Iraq: What Lies Ahead
Black Coffee Briefings on the War in Iraq 

April 22, 2003

UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT

8:45 a.m.	Registration
9:00	Briefing:	Newt Gingrich, AEI
		Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post
		Sally Satel, AEI
	Moderator:	Danielle Pletka, AEI
10:30	Adjournment

Proceedings:

MS. PLETKA: Good morning, everybody. Welcome to AEI. I'm Danielle Pletka from AEI. This is the last of our many, many briefings on the Iraq War. We will have one final session in our series on Post-Saddam Iraq at some point in May. We don't have a date for that yet, but this is the last of our weekly briefings, and we are very proud to have with us a distinguished group of panelists, one of whom is missing in action, but should arrive very soon.

We have with us today Charles Krauthammer, who is a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist for the Washington Post. He's going to speak about the meaning of the war.

We also have with us Sally Satel, who is a Brady Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a staff psychiatrist at the Oasis Clinic in Washington, and she is going to talk about shell shock and awe.

And we have Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and he is going to speak about the imperative to reform the Department of State and to take on the United Nations. He will be with us shortly.

What we're going to do is, as usual, we will start with Dr. Krauthammer, move on down the line, each of our speakers will go, and then we will take questions after that.

So, with that, Dr. Krauthammer, thank you.

DR. KRAUTHAMMER: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm in the unusual position of being the first speaker and also being in a position of saying that I agree with everything that our third speaker has already said.

[Laughter.]

DR. KRAUTHAMMER: I've been writing for the Post for 19 years, and I've been insisting that my editorials ought to run on the front page, but I see that Newt has beaten me to it.

I want to talk about the meaning not just of the war in Iraq, but of the war on terrorism. There was a book written about 40 years ago by a man called Joseph Jones, who was in the State Department in 1947. He wrote a book called "15 Weeks." It was the 15 weeks between the day on which the cable arrived from London saying that the British had given up on Turkey and Greece and were pulling out and the announcement that the Harvard commencement by George Marshall of the Marshall Plan.

Those 15 weeks, in 1947, redefined the world, redefined American foreign policy, began the policy of containment, and stand as one of the great sort of intellectual revolutions in modern diplomacy.

I would argue that we have now lived through the 19 months, which stand on an equal plain in their audacity, success and revolutionary nature. The 19 months, of course, are from September 11th, 2001, to April 9th, 2003, a period which, in responding to an attack out of the blue, this administration has redefined the world, reoriented American foreign policy, and put in place a profound new approach which I think will stand with the 15 weeks in history as one of the more remarkable achievements, both intellectually, militarily and diplomatically, and done by a foreign policy team, national security team, which I believe is the most successful and the most impressive since the Truman-Atchison-Marshall team and the others of the late 1940s.

The war in Iraq is simply a battle in this larger campaign and then this larger conceptual structural, and it was characterized by the immediate understanding by the administration in 2001, after 9/11, that the successor to the great ideological wars of the 20th century had presented itself to us, that just as communism was the successor to fascism, in terms of the Cold War being a successor to the second World War, the war on terrorism was now the successor to those great ideological struggles that the 10-year period of the hiatus, the dream sleep that we had in the 1990s had evaporated, and we were in a new world.

And it correctly understood that the struggle was against terrorism in the context of weapons of mass destruction, that the war on terrorism had been entirely misconceived as a war on individuals, a war involving law enforcement, that it was seen as a matter of policing, and trials.

What was understood was the war on terrorism is a real war, and the war had to be taken to the enemy, and it was a war that involved states, that terrorism can only live among states, can only be supported by states and that the distinction had to be made between states which were supporting terrorism, which would inherently be our enemies and states which were not. The war in Afghanistan followed. The war in Iraq has followed.

These are very important conceptual ideas, and wedded to the notion of weapons of mass destruction, they produced the Bush Doctrine which embodied a new, a radically new idea of preemption, and the logic was, and I believe it is unassailable, that in a world post-9/11, when we know that we can be attacked out of the blue, in the context of a world where we have democratized the knowledge of how to make and acquire weapons of mass destruction, we cannot afford to wait to be attacked again because if we are attacked again with weapons of mass destruction, the results would be so catastrophic as to be unimaginable. Therefore, we must, necessarily, have a policy of preemption.

Now, the problem is that preemption is an uncomfortable idea, not because of moral or legal reasons. Morally, I think it is unsalable, and in terms of international law, international law is useful in regulating the fishery rights off Newfoundland, but they have nothing to say about matters of war and peace, particularly between civilized states and terrorist states.

The real problem is that America is a pacific democracy. It does not like war. It does not particularly like casualties, not only among its own soldiers, but among civilians, and that's why the idea of preemption is an uncomfortable one, and I think the war in Iraq is extremely important because it shows us that we have a new way of warfare in which those problems can be mitigated to an unimaginable degree.

The importance of the war in Iraq is that it has demonstrated for the first time in history the capacity of one country, the United States, to destroy a totalitarian regime without destroying the country. That's never been done in human history. We know what happened to Germany and Japan. Those were wars on nations, on peoples. We broke their will, we destroyed their infrastructure, we reduced them to rubble.

We did in Afghanistan, to a lesser extent, and Iraq, to a greater extent, what could only be called surgical preemption, in a way that had been previously unimaginable. I say that Afghanistan is a minor example because it's hard to elevate the rule of the Taliban to a rule of totalitarianism. They were necessarily too primitive in their rule to merit the title, but the rule of the Ba'ath Party does merit that title as a classic Stalinist state and it collapsed as a result of our precision, high-tech and the very novel kind of warfare.

The brilliance of the campaign on Iraq was not just the military pyrotechnics, the integration of intelligence, the use of air power, et cetera. At the root of the success of the war in Iraq was a deep understanding of the nature of Stalinist totalitarian regimes. It understood that it was a brittle form of regime, that it existed entirely on fear, repression and terror, that it has a desiccated ideology. It was not one of the mobilized totalitarian states of the early 20th century. It was a regime, therefore, subject to decapitation.

The brilliance of the strategy was that the entire military idea of the campaign had to do with attacking the regime at the top relentlessly and almost to the disregard of everything else. Therefore, the attack on the first night of the war on the bunker, an attempt at physical decapitation; therefore, the attack on August the 7th, on the restaurant; therefore, the thrust all the way to Baghdad immediately, bypassing the cities in the South, against all criticism by those who said that we were leaving long supply lines, we're vulnerable to attack.

The idea was that if you went after the head of the snake in a regime like this, the rest of the body will die, and it was precisely correct. It was a deep political intuition, and the war succeeded because when Baghdad collapsed, everything else went. It was I think at the root of the success was a deep political understanding. And the larger impression is that it showed that we have the capacity to wage this kind of war with relatively few casualties, both among combatants on the allied side and among civilians on the other side. And that I think has had a deep impression in the region and around the world. The only people in the world who still think that--who question whether or not we won in Iraq are Upper West Side liberals who aren't quite sure that we won the Cold War either--

[Laughter.]

DR. KRAUTHAMMER: --and who think that Gorbachev sort of threw the game like the Black Sox scandal.

But, clearly, from Pyongyang to Damascus, the effect of the war is clear. It is no accident comrade that the North Koreans have agreed to negotiate with us with China, a significant retreat on their position of only a month ago. It's no accident that they have asked for talks with the South Koreans. It's no accident that we have not heard any saber-rattling out of Pyongyang now for weeks. It is a direct result of their understanding of what we can do and that we might be able to do it to them.

Similarly, I think it's no accident that Hashemi Rafsanjani, the influential former president of Iran, has proposed, three days after the fall of Baghdad, he proposed in an article in Tehran that a referendum be held on renewing ties with the United States, knowing that public opinion polls in Iran have shown that that would be overwhelmingly supported.

