Face The Nation/Nov 25 Transcript – War on Iran/Iraq/Terror

The first posting is by "solutions" and comprises the book review by the Wall Street Journal (probably Israel's strongest supporter in the American media) of "Failure Is Not An Option" by John Bolton (U.S. Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control (2001-2005) and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (2005-20006)). The fourth posting is the "Face the Nation" transcript for Nov. 25 re Condi Rice's Mideast Peace Conference involving 50 nations at Camp David and the inter-relationship between the conference and War on Iran/Iraq/Terror.
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Face The Nation/Nov 25 Transcript – War on Iran/Iraq/Terror

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Editorial Note:

Please don’t get discouraged by having to “wade through” all of the opening comments in this transcript about Condi Rice’s Mid-East Peace Conference this week involving 50 nations at Annapolis – What? Who? When? Where? How? Why?

Because the panel comprises four authors who are our best experts on Iran, Iraq, The War on Terror, etc. – including General Anthony Zinni (Former Commander - U.S. Central Command (Iraq, Afghanistan & War on Terror)) and Lawrence Wright who “literally wrote the book on Al Qaida" (“The Looming Tower”) and, per Moderator Bob Schieffer, is often acknowledged by the C.I.A. to know more about Al Qaida and bin Laden than the C.I.A.

And they discuss the inter-relationship between Iran, Iraq, al Qaida, the War on Terror, this week’s Israeli/Palestinian peace conference, etc. – INCLUDING

1. The consequences of the conference ending in failure.

2. The potential up-side – e.g., Lawrence Wright: “Bin Laden doesn't really care about Israel, but the Israeli-Palestinian dispute fuels the despair and anger of so much of the Muslim world that if it were resolved he'd be in tears. It really is a very potent recruiting tool for him and for other radical Islamist groups.”

3. Lawrence Wright on the relationship between Iran and al Qaida.

4. General Zinni re War With Iran being “the Number 1 concern in the Middle East” from voluminous conversations during recent trips to most of the countries there – “Number one on the list is Iran. All the discussions I had, that topped the list. They're concerned about their ability, obviously, to get weapons of mass destruction. They're very deeply concerned about the possibility of a US or US-Israeli strike on Iran and what that would mean for the region, what the aftermath would look like. They're even gaming some of that out to try to understand it.”

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Face The Nation – Transcript - 11/25/07

GUESTS:

Robin Wright
The Washington Post
Author, “The Great Revolution”

General Anthony Zinni
Former Commander, United States Central Command
Author, “Battle for Peace”

Lawrence Wright
Author, “The Looming Tower”

Rick Atkinson
Author, “The Day of Battle”

MODERATOR: Bob Schieffer

FACE THE NATION -CBS NEWS
(202)-457-4481

BOB SCHIEFFER, host:

Today on FACE THE NATION, our annual Thanksgiving weekend books and authors broadcast.

If the surge in Iraq is working, where's the political reconciliation? What's the situation in Afghanistan, and with Iran's nuclear program? Will anything come of the conference on the Middle East the administration is arranging this week in Annapolis?

We'll analyze all these issues as we talk to a distinguished panel of authors: Robin Wright of The Washington Post who's written four books on foreign policy; General Anthony Zinni who once ran our military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and is the author of "Battle for Peace"; Lawrence
Wright, who won the Pulitzer for his book on terrorism "The Looming Tower"; and Rick Atkinson, author of "Day of Battle."

Robin, I want to go to you first and talk about this conference that the United States is putting together in Annapolis. We have all these parties from around the Arab world, from Israel, all coming together, looking for some sort of way to start a process that will establish two states- Israel and a home for the Palestinians. What's it about and is there any chance that this could possibly work?

Ms. ROBIN WRIGHT (Author, "The Last Great Revolution"): Well, this is an enormous gamble for everyone who is participating. There are more than 50--well, almost 50 countries or groups coming to Annapolis to try to sort out or begin a process that will unfold over the last year of the Bush administration. But I've never remembered a time when all the parties were as weak as they are now. Prime Minister Olmert of Israel is still recovering from the war in 2006 with Hezbollah, his popularity is very low. He faces opposition for some of his ideas even within his own coalition. Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinians, faces an unparalleled situation that you have Gaza and the West Bank separated, two different parties in control. And the one party that has probably brought all of them together is not coming to Annapolis, and that's Iran. It's a common fear of extremism, Iran's growing influence in the region, that is getting them all to Annapolis. I think there are those who think that it may start off well, but the danger is, in the Middle East always, that events on the ground always overtake diplomacy. And there's the danger of that whether it's an extremist attack that makes it even harder for both sides to compromise or the fact that politics in the region tend to atrophy, lose the momentum. President Bush will have to get involved in a very high profile way in order to make this work, and there's no sign yet that he's going to do anything more than give the opening speech and hold a dinner in honor of the participants.

