Press Briefing on the Terrorist Attacks

September 14, 2001

Transcript prepared from a tape recording

Proceedings:

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK: --at these events. The shock has been very great, is very great, and is very much still with us. The attacks were so utterly unanticipated, unprecedented, so strange, so sudden, so terrible, so devastating, so foreign to our experience, many of us have found it hard to believe, hard to absorb, and hard to assimilate. Enemies whom we barely know planned and executed attacks on the United States of stunning audacity, truly stunning audacity, on us, the world's greatest power, without any question, and that's a very shocking fact itself.

The imagination that was required to transform our greatest airliners into bombs that could bring down the World Trade Center is itself extraordinary, just extraordinary, bombs that could be delivered with, almost with incredible precision in timing and in space. The skill that was required to fly our large planes accurately enough to simultaneously, almost simultaneously, within minutes, hit the two towers, and so shortly thereafter the Pentagon is stunning. To hijack the planes, once, twice, three times, and deliver them as bombs to intended targets is extraordinary. To have become so expert on the procedures of our airports and our air traffic systems, to be so well-organized, to have achieved masterful timing, to be--and to be all of this and suicide bombers at the same time is what I think is the most surprising, in many ways, of all.

We're accustomed sort of, if not to knowing suicide bombers, at least to knowing that they're there in some parts of the world. We know that our friend and ally Israel suffers a lot from suicide bombers, but we don't know suicide bombers in our country and in our society, and we don't know suicide bombers in planes. This is something different. The combination of technical precision and competence, with fanaticism of an extraordinary--I'm reluctant to call it religious fanaticism. I'm a little more inclined to call it political fanaticism. I'd be interested in your judgment about that, in fact.

This is all very impressive. These are the people, of course, and the ways that they have killed thousands of our friends, and relatives, and countrymen and persisted. I've heard, as I was driving in this morning with some difficulty, I heard the accounts that the reports last night that they had arrested persons of highly suspicious character in the New York airport were untrue and that they weren't carrying false credentials, and they didn't seem to be suspicious people, and they weren't wearing airline uniforms.

And then even the NPR announcer to whom I was listening said that seemed a bit much because there had been so many details last night about this second wave or third wave of terrorists seeking to descend on our airports. And he suggested that he thought we would need to wait and see, and I think we will need to wait and see. I think we may need to wait quite a long time and see a very great deal before we come to understand, much less to cope with, this really extraordinary new problem with which we are faced.

My trip down was improved, however, by listening to the British band at the changing of the guard play the Star Spangled Banner at the queen's request. I missed that yesterday, so I heard it this morning. I read in Lumond yesterday a front-page editorial that said, "We are all Americans," and that kind of solidarity is very nice. We don't too often get it.

I am going to call this morning on our panel, which is a distinguished panel, whom I am certain you will be able to learn a great deal from.

First, is Laurie Mylroie, who is an adjunct fellow of AEI, the author of surely one of the most interesting, and quite possibly most accurate, certainly the most suggestive book that I know on Saddam Hussein and the networks of political violence which he has spawned. Laurie is just a very distinguished scholar, and she will speak first. Laurie? I could give you all of her credentials, but you have, I think, a bio.

DR. MYLROIE: Thank you all very much for coming to this discussion. There has been no clear demonstration that Osama bin Laden was involved in Tuesday's assault on the United States, but there's been a lot of speculation to that effect, and it may turn out that he is. So assume that he is because I think the key question will be how likely is it that Osama bin Laden's group or any other group carried out these attacks alone, unassisted by a state? I'd like to suggest that it is extremely unlikely--in fact, next to impossible.

As Ambassador Kirkpatrick described, these attacks to a high degree of sophistication and organization, and bin Laden's group, al Qaeda, despite a great deal of media hype, doesn't have that kind of sophistication, organization--in fact, it's pretty bad. One of the more accurate and telling accounts of al Qaeda came out during the recently completed trials for the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998.

An Egyptian testified in that trial that he had been involved in the fighting in Afghanistan, he had parted ways with bin Laden and came to live in the United States, and he was a pilot. And in 1993, when bin Laden was based in Khartoum, Sudan, he wanted an airplane. And this Egyptian was asked to get an airplane for bin Laden. So he bought a moth-balled jet because he had a limited budget, he refurbished it and flew to Khartoum.

Later, in the same year, al Qaeda had to fly some people to Kenya. Well, they called that Egyptian back from the United States because they didn't have anyone else that could fly the airplane. After doing that mission, he returned to the United States. He was called back again at the end of 1993, found the jet in very bad condition because it had been so poorly maintained. He nonetheless took it out on a test flight, and when he tried to land the plane, he found that the brakes didn't work, so he drove the plane into a sand dune on the side of the runway and just left it there.

As the New York Times writing at the end of the trial noted, "Despite al Qaeda's fearsome reputation as a terrorist organization, reality was that it was `at times slipshod, torn by inner strife, betrayal and greed.'"

Now the trial also revealed something else important, that al Qaeda was intimately connected to Sudanese intelligence, at least while bin Laden was in Sudan, just from 1991 to '96. Indeed, in '91, bin Laden was in Afghanistan pretty much unknown. Very few in the West knew of him. And Sudanese intelligence came to him about the time of the Gulf War or afterwards. In '91, Sudanese intelligence came to him in this remote area of Afghanistan, and they invited him to Khartoum, and he took up the invitation.

So from the get-go almost, bin Laden's group has been involved with the intelligence agency of one state. And the government's star witness defected from al Qaeda in 1996 is another example of the close ties of that organization and Sudanese intelligence. That star witness also worked for Sudanese intelligence at the same time that he worked with bin Laden.

So, from reading the trial transcripts, it became pretty clear why in the retaliatory strikes for the embassy bombing the United States included Sudan as well. But the role of Sudanese intelligence, its relationship to bin Laden, I don't think many people are that aware of, though it is clear from the trial.

U.S. officials didn't say it at the time of the embassy bombing, and during the trial the role of Sudanese intelligence in this was treated as if it were secondary or peripheral. Now, presumably, that's because of the dynamics of the American legal system. A prosecutor can't so easily put his faith on trial and convict it in the courtroom. Thus, the trial distorted the perception of these massive acts of terrorism because every time there is a trial for one of them, it will cause people to focus on the individuals who are indicted in the courtroom and not the state that was involved.

Of course, states are much more important than individuals in terrorism. Their capabilities for terrorism are much, much greater. They control territories, they have embassies and diplomatic immunity, and diplomatic pouches to transport material without anyone checking it. They often have large intelligence agencies.

Moreover, al Qaeda's demonstrated ties to Sudanese intelligence raised another question. Iraq had close ties to Sudan. Both are Suni Arab states. Sudan supported Iraq during the Gulf War. And it seems that after the Gulf War, Iraq also used Sudan to get around the U.N. weapons inspectors much the way Germany did after World War I with the Soviet Union. And after the Gulf War, Iraqi intelligence made Khartoum a major base for its intelligence operations abroad.

So one has to ask did Iraqi intelligence establish ties with bin Laden while he was in Khartoum? Maybe Iraqi intelligence was behind the original Sudanese intelligence groups, or behind the original Sudanese invitation to bin Laden in '91.

There's evidence to suggest that Iraq was involved with bin Laden in the 1998 bombing because those bombings occurred in a certain context. That context was a series of crises over the weapons inspectors that Iraq began in 1997 that had the effect a year later of terminating the weapon inspectors' presence in Iraq.

And following the "resolution" of the second crisis in February of '98, after Kofi Annan went to Baghdad, there appeared suddenly on the world scene bin Laden's World Islamic Front, and they issued a fatwah, though bin Laden doesn't really have the religious authority to do so, a fatwah to kill Americans. And bin Laden began issuing threats, and Iraq, a month later, began issuing its threats, demanding the lifting of sanctions, saying that it had complied with the Security Council resolution. It's weapons were destroyed.

These things all marched together in lockstep: bin Laden's threat, the Iraqi threat, and the preparations for the bombing, until, on August 3rd of 1998, the head of UNSCOM, Richard Butler, came to Baghdad, and the Iraqis were incredibly belligerent towards him. They said, "You declare that we've complied with the cease-fire resolution, destroyed our weapons or leave immediately."

So he left the next day, August 4, and on the following, August 5, Iraq announced Suspension Day, the suspension of weapons inspections in Iraq. It was a big day in Baghdad, and Iraq reissued threats that it had made earlier. And then less than 48 hours later, two embassies were bombed simultaneously in Africa. Isn't that a little suggestive?

