|
Madeleine Albright
Former U.S. Secretary of State
Answers to Written Questions from the Floor:
Q: If you had one piece of advice to give Colin Powell today, what would it be?
A: Well, first of all, I have to tell you, he and I have been friends a long time and when I left office - you have to be secretary of state until the moment, and yet your office is a mess. We were all in there cleaning up, and as we finished, I wrote him a note and I said, "Dear Colin, I hope very much that the office is clean, but it is filled with the spirits of our predecessors all of who loved representing the United States, and I now turn over to you the best job in the world." I had previously said to him and others, "It's a great job, but it's a lot harder than it looks." I think that when I started writing my book and I was thinking over the various inter-agency discussions and debates and fights I'd been involved in, I thought, Well, maybe they are gender-based. Now that I've watched my successor, I've decided they are not. There is a genuine issue about the role of the State Department these days, especially as there are more and more agencies involved in making national security policy, and especially when the Pentagon has taken over so much, not only of the war, but of post-war planning. And I basically would say to Colin, "You do have the best job, but you have to stand up and fight. Even if it's unpleasant you simply have to do that." I think he's a remarkable person who has a great deal of political capital and the admiration of practically every American I've talked to. He needs to - I hope will - make his voice heard, because it's a very good voice.
Q: You mentioned the question about whether some of the issues you faced were gender-based, and someone has a question on that topic, that is, of female secretaries of state. Was your tenure of secretary of state an isolated one-time-only occurrence, or can we expect another woman or women to represent us internationally as secretary of state sometime in, say, the next 20 years?
A: I certainly hope so, because I think one of the things that I've been worried about is that I'm a historical accident. I did work for a president who I think fully understood the importance of putting women into high-level government positions, with Janet Reno and Donna Shalala, and Carol Browner who was head of the EPA, and there really were a lot of women in high-level positions. There are more and more women that are capable of being in high-level positions, whether they are political ones or ones with a specific scientific background or foreign-policy background, and I don't think that the powers that be can keep making excuses like, "there is nobody that's qualified." Or one of the things that was said about me: "Well, she won't be able to deal with foreign leaders." I have to tell you, I had no trouble dealing with foreign leaders, as I did arrive in that plane that said "United States of America." I had a little bit more trouble dealing with the men in our own government. Not that they were all male chauvinist pigs, but that basically they had known me for too long, through all my various comings and goings, of having been a carpool mother and a school board chair, and their wife's friend and a Senate staffer, and finally, "how did she get to be secretary of state?" But the main thing is that we can't forget that we're qualified and we all have to push.
Q: You mentioned the relationship between state and defense, and one person is interested in knowing whether you think there has been a shift towards DoD in terms of being a powerful agency, because, as this person describes it, The country is in a perpetual state of war.
A: I think there is a great deal to be said for that, because when we are in war, the Pentagon takes over. But if this is our permanent state - which, I'm afraid, to a great extent it is, because fighting terror is not something that will be easily or quickly dealt with - I truly do think it is a mistake, as great as some secretaries of defense have been, to decide that the Pentagon is going to run national security policy. I worked in the White House on the National Security Council for President Carter, and the big debate at that time was the relationship between the national security advisor and the secretary of state. They went at each other, and there is a natural kind of competition among the president's advisors. In fact, Franklin Roosevelt set it up and he liked it that way, and it was the setup of the National Security Council that was supposed to end this. Clearly, every agency has to respond to the needs of the people who work there and fight for their portion of the budget, but the best national security policy is when the State Department has the prime roll in making foreign policy, and the Pentagon fights the wars, and the Treasury deals with a variety of financial issues, and everybody has their job. So I hope very much that we are not in a time when the Pentagon is running our lives.
Q: I should mention we also have former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry with us today, one of the great secretaries of defense who you worked with very pleasantly. Onto the question of non-proliferation. Did this administration's actions in Iraq precipitate Libya's concessions on weapons of mass destruction?
A: I think it had some role to play, but a little-known, described fact is that we actually began the discussions with Libya. With the British, we were dealing with the issue of how to get some kind of closure on the Pan Am 103 issues and how to get compensation for the victims and how to try the perpetrators. And as a result of very careful and long negotiations, we managed to assure the fact that there was a Scottish court that was taking place in The Hague, and those accused of the bombing were brought to justice, and the process was able to move forward and compensation discussions were begun. You know, life doesn't come in four-year segments, according to our campaigns, and a lot of hands of cards are left on the table. I think that we did start the diplomatic ball rolling with Libya. It's very hard to read Qaddafi's mind, believe me. And it is perfectly possible that what happened with the use of force in Iraq had some impact on him. I think one of the major things that's going on, though, is that as his economy was going down the tubes, he really did not want to continue to be totally isolated and that the time was right. The main issue now is to make absolutely sure that this process goes forward and that we make sure that he doesn't have any of the weapons of mass destruction.
