David Wurmser, my colleague who organized the conference, posed a very interesting question: Are the resources of our government adequate to the challenge of dealing effectively with the region? And I think the short answer to that question is no, emphatically no. And I want to say a little bit about that. But, because I believe you cannot separate institutions charged with implementing policy from the policies themselves, it’s necessary to say a little bit about our policy in the region. And I’m even less favorably inclined toward the policy than I am toward the institutions that are presently struggling with implementing it.

A bad, weak, indecisive, and vacillating policy will put impossible demands on even the most effective and energetic set of implementing institutions. But that ’s exactly the sort of policy that we have. And I’ll come back to that in a moment. And in thinking about this topic, I had a conversation a few days ago with a former director of Central Intelligence, who is not let me say, because you’ll have the pleasure of hearing him later this afternoon, Jim Woolsey. And this friend of mine, rather plaintively reflecting on the chronic failure of his institution in the region said, we the Central Intelligence Agency, we the implementers of covert actions cannot substitute for a bad policy. And he was quite right.

Having said that, let me say a little bit about the capacity of our intelligence institutions to deal effectively in the region. And I think I must observe at the outset that it’s difficult to make judgments in this area, because unlike the world of scholarship, where there is peer review, or the world of business, where there are profit and loss statements quarterly, the activities of intelligence organizations in particular are seldom subject to public scrutiny and judgment of the kind that we can apply in arriving at conclusions about the performance of most other activities. So if an intelligence institution consistently misjudges a situation, and those judgments are contained in documents that are not available to the general public, about the only way one can hope for assessment and judgment is internal to the institution. And if the institution itself is incapable of judging itself with a degree of objectivity, then the task becomes almost impossible, and one is forced to look at the effects of intelligence operations, and whether they have been successful or not. And that, of course, gets you back to the dilemma of distinguishing between policy and the implementation of policy. So it’s a difficult task.

Nevertheless, I think one can reflect on the performance of U.S. intelligence over a long period of time, in the region. And I want to zero in, if I may, on two countries, Iraq and Iran. I think one would see—in fact, I’m quite sure one would see—a very similar story with respect to other countries in the region. And I want to recall for you an incident that occurred, I think it was in 1979, when the Shah of Iran was teetering on his throne, and a number of you will remember that encamped in a suburb or Paris was a shadowy figure known as the Ayatollah Khomeini, and his spokesmen, names I’ve long forgotten. But, they would appear routinely in front of the little house in suburb of Paris, and make statements about events in Iran. And these were widely carried by the news media.

I got a phone call one day, after this had been going on for some weeks, from a distinguished scholar of the region, for my money, the preeminent scholar of the region, Professor Bernard Lewis. And Bernard said, you know, if I hear another reference to this mysterious figure Khomeini, I’m going to scream. He said, there’s nothing mysterious about the Ayatollah Khomeini, he’s written seven books, and his activities are well known. He operates from Iraq. I can’t why everyone finds it so difficult to understand the Ayatollah."

And I said, "Well, tell me more." And he read me some quotations from Khomeini’s writings.

I was a young Senate staffer at the time, and I said, "That’s really good stuff." I said, "We’ve got to get that into print."

And he said, "Well, what do you suggest?"

And I said, "If you’ll send me an op-ed piece I will give it to a friend of mine at the New York Times, and with any luck she will succeed in getting it published." She was a very junior journalist then, and since a much more distinguished one. And so Bernard wrote this piece up, and I passed it along to my friend and got a call from her a couple of days later, and I said, "How are we coming on the piece?"

And she said, "Well, they’re not going to run it."

And I said, "Why not?"

She said, "Well, they checked with the spokesman for Khomeini in Paris and he says it’s a fabrication, that Khomeini has never written such a book, or any book."

Well, this seemed a slight hiccup, but surely not impossible to overcome, and so I said, "Well, what do we do? What do we do now?"

And she said, "Well, can you get somebody to validate the existence and the text of the book?"

And I said, "That should be easy." So I called the Senate liaison for the CIA (I was working on Scoop Jackson’s staff in those days), a very good fellow named Jack Murray, and I said, "Jack, could you do me a favor, here’s a manuscript, or here’s a Xerox of a book." By the way, the Khomeini people, realizing how clearly his purposes would be expressed if the book were generally available, had gone to great lengths to remove them from library shelves all over the United States and in Europe, so that it was difficult to come by. But, we had a Xerox of the text, and I said, "Would you have your guys take a look at this, and all I need is a statement that this is authentic."

