Crossfire

Gentlemen, thanks for being with us.

CLIFF MAY, PRESIDENT, FOUNDATION FOR DEFENSE OF DEMOCRACIES: Thank you.

JAMIE RUBIN, FORMER ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF STATE: Thank you.

TUCKER CARLSON, CO-HOST, “CROSSFIRE”: Jamie, in the wake of this murder, some members of congress, including Senator Frank Lautenberg, have called for tougher American action against the government of Saudi Arabia. And while there’s no question that the government has anti-American elements in it, shouldn’t we recognize that we have real American interests in keeping that government whole, because the oil, and also because we could get a lot worse?

RUBIN: Well, I think what we should recognize, and today brought it home, I think, for everybody, is that the intellectual home, the financial home of the al Qaeda organization that attacked us on September 11 can be found in Saudi Arabia. That doesn’t necessarily mean the Saudi government, but it does mean in Saudi Arabia.

This is the place from which al Qaeda was created, was financed and was intellectually justified. The Saudi government has started to realize this. Too late, unfortunately, for a lot of people who died in recent years.

I do think it’s appropriate to push the Saudi government harder. We still have a Saudi government that says that when these things happen, the Zionists are funding it, that the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Abdullah, has said the Zionists are funding al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, so we still got some big problems there.

I think you’re right, we have oil interests, you’re right, we have a relationship with the Saudi government. But for our foreign policy to work over the long-term, we have to work to stabilize — to work with stable governments. And unless the Saudis reform, they may not be stable so long.

BEGALA: In fact Cliff, let me read you a brief excerpt of Senator Lautenberg’s statement that Tucker referred to a moment ago. The audience should know I used to work for Senator Lautenberg for many years. He was one of the founders of your organization.

MAY: Yes, he was.

BEGALA: Bipartisan on this…

MAY: I met Senator Lautenberg many years ago.

BEGALA: Absolutely. Well, here is what the senator said today. “The United States will no longer tolerate Saudi neglect of the extremists and terrorists who live and thrive in the Kingdom. All further relations with Saudi Arabia must be entirely contingent on the Kingdom’s progress, cracking down, reigning in and snuffing out its terrorist problem.”

Is America doing enough to crack down on the Saudis? Are the Saudis doing enough to crack down on terrorism?

MAY: No. Let me say no, and let me say Senator Lautenberg is right, and let me say I agree 100 percent with absolutely everything Jamie just said. I don’t want to hear anything from the Saudis; I want to see what they are willing to do. We need to look for action.

A year ago, most people in this country, including an awful lot in the policy community, didn’t understand the nature of the Saudi regime as you’ve explained it. It is, as Jim Woolsey says, a country, a police state. It is a place that gave birth to wahhabism, which is sort of like if the Ku Klux Klan took over Texas, and every preacher had to be a Ku Klux Klan preacher, plus the oil. Wahhabism, a word people didn’t know a year ago, is the soil from which bin Ladenism grows, as Jim Woolsey has put it.

Now we have a real problem. Hopefully, they finally understand they have a problem, too, and the Frankenstein monster they created is coming back for them as well.

I would say this, when they kill an American in Saudi Arabia, that is not as good for Al Qaeda as killing Americans on American soil. It may show some frustration about what they can do operationally, but what they would like to do is push foreigners out of Saudi Arabia. Without foreigners, Saudi Arabia cannot exist. They would like to see it fall. They are great at picking up the corpses from the road and utilizing them. That’s what they like to do. They’ll do it there; they’d like to do it in Iraq. Failed states are the prey of terrorists.

CARLSON: Jamie Rubin, it’s usually one of President Bush’s strengths, one of his key strengths, is he thinks clearly about terrorists. He believes terrorists are evil, he thinks we ought to kill them. He said today, you can’t negotiate with these people to win this war, we need to stay on the offensive and bring them to justice. Isn’t A, that’s exactly the kind of clarity we need in a leader in the war against terrorism right now, and B, a political asset?

RUBIN: I think we’re in an election season, and I believe that John Kerry will think more clearly about terrorism than President Bush has.

What we saw today was the clearest evidence that it’s Saudi Arabia that was the intellectual foundation, the financial foundation for al Qaeda. The vice president of the United States still clinging to this false notion that Iraq was somehow the basis for al Qaeda.

He said over and over again — he still won’t admit that the 9/11 Commission has debunked the basic argument that a 9/11 argument was that the Czech intelligence service told us that one of the hijackers met with the Iraqi intelligence in Czechoslovakia.

The 9/11 Commission says that they have judged that that didn’t happen. The vice president, please let me finish. The vice president says he still thinks it did happen. The vice president won’t even say that Iraq wasn’t behind 9/11. He simply says I don’t know.

So if we’re going to have a president who is going to win the war on terrorism, he has to think clearly. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, these are the places where the intellectual foundations of al Qaeda need to be destroyed. When we went to war in Iraq, we changed the subject and we’re paying a price for that. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t win in Iraq or Iraq wasn’t a threat, but it means to win the war on terror, have you to think clearly.

BEGALA: Yesterday, the vice president did not speak with the same clarity as the president just did. The president is right; America should not negotiate with hostage takers. The vice president yesterday put a quibble in there. He said we do not as a general proposition believe it makes any sense to negotiate with hostage takers. Why the loophole there from the vice president?

