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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GWOT Year 3 - 2004 (mainly Iraq)
Winning the War: Interview with Karl Zinsmeister 
Winning the War Interview with Karl Zinsmeister AEI Online, Posted: Thursday, July 15, 2004 Publication Date: July 15, 2004 Front Page Magazine's interview guest is Karl Zinsmeister, the editor in chief of The American Enterprise and author of the new book Dawn over Baghdad: How the U.S. Military Is Using Bullets and Ballots to Remake Iraq. The interviewer, Jamie Glazov, is Front Page Magazine's managing editor. FP: Welcome to Frontpage Interview, Mr. Zinsmeister. Zinsmeister: It's a pleasure to be here. FP: Congratulations on your new book. It took quite a bit of personal bravery to write it, seeing that you spent three months in combat zones with American soldiers in Iraq doing your research. First things first, share a story with us about your experience. Zinsmeister: I began as an embedded reporter during the hot war which toppled Saddam a little more than a year ago. I had an incredible string of experiences--with everyone from very impressive line soldiers of all sorts, to the top generals in the country, to English-speaking Iraqi civilians pinned down next to me by sniper fire. I came home and wrote the first book about the invasion, called Boots on the Ground: A Month With the 82nd Airborne in the Battle for Iraq, which was out in August 2003. My next experience in Iraq was commissioning and writing the first public opinion poll ever carried out across that nation. I orchestrated and then published this through the magazine I edit, The American Enterprise. The results were extremely interesting, and showed that ordinary Iraqis are much less fanatical than the typical media coverage implies. As the guerilla war unfolded during the fall and winter, I became very concerned that the run-of-the-mill reporting from Iraq wasn't giving a complete and balance picture of developments there. So I decided to re-embed myself with troops in the most troubled parts of the country in January 2004, in order to get a good firsthand look at the counterinsurgency fight and reconstruction efforts. I spent several weeks going out on combat patrols, watching interrogations, listening to intelligence briefings, going into Iraqi homes during cordon and search operations, sitting in on city council meetings, observing powwows between American commanders and radical Iraqi imams or tribal sheiks, and so forth. I walked the streets in Baghdad, Fallujah, Abu Ghraib and points in between. A lot of journalism is serendipity, and I was very lucky this spring, as I had been during the hot war, in terms of getting to see some important and fascinating things. When I came home I realized I had most of another book already written on my laptop. So my publisher, Encounter Books, and I pushed out what is the only book available today detailing the prosecution of the guerilla war in Iraq, and its actual, ground-level effects on Iraqi society. Dawn over Baghdad is not a policy analysis, it is human storytelling and eyewitness reporting written from the perspective of the ordinary American soldiers and everyday Iraqi citizens who are in the thick of things in critical neighborhoods. FP: Your book focuses on the terrorist insurrection in Iraq, especially in the Sunni triangle. Could you tell our readers a bit about what this threat is and what it entails? Zinsmeister: Iraq is a big country, and its citizens hold a wide range of viewpoints. There is a large silent majority in Iraq, as in most countries, that is more sensible than most of our readers may imagine. Large swaths of the countryside--for instance the Shiite areas in the southern half of the nation where I spent most of my time during the 2003 hot war--are comparatively quiet and beginning to get on with ordinary life. The Iraqi economy will grow about 60 percent this year, and there is a consumer surge going on. Cell phones are proliferating, about a million cars have been imported, a third of the homes have installed satellite TV, and families are buying up washing machines, air conditioners, radios, and other things long unavailable. It's a problem that these relatively stable areas receive so little notice in the West. But on my latest trip I wanted to go right into the Sunni triangle and observe the worst snakepits in Iraq. So I spent most of my time in Fallujah and some rough areas of Baghdad. The fighters in this region are a mix of former Saddam-ites and religious extremists (Fallujah is a historic center for recruiting into Saddam's security forces, as well as the center of Wahabi Islam in Iraq), with extensive orchestration from foreign jihadists. The foreigners are not large in number, but Zarqawi's group is behind most of the more serious and visible attacks, including nearly all of the car bombings. The high end of the latest intelligence estimates is that there are a grand total of around 20,000 insurgents carrying out violence in Iraq today. They are a dangerous lot, and obviously capable of inducing plenty of instability and fear. This is NOT, however, a broad popular insurrection. Far from it. 20,000 guerillas in a population of 25 million works out to one insurgent for every 1,250 Iraqis. To put that in perspective, realize that, for