Part II, Debate, Questions & Answers
(NOTE- Limited editing largely for the sake of clarity)

Host: Amb. Jeanette Hyde, President, American Diplomacy Publishers
Moderator: Hodding Carter, III, Professor, UNC
Panel: Congressman David Price, (D-NC)
Lt. Gen. James Lee, U.S. Army ret.
Dr. Joseph Glatthaar, Chair, UNC Prog. in Peace, War and Defense
Dr. Robin Dorff, Exec. Dir., Inst. of Political Leadership, N.C. St. U.

CARTER
Now, gentlemen, you all have some debating to do if you wish to, so just speak right up, or not. You don't have to fight. Love, not war, but in any case,

PRICE
Let me just observe that I think through most of the panel presentations have been a couple of assumptions that we probably have agreement on. One is that the world would be better off if there were indeed more widespread legitimacy among governments' accountability, responsiveness, respect for human rights, etc. But secondly that democracies and regimes that respect human rights are, as Robin said, normally not established or imposed. Doing this through military means is extremely problematic and often counterproductive. I thought Joe's comments about the dangerousness and presumptuousness of preemptory war were right on target.

That said, I wonder if there are some hard cases. And I guess, Joe, if maybe this would get us started. Are there some hard cases? Are there instances where the practices of governments become so egregious and so unacceptable morally — I mean, genocide comes to mind — that you would overcome your quite justified reluctance to get involved? I'm talking here not just about unilateral U. S. involvement; in fact, my presumption I hope I made clear was that normally multilateral is better. But are there hard cases? Is Egypt a hard case for you in terms of the way we should be handling that relationship where clearly democratic values are at stake, where here we're not talking about direct military intervention, obviously, but it is one of those gray areas where there is a military alliance and where we need to ask some questions, I think, about how.

We just debated this on the floor of the House. I found it very difficult. What about the conditioning of aid to Egypt on human rights accounts? Are these hard cases, or is there some kind of simple way to cut through them?

GLATTHAAR
I thought I'd be able to ride this section out. Evidently not. (laughter) And Hodding, I think it has to do with the water in Chapel Hill. That's why you changed your view. (laughter) But anyway, with regard to Egypt, I would not utilize military forces. We have a reasonably good relationship with Egypt and I think we work through more traditional means to encourage that sort of conduct. In the case of genocide, I'm not opposed to intervening, but it needs to be done in a truly collective fashion under the rubric of the United Nations. If the United Nations is not willing to intervene in mass genocide, then what in hell do we have a United Nations for? (applause by audience) It's to my mind really that fundamental.

	General Lee and Congressman Price

CARTER
Now, gentlemen, let me ask you one thing: If we could actually concentrate on the hard issue of the topic, because going in to stop genocide is not creating democracy. Going in under the rubric of the United Nations under collective security agreement is not to impose democracy. The question this one is asking is, should the United States use military force to create democracy. And because famously on the day that Bill Clinton cried as he dedicated the memorial to the Holocaust in Washington, he was also pulling the plug on a U.N. effort to save…I mean there are any number of “never agains” that you might raise as to whether or not you use military power. But this is for the sole purpose of creating a democracy...I think was why you described this one so definitely.

PRICE
Well, let me just say just a mild quibble. I don't think democracy is a single or simple thing, and I was taking the question to involve a range of issues about the practices and composition of other governments. That's why I described genocide as a kind of limiting case.

CARTER
Right. General? Do you have some other thoughts?

LEE
I think I'll use my next two or three minutes to talk about what you might call an alternative question. The question was, Should the United States use force to establish democracies around the world? I want to pose the question of what would we be saying if the question instead of using force to establish democracy was…how should I put this? [H]ow does force fit into the question of how we handle the war on terrorism? To me that's the overarching question of the day — how we handle terrorism, how we use force, what force? Does force play in this quest? And I went through three steps. I said war on terrorism is really a war on nations that

(a) have weapons of mass destruction, or desirous of achieving weapons of mass destruction, or have achieved that, and
(b) or to a totalitarian state with fanatical, unpredictable governments headed up by, for lack of a word, crazy people.

Fair game in this war on terror? That seems to me to be the question that has to be confronted in the discussion of force and democracy. My starting point is the security of the United States and the security of the world. The United States government, whether we like it or not, is the lone super power. The whole world depends on the United States to go and do what has to be done when there's a crisis in the world because we're the only one with the forces to be able to do it. So it's not a question of why we should, but it's a question of we have to. We have that responsibility and of course we have to do it in the process of human rights, [the] process of democratic government.

A democratic government was formed [with] a constitution that set up a bicameral legislation, set up a judiciary, set up a legislature, and the executive branch. People were voted on and we've been voting yes and no ever since. . . . [Y]ou can define democracy any way you want, depending on your prejudices and “druthers,” but there has to be some kind of definition of democracy, and I think the American government is the best one I've found.

