10:00 A.M. EST
Mr. Scrimenti: Thank you everybody for coming. We have some people that did call in that will trickle in. Two parts to our roundtable: First, I'd like to introduce, from the far right, Lisa Shields, Vice President of Communications for the Council on Foreign Relations. On January 14th, they launched their Campaign 2004 website, which Lisa wanted to take a couple of minutes in the beginning of the roundtable to introduce you to it and show you what the website has to offer.
And our featured guest in the middle, Max Boot, is an Olin Senior Fellow in National Security Studies in the Council on Foreign Relations here in New York. He's also a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and a weekly columnist for The Los Angeles Times, and in the past has been a writer and editor at The Wall Street Journal and The Christian Science Monitor, and worked on several books and is currently working on a book.
So I'll now turn it over to Lisa to introduce the website, and then you can pass it on to, to Max.
MS. SHIELDS: Thank you. Good morning, everyone. As most of you probably know, the Council on Foreign Relations is a nonpartisan, not-for-profit think tank, membership organization and publisher. The Council takes no institutional position on anything, while our fellows, on the other hand, can take an opinion on just about any subject.
One of the ways that the Council communicates, obviously, to our broad audience is through our website and through the Internet. So I just wanted to briefly show you some of the features on it that we've been launching recently.
This is the main Council on Foreign Relations site, cfr.org. And if you click on here, the feature I wanted to show you today, since we're talking about politics, is the "Campaign 2004" site.
This is a site that follows on from an initiative that we did in the presidential election of 2000. The focus of this site is foreign policy exclusively, and the role it plays in the presidential election. So what we've done here is, there are two -- at present, there are two main features of the site, and then we add features as the election goes on. We have looked at and selected a number of issues that we think will be relevant in the campaign.
These are not all foreign policy issues; just the issues that we think will likely be discussed and debated. And in each of these cases, we've had one of our fellows, or in this case, the president of the Council write an issue brief -- basically, a short summary of what the main points are with regard to that issue and issues that were likely to be raised in the campaign -- what kind of questions are relevant, for example, to this issue so that we, you know, we have it for everything, economics, et cetera. It's just a really good, what we call a kind of "virtual briefing room" on the issues that we think will be relevant in the campaign.
As the campaign goes on, and we have two candidates, we will compare their statements and their positions on each of these issues. Right now, with the number of candidates, it's a bit tricky for us to do. So when there's two candidates in the race, we'll actually have scorecards that compare their positions on each of these particular issues. So it'll be a very easy reference and a terrific resource for you all to be able to look there and very quickly see what Bush's policy versus the Democrats' policy is on intelligence, on homeland security, et cetera.
The other feature that I want to draw your -- let's go back, it's going too far -- attention to is we have profiles of all of the candidates here. They keep dropping out, so we just take them off as they -- as we go along. So say, for example, we will have George Bush -- we'll have a profile of him, his campaign website, and then all -- we've taken and collected all of his major foreign policy speeches and we've summarized them. So in each of these cases, you will be able to see exactly what was said.
So if he said anything that's relevant to foreign policy in a substantial way, not in sort of a passing way, we've collected all of these speeches for you. And it just, again, makes it very easy to be able to find out, you know, what the candidates have been saying on particular issues. And we've done it for each of the candidates.
And again, when we have two candidates in the race, what we'll do is take all of their speeches, and then categorize them by these issues. So you'll have all the speeches relevant to immigration; you'll have all of the speeches relative -- relevant to, sort of, defense, and that'll just be another, you know, easier way for you to be able to go through the material and look at it and understand exactly what the candidates are saying on these particular issues.
So for now, those are the main two features. We also have an election year calendar. So if you want to see what sort of the upcoming, you know, key dates are in the election, this is a good place to go and find it. And then the other section that we have, the Council has a program, it's a CFR-wide program that's "Campaign 2004." At the Council, we have a lot of meetings. The candidates come and speak to us. They deliver speeches and they answer questions about foreign policy, et cetera.
So any of the programming that we do at the Council -- for example, General Clark was there, we'll post transcripts of that information. So this is anything that happens at the Council on Foreign Relations that's related to that.
So that's basically all I wanted to show you today. I encourage you to look at the site, tell your friends about it. There are one-sheeters over there about the site and how to get there, et cetera.
So that's all I had to say. Any questions?
QUESTION: Is there a -- also a forum space with the site where, you know, people comment on --
MS. SHIELDS: At present, there is not. We are considering doing some blogging. We're considering having a number of our fellows do web logs, and maybe even talk to each other. We may even try to sucker Max into doing something like that for us, in which case, we may invite people to comment.
We haven't decided that yet, because that's something that needs to be monitored and it's a staffing question. It's -- yeah, it's a complicated thing to be able to follow.
We will do debates online and we will do online interviews, sort of live-online interviews. We've done a number of them, for example, with The Washington Post. So we'll do those sorts of things, not just with Council fellows but with other experts from other institutions as well. So just keep following the site and we'll see the other things that are developed over time.
QUESTION: How many people do you have working on the site?
MS. SHIELDS: Altogether, we have a team of writers, who do -- the team of writers, actually, that we have on our site don't work that much in this section.
There are probably -- on this section alone, there are two people dedicated to this section -- not that many. We have a relatively lean operation. We did this -- this is -- we did this in 2000, so we're basically using the same template that we built then, which makes it easier for us to know how to do it this time around.
This is also a very good archive. If you want to compare, for example, what Bush said in the previous election, well, if you go to "Candidate Positions," you can see everything that he said on -- there's a scorecard there that we'll do this time -- you can see everything he said on humanitarian intervention in the last election, which is a very interesting resource and a good thing to be able to compare and contrast with what he'll be saying this year. And particularly, once we have all of the speeches categorized and loaded, that will be a very easy way to reference and cross-reference what he said previously.
