INTERVIEW WITH ADMIRAL STANSFIELD TURNER

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00498R000200030030-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 15
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 29, 2007
• Sequence Number: 30
• Publication Date: August 25, 1982
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO TV REPORTS, IN
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20815 656-4068
STAT
PROGRAM The Larry King Show STATION WTOP Radio
MBS Network
DATE August 25, 1982 12:05 A.M. CITY Washington, Q.C.
LARRY KING: Our special guest tonight, a distinguished
American, Admiral Stansfield Turner. Admiral Turner was former
Director of the CIA in the Carter Administration. He was a
Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, was the President, the 36th President
of the Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island, held the rank
of Admiral and Commander-in-Chief of NATO's southern flank, with
headquarters in Naples, Italy. Was appointed in the Carter
Administration as Director of the CIA. Is presently in private
business as a writer, lecturer, and consultant all around the
United States. Is a member of the board of directors of such
companies as Monsanto and Times Fiber Communications and the
Amcon Group. And we'll meet Admiral Stansfield Turner in a
moment.
KING: We welcome to our microphones, it's a great honor
to welcome to our microphones a distinguished American, as we
said, the former Director of the CIA, Admiral Stansfield Turner.
I thank you very much for coming. It's a pleasure
meeting you.
ADMIRAL STANSFIELD TURNER: Good evening, Larry.
Pleased to be with you here.
KING: How do you like private life?
ADMIRAL TURNER: I'm enjoying, particularly, being out
from under the pressure of government routine. Not only is it a
personal relief not to have lots of crises on your desk every
day, but it gives you an opportunity to think and take a
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perspective on things that you've worked on all your life, but
you've been so busy you sometimes lost sight of the woods -- the
trees for the woods.
KING: There must be some sort of, for want of a better
term, a kind of drying-out period, isn't it? Because you've
always been in service of one kind of another, militarily, key
top civilian post. And then suddenly. having no basic
responsibility for tomorrow morning has got to be a tough
adjustment.
ADMIRAL TURNER: No, I didn't find it all that
difficult. Once in a while I would pick up the newspaper and
find there were six or seven international crises going on at
once, and feel a little left out of things. You normally would
have been in the middle of those and found them very exciting.
But I've found private life very interesting and it's
kept me very busy. But as I say, I can measure my own pace a
little bit more. And if I don't accomplish something tonight and
I have to put it off till tomorrow, it's usually okay. Whereas I
might be very embarrassed if I had to appear before a
congressional committee or something tomorrow morning and I
didn't do my homework tonight if I was in the government.
KING: Do you like the lecture circuit?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Yes, I enjoy that because it gets out
to meet people, lots of different walks of life. You get good
questions. It makes you stay on your toes and read what's going
on and try to analyze what's happening around the world. It's a
stimulating experience.
KING: Let's trace a little background. What took you
to Annapolis in the first place? What made you go career Navy?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, I don't think I really decided I
was going to be a career officer, Larry, till about the time I
made admiral. I kept thinking another couple of years and I'll
get out. Really, that's about the way it happened.
I went to a private college in Massachusetts three
months before Pearl Harbor. The war came along and I decided to
join the Navy, and maybe it was best to do it right by going to
Annapolis. And it looked like it was going to be a long war. I
must say I don't think when I got out of Annapolis I thought I'd
stay in the Navy more than the minimum time required.
KING: Why did you?
ADMIRAL-TURNER: Well, I was lucky and won a Rhodes
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Scholarship, which the Navy let me take. And I was only six
months out of Oxford when the Korean War came along. You
couldn't, of course, quit the military, as a professional, when
the country was at war. So that kept me in another few years.
Then I got a very exciting job here in Washington as a
very young officer in the Pentagon doing relations between the
Navy and the State Department. I really found that exciting, and
almost left the Navy stay here and do something like that as a
civilian.
KING: So it was circumstance and desire.
ADMIRAL TURNER: That's correct. And, you know, each
time I thought it was the right opportunity to get out, something
came along and I stayed in for one more time. And I really am
pleased that I did.
KING: Are there many Rhodes Scholars out of the
military academies?