CARTER
When I was growing up in Mississippi, General, I was taken to see Mrs. Ball, who . . . was originally from Vicksburg. Every time we'd go to see her — she was about 85 at the time — she'd say, “No Southerner will ever celebrate July 4th,” and I'd say, “Why, Mrs. Ball?” every time. She'd say “Because that's the day the Yankees took Vicksburg.” (laughter)

	General Lee

[J]ust quickly, I think we come back to this point that the question as it's framed. . . And Hodding, I want to come back to what you said and challenged us to think about. The point is that establishing democracy, you can't do that just by the use of force. It may well be your choice, Congressman Price, as you were saying, you may have to make a choice of whether you go in with military force to initiate that process. But if you think that you can establish democracy just by the use of military force, I doubt that anybody in this room would agree with that. I don't think really that anyone in the administration today agrees with that.

The challenge I was trying to throw out is to say that you use military force in order to accomplish other objectives. If your objective is in fact to promote democracy or legitimate governance, then you better have the rest of the equation thought through before you make that choice to go to war. [T]here is a great line, to come back to 1776, which in the conservatives are singing: “Why begin till we know that we can win?” That does come back actually to the Powell and Weinberger doctrine because there's a bit of a misleading point in that doctrine, which I have taught a long time. You don't always know that you can win and in some of the most difficult cases, being certain of the outcome ahead of time is not possible. In this particular arena where your objective may well be to try to promote long-term, legitimate governments or democracy, we need to recognize that certainty is not one of the things we will ever have. [B]ut as, just to repeat my one point, hoping for what will happen afterwards is almost assuredly a lack of strategic thinking.

CARTER
All right, folks, you have a chance now to be strategic with your questions, tactical or carpet-bombing. (laughter) I'll start here and you're going to be second, all the way in the back.

	Edward Marks

One is, there is an assumption — the question is posed as if the decision to use force is to obtain democratic government somewhere, and second, it implies U. S. initiative. But what about a situation where we didn't use force for that purpose and it wasn't — maybe or maybe not — our initiative, but to use force has finished . . . [W]e completed the war, we then occupy a country, Is it now a legitimate, responsible policy initiative to then complete the job by installing democracy in the conquered area? Or is that also a illusory objective?

CARTER
All right, gentlemen, you're the panelists. [F]rom here on we'll do identification, and each of the questioners will identify themselves as well.

MARKS
[Ambassador] Edward Marks, a member of the Board here, a contributor. [American Diplomacy] has been kind enough to take my scribblings. I'm not sure I'd use the word illusory, but I think it's extremely difficult and, as I tried to think with you, there aren't too many post-World War II cases that one can think of where this [the imposition of democracy by force] has worked. Where it has worked, it's first of all not mainly been or maybe not at all been a military operation. The full range of tools that Robin [Dorff] talks about are things that are much more promising. Moreover, in these post-military situations, often we're dealing with societies that don't have these traditions. We're dealing with a great deal of resentment, a lack of security, situations that just compromise our ability or anyone else's to impose anything. [S]o there are a few cases we can think about. But I think in general we're talking conflict and post-conflict as being very difficult situations for the establishment of “democracy” to be a central and successful U. S. objective.

LEE
Well, I may be misinterpreting your word, but it sounds like you agree with me and I'm all for that. I think your question was that you may argue why we went there in the first place, but once we are there, shouldn't we stay and finish the job? I agree 100 per cent and the Congressman has challenged us on a couple of occasions to name some examples where we went in to establish democracy and succeeded. Am I correct in saying that?

PRICE
By military means mainly, yes.

LEE
By military means, right, and I will mention, and they're small examples. . . If I had more time to think about it, I might think of more, but Grenada was one. [A] very small nation, but we went in, we kicked out the communist government, and a democratic government was established. Panama — we went in and kicked out a dictator, established a democratic government, and both have held over the years.

CARTER
Those are good examples and we have a question all the way in the back. I just want to observe something because it's really useful [and] everybody doesn't want to keep talking about it. We destroyed Germany and Japan for good and sufficient reasons of national security, but every test that the rest of you all imposed on how it is you're going to get a democracy then followed. The biggest recipients of foreign aid in 1960 from the United States were Japan and Germany. It's hard to believe that anymore. We, of course, kept occupying armies until this day, as was noted in Korea.

Of course, if the Yankees had kept their army down in the South for about fifteen more years, we might [not have] had to wait for a hundred years to finally get full freedom for black Americans. I mean it takes a long, long time to do this thing when you actually go in.