QUESTION: How long have you got? Back to 2000?
MS. SHIELDS: It's at the bottom here. It's right here. This is the new site.
QUESTION: Oh, I see.
MS. SHIELDS: Yeah.
QUESTION: Oh, I see the Archive.
MS. SHIELDS: Yeah. I can't see. It's right there.
QUESTION: Oh, I see. Oh, okay. That's great.
MS. SHIELDS: Yeah, it's a terrific resource. We -- it was a very successful site that was the Council's sort of first satellite site that we launched in 2000, and it was a really big hit, so we're back again.
QUESTION: Back?
MS. SHIELDS: Yes.
QUESTION: And when you say two people, are they the technical people that would make the code to test out the station?
MS. SHIELDS: No, we have technical people. We have, yeah, we have people -- that's separate. We have a design group that we work with in Los Angeles who have done all of our websites.
QUESTION: Mm-hmm. Are they your people or is the website --
MS. SHIELDS: It's their own company. They specialize particularly in non-profits and other organizations like that.
QUESTION: Treemedia?
MS. SHIELDS: Treemedia.com. T-r-e-e --
QUESTION: In LA?
MS. SHIELDS: Yeah, in Los Angeles.
QUESTION: Okay.
MS. SHIELDS: And their web address is treemedia.com. They're very good. They've done all of our site stuff. What else?
QUESTION: If I may ask a question --
MS. SHIELDS: Sure, of course.
QUESTION: Do they charge you a lot?
MS. SHIELDS: No, they are actually very reasonable. Relative to what other web companies are building, they're very reasonable. The woman who is there, her name is Lila Connors-Peterson. She's very nice.
QUESTION: Thank you.
MS. SHIELDS: Sure. Anything else? Any other questions? Well, I will turn it over to Max. Welcome.
MR. BOOT: Thank you very much, Lisa.
Okay. Well, I'll just say a few preliminary words, then I'd just be happy to have a conversation or answer questions, whatever you like. I don't think I have any great, stunning insights. I did do my research, which was, you know, staying up late to watch all of the speech, even as my wife was falling asleep on a chair next to me. I struggled to stay awake as the President was going on about prisoner rehab and steroids in sports and so forth. But I stayed awake through the whole thing so I think I'm cognizant of what happened. And just in case I missed anything, I have the transcript from The New York Times. So I've been doing crack research for you guys and I'm ready to offer my insights on what happened.
Well, Lisa and I were talking beforehand. I think we basically both agreed that the first part of the speech was more compelling than the second part. Maybe that's because we're more interested in foreign policy than in prisoner rehab or steroids. But I think there was also a different tone from Bush. I think he was sort of more involved, more confident, more emotionally invested in the first part of the speech dealing with the war on terrorism, foreign policy, Iraq and Afghanistan -- those kinds of his issues -- than he was on kind of the laundry list of proposals that were in the second part of the speech.
I'll just talk briefly about the second part of the speech, but I mean, that's sort of the staple of the State of the Unions and that's something that I think Bill Clinton perfected, which was a laundry list of micro-initiatives. When you're running a deficit, as we are now, of about $500 billion, you're not going to propose too many major initiatives that cost a lot of money, and yet you still want to be seen as an activist President who does things and cares about domestic issues. And so therefore, you throw $100 million here or $30 million there, which is, you know, small change in a budget of $2.1 trillion.
And so Bush has all these sort of mini-proposals about jobs for the 21st century, larger Pell Grants -- what were the other ones? The steroids -- I mean, that was really my favorite. I mean, I think John Stewart had a good line about, you know, why didn't he say something about abolishing the use of instant replay in the NFL? That's a pretty big -- for those of us who are football fans, that's a pretty big issue, too, and talking about abstinence programs and $300 million prisoner-reentry initiative; so, you know, I mean, this kind of small-scale stuff, just basically canvassing all the Executive Branch departments and trying to come up with a handful of initiatives that he can toss out there as fodder for the State of the Union.
I don't think the President is really going to stake his reelection bid or his second term on the success of the prisoner rehabilitation initiative. So I think that's pretty minor stuff that he's tossing out there.
I mean, I thought that there was some irony in the fact that after talking about all these initiatives where he's going to spend money, he then says we have to cut wasteful spending and be wise with the people's money. There's a little bit of tension there, but it's the exact same tension that Bill Clinton and everybody else always has. Presidents always say, I want to be a good steward of your money but I want to spend a lot of it, too. And here's 20 proposals, but I'm really holding the line -- even though he really isn't -- and discretionary spending is really going through the roof.
Okay, let me just quickly talk about the first part of the speech, which I thought was much stronger. I thought it was actually a very strong rebuttal to a lot of the criticisms that have been made of the United States abroad, and also to the criticisms that are being made by Democrats in this presidential race, which echo a lot of the things that are being said abroad. I'll just go through a few of the lines that I thought were the strongest.
I think, very early on, he said, "It is tempting to believe that the danger is behind us. That hope is understandable, comforting and false." I thought that was a very good line because I think that is one of the major divisions between the United States and other countries in the world, especially in Western Europe, and also between President Bush and the Democratic candidates who are running against him.
Bush believes that we are basically in World War III right now, that we are at war. We are fighting a deadly implacable foe, we cannot let up our guard, and that we have to act as if we were in wartime. This is not a view that is shared across much of the world. It is certainly not a view that's common in Europe. And it's not a view that's common among the Democratic presidential candidates.
