<html><body>AEI Briefing on the London Terrorist Attacks July 11, 2005 Unedited transcript prepared from a tape recording. <TABLE cellSpacing=1 cellPadding=1 width="100%" border=0> <TBODY> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV> <DIV class=BodyText>1:45 p.m.</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV> <DIV class=BodyText>Registration</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>2:00</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Discussants:</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Peter Bergen, New America Foundation</DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText>Frederick Kagan, AEI</DIV></DIV></DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText>William Kristol, The Weekly Standard</DIV></DIV></DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText>Michael Rubin, AEI</DIV></DIV></DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText>Moderator:</DIV></DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText>Radek Sikorski, New Atlantic Initiative</DIV></DIV></DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>3:30 </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Adjournment </DIV></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE> Proceedings: MR. SIKORSKI:  [In progress]  My first impression is that the terrorists have made a mistake because, if anybody knows anything about the history of England, the frame of mind of the people of London, they would have known that this attack would be seen as a retroactive vindication of the forward British policy on terror.  Therefore, it strikes me that the terrorists are either so blinded by their ideology that they cannot think strategically, or they are so short of capabilities that they are striking where they can rather than where they should.  Perhaps this is a tiny silver lining in the horrible tragedy that is still unfolding as the bodies are being dug out and scraped out. We have for you a distinguished panel of experts, some of whom, most of whom do not need introductions.  I believe you have their affiliations on our order paper, and, therefore, without much more ado, I'd like to start with Peter Bergen, the author of--"Al Qaeda, Inc."?  "Terror, Inc."? MR. BERGEN:  "Holy War, Inc." MR. SIKORSKI:  "Holy War, Inc."--to give us a historical perspective on what looks likely to be an al Qaeda attack.  Peter? MR. BERGEN:  Thank you very much, and the last time I was here I was debating the al Qaeda-Iraq connection, so I think we'll have less disagreement this time perhaps. Well, let me preface, I first encountered, I guess, the al Qaeda network, for what of a better word, in late '96, early '97, in England when I was prepping what would be Osama bin Laden's first television interview, which was with CNN.  I was a producer, and I met with people affiliated with bin Laden in London. Now, the person that I encountered in London principally to arrange all this was a guy by the name of Hamad al-Fawaz, who is a Saudi.  I think he comes out of an engineering background.  He was living in Dollis Hill in North London, and he was really kind of operating very openly as bin Laden's spokesman in London.  You may recall that bin Laden founded a political group called the Advice and Reformation Committee, which was really an outgrowth of the letter of demands, the letter of advice that a group of Saudi opposition figures had sent to the Royal Family in the early '90s. So Hamad al-Fawaz made no secret of his affiliation with bin Laden, and he facilitated our interview with bin Laden.  Al-Fawaz has actually spent seven years in prison in Britain without charge, awaiting extradition to the United States in his alleged role in the U.S. Embassy bombing attacks in '98.  In my view, Hamad al-Fawaz probably had very little to do with the embassy attacks.  He was obviously not in the country.  He was in London at the time. There are a couple of problems for his lawyer.  One is that he set up an import-export company in Kenya before the blast, and on the board was a guy called Abu Ubaidah Banshiri, who happened to be al Qaeda's military commander at the time, which is either a case of very bad timing or being in the wrong place at the wrong time or something more.  So that was Hamad al-Fawaz. Another person that I met in London is somebody who's been suggested has been involved in this case, a guy called Abu Musab al-Suri, who's a Syrian of Spanish descent.  The English papers are full of speculation about who might be behind this, and the fact is, I was saying to Radek before I came into the room, one of the striking things about this case is that there is no case.  I mean, by this moment in the Madrid attacks, despite what the Spanish government said initially, it was clear it was not   (?)   it was a group of Islamic radicals and the names of these radical were known by this stage.  By 9/11, within 24 hours we knew who was involved because we had the passenger manifests of the jets. So one of the striking things to me about this case is that, despite the fact this is the most surveyed city by surveillance cameras probably in the Western world, and with one of the most aggressive police forces in the Western world, and the most aggressive media presence, we have nothing in the case so far, which poses a bit of a problem for our panel, because what to say about who might be behind it. Well, there are a lot of things I think we can say in general about Londonistan.  The British--you know, Karl Marx is buried in Highgate, and the reason he's buried in Highgate is that the British have a long tradition, an honorable tradition of asylum laws, very open asylum laws, and that continues.  And I think that there's a question--I mean, here's an example of somebody that one might want to look at.  Saad al-Fagih is the leader of the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia.  He is, arguably, the most important Saudi opposition figure today.  He lives in North London.  Last year, a group of--two people came into his house in North London and tried to stab him to death without robbing him.  Now, that doesn't really happen very often in North London.  It was a targeted assassination.  We can guess who was perhaps behind it. Saad has certainly irritated the Saudi Royal Family considerably because he called for demonstrations in the streets of Riyadh, and they happened for the first time in history last year.  He is also operating a satellite channel with some success, broadcasting TV and radio into the Kingdom. Recently, the State Department--the Treasury Department designated him as a terrorist.  So I think Saad is sort of an interesting question.  I spent a great--quite a lot of time with him.  Is he a terrorist or is he a legitimate dissident?  That's one level of question about what's going on in London?  The one thing that Saad has perhaps a problem with is that his credit card was used to buy Osama bin Laden's satellite phone. The second level of question to look at are people like Abu Hamsa and Omar Bakri Mohammed, who in my view are sort of blowhards and jokes who, unfortunately, people have taken seriously.  Abu Hamsa is now on trial.  That trial, in fact, began just--well, it was scheduled to begin the day before the bomb went off.  Is there a link between the trial and the bomb?  I don't think so because I think that really it was the G-8. Now, Abu Hamsa is neither a serious political figure nor a serious religious figure.  However, he's had rather an influence on a number of impressionable young men.  For instance, his son and son-in-law traveled to Yemen in December of '98, claiming that they were on vacation.  Well, a traffic stop at a traffic light in Sana'a led to a house where things not associated with a quiet vacation in Yemen were found, like mines and GPS.  And it turned out that this group of young British blokes had gone to Yemen on a sort of jihad vacation. As a result of that jihad vacation, a group of Westerners were then kidnapped, almost immediately thereafter, Western tourists.  And in the middle of the kidnapping, the leader of the kidnappers took time out to call Abu Hamsa on his sat. phone.  So we see this other level of people who are not serious political figures and who have influenced a whole group of young men in London to do things that are wrong. Another example is Sheikh Bakri Mohammed, who also--he runs a group called al-Muhajiroun, which is sort of an al Qaeda support network, I would say, kind of, you know--now, again, two British middle-class, second-generation Pakistanis who'd attended--British citizens who'd attended college in London, walked into a busy jazz club in Tel Aviv two years ago, one of them blew himself up.  And these guys had attended al-Muhajiroun meetings, and by Sheikh Bakri's own account, he had been a spiritual mentor.  He conceded as much in an interview in the Daily Telegraph, although he's obviously changed his mind since he gave that interview. So you see that these clerics in London have been operating with some impunity.  Finally, when the United States finally decided to extradite Abu Hamsa, because the Western tourists I referred to included two Americans who were kidnapped, it turned out, of course, that three of the people who got killed in the kidnapping were actually British, and so the British then turned around and re-arrested him, not on the extradition but on our own case for inciting racial hatred, which is a crime in Britain. There's much else I could say, but I don't want to take up much more time.  I think the striking thing about the case, again, the lack of leads, and I think that, you know, I suspect that British tolerance for people like Omar Bakri Mohammed will disappear.  Up to this point, he's not been charged with any crimes.  You can also make the case that he was connected to an important case which is a precursor of what we just saw last Thursday, which was the arrest of 12 British guys who had half a ton of ammonium nitrate in a locker stored near Heathrow.  Now, ammonium nitrate can be used for gardening, but not in half-ton quantities.  And it was the same material used in the Bali blast and also in the Oklahoma City blast. And, one, I guess just to sum up, why is this happening at all?  Well, I think that this is a larger problem about a lack of integration of European Muslims into their host populations that is going to get much worse over time.  Europeans as a group are sort of going out of business.  The Italians are not replacing themselves, and they face a question.  If they want to continue as a nation, they have to import large numbers of workers from North Africa, from the Middle East, the very place where al Qaeda is incubating itself.  And in Britain, we're seeing 22 percent unemployment rates of young men between the ages of 16 and 24. The Guardian newspaper polled British Muslims last year asking, Would you countenance a kind of al Qaeda-style attack on the United States?  And a surprising 13 percent said yes. So there's this problem of alienation.  It's not peculiar simply to Britain, and it's going to get worse before it gets better, which is a national security problem not only for the Brits and for Europeans but also for us.  These people benefit from a visa waiver program that makes it extremely easy for them to come here to this country.  