Source: Charlie Rose Show
On September 19, Carnegie President Jessica T. Mathews appeared on PBS's The Charlie Rose Show to discuss President Bush's speech to the United Nations. In his speech, President Bush addressed religious extremism, the crisis in Darfur, and the Middle East peace process.
Click here for video of the broadcast.
Read a transcript of the segment below.
Guests: Jessica T. Mathews, Max Boot
CHARLIE ROSE: Welcome to the broadcast. President Bush spoke at the U.N. today. We’ll talk to Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi about the president’s speech and other issues at the U.N. this week.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CHARLIE ROSE: He now recognizes the need for multilateralism.
ROMANO PRODI, ITALIAN PRIME MINISTER: Yes. This is what I want, and I think it’s so important for peace. You’re asking me, there is no hope for peace. I told you there are now more hope for peace than before, simply because there is an international engagement there. This is backed not only by Europeans, but by the Americans and by the Chinese.
And so you know, it’s -- we can start.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CHARLIE ROSE: And we take a more specific look at the president’s speech with Jessica T. Mathews of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Max Boot from the Council on Foreign Relations.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MAX BOOT, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS: I think one of the problems
that I saw from what President Bush said is, you know, I’m glad that he said we’re sticking with the Iraqi people, but he didn’t say what more we’re doing to help the Iraqi people. He didn’t say, we’re sending another division to Baghdad to help secure the capital of Iraq and to prevent the terrorists from winning. I think there has to be a need for more decisive action, because right now we’re losing the war, and that hinders everything that we’re doing all around the world, especially in the Middle East.
JESSICA T. MATHEWS, CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE: You can’t do diplomacy unless you’re doing it. You can’t outsource it. And that’s been the central mistake on non-proliferation. And there’s one other thing, Charlie, that’s an essential part of it, which is that we have to realize that success in non-proliferation also depends on what we do at home. You can’t go making new nuclear weapons and talk to the rest of the world about giving them up.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CHARLIE ROSE: Jessica T. Mathews and Max Boot, next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
President Bush addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York earlier today. He spoke about democracy in the Middle East and the struggle against extremism. He also urged Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons ambitions. Here’s a part of what the president said.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Some have argued that the democratic changes we’re seeing in the Middle East are destabilizing the region. This argument rests on a false assumption that the Middle East was stable to begin with. The reality is that the stability we thought we saw in the Middle East was a mirage.
My country desires peace. Extremists in your midst’s spread propaganda claiming that the West is engaged in a war against Islam. This propaganda is false, and its purpose is to confuse you and justify acts of terror.
We respect Islam. We will protect our people from those who pervert Islam to sow death and destruction.
The United Nations has passed a clear resolution requiring that the regime in Tehran meet its international obligations. Iran must abandon its nuclear weapons ambitions.
Despite what the regime tells you, we have no objection to Iran’s pursuit of a truly peaceful nuclear power program. We’re working toward a diplomatic solution to this crisis. And as we do, we look to the day when you can live in freedom, and America and Iran can be good friends and close partners in the cause of peace.
CHARLIE ROSE: Joining me from Washington is Jessica T. Mathews. She is president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Here in New York, Max Boot. He is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His book is called "War Made New: Technology, Warfare and the Course of History." I am pleased to have both of them here.
Jessica, tell me what you thought of the president’s speech, this
20-minute speech he made, in which he talked about Iran, Iraq, Sudan,
Syria, and praised Iran, as well as the Iranian people, as well as
criticized the leaders and said to the Iraqi people, we’re going to keep the faith.
JESSICA T. MATHEWS: I thought it was almost entirely a lost opportunity, at a time when the U.S. can ill afford to lose any opportunities, to explain itself to the world and to repair the damage...
CHARLIE ROSE: For a moment there...
JESSICA T. MATHEWS:... the distrust in how we’re held there.
CHARLIE ROSE: OK. If he had taken advantage of the missed opportunity, in your judgment, what should he have said?
JESSICA T. MATHEWS: Well, when you want to talk to people, if you have chosen to talk to the people of the Middle East rather than the government, what you have to do is talk about the issues that concern them, and use the rhetoric and the frameworks and the ideas of how they see the world, rather than how you see it. Otherwise you don’t reach them, and therefore you don’t advance your own interests.
