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Fareed Zakaria GPS

On U.S. Gun Violence; World's View of America's Elections; Talking Turkey, Fighting ISIS; Interview with Robert Jordan, Former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Aired 10-11a ET

Aired August 02, 2015 - 10:00   ET

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

FAREED ZAKARIA, HOST: This is GPS, the GLOBAL PUBLIC SQUARE. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria.

Let's start the show today with the American political circus. Seventeen candidates. And that's just on one side of the aisle. 464 days left until any votes are counted. Two major American political dynasties, and one and only Donald Trump.

What does the rest of the world make of all of this? I have a great international panel to talk about just that.

And the nuclear deal with Iran has upset many atop that list Israel for certain, but next in line is surely Saudi Arabia. We'll take you inside the secretive kingdom with a former U.S. ambassador to Riyadh.

Then Nobel Peace Prize winner Kailash Satyarthi on keeping kids in school. And why that means something very different in India than it does in the West.

Finally, something is rotten in Lebanon. The Pearl of the Mediterranean is becoming putrid. What's all the stink about? Find out.

But first here's my take. Since 9/11 America has responded aggressively to the danger of terrorism. Taking extraordinary measures, invading two countries, launching military operations and many others, and spending over $800 billion on homeland security.

Americans have accepted an unprecedented expansion of government powers and invasions of their privacy to prevent attacks. Since 9/11 74 people have been killed in America by terrorists according to "New America." And calculating using CDC data in the same period, over 150,000 Americans have been killed in gun homicides.

And to tackle that problem, we have done nothing. Our attitude seems to be one of fatalism. Another day, another mass shooting, which is almost literally true. The Web site ShootingTracker.com documents that in the first 207 days of 2015 America had 207 mass shootings. After one of these takes place now, everyone goes through a ritual of shock and horror and then moves on, aware that nothing will change, accepting that this is just one of those quirks of American life. But it is 150,000 deaths. That's almost three Vietnams. After last week's incident in Lafayette, Louisiana, the governor of

the state and presidential candidate, Bobby Jindal, pointed his finger at what has now become the standard explanation for these events. Three days after the tragedy he said on "Face the Nation" --

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOV. BOBBY JINDAL (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Every time this happens it seems like the person has a history of mental illness.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: But it makes little sense to focus on mental health. Look at these statistics for the United States and other countries provided by gunpolicy.org which uses official data. America has a gun homicide rate that's at least a dozen times higher than those of most other industrialized countries. It is 50 times higher than Germany's, for example. We don't have 50 times as many mentally disturbed people as Germany does. But we do have many, many, many more guns.

Former Texas Governor Rick Perry's solution is to loosen the few restrictions on guns that do exist so that in the Lafayette movie theater other patrons would have been armed and could have shot the gunman.

The notion that the solution, in dark, crowded movie theaters, is a mass shootout is so dangerous that frankly it should rule Perry out as a serious candidate.

When asked about such proposals after the last mass shooting in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, William Bratton, who has been police chief in three major American cities, dismissed the notion entirely. To him the solution is obvious. "We need some sanity in our gun laws. Gun control can reduce these numbers of incidents," he told CNN.

[10:05:16] We have done the opposite. We have actually loosened restraints on the ability and ease with which people can buy, own and carry guns. This is partly because, in June 2008, the Supreme Court broke with 200 years of precedent and in a 5-4 decision written by Justice Antonin Scalia created an individual right to gun ownership that has made common sense regulation of guns much harder.

In his powerful dissent in that case, Justice John Paul Stevens pointed out that Scalia's opinion was an act of extreme judicial activism that for two centuries federal courts have recognized that the government had the power to regulate the sale of firearms and that the Supreme Court in particular had for at least seven decades consistently ruled in this way.

It is not an act of fate that has caused 150,000 Americans to die over the last 15 years. It is a product of laws, court decisions, lobbying and pandering politicians. And we can change it.

For more, go to CNN.com/fareed and read my "Washington Post" column this week. And let's get started. As I sat one day watching coverage of the 17 Republican candidates for

president and five Democratic ones, as I thought about the fact that there were still more than 450 days before the election itself, as I considered the fact that, if Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton wins and then wins re-election in 2020 there will have been a Bush or Clinton in the White House for 28 of the prior 36 years.