And Jack said, "Sure, glad to help." He was from a Soviet background, and those guys were much more helpful.

Jack came back a couple of days later, and he said, "We’ve got a problem."

And I said, "What’s the problem?"

He said, "Nobody around here is prepared to authenticate this book. In fact, nobody around here is convinced that it isn’t a forgery." I passed this back to Bernard, who was incredulous, as you might expect. Now, here was the team they had assembled to advise us about events in Iran, at a moment in which a crucial policy decision or a sequence of crucial policy decisions had to be made about our attitude toward the Shah and his continued tenure and the events taking place in Iran, and the whole bunch of them were so ignorant of the crucial underlying facts that they couldn’t even speak to the authenticity of a Xerox copy of a book written by the Ayatollah and in print for several years.

So I started thinking back in 1979 that we had a problem in that part of the CIA. And as you look at events following, the failure to understand what we were getting into when Khomeini came to power, remember that his rise was greeted with enthusiasm in parts of the U.S. government, who were improperly advised as to the implications. When you look at the failure to anticipate Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, when you look at the failure to understand the extent of Saddam’s progress in acquiring weapons of mass destruction, when you look at the record, it is chronic and it is unbroken. And it is one failure after another.

Any business that had a division that consistently made losses would at least hire McKinsey or try to understand what was wrong. But as far as I can tell, and I’ve tried to track this over the years, there has been no real audit of the performance of the Middle East operations at the Central Intelligence Agency, either on the analytic, or the operational side. Now, what would it take to have a first rate organization in this regard? Well, I submit that a minimum requirement shall be a cadre of trained professionals with some knowledge of the history, the culture, the language, in the region.

If you were to go out to CIA today and say, "We’d like to know a little bit about the background of the guy who is running operations on the Mid-East side. Which of the languages does he speak?," the answer would be none. He doesn’t speak Arabic, doesn’t speak Farsi, doesn’t speak Hebrew, doesn’t know any of the languages. I don’t think he knows much about the culture either, and having struggled with one nearby language for years, there’s a limit to how far you can go in understanding a culture without understanding the language.

Steve Richter, who runs the Near East division, for operations, of the Central Intelligence Agency, in my view has an unbroken record of mismanagement and incompetence, and yet as far as I can tell there has been no effort whatsoever, with failure following failure, to examine the internal effectiveness of that organization. On a previous occasion I proposed to the Congress that after 20 years of failure in the region they ought to do an audit, they ought to pull together a committee, examine the history of the performance of the Near East division, and draw their own conclusions. It hasn’t happened yet, and so let me reiterate the suggestion that it is time to examine the performance of the Near East division of the Central Intelligence Agency, which has only a record of failure.

The failure continues, in my view, right up to the present. And in particular has disastrously effected our feeble efforts to come to grips with Saddam Hussein. This is the product of a number of ideas that are current within the intelligence community as it relates to Iraq, the most important of which is the belief that the only way to eliminate Saddam Hussein is by attempting to eliminate his governance, is by organizing a coup d’etat against him. I’ve got news for you: Saddam is a lot better at resisting coups that we are at perpetrating them. So much better that every effort has failed, in many cases with significant loss of life, and despite the numerous failures, the most recent of which is still very much alive in the memory of a great many people, we continue to pursue that course.

Not only is the institution wedded to the idea that we are capable of encouraging a coup that might bring Saddam down, but it is so committed to that view that it has resisted all alternative suggestions, including what I believe to be the most obvious, which is that we get behind the opposition to Saddam Hussein. And in fact, not only has the institution been unwilling to support an effort to get behind the opposition to Saddam Hussein, I think it is fair to say that it has worked actively against any such suggestion.

The Congress of the United States, two days ago, three days ago, took what I believe is an unprecedented step. It actually voted authority for the administration to use U.S. military equipment for the purpose of transferring that equipment to the opponents of Saddam Hussein, in order to give them, if they can organize themselves, some means with which to oppose Saddam’s regime. They also voted a small amount of money for radio broadcasting by the opposition to Saddam Hussein.

