Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-37)
PROFESSOR MICHAEL
CLARKE, PROFESSOR
FRED HALLIDAY
AND MR
JAMES RUBIN
TUESDAY 30 OCTOBER 2001
Sir Patrick Cormack
20. Could he just add whether he agrees with
the analysis of Mr Rubin?
(Professor Halliday) I hoped you were not going to
ask me that. It is a simple concept but I talk about what I call
the creation in the last ten years of a greater West Asian crisis.
By that I mean the issues which I know, and I have been going
to the Middle East since I was a student, I first went some 36
years ago, issues which I have experienced and which I have studied
in my academic career which have been relatively separate: Palestine,
Iraq, Afghanistan, you can tack on Kashmir and you can tack on
the Balkans. The causes are separate unless you say it is all
imperialism and so on and for a long time they really were not
very related. In the last ten years for a number of years you
have had not just reunification of sentiment so they all become
fused but you have also had the unification of the creation of
this transnational very violent militia based in Afghanistan recruiting
from all these areas, also from Chechnya, but also active in Yemen
and in a number of other countries. In a sense they have become
fused and these particular political issues are the three core
ones which bin Laden and others go on about—the Sunni Muslims
do but not Shiites—which is Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan,
and these have been fused with general discontent within these
countries. Having said that, in the Gulf States the biggest problem
is simply that the deal which lasted for 20 or 30 years was the
ruling government saying "We will take a third of the oil
revenues and the investment income and do with it what we want
but we will give you education, housing, a kind of welfare state.
We are not going to torture and murder lots of you" and they
do not in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is not a pleasant place but
it ain't Iraq and it ain't Syria. The reason I supported Kuwait
in 1990 was because I knew Kuwait, I had been there as a student.
It is not a perfect democracy but people speak freely, they come
and go, there are newspapers. A very interesting point is the
former Emir's private doctor was a leader of the opposition and
he sent him on missions to talk to the people who threatened Kuwait,
although he did not get anywhere. It is a society with a strong
degree of civility. That worked for 20 or 30 years but now it
is breaking down. Why? Partly because of this greater West Asia
crisis but partly the fact that the money simply is not there.
Saudi Arabia's per capita income has gone down two-thirds in the
last 20 years. If you are talking about 1998 figures it has gone
from US dollars 20,000 per capita to about 6,000 now. Unemployment
is growing. A friend of mine, a former student of mine, is a junior
minister in the Economics Ministry in the Gulf and he gets anonymous
phone calls every day asking "What are you going to do about
the so many tens of thousands of university graduates coming on
to the market each year? Where are the jobs?" That issue
of the lack of employment is tied to two other things. One is
the very bad educational system and one of the big mistakes the
Saudis made in the 1970s was they thought they would buy peace
by packing people off into Islamic universities but these people
are unemployable. No Saudi will employ them and no foreigner will
employ them. They are exactly the kind of people, with degrees,
with some education, who got on those planes. I can tell you sociologically
with some precision who they were and what part of the country
they came from. There is a clear profile there. In a province
like these people came from the school teachers are the debris
of Iraq and Syria, fundamentalists who were chucked out of Iraq
and Syria who the Saudis employed and tacked on to the provinces.
So the education system creates one problem. The second problem
is people are quite simply saying "What has happened to the
money?" The basic argument that people make in the Gulf is
"We are not employed but there are all these rich palaces"
and there is no transparency.
Chairman
21. Is there not a third problem of differential
population increase?
(Professor Halliday) In terms of?
22. Comparing, for example, Israel and Iraq,
comparing the Maghreb countries with Europe. How can one find
jobs for individuals with such population explosion?
