The Shield and the Cloak: The Security of the Commons

JOANNE MYERS: Good morning. I'm Joanne Myers, Director of Public Affairs Programs, and on behalf of the Carnegie Council I'd like to thank you all for joining us this morning.

Before we begin our discussion on The Shield and the Cloak: The Security of the Commons, I wanted to take a moment to thank Enzo Viscusi, who was instrumental in helping me to arrange the event this morning.

Today it is an honor to welcome Gary Hart to the Carnegie Council. Our speaker is a man who is intellectually distinguished, is often called a visionary, and is known to possess the directness of someone who is not bound by the constraints of political necessity.

Gary Hart is not your average citizen. He is a statesman, scholar, attorney, and the author of more than a dozen books, including three novels. He is an original thinker who possesses an infinite range of ideas. Paramount among them is his vision for a new American national security strategy. This is an issue of major concern to our guest and should be of concern to all of us as well.

The Millennium began in an optimistic mood, but this did not last long. An impending sense of doom followed the suicide attacks on 9/11, presenting America with grave and unconventional threats to our national security. These new threats emanate from no particular country; they are amorphous and peripatetic, making them an impossible target for our military force to strike at. At the time, our country was presented with an urgent need and a challenge to devise a new security policy, an opportunity that, according to our speaker, was squandered.

For some time now, Senator Hart has stood out as one of our nation's foremost experts on national security. As a senator, he founded the Military Reform Caucus in Congress, which was a bipartisan effort that contributed substantially to contemporary defense policy. Most recently, he co-chaired the U.S. Commission on National Security of the 21st Century, which issued, not one, but three separate reports forecasting the age of terrorism. He has also been involved with the Council on Foreign Relations Task Force on Homeland Security, which recently released its report on "America: Still Unprepared, Still in Danger." [PDF 323k ]

In his latest book, The Shield and the Cloak, Senator Hart builds on these experiences and draws on his decades of public service to address our country's need for a new, more inclusive security framework. He writes that "we can no longer depend only on a shield that defines national security in narrow terms of preemptive warfare and increased military spending, but in this new century we will need to include a cloak of protection, which should incorporate such measures as economic, environmental, and communal dimensions."

In proposing his strategy, Senator Hart brings unique insight and original thinking to this task. This no-nonsense analysis, intertwined with candor and common sense, is perhaps just what our country needs at this moment in time.

Please join me in giving a very warm welcome to the former senator, doctor of philosophy, currently professor, from the Rocky Mountain state, who will not only pique our interest, but I am confident will offer us some very sage advice. Thank you.

GARY HART: Thank you very much. The only thing wrong with that introduction is that it was too short. Thanks to Joanne Myers and my dear friend Enzo Viscusi for the opportunity to be here today, and thank all of you for joining us.

I make two arguments in my book:

1) the nature of security in the 21st century will be much different and much broader than the definition of security in the 20th century, and particularly during the Cold War years;

2) within the next five to twenty-five years the entire concept of national security will begin to disappear. It will be increasingly impossible for the United States to be secure if the rest of the world is insecure, and our only hope for security in this country, either traditionally narrowly defined or more broadly defined, is in collaboration and cooperation with other nations of goodwill—not just our traditional allies in Europe but throughout the world.

During the period from 1947 to 1991, defining and bracketing the Cold War years, the discussion in the armed services committees of the Congress and in venues such as this and the Council on Foreign Relations was very narrow: national security meant the prevention of the Soviet invasion of Europe, the expansion of communist influence, and the exchange of nuclear missiles between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Out of this narrow definition of security a kind of priesthood arose. We used terms like "circular error probable" and "throw weight." This was all well and good if you were part of that priesthood and understood that language, but if you were a working person in Denver, you probably found this pretty abstract. You were concerned about the Soviet threat because you heard about it constantly, and almost all of our foreign policy and national security debates and discussions revolved around this perceived threat. Two or three generations came to believe that the idea of U.S. security had to do with that narrow focus on containment of communism, which was our central organizing principle for most of the second half of the 20th century.

The 21st century is a much different era. We are living in a profoundly revolutionary age on several levels.

1) Globalization. The internationalization of finance, commerce, and markets is an epic historic revolution, by any definition. By itself, it would be transcendent, but it is also accompanied, by an equally profound revolution.

