FROM IRAQ TO NORTH KOREA: US FOREIGN POLICY

Transcription

1 FROM IRAQ TO NORTH KOREA: US FOREIGN POLICY A speech given to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on March 9 th 2015 Ambassador Christopher Hill Former Ambassador to Iraq and Former Asst. Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs McCarthy: Hello, welcome, I am Terry McCarthy. I am president and the CEO of the World Affairs Council. Thank you for coming to our lunch. Let me first recognize a few people we have in the room starting with our Chairman Mr. John Hotchkis. We have some other board members here, Bob Van Dine, Elliot Ponchick, Jason Sturmana and Sebastian Zacharia, you are all very welcome. We are also honored to have some members of the consulate who are here from Canada, Korea, Qatar, and Taiwan. Thank you so much for coming. My favorite part of this is when we welcome our High School students, as you know our members generously support High School students who come for events and today we have five high schools. We are delighted to have the Central City Value High, La Canada High School, St. Bernard High School, San Pedro High School, and Vaughn Next Century Learning Center, you are welcome. Now, our speaker today, Ambassador Christopher Hill was with the State Department for thirty-three years and when you read his bio you have to think he must have displeased somebody on the Mt. Olympus in the State Department who spent the rest of his career putting in front of him bigger and bigger trials and tribulations. He started out serving, well he served as Ambassador in Macedonia, Poland, South Korea, and Iraq, but he was deeply involved in the peace negotiations in the Balkans. For his troubles there they sent him to Korea, our wonderful friends in East Asia and having done a good job there they decided to send him to Baghdad, where he was nearly blown up in an IED on his way to Nasiriyah. So, Ambassador Hill is now retired. He is a much more peaceful setting in Denver, Colorado where he s Dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. He got his B.A. at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. He received his Master s from the Naval War College in 1

2 1994. Speaks Polish, Serbo-Croatian, and Macedonian and he has a recently published memoir (which you probably saw outside) Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy, where he discusses his lessons of thirty-three years in the State Department and why he always managed to get sent to the heart of darkness. Ambassador Hill, you are very welcome. Hill: Thank you very much Terry and let me just clear up some confusion on that. What you try to do in the Foreign Service, what you aim for, is to go to sort of fun places where you re out there kind of making decisions because there s no one else around to tell you what to do, which is always a nice thing in life. I had a mentor, actually a mentor and a tormentor named Dick Holbrook. Dick used to say you know, the only thing worse than not having guidance is to have guidance because you are often out there and then some genius in the State Department sends you a telegram and you re supposed to go in and yell at some local prime minister and it s really not going to work very effectively. You kind of have to improvise and I think what you strive for in life is to be out there dealing with these kind of fluid situations and doing the best you can. It s a little like the Boy Scouts you know you re not going to fix things forever in history. These problems are around today because many of them have been around for hundreds of years, but you try to leave them in a little better shape than when you found them. So, that s something that you try to do, don t make things worse, try to make things a little better. Then, see what your successor can do with them. I always really relished the opportunity to go off into these difficult places. Now, I m in Denver, I am from New England, the real challenge is that I have to avoid trying to mention the Patriots in front of Bronco (that s a real issue in Denver, by the way). McCarthy: To continue along the thought process of trying to make things better let s talk about you and Iraq, where we have had a pretty deep involvement and let s go straight to ISIS. I know that happened after you left, but as a diplomat looking at this extraordinary problem we have here with these people, just this past week they destroyed Nimrud and Hatra, two extraordinary archeological sites that killed thousands of people. What do we do with ISIS? Hill: Whenever I would be asked a question like that in the Balkans, I d say well you kind of have to pick up the story two-thousand years before, but in this case- if you don t mind- I will only go back onethousand, three-hundred years. Let me just say, for many American s who look at the Arab world and they think they re all speaking the same language, they have the same alphabet. Yes, there are states in the Arab world, but basically you re dealing with this monolith, you re not. A short-cut to understand some