Return to Transcripts main page

American Morning

Bush Identifies Iraq as Central Front in War on Terror

Aired September 09, 2003 - 08:14   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.


BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: President Bush has identified Iraq as the "central front in the war on terror."
Michael O'Hanlon is a senior follow at the Brookings Institution. He's also written a new book about the North Korean situation titled "Crisis On the Korean Peninsula."

Michael is back with us here on AMERICAN MORNING to talk about it from D.C.

I want to get to both topics.

Good morning.

How are you?

MICHAEL O'HANLON, SENIOR FELLOW, BROOKINGS INSTITUTION: Good morning, Bill.

Fine, thanks.

HEMMER: Who is the enemy right now that's fighting U.S. troops in Iraq?

O'HANLON: I think the president said about as much as he knows the other night when he said it's a combination and we don't really know how to quantify how many of them are former Saddam loyalists, how many of them are just sort of angry Iraqis who are being recruited to this cause because they're upset with how the effort is going and how many are foreign terrorists. We really don't know.

All we can do is interrogate prisoners and try to do a head count on prisoners and use that as a sample to estimate what's out there. But we really don't have much of an idea. It's probably a few thousand total people.

HEMMER: Why don't we know?

O'HANLON: Because when you think about it, how do you get this kind of information in a counter-insurgency? You don't have a big force out there that you can monitor with some kind of a satellite or even with human intelligence very easily. These are people who are running, doing a quick attack, immersing themselves again in a population. All you're getting is some kind of a random sample of those you are able to kill or capture and then you can do interrogations to ask of those you've captured who else might be out there. And if they're telling the truth, you get some information, you can cross correlate and see if people are telling the truth, to some extent.

HEMMER: This is a process and it's going to take a while, too, you'd agree?

O'HANLON: Yes. It's going to take a while. Any kind of a counterinsurgency, even a successful one -- and I think this will be successful in the end -- but even a successful one has to be usually measured in many months or even a few years.

HEMMER: What do you think about the suggestion that the United States right now is not nearly as equipped as it should be in terms of having a number of interrogators on hand to go out and carry out the prosecution of these witnesses and those who are captured?

O'HANLON: I think there may be some truth to that. But I also am struck by how well we've done in interrogating some of the al Qaeda prisoners. We seem to get a lot of leads from these people. And so I think our techniques, judging from the distance that I see this at, are pretty good. And my greater concern here is the lack of intelligence from the Iraqi people themselves.

We haven't yet gotten to the level of confidence and security in Iraq where Iraqis are coming out and giving us more information. That's because of the poor start we got off to in the post-war effort, because we still don't have enough international troops on the scene and because the momentum that we had begun to establish in June and July has been lost with all these bombings in August.

HEMMER: If you take out Saddam Hussein, does that scenario change among the Iraqi people?

O'HANLON: It helps some. It helps some. But I really think, you know, the big thing is to stop these kinds of big, prominent bombings, having major political figures assassinated. We are losing momentum in Iraq, if we haven't lost it already, because of this terrible month of August we've had. And any rhetoric to the contrary by the administration is ignoring reality.

We are, we're still in a relatively strong long-term position, but the last few weeks have been a very serious setback.

HEMMER: Let's talk about North Korea in the minute we have left here.

Some videotape from Pyongyang earlier today. No military hardware, no speech by the leader, Kim Jong Il.

What does that tell you, knowing that in the past this has been almost standard fare for these military parades?

O'HANLON: Yes, a good point. Well, first of all, Kim Jong Il, I think, is still nervous about being attacked by the United States and he is obviously a paranoid leader in many ways, and he's a Stalinist leader. But he's also nervous. He saw what happened to Saddam. He wonders if he's next. That's the side that explains why he didn't come out. As to the military hardware, my guess is that they are having trouble making any major inroads or progress in their new technologies and they're also really not sure how to play the issue of provocation. They were pretty provocative when they met with us two weeks ago in Beijing, talked about possibly having a nuclear test. Maybe they don't want to over play their hand. Maybe China reigned them in a little bit.

HEMMER: Thank you, Michael.

We'll talk again.

Michael O'Hanlon in D.C.

Appreciate it.