(Professor Halliday) I remember once talking to a
leader of the FLN in Algeria and he made two points. He said "Look,
the reason this has all happened is we have run out of ideas and
everybody knows it. The others do not have any ideas but people
do not know that yet". The second thing was if people asked
him, people like yourselves, what can the West do to help the
Algerians, he said "Find a way of employing millions and
millions of unemployable young men". He was putting it in
that way to get you to focus on the problem but I think that is
the problem in the Gulf. There is a lot of resentment about the
money. We talk about lack of foreign investment for the Gulf but
of course they blame it on Israel, it is a classic example of
where there is such insecurity but this insecurity is not anything
to do with Israel, it is to do with their struggling brother Saddam
and also to do with the corruption of states and meanwhile $1,000
billion is invested here, at least. The issue on unemployment
then becomes not just an issue of dissatisfaction but of resentment
of the rulers for pocketing the money and not promoting the economy.
That feeds into this radicalised view that we are seeing, many
of them people with a level of education, many of them even people
with higher education.
Chairman: I want to focus again on our bilateral
relations.
Mr Maples
23. This leads on from that in a way. This coalition
that has been built has found our country and yours in alliance
with countries that a few months ago, or even a few weeks ago,
we did not want to have much to do with. In fact, the price of
this coalition it seems to me has been giving Putin a relatively
free hand in Chechnya and bringing Musharraf and his regime back
into the international community whereas in this country we were
seeking to chuck him out of the Commonwealth not too long ago,
which I mention as an aside. It is difficult to imagine the same
co-operation we have had out of Musharraf or Putin, but we are
starting to make overtures towards Iran again. When the administrations
in the United States changed at the beginning of the year we saw,
as I think we expected to see, a shift of continuum from values
to more of an interests direction and now interests are absolutely
numbers one to nine on the top ten in the agenda. When we move
past, which hopefully we will, this phase of the war against terrorism,
what do you think the response will or should be of the United
States' Government? Will it be "our overriding interest is
peace of the United States and therefore the stability of the
world and therefore strong governments, even if they have bad
human rights records," like the ones I have just mentioned,
are people we need out there maintaining this peace and stability,
or is it, as Professor Halliday was saying, or started to say,
the way to long-term stability is to solve some of these problems
by actually exporting Western values rather than insisting on
our interests? It seems to me that this question is going to be
posed in perhaps rather an uncomfortable way if we get past this
stage of the war. I am just wondering (a) what do you think the
United States' Government should do and (b) what they will do,
because they are not necessarily the same?
(Mr Rubin) Thank you, I think that is an excellent
question and it requires a bit of a crystal ball, but let me address
it directly. In so doing, I address what I think was half a question
towards me about no leadership in Washington. On your specific
question, it is traditional for the new administration to think
that everything that came before was, I guess the word in England
would be "rubbish". What they have discovered over time
is that maybe these policies which developed over many years of
thought and trial and error, sometimes are not so bad after all.
So when the new administration came in, you say it was more on
interest, and I think that is correct, but there was also a very
clear attempt to sideline the relationship with Russia, top White
House officials saying, "The Russians are not important for
us to meet with in the first couple of months," and strong
efforts to create an acceptance of the proposition of China as
a strategic competitor rather than a potential partner, etc.,
etc. That was already ending prior to September 11. Certainly
in the case of Russia, there was a recognition that Putin was
someone they needed to do business with because of the support
they wanted to get for missile defence. To the extent, in my opinion,
the administration had a vision of foreign affairs, it was missile
defence: "if somebody is good for missile defence we are
on their side, if they are bad for missile defence we are against
them". That was almost the defining trait they saw in developing
a grand strategy, but that has changed. If you look at the Musharraf,
Putin, Chechnya, Iran issues, I would add China to that list,
I say to myself they may not be doing it for the right reasons,
but these are the right decisions. In my opinion in China, the
Clinton Administration got the balance about right: you do what
you can to condemn the human rights abuses, you do what you can
to promote the kind of trade that is good for everybody, and in
the meantime you make China a partner in these international challenges.
Look what we got. During the Gulf War the Chinese abstained on
the resolution and criticised us all the way through the operation.