Now I'd like to just quickly turn to another line of reasoning suggesting Iraq is working with bin Laden or the likes of bin Laden, and that is that in February of 1993, on the second anniversary of the Gulf War cease fire, an attack was made on the World Trade Center, where there was an attempt to topple New York's tallest tower onto its twin. And New York FBI believed that Iraq was behind the Trade Center bombing.

And I think it's even possible to demonstrate to the high legal standard of beyond a reasonable doubt that Iraq was behind that bomb. There's not time to do it now. I've written about it, including in my book, but if you can show that Iraq is behind the 1993 attempt to topple New York's tallest tower onto its twin, of course, Tuesday's assault finished the job that had been started in '93. There seems to be a link between the two attacks. So that suggests that Iraq may well be the party behind Tuesday's attack because it tried to do the same thing back in '93.

And one of the things that has impressed me--I learned it from Khidhir Hamza, the Iraqi nuclear scientist who defected some time ago--one of the points he's made is that when Saddam is bent on something, he never gives up. Saddam is bent and was bent on acquiring nuclear weapons. He tried to do that way back in the 1970s. Israel bombed his nuclear reactor, the program went underground and continued. We bombed Iraq during the Gulf War. That program has still continued.

Well, it's the same thing with the Trade Center bombing. You fail once, try again.

Finally, I'd like to conclude by emphasizing just how dangerous the situation is. This assault this week was the terrorist attack on U.S. soil, yet much worse is possible. Above all, there's a danger of biological or nuclear terrorism. One incident of such an attack could result in casualties in six or seven digits. Now we've treated terrorism as a law-enforcement issue, the emphasis on arresting perpetrators and bringing them to justice. That has to change. The question of the bigger organization behind these individuals must be addressed. To do so effectively may even require changing U.S. laws like grand jury secrecy laws.

The second thing we need to do is to do a serious review of the major terrorist attacks in recent years. That may even require establishing a B team. That was done in the early years of the Reagan administration to reexamine Soviet capabilities. And I believe that such a review will raise very serious doubts about whether there is a new kind of terrorism represented by bin Laden and his like that does not involve state. Rather, I think such a review will conclude that a good bit of the terrorism we have experienced since the Gulf War is merely another phase of the Gulf War--Saddam's part of the Gulf War.

So thank you very much.

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK: Thank you, Laurie, for a most interesting presentation.

I turn now to a research fellow at AEI, David Wurmser, who is a scholar, also, who spends virtually all his time working on the Middle East, particularly Israel, but by no means exclusively Israel, working on questions of politics and terrorism and terrorists as they develop and grow in the region of Israel, and Syria, and their neighbors, Iraq, Iran.

David Wurmser.

DR. WURMSER: Thank you, Ambassador.

First of all, I want to reemphasize everything Laurie just said. This is not a new threat, and this is not a threat we did not know about. Saddam Hussein has, in many ways, openly dreamed of mass death in the United States. He has shared his dreams with his nation and the world many times. We also know he has actively planned to do so many times, and Laurie's book is a rather convincing argument that he is active and successfully implemented plans to do so as well.

So we really do have to begin with Iraq. I think that the idea that some amorphous terrorist organization, while certainly involved, certainly the lead attacker, was behind this. I think we really do have to go to the issue of states, and that's why I was particularly pleased to hear the president's remark that we will strike back not only at the terrorists themselves, but all of the states that harbor them and so forth. We do have to do that.

Now, having said that, the first thing I'd like to say is, sadly, I think we need to cast our net slightly larger. Iraq is the key. Bin Laden, I think Laurie has demonstrated a number of times, may well be working for Iraq, but Iraq is not alone. Why America was attacked gives you the key to what we have to do. America was attacked because it represents freedom, make no mistake about it. This is an existential war, and it's a war to stop our very existence as a nation. It may be tactically on a lower level than their missile exchanges, but as we saw on Tuesday, not by a hell of a lot.

Anything short of a devastating response to such a challenge will erode the foundations of our nation and bring into question its long-term viability. It will erode who we are. Essentially, we are now at war not only with one man or one country, but a type of politics that we've seen all too often in the Middle East.

Laurie has said a lot about Iraq, and again I reinforce everything she said. So I'll focus on some of the others, and I consider them supporting actors in the whole play that Saddam Hussein is scripting here. So I, by no means, am belittling Saddam's role here by short-shrifting him. Laurie has already done so.

But let's start with some of the people who it may be more controversial to say. Yasir Arafat. He has cultivated a culture of suicide bombers. He has done so for not only most of the last years, indeed, he's done so for decades, ever since he started his political career. Similarly, he has made a career on praising struggle against the West, a fight against imperialism, perpetual revolution, violence, blood, fire. The same can be said of the Assad family, of Qaddafi, certainly of Saddam, of Sudan, and clearly also Iran.

Unfortunately, a good bit of the Arab political leadership has excused, funded and tolerated the sort of terror launched by people like Arafat, Saddam, and so forth under the condition that it strikes Israel or Western targets and leaves them alone.

Now we cannot win this war if we do not deal decisively and harshly with this broad context to the particular act of devastation we've just encountered. Now this goes even further to some of the allies we have in the region. I'll give you an example of this legitimization. Egypt's leading daily, Al-Ahram, government run in a country that is not free, therefore controls its press, wrote about the bombing of the Sbarro Pizzeria in Israel in August, "I cannot hide my happiness about the martyrdom operation that took place in Jerusalem last Thursday. It liberated me from the sorrow and misery that has overtaken me over the past weeks. At first I thought that this was my own private feeling, but shortly after the news was broadcast, I discovered that many share it with me." He goes on, and on, and gets increasingly worse.

We have been treated for years, not weeks, not since the beginning of the Intifada, but for years speeches and sermons by Ikrema Sabri, the mufti of Jerusalem, appointed and funded by Yasir Arafat, is part of Palestinian authority structure, and he has called for Muslims to rise up and burn the White House and kill as many Americans as they can. It's no wonder that that leads to this.

So what we really get is, when you praise and legitimize mass murder of civilians via suicide bombings as a glorious means and national duty, the damage is already done. Debate over the proper target, whether it should just be Israeli Jews or Christians in America or the West as a whole really isn't all that important. You are dealing with the same phenomenon that has to be dealt with decisively.

So, as I said, Iraq is clearly one of the leaders of this. We've already gone to war with Iraq. But what we've seen, especially over the last year or two, when it became clear that America's responses to Iraq were weak, was a gradual coalition of radicals building. Syria drew much closer to Iraq. The PLO, which remained always fairly close to Iraq, drew even more openly and brazenly closer to Iraq, condemnatory of the United States and its attacks on Iraq, calling always for sympathy with the Iraqi people, always leading the effort to try to lift sanctions on Iraq.

This coalition, I would argue, came to a head and began to actually have an effect on the dialogue on the world as a whole at Durban. That sort of frenzy of hatred that we saw explode at Durban, not only at Israel, but the United States, this was early warning, as was everything else that we have seen in the last year or two, and that raises a very serious question. Why did we not take the words of our enemies seriously when they consistently said that they will kill us, attack us, pursue us globally?

And why did we not take seriously the clear emerging coalition that was forming over the last year or two, before the rise of this current uprising, which is really a misnomer, a war launched by Yasir Arafat last September. This was building even before that. And when you go to war, and we are at war, not in a counterterrorist operation, different rules apply. The first rule is if somebody else is clearly and actively forming a coalition with the nation that has attacked you, then they also are part of the problem and also are part of the target that we have to launch.

So I know I'm calling for a very broad effort, that will be an effort that will call for years of work, but we are at war, and this is the way wars must be prosecuted when they threaten our existence, and that is what is threatened right now.

Thank you.

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK: Thank you, David. I might just say that we are all independent and free thinkers in AEI, and we each have our own opinions about virtually all subjects, so some overlap. I would say generally we're harmonious, but we're not identical.

[Laughter.]

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK: So you'll sense a bit of divergence and differences among the presentations here, and that's the way we want it, I might say. That's the way the panel was selected.

I will turn now to another AEI resident scholar. What's your title, Michael?

DR. LEDEEN: Resident scholar.

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK: Resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at AEI. Michael is really a contemporary historian, and he's a kind of expert on contemporary history. He is a historian. And he writes on and has written a wide range of subjects of central importance in our times. He writes broadly. He reads broadly. He knows broadly about our world, and so I'll just call on Michael Ledeen.

DR. LEDEEN: Thank you. I'm supposed to talk about how it happened.

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK: That's right.

DR. LEDEEN: So I will, at least in part.

[Laughter.]

