Sunday, April 17, 2005
Meet the Press
This morning's MEET THE PRESS with host Tim Russert included an excellent interview with Dexter Filkins of The New York Times and Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News. Both have just returned from Iraq.
The unedited transcript follows:
TIM RUSSERT: And we are back.
Dexter Filkins, Jim Miklaszewski, welcome both.
Iraq--Mik, you just got back on Friday. Our government leaders say they are cautiously optimistic. What did you find on the ground?
JIM MIKLASZEWSKI: What I found on the ground, Tim, was that the American troops still have a pretty high morale. They're still behind the mission 100 percent, but there's a growing concern among U.S. military leadership in Iraq that in this post-January 30 election period, when everybody goes so high on the fact that people stuck their fingers in the ink and declared that they were going to promote and actually participate in a democratic movement there in Iraq, that since that time, the slow rate of reconstruction in Iraq, the fact that 50 percent of men in parts of the Sunni triangle are still unemployed, that there's a growing dissatisfaction with the pace of democracy in Iraq may, in fact, lose the kind of momentum that had been gained during the election period.
MR. RUSSERT: Dexter Filkins, you spent the better part of two years in Iraq. What's your sense of how things are going?
DEXTER FILKINS: I think it's better. It feels better. I mean, you know, in the last four or five months, you've had two pretty significant events. One was the recapture of Fallujah, which had become a safe haven for the insurgents, and the other was the election, which I think gave a lot of Iraqis a sense that they were going to get their country back and they were going to be able to control its destiny. And I--just being on the streets there you can feel some of the anger having been drained away. And it's clearly not as violent as it was, you know, six months ago, five months ago when there were--I remember the month of August, there were 45 car bombs. Now, the level of violence, the number of attacks against American soldiers and Iraqi soldiers is down. The number of Iraqi recruits into the security services is way up. So at the moment, things are feeling a little better.
MR. RUSSERT: That's a very important point, because our exit strategy is to have enough Iraqis volunteer for military service and be trained so that our troops can come home. Realistically, how long, based on your reporting, do you believe it will take to have an Iraqi force in place that will allow the Americans to come home completely?
MR. FILKINS: "Completely" is the key word there. I mean, it's such a big job, and particularly--I mean, if you talk to the Iraqi commanders and the American commanders who are trying to do this, generally what they tell you now is that it's working, like so many other things. It's working in the Shiite areas. It's working in the Kurdish areas. It's not working that well in the Sunni areas. And that's kind of the--I mean, that's the linchpin for the whole enterprise. So I think it's hard to imagine. I don't like to make predictions, but it's hard to imagine that it won't be years, you know, maybe even a decade, before all the Americans could come home.
MR. RUSSERT: A long investment.
MR. FILKINS: Yes.
MR. RUSSERT: There are a lot of concerns, Mik, in the newspaper accounts I've been reading over the weekend where, as we put together this government, or the Iraqis put together their government of Shiites and Sunnis and Kurds, that there are some tensions, obviously, between the Sunnis and the Shiites, particularly. There's a standoff now in part of the country. What happens if the Iraqi government decides, "We have to put down this insurrection in the Sunni area," and the Sunnis in the government say, "Oh, come on. That's my neighborhood. You can't be going in there," and then they turn to the United States and say, "You're the honest broker; what do you think here?," what happens? How does this play out?
MR. MIKLASZEWSKI: That's a very perplexing question for U.S. military leaders. When I asked them about that very question--if the U.S. military, for example, should see an area where they need to launch an operation, yet the Iraqi political leadership says, "No, we don't want you to do that operation," the only thing they can say for now--Excuse me, Tim--is that it hasn't happened yet. But there is a strong likelihood that, as the Iraqi government gains more strength, they will, in fact, start to veto specific military operations. Again, it hasn't happened yet, but it's a very real concern on the part of the U.S. military down the road.
MR. RUSSERT: In fact, there's a headline in the Los Angeles Times today, Dexter Filkins: Iraqi leaders flexing muscles; U.S. officials may have limited influence on the direction of the new government. There was a sense, when we talk about Iraq, it's going to be a democracy, a model democracy in the Middle East. What, in fact, do you think is emerging from the political leadership in Iraq? How would you describe the government, the country, the philosophy?
