Presentation by George P. Shultz — “The War Against Terrorism”

George P. Shultz

I attended the sessions this afternoon and it was very informative. It was frustrating because it turns out that the problems having to do with defense are difficult. So I thought I would relieve the frustration a little bit by talking more broadly about the war on terrorism as I have indicated. And then I'll talk about the problems in the Middle East.

President Bush has declared war on terrorism with broad support in the Congress and the American people and around the world. It's important to recognize the conceptual basis of the war as he has put it forward and to realize the continuing and the serious nature of the threat.

So I'm going to talk about those things a little bit, and then I want to demonstrate to you how, despite the statements that we are acting somehow unilaterally, that our actions are squarely within the framework of U.N. Security Council resolutions.

First, the conceptual base. Number one, as we've struggled with the problems of terrorism over the years, when I was in office and subsequently, we somehow regarded them as a law enforcement problem. The idea was somebody could commit murder - a criminal act somewhere against Americans - and you catch that person and negotiate an extradition treaty with the country involved, bring him to America, try him, put him in the slammer. That doesn't work. As we have seen in what has happened, that has proven frustrating. It has not been able to bring the terrorists to account. The result is they've spread. And so we have a different concept - war. War is different from law enforcement.

Number two. The president has said that the states who harbor the terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists. Terrorists can't operate in vacuums. They have to have a place where they train, where they plan, where they equip themselves, where they gather their finances. So, in saying states that harbor terrorists are in the crosshairs, what he is saying is, "Do something about those people, or else we're coming after you." Gotta do that. And then he has asserted the right of self-defense, which means that when you can identify the high likelihood of a terrorist act against you, you act in advance. You preempt. That's a very big statement. And as Abe said, when I gave that talk back in the eighties and I talked about the need for preemption, The Washington Post roasted me, The New York Times patted me on the head and told me to get lost, and so on. Fortunately, President Reagan, after thinking it over, decided I was on the right track. But at any rate, we went nowhere. We did things, but basically, we went nowhere.

Now this threat is real and continuing. And I think there is now a deep realization in this country and around the world of that fact and of the need to do something about it. We are galvanized as we haven't been before. In order to dramatize the seriousness of the threat, I want to read to you some excerpts from Don Rumsfeld's statements on the Jim Lehrer about a month or so ago. This is not a written out text. This is just reading what he said.

"We know what Al-Qaeda is willing to do. We know that several terrorist networks have active programs to acquire biological weapons and chemical weapons as well as radiation and nuclear weapons. We know they want them and we know there are countries that have them. And the power of a biological, weapon for example, is something that we have to be very respectful of as a country.

"Iran is very active in sending Hezbollah terrorists down through Damascus into the Bekaa Valley and down into Lebanon. We know that Iran has been selling or giving, probably giving, weapons to Afghan elements in the country, which we find notably unhelpful. So that's a fact. The ones that have the control have been doing the things I just said. Let there be no doubt."

That's the Secretary of Defense. He has access to intelligence that I don't come anywhere near.

"Saddam Hussein used weapons of mass destruction on his own people. It is a country that has had had and does today have very active weapons of mass destruction programs and this is a vicious, repressive regime. Don't kid yourself. It's a vicious, repressive regime.

"What the President is saying is," in response to one of Jim's questions, "'Look, world. Be on notice. This is a very dangerous time for the world - that these weapons are enormously powerful and these countries have engaged in a behavior pattern of terrorist acts, cooperating with terrorist networks, providing haven to terrorists. That they have those weapons and pose a threat that we need to be conscious of and attentive to.'

"We have no choice. It is physically impossible to defend at every time and every location against every conceivable technique of terrorism." Sounds like this afternoon's program. "Therefore, if your goal is to stop it, you cannot stop it just by defense. You can only stop it by taking the battle to the terrorists. Where they are, going after them." In other words, preemption.

And finally he says, "Now you can tolerate it -" I don't know about that - "if they're not going to have access to powerful weapons and not going to kill thousands of people. If it's one or two or three people, the world has learned to live with a level carnage that's modest. You don't like it. But when it's not modest, when it's large numbers, when it's something like smallpox or anthrax or a chemical weapon, or the radiation weapon, or killing thousands of people at the World Trade Center, then you say to yourself, well, if we can't stop terrorists at every location of every technique at every moment of the day or night, what must we do? Just sit there, and take the blows like the World Trade Center? Take the blows that biological weapons would pose to us? The answer is no. You have a responsibility to defend your country.

