accessible to everybody. so i think it remains to be seen what congress, in fact, will do. >> sarah weinman is the news editor for publishers marketplace. we'll talk we are again after the april 25th hearing. thank you. >> thank you so much for having me. >> coming up next booktv is live from the key school in annapolis, maryland, 2011 annapolis book festival. ..

>> good morning. welcome to the annapolis book festival. our session today poses the question why is war the answer? hopefully are two authors will help us answer this question or at least understand it a little better during the course of the hour this morning. let me take a moment to remind you to turn of cellphone or other devices that could make a bee during our conversation. let me introduce our authors. evan thomas is the author of "the war lovers".

roosevelt, lodge, hearst and the russian empire, 1898. mr. thomas is one of the most respected journalists today. see of thunder and john paul jones. mr. thomas has been editor at large of newsweek since 2006, and the lead rider of major news events and author of more than 100 cover stories. he has won numerous awards. for newsweek's coverage of the monica lewinsky scandal. is 50,000 word narrative of the 2004 election was honored when newsweek won of national award for best single topic issue. he appeared on numerous television shows including charles rope and the pbs news

hour. and a fellow of the society of american historians. mr. thomas lives with his family in washington d.c.. peter bergen is the author of "the longest war". the enduring conflict between america and al qaeda. he is director of the national-security studies program at the new america foundation. and author of the newly released book "the longest war". he is a television journalist, the author of holy war inside the secret world of osama bin laden. and the osama bin laden i know, an oral history of al qaeda's leader. both books are among the best nonfiction books of the year of the washington post and documentary based on these books were nominated in 2002 and 2007.

he is cnn's national security analyst and fellow at the university center. he has written for the washington post, vanity fair, the new republic, los angeles times, wall street journal atlantic, and he worked as a correspondent for the national geographic television and cnn. he holds an m a in oxford university. i invite each other to tell us about this book and we start with mr. thomas. >> back to the question of our wars really necessary with teddy roosevelt. let me take you to july 1st, 1998, the most important day of his life.

he was standing aside a hill in santiago, cuba. at 4:00 he put on his uniform from brooks brothers, tied a bandanna over his head and set off on his horse. like many powerful people he arranged to have a newspaper reporter to cover this and richard harding davis, as roosevelt headed up san juan hill. no one salt roosevelt take that right expected him to finish a live. he rested for a moment and started to the other side on the next hill shaking what fun! an end of the day he took out his pocket diary and rose it for

big battle. a couple days later, he said did i tell you i killed a spaniard with my own hand? teddy roosevelt was a war lover. it your thing. no ambiguity in him. he wrote constant letters before this war wishing the united states would get into a war with great britain or spain or mexico or canada or pretty much any country would do the job. 1890's 7 he wrote a famous speech in which all the great war races have been fighting races. the triumph of peace is greater than the supreme triumph of war. as president he was not a war lover. he was savvier than that. he had a famous line, speak softly but carry a big stick but he didn't use a stick. almost as of the battle experience got something out of his system. he didn't need it anymore but

after he left the presidency, he went to president rosalynn and volunteered to raise a decision -- division to fight in france. president wilson wanted nothing to do with this. as roosevelt was leaving the white house he said to president wilson's senior adviser, doesn't the president understand i just want the chance to die. he said did you make that quite clear to the president? roosevelt was generous. he wanted his sons -- he wanted all four to fight. he was thrilled when they did. he was thrilled when they got winded but the youngest died. he was shot and killed in action over france and roosevelt had the -- a fighter pilot--and the axle of his plane brought back

and hung over the fireplace. a bullish momento of his son's death. this time he wasn't so thrilled about war. he spent a lot of time pretending to read a book, honoring his youngest son quinty. he was dead within six months. put roosevelt to one side and i will turn to the person i am writing about right now, dwight eisenhower. eisenhower in many ways was the greatest warrior of his time. he commanded the greatest invasion. the greatest army. supreme army. interestingly, eisenhower, because he was so intimately involved in the war and made decisions like this. the americans in world war ii when we were bombing germany we liked to bomb industrial and military targets. the british did terror bombings,

