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Tavis: Martin Indyk served two tours as U.S. ambassador to Israel under President Bill Clinton. In between his time in Tel Aviv, he served as the assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs. He is now the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. He joins us tonight from Washington. Mr. Ambassador, nice to have you on the program, sir.

Martin Indyk: Thanks for having me, Tavis.

Tavis: Let me start with your assessment of the timing and the mission and the success, or lack thereof, of the visit to the Middle East by our Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice.

Indyk: Well actually, as a former member of the Clinton administration, I perhaps am gonna surprise you by saying that I give her high marks for the way that she plied a coherent strategy, and I think actually achieved some success. Of course, the press is trumpeting the failure to achieve a ceasefire, or the failure to achieve agreement in the Rome meeting.

But she wasn't going out there to achieve a ceasefire. She made very clear that that was not her objective. And I think that what she was basically trying to do was to hold off demands for an immediate ceasefire, which could only be achieved in these circumstances by the United States pressing Israel to stop firing, and that would be a victory for Hezbollah.

She succeeded in holding off those demands at the Rome conference. But she did something else in Rome which I think was an important achievement. She helped to put together a kind of consensus behind the idea that the Lebanese government will have to extend its authority throughout all of Lebanon. That there will have to be an international force to back up the Lebanese army as it fulfills that call for the Lebanese government to extend its authority.

And, and that Hezbollah will have to engage in a process of disarmament that is called for under UN Security Council Resolution 1559. And indeed, if you saw that press conference after the Rome meeting, where Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, was standing with Secretary Rice, he said there can only be one gun, and one government, which is a call for the disarmament of Hezbollah.

So the fact that there is a consensus around those two points, the extension of the Lebanese government's authority in southern Lebanon, backed by an international force, and the process of disarming Hezbollah, is I think an important achievement for American diplomacy.

Tavis: Is that what you meant by your use of the word coherent, with regard to the strategy applied here by the Bush administration?

Indyk: That's right, because essentially, the strategy that I, I think that they're pursuing is one in which they get behind the Lebanese government, give it Arab and international support, so that it can move into southern Lebanon, as the Israeli moved out of there, and Hezbollah is no longer able to operate from there and provoke a crisis like the one they've just provoked.

Tavis: All right, if the Bush administration strategy here, by your judgment, is coherent, let me honestly tell you what, for me, is incoherent in what you said earlier. And that is, unless I heard you wrong, Mr. Ambassador, that is your suggestion, your statement, in fact, that a ceasefire right now would be considered, in your judgment, a victory for Hezbollah.

I'm not sure I understand that, because if what we are valuing here is the sanctity of human life, and if all life has value, how does one of your experience suggest to me that a ceasefire here would be a victory for one party or the other, versus everybody at the table?

Indyk: Look, of course you're right. And, and civilian casualties on both sides is a really bad thing that's happening here. And I don't mean to be morally obtuse on that subject at all. But we have a situation in which Hezbollah provoked a crisis, and is raining rockets down on northern Israel, and Israel's third-largest city, Haifa. As part of an overall approach designed to provide it with what it calls resistance, the ability to paralyze Israel, and as part of its effort to destroy Israel.

That's its objective. It's an objective which is backed by Iran, which arms, trains, and funds Hezbollah. And Hezbollah's been very clear that what it wants to do is to establish a situation in which it has the ability, at will, to create the kinds of crisis that has just been created. So, I think the administration is actually right. And I say this as somebody who's been a very harsh critic of the diplomacy in the Middle East.

But they're right when they say we do have to treat the problem here in terms of how do we get a ceasefire, which ensures that the Lebanese government is going to extend its authority to the south? That's the way that we can stop further killing in the future.

Tavis: Speaking of the creation of this particular crisis, let me ask you whether or not it is your measured opinion that at this point in the process, we should or should not be engaging Syria in conversation?

Indyk: Look, I think that it's important to engage Syria in conversation. But the conversation needs to go something like this. Listen. You are facilitating Iran's support for Hezbollah. And unless you stop that, you should not be surprised if you get burned by the flame that you helped to light. In other words, it should be a very clear kind of, if you'll excuse me, come to Jesus conversation.

If we go to Damascus and say to them, please curb Hezbollah, they will take it as an invitation to come back into Lebanon after they have been pushed out of there. Not by the Bush administration, but by millions of - millions, Tavis - of Lebanese citizens coming out in the streets of Beirut and demanding that 15,000 Syrian troops leave. And we cannot betray those people by asking the Syrians to come back in, so as to control Hezbollah.

Tavis: All right, let me jump off of that to another point that I think is connected, right quick here. To your point about Hezbollah, inside of Lebanon, you know this better than I do; they are a major political force. They've got members of their party in the cabinet; they're the second-largest employer in the nation. All this stuff, you know better than I. Hezbollah, inside of Lebanon, a potent political force.

Hamas, clearly a potent political force in the Palestinian territory. That said, what does one do when terrorists become democratically elected? If you're not gonna talk to terrorists, so we say, but these terrorists are democratically elected, doesn't that kind of put you in a trick bag?

Indyk: It does indeed, and the administration has made a big mistake in this regard. Because its focus on democratization has been, in my view, misplaced. And the President believes that elections equal Democracy. And we know that there are a lot of other things that are important in promoting Democracy, such as women's rights, rule of law, freedom of religion, freedom of press, separation of church and state, or in this case, mosque and state.

And perhaps most important of all, in the case of Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian arena, ensuring that a monopoly of force is in the hands of the democratically-elected government. What this administration failed to do was to insist on that principle. So what we had first of all in Iraq was parties with militias entering the government, and then taking over the police and the security services, causing a havoc in Iraq, because the militias are now basically promoting the civil war there.

In Lebanon, we had a UN Security Council resolution which called for Syrian troops to leave, and for all the militias to disarm. There was only one militia that was left that hadn't disarmed, and that was Hezbollah. And instead of insisting on that, we said, let's have an election. And as you said, Hezbollah came in through that door, into the government, into the cabinet.

They vetoed any attempt then to get them to disarm. And the same thing happened in the Palestinian arena, where there was the Oslo Agreements, the roadmap, all of which required Hamas to disarm, and dismantle its infrastructure of terror. And instead, we had elections, Hamas was allowed to run, and they took the government and came in there with their militias and their terrorist cadre. So we have, in the process of trying to promote Democracy, laid the seeds for the very problems that we now face. And we don't have a good answer to solving those problems.

Tavis: Well, I appreciate your insight, and born of your experience in the region, this story continues, as we all know, to change by the hour, literally. Mr. Ambassador, an honor to have you on the program. I look forward to talking to you again in the coming days.

Indyk: Thanks very much for having me, Tavis.

Tavis: Thank you, sir. Ambassador Martin Indyk, former ambassador to Israel two times during the Clinton administration. Up next, Grammy-winning group Los Lonely Boys, and a performance from them, so stay with us.