As part of the World Economic Forum Simulcast 2002, the Foreign Policy Association assembled a panel of distinguished policymakers to discuss “The War on Terrorism: Summing Up and Looking Ahead.” The panel, moderated by Foreign Policy Association President and CEO Noel Lateef, addressed the security and diplomacy issues that the U.S. will continue to face in the ongoing war against terror. “Until there is greater political understanding that some things are simply not tolerable anymore, we will not get a worldwide definition of terrorism,” said Nicholas Rostow, a Counselor to the U.S. Ambassador to the UN and U.S. Representative to the United Nations Committee on Counterterrorism. “But that doesn't mean that the international community can't work together to make significant progress, and I think that it is engaged in a process that will produce some very interesting results.”

Panelists also included Professor David B. H. Denoon, Professor of Politics and Economics, New York University; Ambassador Robert Gosende, Associate Vice Chancellor for International Programs, State University of New York; Mr. David Malpass, Chief International Economist, Bear Stearns & Company; Mr. Charles William Maynes, President, Eurasia Foundation; and Admiral Stansfield Turner, U.S. Navy, Ret., former Director of Central Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency

Begin Transcript

DM: I'm David Malpass with Bear Sterns and I want to give you a very warm welcome to Bear Sterns. We're going to have, I hope, an interesting panel discussion here. This is a joint venture between Bear Sterns and the Foreign Policy Association, and the moderator of our panel is Noel Lateef, the president of the Foreign Policy Association. Thanks again for coming to Bear Sterns.

NL: Thank you David and thank you very much for hosting us. Ladies and Gentlemen, if you signed up for the panel on the war on terrorism -- summing up and looking ahead – you've come to the right venue. Welcome, and we're especially pleased to have a very strong panel today. Kierkagaard observed that “life is lived forward, but understood backward.” With us today is an extraordinary galaxy of talent and expertise to help us better understand both where we've been and where we're heading in the current campaign against terrorism. You've been given biographic materials on our panelists; suffice it to say that in Adm. Stansfield Turner we have a former Director of Central Intelligence, who preceded that assignment with an illustrious career in the Navy. Bill Maynes is president of the Eurasian Foundation and former Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs as well as longtime editor of the distinguished journal Foreign Policy. Dave Denoon is professor of both politics and economics at NYU, and a former Assistant Secretary of Defense whose expertise in the Far East is widely sought out. Nicholas Rostow, who will be joining us, served as counselor to President Bush in the first Bush administration, and is currently counselor to Ambassador Negroponte at the United Nations, where he is also US representative on the UN committee on counterterrorism. Ambassador Robert Gosende is in charge of international programs at the State University of New York, having put in an extraordinary career in the Foreign Service that included serving as US envoy to Somalia at a very challenging time. David Malpass is chief international economist here at Bear Sterns. David has held senior posts at the Treasury and State Department. I don't have to tell those of you who have received his reports that they contain some of the most penetrating insights into the global economy.

I'd like to begin by asking Bill Maynes to help us place the war on terrorism in the wider context of US foreign policy. Looking back ten years from now, Bill, will the war on terrorism be viewed as the overarching policy challenge facing the United States?

