Q: First of all, last night at the
dinner you were seated next to Senator Robert
Hill, Australia’s defense
minister. I was wondering if you could
allude to what some of the talk was after the
roasted lamb…
Wolfowitz: Well, first of all, great
appreciation for what Australia has been
doing with us in the war in terrorism and as
I said in my public remarks today, it’s
just wonderful to have an ally that takes
security seriously and takes its commitments
seriously. I think we both feel a real
sense of accomplishment of what’s been
done in Iraq and the uncovering of these mass
graves, which should not have come as a
surprise to anybody, I think is a proof that
there’s no question about the morality
of what we did, and now the big challenge is
to make sure that we can deliver on what the
Iraqi people have a reasonable expectation
will come after this terrible regime.
Q: At the dinner last night,
Singapore’s Senior Minister Lee Kuan
Yew alluded to American unilateralism and
suggested very gently that the US might like
to consider taking a more sensitive approach
so as not to push people into a corner where
they feel the need to oppose the United
States. Are you going to be taking that
kind of advice on board?
Wolfowitz: I certainly don’t
think we should push people into a corner,
but it seems to me it was Mr. Chirac that
pushed us into a corner, pushed the whole
United Nations into a corner. And
frankly, if anyone was behaving unilaterally,
I think it was really the French. We
had 46 countries with us, including, very
importantly of course, Australia and the UK
and Poland that actually all contributed
troops. And most importantly of all
it’s clear that we had most of the 20
million people of Iraq with us, and their
voices should have counted for something.
Q: Certainly within southeast Asia you
do have a number of countries with you in the
coalition of the willing, Australia and
Singapore to name two. There were also
some countries that weren’t part of
that coalition, for example, Malaysia and
Indonesia. Is the United States aware
that there is a certain amount of discord
within southeast Asia between countries which
are considered to be strong allies of the
United States and those that have significant
differences of opinion?
Wolfowitz: Absolutely. And we
respect differences of opinion. I think
in many ways the problem was that with some
of our traditional European allies that went
beyond differences of opinion into really
active obstruction of policies that we
believe were essential to our security and
frankly I think to world security. But
obviously an issue like Iraq is going to be a
sensitive issue in a majority Muslim country
like Malaysia and Indonesia. I think
both sides managed our differences well and
we continue to have excellent cooperation
with both those countries on our common
interest in fighting terrorism.
Q: Obviously different countries look
at regional terrorism through different eyes
and countries like Malaysia and Indonesia
have domestic political considerations and
different considerations with regard to
nuanced understandings of Islam. Has
there been a suitable rapprochement between
views of countries like Australia and United
States and views of countries like Indonesia
and Malaysia in dealing with regional
terrorism?
Wolfowitz: I think there’s a
pretty good common approach. It’s
not perfect, but I think it’s worth
remembering that for many years many of us in
both United States and Australia were hoping
for democratic government in Indonesia and
now we have one, and as a democratic
government it’s not able to deal with
terrorists as decisively, to use a charitable
term, as the old authoritarian regime was
able to do. So I think some of our
differences in outlook frankly have more to
do with that basic issue of what is
acceptable in a country that’s trying
to institute the rule of law. But
clearly there is a little bit of a tendency
among some Indonesians who abhor terrorism to
nonetheless be concerned that actions against
terrorists not be seen as actions against
Islam or against Muslims, but they’re
not.
Q: Does the United States still see
southeast Asia as the second front in a war
against terrorism?
Wolfowitz: Well, you know I spoke today
about what I think of as the second front in
the war on terrorism, and I used it not a
geographic sense, but in a psychological
political sense, that is to say the first
front is killing and capturing terrorists
which you have to do, but the second front is
what President Bush referred to last year in
the State of the Union message as building a
just and peaceful world beyond the war on
terror and in particularly in the Muslim
world.
I
think clearly efforts have to be made to
counter the sense of hopelessness and
humiliation that I think affects many parts
of the Muslim world, particularly the Arab
world and that gives the extreme views more
of an opportunity to propagate, gives
terrorists more of a chance to recruit.
So I think that supporting countries like
Indonesia that are struggling to manage a
successful transition to democracy,
supporting countries like Turkey which is one
of the I think models of progressing, not
completely progressed, but a progressing
Muslim country. A country like Morocco
that’s making some real strides
forward. We need to support those kinds
of efforts just as strongly as we go after
the terrorists.