And as I watched the Donald with his big mouth and his almost bigger make-America-great-again trucker's hat, I said to myself, I wonder what the rest of the world thinks when they see all this.

So let's find out. Joining me here in New York are Timothy Stanley, the British opinion writer, currently a columnist for United Kingdom's "Daily Telegraph," he's the author of many books about America and its politics, Anne Applebum, foreign policy columnist for the "Washington Post" and Pulitzer Prize-winning book author. Although she is American by birth, she's lived overseas for more than two decades and is married to a Polish politician.

From Mexico City, Jorge Castaneda is the former foreign minister of Mexico and also a prolific book author and a professor at NYU.

And in London Mina Al-Oraibi is an Iraqi journalist currently the assistant editor-in-chief at a newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat and a Yale world fellow.

And what does the world think when they're looking at American elections?

ANNE APPLEBUM, 2004 PULITZER PRIZEWINNER FOR NON-FICTION: In a word, they think we're insane. Our elections are, as far as I know, the longest one of any -- in any democracy that you can find and of course by far the most expensive.

The last Polish presidential candidate on his campaign spent the equivalent of $4 million, which I think might buy you a House seat in this country but probably not a Senate seat. The total cost of the last British election campaign or general election, parliamentary election, was $37 million, 25 million pounds. So that gives you some idea of the scale of the difference, length, cost, length of debate, everything.

ZAKARIA: You say, Tim, lunatics with money are never mad, only eccentric in America. You're talking about --

TIMOTHY STANLEY, OPINION WRITER, THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Or run for president.

ZAKARIA: Donald Trump.

STANLEY: Yes.

ZAKARIA: What do you think? I mean, Brits are used to eccentrics. What do you think Brits think of Donald Trump?

STANLEY: I think we see him as being part of a long line of candidates like him. Think of Herman Cain back in 2012, before him Ross Perot. We're used to this idea of the snake oil salesman. The guy who steps in and says, if you vote for me, I will build roads, I'll give you health care, I'll give you everything you want, and then we see them burn up.

We don't expect them to do very, very well but it conforms to a particular cliche in the European mind about America and how its politics work. That it's about money. It's about buying yourself attention. It's about personality but most of all it's about anger.

One thing that's slightly troubling for Europeans is there are a lot of talk about what Americans right now are angry about. We're getting that Donald Trump, the list is very long. Immigration, health care, all those things. We're not getting a very long list about what America is going to do about it and what these candidates actually stand for.

So I think the Europeans are looking at him, thinking, we've heard this before. It's amusing, it's fun, it's eccentric but it speaks to a politics that's kind of stuck.

ZAKARIA: Jorge Castaneda, the anger, you know, in Trump's case seems directed very particularly and aggressively toward Mexico. How is Mexico receiving this rather extraordinary candidacy?

[10:10:14] JORGE CASTANEDA, FORMER FOREIGN MINISTER, MEXICO: Well, Fareed, I don't think it's seen as a lot of fun either in Mexico or in Central America or parts of Latin America because despite this being the usual silly season of American electoral politics Trump has been very insulting, very offensive. He's been racist. He's been -- he has generalized. He has been vicious in many of his comments. And so this is not taken as funny at all here.

What's even worse, perhaps, Fareed, is that, with a few exceptions, Jeb Bush, perhaps Rick Perry and Lindsey Graham, most of his 17 rivals as you said or 16 rivals are not really pushing back at all against Trump, specifically on the question of the racist comments he has made constantly about Mexican migrants to the United States or Central American migrants or Caribbean migrants or South American migrants.

So there is a lot of -- a lot of discontent, a lot of confusion in Mexico, of course, mainly, but elsewhere also in Latin America, about who this guy is and why aren't the other guys saying really anything about it. Why aren't they pushing back, why aren't they differentiating themselves from him?

It's making a lot of people very upset here and they would like to see a stronger reaction in the United States from more civilized voices. This is American -- these are American barbarians, to put it very simply.

