Iraq: Next Steps After the Surge

This is not an official event with participants briefing on particular topics, it is just meant to be a conversation on Iraq by our several panelists here.

We have Lt. Col. Bateman, who has served in Iraq in 2005 and 2006 on General Petraeus's staff and is here a, as a journalist and as an author. He's also an historian, a former professor of history at West Point.

We have Col. Tex De Atkine, Ret., who is also a West Pointer and has a graduate degree in Arab studies from American University in Beirut. He's a former professor of the JFK Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg.

We also have Mr. Charles Hunter, who's been a Foreign Service officer for the past 17 years and has served in several Arab posts overseas. He just came back from Iraq where he led the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Al Hillah.

And lastly we have Professor Colin Kahl from Georgetown University, where he teaches international relations. He's also a member of the Center for the New American Security, where he helped draft their most recent Iraq report.

That's the panel. We'll proceed. Starting with Lt. Col. Bateman, there will be three to five minutes of opening remarks. When that's done, we'll move to your questions. Please turn off any cell phones or any other electronic devices that make noise. And when you ask a question, state your name and publication and wait for the microphone, which will be coming from your left. And afterwards there may be time for one-on-one interviews.

So take it away, Lt. Col. Bateman.

LT. COL. BATEMAN:

I would like to start off -- and this applies to all my comments -- I'm not a public affairs officer. I'm a grunt. I'm an extremely well-read grunt, but I'm still a grunt.

And I'm not speaking on behalf of Department of Defense or anybody on the other side of the river in this house. I'm speaking based upon my personal observations, and my analysis as both a strategist and as a historian.

That being said, when you invite somebody who has a background as a historian to be on a panel, he's going to talk in large chunks of time, both in the past and, in this case, a little bit to the future.

And the key point that I would like to start off with -- and maybe we'd talk about that in the future -- is, there's been much discussion -- the questions and debate about the idea of a hard partition of Iraq or a soft partition of Iraq. The contention's that, you know, Iraq is an artificial country; it was created because of the 1920 Sykes-Picot treaty between the French and the British agreeing on how they would divide up the areas of interest, the French gaining Syria and Damascus; the British, Iraq. And, people have said, "Well, Iraq, it's, you know, an artificial creation." No, it's Mesopotamia. I mean, that's Greek for "land between the rivers." It's been one cohesive political body for about 4,000 years.

Now, there have been periods, for example, Saladin never managed to extend his caliphate down to Baghdad and down to Basra. The Abbasid caliphate still existed down there. So at that point, what is now Iraq was split in two, but that was dynastic internal squabbling. Usually the only time Iraq has been split is when it's been split by much larger powers outside who have divvied it up and made it a border somewhere inside their own country.

Iraq, from Mosul to Basra, has traditionally been tied together by the rivers. If you're traveling, if you're moving commerce -- and where commerce moves is where culture moves -- it's got to go by river, because moving across those deserts, I've got to tell you, is not fun. And now, yes, we have internal combustion engines. That makes a difference. Certainly I wouldn't want to be trying it on camel back.

Now, the counterpoint I just made to my own argument -- the possibility now exists in the past hundred years that you could split the country, that you could develop economic ties that go in different directions because trade and transportation is no longer exclusively tied to the Tigris and Euphrates. I still do not think that will happen. For example, I mentioned Saladin. He's revered by the Kurds. He was a Kurd. But he's also revered by the Arabs for, you know, his victories at Hattin and Jerusalem, among other things.

They have shared common history that is tied to the land, both in the Muslim era and pre-Muslim era. The first declaration of human rights was put there by the Cyrus Cylinder. And when Cyrus took Babylon, bloodlessly, he had this cylinder created -- it's taken by some people as the first declaration of human rights -- and had it embedded under the walls in Babylon.

That's a long period of history that's shared by the inhabitants of Iraq. I don't think, for cultural, social and, ultimately, in some cases, economic reasons, that the country will fragment. That's my initial take.

COL. DE ATKINE: I was in the Army for 30 years and 20 years as a civil servant. I'm now retired after 50 years. So I can actually say what I think. It's kind of nice.

Actually, I've just got some bottom lines here, and I'll throw them out and talk to them, if you want to, later. Iraq will not fragment. The al-Maliki government will remain in power. The civil conflict will continue, but on a reduced rate. It will evolve more into an intra-sectarian than a Sunni-versus-Shi'a, Kurd-versus-Arab.

There will be further fragmentation of the political movements in Iraq, and particularly that will affect the Shi'a; Muqtada al-Sadr's Jaish al-Mahdi, which will fragment into even more pieces. There's already three or four of them. And a lot of things you hear about the JAM -- this is actually Shi'a who have broken off from the -- Muqtada Sadr. He kind of messed up when he created a problem at Karbala on the latest march down there, plus his flight to Iran did not go over well with a lot of the Shi'a community.

The Iraqi army will reemerge as the ultimate power broker in the new Iraq. It's becoming strong. It has a good report card, and it's coming along pretty well.

As the Shi'a become more accustomed to holding the reins of power -- something that they haven't had for God knows how many centuries -- the old Shi'a-Persian rivalry will re-emerge, and that will be stronger than the Shi'a solidarity. Progress will remain low in the restoration of national infrastructure, unfortunately, and that's I think the thing right now that's most important to most of the Iraqis I know. It's not security; it's the absolutely abysmal lack of electricity, water, picking up trash, just the normal things of life.

The dislocation and relocation of Iraqis that has been taking place -- Shi'a moving to Shi'a neighborhoods, Sunnis moving to Sunni neighborhoods -- is abating, because now people are beginning to move into neighborhoods, even though they may be of an opposite sectarian group, because of better services or better amenities. Sadr City right now is getting more electricity than Mansour or Yarmuk, so this is becoming important. Some of the Sunnis are moving into that area. Increasingly, residence will be based on the services and amenities available. For instance, most of the Shi'a I know still live in the middle-class neighborhoods and Sunni neighborhoods of Yarmuk and Mansour.

And the last thing I want to mention - and what should have been taken into account from the very beginning -- is the dysfunctionality of the Iraqi society. The thing we could have learned from the Iraqi historian Ali al-Wardi, who wrote about all this stuff on the character of the Iraqis, is the effects of the Ba'ath Party on family life; the effects of the Ba'ath Party on the destruction of the tribal integrity; the effect of continual wars with Iran, the United States, which has produced a tremendous amount of orphans and one-parent families, in which family structure has largely broken down in parts of Iraq. They don't have control over their kids; the dislocation that occurred even before the war, with many Iraqis having been moved -- Kurds, Shi'a here to the north, Kurds to the south -- lots of that that went on, and people were torn from their roots, which also has affected Iraqi society; and of course the refugees.

