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American Morning

Crisis In The Middle East; Troops Stay In Iraq

Aired July 28, 2006 - 07:00   ET

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

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: It's the battle of Bint Jbeil and Maroun al-Ras as Israeli forces continue pounding these suspected Hezbollah strongholds.
Let's zoom in and take a look and you can see what's been going on. Not much smoke now, but it won't take long before you'll see yet another round of artillery going in there. Everything in the foreground in green is Israel. Everything in the foreground that is in green is Israel. Everything that is brown and more aired is in Lebanon.

And what we've been seeing is a series of strikes here in the southern approaches of Bint Jbeil. The center of the city is just over the crest of that furthest hill right there. To the right, in that direction, is Maroun al-Ras. Been seeing some action there as well.

We're hearing explosions all throughout these valleys and we've seen at least one suspected Katyusha rocket landing on this side of the border in Israel, apparently harmlessly. So this comes in the wake of a pounding by the Israeli air force yesterday. No less than 110 suspected sites targeted by the Israeli air force. CNN's Karl Penhaul has been in the midst of all this in Tyre, Lebanon, and is here to tell us there are renewed attacks today. Karl.

OK, apparently we don't have Karl just yet.

In the midst of all of this, a lot of discussion inside the Israeli government as to what to do next. Continue what you're seeing right behind me. This sort of attempt at a surgical operation focused on the headquarters -- or suspected headquarters of Hezbollah here, or something much broader. An outright invasion into Lebanon, ala 1982 when Israeli troops came in at that time and occupied.

That is the question that's facing the Israeli cabinet. So far they're saying stay the course. But having said all of that, they're also activating 30,000 reservists, telling them to report for training. CNN's Paula Hancocks with more on that from Jerusalem.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

PAULA HANCOCKS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Seemingly conflicting decisions from Israel's security cabinet on Thursday. The military commanders wanted this military operation ongoing in Lebanon to be expanded, but the politicians said, no, and said that it would stay at the status quo and the military operations would be ongoing. But at the same time, they also said that up to 30,000 reservists are being called up. Now they will have to go back to the security cabinet for approval before these reservists are actually deployed into battle.

Now, at the same time, Israeli officials were at pains to point out that Israel has no intention of fight war with Syria. This is something that Amir Peretz, the defense minister, mentioned in a press conference numerous times after this meeting, saying that Syria was not involved at this point and it had no intention of involving it in this fight itself.

Now we also heard reports from the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, saying that this international force that was going to be planned for southern Lebanon in the future should not involve the United Nations in a huge way. He pointed to the UNIFIL forces that have been there since 1978, saying that what is needed is something better equipped and stronger and able to face up to Hezbollah. And he also said that the investigation that Israel is carrying out into why the U.N. outpost was targeted in southern Lebanon and four U.N. workers were killed should also not involve the U.N. They said that the Israeli investigation will be thorough, it will be honest and there was no need for more investigations from the U.N. itself.

Now the Israeli military have been saying that rocket launches overnight an a base where long range missiles from Hezbollah was targeted is still ongoing. It says that it is destroying these rocket launchers. But at this point it seems to be making very little difference on the ground as further rockets are falling in northern Israel on Friday.

Paula Hancocks, CNN, Jerusalem.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

M. O'BRIEN: Day 17 now. The battle of Bint Jbeil continues. The tally is this, 33 soldiers on the Israeli side dead, 19 civilians. Around 400 deaths on the Lebanese side. Unclear because Hezbollah doesn't make official reports on this of those 400 dead how many are civilians and how many are combatants.

Soledad.

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Miles, thanks. We'll check in with you in a little bit.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair coming to Washington with hopes of a Middle East cease-fire. Blair believes President Bush will agree to a U.N. resolution. CNN's Elaine Quijano at the White House for us this morning.

Elaine, good morning to you. When exactly is the prime minister expected to get there?

ELAINE QUIJANO, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning to you, Soledad.

Well, we'll have to wait and see. Certainly what we were hearing from White House officials yesterday, there wasn't expected to be any kind of major shift in strategy. The two leaders will meet in the Oval Office a few hours from now. They'll then appear before reporters in the East Room.

Now this visit was planned well before these latest hostilities broke out in the Middle East, but, of course, that will be the central focus today.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

QUIJANO, (voice over): When they last met, President Bush's frank and off-color assessment to British Prime Minister Tony Blair dominated the news and showed the president's frustration with the diplomat effort.

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I feel like telling Kofi to get on the phone with Assad and make something happen.

QUIJANO: But that was 11 days ago. Since then, the fighting has not stopped and the civilian death toll continues to climb. Against that backdrop, President Bush is said to welcome Blair, he staunchest ally in the war on terror, to the White House. Both the president and the prime minister are facing intense pressure from European allies to support an immediate cease-fire.

