Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 3 | Career Ambassador: Thomas R. Pickering, page 2

SK: You mentioned the term “guerrilla warfare,” which you brought up as a consequence of unchecked looting. That notion has crept into the headlines and into the debate over Iraq. How serious a threat is guerrilla warfare and the possibility that this rather successful war could morph into a long guerrilla war?

TP: I think the idea that we can lose one American soldier a day and have numerous armed incidents against us and a constant drumfire—which appears not to be reducing, but maybe even increasing—is a problem. Intelligence and military experts with whom I’ve worked in the past and who I highly respect are very, very frank and straightforward in saying this is a guerrilla-type war, a guerrilla situation. I think that puts the reality exactly where it should be, right up front.

SK: What should Americans expect? A long engagement in Iraq?

TP: I believe that we should have a serious effort made, as we always do, to deal with the critical questions. I think first and foremost we should think about two of the major principles in the basic report. One is, what’s the role for the Iraqis? I think the notion that there were, as we said in our follow-up report, 400,000 Iraqi military, as inefficient and as helpless and as feckless as they were, suddenly dismissed with their weapons in their hands and told they were no longer going to be paid, meant that you put a large share of them on the street at a time when criminal activity seemed to be the order of the day. So it was not, in my view, an entirely wise decision.

I would have put them to work, cleaning rubble, clearing mines. Maybe the Iraqi military could begin to help the police restore law and order under allied and coalition supervision. And, maybe you could use some of these people as the kernel for a new military force rather than just putting them out on the street and saying, you’re on your own. It wouldn’t have cost us a lot of money to keep the rank and file going and we would have achieved a lot.

I also think we have to find Iraqis who are willing to confront and work on the country’s problems, everything from intelligence to garbage collection to security. Apparently the Pentagon is beginning to think about that and is bringing in people to deal with it.

Another major question is the international question. The enthusiasm on the American side for international participation has grown as the problems have grown worse. But I do believe that the international community is willing to help. Those who would have provided troops just wanted a clear U.N. umbrella.

In sum, we are talking about an American presence in Iraq for several years as a minimum and maybe up to five years as a possibility.

SK: I want to ask you more about international cooperation. In reading this report, I was taken by the fact that even though it was written before the war, it calls for thinking about a future government of Iraq as composed of those within Iraq, not just those exiles who have come back as the leaders.

TP: That was very much a key finding.

SK: And now the U.S. has organized a coalition of Iraqis that’s been put together this summer. Do you think the coalition reflects the kind of thinking that is necessary? Is it too weighted toward exiles? Does it represent enough of the internal players in Iraq?

TP: I think it represents a fair balance. One might argue that there could be fewer exiles and more local people, particularly given the balance of population and that may be what happens over the long term. It isn’t chiseled in stone that there has to be a certain number of members or a certain balance between male and female or Shia and non-Shia. I think Ambassador Jerry Bremer is wise in trying to reflect national balance in a reasonable way but not tilt so far over in one direction or another. I think he’s found some very good Sunni, some of who I also know. And I believe the steps that have already been taken will be the beginning of the really more intensive Iraq-ization of the whole process. In the long run, our ability to be helpful is going to be determined by the level of Iraqi cooperation and the ability of Iraqis to take responsibility for themselves and their country.

Over the last few days I’ve met with many people returning from Iraq. They’ve told me how some exceptionally able Iraqis are beginning to step forward and work with the coalition provisional authority. They don’t want to see their country destroyed. And I think there’s a relatively small minority who are focused on destruction and from my experience in places like El Salvador, I think there is an opportunity to marginalize the people who want to solve problems by force, by using electoral politics and building a national coalition in favor of a peaceful solution. I think there can be a very powerful movement for peaceful solutions and in fact, I’ve seen such efforts be more powerful than military force.

SK: As a former journalist, I’m finding it hard, since the fighting ended, to keep up with what is really going on in Iraq. I don’t feel like I have enough insight since I’m dependent on the news media for my information. Do you think the public is informed in the way they need to be about what is really happening since the war was declared over?

TP: I think that we never can be well enough informed. It’s like being in the government and asking “Do we need more intelligence?” The answer is always yes. The more difficult question is whether the present balance of reporting is sufficient to give people the basis for making good judgments about what is going on.

But I also think that there is always a bias. I think that the embedded journalists reporting on the war offered the public a very interesting experience because we seemed to get a lot of fresh information and firsthand reporting. But the public was not able to get an overall appreciation of the war. And much of the television coverage seems to have been from the tank-turret perspective. Also, journalists were not embedded in airplanes very frequently, so the folks who actually carried out a very successful aviation campaign tended to be ignored, although they made a major contribution to the success of the ground forces. So the public lost some balance.

And I think we’re probably losing more balance today. We don’t have reporters who are spending their days in the Sunni area of Iraq. It’s very dangerous in that region, or seems to be. And then there’s the perennial complaint against the press: that it’s only the bad stories that get into the headlines, and the successes don’t. Right now, we could use some sense of where there are successes in Iraq because of course, there are some.

At the moment, though, we seem to have a news process totally dominated by the failures or the difficulties or the problems or the deaths and that clearly is not a balanced view of where we are as a nation in this war.

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