Frank Gaffney:

Thank you, Mr. Ambassador.

It's a pleasure to be with you. The pleasure is only slightly alloyed by the fact that I was prepared to talk about a slightly different subject than the one at hand, but I'm going to try to roll as much of that subject, which is really the substance of what's going on in the Middle East, into a discussion of the politics of the Middle East, particularly as it relates to the 2004 election, as I possibly can. It's especially interesting to be participating on a panel that has people who are very active in making the Middle East a political issue in the 2004 election. I look forward to their comments about their roles as well as the substance and politics of nd Carter – they voted for John Anderson, who probably mosthis.

I've actually just returned from a conference in Jerusalem, which had as its theme “Building Peace on Truth.” I would suggest that that would be a very good leitmotif for this conference as well. I think if we build discussion of the Middle East -- both in the context of the Arab-Palestinian and Israeli conflict and the larger Middle East issues -- on truth, chances are that it will not only inform our political debate in a useful way but it will actually produce useful results in the democratic process here in the United States.

The hardest truth of all about the Middle East, I believe, and the one that has greatest bearing on the prospects for stability in the region, let alone democracy, and that ought to inform most especially American policy – and to the extent we're in an election year, American politics – is, I believe, the truth that authoritarian and for that matter totalitarian regimes have a compelling need for external enemies. This is particularly true because in the absence of external justifications for their generally very repressive domestic behavior, there's no other way to justify the suffering that is entailed on their population, particularly the failure – the manifest failure – of their economic and social policies.

Now, some suggest that these tend to amount to sort of Faustian deals; that people pursue these notions of external threats to keep the pressure off them at home. That's certainly true in some cases and in other cases I think there's no question that there's a sort of social engineering going on. But most especially when we're talking about what I think are correctly described as “Islamo-fascist” regimes, this is more than just a Faustian deal. This is about promoting, I believe, an agenda that is deeply rooted in an hostility to the West in general, of course to Israel, and certainly to the United States as well.

Even those Arab governments in the Middle East that are said to be friends of the United States or moderates in the region incessantly engage in propaganda, incitement, and in many cases even calls for jihad against this country, as well as of course its allies in the West. It's striking that the acclaim given by many of these countries represented at the OIC meeting recently to the outrageous comments of Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir, about Jews running the world and the need to give up suicide bombing in favor of rockets and planes for the purpose of having the 1.3 billion Muslims destroy the Jews and wrest control of the world back – I mean, if this is moderation, ladies and gentlemen, there's not much hope for this being a constructive relationship.

I believe, having said that, that even if there were no West, no United States, no Israel, you would have these same imperatives of external enemies for domestic consumption driving bloodletting in the Middle East and making our world a more dangerous place. People in this room know better than I, I'm sure, the history of the wars between Arabs, between Muslim states: Iran-Iraq, Iraq-Kuwait, Syria-Lebanon, Syria-Jordan, Egypt-Libya, Egypt-Sudan. These are people who are driven not by simply an enmity toward us but towards, as I said, a domestic need for a justification for their repression. To the extent it gets dressed up as an Islamist agenda, it can make things more complicated, but it doesn't alter the underlying reality that even if we weren't in the mix, this would be a difficult, turbulent, and violent region of the world.

This ought to inform the policies we pursue, especially as we are told endlessly that if only we make Israel make territorial concessions to its Palestinian Arab neighbors, that will end the problem. It won't end the problem between Israel and the Palestinians, let alone transform this region into the sort of peaceful arena we hope it would be.

Moreover, I think it should be particularly worrisome to us, as we're encouraged in the political debate and the policy debate to impose on Israel the need for such concessions, that we persist in ignoring the manifestation of this same phenomenon in the Palestinian Authority itself. I participated yesterday in a press conference up on the Hill with Frank Luntz and a gentleman by the name of Itamar Marcus, who runs an organization in Israel called Palestinian Media Watch. I commend it to you because what it is doing is a public service, in terms of simply making available to the West, and particularly to English-speaking audiences, the content of what is put out in the Palestinian official media outlets and the press of all forms, including the sports pages, the cartoons and the crossword puzzles, as well as of course the television news, music videos and educational materials. What this material unmistakably conveys to the Palestinian people is the need for jihad against the United States as well as against Israel, the latter's destruction being the only legitimate outcome of the current struggle.

I don't have the videos and other materials that Itamar presented. They are available online. But I do have one visual aid, which I commend to your attention particularly as we think about what President Bush should be doing between now and the election and what the Democratic candidates who wish to replace him should be saying between now and the election, and what the next president, whether he's Democratic or Republican, should do.

It is in the form of a map, a map that is used universally by the Palestinian Authority – for that matter, it's used by most governments in the Middle East. I call it “Arafat's Map,” because it is particularly evident in his office. For those of you who are familiar with the region, you'll notice that there's something missing from this map – namely, the State of Israel.

