To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Foreign Affairs

From PRI, Public Radio International, it's to the best of our knowledge on Jim Fleming. If we saw a missile being erected on a launcher aimed at the United States and we had the capacity to destroy that missile, we would be justified in doing that. Richard Pearl, that's an act of preemption. It's also an act of self -defense. Every country does have the right of self -defense. Madeline Allbright. But by making it a doctrine, the doctrine of preemption, the administration has created huge problems and unnecessary discussions. This hour we'll talk with foreign policy heavyweights Madeline Allbright and Richard Pearl, and hear how one Texas congressman funded the Afghan Mujahideen almost single -handedly and changed the course of history. Also documentary filmmaker Errol Morris on the enduring mystery of Robert McNamara, the man who ran America's war in Vietnam. Who is McNamara? What did he think he was doing? Is he a good man or a bad man? Does he see himself as a good man or a bad man?

For years, Richard Pearl has wielded enormous influence on American foreign policy. He was Assistant Secretary of Defense during the Reagan administration. But his real influence comes from outside the government. He's one of the intellectual gurus of conservative hardliners. Pearl's just written a primer on foreign policy with another Washington insider David From. The book is called An End to Evil. Pearl told Steve Paulson that Iraq was just the beginning of the war on terror. Now he says Iran is pursuing weapons of mass destruction and its leaders must be removed. Iran is harboring al -Qaeda people in Iran now. They claim they have them under arrest incarcerated, but there's lots of evidence to suggest that they are being allowed to operate. The Mullahs who run Iran quite apart from dictating every aspect of the lives of the Iranian people to totalitarian state are up to their eyeballs in terror. We caught them sending

weapons to Palestinian terrorists, for example. You have a lot of connections to the White House and to the Defense Department. Are high -level people there seriously considering in invasion of Iran? I don't know that they are. I have no indication that they are and we're not recommending David and I are not certainly not recommending an invasion of Iran. What we are recommending is that we support those Iranians who want to liberate their country. We think it's a substantial majority of the people of Iran. What does that mean to support those people who would want to overthrow the current regime? Well, at a minimum, it means helping them communicate. So they have a window into the outside world and the people of Iran have some sense of what is going on even in their own country. During the Cold War, our broadcasting activities frequently provided the best information that polls and checks and Hungarians and others had about what was going on in their own countries. That's a service we can and should provide to the people of Iran. But realistically,

if you're serious about wanting to remove the current regime in Iran right now, at some point, wouldn't that involve US military action? I mean, is it realistic that it would happen any other way? The truth is, there's a lot we don't know. We don't know whether the Iranian security forces, the revolutionary guard, would fire on Iranian citizens or if they did, whether they would sustain that. We have seen governments change largely without violence. Look on one step down, but the massed opinion in opposition was sufficient. I think you take this step by step. There's already tremendous anger in the Muslim world against the United States. I would think that if there is obvious US support to try to overthrow the regime in Iran, that anger would escalate even more, probably rather dramatically.

Does that bother you? Well, I'm not sure it's true. I think there is a lot of sympathy for the plight of the people of Iran, who, of course, are not Arabs. So the Arab world shows less interest in Iran than it does in some other places. I think we have to align ourselves with people who want freedom. And we need to do a better job of explaining that that's who we wish to associate with. And that task is made more difficult by the fact that we are frequently allied with dictatorial regimes. I'm willing to take the risks of whatever negative publicity attaches to our support for people who are trying to free themselves. But don't you think there is tremendous anger towards this kind of unilateral action by the United States? I mean, isn't that sort of the motivation for protests not only throughout the Middle East, but Europe as well? Well, I think there are a lot of reasons behind the protests. But if the choice is between unilateral action and anger on the one hand, and paralysis and inaction and defenselessness on the other without anger,

there's no question what we have to choose. And one of the complaints, the criticisms that a lot of people who opposed the war against Iraq voiced was the morality of preemptive war. Iraq had not attacked us. What do you make of this as a moral issue? Well, I think it's a practical question and not a moral question, although I'm perfectly happy to defend our Iraq policy on moral as well as practical grounds. I'm sure you would agree, and the people you're referring to would agree that if we saw a missile being erected on a launcher aimed at the United States, and we had the capacity to destroy that missile on its launcher before the countdown, we would be justified in doing that. In fact, we'd be irresponsible and negligent if we didn't do it. That's an active preemption. It's also an act of self -defense. Do we have to wait until the missile lands on our territory? Now, if we're talking not about a missile on a launch pad that's within our gun sites, but a nuclear warhead that is being fabricated in

