Television evangelist Pat Robertson defended remarks made on his show in which he suggested the State Department’s headquarters be blown up with a nuclear weapon.
 Pat Robertson |
At his daily briefing Friday, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher called the comments made two weeks ago on Robertson’s “700 Club” program “despicable,” and a senior official said Secretary of State Colin Powell was extremely outraged.
But Robertson explained on his program yesterday he simply was trying to characterize, in a “laughing fashion,” the negative tone of author Joel Mowbray’s book “Dangerous Diplomacy: How the State Department Threatens American Security.”
In his clarification, Robertson said of the agency’s Foggy Bottom headquarters: “We’re not going to nuke it, we’re going to gut it.”
In his original interview with Mowbray, the evangelist said after he read the author’s book he thought, ‘If I could just get a nuclear device inside Foggy Bottom, I think that’s the answer,'” according to a transcript on the website of his Christian Broadcasting Network.
“I mean, you get through this, and you say [to yourself], ‘We’ve got to blow that thing up.’ I mean, is it as bad as you say?” Robertson asked.
“It is,” Mowbray responded.
 Joel Mowbray (Photo: CBN) |
Mowbray’s book alleges the State Department appeases sponsors of terrorism, ignores U.S. citizens abroad who are in trouble and mishandles visas, to the detriment of security.
Robertson invited Mowbray, a columnist for National Review, back for yesterday’s program and asked him to comment on the State Department’s reaction.
Mowbray said, “I obviously would not have chosen the same words you did, and probably if you had to think about it, you might not as well. But it’s amazing to me that they reacted as they did, because they never want to criticize, at least if you’re a foreign dictatorship.”
The columnist said in 1988, when Saddam Hussein killed 100,000 of his own people with chemical weapons, the State Department’s reaction was to “fiercely fight any efforts” to issue criticism.
Further defending his remarks, Robertson noted Mowbray’s book referred to the opinion of members of President Reagan’s cabinet that the State Department’s career administration should be “gutted.”
He asked Mowbray to explain what he meant by that.
“Well, what gutted means is you have to go in and you have to grab hold of the culture, and you have to challenge it and change it,” he said. “But to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, personnel is culture. So you have to change the people of the State Department.”
Mowbray said Reagan’s secretary of state, George Schultz, did not have much success trying to work with the career officers. What needs to be done, he said, is to “bring in outside leadership, fresh blood and infuse the place with a different mind set, one that does not have this dual emphasis on stability and making friends.”
The State Department needs to have the mindset of President Reagan, he said, to “look evil in the eye, call it for what it is, and then sit down at the negotiating table.”
“The State Department thinks that you have to make nice with countries like North Korea and Iran, so they can hold hands and be friends with the Iranian Mullahs and the Syrian dictatorship,” Mowbray said. ‘They don’t like these people, but they think they need to be nice with them in order to have agreements with them. Whereas Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union ‘the evil empire,’ and he still sat down and had more agreements with them than any other president before him.”
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