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THE HON. LAWRENCE EAGLEBURGER
Former Secretary of State, USA
LUNCHEON SPEAKER
Friday, September 27,
2002
Thank you, Arnaud. I really appreciate the invitation to speak here because it gives me a chance to be seen in the wonderful company of Arnaud de Borchgrave. Therefore, I’m pleased. I should say, however, that Arnaud recognizes that sometimes I tend to be nasty in some of my comments, so he asked me to be careful today, and I promised him I would follow the Machiavelli principle. That principle is that when Machiavelli was dying, they got a priest to come and give him the last rites of the church. As Machiavelli is lying on the deathbed, the priest comes and stands over him and says, my son, my son, do you repent of your sins and renounce the devil? There was no answer. And the priest asked three or four times. Again, no answer. So finally in great frustration he says, I ask you for the last time, do you repent of your sins and renounce the devil? Machiavelli looked at him and said, this is no time to make new enemies.
Now I suppose everyone here at one point or another wants to talk about Iraq, or has been asked to talk about Iraq, and I have too, but I’m going to try to do it briefly and in a somewhat different context. I have to apologize if I puff a bit. It’s because I'm in the midst of a bronchitis attack and I’m therefore winded. Which some of you, after I’ve been at this for five or ten minutes, will think is a great relief, but I’ll try to make sense of it anyway.
Everyone, or almost everyone, has said that the United States changed, and probably permanently, after the awful events of September 11 last year. I’m not so sure that’s really true. Certainly for a while after those awful events everyone thought we had changed a great deal. But as I say, if you look at us now, I’m not so sure. You know, it is reputed that Admiral Yamamoto, shortly after the devastating attack of December 7, 1941, remarked to his celebrating naval colleagues, “Be careful. Remember what we have probably done is awaken a sleeping giant and we will soon regret it.” Well, although I don’t want to compare too much the events of September 11 with Pearl Harbor, I am not so sure that that remark of Yamamoto’s may not apply.
I’ll tell you something. I think we saw the real America immediately after those events. We saw it in the faces of the policemen, the firemen, and the blue-collar workers who all rushed to try to save the lives of the people in those buildings, and in the process lost their own lives. That was the real America, and God bless them. And that hasn’t changed. It was there, yet we didn’t see it until it happened. It’s been there for generations and I think it’s still there, and that’s the America that we Americans need to remember is there, and that foreigners need to recognize is there. That hasn’t changed. I don't think it’s going to change, and I think it’s something that we, all of us and all of our enemies and allies and friends and the doubters around the world, need to think about as they think about whether they should remain allies with the United States, or should remain questioning the United States, or whether they should, as in the case of the Federal Republic of Germany for a while, campaign for office by making it clear that they stand in opposition to the United States and win an election that way. But have they lost the future? Perhaps.
I think the whole world needs to understand, as we Americans need to understand, that there’s a fundamental strength in this country that doesn’t depend on television sets and doesn’t depend upon, if I may use the term, the effeteness of much—and I apologize to those of you who are in the media—but the effeteness of some of what we see on television, and that there is a strength to this country that is remarkable and often not seen. But it’s there, and it’s been there, and it will still be there.
Why do I say this? Why is this important to what I would like to talk about now? It’s important because what we Americans are going through now and have been going through for some time, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, perhaps, is we are struggling within ourselves to try to figure out what we as a country need to be about in the 21st century. What are we? Not only domestically, although that really probably most of the time is consuming our real interest, but what are we internationally. The events of September 11 last year forced us to focus on that in ways that I think otherwise we probably would not have done for some time.
It is in that context that I’d like to talk for a few minutes about Iraq because Iraq in its own strange way, in microcosm, points us toward some of the same problems that are going to plague us throughout this century as we try to decide what we are, as we try to describe to ourselves and to the rest of the world what it is we are. And we’re not going to get an answer to that over a short period of time. Dealing with Iraq and some of the consequences of what we finally decide to do with Iraq will in part play a role in how we decide we’re going to deal with the rest of the century.
I have to remind everybody here, I think, that the era we come out of—namely the Cold War, the confrontation with the Soviet Union and the post–World War II era—while most of us consider that to be the typical American historical period, it is not. It is not American history writ large. It is the history of America from 1945 to whenever the Soviet Union collapsed. But it is a history of a period of our country in which, strangely enough, as we grew stronger and stronger, we also were living in an era in which, because of the competition with the Soviet Union, it was a period of relative stability.
