RAY SUAREZ: And I'll begin tonight's questioning with Governor Dean. The United States is now trying to get help from the United Nations in the form of a resolution to internationalize the mission in Iraq. How much decision-making power can the United States share, while at the same time urging other countries to share the cost and share the risk of being there?
HOWARD DEAN: Well, as you know, I believed from the beginning that we should not go into Iraq without the United Nations as our partner. And in this situation, fortunately the president is finally beginning to see the light. We cannot do this by ourselves, we cannot have an American occupation and reconstruction. We have to have a reconstruction of Iraq with the United Nations, with NATO, and preferably with Muslim troops, particularly Arabic-speaking troops from our allies such as Egypt and Morocco.
We cannot have American troops serving under United Nations command. We have never done that before. But we can have American troops serving under American command, and it's very clear to me that in order to get the United Nations and NATO into Iraq, this president is going to have to go back to the very people he humiliated, our allies, on the way into Iraq, and hope that they will now agree with us that we were wrong to go–excuse me–that they will now agree with us that we need their help there. We were wrong to go in without the United Nations, now we need their help, and that's not a surprise.
MARIA ELENA SALINAS: (Speaking in Spanish) No matter what your point of view was on the war, whether you voted for it or you were against it, the truth is–the fact is that now we are committed there in Iraq. And nearly every day we hear of one or two soldiers dying, one or two soldiers being hurt. So now what do you say to the parents of these soldiers that are there in Iraq? What is the next step for the U.S.? What do we do with the troops? Do we bring back the troops? Do we send more troops? Or do we keep the current levels that are there? Mr. Lieberman, you have already said that you would commit more troops. Congressman Gephardt, what would you do?
Governor Dean?
We are spending more than $4 billion a month in Iraq. Do we send more troops?
HOWARD DEAN: Look, I think the most important aspect and the most important quality for any chief executive when they're executing foreign policy is judgment.
I supported the first war in Iraq because one of our allies was invaded, and I thought we had a responsibility to defend them. I supported the war in Afghanistan; 3,000 of our people were murdered. They would have murdered more if they could have. I thought we had a right to defend the United States of America. But in the case of Iraq, the president told us that Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were about to make a deal or were making a deal. The truth is, there are more likely to be people from Al Qaeda bombing Iraqis and Americans today than there were before Saddam Hussein was kicked out.
Secondly, the president told us that Iraq was buying uranium from Africa. That wasn't true. The vice president told us that the Iraqis were about to get atomic weapons. That turned out not to be true. The secretary of defense told us he knew exactly where the weapons of mass destruction were, right around Tikrit and Baghdad. That turned out to be false as well.
As commander in chief of the United States military, I will never hesitate to send troops anywhere in the world to defend the United States of America. But as commander in chief of the United States military I will never send our sons and daughters and our brothers and sisters to a foreign country in harm's way without telling the truth to the American people about why they're going there. And that judgment needs to be made first, not afterwards.
We need more troops. They're going to be foreign troops, as they should have been in the first place, not American troops. Ours need to come home.
MARIA ELENA SALINAS: Let's talk about the economy.
So the economy is growing slightly. The number of jobs is continuing to decline. And unemployment has risen faster for Hispanics than any other sector of the country. Right now, it stands at 8.2 percent. What would you do as president of the United States to remedy the situation?
RAY SUAREZ: Governor Dean, people doing all kinds of work have lost jobs in the last couple of years. But people working in the manufacturing sector have done worst of all, losing between 2 and 3 million jobs. Now, Congressman Kucinich talked about preserving certain industrial capacities as a matter of national security. But given the way goods move around the world, can we really say to a laid-off American steel worker, textile worker or auto worker, with any assurance that they ever are going to get their jobs back?
HOWARD DEAN: We can say that we can have jobs again in America, manufacturing jobs in America. I agree with most of what was said here about the economy. The one piece I would add to it, however, is that we need to stop corporate welfare and start doing something for small businesses in this country.
Small businesses create more jobs than large businesses do and they don't move their jobs offshore because they're rooted in their community. If you want to invest in America, we ought to invest in America and stay in America with those jobs.
And I agree with the infrastructure and the… We also ought to invest in renewable energy because, Lord knows, we ought to stop sending our foreign oil money to the Middle East where it's used to fund terrorism.