BM: I think the answer to that question depends on what you think September 11th signifies. Was it simply an end to American invulnerability, so that we began experiencing what other's had experienced, or was it a quantum change, which would spell the beginning of a totally new agenda for the United States. Was it simply an enhanced example of more of the same, greatly enhanced because of the number of casualties, or are we facing a change in the strategic environment similar to say the rise of Japan in the 1930's? I'd like to suggest that it's the latter. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the team that made the atomic bomb, was asked in the late 1940's to do a secret study for Congress on the implications of the nuclear age, if the United States went down this path. He predicted then that at some point it was inevitable that an individual or a group, nongovernmental, would be able to make an atomic weapon and put it in a suitcase, and the only way to detect it, he said, would be with a screwdriver. The Congress buried the report and decided that this was an issue that future generations should address. Well, I think we're the future generation. What's happening here, I think, is a change in the nature of terrorism. There's an interesting graph in the latest Atlantic Monthly, and it shows that since the fall of the Berlin Wall the incidents of terrorism have sharply dropped, but the number of casualties, particularly since the mid-1990's, has sharply increased. So we have less incidents and a greater number of casualties. Terrorism seems to be shifting from a political tool, where you go after limited targets to make a statement, to something that has the potential to resemble the kinds of wars that states have waged over the centuries. Always before, only a state with an army could kill large numbers of people for a political objective and they've been doing it through the centuries. Richard the Lionheart and Genghis Khan both had the same strategy, which was to go before a city, say ‘surrender, or if you don't everybody will be killed.' Then they pile the heads or bodies up outside the walls after they had conquered the place. When you think about it, the message of the blitz of London or the firebombing of Dresden or the atomic bombs were ‘surrender or perish.' Now, we've got the potential that terrorist groups could essentially be saying ‘leave us alone or perish – stay away from us, or you're going to suffer dramatically.' The question is how to deal with this. A military tool is obviously important, there's no question about that, but I would argue in the long run that it is secondary. It has to be there, but we're going to have to address this with much greater intelligence, and we can't do that alone. The Ambassador to Jordan in Washington pointed out that other day to a group of senior officials that blue eyed Americans aren't going to penetrate Al-Qaeda or their future successors, you're going to have to depend on us. So we're going to have to reach out to countries that we haven't reached out to before. Also, financial controls and policy shifts, to try to dry up the lake of support for these institutions. Now, when I say that I think what happened on September 11th will constitute a strategic shift, that is only if these groups can get a hold of weapons of mass destruction. Otherwise, we're back in the traditional world of terrorism, where it's a huge problem, and enormous problem, but it is not a strategic threat to any country. If Oppenheimer is right, and they get their hands on weapons of mass destruction, then it is a strategic threat and America's international agenda will have to change.

NL: In Global Trends 2015, a published report under the direction of the National Intelligence Council, the following observations were made about national and international governance: “ the state will remain the single most important organizing unit of political, economic, and security affairs through 2015, but will confront fundamental tests of effective governance. Successful states will interact with non-state actors to manage authority and share responsibilities. These non-state actors will increasingly gain resources and power over the next 15 years.” Stan, post September 11, should the military and intelligence community be gearing up to anticipate new non-state threats to national security?

ST: On the military side, I would suggest that we're going to be more high tech, but smaller scale operations very much like what we've seen in Afghanistan, of course in different climates and different geographical situations. But the emphasis of the military, of course, has traditionally been on winning major wars, and our budget today is skewed today towards high caliber equipment like major tanks and major fighter aircraft, submarines, aircraft carriers, and so forth. I think we're going to have to as a country scale down some of that preparation for the Soviet Union that we've made over all these years and do more emphasis on these special forces, these lighter attack situations, where we have high accuracy and therefore great lethality, but not great quantities of deaths and munitions. On the intelligence side, its going to be very integral to the development of the military, because it will be the function that lets the military be precise, be accurate, and do the specific job that is required of it. We spent probably 80% of our resources on intelligence during my tenure in the 1970's, and the late 1970's and well into the 1980's, on the Soviet Union. That of course has changed since then, but the emphasis I believe now has got to be on knowing what's going on politically, economically, knowing the culture and language of 180 countries in the world, not a big focus on one or two. Al-Quada cells could develop in any one of those 180 countries, and we've got to be able to anticipate that, we've got to be able to understand that. It's a great challenge because although our intelligence community has always paid some attention to all of these countries, now we really need to understand them in much greater depth. And yet, the majority of them will never appear over the radar horizon of the president or the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Defense. But you're going to have some analysts over here doing nothing but studying Rwanda. If they make a career of that and no one does call them, they'll have a pretty dull career. I think that's going to mean, Bob and David, a lot more interplay with academia. I think we're going to have to work with the academic community to maintain this residual capability that we can call upon for various countries when the time comes up. But it's going to be a very important era I believe for intelligence in dealing with this terrorist situation.

NL: Bob, you were US envoy to Somalia during a harrowing time in the conduct of US humanitarian diplomacy. What lesson's can be drawn from the Somalia experience? With reports from Afghanistan late last week of warlords fighting it out and incidents of US forces seeming to play into the hands of Afghan factions, what advice would you give the Bush administration? How do we avoid a repetition of the circumstances that lead to “Black Hawk Down.”

