<html><body>American Enterprise Institute November 13, 2007 [Edited transcript from audio tapes] <TABLE cellSpacing=1 cellPadding=1 width="100%" border=0> <TBODY> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>5:15 p.m.</DIV></TD> <TD> <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>5:30</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Presenter:</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>The Honorable John R. Bolton, AEI</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> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText>Moderator:</DIV></DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Christopher DeMuth, AEI</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>7:00</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Adjournment and Reception</DIV></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE> Proceedings: Christopher DeMuth:  -- on the occasion of the publication of John Bolton s book Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad, published just a few days ago by Threshold, Simon & Shuster.  John Bolton served in the Department of Justice in the Reagan administration and in the Department of State in the first Bush administration.  He was a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for three years, from 1999 through 2001, and in those days helped me with the management of the Institute but also built up a significant program here in Sovereignty and International Law.  From 2001 through the end of 2006 he was first Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security and then the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, serving with great distinction and occasional controversy in both of those posts and responsible for several of the most successful initiatives of the administration of the current President Bush, including the non-proliferation initiative. John s book, like John s public career and like John himself, is energetic and very fast-paced, exhaustively informed, highly principled, blunt, unflinchingly realistic about the nature of politics, whether on the international stage or within the hallways and meeting rooms of our own government; where necessary, combative on behalf of his principles and unapologetically patriotic.  It is as detailed a contemporary memoir of the goings on within the councils of government as I have ever seen.  It is witty and, by turns where appropriate, good natured or angry when, as Aristotle said, anger is due; a highly educational book which I recommend to everyone here. For our event this evening, the procedure is as follows.  John is going to give a talk.  As I think many people have heard, our two senatorial guests, Senator Lieberman and Senator Kyl, have been waylaid by their Tuesday senatorial schedules and have had to excuse themselves with great regret.  They may come for the reception but I know that they are both in meetings as we speak.  So I m not only John s introducer; I m also his moderator and interlocutor.  After he speaks, I ll have a few questions to ask of him and then we will turn things over to an open discussion and question period. Could I please ask everyone to give a warm welcome to my colleague, AEI senior fellow, John Bolton. John Bolton:  Thank you very much, Chris.  Thank all of you for coming this evening on the occasion of this book event here at AEI.  I m very grateful that you came and for those of you who have not bought a book, to paraphrase what they say in Chicago, Buy early and often.   It should satisfy all your present-giving needs for the upcoming holiday season and if we run out outside here, I m sure we will find others somewhere in town.  Now having done my bit to flack mercilessly and shamelessly for the book, let me talk a little bit about why I wrote it and what is in it.  And then, as Chris said, I would be happy to answer any questions that you may have. I felt that it was important in advance of the 2008 presidential election season to talk about the story of how American foreign policy has been made during the Bush administration, both at the State Department and at the United Nations, and to do so in a way that really conveyed what was at stake and how these issues were argued in a way that show what we did right and what we did wrong in the Bush administration, at least in the areas for which I had some responsibility.  I did not undertake this task lightly.  I had never written a book before.  I had written a million op-ed pieces and sundry other articles and whatnot but never undertaken a book and certainly never undertaken one about the actual workings of our policy.  But I am convinced that the 2008 election is going to be extraordinarily consequential for the United States in the area of foreign and defense policy.  And I think what happened in the Bush administration after 9/11, especially on a wide range of issues, was something that people needed to understand so that when the debates unfold, as they have begun already in our presidential campaign, the people would see some of the issues that are at stake that will require decisions by our next president, but decisions that will have implications far beyond the four years of his or her term that will affect this country and the world for decades to come. I wanted to tell this story basically from a very factual point of view.  I state a number of conclusions and policy recommendations and the like in the book, but I wanted to ensure that those who have a different point of view from the one I expressed were going to confront not simply assertions and argument but the reality that we face.  And if they disagree with the conclusions and assertions, they cannot do it simply by argument and response; they are going to have to deal with the facts that I present. Let me just go through some of the key issues that the book discusses and why I felt they were important and how it plays out in the formulation of policy because policy is not made by abstract forces in the sky; it is made by individuals.  And to start with the most central aspect, the United Nations.  You know too much of our debate about the United Nations in this country is an abstract debate about the ideals of the founders of the United Nations and the reliance on their aspirations rather than the concrete reality.  I wanted to show what the concrete reality is in case after case after case:  How the U.N. is used to counter-balance American influence in the world; how too many people, too many governments rely on it as a way to constrain America, and what we need to do in response to it.  And not only in the battles in the Security Council, which do receive attention in America, but in a range of other ways that are not so well understood. One of those that I think was important was the issue of selecting the secretary general, the current secretary general, Ban Ki-Moon, against the backdrop of his predecessor.  This is a story that really tells a lot about the United Nations and what its troubles are and why dramatic change is needed.  Kofi Anan, the previous secretary general, was simply not up to the job.  Despite that lack of fitness for the position, a few years ago he had his press people go out to the media in New York and say that, all things considered in the world as it stood, the position of secretary general and, particularly, the person of Kofi Anan was really in our time much like a secular pope.  Now I m a Lutheran and I have trouble with this idea to begin with.  I certainly do not believe in secular popes and if I did, it would not be the U.N. Secretary General.  So one of the things that we confronted in the decision as to who Kofi Anan s successor would be was to find somebody who did not wake up every morning convinced he was God s gift to humanity.  And I would say in that task, we succeeded.  And that is a quintessential inside U.N. story about how the five permanent members of the Security Council essentially came to the decision on Ban Ki-moon, how that decision was carried out by the Security Council and what that means going into the future. I also talked in detail about how the U.N. works, how negotiations are carried out, how the Secretariat performs and what the difficulties are that we face in affecting American policy at the United Nations.  I display, I think, some of the evidence for why reform at the U.N. is so hard and why after not just 16 months of being U.S. ambassador to the U.N., but 26-plus years of working in U.N. affairs, I have a few things to say about U.N. reform. My first encounter with the U.N. was in late 1981 when I was at the Agency for International Development and the agency was called the International Fund for Agricultural Development, a little known agency in Rome where we were working on replenishing the resources of that organization.  That is when I first found how strange it can be to work in the U.N. environment when countries were critical of the U.S. for not contributing enough money.  