Q: This is all very helpful.
This is sort of the two very small, well, they're big questions but I don't expect you to give me extended answers to the questions of the day. One is there is some question as to whether the Pentagon underestimated Iran's readiness to intervene in Iraq and whether that upset the plans at all, the post-war plans.
Wolfowitz: That's nonsense.
Q: Okay. That had been reported.
Wolfowitz: There's so much that's reported that -- No. In fact it's, I don't want to comment [inaudible] government. We've understood very clearly that Iraq, especially the Shia population of Iraq, is both a source of danger and opportunity to the Iranians. I think it's more danger than it is opportunity. But the danger itself is incentive for them to try to intervene because the last thing they want to see, which I think is a real possibility, is an independent source of authority for the Shia religion emerging in a country that is democratic and pro-Western.
Q: That's a --
Wolfowitz: There's going to be a huge struggle for the soul of Iraqi Shiism, there's no question about it.
Q: What about the notion that the military campaign went so quickly and so brilliantly that you did not have everything else as much as you might have in place for this later era, later period [inaudible]?
Wolfowitz: It certainly has gone quickly. People that remember when you want to take your story, I mean we're, 50 days after the war began people started -- Having been wrong about the first quagmire saying we were in a quagmire in terms of the restoration of the civil services in Iraq or dealing with any number of other obvious problems. To me what's remarkable is how much was accomplished in 50 days.
Things are not going to happen overnight. The notion -- I mean policy, like life, is fundamentally about choices and the notion that we should have chosen to delay until we had a huge force and go more slowly and deal with all the problems that would have come from going slowly so that we would have had enough people, for example, to guard the museum in Baghdad is frankly absurd. And it may well turn out, in fact, that the museum in Baghdad was looted before the war even began, in which case no amount of guarding would have done any good.
There are choices that had to be made and I don't think there's any question that the fundamental speed of the operation, the remarkable speed of the operation, played a role in preventing a number of the worst things that we feared from happening. We'll never know exactly why the oilfields were not destroyed. We did not have an environmental disaster resulting from huge hydrogen sulfide fires in the north. We did not have attacks on Israel. We did not have a fortress Baghdad. We did not have a civil war in northern Iraq or a Turkish intervention in northern Iraq. We didn't have an Iranian intervention to speak of in southern Iraq. We didn't have any Arab governments collapse. Should I keep going?
Q: These were all possibilities you weighed, right?
Wolfowitz: Absolutely. And most of these were things that people warned were absolutely certain to happen if we went to war. I think a few of them I thought were exaggerated. The one that has always worried me the most was the use of weapons of mass destruction. We still don't know why they weren't used. That's something maybe we'll know more about one of these days, I don't know.
But there seems to be very little doubt that everything came at the Iraqi regime much faster than they expected it. That the war began sooner, that the ground troops moved in faster, that they moved up north faster, that they moved into Baghdad faster, and a lot of things happened before for that matter some of the meddling neighbors could interfere, either.
One of our senior generals in a discussion of a related but different subject made the observation that speed kills, as in it kills the enemy, and that getting to an objective quickly is often the thing that's most effective militarily. There's always usually a tradeoff between speed and mass.
Q: And then the last question, you've been very patient and generous. That is what's next? Where do we stand now in the campaign that you talked about right after September 11th?
Wolfowitz: I think the two most important things next are the two most obvious. One is getting post-Saddam Iraq right. Getting it right may take years, but setting the conditions for getting it right in the next six months. The next six months are going to be very important.