cities. we tried to do military targets. as the war went on i never had to make the choice and finally decided to flat in berlin which meant indiscriminate bombing of civilians. it gave him a key understanding of the nature of work that it escalates in ways you can't always anticipate and control. he was a big reader of plow auschwitz, a german thinker on war. most people think of war as an extent of politics by other means. the part that eisenhower understood, the award lead to big wars. this is relevant, very relevant to his presidency. eisenhower spent all his presidency keeping out of war. he kept us out of vietnam at a

time the french were trying to get us in, he avoided fighting, in china. there was a piece in the wall street journal talking about how eisenhower stopped the british and french invaded egypt in 1956 to capture suez. little worse lead to big wars. this is particularly relevant, and arming our arsenals, fearful that a small war would lead to a big one. he was under tremendous constant pressure. to get away from his own theory of war. military and civilian to fight limited wars. to fight in the vietnams of the

future. eisenhower resisted every step of the way. you have to be willing to go all the way but don't fight at all. this is relevant to this very moment because barack obama has sort of i don't want to intervene but this one time in libya because a lot of civilians are about to be killed, let's do it this one time with allies and a limited war. he is talking about national policy which is gaddafi has to go but he doesn't talk about how that is going to happen. makes me nervous. i thought he made a good speech and reasoned analysis but had eisenhower ringing in my head. i could hear his ghost say all or nothing. don't do this unless you mean it. don't go in unless you mean to take out gaddafi.

we don't have the means to do it. you get sucked into something we didn't anticipate. i think eisenhower although he is a forgotten figure, someone we are thinking about right now. >> teddy roosevelt and eisenhower, that shows you the polarity of american feelings about war and peter bergen will take this into allow this war of the mall, america's war against al qaeda. >> thank you for the invitation to speak. i call my book "the longest war" because the war against al qaeda is the longest in american history. it is an important question when we think about this war. i am paraphrasing, the most important job the statesman has is when going to war what kind of war are we embarking on, not

to mistake it for a war it isn't. this is a task george w. bush failed. after 9/11. i will get to that in a minute. before i get to that i want to leave you with a thought about what kind of war we are engaged in right now. what was the proper response to 9/11? but before i get to that one dimension teddy roosevelt. it is not a happy comparison but there are comparisons to osama bin laden and teddy roosevelt falling away. they're both from upper-class families who volunteered for war. in osama bin laden volunteering for the war against the soviets in afghanistan. he fought quite bravely against the soviets almost suicidally so in 1985. he set up a camp outside the soviet garrison to attract enemy fire which was a strange thing to do from a military

perspective but this is a guy who wanted to die--who wanted to martyr themselves in a fight against the soviets. in 1997 i produced a television interview with ben watson in which he declared war against the united states for the first time to a western audience. who are you trying to attack? he said essentially american military targets but if american civilians get in a way that is their problem. overtime he would expand potential targets just as eisenhower expanded universe of potential targets in world war ii to include civilians. and she wore a wet -- osama bin laden was declaring was not noticed by most people in the u.s. government and one of the problems we have on 9/11 is few people had taken this guy seriously even though 1937 the japanese high command said repeatedly they were planning to

attack the american homeland at pearl harbor. might have turned out differently on september -- december 7th, 1941. we were warned but the warnings were not heeded and similarly there were people in the government and the cia, certain people in the fbi, o'neill died in the trade center on 9/11, richard clarke and others who took this threat seriously. the problem with the bush administration is they came into office, there's a quick about after the french revolution when the monarchy was restored they came back into office having forgotten and learned nothing. that is true of the bush administration. when it came into office in the pre 9/11 time period they basically were locked in the cold war mindset concerned about russia, china, iraq and missile defense which would do nothing to stop a terrorist attack.