And I remember in particular one speech by the representative of El Salvador deeply critical of the Americans for not contributing more at a time when we were basically protecting his government from communist guerillas and keeping the hope of democracy and freedom alive.  And 26 years later, not much has changed fundamentally.  I conclude that incremental or marginal reform at the U.N. is not likely to be successful and that the single most important reform we need at the U.N. is to change the way the organization is financed, to get a system of purely voluntary contributions so that the United States can put its money where it is going to be most effective and withhold its money from programs that are ineffective or counterproductive.  Now, this proposal will encounter enormous opposition in the U.N. system but it will not surprise everyone in this room that the place that encountered the most opposition first was at the United States State Department, which is the second subject of this book:  What is wrong with the State Department and how to fix it.  Now, I acknowledge that in a company town like Washington, it is not popular to critique the bureaucracy.  But I think it is central, especially for Republican and conservative presidents, to understand that the bureaucracy and particularly the State Department bureaucracy is not eagerly awaiting January 20th, the inauguration oath, so that it can spring into action to implement a new Republican president s policies.  I remember the day after Bush 41 lost, I went down to the State Department cafeteria; they were doing everything but popping champagne.  Just for historical comparison, the day after the 2004 election, I went down and I had a feeling the walls had been hung in virtual black crepe because now they had to face another four years of this crew. We need a strong and effective State Department.  We need a State Department that is not embarrassed by the United States, that articulates our policy effectively in the world, that knows how to negotiate hard issues, knows how to conduct our affairs and it is free of the diseases of clientitis, of moral relativism, and of mirror imaging that amount to so many of the problems we see in the State Department. I think it can be done.  There are many good and loyal civil servants who understand the appropriate role of being a civil servant, who understand the obligations they undertake including to be assigned to places that they do not want to be assigned to.  And I think that a president and secretary of state who are committed to a cultural revolution at the State Department can achieve it. Now, I also talk about some of the critical issues that we face.  My own view is that the most important issue facing the United States into the next several years is the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction - nuclear, biological and chemical - and the risk that those weapons will fall into not just in the hands of the rogue states that are currently pursuing them, but terrorist groups as well.  We face two particular tests at the moment - one in North Korea; one in Iran.  But these are not the only risks.  We can see today in Pakistan, where a substantial nuclear arsenal is at risk because of political instability in that country in falling prey to a coup d etat where a radical Islamisist regime could come to power, or even in the chaos surrounding a failed coup where military command and control over those nuclear weapons could break down and some of them will be transferred to Al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups. This is the question that will determine our security well into the future and it is the issue, frankly, where I have been most disappointed in the Bush administration.  I try and lay out in several chapters on both North Korea and Iran how we started off, how the president articulated a sound national security strategy that focused on keeping these weapons out of the hands of rogue states and terrorist groups to begin with because once they acquired the weapons the calculus would change dramatically.  And how over a period of time the relentless pressure of the State Department s bureaucracy and its obsession with continuing to pursue policies that it had pursued in the past despite their manifest failure in the case of North Korea in particular -- how those policies eventually came to predominate even in the administration of a conservative Republican. I think this is an important lesson for the people of the United States to ponder.  They think they go to the polls in November every four years and elect the president who sets policy; if that were true, it would be a happy day indeed.  Unfortunately, it is not.  And I think that the consequence is that we are more at risk from the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction than we have been in some time because we have turned away from the president s best instincts and his initial policies to pursue policies that I think are ultimately going to be counterproductive. I also talk at some length about what has happened in the Middle East and how we lost sight of our efforts after the Hezbollah-Israel war last summer not simply to have another ceasefire in the Middle East, another ceasefire to join the long list of other failed ceasefires that have simply laid the groundwork and the conditions for future hostilities; how we saw the opportunity that Hezbollah s attack across the blue line between Lebanon and Israel gave to us to have a fundamental change in the region.  And yet what we have seen, despite vigorous efforts at the time of the war, is that Hezbollah is today as strong as it was before the war.  The government of Lebanon, the democratically elected government, is even more threatened than it was before the war; Syria is more under Iranian hegemony than before.  And Iran, pushing out not only with its nuclear weapons program but its role as the world s central banker of terrorism, is funding terrorist Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Gaza strip, radical Shiites in Iraq and even its once-sworn enemy, the Taliban in Afghanistan. This is a record that does not give me optimism for the future and, in fact, many of these themes converge at once in what I think may be the most disturbing event of recent American history.  And that is the pall of silence that the administration has caused to fall over Israel s September 6th raid on a facility in the Syrian Desert near the Euphrates River.  Now, we do not know all the details about this facility; that is for sure.  And I do not want to overstate what we do know publicly; obviously, people in the government know a lot more about it.  But from what we can piece together, there is very substantial reason to believe that there were North Koreans present at this facility and that, indeed, this facility had been under construction for some number of years with substantial North Korean assistance.  Overhead photographs that have been published in the newspapers indicate it is about the same dimensions as the Yongbyon reactor that North Korea, with great fanfare, is saying today that it plans to freeze in its operations.  I do not know for sure that North Korea was cloning the Yongbyon reactor in Syria or whether this was some other kind of facility, although all the available evidence points to it being a nuclear facility.  If it was a nuclear facility -- if it is before it was at first bombed by the Israelis and then, surprisingly, completely bulldozed by the Syrians, if it was a replica of Yongbyon and if as the analysts tell us publicly that facility had been under construction for several years, it shows that North Korea was following through in its principal characteristic once described by Fred Ikle as its boundless mendacity, and has been engaged during the entire life of the six-party talks in trying to outsource its nuclear program and even since the February 13th agreement. Now, this is not only a reflection once again of the pattern North Korea has set of committing to give up its nuclear weapons and then cheating almost from the minute that the ink has dried on the agreement; it has enormous implications for the Middle East as well.  The notion that there could be a joint venture between Syria and North Korea in the nuclear field is about as chilling as I can imagine.  And it shows what happens when threats like Iran and North Korea are not dealt with adequately.  I had enormous battles during my tenure as undersecretary over the question of what exactly Syria s interest in the nuclear field was.  And many people in the intelligence community said they have no interest in the nuclear field:  We do not want to talk about possible evidence to the contrary.   They had two basic reasons: One, that Syria lacked the technical capability to have a nuclear program and, two, that it lacked the financial resources to undertake one. Well, how convenient that North Korea has the technical capability and how convenient with oil at nearly $100 a barrel that Iran might have some interest in helping Syria finance this.  