Now, you should keep in mind, the refugee problem is not something that occurred just in this last war. When I was in Amman in 1998, whole sections of Amman were Iraqi. Large numbers of them had come for economic reasons; some were fleeing the Ba'ath Party. So basically you have to look back a little bit in the history of that.

And the last thing I want to say is I have tremendous admiration for the Iraqi people, what they have gone through and what they continue to have to put up with day in and day out. It is a monument to people's ability to endure. Thanks.

MR. HUNTER: Well, as I already mentioned, I've just come out of Hillah. And since I wasn't in Baghdad and was on the ground leading a PRT, the approach that I can take with you has to be much more the worm's eye view, rather than something from 60,000 feet. I'm not Ambassador Crocker, and our job in the PRT was to be there on the ground and be working with local officials, trying to move forward bit by bit, and actually to work ourselves out of a job to the extent possible.

What you find when you're away from Baghdad and the palace, let alone away from Washington, is that the sort of broad characterizations that you need to make, when you're speaking with Congress or with people who aren't right there day in and day out, is that there's a whole lot more variegation in the situation than you might think. Tex has just spoken to some of those points, the sort of Shi'a-on-Shi'a rivalries that exist and that leave open a whole lot of questions just about what may happen in the palace, let alone for the country as a whole.

So what we were seeing there in the south where I was was a lot of sort of sideward glances. As if each group was trying to suss out what move the next was going to make and what that might mean for themselves, and with important things still in the future like provincial elections, like the entry into effect of the law passed last October allowing the formation of regions. This is a period, I would say, of some internal gamesmanship that we don't always have too full a sense of from outside the country, but that is probably going to be the most important thing, far beyond what might happen in specific and discrete security incidents, let's say, for shaping the future of Iraq.

So what I can bring to the conversation is a perspective from outside of Baghdad, admittedly a somewhat parochial one, because what is true in Babil province is going to be far different from what is true in Anbar or in the Kurdish regions or Mosul or anywhere else. But from where we were, I had a team that was working with counterparts that by and large were interested in moving forward in all the areas that we were looking at: providing good governance, overcoming these horrible problems that Tex was talking about of basic services to the people, trying to implement the rule of law and be responsive to citizens. It's an enormous challenge, particularly in an environment where for decades, if not longer, any semblance of initiative generally wound up not being too career- enhancing or even life-enhancing in some cases. (Laughter.)

So a lot of what we were focused on and what will need to continue to be the focus is simply the cultivation of initiative on all levels, whether it's in business, whether it's the general machinery of government -- having a provincial council willing to make decisions, willing to spend its money -- all those sorts of things are going to be what will determine, outside of Baghdad, what takes shape. So that's what I can talk about, if that's interesting to you.

PROF. KAHL: Well, I'm batting cleanup, I guess. (Laughter.) I think there's a lot of disagreement at the moment in the wake of the Petraeus and Crocker testimony and the continuing feuding in Congress about exactly how much progress there is in Iraq and how much progress that we've seen can be attributed to the surge. And I think that a lot of the problem that we're facing is that people want a yes-no answer to that; either yes, there is progress or no, there isn't progress. And I think that unfortunately, like a lot of things in life, the answer simply isn't that simple.

And so I think it's more productive, actually, to think of different types of progress along four dimensions. I think those four dimensions are the type of progress; the location that that progress is happening; the causal direction of the progress -- and I'll explain what I mean by that in a second; and then last and most importantly, the possibility for aggregation and sustainability of what progress we've seen.

I'm going to talk just a little bit about those things.

The first dimension is the type of progress, and here, I think, most people are comfortable with the differences between security progress and political progress. Perhaps in genuine security progress in Iraq the overall levels of violence against Iraqi civilians is down from its peak last year. There's also been important degradation of al Qaeda in Iraq, but I think we do have to keep all of this in perspective. Things only look good relative to how bad things were in 2006. I think, relative to what conditions were like in 2003, 2004 and 2005, even security conditions in Iraq are quite weak, so I think our frame of reference has to be kept in mind when we're evaluating things. The trends may be going in the right direction, but we're not anywhere close to being home on the security front.

More importantly, we have to keep in mind that the surge was, of course, justified in an effort to create breathing space for substantial political reconciliation, and there's been almost none at the national level. The most recent White House benchmark report has to strain pretty hard to argue that about half of the benchmarks we're making progress toward reaching them -- not that they've been reached, but that we are making progress toward reaching them. So I think there's pretty much widespread agreement that at least on the political front as of yet we've not seen the types of breakthroughs that a lot of people would hope for.

The second dimension to keep in mind is location, location, location. In terms of security, there's been a reduction in sectarian violence and insurgent attacks in areas where either there are a lot of American troops present or there are substantial cooperative arrangements between American forces and Sunni tribal groups and former militant groups, and I think this is a result of five factors.

One is that U.S. forces are taking the lead in population security in some areas, in particular in Baghdad in Diyala province, which is helping to push down violence there. There's the ability of U.S. forces to simultaneously disrupt multiple enemy sanctuaries at the same time, which didn't happen before the surge, and I think this is most evident in Operation Phantom Thunder in the Baghdad belts, but it's ongoing in Diyala province and elsewhere as well.

I think a third factor is that some of the Shi'a militias have simply decided to stand down until the surge is over. I think a fourth factor is that a lot of the past sectarian and ethnic cleansing that's occurred is basically gotten victims out of the way, and so some of the violence is a natural -- has decreased almost naturally because there are fewer victims. And last, there's the so-called Sunni Awakening of tribal groups, which started in Anbar, but it spread to other areas.

The first two factors that I mentioned can be directly attributable to the surge. The third, which is the Shi'a militias laying low, is also a response to the surge, although this may simply return to normal once the troops go back down. The last two factors that I mentioned -- the sectarian cleansing, which is getting rid of potential victims; and the Anbar Awakening, which we've heard so much about -- actually think are probably the most important, but also have the least to do with the surge. And let me spend just a second talking about the Anbar Awakening because a lot has been made about that by President Bush and General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker about travel cooperation.

I think it's important to keep in mind that the motivation for Sunni tribal cooperation have very little to do with the American presence in Iraq. The motivation to cooperate with the United States is basically driven by an enemy-of-my-enemy logic. Al Qaeda in Iraq made a number of significant missteps in 2006, including engaging in widespread atrocities and by declaring the Islamic state in Iraq, which was a direct challenge to traditional, economic and political authorities in Western Iraq. This is the reason that the Sunni tribes decided to flip on al Qaeda in Iraq and why a number of former militants have been doing it.