"Anyone in the world knows, even the U.N. Charter provides for the right of self-defense. And the only self-defense, the only effective way to defend is to take the battle to where the terrorists are. They are planning, they are plotting, they have trained thousands of terrorists very well. And we have no choice but to find those people and root them out, as the President said, and stop them from doing what they're doing and stop countries from harboring them.

"We've already been attacked, so what we're doing is self-defense."

Well, those are statements by Don Rumsfeld. I think they're very specific. And they reflect what he knows and they reflect what he thinks and what the President thinks as a result of these.

Now let me just review some of the U.N. Security Council resolutions that have been passed in the last few years. After the bombings of our embassies in 1998, the Security Council stressed "that every member state has the duty to refrain from organizing, instigating, assisting or participating in terrorist acts in another state, or acquiescing in organized activities within its territory directed toward the commission of such acts."

On December 29, 2000, the Council strongly condemned "the continuing use of the areas of Afghanistan under the control of the Afghan faction known as Taliban for the sheltering and training of terrorists and planning of terrorist acts."

Then after September 11^th, the Council accepted the position, pressed by the United States and Great Britain, recognizing the inherent right of self-defense; stressing "that those responsible for aiding, supporting, or harboring the perpetrators, organizers, and sponsors of these acts will be held accountable," reaffirming that every state is duty-bound to refrain from assisting terrorists or acquiescing in their activities.

So, it seems to me that the legal basis, if that's what U.N. Security Council resolutions can be called, for the principle of state accountability is clear and the right of self-defense is acknowledged. Action, now, is needed to turn those principles, those words, into reality. Words, Security Council resolutions, mean nothing if nobody does anything about it. So we're doing something about it.

Now let me turn to the Middle East. The scene in the Middle East is horrifying. People are alarmed, dismayed and distraught, including me. The dead, the injured, the suicide bombers in public places, the sheer inhumanity of what we see every day, the clear possibility of major escalation with widespread calamitous consequences. Surely the worst of times.

But another outlook is warranted. To slightly alter what Charles Dickens wrote in A Tale of Two Cities, it is the worst of times, it is the best of times.

Why best? Or at least a time for some new possibilities. Because, when things are at the worst, they are clarified. We can see more clearly what is going on and what is needed. And when things are at their worst, it may be possible to convince people to take dramatic action for change.

If clarity is now possible, what is it that we can see more clearly? We can see that the terrorists in the past couple of years have taken over the Palestinian cause. The terrorists reject the very idea of Israel. Their goal is not peace with Israel. Their goal is the eradication of Israel.

So the drumbeat rhetoric that the terrible clashes in the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, are a cycle of violence, simply misses the point. The cease-fire is simply inadequate and becomes part of the cycle of violence because the object of the terror is not negotiations for peace, but a pause to regroup and re-equip.

The fighting in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is now a main active front in the war on terrorism. The terrorists must be suppressed or peace is impossible. As long as the terrorists are calling the shots for the Palestinians, as they now are, no negotiations with them are possible. Terrorists must be defeated.

For thirty years or more, the potential deal has been that Israelis and Palestinians would negotiate to agree eventually on peace between the State of Israel and a Palestinian political entity that would at some point be accepted as a Palestinian state. The reference point has been U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, with its broad formulation of land for peace.

But the negotiations to this end have relied upon a shaky expectation. That is, that if the Palestinians eventually agreed with the Israelis, that the rest of the Arab world would decide not to "be more Palestinian than the Palestinians." That's not the kind of deal you want to rely on.

So the new Saudi initiative is important. So far it is an initiative. It won't become an operating reality until Crown Prince Abdullah puts it forward to the Arab League and gets League support.

If that happens, we have the potential for a real deal. We have the potential for a big deal. The Arab world would have committed itself to accept forever the presence of the State of Israel as a recognized, permanent state of the Middle East. That is a big deal. The U.S. should make clear that Arab governments would be held accountable to stand by that commitment, as have Egypt and Jordan.

This means that the Saudi initiative must be pursued actively, intensively on all fronts, starting immediately. The U.S. must make clear our support for what Saudi Arabia is doing and be energetic in helping create the atmosphere for progress. At the same time, it is critical to keep the Saudis out front. This initiative is theirs and the meaning is great for that very reason.