The fact is that in the Arab World, they understand that they have suffered the most significant, and in their eyes, humiliating defeat since the Six Day War. There are tyrants throughout the region who sit uneasily on their thrones. All of them have seen the statues toppled in Baghdad, and they know that their citizens also have seen those statues, and they know that the statues outside the windows of those who saw it in Cairo, and in Damascus, and elsewhere also can be toppled.

So what we have produced, I think, is, A, a revolution in military doctrine, a revolution in national security doctrine, and also a revolution in the region and the world in understanding what the power of the United States is and what it is capable of doing.

Let me just conclude with what we ought to do, given what we have achieved. We ought to do two things:

Number one, make Iraq work; that is, what's important in Iraq today is to succeed in doing what we said we would do. Showing that we were there as liberators and to help establish a truly open, pluralistic, reasonably democratic, decent society. We can do that, but we're going to have to do it largely alone.

If we listen to the critics, if we listen to those who opposed the war in the first place and are now urging us to internationalize this issue, to bring in the U.N., the French, and the Russians or others, we will not succeed. The French and the Russians do not have the slightest interest in establishing the kind of open society we want in Iraq. If anything, they have an interest in seeing us fail as a way of preventing the, as they call it, the hyper power from succeeding and spreading its influence.

So we ought to do what we have to do, alone if we have to, because the vindication of our war will be what Iraq ends up. It will not be process. It will not be the benedictions of Kofi Annan. It will be is there a decent society in Iraq or not. We can succeed, but we're going to have to do it on our own, if necessary.

Secondly, apart from making Iraq succeed, which I think will have a revolutionary effect on the region, secondly, we ought to carry the momentum. We are now in a very fluid situation. As always, post-war situations are fluid, open, things have not congealed.

The neighbors are wondering what we are up to. I think it's a mistake, for example, to have our secretary of State say he'll be going to Damascus. It gives a message to the Syrians that, at least temporarily, nothing is going to happen untoward. We ought not be giving that message. We may not have any intention of invasion--I think we ought not--but we ought not announce that. We ought to make the Syrians think that anything is possible.

We are in a position, after the shock and awe of this war, of influencing the behavior, if not the composition, of regimes in Iran, Syria and elsewhere. We ought to use that momentum. We ought to use the uncertainty in the region to try to impose changes in behavior on regimes like that in Damascus and leave them wondering and thinking.

I think it's a very important moment. It's historic. It's unique, and it will not last long. As soon as the situation stabilizes, it will become encrusted and very static, and we will have a very hard time changing things. Right now the situation is open, fluid, and we have an opportunity to deeply influence the behavior of these states.

The war on terrorism many people believe is an endless war. It is not. It is a war which is winnable. Today, it consists, we have succeeded in Afghanistan and Iraq, we have problems with only three major states right now--Syria, Iran and North Korea. I would venture a guess that this war is winnable in five years; that within five years we could see profound changes in all three of these countries.

I'm not saying it will necessarily happen, but it is certainly conceivable, and it would mark the end of the war on terror and the success on the war on terror. It wouldn't eliminate terror forever, obviously, but if we can change the behavior or the nature or the composition of the regimes in these three countries, then terror, the swamp in which it exists, the strength it draws, would be deeply changed.

The support structure for terrorism would be I think radically weakened, and we could be in a position of declaring success in this war, but it requires energy, innovation, boldness and audacity, as we have shown in the last 19 months.

Thank you very much.

MS. PLETKA: Thank you.

[Applause.]

MS. PLETKA: Sally?

DR. SATEL: Good morning. As Danielle mentioned, if my talk had a title, it would be "Shell Shock and Awe." I'm a psychiatrist, also, and I want to talk about the fact that organizations like the World Health Organization and some other relief agencies are concerned reasonably about the Iraqi children and the Iraqi civilians who may be "mentally scarred for life" as a result of this war, damaged by the last five weeks in a way that calls for therapy.

Now, it's hard to predict how many psychological casualties there will be, but one thing is fairly certain from our experience with other conflicts is that we can expect a second army gearing up to enter Iraq soon, the trauma therapists.

Now, in the past decade, relief agencies such as UNICEF, the U.N. High Commission on Refugees and others, even our State Department, has sent Western-trained therapists to the far reaches of the war-torn globe, and typically their interventions have consisted of urging their patients to open up and talk about their traumatic memories, an approach developed for Western populations.

No question the Iraqi people have suffered terribly, and terror does change people in profound ways. But whether this war experience has rendered many of them psychologically damaged and in need of therapy to avert further impairment is another matter entirely.

As a psychiatrist, I'd like to step back and review what we've learned from the experience of these relief agencies in their attempt to give psychological aid.

The first lesson is that there is an enormous range of measurable responses to the horrific events of war. Some researchers have actually found rather low levels of pathology. For example, at a resettlement project for Albanian Kosovars in Fort Dix, New Jersey, the medical personnel from the U.S. were prepared to treat very high levels of post-traumatic stress disorder. Yet they found that only three of the three thousand refugees needed psychiatric care.

Other researchers, by comparison, have found extremely high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, sometimes up to 100 percent. Now, you recall post-traumatic stress disorder--or PTSD--that's a diagnosis that was developed by the American Psychiatric Association about 1980, and its roots are in an effort to describe the psychopathology of some Vietnam veterans. I'm sure you're familiar with it. It's a condition marked by intense re-experiencing, classically flashbacks, nightmares, intrusive memories, high anxiety, sometimes social withdrawal and dysfunction in the worst cases.

But then why this difference? Three out of three thousand in the Kosovars in Fort Dix and almost 100 percent in some other areas, Cambodia, Rwanda. Well, different things were being measured.

First, was observation of individuals, the second was research questionnaires. And it's important to realize that these checklists of symptoms can give a very limited picture. Let me give you an example.

A study of Rwandan adults who saw relatives and friends hacked to death found that up to 90 percent of them did have trouble sleeping, poor concentration, bad memories; that is, they had symptoms of PTSD. Yet, when questioned, over half had an optimistic view of the future and their ability to care for their families, suggesting that symptoms do not necessarily spell disabling suffering.

This is why Dr. Harvey Weinstein of the Human Rights Center at Berkeley cautions his colleagues not to look at symptoms only because, as he says, then we are left with diagnosing the people of an entire nation with a psychiatric disorder.

The second lesson we've learned from these efforts is that survivors often reject therapy. They resent the implication implicit in the mental health message that they are emotionally abnormal in any way, and what's more, the therapy that we've imported, which is essentially talking about painful memories with a stranger, is alien to them culturally.

My colleague, Kenneth Miller, of the Bosnian Mental Health Program in Chicago says that his patients, most of whom were interred in concentration camps before migrating to the United States, the most successful feature of his program, community program, is not the therapy, which most of these individuals rejected, but efforts aimed at relieving loneliness, worry over economic survival and loss of occupation.

When Joan Giller, a physician working with a London-based medical foundation and caring for the victims of torture, when she offered counseling to Ugandan rape victims near Kampala, none of the women took her up on it, but what Giller says they wanted was advice, medication, practical financial assistance and reassurance.

And at Fort Dix, where the Albanian Kosovars were resettled, as I mentioned earlier, they politely declined to tell their trauma stories, as the mental health experts call them, to the therapists. Instead, they wanted to talk to Amnesty International and people from the State Department to talk about their ordeals. The act of political testimony was much more important to them than sharing and therapy, which is something we might have expected they wanted.

Now, don't get me wrong. Certainly, some civilian survivors will undoubtedly slip into a serious pathological state and require psychiatric care. That's why it would be reckless to interpret all of their suffering in terms of political or social terms, and any treatment given by relief agencies should require collaboration with Iraqi physicians or medical anthropologists who know the culture.