It is hard to believe that Syria would engage with North Korea on nuclear issues without Iran s approval and, perhaps, even with Iran s financial assistance.  We know that Iran has an interest in many respects similar to North Korea in hiding its nuclear program from international inspectors.  And what better way for Syria or North Korea to do that than to build something in another country where the inspectors are not even looking. Now, the Israelis characteristically looked at this developing threat and they have not said publicly what it was, but they reacted consistently with the Bush doctrine.  And the Bush doctrine of national security that said, We do not want the world s most dangerous weapons to fall into the world s most dangerous hands.   And whatever that facility was, it is now only a memory. But the real issue it seems to me from an American policy point of view is what exactly that facility was.  There is a growing feeling in Congress, not just among Republicans but among Democrats, that the facility was nuclear, that it was being built with North Korean assistance and that the administration will not allow public knowledge about that raid and the nature of the facility for fear that it will tank the 6-party talks, adversely affect the European negotiations with Iran on Iran s nuclear program and, quite possibly, jeopardize what we have all now come to call the Annapolis Peace Conference -- if that is where it is held, if it is ever held. This is a threefer [sounds like] in many respects but it does not serve the administration well, if this information is accurate, not to reveal it publicly.  If there is no North Korean connection let s hear about it; if there is no risk of a Syrian nuclear weapon, let s hear about it; if there is no Iranian involvement, let s hear about it.  And if you are afraid to have this information come out, what does this say about the nature of the diplomacy that is under way?  This is an example, I fear, of the triumph of the bureaucracy over elected officials to the point where the elected officials and their political appointees, having been seduced or deceived or fallen under the spell, do not even fully appreciate that they have changed their own policies from the way they got elected.  This is a great tragedy not just for conservatives and Republicans, but for the constitutional process that we all think should be applicable.  And that is why in this book I try to lay out in a very precise and factual way how we got to this point.  People can agree or disagree with my conclusions, as I say, but at bottom, the book s factual and specific statements I think lay the basis for Americans, whoever reads the book or hears about the book, to draw their own conclusions because if we make the wrong decision in 2008 as if we had made the wrong decision in 2001, it is our security and our safety that will suffer and our future that will be in jeopardy. Thank you very much. Christopher DeMuth:  We are going to have some questions, and I m going to ask the first question.  John, you have in your book a really heartbreaking account of the decisions that were made several years ago with respect to Iran when our options might have been wider than they have become today.  It was not just the State Department ethic but I mean there were political decisions that were being made early in the administration and -- such as the three tenors going to Tehran, things such as this.  If you think back then, was there a faith that diplomacy could somehow solve this problem?  Or was it simply being preoccupied with Iraq, not wanting to worry about this, kicking the can, just trying to keep this thing off away from the front burner for a while, hoping that things would go better in Iraq or new possibilities would open up?  Was it the conventional faith that diplomacy could actually achieve something or was there something else going on? John Bolton:  Well, I think it was a confluence of both those things.  I think the White House was in part distracted as perhaps it still is today by Iraq and hoping that other things would stay calm, reinforced by the view from the State Department that diplomacy solves everything.  And that is one of the points that I think is important about this book.  Diplomacy is not a policy; diplomacy is a utensil.  It is something that you employ when it is suitable to do so.  And I hope by laying out some of the diplomatic efforts that I made - the withdrawal from the ABM treaty, the creation of the proliferation security initiative, the negotiation of the treaty of Moscow - I can dispel in part this urban legend that the Bush administration was filled with unilateralist cowboys who -- you know, Real men do not negotiate, that kind of thing, because it is a completely false impression.  The fact is this debate is between two separate camps, one camp which holds that in the resolution of international disputes, negotiation should be used 99.44 percent of the time - that is the group I belong to - versus a group that says these disputes should be resolved 100 percent of the time.  This is the group for which negotiation has become an obsession, an objective rather than an instrument.  And I think the case of Iran demonstrates why reliance on negotiation is not cost-free.  Four-plus years of failed European Union negotiation with Iran have given them something that they could not have bought for love or money, and that is time.  Time is usually on the side of the would-be proliferator.  And in Iran s case it used this four-plus years to good advantage to master the complex science and technology of the nuclear fuel cycle, all the way from uranium in the ground up to the capacity to enrich the weapons grade uranium and to fashion into deliverable nuclear weapons. That is why our options on Iran are so constrained in my mind basically down to two, one being regime change; the other being the targeted use of military force against Iran s nuclear program.  Otherwise, you are going to have an Iran with nuclear weapons at a time and a manner of their choosing.  That is a cost of diplomacy; that is a cost of failed diplomacy in particular but it is a cost of the -- what happened when the Iranians strung the Europeans along and they were unable to see through it. There was a former senior career official at the Department of State who used to like to say, If the American people knew how we made foreign policy, they would be after us with pitchforks.   And I think if enough people read this account of what happened on Iran, pitchfork sales would be increasing shortly. Christopher DeMuth:  But if you had been making policy four or five years ago on Iran, what would you have done differently? John Bolton:  Well, as I described in the book, what I tried to do was first to show our multilateral bona fides to go to the International Atomic Energy Agency and conclude from what was obvious from the public evidence that Iran was violating its non-proliferation treaty obligations; violating its safeguard agreement with the IAEA by concealing data by submitting false data, by literally bulldozing buildings and hundreds of cubic yards of dirt to keep traces of radioactivity away from the IAEA; find as the IAEA should have done that Iran was in violation, and refer the matter to the Security Council which is what the IAEA charter provides. We allowed ourselves to get caught up in over two years of European negotiation and what people called the Spirit of Vienna, which apparently means you never do anything unless you have unanimity in Vienna - guess what that means? - and then get to the Security Council.  Once in the Security Council, I think we could have presented the evidence about what Iran was up to and tried to move quickly for really stringent sanctions.  We either would have succeeded or we would not have.  If we had had stringent U.N. sanctions three or four years ago, it is possible we would be in a very different position today.  If we had not gotten those sanctions, as we have not to date, despite three Security Council resolutions which Iran is happily ignoring even as we speak, then we would have shown we had tried in the Security Council; we had checked that box and it was time to move on to something else.  All of this could have been done perhaps three years ago and then we would not be in the tightened and constrained position we are in today. Christopher DeMuth:  I m going to open things up to comments and questions.  We have two roving microphones from both sides.  Please wait until I call on people; please wait until the microphone arrives.  Please give your name and affiliation to everyone in the room and then pose your question or comment to John. Michael Barone:  Michael Barone with American Enterprise Institute and U.S. News.  John you served, by my count, with six secretaries of state in one form or another.  Can you describe to what extent each of them has measured up to the job of changing the culture of the State Department?  Perhaps omitting the two who served very briefly, Al Haig and -- John Bolton:  Larry Eagleburger, yes.  