Yes, ma'am?PEDERMAN
Hi, I'm Rebecca Pederman and I'm a high school senior and news editor of The Eagle's Eye newspaper and aspiring diplomat. I have a question for the panel. This is based on the question of should we use force to establish democracy, but it kind of asks something in a different direction that we haven't touched on at all. If we are going to use force to protect our vital interests, as most of you have said we should, is there a point in time when this force , , , puts us at more of a risk regarding the War on Terror? Maybe fighting a war on terror could create more terrorists. Is there a point where the force is a problem and makes us less [safe] than before? Also, who is to determine what a vital risk or a vital interest of the United States is? Could that be oil? [W]hat is a vital interest?

		Dr. Dorff and Dr. Glatthaar

DORFF
I'll take two things quickly. Clausewitz, who is probably the Bible for us who spent any time at the Army War College. . . [H]e famously writes that the choice to use force, once you unleash military force, you really don't know what the final outcome will ever be. I was kind of alluding to that . . .

[T]here was no doubt we could defeat the Iraqi Army. There wasn't anybody I knew that had any question in their mind whether or not they could defeat the Iraqi Army. The question that was much more difficult is what other things are unleashed when you choose to use force. I think that [the] answer to your question is one of the reasons why you really do have to think long and hard about the use of military force. The answer to the second question is actually easy, but it's not going to help you very much. Remember I said that using force is always a political act and who decides what our vital national interests, it's political leadership. Now we hope and we believe fundamentally that people like Congressman Price here are spending a lot of hours sweating, thinking very carefully what we the American people want and what we believe our vital interests are. But ultimately the use of physical [force] is a political act and the military is subject to civilian control, and that is the political leadership.

GLATTHAAR
Actually, Clausewitz stole that idea from Thucydides, so that gives you some sense of what we're talking about, things that human beings have known for 2,000 plus years.

But secondly, I just want to clarify something. The armies that we have in Germany and South Korea are not occupying armies. Since we established a democratic republic in Germany, it has been there for the defense of Germany, not for occupation duties. After the Cold War we dismantled the overwhelming preponderance of it, and secondly, in South Korea it is absolutely not an occupying army, it is there to defend against an attack from North Korea. Thanks.

CARTER
I would note that the only period of time as long as Europe has gone without an internal war in Western Europe has been when the non-occupying army of the United States has been in Germany. I mean that there are some connections between events and whatever the auspices of the armies present, the army's presence is the first and [is] required, I think, for the evolution of virtually everything else.

	Peter Wagner and roaming mike handler Rick Schoonover

One is, it seems to me that a lot of people here agree simply on American national interests as the defining factor for the use of force. I would like to know a little bit more about the international context and in terms of whether or not an international regime approach would be a bit better, rather than assuming . . . that it's American national interests defining interventions.

The other part, of course, is that I do take a little bit of issue with the myth-making surrounding in particular Germany as an example of where it functions and why. I do think that lessons of history should be taken seriously. but I would really add that in the German case a lot of domestic factors aided in the democratization of Germany after the Second World War, including in fact, an acceptance that the Nazi regime was immoral and a colossal failure. [I]f one thinks in those terms and applies it to, let's say the Iraq case, you really have to weigh in terms of what is happening in Iraq today in terms of . . . how legitimate, so to speak, the present situation is actually [as] seen by Iraqis.

Anyway, two observations. Thank you.

PRICE
Well, I think that the question would have been dealt with in more depth and detail if we weren't told that Iraq was not on the table. [I]f Iraq were on the table as a point of discussion, well, that's all we'd talk about.

CARTER
If anybody wants to take up the point, either one of those points…?

PRICE
Just very quickly, I think what you say about the comparing historical context in Germany and Iraq is very much on point with the kind of preconditions we were talking about earlier, and when this is likely to take and when it isn't. The national interest point is a topic for a full discussion. I happen to think that our Iraq policy would have been very different if this administration had taken a hard look at our legitimate national interest. I think it was an undertaking that wasn't grounded in that kind of realism at all.

That said, I do think that the U.S. national interest is not a totally sufficient way of calculating or justifying our foreign policy. The case I come up against is genocide. . . I think there are overriding human values that may call on us to do things, not necessarily military things, but may call on us to do things that one would not justify simply on a national interest calculation.

LEE
On the question of international, you say what would have happened if we'd taken a more international approach instead of a national security approach? I'd say that we took an international approach, I say that without Pakistan our bringing them onboard, we could not have had Afghanistan, there was no way we could, and people keep saying, well, the Arabs are against us and you make them mad, and all that, but our allies in the region, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Dubai, Maharain, United Emirate, all in support of us, with us, Indonesia, with us on the War on Terrorism, Thailand is with us. We started out with a coalition of forty-one countries, some of them substantial, Britain, Poland, we have lost some due to political realities. There was a bomb in Spain and the left-of-center government came in and withdrew its troops. South Korea's a decidedly left-of-center even though it still has troops there, and there has been an erosion but for the most part the coalition has held. There's a strong international flavor to operations in Iraq.

