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CNN Crossfire

Richard Perle and Martin Indyk Debate Coalition-Building

Aired October 05, 2001 - 19:30   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.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DONALD RUMSFELD, U.S. SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: It's going to take the cooperation of nations all across the world, and certainly the support that's been provided is appreciated.

TUCKER CARLSON, CO-HOST (voice-over): But should the United States cooperate with terrorist states in the war against terrorism? Should past enemies become new friends?

That's tonight on CROSSFIRE.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CARLSON: Good evening, and welcome to CROSSFIRE.

From the looks of it, the United States has never had more friends. It's hard to find a country these days that isn't eager to denounce terrorism and express sympathy for America.

Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld traveled to Turkey and Uzbekistan today. His efforts at coalition-building seem to be working. Uzbekistan says it will allow the U.S. to use one of its airbases for humanitarian purposes.

But has the coalition grown too large? Israel appears to think so. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon denounced what he calls American appeasement of the Palestinians, whom he likened to the Nazis. Others will question whether the U.S. can fight terrorism with the help of states linked to terrorism. America used to view countries like Syria and Sudan with profound suspicion. Are they now friends of convenience?

Joining us to debate it tonight, former United States Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk and former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle.

Bill Press.

BILL PRESS, CO-HOST: Richard Perle, its been three-and-a-half weeks. The United States has not dropped one bomb, has not fired one missile against any terrorist camp. Are we letting the desire to build a coalition get in the way of taking action? RICHARD PERLE, FORMER ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: No, I don't think coalition building is the source of the delay. The delay is to enable us to get the military planning right and to be devastatingly effective when we do go into action.

CARLSON: Ambassador Indyk, do you find something odd about the idea of aligning ourselves with countries that have supported terrorism in the fight against terrorism? Is sort of like recruiting John Gotti into the FBI's Organized Crime Task Force self-defeating?

MARTIN INDYK, FORMER ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF STATE: Yes, I don't think that we should, or really are, in the business of recruiting those people. We may be able to -- or those countries. We may be able to find some tacit arrangements of convenience, but we should have no doubt about other countries that sponsor terrorism. They are the problem here, not the solution.

PRESS: Mr. Perle, back to you. There have been a lot of people critical of the United States' efforts to build a coalition, none more critical, as Tucker pointed out earlier, than Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who yesterday said that we were throwing Israel away today the way that Great Britain threw Czechoslovakia away in 1938.

Just listen, please, to a little bit of what the prime minister said yesterday.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ARIEL SHARON, ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER: To not try to appease the Arabs on our expense. This is unacceptable to us. Israel will not be Czechoslovakia.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PRESS: He accused the United States of appeasing the Arabs. Is that any way a friend ought to treat a friend?

PERLE: Oh, I think a friend, if he thinks that his interests are being jeopardized, ought to speak out, ideally privately, and ideally soon enough so that if there's truth to it, it can be changed.

What I think he was worried about were the indications that we were putting pressure on Israel to make an accommodation with terrorists who have been acting against Israel in order to curry favor in the Arab world. That would be a profound mistake, but there are people at the State Department who are inclined to do that.

And the danger of doing that is that it rewards terrorism. It says to the terrorists, "If you want to get at Israel, then attack the United States."

PRESS: Well wait a minute. Accusing us of appeasement -- what we're doing, it seems to me, we're asking Arab nations to join the United States in a common cause against terrorism. How is that in any way appeasing Arab nations? Isn't that just outrageously over the line? PERLE: That isn't the point. The point is...

PRESS: That is the point.

PERLE: The point is, that the president of the United States took the position, quite properly, that we would not push Israel to go back into negotiations with the Palestinians until there was an end to the violence. That was the president's position.

Then, recently, the Department of State has been leaning on the Israelis, even though there has been no end to the violence, to get back into that negotiating process. That was a change in policy, a very undesirable change in my view; and I don't believe it was the president's policy. I think it originated, it began, and it ended in the Department of State.

