Debate Transcript
THE INAUGURAL MUNK DEBATE
TORONTO, CANADA
May 26, 2008
© The Aurea Foundation
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The inaugural Munk Debate took place in Toronto on May 26, 2008. The debate’s resolution was: “Be it resolved the world is a safer place with a Republican in the White House”. The ‘pro’ debaters were Niall Ferguson and Charles Krauthammer. The ‘con’ debaters were Richard Holbrooke and Samantha Power. The capacity audience of 800 people voted 21% in favour of the motion at the debate’s outset and 46% in favour at the debate’s conclusion. The Munk Debates are a signature initiative of the Aurea Foundation, a charitable organization founded in 2006 by Peter and Melanie Munk to support Canadian institutions involved in the study and development of public policy. For more information please visit our website www.munkdebates.com.
Audiomunk - Debate
Rudyard Griffiths: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. Tonight we launch a project where twice a year we’re going to bring some of the world’s finest minds, some of the world’s brightest thinkers to debate the major issues facing this country and facing the world. We’re extremely fortunate this evening, to have four exceptional debaters who will consider the question: “be it resolved that the world is a safer place with a Republican in the White House.” I would like to remind everyone that tonight would not be possible without the generosity and the support of one foundation that has underwritten this entire project from start to finish and that’s the Aurea Foundation supported by Peter and Melanie Munk.
Buildings like the ROM are the lifeblood of this city and to sit here in this lovely renovated gallery with the Crystal outside to do an event like this is, the purpose of the ROM. Equally important is the intellectual capital that we create in Toronto and that we take across the country. Tonight’s broadcast will be broadcast on CBC radio and on Newsworld so that the debate in these four walls will reverberate from coast to coast and beyond our borders. Without further adieu let me introduce our moderator this evening. We’re very fortunate to have someone who knows Canada well. She was born in Bathurst, New Brunswick, went to University at Queens and the University of Toronto and has spent the last quarter century traveling around the world in trouble spots, grilling world leaders, convening events like this; and that is none other than Canada’s Lyse Doucet. Lyse, come on up and kick us off.
Lyse Doucet: Thank you.
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Hello and welcome to fellow Canadians, fellow debaters. Welcome to our guests from south of the border and from across the pond. I am indeed from New Brunswick and for those of you who are geographically challenged, that’s east of Toronto and northeast of Bangor, Maine. Whatever you’d like to say about Maritimers, we like to give plain truth and so are all of us gathered here this evening. I have to ask, why are we in a museum? Why are we in this magnificent Royal Ontario Museum? Is it a coincidence that they have this superb exhibition of Charles Darwin and the evolution of the species, the survival of the fittest? Peter and Melanie Munk never do anything by accident. Are they trying to send us a message? Is debating in Canada about to go the way of the Do-Do? Behind all of these screens are lots of extinct species and coincidently this debate comes at a time when the Ipsos Reid polling agency tells us that there’s a very deep public malaise in Canada about the quality and the quantity of public debating. Even worse, this debate comes at a time when south of the border there is an impassioned debate about politics in every form; and I don’t need telling you we Canadians don’t like when the Americans do things better than us, especially when it is something to do with democracy. So let it be resolved tonight, here on this inaugural debate, in this magnificent museum, that this will be the start of a new and more vigorous debate in Canada on all of the issues that matter. How are we going to start? We’re going to start on an issue, that all of us, no matter where we come from, have to be worried about: the world being a safer place. Would the world be a safer place if a Republican was in the White House? Now herein lies another difference between Americans and Canadians. Again, the Ipsos Reid pollsters asked this question in the United States. 52% of Americans said it would be safer with a Republican in the White House. However in Canada, only one in four agreed. When all of you, more than seven hundred strong, acquired your tickets for this inaugural debate we also found out about you and what you think. Only 29% of you agreed that the world would be
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a safer place with a Republican in the White House. 71% disagreed with the motion. Now, you’re a educated and informed crowd, you don’t take your views lightly. You came at this voting decision by force of conviction, but can they change your mind? Can the force of argument and public debate make you think about something different? Remember Charles Darwin and those orchids. Orchids weren’t just beautiful on their own. They developed with a cross pollination of insects. Tonight we’re going to mix ideas up and see whether we get a better survival of the species. So, as the American military says, listen up we have a plan. For the next two hours, we have four of the leading thinkers and doers from the United States. We’ll give them each seven minutes to provide their arguments and to try to convince us of their case. After that, it’s time for all of us to go on the offensive. I will lead the charge with a cross-examination and then all of you have a chance to put in a question. After that, our four speakers will get one last chance to convince you that you’re absolutely wrong. Then you’ll get a chance to vote again. That’s the magic of it. Can the force of ideas change something here in this room?
Please join me in welcoming our speakers. First of all, against the motion, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. Ambassador Holbrooke has been America’s Mr. Fix-It for a long time. The New York Times hailed him as a man who is a master of missions impossible. Between ‘94 and ‘96 he was the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Canadians Affairs. In 1995, he turned his attention to the Balkans and he became the Chief Architect of the Dayton Peace Accords. He served everywhere from Vietnam to the United Nations, where he was part of Bill Clinton’s administration and now an advisor to Hillary Clinton. Also against the motion is Samantha Power. Samantha Power is a leading human rights scholar, she’s a Pulitzer Prize winning author and a Harvard Scholar. Unlike Richard she doesn’t give very much advice to Hillary
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Clinton, in fact she thinks she’s a bit of a monster, now she does regret saying that so she resigned from Barack Obama’s campaign team, but it doesn’t mean she won’t be back there again because she’s got impeccable democratic credentials. For the motion, and from across the pond, Niall Ferguson: British historian, Harvard Scholar, and leading columnist. Time Magazine calls him one of the top 100 thinkers of our time. He’s also a leading supporter and special advisor on foreign policy to John McCain. And last but not least, we have Charles Krauthammer. Now as we saw from that voting, the camp that is for the motion has a really tough hill to climb. Charles Krauthammer is their secret weapon because in fact he grew up in Montreal. He’s an honorary Canadian, and on top of that he’s a psychiatrist. Since he moved back over to the United States he has become one of the most influential writers. He’s also a Pulitzer Prize winner and syndicated columnist for the Washington Post. For the last two decades he’s been influencing policy makers in the United States, but can he influence you? Join me in welcoming our four great debaters for the evening and welcome all of you too. Now to the arguments: Both sides of the argument would possibly agree that there is no other President and Commander-in-Chief who will take over in the White House at such a difficult time. There’s a challenge to restore American respect, American moral legitimacy, to win over friends and decide how to deal with foes. So please, first for the motion, Niall Ferguson.
Niall Ferguson: Well, thank you very much Lyse, and thank you, ladies and gentlemen. As all Scotsmen have Canadian relatives, I knew entirely what to expect when I came here this evening. My uncle, aunt, and cousins warned me that trying to defend the Republican party in Ontario was a suicide mission straight out of the Pacific War.
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However, it seems to me that there is a case to be made for this motion. As an historian I must say I find it very implausible that over the last hundred years, Democrats have consistently made the world safer than Republicans. A moment’s reflection on the history of the United States will set the record straight. All the major wars fought by the United States in the twentieth century were fought by Democratic and not Republican presidents. It’s easy to forget that even under that great peacenik, Bill Clinton, the United States took military action in three different countries and it was far from clear when it took Kosovo that it was taking it within the scope of international law. So, from a historian’s point of view, this is in fact a no brainer, ladies and gentlemen. But I’m not going to weary you with a history lecture tonight because this motion can’t really be interpreted as being about “Republicans,” because we have already got a candidate and can speak about that Republican, John McCain. It seems to me that this makes a very significant difference to the way that you should vote after this debate. Ladies and gentlemen, I wouldn’t be standing here talking to you now if any of the other potential candidates for the Republican nomination had been successful. Providentially, the Republicans nominated the one man who is ideally suited to lead the United States out of the legitimacy crisis, the diplomatic crisis and the military crisis in which it finds itself. John McCain is a man whose record is really quite extraordinary. Twenty-two years as a serving naval officer, five and a half of those years spent as a prisoner of war, his spirit unbroken by that experience. Seventeen military honours, twenty six years as a legislator, twenty two of them as a senator. The word “experience” matters in this debate. The notion that John McCain is somehow too old for the presidency is easily dismissed. Relative to the median age of other American presidents, he is by far not the not the oldest president in modern times. In fact, nine other presidents in the past hundred years have entered the White House older in relative terms, than John McCain will be when he becomes President at the age of seventy-two.
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But it’s not just his experience which seems to me to be relevant here. The thing that most impresses me about John McCain is that he understands the predicament that the United States finds itself in. He sees that there is no way that the United States can walk away from Iraq with the job unfinished, half finished, completely aborted. The stakes are too high. This is not 1968, this is not Indo-China, we are talking about the most strategically vital region of the world and the United States cannot afford to allow that region to descend into a maelstrom of sectarian violence and geo-political conflict. The critical thing is that whereas a year or two ago many people feared that the ultimate outcome of the American invasion of Iraq would be catastrophe, the surge has proved those Cassandras wrong. John McCain took an enormous risk when he backed General Petraeus’ strategy. It very nearly cost him the nomination, but John McCain is not a man who’s afraid to take that kind of political risk. At the end of 2006, the monthly fatality rate in Iraq was running around four-thousand, it is now around five-hundred. There is a realistic prospect of this country being stabilized. There is also a realistic prospect of the Iranians being driven out of the south where they have sought to infiltrate. This is not fantasy, this is fact. It goes contrary to the expectations of Barack Obama and it seems to speak very well of John McCain’s military judgment that although he had repeatedly criticized the way in which the Bush administration handled the Iraq crisis, he saw that an increase in troop numbers was the only possible way in which that situation could be brought under some kind of control. But you know ladies and gentlemen, this election isn’t just about Iraq. In fact I think with every passing week it may become less and less about foreign policy and more and more about economic policy and I just want to remind you this is an unusual state of affairs. It’s not everyday that the most important economy in the world goes into a presidential election in a recession, with a realistic prospect that the situation in the United States could deteriorate further. This is a very serious financial crisis that we find ourselves in. Canada will not be unscathed by it. The question is, what do these candidates have to say
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about that kind of safety, that kind of security and I would just like to point out that there’s only one candidate for the presidency who is clear about the need to avoid raising taxes and raising federal expenditure at a time of recession and clear about the importance of free trade. Let’s not forget that Barack Obama was not unwilling to stoop to a sideswipe against NAFTA in his pursuit of a few extra votes. Ladies and gentlemen, it is extremely important for Canada and indeed for the rest of the world that the leader of the United States should have an unshakable commitment to free trade Ladies and gentlemen, we need a straight-talking President in the United States. We do not need the heir to Jimmy Carter, which is I fear we could get; we do need the heir to Ronald Reagan. Thank you very much indeed.