of this, if you can get your head around two concepts: Shi ism and Sunnism. Shia Arabs in the Arab world they are a small minority and in the rest of the Arab world these are Sunni Muslims. Where is that small minority of Arabs? The Persians or the Iranians are also Shia, but they re not Arabs. If you look at the Arab world, every single country in the Arab world is Sunni led. I want to leave aside Syria, suppose we will get to Syria at some point. Every single country in the Arab world is Sunni, so that was true in Iraq as well, but the majority of Iraqis are Shia. The breakdown is 60% Arab Shia, 20% or so Arab Sunni and another 20% Kurdish. The Kurds are not even Arab, so if you look at this Sunni-Shia Arab split within in Iraq it s three times as many Shia as there are Sunnis. I am mentioning all this because we went in there in 2003 we wanted to get rid of this dictator and we assume the major division was between those who wanted this terrible dictatorship under Saddam Hussein and those who wanted Democracy. The real division in Iraq were between Shia who were embattled and put upon majority and put upon by a Sunni minority that ran the country under Saddam Hussein, last Sunni ruler in Iraq. By the way if you ask 2

3 a Sunni and say wasn t Saddam Hussein a Sunni? They ll say oh no he has nothing to do with us. He was a Sunni, from a very Sunni part of Iraq. We go in there and what do we do? We turn a Sunni led country like any other Arab country, but this time we turn it into a Shia led county. So, the Sunni s of Iraq, always a minority and now an oppressed minority that is living under the Shia, deeply resented this sort of Shia hoi polloi that these goat herders can now be in charge of the country and they never accepted it. I think it s important to get that point across because many American s look at Iraq today and say well, you know we had this Iraqi Prime Minister this Shia, Nouri al-maliki and he clearly didn t do enough Sunni outreach and that s why the Sunni s became disaffected living under Baghdad under a Shia led government, that s why they became disaffected and that s why they have welcomed in ISIS as a kind of extremist Sunni faction. I submit to you, it s a little more complex. I don t think they ever accepted Shia rule in Iraq and when you think look Sunnis your only 20% of the country, there s three times as many Shia Arabs there. The Sunnis don t think in those terms they think in a strategic depth all the way to Morocco, they are all Sunnis. Just in this one Arab country of Iraq the Sunnis are not only a minority, but now they are living under Shia. Now within the Sunni world and let me talk especially, not so much about Sunnis from North Africa or Egypt but Sunnis from the Arabian Peninsula. Sunnis in Iraq, Sunnis in Saudi Arabia, the Saudis have always had a problem with extreme Sunnism you ve heard of Wahhabism that s an extreme Sunnism. Take the extreme of Wahhabism and you get to Al-Qaedism or ISIS-ism (if you will) these are people who believe that there needs to be recreated in the Arab world, in the 7 th or the 8 th century caliphate of the Arab world, it has to be under one state. So, that s what they are doing. They are anti-modernists that doesn t begin to describe the problem. The Sunni s of Saudi Arabia, the Sunni s of Iraq, they don t like this ISIS group, but at the same time they don t like the Shia and from the Saudi point of view, the United States created a new strategic situation for them by putting a Shia country, a Shia led country on their border. Iraq was a Sunni led country that was one thing to have them on the border now the Shia led country that s another thing to have them on the border. So, I think a lot of the diplomacy that needs to be done about ISIS has to be done in Saudi Arabia to make sure the Saudi royal family, make sure the Kuwaiti s, make sure the Qatar, make sure the Emirates, make sure they are all supportive against the efforts of this extremist Sunni version of Islam presented by ISIS. McCarthy: Let me speak up a little bit on behalf of the Sunnis, the Shiats under al-maliki were extremely vindictive, the day that we pulled out of Iraq in 2011 the issued an arrest warrant for the Vice President just because he was Sunni. The exclusion of Sunnis in al-maliki s state was totally over the top, was an overreach I would suggest was on a par with Morsi s overreach in Egypt where he got into power and then he overreached so much they created a reaction. There s blame in both sides here. Hill: Absolutely and I m not going to make the case that Maliki, ideally Maliki first serious Shia leader comes into Iraq. Iraq has never been ruled by the Shia, so he s the first Shia to come in and ideally he looks around Iraq and he sees this very talented, frankly cosmopolitan community of Sunnis and ideally he (switch the scene) looks down at South Africa and he says how did the black South African s manage they have never run the country and they come into power and they have this 20% minority just as we the Iraqis have a 20% minority known as Sunnis. Nelson Mandela comes in and he sees this 20% minority of white South-Africans and he realizes he can t run South Africa without this 20% minority and so he reaches out to them, he makes sure they understand they are part of the future of South Africa even though they are not going to be running the place the way they have for literally centuries. 3

