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Length: 8:36
JOHN ROBERTS: From
Baghdad to Washington, to Tehran, we are covering all
the angles. Michael Ware on the surge: success or
spin? General Spider Marks and how insurgents defeat
checkpoints, and Aneesh Raman on a defiant Iran, THIS
WEEK AT WAR.
As U.S. troops and Iraqi security forces step up
their crackdown on sectarian violence fresh signals
that insurgents aren't backing down. It was a message
that United Nations' Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon
received firsthand during a visit to Iraq.
CNN's Michael Ware joins us from Baghdad, Senior
Pentagon Correspondent Jamie McIntyre at his post
there, and here in the studio, Colonel Patrick Lang,
U.S. Army Retired, former intelligence analyst for
the Defense Intelligence Agency.
On Tuesday, Major General Michael Barbero, of the
Joint Chiefs, outlined the deadly Trojan horse
tactics that insurgents supposedly used this week.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MAJ. GEN. MICHAEL BARBERO, JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF,
OPERATIONS: We saw a vehicle with two children in the
backseat. Come up to one of out checkpoints, get
stopped by our folks, children in the backseat lowers
suspicion. We let it move through. They park the
vehicle. The adults run out, and detonate it with the
children in the back.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROBERTS: Michael Ware, if that's true it would
represent to me an incredible new level of barbarism.
Is this another tactic that these insurgents are
using to try to defeat these checkpoints, or do we
know if it's true at all?
MICHAEL WARE, CNN BAGHDAD CORRESPONDENT: Well, yeah,
it is far too early to tell, John.
It is hard to say if it in fact happened. Certainly
none of the American military commanders here on the
ground are adding to the general's remarks which
seems to suggest quite rightly that there's probably
doubt surrounding this incident.
Don't forget it's being reported from a part of the
city that is a Mahdi Army stronghold. This is a place
where the conspiracies run rife. Indeed the
predominant conspiracy is that America sends the car
bombs anyway just to attack Muqtada, just as an
excuse to destabilize him. So, anything that's
emerging from that part of the city and being
recycled by the military on vague, you know,
uncorroborated witness accounts, is hard to make
assessments of.
But kids are in the war. All the sides in this war
are killing children, whether dropping bombs on their
houses or blowing them up in the marketplaces, or in
fire fights. Kids are being used to lay bombs, as
reconnaissance. I mean, this is a terrible, terrible
place to be growing up.
ROBERTS: Yeah, the U.S. military command has been
claiming some success, particularly in Baghdad, with
a reduction in the number of sectarian attacks. But
there's still plenty of violence to go around. Let's
take a quick listen, Michael, to how you reported on
that on Monday.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
WARE (voice over): American and Iraqi officials
acknowledge as many as 20,000 Sunni insurgents alone
are still out there. Despite some successes,
coalition forces are attacked around 100 times a day,
almost twice as often as two years ago.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROBERTS: Pat Lang, how does Michael's report,
including the assassination attempt against the
deputy prime minister on Friday, square with these
claims by the U.S. military that things are beginning
to look up? Is the plan really working?
COL. PAT LANG, U.S. ARMY (RET.): Well,
understandably, we are trying to emphasize all the
positive elements in the situation. And what they
have been counting, that enables them to say that
violence has gone down, is they have not picked up as
many shot and drilled bodies of civilians in the
streets lately. So the argument is, is that this is
the indicator that in fact the level of sectarian
violence is going down.
But everything else is still going great guns all
over the place. There are all these attacks, you
mentioned. There are attacks all around Baghdad.
There are attacks in the city, suicide bombers. All
kinds of active attacks are ongoing, so I don't think
you can tell as yet. There's no real indicator.
ROBERTS: So, Jamie McIntyre, is there some kind of a
flaw in the security plan that they manage to affect
one type of violence but the other types flourish?
JAMIE MCINTYRE, CNN SR. PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Well,
one thing that's clear is that -- while we're
debating whether it's working, the insurgents are
trying to show very clearly that it's not working.
But I was struck by the comments this week by Stuart
Bowen, he's the special investigator for Iraq
reconstruction, he's an auditor, very critical, very
skeptical, been to Iraq 15 times; has come back
pretty pessimistic every time. He came back from his
last trip saying that for the first time in the last
20 months he actually thought maybe things were going
better.
