President's Baghdad Trip Sparks U.S. Iraq Policy Debate

President Bush Wednesday 6/14/06 hailed efforts to build a democratic Iraq, but called for "patience" as U.S. troops continue to fight the war on terror. Analysts Zbigniew Brzezinski and Walter Russell Mead discuss the direction of U.S. foreign policy.

JIM LEHRER: And now reaction to what the president said about Iraq from two analysts who have been with us since the war began: former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, he's now a counselor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; and Walter Russell Mead, the Henry Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, author of "Special Providence: American Policy and How it Changed the World."

I talked to them earlier today.

Gentlemen, welcome.

Dr. Brzezinski, the president ended his news conference saying, "Going to war in Iraq was worth it. It was necessary, and it will succeed." Do you agree?

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, Former National Security Adviser to President Carter: No, I do not. I don't think it was worth it. I don't think it is succeeding, and I think we ought to think very seriously as to how we can extract still some degree of success from what, obviously, has been a major misadventure.

JIM LEHRER: You did not hear the president say anything today that gave you confidence that success was still possible under his way of doing it?

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: Well, the president opened his press conference by make a statement, which I suspect most Americans didn't quite fully interpret correctly. This is what he said: "I have just returned from Baghdad. I was inspired to be able to visit the capital of a free and democratic Iraq."

Now, this is what the president actually visited. This is an aerial map of Baghdad and, within it, the viewers can see a small spot. That is the so-called Green Zone, a fortified American fortress housing the American embassy, the American high command, and all the major institutions of the Iraqi, as he said, free and democratic government, in an American fortress.

This is worse than in the bad days of Vietnam, when the South Vietnamese regime was still operating from its own palaces, had its own army and so forth. We do not have in Iraq a free and democratic government that is functioning.

Are there positive changes in Iraq?

In that the position of the Kissinger Senior Fellow (and a former head of the Bob Dole Library in Kansas) Mead is likely to be that of the major networks regarding Bush and the "positive changes in Iraq?", we'll focus on the levelheaded Mr. Brzezinki.

Possibilities of civil war

JIM LEHRER: Do you see those same positive changes, Dr. Brzezinski?

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: I would have to have an enormous magnifying glass to be able to see them that way. The fact of the matter is: The government is meeting in an American fortress.

If it is meeting in an American fortress, it is because it is not able to operate outside of an American fortress. That tells you a lot. The notions that a new plan is being put in to enhance security in Baghdad makes me think of a person in the midst of a huge fire in a house who all of a sudden announces that he has a new plan for the installation of air conditioning.

I mean, the fact of the matter is that, three years after the occupation of Baghdad, the authority we have installed is besieged and relatively helpless, and a civil war is beginning to mushroom, under the occupation, which is unable to crush the insurgency, because it is a foreign occupation.

And, last but not least, we have to get rid of the mindset, which is really by now totally ahistorical -- we no longer live in the age of colonialism. We no longer have to assume "the white man's burden" in order to civilize others, and I'm using these phrases in quotation marks.

The Iraqis are a historical people. They're quite capable of handling things on their own, provided their leaders are real leaders of the country and not essentially proteges of an occupying power hiding in an American fortress.

"Gaining ground on the ground"

JIM LEHRER: "Gaining ground on the ground," Dr. Brzezinski, in terms of the Iraqis themselves taking control, as you say they should?

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: You know, I don't understand the definition of "progress," if progress is movement from just Sunnis killing Shias to Shias now killing Sunnis, in addition to Sunnis killing Shias. What sort of progress is that?

I'll give another example: Until recently, Basra, which is in southern Iraq, occupied by the British, was relatively quiet. Now it is becoming violent. I am afraid that the sense of resentment against a foreign occupation is spreading, and to the extent that we can gage, by public opinion polls -- and one, of course, has to wonder how reliable they are -- a large majority of the Iraqi people now resents the foreign occupation.

And then, last but not least...

... is the fact that the so-called Iraqi government, three years after the beginning of the occupation, still sits in an American fortress. It cannot venture outside of it. To call it a government is to misuse the word "government."

It is not governing; it is sitting there. It's receiving American visitors, but it is not operating.

Now, the Kurds are running the north. There's no doubt that there's a Kurdish authority that's established. But in the Sunni and Shiite regions, I'm afraid we do not have a viable political entity operating independently of us.

Should we pull out of Iraq?

JIM LEHRER: Worth a try, Dr. Brzezinski? You're saying no?

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: Well, it's worth a try. The question is: How long do you continue trying?

Now, Walter (Mead) says, if I understood him correctly, that he's willing to wait three more years to see if the present government leaves the Green Zone, the American fortress. Well, how many thousands of Iraqis will die in the meantime? How many hundreds, how many thousands of Americans will die in the meantime?

How much will our prestige internationally decline? How many billions of dollars will we spend on this?

You know, analogies are not always very helpful, but farfetched analogies are really misleading. I think the analogy to the American Civil War is really farfetched.

If you want some analogy, I would say a closer analogy is that of Algeria, in the waning days of the war that the Algerians were waging against the French. Until de Gaulle came to power, the government was getting all the time the same kind of advice we now are hearing about the situation in Iraq. It may get better. Yes, three years have been wasted, but maybe we can go on for another three years. And we're going to do better; we're going to control Algiers.

There's a wonderful movie called "The Battle of Algiers," which shows what happened when the effort was made finally just to control Algiers. I'm afraid the battle for Baghdad is, in many ways, reminiscent of the battle for Algiers.

And then a man came along, de Gaulle, who instead of listening to the same degree of timid consensus -- "Gee, we are stuck, but we don't know what to do, so let's continue being stuck and maybe we'll win" -- he realized that this is a wrong war.

This is an unhistorical war. This is a war which France cannot win because the age has passed. And we have to realize that we cannot do now in Iraq what the British did in the 1920s. This is a new age and a colonial imperial war, in the name of tutelage, is just not going to prevail.

JIM LEHRER: So pull out, Dr. Brzezinski, now?

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: Pull out in an intelligent fashion. I have been advocating a four-point program which, in a nutshell, is the following.

Talk at length with the Iraq leadership as to when we have to leave. Those who say, "We don't want you to leave," are the ones who leave when we leave. The real leaders, probably not living in the Green Zone, will say, "Yes, leave." I suspect Sistani is among them.

Secondly, then announce jointly a date, but a date set jointly.

Then, thirdly, let the Iraqi government convene a conference of all of Iraq's Muslim neighbors about stabilizing Iraq and helping it to stabilize. Most of them will want to be helpful, maybe even Iranians.

And, fourth, we then announce as we're leaving a donors conference of interested countries in Europe and the Far East who benefit from Iraqi oil on helping to rehabilitate Iraq. I think this would enable us to leave and still say we achieved basically what we wanted -- the removal of Saddam -- though not a secular, stable, united Iraq under a perfect democracy because that, frankly, is a fantasy.