It’s always interesting to hear yourself introduced; it reads like an obituary.  I want to tell you a couple of things that are useful for you to know about me before this starts.  I have a very active sense of humor, which, as some of you may be aware, is a dreadful burden to drag through a career in diplomacy.  The only reason I bother to tell you this is that people who have an active sense of humor always try to inject humor.  That’s what it’s all about and tonight I’m going to talk to you—we’re going to talk together—about very serious subjects.  If I make an effort to inject some humor, please understand it’s not because the subject is not serious it’s just my way, okay?

Secondly, you need to know that I am not a very good diplomat.  You may have heard the definition.  The dictionary will tell you that a diplomat is someone who can tell you to go to hell in a manner that makes you look forward to the trip.  But there’s a better one that I like and that is that a diplomat is a man who can convince his wife that she looks terrible in diamonds.  I have a very direct and sometimes pungent way of speaking.  If I should offend anyone tonight it is entirely unintentional and I apologize both sincerely and profusely in advance.  Sometimes it happens.

I’ve been asked to talk about subjects that I know a little bit about.  I may not in fact know more than some people in this audience but nonetheless I’ve been asked to speak about Iraq. 

The subtitle is “Opening Pandora’s Box.”  This is a shopworn cliché, you understand?  Perhaps in this context you could use the phrase “you can’t put the genie back into the bottle.”  We have created for ourselves, I fear, a major, major serious crisis.  I feel a little bit like U.S. parents—or those of you who had parents who said “don’t do this.  Something terrible could happen,” and the parent hoping, of course that it won’t.  It is a source of considerable regret that many of the things that I have talked about happening if we did what we have done have happened.  This does not please me.  I did not wish to be right and I would have prayed to any god you could have named that I was wrong.  So far it looks like I wasn’t.

Let’s start from the beginning.  We have lost our national credibility.  By the way I have to tell you this—I’m a Republican, I voted for President Bush.  The catalyst that changed everything was September 11, as I’m sure many of you are aware and historians will look back and be able to identify that date and that event as one of those things that took place that changed the course of history to a considerable extent. 

We have gone off to a country 7,000 miles from Washington and we have invaded and occupied that country.  Ladies and gentlemen, history tells you without the slightest equivocation that people who get invaded and occupied—or liberated, sorry, I have to use the right terminology—people who get liberated by an occupying army don’t like it. 

I lecture on cruise ships.  I’ve mentioned this.  It’s a dirty job but somebody has to do it. Earlier this spring my wife and I were in Holland, Poland and Norway, among other places, and I took it upon myself to go visit the memorials to the people who fought the German invaders.  Some of you are perhaps too young to remember that Germany conquered just about everybody, and the people who fought the German invader were called “heroes” and “freedom fighters” because they were fighting an invader.  In Iraq and in Palestine they’re called “terrorists” because, painful though it may seem, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.  This is what makes it such a dreadful issue. 

Think about this for a second.  We are going to convert Iraq to a democracy whether they like it or not.  You cannot impose democracy, folks.  An imposed democracy is a dictatorship.  You can’t go in and say “you’re going to be democrats, right?”  You can’t force them to do that.  That’s a contradiction in terms.  You cannot oblige them to be democratic. 

Try to understand.  Everything is perception.  Perception is the only thing that matters in this world.  Perception is reality.  What you perceive is real for you and every decision you make is based upon perceptions, period.  Perception is how you choose a car color.  Perception is now you select a necktie.  Perception is how you pick a hairstyle, how you choose a spouse.  Somebody else comes along and says “Good Lord, where did you get that necktie? Or spouse” because their perception may be different than yours.  It doesn’t make them right.  But the point is this: The Middle East just happens to be the area where I spent most of my adult life, but these rules apply everywhere.  Perception is what counts.  It does not matter one iota what the United States says it is doing in the Middle East—totally meaningless.  It does not matter, actually, ladies and gentlemen, what we are doing in the Middle East or anywhere else.  The only thing that matters is how the people out there perceive what we are doing, because that’s what controls how they respond.  If you choose to pretend that their perceptions are not different than ours, or if you ignore the fact that they are, you are merely making it that much harder to get wherever you’re trying to go.  It applies to your daily life as well, and in the Middle East we are perceived much differently than we perceive ourselves.  It doesn’t make those folks right, but it certainly is something you need to consider. 

Now, with the word “perception” in your mind, let me read this to you.  This is from our president at the United Nations General Assembly a few weeks ago.  He said, “Iraq now has a governing council, the first truly representative institution in that country.”  He said that to the United Nation’s General Assembly.  The group of people that we put in power is truly representative?  What are you smoking?  That is not a representative group, is it? No.