This is the essence of what the indoctrination, the brainwashing, the incitement that continues to this day out of the Palestinian Authority is translating into in terms of a populace in the Palestinian community that, yes, wants its own state and, yes, in many cases would like to have some of it right away on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but that is absolutely committed and convinced that it will achieve the ultimate liberation of the entirety of “Palestine.” That's the rub, ladies and gentlemen.

If you don't believe this is an accurate characterization of public sentiment, I commend you Frank Luntz's poll done just this week contrasting Israeli and Israeli-Arab and Palestinian views on a number of these topics. It's unmistakable that the commitment to terror for the purpose of liberating Palestine is overwhelmingly supported within the Palestinian community.

What's particularly troubling, and I think we need to talk about in the context not only of the political debate but about this war on terror, is what is used as a central organizing theme and justification for much of this incitement: the concept of shahada, the idea that dying for the cause, dying for the faith – particularly for Allah – is a high obligation of any good Muslim. This is, I believe, not the view of all Muslims, by any means. I believe it is certainly the view of the various strains of what are known as Islamists – Wahabis, Shi'ites, other stripes that very much promote this sort of culture of death.

In Itamar's tapes of the Palestinian Authority and in many other similar propagandistic materials -- whether they're disseminated by Saudi mosques or by organizations overseas, including in the United States, that amplify this message -- it is persistent, widespread and pernicious in the extreme. It makes the prospect for actually achieving what I think we all hope for – namely, real peace between people of the Muslim world and non-Muslims, as well as in the narrowest sense the people of the Middle East and people elsewhere – extremely difficult, if not absolutely problematic.

This is manifest also in the ongoing efforts by countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Syria to deny the Iraqi people freedom.

We may disagree on this panel – indeed, we will disagree on this panel – whether the United States under George Bush was right to secure freedom for the Iraqi people. I happen to believe it was right. It is a very damning indictment indeed that there are so many countries in the world that not only thought perpetuating Saddam Hussein's brutally repressive regime was a good thing to do, but who today refuse to help consolidate freedom there, perhaps in the hopes that we'll fail.

Maybe Saddam will be back. Maybe some other despotic, maybe Islamist regime will be put in place in its stead. None of that, I believe, is in our interests, and I have been heartened by the position that most of the Democratic candidates have taken, which is we can't cut and run from Iraq. We must make the investment in trying to preserve and consolidate freedom and let it hopefully take hold in a region that knows very little of it apart from that country that isn't on Arafat's Map.

I must tell you one other area of special concern that will color the election in this country: the evidence of what I believe is the makings of a fifth column in the United States, Islamist operations that have been long established and are only now beginning to be uncovered, exposed and hopefully rooted out. I believe the arrests of a number of people, including Sami Al-Arian and Abdurahman Alamoudi, is indicative of the advanced state of this problem.

George Bush as well as his Democratic rivals are going to have to come to grips with whether in fact there is a distinction to be made domestically as well as internationally between the Islamists – of which I believe both Mr. Alamoudi and Mr. Al-Arian are examples – and what I profoundly hope remains the vastly larger majority of American Muslims as well as Muslims elsewhere around the world that do not subscribe to the intolerant, jihadist teachings of this Islamist sect or one of its alternatives.

In that vein, we had best figure out what these Islamists have been doing in our military – the chaplain corps, for example – in our prison systems, in the mosques in this country, in our college campuses and elsewhere.

Finally, I'll conclude by just saying I personally hope that some good will come out of the controversy recently inspired by the revelation of remarks by Lieutenant General William Boykin. While we may disagree on many points about how he made his statements, where he made them, the uniform he was wearing at the time he made them and so on, the essence of what General Boykin was warning about, I believe, is correct: that Islamists are trying to destroy this country and the people and values that we share. That, I believe, is something we need to have as a focus of this debate about Middle East policy and about the presidential election of 2004, if we are either to understand the enemy we are confronting, let alone deal with it effectively.

M. J. Rosenberg:

Good morning. My name is M.J. Rosenberg, and I run the Washington office of Israel Policy Forum (IPF). Just for those who don't know IPF, we are a pro-Israel Jewish organization. Our board is made up of mainstream Jewish figures, people who are also involved in AIPAC, the American Jewish Committee, and all the other organizations. But we were established to be a little bit different.

We were established at the behest of Yitzhak Rabin in 1992, when he came to Washington for the first time as prime minister. I don't know if you recall the backdrop. One of his first meetings in Washington as prime minister was with AIPAC, and he met with the heads of AIPAC and said Israel is a sovereign government, and the United States is a sovereign government, and we're going to deal government to government. I don't really need an intermediary – I was an ambassador here. Basically said AIPAC can do its job but Israel will represent itself essentially in Washington.

But that wasn't all that he said or did. He also asked certain wealthy Jews to set up an organization that would support Israel when it tries to make peace as much as during times of violence and war. That is what IPF does. Our sole goal, our sole responsibility, is to support the U.S. involvement at the highest levels to advance the peace process. We do that as Americans and we do it as people who are Jews and Zionists. We believe that the only way that Israel can achieve security is through the two-state solution, and the only way the two-state solution will be achieved is by high-level U.S. diplomacy. So we worked with the Clinton Administration and now work with the Bush Administration and try to encourage them to understand that not all of the pro-Israel community wants the United States to play a hands-off role.