CARTER
This is our third rail folks. I mean if we get onto this, we're never going to get off. I would only say in passing that again all you Republicans in the audience, remember that I said this: George Bush, Sr., looks like a genius (laughter) because his Gulf War really did have an international coalition. They paid for it, they put heavily troops [in] and it was over, and when it was over we came home. Brilliant piece of work. Did I say that?

	Jim Abrahamson

JIM ABRAHAMSON (Member of Board, American Diplomacy)
An observation first and then I'll get to the questions.

I respectfully disagree with the way you have narrowed this question to only force and only apparently American style democracy. I think that limits it to the point that it disappears as a useful question . . .

Since I normally speak from the conservative perspective, I'm going to refer to a man named Michael Walser. If you know Michael Walser, you know that he is from what I'll call the traditional far-left in American history, about as far away from me as he can be. But he wrote a book called Just and Unjust Wars, which suggests that maybe he knows as much about the subject as Casper Weinberger and Colin Powell. In the preface to the third edition of his book on the subject of sovereignty, he made the point that there are some nations whose behavior of their leadership is so atrocious that they need to be eliminated. I don't know…certainly genocide, but many things a lot less bad than that. And he said it would be nice if the U.N. could do this, but the way it's structured it can't and won't. We've seen that illustrated in the Sudan most recently, and he said it's going to have to probably be done unilaterally, which puts us back into our topic area.

So here's a man of the far-left who can support that, even though he's very skeptical about the justice of wars. I think we have to keep that importantly in mind — that there are nations that need to be dealt with. So then the question becomes if we do intervene with whatever size of coalition of other people that would join us — and I don't think we need to expect much. Here we are months after the ceasefire in Lebanon, how many troops are on the ground? Five thousand, I think, coming from basically NATO countries. That's pretty petty. I mean we do these things because the world expects us to do them, and we do these things because we can do it. And the rest of the world, once they get out of their immediate area doesn't have much of a capacity, so that's something I hope some of you will consider.

And then the second point I wanted to make… We ought to look at this not only from the point of view of what happens when we do intervene to try to establish legitimate government — and I like Robin's definition. What happens when we don't? You know, we got into Somalia for a while, made a very unwise and poorly supported use of armed forces to try to deal with a warlord. People were killed; we left. The Somalis then enjoyed their sovereignty for what? another fifteen years of oppression and we see them on the verge of having a Taliban-type Islamic autocracy imposed on them. We refused in 1975 to assist the [South] Vietnamese government as we had promised to do. Twenty-two divisions came across the border with North Vietnam. The government not surprisingly went down.

There are costs to not using force and we need to consider those consequences as well, so perhaps you could address either of those points.

DORFF
Yeah, if I could just quickly — because it gives me a chance to [comment on] something that the Congressman had said, too. I happen to believe — and I tend to fall on the more conservative side of things, too — I think there are U. S. national interests. There are vital interests. But I believe that the sanctity of human life, since standing on the sidelines while genocide occurs, I think is one of those things that I would have a hard time looking in the mirror about. Those questions that we have to wrestle with. I think [it] comes back to what is a really vital national interest? Oil, obviously protecting lives of Americans, our society, our values, etc. But what do we stand for? That's ultimately the question that has to be debated and I would say I would probably agree with the Congressman in the sense that you don't just intervene because there's an evil actor doing bad things. You make that choice to intervene because there's something that goes to the core of your values, and those are things that I have taught a lot of in places like the Army War College. It's not just things, it's also values — that Hitler was a geo-strategic threat to our survival. . . .

CARTER
All right, still more that you have on this? I do not notice my ability to straightjacket this conversation, (laughter), but I appreciate your concerns. Anybody else on this point, because I have a question here, and then folks, it's all yours.

Maybe I should just say a word about unilateralism since that came up. But I know we have lots of questions, I'll be quick. The notion that the U.N. is in every case going to act or this is what's the U.N. for, I think, is the way Joe [Glatthaar] put it. You know, of course, it would be ideal if the U.N. were to intervene in these cases, but we have the Serbian example, we have the Sudanese example, that do, as Jim [Abrahamson] says, pose the difficult questions for us about when that kind of U.N. action is impossible. But that's not to say it has to be unilateral, Jim, and I think there's a lot to be said for coalition building. I think the . . . dispute I have with the basic Bush foreign policy direction is what I think to be a reversal of fifty years of [the] largely bipartisan foreign policy approach in this country where we have relied on alliances and international organizations and treaties. And where the notion of preemptory war, the notion of the U. S. in new ways breaking from international alliances and international consultation forged ahead, I think that's where the problem arises.