And it is also clear that the Israelis would have to recognize that the touchstone for negotiations would be resolution 242 and some version of the 1967 borders. I would personally like to see religious leaders involved in arrangements for the holy sites.

We need to recognize the concept of shared, not separated functions in key areas. While each state will be sovereign and independent, the unavoidable reality is that in certain and specific functions, separation is just not possible. Air space, water, tourism, labor markets, potential economic zones, areas of understood demilitarization and more - all must be to some degree shared or overlapped. This requires serious negotiations by responsible parties on matters of shared concern.

How can this best be done? By states. States, which we have down-graded and disparaged over the post-Cold War period, turn out to be indispensable, and the only available effective units for bringing order and stability to human affairs. The Middle East situation became more difficult when Jordan pulled out of the West Bank, when King Hussein decided that the State of Jordan no longer would negotiate for the Palestinians. Under the circumstances in 1988, that seemed to make sense from his standpoint. But states need to negotiate with states. When the State, Israel, must negotiate with a non-state, the PLO, the outcome is almost inevitably loose, since the non-state entity does not speak with the voice of a sovereign, and therefore does not make the kind of commitment possible by a state.

So now, at this moment, Saudi Arabia has stepped forward, as a state, to take a negotiating position regarding the Palestinians. This is important. Really important. One may have problems with the Saudi positions on a variety of specific issues, but the big the fact of their initiative demands that the United States swing into action to help make it work. The Saudi position also could be seen as to some extent as an answer to President Bush's question at the start of the war on terrorism, "Are you with us, or against us?" he said. The initiative may well be a way of saying, "we are with you." The Saudis may well realize that the terrorists have seized the process and must be stopped. That the potential for major escalation could lead to regional catastrophe.

But in the long run, Saudi Arabia, the necessary state, will need help, to begin with from other states, and eventually from a Palestinian State, to see the job through to the end.

So, a Palestinian State should be proclaimed up front. Israel should agree, in negotiation with Saudi Arabia or some consortium of Arab states, to the proclamation of a Palestinian state. U.S. diplomacy should aim to bring this about.

But, there must be more. A proclamation does not automatically create a functioning state. Patterns of governance must be created, the legitimacy of leaders established, means of accountability for policy decisions, for handling funds need to be brought into being. And a state can hardly even begin to function effectively where citizens cannot move about from one urban center to another, as they are now prevented from doing. So there is lots of work to do. But the work has a potential for major payoff. State-to-state negotiations, in the context of a potential regional and world network of support, can transform the situation. And transformation is a necessity. Palestinians and others in the region now lead miserable lives without the light of hope for a better future. A major change is imperative to improve the quality of life in the region. Security, water, education, health, the opportunity to create the jobs on which standards of living depend. Help in the form of private as well as public initiatives is needed. So again, there is lots of work to do.

There is an important logic chain here. Start with where we want to be in the future. What is the goal? A secure, stable, peaceful and prosperous life for Palestinians and Israelis, as well as all people in the Middle East. It can happen. That outcome has to rest upon cooperation and shared practices between Israelis and Palestinians. It can't be walled off. The space and the resources of the area are limited so arrangements for some common and overlapping use have to be negotiated. These negotiations in turn have to be conducted by states. The state is the international unit of accountability. Saudi Arabia may be coming forward to play the state role once played by Jordan. We'll have to see. This opportunity needs to be worked closely and carefully. But there will need to be a Palestinian state. Real Israeli-Palestinian negotiations will have to be between these two states.

And this state-to-state negotiation of peace can only come about when the Arab-Islamic world accepts the state of Israel as a permanent, legitimate, full-fledged reality in the Middle East. That requires the defeat of the terrorists because the terrorists don't want peace with Israel. They may not even want peace without Israel. So the war on terrorism must be fought all the way through to a victory.

So we have threats on our hands and a war to win. We have the worst of times but a genuine basis for hope in the Middle East. Extremists have had their way for far too long with intolerable consequences. Now is the time for men and women with common sense and compassion to assert themselves with conviction and drive. That can rekindle the hope for better lives for people who have been miserable for far too long.

Thank you.

Introducer: We will continue our tradition of taking a few questions and George agreed to do that so he is coming back up here and fire away.

Questioner: Yes, I find myself in agreement with your ideas, but your…

George Schultz

Stop right there. Nothing, nothing in any sentence, nothing that's said matters before the but.