CARLSON: Ambassador Indyk, there's a fascinating piece that's going to run this Sunday in the "New York Times Magazine." We've got an advance copy. Let me read part of it to you. It's a tic-toc, an explanation of how the president's speech to the joint session two weeks ago came into being.

This is the original text. This is how the speech was written. I'm quoting now: "Any nation that harbors or supports terrorism will be regarded by the U.S. as hostile." This draft went over to the NSC, the National Security Council. An official there wrote in the margin, "What about Syria?" So the text was changed to, "Any nation that continues to harbor." We're sucking up to Syria, a nation known to harbor terrorists, in an effort to fight terrorism.

INDYK: Yes, well, I don't think we're sucking up to Syria. The Syrian president said something in his letter of condolence to the president that seemed to indicate that maybe there was a change of heart there. And I think that there is an interest in exploring to see whether, in fact, the Syrians were going to wrap up the terrorist bases that they control in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, for instance, or the headquarters of Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad, which they have offices there in Damascus and the PFLP general command.

So the question was, and this is the idea of continuing, whether the Syrians were going to change after September the 11th. And I think there is an interest in exploring to see whether that, in fact, was going to be the case. But I don't think that we're trying to recruit Syria into the coalition at this stage. It's merely a question of whether a country like Syria and Iran are prepared to change their policies of giving safe harbor to terrorists in the wake of those events.

CARLSON: Well those, I mean I don't think anyone would argue that it's always and everywhere a good thing to encourage people and countries to change, but those efforts can have implications for U.S. policy. Let me give you an example.

You mentioned Iran, a country that supports the Hezbollah. You'll notice that Hezbollah was not listed on the list of organizations who's funding we were freezing or forcing banks to freeze abroad. Do you think it's possible that our efforts to bring Iran into a coalition of some kind with us in this fight, has made us lay off Hezbollah?

INDYK: It's possible, and if that's the case, it's a mistake. Hezbollah should be on the list. It was on the previous list that the State Department has reissued now.

But the kind of tough regulations that have been applied to the al Qaeda network and branches should be applied to Hezbollah, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad as well. And I think there is some attempt to kind of show that really we're focusing on al Qaeda, and not on these other organizations.

But let's have no mistake, these organizations are involved in terrorism. They've killed Americans. And the question for Iran is whether, because they are hostile to the Taliban and vice versa -- and they're neighbors of Afghanistan -- whether they are prepared for some kind of tacit cooperation. But we should make no mistake about it, Iran is the premier state sponsor of terrorism. So it's only a question of some tactical convenience.

But we should never allow the perversion of our purposes in the campaign on terrorism to allow us to somehow accommodate these people.

PRESS: Richard Perle, I want to get back to the basic question of coalition or no-coalition. When you look at this enemy, it's unlike any we've fought before. It's not one country, it's not even one individual. It's this nest of -- a network of terrorist camps and maybe a dozen or more countries, most of them Muslim countries. Isn't -- given that, isn't it absolutely essential that we build a coalition? Isn't this clearly a war that the United States cannot wage and cannot win alone?

PERLE: Look, it is essential that we deprive these terrorists of the safe havens that they have managed to find in a number of countries, in Iraq, in Iran, in Syria, in Lebanon, in Afghanistan. Now, there are two ways to do that: You can pretend that you can talk the leaders of those countries into joining you, or you can raise the price so high that they stop harboring and supporting terrorists, because if they do so they, themselves, run the risk of being destroyed.

That's the right policy. The right policy is not this foolish diplomacy that says you can bring the whole world into this, including the people who are on the other side. But coalitions have to have a purpose. You don't build them for the sake of building them.

PRESS: Well, I would suggest the purpose here is to win. And the purpose here is by putting together a coalition of countries, which includes other Arab countries, it doesn't look like it's the United States versus the Arab world, and it doesn't look like it's Christians and Jews versus Muslims. Isn't that absolutely essential?

PERLE: Those people in the Arab street who believe the United States is on the wrong side of this are going to go on believing that no matter what. And the leaders of the governments we are talking understand perfectly well what the situation is. I mean, I believe the account that somebody on the national security, I can guess who it is, he's a holdover from the Clinton administration.