Now, I give a lot of credit to American commanders for supporting this opportunity, and believe me, there's been so much bad luck in Iraq it's good that there's some good luck for a change. But we need to keep in mind that this momentum towards tribal cooperation started before the surge and is causally not directly related to the surge. In a sense, I think this is good news because it suggests that perhaps this can be sustained at lower levels of American forces, which is, of course, what we all hope for.

Politically, there's been no progress in Baghdad if we're talking about location. In Anbar, there's been progress, but it's difficult to frame this as sectarian accommodations, and Anbar is largely a homogenous area. This is some degree of accommodation between coalition forces and Sunni groups, which is a good thing as it relates to the insurgency, but this is not across sectarian accommodation.

I also think we have to be on the lookout for the possibility that the more the United States turns towards Sunni groups, the more anxiety it will produce among Shi'a groups, which means that the more progress there is along some areas with Sunni groups may actually act across purposes with national reconciliation if it magnifies Shi'a paranoia. And I think we have to keep in mind that even though Shi'a Arabs are a majority in Iraq, they're a majority with a minority complex, and they're incredibly anxious about the possibility that we might be empowering their adversary. So this is something to look for.

In terms of causal direction, I think that much was made in the last couple weeks about the bottom-up progress, that is the top-down progress from the national government we're not seeing. Almost all of the progress is coming from localities in the provinces up through these ad hoc relationships, which brings me to the last point, which is about the possibility in the context of this kind of grass-roots or bottom-up progress for aggregation and sustainability.

I think sustaining gains in security hinges on being able to hand cleared areas off to the Iraqi security forces, and here the capability and loyalties of the Iraqi army are particularly important. The Iraqi national police is a corrupt and broken institution. General Jones' report from a couple weeks ago recommended disbanding it. Local police are a little better, and the police have either been incapable of preventing sectarian violence or are sometimes complicit in that violence. The Iraqi army, however, has made substantial strides, and I would agree with the other panelists that suggest that if there is hope for one kind of nationalist institution that might be able to police the scene, between communities it's really the Iraqi army.

And the good news out of the General Jones' report from a couple weeks ago was the notion that over the next year or year and a half there might be the capability to hand substantial portions of the country over to the Iraqi army, and I think that's a real good news story, but a lot has to be -- a lot of emphasis has to be put on improving the capabilities of the Iraqi army.

But the real key is going to come in politics, and there's really only two ways in which political accommodation is going to happen. Either there's going to be the ascendance of a strong man, who uses a nationalist Iraqi army to pull the country together. I don't see that as a likely possibility despite the fact that Ayad Allawi is hiring Washington lobby firms to position himself for that. I don't think there are any George Washington's or Kemal Ataturk's that are likely to emerge in Iraq to pull the country together.

I think a more likely scenario is that you're going to have a highly decentralized Iraq. This separate from the argument about partition. I don't see any possibility that Iraq is going to neatly segregate itself into three different countries in a hard or soft sense of a Kurdistan, a Sunnistan and a Shi'astan, but I do think that what you're getting in Iraq is a scenario in which all politics are local. The degree to which you're going to have political and security gains that are sustainable, therefore, requires localities to be able to create security forces that the people in those localities are confident in and then have national security apparatuses that are sufficiently non-sectarian and professional to police the scene. That is the only way in which you are going to get a stable, but highly decentralized Iraq, and it will require a political -- a government in Baghdad that is comfortable with being relatively weak and basically being an ATM machine for the localities and provinces; that is dispensing revenues so that those localities and provinces can basically govern their own communities. If we can get there, then there is some hope, but that's going to be a very difficult place to get to.

MODERATOR: Okay. Are there any comments based on remarks that were made that the panel would like to debate, or should we move to questions?

COL. DE ATKINE: There's just one thing I'd like to say about the benchmarks. You know, I'm not a professional historian like Lt. Col. Bateman, but I'm an amateur historian. And I look at the Reconstruction era of the United States after the Civil War. A hundred and forty years after that war, where I live in North Carolina you see more Confederate flags than American flags. You know, hatred dies slowly. And as you were saying, the Shi'a fear of Sunni ascendancy is palpable.

And the other point is, this guy al-Maliki, they feel sorry for him because they know he really doesn't have the power to do the things that Americans seem to expect him to do. So, as you were also saying, there really isn't anybody out there who can replace him. So, you know, you can say we're stuck with him, or maybe he isn't so bad. And I guess that's the point I would make.

MODERATOR: Any further thoughts, or are we all ready for questions? (No response.) Okay, let's move to questions. Please state your name and publication before your question.

Q Daniel Anyz, Czech daily Financial News. You mentioned that the Anbar Awakening is making troubles for the Shi'a community. I wonder whether this couldn't turn back against the U.S. forces, that at some point it will get out of hand on the Shi'a side? I'm wondering whether making now Sunnis stronger couldn't get the Shi'a community to the point that they will turn against U.S. forces, they will block any political negotiation, and then even turn violent against the Coalition.

COL. DE ATKINE: Well, first of all, forecasting bad things in the Middle East is very easy to do because they very often do happen. There's no way that I or anyone else can forecast what will be the intentions or the motivations or the actions of the various Shi'a groups, particularly in the south. There's a lot of different things that are driving those folks. So, could the Shi'a at one point take up arms -- if that's the question -- against the Americans? It's possible, but I don't see it happening in the short or intermediate range.

PROF. KAHL: I think that the best piece of security news in years is the Anbar Awakening and the broader tribal movement in Iraq. But I think it holds in it two potential dangers that have to be managed. The good news is, that both American military commanders and the embassy is acutely aware of these dilemmas. But we have to be honest about them, because things can go wrong in Iraq in lots of ways. The two dangers are that in empowering Sunni groups, we magnify Shi'a anxieties, which actually reduces their incentive to reach a grand bargain with the Sunnis in the form of national reconciliation. That's one danger.

And the second danger, I think closer to the one that you mentioned, is the possibility of blowback; that is, that we empower groups to turn against our forces over the long run, especially some of the former insurgent groups that we're now bringing in to auxiliary and provincial security forces.

Now, the good news is that, like I said, the U.S. military and the embassy are aware of these. And I think they have to do a couple of things. And I think they know that they have to do these things. Whether they can pull them off or not is a different matter. One is, they have to vet, train and integrate auxiliary and provincial security forces in Sunni areas into the Iraqi security forces in some way. That's necessary so that the government, the Shi'a-dominated government, has some confidence over them. Right now the sheer numbers of new recruits in Sunni areas is wildly outpacing the abilities to train and integrate them. Hopefully, that will catch up.

I think a second thing that has to be done is these groups have to be strong enough to protect their localities against al Qaeda in Iraq, against other extremists, against Shi'a militias or other groups, but they can't be so strong that they produce threats to the center. So they have to be strong enough at the local level, but not so strong that they have offensive capabilities they can project into the center of the government. Again, that's a difficult kind of calibration to pull off.

