March 31, 2006

Q: (telephone)

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Oh, I don’t think so. You know, one of the things that we do is to have this around the United Nations. And I don’t try to make it an American initiative, I try to give Americans and others a chance to participate. And indeed, a lot of the most important commitments that are made have been made by Americans, but some by people from other countries have amounted to more. I mean, let me just give you an example…the Swiss Re, the European insurance company committed $300 million dollars to clean energy investments in Europe. Tom Hunter, the Scottish philanthropist, committed up to a hundred million dollars of help to dramatically increase per-capita incomes to African countries. And those are just two examples—Mohammad Ibrahim, a Sudanese native, who made a billion dollars in the cell phone business, committed a hundred million dollars to create small businesses in Africa. So nobody thinks it’s an American initiative.

Q: (telephone)

PRESIDENT CLINTON: No, it’s a global policy by NGOs. I think the post Cold War era, the whole twenty-first century interdependence moment is defined in part by the rise of the non-governmental organization. And it’s unrealistic to think that this movement wouldn’t become globalized or that there wouldn’t be a lot of cross-fertilization and cooperation. That’s what I’m trying to do; I’m trying to bring us all together.

Q: (telephone)

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Well, you’ll have to ask her that. Right now she’s trying to get re-elected and I’m doing my best to help her. We do have differences of opinion, but I also think it’s important to point out, if I might, that, I believe that this kind of activity that I’m promoting will be needed no matter who’s elected and what their policy is. First of all. And secondly, even though my differences with the current administration are very great in some areas, not all of their policies are bad. You may not agree with everything their AIDS program does, but they’ve got a lot more money from the Congress and they’ve just gotten a great deal of money for a malaria program that I happen to think is well-conceived. They want to get away bed-nets, for example, instead of forcing poor people to buy them, a clear policy advance based on all the evidence. So I don’t want to spend a lot of time with political fights, I’m just trying to get people together across all the lines that divide them, to change people’s lives for the better.

Q: (telephone)

PRESIDENT CLINTON: What did who get wrong?

Q: (telephone)

PRESIDENT CLINTON: First of all, when they took office, for quite understandable reasons, that is, Arafat going with the Intifada and then-Prime Minister Sharon having nothing to do with him…they said, as the President said to me, he said, you know, you work this hard for peace in the Middle East and don’t get anything; these guys are never going to make a deal so I’m gonna wait until they’re serious before I do anything. I think that was probably not the right thing to do because my experience is whenever America is involved in the Middle East, fewer people die. And that matters. Because the more people who die, the harder it is to get the peace process back on track. Now having said that, I think the error that Arafat made in turning down the peace agreement that I offered that the then-Prime Minister of Israel accepted was the primary factor precipitating this. And he, Mr. Arafat, about a year after I left office, said that he wanted that agreement. But then he didn’t have a chance to get it. So, a lot of mistakes have been made, but the main thing is, can we put this back on track now.

Q: (telephone)

PRESIDENT CLINTON: If they made the same assurances as Arafat did. That is, keep in mind that Arafat himself did not take the offending provision calling for the extinction of Israel out of the PLO constitution. But he signed an agreement which de-facto recognized Israel’s right to exist and the Two-State Solution in 1993. And he made private assurances, and he made public assurances, that he did not support terror anymore and would try to restrain it. And in fact, as late at 1998, we had the only year in the history of the State of Israel where nobody was killed by a terrorist attack. So if Hamas would say, suppose they’d say “Look, we can’t change our theory; we can’t change our documents, we can’t change our history, but we’re in government now and the policy of the Palestinian government is no to terror and yes to negotiations. As long as we’re in government, we’ll honor that policy.” If they did that, I would support dealing with them.

Q: (telephone)

PRESIDENT CLINTON: It depends on what happens from here on in. I think the most important thing is to talk about what might offer a way out. I think this has happened because it’s been a long time since the election, and no government has been stood up. The increased capacity of the security forces to do their job, therefore, is largely irrelevant because they’re not working on behalf of a coherent government which seems to have the allegiance of the majority of Shi’ites, Sunnis, and Kurds. So the number one thing they’ve got to do is to realize that they have this enormous turnout among Iraqis who risked their lives to vote and they have got nothing for it. There is no functioning government that can hold the country together and stop it from becoming a launching pad for terrorists.

Q: (telephone)

PRESIDENT CLINTON: No, right now what I would do is focus on getting the government up and going that could command the support of the country. The security forces of the Iraqis are capable of doing a lot more protection work. If we had an ongoing government, then America could reduce its forces more, put them in safer areas, and change the composition—you could have more special forces, more Arabic speakers, more intelligence people—they could be brought forth when they’re needed. But you don’t want to do anything at this moment, I wouldn’t think, that would accelerate the changes of internal disintegration, and accelerate the chances that Iraq could become what it never was before the invasion, which is a seat of terrorist activity toward the rest of the Middle East. Keep in mind, the attacks in Jordan, launched by Mr. Zarkawi, came out of a base in Iraq.

Q: (telephone)

PRESIDENT CLINTON: I don’t know; I’m not sure I even understand it. All I know is, as I said in my speech at Chancellor Brown’s globalization ceremony, I mean globalization event, the performance of the British economy, and the progress of the British society from the other side of the Atlantic, looks pretty good. Therefore, the health and the vitality of the British political system looks pretty good.

And I think Gordon Brown will make a good Prime Minister and I think Tony Blair has done a fine job. You can’t agree with anybody all the time, particularly if they serve any length of time. But he has really made a big difference for the UK. I think Gordon Brown will be a worthy successor, but I think all this conversation within and beyond the Labour Party about when and where and who’s up and who’s down is basically destructive of the public interest in the UK, which is to keep this forward progress going. So what I tried to do was to say, I may be an odd duck, but I very much admire both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and I think it’s up to them and to the leaders of the party to decide who does what when. Meanwhile, what the rest of us should want is continuing forward progress. And that’s what I’m pulling for. Thank you.