Think about it for a minute. We all thought at the time it was an unstable period. Oh my God, the Russians may push the nuclear button and Katy bar the door. Nonsense, if you think back on it now. The fact that they had nuclear weapons and that we had nuclear weapons imposed upon us both, and our allies, a discipline that no longer exists. It was a discipline of concern on both sides that if we did not behave ourselves, if we weren’t careful on both sides, we could in fact find ourselves in a nuclear war that could consume us both. Therefore, we exercised discipline on our satellites, if you will, on those who depended upon us. We exercised a discipline on them that no longer exists.
Saddam Hussein would never have invaded Kuwait the first time around if the Soviet Union still existed at that time and the Soviets had told him to knock it off because they knew what would happen. I lived in Yugoslavia for a period of time in which we were worried about what the Soviets might do in Yugoslavia. They were worried about what we might do in Yugoslavia. As a consequence, we both behaved ourselves and were careful in Yugoslavia because we both knew that if either one of us overstepped our bounds, we would find ourselves in a confrontation in Yugoslavia that could lead to a nuclear war.
I spent a lot of my time in the State Department, and let me tell you something. It was a lot easier to make a decision in those days when you said to yourself, how does this decision affect the balance between the Soviet Union and the United States? You don’t have that test any more. It’s a world that’s quite different now from what it was then.
It is in that context that Iraq must be looked at by us today. And it is in that context that the president of the United States can say it’s time for a regime change in Iraq. He couldn’t have said that 10 years ago. Five years ago, maybe. But he couldn't have said it 10 years ago because it would have been perfectly impossible for him to have said it and meant it without facing a nuclear holocaust perhaps. But there we are. We are now the world’s only superpower and we can say things like that and mean it, and we couldn’t do that before.
Now the question becomes, is that a proper role for the United States in the world in the century to come? What is our right? And the answer to that is, don’t give me any of this nonsense about international law. The real question becomes, is it in our national security interests to take a step like this in the absence of support from allies and the UN or the world community? The answer to that is, it rests in the judgment of the people and the Congress and the people of the United States whether it’s important enough to do it or not. What that says is that, whether we like it or not, the United States has become, willy-nilly, the arbiter of actions we may take, and that unless we are smart enough to recognize that that kind of hubris on our part begins to smack a bit of—and I don’t want to overdo the historical analogy—the Roman Empire and of other times in human history where a state has taken upon itself, because it has the strength to do it, the right to make decisions on behalf of the world at large, or at least that part of the world that it could control. Unless we recognize that that is where we’re moving, or perhaps are moving, and then decide for ourselves if that is really where we want to go, we will willy-nilly slide into that kind of a situation, and we won’t have recognized either the consequences that we may face or the resources, if I may put it that way, that we may have to expend to make it work.
It is in that sense, if I may, that I want for a few minutes just to talk about, if I can, what it would be like if we now decide to move into Iraq unilaterally. If we can’t get either the UN or at least a fair number of allied states—the UK, the Germans, the French, the Italians, some others—to join us in a military action against Iraq, if we decide that we’re going to do it on our own with our own forces, let’s take a look at what that means.
First of all, I have no doubt that militarily we can accomplish it, though I think it is senseless—not only senseless, dangerous—to listen to some of those at the Pentagon and other places who say it’s a cakewalk Oh, we'll go in and we’ll win it. That is always a mistake, and it’s the way you end up with body bags if you’re not careful. One of the things I admired most about George Bush, Sr., was when we went to kick the Iraqis out of Kuwait the president in effect said to the generals, you tell me what you need and you can have it. His point was, particularly in the context of Vietnam—where the political leadership had constantly cut back on what the military said it needed—and I admit you can’t give the military a blank check, but on the other hand you can’t ask them to do on the cheap what must be done. That leaves you therefore to say, whatever forces are really needed to accomplish a task, you’d better give them to the military to do it, even if that means you’ve given them too much. Okay, but at least it’s the way you save lives and it’s the way you get things done. Anyway, George Bush, Sr. —and you will see how well we accomplished that task—said to the military, you tell me what you need and you’ll have it and we’ll get the job done.
Despite the fact that some of these great military analysts like [Edward] Luttwak and so forth kept saying, you’re going to have thousands of dead, we came out of that war without very many dead. It was done because the president told the military they could take what they needed to get it done.
Now people today, some of them are saying, oh, we can do this one on the cheap. I don’t believe that. Maybe we can, but that isn’t the way we ought to start. I do have to assume this is a war we can win, and if we can’t, we deserve to go down in the annals of Italian military history. I hope there aren’t any Italians here who are going to make an insult out of this; I don’t mean it that way. Nonetheless, that’s the kind of thing Arnaud was saying about me before, that I put my foot in my mouth.