If you listen to what they're actually saying on the stump, people like Kerry or Edwards or Howard Dean or so forth, they spend most of their time talking about health care or jobs or those kinds of domestic issues. And to the extent that they talk about terrorism and Iraq and those issues at all, it's usually in the context of law enforcement.
It's been even sort of interesting to see both Howard Dean and Wesley Clark caught in these rhetorical thickets, saying that they don't want to prejudge the guilt or innocence of Usama bin Laden, and that they deserve a full trial and Saddam Hussein deserves all the judicial protections that are offered to any other defendant.
I mean, those kinds of things -- they're still very much looking at life, at the war on terrorism, not as a war but as a law enforcement problem. And I think President Bush was very eloquent in making the case why that isn't a good way to go, that that was in fact the approach we tried in the 1990s, and it didn't really work very well. It resulted in emboldening al-Qaida, it resulted in emboldening Usama bin Laden, and it resulted in 9/11. And so Bush is trying to pursue a different approach, the war approach, but I think that really sets him apart and creates a clear division between the U.S. and the rest of the world, as I say, but also between Bush and the Democrats.
Another developing division is over the Patriot Act, which has became this favorite whipping boy of those who claim that the dark night of fascism is descending in America, which is very -- somebody, you know, who lives here, I think all of you will agree, it's very hard to see, to find the jack-booted Nazi thugs rampaging through the streets, but this has become a staple of anti-American criticism around the world, and it's one that a lot of Democrats have picked up on as well.
And the centerpiece of that criticism is the Patriot Act, which, you know, I admit has a slightly Orwellian name, but is actually a fairly innocuous bit of legislation, which basically is designed to increase intelligence sharing between the law enforcement community and our intelligence agencies so they can target terrorists more effectively.
This is not quite the same thing, as you know, the Nuremburg laws or some of these other to which the Patriot Act is compared, to put it mildly. And I think President Bush has probably gotten a little bit tired of the pasting that the Administration has taken on the Patriot Act, which was passed with overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress.
There hasn't been a single documented instance of any abuse tied to the Patriot Act, and I think he was very eloquent in talking, in defending it, and rightly so, in defending this vital piece of legislation that we need to fight the war on terrorism.
He also talked about everything that's being done in the war against al-Qaida. This is another staple of Democratic rhetoric, Wes Clark is saying that if he were President, there would be no more terrorism. He would have caught Usama bin Laden by now. He would have eliminated al-Qaida, but the reason Bush hasn't done that is because, allegedly, the President was fixated on Iraq instead.
And so Bush -- I think the President very strongly came out swinging against that argument by noting that over two-thirds of al-Qaida's known leaders have now been captured or killed. So showing that yes, we are making a big effort in Iraq, but we're not neglecting the war against terrorism. And I think that's a very important point to make in rebuttal to some of the criticisms that we're getting.
He also talked about what's happening in Iraq. I don't think he gave -- obviously, there's only so many paragraphs you can devote to it. I mean he highlighted some of the progress that's been made, especially in capturing 45 -- capturing or killing 45 out of the top 55 officials in the Saddam Hussein regime, topped, of course, by Saddam Hussein, himself; and talking about some of the progress that's being made in restoring the rule of law. I mean, you could all see the big round of applause that Adnan Pachachi received sitting up there as this month's head of the Governing Council of Iraq.
I was a little bit disappointed, I have to admit, because I recall -- I guess it was a year ago when it was Hamid Karzai who was sitting up in the balcony, and I just thought that Karzai was so much better dressed than, you know, Adnan Pachachi. He had that wonderful hat and the robe and everything. He was just much more colorful. But, you know, we'll take what we can get. And so I thought that was a nice moment as well, recognizing our achievement.
There's obviously been, we've obviously suffered some hits in Iraq, both literally and rhetorically. Literally, obviously, being the casualties we've suffered and the losses that our men and women have endured over there. The rhetorical hits have had more to do with the issue of weapons of mass destruction and the fact that we haven't found any of them so far, as everybody expected that we would.
And you know, Bush came out swinging to some extent on that score, as well, talking about our humanitarian achievement, the road to democracy that Iraq is now on, and noting that we have found evidence of a program to continue making weapons of mass destruction. Even if the actual arsenal was not in place, certainly the program to make it was there, and Saddam could have resumed production at any times if the sanctions had slackened. "Had we failed to act, the dictator's weapons of mass destruction programs would continue to this day." That was Bush's words.
I think certainly what's happened in Libya has strengthened his case, that we are imposing deterrence upon other regimes that are trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction, that we are having a positive effect, ripple effect from Iraq, and he certainly highlighted that in his speech, making the point that, "…words must be credible and no one can now doubt the word of America."
The other point that he made on Iraq that I thought was a good one is taking on this argument that it's a unilateral American mission. Now this has almost become a cliché by now. Everybody says it. Even I say it sometimes. But it's important to be reminded it is not, in fact, a unilateral American mission, that there are, in fact, a lot of soldiers from other countries there -- over 24,000, I think, at last count; and they've suffered casualties, they've taken hits. We've had British soldiers killed, we've had others killed -- Spanish and others, and they are certainly fighting and suffering alongside Americans.
And it's really an insult to those other countries to suggest that they don't count, or as various Democrats have said in the last few months, that this is somehow a "phony coalition," as if the definition of a real coalition is one that has to include France and Germany, and if you have other countries, it's not real, which is a very demeaning way to look at other countries and the sacrifices that they're making.
And I thought Bush made that point very eloquently just by listing all the countries that are contributing, from Britain and Australia to the Netherlands and in Poland and all the others in saying, you know, look at this. It is an international coalition.