WENDY SHERMAN, FORMER STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: Europe and the United States are not on the same path and we'll see if Tony Blair is going to stick with Europe or stick with the United States.

QUIJANO: So far, the Bush administration has not budged. With the president restating that peace and a cease-fire are not the same thing. At an Oval Office meeting with Romania's president, Mr. Bush laid out his Mideast goal.

BUSH: To hopefully end this as quickly as possible and, at the same time, making sure there's a lasting peace. Not a fake peace. Not a fake, you know, circumstances that make us all feel better and then sure enough the problem arises again.

QUIJANO: With the secretary of state expected to return to the Middle East this weekend, the White House is forcefully rejecting any notion her earlier trip there was a failure.

TONY SNOW, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: You're laboring under the presumption that she was supposed to come with a magic wand to say a cease-fire. What she has said is, what on earth is the good of having another empty-handed cease-fire in the Middle East?

(END VIDEOTAPE)

QUIJANO: Now yesterday the president engaged in some telephone diplomacy, speak for the second time this week to Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel. As for the meeting today, other issues on I agenda include trade and Iraq. But, of course, the main focus on the Middle East crisis.

Soledad.

S. O'BRIEN: Who else is the president meeting with today? QUIJANO: Well, that's right, the president's going to be taking a break from the high pressure diplomacy just for a moment this afternoon. He'll be meeting with the 10 finalists of "American Idol." And there actually is a White House connection here. Taylor Hicks, the winner of last season's "American Idol," was actually a pupal, the ninth grade student, of First Lady Laura Bush's press secretary back in Birmingham. She taught him English. So it will be a happy reunion for them.

S. O'BRIEN: They're practically like this then.

QUIJANO: That's right.

S. O'BRIEN: The pupil of the first lady's press secretary.

QUIJANO: Press Secretary Susan Whitson, yes.

S. O'BRIEN: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. All right, Elaine Quijano for us at the White House. Thanks, Elaine.

CNN's going to have live coverage, probably not of the "American Idol" meeting, but of the president's news conference, certainly, with Tony Blair. That's at 12:30 Eastern.

Thirty-five hundred U.S. soldiers are going to have to wait four extra months now before they can come home. They're going to go into Baghdad to help deal with the increased violence that we've been telling you about there. CNN's senior Pentagon correspondent Jamie McIntyre has our story today.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JAMIE MCINTYRE, CNN CORRESPONDENT, (voice over): The need for battle-tested troops with top-of-the-line vehicles has prompted General George Casey to order an Army brigade, equipped with Stryker armored vehicles, to stay in Iraq as much as four months beyond its scheduled 12-month deployment, breaking the Pentagon's promise to U.S. troops that they will only serve one year in Iraq is something that had to be personally approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

DONALD RUMSFELD, DEFENSE SECRETARY: If you extend somebody, is there some disappointment that they won't be home when they thought they might be home? Sure. But, as I say, this is a professional military and they're doing a superb job.

MCINTYRE: While about 200 of the soldiers from the 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, based in Alaska, had already left Iraq after a year long tour, 3,500 of the remaining soldiers, now in Mosul, have been told they will go to Baghdad instead of going home.

REP. IKE SKELTON, (D) MISSOURI: What this does to that particular brigade, it's going to cause morale problems with the troops and also with their families who are expecting them to come home at the end of the year.

MCINTYRE: The Army has prepared messages to the families of the effected troops, who will likely be eligible for pay bonuses, but will get no form promises of how much longer they will have to stay in the war zone.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

S. O'BRIEN: That report comes from our CNN senior Pentagon correspondent Jamie McIntyre. The troops from the 172nd Stryker Combat Team are going to get around $900 extra per month for their extended stay in Baghdad.

Time to get to the forecast. Chad's got that at the CNN Center.

Hey, Chad, what are you looking at this hour?

(WEATHER REPORT)

S. O'BRIEN: Also ahead this morning, Israel's decision to continue its military operations, but not expand it. We'll take a closer look at what that's going to mean for Lebanon.

And also, the controversy over that bombed out U.N. outpost. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan originally said it appeared to be deliberately attacked. Did he rush to judgment?

Plus, America's long ties with Israel. We'll take a look at how that could hurt or help the chances for peace. That and much more ahead on this special edition of AMERICAN MORNING. We're back in a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

M. O'BRIEN: Good morning and welcome back from northern Israel as we witness the battle of Bint Jbeil and beyond, happening right before our eye about three miles behind us. As we speak, there's a ship sailing from Lebanon to Cyprus with a few hundred foreign nations on it. Many of them Americans. Probably every one of them has a harrowing tale to tell. At the other end, where they arrive, CNN's Alessio Vinci will be there to tell the story. In the mean time, he'll tell us how those evacuations are going.