North Korea, it becomes a more difficult issue. And the question then is, what is the right moment when the requirements of self -defense justify our acting before we are struck? And I think that can only be answered in the specific context of the specific situation, but on moral grounds, it seems to me if we can protect the lives of our citizens by acting preemptively, the President has an obligation to do that. We're right to do that. I'm curious about your background and how you came to be a hardliner. Were there any pivotal events, any turning points in your intellectual development that made you what you are today? Oh goodness. I suppose I was influenced more than anything else by 11 years working for Scoop Jackson, Senator from Washington State, Scoop was a man who detested totalitarianism in all its forms, left right, he fought the Nazis, he fought the communists, and he believed

that properly focused American power could be a tremendous force for good in the world. Back in the 80s, when you worked with the Reagan administration, you got various nicknames from people who didn't like you. You were called the Prince of Darkness and Darth Vader. What did you make of those kinds of comments? Well, I can tell you about the Prince of Darkness. That was a case of mistaken identity. And it's a simple story. A reporter from a British newspaper, the observer came to Washington, thought he'd do a feature piece about a young Senate staffer. He selected me to write the piece about. And he went about interviewing people who knew me, one of whom happened to be Dennis Healy, who had been Minister of Defense in the UK and who knew my boss, Scoop Jackson, and this reporter interviewed Healy, and Healy said, in Washington, Pearl is known as the Prince of Darkness. Well, he was wrong about that. Nobody'd ever called me the Prince of Darkness. There was someone who was called the Prince of Darkness in Washington then, and that was Bob

Novak, the syndicated colonist. It was literally a case of mistaken identity. But it was published that way, and it's even worse now in the Google age, but even then, once you're described in a newspaper article, it's widely published. The next guy who writes about you goes and looks at the clips. And so the next guy who wrote about me said, in Washington, he's known as the Prince of Darkness, and that was it. That was there forever. Well, and then those nicknames stuck. For years, then liberals who saw you as kind of this lightning rod, this conservative figure who was always pushing for policies they didn't like. I mean, they would call you Prince of Darkness, Darth Vader. I guess I'm wondering if in some way you kind of wore those names as badges of honor. Well, I would have preferred to be known by my property, but I gave up trying. I once had to a friend of mine. There are all these attributions of almost demonic powers

to me. How should I respond to that? And he said, just tell him they don't know the half of it. Richard Pearl, the co -author with David from of the book, an end to evil. How to win the war on terror. He spoke as he falls. What are the lessons I learned early on? Never answered the question that is asked of you. Answer the question that you wish had been asked of you. And quite frankly, I follow that rule. It's a very good rule. That's former US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, one of the architects of America's war in Vietnam. McNamara is the subject of a documentary called The Fog of War, the new film by Errol Morris with Music by Philip Glass. To this day, McNamara remains a mysterious figure. In recent years, he's admitted that Vietnam War was a colossal mistake, but he's always avoided questions of personal responsibility. Robert McNamara is now in

his mid 80s, and he's still a controversial figure, as Morris told Steve Paulson. For many people of my generation, he symbolized everything that was wrong with the war in Vietnam, everything that was wrong with government. He sometimes described McNamara as the man who got the hat trick. He got hated by the left, the right, and the center. He was hated by the right because he didn't go all out to win the war. Of course, he was hated by the left because he was the defense secretary during the war. That's correct. At one point, the war even became known as McNamara's wars, if somehow he was the cause of it, all. The sole cause of it all. Nine regiments of

some of the men had little training in a state park in Kentucky before coming here, but it did not prepare them for the thicket of trees, spiked vines, foreign bushes, almost perpendicular cliffs, 90 -degree temperature inside. This was a change from a nasty little war to a nasty middle sized war. Now, Maricopa wins the wars that she undertakes. Make no mistake about it. If this little nation goes down the drain and can't maintain her independence, ask yourself, what's going to happen to all the other little nations? McNamara tells us a long story about his development. Very, very early on in the interview, I found out about his relationship with Curtis Lemay, who was an Army Air Force general at the end of World War II, and McNamara served under him. This is a pivotal moment, it would seem, in the shaping of Robert McNamara, what he did during the Second World War and what his relationship with his commander Curtis Lemay was. And

