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July 08, 2006

Hot Story: Axis of Trouble

Beltway Boys

FRED BARNES, "WEEKLY STANDARD: Coming up on "The Beltway Boys," President Bush tries to capitalize on political momentum at home as foreign policy crises dominate his second term.

MORT KONDRACKE, "ROLL CALL": The Republicans' split over immigration reform on full display with dueling field hearings this week.

BARNES: Joe Lieberman's fighting for his political life as the anti- war left turns up the heat.

KONDRACKE: And New Jersey's budget crisis may be over, but the political damage is already for Jon Corzine.

BARNES: "Beltway Boys" are next, right after the headlines.

(NEWSBREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The problem in North Korea and the problem in Iran is their leaders have made choices. And what we're saying is, there's a better avenue for you. Here's a different route. Here's a different way forward for your people.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KONDRACKE: I'm Mort Kondracke.

BARNES: And I'm Fred Barnes, and we're "The Beltway Boys."

And the one-and-only "Hot Story" is "Axis of Trouble." All these foreign-police crises has in his lap that he's got to deal with. They're - a lot of them are at flashpoints.

Mort, let's start with North Korea. As you know, the Bush policy is one of a multilateral diplomatic policy in dealing with North Korea, trying to get them to back away from their building of nuclear weapons, and now these missiles that they've been firing, including one that's an intercontinental missile that could hit U.S. Of course, this one they fired didn't. But that's what they're aiming for.

The policy of President Bush is not working. Listen to the president talk about it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BUSH: You know, the problem with diplomacy: it takes awhile to get something done. If you're acting alone, you can move quickly. We are rallying world opinion and trying to, you know, come up with the right language at the United Nations to send a clear signal. It takes awhile.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BARNES: It does take awhile, but we can't wait forever.

You know, the North Koreans want to have one-one-one talks with the U.S., not in the six-party deal, where China and South Korea and Japan and so on are involved. And Democrats cynically, I think, are pushing the president to do that. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and others are pushing Bush to do that - the same people who said they didn't like him going unilateral in Iraq. But now they want to go - and should have gone multilateral. Now they're taking the opposite position.

It would be a total mistake to do that; it would reward North Korea for their bad behavior once again. It - and the U.S. in these talks, it would be all these demands for more concessions by the U.S. And somehow, as Bush mentioned at his Friday press conference, where we just saw him by the way, in Chicago - somehow the U.S. would come out as the bad guy that was responsible for the whole North Korean problem in the first place.

KONDRACKE: You know, I - I - I'd like to think that the Democrats were being cynical about that, but I'm afraid the message is even worse. Whatever.

BARNES: You believe it?

KONDRACKE: .the enemy wants - whatever the enemy - the adversary wants is what the United States has to give them in order to be diplomatic in the Democrats' mind. That - that's where I think they're coming from.

But anyway, we - we go on to further discussion of substance, I want to do a little drama criticism of that - of that press conference. Look, I thought that - that - that here the president is dealing with the most deadly serious subjects in the world. And frankly, I thought he looked goofy.

Just watch this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BUSH: Rick (ph) - let's get a little local here, Ricky (ph). Do you consider yourself local or national?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Uh.

BUSH: Hybrid? Are you a hybrid?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (INAUDIBLE)

BUSH: Yes, very trendy. You're kind of a trendy guy. You know, got the gray shirt.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Thank you very much.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KONDRACKE: You know, I - look, I - it's all very well and good. I mean, John F. Kennedy, you know, famously was informal and, you know - and joc - was jocular with the press and stuff like that. But in this case - and I like it, by the way, that the president is dealing with - with the world diplomatically, as - as his critics used to demand, and now criticize him for.

But - but at the moment - look, diplomacy is plainly not working. And what Bush is doing is - is pleading for patience on this score, which is basically playing a weak hand. And - and if he's going to play a weak hand, he ought to play it strongly. He ought to come off as presidential. He ought not come off as a - as - as - as a jokester, which at - and I don't think he even comes as a jokester very well. So.

BARNES: So you would rather have him be grave and pompous and stumpy?

KONDRACKE: I don't want him to be pompous and stuffy. I want him to be authoritative. I want to have him - I want to see some gravitas when you're discussing subjects like this.

BARNES: All right.

The second foreign-policy hotspot: Iran. You know, the Iranians, as I think you'll agree, Mort, have to be watching what goes on in North Korea. And I think they are already learning the lesson from that. And the North Koreans, their - their policy is to be - is to be uncooperative, as uncooperative as possible and threatening as possible. Because what does that get you? Concessions. And that's the whole history going back to the early 90s, when the first made a - a deal on nuclear weapons with the Carter - the Clinton administration. Of course, they can't be trusted. But it works, and we can see - the Iranians are doing the same thing; they're not responding to deadlines. Now we President Ahmadinejad threatening Israel by saying that there will be - what? - an explosion when the - in the Islamic world if they keep making aerial attacks in Gaza, where they're trying to get their kidnapped solider from Hamas. I mean, they're learning the lesson.

