Posted November 5, 2003

On October 30, 2003, US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz gave a speech at Georgetown University.  In the question and answer session that followed, an exchange with a student condemning his policies occurred which received a fair amount of press attention.  An attendee indicated that the student was reportedly very emotional and nearly on the verge of tears while Wolfowitz was said to be stiff in his response.  MENAVista has obtained the following transcript of the Q&A session which is valuable for both the actual text of the sharp exchange with the student and the manner in which Wolfowitz expounds on some of his positions.

Question:
with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you said that you need more UN resolutions, that you need to respect communal universal human rights, the Geneva convention, etcetera, and I was wondering if this applies to Israel as well.  You have the chief of staff coming out that saying that Israeli security policies towards Palestinians are harmful to Israeli security and to Palestinians.  They violate Geneva Convention 53 and tons of other human rights of these Palestinians.  So I'm wondering if the President as you said is ready to make decisions of the magnitude needed for change?  Is he ready to make decisions in the Israeli Palestinian conflict that will lend greater support to the Palestinians and ask the Israelis to stop these policies that are detrimental to the Palestinians and adding to the hopelessness that may be at the root cause of these suicide bombings?

Wolfowitz:
Obviously there's a great deal that has to change on both sides.  You cited some things that Israelis have to change and you could make a longer list. You could have talked about settlements, for example.  The President has talked about settlements, he's talked about the wall, he's talked about the suffering of Palestinians under Israeli occupation.  There's no question that the President is prepared to put pressure on the Israelis to change.  There also has to be change on the Palestinian side.  And I really do believe that the single greatest obstacle is terrorism.  If the Palestinians would adopt the ways of Ghandi I think they could in fact make a more (laughter) - just very quickly - I believe the power of individuals demonstrating peacefully is enormous but in any case I think what the President has set out and what Secretary of State Powell has set out seems to be at this point the best way forward. And I do have to say contrary to what you may have heard, foreign policy is made in the State Department and I need to be very careful of getting in the way of Secretary Powell's diplomacy.  I think its pointed in the right direciton.  I do believe as I said in my remarks, that the solution unfortunately has been awfully clear for a very long time.  It came, it seems to me, tragically close at [...] at getting to that solution.

It began to look in early this spring as though we might once again be along that path and this time with the active support of major governments in the region. The bombings and the violent response to the bombings in the last couple of months has certainly been a great setback and we've got to get it back on track

Question:
Hi, in Richard Newstadt's book about presidential power, he talks about the President's ability to use presuasion as his true leverage.  Given your different vantage points and different administrations, particularly with wartime presidents, how do you assess President Bush's ability to persuade the nation and other foreign leaders that their main goal is in the best interest of Muslims in the war on terror?

Wolfowitz:
Obviously we still have a long way to go.  But I believe we've done some remarkable things over the last ten years for which the world ought to be giving us more credit.  Under three different administrations.  If you stop and think about it, I think it's seven times since the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, that the United States has put young men, American men and women, into combat and near combat situations in order to defend people from aggression or tyranny or war and [..] starvation.  I'm counting the liberation of Kuwait, the liberation of Northern Iraq, later in 1991 the ending of the starvation in Somalia, the actions in Bosnia that brought an end to that horrible civil war, the intervention in Kosovo has brought an end to the repression there, the liberation of Afghanistan in 2001, and now more recently in Iraq.

In every case we happen to have been advancing the cause of a majority of the muslim population, and Americans have died and been wounded for those causes.  We also think we are advancing the security of our country, but I think we deserve a little more credit for that. How we go about getting it, I'm not quite sure but I think that one of the challenges you mentioned, trying to persuade people in the middle of wartime is a difficult thing to do.  The action in Kosovo, even relatively mild as it was, was enormously controversial until it was successful.  I think as we move forward a year or two from now when people look back on this, and my friends in Indonesia who now are so critical of what we are doing in Iraq, have a chance to actually visit Iraq and hear from Iraqis what's been done for them and what they're doing for themselves. I think that opinion will begin to change. But other things have to happen as well.

You mentioned the Arab Israeli issue. that is obvious a key. But finally, this particular battle of ideas ... is not only fought in news media and newspapers and books and in public debates.  It's also taught in those madrassas I referred to, where poor children
are given a chance to get off the streets and study, but what they're taught there is not real learning. It's not the tools for coping with the modern world.  It's the tools that turn them into terrorists.

