Re: [casi] Source of Perle quotation?

["AS-ILAS" <AS-ILAS@DELETETHISgmx.de>]

Dear Fay,

In fact the "total war" quotation was ERRONEOUSLY attributed by Pilger et
al. to the "Prince of Darkness" Perle.

You'll find proof for this in the below transcript of the American
Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research which evidences Michael
LEDEEN's authorship.

In addition I have enclosed 2 fine articles which both mention correctly
Ledeen's role.

Will you share your `German Nazi or Bush/Blair Neocon?' quiz ?

Best

Andreas

--------------------------

Contents

1) American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research - The Battle For
Ideas In The U.S. War On Terrorism (transcript includes Ledeen's "total war"
remark; please use your search utility to locate it roughly halfway down)

2) What Does the Imperial Mafia Really Want?

3) Global Eye -- Dark Passage


-------------

1)

 http://www.geocities.com/sarefo/webarchiv/leeden_total_war_oct01.html.

  Speeches


 AS SEEN ON C-SPAN

American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research

The Battle For Ideas In The U.S. War On Terrorism
Monday, October 29, 2001
Wohlstetter Conference Center
12th Floor, AEI


Moderator: RICHARD N. PERLE, AEI
Panelists: NEWT GINGRICH, AEI
MICHAEL A. LEDEEN, AEI
R. JAMES WOOLSEY, Shea & Gardner
NATAN SHARANSKY, Deputy Prime Minister of Israel

P R O C E E D I N G S

MR. DEMUTH: [In progress]--panel discussions of military intelligence
aspects of the new war against terrorism. This session will be moderated by
Richard Perle, and will include our AEI colleagues, Michael Ledeen, the
holder of the Freedom Chair at AEI; and the gentleman to my right, Newt
Gingrich, former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

In addition, Jim Woolsey, the former director of Central Intelligence, is
with us this afternoon; and our very special guest, the Deputy Prime
Minister of Israel, Mr. Natan Sharansky.

Everyone will speak for seven or eight minutes to begin with. There will be
a general discussion up front, and then we will broaden the discussion to
include our audience. I will turn things over now to Richard Perle.

Richard.

MR. PERLE: Chris, thank you very much.

Let me welcome you all, together with Chris, to AEI. Our old friend, the
Israeli Ambassador, General Avery [ph.] is here, welcome to you. I am not
going to delay the proceedings. You know everyone at this table.

We have called this the "Battle for Ideas on the War on Terrorism." I had
occasion the other day to participate in a BBC global town hall that
included a number of people in Islamabad expressing their ideas about
terrorism and it was a little bit like talking to people who believe the
Earth is flat. Their views ranged from there is no evidence that Osama Bin
Laden was in any way involved in the September 11th to the view that--the
sort of moderate view in that group that America is a terrorist nation and
the extreme view that the Mosad [ph.], the Israeli intelligence service, was
responsible for September 11th.

We are talking about a different set of ideas, ideas that can be
communicated among people that are living in the real world. So, without
further delay, let me invite former speaker Newt Gingrich to contribute to
those ideas.

MR. GINGRICH: Well, let me start by talking about the real world for a
couple of minutes, and I am citing today Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR in WWII
Espionage, by Joseph Percigo, which is a new book which is quite helpful and
relates in a couple of ways to where we are at right now.

First of all, it took the U.S. from December 7, 1941 until June 1942 to win
a major victory. Midway was, in fact, a surprise victory, and it would take
us another five or six months to truly be on offense. I say that because I
think the whole pressure of the media is towards victory by Thanksgiving or
it is a failure, et cetera, and we need to find a way to communicate the
deliberate, resolute intensity and the mobilization of resources.

Now, having said that, let me talk for a second about the proof and the
question of Bin Laden. This is Franklin Delano Roosevelt speaking to the
nation: "When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until
he has struck before you crush him." And that is going to be the cortext
from which I am now going to speak because I think it is important for us to
get rid of all this criminal justice mumbo jumbo.

September the 11th and the subsequent anthrax case in my mind are much, much
more profound than we have yet come to grips with psychologically. I woke up
this morning really thinking about where would be if we had faced an
opponent who had a contagious product or an opponent who used a large
quantity of anthrax.

And I would point out to you that The Wall Street Journal, this morning,
points out that Iraq at one point had produced 2,300 gallons of anthrax.

Now we are currently almost paralyzed in this city by one, two, three, four
envelopes. Imagine where we would be if there were 70,000 cases. Imagine
where we would be if, on September 11th, we had a nuclear or chemical weapon
and as tragic as the loss of 6,000 people are, I don't think we have yet
come to grips with how big the tragedy could be in the future.

I think we have to think of these two events, September 11th and anthrax, as
precursors to a real heart attack. We have now had a warning. The question
is how serious we are going to take this warning. My conclusion is that
there are three kinds of opponents we face and they are substantially
different opponents.

The first opponents are actually dictators determined to get weapons of mass
destruction. And, there, I will primarily cite two countries, Iraq and North
Korea. And I would say that it is madness for us to wait until they prove
that they have them by using them, and that we need very determined
strategies that basically set as a rule to the future of civilization that
we will not tolerate dictators of this kind getting weapons of mass
destruction because the consequence is simply too enormous.

Second, there are international terror organizations, of which al-Qaida is
currently the poster child in the United States, but the truth is that Hamas
and Hezbollah are equally dangerous and that there are other organizations
and that there are people who suggest that Syria could be a part of a
coalition when there are ten terrorist groups headquartered in Damascus. It
is just a level of naivete that is stunning.

Third, there is the core reality that there is a medieval Islam with an
estimated 11,000 schools who have evolved into a system where young men are
trained into a set of skills, none of them marketable, guaranteeing they
will be economically frustrated, that are then told in advance your
frustration will be the fault of the West, in general, and America, in
particular. And that are then told, by the way, when you are frustrated, if
you want to kill people, you have a moral cause.

Now I would just suggest to you a system large enough to finance and sustain
11,000 schools, not counting mosques, radio stations, et cetera, is a big
system. And that we need to confront the requirement for a large campaign
appropriate to that size system.

And I also say that if you look at the Cold War as distinct from the second
World War, the real model of this, think of it as concentric circles. The
outer circle is winning the cultural argument from which you get moral
dominance. There is a reason Roosevelt and Churchill issued the Four
Freedoms. There is a reason that they waged the campaign on behalf of free
France and why a free French division liberated Paris.

There were moral underlying purposes. In the entire Cold War, personified by
Reagan's speech on the Evil Empire, we created a clear dichotomy and we
reached out across the planet.

So, first, you have got to win the moral campaign. We are the ally of any
Muslim who wants their family to live in peace, prosperity and safety, and
we are with them against those who would repress women, impose dictatorship
and exhibit behaviors of religious intolerance. That should be a fairly
clear moral war.

Then I think various governments should decide which team they are on. And
if the Saudis decide they can't be on the team I just described, we should
accept that as a sad reality and then deal with it. But we should not try to
shape our policy around some diplomatic effort to have a collectivity of
people who are guaranteed to be impotent by their very definition--which is
not a coalition, it is a coterie.

The second circle is social, political and economical. The fact is the
people in the refugee camps should already be wealthier seven weeks after we
engaged in this campaign. The people in the Northern Alliance territories
that are open where we could be getting aid in should be wealthier. There
should be a clear difference between being on the American side and the
other side.

I suggest we subcontract to WalMart, K-Mart and Target because I think the
USAID is hopeless at this kind of thing. But I think literally from flush
toilets to better food to better clothing, we have had seven weeks of
apparat without having taken advantage of saying we truly want to help
people in the region in a serious way.

Lastly, is military. But, unless the military is surrounded by moral purpose
and surrounded by political and economic and social behaviors, I don't think
the military gets you very far. Because (a) you can't sustain it, you end up
in Vietnam; (b) after you win, you have a hostile population you can't
govern, you end up with the Soviets in Afghanistan; and (c) the longer-term
key fight is an overall fight between two wings of Islam.

And I think unless we fight under those terms--and I am, again, I am a hawk,
I am for a very strong military response--which gets me to one last general
comment. This notion you have got to do Afghanistan first and Iraq comes
later strikes me as totally alien to the American tradition. In the second
World War, we did Italy, Japan and Germany simultaneously. It was a large
campaign, but we did it. And while it was Europe first, the Japanese didn't
notice that because we had enough left over to make their life impossible.

In the Cold War, we didn't stop trying to rearm in Europe so we could focus
on Korea. We didn't give up all of our other alliances so we could focus on
Vietnam. We understood that you had to, in fact, sustain a worldwide
continuous effort. We should be simultaneously replacing Saddam and
replacing the Taliban. We have the power to do it. We have the weight to do
it. We have the will to do it, and it would define the coalition. Because I
think we are going to fritter away this moment in history and end up a year
or two years from now having lost the momentum, having lost the clarity, and
setting the stage for a further and deeper disaster.

That is my closing point. The cost of failure in this war will be historic
and it will be bitter. We have a rare opportunity to define a world without
terrorism, to define a world without weapons of mass destruction by
dictatorships, to define a world in which young Arabs and young Muslims, in
general, can grow up and have a decent future. If we lose this opportunity,
the price we will pay will be very real.

MR. PERLE: Thank you, Newt.

For anyone who is wondering how we arrived at the order in which people were
being asked to comment, I thought it would be a good idea to start slow and
then get going. [Laughter.]

Jim Woolsey.

MR. WOOLSEY: You levy a heavy duty on me here, Richard, a heavy duty.

Several quick points to start it off. First of all, what is the source of
the problem? Well, of course, a major source of the problem is in the minds
of the terrorists and the supporting governments that have attacked us.
There have been some things that I think have contributed to it. First of
all, it is understandable if Saddam and Bin Laden believe that we are
feckless and will not respond strongly because, since March of 1991, we have
been feckless and have not responded strongly. I don't fault the first Bush
administration for not taking Baghdad with the U.S. Army. That would, I
think, have violated the terms of the alliance that they had put together,
but I would say that in the immediate aftermath of the war when the Shi'a
arose in the south and the Kurds and their allies in the North began
fighting, encouraged by us, and we did not support them, indeed watched them
be massacred from the cockpits of our fighter aircraft, it was a terrible
mistake.

And whereas the Bush administration, the first Bush administration, made one
mistake in dealing with Iraq, the Clinton administration made eight years of
them. We did nothing forceful and decisive with respect to Iraq's
development of weapons of mass instruction, its getting out from under the
inspections.

The most amazing thing was that, when we had both FBI and CIA agree in the
spring of 1993 that Saddam had been behind the effort to assassinate former
president Bush in Kuwait, President Clinton's response was to launch a few
cruise missiles in the middle of the night at an empty building.

I am not quite sure how our demonstrated high tech capabilities against
Iraqi cleaning women and night watchmen and masonry were supposed to impress
Saddam. But I think it had exactly the opposite effect on him and anyone
else who would have wished us ill in the Middle East.