for his pivotal moment in McNamara's history and in the history of the world, oddly enough. Well, I mean, just the fire bombing of Tokyo in one night, 100 ,000 people were killed, and that was just one of many cities across Japan. I mean, there was massive death even before the United States dropped those two nuclear bombs. I think the issue is not so much incendiary bombs. I think the issue is, in order to win a war, should you kill 100 ,000 people in one night by fire bombing or any other way? Well, May's answer would be clearly yes. McNamara, do you mean to say that instead of burning to that 100 ,000 Japanese civilians, and then one night we should have burned to death a lesser number or none, and then had our soldiers cross the beaches in Tokyo and been slaughtered in the tens of thousands? Is that what you're proposing? When McNamara started talking about the 67 cities that were fire bomb, pre -Hiroshima, pre -Nagasaki, I

knew nothing about it. I'm a little ashamed of myself. Essentially, we had turned Japan into a wasteland even before we dropped the atomic weapons. And he went on from Tokyo to fire bomb other cities, 58 % of Yokohama, Yokohama is roughly the size of Cleveland, 58 % of Cleveland destroyed. Tokyo is roughly the size of New York, 51 % of New York destroyed. 99 % of the equivalent of Shana Nuga, which was Toyama. 40 % of the equivalent of Los Angeles, which was Nagoya. This was all done before, the dropping of the nuclear bomb, which by the way was dropped by Lamei's command. Proportionality should be a guideline in war. Lamei said if we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he's

right. He and I'd say aye, we're behaving as war criminals. It's important, and I'm in some way talking to myself, going back over all of this, important to understand that 1945 was this important moment, not just for McNamara who participated with Lamei and the fire bombing of Japan, important moment for the world, in the sense that warfare has changed. When you choose to bomb with incendiaries, you're no longer involved in strategic bombing. You're not after some specific military site that needs to be destroyed. You're after civilians. You want to terrorize the population? That's correct. Fire bombing is a way of destroying cities and people. And you know what I found fascinating about McNamara's recollections of the Second World War? He

talks about conversations he had with Curtis Lamei about this, and Lamei said that, look, if we didn't win the war, we would be tried as war criminals. Thankfully, we did win the war, so that didn't happen. And it's so interesting that McNamara would talk about the whole question of war criminals in the context of World War II, but I'm guessing he would never touch that question in Vietnam, because of course that's what he was called during the Vietnam years. It's a very interesting question. Here is McNamara talking about war crimes and a just war, a war that we, correctly, I believe, see as a war between right and wrong, but doesn't bring it up with respect to Vietnam. Well, people who have uncharitable feelings about McNamara will say, well, he brings it up in World War II because he doesn't want to deal with the question in Vietnam. I think that that question is very much on his mind. What has to be? He's been accused of this for

decades. I remember a talk he gave in Madison, oh, probably 15 years ago when he was president of the World Bank, and people in the audience got up and shouted at him, war criminal, war criminal when he was talking. And I'm sure he got that all the time. He's had to think about that, I would think. Yeah. I'm fascinated by the man because you actually are witness to someone wrestling with his conscience. You know, people come up to me and they say, oh, he really doesn't feel bad about what he's done. It's just a pose. He's trying to save his reputation to posterity. I say yes and no. My feeling reading his books and having spent this time with him is of a man actually wrestling with his conscience. A man tortured by his past. Well, and McNamara makes the point about how the whole point of living is to learn,

particularly to learn from your mistakes, to understand. And there's seemingly this obsessive quest to go back and try to understand why things turned out the way they did. But somehow there's a piece missing in that because what he never talks about at least publicly is his own personal responsibility and all of that. He tends to defer those questions to, well, we the United States did such and such in Vietnam. It's never I did this. I try not to forget about one simple set of facts. No one knows for sure exactly how many three million as well as 58 ,000 Americans who died and a deep mistrust and suspicion about government that it left in its wake. Yeah, my hope is that this movie teaches us something about the world, about how we have ended up where we are now. McNamara is very useful and very instructive for that purpose.