Actually, Haig and Eagleburger are two of my favorites and Al Haig had one of the best lines I think I quoted in the book in discussing some wavering Republicans during my confirmation battle; he talked about weak-kneed Republicans who flutter in the heart.   And the metaphor may be a little bit mixed but he was right on target.  I think his tenure was too brief to assess.  I think you are right; Larry s was as well.  I did not work very close with George Schultz, so I probably could comment only historically.  But the first secretary that I did work with closely was James Baker, whom I think was the best secretary of state in recent times.  And I think that for a lot of reasons, not only because Baker was extremely effective in getting done what he needed to get done, but because he had the right vision of what a secretary of state should be.  He was famously quoted, perhaps, apocryphally, perhaps not - it sounds like Baker, I will say - when he said, I m the president s envoy to the State Department, not the other way around.   And he did behave that way; whether you agree with his policies or not, he never misunderstood what his role was.  I think that both Secretary Powell and Secretary Rice have been the State Department s envoys for the White House.  Powell quite consciously -- based on his military career, he felt these were his troops and he had to represent them.  I would reverse that; I think the troops should do what the secretary wants but that is my personal opinion of how the constitution works.  Secretary Rice I would have to say I predicted 100 percent wrong.  I thought she would be in the Baker model when she came to the State Department.  I think she has proven to be more in the Powell mode. Christopher DeMuth:  We have several questions over here.  We will start in the front row.  These two gentlemen and then we will go back. Male Voice:  Two questions, could you give us your take on Mr. El Baradei, because apparently over the last -- John Bolton:  How long do you have? Male Voice:  Nutshell take.  Apparently over the last couple days he said, No concrete evidence of nuclear weapons programs in either Iran or Syria, and mentioning you to contradict you.  And the second is, if you are concerned about a weapons-free Middle East, why have you not raised the issue of 200 nuclear warheads owned and controlled by Israel? John Bolton:  Let me say about Mohamed El Baradei -- he is an international civil servant who does not understand that; that is the first place to start.  He may not be a secular pope but he thinks he is a secular cardinal.  He needs to understand - and somebody needs to tell him and I would be happy to do it - that he works for the member governments of the IAEA, not the other way around.  He has advocated positions with respect to Iran that contravened the three Security Council resolutions that I mentioned to you, that say mandatorily - I mean if you believe this international law business - mandatorily under chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, mandatorily Iran must cease uranium enrichment.  And El Baradei has proposed various devices whereby Iran could continue its uranium enrichment.  So he has not read the applicable Security Council resolutions; he has, in fact, been an apologist for Iran for the last several years.  We know from what IAEA staff members have told us that he has changed staff reports on their investigations from Iran to spin it in a way more favorable to Iran.  He has been engaged in negotiations with the government of Iran with no authorization from the IAEA membership.  And his statements about what evidence there is or does not exist about Iran s program ignore what the IAEA itself knows, and that is the full scope of Iran s activity, the deception, the covering up that Iran is engaged in, all in plain violation of Iran s Safeguards Agreement with the IAEA. Let me just give you one example.  We know from documents that Iran produced -- why they did it I do not know but we know that they have the technical capability to engineer uranium or plutonium metal in the hollow hemispheres.  Now, Iran s claim is that its program is for civil nuclear power.  The only known purpose of uranium or plutonium metal hollow hemispheres is like those globes that we had as children, those metal globes.  You take the two hollow hemispheres; you fit them together; you surround them with high explosives; you set the high explosives off; you compress the metal; you get critical mass and then an uncontrolled chain reaction.  Why is Iran doing that?  Well, maybe an abstract interest in nuclear physics. El Baradei is going out of his way to state something that he cannot possibly prove and that is only based on what he knows.  What frightens me is how little we know about what is going on in Iran.  El Baradei and the IAEA see only what the Iranians have declared and the IAEA reports themselves say, We see no diversion of nuclear material from declared locations.   What about undeclared locations?  So I think he is way out of line and his comment about Syria is, I think, if anything, the most fantastic of all.  He said, Well, we did not know anything about any nuclear facility in Syria.   Hello!  We did not know anything about any nuclear facility in Syria, and Israel or the United States should have come to the IAEA first and we would have taken care of the problem.   I mean, I rest my case. Male Voice:  If you are concerned about a nuclear-free Middle East, why do you not ever address the 200 nuclear weapons that Israel -- John Bolton:  I think the stated policy of the U.S. government for quite some time has been a nuclear-free Middle East.  But let s be clear - not every state that possesses nuclear weapons is the same as every other state. I do not regard Israel s nuclear weapons as anymore of a threat than I regard Great Britain s nuclear weapons as a threat.  And if the existence of nuclear weapons by some states is an excuse for others to violate the Non-proliferation Treaty, you do not need Israel; Iran has already got Pakistan, it has got us.  This is a pretext; it is a manifestation of the bad faith of the government of Iran and it is simply an excuse that is convenient.  It is not a legitimate motivating factor. Daman al-Barazi:  Mr. Ambassador, my name is Damam al-Barazi [phonetic].  I interviewed you a couple of weeks ago.  You talked to me about the necessity of changing the Syrian regime.  But what we can see now from the Bush administration -- more appeasement, apparently.  I mean, they would invite them to the Annapolis Conference and we did not hear too much detail about what happened in 6th of September attack.  I mean, what is happening in the administration towards Syria now? John Bolton:  I wish I knew.  I mean, I personally think the Annapolis conference, if and when it is ever held, is extraordinarily risky for the United States because if it fails - and I think the circumstances are such it is hard to see how it could do anything other than fail - it will not leave us simply in the status quo ante before the meeting; it will resolve in a diminution of American influence to bring peace to the Middle East.  I think that rather than force in an unnatural circumstance, a government of Israel that has its own enormous internal political difficulties on the one hand and a Palestinian Authority on the other that is broken, perhaps, beyond repair, what we should be concentrating on in the Middle East is protecting the democratic government of Lebanon from the threat of the terrorist Hezbollah and working with forces inside Syria that aspire to democracy in that country and to get rid of the only remaining Baath Party dictatorship in the region. Farid Ghadry:  Ambassador Bolton, thank you.  My name is Farid Ghadry from the Reformed Party of Syria.  I think it is along the same lines since we are on the subject of Syria -- John Bolton:  I ll give you the same answer. Farid Ghadry:  We believe that the nuclear kitchen of Iran has moved into Syria today.  We are of the belief that, as we speak, there is a delegation of 40 high-level military Iranian IRGC people touring the borders of Syria today, and we [sounds like] are monitoring their movements.  What do you think -- and we do not seem to have a policy towards Syria, regardless whether it should be a policy of this and this.  What do you think the policies this country should have -- what policy should you have towards Syria in your belief?  Thank you. John Bolton:  Well, quite some number of years ago, Secretary Powell went to Damascus and gave Bashar al-Assad an ultimatum, basically; he said, Stop pursuing weapons of mass destruction.  Close down the offices of terrorist groups, Palestinian and others that are headquartered in Damascus.  Stop all assistance to Hezbollah and Palestinian rejectionist groups inside Lebanon.  If you do all these things, then you can have a different relationship with the United States.   It was the right thing to do; it was the right message to convey.  But after that message was conveyed, nothing happened. The consequence, I think, has been that Iranian hegemony over Syria has grown.  