DR. LEDEEN: Well, the first reason that it happened is because it's our destiny, being our history. It's what always happens. The United States has never been ready for the next war. We never prepare for it, and that is because the American people are the first people in the history of the world to believe that peace is the normal condition of mankind, and therefore every time we win a war, we demobilize. We breathe a great sigh of relief, and we say, well, thank God that's over. Now we can go back to normal.

So, for example, if Saddam had been smarter, if he had understood us, which he doesn't, and we will look at this from Saddam's point of view or the Syrian's or the Egyptians, those guys over there who hate us and are killing us, in a minute, he'd have understood that all he had to do is wait another couple of years and we wouldn't have had sufficient military power to put together that armed force in the Gulf War because we were taking it apart. We were retiring people and demobilizing and putting things into mothballs and so forth. So that's number one. It's what we always do.

America has always been saved by its enemies. We were torpedoed into World War I. We were providentially bombed into World War II just in time. If the Japanese had waited another year, God knows what would have happened. We were dragged kicking and screaming into the Cold War by Stalin because he just wouldn't sit still for another few years. We were--and, again, Saddam in the Gulf War, dragged us into it.

We don't do these things on our own initiative. We are dragged into it. Americans are never ready. We do not prepare. We were not ready for this one. We did not prepare for this one, and it's quite understandable because we have lived for so long in such a secure environment. This is the first time that Americans have been killed on American soil in what could be called military conflict since the Civil War. That's what, 135 years? It's a long time. We're not used to it. We don't think about it. We feel secure. We have oceans.

It never occurred to us that this would happen, even though people have been saying it for a long time and even though, two key points, it's not new. Americans have been killed by terrorists for a very long time. America has clearly been the primary target of terrorism for 20/30 years. I mean, how far back do you want to go, from our embassies being bombed, to the Marine barracks in Beirut being blown up, to American ambassadors being assassinated, to American diplomats being killed in Greece, to American targets being attacked everywhere in Europe, in Khartoum, Rome, et cetera, endless.

And a lot of people tried to pretend that that wasn't happening, and government officials never wanted to face it because it's hard, it's nasty, it's difficult. It's excoriated all of the time because to do the things you have to do to fight terrorism, even on a lower scale than the scale that we now have to operate on, gets people yelled at. I mean, it's tough.

I'm going to end up recommending four things here, and I'll give you the first one right now. The first thing that any serious government has to do if it's going to fight terrorism is to abolish the Executive Order on Assassinations, and that is for two reasons:

Back you remember when people got upset that the United States government, like every other government in the world, actually had plans to kill its enemies, President Ford signs an Executive Order banning assassination. We can't assassinate anybody. We can't cause them to be assassinated. We can't associate with assassins. We can't pay assassins. We can't work with people who are likely to be involved in assassination.

And, of course, the lawyers got hold of this and expanded it beyond all reason, and the lawyers are an important point of the answer to the question why were we not ready, how did it happen, how could it have happened.

Well, the consequences, unintended, no doubt, of this Executive Order are twofold: First, it limits our action. It gives a president of the United States, when he chooses to respond to a terrorist attack, two basic choices. He can either issue an arrest warrant and ask Interpol to arrest these guys if they show up, and the second is he can bomb. He can bomb terrorist training facilities. He can bomb such targets. And so, after Beirut, for example, when the terrorists who bombed the Marine barracks there immediately moved into a highly populated facility, full of nuns and school children, because they know that those are our options.

So, if you want to tell the world and our own people that you're serious about fighting terrorism, that's the first thing to do. Every American president has known this for the last 35 years. Every American president has been told this by the people he has appointed to conduct counterterrorism. If you want to be serious, you have to have that. Moreover, if you can't associate with these people, it's very hard to penetrate terrorist organizations. It means that your information is going to be, at best, secondhand. And most of the time, intelligence officers and case officers, not wanting to go to jail for violating this thing, try to get two, three, four arms' lengths away from the terrorists. So that's the first thing that has to be done, and that's another reason why we were not ready.

Moreover, Machiavelli, as usual, has very smart things to say about moments of virtue and moments of corruption. We have suffered now through a good 10 years of profound corruption in the United States, not just venality, although we have had that, but moral corruption. Machiavelli says about people, since people are more inclined to do evil than to do good, a really iron discipline is required to impose virtue both on people in society. That's why leadership is so important. That's the role of leaders.

But like all other people, leaders, when great success occurs, when they win, they're always inclined to lean back and say, "Life is good, and we deserve it, and now it's time for some good personal time, and enjoy life a little bit," and that's when the rot sets in, as it always does.

Unfortunately, the consequence of our lack of historical understanding and our basic inclination to withdraw from an external world from which we all escaped and which we find unpleasant mostly is that we become soft, and self-indulgent, and weak, and therefore unprepared for all of these things. And Clinton was probably the greatest example of a personally self-indulgent, and therefore nationally weak leader that we have had in a very long time, perhaps ever.

So leaders were either unwilling or incapable to address this matter. People were afraid to deal with it because there were legal boundaries on them.

And then, lastly, the greatest sign of corruption of a society is that no one is ever held accountable for failure. Any organization that serious about its mission always holds people accountable. That means failure is punished and success is rewarded, not complicated. And yet when is the last time that you can remember a high official in this country being removed from office because he or she failed to perform his or her job?

When is the last time you can remember a high official in this country resigning in shame because he or she failed to carry out his or her mission. The last public official I can think of who retired in such context was Cyrus Vance, but he didn't retire because he failed, although he had, he retired because he disagreed with policy. Other people have resigned because they were on the front page of the Washington Post in a scandalous context, but people don't resign because of failure. That's the first thing that has to change.

I'm going to just quickly go through three things that the president can do, and he can do them right away, and it will make it clear to the whole world and to his own people that he's serious because that's the thing that has to change right away. Everybody has to see that we're serious.

So the first thing is to abolish the Executive Order, as I've said.

The second thing is to fire all of the people who have failed, and it's quite a long list.

[Laughter.]

DR. LEDEEN: It's basically all of the people who are concerned with security, counterterrorism and intelligence. And, yes, you'll make a few mistakes here and there. You'll undoubtedly fire one or two worthy people, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that people have to understand that henceforth, if you screw up, you're out. If we're in war, you don't have time for grief counseling and worrying about how people feel and sharing grief and all of the rest of these things. If it is, indeed, war, then people have to be accountable.

So director of Central Intelligence has to go, head of Counterterrorism in CIA and FBI has to go, head of FAA has to go. All of the top people associated with airport security, all of them have to go, and you have to replace them with people who can get it done. We can talk about candidates later on.

[Laughter.]

DR. LEDEEN: Third, take off the restrictions, the outrageous, ridiculous, pedagoging, legalistic, self-defeating restrictions on the Iraqi National Congress. In for a dime, in a for a dollar. If we're going to fund the Iraqi resistance, they have to be free to operate in Iraq. Right now they're told by the Department of State, that same Department of State that reacted to this crisis with its initial instinct was to say we've got to jump-start the Middle East peace process.

[Laughter.]

DR. LEDEEN: Backwards more than which one cannot imagine. So tell the Iraqi National Congress either cut them off and say we're not going to do it this way or tell them, oh, for God's sake, operate in Iraq. Go for it. Because what Paul Wolfowitz said yesterday, and Paul Wolfowitz is not a person who speaks from the hip. He thinks carefully about language. The words he used were, "We must end terrorist states."

If you're going to end terrorist states, that means the regimes must go. And if the regime of Iraq, which is certainly a terrorist state, if that regime is going to come down, the best way, one of the things that you have to do is, A, you have to have a replacement for it. That's one of the things that's going to be involved in this that nobody ever talks about. We have to find people who are acceptable to us for these various regimes that we intend to bring down. And so fund the Iraqi National Congress fully and unleash them.

And, finally, move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Because if these people think that we're going to be, first of all, they don't distinguish between America and Israel. It is the same Satanic continuum. We're the big Satan. They're the little Satan, but it's the same thing, and they hate us all. And it's not that they kill us because we support Israel, they kill us because they don't see any difference between us and Israel. If they're going to kill all of the Jews, they have to kill all of the Americans, too. So it's one big happy slaughter.

So let's just make everything explicit, and let's make it explicit to the Israelis that this is not going to happen, that we're not going to be intimidated, that we do support them because we're in this fight, as David has rightly said, for the advance and the success of freedom, and we are combating people who are seeking to advance tyranny and despotism, and we won't stand for it, and we'll make it clear that we will not be intimidated, and we'll have our ambassador go to Jerusalem and join the fight there.

So those are my basic points.

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK: Thank you, Michael. There will be time for questions.