Some of us – and some of us are very significant people in the Democratic and Republican Parties – want the United States to be deeply involved. We applauded what Bush did at Aqaba. We only wish he would have – he said he was going to ride herd on both sides after Aqaba and nothing really happened. The Roadmap was thrown in the glove compartment and that doesn't make us happy. We want this president to be engaged, as we did Clinton. Clinton delivered the Clinton Plan for Middle East peace at the IPF dinner. That plan, the Clinton Plan, which most people think is very close to what a final Middle East peace treaty will look like, was delivered at IPF, which is something that we take great pride in. It was done in the last days of his presidency.

But I'm not supposed to be talking about that. I'm not supposed to be doing self-promotion for our organization. I'm supposed to talk about the presidential election. Just a little bit about my background: I worked on Capitol Hill for twenty years and I worked for AIPAC for four years – I was editor of Near East Report back in the early 1980s. So I know the political scene pretty well, but mostly I know it from my years on the Hill and working on various presidential campaigns.

Let me tell you something about the Jewish vote, the so-called “Jewish vote” – though I have to say one thing. We always discuss the Jewish vote, this vote or that vote – sometimes I wonder if we should be discussing money. That the vote doesn't count for any group we're talking about; it's not so much individual votes as money that counts. I was thinking about that when I was walking over here. If President Bush thinks about the Jewish vote at all, is he really thinking about money that might come from Jewish contributors? I realized in a way perhaps we can discount the money a little bit, because Bush has so much.

And as everyone should know, the Democratic Party is heavily financed by American Jews and the Republican Party is not. You take money from Jews away from the Democratic Party, and there is no Democratic Party. Jews are Democrats, not Republicans – that is a fact. But I'm thinking, there's so much money that Bush has already, I don't think he really has to worry that much that there are a few Jewish donors out there who might not give him money because of Israel. I don't think so, but I don't know.

I'm going to talk a little bit about the history. I said Jews are Democrats. They are. The last Republican presidential candidate that Jews voted for was Warren G. Harding. I guess that taught them a lesson, because he was the worst president in history! But actually they didn't abandon the Republican Party because they didn't like Warren G. Harding. What happened was, eight years later, 1928, the Democratic nominee for president was an unabashed liberal. The Democratic Party before that wasn't the liberal party, per se; it was just the alternative party. It represented slightly different business interests than the Republican Party.

In 1928, a man named Al Smith came along, an Irish Catholic. He was the governor of New York. He was a progressive, a liberal who turned New York into a state that banned child labor and enacted all kinds of welfare reform. Basically he made New York a laboratory of liberalism for the nation. That appealed to Jews. In 1928, this Catholic gets the nomination for president. He loses overwhelmingly, but what political scientists now see is that right beneath his overwhelming loss he created the coalition that's been very important to the Democratic Party ever since, which are African Americans, Jews, labor and various Catholic groups – in that particular race, arch-Catholics. That's changed some over the years, but it's what we tend to call the FDR coalition. It really was started by Al Smith, who was his immediate predecessor as Democratic nominee.

Jews have voted Democratic in every election since 1928. That is eighteen presidential elections. The average Jewish vote for Democrats has been 75%. So there's not a question about whom the Jews will support in the year 2004. When George McGovern carried one state, he still carried the Jewish vote. When Walter Mondale carried one state, he still carried the Jewish vote.

However, there's a subtext to that, the Israel issue. The Republican Party correctly decided that they're not going to make inroads into the Jewish vote by trying to turn Jews into conservatives. It's like what Stalin said about communism in Poland, that trying to get communism to stick in Poland was like putting a saddle on a cow: it won't work. No matter how rich Jews get, they vote Democratic. This is like no other group. It's a phenomenon that should be studied in and of itself -- what are the roots of this Jewish liberalism? But it's there.

Some say it's because Jews always think that if somebody else is getting beat up – right now it might be Arab Americans, for instance – we might be next. Traditionally that's why Jews and blacks have traditionally been allied. It's like, the people who hate them, hate us too. It's a historic memory.

So I think I can predict here, and know that no one is going to say I'm an idiot after the November 2004 election, that the Democratic nominee will overwhelmingly carry the Jewish vote. No question.

However, there are variations. The Republicans have been able to successfully at times convince segments within the Jewish community, along with many other people, that they are the party of national security, that they are better on security issues. Whether that's right or wrong, that has been a convincing argument overall to Americans in general.

Most Americans do consider the Republican Party the national security party. The polls show that. And Jews are Americans, so there is a segment within the Jewish community that is persuaded by that and feels that Israel's security hangs on an America that is aggressive internationally – the America that George Bush, the current president, is trying to create and has over the last couple of years.

