Prosser Gifford: Good evening, I'm Prosser Gifford the director of scholarly programs here at the library. It's my pleasure to welcome you to this special book talk on the occasion of a brand new book, by Sadako Ogata. I'll introduce briefly our three panelists. If I introduced them fulsomely there wouldn't be any time for our program. And then I will turn it over to Dana Priest who will conduct a conversation between General Clark and Mrs. Ogata. Sadako Ogata is President of the Japan International Cooperation Agency, which for those of you who do not know is equivalent of the USAID. In addition she Chairs the Advisory Board on Human Security a follow up to the commission on human security which she co-chaired with Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Professor Amartya Sen. She also serves as special representative of the Prime Minister of Japan on Afghanistan assistance. As everyone here I believe knows she served as United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for ten years, which is indeed the subject of the book, and was, Independent expert of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, on the human rights situation in Myanmar, representative of Japan on the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary at the permanent missioner of Japan, the United States where she previously served as minister. Prior to her diplomatic career she had an academic career as dean of the faculty of foreign studies at Sofia University. She received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. General Clark is, again as everybody in the audience knows, one of the nations most distinguished retired military officers. During his 33 years of service in the United States Army he held numerous staff and command positions rising to the rank of Four-Star General and NATO Supreme Allied Commander. He's now in the private sector, Chairman and CEO of the Wesley K. Clark and Associates and advisory and consulting firm. From 1997 through May of 2000 General Clark was NATO Supreme Allied Commander and Commander in Chief of the United States European command. In this position General Clark commanded Operation Allied Force, NATO's first major combat action, which saved over a million and a half Albanians from ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Before that, the year before '96- 97, he served as Commander in Chief of the United States southern command Panama where he was responsible for the direction of U.S. Military activities in Latin America and the Caribbean. I could go on, let me just say that he is of course a graduate of the United States Military Academy and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford from Arkansas in 1966, two years before another Rhodes scholar from Arkansas who became even more famous. Dana Priest covers the intelligence community for the Washington Post and is also an analyst for NBC News. She's worked at The Post for 15 years where she was the Pentagon correspondent for six years and then wrote exclusively about the military as an investigative reporter. She was one of the first reporters on the ground for the invasion of Panama. Reported from Iraq in late 1990 just before the war began, and covered the 1999 Kosovo war from airbases in Europe. I think you can begin to see the connections here. She's written extensively for the Post about the nation's four regional Commanders in Chief, Army Special Forces training programs overseas, and the 1999 Kosovo air war and the army's peacekeeping mission in Bosnia and Kosovo. She was awarded a Macarthur Foundation research and writing grant and she won the Gerald R Ford Prize for distinguished reporting on national defense. So you have here a very distinguished panel. Let me just say a brief word about the format. After the conversation we will open it up to questions from the floor. Please make them questions and not statements -- [ laughter ] -- and keep them brief so that others can have the same privilege and then after that Mrs. Ogata, I was going to say sit, but the chairs have all disappeared, we will produce a chair for her to sit at that table and sign books for those of you who bought the books, which are available outside. And now Dana Priest, it's yours. Dana Priest: Thank you. Well I'm so happy to be here and when I was first asked to moderate this I thought this was such an intriguing pairing because really even though they came from extremely different worlds and backgrounds both these individuals represent the two sides of the coin, which is to try to give time for political, or give time and space for political solution to the world's crises, and I know that that's caused a lot of frustration, too, when the political leaders don't step in and take that space as quickly as they should. And over the years as you all have read the military and the UN humanitarian organizations have learned to work together and have been thrown together a lot of times in different locations. And that's really what I wanted to start with, a question for Mrs. Ogata is: you go through four scenarios Northern Iraq, Afghanistan, the Great Lakes region and the Balkans and throughout that one of the