4 Ideally Nouri al-maliki he s a difficult guy, Terry I don t know if you got to meet him- if he ever had charisma it cleared up a long time ago this is a guy who did not understand who had no instinct whatsoever for the kind of outreach and inclusiveness that you re talking about. In Maliki s defense (and that s not an expression I like to use to often) the Sunnis basically, it s not clear that they would accept any Shia as their ruler. No Sunni Arab in the entire region has to live under a Shia and again we will get to Syria because that s another mess. Ideally, Maliki should have done a lot more, you re right, but this is a tough situation. McCarthy: So, ISIS. Hill: Crisis. If you look at ISIS you re essentially looking at several component parts to this sort of movement there s this anti-modernist movement that I described earlier and we re seeing signs of that. I think just like the Taliban and Afghanistan, they ve just blown up some historical sites in Nimrud the historical capital of the ancient Assyrians. They have tried to destroy all signs of any previous civilization there. Most Iraqis are very proud, Iraq didn t just spring fourth when Mohammed came along in the 7 th century. Iraq had a history that goes back four thousand years and what ISIS is saying is that we don t care what happened before the prophet showed up. There s this anti-modernist group there s also an element at their military vanguard and why they re not bad militarily is because they have some very highly trained military officers who came from Saddam s army. They took one look at the American armed forces coming up from Iraq in 2003 and quit and ran, but they are not quite prepared to quit and run in front of Shia or even in front of Kurds, there s that aspect that kind of trained military aspect there- and then finally there are these foreign fighters who ve come from various other parts of the Arab world who want to participate in this restoration of Sunni Arab rule over the Shia. It s kind of hodgepodge and what we ve got to do, first of all I don t think there s a lot of diplomacy there s a lot of saying to ISIS -I don t think we can talk or work something out- but, at some point as they start to have battlefield defeats and that s beginning to happen I mean you may have read the Kurds have the Iraqi army is planning attacks against them in Tikrit and this is a very Sunni part of Iraq. It ll be interesting whether the Shia dominated Iraqi army is going to be successful there and finally the Iraqi army and the Kurds want to push them out of Mosul, so they are beginning to have defeats on the field and the question is whether, once they start getting rocked back on their heels and some people you can start pulling off from them. Some people have jumped on the bandwagon, usually the last to jump on the bandwagon are the first to jump off. So, there might be some scope for Diplomacy there. I think the U.S. role is appropriate to helping Iraqis, helping the Kurds, dropping ordinance on these ISIS battle formations. We ve done a pretty good job in the air and there are people who say well, why don t we put in ground troops? I think that would be a huge mistake for us to start putting in ground troops and the reason is once you start putting in ground troops we become the issue and we sort of galvanize the whole ISIS movement, more people will come in just as Soviet troops in Afghanistan caused all these people to move to Afghanistan. I think we need to be very, very careful about committing ground troops and the Arab world again. McCarthy: Who is it who tried to kill who in Iraq near Nasiriyah? Hill: Well those were Shia, those were Shia militia groups. McCarthy: Can you tell that story? 4

5 Hill: Well, it s in my book. Basically, what do ambassadors do even in a country like Iraq? You try to get outside of the capital city, you try talk to people, you try to see what their aspirations are, what their issues are. Whether their interested in a close relationship with the U.S. and I was doing that in Nasiriyah sort of whistling past the graveyard- in the sense that you re trying to say, hey we can have a normal relationship, it s true we re very far away, but we feel very close to Iraqis for a lot of reasons. I think it was very important to talk to the Iraqis about our lives for long-standing interest in Iraq and so I did that and as we left Nasiriyah in route to a big American base there called Tallil. So, as I am going to Tallil we have this IED (improvised explosive device) and what it is these are cellphone detonated bombs in this case it blew up from a pile of garbage in Nasiriyah if you think New York City doesn t pick up their trash and you went