Syria, despite the withdrawal of its forces from Lebanon, its military forces have kept intelligence operatives in the country.  It is paralyzing, along with Hezbollah, the operation of the democratic government and it shows no inclination to shut down and divorce itself from terrorist groups.  If this facility in the desert near the Euphrates River in fact was a nuclear operation, it shows exactly what I and others have feared for some time that Syria does have, if not nuclear ambitions on its own, a perfect willingness to work with North Korea and, possibly, with Iran to evade notice. I think the most significant reactions to the Israeli raid on September 6 were, one, silence and, second, one press release.  The silence was from the rest of the Arab world.  Here, you have the government of Israeli whacking a facility deep inside an Arab country, and the Arab world was essentially silent.  I think the reason was they probably think it was a very dangerous facility, and they probably believed that Iran was involved.  They did not like that any more than they liked Iranian support for Hamas or Hezbollah.  The second was the press release from North Korea, which, within a day of the Israeli attack, condemned Israel.  Maybe it is because they share a common border, right?  Oh, no, sorry. This is extremely important and I think that Syria and the administration noticed these facts.  If it was engaged in nuclear cooperation with North Korea, this should be all that anybody needs to hear to conclude that we need regime change in Damascus.  There is a Syrian Diaspora; many in this country, in Europe and elsewhere who want the same thing we have, which is a democratic government as we have been trying to defend in Lebanon and trying to give the Iraqis a chance for, the people in Syria want it, too.  I think that is the policy we should support. Henry Sokolski:  Henry Sokolski with the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center.  When you wrote this book -- I have not had a full chance to read it but I did not see something that was reported in the newspapers shortly after the announcement by President Bush and Prime Minister Singh of a nuclear cooperative agreement with India.  That report said that you had some concerns about this deal.  I m curious to learn whether those reports, one, were accurate; two, what your concerns were, and whether or not you think -- if there were concerns, whether or not we got enough from the Indians from this deal, or whether we should be asking perhaps for something more. John Bolton:  Well, my editor, Maggie Crawford, is here and she will attest there is a lot on the cutting room floor.  If I were Henry Kissinger, I could have had a three-volume memoir, but what can I say?  I have just got the one for now; that is all there is. I think the India issue is a matter of really profound importance to the United States.  The fact is that the nuclear nonproliferation regime was always incomplete.  There were some countries, notably Israel, India and Pakistan, that never signed the nonproliferation treaty and at least possessed the virtue of honesty when they pursued nuclear weapons because they had never, unlike Iran and North Korea, committed not to do so.  But the notion that many NPT advocates had that you could kind of talk India and the others into giving up their nuclear weapons and becoming non-nuclear states, I think, was always hopelessly na�ve.  As a consequence, in the Clinton administration and even to some extent extending into the Bush administration, it was just an unwillingness to accept the reality that these states were not going to give up their nuclear weapons. So I believed for some time that in the case, specifically, of India and Pakistan where you have the risk of conventional military conflict that has broken out three times since partition and independence, the risk that another conflict would go nuclear was acute from our point of view and, given Pakistan s role in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, particularly important to avoid.  So I think it was right for the administration to seek some kind of regularization of the relationship with India and Pakistan to recognize the reality.  I do not think the deal that was negotiated was to our interest;  I think it gave up more than we had to; I think it was a classic State Department negotiation.  It is ironic to say the least that it may fall because of opposition inside India. I would have done it differently but I was not much involved in the specifics of it and, therefore, did not put a lot of it in the book.  But I think that dealing with the Indian and Pakistani nuclear programs was the correct thing to do.  I think the notion that you could push them back as non-nuclear weapon states was never going to fly.  I just do not think this deal was one that we should have negotiated. Male Voice:  [inaudible] John Bolton:  I think that we could have had much clearer separation and limitation of the Indian military application on the nuclear side; on the missile side I just think we were almost totally wrong in how we negotiated that.  It is complicated, obviously, because of Pakistan, but look now where we stand with Pakistan s nuclear weapons at risk of a coup by an Islamic fundamentalist regime.  So I think we forfeited major opportunities with both countries over these past five or six years. Koichi Shirayanagi [phonetic]:  My name is Koichi Shirayanagi.  Your answer that Jim Baker was one of your favorite secretaries of state really surprised me because I m not old enough to remember that. John Bolton:  Do not get personal now. Koichi Shirayanagi:  More recently, he came out with this report, the Iraq Study Group Report.  One of his key recommendations was that our country goes and negotiates with Iran and Syria.  That is a policy that would surprise me if you supported it.  I wanted to know more about what you think about the findings. John Bolton:  When I asked Jim Baker for a blurb for the book - you know, how you get prominent people to do it - he laughed and said, You want a blurb from a cheese-eating surrender monkey?   I have enormous admiration for Baker.  He has done many things for me in my career, not least of which was dragging me from South Korea to Florida in the days after the 2000 election and keeping me there for 31 days counting chads and doing other exciting things.  I certainly do not mean to say - and if he were here, he would second the notion - that we agree on everything. What I admire about Baker was that he knew how to get things done; he knew what his objectives were.  He used to say, Keep your eyes on the prize.   That is advice that you can never forget; our State Department forgets it too often.  And he never misunderstood who he worked for.  He used to call the president the guy who got elected, and it was his way when he was being polite to telling me I had argued long enough.  He would say, John, the guy who got elected does not want to do that.   I at least understood that meant we were not going to do it.  I wish more people in the State Department understood it. So it was not an endorsement of all of his various positions.  The Iraq Study Group is one where we have cordially disagreed.  I admire the man and the professional, and that is why I think he was one of our best secretaries of state. Claire Lopez:  Claire Lopez with the Intelligence Summit Organization.  I wonder how you would characterize the current relationship between the Iranian regime and Al Qaeda, and whether you think that this regime, if nuclear weapons-capable, would share any elements of that capability or technology with Al Qaeda. John Bolton:  I think the first thing I would say is I think we have a cultural misapprehension in many circles in the United States that says basically, Well, there are Shiite Muslims and there are Sunni Muslims and never the twain shall meet.   I think that division is real when you are talking about intra-Islamic controversies; it goes back a millennium, and it is not going to end any time soon.  But I think when the Muslim world faces what they perceive to be a common external threat, there is a lot more cooperation than people think. So in response to your question about Al Qaeda, I think we have evidence of the Al Qaeda being tolerated at a minimum in parts of Iran.  We see already substantial Iranian financing of Hamas which is a Sunni organization; of the Taliban, a Sunni extremist organization, and operating under the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.  I do not doubt that they are assisting Al Qaeda, perhaps, even in Iraq; not just the Shiite extremists but Al Qaeda in Iraq as well. One of the reasons that I fear the consequences of an Iranian nuclear weapon or a North Korean nuclear weapon is precisely that they could be delivered into the hands of terrorists.  