common themes you talk about is working with the military or underneath the air strikes of the military or dealing with the refugees who are in the process of fleeing military action. So I wanted you to tell us what's the most difficult thing about working with the military? And in this experience can pull out some lessons learned for how do you make that relationship work better? Sadako Ogata: Well, thank you very much. There are moments when working with the military is not easy. At the same time I had to work with lots of other organizations and agencies that were a lot more difficult to work with. [ laughter ] The military is a very organized setup. The humanitarian is not all that organized. At the same time, if the purpose is very clear and we know the objectives, we can work with the military. At the same time it depends on what sort of military action is required. When the military is really trying to contain the situation, it's easier. But when the military is in combat situation, then how do you really work with them because the humanitarians are not in combat situation, I have to protect the victims as well as the staff and those are the times when working with the military becomes a bit difficult. Dana Priest: So did you develop or do you have some recommendations for developing communications that can facilitate that working relationship? I know that NGOs and other humanitarian organization always have a somewhat conflicted view of how closely they should be aligned with any military. Sadako Ogata: Well, the moments when it's difficult to be aligned so closely with the military is when the military tries to take on too much of a humanitarian posture. That is a rather difficult situation. But communicating very clearly I had no difficulty communicating directly with General Clark because it was clear, especially over Kosovo, what the military was trying to do was to have one clear objective, which was to have the Serb security forces withdrawal. That was very clear. But when the side effect of that action became a flood of refugees going to Albania and Macedonia, that I think complicated my job. But it complicated the military's job as well because that was a side effect that was not quite calculated. Dana Priest: So General Clark, what was the most difficult thing working with the NGO community? And are there lessons that you learned in your Balkans experience in particular about how to make that relationship work better, and maybe even where the limits are? General Clark: Well, first of all, Working with Sadako Ogata was a pleasure and it wasn't difficult. And the reason was she had very clear views, very clear standards. She a good strong organization and they were always easy to reach and coordinate with. And her people were on the ground and they were experienced and they were often more knowledgeable than the military people who had just come into the theater. Difficulty came in that there are other nongovernmental organizations than the UNHCR. The most difficult of all the situations was we were running the bombing in Kosovo and we had some nongovernmental organizations who insisted on delivering relief supplies in the middle of bombing runs. We couldn't contact them. We certainly were not going to tell them in advance where the targets were. We often didn't know where the targets were at my level because they were targets of opportunity on Serb forces and these were trucks moving on the road and they weren't marked and no one knew who was in these trucks. So ultimately their movement stopped what most of the Europeans wanted us to do, which was to take more direct action against ethnic cleansing. Dana Priest: So how do you at the same time now alert them, but alert them. In other words try to get them not to do certain things on a given day? General Clark: You can't because the organizations, not the UNHCR but other nongovernmental organizations, they all operate on their own drumbeat. And so it was perfectly reasonable for these, I think this was a Greek nongovernmental organization. They never supported the fact that we were going to take military action against the Serbs anyways. And there was a certain mindset that some of them had that they would be able to forestall our military action by delivering humanitarian supplies and they were successful at doing so. And so we had to operate around that. It was just, it's one more factor of difficulty in clutter on the battlefield. It's one more reason why the application of force can't be done from 20,000 feet effectively in many situations. You've got to have other options. You can't rely on only a single dimension to apply extreme pressure. Dana Priest: Now one of the things you just mentioned was sometimes the concern is that the military might take on too much of a relief role, and I know from being with troops on the ground in Kosovo that they felt pushed in to that because the relief organizations weren't as big and as you said not as organized. So how do you make sure that that doesn't happen and how to you try to help them so that they can actually step into the breach or is it possible to do that? Sadako Ogata: In Kosovo it became