2) The information revolution. This is an important an economic and social revolution as the Industrial Revolution of the early 19th century. If you put together the internationalization of markets and the transformation of Western and progressive economies, expanding economies, by the silicon chip, the computer, and new communication technologies, you produce a third revolution.

3) The erosion of the sovereignty of the nation-state. Nation-states are relatively recent inventions, largely the product of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. They devolved from a bargain between the state or government, and the nation or the people: "We the state will protect you the people in exchange for your loyalty." That construct then became the basic political building block of the world. Nations had existed before then, but they were largely principalities or city-states.

The people delegated sovereignty to the state in exchange for security. If the state can no longer provide that security, either physical or economic, then people begin to doubt their loyalty to the state, and that sovereignty begins to erode.

This certainly happened here on 9/11 to a degree. All of a sudden, Americans are faced with the notion, for the first time since 1812, that we could lose our lives on our own soil. Many people are asking: How much confidence can I have in a government that cannot protect me?

The late Gaylord Nelson, senator from Wisconsin, had a very commonsense definition of national security. He said: It is composed of three things: a sound dollar, meaning a sound economy; the security of our borders; and the confidence of the people in their government.

4) The transformation of the nature of warfare. Some of us began to argue that this was happening even during the Cold War, in the 1980s and beyond, that the possibility of great armies meeting in the field and exchanging men and materiel until one side lost and one side won was beginning to disappear and a new kind of warfare was emerging, characterized by what we used to call wars of national liberation, and which quickly morphed into today's terrorism.

Terrorism is not a new idea. Nor is it an ideology. Making war on terrorism would be the World War II equivalent of making war on blitzkrieg. Terrorism is a method. It has been used throughout human history by those who wish to terrorize those who oppress them or those with whom they are angry, those they hate.

If you want to know what the warfare of the 21st century is and will be, watch the movie Black Hawk Down, or look at the coverage of the two American attempts to pacify Fallujah in Iraq.

The warrior of the future will look very much like the Delta Force personnel in Afghanistan, with beards and shaggy hair and native dress, eating scorpions and drinking snake's blood, and with a dagger in their teeth, kicking down doors and going after terrorists one by one. That's the warfare of the future—primitive, barbaric, awful—and it is already characterizing our age.

On the issue of what security means in the context of these four revolutions—globalization, information, eroding nation state sovereignty, and changing nature of warfare—we will have to think differently about the shield, or the military side of our defense and the security of our borders.

I argue, for example, that we should consolidate all the Special Forces into a fifth service. Delta, Rangers, and Seals ought to operate and train together.

But security of our borders alone will not make Americans secure. If you've just lost your job, you are probably not feeling very secure. If the major employer of your community has announced he is packing up and going to Bangladesh and 2,000 people in your community have lost their jobs, you are probably not feeling very secure. If you have just come home from the doctor and your daughter has respiratory illness due to the environment, you are probably not feeling very secure. And if your son or daughter has joined the military to fight Gulf War III or V so that your neighbor can drive his Humvee, you are surely not feeling very secure.

At the very least, security in the 21st century must include not only secure borders—that is to say, prevention, to the degree possible, of terrorist attacks—but it must also include security of livelihood; security of the community, economically and physically.

Climate change and global warming are a real threat to our security. And, if the United States continues to rely on foreign sources for 60 percent of its oil, including the most volatile region of the world, I don't feel secure. If I had a son or daughter who was eighteen or nineteen, I would be very insecure, because so long as we pursue our current energy policy, we will need military forces to guarantee it.

We should declare the entire Persian Gulf a zone of international interest and have the world guarantee the flow of oil from that region, not the U.S. Army. We should not be the default guarantor of the oil supplies for the rest of the world.

The idea that the United States can guarantee its own security is folly. We thumbed our nose at our European allies when we invaded Iraq. There is no real coalition force there—8,000, or 10,000 British troops. For the Secretary of Defense to prattle on about coalition forces is just rhetorical construct. This is an American show with British support.

But now let's say that the CIA Director decides that Mohammed So-And-So is in a Paris suburb and he's one of the leaders of al Qaeda. It makes it very difficult to call up the head of French security services and say, "We need your help," after demeaning the French.

First of all, this was done by people who don't read their history. The French were called "cheese-eating surrender monkeys." That's not only terrible, but it's factually inaccurate. Although the Germans went around the French army, which was wrongly deployed, 70–90,000 young Frenchmen lost their lives defending their country. The French didn't surrender, and we shouldn't be misrepresenting history to make political points here at home.

