WASHINGTON–Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates hit the network Sunday shows–ABC, CBS, NBC– to explain and defend the Obama administration on Libya, paving the way for President Obama’s Monday night address to the nation.
Clinton to NBC’s David Gregory: “I think we’ve prevented a great humanitarian disaster, which is always hard to point to something that didn’t happen, but I, I believe we did. And now we’re beginning to see, because of the good work of the, the coalition, to see his, his troops begin to turn back towards the west and to see the opposition begin to reclaim ground they had lost.”
Gates to CBS’ Bob Schieffer:
SCHIEFFER: There are some people in the Pentagon quoted in various newspapers as saying this no-fly zone may last for three months or so. How long do you think this is going to be in place?
GATES: I don’t think anybody has any idea.
Gates to ABC’s Jake Tapper:
TAPPER: Do you think Libya posed an actual or imminent threat to
the United States?
GATES: No. No, it was not — it was not a vital national interest
to the United States, but it was an interest. And it was an interest
for all of the reasons Secretary Clinton talked about, the engagement of
the Arabs, the engagement of the Europeans, the general humanitarian
question that was at stake.
There was another piece of this, though, that certainly was a
consideration. You’ve had revolutions on both the east and the west of
Libya. They’re fragile.
TAPPER: Egypt and Tunisia?
GATES: Egypt and Tunisia. So you had a potentially significantly
destabilizing event taking place in Libya that put at risk potentially
the revolutions in both Tunisia and Egypt, and that was another
consideration I think we took into account.
ABC News Transcript
-ABC-
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TAPPER (voice-over): This morning, “Target: Libya.” Clinton.
Gates. Rumsfeld. Three major headliners, only on “This Week.”
U.S. and allied bombs and missiles hammer Libyan targets, the rebels
gain ground, and the president prepares to make his pitch to the
American people.
OBAMA: It is U.S. policy that Gadhafi needs to go.
TAPPER: But what if Gadhafi stays? Just back from the Middle East,
Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
come to “This Week” for their first interviews since the attacks began
to make the president’s case.
What does victory look like? Can it be achieved? And at what cost?
Then…
RUMSFELD: I don’t have any regrets at all.
TAPPER: The man who helped George Bush wage two wars, what would
Donald Rumsfeld do in a third war? I’ll ask him, and he’ll respond to
critics who say he’s been rewriting history.
Plus, George Will and the roundtable will debate the Libyan mission,
the president’s message, and why at least one Republican White House
hopeful is having a tough time agreeing with himself.
ANNOUNCER: Live from the Newseum in Washington, D.C., “This Week”
with Christiane Amanpour starts right now.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
TAPPER: Good morning, everyone. I’m Jake Tapper. Christiane is
off today.
As we come on air this morning, some major developments in Libya to
report since the morning papers. Rebel forces have scored a key
strategic victory, taking back the oil town of Brega in the east. They
now continue to push west towards Tripoli.
ABC’s Alex Marquardt is in the opposition capital of Benghazi.
Alex, what’s the mood where you are?
MARQUARDT: Good morning, Jake. Well, there is a lot of excitement,
a lot of gunfire and honking on the front lines, as you might imagine.
A quick advance towards the west was expected following the stalemate
that was broken by the coalition air strikes, but even this took many by
surprise, with opposition leaders here telling me today that they’re
hoping that the rebels will slow down a bit, allowing them to regroup
and allowing senior defected military officials to take over, because
the next city is Sirte, which is Gadhafi’s hometown, and they’re unsure
exactly what sort of weapons he has there.
Now, turning to Tripoli, there was a disturbing incident yesterday
that reminded us of the brutality of this regime. A woman burst into a
hotel that houses a lot of foreign journalists. She said that she had
been arrested and raped by Gadhafi forces. Officials and security
forces in the hotel tried to silence her. They put a hood over her.
There was a scuffle that ensued. She was driven off. A government
spokesman said that she was mentally ill and drunk, but then allowed for
the fact that she might have been actually raped and said they’re
looking into it.
Jake?
TAPPER: ABC’s Alex Marquardt in Benghazi with the very latest from
Libya. Alex, stay safe.
President Obama is set to address the nation tomorrow night. He’s
under intense pressure to explain his decision to attack Libya and to
outline his plan to bring this military campaign to a successful
conclusion.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
TAPPER: And joining me now in their first interview since the
attacks on Libya began, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense
Secretary Robert Gates.
Madam and Mister Secretary, thanks so much for joining us. I’ll
start with you, Secretary Gates. The mission is a no-fly zone and
civilian protection, but does not include removing Gadhafi from power,
even though regime change is stated U.S. policy. So why not have as
part of the mission regime change, removing Gadhafi from power?
GATES: Well, first of all, I think you don’t want ever to set a set
of goals or a military mission where you can’t be confident of
accomplishing your objectives. And as we’ve seen in the past, regime
change is a very complicated business. It sometimes takes a long time.
Sometimes it can happen very fast. But it was never part of the
military mission.