RG: I think that one of the things that has to be recognized up front, and I think the Bush administration has been good at this so far at least, is that this is a long term effort that we're engaged with in Afghanistan. In the case of Somalia, we were announcing the return of US troops from Somalia before Christmas of 1992, when in fact we couldn't even send all the troops that we were intending to send to Somalia before February 1993. There was a highly unrealistic attitude about how long it would take to deal with the Somali problem. In Afghanistan, I think, its obvious the administration is taking a longer view concerning that. I think that another thing we have to deal with is this whole question of nation building. I think it became apparent even in the last presidential campaign that this was an issue that the new administration coming in didn't intend to engage in or didn't intend to do any of. I think the American people have gotten a kind of distorted view of what nation building is, thinking that maybe its a chicken in every pot, two cars in each garage and wall to wall carpeting for everyone, all paid for by the American taxpayer. In fact, nation building is coming to grips with the very basics that are needed for a civilized existence. In Somalia, when we went in, we had plenty of money for relief assistance, but there was no money whatsoever to establish Somalia's national police force or its court system. These are basics that Afghanistan is going to need help with from the outset, and over a fairly long period of time if we expect the country to return to some modicum of stability. I think also as we deal with the war on terrorism, and I think Dr. Brzenski said this eloquently yesterday, we have to be aware of the fertile ground for instability that exists out there. We have to be concerned about, in a somewhat heightened manner than the US has been concerned about these matters of late, with how much funding and activity we're willing to put into development assistance. We now run way down on the list of developed countries in term of percentage of GDP devoted to development assistance. The outside world I think does admire and like us, but has increasingly come to think that we're selfish. That is really not what American people are. That's not the way American people think about the outside world or each other. So I think we need to overcome this view of selfishness. Stephen Kinser, the longtime correspondent for the New York Times in Turkey and Pakistan, said a little bit about this in a column about three weeks ago, when he tried to answer the President's recent question “why do they hate us?” Steve's answer for Pakistan and Turkey was that during the last fifteen years we've closed our information service offices, our outreach to the general public in those countries. It's not so much that they hate us as that they don't know us. And that which they don't know, perhaps, they tend to suspect. I think we need to go back to an age where we spent more time on what Joseph Nye would call “the soft side of diplomacy.” International and cultural exchanges I think are very important. I think as Bill said a few moments ago we need to be concerned about how many people are studying languages, and how many people are studying foreign cultures. I can tell you unfortunately that at the State University of New York, and I don't think we're that atypical, that in this regard there has been a diminution over the last several years in the number of our young people who are engaged in this type of study of the outside world.

NL: Nick Rostow, since September 11, the UN and a number of treaty organizations have appeared to step up to the plate in the war on terrorism. Could you give us your appraisal of whether these efforts will have teeth, whether they vindicate the practice of more robust multilateralism by the United States.

NR: First of all I apologize to you all for being a little late, I was coming actually from a meeting of the United Nations terrorism sanctions committee, in which we were debating how to accommodate concerns about due process in the blocking of international terrorist assets. It was a highly relevant exercise to your question. September 11th was of course a traumatic event on 1st avenue as elsewhere, and it's immediate impact was to galvanize the international community in ways that had not been seen previously and focused it's attention on terrorism, I would say, almost in a non-political way. In the immediate aftermath, therefore, the General Assembly condemned the attacks and the Security Council undertook unprecedented action binding on all states, which I'm not sure it would take today. But in the immediate aftermath of September 11th, it took the following the decision, and it was a decision that's binding on all states, to require countries to evaluate their capabilities to counter terrorism and to work together to raise the capabilities by raising the gaps and working together to fill the gaps. It was an extremely far-reaching act, probably one of the most significant in the history of the Security Council. The United Nations, through the Security Council, has been working on this project ever since in a very systematic way. It remains to be seen, what the outcome will be, no one is quite clear, but the operative Resolution 1373 requires the criminalization of active and passive support of terrorism, the freezing of terrorism assets, international cooperation to strengthen border controls, and so on. This is mandatory, and for much of the world it is automatically enforceable. It also requires that every country report to the Security Council what they've done, what their able to do, and where it's needs lie. Over 120 countries have filed reports so far, and the Security Council is crunching through them, trying to establish what they mean. And that's one of the great questions – what is paper truth, what is on the ground truth, and to what extent are people going to tolerate the Security Council scratching beneath the paper. The effort so far has been to co-opt countries, to get them to evolve, to get them to understand that this is a probably that effects everyone. And however a particular country defines terrorism, they all can identify their capabilities and their needs, and work together to fill the needs. There are limits, and the limits were rather dramatically demonstrated last week with the failure of the General Assembly, as it has failed to do every year since the early seventies, to reach an agreement on the definition of terrorism. There was no agreement because some countries cannot give up terrorism as an instrument of their favorite enemy. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out whose got favorite enemies which they wish to use terrorism or where they don't wish to describe the fighters as engaged in terrorism. Until there is greater political understanding that some things are simply not tolerable anymore, we will not get a worldwide definition of terrorism. But that doesn't mean that the international community can't work together to make significant progress, and I think that it is engaged in a process that will produce some very interesting results even though at the moment nobodies quite sure how its going to work or whether it will work. That's one of the most interesting things about it.