So he would have talked about Iraq. He would have talked about the war in Lebanon. He would have talked about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute in ways that he knows that the people in the Arab world think about it, in some ways that connects them to -- I think he described a world that to them is imaginary.
CHARLIE ROSE: What do you think is imaginary about the world he described?
JESSICA T. MATHEWS: That freedom is on the march from Beirut to Baghdad.
Look, there have been some successes that he mentioned, but the largest
Arab country, half the population of the Arab world, Egypt, is moving backwards on democracy. And liberal reformers in the region are very concerned that the United States is backing away. The overall trend is certainly negative.
The description of Iran as a country whose rulers have deprived you, the Iranian people, of liberty -- President Ahmadinejad is an elected leader through elections that were widely held and high participation. They weren’t perfect, but neither are American elections, et cetera.
The description of Iraq doesn’t really connect to an Iraq that the Arab world sees or that we Americans see day to day as a country that is being torn to shreds by sectarian violence.
CHARLIE ROSE: OK, let me bring in Max. You liked the president’s speech?
MAX BOOT: I thought it was a good speech, Charlie. The president is a good speechmaker, and he’s especially good when he’s talking about his sweeping vision of freedom in the Middle East.
But I also agree with some of the points that Jessica made, which is that in some ways, it felt to me like this was a speech that could have been given a year ago when it did seem like freedom was on the march, when you had the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, when you had the Iraqis holding up their purple fingers in the air to show that they had voted, when you were seeing real positive change, and we were seeing elections in Egypt.
But in the past year, you’ve seen the region take a huge turn for the worse, where you’ve seen worsening violence in Iraq and Lebanon. You’ve seen Hosni Mubarak jailing Ayman Nour, the liberal opposition leader. You’ve seen -- this is not the march of freedom, this is a step backward for freedom, and I think in some ways the president would have been more effective if he acknowledged that reality up front and said, look, I still believe in these things, this is still the right policy for the United States. There are going to be setbacks, the dictators are not going to go easily. There will be problems to overcome, but we will overcome them.
Then I wish he had spelled out some actions that he would take to overcome them, instead of just saying, we urge freedom upon the people of the Middle East. And I think this is the right message, but I think we need to do more to hammer home that message as a policy.
JESSICA T. MATHEWS: I think that one has to also say that freedom is not
-- and that word reappeared over and over and over in the speech that’s not the operative word for most Muslims. Their concern is with justice. And that’s what I meant by choosing to use a rhetoric and a framework that connects to the people you want to talk to, that you want to reach.
I think the president used freedom, democracy and elections almost interchangeably, and we know from painful experience that they’re not.
Elections, which is used over and over again as the measure of progress
-- elections without a rule of law and without institutions that can deliver government services and without, very importantly, protection for minority rights, election in those circumstances don’t give you democracy in the way Americans think about it. They give you chaos, and they give you sectarian violence, because people are trying to protect their own interests.
CHARLIE ROSE: Do you think elections in Iran gave people the people those things that you just talked about?
JESSICA T. MATHEWS: Iran is a funny country, because it has two parallel governments, one elected and one unelected. And so I think it’s a system that you can’t compare to anything else, because the center of power in the government is in its unelected government.
So you don’t have anything like the kind of freewheeling mess that you get into when you have elections really prematurely in countries that don’t have either the institutions of government to do the job that governments are supposed to do, or rule of law and minority -- protection of minority rights.
CHARLIE ROSE: Let me say this, I mean, clearly the president, it seems to me, at this time -- perhaps because it’s a political season, perhaps because the war has had increased levels of sectarian violence in Iraq and perhaps because of what happened with Hezbollah -- seems to be wanting to take what is going on, especially in the Middle East, you know, and use it as an example of how he sees the great conflict of the 21st century. Is he right in defining it that way, in your judgment?
MAX BOOT: I think he is right. I mean, I think fundamentally, what
President Bush is trying to do is to do something that a lot of his liberal critics ought to applaud, which is trying to address the so-called root causes of crime, in this case the root causes of terrorism, which struck America on 9/11. Obviously, he’s doing a lot to chase individual terrorists. And we know that the U.S. government has been reasonably successful in that because we have not been struck again since 9/11.