The third thing that has to happen is that these groups have to be sufficiently dependent on the central government that they don't turn against the central government. And the key here is really money. Right now, a lot of these auxiliary groups are being paid for by the U.S. military, all right? The U.S. military realizes that this is not sustainable over the long term, and that durable relationships have to be established whereby the central government, through its ministries, pays these security groups so that they have a direct dependence on the central government, which deters them from turning against it. All right?

Assuming that these three things can be pulled off, though -- vet, train, integrate; making them strong enough to protect their own, but not too strong; and creating complex interdependencies that deter them from attacking the central government -- then I have some confidence. But those are all balancing acts that are going to be hard. And none of this is good; it's just the best we can expect in a really bad situation.

MODERATOR: Okay, next question?

Q Reymer Kluever from the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung. If we stick to the realm of predictions and concerning the U.S. engagement in Iraq, how long do you think the current sustainable troop level of easily 130,000 personnel, troops, can be kept, or is there more truth in what Mr. Gates has proposed, keeping troop levels at 100,000, or is there any sort of further chance of further diminishing the troop levels in Iraq, and in what time frame?

LT. COL. BATEMAN: I think I can handle that. In one way, realize that all force-level issues are ultimately domestic political questions. When I first joined the military, the United States Army was 870,000, 20 divisions, with eight of them stationed in Germany. By the time of the first Gulf War, we were down to 14. Now we're down to 10. But, you know, we had 880,000 before, with a peacetime army. If we had 880,000 before, then we could have it again, without a draft, if there is the political decision and the will to vote the money and expand the size of the Army. A decision was made last year to expand the size of the Army by 70,000. And that was an acknowledgment that the 130,000 was putting too much strain.

For an Army officer, you wear the unit patch of the unit you're with on your left shoulder, and you wear the unit patch of the unit you served with in combat on your right shoulder. When I first came in, there were a lot of Vietnam-era combat patches. But among people my age and just a couple of years older -- you know, 5, 10, 15 years older -- there weren't any combat patches. The U.S. hadn't been at war.

Prior to 2001, 2002, you'd walk around the Pentagon, there were almost none. All the Vietnam generation had gone. If you go to the Pentagon today, just about everyone has a combat punch. And so the addition of the 50,000 or 70,000 was a political decision. It was decided we're going to spend more money on the Army to raise the size of the troops.

The surge, as it stands, is not sustainable. We're up to 15 months, and there's nobody in the Army or, so far as I know, in the Administration or on Capitol Hill who thinks that we could keep that up. Fifteen months is breaking us. I have lieutenants and young captains that I taught as a professor at West Point who have spent more time in combat than they have in the United States. The 2nd Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division, when it comes back in November, will have spent 40 months in combat since December of 2001.

And if the current trends continue -- I'm a lieutenant colonel now. It takes 17, 18 years to make a lieutenant colonel. It takes that long to develop the experience. I mean, you guys are all international correspondents for your respective papers. You didn't get that job when you were 22years old. You had to work your way up to where you are. Well, it takes the same kind of thing.

Right now, if we're on track, unless things change, by 2010 the Army is going to be about 4,500 captains and majors short of what we need. That's like closing half of your foreign bureaus and chopping your editorial staff by two-thirds or a third, you know? Again, it comes down to political decisions here in the United States. You can decide -- you can assess as well as I can which direction you think that's going.

PROF. KAHL: Quickly on that. I think that's right. I mean, there's two constraints. There's the military constraint and there's the political constraint and both of them are important. And both of them suggest that the surge will die its natural death in the spring of 2008. As Petraeus kind of foreshadowed in his testimony, the expectation is that you're going to get back down to pre-surge levels by midsummer of 2008. Actually, because more -- the rotations had to be accelerated and lengthened to make up for the surge, I would expect it to dip even further down come late summer, early fall, so that you'd be below 130,000 inevitably.

I also think there's some political momentum towards trying to have the number close to 100,000 by the end of Bush's term, if not a little bit below, kind of like when you want to sell something for $10, you price it at $9.99 because it looks like it -- so expect 999,99 troops at the end of the Bush administration. Why? I think there's a political dynamic here, the symbolism of having 100,000 forces. The Army and the Marines, despite losing a lot of junior officers, are being stressed by this. They could probably maintain 100,000 - 120,000 for years. But I don't think our political environment is such where that's likely to happen.

And I think that if come November of 2008, there isn't substantially more progress than there is now, especially on the political front, and there are still something like 120,000 or 130,000 troops in Iraq, I think you're likely to see a next administration elected on the pledge to get those troops home immediately.

So I think in the effort to avoid that, to kind of avoid driving off the cliff of political exhaustion, you may see an effort to ratchet back those troops and accept some risks to get lower than pre- surge levels by the end of the Bush administration. That would be my political take.

Q My name is Isa Ismail from VOA Indonesia. I have two questions. The first one, you said that this is an informal conversation. So how do we attribute your statements? That is the first question.

Second question. You said that the Iraqi army will reemerge as a main player eventually. Are we talking about the old Iraqi army from the Saddam time, or the new?

MODERATOR: On attribution. This is an on-the-record event, and everybody's full names and titles are in the announcement. Our panel may want to clarify particular things.

COL. DE ATKINE: I've been talking about the new Iraqi army. I'm one of those who say it was a good thing to dissolve the Iraqi army. And even people who criticize it now, when I read back what they wrote before the war, they were in favor of it because the army had to be dissolved.

There is a cultural aspect of building an army that has to be addressed. It could never have been done had we just replaced a few people, called them back in. Nothing would have been accomplished. It would be like invading Russia, displacing Stalin, and leaving the Communist Party in charge. I believe that, yes, we would have had stability, we would have had the peace of the dead had we allowed the army to remain in power.

Now, I'm talking about the new Iraqi army, and I believe that it does have remnants of the old Iraqi army. Many people have been brought back into it, had to be, but I think it is professional people. The Iraqi army traditionally has had a certain amount of prestige among the people. So I think it's inevitable, with the path that I see, that the Iraqi army will be the guarantor if you will of the constitution, or the power broker. It really depends on which way it goes, and I don't know which way that will be.

MR. HUNTER: I'll just speak to it at a local level. Certainly in Babil province and the southern region generally where the 8th Iraqi Division was taking the lead, they were very much moving toward being that guarantor of stability, with an extremely professional leadership working closely with their U.S. military counterparts, doing joint operations and working to win the confidence of the people. The division commander was actually based in another province. But his lieutenant, who was based in Babil province, was someone I saw on a weekly basis - he met with me and my U.S. military counterpart weekly, along with the provincial chief of police, and were individuals who visitors would frequently look at and say, well, they may not be George Washingtons.

