munk debate transcript

Munk Debate TranscriptTORONTO, 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.

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.
Page 2 of 50 SC June 19, 2008
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.
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.
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:
If I could take that on, I would like to do that. That is a lovely
misrepresentation of our position.
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.
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

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