Lesson Three. The best way to prevent psychopathology from developing is to attend to the basics that keep people moving forward, not encouraging them to talk about how much they have suffered. I'm not saying we should discourage anyone from talking about that. We just should not impose therapies that demand it because there's no evidence that it works and actually some evidence from Western populations that it can make some people worse.

We know, for example, also, that social disarray lowers the threshold for development of a mental illness after a crisis, so we need the obvious: adequate food, medicine, sanitation, civil order, reinstatement of schedules, routines. Employment is critical, and schools are especially important, not just for the children, but for the parents, to reduce their anxiety about the safety of their children during the day, and lowering anxiety in parents, and especially mothers, is very, very important because it's well-established that children's mental health is highly dependent on their mothers. When mothers are depressed, children do not fare as well.

And with a physical and social infrastructure in place, people are in a better position to rely on the organic institutions that have always given them strength, religious entities, communities, families. Loss of friends and families here will, of course, be a vast stress for people, so it's important not to interfere with normal traditions of mourning and burial.

One last word about response to crisis. It's well-known, in the literature on resilience, that the way people interpret events, the meaning they make of disaster is strongly related to their psychological health after a traumatic event. So along with the immense grief and fear of the last five weeks, we must keep in mind the uplifting effect of liberation after 30 years of dictatorship, with its own atrocities and oppression. This must play, too, a role in the psychological dynamics of response to the war experience.

Right now what the Iraqi people need is tangible assistance, not therapy. This is not a matter of money. Compared to $75 billion, a few million on therapy is no big deal. So it is not an issue of money, of course. The point is that we should not impose Western models of psychological help. It doesn't work. Civilians and refugees don't want it. In general, there is no need, in fact, for therapy in the first place for people with normal, if painful, if excruciating reactions to traumatic events. That applies universally.

Also, when psychiatric help is needed, it must be integrated with local customs, indigenous theories of emotional distress and treatment, and, finally, for the majority, the best practical therapy--in fact, in the old days, it was called preventative mental health, community mental health, public mental health prevention--is to lay the foundations for people to rebuild and reinforce socially connected and productive lives.

Thank you.

[Applause.]

MS. PLETKA: Thank you.

Newt?

DR. GINGRICH: Let me say, first of all, that those of you who are here have a handout and that that handout is also available at aei.org and at newt.org, for people who'd like to get a copy of it.

I want to start, before I get into the text of the handout, by just saying I want to emphasize that what I'm talking about today is not about personalities, which is how this city translates all arguments. But, in fact, it's about effectiveness and about candidly facing the facts. There are two world views in conflict about foreign policy. One world view is a world view of process, politeness and accommodation. The other world view is a world view of facts, values and outcomes.

President Bush clearly represents the latter world view, with his focus on facts, values and outcomes. The State Department, as an institution, and the Foreign Service, as a culture, clearly represents the former, with a focus on process, politeness and accommodation.

Let me just give you two examples from the early phase of the Bush administration.

When I go out and talk to American audiences and I say Libya chairs the U.N. Human Rights Commission, audiences get it almost immediately. How can you have Qadhafi as a dictator sending somebody to represent human rights and chairing a commission? It's an absurdity. It is a, on the face of it, if you value facts, values and outcomes, it's ridiculous. It's a commentary on the U.N. being messed up.

But if you represent a world view of process, politeness and accommodation, the correct answer is they won the vote. Who are we to judge a dictator being in charge of a Human Rights Commission? That would, after all, that our values somehow were better than Qadhafi's. Now, obviously, President Bush represents the side that says, yes, you're right. Our values are better than Qadhafi's. But what's the second part of the conversation?

Second example. When the United States was ambushed and, for the first time in history, knocked off of the Human Rights Commission, everybody who focused on facts, values and outcomes understood exactly what had happened. I happened to see former Secretaries of State George Schultz and Henry Kissinger a few days later in a private meeting, and they were both quite vivid about their understanding because they both come out of a school of facts, values and outcomes, and they both said the consequences would have been horrendous, particularly with regard to one country--France. But, of course, if you believe in process, politeness and accommodation, the vote was held, it was a little bit unfortunate. We're not quite sure how it occurred. The State Department announced it was surprised, and nothing happened which I think is a key stage in why the French felt so bold in trying to defeat U.S. policy over the last seven months.

So within this framework of these two world views, let me comment now on where we find ourselves after the victory in Iraq. Because the last seven months have involved six months of diplomatic failure and one month of military success. The first days after military victory indicate the pattern of diplomatic failure is beginning once again and threatens to undo the effects of military victory, and that's why I chose to speak out at this time as strongly as I am speaking.

The diplomatic high point of the United States was President Bush's speech at the United Nations General Assembly on September 12, 2002. At that point, the case had been made emphatically by the President that the burden was on the U.N.'s Security Council. The Iraqi dictatorship had violated U.N. resolutions for 12 years. It was the United Nations that was under scrutiny because it as obvious that the regime of Saddam Hussein had failed. As President Bush said, it was time to choose between a world of fear and a world of progress.

The State Department took the President's strong position and negotiated a resolution that shifted from verification to inspection. This was done, in part, because of internal State Department politics, because verification would have put the policy in the hands of people who disagreed with the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs' propensity for appeasing dictators and propping up corrupt regimes.

The State Department then accepted Hans Blix as chief inspector, even though he was clearly opposed to war and determined to buy time and find excuses for Saddam. The State Department then accepted Blix's refusal to hire back any of the experienced inspectors, thus, further drawing out the process.

The process was turned from verifying Iraqi compliance, in which case the burden was on Saddam, and Iraq had clearly failed, to pursuing United Nations' inspections, in which case the burden was on the United States.

From President Bush's clear choice between two worlds, the State Department had descended into a murky game in which the players were deceptive and the rules were stacked against the United States. The State Department's Communications Program failed during these five months to such a degree that 95 percent of the Turkish people opposed the American position.

This fit in with a pattern of State Department communications failures, as a result of which the South Korean people regarded the United States as more dangerous than North Korea and a vast majority of French and German citizens favored policies that opposed the United States.

As the State Department remained ineffective and incoherent, the French launched a worldwide campaign to undermine the American position and make the replacement of the Saddam dictatorship very difficult. This included twisting Turkish arms to block a vote in favor of the United States using Turkish soil to create a Northern front and the French appealing to other members of the Security Council to block a second resolution.

Despite a pathetic public campaign of hand-wringing and desperation, the State Department publicly failed to gain even a majority of votes on the U.N. Security Council for a second resolution. Opposing America and a world of progress had somehow become less attractive and more difficult than helping America eliminate the fear of Saddam's wicked regime. It's important to remember where we were the day before the war.

All across the planet, it was easier to oppose the side of freedom and prop up the side of tyranny, terrorism and torture. That is a stunning diplomatic defeat and communications defeat of the first order.

Fortunately, the Defense Department was capable of overcoming losing access to Turkey, losing public opinion support in Europe and the Middle East and turned those disadvantages into a stunning victory, working in concert with our British allies and with support largely secured by CENTCOM and the Department of Defense among the Gulf States.

Had General Franks of CENTCOM and the Defense Department been as ineffective at diplomacy as the State Department, which is supposedly in charge of diplomacy, Kuwait would not have been available, the Saudi air base would not have been available, and the Jordanian passage of Special Forces would not have been available, and the war would have been stunningly more difficult, although technically possible.

The military delivered diplomatically, and then the military delivered militarily in a stunning four-week campaign and General Frank's second major victory in a remarkable career.

Now, the State Department is back at work pursuing policies that will clearly throw away all of the fruits of hard-won victory.