ZAKARIA: And Mina, in Iraq there are many, many people -- forget Iraq is actually a democracy and, you know, quite a lively one. Do you have tons of candidates and lots of jostling? There's a lot of craziness in Iraqi democracy, right? MINA AL-ORAIBI, ASSISTANT EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, ASHARQ AL-AWSAT: There is.

And having lots of candidates, as you said, is something that Iraqis have gotten used to in the last 12 years or so. The presidential system is slightly different, of course, because the president is almost an agreement between the different political parties who they choose to be president. But the parliamentary elections bring up all sorts of names and parliamentary lists and so forth. So we're more used to having different candidates and different names and some crazies on the side than perhaps other countries in the region.

ZAKARIA: All right. If Donald Trump isn't going to win, who does the world want to be the next American president, when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:17:11] ZAKARIA: And we are back talking about the American elections with Anne Applebum, Timothy Stanley, Jorge Castaneda and Mina Al-Oraibi.

Anne, in your "Washington Post" column recently, you wrote something fascinating. You talked about dinner parties in London where people are talking about international affairs and then somebody looks up and says, you know, we haven't mentioned the United States once in this entire conversation, and everyone agrees that it's very odd and they go back to talking about what they were talking about and never get to America.

APPLEBUM: I'm afraid that does happen. I mean, I'm not sure that it would happen on every topic but it very often happens on European topics, it very often happens when you talk about Russia. There is a sense that the United States is not fully part of all of these conversations anymore, that it's very distracted. And of course that's going to grow worse over the next few months during the elections.

ZAKARIA: And as a result, do you think it means that people don't care whether it's Bush or Clinton or who?

APPLEBUM: I don't think it's so much that people don't care. I just think that people are a little more sanguine now about whether it can really make such a big difference. I think in a way they're speaking particularly about Europe. You know, the hatred of Bush was very overdone. The huge welcome for Obama, which is, as you remember, the cheering crowds in Berlin before he was even elected, were also overdone. And people now have a little bit of -- you know, they think, OK, whoever is president, many things are going to remain the same, a few things will change and there is neither an enormous amount of hope nor an enormous amount of fear attached to the presidency anymore as there has been over the last decade or two.

But the sense that this is world-changing and that our lives will all be different depending on who the next U.S. president is, that's kind of fading away.

ZAKARIA: Mina, in Iraq, and in the Middle East in general, is there a feeling that the next president is consequential because of the Iran deal, because of ISIS? How are people seeing it and do they have a preference?

AL-ORAIBI: Yes, I'm afraid it's quite different in the Middle East and a lot so in Iraq. That people still think America is very consequential. And there is a sense that the current president really wanted to step back from Iraq. He came in with a promise to withdraw from Iraq and really didn't have any other policy when it came to Iraq until ISIS cropped up. So people are waiting to see what the next American elections will bring out in terms of a president that may be more engaged. And so there is a curiosity, very much so.

ZAKARIA: Jorge, there is a big difference I assume for the Mexicans which is odd, by which I mean, Mexico's leaders for a long time had worked very closely with Republicans, the La Madrid, the opening up of Mexico both economically and politically was very much a partnership that had taken place with a lot of internationalist Republicans like Reagan and Bush Senior. Now is there a very stark divide where kind of all Mexicans would just prefer Democrats?

[10:20:13] CASTANEDA: I don't think so, Fareed, for one reason, which is that none -- despite of everything, Jeb Bush is viewed as a frontrunner, as someone who is likely to be the Republican nominee. And he is seen with actually a great deal of affection in Mexico. Firstly for the obvious reason that he has been married for 40 years to a Mexican national, not a Mexican American. Columba was born in Mexico, maintains a lot of roots here. Jeb Bush's children could become Mexican citizens overnight if they wanted to.

And his stances on immigration and his knowledge of Mexico and other parts of Latin America, he's lived in Venezuela also, do I think bring him closer to the opinion that a lot of people in Mexico and Latin America would have. So you have this ambiguous situation but at the same time at the end of the day, people are, at least elites, relatively happy because on the one hand, if it's Hillary Clinton, this is the first time since Thomas Jefferson, if I'm not mistaken, that a U.S. secretary of state has become president. It has never happened.

And this would give her inevitably an enormous amount of experience. So I think there is a certain ease, a certain tranquility, about who -- if it's either of those two. The problem, of course, what happens if it's not either of those two.