Then, we after the Gulf War--I mean, after the '89 victory in Afghanistan
but continuing after the Gulf War, abandoned Afghanistan, pulling back here
to do IPOs and rest in our post-Cold War prosperity. We should have known
that, even though there are some things you can't accomplish in the way of
nation building, there were a number of things we could have done to have
improved the situation in Afghanistan from drought resistant seeds to
irrigation projects to schools and all the rest, and we didn't do it. Part
of the whirlwind we are reaping now, I think, comes from that wind.

I completely agree with Newt, that the source of the problem is not a crime.
We should not discuss this in terms of criminality, set ourselves criminal
justice standards, beyond a reasonable doubt, use words like "proof" and all
the rest. This is a matter of war and, just because most wars begin with
banners flying and people in uniform and this one did not, doesn't mean we
treat it any differently. We are not to be held to some sort of lawyerly
standards of proof here. We are going to have to make judgments, hard
judgments and we can't get trapped in legal niceties.

It will be the case, I think, that when this is over, as one distinguished
scholar of the Mideast said to us recently in a meeting, either we will be
held in contempt by people like Saddam and Bin Laden, as we are now held in
contempt by them, or we will be feared and respected throughout the Middle
East--and those two go together--and in between held in contempt and being
feared and respected there is nothing. There is no middle ground of being
more or less kind of tolerated for being sort of nice guys. That realm, if
it ever was there, is gone.

I believe, in my own judgment, that there is a strong possibility Iraq has
been involved in one way or another in terrorist incidents against us, even
after the attempt to assassinate former President Bush; quite possibly, into
the two recent ones. And that one very important piece in this piece of this
puzzle, as Newt implied, is that we get a handle on that issue quickly.

For me, it is plenty that Saddam tried to assassinate former president Bush
and that he has been developing weapons of mass destruction, and thanks to
the Russians, the French, and the Chinese, got out from under--and the
acquiescence of the Clinton administration--got out from under the
inspections three years ago. I think he is a danger that has to be removed.

I fully understand how the president could, under the current circumstances,
require some more demonstration of ties to recent or other 1990's terrorist
events, and I hope and trust as these continue to materialize day-by-day
that, at some point, a decision will be made that Iraq is within the
crosshairs.

Second, Walter Russell Meade in his superb piece in national interest of a
couple of years ago, The Jacksonian Tradition, which I understand is now out
in book form, summed up the spirit of the American people in circumstances
like this. In peacetime, we are variously Jeffersonians, Wilsonians and
Hamiltonians; but, once something like December 7, 1941 or September 11,
2001 happens, this becomes a nation of Andrew Jacksons, slow to anger, but
absolutely ruthless and determined in war.

Whereas Andrew Jackson's ruthlessness sometimes centered on being tolerant
of what in these days and times is called "collateral damage," we have to be
very careful about that, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be ruthless
with respect to our enemies. By "ruthless," I mean all gloves off, every
last one.

Third, this is a nation of networks of all sorts. Two of them, air transport
and mail distribution, have been attacked now and used to disseminate
terrorism. There are a large number of others: food delivery, water
delivery, electricity production, oil and gas pipelines, the Internet,
financial transfers.

Einstein used to say, "God may be sophisticated, but he is not plain mean."
And what I think Einstein meant by that--since he regarded God and nature as
pretty much the same thing, is that, when you are playing against nature
like trying to discover E equals MC squared, there is not an intelligent foe
on the other side trying to make things harder. It may be difficult, but
nobody is trying to outwit you.

Our networks have all been put together in order to be resilient against
natural failures and against things like natur al disasters such as
hurricanes or the failure of one part by random causes, but not to be
resistant at all--no one has given a single thought to making the Internet
or the food distribution network resistant to intentional interference by
someone who is bozoft [ph.] evil on the other side.

We have a huge undertaking here that will last a long time, in which the
country has to get together to stop doing such things. I trust by now even
the dimmest bulbs amongst us will realize that it is not a good idea to be
dependent for virtually all, as the years go on, of our transportation fuel
and our chemicals on a part of the world in which, outside Israel and
Turkey, the governments consist of either pathological predators or
vulnerable autocracies.

So, at some point, all of these networks, including our dependence on the
Mideast and the rest, have to be dealt with and it is a big idea which is
going to have to seize us and govern a great deal of our undertakings.

Fourth, liberation--the Iraqi resistance and the organizations which support
it somehow fell out of favor in the U.S. Government some time in 1995, and
it has now been six years except in the halls of Congress since the notion
of democratizing Iraq has had much support.

We need to change that. We need to get back to the idea that the people of
the Mideast, including first and foremost the citizens of those countries
which are horribly oppressed, are our friends. And that good old American
idea that we are enemies of evil regimes but friends of the people needs to
be resuscitated and given a concrete implementation.

Finally, we need to enlist Muslims in the United States and abroad in the
undertaking of attacking Bin Laden's crazy Islamist interpretation of what
Islam is all about. Bin Laden and those who work with him bear exactly as
much relationship to the prophet Muhammad and the fine, indeed wonderful
religion which he founded, as Torquemada [ph.] and the Dominicans around him
and in their torture and killing of Jews and Muslims in the 15th Century
bear a relationship to the carpenter of Galilei and to the sermon on the
mount, which is to say not at all.

There are crazies in every religion, and these unfortunately have a rather
substantial following, certainly not a majority. We need to work very hard
with our Muslim friend and allies in that part of the world and the thinkers
and scholars of Islam who are willing to stand up and be counted and
broadcast and be heard, to undercut the idea that there is anything at all
legitimate about the brand of Islam which Bin Laden and his allies are
purporting to be responding to.

MR. PERLE: Thank you very much.

When a young man chooses a career in mathematics, that is not generally
preparation for a lifetime of fighting terror. But Natan Sharansky has found
himself fighting terror all his life. First, the terror of the Soviet
Communist state; he spent a good deal of time in jail resisting that terror.
He now serves as deputy prime minister in Israel, a country that is
resisting terror--that is fighting terror much in the way we are, by the
way. I don't know where the idea comes from that Israel should not fight
terror with all the instruments at its disposal even as we organize
ourselves to fight terror with all the instruments at our disposal.

But, I am very glad he was able to come here to join us.

Natan.

MR. SHARANSKY: I think the choice for the panel, this panel, is done more or
less on the same principle as in my former home country. You are choosing
the people who think the same. Because the previous two speakers said a lot
of what I was going to say. So that is why I am very grateful to them for
this.

Second--well, nevertheless, I will make one remark on how to fight the
terror because, after the specialists in this, I don't think I can add much.
Then to speak what to do after we defeat the terror.

About how to fight the terror, I really want to say only one thing, we need
to define the terror. I think it is urgently needed today when America is
leading this unique, historical, great moral battle--moral battle. It is
urgently needed to define the terror, especially American leaders and
Western leaders spend a lot of words explaining what they are not fighting.
They explained that they are not fighting against Islam, but it is not yet
enough. They also said that they are fighting evil and it is very important
for putting the moral ground, but they still didn't define this terror.

That undermines the moral clarity which we need today. Because today we can
see that everyone's actions, from Americans bombing all over Afghanistan to
Israel's encroachment into Area A, is called terror. Terror is being defined
by some states on the basis of the underlying grievances for which people
commit violence. This way, Palestinians/Chechnyn/Bosque [ph.] terrorism is
often denied as terrorism because of the simplicity which people can feel to
their causes.

Other define terror in terms of who are those who made these acts, and even
the state, like Syria, it cannot be terror by definition because the states
cannot be terrorists. But, in fact, the terrorism is not something which can
be defined on the basis of grievances or who makes these acts.

The act of terror has to be defined by itself. The definition of terrorism
which is a very simple and obviously is the intentional targeting of
civilians in order to achieve political goals, pretty simple: Intentional
targeting of civilians in order to achieve political goals. By this, you
immediately separate the real terror from the cases when some innocent
civilians are becoming victims or where the state has to fight the terror.

Just in our press conference in the Press Club, I was asked, "Why are you
demanding from Palestinians to arrest the terrorists, but what about your
terrorists, those who are participating in military operations?"

And I said that, you know, for five years, my time in the government of
Israel, I was always a member of the Security Cabinet and we were discussing
many military operations in those cases where Security Cabinet has to make
decisions. There are very often options between operations in which our
soldiers are under big risk, and there are options where there are civilians
at big risk. And always, in every case, I don't remember any exception--in
every case, we chose the option in which the bigger risk is on our soldiers.

What that, in fact, means in practice is that our soldiers were dying and
maybe in the future will have to die for the security of our citizens but
also for the security of Palestinians, less victims among civilian
populations

So that is anti-terrorist policy, which sometimes we are viewed as terrorist
policy. So that is why it is so important to define what is terrorism. And,
especially today, when there are many organizations, some of them very
important, that are engaged in terrorism and at the same time [inaudible.]

Even the rest is clear stand against terror and doesn't differentiate
between different kinds of terror, then these organizations cannot find
[inaudible.] We have the unique situation, for example, when Yassar Arafat
is leading one of the biggest waves of terror--well, I mean, it is difficult
for me to say biggest wave of terror after I was at Ground Zero site
yesterday and saw this grave of 5,000 citizens. And, of course, all our
sympathies and prayers and hopes are with Americans.

Nevertheless, the pain of terror which includes Yassar Arafat, which
includes hundreds of suicide bombers which were sent in our cities in the
last month. At the same time, the same Yassar Arafat is viewed as the only
one with all the hope for peace and almost as a champion of peace efforts by
many countries. That, it encourages more terror; that, we will have to pay
price for this and you will have to pay price for this.

Again, that is why it is so important to have this statement of moral
clarity and clear definition which have to be accepted by the leaders. Of
course, this example was already mentioned by Newt Gingrich when he
mentioned the Evil Empire. I remember this great day in Soviet prison when
Soviet Newspaper Pravda was brought to prison and when you are not in
punishment cell you have the luck to read Pravda. And there was an article
against President Reagan who dared to call Soviet Union "Evil Empire."

We were so excited and we were knocking from one cell to the other, talking
through the cube of the toilet. That was the way of communication. There was
a risk, of course, but it was very important for us to reach to everyone and
to say every political prisoner about this news. And I remember how happy
President Reagan was when I met him first time after release in '96, and I
told him this story. He act like little boy. He jumped and he said, listen
what this Natan has to says. He said, listen, listen, listen, and you can't
understand how much he suffered from this speech, probably.

Why it was so important for us in Soviet prison? Because in Soviet prison,
we lived in the world which was morally very clear and simple: good and
evil, black and white. But we had the feeling the moment you crossed the
border of the prison, there is no moral clarity. There is--everything is
confused. And that is why it was so important that the leader of the West
gave definition, a very simple definition, very simple, very true definition
of communism.

What we need today is a very clear and very simple definition of terrorism
in which everybody can agree: Deliberate targeting of innocent civilians for
political purposes. And, by this, there is no definitive discussion about
different types of terror, black, white, grey and so on.