even though they were getting a lot of information about al qaeda's plans they didn't process it. there's a distinction between belief and knowledge. the classic example is it was well known during world war ii that the holocaust was happening but it was never believed until the footage of the death camps were shown. george w. bush and others were getting briefings about al qaeda and famously another briefing where a woman who was a long time al qaeda analysts prepared a briefing for president bush that set osama bin laden determined to strike the united states. george w. bush took the longest vacation in three decades. the same time he was receiving that warning. obviously the latest statements that we were at battle stations during this pre 9/11 time period

is not correct. i say that because it is important to understand what happened when you are surprised by something you are likely to over react. george w. bush administration over reacted in a number of ways. the most prominent is they didn't take clouds what's events -- advice. they did not take out as the serious threat it was. if you go to nine days after 9/11 george w. bush addressed both houses of congress. the most widely watched presidential address american history. eighty million americans were watching and he essentially said the war we are embarking on is similar to the war against the fascists and communists which from a historical perspective made no sense. when eisenhower was making the decision that he made the nazis had indicated a global conflict that killed tens of millions of people in the cold war ended

with a bang instead of a wimp for we would all be dead. these were existential conflict. al qaeda was a serious enough threat but not an existential problems. from the idea that was existential you have a series of other decisions that was ok to abrogate the geneva convention at guantanamo and okay to interrogate prisoners and other decisions all of which eventually the supreme court found to be not go ahead. the american system has the ability to correct its mistakes whether it was a rack or getting the war plan right. one of the themes of my book is the united states is an open society is self correcting. what was al qaeda ad strategy on 9/11? to tech united states to put the united states out of the middle

east and the authoritarian regimes of the united states in the middle east would then fall so saudi arabia would fall and the mubarak regime would fall. this was the principal aim of the law non 9/11. the opposite happened. we occupied if and stan and iraq. the strategy did not think carefully in terms of what he was actually trying to achieve. none of the outcomes have anything to do with al qaeda. it was the popular revolution about any cannibal government. the strategy didn't work on

9/11. we made some strategic missteps in response. osama bin laden going back to the question of why is more the answer he thought war was the answer because it was the only way to basically put enough pressure on the united states to change its policies in the muslim world. that turned out to be untrue. when we spoke to him in 1997 he based that analysis on the idea of the united states is week as the former soviet union which he had fought in afghanistan. he based that on our withdrawal from vietnam and beirut in 1983 after the attacks and following -- we won't withdraw from new york or washington. it didn't make sense. it was based on a flawed premise. the united states was not as weak as the former soviet union once was. his strategy made no sense and people in his inner circle said this doesn't make sense. he ignored those points.

war was the appropriate response. war of some kind to al qaeda. people on the left wanted -- this be a law enforcement exercise. a number of european countries believed terrorism can only be dealt with by law enforcement but there are a couple problems with this analysis. the largest terrorist attack in british history killed 29 people. three thousand people died -- across three decades. 3,000 people died in america on one morning on september 11th. this was by orders of magnitude a bigger terrorist attack and al qaeda declared war on the united states and fulfilled that promise by doing warlike activities. attack in embassies and warships and our civilians without warning. these are warlike activities that needed to be responded to was a warlike response. george w. bush was not wrong to say this was a war but he was wrong to make it much larger than it really was.

president obama comes into office with a question of how to reach frame this war. do we still call it a global war against terrorism? an open-ended tactic with no end or do we circumscribe it? he came up with the appropriate response to say it is a war against al qaeda and its allies. it name is the enemy. when roosevelt went to war against the nazis he did not go to war against u-boat's but against the nazis. he didn't go to war against a tactic. we have named the enemy and the reason it is useful to say al qaeda and its allies is we are no longer at war with you which is part of the strategy in afghanistan. if you renounce al qaeda and our member of the taliban we will engage in the reconciliation process. one final point since we are talking about wars and i mentioned president obama, one of the least processed decisions of obama's presidency and the most important one on the farm