After you left the Johnson administration, why should he speak out against the Vietnam War? I'm not going to say any more than I have. These are the kinds of questions that get me in trouble. You don't know what I know about how inflammatory my words can appear. A lot of people misunderstand the war, misunderstand me. A lot of people think I'm inside of a bitch. Do you feel in any way responsible for the war? Do you feel guilty? I don't want to go into further discussion. It just opens up more controversy. Is it the feeling that you're damned if you do

and if you don't no matter what you say? Yeah, yeah, that's right. And I'd rather be damned if I don't. It's an odd world we live in, a somewhat frightening disturbing world. I started this movie pre -9 -11. My first interview with McNamara was in May of 2001. 9 -11 was in the future, Afghanistan was in the future, Iraq was in the future. But here you have a man talking about events that are 40, 50, 60 years old. And he could be talking about four, five, six days ago. We are the strongest nation in the world today. I do not believe we should ever apply the economic, political, and military power unilaterally. If we had followed that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn't have been there. None of our allies supported us. Not Japan, not Germany, not

Britain or France. If we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we'd better re -examine our reasoning. I want to ask you about one of your choices about how you made this film. McNamara is the only person interviewed in the film. You didn't put on any protesters against the Vietnam or any critics of McNamara. We see lots of newsreel footage, and we hear old -taped conversations from the Oval Office. But it's only McNamara. We occasionally hear your voice as the interviewer in the background, but you're always off camera. Were you worried at all that you were just giving McNamara a platform to justify his life? Of course. But I also... I've been very much interested in first -person narratives. Because I think that if you let someone talk,

you'll let them talk a lot. That it's a way into discovering who they are, creating if you like a mental landscape, a picture of how they see the world. This was not a bill of particulars for some proposed war crimes tribunal in the future. As for example, Christopher Hitchens' book on Henry Kissinger, different kind of enterprise altogether. A mystery story. Who is McNamara? Is he a good man or a bad man? Does he see himself as a good man or a bad man? Now you've spent a lot of time with Robert McNamara. You've interviewed him for hours and hours. Do you like the man? I do like him. It's quite unexpected. A friend of mine said I'd become a victim of the Stockholm syndrome that I'd spent so much time with McNamara that I had grown to like him. I had taken leave of my senses. But part of spending time

with someone is learning about them. And McNamara is a very, very interesting man. I think regardless of your feelings, particularly for people of my generation, people who grew up during the Vietnam War, it's interesting to look at McNamara and to ask yourself to what extent is he dealing with it? To what extent can he ever deal with it? But over and above that, does he have something to tell us about the present time that is relevant and important? And I think the answer is clearly yes. In my seven years as secretary, we came within a hairspray of war with Soviet Union on three different occasions, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. For seven years as secretary of defense, I lived the cold war. Cold war? Hell, it was a hot war. I think the human race needs to think more about killing, about conflict. Is that what we want in this

21st century? Robert McNamara, from the documentary film The Fog War, the film's director, Errol Morris, spoke with Steve Paulson. What do you think of McNamara's legacy? You can send us email through our website at www .ttbook .org. We'd love to hear from you. I'm Jim Fleming. It's to the best of our knowledge from PRI Public Radio International. Ever heard of Charlie Wilson? Well, if you haven't, don't feel bad.

He was never a household name during his 24 years in Congress. But Wilson did something remarkable. Almost single -handedly, he persuaded the US government to fund the Afghan Mujahideen in their fight against the Soviet occupation. It was the largest covert operation in American history. The story fascinated CB S. producer George Crile, and he ended up writing a book called Charlie Wilson's War. So who was Charlie Wilson? He's a Texan. That's the heart of the matter. And his main claim to fame, most people thought, was that he was the wildest man in Congress. Bar none. Drank more whiskey, chased more girls, and gotten to more scandals, and just about anybody. But what happened that shaped this book that I became preoccupied with writing for long, long time, was his decision, halfway into the Reagan first term, that he was going to go energize this covert war, the CIA's in Afghanistan, against the invading

