Wolfowitz speech at Georgetown Part three
Q: Hi, my name is Courtney Raj. I'm a second year MSFS student. I'm going into international journalism. I'd [extract] a quote from what you said, that those who advocate free speech. And the things that the U.S. stands for can and do change things. I'd like to point out that our freedom of speech was taken away here when they had a banner. That was a free expression of speech. I think that's a shame at any university like this, first of all. [Applause]
Anyway, my question has to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You said that you need to look no further than U.N. resolutions, that you need to respect communal universal human rights, the Geneva Convention, etc. And I was wondering if this applies to Israel as well.
You have the Chief of Staff coming out and saying that the Israeli security policies towards the 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 is the President, as you said, he's 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 some of the suicide bombings? [Applause]
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 Ghandhi, I think they could in fact make enormous change very, very quickly. I believe the power of individuals demonstrating peacefully is enormous.
But in any case, I think what the President has set out, what Secretary of State Powell has set out, seems to me to be at this point in history 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 about getting in the way of Secretary Powell's diplomacy. I think it's pointed in the right direction.
I do believe, as I said in my remarks, that the solution unfortunately has been awfully clear for a very long time. We came, it seems to me, tragically close at Tabah to getting to that solution. It began to look early this spring as thought we might once again be on 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 have certainly been a big setback, and we've got to get it back on track.
Q: Hi. In Richard Nustadt's book about presidential power he talks about the President's ability to use persuasion as his true leverage. Given your different vantage points and different Administrations, particularly wartime Presidents, how would you asses 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 American men and women into combat or near combat situations in order to defend people from aggression or tyranny or war-imposed 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 that 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 Muslim population and Americans died and were wounded for those causes. We also believe we were 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 one of the big challenges is what you mentioned. Trying to persuade people in the middle of wartime is a difficult thing to do. The action in Kosovo, even as 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, when my friends in Indonesia who now are so critical of what we're 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.
I mentioned the Arab/Israeli issue. That is obviously a key.
But finally, this particular battle of ideas is not only fought in news media and newspapers and books and public debate, it's also fought in those Madrasas that I referred to, where poor children are given a chance to get off the streets and to 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've never had to think so seriously about 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 Pasantrans, Muslim-based 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 history of the Civil War. Persuading people in the middle of war is a difficult challenge. Success, though, at the end of the day, also persuades people.
Q: Secretary Wolfowitz, with Iraq having been labeled as the central front in the war on terrorism and with much focus having been put on Iran, I have the following question.
The radicalization of Islam in countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia can be traced to foreign Wahabi ideological influences. Should the global networks of Wahabism be confronted as perhaps one of the if not the core base of bin Ladinistic terrorism? If so, how?
Wolfowitz: That's a huge question and it's a good question. I'm going to just bite off a small piece of it.
But I would question a little bit the premise, that phrase the "radicalization of Islam in Indonesia." It implies that Indonesia's 200 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 they're 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 20,000. You can do the math. It's a tiny, tiny percentage of the 200 million people in that country. But 20,000 people, and I don't think it's anything like that, it just takes a few dozen 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 it.
I do think that the funding of extremism is not, though, just a 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 whose governments, or perhaps just their leading citizens, 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. 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're 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 is the Left, the enemy is anyone who calls themselves a Marxist, whether they're democratic Marxists or not, were obviously wrong. The greatest enemy of totalitarian Marxism were the Democratic Socialists of Europe, and we learned to work with them.
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 it's an odd situation, despite obviously the Gulf countries have a lot of money to pass around. But it's an odd situation where some of my friends in Indonesia who are 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, but the extremists can go around the world and get large quantities without any difficulty. It's not that we lack the resources. We lack the means to deliver them. That's a challenge that we need to work on, I think.
Q: Hi, Mr. Wolfowitz. My name is Ruthy Coffman. I think I speak for many of us here when I say that your policies are deplorable. They're responsible for the deaths of innocents and the disintegration of American civil liberties. [Applause] We are tired, Secretary Wolfowitz, of being feared and hated by the world. We are tired 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 this ideal 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. [Applause and jeers]
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 Amarah near the Iranian border. To get there you have to fly over 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 it's 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 by breeding a new kind of water buffalo. It's not a small achievement. They produced some very large percentage of the vegetables for the entire country. They were peaceful people, but they also provided a refuge for the rebels that 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 and 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. I think you ought to think about that. They're innocents as well. Far, far more innocent.