I want to say that I've been a bit casual I think about the credentials of this very distinguished panel. I have not mentioned that each of us in the panel, of course, is a doctor, if you will, a Ph.D., from someplace in something, in political science, above all, and in history, and not necessarily in diplomacy.

[Laughter.]

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK: Thank you, Michael.

DR. LEDEEN: Grateful for that.

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK: We come now to a very distinguished and perhaps most well-known, certainly world known, accomplished, smart, speaker, Dr. Gingrich.

Newt?

DR. GINGRICH: Let me start by saying, as somebody who learned a great deal about effectiveness in foreign policy from studying three people, the words of three people, Prime Minister Thatcher, President Reagan, and Ambassador Kirkpatrick. I'm honored to be on a program that she has allowed me to be with.

My topic is what should we do. Let me begin by acknowledging the administration has steadily moved in the right direction in a very short period of time. They moved from talking about justice to talking about victory. They moved from talking about criminals to talking about enemies. They moved from talking about retribution to talking about defeating. Very, very important changes, and you can track them by the hour as they came to grips with the fact that Tuesday was not a political event. Tuesday was an historic event.

The reason that I described it as a 21st century Pearl Harbor from a 21st century enemy, launching a 21st century war, is to try to communicate the finality of the moment because historic events create conditions which are never the same as where you were before. Tuesday was, in that sense, an historic event, and the administration has, I think, in a remarkably short time begun at a language level, and I want to draw this distinction, at a language level to come to grips with this.

I listened to the president yesterday who was exactly correct. We're not about punishing those who did this one thing. We're about defeating terrorism. He said in his Texas way, "We will whip them." Whipping ain't the same as punishing. Whipping, in Texan--

[Laughter.]

DR. GINGRICH: --means defeat.

I listened to Colin Powell's press conference at the State Department with the sense that he had it exactly right. We will form a coalition willing to work with us, we will act unilaterally whenever necessary. Our opponents are terrorism and the states that support them.

I listened to Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon, and he got it exactly right, not just the terrorists, not just the structures, but the states which harbor and protect the terrorists.

Now what I want to outline briefly is nine principles to turn these words into reality because while they have in three days moved to the right words, turning those words into reality is an enormous task, and I believe the Pearl Harbor analogy is, again, correct.

Let me ask you all a simple question. How many of you find yourselves profoundly more moved by Tuesday than you were in August of 1990, when Kuwait was ceased by Iraq? That's a very important question. How many of you find yourselves much more emotionally engaged, much angrier?

It may seem self-evident, but I want to make this point. We orchestrated 28 countries for eight months, and put 500,000 troops in the field and bombed Iraq for 42 days over their neighbor. Now, if that was the appropriate-scale campaign over their neighbor, then for the most powerful nation in the history of the world, what is the appropriate-scale campaign over thousands of American civilians being killed in our own cities. It's important to understand this. This is not about a tiny thing. This is not about a few strikes. This is not about three special forces teams being magical.

So let me give you my nine quick principles:

One, we are at war. We have been at war at least since 1990, when Saddam invaded Kuwait. They keep killing Americans, and this time they crossed the threshold of killing enough Americans in our own country that it is unavoidable by the political system. For eight years, the last administration did everything it could to avoid accepting the reality that we are at war. In fact, in that administration, as Michael pointed out, they issued the ruling, Jim Woolsey, their first Central Intelligence director who quit because they didn't want any intelligence, pointed out that after he left, his successor wrote a rule that you cannot, as an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency, interact with people who might be human rights violators.

Now I ask you, how are you going to penetrate a terrorist cell if your lawyer next to you says, have you asked him yet if they violate human rights?

[Laughter.]

DR. GINGRICH: This is madness. Pinpricks against Saddam are madness, and we had eight years of what history will record as madness. We're at war. We have to solve it by being at war.

Principle two, in wars your enemies are allowed to be clever, courageous and determined. There was a note at 8:01 this morning on the Washington Post website, "Taliban warns of revenge. Afghanistan's ruling Taliban warned of revenge if the United States attacked their country in retaliation for this week's devastating terrorist assaults."

Well, why shouldn't they? If the Taliban, given the choice of being on the side of civilization and the side of terrorism chooses terrorism, and we are so foolish as to only--

[Tape change: T-1A to T-1B.]

DR. GINGRICH: That's why when you go to war, you seek victory, so that they're no longer in power, so they don't have the power to have revenge, so they can't threaten you. Time is always on the side of the evil. It's an important premise of history. Time is always on the side of evil because they can wait, they can plan, they can look, and the good go about their daily business. The good have to mobilize for decisive victory, which gets me to my third point.

In war, your vision of success is decisive for the rest of your achievement, and it's important for this administration to codify what the president, the secretary of State, and the under secretary of Defense said yesterday, and here's why.

World War II we picked a very specific goal--unconditional surrender. It's quite clear. We occupy Germany, Japan, and Italy. We created democracies. The world has been better ever since. That was a reasonable direct goal.

In the Civil War, Lincoln chose a specific very, very hard goal--unconditional victory, and he paid more lives to achieve that goal than any American war.

In Korea, we tolerated the goal of stalemate because we thought the geopolitical consequences were too great, and we have had troops in the Korean Peninsula since 1950. For those of you who talk about a long campaign, this is the 51st year.

In Vietnam, we only decided that defeat was preferable to the risk of victory, not that we couldn't win, but the nation, the body politic, after a decade of agonizing internal struggle, decided that defeat was preferable to the cost of victory.

In Desert Storm, we arranged a coalition for or a limited goal--kick Saddam out of Kuwait and weaken him, and that was a very specific goal. It turned out, in my judgment, in retrospect, to have been wrong, and I think all of the architects of it would now agree, but they thought he would fall as a consequence, an underestimation of dictators.

It is vital that we have the right vision. It is not going after bin Laden, who is trivial in this context. It is not going after the specific terrorist organization that launched the attack in New York. Yes, it would be useful to know who they are, yes, we should get them, but they are a symptom of the disease. If we eliminate them, we'll simply create martyrs. They'll be the bin Laden brigade. There will be a new generation of their children who decide to fight us.

The only legitimate vision is the defeat and the destruction of the system of terrorism, an that requires that we declare terrorism to be a crime against humanity, just as we did with piracy, and that we refuse to accept the existence of any regime which harbors, supports, or protects terrorists. Anything short of that simply sows the seeds that 10 or 15 years from now they will come back. And by the way, I want to reemphasize what was said here earlier.

I was on the National Security Commission, the Hart-Rudman Commission, and we spent three years studying the world of 2025. Our number one unanimous conclusion by a bipartisan panel of 14 people, which included a lot of Democrats. I mean, Andy Young was on there, Lee Hamilton was on there, Gary Hart was the co-chair. We unanimously concluded that the number one threat to the United States is a weapon of mass destruction going off in our cities, biological, chemical, or nuclear. [Click for Road Map for National Security: Imperative for Change <http://old.aei.org/past_event/nssg.pdf>]

We know today, know, not theoretically, know that Iraq is willing--that Saddam is willing to accept any level of sanctions to keep his program for weapons of mass destruction, that Iran has a massive program underway, that North Korea has a massive--while its population is starving and North Korea is the largest recipient of U.S. food aid in Asia, the largest recipient of U.S. food aid in Asia, has a massive program of weapons of mass destruction. And then we wonder why are they doing this?

And as Michael said or as David said, you read the material. You read what they say. And you wonder why no one understood Hitler, just as we don't understand our generation's Hitlers. So we have to take it seriously.

That means my fourth principle. This implies a series of ultimatums. Sudan will cease to house terrorists or we will replace the government of Sudan. The Taliban will cease to house terrorists or we will we replace the Taliban. This, by the way, doesn't mean you have to be stupid. It does not require us, for example, to decide that we'll put seven American infantry divisions in Afghanistan. It may mean we decide to allocate $3 billion to hire every Afghan who doesn't like the Taliban and arm them. And in less than a year, my guess is American air power, combined with armed Afghans, would eliminate the Taliban.

Similarly, in Iraq, I am against only doing something indirectly with volunteers as guerrillas. We're the most powerful nation in the world. If we want to eliminate the regime of Saddam Hussein, we have the capacity to eliminate it. We didn't say let's set up a free Japanese spy movement in 1942. We didn't say the OSS can liberate Europe. We said the OSS is a helpful addition while we land at Normandy and bomb German cities.

This is a serious nation, and if this is a serious war, then the message is simple. Saddam will either close down all of his systems of efforts of mass destruction, and he will expel all of his efforts to help terrorists or we will create a regime in Iraq that's not doing this, period because if we don't do this, we now have vivid proof in New York and Washington of the future. The next time it won't be an airplane. The next time it will be gas or it will be a germ agent or it will be a nuclear weapon, and we have to take this seriously, and no one should say they haven't been warned by the facts of their own life.