NL: David Denoon, where do we go from here in the war on terrorism, or more appropriately put, where should we go from here?

DD: I think that one of the central issues that the Bush administration will face and the American public in general will face, and our allies and those who will cooperate with us abroad, is how to get an appropriate balance in what we do. It seems to me we've made a lot of progress going after both the Taliban regime and Al-Quada in Afghanistan, but I think we're now at the stage where we have to start asking broader questions. The questions that come to the fore are, how do we proceed that we avoid the kind of disaster on 9/11, and in Washington, but at the same time not create problems that are worse. We therefore have something of a paradox. We may well be dealing with an immediate problem that we consider essential, but creating future that we don't want to deal with. I think Bill Maynes has certainly hinted at this, and certainly Adm. Turner's comments about our knowledge in different parts of the world make this front and center. The US government has just announced, for example, the forward deployment positions of the forces dealing with Afghanistan, and I think that's an important announcement. They've announced that the army base will be in Kuwait, the Navy and Marines will be in Bahrain, and the Air Force is going to be in Saudi Arabia. Now, if we go back to any of the central issues of what apparently the al –Quada group is concerned about, it's obviously the extension of American involvement in a region where they don't want us. So, the question is, how do you get some balance while you're achieving this? I think all of us on this panel are trying to wrestle with that question. How do you get an effective military action to deal with true antagonists, but at the same to not lay the basis for a recurrence in the future? So, it seems to me, restoring that balance is critical. I would argue that in term of our bilateral relations, we're in better shape in many ways than four or five months ago. Certainly the countries that are most important to the United States are Canada and Mexico, and there's no reason to believe we're not on good terms with them. We certainly have very close ties with Britain that were enhanced by Tony Blair's response. The Japanese have begun a much more active foreign policy, and as we all know have agreed to participate in the task force in the Indian Ocean, something they haven't done since the post-World War II period. Certainly our relations with Germany are as good as they were, and our relations with both Russia and China have substantially improved. The problem is when we get into the mechanics of dealing in areas where al-Quada may operate, or where there may be much more bitter resentment to our presence. I would argue that in South Asia, our relations with India have deteriorated somewhat because we've been involved in trying to court both India and Pakistan that the same time, which clearly is a dicey game. We also have a problem in East Asia, in that we are deeply concerned, and correctly, about the potential terrorist activities that may emanate from North Korea, but when we do that we face difficulties with both Japan and South Korea. So we have to get the balance right so that we can deal effectively with true military threats. I think many in Japan, for example, were not willing to acknowledge the challenge that North Korea faced, but after the firing of the Te-Po-Deng II, the Japanese public got more aware of this. Certainly after 9/11, their more aware of how such difficulties could develop. But, I think we also have problems in Southeast Asia. We're in a situation now where the Philippines has asked us to cooperate with them, and I think the general public in the Philippines will support that, but certainly there will be pockets of resistance. The question is will that escalate? And a country where I have lived and worked considerably is Indonesia, and I think the Indonesians are deeply concerned about the pattern of US involvement in the region. So, I think we have to decide how do you get the appropriate balance. I think all of us on the panel are bringing up different features. I believe David will now turn more to the economic issue, but I will just mention that I think earlier in this conference Steve Roach brought up the dilemma of whether the US can always lead in pulling other countries out of recessions, and so I think we have a very unusual situation now where Japan, Western Europe, and the United States are all facing economic difficulties simultaneously. That's the first time this has happened since the seventies. We're clearly in need of some more broadly coordinated effort. The international institutional aspects that Dr. Rostow has now mentioned are critical, and I also think that in this panel we may want to talk about non-proliferation. It seems to me that all of these are areas where we need to get cooperation that cannot be unilateral. The question is how do you get the right balance? It would seem to me that we start with our allies, and our allies and our allies and our relations to them are made closer. But we need to build these institutions over time, so that we don't create a cycle of difficulties.

NL: David Malpass, how will a sustained campaign against terrorism affect the global economy?

