Q+A’s Paul Holmes Interviews Ploughshares Fund CEO, Joe Cirincione.

The interview has been transcribed below. The full length video interviews and panel discussions from this morning’s Q+A can also be seen on tvnz.co.nz at, http://tvnz.co.nz/q-and-a-news

Q+A is repeated on TVNZ 7 at 9.10pm on Sunday nights and 10.10am and 2.10pm on Mondays.

JOE CIRINCIONE interviewed by PAUL HOLMES

PAUL It's nine years since those unforgettable images of 9/11 burnt themselves into our consciousness. Nine years since the attacks on New York City, Washington DC, which killed 3000 people. It was a day that radically changed the United States’ national security strategy. But now President Barak Obama has started to bring home American troops from Iraq and he's pledged to slash the nuclear arsenal as well. Now with us is Joseph Cirincione, he is the Ploughshares Fund President. Now Ploughshares is the largest grant making foundation in the United States with a mission for peace and security. So Joe Cirincione, welcome to Q+A. Nine years on from it and God things changed dramatically that day, and people understood yes they were going to change. Nine years since 9/11 and again we're at each other’s throats, this weekend weren’t we over plans for the mosque a few blocks from Ground Zero and the fellow down in Florida who wanted to burn the Korans. What does that tell us? Where are we at?

JOE CIRINCIONE – CEO Ploughshares Fund Yeah it's not good, and it's not primarily because of the attack that Osama Bin Laden launched on us, or the advances Al Qaeda has made, Al Qaeda’s actually in retreat, they’ve been disorganised, fragmented. A lot of this is the damage we've done to ourselves by our own flawed strategy. I thought the editorial in this morning’s Sunday Star Times hit it spot on. We took our eye off the ball when we defeated the Taliban in Afghanistan and we diverted to Iraq. President Bush told us that Saddam Hussein was linked to Al Qaeda, that wasn’t true. That he had nuclear and chemical weapons, that wasn’t true. And we diverted US forces and treasury to a war we never should have fought, and we didn’t pay enough attention to the Israeli Palestinian conflict. We squandered the last nine years, not doing enough to resolve that conflict which really fuelled so much of the tension in the region. So we're now just recovering, just starting to get it right with the withdrawal of the US troops from Iraq, with a new effort on Middle East peace.

PAUL isn’t it amazing though when you think about Iraq and the Bush determination to go into Iraq. Most reading people who read the current affairs magazines around the world, and were reasonably informed and watched the news programmes and so forth, understood even in those days I think that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with Al Qaeda.

JOE Right, but then you had the President of the United States and the Vice President of the United States, and the Secretary of Defence saying over and over again, he's linked to Al Qaeda, he has nuclear weapons, or he soon will have nuclear weapons, and that overcame a lot of people’s doubt. All of that was untrue. All of this brought us into what is the greatest sin any president can commit, committing your nation to an unnecessary war. It squandered the legitimacy and international credibility of the United States. It's practically bankrupted us. A trillion dollars in funds spent on this war. We lost thousands of our best warriors. We're still recovering from this strategic blunder.

PAUL And you think we are recovering but then go back Joe to this weekend where you’ve got the row about the mosque in Ground Zero in New York City, and you’ve got the fellow in Florida who was terrifying everybody by talking about burning the Korans. So where are we at? It's tinder dry.

JOE It is. So 9/11 taught us that you have to pay attention to a crazy man in a cave in Afghanistan, and we have to pay attention to a crazy pastor in an obscure parish in Florida. Osama Bin Laden has a terrorist network, this pastor has a TV network, and that media can take that message and whip it around the world, and affect US troops. That’s why the Secretary of Defence of the United States called that pastor and said don’t do this, you're harming US troops, you're putting lives at risk by this crazy bigoted religious prejudice.

PAUL But in the end what we still have is the extremists controlling the dialogue isn’t it? You have Newsweek’s Forenza Caria this week saying America overestimated Al Qaeda, just as it did the Soviet Union, just as it did Saddam Hussein, and in the meantime the United States has spent over a trillion dollars on these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as you say. They’ve built 33 new intelligence buildings providing officials with 136 intelligent reports a day. In other words the terrorists have won, because they’ve created terror.

JOE Well if you see every problem as a nail then your solution is always gonna be a hammer, and we saw Al Qaeda as a military problem that had to be addressed. It is not fundamentally a military problem. In Afghanistan today we think there are approximately 100 Al Qaeda operatives. We have 100,000 troops, it's a 1000 to 1, and we're losing that war. That shows you that it's not the way to do it. You have to get out of that mind set.

PAUL In the end it's going to be Israel Palestine, it's always come back to Israel Palestine.

JOE It always will. That’s the underlying cause. These other issues are really on the side line and it fuels – the resentment against the West is fuelled by the Israeli Palestinian conflict, we've got to solve it.

PAUL Speaking of fuel let's speak about the nuclear bombs, and let's speak about enriched plutonium and enriched uranium. In the end what are the Iranians up to and are they going to have to be beaten up?

JOE They say they have a factory to enrich uranium for fuel. That same factory could be used to enrich uranium for a bomb. Do you trust them? The answer that goes to the world is no they don’t, so the strategy has gotta be to contain them, to put the pressure on. We actually have a more effective strategy on Iran now than we've ever had since ….

PAUL They're still carrying on aren’t they?

JOE They're still proceeding but the programme has actually slowed. There are real technological problems in it, you’ve got more sanctions, more international unity on this than ever before. Iran is more isolated than ever, there's signs that they're cracking. The key is not just to pressure but to do what the Obama administration wants to do, offer them a way out, offer them a face saving way out, so when you back them into the corner let them find a way out. There's signs that we may have talks with Iran again in the next month.

PAUL In the meantime we've got a New Start Treaty about to be voted on by the Senate this week I think, this was negotiated months ago, this is 30% nuclear warhead reduction both sides. Is it going to happen?

JOE Yes it's gonna happen. The good news is you have the President of the United States and the President of Russia agreeing that they want to reduce their weapons and move eventually to a world free of nuclear weapons. The bad news is you have a tribe of nuclear Neanderthals in the United States who want to block any arms control treaty and don’t want to give the President a political victory before the November election, so they're dragging it out, they're delaying it. Whether it gets ratified before the November election or after, the military is totally in favour for this treaty, it's gonna be hard not to ratify it.

PAUL I thank you very much for you time. Joe Cirincione of the Ploughshares organisation.

ENDS

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