Doucet: Thank you very much, Niall Ferguson. Samantha Power, against the motion.
Samantha Power: Here is what the world can expect from a Republican President and let me start by echoing what Niall has said about John McCain. John McCain is the most honorable, the most experienced, and the most knowledgeable of the Republicans in the Republican field, but a Republican President would continue a war in Iraq that has left the U.S. military at it’s breaking point, undermining U.S. military readiness, which in turn undermines the U.S.’s ability to concentrate resources in Afghanistan, a place that Canadians have a deep interest and invested interest in stabilizing. Also, that undermining of military readiness interferes with the U.S.’s ability to engage in strategic lift of peacekeepers from the developing world to places like Darfur. A Republican president will continue a war in Iraq, and policies associated with that war would undermine the U.S.s’ ability to lead within international institutions on a range of other issues. From the hard security issues, like proliferation or the containment of Iran, to Darfur to Burma. Even when the United States does come around, as I think Senator McCain is
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prepared to do in some measure on the issue of climate change, it will undermine our summoning power in the United Nations and in global bodies and regional institutions. Thirdly, a Republican president, President McCain, will spark an internal debate, an overdue internal debate about the role of torture in American foreign policy, a practice that has not only deep moral and legal implications, but profound national security implications, and here I quote none other than Donald Rumsfeld’s famous standard for whether the struggle for terrorism was working. As you recall, the question he posed was: “are we capturing killing or detouring and dissuading more terrorists everyday than the Madrases and the Radical Clerics are recruiting?” and here of course, because of Abu Graib and Bagram and Guantanamo, the answer is no. Now as many of you know, the honorable John McCain is somebody who has pledged to reverse most of the egregious excesses of the Bush administration to close Guantanamo, to return the United States to the Geneva Conventions, but will John McCain, who has shown very worrying signs of playing to his base, will he be prepared to convene a 9/11 style commission to actually establish meaningful accountability on the issue of systematic torture and systematic abuses as part of U.S. detention policies? There’s a worrying sign of late that McCain, who’s been well out in front of his Republican colleagues on this issue for obvious biographical, and I think deeply held moral reasons on his part, recently sided with the majority of Republicans in the Congress in seeking to exempt the CIA from the U.S. military rules of interrogation and engagement. Military rules that are much more inline with international law, that’s a worrying sign. Fourth, you can expect a Republican President will continue the policies of non-engagement in the realm of diplomacy with America’s adversaries, in the region where Iraq finds itself and, given the fact that stability in Iraq depends so fundamentally on a regional solution and regional involvement. This is deeply worrying.
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Now I’d like to say something about the two issues and I think Charles will talk about both of these in his presentation but, Iraq and Iran are two issues that Niall has also suggested will divide the candidates, Senator Obama and Senator Clinton on the one hand and Senator McCain on the other. First on the issue of Iraq, you will hear an awful lot this evening about the cost of leaving Iraq and I want to say at the outset that these costs absolutely have to be considered, they have to be. We have to do everything in our power to mitigate the cost in terms of the Al Qaeda presence that has come to Iraq in the wake of the U.S. invasion and crucially, but too often left out of the domestic debate in the United States, the fate of Iraqis who have relied upon the promise of the American presence, many of whom have recoiled against that presence, but all of whose destinies have been forever altered by the U.S. presence. Consideration of human consequences in discussions of withdrawal is essential. You will hear so much that is dogmatic about the inevitable effects of a U.S. withdrawal and I think it’s worth remembering that the same people who will warn you dogmatically about the coming apocalypse are the same people who argued that American soldiers would be greeted with flowers, with chocolates and as liberators. So this is not an incidental fact and it is not a snide debater’s tactic. John McCain himself said in September 2002, “we’re not going to have house to house fighting in Baghdad, we’re not going to have a bloodletting of trading American bodies for Iraqi bodies.” In January of ’03, two months before the war itself,” we will win this easily” he said. I’m not saying that this means that the warnings of harm to civilians or the warnings of Iraq can be discounted, as some Progressives seem inclined to do, but one has to be careful about dogmatism in the realm of national security especially in the wake of the recent record. So these costs of leaving have to be taken into account. I hope in the discussion we can talk about how to mitigate the harms associated with departure. But there is no acknowledgement that you will hear, or hear very little acknowledgement of the cost of staying and we cannot look at Iraq in an à la carte fashion, as we are so prone to do. The cost of staying to U.S. soldiers; of
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course to the recruitment of terrorists as I have mentioned, both in the context of detainee policies but the occupation itself; the cost to Afghanistan and stability there; and crucially, the cost to U.S. summoning power. When you look at those public opinion polls about the United States it’s very tempting to see them simply as popularity contests. That is how they are parodied in certain circles in the U.S., but they are a measure of the U.S.’s ability to get what it wants in international institutions. It matters when you have 5% approval ratings in a country. Governments fear they will fall if they affiliate with the United States on crucial issues, and in the context of Iran, I’ll just say this because I know Charles is going to engage it and I know I’m about to be decapitated, I think it is reckless at this stage not to embark upon every policy that we can in service of stability and in service of the mitigation that is suffering. That does not mean that you meet with an abusive regime, a holocaust denier, tomorrow, but it means to rule out aggressive diplomatic engagement is reckless and precisely the kind of recklessness we’ve seen over the last seven years. Thank you.
Doucet: Samantha Power against the motion, and if you were close enough as I was to Richard Holbrooke, he feels very happy with his team member. For the motion, Charles Krauthammer.
Charles Krauthammer: Thank you Lyse for that kind introduction. I feel that there are some things in my past that I have to explain. Lyse had mentioned I’m a psychiatrist. In fact, I’m a psychiatrist in remission, doing very well thank you, I haven’t had a relapse in 25 years. I’m sometimes asked to compare what I do today as a political analyst in Washington with what I did twenty-five years ago as a psychiatrist in Boston, and I tell people, as you can imagine, that it’s really not that different. In both lines of work I deal on a daily basis with people who suffer from paranoia and delusions of grandeur, with the exception that in Washington they have
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access to nuclear weapons which makes the work a little more interesting because it raises the stakes. Ladies and gentlemen, the stakes are very high in this election. That’s why you’ve honored us by having us here to debate whether it would be better for the world, for the safety of the world, if a Republican or a Democrat were elected. And let me say that if the Democrat running for President were Harry Truman, I would be on the other side of this debate, but the former Vice- Presidential candidate for the Democratic party in the year 2000 said plaintively and with regret, that the Democrats have abandoned the tradition of Roosevelt and Truman and Kennedy who said in his inaugural address that America would pay any price, bare any burden, meet any hardships, support any friend, oppose any foe in order to ensure the success and survival of liberty. Joel Lieberman said he is the last Truman-Democrat and ostracized as he is from his own party, chose to support John McCain as President because he sees him as the best guarantor of the security of the United States and by extension of the safety of the world. The issue is the one issue that both the Democratic candidates and the Republican candidates have insisted is the single most important issue of foreign affairs which the American people should make their judgment in choosing a president on, and that is the war in Iraq. As the Democrats have made extremely clear in their debates and in their statements, there is a very stark difference between the two positions. The position of Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama is unequivocal. On the day they are inaugurated as President they will call in the Joint Chiefs of Staff and ask them to immediately prepare a plan for the evacuation of Iraq. Obama says over sixteen months, but he will begin to withdraw combat troops almost immediately. The position of John McCain is diametrically opposed, on the day he is inaugurated, he will bring into his office the Joint Chiefs of Staff and ask them to give him a plan to try to achieve success in Iraq, and by success I would refer to what General David Petraeus has said in his testimony last week to
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Congress, he defines it as Iraq at peace with itself and it’s neighbors, an ally on the war of terror and a government that serves all Iraqis. Now the Democrats two years ago in 2006, at a time when the war in Iraq was at it’s lowest ebb, where America had essentially lost it’s way, the Democrats concluded that the war was lost, they said so, the majority leader in the Senate said so, the House Speaker said the war is lost, they ran an off year election pledging to withdraw America unconditionally, regardless of conditions on the ground and they won a smashing electoral success. Ever since then their position has remained unshaken, that is the position of the party, the position of their leaders and the position of the President of United States if a Democrat is elected. The problem is that things have changed on the ground in the last two years and the Democrats refuse to accept the empirical evidence of the astonishing changes on the ground in Iraq. Essentially, when the Al Qaeda had conquered the Anbar Province, a secret CIA report at the time had declared Anbar lost to Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda has been driven out of Anbar, the Sunnis have changed sides in the civil war, joined with the United States. There are 80 thousand Sunni civilians who are on joint neighborhood patrols armed and supported by the United States making war in Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is on the run, its last redoubt is in Mosul and the Iraqi army has launched a campaign in Mosul against it. This is an extremely important event in the war on terror. We did not seek a war with Al Qaeda and Iraq, it was not the reason for the war but Al Qaeda had decided that after the fall of Sadam and the chaos afterward they had an opportunity to strike at the United States and they declared Iraq as the central front on the war on terror. It was their understanding that this would be the great challenge to the United States and for a year and a half it looked as if they were succeeding. They are now on the run. If America stops, as the Democrats advocate, if they give up the war and allow Al Qaeda to re- establish themselves in Anbar in Baghdad and elsewhere, it will be a catastrophic defeat for the United States and the world taken out the jaws of victory.