to Nasiriyah you d give New York City a gold star this heap of trash essentially exploded in front of our vehicle and fortunately no one was killed. McCarthy: You drove through pretty much the explosion? Hill: Yeah, well what can you do? It was pretty much a thick black cloud and often what would happen is that you re driving along and if for some reason the IED doesn t blow up under your vehicle then it blows up in front, so you see this black cloud in front of your vehicle, as we did and so we came to stop. Very bad idea, because that s when a rocket propelled grenade can be aimed at you and that can really finish you off because the vehicles are protected better from below because of these bombs then they are from above. You don t want to stop you ve got to keep going and those are a little nerve wrecking for people, but I ve got to say I am kind of typical in that regard, you don t really think about it until it s all over and then at night you think why am I here in Nasiriyah? In fact, when I was talking to the Nasiriyahns and they were talking about all the things they want from us. They wanted a new highway, they wanted a new school, new hospital, and they wanted an international airport. I said we have some education consultants who can help you with a school we have some legal people who can help with a University Law School, we have civil engineers who will work with you on whether a road project would make sense and such if you can apply for funding for it, but the international airport that s a problem with people not wanting to come to Nasiriyah for obvious reasons. Let s work on making the roads better, the schools better, etc. and then kept coming back to this airport and it drove me crazy on why they would need an international airport. Finally, I get off that afternoon and we re heading back and we hit this IED. Again, a lot of people are getting upset about it thought it was in-between the cars so it didn t kill anybody which was a very good thing and then I finally get to the base and my military aid a very talented man named Jeff Pitcher former F-15 pilot. I said are you okay? and he said you should have said yes to that airport. It s kind of an example of people keeping a sense of humor through the day, but at night you go what were we doing here? McCarthy: I am going to bridge over here on attacks to ambassadors and as you know our ambassador in South Korea was attacked last week, by some lunatic with a ten-inch blade, fortunately he s recovering. When you were in Korea a lot of your focus was on North Korea and you were our head of negotiating with North Korea. Talk about North Korea and dealing with them. Hill: Let me just disaggregate that a little as well. I went to South Korea as U.S. ambassador and one of the things that you saw first of all, our relationship to South Korea is second to none. Yes, we have some very special relationships out there in the world, but we don t have too many that I would say is better than our relationship with South Korea. It s a very special relationship and yet when I got there in 2004, - 5

6 - at the time before that our relationship wasn t going that well - South Korea, was drifting more into sort of left-wing politics while the U.S. might have been going the other direction, but any event was really beginning to harm that special relationship which by the way had last over 50 years since the Korean war - what was beginning to harm that relationship was the perception that the U.S. was not engaged enough in trying to deal with North Korea. We had some officials back in Washington who would be taking potshots at the North Koreans every day and the South Korean reaction to that is -easy for you say Washington, we live twenty-five miles away from those people, easy for you to say whatever you want thousands of miles away not so easy for us to live with it -- I saw this not just among radical leftist youth or something, you re seeing this a lot. People are very close to the U.S. and so when Secretary Rice invited me over to her office in Washington and she asked me if I would leave the ambassadorship in South Korea and come back to Washington to become the assistant secretary for Asia oh and by the way I would be double headed as the main negotiator for North Korea. You know that was tough, because I loved living in South Korea, there nice to Americans, they play baseball they do all kinds of nice things there. I was sad to leave South Korea, but I felt one of the best things that I could really do for the U.S. - South Korea relationship was to engage more seriously in the negotiations with North Korea and do it in a way that made it clear to everybody that it wasn t just the U.S., that we were working with others and president Bush -I don t think he gets enough credit for this- had very wisely said we re not going to have these U.S.