Okay, what we are doing after the war? We have defeated one or another
terrorist regime. There is only one long-term guarantor of peace and
stability, democracy. It is freedom of the people. And we should not be
ashamed to speak about it and to see it as an aim. The end of this war--see,
there were two in power, two powers; power of freedom and power of terror.
At the end, if we won this war, if we defeated terrorism, the territory of
freedom must become bigger. Expansion of freedom, that is what is left.

Why democracy is--why is freedom of the people so important for security
stability? Democracies don't go to war with one another. Why? Very simple
reason: In democracies, leaders depend on their people. Leaders of
democracies also can be bad people, they can be phobic, they can be corrupt,
but they depend on their people that is why they have to deliver goods to
their people; otherwise, they will not be in power. That is why the war is
always a last option.

With dictators, it is opposite. They don't depend on their people, people
depend on them. And that is why the challenge for dictator is not how to
improve the life of your people, but is how to keep your people under
control. To keep your people under control, you need war. You need to
mobilize your people against external enemy, against internal enemy. And
every dictator, Stalin, Hitler or any other dictator, they have these needs
met. War is the first option, not the last.

But, of course, see immediately what I said, it is not for every people,
democracy. Freedom is not something what is the value for different
civilizations. We heard it is about Japanese, who explained about how this
is the civilization which is built on hierarchy and not on freedom and that
is why it is impossible to impose it.

We heard it--I heard it from Americans about Russians when I was dissident
Soviet Union and some very respectable Americans are explaining to me that
"You and [inaudible] are fighting the wrong struggle. We are ready to help
you, but why do you try to change the system when democracy is not for
Russians?"

Today, we hear the same about Muslim world, and we hear even more that in
every Muslim country, you give them freedom, free elections, some extremists
will be immediately elected who are much worst than those dictators who are
now and then the terrible will happen.

Democracy is not a one-time election. Democracy and freedom means the long
process, building of institutions. Those very institutions which elect free
press, free courts and human rights organizations. I am not only speaking
about liberal [inaudible.] Well, that is exactly what my country was saying
about Arafat, how good it is that Arafat doesn't have free press, free
courts and human rights organizations.

He will take care of our terrorists much easier than we will do because he
doesn't have all these restrictions. He, strong dictator, will give us
strong stability. That is the belief of many leaders in my country. That was
the belief of many leaders in America and in the Western world. That is
something that we see until this day when we explain that if you want to
defeat terror and then to have strong peace, you must bring strong dictator.

I do hope that after the great victory in Afghanistan we will not be of the
same story which was with the last ten years when one dictator was replacing
another. Do we be loyal Soviet Union or do we be loyal to Saudi Arabia, and
now you have dictator who you be loyal to United States of America. It will
be very difficult and long process of encourage of giving more freedom to
people or protecting them from the extremists who came to take the power, as
it was in Japan and it was in other countries.

But there is no other way to make the world more secure. There are two ways.
One is defeat the enemy. That is how it was in Germany. In Germany and Japan
and Afghanistan, I hope it will be. And then to lead this world to the
building of freedom and democracy. And the other, of course, so you don't
think that America will now start declaring war to every dictator in the
world, the other is when you are not fighting with the dictator is to link
your policy, link your economic policy, your social policy, your cultural
policy, your political agreements to link with the creation of the freedom
of those people.

And here, well, the best example of course is what America was doing the
last--the case of Cold War with the Soviet Union. The [inaudible] Amendment,
by one of the authors of this amendment and all the council people which
many saw as a big failure of the West because West gave away Eastern Europe,
but which happened to be the beginning of the collapse of Soviet Union
because of the strong linkage between the first, second and the third
[inaudible.]

That should be the two models for making our world more secure. As to Middle
East, I do believe that we have to fight terror with all the--without any
restrictions, but with the main restriction which is for free society to
minimize victims among the innocent civilians and at the same time the time
has come to call for Palestinians to [inaudible] their lives. But not
through strengthening the dictatorship, but through having big new marshall
plan for Palestinians which will mean the mobilizing of efforts of United
States to Western countries and Israel, when you are helping to Palestinians
not through dictatorship, but through dependence, international and national
structures, to have more opportunities economically, to have more freedom
politically.

And in the end, then, the resolve--the leaders of Palestinians--when the
leaders of the Palestinians will be dependent on them, not on us, not on
America, but on them, on their own beings, then the real opportunities for
new Middle East will become real.

MR. PERLE: Thank you, Natan.

Michael Ledeen has the most wicked sense of humor in Washington. I want you
to know that before I turn to him.

MR. LEDEEN: I should tell a wicked joke to start, but I don't have one.

I am really thrilled to be on this panel, where my favorite people, Newt
Gingrich, one of my favorite politicians; Jim Woolsey, my lawyer who saved
me; Richard Perle, my constant inspiration; and Natan Sharansky, my hero. So
it is really a real inspiration.

I just want to pick up on some of the things that everyone has said, and try
to expand it into a kind of global vision of what this war is about and how
we should wage it.

The first point is that terror has always been directed against democracies.
You don't find big terrorist organizations fighting dictatorship.
Dictatorships sometimes have individual acts of sabotage or violence, but
terrorist movements if you just think about modern terrorism, whether it was
Uruguay or Turkey or Germany or Italy, the famous terrorist movements of our
time from Bader Meinhoff [ph.] to the Red Brigade to Atta, these were all
aimed against democracy, and they were all helped and encouraged and
financed, trained, by dictatorships.

And there is a reason for that, because the conflict between dictatorship
and democracy is inevitable. And there is always a great misunderstanding of
why this happens. It doesn't happen because of one or another of the
policies of the democracies. It doesn't happen because there are differences
over one or another issues. It happens because the existence of free
societies threatens and undermines the legitimacy and the stability and the
authority of dictatorships.

So, as far as the United States is concerned, there is no escape from this
conflict, as there has never been an escape. Toto wrote, in 1831, that it
was just a matter of time before the great battle between tyranny and
freedom was fought, and it would be fought between the United States and
Russia. He said this in 1831, and that was because these are the two
principles that seek to dominate the world and the world will be dominated
eventually by either one or the other.

So that conflict can't be avoided. We can't opt out of this of which the war
against terrorism is simply the latest form. We can neither win it or lose
it, but we can't get out of it. And, therefore, this is not as all kinds of
people have written and said an entirely new kind of war. This is a very old
kind of war, and the kind of war we have to wage against terrorists and
terrorist states and terrorist sponsors.

It is the oldest kind of war in which we have engaged. It is the history of
America. It is the Revolutionary War. It is a war against tyranny. It is a
war that has to be aimed at the destruction of tyranny and the expansion of
democracy, as Natan has said.

And you cannot solve it by any number of concessions to the terrorist states
or by any kind of embrace of terrorist states or clever coalitions or deals
or payoffs or temporary alliances with terrorist states. Because, at the end
of the day, either we are going to survive or they are.

So we have to fight this war, and we are well equipped to fight this war. It
is what we have always done. It is what we do every day. America is an
enormously destructive country. People around the world love us and many of
them dread us because we undo them every day. We undo them in every area of
life, whether it is business or economics or whether it is entertainment or
sports, just across-the-board.

Creative destruction is our middle name and we threaten everybody's
stability. And one of the reasons that people like us are constantly upset
with some of our professional diplomats is that they always stress the
endless desirability of stability. Well, stability is not what we want and
stability is not what the United States is about. We are one great
revolutionary society in the world and we want revolution. We don't want
stability. We want to bring these people down.

And we have strengths and weaknesses in this war. Our weaknesses are our
poor education and our embrace of all kinds of silly ideas; foremost among
which is the ideas that peace is the normal condition of mankind. Only a
country devoted to the systematic ignorance of human history could believe a
thing like this because war is the normal condition of mankind. And it is so
normal that the 19th century is described in the historical literature as
the century of total peace, even though there were lots of wars in the 19th
century. But it is considered to be a century of total peace because there
weren't any really huge wars, as compared with the centuries that led up to
it in the 20th century that came after it, the most horrible century in the
history of mankind.

Second, our children are unfortunately being raised to believe that all
people are the same, and all people are not the same. People are enormously
different. One of the really neat things about the world, but one of the bad
things about the world, too.

Third, an entire generation of negotiators and conflict resolvers and arms
negotiators and so forth are trying to teach us that good will eventually
prevails if only you sit at the table long enough, be patient enough with
the people you are dealing with. Well, we have seen how well that works out.

And our fourth big weakness, as we go into this war--and I want to underline
what Newt said because it is enormously important--America is never ready
for the next war. A country that believes that peace is normal demobilizes,
dismantles, does butter-not-guns everytime a war is over. So we are
never--we have never been ready for the next war, ever, and we are not ready
for this one. And we have to now gear up for it.

That is why we have always done badly at the beginning of wars because we
are always attacked first and then we wonder what has happened and then we
start to think about, well, what shall we do? And then we fight the last war
for some period of time and that doesn't work out, and eventually we get it.
And I have no doubt that we will get it, we will get it right. People here
today have all said all series of enormously smart things.

The fourth great weakness that we have going into this war is a failed
intelligence apparatus, and a lot of that is due to various terrible things
that we have done to ourselves as governments, and a lot of it has to do
with the poor educational system, and a lot of it, you know, we don't
travel, we don't speak languages, we don't study foreign cultures and so
forth.

Okay, those are the bad things. But we have enormous strengths. We have
great military power and we love to fight. Everyone should go back
me--people think that Americans don't love to fight haven't studied American
history. 19th century, we produced the bloodiest war in the history of the
world, the American Civil War. Hell of a war.

And if you go read Patton's speech, the real speech not the one from the
movie, when he talks to his troops getting ready to go into battle in Europe
in WWII, he says this explicitly, it is a lot of crap. People say that
Americans don't like to fight, every American has always loved to fight, and
we hate losers. We despise them, we have contempt of losers, we dread
losing.

People of Washington having endured five horrible weeks of losing Redskins
this year--we know all that, we know how terrible it is. We know how we hate
it and how we are desperate to change it and do something about it.

So we will fight this war and we fight it well and we will fight it
enthusiastically.

But, above all, we have a winning Messianic vision because we are a
Messianic country. And our message is--our Messianic vision is the triumph
of freedom everywhere in the world. And that is built into our national DNA.
We can no more get out of that than we can get out of our love for our foods
and our sports and our clothes. That is just what we are.

And we are now going to do this and my heart really goes out to these people
who have taken us on because they did not understand this. I believe that
the people who attacked us and the countries that supported us made exactly
the same error that our enemies have made throughout the 20th century; they
looked at the United States after an orgy of self-indulgence and
materialism, which is one of the things we do best, and they looked at the
United States and they said, "Well, Americans are weak, they are divided
politically."

It is the same mistake that the Palestinians made about Israel: They are
weak and divided, they argue with each other all the time. They are not
ready for a real fight. They can't stand the thought of body bags, let alone
the sight of body bags. They are ready to be had, we can knock them over.