MAY: I have no idea. Either it was a slip of the tongue or somebody advised him for some strange reason to do it, because you do not want to negotiate with terrorists, you do not want to make concessions, you do not want appease terrorists. If you do so, what happens is other terrorists say, you see these methods work, let’s do it again and let’s do more of it. As tough as it is, you can’t do that. Let me make this one point.

CARLSON: Almost out of time.

MAY: Today, an American was killed. He was killed by al Qaeda; he was killed by the Fallujah detachment. In other words, these were al Qaeda saying we are in solidarity with the Ba’athists, with the Saddam loyalists in Iraq. And in Fallujah also you have Abu Musab Al- Zarqawi, an associate of Bin Laden. These bad people, they are all tied up together in ways we know and ways we don’t know.

(CROSSTALK)

BEGALA: We’re out of time right now.

CARLSON: We’re going to take a quick break. When we come back, questions and comments from members of our live studio audience here at GW about the murder of U.S. hostage Paul Johnson. Be right back. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BUSH: The murder of Paul shows the evil nature of the enemy we face. These are barbaric people. There is no justification whatsoever for his murder.

(END VIDEO CLIP0

CARLSON: That was President Bush, reacting today to the murder of American Paul Johnson in Saudi Arabia.

Paul Begala and I are talking about the war on terrorism with two of our favorite guests, former Assistant Secretary of State Jamie Rubin. He’s now a senior adviser to the John Kerry for president campaign. Also here is Cliff May, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. He’s a former communications director for the Republican National Committee.

We’ll go to our audience. Yes, you have a question?

QUESTION: Yes. My name is Lauren. I’m from New Orleans, Louisiana. And I was wondering, with the current U.S. policy of not tolerating countries who house or harbor terrorists, how will this affect Saudi Arabia as a traditional U.S. ally?

CARLSON: Cliff? Want to take the first stab at that?

MAY: I’m afraid we still are tolerating countries that harbor terrorists, encourage terrorists, finance terrorists and support terrorists. Saudi Arabia is one of them. So is Syria. So is Iran, in a very big way. Iran is supporting terrorists, including al Qaeda, including Hezbollah, which killed more than 250 Americans as long ago as 1982 and never paid any price for it. Plus, they’re building nuclear weapons.

So what happened today, as awful as it is, may seem very small in comparison to what the Iranians hope to do. This is a very big global war we have on our hands, and we’ve waited a long time to wake up to that fact.

CARLSON: But Jamie, isn’t that inevitable? I mean, you pointed out Pakistan, I think it’s true, ISI and elements of Pakistan, also support terrorism, but Musharraf is about the best we’re going to get right now, you know, same with the Saudi royal family. Don’t with have to do that, or we’re going to get worse?

RUBIN: The issue is whether we recognize where the sources of the problem come from. They come from the schools inside Pakistan where young Muslim students are trained to hate non-Muslims, trained to kill…

CARLSON: They finance those schools?

RUBIN: The Saudi Arabian — not the government, necessarily, but rich people in Saudi Arabia. So the point I was making is that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are directly connected to al Qaeda, the people that killed 3,000 Americans.

The problem is that the vice president of the United States still can’t get that through his head and thinks that Saddam Hussein was connected to al Qaeda. If we’re going to win the war on terrorism, we have to think clearly. John Kerry will think clearly.

CARLSON: I think he may be aware that there are terrorists inside Saudi Arabia.

MAY: Can I just give you a quote from Osama Bin Laden? It was said on February of last year. He said the interests of Muslims, when he says Muslims, he means al Qaeda, coincide with the interest of the socialists, when he says socialists, he means Saddam Hussein, in the war against the crusaders, which means Christians and Americans. In other words, al Qaeda’s interests, he said, coincide with the interests of Saddam Hussein in the war against the Americans.

Saddam Hussein understood that he and al Qaeda had the same enemy in America. And by the way, the ties between al Qaeda and Saddam before 2001 and after were very different. They expanded.

BEGALA: We’re almost out of time. Yes, sir, let me get your question.

QUESTION: Hi, my name is Joe Higday(ph). I’m from Kansas City. My question is, do you believe this act of terror will weaken or strengthen the resolve of the American people to combat terrorism?

BEGALA: Jamie Rubin?

RUBIN: I think it will strengthen the American people’s resolve. I think when I, unfortunately, saw the last example of this with Nicholas Berg, I actually watched the tape. I don’t think I’m going to watch this one. But when you see that, it’s a very, very stark reminder of the evil that we’re dealing with, the evil that attacked us on September 11, the evil that, for a brief time, united our country in what we needed to do in Afghanistan and we needed to do on the war on terrorism, a unity that has been, I confess, lost in the last year or two.

CARLSON: Cliff, quickly, do you think we’ll see an exodus of American workers, and there are a lot of them, in Saudi Arabia in the wake of this?

MAY: Unless the Saudis take very clear steps, yes, I think that that will happen.

Just to answer that last question. I think al Qaeda and these others misunderstand Americans. They think we’ll react by running, because we did for more than 20 years under Republican and Democratic administrations alike. But I think this will strengthen the resolve. They saw what they could do in Madrid; they changed an election without a single op-ed or ad. They think bombing and killing will change our minds and weaken us. I think it will strengthen us on the end.

BEGALA: That’s going to have to be it. Cliff May, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Jamie Rubin, former state department official now with Senator John Kerry’s campaign, thank you very much for a difficult, but civil, discussion on an important day.

That is all for now from the George Washington University campus. Judy Woodruff will have the latest developments right after this break. Stay with us.