Bob Inman on Terrorism
By Avrel Seal

This article was reproduced with permission from The Alcalde, It appeared on page 32 of the January/February 2002 edition.

One doesn't have to be around Bob Inman long to realize that one is dealing with a different type of brain, a type not shared by many. He is the intersection of micro and macro, at once displaying an insane head for details and an awe-inspiring grasp of the big picture, seeming to see the dominoes and dynamics of world events at a glance. Omni called him "simply one of the smartest people ever to come out of Washington or anywhere," and Newsweek dubbed him "a superstar in the intelligence community [and] a tough-minded administrator."

We might have known that something was up when he graduated from high school at age 15, and then from UT at 19 with a BA in 1950. From there, Inman, who was born in the deep East Texas town of Rhonesboro, embarked on a 31-year military career that would take him to the highest levels of four different intelligence agencies. In 1981, Inman was nominated by President Reagan to be the deputy director of central intelligence. He was easily confirmed and served in that position until resigning in March 1982. At that time, he became the first naval intelligence specialist ever to earn the rank of four-star admiral.

Inman almost re-entered public service in 1993 when President Clinton asked him to become secretary of defense. Inman accepted, then, in a now-famous press conference in which he cited the cruelty of the media, declined the post.

Inman's involvement with his alma mater has been continuous. In 1985, he was named a Distinguished Alumnus; in 1992-93 he served as president of the Texas Exes; he has taught at the McCombs School of Business throughout the past decade; and five months ago, he was appointed the Lyndon B. Johnson Centennial Chair in Public Affairs.

Now 70, Inman, who is married to the former Nancy Russo and has two sons, continues to prove he is made of different stuff. He is tan, thin, and maintains a breakneck schedule, jetting across the country to sit on boards of corporations and consortiums that pay him handsomely for the use of the aforementioned brain. He had just come from a lunch meeting in which he was trying to marry two high-tech companies and was about to come down to the Alumni Center to talk to scholarship winners and student leaders about the topic for which he is in great demand these days, terrorism.

Inman is highly credentialed in this area, not only because of his long service in various intelligence agencies, but because he was selected in 1985 to head a commission to study the terrorism threat, which issued what is now commonly known as "the Inman Report." We caught up with him at his office overlooking the LBJ fountain on November 12 ... [Because Inman's comments assume a high level of background knowledge, we have included notes in the margins to help refresh readers' memories about certain key references. The terms defined are denoted with capital letters in the body of the interview.]

The last time we saw each other was at LaGuardia, and you had just been to the funeral of a friend who had been in the World Trade Center. How personal is all of this for you?
Obviously when you lose friends that are innocent civilians, it gives it a poignancy it might not otherwise have. It's no longer just an analytical challenge. It becomes an emotional one as well. And I find interesting that both my wife and I still tend to react to both the losses but also some of the kindnesses. Nancy had gone up to New York to go to dinner and to the opera with the widow, and her friend wanted to leave before it was over. They went out and there were no taxis. She said, 'Let¼s get on the bus.' Her friend discovered she didn't have her bus pass, and Nancy only had large bills. And the bus driver said, "Get on! Get on!" So they got on, and he said, "New Yorkers helping New Yorkers." So it's had its pluses in softening some of the hardness in New York.
The other still pretty astonishing factor to me is how widespread the surge of patriotism in the country is. And, at least for a period, if anthrax scares and inept handling doesn't change it, a very significant shift in public attitudes about government. Suddenly, government is the solution to problems rather than being the problem.

A return to more of a World War II-era mentality?
Not yet there, but it's certainly closer to it than any time in my adult life. Korea certainly didn't elicit it, and Vietnam, in fact, became incredibly divisive.

Are you involved in any way in this new war?
Only in limited fashion on the fringes. People occasionally call me and ask me for advice.

What kind of people?
People who are related to intelligence efforts, who you would expect, and a couple of policy people. There are a lot of people in government that I've worked with in earlier years. So they'll call and ask, "Do you know somebody who could work on this problem?" or "Do you have any ideas on what we ought to do?"

Is it fair to say that once you've been to such a senior level in intelligence that you¼re never again really out of the loop?
If you didn't leave under very adverse circumstances, there's an inclination to want to call on you for advice. I've had the incredible good fortune of serving in four different intelligence agencies, and that's relatively rare. I also spent a lot of my years supporting military operations, and so when you suddenly have a crisis, that's when people tend to call and say, "How did you deal with this kind of problem?" Also, members of Congress call from time to time and ask for advice.