This is not a new thing. Nixon, in 1972, had a whole operation devoted to convincing Jews that George McGovern was a neo-isolationist who would sell out Israel. There was enough truth in it, there was enough truth in the charge that McGovern was more isolationist than Nixon – Nixon was anything but isolationist. Look at the wars that were going on, and he was certainly interventionist everywhere he could be – enough Jews bought into it that the Jewish vote dropped dramatically. Hubert Humphrey four years before in 1968 got 90% of the Jewish vote; George McGovern got 65% of the Jewish vote. The reason is Israel.

The 1980 election, Reagan against Carter – Carter, as president, either did not veto or voted for what was considered an anti-Israel resolution, plus his ambassador to the UN shook hands with a representative of the PLO. It became a huge issue, and as a result Jimmy Carter didn't get 90% of the Jewish vote. He didn't get 65% of the Jewish vote. He got 45% of the Jewish vote. Ronald Reagan still didn't break 40% – Republicans never break 40% of the Jewish vote – because there was a third candidate. Rather than vote for Ronald Reagan, I guess because their hands would have just fallen off or something – even though they couldn't stat of you have forgotten, but he was a third-party candidate that year who was running as kind of a progressive third-party alternative.

Then there's the 1992 election. In the minds of some of the people who are Bush supporters, the first President Bush lost reelection because he opposed loan guarantees to Israel. He linked loan guarantees to settlement policy and a lot of people say that cost him in the Jewish community. I don't buy it. Clinton got 90% of the Jewish vote and there's no reason why someone like Bill Clinton wouldn't get 90% of the Jewish vote. He was the kind of candidate that Jews like. Bush didn't have much appeal to them four years before.

Al Gore in the last election jumped right back up to 80%. Then we know what happened in Florida. Well, we don't know whom the Jews voted for in Florida – it's a good guess they didn't vote for Pat Buchanan.

So, if you take the lesson that I just pointed to, of those three times that the Jewish vote drops off for Democrats, it's over Israel. Let's say you're advising George Bush. You could say, look what happens: in a really close election, which you're going to have in 2004, those changes at the margins could be the difference between victory and defeat, particularly in the State of Florida. You really can lose the presidency over a few tens of thousands of Jews who switch their votes because they perceive you as pressuring Israel. It's an argument that's convincing to a lot of people and it's convincing to a lot of the media as well.

My last minute here, I just want to say why it doesn't work. It doesn't hold up. In those previous elections, the status quo for Israel was good. Jews didn't want to change the status quo for Israel in 1968 or in 1980 or in 1992. Israel was doing just fine.

Israel right now is in desperate straits. Anyone who loves Israel, as the Jewish community does -- almost unanimously we care about Israel deeply – if you care about Israel, you want Israel to get out of the situation it is in. It is not supporting Israel for the United States to stand back and allow this awful situation to continue, in which Israel has lost 900 people since the Intifada began. The Palestinians have lost 3,000; Israel has lost 900 – that's the part we focus on talking about the Jewish vote.

Israel's economy has gone down the tubes. There's no tourism. I was one of these Jewish teenagers who went to Israel in high school every year. We went to Israel to learn how to become Zionists and support the Jewish State – that's why we go. We grow up and give money. That's how it works. Nobody goes anymore. The kids don't care about Israel because they identify Israel with war and endless struggle with the Palestinians. People remember, those of us who were in Israel during the last three years of Oslo, when Oslo was working, when Israeli-Palestinian security cooperation was working. I went there with my wife and kids. We were there for a month, in 1999. It was the safest place. You didn't worry about terrorism. We went to the West Bank. We went shopping in Ramallah. So did my Orthodox Jewish relatives: they would go shopping in Qalqiya. That is what it was like a few years ago under the much-maligned Oslo.

I know that if President George Bush gets out there and does what he should do, which is to become diplomatically engaged and to help lead Israelis and Palestinians to peace, he will gain infinitely more votes than he will lose. He will not just gain among non-Jews; he will gain those votes among Jews. We are desperate. Thank you.

Joseph Wilson:

Good morning.

I have been accused recently of being a left-wing partisan Democrat. Having listened to M.J., I think I should wear that as a badge of honor to be in such fine company.

The first line in my obituary used to read, "The last American diplomat to have met with Saddam Hussein before the first Gulf War," as a way of introducing myself. It now reads, "The husband of the wife who was outed as a CIA operative by her own government." That is one of the three debates going on here in Washington in which I am in one way or another involved, but the one which really distracts me most from the contributions that I have tried to make to the other two debates.

So let me begin by saying to those of you who have been so supportive over the past several weeks, when certain members of the Administration decided that it was more important to protect their political agenda than it was to protect the national security assets of the United States, that that national security asset – who also happens to be my wife – is doing just fine, thank you. She is productively employed and she is continuing to serve her country and defend the Constitution of the United States.