I’m afraid that despite the valiant effort of a great many in Congress, the administration will resist, continues to resist in every way putting those resources to use or examining seriously the prospect of mobilizing the opposition to Saddam. And I believe they do so to a significant degree because they have accepted the judgment of the intelligence community that an effort along those lines is bound to fail, while an effort along the much traveled and frequently failed approach of organizing a coup is more likely to succeed.

So it becomes a fundamental question about the future of American policy in the region, whether we can get a reasonably fair and objective judgment about how we might operate and what our options are in the region. And I believe we do not now have an intelligence establishment that is capable of giving us a reasonably objective account.

Let me turn for a moment to a second, and related topic. And this has to do with UNSCOM and its activities in Iraq, and the future of UNSCOM and the policy of the administration with respect to ferreting out weapons of mass destruction, and other illegal weapons that might be in Saddam Hussein’s possession. And I want to address this, because controversy has developed in the press, and elsewhere, surrounding the resignation of Scott Ritter, who was until his resignation probably the key individual on the UNSCOM inspection team responsible for dealing with Saddam Hussein’s all-too-effective efforts to conceal his weapons of mass destruction and other related military equipment. It seems to me that this question is really quite fundamental, because within the controversy, with Scott Ritter claiming that UNSCOM was effectively prevented from carrying out its mission by adverse intervention from the United States, and specifically from the Department of State, within that controversy lies, I think, the single most important issue facing us.

And also, at issue, unavoidably, is the credibility of the Secretary of State, since her account and Scott Ritter’s account are diametrically opposed, at least that’s how I would read the statements that she’s made. And I want to thank Laurie Mylroie of the Information for Democracy Foundation for having collected those statements for me to take you through this brief chronicle.

On the 3rd of March, this year, Ambassador Butler, the head of UNSCOM, took the extraordinary step of removing Scott Ritter from the UNSCOM inspection team, which was about to conduct inspections in Iraq. Now this followed immediately after the triumph of the deal with Kofi Annan, which deal you may have noticed is now dissolved into the meaningless document that it really was, even at that moment. But, it’s now evident to everyone. The staff working under Scott Ritter revolted and they revolted to such an extent that Butler really had no choice but to reinstate Scott Ritter. And that was done.

On the 4th of March, the next day, the day after his removal and reinstatement, the Secretary of State discussed the idea, the policy really of testing whether Saddam Hussein was going to live up to the agreement that had been reached, with Kofi Annan. My view of what follows is that the Secretary of State understood perfectly well that the deal brokered by Kofi Annan was inadequate and would significantly weaken the ability of the United States and its partners in UNSCOM to detect illegal activity but wished to create an impression that a serious deal had been reached. She said that the test was whether they comply, knowing that even full compliance would be inadequate, because the agreement had so diminished the capacity of UNSCOM to do its job.

And so she said, and I’m quoting, "Under its recent agreement Iraq has promised U.N. inspectors immediate, unconditional, and unrestricted access to all sites inside the country, including those previously kept off limits. This step back by Iraq is a step forward for our policy of containing the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. If Iraq lives up to its agreement, we will have achieved our goal." And so forth. That statement was on March the 4th. That was then followed by similar statements in Rome on the 7th, in Paris on the 8th, in Madrid on the 9th, and back in Washington with King Hussein shortly thereafter.

We then did, in fact, carry out an inspection. And much to everyone’s great delight, in the Department of State, Saddam rolled over and permitted us to inspect the Ministry of Defense in Baghdad. Now, I submit to you that we knew—we didn’t guess, we didn’t think, we didn’t wonder—we knew that there was nothing of consequence to be found in the Ministry of Defense in Baghdad. And that is precisely why the Ministry of Defense in Baghdad was chosen for inspection. What I think we can conclude about the policy in first posing the challenge of implementation, and then implementing the challenge in a perfectly meaningless way that was entirely consistent with Saddam’s interest, and what had become unhappily a parallel interest in the Department of State, that is what happened in March of this year.

In the middle of July, UNSCOM planned an inspection of some importance. Unlike the inspection of the ministry of defense in Baghdad, which we knew would yield no useful result, this particular inspection was aimed at a military secretariat, where we had reason to expect a very important result, substantial information about the massive program of concealment in which the Iraqis have been engaged.