DM: If we think about how the world economy changed after September 11th, from the economic standpoint, not so much. The world was falling into a global recession beforehand. It was unclear when we would be coming out. Now it's a little clearer that we seem to be hitting bottom and moving out. So, if you look back at this twenty years from now and say ‘what was the economic impact of the attacks in the US on September 11th,' there won't be much of a blip from a narrow economic standpoint. Now, if we think about it, the world economy is the sum of a lot of individual activities. So, one way to think about the changes since September 11th is to think about how each person's life changes a little bit, and does that add to something greater or less than we had before. Unclear so far, lots of flexibility in the world economy so far, so that the person in India has not had their life changed much. But if we think about people in other parts of the world their changing very rapidly -- people in Japan seeing their life-savings diminish, people in Indonesia have been set back a lot in the last three or four years, not directly related to the World Trade Center bombing, but all of it wrapped up in this current period of time that people will remember I suppose as the late 90's/early 2000's. President Bush in his state of the Union talked about the ‘evil axis' and we have to think about world risks as we go on prosecuting the war on terrorism. I think that we have in our mind's an exaggerated sense of OPEC's power from the 1970's. You know, in my economic framework, OPEC, or (lets be specific) the Arab countries, were able to raise the price of oil in 1974 and onward in large part because the dollar had gotten a lot weaker. Remember that the dominant issue of the 1970's was the devaluation of the US dollar. So in our minds, we often transform that into thinking that the embargo on oil was the impetus, when really it was the change in the value of the dollar. So my sense is that if we have further activity in Iraq and Iran, and it begins to worry people about the world oil supply, that won't become a big factor in the world economy. As long as the dollar is relatively stable in its value, the price of oil over long periods of time is relatively stable. I think that that's my outlook there, and it's not going to depend too much on Iraq and Iran. Of more importance in my mind is Islam and it's relationship to growth. We have to look back over recent years and think there is something systematic going on in countries that are Islamic, in that they just haven't been growing as fast as other countries. So if there was something that came out of this current period that caused a change in Islam and its relationship to globalization and the world economy, that might be a very important outcome. So far, it's hard for me to tell that there is good coming from that specific change, but I think if we talk about total world growth over the next thirty years, a variable is how does Islam relate to that world growth – in a constructive way, or in a less constructive way? We'll have to see how that takes hold. In my mind, good can actually come from the US being assertive in the global order. We can see US concepts of economics spreading, and I think we could see that adding to world growth if its done properly. We have the example of the US's relationships with Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union that are now very important to the way the world is going. If you had said three years ago we were going to have this sense of rapidly improving relations with both Russia and its former satellites, we would have been skeptical. Now it looks like a reality. That's an important positive trend coming. Now, there are 0other economic questions, and I will go through them briefly. Can the US finance this war on terrorism? President Bush released his budget today. It's expansive in the area of national defense. Remember that also happened in the Reagan administration, and it was a time of a very good US economy. Bond yields fell pretty rapidly, even as the fiscal deficit was rising. We saw today in the face of a large US budget prognosis that the bond market was actually rallying. Bond yields were coming down. So I think we have ample history that the US has huge sources of financing. The question is whether we're using these finances for the good of the world, and if so, then that's not going to pose any financing challenge that I can see at all. In fact I think we'll see the opposite – faster world growth to the extent that the US is more assertive. That's of course been a big issue as people try and think about the US fiscal deficit coming back. In my mind a big issue also is the polarization of the world economy. We can be happy that the US has done well in the 90's and seems like it will do well in the 2000's, but we have to recognize what a powerful dominate force in the world the US economy has been and its actually growing larger. We are now producing 40% of the world's growth and that's rising. Our share of the world economy is reaching record proportions, and that also extends into the means of future growth, so that if you think about the investment taking place in the world, the US is getting the huge preponderance of that investment. That means that more and more of the world's future world growth is going to come from and rely upon the US for. Now that's good for the short run in that we're one of the economies set up on market principles with freedom and liberty, but over the long run it means that bigger and bigger swaths of the world are falling below the poverty line. I've written frequently and have been a critic of the IMF's role in this and so as I think about...well I should extend that to US development assistance programs. While I'm all for the US having humanitarian efforts, what I've seen in my Washington experience was often it had the opposite effect. The more the US was extending money into poor regions of the world, the worse those areas were doing in their own self-growth efforts. As we think about what the US can do as an economic adjunct to the war on terrorism, we have to really examine deeply the role of our international financial institutions and our own development aid programs in thinking about how they could better benefit world growth. I'll give you my answer before we close down here. I think we desperately need a prosperity initiative spearheaded by the United States, where we take it as part of our thought process that we're part of the global economy and we really need to see better growth performance out of other countries. It's not our responsibility to do it, but it's our responsibility not to be doing harm to these various countries. We're not doing enough of that under our current system, specifically I think we are projecting floating exchange rate -- there is no theoretical proof that these work at all, but that is now the law of the world economy. That only works for big countries, so we have that hanging over countries like Argentina, which were trying to hold on to it but are no longer able to. We have the value added taxes, where the US and the international financial organizations project very high value added taxes on poor people when we would never tolerate that kind of taxation on the US economy. In Argentina, one of the battles over the years has been over this 21% value added tax that in the US has been pegged at zero, because no one would ever tolerate it being anything other than that. We also have projected through our institutions a very litigious trade environment. Think of all the lawyers we have in the United States working on trade law. In other countries, they're simply not able to deal with that kind of system, yet it has become the heart and soul of the global trade movement. It's free trade through lawyer's projecting the rules. So I think about the economic challenge of the war on terrorism and feed it back into US policy, we have a system that is working well for the United States but is not really working well for a host of other countries. We have a mission statement that patently is not really going to project or allow for growth in quite a few parts of the world. We have this polarization dynamic that we have to think through and play through the war on terrorism.

