John Burns on the Hugh Hewitt Show

I missed the broadcast, but the transcript from Hugh Hewitt's interview with the New York Times' John Burns has been posted at hughhewitt.townhall.com.

An excerpt:

HH: I’m talking with John Burns, London bureau chief of the New York Times, five years a veteran of the war in Iraq, where he served as bureau chief for the New York Times. Mr. Burns, stepping back and recalling the time when the surge got underway, and you have a very extensive relationship with David Petraeus, and from our previous conversations, I know you admire him quite a lot. Did you give him any chance to have achieved what has been achieved there? Or is this what you expected would happen?

JB: You know, I don’t think…as speaking for myself, I was pretty skeptical, as I think most of us were. We had seen four years in which the situation at every turn that we hoped for a turn for the better appeared to turn for the worse. It’s now commonplace in Washington, D.C., to say that the war was well on its way to being lost by December by 2006. And so you know, if you’d been a betting man, you’d have had to say that the odds were heavily against the kind of success that General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker have had there. And it’s not alone, of course, the fact that they’ve had an additional 30,000 American troops, which are now in the process of being withdrawn. But other factors, all of which, if you will, one connected to the other, but the fact that the Sunni awakening, the turning, if you will, of very important elements in the Sunni community that had been either tacitly or overtly in support of the insurgency, who have now turned around and are working with the Coalition forces, the Americans and the Iraqis. That’s had a remarkable effect, as have had the ceasefire by Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite militia leader. There are many factors here, but however you measure it, the fact is that an enterprise which was attended by a great deal of skepticism when it began, a great deal of skepticism in Washington, D.C., in the Congress as you’ll recall, has had a remarkable success, which remains, as I think the phrase that General Petraeus used on the Hill a few weeks ago, it’s fragile and reversible.

Hewitt also asked Burns abot other metrics of success, such as business and electricity. Burns said that private enterprise is humming and that oil revenue has started to pour in, but that electricity and medical services will not progress significantly for a good while because of a lack of infrastructure.

Michael J. Totten on Iraqi opinion

A recent Iraqi public opinion poll by ABC/BBC contained plenty of good news for "stay the course" conservatives. Ed Morrissey, who jumped ship at his own Captain's Quarters blog to join Michelle Malkin's enterprise at Hot Air, already noted that Sunnis were overrepresented in the poll sample and that may have made the poll seem a bit worse than it was in actuality.

Freelance reporter Michael J. Totten offers an additional caution regarding Middle East opinion polls:

Two days ago ABC News released a new poll of Iraqi public opinion, and John Burns at the New York Times made a very perceptive observation that should be taken into account when looking it over.

Opinion polls, including those commissioned by the American command, have long suggested that a majority of Iraqis would like American troops withdrawn, but another lesson to be drawn from Saddam Hussein’s years is that any attempt to measure opinion in Iraq is fatally skewed by intimidation. More often than not, people tell pollsters and reporters what they think is safe, not necessarily what they believe. My own experience, invariably, was that Iraqis I met who felt secure enough to speak with candor had an overwhelming desire to see American troops remain long enough to restore stability.

This feels right to me, not only thanks to my experience in Iraq, but also in places like totalitarian Libya where no one dared criticize the regime in public, and where everyone I spoke to did so in private where they were safe. Saddam Hussein commanded a murder and intimidation regime in Iraq, and today’s insurgents wage a murder and intimidation campaign in the streets. In Fallujah and Ramadi, Iraqi civilians were murdered just for waving hello to Americans, and for accepting bags of rice as charity. Fear should not be ignored when gauging Iraqi public opinion, and that includes fear of American guns as well as fear of insurgents.

(commentarymagazine.com)

I'll add my own two cents. Poll questions are often worthless because of their ambiguity. I'm not convinced that the problem disappears in Arabic.

32. As you may know, British forces have mainly left Basra province in recent
months. Since the British left, do you think the security in Basra has become
better, become worse, or remained the same?

We don't care if you've never ever been near Basra. We want your opinion anyway.

*****

Reporter John Burns on the proposed timetable for withdrawal

Hugh Hewitt interviewed New York Times reporter John Burns last Friday and broadcast the interview over the first two hours of his radio show tonight.

It was a great interview, with plenty to chew on both good and bad.

Hewitt posted to his blog the same response I would have emphasized:

HH: One of the arguments for those favoring a timeline for withdrawal that’s written in stone is that it will oblige the Iraqi political class to get serious about such things as the oil revenue division. Do you believe that’s an accurate argument?

JB: Well, you would think it would be so, wouldn’t you, that the threat of withdrawal of American troops, and the risk of a slide into catastrophic levels of violence, much higher than we’ve already seen, would impel the Iraqi leadership to move forward. But there’s a conundrum here. There’s a paradox. That’s to say the more that the Democrats in the Congress lead the push for an early withdrawal, the more Iraqi political leaders, particularly the Shiite political leaders, but the Sunnis as well, and the Kurds, are inclined to think that this is going to be settled, eventually, in an outright civil war, in consequence of which they are very, very unlikely or reluctant, at present, to make major concessions. They’re much more inclined to kind of hunker down. So in effect, the threats from Washington about a withdrawal, which we might have hoped would have brought about greater political cooperation in face of the threat that would ensue from that to the entire political establishment here, has had, as best we can gauge it, much more the opposite effect, of an effect that persuading people well, if the Americans are going, there’s absolutely no…and we’re going to have to settle this by a civil war, why should we make concessions on that matter right now?
(HughHewitt@townhall.com)

Find the transcript of the entire interview here.

Reporter John Burns on the Charlie Rose Show

And there`s no doubt that the price of staying is very, very high in American blood, to begin with, and American treasure too.

But it seems to me incontrovertible that the most likely outcome of an American withdrawal any time soon would be cataclysmic violence. And I find that to be widely agreed amongst Iraqis, including Iraqis who strongly opposed the invasion. And especially amongst Sunnis, a minority who ruled here, whose power was usurped by the invasion and who now find themselves facing Shiite militias and 350,000 man and woman Shiite-led Iraqi security force, that`s to say army and police, which is overwhelmingly Shiite and would be likely, first of all, to disintegrate in the face of a civil war, but with its principal units falling on the Shiite, not the Sunni side of that war.
--John Burns

John Burns is a reporter for the New York Times.

Makes for quite a contrast with the reporting-from-afar that we received from Kaleem Omar, eh?

Hat tip to Captain's Quarters.

Update: The video embed from the Charlie Rose Show site doesn't appear to be working--if it's not working, go here.