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The Axis of Evil
With R. James Woolsey
Former Director, Central Intelligence Agency
Thursday, Feb. 14, 2002; 3 p.m. EST
In his State of the Union speech, President Bush spoke about an "Axis of Evil" comprised of Iran, Iraq and N. Korea. Some saw this as a signal of expanded targets in the war on terrorism. Increasingly, speculation is turning again to Iraq and once beaten leader Saddam Hussein. However, Secretary of State Colin Powell said Tuesday that the administration has no immediate plans for armed conflict with any of the countries named in the "axis of evil."
Should the U.S. expand its military campaign to include other countries possibly harboring terrorist organizations?
R. James Woolsey, who served as director of Central Intelligence from 1993-95, was Thursday, Feb. 14 at 3 p.m. EST, to discuss the "axis of evil" and the progress of the war on terrorism.
Woolsey was ambassador to the negotiation on conventional armed forces in Europe from 1989-91. An expert on foreign affairs, defense, energy and intelligence, he was a delegate at large to the U.S.-Soviet Strategic Arms Reduction Talks and Nuclear and Space Arms Talks from 1983-86. He was also Under Secretary of the Navy and advised the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. Since leaving government service, Woolsey has been a partner at the law firm of Shea & Gardner in Washington, D.C., where he has practiced for 17 years. He also writes and speaks about foreign affairs and intelligence for organizations including the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.
A transcript follows.
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washingtonpost.com:
Thank you for joining us this afternoon. There are reports coming out of Iran that the government has arrested 150 suspected Taliban and al Qaeda members. If true, what does this mean about Iran's place in the "axis of evil?"
R. James Woolsey: It means that pressure against evil regimes sometimes works. I hope it is an accurate report, but I think it's important that not only the Internet comment coming out of Iran in the last few days, but also the huge demonstrations last fall against the government and in favor of the United States may suggest that the mullahs have a real problem.
Plano, Tex.:
Doesn't it seem unwise in the extreme to target Iran, Iraq and North Korea at the same time from alledgedly supporting terrorism? Two of them are enemies and the third is not aligned with any country to my knowledge. If they don't repersent a group, why not pick them off one at a time if that is what we should go. Listing them all publicly seems to be the worst possible of choices. We don't gain allies because we listed seperate groups. We do lose allies for each step by including the one that gives them heartburn, and we don't gain the moral high ground by failing to list several other bad offenders. Is this another Bush effort to drive the U.S. into Isolation by pissing off our allies?
R. James Woolsey: I disagree with the premise of the question. It's important that Bernard Lewis, the country's leading expert, in my view, on the Mideast says that outside Israel and Turkey there are only two countries in the Mideast where the U.S. is quite popular with the people: Iran and IRaq.
I think Lewis is right and that vast numbers of Iranians saw our labeling the mullahs as evil exactly the way the people of the former Soviet Union saw Ronald Reagan's labeling of the Soviet government as the "evil empire." Namely, Bush's and Reagan's statements have given heart to those who suffer under tyrannical rule. It is important for the people of the Mideast to realize that we are on their side, not on the side of autocratic and dictatorial rulers and that we're interested in more than just maintaining access to oil. I don't believe we need Iran as an ally as we move against Iraq. And I believe Iran is more likely to stay quiet during this undertaking if we fire a shot accross their bow, as the president did in the state of the union, than if we seem to be accepting of their support for terrorism and their development of weapons of mass destruction.
I think indeed that the state of the union "axis of evil" characterization of these three governments should be seen as a shot accross the bow of the mullahs in Iran and the communist regime in North Korea, the purpose being to freeze them in place. I think the only one of these three countries that anyone realistically believes we may take military action against is Iraq.
Jersey City, N.J.:
What legal justification would you put forward for an attack by the United States against Iraq? It seems to me that we could not characterize such an attack as legitimate self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter and therefore would be violating Article 2(4) unless we have some independent legal justification. Would the inspection regime, for example, provide such a justification?
R. James Woolsey: I think you are right about Article 51, but article 51 is not the whole story with respect to self defense. The UN plan was for the security council to deal with threats to international peace except where there were direct attacks that could be responded to under article 51. But the security council has proved totally incapable of this, voting to use force in real war time only twice (Korean War and Gulf War). The international law doctrine of longstanding of preemptive self defense is, in my view, the one that is relevant with respect to Iran, Iraq and North Korea -- given the seriousness of the WMD threats which they pose, via terrorism or otherwise, to the U.S. For a full discussion of this international law issue see the article by Michael Glennon in The Weekly Standard of about three weeks ago.
Alexandria, Va.:
The current Sunday morning talk show consensus is that the CIA needs more coordination with domestic intelligence (i.e., the FBI). But what about greater coordination with the NSA and military intelligence? Is that a big problem in your opinion?
Also, can you name any specific changes you'd like to see in the Directorate of Operations, which will presumably be tasked with most of the ground level intelligence gathering for this effort?