And I think the attack against us--I mean, everybody tries to look for the
deeper meaning or the ultimate cunning of the attack behind us. I think the
attack behind us was designed to knock us out, just as all the earlier
attacks in the 20th century were designed to knock us out and they
underestimated us as they always do.

Now, in this war, I just have two basic points. The first is what Jim
Woolsey and Newt said earlier which is we can't be bound by legalisms.
Churchill said in WWII that it was preposterous to expect the allies in WWII
to observe every jot and tiddle of the law, every legal and moral principle,
when we were fighting against enemies who would destroy all law and morality
if they triumphed.

[Begin Tape 1, Side B.]

MR. LEDEEN: [In progress]--about all the jots and tiddles of legal
principles and so forth. Because, if you lose, there will be no discussion
of these things, whatsoever. The first thing is to win.

Second thing is--and this concerns me a lot--no stages. This is a total war.
We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. And
all this talk about, well, first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we
will do Iraq, then we will take a look around and see how thing stand, that
is entirely the wrong way to go about it. Because these guys all talk to
each other and are all working with one another.

I am sure that, when the history of this period is finally written and we
find out exactly how they worked together and how they communicated and who
supported whom and who trained whom and so forth, we will find just as we
found for the last 30 years that all those countries, the Syrians, the
Iraqis, the Iranians and on throughout the region, have all been--had a kind
of division of labor and one country did one part of it and another country
did another part of it and so on.

And it is intellectually interesting, but as far as waging this war goes the
important thing is that they are all our enemies. They define the enemy
camp, and we have to go after all of them. And we have every reasonable
expectation to win. Our news media have not done a good job reporting on
what is going on in those countries nowadays, but I am sure that we will
catch up soon.

In Iran, for example, for the last several weeks, there have been huge--I
mean huge demonstrations just about every night, generally taking a soccer
game as an excuse, but the content of which is exclusively political. Young
Iranians, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of them in every major city
of the country, have been burning pictures of the president, have been
demanding an end to the Islamic regime, have been calling for greater
freedom for the people and so forth.

Our ideas are not universally rejected in that part of the world, quite the
contrary. Our greatest weapon against these tyrants are their own people.
Because their own people want to get out from under. The vision of human
freedom is not limited to one culture or another, it is really universal. We
saw it in Iraq at the end of the Gulf War. We are seeing it in the streets
of Iran today. We will see it in Syria if we give it a chance.

If we just let our own vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it
entirely and we don't try to be clever and piece together clever diplomatic
solutions to this thing, but just wage a total war against these tyrants, I
think we will do very well and our children will sing great songs about us
years from now.

MR. PERLE: Thank you, Michael.

[Round of applause.]

MR. PERLE: Let me thank the whole panel. We are going to turn it open in a
moment, but I want to ask the first question as chairman, if I may.

General Avery is hear. Some years ago, the Israeli government looked a few
miles away and saw a nuclear reactor supplied by France about to go on-line.
They concluded that a large quantity of plutonium in the hands of Saddam
Hussein was more risk than a sensible Israeli government could tolerate. So
some Israeli aircraft were dispatched and they made short work of that
reactor.

I was in the administration in those days and I remember Ronald Reagan
looking at the photographs after that raid. The State Department, of course,
had prepared a statement condemning it. That statement, by the way, has
remained on the Department's word processor and it is cranked up every time
anybody does something serious about terrorism.

But the statement had been prepared and the president was looking at the
after-action photographs and there was a crater where the reactor had been
under construction, and the fence around it was still standing. It was a
really breathtaking piece of strategic bombing. And he just grinned from
ear-to-ear. The statement was issued, of course.

And I trust, Mr. Ambassador, now that you are in a different role, you will
regard statements of that sort with the appropriate degree of seriousness.

My question is this: Can we afford to wait, given that we are in a situation
rather similar to the situation the Israelis were in in 1981? We know that
Saddam Hussein hates the United States. He has made that clear. We know that
he is engaged in acts of terror himself. We know that he has ties to
terrorist organizations, including al-Qaida and others. And we know that he
has weapons of mass destruction and is trying to acquire even more of them;
but, for starters, we know he has anthrax.

Can we afford to wait and hope that he chooses not to do something that is
perfectly within his means to do, and that is distribute anthrax to
anonymous terrorists who might then use it, not a few spores at a time in
letters sent through the mail but in a way that could kill tens of thousands
of Americans, maybe even more, in a single attack?

Is it prudent to wait and hope that he doesn't do what we know he is capable
of doing?

MR. GINGRICH: Let me say that I think I would give you a different answer
today than I would have four weeks ago. And the reason is it is becoming
increasingly obvious that, from the standpoint of our enemies, we are in a
war. And every day that goes by that we are not decisive and we do not draw
the lines clearly, we lose ground.

Because the lack of clarity, the lack of moral purpose, the lack of
seriousness on our part is translated by the world into negatives. So I have
concluded that we have to take this with breathtaking seriousness.

I would say that there are three profound reasons to open a second front, to
use the second World War analogy, and to do it immediately. The first is
that Saddam is that dangerous. To be quite clear what we are talking about,
we do not have a complaint against the Iraqi people. We have every interest
to assist the Iraqi people in liberating themselves from a regime.

And remember, all these so-called stable, strong regimes, have secret police
because they don't trust their own people. I mean, by definition, if you
have to be surrounded by five layers of secret police, there is a hint that
you might not have a stable populous under you and you are keeping them
repressed.

So, first, I would argue that we should act immediately against Saddam
because the anthrax warning coming on top of the September 11th warning
should say to us, you can't tolerate this. You can't take this risk.

We should also serve notice to North Korea that any shipments from North
Korea anywhere would be a causa belli; that we will not tolerate missiles,
will not tolerate nuclear weapons, we will not tolerate anything. Because
North Korea is a major supplier, and it is very dangerous.

Second, we should go after Iraq is Iraq is in many ways the most secularized
Arab society and is the place most likely to become a democracy very
quickly. And I think that the people of Iraq deserve an opportunity to be a
democracy. And I think that would change the entire equation in the Arab
world if they saw us actively helping the Iraqi people live a life of
prosperity, live a life of opportunity and have a chance to move.

The third reason we should go after Iraq, frankly, is to clarify the
coalition. I do not think, having 6,000 dead Americans, that we should
tolerate any regime explaining to us the nature of our relationship. I think
we owe it to those 6,000 dead Americans and their surviving spouses and
children and their families, to say to these regimes: We are a great nation,
we have a serious purpose, we are going to change the world, we are
perfectly happy if you are with us in that engagement; and, if you don't
want to be with us, you can either stand to one side or we will list you
with the opponents, but we will not tolerate you besmirching the memory of
these people by setting trivial and petty standards for your own comfort
and, thereby, blocking us from doing what is necessary.

An Iraqi campaign would instantly say to the Middle East: This is not a
game, this is not business as usual; you are either with the Americans or
you are at risk. And that ought to be our policy.

MR. PERLE: No beating around the bush.

MR. WOOLSEY: Let me add one or two points. I think that the analogy is WWII,
and Germany first, Japan second, in terms of emphasis. Certainly, we did
not, at that point, delay any declarations of war. We declared war on Japan
after the attack and then Germany declared war on us, but we decided to put
Germany first in a strategic sense because it was a more immediate and
urgent problem.

For me, Saddam's attempt to assassinate former president Bush in '93 and the
work on weapons of mass destruction and the ending of the inspections is
enough. But I must say I do have some sympathy for the president, under the
current circumstances, in needing to get at least some ducks in a row before
he moves.

Two of those very important ducks are Turkey and Kuwait. Because, if we are
to undertake a strategy vis-a-vis Iraq such as supporting, finally, the
Iraqi opposition with arms and money; permitting attacks by the Shea in the
south and by others coming from the north; moving to declare no drive zones,
as well as no fly zones, over the north and south; moving to help, perhaps,
with special forces and the like, others on the ground--we are going to need
to be able to operate in and through at least Turkey and Kuwait, even if
other countries in the neighborhood, such as Saudi Arabia, remain on the
sidelines or worse.

And, in both of those countries, there is hesitancy. Would that the rest of
the Mideast had the fortitude of Israel an d, on an issue like this, the
sort of lack of Islamist riots in the streets of say Bahrain which has
handled its relations with its people rather cleverly and in a very liberal,
direction and, therefore, is not really a problem for us even though
American ships are based there.

But we do need to figure out a way, I think, to help the president make the
decisions that he needs to make in order effectively to do this. So,
substantively, as I said, what has already happened for me it is enough to
put Iraq in the gunsights. But I do believe that probably, under the current
circumstances, more ties to terrorist acts against us are going to be needed
to be demonstrated in order for the administration and in order for at least
those two key allies in the region to be able to be brought around.

As far as I am concerned, this is a question of tactics, not overall
strategy. The overall strategy should be to end the support of these
terrorist groups in I think at least the two governments in the region where
the acts, recent acts, support is quite clear and that would be Afghanistan
and Iraq.

MR. SHARANSKY: A very short remark.

Just now, Richard told us in story how after attack of Israel Air Force on
nuclear reactor in Baghdad, American President grinned and administration
published a statement condemning Israel. I think that when you go after Iraq
today and I think you should do it as soon as possible, many leaders of the
Western--not only the West-- will agree and their foreign offices will
publish very strong condemnations.

And, If Israel survived it, America will definitely survive it.

MR. PERLE: Okay, questions please?

MR. : What do you see as the worse case scenario of America coming to assert
itself all through the Middle East and creating essentially a conflagration?

MR. GINGRICH: I think the worse case scenario is a weapon--nuclear weapon
going off in an American city and a very close second is a contagious
microbe being released, particularly one that is engineered so that the
vaccinations you have pre-engineered don't work.

I mean, people need to understand that while it is very, very difficult to
do, if you ended up with a smallpox-type or just a very severe flu--I mean,
the influenza epidemic of 1918 killed more people worldwide than the first
World War. So I think you have to take very--and my conclusion out of the
last--was probably shaped by reading a terrific book called In the Wake of
the Plague, which is a study of 1348 and '49 where you had huge die-offs, 30
to 40 percent. Or, if you read North American Indian population patterns, as
European diseases entered.

I mean, we need to understand this is--if we take this wake-up--and maybe it
is because I am a literalist and I sometimes end up out on limbs, but I
think they are important limbs. If you take seriously the level of fear from
the current anthrax which is 2 or 3 or 4 envelopes of a noncontagious
system, and you take that as a serious wake-up call and say, okay, let me
understand, as an engineering principle, how bad this can get, the answer is
simple.

In the Hart/Rudman Commission, when we called for Homeland Agency and we
said you have to have homeland security as a major project separate from the
Defense Department, my personal working model in that period was four
simultaneous weapons in four cities. Then you say, okay, and how many
hospitals does that take? And you suddenly realize we are entering a world
of big problems, not small problems. And we have not come anywhere close yet
to gearing up to the problems we could be faced with.

