Former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Jed Babbin was a recent guest on “Your Turn — Meeting Nonsense with Common Sense,” a radio program hosted by the Center’s Corporate Counsel, Renee Giachino.  Mr. Babbin is the author of the new book Inside the Asylum: Why the United Nations and Old Europe are Worse than You Think and a contributing editor for The American Spectator.  What follows is excerpts from the interview that aired on WEBY 1330 AM, Northwest Florida’s Talk Radio.

GIACHINO:  My next guest served as a former deputy undersecretary of defense in the first Bush administration.  He is a contributor to National Review Online and contributing editor of The American Spectator.  I have seen him referred to as a talking warhead on television and radio, and he is the author of Inside the Asylum: Why the U.N. and Old Europe are Worse than You Think.

Mr. Jed Babbin, thank you very much for joining us on the program this afternoon.

BABBIN:  It’s great to be with you.

GIACHINO:  Mr. Babbin, if you will please, tell us about your role as deputy undersecretary of defense under George H.W. Bush?

BABBIN:  I was deputy undersecretary under Mr. Cheney and his deputy, Mr. Atwood, and my immediate boss was a fellow named John Betty.  Basically what I was doing was trying to tidy up the political mess that kind of occurs in and around the Pentagon once in a while.  It was not like I was doing anything like fighting a war — I was part of the big mechanism, that big gray slab over in Arlington that is called the Pentagon, and I was just trying to keep all of the pieces together and keep the balls that we were juggling up in the air.

GIACHINO:  I have to confess that I Googled you for the program — something I frequently do to learn more about my guests — and an interesting article came up about how you are quoted as saying, during a January 2003 appearance on the political talk show Hardball, that “going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion.  You just leave a lot of useless noisy baggage behind.”  The story then goes on to say that other prominent political and military figures have been credited with that same quote, including current Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.  So, what’s the real story?

BABBIN:  Well, that quote comes originally from a piece that I wrote for The American Spectator, and I was on Hardball that evening with Chris Matthews and Ken Adelman, the arms control expert, and we were of course talking about the upcoming war with Iraq and that was the thought that came into my head.  Of course, Chris went ballistic and started screaming at me.  Poor Ken Adelman was sitting there and at the commercial break he asked me if I had just thought of that.  Now Ken is ten times smarter than I am, but it was just one of those good lines that very few people had a response to.  On the other hand, I don’t think I am on Jacques Chirac’s Christmas card list.

GIACHINO:  I don’t think you are and certainly you wouldn’t be if he read your recent book, Inside the Asylum.  If we can first talk about the book, Inside the Asylum:  Why the U.N. and Old Europe are Worse than You Think.  In the book, you describe the U.N. as the handmaiden of terrorism.  Can you explain what you mean?

BABBIN:  Well, it started off really as my criticism of the U.N. and looking at the U.N.’s role since 9-11, and when I got into the research of the book I found out that not only is the U.N. really quiet about terrorism, it is really quite comfortable with terrorism.  In fact, in a lot of instances the U.N. is employing terrorists in its organizations.  The thing that really got me is if you look at page 155 of the book you will see a picture of a U.N. peacekeeping outpost at the Israel-Lebanon border where two flags are flying — one is the U.N. flag, which you would expect, and the other is the flag of the Islamic terrorist organization that has more American blood on its hand than any other except al Qaeda.  And that to me, I just don’t see that we should be sending another Yankee dollar to the U.N. until that flag comes down.

And going farther and farther into this you see that the U.N. has become a quagmire of diplomacy.  Shortly after 9-11 they said “we will lead the charge against terrorism and organize the fight against it.”  In almost four years the U.N. has not even been able to agree about what terrorism is.  They don’t even know what the definition is so they are obviously not doing a doggone thing to fight it.  So the U.N. is really the handmaiden of terrorism and is making terrorists jobs easier instead of harder.

GIACHINO:  Do you think it is the leadership of the U.N., namely Kofi Annan, or is it something more than that.  I know in one of your chapters you call it “The UN's Fatal Flaws.”  What flaws are you referring to?

BABBIN:  Let me answer your first question first — the problem with the U.N.  Kofi Annan is just a symptom of it and he really is not the problem.  The problem is the U.N. Charter and the U.N.’s members.  If you look at the U.N. Charter you will see quite clearly that the U.N. by its founding documents is precluded from telling good from evil.  We have a situation where every nation is given the equal rights and dignities of every other and as a result of that you end up in a situation where the rogues and terrorists run the show.  You have in the U.N. a situation where you have 190 members — fewer than 50 of them are democracies.  So we do the math and roughly 3 out of 4 are rogues and terrorists.  That means that the democracies of the world don’t get to say a lot and frankly cannot even get a fair hearing when they are fighting terrorism and doing the things that they need to do.

