Part II: Iraq and National Security
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RAY SUAREZ: Before the delegates came together, they were given background materials prepared at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. The national security briefing focused on the use of U.S. Military and diplomatic power and the situation in Iraq. Last Saturday, the participants were shown a video version of the briefing. Here's an except.

In March, 2003, after failing to get U.N. backing for military action in Iraq, the U.S. with the support of a small coalition invaded Iraq and topples the government of Saddam Hussein. By mid November, there were 130,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq, more than 400 Americans and thousands of Iraqi civilians killed in action. Each month of the war an ongoing occupation costs an average of $4.4 billion. Congress has approved President Bush's request for $87.5 billion to pay for the occupation of Iraq.

L. PAUL BREMER, U.S. Administrator, Iraq: Creating a sovereign, democratic, constitutional and prosperous Iraq deals a blow to terrorists. That is why the president's $87 billion request has to be seen as an important element in the global war on terrorism.

SEN. ROBERT BENNETT, (R) Utah: Why are we spending money to build schools and pave roads and do all of these wonderful things in Iraq when we need more schools and roads, et cetera, in the United States?

RAY SUAREZ: Questions about the future role of the United States in Iraq were made.

RAY SUAREZ: Should the U.S. increase or decrease U.S. military presence? And how long should U.S. troops remain? Critics have called for everywhere from an increase in U.S. presence to deal with security threats and stability to a decrease or even a complete withdrawal of U.S. military personnel.

MAN ON STREET: Where is the security? America should offer to us the security.

RAY SUAREZ: What's the right level of international involvement? The current approach is that the U.S., with some help from Britain, should have a largely exclusive role. Some suggest that financial and personnel support from other countries or a greater role for the United Nations in reconstruction would help share the burden. But sharing responsibility would require that the U.S. share power and influence in Iraq. Should the U.S. promote democracy in Iraq?

The present U.S. strategy is to actively create a constitution and promote democratic elections. If the U.S. doesn't leave until a democratic government is up and running it might increase the cost and length of U.S. involvement. But if elections were held soon, it might lead to the election of a radical government opposed to the United States.

How the United States responds to these questions and their effects in Iraq will likely affect American national security going forward.

Small Group Discussions
Breaking into small groups, each with a moderator, the participants plunged into discussion, from Iraq to the U.N. to the Patriot Act.

JOYCE CHEATHAM, Retired Engineer: There was always for me some suspicion about why we were going to Iraq and why we didn't wait until the United Nations and others had really gone through and looked thoroughly, had a chance to look for the weapons of mass destruction. I think it was just... I think we went too soon. And...

PARTICIPANT: How much time would you have suggested we give?

JOYCE CHEATHAM: I think we really should have not done it unilaterally. I think we should have waited until the United Nations decided that their inspectors had done a thorough job, had gone and looked where they felt that they needed to and then to have gone in together. I think the United Nations wasn't... I don't think that they didn't want to go into Iraq. If they had found weapons of mass destruction, I think they were willing to do that. But I think we went too soon.

PATRICIA CHARLES, Day Care Provider: Basically, I feel that we didn't go soon enough because, as it is, the way I've seen it and I was glued to the tube every day all night long, when it was daylight over there, I was up watching. When it was night, I was up watching. And I think we didn't go soon enough because it gave him a chance to hide. They did hide, and they did have the weapons. As far as going in too soon with the mess that it is now, I feel that the president felt it was emotional, you know, you did this and uh-uh, we cannot stand for that. It doesn't matter what everybody else thinks, as the president, I'm not going to allow this, this cannot happen.

RONAN MURPHY, MD, Neurologist: Regarding the question whether or not invading Iraq really made any difference to our security, I think it has actually been detrimental. There is no evidence that Iraq played any part in the 9/11 attacks. Now, Saddam Hussein was an enormous threat to his neighbors and to many of his own countrymen, and I think that there is no argument with the fact that the world is better off without him. I mean obviously, the world is. But if we had gone with that argument to the international community and said, "We want to do something about this situation, then I think there would have been a much more forceful argument."

JIM WATSON: I have a sister who, with her husband, has been a missionary in Rwanda, and Burundi, where we have the largest example of genocide since Hitler. And we did nothing. The world did nothing. So now, as the only superpower, we jump into Iraq with flawed motives, oil is always lurking in this government's motivations, big business is always lurking. There are no weapons of mass destruction. We didn't bother to go in with any allies, where it would have been easy to build consensus. But what concerns me is the larger picture that we're creating a climate of fear.

KATRINA JARMAN, Sign Language Interpreter: It also concerns me that we think we can impose our values and our institutions on foreign countries that have totally different histories, totally different centuries and millennium worth of existence and a 200--year-old country is going to tell you what you ought to do for your people.

ILENE EVANS, Retired: I feel we do need to help them to restructure and develop a democratic society after they had been lived under... had been living under the terrorism of Saddam Hussein.

KATHY KEENE: Now that we are in there, we have a moral obligation to those people. We have destroyed their homes, we've destroyed their infrastructure, and it's as a nation, we owe them at least the rebuilding of that infrastructure and bringing some sort of stability to their country. If we get out because of political reasons, because of the election and just leave those people to be, it's going to not only destroy that country I would imagine, and there's going to be a civil war, it's also going to do major harm with the rest of the Muslim world.

GENE (BUTCH) KNUTH, Retired Safety Director: You have to be patient with all the security now. I mean, it might start violating some of our things we believe in but it's going to... it has to be there. I mean the world's changing and we're going to have to have these security measures, and if they take longer for everything, well, that's just part of life now.