That said, there of course is still somebody in the U.S. Government who has leaked the name of that national security asset to the press and may leak again. So one hopes that the Administration will continue to pursue this inquiry with vigor and enthusiasm until they find the person who has betrayed the national security of my country.

There are two other great debates going on, which I call roughly "How did we get in this mess in Iraq?" and "How are we going to get out?" I want to talk about them briefly.

Our engagement in the war on Iraq was predicated on three pillars. The first was the threat to our national security presented by weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a rogue state. I happen to agree that that threat was legitimate. I wrote about that in a number of articles. I supported the President of the United States when he went to the United Nations and secured passage of Resolution 1441. I argued, even before 1441, that in fact the real problem that we had with Iraq was the possibility that Saddam, who had used weapons of mass destruction against his neighbors and against his own population, might reconstruct his arsenal of chemical weapons in violation of Resolution 687 and that what we needed to do was to enhance or put back into place an enforcement mechanism for 687. That enforcement mechanism had been the UN inspections that had been pulled out in 1998 preparatory to the launching of Desert Fox.

I debated a number of people, including Mr. Gaffney, on a number of these issues – including Ken Pollack, who in my judgment wrote the book on which we could all sort of form our assessment of the way ahead. In his book he said that one of the reasons why we need to pursue a regime change option with respect to Saddam Hussein, which he said he reluctantly had concluded we needed to do, was because we would never be able to put back together the international consensus to have a coercive containment regime. In fact, shortly after his book was published, the president went up to the United Nations and did precisely that.

When I listened to the President of the United States give his State of the Union address, and when I listened to Secretary Powell just a few days later speak to the United Nations about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction, I came away with a much different view from what was commonly reported. The President of the United States and subsequently Secretary Powell said the following: scientists involved in weapons of mass destruction programs have either been secreted in neighboring countries or they have been threatened with death should they cooperate with the inspection regime that had been put into place. Ergo, they are at best dysfunctional, if not totally removed from the program. People working on weapons of mass destruction, we were told, were busy cleaning out those sites where weapons of mass destruction were being constructed. Ergo, they were sweeping and mopping instead of loading artillery shells with chemical weapons. We had inspectors roaming through Saddam's palaces – flash to a satellite photo – we were seeing everything that he was doing and – flash to a tape – we were listening to everything that he was saying.

People that I know in the military who are involved in disarmament-type activities will tell you that disruption is a significant measure of success in any disarmament campaign. I defy anybody to tell me that we had not, with what we were doing, disrupted Saddam's weapons of mass destruction programs.

Where I separated myself from the Administration's policy was in the need to go to Baghdad, the need to implement the highest-risk, lowest-reward option that we had – the invasion-conquest-occupation option – in order to disarm Saddam Hussein, and I'll come back to that in a minute.

The second pillar, of course, was the operational ties to "terrorists with a global reach," which was the president's own definition shortly after September 11, i.e., those terrorists who were prepared and who had acted against fundamental, core United States' interests, particularly related to 9/11 – code for Al-Qaeda and like-minded organizations. My judgment on that, even before we learned that in fact the evidence of any sort of operational ties is very flimsy at best, was that the Administration was utterly unable even to persuade itself of these operational ties. Because, had it been able to persuade itself, it would have justifiably acted under the self-defense article of the United Nations Charter and the Patriot Act, just as it had acted in Afghanistan, a war that I believe all Americans applauded to take down Al-Qaeda and the government that was harboring it. The Administration was unable to persuade itself of these ties in the run-up to the war.

The third pillar was the liberation and subsequent democratization of Iraq from a 30-year tyranny. That indeed was a laudable goal. Saddam Hussein was a tyrant. The Ba'ath Party's grip on the nation was horrible. The mass graves that Colin Powell stood over when he was out there in Halabja were real. (In fact, those graves were created when Colin Powell was national security adviser.)

But wars of liberation are not typically wars for which our military is constructed. Every four years we do a quadrennial review of our military forces. We look at the doctrine, we look at the resourcing, we look at the arming, we look at the objectives of what we have this organization for – and it is to defend the national security of the United States. Wars of liberation do not generally fall above the cut line. Now, there are those who argue that we of course have passed the Iraqi Liberation Act, which called for regime change. We had funded it at $90 million per year – $90 million does not buy you breakfast, lunch and dinner for one day in this current occupation.

Countries, including our own, have had regime change policies in place, whether underpinned by law or not, forever. This country has had a regime change policy in place for generations, towards Libya and Cuba. This Administration, one could argue, even had a regime change policy or approach in place with respect to the last elections in Germany. We heard all the rhetoric that flowed before the elections. And I believe you can easily make the argument that this Administration had a regime change policy in place towards my home state of California – and in fact may have effected regime change in California, with the arrival of Mr. Schwarzenegger. That does not, however, mean that you put 130,000 soldiers on the Nevada-California border in order to march into Sacramento.

