Zbigniew Brzezinski

Zbigniew Brzezinski, a counselor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and national security adviser to President Carter, was Tuesday's guest. Here are excerpts from his remarks:

"We are in the process of alienating not only much of the Muslim world .. [but also] we are alienating most of our friends."

"What we are seeing ... is, unfortunately, a gradual spread of the view among the Iraqis that they are dealing with an assertive, ham-handed occupation that's ... humiliating them and increasingly oppressing them. And, therefore, I expect the violence to rise up."

"If we want to deal with Iraq, we have to deal with the Israeli -Palestinian problem at the same time. There is no extrication from Iraq with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict going on."

"We are dealing with a porous, primitive regime and ... with primitive, clandestine terrorist groups, and we are totally uninformed.... We badly need a decent, competitive, highly professional, clandestine service that is able to penetrate regimes such as Iraq's."

"I am just amazed at the way this commission has been permitted to just flood the talk shows.... It is beginning to look like a partisan exercise."

An expanded report is available at: http://blogs.csmonitor.com/cooks_capitol/