Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering is the Senior Vice President for International Relations with the Boeing Company. He assumed his current position in January 2001 upon his retirement as U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. Prior to that, Pickering held the personal rank of Career Ambassador, the highest in the U.S. Foreign Service. In a diplomatic career spanning five decades, he has served as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation, India, Israel, El Salvador, Nigeria and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. From 1989 to 1992, he served as Ambassador and Representative to the United Nations in New York. He also worked as Executive Secretary of the Department of State and Special Assistant to secretaries William P. Rogers and Henry A. Kissinger from 1973 to 1974. He is interviewed here by Susan King, Vice President, Public Affairs, of Carnegie Corporation of New York.

SK: What makes this interview so interesting for me is that you are not only an ambassador, as they call it, a “career ambassador,” but a veteran of so many hot spots. But now that you’re out of government, you’re a citizen looking at the really important diplomatic questions of the last six months. So it’s exciting to be able to get that perspective from you, with all that you bring to it, yet with some of the freedom of being able to discuss events more openly. We want to start with talking about the Council on Foreign Relations report developed by a task force you co-chaired: Iraq: The Day After. As the country was preparing to go to war, your task force was preparing for the next question and I found it intriguing that your report concluded that, “It’s as important to win the peace as it is to win the war.” Why was that perspective so critical?

TP: It was tremendously important because, as we’ve seen in the aftermath of Iraq, it appears that either the planning was insufficient, or the follow-up was insufficient in terms of where we are now. And secondly, with the collective experience of the twenty-some experts we had and seventeen observers, most of whom had dealt with one or a number of these events, issues and problems in the past, we brought our collective experience to the fore, and we all felt that America had more trouble winning the peace than it had, in many cases, winning the combat operations—witness, for example, the long, drawn-out episodes following Bosnia, the difficulties and problems in Kosovo and in Macedonia. Also the issues that arose in West Africa over the years, in every place from Liberia to Sierra Leone to Ivory Coast, and the never-ending conflict in the Congo.

And, of course, there was my experience with Iraq, at the time of the first Gulf War, where as the United Nations Ambassador in New York, I made proposals for a very large U.N. zone that would have, in effect, taken over most of southern Iraq. There was also a strategy that would have created limited armament zones in Iraq, in the way that Henry Kissinger did when he disarmed the front line areas in the Sinai and the Golan in the 1970’s. But both were ignored.

Our military felt that everything was fine; all they had to do was win the war and then go home and they didn’t want to fool around with the aftermath, but that left Saddam in a much stronger position following 1991 than we should have allowed. So I think that all of the collective experiences we had, as a task force, put up a red flag for us that signaled, watch out. Almost always the biggest American problem related to combat is what to do after the war.

SK: The administration was pretty optimistic about what they felt was the opportunity for democracy after the war. Your report was not quite as optimistic. From what we know now, were you still too optimistic?

TP: We were probably a little too optimistic in some areas and a little too pessimistic in others. I think that you’re right, the administration was super-optimistic, they thought that there were going to be palm fronds and roses and that the troops would go home in August, that everything would be fine, that we’d have a government by the end of July and that, in fact, the international community and the Iraqis would take over. And they lost all sight of reality of the years of repression, of the deep sense of feeling among the Iraqi people of the need for retribution and revenge, which led to the subsequent looting. And of course the administration should know that looting is endemic after these kinds of activities. In fact, if you let looting go on, it moves from disorganized personal looting to organized criminal activity and then to guerrilla warfare.

And we’ve seen that transition begin to take place in Iraq, particularly in the Sunni-dominated areas where, unfortunately, I think the spirit of Saddam, his malign influence and people’s fear have made it hard for Iraqis to cooperate with the U.S. and the coalition. And many Iraqis are perhaps also willing to become guerrilla fighters in the hope of some future reward or maybe some potential benefit, or at least in keeping with their Baathist principles. So the situation is becoming more and more dangerous.

We’re in a very difficult period now. I’ve spent the last two days seeing old friends, many of whom have just come back from Iraq. I think certainly their firsthand experience confirms that difficulty

SK: Your report anticipated the security needs after the war and you recommended that along with troops, there ought to be legal teams to put security systems in place once the fighting stopped. Did that message not get heard by the administration?

TP: I’m afraid it did not. We also recommended that along with combat troops there should be units of specially prepared coalition forces whose principal purpose was to deal with law and order, looting, civil disorder and all the difficulties that arise, particularly following combat situations in major cities, where you have the potential at least for an ideological confrontation and ideological opposition.

But we were not the only ones making this recommendation. I think that if you canvas the Washington think tanks, all of us, about that time, were putting out similar reports. The Council’s report happens, in my view, to be one of the most salient and prescient, but all the others also raised this question of security. So it wasn’t as if a small group of experts in a quiet corner somewhere were ignored, it was basically every think tank in Washington that examined the problem making the same recommendation.

SK: With that kind of chorus of seasoned observers emphasizing follow-up support for combat troops, why do you think they weren’t heard by the administration?

TP: I wish I knew. It’s an unanswered question. I suspect that Congress and others will ask those questions over a period of time. And I think that they should be given an opportunity to do so. Those who are in charge of the situation in Iraq should be given an opportunity to relay their own experiences, their own concerns, their own decisions, their own reasons why they perceive it the way they do. But, unfortunately, I found that some of the people coming back from Iraq are themselves wondering why expert advice, which was available there, was ignored, as apparently it was.

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