But then I think he did make the rejoinder to those who say that we only have to -- we can only act if we have the support of the United Nations, or we can only act if we have the support of France and Germany, which is a very common line among the Democratic presidential candidates, suggesting that Bush is some kind of rogue out of control and is burning all of our multilateral bridges.
Bush said, "There is a difference, however, between leading a coalition of many nations, and submitting to the objections of a few. America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our people." I think that's a very good rejoinder. And, in fact, it's one, however much the Democrats may criticize Bush on this, it's one issue where I think they basically agree with him.
Even Howard Dean, who has been the most critical of George Bush on foreign policy issues, back in 1995, we've now seen this letter that he wrote to Bill Clinton at the time saying, disregard the United Nations, go do something about Bosnia because the price of inaction is terrible, and we can't afford to see if we'll get complete agreement at the United Nations.
I think when it comes down to it, most Americans are very much like Howard Dean in that, yes, they want to see the support of the UN; yes, they want to see the support of as many countries as possible; but ultimately, they agree with Madeleine Albright, who said that America is the indispensable nation, and that we will act even if we cannot get everybody else on board.
I think that's -- for all the froth of the campaign, all the criticism that Bush is getting -- I think that's the bedrock issue, where there is a substantial degree of agreement between him and his foes, his opponents, even if they're not willing to admit it at this time. And I think he made a very strong point in pointing that out.
And the final part of his foreign policy message had to do with democracy in the Middle East -- a message of hope, I think -- and one that is very much in America's interest. And again, he's been criticized by various cynics for suggesting that you can have democracy in the Middle East, but I think -- he made the point on a personal level that, I believe -- saying that. "I believe that God has planted in every human heart the desire to live in freedom."
Now, that's the kind of language that makes skins crawl in Europe because any mention of God is verboten in public discourse in Europe, but its message -- it's a message that resonates very well in the United States, I think, where our presidents have always talked in biblical terms. And I think it's a message that finds an audience, certainly in this country.
I mean, of course, this is not a purely theological imperative here. There is a real national security concern in order to try to foster democracy in these regimes that have been breeding terrorists who wind up killing us, and I think he made that point, as well.
So bottom line, I thought it was a tremendously effective foreign policy speech. The economic part of it I thought was kind of ho-hum, but that may just be me. And I would be happy to answer questions or to take rebuttals, whatever.
QUESTION: Do you believe that this is the beginning of the campaign?
MR. BOOT: Well, the campaign has begun. I mean --
QUESTION: I mean only the Republican campaign.
MR. BOOT: Oh, I think the campaign began before the speech, but it's one more element of the campaign. I mean I think -- I mean a lot of the things that Bush has done in office, especially on domestic policy are hard to understand unless you see it through a political prism, such as the steel tariffs, which were you know, boneheaded public policy, as I think most people within the Administration agree, but were basically designed to win over West Virginia and Pennsylvania and a handful of other states that are considered important to the President's reelection campaign; or the huge Medicare expansion bill -- adding prescription drugs to Medicare.
I think a lot of that had to do with eviscerating the Democrats and taking away one of their top issues on health care. So I think a lot of, I mean this is -- and I'm not singling out Bush for criticism here. Every Administration is intensely political, this one probably less so in some ways than the previous one, but I think they're -- like any other Administration, they're very cognizant of the political impact of things. But I will go on beyond that and say that I think on foreign policy, Bush has not been cravenly political. I think he has actually been very brave and apolitical, and has been willing to take political hits in order to do what he thinks is right.
I think, basically, my take on Bush is that he thinks that he's got to deliver a lot of stuff -- a lot of liberal initiatives, basically, on domestic policy in order to get reelected, in order to pursue the war on terror, which he views as being his overriding mission in office and what his real legacy will be. And I think there's a real argument that can be made in favor of that. And the Democrats have been going on and saying that Bush made this political move to go into Iraq and so forth, which is crazy.
You know, I don't think any -- I don't think any American president would commit 150,000 troops to a long-term occupation of another country in order to try to improve their public support. And if they did, they would have to be crazy because there's no guarantee that it would work and it would -- in fact, there's a high likelihood that politically it would fail.
It's a gamble that he's taken. I think it's a good gamble. I think it's taken for the right reasons, but it's not taken for political reasons. I mean, I think he has been very brave and -- politically, on the foreign policy front, just as I think he's often been politically craven on the domestic policy front.
QUESTION: Last year about this time, President Bush was very scornful of the United Nations, doubting, you know, the Commission and the future and so forth. And now, he has -- it seems he has played down that, you know, that (inaudible).
Do you think that this speech would sort of complete his tour if a change in reflections by the United Nations members and also Western Europe, who said it is going to back to the war in Iraq to get two, three things, you know, to a change and come back to better relations with France, with Germany and other nations that were set against it?
MR. BOOT: Well, actually, I sort of asked earlier, but would you mind identifying yourself when you ask a question?
QUESTION: My name is Gabriel (inaudible). I'm a correspondent for Romania Libera of Bucharest.
MR. BOOT: That's an interesting question. I hadn't really thought about this until you brought it up, but it is sort of interesting that there were not really any grace notes towards the UN or France or Germany in this speech. Although he's made some rhetorical concessions, at any rate, in the last few months, there really wasn't anything in here -- in the actual speech. It's sort of interesting. I mean, he was -- I think he was -- in some ways I think it was, he was more defending his record rather than trying to reach out so much in this speech.
I mean, I think there has been, certainly, some coming together between -- across the Atlantic and also over here in Turtle Bay. I think certainly France and Germany, by -- have softened their tone on Iraq. They've agreed to some debt relief. You know, I think there has been some attempt to come together there, and certainly the U.S. has sought and won several resolutions at the UN since the Iraq invasion, and is now trying to get Kofi Annan more involved in Iraq.