NL: Nick, following up on what David Malpass has just said, we are hearing increasingly that fighting poverty and corruption are the best tactics in fighting terrorism. Indeed, Secretary Powell flagged late last week in this forum the importance of countering hopelessness. Is the administration contemplating widening the aperture of the coalition of the war on terrorism to address the fertile breeding ground issue that Bob Gosende mentioned?

NR: As part of the international community, we'll try to address some of these issues as the international community has been trying to address them as long as I've been alive. I suppose I'm a skeptic about these deep-seated causes of terrorism and what motivates a terrorist to be a terrorist. But that doesn't mean that there aren't extraordinarily significant social, political, and moral issues that need to be addressed, and I would say in a better way than the international community has addressed them to date. I think anyone one who takes one look at Africa really quickly realizes what an appalling failure international efforts on that continent have been over the last forty years. The fact of the matter is that not every poor person thinks of his or her solution as flying and blowing up an office building or a discotheque or hijacking an airplane or any of the other ways which terrorism has manifested itself. I think we have fundamental problem here in that there are countries that use terrorists to advance their political agenda, and there now appear to be this interesting phenomena of independent multinational organization that don't seem to owe allegiance to any one country. I'm sort of reminded of SPECTER in the James Bond movies. I think the agenda is therefore complicated and simple at same time. The simple part is that we have got to get a better handle on terrorist activity or there will be hell to pay. I was on a panel on Saturday and a congressman produced a briefcase and he opened up it. There was a pipe inside and he said “that represents the size of a nuclear device, and the technology for that device has proliferated and at least one of the producers of that device cannot today not account for every one that was produced. So there are very, very urgent defense, police, and intelligence issues. There are very important long-term problem. As one of my colleagues said, “we go through another September 11th and there will be no forgiveness.” The entire US government is responsible, for the last decade or two, for failing to prevent September 11th, and there will not be as much tolerance the second time around.

NL: Let me turn to you Stan, and ask you how good a job we're doing in anticipating the unimaginable. Do we know what the consequences would be of a large airliner crashing into a nuclear power plant?

ST: I think there have been reasonable studies on that Noel. I don't think we have enough to build enough to build the protection of those plants. I think we have a reasonable idea of their vulnerability, but there hasn't been enough done to ensure that you can't drive a truck in or fly an airplane in. When you talk about imagining the unimaginable, it is a tough challenge. We must all remember that in 1993 they drove a truck into the world trade center, and set off a conventional bomb that did a modest amount of damage comparatively speaking. We didn't have the imagination to say – having not succeeded very much in 1993 would they come back in 2001 with something new technique or device, and what could it be? It's a human failing. It's a particular failing in the world of intelligence not to get out of the box, not to get out and think about the unimaginable. Certainly, 9/11 is going to encourage people to do that more, but it is a natural human failing to think the world is going to be like it is today, tomorrow.

NL: Bob Gosende, how important is it to win hearts and minds in the war on terrorism and how effective is U.S. public diplomacy today, particularly in the Islamic world?

RG: Well first, Nick has scared me rigid with ‘this can't happen again,' because, just to look at the problem of a suitcase bomb, a suitcase sign object moving over a border is a relatively easy thing to accomplish.

NR: I did not say that it could not happen again. I said that if it did not happen again, there would be even more hell to pay.