The point is, I think we can win it, but I think it is also important to remember that Saddam Hussein will not necessarily fight this second war the way he fought the first one, with the tanks all out there where we can pop them off one at a time. But anyway, we’re going to win it, and we’ll probably win it without too much of an expenditure of lives or treasure.
All right, let’s assume that, one way or the other, we have Saddam Hussein or he has committed suicide or something. Now here are the problems we have. First of all, it’s cost us $90 billion, $100 billion to get it done, which I must say to you first of all, assuming that you decide the president of the national command authority has decided something must be done to maintain national security, I don't care how much it costs. That should not be the controlling issue. Whatever it costs to secure the country, you have to pay it. I’m saying, whatever it costs to get this job done, we’ve paid it. It’s around $100 billion. That will be felt in terms of the conditions of the American economy. How much it will be felt I don’t know, but it will be felt.
Second, you’re there now. The vice president has said, I think relatively foolishly, but he has said we're going to turn Iraq into a democracy. I think democracy could jump up and bite them in the ear and the Iraqis wouldn’t know what it was. But that’s neither here nor there either. And if we’re there, we certainly should try to turn the thing into a democracy. I’m not going to argue that either. But what that means I think, under any circumstances, is that we stay there for a relatively long period of time, and since we have not gone in there with any allies, we, the United States, have to do it on our own. Although I would hope that once we have accomplished the task of defeating the Iraqis and clearly Saddam Hussein was out of there, we could persuade some of our allies to join us at least in the process of policing Iraq and hopefully establishing democratic institutions and helping us to create the institutions of democracy and so forth. But even with allied support, I think you have to assume we’re there for a fairly long period of time, and we are surrounded by Arab states, none of which are going to be joyful that we’re there, despite the fact they will probably all be very happy that Saddam Hussein has gone. Because there aren’t any of them who like him. There are a lot of them who fear him, but they will not be happy about this great colossus having come into Iraq and displaced him and put into power an Iraqi government—I don’t care if they’re all saints. They will nevertheless be puppets of the United States as far as most Iraqis will, I think, believe them to be.
This is purely an assumption, but I would have to assume that once we leave Iraq the Iraqis we leave behind as governors may not be around very long. I hope I’m wrong. The last Iraqi leader that was left behind by the British when they left was dragged headless through the streets of Baghdad some time thereafter. This is one where I really have no business predicting. I do not know. I do believe that putting in a government at the behest of some outside power is not going to be a particularly popular move as far as that new government’s concerned. But maybe it works, and particularly maybe it works if in fact we have been able to establish a clear democratic establishment there.
I do think under any circumstances that it will take a fairly long period of time. So we will be an occupying power in that part of the world for some period of time, surrounded by states that are not going to be particularly happy we’re there.
I could go on, ladies and gentlemen. I don't mean to because I’ve already spent too much time, but my only point here is to try to tie that back to my fundamental point which is, where are we as a nation going to go over the course of this next century? I think it is terribly important, and Iraq is a case study here. I think it is terribly important for the United States to recognize first of all that we are in a new time and have the power to do good—remember that we are not an avaricious nation with blood dripping off our teeth. We do want to do good. We do want to make human rights a conscious part of any nation’s agenda. We do want to further the cause of democracy around the world. We may be terribly naive in how we do that sometimes, and in the process damage the cause rather than help it, but our purposes are, by and large, not only benign but better than that.
So when we look at this world we’re going into, let’s not do what us old conservative fuddy-duddies like Arnaud and I tend to do, which is to say, oh, we can’t do that. Because we have too many years of having lived in a different time where in fact we didn’t want to push these sorts of things because we didn’t think it was any of our business to begin with, and we recognized how destabilizing it could be on the other hand.
I really have a certain prejudice against all of these things, but I also will tell you I’m probably wrong. But I do think I’m not wrong when I say that as we think about where we’re going to do it, we need to ask some very tough questions. I’m not at all sure they’ve been asked in this Iraq case. But at the same time I’m prepared to tell you, if the questions are asked and all these very tough answers are recognized and still in the end you say to yourself, Saddam is too serious a problem in the region, he’s created a real danger of instability in the region for too long and he’s too dangerous, and if he gets a nuclear weapon he becomes massively dangerous, then I’m prepared to say to you, okay, we may have to do it anyway, even if we have to do it by ourselves, with all of these dangers that I think come with it.