army of the Soviet Union. It's a fascinating story, and what he did is really astonishing. But it's even more astonishing when you put him in context, because it is not logical for a hard -partying Texas congressman who's primarily interested in his district, and a liberal Democrat at that, at least by reputation, to get interested in fighting the communists in Afghanistan. There was, it's hard to remember back not too long ago, but to what it meant to be a Kennedy Democrat. You kind of love the New Deal, and we're very liberal on all domestic issues. But when it came to foreign policy, John Kennedy wasn't that far off from Ronald Reagan, and Charlie Wilson was a Kennedy Democrat through and through. He was like a self -appointed knight of Kennedy's round table. And he was one of a collection of people in the late 1970s, early 80s, who were led by Ronald Reagan, a swept victory, that the United States was simply losing it, falling behind in the great battle for the world

during that cold war idea of facing the evil empire. Back to Charlie Wilson, and the beginnings of his campaign. Why Afghanistan? Why them at least, for that matter? His interest really began in supporting Israel, isn't that right? Charlie Wilson, when he encountered a noble underdog, being bullied, would have some kind of a transformation of his mind, and he would acquire visions of what could be done that no one else would would imagine. And when he hit Congress, well, when he was in Lufkin, Texas, thinking about running for Congress, he read Exodus, and was so fascinated by the story of these Davids against the Goliath that they faced in the sea of enemies. He subscribed to the Jerusalem Post and Lufkin, Texas. He's not Jewish. And when he went to Congress in 1973, the Arab -Israeli War was running, and he became a key member of the Jewish caucus, even though he wasn't Jewish. He had no Jews in his district, and he really learned how power

works in the Congress. And then he just set about building his alliances and building up his credit for that day that he knew not when, or how it might happen, but he thought he better be ready. Well, let's move to that moment, because the moment arrived when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and Charlie Wilson decided, I guess, without anybody's assistance, he was going to almost single -handedly make sure that they rude the day. Well, if you jump ahead about three years, that's true. The fun part about this whole story, the unlikely part about it, is that when come about the second or third month after the invasion, after Jimmy Carter has taken this out of the Olympics, after he has declared that the United States now faces the worst foreign policy crisis since World War II, every expert in the West, everyone at the CIA concludes that nothing can be done in Afghanistan, that

the Red Army, the Invincible Red Army, is a marauding, ruthless operation, over a hundred thousand troops, nothing can be done. And it's the moment, and I think of it as a moment in a fairy tale, that these mountain men, who have been called freedom fighters, and admired, that their goose was cooked, unless they could have the fairy tale character arrive. And there was that man, Charlie Wilson, but right then he was walking into a hot tub in the fantasy suite of Caesar's palace in Las Vegas. Two beautiful showgirls with high heels on walking into the tub with him with a lot of white fluffy powder under their nails. And this would almost get Wilson indicted a couple of years later. It wasn't a town compelter, was it? He's never specified exactly what it was, but Rudolph, Giuliani's, just his department seemed to think it was cocaine. But he beat the rap, and he got through what he called the longest midlife crisis in history, and that's when he discovered the Afghans

in 19, about three years into the war when he became the first congressman to go out to Pakistan to the border and meet these people. So practically speaking, what did he do? He went off to the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan, that's just another junket. How did he manage to change events? He just knew how power worked. And Wilson figured, well, I've got a doctrine. You know, this is official US policy. We're supposed to support anti -communist guerrillas. I'm in a position to get my colleagues to give me the money. And I'm just going to throw it at the CIA. So he back ended the whole process. The president didn't ask for the money. The CIA didn't know it was coming. The authorizing committees had not conducted hearings. He just back ended everything. And one morning, the leaders of the CIA woke up to find that this madman had thrown $40 million at them. One of the funny things about this part of the story is that the Reagan administration actually was not in favor. Now

of what he was doing, the CIA to whom he had given $40 million didn't want it. At all costs, they didn't want to take it, especially from a friend like that. The reason why the CIA didn't want it and the president didn't want it is because they were convinced that it was a losing cause. Nothing could be accomplished except to put the United States in the position of possibly provoking a major confrontation with the Soviets. But he was insistent. This is one of these curious things about American government. When we read in the papers day after day after day, that there is no money for this, that or the other thing. One congressman from a small district in Texas who has the ability simply says, I don't care. I want this to happen. I'll give you $40 million and by God you'll use it. After it got going, the CIA became wildly happy warriors. This was like a Cold War fairy tale come true for them. While the countries got no money or 20 million or 30 million, all of a sudden the Afghans in a real stealth campaign led by the Democrats in the House of Representatives by