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Al Qaeda is now at the point where, if it were defeated, as it is on the way of being defeated in Iraq, it will be a humiliation for Osama and his cohorts. They have declared it the central front recruited Sunnis, co-religionists, co-Sectarians, aggrieved against the United States and they will have witnessed their own co- religionist joining with the infidel against them and defeating them. That is an extremely important event in the war on terror. It would be entirely in jeopardy were America to withdraw and, as a collateral effect, it would be the collapse of central government in Iraq, which is the one hope for a reasonable democratic representative government in the region struggling to establish itself. Abandoning it would not only be a humanitarian disaster, it would be a strategic catastrophe, self-inflicted unnecessarily and that’s why America must elect John McCain who will not allow that to happen. Thank you very much.
Doucet: Thank you very much Charles Krauthammer. For a psychiatrist in remission you did very good indeed, and as a political scientist even better. Now against the motion, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke.
Richard Holbrooke: Charles, regarding Harry Truman, if he were running today he’d be even older than McCain. I am delighted to be part of this panel and I especially thank Peter Munk for this inspired idea. I know of no comparable event that’s yet taken place in the United States. I hope our own electorate takes the election as seriously as Canada does. I am honored to be part of the panel with my friend and colleague Samantha Power. She and I are supporting different candidates in the primaries, but we will be united behind the Democratic nominee. We also share our firm opposition to this resolution which we’re debating tonight. I’m also pleased to debate such worthy antagonists as Charles Krauthammer, the author of famous 1990 article on foreign affairs which proclaimed the post-Cold War era
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was America’s uni-polar moment. Things seemed not to work out as precisely as he predicted. And Niall Ferguson, a man for all seasons, whom I hope, trust and expect will see the error of his ways next year when the Democrats will listen to their critics, and I speak as someone who served every Democratic president from Kennedy on. We take seriously what other people say, unlike the current administration. The question before the house tonight is simple: is the world is a far safer place with a Republican in the White House. This is an astonishing concept for obvious reasons. Based on the record of the last seven years, our opponents tonight want you to believe that having weakened the United States throughout the world their party should be given another chance. One of the two bases his position solely on the fact that it’s John McCain or he wouldn’t be here tonight. I’ll return to that in a minute. The other says he would only be on the other side if the Democrat were Harry Truman. This administration has done nothing on climate change, with catastrophic damage to the planet. They mismanaged Afghanistan in internationally supported effort in which Canada has borne such a disproportionate burden. I was in Afghanistan last month. The NATO commander General McNiall, went out of his way once again to praise the Canadians and I commend the bipartisan efforts of the Canadian government to extend their participation to 2012 and I hope that we’re worthy of your confidence. But in order to be worthy of your confidence the United States and it’s allies must change it’s strategy in Afghanistan. They have allowed Iran to grow into a major international threat. They’ve watched North Korea go from one nuclear weapon to six to ten, based on the estimates. They have watched and presided over a long steady decline in America’s standing throughout most of the world from our allies to our adversaries. They have allowed America to be fined by the most of abhorrent events. Words that have entered the English language in the international lexicon as short hands for something that does not represent our great nation: Abu Graib, Guantanamo, torture. This administration openly opposed the bills on
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torture in the Congress, what an extraordinary thing to do. They presided over a spectacular decline in the strength of the dollar and the weakening of our economic position internationally. They’ve done far too little to deal with dictators in such desperate places such as Burma, Zimbabwe, Sudan, and elsewhere, and you’ll notice I haven’t yet mentioned Iraq. The Republican argument is quite simple. It’s based entirely on fear. Fear of the Democrats, misrepresentations of their past and misrepresentations of their current positions. They say “we have messed up Iraq so far, but we can’t let the Democrats take over because they’ll make it worse.” That is the core of the two arguments you’ve heard from my distinguished colleagues to the left here and this is the only time they’re ever to the left. Yet all they offer is more of the same, particularly in Iraq. I do want to note that Senator McCain is the only Republican who has said that climate change is an important issue and therefore, and I know how important this is to Canadians, at least climate change will be a major change in policy. Although the candidates do differ on important details, on the key issue that Charles Krauthammer has focused on, Iraq, there is a tremendous difference and Iraq will be the defining difference of this election in my view. I respectfully do not agree with you Niall, that it will be the economy for a simple political reason: those people who will vote the economy have already made up their mind and that will favor the Democrats. The undecided voters will be faced with exactly the choice Charles posed and he has posed it precisely the way Senator McCain has, but I respectfully disagree with his conclusions. Now here is what the two democrats still standing, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, have said, if you watch the television you would think that they are having a major disagreement, but the differences are far less than the structural similarities. They both say that they will start withdrawals of combat troops shortly after taking office. Words have meaning and they will move to remove all combat troops in an orderly and careful manner. The Pentagon says this would take twelve to sixteen months at a minimum given the difficulty. You can’t go out through Basra anymore which is being taken over by the Iranians
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and let’s be clear on that, Iran is taking over Basra and it’s unreported by the press. They can’t, they’ll have to get out by air through Turkey. It’ll be very difficult and it’ll be done very carefully. Neither of the two Democrats have given a date certain for full withdrawal of all American military personnel in Iraq. Notwithstanding the impression of deliberateness put forward by our two worthy opponents here, both have said that if it’s the right thing to do they would leave an unspecified residual presence to deal with the very terrorist problem that Charles Krauthammer referred to. A problem which he neglected to mention did not exist before the invasion of Iraq and which was caused by the chaos created by the policy he so strongly supported. Both have said that this is what they would do and above all both have said “put Iraq in a regional contest and bring in the neighbors.” The bad news is that one of those neighbors is Iran, but to settle and stabilize Iraq you must have a political solution. You can’t do it militarily and this effort has never been seriously tried by this administration. Thank you.
Doucet: Thank you.
Not bad, well spoken, well argued, maybe a few of you changing your mind? I’ve got a lot of questions, and I hope you also have a lot of questions. You’re not here to just sit and enjoy the ROM, you’re here to take part in the debate. Let’s start: Iraq is the defining issue. What have we heard tonight? Well, General Petraeus, probably the best person to tell us what’s happening in Iraq, described what has happened there so far as fragile and reversible. Also, Ambassador Crocker has talked about progress as being agonizingly slow. Charles Krauthammer has already declared victory: astonishing success, astonishing changes. Niall Ferguson, the same: the surge has proved the Cassandras wrong. It’s sort of McCain-nesque declaring victory, victory in Iraq.
Krauthammer:
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If I could take that on, I would like to do that. That is a lovely misrepresentation of our position.
Doucet: “Astonishing changes,” I quote you, Charles Krauthammer.
Krauthammer: The changes are astonishing because no one anticipated that Al Qaeda would be driven out of Anbar.
Doucet: And into the Diala province, into Diala and into Baghdad.
Krauthammer: It’s not into Diala and it’s not in Baghdad, it’s in Mosul. Now, astonishing changes have occurred and it is precisely because they are fragile and precisely because they are reversible. That the democratic idea of withdrawing on a timetable regardless of conditions on the ground is a prescription for disaster. The difference between the Democrats and McCain is that the McCain says I want to try and entertain withdrawals but only on conditions that meet our requirements, only if conditions on the ground allow it, because the situation is reversible and fragile. So you have made my argument Lyse. It is precisely because there is not a faite a compli, we have not declared victory. The difference between now and ‘06 is that ‘06 you could have plausibly argued that the war was either lost or unwinnable, you cannot plausibly argue either right now. The Democrats have persisted in a policy based on the assumption that it is easier lost or unwinnable, and they are impervious to the empirical evidence to the contrary.
Doucet: Well, why is it that John McCain seems to be about the only Vietnam War veteran in the Senate who has reached the conclusion that you can win this war; that by putting in more troops and staying longer that you’ll ultimately prevail. Why is it that he is the only one among the veterans that carries the haggles of
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the world. Okay, politics not withstanding, they say “listen John, sometimes you have to decide that actually winning is not possible.”
Ferguson: This actually illustrates a critical issue here, namely that McCain is consistently underskewed the character of this war. He’s understood that in 2003 it was a walk over. There was no house to house fighting in Baghdad, it was exactly as he foresaw. In 2004, he said there are not enough troops here, we’re going to lose control. In 2005, he was extremely critical of Donald Rumsfeld handling the situation. Let me just address the point that you raised about the Vietnam veterans. One of the points that McCain has made very well is that we have already tried troop reductions. The recipe that Richard Holbrooke has offered us tonight was tried in 2006. We reduced troop numbers and the results were absolutely calamitous. When we brought them back up to their level at the end of 2005, which is all that the surge did by the way, just as McCain predicted, the violence dropped and I don’t think “astonishing” is the wrong word. You look at the data from the Brookings Institute, the monthly death toll, as a result of troop reductions, went up to four thousand fatalities. It is now down into the low hundreds.
Doucet: It was actually a thousand in March, I reported on it and a thousand in April.
Ferguson: That is still a reduction.
Doucet: Your numbers against mine.