So, Colin Powell, a man from whom integrity oozes from every pore, says, “You’ve got six months to write a constitution.”  How long did it take the 13 colonies to come up with one?  Do you remember?  Seven years.  And Iraq is going to do it in six months?  Okay, you can, I suppose come up with one, but will it work?  Look, you cannot impose democracy.  Think about this for a second. 

People of my generation have a hard time using [cell phones].  It wasn’t so long ago in this country that you could tell whether or not a house had a teenager living in it because the VCR wasn’t blinking at 12:00.  You remember that?  Here’s a cell phone.  This is a piece of hardware.  I can hold this in my hand.  It comes with an instruction book.  It tells me precisely how to use it.  The people of my generation forget to turn it on, forget to carry it, and when we use it, God forbid, we do it [two handed] when you’re suppose to do it with your thumb.  Right?  And the reason we’re not comfortable using it is because we’re not used to it.  Now think about democracy in Afghanistan.  Ladies and gentlemen, democracy is not a piece of hardware, you cannot hold it in your hand, there is no instruction book—it’s cultural, it’s historical, it’s psychological, it’s philosophical, it’s a whole flock of things about which they know absolutely nothing.  So, how long will it be before they have a democracy in Afghanistan?  Who says they want one?  Think about this. 

Think about this for a second.  The founding persons said in this country there should be a separation of church and state, not because they were opposed to churches but because they were concerned that one group [might try] to impose its beliefs on another group.  This had happened in various parts of the world and they didn’t want that to take place.  But democracy has become America’s religion and we are out to convert if necessary by the sword, “you will be democratic.”  Who gave us the right to do this?  Do we have a mandate that says we can go out to Iraq, a country thousands of miles from here, an Arab country that, as we now have discovered, never did anything to us and overthrow that government? 

Now, nobody can stop us, that’s a whole different kind of thing, but that’s not our job especially since we’ve made it clear that that isn’t the last time we’re going to do it.  We’re going to set out to do a regime change throughout the region—that’s guaranteed to develop a warm feeling of fuzzy puppiness on the part of those people out there, right? 

I lecture a lot for the military and it was kind of you to mention that I was a paratrooper.  I was a paratrooper two and one-half years before the discovery of the parachute.  We were a lot tougher then than the kinds of people they have now.  I lived in a world of gray areas—what’s the right thing to do, when is it over, when does it start?  The military likes to deal in black and white issues and one of these people said, “Hey, tell us about these French people” with no historical memory and no gratitude for all [they] did, and Mr. Consul General I apologize to you wherever you are in this room.  And I said, “Yeah, I think about that every time I walk through Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C.” 

Does anybody in this room remember why General Cornwallis surrendered?  Cornwallis went to Yorktown.  It’s an inland peninsula—it has two rivers on it—and he went there to await reinforcements and he fortified the end of the peninsula and he went to wait for reinforcements and Count de Grasse of the French Navy prevented the reinforcements from getting there.  When that happened Cornwallis realized he had to surrender because he was trapped, and he sent his No. 2 person off to give the sword to Count Rochambeau who commanded the French troops at Yorktown.  And Count Rochameau said, “No, no not here.  You must give your sword to the chap there with the wooden teeth.”  And this is why Yorktown is on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.  Yeah, who’s got a short memory?  How about gratitude?  And now we’re saying, “My gosh, look at this thing.  Here are these people going into Iraq to fight us, those terrorists.” 

Baron Von Steuben came here to help us, remember him?  And Kosciusko the Polish nobleman who came here to help us, and how many of you remember the Lincoln Brigade that went off to fight the fascists in Spain, or the Eagle Squadron, the Americans who went off to fight the Germans before we were in the war?  Hey, those guys were heroes.  But the people going to Iraq to fight us are terrorists.  This is a painful thing to say, but I’m sure you understand: “One man’s terrorists is another man’s freedom fighter.”  It always depends upon perception and which side you’re on.

Regarding the destabilized Iraq—we have overthrown the government.  Now, they were nasty guys.  Thank goodness President Bush 41, the senior Bush, made a statement at one point that you may remember, just before we went to war in Gulf War I.  He said, “The United States of America, its people and its government oppose Saddam Hussein because he is a dictator and we have always opposed dictators.”  And the rest of the world said, “What are you folks smoking over there?”  Have we always opposed dictators?  We’ve backed some of the biggest dictators the world has ever seen, some of them for decades because we perceived it to be in our best interests.  Now, I can remember as a diplomat how the Americans waited eagerly for Marshall Tito to die so that Yugoslavia could flower and prosper.  Well, it’s done a lot of things but flowering and prospering are not two of them.  Vile though he may have been, Saddam Hussein served our interests by bottling that place into a country that it isn’t any longer. 