First, the concept of the American secretary of State going to Damascus to meet with a terrorist-supporting, secret police-wielding dictator is ludicrous. The United States military has created an opportunity to apply genuine economic, diplomatic and political pressure on Syria. The current Syrian dictatorship openly hosts seven terrorist offices in downtown Damascus in public, with recognized addresses. You can get off the airplane, get in the cab, and give them the address, and they take you to the terrorist offices.

The current Syrian dictatorship is still developing chemical weapons of mass destruction and will not allow inspections. The current Syrian dictatorship is still occupying Lebanon, to the disadvantage of peace in the region, and is still transmitting weapons and support for Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon, where there are over 11,000 rockets and missiles aimed at Israel.

And by the way, as recently as last night, I saw a reference in the news that the Syrian dictatorship had lied to the deputy British foreign minister in saying they weren't able to stop people from leaving Syria to go to Iraq to fight. The notion that this dictatorship is not capable of controlling its country, when it is a totalitarian system, is an absurdity, and the fact that they would lie directly to the British tells you how arrogant they still are, despite the results in Iraq.

This is a time for America to demand changes in Damascus before a visit is even considered. The visit should be a reward for public change, not an appeal to weak, economically depressed dictatorship. And those of you who have studied foreign policy, will remember the Clinton administration tradition of well over 20 visits to Damascus by the secretary of State, none of which produced any change.

Second, the State Department invention of a quartet for Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations defies everything the United States has learned about France, Russia and the United Nations. After the bitter lessons of the last five months, it is unimaginable that the United States would voluntarily accept a system in which the United Nations, the European Union and Russia could routinely outvote President Bush's positions by 3 to 1 or 4 to zero, if the State Department voted its cultural beliefs against the president's policies.

This is a deliberate and systematic effort to undermine the president's policies procedurally by ensuring they will consistently be watered down and distorted by the other three members. Let me be very clear here. The president has said Arafat is unacceptable. None of the other three partners in the quartet believe that.

The European Union will not even audit the money it gives Arafat because it doesn't want to learn how much corruption there is. For us to invite them into a quartet is an absolute defeat before the process even begins, and this is worse than the U.N.'s inspection process. It is a clear disaster for American diplomacy.

Third, the people the State Department has sent to Iraq so far represent the worst instincts of the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. They were promoting a culture of propping up dictators, coddling the corrupt, and ignoring the secret police. They have a constituency of Middle Eastern governments deeply opposed to democracy in Iraq. Their instinct is to create weak Iraqi government that will not threaten the Syrian, Iranian, Saudi and other dictatorial neighbors. This is the exact opposite of the president's stated goals.

Fourth, the announcement that someone from the Agency for International Development would work to help reconstruct Iraq was a further sign that nothing has been learned. As of two weeks ago, not one mile of road had been paved in Afghanistan. This is a stunning bureaucratic failure.

For a country whose genius with the Corps of Engineers or with the private sector could have paved all of those roads in one summer, to not have paved one mile of road is an astonishing achievement of incompetence by the bureaucracy of the Agency for International Development.

This absolute failure of American entrepreneurial effort was a direct result of the State Department blocking the Corps of Engineers from being directly involved. There is no reason to believe AID will be any better in Iraq than the disaster it has been in Afghanistan. As one AID official to the Post, "Afghans need to understand the lengthy bureaucratic processes of AID and not become impatient." That was a direct quote in the Post.

That is exactly the wrong attitude and helps explain why the State Department should be transformed, but AID should be abolished. These continuing failures and refusal to learn about new realities compels the Bush administration to take on transforming the State Department as its next urgent mission.

The president called for transforming the Defense Department in his 1999 Citadel address and, "keeping the peace by redefining war on our terms." Secretary Rumsfeld has been implementing the president's plan, and the success can be seen in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

The president called for reorganizing Homeland Security in 2002, and Secretary Ridge has begun that difficult, but vital, job.

It is now time for the president to call for the equivalent of a Goldwater-Nickles reform bill for the State Department and redefine peace on our terms. America cannot lead the world with a broken instrument of diplomacy. America cannot lead the world in an age of democracy and 24-hour television with a broken instrument of international communications.

America cannot help develop a vibrant world of entrepreneurial progress, where countries grow into safety, health, prosperity and freedom for their people with a broken bureaucracy of red tape and excuses.

The House and Senate Committees on International Relations should hold exhaustive hearings on the requirements of diplomatic and communications leadership in the 21st century. The House and Senate Committee should examine critically what would be needed to help countries grow into safety, health, prosperity and freedom for their people.

The president should appoint a small working group to report back within six months and should prepare to propose for a transformation of the diplomatic communications and assistance elements of the United States.

Without bold, dramatic change of the State Department, the United States will soon find itself on the defensive everywhere, except militarily. In the long run, that is a very dangerous position for the world's leading democracy to be in, indeed. In the long run, that is an unsustainable position.

Our ability to lead is more communications-, diplomatic- and assistance-based than military. People have always admired us more than feared us. The collapse of the State Department as an effective instrument puts all of this at risk. We must learn the transforming lessons of the last six months and apply them to create a more effective State Department.

[Applause.]

MS. PLETKA: Okay, everybody, we're going to go to questions now. If you would do me the favor of not pontificating, identifying yourself, asking the question, and if you would wait for the microphone.

MS. LABOTT: Thank you. Elise Labott with CNN.

Mr. Gingrich, do you think that the diplomatic failures, in part, that you attribute solely to the State Department could be, in part, due to the policies themselves of the administration, which have been widely unpopular around the world, and which many, not necessarily Iraq, but which many countries have cited as one of the reasons that the U.S. never made it to the Human Rights Commission and was voted off?

And aren't you concerned that without engaging countries on some of these problems that you cite, America will stick to its values and morals, but might be isolated and have no ability to change these policies around the world?

Thank you.

DR. GINGRICH: Well, I guess I'm a little puzzled by your question from this standpoint: I think that when people are asked if you support torture, they say, no. If they're asked, do you support terrorism, they say, no. Yet somehow we were unable to communicate in Europe, for example, the nature of Saddam Hussein's regime, and the issue became President Bush, rather than Dictator Saddam. Now, that's I think a communications issue, not a policy issue.

I would say, for example, that an effective State Department would currently have a program by which Iraqis who had survived the torture, Iraqis who had witnessed their families being tortured were on tour in Europe, talking and being witnesses to the correctness of the American position. I don't think this is necessarily an overnight argument.

As to our losing our position on the Human Rights Commission, that occurred early in 2001 and was a deliberate ambush by the French, and I don't think French opposition, and I don't think President Chirac and French opposition to the United States has anything to do with communications.

I think this is a deliberate strategy by France to create a countervailing force in the world, and we need to deal with it as an honest, deliberate strategy, and as the most powerful nation in the world, we need to orchestrate an appropriate response to being challenged.

I think communications is a part of that response, but I'm not certain which of the president's policies we should give up. Opposing terrorism? No, I'd rather have a debate. Being against dictatorships that torture people? I'd rather have a debate. Being against Arafat, who is both corrupt and a terrorist? I'd rather have a debate.

So my argument is that our policies are really right, but that we need to be dramatically more aggressive and effective in communicating them.

[Tape change: Side A to Side B.]

MR. : --treaty and things, you know, we'll accept what we want, where we want it, and what we don't want, we'll just pull out of and then asking countries to go along with us, not that we weren't right to do that, but don't you need to at least consider that in your analysis?

And related to that, wasn't there some value in having Colin Powell be a little bit cautious about the war, and then, finally, when Colin Powell when "even he came on board," didn't that sort of sap a lot of the anti-war sentiment, both in the U.S. and overseas?

DR. KRAUTHAMMER: Let me try to answer your question whether democratization in the Middle East would actually exacerbate the Arab-Israeli dispute.

