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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KLP who wrote (99947)	6/3/2003 1:30:47 AM
From: KLP	Respond to of 281500

Wolfowitz Highlights Saddam Hussein's Terrorist Links~ 02 June 2003 -Part 3 of 3 Part 3 of 3 : Despite that there has been a lot said about Indonesia doing a lot to dismantle the network, but the network still remains. As late as April you still have JI and Al Qaeda still meeting in Indonesia. I guess from you, a sense of how this network that is here, JI, how large a threat of -- Wolfowitz: Look, there are still terrorists operating in United States and in the UK and in Europe. Particularly I think in democratic countries, it takes time, and you have legal restrictions on what you can do and political constraints on what you can do, and even in less democratic countries these people go underground. So that's why our President had said from the beginning it is going to be long war, it's not going to be won with one victory in Afghanistan or a second one in Iraq. It's not going to be won just by arresting 3,000 people, although we have done that. It's going to take time and I do believe it's also important during that time that we build up the positive forces. Q: Redeployment of U.S. troops. Looking at the threat, and then bringing the troops. Where in Southeast Asia are we looking at? We know they are coming to the Philippines, but where -- Wolfowitz: No they are not. Here is the basic thing. We are looking at our military posture worldwide including in the United States, Congress has given us authority and it's not easy to get that authority to do a base realignment and closure commission in the United States starting in 2005. That's a big thing. We are doing it in United States, we are doing it worldwide, because we have to figure out how to make the most effective use of our military forces. I know we have a lot, but the requirements are large as well, and the threat has changed. The threat turns up in places in the world we had never imagined we'd be in before. But the technology has changed also, and allows us to do things with an efficiency and an effectiveness and a reach that didn't exist when we set up many of these bases. So we need to approach our posture differently. But some of these announcements in the press that come if anything from some ninth level bureaucrat, and I'm not even sure that it came from there. We are not about to move our Marines from Okinawa to Australia -- that's wrong. We are not about to base forces in the Philippines -- that's wrong. And in any case we are not going to make any of these changes without consulting with our Congress and consulting with our allies and our friends in this part of the world. So, the general principle is correct, most of the details that I have read are either inaccurate or extremely premature. Q: What are the key ideas that are going to motivate this new change? Wolfowitz: I think there are really three things. One, that we can do things at long range with precision in a way that was never possible before. Secondly, the same sort of internet revolution that you can see on your home computer brings together disparate forces with an effectiveness that never existed before. But the third thing is that the threat is so dispersed that you need a kind of mobility and flexibility in how you move your forces around. It's very different from old Cold War posture in Germany, where you thought you knew exactly what the Soviet war plan was, and exactly what you had to do to meet it, or the threat you face on the Korean Peninsula. Those are very fixed, they are very calculable. You need a very big force in place to deal with them. The new threats are unpredictable, widely dispersed, and what you may need is a much smaller force, much more quickly. Q: There is a growing paranoia or fear among the Muslim nations that the U.S. power, will result in them getting picked off one by one. How do you respond to that? Wolfowitz: I think by my count, seven times in the last ten years or so, U.S. military forces have gone into harm's way to rescue people from aggression or from ethic cleansing or from war-induced famine. I'm thinking about Kuwait, I'm thinking about northern Iraq after the Gulf War, I'm thinking about Somalia, I'm thinking about Bosnia, I'm thinking about Kosovo. I'm thinking of Afghanistan. I'm thinking Iraq. All seven of those countries were majority Muslim populations. We were there helping Muslims who were suffering, not because they were Muslims, but because our interests were engaged and because in many cases our moral impulses were engaged as well. I think what we're trying to accomplish in Iraq is to help the Iraqi people build a free and democratic country, which I think will have a powerful political effect throughout the Muslim world and the Arab world. Not all change is accomplished by the use of force. (end transcript) (Distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: usinfo.state.gov)