Now, I do not agree with Dennis that we ought to get rid of NAFTA and the WTO. But we do need to understand what makes the European Union work. You can't get into the European Union unless you have exactly the same labor and environmental and human rights standards that you do in all those countries. We ought not to be in the business of having free and open borders with countries that don't have the same environmental, labor and human rights standards. And if you do that, we're going to be able to create manufacturing jobs in America again and they'll stay in America.
MARIA ELENA SALINAS: As many of you know, the U.S. and Latin America have been negotiating the FTAA–the Free Trade of the Americas–that would create a free trade zone in Latin America by 2005. Do you support it?
HOWARD DEAN: Thank you for the opportunity to respond. We do have to have trade relations which rely on equality and labor standards throughout the world. It doesn't have to be American labor standards; it could be the International Labor Organization. I believe Mexico will do that. I believe that Mexico wants open trade relationships with the United States. And I believe, given the reform that's gone on in Mexico under Vicente Fox, that we will in fact be able to negotiate with Mexico the same labor standards, the same human rights and the same environmental standards over a period of time. And I think we need to do that. We cannot continue to ship our jobs to countries where they get paid 50 cents an hour with no occupational safety and health, no overtime, no labor protections and no right to organize. We're going to move every job out of this country.
JOSEPH LIEBERMAN: Maria Elena, may I say just briefly that Governor Dean, in his interview with The Washington Post, referred to American standards, not international standards.
HOWARD DEAN: Either is fine with me.
JOSEPH LIEBERMAN: Well, then that's a reassuring change of position. I totally support the application of international labor standards to all of our bilateral trade agreements, and I have fought for that on the floor of the Senate over and over again.
MARIA ELENA SALINAS: Forty-one million Americans do not have access to medical care or health care.
One-third of Hispanics of the 38 million Hispanics in this country do not have health care. At a time of record federal government deficits, how can this country bring the number of uninsured down?
RAY SUAREZ: Governor Dean, how would you get more of the 41 million uninsured covered? And would you have to repeal all or part of the Bush tax cuts to do it?
HOWARD DEAN: Every child under 18, 99 percent eligible, 96 percent have it. Everybody under 150 percent of poverty has health insurance in my state. Every senior under 225 percent of poverty gets prescription help. Now, if we can do that in a small rural state and balance the budget, surely the United States of America can join with the Japanese and the French and the Germans and the Irish and the Italians, the Swedes and the Norwegians, the Israelis, the Canadians. Every other industrial country in the world has health insurance for all its people, and we can do that, too, if we can do that in a small state like Vermont.
Here's what we're going to do. We are going to repeal the Bush tax cuts. You can't pay for health insurance if you have those tax cuts, including the tax cuts for middle-class people. Most middle-class people never got a tax cut from George Bush, and I'm sure they'd rather have health insurance for everybody than the $100 they got from George Bush's tax cut.
Second thing, George Bush spent $3 trillion, if you include the interest, on tax cuts for people like Ken Lay, when these people out here had their tuitions go up, their property taxes go up and their state taxes go up because of George Bush's economy. For less than a third of George Bush's tax cuts, we can cover every man, woman and child in America, in many ways building on what we did in Vermont, and that's exactly what we should do, and we should not wait.
RAY SUAREZ: Governor Dean, many of the functions of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service are now included under the new Department of Homeland Security. How do you balance the needs of the United States to both protect itself, during a time of high overseas threat, and process people who want to be immigrants to this country during an era of very high immigration?
HOWARD DEAN: Let me make two observations. First of all, I think it's important not to use profiling. Profiling doesn't work. There's been a lot of studies about it. It doesn't work in Hispanic communities. It doesn't work in African-American communities. And it doesn't work against the Arab-Americans either.
Secondly, I think for 9/11 to have affected our immigration policy is ridiculous–with Latin America is ridiculous. The last time I looked, not one of those 19 hijackers was Latino.
So the problem here is that immigration is a hot topic because people, like the president, use code words like “quotas” to try to frighten people into thinking they're going to lose their jobs to somebody who is a member of the minority community. And for that reason alone, the president ought to go back to Crawford, Texas, with a one-way bus ticket.
I am tired of being divided by race. I'm tired of being divided by gender. I'm tired of being divided by sexual orientation, by income and by religion. I want a country that's based on a community again. Yes, we can have a decent immigration policy in this country. But the problem with this administration is they can only think about one problem at a time. They are bogged down in Iraq, they are not defending us from Osama bin Laden, and they are not paying any attention to Latin America, which is the most important hemisphere in American history.