ADMIRAL TURNER: There's a reasonable number. Much more
out of West Point. Even more, I believe, out of the Air Force
Academy than out of Annapolis, unfortunately, from my point of
view. But we're very pleased Annapolis won a Rhodes Scholar in
each of the last two years. We hadn't had any for quite a few
years before that.
Is that a worthy experience?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Oh, that's a super experience. It's
super because the English educational system at Oxford and
Cambridge is something that most universities in the world cannot
afford. You have an individual tutor for your subject and you
meet with him once a week. You write an essay for him. You read
it, or he reads it and critiques it, and you have a one-on-one
intellectual exchange for that hour. He then tells you, "Read
these three books next week and write me an essay on this." It
really is very stimulating.
KING: What was your subject?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Philosophy, politics and economics. It
was at that time the only course at Oxford that let you explore
several fields at once. It's quite a different approach over
there. You take, generally, only one subject: theology,
physics, mathematics, whatever it is. But they work into it a
lot of history, a lot of philosophy, and so on. But you usually
take only one basic theme. I happened to get this course that
had three themes that knitted together.
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KING: Able to use it in your life?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Interestingly, I talked with a young
man yesterday about what was useful to me from Oxford, because
he's going to Oxford. And I told him that even though he is a
military officer, the most valuable part of the course for him
was going to be the philosophy. At least that's what I found was
most valuable. One would think I would have found the politics
or the economics more interesting or useful.
The philosophy was a matter of logic and reasoning, how
to approach problems rationally, how to look at the alternatives
and size them up. And that's what most of life is really all
about.
KING: Is it hard to separate logic from emotion?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Oh, yes.
KING: That may be the hardest.
ADMIRAL TURNER: It's very hard. But again, a good
training in philosophy will let you do that. Because that's what
happened in these tutorials. When you got emotional, the
professor just sliced you up. You know, he tore your argument
apart.
KING: Our guest is Admiral Stansfield Turner, former
Director of the CIA. We will tell you that even though the
interview is extensive, many Americans are beginning to call in
already. If you would like to join them, you can do that by
dialing area code 703-685-2177.
KING: Our guest is Admiral Stansfield Turner, former
Director of the CIA. He was also, as Admiral,
Commander-in-Chief of NATO's southern flank, headquartered in
Naples, Italy; and was appointed by President Carter to his last
post. He's now in private enterprise, is a lecturer and writer
and consultant to companies, on the board of directors of many
companies.
What is the Naval War Colleqe, that you were president
of? What is that?
ADMIRAL TURNER: It's an institution for what I call
mid-career education, Larry. In business, in education itself,
in the military, you need to refresh people in midstream. You
also need to take people who have been focused into a narrow part
of their profession, whether it's medicine or whether it's
manufacturing or sales, or whatever, and you need to expand their
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horizons, because they're going up to the top of their companies
and they have to be able to cover lots of topics, not just
manufacturing or marketing or advertising, or gunnery or
submarines, or whatever.
And so we attempt, in a nine-month period, to broaden
the officer's outlook, to make him a prospective admiral, to
study parts of his profession that he's just been too busy to get
into.
KING: Is it required?
ADMIRAL TURNER: No, it is not required. The Army
almost requires it for officers to get promoted to general. The
Air Force comes a little closer. I'm sorry to say the Navy
doesn't put as much emphasis on education as do the other two
services.
KING: Why does it have so, forgive me, harsh a word as
War College? It sounds like you're in there blowing up games.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, you do have in part of the course
those questions of tactics, of military procedures in order to
win wars. But the end objective of any military organization is
to keep the peace, hopefully, by not having to fight. And in the
War College, we do teach the strategy, the reasons for having a
military, and when you want to fight and when you prefer not to.
KING: During your naval career, did you know Jimmy
Carter at all?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Not very much. We were classmates at
the Naval Academy, knew each other just a little bit there. .
When I went to the War College, Larry, was the time I
made contact with Jimmy Carter.
KING: Was he there as a student?
ADMIRAL TURNER: No, no. No, he was the Governor of
Georgia at that time. And I was running a program up there to
help broaden the outlook of the officers, so I invited Jimmy
Carter to come up and give them a talk one time. Subsequently, I
happened to be in Atlanta on business and I called on him in his
office there. He told me as I left that interview that. in two
days he was going to announce his candidacy for the presidency.