And - and that's bad.

KONDRACKE: Yes. I have one more thing to say about North Korea before we - before we move on. And that is - now look, on July 4, when that - when the North Koreans shot off their - tried to shoot off their missile, it fizzled, right?

BARNES: Yes.

KONDRACKE: Now you last week said that we should attack that missile on its launch pad.

BARNES: Yes.

KONDRACKE: And you're still - you still think that that was a good idea after the fizzle?

BARNES: I was agreeing, of course, with Clinton Defense Secretary Bill Perry.

Look, they learned an enormous amount from that firing, which means the next one will go much further.

KONDRACKE: I mean, you know, you would have - you would have started a second - you might have started a second Korean War.

BARNES: Oh come on.

KONDRACKE: Just in - yes. Well, it would have been an act of war, a preemptive attack on a North Korean missile when you.

BARNES: Well, you - you wouldn't have just taken out that site.

KONDRACKE: Oh you wanted to star the whole war?

BARNES: No, there wouldn't - there wouldn't be a war. North Korea wouldn't be able to fight one.

KONDRACKE: I think it's.

(CROSSTALK)

KONDRACKE: Well, let's move on to Iran.

Look, you know, when - when Bush said that there was an axis of evil, he was exactly right. There is an axis, and Iran and North Korea are cooperating. North Korea develops a missile and it gets sold to Iran right away. Iran's missiles are basically North Korean-derived. If the Taepodong II missile had - had succeeded, it would have been in the Iranian arsenal right away.

The big danger is that North Korea not only will sell missile technology, but nukes. And that - you know, that ought to - that ought to get the attention of the world in a way that it hasn't at the moment.

BARNES: Yes, very good point.

All right. Next on the list: Iraq. You know why we haven't been getting a lot of news stories from Iraq recently, Mort?

KONDRACKE: Why, because things are going better?

BARNES: Yes, obviously, things are going better. We don't a lot unless there's bad news. And of course, it - it - look, it turns out to be very difficult to clean insurgents out of Baghdad. Not only is it a big city, but insurgents are tough to deal with. The truth is though the insurgents are reduced to these suicide bombings. There was one at a - a - bombing the softest of targets: you know, Shiites civilians at mosques. I think things are going better, marginally better in Iraq.

KONDRACKE: Yes, well, look - look Zarqawi may be gone, but the - but the jihadists are still on the march. I don't know whether you can say that they've escalated. But nonetheless, they're still working on things. You know, they kidnapped the American soldiers; they butchered them. They - apparently they set off these - these suicide bombs all the time. They killed 12 people at a - Iranians, as it happened, Shiites at a mosque on - you know, just on Thursday.

So, I mean, the - the - the carnage continues. And it's - and, you know - and until security is established in Iraq, you can't say that we're winning there.

BARNES: OK, here's another worry for the administration, and that's terrorism and a possible resurgence of al-Qaida. It was good news in New York, where the FBI broke up this plot to bomb - an al-Qaida plot to bomb the railway tunnels that go under the Hudson River between New Jersey and New York, which could have been very, very harmful.

I think we're winning the war on terrorism, and the - and the amount of turf in the world that al-Qaida can operate it on continues to shrink.

KONDRACKE: Yes. Well, this New York plot looks on the surface like a more serious threat, even though it was early, early stage, than the one that these Miami characters were going to - were going to try to blow up the Sears Tower. That - you know, that didn't seem as though they could do it.

This gang might have been able to.

BARNES: All right. And lastly, a growing problem for the White House: Afghanistan.

Certainly the Taliban is trying to have comeback. But I think there are enough NATO forces there that they can handle it. But the truth is, an elected Karzai that's there - it's never going to rule all of Afghanistan. Nobody ever has in human history.

KONDRACKE: That's true. But, you know, the - the allies promised huge amounts of aid to Afghanistan to help Karzai give his people, you know, the benefit of - of democracy. And they have not delivered on those promises.

BARNES: Yes.

KONDRACKE: And they - they - they - NATO may be there, but it ain't paying up.

BARNES: Yes. Some countries have done well in troops, though. I think Canada has something like 2,200 there. Good for them.

All right. Coming up, the political impact of this week's dueling immigration hearings.

And the anti-war left makes Joe Lieberman public enemy No. 1. We'll tell you how he's fighting back. Our "Ups and Downs" are next.

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