RG: Exactly. And how you get at dealing with things like that happening – we had a conference at the ambassador's residence in Moscow in 1995 – it had been revealed that weeks earlier a briefcase-sized package of gyroscopes had made their way out of Russia to Iraq, and someone at the conference said, ‘Do you mean to say that people exported those things just for money?' And the answer was yes they did – just for money, because the place that is producing the gyroscopes, people are facing a complete collapse of their way of life, of the way they earn money. Can we provide hope to people on a broad basis so that they won't export devices like this? Of course not, but we can begin to think about how we do help countries to provide some sort of hope in what they are up to. I think to get at what you just said Noel – where are we with the public diplomacy of the United States? Two years ago we decided to close down the United States information agency. It was the arm of our government that did educational and cultural exchange, separate from the department of state. That function has now been moved into the Department of State, where I believe it will not fare well. The Department of State is dedicated to the conduct of foreign relations. Its concern about educational and cultural exchange is way down on the list of things it worries about every day. I think we do need to get at a broad-based effort on the part of the United States government to deal with how we are perceived in the rest of the world. That message has got to be backed up by, I believe, action. I share all of the concerns after just completing a career of 38 years, with two tours in Central Europe and the rest in sub-Saharan Africa. Mr Malpass just referred to how successful we have been with development. When I first came into the foreign service, I first contemplated in going to work for USAID, and an AID officer told me, very wisely at the time, don't come here Bob, because I know the things you are interested in we are not going to do anymore. We were beginning to shift away then from very basic programs that carry very real meaning. We said, we can't build a school for every child in Africa, we can't pave all the roads in Africa, but I don't know David, if we looked at all the money we spent we probably would have built those schools. We probably would have paved the roads. And we probably would have been a lot more successful in providing not only hope, but also real economic development out there in the rest of the world that we so desperately are going to need if we are going to lead the world economy. I think we are in bad shape right now. I think we need to come back from where we are. I think that we need to engage in nothing short of a Marshall Plan for education and cultural exchange, to get at what the Admiral talked about how many of our young people are studying foreign languages and culture, to develop expertise in 180 countries.

NL: Bill Maynes, your reaction to these remarks by Bill Brzezinski: “It is easy,” he said to us yesterday, “to slide into a global alliance with lots of takers who want to label their enemies as terrorists. We can gain short-term security, but we should be striving to a world of security and democracy.”

BM: First, before I comment on that, I'd like to speak on this issue of loose nuclear weapons, I'd like to point out that at the beginning of the Carter administration they decided to count all our weapons, and one was missing. David Aram, who was then the – they found it – who was then the assistant to the number two in the National Security Council staff, went on to write a novel about this. He later produced a novel about what would happen if a nuclear weapon went missing. The fact is, we've got thousands of these things that are totally unnecessary. One of the issues that we have to come to grips with is lowering that stockpile. There have been some promising statements by the president on this, but I think the country itself needs to understand just how vital this is to reduce these stockpiles and get rid of them – don't have them in storage where they can be stolen. We've already had two cases now in history where two nuclear powers have been on the verge of revolution. One was France when De Gaulle came to power, and the second was Russia. We were very fortunate that some criminal bands, and we are still not sure in Russia, didn't get a hold of some of these weapons.

NL: Before you react, maybe Stan could comment on that. I know he has written a book on the subject of curbing nuclear proliferation.