I think it's a real problem and it seems to me there's very little that we're talking about here today military or otherwise that wouldn't be well-served by a return to a more multilateral approach to U.S. policymaking.
Is there somebody who wants to ask a question over here who is not involved with any of these organizations and here because you're really interested as a newcomer? How about you?

SHELLY GUTEN
Thank you. My name is Shelly Guten, I am a newcomer to the area, six months here. I have no credentials, don't worry about any background in this area. I'm just the average Joan voter. I'd like the panel to talk about propaganda and the use of what could be a smokescreen of saying that our purpose is to establish democracy when, indeed, it's another national interest, which might be economic. Oil has been mentioned. I just would like propaganda to be discussed.

CARTER:
I think that's a question, questioning the use of the flag of democracy to disguise other interests.

DORFF
I'll say one thing quickly. Part of it is that historically, and at great risk with Joe here next to me, but historically Americans really, we haven't gone to war for material things. Even FDR found it very difficult understanding, certainly with a lot of prodding from Winston Churchill, what a grave geo-strategic threat Nazi Germany was. Still he himself had to find the kind of language to couch it in to…pardon the phrase…to sell it to the American public. The most difficult task he had was to try to convince the American public, although we had been bombed and attacked by Japan, that where we really needed to go first and foremost was to continental Europe.

It isn't just a manipulation of propaganda, although that's a lot in the news today, a lot of it is Americans as a people. We tend to fight for causes that are much larger than in fact some of the realists in continental Europe would probably argue understanding that there are just those real, tangible threats to things that matter that don't have to be all about the great causes like democracy.

GLATTHAAR
The exceptions might be the Mexican War and the Spanish-American War.

LEE
Well, on propaganda, on oil, the first Gulf War was very much about oil. Saddam Hussein had captured Kuwait and its oil fields and it was headed — there was no doubt about it — headed for Saudi Arabia. They had to be stopped and they were. And the war didn't drag on because we pulled out. Somebody said that George Bush the First was a genius because he got in, won, and got out. The son got in, no doubt about that, he made the decision, he won militarily in less than a month, then he had a terrible political problem and that is playing itself out today. But it's not over.

And oil was not a part of the rationale for going into the second Gulf War. If oil had been the goal, we would have captured Iraq and gone up and seized its oil fields and sent the oil to America. We didn't do that and that was never a goal.

CARTER
All right, one more from the newcomer field. We're going to have to conclude in a couple of minutes. All right?

BOB GUTEN
I'm the other half of the Guten group here. Bob Guten. I'm a recovering academic, but not in this field. Of course, we wonder about the past and whether we should be in Iraq and that's certainly an important topic. But what we can do next is really what we should be thinking about perhaps. What about Iran? There's a lot of discussion about what our policy should be there. What lessons have we learned that might help us think about what posture we should adopt with respect to Iran?

[Moderator and members of the audience opine quickly the question of Iran has little to do with democratization.]

LEE
I'll carry on for just a couple of seconds from my earlier reasoning about how we handle terrorism and governments that are crazy and pose a great threat to the world and the American people. The much maligned axis of evil, or the three nations that I cite where having weapons of mass destruction are a real threat to the entire world. The one thing we cannot allow to happen is that a nuclear weapon falls in the hands of terrorists and they come to this country and blow up New York. We've got to stop that, and Iran has to be stopped. It's got to be prevented from having nuclear weapons, and by hook or by crook.

CARTER
Anybody else going to help us on Iran, get yourself on the record while you still can?

PRICE
The Iran question obviously is a lot bigger than we can deal with in the context of this panel. Even the administration hasn't trotted out that justification, though, for involvement in Iran as they did with Iraq. There are reasons to be concerned about Iran and some of them quite legitimate. But I think the Iran case does illustrate a number of things that have come up repeatedly here today and that is the limits of military means and the vital, vital importance of multilateral diplomacy.

CARTER
As Mr. Interlocutor is moving towards the back of the hall, let me say those who feel constrained by time know now that I'm going to go over time because we started about ten minutes late and there are a lot of questions.

	Andreas Ringl

RINGL
My name is Andreas Ringl. I'm a first-generation political refugee from East Germany. My parents brought me over, so America means something very special, and basing my context on that, I also joined the service, I spent some time in the United States Marine Corps, I spent some time as a United States Army Special Operations, twenty-two years, I have two Master's Degrees and am working on my Ph.D. So I want to stay balanced, did not just military, a little bit of headwork as well, just to make sure that I'm, you know, in the context. A couple of things I'd like to address.

[But] first of all, we need to do this again, [a] wonderful venue. I thank you for the panel of distinguished guests, absolutely great. Let's do it again very soon. First of all, I think we should spend more time when we do this next time and there's a special day we need to spend more time to define force because is going to continue. Force even in the context of the military can be very small, can be very large.

