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Good to see both of you.

MICHAEL O’HANLON: Thanks, Carol.

LIN: Let me begin with you, Michael. The tactics that the United States — let’s start with Iraq. The tactics that the United States is using now to crack down on the insurgency and the Shia uprising around Fallujah, as well as the different portions of Iraq, does it appear to you that those tactics are working?

O’HANLON: Well, as well as anything I can think of, Carol, I do believe that you had to retake Fallujah. I think the Army made a mistake last year to essentially withdraw. I think the Marines had the right idea to try to restore security because we needed to give the people of Fallujah more confidence in their own lives and their future. You can’t let thugs run the place and do that. And, therefore, we had to reintroduce American power.

On the other hand, you didn’t want to have any longer of a fight than necessary, even after the tragedy of a couple of weeks ago with the four contractors being killed. And so you want to use force, make a statement, get some of the bad people off of the street, and then find some way to cool things off to the extent possible.

With the attacks against al-Sadr, frankly, I think they’ve largely succeeded. It’s terrible it came to that. Perhaps we provoked that confrontation unnecessarily. I know there are some opinions about its effect.

But I think we basically found an extremist Shia faction, and dealt with it. And now, even though I do worry about the consequences and the symbolism of this, for the most part, other Shia do not have sympathy for al-Sadr. And I think we’ll find a way out of that one, at least.

LIN: Eleana, does it appear in a way when it comes to winning the hearts and minds of Iraqis, though, that it is backfiring all over Web sites, Arab news Web sites? Arab television is reporting that there are U.S. forces acting as snipers, gunning down civilians. As many as 600 civilians reported killed. Many of them women and children.

ELEANA GORDON, FOUNDATION FOR THE DEFENSE OF DEMOCRACIES: Well, we’ve had a communications problem in Iraq from the beginning, when we allowed the airwaves from the moment we liberated Iraq to be taken over by Iran. And so you have to look at how other Iran and al Minar (ph) television, in particular, which is a Hezbollah television station, are fueling the conspiracy theories, are exaggerating the casualties. They are taking advantage of confusion that has been in Iraq for the past year.

So is it a concern of winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqis? Absolutely. But part of that is because we have still not done enough on the communications front to speak to the Iraqis, to educate the Iraqis, and to counter the misinformation coming from outside.

I think we should have taken moves a long time to go to stop al Minar (ph) television, and not just in Iraq. It’s a terrorist propaganda tool.

LIN: But — go ahead.

GORDON: Well, and Hezbollah — the (UNINTELLIGIBLE) hasn’t been talked a lot about is the role that Hezbollah and Iran are playing in supporting Sadr. Sadr, to do what he’s doing, needs money. I mean, he can’t just get — people need arms.

There are newspapers running. There are leaflets. There’s propaganda. And, essentially, al Minar (ph) television and Iranian media have served as a propaganda outlet for him.

LIN: Michael, do you think that the United States should have cracked down on Muqtada al-Sadr and his movement much earlier?

O’HANLON: I don’t know. You know, there’s an old premise in counterinsurgency, you don’t want to have to do anymore of the heavy lifting against these kinds of extremist groups yourself than necessary. You want to let them be marginalized by their own meek.

You want to work with the moderate Shiites so that, therefore, the al-Sadr people seem more and more isolated and unimportant in the process. And I think that was right strategy to try for a while. Unfortunately, then we had this escalation in the use of the media by the al-Sadr people. And then, of course, in these street protests and violence.

So I’m prepared to question the timing of this, whether it should have been these last couple of weeks or maybe we should have waited a little longer or gone a little sooner. But the basic approach of trying not to have this confrontation for as long as possible, I do believe was correct.

LIN: Because when you look at big picture, I mean, you have a 30-year-old cleric, a young gun, right? Not particularly well respected by the senior members of the Shia faith. And yet he has managed to become one of major obstacles to the U.S. coalition.

And not only that. More people are beginning to join his movement. There are locals who are now even supporting the murders of the four American contractors on the ground.

Just yesterday, the coalition found a cache of suicide belts which indicates that ground tactics by these insurgents may be changing. We may be seeing suicide bombings. This pattern here, what does that tell you in terms of the military strategy and where its going and what the end game is going to be, Eleana?

GORDON: Well, Sadr is a fascist thug. And he right now is trying a fascist coup. And he’s not doing it alone. Again, he is doing it with the support from Iran.

The Italian Secret Service believes that the Iranian — the Islamic Revolutionary Corps has been giving Sadr $70 million a month. And he’s getting support from Ayatollah al-Hari (ph), who is a close confidante of Homeini (ph), the supreme ayatollah of Iran.

I agree that we needed to work with the moderate Shia, like Sistani, like Ayatollah Montizeri (ph), who was Iranian and was positioned to become the ayatollah. But he’s now a dissident in Iran. And he’s made very strong comments against al-Sadr.

But we allowed Sadr in the last few months to increasingly intimidate the population. His militias have been beating up professors. They’ve been holding illegal courts. They’ve been forcing women to wear hijab. In October, he tried to bring 30 busloads of fighters from Baghdad to take over Karbala.