very difficult for NATO I think because you were doing air strikes, bombing from 20,000 feet, you said. And at the same time you wanted to show that you were doing this for the people. And so there was a contradiction in the posture, which I think gave the kind of signals to the NGOs, which way are you really running? But I'd like to just qualify UNHCR was not born to just work with the military. When we started this closer relations this is because the nature of the war had changed from being interstate kind of wars to internal conflicts in the 1990s, and this was something that was very new to UNHCR. A very good example was when we were delivering goods through Bosnia and the [ unintelligible ] , this was the UN peacekeeping forces was mandated to assist us which meant that they wanted to cover the convoys that ran through conflict areas and our colleagues were very uncomfortable. They wanted to go without military escort. But when the war became one in which was fighting between peoples and between military all over the place. You had to have some escort to make sure that the road was clear that there were no attacks while we were delivering. So gradually we had to receive the assistance. And this is how we got to -- so that more serious the war needs to be on the ground in conflict situation, this relationship had to be developed. Dana Priest: Can you explain why NGOs or humanitarian groups would have problems being guarded by the military? Sadako Ogata: I think because they want to keep a principle position, but the security coverage was something that UNHCR undertook on behalf of all the NGOs as well. This was one thing as the lead UN organization in charge of refugees. We try to help them maintain security information provided to the NGOs as well. This was in Kosovo as well. Dana Priest: And General Clark, you know many of your soldiers would complain about the humanitarian mission. I think on the one side they liked it because it was something that was so positive for the population. On the other hand this was not what they were trained for. How do you pass more of that? Is there a way to pass more of that to the humanitarian organizations that are by nature smaller when you're operating in the same areas? General Clark: I think you're asking key questions. But let me say first of all that it wasn't always soldiers on the ground who complained to us. Sadako, who came to my office in the middle of this and complained that I was trying to do her job. But there was a reason why this had to be done because in the Balkans the object of these campaigns was ethnic cleansing. So the people were forcing the people out or retaining the people. The people became the weapons in the larger campaign. So take the case of Kosovo first, where we worked closely together. When Milosevic forced the Albanian population of Kosovo out of the capital of Pristina by putting them on trains it wasn't, he may have said it was an accident, I won't believe that because he knew very well that Macedonia is an ethnically balanced society. President Gligorov had already told me, and if he told me before the war started it certainly would have been known in the region that he would accept maybe 100,000 Albanians, more than that the government was going to fall. At three o'clock on a Saturday morning of Easter weekend, as I recall the date in 1999, suddenly these people started being shoved. Sixty thousand people coming through the border at crossings there at Bloche [ spelled phonetically ] and Mike Jackson called me, the commander on the ground and he said, "The government is going to fall, I'm going to be told if I don't take care of these Albanian refugees they are going to ask me to leave." I called president Gligorov that morning and I assured him we would do what we could. So it became a strategic function of the armed forces to take care of the refugees right then and there lest we destabilize our host country. There wasn't time to let it be handled. Conversely in Albania, what was happening was the Albanians of course were happy to have to other Albanians there. They expressed full political solidarity, but we couldn't have the refugees collected and remaining in the area near the border with Kosovo at Kukish. Because if they were at Kukish they would be targets for the Serbs, and if we ever were going to have a ground option we wanted to have those avenues of approach cleared out so that the Serbs would not be able to retaliate against refugees if NATO decided to do something militarily on the ground against the Serbs to get them out of Kosovo. So there the mission was to help move the refugees into an area that was less sensitive, and less vulnerable to attack. So, for reasons of military and political necessity, dealing with the refugees became more than a humanitarian issue. Just the similar, exact circumstances weren't present and they won't be present in any other conflict. But let's take the case in Bosnia. There what the UNHCR was doing was frustrating the Serbs intent to ethnically cleans Eastern Bosnia. It was clear, and it was well understood by the United States and western nations that they were asking the UNHCR to