Has the president called you?
No. Clinton did on a couple of occasions, but I guess the last one to call me was the father of the president.

How did you come to be commissioned to do the 1985 Inman Report? Secretary [of State George] Shultz called me and asked if I would chair a commission looking at the terrorist threat to U.S. installations overseas. And I agreed to do it if it also looked at intelligence threats to those facilities -- physical penetration -- and if it was bipartisan. He agreed to both of those. The intelligence report was and remains classified. We did an unclassified version of the terrorist threat.

It seems that all debates on recent events get back to one's definition of terrorism. What is your definition of terrorism?
Anarchy has been around as long as recorded civilization -- people who elect to use violence displaying their opposition to something. It's not what they're for; it's almost always what they're against. Terrorism is the use of lethal force. Sometimes it's aimed against governments, but at other times it's aimed against innocent civilians simply to shake the support for government. What we¼re seeing now is the latter version. So terrorism takes many faces.

You said it's the use of lethal force, sometimes against governments, but you probably wouldn't characterize what we're doing to the current government of Afghanistan as terrorism--
--To the contrary, it's a conscious decision to use overt military force to respond to threats.

Osama bin Laden points the finger of accusation back at the United States, claiming that we began the era of indiscriminate killing of civilians when we used the atomic bomb. What is the essential difference between what he has done and the mass annihilation that we visited on Japan?

Would we have used the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki if we had not had the suicide bombers, the kamikaze? It's hard for me to be sure. But what the kamikaze told the policymakers was that invasion of Japan to bring an end to the war would cost thousands of lives, maybe millions of lives, and therefore escalating to a different level ultimately would save large numbers of lives -- of Japanese, as well as, certainly, America and its allies -- in the process.

None of bin Laden's activities are aimed at what you're for -- trying to bring something to closure. He initially was out to force the withdrawal of all Westerners from the Arab peninsula, considering that their mere presence is an affront to the holy sites of Medina and Mecca. He's a latecomer to worrying about the Palestinians. That wasn't on his agenda earlier.

What he's really after, if you read carefully, is to recreate the Ottoman Empire. It's a political victory that he's after in the process, not a religious victory that motivates him, that drives him. The decision to blow up embassies in Beirut, Kuwait (much earlier); the decision to plant a bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center, trying to create major loss of life (didn't succeed); the effort to bomb the embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam: the attack on the U.S.S. Cole -- even before the events of 9-11, showed a steady progression. The common hallmark is the number of innocent civilians killed, with the exception of the Cole.

You'll note I didn't quote Khobar Towers in that, nor the Marine barracks in Lebanon. We know the attack on the Marine barracks in '83 was funded by the Iranians. The evidence is pretty persuasive that the Iranians funded the attack on Khobar Towers. So those attacks are by competing terrorists, but the objective is still the same: inflict casualties on the U.S.

How do you respond to those who say the United States had this coming?
As I stood back and watched and listened to people saying, "This is all the fault of American foreign policy," I felt that is shorthand for anti-semitism. Because, basically, they want a policy that would abandon Israel to whatever its opponents want. That's what they really mean by "changing American foreign policy." Why do we support Israel? It's largely guilt, because we didn't act on the Holocaust. There was evidence the Holocaust was under way even before we were drawn into the war, and we didn't elect to do anything about it. And the leadership at the end of World War II, traumatized by that reality, were determined. That was the driving factor in Truman's decision to recognize Israel in '48. It is clear the Israelis used terrorism against the British and others to get their own independence. But rather than second-guessing how they got there, the reality is that it is a democracy, that it has a right to exist in the Middle East, and I don't think any U.S. president is going to walk away from that.

Are we going to also find a way to support the Palestinians, to give them statehood, to give them economic support that says it can be a viable country? That's a harder choice. I think we ultimately will. What to do about Jerusalem is tougher still. My solution is a rather simple one: Make the Temple Mount into an area like the Vatican, which has its own independent status within a greater city. The Palestinian capital has got to be somewhere else. It may be Ramullah, somewhere else, but it's not going to be Jerusalem. This small place inside Jerusalem should be an international place, not Israeli.

