David: Well, as far as pashing out in Iraq is I think there’s really no choice. The Iraqis want us to phase out and the whole- and the fact is our ground forces are being utilized in unsustainable level. We cannot manage certainly both of these wars and even Iraq I think in the long term is unsustainable. But in any case the whole idea was to prepare the Iraqis to run their own country and given the history of the Middle East I think that’s the only feasible outcome you could seek, you can keep Iraq under occupation and you have to let them eventually stand on their own feet and do what their issue is, you know, the issue the debate I think is more the rate, the speed at which you are going and I think given the realities of what the Iraqis have done, we probably are pretty much at the right point. As far as Afghanistan is concerned I think probably I’m not the only to think that the chances for successful outcome in Afghanistan and are less than certainly than they are in Iraq.
If you look at some of those statistics and you see how much less well developed Afghanistan is, you realize and of course, you look at the- they have about the same Arab land but the rest of that land is easily traversable desert in Iraq, it’s all mountains in Afghanistan. I spent October of ’07 in Afghanistan working for the State Department inspector general and it’s, you know, it’s a horrendous tasks, but the issue there is can you, you know, this idea can you split off the Taliban in some fashion from Al Qaeda. We split off the more reasonable, relatively more reasonable Taliban sympathetic Pashtun but the idea of getting a functioning central government in Afghanistan for me is very hard to conceive, I mean, but never had one, but if you can at least stabilize the country to a degree maybe you can do something but I think the outcome is very murky in Afghanistan. As far as the Shia are concerned, I think this idea of Shia of Middle East is greatly exaggerated.
First of all, the Shia Arabs in Iraq do not like Persians in general. Now, there are many more ties now and sympathies I think between the two, but the dislike and the divisiveness is still there in the- well, I was there in the Iraq-Iran war. At least 70% of the enlisted strength of the Iraqi army that was fighting fiercely against Iran, 70% were Shia, and they viewed this as a national struggle and they viewed the Iranians as a bunch of medieval fanatics. And the one thing they would not accept from the government was to portray this as a religious war and this would come up because the- from time to time Saddam’s regime tried to force the families to bury their dead as martyrs, you know, not watch them and bury them in their own blood and this really infuriated the Shia. They said this is not a religious war, this is a war against these alien Persians. They’re view of course is the hordes of central Asia start at the border with Iran. So, and as far as the Hezbollah’s concern in Lebanon, I see in many respects the Hezbollah is very Lebanese. Now, they have tie- sure they have ties and they have a major Atallah among the Hezbollah, but I don’t think that especially under current conditions in Iran that they have any prospect of running a kind of joint Shia operation. Khomeini in the beginning you remember said he was starting an Islamic revolution and was also for Sunnis and then that didn’t work and then he portrayed it as a Shia revolution, and then it deteriorated into an Iranian revolution. I don’t see these people as getting together. The Alawites are very different breed in Syria. They don’t have any particular liking for his Hezbollah and others except they have common interests, and for them they’re fairly isolated in the Arab world and for them the tie of Iran is a very important one, but if they could get a high enough price, they would give it up in a minute, I think. You could make a deal with the Syrians but you would have a hard time meeting their price I think.