I mean, I've -- I'm not sure I would completely agree with your earlier characterization that Bush was scornful of the UN last year. I mean, remember, that he did spend about six months trying to win UN support for our action in Iraq, at a time when a lot of people in the Administration, I think, including Vice President Cheney, argued that it wasn't worth it, that we should have just gone in, and we were never going to get the support of the UN, so we should have just gone and done it.
But Tony Blair made a very strong case that, no, we should, and President Bush basically agreed with him. And a lot of the public relations hits that he's taken had to do with the fact that he wasn't satisfied with the 17th UN resolution that he won, I guess it was in November of last -- of 2002. He wanted to get an 18th UN resolution, but we weren't able to get that 18th resolution.
But if he'd just stuck with the 17th resolution, as I think a lot of people expected him to do, he would have had pretty strong backing, or a pretty strong legal basis from the UN for going after Saddam Hussein because he -- Saddam did not -- Saddam clearly violated the terms of the resolution by not instantly coming clean with all of his weapons programs.
So in some ways, I think Bush paid the price for being too committed to the UN instead of being too scornful of it. Now, obviously, he wasn't happy with the UN when they finally rebuffed him on another resolution, and no doubt cast some aspersions on the UN.
But all along, I think the U.S. has been eager to win UN resolutions to support the occupation of Iraq at the same time that the U.S. has been very cautious about getting the UN involved in a major way in running Iraq, because the feeling had been that the UN probably wouldn't do a very good job, and that we could be more effective, and, you know, we'll never know how that goes. You can't have an instant comparison of something that didn't happen.
But so, I wouldn't put Bush down as a hard-line anti-UN person. I think that there are some people like that in the Administration. There are also some very much pro-UN people like Colin Powell, and I think Bush is sort of trying [to be] right in between them. He's gone both ways, as he sees fit pragmatically. And in some ways, I would say that's probably the mainstream American view. I think there are a lot of people around the world who have this almost religious faith in the United Nations as being this wonderful institution that is the font of all moral legitimacy.
I think most Americans, including most Democrats, I would say, have a much more pragmatic utilitarian approach to the United Nations, which is that we will work with it as much as we can, but we'll ignore it if we have to. That's what Bill Clinton did when he went into Kosovo. That's what George Bush did when he went into Iraq. So I don't think that Bush has been out of that mainstream view.
QUESTION: Lillian Lin from Taiwan. I have a question on China. The interests of the Chinese policy and gigantic cooperation, do you think it will become a foreign policy issue of the U.S., say, and China relations? And how is Bush preparing to react to his attack by other Democratic candidates?
MR. BOOT: I don't think China's going to be a major issue. I mean, I think there's only one, well, maybe one and a half foreign policy issues in this campaign, and that's the war on terrorism and Iraq. You can debate whether that's one or one and a half or two, but that's the foreign policy issue. I don't think there's going to be a lot on China. And frankly, I'm not sure that China has made much of an impact in any previous presidential election.
It has come up as an issue. Of course, it came up when Bill Clinton was running in '92 and he criticized the elder George Bush for cutting deals with the butchers of Tiananmen Square, and then Bill Clinton turned around and did the exact same thing. Then George W. Bush ran against Bill Clinton in 2000, criticizing him for making deals with the butchers of Tiananmen Square, and then he turned around and did the exact same thing.
I think there's a pattern there, which is that American presidential candidates like to attack communist China during the campaign, but ultimately, when it comes to governing, they pretty much adopt the policy of their predecessor. I could generalize that, by the way, and say that's true with most foreign policy, that there's a lot of froth, there's a lot of empty talk, there's a lot of hot air that comes out in a presidential campaign, but there's a remarkable consistency to American foreign policy from administration to administration in that the -- all this rhetoric of the campaign really masks the deeper degree of consensus, which you see among basically center-left or center-right foreign policy experts or politicians in the United States. And China is one of those issues.
I mean, I think Bush has maybe slightly strengthened our ties with Taiwan and I think and I'd be happy if he did more on that, but there are sharp limits to how far he's going to go on that front and some of my friends on the conservative side have been critical of him for being critical of the planned referendum in Taiwan, but I think the stand he took is one that probably just about any American president would have taken under those circumstances, and -- I mean, I think our policy on China is basically (a) we're not going to -- we are going to stand by Taiwan, and China has to be clear on that, that we're not going to allow the issue of Taiwan to be settled by force.
At the same time, we're not going to encourage or even allow Taiwan to unilaterally declare its independence, and we're going to try to work to democratize and transform China from within and hope that these issues can be -- that the larger political issues of Taiwan, for example, can be addressed in a more amicable spirit some time down the road.
Now, I think to some extent this is a delusion, but this happens -- this is basically the American policy and I don't think -- I think it's basically one that Bush is hewing to. It's one that we will continue to hew to pretty consistently. And you know, I think any president of Taiwan would be misinformed if they, if they thought there was going to be a major shift in American policy just because a Republican happened to be in office.
QUESTION: I have a question. Addressing the issue of the preemptive strike that the President gave at the West Point graduation a year or so ago -- it'll be two years, I guess, in June. A lot of people were saying that because we didn't find the stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq immediately that it's hurt the President's credibility to further that foreign policy statement of preemptive strike.
Do you feel that the President's regained any of that credibility to -- if, a year down the line there's another country that the President feels is a threat and we want to kind of preempt that threat, does he have the credibility to go to the American people again and say, this is the evidence. You know, will the -- would the American people believe that evidence again after, after Iraq?
MR. BOOT: Well, it's a very good question. I mean, I think there are two sides to the coin.
