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CNN LATE EDITION WITH WOLF BLITZER
Interview With Pat Buchanan
Aired September 12, 2004 - 12:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
BLITZER: Let's move on now. We'll have more on Hurricane Ivan coming up. But let's get to some politics.
He's not running, but he's still raising a ruckus on the campaign trail -- specifically, the conservative commentator, the sometime candidate, and now the author Pat Buchanan. His new book, Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency.
Pat Buchanan, welcome back to "LATE EDITION."
PAT BUCHANAN, AUTHOR: Thank you, Wolf.
BLITZER: You're not running this time.
BUCHANAN: No, not yet.
(LAUGHTER)
BLITZER: But you sound in this book like you're really, really angry at the president.
BUCHANAN: Well, I'm not angry at the president, but I do believe the president, certainly in the course he took in Iraq, I believe that is not conservative at all.
We invaded a country that had not attacked us, did not threaten us, did not want war with us. We now know it didn't have weapons of mass destruction. We invaded and occupied. And I think we've radicalized the entire Arab world here, and we've created a situation where we've removed one devil, but seven more may come in his place.
BLITZER: So you don't think the American people -- that's your primary concern -- are better off with Saddam Hussein in jail and his two sons, Uday and Qusay, dead?
BUCHANAN: Oh, I think it's a good thing he's in jail and they're dead, but I'm not sure it's a good we got 140,000 soldiers fighting a guerrilla war in Iraq, and we've got imams from Morocco to Malaysia telling the people of the Islamic world to rise up and throw the Americans out.
BLITZER: They were telling their people that before the U.S. invaded Iraq.
BUCHANAN: Well, I disagree. I think the president of the United States and the United States' prestige, according to President Mubarak, have never been lower in the Islamic and Arab world.
I think, during Afghanistan, I think the president had the passive support even of Iran, even of Libya, even of Sudan...
BLITZER: Let me interrupt.
BUCHANAN: Sure.
BLITZER: Even before the U.S. invaded Iraq, look what they did on 9/11, they killed almost 3,000 Americans.
BUCHANAN: Well, look, I am 100 percent behind running down al Qaeda and killing them, but what the president has done by going into Iraq, I believe, is created a vast spawning pool for new recruits for Osama bin Laden.
I think Osama rejoiced at the fact that the Americans are going to invade the country that was the seat of the caliphate for 500 years, we're going to occupy an Arab country. That is exactly what they wanted.
BLITZER: You heard Condoleezza Rice say on this program just within the past hour, he's now in some cave, Ayman al-Zawahiri, his deputy, in some cave. They're not doing anything of any significant threat along the lines of what they used to be able to do.
BUCHANAN: Well, that's excellent. I mean, the president's focus on Afghanistan, the Taliban, al Qaeda was exactly right.
What I'm saying is, to me, Iraq was a total distraction, we went after a secular despot who had his country under control. That place could wind up as a haven for terrorists now, Wolf. Whatever you say, before we went in it was not that.
BLITZER: You write this in the book, in the book entitled "Where the Right Went Wrong": "Those of us who were called unpatriotic for opposing an invasion of Iraq and who warned we would inherit our own Lebanon of 25 million Iraqis were proven right."
Now, Condoleezza Rice will say there's a good chance there's going to be elections, this interim government in Iraq is moving along; yes, there are problems, but the final chapter of Iraq and the move toward democracy is by no means over.
BUCHANAN: Well, I hope she's right. But let me tell you, you've got 25 million people, and if you had a referendum, should the American occupiers get out, I would think that 90 percent would vote for the removal of the United States of America.
We don't know how it's going to come out. But you don't go to war, Wolf, to set up democracies. You go to war when you are threatened. Potentially, we have a problem in Iran, and potentially in North Korea. There was no threat from Saddam Hussein for the United States of America.
BLITZER: You keep calling those U.S. troops in Iraq occupiers. Zell Miller, the Democratic senator from Georgia who spoke at the Republican Convention, hates that. You heard his speech.
BUCHANAN: The American troops...
BLITZER: He says they're liberators.
BUCHANAN: They did. They went in and liberated the country from Saddam Hussein. But the perception almost of 100 percent of the Iraqi people is that they are occupiers. And the president of the United States has said himself, "I can understand how people do not like an occupation."
BLITZER: Here's another quote from your book. You write, "We are not hated for who we are. We are hated for what we do. It is not our principles that have spawned pandemic hatred of America in the Islamic world. It is our policies."
Now, the president of the United States totally disagrees with that.
BUCHANAN: The president is wrong.
BLITZER: Listen to what President Bush says.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The terrorists are fighting freedom with all their cunning and cruelty, because freedom is their greatest fear. And they should be afraid, because freedom is on the march.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BLITZER: He says that -- he totally disagrees with you.
BUCHANAN: Osama bin Laden and his crew up there in Tora Bora did not stumble on a copy of the Bill of Rights and go berserk that Americans are free in the United States. Read his fatwa, his jihad. He declared war on us for three reasons, Wolf.
One, we're sitting with an imperial footprint on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia. Second, we have these sanctions that are persecuting the Iraqi people, killing 1 million, which was an exaggeration. And third, we have an uncritical support of the state of Israel, which is stealing Palestinian land, dispossessing those people of rights which we preach to the whole world.
That is what they say why they are attacking us. I think we should listen to them, since they're the ones attacking us, rather than folks here who say they don't like us because we have a Bill of Rights and separation of church and state, which is an argument I think which is unpersuasive to a second-grader.
BLITZER: But some people would say that what your book is suggesting is that the United States and its policies are to blame for 9/11.
BUCHANAN: The United States and its policies are what are hated in the Arab world. The United States and its policies are what they are attacking.