This time around they voted for everything, and they limited their
criticism to hoping that there will not be too many civilian casualties,
which I think everyone in this room can agree with. The same with
Russia. During the Gulf War the Russians were voting yes, but
Gorbachev and Primakov were a major irritant for the Bush Administration
as they went forward. This time around, as I think you have correctly
put it, they would love to see, let us speculate, Osama bin Laden
end up in Chechnya and US Russian units tracking him down. That
would be the best outcome for certain Russian policy makers because
it would ratify every wrong decision they have made in Chechnya,
where they have tried to make it a religious issue when it was
a nationalism issue. None of that changes where they are going
to go, and that is why I think that this idea that there is no
leadership in Washington is also rubbish. This is an extraordinarily
difficult problem, and I think Professor Halliday alluded to how
difficult it is. The leadership crisis, to the extent you accept
that phrase and I do not, is mostly on the domestic side about
anthrax and the inability of the different agencies to be talking
properly. When it comes to the international side, I think the
President and his Secretary of State, who is travelling plenty
and Rumsfeld hates to travel and I would not worry about Rumsfeld
trying to out Secretary of State the Secretary of State, have
put together an extraordinary coalition, and that was not an accident,
that they have Russia, they have China, that they are working
with the Europeans to see what Iran will do for us. This was not
an accident, this was extraordinarily carefully put together.
If you are going to say that is the starting point then of course
you are not going to be able to solve every other single problem
that well intentioned academics can come up with afterwards. Government
is about priorities, and you have to create priorities. You cannot
solve every problem in advance. When it comes to the political
track, which is what the criticism is, I defy anyone to give me
a really good political solution for Afghanistan. I have seen
the six-plus-two documents and they are very general. I have seen
the proposals to have Zahir Shah convene a council. We had one
of these meetings in Pakistan and they did not get us very far.
There was a reason for that. Prior to the bombing was the moment
of maximum leverage when everyone imagined in Afghanistan that
this was going to be a disaster, we were all going to end up on
the wrong side, the Taliban were going to fall, and then the bombing
starts and they realise they can continue most of their daily
lives and it is not going to end right away, so any potential
for people changing sides has now been lost. Should we have waited
a few more months, would it have made a difference in putting
a political track together? I do not know. It might have made
a difference, however, in not forcing the al-Qaeda network to
go on the run and be able to plan more terrorist attacks. The
next moment of leverage is going to come when the Taliban begins
to collapse, and that may be weeks, it may be months, it might
even be longer than that, but when they know that is happening
then all of these meetings and the Iranian view, which one day
is, "we want the King back" and the next day, "we
don't want him back", and when they think they have stronger
leverage they insist that they can have him back, the Russians
saying, "no Taliban part of it" and the Pakistanis saying,
"Taliban have to be part of it". These people are all
going to bargain until the day they see it is all coming together
and gelling, and they need to make a decision, "are you in
the group, are you part of the solution, or are you going to be
outside of the group?" Unfortunately, on the political track
that is not going to happen until the signs of the Taliban collapsing
occur. To get to your question, because I veered around a little
bit, nation building for the Bush Administration was an extraordinarily
difficult thing to come out of the President's mouth. That administration
and those politicians criticised the administrations I worked
for relentlessly over this phrase. You could see during the campaign,
and in the early days after September 11, that when the President
used the words "nation building" he did it with disdain,
but now it is part of American foreign policy and so the values/interest
mix that we always understood—that your interests are served
when you are pursuing your values, when you are feeding people
in Afghanistan, when you are helping to create semi-legitimate
government structures, you are going to be better off in terms
of real interest on resentments towards you—they are going
to get it, there is no other choice. They are going to be part
of the rebuilding of Afghanistan, the reconstruction, billions
of dollars are going to be spent on this and a lot of political
effort. We are not going to get tired. In the end there is going
to be the proper mix of values and interests that I always thought
most American governments end up trying to marry.
24. I wanted to ask your two colleagues what
they thought in answer to the point I was trying to make, how
do we deal with these governments, countries, we consider pretty
unpleasant but who, on the other hand, have been vital partners
so far in the coalition and how do they think American policy
should and will develop?
