Transcript
KENNETH POLLACK: My own experience in Iraq and also listening to everything that I hear talking to other Iraqis—because I'm very careful to recognize that my time in Iraq, while I may have seen a lot, tried to speak to as many people as I could, was only the views of one person. I think you have to temper that. I tried as hard as I could to speak to as many Iraqis as I was able to. And I may have spoken to a hundred Iraqis in the little more than a week that I was in Iraq. And, you know, at the time, that seemed like a lot of people, and I think, compared to most travelers, it probably was. But a hundred people is not a very good representative sample of Iraq. So I try to be a little bit careful of that.
Now that said, my own sentiment about Iraq is that this could go either way. There is a great deal of good going on inside of Iraq, but there's also a great deal of bad going on inside of Iraq. And I think that ultimately it really comes down to what the United States wants to do. If we are willing to stick this operation out and if we're also willing to make some changes in how we're doing things, I see no particular reason why Iraq cannot become a perfectly stable, prosperous, pluralist society. Because there is all kinds of good in Iraq, and there are all kinds of good building block that you could work with.
And some of the things that Mike was talking about are absolutely true. The electricity is in much better shape than it was. And whereas three or four months ago the greatest Iraqi complaint was the electricity, when are you going to get the power on?, it no longer is. Now the biggest complaint is security, and I'm going to come back to that in a second. There are lots of good, smart Americans and other members of the coalition out there working in the field with Iraqis and doing all kinds of really good things.
And some of the kind of raw statistics that Mike was citing that the Pentagon has cited, when you actually see them in operation, they're really meaningful. Rebuilding those schools is really important. It's given a livelihood to the teachers. It means that they now have sources of income and they're getting paid much better than they were being paid under Saddam's regime. It means the kids are off the streets and they're back in school and they're learning. They're no longer a burden; they're not out there playing in the mine fields; they're not out there where they can be shot, killed, maimed by U.S. forces under their operations. It means that life is beginning to return to normal. And you do see that around the country.
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