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American Morning
Israeli Troops Met Heavy Resistance as They Moved Into Another Palestinian Refugee Camp
Aired March 04, 2002 - 07:32 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.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Israeli troops met some heavy resistance as they moved into another Palestinian refugee camp today. Attacks over the weekend killed 20 Israelis and prompted Israel's security cabinet to increase the military pressure it is putting on the Palestinians. Ten Palestinians have also been killed in the latest violence.
Joining us now is Michael Elliot of "Time" magazine -- good morning, Michael.
MICHAEL ELLIOT, "TIME" MAGAZINE: Good morning, Paula.
ZAHN: Good to have you with us.
ELLIOT: Nice to be here.
ZAHN: What do you think this latest escalation of violence means, particularly at a time, when there is this Saudi Arabian peace plan -- I know some people don't call it a plan, whatever you want to call it...
ELLIOT: Vision. Yeah.
ZAHN: ... vision -- is now being widely debated?
ELLIOT: Utterly grim. I mean, a really, really grim weekend. The sort of number of casualties and deaths that frankly force you to say these people are at war. I mean, it's not a kind of sporadic outbreak of violence. This is pretty much a full-fledged war.
The thing that really interests me at the moment is this. There is sort of a conventional wisdom in the Middle East that outsiders can't impose peace on the Israelis and the Palestinians, and you have to kind of wait for the two of them to kind of bludgeon each other into a bloody pulp and then decide they will sit around a table.
I just wonder whether in Washington their conventional wisdom is not being reassessed right now, because you can't have many weekends like this in which scores, not tens, but scores of people are killed on both sides without the whole region being destabilized in an incredibly dangerous way.
ZAHN: Well, there was tremendous pressure building, is there not, on the Bush administration to become more actively involved. And then we heard, of course, the Democrats say that over the weekend.
ELLIOT: Absolutely. President Mubarak...
ZAHN: ... former members of the Clinton administration, Mubarak, Yasser Arafat.
ELLIOT: Mubarak (UNINTELLIGIBLE) in Washington this week, so we know there will be some discussions about that.
No, I mean, I think there is pressure building. The administration, I think they are kind of (UNINTELLIGIBLE) for reasons. It spent a year saying, look, you know, the Clinton administration got really down and dirty on this, and it didn't do them much good. We have to step back, and we have to let the parties themselves decide when it makes sense for them to talk to each other. But that strategy, you have to say, has not brought peace or a situation, where people are not getting killed in the Middle East.
And when you can look at what happened over this weekend, you know, with this dreadful suicide bomb in Jerusalem on Saturday, then you have Israeli incursions into the West Bank, then you have this attack on an Israeli checkpoint on Sunday, I mean, these are acts of war. They are perceived on both sides as acts of war, and I think maybe the pressure on the U.S. administration to do something about it is just going to ratchet it up even more.
ZAHN: A couple of other things I want to touch on this morning. The big vote on Switzerland to -- I guess this referendum to vote themselves into the U.N., which of course that action would be taken...
(CROSSTALK)
ELLIOT: I am hugely disappointed in the Swiss.
ZAHN: Now, why is that Michael?
ELLIOT: I am hugely disappointed in my Swiss friends. I love the idea that there could be somewhere that was weird and offbeat and was not a member of the U.N. and had its own currency. You know, it's just about the only country in Europe that does have its own currency now. And you know, with all of those guys, you know, with lader hose (ph) and the big Alp horns, I love the idea that somewhere it can be odd. And now, they are just like everyone else. You know, you have to go to the Vatican for heaven's sake to find somebody that isn't a member of the U.N., and the Vatican isn't nearly as big and it doesn't have as good mountains or as good cheese.
ZAHN: I want to move you back to the seriousness of your "Time" magazine cover story this week: "Can We Stop the Next 9/11?" As best you can in 30 seconds, describe to us what your reporter found out we thought we were dealing with back in October.
ELLIOT: Well, we were pretty proud of our team who put that together. What some members of the administration, some key officials, thought had to be taken seriously was the possibility that a 10 kiloton Russian bomb had been smuggled into New York Harbor, where had it been exploded, it would have essentially demolished lower Manhattan and caused untold number of deaths. Now, fortunately, as we report, these rumors didn't pan out, and everyone was able to relax.
ZAHN: But they weren't simply just rumors. I mean, you had...
ELLIOT: No, no, no. They were -- no, no, no. They were not rumors.
ZAHN: ... good intelligence coming from some guy...
ELLIOT: No, no, no, they were -- they were -- they were...
ZAHN: ... named Dragonfire (ph).
ELLIOT: ... they were reports from a source of some reliability. They appeared to check out at one time with what Russian sources were telling us. So it was genuinely, genuinely scary. And I think what that reminded us is that this isn't over. I mean, we have seen over the last few days there has been a major, major firefight in Afghanistan. The war that started on September 11 is not over. We can expect other terrorist attacks. We can expect our armed forces in Afghanistan to take more casualties, as they have done this weekend. So this is -- we've got a long way to go yet.
ZAHN: All right. Michael Elliott, see you same time, same place tomorrow morning.
ELLIOT: I'll be here.
ZAHN: Thanks for dropping by.
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