Charlie Wilson are adding first 40 million, 50 million, 100 million, then it goes up to a half billion. It gets close to a billion dollars a year. Not 10 years later, we're looking back at all of this and no one seems to question now that the United States poured millions of dollars into the support of the Mujahideen. We funded Ajihad after the bombing of the World Trade Center, the terrorist campaign around the world to do people like Charlie Wilson, look at themselves in the mirror and say, what have I done? I think that you could make an argument and I certainly did in the book that the CIA war, the 10 -year war that led to the Soviets getting their Vietnam in Afghanistan and shortly afterward to the Berlin Wall coming down and the entire communist empire imploding that the Cold War ended and that was a good thing. But the moment after that last Soviet left Afghanistan,

everything we did was wrong and it was unforgivable and it's a cautionary tale because what could have been and should have been a moment where the United States could have lived in harmony with Islam, we packed our bags up and left, we did worse than that, for a while we funded a kind of tribal civil war for no good reason. And then we got frustrated and left, we didn't build any schools or hospitals or roads, a million and a half of them had died and the course of that. So we funded a war but we refused to fund the peace. We absolutely did not fund the peace and we acquired a very unpleasant reputation for being wildly hypocritical and liking Afghans if they kill Russians for us but afterward not being willing to even consider a kind of martial plan approach which is what really defined us as a nation and made I think us properly proud and be able to carry that identity as the leaders of the free world. George Crile, he's

a producer of the CBS show 60 Minutes, his book is called Charlie Wilson's War. Coming up, Madeline Albright reflects on what it was like to the America's first female Secretary of State. If a woman talks loudly she is aggressive, if a man does he is bold, you know, so it's that kind of a thing. I'm Jim Fleming, it's to the best of our knowledge from PRI Public Radio Madeline

Albright never dreamed of becoming Secretary of State. Why would she? She was born in Chakoslovakia, only came to America when her family was forced into exile after the Second World War. Albright married, at children, and then spent much of her time packing lunches and carpooling the kids. But life is full of strange twists of fate. Madeline Albright talked to Steve Paulson about her life and her memoir, Madam Secretary. The possibility of having the world's greatest job never occurred to me and I really didn't start into a full -time career until I was 39 years old and had three children. So I had kind of a stealth career. So how did you make that transition from mother of three, as you say, to never government job until you were 39, to become the highest ranking woman in the history of the United States? Well, I was not idle in the years before I was 39. Well, I graduated from college and got married immediately and had the children. And then I went back to school and so it took me forever to get a

graduate degree. I had a PhD by then and I had done an awful lot of volunteer work. I worked on school boards and I worked in politics and so ultimately at age 39 I was able to put all those things together and had the honor of first to work for Senator Muskie and the Senate. And then less and always to my students be nice to your professors because then I went to work for his big nephew, Briginski, who had been my professor at Columbia when he was national security adviser. So I then worked in the Carter White House. And after that I taught at Georgetown and headed a think tank and worked mostly in a series of losing campaigns but ultimately got asked by Bill Clinton to go to the United Nations. Were you very ambitious? Well, it depends on whether you define that as a good or a bad thing. I think that in women sometimes it's not supposed to be a good thing but yes, I wanted to work, I wanted to make a difference.

But there's there's wanting to work and then there's becoming secretary of state. I mean I guess did you want to rise to the highest possible levels of government? Well, it never occurred to me that I could become secretary of state. First of all, I'd never seen one in a skirt and I also just did not think that something like that would ever happen. I did want to work in the government. There's no question about that and I didn't specifically push people aside in order to rise. But I did want to work in the government. In your book, you're pretty upfront about what happened to your marriage, your husband left you for a younger woman. And I guess it raises the question of whether if you hadn't been divorced, would you have ever become secretary of state? I think that if I could have at the time persuaded my husband to stay, I would have given up everything to have that happen. On the other hand, I do not think that in my case, I would have become secretary if