We can't make this country secure without our allies and other nations. We need their help, their intelligence services, and their Special Forces. They can't be secure without us and we can't be secure without them.

Turning our backs on allies that helped us win two world wars and the Cold War, as blithely and ignorantly and arrogantly as we did in 2002 and 2003, runs contrary to everything that most Americans have believed for a century or more, that we are in an interdependent world.

If you agree with me that the revolutions of globalization and information bring us closer together, why then should we be devising a security policy that tells our allies to take a hike? For anyone here or beyond who supported the Administration's unilateralist invasion, think again about the implications for the people we need to help us make ourselves secure.

We are in an interdependent world. I would hope that all of us would begin to think differently about what security means, and realize that we are unable to achieve it alone.

QUESTION: How do we persuade the democratic leadership to pick up your theme and do something and use it to criticize the Administration?

GARY HART: The answer is in my next book, The Courage of Our Convictions, due out in September from Henry Holt Time Books.

I spent seven or eight pages of the book criticizing many of the current democratic leaders for their position. I use Iraq as a metaphor for the lack of conviction in the Democratic Party across the board, and the failure to stand up.

You can vote any way you want on Iraq, but you don't cast a vote in favor of the War Resolution without at least demanding answers to four questions:

1) Who will go with us? And I don't mean a phony coalition; I mean real forces.

2) How long will we be there? Had that question been asked and answers been forced, Secretary Rumsfeld would have said, "We'll overthrow Saddam in three months and we'll be welcomed. Mr. Chalabi has guaranteed that the Iraqi people would put flowers in our gun barrels and throw their arms around us. We will help structure a democratic government, that government will invite us to stay in perpetuity, and we will use Iraq as our political and military base to pacify the Middle East." That was the policy long before 9/11.

3) How much will it cost? Mr. Lindsey lost his job because he said $100–200 billion. That was on the low side.

4) What are casualty estimates? When I would give that speech in 2002 and 2003, conservative newspaper columnists said, "That's ridiculous. Nobody can know in war what the casualties are." Generals in the Pentagon routinely make casualty estimates, low-side and high-side. Somewhere there is a piece of paper in a Pentagon vault that says: "Casualties will be 123, and the high side is that if there is an insurgency in the cities of Iraq, casualties will soar." I guessed 5–10,000. I was ridiculed. American casualties—"killed and wounded"—are now 25,000, not 2,500. For some reason, you don't read that in The New York Times, The Washington Post, or anywhere else, but that's the fact.

So if the Democrats had demanded answers to those questions, then they had grounds for voting against the Resolution. Plus, the Democrats should have introduced a counter-Resolution of containment, which was working, and which guaranteed that Saddam could not arm himself or threaten this country.

The second half of the book does suggest, from the great Democratic presidents of the 20th century, certain principles that would be the foundation for the restoration of the Democratic Party.

From Franklin Roosevelt: we are a national community. That was a bold concept—"we are all in this together," 1932; and "we all sink or swim together"; and "we only get this country back on its feet through the concept of social justice."

From Harry Truman: "international friendships and alliances." Harry Truman, as much as Franklin Roosevelt, kept the United States in the world: the Marshall Plan, NATO, World Bank, IMF, Bretton Woods.

From John Kennedy: the ancient Greek ideal of civic duty. The ancients used to call it civic virtue. In the age of faith and values, I much prefer "virtue" than "values," because "values" has been devalued. But if you say "civic virtue," people don't get it right. So John Kennedy said, "Give something back to your country." That had ancient, ancient roots, and it is a principle that you will not hear from the Republican Party.

Fourth, Lyndon Johnson: "equality and justice."

So if you put those together on a platform, that's a manifesto for the Democrats: we are a national community; we need international friends and allies; we believe in civic duty; and finally, we believe in equality and justice. These principles and ideals could form the basis for a restoration. But you have to believe in them and stick with them.

QUESTION: Is there a role for international institutions in your vision of U.S. national security, particularly in an era of global threats? How do you see the United States, the UN, and international institutions relating in the years ahead?

GARY HART: It has to be an expanding role. If I were to be asked what is the key issue of the 21st century, I would say sovereignty. We are at a crossroads again in the crisis of the nation-state, where to achieve our objectives—whether fair trade, economic development, sustainable development, climate change—no single nation, including the most powerful in human history, can solve those issues alone.

