Mr. Armitage was undersecretary of state 2001-2005. He served as assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration. The following interview was conducted by Anne Joyce, editor of Middle East Policy, on July 21, 2005.
Q: Why did we go to war in Iraq?Did insiders actually think Saddam Hussein had WMD?
MR. ARMITAGE: Everybody believed that there were WMD. That is what the intelligence folks were telling us. But I think the real reason is that the president, after 9/ 11 – after we were attacked and surprised – made the decision that, as the only nationally elected leader, he was not going to wait until the storm gathered. And he felt that the successive U.N. Security Council resolutions had been disregarded by Saddam Hussein. At least this president wasn’t going to wait for someone to strike us.
Q: Were there strategic calculations? The Cold War was over. Was there the idea that we had the chance to shake up the Middle East, create a new political dynamic? Michael Ledeen has been quoted as talking about it as a war to remake the world.
MR. ARMITAGE: No. There were some who thought in those terms, and some people thought it would pressure Iran and things of that nature. But at the heart of it, what the president was focused on was just as I suggested: He wasn’t going to let the storm gather. He felt, as we all did, that Saddam Hussein, with weapons of mass destruction, was a real problem.
Now, there are subtexts to all of that, and in the wake of the war I can tick them off for you: Saddam Hussein will never again use weapons on his own people. He will never again threaten and invade his neighbors. He will never again use murder and torture as tools with which to control his enemies – or perceived enemies. There were many good reasons for the removal of Saddam Hussein, beyond WMD.
Q: What was the importance of oil as a strategic commodity? I don’t mean just as a benefit to oil companies, but China apparently wanted to develop Iraq’s oil if it could after sanctions were lifted. Was this in the strategic thinking of the Bush administration?
MR. ARMITAGE: To the extent we thought about it a lot, it was to seize the oil fields initially in the battle so that Saddam Hussein could not destroy them. We realized that the future Iraq would need the revenues from the oil rigs. So that was the calculation.
Q: So there wasn’t a desire to deprive China of an opportunity?
MR. ARMITAGE: Not at all. Never imagined.
Q: People compare the situation in Iraq with Vietnam. How do you see the similarities? Were there major surprises in Iraq?
MR. ARMITAGE: Just for the record, it was more than the State Department. The joint chiefs of staff participated, the CIA participated, civilians from the Office of the Secretary of Defense participated. It was a pretty good roadmap. But those who invaded and occupied Iraq chose not to use it. A lot of the diaspora Iraqis participated in it as well.
Q: Do you think the Baathist regime in Iraq had a plan to melt away and come back?
MR. ARMITAGE: I am not sure if they had a plan or not. The intelligence leading up to the invasion of Iraq indicated they would fight, but I have seen news broadcasts and discussions with certain insurgent leaders where they claimed they had practiced for just such a tactic. I think it is relatively unlikely that they did have this plan, but I can’t dismiss out of hand the statements of these insurgent leaders.
Q: How do you see the experience in Iraq as affecting our military in the long run?
MR. ARMITAGE: I’m very worried about it. I am very worried that it will run people too hard and put them away too wet [like cavalry horses--ed.]. I’m worried about their family situations. We have seen anecdotal evidence about divorces going up and things of this nature because of the constant deployments. There is a real wear and tear on equipment, particularly in that environment. So there is a personal cost to families, there is a tremendous actual cost in terms of dollars because of the wear and tear on the equipment, and finally there is the just absolutely terrible loss of life, which continues, one or two soldiers today or the day after tomorrow – very tragic.
Q: The maimings from injuries are almost as devastating.
MR. ARMITAGE: Yes, when you visit our soldiers in the hospital, which I have, it is remarkable that they have such high morale. They realize they were doing something that the nation in general supports, the Congress of the United States supports. They felt it was important, and they felt their participation on a personal basis was important, even those with some rather traumatic injuries.
Q: How hard is it to stand up an army in a third-world country?
MR. ARMITAGE: The hardest part about standing up an army is not to teach people to shoot or to march. They can do that. The hardest thing is to develop a good, solid NCO, non-commissioned-officer corps, which is the backbone of our military. The second-hardest thing, contemporaneously with developing an army, is to develop the logistics tail that goes with it so you can supply yourself when you are on the move. Those are not things you do in six months, eight months or a year.
Q: We seem shocked that the Iraqis would see us as occupiers rather than liberators, in spite of the evidence of history, even from the Civil War. Do you think we were naïve or that there wasn’t much thinking put into it?