MR. FILKINS: It's pretty divided at the moment. I mean, essentially, when the elections were finished, you basically had a split between the Shiite majority, which ultimately came to control the government. That's pretty theocratic. And there's going to be a big tug-of-war over the next few months as they write the constitution, which is the main purpose for this government, about the role of Islam and about a theocracy. But then that's about 50 percent of the National Assembly that was elected. The other half is pretty secular. I mean, you've got the Kurdish parties and you've got Allawi. And so it's very-- there's going to be a really big, I think, tug-of-war over the soul of the country.
MR. RUSSERT: One of the more interesting issue is that the new president, Talabani, who's Kurdish in the north, during his campaign said, `We should consider amnesty for the insurgents, perhaps even those who attacked American troops.' How does that play out?
MR. MIKLASZEWSKI: Well, it's not going sit very well with U.S. military commanders, but at the same time, they acknowledge that the government and the overall military operations, in fact, will fall into the hands of the Iraqi leadership. You know, that was a very strong point that the U.S. was trying to drive home for the past six months or so, that Iraq is now being run by Iraqis. You don't see the U.S. military briefings that we used to see during the height of the war, certainly, and even in the postwar conflict that lasted for well over a year. The U.S. military is trying to take a backseat in terms of a high profile, in terms of putting out any individuals to speak on behalf of the country of Iraq. So it'll be difficult for the U.S. to try to veto that. I suspect there's going be a lot of behind-the-scene negotiations.
MR. RUSSERT: How do you gauge the level and the intensity of the insurgency right now?
MR. MIKLASZEWSKI: By all accounts, the insurgency is still reeling from a number of successful operations, as Dexter pointed out, in Fallujah, and the continuing operations in the Baghdad area in particular. They've had some very major successes in rolling up insurgent and terrorist leadership. However, the U.S. military officials in Iraq are very pragmatic about this and say that there's enough money, there are enough disgruntled Iraqis around that this insurgency could go on for some time. It's not certainly at the level that it was, but you'll see that just in the past week, the number of IED--the improvised explosive device--and vehicle-borne IED attacks has sharply risen. That was anticipated by U.S. military leaderships. What they say is that the number of high-level, sustained attacks has been reduced, and the period between them is much longer. It's just taking the insurgency and the terrorists longer to regenerate.
MR. RUSSERT: Dexter Filkins, your dispatches are so rich with detail and understanding of what you're seeing and observing. Tell us about your life in Iraq. What do you do? Where do you live? How do you get up? How do you function as a reporter?
MR. FILKINS: Well, The New York Times has a huge operation there. It's very expensive. But it's...
MR. RUSSERT: Heavily guard?
MR. FILKINS: Very heavily guarded. We've got a couple of houses, we've got 20-foot-high concrete blast walls topped with barbed wire. There's armed guards, there's armored cars, searchlights, the whole thing.
MR. RUSSERT: How do you move around the city?
MR. FILKINS: You just try to do the best you can, you know. The--you go...
MR. RUSSERT: With guards?
MR. FILKINS: Usually with guards. I mean, you know, none of that's desirable. You want to be--as a reporter, you want to be as unintrusive as possible. You want to put people at ease. And--but that's not really possible anymore. So you can--things have gotten a little better. I mean, Baghdad is not as tense and as angry as it was even six months ago. But doing something like getting out of your car and walking around a neighborhood and just talking to people on the street, you can't really go that anymore. I mean you can do it for 20 minutes, you know, 25 minutes, and then get in your car and get out, because if you linger too long, you're putting yourself in danger.
MR. RUSSERT: Have you had any close calls?
MR. FILKINS: More than I can count, yeah.
MR. MIKLASZEWSKI: Even when you're accompanied by large numbers of American troops, if you're in one place for longer than 10 minutes, they start to get nervous, and they say, "Let's get this over with and move on," because word gets out very quickly who's where and how vulnerable they may be. So you really do, as Dexter said, have to keep moving.
MR. RUSSERT: There is a road, a highway from the airport to downtown Baghdad that's called the Road of Death by many. I understand there's a taxi service on that road to take someone from downtown to the airport.
MR. FILKINS: Yeah. There's actually a company in Baghdad that does nothing except offer rides to the airport and back. They've got an armored cars and some guards. And they charge $35,000 for...
MR. RUSSERT: Thirty-five thousand dollars?
MR. FILKINS: ...for a ride to the airport. And I think you know, if you miss your plane and you have to come back, it's another $35,000. But...
MR. RUSSERT: How long--is it six miles?
MR. FILKINS: I think it's about six miles, yeah. It's not a happy six miles. So, you know, they earn their money.
