Transcript

Host: This is “On the Line,” and I’m Eric Felten.

In his final State of the Union address, President George W. Bush devoted more time to Iraq than to any other topic. He said the U.S. will continue with the strategy that began in 2007 with a surge of new troops in Iraq:

Bush: "While the enemy is still dangerous and more work remains, the American and Iraqi surges have achieved results few of us could have imagined just one year ago. When we met last year, many said that containing the violence was impossible. A year later, high-profile terrorist attacks are down, civilian deaths are down, sectarian killings are down."

Host: Mr. Bush said that defeating the terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere will allow people to embrace democracy. He said that a freedom agenda continues to guide the U.S.:

Bush: "Our foreign policy is based on a clear premise: we trust that people, when given the chance, will choose a future of freedom and peace."

Host: With one year left in President Bush’s term, how much foreign-policy success can the U.S. expect to achieve in Iraq and elsewhere? I’ll ask my guests: Massimo Calabresi, White House correspondent for “Time” magazine; and a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies: Reginald Dale. Welcome. Thanks for joining us.

Let’s hear a little bit more before we get into the discussion of what George Bush had to say about Iraq. Here was one of his main statements about it:

Bush: "A failed Iraq would embolden the extremists, strengthen Iran, and give terrorists a base from which to launch new attacks on our friends, our allies, and our homeland. The enemy has made its intentions clear. At a time when the momentum seemed to favor them, al-Qaida’s top commander in Iraq declared that they will not rest until they have attacked us here in Washington. My fellow Americans, we will not rest either. We will not rest until this enemy has been defeated."

Host: Massimo Calabresi, a year ago, it wasn’t clear that President Bush had the political capital at home to continue pressing any kind of effort in Iraq. How much have things changed in this last year?

Calabresi: It’s been a dramatic change, primarily on the ground in Iraq, and that has meant, at home, a dramatic increase in his ability to control Iraq policy. He spent an enormous amount of time in the speech talking about Iraq, partly because it’s an issue of great importance to America, but also because it makes sense for him to do it. It has been an unpredicted success for him that he can capitalize on in trying to hold the line for his policy there.

Host: In fact, in “The Washington Post,” they did a trendy graphic here where they took the words from the speech and they made the word the size based on the frequency with which a given word was used in the State of the Union speech. And we can see that “Iraq” is much larger than just about anything else. Reggie Dale, is this an indication of trying to emphasize the unexpected success of the last year or more an emphasis on where policy’s going to be focused in the coming year?

Dale: I think it’s both. I think it’s also what President Bush thinks is the most important challenge. I thought the speech was strongest -- the Iraq section was strongest on analysis and prediction of what needed to be done. I thought it was extremely interesting that he defined the fight against radical Islam as the defining ideological struggle of the 21st century. I think that’s correct. I just hope it’s not the whole of the 21st century -- maybe the first part of the 21st century. Another thing that struck me was when he said we must take the offensive -- take the fight to the enemy -- against terrorism. The Democrats applauded as well, which was somewhat surprising. I think that was an indication of the way that they’ve understood that, with the success of the surge, that they can’t keep harping on trying to cut the funding for the troops in Iraq and bring them home immediately.

Host: Massimo Calabresi, there were any number of votes on Capitol Hill last year over the issue of bringing the troops home -- “How fast can it be done?” Do you expect much more of that in the coming year?

Calabresi: The Democrats, by and large, have been happy to move away from Iraq as it has become a success over the last year. They now are focusing much more intensely on domestic issues where they can, the economy -- areas where they think the Republicans are vulnerable. I would expect that the Democrats generally don’t like to tackle national-security issues where they don’t have to on Capitol Hill. Now, we have a good example at the moment of their handling of the question of domestic eavesdropping that had previously been something of a vulnerability for President Bush, but now has the Democrats on the defensive. There, as in Iraq, they’re running away from the issue. So I don’t expect to see the kind of persistent push for withdrawal of troops that we saw over the last year.

Host: Reginald Dale, usually in the last year of a presidential administration, there’s a sort of mettle fatigue, if you will -- mettle, m-e-t-t-l-e fatigue -- and a sense of the president being a lame duck and the power being reduced and really not much happening in the last year. And yet, is President Bush in a position to have more of an impact in this final year than would have been anticipated from where things were a year ago?

Dale: I think on Iraq, yes. Because he remains commander in chief, obviously, and because his policy is showing that it’s been successful, although it’s still, as he said himself -- the enemy has not yet been defeated. So I think he will maintain a dominant influence in Iraq. In other areas in the speech, which were less precise, he said he deplored what Iran was up to in the Middle East, but really produced no sort of policy recommendations as to how to deal with it.