I had still been married. Not because a married woman can't be secretary of state, but because what I did after what was a very painful period was pull myself together and volunteer for a lot of things always be available to do whatever anybody asked me to do initially just to kind of fill the time. And I said because the ice was so thin, I had to move fast. And then I got very involved in the things I was doing. And did, in fact, develop a reputation for getting things done. And I was very glad that I had my PhD in international relations so that I had the right credentials at a time when it was possible to go into the government. You are the only American woman who's ever served as secretary of state. And you've written that you actually had more trouble being accepted by men in your own government than by men in other countries, including in rather traditional cultures like Arab cultures. What kinds of comments did you hear from your colleagues in the United States? Well,

you know, what happened was when I went abroad, I represented the United States. It also helped that I arrived in a very large plane that said United States of America on it. And they, whoever they were, knew that they had to deal with me if they were going to have a dialogue with the United States in that particular circumstance. In this country or in our own government, what happened was that the people that were part of our national security circle were people that I had known a very long time. And all of them actually very nice men. But they had known me in all those previous roles that I told you about, you know, either as a carpool mother or board chairman or a hill staffer. And I think it was a little hard for some of them to imagine that all of a sudden I had the number one job in diplomacy. And it wasn't so much anything that they said. And I think every woman listening to you will identify with this. But more kind of a look of, oh my god, there she goes again. Or why is she stating that case so stridently? Or, you know, what is her business in

this? And it's not anything that anybody ever says. It's more kind of an attitude. So women have to be more careful or they may worry more about being accused of being strident than men would be? Well, the thing that happens is the very same qualities in a man and a woman are described by entirely different adjectives. So if a woman cares about a subject, she is called emotional. If a man cares about a subject, he is called committed. If a woman talks loudly, she is aggressive. If a man does, he is bold, you know. So it's that kind of a thing. Do you have a proudest moment from when you served as Secretary of State? Yes, I do. And it has a lot to do with the fight against ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. There were a lot of people who questioned whether we should be in Kosovo, whether we should use force in Kosovo. And at the beginning, people called the war in Kosovo, Madeline's war, which was not supposed to be a compliment. A

lot of things had gone wrong, most of which I had nothing to do with, like the weather or the fact that our airplanes were not able to hit the targets, or we bombed the Chinese embassy, which was a disaster, an accidental one. But then when we won, I went to Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, and was greeted by huge crowds of people who were cheering and thanking the USA. And now I have been told that there are a lot of little girls in Kosovo whose name is Madeline. How do you see the role of US military force in relation to NATO and European military force? And then in relation to the UN, how do those pieces fit together? How should they fit together? Well, you've asked a very interesting and complicated question. First of all, I do think that the United States is an indispensable power. I said that many times because we are large and powerful and democratic and economically viable with the best military in the world. And I saw in enough of the meetings

that I attended that unless the United States made the point or started the discussion or had some initiatives that a lot of things did not happen. So I did say we were indispensable, but I also never said alone. I believe in NATO and the U .S. role within it, I would have always preferred to have a UN mandate under which to use force. But in Kosovo, for instance, we did have the support of 18 other NATO countries, but we could not get United Nations support for the military action. I didn't think that NATO should have to wait for UN approval because it already was a multilateral organization and showed community consensus. And we went to the UN right after and got an agreement for the United Nations to be able to run the political part of Kosovo. So I believe in American power, but I do not believe that

force should be the first resort. And I believe because we have so much power that we need to have some self -control. Madeline Albright, the former Secretary of State, she talked with Steve Paulson about her memoir Madam Secretary. We always told our son when he was little. Talk to strangers. Poet Naomi, she have nigh. Ask questions. Engage. If you were lost, maybe they will point you in the right direction. Anyway, they're fun. They make life a lot more interesting. Now, don't get into cars with them or take off your pants with them or eat weird candy out of their pockets. But feel free to converse in a courteous way any time you feel like it. Naomi, she have nigh says the fear of strangers has led to a lot of trouble around the world. Political trouble. Nigh is a poet based in San Antonio. She calls herself a wandering poet. Her father is Palestinian, her mother,