GIACHINO:  Isn’t that despite the fact that the majority of the money coming into the U.N. is coming from that minority?

BABBIN:  Absolutely.  No question about it.  If you look at what the U.N. is doing and the funding of it, quite frankly the United States is the largest financial supporter of the U.N. and always has been.  We pay roughly 22 percent of the U.N.’s budget every year, and what do we get for it?  Corruption and, quite frankly, an awful lot of anti-Americanism.

GIACHINO:  If we can focus once again on my second question.  One of the chapters talks about the fatal flaws.  What flaws were you referring to there?

BABBIN:  Well, pretty much the things we just discussed — the fact that you cannot fix the U.N. because it is made up of all of these dictators and they have the votes.  In fact, in the cases of Russia and China, they have the veto in the Security Council.

Just as an example, about a month ago, Kofi Annan — for whom I do have enormous contempt — tried at least to change the U.N. Human Rights Commission, which has been a rather tragic joke because it is made up of countries such as Libya, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and China.  What Kofi Annan tried to do was say that we should at least have on the Human Rights Commission those nations that are not the ultimate abusers of human rights.  Almost immediately — within 24 or 48 hours — the Chinese said they would veto that if they tried it.  So the U.N. is broken and you just cannot fix it.  It is not something that you can deal with at all.

GIACHINO:  Tell us about your proposal for a “new alliance of the free.”

BABBIN:  I think that is basically the best idea that has come along.  I don’t think that I started it.  I know for example that the eminent British historian Paul Johnson very much favors the idea.  We need to replace the U.N.  We need to replace it with an organization made up only of democracies.  And quite frankly can then meet and you will have nations of goodwill trying to solve some of the problems of the world and not be entirely burdened with the dictators.  And I think that is where we need to go.

We are the superpower so we cannot just walk out the door and slam it behind us.  But what we can do and should do and we must do is to get to the point where we can withdraw from the U.N. and get the other democracies of the world to follow us out and to form an organization that simply will be made up of democracies, and that way we would at least have a shot at getting some of these issues dealt with.

GIACHINO:  Your book is titled Inside the Asylum:  Why the U.N. and Old Europe are Worse than You Think.  We have been talking about the U.N., and now I would like to turn our focus to Old Europe.  Why is Old Europe worse than we think?

BABBIN:  The Europeans have become nations of shopkeepers, and it is really quite unfortunate when you see a situation like the U.N., because in old Europe we now have a series of nations — and I am talking now mainly about France and Germany and Spain and the like — where those nations really don’t share values with us anymore.  You really have a situation where they do not value freedom in the way that we do and they are breaking the bargain.  We have defended them for so many years that they are taking for granted that we would always defend them.  And the nations like our friends in Germany — quite frankly they have unilaterally disarmed to the extent that they could not even keep up the burden of NATO for their own defense.  So what we have to do is reform NATO in much the way that we can reform the U.N., by leaving it and reforming it.  What I would not do is simply trash NATO and throw it away.  But what I think we do need to do and what I hope we would do is get to the point in NATO where we could have a serious dialogue with serious nations and those nations — such as Britain and Poland and few others — those that are serious about their own defense would be able to stay in there with us.  We would continue the NATO partnership with them.  Those that are no longer serious — and there I include people like Italy and Germany and probably pretty much everybody except Britain — those who are not serious about their own defense would frankly no longer be members.  Those that are serious we would frankly get closer to — we would make sure that they had the means of defending themselves by increasing military aid to them and increasing military training and things of that nature.  And I explain in the book how we could basically reform NATO around Britain and Eastern Europe and come out with something that would actually be valuable — not just in our defense but in theirs as well.

GIACHINO:  What’s the significance of the French and Dutch rejecting the proposed EU Constitution?

BABBIN:  Well, for one thing I think that it is hilarious.  I just love to see the French do to themselves what they always tell us to go do to ourselves — which is kind of anatomically impossible.  What the point really comes down to is that the European Union was being built on an undemocratic premise and on the basis of some very grave and false assumptions.  They were trying to take 25 weak economies and combine them into one strong one without solving the underlying problems.  And basically it just did not make any economic sense and it does not make any political sense.

What they are seeing now is a dose of reality.  The European Union people in France and in the Netherlands were basically saying “what are you doing?  You are not allowing us to participate in the process so why should we allow you to impose this on us when we are not having a voice in it?”  So the undemocratic process reaped a democratic result and I think they are going to have to go back to ground zero and start all over again.

GIACHINO:  Do you think the U.N. is to blame for the prolonged battle that we face in Iraq?