Q: What do you think of the president's statement on non-proliferation?
A: I was very pleased to hear it, because I think that one of the problems is that the whole non-proliferation mechanism has been broken. And even though we re-negotiated the non-proliferation treaty, the bargain within it, which was that the five nuclear powers would reduce their nuclear arsenals and that no other country would try to acquire any, has not worked. On the face of it are some very important and good suggestions in the president's speech. You mentioned Bill Perry; he has been working along in a group that some of us are a part of in looking specifically at what to do to revive and make relevant the non-proliferation regime. Some of the suggestions in the president's speech were very useful. I think the question will continue to be, however, What is the role of the United States going to be? Are we going to keep producing nuclear fuel and the question is, as the Pentagon studies a whole new generation of small nuclear weapons, What is the effect of that? But I must say, I'm glad the president made this speech and is at least thinking in broader terms about proliferation issues.
Q: One questioner wants to know, though, whether the U.S. efforts to develop a nuclear missile shield undercut our position on nuclear proliferation, and, I would add, our attempt to develop a further small nuclear weapon.
A: There has been a question all along as to what the value of a missile shield is, especially since there isn't one that works, and what it does, in effect, to try to undermine the various missile regimes and arms control arrangements that we had. I'm very sorry that we left the anti-ballistic missile treaty. It clearly was a treaty that again, like so many international instruments, needed to be updated. But I thought we were in the process of doing that and, as I said, we went forward with agreeing to do research on a missile shield. The important point here is that it is counter-productive, I think, for the United States to be thinking about a new generation of small nuclear weapons which "would be usable."
Q: We invaded Iraq because they had weapons of mass destruction supposedly, yet we now find out that the Bush administration knew that Dr. Khan in Pakistan was selling nuclear secrets on the black market back in 2001 but did nothing about it other than to give General Musharraf a heads-up. Can you explain the logic here?
A: Fortunately, it's not my job. I do think that there are a number of questions to be asked about what the message is out of the invasion of Iraq if, indeed, it was to deal with weapons of mass destruction and potential nuclear programs - because, if I were Kim Jong Il for instance, I would have read this differently: If you don't have nuclear weapons, you're likely to be invaded, and if you do have nuclear weapons, you won't be, because we didn't invade the Soviet Union or China. So the messages are mixed, and you asked the question about Libya, so I think in that regard, it's interesting to try to figure out what Qaddafi was, in fact, receiving in messages. Pakistan - I have to tell you, I wish there were just a flat-out straight answer about what to do about Pakistan. There have been very serious problems with that country for a long time. When we came into office there already were sanctions on the table against them because of their desire to produce various aspects of nuclear technology. They then, in order to match the Indians, did, in fact, detonate a bomb, and there were more sanctions put on, and then when Musharraf took over by coup, there were more sanctions put. I teach a course on the national security toolbox, and you think if you're an outsider that we've got a lot of tools in that box. We actually don't. There is diplomacy, there are economic tools and there is the use of force and some combination of them. Once you have used all of your sanctions tools, you lose a lot of the leverage. There are very serious issues with Pakistan, but we are now, as I said in my comments, dependent on Musharraf, both his physical and political health, and we need to be tougher on what is happening and that IAEA has to go in there. There has to be a way to make sure that this never happens again, but I would not have advocated invading Pakistan. We have to tell it like it is to him although, as I said, we are very dependent on him. It's one of the most difficult issues that any administration has to deal with.
Q: Do you think General Musharraf, president of Pakistan, will cough up bin Laden in late October?
A: I just read that somewhere, but I am not that cynical, I have to say. I would hope that if they have, if anybody has Osama bin Laden that they would produce him now. What I found interesting was that the president - the words "Osama bin Laden" did not cross his lips in the State of the Union message, when he certainly was the most wanted of all the posters at that stage. One of the things that's happening is that the administration in some way is trying to get our minds off of Osama bin Laden and off of Afghanistan and may want to get us off of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq pretty soon, but I think that that is not their major goal at the moment.
Q: What is the one question we should be asking all of the presidential candidates regarding foreign policy?