-- foreign policy realm before the libyan decision is obama's decision to stay in afghanistan until 2014. imagine the gnashing of teeth on the left if a republican president said by the way we will not withdraw in july 2011 from afghanistan. by the way we will have 100,000 men and women in uniform in that time period. the reason there is little public discussion of this, if you compare this to the decision on the surge with 30,000 troops which produced millions -- much more significant decision about staying in afghanistan through the end of 2014 has attracted little decision. it doesn't fit with the narrative of the nobel peace prize-winning president or the week on national security democratic party. it does fit with something evan thomas mentioned which is obama is surprised by a lot of people

who voted for him. in taking this decision on libya which was quite unpopular on the left and also on the right. it turns out president obama is, like many other american presidents more prone to go to work, he came into office that war is the answer to certain situations. president obama didn't authorize libyan intervention. he would have essentially related every dictatgreenlighte use any measure necessary. we all want to get along but sometimes it is the only answer. >> we now have the opportunity to ask questions of the authors. as moderator i set that opportunity by asking one

question of each author and opened the door to your question. let me start with evan thomas. pretty early 20th century war lovers unusually imperialists deck in their view of america and the world or do they show us ourselves in the mirror of history? >> they didn't like the word imperialists. they didn't call themselves imperialists. that was a european word. the americans had a more high-minded view of themselves. because of that they were conflicted. roosevelt was extraordinarily exuberant and had a view of war that is good for the american spirit and expansionism is good and makes us feel better and be stronger and more vigorous if we went to war but he was a little bit uncomfortable with this idea of ruling other races and nations because we had once been

connell and -- colonists who rebelled against our mother country and there was a strong streak in american public thinking that you don't do this. america even in 1898 going into cuba and the philippine there was a lot of ambivalence and -- ambivalence. an interesting example of war getting out of control we invaded cuba to liberate cuba from spain and then we are in the philippines thousands of miles away liberating the philippines. that was not part of the original war plan. we happened to defeat the spanish fleet and found ourselves occupying -- the queue but part of the war went pretty well. we lost a couple hundred men in combat and another 800 to disease but in the philippines a war we didn't need to fight cost as 4,000 men, the same we have lost in iraq. that turned into a nasty

counterinsurgency. and roosevelt was a colonel in the roughriders is president of the united states in 1902 still going on. his solution was to declare victory and get out. on july 4th he said we won. in those days there was no cnn so we just withdrew. a couple points. work has a way of getting out of control and america's deep-seated ambivalence about war. the war became quickly -- a really popular at first. when we first went in president mckinley asked for 125,000 volunteers and got a foot that a million overnight. after a year of slogging around the philippines, satirists came out, mark twain making fun of it. it turned into an unpopular war. the united states has the

capacity to change and we did. we finally got out of it so americans have had -- when we are oppressed we will fight but there's always a healthy uneasiness about it. >> korea, vietnam, iraq. the history of each of these conflicts demonstrates that getting america out of an undeclared war is a lot harder than getting the nation involved in the war to begin with. in light of that history is there any hope for a successful conclusion to america's longest war against al qaeda? >> one of the operating principles of my book which came out just before the recent events in the middle east, al qaeda is losing the war of ideas not because the united states is letting them, the united states

is quite unpopular in the muslim world. it was naive to think it was to get everyone to love the united states. the largest cia station, anti-americanism is just part of the drinking water of a lot of countries and it is not surprising that that is the case but the point is al qaeda is losing the war of ideas because first of all our car and its allies have killed mostly muslim civilians and this is widely recognized whether in iran or jordan, these attacks in iraq, mostly muslims. this is understood in the muslim world. secondly these groups are not offering a policy. we know what they are against the what are they for? does osama bin laden have a plan to get 1 hundred million men to work who are unemployed?