Peter Burley (sp), I think deputy U.N. Ambassador at the time, official representative of the government of the United States, speaking for the government of the United States, learning of the plan to conduct this inspection, went to Ambassador Butler and made it very clear that the United States would not support such an inspection. And so the inspection was postponed. And what might have been the most promising opportunity from the day UNSCOM was founded, was not permitted to go forward. That was on the 15th of July.

On August 2nd, that planned inspection was rescheduled after a great deal of back and forth between Washington and the United Nations. And Scott Ritter returned to Baghdad for the purpose of conducting that inspection, August 2nd. On August 4th, Ambassador Butler, head of UNSCOM, authorized the go ahead for the inspection on August 6th. He was then asked to go to Bahrain where a secure communications link existed, in order to talk to the Secretary of State. The Secretary of State made it clear on that occasion that it would be a mistake to go forward with that inspection. That was August 4th. On August 5th, Iraq suspended all inspections. On August the 7th, Scott Ritter, having failed to conduct that most promising inspection, first because it was canceled, second because of the intervention of the United States for a second time, returned to the United States, and as we now know, he subsequently resigned.

Now, let me read you a couple of the things that the Secretary of State had to say about this controversy, because Scott Ritter has made it very clear that in his judgment, and to the best of his knowledge, he was prevented from carrying out inspections with very great potential on the explicit advise of officials of the United States, including the Secretary of State.

And the Secretary of State was asked about this on CNN, and let me just share this exchange with you. You all know Wolf Blitzer. He asked: "The other criticism that you’ve been getting involves the inspections in Iraq, U.N. Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter, who just resigned in protest, complaining about, in part, the administration’s position. This is what he told Newsweek magazine this week. Let me read to you from Scott Ritter’s quote. He said: "I heard somebody say Madeleine Albright blocked more inspections in 1997 than Saddam Hussein did. It’s a funny quip, but unfortunately it’s true." That’s Scott Ritter in Newsweek. "Not only is it Iraq that is frustrating us, but it is the people we are supposed to be supporting that are obstructing us."

"Why," Blitzer asks, "does he conclude that you personally are obstructing the inspections against Saddam Hussein’s facilities?"

And the Secretary of State answers as follows: "I have no idea. I think that Scott Ritter has his piece of the story. He was a good inspector; I’m not going to criticize him." By the way, the criticism has come from every other quarter of the administration in what is clearly an orchestrated campaign. "I’m not going to criticize him. However, he doesn’t have a clue about what our overall policy has been. We are the foremost supporter of UNSCOM, we have directed and inspired really more inspections than anyone else. There have been grave inspections that have taken place in the last several years where we have made it possible for them to go to the ministry of defense, for them to go to a number of areas which had never been inspected before. So, it’s a quip, it’s a fine quip for Scott Ritter to make. I am not going to speak ill of Scott Ritter. He’s a great American but he does not know the policy we are carrying out."

Well, I submit that the policy we’re carrying out is one of avoiding inspections at critical times, and in critical places.

The controversy didn’t die down with that exchange. There were further questions back and forth. And on the 17th of September, the question was again put to the Secretary of State at a meeting at the Carnegie Foundation. And, she answered again: "There was such a clear cut reason"—this is referring to the aborted inspection—"there was such a clear cut reason to shine the spotlight on the decision Saddam had made, and not whether a particular inspection would go forward, that we felt, and we all had conversations with Richard Butler. I’ve had scores of them. And so has every other member of the Security Council, that’s what his job is, to consult with members of the Security Council. I think that he felt, after some discussion with a number of us, that it is better to leave it a very clear case of Saddam Hussein not living up to the memorandum of understanding rather than muddying the waters with an inspection at that time, he felt."

Now, his theory was the product of the discussion between the Secretary of State in Washington (I think in Washington) and Ambassador Butler in Bahrain, at which he was clearly told the United States did not and would not support that inspection.

Where does that leave us? I’ve got two or three conclusions. The first is that the head of the Near East Division at the Central Intelligence Agency, unless he’s got a story to tell that I’ve never heard and none of my investigations have revealed that justifies his continuation in that job, should be removed on grounds of incompetence and a lack of the fundamental qualifications to hold that position. The Director of Central Intelligence should explain why he’s been there all this time despite a record of one failure after another.

