PAJAMASMEDIA™
presents:

War on Terror Conversations: Fred Thompson
by roger l. simon and bob owens

November 2007

In the first Pajamas Media War on Terror Conversation, Presidential candidate Fred Thompson discusses the current situations in Iran, Iraq and Pakistan. The senator/actor also explains why he thinks the recent Hollywood anti-war films are box office failures. Joining Thompson are PJM CEO Roger L. Simon and Bob Owens of Confederate Yankee.

Transcribed for use only by PAJAMASMEDIA
by eScribers, LLC

SIMON: This is Roger Simon for Pajamas Media. I’m here at the Citadel Campus in Charleston, South Carolina for our first War on Terror conversation with a leading Presidential candidate. These War on Terror conversations are a new program to be conducted by Pajamas Media, in which we will be interviewing the leading candidates on the subject of the War on Terror only, because we believe that that is the issue that trumps all others in this campaign. Senator Fred Thompson is here today giving a speech at the Citadel. We had a chance to sit down with him. Let’s have a look.

Thank you for joining us, Senator Thompson.

THOMPSON: Thank you, Roger. Good to be with you.

SIMON: Okay. Now let me ask you — I’m going to go straight off the bat by lying, by asking you a question —

THOMPSON: You’ve been talking to too many politicians.

SIMON: I must have. It’s about that much off topic.

THOMPSON: Um-hmm.

SIMON: But you and I share a background in show business, you as an actor and I as a writer. I’d just like your view on why do you think that all these war on terror, Iraq movies, that Hollywood has been producing lately have gone right in to the box office bottom?

THOMPSON: Well, because they’re probably bad movies, I think that there are a lot of people who are kind of tired over the years of seeing our country as the bad guy. As a matter of fact, you can say that about law enforcement officers, FBI and CIA. I don’t know how long it’s been since you’ve seen a good CIA officer or agent, a good one for trade. They’re always the villains and so forth, and then it makes for interesting stuff sometimes if well done. But over and over and over again over a period of years it gets a little boring and, you know, people are a little bit tired of seeing all the bad news and then when good news comes, you can’t read about it in the paper. And then you go to the movies and, sure enough, it’s all the bad news again.

OWENS: We just got part of your speech. You mention “will” several times in relation to the American people which is something we have not really fully engaged in. What can we do to recapture the will of the American people?

THOMPSON: Yeah. I was referring to a passage in Andrew Roberts book, The History of the English Speaking People Since the 1900s. And he points out that the will of the people is at least as important as its military might in prevailing in a conflict. I really believe that that’s true. You’ve got to understand you’re going to have some bad times. You’re going to have some difficulties. You’re going to have to understand the need for doing what you’re doing and the need for perseverance. That’s one of the most important jobs I think nowadays of the President of the United States, of having communication with the American people and explaining those things. Here’s what we’re doing and here’s why we’re doing it.

SIMON: A lot of us have felt that the Bush administration has failed. That’s been one of their — public relations has been one of their weak spots. How would a Thompson administration recapture that, recapture the will of the people?

THOMPSON: Well, you’ve got to be — you’ve got to be honest with the people and bring them along for the ride. You can’t just say everything’s fine and don’t pay much attention to it and go on about your business on a daily basis and then be able to sustain yourself in the bad times. You got to be honest up front. What we’re going to have to do is face up to the need to make a substantial commitment physically in this country, rearrange some of our priorities. And I understand, we’re going to have to rebuild our military. We’re going to have to modernize our military. We’re going to have to replace our equipment. And do all those things necessary for the long haul. You can’t do it on the cheap. You can’t do guns and butter. In past conflicts when our nation has faced difficulties, non-defense spending has gone down substantially. Not this time. We’re still operating on the assumption that the conflict is all — it all has to do with Iraq and Afghanistan and once that’s over it will all be over, which I think a lot of people still think. And secondly, we’re not going to have to make additional financial commitments to it. Both of those things are erroneous. And a president has to communicate the truth to the American people on the front end. Because you can’t expect — if you don’t have the American people on the front end of this, you’re not going to have them on the back end.

OWENS: Senator, as far as engaging a specific aspect of the American people, what can we do to get the American Muslim community to buy into this war and participate more fully than they seem to be at this point. Right now we have CAIR, Council on American and Islamic Relations, that has pretty much seemed to have thrust itself as a group representing all of them and I believe their numbers are less than 3,000. What can we do to engage the rest of the American Muslim community?

THOMPSON: I think sometimes we have a little bit difficulty in choosing among our friends. There are some who give lip service and not only do not come through with moderation and preaching moderation. They go in the other direction sometimes. And we need to — we need to, again, be able to call a spade a spade. But for those who are standing up and really putting their lives in jeopardy, is what they’re doing, we need to support them in every way possible. We need to honor them. They need to know that they have our support.
Now, having said that, I would think the average Muslim and the moderate Muslims, the ones around the country, around the world who live in moderate societies, which is most of them, would be the most outraged about what they see. They shouldn’t need constant bolstering to come out against the slaughter and wholesale slaughter of innocent people in trying to bring down western civilization which they are now part of and enjoying along with us. So I think they need to recognize the commitment that they need to make. And the fact that we’re dealing with a small part of radical Muslim that came originally out of Saudi Arabia and because of Saudi oil, it’s been propagated around the world and now has a lot of adherents and a lot of young ignorant people who are willing to sacrifice their lives for these people and it’s grown and grown and grown. We should not label all the Muslims with them. But right-thinking Muslims should be willing to label them for what they are.