That needs to be discussed in detail. Also the word established, what does that mean? There are different ways to establish things. We can begin socially, we can do so militarily, they all have to work in context with one another. . . . Congressman Price, you seem to speak of rights quite often and so do some of the other panelists. Never in that context do I hear the balancing of that with human responsibility. When we talk about human rights, we should talk about responsibility because the definition of liberty …

General Lee, I think you're absolutely right on target when you say that everything depends on the lay of the land. It really depends on where we're at and depends on the context of where we're operating, and that depends on what type of force we need. But it is also crucial to use reality as a base. We must be a good mate. Dr…I hope I pronounce this right…Glatthaar?

GLATTHAAR
Yes.

RINGL
Okay, that's a nice German name by the way.

GLATTHAAR
Thank you, straight or smooth hair, can you tell? (laughter)

CARTER
Enough already. Go ahead.

RINGL
And again it's human rights balanced with human responsibility and it'll tie all of this together. And finally Dr. Dorff, you speak about compounding the situation, which is about more important. And the use of force must be followed on by functional security apparatus, absolutely imperative. Well, let me tie it together, okay.

CARTER
Is this a question because right now you're pretty much giving a speech?

RINGL
The question is this: Iran. What type of action should we take, and is the action that we should take, does that include use of force? [T]he people there are ready for democracy. What should we do because ….directly to Iran suggests that America needs to take action. They want Americans to take action, and yet we are failing the people on the ground because America is not taking the appropriate action. That's the question. What should we do?

LEE
My answer is we should do something but we should use the diplomatic approach first, and that's what we're doing. I sure hope that works out… But the goal is to make sure that they do not develop a nuclear weapon, a military weapon. Whatever it takes in the end, if it takes force, it takes force.

DORFF
My only difference of opinion on that is I don't think we can prevent them from developing a nuclear weapon unless we absolutely are going in to conquer the country and occupy it. I think that my views on nuclear weapons — I don't like them, but I think ultimately there are countries that already have them. Some of them aren't friendly to us, but what we want to avoid is ever having them used. I think the army is broken right now and if we invade Iran, I have to ask myself how in the heck we're going to carry that one off simultaneously with Iraq. I'm not disagreeing with the general, (applause) I'm saying somebody with the political leadership needs to step up and give us the soldiers that we need and the equipment that we need, if that's what we're going to do.

Right now my answer to the question of Iran is make it very clear that there is nothing to be gained by developing those weapons. And further, if there's any hint, smell, sniff that they're going to be used anywhere, that's when the trigger goes off.

LEE
Well, I'd make two points in answer. One is we can use military means, cruise missiles and air to completely destroy at least the surface facilities that are needed to develop a nuclear weapon. Now that can be done, and I don't think we have to invade Iran in order to prevent them from having nuclear weapons.

Second, I do not believe that the United States army is broken, I think it is the finest army in the world, I think it has supplied Iraq with all the forces they need, and if the president says we need more, the generals on the ground say we need more, we've got them to send.

CARTER
All right, now then I'm going to go forward here. Two guys who have been sitting here patiently certain that I was going to deprive them of their opportunity. Let me go all the way over to the right.

	Ron Palmer addresses the panel

RON PALMER (retired ambassador, American Diplomacy board member]
I'm going to try to see whether we can't cool things down a little bit. First of all, I have a recommendation and that is that the former U.S.I.A. be reconstituted so that we can get to work on many of the issues that need to be dealt with, particularly in terms of reaching out to other peoples. (applause)

Secondly, it's been a very interesting panel. Interesting, I think, is the correct word. I do want to return to the idea of legitimacy and the promotion of legitimacy. You cannot have effective government unless it is legitimate. We have a series of incredible problems coming right down the pike at us. A lot of them are in Africa, but not just Africa. Problems having to do with failed or failing states. The question of the use of force is terrifying because again the world is awash in Lebanons, and it is not a case unfortunately, General, of dealing with states. We're dealing with non-state actors and that gets to the…

LEE
What? We have terrorists; is that what you're referring to?

PALMER
They're not a state, Hezbollah is not a state, Hamas is not…

LEE
Okay.

PALMER
Finally I simply want to remind everybody that the world is composed of states that by and large are quite traditional and have their own ways of getting to Mecca. We have a great problem in using force against cultures that we do not understand.

CARTER
Shall I go to a question here? All right, last question.

	Ed Williams

WILLIAMS (retired FSO, board member of American Diplomacy)
Thank you, I'm Ed Williams. I wanted to clarify some remarks that a couple of the panelists made — Dr. Dorff and Dr. Glatthaar. One is that apparently some countries are simply not suitable for democracy, so that it would not do really anybody any good in the long term for us to go in and try to establish a democracy. Perhaps you can tell me whether that is correct. And I thought I heard that maybe an equivalent of democracy is a country in which people believe their leaders are legitimate. I think I heard that, and I'm not sure if that is … considered to be the … same or a substitute for democracy? And then I would like to know if anybody can give me a couple of examples of some non-democratic governments that have respected human rights?