So I start on the defensive side. I can imagine a world in the next five
years where, if we are slow enough and we give our opponents enough time,
you are going to have weapons of mass destruction in American cities that
are horrifying.

Now, on the other side, I think the worst case would be to not win the
cultural fight, to not have a universal appeal--I agree with that--to not be
there on behalf of those Muslims who want to have a decent future, and end
up as a foreign oppressor. I think that is the worse offensive side.

But I think that we have every potential--I have my staff check today, there
are 51,000 Pashtungs living in the United States. Now I don't know how many
people--this is the group, the Southern Afghanistan group we are supposedly
most fighting.

I don't know how many of those 51,000 have been contacted by our government
and asked if they would be part of a radio program, if they would be part of
a relief program. But we already have 51,000 people who don't need language
training. That is part of the genius of America.

MR. LEDEEN: They are not working for the CIA, I can tell you.

MR. GINGRICH: I am just saying, you look at this, you are more likely to
meet them getting a cab at National or going to a graduate school than you
are visiting with George Tenant and the CIA. Now that tells you we are not
being very clever yet, but we do have 51,000 people as a potential reservoir
in one sector alone.

So I think we have to win the cultural fight that we are with Muslims who
want to live in the modern world. Then I think we have to really worry about
homeland security.

MR. WOOLSEY: You asked about--Newt has already mentioned the attacks on the
United States by weapons of mass destruction and the cultural war problem.
Let me mention one thing that could go wrong.

I agree that our long-term objective here ought to be to bring democracy to
as much of the world as we can and hopefully to all of the Middle East which
is probably the only part of the world now outside China that is of massive
sort of strategic importance and has been entirely resistant to that--or
almost entirely, outside Israel and Turkey.

I think that just as we allied for three years and eight months with
history's greatest murderer from 1941 to 1945 in order to defeat a more
immediate problem, Hitler, and it took us another 40-plus years to destroy
the Soviet system, we need to have in mind here a sense of what order we are
going to do things in and how we go about it.

For example, there is no doubt that Iran has been deeply engaged in
terrorism, supporting Hezbollah and other organizations against Israel, and
the FBI thinks it has good evidence that they were engaged in the Khobar
Towers attack against us. But, unlike Iraq, Iran is a much more complicated
place. It has an electorate that consistently votes 70 to 75 percent for
reformist candidates. It has some brave newspaper editors and reformers, and
even some brave Mullahs who take on the powers of the Walleotal Facki [ph.]
It has a president whom we could probably work with if he were not tied down
by the Mullahs.

Probably, the thing that would hasten the demise of the tyrants who now are
in control of the instruments of state power in Iran, as much as anything,
would be some working relationship with the United States. I think it would
take us a lot less time than the 40 years it took us with the Soviet Union,
to see a change in Iran if we can find some way of beginning to work with
them.

And we may need to do that if we are going to take on Iraq. It would not be
my first choice. I would like to avoid it. I am not blinking at the
terrorism they have launched against Israel and probably against us, but as
Churchill said following Hitler's attack against Stalin that if Hitler
attacked hell he would find something favorable to say about the devil.

I think we are going to need to find a way to avoid being immediately
engaged on all fronts against all disreputable regimes, because they almost
all are in the Mid East, from the first day. My priorities, as I have said,
would be to try here to win in Afghanistan, as soon as possible; to move
against Iraq, as soon as the president is able to get the evidence or the
support, the indications that he needs--slipped into using a legal word
there, I didn't mean to--and to see what we can do, in the context of doing
that, to bring freedom along the lines of what Mike said, to as much of the
rest of the Mideast as possible.

MR. PERLE: But, Jim, if Mike is right--and I believe he is--that there is
massive dissatisfaction in Iran with the government, shouldn't we just wait
until the dissatisfaction of the Iranian people brings that whole miserable
regime down? Because even Khatami [ph.] is a pretty miserable SOB. I mean,
slightly less miserable than [inaudible] but they are all pretty much--

MR. WOOLSEY: This is all relative but, on the other hand, we may find that
in some ways because of the history of the relationship between Iran and Ira
q and on all the rest, for example, we could get some substantial support
for the Iraqi opposition operating out of Iran. We may need that. I don't
think we should write it off.

So there are tradeoffs here to be made, and none of this is easy and none of
it is very clearcut. But I am not willing to say, in spite of the
attractiveness of this in moral terms, I am not willing to say that we
should move simultaneously against all of the regimes in the Mideast that
have supported terrorism such as Iran, Syria and Sudan right now. We are
going to need to pick and chose the way we go at this in order to be
effective.

MR. PERLE: Natan? Michael?

MR. SHARANSKY: Some comment about Iran. I definitely agree that you can
fight--you cannot fight all the dictators in the world and you should not do
it. And I agree that with Iran we can have hope that it will not take as
many as it took with communism, that there will be serious reforms.

But, on two conditions. First of all, the organizations they support,
terrorist organizations, which are very active now--Hezbollah is very active
terrorist organization, and we are paying very high price along with
this--they have to be dealt with immediately, in the same way as the other
terrorist organizations.

And, second, that the citizens of the United States of America and all over
the world have to make the best effort t o stop leakage of nuclear and other
technologies to Iran. And they think that when Russia met--Russian president
only some days ago, they definitely are looking for the new era of good
relation with United States of America, that is the time to take immediate
steps to stop the leakage of all this dangerous technologies from Russia and
some of them from the Western Europe too.

MR. WOOLSEY: I have no quarrel with that, at all.

MR. SHARANSKY: I hope not.

MR. LEDEEN: If, as I believe, our greatest weapon against the terror regimes
are the people who live in the terrorist states, then any kind of embrace
right now of the Iranian regime in the face of the clearly expressed desire
of the Iranian people to see them gone and to be able to freely express
their desires, would be the most discouraging thing we could do. I mean, we
would be weakening our own best weapon.

What I am saying when I say that we have to not do this in stages, that our
war against the terrorist states is a war on behalf of freedom and democracy
against these tyrannical regimes, I am not asking you to invade every
country all at once. What I am saying is that we have to make it clear that
we hate those regimes that are now in place, including the Iranian regime
today; that we support legitimate demands of the Iranian and the Iraqi and
the people for freedom and to determine their own destinies, and that we
will not betray those people by making cozy deals with their oppressors
right now.

MR. WOOLSEY: Let me contrast Churchill's view of the Soviet Union in WWII
with Roosevelt's. Churchill never called Stalin "Uncle Joe." He understood,
I think, in a very clear-eyed way all the way through the war that it was a
temporary alliance of convenience in order to defeat Hitler, and he tried to
manage things toward the end of the war in such a way as to weaken the
Soviet Union.

But, nonetheless, he realized that he needed the Soviet Union in order to
defeat Hitler. If we don't need Iran to defeat Iraq should we get involved
in hostilities with Iraq, fine; if we don't need its neutrality, its
intelligence, its support of the Iraqi opposition, whatever. But if we do
need it and this is something that is not crystal clear at this point, we
are going to have to find some way to work this out.

MR. LEDEEN: But, Jim, there is a huge difference. Hitler had the
overwhelming support of the German people. So you had to occupy Germany and
de-Nazify it.

These countries do not have the overall support of their own people; quite
the contrary, they exist only through organized terror. History is running
on our side in these places. These guys were not elected. They don't have
elections. They would lose any election.

MR. GINGRICH: Can I just make two comments for a second. And I want to step
back from Iran for a second and go back to Iraq because you started down a
road, I just want to sort of suggest a different road.

I don't think we need evidence about anything with regard to Iraq. I think
what we need is a series of steps which de-fang the rattlesnake or eliminate
it. I think it would be perfectly reasonable for the United States to say,
look--to say to all of our so-called allies in the region, look, if Iraq is
prepared tomorrow morning to accept U.N. inspectors with 100 percent
opportunity to go anywhere they want to with no notice, we will consider
that.

But, in the absence of open, overt, transparent demobilization, Iraq is a
mortal enemy of the United States. And every country in the region needs to
understand that.

Now, we are happy to have either solution, and you have got a couple days to
go talk to--you know, if you would like us to not act, then go talk to
Saddam because this is his last shot and we are willing to be reasonable for
a week while you talk to him.

But I think that is much more rational than to worry about connecting
things. Because, first of all, everybody that doesn't like us will simply
lie about the connections. So did the fact that Atta met with the Iraqi
intelligence agent in Prague before hitting an American city with an
American airliner mean that the Iraqis might have been involved?

Well, I wanted to take a reasonable doubt, yes, and say sure. But you can
understand why other people would say, gee, why could you say having coffee
in Prague and discussing, generally, the weather and how soccer teams are
doing could in any way be related to that?

Let me make a second point. I worked on a plan for Clinton at one point in
'97 because I got fascinated with this notion of defeating Iraq and who do
you need to help you. I just want to illustrate, as a technical matter, the
United States has the pure military power to project power into the region
as long as nobody overtly fights us but Iraq. We will defeat Iraq.

First of all, the Iraqi Army having lost 100,000 men 10 years ago probably
has a high propensity to believe we will win. And I think you could
literally project the power--probably, you would like to have Diego Garcia,
but we pay for a 12-aircraft carrier Navy. We pay for a Marine Corps. We pay
for airborne units. Our capacity to seize desert land, turn them into
airfields and dominate the region is 100 percent. Our ability to project
enough air power from the sea to dominate the air over Iraq is 100 percent.
Our capacity to launch long-range bombers that would dominate Iraq is 100
percent.

And we have every ability to say to our allies and our friends, look, if it
is a little too tough this month, don't do anything. But, also, we are not
going to tell you when the B-2s are over your space and you won't pick them
up on your radar, so don't worry about it. And we are not going to ask
permission to do things, just don't get in our way.

And I think you would find that if we then said to the Iraqi Army, starting
Tuesday, we are going to wipe out everybody who is not on our side and we
are going to do it one division at a time, one town at a time, and you get
to start in Bostra [ph.] Everybody in Bostra who would like to be on our
side on Tuesday and still be alive on Tuesday, here is where you sign up.
Everybody who wants to stick with Saddam, well, Tuesday morning we will have
a no drive, no fly, no nothing rule, and there will be people allied with us
in your village.

I think you we find the rate of demoralization and the rate of shifting
power would be stunning.

MR. PERLE: Newt, thank you. Saddam has seven days beginning now.

John Wolsteader [ph.], first, and the Alan Gershin who has written a very
interesting book on the subject of terror is here, and so I want to ask him
to make a comment.

Go ahead John.

MR. WOLSTEADER: A couple of questions about Iraq. One of them is, I saw--I
don't know if this is true, but that Saddam might have cancer. And it
occurred to me that if he is, in fact, quite sick and his doctor tells him
that he has two months to live that there is a possibility that he may not
go quietly into that gentle night; that may accelerate the need to act
there.

And the second thing is, if he is succeeded by son, I understand he is not
Abe Lincoln either, and what does that do?