And I wished him good luck, and sort of laughed to myself and
thought, "He's not likely to make that, I don't think." And
little did I know how much his making it would change my life.
KING: Do you remember him well at Annapolis at all?
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ADMIRAL TURNER: No, we didn't know each other that well
there.
KING: Was he a good naval student?
ADMIRAL TURNER: He came out number 52, or something, in
a class of 832, which is fine.
KING: Not too bad.
What was the post of Commander-in-Chief of NATO's
southern flank? Will you explain that?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, General Haig, when he was my boss
there, was the head of all of European NATO, and he had three
subordinate commanders, one who had his northern flank, which was
Denmark and Norway; one who had the center area, which is Holland
and Belgium and Germany; and then I had the southern end, which
was Turkey, Greece, Italy, and the Mediterranean Sea.
So, my job was, in time of war, when those countries
committed their forces to NATO, to command the armies, the air
forces and the navies of those three countries, and the United
States and British contributions, primarily through their navies,
to that area of NATO.
KING: So you commanded all areas of the south.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Yes.
KING: Is there a NATO navy?
ADMIRAL TURNER: No, there's not a NATO navy, with one
or two small exceptions. NATO has a force of a few destroyers
that work together, some from different countries, all the time.
It's a permanent force. That's a very small part of it, though.
The real thing is that in the Mediterranean, for instance, as the
NATO commander, several times a year I would conduct exercises in
which we tried to get the Greek, Turkishs, Italian, and American,
sometimes the French, and British navies all to come out and
exercise together. They were, in a sense, one navy at that
point, a NATO navy. But they all, of course, flew their
individual flags, they had their own officers and men, they had
their own. procedures. But we tried to make common those
procedures enough so that they could work together very-
effectively. And I think that does work well.
KING: You know, I guess we get sort of lax and we
hardly ever think that the NATO countries are ever going to be
attacked. I guess that's sort of remote. Is it tough to -- in
NATO, to keep on your toes, so to speak, since the threat against
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NATO, at least in this period in world history, doesn't seem
imminent?
ADMIRAL TURNER: There are problems there. There are
problems in keeping the Europeans, sometimes, serious about these
activities, these maneuvers, and such forth. And yet, the real
threat to NATO today, Larry, is the danger that people will come
to perceive the Soviets and their allies have such a military
advantage that NATO will become what they call Finlandized. It
will begin to make concessions because they're afraid that
they're outpowered. Not that they really think the Soviets are
going to invade...
KING: Do you fear that?
ADMIRAL TURNER: I do fear that. I don't think we're
quite there yet, but I think we're at a turning point, where if
we can't induce our European allies to do more to contribute to
their own defense over there, they could become Finlandized.
KING: How did you -- did you expect the appointment as
Director of the CIA?
ADMIRAL TURNER: I was sitting in that office in Naples,
blissfully unaware that anybody was thinking about that, when I
received a phone call one day, said, "The President would like to
see you in Washington tomorrow morning." It was four o'clock in
the afternoon in Naples. And somehow I got to Washington by the
next morning.
KING: What did you think on the flight over?
ADMIRAL TURNER: I assumed that he was going to move me
to some different military slot, or maybe he'd just interview me
to see if he liked me for any different position in the military.
Interestingly, I was told to go see the Secretary of
Defense, Harold Brown, in the morning. I went to see him. And
he just chit-chatted with me for about five minutes. I'd never
met him, and we just got to know each other. And he said, "Well,
the President has something he wants you to do. Go across to,the
White House and see him."
Well, as soon as I walked out of Mr. Brown's office, I
said to myself, "I'm not going to a military assignment. He
didn't even really try to interrogate me or see what kind of a
person I was." And he certainly would if I was going to be one
of his principal officers. So I had to think on my feet, or
maybe I thought in the car on the way across the river from the
Pentagon to the White House what I was going to say when the
President said, "Will you take the CIA?"
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KING: And you said yes.
ADMIRAL TURNER: No, I never did say yes, I don't think.