I'm not suggesting we junk the program, but we might look at ways of putting Department of Homeland Security officials in embassies to have face-to-face interviews with people thinking of coming to the United States. MR. SIKORSKI:  It seems to me that you described rather precisely the sociological milieu from which the terrorists could have come.  And given that the U.S. experience in New Jersey and New York was literally with a couple of families, isn't it possible that it was those people and families associated with them that were responsible?  And how much do we know about them given that one assumes that MI5 was on to them all along and that they would have been under constant surveillance? MR. BERGEN:  When you say a couple of families, you mean Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Yousef? MR. SIKORSKI:  Yes. MR. BERGEN:  I mean, who knows?  It's clear that they are the usual suspects.  The two or three hundred people that the metropolitan police or the English police in general are looking at were not involved.  Otherwise, they would have surfaced their names by now, I think.  And, also, they could have come from somewhere else.  I mean, EU passport holders can obviously move very easily around Europe.  You know, as to who their identities are, who knows? One thing I'd like to say about the class dimension of this, in this country the American dream sort of works in this instance, and American Muslims have not signed on to the al Qaeda ideology.  American Muslims second generation become dentists.  They don't become Kashmiri militants.  That's not true in England.  And that cuts across class lines. For instance, Omar Sheikh, who kidnapped and murdered Danny Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter in Pakistan, attended a British public school.  He then attended London School of Economics.  His father was a wealthy manufacturer.  You can't--it's more than just simply a class thing.  It's also an alienation thing.  And having grown up in Britain myself and being an American citizen, I felt somewhat--you know, as you know, Radek, the British are not--you know, if you're a Pakistani, you're still a second-class citizen too often.  That's also true in France if you're an Algerian, or Spain if you're a Moroccan, and also in the Netherlands.  And I think that--you know, there isn't a European dream.  There is an American dream. MR. SIKORSKI:  Well, since you've smoked me out, I have to say I was an asylum claimant in Britain, and somehow I didn't turn to jihad-- [Laughter.] MR. SIKORSKI:  Karl Marx, by the way, may have got asylum, but he was refused British citizenship on the grounds that he was not a respectable person. [Laughter.] MR. SIKORSKI:  Michael, what's your take on this? MR. RUBIN:  I'm also going to talk a little bit more historically today and leave the commentary and the current policy discussion to our other two guests and our able asylum seeker and moderator. What I'd like to do is actually look a little bit about the evolution of some of the Islamist as opposed to Muslim groups in Europe, because I will always draw a distinction between Islamism, which is more of a political ideology, and Islam, which for many peaceful is a peaceful religion.  I mean, there is a sharp difference between the two, and I think despite all the straw-man arguments which many people often make, many people who do study terrorism and do study militant Islam are very careful always to make that distinction. I'd like actually to explore a little bit both the Muslim Brotherhood and Tablighi Jamaat, two different groups which were ably addressed in the winter 2005 issue of the Middle East Quarterly by Lorenzo Vidino and by Alex Alexiev.  I want to cite the fact that these two men are some of the experts on the evolutions of these groups and how they relate to the West and, therefore, give credit where credit is due. In many ways, oftentimes people talk about the development of al Qaeda as an artifact of the Cold War.  There's this false conventional wisdom out there that the United States, for example, trained al Qaeda, trained the Taliban, where--I mean, for example, when I was in Afghanistan back in 1997 and 2000, most of the Taliban folks who I met and some of the foreign jihadis inside Afghanistan, inside Kandahar and so forth, they could have been twenty-something years old at the time, which meant they would have been in nursery school, kindergarten, at the time when the CIA was supporting the mujahedin  (?)  .  It is a little bit of a false or overly simplified analysis at times, but no matter how critical one wants to be of the Central Intelligence Agency, they're not yet into the habit of training kindergartners.  And oftentimes we have to remember that groups don't remain frozen in time, and it's important to address the time factor that groups do evolve over time. At any rate, though, in the case of the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe, the case extends considerably far back to the beginning of the Cold War, where, as you recall, with the division of East Germany and West Germany, in the early 1950s West Germany had a policy that any country which established diplomatic relations with East Berlin would automatically have to sever relations with Bonn.  I mean, in many ways similar to what China and Taiwan have done for the last 20 years or so. And as a result of that, I mean, against that backdrop, you also had the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, and many Muslim Brotherhood adherents fled Egypt--and Syria, for that matter--as a result of the crackdown, and West Germany, among other Western European countries, gave these Islamist dissidents asylum, not so much because they wanted to support peace and resistance and so forth in the Magreb and in the Middle East, but because they basically wanted to stick it to the Eastern bloc.  And it's one of those things.  Germany and Switzerland became centers for the Muslim Brotherhood, and we could go into a whole evolution.  I'm not going to go into everything, but Said Ramadan, for example, had formed the Islamic Society of Germany and cofounded the Muslim World League. Fast forward several decades, several changes of leadership.  In March 2002, U.S. authorities raided the Muslim World League offices in, I believe, Northern Virginia because of suspected ties to fundraising with al Qaeda and Hamas. The Islamic Society of Germany has since, for actually the past nine years or so, been focused on youth recruitment and also on unity beyond--taking advantage in a way of European Union open borders.  In 1996, Muslim youth organizations from Sweden, France, and England joined with the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, which is supported by Saudi Arabia, to create a European Islamic youth organization.  It was actually formed in Leicester--I'm trying to get my British pronunciation right--and it was called the Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organizations. Now, put the Muslim Brotherhood aside for a second.  You also have the Tablighi Jamaat, which isn't a Salafi group or Wahhabi group, as many people often conflate Islamist extremism just with Wahhabis or Salafis, or whatever you want to call them.  They're actually a Deobandi group, which has a philosophy slightly--I mean, with its roots in South Asia, has a philosophy slightly different, and sometimes on the Islamist chat lines and the question lines, you'll see debates between Salafis and Deobandis as to, for example, whether it's permissible to pray in a mosque that has a tomb in it, and a little more arcane issues of Islamic interpretation, theological interpretation. But oftentimes in the Western media, where even after this, BBC is afraid to call this a terrorist attack, they let other people do it for them.  I mean, because, as we know, they're just militants.  And I saw in one--it may have been Reuters; I forget what--"An attempted militant attack," which was a really strange verbiage.  But at any rate you have this belief voiced by many in the academic community and by many in the press that is afraid to talk about the Islamic component to militant Islam, to Islamists.  And this doesn't do anything in the service of understanding and of tolerance.  Frankly, what it does is it screws over the silent majority, perhaps, of the Muslim community, which is quite a bit more moderate in their outlook, because it allows people, A, to not address--I mean, basically to not address the root of the problem. For example, when it comes to Tablighi Jamaat, which is sometimes portrayed as just a spiritual development and proselytizing group--Barbara Metcalf, a University of California scholar, South Asian Islam, called the group "an apolitical quietist movement of internal grass-roots and missionary renewal."  Olivier  (?)  called it "completely apolitical and law-abiding."  The problem is there's more than 6,000 Tablighis in Harakat mujahedin camps, and they were also suspected of involvement in the Casablanca synagogue attack in 2003, and this goes into the issue of the type of Islam which is preached, the incitement, in Britain's South Asian Community or aspects thereof and in mosques in general. It brings us to the point that sometimes this taboo gets in the way of addressing the problem.  Daniel Pipes pointed out this morning that MI5 in the report which was leaked, I believe in the Daily Mail, said that a very small number, only about 1 percent of British Muslims are suspected by MI5 of participating in any activity relating to terrorism.  But when you have a population of 1.6 million, this works out to about 16,000 people, which is anything--it can be a lot of things, but it's not exactly small. I do think what this highlights is that we need to talk a little bit about incitement, and with this I close.  We're oftentimes afraid to address the issue, and while I'll leave some of the policy implications for questions and answers and Bill Kristol and Fred, I'd like to point out that when I go over to Iraq, oftentimes--and when I'm visiting people in the Pentagon and so forth, oftentimes I'll see Korans on their desk because people want to learn about the part of the world in which we're now actively engaged.  And oftentimes there's very little attention paid to the Korans and the translations of the Korans which people are using.  I'd just point out two examples:  the Yusuf Ali Koran, which was subsidized by the Saudi Government, it was banned a couple years ago in California schools for its anti-Semitic commentary; and also the Noble Koran in the English language, which is now promoted actively and subsidized by the Saudis.  And one example from that is the phrase, "Guide us to the straight path, the path of those whom you have favored, not of those who have incurred your wrath, nor of those who have gone astray."  In the Noble Koran in the English language, that version of it, it became, "Guide us to the straight path, the way of those on whom you have bestowed your grace," not those of whom have earned your anger, such as the Jews, nor of those who went astray, such as the Christians. We've got to start paying attention to the problems that are going on in theological debates within the Islamic world. I would just leave with pointing out that Michael Duran's thesis, I guess, from Foreign Affairs, that in many ways this isn't an "us versus them."  