The harder elements are the settlements. They were deliberately placed in the territories to avoid there being land for the creation of a Palestinian state. That's probably the toughest issue between here and peace in the Middle East.
But the sudden effort to pull bin Laden's effort and his attacks into a context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict just isn't true. It isn't true to the facts. Hes a latecomer. He and Iraq were competitors for power in the Arab world, not allies.

As I understand the chain of events, it was the United Nations that created the state of Israel, so why isn't Arab angst directed more at the U.N.?
It was our recognition of their independence that was the critical event. Had we not elected to recognize their independence in '48, the U.N. would not have created the state. The U.N. had been playing with what to do. You had the Balfour Declaration, substantially earlier. You had long immigration of Jews to Palestine, and we have a lot of friends there whose parents, grandparents immigrated. They¼re very tough about the idea of giving up any territory. They consider it was theirs. It¼s been seized back in the fighting that took place after Israeli independence was announced. They make the case that what they¼ve done is just fair.

We had a real move toward peace in the Middle East led by Yitzhak Rabin, really a great man. He had been a fierce warrior but he understood that if you were going to change the future and the hopes for young Israelis, as well as young Arabs, you had to move away from war. The terrorists won. It was a domestic terrorist in that case, the right-winger who assassinated Rabin. But with it went any near-term chance for peace. We're not going to get it with Sharon. Peres has never been able to win a leadership role. He doesn't commit. So it's got to be somebody on the Israeli side that we don't yet see who will decide.

Do you feel that our support for Israel is sufficiently conditional?
U.S. support for Israel is not conditional; it is overwhelming. Domestic politics clearly play a significant role in that. There is influence through contributions in both political parties in the process. But it's got deeper roots than that; it isn't just politics. It really does go back to a sense of commitment for their founding, and that they should be given the right to live in peace within clearly defined borders. And that basic premise is broadly supported in both political parties. We aren¼t conditional in our support for the United Kingdom, we aren¼t conditional in our support of France or Italy. So I don¼t exactly understand why we should be conditional in our support for Israel. Now, if France does something we don't like, we're blunt to tell them that. If Britain does something we don't like, we're not reluctant to tell them. That's less frequent because they tend to stick very close to us. Same for the Japanese. We lecture the Japanese all the time, particularly about the way they manage their economy. We are not conditional in our support for Egypt, despite a pretty autocratic regime and significant corruption and not a lot of democratic participation. Nonetheless, we did it as a reward for the Camp David Accords and making peace with Israel. Should we constantly pressure Israel to try to find peaceful solutions for living with the Palestinians? The answer is absolutely yes. We do that everywhere else; there's no reason not to. But as soon as you do it, you can be sure you've got a coterie from William Safire and the New York Times and others who will take any administration under fire. Safire's position is that the right wing in Israel is right no matter what their view is. We say in this country sometimes, "My country, right or wrong." Safire says, "Israel, right or wrong." There's an element that attacks U.S. policy if we try to put pressure on Israel. I don't consider that putting pressure to find peaceful solutions as conditional support. Conditional support has a connotation to me that you don't really support Israel's right to exist as an independent country.

Many of the Arabs say they should be pushed into the sea, and we're not going to ever agree to that.

What would happen if the U.S. just said, Israel is more trouble than it's worth, and just disengaged in the region?
War. It would lead to much greater bloodshed than we see now. The temptation of Iraq and others to try to use force to expel the Jews would quickly follow. The danger on the other side if we don't stay there and engaged is that Sharon will decide to try to push Palestinians out of Gaza and out of the West Bank and into Jordan and Egypt, which would almost certainly bring about the fall of those governments. So we are in the unhappy circumstance of finding ourselves drawn to stay and to counsel, even when we don't have much effect. Only the warring parties can decide to stop fighting. Don't forget that it was Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount, which he knew was going to be incendiary, that touched off the second intifada. His very hard-line views -- don't give up any territory for peace, he would clearly prefer to have no Palestinian state -- ultimately are not the way to a peaceful solution.

Now the danger is that if he falls, Netanyahu would be elected and get another swing at the bat. He certainly didn't do anything when he was the leader to give us encouragement that he was interested in finding a peaceful settlement for the relationship with Palestinians.

It sounds like Netanyahu¼s philosophy is "peace through strength." If that worked for Reagan, why doesn¼t it work for Israel?
I don't think it is peace through strength. It isn't just the use of force, it's the continued expansion of the settlements. That's the heart of the problem I had with Netanyahu. That's where he really set out to walk away from Rabin¼s vision for bringing peace.