I’m not saying you should never do it. I am saying, however, I would feel far more comfortable if in fact—and I think the American people deserve this, too, by the way—this administration, or any administration, when it comes to the point, would sit down and say to the Congress and to the American people, here’s why we feel we must do this. I have to believe that in most cases the American people, if the president stood up there and said to them, this is why it’s got to be done, would salute and say, Mr. President, go ahead.
The only time this will be a dangerous thing is if, as in Vietnam, the American people feel they are misled, and that comes close. Arnaud was talking about this. If this administration all of a sudden has decided, has discovered that there are relationships between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, that all of a sudden they’ve decided this, if they do that sort of thing they will lose us all very fast. So don’t mislead, but stand up and say why you think these things should be done. I think most of us would agree with it. But if they mislead, or if we get into a situation where in fact there are lots of body bags coming home, then we’re going to have a different situation here.
But if they’re straight with the American people and tell us why they think this should be done, in most cases I think we would salute and say, Mr. President, this what you’ve said and this has got to be done. I’ll also say this to you, and I haven’t touched much on this, we Americans have a perfect right to be terribly, terribly disappointed—I think that is the best way to put it—with the performance of many of our allies, particularly in Europe. I think they have been pusillanimous. To a degree, they’re trying to build Europe at the expense of the United States. I thought the performance of the governing party in Germany in the process of this last election was abominable. I thought it was interesting that the person who compared George Bush with Adolf Hitler was fired by the chancellor after the election, not before. After the election he screwed up his courage and fired the person. One must ask why he had to wait until after the election to do it, but it’s a classic example of what I think is becoming a serious transatlantic problem. I don’t want to spend a lot of time on it now.
This sort of an attitude, by the way, is going to drive us toward the kind of unilateralism that I think is too bad. I probably should stop now because I’ve gone on too long. If you don’t want to throw me out yet, I’d be glad to answer questions.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Question: I would very much agree with you that the president has to share with the Congress and the American people. However, with a free country, a lot of demonstration, a lot of movement against the war, how can the executive branch accomplish its goal?
Amb. Eagleburger: I don’t think that’s the problem at all. First of all, we have these Luddites out across the river right now demonstrating against reality. That isn’t going to stop us.
I go back to the point I made at the very beginning of this thing. You can’t fool those firemen, those policemen, those blue-collar workers in this country. By God, they understand more than we think they do. When I got through watching that exercise of theirs, their strength, their courage, their patriotism; when they fly that flag—and they flew it because they wanted to, not because somebody told them to—that was the United States of America as far as I was concerned. That’s the U.S. that will do it if the president tells us we have to do it. I think they’ll follow him, and I don’t worry too much about that as long as the president doesn’t lie to them and explains forcefully what needs to be done.
By the way, I should have said one other thing here. The president’s speech to the United Nations was absolutely brilliant as far as I’m concerned, and what he did, if you look at it carefully, gave the administration and all of its critics a real opportunity to get off the business of talking only about nuclear weapons. It listed in brilliant form, I thought, all of the resolutions of the Security Council that the Iraqis have failed to respond to, or thumbed their nose at over a period of time, and it had to embarrass all of the UN members because they had let all these things go by without response.
The president, if you notice in that speech, only mentioned nuclear weapons one time in passing. One of the weaknesses I have felt in the earlier campaign was all this constant mention of nuclear weapons. One of the disconnects for me in all this process was [Vice President Dick] Cheney constantly talking—every time he got a chance about Iraq, he’d talk about nuclear weapons. Then at the end of it either he would say or one of the press spokesmen would say, but the president hasn’t made up his mind yet. Well, if it’s as bad as Cheney had said it was, you had to ask yourself, where the hell is the president? Why hasn't he made up his mind?
The point was, each time it was clear they didn’t have the evidence on the nuclear weapons yet. Now I'm not saying that they should, but I am saying if they’re going to go to war over this issue of nuclear weapons, I’d like to know that they have the evidence.
All I’m saying is that the president’s UN speech gave this administration and everybody who’s anxious to have him be successful in this thing an opportunity to deal with Iraq in a different sense. Now if we can get the right kind of resolution out of the Security Council, the president will have turned the whole argument away from the issue of nuclear weapons and on to something where in fact we have a perfectly legitimate issue, which is: the UN has passed any number of resolutions on Iraq and they’ve all been ignored.
I will also say to you, and this may sound like a partisan comment and I don’t mean it as such, but if the Clinton administration, from the day that the Iraqis first violated the sanctions, had come down on them like a ton of bricks militarily, and each time that the Iraqis had violated those sanctions had come down on them like a ton of bricks militarily, we wouldn’t be in this mess now because the Iraqis would have had to comply with them. But once you start letting them get away with this stuff, we’re now at the point we are.
