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July 26, 2006

Special Report Roundtable - July 26

FOX News Special Report With Brit Hume

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

NOURI AL MALIKI, IRAQI PRIME MINISTER (through translator): Let me begin by thanking the American people. Through you, on behalf of the Iraqi people, for supporting our people and ousting dictatorship, Iraq will not forget those who stood with her -- with him and who continues to stand with her in times of need.

(APPLAUSE)

HOWARD DEAN, DNC CHAIRMAN: The president made a big deal about bringing the Iraqi prime minister to address Congress and met with him yesterday. The Iraqi prime minister's an anti-Semite.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: Well, there you got a contrasting response, applause from Capitol Hill, but not from Howard Dean who was down in Florida. He's isn't there, some in Congress who don't disagree with him, or at least don't think his position, in terms of condemning Hezbollah's strong enough.

Some thoughts on this now from Fred Barnes, executive editor of the "Weekly Standard"; Mort Kondracke, executive editor of "Roll Call"; and Mara Liasson, national political correspondent of National Public Radio, all are FOX News contributors.

Mara, what about this latest round. Pretty eye catching comments from Howard Dean?

MARA LIASSON, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO: Yes, and they actually aren't even in concert with the Senate minority leader, Harry Reid, who said he was concerned about the prime minister's comments about Israel and his lack of comments about Hezbollah. But when he met with him, he actually thought he felt a little bit better and he felt like the guy was in a difficult position and he was somehow mollified. So not every democrat is singing from the same page as Howard Dean and those comments sounded a little harsh.

The fact is that the -- what has caused this minor ruckus about whether Prime Minister Maliki, who says he's on our side in the war against terror, and by the way the speech was quite he eloquent, and I don't know if Mike Gerson came back to help him with it, but it was really ringing and quite.

HUME: Former Bush speech writer, Mike Gerson.

LIASSON: Yeah, Mike Gerson. It didn't talk about the current conflict. I don't think the guy's required to -- in Israel.

HUME: Current conflict in the -- between Israel.

LIASSON: And Hezbollah, but it's not that he's required to. On the other hand, it is something that's going on and really galvanizing the world's attention. And when he talks about terrorism, it kind of raises the obvious question, well gee, the United States feels Hezbollah is a terrorist group and is doing everything it can to treat them as such and get the world to and, you know, he hasn't actually coming down on our side on that.

MORT KONDRACKE, "ROLL CALL": The prime minister was to have a press briefing this afternoon and didn't make it, didn't -- felt indisposed. So, the foreign minister, Hoshyar Zehari (ph) did it in his sted and was asked, specifically, does the prime minister regard Hezbollah as a terrorist organization and he said -- he sort of backed away from the question, he said he honestly could not say whether he included Hezbollah. Then he started explaining how well the prime minister is a Shiite and Hezbollah represents the Shiites in Lebanon and therefore he was, you know, it was politically difficult for him to attack Hezbollah. So, that's, you know, that's the situation. That certainly doesn't make him anti-Semite.

(CROSSTALK)

HUME: But, didn't the same guy say earlier that he had authorized him, the foreign minister, to go along with the Arab League ministers in a statement that condemns Hezbollah?

KONDRACKE: He said that, too. That at the Arab foreign minister's meeting that he took the same position as the Jordanians and the Saudis and the rest, saying that a militia should not drag its country into war, and shouldn't be allowed to do that.

FRED BARNES, "WEEKLY STANDARD": Yeah, I think he might have been unwilling to criticize Hezbollah here in the United States and he didn't.

The foreign minister was actually very good. He's Kurdish, and the Kurds are Sunni, but they're not like the Sunnis in the Sunni Triangle in Baghdad, you know, who were the, basically the Saddam Hussein people. And he said amazing things. He sounded as if the government is not all that united, that there's still great divisions.

He suggested that some of the Sunnis in the government actually may be inspiring the terrorists, many of whom -- or some, are Sunnis. And he said the terrorism stems from one source and that's the old Baath party, which was the Sunni party and the Saddam Hussein party and the Baathists who are still out there, he said they are the ones totally responsible for all the terrorism that's going on.

And there's a lot -- he said, he was absolutely confident, some American troops would be withdrawn by the end of the year and he said Baghdad is now everything, Baghdad is the challenge. He said the other -- forget about the other provinces for now. They have to win in Baghdad and have to really -- by the end of the year, have to dramatically reduce the violence and also increase the government services for the people. But -- he made it sound like Algeria, remember there was a movie that was a documentary-like movie, it wasn't really a documentary, about the battle of Alders. It was all about the capital city. The French revolution was all about Paris and Baghdad -- they have to win in Baghdad, they have to get terrorists out or the game's up.

LIASSON: Well, it's not just the terrorists, as a matter of fact it's the sectarian violence and massacres and counter massacres. Now, that was one of the criticisms today of the speech that he didn't talk enough about that. But he did say he wanted to disarm all of the militias.

