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American Morning

Iraq Violence

Aired October 29, 2003 - 09:17   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.


MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: The steady increase in attacks in Iraq has caught the attention of many people in the defense community, including our next guest, retired Army Colonel Patrick Lang, a former defense intelligence analyst. He joins us from Washington.
Good to see you again, Colonel Lang.

COL. PATRICK LANG, (RET.) FMR. DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE ANALYST: Good to see you.

O'BRIEN: It seems evident that these attacks are at least at some level orchestrated and organized. Would you agree?

LANG: Yes, I think what has emerged here is that some fairly small proportion of the Sunni Arab population in Iraq is at least passively supporting guerrillas attacking our forces in the field, and then there are a smaller number of people who are actively supporting them and the number of fighters is probably quite small, a thousand or so. But that's a lot if you have to deal with these guys in what are increasingly sophisticated, combined arms attacks, involving rockets, and mortars and small arms fire, things like that.

Then distinct from that, you've got what appears to be a group of foreign Jihadi Islamic suicide types, who are quite willing to come in and blow themselves up in order to hit big targets. You can differentiate between these two groups quite clearly by the willingness of people to die in these attacks.

In the attack on the Rashid Hotel, for example, the guys who built that device and set it off were very careful to get out of the area before anything happened. As far as I know, they all got away.

O'BRIEN: So we can perhaps make an assumption that that might be attributed to some remnant of Saddam Hussein's regime, Republican Guards maybe, and the rest might be some sort of al Qaeda type presence there. I guess the question is, with that kind of orchestration, that kind of organization, it's undoubtedly going to leave some kind of footprint for intelligence. Does this tell you that the intelligence system there that the U.S. has is just broken?

LANG: I think that we are fairly rapidly reacquiring the ability to run low-level human agents among populations. And in Baghdad, for example, it seems that it wouldn't be possible to plan an attack like the one on the Rashid with great success, so it was probably planned out of town.

And with regard to one of your earlier points, it probably is true that there was some degree of coordination amongst these various attacks, because they're coincidence in time and correspondence to the beginning of Ramadan and what is probably a month-long offensive against this is probably too much to attribute just to happenstance.

So, I think our intelligence is improving, but the roots of the guerrilla war are out in the countryside, and that's going to be harder to deal with in a sympathetic population.

O'BRIEN: It's kind of a psychological campaign. What's the key to thwarting it?

LANG: Well, it is a psychological campaign. In wars like this, the target of these operations on their side is not to defeat the United States Army. You know that they can never do that. The damage involved is symbolic, and it's intended to indicate to the Iraqi people, to foreign business, and most importantly to the American people, that this is a hopeless situation in which you should give up. The president seems to see that quite clearly. So, there's a kind of foot race going on to see which side will have the greater effect.

And the way to deal with this in the long run is to as rapidly as possible turn the security situation back over to the Iraqis.

O'BRIEN: "Iraqification" is the term we're hearing. And I guess we'll see that unfold. Colonel Patrick Lang, always a pleasure having you with us.

LANG: Thank you.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com







Aired October 29, 2003 - 09:17   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: The steady increase in attacks in Iraq has caught the attention of many people in the defense community, including our next guest, retired Army Colonel Patrick Lang, a former defense intelligence analyst. He joins us from Washington.
Good to see you again, Colonel Lang.

COL. PATRICK LANG, (RET.) FMR. DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE ANALYST: Good to see you.

O'BRIEN: It seems evident that these attacks are at least at some level orchestrated and organized. Would you agree?

LANG: Yes, I think what has emerged here is that some fairly small proportion of the Sunni Arab population in Iraq is at least passively supporting guerrillas attacking our forces in the field, and then there are a smaller number of people who are actively supporting them and the number of fighters is probably quite small, a thousand or so. But that's a lot if you have to deal with these guys in what are increasingly sophisticated, combined arms attacks, involving rockets, and mortars and small arms fire, things like that.

Then distinct from that, you've got what appears to be a group of foreign Jihadi Islamic suicide types, who are quite willing to come in and blow themselves up in order to hit big targets. You can differentiate between these two groups quite clearly by the willingness of people to die in these attacks.

In the attack on the Rashid Hotel, for example, the guys who built that device and set it off were very careful to get out of the area before anything happened. As far as I know, they all got away.

O'BRIEN: So we can perhaps make an assumption that that might be attributed to some remnant of Saddam Hussein's regime, Republican Guards maybe, and the rest might be some sort of al Qaeda type presence there. I guess the question is, with that kind of orchestration, that kind of organization, it's undoubtedly going to leave some kind of footprint for intelligence. Does this tell you that the intelligence system there that the U.S. has is just broken?

LANG: I think that we are fairly rapidly reacquiring the ability to run low-level human agents among populations. And in Baghdad, for example, it seems that it wouldn't be possible to plan an attack like the one on the Rashid with great success, so it was probably planned out of town.

And with regard to one of your earlier points, it probably is true that there was some degree of coordination amongst these various attacks, because they're coincidence in time and correspondence to the beginning of Ramadan and what is probably a month-long offensive against this is probably too much to attribute just to happenstance.

So, I think our intelligence is improving, but the roots of the guerrilla war are out in the countryside, and that's going to be harder to deal with in a sympathetic population.

O'BRIEN: It's kind of a psychological campaign. What's the key to thwarting it?

LANG: Well, it is a psychological campaign. In wars like this, the target of these operations on their side is not to defeat the United States Army. You know that they can never do that. The damage involved is symbolic, and it's intended to indicate to the Iraqi people, to foreign business, and most importantly to the American people, that this is a hopeless situation in which you should give up. The president seems to see that quite clearly. So, there's a kind of foot race going on to see which side will have the greater effect.

And the way to deal with this in the long run is to as rapidly as possible turn the security situation back over to the Iraqis.

O'BRIEN: "Iraqification" is the term we're hearing. And I guess we'll see that unfold. Colonel Patrick Lang, always a pleasure having you with us.

LANG: Thank you.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com