MR. RUSSERT: Why have we been unable--or the Iraqis unable to protect that road, that stretch?
MR. FILKINS: That's a real mystery. It's a really bad neighborhood that it goes through, and you know, people come in from both sides. And--but it's--you know, they'd have to occupy six miles of road 24 hours of day. I think in the dead of night, people come out and plant bombs and they stage attacks.
MR. MIKLASZEWSKI: The most heavily controlled city right now is Fallujah. You can't get into the city unless you go through a checkpoint. Traffic backs up for three or four hours at a time. It's heavily patrolled. There's a curfew from 8 PM to 5 AM. Yet last week they found five freshly made roadside bombs--they didn't detonate, fortunately--and it's believed that these bombs were made by people still in Fallujah with those weapon caches that still remain. And even when we were at the camp for a couple of days, there was the thump and boom of mortar attacks from within Fallujah, the most heavily guarded city in Iraq right now. It's just an impossible task, really, to control those--the Baghdad highway or large segments of Iraq because there are just too many people willing to either attack or blow themselves up on behalf of what they think is the insurgency or a fundamentalist or a terrorist cause.
MR. RUSSERT: Dexter, talk about life in Baghdad as opposed to prefall of Saddam. What is the average guy, the average lady--do they get up in the morning? Are they going to work? Is the city functioning? Are kids going school? Are the markets open? What do you see?
MR. FILKINS: All those things. I mean, the truth is, you know, on most days, Baghdad is a very normal, Middle Eastern city. You know, after the fall off Saddam, there was a huge economic boom. They took down all the duties, you know, the amount of car traffic has, you know, quadrupled or possibly more. The traffics--the streets are jammed, the schools are open. There's lots of commerce. So in that sense, it's a very vibrant, bustling place. It's just sort of punctuated by, you know, this terrible violence. But, you know, it's difficult to describe the country because you have these very dramatic moments of violence. But the truth is, you know, most of the time, it's pretty normal.
MR. RUSSERT: What about the newspapers, the television, the radio? What are the people in Iraq seeing and hearing? Is there honest and open debate?
MR. FILKINS: There is. Yeah, there's plenty of debate. I mean, the shadow of Saddam Hussein is still--still lingers over everybody, but--I mean, you can really see that. But one of the things that everybody bought after Saddam fell was satellite dishes. I mean, there's just zillions of them now. And so everybody gets everything from, you know, CNN to Al-Jazeera. So yeah, there's no shortage of information and opinions now.
MR. RUSSERT: Reconstruction--Mik, there was a lot of emphasis by our government that we were going to rebuild the infrastructure of Iraq. In fact, the former deputy defense secretary, Wolfowitz, said that the oil revenues that would be generated from increased production would begin to finance a lot of our military and economic operation. Every article I have read indicates that reconstruction is way behind schedule. What's happening?
MR. MIKLASZEWSKI: Again, I'll go back to Fallujah, because I was just there for a couple of days last week. Nine thousand homes and buildings in Fallujah were destroyed when the Marines went in in November. There have been 32,000 claims against the government by homeowners and business owners. Of those 32,000 claims, only 2,400 have been paid off so far. And when you walk in and--let's say your house is worth $10,000. They will only give you 20 percent of the amount of your claim for now. It's because--and those funds are controlled by the Iraqi government. They're husbanding those funds for use in the future. And as I stood next to the line of those claimants, all you have to do is ask them what their complaint is, and within seconds, their rage surfaces, so badly at one point the cameraman said to me, "Mik, we're about to start a riot here. I think we'd better leave."
And the current president of the temporary council, Sheik Khaled, admitted to me that the people in Fallujah are already growing impatient, and predicted it will take at least another year before reconstruction actually begins to take hold.
MR. FILKINS: If I could just jump in there--I mean, I think what's happened here--you know, Congress allocated $18 billion for reconstruction. And what's happened is, you know, it's a lot easier to kick a barn down than it is to build one. And so, so much of this money has had to be diverted for security training, for just security on the projects. I mean, on any given construction project, as much as 35 percent of the money goes to protecting the workers who are working on it. So the problem is just--has been the violence, and it's basically overwhelmed every attempt or most of the attempts to rebuild the country.
MR. RUSSERT: Dexter Filkins, Jim Miklaszewski, thank you both for keeping your fear and emotions in check and giving us those kinds of straightforward, candid reports.