But I think the operating assumption for President Bush, it’s not enough to go after individual terrorists, we have to change the conditions that give rise to terrorism. And what are those conditions? It’s clearly not poverty, because as we know, so many of these terrorists are actually from the middle or upper classes. What they’re sucked into this ideology of hatred, this ideology of extremism and violence, and the analysis that President Bush offers is they’re sucked in because they lack economic opportunity, they lack political opportunity, they lack cultural opportunity. And so if we create opportunities in the Muslim world, there will be other avenues of advancement for people and other ways to channel their energy instead of strapping on suicide belts.
And I think that’s the right analysis. The question, however, is not --and I might add, I don’t think that’s an analysis which is all that controversial, because, in fact, advancing democracy and liberalism has been the policy of pretty much every U.S. administration going back since time immemorial, and certainly was the policy of the Clinton administration.
The question is, how do you go about doing it? And I think some of the things we’ve been doing are effective, but a lot are not. And I think instead of retreating and saying we’re going to give up, as a lot of people think we should do, I think we should redouble our efforts, and we should make clear, for example, to Hosni Mubarak in Egypt that if he’s going to violate his pledge to bring more liberalism and democracy
-- and I agree with Jessica, it’s not just elections, it’s rights for women, rights for minorities, a free press -- but you know, Mubarak is attacking all of those. He’s attacking the independent judges who are
protesting against what the government is doing to them, and he’s cracking down on them.
And President Bush had made clear, we’re not going to just talk about this. We’re going to act on it, because we give Hosni Mubarak $1.8 billion a year in aid, and we ought to be cutting off some of his aid if he’s not doing what needs to be done in order to liberalize the society. Because the problem that we face right now is regimes like the one in Egypt are offering us this choice, which is either the dictator or the mullahs, either the jihadis or the junta. And that’s not a good choice for us.
CHARLIE ROSE: Secretary Rice has spoken to that by saying, you know, we think the stability of the past is not the best way to go.
MAX BOOT: Right. The talk is good, but I think there needs to be more action.
JESSICA T. MATHEWS: Well, I think if you -- would be more action in the ways that you described, you would have more results that you really regret. And one of the big lessons of the last five years is as much as a particular condition may be bad at a given moment, it can get an awful lot worse.
You know, we rejected an Iranian overture in 2003. We could have worked then. Look where we are. And you could give a dozen examples.
In Egypt, if you really allowed free elections now, you’d have an Islamist government.
CHARLIE ROSE: That’s true.
MAX BOOT: What I was suggesting...
(CROSSTALK)
JESSICA T. MATHEWS: ... whether that’s an outcome that he would prefer to have.
CHARLIE ROSE: Well, how do you feel about elections in Palestine then,
Jessica? Would you be opposed to them if you believed Hamas would win?
JESSICA T. MATHEWS: You mean if history hadn’t have happened or where we are now?
CHARLIE ROSE: Sure. I mean, before, either way. I mean, in other words, you’re saying the same thing that would happen because of the --if the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which probably represents the majority of opinion, you’re saying, and would have won the election, are you saying therefore we should not have an election because it would produce that kind of result?
JESSICA T. MATHEWS: I’m saying that U.S. national interests are not so simple that it is just a matter of pushing in one direction, to have elections, have elections, have elections. There are times when having elections is neither good for a particular country or good for us.
MAX BOOT: Nobody is -- with all due respect, nobody is saying that the only thing we ought to be doing is pushing for elections. What I was talking about, for example, is we ought to be pushing for judicial independence in Egypt, because they do have a semi-independent judiciary, but it’s under assault by the ruling party. And we ought to be supporting those judges.
JESSICA T. MATHEWS: I agree.
MAX BOOT: We ought to be supporting dissidents, women’s rights activist, newspaper editors, and people like Ayman Nour, a liberal dissident opposition leader who is now in jail.
It’s more than elections. It’s supporting individual rights. And that’s what we ought to be doing.
JESSICA T. MATHEWS: I agree with that.