- North Korea talks for the rest of history. What we re going to do is work with other countries in the region who should also have a real reason to do something about North Korea s nuclear ambitions and so then he and the then Chinese President at the time Jiang Zemin, put together the so called six party talks. Prior to that the U.S. negotiators had gone to deal with the North Koreans and they would say goodbye to their South Korean friends at the airport and they would say well we ll let you know what happens. The South Koreans, that s their peninsula for heaven s sake. I felt that was really the right way to go about it and we never did solve the North Korea, nuclear issue and I am happy to get into some of the reasons of why we didn t, but we did however close that growing gap with South Korea. I think to this day South Korea and the U.S. are in very good shape. McCarthy: Now we talked a little bit about this with the students, but what is the future for North Korea? Hill: I don t think there is much of a future for North Korea. I was asked a very good question by one of the students who had asked me you know he had checked on the internet and noticed I had said something not very nice to the North Koreans, but I was in Seoul when I said it, I want to make that clear and he said so you were quoted as saying you don t think North Korea is going to be around forever and I said you bet I don t think it s going to be around. When it ends, I don t know when the end will be and how it ends, I don t know how it will end, but I do believe in the fullness of time a country needs a point, a country needs a purpose. Apart from maintaining this hideous dictatorship of the Kim family, I don t see much purpose to North Korea going forward. I explained a little history to the students when you think of Korea being brutally divided in the 20 th century through no faults to the North Koreans, I mean it s very unlike East and West Germany, there are reason of why Germany was divided in There were no reasons organic to Koreans, on why they were divided, had to do with Russians who had to take surrender of Japanese troops North of the 38 th Parallel. The U.S. took surrender of Japanese troops South of the 38 th Parallel terrible tragedy. So, I felt that was something we could work with 6

7 them on and to start talking about if North Korea doesn t survive how are we going to handle that? Cuba is going to have this interesting problem, you have all these people living in Miami who have property in Cuba let s say the Castro regime disappears so how are they going to manage this? You have someone in Miami who goes back to Cuba and says you know that house belongs to my family and we need it back. They have to respect property rights otherwise there s not going to be an economy there at the same time they have to respect the human rights of the twenty-six families living in that house. There is going to be a lot of these kinds of issues. First of all, I think it s important to the U.S. and South Korea to have a clear understanding of how we re all going to manage this. Generally, I think the division of labor would be if there s a meltdown in North Korea whatever that means, you know a palace coup or a peasant uprising we need to have a better understanding of who does what. I think the U.S. role is to grab those nuclear weapons and make sure that they are never sold to some terrorist group. The South Koreans though have a far more complex and outstanding issue of dealing with the humanitarian catastrophe, creating some governance in the area, making sure you don t have a flood of refugees leaving North Korea, but also making sure you don t have a flood of people coming from South Korea to create social tensions because they haven t set up the methods of giving back property to private individuals and things like that. So, a lot of work needs to be done and that s why it s appropriate to talk about it even though we don t know when this hideous thing North Korea, disappears. We don t know how it disappears, but we do need to be prepared and that s why anyone who has been in the military, you know that planning is everything. Plans are nothing, planning is everything as Eisenhower once said. We need to be thinking in these terms. McCarthy: Recently the Swedish ambassador who looks after Pyongyang who looks after interest in North Korea, because we don t have anyone there. Hill: It s usually looking after wayward American s who went there and ended up stuck there. Anyone going to North Korea, please do it in an organized group and settle your affairs and no, just be careful. McCarthy: But his point having spent two years there. Everything he saw, the regime is dedicated to one single aim which is to perpetuate the survival of the regime. That s all there interested in. How can you negotiate with people like that, if that s all they want? Hill: What you have to convince them of is that, if you think that perpetuating you regime, if that s your goal and I agree with that. That s what the goal is. If you think that s what you are trying to do you have to understand that having nuclear weapons is a part of that then it really doesn t make sense because we will never accept a North Korean, nuclear state. The