SCHIEFFER: Well, I mean, the United States is counting it as progress that the Saudis have deigned to actually to send their foreign minister. This is considered a good sign. I mean, if that's a good sign, doesn't it sort of underline how steep this hill is that we have to climb here?

Ms. WRIGHT: Absolutely. And the Syrians have indicated today that they will send a vice foreign minister, so that you have all the major parties involved. The question is, can you come to common ground? That's always--on these last critical issues--Jerusalem, borders, refugees, security. How do you figure out a way to overcome hurdles that have been there for 60 years
since Israel was created, 40 years since the occupation began? That's a huge hurdle when even the Bush administration is facing its own obstacles. It's not in the--the president himself is not in a strong position. So the challenges are enormous.

SCHIEFFER: General Zinni, you, of course, were once the central command CIC. You directed what was going on in that part of the world, Iraq, Afghanistan, the whole war on terror. What really is at stake here? I mean, there are conferences and there are conferences. Is that--what if this one doesn't work?

General ANTHONY ZINNI (Former Commander, United States Central Command): I think it would be devastating to the region. There's so many hopes pinned on this one. As Robin said, everybody's weak. So they are coming to the table really seeking to have some resolution. I think the danger here is not in that you might not get an agreement. You can paper the walls with the
agreements we've had so far. It's implementation. I would worry about a couple of things. One, that the preparation for this maybe wasn't done. We could get an agreement, but the implementation is going to be extremely difficult and has to be orchestrated, that there's a timeline on this, the end of the administration.

If you began a process that showed progress and it went beyond the end of the administration, that should be considered success. I would not want to see these things cause failure. I think, as Robin said, there will be elements out there that will try to undermine this, and we can't fall back and give in to those in this process, or the sense of despair will devastate the region once again.

SCHIEFFER: Well, when you say there's a danger here, are you talking about putting the region in danger? Would a failure to come to some kind of agreement here make the--make the area more dangerous and that could make our security less secure?

Gen. ZINNI: Absolutely. I think there're elements out there that will take advantage of this. Recruiting for extremists could go up if this sense of despair took hold and yet another failed attempt at this. I think you have to plow through this. There will be ups and downs in this process. Again, implementation will be difficult. We can't do an on and off again process. We
have to stick with it. If we're going to start it this time, we have the advantage of all these participants now committed to it all week, which I happen to think is an advantage in a certain respects, and that everybody would be willing to compromise and work at the table. We have to see this through, and it probably means seeing it through into the next administration. And I think this administration ought to be satisfied that that would be a success if they have a process that continues on and is progressing into the next administration.

SCHIEFFER: Lawrence Wright, you literally wrote the book on al-Qaeda. I think even the CIA sometimes acknowledges that you may know more about Osama bin Laden than even they do. How do you see this as fitting into this whole war on terrorism?

Mr. LAWRENCE WRIGHT (Author, "The Looming Tower"): Bin Laden doesn't really care about Israel, but the Israeli-Palestinian dispute fuels the despair and anger of so much of the Muslim world that if it were resolved he'd be in tears. It really is a very potent recruiting tool for him and for other radical Islamist groups. So, from that point of view, this is really on the table in Annapolis, as well as, I think, the whole future of the idea of a two-state solution. You know, the--right now, Palestine itself is divided into two states, and, if this procedure fails, then we may not be talking about a two-state solution again in the future because the West Bank itself would become even more radicalized. Abbas' government would be unsupported, and then what? Well, it'd be very difficult to tell.

SCHIEFFER: Rick Atkinson, you have spent a lot of your career in recent years on the war in Iraq. I know that just this week you talked to General Petraeus, our commander there. How--what is the connection to this conference and what's going on in Iraq right now?

Mr. RICK ATKINSON (Author, "The Day of Battle"): Well, they're all intertwined, obviously, as our other guests have said. You know, what you're seeing in Iraq right now is a glimmer of hope of some sort, at least on a tactical level. We had four American soldiers per day on average being killed last spring. Now it's about one per day. In the spring and early summer, here were 3300 IEDs, improvised explosive devices, per month. Now it's about half that, 1600. The truth is, though, do we believe that they've stopped hating each other, that the partisan bickering, the partisan hatred that, in fact, is the salient feature of the landscape in Iraq, has gone away? Do we think that Iran, which seems to have subsided somewhat in shipping certain kinds of explosive devices and other weapons, has, in fact, lost its interest in having serious influence over the shape that Iraq becomes? So I think, you know, for Americans in particular and especially with an election year coming up, Iraq is the--is the ballgame. And if these relatively minor but not
unimportant tactical issues are to have staying power, then you've got to see them conveyed into a strategic advance in Iraq that will go beyond just what's happening in the fall of 2007.