But I remember several occasions on which visiting staff and other Washington officials would say to themselves, these are the kinds of guys we need testifying in front of Congress. They're just enough out of the spotlight that people aren't really aware that there are people, that there are Iraqis out there working in this direction. But on a province-by-province basis, you can find them, people who do give you hope, who have their head on straight, as it were, and understand what they need to do in order to be this pillar of the new Iraq.

It's not perfect. There is penetration of some security forces, without question. But at the leadership level, people know what direction they need to be going in and where they want their subordinates to be leading.

MR. KAHL: I think that as it relates to the Iraqi army, the Iraqi army is key to the twin goals that the United States has in Iraq, which is to stabilize Iraq and to leave. Neither one of those two things can be accomplished without a capable and professional, and I think -- I use professional to basically mean loyal to the state, not loyal to sects or ethnicity. Because if the Iraqi army is simply another, yet another sectarian combatant, then it doesn't solve the stability problem at all. And in fact, it aggravates the stability, the instability and stability problem in Iraq.

The role that the Iraqi army plays will vary tremendously, depending on what part of the country you're talking about. In more homogenous areas, one would hope that the Iraqi army will basically move out to the periphery. That is, most security will be local, done by local police forces, with some support on occasion but not a permanent, large-scale presence by the Iraqi army.

In this area that we're talking about -- certain parts of Baghdad, Diyala, Salahuddin, Nineveh province, et cetera -- you may have different localities that would be warring with one another if there wasn't a sizable Iraqi army presence to police the scene between those communities. So in some areas, the Iraqi army will have a very regular presence in basically a policing function. In other areas, they will basically -- should stand aside.

And one would hope, 10 and 20 years from now, the Iraqi army won't be doing anything inside Iraq. They'll be oriented towards protecting Iraq's borders, but we're not anywhere close to that at the moment. But I think almost all of us can be in agreement: There is no future for a stable Iraq without a professional Iraqi army.

Q Anja Keuppers from Deutsche Welle radio in Germany.

Is that something that the Iraqi population sees as well? I mean, you've all been speaking about how important the role of the army is, and that it's something that is vital to success. If you would ask people on the street, do they accept that? And do they also see it as the new Iraqi army? Or do they -- are there still suspicions? Are there still fears? And are they happy to be so intensely policed by an army?

LT. COL. BATEMAN: I'll take this. First thing, I always wanted to do this, I'm going to ask a question to the journalists. How many of you have been to Iraq? (One hand is raised). Okay, I'm an historian so I'm going to tell a story.

It was in early 2005, I think, when the first brigade of what later became the Iraqi Armored Division received its armored vehicles, its tanks: old T-72s. They'd been refurbished; the engines had been fixed up a little bit. But they were still T-72s. And there was unrest in a particular city, and the decision was made to deploy them. Along with American forces, we were going to send this brand new Iraqi armored battalion -- it's just standing up, but we hope it will hold.

And they got there, and I wasn't on the ground, but some friends of mine were, and they watched this and said there was cheering when the Iraqi tanks went down the road, because these were Iraqi tanks. You're both better at the cultural analysis than I am. But in Iraq, much more than in the United States, far more than in Europe, far more than in Japan, the military is seen as a symbol of national pride, throughout many countries in the Middle East, even sadly under Saddam, when it was also a tool of massive repression and also a social works program. Saddam's army is gone, and that is very clear in my interactions with Iraqis.

You're also seeing, since late 2004, really since 2005, the Iraqi army is coming along in leaps and bounds. I know that sounds like a press release. But remember, I mentioned how long it makes to make a lieutenant colonel, right? We're trying to grow lieutenant colonels inside of two or three years, you know? So we have to take an older guy. We have to give him all the instruction. And it's kind of like, you know, how long does it take to get a top-flight reporter that is assigned by their newspaper to Washington, DC, you know? Your company may decide to send the 22-year-old reporter here, but they're not going to do as well as all of you do.

The same thing's starting to happen in Iraq. We were creating an instant army, and the first attempts weren't done well. That's why we created what was called MNSTC-I, the Multinational Security Transition Command that General Petraeus commanded last time he was in Iraq. We started teaching the Iraqis how to build an army, like a real democracy's army, where you don't just go through basic training of a couple hours or a couple days, get your uniform then get sent to your unit and get all on-the-job training and mostly, you know, have the officers doing everything, but actually, you know, learning how to be a soldier, learning how to be a soldier versus how to be a warrior.

There are warrior cultures and there are soldier cultures. Most of Western Europe, most of the professional countries in Asia have soldier cultures now. But throughout South Asia and the Middle East, you still have some strong vestiges of warrior cultures, where the motivation is not collective, it's individual; the motivation is not preservation and loyalty to the state, it's accruing honor for myself. That's a tough thing to do, to create an institution like an army. And that's why I'm in line with Tex. I think, you know, there are good things and bad things to be said about the decision to disband that army -- Saddam's army. But without disbanding it, we couldn't have created something from scratch. We didn't disband or ever have control over the Ministry of Interior; I set that for you to consider in contrast.

COL. DE ATKINE: Thanks. I would just add that, as an example of what Lt. Col. Bateman is talking about, growing noncommissioned officers -- I've worked with Lebanese, Egyptian, Jordanian, some with the Gulf armies, and no Arab army, with a possible exception of the Jordanians, actually has a professional noncommissioned officer corps. They are the -- that is the glue, the guts of an army. The Iraqi army didn't have that, either. What you have is the officers gave orders and the enlisted men carried them out under pain of death.

LT. COL. BATEMAN: Saddam's army didn't have that…

COL. DE ATKINE: This was a very significant aspect of the old Saddam army.

So in any event, as just one example, it takes quite a while to build -- I mean, I've spent a lot of time in the Army -- it takes a long time to build a professional noncommissioned officer corps. And they're the ones who actually lead troops. So that's just one example that Colonel Bateman was talking about, and an important one.

MR. HUNTER: Your question really went to how much popular awareness there is of these things. Again, I have to be parochial, because Babil is what I know. But both on the level of the major elements, the army and the police, and in the case of a much smaller but extremely important unit that was created fresh after the liberation, the Hillah SWAT Team or the Scorpion Force as it's known, there are leaders there who do make those points virtually every time they have the opportunity, whether it's to the soldiers or officers that they are training -- and I've attended several graduation ceremonies for the police in Babil province and heard the provincial police chief saying things like there is no place for sectarianism in this force; our loyalty is to Iraq above all things -- I could count on those being in his talking points, whether he was speaking to American officials who were visiting, to foreign or Iraqi journalists who would be around them or to general people who wanted to know what their work is.

