Examination of Witnesses (Questions 68-79)
4 NOVEMBER 2003
MR NICK
PELHAM AND
MR PETER
DAVID
Q68 Chairman: On behalf of the Committee
may I welcome you to this the foreign policy aspects of the war
against terrorism. Mr Pelham, you are a journalist on both The
Economist and the Financial Times. Mr David, you are
Foreign Editor of The Economist. We are now looking at
Iraq itself. It is difficult for us outside to get a clear picture
of the current state of the country. Clearly there are some who
have an interest in stressing the return to normalcy, the number
of hospitals which are operating, the schools which are back to
business and so forth. There are others who will stress the insecurity
there which is preventing any proper such return. I believe you,
Mr Pelham, have visited Iraq regularly and at the end of this
week you are returning to Iraq. Is it possible to give us an overall
picture and perhaps stress the differences in certain parts of
Iraq, the current state compared with the point at which it was
left with the defeat of the Saddam Hussein regime?
Mr Pelham: Both pictures you presented
reflect a degree of the reality. Certainly in the aftermath of
the war there was absolute chaos: there was no system of government,
utilities had broken down, there was no power, no water, no schooling
and the United Stated led coalition has had considerable impact
in re-establishing a degree of order. That re-establishment of
a semblance of order has presented far greater challenges to those
elements within Iraq which are extremely unhappy with an American
presence in the country. The sense after the war was that many
Iraqis were on the whole favourably disposed to the American presence
there, there had been very little resistance to the war itself,
to the United States invasion, the bulk of the army had melted
away. What you have seen over the past six or seven months is
an ebbing away of the enthusiasm and the trust which many Iraqis
had placed in the United States and bafflement at their inability,
as many Iraqis see it, to deliver the shock and awe of not just
conquest but destruction.
Q69 Chairman: We shall be coming
on to what is needed to restore that element of trust, but have
the conditions of life for the ordinary Iraqi improved or deteriorated
in your judgment, compared with the latter days of the Saddam
Hussein regime?
Mr Pelham: There was a dramatic
deterioration in the provision of services and the United States
have been fairly successful in trying to bring back the power
to the level it was before the war, to bring back the water supply
to the level it was before the war and hospital services to the
level they were before the war. There have been some significant
improvements in salary payments to government employees; a dramatic
increase in teachers' pay from a handful of dollars a month to
$200 a month. But the comparison many Iraqis are making is not
so much to the period when sanctions were in effect, but the period
before 1991 sanctions, and their salaries are still not at the
level of pre-1991.
Q70 Chairman: Can you tell us where
you see the actual money being spent successfully? What physical
signs are there that all this money which is going to Iraq is
bearing fruit?
Mr Pelham: The bulk of the money
which has been going into Iraq is military money. At the moment
not many Iraqis have felt that there is much sign of money going
into reconstruction. Bridges which were down as a result of the
war are still down and there are very few cranes on the horizon.
There are fewer cranes on the horizon in cities than there were
prior to the war, less large-scale construction activity than
there was before the war. The bulk of the money is going into
the payment of salaries, if you like sweeteners to the Iraqis.
The other area where there has been a dramatic increase in spending
power is in people's ability to import goods tax and tariff free.
Q71 Chairman: That is a pretty depressing
picture, that there are relatively few cranes around, little evidence
of civil engineering works, schools, hospitals.
Mr Pelham: Some schools have been
rehabilitated. There are 13,000 schools in Iraq, of which somewhere
between 1,000 and 1,500 have been refitted to varying degrees
of professionalism. Some of the Iraqi companies which were used
have been very slapdash at repairing the schools. An enormous
degree of looting took place after the war and many of the buildings
which were looted, many of the ministries which were gutted, are
still gutted.
Q72 Chairman: So it is not even the
bonanza for US construction companies which certain critics of
the war claim, at least as yet.
Mr Pelham: Construction companies,
no. In terms of military supplies and all the supplies that an
army needs, there are lots of companies which are doing very well
out of that. Of the money which has so far been handed over to
the two prime American firms which are in charge of the reconstruction
effort, KPR and Bechtel, Bechtel has received about $1 billion
and KPR has received something more than that for the oil reconstruction
and for military supplies. No, where you see most of the money
going so far is in re-fortification and barricades for the United
States installations around Iraq.
Q73 Mr Pope: Could you tell us something
about the rule of law in Iraq at the moment? It seems to me from
the outside that troops in general and American troops in particular
are not very good policemen and women. What is the current state
on Iraqi streets in terms of crime, looting, general respect for
the rule of law?
Mr Pelham: As far as Iraqis are
concerned, there is a greater sense of order than existed two
or three months ago. That is largely due to the fact that the
coalition has handed over a lot of the security and policing work
to Iraqis and Iraqis can feel that there is a degree to which
there is a system of law and order which they can be in touch
with, that they communicate with, that there are Iraqis doing
the policing. The problem with having the Americans doing the
policing is that there is virtually no interface between Iraqis
and Americans. Certainly the American soldiers you see on the
streets are often very jumpy, they feel very nervous about being
on the streets. When they are caught in traffic jams you see instances
where they get nervous and try to force themselves out of a traffic
jam; they bump cars, they knock over the jerry cans of the black
marketeers selling petrol on the streets. The policing of Iraq
is probably better done by Iraqis than by Americans and we have
seen a sustained effort to try to return security to Iraqis. That
is by and large welcomed by the population.