The problem is that all of the international institutions on which we rely are now fifty or sixty years old, and they were designed for a totally different world. My reform principle flows from Jefferson, who said, "You have to keep pace with the progress of the human mind," and that means times change.

The basic flaw of conservatism as an ideology is that it presumes that times don't change. So you don't adapt your principles, your virtues or your values; you adapt your institutions, your systems and your structures.

It is long overdue for all of the international institutions to take five years out and overhaul themselves, to look at the new world of the 21st century and say: "Let's redesign the UN for the 21st century and adapt its institutions and structures to the new challenges of mass migration south to north, and global climate change." That may cause an upheaval, but at least it causes people to think about their mission.

Both the United States and the IMF could have done a better job of bringing Russia into the West. My understanding, in a crude sense, of what the IMF said to the Russians was, "When you get a rule of law, when you get a judicial system, we'll give you the money." In the meantime the economy was falling apart and being absorbed by oligarchs.

I mention a zone of international interest in the Persian Gulf. I don't want the United States to be the default policeman, and I don't want the Secretary of State to go around the world, as James Baker did, with a tin cup collecting money so the U.S. Army can drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait. It makes the U.S. Army a mercenary army for the first time in our history.

There are those who say, "We're the end of the line, top of the heap. We don't want any rivals." I disagree with that, and most Americans do. They would like to see an international peacemaking, not peacekeeping, force. We would participate in such a force with the basic mission: "We will not permit violence anywhere in the world—Darfur, Rwanda, or anywhere else. We will not settle the political dispute; we will prevent genocide and violence in areas where if civil war erupts it affects us all." We need to have an offensively trained and equipped force that can make the peace before we can keep the peace.

Americans are critical of the UN because it can't always keep the peace. You can't send defensive forces into a volatile combat or conflict and expect them to keep the peace if there is no peace.

QUESTION: Some would argue that what we have done in Iraq is to embolden Iran. Do you believe that it is time to pull out of Iraq to have options vis-à-vis Iran, or should we engage with Iran to deal on their influence regionally?

GARY HART: Both here and in North Korea the Bush Administration must be credited with traditional mainstream foreign policy. That is to say, we and our allies will address these two issues. It is ironic, in that we were unilateralist in Iraq, but faced with a nuclear-armed North Korea and a potentially nuclear-armed Iran, we are saying to the Europeans, and even the Russians, "We need your help."

Putting our allies forward, Chinese, Japanese, and Russians in the Far East and the European allies with regard to Iran, gives us a better chance, because we are so disliked in those two venues. To put a buffer that we support but have other nations in the region be the front line of negotiation is very wise foreign policy. It's probably what we should have done in Iraq as well.

But let me give you an apoplectic view on Iraq which I submitted in op-ed form to The New York Times. To no one's surprise it was rejected. The thesis is as follows:

"In 1812, the Emperor of Europe invaded Russia, and after success at the Battle of Borodino invested itself in the great palaces of Moscow. This was Napoleon at the height of his powers and achieving his greatest triumph.

"The Russian people had a different view of the future of their country, and within days they burned their own city down around Napoleon's ears and he was denied his greatest triumph. He packed up his troops and started back to France, and the greatest army in the world was decimated by Cossack insurgents and what General Katusov called 'General Winter.'"

Then I flash forward: "With the destruction of the Golden Mosque in Samara, we moved a giant step forward toward civil war in Iraq."

Now, hypothesize that there is a one-in-ten, or one-in-twenty, or one-in-fifty chance that that will happen. We have troops deployed in most of the cities of central Iraq, in southern Iraq as well, but those most in jeopardy are in the Sunni region in central Iraq—Baghdad, Fallujah. What if hundreds of thousands of Shiites and Sunnis take to the streets with daggers in their teeth, killing each other and trying to kill Americans?

If you disbelieve this, look at the movie Black Hawk Down and take that to the tenth power, and you begin to see the potential here. We're not talking about the Iraqi army; we're talking about heavily armed mobs surrounding our forces.

The strategy then will be, if we haven't planned ahead of time, to get as many of our troops into Baghdad as possible. So you will have to fight your way across part of Iraq to get to the Green Zone, and then you've got the potential for about 50–75,000 American forces packed into the Green Zone, with the diplomats and the consultants, and too few helicopters to lift them off. It will be a scene much like Saigon in 1975, but again to the tenth power.