First of all, it's undeniable that the dictatorships in the Arab World for 50 years have used the Arab-Israeli dispute as a way to deflect discontent with their own governments. That's indisputable. So if you remove that, and you have relentless propaganda coming from state-controlled organs entirely focused on the Arab-Israeli dispute, as if it were the only issue in the Arab World.

Secondly, our own experience is undeniable over the last 50 years, that in the long run, democracies tend to be less warlike than dictatorships, and certainly democracies generally don't go to war with each other. So that's a general historical lesson.

It is true there may be a country in which if you had a free election, you might have, for some time, a more radical or reckless government. That is not impossible, but I think it is undeniable that if you were to democratize the region, and let's look at the Palestinians today. As we are trying to remove the dictatorship of Arafat, what are we getting? People for the first time expressing discontent with the Intifada, people like Abu Mazen who are proposing a reasonable, less-aggressive policy towards Israel. So what you're doing by removing dictatorship is getting the natural expression that you would expect from normal, decent people, which is we want to live in peace with our neighbors and raise our families.

But the more important point is this: The reason that we are, as Americans, democratizing the Middle East or at least attempting it, at least starting with Iraq is not necessarily to solve the Arab-Israeli dispute. That might not be a nice side benefit. The main reason that we are doing this is for protection of the United States and America at home and abroad.

Our only hope of eradicating the kind of hatred, enmity and fanaticism which gave us a 9/11 is to see a revolution in the Arab World, and this will not be overnight, but to try to change the cauldron in which that radicalism, anti-Americanism, hatred and fanaticism has been bred. And you start that by democratizing societies, bringing in a decent society, decent education, and I think that is the long-run project.

That's the meaning of the war on Iraq. It is an attempt, it's a radical attempt, it's an ambitious attempt, but it's a serious, and I think utterly sincere, attempt, to try to bring decent government and democracy to a region that the world has written off, and I think should never have written off in terms of democracy.

DR. GINGRICH: Let me start by picking up with what Charles Krauthammer just said, which is if you listen to all of the values statements, all of the statements he's outlining, they're all post-military. The military talks about joint operations, which means the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps together. They talked about combined operations, which means with allies.

They also need to be talking about integrated operations, which is all the different elements of non-DOD, whether it is intelligence or communications or the State Department or helping economically or helping with education or helping get the water system back up. There's an integrated zone we've not really developed as a pattern, and yet almost all of the positive end-state values we want are post-military values. They are after the victory. And the reason I'm saying we need to transform the State Department is, in part, it is an essential instrument of a post, of both pre-military and post-military activities, and it currently can't deliver.

Now, let me go to your question, which is I think a legitimate one.

There are some things this administration did clumsily, particularly in the first year, so I'll accept that. I'm not going to defend everything they--the way they did things. But the deeper fact is that if you're the leading country in the world, and if you represent a unique value system, I mean, our belief that, as the president stated, that freedom is God's gift to the human race is really a very different belief system than dictatorships, cultures of terror and places that have much narrower definitions of freedom, and our passion about freedom is a much greater passion.

When I was in China several years ago, I made a speech at the Institute of Foreign Policy, making the case that to ask Americans to deal with you and not discuss political and religious freedom is to ask them not to be Americans because they had no bound to explain themselves if you stripped away the core of who Americans are.

And so I start with the idea because we are so unique, because we're all so relatively so powerful, we actually need a better diplomatic system and a better communications system than a smaller country, a less-central country or a country more willing to tolerate dictatorships.

Let me just close with this point about the Middle East. You're going to hear lots of governments in the Middle East say the United States should get out of Iraq quickly, and they mean it sincerely. They are dictatorships. They would be very comfortable if Iraq would slide back into a dictatorship presided over by a general because that's their model. Some of them are dictatorships, and now we're moving into a second generation of family dictatorship.

The last thing they want is for the United States to stay in Iraq long enough to create a genuine democracy, to create a country like, let's say, Germany and Japan, to take two other American success stories, or South Korea. Those are very frightening if you are a dictatorship because they suddenly set for your people a standard of power, a standard of opportunity, a standard of openness that shatters your dictatorship.

So when you watch the conversations, and you have the dictator of Egypt, the dictator of Saudi Arabia, the dictator of Syria explain to you how much they want us to leave, it would be nice if you reported it that way. Because if you simply say the Syrian dictator, it's somehow different than the Syrian president, and you begin to understand what the real game is.

DR. KRAUTHAMMER: Could I add one point on your question about democracy and peace? There's a very stunning example in recent history that is a counterexample to your suggestion that if you democratize the area, people will then want to, say, pursue war as a result of hatred of Israel. That's Lebanon. Lebanon, until 1975, was a decent, open, pluralistic, reasonably democratic society, and it was the country most at peace with Israel.

What happened? That Lebanon was destroyed in the mid '70s by the PLO and the Syrians. It is today an extension of the Syrian dictatorship, and the Lebanese Israeli frontier is the most electric, dangerous and threatening one in the whole region, and I think that is a stunning historical example which would prove our case that democratization is far more likely to lead to peace and comity in the region than dictatorship.

DR. SATEL: Actually, I'd like the opportunity to beat up on Phil for a second, since everybody else has. Phil, you said abrogated treaty after treaty after treaty. Words, if I may coin a phrase, do have meaning, and the United States pulled out of the ABM Treaty according to the terms of the treaty, but not signing up to treaties is, in fact, not an abrogation. We didn't sign up to the International Criminal Court.

Now, I would point everybody toward the news last night that the government of Belgium is using its laws on war crimes to try and bring Tommy Franks to trial for war crimes in Iraq. Should we have signed up to the International Criminal Court in order that the ICC would have brought Tommy Franks to trial for that?

Let's be careful about what we talk about. That's my end of it.

MS. PLETKA: Thank you.

MR. : --Kagiana [ph], Middle East Broadcast Center.

Mr. Gingrich, you've put forth some very bold ideas, one that would probably take different personnel in order to implement them. If you were advising the president, would you say Secretary of State Colin Powell needs to be replaced and by whom?

DR. GINGRICH: No, I think Secretary Powell is an extraordinary figure. I think he's a very effective advocate, but I think he is currently presiding over an institution that's broken. I think had Secretary Powell had an effective Near Eastern Bureau they would have said to him, you know, don't consider going to Syria until you get something out of the Syrian Government.

After all, the effort of the 1990s was absurd, and at one point an American secretary of State actually sat on the runway for four hours, and the dictator wouldn't even allow him to come into the city.

And I think if you would have had somebody from the Near Eastern Bureau suggesting to Secretary Powell that the long record of trying to appease the Assad dictatorship is not very encouraging. So I think the question is structural and institutional. It's not personality. And I think Secretary Powell, as an individual, is probably as effective a person as you could get, but the instrument under him is, in fact, I think clearly decisively broken.

MR. : [Off microphone.] [Inaudible.]

DR. GINGRICH: I think that Secretary Powell, with a more effective State Department, would be a dramatically more effective secretary of State. I mean, you can't expect Secretary Powell to have personally won the communications campaign across the planet, and yet that campaign was clearly decisively lost during the five months after the president's speech. I think that's an institutional issue. It's not a personality issue.

This is a city that would like to reduce every complex, difficult problem to a personality fight, so it can then gossip between the personalities. This is a serious, long-term institutional problem that has to be addressed without regard to the personalities on the top.

MR. MASSEY: Alex Massey from The Scotsman in Edinburgh.