MR. ARMITAGE: I think that not sufficient thought was given to that. You remember, some were speculating that flowers would be thrown in the path of the invaders. There were some cautious voices. The Future of Iraq Project, to which you referred, makes it clear that there is a fine line between liberating and occupying.
Q: The security of Israel is important to American politicians and Americans generally, and presidents of the United States since 1967 have tried peace interventions. President Bush has not pushed Israel very much. You have been frank in talking of the United States as something other than an honest broker. Do you think the United States has an obligation to do more?
MR. ARMITAGE: Whenever I have been asked by our friends, particularly in the Middle East, about being honest brokers, I stop and say, look, you can’t ask the United States to be an honest broker. At the end of the day, every single American president, Republican or Democrat, and every single administration will come down on the side of Israel. But we can be fair, and I think we were fair. The president in June of ’02 put out his vision for two states living side by side in peace and security. That is a pretty good development. Dr. Rice was just out there. She will be out again trying to move along the Gaza withdrawal in working with our Egyptian friends. So we can be fair in this, and we are. We’re the biggest donor to the Palestinians.
So, I wouldn’t use the term “honest broker” because we are always going to come down on the side of the Israel. We can be fair in this and I think we have to.
Q: What should our approach to Syria be? Bashar al-Asad is new on the job perhaps. Should we engage him or try to isolate him?
MR. ARMITAGE: At some point in time, you are no longer new on the job, and President Asad has been there for a couple of years now. I used to say we ought to give him time to develop. I think he has had enough time. I think that the Syrian view is that we are all stick and no carrot. And in truth, although Syria did not help us with Hamas or Hezbollah, they certainly helped us originally with al-Qaeda, helped us enormously. They were slow off the mark, I believe, to realize what was happening in Iraq – that they are a vanishing breed, the last Baath party. But I think if we’re going to engage them meaningfully, we have to give President Asad some degree of – I wouldn’t say optimism – some degree of faith that we can and do want to engage, and we prefer to engage him positively. But right now, I think, from their point of view all they see is us engaging negatively.
Q: Do you think terrorism is in part a response to U.S. policies?
MR. ARMITAGE: No, but I think we are far from understanding all of it. Initially Osama bin Laden wasn’t about us, as you know, he was about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And what we’re seeing, I think, is fundamentally a big struggle within Islam itself. It is not, as Sam Huntington so famously put it, so much a clash of civilizations as it is a clash within Islam. The battle is for a rather radical brand of Islam or an enlightened Islam with moderation, respect for other people’s views. That is what is going on, and I don’t think the roots are in the United States. Certainly, initially after 9/11 people were talking about the roots of this being poverty, and we’re having a debate in London now about the root cause of terrorism.I think there are many, but I think fundamentally what we’re seeing here is a battle within Islam.
Q: It is important to try to get the center in the Muslim world to not support terrorism. Of course we are not going to persuade Osama bin Laden or other hard cases to change, but because of many of the things we’ve done, there seems to be some support for terrorism rather than support for our alternative.
MR. ARMITAGE: First of all, it has got to be an Islamic alternative. Second, I think that there are other people pointing to our support for Israel, et cetera, as one of the root causes. I don’t buy it at all. I was in Saudi Arabia for all three of the bombings – I just happened to be there – and I remember being exposed to some booby-trapped Qurans that had been captured by the security forces of the Saudis. The thought occurred to me that this is not about Western civilization at all. This is a battle within Islam, and those booby-trapped Qurans were meant to kill Muslims, not Americans.
Q: Of course, they see their government as an instrument of the United States in a sense – that we keep them in power.
MR. ARMITAGE: I think we’re also seen by those same governments as being a threat to them because we push human rights and democracy. Those same people who sometimes criticize us for keeping those governments in power count on us to get their opposition leaders out of prison, et cetera, and we, as often as not, do successfully. But you started to talk about the center, the very center of Islam, to get them on our side, or I would prefer to say on the side of moderation. There are some rather encouraging signs. If you look at Islam in Indonesia and Malaysia, they have opted through the ballot box for more enlightened moderation, while President Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan is trying to bring about enlightened moderation, embracing all the great tenets of a great faith, Islam. And we ought to put wind in their sails as much as possible, as much as is comfortable to them to continue that drift towards moderation.
Q: There is a sense in which radicalization is moving rather fast. The situation in Iraq seems to be a breeding ground for it.
MR. ARMITAGE: I think it’s a breeding ground for training. We have seen recent intelligence and military reports that clearly indicate that insurgents are getting the training there that they used to get on the Afghanistan battlefield during the Soviet war. Whether it is a breeding ground itself, Iraq is not a state in the traditional sense.