Ferguson: From four thousand to that level is a major breakthrough. That is not defeat and in that sense I think McCain has been consistently right.
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Doucet: Okay, you know Obama well, Samantha Power, when was the last time Obama was in Baghdad?
Power: 2006.
Doucet: He doesn’t go there a lot though; John McCain has been many times, Hilary Clinton has been there many times, if Iraq is the supreme challenge why should we entrust the future of Iraq to him?
Power: He’s the only mainstream candidate, and certainly the only candidate left in the race, who opposed the war in Iraq back in October 2002. If you go back to his speech in October 2002, you will not see some anti-war jargon or the statement of some idealog trying to pander to a progressive sector of the purple state of Illinois, but actually somebody who foresaw, very much unlike John McCain, who did say Niall, we will it easily two months before the war began and this is not a measure of…
Ferguson: ...what happens to them.
Doucet: Yes.
Power: In any event…
Doucet: But he doesn’t seem to have any faith at all in the military side of the equation in Iraq. I mean we can argue a lot and debate about how far the search has been a success so far, but it is clear it is having an impact and Barack Obama doesn’t even want to talk about that. Here he is, he’ll be the Commander in Chief, and on day one he’s going to immediately withdraw, which some people would say is precipitous.
Power: He has never said precipitous withdrawal…
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Obama was the first person to come up and say Musharraf is an unreliable partner. We’re giving him a billion dollars of aid without asking where the assistance is going. A lot of it is being used against his own people. The very force is secular, immoderate forces that we want to see prosper in Pakistan. He got Iraq right. He was the first person to say, “we want to open up with Cuba, at one point is there a statute of limitations on a failed policy.” There are a series of judgments and evidence that he does not “focus group” his way to policy decisions in the way that other candidates do. Now to your second question, which is whether or not he understates the value of military force, I don’t think he does at all. He is prepared to leave a residual force in Iraq to deal with Al Qaeda. He doesn’t believe that Al Qaeda will simply vanish into thin air in the absence of a U.S. troop presence. It’s unclear where that force will be based and how large it will be. He is somebody who has never taken military force off the table with regard to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. He is somebody who has said that if Musharraf is unable or unwilling to deal with Al Qaeda in the north western provinces of Pakistan, the United States will have to go after them. So I think what you see is actually discerning judgment where he looks across a range of national security challenges and is able to pick and choose and not see military tool as the only tool in a vast American foreign policy tool box.
Holbrooke: I want to address the issue of dialogue with Iran. This is really a huge issue. President Bush initially said he would not talk to either North Korea or Iran. As a result, the North Koreans made a significant increase to their arsenal. He reversed himself under advice from Secretary of State Rice in 2006 and began a six party dialogue, the other parties being the Chinese as the host of the six party talks, Russia, the two Koreas, the United States and Japan. He put a very skilled professional diplomat in charge, Christopher Hill, and as a result of that dialogue some progress has been made. Some people didn’t think it is enough and interestingly enough, President Bush’s major critics are former members of his own administration on the right,
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like John Bolten who have called it a sell-out. Nonetheless, the North Koreans turned over 18,000 pages of documents on their acquisition and use of plutonium to the United States last week. Those are now being analyzed by the intelligence community and based on that judgment, the President will decide whether to precede down the road towards a progress with North Korea. On the other hand, he has still not done anything in regard to Iran. He still insists on talking to Tehran through two channels, neither of which fills the needs that I mentioned in my earlier statement. First, and most important, is Iran’s very dangerous nuclear programs. The United States speaks to Tehran through the voice of Javier Solana, who carries messages back and forth between Washington and Tehran. Now many of you in this room are distinguished diplomats like David Wright, who was ambassador to NATO from Canada, Alan Gottlieb, who’s here, you all know Javier Solana, he’s a good man, but why in God’s name, would the greatest and the most powerful nation on Earth, think that they are being somehow being stronger by having their message sent to Tehran through a European who has a different style of talking and will obviously not convey our position. The second channel is at the ambassador level in Baghdad where Ambassador Crocker is political counselor and has an intermittent dialogue with the Iranians about their outrageous, murderous behavior in fueling bomb attacks and road mines against Americans. That’s not a dialogue and the position of the Republicans, including at least one of our worthy opponents here who says that any talk at all would be a sign of weakness. It is simply not true that negotiations or discussions in and of themselves represent weakness. Weakness is conveyed inside the dialogue and not as a result of talking to people.
Ferguson: With all due respect to Richard, there’s no point in talking for talking’s sake to a rival power which is in a position of such obvious strength at this point. The critical thing that happened when the United States made it’s opening to China, was that China’s position had been fundamentally altered strategically by the
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breakdown of its relations by the Soviet Union. That is what opened the opportunity for Richard Nixon. There is no comparable situation today, nothing has changed. On the contrary, the position of Iran in relative terms and balance of power terms is relatively good. Economically, they have difficulties. Domestically, Iran is by no means as anti-American as other countries in the region. There is a potential for some kind of transformation in relations between the U.S. and Iran but it won’t happen by Barack Obama hopping on a plane and hoping to be welcomed with open arms. That’s not how diplomacy works.
Doucet: But if seven years of doing it the Bush way didn’t work, why should more years of McCain doing it the same way work?
Ferguson: The reality is that the option of using a literary force against Iran needs to be there and it needs to be credible. If the Iranians pursue their nuclear arms program, which the International Atomic Energy Agency today says that they show no sign of abandoning, the United States cannot say, “we only want to talk, we won’t bomb you, we promise.” There has to be credibility of the United States and that’s why the parallel I drew a moment ago with Nixon and China is interesting. It wasn’t a democrat who was able to make that single most important departure in American Cold War foreign policy. It was a Republican. Why? Because Richard Nixon had the credibility to make that opening in a way that only in my view, John McCain has. I certainly don’t think Barack Obama has a snowball’s chance in hell of an opening to Tehran. The Iranians will be celebrating if he is elected.
Doucet: Richard Holbrooke, a short rejoinder.
Holbrooke: Niall makes an important political point which I do not dispute. It’s easier for somebody on a conservative side to reach out to the other side. On the other hand he just said we shouldn’t do it and I want to underscore…
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Ferguson: No, no, Richard, can I correct you? When the time is right, but not now. Not from a position of weakness.
Holbrooke: Niall, let me remind you that it was a Republican President, the hero of the Republicans, who sent his National Security Advisor to Tehran with a cake with a key in it. Let’s not forget which administration reached out in a humiliating and disgraceful way. The real core issue is that Senator McCain has not taken the position Niall has outlined. Charles has been very notably silent, because as suggested earlier, I do not believe he shares the view we just heard.
Krauthammer: Well, my silence was a sign of politeness, but now that it’s been misinterpreted I retract my silence and I shall speak to this issue. This whole argument is ridiculous about speaking with Iran or the others. In our history, you sometimes speak with enemies, you sometimes don’t. It depends on the conditions. Obama says he was asked, “would you be willing to meet separately without precondition during the first year of your administration in Washington or elsewhere with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea?” He said, “not only would I, but the fact that the Bush administration refuses to do something comparable is a disgrace and ridiculous.” Now I think this was a gaff off the cuff he was not prepared for and now he’s stuck with it. So he turned a gaff into a policy and a policy into a doctrine. It is absurd if there are conditions, indications from Iran of a change, as there were indications coming from China when Kissinger went. Then you go through the eighteen months of preparation that Kissinger did, and you try to negotiate an agreement in advance so that the Shanghai communiqué is basically written by the time Nixon arrives. But the idea that a President in his first year will meet without precondition with the leader of Iran and these other rogues is absurd. It is a gift from the
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United States. It’s an utter mistake. That does not mean you don’t have back channel contacts as we obviously have. It does not mean that we don’t have the British and the French and the Germans negotiating on our behalf as they have for three years. They know our position on nuclear, on uranium enrichment. Is there anything that Obama is going to tell them that they have not heard? And if there is he should tell us. What exactly is he’s going to offer that’s new? The reason that summits are dangerous is because once you hold a summit everybody expects a result. There’s pressure to have a result, and results are a result of concessions. What concessions have the Iranians offered that are even conceivable on their Iranian regiment? None. What concessions will Obama offer in return to entice them? Does he believe that his eloquence alone will induce Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions? This is a ridiculous answer of someone who is a novice in the field. He’s stuck with it. It will now be a policy and if he’s elected he’s going to have to go ahead and do this to the injury of the United States and its interests.
Doucet: I want to get Samantha Power, because the point made by Charles is one that actually Hillary Clinton described Obama as naïve; John McCain described him as naïve and reckless.
Power: First of all, I think Charles has the question correct and had the answer correct where Obama said “I would,” but then he allotted it and changed it to, “I would be willing, conceivably, to meet within the first year.” Obama has at no point has said, “I pledge to meet, unconditionally, with President Ahmadinejad.” What he has said is that if it would advance the U.S. interest, he is open to the possibility, and it is irresponsible when U.S. lives are on the line in Iraq and Iran has such a major role to play in the region to rule that possibly out. It’s not the same as saying you’re going to meet without preparation or you’re not going to think pragmatically about what a negotiation achieves and the upsides and downsides, both of which could be considerable.
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Threatening the use of military force against Ahmadinejad, which both Senator McCain and the current administration have done repeatedly, strengthened Ahmadinejad’s hand domestically. He has almost nothing to point to in terms of economics, deliverables for the Iranian people. It has done nothing to detour the enrichment of uranium, which is now occurring at five times the pace. I mean, Niall your rosy picture of Iran notwithstanding, I would think that this would concern you. Finally, when the United States has gone to other countries in the international system and said “let us contain Iran, this enrichment intelligence is deeply worrying,” people have basically yawned. You cannot have containment regime in a more multi-polar world than we live in. The United States is the only country that believes it’s saying about the threat that Iran poses. Negotiating, not a meeting for meeting sake; areas of overlap where you could conceivably make progress or remind the world that Iran is the problem and the United States is not.