(Professor Clarke) Before Professor Halliday speaks
let me just put in one important point which takes up what James
Rubin mentioned. There is always a mix between values and interests,
of course. One of the things that September 11 has done, I think,
is created a need in the US and its allies to think more assertively
about the defence of its values, not just holding values and defending
interests but defending values. The problem, of course, is one
has to defend one's values by upholding them as well and that
is where all the tricky compromises really come. The two areas
in which I think there is real structural change in the world
as a result of September 11 and in which values will have to be
defended in perhaps slightly different ways will be in the Gulf
and Middle East and in the relationship between the United States
and Russia. I think those are the two areas that are likely to
be fundamentally affected by the outcome of this crisis. What
the United States has got to try to do, and where I think there
is a policy vacuum in Washington, is not over tactics, it is not
that the American Government is not doing things and is not efficiently
putting together coalition partners and holding them together
on a day to day basis, but it is in articulating the strategy
that allows for an assertive defence of values which also upholds
them. That is a very difficult trick to perform that, we all know
that, but that is the nature of the task. That is the challenge
which I think these terrorist attacks have laid down to the West.
Unless values can be defended the Osama bin Laden network is not
interested in attacking our interests, it is attacking our values.
If this is part of a form of regional or even global insurgency
it is the values of the West that are being attacked, this global
rancour that Professor Halliday mentioned earlier on. That is
what has got to be defended against and that is a very difficult
set of compromises, but it could be worse. One has to think about
defending values in two specific areas, the Gulf and the Middle
East and in the relationship with Russia, they do not have to
be defended differently in other parts of the world which are
not fundamentally affected by these events. The priorities are
the Gulf, the Middle East and Russia, it seems to me.
(Professor Halliday) We are talking about the broadening
of military action and a second front has already opened in the
Philippines. The United States' forces are involved there against
bin Laden allies, the Abu Sayyaf Group. This is made public, it
is perfectly obvious, and I think it indicates that other less
overt but nevertheless substantive and directed operations will
be taking place and I can think of three or four other places
they may start in and they may already have done so. On the question
of understanding, I agree that the policy problems are enormous
for any government in Washington and I do think not the lack of
intelligence about 11 September, which I do not think anyone could
have predicted—maybe someone will prove me wrong if they
come up with evidence—but the lack of intelligence and understanding
of these countries, I do not mean agreeing with them but knowing
what goes on, having the old style language speaking history educated
people who can understand them, is a major problem. People in
the American civil service like to go home at 5.30 and have desk
jobs and that is a major problem linked to the personality of
the President who is there, and who is probably going to get re-elected,
but I do not feel has the best qualities needed for this job.
The mood of the American people is very important and I hear two
things. One is that Americans are deeply traumatised but will
become deeply angry, and they say "why has this happened
to us" and here the homeland civilian side is very important,
but, secondly, Americans, if I can generalise, want to fix it,
they want a quick fix and there ain't going to be a quick fix
on this one. That is going to be a very big problem. "What
are we going to do now?" Just as we are hearing here this
sort of half-time score approach to the war, as if anybody knew
how long the war is going to be, I think the quick fix demand
will create problems in the longer run which Bush may find difficult
to answer. On the question of these different allies, I entirely
agree with the phrase "value/interest mix". I am all
for values in international relations I just think that sometimes
there is a moral position when actually there may be three or
four moral positions which may coincide with each other. How many
war criminals do you arrest in the Balkans if you are also trying
to keep the Dayton Peace Agreement going or get food through to
refugees? It is not an easy question. You have got to take it
country by country. On the question of Iran, I am on record, and
the Chairman knows this well, as thinking this country dragged
its feet on Iran, partly because of the pressure on the Labour
Party from the bottom up by a pro-Iraqi terrorist group that had
infiltrated over half of all Labour Party local branches, and
I say that on the record as well as off, and partly because of
what I regard as improper obstruction from people at the top,
one or two people in particular, who have a very strong and ill-informed—I
stress this word because I know them personally—anti-Iranian
agenda. The Iranians are not easy or nice people to deal with,
they are tricky, but I think they should be dealt with and I welcome
very much the fact that the Foreign Secretary has gone and I think
the Iranians themselves have been drawn into this alliance in
a sensible way. They are even quoting Palmerston I see in yesterday's
Iranian parliamentary report, which is fine.