The United States could potentially lose its army in Iraq. All I did in the op-ed piece was to raise the possibility and say: If our commanders are not planning for this potential in better ways than they planned for the occupation, we are jeopardizing the greatest army in the history of the world. We could lose 50,000 troops overnight in a civil war. It's a remote danger but we ought to have a plan for airlift and land convoys to evacuate our forces.

Up to now, we've been blithely saying, "We can stay or leave," and "what's our exit strategy?" I'm hypothesizing a scenario where we have no choice.

QUESTION: Is there not something in the American ethos that requires an enemy—the Indian, the Nazi, the Cold War—and is there not a cohort divide in our society of militarists on the one hand married to enemies, and an indifference on the other hand? What should we do about this?

GARY HART: I am fond of recalling a story from 1987 or 1988 of a prominent Russian, Georgiy Arbatov, who ran the U.S.-Canada Institute. In the heyday of glasnost and perestroika, an American journalist asked Arbatov what all this meant, "What is Gorbachev up to?" Arbatov replied, "We are about to do to you the worst possible thing we can do." The journalist was scared to death. "Are you talking about nuclear war?" Arbatov said, "We are going to take away your enemy." It was a profound insight. What he knew, as a Soviet Communist, was that it is much easier to unite a mass democracy of 300 million people against something than for something.

If you are a political leader and you try to get a consensus, particularly today, with the country so badly divided on health care, education reform, energy policy, it is almost impossible. Narrow-minded politicians therefore invent an enemy.

Iraq is very complicated. We didn't learn anything from the French in Indochina; we learned nothing from the British occupation of Iraq. If Americans read history, we would do things much differently. Harry Truman once said, "The only new thing in the world is the history we haven't read." He was absolutely right. We don't think about ancient cultures.

The policymakers didn't have a clue that Iraq was an artificial country, created by the French and the British after World War I. It was part of the British mandate, and the British occupied it to pacify these warring tribes of Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds who had been artificially put together. Most of them didn't think of themselves as Iraqis.

Now we have a mess on our hands. The President didn't create 9/11, but it was convenient. Our central organizing principle, fit on a bumper sticker, for forty-seven years was "Containment of Communism," now replaced ten years later with another three-word slogan "War on Terrorism."

But the ironies are coming home to roost now, not only with the Dubai Port deal, but now we've also told the Indians to build nuclear weapons. Americans have a right to be confused. This is 21st-century America: the age of terrorism clashing with the age of globalization.

QUESTION: You haven't described what this amorphous warfare of the future is all about. Who are these terrorists, what do they represent, where are they coming from, and what is their goal?

You also talked about the strong American military. We have a problem, in that China is rapidly expanding. We have convinced ourselves that China is not a world threat. On the other hand, we have not convinced ourselves that China is not a world threat.

Would you refine a couple of these arguments that have not been quite reconciled in your presentation?

GARY HART: Somehow I find it difficult to imagine the United States making war on its greatest creditor. That might be a way for us to resolve our debts, to nuke Beijing, but I don't think it is going to happen.

Except for excitement about people on its borders, China has never in human history demonstrated hegemonic intentions.

You have to watch what kind of forces gain power there. Are they forces that are capable of and directed toward occupying Taiwan? Are they forces that are building a massive nuclear arsenal with long-range missiles capable of reaching New York?

The principal warfare of the future is in knocking down doors, or getting up to the twenty-fifth floor of a high-rise building and taking out people who are sitting there with a dirty bomb. It's hand-to-hand, it's primitive. That will be the dominant, but not exclusive, kind of warfare of the future.

We still have weapons systems on the board to fight the Cold War. We will buy exotic fighter jets, at $250 million or more a pop, none of which can even begin to eliminate al Qaeda.

The center of the jihad is not in the Middle East, but in Europe, and it is metastasizing. Most experts believe that the Madrid and London attacks were self-starters. The idea that al Qaeda is a pyramid that takes its orders from bin Laden in his cave is just not happening.

I advocate a human intelligence corps in the CIA, largely recruited from the Arab-American community. You can't send guys from Harvard who barely speak Arabic into the cells and expect them to survive. So let's use our greatest asset in this case, which is the 5 million Arab-Americans in the United States, and deal with them. This is very close combat, and you have only military and paramilitary response.