© 2005 NBC News MEET THE PRESS
WTSjr
The unedited transcript follows:
TIM RUSSERT: And we are back.
Dexter Filkins, Jim Miklaszewski, welcome both.
Iraq--Mik, you just got back on Friday. Our government leaders say they are cautiously optimistic. What did you find on the ground?
JIM MIKLASZEWSKI: What I found on the ground, Tim, was that the American troops still have a pretty high morale. They're still behind the mission 100 percent, but there's a growing concern among U.S. military leadership in Iraq that in this post-January 30 election period, when everybody goes so high on the fact that people stuck their fingers in the ink and declared that they were going to promote and actually participate in a democratic movement there in Iraq, that since that time, the slow rate of reconstruction in Iraq, the fact that 50 percent of men in parts of the Sunni triangle are still unemployed, that there's a growing dissatisfaction with the pace of democracy in Iraq may, in fact, lose the kind of momentum that had been gained during the election period.
MR. RUSSERT: Dexter Filkins, you spent the better part of two years in Iraq. What's your sense of how things are going?
DEXTER FILKINS: I think it's better. It feels better. I mean, you know, in the last four or five months, you've had two pretty significant events. One was the recapture of Fallujah, which had become a safe haven for the insurgents, and the other was the election, which I think gave a lot of Iraqis a sense that they were going to get their country back and they were going to be able to control its destiny. And I--just being on the streets there you can feel some of the anger having been drained away. And it's clearly not as violent as it was, you know, six months ago, five months ago when there were--I remember the month of August, there were 45 car bombs. Now, the level of violence, the number of attacks against American soldiers and Iraqi soldiers is down. The number of Iraqi recruits into the security services is way up. So at the moment, things are feeling a little better.
MR. RUSSERT: That's a very important point, because our exit strategy is to have enough Iraqis volunteer for military service and be trained so that our troops can come home. Realistically, how long, based on your reporting, do you believe it will take to have an Iraqi force in place that will allow the Americans to come home completely?
MR. FILKINS: "Completely" is the key word there. I mean, it's such a big job, and particularly--I mean, if you talk to the Iraqi commanders and the American commanders who are trying to do this, generally what they tell you now is that it's working, like so many other things. It's working in the Shiite areas. It's working in the Kurdish areas. It's not working that well in the Sunni areas. And that's kind of the--I mean, that's the linchpin for the whole enterprise. So I think it's hard to imagine. I don't like to make predictions, but it's hard to imagine that it won't be years, you know, maybe even a decade, before all the Americans could come home.
MR. RUSSERT: A long investment.
MR. FILKINS: Yes.
MR. RUSSERT: There are a lot of concerns, Mik, in the newspaper accounts I've been reading over the weekend where, as we put together this government, or the Iraqis put together their government of Shiites and Sunnis and Kurds, that there are some tensions, obviously, between the Sunnis and the Shiites, particularly. There's a standoff now in part of the country. What happens if the Iraqi government decides, "We have to put down this insurrection in the Sunni area," and the Sunnis in the government say, "Oh, come on. That's my neighborhood. You can't be going in there," and then they turn to the United States and say, "You're the honest broker; what do you think here?," what happens? How does this play out?
MR. MIKLASZEWSKI: That's a very perplexing question for U.S. military leaders. When I asked them about that very question--if the U.S. military, for example, should see an area where they need to launch an operation, yet the Iraqi political leadership says, "No, we don't want you to do that operation," the only thing they can say for now--Excuse me, Tim--is that it hasn't happened yet. But there is a strong likelihood that, as the Iraqi government gains more strength, they will, in fact, start to veto specific military operations. Again, it hasn't happened yet, but it's a very real concern on the part of the U.S. military down the road.
MR. RUSSERT: In fact, there's a headline in the Los Angeles Times today, Dexter Filkins: Iraqi leaders flexing muscles; U.S. officials may have limited influence on the direction of the new government. There was a sense, when we talk about Iraq, it's going to be a democracy, a model democracy in the Middle East. What, in fact, do you think is emerging from the political leadership in Iraq? How would you describe the government, the country, the philosophy?
MR. FILKINS: It's pretty divided at the moment. I mean, essentially, when the elections were finished, you basically had a split between the Shiite majority, which ultimately came to control the government. That's pretty theocratic. And there's going to be a big tug-of-war over the next few months as they write the constitution, which is the main purpose for this government, about the role of Islam and about a theocracy. But then that's about 50 percent of the National Assembly that was elected. The other half is pretty secular. I mean, you've got the Kurdish parties and you've got Allawi. And so it's very-- there's going to be a really big, I think, tug-of-war over the soul of the country.