So, did we do the right thing in Iraq?  Well, history will tell us, but I would say no.  We’ve lost all the sympathy that we had after the horror of 9/11 when the president of France said, “We are all Americans now,” Do you remember?  If tomorrow, ladies and gentlemen, if tomorrow another terrorist incident takes place—God forbid—an awful lot of people in this world are going to say, “Well, you really asked for it, didn’t you?”  because we are out there doing the sorts of things which we revile other countries for doing. 

The deputy assistant secretary of state for European affairs speaking at the Helsinki Conference on Human Rights—this was just last week and Mr. Putin was very upset—he said, “Russia’s conduct of counterterrorism operations in Chechnya fuels sympathy for the extremists cause and undermines Russia’s international credibility.”  Well, you can change a couple of words in that statement, and everybody is aware of [which]. 

Understand, I am a patriot.  I’ve served my country twice in uniform and I have been out on the diplomatic front through wars and riots and coups and life-threatening diseases.  My family has been evacuated for security reasons, we’ve been separated for health reasons, mobs have attacked the building I lived in with my family, they’ve attacked the building I worked in—I don’t take a back seat to anybody in terms of patriotism.  Understand me, this is the greatest nation that ever was and it could be the greatest nation that ever will be, but there’s an awful lot of people out there who do not agree with that assessment.  Americans know that the world is a better place because there’s an America in it, but not everybody shares that view.  See, their perception is different, especially if they’re in the Middle East and especially if they’re Arabs. 

Here’s what President Bush said—listen to this now—he’s speaking to the United Nations General Assembly:  “Events during the past two years have set before us the clearest of divides between those who seek order and those who spread chaos, between those who work for peaceful change and those who adopt the method of gangsters, between those who honor the rights of man and those who deliberately take the lives of men, women and children without mercy or shame.”  Do you know any country that fits that description?  A lot of people think it’s us and they don’t like it, they don’t like it at all. 

Tony Blair came here to speak to a joint session of Congress and he told us that the key to the whole problem is Palestine.  He said, “Unless and until some reasonable solution is found for the Palestinian problem, you’re not going to have peace in the Middle East.”  He was kind enough not to point out that us going into Iraq has made the situation worse. 

Nobody with half a brain wants anything bad to happen to a single Israeli.  Bad things have happened and probably will, but by the same token nobody should want any bad things to happen to Palestinians.  Bad things have happened with worse coming, but above all I don’t want bad things to happen to Americans and bad things have happened with, I fear, worse things to come.  You cannot defend yourself against terrorism; you cannot defend yourself against terrorists.  There is no way to do that because you don’t know where they’re going to strike, when, during what.  And we are everywhere vulnerable, everywhere.  And a lot of people will look around for ways to make us sorry we did what we did, even though they couldn’t stop us from doing it.

Let me try something with this group.  Definition of peace and security means that the parties to whatever the dispute is are sufficiently satisfied with the resolution and that any small groups that are not satisfied, because you can’t please all of the people all of the time, are either marginalized or, at the minimum, not supported.  On that basis, raise your hand if you agree with me that the Middle East certainly, and perhaps the rest of the world as well, will be a better place when Israel lives in peace and harmony and security among her neighbors.  Now, raise your hand again if you believe that the current policies of the Israeli government are going to lead that nation to peace and security among her neighbors.  Now, there’s the problem right there.  You can’t talk about it, but you cannot get there from here.  That will not work.  But you don’t like to talk about it because it becomes an emotional issue.

Let me back away for three steps—can you honestly accept as a thinking, rational human being that there are people out there who are prepared to kill and die because we have freedoms?  What a ridiculous concept.  Somebody is going to blow themselves up and kill a lot of people because we are capable of screwing up elections in Florida and California?  Or because Brittany Spears has a belly button?  Nobody is going to kill and die for that.  A lot of people may resent our successes, or our excesses, but they’re not going to kill and die for that.  Some of them, thank God it’s a small number, are prepared to consider killing and dying because they see their people being killed and dying because of us.  That’s their perception—indirectly because of our support for Israel and its 37 years of suppression of the Palestinian people, and directly in Iraq where for 12 years we imposed the embargo and flew over and bombed and now we’ve occupied the country and they don’t like that.  That doesn’t make them right.  But it’s not a question of right or wrong.  But their perception is that we’re doing nasty, miserable things to their people and some of them are going to try to even the score and this is kind of tough stuff to think about because there are ways you could do it better.  Maybe. 