I was just wondering, Mr. Gingrich, given that many people would make exactly the same criticisms of the Foreign and Commonwealth Offices of the EU as the State Department, I am curious as to whether you think that these institutional difficulties recognize borders, but also whether, perhaps more importantly, whether the United States needs to rethink its trade policies, particularly perhaps shifting an emphasis away from engagement with China towards advocating trade policies that help develop flourishing economies in the Middle East and across the Arab World instead.

DR. GINGRICH: Well, let me say that I think the United States is very interested in developing trade policies that help the Third World. That, of course, directly collides with the common agricultural policy of the European Union, which is a remarkably anti-Third World policy.

But I think you'd find the United States is consistently the most open market in the world, and I think that this administration, in fact, will be pursuing free trade agreements with Iraq and with Gulf States and will be trying to find a way to reach out because the kind of transparency and the kind of legal honesty you have to have to be part of the world market is precisely one of the things missing in the various dictatorships in the region, and moving towards transparency, accountability and legality would both be good for the people of the region, but is a necessary part of becoming part of free trade agreements.

So I think the United States will be far more open to have those kind of agreements, I suspect, than will the European Union.

MR. WRIGHT: Thanks. I'm Jonathan Wright of Reuters.

I hope I'm not alone in detecting a tone of premature triumphalism in your analysis of Iraq. I think people actually in Iraq now see that there's a crisis possibly looming in the contradiction between U.S. aims and the wishes of the Iraqi people, and who generally seem to wish that the Americans would soon leave and do not appear to be enamored of the project which you advocate.

How do you see that conflict playing out? Do you think that the United States will tamely yield to the wishes of the Iraqi people or do you think that the Bush administration will, in fact, as many people suspect, try to impose a system of their own liking?

DR. KRAUTHAMMER: Who are you addressing?

MR. WRIGHT: All of you. I don't mind.

DR. KRAUTHAMMER: You seem to have a remarkable intuition about the will of the Iraqi people. You seem to have intuited it before any election and by watching television. Your inference that the Iraqi people, generally or as a whole, would want us out, I think is, to say the least, rather premature.

Of course, you have demonstrators who appear on camera in front of the Palestine Hotel or who marched to Karbala who would like an Islamic republic. We have known that there are radical Shi'a elements in Iraq who are influenced by Iran. We know that the strongest Shi'a organization is headquartered in Tehran, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and we would expect that in a vacuum, it would exert its influence, show itself early, but to infer that they speak for the people of Iraq is simply absurd.

We have a Kurdish population which is extremely thankful about the support it's had from the United States and Britain in establishing a fledgling democracy. We have vast numbers of people who have not spoken, who clearly are happy to be liberated from Saddam. We have a very fractured society, where civil society has been almost destroyed by 30 years of Stalinist dictatorship.

This is a country that has not expressed itself, and there are people like you who are assuming that the demonstrations on television speak for the whole people. That's absurd. We're going to try to establish a system in which in this fractured, highly fragmented society, we're going to try to allow all of the elements to speak in a way in which they can express the common will or, if there is no common will, to express themselves in a way that produces a compromise or consensual policy.

And I suspect that the vast majority of Iraqis will want to live, as you want to live, in a decent society with some protection and the rule of law, rather than an Islamic republic which has been tried in Iran and is overwhelmingly unpopular.

And so I would say you're a little bit premature. Let's have a year or two of establishing the rudiments of a structure which will allow Iraqis to express themselves, and I am completely confident that in that context, Iraqis will choose freedom.

MR. MENGES: I'm Constantine Menges with the Hudson Institute.

I would like to say that in my years at the [audio break] observed the Department of State institutional problem that Newt Gingrich talks about and seven times the Department of State career foreign service officers and their political leader [audio break] countermanded, manipulated against the written national security directives of the president.

I had the honor and privilege of bringing that to the president's attention and stopping his policy from being undone by a State Department, which time and time again, felt it knew better than the elected president of the United States. I wrote a book about it called, "Inside the National Security Council." I was, frankly, shocked by what I observed, and I think the same thing has continued decade after decade, and we have seen this for so many years.

The Department of State also has a problem institutionally, not only in countermanding the president and not supporting his policies, but also in failing to have foresight, strategic foresight again and again. And I would just mention exactly what Charles Krauthammer has talked about. It was obvious to anyone who has followed the region that the dictatorship in Iran [audio break], the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iran would try to do what it's doing now, which is a covert action to try to intimidate the Shi'a community of Iraq and to try to take over [audio break] and gradually politically.

This can be stopped, it must be stopped, and I've got some suggestions for that, but that's another panel.

MS. PLETKA: Would anybody like to comment on that? Okay. All right.

Hiding back there. Stand up. Stand up. We can't see you so speak up.

MR. DAOUD: My name is Hala Daoud [ph]. I'm from Egyptian newspaper Al Haram, and my question is for Mr. Gingrich.

Just mentioning that you are saying that it's only dictatorships in the Arab World that oppose your presence in Iraq. You mentioned Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the rest, while there was a recent study by Pew Institute Research which said that even in Turkey, you know, and you mentioned it yourself, 95 percent of the people oppose your presence in Iraq or oppose the war, and the same for other Arab countries, and the same all over the world.

I mean, don't you think really that you're just basically not seeing the amount of, you know, disagreement that it has on the international level, and it's not just by people who oppose your values. These are real kind of requests. You know, people are afraid of the United States going into Iraq, and then into Syria, and then into any other country. So I just wonder if your views are seeing the people as well as the governments.

Thank you.

DR. GINGRICH: First of all, as you point out, I did suggest to you that having 95 percent of the Turkish people in a poll oppose our policies, one would normally assume it was either a sign that we were totally out of touch with the world, which is I think the interpretation of some people, or a sign that we had dramatically failed to communicate anything.

I think with a reasonable communications plan, that would have been in the 35- or 40-percent approval level. It may not have been a majority, but we would have a substantial minority of the Turkish people who said, yeah, this is the right thing to do for the people next door who are suffering from torture, and who are connected to terrorism, and who are doing things that are harmful, in the long run, to Turkey.

Second, as you point out, in the dictatorships, where you've had government-run and government-censored media, there is a surprising level of anti-Americanism. There was a study done that if you turned to Iran, as Charles was pointing out, in places like Iran, any polling which has been done indicates dramatically more pro-American feeling than among countries such as Egypt, which has gotten billions of dollars from us, but whose dictatorial government doesn't create any civil space and which has a media which is vehemently anti-American in many ways.

So I would start and say that part of the State Department's obligation has to be to pretty aggressively state-owned publications that are systematically and methodically anti-American and [audio break] to governments that supposedly like us, that, you know, paying for a newspaper or a TV channel that systematically vehemently communicates anti-Americanism every day, if you are an ally of the United States, has to be looked at questionably.

This is not about a free press. I mean I don't think, in the short run, this is going to be an easy struggle. Somebody mentioned triumphalism, and I think my speech is the opposite of triumphalism. What I'm trying to suggest is that we have to get under control our ability to communicate both diplomatically and in open media in order to be able to survive as a leading country because you can't just use military force.

And so I would say that you're simply repeating the challenge, unless you believe that the world--and this is a question that would be useful to pose to people. Do you truly believe the world would be better off today if Saddam was still in power, if people were still being killed and tortured, if they still had ties to terrorists, if the branch of al Qaeda was still in Northeastern Iraq, if the terror facility at Salman Paq was still there with its airplane to train hijackers, if in fact the chemical weapons or the chemical and materials they found last night were once again being turned into weapons with the absence of the U.N. inspectors? Would the world be better today if Saddam was still a dictator?

Now, if you believe that, then U.S. policies were wrong. But if, on the other hand, you believe the world is, in fact, slightly better today to have a chance to create a free Iraq, despite the efforts of Iran, despite the efforts of others, then you have to say, okay, why have we not been able to communicate that correctness better, rather than is the policy itself wrong?