Questioner: And I agree with the statement that the terrorists have taken over the Palestinian cause, but how are you going to deal with that? The Saudi Arabian initiative is a good one, but then what do you do with the terrorists?

George Schultz

You keep after the terrorists, but you take advantage of this initiative. Don't just sit there and say it doesn't mean anything, as so many people are doing. It does mean something. It means a lot, potentially. Because it means that potentially the Arab world is ready to acknowledge that Israel is there, and get on with it. And so if you will drive on that and take advantage of that and work with it, don't do as we often do in the United States, you rush in and then take over - we know how to do that - because we want to keep the Saudis out in front. It's their initiative and it means much more coming from them than if somehow it's negotiated by us. So that's what we want to do. And somehow that can change things, I believe. From the situation where people are going there and constantly trying to get cease-fire, and then that's it. To a hope, a possibility that people can maybe dream about. And then, the more moderate people can take over. And then you deal with the terrorists. You have to keep dealing with them. Tough.

I always felt when I was negotiating over there, that if you don't have some balls in the air, you're going to go backward. And, even if you think the chances are very high, still, if you have some proposals, if you have some things to work with, then people can focus on that. And I know how tough it is and I recall, toward the end of one of my trips with the peace initiative, there was a cartoon in the Jerusalem Post. It showed me holding off blows on the ground with a piece of paper labeled Shultz's peace proposals. There was an Israeli with a club beating on me. There was a Jordanian with a club beating on me. There was a Palestinian with a club beating on me. And the caption is, "well, at least they agree on something."

So it's hard. But it can be done.

Mr. Secretary, it's been said on numerous occasions that sometimes the Syrians play the spoiler. So in a comprehensive agreement, what can be done about the Golan Heights?

George Schultz

Well, the Golan Heights are going to wind up back with Syria. That's hard to swallow if you've been on the Golan Heights and looked down and remember where the riflemen stood up there. But there's got to be…Among the reasons why there is a really important, difficult negotiation here - and I've focused on the West Bank type issues, but the same is true with Syria - is that you can't just turn something over. There has to be demilitarization. So it doesn't once again become a platform for attacks on Israel. But Syria certainly will have to.. And they have, I read, signed onto the Saudi initiative, but that's their price.

Is Yasser Arafat irrelevant, the key, or somewhere in between?

George Schultz

Well, we'll have to see. Right now it's hard to feel that he is the key. That is, if he has control, and says he wants to stop the violence, why doesn't he do it? But if he can't do it, then he doesn't have control. So somehow, I think, that's why I say just declaring a state doesn't make one, but there's a process that people need to go through, and there are precedents for that. And the Palestinian Authority gets some start, but whether Mr. Arafat or someone else winds up as the chief negotiator, we'll just have to see. But right now, what Israel has as a possibility is a state to negotiate with, namely Saudi Arabia.

That would make a Palestine State. If Palestine has become capable of being part of a legitimate partner. And then they would have a negotiating partner there. It's a …

That's the point. You negotiate with the Saudis on their initiative, and among the things you negotiate with them, and with as broad an Arab consortium as you can get, the creation, as I said in my talk, upfront, of a Palestinian State.

Or antagonize the states, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya are also aligned and promote terrorism and they get taken out.

Well, we are at war with terrorism. The United States is. And so are a lot of our allies. And so we have to look at what's going on. And of course, one of the real threats, one of the reasons why I imagine some common sense is maybe asserting itself, whether it is or not I don't know, but maybe it is. Is that the threat of escalation is very real. And if you have escalation, people start throwing chemical and biological and nuclear weapons around, it's [katie by the door] So we don't want that. Therefore, it seems to me, crystal clear that instead of just constantly trying to negotiate cease-fires, there's another issue about there - work with it. And see if you can't make something out of it. And get people to start thinking about that and what it might lead to.