Even though North Korea and Iran do not currently have the ballistic missile capability to reach the United States, if they can deliver the weapon device to terrorists who can transport it in a box car or some other way to bring it to the United States or to the capital city of one of our friends and allies and can detonate it there, it is just as effective as if delivered in a ballistic missile warhead. We know not just that Iran finances terrorists; we know from the apprehension of the ship the Karin-A some years ago filled with weapons intended for the Palestinian Authority.  We know as well -- and, certainly, nuclear scientists understand fully this problem of identifying the source of a nuclear weapon where even with a sophisticated knowledge that the nuclear science community has, it may well be that if a terrorist group detonated a nuclear weapon, let s say, somewhere in the United States, we could not have complete confidence what its origin was.  Was it from Iran?  Ultimately, was it from North Korea?  Before we can retaliate, I know the agonizing decision making process that the U.S. government would go through. So you could have a situation where it is actually more efficient and less risky for a country like Iran to give a weapon to a terrorist group.  Let them detonate it and not face retaliation. So I fear this connection.  I look at a regime like that in Tehran, and the thing that comes to mind is the statement my good friend, Dan Gillerman, Israel s ambassador to the U.N., has said many times that in the person of Ahmadinejad, you have somebody who is denying the existence of the original Holocaust while preparing for the second one.  But it is not just Israel that is at risk; we are at risk too, and other friends and allies around the world. John Walstead:  This is John Walstead, a senior fellow of Discovery Institute.  With respect to North Korea, without the serious help of China in bringing down the regime, would we have enough in the West in terms of leverage to have a realistic chance to bring their regime down without getting China to, say, cut off their energy supplies or something like that? John Bolton:  Well, I think the failure of China to act decisively against North Korea s nuclear program is our principal problem.  I take China at its word on this point.  I do not think they want North Korea with nuclear weapons, not because China fears North Korea but because they fear the ripple effect of Japan or South Korea or Taiwan or others concluding they cannot be safe without their own nuclear weapons.  And China does have the leverage; it supplies 80 to 90 percent of North Korea s energy supply, and it could do what it wanted to do, I believe. But this is where China diverges from the United States.  It fears that if it applies too much pressure to Kim Jong-il s regime, it will collapse the regime.  It is a legitimate fear on their part because that regime is more fragile than people think.  But what China worries about is if it collapses the regime, that reunification will take place perhaps because South Korean and American forces would move into the vacuum to prevent the nuclear weapons from getting into the wrong hands.  Then you would have a reunified Korean Peninsula with the risk of American troops on the Yalu River.  The Chinese did not like that movie when they saw it before; they do not like it any better today. So China likes having a puppet state of North Korea between it and South Korea, and it is sort of a normal human reaction because they fear applying too much pressure.  Because the regime might collapse, they actually do not apply any pressure at all, and North Korea continues.  That is the dilemma we are in right now. Matt Korade:  Hi, Mr. Ambassador.  I m Matt Korade; I m with Congressional Quarterly.  I wanted to ask about our relationship with Pakistan.  It has come to light in recent news reports that for a long time, the State Department and intelligence agencies within the U.S. were aware that Pakistan was trading nuclear secrets with countries such as Iran, Libya with the help of China.  Benazir Bhutto even went to North Korea and afterwards regretted doing so. John Bolton:  So did Madeleine Albright. Matt Korade:  Related to nuclear technology. John Bolton:  I do not think she regretted it, though. Matt Korade:  My question is we have treated Pakistan as a close ally for a long period of time for obvious reasons when we were fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.  Now, we have the situation of extreme instability there.  Would you have done anything differently with Pakistan over the years? John Bolton:  Well, let me say that I m a little constrained in what I can say here because of where a lot of my involvement and the information in it derived from, but I can say this.  I think A. Q. Khan s network was operating semi-independently from the government of Pakistan; I do not think that every element there was witting.  Whether Benazir Bhutto was witting or not during her time as the leader of Pakistan, I do not know.  I have heard Pakistanis who believe that very strongly. I think Musharraf when he came to power realized he had a problem in A. Q. Khan.  But he had two problems.  One, he did not know what to do about A. Q. Khan; and, two, he feared if he moved against him, Khan s iconic status in Pakistan could lead to a coup against Musharraf.  So I think Musharraf moved against Khan at the moment we felt that it was most propitious to do so, and I have to say this in somewhat abstract terms.  When you look at a proliferation network, as when you look at a drug network, you have to make a tradeoff between the acquisition of information about the network that tells you more and more about what they are doing and the risk of allowing it to become too successful.  So the decision when to strike against the Khan network had a cost-benefit analysis that said, Why do we not go against what we know?  We can bring it down but we will lose what we do not know.  By definition, it will go to ground and be hidden from us.   I think we moved at the right time.  I think it represented a major element in a second aspect of our strategic victory in Iraq, the Libyan decision to give up the pursuit of nuclear weapons.  I do not think it was a decision free from doubt.  I acknowledge reasonable people could disagree on it, but I think we did the right thing and I think Musharraf did the right thing in Pakistan at the time.  In more recent years, I wish we had gotten more information from Khan.  I wish we had pushed Musharraf harder.  I think one of the tragedies of the current situation is that our own government is now, in effect, helping to bring Musharraf down by indicating doubts about his viability.  I am extremely worried about the chaos that Pakistan could plunge into. Chin Sook Lee [phonetic]:  Chin Sook Lee of MBC Television, South Korea.  Regarding North Korea, you seem to discredit the Six-Party talks that are now currently underway.  But now that North Korea has made it clear that it is ready to give up its nuclear program, do you not think we would better give them another chance?  You raised the issue of a possible Syria-North Korea connection but, obviously, we do not have concrete evidence as of now.  Do you not think we would better wait until we see concrete evidence?  And as of today, what would be the best possible policy towards North Korea?  Thank you. John Bolton:  Well, I think North Korea has a long record of committing to give up its nuclear weapons program in exchange for tangible economic and political benefits, and then it never does so.  It gets the benefits; it re-legitimizes itself; it gets up off the mat where it puts itself economically.  But then as in the case of the agreed framework, it finds a way to violate its commitments almost from the outset.  We are going to come up on a very critical point here perhaps within a matter of days when North Korea is required to declare what its full nuclear program is.  I think they are going to lie about it;  that is my personal view.  I think they will say, Well, we do not have much plutonium.  We only have one other weapon and we do not really have a uranium enrichment program.  We were not there in Syria.  So that is it.  Are we okay now?  Would you take us off the list of state sponsors of terrorism and the Trading with the Enemy Act? And I would predict the government of South Korea will say -- the current government of South Korea will say, Yes, absolutely.  Go right ahead.   I think that is a major mistake.  I think the credibility of North Korea is slim, to say the least, and that the United States should insist on a very, very intrusive verification mechanism, which we have not yet done.  That is the only real answer.  Ronald Reagan used to say with the respect to the Soviet Union, Trust but verify.   I ll confess at the front end I do not trust the North Koreans but I would use the other half of Reagan s saying and I demand verification.  So far, we have not done that. Chuck Downs:  I m Chuck Downs.  I wrote a book a few years ago for AEI on how North Korea negotiates, and this a follow-on -- John R. Bolton:  Better than us, unfortunately. Chuck Downs:  And I want to get to the heart of why that seems to be the case, how the State Department actually negotiates.  