Second, a Select Committee of the Congress should be established to conduct a thorough investigation of the quality of our institutions for conducting operations in the region, and in particular they might narrow the focus to Iraq and Iran, where there is a well-documented history. It’s a secret history, and so the committee would have to work under appropriate conditions, and with appropriate access. But it is high time that the Congress, if it wishes to believe, continue to believe that it exercises an oversight function and responsibility with respect to intelligence operations, it’s high time for them actually to do that and inquire into the last 20 years, and I might even start with the last 12 months, and see whether they’re inspired to go back further.

And, finally, this investigation should include an effort to reconcile the competing claims of Scott Ritter and the Secretary of State. I’m inclined on the basis of the record as it has evolved to believe Scott Ritter, but I can’t prove that Scott Ritter is right and that the Secretary of State is wrong. She denies ever having interfered with inspection plans. And he says she did. We ought to get to the bottom of it. And if it turns out that the Secretary of State discouraged inspections and then lied about it, she should resign. It strikes me as embarrassingly similar to others in the administration who redefine history and hide behind words that are given personal meanings, like "we all talked to Ambassador Butler," when she knew that the subject of the question put to her was a specific conversation on a specific date at a specific time. And the pattern at the upper reaches of the administration of misrepresentation, which has already done great damage in the White House, mustn’t be allowed to infect the Department of State as well.

Well, I think that’s where I want to stop. And I’m happy to respond to any questions. I’ve always believed in Scoop Jackson’s rule about questions, which is to do it the way they do it in the Senate, and that is to say the questions need not be relevant or pertinent to anything I’ve had to say. And I thank you very much.

(Applause.)

QUESTION: In your remarks about the strategy to depose Saddam, you mentioned the appearance of the administration’s intelligence community to a military coup versus our preferred alternative of encouraging vigorous opposition. This was already prevalent during and right after Desert Storm, where the Bush administration didn’t want Iraq after the way to disintegrate. And I’m wondering if even today there is a concern by the policy makers and the intelligence people that if you switch to the robust encouragement of the political opposition, you risk the dismemberment of Iraq, and strategically we don’t want to do this.

MR. PERLE: There’s no doubt that the notion that the territorial integrity of Iraq is in the United States’ interest has affected this administration and the previous administration. I think it was an important element in George Bush’s thinking. I’ve heard Brent Scowcroft at AEI occasionally has expressed that view. I’m not sure I agree with that, but it seems before one ever gets to that broad strategic question, there is a narrower question which is, can we get a reasonably objective view in operational terms of the options available to us. It’s the job of policy makers, including the president, to make a broad strategic judgment like that. So if offered a plan that could lead to bringing down Saddam Hussein’s regime, but one that entailed a risk that Iraq might disintegrate, whatever that means in the aftermath of such a plan, it’s certainly proper to consider whether to proceed with that plan.

What I find deeply troubling, and the reason why I’ve talked about a particular division within the Central Intelligence Agency, what I find so troubling is we can’t even get an honest appraisal of the options so that policy markers could make those large strategic judgments because there’s been such opposition for other reasons to considering supporting the opposition in an effective way that the decision makers, I think, generally believe now they don’t have a very attractive option in association with the opposition. I think they’re quite wrong about that. I think the intelligence judgments underlying that are wrong.

And at this point, I’m sorry to say that the past failures, the support for coups that failed, has created a situation at the CIA where the success of the alternative strategy would be such a reproach, and such an embarrassment that they are no longer capable of objectively looking at alternatives that they believe would reflect on their past performance, which is why for the first time, I think, in my life, I’ve called for the resignation of an official in a bureaucratic position. I used to be one of those officials. It’s not a comfortable position to be in.

QUESTION: Really Machiavellian power tonight has drawn you. You’ve spoken about the consistent failure of the judgment of CIA in the region, and isn’t that also true of the lock-step of the State Department’s policy. But even beyond that, don’t you see that a driving force, or the force, is really economic, commercial and corporations that really push the agenda? Now, everybody is in that synergistic line, but our real reasons are commercial, and to what degree does that influence our foreign policy?

MR. PERLE: Of course, foreign policy is the product of a great many judgments and pressures affecting commercial, political, strategic, ideological factors, domestic politics. Practically everything that could bear on the making of decisions with respect to foreign policy does. And so, I wouldn’t single out any one motivation. And you’ve really got to look case-by-case. I mean, I happen to think that in the instance that I wanted to discuss today, which is dealing with Saddam Hussein, that the commercial considerations are not important. In fact, I think the inadequacy of our policy works against us in a commercial sense as well. So, I don’t think that’s the origin.

