Well, yes. And as a matter of fact I'm going to do a piece defending it. I think it's the right decision. It's the right thing; it's the necessary thing, if people think it through. Everybody's talking about "Let's have civilian trials." [New York Times columnist William] Safire even said we should have had civilian trials of those Germans! What I would say to him is, suppose instead of six Germans it were 60. And suppose the Japanese had landed and filled the country with thousands of saboteurs and spies. The idea that we would be able to give them all civilian trials is an absurd one. If we're at war -- and we are -- and if the war is being fought on American ground -- and it is; we know that because we're still digging up our friends at the World Trade Center site -- then a military tribunal is certainly justified.
As a conservative, though, surely you have concerns about individual rights and big government.
The Salon Interviews index -- links to all the interviews related to the Sept. 11 attacks and the events that have followed.
Am I concerned about it? I'm far more concerned about the threat of terrorism in this country than I am about that. I don't think this country is going to allow the civil rights, the constitutional rights of our citizens to be abridged. If the government tried, there would be a firestorm of protest no government would be able to overcome.
You know, the American government is not as strong as it used to be. Not at all. It's not as strong as it was under Eisenhower, for instance. Eisenhower ordered every illegal immigrant deported. And you know what it was called? "Operation Wetback." No American president would have the courage to do that today.
You like Ike.
I'm starting to reevaluate him, and the more I do the more I appreciate him. His Cold War policy, for instance. He, in fact, drew a line. When I was a kid there was a huge protest because he didn't do anything about the Hungarians being butchered. Ike said, "Look -- they're on the other side of the line. We deplore it. It's ugly, it's horrible. But we cannot risk all-out war with the Soviet Union over this." A lot of people condemned Ike. Conservatives thought he was "do-nothing." But if you look at it historically, I think he was right. Same thing with Truman; he was right to use the airlift out of Berlin rather than sending a military column.
You've got to look at the tremendous success of the Cold War. We did not have one nuclear exchange with the Soviets. It lasted 40 years, and we lost maybe 100,000 soldiers in the two relatively minor hot wars. But would it have been better to have a nuclear war? I'm rereading A.J.P. Taylor's book "The Origins of the Second World War." And he wrote that to become a great power you've got to be able to fight a great war, but the only way to stay a great power is to stay out of great wars.
Another bit of advice you offer in "A Republic, Not an Empire," which President Bush seems to be taking, is a rethinking of the U.S. relationship with Russia -- perhaps even considering an alliance.
Yes, there, too, I think we're doing the right thing, though we started off on the wrong foot. I would not favor an alliance with Russia, however.
Why not?
Russia is going to lose the Russian Far East -- Vladivostok and Khabarovsk. They were taken from China in 1858 and 1860. Back in 1969, when I was at the Nixon White House, there was an engagement between the Russians and the Chinese at the Ussuri and Amur rivers that go around Manchuria like a gloved hand. There were battles around those rivers; it was the Russians sounding us out on what might happen if they used nuclear weapons against the Chinese. And those battles were portents of what's going to come.
But there's a problem. Look at the population statistics of Russia now. Their populations is dying rapidly. Putin predicted they'd be down to 123 million by 2015. Using some U.N. numbers, I've got [that figure] projected to 114 million by 2050. That means that by the end of this century the Russian population will be down to 80 million people. They can't hold an area twice the size of the United States. China, their people, [are] already moving in there like we did with Texas. So there is the probability of a Russian-Chinese war. And the United States can't get involved in that. So I would think entente with Russians -- but not an alliance. And we should not bring them into NATO. We don't want to be in that war.
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