undertake these supply missions with the deliberate purpose of frustrating ethnic cleansing. And of course the Serbs knew this. So what the Serbs wanted to do was do everything they could to defeat the UNHCR without bringing down NATO intervention or the intervention of the great powers. So Milosevic knew just how hard he could shake the tree before the apples fell on his head and he would bump it. And so if you read Mrs. Ogata's book she talks about on occasion their supply convoys were targeted and a man was shot and somebody at the airport was shot. It may have been accidental in a particular circumstance, but the policy of pushing the UNHCR to try to break them without actually attacking them was part of the Serb military campaign run by General Milodich [ spelled phonetically ] . He knew exactly what he was doing and so in this case, as Sadako has said, we where in a new situation. We weren't just providing humanitarian relief, we the western world. We were actually one way or another intervening to try to work against something we find abhorrent, which is ethnic cleansing. Dana Priest: Did you feel the same way? Sadako Ogata: What General Wesley says is correct. What we were trying to do was, we can sort of cover that phase, but I wanted very much, and this is when I would complain, that political action take place because we can keep that period humanitarian assistance is not just giving goods, it's about being present among these people to show that the people who were victims were taken care of. The international community had not abandoned them. This is a very important message about being present. But we cannot do that forever. And this is where I think I wanted more action quickly at the political level because negotiations of what kind of a new state of Yugoslavia comes out. That was at the bottom of the issue. And so I complained that we did not want to turn into a humanitarian fig leaf. And that I'm afraid, I must have said that in my desperation. But that word went around. [ laughter ] General Clark: Well but it was true. The UNHCR was being used because the western countries were unable to agree and push to the United Nations the kind of stronger proposals that were required to bring a political solution to the conflict. This is unfortunate, but it is exactly what happened. It's what happens when you don't have other means available to resolve a conflict and when the international community is split and divided. And so the United States, which had suffered its own problems at the time in Somalia when it had put its own forces on the ground, was reluctant. You know when I was reading your book it made my blood boil to see the kinds of pressure that we subjected humanitarian workers to, and we in the west and in the United States, standing for what we stand for, we put up with it, we tolerated it. We failed to come forward decisively until the mortar incident in Sarajevo in 1995 in which we finally said enough is enough to Milosevic and then you know we did a short bombing campaign and then I remember Milosevic telling us as we were meeting with him, and he's saying to Holbrook he said, "Oh Mr. Holbrook you must stop this bombing its so bad for peace!" It was bad for his version of the peace. But, you know, he was prepared to do everything he could do to -- he didn't care about the people there. He wanted to bump them as far as he could to get them out of there. And it was the courage of the UNHCR and its unarmed workers and their idealism that helped prevail in that circumstance. Sadako Ogata: Well if I made your blood boil it was worth writing I think. [ laughter ] General Clark: There were a lot of things in that decade. Something you said in the book that really struck me was you said you know the structure of the international community crumbled in 1990. And in each of the countries in the west we've had our own difficulties coming to terms with this and you were in the front lines with your organization because the crumbling was expressed as these states falling apart and people, unscrupulous people, using force to gain their own ends. And we didn't have the political will, the consensus, the strategy that was necessary to take action, but we could all join and feel that there was a humanitarian issue. And that is why the UNHCR were the front lines and you were the front line general in that period. Sadako Ogata: Well we were certainly. The humanitarian agencies, the UNHCR, UNICEF, these were all on the front lines when we called ourselves the front lines organizations. But there was a limit to what we can do and this is what was very frustrating for me, as you understand. Dana Priest: Were you limited by your numbers and resources or by your political mandate? Sadako Ogata: Well I don't have 5,000 foot soldiers for example. That's a big difference. [ laughter ] Dana Priest: Would it help if he could [ unintelligible ] you some, borrow them for a minute? Or is that not [ unintelligible ] . Sadako Ogata: Well, the fact of that, in fact, happened and the Bloche in Macedonia for example. General Jackson understood he should go in but he understood that he should get out quickly too. And so these are