I happened to be in the Middle East about, by chance, about two weeks after Sadat's visit to Jerusalem. I'll never forget it. I had been, I was then President of Bechtron, and we had been in negotiation with the American Jewish community over legislative language having to do with the Arab boycott. And the head of the business roundtable was the president of Dupont, a wonderful man named Irving Shapiro. And he was the negotiator and we worked something out that everyone agreed to and the Congress was so pleased they enacted it without changing a comma. They were so relieved. And the King of Saudi Arabia, who then was King Khalid, I guess he must have thought we did a good job, so he invited Irving and I to come. So we went. We made it clear we're going to Saudi Arabia, then we're going to Jordan, then we're going to Israel. This was all arranged before Sadat's visit. So we start our way and it was clear wherever we went that people without saying so were busy passing us messages to take. But when we got to Israel, we had quite a few, we met some government officials, but mostly we met with university people and company people and Irving had given quite a lot of money I think to get some management schools going and things like that. And I sat next to numerable Israelis, in most meetings it's like here, you get a space of women and men around, it's so nice to talk to a lot of mothers. And it was absolutely apparent that it was a tremendous thing that Sadat visited Jerusalem. Why? Not because they thought there was a probability of peace, but because they thought there was a possibility of peace. That excites people. And you think of the way people are living their lives now. If there is some chance to settle things down. And any chance in the Middle East is slim. You don't have to tell me that there's a high probability of something. There isn't. The Middle East, it's like an addiction, you get into it and you break out and you have to be the most determined optimist around to keep going at it because it's so difficult. But, there's always that chance that something might work. So that's my message here - don't give up. Work at it.

Thank you for your insightful presentation. I'm Ekaterina Rostova from New York University and I also was involved with the previous National Security Forum on Cyber-terrorism and security. My question relates to your very important comment about preemption and taking preemptive activities to where the terrorists are. Now as September 11^th demonstrated, terrorists are not necessarily abroad. They could be anywhere in the United States. They could be living in [ ], going to the grocery store down the road, as did some of the hijackers who were living in this country for months preparing for the attack. Now this kind of reality requires preemptive activities domestically, possibly blending the capabilities that were traditionally employed for international or security efforts, surveillance efforts abroad, with criminal and law enforcement kind of activities domestically. Now, these two forces have been separated in the past as one of the efforts to protect the civil liberties of people who live in this country. I was wondering if you could comment on the tension between security and civil liberties in the situation that we face today, evaluate the efforts to heighten surveillance and security domestically of the leadership today and the possible tensions with civil liberties, and offer any of your own recommendations, perhaps, on how to ensure civil liberties that underlie democracy domestically while also ensuring its security.

George Schultz

It's tough. It's tough. But we know, as you say, that there are people in the United States, we have evidence in Britain, we have evidence in Germany, lots of countries, where there are problems. We are not harboring these people. We want to find out who they are and get them. That doesn't mean you go and shoot them, but if you can identify them, you do so properly. Now, no doubt surveillance is stepped up. And it's a hard issue, particularly, I guess, for you, for a person like me, I'm very much a civil liberties type person. And so I'm cautious about this, but I think that you have to say to yourself, there are people who are trying to harm us badly. They are connected. And they have an ability to do great harm, and we need to do a much better job of finding out about them. I happened to watch the news tonight. So here's the news that a letter postmarked March 3^rd comes from the immigration service to that school in Florida where that guy was trained, telling the people in the school they shouldn't train him. Come on. We've got to do better than that. And we can do better than that. And that's not trampling on anybody's civil liberties. It's a question that you have to keep in your mind all the time. But we need more competence, that's the point, competence.

I want to go back to the Saudi initiative. It's been clear for some time that the only people who can suppress the Arab terrorists and the Arab radicals are the Arab states. But the only people who can do something about the Israeli right wing and the Israeli settlers are the West. Are we prepared to supply the pressure on our side that balances the pressure that the Arabs have to supply on their side?

Yes. I should think so. As I said, I think that if this deal is to go forward, then the Israelis have to be prepared for some version of 242. No doubt the exact 1967 borders are not feasible. For all sorts of reasons. And people are familiar with that. They have to negotiate about that. As I said in my talk, I also think that there needs to be a more sophisticated form of negotiation than simply, this is your side and this my side. Because there's too much activity that is necessarily mixed up. You're going to find that there is a piece of land and somebody has the right to farm it. But then, that's not going to be the same thing as who's got a right to the water under it. And who's got a right to fly over it. It's a tiny little piece of land. So there has to be a more sophisticated approach, as I tried to indicate in my talk. But, my own sense on the settlements is that just as Arabs can, and are now living in Israel, Jews should have the right to live in the West Bank. But just as the Arabs in Israel have to accept that they are in the jurisdiction of the State of Israel, if you want to live in the jurisdiction of the Palestinian State, well, you can do that. But that's the state under which you're living. But I think some of the settlements probably are indefensible.