E-mail a friendDavid Ignatius
original airdate May 3, 2007
David Ignatius has had a wide-ranging career in the news business, serving at various times as a reporter, foreign correspondent, editor and columnist. His twice-weekly column on global politics, economics and international affairs debuted on The Washington Post op-ed page in '99. In addition to writing his column, Ignatius co-moderates PostGlobal, an experiment in online global journalism. The Harvard grad has also written six novels, including the recently released Body of Lies.
David Ignatius
Tavis: David Ignatius is a widely read columnist for "The Washington Post" whose covered foreign policy and the Middle East for over 25 years. Prior to joining the "Post," he spent 10 years as a reporter for "The Wall Street Journal." In his spare time (laughs) he's also a bestselling novelist, and he must be pretty good at it because his latest book, "Body of Lies," is being turned into a major film directed by Ridley Scott and starring some kid named Leonardo DiCaprio. David, nice to have you on the program.
David Ignatius: Nice to be here, Tavis.
Tavis: Good to see you. So many issues, so little time. Why don't we jump in.
Ignatius: Good.
Tavis: And we'll come back to the book. In no particular order, I was looking at the back of the book, at all the persons who have blurbed this book, and lo and behold there's a guy named George Tenet, former director of the CIA, who has some nice things to say about this book. Not a whole lot of folks saying nice things about George Tenet right about now.
Ignatius: He's getting clobbered this week, with the publication of his book. I feel bad for him, in some ways. I think he's trying to tell the truth about what happened to him. And it's a reminder that after events like these, when people are so angry about the war in Iraq, for Tenet to try to defend himself, people just don't want to hear that.
It reminds me of Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense during the Vietnam War. People just didn't want to hear his side of the story, they were still so angry about it.
Tavis: What about those who don't feel sorry for him, based primarily on the fact that had he wanted to be and to say and to do what he's done in this book, he had every ample opportunity to do that?
Ignatius: He should have spoken out sooner, but he's feeling that this week. I know that he's been doing a slow burn over the last several years. He initially intended to keep his mouth shut. He had a book contract; he walked away from it, and then people began laying more and more of the blame for the war on him. And I think finally he just decided he'd had enough, and he was going to tell his side of the story.
I'm reading the book now. I'll tell you the one thing that's coming through to me as I read it is that in the time before 9/11, George Tenet was one of the few people in our country who really understood that a deadly adversary was coming at us, and he did try to wake up the government. He didn't succeed. You can argue he should have shouted louder; I think he must feel that he should have shouted louder.
On Iraq, there was just no excusing getting the WMD issue wrong; he had a lot of company. But he's getting pounded; he's a guy who's tried to serve his country. I don't know what the lesson is. Maybe the lesson is keep your mouth shut for a little longer.
Tavis: Beyond George Tenet, what do you make of the fact, though, that one by one, we are starting to see folk inside the inner circle whack the president about what he knew and what he should have done and didn't do, etc., etc.?
Ignatius: Well, I think the White House bunker has been breached. A lot of people are beginning to talk; they talk to people like me, as a journalist. They're telling their own sides of the story. I think we have a government - an administration that really is beginning to crack. And as angry as the country may be at George Bush - you look at the numbers; people are pretty angry - we are still fighting a war in Iraq, and somehow, we gotta hold the country together enough to have a clear sense of where we want to go.
And I think that's what worries me. People are so angry in Washington; the debate is so intense that I just worry that we're just slipping a gear as a country. People are almost so angry at George Bush that they want to see this thing fail to spite him, and that should be. That's wrong.
Tavis: Far be it for me to argue with you, but let me just take the devil's advocate position on this, just to press you a little bit more on this. Why shouldn't we be outraged? Why shouldn't we be angry with George Bush?
Ignatius: We should be.
Tavis: Why shouldn't this be the issue around which we will throw down a gauntlet and be angry? We're losing lives every day, why not this, if any issue, to be just outraged about?
Ignatius: We should be outraged. What's happening in our country now is a tragedy, and what's happening to people in Iraq is a tragedy. The question, Tavis, to me is what are we going to do with this? We have made terrible mistakes. How are we going to undo them to the extent we can? How are we going to get through this period without doing even more damage to ourselves and the people we naively came and tried to help?
Tavis: But David, we -
Ignatius: What's the way to do that?
Tavis: But we didn't make those mistakes. George Bush and his administration made those mistakes. So, how do you hold a guy accountable when you send him legislation, he vetoes it, sends it back, and says, "I dare you to override it?"
Ignatius: Well, look at the November elections; you see how you hold him accountable. We have a Democratic Congress now, and we have some powerful Democratic candidates, and I'd be surprised if a Democrat isn't elected in 2008. But there is a separate question, which is how do we protect our country's interests, which transcend George Bush, which transcend this group?
They led us into this terrible situation, but it is ours to deal with. What's the right way to deal with it? I've heard from an Arab ambassador something I want to share with you which really stuck with me. I heard this a couple weeks ago. He said, "There are two kinds of landmines. One that detonates when you step on it, and the other that detonates when you take your foot off. Which kind is Iraq?"
It's probably both, but if it's in part the kind that detonates when you take your foot off, we as a country - put aside George Bush and this cast around him - we as a country have to think really carefully: how do we do this in a way we don't hurt ourselves even more? That's all I'm saying.