Krauthammer: The correct answer to the question, would you meet unconditionally with these rogues as President, is a simple no. That’s not the answer he gave and now we have Samantha and the others who have to clean up after him saying, “well, really we’re going to meet, not with preconditions, you have to understand, with preparations.” So the word “preparation” now is going to become a substitute to try to undo the mistake he made with preconditions. A president does not meet unconditionally, without condition. A president does not go and shake hands with Ahmadinejad or Ashaudis without precondition. That’s the right answer. Hilary gave the right answer in that context, McCain wouldn’t think twice, and Obama obviously was unprepared and he stumbled and now we’re stuck with it.
Doucet: We had a little discussion trying to understand Barack Obama. Help us, Niall and Charles, to understand John McCain.
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Ferguson: Well I think there’s no question that in McCain you see the two streams of foreign policy tradition, realism and idealism coming together. The idea that you could have a league of democracies as a compliment to existing institutions in the international system is obviously an idealistic idea. It’s one in fact I’m sure Richard would acknowledge that has it’s antecedence in the Clinton era, but at the same time, and more importantly, John McCain understands that such ideals can only be viable if they are based on a credible constellation of forces. That is why if you look at John McCain’s foreign affairs article from the end of last year or his most recent speech in which he said, “these are the things I want to look back on in 2013 that I’ve achieved.” He makes it very clear that diplomacy, effective directed particularly at Russia and China will play an integral part in his foreign policy. George Bush didn’t really know how to spell diplomacy when he was elected. It was not regarded by him or by Donald Rumsfeld as necessary for the über-power that the United States had become. John McCain sees statecraft and diplomacy as central and only after those have failed, to get the Russians and the Chinese to recognize the need to contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions, will there be any consideration of military options. That’s the difference it seems to me between McCain and Bush, and it’s also the difference between McCain and Obama.
Doucet: You mention about the league of democracies. You say it’s a compliment, but some people say this is the United States flying in the face of multi-laterals and going around the United Nations which doesn’t include China.
Ferguson: Well, the United Nations does not have a tremendously impressive record on acting in the face of humanitarian catastrophes and I’m sure it wouldn’t have escaped Samantha’s notice that in recent interviews he’s given, John McCain has said if we’re to take any action to stop the genocide in Darfur, it will have to be through some kind of coalition of democracies because it’s clear that the Chinese don’t give a damn about human rights in Sudan or for that matter human
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rights in their own country. That’s the kind of action which I would have expected Samantha to welcome. I sometimes worry that maybe Samantha, you’re on the wrong side of this and maybe you’ll see reason and see that McCain is the one who can make that kind of humanitarian intervention happen, because he believes in something more than rhetoric.
Doucet: This idea of a league of democracies, Richard?
Holbrooke: As Niall had already said, this idea exists today. It was put into place by Bill Clinton in 1998, there’s a headquarters in Warsaw. The Bush administration refused to touch it because it had Clinton fingerprints on it and the people advocating it were all liberal Democrats. I’m delighted John McCain joined that cause. Let me say a word about John McCain, who I’ve known for twenty years and I consider a friend. There are many areas of agreement between John McCain and both Democrats. In the case of Hillary Clinton and John McCain, they serve on the Armed Services Committee, they travel together, they like each other and it is alleged that they’ve even had a drink or two together in places like Estonia. Although they claim that what happens in Estonia stays in Estonia. But, I want to stress, that there are wide areas of agreement and there should be, because we’re all talking about America. All of us on this panel believe that the United States must regain it’s leadership role in the world, if we don’t the world suffers. My own view is that we want leadership without hegemony, but the Bush administration has offered hegemony without leadership. I do not disagree that McCain is the least bad of the nine offers the Republican electorate were offered. The defining issue is Iraq. On the issue of the United Nations and the league of democracies, it is a very difficult subject. I can tell by the applause in the room many of you share the feeling that the U.N. is a negative factor in world affairs. The fact is that the
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United States and a few of our allies, including Canada, created the U.N. in 1945 to solve a set of problems, and the key to the U.N. and the context that we’re talking about today is the Security Council in which we gave ourselves a veto to protect our interest. We’ve used that veto more than all the other four countries of the veto combined, and we’ve used it for a variety of reasons. This administration was schizophrenic from day one on the United Nations. They undermined, it underfunded it and appointed as one of the ambassadors a man who declared that it wasn’t an organization that was fit to exist. He did this by proposing reforms that he knew were not possible to achieve. I was an ambassador at the U.N. for several years. It is a deeply flawed institution. However, we are still better off with it, than without it. Our job, and Canada’s indispensable to this, because Canada has always been a leading country in the U.N., the number two man in the United Nations office in Afghanistan is one of the great diplomats in the world, Canadian Chris Alexander; our job is to improve the U.N. To break down the ironlock of the so- called G77. These developing countries think it’s a punching bag, to give it the right amount of money and leverage that money for reforms and action. When the U.N. won’t act, as it wouldn’t act in Kosovo, we together with the Canadians and our NATO allies, went around the U.N., liberated the Kosovo Albanians in 1999 with seventy-eight days of NATO bombing, and then went back to the U.N. and got everyone including the Russians, to agree to what we’ve done. That’s what we have to do with the U.N. We have to make it better, and not undermine it. The league of democracies, I’m all for, but do not think, as Senator McCain has suggested, that it can be a substitute for the U.N. Even our closest allies, including you here in Canada, will not agree to that proposal. I see someone nodding; I can’t tell who it is, but I assure you, it’s a man who deeply believes a stronger U.N. means a stronger international system.
Doucet: Let’s bring it back to leadership. Charles, let’s bring you in here. John McCain feels this is useful forum, this league of democracies. He’s said that if
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there was a league of democracies they could try to impose sanctions on Sudan and force Sudan to accept peacekeeping troops. Now, what does this tell us about the kind of leadership John McCain would show?
Krauthammer: I’ve been in favour of a league of democracies for a long time and unlike Richard, I’m explicit as to why I want to do it. The U.N. is useless: counterproductive, injurious, it’s almost a fiction – I wish it was a fiction. A league of democracies would be a way to undo the mistake we made sixty years ago imagining that universal international institutions are the way to go. “Universal” includes rogue states like the Russians and the Chinese who stopped action in Sudan, and Darfur, and elsewhere. Nothing ought to be expected out of the United Nations and the idea that somehow the Bush administration inadequacies are the reason it hasn’t done stuff is ridiculous. The U.N. is inherently dysfunctional because it was established as a coalition of the winning states in the Second World War, and within a year they were at odds with each other and introduced a paralysis which has lasted sixty years. If you want to act multilaterally in the world, then you establish a league of democracies with the understanding that over time you would hope it would displace the U.N. Americans are too emotionally attached to the idea of the U.N. to ever withdraw, which is why I think a league of democracies is a clever way to do it, without ever withdrawing. But I want to say, that when you were earlier speaking of John McCain and dismissively said that he was for the rollback of rogue states...
Doucet: I wasn’t dismissing, I quoted him.
Krauthammer: You quoted in a way that, if I may act as a psychiatrist for a moment, after all I am board certified, there was a note of skepticism that even a non-
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professional would have detected, and I find this astonishing. What’s wrong with a rollback of rogue states? Canada is a country that is distinguished in its history for having invented peacekeeping, having devoted itself to international institutions to try the bring peace into areas that nobody had imagined. I landed in Pearson airport and we know why Pearson is remembered: he’s the man who invented Canada’s devotion to the idea of human rights. The United States has taken action in Iraq against the second worst man on the planet. A man who had committed genocide on his own people, a man who used weapons of mass destruction, chemical attacks on innocent civilians, a man who had committed the greatest ecological crime on history by opening the ____ after the Gulf War into the Arabian Gulf, the Persian Gulf. This is a man who drained the swamps in Southern Iraq in order to starve and destroy the marsh Arabs, an ecological and a human rights catastrophe of the first order. The United States acted to depose him and bring a democracy that stayed. Now you can argue that the United States have mismanaged the occupation and I would agree, but somehow to question the United States for having undertaking an action that I would imagine Canada with it’s long history would applaud for the nobility of it’s objectives, is to me astonishing. If you can rollback a rogue state, you ought to do it in the name of humanity.
Power: I just can’t resist on the topic of the Darfur and on the topic of the U.N.. First of all, Niall and Charles, go back to Rwanda which is the greatest emblem of the U.N. failure on peacekeeping of the last…
Krauthammer: And the United States under the Presidency of ..
Power: Well, this is my point. Take the extermination of eight hundred thousand people, one Canadians know so well because of General Dallaire, it was the Belgians, a democracy the last time I checked, who withdrew at the first sign of
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casualties. It was the United States under President Clinton, who went to the U.N. Security Council, as you just said and insisted on the withdrawal of the peacekeepers from under General Dallaire. Why? Because the United States was afraid that if the peacekeepers stayed, the U.S. would somehow be called upon, it would be mission ______Somalia syndrome, et cetera. The only countries currently willing to send peacekeepers to Darfur as part of the U.N. force were authorized because of belated high level diplomatic pressure on China, where they finally acquiesced the importance of peacekeeping force. The only countries who put boots on the ground in Darfur are developing countries and most of them are not fully democratic countries. The notion that creating an alliance of democracies, however worthy is going to deal with the central problem, which is that democracies fundamentally are not yet interested in baring the collective security burden on the planet right now, dealing with these humanitarian challenges, I think is to focus on institutions is an alibi. You could create as many new institutions as you want and unless you change what political priorities actually are in these places, you’re not going to get anywhere. League of democracies is fine; there’s a lot of good that can come out of it, fine, but think about the central challenges on the rise in the 21st century: Global warming, not democratic warming, global warming; terrorism, the very countries that we need counter terrorism, intelligence co-operation, are countries that are not democratic. The U.N. is the symptom and is always going to be the symptom of the worlds, namely the one-hundred and ninety-two countries within the world. Their conscious, whenever it peeks and ebbs, and the polarization that is tearing this planet apart right now, we’ve got to deal with the polarization and we can do it bilaterally, but the more you have international legitimacy, the more that you can pool resources from countries that don’t see their entire national interest at stake. You might be able to peel off a sliver of national interest. Right now there are a hundred and seventeen thousand peacekeepers active in the world, and I’ve lost track now of the number of missions, twenty-one missions or something, around the world. All but, I think two or three thousand of
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them, are from non-Western countries. To think that it is the developing world that is the only problem right now with major humanitarian calamities, is really to pass the buck.