This is more a case, as he so aptly put in Foreign Affairs, of "us getting"--"people trying to bring us into their civil war." And, with that, I'll turn it over for more policy analysis. MR. SIKORSKI:  Thanks, Michael. Fred, how does this attack fit into the ideological confrontation?  And would you agree with me that the terrorists have made a mistake? MR. KAGAN:  I do, Radek.  I do think that they've made a number of mistakes, and I think that it has to do a great deal with how this fits into the ideological dimension. It strikes me that we have been very quick to say that this is a struggle unlike any we've ever seen before; this is a new struggle that has nothing to do with the Cold War.  And the amazing thing is that to me it actually has quite a lot to do with the Cold War, not because the roots of this lie in the Cold War but because this is an ideological struggle.  And it is every bit as much of an ideological struggle, I think, as the Cold War was. There is a coherent body of Islamist thought that dates back into the 19th century, but especially back into the 1950s and '60s, and you can go back and read the writings of Sayyid Qutb  and various other members of the Muslim Brotherhood and a variety of Islamist activists back then and see that there is a coherent body of Islamist ideology, radical ideology that all of this is feeding on.  And I think that one of the things that the London attacks show is that this ideology is itself the binding force for a lot of these activities. It's remarkable that we know apparently nothing at all about who specifically conducted these attacks.  It seems very clear that it was an Islamist attack.  And if so, it must have been or probably was an attack by a group that was only loosely affiliate with al Qaeda, with groups that we've been watching very closely. And yet the link was strong in terms of ideology, and if you look at the claim of credit, the statement claiming credit that came out, you could see there very, very clearly a statement of the same sort of ideology that has been motivating these people all along.  And I'd like to just make a couple of salient points about that ideology and its significance in this struggle. First of all, it is an ideology that is extremely destructive.  It is not an ideology that offers a very positive vision, except for a very small handful of people, I think, in the Muslim world who will actually be attracted by it.  I'm not going to go so far as to say that it's just an ideology of hatred.  It isn't, although the hatred is extremely prominent in it.  But the notion of reclaiming the Umba(?) and purifying it and establishing it in accord with a very particularist set of notions about how Islam ought to work but I think on the whole will not be very popular in the Muslim world is in many respects a drawback.  And I think we're seeing--it's a drawback for the terrorists.  And I think that we're seeing this in Iraq, that this ideology is not really serving very well to rally a lot of Iraqis away from the cause of establishing a stable democratic government in Iraq and to the terrorists.  And I think we'll find that as this insurgency unfolds in the Muslim world, they will have problems putting this ideology over and getting a large number of recruits. Now, of course, our problem is they don't need a large number of recruits because their techniques are designed to allow small groups to undertake very dramatic attacks, such as the one we saw in London.  But if you think about the likelihood of overall success of this movement, I think that the particularities of their ideology are going to be much more of a drawback for them over the long term than they are going to be a benefit. I think it's extremely important--excuse me, and I think in that regard they are also capable of making significant mistakes that flow from the particularities of this ideology.  I was very struck by the fact that the statement claiming credit linked Iraq and Afghanistan together, which from the standpoint of tactics in Britain was, I think, a major mistake.  The British participation in Iraq has been unpopular.  It's been increasingly unpopular.  Attacking that policy is one thing, although, again, I also agree with Radek and others that attacking it in this way was probably the least likely to succeed given Britain's historical ability to shrug these things off.  But if you were just going to attack the occupation of Iraq, that's one thing. The occupation of Afghanistan, Britain's role in that has been a completely different story in the way the British people have perceived it.  And I think by linking the two of those things together, the statement made it clear that there was really no acceptable role that Britain could play in the Muslim world at all.  And that, I think, tends to obscure a message which would have been otherwise much more straightforward, get out of Iraq, which was the message that was sent to Spain and apparently received. Why did they link these two?  Well, I think in part because of the nature of the ideology.  The ideology does say that there is no acceptable way for Western democratic states to involve themselves legitimately in the Muslim world.  And it is a jihad against all such states.  And I believe that these terrorists and other terrorists such as the ones who have been kidnapping the envoys of Muslim states in Iraq are allowing themselves to be blinded by their ideology, and that is, in fact, overwhelming their ability to pursue a coherent strategy that's more likely to succeed.  And that is a certain amount of good news, as Radek said, that is a silver lining, I think, in this dreadful attack. I think it's equally important that we understand that, you know, as Bush has been much maligned for pursuing an ideological foreign policy, I personally think that he is doing exactly the right thing; and if we want to succeed over the long term in this struggle, it is critically important that we have the sort of positive ideology that Bush is laying out, which has proven to have a significant draw, even in places like Iraq, where, after all, eight million Iraqis braved the bullets and went out and voted, and in Afghanistan, where millions of Afghans have gone out and participated in the political process despite threats, which does demonstrate the appeal, I think, of this positive ideology even in the Muslim world. I think it's extremely important that we not lose sight of that, and I think that it's very important that we continue--we, the West, continue to put up against the Islamist ideology of hatred and intolerance an ideology of openness, democracy, and a positive vision for the world.  I think if we stop doing that, then we really will be in danger of losing the ideological portion of this global war on terror, which I think is going to end up being the most decisive portion. And I think with that I'll turn it over to Bill. MR. SIKORSKI:  Bill, of the Weekly Standard, were you surprised that they struck in Britain?  How does this fit into the war on terror?  I was expecting them, frankly, to hit either in Italy or in Poland, whose governments are less committed to the Iraq operation, and in Italy in particular, the terrorists might have hoped to achieve a Spain  (?)  too, namely, a change of government.  Instead they hit London, where they've been well treated--it was a base in some senses--and where they couldn't hope to change the policy.  What's your view? MR. KRISTOL:  I don't know how much they can plan and coordinate these things.  I imagine they attack opportunistically, and, as Peter said, there are a lot of them in London, and London's tradition of civil liberties is I think given them much freer rein, even though they seem to be monitored a lot, they don't seem to be actually be locked up as much as in some other countries.  So it may just have been that they thought that was a, you know, an attack they could pull off, and they pulled it off. I don't think terrorists--I think their basic view is the more people they can kill the better.  And I think usually that's not--I don't quite buy the argument that that's foolish of them, you know.  They have succeeded in intimidating an awful lot of western governments over the last 20 years, including ours.  To retreat from countries where we wanted to be--Lebanon, Somalia, et cetera--and to make accommodations where we shouldn't have I would say to the various terrorists groups, particularly in the case of the Palestinians, they learned the lesson that terror basically works.  Now, sometimes it backfires.  And let's hope ultimately that it's all backfired and 9/11 certainly--I'll come back to this in a minute--did backfire I think, but I don't know.  Their view is probably the simple-minded view that the more people they kill, you know, the better off they'll be and that people probably will decide to retreat--people in the West and also people in the Middle East who are fighting the terrorists will decide to retreat. So I'm not so sure--I think their--you know, their attitude is the more people they can kill the better, and we need to prove that wrong.  But I don't think we can assume that it's been proven wrong to them yet, unfortunately. I was worried when Peter began by saying that because we actually know so little about what happened and who did it here, in this case, that we're limited in what we can say, since that would really destroy all of cable television commentary and even many think tank panels, you know.  But I'm glad that hasn't deterred us here. I also--let me just say a word about three topics that I'm not going to say anything more about.  This will be an important moment.  It will cause lots of debate about how to fight terrorism and the sort of precise, law enforcement Patriot Act, you know, should Britain have something more like what we do.  Let's compare into other European ways of dealing with indigenous or recently imported terrorists.  You know, I think that will be an interesting question that could lead to changes in policies.  I think the issue of Europe--to the degree that Europe is having a crisis and the referenda show that--the referenda that defeated the constitution in France and the Netherlands--I think this will contribute to the sense in Europe that all is not well.  They have bad economies.  Their constitution is failing.  They have big immigration problems, and now they've had two terror attacks in a little over a year, and what--you know, so it will increase general dissatisfaction with the status quo in Europe and lead to all kinds--who knows what the effects of that will be. But I think they could be pretty considerable, and I think some of the issues Peter just touched on--I mean the degree to which there is mobility now within the European--most of the European Union; the degree to which if one can get into one country, one can go to all the others; if one has a passport, one can really go to all the others, but even if one gets in illegally, one can pretty well go to a lot of the others.  A lot of these things that have been pretty much taken for granted as kind of core elements of the European project I wonder, you know,  whether electorates in various countries won't start to take a look and say, wait a second.  What about this?  Because they don't think of immigration policy, civil liberties policies and the like. And then there's the question of sort of let's call it Western Islam, to distinguish it from Middle Eastern Islam.  