consequence is that we will come after them wherever we can, just until the end of time or the end of their time. Make sure that they understand that they will never have a day s peace as long as they keep those nuclear weapons. So, what you try to do and this is basically what the negotiation was about, is if you give up these nuclear aspirations and really give them up, then we are prepared to put on the table a peace treaty. We re prepared to have cross recognition that is recognize the North Korean state, we re prepared to do some economic assistance. So, if you re interested in regime preservation you say, well I can keep these nuclear weapons or I can have other things which is going to be more valuable for me these nuclear weapons or these other things? There calculation today is that we need more nuclear weapons. I would argue the North Korean nuclear arsenal is obsolete the minute it s deployed. I think we are making far more progress on defensive systems than they are on offensive systems, so I don t think it s such an obvious 7

8 calculation that they should keep nuclear weapons in order to have regime preservation. I don t think that s so obvious, but convincing North Koreans otherwise, that takes a lot of convincing. You sit there in these desultory endless meetings, you re talking to your counterpart and you realize he doesn t understand what you re talking about, so what you do is you figure out who the note taker is and just make sure the note taker is getting it all down right because then the notes will be sent to Pyongyang and maybe someone with a triple digit IQ will be reading it and thinking about it. Question and answer portion: McCarthy: Let s open it up for questions now. Q: Speaking of being prepared ISIS walked across Syria into Iraq and took over the American weaponry, where were we? When we read the newspaper it seems like the major failure of military preparedness and diplomacy. Hill: I think that s a harsh statement, but I think it is a statement that is very much in play because I think it goes to really the question of how we ve been handling Syria. I think we took the view that Bashar al- Assad was sort of the bum of the month. I mean everyone else was gone, he was still standing. We were a little slow in saying Mubarak should go, so we re going to make up for it by being a little fast to saying that Bashar al-assad must go. There was much too much focus on his fortunes, the opposition around him, whether it s al-nusra or these other Islamists. I don t think we were recognizing what was going on in Western Anbar, a heavily Sunni province of Iraq it borders Syria. It was very clear that all the investment and safe guard that we had put into the Iraqi border from border crossing from Syria. We had kind of lost track of that one. Now I am sure there are people monitoring it from the air, I am not saying nobody knew about this, but it clearly wasn t getting to appropriate policy makers. Meanwhile, there was this view that somehow the root of all evil in Syria was Assad. Assad is a terrible guy and I am certainly not going to be defending him, but I think when you see a terrible guy the question wouldn t be how we get rid of that guy? The first question should be, how did we get that guy in the first place? Instead, we looked at it as how are going to get rid of that guy and completely lost track of the fact that the people who are really after him were in many ways worse. If you are looking for solutions in the world of good versus evil, I submit to you it s not between good guys and bad guys, it s more likely between bad guys and worse guys. There it s a little tougher to figure out because Assad certainly fits the bill as a bad guy. Is he worse than ISIS? I am not so sure. I think we were excessively focused on him as one of these dictators that we wanted to see go. McCarthy: Should we have left Iraq in 2011? Hill: In an ideal world I wish we would have kept residual forces. I am not sure that we would have kept them in a way that could ve prevent the encroachment of these radical Islamists who essentially there main common cause with tribal shakes in Anbar or if they couldn t make cause they would kill the tribal shakes in Anbar. Could our troops in cantonment and various parts of the vast Iraqi desert stop that political slash terrorists slash military process? I am not so sure. McCarthy: We might have seen it coming which was the problem. 8