But the other day when Stephen Hadley was briefing at the White House, he said, in Baghdad this isn't about insurgency, it isn't about terror, it's about sectarian violence and that's where the Maliki government has not made the kind of progress that it wanted to.

I mean, about five weeks ago, they announced this new plan for securing Baghdad, that hasn't worked.

HUME: And now they got a new one.

LIASSON: And now they have a new one. But look, that is -- if -- I think that more than anything else is going to determine the success of this guy.

KONDRACKE: What Zoohari (ph) was that they were going to put a division of combined -- that's about, I guess, 10,000 troops, additional, into Baghdad to try to bring it under control and they've got until December.

In December, the U.N. mandate for our presence there comes up and he said that if they have not delivered the goods and restored the faith of the people by December, there's going to be the impulse on the part of the population and the neighbors, frankly, to have a strong man, like Saddam Hussein, come back. That's the danger.

LIASSON: Not Saddam.

KONDRACKE: Not Saddam Hussein, obviously.

HUME: When we come back with "The Panel," we'll discus the controversy of the death of those U.N. observers in Lebanon killed by Israeli fire. Stay tuned.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ROSEN: To effectively accuse the Israelis of deliberately killing four U.N. personnel, do you believe a statement like that enhances your role as an honest broker of peace?

ANNAN: The statement said, "apparently deliberate target," you dropped the word "apparent" I think it's important in this.

Let me say that I had a chance to talk to the prime minister of Israel this morning. He definitely believes that it's a mistake. He has undertaken to investigate and I have suggested we do a joint investigation, and he has expressed his deep sorrow at what happened and we accept that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: And it's true, James did drop the word, "apparently." On the other hand, he used the word "effectively." And the secretary general dropped that, so what about this whole deal with regard to the -- this is kind of a test case for how this is going to play out in the sense that sooner or later, Israel was going to hit a sensitive target and it might have been a bunch of Lebanese civilians all gathered in one place, or it might have been a government building or as in this case, it was a U.N. outpost, four soldiers killed and the pressure for Israel to back off was going to intensify. What about it?

BARNES: I don't think this is the incident that's going to do that and so far as we can tell, it hasn't provoked such an outcry that the Israelis are going to do anything other than to continue to fight the war.

The word "apparently" is important, because what it means here -- and this was not a charge just thrown off in a moment of great by the secretary general, it was a written, printed statement that was handed out and it says "The apparently deliberate target by Israeli defense forces." You say "apparently" when you believe it to be true, that it was deliberate, but you don't have any evidence so you say, "well, apparently deliberate." That's exactly what he did. He was accusing the Israelis of deliberately killing those four U.N. officials.

HUME: Well, and what -- so, what was he doing today, Mort? Backing off?

BARNES: Well, he was backing off.

KONDRACKE: Yeah, he was backing off quit a lot. And you know, look, this kind of thing happens. We, the United States, bombed the Chinese embassy, for heaven sakes, in 2001 in Belgrade, if you remember, and there was a big hoo-ha about that, you know, and people were accusing us of having doing it on purpose. Which clearly.

HUME: There's another spectacular intelligence success on CIA, right?

KONDRACKE: Exactly. Yeah, the building had changed, the embassy had moved in. But, you know, this -- and Fred's right. I don't think that the pressure has built up yet to the point that there's an overwhelming demand on the United States to put the issue to the Israelis and force them to back off. On the other hand, what happened today in Rome was not very encouraging. I mean, this group of benefactors, or.

HUME: Concerned countries.

KONDRACKE: Countries, yeah -- said that there ought to be an international force installed in Southern Lebanon to police peace, but nobody was volunteering -- nobody was volunteering troops.

HUME: Italy. Italy. Italy said they'd send troops.

LIASSON: Yeah. So far, Condoleezza Rice hasn't been able to take the consensus or this unusual international consensus about.

HUME: But did you really.

(CROSSTALK)

LIASSON: No, but still, you know, so far, she hasn't done it, and that's her job, to take the consensus and turn it into something on the ground that will work.

Look, I think this thing about the bombing of the U.N. site is that, as Brit says, it is absolutely inevitable, something like this was going to happen. And it also is -- shows the limitations of what you can do with air power. You know, Israel said it would take a couple of weeks and it was going to -- this kind of bombardment was going to convince the Lebanese to turn against Hezbollah because they would understand that Hezbollah was the cause of all this havoc being rained upon them, that hasn't happened yet and...

HUME: Hold on -- so you can tell.

LIASSON: Right. NPR's reporter in Israel today was saying now Israelis who are absolutely unanimous in support of this operation, are beginning to wonder why hasn't worked yet. Why is help Hezbollah still able to send hundreds rockets a day into Israel. Why haven't they been weakened more? Not that they're turning against the operation, but wondering about the effectiveness of doing it this way.

HUME: Quickly.

KONDRACKE: The principal Israeli target was the long-range missiles and the Israelis are claiming they have substantially knocked them out.

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