ZAKARIA: When you talk about this, Tim, you think that the Republican Party has many very sane and serious candidates but they have to make their way through the land mines that is Donald Trump right now.

STANLEY: Yes, absolutely. They have to take this opportunity as a teachable moment to say, here is where we stand in relation to that and then define themselves by it. Some candidates are doing it like Rick Perry who's come out very strongly against him. The problem is that there's something about Trump's character. If you get into a fight with him you'd get covered in the mud in the struggle. And they're just going to happen to those candidates is what they're worried about.

But look, we in Europe expected a great change to come over America when Barack Obama was elected, and yet eight years later we're still seeing headlines about gun problems, still seeing race riots, we're still seeing stories about grotesque income inequality. So there's a feeling that if it's Bush versus Clinton again, when is the change going to come? How does America move forward?

So I think that's the serious angle to Europe's amusement to Trump is this sort of reflects a sense of things not changing and not evolving.

ZAKARIA: The other aspect of Trump that I think is his appeal is that he is not a standard factory manufactured politician where everything is poll tested. And I remember you wrote something once about how American politicians seem so manufactured and the families seem so manufactured and this is so different in much of continental Europe certainly.

I mean, you were the wife of the foreign minister and you pointed out you barely ever had to go campaigning with him and were regarded as very weird if you had gone campaigning with your husband.

APPLEBUM: Yes. No, there's a very different attitude towards families and towards spouses. And it does vary a lot from country to country, and running for president is different from running for parliament. But, you know, I think you can also, though, see Trump as part of a tradition or a change that's happening which you can see in European politics as well, which is that these crazy candidates coming out of the blue, attracting a lot of attention. You had this in Italy. You have -- I think Rio, was a comedian who attracted a lot of attention.

There are quite a lot of elections if you look around the continent which are being disrupted by unexpected forces of the far right or the far left, sometimes anti-European, sometimes anti-immigration, which are giving people the feeling that they're voting for something real, that give them some kind of -- the sense that there is an edge or there's an emotional surge to politics which they don't feel from the mainstream parties. So I think in that sense the United States is very similar to quite a lot of European countries, a lot of other mature democracies.

ZAKARIA: We are going to have to leave it there.

Next on GPS why in the world is Turkey just about the only country in the Middle East putting a serious effort into the fight against ISIS? Where are the rest of them? We will describe the concept of free- riding when we come back.

[10:24:25]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: Now for our "What in the World" segment.

The big news out of the Middle East is that Turkey is now going to take the fight to ISIS. It's striking targets in Syria by air, and it's letting the United States use its air bases to launch attacks, which will allow American airstrikes to be more frequent and effective. The two countries will try to create an ISIS-free zone in northern Syria.

Great. But as with most things in the Middle East, the truth is more complicated. In their first set of strikes, it seems that the Turks are also attacking Kurdish fighters in Iraq, many of whom are allied in the struggle against ISIS. Why? Well, fearing Kurdish separatism at home Turkey has been at odds with militant Kurds elsewhere in the region as well.

The Turks' second ulterior motive, according to observers, is political gain at home. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's party failed to win a majority in the recent elections for the first time in years forcing it to seek a coalition government with other parties.

Erdogan's strikes could stoke the fires of Turkish nationalism around him, allowing him to call another election and get a majority. An after the elections, well, some observers think the airstrikes with peter out once they have served their domestic purpose.

But at least Turkey is now doing something. The strange reality is that, while ISIS is a mortal threat to its neighbors, its neighbors don't seem to be doing much about it, content to let the United States fight their battles.

[10:30:04] Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have all been involved in the campaign against ISIS in Syria but look at their contributions. The United States has carried out over 2,000 air strikes against ISIS in Syria, the military says. Meanwhile, the Arab allies have flown just over 100 strikes combined. Airwars.org estimates that Denmark, which has conducted missions against ISIS in Iraq, has flown as many air strikes as those Arab allies have flown in Syria combined. The Netherlands has conducted almost twice as many strikes against ISIS as the combined total of Arab strikes in Syria.