I told him I would prefer to stay in the military, and thought
that I could serve him better, having prepared my life for 31
years in that direction. He told me that he thought I could
serve him and the country better by taking this. And I think I
just sort of numbly acceded.
KING: Was it hard to resign your commission?
ADMIRAL TURNER: I didn't actually have to resign
initially. The law provides the Director of Central Intelligence
may be an active-duty military officer.
KING: Oh, really?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Or a retired officer or a civilian.
And I think in order, perhaps, to persuade me to, in effect,
forsake my military career, the President said he wanted me to
stay on active duty. And so I did, for the first two years,
anyway. And at the end of that, I thought that wasn't necessary
and it wasn't a good idea, and I clearly wasn't going back to the
military, nor did I want to go back at that point. And I retired
and went onto the civilian rolls for the last two years.
KING: Did that mean that while you were Director of the
CIA, a higher-up could have ordered You to go on maneuvers for
two weeks in the summer?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Not quite. And it's very interesting
you raise that, because the law itself provides that if you are
on active duty as the Director of the CIA, that you may not
respond to military direction and you may not play a role in it.
It wants to be sure there's a separation there.
KING: A little Catch-22, right? You're in but you're
ADMIRAL TURNER: That's right. Really, it's very --
that's why I finally decided to resign.
KING: Had you had a lot of intelligence experience?
ADMIRAL TURNER: None. I mean I'd never...
KING: When he told you this is the job, did he tell you
why you suited this job for him?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Yes. He described what he thought were
my contributions to the military or to the country over the years
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and why he thought I was the right caliber of person for this.
And that's when I said to him, "Mr. President, if I really do
have the qualities that you've been so kind as to attribute to
me, I think you need those qualities and that kind of a person in
the military today. I think we have a lot of problems in our
military and that I could better serve you there because that's
what I've prepared for over the years. You're very generous, but
I think I can help you better there."
KING: And he thought otherwise.
ADMIRAL TURNER: And I sat there rather numb as he kept
saying, "I want you in the CIA."
KING: Was it a lot to do with your organizational
ability, as well?
ADMIRAL TURNER: It may have been. I'm not sure. You
know, in 1977, when he asked me to do that, the CIA, in
particular, our intelligence community, in general, was in rather
bad repute in this country. The media had overplayed some
genuine criticism that was deserved, some errors that had been
made. And I know the President wanted to be sure those errors
did not happen again. But he was also very supportive of having
good intelligence. And I think he wanted to be sure that he had
somebody in the job he thought could make the transition from
rather little control and regulation to some kind of regular
order.
We'll be right back with Admiral Stansfield Turner,
former Director of the CIA.
KING: He is now a consultant, lecturer, writer. He is
the former Director of the CIA and the former admiral and
Commander-in-Chief of NATO's southern flank, headquartered in
Naples, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He's Admiral Stansfield
Turner....
How, Admiral -- and this boggles the mind -- how do we
measure how effective an intelligence agency is, since, by its
nature, it is secretive? So how do we know that the Mossad of
Israel is a great intelligence agency? And how do we know that
Britain's M-5, or whatever it is, or the CIA -- how do we know
that maybe the intelligence agency in Italy might not be superior
to the -- I mean how do we know? How do you measure it?
ADMIRAL TURNER: That's a very tough one. You do have
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to keep the basic things you do in intelligence secret.
Clearly, when countries get caught out, you have to
worry that there's been some kind of an intelligence shortcoming.
On the other hand, we often judge getting caught out on the
basis of short-term predictions rather than long-term. You know,
you don't predict every coup, every assassination, every change
of government. No agency, intelligence agency is going to have a
high batting average at that. What you want to do is predict the
long-term trends. Your politicians can do something about that.
They probably can't do much if there's going to be a coup
tomorrow afternoon in some country.
And it's hard for the public to know whether the
intelligence agencies are in fact predicting the long-term
trends, because they don't come out and do it publicly. And even
if they did, it probably wouldn't get much attention, because
it's too far away for the.
KING: Among the professionals, how do you measure it?
You know, if you were to gather with the head of all the
agencies, what would be your yardstick?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, of course, when you talk about
friendly countries, we have a reasonable exchange of information.