Five, to achieve victory we must plan for a coercive, not a consensual campaign. In a consensual campaign you say, you know, I really wish the Sudanese would be nice, but they won't do more than X. In a coercive campaign you say, anyone not doing X, anyone not doing the minimum we've set, we will have to replace. So we just need to know which team you're on, and there are only two teams on the planet for this war. There's the team that represents civilization, and there's the team that represents terrorism. Just tell us which. There are no neutrals.

So the Swiss Banks have to now break their secrecy law to find out everything we need to know about terrorism, period. Well, we should isolate the Swiss Banks. They won't be part of the world banking system. So we say, again and again, across the planet, and my personal judgment is, when the United States is that serious, it's amazing how many people decided there was civilization.

[Laughter.]

DR. GINGRICH: But this is not asking permission, this is stating a fact. There are two scorecards, which scorecard do you want? We're going to eliminate the people who choose this scorecard, so if you'd like to be on the elimination list, we need to know it because we have a planning process underway, and we already have five lined up, and you know if you want to be sixth, we need your information.

[Laughter.]

DR. GINGRICH: Which means the key word is replace, not punish. You do not punish regimes that are dictatorships because they don't care if you kill their civilians. They don't care if you kill their infantry. I mean, if we kill 100,000 Iraqis, and it hasn't changed the regime, there's a hint here. Saddam couldn't care if every Iraqi died, as long as he was the heroic of the myth. And so we have to talk about replacement, not about punishment.

Sixth principle, the campaign has to be comprehensive; that is, we should reach out economically, diplomatically, and militarily to all Muslims who oppose fanatic terrorists. We should offer the future of a better way of life for every Palestinian who would like to live in peace and prosperity. We should offer to every Muslim country that we are not anti-Muslim. We are anti-fanatic, and that we would like to have good relations and that it is as important to be prepared to be economically supportive.

Remember, one of the keys to winning the Cold War was the Marshall Plan, which was at least as important as creating NATO or the CIA or the Strategic Air Command. We should have a comprehensive understanding that in this war, we will be the proactive allies of creating prosperity, and safety and freedom for all of the Muslim world which wishes to live in civilization, and we will only be coercive and focused on those fanatics who give us no choice, including regimes which give us no choice. But it cannot be only a military or an intelligence campaign. It has to be an economic, military, diplomatic and political campaign.

Principle seven, the coalition must be the largest willing to support our plan. It's a very important distinction. We cannot write a plan designed to have a big coalition. We have to write a plan to win and then recruit to the plan. And countries which are willing to say, gee, I can't do that, but I won't harbor any terrorists, that's fine. That's a kind of passive support we'll tolerate. We won't tolerate opposition. I want to draw that distinction. Countries can say, this is not my fight. Uruguay may decide they're not in this fight. That's fine, as long as they don't harbor terrorists. But no country can harbor terrorists and claim to be neutral, and I want to draw that distinction.

And the United States has to say, and Secretary Powell did exactly correctly yesterday, we reserve the right to take any unilateral action necessary for the achievement of victory in this war.

Principle eight, the stakes are enormous. The Second World War we understood. Our way of life was a threat. A world in which the Nazis, the imperial Japanese and the Italian fascists had won would have been a stunningly different world. Let me just say to you the principles at stake on two grounds. The first is the very fabric of a free worldwide economic political structure, the ability to travel, the ability to have a decent job, the ability to have just in time where Taiwan or Thailand or China or Mexico is making something which arrives at the auto factory exactly on time. The entire fabric of the world we've built for the last 60 years is being directly threatened.

And, second, as I said earlier, and I cannot overstate this, if we do not defeat terrorism while it is still using conventional weapons, we will inevitably in our lifetime be faced with terrorism using weapons of mass destruction. This is a tragic, but providential warning, of a much worse future.

Lastly, and I say this, in part, to slow down a little of the rush to defensive measures. A worldwide economic system and a high-speed prosperous free society is inevitably vulnerable to a deeply committed state-supported terrorism. It's inevitable. Whatever we brilliantly figure out how to stop this time, they will study, and they'll look for the one thing we haven't figured out because they only have to hit once. They don't have to hit every day. We have to sustain freedom every day.

And so it is unavoidable, if you intend to remain a prosperous, free society, that our campaign must be 90-percent offense and only 10-percent defense, that our job is to root out the terrorists, root out the organizations, and root out those governments which support them because only by pursuing evil abroad can we stop evil from entering the United States. We cannot ever passively build a system that will stop evil from entering the United States. We can only slow it down.

So those are the nine principles I hope the administration applies to make the words into the reality of victory.

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK: Thank you. Thank you very much, Newt.

I think that we have subject matter for some interesting discussion, and I feel certain that there are questions among you. I might say that I have listened to this extremely fascinating discussion. I knew it would be, let me say, and a stimulating and not only suggestive, but imaginative.

I want to mention just one thing. As I was driving in, I was listening to NPR, as I mentioned, and one of the things I heard on NPR was an interview with a helicopter pilot who had been volunteering every day since Tuesday. He had friends and associates, colleagues still trapped in the building, killed there, and he was working, and he worked until 3 a.m. and was just commenting, and they caught him as he came out from having worked till 3 o'clock in the morning trying to clear the rubbish and find the living.

And he said, when the interviewer said something like that's, you know, very good of you to spend all of this time and do this very hard work, he said, "I have to. They are destroying our freedom." He said, "They've already destroyed our freedom. They have already destroyed my ability to live a normal life, and they will destroy freedom if we don't stop them now."

Newt, he had exactly the vision, if you will, that you have proposed for us.

With no more ado, may ask who has a question? Identify yourself and please identify your professional association.

MR. : John [Inaudible], Gannett Newspapers.

Speaker Gingrich, I'd like to ask you what sounds like a terrifically naive question, but newspapers are getting this from everyone outside the Beltway every day, and that question is why do they hate us so.

DR. GINGRICH: Well, why shouldn't they? They want a coercive, unfree, dictatorial world in which their values are imposed on everyone, period. We want a free, open society in which you can worship the God you believe in, you can pursue the style of life you want, women have full freedom, at the level of the fanatics.

Now I think "fundamentalist" is a profoundly wrong word. These are fanatics. These fanatics, and bin Laden has been open about it, he wants to drive the West, the Americans out of the Middle East. He wants you not to drive your car with his oil. He wants you not to pollute his world with your movies.

Now there's an easy way for you to avoid this. Cease being an American. But if you're determined to remain an American, they will hate you, just as the Nazis hated us, just as the Communists hated us. They had good reason. Free peoples are frightening to dictators.

DR. : It's worse than that.

[Laughter.]

DR. : The existence--no, no, no. And I'm surprised, although pleased, to hear you say that you get this question all of the time because that's the question, and the answer is that the existence of America threatens the legitimacy of tyrants everywhere in the world. It has all along. That is why they have to attack us. That is why they have always attacked us, and that is why they always will attack us. It's not what we do. It's not this policy or that. It's not this administration or that or this president or secretary of State or the other one, it's America itself. So long as America exists, every tyrant knows that his people, knowing of our existence, will prefer to live the way we live rather than the way that they live under tyranny, and so they have to come after us, and they must hate us. It's just a fact of life.

DR. : I'd like to add to that too. You know, when you look at these regimes, and this is part of the direction in which we have to go in this war, these regimes, starting with Iraq, and Afghanistan, Syria, and so forth, long before they were at war with us, they chose to start going to war with their own people. All of these are the human rights abusers in the world. Why? They're tremendously violent, tremendously violent.

And as Ambassador Kirkpatrick told me a few days ago, they're also sadistic. They think they can transform--well, they don't really have a great vision of transformation. They think they own their population. They prey on their population. And when they're done preying on their population, they have to make an excuse for the collapse of their societies. So they turn outward. And it's no wonder then that these people who have already demonstrated absolute lack of concern for the rights or existence of an individual or freedom inside, then have to strike at the symbol of freedom outside. That's why when the Nazis attacked, the ones they attacked with particular relish were the Czechs in 1939, because they were the most democratic and successful state on their border.

When these people attack in the Middle East, they love to attack Israel because it's the only democracy in the region. And when they attack globally, they have to attack the United States because we're it. We are the symbol of freedom in the world, and we have been ever since the British began to decline, and frankly even before that because we were part of the British decline.