Krauthammer: But with all due respect Samantha, it’s just a set up. The reason that hundreds of thousands died in Rwanda was not institutional deficiencies or that the Belgians did not step up. It was that the United States did nothing and that’s the problem. The United States is what moves the world, and you can plead all you want about getting Congolese into Sudan. Are you willing to support an American invasion of Darfur? That would save them. Would you do it or would you not? The answer is no, then you’re not serious, if the answer is yes, then let’s do it. What we did in Iraq is to save hundreds of thousands who had been slaughtered by Saddam over a decade and all we get from critics is that there was a war for oil. It was a war about Abu Graib. It was a war of liberation exactly comparable to what you want to do, or at least imply what you want to do in Sudan. But when it happens in Iraq, all we hear is the negative about American intentions. If there’s a country that will move the world, it has to be the United States given its strength and capacity and if you’re serious about that you want to advocate more intervention and not less.
Power: What astounds me is that in the wake of Iraq, you are not even a tiny bit ____ by playing out your own moral principles and your moral convictions on the backs of American soldiers and on the backs of the Iraqi people and victims in other countries. Do I support a U.S. invasion of Darfur? I do not, and I’ll tell you why not. There’s plenty of things the United States can do in order to ensure that twenty six thousand peacekeepers get deployed to Darfur within six months and that the two million people in the camps actually manage to live to tomorrow. Do I support U.S. invasion, no, why? Because one sector of the American society is
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baring the entire national security burden. The military is broken, we don’t have readiness to respond to anything that hits us on our own shores.
Krauthammer: So if there weren’t a war in Iraq you’d be in favor? Would you be?
Power: May I finish? Would I be in favor of waging a third war in, let me finish, a third war in 8 years, against an Islamic country? No. Why? Because of U.S.’s national security interest and the interest of the refugees. The only thing worse than the atrocities being perpetrated against people in Darfur, and having been there many times I can tell you about many of those atrocities, the only thing worse is when you combine atrocity and Jihad and inflict upon the people in Darfur what we have inflicted upon the people of Iraq.
Krauthammer: I’m not in favor of another invasion. I’m trying to illicit a sense of seriousness and unless one believes that the United States is willing to act and that America is justified in acting, I can’t it see how you can be serious about this relief for the people of Darfur. Sudan has just started trouble in the southern part of Sudan in a region in which we had imagined there was a treaty, there was an agreement, there would peace. Just several days ago there’s been new trouble in the south because of the discovery of oil there. If you want to be serious about Sudan, which is protected by China, which has interest by China, you have to be willing to act seriously and that’s not what I see.
Doucet: Niall you advised John McCain on foreign policy. Would you advise John McCain that’s the right way to go regarding China?
Ferguson: Well, it’s clearly extremely difficult for the United States to contemplate any kind of unilateral or even multilateral military intervention at this point in
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Sudan. That’s partly because the United States keep militarily overstretched and that’s why John McCain very sensibly argues that one of the things that he would do as President is to increase the size of American military forces, which is really the only way that one can make these sorts of statements credible. But I think that the critical point here is to stop picking over the bones of past wars and ask ourselves the question about the shape of the strategic world to come. Let’s look ahead. At the moment it’s Africa you worry about, because the population growth in Africa is creating a huge Malthusian crisis there. In a forty to fifty year timeframe, it is China. It is China that is scrambling for natural resources anywhere they can be found in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the effects of that will pose a major challenge to the strategic security not just to the United States but of all developed economies. We cannot regard the world as heading in a new era of cozy, touchy, feely arguments at the U.N. about climate change. Something is happening far more serious that is indifferent to climate change. There is a scramble for natural resources at the moment which resembles the late 19th century in it’s intensity except that we’re not scrambling. We need a President who understands these sorts of great geopolitical shifts of power and who realizes how high the stakes are going to be in the next four to eight years. It is going to become far more apparent than it has hitherto been. The kind of challenge that China poses, if you believe the projections that China’s GDP will equal that of the United States by 2027. This is the new world. Arguments about who was right and who was wrong over the invasion of Iraq in 2003 are in some ways irrelevant now. The issue in this clash over commodities is as big an issue as the world has ever confronted and I don’t really hear any credible answers to the question of how the United States deals with these challenges from Barack Obama, whereas John McCain makes it very clear. He sees the strategic ambition of China in the far east, just as he understands the way in which Russia is using it’s energy power to intimidate our allies in western Europe. These are the issues that are
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really going to be critical in this next presidency. You cannot afford to have a novice dealing with issues of this importance.
Doucet: I’m going to pose a question from the audience. Richard, I’ll direct this to you. Audience member Cam Debroita, asks “Mr. Obama wants to talk, but this is a tough world. Can he throw a punch if need be?”
Holbrooke: Based on his extraordinarily skillful campaign, I think the answer is self- evidently yes and I speak as a person supporting Senator Clinton. He’s run a terrific campaign tactically and strategically and he’s shown that he’s tough enough to dish it out with senior Democrats and now he’s taking on McCain one on one, and it’s very impressive. Is he tough enough to be President? Yes. Anyone who survives the Presidential marathon ought to be tough enough; unless they happen to have won by one vote in the Supreme Court and their father was President. Charles, I want to make a quick comment on Darfur. Samantha’s right, nobody’s advocating U.S. troops on the ground for all the reasons she said and many more, but the United States proudly led the fourteen to nothing China- abstaining resolution in the Security Council that was going to send peacekeepers, after which we did nothing to implement it. Each time someone asked the President why we weren’t doing anything in Darfur, his answer was “it’s the UN’s fault, they don’t have any helicopters.” They need maybe twenty- five helicopters, we could do that, there are many other things we could do. Final point, I find it sort of ironic that you would instruct Samantha who wrote the definitive book on Rwanda about what the Clinton administration failure was. As a person who served President Clinton with pride, I can tell you that it was a low point of the administration and by the way, Bill Clinton very well knows it.
Krauthammer: The point I wanted to make is not to make a partisan point. It is to say that those who care about these humanitarian crises have to step up and be
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serious. Pushing it off on institutions like the U.N., which have been proven ineffective time and again, or on peacekeepers that often are corrupt and involved in rape and other criminal activity, which is even more horrific than the diseases it’s trying to cure, is not a serious issue. I’m not in favor of invading anybody. I’m saying if you’re serious about this, show us and make a case.
Doucet: Okay, Charles, I’m afraid that even though you said you’re a psychiatrist in remission, the audience wants to use your psychiatric skills. We have a question from Alan Williams of Toronto. He writes: “to what do you attribute the kind of emotional appeal that Senator Obama exerts on people all over the Western world?”
Krauthammer: I think his appeal is remarkable and a tribute to his astonishing skills, his intellectual nimbleness, his attractiveness and his ability to rise from obscurity in three or four years to dominate the American scene I would attribute all of that largely to him. There’s of course an element, in that America has been looking for a long time to atone for one of it’s greatest sins, which is without a doubt, slavery, Jim Crow, and racism. When Colin Powell was flirting with the idea of the Presidency in the late-nineties, there was a tremendous outpouring. I think there are many people of goodwill in America who would love to see a vindication of the civil rights revolution, and in some way an expiation of our sins in the past, by having an African American as President. I know I would like to see the United States reach a point where an African American is President of the United States. The question of course is, which African American? Thomas Sowell, who’s one of the most astute writers in America, an economist and a philosopher, who himself is African American, raised that issue in a column just a few weeks ago. He said he would support someone of his race if they were the kind of person who reflected his values. People have talked about race being an issue in the campaign and obviously it is. There’s a finite number of Americans who are racist and would
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not support a black candidate. I think there’s a finite number of Americans who would like to support a black candidate, all things being equal. I’m not sure which of those numbers is the larger, but I would hope and expect that the former is a larger number and I think it would be a great thing for America. The fact that he is the front runner in this campaign is going to raise that issue front and center, and I hope that we’ll come out of this election with a healthier understanding and perception about race in America than we did at the beginning.
Doucet: Thank you. We have a question from the floor from the Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, Michael Ignatieff.
Michael Ignatieff: Thank you very much. This is an extraordinary debate and I think we all feel grateful for the participants. This is a question for the Republican side of the question. You have raised the issue of moral seriousness and you’ve raised the issue of humanitarian intervention and you’ve said if you’re serious about Sudan you go. What I’m entirely unclear about is the principles that John McCain, or the Republican side, would use to decide when and where and how to intervene when there’s ethnic cleansing, genocidal massacre or as we’ve recently seen, a regime like Burma forbidding the entry of food aid resulting in the starving of people. You’ve got to tell me how you make the decisions here, because the world will not be a safer place if it’s just strong feeling. You’ve got to tell me how you’re going to decide. There is an existing framework developed in Canada called the “responsibility to protect,” which sets out guidelines. I’m not trying to sell you on it, but at least it’s a clear set of guidelines. So what are your criteria for intervention across the gambit of what intervention can mean?