A: It's an easy question and hard answer. And I have to tell you that my record of advising Democratic presidential candidates is not the greatest. But I was a foreign policy advisor to many of them, and I used to have to spend my time saying, There is really no line between domestic and foreign policy. One, I believed it; but two, it was a way to make myself important in campaigns. Nobody ever wanted to talk about foreign policy or national security, and I do think that in this campaign it will come to pass - though I do believe also that jobs and the economy are a major issue, as they should be.
The major question that has to be asked is, How do you see the role of the United States? I said over and over again that the United States was an indispensable nation, and I fully believed it. I sat in meetings of the Security Council for four years and attended various ministerial meetings later, and I know what happens. The U.S. has to be there, asking questions and pushing. Occasionally, however, we have to let some other country have their way. While I said indispensable, I never said omnipotent or alone. So for me, a very basic question is, How do you see the role of the U.S. related to other countries and the organizations that exist, and do we feel that we have an obligation to act abroad? We need to know more about how people fight terrorism, how to deal with proliferation and how every elected official does what is essential to protect our territory or people and way of life, which seems simple but is more complicated. Our territory, as 9/11 showed, was potentially threatened. Our borders are long and porous. Although we have two friendly neighbors, our people travel and invest abroad, and our way of life is completely dependent on what goes on in other countries. No sound bite, I'm afraid.
Q: Can John Kerry be elected in November? What does he need to do to be electable?
A: The answer is - I'm a card-carrying Democrat - yes, yes, yes. We will do very well with him. The Democrats will not do our normal thing - which is a firing line and a circle - and also not a kind of 1968 thing where people decide that they wouldn't go out and vote for Hubert Humphrey, because then we got Richard Nixon. I hope very much that we can get our act together.
Q: You mention the seamlessness of domestic and foreign policy, and other than the role of that belief in increasing your importance in campaign circles, one questioner wants to know how important are Western economic challenges, for example, the ability to support graying populations, to our future and to our international relations?
A: What is absolutely essential is to understand how American way of life, as wonderful as it is, is completely dependent on other countries. Globalization is not something that can be prevented, it's here, and the issue is, how it's managed, not how it is a step back. What I find interesting is that the anti-globalization forces that are out there demonstrating, they are the most globalized group in the world. Most Americans need to understand that there are stakes. Every one of us is in a functioning international economy where our own domestic policy works and where our agriculture works - because I do think that's essential - we cannot operate in a world where the Europeans spend more money subsidizing one cow than most people are able to eat food in the rest of the world. Our responsibilities are that our way of life, as I said earlier, is very much dependent on how other people are able to function in theirs - not just because it's a goody-goody point of view, but because there are many problems that then come home to America.
Q: You spoke to The Commonwealth Club in 1993, not long after you'd been named U.S. ambassador to the UN. Has the U.S. relationship with the UN changed since then, and how?
A: A great deal. I'd have to say that one of the most exciting things about being UN ambassador from 1993-97 was that it was the period where the UN was being viewed as coming alive again, and the possibilities for a functioning UN were very exciting. It had been truly paralyzed by the Cold War. This a great place to talk about it in San Francisco where we came to celebrate the 50th anniversary with Walter Shorenstein's help in terms of really celebrating properly, so I was thrilled to be at the UN at a time when all the possibilities existed. It's not easy, because it is a bureaucracy that really, for 50 years, kind of went to waste and grew in elephantine proportions, and then when we were trying to get it to do gymnastics, it really did need to reform. There are a lot of people in the United States that will never like the UN. They are afraid that it has black helicopters that swoop down and steal our lawn furniture, and then there actually are people that will never like it because it's full of foreigners, which, frankly, can't be helped. It can play a huge role, and what I think is interesting is the way that now the Bush administration has, in fact, turned to the UN for help in Iraq. But the truth is, it needs support and it needs our help, and it needs our tough love also in terms of trying to get it to reform and do the right things.
Q: What do you see as the future of multilateral negotiations, in light of the current administration's unilateral approach, and what steps can the U.S. take in the short term to end the political isolationism we've fostered in the international community?