CARSON: What's his name?

PERLE: Bruce Rydell, I'll guarantee it, put that line in. And the fact is that the idea of bringing Syria in as a coalition partner as opposed to a target for American retribution, if they don't get out of the business of supporting terrorism, shows a weak, indecisive and confused policy.

(CROSSTALK)

INDYK: Let me drop in on that, because I think that's unfair to point the finger at Bruce Rydell.

(CROSSTALK)

INDYK: He's very clear-headed about the Syrians on this issue.

PRESS: How about the coalition question?

INDYK: On the coalition question, yes, we don't want to give the impression that it is a war against Islam. That's important, and I think...

PERLE: Who thinks it is? Who thinks it's a war against Islam?

INDYK: In the Arab world and the Islamic world, the extremists will play on...

(CROSSTALK)

INDYK: ... they will say it is a war on Islam.

PERLE: Of course they will, no matter what...

(CROSSTALK)

INDYK: Hear me out, Richard.

What we need is for the leaders in Saudi Arabia and Egypt in particular, because they have strong influence in the Islamic world and the Arab world. To stand up and say, not for us to say, but for them to say to their own people that what happened here is un-Islamic, is anti-Islamic, is against the interest of the Arab world, and that's why we're standing up with the United States. That's the kind of support we need; and if we get it from them, it's worth having.

(CROSSTALK)

PERLE: They themselves are targets, the Saudi royal family is Osama bin Laden's No. 1 target alongside the United States. The Egyptian government is a target of his principal deputy. So they're in the same boat, in a sense. We are not going to persuade the masses who are deluded on this, and the governments understand. I think this is the same mumbo jumbo that got us into the trouble we're in now. We have been attacked. We have to defend ourselves and we have to defend ourselves in the most effective way. And if catering to an opinion that you're not going to change anyway shackles us and prevents us from acting decisively, it's a terrible mistake.

CARSON: Well, Ambassador Indyk, very quickly, one of the reasons that we are trying to draw these other countries in, of course, is to benefit from their intelligence. Pakistan is obviously a great example of that. But can we trust the intelligence with any certainty? Pakistan, of course, helped arm the Taliban, helped create them and sustain them all these years. Can we trust them?

INDYK: Well, certainly, because they played that role, they certainly know something about the Taliban and...

CARSON: But they also have motive to not tell us anything.

INDYK: But there's also trust and verify. There are ways of triangulating this in order to test whether the intelligence we get from countries like Pakistan or Egypt is accurate or not.

I wouldn't place heavy emphasis on that in the Arab world. I think Pakistan can play an important role there. There are others who quietly can help us a lot in the intelligence areas. Israel is a country like that.

And we have a kind of covert coalition and an overt coalition for fighting this war, and in this context Pakistan is important, obviously, because it's a neighbor and obviously because it had penetrated the Taliban, it's creation. And if we can turn them against it and use them, that's to our advantage.

PRESS: All right, more on the coalition, both overt and covert, domestic and international. Who's in and who's out? More CROSSFIRE coming up. Take a break, we'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TONY BLAIR, BRITISH PRIME MINISTER: I think things are coming into place now. The political coalition is very strong in the outside world, but also now in the region. The military preparations are well underway, and the humanitarian mission can be established.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PRESS: Welcome back to CROSSFIRE. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is on his way home after lining up partners for America's war against terrorism. But is that process taking too much time, and in some cases are we getting in bed with the devil?

We're debating the need, the wisdom and the perils of coalition- building tonight. Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle thinks a coalition could limit our ability to take whatever action is necessary. Former Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk believes a coalition is essential for success -- Tucker.

CARSON: Ambassador, I have never seen the perils of diplomacy summed up perhaps quite as well as they were recently by Martha Olcott, who's with the Carnegie Endowment. In a quote to the San Diego Union-Tribune, let me read it to you, quote: "Getting into bed with dictators is a bad strategy, generally, unless it's a quickie."