At that point, we really didn’t do anything. We neither resisted him, nor did we try to work with moderate Shia or other Shia groups to enable them to better resist him.

So it really is critical not for us to resist him alone, but to empower the silent majority of Shia leadership that does not want Sadr to win and to allow them to negotiate with him, to put him down, and to fight back when he is lawless and takes too much power.

LIN: All right. The two of you stay right there.

When we return, we’re going to be talking about the 9/11 Commission developments, the reaction out of White House, and what happens next in that investigation.

We’ll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LIN: Welcome back. We’re talking about now the 9/11 hearings and the conflict in Iraq with my guests, Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, and Eleana Gordon, who oversees communications and public education campaigns at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

All right. Let’s talk about this presidential daily briefing memo which came out over the weekend. It was classified. This is information, national security information the president received just a month before 9/11.

Michael, why is it that the White House didn’t release it when the committee first asked for it?

O’HANLON: They made a big mistake, in my opinion, Carol, because, frankly, the appearance is worse than the substance. I don’t think that the Bush administration distinguished itself trying to stop terror in its first eight months, but nor do I think that the mistakes can be made can be blamed primarily on it. I think the Clinton administration had ample time to know that al Qaeda was interested in hijacking airplanes going back to the Manila plot in the mid ’90s.

So I think in one way the Bush administration sort of gave into its worst control freak impulses to exert executive branch privilege. And it actually makes the appearance of this worse than the reality. They did not do a great job with terrorism in those first eight months, but they also did not do an atrocious job, and they would have been better off just simply saying so.

LIN: Eleana, what do you think they were concerned about in releasing the memo then?

GORDON: I don’t disagree with Michael. I think that they have in general not handled these kind of criticisms very well. And I think that’s why they blow up so much instead of just coming right out and saying, well, we did get the memo and putting their case out.

The position they seem to take is, no, we really were on top of the terrorism problem. No, we really were watching it.

LIN: Right.

GORDON: And I think the reason people are paying more attention to it now is it is a deeper questions that Americans have, as we are going into Iraq and going into these massive campaigns around the world, which is, can we trust this administration? Are they leveling with us? Did they level with us about what we would need to do in Iraq and what kind of troops would be required? And will they level with us going forward?

LIN: Yes, but now, also, you know, President Bush is coming out and saying, well, in this memo, yes, we understood that there were investigations ongoing about al Qaeda, that al Qaeda was recruiting membership, that they might be interested in hijacking airplanes. But there wasn’t specific information.

Does that come across to you, Eleana, that what they are saying is, oh, but it didn’t say that they were going to fly a bunch of airplanes on 9/11 into critical buildings in New York and Washington? I mean, did it have to be that specific?

GORDON: Well, it didn’t say that, for one. And I don’t think any critic has been able to articulate clearly what was if that memo that could have led to more specific action that might have prevented 9/11.

Dick Clarke himself, who has been such a critic of the administration, has clearly said that he never had any recommendation or if any recommendation had been implemented, would they have prevented 9/11. That is too specific, whether we could have prevented it.

But the broader question, as Michael O’Hanlon pointed out, is what were we doing for the 10 years that this threat was mounting? What were we doing as a nation, our government, Congress, all of the different agencies to recognize this threat, prepare for it, and very simple things such as increasing the number of Arabic speakers in the FBI and the CIA?

That was never done look back. Looking back, you would think that was an obvious first step. So that’s what we need to be looking at.

LIN: Michael, when the public look at this memo, though, and without the context of frankly pretty frightening memo that the president probably gets on a daily and weekly basis about the status of terrorism and the enemies of the United States, to the average person it looks like a laundry list of red flags.

What sort specificity should have then, from the White House’s point of view, perhaps, triggered action based on what was said in this memo?

O’HANLON: Well, I’m not defending the White House here. I’m not saying that they had the right reaction. And I think they were a little complacent.

But if you asked, what could they have realistically done in August to prevent an attack that ultimately happened in September, especially when we had no way to know that hijacking was going to be, as you say, flying airplanes into the World Trade Center — or, more specifically, the briefing was talking about traditional hijacking, hijacking a plane to then land it safely and bargain for the release of a prisoner. Under those circumstances, you would not instruct your air marshals to start firing their weapons around the cabin at the first hint of any kind of a hijacking, because that could put the airplane at greater risk than simply allowing it to land and then have this negotiation.

So what you could have done in August, you could have increased screening. You could have banned box cutters if you were (UNINTELLIGIBLE) enough to think of things like that.

You could have done an emergency — on a basis, puts more air marshals on airplanes. They would not have been properly trained air marshals. They might have been police officers. You could have done that.

You could have forced the FBI and the CIA to share intelligence on potential terrorists who are getting on airplanes. That might have been the single most useful things, as Condi Rice, herself, I think, was getting at last week when se said the lack of coordination and cooperation is the big problem.

Those sorts of things could have been done. Some of them probably should have been done. But I do not believe it was a dereliction of duty to fail the duties (ph), because it might not have prevented 9/11 in any event, and it would have been very hard to anticipate the use of airplanes as missiles based on this briefing.

LIN: Good to have that perspective. Michael O’Hanlon, Eleana Gordon, thank you very much for joining us today.

GORDON: Thank you.