MR. WOOLSEY: Both Odai and Kusai [ph.] like killing people for fun. No. That
would be no improvement.

MR. PERLE: That argues for being comprehensive about it.

MR. WOOLSEY: Of the regime, yeah, it is the regime is stupid. The whole
regime has to go.

MR. PERLE: Alan Gershin has looked very closely at Lockerbie. My own view is
that the failure to respond to Lockerbie adequately contributed to the
emboldening of terrorists who ultimately attacked us on September 11th, but
he has done a lot more work on this than I have. He has written a book
called The Price of Terror, and I think his conclusion is the price was too
low and therefore it was indulged in by a number of governments.

But, let me give you a moment, Alan, to say whatever you want to say.

MR. GERSHIN: Thank you very much for the plug. The book did come out the
other day.

But I was listening with concern, I think, when I heard the reference first
by Minister Sharansky and I think Newt Gingrich picked up on it, the
emphasis on moral clarity. And I would like to shift the focus from moral
clarity to moral courage and try to explain the difference, and that is
central to one of the lessons of Pan Am 103.

Before doing that, if I may, Richard, you made reference to a hero who is
here and that is General Ambassador Avery who was responsible in many
respects for the 1981 destruction of the Asuric [ph.] reactor in Iraq. God
knows what would have happened to our operation in '91 if that reactor had
not been destroyed.

But there is also another hero here, an unsung hero, and I saw her walk in
and that is Jean Kirkpatrick. And I say that because when she was Ambassador
to the United Nations and I had just started working with her at that time,
the clear instructions that she had from the State Department was not merely
to condemn the Israeli raid, but to condemn it explicitly as "aggression,"
which has a lot of legal consequences. And she had just started out on the
job and she just flatly refused to use that term. [Applause.]

Now, that was an example of moral courage.

MR. PERLE: That is the kind of ambassadorial insubordination that one can
admire greatly.

MR. GERSHIN: Now I use the word "moral courage" because, after the bombing
of Pan Am 103 which happened in 1988, the families went around and screamed
to the heavens, to anyone that would listen to them saying, if this was an
attack against America, then we are not unique, there are going to be other
attacks. What is being done?

Well, no one really wanted to listen. Over the objections of President Bush
and Secretary of State Baker and Secretary of Transportation Skinner, they
finally did through the help of a bi-partisan assistance in Congress get the
establishment of a Commission which issued its report in 1990, and that was
called the Presidential Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism.

And I find the key recommendation haunting, because that recommendation
said, as I recall it, "National will and the moral courage to exercise it
are the ultimate means of defeating terrorism"--national will and the moral
courage to exercise it. It then went on to define "National will." It said
national will means, preparing the public for sacrifice and risk; it means
preparing the public to understand that we need overt and covert operations;
it means understanding that the enemy's tactics are the tactics of surprise
and we have to use their tactics against them.

And it said, moral courage, to spell it out clearly is no mere euphemism.
Moral courage means going after those states that we find geopolitically
significant or not, as long as they support terrorism they are our enemy.
Clearly, there were signaling Iran. Clearly, they were signaling Syria.
Clearly, we knew at the time their involvement in the bombing of Pan Am 103
which was handed over to Libya.

What was the response? The answer is zero. Zero by the Bush administration.
Zero by the Clinton administration. A lot of good rhetoric. We can ask
ourselves why, but today we are back to that same point. Are we going to
have national will? We have seen it. Are we going to have the moral courage
to really go after all perpetrators?

And here is where I run into one problem, a practical problem, a tactical
problem, if I may say, with Minister Sharansky's formulation about the need
for moral clarity. Having been at the United Nations for so long, if what
you mean by "moral clarity" is an effort to achieve international consensus
on the definition of terrorism, that is a lost cause because you will not
get it. There are too many on the other side who will put in a million
different exceptions.

Moral courage dictates that we find our own clarity and act on it, but we
will never get consensus on the definition. Thank you.

MR. SHARANSKY: May I answer? Thank you.

First of all, I agree practically with every word that you said, but
definitely I am not looking for international cons ensus. Nobody in Israel
is looking for international consensus. In fact, in Israel, they are not
looking for consensus from the government.

But I tell you why moral clarity is important. You are right that moral
clarity is not a replacement of moral courage. After clarity, you need
courage. But the absence of moral clarity, can be the shelter for moral
cowardice because it can help the cowards to say, that is not the case of
the terror. That is why we need moral clarity in order to--

MR. : [Inaudible.]

MR. SHARANSKY: Absolutely.

MR. : Having served two-and-a-half years in Israeli commandos, I agree with
everything the panel said, but I have a technical question and maybe, Mr.
Perle, you will consider answering.

Can you take Iraq on in this small stage way; do you have to knock them out
on the first round? I am asking if Iraq can be taken on slowly by helping
local groups with few special forces and giving them Tuesdays and
Wednesdays, giving them time to unleash his nuclear and biological weapons
when he feels cornered, or does it have to be what you say comprehensive on
day one?

MR. PERLE: I have my own view on how we ought to deal with Saddam and it
begins with support which has not been forthcoming, sadly, for the Iraqi
opposition, the people who are eager to liberate their country, who in every
sense of the word can and should be regarded as freedom fighters.

Not because we think that in a day or a week or a month they could march on
Baghdad, but because support for the opposition is essential to establish,
first, the legitimacy of any subsequent action; and, second, because we
don't want to find ourselves in the position that we have been in in
Afghanistan where we are scrambling, frankly, to find people on the ground
with whom we can work, and where we can find people with whom we can make
common cause in a subsequent Afghan government that will operate for the
benefit of the Afghan people and not for these imported terrorists who have
taken over the country.

So we need to begin with serious support for the opposition. We need to
break Saddam's monopoly on broadcasting which he now has. We need to
demonstrate that much of Iraq is beyond his control, as the establishment of
opposition forces in the north and the south would clearly establish. Then
we can go on from there and ultimately, if we do it right, we will achieve
at least enough tactical surprise to deal with the sorts of problems that I
think are lurking behind your question.

But we need to get started with the opposition. The last administration
flatly refused to do anything to support the opposition. This administration
has been dithering about this endlessly, and I hope that the events of
September 11 will now cause the Bush administration to understand that you
can't be leisurely about this, you have got to make decisions and you have
got to get going.

Yes?

MS. : I am very concerned about Israel, so I want to know how any of this,
even if it all goes into effect, is going to help me go to Israel next year
and not have to worry about the terrorists in the streets.

Do you feel that you are fighting terrorism the best you can or can more be
done?

MR. SHARANSKY: We are fighting terrorism, in those conditions in which we
have, the best we can. But if Arafat--if there will be more moral clarity
about the fact that we are part of the same struggle with terror that
America is now leading, the result will have a lot more understanding and
sympathy.

If Arafat will be under much bigger pressure than he is today and that he
will not be able to have a double role over the leader of terror and the
moral hope of peace in the Middle East, definitely we can be much more
successful in our struggle.

MR. PERLE: Yes, please?

MS. : I wanted to ask you about Libya. U.S. intelligence tells us that
Muammar al-Qaddafi is being exceptionally helpful these days. He sent his
chief of intelligence, Mousa Kousa [ph.] to London where he met with a
senior State Department official. They are giving up names of Libyans who
are part of an al-Qaida offshoot. He claims he has renounced terrorism, he
is talking about putting Lockerbie behind him.

What do we do with Qaddafi? To anyone.

MR. LEDEEN: Well, he is not running for public office here, yet, but if he
does--.

No, I think Qaddafi actually, after Blair and Belisconi [ph.], I think
Qaddafi's support for our bombing of Afghanistan is No. 3 in the world. And
you should ask yourself why? And the answer is that 2000 pound bombs coming
through the roof of your tent really makes an indelible impression and
people are capable of changing. And the best way to change them is to
demonstrate that they are taking a losing option.

Actually, Qaddafi is one of the, you know, history's little jokes because
Qaddafi himself has been the target of all kinds of international terrorist
groups for the last several years. And, you know, he has been desperately
trying to get out from under his well-deserved reputation as a terror master
for many years.

I mean, here again is the kind of case that I am thinking about. I do think
that if we bring power to bear and pursue our interests seriously--and I
didn't think that one day's bombing of Tripoli was all that much. I mean, I
wanted to continue. I thought it was a good start, right? And yet it turned
out that, over time, the lesson sank in.

MS. : But Qaddafi is one of those tyrants that you described who is hated by
his people, who gives no democratic rights to his people. Are you saying now
that, yes, we should accept the fact that he has changed in the
international realm and too bad about democracy for the Libyans?

MR. LEDEEN: Oh, no, not at all. I mean, I am in favor of democracy
everywhere. The question that you asked me to start with was how should we
evaluate Qaddafi's statements about terrorism. I think he is certainly a
changed person about terrorism.

MR. SHARANSKY: Could he be defined as newly-born Muslim.

MR. PERLE: Born-again Muslim.

MR. SHARANSKY: Born-again Muslim.

MR. PERLE: I can see Alan wants to comment.

MR. GERSHIN: If I could just respond to that, too, on Libya since I have
been tracking Libya for a while. It is rare that I take issue with Michael
Ledeen, but I will take issue with you here.

You see what happened in the bombing which occurred in 1986, we sent 16
F1-11s, only 2 of them got through. There were 40 to 60 civilian casualties
on the ground. Immediately thereafter, the Secretary of State went to a
meeting of the G-7 and said that we now have Qaddafi in his box. Everyone at
the NSC lauded themselves for having taken care of the Qaddafi problem.

At the very same time, the State Department was tracking what the Libyans
were doing. They were being instructed to bomb whatever American facility
they could. And, according to our own reports, immediately thereafter, they
began planning or became involved in the bombing of Pan Am 103.

So I think the lesson that we draw from that is that if you are going to
bomb, don't leave any wounded bears. I think we did that with Iraq with
Saddam Hussein. I think we certainly did that with Qaddafi.

My book, if I can--the book is called The Price of Terrorism, and you asked
me the question, Richard, what about the price? Well, the point is if there
is no price that the other side pays then every other leader will be
encouraged.

What is the price that Libya has paid? We have had sanctions on Libya. It is
estimated by Libya that it has cost $30 billion. We estimate it at between
$18 to $20 billion. But, just when they were becoming effective, we
essentially let Libya loose by saying all they had to do is release two
individuals. There would be no accountability for the government.

And if there is no payment, massive payment, if there is no payment that
signifies accountability, we have to ask ourselves what is the message to
everyone else? So that is what we have to consider when we work out this
equation about building the widest possible consensus.

MR. PERLE: The gentleman here on the aisle.

MR. : You mentioned earlier that you thought it would be useful to use the
Muslims that are citizens or have visas here in the United States as
spokespeople for Islam, freedom-loving people. And yet recent articles in
The Washington Post and The New York Times talk about some of the Muslim
clerics in the United States who have publicly spoken about peace and love
and humanity and love of the United States, and yet subsequently or prior
were filmed on videotape--some of it recently released--talking about
hatred, support of Hezbollah, for various Jihads.