Sir Patrick Cormack
25. There is hope for us all.
(Professor Halliday) The second is the question of
Israel. I am a great supporter of a two state solution and if
I am the last person in the world who is, so be it. I think both
Arafat and Sharon have made a mess of things for the last year.
I certainly think that Arafat, but also more broadly the Muslim
and Arab world, were not ready, and I think you have got to broaden
this one out, for a sensible compromise on Jerusalem and other
issues last year. My solution is very simple: two states, no settlements,
no right of return.
Chairman
26. And Jerusalem?
(Professor Halliday) Partition it, as many Israelis
are quite happy to. David Ben-Gurion was quite happy to partition
Jerusalem. Let me say on the record as an historian that the Judaic
and Islamic traditions have not made such a fuss about Jerusalem
in the past as they have now. It has become a political issue.
It is perfectly practicable to partition it and it is perfectly
practicable to do what many Israeli social scientists and many
Palestinians have accepted and that would solve it, there is just
a lack of political will. It is easier to partition than the Garvahy
Road, if I can put it that way. One point I would criticise Israel
on is its refusal to negotiate while violence is continuing. This
country negotiated with the IRA and violence continues, the French
negotiated with the Algerians, the Americans with the Vietnamese,
and so on and so forth, and with Mugabe in his better days, if
I can put it that way. Why not negotiate even if some violence
continues? That seems to me to be an unreasonable demand. On the
Arab and Palestinian sides there is all this stuff, all this racist
stuff about Zionism that has come up again and in my view is completely
unacceptable. The argument has slipped back on both sides from
the position that was there. A final point is I think a broad
alliance will hold. To have a major break in an alliance you have
to have a revolution or an upheaval within a country; Russia quitting
in 1917, Italy going the other way in 1943. If there is a huge
upheaval, an overthrow of a member state, and we think first of
Pakistan here, then countries will leave the alliance but otherwise
they will bob and weave as countries did during the Second World
War. The British and the Chinese did not love each other but they
got on with it and I suspect this will happen this time as well.
To go back to the domestic issue, which is how do you defend liberal
values with the kind of security flux you now have—
Mr Maples
27. That is tremendously interesting but it
has not helped me very much on how one deals with Putin, Jiang
Zemin and Musharraf. It seems to me by itself absolutely key to
this standing rock solid against extremist elements, yet we have
a military regime which overthrew a democratically elected President,
put him in prison and is also on the wrong end of nuclear proliferation
which predates Musharraf. When this is all over if Pakistan has
been a very solid ally and we have been much nicer to Musharraf
than we will ever have been before, will we revert to saying "no,
our long-term security interests are best promoted by liberal
values"?
(Mr Rubin) You have encapsulated a great example.
Musharraf is the classic mix of proliferation, anti-terrorism
and democratic values. I was part of a government that was pretty
tough on him, when he took over power, but we have to acknowledge
that the guy has been extraordinarily courageous in the last few
weeks, has made extremely difficult decisions in terms of firing
people within his own military, he faces real personal risk in
that country and he has turned around. When we look at why did
they lose the support of the West, there were some who viewed
the coup d'état as the problem, there were some
who viewed the nuclear weapons as the problem, but the real problem
was below those policy levels were the hard-nosed national security
people and they said, "well, we would be fighting against
you liberal, human rights people on democracy or on the non-proliferation
ground except he has turned around on terrorism and there are
all these people in Pakistan and he is supporting the Taliban
and he refuses to take the steps necessary to cut off ties with
the people who support the ones who did this on September 11",
but he has now done that, he has done a one hundred and eighty
degree turn. Will he be able to implement it at all levels in
the Pakistani Intelligence Service, are there still going to be
problems? Yes. Now we have to look at this guy and ask, "What
about Musharraf?" as you quite rightly put it, "What
about Benazir Bhutto? What are the real traditions of democracy?"