When and where did the modern era of terrorism begin?
1967. In the wake of the Six-Day War, and the major loss of prestige the Soviets suffered, they were eager to do anything to regain favor. They knew the Palestinians wanted to carry terrorist attacks into Israel. So they set up four training camps in Czechoslovakia, recruited Palestinians to come be students, and the East Germans provided the instructors. Suddenly in 1968, we had the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, and it didn't look like such a good place to carry on those operations.

So in 1969, the camps in Czechoslovakia were closed, and new camps were opened all over the Arab world: Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Algeria. Pretty soon, some of the moderate Arabs cracked down on them. King Hussein closed the ones in Jordan in '70. Others over time also were closed down until you reached the stage where Becca Valley, Syria, and Iraq were prime training grounds for those who were going to carry the battle into Israel. Yemen, Algeria, and Libya were prime training grounds for terrorists who were going to carry out operations in other parts of the world.

And then suddenly, beginning Christmas Day 1979, Pakistan became the site of training camps for guerrillas in Afghanistan, and as the war there ended, Afghanistan became the center of many of the training camps.

I've heard you say before that the Soviets were the grandparents of what is going on now--
Yes. But there is no sign that they have had any direction, control, or financing since the '70-71 time frame.

We are for the moment allied with the Russians. To what extent are today's "Russians" the same people as yesterday's "Soviets"?
They¼re a younger generation. It's not the same leadership.

Was not Putin himself KGB?
He wasn't a leader. He was a young KGB officer. It won't surprise you that I have resented the immediate move to characterize Putin and his actions because he served in the KGB. (Smiling) I don't happen to have the view that someone who served in an intelligence agency is automatically suspect in their commitment to democracy or to building a different world. KGB recruited a lot of very bright people. He wasn't over in the Spetsnaz, the wet departments, or the rest of it. He was in the collection/analytical side of the process. He got out and went to Leningrad and went to work for [Mayor Anatoly] Sobchak, who was probably the ablest of the Russian leaders after the fall of the Soviet Union. He was the go-to guy working for Sobchak in Leningrad for people who were trying to build businesses -- Westerners who were trying to work there -- and he worked his way on up. So I consider him a very different person than we saw with the old Bolsheviks. The transition was Gorbachev. And you go back to what produced Gorbachev and his allies; it was Khrushchev's stunning speech to the Communist Party in which he revealed all the terror conducted by Stalin. That was a seminal event for a lot of young communists, and they said that if they got to power they were going to change things so that could never happen again. Problem was, Gorbachev didn't know what to build afterwards. He wanted to try to keep the Communist Party alive but to make it a different Communist Party. Yeltsin understood you had to actually defeat it, or you weren't going to change Russia. It's early to say what Putin will eventually end up doing, but he's a pragmatist. The first sign of the potential of he and Bush to work together, as I understand it, came in the talks in Slovenia over terrorism, when they found they had common ground. Putin was persuaded that the Chechen rebellion, the bombs in Moscow and all, were funded by terrorist organizations.

What are the odds that America's war against other states will widen?
The war on terrorism, as it's phrased, clearly is going to be done in stages. The first stage is to go after Osama bin Laden and his primary supporters, and the Taliban for providing shelter, and to the Al Qaeda network wherever it's found around the world.

We know there are cells in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Western Europe. Can you bring those to justice by police action? Hope so, because you don't have to use military force, collaboration with host governments, et al. But if we're going to continue the war against use of terror against civilians across international boundaries, then we're going to have to face up eventually to Hezbollah and Hamas. There's no getting around it. But sequentially going after, first, who attacked us, I still believe is the right course.

And candidly, we don't want to define this in a way that reduces your chances of winning. And doing it sequentially offers a substantially better chance of winning. We saw immediate efforts to get us to try to go attack Iraq, beginning the night of 11 September. "Well, if there isn't evidence, they're bound to be involved, and it's a good chance. Go hit him." Some of this is a holdover from the fact that he survived the Gulf War. Some of it is the fact that Israel considers him Enemy No. 1 in the funding and support of attacks there. I think the decision that was taken was the right one, but it's going to take a long time.

If evidence did turn up that Iraq was clearly involved, wise to go in?
Then we would clearly take the battle there. I don't know what form that would take.

