi is you have quite substantial numbers of Sunni Arab fighters using reasonably sophisticated weapons to try to get us to back away from them out of that town so they can declare it to be a liberated area. This would have a tremendous political effect in Iraq and across the Arab world.

And now have you the Shiia starting to say well, we don't want to be excluded from this process of fighting the occupier because it might damage our political prospects. So you have that going on. This is a serious matter. Your introduction said ten cities. My information says more like 14 cities were engaged today. This is a large scale thing and it will go on for a while.

That seems like a non-hysterical analysis. We can crank up the hysteria a bit without going over the top, though.

JIM LEHRER: Mr. Mearsheimer, in general terms, is this going to work?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: No, the United States is basically in a situation where it's damned if it does and damned if it doesn't. If we get tough on the Iraqis as we're doing now, tough on the insurgents, it's likely to backfire on us. What it's going to do, is it's going to enrage more of the population and make them more sympathetic to the Iraqis. And even if we shut this down in the short-term, we still have the long-term problem that we have no political institution inside Iraq that we can turn power over to on July 1. We also suffer greatly from the fact that the Iraqi security forces that we have been building up over the past year are effectively melting away and many of those forces are joining insurgents.

It's very hard to see how getting tough with the Iraqis is going to solve the problem. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to me that it is going to work if we back off either because then we'll show weakness and the Iraqi people will tend to bandwagon with the insurgents. The insurgents will grow stronger. So we're in a hopeless situation. Either way we turn we lose.

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JIM LEHRER: Col. Gardiner, do you see this as hopeless a situation as Mr. Mearsheimer does?

COL. SAMUEL GARDINER: I don't think I'd go that far, Jim. I think we've got three problems: We have got an immediate problem, a mid-term problem and a long-term problem. The immediate problem we have to remember is we started this. In both cases the aggressive policies towards Sadr that came from us, shutting down his press.

JIM LEHRER: The reason we shut down his press is because it was calling for violence and anti-American...

COL. SAMUEL GARDINER: Sure.

JIM LEHRER: I just want to get that on the record.

COL. SAMUEL GARDINER: But we went there. And the other thing is we went into Fallujah for the purposes of revenge against the attack on those four civilians. Again, that was our choice to go in there and start this.

Now in the immediate thing, I think in both cases, there's a possibility for us to soften. We need to do that. We need to have a week without 20 casualties. We need to have a week where the press isn't covering it both in the United States and in the Middle East. This needs to be calmed down a little bit and we can do that. Mid-term, we have to deal with the control of the situation. A serious thing happened since Sunday, and that is we lost more than half of the coalition.

JIM LEHRER: Meaning?

COL. SAMUEL GARDINER: The coalition consisted primarily of the Iraqi security service. The lesson of the last four days is you can't count on them. We've lost a number, probably in the neighborhood of five coalition partners of other countries. So the situation, with respect to that, has changed significantly since Sunday.

JIM LEHRER: But do you see... in Mr. Mearsheimer's equation there that you are damned if you do, you're damned if don't, if you go tough you lose, if you go soft you lose -- where do you come down on that?

COL. SAMUEL GARDINER: I come down on we have to go through a transition period of softening. Back off now, put the cordon around Fallujah, which is what we had thought we were going to do before. And I think that may have been what the Marines had planned up until this attack on the four contractors when then we decided for what reasons, it would be interesting to find out, that we had to go in there and do revenge. We had to find these people.

The decision to counter recent attacks
JIM LEHRER: But that resulted, did it not, Colonel Lang, from a decision of the part of the U.S. leadership that we could not sit back and let those four Americans be killed and their bodies be mutilated in such a way. We had to take action, correct?

COL. W. PATRICK LANG: Yeah. I think that's right. I think the decision essentially was that we were losing control of the city of Fallujah -- most places in the Sunni Triangle, and that you can't afford to do that. You can't afford to show that kind of weakness.

In the Arab world if you show weakness, you're just prey, in fact. People will decide to move against you. If... there may be people who think that the Iraqis like our occupation of their country but the Iraqis, the vast majority of them, know that's not true.

JIM LEHRER: Whether that's Sunnis or Shiia.

COL. W. PATRICK LANG: That's right. Any of them. The military-- the only people that like having us there probably are the Kurds because they expect we're going to protect them from the rest of them. But if we start to show that we are not going to resolutely stand up to them with the forces available, they're going to start to move on us everywhere.