things that happened there, but at least in the Balkans there was focus. And if I could just express my frustration over the great lakes region in Africa we could not get not even the military to assist the humanitarians. This was a whole area in which there we no real international readiness to correct the situation. General Clark: Well so many people here have probably seen the movie Hotel Rwanda. Sadako Ogata: I haven't seen it yet. General Clark: I haven't seen it -- [ laughter ] -- but I lived through. I lived through it in the Pentagon. I lived through it in my duties as the J5, I was responsible for coordinating the U.S. response to the international situation through the U.N. And of course we didn't know everything with the clarity that we know it today, but we knew something terribly wrong was happening. But the United States was recovering from the previous October in Somalia and it had been a severe political trauma to have 18 U.S. soldiers die there. And it had really dimmed the bright light of expeditionary operations. In fact you know we were talking about how to get out of Somalia at the very time you know we went back and someone said prepare a plan for intervention in Rwanda. We looked into it, about 20,000 soldiers, a couple of billion dollars. And somebody said we're going to go to Congress, we're going to put 20,000 Americans in the middle of Rwanda. And our national interest there exactly is what? You see we didn't have the strategy. Now, President Clinton said he very much regrets that, he said that. And as one of the staff officers involved you know I made up my mind afterwards I'd never let something happen like that again if I could prevent it, which is part of the reason we responded in Kosovo the same way. It was 1994; there wasn't a strategy. We didn't understand, we hadn't conveyed it to the American people, and the same thing is happening in Darfur today. Sadako Ogata: Now, it is very difficult to decide how to intervene and when to intervene. And I am not really advocating military interventions all the time, but when there is a crucial point when all the others means of intervention, and I would call humanitarian assistance a way of intervening in order to protect the people against all the, what shall I say, war liking, whether it's the warlords or the militias or whatever you have to protect the ordinary people. And for that international presence, it could be police presence, it could be observers. All these things have to be still worked out. There are not enough really intervening means of protecting people available. But at the very, very last stand, and I remember when NATO did air strikes over Gorash [ spelled phonetically ] I remember, that finished it. And at that time the political negotiations, the American led ones, started really to have an effect. So there are times when that is important, but we shouldn't let situations come to a point when a military intervention becomes necessary. Dana Priest: Do you think we're at that point in Darfur now that we have to intervene, or -- ? Sadako Ogata: Well, I think that at Darfur -- I don't know Darfur very well at all. I have not been there. But there are some six million Sudanese who are either refugees or displaced and something had to be done and something has to be done now. But at least in over Darfur I know it's inadequate, but the African Union is trying very hard to send their observers. And I think that all help should be given to the Africans trying to do something about themselves. Dana Priest: Do you have in your mind a formula for deciding when it is time to intervene? I hear this question a lot asked of people who have had a lot of experience in this area. Sadako Ogata: In Bosnia, I think a little earlier intervention might have prevented a lot more lives from being lost. In the great lakes region, yes. There was a point in '96 I think when there were all the refugee camps were attacked. And about a million people were lost from the refugee camps, and the attack took place from within Zaire. There was revolution going on. And then Rwanda wanted to clean up the refugee camps. So there was attack on all the refugee camps. And finally, finally the Security Council decided to send a force. And before the force arrived the refugees were all -- the camps were attacked and the refugees were sort of forced back. And after that UNHCR and a lot of the NGOs too all worked to rescue the people who were lost in Zaire. And I wished that the military would have been more active in helping these people out in the jungle. It was very difficult. But then the coalition forces decided that they had done enough and they couldn't find any more people so it's true. Dana Priest: Do you have a concept in your mind when it is time? How do you finally decide that? Is every case just so different you can't have a model to judge it by? General Clark: Well President Clinton said when you can make a difference, you should. Conceivably there are places where you can't make a difference. But I think that when you look at these humanitarian situations, which are very seldom humanitarian. The tsunami of course is a clear example of a humanitarian