And he based that on, not so much the level of
violence, which he concedes is pretty high, but on
the level of cooperation, and the coordination with
the Iraqi forces. He really got a sense, for the
first time, not like in "Together Forward", which
didn't really succeed, that it really was starting to
pull together. But it's way too soon to see if it's
going to -- to be able to say if it's going to work.
ROBERTS: But, Jamie, almost every time you get a
report of things that are going well, you get some
reality on the ground that tells you, well, maybe
they're not going so well. Let's take a look at how
you reported on one particular incident, earlier this
week, on Thursday when the U.N. Secretary-General
visited Baghdad.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MCINTYRE (voice over): In Baghdad, a jarring reminder
that Iraq remains awash in weapons after four years
of war. An insurgent rocket caused no injuries, but
prompted the new U.N. Secretary-General to duck for
cover during a press conference in the supposedly
secure green zone.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROBERTS: Michael, as people in your homeland might
say, a fine how-do-you-do. It came right as Maliki
was claiming that it was -- you know, that Iraq was
really on the road to progress here, in terms of
cutting the violence down.
WARE: Yeah, absolutely, John. I mean, that kind of
event is not such an event of importance militarily.
I mean, as Jamie rightly pointed out, no one was
hurt. I mean, bombs fall on the Green Zone all the
time. The point was that it was done at that moment.
And you watch that press conference. It's a moment of
extraordinary theater in this war. You saw the
secretary-general flinch and duck for cover, but you
saw the Iraqi prime minister -- no matter what he was
feeling inside -- stand resolute. Even as his
bodyguards tried to drag him away, he barked at them
to leave him alone. Why? Because if he was seen by
his people to have flinched at that moment, they
would have lost all confidence in him. So his
government was all but in his hands at that precise
moment, John.
ROBERTS: Pat Lang, just about the same time that
mortar attack happened, the government accountability
office was releasing reports saying the reason why
Iraq is so awash in mortars, and rockets, and
artillery shells for making these car bombs, is
because of poor planning on the part of the United
States.
Here we are four years out, four years from the time
when those ammo dumps weren't secured and they still
can't get a handle on it. What does that say?
LANG: Well, I think the GAO report is exactly
correct. In fact, the operation was planned largely
here in Washington, at the office of the Secretary of
Defense level, and such a way that there were too few
forces, nobody paid any attention to tasks like
policing up this vast amount of hardware around the
country. And General McKiernan, the ground force
commander of the engagement was really given the task
to do that kind of thing and they just ignored it.
They just ignored it. They thought everything would
be peaches and cream afterward and there'd be a
friendly government, you would not have to worry
about it. It turned out they were absolutely wrong.
ROBERTS: But they still can't do it and there are
still a number depots and ammo dumps that they
haven't gone around to check to see if they're
secure, despite the fact that people are asking them
to do it now.
LANG: Yeah, but if you look at the number of troops
available on the ground, they had a number of
shooters that people in brigade combat teams and
Marine regiments, things like that. And soft forces,
things like this. There still is not a very large
number of troops given the tasks they have to do. I
doubt if they really have the manpower to do that.
ROBERTS: Jamie McIntyre, you mentioned Stuart Bowen,
the special inspector general for Iraq
reconstruction, saying something positive about Iraq.
At the same time as he did that, though, he was
suggesting that there are still big problems
particularly with the Iraqi government. Take a listen
to this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
STUART BOWEN, INSPECTOR GEN., IRAQ RECONSTRUCTION:
Corruption in -- within the Iraqi government is a
serious problem inhibiting all progress in Iraq. We
have called it the second insurgency in our report.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROBERTS: So, Jamie, if corruption is still such a
problem in the Iraqi government, how is this security
plan ever going to work?
MCINTYRE: Well, it's a very good question. Because,
of course, it entirely hinges on the Iraqi
government. And this report by Stuart Bowen is the
latest in a series of very sharply critical reports
about how money was spent, how money was spent
without anybody knowing what happened to it, how a
lot of it was sort of siphoned off.
And while he saw a sort of a silver lining and how
things are going at the moment, his reports point to
really serious potential problems in trying to make
this thing work over the long haul. And, of course,
the key is what happens as soon as the Americans
believe that they have the opportunity to start
withdrawing and drawing down the troops? That still
remains a big question.
ROBERTS: A real mixed bag here. Perhaps, as Pat was
saying, too early to tell how this is going. Michael
Ware, Jamie McIntyre, Pat Lang, good to finally have
you on the show, my friend. Appreciate it.