So those leaders were aware of the importance of getting all the people in that same mind-set and demonstrating to them what their intentions were, to set people's minds at ease. And it's a challenge. And with all the good intentions in the world, getting Sunnis, for example, to come volunteer for a force that was largely Shi'a was, throughout my year there, an ongoing challenge. But these leaders recognized the importance of doing it, and were reaching out at every opportunity to those communities in the northern part of the province, because that's where the Sunnis are concentrated in Babil, to try to integrate them as much as possible and achieve the right sort of mix in the force.

PROF. KAHL: I would say, you know -- after disbanding the Iraqi army, whether one thinks that's a good thing or a bad thing from a stability perspective versus a democracy perspective -- there's a whole host of debates about that -- but the effort to reconstitute the Iraqi army was helter-skelter and plagued by all sorts of problems for a long time. And for a long time, the emphasis was on quantity rather than quality, because the exit strategy was, "as they stand up, we'll stand down; the more of them we have, the less of us they need, then we'll leave."

The problem is that there can be a lot of rhetoric about national unity and the importance of Iraq, but at the micro level, at the small unit level, you'd have people who would pick up their cell phones and call their buddies five minutes before a raid happened to make sure that the arms cache was moved. And so I think that there's a lot of evidence that the professionalism, especially of the Iraqi army, has increased dramatically, and that quality is being emphasized as much as quantity these days. But there's a lot of catch-up here.

I think this is an argument, however, for a continued American presence of some sort. And the reason I say that is that while a lot of emphasis in Washington is on the training mission, there is a mentoring and advising mission that is at least as important, all right? Once they leave the police academies or once they leave basic training or the officer schools, it's being able to pair with those units, that is, American units pairing with Iraqi units to observe not just their ability to show up on time, do their logistics and fire straight but actually their loyalties and their sectarian inclinations, and that requires being present, all right?

I think one of the benefits of the surge has actually been that more American units have been able to pair and therefore mentor and advise Iraqi units, and that's providing a lot more information to the American military and through them to the Iraqi government about exactly what the loyalties and inclinations of the Iraqis are, and that is a very good thing. Because for a long time, the metric that the U.S. military used to measure the effectiveness of the Iraqi army was precisely bodies -- did they tuck their uniforms in right, did -- you know, the quality of leadership in terms of, you know, how many people showed up, what their marksmanship was like. All right?

It wasn't these types of kind of fine-grained sectarian analysis that I think is creeping into the metrics that are being used now.

I would argue that as the U.S. military transitions out of its current lead in a lot of these areas, it probably needs to increase the number of advisers that it has, even as the overall number of American forces goes down, because there will be a role for Americans to play in this mentoring and advising relationship for a long time to come if you believe that an American presence in Iraq is worthwhile. And if you don't, then you don't.

MR. HUNTER: And that's true on the civilian side, too. And what we're facing is a long process of calibration and transitioning the PRTs that we have on the field, for instance, toward a more traditional kind of development assistance program in the long term, rather than being heavy on the ground right now in uniformed personnel as part of PRTs.

That's why I was saying at the outset we're looking to work ourselves out of a job to a large extent, so that USAID in the first instance can be the ones on the ground doing the advising and mentoring, rather than doing a lot of work for the Iraqis, which has been the case in many instances up to now.

Q Hiroaki Wada of Japan's Mainichi newspaper. I have two questions. One is about the political side of the situation. And this question, I think, especially goes to Mr. Hunter. Based on what you saw and experienced in the southern part of the country, are there any political developments that you think can accelerate political compromise on the national level?

And this is more of a larger question. Do you think that the necessary political compromise can take place before a substantial reduction of U.S. forces? And if we have to wait beyond that, can such a change happen with a lower level of U.S. forces?

And lastly, what about the way so-called private military companies are operating in Iraq, I was wondering how you see the way they operate there? Thanks.

MR. HUNTER: Well, I'll start with the first part of the first one, because that's all I'll trust myself to be able to keep in mind while I'm talking.

The question was whether what might happen at a local or provincial level can reflect back to the nation level and be a factor in effecting the sorts of compromise or reconciliation that might be needed for long-term stability. I'd say, in brief, the answer is yes. In theory, that can happen. But there are a couple of things, at least from where I sat, that I saw, if not working against that, at least mitigating it for the time being.

One thing I referred to earlier is the sort of sidelong glances that everyone is shooting to figure out where everyone else is before taking a firm position. And I think that's likely to continue certainly until there's a date for elections set, at which point people are going to have to be a little bit more upfront about exactly what they stand for, particularly if there are going to open lists in this election, rather than the closed lists that they used to the last time.

But another thing that is probably working against having the provinces exerting a lot of pressure on the center is the mind-set that has developed over the years for provincials governors before -- certainly for provincial legislatures, which -- under, you know, provincial councils, which under Saddam were nothing more than rubber stamps -- what people were used to doing was waiting to hear what Baghdad wanted done and then doing it.

And to move from that sort of approach to the world to all of a sudden saying, "Well, okay, we can throw our weight around and if we play our cards right, group together in the right ways, build the right sorts of coalitions, we can get our outcomes" -- that takes some doing.

Now there's evidence that that's happening, to some degree, at least in Baghdad. And if you followed, for example, what has happened inside the national legislature, the Shi'a parties and in particular the Supreme Council had been very skillful in moving along the things that they wanted to see happen and delaying the things that they weren't so interested in happening, in having happen. The passage of the Provincial Powers Act a year ago this fall happened basically exactly the way the Supreme Council wanted it to, and they got it by with just the votes that they needed to.

On the other hand, the legislation needed for elections hasn't even been brought to the floor yet for a reading. And that too is probably a reflection of the fact that for the Shi'a parties in the south -- and those provinces are, you know, not the -- a numerical majority of Iraq, but a body where the various political forces at play see themselves as positioning themselves to achieve fairly specific outcomes, I think -- for those Shi'a parties, for the Supreme Council in particular, which controls seven out of the nine provinces in the south, it's not especially in their interests to make changes in that before they absolutely have to.

And so they haven't moved forward with bringing up to that legislation. That's one of the elements, as you know, that Ambassador Crocker has spoken to in citing lack of political progress at the center.

And so far, no one at the provincial levels have been rattling the cages up in Baghdad, saying, "We've got to have elections now." They understand what's in their interests and what's not.

So yes, in theory, it can happen that way. For the moment, I think there are a couple of factors that mean that everyone's playing it fairly cautious at the provincial level, and the focus pretty much remains in Baghdad for someone to make that big move that will say reconciliation is the direction we're going. And even when that happens -- and Prime Minister Maliki has been upfront about saying that we do want national reconciliation -- as Colin mentioned, it comes down to local factors. And those local factors on the ground, be they sectarian or tribal or any others, are still very much dictating the approach that people in the political sphere are taking to their decision-making.