Are you one who believes Desert Storm ended too soon?
Desert Storm ended when it was designed to end because it was conducted under U.N. authorization. It wasn't at all sure that President Bush would get support from the Congress to go expel Iraqis in Kuwait, so he went to the U.N. first and got a U.N. resolution, and that didn't authorize toppling the government in Baghdad; it authorized expelling Iraqi forces in Kuwait. He then went to the Senate, and you'll recall he won by only one vote, even with that U.N. approval. Very different from the array of support after these attacks. You would certainly have torn apart the coalition and with that any chance to negotiate a peace in the Middle East.

And look at what we got by stopping. We got the U.N. to assert authority to control what an individual country could have in the way of developing weapons. First time ever that the U.N. has decreed that an individual country could not have weapons of mass destruction, and [an inspection] regime to try to control that. Worked for a good long while. Eventually Saddam Hussein thumbed his nose at us successfully, and the U.N. didn't back up their earlier effort, but it certainly slowed him down for years in the process. So, as an assertion of a right by the U.N., pretty brave!

As for, "Well, we should have gone on to Baghdad and taken control," who would we have put in charge? Who is going to be the U.S. proconsul in Baghdad? The last journalist to interview Saddam Hussein before the war was a UT alum, Karen Elliott House. I remember hearing her right after the Gulf War started, saying, "If you think Saddam Hussein is bad, you should see the four thugs who are just below him in the hierarchy." This time, we didn't go to the U.N. for authority, so we don't have a problem. We put together a coalition. The U.N. has now passed a resolution blessing the effort to go do it, but the framework is very different than the framework that authorized the action in the Gulf War. It's very interesting that notwithstanding that, Osama bin Laden is now making the U.N. one of his targets also, calling Kofi Annan a criminal, et al.

Isn't it true that if the U.S. widens the war to include all states who have knowingly hosted terrorists, that we will, by definition, be engaged in a third world war?
No, I don't buy that. There's a very interesting line, and that's the statement that in this war on terrorism, you're either with us or you're against us. Now, there have been some who said, "Oh, that forces people into difficult circumstances." It also offers them an out. There isn't anything in that that says your past behavior counts against you. You want to stop funding terrorists and stop giving support to them and start providing information, then you're a reformed sinner that's forgiven. So for Syria, potentially Iran, Libya, here's a chance to get rid of sanctions, be on the side of economic development, growth, international trade. I think they'll think seriously about it. Iraq won¼t under its current leadership. But then again one of these days, some Iraqi aspiring to be wealthy will produce a change in leadership in Iraq. It won't be U.S. money; it will be Saudi money alone sitting in a bank in Switzerland, hoping someone would be able to dispatch it. [Saddam Hussein] is so ruthless in his set of controls, nobody but family and close tribal people ever get a chance to get near him. But sooner or later, someone tired of him being a tyrant will elect a change. Certainly the guerrillas in Afghanistan who combated the Soviets and ultimately caused them to withdraw made a major contribution to the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union. And you look at the Russia that's emerged and the other republics -- there's a real opportunity here to build longtime peaceful relations for the rest of my adult life and probably the rest of yours, if it's played right. We'll see how a lot of that plays out the next two days in Washington and Crawford.

Mr. Putin has to make some clear decisions. He's already made a bunch this year. Legislation has been enacted in the last six months that does more for the prospect for economic growth and foreign investment than has occurred in the 10 years since the Soviet Union fell. The coup that failed was 17 through 19 August '91.

This has the potential to change our relationship with Russia for many, many years to come. And as we find common interest, that will cause us to rethink elements in our relationships. This may force us to think differently about NATO. Do we need a NATO? What is the purpose of NATO? Do you need a different structure that includes all of the democracies of Western Europe to which we provide some alliance and structure? Obviously, in that case, you're contemplating one that's going to bring force to bear on problems externally to that whole area.

You postured the worry, this could lead us to a third world war. I think there's as good a possibility that this is going to lead us to a total realignment of relationships that have been adversarial.

The huge question is, where does China go in all of this? They have their own terrorist problem up in the Muslim northwest that they're worried about. But the real key in China is the generational change of leadership that will take place 11 months from now with the requirement for senior leaders to retire -- Xiang to turn over his role as president, Zhu Ron Ji to turn over the prime minister. We're going to be dealing with a younger generation of Chinese leaders just over a year from now. They may have a very different view of the world and how they want to play in it as well. I don't think we have to necessarily see the shape of the world in blocs and adversaries. If we are skillful, and thoughtful in our premise, we could end up with a significantly enhanced position in the world.