The half-pillar of these three and a half pillars is the possibility of a rogue state transferring weapons of mass destruction to a non-state actor or international terrorist organization. A number of people look at this very closely, far more closely than I do, but I did write about it based on my experience in Iraq and my experience with Saddam Hussein. I argued that the one time when you might actually see weapons of mass destruction pass from a highly centralized, authoritarian system like Saddam's into the hands of somebody over whom he would have no control would be just in the last throes of that regime's existence. I called it the posthumous last laugh.

The fact that we haven't found weapons of mass destruction doesn't mean they weren't there and doesn't mean the goal of disarming Saddam wasn't legitimate. It means one of two things. Either he didn't have them, as we're hearing – although I still believe that we will find chemical weapons, we may find biological precursors – and I say that based upon my past experience there – and we will find that he continued to have an appetite for a nuclear program eventually. But if he did have more than we've been able to find so far, we should really worry about the possibility that these have fallen into the hands of non-state actors who will be far less reticent, since they are nihilists, to use those weapons against us.

But now we're there. We have 130,000 American soldiers in a country with a growing insurgency. Six months into this, we have failed to make a good first impression – and as everybody knows, you never get a second chance to make a first good impression, unless you're Muhammad Ali or Andre Agassi. In each of those cases it takes 20 years – and we don't have 20 years.

The argument that I would make for the way ahead, the second great debate, is that we really do find ourselves obligated to succeed despite the obstacles that the Administration continues to put in the way. To succeed in achieving something akin to the president's vision of a democracy in Iraq that will serve as something of a beacon to the rest of the world. By obstacles, I would argue everything from the New Europe/Old Europe formulation before the war that so alienated our traditional partners, to a reconstruction that has been so badly managed that a cynic would be excused if he believed that Balkanization is an acceptable outcome for those in charge of the reconstruction effort.

I believe that we need to do a number of things rather quickly. One, we need to internationalize this, and that does not mean that we give up authority. That does not mean we give up responsibility. That does not mean we give up command and control. What it means is we bring in flags of a lot of other countries and people from a lot of other countries, so as to be credible in attempting to explain to the Iraqi population that this is not in fact a foreign occupation, it is rather a global response to help them through a difficult period brought about by 30 years of Ba'athist tyranny, three wars and "shock and awe." I do not believe that we can do that by ourselves.

It doesn't necessarily mean that the UN flag has to be the biggest flag, because the UN is hardly more well regarded than we are. After all, the UN was the administrator of a debilitating sanctions regime for 13 years. But it does mean you need a lot more people.

It also means at the very beginning, as soon as possible – like yesterday – we need to redouble our efforts to not just fight the insurgency but to bring public safety to the streets of the major metropolitan areas. In order to do that, military people will tell you what the configuration of the troop strength should be, but we do need a different configuration to enhance public safety.

It also means that we need to be able to bring more efficiently basic human needs and services to the population. It is not sufficient to tell a general contractor, "You do the work, and in doing the work you provide the security and you provide the logistics support from the get-go." When we did the Bosnia deployment, the Commander in Chief, US Armed Forces, George Joulwan, used to go around with a couple of slides in his briefcase: one with an “M” [Military] and a “C” [Civilian]; and one with a “C” and an “M.” What he meant by that is when you go in and secure an area, the military takes an inordinate burden of the task, because the area is not secure. One of the things you need in such an environment is force protection. But as you stabilize the area, the role of the military – the “M” – shrinks as you're able to hand off more of these tasks to those civilian organizations that are better capable of doing it. That has not happened here, and that needs to happen if we ever hope to have a chance.

Bringing democratization to Iraq will not be easy. It is much more difficult, in my judgment, from the point of a gun, but you have to play the hand that you're dealt. Democratization in fact is not unlike an English garden, an English lawn: if you want to make it look good, you have to seed it, you have to water it, you have to roll it – every day for 600 years. If you don't believe it, look at the extent to which we fight day in and day out at every level of our own society, whether it's a city planning commission, the board of education, the city council, or up here on Capitol Hill. It is not an easy task. It is made even less easy at the point of a gun.

My own sense of this is that our best hope is in creating a benign environment, an environment in which Iraqis feel sufficiently sated, sufficiently satisfied, with their lot in life that they are able to break out of their traditional self-defense mechanisms of family, clan, tribe, and honestly begin to believe that there is a better future ahead.

As we go forward in this, and as this affects our 2004 elections – and I think probably more the 2008 elections – we should understand – and this is not of course a Democratic view, although somebody asked me if I was going to be telling the Democratic perspective on this – I tried to find one, but there are nine candidates and there are at least eleven points of view among the candidates – the election of 2004 may well ride on the success of our operations in the Middle East. Certainly if they fail, I think the Administration is vulnerable. I do not want my president to fail in this. I did not want to have this debate on 130,000 people in Baghdad before they got there. I want the president to succeed, and in order for him to succeed we do need international support. We do need to remain faithful to the vision, and we do need to understand that bringing democracy to Iraq means that you cannot cut and run.