If ever there was a coup d'état that had popular
support in the modern world, it was in Pakistan. It was a popularly
supported coup d'état. This is where interests and
values are coming together, and we have to think clearly about
both of them, and have the democracy in the long-term but the
interests in the short-term.
Sir John Stanley
28. A different subject but very topical, that
of biological weapons. Could each of the three of you respond
to these two questions, please. On July 25 at Geneva the American
Ambassador to the Biological Weapons Convention negotiations,
Ambassador Donald Marley, made a lengthy speech in which he endeavoured
to justify the Bush Administration's decision to torpedo six years'
work in creating a verification protocol to the Biological Weapons
Convention. First question: if you have read Ambassador Marley's
speech could you tell me and the Committee whether you consider
the justification which he advanced at Geneva on July 25 to be
intellectually credible or not? Secondly, with a pretty grim irony
barely two months after torpedoing the verification protocol the
United States itself has come under attack from a biological weapon,
anthrax. Can you tell me now in the light of the US's current
experience with anthrax, do you believe that will produce a change
in policy by the Bush Administration to effectively reverse the
position they took at Geneva on July 25 and put their very considerable
weight behind establishing a credible verification protocol so
that the Biological Weapons Convention does have teeth, or do
you believe that the previous position as of 25 July of destroying
the verification protocol will stand?
(Professor Clarke) Let me begin on the basis that
I probably have less to say about this than James Rubin. I cannot
comment on Ambassador Marley's speech, I have not read it. On
the stance which the United States took on 25 July, undoubtedly
that stance was a great disappointment to many other members of
the Biological Weapons Convention and members of the world community.
I had a conversation only this morning actually with the head
of the Department of Disarmament Affairs in the United Nations
who was speaking about the possibility of getting a new agreement
which he felt the United States was more keen on and would be
quicker to negotiate than the six and a half years that was spent
on the previous protocol that was voted down. He himself—I
simply report this officially as it were—is reasonably optimistic
that there is a new awareness in the United States that they have
to go back to Geneva with a more positive attitude towards the
particular problem. One of the reasons why the US voted it down
in July was partly pressure from US industry, particularly the
biotech industry in the United States which is deeply worried
about intrusive inspections. In general, chemical industries in
the US are more relaxed and have supported the Bio Weapons Convention,
that is have supported an implementation protocol. The biotech
industry has been extremely anti. That seems to me to be probably
the stumbling block which the United States' Administration would
have to get over and the present administration has not shown
so far a great ability to persuade industry to do something it
does not want to do, so I am not very optimistic about that. The
pressure that has been created by the September 11 attacks almost
certainly is going to force some degree of rethinking in Washington.
(Professor Halliday) I would just put this in the
context of a broader issue which is the relationship in American
foreign policy between, to use their terms but they are not our
terms, unilateralism and multilateralism. What we saw was the
Bush Administration pursuing a number of things which they felt
they should change with regard to the Clinton Administration.
Very often they were issues which right-wing lobbies in Washington
had been targeting for a long time, of which this was one. Others
would obviously include the ABM Treaty, measures against tax havens,
the Kyoto Protocol, there is a long list of them. Even had it
not been for September 11 I think there would have been the kind
of shift that Michael Clarke identifies. One of the main consequences
of September 11, which is a welcome move, although in tragic circumstances,
is that it has significantly reduced the pressure for American
unilateralism in a whole range of issues. The most obvious of
all is Paul O'Neill was saying before September 11 "I am
not going to go along with the OECD's anti-tax haven policy"
and now he is 200 per cent in favour of it for reasons of counter-terrorist
security. I think here too we may well see a shift. Where you
have, and this goes back to understanding American foreign policy,
a very strong lobby, as you clearly do, and Michael Clarke mentioned
it, it could be on steel, in this case the biotech industries
who are and upcoming sector in America, then resistance to abandoning
unilateralism will be all the greater. I think the onus is on
us, whether it be yourselves or academics, to study how is policy
actually made in America and not to say "oh, it is all lobbies"
but to actually get a handle on it and that will explain what
is happening.
