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Bush To Assert War Goals in VMI Speech

Aired April 17, 2002 - 10:05   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: Well, Leon, let's go ahead and turn our attention now to the fight against terrorism here in the U.S. More than seven months after the September 11 attacks, a lot of people are wondering whether the government is doing enough to keep the nation safe. We could get an answer to that question in just a matter of minutes when President Bush speaks at VMI, the Virginia Military Institute.

Our Major Garrett is traveling with the president, and he joins us live this morning from Lexington -- Major good morning.

MAJOR GARRET, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning Daryn. Yes, the president is going to give what senior White House officials describe as a war update to reassert all of the goals of the global war against terrorism and explain exactly how those goals in that war on terrorism are not in way undermined by his policy in the Middle East. Of course, that. has been an underlying theme of criticism from some Republicans and some Democrats on Capitol Hill.

But in pursuing peace in the Middle East, the president has undermined his absolute doctrine on terrorism. That is to say if you harbor a terrorist and you give aid and comfort to a terrorist, you will be treated as a terrorist by the U.S. government, subject to economic, diplomatic or military sanctions.

Well, the president is going to try to lay out all of those themes, put a large section of his speech dealing with the Middle East. Senior advisers tell CNN that it was that part on the Middle East that got the most attention and quite a bit of internal dialogue and debate exactly what to say with about the situation in the Middle East, how to take an assessment of Secretary of State Powell's visit to the region.

While the president was traveling here, a senior administration official brief reporter was saying the president was pleased with the progress that Secretary of State achieved in the region. However, that senior administration official was hard-pressed to describe specifically what kind of progress was achieved, taking note, in fact, the cease-fire was not achieved. But there are still Israeli incursions into the West Bank. There is still a siege in Ramallah, still a siege at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and that there is no timetable precisely for an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. Nevertheless, the senior administration official said the president is pleased, because the situation is not worse, there has been a reduction in the level of violence, and all parties are talking to each other. And it's at that level, Daryn, a limited level, senior administration officials conceded, progress was achieved, and for that the president is generally pleased -- Daryn.

KAGAN: Major, I am interested in some inside perspectives about what happens in the very spirited debate that was taking place within the administration before Colin Powell headed to the Middle East, given the limited or lack of progress of what he achieved once he was there. What happened to that talk and that pulling on either side that was taking place within the Bush administration now?

GARRETT: Well, you can you bet it is going to continue. The secretary of state will return to Washington, and then there will be a very lengthy series of high-level meetings with him and everyone else in the president's National Security and diplomatic team. He will then be able to give them probably more nuance and more definitive briefing of exactly what his conversations were like.

It is not easy to condense lengthy conversations with the parties in 10 or 15 minute conversations back to Washington, which occurred frequently during the secretary of state's visit to the region. He will have a chance to sort of go through all of the conversations, everything you heard, the nuances we picked up, some perhaps encouraging signs, some things we can look at in the future, perhaps this international conference at the ministerial level to talk about ways to approach a political dialogue.

All of that will be hashed out at the White House in the coming days. But when you ask senior administration officials, well, where does the Bush policy in the Middle East go from here? It sounds very much like it did during the Clinton years. We're going to try to make progress one centimeter at a time, one fraction at a time. Basically now the Bush administration finds itself exactly where it didn't want to be when it took the White House, that is to say looking at the Middle East and saying the process itself legitimizes the process -- the policy that is.

They are talking. That's better than fighting, and even if they are talking and it is not achieving a lot on the ground, talking is better than fighting, and that's where they are right now. How they advance that. How they move from talking to real concrete achievements, either a cease-fire or full-blown political dialogue that leads to a resolution of that, there is no clear path and no clear road map -- Daryn.

KAGAN: Major, an interesting comparison. I don't think anybody in the Bush administration would like to be compared to the Clinton administration on any topic, especially when it comes to the Middle East. But it looks like that's the road that they are going down.

GARRETT: Well, I wouldn't put that way, Daryn. I wouldn't say that they would resent any comparisons to the Clinton administration. The Bush administration thought the Clinton administration tried to put together a package that would achieve a final resolution of all of these longstanding agreements between the Israelis and Palestinians. Their overall assessment was that for a lot of complicated reasons, it wasn't able to succeed. Perhaps the bar had been set too high, perhaps there was not enough support in the Arab world for Yasser Arafat to make the kind of compromises necessary to seal a deal with the Israelis.

I believe it is that second factor that the administration is focused on considerably. It is why Secretary of State Powell didn't go to Ramallah and Jerusalem first. He went to surrounding Arab nations first on his trip, because we wanted to try to build support within the Arab world to give signals, concrete signals to Yasser Arafat that when the time comes to make compromises, you can and have the support of the Arab world. That's one of the methods they are trying to work on. That the difference from the Clinton administration approach, a new approach with the Bush administration as yet, however, no concrete levels of success -- Daryn.

KAGAN: Unfortunately a lack of progress. Major Garrett in Lexington, Virginia, thank you so much.

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