CARTER
Now, let's use those two questions, which are useful questions, in a number of ways to also help you come to your last remarks to close out this panel,

GLATTHAAR
Want to start down at this end and we'll break out?

CARTER
Work it any way you want to work it, but don't ignore Ed's questions in your summary.

DORFF
We'll lead with the weakest and go from there. Yes, I did say that legitimacy is one of those things like beauty is, and it's ultimately in the eye of the beholder, and the reason I like to use the term legitimate governance, I'll get around it just by example. I believe you could have an Islamic legitimate state, not an Islamist state that was out to eradicate its neighbors but a country in which Islam is the value system in which a combination of a sort of religious/political leaders rule the country.

I don't see that as fundamentally out of line with effective, legitimate governance. It has to do with then with what they do with political power, both internally and externally, and that's where the legitimacy derives from. I think that there's some countries not suitable for democracy. I don't want to get into that particular cultural debate, but a moment ago, and I will close with this, what I wanted to say was another…

I teach a lot with bumper stickers, I think, shows the depth of my thinking. But one of the little bumper stickers I put up for students of all ages but at the Army War College and business, too, [is] “not every problem has a solution.” We as Americans have a tendency to not recognize that. There are places, I'm afraid — and I've argued in some of my works about triage and that approach to the international system. Just because bad things are happening somewhere doesn't mean you can and should fix it, and that's one of the things that is a difficult challenge in the world of strategy.

You have to make those decisions about priorities, so in sort of a backwards way of answering your question, I wouldn't so much address the suitability of any country, but I would certainly be making choices about where to allocate scarce resources and putting them in those places where it was mostly to make a difference, and in a place where we really needed to make a difference. I hope that helps.

GLATTHAAR
Well, I'd like to respond to that in a couple of issues, first, with regard to democracy and cultures and societies. In our current situation, for example, in Afghanistan a democracy isn't going to take hold in the near future. The best we can hope, I think, is a respect for human rights and working towards that goal, but the Afghanistan culture, of the Afghani peoples and different tribal structures and it 's a complicated situation, is ill-suited to my mind to a democracy today or a decade from now, or a couple of decades from now. That's a good example. We also need to keep in mind that the United States has a finite amount of power. If we were gods, yes, we could create democracies all over the world and we would do it painlessly. That is an impossibility. I strenuously disagree with the general about how worn-out our Army is, Yes, it is the best army in the world, but when you have to offer $40,000 enlistment and reenlistment bonuses, when 98 per cent of all captains get promoted to major, when 50% of all lieutenant colonels get promoted to colonel, you have a serious problem in the United States. The generals may not have asked for the manpower. but they were clearly intimidated by Rumsfeld. And if they weren't, they used bad judgment, in my opinion. So that's my position on this, but the bottom line is with regard to culture and society, democracy is not necessarily well suited. That's why I argue we should push toward human rights. Thank you.

CARTER
I think you and the general both lack clarity in your position. (laughter)

. . . . (brief generalized discussion)

CARTER
Sorry, folks, we've got to move it through. General?

LEE
Okay, first of all, I must say that I have in the calculation and measurement of military power never used promotion rates as a factor. What . . . point you're making there, I do not understand.

GLATTHAAR
You were talking about whether the Army was worn- down or not, and I suggest that it is, that there's a manpower shortage within the military — that you have a retention problem.

LEE
Well, the last month was the best recruiting month the Army had.

DORFF
With $40,000 bonuses.

LEE
Well, all right, but you don't think we should do that? You think that's wrong to use $40,000 bonuses?

DORFF
You never had to use it before.

LEE
It's a volunteer army. You've got to get people to join, it's not a draft.

DORFF
But it represents a serious problem in our society that we have to…

(Brief generalized discussion)

LEE
…I agree with you 100 per cent. I really do think we ought to use all the means at our disposal to obtain our goals, and information is a very, very important element of that. I agree with that. And Edgar, I think people are going to be hard-pressed to answer your question where we find a totalitarian government looking out for the human rights …

PRICE
I also think there's no clear-cut answer to your question. I'm sure you would agree, though, that not all governments are equally egregious violators of human rights. It's clearly related to democracy. It's not perfectly correlated, no, and I don't think that you're saying whenever human rights are violated to any degree that we have to go in somehow. But clearly there's a correlation between democratic, accountable governments, and the observance of human rights. That's one reason that democracy promotion is a legitimate U.S. objective. That I think we probably all agree on, although there's some disagreement as to the efficacy of using military means. Let me just conclude by saying a word about the one aspect of this which I'm very much involved in, and that I would like for you to know about. I also think it illustrates a couple of themes here today, and I'll be very brief.