This has been a war that's been -- War is an ugly business. It is a brutal business. And a lot of those innocents died, by the way, because Saddam Hussein put his weapons in hospitals and other places. But it's ugly and it's brutal. But the alternative was far, far uglier, far more brutal. There's no question about that in my mind. [Applause]
Q: I'd just like to say that people like Ruthy and myself have always opposed Saddam Hussein, especially when Saddam Hussein was being funded by the United States throughout the '80s. And -- [Applause] And after the killings of the Kurds when the United States increased aid to Iraq. We were there opposing him as well. People like us were there. We are for democracy. And I have a question.
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 New American Century's policy of American military and economic dominance over the people of the world? [Applause]
Wolfowitz: I don't know if it was just Freudian or you intended to say it that way, but you said you opposed Saddam Hussein especially when the United States supported him.
It seems to me that the north star of your comment is that you dislike this country and its policies. [Applause] And it seems to me a 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 viciously.
Look, let's back up a little bit. You and I should both calm down a little here.
Q: Okay. [Laughter]
Wolfowitz: This is not ideological, I don't believe. I think it is a moral issue. I respect the fact 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 changes in Indonesia and I took some pleasure when President Suharto left. But to quote that famous Vice Presidential debate, or to paraphrase it 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 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 most of you, a well-informed audience know, this is one of the two holy cities of Shia Islam. It was pretty remarkable to be sitting with a 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 head? You may think that's paranoid, but if you'd been through what they went through in 1991, the suspicions about our intentions run 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?
I told him as best I could, and I still believe it, that at bottom, no matter how partisan we get in our political debates, the American people stay to a certain center. If you look at the perseverance we had over many years of the Cold War, in spite of some pretty fierce policy debates, the United States really did stay the course. I think I did a pretty good job, maybe not of convincing him completely, but convincing him that we were with the people of Iraq until they succeeded.
I think this Madrid Conference sends a message that it's not just the United States. It's 70 countries in the world. And the fact that Najaf is now under the direction of a Spanish brigade with a Polish commander probably sends a good message.
But I have to tell you that when 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 councils. It leads them not to want to risk their lives as policemen.
There are thousands of Iraqis right now who are risking their lives for future freedom for that country, and I think it would be good if they got an unequivocal message of support from this country. Thank you. [Applause]
Q: I'm a second year student in the securities studies graduate program here. My question is in the PBS Frontline documentary, Truth, War and Consequences that aired this October and that you can see on their web site, a U.S. tank crew comes across a few men and a boy who had stolen a few pieces of wood. The U.S. soldiers made the men and the boy step aside, then they opened fire on the car with handguns for fun before running it over twice with their tank. One of the soldiers then said something along the lines of this is what happens when you loot.
It turns out that the driver of the car was a taxi driver and the car was his only means of making a living.
My question is, will you make a personal commitment here today to look into this incident and see that the soldiers involved are punished and the owner of the car given a new vehicle and other compensation?
Wolfowitz: We are looking into it. Mistakes, pretty ugly mistakes can get made in wartime. That is, again, one of the reasons why if you can find a peaceful way to resolve things it is so much better.
I would remind everybody here, I don't think you need much reminding, it wasn't so long before that incident when people were saying why don't you shoot a few looters in Baghdad because this looting is causing terrible disruption, it's causing the looting of the National Museum, although that begins to look as though it may have been a different kind of activity. Looting has been a serious problem. I don't know what mistakes, why those mistakes were made in the particular incident that you described.
I do know that the best way to change that situation is not to put more American troops into Iraq to deal with the security problems there. It's to get more and more Iraqis on the front lines. They are much less likely to make those mistakes, and if they do make those mistakes it's an issue, not between the United States and the Iraqi people, but between Iraqis.
That was a legitimate question and we're looking into it. Thank you.
Q: I hope the press holds you to it. [Applause]
Voice: Mr. Secretary, thank you not only for your statements, but most particularly for engaging in this conversation with our students.
Let me now in closing this, ask Dean Galucci to present the Oscar Iden plaque, which states, "This plaque is presented in appreciation to the 24th Oscar Iden lecturer, Paul D. Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense." [Applause]
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