Think about this.  Our nation pushes, pushes people who have problems to talk them out.  India and Pakistan that have fought all those wars across their bloody disputed borders.  “You guys have got to talk,” Colin Powell said to them last June, “because if you don’t talk you may wind up going to war.”  We push the Protestants and the Catholics to talk in Northern Ireland—they don’t even have a border.  We pushed the Israelis and the Palestinians to talk and the Chinese and the Taiwanese.  We didn’t speak to Iraq on any subject at any level for 12 years.  Why is that?  Because that’s different.  You guys have to do it but we shouldn’t.  You can get away with that when you’re the big guy, but there are a lot of little guys around.  Could we have worked out something with Iraq?  We’ll never know now will we, because they had all these weapons of mass destruction.  There’s one right there.  How much has it cost us to look for those weapons of mass destruction, which it turns out everybody knew they didn’t have?  They lied to us. 

We have lost our credibility and credibility, like virtue, is not lost on a temporary basis.  It’s gone.  Nobody believes anything we say any more.  I’ll offer you a couple of examples.  Poor PFC Jessica Lynch and that whole story—manipulated beyond belief.  The taking down of that statute where there were how many people present?  One hundred fifty and they filmed it like it was thousands.  And who pulled down the statute?  An American tank.  And where is L. Paul Bremer living?  In one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces.  Haven’t any of these folks ever read Animal Farm?  And where do we keep the prisoners?  At Abu Ghurayb prison.  That’s the one Saddam used.  And we have just announced, if you saw that in the local paper, that we are hiring former members of the Mukhabarat, the secret police, to help us control matters in Iraq.  Good Lord.  That means that the person who clips the electrodes to your private parts next week may have a little teensy American flag on his lapel.  That’s what we went in to stop, wasn’t it?  So now we have American soldiers, decent, honest, well-trained, educated, loyal people, kicking in the houses and opening fire, dragging folks off in handcuffs and blindfolds, and that’s going to give us peace and security?  I doubt it.  I doubt it very much.  Folks don’t like that. 

The United Nations charter, which we helped write, specifically authorizes the use of force to resist an occupation and an invasion because everybody knows that that sort of action, to use a French phrase “pisses people off.”  They do not like being invaded and occupied.  Can you get that?  However, we are there as liberators, but that’s not how they see us.  That’s not how anybody else sees us, either.  Should we care?  Yes, because there are price tags attached to this kind of business.  And as you maybe aware people running the government today say, “Hey, we don’t stop with Iraq.  We’re going to have regime change throughout the region.”  Who says you can do that?  Nobody can stop us.  That’s a whole different set of things.

I’m very gratified that so many people turned out, having seen the list of people that you produce here at this World Affairs Council who come here to talk.  I certainly don’t put myself in the same category with large numbers of them, but I’ve had some experiences and I’ve had some understanding and I recognize that this is a nation which is noble and decent and honorable, except we don’t always behave that way over there, wherever “there” is. 

The big program going on right now in Washington is to win the hearts and minds of the Arab people by ensuring that they know about us.  But that’s the problem.  You see, they do know about us already, and what they know is not so terribly upbeat, not so terribly friendly and warm.  They see us as hostile, they see us as dangerous, they see us as scary, and that’s what generates fear and hatred, not freedoms. 

I was also told that I’m suppose to offer some time for questions because there may be issues that you wish to discuss with me, but I would just like to wrap up this generalization by pointing out—and my wife giggles hysterically whenever I say this— I’m writing a book called Text Postulates:  The Four Keys to Total Understanding in International Relations, and I point out to folks that a lot of stuff they really don’t think about is stuff that they know but don’t think about.  When you think you know something the doors of your mind swing shut and you stop learning.  For example, the L.A. Times says “At the LAX Airport last Wednesday there was a horrifying near-miss.”  What’s a “near-miss?”  A near-defeat means you won.  A near-victory means you lost, a near-collision means they missed, a near-miss means they collided.  Oh, my God, they almost missed.  But when you read that “near-miss” you don’t think about what it means because you know what they’re trying to tell you, [even though] a “near-miss” means they hit.