You could make a case I think that Islam in Western Europe is now more radical than Islam in the Middle East.  Ruel Gerecht [ph.] has made this case and is going to make it again in this week's Weekly Standard, and I think that--I mean there's a way in which you really have to stop and think about our general picture of these extremely radical, radicalized parts of the Middle East exporting a dangerous form of Islam to Western Europe.  It may just be now out of date.  And it seems that there's more breeding of the true radicals in Western Europe and conversely incidentally more of a rising up of a moderate kind of Islam that wants to suppress the extremists in parts of the Middle East, such as in Iraq.  And so I think the whole question of how Islam and America seems to think ought to be very different from Islam in Europe.  And the question of what they can do about this in Europe that's going to become a very interesting debate. So those are all I mean interesting questions that will be debated and could have policy implications over the next few weeks and months. I'll just say a word about the general war on terror, and this is very tentative as I just started thinking about this after Tom Donnelly called and asked me to be on this panel.  I mean if one really steps back and says--and this goes to your point, Radek, about sort of victory or failure for the terrorists--you know sort of how's it been going.  I mean let's assume it is a global war on terror, regardless of what links there were between, you know, Saddam and Al-Qaeda before September 11th, but we are now--since then in one war.  I should tell Peter who debated Steve Hays [ph.] I think what about a year ago that Steve has a huge piece in the New Weekly Standard reiterating and amplifying on the Al-Qaeda [inaudible] links. MR. SIKORSKI:  That's the end of the commercial. MR. KRISTOL:  Yeah.  I know.  Based on newly developed, new documents captured by us in Iraq.  So you can have this debate with Steve again in a month or two. But whatever the case was before, it clearly is in some sense one war.  Certainly, the terrorists think it is.  I would say generally speaking for the first couple of years we did quite well, quite well.  If you had said on September 12th that we would succeed in removing the Afghan regime and the Iraqi regime with limited cost in casualties to us or to the people living there, incidentally; that there would be no uprising; there would be very little terror certainly in the West over those two year--and some, you know, bad, terrible incidents in Bali and Istanbul.  But really compared to what people expected on September 12th, less I think success on the part of the terrorists.  The Arab Street didn't rise up on their behalf.  There wasn't, you know, pro-western governments weren't retoppled all over the Arab world or anything. The first couple of years on the whole went pretty well.  I think for about the year, from late 2003 through mid-2004, things started to look as if they were going much worse, and they were going somewhat worse. Iraq was much harder obviously.  We made big mistakes.  The occupation was much more costly and difficult than we thought, partly due to us, partly due to things beyond our control I suppose.  There was--so the domestic support for the war here went--got much shakier.  What had been genuinely a bipartisan effort became much more partisan, with the turn of a good chunk of the Democratic Party against the Global War on Terror.  Then there was the Spanish attack in Madrid and the election of March 14--again, whatever the motives of Spanish voters and however the Aznar government might have mishandled it--objectively, I think it's very hard to say that March 14th and the election of Zapatero wasn't a great victory unfortunately for the terrorists.  And then Fallujah, which was what?  The first week of April?  And the I think really disastrous retreat there after we began and then stopped the operation. Generally speaking, by mid-April, May of last year, one had the feeling, both in terms of public opinion at home, political developments in Western Europe, and actually what was happening on the ground in Iraq, that it was not very reassuring. After that, I think things turned again, though, and from about October--let's say the Afghan elections, which were a pretty big success and reflected a sort of quiet change in and improvement in our Afghan--execution of our Afghan policy in 2003--the Afghan elections through Howard's reelection, Bush's reelection--I'm not being partisan here, but just--if the governments that are running the War on Terror and are the more hawkish in fighting it tend to get reelected, you've got to say that that's in some sense, you know, a strengthening of the hand I think of the countries fighting the war.  Howard and Bush get reelected.  The Palestinian election gets pulled off in December.  Progress on Palestinian-Israeli issues--less terror there than there has been in years actually over the last six, nine months.  Then, of course, January 30th in Iraq, above all, and then the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon; the Arab Street rises and it turns out it's a pro-democracy street, not a pro-terror street. I mean you had about five or six months there that were awfully good for us and for the anti-terror forces in the War on Terror. I'd say over the last three, four months, it's gotten much more questionable and [inaudible] shaky.  Iraq, the hoped for transformative effects of the Iraqi elections don't seem to have happened.  I mean I think it's a good thing, and I think the political progress there is still impressive, but obviously on the ground, it remains very tough there.  The dictatorships in the region are fighting back, somewhat effectively unfortunately.  The sort of inevitable move to democracy seems more complicated and mixed.  Things are very much in question in that respect.  And now we have this development in London. I think it's a big moment actually.  I hope certainly the British don't seem inclined to behave like the Spanish did in the immediate aftermath of their attack, but I don't know.  I don't know what's going to happen.  Still, I think ultimately things depend on how the broader war goes, and that--I'll just close with this--that does come back to Iraq. I mean the truth is if we defeat the terrorist and if Iraq progresses to something resembling a pluralist, constitutional democracy, that is a huge, huge victory which swamps the various setbacks and problems, and you know, Uzbekistan, where dictators unfortunately seem to have succeeded in cracking down unlike in other places where they tried to crack down.  If we could pull off Iraq and make progress in Egypt--those are such huge aspects of taking--if we can make progress on the democratization agenda in Egypt and win the war in Iraq, I think that tends to swamp whatever minor setbacks we have. But those are both up in the air and question marks and I worry a little bit that in the absence of progress there, in the absence of progress there, the initial response in Britain will certainly be tough and strong, but two or three months from now, one could have a drum beat of calls for Blair to pull out of Iraq and an increased sense among public opinion in the Western democracies that this was all--that accommodation and not winning the war is the way to go. I hope not, and I think not.  But I'm--I think it's a worrisome time. MR. SIKORSKI:  Thanks, Bill.  I would add a footnote in that the implications on policy conclusions from the fact that the terrorists managed to get through in Britain are somewhat perverse, because Britain is actually not part of the Schengen Agreement and actually has border controls.  It has a domestic intelligence service, MI-5, that the United States is only thinking of, and it has a draconian prevention of terrorism act, much stricter--that gives the government much greater powers than the Patriot Act. And even so, the terrorists managed to get through, which just shows you how difficult it is to protect our transportation systems. I'll open the floor for discussion, but I'll give preference--if there is in the room a computer expert who can explain to us how come it is that things appear on the Internet claiming responsibility for atrocities, and we cannot get--catch the people who put them there.  I mean we convict those who upload computer viruses.  Computers are not anonymous.  If we can catch those people, computer experts who try to stay anonymous, why can't we catch the radicals who put up those claims of responsibility?  Is there anybody in the room who can explain this to us because it would actually be pertinent to what we're discussing.  If not, I'm opening a general discussion.  Please. MR.          :  [Inaudible.] [Laughter.] MR. BERGEN:  Radek, can I comment on the claim of responsibility?  You may remember the Abu Hafs Masri Brigade claimed credit for the U.S. blackout, so anybody can do this and claim anything.  So, while agreeing with everything that Fred said, so from an ideological point of view, we have no idea what this group is, who these people are, and it could be nothing. MR. SIKORSKI:  Sure, but even if the claim of responsibility is false, at least we should be able to get the people making the false claim. MR. BERGEN:  No doubt. MR. SIKORSKI:  Right?  The gentleman-- MR.          :  [Off mike.] I would just add one point that the web sites often can be handed off to three or four venues.  For example, the hacker that got into the Pentagon files a couple of years ago came through Moscow apparently, and that's one of the reasons they're hard to get. MR. SIKORSKI:  Moscow is supposed to be an ally in the War on Terrorism and surely they would look up the IP addresses and  let us, you know, trace the thing back to its origin.  It should be doable.  I mean we've all seen the movies in which it's done. Right?  The gentleman here. MR.          :  My name is Sayed Urka [ph.] from Ur Katz Daily Newspaper.  My question is to Peter Bergen.  I heard today a report that 10 percent of the population of London is Muslim. MR. BERGEN:  Yeah. MR. URKA:  Could you give us a breakdown--I mean, you know,  is it mostly Arab, mostly-- MR. BERGEN:  It's mostly-- MR. URKA:  And then I have just a follow up.  And Michael mentioned there's a 16,000 hard-core Al-Qaeda or, you know, extremist kind of support-- MR. RUBIN:  According to MI-5. MR. URKA:  Right.  Right.  According to MI-5.  So could you tell us what kind of activities constitute extremism or supporting of Al-Qaeda?  Thank you. MR. BERGEN:  Well, okay.  This was a British Home Office report concluded there were up to 15,000 Al-Qaeda sympathizers or for groups similar to Al-Qaeda.  And they arrived at that figure by three methods: intelligence, the fact that Hizb-ut-Tahrir, which they describe as a structured extremist organization, attracted 10,000 people it had last year.  And that's how they came to that figure. How many--you know, obviously most of--the majority of Muslims in Britain are South Asian, from Pakistan and also from India.  Their age profile is interesting.  It's the youngest age profile of any group in Britain.  Over a third of the population is under the age of 16.  