And I think it -- you can think of perhaps a dozen examples in just the past century of America waking up with a hangover the next morning, you know, with Stalin, with the shah of Iran, with Noriega. But you never hear, at least in the popular press, any concern about American involvement with the many dictators we appear to be getting involved with now. How does that wind up 10 years from now?

INDYK: I think it's a very important point that we do need to consider that this coalition-building creates some strange bedfellows for the United States. And we need to be very much aware of who we're getting into bed with, and what the trade-offs are.

Already we can see that in the case of Uzbekistan, for instance, very repressive regime; but we need Uzbekistan for our operations in Afghanistan. The same as we discussed before with Iran, the preeminent state sponsor of terrorism, but there are some things that we may be able to get from Iran.

I think the basic principle here as we go into this is to make sure that we are clear about our purposes, that the president's principle is the right one, that we're not only against the terrorists, but we're against those who harbor terrorists, and that those who have a record of involvement with terrorism need to understand that it's not good enough for them just to say that they condemn this. They're going to have to take actions. And if they don't take actions we will get -- we will need to get around to them. But first things first.

CARSON: Well, how about as a first step maintaining arms embargoes against a number of countries like Sudan, or Tajikistan or countries to which it's not legal for American arms manufacturers to sell arms? And yet there's some suggestion that that embargo will be lifted in a sense of reward to these countries for cooperating with us.

INDYK: Well there are some things that we can do for the Sudan. It's really not important, at this point, to be providing arms to Sudan. I think that's really pointless. The Sudanese are moving away from terrorism. That's good. They have a serious internal conflict there that needs to be dealt with. The Sudanese government can give us some hope in terms fighting terrorism.

But we should have -- again, make no mistake, what we need to see is a change in their behavior in these things as well. You know, something so dramatic has happened here that countries are willing to pay lip service to the coalition. What we need to do is distinguish between the lip service, the kind of help that we can get in a tacit way, in some cases and in a public way in others, but never drop the principle that what we're fighting against here is terrorists and those who harbor them.

PRESS: Richard, I want to come back to something you came close to saying in the first segment, probe that a little bit with you, about what's going on at the Department of State, because if there's an architect of the coalition-building, it is Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Are you saying that by reaching out to these Arab nations, he is guilty of appeasing Arab states at the expense of Israel?

PERLE: I'm not sure who he's reaching out to. If he's reaching out to Syria and Iran, then he's making a terrible mistake, and the price will be paid not by Israel, but by the United States. So coalitions are things that you build when you have a strategy and you want to implement the strategy.

If you build the coalition without the strategy and then ask it to produce a strategy, it will reflect the full range of attitudes and views of the members of the coalition. And the idea that we could build a strategy on a coalition that included sponsors of terrorism like Iran and Syria is just absurd.

PRESS: Isn't it though, simply pure pragmatism, I mean, you know, the Israelis said no permanent friends, no permanent enemies, just permanent interests. In this case, as you pointed out, they are maybe as not as much as we are, but they are certainly threatened by fundamentalists, extremists within their own countries. There is a common cause here; so for this particular time, in this particular interest, why not band together and go after Osama?

PERLE: It's an empty shell of pragmatism. There's nothing that the Iranians can do for us that we can't do for ourselves. There's nothing the Syrians can do for us that we can't do for ourselves except get out of the business of harboring terrorism on their territory. And we should be not appealing to them, but telling them that either they stop the practice of harboring terrorists or we will take direct action them.

INDYK: But there is one thing, if I may jump in -- there is one thing the Iranians can do that would be helpful to us, which is restrain Hezbollah and restrain Palestine Islamic Jihad, which they fund, from taking actions against Israel, terrorist actions against Israel, because that would help to calm the situation down there, which is important in terms of...