MR. RUSSERT: One of the more interesting issue is that the new president, Talabani, who's Kurdish in the north, during his campaign said, `We should consider amnesty for the insurgents, perhaps even those who attacked American troops.' How does that play out?
MR. MIKLASZEWSKI: Well, it's not going sit very well with U.S. military commanders, but at the same time, they acknowledge that the government and the overall military operations, in fact, will fall into the hands of the Iraqi leadership. You know, that was a very strong point that the U.S. was trying to drive home for the past six months or so, that Iraq is now being run by Iraqis. You don't see the U.S. military briefings that we used to see during the height of the war, certainly, and even in the postwar conflict that lasted for well over a year. The U.S. military is trying to take a backseat in terms of a high profile, in terms of putting out any individuals to speak on behalf of the country of Iraq. So it'll be difficult for the U.S. to try to veto that. I suspect there's going be a lot of behind-the-scene negotiations.
MR. RUSSERT: How do you gauge the level and the intensity of the insurgency right now?
MR. MIKLASZEWSKI: By all accounts, the insurgency is still reeling from a number of successful operations, as Dexter pointed out, in Fallujah, and the continuing operations in the Baghdad area in particular. They've had some very major successes in rolling up insurgent and terrorist leadership. However, the U.S. military officials in Iraq are very pragmatic about this and say that there's enough money, there are enough disgruntled Iraqis around that this insurgency could go on for some time. It's not certainly at the level that it was, but you'll see that just in the past week, the number of IED--the improvised explosive device--and vehicle-borne IED attacks has sharply risen. That was anticipated by U.S. military leaderships. What they say is that the number of high-level, sustained attacks has been reduced, and the period between them is much longer. It's just taking the insurgency and the terrorists longer to regenerate.
MR. RUSSERT: Dexter Filkins, your dispatches are so rich with detail and understanding of what you're seeing and observing. Tell us about your life in Iraq. What do you do? Where do you live? How do you get up? How do you function as a reporter?
MR. FILKINS: Well, The New York Times has a huge operation there. It's very expensive. But it's...
MR. RUSSERT: Heavily guard?
MR. FILKINS: Very heavily guarded. We've got a couple of houses, we've got 20-foot-high concrete blast walls topped with barbed wire. There's armed guards, there's armored cars, searchlights, the whole thing.
MR. RUSSERT: How do you move around the city?
MR. FILKINS: You just try to do the best you can, you know. The--you go...
MR. RUSSERT: With guards?
MR. FILKINS: Usually with guards. I mean, you know, none of that's desirable. You want to be--as a reporter, you want to be as unintrusive as possible. You want to put people at ease. And--but that's not really possible anymore. So you can--things have gotten a little better. I mean, Baghdad is not as tense and as angry as it was even six months ago. But doing something like getting out of your car and walking around a neighborhood and just talking to people on the street, you can't really go that anymore. I mean you can do it for 20 minutes, you know, 25 minutes, and then get in your car and get out, because if you linger too long, you're putting yourself in danger.
MR. RUSSERT: Have you had any close calls?
MR. FILKINS: More than I can count, yeah.
MR. MIKLASZEWSKI: Even when you're accompanied by large numbers of American troops, if you're in one place for longer than 10 minutes, they start to get nervous, and they say, "Let's get this over with and move on," because word gets out very quickly who's where and how vulnerable they may be. So you really do, as Dexter said, have to keep moving.
MR. RUSSERT: There is a road, a highway from the airport to downtown Baghdad that's called the Road of Death by many. I understand there's a taxi service on that road to take someone from downtown to the airport.
MR. FILKINS: Yeah. There's actually a company in Baghdad that does nothing except offer rides to the airport and back. They've got an armored cars and some guards. And they charge $35,000 for...
MR. RUSSERT: Thirty-five thousand dollars?
MR. FILKINS: ...for a ride to the airport. And I think you know, if you miss your plane and you have to come back, it's another $35,000. But...
MR. RUSSERT: How long--is it six miles?
MR. FILKINS: I think it's about six miles, yeah. It's not a happy six miles. So, you know, they earn their money.
MR. RUSSERT: Why have we been unable--or the Iraqis unable to protect that road, that stretch?