And, as I said, they have a 23 percent unemployment rate in that 16 to 24 age bracket. MR. SIKORSKI:  Do you think reducing welfare benefits might be useful in making those people move to other countries? MR. BERGEN:  Well, it's actually kind of a brilliant idea, because, you know, these blow hards who are calling for, you know, of the black flag or the green flag of Islam to be flying over 10 Downing Street are all on welfare, and Abu Hamza is on welfare.  Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammed is on welfare, and so one of the reasons that apart from I think the liberal asylum laws are much more--the main attraction.  But if you can also get paid to be a kind of full time blow hard, that's good, too. MR. SIKORSKI:  The gentleman over here. MR. AMATAI:  Maury Amatai [ph.] with Jensa.  No one mentioned Prime Minister Blair's statement after the bombing, making the linkage between the bombing and a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem.  I think that was not a particularly astute observation, and I wonder whether anyone would like to comment on Prime Minister Blair's comment? MR. SIKORSKI:  Gentlemen?  Bill? MR. KRISTOL:  You know, it's--I mean [inaudible] fair to Blair.  He said a lot of very good things, and I don't--he didn't in any way excuse the bombing because of the failure to have a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem.  It is deeply embedded in Europe, as people know.  It's a deeply embedded view there that if the Israeli-Palestinian problem is, you know, a huge source of terrorist recruiting and that its solution is key ultimately to winning the broader war on terror and, to be fair to Blair, Bush has said things somewhat like that, too. I mean Bush obviously is investing a lot now actually in trying to move towards a Palestinian state that is not a terrorist state and at some level of commonsense if that could be solved, that would be a good--obviously a good thing of removing an excuse for some of the recruiting that they do, not--maybe not  for most of it. But I mean I guess I just come back--I don't--it will turn out I would bet that there are foreign links--this is a pretty--I gather from talking to people in--I've only talked to people here in Washington, in Homeland Security and in the Defense Department--I mean this seems like a fairly sophisticated effort, obviously timed, as Madrid was timed, maybe it will be--you know, maybe it will turn out just to be a bunch of people sitting around cooking something up, but it doesn't sort of feel like that to me, and, therefore, I think it is worrisome, and it does get, if I can sound like Dick Cheney for a second, I hate to--I don't really hate to do that--but I--be ridiculed for doing that--I mean it does bring home the importance of--I mean what if they had chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons and those weapons are mostly obtained, not entirely, but mostly obtainable through states or through having a safe haven in a state. The good news is about the removal of the Taliban, and I would argue about Iraq and about at least our containing and turning around to some degree what's happened in some other countries like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia if we have is that it is harder for terrorist groups to kill lots and lots of people-- [End of tape 1, side A; flip to side B.] MR. KRISTOL:  [In progress.] --and people in a la Afghanistan or access to the things that regimes can really give you access to that are pretty hard to get on your own by going to a few pharmacies and picking up some, you know, some nitrite, or go to an agriculture supply store and pick up some nitrite and then, you know, do some stuff in your basement. So I guess I'd come back always to the centrality of regimes and to the fact that we could live in a world, we could live in a world where there are disaffected Muslims throughout Europe and in the U.S. and a lot of unhappiness in aspects--parts of the Middle East and where there are occasional terrorist attacks that kill people on buses and subways and planes.  I mean no one likes that or wants that, but that is a livable 21st century world. What isn't a livable world is terrorist groups having access to weapons of mass destruction.  So I come back to what Bush and Cheney come back to, which is the centrality of dealing with the weapons of mass destruction and the regimes and nation states that could provide those to terrorist groups. MR. SIKORSKI:  Bill, to me, the attack [off mike.]-- MR. KRISTOL:  But I'm no expert on sort of terrorists in this sort of technical sense, but the only thing that makes me worried, I mean, not the only thing.  The one thing that really makes me worried about is that, as Peter said, we don't know who they are yet or don't seem to have much of a clue as to their--if these were clowns sitting around, somewhere, you know, brewing stuff in their basement, you know, gabbing to their neighbors, we would have--we may not have found them yet, but I would think we would be in a Madrid type situation, where they knew--you know, we would--or maybe they-- MR. SIKORSKI:  We were lucky in Madrid. MR. KRISTOL:  Well, we were.  Right.  Right.  And they were competent, but they were competent and they were--did have foreign links and they were plugged into a broader Al-Qaeda or Al-Qaeda-like network. And as I say, I mean it seems to me if these were just guys, most likely some neighbor would have shown up and said, hey, you--someone should track down--these four who used to live next door aren't there anymore, and they were doing some weird stuff and maybe now--maybe the British police wouldn't have let that leak out.  Maybe tomorrow we'll find out that that's exactly the case. But one has the feel here of fairly sophisticated planning and concealment.  Just because we don't seem to know anything, we've heard no reports of who these people were so far. Now, maybe again, maybe this is--you know, this is three days later.  Maybe two days from now, it will turn out to be exactly as we thought, but exactly as I just said it wasn't.  But it gives me--it makes me nervous and I talked to someone yesterday who's fairly experienced in these matters who was made nervous, a U.S. official who works on this stuff, who was made nervous by the fact that the British don't seem to have much in the way of leads. MR. SIKORSKI:  Just to come back to the gentleman [inaudible] and Prime Minister Blair's statement that the Middle East has something to do with it.  Michael you would be able to recall for our audience the stated goals of Al-Qaeda, of which the Middle Eastern, the Palestinian-Israeli problem is one thing.  The crusaders leaving the Holy Land of Saudi Arabia is another.  Resistance to the spread of Sharia in Africa is another, and I think there was one more. MR. RUBIN:  I would actually defer to Peter, who's the expert on Al-Qaeda's demands.  So-- MR. BERGEN:  They're very simple.  I mean Bin-Laden told them to me directly in '97, in March of '97, and they were four and the order is swapped around depending on what's happening in the outside world, but it was U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia was number one.  U.S. policy in Iraq was number two. U.S. support for Israel number three and U.S. support for Egypt and Saudi Arabia, regimes that are not sufficiently Islamic.  And basically, he's been remarkably consistent about that.  He never talks about Hollywood or the First Amendment, Supreme Court, feminism, alcohol.  You know, all these kinds of things he just never talks about it. MR. RUBIN:  But in answer to Maurey Amitai's question, to directly address Prime Minister Blair.  Look Prime Minister Blair is wrong.  Sometimes it's very easy to have a false conventional wisdom.  Sometimes it's very useful politically or diplomatically to adopt a logic which the evidence doesn't support in order to appeal to your constituency.  I mean frankly speaking, when it came to the 9/11 attacks, the planning for those began when it looked like the Camp David II peace talks between Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat would be successful, and there would be Middle East peace.  Likewise, if you recall a different incident, when it came to the terrorists boat--I'm sorry the arms shipment from Iran that was intercepted in the Red Sea--I believe it was back around 2002--those weapons were loaded onto the boat I believe off Kish Island in Iran, destined for Hamas and the Palestinian Authority at a time when there was an actual cease fire in the Intifada. It also just--and Peter would be aware of this as well--that while rhetorically and listening to the official media, many governments in the Islamic world are more Palestinian than the Palestinians, much less willing to compromise than both the Palestinian Authority in some cases and dissidents in other cases are.  The fact of the matter is the obsession with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the center of everything, of everything which is wrong is an obsession which exists in the front line states with Israel, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, the West Bank, Gaza, the Palestinian Authority, and among some in Israel.  But it's not an obsession which is shared when you go to Sudan, Afghanistan.  Pakistanis are much more likely to complain about Kashmir, what the Indians are up to. I mean that's one of the false myths which is out there.  Another false myth is that poverty and lack of opportunity breeds terrorism and people that have heard me on panels before know I always use this example. But Mali, in West Africa, which is 95 percent Muslim, is listed by Freedom House as the freest country with an Islamic majority on earth, a higher rating than it gives Turkey.  It's also one of the five poorest nations on earth, and it's not guilty of terrorism.  If anything, if you wanted to look at the evidence, one could say that if you want to decrease terrorism, decrease education, because many of the terrorists who are most deadly are the ones who have quite a middle class education.  This MI-5 report went into before, and when I was reading it, I was thinking about my experience wandering the halls of the School of Oriental and African Studies, when I was doing my dissertation research.  I wasn't a member of SOAS, but I lived near it--and some of the debates and some of the radicalism which went on there. It's a very interesting thing, and now being completely in the weeds, I'll just throw this out as one research question which has always interested me is when one looks at the French--the disaffected French population from Algeria, there's an exception to this third generation militancy, if you will. And that's among the Kabail population.  The Kabails are--they're Berbers, but many Berbers are militant.  But the Kabails are from a specific province in Algeria, and they tend to be at the forefront of anti-Islamists and pro-moderation and recently the son of the community leader was kidnapped and killed. I mean there's been a battle going on there underneath the radar screen, but it would be interesting to look at why certain communities have so roundly rejected this.  And this is communities several millions strong.  And the case of the Kabails also shows that sometimes it's wrong to conflate Arabism with the fundamental root of all these--with all problems, which many militant Islamists have.  Much of militant Islam exists outside the Arab world.  