9 Hill: With that said if we had troops in Iraq, we surely would have been following this border. We surely would have understood that Iraq is effected by blowback from the Syrian Civil War and I think we would have had a much better analysis. When we have troops on the ground it s not just the firepower they bring it s the intelligence assets they bring. We have this force protection this concept that we have to be protecting our people and in order to be protective of our people we need to be knowing what s going on. So, when you take troops out we don t really care that much. When we had troops in Macedonia to name my first ambassadorship when we had troops there we knew everything about Macedonia and now we don t have troops there and find someone in the U.S. government who can spell Macedonia. In that sense you re absolutely right, that said and I think this is an important point to understand, all these Arabs, these Iraqis would say to us oh I personally want to see your troops, but it s the other ones who don t. Yet, when you kind of trace them back to when you they re talking to the other ones, no one was in favor of keeping U.S. troops there. Question 2: My question is in two parts from the premise of what is going on throughout the Arab region is the Shia-Sunni divide and on the Shia side you ve got sitting behind it, Iran and all that. To find that sort of solution you have to find some sort of balance between Iran and Saudi. So, there are two parts to the question, one is hearing you talk about Iran and Syria and the region, the second one is to aggregate Israel-Palestine distraction, lightning rod from the bigger Shia-Sunni conflict in Saudi and Iran. Hill: Let s put aside Palestine, Israel issues. Certainly, that has been a magnet of Arab concerns about the plight of Palestinians. I must tell you, I was in Iraq for a year and a half I never heard one Iraqi express concern over how the Palestinians were being treated. I think to a great extent the Palestine issue is not as heartfelt in the rest of the world as sometimes we are led to believe. I am not saying it is irrelevant and certainly it is some kind of galvanizing issue for some people, but I was very struck by the fact that I think the real issue is within the Arab world between Sunnis and Shia and I think that s a big part of it. I wanted to get to the other part, I think the big issue, enormous issue, is as the U.S. goes to some kind of stabilization of the Iranian nuclear program, by the way it s a stabilization it s not a get rid of all those fissile material making machines (I.E. the centrifuges) it s just kind of capping the thing at a lower level and sort of taking it a step at a time. One thing that is going on is the Arab-Persian relationship is very bad and the more we deal with the Iranians the more anxieties there are in Saudi Arabia that were somehow switching partners. That has to be managed. For example, when we have these meetings with Iranians in Vienna, believe it or not we ve been inviting Saudis to be a part of it or be in near proximity of it because we don t want a situation where the Arab world believes we switched partners to the Persian world and with the idea that we don t care about the Arabs anymore. This is tougher, than even that because the Iranians have been messing around in the middle of the Arab world. Southern Lebanon Hezbollah I mean American s know Hezbollah as anti-israeli organization (which it is) but it s a lot of other things too namely anti-sunni organization and they ve helped the Alawites in Damascus against the Sunnis. In fact, Hezbollah is allied against the Sunnis opposition in Syria and moreover the Iranians have been involved in funding them and etc. The obvious solution in saying the Iranians were interested in a better relationship with you starting with a nuclear issue, but you ve got to stop messing around in Southern Lebanon. You ve got to stay out of these Arab areas because you re causing tremendous tension between the Saudi s and others as you, Iran, appears to be trying for some kind of Muslim leadership among these people. Well, that s a lot easier than it sounds because why are the Iranians so involved with the Shia in Southern Lebanon by the way more involved with the Shia in Southern 9

10 Lebanon than the Shia in Iraq, I mean not withstanding their support for militia groups in Southern Iraq. So why are they so involved? Well, go back to 1501, again I hate to bring up history but you ve got to know this stuff. When Ismail this Iranian leader about the first century of the 6 th decade, who was he fighting at the time? The Ottomans, who were the Turks, but they were Sunnis. So, Iran was a Sunni country until Iran was Sunni so, Ismail turned Iran into a Shia country. He did this through a lot of brutality, but he also did it with Shia clerics whom he imported into Iran, to spread the gospel according to Shi ism. Where did he get these clerics? Southern Lebanon and the early part of 16 th century that was the hotbed of Shi ism in that part of the world. I m not saying it s impossible, it s not impossible and we need to get the Iranians away from the terrorist organizations. I think it s very important to understand if you re an Iranian to Ayatollah and your history book stops about 17 th century. You re thinking of Iran keeping true to the people who helped it so much in the beginning of the 16 th century. All I am saying I this is kind of complicated. Q: I wanted to bring Israel into this story because as the relationship is becoming fractured and as we are working with Iraq it is politically affecting where Israel stands with the United States Hill: I think Israel