DR. KRAUTHAMMER: I'd like to make a comment on that.

I agree with Newt that part of this is communication, but I do believe that there is a large, sincere and quite culturally understandable aversion to our presence in Iraq, and I wouldn't deny it. And I think it's widespread, it's in the region, it's in Europe, it's all around the world.

And I think the challenge for the United States is to prove, by succeeding in Iraq--that's why the stakes are so high in winning the peace--by succeeding in Iraq that we were utterly sincere in saying that we have no desire for Iraqi oil, we have no hunger for desert lands. We want to establish the beginning of a decent, open, pluralistic society in Iraq, and that was our goal. And that's why I think it's very important that we control the transition process because if we bring other people in, particularly in the U.N., the French, the Russians and others who want to get in by using the blackmail, the Security Council control over sanctions, we will then fail.

The world looks at us, thinks of Napoleon in 1898. It thinks of Sykes-Picot in 1916. We are not Napoleon. We are not the British and the French imperialists. We are not a colonial power. We are the only hegemonic power in history that's obsessed with exit strategies. I can assure you the Romans did not discuss exit strategy or the French or the British at the height of their empires.

When we enter a country, the first thing Americans want to do is to pack up, leave and go home, back to McDonald's and Western movies. This is what America has always been. The paradox is that we are accused, on the one hand, of having abandoned Afghanistan in the '90s and on the other hand of being an imperial power. Our problem has been abandonment.

And I think the reason that Iraq is so important, and post-war Iraq is so important, is to try to change world opinion about us by demonstrating, with a success on the ground in Iraq, that we are sincere in saying that our only interest in there was a change in the region and the introduction of a decent and open society.

DR. GINGRICH: Before we go, let me just build on one thing that Charles mentioned because I want you to understand the contrast. If the United States ends up managing the sale of oil for the Iraqi people, we have an absolute obligation to do it in a transparent, accountable and open manner. Now, I suggest to the reporters here today call the U.N. and ask them about the billions of dollars the U.N. has managed in the Oil for Food program, ask them who the money was paid to. Ask them which countries have profited. Ask them which things were approved by Kofi Annan, including, for example, Russian television equipment and other things and just go look at the list.

The fact is the United Nations runs the Iraqi program in a totally secret manner with no accountability and no transparency. The United States would bend over backwards in the opposite direction to ensure that the money was spent for the Iraqi people and not diverted to the United States. But in the double standard, it is America that will be questioned and the United Nations that will be ignored.

MR. FARGHALI: My name is Nassir Farghali [ph] from Abu Dhabi Television.

We heard a lot being said today about the Middle East. I want to hear Mr. Gingrich [audio break] to an old, widely spread and circulated argument in the Middle East, which is the American double standards. We heard him today mention, for instance, the Syrian chemical weapons capabilities. What about the Israeli [audio break] capabilities? Does he have anything to say about this?

We heard him mention Saudi Arabia, Syria and Egypt [audio break]. Would he include [audio break], would he include Kuwait and Qatar, for instance?

That's it. Thank you.

DR. GINGRICH: Well, I think definitionally, although there have been some steps taken by some of the Gulf states towards free elections, they still have a long way to go. My only comment on possession of weapons of mass destruction would be that whether or not Israel has them--and everyone agrees they do have them--they clearly have refused to use them, and they clearly exist for the purpose of deterrence.

And I think it's fairly hard, if you read, for example, Saddam's speeches, to believe that he was trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction for deterrence purposes and, in fact, Ambassador Richard Butler, who was the Australian, who was the head of the inspections for the U.N. in the late '90s in his memoir makes very clear that he believes Saddam was trying to get weapons of mass destruction to use them.

I would finally point out that where the Syrians and the Iraqis each had a dictatorship that destroyed an entire city, in Saddam's case using chemical weapons, in the Syrian case using conventional weapons, I think that's a different standard of aggressiveness against human beings than we would normally [audio break] for.

Finally, in terms of double standards, I think President Bush has moved exactly in the right direction by emphasizing that we have a commitment to helping the Palestinian people achieve an opportunity to have freedom and dignity and to create a genuine state, and I think, in that sense, that President Bush has moved the United States more dramatically in favor of helping the Palestinian people than any American president up to this point.

DR. KRAUTHAMMER: If I could add to that, I think it's very important, when you talk about double standards, to recognize that Israel is a state in the region that with the exception of Jordan and Egypt is surrounded by states, all of whom do not recognize its right to exist, some of whom believe that the eradication of Israel is a religious obligation.

The leadership of Iran has spoken about using nuclear weapons in a way to eradicate Israel. In those circumstances, it is entirely understandable why Israel would want to have a nuclear deterrent as a way to protect itself in a sea of countries who believe that it should be wiped off of the face of the earth.

Israel, on the other hand, does not have a policy which believes that Syria has no right to exist or Lebanon has no right to exist, and therefore you have a radical asymmetry in that region. If you achieve a state in which the other states in the region recognize Israel's right to exist, which is a rather elementary idea--after all, no other state in the world is treated that way by other states--if you had a situation where Israel were recognized, I'm sure that you could then have a situation in which the mutual disarmament would be very easily negotiable.

MR. FARGHALI: [Off microphone.] [Inaudible.]

MS. PLETKA: Just make it very quick, please.

MR. FARGHALI: A second argument. The mighty American military that managed to get the Kuwait and the Kuwaitis back about, I don't know, 12-/13,000 miles across the face of the earth and now did the same thing with the Iraqi regime that defied the United States, cannot guarantee the safety of the Israeli state without the Israelis possessing mass destruction weapons?

DR. KRAUTHAMMER: After 9/11, in which it's obvious that the United States, for all its might, could not ensure the safety of New York and Washington, I think it's a rather absurd presumption on your part that America can extend an umbrella over anywhere it wants instantaneously in the world.

In the world of rockets, missiles, terrorists and weapons of mass destruction, absolute protection to anybody is utterly impossible.

DR. GINGRICH: I also would just point out that it's interesting that you didn't suggest that maybe the Iranian Government should announce it's not interested in wiping out Israel. That would be a step towards a more peaceful region, and it goes back to the one-sided nature of the moral standard in which some people in some countries can say the most destructive, vicious and unbelievable things, and it's just accepted, and then we move on to the next topic.

So it would seem to me one step towards asking the Israelis to eventually not have nuclear weapons would be for Iran to recognize Israel, for Iran to say we are not going to try to wipe them out. But I think it's just interesting that that half of the debate can't even occur in most of the Middle East because it is unthinkable to suggest that Iran or other countries would behave as though they were going to be civilized neighbors.

MS. PLETKA: Barbara, and then we're going to move back to the other side and then to the middle.

MS. SLAVIN: Barbara Slavin of USA Today.

For Mr. Krauthammer. If Iraqis freely vote for an Islamic Republic of Iraq in a year or two, would the United States be obliged to accept that, and would you regard that as an improvement over what they endured under Saddam?

And for Mr. Gingrich, you say this is not about personalities, but Colin Powell is one of the most beloved secretaries of State, if I'm to believe it, among State Department employees. He prides himself on his leadership capabilities. He, I'm sure, would say that what he espouses reflects his department's and his own views. How can you say, in all candor, that what you've proposed today is not a direct assault on Colin Powell and a call on the president to fire him?

Thank you.

DR. KRAUTHAMMER: On the first question, I think it's a wild hypothetical. I don't think there are any examples in human history of a country voluntarily voting for a totalitarian regime. Certainly, the Islamic Republic of Iran was not elected. It came about in a revolution. If you had an election today, I can assure you it would be rejected.

Germany was a minority. Hitler had 31 percent of the vote, and he seized all of the other institutions. He had a minority government.