So I think, again, education, but in a way that we never had to think about it so seriously it before, making funds available to the thousands and thousands of moderate religious schools, and this country isn't very good at supporting religious schools, we have some constitutional difficulties there.  But I saw in Indonesia how what they there call [...] boarding schools had been a vehicle of giving poor children a chance to succeed in the world, teaching them that their religion is a religion of tolerance and teaching them to respect other religions in their country.

So schools like that which don't get Gulf oil money, ought to be able to get support from the rest of the world, that's part of this battle as well.  But let's go back and read our own civil war.  Persuading people in the middle of war is a difficult challenge.  Success, though, at the end of the day also persuades people.

Question:
Secretary Wolfowitz, with Iraq having been labelled as the central front in the war on terrorism, and with much focus being put on Iran I have the following question. The radicalization of Islam in countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia can be traced to foreign Wahabbi ideological influences. Should the global networks of Wahabbism be confronted as perhaps one of the if not the core base of the modernistic terrorism, and if so how? 

Wolfowitz:
Huge question.  It's a good question.  I may just bite off a small piece of it, but I would question a little bit the present premise that phrase the radicalization of Islam in Indonesia.  It implies that Indonesia's two hundred million Muslims have been radicalized and I don't think that's the case. I could almost argue with you that they have been radicalized in exactly the opposite sense by the brutal attack in Bali in the fall of last year, just as Americans were radicalized in the opposite sense by the attacks of September 11th.

More and more Indonesians, I believe, are accepting that their country has a problem with extremism and terrorism and are standing up against it.  So, that radicalization, at least in the case of Indonesia, I think applies to ... I don't want to guess at a number, but suppose the number was as great as ...  as 20,000.  You can do the math, it's a tiny, tiny percentage of the two hundred million people in that country.  But 20,000 people, and I don't think it's anything like that, it just takes a few dozens of people to do the Bali bombing or the Jakarta bombing and they're out there but the Indonesians are getting much more serious about dealing with them.

I do think that the funding of extremism is not, though, just the funding of bombers.  It is the funding of schools that teach hatred, of schools that teach terrorism, and to the extent that we can bring influence to bear on countries, governors or perhaps even citizens, who are putting money into those kinds of enterprises, I think we should do so.

But I believe the stronger counter is going to be not cutting off those sources of funds, much as I'd like to do it, but to be able to channel support to the people who oppose them.  And we're not very good at doing that yet.

Analogies are dangerous and when people first made analogies between this war on terror and the Cold War, my initial reaction was to think they were completely different things.  I think there are some similarities, and I do think that one of them was that during the Cold War, the people who said that the enemy was anyone who called themselves a Marxist, whether they're democratic Marxist or not, were obviously wrong.  The greatest enemies of totalitarian Marxism were the democratic socialists of Europe, and we learned to work with them. and part of what we learned how to do, although we did some things that we've now made illegal, and maybe appropriately so, were to find ways of giving material support to people who were on the front lines of those battles of ideas.

It does seem to me that its an odd situation, despite, obviously, that both countries have a lot of money to pass around.  But its an odd situation where some of my friends in Indonesia, who were exponents of moderation, have difficulty in this world getting funding for moderate libraries and schools that can teach young Muslims the true teachings of their religion. That the extremists can go around the world and get large quantities without any difficulty.  It's not that lack the resources, we lack the means to pull through. And that's a challenge that we need to work on.

 Question:
Hi, Mr Wolfowitz. My name is Ruthie Kaufmann.  I think I'm speaking for many of us here when I say that your policies are deplorable.  They're responsible for the deaths of innocents (cheering) ..,and the disintegration of American civil liberties.  We are tired [...] of being feared and hated by the world. We are tied of watching Americans and Iraqis die and international institutions cry out in anger against us.  We are simply tired of your policies.  We hate them and we will never stop opposing them. We will never tire or falter in our search for justice, and in the name of [...] and the ideal of freedom, we assembled a message for you that was taken away from us.  And that message says that the killing of innocents is not the solution but rather the problem.  Thank you.

Wolfowitz:
I have to infer from that that you would be happier if Saddam Hussein were still in power. (applause) I wish you could have come with me in July when we visited a little Marsh Arab village called al Amara on the Iranian border.  To get there you have to fly over a desert the size of New Jersey. It is a man made desert created by Saddam Hussein in the aftermath of the Gulf War.  For thousands of years its been a lush marsh.  The Marsh Arabs are one of the oldest continuous human civilizations. They had figured out how to get milk out of water buffalo, that by breeding a new kind of water buffalo.  It's not a small achievement.  They produce some very large percentage of the vegtables for the entire country.  They are a peaceful people, but they also provided the refuge for
the rebels who Saddam Hussein feared.  So in the true traditions of Nebuchadnezzar, he simply proceeded to wipe them out, by drying them out, by creating an environmental catastrophe.  There were half a million Marsh Arabs in 1991.  The estimates today are
somewhere between 40,000-200,000.