Very private, but a good exchange with the principal allies in
Europe and in the Pacific. And it's not hard to tell whether
their opinions about what's going to happen in some third'country
are sensible. And so you judge them because you sit down with
their chief of intelligence and you say, "I think down in Zambia
in Africa things are going this way." And he says, "Oh, they
are?" And you realize he isn't up to date on that country.
So what you find, really, Larry, is that only the Soviet
Union and the United States have complete intelligence services.
We are the only ones, for instance, with satellites. We are the
only ones who attempt to do a really full worldwide coverage.
We're the only ones who can afford that.
ADMIRAL TURNER: So other intelligence organizations may
be excellent with their limited sphere. So you probe until you
find out. Country X, a friend of yours, it knows a lot about
Countries Y, Z, A, B, and D, but it doesn't know much about R, P,
and Q. You see what I mean? So you deal with them in those
terms.
KING: What was the morale like when you got there?
ADMIRAL TURNER: The morale was, of course, hurt by the
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intense public criticism of 1975 and '76, during all of.the
investigations. I think there's been a lot of overplay on how
bad the morale was. I always say to people, "If I ever have to
again command an organization that's supposed to have bad morale,
let me have the CIA, because they work like troupers even if
their morale is bad."
What it did, though, worse than morale, the criticism,
it made the people in the CIA cautious. They were conscientious.
They didn't want to get the CIA in trouble again. You see what
I mean? And intelligence is a risk-taking business. That's the
whole essence of intelligence: what risk will you take in order
to get what information?
Well, if they hunker down and don't want to take too
many risks because they'll bring on more criticism, then you're
not going to have good intelligence.
KING: Philosophically, Admiral, do you support the
concept that if agents can effectively change a government we
don't like, they should do that?
ADMIRAL TURNER: That philosophically all right, but
only when that it is duly authorized by the political authorities
of our country. The CIA has never done that without it being
authorized. And today we have a very thorough set of checks and
controls to insure that the CIA, or any other intelligence
organization in the country, doesn't even move in that direction
without authorization of the President of the United States, not
just anybody. And we are also required by law to notify the
Congress that we're moving in that direction.
So, it's well under controls.
KING: Mr. Reagan would change it somewhat. There are
thoughts of permitting the CIA to do work inside this country,
something that some call abominable. I think that was the term
you used in a letter to someone, that the CIA should never act
inside this country at all, that's not what it's chartered to do.
How do you feel?
ADMIRAL TURNER: I am much more with Mr. Truman than Mr.
Reagan. I admire the fact that Mr. Reagan relaxed those rules,
in the spirit of trying to help the Central Intelligence Agency.
I think it will hurt more than it will help.
KING: Why?
ADMIRAL TURNER: First, the one thing the CIA cannot
stand is another series of criticisms like 1975-76. I think that
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would do it almost irreparable harm, in terms of the personnel
and their willingness to stay and the young people to come in,
and so on.
If you turn the CIA loose to do clandestine spying
against Americans, they have to do it within the restraints of.
law. No question about that. But they're not trained to do
that. They're trained to operate outside this country, where our
laws do not apply.
Now, the FBI is trained to operate within the law. An
FBI agent's first reaction when you give him a new job is, "What
are the limits of what I can do here?"
So, the answer is to let the FBI do that clandestine
work when it's necessary and authorized, and then provide the
information to the CIA.
KING: Did you change somewhat the cleavage that had
occurred between the two agencies?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, I don't want to take too much
credit for that because that healing had started before my time.
But I did work very hard to insure there was a close
coordination. I was very lucky and grateful that when Clarence
Kelley, who was the Director of the FBI when I arrived, decided
to retire a year later, the President called on Judge Bill
Webster. Well, Bill Webster and I had been at college in 1941,
as I mentioned to you earlier, just before Pearl Harbor, together
and we had been friends for all those years. So it was very easy
to work with Bill. And he's a super person and was most
cooperative.
One day I happened to have dinner with a person I didn't
know in the FBI. I met him for the first time. And in the
course of dinner he turned to me and he said, "You know, Admiral,
when we found out down at the working level in the FBI and at the
CIA that you and Judge Webster were playing tennis together
regularly, we decided we'd better get along."