The other thing is trying to get some progress on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. I do think we have a better atmosphere for working on it now than we did before in all kinds of ways. Whether that's enough to make a difference is not certain, but I will be happy to go back and dig up the things I said a long time ago which is, while it undoubtedly was true that if we could make progress on the Israeli-Palestinian issue we would provide a better set of circumstances to deal with Saddam Hussein, but that it was equally true the other way around that if we could deal with Saddam Hussein it would provide a better set of circumstances for dealing with the Arab-Israeli issue. That you had to move on both of them as best you could when you could, but --
There are a lot of things that are different now, and one that has gone by almost unnoticed--but it's huge--is that by complete mutual agreement between the U.S. and the Saudi government we can now remove almost all of our forces from Saudi Arabia. Their presence there over the last 12 years has been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly government. It's been a huge recruiting device for al Qaeda. In fact if you look at bin Laden, one of his principle grievances was the presence of so-called crusader forces on the holy land, Mecca and Medina. I think just lifting that burden from the Saudis is itself going to open the door to other positive things.
I don't want to speak in messianic terms. It's not going to change things overnight, but it's a huge improvement.
Q: Was that one of the arguments that was raised early on by you and others that Iraq actually does connect, not to connect the dots too much, but the relationship between Saudi Arabia, our troops being there, and bin Laden's rage about that, which he's built on so many years, also connects the World Trade Center attacks, that there's a logic of motive or something like that? Or does that read too much into --
Wolfowitz: No, I think it happens to be correct. The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason, but -- Hold on one second.
(Pause)
Kellems: Sam there may be some value in clarity on the point that it may take years to get post-Saddam Iraq right. It can be easily misconstrued, especially when it comes to --
Wolfowitz: There have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people. Actually I guess you could say there's a fourth overriding one which is the connection between the first two. Sorry, hold on again.
Kellems: By the way, it's probably the longest uninterrupted phone conversation I've witnessed, so --
Q: This is extraordinary.
Kellems: You had good timing.
Q: I'm really grateful.
Wolfowitz: To wrap it up.
The third one by itself, as I think I said earlier, is a reason to help the Iraqis but it's not a reason to put American kids' lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it. That second issue about links to terrorism is the one about which there's the most disagreement within the bureaucracy, even though I think everyone agrees that we killed 100 or so of an al Qaeda group in northern Iraq in this recent go-around, that we've arrested that al Qaeda guy in Baghdad who was connected to this guy Zarqawi whom Powell spoke about in his UN presentation.
Q: So this notion then that the strategic question was really a part of the equation, that you were looking at Saudi Arabia --
Wolfowitz: I was. It's one of the reasons why I took a very different view of what the argument that removing Saddam Hussein would destabilize the Middle East. I said on the record, I don't understand how people can really believe that removing this huge source of instability is going to be a cause of instability in the Middle East.
I understand what they're thinking about. I'm not blind to the uncertainties of this situation, but they just seem to be blind to the instability that that son of a ***** was causing. It's as though the fact that he was paying $25,000 per terrorist family and issuing regular threats to most friendly governments in the region and the long list of things was of no account and the only thing to think about was that there might be some inter-communal violence if he were removed.
The implication of a lot of the argumentation against acting -- the implication was that the only way to have the stability that we need in Iraq is to have a tyrant like Saddam keeping everybody in check -- I know no one ever said it that way and if you pointed it out that way they'd say that's not what I mean. But I believe that really is where the logic was leading.
Q: Which also makes you wonder about how much faith there is in spreading democracy and all the rest among some of those who --
Wolfowitz: Probably not very much. There is no question that there's a lot of instability that comes with democracy and it's the nature of the beast that it's turbulent and uncertain.
The thing is, at a general level, I've encountered this argument from the defenders of Asian autocracies of various kinds. Look how much better off Singapore is than Indonesia, to pick a glaring contrast. And Indonesia's really struggling with democracy. It sort of inherited democracy under the worst possible conditions too, one might say. But the thing that -- I'd actually say that a large part of Indonesia's problems come from the fact that dictatorships are unstable in the one worst way which is with respect to choosing the next regime. Democracy, one could say, has solved, not solve perfectly, but they represent one of the best solutions to one of the most fundamental instabilities in politics and that's how to replace one regime with another. It's the only orderly way in the world for doing it other than hereditary monarchy which doesn't seem to have much of a future.
Q: Thanks so much.
Wolfowitz: You're very welcome.
[Web Version:
http://dod.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030509-depsecdef0223.html]