The United Arab Emirates suspended air strikes in Syria for a while because they were worried there were insufficient plans to save personnel who may be captured, a senior U.S. military official told CNN. Guys, this is war. Sometimes planes get shot down and people get hurt. Saudi Arabia is the largest market for the U.S. defense trade in the world, according to IHS in its annual report on defense. In 2015, one out of every seven defense import dollars will be spent by Saudi Arabia, IHS predicts. Together, Saudi Arabia and the UAE imported more defense equipment than all of Western Europe combined. Where are these weapons? If they are not to be used against a mortal foe like ISIS, when are you planning to use them? Egypt has the most combat aircraft in the region, according to IHS, but so far they've only managed a few air attacks on ISIS targets in Libya and none in Syria.

So before Washington expands its war against ISIS, maybe we should end the free riding and get the nations in the region to start fighting against an organization that threatens their very existence.

Next on GPS, we'll take you inside a country that is opaque to outsiders, the secretive Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It is angry over the Iran nuclear deal, it's been bombing Yemen for the last four months. What is going on? We have a great guide, America's former ambassador.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: Saudi Arabia is one of the most secretive countries in the world. Although the place has been home for millennia to Islam's most holy sites, it was just last century that the kingdom emerged from what was essentially a group of warring tribes in the desert. Saudi Arabia and its intentions are back in the news today for two main reasons. First, if Israel is the nation most upset by a nuclear deal with Iran, by all rights Saudi Arabia should be a close second. The Sunni monarchy of Saudi Arabia fears a resurgent Shia Iran in this age of fierce sectarian struggles. Secondly, Saudi Arabia has been bombing rebels in Yemen for more than four months now. What is going on?

To go inside the secretive kingdom and inside the minds of Saudi Arabia's leaders, I asked Robert Jordan to join me. The Bush White House sent Jordan's nomination to be the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia on September 12th, 2001. Jordan is the author of the new book, "Desert Diplomat, Inside Saudi Arabia Following 9/11." Listen in.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Robert Jordan, thank you for joining us.

ROBERT JORDAN, FORMER AMBASSADOR TO SAUDI ARABIA: Good to be with you, Fareed.

ZAKARIA: You were an odd choice for ambassador to Saudi Arabia, as you yourself say in the book. You helped Bush in a crucial legal battle. You represented him in a case that essentially won -- saved his political career. And from that, how did you, as somebody who had no Middle Eastern experience, didn't speak a word of Arabic, how did you end up in Saudi Arabia?

JORDAN: I asked myself that a number of times. But as it turns out, the Saudis refused to give diplomatic credentials to a career foreign service officer, as ambassador to the kingdom. They want someone who is a friend of the president, who can go over the heads of the bureaucracy, who does not have a career to protect, and who can actually speak for the president with the king and his leadership.

ZAKARIA: You point out that the United States did not actually have an ambassador in Saudi Arabia when 9/11 happens and when the world realizes that 15 of the 19 hijackers were in fact Saudis.

JORDAN: Exactly. My predecessor, Wyche Fowler, had resigned and left office sometime in the early spring of 2001, so that position was vacant. And actually as it turns out, even the deputy chief of mission, Margaret Scobey, arrived for her job as acting ambassador only on September the 10th. So she had her hands full within 24 hours, and then I came a few weeks later.

ZAKARIA: And in dealing with the Saudis, give us a picture of what that was like, because you get there, 9/11 has happened, and we all remember this. Initially the Saudi official response was, well, maybe these guys weren't Saudis, and if they were Saudis, we know nothing about it.

JORDAN: One of my first calls was on then the governor of Riyadh, Prince Salman, who is now the king. His response was very emphatic. This could not have been Saudis. We couldn't possibly have done this. This had to have been an Israeli plot. The Mossad must have done this. I got the same thing from the minister of the interior, Prince Nayef. I finally had to bring a CIA briefer out and show some of these princes some compelling evidence that it indeed was Saudis who were the hijackers.

ZAKARIA: But it's disturbing that you say that the current king, his initial reaction was essentially, you know, highly defensive, and in a way suggesting that Saudi Arabia did not have this big terrorism problem.

JORDAN: I think they were in denial to a great degree, particularly at some of these levels. And it took a great deal of effort on our part to develop the cooperation which finally did come.