As you know, this week Prime Minister Fukuda is coming in from Japan and it appears as though Japan poses an obstacle to the resolution of the Six-Party talks; Japan wants an accounting of the people that North Korea abducted from the streets of Japan.  And so it is anticipated in the State Department that this meeting with Prime Minister Fukuda can be an opportunity for Japan to loosen up on its concern about this human rights issue so that the Six-Party talks can move ahead.  It is strange, I think, you will agree, that the people who advocate negotiating the most are not turning to North Korea and demanding an accounting in negotiations with North Korea; instead they are turning to an ally and asking an ally to give up its concerns.  Can you comment on that? John R. Bolton:  Yeah.  I think this is one of the worst aspects, not just politically but morally, about the February 13th agreement.  And the way it seems to be unfolding is we are going to slap Japan in the face if we take North Korea off the state sponsors of terrorism list without their accounting for the abductions.  We are going to do it almost for no performance from North Korea.  And how you can justify this insult to our close ally, Japan, I just cannot even fathom.  I do not think that the State Department has considered the potential negative implications for the Japan-US alliance and stability in all of East Asia.  We have press reports that our ambassador to Japan has been completely cut out of the deliberations on this subject.  I hope Prime Minister Fukuda makes his case.  He will do it; he represents a sovereign government; he will take whatever position he wants.  But I hope that the President also considers that in addition to this enormous human tragedy of the abductees -- and just for a minute pause and imagine how America would feel if some government were kidnapping our citizens and would not tell us what they had done with the people.  That is why the Japanese are concerned and emotional about this for the same reasons we would be.  But if the human rights violation is not enough, I hope the President also thinks about the implication of North Korea s assistance to Iran on ballistic missiles and now, quite possibly, to Syria on nuclear weapons.  Iran and Syria are nations on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, and the notion that you can get away with assisting two state sponsors of terrorism in the development of their weapons of mass destruction program and still get yourself taken off the list of state sponsors of terrorism is a terrible signal for the global war against terrorism. Benjamin Price:  Hello.  Benjamin Price, managing editor of the Clarion Review.  Switching gears here a little, looking ahead to 2008, who do you see on the Republican side, specifically Giuliani, Huckabee, and Thompson as far as who they will send to represent the United States and which one of those do you think would send people that are going to represent us the way that you discussed? John R. Bolton:  Well, I have not selected a candidate for president yet in part because I want to write the book and I had been under discipline for six years.  Appropriately, when you are in the government you support the government position until you cannot support it anymore and then you leave.  So before I got into the position of supporting somebody else, I wanted to write a book and get it out there into the campaign.  And I also did want to burden the candidate with questions from our esteemed colleagues in the press who would say, Well, on page 256, Bolton says this.  Do you agree with it or not?   So let s get the book over with and then I ll worry about the presidential campaign.  It was inconveniently inconsistent with my life cycle.  And so now, I m going to finish the book and then move on. Male Voice:  One of the areas of U.S. policy where the State Department bureaucracy seems to have trumped sort of the better angels of the Bush administration in coming in is on the issue of US policy towards Taiwan.  The Bush administration came in being very supportive of the democracy on the island and, since, that has turned in almost 180 degrees to the point where the State Department is now acting in some cases as the lead cheerleader trying to restrict Taiwan s international space.  First, do you think it is in US interest to reverse that trend?  And second, what do you think is the most pragmatic and best way to do that? John R. Bolton:  You know, the State Department has found Taiwan to be inconvenient since 1949.  They thought that the problem would be solved by Mao Tse-tung and the Red Army finishing its conquest of China and then they would not have this messy problem.  Years went by; the Taiwanese stayed there and then, even more inconveniently, became a democracy, making it a lot harder to push around because the people have their own views.  I think the most recent spectacle where the Taiwanese are preparing a referendum on whether to continue their annual application to the United Nations and under what name -- we have the spectacle of the State Department saying to Taiwan, Do not conduct the referendum.   Now, this is a case -let me be clear what this means.  This is a case of one democracy telling another democracy, Stop being so democratic.   It is an embarrassment to the United States that we are doing that; it is an embarrassment.  It can only be accounted for by the insular attitudes in the State Department and their fascination with solving the Taiwan problem by the unification of Taiwan with the Mainland.  I think that we are in a very risky situation.  We have seen over a sustained number of years a buildup of PLA missiles on the Mainland aimed at Taiwan; many estimates now have it up to between 900 and 1,000 medium and short-range missiles whose only target is Taiwan.  And I think the policy we have been pursuing, which may have served us well in its ambiguity for sometime, I think, now is actually potentially causing more difficulty than it is resolving.  So I have believed for some time that we should eliminate the ambiguity and thus eliminate the possibility of Chinese miscalculation about our intentions on Taiwan.  I think we should extend full diplomatic recognition to Taiwan and recognize it for what it is - it is a state within anybody s understanding of customary international law.  It controls territory; it has a defined population, a capital city; it carries on the normal functions of the government.  And, by the way, it is a thriving democracy.  And I do not think that this precludes a resolution of the cross-straits dispute in some way that would not necessarily involve an independent Taiwan; we recognize both East and West Germany and they reunited at the end of Cold War.  I do not think our recognition of Taiwan foreshadows a position on that, ultimately, in either direction.  Now, many people would say China would be upset.  I m sure they would be.  But if we fail to take action to minimize the tension and risk of military confrontation in the straits now, it is going to be much harder to do it later.  So as unpopular as I might be in Beijing, I think that would just add to the list of other places I m unpopular.  I think from America s own security point of view that is something we should do. Ed Powers:  My name is Ed Powers.  I have no relevant affiliation; I m a NASA engineer.  The question of North Korea, Syria, and Iran helping to fund Syria to pay for the nuclear -- clearly, Iran is using Syria as a pass-through for arms for Hezbollah and a variety of other not-so-very-good things.  But to help Syria develop a nuclear program seems very implausible to me in an area that is so unstable that today s client or whatever -- when you have control over could be tomorrow s enemy.  I expect that Iran s leaders are clever, if nothing else.  It just seems like something to me that really is not anything that they would ever want to do.  Would you comment on that? John R. Bolton:  Sure.  I think it is a legitimate question.  And, in part, I think we do not know what the relationship of the North Koreans with the Syrians is, to begin with.  I could imagine three situations - a sale of North Korean technology and equipment outright to the Syrians for an independent Syrian program; that is one possibility.  The second possibility at the other extreme is the Syrians simply renting land in effect to the North Koreans to clone their nuclear program in Syria; that is the opposite possibility.  And in between is some kind of joint venture where the facility would be controlled by both Syria and North Korea.  Now, if and this is all hypothetical, this part about Iran there is Iranian funding, then my guess would be Iran would not be supporting a completely independent Syrian program, but that they would see advantage for Iran to having nuclear capacity outside of Iran, outside the gaze of inspectors, and that it would be more complex.  