Question 29: Mr. Ike Skelton (D-MO):
Summary: You told us that you did not agree with General Kean that we were seduced by Iraqi exiles, but in your testimony you said: "There is reason to believe that we were sucked into an ill-conceived initial attack aimed at Saddam himself by double-agents planted by the regime".
What is the difference between General Kean's comment and this comment?
(question summary by incap)
Play Audio
Response from Richard Perle (not transcribed but available on audio)
Question 30: Mr. Ike Skelton (D-MO):
Summary: If each of you had full power to have made decisions immediately after initial conflict in Iraq ended, what you have done differently for a better outcome?
(question summary by incap)
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Response from Richard Perle (not transcribed but available on audio)
Response from General Wesley Clark
Transcript by Melange
Well, Congressman, your question is assuming you couldn’t have changed anything before the fall of Baghdad.
Obviously I would have slowed the pace of action until we had our planning and preparation caught up, run through and exhausted the diplomatic efforts and demanded a number of things from Saddam Hussein and his regime as we went through that. So, my idea would have been to infiltrate intelligence operatives and human rights monitors and democracy workers and a whole lot of people into Iraq during this process of inspections were under way. And, to have tried to disassemble the Iraqi government in pieces during that period - could have been a prolonged period unless we hit a trigger point at which we had to strike and during that period we would have done some of the things that Richard’s suggesting – building up a government in exile, training Iraqi forces in case we did have to fight and so forth.
Set aside all that, it’s the 9th of April or so of 2003…the first thing we needed was a unified authority on the ground in Iraq representing the United States of America and the coalition. We didn’t have that. We had a US military commander who was commanding two deputies - a military deputy and then Jay Garner who was reporting through the military commander to the Secretary of Defense and that doesn’t work.
We should have had a top-level leader. You need a Richard Holbrooke kind of a guy. Put him on the ground in Iraq, tell the military commander ‘support him, he’s setting up the directions for the government, do what you have to do to maintain security – you get in there and work with the Iraqis and put that together’. We didn’t have that in place until we put John Negroponte on the ground last summer of 2004. So, we wasted an awful long time without an effective, unified authority on the ground in Iraq.
Secondly, we didn’t have enough troops. We should have immediately brought forward more troops, more rapidly. We should have called on the United Nations and Arab governments to join us in that. We probably needed, during the initial period, 250-300,000 troops - just for presence purposes to be there on the ground, to walk through the area, to say ‘we’re here, we’re not going to hurt you, you know, go about your business.’
In places like Falluja, they didn’t see us for six weeks until someone drove through. So, this was a mistake. We needed more forces there.
Third we should have pushed interpreters forward – even when we had forces there, we didn’t have the ability to communicate with the Iraqi people. I don’t know why we didn’t go out to the Arab American community and bring in tens of thousands of native Arabic speakers – people from Iraq and Yemen and everywhere in the region who can communicate with people on the ground in Iraq. And say ‘come in, you know, here’s a six-week program of getting you trained, we’re going to give you extra pay, come over here and do your duty for both your old country and your new country and help us.’ We didn’t do that.
I think we should have ordered the Iraqi military and the Iraqi ministries to stay on duty. We should have had the Iraqi military back in their barracks. We should have had inspections. We should have lined them up; we should have looked them in the eye. We should have then started a debriefing program to find out who was what, what they did and so forth and move through this in a logical way to take them apart.
I hope these are the kinds of lessons…and then, one more thing if I can say that, after we got into this, we should have had a transition program that would have turned over US political authority as rapidly as possible to the Iraqis themselves and, absent that, to a United Nations mandate that would have put someone in, other than the Americans, leadingthe elections.
Now, obviously you’re leading the witnesses here, sir, because you want us to tell you these things. I hope that they will be applied to the next government that falls in the next region in the Middle East. I hope we’ll have the planning ready, the forces ready, the diplomacy ready, the translators ready – all that can be done.
It’s as easy to do that as it is…it’s as easy to get it started as it is to start with the Syrian Accountability Act. We should be preparing the way if we have to use it, not be caught flat-footed.
Question 31: Mr. Ike Skelton (D-MO):
Summary: What would be the one thing you would recommend to this administration to increase the chances of achieving success in Iraq?
(question summary by incap)
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Response from General Wesley Clark
Transcript by Melange
I’ll hear Richard’s answer because I’ve got several different things…but basically…well, let me say this before I surrender my time so quickly.
Rep. Skelton comments: That can be a very dangerous thing around here.
Exactly. I think the action is actually…I think things are moving in the right direction from everything I can see. I think it’s a matter of…I think the principal problem for us is sustaining our ability to remain engaged. I think we are trying to work with the Iraqi people. I think we are trying to train the Iraqi security forces. I think the military is trying to get the advisory position in place.
I think that we’ve got…if there’s only one thing else that we could do is to take away the regional resistence. We need a little diplomatic action in the region to bring in some other Arab states to reinforce us. I was over there, of course, leaders told me they’d be happy to send troops but we haven’t asked. I don’t know if that’s true or not but that’s what I heard. And, um, and I do go back to the idea of a regional council in which not only Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and Turkey and Jordan are present, but also Iran and Syria. And in which we hold those nations accountable to some extent to help us in Iraq rather than keeping them on the outside of the circle and making them the next targets.
So, that…those are the approaches I would take in Iraq and then we’ve got to sustain our military, add to the force so we can do our job there.
Response from Richard Perle (not transcribed but available on audio