That, I think, is foremost in their minds very often, more than saying, "We have to do what's best for the majority of our constituents" or for "the good of the province." And that's a learning process. It's a mentoring process. It's not, you know, add water and talk to me in the morning, and things should be better.

LT.COL. BATEMAN: One of the most frustrating things for me when I went to Iraq and even before I got there was our initial efforts when we went in. And I was frankly ashamed of some of our cultural arrogance.

The idea that we were going to teach the people of Baghdad and Iraq about politics is as crazy as us going to Czechoslovakia and trying to teach them how to make beer or trying to go to Japan and teach them how to fish. I mean, the people of Mesopotamia are humanity's most perfect politicians; I mean, all they needed was the machinery.

The machinery at this point still has some hiccups. They are still wrestling, as Tex pointed out, with the long-term effects of Saddam. We all make budgets. All of your companies have a budget. They stay within their budgets. If they don't, shareholders punish them. Nobody in Iraq used to make a budget under Saddam. It was all based upon how much you, whether it's your ministry or your province, it was all based upon the connection, and if Saddam was angry at you or somebody that was close to Saddam was, you didn't get the money. Nobody had to think about making a budget and analyzing what they'll need for the next year and then justifying the budget and then coming -- they're having to learn that from scratch. Can you imagine being 50 or 60 years old and having to change your whole mindset of how things like that work just like that?

So that's something, I think, that you're seeing, because in my experience -- and not so much in Hillah but in other provinces -- was, one, you know, there's traditional families in the local areas that are reasserting their power, and they're getting, you know, the promising young son who's getting in at the ground level and he's learning how to make budgets, and he's got a mid-level job in the provincial government. He'll go to Baghdad in five years, you know. He'll be elected to the parliament or he'll start working in a ministry. It takes a while to develop that groundwork.

But as far as politics, no, there's nothing we can teach the people of Iraq about how to do politics; it's there, like I said. The machinery still has some problems.

When Thomas Jefferson took over as our president, it was the first peaceful transition between opposing parties in our country and it just went smoothly. Nobody fired a gun. However, decades later some of the flaws in our Constitution as it was originally written resulted in more 600,000 American dead before we got those issues resolved. That was the American Civil War. You can trace it back to problems in our original Constitution.

The Iraqis, you could argue, are having that resolution now. Their original constitution had some gaps in it. They deliberately left some gaps in it because they couldn't pass it, and so they said we'll just take a couple things such as oil down the road. They're wrestling with what -- with major issues of who has power and who doesn't and things like that that in the United States, in our history, we kicked down the road for more than 60 years, about 75 years we kicked it down the road before we finally had a hashing out. It appears that they're doing their hashing out now. Hopefully what comes out is a much more efficient tool for the Iraqi people.

PROF KAHL: There was a second question in there about whether political progress could happen at lower levels of American troops, and I think that's an important question to consider. I think the answer is yes, but -- and the "but" comes in in how fast do you remove those troops and what is the process whereby they're removed because that's all of -- that's the single most important thing. I think there's widespread agreement in the assessments of Iraq -- at least the official ones, the National Intelligence Estimate, the ones provided by General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker -- that a rapid withdrawal -- by that, meaning, getting out as quickly as possible -- would reverse what modest gradual gains have been made.

Now, one could make the claim -- I do not -- but one could make the claim that those gains are going to disappear anyway or that they're unsustainable whenever we leave, so all we're doing is delaying the inevitable. So if one wants to be completely pessimistic, one could say we should leave, and yes, things will get worse, but they'll get worse inevitably because we'll inevitably leave. I don't know about that, but I do think that there is widespread agreement that if we leave too quickly, that what little gains there have been in the past will go away. The Iraqi security forces will become increasingly Balkanized, rather than increasingly professionalized, and the first thing that'll happen when we announce a total and rapid withdrawal is that all those groups will start positioning themselves for the day after and then they do so incredibly violently, so we have to consider that. So the pace of it matters.

But I also think the process whereby we arrive at that pace also needs to be a little bit different from the way it's being talked about now. In Washington, D.C., the entire debate is how we should unilaterally establish the timelines for leaving; that is, that we should decide from 10,000 miles away when it's appropriate for us to leave. To me, the only leverage that the United States has in Iraq is the fact that we have 150,000 forces in Iraq. Those are bargaining chips to be used for substantial negotiations among Iraq's warring parties. I think that there's a lot of room for clever diplomacy here along the lines of something bold and ambitious like the Dayton Accords that ended the Bosnian civil war.

And I think the one opportunity that we're missing is to get all of the warring parties, not just the Iraqi government, but all the warring parties, including some of the front organizations that are emerging from the Sunni insurgent groups which didn't exist a year ago, including some of the wings of Muqtada al-Sadr's movement who were not willing to talk to the Americans six months ago or eight months ago who are willing now, to have a series of formal negotiations that establish both the pace of the withdrawal of American forces and what the mission of the residual forces would be; and that that should be something that we engage in hard bargaining with the Iraqis over, not something that we establish unilaterally here. It seems like we'd get the most out of our withdrawal by doing that.

The other reason to do this is, there's a lot of uncertainty in the political environment now. The one thing that Americans have trouble figuring out is: Do the Iraqis want to live in peace with one another? One of the benefits of having a very open and informal type of negotiations is that it would force the various warring parties in Iraq to reveal their preferences. If through these negotiations the Iraqis basically demonstrate that no matter how much we push them, no matter how much we cajole them, they simply are incapable of coming to reconciliation with one another, that's pretty important information for the Americans to have, because if I want a decision-making perspective and I had the decision-making position, and I had the information that the Iraqis were simply incapable of reaching a political compromise, then keeping American forces there does nothing and we should move to a containment model, not a stability model, all right. But we won't know until we try to find out, and I'm not sure that we're trying to find out very hard.

LT. COL. BATEMAN: I'm not sure how I feel about being called a bargaining chip. (Laughter.)

Q Hiroaki Wada of Japan's Mainichi newspaper. My last question was about how you see the way major companies operating in Iraq, if you have any comment?

MR. HUNTER: Where I was, we had both private contractors and a number of different of different private contractors working with different elements of the mission and the U.S. military. All of the, you know, had a role in helping us do our job. During the time that I was there, they increasingly became, I'd say, interoperable so that by the time I was near the end of my tenure, I was able to go out not just with Blackwater but with the military as well. And that, I think, is a reflection of recognition on both sides of the house, military and the diplomatic or civilian, that we compartmentalize ourselves at our peril, that we do need to be one mission.