Finally, I worry very much that the longer we are seen to be floundering in Iraq, the more people will begin to ask the following questions. What war did we send Jessica Lynch to fight? Did we send her to fight our national security war? Did we send her to fight Ahmed Chalabi's war? Did we send her to fight some other war? Was the battle of Baghdad in fact the second battle in the War on Terrorism, or was it the first battle to redraw the political map of the Middle East? If it was the latter, did we have that debate before we sent Jessica Lynch in there to do this?

Thank you.

Jim Zogby:

I've had a change in my obituary too. Many years ago I wanted it to be "greatest left-handed pitcher produced by Utica, New York." That certainly wasn't going to happen. But more recently I'm convinced that it will be "he's the pollster's brother." Many of you expected to find John here and you're getting a poor substitute.

I have a number of comments to make, basically falling under four separate headings, all of them focused on the 2004 elections. I'm going to start first with the Arab-American vote.

There's a story that when Harry Truman was getting set to recognize the State of Israel, his advisers said to him that the Arabs didn't want it, that President Roosevelt had promised the Arabs to consult with them first, etc. Truman was said to have responded, "I don't have any Arabs among my constituents, but I have many Jewish voters and friends." What we saw in Dearborn, Michigan, this past weekend is a sign that certainly in the consciousness of American politicians there is an awareness today that they have Arab constituents, and that while the Arab-American vote is by no means a decisive vote nor does it ever pretend to become one, it is a factor in American politics today – something we worked for two decades to build and the fruits of that work are beginning to be seen.

One of the candidates, as we were walking into the room, said to me, "This is tough. I met with Jewish groups, and now I'm meeting with your groups, and this is like threading a needle." And I said to myself that there's a certain kind of victory in all of that. It used to be just a slam-dunk: you spoke to one group; you didn't have to talk to the other group. But the fact that they need to weigh some words and hone a message that appeals to some degree to both sides is indicative of the change in consciousness. In politics, the change in consciousness is reflected by the need to deal with external realities and constituencies you're attempting to appeal to. We've now become a factor.

There are 3.5 million-plus Arab-Americans. By accidents of immigration or the poor judgment of our parents and grandparents, we settled in what are known as battleground states. We're a large voting bloc in Michigan but also in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Who would have thought that they would play the role that they do? But that's where our votes count.

When eight Democrats speak to us in Michigan and the chair of the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign to us, it's because they're aware of that constituency. We're proud of that on the one hand, but also understand that it helps the democratic debate move forward.

One of the candidates said to me as he was beginning to prepare his remarks, "Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to start talking about the economy and health care, and then I'll get into your issues." I said, "That might have worked a decade ago, but they're not my issues anymore."

The loss of prestige of America in the Middle East and the failure of our Middle East policy, the presence of Americans at risk in Iraq and the success or failure of that mission, our overall relations with the countries of the Arab world and the issues of civil liberties at home – they're not my issues. They're America's issues.

Frankly, we need to begin seeing them that way. When the Constitution is at risk, it's not an Arab-American issue. When American lives are at risk and American prestige has been compromised, that's not an Arab-American issue.

For the last 30 years, since the end of Vietnam, we've fought more wars, sent more troops, sent more money, lost more lives and have more at stake in the Middle East than anywhere else in the world. And yet until this presidential election, we've never had a debate about that. The fact is that we've having a debate. It's not always as enlightened a discussion as one would like it to be, but nevertheless it's significant that the discussion is there. Howard Dean uses the term "evenhanded," which one might have thought is a sort of commonplace term referring to the fact that America needs to have relationships on both sides, and gets beaten up around the ears for it – but nevertheless the debate continues and was in evidence when the candidates spoke at Dearborn. If I were Howard Dean, I would have said to the candidates who beat up on him, after listening to their speeches, "So, what was wrong with what I said?" Because, frankly, the effort of the candidates, even those who beat him up, to be evenhanded in their discourse and to address Palestinian suffering and the Israeli insecurity and the need of Palestinians for a state – that was everywhere in evidence in the discussion. Since it was not a closed-door meeting but a public gathering, it was clear that the remarks were framed as part of the ongoing political discussion and not simply an effort to court a particular group's vote.

But we've had crises before, from the '73 war and the oil embargo, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and the disastrous U.S. entrance into that to provide a buffer facilitating an Israeli withdrawal that cost American lives, the Iran-Iraq War and the U.S. involvement on both sides, our sponsoring of the mujahedin in Afghanistan, etc. We've been engaged and have had catastrophes in our policy before – but no debate.

But now we have one. It is interesting to look at the positions of the candidates, which I will not go through – but you can look on our website, aaiusa.org. We've reviewed all of the positions of the Democrats and the president. We have a link not only to a summary of their positions but also everything they've said about these issues, to see how the debate is moving forward.