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Ferguson: Michael, I’m puzzled to as to why you only ask us that question because it’s by no means clear that Democrats have a straightforward yardstick for making those decisions. John McCain was recently asked the same question by Matt Byers from the New York Times Magazine and he gave, I thought, a very thoughtful reply in which he made it clear that he saw no way in which the United States could randomly or universally intervene in humanitarian catastrophes because of the crucial need to have the support of the American electorate for action taken involving the lives of American troops. The American electorate is not about to become a global cop intervening in any country whose leaders are performing horrendous acts against its population. That would be a completely unrealistic and Utopian project. Natural interest has to be a factor and public legitimacy has to be a factor. I think John McCain understands that and there is no other way in which a responsible and experienced politician could make that kind of decision. You have written about this as eloquently as anybody I know and have grappled over the last decade in a way which I’ve found profoundly influential and moving with this fundamental dilemma of democratic politics. We do empathize with the plight of the people of Zimbabwe, a country not mentioned this evening. We, I hope, feel abhorrence towards Robert Mugabe’s authentically evil tyranny in that country, but can we credibly imagine any American president regardless of his partisan allegiance, sending troops into that country to be accused as he inevitably would be, of a neo-colonial project? This is a difficult thing. This calls for judgment on a case by case basis and I think that is something that John McCain has shown clearly he understands.
Holbrooke: Lyse, I want to point out the facts of Zimbabwe, which by the way I did mention. President Bush went to Johannesburg and stood next to Tubule and Becky and said, we will talk to Mugabe through you. That’s not leadership. We all know that only yesterday President Becky did suggest for the first time that maybe things in Zimbabwe weren’t going so well. He did that because he
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suddenly discovered that the Zimbabwe refugees are destabilizing South Africa, which everyone else who’s been down there knew was going to happen. So let’s get the facts straight here. No one is advocating military interventions in Zimbabwe, but it is the inability of this administration to know how to put together meaningful coalitions using existing international organizations that is the problem. That is the problem in Darfur, where you talk about the Chinese, I completely agree with you about the Chinese, but they have changed under pressure. Who did that pressure come from? Washington? No, Mia Farrow. She had more effect in Darfur than the United States government.
Ferguson: You know you’re really stretching my credulity here. Mia Farrow, film star – theory of diplomacy.
Hobrooke: Excuse me, Niall. Mia Farrow wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal about the genocide Olympics. Right after, Spielberg withdrew as their advisor for the opening games and within three weeks the Chinese appointed a special envoy who came to see me in New York a few weeks ago. I’m not making a point about Mia Farrow, I’m making a point about the administration’s lack of understanding. I’m responding to the points both you and Charles made about the administration’s diplomatic incompetence on all the issues. You just cited Zimbabwe and Darfur. On the question of Senator McCain, I believe Senator McCain will be a better President if he’s elected than the incumbent, I don’t disagree with you on that. It is Iraq that is the real voting issue. I’m happy to debate these issues with you but I honestly don’t think the disagreement will be that great. Collective action through existing international institutions is the key. Michael talked about the responsibility to protect. Every nation in the U.N. voted for that, and it wasn’t implemented. The U.S. has made no effort to lead a coalition to implement a resolution it helped draft.
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Krauthammer: ….differences have to do with matrix of success? You say that Mia Farrow writes an article and as a result China sends a special envoy to talk with you, which is lovely, but how how many people have been saying “Darfur” as a result of that? I’m looking for every bit of seriousness.
Holbrooke: That’s because there’s been no U.S. government back up. The point is Charles, that international public civic action pressure, which Samantha has been central in, has had more of an effect on Beijing than Washington. That’s the core point.
Doucet: You both keep coming back to Iraq and the centrality of it. It’s clear that you both agree that this is an important issue to resolve, but one issue that Canadian’s are worried about is what’s happening in Afghanistan where Canadian troops are serving. Do you see a problem with maintaining forces in Iraq when many are also saying that Afghanistan? Niall?
Ferguson: Well I do think it’s as important as Iraq, though you would never guess that from the coverage in the U.S. media. I think it’s clear that there is a degree of stress and strain on the U.S. military and on the militaries of NATO allies, and that is precisely why John McCain has turned his attention to the question of how quickly we can improve our military capability and at some level it is very simple, it is about numbers. The United States did not have enough combat troops for the national security strategy that it embarked on in 2002. That doesn’t mean that the strategy was wrong, it means that the means were not there, and they need to be willed. But I just want to take up a point that Richard has just raised. 75 to 80% of the things that Richard Holbrooke has said tonight would have been relevant if we had been debating the re-election of George W. Bush but because of term limits, thankfully, he cannot stand for re-election, so his record is kind of irrelevant Richard, that’s not the issue.
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Holbrooke: Not as long as McCain defends it, Niall.
Krauthammer: I find it interesting that you brought up Afghanistan. Richard brings up the difficulties that we currently have in Afghanistan as an argument against Republican administration. Let’s remember what Afghanistan was in the 1990s. The attacks on the United States that came out of Afghanistan in the name of Al Qaeda happened in the 1990s under the Clinton administration. What happened after the attack on our embassies in Tanzania and Uganda? the lobbying of missiles into empty tents in the deserts of Afghanistan? What happened after an American warship, the Cole, was attacked. A classic definition of an act of war. Did the Clinton administration responded by sending FBI agents into Yemen to apprehend the perpetrators? That is a fundamental misunderstanding of the conflict in the war on terror, on the nature of the conflict with Al Qaeda. The Democrats understood it as an issue of law enforcement. When the first World Trade Center was attacked in 1993, what was the response of the Clinton administration? He put a couple of miscreants on trial. He put them in jail and thought it had actually addressed the problem. The current Attorney General of the United States, Michael Mukasey happened to have been the presiding judge in that trial, and not only was it a complete distraction from the war on terror, but Mukasey will tell you that because we granted the rights of ordinary Americans to these terrorists in open trial, Al Qaeda learned about our intelligence on them. One glaring example, they learned from an open discovery process that we had been listening in on Osama Bin Laden’s communication by satellite phone and it was shut down within a day. What happened was when we’re talking about comparing the beauty of the world in the year 2000 when the Democrats left with our difficulties today, our opposition here is ignoring a central fact: 9/11 happened. 9/11 was an unprovoked declaration of war on the United States, occurring in a Republican administration which changed the world, and the Bush administration had to
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respond to it. From the ground up, the Bush administration devised an entirely new strategy of addressing an enemy which had been ignored because it had been seen as a criminal problem, as a law enforcement problem in the previous decade. It adapted a new set of institutions to adapt to that war. When 9/11 occurred there wasn’t anybody in Washington or anybody in any administration, Democratic or Republican who imagined that we would go another six months, or even a year or two, without a second attack. The fact that we have not had a second attack in six and a half years is not an accident. It’s not because Al Qaeda had decided to unilaterally disarm. It’s not because Al Qaeda accepted Jeffersonian principles of democracy. It’s because the United States confronted Al Qaeda on the ground in Afghanistan, today in Iraq, and established institutions that have prevented a second attack, and that will be the legacy of the Bush administration.
Doucet: Thank you. Thank you. Let’s take another question from the floor. Pamela Wallin, former Council General to New York.
Pamela Wallin: Looking at the question of whether the world would be a safer place with Republicans in the White House, I want to touch on the two issues, one that has just been mentioned, Afghanistan. I sat on a commission looking at Canada’s future role in Afghanistan and we spent a lot of time with our NATO allies, and with the Americans. Is there a way in the short term for America to move troops into Afghanistan? How do you deal with that, because as we learned in Iraq, time is of the essence and if there’s not movement of a greater number of troops in there soon, than I think that poses a problem. The other issue is related to the security of both of our countries, and it was raised earlier on the question of energy resources, if security continues to trump trade and we hear this discussion about the future of NAFTA being in
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jeopardy, an agreement that’s very important to your largest energy supplier, how do you think that is going to play out?
Holbrooke: …a critical question about Afghanistan, having just come back from another trip I made out there. We’re now in the seventh year of this war in Afghanistan. It is that war that we must win, whatever happens in Iraq, it will go on a lot longer than Iraq. The Taliban cannot win. You can’t win based on terror tactics, executing teachers in schools because they teach young girls. The memories of the black years in Afghanistan make the overwhelming majority of the people not want the Taliban to succeed. However, having said that the Taliban can’t win, I must say with great regret, that the side we’re supporting cannot win either as it is currently operating. In other words, we have a very dangerous long-term stalemate. What are the factors that must be addressed? Number one, the Pakistan border. We now have a Afghan-Pakistan theatre of war. The NATO forces can only fight on the western half of it, we can’t go into Pakistan, except briefly, covertly, a predator drone here, a few night time raids there, a few kilometers in, because of the politics of the situation. The new Pakistani government is involved in negotiations which may result in giving them more breathing room against the militants and putting more pressure on Afghanistan. That would be a very dangerous situation for our troops. Secondly, the drug situation. The drug policies that the United States has followed in Afghanistan are without doubt, in my forty plus years in and out of the U.S. government, the worst foreign assistance program I’ve ever seen. It isn’t just a complete waste of money, last year the U.S. alone spent eight hundred million dollars on drug eradication, it is helping the enemy for the eight hundred million dollars the United States, according to it’s own statistics, got a 40% increase in the opium traffic last year. Businessmen in the room will say, that’s a pretty bad deal, you put in eight hundred million dollars and you help the enemy. You help recruit Taliban.
