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CNN Live At Daybreak

Talk About Possible U.S. Attack on Iraq Raises Unease With Turkey's Prime Minister

Aired August 01, 2002 - 06:36   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: All of the talk and speculation about a possible U.S. attack on Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein has raised great unease with Turkey's prime minister.

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: CNN's Jane Arraf, who has served considerable time in Baghdad, is visiting Atlanta. She has most recently been covering the changing political landscape in Turkey, and she joins us this morning.

COSTELLO: Yes, before we get to Turkey, though, I want to talk a little bit about Iraq, because you spent so much time there. We know how Saddam Hussein is feeling about a possible U.S. attack, but what about the people of Iraq?

JANE ARRAF, CNN ISTANBUL BUREAU CHIEF: That's always been one of the really tricky things in reporting from a place like Iraq. You're not particularly free to actually go out and stick microphones in people's faces and say, tell me what you really think, which you can in so many other countries. I mean, they'll tell you what you think, but you sort of have to read behind the lines, and behind the lines -- I mean, they are naturally terrified. They are facing a major war, and this isn't the first time.

There is a real sense there as well of being completely fed up with the government, which they certainly won't say and which the government won't admit. But that certainly is an underlying current. But most of all, I mean, it's a whole country of people who are basically trapped between their government and American foreign policy and international politics, and there's not very much they can do about that.

COOPER: How aware are people there of what is going on? I mean, how much information flow is there?

ARRAF: They are surprisingly aware and surprisingly political. You would think in a country that's so cut off and so isolated -- where you can't get satellite television, the Internet is very highly- regulated, computer modems are banned, for instance -- you would think that they wouldn't know what's going on, but they do. You still get radio. They still get radio and TV signals from surrounding countries.

And they are very attuned to what's going on outside in the form of sort of an informal network of news development, so they do know what's going on.

And the other thing is, they don't really believe their own newspapers, I mean, which is probably a wise thing in many countries, but certainly in Iraq.

COSTELLO: Do they know things like Saddam Hussein may be developing nuclear weapons or biological weapons?

ARRAF: They certainly know the reports, and certainly there will be people in Iraq, since it has been such a huge weapons development program that in the past would have been working on these things and would have great knowledge of it. Now, they wouldn't necessarily know what's going on now.

And for ordinary people, I think it actually really doesn't matter that much. They would say, as they say to us, a lot of countries have nuclear weapons. Israel, for instance, has nuclear weapons, and no one makes a fuss about that.

So for them, that's not really the issue. The issue is that there is a government, the American government, that's saying they want to come in and kill their president. And no matter how they feel about their president and no matter whether they would be overjoyed at this prospect, it's still a very scary thing looking at that.

COOPER: You mentioned that there is frustration among a lot of people with the government. That's certainly something that you don't really get on TV when people do interviews. I mean, often, like in a country like Iran when I was there, people behind the camera will kind of say things to you, and there is a sense of they know -- it's kind of a nudge and a wink. They kind of know what the reality of the situation is. Do you get that sense from people off-camera in Iraq?

ARRAF: Off-camera you do, but you really have to get to know people, and they have to get to trust you. It is very serious -- a very serious offense for people to say anything even vaguely subversive or complain about the government.

It's loosened up quite a lot in the past 10 years. When I first started reporting in Iraq just after the Gulf War, there was a brief window where the war was over, they thought maybe there was a chance that the president would be toppled. And they were talking, but then that clamped down very quickly like an iron curtain, and they were very afraid.

Now, they are a little less afraid, because you can't really keep that level of control on a whole country like that, so they talk a little bit more, but still in whispers and still only to people they really trust.

COSTELLO: How likely is it that the United States will get support from anywhere, if it does decide to attack Iraq?

ARRAF: That is a really tricky question, and that's the key thing that they are trying to work out here. They will certainly get support, although not spoken support, from some of the leaders. There are a lot of the Arab leaders in particular who don't feel that Saddam Hussein is good for the region, and feel that he is still a threat.

The problem is there's a really big gap between what Arab leaders think and leaders in other countries and what people on the street think. And what people on the street think in the Arab world generally is that the United States has no business going into an Arab-Muslim country and just saying, we don't like this leader, we are going to get rid of him, for whatever reason. So that's going to be a really big problem.

COOPER: You know, on Capitol Hill, a lot of people are asking these days who comes after Saddam? I mean, if the U.S. is successful in ousting him, who is next in line?

ARRAF: Yes.

COOPER: You have spent a lot of time of there. Who is?

ARRAF: That's the thing. There is nobody who has come forward to be even considered the remotest candidate as being next in line. We often interview people with the Iraqi opposition, but there are people who haven't been to Iraq in some decades, the people have no power base. Or they are former officials of Saddam Hussein, who, because of the fact that they are intimately associated with that regime, aren't really credible candidates either. So that's a tricky thing.

Unless the U.S. is talking about installing a government that it is going to back up, there is no Arab state...

COSTELLO: Oh, no, the United States would never do that.

ARRAF: Never, and we know that they would never do that.

COSTELLO: All right, Jane Arraf, thank you very much.

ARRAF: Thank you so much.

COSTELLO: And have a nice flight home.

ARRAF: Thanks.

COSTELLO: To Turkey, right?

ARRAF: To Turkey.

COSTELLO: Oh, my!

ARRAF: And then to Baghdad.

COSTELLO: OK. Thank you very much.

ARRAF: Thank you.

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