This has to do with encouraging parliamentary development in these countries. That's one aspect of democracy; it's not the whole story, but it's one thing that I think the U.S. Congress is particularly well equipped to be involved. The reason I think that is that we had a very positive experience with it in Eastern Europe as these countries emerged from communism back in the early 90's. We would go into these countries, we'd send staff in, we'd work with them in developing their resources, in developing modern, effective, functioning parliaments that could be responsive to their people and could recast their laws and otherwise aid in this transition to a more democratic way. Newt Gingrich let that lapse when he came in as speaker, but we've revived it. We've revived it and we now have a commission that is once again working with these parliaments. This time it's not just Eastern Europe, although we're still in Macedonia, and we're still in Georgia. It's now places like Kenya, Indonesia in an interesting case, and then some very difficult cases like Lebanon and Liberia. Those are obviously not all countries similar in most respects, but they are similar in that they do have parliaments that have shown some degree of independence, and very importantly they've shown a strong desire to work with us. So that's the first general point. We're not talking here about one-size-fits-all, and if we are we're on the wrong track. You know, we need to be partners, we don't need to be pretending and goodness knows, you look at C-SPAN and you know that it would be a pretense, pretending that we've got all the answers in terms of how a representative government should work, but there's plenty of room for partnership and for mutual discussion. It's one of the most interesting and rewarding things I've been a part of, and I do think it's worthwhile. One reason it's worthwhile is because it's not pretentious because it is a genuine cooperation, and believe me, it's encouraging to see how this can work. It doesn't always work.

By the way, Joe, …my experience with Afghanistan would not be as… I know this is just one piece of the puzzle, but we had the Afghan parliamentarians —had a group of ten of them — visit a couple of weeks ago. We're going to Afghanistan later this year.…[We] did not experience this as a kind of alien place where this idea of parliamentary responsiveness and independent just wasn't capable of taking hold. I'm not that pessimistic, although I know Afghanistan has plenty of problems. So this is an example of a non-presumptuous way of cooperating, being genuine partners. I hope we can maintain that approach, and it of course, manifestly is not military. It's a good example of other approaches we have in our arsenal. Now in some cases it is following on military action. Afghanistan's an example. In other cases I think it's threatened by what's going on militarily. Lebanon's the best case there, but basically it's one of those diplomatic tools that I believe we should build on as a promising alternative, really the only alternative to some kind of notion of coming in and imposing something by force.

CARTER
Years ago — some of you don't think it's that many years ago — after the Salazar government had fallen in Portugal and the communist colonels were essentially running it, Frank Carlucci was the ambassador, and Henry Kissinger had decided in his great pessimistic frame of mind that Portugal was forever lost. Carlucci said, “No, it's not lost,” and the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats of Europe poured resources in. Carlucci with his various contacts saw to it that despite Henry, a great deal of effort was made, and of course, it prevailed.

Democracy was in fact encouraged through from a non-democratic basis into reality, thanks both to the heavy investment of other democracies in the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats because of Frank Carlucci's stunning commitment to the idea that Henry's pessimism was ill-founded, and that out of that unlikely weed patch you could grow a flower called democracy which of course, has endured in Portugal to this day. I argue that case only to tell you that there are examples in which the most unlikely places have produced democracy. I would also argue, of course, that if we had sent a bunch of my fellow Marines in there to do it, I think it's unlikely, in fact, it would have prevailed as long as it has, which is another question in my mind which we didn't get to enough; that is, how much democracy grows out of the barrel of a gun. I know revolution does, I'm not sure about democracy.

Now for those of you who have managed “the devil” or scripture, depending on Mike Walser, I'm going to go back and say that I heard approvingly from some friends of mine who I know to be great conservatives quoting my wife's doctrines when she was running the Human Rights Program and was being vilified for destroying freedom in the world by supporting Human Rights, that it's now considered to be an absolutely vital tool for the future of American democracy and the destabilization of non-democratic governance. ….used to be known as Gunboat Carter for a long, long time and used to debate with great fervor the brilliance of Vietnam generals, and will have to tell you that having repented of my sins, I'm glad to know of others who know it wasn't ever a sin at all. It's been great having these four participants. It's been a wonderful…
(applause).

HYDE
In closing I quickly want to thank our accomplished and distinguished panelists. You were articulate, you were enlightening in presenting your views. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And to our Moderator, he did a masterful job at a very difficult task. We're so glad you're here in North Carolina. We're glad you and your wife Pat are here; we hope to see more of you. To our audience, thank you so much for coming today. You were wonderful and I want to ask you a question…how many of you would like to see a similar such event, raise your hands. I thought so, and I thought this for a very, very long time. We'll take this into consideration and thank you very much, and have a wonderful weekend. Thank you for being with us.

END — CLOSE OF SYMPOSIUM