Well, that didn’t work too well as an example.  Try this.  You’re in a coastal country where there are tides in the ocean.  What causes the tides?  The moon.  What particular aspect of the moon?  The gravitational pull.  The gravitational pull on the moon causes the tide, right?  Anybody disagree?  How many high tides a day are there?  Two.  They’re 12 hours apart, they’re almost exactly the same amplitude.  So here’s the earth, here’s the moon and the gravitational pull of the moon is going to give you a high tide on this side at exactly the same time it gives you a high tide on that side.  Right?  How in the world do you get two high tides in opposite directions at the same time from one moon?  The answer is you haven’t got a clue.  So they told you about that in the fifth grade, or if you’re from Arkansas the eighth grade, that’s not the point.  They told you that and you said, “I got that.  I understand it perfectly.” But you stop to think about it and you recognize that something rather significant has been left out of the explanation.  This is certainly the case in the field of foreign affairs where the American people, bless us, are not really certain there’s a world out there and you don’t really care that much either.  I’m talking about the world.  I was in Milwaukee talking to the World Affairs Council and one of the people in the front row said, “I find that highly offensive.  You are speaking to the World Affairs Council of Greater Milwaukee.  We are here because we are interested in the world,” and I said, “Please excuse me.  I was generalizing.”  Always a dangerous thing to do and I just did it again.

Three hundred and twenty miles north of here is a country called Canada—with a 3,000-mile border—our major trading partner.  We are their major trading partner, many of them speak English.  “Raise your hand,” I said to the group [in Milwaukee] “if you know the name of the person who heads that country.”  Oh, man.  That was embarrassing.  About eight people raised their hands.  I said, “Okay, now raise your hand if you know what party that person represents.”  But think now why this is true “Who cares?”  How important is it to know the name of the guy who heads Canada?  They’re very aware of this, as I’m sure you know.  It’s important for them to know about us, but we don’t need to know about them.  We’re America.  People don’t think about things. 

Let me try this last one on and then we’ll go to questions.  In August of 2000, Yasser Arafat walked away from Camp David after Barak had put on the table the final offer for a Palestinian state.  You remember?  Endorsed by Mr. Clinton.  Raise your hand if you think that Yasser Arafat passed up a great opportunity for a Palestinian state by rejecting that offer.  Okay, that’s very good.  Now, raise your hand again if you came to that conclusion after having carefully studied a map of what he was offered.  [pause]  You didn’t see it in any American newspaper, did you?  How in the world do you know how great a deal this was if they never showed you what it looked like?  You took Barak and Clinton at their word.  The Foundation for Middle East Peace have it on the web, they will show you the map.  The instant you see it, the second you see that map, you’ll see why he turned it down.  Thirty-six little Bantustans, noncontiguous, Palestinian Authority, Palestinian sovereignty and control.  The rest of the area, Palestinian sovereignty, Israeli military control, with all the settlements and the roads and the checkpoints.  Here’s your state.  You wouldn’t have touched it with a 15-foot pole. 

But the American people said that was a fantastic deal without thinking about it because they told you and you knew, and to use a phrase that my children employ, “it sucks.”  [It was] Nothing even resembling a state and that was, you remember, the final offer.  There it is.  So he didn’t take it.  Is he the greatest statesman around?  No.  Far from it, but he’s leading a people who are desperate for the sorts of things that we think everybody else in the world should have—freedom and all of that kind of thing, but it doesn’t apply there because Israel is our friend. 

In the same sense that the United States of America, ladies and gentlemen, think historically, we are trying to encourage the Turks to send troops in to keep peace in Northern Iraq—and you don’t think the Kurds know all about the Turks?  Good Lord, what in the world are you thinking?  See, the Iraqis know what an occupation is.  People don’t forget these things.  Some of you may have been in the Southern states in our country where people will speak to you quite forcefully about the war of northern aggression, and do you remember that President Bush had to kind of withdraw the use of the word “crusade” because the people of the Middle East, although it was a thousand years ago, know what a crusade is?  When the Christians came down and killed every Jew and Muslim they could lay their hands on, as well as any Christians that didn’t look Christian enough, and they remember this.  And Iraq in living memory was occupied by Great Britain, and before that the Turks were there for 430 years and you think they’ve forgotten that?  Absolutely not.  We don’t think about these things because they’re not important to us, but they’re important to them. 

My government spent a great deal of time and money, and I invested a great deal of effort in learning to be able to go and live amongst people in other parts of the world and work with them and talk with them for the express purpose of being able to tell my government how these people see things.  It doesn’t mean I have to agree with them.  It doesn’t mean I have to think that they’re right, just that this is what they think, and my government doesn’t want to hear these things.  Well you don’t have to do anything about it, but you sure as hell ought to get the information straight.  So people like myself spend a fair amount of time on television and other places talking about this, saying “Don’t do this in Iraq.  It is going to cost our nation dear for a long time to come in many different ways and places.”  And we’ve done it and the bill has to be paid.

With that cheery upbeat introduction, let me turn to you for questions.