Tavis: All right, two questions in that regard, and we'll move on. One, is the damage done irreparable at this point? And number two, to the extent, again, that when the Congress tries to act upon the will of the people, as expressed in those elections that you referenced a moment ago, the president vetoes it, sends it back, does not want to hear what you have to say. How do the people engage in this conversation that you're challenging us to have?
Ignatius: Well, I think the people are engaging in it. They engaged in it in the November elections. They sent a powerful message. Unfortunately, I don't think the president really heard it. But I think there is one thing that's happening now that I regards as very positive. I think the only way we can possibly begin to undo this is through diplomacy; is by talking to Iraq's neighbors, is by having a group of countries around Iraq that applies a kind of tourniquet, keeps this thing from getting worse.
And Secretary of State Rice is this week in Egypt trying to do that. She's talking to the Iranians, she's talking to the Syrians, she's doing the things that President Bush said a few months ago he'd never do. And she's doing them now, and that's good. I think that's a step in the right direction. But we're going to have to live with this for the rest of my lifetime. I wish I could tell you otherwise, but I think these are really serious mistakes; they're not going to be easy to undo.
Tavis: Speaking of the Middle East, let's stay there for a second before we come back this way. The drama, the trouble that Mr. Olmert is in - this commission in Israel did not suggest - did not say that he ought to step down, but there's certainly many people in the country calling for him to step down because of what they see and what this commission saw as, quite frankly, a failure in this last war, this last fighting with Hizbullah in Lebanon. Your thoughts? You've had a few things to say about that.
Ignatius: I think there's no question now for Israelis as they look back that the strategy Olmert pursued in jumping into Lebanon without a clear plan was a mistake. The paradox is that Ariel Sharon, the tough guy, the Israeli general par excellence, had learned a lesson about Lebanon. He had invaded Lebanon in 1982 - I was there as a correspondent in Beirut when it happened.
And it took Israel more than a decade to get over that. I think Israelis understood that Lebanon war was a punishing, thankless mistake. I don't think that Ariel Sharon, if it had been his decision to make, would have leapt in, sent Israeli troops across the border, on what was basically a no-win mission. I think Sharon would have been wise enough not to do it. Olmert wasn't; Israelis are furious at him. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a change of government soon.
There are smart, young Israeli politicians who are coming up, their foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, a woman who used to be a Mossad agent - kind of interesting woman - is talked of as a possible successor as prime minister. She's young, but she's really, really smart and interesting.
Tavis: A question that doesn't come under your bailiwick, per se, but it was your paper that wrote the story, so I just thought I'd ask you, since you're here. We talked about it earlier on this program this week. This story that "The Washington Post" broke about the almost one billion dollars in foreign aid that was offered to our country to help out post-Katrina that our government could not find a way to put together an infrastructure to accept and to do something with. The "Post," your paper, broke that story. Your thoughts about what that says about our government, even now?
Ignatius: I think we are - and this administration in particular - are proud to the point of being dysfunctional. When folks want to help you out, you say, "Thank you, brother, thanks, sister, we appreciate it." And I think especially - I think it was a total embarrassment after Katrina that we had dropped the ball so completely.
We all know this experience - when you're feeling humiliated and embarrassed and somebody says, how are you? Can we help? (Laughter) Your first reaction is you want to slug them. And I'm sure there was some of that, but they shouldn't have reacted that way.
Tavis: Let me switch gears here. "Body of Lies." First of all, when is a guy who is covering world affairs and writing a column find time to sneak away to do a novel?
Ignatius: Well, it just - the truth about writing a novel is it takes you over. Once it gets rolling, you fall asleep thinking about it, you wake up thinking about it. It makes room for itself. And I love to write. It's fun, it's a pleasure for me.
Tavis: Tell me about "Body of Lies," this story.
Ignatius: This is a novel about a young CIA officer who's been in Iraq, as I have been a lot these last three years, who gets wounded there, who comes out and is given the assignment of getting inside of a particularly dangerous cell in al Qaeda; of penetrating it, as the CIA would say, and who struggles with that, tries to do it, and concludes that it's impossible, but that it might be possible to convince al Qaeda that we have done the impossible.
That we have, in fact, gotten inside their tent, and then begin to play games with them and manipulate them. And he sets off - and this is modeled on a classic British intelligence operation during World War II, where the Brits floated a corpse ashore in Spain with some phony documents that told the Germans that we were going to land in Greece and not in Italy, and the Germans believed the phony documents.
So there's the body of lies, and the title of this book is a body that's bearing cables for our secret contact in al Qaeda, giving him instructions what to do. We don't have a real secret contact, so he's playing the same kind of game the British did. And he gets in - in this story, Tavis, he gets in the kind of trouble America 's gotten into in fighting this war on terrorism. And the war peels back on this CIA officer, much as it's peeling back, I think, on all of us.
Tavis: Everybody in this town that you sit in tonight, Los Angeles, wants to write one of these - a book, or something called a screenplay, and everybody wants a director like Ridley Scott to direct it, and everybody wants a guy like Leonardo DiCaprio to star in it. And you've done all of the above.
Ignatius: Well, don't wake me up.
Tavis: We hate you. (Laughter)
Ignatius: Clearly I'm dreaming; don't wake me up.
Tavis: Yeah, we hate this guy. Not good enough to have a column in "The Washington Post," and to have covered the Middle East, and written for the "Wall Street Journal;" now he's writing bestselling books that have great directors and great actors in them. The book is called "Body of Lies," a novel by "The Washington Post's" David Ignatius. David, nice to have you on the program.
Ignatius: Thanks so much.
Tavis: Good to see you.
Back to May 3, 2007