ZAKARIA: And eventually it came because al Qaeda actually attacked within Saudi Arabia.

JORDAN: The greatest leap forward was after the bombings on May 12th of 2003, when three Western housing compounds were blown up by al Qaeda operatives. At that point Crown Prince Abdullah said to me that he understood that they had a problem, that they would take immediate action to capture or kill the attackers and to treat just as harshly anyone who give them comfort or aid, or even tried to justify what they did.

ZAKARIA: Describe Salman, the current king of Saudi Arabia. Because as you said, when he was governor of Riyadh, you dealt with him.

JORDAN: He was governor for almost 50 years. So he had to have started in his 20s. He was and has been considered one of the least corrupt leaders. He has been considered probably the hardest working member of the cabinet. He would be in his office at 8:00 every morning. The story goes that when he was appointed defense minister, he went over the ministry of defense at 8:00, and the only person there was the gate guard. The next day everyone was there at 8:00.

ZAKARIA: Do you think the Saudi actions in the last few years -- they've, after all, militarily intervened, one might say invaded, two countries, Bahrain and Yemen, for the first time in decades. Is this motivated by a clear, thought-through strategy, or is this kind of just fear of Iran and all of its influence?

JORDAN: They have not articulated a strategy. It does appear that their strategy is to be against Iran at every turn, and to presume that Iran's hand is behind every negative act, certainly in their eastern province, in Bahrain, and now in Yemen. We haven't seen what the political objective is of the adventure in Yemen. And I think this could really come back to haunt them.

ZAKARIA: Fascinating set of insights. Robert Jordan, thank you for coming on. JORDAN: My pleasure, thanks.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Up next, a rare treat for us all. The most recent Nobel Peace prize winner. We all know Malala. But do you know the man she shared the prize with? I'll introduce you to Kailash Satyarthi, a man who is trying to fix the world's future one child at a time.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: It's a rare honor to have a Nobel Peace Prize winner as a guest. Indeed, the most recent winner. You're thinking Malala Yusafzai, that brave Pakistani girl who stood up to the Taliban and won the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize. But perhaps you're less aware of her co-winner. Kailash Satyarthi, who has dedicated his life to fighting child labor and child slavery. You should know this man for the great work he is doing, and you will know this man after you hear his amazing story, including what inspired him to do such good.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Kailash Satyarthi, pleasure to have you on.

KAILASH SATYARTHI, NOBEL PEACE PRIZE WINNER: Thank you so much.

ZAKARIA: How did you get started on this quest? Because you were a -- you're a trained engineer. You had a good job in India. This is the thing everybody aspires to. And then you give it all up.

SATYARTHI: Well, frankly speaking, it started from my childhood. The seed was sown on the very first day of my schooling. I was a 5-and-a- half-year-old child. And I saw a cobbler boy outside the school gate. That made me a little bit uncomfortable. Then every morning and evening, after schooling hours, when I would go back home, I saw him. And that made me more angry inside.

And one day I gathered all my courage and went straight to the father of the boy, who was also sitting alongside, cobbler, and I asked him, sir, why don't you send your son to school with all of us? And he looked at me as it was a very heavy question. He said, I never thought about it, and I started working since my childhood, and so was my father and grandfather, and now my son. Then he looked at me and said that, abuji (ph), meaning sir, we people are born to work. On his part it was an answer, but for me it was a question and a challenge for the rest of my life, that why some children are born to work at the cost of their childhood and freedom and education and dreams? It was unacceptable for me. I refused to accept it then, and I am still struggling with that, that no child must be born to work at the cost of childhood and freedom. So --

ZAKARIA: But then when you were an engineer, you had another encounter.

SATYARTHI: Then I started a magazine, in Hindi. One day a desperate father came and knocked my door to publicize his story. Then I heard him. I found that he and his wife and many more people were (inaudible) or trafficked from his native village to work at a brick kiln 17 years ago. His name was Vasil Khan (ph).

