100 monkeys typing.

News Blackout

After a day travelling across the fly-over states listening to Jefferson vs. Adams on CD, followed by 3 days on a river bank in a tent, I've had an almost complete news blackout. How refreshing to turn on the TV, cue up TIVO and get this.

MR. RUSSERT: As we sit here in September of 2006, what do you think is the biggest problem confronting our world? The biggest?

MR. CLINTON: In the short term it is the illusion that our differences matter more than our common humanity. That’s what’s driving the terrorism. It’s not just that there’s an unresolved Arab/Israeli conflict. Osama bin Laden and Dr. al-Zawahiri can convince young Sunni-Arab men who have—and some women—who have despairing conditions in their lives that they get a one-way ticket to heaven in a hurry if they kill a lot of innocent people who don’t share their reality. That means they—by definition, everything about them is, the differences are more important. And that’s driving the terror, that’s driving the attempt to acquire for terrorist groups small-scale chemical and biological and maybe even someday nuclear stuff.

In the longer term, climate change is the biggest threat, because if it’s allowed to come to fruition—and particularly if we’re, at the same time, running out of affordable, recoverable oil—you’re going to have a—almost over night—a dramatic change in the way we live, and it will cause millions of food refugees, it’ll cause probably food and water wars, and it could change the underlying conditions on which our civilization rests. So I’d say terror, based on human difference today, climate change over the long run.

MR. RUSSERT: What did you think when Colin Powell said, “The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism”?

MR. CLINTON: I think he was referring to the, the questions that have been raised about the original evidence, which plagues him and in which he was, I think, unwittingly complicit. I don’t think—I think it’s pretty clear, based on what all the people that worked for him have said. I think he was most worried about the question of torture and the conduct of the prisons at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. And of course, he weighed in in this debate about the extent to which the CIA or others could engage in conduct which clearly violates the Geneva Convention.

Now, we—as you and I talk, and we hear that they’ve reached an agreement, the senators and the White House, and I hope they have. But Colin pointed out that, you know, we’ve got soldiers all over the world. If we get a reputation for torturing people, the following bad things are going to happen: We’re as likely going to get bad information is good, just for people to just quit getting beat on; two, we’re likely to create two or three or five enemies for every one we break; and three, we make our own soldiers much more vulnerable to conduct which violates the Geneva Convention. That is, we can’t expect our friends, much less our enemies, to accept the fact that because we’re the good guys, we get to have a different standard of conduct. And most people think the definition of a good guy is someone who voluntarily observes a different standard of conduct, not someone who claims the right to do things others can’t do.

I'd have a beer with him.