the answer is no. they have made a world of enemies. it is not a winning strategy to keep adding to your list of enemies. you want to add to your list of allies. osama bin laden and his people have said they are against any muslim who does not precisely share their views or every government in the middle east, russia, china, india, made no, united nations, the list goes on and on. they won't engage in normal politics hard to turn themselves into popular movements. so the war against al qaeda has been won. 1-way to measure that is 17 people have died in the united states in jihadists terrorist attacks since 9/11 which is less than the number of americans who drowned in their own baths every year. terrorist attacks have not been something on a national security problem anymore. their second order threat. there's a terrorist attack that

might kill a few dozen americans at some point either by al qaeda or its allies but this won't completely reorient our foreign policy as 9/11 did. so al qaeda is losing but there's no battleship, osama bin laden won't be signing some kind of peace agreement or concession agreement on a battleship off the coast of pakistan any time soon. it will just peter out. the way to tell the victory has been achieved is if i don't get anything like this again because it is no longer a subject of public interest. to some degree that is beginning to be where we are. the caveat to that is christmas day of 2009, if northwest 23 had blown up over new york killing 300 americans and more on the ground, it would have to live on

cnn and others. the obama presidency would have suffered a blow from which it would not have recovered because there is a zero tolerance for catastrophic course seemingly catastrophic attack on an american tower that what you are republican or democrat. won final caveat is it was a small group of people with zero public support. it would take a tremendous amount of damage on the german state in the 1970s. the fact that al qaeda is losing public support is not a game change because it is a -- they recruit 1,000 followers. one final point, striking to me that in the middle east we have not seen a single protester carrying pictures of a osama bin laden or a single american flag burning in the streets of cairo or ben gauzy, pro-forma in that part of the world. osama bin laden's ideas are not

part of the conversation about what is going on in the middle east. the events in the middle east under lie the effect that al qaeda is on the losing side. president obama said small man on a wrong side of history and that is a good way of looking at them. >> we have an opportunity for your questions. please wait for the microphone to come to you before you post your questions so the viewers will be able to hear what you are asking. let's start over here. >> we heard that war is the answer in some cases. i wonder if we could hear from both of you on your view if war is the answer,. >> i started to talk about this a little bit. i am ambivalent about it because

the year may be point that we need to -- you can't kill civilians with impunity. i think obama gave a pretty good speech explaining why he did it. here is the problem. this goes back to what dwight eisenhower worried about. once you start these wars it is hard to know where they stopped. in this case we wanted to make it a fairly limited narrow thing. let's save these civilians from slaughter by joining with our allies and bombing libyan troops. but president obama made it clear that we want gaddafi gone. how exactly is that going to happen? he said we won't put in grassroots. are we going to bomb gaddafi? this worries me on the terrorism front.

gaddafi is the only head of state i know who is a proven terrorist with a record. he blew up an airliner over lockerbie, scotland. he blew up a disco in berlin in 1986. people forget this. we attacked him in 1986. we tried to kill him. we bombed his compound in libya. we missed. we didn't kill him. we killed one of his wives -- daughter. it is harder to kill these folks that it looks like. some of my friendso cf1 o some of my friends said we can -- can't the cia just knock off gaddafi? i have written about intelligence over the years and thinking let's see. fidel castro is still there. >> osama bin laden is still

there. >> we occupied iraq and the six weeks to find saddam hussein. we tried to kill gaddafi and missed. the record of killing heads of state, tricky business and pretty hard to do. as far as i know we have never done it successfully. we tried a few times but have never done it successfully. it is not that easy to do. piendsh someone like gaddafi ina corner he is a pretty vengeful guy and he is crazy and he has money and assets. he is more of a threat than osama bin laden isddafight now us. he has the capacity to inflect a terrorist act that would hurt. it wouldn't be a game changer but he could blow up some ways. he has chemical weapons. he could do something nastier if he gets it together. have we really thought all this through? has the president thought it through? do we have a long-term strategyo

war was the answer in a narrow terms of sending a message and saving some civilians but as white eisenhower would always ask in his national security ed eetings, where is this going? what is the end game? how will we get outknoo cf1 o what is the exit stratega l i don't get the impression the administration has fought trealough these questions. i hope i am wrong and they do have a grand plan and they figure it all out. obama is a pretty secretive ga but i have this uneasf feeling that they haven't done this. i don't want to be presumptuoie about this because i think he did the right thing saving those civilians but it is a tricky d?