SIMON: I know you were on Meet the Press discussing a problem with the twelfth imam and all this eschatology that aspects of the Iranian government preach and seem to believe in. And now we know Larijani, their negotiator, their nuclear negotiator, has been either resigned or kicked out or both and replaced by another extremist who never even visited the west and is a member of the Revolutionary Guard and all that.

THOMPSON: Yeah.

SIMON: How do we go about negotiating with a government that has this kind of very strange belief system?

THOMPSON: First of all, you have to realize what you’re dealing with and who you’re dealing with. I’m not sure there’s an answer to your question. Our inclination, my inclination, is always to talk to anybody if there’s any chance of reaching some kind of an agreement or reconciliation. But this is not a typical nation state with typical nation state interests involved. At its heart is a radical religious belief that gives them authority in their own minds to bring down not only the little Satan, which they call Israel, but the big Satan, which they call us. And they’ve been killing us for a long time through Hezbollah and others. So sitting down and talking about territorial rights and things of that nature that you would ordinarily do, power structures and how they might be used or not used, negotiations that you might engage in with the Soviet Union in times past or things like that, it won’t work. It won’t work.
Now that doesn’t mean that — you know, hope springs eternal, if there’s ever any opportunity for that to change, we need to take advantage of it and embrace it. But under the current circumstances, when they perceive the United States is back on its heels and they’re wondering whether or not we’re weak, they’re wondering whether or not we have the will that we were talking about a few minutes ago, the chances of them changing their spots under those circumstances, I think, are nil. I hate to be pessimistic with regard to negotiation or diplomacy; that always has to be a part of what we do. But I think here when you’re dealing with that particular situation under these circumstances, which is probably the acquisition of a nuclear capability, I think realism and knowing who you’re dealing with and what your chances are with this particular regime is more important than anything else.

OWENS: Speaking of nuclear issues and Islamic countries, Pakistan, which does have nuclear weapons capability, is going through a pretty tumultuous period right now. What obligation, if any, do we have to make sure that those munitions are safeguarded?

THOMPSON: We have a very high obligation. We’ve got to make sure that that’s the case. As you know, there are people in the Pakistani government, they’re not friends of ours who have ties with the radical Muslim who in some cases apparently have had contact with Al Qaeda, for example. And we know that Al Qaeda wants to get its hands on this kind of capability. We know that Pakistan has a history with the Khan network of proliferation of this kind of technology and capability. And, you know, we found a Chinese design for a nuclear warhead in Libya before Libya gave up its nuclear capability and undoubtedly came from A.Q. Khan and Pakistan and so forth.
So that’s the whole background and that’s the situation. While this political thing plays out, you know, we’ve got to keep that in mind. Musharraf has probably made a terrible mistake. He has probably created the very circumstance that he was trying to avoid. And he has lost some of the political backing that he needed probably to maintain himself. I don’t know. I’m just speculating that. Whether Bhutto would be that much better when the dust settles, who would be in control of what, who knows? Probably if they could still get together that’d be a good idea and settle things down there. There are no particular cards that can be played that would be — that would guarantee the solution of this problem because we’ve got the rule of law and conflict with national security.

SIMON: How —

THOMPSON: We’re for both but we can’t let — we can’t let, if we have any possibility of avoiding it, we cannot let nuclear weapons get into the hands of these radicals.

SIMON: As a final question — we know you have a campaign to run here.

THOMPSON: Well, this is a rare opportunity to talk about these things in more than fifteen second sound bytes.

SIMON: Well, that’s the idea —

THOMPSON: So don’t apologize to me. I want to thank you.

SIMON: Well, here’s our final question, though. As you probably know, I’m sure you know, Ambassador Bolton has become very critical of the Bush administration since his resignation from the United Nations. He wrote a book about it and he’s made a lot of public statements. Do you think — and implying that the Bush administration is essentially walking backwards on the war on terror. Do you think he has a point?

THOMPSON: I will say this. I do share his concern about a deal with North Korea. North Korea is a country that’s never kept a bargain it’s ever made. Any deal with them has got to be based upon verification. It’s a country that it may be impossible to carry out verification. They’ve lied to us before about that. And now it looks like from all we can tell and from statements that current members of Congress have made that they can make due to the classified nature of what they’re seeing, my guess is that North Korea is now outsourcing a lot of its stuff to Syria. And we saw the Israelis launch a strike against the Syrian location and the word is that they were in the process of building a plant there and with Syrian assistance perhaps.
I hope the administration is not so intent on making a deal on its way out that they get into the situation that the Clinton administration did with the agreed framework when North Korea was giving us here and taking back over here, you know, behind the scenes.
At the end of the day, we’ve got to have verification before we start rewarding them again. We’re giving them current rewards for future promises. It’s never worked before with them. And I’m skeptical of it.

SIMON: Oh, speaking of the Bush administration trying to wrap things up like the Clinton administration as it heads out, they have a conference coming up, as you know, in Annapolis, on the Arab-Israeli protracted conflicts. What’s your evaluation of that?

THOMPSON: I don’t know. I don’t know what to make of that. I know that ultimately the people of that part of the world have got to want peace in order for us to see peace there. And no matter what magic words we use or how many trumpets we play before the next conference, people there have got to want it. And both sides have got to want it. Israeli can’t fashion it by simply making more and more concessions. We’ll hope for the best. But again, I hope we don’t try to push the Israelis into an agreement just for the sake of an agreement unless both parties are willing, and express a willingness, to have peace and the terrorists renounce terrorism.

SIMON: Well, we can all dream. Thank you very much, Senator Thompson for joining us.

THOMPSON: Thank you.

Transcribed by:
Lisa Bar-Leib
eScribers, LLC