Internationally, I think that we have enhanced our deterrence by our action in Iraq, and I think there is kind of a sense among some dictators in the world, "Wow, this George Bush, he's nuts. He went and invaded Iraq even though Saddam Hussein didn't actually have nuclear weapons or any of this other kind of stuff. I'd better not get on George Bush's wrong side." I mean, I think there's a certain element of that that this was an image that previous American presidents like Richard Nixon and Ronald Regan have successfully cultivated, of being slightly nuts, that they're dangerous, they're bellicose, they're not to be messed around with. And that's been a very useful image to cultivate.
I think there was a genuine fear in the Kremlin that this cowboy Reagan, he could do anything. "We don't want to -- he's not a pushover like Jimmy Carter. We'd better watch our step here because this guy, he's out of control."
I think there's a little bit of that same element about George Bush, which I think is actually a very positive message to be sending to our enemies around the world, and I think it's a message that Colonel Qadhafi has gotten very strongly in Tripoli that he'd better not mess around with us, otherwise, he's going to have the 3rd Infantry Division pay a call to his hometown.
So I think that's very positive. And the fact that we haven't uncovered these weapons, I don't think, makes a difference to that. In some ways it even strengthens the deterrence by saying, if we do this to Saddam Hussein, imagine what we'll do to somebody who actually has more of a program.
On the other hand, I think it has been a huge black eye for the President among -- not among dictators, but among our friends in places like Europe, and also among the American public. I mean, less among the American public. Certainly, I don't -- if you look at the public opinion polling, 60 percent of the public thinks that invading Iraq was the right thing to do, so the issue of weapons of mass destruction does not loom that large for the American public. I think it does loom larger for our sometime-friends and allies, and you know, especially in places like Europe.
And you know, truthfully, it is a blow to our credibility. It's a blow to -- certainly to the -- to the reputation of our intelligence services, and you have to wonder, can you trust what they have to say. And, I mean, personally, I would be distrustful of what they have to say, both good and bad. I mean, in Iraq in 1991, they were saying that Saddam Hussein did not have much of a nuclear weapons program and it turned out he was actually very far advanced, as we discovered after the 1991 Iraq War.
Then in 2003, they were saying that Saddam Hussein was fairly advanced with his nuclear weapons program, and we discovered that he wasn't, after the war. So I think that does raise some serious questions about whether we know what really goes on inside these closed-societies, and if we don't, how do you justify this kind of doctrine of preemptive action?
I think that is -- I mean it does make it very hard to justify and I think it is a blow to that doctrine. I mean I think he was -- he certainly avoided language about "axis of evil." He avoided naming other countries and saying that they'd better ship up -- shape up or else. He didn't make any kinds of threats directly to other nations. In fact, he said different threats require different strategies. And that was in the context of North Korea. It could have also been in the context of Iran, where, in both of those instances we're not pursuing a very militaristic strategy. We're not even pursuing a policy of regime change.
We're basically trying to pursue of diplomacy to try to end those weapons of mass destruction programs. So you know, I think to some extent, Bush has certainly been chaste, and on the other hand, I think you can exaggerate that. I think he was always pretty clear that although preemptive action got all this attention, in some ways it was undeserved because it wasn't like we were going to suddenly go out and start taking out countries one by one. Contrary to Wesley *Clark, there wasn't a list of countries that we were planning to invade.
It was pretty clear that preemptive action was going to be a rare thing for special circumstances, and we were certainly going to try other tools in our toolkit to try to deal with other approaches. So you know, to that extent, I don't think preemptive action was ever going to be the way that we interacted with most of the world. And it's going to be even so -- even less so now after Iraq. But I don't think it's going to be taken off the table entirely. I don't think any American president is going to sit by and let the training and the planning for another 9/11 happen the way that we allowed it to happen before 2001.
I think any American president would feel an imperative to act if a country like Afghanistan were, were being turned into a terrorist training base, for example. And you know Bush didn't invent preemptive action. Other presidents have done it. Other presidents have considered it. President Clinton seriously considered preemptive military action against North Korea in 1993-1994. He did take preemptive action against Afghanistan and the Sudan in 1998. So I think this is going to remain on the policy table, but I think at least at a rhetorical level, I think it's been toned down and it's been -- and the focus on it has been dramatically decreased, in part, because of some of the embarrassment that we've suffered in Iraq.
QUESTION: Renzo Cianfanelli from Italy, Corriere della Sera from Italy.
Going back to Iraq, I don't know have you been there. I have been there five months and I've been embedded with Marines. And I can tell you, in this rhetoric of the war against terror, it seems that they are a result of politics.
It was easy to predict the war, I mean in retrospect, for example, that intelligence was poor. I've seen the agreements of a would-be administrator, governor, and it was often that he couldn't control anything, and in fact, his first statement was, we tried to get ourselves down to the job as soon as possible, you know that he was talking about himself here, but it meant we would see -- we would be coming, democracy would be coming.
I don't know, in the region that that was read, the only interpreter, average speaking interpreter was a Marine from Brooklyn of Yemeni parents. Now, it's like sending, say, a Hispanic, I don't know if you want to interview some white criminals in the Midwest -- you don't send a Hispanic. I could see it, you know, that good nature of the unit I was with that, you want to ask the POWs some questions? I mean, asking a journalist one question. This was the level.
So although, and in the beginning, the operation was a huge success, in fact, the -- I had never saw any pictures on TV in the West of those tanks which our, shall we say, forces destroyed. There were hundreds of them. But the Army just melted the Iraqi army.