BABBIN:  I don’t think it is to blame, but it certainly is no help.  If you look at what is going on in Iraq right now you see a very grave situation where we are not prosecuting the war, frankly, as vigorously as we could and probably should.  But I do not think that is the U.N.’s fault.

The U.N. is very dedicated to thwarting our policies in most places but I don’t think we can blame them for what is going on except for one thing — we spent six months fiddling and diddling in the U.N. — and people get uniformly excited when I say this — the fact that we found no WMD in Iraq means absolutely nothing simply because we spent so much time that it is quite likely that what happened in the U.N. is that we gave Saddam enough time to move the WMD and we may never find out what happened to it.  For that reason the U.N. is to blame for what is going on there because we did not do what we should have done in the time that we should have done it.

GIACHINO:  That is exactly the argument that Bill Gertz makes.  He will be my next guest to talk about his recent book Treachery: How America’s Friends and Foes are Secretly Arming our Enemies.

Mr. Babbin, where is the book available?  I assume still on Amazon.com.

BABBIN:  It is available pretty much everywhere — Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble and fine bookstores everywhere.

GIACHINO:  That’s great.  I think people will really enjoy the book.  What was your motivation for writing it?

BABBIN:  People often ask me why I write and write so many times.  And I sometimes wonder.  But I think it is my way of venting my feelings.  You know you get up in the morning and you are faced with a choice: you can either write something very tough and very precise or you can go screaming down Constitution Avenue at high speed.  At my advanced age I think I would rather not go running down screaming naked on Constitution Avenue.

GIACHINO:  You might get written about under those circumstances.

BABBIN:  Right.  It would not fit my image.  It is a way of making a point and hopefully informing people about things that they did not know.

When I started researching the U.N., I was astonished that before my book there really was not a critical look at the U.N.  There were a lot of people who had written about the history of the U.N., but no one had really taken a good critical look at it.  And I hope that I did.

GIACHINO:  It’s interesting that you would say that because, as I mentioned earlier, my next guest is Bill Gertz and his book, like your book, really outs a lot of things that the big media is disregarding.  Whether or not they are disregarding it intentionally or not is up for great debate, but they are failing to report the other side of the Iraq war — that is the side that the liberal media does not want us to know about.  Would you agree with that?

BABBIN:  Absolutely.  And let me make what I hope is an important point on that — one of the things that we have to be very concerned about in our country today is the opinion that our young people have of their country.  And the fact really comes down to that all they really hear about is Guantanamo Bay and this abuse and that treachery, and if they come away believing that our people are not fighting honorably and that our people are abusing prisoners as a matter of course, that would be what the media wants.

We as parents and teachers and friends need to be able to explain to them just why it is that when Amnesty International says that Guantanamo is a gulag it is not just wrong, it is obscene.

GIACHINO:  Mr. Babbin, we are just about out of time, but I did want to ask you what you think about John Bolton’s nomination to be U.N. Ambassador?

BABBIN:  I think it is a wonderful thing.  We need somebody who has a very tough attitude and who has the United States’ agenda at heart and not the United Nations’.  I think that is why you see the left — Mrs. Boxer, John Kerry and the rest of these folks, so desperate to stop the Bolton nomination because they do not want anybody to rock the boat at their favorite place.  The Left trusts the U.N. more than they trust their own government.  That is why they do not want John Bolton there.  No other reason.

GIACHINO:  Then how do you explain critics like Republican Senator George Voinovich of Ohio who called Mr. Bolton the poster child of what someone in the diplomatic corps should not be and that Mr. Bolton could hurt efforts to reform the world body?

BABBIN:  Well not only is Senator Voinovich wrong, but while I have lived here in Washington for the last 30 years or so I have seen a lot of George Voinovichs come and go and basically what these guys do is get lovey-dovey treatment from the Washington Post and that is all that they need to go whatever way the Post wants them to go.  George Voinovich is really an empty man.

GIACHINO:  What do you think is going to happen with John Bolton’s nomination?

BABBIN:  I don’t know.  I think it is 50-50 whether they will succeed in filibustering.  And, yes, that is what they are doing even though they don’t like to use the “f” word, but they are filibustering and I think and hope that if nothing else the President would give him a recess appointment over the Fourth of July recess.

GIACHINO:  That would be great news.  Is there another book in the works?

BABBIN:  Well, yes.  I am not at liberty to talk about it quite yet, but hopefully in the next couple of months I will be able to tip you off about what it is.

GIACHINO:  Okay, in the meantime pick up a copy of Jed Babbin’s book, Inside the Asylum:  Why the U.N. and Old Europe are Worse than You Think.  Thank you so much for joining us and we will have you back on the program again when the new book comes out.

BABBIN:  I look forward to it or even sooner.  Thank you very much, Renee.

GIACHINO:  Thank you Mr. Babbin.