I think at the operational level it’s incompetence, and at the policy level it’s more complicated. It includes an unwillingness to take risks, for example. It includes an extreme aversion to the use of force. It entails—and here is where you get at the connection between policy-making and policy implementation—it includes blinders about the options open to us. I think that the president has no idea that there are plausible plans that can be adduced for supporting the opposition to Saddam Hussein within Iraq, that have at least as good a chance of succeeding as the policies that have been adopted in their place.

One thing seems to me very clear, our policy now, if one can call it that, consists of little more than clinging to the sanctions, and the sanctions are disappearing. They’re disappearing because much of the world now believes that the victim of those sanctions is innocent women and children in Iraq who are not receiving the nutritional care they need. Not receiving the medical care and the like. And the policy will not be effective in removing Saddam. And I think on that there can be little debate. It is not going to remove Saddam.

So I think that there are many sources for policy here. But I don’t believe that the administration has been given a fair opportunity to judge the range of options available to it, and that is the responsibility that I would put directly at the door of our intelligence organizations with a lot of help from the Department of State.

QUESTION: In regard to the other major strategic battle going on dealing with Oslo in another country, do you feel that the policies or the decisions are also incompetent when they come to making decisions that tend to emasculate or to truncate or to weaken a formerly strong strategic ally of the United States? In other words, what will Israel become if she agrees to what the United States is proposing, and how do we get out of it?

MR. PERLE: Well, I don’t much like the policy of insisting that a friend and ally and a strategic partner of great importance should under pressure adopt policies that will leave it unable to defend itself. It seems to me the first element in any American-Israeli policy should be American support for a defensible Israel, and that includes a territorially defensible Israel. And if we are effective in pressing the Israelis, and the Israelis succumb to the pressure, if we are effective in causing them to accept a territorial settlement that leaves them vulnerable, and leaves the country indefensible, we will have assumed a terrible responsibility, which I frankly think no one would be wise to entrust to another power, and certainly not another power with a demonstrated aversion to the use of force.

So, at the end of the day, I don’t think the Israelis will accept a settlement that they believe places them in a position where they can’t defend themselves, but the more important point is that we shouldn’t wish that either. And it seems to me the view of the administration is that we should do what we can to promote an agreement without caring very much about what the terms of that agreement are. And we are leaving it up to the Israelis themselves to decide how much pressure they can take. The theory being that whatever they’re prepared to agree to is just fine with us. And I think we’d be making a great mistake if we push them to make a mistake.

So, I would put the emphasis on a negotiating process that doesn’t rely on slogans like "land for peace" but focuses on the key issue, which is the security, the survivability, the defensibility of Israel, which is, after all, our friend and ally.

QUESTION: Did you tell us why the Secretary of State was so concerned to stop that inspection? Because I didn’t fully understand.

MR. PERLE: No, I couldn’t. I didn’t.

QUESTION: Could you tell us?

MR. PERLE: I can only—

(Laughter.)

MR. PERLE: I find it easier to understand why the Secretary of State denied doing it than why she did it. And I can only speculate on this, but I believe that this administration is simply not ready for the confrontation that they expected would follow if we, in fact, descended upon the—

MR. PERLE: (In progress)—that Scott Ritter thought it was vital for us to inspect. And I think had we, the Iraqis would have been in a difficult position, because if the information on the basis of which that inspection was planned was correct, then we would have discovered a great deal about a systematic and sustained pattern of deception by the Iraqis that has vitiated much of the UNSCOM effort.

And so I think the reasoning must have been, Saddam cannot allow this inspection to take place, so he will block it, and we will then be in the position of having to react, and we’re not ready to react. So, they backed way from the confrontation just as they backed away from a confrontation earlier, and just as they have backed away from every confrontation that was worth getting involved in. Well, I can’t think of an exception. And in Kosovo it’s happened again. I mean, we’ve got another miserable agreement that will prove no better than Kofi Annan’s agreement. And the Kofi Annan mission was intended to avoid—at the end of the day, there’s a failure of will.