CHARLIE ROSE: What should we be doing, Jessica, with respect to Iran, in your judgment?
JESSICA T. MATHEWS: Talking to them. You can’t have a diplomatic solution, which the president says he wants, through outsourced diplomacy. This is an issue that requires -- and the crux of this issue has been known for a very long time, which is the U.S. prepared to accept the sovereignty of the current Iranian government, that is will the U.S. forswear forced regime change.
CHARLIE ROSE: Should we?
JESSICA T. MATHEWS: Should we?
CHARLIE ROSE: Yes.
JESSICA T. MATHEWS: Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely, we should. The crucial issue for us right now is the nuclear issue, in the same way it is and we should have in North Korea.
You can’t do diplomacy unless you’re doing it. You can’t outsource it.
And that’s been the central mistake on non-proliferation.
And there’s one other thing, Charlie, that’s an essential part of it, which is that we have to realize that success in non-proliferation also depends on what we do at home. You can’t go making new nuclear weapons and talk to the rest of the world about giving them up. You just can’t...
CHARLIE ROSE: But should we then therefore go further than that and not only not make new nuclear weapons, but dramatically, unilaterally reduce our own force?
JESSICA T. MATHEWS: I think what we should do is the biggest -- the thing that would do -- make the biggest difference is if we ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which was an American initiative for decades, and which we have failed to do. Nothing would send a bigger message to the rest of the world about the way we feel.
And, you know, the irony is, we don’t have a mission for nuclear weapons right now. We know how to develop weapons if we chose to, where we don’t have to test them, and so we have this weird thing where on the one hand we have a moratorium on testing, and on the other hand we have no uses for these weapons, and yet we won’t sign the comprehensive test ban at a possible cost of living in a world with North Korean nuclear world.
I think we’re going to see a North Korean test very soon. I think that will likely precipitate, very likely a shift in the Japanese position.
And because proliferation always happens in clumps, never one country at a time, you could easily find yourself in a world with 20, 30, 40 ultimately nuclear nations.
I think, you know, we are on the cusp of almost loosing the non-proliferation regime, and we have steps we could take to take it, to stop that, but we have very little time to do it in.
CHARLIE ROSE: Some people expressed what -- part of what she just said in the following way: The administration doesn’t know whether it wants to change the regime or change the behavior. How do you see what the choices are in Iran, which is the central topic at this United Nations General Assembly meeting. More than anything else, it’s all about Iran.
MAX BOOT: Well, first off, I agree that the administration’s policy towards Iran is confused, but I have very little faith that even if they are putting more effort into diplomacy -- and they’re putting quite a bit right now -- I have very little faith that that would result in Iran voluntarily giving up its nuclear weapons program, which it has spent billions of dollars and decades pursuing. And not just this Iranian government, but all the way back to the days of the shah. These folks clearly want nuclear weapons. They’re not going to give them up. And if we sign an agreement with them, they’ll likely cheat on it, the same way the North Koreans cheated on the agreed framework in 1994.
Now, to me the problem here is not whether Iran has nuclear weapons or not, because if you have a liberal democratic Iran in the future, I am not going to be too worried about whether they have nuclear weapons, just as I’m not worried about India having nuclear weapons, Britain, France, Israel, all these countries, or the United States, obviously. We’re all democracies. There are internal checks and balances on our behavior, and nobody is worried about us using nuclear weapons offensively, whereas right now, when you have this terrorist-sponsoring regime in Tehran led by this guy who denies the Holocaust, who threatens to incinerate Israel, that’s a very worrisome prospect.
And so what should our policy be? I don’t -- the military option has to be on the table, but it has to be a last-chance type of deal. It’s not something you want to do eagerly. There’s a lot of drawbacks to it.
There is no immediate need for any kind of military action.
What we ought to be working on right now is helping the people of Iran to help themselves. Now, Jessica said we ought to forswear forced regime change. I’m not sure what that means. If that means we shouldn’t invade Iran and change the government, I agree with that, we shouldn’t. What we ought to be doing is the same kinds of things that we’ve done successfully in places like Ukraine, Georgia, Lebanon and other places, where we’ve helped to foster peaceful regime change.
