Should the U. S. use force to establish democratic governance?

Host: Amb. Jeanette Hyde, President, American Diplomacy Publishers: I want to say good morning and to welcome you to American Diplomacy Publishers 10th Anniversary Celebration. Thank you for being here with us today. I'm happy to see all of you and I know there's many distinguished guests in the audience, but in particular I would like to recognize that our co-sponsor today, the International Affairs Council Members are here and the Executive Director of the International Affairs Council is here with us, Todd Culpepper. Could I ask Todd and the members of the International Affairs Council to stand, please, and let us recognize you. Thank you for all that you all do.

--You know, it is a beautiful Saturday morning and it is a great day for a good, all-healthy-American debate. When American Diplomacy Publishers started discussing how to celebrate our 10th Anniversary, you know, we thought about throwing ourselves a party, of course; that's the first thing you think of, but then we decided that more in keeping with the nature of our business and our mission, we decided that a debate on a timely issue important to our country and the American people would be more in keeping, so we hope that you will enjoy our program today.

Many of you may not be familiar with American Diplomacy Publishers, so if I could just note very, very quickly: We publish an online journal on international issues. When launched in 1996, ten years ago, our journal had the distinction of being one of the few electronic journals in the world. Now I know this is hard to believe--that just ten years ago we were one of the few electronic journals in the world, but it is true. Of course, today, ten years later American Diplomacy continues to thrive. Now, of course, among innumerable Internet publications our journal remains, we believe, a respected publication of its type, one whose small staff and board of directors work diligently to bring our readers from all over the world comment and analysis of foreign affairs, world events, and understanding of diplomacy, book reviews, the role of the American Foreign Service, historical happenings, as well as an opportunity for illuminating personal accounts from American diplomats serving abroad. If you have not been to our website, please do. We invite you to give us a hit.

The primary impetus for the online journal in 1996 came from Dr. Henry Mattox and Amb. Frank Crigler, both retired Foreign Service and retired to the Triangle to make their home. I would like to ask them to stand and would like to ask all founding members of the American Diplomacy to stand, and to remain standing while I call your names. Henry Mattox, William Dale, Curt Jones, Bart Moon, Roy Melborne, Ed Williams, and Carl Fritz, and while our founding members are standing I would like to ask all current serving board members to stand and let us recognize you. Thank you, thank you so very much.

Our board actively manages and operates the journal today, and we have a staff of two people, just two people. They are with us today. Will our founding webmasters Sandy Johnson and Chris Kuster please stand. Thank you so much for your hard work. I also want to recognize the important association with the University of North Carolina and of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies at UNC. Without the valuable link with UNC we could not be where we are today, and where are we today on our 10th Anniversary is with a broadening readership from all over the nation and all corners of the world. We have increasing hits to our website every year, we have eminent online contributors of material for publication, and we have vital financial support from private donors, including the Delavan Family Foundation of Washington, D. C.. Again, thank you for your interest, for being here.

We're pleased to offer the scholarly debate on a most timely foreign policy issue with a most knowledgeable and distinguished panel, and now it is my great pleasure to introduce our moderator for today's discussion. We are honored and happy to have Hodding Carter III, who now lives and teaches at UNC. He said for me to tell you that he was just an old newspaperman from Mississippi. I've known Hodding actually a long time, I guess about forty years, and indeed he is an old newspaperman. His family was in the newspaper business in Greenville, Mississippi, but he now ... we are so glad to say, lives and teaches at UNC in Chapel Hill. You will remember him from his prominent role with President Jimmy Carter's Administration. He was Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and the State Department spokesman for the Carter Administration. We are sorry his wife Pat could not be with us because she is also a former U.S. State Department diplomat and also teaches at UNC. We're so glad to have them in the Triangle, please welcome the Honorable Hodding Carter, III.

Moderator: Hodding Carter, III, Professor, UNC: Thank you very much for that, and thank you for not getting much beyond that because in fact given the qualifications of our speakers, to go much beyond the journalist side would be a bad mistake in introducing me. Now I asked each of the speakers to give me three lines that if I absolutely had to introduce them and had nothing else to say would be what they wanted me to say, and that's what I'm going to read. I trust that everyone here is literate and you have some very nice programs which go further into the backgrounds of each of our speakers, and I hope you will read them, and in fact I can say on each one of them there are many more things that might have been in there. They were asked to curtail, as we all were, what we had in the program and I'm going to curtail it even further for the sake of the program, which is going to run like this:

--Each of the speakers will speak from this microphone for ten minutes in the order in which you see them reading from your right to left as the program has it. We will have a short exchange between the four. Anyone who wishes ... what are the words being used? In a civilized and discreet and very ... In any case, it's going to be a civilized debate if they wish to go back and forth at each other, and then it is ours in a dialogue between the audience and the panelists. I will try to play ringmaster to a degree, though in fact if you want to ask a question, raise your hand and either the man with the mike, which will be a mobile mike moving among the crowd, Or I will recognize you if he doesn't see you. Make the questions as specific as possible. Make them as short as possible, and as moderator I assure you I'm going to cut you off about five minutes into any of your speeches, all right? So really try to make the questions be questions the conversation obviously can include any amount of opinion you want, but you want to keep it fairly short so that everybody can get a chance to participate.

I want to say one other thing briefly before I introduce the panelists, and that is that we are fortunate to be in this great facility, Exploris [in Raleigh, North Carolina]. One of the things they particularly want me to note given the nature of this meeting right now is that they are hosting an exhibit called "The Enemy Within," which they obtained from the International Spy Museum and it will be running here through Thanksgiving. So for those of you who are interested in that notional aspect of the war that we are engaged in and have been in the past, there's an opportunity.

Now I'm going to get to the speakers in one second because I'm going to take my next forty-five seconds to say two things on my own. The title is "Should the United States use force to establish democratic governance?" and it is of course, the question of use force which is at issue. The United States has been in the business of trying to establish democratic governance in this world for a very long time directly and indirectly and since World War II quite directly in any number of ways which have felt by some governments in some places to be intrusive. It doesn't matter whether you're talking about human rights, or whether you're talking about funding political parties overseas, whether it's about in fact more direct subsidy of people who are attempting to establish democracy. We have been in this business for quite a long time. The question of military as a should is a question here, and should is the operative word because, of course, "should" raises some obvious questions in itself. That is, it implies at any rate a concern for consequences, a question about outcomes versus inputs, a question about ends and means. It implies the chance of success being central, I assume, to whether or not should has an answer which you can define in some reasonable way.

--And so here we are. Should the United States in fact use force to establish democratic governance? There's no question that whether we should or should not, we are at this point by our own protestation as official policy using force to establish democratic governance. So we're past the threshold of "should" in the sense that government has already decided definitely we should. Now we're going to debate and discuss that particular question in a larger, more abstract field, though I assume it's going to have to rely on the examples of the specific instance in front of us, the participants in order that I'm going to say the three lines about each of them, and then have David begin the process.

The first is Congressman David Price, who describes himself as fourth district Congressman of the Triangle area, a former political science public policy professor at Duke and the ranking Democrat in the House Democracy Assistance Commission, working to strengthen parliaments in emerging democracies.

The next speaker will be Lt. Gen. James Lee, a West Pointer and...