remains the best ally within the region I think Israel to some extent has labored under the fact that it locks an inner locket. The Palestinians are split, symbolized by Hamas and Fatah. They are split and that makes it kind of difficult to reach an agreement with the Israelis, you know who we are supposed to negotiate with. So, not easy for Israel. I had some Middle East journalists in my office in Denver a couple of weeks ago and I got asked by some Palestinian journalists help us, etc. and I said you should stop looking around the world for sympathy because sympathy is not going to help you. What you need is to take the Palestinian platform that you have and to make something of it. Countries have done far more with a lot less throughout history and so if you think that just getting sympathy is going to build your state, you re wrong. You need to be able to attract a capital you need to have laws that make sense, private property I mean there s a lot of work that needs to be done. Even if Israel didn t exist and all that existed was Palestine authority they have a lot of work to do and they ought to go to work on that and stop bad mouthing Israel or saying that all their problems had to do with Israel. That s tough love, but I think they need to hear that. I say this as an American, I have always been very careful about going to other countries and tell them what to think. I have also been very careful to not go to other countries and you know speak over the heads of the government you know there s some totalitarian, when I was in Poland in the 1980s the first time we didn t just deal with General Jaruzelski, brave Poles etc. I ve got a problem with a foreign leader coming here and telling us what to think. I just have a problem with that. I don t care what country that foreign leader is from, if he s from the UK, Israel, South Korea, whatever I have a problem with it. In going about my diplomatic career I ve been very careful about not going and telling people what they ought to do or what the threat is to them. You know private conversations, yes, but public speeches, public statements, no. The reason is I am turned off by it and I am sure they would turned off by it. I think we have to monitor this situation with this very important relationship and I do consider a very important relationship between the U.S. and Israel. If the Arab world can get over Israel they would understand that Israel is growing tomatoes out of sand. Israel is bringing up brackish ground water and using it for crops. It s amazing what Israel has done with that desert and I think the Arab world has a lot to learn from Israel. Israel has so much to offer. I don t what s going to happen in the Israeli elections, it s up to the Israelis to determine that, but I don t want it determined in Washington. 10

11 Q: I am very happy that the bomb didn t knock you off and that you are here today. My question is what is going to be the future of Iraq since Middle Americans are sick and tired of spending four trillion dollars and what s going to happen? My last question is wasn t Saudi Arabia the one that was financing Al Qaeda? Hill: I don t know if Iraq is going to survive? It has survived a long time, the borders have shifted somewhat over the years the sites. I am not so convinced that changing the Syrian, Iraq line is going to solve problems. Show me a border change in that part of the world and I ll show you another war. Iraqis do have a concept of being together Shia living with Sunni although this a rare living occurrence where Shia are on top rather than Sunni being on top. I think for the near term those places out in Western Iraq which are heavily Sunni will probably not live under a Shia leadership in Baghdad and so I think there needs to be constitutional changes such that there s a lot more local autonomy, budgetary autonomy a much looser concept rather than a single capital, single unitary state which is what was put together for Iraq often by American constitutional lawyers who knew very little about Iraq. As, for Saudi Arabia, I think we are seeing some very interesting investments for Saudi Arabia. What I have always seen in diplomatic life is just when you think a situation cannot get worse, it gets worse. The Saudis have just gone through the death of a king, the crowning of a new king and I wouldn t want to talk about anyone s ill health, but I wouldn t be surprised if they don t go through that again soon in the next few years. Secondly, they have this Shia Iraq country on their northern border they now have a Shia Yemen on their southern border. The Saudi issue is that you just always give people oil money, but I think this oil price drop is going to be around for a while. If I knew precisely I wouldn t be here talking to you all I would be doing something else. We ought to really look at how Saudi Arabia is put together. This is the only country that doesn t even have a parliament. It s a brittle political system. The modern Saudi state are things to worry about, I think we need to watch that space. 11