O'HANLON: Thanks, Bill.

HEMMER: All right.

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 September 9, 2003 - 08:14   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: President Bush has identified Iraq as the "central front in the war on terror."
Michael O'Hanlon is a senior follow at the Brookings Institution. He's also written a new book about the North Korean situation titled "Crisis On the Korean Peninsula."

Michael is back with us here on AMERICAN MORNING to talk about it from D.C.

I want to get to both topics.

Good morning.

How are you?

MICHAEL O'HANLON, SENIOR FELLOW, BROOKINGS INSTITUTION: Good morning, Bill.

Fine, thanks.

HEMMER: Who is the enemy right now that's fighting U.S. troops in Iraq?

O'HANLON: I think the president said about as much as he knows the other night when he said it's a combination and we don't really know how to quantify how many of them are former Saddam loyalists, how many of them are just sort of angry Iraqis who are being recruited to this cause because they're upset with how the effort is going and how many are foreign terrorists. We really don't know.

All we can do is interrogate prisoners and try to do a head count on prisoners and use that as a sample to estimate what's out there. But we really don't have much of an idea. It's probably a few thousand total people.

HEMMER: Why don't we know?

O'HANLON: Because when you think about it, how do you get this kind of information in a counter-insurgency? You don't have a big force out there that you can monitor with some kind of a satellite or even with human intelligence very easily. These are people who are running, doing a quick attack, immersing themselves again in a population. All you're getting is some kind of a random sample of those you are able to kill or capture and then you can do interrogations to ask of those you've captured who else might be out there. And if they're telling the truth, you get some information, you can cross correlate and see if people are telling the truth, to some extent.

HEMMER: This is a process and it's going to take a while, too, you'd agree?

O'HANLON: Yes. It's going to take a while. Any kind of a counterinsurgency, even a successful one -- and I think this will be successful in the end -- but even a successful one has to be usually measured in many months or even a few years.

HEMMER: What do you think about the suggestion that the United States right now is not nearly as equipped as it should be in terms of having a number of interrogators on hand to go out and carry out the prosecution of these witnesses and those who are captured?

O'HANLON: I think there may be some truth to that. But I also am struck by how well we've done in interrogating some of the al Qaeda prisoners. We seem to get a lot of leads from these people. And so I think our techniques, judging from the distance that I see this at, are pretty good. And my greater concern here is the lack of intelligence from the Iraqi people themselves.

We haven't yet gotten to the level of confidence and security in Iraq where Iraqis are coming out and giving us more information. That's because of the poor start we got off to in the post-war effort, because we still don't have enough international troops on the scene and because the momentum that we had begun to establish in June and July has been lost with all these bombings in August.

HEMMER: If you take out Saddam Hussein, does that scenario change among the Iraqi people?

O'HANLON: It helps some. It helps some. But I really think, you know, the big thing is to stop these kinds of big, prominent bombings, having major political figures assassinated. We are losing momentum in Iraq, if we haven't lost it already, because of this terrible month of August we've had. And any rhetoric to the contrary by the administration is ignoring reality.

We are, we're still in a relatively strong long-term position, but the last few weeks have been a very serious setback.

HEMMER: Let's talk about North Korea in the minute we have left here.

Some videotape from Pyongyang earlier today. No military hardware, no speech by the leader, Kim Jong Il.

What does that tell you, knowing that in the past this has been almost standard fare for these military parades?

O'HANLON: Yes, a good point. Well, first of all, Kim Jong Il, I think, is still nervous about being attacked by the United States and he is obviously a paranoid leader in many ways, and he's a Stalinist leader. But he's also nervous. He saw what happened to Saddam. He wonders if he's next. That's the side that explains why he didn't come out. As to the military hardware, my guess is that they are having trouble making any major inroads or progress in their new technologies and they're also really not sure how to play the issue of provocation. They were pretty provocative when they met with us two weeks ago in Beijing, talked about possibly having a nuclear test. Maybe they don't want to over play their hand. Maybe China reigned them in a little bit.

HEMMER: Thank you, Michael.

We'll talk again.

Michael O'Hanlon in D.C.

Appreciate it.

O'HANLON: Thanks, Bill.

HEMMER: All right.

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