instance, one out of every 305 Americans is a Hindu. So guerillas in Iraq are four times less common than Hindus are in the U.S. Now, many of those 20,000 guerillas are well trained in the black arts of terror. And nearly all of them are nihilists who hold nothing sacred as they wage terror. So I'm not denying we are in the midst of a tough and serious guerilla fight in Iraq. But it's important that Americans understand this is not a mass insurgency. FP: That's not something you'd learn from most reporting. Zinsmeister: The huge, central fact missing from most of the reporting from Iraq this year is that the Shiite middle--who are going to run this country--have so far stuck with us through many travails. This was demonstrated again when the radical Shiite cleric Moktada Sadr went on the warpath during the spring. Scads of reporters and newsroom analysts declared a general uprising, the loss of majority Shiite support, the beginning of the end for the U.S. in Iraq. I have in front of me, for instance, an April 7 New York Times story written from Washington which announces in its lead sentence that "United States forces are confronting a broad-based Shiite uprising." A Newsweek headline on April 10 screamed: "THE IRAQI INTIFADA: Suddenly the insurgency is much broader and much more dangerous than anyone had imagined it could become." These reports were wrong. Ordinary Shia and Shiite leaders alike subsequently made it clear that the mad cleric does not speak for most of them. They quietly plotted amongst themselves and with the Coalition to neutralize Sadr. Today he remains a fringe figure. Certainly there are too many dangerous, well-armed fanatics carrying out violence in Iraq today. And much of the rest of the population is afraid cross them: 70 percent of Iraqis believe their family will be in peril if they are perceived to be cooperating with the U.S. Our failure to convince more good Iraqis it is safe to stand up and be counted is a serious problem that needs concerted attention. But fearing the guerillas and supporting them are two different things, and the clear evidence of polling, interviews, and behavior on the streets of Iraq is that most ordinary Iraqis do not admire, aid, or encourage the fighters. FP: You note that during U.S. bombing and ground raids in Iraq, that you have actually witnessed Iraqis continuing to go about their business, shopping, traveling etc. This is connected to what you have termed the "gentlest war in history." Can you illuminate this picture for us? Zinsmeister: The Iraqis quickly learned that the U.S. soldiers and airmen were not the beasts they have been told about in their schools and government propaganda all their lives. They discovered that if they weren't taking up arms, they had little to fear from Americans. On a number of occasions during the hot war I was staggered at how much effort U.S. soldiers made to avoid hurting innocent people, often transferring considerable danger onto their own shoulders in the process. That has been the most distinctive motif of this war--just as a historical matter, there is no question it is the gentlest war in history, particularly considering that the fighting has taken place in dense cities, often door to door, against enemies who are indistinguishable from everyday citizens, and enemies who have no qualms about using ambulances, mosques, schoolchildren, people in hospitals, women, and other innocents as shields to fight behind--all things I saw, often with disgust and horror, with my own eyes. FP: You note that the Shiites offer hope for a democratic Iraq. Tell us why. Zinsmeister: The Shiites are about 60 percent of the population--where they go, the rest of Iraq will follow. They, of course, were brutalized by Saddam, and loath him and his acolytes, so they will have no truck with insurgents who dream of reinstituting a Baath-style state. And one of the most interesting results of the poll that we at The American Enterprise carried out last year was the discovery that there is also relatively little support among rank-and-file Shiites for bringing Iranian-style theocracy to Iraq. So two of the "nightmare" scenarios for a future Iraq are quite unlikely. Then you have to look at the insurgency. As I've noted, the most serious armed resistance in Iraq today is led by Zarqawi's foreign jihadis. If you read Zarqawi's letter to Osama bin Laden that was intercepted by the Kurds this spring you will understand why this man has no chance of becoming a popular figure in Iraq. His only allies are the Sunnis; he does not even consider the majority Shiites or the Kurds (who together represent 80 percent of the population) to be true Muslims. He calls them scorpions, polytheists, and "the enemy," and acknowledges that if they assume governance of Iraq he and his band will have lost. With the encouraging events of the latest month--where strong, responsible Iraqis (most of them from the Shiite and Kurdish majority) have finally stepped up to the obligations of stabilizing their own society, Zarqawi's nightmare is well on its way to becoming a reality. ("By God, this is suffocation," he cries in his letter to bin Laden.) Obviously there is nothing automatic about future success. And no one is likely to mistake Iraq for Switzerland any time in the near future. But the Shiites (and the