Dateline: SWA flight from Raleigh NC to Baltimore MD, Father’s Day, 20 June
I got a copy of the current issue of Rolling Stone (and yeah, it’s the recently deceased Ray Charles on the cover—not me) while I was taking my family out for a Friday night (early Father’s Day) meal at our favorite Japanese restaurant in Swansea MA. My punishment for this good deed was having to sit through Garfield—the Movie with my kids while my wife took in The Terminal (much better).
I forgot to bring the issue with me on my trip to North Carolina, so I had to pick up another one on the road. Below is the relevant text from the group interview I participated in asynchronously by phone. I only include those portions of the article where my responses were used, but I detail all the questions en route. Following these excerpts, I have some commentary on the process and the piece.
Oh, and yes, I did pick up a copy of the Sunday New York Times at Raleigh's airport before I took off, just to make sure the Book Review section had the Best Seller listing that included me in it. It did, and I immediately set the copy aside for safekeeping. I already printed out a nice hard-copy of the list and am having that framed with the jacket of the book, plus a blown-up small poster-size version of the cover—all nicely matted.
What Next? Rolling Stone convenes a panel of experts to discuss what went wrong in Iraq—and where we can go from hereMY COMMENTARY ON THE “GROUP INTERVIEW”: I can’t speak to whether or not any of the people in this group were interviewed together. I wasn’t. I did two phone calls with Amanda Griscom that ran cumulatively about 75 minutes. She was really taken with my June Esquire story, so we spent most of our time exploring the arguments and ideas I offered there. About a week before the issue went to press, she sent me an email with five paragraphs of my responses, which she allowed me to edit for clarity. The two that got cut saw me introducing the Core/Gap concept and speaking long-term on the reality of oil markets and Asia’s rising demand pattern.
By Amanda Griscom
8-22 July 2004, pp. 63-66.
[box on page 64]
THE ROLLING STONE PANEL
· Gen. Anthony Zinni Commander in chief of Centcom, 1997-2000; special envoy to the Middle Eaast, 2002-2003; author of Battle Ready
· Gen Wesley Clark Supreme allied commander, Europe, 1997-2000; led NATO military campaign in Kosovo
· Rand Beers Counterterrorism adviser to President Bush, 2002-2003; national security adviser to Sen. John Kerry
· Sen. Joseph Biden Ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
· Thomas P.M. Barnett Strategic adviser to the Defense Department, 2001-2003; faculty member of U.S. Naval War College; author of The Pentagon’s New Map
· Fouad Ajami Director of Middle Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University
· Sir Jeremy Greenstock British diplomat in Dubai and Saudi Arabia, 1969-2004; U.N. representative, 1998-2003; special representative for Iraq, 2003-2004
· Youssef Ibrahim Managing director of the Dubai-based Strategic Energy Investment Group; former Middle Easter correspondent for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal
· Bob Kerrey Senator from Nebraska, 1988-2003; president of New School University
· Chas Freeman U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, 1989-1992; assistant secretary of defense, 1993-1994
[opening text and first question]
At the end of 2002, as the Bush Administration prepared to invade Iraq, Rolling Stone convened a panel of experts to assess the march to war. Things have since gone far worse that most imagined. There is no evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction—the rationale used to justify the invasion. The fighting continues to escalate long after Bush declared “mission accomplished,” and the White House tried to ignore the abuse and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers. As the U.S. prepares to hand over control to an interim Iraqi government, we reconvened key members of our panel, along with some new experts, to examine the current situation in Iraq. What went wrong—and what should we do now?
Before we look forward, let’s look back. What have been our biggest strategic blunders since we invaded Iraq?
GEN. ANTHONY ZINNI: We’ve had a year of disasters. The strategy going into Iraq was patently ridiculous—this idea that we’d generate Jeffersonian democracy the plant the seed of freedom in the Middle East. The rationale was even worse: We grossly overstated the threat and cooked the books on the intelligence. They we put on the ground a half-baked pickup team that has alienated the people and can’t connect to viable leadership.
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: We went in with far too few troops and seat-of-the-pants planning. We’ve been there for more than a year, and the borders still aren’t being controlled—jihadis and extremists are coming in from Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Fuel convoys are getting routinely attacked; oil facilities and police stations are regularly targeted.
RAND BEERS: The precondition to freedom is security. You can’t succeed in beating the insurgents unless you can convince the people that they can be protected.
THOMAS P.M. BARNETT: It was a major mistake for the Bush administration to say to potential allies, “If you’re too big a pussy to show up for the war, we’re not going to let you in on the peace or rehab process—and don’t expect any contracts.” We had such a macho view of war that we completely miscalculated the dangers of peacekeeping.
FOUAD AJAMI: Now we’re a Johnny-come-lately for a U.N. resolution to internationalize the political process. You might call it deathbed multilateralism.
[subsequent questions where my answers are not included:
· What about the blunders behind the scenes at the White House? (Biden, Kerrey)
· What would happen if we did pull out in a hurry? (Zinni, Ibrahim)
· Would civil war spill over the borders to create a regional conflict? (Biden, Beers)]
So let’s assume we’re in it for the long haul. How do we even begin to regain control?