Alessio.

ALESSIO VINCI, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hello, Miles.

As a matter of fact, there are several ships coming into Cyprus today. Three more are expected later tonight here at the Port of Larnaca and the ship carrying most Americans, the Orient Queen, will arrive around 10:00 local time. That's about eight hours from now. About an hour away from here, in the Port of Limassol.

All together, over the past two weeks, some 47,500 people have arrived here in Cyprus, including Americans, of course. By the time the week ends, we understand from Cyprus authorities, 50,000 will have come through here. Most of them have already left. Of those, 13,200 Americans arrived and 9,700 have already gone home. There is a period here of processing. We understand that there are some delays because some people have said we're Americans in Lebanon where (ph) actually had expired passports, non-valid documentation, so they need to be going through some immigration procedures here in Cyprus before they can actually board the charter flights that are organized by the U.S. government.

And we also understand that the U.S. military, that is based in Limassol, is organizing a shipment of aid into Lebanon later tonight. We understand that the catamaran, the swift which has been used already in other crisis over the recent years, namely during Katrina and during the tsunami, will be carrying tons of medical kits and medical equipment into Lebanon. We do not know exactly whether this shipment will arrive directly in Beirut or whether it will go down south to Tyre.

What we do know, however, that no U.S. military personnel will be dealing with the distribution on the Lebanese side. This aid will be handed over to government authorities there and to the NGOs and they will be then taking the responsibility of distributing it to those into need.

Miles.

M. O'BRIEN: Alessio Vinci joining us from Larnaca, Cyprus, bringing us up-to-date on both the humanitarian effort and the evacuations of foreign nationals who'd like to get out of Lebanon right behind us there.

What we see here on this peak 2,600 feet above the border in northern Israel, is apparently what we're going to get for some time. The Israeli cabinet, the Israeli prime minister met yesterday and essentially said let's stay the course with the battle such as it is, focused on Bint Jbeil, Maroun al-Ross, and not initial a large scale invasion.

Having said that, they did call up 30,000 additional reserves with the possibility that this could escalate further in the future. Joining me now to talk about this and some other matters is a spokeswoman for the Israeli government, Miri Eisin.

Miri, good to have you with us here on this mountain top as we watch the shelling of Bint Jbeil. Quite a backdrop. It's rather amazing how constant this shelling is. But I want to ask you about whether this war should, in fact, be escalated? Or many Israelis believe that? I spoke to a border guard, a reservist, Micha Avni, yesterday. Listen to what he had to say.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MICHA AVNI, IDF SOLDIER: I think that Ehud Olmert hasn't yet reached the decision that he needs to make, which is that we have to have a full-scale invasion. I think his inexperience in military matters has probably slowed us down over the past few weeks and cost a lot of lives.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

M. O'BRIEN: What do you make of that? Has that cost lives because it has not been escalated?

MIRI EISIN, ISRAELI GOVERNMENT SPOKESWOMAN: No. I disagree with him. I think that the Israeli government stated clearly yesterday that we're determined to go the whole course here, but we're not walking into a trap. Hezbollah, over the last six years, since we departed Lebanon, has built up in this area that we can see behind us, not only a terrorist army, but they're sort of waiting for us to come in. They've booby-trapped the entire area. They want us to walk into these booby-traps. Israel is going to do it at our own pace, at our own time to make sure that when we go in, we go in carefully and that we don't walk into their booby-traps. We want to stop the rocket fire, but we also want to make sure that Hezbollah will not be there afterwards.

M. O'BRIEN: If the goal, though, is to eradicate Hezbollah, going after just a few towns in a so-called "surgical way" might not be the best way to accomplish that goal.

EISIN: There is no question whatsoever that Israel is looking at the wider goal here, but the idea is not only to do this militarily. We're starting here because we have no choice. We have been put in a place where Hezbollah crosses this international border into Israel, kidnapped soldiers, opens fire whenever they want on our northern border. We're doing these small, in and out incursions at our own pace. We're trying to pinpoint and pursue Hezbollah wherever they are.

But I'm going to remind you, Miles, what you know well. They're hiding behind the civilians. They're hiding inside Bint Jbeil. They're hiding inside the hospital. They're putting both the rocket launchers, all of their ammunition, all of their weapons in underground tunnels all around all of these towns and villages. Bint Jbeil is one of their headquarters. There are others.

