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August 08, 2006

Special Report Roundtable - August 8

FOX News Special Report With Brit Hume

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TAREK MITRI, LEBANESE ENVOY TO THE U.N.: Twenty-seven days ago we asked for an immediate cease-fire. More than 900 lives ago we asked for an immediate cease-fire.

DAN GILLERMAN, ISRAELI AMBASSADOR TO THE U.N.: The terrorists are watching, Mr. President. If this council adopts the path of half measures, concessions, and mere declarations, they will be emboldened and will find ourselves back at this table a week, a month or a year from now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANGLE: From the U.N. debate, today, in the Security Council of the Lebanese and Israeli represents now some analytical observations from Fred Barnes, executive editor of the "Weekly Standard"; Juan Williams, senior correspondent for National Public Radio; and Bill Sammon, senior White House correspondent for the "Washington Examiner," FOX NEWS contributors all.

So gentlemen, a very emotional debate, but the result, we are told, was at the end of the day the French were moving toward the Arab League position, which is calling on Israel to immediately withdraw upon a cease- fire, and even to the point of not being in favor now of the international force that France was actually going to lead, Bill. Not being in favor of that and instead going with the UNIFIL forces which are U.N. observers who have been totally infective.

BILL SAMMON, "WASHINGTON EXAMINER": The problem is it's the status quo solution. The UNIFIL blue helmets were there, so was the Lebanese army, they didn't get the job done in restraining Hezbollah so the Arab community wants to basically go back to that and the French are now siding with them after originally siding with us and saying we need an international force.

ANGLE: And Juan, that's why you had the Israeli ambassador to the U.N. saying, look, guys, you know, these guys are watching and if you do not do the right thing here, you're going to be back here a month or year from now with the same problem over and over and over again.

JUAN WILLIAMS, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO: Well, I think he has a point, but unfortunately, with the continued barrage Israel's launching against Lebanon, they're losing the public opinion battle and apparently French support and that's not good Israel, that's not good for the U.S. because it further isolates our interest in that Middle East region, so it becomes more problematic. At what point do you make a deal to get the multinational force that Israel ultimately wants in Southern Lebanon?

ANGLE: Fred, do you see any way to revive this idea of international force because the Lebanese army, both the U.S. and Israel, were open to the idea of the idea of the Lebanese sending 15,000 troops, but both said it would not be sufficient. In fact let me play for you what Sean McCormack at the Statement Department said today on that very point.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEAN MCCORMACK, STATE DEPARTMENT SPOKESMAN: We will need international forces to support the Lebanese armed forces. They are not, at this point, a robust enough entity to be able to, on their own, exercise total control of that southern area of Lebanon.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANGLE: Understatement, Fred?

FRED BARNES, "WEEKLY STANDARD": "Not robust enough," that's quite a euphemism given the state of the Lebanese army. I mean brining them in there and adding them to UNIFIL is like -- you know, like putting a high school team up against the Pittsburgh Steelers in a football game. I mean it's just ridiculous, I mean, you can't expect the Israelis to accept that. The American policy all along is, I have heard in briefing after briefing, is, we will not accept the status quo ante. If the Israelis have to retreat to their border and all that stands between the border and Hezbollah this ragtag army of Lebanon, then that -- that's the status quo ante and it's not going to be acceptable. It clearly is not acceptable to President Bush, from what he said today, and it's not acceptable to the Israelis and so the U.S. would have to veto a resolution that...

WILLIAMS: Let me ask a question, how long can the U.S. allow Israel to continue down this path, given that they've had weeks to degrade Hezbollah's strength and have so far failed to do the job?

BARNES: We can do a little more, you know, they can -- maybe you haven't noticed, Juan, but the Hezbollah is firing several hundred rockets into Israel every day. They're the ones who started this, they are a terrorist group, they represent a government, Iran, that has sworn to eradicate Israel and you want Israel to cave into them?

(CROSSTALK)

WILLIAMS: No, I didn't say cave in. But they had several weeks now, a month, I think it's more than a month now, to actually take on Hezbollah and to weaken them and somehow Hezbollah has met this match, and the airstrikes didn't work, now they've got people poised in terms of literally reinvading Lebanon again, which know is a losing deal.

BARNES: And remember D-Day? You know, we landed on the beach in Normandy and we're stuck on the beach in that area for weeks after weeks after weeks and then finally they broke out. Now, I'm not saying Israelis will do that, but they obviously need a little more time.

SAMMON: Even Israelis are acknowledging that they did not quite estimate the strength of the Hezbollah, and that's reality. But I think what's interesting is that all parties agree that it would be fine for the Lebanese to deploy more soldiers down there. I don't think America is objection to that.

(CROSSTALK)

Put the blue helmets in there, too, but what the Americans are saying is we need an international force with some teeth on it. You're also hearing rumblings from the Arab community saying, you know, we want a force in there that will observers, that won't actually be able to do anything, you have to have robust rules of engagement by an international force.

ANGLE: Well now here's a question. Let's say that Israel accepted the thrust of what the Arab League is saying and you had 15,000 Lebanese army soldiers down there with the blue helmets, Israel withdraws and Hezbollah fires rockets into Israel again. What is Israel supposed to do at that point, fire on the Lebanese army, which is mixed in with Hezbollah?