So militarily, I have no complaint. The military machine was perfect. But the intelligence was very poor and this means that there was a systemic failure in the intelligence, and I think that the President's attitude should have reflected, maybe, something like that; that this event is not destined to a quick solution in Iraq, but I could see that the friendliness has become hostilities, and you don't win, at least at the experience we have in Europe, you don't win a war with terrorism unless you isolate the hard-core terrorists and do, you know, you take away the water to the fish so that they will drop it, to use Mao's analogy. So it's this ingredient that is missing, I think.
MR. BOOT: Well, I mean I agree with a lot of the things that you said, and clearly our intelligence has not been perfect, to put it mildly, in Iraq.
One point I would make is that, you know, nobody's intelligence is ever perfect, and people tend to think in retrospect what a wonderful success the American occupation of Japan or Germany or Italy was, but in fact, there were huge problems along the way, and these were very long-term occupations lasting for many years, not just for six months.
Or even if you compare the so-called multilateral model that we're seeing in places like Bosnia and Kosovo, those are deeply troubled societies with a lot of criminal and extremist elements still running wild there, too, even if they're not killing American or foreign soldiers, but there is still a lot of political violence going on; there are a lot of problems in those societies. And so, you know, I think it's not realistic to expect that a country like Iraq is going to be transformed into a democratic paradise in six months or a year. And I don't think anybody expected that.
I think -- you know, we have made a lot of mistakes. There's no question about it. I would be the first to say so. I think Bush has made a lot of mistakes in Iraq, but I think overall, we're still winning, and I think we, we certainly made the country much, much better than it was before the arrival of American troops.
I think the -- I mean, the sense that I got from visiting Iraq, and the sense that I get from talking to other visitors and from looking at public opinion polls of Iraqis, the dominant attitude in Iraq seems to be, you know, "We don't like American troops here. We don't like being occupied. We want you to go home." But the only thing worse than having American troops here is not having American troops here. Nobody likes being occupied, but they want the American troops to stay.
QUESTION: Iraqis are for troops --
MR. BOOT: Yeah.
QUESTION: Except that they liked the American troops when, when we came in. I mean, I went with the Marines. I went -- in Nasiriyah they painted the American flags on the walls. It was not us, it was the local people. So the -- it's, I don't know, we had to use the opportunity to, I don't know, establish some kind of rapport with the local population because it's obvious now that Saddam Hussein has been captured that he was not the leader, there was some other leader.
So what are we doing (inaudible)?
MR. BOOT: Well, we're doing a lot and I would disagree with you when you say that there is no rapport between the coalition forces and local people. I mean, we have to keep the problems that we're experiencing in Iraq in perspective; and there are serious problems. I don't want to downplay that. Certainly we saw that with the recent car bombing in front of the Coalition Headquarters in Baghdad.
But as you know, the trouble is mainly confined to the Sunni Triangle areas west and north of Baghdad. In the Shiite south and the Kurdish north we're not experiencing problems. I mean I was there spending time with the Marines in August when they were garrisoning the Shiite areas. They seemed to have excellent relations with the local people.
There was really -- there was -- they didn't lose a single soldier. They didn't lose a single Marine at any time after the end of major hostilities. Up in the Kurdish area, not a single American soldier has been killed. That's, you know, that's over two-thirds of the country, and yeah, we're having a lot of problems in the Sunni Triangle, no question about it.
I wish we were doing better, and I think -- and I suspect and hope we will do better once the Marines come in to take over Fallujah and some of those areas from the Army, but you know, I think you have to keep in perspective that our standards of success are so high that they're, perhaps, impossible to meet.
I mean, in the 1990s we got used to these bloodless victories -- bloodless on the part of American and Allied forces, I mean, in places like Bosnia, Kosovo, then in Afghanistan where we've suffered almost no casualties and we've won impressive victories.
And so we've gotten -- or in the Gulf War, was the template of that, so we've gotten used to that and so we tend to think that's the norm, whereas, in fact, if you look at any kind of serious military operations, you take losses. And when the British occupied Iraq in 1920, there was a Shiite rebellion. They lost 500 soldiers in that rebellion, about what we've lost so far in Iraq.
I think that's to be expected, but overall -- I mean, if you had told me a couple years ago that we were able to depose the tyrannical governments of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, liberate Afghanistan and Iraq, and do it all at a loss of fewer than 600 soldiers, I would say that's probably a success. I mean, it's hard to -- those are pretty big achievements.
Now, unfortunately, we're going to have to, you know, keep dealing with the insurgency in Iraq and it's going to continue going. I don't -- at this point, I don't think it's strong enough to -- it's not a serious military threat; we can continue to govern the country. It's a nuisance and it's more than that for those unfortunate people who are killed or hurt; it's a tragedy. But I think we can still prevail in Iraq despite the current level of insurgency.
QUESTION: Matt (inaudible) from the Canadian Broadcasting System. In an article that you wrote recently, it said that if the situation in Iraq went badly, the neoconservatives would be a likely scapegoat. Could you talk a little bit about what you meant by that?
MR. BOOT: Well, I think you're probably looking at one. While this is -- let me try to give you the short answer to that. You know, neo-con is one of the buzz phrases, which has swept the world in the last two years, and most people who use it have no idea what they're talking about. I'm not sure they know what they're talking about. It's used very loosely, basically to refer to anybody who's sort of hawkish or strong on American foreign policy.
There was a Tina Brown column in the Washington Post where she talked about the neo-conservatives who opposed Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930's, which was, you know, completely nonsensical because there weren't any neo-conservatives before the 1970's. And to the extent that they were, they probably would have been supporting Franklin Roosevelt because most of those neo-cons were former liberal Democrats who would have support Franklin Roosevelt. And in fact, I think FDR is a neo-con hero, along with Harry Truman and some other presidents who have been able to integrate American power and American principle in a very forceful package.