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The third thing is the weakness of the government. It is corrupt, it is weak, and within that subset the police are even worse. This is the most important issue that we haven’t addressed, and I am awfully glad that we have a member of the Canadian commission on this here, because her views obviously may be different but as I said earlier, your representatives, in Kabul are superb. These issues must be fixed. This administration has done a very bad job on these issues when they should have done better for all the reasons we know. I agree with Niall that I’m attacking this administration too much, partly because Senator McCain has not clearly laid out his position on Afghanistan yet. We must change it and I hope we will next year because we can’t afford to lose. There are a dozen other problems, the role of women, agriculture, but those are the four I’d single out: the border areas, drugs, corruption of the government and the total hopelessness of the national police force.
Doucet: Thank you, Richard. A very brief comment because we’re coming to the close of the debate but a very important issue for Canada. NAFTA, when they were in Ohio both Obama and Hillary said they’d reopen it.
Power: Obama has long talked about some of the benefits of free trade and his concern is the people who have been hurt by the agreements that we have in place and that have given short shift to environmental labor standards. He looks forward, I am told, to sitting down with Canada and Mexico and looking at environmental and labor standards. He has been fully supportive of and voted for the Peru free trade agreement, and voted against the Columbian one because he felt like there were insufficient provisions. He is not anti-trade. He is just looking to strengthen those measures.
Doucet: Sadly, we have to bring to a close this part of the debate. Let’s give our four fine debaters another chance to try to convince you of their arguments. Three minutes each, starting with you Richard Holbrooke.
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Holbrooke: First of all, thank you Peter Munk, thank you CBC for this opportunity. I sure hope there are debates of this quality and intensity in the United States to inform it’s voting public. I thought a great deal about Senator McCain’s central argument, which is if you get out of Iraq, things will get worse and the Obama/Clinton argument that we have to start to draw down our combat troops and push the two sides together. This is an enormously difficult decision and I believe it will define the next presidency. Unlike our Republican colleagues, I am not filled with certainty about this and I’m astonished at their certainty given their track record over the last seven years. It is the toughest problem I have ever seen in my government service, and with all due respect I am the only person here who has served under combat in the United States government on several continents. I’ve negotiated with the worst people in the world. I work closely with your government and others trying to improve the condition of humanity, and I’ve also worked heavily in Africa on things like HIV/AIDS, so I care passionately about these issues. We’re going to have to figure out what to do. It is my view that the McCain/Bush position on Iraq boils down to this: stay there forever until we win because winning is a ______and remote. Neither of our opponents have addressed how long the McCain strategy would require for success. Stay there forever in order to avoid defeat. That means people are going to die, coalition forces, Iraqis, while we don’t create a process which stabilizes it. That to me raises fundamental problems of morality, number one, and secondly it’s going to drain the United States of the capacity to deal with all the other problems of the world. One last thing, Niall, with all due respect I agree with the other issues you raised. We haven’t had time to talk about China and Africa, and by the way, it’s not China and Africa, it’s China. Africa’s just a leading edge. But I think you have, inaccurately and inadvertently diminished the climate change issue which
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there is plenty of room for leadership on that issue, and thank God you have a Republican candidate who agrees with that particular point. Thank you.
Doucet: Thank you. Charles?
Krauthammer: I want to also thank you for the forum, for the opportunity to address you in this remarkably interesting political year in the United States. The issue of NAFTA was raised and I think you have to understand as Canadians that it is a symptom of a larger issue that for the Democrats they are now in a period of withdrawal, pulling in on protectionism, appealing to the popular sentiments of a people who are economically dissatisfied and weary of a war abroad in another long twilight struggle and the appeal to protectionism is not an accident, it’s a part of the drawing in. I mean it seems to me extremely odd that a leading candidate for the presidency would make a point of scapegoating NAFTA and Canada in a time of economic difficulty, in situations in which obviously are difficulties in a central industrial ways of the United States have nothing to do with Canada but have to do with larger issues of globalization, regulation in the American economy. It’s extremely odd that Obama would say that he would take the hammer to Canada on NAFTA and at the same time he’s going to have a chat with Ahmadinejad on neutral interests abroad. Particularly given the fact that Canada has been a incredibly stalwart and courageous ally in the war on terror in Afghanistan. As many Americans, Republican and Democrat are aware, Canada as taken the highest per capita casualties and as a American who was raised, nurtured, and educated in Canada that does not surprise me because I know of Canada’s history in the twentieth century. The courage and valor of it’s soldiers in the First and the Second World War, which incidentally Canada entered long before the United States, so I’m not surprised and I find it rather odd and unfortunate that it should be used as a scapegoat. It’s a larger drawing in with America weary of this long twilight struggle.
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Richard is right, no one is certain about an outcome in Iraq. But one thing is certain, if we liquidate the war the way the Democrats want, we will have a return of Al Qaeda, we will have a collapse of the government in Baghdad, we will possibly even have a genocide which our opponents here are so concerned about in other areas of the world. What do you do to them? do you reinvade? I say the safer course is to elect a man who understands the difficulties of this issue, who’s been in combat himself, who understands the military, who has experience and has a realistic understanding of what has occurred on the ground and how it ought to be preserved. Fragile it is, delicate it is, reversible it is, and that’s precisely why it cannot be allowed to be reversed. Thank you very much.
Doucet: Thank you Charles. Samantha.
Power: Charles said something very important, about ten minutes ago, in context to Darfur. One could generalize it in terms of American foreign policy or even in terms of Canadian foreign policy. Those who care must, as he put it, step up and be serious. We, all four of us, probably all of you, agree with that, but it is so clear tonight that we have very, very different perspectives on what stepping up and being serious entails. I think this debate was incredibly stimulating and I’ve been scribbling notes, learning. It is also a debate that was in fact a la cartism at it’s best. We talked, we had a long discussion of Iraq, we had a long discussion of Iran, we talked about Darfur, we talked about Afghanistan, we talked about fixing the U.N.., we touched upon trade, all of these issues in a globalized world where everyone can see all policies at once, and the policy statements of leaders in Western countries are broadcast into countries where economic and security interests are at stake, all of these issues are connected and we have to see those connections and talk and think about policies that are responsive to those connections. I think stepping up and being serious entails recognizing that, and I want to give you just a few examples here one of which will concede a very important
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argument that they made our standing in the Middle East, our ability to broker or be useful in helping broker an Arab-Israeli peace agreement, will be affected by how we get out of Iraq or how we draw down in Iraq. Again, to concede a point that the struggle against terrorism and the proliferation of terrorism will be affected in terms of how the Al Qaeda residual presence in Iraq is dealt with. Richard just made an important point quietly to me which is that it is in fact Sunni tribal chiefs who have done more of late to contest the Al Qaeda presence in Iraq and we should hope that continues and again, both Democratic candidates are for maintaining residual force. But this connectivity goes further. You cannot do as the Bush administration has done, and I know John McCain will not do it but is a temptation to call U.N. forces to be sent to Darfur on a Monday, to denounce genocide on a Monday to endorse water boarding on a Tuesday, turn back on the United Nations on a Wednesday and expect other countries to take you seriously and actually take your words at value. It is very difficult to put meaningful pressure on China in the context of Burma, Tibet, and Darfur when China has become America’s ATM machine. Which is what has happened over the course of the last seven years. It is very difficult to build a coalition in Africa which will have credibility with Mugabe on the issue of democracy in elections when we back Pervez Musharraf uncritically in Pakistan. We have got to understand that dealing with multi-national threats, global threats are going to require actually being able to summon and not simply coerce. Thank you.
Doucet: Thank you Samantha, and last but not least, Niall.
Ferguson: Ladies and gentlemen, I want to remind you of something, this is your only chance to vote in this election, so please use your vote wisely. We need a President who knows war; we need a President in Washington D.C who knows torture. Samantha completely misrepresented John McCain’s position on torture. He has led the way in condemning maltreatment of ______and the
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issue of whether the CIA should be subject to the army’s rules is a technicality, misrepresented systematically by Democrats. We need a President who understands what Richard seems to have overlooked: that giving up in Iraq could end up costing many more lives, than succeeding in Iraq. We need a President in the United States who can command respect from allies and a measure of fear in our enemies. We need a President who’s not afraid to do the right thing, even when it looks like being unpopular. We need a President who has learned from history that you don’t just sit down with the bad guys without preconditions. We desperately need at this time, when trade barriers are being raised all over the world not least because of rising food prices, a President who unequivocally is committed to free trade and is not afraid to say that free trade has created many more jobs in the United States than it has lost. We need a President who understands the magnitude of the challenges that the United States and the western world generally faces from a renascent, rapidly growing Chinese dragon, and an incorrigible Russian bear. One final point that’s been unmentioned this evening, we need a President who realizes that the war on terror is not over, experts who think about nuclear terrorism put the probability of a nuclear attack on an America city at somewhere in the region of 15%. Just think about that. Al Qaeda has expressly said that it’s intention is to carry out a Super 9/11 and ladies and gentlemen, it has to or it’s finished. It’s failed in Iraq, 9/11 did not bring capitalism to its knees, what do you seriously think they are going to do next? I ask a question that was asked quite rightly, by Richard Holbrooke’s friend, Hilary Clinton, who do you want to answer that telephone at three in the morning? Thank you very much indeed.
Doucet: Niall Ferguson, Charles Krauthammer, Richard Holbrooke, Samantha Power. Join me in thanking all of them, for being brilliant. Thank you. Stay where you are. We heard them through, their passion, their conviction, their intelligence, let us remind ourselves of how you thought about these issues when you came into the room. 29% of you agreed with Charles and Niall, that the world is a safer place with a Republican in the White House, 71%
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of you agreed with Richard and Samantha that it is not. You have a chance to vote again, you have a second ballot, do fill it out. Please join us in the Crystal Room, in ten minutes, we will announce what has happened with the magic and the power of debate. How many of you changed their minds?
End of Tape
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