SCHIEFFER: General Zinni, I know you're just back from the Gulf region.

Gen. ZINNI: Right.

SCHIEFFER: What are people worried about out there these days? Iraq? Iran?

Gen. ZINNI: Well, number one on the list is Iran. All the discussions I had, that topped the list. They're concerned about their ability, obviously, to get weapons of mass destruction. They're very deeply concerned about the possibility of a US or US-Israeli strike on Iran and what that would mean for the region, what the aftermath would look like. They're even gaming some of that out to try to understand it. And the Iranian--Ahmadinejad, is crossing the Gulf pretty frequently these days with a mix of threats and attempts to cajole or get buy-in on the other side. But I think that the deepest concern right now is with Iran.

SCHIEFFER: And when you say--where have you been, exactly?

Gen. ZINNI: I was in the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen, in this most recent trip, but I've been too all those nations on the Arabian peninsula recently.

SCHIEFFER: But when you say they're worried about Iran but they're also worried about an attack on Iran...

Gen. ZINNI: Yes.

SCHIEFFER: ...by the United States?

Gen. ZINNI: Yes. And I don't think it's necessarily because they think the administration is hellbent to do this. They just see the tensions mount that a slight spark or an incident that could occur. You know, for example, the British sailors that were picked up by the Iranians, something like that that could spark an incident. And they believe that's bound to happen sooner or later unless there's some sort of dialogue that's opened up or some sort of pressure that can be brought on Iran to disavow the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.

SCHIEFFER: What would you add to that, Robin?

Ms. WRIGHT: Well, I think one of the things that we've discovered over the last year is that almost every threat, every challenge the United States faces, leads back to Tehran. When you look at Iraq, al-Qaeda's been pushed out, and the Shiite extremists backed by Iran are the main challenge now. They're the ones who are--who have placed most of the explosive bombs,
roadside bombs that are killing American troops and Iraqis. You look at Arab-Israeli, it is Iran that supports Hamas. In Lebanon, where you have a crisis this week because they couldn't elect a new president, the political divide boils down to those who are kind of pro-Western and those who are--who have ties to Iran. Syria, big challenge, again, because it's a holdout, the spoiler in the peace process. Its closest ally is Iran. You begin to see a kind of new cold war for the United States that plays out throughout the Middle East but also into the wider Islamic world, that is pro-Iran or pro-US. It even plays out in a place like Venezuela, where you see Hugo Chavez creating an alliance with Iran on oil prices. So Iran is becoming the background to so many of the conflicts we now face.

SCHIEFFER: I know you've done a lot of work, Rick, on the connection between Iran and the Iraq war and the Iranians funneling weapons in. What do you think is going to happen? What will the United States do about Iran? Is there anything we can do besides try to bring some sort of sanctions there? Or is the military option likely, do you think?

Mr. ATKINSON: I don't think it's likely. I don't know any military man, and General Zinni would have a better feel for this than anybody at this table, but I don't know any military strategist who believes that there's a military solution in Iran. Sanctions have limited effect. I think basically what we're seeing now is a kind of operational pause of sorts in Iraq, and that includes the Iranians. The fact that they are not shipping these explosively foreign penetrators, an especially deadly type of roadside bomb, in the numbers that they were six or eight months ago probably means, my guess is, that they've simply decided to lay low for awhile. But, in fact, the endgame for them is measured in years, maybe even in decades, and they know that the Bush
administration will end in 14 months.

You know, there are other flashpoints that are of greater concern to General Petraeus and others. Turkey, for example. He's spending a lot of time trying to assure the government in Ankara that he's got things under control, that the Kurdish rebels that have launched attacks into Turkey will be restrained, and he's trying to prevent Turkey from making an incursion into Iraq, which would be potentially catastrophic for the whole region. So Iran is a problem, Turkey's a problem, every country that surrounds Iraq is a problem.

SCHIEFFER: Is there a connection, Larry, between al-Qaeda and Iran? Or are those two separate problems that we have to deal with?

Mr. WRIGHT: There's a weird connection. You know, that's one of the reasons the Middle East is such a paradox for us. Al-Qaeda, of course, is an entirely Sunni organization and the heretics are the Shiites, in their opinion, so, you know, they're natural enemies. And yet, Iran has been a sanctuary for some members of al-Qaeda. Right now, its holding Saad al bin Laden, bin Laden's- one of his sons, and Saif al-Adel, their head of security, as well as an untold number of other al-Qaeda people. Traditionally, you know, in the '90s, they actually helped al-Qaeda. They helped train some of the al-Qaeda fighters, with Hezbollah in the Bekah Valley. So there is a correspondence between these two natural enemies. And it's a puzzle. I think the only way one can understand the reason that Iran has at times helped al-Qaeda is they have a greater interest in seeing the United States lose.