Host: Let’s look at that exact point. Let’s go to the tape and see what President Bush had to say about Iran:

Bush: "Wherever freedom advances in the Middle East, it seems the Iranian regime is there to oppose it. Iran is funding and training militia groups in Iraq, supporting Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon, and backing Hamas’ efforts to undermine peace in the Holy Land. Tehran is also developing ballistic missiles of increasing range and continues to develop its capability to enrich uranium, which could be used to create a nuclear weapon."

Host: Reginald Dale, there’s a long litany of complaints against Iran, and what’s your sense of where the strategy stands for confronting Iran?

Dale: As you notice, he made a litany of complaints, but he didn’t really say what to do about it. And one of the problems there is that the wind has been taken out of the sails of the Western drive for sanctions in the United Nations against Iran by the National Intelligence Estimate that came out in December, the first line of which said that Iran had abandoned the weaponization of its nuclear program in 2003. Now, if you read on that report, it qualified that quite considerably, and it was only one aspect of weaponization. But that’s taken a lot of the steam out of the drive for sanctions in the United Nations and given all the people who don’t want to go along with them, for example, China and Russia, an excuse not to. Now, you can also ask whether these sanctions are getting anywhere. I personally think that Iran is continuing to move towards being a nuclear power, and nobody has yet found the answer of how to stop it. But this was not really addressed in the State of the Union, and I don’t see that Bush is going to do very much in the next year, other than, as most people would, I think, now think, what he will not do is launch a military attack on Iran now that the National Intelligence Estimate suggests that they’re not so close to weapons as they might have been thought before.

Host: Massimo Calabresi, what’s your sense of where the National Intelligence Estimate leaves President Bush and his administration in policy on Iran?

Calabresi: It’s put them in a very difficult position. On the one hand, as Reggie says, it’s taken away the option of military strike to the extent that anybody in the administration might have been considering it. On the other end of the spectrum, it’s made diplomatic maneuvers considerably harder as well because it’s difficult to wrangle the cats to put pressure on Iran if the general impression given by the NIE is that Iran is no longer pursuing nuclear weapons. As Reggie says, that’s one small part of the NIE, and it’s cast in a different light if you read the whole thing. But it has made negotiations with other allies of the United States and with countries in the region much harder diplomatically. The trip that President Bush took to the region in January showed that quite clearly. At every stop along the way, in the Gulf Arab countries, he brought up Iran and made absolutely no progress in convincing them to take any tighter position on any of the economic issues he was pushing. The one wild card here to keep in mind, of course, is Israel. It was quite striking on that trip just how nervous Israelis across the political spectrum are, not just about the continuing nuclear program in Iran but also about what the effect of the NIE has been on the West’s ability to pressure Iran. Real nervousness there and you could see, at the very least, some diplomatic tension, diplomatic issues coming to the fore as they push the issue.

Host: Reggie Dale, how much does it affect the ability of the U.S. to leverage and build a consensus at the U.N. if the possibility of military action as an extreme consequence of inaction -- Once that’s sort of taken off the table, to what extent is it not just a matter of people look at the National Intelligence Estimate and say that Iran’s not really a threat according to this U.S. estimate, but, really, also saying, “The U.S. is no longer a threat to take military action, so we don’t have to do anything anyway.”

Dale: Yes, that’s an absolutely excellent point because up till the intelligence estimate, President Bush was actually using this sort of sword of Damocles policy of the idea that there might be, conceivably, a military strike on Iran to put pressure on particularly the Europeans, who have no great enthusiasm for sanctions. They do a lot of trade with Iran. They don’t want to upset the Arab world. They don’t want to upset the Muslim populations in Europe. But when Bush started talking about World War III and things like that, it really got their attention. And, of course, you know, a lot of this -- They took it all completely seriously, which was what they were meant to do. But I think it was really more just sort of brandishing a sword rather than sharpening it for use. And so that now has removed that particular sword from his hand.

Host: Massimo Calabresi, there has been an announcement, though, that there’s likely to be some new U.N. sanction. Is that likely to be anything that will make any difference in policy toward Iran?

Calabresi: They seem to be fairly mild. We’ll see if they can get them, but the proposal is not particularly damaging or anything that’s likely to produce some reaction from Iran. Certainly not going to be enough to drive them to the negotiating table. It’s worth noting that at the same time that they’ve been brandishing the sword, rattling the saber, as it were, Condi Rice has been exerting herself for eighteen months in a -- “desperate” is probably too strong -- but in a very aggressive attempt to get the Iranians to talk and failing miserably at that. It’s, again, another consequence of the NIE that she has even less to use now to try and get them to talk.

Host: The proposition that Condoleeza Rice has been making is stop the uranium enrichment and we can talk with anything on the table. Is that offer likely to change in this next year, perhaps going to “Well, let’s just talk whatever the case is”?