KAYE FREISCHLAG, Homemaker: We've been traveling and going and doing we want for so long, that all after sudden, to have somebody say, "maybe we need to check, let's go through your bag," we all get all, know, upset. And it's like the bigger picture; we need to try and maybe step back from our civil liberties a little bit and go it's for the good of the country. And that's hard, you know, we're a tough group to give up any rights.

CONSTANCE HASSETT, Homemaker: It scares me. And I have a degree of uncomfortableness. I can see both sides, but I haven't found that middle road that would say, okay, this is the path to go... I'm hoping that with time it'll become clear, but I'm very cautious about the profiling. I think it gives a message to our children, and I also think it may also be handful and set up a situation that only increases the tension between groups and cultures.

BUD ANDERSON, Retired: I think it comes down to: How far do you trust the country or the government with information on you personally? There has been many examples where this has been misused. If you look at McCarthy's red hunt that he did, the people that were ruined for no other reason than for political gains on his part, you looked at J. Edgar Hoover when he was doing case files on everybody in the world, so he had something over them, including the president and the vice president at that time. And so to just blindly give this away under the new national security laws and homeland security laws, I think needs to be looked at very carefully before we give up rights that we worked so hard to get as far as our personal protection.

CONSTANCE HASSETT: I'm concerned as to how we define when is enough and if enough is enough, how do we turn it around?

PARTICIPANT: If we've gone too far you're saying?

CONSTANCE HASSETT: Yes. Yeah.

Asking the Experts
RAY SUAREZ: While the participants were discussing each issue amongst themselves, they formulated questions to ask in larger plenary sessions with local experts, such as professors, members of Congress and business leaders. The point of the plenary sessions was to give the participants a range of differing viewpoints.

MAN IN MINNESOTA AUDIENCE: What are the pros and cons for the United States - the United Nations is fully involved in the current Iraq situation?

CHRIS THOMSON, Canadian Consul General: Looking at the U.S. from the outside, I think the more, the better. The more people who are sharing the burden-- and that's not just financial or militarily, it's morally, sort of socially, politically. How far can you spread this? It's also less of a risk for the U.S. to be seen as being a bully and less focused on the U.S. for those who want to cause trouble.

MAN IN AUDIENCE: How do we improve our determination of what an imminent threat is? And when does a threat really become imminent in the first place?

MAJOR GENERAL LARRY SHELLITO, National Guard: The issues that we have to face is if... and we do it all the time, we war-game. I am responsible for the state of Minnesota in a sense, I mean to provide troops and so forth to support it. So I have people sitting down and say, "if you were to do it, put your bad hat on, if you were to do it, what would be the targets you would hit?" Okay? And then of course I'm not going to tell you what they are. So could things happen here in the twin cities? Yes. Could they be serious? Yes. Is it imminent? No. Is it probable? I don't know.

MITCHELL PEARLSTEIN, PHD, Center of the American Experiment: I wish the metaphor were mine but it's not. In this environment, if you have to wait for the smoking gun to go off, it's too late. And you have to deal with the best evidence that you have, the best intelligence. The intelligence might be wrong, but that doesn't mean the people gathering it and analyzing it and announcing it, if you announce it, are deceitful. The United States and the Bush administration were not the only folks who thought Saddam had weapons of mass destruction as of a year ago. Intelligence services and governments around the world thought so. Sometimes you could be wrong, but deceit has nothing to do with it.

ANN MARKUSEN, PhD, Humphrey Institute: I think there's a considerable expert opinion and there was good intelligence at the time also suggesting another course. I won't say more about it than that.

WOMAN IN AUDIENCE: How do we balance our freedoms with domestic security and without creating fears and suppression?

ROBERT MANN, Louisiana Governor's Office: Well, you know, we have a long history of going through this. This isn't the first time this country's faced this question in the last 100 years. In 1919, we had the red scare when we were deporting people and, you know, just about 30 years later in the '50s we went through it again. And here we are again going through it, and I think it's a pendulum swing where we overreact and then we draw back. But we don't always draw completely back. And what I worry about, not only are the erosion of our civil liberties, but what the events of 9/11 will tell the leaders of our country ten, fifteen years from now and how it will inform them in ways that, you know, may work to our benefit, to make us a more secure nation, but history has also shown us that those kind of events can cause to us overreact and react in ways that are not in our best interest and lead us into situations that we could not have anticipated and which sometimes bring about grave damage to our country. How it will play out, no one really knows because it's just beginning.

MADHU BERIWAL, Emergency Management Expert: Let me comment a little bit on some of the things that I've seen in the work on counterterrorism as well as anti-terrorism efforts in the U.S. It does not take very much money; it does not take very much knowledge and it does not take very many resources to set up a factory to produce biological weapons or chemical weapons. The materials are readily available. They can be purchased without anybody raising an alarm, and you can literally have not hundreds of people, not thousands of people dead, but millions of people dead. And the results are quite horrific. So what are you willing to give up to prevent something like that from happening?

MODERATOR: Okay, we're going to let Karen have the last word on this.

KAREN ADAMS, PHD, Louisiana State University: I just want to say quickly this is a great question and of course this is really the question for the war on terrorism: Freedom and security without fear or suppression. Well it seems to me that one of the best ways to try to do this is to think about how we can promote freedom and security for the people who are finding the world a difficult place for them to live in, people in Afghanistan who supported the Taliban and through them, the al-Qaida operations, that wreaked so much havoc on the United States during 9/11; people in Iraq who are feeling their own freedom and security imperiled now through the occupation and conquest of their country. The more we think about others' freedom and security, probably the more secure we will be because we will be creating fewer threats, fewer... much less resistance against us. Madhu was making of source some very excellent points, but the way to really head off the thing is to think carefully about who we're bumping into. We're this big elephant or bull in a China shop now. We have to be careful what we're breaking up. The more careful we are, the fewer shards we're going to be ending up stepping on.