Q74 Mr Pope: So the general picture
is that things are better now than they were during the summer
and that is largely due to the fact that there has been a transfer
of the policing function away from coalition forces towards Iraqi
police officers. In this period between the summer and now do
you think that the lack of law enforcement has hindered the reconstruction
process?
Mr Pelham: There is no doubt about
that. On your first point, if law and order has improved in Iraq,
Iraqis would attribute that to a greater law enforcement by Iraqis.
They blame the insecurity on the lack of an Iraqi presence, particularly
on the disbandment of the armed forces. The porous borders for
instance, or as we were hearing earlier, the lack of defence around
ammunition dumps would be attributed entirely to America's decision
to disband the armed forces.
Q75 Mr Pope: Obviously hindsight
is a wonderful thing. We can all appreciate why the coalition
forces disbanded the Iraqi armed forces when the conflict ended,
but do you think that was a mistake? Would it have been better
to put the Iraqi armed forces to work doing some of those things,
guarding ammunition dumps or assisting in the reconstruction process?
Would that have been a better thing to do at that point, do you
think?
Mr Pelham: In many ways the Iraqi
armed forces in the war were one of America's best assets. By
and large the armed forces did not fight during the war. That
was on the orders of their generals and of the military officers
and there is little doubt amongst many Iraqis that the armed forces
could have played a positive role in maintaining law and order
in the country, or security forces per se had they not
been disbanded. There was a wholesale disbandment of all the law
enforcing functions the services were carrying out right down
to traffic wardens and it was particularly disorientating for
a population which had grown very dependent on the state for security
and for welfare and for every aspect of the running of society.
When you suddenly take that away, it leads to the chaos and to
the breakdown of society.
Q76 Andrew Mackinlay: In The Economist
it said that the new American rulers in Iraq live behind cordons
of concrete, behind barbed wire. Americans live in a virtual American
world, often paranoid about the world outside. There is a sealed-off
Green Zone. It strikes me that whilst schools might have been
addressed and in a sense they would, would they not, because it
is the kind of things which democratic television would look at
and legislators would be pleased about, but really the Coalition
Provisional Authority seems to me not to be running the country?
Normal municipal works, perhaps public works, are not being addressed
and there is a void. I want to come to the Governing Council in
a moment but could you paint a picture for us of how much of this
country is being run under any degree of normalcy? My fear is
that it is not. Perhaps we as legislators, in the United Kingdom
or round the western world, look for the obvious things like schools,
so American monies and energies will go into that, because that
is what legislators and journalists will look at. The rest is
just anarchical, is it? No governance.
Mr Pelham: My feeling is that
is probably an over statement. Yes, there is an enormous problem
about the contact Iraqis can have with the people who are running
the country. The Americans are running Iraq and they are virtually
inaccessible behind their barricades and if you want to petition
an American in Iraq there are very, very few facilities for doing
that. There are very few facilities even if you are an Iraqi contractor
actually trying to contact Americans and trying to bid for some
of the contracts which are available. There is a danger that the
CPA is becoming increasingly isolated because of security concerns
and that is the other part of Greg Pope's question, which I did
not really answer. Security is imposing an enormous cost on the
reconstruction effort in terms of insurance, in terms of access.
It is very difficult. There is a fear about getting manpower and
supplies into the country and staying in the country and that
is making the American effort ever more isolated. The more power
and decision making can be returned to Iraqis the faster governance
is going to be restored in Iraq.
Q77 Andrew Mackinlay: Where municipalities
or local leadership are functioning—and I imagine there
are some townships, perhaps even large towns, where there is some
degree of municipal governance carrying on—would there be
an inability of those mayors or leaders of those communities to
communicate with the American authorities, the coalition, for
the reasons you said? I am just trying to get a picture.
Mr Pelham: Once you leave Baghdad
power is more heavily devolved onto US military generals and British
military generals, they—rather than the CPA—administer
Iraq outside Baghdad.
Q78 Andrew Mackinlay: Even in Saddam's
regime there would have been some degree of civil justice, civil
law, commerce and so on. Does that still exist, normal justice
as it were? I am not talking about murder, crimes, political things,
but what about opportunities for redress in courts and criminal
courts relating to normal crime? Does that exist at all?
Mr Pelham: The court rooms were
gutted and looted. For the first four months there was no judicial
system to speak of at all. There are now the beginnings of a judicial
system, but it is also operating under severe security constraints.
There was a court which was looking at members of the Baath party
in the holy Shi'ite city of Najaf and was trying to prosecute
members of the Baath party who had committed crimes and the head
of that court was killed a couple of days ago. The judicial system
is operating under severe security constraints and one of the
justifications for the 8,000 or so prisoners-of-war which the
Americans are still holding is that they cannot hand them over
to the judiciary because there is no system to try them.
Q79 Andrew Mackinlay: May I turn
to the Iraq Governing Council? Does that command any popular support
or even tacit support amongst people in the community, in two
categories really, in Baghdad or outside Baghdad? What is your
feel about that?
Mr Pelham: Due to the security
situation within Iraq, the Governing Council is almost restricted
to the inside of their hotel. Since the assassination of one of
its members it has had severe problems operating inside Iraq.
It is not going out to meet its own people. When member of the
Governing Council try to plan visits around Iraq, they are often
cancelled for security reasons. The Governing Council has far
greater impact outside Iraq than it does inside Iraq.
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