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Paul Wolfowitz
Deputy Secretary of Defense
Answers to Written Questions from the Floor:
Q: As we try to figure out whether we are winning, losing or holding our ground in the war on terror, how do we measure the result of our effort? Has anti-Americanism gone up or down since September 11, and how do our policies with respect to Iraq affect that? How we will we know when the war on terror is over?
A: This business of how to measure progress is a difficult one, but it's not going to be measured for a long time by the absence of terrorist attacks. We've seen in Bali that it doesn't take a lot to do one. Although I think there is more behind that kind of network than we may imagine. I do think that those 2,400 people who are off the streets is real progress. The elimination of Afghanistan as a sanctuary for terrorists is real progress. There has been a large number of successes, and not even primarily military ones - although what our military did in Afghanistan is quite remarkable - but this is a war against a secret enemy that hides among us. It is a war fought by intelligence and law enforcement authorities as well. We're making progress, but it's measured by the threats we've blocked and the people we've arrested, and they're obviously still many out there and they're many threats still out there.
Most polling data, if you take the pulse on a daily basis, is a little discouraging. I wouldn't say that all of that is, because the assumption that we are the cause of everything in the world, including anti-Americanism, is a fundamentally false assumption. It's unfortunately the case that there is an awful lot of money, for example, going to fund schools, Muslim schools, in places like Pakistan, where they don't teach science or mathematics or anything of value in the modern world, they just teach religion and a large dose of hatred along with it. There are multiple causes. If you look in Afghanistan, by and large, Americans are very welcome. Indeed, what we hear is, "Why aren't there more of you?" and "Why don't you stay longer?" I think that's an important example, because if it comes to a use of force - or let me put it a little more broadly, because it may happen without a use of force - when the day comes - and it has to come someday, one way or another - that the Iraqi people are finally liberated from this horrible tyranny, if we have a role in doing it, we are going to be cheered as liberators. If any question comes to us it will be, "Why did it take you so long?" When those 20 million Iraqis are able to bear witness to what they've suffered from, it will help us in the rest of the Muslim world. But it is also very important to help those countries and those people that are on our side, countries like Turkey and Indonesia that are already democratic and are struggling to move forward, or democrats in countries that are not so democratic that are struggling just to stay out of jail. We have to help all of them.
When will we know that we've won? From the beginning, President Bush and Secretary Powell and my boss Don Rumsfeld have all emphasized that this is going to be a long struggle. My boss even compared it once to the Cold War. I said, "My gosh, it can't be that long." I don't know, we don't know. If you understand, as I think we must, that winning is about more than just defeating and capturing terrorists, it's also about creating models in the Muslim world that will attract people away from terrorists, it may take a while. But we have staying power and the stakes are enormous.
Q: Have we been had? Pakistan has been supplying North Korea with technology for its nuclear program in exchange for missile technology. What does that tell us about General Musharraf as an ally and what are we doing about it?
A: I was asked that question months earlier and I was tempted to say, and I'm going to say it here to because I think it's true: Those developments which started long before Pakistan became our ally are hardly testimony to the success of a policy that basically isolated Pakistan for 20 years. Some of the problems in Pakistan are of our own making, and will we do better dealing with a leader in Musharraf who, if he's not 100 percent on our side, is very much on our side; who is doing very important work for us; who's helped us in many, many ways not only to succeed in Afghanistan - we could never have done that without Pakistan's help - but continues to help us in rounding up some of the worst terrorists - some of whom are in his own country, he knows that we know that. But it's a difficult country. It's had problems that have gotten worse over the last decade.
Q: On December 8 Iraq is to submit an account of its weapons program. Who decides whether the declaration is adequate and how? And how will we know if disarmament is achieved? Most people think that Saddam Hussein will either obviously dissemble or obstruct weapons inspectors, but might it be much more ambiguous, and what can we do in that instance? Will we regret having agreed to involve the United Nations in the decision-making? Finally, given Saddam's track record, is he guilty till proven innocent?
A: Yes, absolutely, on the last question. On the first, who decides, that declaration that is due on December 8 is going to be very important. It's not the inspectors who have to disclose his weapons programs, it is Saddam Hussein who has to make a full disclosure. Without a full and complete disclosure there is no way that inspectors can do their job. Their job is to give some assurance that we have that kind of full disclosure, not to make it themselves, not to disarm Iraq themselves. This is going to be a very important test. A lot of people are going to be making judgments. Our national security is threatened by those weapons, and we as a country, we as a government are going to have to make those judgments. But we are going to make them very carefully; there are going to be an awful lot of people in our government, experts of many kinds, poring over that declaration. I'm assuming it may be very long, and yes, it's liable to be somewhere in the middle, we don't know, it's kind of useless to speculate at this point. But as I said, the stakes are enormous, this is not a game, it's not solving a crossword puzzle or going out and searching in the desert. The real test - and I think we may know it - if he comes forward with a whole lot of programs that we suspect he might have had but we didn't know about, that would be pretty good evidence. If he flatly denies that he has anything, that would be pretty good evidence. And I can't speculate on all the ranges in between.
Justice Potter Stewart immortalized himself with a phrase in an obscenity decision where he was talking about the difficulty of defining pornography, "I can't define pornography, but I know it when I see it." I don't think we can define in advance what is compliance or non-compliance, but I think we will know it when we see it.
Q: How can we deny the Kurds self-determination in the event of a war with Iraq?