But to the wider world, my theory is that the integration of the international economy, which is happening hourly, will reduce the possibility of nation-state conflict. If we are China's greatest market, they will probably not try to invade us. And if we owe them a lot of money, maybe they would invade us to collect their debts.

Nation-state wars are going down and unconventional war by stateless nations is going up, and we are still designing our forces for the first kind of conflict.

QUESTION: Not so long ago, we were one of the founders of the United Nations and other global alliances, and we were a leader in international law. Now we have become a unilateral, militaristic country with a government that has been reelected on the basis of those policies. How did this change so fast?

GARY HART: I've spent the last fifteen or twenty years trying to figure that out. Several things happened:

1) The dominant party of the 20th century lost its way in Vietnam. The Democratic Party shattered very badly between 1958 and 1972 over Vietnam, and we've never recovered, and probably won't until all my generation is gone and the institutional memory of that operation disappears into the history books.

2) We did the right thing on civil rights in the 1960s, under both Kennedy and Johnson, and we lost the South. Right behind our votes on civil rights and voting rights and housing rights, came in Richard Nixon and John Mitchell and evangelized the South, and we lost the whole region.

3) We did the right thing on women. We advocated and promoted the rights of women and equality of women, helped liberate women in the workplace and politically, and many white males disliked that.

4) Whatever corporate support we had disappeared when we introduced environmental regulations, and the corporations said, "Oh, there go the Democrats, creating big government and regulation."

And then, to top it all off, clever people in the Republican Party—Mr. Rove and others—turned American politics on its head. They abandoned their commitment to fiscal responsibility and advocated a policy called "big government conservatism."

Maybe it was Cheney in the early part of this century who said, "Deficits don't matter. Ronald Reagan proved that." How can a Democrat respond to this? All I heard from Republicans in the 1970s and 1980s was "balance the budget," and "Democrats can't balance the budget." So we balanced the budget in the 1990s, and they went the other way and said, "Balanced budgets don't matter."

Now we have a constitutional crisis on our hands, and it's more serious than Iraq. We had a president twenty-five years ago, who thought to himself, "I don't have to obey the law." Now you've got a president who publicly says, "I don't have to obey the law." Many people don't know how to respond to a president who says, "I don't have to obey the law."

We are about to find out in two or three years what this Supreme Court is made of. Many people focused on Alito and Roberts on the issue of abortion. The real issue is the power of the presidency and checks and balances. As president, can you abrogate the laws passed by Congress?

They said, "You can't disclose national security secrets in a court, so we devised special courts." To my knowledge, neither Alberto Gonzales nor anyone else for that matter has explained why they can't go to those courts. The only explanation is, "We just don't want to."

The center of gravity in the country has moved to the right. The Democrats have not responded well. We have to go back to our roots and rediscover who we are and offer solid alternatives.

Right now there are leading Democrats whose official position remains, "Put more troops into Iraq."

QUESTION: Could you comment on the implications of the president's agreement with India in the context of our hostility to what Iran is proposing to do, and what is the status is of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty?

GARY HART: Our current policy seems to be that we will pick and choose which countries can develop nuclear weapons. And there are good nuclear weapons and bad nuclear weapons, and India's are good and Iran's and North Korea's are bad.

But on the other hand, many of the problems in the world arise from one nuclear physicist in Pakistan who ran a nuclear Wal-Mart in the 1980s and 1990s and shipped technology and equipment all over the world.

People are confused about Dubai. I was on C-SPAN recently, and ninety percent of the questions I took had to do with Dubai and immigration. These are the two issues in people's minds. Now they have a third: If we are supposed to keep nuclear weapons out of people's hands, how can we make this deal with a democratic country that's ostensibly peaceful, but that is embroiled in the second-most volatile region of the world in Kashmir? Why would you want to expand a nuclear arms race in that region?

Finally, the fact that we have not moved forward on Nunn-Lugar and the decommissioning of the Russian nuclear arsenal is criminal. The first George W. Bush budget actually cut money for Nunn-Lugar.

If you are a member of al Qaeda and you want to get a clean or dirty bomb, or a dirtier bomb, where are you going to go? You'll bribe some underpaid guards, who are getting $25 a month at a remote nuclear arsenal, to give you the key and turn their backs.

JOANNE MYERS: Thank you very much.