SCHIEFFER: General Zinni, I know when you were CIC out there in charge of that region, you developed a very close relationship with General Musharraf.

Gen. ZINNI: I did.

SCHIEFFER: What's going to happen in Pakistan? Is this thing going to settle down? Or is it going to somehow break out into chaos? And those nuclear weapons that General Musharraf has under his control, are they safe? Are they being well-guarded? What do you see happening here?

Gen. ZINNI: Well, I think in terms of the nukes, they are--they are safe, and I think we have assurances and an understanding of the control. I happen to think that once we get through the elections that it will settle down. There are a lot of forces pulling against that, however--the opposition parties, obviously al-Qaeda and the extremists. I think it's important to understand that the center of gravity out there is the army. Everybody realizes that. And the army is put in a tough position. They're under attack in order to get them to react in a way that would alienate them with the people, something that the army just could not brook. And I think Musharraf feels the need to
protect the army. That's why it's been difficult for him to take his uniform off. The opposition parties are trying to court the army. Al-Qaeda's obviously trying to separate it from the people.

I think we have to be very careful. If things don't go the way we want politically, we have a tendency to punish the military, sanction military. That would not be in our interest. I think we have to be careful because they are, in fact, fighting the war that's in our interest for them to win and prevail in. And so I think it's important to watch the army, the dynamics.

We may--we oversimplify how this all began with Musharraf taking power. And we keep saying it was a coup. In effect, it was really was Sharif, the former prime minister, trying to effect a coup on the army. Waited till Musharraf was out of town, tried to put someone in as chief of the army, the army reacted. Even before Musharraf, his predecessors were under pressure to change the government. And it's all about the military and where they stand and the position they take and how viable they are and how effective they are in all this. And I think that's what we should watch.

SCHIEFFER: I want to go back to Iraq, quickly, as we come to the closing minutes here. Has the surge worked, Robin?

Ms. WRIGHT: Well, the surge has worked tactically. The problem is that a lot of the things that we expected it to open the way for politically have not happened. Whether it comes to the composition of the country, a federal structure, comes to the budget and distributing the wealth to all Iraqi people through oil revenues, the de-Baathification law, bringing back some of the Sunnis who were part of the old administration but were not loyal necessarily to Saddam Hussein. None of that's happened, and we're halfway through this period that the General Petraeus has to come back in March and give a report. And it looks like we're not going to have a lot of what is
needed--needs to happen.

SCHIEFFER: Are we going to have troops there for a while, Rick?

Mr. ATKINSON: Well, in an odd way, we're at the high water mark of the--of the troop deployment because we now have 20 brigades. That will drop to 15 by July as the surge ends. You know, I think what you're seeing in Iraq, today, for example, you've got more than two million Iraqis who are in exile. You've got an equal number who are displaced within the country. Yes, there are, by some counts, 1,000 a day coming back, but they're often not coming back to their original homes or neighborhoods. You're seeing a kind of ethnic cleansing that is also responsible for the quiescence, relative quiescence in some neighborhoods. You know, I think that if you look at Iraq today you see a country that is so badly fractured by years of sectarian violence and general oppression that you're looking at a, you know, public works project that'll take many years if not decades. And if the American forces are not there to help keep a lid on these sectarian killings, which there've been tens of thousands, it's hard to imagine that the Iraqi army, the Iraqi security forces would be able to do it without a substantial American
presence.

SCHIEFFER: Let me ask Larry quickly, and we're out--running out of time. The war on terror overall, are we safer now than we were?

Mr. WRIGHT: To some--yes, to some extent we are. For one thing, al-Qaeda is losing in Iraq, and this is traumatic for them. They're bogged down in Iraq the same way that we have been. So their concentration of forces is there, and they're losing. This is discrediting them. On the other hand, you know, there's this proliferation of young al-Qaeda wannabes all over Europe, and
particularly in the UK. And Europe has been a staging area for attacks on America. And the vice commissioner of the London police told me that in the last year and a half they've stopped 30 major attempts, attacks. Now, that's an extraordinary piece of luck. But I don't know how lucky they'll continue to be.

SCHIEFFER: And all of these things, in one way or another, are connected.

Mr. WRIGHT: Yeah.

SCHIEFFER: And all are connected to this conference coming this week...

Mr. WRIGHT: That's right.

Gen. ZINNI: Absolutely.

SCHIEFFER: ...in Annapolis. Well, let's hope it goes well.

Mr. WRIGHT: Yes, indeed.

SCHIEFFER: Thank you all for enlightening me.

Gen. ZINNI: Thank you.

Mr. WRIGHT: Thank you.

SCHIEFFER: Although I must say a somewhat gloomy report here this morning. This is--this is a tough one that we all face, and we know it.

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