I think Iran s hegemony over Syria is very, very substantial now but I do think the Iranians would understand that this was a risky proposition and that there is much more that we have to learn about exactly what this relationship is.  Is it two-way or is it three-way, among other things? Howard LaFrankie:  Thank you.  Howard LaFrankie with the Christian Science Monitor.  Continuing on Iran, you were talking about how our dithering, as you see it, has brought us down to two limited options, and just two.  And you talked about military strikes against nuclear facilities; there has been a lot of discussion of that.  And the other option you mentioned -- regime change.  And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that because I would like to understand a little bit better what you see as the options, or how you might get there. John R. Bolton:  I think the regime in Tehran is also more fragile than people think and I think there are three principal sources of discontent in Iran.  The first is economic; the mullahs have made a hash of the economy since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.  I think there is a lot of evidence for that around Iran today in strikes and sometimes near riots and the general problems that the economy has.  With all of the oil that they have, because of their misplaced economic policies, the country does not benefit from it.  And I think, in fact, that is a major source of discontent.  The second is that the young people of Iran - and by young people, I m talking about effectively two-thirds of the population under the age of 30 - who are educated and, I think, knowledgeable know they could live a different life; they can see it in the world around them if they could shake off the theocratic rule of the current regime. And, third, there is a lot of ethnic dissatisfaction.  The Persians are only slightly a majority in the population.  Arabs, Hazaris, Kurds, Baluchis, Turkmen, various other ethnic minorities are unhappy about the way that they are treated, whether they are Shiites or not.  So there is a lot of discontent.  Now, I do not necessarily believe that you can turn regime change on and off like a light switch.  I think it take some time.  And that is why I wish we had been at this both overtly and covertly for the past four years.  That is why even though my preferred outcome would be regime change, I think we have the experience of South Africa that teaches us that a time of great regime change -- as in South Africa when the Apartheid regime fell and democracy came into existence, South Africa gave up its nuclear weapons program.  I think the same would be possible in Iran.  But it is not something we can predict with precision when it will occur.  That is why, unfortunately, as a last resort, and not a happy one, the military option has to remain on the table. Sharza Kravi [phonetic]:  Hi.  My name is Sharza Kravi and I m with the National Iranian American Council.  And I want to go back to some of your comments on diplomacy and why it has been very much ignored, especially when the Iranian government has itself come to the United States.  Two key points -- and where this happened was after 9/11 where they helped significantly in Afghanistan and then, again, in 2003 with the grand proposal where they actually did offer to put the nuclear issue on-hold until some diplomatic resolution can take place.  And I just wanted to know some of your comments on that.  And, again, perhaps if you could comment briefly on how that affected your term at the United Nations in dealing with the Iranians. John R. Bolton:  Yeah.  Well, the cooperation that Iran displayed in Afghanistan was tactical on their part because it suited them at that point to have the Taliban out of power.  Now, we have extraordinarily strong evidence that they are supporting the Taliban against NATO forces in Afghanistan and that is a tactical choice on their part, too.  Now, with respect to this 2003 grand bargain, this is an utter piece of nonsense; an utter piece of nonsense.  I was there.  I know what the Swiss representative, our protecting power in Tehran, was doing; he was off, his lawyers say, on a frolic and detour of his own.  If the Iranians wanted to have a real conversation, there were ways to do it and they knew it and it never took place.  This is a complete fabrication. Elizabeth Dushang [phonetic]:  Hi.  Elizabeth Dushang, American University.  I was wondering if you could return to the Pakistani current situation.  We have a nuclear Pakistan and it is very unstable right now.  And I was wondering what do you think U.S. policy should be and how we best ensure that these nuclear weapons do not fall into the wrong hands?  Thank you. John R. Bolton:  Yeah.  Well, I think the security of the nuclear arsenal is the principal American strategic interest.  And I think in the absence of some discernible alternative, although he is no Jeffersonian democrat, we should support Musharraf.  His control of the army is most likely to hold the nuclear arsenal in a secure place.  What I think we are doing is undercutting Musharraf.  We say publicly we have faith in him.  The paper reports this morning we are going to send the special envoy to Islamabad to tell him to do this, that, and the other thing.  Vietnam analogies are popular.  Here is my Vietnam analogy.  We did not like Ngo Dinh Diem.  He was assassinated; we then had a revolving door of Vietnamese generals in government that hampered our ability to fight the Vietnam War.  I m very afraid that when we try and micromanage what is going on inside Pakistan that we are just adding to the instability.  And I want to say this is obviously a case where American values and interests are not entirely congruent.  But I think it would be a mistake to think we have got the white hats, the forces of democracy on the one hand, versus the black hats, the forces of martial law on the other.  It is a long and complex subject as Pakistan is a complex country.  Let me just remind everybody that Benazir Bhutto, the head of the largest party, the People s Party, that her title in that capacity is chairperson for life.  How is that for democratic? Chris DeMuth:  We have time for one more question. Lee Shapiro:  I m Lee Shapiro from the Cato Institute.  On the subject of the cultural revolution at the State Department, what would that look like?  I m having trouble to imagine it.  Let s say you were secretary of state in January 2009.  How would you affect it? John R. Bolton:  As I say in the book, Barry Goldwater, looking at the State Department where the secretary and the principal officials were on the 7th floor, Barry s solution was -- he said, Fire the first six floors.   I remember that comment.  It rang a bell with me later.  The cultural problem at the State Department did not develop overnight; it developed over decades.  It is not going to be solved overnight.  I think we need to change the culture of accommodation into a culture of advocacy.  I think we need to break through the problem of clientitis of the State Department, officials being better advocates for the country they are supposed to deal with.  And for the United States, the story I tell on the book of George Shultz -- he would bring in new ambassadors, according to the story, political or career; point to this big globe on the floor of his office at the State Department.  He would say, Show me where your country is.   And invariably the ambassador would spin it to the country where they have been assigned and Shultz triumphantly would spin it back, point to the United States and say, This is your country.   A little bit more of that would be helpful.  But in all seriousness, this is going to take a long time and I think you need to change the incentive structure.  I think one of the things that is most wrong is that the culture prizes the deal and the process of getting to the deal more than the substance of the deal.  Now, they will not say that because it sounds so ludicrous.  But if you look at the operation, why is the State Department today clinging to the February 13th deal on North Korea to the point of not making public what this Israeli raid was about?  Many people in Congress believe it is because they think if the facts came out, the Six-Party process would tank.  That would not bother me in the slightest but I think this is an indication that the administration has put itself in a very grave position.  I think the next secretary of state has to undertake a substantial process of change.  The State Department has not gone through this kind of reevaluation in half a century since the [indiscernible] days in the 1950 s and it is long, long overdue.  This is not a campaign bell ringer; it is an issue, unfortunately.  But I think it is critical to the success, especially of Republican and conservative presidents, if they actually expect their policies to be implemented once they get into office. Christopher DeMuth:  Well, this is now anti-climactic, but with apologies to several people that we did not get to, we are going to have a reception and I invite you -- [End of file] [End of transcript]    </body></html>