It's interesting that, if there is a consensus at all on the Democratic side, it's that the Administration is to be criticized for two things. One is the pursuit of preemptive unilateral war. The second is for failing to aggressively pursue and remain committed to a consistent engagement in the pursuit of an Israeli-Palestinian peace. They supported the roadmap, the vision of the President which was initially – as M. J. noted – articulated by Bill Clinton toward the end of his term. They've differed with the Administration's logic with regard to the war, but they have not differed with regard to the need at this point to internationalize both the occupation and the political process of transforming Iraq in the future. So there is an ongoing discussion. The question is how sharp the difference is and whether or not the discussion continues on through the election in 2004.

Let me talk for a minute about the Arab-American vote. This is not a bloc vote. There were some groups in my community who I think created a faulty impression of how the vote went in 2000. They actually did a blast fax to their members and then sold it to the press as a poll. The results really were that George Bush got 44.5% and Al Gore got 36%. Frankly, what was interesting was that Ralph Nader got 13.5%, not unlike the John Anderson vote. Democrats who couldn't vote for George Bush but also didn't feel comfortable with Al Gore ended up voting for Ralph Nader. 80% of those who said the Middle East was the most important issue in their vote voted for Ralph Nader. That contrasts with the '96 vote, which saw Clinton winning 53% of the Arab-American vote and Bob Dole getting 34% of the Arab-American vote.

The point is that as we poll in 2003, we find about a third saying that they would support the reelection of the president, about a third saying under no circumstance they're going to vote for the president, and another third saying they're still not decided but leaning toward replacing George Bush. The point, in other words, is this is a community that is a third, a third, and a third, leaning slightly Democrat overall but still about a third, a third, a third. We've seen that in the last actually four or five elections that we've polled. The point is that we have a portion of our community that is philosophically Democrat and a portion that is philosophically Republican and another that still does not yet have a strong party ID. Largely, those who are born here, about 80% of Arab Americans born here, have strong party ID. Recent immigrants tend to be more fluid in their vote and logically tend, as one would expect with recent immigrants, to focus more on the issues of the Middle East, where they've come from. They provide the swing factor in the community, the competitive factor that has politicians looking to see where they go.

I think that we're going to see that kind of fluidity in 2004. Right now, from the polling that we're doing, Democrats would have the edge.

In the country as a whole, however, we're seeing two other interesting results. When we poll on these issues in the country as a whole, we get numbers not unlike the numbers we get when we poll Arab-Americans and American Jews. We've polled both of those two constituencies, and frankly on most issues affecting the Middle East, interestingly enough, they're within the margin of error of each other. Both support a State of Israel, the right to exist with security – almost the same percentage. Both support Palestinians' right to an independent state. Both support – almost two-thirds to three-quarters support – the need of the Administration to apply pressure and a balanced pressure to both sides to move the process forward. Both support an internationally engaged America and not an America that moves unilaterally. It's intriguing, I think, that both are the same. But that's where the country as a whole is.

So if Democrats were smart, they'd actually look at that and sharpen the debate, because what we're finding is that about two-thirds of the American public say that they want multilateralism and international cooperation to be the hallmark of our policy. That same number exists with regard to the United Nations. About two-thirds think that we need the UN now more than ever in world affairs. On the Arab-Israeli conflict, almost three-quarters say that the president should pursue a policy that favors neither Israelis nor Palestinians but steers a middle course between the two and applies pressure equally to both sides. That's why I think the debate can move, if a candidate decides to move it in that direction – won't lose Arab-American support, won't lose Jewish-American support, but frankly will win the support of the majority of the American people – because Americans, I think, are concerned.

A final observation about the overwhelming majority of good and decent and peace-loving Republicans who have seen their party hijacked by a fanatic and ideological and sometimes beard-winning fanatic crew, who've taken their party in a direction that is really quite disturbing. There are “American Osamas.” They want a war of civilizations, and they've done everything they can to pursue it. They have an infantile fantasy about the world. They see it in stark black-and-white terms, good and evil. Unlike diplomats, who have pursued building bridges between divergent systems – which is what diplomacy is about, it's creating the structures of relationship between worlds – these Manichaeists, these all-good all-evil, black-and-white ideologues can only see the inevitability of conflict and in fact the desirability of conflict between these worlds. They have brought us war. They have brought us a collapse of diplomacy, spurred on by an apocalyptic vision that out of war and conflict and chaos, spontaneously good things will come. They have mired us, alone, in Iraq, with no help in sight.

It's a danger, and we have to talk about it.

The comments of General Boykin are just plain wrong. There is no defense. It does not spur debate. It in fact takes us into conflict that we do not need with people all over the world who are looking to America not to lower the bar of what is allowable in debate but to raise the standard of what is acceptable political discourse. Saying "good," "evil," calling the other side "Satan," does not move us forward. It's the political discourse of Osama bin Laden. It should be rejected. It's bad for them. If Mahathir was evil for what he said, General Boykin and his like-minded kin in America should also be rejected. Frankly, it shouldn't even take courage to do so. It's common sense.

Phil Wilcox:

M. J., that was a wonderful note to end this panel on.

I want to thank all of you for your comments, and thanks also to the audience.