ZAKARIA: So he had been working -- essentially in slavery for --

SATYARTHI: In slavery for 17 years. He was not allowed to go away. Neither paid anything. And there was a fence inside which all the families used to live. Children were born and grew up there, but they had never seen the outside world. And his daughter, Sabil (ph), who was born and grew up in slavery, was about to be sold to a brothel. But somehow the price could not be negotiated. And when I was listening to him, I realized that if she was my daughter or my sister, what would I do? Not write the story. I couldn't sit for one second. And finally we were able to rescue not only Sabil, the 15-year-old daughter of Vasil, but also 36 people all together.

ZAKARIA: How widespread is this problem of indentured servitude, slavery and child slavery, which has been your particular focus?

SATYARTHI: 168 million children are full-time child laborers. 168 million. Out of them, 85 million are working in what they call the worst fronts (ph) of child labor, and the official statistics suggest that 5.5 million children are in virtual slavery.

ZAKARIA: Are governments doing enough now?

SATYARTHI: I think it's much better. Things have changed. In India as well as all over the world. The number of child laborers, I'm saying now 168 million. But that's a remarkable progress in the last 20 years from 268 million almost to this number, similarly the out of school children, were about 130 million, now they have gone -- the number has gone down, and it is 58 million or so. So that brings us strong hope, for me.

ZAKARIA: You in your Ted talk, you talked about how it was very important for people to be angry, that you liked anger. Explain why.

SATYARTHI: Because anger is a power. It is a power to fight injustices. I did not want to use my anger for destruction, for violence or for other negative things. But I tried to preserve it as a positive power, because that gives me energy to fight injustices around me, and I try to convert my anger into ideas and ideas into action, and action which can make the world a better world.

ZAKARIA: So you're using your Nobel Peace Prize, the money and the fame, to create a foundation. You announced it in the United States. You had the ceremony at the Lincoln Memorial. Why the Lincoln Memorial?

SATYARTHI: We have chosen the Lincoln Memorial because this is the continuity of these things. Because we are all making history. I'm very confident that we will make slavery a history very soon. We'll make child labor a history very soon. And those who were joining in this campaign, those who were present there, they were not only witness to making of history, but they are partners, they are change- makers, they are the people who are writing the script of this history of victory of liberty over slavery.

ZAKARIA: Kailash Satyarthi, pleasure to have you on.

SATYARTHI: Thank you so much.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, what is more important? A president or a trash collector? One country was lacking both, and the answer became quite clear. I'll explain it all when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: Last week NASA released this sunlit image of earth taken from a satellite one million miles away. It brings me to my question of the week. When was the first time astronauts took a "blue marble" photograph of earth, a photo showing the entire world in one frame? 1963? 1972? 1979? Or 1983? Stay tuned and we'll tell you the correct answer.

This week's book of the week is John Paul Stevens, "Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution." After a lifetime on the Supreme Court, this middle-of-the-road justice has proposed six simple and elegant ways to solve some of the stickiest problems in America. Whether you agree with all or not, this brilliant, brief book will make you think at length.

And now, for the last look. The small country of Lebanon is bursting with excess at the moment. There is an excess of refugees; more than one million Syrian refugees have flooded across the border in the last three years. And now there is an excess of trash in its capital city. I don't mean slightly overflowing garbage bins. I mean trash piling high on the streets, reeking and rotting in the heat, and giving off fumes as citizens try to burn it. You see, the country's biggest landfill closed this month, and a divided government couldn't agree on new sites for the trash, facing heavy protests.

Why didn't the president step in and do something about this mess? Well, there is no president. The city may be full of trash, but politically there is a vacuum. The Lebanese parliament has failed to elect a new president, not once, not twice, but 26 times since last spring, as many have reported. The government has long been wrought with political and sectarian divisions, and these tensions have been exacerbated by the war in neighboring Syria. This week, the environment minister did announce an agreement to clean up the trash had been reached, though the details are murky.

Many Lebanese see the garbage crisis as indicative of their country's woes, that the government failures fill their lives with rubbish.

The correct answer to the GPS challenge question is B. The first photograph of the earth was taken by the crew of Apollo 17 in 1972. NASA tells us it was the first time photography was used to capture the earth from far enough away to see the whole planet, 28,000 miles away. The 1972 "blue marble" image looks quite similar to this most recent beauty, which makes it even more remarkable that the latest sunlit image was actually taken from one million miles away. Thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week.