When we got off the helicopters, the population was overwhelmingly women and children.  The children's hair had that ugly rusty color that indicates severe malnutrition.  But they were smiling and cheering and saying "thank you Bush" "down with Saddam" and finally hopeful that they might have a future.

For most of the Marsh Arabs liberation was too late, but for those people it came just in time.  And I think you ought to think about that.  Their innocence as well.  Far, far more innocence.  This has been a war that's been .. war is an ugly business.  It is a brutal business. A lot of the innocents died, by the way, because Saddam Hussein put his weapons in hospitals and other places.

Its ugly and its brutal but the alternative was far, far uglier, far more brutal. There is no question about that in my mind.

Question:
I'd just like to say that people like Ruthie and myself have always opposed Saddam Hussein, especially when Saddam Hussein was being funded by the United States throughout the eighties, and after [...] for the United States increased aid to Iraq, we were there opposing them as well. People like us were there.  [...]

 What do you plan to do when Bush is defeated in 2004 and you will no longer have the power to push forward the Project for a New American Century's policy of American military and economic domination over the people of the world?

Wolfowitz:
I don't know if it was just Freudian or if you intended to say it that way but you said you opposed Saddam Hussein especially when the United States supported him.  It seems that the north star of your comments is that you dislike this country and its policies.  [...]

It seems that the time to have supported the United States and to push the United States harder was in 1991 when Saddam Hussein was slaughtering those innocents so visciously. Look, lets, lets, lets back off a little bit.  You and I should both calm down a little here.

Question:
OK.

Wolfowitz:
This is not ideological, I don't believe.  I think it is a moral issue.  I respect that you and the last questioner have deep moral concerns.  War is an ugly thing.  I agree with that. But butchers like Saddam Hussein are incredibly ugly.  I've known a lot of dictators fairly up close and personal. I take some pride in having helped to get rid of Ferdinand Marcos.  I tried to get some change in Indonesia and I took some pleasure when President Suharto left.

To quote that famous vice presidential debater and to paraphrase him from a few years ago ... Ferdinand Marcos was no Saddam Hussein.  Ferdinand Marcos was not responsible for the deaths of a million Muslims. I don't think there's much question here about the morality of having gotten rid of that regime.

I'd also think that it's worth stopping and thinking, from the point of view of the Iraqi people - and I'm not saying that they're the ones who should vote in our election - we should decide our President based on who Americans think is good for the American
people. But I have to tell you that it sends a very unsettling message to Iraqis, that our elections might decide their future.

When I visited the city of Najaf in July, met with the town council, and, as I guess as most of you well informed audience know, this is one of the few holy cities in Shia Islam.  It was pretty remarkable to be sitting with the town council, that included one woman, a religious cleric as the head, and about 15 or 16 professionals for the most part in the rest of the group. One of these professionals, I can't remember whether he was an
architect or an engineer, asked me a two part question.

Part two, I'll start with, borders on the paranoid. He said, "Are you Americans just holding Saddam Hussein as a trump card over our heads?" You may think that's paranoid but if you'd been through what they went through in 1991, the suspicions of our intentions went very deep.  The fear of what can happen to them if that regime comes back is ... palpable and enormous.

But the first question wasn't paranoid at all, in fact it was pretty sophisticated.  He said, "What's going to happen to us if George Bush loses the election?" And I told him, as best I could, and I still believe it, that at bottom, no matter how far it is we get in our political debates, the American people stay to a certain course.  And if you look at the perseverance we had over many years in the cold war, in spite of some [...] fierce policy debates, the United States really did stay the course.  And I think I did a pretty good job, maybe not of convincing him completely, but of convincing him that we were with the people of Iraq until they succeeded.  And I think this Madrid conference, sent the message that its not just the United States, its seventy countries in the world, and the fact that Najaf is now under the direction of the Spanish brigade with a Polish commander probably sends a good message.

But I have to tell you that then they hear the message that we might not be there next year, they get very scared and that fear leads them not to give us information about where the bad people are, it leads them not to want to serve on the town council, it leads them not to want to risk their lives as policemen. There are thousands of Iraqis who are risking their lives for a future of freedom for that country, and I think it would be good if they got an unequivocal message of support from this country.  Thank you.

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