It was held together by the brutality of a regime, almost falsely. So there was plenty already that existed in Iraq to be a breeding ground for discontent and trouble. But I would endorse the idea that it has become a training ground where people sharpen radical skills.
Q: Do you think it is going to be possible to hold Iraq together as a nation?
MR. ARMITAGE: The truthful answer is, I don’t know. We certainly are going to try. The Shia and Sunni and Kurdish factions in a way have held together in the face of unremitting violence and avoided a religious war thus far. That is the good news. The bad news is that, as the violence continues, there is always the chance of a spark that could unleash sectarian violence.
Q: Do you think it’s still early days in Iraq? Vietnam was a long, 30-year struggle.
MR. ARMITAGE: I think it is early days in Iraq. When you think of the enormity of putting together a government and putting in place ministries that are not full of corrupt cronies but actually hardworking bureaucrats who serve the nation, this is not something that happens in a year or two. Now, there are stepping stones along the way that can either depress you or impress you – such as elections, such as standing up a constitution – and each one of these things helps. But at the end of the day, we have been perfecting our democracy for 230-odd years, and we still have plenty of complaints about it.
Q: It looks as though the Islamists in Iraq are going to be putting a great deal of the sharia into the constitution. Is this a problem.
MR. ARMITAGE: Well, it is a problem, because to do so also brings with it a lessening of the important place that we preserved in the interim government, – the Iraqi Governing Council – for women and women’s rights. So if the Sharia were the greatest source of the law, it could also bring a lessening in women’s rights, which I think would be bad for Iraq as a general matter. Women are so educated and so capable in Iraq that they would be really shortchanging themselves.
Q: Do you think we should get out of Iraq soon? Is it possible or moral to make a strategic retreat over the horizon? Should we stay until we put the place back together?
MR. ARMITAGE: We need to stay until we have Iraqis who can make the decision about a hopeful future. So I would not set a timetable.
Q: Can we count on our military superiority and military bases there to enable us to really shape the future?
MR. ARMITAGE: I don’t think a grand bargain is a good idea. First of all, it is perfectly reasonable for Iraq to have a positive relationship with Iran. Iran is a strategic matter for Iraq, and so I found the visit to Iran recently by Prime Minister Jaafari to be reasonable from their point of view. For ourselves, we have a rather interesting policy toward Iran. In Afghanistan we cooperate implicitly. We have had discussions on specific matters but also on other issues that are important to us globally, such as energy. We are content to let the EU3 ministers continue their discussions on nuclear issues and hopefully ameliorate that situation. But sooner or later we are going to have sit down and talk to the Iranians. It is not as if the Iranians are all – to a man, woman and child – dying to have a great, robust relationship with the United States. Our personal belief is they just want a normal relationship.
Q: Looking back at the Iraq experience, what are the major lessons learned?
MR. ARMITAGE: A major lesson learned is that we should have gone back to the Powell Doctrine: overwhelming force. That is not to say that we need to put more forces in now. That is quite different. We needed more forces at the beginning so as not to have the looting and things of that nature. Second, I think we have to be very careful in dealing with a diaspora, because very often they are not as welcome as we might have thought. Yet in this regard we could have been informed by history.
Japan and Germany both had overwhelming, towering political figures who opted for democracy. In the case of Germany it was Konrad Adenauer, who had suffered under Nazi Germany. In Japan, the unlikely figure of the emperor was the one who had also suffered during the war, as the people of Japan did. He raised democracy; it had credibility in the country that was very important.
Q: In your capacity as deputy secretary of state, what was your greatest success?
MR. ARMITAGE: For me the greatest success was the enjoyment that Secretary Powell and I had in working with the men and women of the Department of State, the diplomats. They served sometimes in lovely spots like London or Rome, Berlin, but also in Falujah and Kandahar, right alongside our soldiers. The only difference is they don’t carry weapons, but they serve with the same distinction. That was the greatest success. There were a couple of good developments along the way. Secretary Powell and I did a fair job on the EP-3 situation with China. There is no question that in the summer of ’02, as Pakistan and India were armed to the teeth and eyeing each other over Kashmir, we were able, in very large measure, to stop that and start them unwinding rather than winding up.
Those are some good things. Along the way there were ABM treaties, there were successful U.N. Security Council resolutions. There were a lot of things I think that could be considered successful. But I think Secretary Powell would be willing to say that we consider the big success working alongside the men and women of the services.
Q: What was the greatest disappointment?
MR. ARMITAGE: Well, it’s obviously Iraq – that it didn’t turn out better, that we hadn’t planned better, and that we hadn’t done a better job of executing it. But in no way am I implying that our soldiers didn’t do a fantastic job. I think they did.
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