And, you know, we have meetings all the time in which both sides will be present, and it made no sense at all to say, you know, this flavor of person can travel only with this kind of vehicle and security detail, and this kind likewise has to stay in his lane. You know, as to -- you know, rules of engagement and so on -- you know, companies do have procedures that they are supposed to follow. I, you know, can't really get into what's going on with Blackwater right now; the embassy and the department have been addressing that. And you saw the announcement yesterday about Ambassador -- or the announcement out of the embassy that there would be a temporary suspension of movement while they look at what will happen vis-à-vis Blackwater. But they were an essential part of our movement in the south. That made the PRT that I was part of something of an exception, because by and large the PRTs are on military bases and go only with the military, but I happened to be at a State Department facility, and so we had Blackwater and other contractors there as well.

Q So that means that you have major difficulty moving around if you can't use their services?

MR. HUNTER: At the outset, that probably would have been the case, when we were a little bit more rigid, I would say, about who had to go with whom. But as things evolved, particularly since Ambassador Crocker's arrival and we moved toward this interoperability idea, I would say no, that we have different options, and that's a good thing to have.

PROF KAHL: I think that partly you have to look at what the root as to why there are so many private security contractors. I think it goes back to basically two factors.

One is there were simply insufficient numbers of American military forces to provide for security of movement for civilians. That was first.

And the second, which was alluded to a minute ago, is the poor -- let's put it mildly -- the poor state of cooperation between the State Department and DOD on a lot of these issues. In the initial wave of PRTs, all right, there was a huge fight about whether they could even stay on military bases and how battalion and brigade commanders -- how responsible they were for the protection of these.

And so instead of paying PRTs as a force multiplier, that is, a critical piece in the stability and counterinsurgency operations, some commanders embraced them and others saw them as a burden. One of the changes that occurred during the surge was to create embedded PRTs which were supposed to be more organic to the overall mission, but that was late in coming.

For a long time, civilians in Iraq required private security contractors, as did reconstruction companies and other things. So you've got a lot of these guys, by the thousands, all right. But the problem is, they fall in this legal gray area. They are not responsible or can't be tried under the law of the host nation -- in this case, Iraq -- and they don't fall within the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

LT. COL. BATEMAN: Actually, anybody that has a contract with the U.S. military falls within the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

PROF KAHL: Can be tried by the Iraqis?

LT. COL. BATEMAN: Yes.

PROF KAHL: How long has that been the case?

MR. HUNTER: Duncan Hunter put it in last summer.

PROF KAHL: Okay. So that's relatively -

MR. HUNTER: Now, Blackwater is contracted with State.

PROF KAHL: Okay. That's an important qualification. So at least when I was there last summer, they do have rules of engagement that are probably not dissimilar from the rules of engagement that the U.S. military has, although they have the reputation of not following them quite as often. And there's also a lot of self-reporting; that is, there's not a lot of independent monitoring of their behavior. And while I don't know the in-depth details of the most recent incident, more than what's been read in the paper, it's clear there's kind of a he-said/he-said issue going on, and who fired first and what didn't -- and there's not a lot of independent confirmation for what happened.

So really, I only say this in the sense that this isn't going away, all right? Private security contractors are here to stay, they're going to fill the void of professional military forces in all sorts of places around the world, and this kind of legal gray zone that they fall into has to be worked out beyond Iraq or it's going to continue to create difficulties. Like, it's a big deal that our diplomats can't travel outside of the Green Zone for a -- (inaudible word) -- period of time, because being holed up in the Green Zone is part of the problem.

Q Hiroaki Wada of Japan's Mainichi newspaper. Speaking of how to treat those guys legally, is there some sort of bilateral agreement like kind of a status-of-forces agreement like United States has with other countries, or do you think there is a need for an international framework for that kind of thing?

MODERATOR: This will have to be the last question. I just wanted to get that on record. But we can -- we can have additional questions afterwards informally. Please, go ahead and answer.

LT. COL. BATEMAN: There is no status-of-forces agreement right now. As you probably read in The Washington Post this morning, what you're dealing with is a leftover from the CPA. The CPA ordered -- I don't remember if it's 17 or 15, but this is one of those gaps that I was talking about in their constitution. The constitution included a clause that said anything -- any CPA order which this constitution and by act of parliament does not specifically override or speak over, then the CPA order stays in effect. And so they never dealt with it themselves in their legislation yet.

I am not sure if I agree with you that private military contractors are here to last, for good. Now, that's not to say I disagree that contractors won't be -- we've had contractors on the battlefield since Alexander went across -- well, Mesopotamia too, on his way to India. You know, in the American Civil War we had -- we called them drovers and, you know, we had all sorts of different names for the people that would be running the chuck wagon, effectively.

In Vietnam, you know, we had some of the same companies, as a matter of fact -- DynCorp and Kellogg, Brown and Root at the time -- who would do things like build the dining hall for you or, you know, run the shipping containers, you know, run the port where your gear is coming in.

They weren't armed back then, you know, except for maybe potentially self-defense.

The rise of the private -- and I'll call them PMCs, private military companies. I think there will probably be a niche for -- because these guys come in all sorts of different flavors. There's a company called MPRI, Military Professional Resources Incorporated, and they're filled with former Army and Marine Corps officers mostly. And the kind of thing they do is, they'll be hired by a country to help them run their war college, you know, to help them with their officer education system and help them develop doctrine and manuals to become a professional force.

Companies like Blackwater however harken back -- you know, if they're going to have a lineage, it's the condottieri of Italy in the 15th, 16th century. I mean, there's different names for them. But I don't -- I think there's going to be, not just because of Iraq and not just because of Afghanistan, but I think there's going to be some backlash. That doesn't mean that there's not going to be a need for them. But I do think that there's going to be a backlash that's bigger than just this country.

Q About these private military companies, can you give me a number?

LT. COL. BATEMAN: Number of companies that exist?

Q No, the number of people involved in this --

LT. COL. BATEMAN: No, the secretary of Defense can't give you that number.

Q I've seen the report saying 129,000.

LT. COL. BATEMAN: Oh, what you're seeing is -- remember, I told you -- two different kinds. That's the overall number of contractors, and I've seen everything from 160,000 to 129,000.

Q That includes the cooks and janitorial folks -

LT. COL. BATEMAN: Yeah, that includes probably 50,000 - 60,000 Iraqis who are doing building construction. You know, almost all the construction work that's being done in Iraq, with the exception of the U.S. Embassy, is being done by Iraqi companies, which are subcontracting under a Kuwaiti company, which is subcontracting under, , a British company.

Anybody ever build a house or have a house built for them? You add all sorts of layers of contractors. The same thing's happening in Iraq. And at the bottom levels, they're mostly Iraqi employees, and a lot of Filipinos and a lot of Indians doing the truck-driving, the long-haul truck driving. So the number of armed guys is much lower, and the number of armed Westerners is very small comparatively.