situation that has no political overtones. Nobody caused the earthquake. The case that Sadako is describing in Africa of course is not that way. Those refugee camps held Hutu organizations there. Iteramwees [ spelled phonetically ] were there and organized. And so as far as the Rwandan military was concerned, they were legitimate targets. They were armed; they were bases of future invasion back into Rwanda. This is the difficulty that you get into in humanitarian operations. You cannot disarm camps and keep them disarmed unless you're willing to put the military resources in to do it and then to protect the people and provide them security. Those equations haven't been worked out very well. In general we had the conditions worked out for when to intervene back in 1995. And it has to do with when you're interests draw in largely, not oil, but humanitarian values are affected. When all other means have been tried, when you have the appropriate resources and can make a difference. When you can sustain the intervention with political support at home, you go in with an international coalition with an established alliance if possible and unilaterally only as a last resort. And you always do it with minimum force and maximum diplomatic effort along the way. There were a list of 8 or 10 of these criteria that we worked out and you simply have to go through it and apply them in every case. I think one thing though is clear about intervention: you've got to tell in a democracy, you've got to be transparent, and you've got to tell people the truth about why you're going in. You can't hype it. It has to be straight, and political leadership then has to take the consequences of straight talk. And that's a very difficult thing to do sometimes. Dana Priest: That reminds me that there was a General Shelly Kashfeeli [ spelled phonetically ] who promised to Congress that you'd be in Bosnia in just one year. So talking straight is sometimes hard for all sides I guess when you're trying to convince Congress to go along. General Clark: Well that's exactly right. It is very hard to lay these kinds of conditions out and be totally candid and straightforward. I would say this that when I first heard the one year time limit I'd missed a meeting at the White House and somebody called me on the telephone at home and told me, "Oh by the way they decided its only going to last for..." I giggled because it was clear that it wasn't going to happen in a year. But when I was doing part of Dick Holbrooke's negotiating team, we we're negotiating with the Bosnians on this, it turned out to be a fairly wise negotiating tactic to say we we're only going to be there one year, because as far as the Bosnians were concerned, of course they wanted us to stay forever. What they wanted to say is, "Ah you'll be here until we have elections, oh, we can't have elections for at least five years." [ Laughter ] Meanwhile, the Serbs said it would be better if NATO not come but if you come, come in small numbers and leave quickly. So setting the one-year deadline was important diplomatically. It did convey the wrong impression initially and it subjected the administration to great difficulties afterwards in justifying the continuation of the meeting. But if I could say this, as one of the veterans of that period, I think we had a better way of expressing how long we were going to stay in Bosnia through the matrices that laid out what the conditions were for exit and the quarterly tracking that we provided to the Congress and the United Nations on the duration of that mission. It was a more transparent mission continuation decision process than what we are seeing today in Iraq. Dana Priest: Well with that as a segue, we want to bring this up to ask some questions about the current situation. What do you think prospects are for Afghanistan and how can the UNHCR, as small as it is and with so many problems in Afghanistan, hope to really make a difference and can it do it without a bigger military presence? Sadako Ogata: Well in Afghanistan the military presence will be necessary. But when you look at post-war Bosnia at the end, I think the number of peacekeepers you had there was about 30,000, but in order to keep the peace after the peace agreement you had to have 60,000 people. And I think that is a very important lesson that to keep the peace even after peace agreement, which is always fragile, is something that you have to take it much more seriously. Afghanistan, I think is not doing too badly. I was there again in December; I went to not only Kabul but also to Kandahar area. There is some dividends of peace. There is some recovery; I mean 5 million children in school is not a small thing. More than 4 million people, refugees in intern in this place, have gone back. I'm not saying that they're in very, very good condition, not all of them. But they're back and they're trying to get some jobs done, a little bit here and there. And then there is a government who was elected. That election process, we all worried there was some insecurity, but it worked. And three years ago when you think of how it was it's not doing too bad. And of course there is the popular