R. James Woolsey: Coordination within the intelligence community -- e.g. between CIA and NSA -- is less of a problem than coordination between the law enforcement and intelligence communities. First of all the DCI is, essentially, the chairman of the board of the whole intelligence community. And it's policies are coordinated, though far from perfectlyl. Law enforcement coordination with intelligence is much more difficult because for many years the FBI has been focused on domestic law enforcement and the CIA on foreign intelligence and it is not only their different cultures that have hindered cooperation. In many cases cooperation was blocked by law: for example, until last October it was illegal for the FBI to provide material collected pursuant to grand jury subpeonas to the intel community, even if that material concerned foreign terrorists. Some of these barriers have been lowered by recent policy decisions and legislation, but we do not want to do away with them entirely.
Some of the more aggregious restrictions on the CIA, such as the guidelines adopted in late 1995 that hindered their recruitment of spies who had some violence in their past have now been lifted. Also I believe the CIA is doing a good job in its paramilitary work with military special forces in Afghanistan -- its small teams on the ground, and its use of the Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, are some examples.
Ashburn, Va.:
It appears that President Bush is not worried about his choice of words when discussing the Middle East and its current issues. How do you think the other Middle Eastern countries are currently viewing his method of getting his points across?
R. James Woolsey: I think the point is not that he is not worried, but rather that he is conciously drawing a clear line in the sand between those who are willing to accept our "non-negotiable demands" such as freedom of speech, religion, equal rights for women, limited goverment, etc and those who are not. Some of those who are not go so far as to be terrorists or support terrorists and by calling them "evil" I think he is calling a spade a spade. I don't believe that we should be condescending to the people of the muslim Middle East by implying that they cannot rise above supporting terrorism and the kind of dysfunctional economies and political systems that exist in many Mideastern countries, particularly in the Arab world. For nearly a millennium, from the 600s to the 1600s, the world of Islam was more prosperous, more tolerant, and more committed to scientific innovation than Europe or China. Indeed for almost all of that time Jews were treated better in Muslim countries than in most Christian countries. Islam and the Islamic world have a long and noble tradition of having made many positive contributions to the world. But for the last three centuries or so things have not gone well there. For a discussion of this development see Bernard Lewis' new book, "What Went Wrong." In short, I think the president is entirely correct in beginning the process of trying to help the people of the muslim Middle East move towards societies and gov'ts that uphold their long tradition of humanity, peace and decency, rather than acquiescing to the evil and, in other cases, at least dysfunctional political systems which now exist in so many Mideastern countries.
Westpoort, Conn.:
Retired General Anthony Zinni testified before Congress as commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East in 1999 that "a fragmented and disintegrating Iraq could pose greater dangers to the region than a Saddam-ruled Iraq" now contained by the no-fly zones imposed by the U.S. and Britain. Turkey is also opposed to U.S. action against Iraq because of its fears of a destabilized Kurdish population on its borders, and, yet, your interview in Salon.com states that Turkey's cooperation would be needed to conduct military action. Any concern regarding Zinni's reservations and those of Turkey?
R. James Woolsey: I think General Zinni spoke for the mentality that led to the decision in March of 1991 that we would spare the Republican Guard, permit Saddam to fly armed helicopters against the rebels against his regime, and generally abandon those (principally the Shia and the Kurds who constitute 80 percent of the Iraqi population) in their attempt to throw off Saddam's yoke. It is essentially the mindset that says, like Hamlet, "tis better to bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of."
The problem is that those who thought as General Zinni did and who made the decisions of March 1991 have given us a decade of Saddam developing weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. Because of this mindset, Saddam is far more dangerous today than he was 10 years ago and he will be far more dangerous tomorrow than he is today.
I believe that it is essential, if we are to overthrow Saddam's regime, for Turkey to be willing to assist us. But I believe that with adequate guarantees that there will be no separate Kurdistan developing out of a change of regime and with adequate economic assistance to Turkey, the Turks will support us in changing the regime in Iraq if they are sure that we will follow through to the end and not stop halfway as we did in 1991.
Toronto, Canada:
After Sept. 11, foreign policy was supposedly "changed forever." No longer was the "enemy" a specific nation or group of nations. The new enemy was different, did not play by the same rules as the nation state, and as a result foreign policy would change.
Whatever happened to these ideas? why are we talking about the Iraqi, Irani, and North Korean Nation States? do they really pose any more of a threat to us today than they did before Sept. 11? Isn't the obsession with the Nation State exactly what enabled terrorist to pull of Sept. 11?
R. James Woolsey: I don't believe that anyone should have believed that nation states were made irrelevant by Sept. 11. Even if the attack was carried out by al Qaeda, supported by no nation other than the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the support for terrorism and for weapons of mass destruction development in nation states such as Iran and Iraq is the heart of the matter in terms of our future security. Terrorist groups give nation states who are helping them a way of denying responsibility for their actions, but terrorist groups cannot function effectively, and on a worldwide basis, without someplace to operate from. When their base of operations also produces WMD and has sophisticated intelligence services, as is the case with both Iraq and Iran, these states and the terrorist groups operating from them constitute essentially a single problem -- you can't solve these problems in isolation, you must change the regimes that permit the support for terrorism and you must also destroy the terrorist infrastructure and cells. We are in for a long war, in my view -- probably longer than our involvement in World War II (or in 3 years, 8 months) and I hope shorter than our involvement in the COld War (over four decades). Anyone who has in the past sold the proposition that this would be easy or that it could be dealt with solely by dealing with terrorist organizations in isolation from the states that support them and let them operate never understood the problem in the first place.
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