(Mr Rubin) I am very familiar with the position of
the Bush Administration as to why it rejected this protocol. I
certainly agree with you that the logic was strained. Essentially
they said the downsides, namely the potential loss of secrets
of the biotech industry, were not outweighed by the upsides, namely
the ability to deter and ensure that countries were complying
with the Treaty. The problem I have with that, is that all of
those calls are judgment calls. On bio weapons and chemical weapons,
the best single instrument we have ever had to crack down on biochemical
weapons was UNSCOM in Iraq, where you had the support of the international
community, you had a Security Council Resolution authorising the
use of military force, you had a team of inspectors on the ground
and yet a determined cheater was not going to let you find its
biochemical capabilities unless you invaded and overthrew the
government. I bring that up because I think we have to be realistic
about what any treaty instrument can do. The reason I disagreed
with their decision was not because the upsides were so great
and the downsides were minimal, but because I worried if you were
too much out of the multinational system and you had a biological
weapons attack without September 11, and you had not used this
forum as a way to get support for any action you might need to
take, or pre-emptive action you might need to take, you would
lose the support of coalitions that you need to actually perform
the task. While I think Professor Halliday is absolutely right,
for the next three years any time someone wants to do something
unilateral the Secretary of State is going to say, "Okay,
that is the upside of doing something unilateral, the downside
is we might lose coalition support in the fight against terrorism,
law enforcement intelligence, economic sanctions, potential military
action", and that balance is going to have to be weighed
in a very new, geo-strategic environment where every decision
is going to be weighed against the loss of the coalition. For
those of you who are multilateralist that is pretty good news
and I think that is fairly evident.
29. You did not answer the second question,
do you think there is going to be a change of policy in the Bush
Administration?
(Mr Rubin) I do not think that the BWC protocol as
drafted and prepared for the meetings this July will ever be approved
by the United States. I do think it is possible that a new round
of negotiations with a temporary set of measures agreed unilaterally
essentially, each country agreeing law enforcement steps while
negotiating a new version, is plausible, but I would be stunned
if the Bush Administration revived its support for that particular
protocol.
Andrew Mackinlay: Do I get a slice of the action?
Chairman: Of course, yes.
Andrew Mackinlay
30. I would like to bounce something off James
Rubin. It seems to me that one of our problems is a presentational
one. Quite understandably in the immediate aftermath the term
"war" is used but there really is not anything in our
vocabulary to describe what we are doing. Clearly there is war
in the geographical area of Afghanistan and that will have an
end, perhaps, but the wider ongoing thing is something which,
if we have got to use the term war, is rather like the war on
organised crime and until the end of time we will be waging war
on organised crime, it is a question of containment and denial
of certain things. It is a war on terrorism that will be with
us until the end of time and we are dealing with denying of weapons
of mass destruction and containing it in the networks. It does
seem to me in terms of public opinion, both in North America and
Western Europe and the UK, all of us involved in this, and military
and political commentators, should try to get some terminology
which is meaningful and does not convey the wrong things because
a lot of people are still thinking in terms of very much a campaign,
expeditionary force and so on, a beginning and an end, castles
on mountain tops stormed, trenches to seize. There was somebody
in the administration who actually said it will take ten years
and that implies an armistice or a capitulation but this is not
going to happen, is it? It does seem to me this is one of the
problems that we ought to be discussing.