Because the mullahs, the ruling theocracy in Tehran, is very unpopular with its own people. They want to be set free. They need our help, though, just in the same way as the people of the Soviet Union needed our help, the people of Ukraine and other places needed our help.
And we can provide it with simple things like radio broadcasts, helping labor unions to get organized, smuggling information in, helping them to get organized, all these kinds of basic human rights things, pro-democracy things, not using force. That ought to be our policy. And we should never say that we will forever recognize the right of these mullahs to oppress their own peoples. There’s just -- that can’t possibly be in our interests.
JESSICA T. MATHEWS: But that’s not -- of course, I mean, it is what you earlier described that I’m talking about, which is what in diplomatic jargon is a security guarantee. They want to know that the United
States does not intend to invade Iraq and force -- and do regime change by force. They want that form of guarantee.
I agree with you that the chances of success are slim. We have lost precious, precious time, and the fund of trust in this government in the rest of the world is so low that I think the chances of success in the next couple of years...
MAX BOOT: Are you talking about the government of Tehran or the one in
Washington?
JESSICA T. MATHEWS: I’m talking about the one in Washington.
CHARLIE ROSE: I know you are.
JESSICA T. MATHEWS: But I think there is another point that’s really important there, where we really have a kind of a fundamental disagreement.
You said at the outset, Max, that it’s OK with you if certain countries have nuclear weapons, but you don’t like this one, and this is the core
--sorry, this current government in Iran. Neither do I, but this is the core of this administration’s policy, and it’s the core mistake in non-proliferation.
You can’t have a good guy/bad guy policy. Nuclear weapons are OK for the good guys, and we decide who the good guys are, in this case currently India, et cetera, et cetera, and they’re not OK for the bad guys, and we define the bad guys. That regime is -- that whole concept of a regime is flawed from the outset, and it’s -- it has failed. And it will continue to fail.
CHARLIE ROSE: Is it acceptable risk for society and especially the Middle East for Iran to have nuclear weapons?
JESSICA T. MATHEWS: I think that the likelihood of catastrophic results from a military venture to try to keep Iran from having nuclear weapons in the next few years would be, you know, is enormous.
CHARLIE ROSE: So you’re saying it’s worse to have -- the consequences of an invasion to eliminate weapons would be worse than Iran having them? That’s what you’re saying?
JESSICA T. MATHEWS: No, I’m not saying that. I really don’t go that far.
I’m saying the current policy, which has done almost nothing effective in five years on the diplomatic front, is backing down a cul-de-sac, at the end of which we’ll have our backs against the wall with only two choices -- a nuclear Iran or military action -- both of which are horrible choices.
MAX BOOT: I completely agree with Jessica. I agree with Jessica. And that’s why we ought to be working towards a third option.
JESSICA T. MATHEWS: The issue right now...
CHARLIE ROSE: I can only listen to one at a time. You finish, Jessica, and then I’ll go to Max.
JESSICA T. MATHEWS: No, I’m just saying, before we back any further, we
ought to be doing something different, and I’ve tried to suggest two components of that.
CHARLIE ROSE: Is to promise the Iranians we’ll not overthrow them.
JESSICA T. MATHEWS: Is to negotiate with them hard.
CHARLIE ROSE: So what’s your grand bargain? So the administration, they get what for saying we never -- do they get something, or is that not even a correct way to express it? They say, we won’t do this, now what can we get from you? If that’s your fear, we are willing to say we won’t do it if you do something? And what’s the something?
JESSICA T. MATHEWS: In my view, the nuclear issue is at the very top of the pile, and we ought to be focusing on that, and we ought not to try to get too much in one package because we’ll lose it all. OK? And a crucial element of that, I think, is recognizing the sovereignty of this country and of this government by talking to it, you know, the – and taking off the table the constant return to threats and hints that we’ve seen through the last five years, which are designed to, I think, and which do in effect undermine every time you can get any sort of opening going.
CHARLIE ROSE: On that, thank you very much. Great to see you, Max.
Thank you, Jessica, as always.
JESSICA T. MATHEWS: It’s a pleasure.
CHARLIE ROSE: Thank you for joining us. We’ll see you next time.
END
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