ST: I commend Bill, because I think this is the number one lesson from the World Trade Center situation. Bill, you very sagely said earlier that this is a seminal change in the world, and what changed, as you put it, is that the individual today has the ability to wreak destruction that was only the capability of nations before. If you think of a terrorist driving a truck bomb with a real nuclear weapon into the World Trade Center, I wouldn't want to be here on 46th street. This is what has really changed – the immensity of destruction that could be wrought by a few individuals, assuming that they can get hold of one of these. This is not an easy job, but if they do. Therefore, the President in his State of the Union address, was I think very right in labeling the preventing of the proliferation of nuclear weapons as a very high priority in the fight against terrorism. My complaint is that I don't see any action in the administration to take some new initiative against this proliferation. We are continuing to embargo trade with Iraq, we are continuing to have sanctions on people like Iran, we have more security for nuclear components in Russia, and those are all good and desirable, but they are not going to prevent a determined terrorist from getting a nuclear weapon over the long run. I think we need to recognize that to get the cooperation we need from other nations, to prevent the sale of nuclear components or materials to people like Saddam Hussein in Iraq, to support us diplomatically and even militarily in preventing such a country from getting nuclear weapons, we are going to have to have more understanding of our position on these weapons. Our position on these weapons is, just as Bill said, crazy. We have over 10,000 nuclear warheads in the U.S. arsenal this afternoon. Let me say that again. 10,000 nuclear warheads. Can anyone of you imagine wanting to wreak 10,000 Hiroshimas anywhere in the world? Of course not. We don't need anything like that amount. As long as we demonstrate that we think there is great utility in these weapons by keeping this number, we undercut our case of going out to the world and saying that we must prevent an Iraq from having even one. The administration recently completed a nuclear posture review. The bottom line is something like 2,000 warheads is the minimum we can go to, and even at that, when we get rid of the other 8,000, we are going to keep them in ready reserve so that we can bring them back if we needed them. We are the most powerful military country in the world, without nuclear weapons, and we think we need a minimum of 2,000 plus some reserves to protect ourselves, and yet we want to enlist the world to prevent the proliferation of these in ones and twos to groups like Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. It just doesn't hold together. In my opinion we could go from the minimum they are talking about of 2,000 to 200, and be safe and we could do it very quickly. They are talking about 10 years to do this. 10 years is just unimaginable long when you talk about how one of these things might go off tomorrow in the World Trade Center.

NL: Dave Denoon, did you want to weigh in?

DD: Yeah, I would just like to add a point or two. The theme I was trying to raise is the question of what are the mechanisms by which the U.S. can proceed. We have an opportunity now, with both China and Russia, which we didn't have before 9/11, and I think the Chinese realize in a way that they didn't even as recently as 5 years ago. Some of you may remember that the U.S. boarded a ship that the Chinese had called the Jin Hu, and we had intelligence that there was a medium-range rocket on that, and we thought that we also might identify nuclear components that were going to Pakistan. There were not, and that was false intelligence information, but at the time the reaction from the Chinese was just pure nationalism. Obviously we blundered. It seems that today, the Chinese are willing to discuss these issues in a much more serious fashion, and they have to be much more concerned. In a similar way, I think the reaction from President Putin of Russia is much more positive, and I think therefore that I share some of Dr. Rothschild's concerns about how effective some of the efforts of the UN in this area may be, but we may be able to find that there are bilateral routes by which we are going to get more effective action. So by balance, what I meant was how do we establish a mechanism by which we actually get something tangible done. I also think that if the U.S. tries to do these things alone, we might get more situations like the Jin Hu where we intervene, embarrass a state, and find that we didn't accomplish it, and it is far better for us if we can get principle states that have a common interest with us to cooperate.

BM: Now you want me to answer the question? [laughs] Well, I think Dr. Brzezinsky, in that statement, maybe unintentionally points to an issue that Nick raised, which is the definition of terrorism. What I think Dr. Brzezinsky is driving at is that there are states in the world, India, Russia, Israel, almost any state that is facing a “war of liberation” or “terrorism” has a vested interest, obviously, in wake of 9/11, in saying that none of these activities are legitimate, and that you, the rest of the world, should help us repress these people, because they don't have the right to use these methods in order to achieve their political objectives. I think a number of people would say that they don't. That any kind of resorting to terrorism, regardless of the pretext, is totally illegitimate post-September 11. Others are saying that we are not going to deny the Chechens the right to continue to struggle for their independence. We are not going to deny the Palestinians the right to try to get their own state in the West Bank, or the Kashmiris. The world is divided on this issue. The administration initially had this concept of terrorism with a global reach, and I thought that seems to have evolved. Now we are closer in our position to a blanket lumping of all of these groups into one basket. I think it will be very difficult to get support for that in a number of parts of the world, for the reasons that I have just stated. At the same time, a line has to be drawn, for the same reason that we are talking about terrorists using weapons of mass destruction. There are certain limits, that if they are crossed, pose a strategic threat to not just the United States, but really to civilized society. We have to find a way to draw that line. I wish I knew what that line was, I would pass a memorandum to Nick right now, but we have to continue to struggle.

NL: Nick, do you want to comment.

NR: Yes. I just wanted to say that I agree with what Mr. Maynes just said, but I would like to call your attention to a statement that the Secretary General Mr. Kofi Annan said on October 1. He said the issue now is that there has to be moral clarity, and that the indiscriminate killing of civilians, in order to advance a political cause is simply not tolerable, and the trouble is, he is right, but the international community is not of one mind on that subject.