>> it is easier to begin a war. and because of the united states's overwhelming superiority it is quite tempting. the reason the administration gave two conflicting accounts of what they're end goal in iraq and libya is is because you could not get a un resolution for obvious reasons to say our goal is regime change. there are plenty of dictators in the un who would find that pretty difficult to abstain from or boat with. china and russia abstained in libya resolution. you can guarantee they would have voted against if the un resolution instead of saying we

will protect civilians our goal is to get gaddafi out of power. our goal is to get gaddafi out of power. let's not pretend otherwise. how that will happen, how long it will take, who knows? overthrowing saddam hussein took three weeks. finding him this took six months. we are in iraq until the end of this year. it is messy but you have to make these bad decisions. not the ideal decision and this was the least bad decision you could make it was done in the context of we didn't do anything about rwanda. when we could have we could have taken out the french radio stations and inciting violence. we didn't do anything in bosnia for two years. that way it heavily on the people involved whether it was susan rice in charge of africa or the state department, massacres weighed heavily on a

journalist in -- has those massacres were happening. and weighs heavily on obama. >> next question? >> wait for the microphone to come to you. actually over here in the front row. >> i read in the paper that some general is using the word ground troops in libya and i wonder if you know anything about that or is that going to happen? >> general ham is the commander in charge of the operation and he was misquoted. >> i would be surprised. >> one point about this and peter knows more about this than i do. killing gaddafi is hard to do. and a much harder than we think

from watching too many movies. this is a grim side effect of all this fighting we have been doing since 2001. we have gotten better at killing people. we have these special forces and intelligence people who are more able at it and we do kill lesser figures pretty routinely with drones and maybe even boots on the ground. kind of spooky and hard to know. it is possible we have learned from experience and gotten better at the very ugly and morally questionable and legally questionable art of the assassination is what it is. there are executive orders we personally very murky and difficult subject. the exceptions are when you are at war you can go after the head of state but it is a fraud area that we had a national debate on in the 1970s after watergate when the church commission met

and we examine all the plots to kill people particularly in 1960 and we wrote rules say and we are going to get out of this and one reason we didn't kill osama bin laden in the late 1990s is those rules were on the book. the head of the cia said their rules against these things. you could make a good argument that that is too bad. it would be better if we had killed osama bin laden in 1999 and better for new york and washington. it is a fraud area, this assassination area and i don't know -- maybe you can tell me. what are the rules on whether we can kill gaddafi? [laughter] >> i don't know. from other activities in the united states, you mention the drones, we killed at least a

thousand militants in pakistan, none of whom would rise to the level of someone like gaddafi. the point about assassinations is we are not supposed to kill leaders. for assassinating by drone leaders of al qaeda and the taliban because we are doing it routinely almost every day. with gaddafi that is a question for you. these authorizations exist as general principle in boards we are engaged in but the president said we are not engaged in a war in libya which makes it more we are engaged in sustaining a un resolution. from a legal perspective it might make it harder to kill gaddafi. >> you need to get a finding -- congressional leaders. maybe they are doing all that. secrets do get held in washington for a while. not one that go on to capital

hill. it is a blurry and morally ambiguous area because once you're in a full-scale war that is different but if you are in this fuzzy area short of war which is where we are right now, not even official u.s. policy to get rid of gaddafi. it is just understood we want to do it. is there a legal sanction for hitting with a cruise missile? i don't know. >> let's take a question on the right side. >> i wonder why the situation in libya is not analogous to egypt. perhaps the obama administration is hypothesizing that it was highly unlikely to have hosni mubarak out in four weeks that happened because of the will of the people.