Look, you do not--I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's a radical hypothetical. Should we allow it? I think it's imperative on us to make sure that you do not have a situation of one man, one vote, one time. That's not democracy. Democracy is not just elections, as we Americans know. Democracy is about the rule of law, Constitutions, individual rights, balance of power.

So what you're talking about is a notion of massive democracy which has been advanced by totalitarians in the past as a way to seize power. I don't think we ought to have had a war in Iraq as a way to pave the way for totalitarians to seize power. I think we ought to set up a structure. I'm sure we will. I'm sure the vast majority of Iraqis, Kurds, Sunnis and Shi'as will agree to have a structure in which there is more than one man, one vote, one time, in which you will have institutions that protect rights and ensure the transfer of power, not just once, but regularly.

Therefore, I think it's important that we leave behind a structure like that, rather than have a single election in which all of the advances that have come about as a result of the war could be wiped out.

DR. GINGRICH: Let me build on what Charles Krauthammer just said because I think talking about democracy, per se, without the underlying principles of the rule of law, independent judges, the ability to guarantee a following election is, in fact, a nonstarter.

On the other hand, in Turkey, where there's an Islamist party currently forming the government, it was interestingly the Islamists in the Parliament who voted for the Americans to have access to Turkey. It was the Western parties in opposition, both for tactical reasons and under some pressure from the French, who voted against the Americans being able to pass through.

So an Islamist party dedicated to a constitutional system of liberty and willing to tolerate the rights of others it strikes me would be a totally acceptable future and one we would have no right to reject.

That kind of party, by the way, in Iran would lose the election decisively because the younger Iranians have concluded that there is not, in fact, an Islamic way to create prosperity, and there is not an Islamic way to fix computers, and that they actually want access to a larger world within a framework defined by Islam.

I explicitly reject the idea that you cannot discuss institutional failings without personalizing it. To go back to your question, Secretary Powell is a remarkable American of great capability. I cannot imagine any circumstance under which the president should not wish Secretary Powell to continue as secretary. On the other hand, it's pretty hard to argue the last six months have been periods of great success by the State Department.

Now, if your point is we cannot discuss honestly the diplomatic, and communications, and construction failures on the part of AID, the State Department Communications program and the Near Eastern Bureau because they can all shelter behind Secretary Powell's personality, then I don't see how America can ever have an effective diplomatic system in this administration.

I can't imagine that President Bush looked on this series of failures and looked--I mean, the failure to pave a single mile of road in Afghanistan by itself should be sufficiently high value to suggest that there's something deeper going on here than an argument over personalities. This is not a Rumsfeld-Powell argument.

This is an argument that transformation has worked in Defense, transformation is underway in Homeland Security, and it's time now to bring the same model to the entire instrumentality of the diplomacy, communications and helping other countries economically.

MS. SLAVIN: [Off microphone.] [Inaudible.]

DR. GINGRICH: Not necessarily.

MS. SLAVIN: [Off microphone.] [Inaudible.]

DR. GINGRICH: Look, of course, you can have changes. The question is does it require change in leadership. I simply think it requires the president and the secretary of State to sit down, look at the results. I can't imagine the secretary of State would defend not having a single mile of road paved in Afghanistan. Now just take that one example. I suspect he would like to figure out how to change AID so it actually worked.

But historically what happens is people say that's too hard, and they go on to the next topic. They report how bad it is. They shrug their shoulders, and they go on to the next topic. So I would not prejudge that Secretary Powell is necessarily totally happy with the instruments that failed over the last five months, and I suspect, just as by the way Secretary Rumsfeld, without the president's backing, wouldn't have transformed the Defense Department.

So I think that this goes back to the opportunity the president has, working with his team, to create continuing change in the Executive Branch.

MS. PLETKA: Barbara, I do think it's important that we dispel the notion that somehow all Shi'ites are fundamentalists. Not all of the demonstrators in Najaf and Karbala yesterday were representative of all of the Shi'ite of Iraq any more than the demonstrators over the course of the war were representative of all of the Americans. So I don't think that's fair to them.

A question over there from this gentleman.

MR. : [?], visiting Austrian journalist. I am most impressed by the quality of discussion and also by some degree of naivete concerning the future.

Credibility gap. Number one, the weapons of mass destruction haven't yet been found.

Number two, the contacts between Saddam and al Qaeda haven't yet been proven. This is also criticized in the European and the American press.

Number two, credibility gap. I believe, Mr. Krauthammer, that he wants values, no question about that, but there are people who also want money. And if you look at the situation in awarding contracts, major contracts without a tender to major companies, Halliburton, Bechtel, which are direct or indirectly connected with major political figures, I don't want to mention names, it also doesn't help the credibility gap.

DR. KRAUTHAMMER: Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We've had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven't found any, we will have a credibility problem. I don't have any doubt that we will locate them. I think it takes time. They've obviously been deeply hidden, and it will require that we get the information from people who know where they are.

If you're looking for anthrax and VX gas, which can be hidden in a basement or a closet, in a country the size of Germany, you can understand how in five weeks we might not have stumbled across them.

I understand that from the Austrian point of view, Americans appear rather naive. I can assure you that from the American point of view, Austrians appear rather cynical.

[Laughter.]

DR. KRAUTHAMMER: We did not go into Iraq to give contracts to Bechtel. We did not go into Iraq for its oil. If we wanted Iraqi oil, why did we leave 12 years ago when we had the damn thing?

We have enough oil. We are interested in seeing a change. The deep reason for the war in Iraq is the war on terrorism. It would never have happened without 9/11. The reason that we are doing it, the most important and the deepest historical reason is the one I tried to explain in my opening presentation.

This is a region of the world that the world, including the Europeans, and I must say also Americans, had for 70 years written off as somehow immune to the lure and attractiveness of democracy. We believed we helped to democratize Germany, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, other places, Latin America, but somehow there was a kind of Arab exceptionalism, there's something about Arab culture that makes it immune to modernization and democracy. And this proposition has ruled for 70 years.

It was said, incidently, about the Far East. There's something about Confucianism that we Westerners don't understand, and therefore the Far East is immune to democracy. That has been shown to be absolutely false. There is a thriving democracy in Taiwan, and I think we have demonstrated that there is nothing intrinsically

hostile to democracy in that kind of culture.

I think it is cynical, and it's somewhat racist for Westerners to believe that the rest of the planet and the species understands, values, and appreciates democracy, rule of law, freedom, human rights, but somehow there's something in Islamic culture which rejects it.

If that is so, then we'll discover it, but at least let us have an historical experiment. Iraq, I believe, will be an historical experiment. I think Lebanon was an unfortunate example where we had a thriving, open, and decent society, which was destroyed in the mid '70s by the PLO and the Syrians. We will now have another attempt to question this proposition, and I can only hope that we will demonstrate that American idealism or, as you say, naivete was actually correct.

DR. GINGRICH: Let me just also comment that in terms of cynicism and sincerity, I would be much more impressed by press concerns about Bechtel if the press would go and get the billions, and billions and billions of dollars of contracts that the United Nations let over the years under the Oil for Food program and had some accountability of who got the money, and what were the deals, and how was it done.

But I find it interesting that when the U.N. spends literally billions of dollars over a 12-year-period with zero public accountability, that's fine. When the United States spends its own money in an expeditious way to hire a firm which has a worldwide reputation for being effective, that's somehow troubling.

I just think sincerity would be a little more indicated by some evenness on how we have accountability.

MS. PLETKA: Unfortunately, we don't have any more time. Listen to me, don't get up. I know you all by now.

We need to vacate this room, but we will move out into the lobby. So if anybody wants to press further with questions or the media, we can do that, but please clear out.

Thank you all very much. It's been wonderful.

[Whereupon, the briefing was concluded.]

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