A: There has to be a future for multilateral negotiations, because as you look out at the problems that face any country, but especially ours in the 21st century, most of them are what we call transnational problems - they know no boundaries. Terrorism knows no boundaries, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, drugs, the environment, refugees who travel back and forth, and so it requires a systematic approach to these problems, and it requires more than unilateralism or even a bilateral relationship. When I was testifying to be UN ambassador I thought I'd come up with a great slogan, and I talked about assertive multilateralism. Big mistake - multilateralism has too many syllables in it and it ends in an -ism; and assertive, although I can't think of benign multilateralism. I really got taken to the cleaners over that. But I thought that it was important, because I saw that many of these problems had to be dealt with in combination with other countries. This administration started out wrong by deciding that we didn't want anything to do with the International Criminal Court or with the environmental convention Kyoto Protocol and that we could do everything on our own, and so it's a matter now of trying to get them to understand that it's important. Now, I did make a point about the fact that I didn't think it was great that we'd contracted our North Korean policy to the Chinese, but I do think that it is important that we are involved in multilateral talks there. So I think there is an increasing realization in this administration that multilateralism is useful and that isolation within an international system is not a good idea.
Q: Do you believe that Operation Iraqi Freedom could be justified strictly for humanitarian reasons?
A: This is a very hard question - I've been asked it before - and I do not have an adequate answer. In fact, yesterday, in one form it was coupled with, You believe in humanitarian intervention in Kosovo and Bosnia and Somalia and various places, and why isn't this the same thing? I think that there is no adequate answer, but one that I've thought about is that a lot of the things that had happened in Iraq had happened sometime before. There was no question in my mind that Saddam Hussein should have come up before an international war-crimes tribunal, that there was adequate cause to bring him up on that, and there clearly continued to be terror in Iraq. But the truth is that the kind of humanitarian intervention that I think I advocated was when there was visible ethnic cleansing going on. Maybe something should have been done when he gassed the Kurds, but the timing on it - I think there's a real question as to why we diverted our attention from Afghanistan into going into Iraq, and we had Saddam in a box. We were unclear about the chaos that would be created with an invasion, and I think that chaos is now there, but it's a very, very hard question and it's hard to give a completely straight and adequate answer to it.
Q: If you were reappointed as a secretary of state tomorrow, what would you do about the current situation in Iraq? One thing.
A: What I would do is give an even larger mandate to the United Nations. They are now being asked to go in there in order to evaluate the possibilities of the election process. The truth is that if we were not there as the occupying power but as part of a support for a UN civilian authority, there would be other countries that would join us. There are countries with much larger militaries that would be willing to come in to assist, but not to assist as an occupying power. It would require something else, which is actually admitting a mistake, as I said. I don't think the U.S. needs to apologize for things, but it is possible to say that mistakes were made, and that there has to be a different approach to it.
Q: There are many questions from women who view you as a role model. The youngest is probably one from an eight-year-old who wanted to know, What did you do as secretary of state? I think you've answered that one, but let me ask a couple of others. The Nobel Peace Prize went for the first time to an Iranian and for the first time to a woman, Shirin Ebadi. Do you think that has an impact on the future of Iran and peace in the Middle East, the fact that she is a woman?
A: I think there was definitely a very important signal sent by the Nobel committee because the whole role of women in Islam is something that we have to learn about and consider in its fullest range, in addition to something I feel very strongly about - we just need to learn about Islam. We are filled with stereotypical information and have, in fact, made judgments on the basis of very little information, and we need to understand that Islam is a religion that's been hijacked by extremists. Clearly, the role of women in Islam is an issue that concerns many of us and I would hope that we can all work on that together, but there clearly was a signal about that by the Nobel people.
Q: Our last question: Can we broach the subject of broaches? After Saddam Hussein's spokesperson called you a snake, you began wearing a snake broach; after you were called a witch you started wearing a broom; what are you wearing today, and what is its significance?
A: The whole thing did start with the snake comment. I happen to have had a snake pin, and so I wore it, and then as I was sitting at the Security Council with 14 men in suits I thought it would be kind of fun to have a little fun, plus it allowed me to enlarge on my one real sin, which is jewelry. So I started getting pins that sent some kind of messages, and I wore a lot of bugs and spiders and bees and things like that. I often wore balloons when I was feeling great, a lot of butterflies, because they make me think about hope, and so I sent messages with my pins. And when I was negotiating with Foreign Minister Ivanov about the ABM Treaty, somebody had given me a pin that looked like a little missile, and so he looked at it and he said, "Is that one of your interceptors?" and I said, "Absolutely, and we make them very small." But I hate to admit this: there is no significance to this pin. It's new; I like it. So I could make up a story, but I can't. I love to wear pins, and I've gotten them as presents, and I give them as presents, and I usually wear an eagle, but I thought I'd wear this today because I like it. ?
Marwan Muasher
Arianna Huffington
Ben Stein