A: They should go to northern Iraq and ask any Kurd what they really want. The Kurds are at the forefront of people who are demanding, hoping, desperately hoping that the United States will in fact remove this horrible regime. Indeed, it's very important and barely understood in this country, it's so important and I'm kind of amazed that most people don't know it, northern Iraq, in the northern third of the country, which is predominately Kurdish but it's not exclusively Kurdish there are many Arabs and Turkomans as well who are basically Iraqi-Turks. And there are Syrian Chaldeans - Iraq is a mixture, the Syrian Chaldeans are Christians. The northern third of Iraq has basically been free from Baghdad's rule for the last 11 years, thanks to a remarkable U.S. operation at the end of the Gulf War when a few battalions of light infantry, in order to create a haven for Kurdish refugees, and without firing a shot, pushed the Iraqi army out of the northern third of that country. That itself was remarkable, but what's happened in the 11 years since then is more remarkable. Because those people who live unfortunately - and I have trouble understanding this myself - but those people who live under the same economic sanctions that apply to the rest of the country have managed to create a relatively free and open, and by local standards, economically successful society. They have not one legislative assembly but two; I guess that's a sign that they don't get along so well. They have, by local standards, a free press. I haven't heard horrible stories about babies starving. Maybe it's because they don't spend what money they have on building weapons of mass destruction. It really is a model that Iraqis, under very difficult circumstances, can manage to do pretty well for themselves.
A friend of mine named Barham Salih, who spent many years in Washington as a representative of one of the Kurdish groups, who went back to northern Iraq to become the prime minister - they call it the number two of the Talabani Kurds - said to me, "There is no reason why I can't aspire to be the president or prime minister of Iraq. I am an Iraqi. Tell your Turkish friends," he would say, "to calm down. We're not trying to create a separate state, we want to be part of governing this one."
Q: In the event of a chemical or biological attack by Iraq on Israel, what is Israel's likely response to be? In retrospect, did we make a mistake in not being more active, or more aggressively seeking a resumption of the peace process in the Mideast?
A: We were as aggressive as we possibly could have been in 2000 right up until January, with the Taba meeting in January 2001, in trying to achieve a peace between Arabs and Israelis. The second Camp David agreement with President Clinton and Ehud Barak and Yasir Arafat laid out clearly what could be a peaceful resolution of this horrible conflict on the basis that seems inevitable: two separate states living side by side at peace with one another. When that ever failed it's been succeeded by the most horrible, ghastly kind of terrorist attack on Israel that one could imagine, an attack that plays right into the hands of people, if there are some in Israel, who don't want peace. But the truth is that any poll will tell you that the overwhelming majority of Israelis are eager for peace. Last month was the 25th anniversary of that incredible visit Anwar Sadat of Egypt made to Israel to speak to the Israeli parliament in 1977. That was the first time that any Arab leader had even spoken the word Israel with respect, much less visited the capital and spoken to its parliament. And the result was a wonderful psychological breakthrough, a complete turnaround in Israel's attitude about giving up that incredible peace of strategic real estate called the Sinai Desert, even giving up settlement in the Sinai Desert. It was a general named Ariel Sharon who was responsible for dismantling the last Israeli in the Sinai Desert. So there is a peace that's out there to be achieved. I'm not sure how you get there, but I don't think it's for any lack of America trying.
One of the most serous risks that we worry about, if it does come to a use of force, is the use of chemical or biological weapons of various kinds not only against Israel but also against our other allies in the Gulf or, by means of terrorists, all around the world. It's a serious problem we've given a lot of thought to; it's not a trivial risk. We've spent a lot of time with the Israelis and others in the region doing everything we can think of from a military point of view to be able to suppress threats if they happen. We've given a lot thought as to how to deter those threats. Indeed, we've made it clear, very clear in public, including the president himself, that any Iraqi who has been involved with these horrible weapons programs should worry if those weapons are used. Because if they haven't come forward to the United Nations or to someone else and disclosed what they know about those programs then they really are accomplices - I don't know if it's before the fact or after the fact, I'm not a lawyer - but they really are guilty parties. It's a reason why we are hopeful that some of those Iraqi scientists, if not for any other motive than self-preservation, will help guide us to what is there if there is not a full disclosure.
Q: When a long-standing despot falls, chaos ensues - witness Suharto, Marcos, Tito, Duvalier. What are U.S. plans to ensure that post-Saddam Iraq is not the mother of all quagmires?
A: That's a horrible misstatement of history. One of the things I'm proudest of having some role in working for Mr. Shultz was helping to assist the democratic transition in the Philippines that removed Marcos. Not that the country solved all its problems that way, but it is certainly wrong that chaos ensued. The chaos in Indonesia, such as it is, is not because Suharto left, it's because he created an economic catastrophe before he left. That's part of why he's gone. Indonesians, with all of the difficulties, including having gone through that economic tidal wave, are doing pretty well. I worry a lot about the risk of using weapons of mass destruction. All these worries about instability if Saddam goes are completely misplaced. He is a major source of instability - through what he does, through how he treats his people. There's every reason to think that at some level or another, maybe modest, maybe very good, the Iraqi people are going to produce one of the better governments of the Arab world. I notice that the questioner didn't ask about Romania or all those other countries in Central and Eastern Europe that have struggled through pretty well.
Romania is my favorite for a number of reasons, but particularly because it is the source of one of the better Iraqi jokes I've heard. The only thing I miss about the old Soviet Union is they used to produce the best political humor in the world, and now that seems to be left to the Iraqis. Ten years ago there was an Iraqi joke about Saddam's barber. It seems that Saddam went to his barber and the barber asked him, "What do you think about Ceausescu?" Saddam kept coming back and the barber kept asking the same question week after week and finally Saddam got impatient and said, "Every time I come here you ask me 'What do I think about Ceausescu?' and every time I give you the same answer. What's the matter, are you stupid or something?" The barber said, "Oh no, no sir, it's just that every time I ask you the hair goes up in the back of your neck and it's much easier to cut it."