So my question really is, how do we know that we can trust the Muslim
community in the United States and what would be the mechanism for even
making that determination?

MR. WOOLSEY: The answer is you go back and look at what individual ones have
said and there are differences, there are substantial differences. Some of
the leaders of these organizations have said in the past and continue to say
terrible things, and one of the leading Muslim organizations--at least it
considers itself so--in this country is trying now to get the bombing to
stop, and I wouldn't go anywhere near any of those people with a ten-foot
pole.

You have at least one cleric who has said some horrible things about Israel
and recently has expressed his regret and has started to talk differently.
Then you have a handful of clerics in this country who have been solid all
along, mainly from the Sufi tradition.

So there is a range, just as there is overseas. And I think one does not
want to get trapped into identifying some of these organizations like Care
[ph.] and others that have taken really strident positions against the
United States and against Israel as being spokesmen for American Muslims.

But there are at least enough Muslim clerics around the world--

[Begin Tape 2, Side A]

MR. : [In progress]--you may well be quite wrong. During the Cold War, our
policy objective was to outlive or outlast the most dangerous of the bad
guys. That policy proved to be both sustainable and ultimately very
successful.

Now why should we adopt a different policy with respect to the petty tyrants
in the Mideast?

MR. WOOLSEY: Because these guys are Nazis not Communists.

MR. LEDEEN: But I don't think it is true anyway. I think that the--I think
that containment was practiced up to a certain point, but I don't think that
the Reagan administration thought about it that way at all. I think that
Reagan's intent was to wrap it up and roll it back and undo it.

MR. WOOLSEY: We outlasted the Soviet Union. We couldn't have done this with
Hitler, we had to destroy him.

MR. GINGRICH: Because I think there is a profound difference between the
Soviet state as it evolved after Stalin and what we are now faced with,
particularly in terms of Saddam and potentially North Korea; and that is, a
large cumbersome bureaucratic system could participate in deterrence because
it was a state that had things to risk.

We have--I mean, I think the sobering thing, if in fact it turns out that
Saddam does have cancer, I think the notion of asking the question, so would
he like to go out in a burst of glory to be an heroic figure who has defied
the West and won, is non-trivial. We have every reason to believe that the
propensity for danger--and remember, we live in an age where the price of
mass violation is declining, so it gets easier and easier for people with
relatively small investments to kill more and more people. And we live in a
world where we are bound together by common transportation and communication
systems.

The Nazis and the Soviets, prior to 1955, they didn't have this kind of
world. In the end, we went after Hitler overtly and FDR clearly was trying
to get us in the war because the conclusion was he was that dangerous.

I would just suggest to you that the prospect of Saddam with nuclear weapons
and the overt fact that 6,000 Americans have been killed in an America city
suggests that containment in the tradition sense is totally not applicable
here, and you either have to bury your head in the sand or take them out
before they are any more dangerous. But to pretend you can lift next to
these people in this kind of world, I think, is just utterly irrational.

MR. WOOLSEY: This is precisely what is wrong with Sandy Burger's analogy of
the Whack-a-mole game, that Saddam is like mole in a Whack-a-mole game, you
just--the kids game in a carnival-- you just whack him on his head and he
goes down and stays down for a while, then he pops up someplace else and you
have to whack him someplace else.

It continues--it neglects the fact that, while he is down there, he is
developing weapons of mass destruction and sponsoring terrorism and all the
rest. So I completely agree with Newt.

MR. SHARANSKY: I only want to add that if you are talking about coping with
immediate terror based--terrorism based on Islamic fundamentalism, of
course, it is very different from communism because there was no after-life
in communism, there was no paradise in communism. In fact, paradise was at
that very moment in the Soviet Union. So suicide bombers could not exist.
You were killing millions of people immediately here, and not suicidal
bomber to heaven afterward.

So, from this point, I agree with what was said about the difference. At the
same time, I have to say I don't know what exactly went, but there is a lot
of truth in this equation. That just after such brilliant victory, the Cold
War, through the policy of linkage, of linkage between international policy
and human rights in the countries under communism, this policy was abandoned
fully.

I am not now talking about policy towards immediate terrorist countries. If
you look, let's say the world after Gulf War which was only two years after
this brilliant experience with the Soviet Union, America did at that moment,
when Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other countries existed only because of the
United States of America, what America did even a little bit to encourage a
little bit some openness in economy of Saudi Arabia, in the life of
opposition in Saudi Arabia.

Today I read editorials in American newspapers how bad it is that there is
no freedom in Saudi Arabia. When I was raising this question in '93 and '94,
why United States abandoned full that great example of its own victory and
is not dealing with the regimes of today's world which are not immediate
sending suicide bombers, so you do have the process--you do have the time to
build this positive linkage. Unfortunately, until recently, this question
wasn't existing even in American politicians.

MR. PERLE: Natan has reminded me of that old radio Eurovan [ph.] joke: How
do we know that Adam and Eve were communists? And the answer was, they had
no housing, they had no clothing, they had one apple to share between them
and they thought they were in paradise.

Question?

MR. : We are mentioning here different broadcasting possibilities. Somebody
said we don't have broadcasting possibility in Iraq. We mentioned Radio
Eurovan which was network of jokes, actually, that undermined the Soviet
Union.

If we have all these wonderful allies in the Middle East now, would they
allow the United States to put a network of AM and FM radio stations that
will address, in the War of Ideas, the issues of openness, democracy,
interpretations of Islam, economic reform, et cetera, and would the United
States government make the litmus test for their support of our war effort?
Thank you.

MR. WOOLSEY: I think the answer to that question is the same as the answer
to Natan Sharansky's excellent question of why United States abandoned its
strategy of linking human rights, which is a three letter word, O-I-L. The
dependence of the world on Mideastern oil has undermined a great deal of
sensible strategy and sensible approach to dealing with this part of the
world.

And if we had continued some of the policies we adopted in the early '70s to
try to reduce dependence--some of them were misguided, some of them were
pretty smart--we would be in a lot better shape now. But it is time now,
finally, to do everything we can as a society to move away from dependence
on Mideast oil; whatever we need to in whatever dimension, renewable fuels,
everything, we need to get out of that box. Because that is the main thing
that is undermining our common sense as expressed by the questioner, by
Natan, by a lot of people here.

MR. LEDEEN: Would anyone here who knows Senator Daschle pass the word along,
it would be useful to have an energy bill.

MS. : Thank you. I want to amplify the role of Turkey. Steven Kinser, the
New York Times bureau chief to Turkey, just in the last month or so, he said
the only voice that can counter the voice from the cave is that of a
moderate Muslim nation and that is Turkey.

It seems to me that when we look at U.S. foreign policy vis-a-vis
Turkey--after the collapse of the Soviet Union it seems to me that when the
State Department and the White House look at Europe they don't see Turkey.
They look at the Middle East, they don't see Turkey. They look at Central
Asia and the caucuses and they don't see Turkey.

Whereas Turkey has a very important role to play in all these three regions,
do you think that there is any chance of that changing in the post-September
11 world? Thank you.

MR. LEDEEN: I, frankly, think you have overstated the attitude of the
American government by understating the importance that we attach to Turkey.
I certainly agree we have not done as much as we might have done, should
have done, and I hope not as much as we will do to deepen the ties with
Turkey. But we have tried hard to persuade the Europeans that Turkey must
become a member of the European Union, that to leave it outside would create
a political problem of immense proportions.

So we need to do a lot on the bilateral front. We have done a lot, more
certainly than is evident now. And I think September 11 is going to change a
great many things, and one of them will be a rediscovery of the importance
of Turkey for exactly the reasons you suggest.

MR. PERLE: Yes?

MR. JONES: Bill Jones, from Executive Intelligence Review. I was quite
flabbergasted to hear what I heard today. Although I know the profiles of
most of the individuals here, I know their history, I was still overwhelmed.
And the only thing I can hope is that this forum will become widely known
and widely seen around the world. I think our European allies who see this
will ask themselves, what the hell is happening to America?

Because the solutions that you are putting forward in tandem with the new
doctrine of the new imperialism that Mr. Perl e hosted a panel on not too
long ago, is going to be a shock for a lot of different people, and I think
it should be and will be a shock for a lot of Americans. And I never really
thought about--

MR. PERLE: Is there going to be a question at the end, Mr. Jones?

MR. JONES: Okay. I never really thought about this before--

MR. WOOLSEY: This is the Lyndon LaRouche stance, I believe, right?

MR. JONES: That is correct.

MR. WOOLSEY: I think, simply coming out of that mouth and your mouth, your
propositions refute themselves. [Applause.]

MR. JONES: Let me just mention that I think--I will give the panel coverage,
as a matter of fact--

MR. WOOLSEY: Please do.

MR. JONES: --we will probably make it a front page story--

MR. WOOLSEY: We are delighted.

MR. JONES: --in the next issue of EIR because people have said and I never
have--

MR. WOOLSEY: You have so much influence in the world, we are simply
delighted in that.

MR. JONES: --maybe some whacko right-wing group is sending this anthrax
around as a type of Reichstag fire in order to get this kind of a solution.
I never put much credibility in that before but, after hearing you gentlemen
today, I think there is probably something to it.

MR. SHARANSKY: What was the question?

MR. : I am not quite sure how to ask this question, but I am wondering if
you think America still has the cultural confidence to wage the scale of
war, intellectual, moral and military and what kind of casualties you are
envisioning here? It is a very ambitious agenda, is America ready for this?

MR. GINGRICH: Let me say, first of all, having served as a freshman through
Clinton-- through Carter's Malaise speech and having been told that
democracy was dying in a very famous French bestseller, and seeing the
Soviets invade Afghanistan, have forces in Grenada, El Salvador, in
Nicaragua, as the United States collapsed, inevitably--and watched, in about
40 minutes on a January morning, Ronald Reagan explain the future of the
world centered on democracy, freedom and courage, and the United States
responded pretty enthusiastically and said, yes, we have been wondering.

I believe if the president goes to the country and says, in contrast with
our previous person, that 6,000 dead Americans dead Americans by themselves
deserve us to do our duty, and that an addition as a warning to how many
hundreds of thousands we may lose if we don't do our duty, and that our duty
consists of the following and outlines whatever "the following" is, that if
it is clear and coherent and has both moral clarity and moral force to it,
that the American people by about 80 to 10 will rally in favor of it.

I think that the American people will sustain casualties. The American
people will do what is necessary. The American people have the moral courage
to give their children and grandchildren a safer, freer and better world.
But I think it requires communicating clearly what this is about, and
nothing will lose the will of the American people faster than a chaotic,
confused, morally uncertain and internally contradictory campaign.

So the quality of the leadership, the clarity of the call and the intensity
and ruthlessness of the campaign will have a direct impact on the willpower
of the American people.

MR. WOOLSEY: Three times in this century by five major powers, Imperial
Germany, Fascist Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan and the Soviet
Union, the United States has been attacked in one way or another and
challenged. They are all gone, and three of them are perfectly fine
democracies now and the fourth, Russia, is heading that way. We are still
here. I think I would bet on us.