Unfortunately, sometimes we just don't stand up for the more moderate factions.  People like Fateh Almaji [ph.] are still in jail in Libya, having spoken up against Muammar Qadhafi, and President Bush frankly does very little. MR. SIKORSKI:  I would second you, Michael, in that the psychological profile of these terrorists reminds me of the psychological profile of late 19th century anarchists and early Bolshevik terrorists--disaffected middle class kids rather than the poor and deprived. The gentleman over there. MR. MITCHELL:  Thanks.  Garret Mitchell from the Mitchell Report.  I want to ask a two-part question, if I may.  The first has to do with--I'm interested whether anybody on the panel A, knows about and B, can explain--it's sort of like your question, Radek, about the computers.  The Norwegians in late 2003 captured a document which purported to be the--essentially Al-Qaeda's strategic plan that, among other things, made three things quite clear: no attacks on U.S. mainland; second, next target Spain aimed at around the time of the elections, with the hope that it would encourage them to leave the fight in Iraq; and the third stated element in this captured document was that that, in turn, would put pressure on the British, and if it didn't, dot, dot, dot. I'm curious to know, as you know, Robert Pape has probably written most about this, from the University of Chicago, I'm curious to know why that document doesn't seem to have sort of surfaced and become public and had something to do with not just the U.S. but the U.S. and allies' strategy on what we still continue to call the War on Terrorism. The second part of the question to Mr. Kagan is I'd be interested in hearing you expand a little bit on what it is that leads you to the conclusion that an ideology-based foreign policy is a successful way to wage foreign policy period. MR. SIKORSKI:  Peter, do you want to lead off with that? MR. BERGEN:  On the document, it wasn't really captured.  It was found by a group of Norwegian researchers on the Internet, and it's a very interesting document because it really was the strategic vision about how to get Spain out of the Coalition, and it worked.  That document, in combination with Bin-Laden's calls for attacks on members of the Coalition, led, in my view, to Madrid directly. MR. SIKORSKI:  So it's being taken seriously? MR. BERGEN:  Oh, yeah.  Very much so. MR. RUBIN:  I would just like to add, and this is something that occurred at times in Iraq.  When we would capture documents, again, documents--people are flexible and documents change with time.  Multiple documents are put out.  People evolve with time and abandon their document.  While Peter is absolutely right, and your question is excellent, I would suggest that in the case of PAPE [ph.], that it could be a mistake for finding one document and assuming that it's a unflexible, unchanging master plan and that we should follow it that closely because I'm not sure the people perpetrating it do as well as the fact that sometimes the documents which are put on the Internet aren't necessarily what people are following.  I mean there's not a web site to necessarily go to to find the master plan for either U.S. strategy or for any other one person's strategy. MR. SIKORSKI:  Fred, why is democratic counter ideology going to work? MR. KAGAN:  You know, it depends on what you think the enemy is.  If you regard the enemy as, you know, a bunch of mindless gooks who run around blowing things up for no particular reason, then no, ideology probably isn't going to help very much. If you regard the enemy as being a bunch of people who are engaged in purposeful activity to achieve particular objectives, and if you look through the history of their statements and the sorts of people that they cite as their examples, then it does look like they are pursuing very much a rather clear ideology that is based probably on religion, but that has a significant political component as well. If that is true and I think that it is, then I do not think that we are going to be able to succeed without offering some counter to that ideology.  I was very struck and granted Bin-Laden doesn't really refer to a lot of this stuff--I know that Zawahiri was much more closely involved--could have been that set of ideological actors.  It is an ideology at its root going back to the '50s that is trying to establish some sort of insurgency in the Muslim world.  And it is very Bolshevik in its methods and in a lot of its way of thinking.  I've always been struck by the parallels between the Bolshevik idea of a vanguard of the proletariat and the sort of vanguard elements that exist in Kudib's [ph.] and in the thought of others. And so I do think that we are facing an ideological foe here, and I think that we are de facto competing with that foe for the support of the bulk of the Muslim world, and I don't mean Arab.  I really do mean Muslim.  This is a pan-Muslim problem. And I think that if we do not have a positive vision to offer, to compete with the vision that is being offered, however positive or negative it is, we're going to be very seriously handicapped when we undertake military action in that world, as we will have to, because one of the core tenets of this ideology is that the United States will be attacked. And I think if you just ask yourself the question would we--put aside for the minute the question should we have attacked Iraq or not, would we have been better off today in Iraq and in the Middle East in general if we had simply gone in, smashed Iraq, blown a lot of things up, withdrawn immediately, and let it go straight to hell?  I don't think--I can't imagine there's anyone in this room who would say that that would have been a better idea than what we have, in fact, done, which is to stay in Iraq and try to establish a more positive vision for the Iraqi people and show that there is a positive result to the attack. That I think is going to be a critical element of our success wherever we are going to be operating. MR. RUBIN:  Can I ask a follow up question to Radek? MR. SIKORSKI:  Sure. MR. RUBIN:  A follow up question to the one the gentleman just asked.  When we were in Rotterdam, the Dutch had a heck of a time trying to explain what their identity was and what they stood for, and how that impacted the integration of people coming to the Netherlands and also, to some extent, the War on Terrorism, and as one of the two European experts on this panel, I would just like to throw the question out to you, what does a lack of ideology mean for countering this Islamist threat? MR. SIKORSKI:  I think you're asking not about ideology, but about identity, and the problem is that nationalism has been delegitimized in Europe as the agent ultimately of war and the nation state as an agent of war.  And if it's impermissible outside the football stadiums to express your patriotism, whereas European identity is not yet strong enough to command real loyalties, then you're condemning your minorities to a situation in which the early identity that's an offer is their former identity or of the country that they come from, or some--even something even more radical.  And that I think is the kind of evolution that we might find ourselves in with Europe.  This is what Oriana Fallaci has been honored by.  This is she, an atheist, making common cause with the Pope, the new Pope who's been strong on this.  This is I think the intellectual ferment in Europe, but it's a ferment of identity. On ideology, namely democracy as an ideology, I can't see why we wouldn't use it in our confrontation with the terrorists.  I find Mr. Zarqawi to have been very helpful to us on this, when he declared that democracy is an evil system and that he--part of his struggle is against democracy.  In a situation when every opinion poll you can look at shows that the majority of ordinary Muslims want it, then we would be foolish not to identify ourselves with the majority of the population, among which the terrorists have to swim.  That's our strategic ideology.  It is our strategic asset in this confrontation. MR. KRISTOL:  If I could just add a word on that.  I don't really like the discussion of this in terms of competing ideologies.  In a way, I mean it gives too much dignity to what the terrorists are doing and to what Al-Qaeda is doing and it makes it seem as if we're doing our thing because we have this set of beliefs we think will be good for everyone.  That's true to some degree, but the fact--I mean it's a hard-headed strategic.  Now, one can quarrel with it, but Bush's fundamental view is utterly simple: A, we've got to kill the terrorists and deter them and that they recruit more when they're winning and they will recruit less when they're clearly losing.  So we have to be tough and stop rewarding terror and start punishing terror.  And, B, you then have to say, okay.  Now what about the broader sea in which they swim.  And this is Radek's point I think, and, you know, can we go back with the pre-9/11 accommodation with various dictatorships, reasonable or not.  Maybe it was reasonable at the time, but in any case, it's not sustainable now.  It seems to have created all this extremism and terrorism.  And, therefore, we have to do something else.  And the only something else that one can really do practically speaking is democratization.  I mean I find the whole--the attempt to ascribe to the Bush Administration this sort of--so many and high-flown, you know, view of why we have to have democracy is a little misleading.  I'm all for high-flown defenses of democracy, but it's a pretty hard-headed argument. Now, maybe it's wrong.  I mean there are people who would say that's foolish. I disagree, Fred.  I mean you're wrong when you say no one thinks we should have just gone in there and crushed Saddam and gotten out.  A lot of people think that.  Half the Defense Department thinks that. The current Secretary of Defense thinks that.  It's [inaudible] our policy.  Tom is already having a heart attack.  You agree with this.  It's our policy that started people to think this because they don't believe that we need to have--stay in there and fundamentally change the Middle East.  They believe that we should have found some tough guy and got him in power and that would have been fine, if we couldn't have gotten out, and it would go back to having local dictators who can keep things under control, and we cut deals with them.  It's not an idiotic view.  The world ran itself along these lines for some decades and arguably without great danger to our national interest.  I think it's deeply wrong, but I don't think we should underestimate how tempting that view is.  It's very tempting to the Europeans because it involves much less in the way of effort and sacrifice on our part, and it's going to be tempting to some people here.  And that's the real threat.  And so the real threat is not that people in Britain or in Spain are going to become sympathizers to Al-Qaeda, you know.  The real threat is they will justify a much more--a much less ambitious and much less difficult and onerous task in the Middle East, and they'll say, you know what, we don't really need to worry to--you know, we've taken care of the fundamental problem.  If they have a stable dictator, that's okay there. And I think there's a real risk of that now. MR. KAGAN:  Bill, I think I confined my comment to saying that no one in this room would think that.  