SAMMON: Yeah, that's why I said it's a return to the status quo and that's the other difference here, is that the Arab community and Arab delegation that went to the U.N. today wants Israel to pull out immediately and the United States is saying wait a minute, wait until we get an international force to come in and displace Israel. That's a huge difference, even more so than the difference over whether Lebanon should deploy troops.

WILLIAMS: Well, the key is -- as Fred as saying, the key is the strength. Do you have -- does the multinational force have the strength to take on Hezbollah and stop them from firing those missiles, because you can't imagine Israel -- you said they can't fire at Lebanese forces, they can't fire at multinational forces and of course, part of the deal, the second resolution the State Department and President Bush were talking about, was giving the multinational force the right to fire at Hezbollah and fire at Israelis.

BARNES: That's acceptable.

ANGLE: All right. Next on SPECIAL REPORT, the fed leaves a key interest rate unchanged, the first pause in two years. We'll ask the all- stars about that and latest on oil prices right after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BODMAN: I'm confident by working together we will have the fuel that we need for families and businesses to work as well as to play this summer.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANGLE: And we are back with the panel, that's Energy Secretary Bodman talking about the shutdown of the Prudhoe Bay oil field in Alaska which provides eight percent of total U.S. consumption. Today, we learned the White House has secured pledges of help from Saudi Arabia and Mexico in case there are any shortages. Bill, this interruption could have been a pretty serious blow to the U.S. economy, but it looks, at least now, it looks like we're going to dodge a bullet.

SAMMON: Yeah, and the White House has shown more of a willingness to be flexible with the strategic petroleum reserve that used to be a sacrosanct entity. You never messed with the strategic petroleum reserve unless there was a grave crisis like a war or something like that and now they're saying, you know, every time there's some blip in the oil industry, they're willing to say, look, we'll stop filling up the reserve or now they're saying we'll actually take out oil, if anybody needs oil, we'll now look to Mexico or Saudi Arabia, they've agreed to help us out. And I think that reflects a growing sensitivity to the, obviously, the high gas prices. In fact Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, today, talked about how the White House is now going to further regulate these low-volume pipelines. Initially they only regulated the high-volume pipelines and they had these devices that would go through and gauge the strength of the pipe called PIGS.

ANGLE: Right.

SAMMON: And they never ran these PIGS through the low-volume pipeline, so Tony Snow said today, we're now going to start regulating that. So that's another sort of a hair trigger response from a conservative Republican administration that normally doesn't turn to regulation all the time.

BARNES: Well, I always turn to Tony when I want to know about pipelines. The first call I make.

(LAUGHTER)

ANGLE: Well now one of the interesting things here is that the administration has always resisted the notion, pushed by critics, that you should release oil from the strategic petroleum reserve when prices go up, for no other reason than increased demand. In this case, they're saying, OK, here's a crisis, you have an interruption in supply, that is what the strategic petroleum reserve is for and so they're talking openly, Juan, about maybe releasing some if it's necessary, but at the moment it doesn't look like it will be.

WILLIAMS: Well, hopefully it will not be, but it's not only that crisis, you got to understand, it's conjunction with the crisis ongoing in the Middle East, so you have pressure from the Middle East, you have pressure here at home. Hugo Chavez has not proven exactly to be reliable ally here, he's using his oil reserves for his own purposes, so what we're getting into is, I think, two-pronged. One is it's a political crisis, going into midterm elections. You cannot -- I don't think the administration, the Republican Party, wants to push gas prices any higher and test the patience of the American people at this point, but secondly, there's the real issue of American security.

And final point on this, I think that is interesting, is it may be pushing the administration more and more towards looking towards alternative fuel -- you know, alternative kinds of energy supplies and I think we're going to go farther and farther down that road. President Bush was ahead of the curve on this when he spoke about it in his State of the Union Address.

ANGLE: Yeah.

BARNES: And not only do we have a crisis, we do certainly have a new reality in regard to energy, particularly oil, but you know, that consultant in Washington, Dave Smith, pointed out to me today when I was talking about the fed, that the markets -- look at how markets in the world have responded to the war in the Middle East. Not that they're worried that it -- oil supplies and our economies are more at risk, but less at risk. They've gone up in the United States. I think the Dow is up three percent, European markets are up, and they didn't (ph) collapse because of that. Unusual but true.

ANGLE: Yeah. Bill, let me ask you about one other thing that happened today. We were talking earlier about the Federal Reserve and pausing in its steady increase in interest rates. It is interesting -- it wasn't that long ago that mortgage rates, for instance, were way, way higher than they are. I mean, we've looked at this 17 straight increases we have the sense that they're high, but not historically.

SAMMON: Yeah, I remember when I got -- years ago I was able to get a 10 percent mortgage and I felt like the luckiest guy in the world, you know, now everybody's got five percent mortgages or six percent mortgages. But you know, they had 17 consecutive rate hikes, I mean, so this has been going on for years. And I think it's been time for a pause. I mean, the economy has been slowing, it's growing but the rate of growth has slowed and I think the fed is saying, let's let it go unchecked this time.

ANGLE: Right, and those things filter through the economy some.

BARNES: Yeah, they do. You know, Ben Bernanke, the head of the fed, is an expert on one particular subject and that is the lag time of what the fed does and how long it takes to really affect the markets.

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