KING: We'll be right back with Admiral Stansfield
Turner, former Director of the CIA, distinguished military
career, an incredible academic career.
KING: Our guest is Admiral Stansfield Turner. We will
go to your calls at the top of the hour. Admiral Turner is now a
lecturer, writer and consultant, appeared recently on one of the
networks regularly during the Falkland crisis.
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ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, they asked me twice to be on the
Today Show about the Falklands. And after the second time, they
called me up and said, "We'd just as soon you not skip to the
other networks. And so would you like a contract?"
KING: And they paid you as a consultant.
ADMIRAL TURNER: And so they put me on the payroll for a
couple of months.
KING: By the way, having watched you, you forecast that
almost on the button.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, thank you. That was a lot of fun
to do. It was a fascinating war. One doesn't like to think of
wars in that term because there was so much unnecessary killing
and death in that war, which I think. the whole war was
unnecessary. But if you had to have a war, it was sort of a
microscopic view of what might happen in a bigger war, and lots
of lessons to be learned, the principal one of which, to me, is
that navies have got to be able to control the seas that they
operate on. You can't do anything else unless you can do that.
And the whole war of the Falklands was just a question of could
the British Navy stay afloat down there against the Argentine
opposition? Because once the British Navy had cut the Argentines
off from getting to the islands, there was no question Britain
was going to win if they could maintain that blockade of the sea
and of the air lines to the Falklands. And the only real issue
was, could those Argentine Air Force planes, and maybe the
submarines, which never did show up, do enough damage to the
British Navy to drive them away?
KING: In retrospect, do you think Argentina thought
they would not come, or that Argentina thought they would win if
they did come?
ADMIRAL TURNER: The former. I don't believe they
thought Britain would come that far for that little.
KING: Admiral, before we get back to the CIA, I know
you have also discussed on television and made a speech recently
concerning the Israel move into Lebanon.
KING: First, is Israel, as has been stated, do you
think they're the third strongest army in the world today?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, I think they may be the third
best army.
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KING: Best army.
ADMIRAL TURNER: But, you know,...
KING: Their numbers...
ADMIRAL TURNER: ...they're small. So it would be
pretty hard to...
KING: You criticized them, did you not, as I read that
speech, on going too far? Did you say they were going too far,
or they got hesitant after they went? I'm trying to remember.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Larry, it wasn't a question of being
critical. I think the time has come now to ask ourselves, what's
going to be best for Israel and what's going to be best for our
Arab friends and what's going to be best for the United States in
the Middle East?
Mr. Begin recently said the action in Lebanon has
brought 40 years of peace to the Middle East. I'm not so sure
he's right. And I'm worried if Israel operates on that
assumption. Because if they really believe they've brought 40
years of peace, they don't have to now accommodate to the
Palestinians and try to make friendship and peace in a prolonged
basis with the Arab world.
You see, when a country has overwhelming military power
and then can't really fully utilize it, as we did not in Vietnam,
and as they did not before West Beirut, the enemy says, "Wait a
minute. What's holding them back?" The Vietnamese took
advantage of us and beat us in Vietnam because we couldn't turn
loose. Here, if the Arabs look at it, they'll say to themselves,
"Israel's weakness is she can't take a lot of personnel
casualties." She's got a small population. And she also has a
small economic base and a lot of economic problems. "What are
my," the Arab, "advantages over Israel?"
The only ones, really, are, "I've got a lot of people,
and they're willing to die for the cause. And secondly, I've got
a lot of money."
So, Israel has got to be concerned whether over the next
decade -- I don't mean tomorrow or next year -- the Arabs may
just try to wear them down.
KING: Do you think that she could -- she tried to go in
and did not? She feared greater losses if she did go in?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, she feared several things, but
one of them was high casualties to her personnel. They were
concerned -- in this war, her casualty figures in the -- not
caualties, but fatalities in the-low three hundreds. In the last
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major war, in 1973, they had over 2800 fatalities. That shook
the country enough that the politicians were nervous about as low
figures as 300. I hate to say low because it's human lives.
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