But I think there's this vast -- there's this conspiracy theory about this vast neo-con conspiracy that's somehow taken over the Government, and anything that anybody doesn't like about U.S. foreign policy is attributed to this neo-con cabal.
As I argue in that article, I think this is vastly overstated. It vastly overstates the influence of neo-con and it also understates the nature of their influence, which I don't believe comes from some kind of insidious conspiracy. It comes from the fact that they have a powerful argument which made sense to people after 9/11, such as the argument that we can no longer continue to coexist with these tyrannical regimes in the Middle East, that it is very much in our interest to promote our ideals, democracy and freedom in the Middle East in order to deal with the real security threats that we face in the region, that we have to take on challenges like nation-building.
Those were -- President Bush and his National Security team were very skeptical before 9/11, but after 9/11, they were really won over to some of these arguments which were being made by neo-cons, not only by neo-cons but by various other people, and so that's the nature of this so-called neo-con takeover which is vastly exaggerated.
But this has become kind of a trope from Howard Dean, Wes Clark and pretty much the rest of the world that the United States has become this unilateral monster going around invading people for no good reason and it's all because of those evil neo-cons. And the invasion of Iraq is, of course, the part of that.
People tend to forget that both houses of Congress voted in favor of resolutions giving President Bush the authority to take military action in Iraq and that a majority of the Senate Democrats, including a number who are now running for President were among those who supported the resolution. Now, I don't think anybody would accuse John Kerry or John Edwards or Richard Gephardt or Joe Lieberman of being neo-cons and yet they all voted for those resolutions, too. There was actually very widespread public support in favor of taking strong action against Saddam Hussein and if it had been, the support had been limited to neo-cons, it wouldn't have registered one percent on the public opinion scale, but in fact it registered, 60, 70, 80 percent and that was a consensus that President Bush reflected and acted upon.
So, you know, I think we're -- this is not an -- it's just crazy to suggest it's a neo-con war, but I think that's going to be -- that's a convenient scapegoat. If things go bad, people look to blame somebody and the people who are going to be blamed are the so-called neo-cons, which is a very loose and amorphous term, which is applied to people like Paul Wolfowitz or Doug Feith or Scooter Libby. It's even applied to people like Cheney or Rumsfeld where I don't think they're neo-cons at all. In fact, they've been usually hostile to neo-con ideas in the past, but that seems to be the conspiracy theory de jour.
In the past, you know, people thought that American policy was controlled by Freemasons, or by Catholics, or by the Trilateral Commission, or by the Council on Foreign Relations -- now it's controlled by the neo-cons if you believe the conspiracy mongers.
QUESTION: Okay, back to the home front and to the economy. I don't believe incidentally in this neo-con constellation. I think that Bush, without mentioning the existing of (inaudible), once Texas covered the existence of (inaudible), so much so that The Financial Times which is no communist newspaper, said this is, I think they said, a financial requisite. Now, if I'm not wrong, I listened to the State of the Union message last night, but the their President didn't talk about going to Mars. I think he meant the (inaudible), but how is he going to pay? You know, the advantage is there, and this has probably a weak part of the message, although he sounded very optimistic. I'd like to know how you see this.
MR. BOOT: Well, I mean, I think it's a policy weakness; it's not a political weakness, because if the Democrats think they're going to win an election by saying that Bush was a big spender and he's reckless in running up the deficit, they're going to lose. That argument has been tried before and it fails. It just doesn't work.
The American people are not -- the Republicans tried that argument in 1994 when they took over Congress led by Newt Gingrich. They talked about, you know, we're going to eliminate Government departments, we're going to slash federal spending and the American people yawned basically and they didn't get any of those huge cuts through.
So I don't think that the American people care that much about running up the deficit and I think Bush has made a shrewd political calculation that he can -- that the huge tax cuts will send the economy soaring, which is really what people care about and it will run up the deficit at least temporarily, although I think economic growth will bring the deficit down naturally over the next few years.
But that's the political calculation he's made. In fact, it's in some way the opposite of what Europe does because Europe has been very concerned about budget deficits. We have the Stability Pact even though it's routinely violated, but nevertheless, it exists.
And Europe has very anemic job growth, high rates of taxation, trying to keep deficits low. And Bush is trying to go the other way. I think he really is showing that Keynesian economics really does work. Now, just quickly, I think on a policy level, I'm troubled by it. I do think that he's proposing way too much spending. The Wall Street Journal had and interesting chart yesterday showing that, in terms of domestic discretionary spending, he has the biggest increases of any President since Lyndon Johnson, which is pretty startling that he has higher rates of budget increase on domestic discretionary spending that Democrats like Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter.
And I think that is a problem. I can't justify the fact that he signed a hundred -- a Farm bill worth $190 billion, which basically goes to rich agribusinesses and hurts poor farmers in the third world. It's -- I might add it's exactly what Japan and Europe do as well, but I think it's wrong and it's a waste of our money. I can't justify his "No Child Left Behind" act, which he defended last night and which is another multi-billion-dollar boondoggle as far as I'm concerned.
At the same time, I think he's actually not spending enough on our military, that we're -- our military is tremendously overstretched, it has huge commitments around the world, yet the overall size of the force has been dramatically reduced in the 1990's. We have gone from 18 army divisions to 10. We can't meet all of our commitments with that size force, and he's not committing to expanding the size of our military, which I think he should be.
So -- at the same time that I think he's recklessly spending money on a lot of other things. including this gigantic Medicare entitlement, which is the biggest expansion of Medicare since its creation under Lyndon Johnson, so I think from a fiscal conservative standpoint, I completely agree this is reckless. From a political standpoint, I think it's smart.
Mr. Scrimenti: Anyone else? Okay, thank you very much.