question that there's still -- and get the economy now moving is a real problem. But there was enough concerted attention internationally, U.S. involved, Europeans, Japan was involved. Now they're trying to keep the security. At least get the social conditions improved for the people. These were very basic things that I think were moving and I hope this kind of concerted attention would be important to be repeated in other places. UNHCR really led the repatriation, and I think it's important that the first step for peace is in how refugees start going back. And this is something, a start, that has to be attended, treasured and really bring in a lot of resources there. So war starts when people flee. War ends when people go back. And there I think UNHCR has a very important role to play in war and in peace. Dana Priest: Can you share that view an optimistic one on in Afghanistan or -- ? General Clark: I think both Afghanistan and Iraq are doable. This is not like Vietnam in either case. Vietnam we were facing a super power conflict. The military instrument was much less capable. If we sustain our involvement, if we work, if we can move beyond humanitarian assistance into economic development in Afghanistan if we can get rid of the opium, poppy as the national crop, and move into something else, we got a chance. Afghanistan is on strategic terrain. It is a natural conduit. It has natural gas and other resources. It is prime agricultural territory if you can bring water back and plant the orchards that they have. You can grow wheat there. There is a lot that you can do in Afghanistan if we'll provide the wherewithal and the education for people to do it. And yes there are still terrorists there, and there is still the threat of Islamic extremism there so we can never neglect that. Much of what happens to Afghanistan is going to depend on what happens in Pakistan. And that's a much more difficult problem for outsiders to influence. As far as Iraq is concerned, the terrain, the military, the demographics, this is not Vietnam. It may be an incredibly difficult problem but it's not Vietnam. Dana Priest: Do you mean it's better or it's worse? [ laughter ] General Clark: I mean that in Vietnam, essentially in 1973 we left behind, inside South Vietnam, the North Vietnamese army. It was left behind inside South Vietnam because, well there was no way to attack it and negotiations inevitably reflect the balance of power on the ground. We wanted out. We wanted our prisoners repatriated. And we wanted to remove this as an issue in the American political system. So we accepted something that we couldn't fix militarily. We spent years bombing the Ho Chi Minh trail only to find afterwards that it was as faulted, the trees were laced together. That there were bunkers that were virtually impervious to anything but a direct hit from a 2000 lb bomb. We built base camps in Vietnam in places like Koochi [ spelled phonetically ] only to find that they were built on top of a tunnel headquarters filled with enemy soldiers 40 feet underground beneath our division headquarters in Koochi. So I think that the scale of the fighting, the difference between U.S. military capabilities and the opposition's capabilities is so much great now. And especially in that terrain that that level of resistance can't succeed in Iraq. In other words the Vietcong were able, or the North Vietnamese were able to still mask battalions and regiments against us despite our airpower and everything in Vietnam. There are no battalions of insurgents masking against U.S. forces. We're not having isolated outposts overrun. They can hardly fire mortars off a truck without being chased down the street by apache helicopters. So we are being hit by improvised explosive devices. There is an insurgency going on. It's very serious, and people are dying and it's wrong. But it's principally being targeted now in an effort to provoke sectarian violence and prevent the emergence of a cohesive state. I think Iraq has always been a more doable post conflict situation than popular opinion here may have given it credit for because it wasn't handled well. That having been said, you know the consequence of Iraq is liable to be a state which is profoundly disturbing to many others states in the Middle East simply because of its Shiite majority and the potential connection to Iran. So it's not clear even if the United States succeeds in getting a stable, secure, somewhat democratic government in place in Iraq that it will be a long-term agent of regional stability. Dana Priest: So I'm going to open it for questions and as you're thinking about it we have one microphone over here, but I would like to ask you a follow up as you search for a hand maybe. Mrs. Ogata, can I ask you one follow-up on the Iraq question? Sadako Ogata: Yes. Dana Priest: Is the UNHCR prepared to come in, in much larger numbers once the violence? Sadako Ogata: If there is a need for coming in at much larger numbers, but there were very limited refugee outflow from the current Iraqi situation. There were refugees who fled in '91, but in the current situation that is very limited. Dana Priest: Okay, right up in front here.