TAPPER: NATO has assumed command and control for the no-fly zone,
or is this weekend, but not yet for the civilian protection. When do we
anticipate that happening?
GATES: I think Hillary’s been more engaged with that diplomacy than
I have.
CLINTON: Well, we — we hope, Jake, that NATO — which is making
the military planning for the civilian protection mission — will meet
in the next few days, make a decision, which we expect to be positive,
to include that mission, and then just as the arms embargo and the
no-fly zone has been transitioned to NATO command and control, the
civilian protection mission will, as well.
TAPPER: What do you say to the people in Ivory Coast or Syria who
say, “Where’s our no-fly zone? We’re being killed by our government, too.”
CLINTON: Well, there’s not an — there’s not an air force being
used. There is not the same level of force. The situation is
significantly different enough that the world has not come together.
However, in Ivory Coast, we have a U.N. peacekeeping force, which we
are supporting. We’re beginning to see the world coalesce around the
very obvious fact that Mr. Gbagbo no longer is president. Mr. Ouattara
is the president. So, you know, each of these situations is different.
But in Libya, when a leader says, “Spare nothing, show no mercy,”
and calls out air — air force attacks on his own people, that — that
crosses a line that people in the world had decided they could not
tolerate.
TAPPER: When do we know that the mission is done, the — the no-fly
zone has succeeded, civilian protection has stopped? When — when…
GATES: I would say, for all practical purposes, the implementation
of the no-fly zone is complete. Now it will need to be sustained, but
it can be sustained with a lot less effort than what it took to set it up.
As I indicated in my testimony on the Hill, you don’t establish a
no-fly zone by just declaring it. You go in and suppress the air
defenses, and that mission is largely complete.
I think we have made a lot of progress on the humanitarian side, and
his ability to move armor, to move toward a Benghazi or a place like
that has pretty well been eliminated. Now, we’ll have to keep our eye
on it, because he still has ground forces at his beck and call.
But the reality is, they’re under a lot of pressure, their
logistics, with — there are some signs that they’re moving back to —
back to the west, away from Ajdabiya and other places. So I think that
we have prevented the large-scale slaughter that was beginning to take
place, has taken place in some places.
And so I think that we’re at a point where — where the
establishment of the no-fly zone and the protection of — of cities from
the kind of wholesale military assault that we have seen certainly in
the east has been accomplished, and now we can move to sustainment.
CLINTON: You know, Jake, I would just add two points to what
Secretary Gates said. The United States Senate called for a no-fly zone
in a resolution that it passed, I think, on March the 1st. And that
mission is on the brink of having been accomplished. And there was a
lot of congressional support to do something.
There is not a perfect option when one is looking at a situation
like this. I think that the president ordered the best available
option. The United States worked with the international community to
make sure that there was authorization to do what we have helped to
accomplish.
But what is quite remarkable here is that NATO assuming the
responsibility for the entire mission means that the United States will
move to a supporting role. Just as our allies are helping us in
Afghanistan, where we bear the disproportionate amount of the sacrifice
and the cost, we are supporting a mission through NATO that was very
much initiated by European requests, joined by Arab requests.
I think this is a watershed moment in international
decision-making. We learned a lot in the 1990s. We — we saw what
happened in Rwanda. It took a long time in the Balkans, in Kosovo to
deal with a tyrant. But I think in — what has happened since March 1st
— and we’re not even done with the month — demonstrates really
remarkable leadership.
GATES: I would just — I would just add one other thing, and sort
of a concrete manifestation of where we are in this, and that is we in
the Department of Defense are already beginning to do our planning in
terms of beginning to draw down resources, first from support of the
no-fly zone and then from the humanitarian mission. Now, that may not
start in the next day or two, but I — but I certainly expect it to in
the very near future.
TAPPER: Well, I wanted to follow on that. How long are we going to
be there in this support role?
GATES: Well, I think — as I say, we will begin diminishing the
level of our engagement, the level of resources we have involved in
this. But as long as there is a no-fly zone and we have some unique
capabilities to bring to bear, for example, intelligence, surveillance
and reconnaissance, some tanking aviation, we will continue to have a
presence.
But a lot of these — a lot of the forces that we will have
available, other than the ISR, are forces that are already assigned to
Europe or have been assigned to Italy or are at sea in the Mediterranean.
TAPPER: I’ve heard NATO say that they anticipate this — some NATO
officials say this could be three months, but people in the Pentagon
think it could be far longer than that. Do you think we’ll be gone by
the end of the year? Will the mission be over by the end of the year?
GATES: I don’t think anybody knows the answer to that.
TAPPER: Do you think Libya posed an actual or imminent threat to
the United States?
GATES: No. No, it was not — it was not a vital national interest
to the United States, but it was an interest. And it was an interest
for all of the reasons Secretary Clinton talked about, the engagement of
the Arabs, the engagement of the Europeans, the general humanitarian
question that was at stake.
