Billionaire speculator Soros says Democrats should subpoena the president

John Byrne
Published: Monday September 18, 2006

To view video highlights of the interview, click here.

Should Democrats retake the House in November, George Soros says they should have one priority: Subpoena President George W. Bush.

The billionaire currency speculator, who poured more than $20 million of his personal fortune into efforts to unseat Bush in 2004, offered his opinions on American politics and foreign policy in a wide-ranging interview with RAW STORY last week. In the exchange, he responded to questions on domestic politics, while criticizing the war in Iraq and efforts to contain nuclear technologies in Iran and Pakistan.

Soros wouldn’t say who he favored for the 2008 presidential race, but he did say Democrats should take bold moves should they win back the House of Representatives in November.

“Clearly,” he said, “using the subpoena power to bring to light the misdeeds by the administration would have to be, I think, a top priority.”

Asked whether he’s given thought to supporting moderate Republicans, he said he believed the party couldn’t be “recaptured from extremists” without the right wing of the caucus suffering defeats.

“I don't think it can be done without a defeat that will lead the Republicans to regroup, when the extremists are distracted,” he said. “Right now the extremists are still ridding themselves of the moderates in the Republican Party.”

“But I don't yet see moderates knocking out Republicans,” he added. “There are many radical or extremist challengers to moderates within the Republican Party, and very few -- if any -- to the extremists from moderates.”

Soros, who left his native Hungary in 1947, fleeing the communists after having survived the Nazi occupation, first began trading currencies in the Hungarian currency speculation of 1945-1946. His net worth was estimated in 2004 at $7 billion.

The liberal financier has given away roughly $4 billion of his fortune to philanthropy, mostly embracing causes that advance open societies and human rights. One of his first major gifts was to the University of Cape Town in South Africa, which allowed black students to attend college under apartheid.

Soros criticized American foreign policy in Iraq, saying he favored a timeline for withdrawal. Pressed specifically as to whether he thought a pullout would give a new lease to terrorists, who would proclaim an American pullout as a victory, he countered by saying he thought that the current American strategy was aggravating the problem.

“I think the argument is valid that pulling out of Iraq, cutting and leaving in a disorderly way, would have disastrous consequences,” he said. “But staying there is also having disastrous consequences, because civil war is actually gaining momentum.”

The billionaire philanthropist says he believes that an American withdrawal from Iraq would force Iraq’s neighbors to take a more active role in containing the insurgency.

“All the neighboring countries have an interest in avoiding civil war leading to a regional war,” he said. Iran “would then have to do something constructive to prevent civil disorder that could easily spread to Iran because Iran is only half Persian.”

Iran is of particular interest to Soros, who has for decades crusaded to limit the spread of nuclear weapons. He says it’s paramount that Iran not develop nuclear weapons technology because he believes it would spark a nuclear Middle East arms race. But he maintains that any solution must take into account Iran’s “legitimate” security concerns.

“You have to avoid posing the question, should we allow Iran to have nuclear weapons or should we use military force to prevent that?” he said. “A missile attack would be even more counterproductive than the invasion of Iraq, because… if there was an attack the whole nation would line up behind the leadership just like America lined up behind the president, and the same would happen to the Muslim world, and to the developing world altogether, so Iran would emerge as the leader of an anti-American block.”

Soros believes current nuclear nonproliferation treaties have failed. He says he sees this failure as an opportunity to develop a more ecumenical and lasting treaty that would apply to Iran equally with other nuclear powers, including the United States.

“You really need to reconstruct a more effective nonproliferation treaty that would address the legitimate concerns of the non-nuclear powers,” he remarked. “And that would involve -- I think -- rules that would apply equally -- a nuclear freeze that would apply equally to the nuclear ‘haves’ and the nuclear ‘have-nots,’ with intrusive inspections which would apply to the United States just as much as to Iran.”

Turning east, I asked Soros what he thought of America’s alliance with Pakistan, a key regional ally that has been fingered in the spread of nuclear weapons and is likely harboring Osama Bin Laden. He said he recognized Pakistan’s role in the US war on terror, but believed that free elections would probably produce a more positive result.

“All the indications are that the secular parties would gain an absolute majority, the religious parties would get 15 to 20 percent of the vote,” he said “Now if they [get] 15 to 20 percent of the population and it's radicalized can do an a lot of damage. But I think that's one country where holding free elections would have beneficial results, because it would put the extremist threat in proper perspective.”

He skirted a question, however, on whether the West’s cutoff of aid to the democratically elected Palestinian militant group Hamas was hypocritical. He noted that the aid cutoff had forced Hamas to form a unity government with the Palestinian secular party Fatah, and hailed this alliance as vital on the road to peace.

“I think this is actually an opportunity for Israel to engage in political negotiations that might lead to a viable settlement… a settlement that would have both main political forces agreeing to it in Palestine and thereby [be] an agreement that could actually stick,” he asserted. “And having come to the end of the road of massive retaliation because it hasn’t worked very well in southern Lebanon against Hezbollah, maybe there could be a change of attitudes on the Israeli side [that] recognize the need for a political settlement. So actually the conditions are more favorable for progress in that direction than before.”

The full interview with Soros – in which he also fields questions about the ‘end’ of sovereignty, Europe and China – can be read here.

To read the introduction or to learn more about Mr. Soros book, The Age of Fallability, visit his site here.