We went from the Cold War to 10 years of chaos, in which we saw Bosnia, Somalia, Kosovo, things all throughout Africa. The next decade could play out really quite different. If you, in fact, are successful in going after international terrorism, what do you get next? Hopefully you go back toward economic growth, development, education -- the things that offer the structure for democracy to have a chance to grow. There are some very fragile points in this glowing new globe that I shaped for you: Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Indonesia, perhaps Argentina and Brazil for economic mismanagement. So even as we find new relationships, there are still some problems out there that could explode.

Yet one that could explode and go a very different direction is Iran. Sixty percent of the population is under 30 years of age. That means 60 percent of them have no memories of the seizure of the American embassy on November 4, 1979, and how the animosity came about. All they know is that they've got a group of extreme religious rulers who suppress all their individual freedoms. And I think you're seeing every year more signs of restiveness. So the next revolution we see there in the streets could be to bring down the fundamentalist Islamic rule in Iran, and that changes dramatically the whole situation. It seems to many that America has shot itself in the foot time and again because it has propped up bad guys around the globe simply because they weren't communists: the Shah, Somoza, Noriega, Marcos, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden, to name a few. Would we be better off today if we had just kept our noses out of those Cold War-era civil wars? If the communists had succeeded in taking control of power in many of those countries, the world would have had a sense of forward momentum for communism that might well not have led to the economic collapse -- their access to raw materials in many countries around the world. So no, I don¼t think simply staying home, trying to build a Fortress America and not having an involvement, would have made us better off.

I do think we went overboard in the issue of: You've got to either be communist or anti-communist, and ignoring the in between. In fact, you had India and a number of other countries, the so-called non-aligned, that we grumbled about but we came to accept over time because we did not see them as staging grounds for communist growth. The great difference in this war now is, there is no ideological challenge like fascism or communism. Bin Laden would like to make Islam one.

And what about the covert elements of support?
I have never been a fan of covert operations. You may not have the same objectives as those who are the executors of the policy. You don't control their activities, you have no real way of moderating or controlling where they're going, and you don't know what the consequences are going to be.

If you believe a problem requires the use of force, then you should be willing to do it overtly with your own military forces, not go try some paramilitary operation that you don't control.

Is that why you were only in the CIA a year and a half?
Probably. (Laughs) They probably were very happy that I was only there a year and a half. Yes. It was a subject of constant conflict, as I watched the expansion in Central America, daily tension with the director as they began supporting forces in northern Costa Rica. Those weren't there to interrupt the flow of arms. They were there to try to overthrow Nicaragua. Now, look at the outcome: democracy is at work in Nicaragua. The Sandanistas tried once again to come back by the ballot box, but the public rejected them.

Bin Laden's foremost grievance seems to be the presence of the U.S. military in Saudi Arabia. Is it legitimate for us to be there?
The decision over the presence of military forces in a country belongs to its government. The government of Saudi Arabia requested that assistance, and they wanted that assistance to remain, and they have a legitimate right to do that, and we have a legitimate right to a response. Bin Laden doesn't like it. He wants to try to create a holy war. Ultimately he has the hope that it will also cause the failure of the Saudi regime, and he sees himself as a sort of Ayatollah Khomeini-come-home as the ultimate political ruler in the process. I consider his views to have no legitimacy at all.

And that they¼re not even heartfelt?
No. They're justifications for action that is really aimed at creating a political power base.

Do you think that this new empire that he would create would take on a Taliban flavor?
Absolutely. The whole view is that the only place for women in that society is at home. Girls cannot even be educated.

In that sense there is an ideological element to his powerlust. But it doesn't have the appeal that communism had, that fascism had, in its time. Both of those essentially were arguments that they were going to give you a better life. The Taliban's approach isn't giving anybody a better life. It is simply setting out to suppress in every way women's rights. To make them totally subjugated to male domination. That's why we're such a threat to them. They look at the role that women play in this society -- political, economic, cultural. It totally threatens their whole view on the way life should be played out.

That said, time to get home to the wife.
(Laughs) Right.

January 18, 2002

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January 18, 2002

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