There was another piece of this, though, that certainly was a
consideration. You’ve had revolutions on both the east and the west of
Libya. They’re fragile.
TAPPER: Egypt and Tunisia?
GATES: Egypt and Tunisia. So you had a potentially significantly
destabilizing event taking place in Libya that put at risk potentially
the revolutions in both Tunisia and Egypt, and that was another
consideration I think we took into account.
TAPPER: And, Secretary Clinton, how does the — it…
CLINTON: But I — Jake, I just — I just want to add, too, because,
you know, I know that there’s been a lot of questions, and those
questions deserve to be asked and answered. The president is going to
address the nation on Monday night.
Imagine we were sitting here and Benghazi had been overrun, a city
of 700,000 people, and tens of thousands of people had been slaughtered,
hundreds of thousands had fled, and as Bob said, either with nowhere to
go or overwhelming Egypt while it’s in its own difficult transition, and
we were sitting here.
The cries would be, why did the United States not do anything? How
could you stand by when, you know, France, and the United Kingdom, and
other Europeans, and the Arab League, and your Arab partners were
saying, “You’ve got to do something”? So every decision that we make is
going to have pluses and minuses.
TAPPER: You heard the secretary of defense say that Libya did not
pose an actual or imminent threat to the nation. And bearing in mind
what you just said, I’m still wondering how the administration
reconciles the attack without congressional approval with then-candidate
Obama saying in 2007 the president does not have power under the
Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation
that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the
nation. And as a senator, you yourself in 2007 said this about
President Bush.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CLINTON: If the administration believed that any, any use of force
against Iran is necessary, the president must come to Congress to seek
that authority.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
TAPPER: Why not go to Congress?
CLINTON: Well, we would welcome congressional support, but I don’t
think that this kind of internationally authorized intervention, where
we are one of a number of countries participating to enforce a
humanitarian mission, is the kind of unilateral action that either I or
President Obama were speaking of several years ago.
I think that this had a limited timeframe, a very clearly defined
mission, which we are in the process of fulfilling.
TAPPER: I want to get to a couple other topics before you guys go,
and one of them is in Yemen. President Saleh, a crucial ally in
counterterrorism, seems quite on his way out. Secretary Gates, you said
this week, “We have not done any post-Saleh planning.” How dangerous is
a post-Saleh world, post-Saleh Yemen to the United States?
GATES: Well, I think — I think it is a real concern, because the
most active and, at this point, perhaps the most aggressive branch of Al
Qaida, Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, operates out of Yemen. And we
have had a lot of counterterrorism cooperation from President Saleh and
Yemeni security services. So if that government collapses or is
replaced by one that is dramatically more weak, then — then I think
we’ll face some additional challenges out of Yemen. There’s no question
about it. It’s a real problem.
TAPPER: And, Secretary Clinton, on Pakistan, Pakistan has been
trying to block U.S. counterterrorism efforts in the FATA region. It
continues to work with terrorists who attack India. It held a U.S.
diplomat in its prisons for several weeks, as I don’t need to tell you.
Has this relationship gotten worse in the last six months, U.S.-Pakistan?
CLINTON: Well, Jake, it’s a very challenging relationship, because
there have been some — some problems. We were very appreciative of
getting our diplomat out of Pakistan, and that took cooperation by the
government of Pakistan. We have cooperated very closely together in
going after terrorists who pose a threat to both us and to the
Pakistanis themselves.
But it’s a — it’s a very difficult relationship, because Pakistan
is in a hard position, trying to figure out how it’s going to contend
with its own internal extremist threat.
But I think, on the other hand, we’ve also developed good lines of
communication, good opportunities for cooperation, but it’s something we
have to work on every day.
TAPPER: And, finally, we’ve talked a bit about the end of this
operation, how it ends. I’m wondering if you can envision the United
States supporting a plan where Gadhafi is exiled. Would the U.S. be
willing to support safe haven, immunity from prosecution, and access to
funds as a way to end this conflict?
CLINTON: Well, Jake, we are nowhere near that kind of negotiation.
I’ll be going to London on Tuesday for a conference that the British
government is hosting. There will be a number of countries, not only
those participating in the — the enforcement of the resolution, but
also those who are pursuing political and other interventions.
And the United Nations has a special envoy who will also be actively
working with Gadhafi and those around him.
We have sent a clear message that it is time for him to transition
out of power. The African Union has now called for a democratic
transition. We think that there will be developments along that line in
the weeks and months ahead, but I can’t sitting here today predict to
you exactly how it’s going to play out. But we believe that Libya will
have a better shot in the future if he departs and leaves power.
TAPPER: All right, Secretaries Clinton, Secretary Gates, thank you
so much for joining us.
GATES: Thank you.
CLINTON: Thank you.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
TAPPER: Next, what would Rumsfeld do? I’ll talk Libya strategy
with Donald Rumsfeld, the man who helped lead the United States into
Afghanistan and Iraq. And I’ll get his response to the harsh criticism
being leveled at his best-selling memoir.