Q: Just a couple of questions on
Iraq. I was just wondering as of today,
where you consider the weapons of mass
destruction to be and why the United Nations
and weapons inspectors are still not being
invited back into Iraq.
Wolfowitz: Well on the second point,
they’re certainly welcome to come back
and in fact I believe we’ve made some
arrangements already for the IAEA to come
back to do some checking on sites that are
known. But bear in mind this regime had
12 years to develop very sophisticated
methods of hiding things. We have found
those biological vans that the defector in
Germany told us about. They seem to be
exactly what he said they would be. And
I would think that would pretty well
corroborate the rest of his story which is
they were for the production of biological
weapons.
We
said all along that we will never get to the
bottom of the Iraqi WMD program simply by
going and searching specific sites, that
you’d have to be able to get people who
know about the programs to talk to you.
And that’s why we gave the UN
inspectors authorities they never had before
to interview people.
It’s quite significant I think that
Saddam never allowed any of his people to be
interviewed without tape recorders present or
monitors present, and we now have our hands
on some small number of those people, and I
think eventually with information that we get
from people who know about the programs,
we’ll get to the bottom of what was
there and what happened to it.
Q: Tomorrow is one month since
President Bush announced a military victory
in Iraq. One month later the country
seems to be in some degree of mess. Why
is that the case?
Wolfowitz: Well, I could give you a
two-part answer. First of all he
announced the end of major combat
operations. He didn’t say the end
of combat operations. We were very
careful in the choice of words because we
knew that low level combat operations
continued and they continue actually to a
disturbing degree. It’s a clear
demonstration that this regime didn’t
disappear simply when Baghdad was captured
and the statues came down. If you have
20,000 or 30,000 former members of the secret
police -- torturers, war criminals -- those
people are still around. They’re
making trouble. They attack armed
American convoys everyday so you can imagine
what they do to unarmed Iraqis who may
support us.
It’s a problem. It will be dealt
with. And that’s the second thing
I would say. I believe its only 72 days
since American and Australian forces first
crossed the border into Iraq.
It’s not very much time since the
beginning of the war. One of our
generals, John Abizaid, who actually is an
Arab American, a native Arabic speaker,
commented he’d been Kosovo, he’d
been in Bosnia. He said we’re way
ahead in Iraq of where we were at the
comparable stage in those countries; and I
think those are much simpler cases, so it
will take some time.
There’s still substantial work to be
done, and in my view, and I think the
President shares this view, we’re not
declaring victory. Our victory will
come when the Iraqi people have a new and
free country that they deserve.
Q: There seem to be increased questions
being raised in the media about the validity
of some of the intelligence that was put into
the public domain by the United States and
Britain in particular -- questions about WMD
and about other aspects of the war and the
justification for the war. I’m
wondering whether the kinds of reports that
we’re seeing increasingly in the media
and the kind of skepticism which the media is
developing. Is that potentially going
to be creating problems for the United States
when it comes to deal with Iran, when it
comes to deal with Korea; that there’s
going to be public skepticism about what the
United States is saying, that there’s a
view that the United States and Britain will
say what it takes in order to get job
done.
Wolfowitz: Well, let me say first of
all nobody distorted intelligence or said
what it would take. In my experience in
government there have few issues on which the
intelligence community was as unanimous as
they were on the existence of Iraqi chemical
weapons and biological weapons, and the
intention to develop nuclear weapons.
Look, intelligence is an art, it’s not
a science. It’s true that we can
read the numbers on a license plate from
space, but that doesn’t mean that we
therefore know everything that goes on in the
country. If you think back to 1991, we
clearly made massive mistakes in
underestimating what the Iraqis had, and
before what we discovered after we got into
Iraq was that they had a much more advanced
nuclear program than we believed.
It’s interesting too, by the way, we
didn’t find it right away. Three
months after the end of the last Gulf War,
the UN inspectors were ready to declare Iraq
nuclear free. They held off, and six
months later they discovered that Iraq had
not one but four different routes to nuclear
weapons that they were pursuing with
investments that were massive.
It’s a big country. They’ve
worked at hiding things very, very
deliberately. There’s no question
in my mind that there was something
there. There are just too many pieces
of evidence and we’ll get to the bottom
of it.
Q: Is that skepticism there in the
public domain?
Wolfowitz: The press is paid to be
skeptical, and the public is always
questioning government. I think
that’s the strength of democracy,
frankly.
Q: Thank you.
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