I’m inclined to think, for reasons I’m not quite sure I understand, that for this administration, Saddam Hussein has become a bête noire. I don’t like him; I think he’s an SOB, but I'm not quite sure I understand precisely why they have gotten quite so upset about him. But they’re there now, and I must tell you this. The other thing I feel very strongly about is, once the president of the United States has said that something is terribly important to the United States, we have an obligation to support what the president has said.
If I didn’t learn anything else in too many years in the United States government, it is two things. One, don’t ever make a threat that you don’t intend to carry out if you have to. And second, don’t ever lie to the American people. Don’t mislead them. If you mislead the press, that's one thing. Even that’s unwise. You can often simply not answer, but don’t mislead and certainly don’t lie because you’re going to get caught on it. But most important of all, don’t ever make a threat that, if pushed to the edge, you will not carry out. Because the minute you do that, you have lost all credibility.
I will say one other point related to that, which is, if you get into a situation, as we did, for example, in Somalia, where we lost some Americans and the next thing we did was pull out, you have simply condemned another set of American GIs somewhere, some time, somehow, to be killed as well, because the next tyrant will say, the way you get rid of the United States is you kill some Americans and they will leave. Don't ever let that happen either.
Question: Ronald Reagan once said a nation without borders is not a nation. I understand how important Iraq and the Middle East crisis are. But in your opinion, on a scale of one to ten, how important is our challenge of illegal immigration and unchecked borders?
Amb. Eagleburger: On a scale of one to ten: six to seven. It’s an important question. I will tell you right now, to me the most important is getting back to and getting terribly serious about the war on terrorism. One of the concerns I have about Iraq is I’m afraid it’s tended to pull us away. For example, there are so many terrorist targets that we ought to be getting at. Almost anybody that moves in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon is a terrorist. That’s one place we could go without much difficulty, and we ought to go in there and clean it out. There are any number of other places like that where clearly there are terrorists and we should do something about them.
Question: In light of the fact that in the last decade we’ve seen a clash of civilizations that was somewhat described in the morning sessions and that is part of the root of the current challenge, if we were to adopt your policy of America’s history of non–first strike interventionism, what policy tools would you recommend?
Amb. Eagleburger: I didn’t say we should adopt that. I said that has been our policy.
Question: What policy tools in our arsenal would you recommend, and do you see cultural engagement of the religions of Abraham, if you will, dialogue and engagement at the civic and cultural and religious level perhaps?
Amb. Eagleburger: I think you want me to give you an answer yes, don’t you? How the hell am I supposed to answer that question?
It’s a perfectly legitimate question, and I guess the only way I can answer it is, number one, I can’t stay away from the religious question but I have to be careful about it because it is now relatively clear to me that whether any of us like it or not, there is out there somewhere the makings of a real religious—I’ll use the word jihad, although that’s not necessarily the way I mean it—but there are the makings of a modern 21st century religious war. Not run by the majority of any single religion, but by the radicals.
I’m going to be blunt, and again I’m going to upset Arnaud. But it’s Moslem more than it’s anything else, and this is not an attack on Islam, but where there are clearly some very, very hard—fundamentalists isn’t the right word either. A lot of people are fundamentalists without being murderers. Fanatics. And they seem at this stage to be more Islamist than anything else, although there are also some Jews in this game, too. Not as many. I can’t name any Christians at the moment. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some.
Question: (off mike)
Amb. Eagleburger: Could be. I don’t even know who he is but he could be. I’m not arguing that. But what I am saying is there are the makings out there not of war, but of some murderous confrontations for a period of time, all in the name of religion. So I’m going to have to be careful about that.
I’m going to try to answer you in a different way, which is something else we tend to forget too much. With all of our warts and our mistakes, you name for me another country that has, over the course of 200 and some years, more successfully—I’ll put it badly but I’m going to say it this way anyway—dealt with its own internal problems of bringing people together. We have a terribly long way to go, and I know a number of American blacks will say we aren’t even close, and so will some other minorities. But you tell me any country in the world with the heterogeneous population we have that has done as well as we have.
What I guess I’m saying to you is, if we could begin to share our experiences in that regard, the good pieces and the bad as well, if we could begin to open up that kind of a dialogue with others—and talk as well about the things we have done wrong. As far as I’m concerned, one of the aspects of American history that we will never, ever live down or even come close to assuaging our consciences on is slavery. We’ll live with that to the end of our days.
But starting there and trying to tell the rest of the world what we have learned and what we have learned badly is one of the best things in the world we could do. It’s a hell of an answer, but it’s the best I can do. Thank you very much.
