But when the Obama administration came in the PA said we’ll apply for UNESCO and elsewhere, and the administration started to wring its hands and say that UNESCO members will try to get a waiver from Congress so that we can still make contributions. The Palestinians and the Europeans saw a weakness. Now Palestine is a member of UNESCO, after twenty-five years of being held off by strong policy. The PA did it because they saw they could do it and succeed.
I think it’s exactly the same approach with BDS. This administration has given every signal that it understands the BDS movement. When Kerry said that if Israel doesn’t make very substantial concessions, “who would be surprised if the BDS movement continues to gather momentum?” it means they fully appreciate or accept the premises of the whole approach. So if you want to create facts on the ground that way, then Israel should feel justified in going ahead and doing what it needs to do.
As a former assistant secretary of state, you played a role in 1991during the first Bush presidency in getting the UN to repeal the Zionism is Racism resolution. George H.W. Bush and James Baker weren’t exactly thought of in positive terms by large segments of the pro-Israel community; do you think they deserve more credit in terms of U.S.-Israel relations?
Absolutely. I didn’t do this by myself. If I hadn’t convinced Baker, and if in turn Baker hadn’t convinced Bush, it wouldn’t have happened. I know they’re not widely popular in some circles. Baker is outspoken and has said some controversial things. He certainly held strong views on the Arab-Israeli issue, but he was also the one who took the hard line with the PLO and the World Health Organization, and if he hadn’t done that they would have been members of the UN twenty years ago. So you have to weigh that into the equation of how Baker performed.
There is an open disagreement between Senator Rand Paul and Governor Rick Perry over an isolationist versus a more neoconservative approach to American foreign policy. What’s your view?
I take the view that the United States has to be an active presence in the world to protect its own interests and its friends and allies. I don’t think that’s neoconservatism because in order to be a neoconservative you had to have been a liberal once and I was never a liberal. I just think it’s the main strain of American foreign policy. It’s Reagan’s view of maintaining peace through strength and the traditional view of the Republican Party.
I think Perry, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio are well within that mainstream. It’s Rand Paul who’s the outlier, reflecting the strain of isolationism that we haven’t seen in the party really since the 1930s. And that was not a happy experience. I think it’s a mistake.
Given the gains made by ISIS in Iraq as well as the lack of any discovered WMD there, would you agree, in retrospect, that the Iraq invasion was a mistake?
No, not at all. There’s no doubt in my mind that if Saddam Hussein had gotten loose from UN sanctions and had gotten UN weapons inspectors out, he would have returned to pursue weapons of mass destruction. He had over 1000 nuclear scientists and technicians. Were they spinning centrifuges and enriching uranium? Almost certainly not. But did they retain the intellectual capability to recreate a nuclear weapons program? Yes. And Saddam would have done that.
I think that historically we’re looking back at what happened in 2003 as a continuation of what we failed to do in 1991. With 20/20 hindsight we should have finished Saddam’s regime in 1991. I don’t disagree that mistakes were made, but knowing everything we know today it was still in America’s interest to overthrow him in 2003, which we did with amazing speed and skill.