ZINNI: Security is the most important issue short-term. I’m talking probably at least a year and twice the number of boots. People won’t help build a new Iraq unless they can walk to a police station—much less a voting booth—without fear of getting killed.
BARNETT: The Bush team needs to eat crow and make the tough deals necessary to internationalize this. They need to call a summit meeting of the major powers, including Russia, China and India, and say, “We have a problem in Iraq. Our loss would be as big a loss for you—economically and otherwise—as for us. What will it take to get 10,000 Chinese troops, 10,000 Indian troops, 10,000 Russian troops? What do you want in return?” We know what the deals are. India would probably demand, for example, that we don’t declare Pakistan a major ally. Russia wants full membership in NATO. China might ask us to stop planning a missile defense in northeast Asia.
ZINNI: You have to see the bar scene from Star Wars, where there’s a lot of different uniforms, not just all American desert cammies.
BIDEN: We need to rapidly train an Iraqi army and police force. They need to feel they are fighting for themselves. If I’m president of the United States, my orders to our generals and ambassadors are, “If I see you once on Iraqi television, you’re fired. I want Iraqi faces on Iraqi television.” It should take two to three years to get 35,000 Iraqi troops out there.
[subsequent questions where my answers are not included:
· Should we even be talking about a June 30th hand-over? Are we prepared? (Clark, Ibrahim, Greenstock, Ajami)
· We keep hearing that the violence will escalate around June 30th and the year-end elections—that it will only get worse before it gets better. (Freeman, Zinni, Kerrey)
· We went into Iraq thinking it was a secular state, but the political rhetoric among Shiite and Sunni leaders has intensified. Is religion taking the place of politics? (Ajami, Greenstock)
· Is the concern that as the religious tenor among Iraqis intensifies, they will begin to identify their struggle as part of the larger conflict of Islam vs. the West? (Zinni, Ibrahim, Beers)
· We often hear that the war on terror has supercharged radical Islam and energized recruitment of terrorists. What evidence do we have to support this? (Freeman, Beers, Ibrahim)
· Should we view radical Islam as the enemy? (Zinni)
· Surely the Abu Ghraib prison scandal didn’t help. Should Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or other Bush officials resign? (Beers, Biden)
· Speaking of Cheney, how does this instability affect contractors such as Halliburton? (Zinni)
· What about our oil concerns? We often hear that a prime reason we went into Iraq was to get access to its oil as our ties to Saudi Arabia falter. (Greenstock, Freeman, Ibrahim)
· Has the war at least produced a new respect for American military power? (Ibrahim, Biden)]
What does the future of war look like? Will we face World War III?
ZINNI: My son is a Marine captain, and he’s going to face a changed battlefield—messier than Haiti, Bosnia, Somalia, Iraq. It’s no longer honorable fighting, where you defeat the forces of a nation-state on the battlefield. He’s going to face all sorts of violent components—insurgents, terrorists, warlords—as well as environmental challenges and humanitarian problems.
BARNETT: We’re going to end up replicating the struggle again and again. Like spraying the cockroaches in one apartment and scattering them to the next—we’re driving terrorists to the next country over. Sort of like rooting out old Japanese warriors on some isolated Pacific island twenty years after World War II, we’re going to be killing off the last of these guys years from now in deepest, darkest Africa.
[last question where my answer was not included: In the near term, is a change of administrations the best way out of the quagmire? (Ibrahim, Kerrey, Biden)]
Could I have scored more responses in the total? Hard to say. I was clearly the least weighty of the group in terms of gravitas and experience (and probably the only guy under 50 among that crowd), so I didn’t expect to register as frequently as others—like Zinni or Biden, both of whom seem to be running for jobs quite openly in the possible Kerry White House (Beers already has the national security adviser spot locked down—Kerry . . . who knows?). I guess Ajami, Greenstock, Ibrahim, Freeman and myself were considered more neutral or—perhaps in my case—more supportive of Bush (although my guess is that Griscom really glomed onto me due to my careful neutrality expressed in the Esquire article’s final four paragraphs). In all, pretty much a bunch collected to be critical of the administration, as reflected in the opening text by Griscom. No surprises in any of that: Rolling Stone can’t be expected to be anything other than vaguely counter-establishment (even as it has become quite “establishment” within the music industry).
I know that if I had said a lot of things more opening critical of Bush I could have been more prominent, although it would have been hard to bash Bush more than Zinni, who’s on a real crusade (although he’s selling books too—smart man . . . getting Tom Clancy’s name in huge letters atop the cover . . . 8<). But I figured it was cool enough just to be included with this panel of heavy hitters that I didn’t need to disgrace myself by getting so painfully partisan, which is not my style nor my substance anyway.
All in all, I was pretty pleased with how it turned out. My wife Vonne liked it plenty, saying I sounded sharp and concise and like I knew exactly what I wanted to say (editing down from 75 minutes to three short paragraphs can do that). She said she agreed with all my points, and felt most readers would too.
So I survive my brush with Rolling Stone just fine, and in the end, it’s pretty cool to be in an issue.
