E-mail a friendRichard Holbrooke
airdate August 20, 2008
Richard Holbrooke has had a varied career as a diplomat, magazine editor, author and investment banker. He was U.S. ambassador to the U.N. from '99-'01 and the chief architect of the '95 Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the war in Bosnia. He's the only person to have held the Assistant Secretary of State position for two different regions of the world (Asia and Europe). Holbrooke is vice chairman of the private equity firm Perseus LLC. He's also written numerous articles and two books, including To End A War.
Former U.S. ambassador discusses his disappointment in President Bush's watching the Olympic Games with President Putin. (2:13)
Full interview. (11:28)
Richard Holbrooke
Tavis: Richard Holbrooke is one of the most respected voices on diplomatic issues around the world, having served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and as the man who negotiated the end of the war in Bosnia. Over the weekend, he traveled to the Republic of Georgia, where he met with the Georgian president. He joins us tonight from New York, fresh from that airplane. Mr. Ambassador, nice to have you back, sir.
Richard Holbrooke: Fresh and jet-lagged, Tavis, (laughter) but I'm real glad to be back on your program.
Tavis: I'm honored to have you back on. So let me start by asking what you saw in Georgia and then we'll talk about the politics here.
Holbrooke: I went to T'bilisi, the capital - a lovely, beautiful city, by the way, which has not been damaged in the war. The Russian tanks are less than 25 miles away. On my first day there, I got a ride with a government official to Gori, the city which the Russians have occupied, about 40 miles away. That's, by the way, ironically, the birthplace of Joseph Stalin.
We got stopped at a lot of checkpoints, went through a lot of Russian checkpoints. Wheat fields were on fire on the side of the road, set by Russian tanks and soldiers, there were Russian tanks everywhere. Gori was a ghost town except for the Russian soldiers. Not too much damage in Gori, but a lot - any damage is bad.
The most memorable sight, Tavis, to me, was coming back we got stopped at one of the Russians' checkpoints, and I was traveling with the Georgian national security adviser. And he jumped out of the car, really angry. He went over to these Russians and said - in Russian, I only found out later - he said, "Why are you wearing Georgian uniforms?"
These Russians had stolen Georgian uniforms. And the Russian soldiers said, "Well, they're better than ours." And there they were, a whole gang of Russian drunken soldiers in Georgian stolen uniforms. It's really tragic to see all this. I visited refugee camps, I had dinner with President Saakashvili, I overlapped with Senator Biden and he and I did some stuff together.
But what's happened is that the Russians have tightened their hold on these two separatist enclaves, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, but they had those already. What they're really trying to do is overthrow President Saakashvili. One last word about Saakashvili - he's 41 years old, went to Columbia University, loves America, loves democracy, wants to join NATO.
He's the most pro-western leader in the former Soviet Union area, and frankly, the Russian real goal here is to overthrow him because he's been so pro-western. This is an historic event - a real major event - and it's hard to predict what its consequences are going to be.
Tavis: For those who have not been following this story closely - of course reading about it every day, but for those who have not been following this story closely, tell me what their rationale was for going into Georgia. I hear your point about what they really want to accomplish - overthrowing the president. But what was the rationale on the world stage for going into Georgia in the first place?
Holbrooke: What the Russians say is that they went in to protect Russian citizens in the South Ossetian enclave, which is an area inside Georgia that refuses to recognize that it is part of Georgia - a secessionist area. And the Russians in Moscow, Putin, said that his Russian citizens in South Ossetia were in danger.
That's really not quite true. They had given away thousands of passports, Russian passports, to South Ossetians, which is a separate ethnic group. I know how confusing this is, but it really matters, so bear with me here. They knew that they - so he sends in these phony Russian passports, pretends he's protecting people. It's all a pretext.
Now, President Saakashvili fell into that trap, in a sense. He responded with force, and that was the excuse the Russians were waiting for. And boom, they just went - they just sent tanks and a tank division into South Ossetia, they kept going. They went all the way to Gori, as I mentioned earlier. And they did immense damage to the country - real big, physical, economic damage.
Tavis: I want to talk in a moment about how this impacts our race for the White House here. Before I jump to that, though, is it just me, or is this the kind of war, the kind of military activity that we tend not to see when the Olympics are underway? There's no written rule about that, but typically, unless I'm misreading this, people don't engage in this kind of behavior around, close, or during the Olympics.
Holbrooke: Tavis, I don't think it's an accident that this war started on the opening day ceremonies of the Olympics, and I must say to you as an American, a member of the loyal opposition, to be sure, supporting Senator Obama, to be sure, but nonetheless an American first, I was really upset to see President Bush physically embracing Vladimir Putin in the Olympic stadium and then sitting next to him, laughing it up as the athletes walked by, and then playing beach volleyball while the Russian tanks rolled into Georgia and the ethnic cleansing of the Georgians was taking place, and he was in Beijing saying and doing nothing.