MR. FILKINS: That's a real mystery. It's a really bad neighborhood that it goes through, and you know, people come in from both sides. And--but it's--you know, they'd have to occupy six miles of road 24 hours of day. I think in the dead of night, people come out and plant bombs and they stage attacks.
MR. MIKLASZEWSKI: The most heavily controlled city right now is Fallujah. You can't get into the city unless you go through a checkpoint. Traffic backs up for three or four hours at a time. It's heavily patrolled. There's a curfew from 8 PM to 5 AM. Yet last week they found five freshly made roadside bombs--they didn't detonate, fortunately--and it's believed that these bombs were made by people still in Fallujah with those weapon caches that still remain. And even when we were at the camp for a couple of days, there was the thump and boom of mortar attacks from within Fallujah, the most heavily guarded city in Iraq right now. It's just an impossible task, really, to control those--the Baghdad highway or large segments of Iraq because there are just too many people willing to either attack or blow themselves up on behalf of what they think is the insurgency or a fundamentalist or a terrorist cause.
MR. RUSSERT: Dexter, talk about life in Baghdad as opposed to prefall of Saddam. What is the average guy, the average lady--do they get up in the morning? Are they going to work? Is the city functioning? Are kids going school? Are the markets open? What do you see?
MR. FILKINS: All those things. I mean, the truth is, you know, on most days, Baghdad is a very normal, Middle Eastern city. You know, after the fall off Saddam, there was a huge economic boom. They took down all the duties, you know, the amount of car traffic has, you know, quadrupled or possibly more. The traffics--the streets are jammed, the schools are open. There's lots of commerce. So in that sense, it's a very vibrant, bustling place. It's just sort of punctuated by, you know, this terrible violence. But, you know, it's difficult to describe the country because you have these very dramatic moments of violence. But the truth is, you know, most of the time, it's pretty normal.
MR. RUSSERT: What about the newspapers, the television, the radio? What are the people in Iraq seeing and hearing? Is there honest and open debate?
MR. FILKINS: There is. Yeah, there's plenty of debate. I mean, the shadow of Saddam Hussein is still--still lingers over everybody, but--I mean, you can really see that. But one of the things that everybody bought after Saddam fell was satellite dishes. I mean, there's just zillions of them now. And so everybody gets everything from, you know, CNN to Al-Jazeera. So yeah, there's no shortage of information and opinions now.
MR. RUSSERT: Reconstruction--Mik, there was a lot of emphasis by our government that we were going to rebuild the infrastructure of Iraq. In fact, the former deputy defense secretary, Wolfowitz, said that the oil revenues that would be generated from increased production would begin to finance a lot of our military and economic operation. Every article I have read indicates that reconstruction is way behind schedule. What's happening?
MR. MIKLASZEWSKI: Again, I'll go back to Fallujah, because I was just there for a couple of days last week. Nine thousand homes and buildings in Fallujah were destroyed when the Marines went in in November. There have been 32,000 claims against the government by homeowners and business owners. Of those 32,000 claims, only 2,400 have been paid off so far. And when you walk in and--let's say your house is worth $10,000. They will only give you 20 percent of the amount of your claim for now. It's because--and those funds are controlled by the Iraqi government. They're husbanding those funds for use in the future. And as I stood next to the line of those claimants, all you have to do is ask them what their complaint is, and within seconds, their rage surfaces, so badly at one point the cameraman said to me, "Mik, we're about to start a riot here. I think we'd better leave."
And the current president of the temporary council, Sheik Khaled, admitted to me that the people in Fallujah are already growing impatient, and predicted it will take at least another year before reconstruction actually begins to take hold.
MR. FILKINS: If I could just jump in there--I mean, I think what's happened here--you know, Congress allocated $18 billion for reconstruction. And what's happened is, you know, it's a lot easier to kick a barn down than it is to build one. And so, so much of this money has had to be diverted for security training, for just security on the projects. I mean, on any given construction project, as much as 35 percent of the money goes to protecting the workers who are working on it. So the problem is just--has been the violence, and it's basically overwhelmed every attempt or most of the attempts to rebuild the country.
MR. RUSSERT: Dexter Filkins, Jim Miklaszewski, thank you both for keeping your fear and emotions in check and giving us those kinds of straightforward, candid reports.
© 2005 NBC News MEET THE PRESS
WTSjr
# posted by W. Thomas Smith, Jr. @ 9:44 PM 
