www.aei.org/events/contentID.20031003144313426/default.asp
"Turkey at the Crossroads" Monday, September 22, 2003 LUNCHEON KEYNOTE Transcript prepared from a tape recording - - - MR Lachman: What I am wanting to do is to move on to the next stage of our session today. We're very fortunate to have as our lunchtime speaker Richard Perle, who is probably well-known to all of you. Richard Perle is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Before that, Richard Perle served during the 1980s as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy in the United States. He was also Chairman of the NATO High-Level Defense Group, and currently he is on the Defense Policy Board. Mr Perle's expertise extends very widely, but he does have a keen interest in Middle East affairs, and Mr Perle is going to address us in what I'm sure is going to be a very interesting discussion. But before I call Mr Perle to the podium, I was just wanting to acknowledge Mr Kerakimech (ph) of the group. We're fortunate to have him with us, and we are grateful that you have come along. Mr Kerakimech is pretty much an example of a Turkish success story, and I think it very much follows up the discussion that we had this morning of the need for entrepreneurship in Turkey, having converted a family business into a truly large international conglomerate that is so important to the Turkish economy. It's an example that could very well be emulated and give us some encouragement for Turkey's future. Just with those few words, I'd ask Richard Perle to address us.
We are honored to have the support and friendship of an industrial group that has shown the way in Turkey, modern business practices across a large variety of activities, operating in many countries in the world, and with enormous effectiveness and skill. So we thank you very much indeed for your support and congratulate you on the great success you've achieved. I want to say a little bit about some very immediate issues, a little bit about the United States and Turkey, of course, in the aftermath of the liberation of Iraq, a little bit about the situation in Iraq, and then something about the war on terrorism, which is now the central preoccupation of the Government of the United States, is likely to remain the central concern of any American government, whether a continuation of this administration or a successor from the other party, because I believe that the impact of September 11 on American policy, while understood in this country, for the most part is poorly understood outside the United States, and it leads often to a failure to appreciate the driving concerns of the American administration and the American people. I think we missed an important opportunity to collaborate in the liberation of Iraq, and I regret that. And I believe there are a number of Turks who regret it as well. I watched that situation develop, as I know many others in this room did, with a sense that if we were communicating better and more effectively, we could almost certainly have sorted out the issues that, in the end, became an obstacle to collaboration. I think it was in part the newness of the Turkish Government and its lack of experience in handling crises. And this was probably the first political crisis of that new government. And that distinguishes the failure of Turkey to work with us from the failure of some others to work with us who knew exactly what they were doing, who had no claim to crisis that would excuse their failure to work with us or even their opposition. And so while it will take a long time to rebuild the relations with some countries, I don't think that is the case with Turkey, and I think we have already--we are already looking at those events through a rearview mirror. It's a pity that Turkey wasn't alongside us going into Iraq, not least of all because there are such important Turkish interests next door. I think it might have been different if it had been understood in Turkey that this was a war that would be over in three weeks with hardly any casualties, hardly any Iraqi casualties. But the specter of war was widely misunderstood in Turkey and, for that matter, around the world. People expected large numbers of casualties, if not on the American side, on the Iraqi side. And what we saw in that conflict was in many ways the first modern war, the first war in which weapons of extraordinary precision were used in a manner that reflected the ability to distinguish targets. We've had smart weapons for some time now, but finally the doctrine for the use of smart weapons has caught up with the technology, and this war was planned and executed in a way that was intended--as it should have been since it was a war of liberation--to minimize the damage that would be done to Iraqis, to Iraq's ability to rebuild itself after that war, which is why the bridges were still standing when the war was over. It is why the basic infrastructure was carefully protected. There is a great deal to do in Iraq, and I will come to that in a moment, but very little damage from the military action that liberated 25 million people after three decades of tyranny. So we've seen what can be done, and there were undoubtedly those who feared a very different kind of war, and so it's perhaps understandable that the polls were so heavily weighted against military action. Had people understood what was coming, we might have seen a different result. We face now a very large challenge in Iraq in the aftermath of this war. But I want to tell you that things in Iraq are a good deal better than you would believe if you were dependent on the press reporting that is coming from Iraq, and even more if you were dependent on commentators who were not in Iraq discussing the situation as they imagine it to be. Every incident in which an American is killed or a bomb is detonated is reported. What is not reported is the positive side of the picture in Iraq, the fact, for example, that every Iraqi student, from kindergarten through university, is now in a classroom--unless he prefers to be elsewhere--and schools are open. It is rather more than you can say for France these days where a teachers' strike has threatened yet another academic year. In towns and villages across the country, city councils have been established, and for the first time the people of Iraq at the local level are making decisions that affect their destiny on the basis of the will of those citizens and not at the dictate of Saddam Hussein. We've pretty much now restored electrical power to pre-war levels and have done that despite the acts of sabotage, desperate acts of sabotage that are intended to assure that we will not succeed, acts of sabotage undertaken by the bitter-end remnant of Saddam Hussein's regime. These are the people who are known to their neighbors for their participation in his reign of terror, the people who got up in the morning and went to their jobs in the prisons, who administered torture. And when this is unquestionably over, they will either face a trial or in some cases, if found first by the families of the victims, they are in mortal jeopardy. And they have some support from some of the money that was siphoned off from the Iraqi people over three decades. I think any urban area would be afflicted in the way Baghdad has been afflicted if the prisons were emptied. And, finally, there are outsiders who understand that a success, an undeniable success in Iraq--that is, the establishment of a decent regime and some hope for the future on the part of Iraqis--is a threat to their regimes, which allow no public participation in the decisions of government. Iraq is surrounded, with the exception of Turkey, by dictatorships, and those dictators have no interest whatsoever in demonstrating that the fruits of democracy can be brought to neighboring Iraq. And so they will do what they can to destroy the prospects of the Iraqi people for success. We've been much too slow to empower Iraqis to give them responsibility for their own future and their own destiny. I think if we communicated more effectively with the Iraqis, if we understood them better, if we listened more carefully to what they have to say, we would be ...
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