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By: GIG CONAUGHTON - Staff Writer

Iraq is not a country coming apart at the seams nor is it beset by violent insurgents, even though the media have painted it that way, said Joe Ghougassian, an Escondido resident who spent 18 months traveling safely, often alone, through most of Iraq.

A strong supporter of President George W. Bush, Ghougassian, 60, served as a part of the U.S. interim government in Iraq.

He said Iraq is not teetering toward civil war, and that it can become a democratic, economic "power" in the Middle East within two years. And, he said, the U.S. military is "going to be there a long time."

"We're not going anywhere," he said during a two-hour interview last week with the North County Times.

Ghougassian, an international lawyer, adjunct professor of political science at San Diego State University and former U.S. ambassador to Qatar, said the Defense Department asked him to become part of the Coalition Provisional Authority that ruled Iraq from May 2003 ---- the end of the U.S. invasion ---- until interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi took control in June.

Allawi and U.S. officials hope Iraq's first democratic elections will take place in January.

Ghougassian, who was born in Cairo and speaks Arabic fluently, was the deputy adviser to the Ministry of Education, one of 26 governmental ministries the Defense Department set up to run the country during the occupation.

During his time in Iraq, Ghougassian said he routinely traveled without fear throughout the country, often driving by himself.

However, Ghougassian said he never traveled to Fallujah in the troubled Al Anbar Province, an insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad that has also been the center of media coverage in the country.

And, he said, many Iraqis consistently said in the wake of the war that they had fears about personal security ---- "going out, getting mugged" ---- because the U.S. military had not engaged in civil law enforcement.

Still, Ghougassian said last week that he believes, after talking to Iraqis across the country, that "95 percent" of them are living peaceful lives after the U.S. invasion and ouster of Saddam Hussein.

But he said Americans would never know that by watching the news. News coverage, he said, has fixated on insurgent battles and violence in Fallujah and against rebel Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in the holy city of Najaf.

He said the coverage has made the tiny areas of Fallujah and Najaf appear to be all of Iraq.

"They (the media) make it seem like Iraq is burning," Ghougassian said. "It's not. There's a lot of misinformation going on. There's no war going on. The majority of Iraqis are at peace."

Ghougassian said there would be no trouble in Fallujah and Najaf now except that U.S. officials made two critical mistakes. First, they called off the U.S. Marines siege of Fallujah in April after the insurgent uprising ---- a move Ghougassian said was the State Department's buckling to criticism of "barbarism" from the international media. Second, Ghougassian said, U.S. military officials should have carried out a warrant to arrest al-Sadr on a murder charge a year ago.

Meanwhile, in order to carry out Iraq's elections as scheduled in January, Ghougassian said he expects U.S. forces to resume their siege of Fallujah in mid to late November. He said that will have to be done in order to keep anti-American terrorists from moving out of the city and carrying out attacks to disrupt the elections.

He said the January elections must be carried out. If U.S. or U.N. officials delay them, that could be enough to cause civil war, Ghougassian said.

Meanwhile, he also said the insurgents and terrorists causing upheaval in Iraq were not Iraqis.

He said the country has a criminal element. But, he said, the terrorists who are kidnapping and beheading westerners and setting off bombs were a collection of foreigners ---- Algerians, Syrians, Afghans, Jordanians, Yemenis, Egyptians and Saudis ---- living in Iraq who, like al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, "hate the United States."

"The majority of those guys (terrorists) are not really Iraqis," Ghougassian said. "I have met with the Iraqis. They are really nice ---- meek, gentle, kind. It is not in their nature to be aggressive. To behead, to kidnap, to kill. It's not."

Meanwhile, Ghougassian made several other observations from his stay in Iraq, including:

• He sharply criticized Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry, whom he said has wrongly tried to liken Iraq to Vietnam.
  
• He said U.S. Marines and Army personnel had been much more successful in civil reconstruction ---- rebuilding buildings and infrastructure ---- than the big corporations charged with the job. Ghougassian said military personnel took on smaller projects and were "gutsier" in "meeting the people."
• He said Iraqis were unfazed by the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, where U.S. military and intelligence personnel were photographed abusing Iraqi prisoners. Ghougassian said that although the actions were "clearly wrong," many Iraqis he spoke with were mystified by the scandal it caused in the United States.

"I remember personally questioning them," Ghougassian said. "They would say, 'why, why is the American media making such a big thing ---- because what Saddam used to do was far worse. Far worse ---- bestiality and rape, killing.' Unbelievable."

Contact staff writer Gig Conaughton at (760) 739-6696 or gconaughton@nctimes.com.