(Mr Rubin) I think you are exactly right. There is
essentially a two track policy. One track is in Afghanistan, it
is a war, it is a military campaign to track down the terrorists
and overthrow the Taliban. The second track is political, economic,
diplomatic, law enforcement and perhaps some day military means
used to end state sponsorship for terrorism, because once you
have ended state sponsorship then you can act within states against
sub-groups that are not supported by the states. That is more
a metaphor war than it is a real war. We have the war on drugs
in the United States, we have the war on poverty of Lyndon Johnson,
and that is where this is coming out of. I do think that we need
to bifurcate this and talk about it clearly. We may get to a point
where in Iraq, or somewhere else, we use military power but for
now the coalition's premise that I think has kept it together
is that the military part of this campaign is in Afghanistan and
against—this is what it says in the UN Resolution and the
United States' Congress Resolution—"those responsible
for 11 September". They may be outside of Afghanistan, and
that may involve military action. You are absolutely right, we
need a new word. I dare say that was what the President was searching
for when he misused the word "crusade". I do not think
it was intentional, and it is an excuse in the Muslim world to
not support American policy by saying, "it is because he
said crusade". That was the word he was searching for, a
long-term high priority effort that has motivation behind it.
31. The second point is, I regret to have to
say this to Professor Halliday, and I am not going to let him
go by my silence, he made a very serious point. I understand you
said, unless you want to clarify it, that over half of the branches
of the Labour Party had been infiltrated by pro-Iraqi sympathisers.
(Professor Halliday) Yes, they have.
32. That is sheer unadulterated crap.
(Professor Halliday) No, it is not. You ask people
in the Labour Party International Department. You look at the
resolutions.
33. Absolute nonsense.
(Professor Halliday) I am sorry. You look at resolutions
sent to Labour Party Conferences in recent years. Look at the
Portsmouth pre-election conference held whenever it was. You will
discover that the largest number of issues on which resolutions
are sent is the question of the National Council of Resistance
to Iran, which is an Iraqi funded terrorist organisation, and
they are active in over 300 local Labour Parties. You go to Walworth
Road or whatever it is now called and ask them. I know, they will
tell you. That is on the record. Moreover, there are large numbers—if
you want me to continue on this—of Members of this House,
of both Houses, who sign fatuous motions year after year calling
for recognition of the National Council of Resistance, denouncing
the reforms that have taken place in Iran based on prejudice and
ignorance. I have said this many times, I have said it on the
record, and I am very happy to repeat it here and continue the
conversation with you afterwards.
Chairman
34. You have made the point.
(Professor Halliday) Yes. He asked me to repeat it
and I have done that.
35. One last thought. You said that you were
concerned about the ignorance of the US in our universities?
(Professor Halliday) Yes.
36. I thought there had been quite a strong
effort in terms of American political studies in the United Kingdom.
Can you expand on that?
(Professor Halliday) In the 1960s when universities
expanded there was a composite programme called AMCIV, American
Civilisation, so people read Norman Mailer and James Fenimore
Cooper and Robert Frost but they also studied how foreign policy
worked, the way the US Congress worked, they studied American
history and so forth. If you look at university departments that
has very significantly eroded as an inter-disciplinary project
but also in terms of the subjects I teach, political science and
international relations. I find it easier to get a speaker on
land reform in Uzbekistan than to get a good speaker on how foreign
policy is made in America. When I was writing my last book, which
was an overview called The World at 2000 I was looking
for academic literature in this country on this multilateralism
and unilateralism issue, I could not find it and nobody else could
find it. This is not only among academics but when I look at the
press the level of discussion on America is often less informed,
less measured than that of many, many other countries.
37. Can you give us a note from you or one of
your colleagues on the state of US studies in the United Kingdom?
(Professor Halliday) The Secretary of State for Education
has not noticed this but a major multi million pound research
assessment exercise is just being completed between now and December,
of which one of the 38 committees is the American Studies Committee,
which includes Latin America as well. Basically it is shrinking
and shrinking. The other problem is people think they know about
America and they do not. The biggest simple mistake is to think
why do they not take decisions the way we do, and they do not.
(Mr Rubin) It has got so bad that Professor Halliday
thought he had to recruit me to teach this class at the London
School of Economics.
Chairman: We have had a high intensity seminar
and it has been extremely useful. I thank you on behalf of the
Committee very warmly indeed.
|