why isn't that scenario plausible? there seems to be more segmentation in support and advocacy for gaddafi then there was for mubarak? some situations they cannot analogous? >> the army and egypt which was respected stayed neutral. gaddafi has tanks and planes aimed at the rebels. it is a full-scale civil war. the good thing about egypt is the army, this respected institutions stayed on the sidelines doing a little to preserve order but basically stayed in their barracks and did not slaughter the civilians. gaddafi, totally different. he has takes out there and that is why we intervened. to stop those tanks. it is a civil war and seems to have reached a messy stasis as

far as i can tell. gaddafi can't eliminate the opposition but the opposition can eliminate gaddafi. >> we can come back to the center aisle. the gentleman in the third row who have a question a moment ago? >> the gentleman right back there behind you. >> we brought up some of the wars we are engaged in that everybody knows about. we talked about iraq and afghanistan and now libya but you did mention the drone attacks. is there a secret war going on in pakistan? what is the prognosis? what do you believe the future will be in pakistan because we are quite concerned because of the nuclear arsenals that pakistani is to have and there seems to be a lot of turmoil

within the pakistani government itself. they just assassinated a religious representative and he is a christian and there seems to be a great bit of turmoil that we don't seem to here about. >> the fifth largest country in 2015 has the most rapidly expanding nuclear weapons program in the world. one of the more predictable challenges president obama might face is an attack in india similar to mumbai that would bring them close to war. the inflation rates will go up to 20%. just got a taliban insurgency. it has every problem country could have. a very young population expanding very rapidly. the economic growth rate with

from 7% to 2%. politicians make the choices necessary to reverse that. pakistan survive three years of war within the and lost its population when bangladesh became independent so pakistan will probably follow through which was done in the past. too big to fail. it know that. economic situation is particularly bad. they will sort something out that we might do something to sort things out. on a drone campaign, george w. bush authorized the drone program to quadruple in scale as president obama had. human-rights organizations would be outraged. this is where we talked about assassination. even if you take conservative

figures are mentioned the number, the very conservative estimate of the number of people killed and the drone of attacks. controversial is the question of how many civilian casualties there are. we maintain it is the most comprehensive database on this issue. it was -- nonetheless, and and declared war in pakistan, something that merits more attention. we won't have a monopoly on this technology. if war is an answer other countries around the world have noticed armed drones on the future of war. if we create a precedent where the programs are secretive and outside the normal chain of command we have an active drone program but it is more transparent. this is conducted by the cia as

a highly secretive. we need to think about what kind of precedent former colleagues, a very telling question to the head of the national counter-terrorism center. the head of a secessionist movement in china lives in virginia. the chinese came and launched an armed creditor drone at virginia, who they regard as a terrorist leader, it is a clever question that does raise the issue, basically almost gone. other countries have grown programs. arming them is more complicated. as we think about the future of war, this is the question. >> what are the chances the islamists will get control of those nuclear weapons?

>> close to zero. the pakistan military is well organized. we have given them $100 million to increase passive action which are highly complicated blocks so the warhead and the missile separately. the lot of checks in place. not something we should be concerned about as a government but i don't think the taliban will get in this file and launch it. it is more complicated than it appears in the movies. you can steal a warhead and make it deliberate. it is quite complicated and the taliban when they came close in 2009 pakistani establishment in the military went bananas and push back on them. they don't care if the troubled regions of pakistan are doing their thing in pakistan proper but if they were coming towards the capital or a significant military sites pakistani

military will react strongly. >> any chance the pakistani military will be taken over by the islamists? >> i don't think so. the thing to be concerned about, there is a debate about the anthrax the tax. one of the more significant microbiologists who conducted the anthrax attacks and killed five people what you need to be concerned about is people inside the biological program. not terrorists becoming scientists but scientists becoming jihadists. that is a more legitimate concern because smuggling and rex out of a pakistani laboratory is more durable than smuggling -- we saw the attack that such an attack could be quite damaging. i am more concerned about independent pakistani biological