American, and Nigh herself has spent a lot of time in the Middle East. She told Anne Strange, that political violence comes from dehumanizing people who aren't like us. We are so conscious of the other in our world. Who is the other? Do we have enemies? Who are we scared of? And as the child of a beautiful immigrant father who always seemed friendlier than any other father in the neighborhood, I felt called to say something about empathy with others. And certainly in this time of war, which so many of us opposed vehemently, this is an issue that comes up again and again. But I guess even more than that, you can't have war if there are no strangers. I mean, war grows out of the fact that we think of people as other. I think that's right. It does, unfortunately. On the way to the radio station, I passed a billboard, and I don't know if this happens in other states, but someone in Texas

has taken to buying billboards and writing messages that are signed God. And the one I passed this morning says simply on black background that love thy neighbor thing, I meant that. God. Well, you know, I think if you think about that very long, it's hard to approve of a lot of weapon machinery in parts of the world. It's hard to approve of ongoing kind of battled situations. How do you put this kind of idea in poems? Well, I'll read you a poem that no one's heard or read. It's called The Light That Shines On Us Now. The strange beam of being right smug spotlight. What else could we have done? Ask a little one. What else? Three girls with book bags fleeing tanks. Now that we are so bold, now that we pretend God likes some kinds

of killing. How will we deserve the light of candles, soft beam of a small lamp falling across any safe bed? Orphan boy in a checkered shirt trapped between two glum uncles. He carries his mother's smooth fragrance and father's solid voice. They were not countries. They were continents. That's beautiful. Thank you. You know, as writers, we keep looking into the photographs that haunt us, that we keep on our desks, the children to whom we pledge allegiance daily, whether they're our own children or their children in another country, whose whose names we can't know, but whose images we see. And we keep feeling devoted to some better future for them. One of the things that strikes me and has struck me in a number of your poems is the way in which

you use poetry to begin to question and break down divisions, divisions between countries and definitions even, even, you know, the concept of ownership who owns what. And that seems to me some interesting piece of your effort to create a sort of image of what it would mean to be a global citizen. I guess I'm thinking in particular of your poems. One is called Cross That Line. Well, in Cross That Line, I was trying to to imagine how we extend ourselves even when it's difficult or even when we feel that something is against us. And I was invoking the great American Paul Robeson whose work I treasure. Cross That Line, Paul Robeson stood on the northern border of the USA and sang into Canada where a vast audience sat on folding chairs waiting to hear him. He sang into Canada. His voice left the USA when his body was not allowed to cross that line. Remind us again, brave friend.

What countries may we sing into? What lines should we all be crossing? What songs travel toward us from far away to deep in our days? That was in reference to the time when Robeson was being punished for his outspoken views about civil rights and he was being called a communist and he did have some affiliation with socialist or communist views. But he was not being allowed to leave the country to go to Europe and counter his great audiences there. So he sang at the border. I guess I'm curious about what role in particular you think poetry can have in healing the kind of divides we've been talking about? Well, I think one of the jobs of poetry is to notice the small details which make life what it is and to celebrate those details, to describe them, to savor them, and then to exchange them. If I read a poem written by someone in India,

I would hope to be able to imagine life in India at that moment. And so I think that poetry does something which news doesn't do, news often glosses over the details and gives some big headline, erases a sense of details about lives. And if we are entitled to hear, say for example, what's happening in the lives of children in Iraq, in an honest way, how scared they are, what they have to walk by to get to school, that changes things. It's different than a headline. Poetry creates life. Naomi Shehab -Nai talking with Anne Strangehamps, Nies collection of poems about the Middle East is called 19 Varieties of Gazelle. It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Jim Fleming.

You can buy a tape with this program by calling the radio store at 1 -800 -747 -7444. Ask for the show called For an Affairs, number 125 -A. If you'd like to comment on what you've heard, just send us email through our website at www .ttbook .org. To the best of our knowledge is produced at Wisconsin Public Radio by Steve Paulson, Veronica Rickert, Mary Lou Finnegan, Charles Monroe Cain, Doug Gordon, and Anne Strangehamps, with engineering help from Marv Nunn. 10 years after the end of apartheid, what's left to document the struggle? For the filmmakers of the documentary Amanda, there's music. Next week onto the best of our knowledge, the songs that face down death, despair, and terror on the road to equality in South Africa. It's to the best of our knowledge from PRI Public Radio International.