But the bottom line is you can't avoid it. This is a war between freedom and those who hate it, and it starts at home, and that's also the strategy. Find the Arabs and the Muslims who are the victims of their own governments first and work with them to wage war on their governments.

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK: And I might say we did quite a lot of that in the Reagan administration, and we had quite a bit of success.

Harvey?

MR. FELDMAN: Thank you. I'm Harvey Feldman. I'm the editor of the Journal of International Security Affairs and happy to point out that both David Wurmser and Laurie Mylroie have articles in our last issue.

[Laughter.]

MR. FELDMAN: This has been, for me, a very refreshing discussion because yesterday I was at the New America Foundation, and there I heard, among others, the Washington bureau chief of The Economist tell us that the struggle against terrorists basically cannot be won because, look, we in England have been struggling against the IRA for 80 years, and so this is something that cannot be achieved. And besides, the Americans, you Americans are likely to be disproportional, and you will make people hate you, and so on, and so forth.

Had I had the chance, I might have pointed out that no IRA terrorist has ever been able to hijack a plane.

I, also--I'm sorry. This is not a question, this is a long rant--

[Laughter.]

MR. FELDMAN: I also want to point out that these attacks on Americans, as Michael Ledeen has said and as Newt Gingrich has said, go back a long time. We should recall the assassination of Cleo Noel at Khartoum. We should recall the planes that were hijacked, the ships that were commandeered and American citizens thrown overboard in a wheelchair. This is not new. This has been a war that we have not recognized. I hope we now recognize it.

Thank you.

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK: But we also didn't really recognize it, I feel, we didn't talk about it much after the attack on the Cole, which is a very recent act of war against Americans, material and American servicemen.

Yes?

MR. : Michael [inaudible], U.S. News and World Report.

As I understand it, Secretary Powell has contacted [inaudible] Arafat and urged him, as I understand, to urge Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres to conduct discussions with Arafat. What should we be requiring Arafat and the Palestinian authority to do? What should be our stance towards them? What should be the ultimatum?

DR. GINGRICH: Do you want me to go first?

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK: Newt, would you like to take that?

DR. GINGRICH: I'll go first, but definitely David has done more work on this. I was actually with Shimon Peres last Friday talking about some of this.

I think the answer is very straightforward. Arafat should be asked to side with civilization, and that would mean locking up terrorists. It would mean breaking up Hamas and Hezbollah inside the Palestinian system. It would mean committing to active efforts not to kill Israelis, not to kill those who help the Israelis. After all, when you read about somebody who is a collaborator being killed by the Palestinians, what they're saying is that a Palestinian who tried to help the Israelis stop a terrorist from killing innocent people was executed.

So Arafat, who has not successfully stopped any terrorist in the last seven months, has quite successfully killed people who were trying to stop terrorists. But I also think the administration at some point, and this will probably be further than they're comfortable going this week, we need to be blunt. That's exactly the message I would say to Sudan, to Iraq, to Afghanistan.

If Arafat is unwilling to be the civilized leader and given the corruption of his system, given the thugs around him, given the people he has subsidized, there is little reason on my part to believe it's possible, but I think one should give him one last--just as we should with every regime. If he's not prepared to do that, then we should actively favor his replacement. We should eliminate all aid to the authority. We should help in the breaking up of the authority, and we should seek to replace it with a very important point that David said and that Michael said.

We are not the enemies of the Palestinian people, but we are prepared to be the enemies of the dictatorship which exploits them, corrupts them, tortures them, imprisons them, and does so on behalf of terrorists and murderers. And I think it shouldn't be too much to say to the Muslim and the Arab world, the Muslim world, in general, and the Arab world in particular, we seek regimes which do not prey upon their own people. We seek regimes which do not survive, only through secret police and torture, and we seek regimes which will not tolerate terrorism. And that strikes me as a pretty minimal standard for the planet as we go into a worldwide system in which airplanes and everything else connects human beings together.

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK: Thank you, Newt.

Yes?

MS. NAFISTI: Assa Nafisti [ph], Johns Hopkins SEIS.

I just wanted to respond to you and then make my question. I think that they hate you because at times you have been kinder to your enemies than your friends, and I will explain that a little bit, and then I do have a question to ask.

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK: But be brief, please.

MS. NAFISTI: I will be brief.

One of my favorite writers, Vladimir Novikov, talked about a portable world. As a person who had to leave the country that she loved and was born in to come to a country that she loves, but feels at home in, I have to say that the most important thing for you, the past few days I've heard about allies--Germany, France, Europe. Why are they your allies? Not geographically because they're Western, they're your allies because they're democratic.

When you talk about Israel, it is not the fight between Israelis and Palestinians. They're your allies because they're democratics. The war is between democracy and totalitarianism. This is a portable world.

Now, Khobar, when the American victims sued the Iranian government, and they were blocked, the last bombing of the World Trade Center, how did the government react to these? They did not want to offer a moderate regime, meaning can you have a moderate Marxist regime? Can you have a moderate theocracy? Can you be a little pregnant? No.

I want to ask you, when I wrote an op-ed in New York Times when President Clinton brought his three conditions: weapons of mass destruction, terrorism and the peace with Israel. I asked, you forgot the most important issue, the human rights of Iranian people who are now fighting in the streets to reassert your values. Your values need to be reasserted through those who revive them. They didn't do that.

Please, are you now going to add human rights of Iranians, Iraqis, Israelis, Syrians, Palestinian people to your list of conditions? That is a question that I still have a point because nobody is talking about your allies within those countries, and this is the only platform I've had where people have paid attention to me, Dave and Michael especially.

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK: Thank you very much.

MS. NAFISTI: I'm sorry, I--

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK: That was a very moving statement.

MS. NAFISTI: I'm very angry and very much pain.

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK: Did you have a question? When will we add human rights to our list of conditions?

MS. NAFISTI: Yes.

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK: That's your question?

MS. NAFISTI: When will the reparation for slavery mean dealing with the government in Sudan? When your oil companies understand that their interests are in having democracy? That is how stability is established. These are the questions that I have, need these are the questions that have made me angry for the past four years, when I came back to my own home, which is here.

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK: Those are good questions.

Did you want to respond to that, Newt?

DR. GINGRICH: No, I wanted to see whether David or Mike wanted to.

DR. LEDEEN: We've both been angry for 40 years.

[Laughter.]

DR. WURMSER: No, I wanted to say there's a whole practical thing. We talk a lot about intelligence failures, which I think we really do have to have an accounting of our entire Middle East policy and intelligence communities here like Michael said, but when you do that, you have to start figuring out, okay, what are indicators that will get it right next time, and we've already said rhetoric.

But I think Assa just hit on something that is extremely important. The regime character of the nation you're dealing with is one of the best early warning indicators you have as to whether that regime is going to be your friend or your enemy. When Iraq starts killing its own people, it really isn't going to like you, and you can just tell.

When Lenin started with his massive purges in 1918-1919, you knew this was going to be a problem as long as that regime was there. Our intelligence specialists have already ignored the character of regimes, and they have always tried to focus on stability, which they imagined would be best secured by dealing with fairly strict and authoritarian regimes, and they got it exactly upside down, exactly upside down.

DR. LEDEEN: In fact, I've always said that no American official should ever be permitted to pronounce the word "stability," as if, because the implicit, it's implicit in what our diplomats say invariably, that we stand for stability, which is completely wrong. America is the world's sole revolutionary society. We destabilize the whole world every day. We do it in every sector. We do it in business, we do it in entertainment, we do it in sports, we do it in communications, we do it constantly because the code word for the United States is creative destruction. We do it to ourselves.

And so for our leaders to stand up and say we don't like thus and such because it's bad for stability is un-American. It's incoherent. It's just wrong.

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK: I'd like to say I don't believe that the code word for the United States is "stability." I think the code word for the United States is "freedom," and that is, in fact, the source precisely of our own capacity for change, but it is above all, I believe, the very fundamental basic reason that a lot of regimes, and people who don't support freedom, can't tolerate freedom for other people, never for themselves, for other people, don't like--hate Americans.

Yes?

MR. CHARETT: Robert Charett [ph] of International Investor.

Several members of this panel I think have wisely pointed to the fact that there's an uncanny ability of these terrorists to forge relations and slip into the shadows of regimes all over the world, and it has to be truly a global effort. Are we willing to lift the mantle of political correctness? We know that some of these nations are in Africa. I'm not just speaking of Northern African states either, but I'm talking about states such as Zimbabwe, where we know terrorist activity takes place today. Are we really willing to look worldwide to root out these terrorists?