scientists smuggling pathogens. >> do they have an active buyer warfare program? >> a lot of these, indonesia, a lot of programs could be dual use. a lot working veterinarian medicine have an interest in anthrax naturally occurring. that is a more reasonable concern. >> on that ominous note we have to end our conversation for now. i want to thank our authors. evan thomas on "the war lovers" and peter bergen on "the longest war". we can continue our conversation and have book sales and signings immediately adjacent to a peace sidewalk. thank you for being with us. [applause] [

[inaudible conversations] >> that was peter bergen and evan thomas discussing the question why is war the answer? we will be back live from the 2011 s annapolis boat festival shortly. >> i have used saudi arabia and to a lesser degree arab peninsula tyrannies as the nation state that is the most dangerous to the united states and to the west generally. russia and china are threats to the united states but they are threats washington openly acknowledges, close watches and assesses and is capable of defending america against. saudi arabia is a serious threat

one more dangerous than iran for which our governing elite in both parties turns a blind eye. tower in the pretense that riyadh is a close and reliable ally. it keeps america's energy security depended on its enemies by relying on the saudis to play pro u.s. role in the world oil market and endangers our economy by allowing the saudis to buy a larger share of our ever more out of control federal debt. addition the saudis have built a highly effective lobby in the united states which is as pernicious and corrupting as anyone else but more quiet and subtle. it employs former u.s. ambassadors, generals and senior intelligence officers to argue its case in the white house, congress and the media and wall street journal.

needless to say this lobby's work is assisted by our oil and armsmaking organizations whose concerns have less to do with u.s. securities and making sure they keep their seats on the saudi gravy train that is falling away another $6 billion of u.s. arms. due to these factors leaders never tell americans the truth about the kingdom which is that since the 1970s oil boom started an enormous transfer of western wealth to the peninsula the saudis have quietly exported a brand of sunni islam that has radicalized much of the historically defined middle east region and which is now era buys and muslim populations in indonesia, malaysia, pakistan, india, the balkans, north caucuses and sub-saharan africa. blast your in nigeria where saudi and gulf missionaries have

labored and spend large sums of money, and islamist group amended its local agenda to name the united states as its number one target for, quote, america's oppression against muslim nations particularly in iraq and afghanistan and because of its blind support for israel. more immediately dangerous the saudi funded regime changes of a surrogate islamist cleric in the united states especially in the united kingdom. for 30 years the saudis domestic will establishment which controlled education, social policy and missionary work has brought western muslims to the kingdom for theological training in its religious universities. these men returned to the west to preach what can only be described as a martial oriented islamist imperialism, a vision of the world as holy islamic

which for the west would mean christian and jewish populations could convert. likes of subordination to is law or face elimination. these creatures are prominent in mosques in the united states and europe and have secured positions as chaplains in western universities, prison systems and military. this is not to say let me stress that all american or european muslim communities share this marshall and expansionist orientation but is very much to say these saudi trained clerics have obtained enough positions in the west and have enough access to muslim youth through multimedia vehicles to have a growing impact. they are now influencing some young muslim males in the west in a pro jihad direction. in much the same way they have for years influenced them in the middle east, asia and africa. those who doubt this would be well served in reviewing the

escalating number of militant related activities that have been uncovered in the united states since 2007. to note the growing number of young u.s.-canadian australian, british muslims who are going abroad to fight and trained under al qaeda's banner in somalia, yemen and afghanistan and also to note our cat's successful recruitment of talented u.s. citizen muslims to run media operations targeting muslim communities in the english-speaking world. and the saudis too are the bridge from our second source of concern in the persian gulf, the saudi kingdom and brother tyrannies to the third, namely osama bin laden, are part of, their allies and increasing numbers of muslims inspired by each. when all is said and done, osama bin laden is not an anomaly in saudi arab.