Now, the policies may be right, but they -- the policies are that to which they object. Listen, Wolf, we have been free, wealthy, independent for 220 or 30 years, and the last time we had any trouble with these people before we went over there was with the Barbary pirates.
BLITZER: Isn't this the old Pat Buchanan, forever an isolationist, who simply doesn't like the United States getting involved in other countries?
BUCHANAN: Pat Buchanan was a strong Cold Warrior. I supported every single military action in the Cold War, except the intervention in Lebanon because that had nothing to do with the war with the Soviet Union.
Once the Soviet Union and Soviet empire collapsed, the country broke apart. There's no threat.
BLITZER: But you opposed the liberation of Kuwait.
BUCHANAN: I opposed -- look, I opposed the war in Kuwait, that's right, for the simple reason that in the long run, quite frankly, Kuwait is going to go to Iran or it's going to go to Iraq. The balance of power in that part of the world -- the only check you have for Iran's power is Iraq, and we have smashed that.
BLITZER: Even now you believe the U.S. with its allies going to war to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein's Iraq in 1991, even now you believe that was a mistake?
BUCHANAN: Well, I'll tell you what I wrote exactly. I said going in here is the first Arab-American war. It is not the last. We will have more wars because we are in here. Wolf, we cannot stay in the Gulf forever. And they are going to decide their own destiny there, and I felt what we should have done was defend the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, keep the pressure on Iraq and not invade. That's right.
BLITZER: The subtitle of your book, "How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency." What do you mean by that?
BUCHANAN: What I mean is the neoconservatives, who used to be allies of the old conservatives, they have themselves in positions of power in the administration. They have an agenda that Perle and Wolfowitz and Wurmser and the others, working with Netanyahu, had an agenda for war with Iraq that was going nowhere.
9/11 happens, and they put this agenda before a president, who in my judgment was untutored, as his father was not. Reagan would not have done this. I don't think his father would have done this.
They captured Rumsfeld, and they captured Cheney, and I think they captured the president...
BLITZER: You think the president of the United States, the vice president of the United States, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, the national security advisor are all little puppets that were manipulated by these so-called neoconservatives?
BUCHANAN: They were not manipulated. I think Rumsfeld was sold on the agenda as far back as 1998, and maybe Cheney was, on the agenda of the neoconservatives. And I think what happened -- it was going nowhere, though. The president was not going to war.
After 9/11, Wolfowitz comes in the day after and says, "Forget Afghanistan, let's do Iraq. It's doable." The neoconservatives moved at once. The president, however, went to Afghanistan, did the right thing. Then I think he said, "Where do we go next," and they said, "Here's where we go next."
BLITZER: But you make it sound like the president of the United States is an idiot.
BUCHANAN: No, the president of the United States was untutored in foreign policy. He didn't know Slovenia from Slovakia when he came into office.
I don't believe his father or Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan -- I think they would have listened to Wolfowitz, who Time magazine calls the intellectual architect of this. They would have listened, and they would have said, "No, I don't think so. I don't think that is a real, immediate, grave threat. So I don't think we're going to do it."
BLITZER: And you believe these neoconservatives, Wolfowitz and the others, were simply acting along the wishes of Benjamin Netanyahu, the former Israeli prime minister? BUCHANAN: No, I think they all basically agree. Wolfowitz has a global vision. Many of the neoconservatives have argued for benevolent global hegemony. They believe when the Cold War's over, we use our power to impose our system, our ideas on the world. We focus obsessively on the Middle East.
But all of them are very close to Likud. No question about it.
BLITZER: You know, once again, you're being accused of some anti-Semitism in this book. There's an editorial writer in the Los Angeles Times, Jacob Heilbrun, who refers to one section in your book when you talk about Richard Perle.
He writes in the LA Times, "Buchanan likens, in a blatantly anti- Semitic reference, former Bush advisor Richard Perle to Charles Dickens' Fagan, instructing young Oliver Twist."
BUCHANAN: Look, Fagan is a fictional character in a Dickens novel. And it's a funny comparison of young George Bush as Oliver Twist. Why is that offensive...
BLITZER: Did you think of the Jewish line of Fagan when you wrote that and Richard Perle being Jewish?
BUCHANAN: Well, I mean, obviously Fagan was Jewish. But the thing about it is he was a leader of pick-pockets in a fictional book. Why is it unacceptable for me to use a literary allusion when I am called routinely Father Charles Coughlin of the modern era who was alleged to be an anti-Semitic priest? That is an outrage because that's a real character.
But I'll tell you this. Look, my views with regard to the security of this country -- I disagree with Sharon's agenda. I think we have outsourced Middle East policy to Ariel Sharon. I think that's a disaster for this country. It's damaging our relations over the world.
And we cannot allow ourselves to be silenced because people call us names. My objection to the neoconservatives is not their ethnicity, Wolf. It is their war-mongering.
BLITZER: The notion that a lot of these neoconservatives are Jewish, that's come up several times, and that you're pointing to that is seen by some as anti-Semitism.
BUCHANAN: I can't help it that many of these folks -- if Norman Podhoretz calls for World War IV, an invasion of six or seven countries, and I go after him, he cannot defend himself on the grounds that he is simply Jewish.
Bill Bennett's a neoconservative. Jeane Kirkpatrick's a neoconservative. Robert Bartley's a neoconservative. John Bolton's a neoconservative. None of them are Jewish. All of them are mentioned in that book.
BLITZER: We're going to -- I want you to stand by. The president of the United States and his wife...
BUCHANAN: Is he responding?
BLITZER: No, no, no. He's not responding to you.
(LAUGHTER)
I want to thank Pat Buchanan for joining us. Unfortunately, we've got to leave it right there. Pat Buchanan's new book, Where the Right Went Wrong. | 