DR. MYLROIE: I'd like to answer this question, in part because as the author of a book on the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and what was behind it, it seems to me we are drifting from a concrete reality that on Tuesday--it's Friday now, just three days ago--two airplanes fully loaded with human beings drove into New York's tallest towers, and another airplane crashed into the Pentagon, and we have had this week, three days ago, the biggest loss of life on American soil since the Civil War.

Representative Gingrich has said that if we do not take care of the problem of conventional terrorism we will, in our lifetime, see unconventional terrorism. What happened on Tuesday caused death in four digits--that's thousands. In my talk, I talked about death from the kind of things that Representative Gingrich is talking about in six and seven digits. And it seems to me that we're drifting very far away from what it was that we came here and that there has to be, as there is bad and evil in lots of places, and on the one end must be fought, on the other end, there also needs to be a focus on what are the immediate dangers. God forbid the day comes when we see six- and seven-digit casualties in this country.

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK: Nick, my colleague?

MR. : Islamic terror networks like IRA, [?]EA, FARC in Colombia, the North Korean government, where should they figure in our strategy and battle plan?

DR. : Well, you know the "Islamicness" of some of these terror networks is considerably overstated. Laurie has pointed out in considerable detail with names and so forth that bin Laden's terrorists are hardly what you would call devout Muslims. The story in the New York Times two days ago about some of these terrorists drinking their vodka down in a bar in Tampa, Florida, does not suggest that they were going through cleansing rituals before they went onto the airplane.

[Laughter.]

MR. : So, you know, that's not what this is about. This is another one of these deep fantasies that deep thinkers like to indulge in. I mean, these are killers, and they hate us for all of those reasons. I mean, all terrorists are not Muslims. There's millions of good Muslims. There's millions of good Arabs. I mean, this is an overstatement.

I'll tell you, I was enraged today, but I mean I've been enraged nonstop since Tuesday, but what really annoyed me was that the Washington Post went out of its way today to publish an article by a Muslim-American woman who took a large part of that page to say, in essence, she was terrified. She said, well, we're Americans, but we feel like we're being singled out, and we're terrified. Well, but that, I mean, one hasn't heard more than one or two tiny incidents about this sort of thing. This is not happening. This is not what this is about. No public official has said this. No American leader has said this. No leading American newspaper has said this. This is totally a red herring. This is the kind of thing that's designed to bring back the specter that we are the problem, right? As if American Muslims had been the victims of this week. It's all Americans. I mean, there were undoubtedly Muslims killed in the World Trade Center. I mean, they weren't killed because they were Muslims. They were killed because they were Americans, and enough of hyphenated Americanism for a while.

And as we analyze this problem and look at it, we will find that a lot of these great models about conflicts of civilization and so forth are beside the point. This is as the end of history now has come to a screeching and we've resumed it quite clearly, right?

[Laughter.]

MR. : Because this is interstate conflict. This is enemy states waging war against the United States.

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK: Leon? Is it Leon Aron of AEI?

MR. ARON: Yes, Leon Aron of AEI.

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK: Distinguished Soviet specialist.

MR. ARON: In the very short term when we talk about the strategies outlined here, I think two states come to mind to exemplify complexities, let me put it this way. One is Egypt and the other is Canada. Egypt is because it looks like there is a steady supply of Egyptian nationals in the organization and among the pilots, and Canada because it admits, and I would say with glee, admits the human sewage that it hopes, and largely I think indeed it happens, just passes through Canada and settles in the United States in the hope of perpetrating--so far I believe at least half of those people are tracked as coming from Canada. But I bring those two countries because they're not Iraq, they're not Syria. There has to be--dealing with them would exemplify our seriousness, and I wonder what we should do and what do you suggest we should do?

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK: Well, I think it's very important to make distinctions between countries who are actively engaged in terrorism and people or individuals who are actively engaged in terrorism. And you know those, I would say like Canada, which are simply somewhat careless and somewhat indifferent. So obviously those are different dimensions. It's not unimportant, it's very important, and what we have to do is I think try much harder to do a much more effective job of persuading them.

I must say during the Reagan years we worked very hard on trying to block the, and at least nearly block the delivery of weapons of mass destruction and the technology of weapons of mass destruction to terrorist states, and we really tried very hard, and we had some problems with some allies. Some of you in the room who followed this question will know that we have a couple of allies who have a long history of transferring and selling the technology and the materials of weapons of mass destruction.

You know, what do we do? We talked, and talked, and talked, and we actually took some quiet, but really quite strong steps with one of those very large important allies. And I think that something like that is probably what's required with a country like Canada. We have a 3,000-mile, I don't know, maybe it's longer than that, a 5,000-mile border with Canada, 6,000-mile border with Canada. Canada is a very important country to us.

Our security is also very important to Canada because our strength supports Canada and guards Canada's security, and a lot of Canadians understand that very well, and we maybe need to do a more effective and articulate job of making that case.

With regard to Egypt, Egypt is one of those states which is obviously itself a very divided state, which contains a lot of very sophisticated members of our civilization. One of those sophisticated members of our civilization once said to me in a conversation--I referred to Muslim fundamentalists, this was a number of years ago when Muslim fundamentalist was a common word, and he said, "Jeane, please don't speak about Muslim fundamentalists. It suggests that those extremists are more Muslim somehow than the fundamental Muslims. In fact, those are not Muslims at all. Most of them are not even religious, if you will, they're off drinking vodka," which is Michael's point.

And I think that we need always to bear in mind that people who live--I, by the way, don't use that term any more, and I recommend to you that you not use it any more. We'll scratch Muslim fundamentalism from our vocabularies, but we will also remember that virtually every country that has a large Muslim population has deep divisions within that population--not equal, I don't think, in most cases, between those religious Muslims who follow traditional Muslim religion. It is not my religion, but it is all right with me, as long as they don't--it's not really all right with me if they discriminate terribly against women, which that is the one problem I have with even traditional Muslims.

Egyptian women are very advanced, and very well-educated, and they work in the world, and they're part of our civilization in every sense of the word. We need to bear in mind these distinctions. I don't think we can give them up because it's complicated.

DR. MYLROIE: If I could also add a word. I think if we think about what Representative Gingrich said if we think about the importance of states in addressing the cause of terrorism, in terms of states, much more than we've done before, then, while it's a good thing to control the border, it's a good thing to address poverty in Egypt, it would have less serious consequences because it's the states that are providing the means, and the expertise, and the complexity that Ambassador Kirkpatrick described. The individuals then will become less significant if there aren't terrorist states actively doing this.

DR. : I would, I mean, something said earlier, which is some states can reserve the right to sit on the sideline. That's fine, and they're not our enemy in doing so, but this is a very, very serious war, and how the world will be defined afterwards will be defined by us if we win, and it really serves to everybody's advantage to join the bandwagon. We shouldn't beg them. They should consider it a privilege to be in an alliance with us.

I'm sure Canada will do what it needs to do. The Middle East will be more of a problem when you start defining countries like Syria as an enemy. Iraq, many countries will join in because they've been victims of Saddam. Less so by Syria. And then we're going to have a lot of countries, well, peace process, well, Israel, so on and so forth. You know, we're at war, and we're going to fight it, and we just have to lay down the guidelines, and they'll join if they have to. And if they don't, well, then they simply won't have as much of a share of what the world will look like afterwards. They will continue to exist as they are, but they won't be the way Western Europe was, Britain and so forth were after World War II, soulmates.

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK: Yes. Identify yourself, please.

MR. AUF: Peter Auf [ph] with United Press International. I've got a question for Michael.

It appears domestically that there was a major failure of U.S. intelligence systems, and I'm wondering, in your expertise, if there's a concern that the penetrations of FBI counterintelligence by Robert Hanssen and others that we've heard about transferring information unfriendly to the United States, but nominally Western, that some of those people over there, in recognition of their collapsing economy, may have made secret information available to terrorists for cash to help them facilitate what they did on Tuesday, and what do we need to do in the United States to find additional people in the security services who may be involved in that and to guard against it from happening in the future?

DR. LEDEEN: Peter, could we meet after this thing and write that up for Hollywood because I so wish I'd thought of that. That is a great scenario.

Yeah, sure, it's possible. Anything is possible. What we need to do is simply what I said earlier, which is to get rid of the people involved in security and intelligence up to now who have failed and replace them with people who are capable of doing these jobs. It shouldn't be that difficult, but we haven't been able to find them so far or the ones we have, have been prevented from doing their jobs, and since we don't have the time to figure out which approach is right, it's safer just to get rid of them all and then put in new people.

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK: Okay. Yes?

MS. DUPERIOR: My name is Lisa Duperior [ph], and I'm self-employed marketing and venture capital. My best claim to fame is former student of Jeanne Kirkpatrick's, so that's clearly important.