Putin, after the ceremonies, left the stadium, got in his plane, flew directly to the Georgian border to review the troops. Historically, there's supposed to be something called an "Olympic truce." No fighting during the Olympics. That goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks, and this was hardly the Olympic spirit. So I'm with you 100 percent, my friend.
Tavis: You've not been kind in your critique of what Ms. Rice, Secretary of State, has or has not, should or should not be doing here. What's your issue with her?
Holbrooke: I don't have any personal issue with her; she's very smart and she's done many things as secretary of State I agree with. But I don't understand why, when she went to Georgia last week to get the Georgians to sign that sort of sloppy cease-fire agreement, she didn't immediately go on to Moscow to make sure the Russians agreed it would be carried out.
Instead, she came back to Washington, went back to Europe yesterday to the NATO meeting. That's just not my idea of what the right thing to do was. But my real criticism, Tavis, is of President Bush. He's had an eight-year policy with Russia which failed. He began it by famously saying he'd looked into Vladimir Putin's eyes and saw the soul of a good man.
Putin must have thought he could take this guy, and he just got more and more aggressive. And as a result, U.S.-Russian relations are destroyed; Russia probably thought we wouldn't do anything. And it's a real tragedy, and it's going to change everything. It's going to affect Iran; it's going to affect energy. We're not going to have another Cold War here, Tavis - no one wants a new Cold War. And we're not going to go to war with Russia over Georgia; we didn't go to war with the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.
But here's what's the big deal: For the first time since the end of the Cold War, 17 years, Moscow has sent its troops outside the country to invade a neighbor. Now, under the Soviet Union they did this three times at least, right - Budapest, 1956; Prague, Czechoslovakia, 1968; and Afghanistan, 1979. But we thought those days were over.
Now that the Russians have shown they can do it again, everything is going to have to be reevaluated by the next president of the United States. It makes the next president's job even harder.
Tavis: Okay, speaking of the next president, I've got two minutes here to go. Let's do a mock debate, and since you're an Obama supporter, as you've already mentioned, you play Obama, I play McCain. So here's my opening 30-second statement, or less than.
Putin, as Mr. Holbrooke has already said, is a really bad guy. Who do you want sitting across the table from Putin? Do you want me, or do you want this nice guy, Barack Obama, dealing with evildoers, mean people like Putin? I was a prisoner of war longer than this guy has even been in Congress on the national stage serving the American people. Who do you want sitting across from this guy in these perilous times - me or Mr. Obama? Mr. Obama, now you have the stage.
Holbrooke: Boy, I'm glad you're not the real McCain. (Laughter)
Tavis: So am I, but that's a different issue. Go ahead, yeah.
Holbrooke: That is almost exactly what John McCain is going to say, and the correct answer is Senator McCain is a good man, a patriotic man, I respect his service and courage for the country. But these are new times, and he wants to throw us back into the Cold War era. He has advocated an endless war in Iraq, he has ignored the real front, Afghanistan; he has put forward a series of backward-looking proposals. We have to talk to our adversaries.
But in regard to Georgia itself, Senator McCain and I have essentially the same position - and here I'm playacting for Senator Obama - I would say don't politicize this. Tavis, Senator McCain said, "We are all Georgians now." I, still as Senator Obama, I would say back to him we are all Americans now.
Tavis: All right, so we'll let the audience judge who played the better - (laughter) was I a better McCain or was Holbrooke a better Obama? The good news is we don't have to playact, because there will be, of course, three debates.
Holbrooke: That was the toughest, scariest question anyone's ever asked me. I'm just glad that we're on a one-way deal here and I can't see you. You don't sound like McCain; I don't know if you look like him, I can't see you. (Laughs)
Tavis: Well, I'm not quite 71, let's put it that way.
Holbrooke: Yeah, well -
Tavis: That said, I'm honored to have you on the program as always, and thanks for your insight, and I'm sure we'll be talking in the coming weeks and months as this campaign unfolds. You want to tell me right now whether or not, if offered secretary of State by Mr. Obama, you'd take it?
Holbrooke: I've served in and out of the U.S. government now for over 40 years. I love my country, I've been in the cabinet, I've negotiated, I've been shot at for my country in three places, and if I have one more chance to serve the nation, I would be honored to do so. As for Barack Obama, I know him, I think he's a remarkable man, and he is the right man to lead our country at this time in history.
Tavis: That sounds like a "yes" to me, although very nicely done, and Holbrooke has to be on any Democrat's short list to be secretary of State. Mr. Holbrooke, we'll talk to you again. Thanks for your time, sir.
Holbrooke: Thank you, Tavis.
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