Dale: I think the Iranians are not going to stop the uranium enrichment. Why should they? There’s no sort of effective pressures being put on them. So if you want to talk to the Iranians, then you’ll have to do it while they’re enriching uranium. I think that the problem here is that nobody knows the answer. Nobody has the key to unlock this door and that, so far, the determination of Iran to go ahead with its nuclear program, clearly towards a military direction, is far stronger than the will of the international community to stop it.

Host: Massimo Calabresi.

Calabresi: It’s worth nothing that, in fact, there are sort of loosely scheduled talks between the U.S. and Iran in Baghdad. There have been a series of talks between the U.S. and Iran in a larger context, but talking specifically about the security issues in Iraq. And another one of those has been scheduled. It was supposed to be at the end of the year and then it got bumped off, so there is at least some forum where the U.S. can, again, try and get its agenda going. But the past meetings have been quite cold, and other than a little bit of rhetorical warming on the Iranian side in one or two recent speeches and a little bit of, again, trying to push forward on the talks on the American side, there isn’t much reason to think that they’ll produce anything.

Host: Now, in the second inaugural address of President Bush, three years ago, one of the signal issues that President Bush spoke about was the need to spread freedom as the antidote to the extremism driving terrorism. This was a theme that he returned to in the State of the Union, and let’s hear what he had to say:

Bush: "We are engaged in the defining ideological struggle of the 21st century. The terrorists oppose every principle of humanity and decency that we hold dear. Yet in this war on terror, there is one thing we and our enemies agree on -- In the long run, men and women who are free to determine their own destinies will reject terror and refuse to live in tyranny. And that is why the terrorists are fighting to deny this choice to the people in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Palestinian Territories. And that is why, for the security of America and the peace of the world, we are spreading the hope of freedom." [Applause]

Host: Massimo Calabresi, where does this freedom agenda stand in the last year of the Bush presidency?

Calabresi: It depends who’s talking about it. As far as the Bush administration is concerned, this is the defining issue of his presidency. Even domestically, he believes that the underlying drive behind most of his policies has been greater freedom and opportunity for people here. It’s sort of the unifying theme for his presidency, as far as the White House is concerned. Abroad, the White House talks about the number of people, they say, “liberated” in Iraq, the number of people, they say, “liberated” in Afghanistan. And they total up a package of freedoms that they say they’ve brought to the world. It’s a little more nuanced than that, of course. The recent trip, again, to the Middle East, Bush spent a lot of time talking about the freedom agenda in all of the Gulf states that he went to. When any of the details of where democratization stood in any of these countries came up, it was clear that there wasn’t actually much progress being made on the freedom agenda. In some areas previously, where at the time of the second inaugural, the administration was willing to exert some diplomatic pressure on the strictly democratic or human-rights issues, now, in the last year, they’ve backed off from them a little bit, especially in countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. They still talk about it a lot, but they don’t put a lot of diplomatic pressure behind it.

Host: Reggie Dale, Egypt, Saudi Arabia?

Dale: Yes, well, I think going back to what we just heard the president say, two things were notable. One is that he mentioned the long run. And I think a lot of people didn’t realize at the second inaugural that this was meant to be a target for generations, not tomorrow. Secondly, he didn’t use the word “democracy.” He talked about freedom. Unfortunately, in some parts of the world, democracy is now seen as a sort of tool of Americanization. But also the administration has backed away from all this a little bit. Partly because they’ve seen that when you do have elections -- that’s the democracy part of it -- they don’t always lead to the right side winning. And party because their allies in the war against terror, which remains the supreme priority, like Egypt and Musharraf in Pakistan, they’re not actually terribly democratic people. I think it was Pakistan was actually a very notable absence from the State of the Union, probably because he couldn’t think of anything positive to say about it.

Host: Massimo Calabresi, we have less than a minute left, but which is going to be more to the fore in this last year -- the pressing the war on terror or pressing for democracy in places like Pakistan where those don’t seem to be going together very well?

Calabresi: I think they will try and find ways to talk about the freedom agenda in places where it’s easier to talk about it than somewhere like Pakistan. Bush is heading to Africa next month, and there are a couple of countries there that can be seen to have benefited from U.S. programs in a variety of ways and that are slowly taking baby steps on the road to a greater liberalization.

Host: I’m afraid that’s going to have to be the last word. We’re out of time for today. But I’d like to thank my guests -- Massimo Calabresi, White House correspondent for “Time” magazine; and a senior fellow in the Europe Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Reginald Dale. Before we go, I’d like to invite you to send us your questions or comments. You can reach us through our website at www.voanews.com/ontheline. For “On the Line,” I’m Eric Felten.