My question relates to the disconnect that I've observed this week between particularly the national press and the great mass of America. So I want to give just one quick example and a comment and then see what you all have to say.

Not to pick on any one person, but there's one in mind, and I thought, well, maybe I shouldn't say her name, and I thought, well, why not, we all watch TV. On the intelligence question, former President Bush spoke yesterday. Andrea Mitchell then, within 60 seconds after former President Bush made some remarks, instead of reporting, "President Bush just spoke. He made the following three points," she came on immediately and said, "Well, as the former CIA director, President Bush just said something that might be controversial, and as a matter of fact, the implication here is that we're going to have to give up all of our civil liberties."

Now I just toss that out as an example. And the comment I'm going to make about this, because everybody here has a perspective and their own examples, as Newt said, if we can't make changes, whether it's all of his principles, or a few or less, we can't protect every dam, every reservoir, everything in America, so we have to go to the source. Right now the American people are interested in learning about the issues, but the conduit, in many areas, is the national press.

So what I say to my fellow AEI people, we go to parties here. There's famous power couples. Is it business as usual for us when we go to these parties? Are you going to speak up? Are you going to say something? You know people back home. Make some comment. Tell them which network should they be watching. I mean, forgive me, but it's not business as usual.

Now what we do about the Founding Fathers, and this relates to my question, and I'm sorry, I didn't mean to take so long, but reporting, and a free press is one thing, opinion and commentary needs to go in the opinion and commentary category. So I throw that question out. I know it's the age-old question, but--

[Tape change: T-1B to T-2A.]

-- in his biography of Churchill notes that Margo Asquith, who was a part of the British elite, was deeply, passionately, bitterly in favor of Chamberlain and appeasement. In fact, she and her daughter split because her daughter sided with Churchill in his analysis of Hitler. And on the day that Churchill--rather, on the day that Hitler marched into Prague, she switched 180 degrees, saw her daughter on the street, embraced her, and said, "You were right, we were wrong. This is an evil man. We have to defeat him." It was just--it was a moment of clarity.

I think there are three factions in American society today. There is an enormous mass of people who pay relatively little attention to world affairs but have remarkably good instincts. These are the people who understood Jeane Kirkpatrick and Ronald Reagan. And they've looked up--bearing no particular hostility, as Michael pointed out, as Americans, we're too busy leading our lives to go out and seek wars. But they looked up Tuesday and by noon Tuesday they'd gotten it. This is a war.

There are two factions in the elite. There is a faction of which Jeane is sort of the archetype, somebody who understood the world was dangerous, somebody who understood that evil has to be blocked, somebody who understood that those things don't seem plausible in everyday life in a free society, but they are true. And there's a faction which believes if only America would appease forever, if only we would, in Churchill's phrase, "feed the crocodile," if only we would cease to be Americans, which means cease to be so pushy, cease to be so rich, cease to be so aggressive, if only we could pay reparations to everybody for something, that the crocodile would like us.

And what I've been intrigued with, my personal estimate is because of the size of this event, that for at least two weeks most of that elite will be quiet, but within seven weeks they will be in a war for the future of this country because all of the principles we are describing up here are antithetical to their world. For the United States to actually go out and defeat somebody would imply that our right to life was greater than theirs--which, by the way, if the other person's a fanatic who wants to kill my child or my grandchild, I pick that they do and my child and my grandchild live.

Now, that's a very heretical view for a substantial part of the American elite. And it will be interesting to see when the inoculation wears off--and I'll just give you one quick story apropos the media. One of the network members--and I can't remember which one, I'm not certain 100 percent which one it was, so I'll just say one of them. One of them began to report Grenada as this vehement--it may have been all of them. Jeane was living through this--this vehement usurpation of freedom of the press, this vicious grab of this innocent island, et cetera. The young man gets off the plane--those of you who are old enough will remember this--kissed the ground. The country looked up and thought, That guy was there, he seems okay. If he thinks kissing the ground is a sign he was really, really, really scared, I'm with him. Within three hours, the national media went--okay, not that they believed it. They were coerced by the rage of the American people into reporting it neutrally or even positively for a brief period. It didn't last long, but it was fascinating. It's a fascinating cycle. This one I think will last a little--two or three or four weeks, but as you already said, you see the underlying habits of thought: America's guilty, America's wrong, America must appease, America should be timid, America should tolerate. And those habits of thought are very deep in that part of the elite.

MR. : Just two quick things. On Tuesday, the day of the attacks, the New York Times in its Culture Section ran a huge puff piece praising a new book by the husband of Bernadine Dorn (ph), a person who murdered Americans, committed terrorism on America soil, gave him an enormous send-off, praising the book, praising him, praising her. These were American killers. It was a huge--I mean, I can't imagine why the New York Times has failed to publish a huge apology for having had the bad taste to run that piece at all, let alone on the day when that thing happened.

And with regard to CIA, you can tell that that part of the elite that Newt has quite properly identified is concerned about this because Bob Woodward came out of his chateau this morning for the first time in human memory with a non-exposé exposé of the CIA on the front page of the Washington Post. Now, that tells you everything you need to know because he doesn't work very hard.

[Laughter.]

DR. GINGRICH: Can I mention just one quick thing? Without getting into that comment, we do have copies out here for anybody who wants it of the final report, the Phase III report of the U.S. Commission on National Security, called "Road Map for National Security." And it is--it took us three years to put it together, and I think it is a pretty profound statement of how serious the challenges are. And, tragically, we arrived at one of them much faster, frankly, than we had hoped when we issued this back in March. So these are available for anybody who wants to pick up a copy on the way out.

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK: One question. Yes, I don't know you but I'll call on you.

MR. : Thank you. I'm [inaudible] Ward, a consultant. I wanted to pick up on a theme that I hear, a consensus among the panel, and that is, the reason why the U.S. is targeted is it's the symbol of freedom and democracy.

On the other hand, we're also the symbol of modernity, and I would argue that one of the things we've seen in the last two years, starting with Seattle and going now through the recent events in Italy, is a reaction to that modernity and a backlash. That ties in. I realize only a small core of those are anarchists, but, still, they're very troubling. How do you deal with that aspect of this issue?

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK: You accept it as a fact, because the fact is that free societies are also modern societies. It's not that modernity necessarily leads to freedom because Nazi Germany was a modern society. The Soviet Union was a modern society in many respects, but they were certainly not free societies. But all free societies are modern societies. And I think modernity--many of the critical attributes of modernity are also associated with freedom when they're not very--you know, there was a study done at Harvard 15 years ago called "Becoming Modern," and they looked at attributes of modernity. They studied nine African countries. Very interesting book. Nobody reads it anymore.

But one of the attributes of modernity that they described was permitting women to participate in the society, including in the economic life of the society, but in the sort of public--to be seen in public, exactly what the Taliban does not permit and exactly what most of the terrorist states that we're talking about do not permit. I'm sure bin Laden doesn't permit women to participate in anything.

Modern--modernity is a more--it's a different concept, but it has many overlapping attributes, and, you know, once while I was the United Nations, the wife of a very distinguished Arab Ambassador--not the one I quoted before--said to me, "I don't see why you're always supporting Israel. You're not a Jew." She said, "You know, why don't you support the Arab countries?" I said, "You know, I'm a woman."

To me that's quite enough to say, only because so many of the Arab country--not all. Again, there's not a perfect overlap. But there's a general overlap about opportunities for women and freedom for women. And it's part of a modern society, but it above all is part of a free society.

You know, you lose--women get freedom, men lose their slaves. You know, this is--

[Laughter.]

AMBASSADOR KIRKPATRICK: It's written in many, many, many places. If you meet--I'm sure many of you know some of the traditional--some of the families who were, for example, in the monarchy in Afghanistan. I know some here in town, some very charming people--women, by the way, too--educated, and they are sophisticated participants in modern society. And they are the sharpest possible contrast to the Taliban, for example. And it's very clear that modernity and freedom are very much at issue between these political elites.

I think we'll find that in many places, and that's--I think that's--it is no accident that, as Karl Marx used to say, that slavery was eradicated only relatively recently in most countries in the world. And there are a lot of people in a lot of those countries who still have slavery, either literally or very nearly literally, who are determined to keep it. And I think they're the ones who hate us. They don't want us to say what we think. They don't want us to do what we want. Like the helicopter pilot I heard this morning, you know, they're trying to make us--they're trying to take away our freedom in bombing the World Trade Center. He said, you know, "They've already torn up my life," he said, "but I am going to get it back." And that's, I think, the spirit that a lot of Americans will have today.

Okay. Thanks for coming.

[Applause.]