M. O'BRIEN: All right, let's shift gears and talk about the possibility of an immediate cease-fire. There are many who say it's time to put down arms and come up with a solution. Among the people who say that this should be an immediate goal of both the U.S. and Israel is the former secretary of state, Warren Christopher. Today's "Washington Post" he has oped piece and he says, among other things, "my own experience in the region underlies my believe that in the short term we should focus our efforts on stopping the killing." Why not stop the killing now and come up with a negotiated solution here?

EISIN: Miles, war is a terrible thing. I'm not standing here and saying war is good. I'm a mother. Not one Israeli wants war. In this war, Israel is trying to defend all of our citizens. We have a million and half people who have been sitting underground for almost two and a half weeks. We have people who cannot go out and pick the fruit, do what they're supposed to be doing here up north. We're determined to change that.

Hezbollah has settled itself in southern Lebanon, on our northern border. And at this stage along the way, we are trying to get them out of where they are. The diplomatic effort is important. In time, there's no question that they will be able to help disarm Hezbollah. But until the Lebanese government, until the Lebanese people understand that Hezbollah is hiding behind their backs, taking them hostage, we will continue with this effort to defend our citizens.

M. O'BRIEN: Is it a proportionate response, though, when you consider all of the civilians? You just mentioned it's inevitable, civilians are dying, innocents.

EISIN: There's no question that any civilian dying is a tragedy. It's a tragedy when a Lebanese child dies. It's a tragedy when an Israeli child dies. Every Israeli hurts for those Lebanese. Hezbollah rejoices at every Israeli child killed. We're determined to continue to defend our people. We're determined that we won't have our six year olds in bomb shelters and we hope that with our determination and the backing of the international community that we will change the situation on the ground.

M. O'BRIEN: Miri Eisin, spokeswoman for the Israeli government, thank you for being with us.

Back to you, Soledad.

S. O'BRIEN: All right, Miles, thanks.

Coming up this morning, we're going to talk about that U.N. outpost which has been bombed by Israel. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said it appeared to be deliberate originally. Was he too quick to judge? We're going to talk to one of his top deputies just ahead on our special edition of AMERICAN MORNING. We're back in just a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

S. O'BRIEN: Two technology companies take a hit and their CEOs are responding. Andy's got that as he "Minds Your Business" this morning.

Good morning. Who are we talking about?

ANDY SERWER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: We are talking about Intel and Microsoft, Soledad. Two companies joined at the hip and stuck in the mud over the past couple of years. Yesterday CEOs of both companies responded. And how did they do? Let's start with Microsoft.

You know, this company has been feeling the heat from competitors like Yahoo! and Google, obviously, web-based Internet companies, technology or software companies, I should say. That's redundant to say web-based Internet companies, isn't it? You knew that.

Anyway, Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, sought to reassure analysts yesterday that the company can compete with the likes of Yahoo! and Google. On the other hand, both Office and Windows have been delayed. This would happen to Microsoft previously, but now competing against such nimble companies that have such clout makes things very, very difficult.

Meanwhile, the company also talked about its iPod clone called Zune and said that this product would take millions of dollars to complete, to pay off and would take three to five years before the whole project really came into fruition. Zune is supposed to be out this fall, presumably for Christmas. But really it needs to tie into the Xbox and tie into Microsoft's TV endeavors and tie into Windows media for this to really pay off.

So, you know, big stakes here.

S. O'BRIEN: That's a lot of big ifs. I mean if it does, and if it can meet those goals in five years, if it does all the previous things.

SERWER: And you're talking about competing against Steve Jobs and iPod and he is not standing still.

Let's move over to Intel, Soledad. They have been getting beaten up by AMD, Advanced Micro Devices, in the chip sector for the past three years. Yesterday they announced a dramatic revamping of their product line. The core two duo processors, 40 percent more performance, 40 percent less power used and analysts seem to be pretty darn impressed. Paul Otellini, the CEO of the company, proudly rolling out this new stuff. And the financial community applauding.

So we will watch how both of these stocks trade this morning.

S. O'BRIEN: All right. Let's take a look. Thank you, Andy. Appreciate it.

SERWER: Thanks, Soledad.

S. O'BRIEN: Straight ahead this morning, we'll have the very latest in the Middle East crisis. We're taking a look at that long relationship between the United States and Israel and how that relationship is affecting chances for peace now.

And the controversy over the U.N. outpost that was bombed by Israel. We'll talk to the U.N. deputy secretary-general. Did his boss, Kofi Annan, rush to judgment by originally calling it deliberate? Those stories ahead on this special edition of AMERICAN MORNING.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

S. O'BRIEN: Israel is launching new attacks in southern Lebanon this morning. Increased air strikes of suspected Hezbollah hideouts, killing three people. Lebanese sources also say that nine others were injured.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair is looking for a U.N. resolution on ending the Middle East conflict. Blair is on his way to Washington right now.

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