It is, in my view, a failure of will that suffers additionally from a failure of analysis. And there might be more will there if there were better analysis. If they understood that they really do have options. If they understood how fragile Saddam Hussein’s grip on power is, on how quickly power can be taken from someone who rules by terror the moment that it’s made clear that there’s an alternative to submission to that terror. I mean, I think he’d go to the way of Ceausescu. And so every day that passes is a day that we are failing to resort to options that are available to us. And I think that has a large analytical component.

QUESTION: I think that that was one case where the Secretary had her intelligence. Mrs. Albright knew that Saddam would accept all inspections that don’t find anything, and not accept any inspections that would find something, and that this was an exactly correct perception.

MR. PERLE: It’s a very fair characterization. And what’s tragic about it is that it should be regarded by both sides as a satisfactory policy.

QUESTION: Is it really lack of will caused by faulty analysis, or is it really caused by an aversion really to casualties in the use of force? The New York Times reported that before the strikes on Sudan, the president couldn’t sleep until 2:30 in the morning worrying that some poor soul might be killed. As commander-in-chief, I think he has a duty, of course, to minimize civilian casualties, but also if that’s the attitude that the commander-in-chief takes, we’ll never be able to fight terrorism or confront any enemies.

MR. PERLE: Well, there is clear—you’re quite right, and there was a pattern of military actions that have frequently been described as pinpricks because they were insubstantial and could not have accomplished a military purpose, but were intended to accomplish some very political purpose. And it started right at the very beginning.

So that one of the early decisions the administration had to make is, how do you respond to incontrovertible evidence that Saddam Hussein has plotted the assassination of the former American president. And Clinton and his advisors met, and they decided what to do. They decided they couldn’t allow it to go unremarked or unpunished. So they sent some T-RAM-Cs (sp) some cruise missiles against an intelligence headquarters in Baghdad, but they waited until everybody had gone home lest they actually kill an intelligence officer, lest they actually injure people who were involved in plotting the assassination of the president of the United States and killing a great many other people, including their own countrymen.

So, if anybody died in that raid, it was an innocent charwoman and not the intelligence officers who should have been the object of the attack. And that pattern has been continued throughout, including in the Sudan. The obvious targets in the Sudan were not pharmaceutical factory, even if it was involved in the production of chemical weapons. That’s certainly a worthwhile target, but the easy targets were military installations in Sudan. And that they didn’t want to do. And, in fact, the easy targets in the context of Bosnia were military installations in Serbia that were supporting violations.

I mean, without getting into detail, this administration has failed over and over and over again to use its military resources in an effective way, and so I think it’s a fair point.

Last question.

QUESTION: In keeping with Senator Jackson’s thinking, I want to ask you about Syria. We have in Syria a country that borders on three very close friends of the United States and is potentially a threat to all three of them. Yet, I’ve not seen much sign of a policy, I wondered if you had recommendations for such a policy?

MR. PERLE: Actually policy with respect to Syria is getting better. In the first Clinton administration, the Secretary of State visited Syria 25 times, 26 times, 24 times, so it’s getting better. Syria—one of the benefits of which there are many of the collapse of the Soviet Union has been the relative disempowerment of client states like Syria. I mean, cut off from a steady flow of Soviet equipment and intelligence and support of all kinds, Syria is a weak, pathetic troublemaker. That an American Secretary of State would visit there more often than any NATO country was appalling, and to this day I don’t understand. There must have been something else there.

(Laughter.)

MR. PERLE: Because it was just inexplicable. So at least that has stopped. My view is that the longer Syria is left in its current state of general isolation the better. I can’t understand why the Israelis would want to talk to the Syrians now. With every passing month Syria is weaker, and even if Israel wants ultimately to conclude an agreement with Syria, they’ll get a better agreement a year from now than they will today, and an even better one two years from now, because nobody is going to step in and replenish Syria’s declining capability. And as its military forces age, they get weaker and weaker. So we shouldn’t be encouraging the reentry of Syria into the community of civilized nations, where it doesn’t belong under its current leadership, and neither should Syria’s neighbors. I mean, the Turks have very good reasons for deploring Syrian policy, and the natural alliance in this situation, in my view, is an alliance among the United States, Turkey, Israel, and Jordan. And together they have a common interest in keeping Syria where it is now, which is weak and ineffective.