(CROSSTALK)

CARLSON: And what if they don't, I guess, is my question. I mean, at what point do the promises that we're making for the world now -- we're not going to put up with terrorism. If you continue to harbor terrorists we're against you, you are our enemy, et cetera. At one point do we begin to ring hollow if we don't back them up? At what point, specifically, do you think, ambassador, if Syria and Iran don't knock it off that we say that's it, we're bombing Damascus and Tehran. I mean, how long do we wait? INDYK: I really think that we need to follow the principle of first things first here. And that is we have a clear and present danger in the al Qaeda network. We need to focus on that and deal with that. And there's no reason why we should give up on the broader principle that the president has spoken about.

But if we go to war against Iran and Syria now, it's going to detract from and make more difficult the primary task that we have to deal with immediately.

(CROSSTALK)

PERLE: Once we get one of these countries or two out of the business of supporting terrorism, not by appealing to them, but by destroying their regimes, the others will get out of this business in a heartbeat. The Syrians get very little out of their support for terrorism. If they see that regimes that support terrorism come under attack from the United States and end up being destroyed, they'll get out of the terrorism business too.

PRESS: I want to give you a very practical example. I talking with Sandy Berger just before you appeared with Wolf Blitzer just a little while ago. And he said in 1998 when we went after Osama we had no advantage of any intelligence from Pakistan, they weren't part of it, none from Uzbekistan, none from Tajikistan, and now they're there. Now, isn't that, again, the value of bringing them in? If we had half the intelligence that they know about the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, we're much more likely to be successful.

PERLE: Our problem under Sandy Berger wasn't a lack of intelligence, it was a lack of will and resolve. The Taliban was nothing when Sandy Berger took office. It grew under that administration. And why? Because there was one act of terror after another. There was Khobar Towers, remember that? There was the Cole. There were the embassies in Africa. There was the first attempt on the World Trade Center. There was an assassination attempt on a former president of the United States. All of that under the Berger administration, and we did, essentially, nothing.

PRESS: We bombed the terrorist camps in Afghanistan and missed them by an hour. How can you say the Clinton administration did nothing?

PERLE: It was trivial. The response was trivial. And what it did was persuade terrorists around the world that the risks involved in terrorism were minimal; minimal. And we could have done much more. We should have done much more. When we found acts of terror that we disrupted, which in some cases we did, we should have gone right back to the governments harboring them...

(CROSSTALK)

PRESS: He did, and he unleashed the CIA for three years. In 1998 they were given a green light, and they were unsuccessful.

PERLE: Totally unsuccessful. PRESS: Yes, so you say they did nothing?

PERLE: But it was a feeble effort. And I think any serious retrospective would come to the conclusion that we missed one opportunity after another.

And the main mistake we made was not taking this war to the governments that were supporting terrorism. It's hard to find terrorists. If you're looking for intelligence that identifies where someone is sitting, you've got a problem, but we know where the governments are.

CARLSON: Richard Perle, Martin Indyk, thank you both very much. The first in a series of shows on this exact topic.

Bill and I will take it up once again when we return in just a moment with our closing comments. See you in a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

PRESS: Well Tucker, I know hard-liners like you are disappointed we haven't dropped any bombs yet, but I think the president is acting very wisely. The longer we take, the more people we get on board, the more likely we are to succeed.

CARLSON: Why not include Iraq in the coalition? I'm sure they'd be willing to get up and denounce terrorism. But there's a moral price that one pays when one ignores, as we've had to. And part of this, the part that makes sense -- but part of it, when you have to ignore a serious past of terrorism and include them in it, it's not worth it.

PRESS: I think the greatest leader in wartime was Winston Churchill, and you know what he said? He'd be willing to make a pact with the devil to save democracy, to save England; and we should be willing to do so as well and take our time.

CARLSON: Except it's absolutely not necessary to pretend that Iraq and Iran and Syria aren't exactly the problem themselves.

PRESS: If they can help us get Osama bin Laden, come on board.

CARLSON: We'll regret that choice.

PRESS: From the left, I'm Bill Press. Have a good weekend. Good night for CROSSFIRE.

CARLSON: And from the right, I'm Tucker Carlson. Join us again on Monday for another edition of CROSSFIRE. See you then.

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