I was giving our audience the benefit of the doubt. MR. KRISTOL:  No, yeah. MR. SIKORSKI:  Let's have some AEI favoritism.  Tom Donnelly. MR. DONNELLY:  Thank you.  Look, Bill, opened the door, so I need to dash through it while it's briefly open. And apropos of a theme that Bill mentioned earlier about the larger war, I mean it's interesting--a couple of things are interesting about the reaction to these attacks or the timing of things that have happened since.  I was struck very much this morning about the story in the paper about reducing troop levels in Iraq that include--I mean the source of the story was in Britain, and it included an entire British withdrawal.  Just again, one can overindulge in criminology in this, but it was Michael Chertoff who was the sort of designated front man for the Administration on the weekend, suggesting this redefinition of the War on Terrorism is a narrow defensive one.  And, again, you just didn't see any figure--either Prime Minister Blair or President Bush really reiterating the, you know, to defend ourselves here, we need to win over there trope, which was certainly part of their rhetorical arsenal all along.  I'm just wondering whether this is--and even the question--I'm sorry to go on so long--but the phlegmatic response of the British is it seems a couple days later less about a resolve to win the war, but rather simply to endure the punishments that the war metes out. So I'm wondering about the longer term, larger scale progress of the War on Terror and what this moment actually does mean? MR. SIKORSKI:  Tom, let me throw back one at you.  Are you sure American troops are not going to be reduced in the run up to the Congressional mid-term elections? MR. DONNELLY:  The story indicate an American decline and a British withdrawal, so it's--yeah, correct. MR. KRISTOL:  I mean just to be fair here, I mean Bush I believe in his radio address Saturday said exactly you wanted him to have said, which is we have to fight them over there, and not over here, for which he's been ridiculed already as such a simple-minded view, you know, and so I think Bush believes in this.  I don't know how many other people in the Administration do. And look I mean this will be interesting to see what happens with this idea that was floated.  It's not--I don't think it was floated expressly post the attack in London, Thursday, but clearly there are planning documents that seek a draw down in troops.  Now, anyone would be happy to have a draw down in troops if it's practical, but at what cost and--is our policy being driven by winning in Iraq or by drawing down troops to make up for the fact that we, you know, for various problems in our military and other desires that the Defense Department has here and considerations about public opinion in the run up to the congressional elections. Bush so far the most important--I said before that I thought that the end of 2003 and the first half of 2004 was a bad patch in the War on Terror in general.  The thing that pulled us out of that, one of the things that pulled us out of that in addition to the June 28th handover in Iraq, which went better than I think people have expected was the fact that Bush didn't blink.  I mean Bush deserves a lot--a lot of criticism, which Tom Donnelly and I and others, Fred Kagan, have given him I guess as the friendly constructive critics, a phrase the Administration is not familiar with, however, so he deserves some criticism, but you've got to give him credit for in the run up to a presidential election in no way blinking, in no way pulling back the troops, not even promising to do so, and just sort of toughing it out and sitting there with 140,000 troops taking substantial casualties and going to the American public and saying I'm sorry.  We've got to do this.  We have no choice, and I can't promise it's going to get that much easier.  That really is admirable of the President, and he's mostly held to that since then I would agree. Having said that, I was made nervous by the front page of the Washington Post today, which shows real efforts within the Administration to extricate us from this, and I think that really is--that's a much greater threat than anything that happens directly in London. MR. RUBIN:  Yeah, I think one of the problems that we have that makes it a harder for the British and for the U.S. Administration to succeed in selling what they want to sell is it's hard to know what the measures of success are in Iraq or in Afghanistan.  And it's very easy to be captivated by the statistics on casualties and the number of IEDs and so forth.  I'm not sure that that's a very reliable evaluation of how far we're succeeding in establishing the roots of a stable polity, which is something that's going to take a long time.  But it's very visible.  It's very painful, and it makes it easier to focus on the negatives and to loose heart more quickly, and I think, as we're seeing a rash of these now, it's going to be hard to get over that. MR. BERGEN:  Radek, a quick comment on the metrics. MR. SIKORSKI:  Sure. MR. BERGEN:  I mean Donald Rumsfeld famously complained that we don't have the metrics to know if we're winning or losing the War on Terrorism.  I'd like to suggest one. Two thousand and three saw the worst year--was the worst year for significant terrorist attacks since 1982.  And then it tripled in 2004.  So this is the worst year recent since these statistics have been kept. I think that's quite a good metric to know if we're winning or losing the War on Terrorism.  Obviously, there's a bigger War on Terrorism.  You know, we all agree I think democratization in the Middle East is a way to go.  But if you look at the smallest W, smaller T war, we're doing rather poorly.  And that's going to  get much worse with the blow back from the Iraq War. Think about your Afghan War blow back and times it by about three I think.  The people fighting in Iraq are doing IEDs.  They're doing suicide terrorism.  They're fighting against arguably the best volunteer army in history as opposed to the Russian Army, which was one of the worst.  I think we're going to have a huge problem.  It's going to be a big problem in Europe.  It's going to be a huge problem in Saudi Arabia.  Sixty-one percent of these people are Saudis who are doing the suicide attacks. MR. RUBIN:  The thing is--I'm sorry, Radek--but to counter this because also Daniel Benjamin has a big essay making this point in the upcoming issue of Time Magazine is that the problem we had in Afghanistan and anyone who traveled there during the Taliban's day saw was that we basically allowed it to become a safe haven, and so I think the core of the Bush policy--while I would agree with you on the metric for success--is not allowing another safe haven to develop and first and foremost of that is not scaling back and basically let's call it what it is: fleeing Iraq. MR. KAGAN:  This is not the right metric for success.  I mean if you stir up the hornets' nest, you get more hornets in the short term.  But I would just disagree to say that to have more casualties from terrorism two or three years into the War on Terror that that proves that things are not going well in the War on Terror.  You really have to step back and make a strategic-- MR. SIKORSKI:  I have to claim authority over this panel.  And I hope you're right on the havens, but anybody who has traveled in Pakistan, Afghanistan knows that the havens are still there.  They are called tribal territories of the northwest frontier province, and there is the financing from the drugs; and you have a Colombia mach II there, a confluence of radical politics and big bucks.  And this thing can be financed for the long run, unfortunately. We're not winning there.  Lady over there.  And let's remember we're talking about the London attacks.  We have veered very far from our initial subject. MS.          :  I actually wanted to follow up on what Maury Amitai said in addition to some comments from Bill Kristol and a few others. One thing that moderate Muslims keep reiterating is that the Karbala paradigm is responsible for the terrorist attacks, meaning that the more they feel--like, for example, the Israeli-Palestinian situation--other policy issues, where they feel they're not being respected; that they will continue to attack and risk their own lives.  So it's the injustice that they perceive to themselves and their policies that is spurring these attacks and there is no way that we can [inaudible] the entire world. So I'm wondering do you in any way believe in the Karbala paradigm and what are you doing to bring moderate Muslims on board to make sure--with your policies to make sure that these--that they have legitimacy or at least some consensus from the Arab world. MR. SIKORSKI:  Bill, I think that's one for you.  I mean President Bush has acknowledged in his speeches in London, in his speech to the National Endowment for Democracy that very serious mistakes in U.S. policy had been committed.  And you yourself have said that the U.S. has been coddling Muslim dictators for decades. If you were a moderate Muslim, might you not feel some resentment over the past and might you not accept the wonderful American amnesia about what we did in the past.  Forget what we did in the past.  Like us now, because we are great guys now.  These are societies with long-term memories that are still trying to undo the cruel events of whatever century.  Couldn't this be a motivating factor for people? MR. KRISTOL:  Well, I mean it might cause moderate Muslims to [inaudible] policy.  I don't think it's leaving them to become terrorists and to kill other Muslims, which is mostly who they're killing, of course. We're standing with moderate Muslims in Iraq, who we have helped establish the only actual democratic government in the Middle East, apart from Israel, in Iraq, which is inclusive, and which is including Muslims, including quite religious Muslims, more than some people here would like actually.  I think that was the wise decision, as Ruel Gerecht has argued, and Lebanon we have actually helped foreign troops out and helped sponsor elections, and as that Arab columnist wrote back in November or December, you know, he said it was striking that the only two free elections in the Arab world were taking place under occupation, under U.S. occupation and under Israeli occupation at the time for the Palestinian Authority.  It doesn't mean they're going to like occupation, but I think it shows a certain seriousness on our part at least about fostering democratic self-government in the Middle East.  Now there are places we still remain with--we still have arrangements with dictators, and, you know, obviously there are some tough calls to be made there.  And that's why I've mentioned Egypt, though.  I think Egypt is very important, because Egypt, I mean apart from Iraq, I think Pakistan is very, very complicated and difficult situation I think, and it's--I myself might try to balance things differently there, but I'm not going to second guess that from this distance. Egypt strikes me as a case where we've put a lot on the line.  The Secretary of State has personally intervened there and pretty effectively and impressively; gave a terrific speech in Cairo two or three weeks ago.  