MS. : You mentioned that this war, actually ultimately is a war against
democracy, so this takes on an ideological context. I wanted you to
elaborate a little bit on this context and how you would be dealing with
different countries; for example, take Egypt and Saudi Arabia. With Iraq and
Afghanistan, is much easier because the military action takes precedence.

And, also, in relationship to Iran, I wanted both Mr. Woolsey and Michael
Ledeen to comment on this, if it is true that this war is ideological, would
you not say that Iran that has been the theoretician behind this whole
export of revolution and the war against the great Satan becomes very
central, and would that not mean that you do not have to attack Iran
militarily but you should withdraw support for the regime and support the
people's democracy, fight for democracy in that country?

MR. LEDEEN: Yeah, well that is exactly what I said. That is what I want. And
I think--I can't imagine a greater success for the United States in the war
against terrorism than a popular insurrection against the Mulocracy [ph.] in
Iran. I mean, nothing more wonder

===========

2)


Idealism: remaking the world in what the true believers see as America's
image, with free enterprise and Judeo-Christianity as core elements; here is
Michael Ledeen, former Reagan official, now at the American Enterprise
Institute (one of the leading drum-beaters for attacking Iraq): "If we just
let our own vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we
don't try to be clever and piece together clever diplomatic solutions to
this thing, but just wage a total war against these tyrants, I think we will
do very well, and our children will sing great songs about us years from
now."


http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BLU302A.html

What Does the Imperial Mafia Really Want?

by William Blum
www.globalresearch.ca   18  February 2003
The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/BLU302A.html


Which is the more remarkable -- that the United States can openly announce
to the world its determination to invade a sovereign nation and overthrow
its government in the absence of any attack or threat of attack from the
intended target? Or that for an entire year the world has been striving to
figure out what the superpower's real intentions are?

There are of course those who accept at face value Washington's stated
motivations of "liberating" the people of Iraq from a dictatorship and
bestowing upon them a full measure of democracy, freedom and other eternal
joys fit for American schoolbooks. In light of a century of well-documented
US foreign policy which reveals a virtually complete absence of such
motivations, along with repeated opposite consequences, we can dispense with
this attempt by Washington to win hearts and mindless. Presented here are
some reflections about several of the causes that make the hearts of the
imperial mafia beat faster in regard to Iraq, which may be helpful in
arguing the anti-war point of view:

Expansion of the American Empire: adding more military bases and
communications listening stations to the Pentagon's portfolio, setting up a
command post from which to better monitor, control and intimidate the rest
of the Middle East.

Idealism: remaking the world in what the true believers see as America's
image, with free enterprise and Judeo-Christianity as core elements; here is
Michael Ledeen, former Reagan official, now at the American Enterprise
Institute (one of the leading drum-beaters for attacking Iraq): "If we just
let our own vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we
don't try to be clever and piece together clever diplomatic solutions to
this thing, but just wage a total war against these tyrants, I think we will
do very well, and our children will sing great songs about us years from
now." Oil: the sine qua non of Middle East policy, yesterday, today and
tomorrow; to be in full control of Iraq's vast reserves, with Saudi oil and
Iranian oil waiting defenselessly next door; OPEC will be stripped of its
independence from Washington and will no longer think about replacing the
dollar with the Euro as its official currency; oil-dependent Europe may
think twice next time about being so uppity.

Globalization: Once relative security over the land, people and institutions
has been established, the transnational corporations will march into Iraq
ready to privatize everything at fire-sale prices, followed closely by the
IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organization and the rest of the international
financial extortionists.

Arms industry: As with each of America's endless wars, military
manufacturers will rake in their exorbitant profits, then deliver their
generous political contributions, inspiring Washington leaders to yet
further warfare, each war also being the opportunity to test new weapons.
Israel: The men driving Bush to war include long-time militant supporters of
Israel, such as Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith, who, along
with the rest of the powerful Israeli lobby, have advocated smashing Iraq
for years. Israel has been playing a key role in the American military
buildup to the war. Besides getting rid of its arch enemy, Israel could use
the opportunity to carry out its final solution to the Palestinian
question -- transferring them to Jordan, (liberated) Iraq, and anywhere else
that expanded US hegemony in the Middle East will allow. Iraq's abundant
water could be diverted to relieve a parched Israel.



Written by William Blum, author of "Killing Hope: US Military and CIA
Interventions Since World War II" and "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's
Only Superpower" -- www.killinghope.org  Copyright   William Blum 2003.  For
fair use only/ pour usage équitable seulement .


==============

3)

 http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2002/09/20/120.html

Friday, Sep. 20, 2002. Page XXIV

Global Eye -- Dark Passage
By Chris Floyd



Not since "Mein Kampf" has a geopolitical punch been so blatantly
telegraphed, years ahead of the blow.

Adolf Hitler clearly spelled out his plans to destroy the Jews and launch
wars of conquest to secure German domination of world affairs in his 1925
book, long before he ever assumed power. Despite the zigzags of rhetoric he
later employed, the various PR spins and temporary justifications offered
for this or that particular policy, any attentive reader of his vile
regurgitation could have divined his intentions as he drove his country --
and the world -- to murderous upheaval.

Similarly -- in method, if not entirely in substance -- the Bush Regime's
foreign policy is also being carried out according to a strict blueprint
written years ago, then renewed a few months before the Regime was installed
in power by the judicial coup of December 2000.

The first version, mentioned in passing here last week, was drafted by a
team operating under then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in 1992. It set out
a new doctrine for U.S. power in the 21st century, an aggressive, unilateral
approach that would secure American domination of world affairs -- "by force
if necessary," as one of the acolytes put it.

When the Dominators were temporarily ousted from government after 1992, they
continued their strategic planning with funding from the
military-energy-security apparatus and right-wing foundations. This
culminated in a new group, the aptly-named Project for a New American
Century (PNAC). Members included hard-right players like Cheney, Donald
Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad (now "special envoy" to the
satrapy of Afghanistan) and other empire aspirants currently perched in the
upper reaches of government power.

In September 2000, PNAC updated the original Cheney plan in a published
report, "Strengthening America's Defenses." In this and related documents,
the earlier precepts were reiterated and refined. The plans called for
unprecedented hikes in military spending, the plantation of American bases
in Central Asia and the Middle East, the toppling of recalcitrant regimes,
the militarization of outer space, the abrogation of international treaties,
the willingness to use nuclear weapons and control of the world's energy
resources.

And the present course of action was clearly set forth: "The United States
has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional
security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate
justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the
Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

But Iraq is just a stepping stone. Iran is next -- indeed, Cheney, Rumsfeld
and the PNAC team say that Iran is "perhaps a far greater threat" to U.S.
oil hegemony. Other nations will follow, including Russia and China. In one
way or another -- by military means or economic dominance, by conquest,
alliance or silent acquiescence -- they must all be brought to heel,
forcibly prevented from "challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a
larger regional or global role."

These texts spring from the Dominators' quasi-religious cult of "American
exceptionalism," the belief in the unique and utter goodness of the American
soul -- embodied chiefly by the nation's moneyed elite, of course -- and the
irredeemable, metaphysical evil of all those who would oppose or criticize
the elite's righteous (and conveniently self-serving) policies.

Anyone still "puzzled" over the Bush Regime's behavior need only look to
these documents for enlightenment. They have long been available to the
media -- which accepted Bush's transparent campaign lies about a "more
humble foreign policy" at face value -- but have only now started attracting
wider notice, in the New Yorker magazine this spring, and this week in the
Glasgow Sunday Herald.

The documents explain America's relentless march across Afghanistan, Central
Asia and soon into the Middle East. They explain the Bush Regime's otherwise
unfathomable rejection of international law, its fanatical devotion to
so-called missile defense, its gargantuan increases in military spending --
even its antediluvian energy policy, which mandates the continued primacy of
oil and gas in the world economy. (They can't conquer the sun or monopolize
the wind, so there's no profit, no leverage for personal gain and
geopolitical power in pursuing viable alternatives to oil.) The Sept. 11
attacks gave the Regime a pretext for greatly accelerating this published
program of global dominance, but they would have pursued it in any case.

So there will be war: either soon, after the November mid-term elections,
or -- in the unlikely event that Iraq's offer of inspections is accepted --
then later, after some "provocation" or "obstruction," no doubt in good time
before the 2004 presidential vote. The purse-lipped rhetoric about
"liberation" and "moral clarity" is just so much desert sand being thrown in
our eyes. Backstage, the Bush Regime is playing Mafia-style hardball,
warning reluctant allies to get on board now or else miss out on their cut
of the loot when America -- not a "democratic Iraq" -- divvies up Saddam's
oil fields: a shakedown detailed this week by the Economist, among many
others.

The Dominators dream of empire. Not only will it extend their temporal
power, they believe it will also give them immortality. One of their chief
gurus, Reaganite firebreather Michael Ledeen, says that if the Dominators
reject "clever diplomacy" and "just wage total war" to subjugate the Middle
East, "our children will sing great songs about us years from now." This
madness, this bin Laden-like megalomania, is now driving the hijacked
American republic -- and the world -- to murderous upheaval.

It's all there in the text, set down in black and white.

Read it and weep.





----- Original Message -----
From: "F.Dowker" <f.dowker@qmul.ac.uk>
To: <casi-discuss@lists.casi.org.uk>
Sent: Montag, 9. Juni 2003 10:41
Subject: [casi] Source of Perle quotation?



Dear Listmembers,
In an article in the New Statesman (16 Dec 2002) John Pilger
writes

`One of George W Bush's "thinkers" is Richard Perle. I interviewed Perle
when he was advising Reagan; and when he spoke about "total war", I
mistakenly dismissed him as mad. He recently used the term again in
describing America's "war on terror". "No stages," he said. "This is
total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them
out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then
we will do Iraq . . . this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If
we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely
and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a
total war . . . our children will sing great songs about
us years from now." '

I want to use the ``total war'' quotation for my `German Nazi or
Bush/Blair Neocon?' quiz (one of Goebbels most notorious speeches
is his so-called ``Total war'' speech on 18 Feb 1943).
Does anyone know if John Pilger is quoting from an interview
he himself did with Perle recently or quoting from some other
source (and what that source is)? What Pilger writes suggests the
latter but a simple Google search turns up only references to
the Pilger article itself.

Thanks.

Best wishes,
Fay
--
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+  Fay Dowker                       Physics Department               +
+                                   Queen Mary, University of London +
+  E-mail: f.dowker@qmul.ac.uk       Mile End Road,                  +
+  Phone:  +44-(0)20-7882-5047      London E1 4NS.                   +
+  Fax:    +44-(0)20-8981-9465                                       +
+  Homepage: http://monopole.ph.qmw.ac.uk/~dowker/home.html          +
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++




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To contact the list manager, email casi-discuss-admin@lists.casi.org.uk
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