Kurds) are simply not going to follow the insurgents making most of the trouble in Iraq today. If American leaders will show some endurance and toughness, there is a very good chance that a rough form of democracy far better than anything now existing in the Arab Middle East will take root in Iraq. This is something worth taking some significant risks for. It would have a revolutionary influence in making the world more peaceful and America safer. I believe that carrying this effort through to fruition is the highest challenge my generation of Americans faces. Let's see if the Baby Boomers have the stamina and toughness to accomplish something on par with beating Naziism or dissolving the Berlin Wall. FP: In your book, you give quite a bit of good news of American success and the prospects for a democracy in Iraq. Could you tell us a few reasons for optimism? Zinsmeister: Progress in this war (and every war) is made via two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward. That's how you slog your way toward any big, difficult, historic accomplishment like this that requires overturning a failed past. Dawn over Baghdad puts together lots of little pieces describing what's happening in Iraq's nascent democracy councils, and courts, and economy, and security forces, and shows that in just 16 months important progress has been made. We're so impatient today. We forget it took half a decade or more to stabilize Japan and Germany after World War II. Lots of prosaic little accomplishments in Iraq get overlooked, or even interpreted as failures in the media. One example is electrical generation. We're told over and over that Baghdad continues to suffer periodic blackouts. Just one more instance of U.S. ineffectiveness in this war, right? Wrong. Despite repeated sabotage, Iraq is now generating more electricity than existed in the country before the war. We continue to hear about shortages for two reasons: First, Saddam shamelessly hogged the country's electricity in his capital, shunting 57 percent to Baghdad while the provinces were starved for juice. Today, power is distributed fairly to all population centers, and Baghdad gets 28 percent of the total. That means occasional shortages in privileged neighborhoods unused to such things--but Iraqis as a whole are better off. Second, as I described earlier, Iraq is in the midst of a consumer surge. All those new washing machines, and air conditioners, and satellite TVs require juice, so electricity demand is rising--faster than the steady increases in generation. Yes, that's a problem, but a "nice" problem, not a simple indicator of nothing getting fixed. My bottom line, after months spent on the streets of Iraq, is that Americans--so long as they don't panic and quit--are currently in the process of accomplishing something in Iraq that they have doubted, at least since the Vietnam War, they were capable of: the successful prosecution of a difficult guerilla war. FP: Dawn over Baghdad gives the positive side of the U.S. military operations in Iraq. You comment on why this positive angle is so often missing in our own media. Tell us one or two reasons for this unfortunate reality. Zinsmeister: It's a mixture of things. There is a premium on sensationalism that overemphasizes bad news and problems. Deadline pressures, laziness, and a lack of imagination push coverage in the same gloomy direction. The easiest story to tell in war is to simply point the camera at something that has blown up. It takes more time to write about the 99 counterparts that are NOT in flames. I had to spend months in Iraq walking the streets with patrols, observing lots of humble happenings, every day all day, to get the fuller picture of daily accomplishments, shifting public opinion, rising competence, etc. You can't get this story if you're staying in the Palestine Hotel in the Green Zone and charging out only to describe the bombing aftermaths. And even if you could, your newspaper or TV network might not run it, because they want today's drama, not the slower, subtler changes that historians will look back at and notice. Ideological imbalance in the press corps also is a problem. A whole string of studies dating back a quarter century show that elite reporters are Democratic over Republican, liberal over conservative, dovish over hawkish by about ten to one. Don't tell me that doesn't matter (as some journalists will claim), particularly in a war which has taken on strong partisan colorations as this one has. Another problem that interferes with full and accurate reporting is the cultural distance that separates most journalists from military men and military work. Few journalists have any friends or relatives in the military. They often know little about weapons or tactics or the physical and mental demands of fighting. They are often very different kinds of people from typical soldiers. I don't think it's healthy that there is such a sharp cultural divide between those who fight our wars and those who get to interpret them for the public. More reporters with military experience, or at least an appreciation of military rigors, ought to be recruited into our newsrooms. FP: Mr. Zinmeister, we are out of time. It was a privilege to speak with you. We hope to see you again soon. And a great book. Congrats. Zinsmeister: Thank you Jamie. |