Let's see what happens with the elections in Egypt this fall.  And I think there--but look a lot of our own people--we'll have a split among the hawks on this.  I think we need to be--we have to be willing to risk the election of people whom we don't find entirely congenial or who we even--whom we find worrisome at times in these countries.  I just think that the risk--my personal--and I'm not saying this as a democratic ideologue.  I just think at a cost balance way, the risk of that ultimately in the medium and long term is less than the risk of continuing to prop up the dictators.  And I think the legitimate criticism of Bush's policy would be that in some places, like Saudi Arabia in particular I think, we are insanely wed to the notion in my view that what would come after the House of Saud would be so much worse, though it's never explained exactly why it would be so much worse since already 61 percent of the suicide bombers in Iraq are Saudis.  So--what--you know, it's like--so now, they'll have the official imprimatur of the government instead of the unofficial one. I don't know.  I mean it's obviously you can't just be flip about it, but I think the democratization agenda remains the way to help moderate Muslims win.  They need help to win.  They need practical help to win.  They need assistance of the kind of soft power kind, and they need to be defended against people who are trying to kill them. And that's what's happening in Iraq. MR. SIKORSKI:  Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to remember that you heard it here first. We are doing Egypt next is the view from the neo-conservative cabal. The gentleman here has been very patient. MR. BIN YUMI:  Alab bin Yumi [ph.].  I'm an Arab journalist.  My first question is to Bill Kristol.  You said if I'm not wrongly phrasing you, you said Western Muslims are more extremes than other Muslims. Do you think this, like, accurate?  Do you think are you not giving Western Muslims the credit they deserve if you think that because of American intervention in Iraq and the Middle East, it made some Muslims there or made Muslims there more--less extremist.  Don't you think Western Muslims living in this country or in the West for decades aren't they moderate enough?  So this is my first question. My second question it's like a follow up on the previous question which is democratization.  And it seems to me America and the Middle East is trying to change the situations there.  But is the change equals reform, because Arab--many Arab intellectuals feel that reform needs to come from within.  Change is different from reform. So is America is wiling to commit itself for reform?  And speaking about ideology, is America communicating its ideology to the Middle East?  What is it doing to communicate a reform ideology, not just a change ideology there. Finally, talking about democratization in Iraq and the Middle East, it will bring a lot of religious Muslims to the front.  So is America willing to do that?  Will the recent events--London will change anything?  Thank you. MR. KRISTOL:  On three, I think I just said that I personally would be willing to err--to stick with my democratic strategy, and, therefore, yes, to allow religious Muslims to be brought to the front, and I think we have done that in Iraq incidentally.  That was--I mean Michael [inaudible] but there were big arguments about this, and I think basically those who said look, it's ridiculous.  It's--you've got to let the Iraqis be Iraqis, and let Sistani be powerful if that--if he is the most powerful person in Iraq--and indeed he is powerful and I think I'd give the Bush Administration credit, from my point of view, of being willing to accept the consequences of democracy.  And I think that will be a test in Egypt. On the first point, I was being a little obviously--generalizing a lot and being a little flip.  I think I said that American Muslims it strikes me are very, very different from European Muslims.  I think you have another case of--I think Peter said this--of American exceptionalism here.  And it's a great tribute on this--there seems to be very little serious radicalization here in the U.S., and that's a great thing. MR. SIKORSKI:  You mean outside of Marin County? MR. KRISTOL:  Yeah.  Right.  Outside of one hippie in Marin County who's, you know, not exactly of Arab descent. In Europe--I'm just really repeating what Ruel Gerecht wrote and I'm--again it's being very flip, but obviously most European Muslims are not I think interested in terror and they're not even that radical probably.  And most of them, in my view, despite the difficulties Europe has with assimilation, a generation or two from now will just be Europeans of Muslim faith or losing their Muslim faith like the rest of Europeans lose their religious faith.  But it does seem to be the case that there has been a resurgence among the younger generation in reaction to the conditions in Western Europe of a kind of alienation that has led to a radicalization at the same time that in much of the Middle East actually there have been complicated things going on.  You know, there's been radicalization, but there's also been a real rise of moderate Islam and against I would argue against dictatorship and against theocracy; certainly in Iran when one sees that. I'm just generally unconvinced by the notion that most people in the Middle East want to live in theocracies.  There's no empirical evidence for it.  There's one election in Algeria that may be sort of shows it.  But otherwise, they don't do well.  Their parties don't do well.  When the people have a chance to vote, they don't vote for them.  And, you know, I guess I'm fairly optimistic actually about the actual situation in the Middle East, if you could ever live liberate them from their dictators on the one hand, and the fanatical terrorists on the other. Reform needs to come from within, but it can be helped from without.  And it wouldn't be happening if we hadn't gone into Iraq, in my view, and, you know, maybe I'm sure we could be more intelligent in who we help and how we help them, but it's a long complaint about the U.S. government that we're very bad at this kind of public diplomacy.  We're very bad at subtle private diplomacy.  At the end of the day, the single best message you can still send is terrorists are going to lose, and democrats are  going to be supported. MR. SIKORSKI:  We have time perhaps for one last word from the panel. MR. RUBIN:  Sure if I could just pick up on a couple brief points in the last couple questions. First of all, when it comes to this idea that everything is driven by Arab-Israeli conflict, I would strongly suggest that in 1983, 1993, with the United States withdrawals from respectively Beirut and Mogadishu and with the Israeli withdrawal from Southern Lebanon and the way in which it was conducted, that is what spurred a huge spurt in terrorism.  And I would go so far as to say that you can expect a third Intifada after Gaza disengagement and that third Intifada will also extend--because it's going to happen unilaterally and be cast as a victory for terrorism that will extend and empower the insurgents in Iraq who will say that no matter how long they go at it, eventually terrorism does work.  People use terror because terrorism works.  It's a tactic.  I mean that's why some people would argue that we shouldn't declare a War on Terrorism because you don't declare a war on tactics.  You should declare a war on an ideology, in this case militant Islamism. And then also I would just--last point.  Often times this idea that reform has to solely come from within is used as an excuse to do nothing.  It's an argument which is common inside the U.S. government.  When I traveled--and I don't know whether Peter had the same observations--depending on where I am--when I was under the Taliban--whether I was in Iran, Iraq before the War and so forth, or in Egypt, some people would complain that the United States doesn't do enough to help them.  Other complain that the United States interferes too much.  And it really depends on where you are, but when I was in Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia last March, what really struck me against the backdrop of what was going on in Lebanon was the way that the--Lebanon's greatest export has always been its people.  The Lebanese Diaspora is strong and in Saudi Arabia, they're the ones, the people that do business and have been resident in Saudi Arabia for 20 years but go back to visit their families in Tripoli and elsewhere--Tripoli, Lebanon, in the summers.  They're the ones who are really pushing for change from within. There's--when one looks at history--and Fred could comment on this more aptly than mine, because I'm going into his field of history--there's a sense that at the time of the Cold War, American officials underestimated the power, for example, of Ronald Reagan's Evil Empire Speech and the moral clarity of his rhetoric.  And many people say no, no, no.  That didn't happen. Now that the Soviet archives are open, we know just how important it was to the dissidents who really agitated in the Soviet Union.  Likewise, in government now, often times we hear that no, no, no.  You really can't speak out so clearly for Iranian freedom, Iranian dissidents, people like Ahmed Batebe [ph.], Aras Sigarchi [ph.] and others that in Syria--Ahkta Niese and others because it's going to--it's not really going to help them.  We've got to deal with these regimes and so forth.  But frankly, it's wrong and this historical revisionism is really going to undercut the idea of freedom.  It's a debate which still afflicts the permanent bureaucracy right now. MR. SIKORSKI:  I second that again.  Vlady Bukovsky [ph.] told me his food in the gulag improved after the Reagan speech.  Peter? MR. BERGEN:  It's sort of an idea, a policy idea.  We've done a terrible job of--as long as we don't take the ideas that are attacking us seriously enough and one way to do it--you don't have to be an expert on the Koran to say that killing civilians is a--you know, you don't have to be an expert on Islam.  The Koran is full of injunctions about not killing civilians. And there have been several opportunities we've missed.  In the '98 embassy bombing attacks, we should have pointed that more Muslims were killed in the attacks than Americans. We should have said it publicly.  Bin-Laden when he's asked how you justify the killing of civilians can't resort to Koranic language, 'cause it doesn't exist.  He simply says, well, they pay American taxes; therefore, they're complicit in American tax policies.  There's a huge weakness in his argument. And on 9/11, a disproportionate number of Muslims were killed in that attack because New York is a town of immigrants and visitors and businessmen who were in that--in those towers--and, of course, now in London, we should find out how many Muslims were killed or injured in this attack.  I can guarantee you one of the bombs went off in Edgeware Road, which is effectively one of the most Arab streets in the world.  You would have found a disproportionate number of Muslims.  I think we should really harp on this as a policy idea. MR. SIKORSKI:  Thank you and let me stress again that our thoughts are with the people of London.  Let's give our panelists a big round of applause. [Applause.] MR. SIKORSKI:  Thank you very much. </body></html>