The Scribe

Bush vs. FDR: war, foreign policy, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff

Stephen Van Evera,  professor of Political Science at MIT, and Andrew Bacevich professor of History and International Relations at Boston University -- in a discussion with Tom Ashbrook of WBUR’s On Point -- “critique” the “war on terror.” 

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Intro:  “In defining his War on Terror, President Bush has not been shy about World War II analogies. Today's enemies, he has said, are ‘successors to Fascists, to Nazis.’  But there is at least one big difference. In World War II, Franklin Roosevelt led the country to complete victory over Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in just three years and nine months.  With Afghanistan and Iraq, George W. Bush is six years in, still fighting, and by no means clearly winning.  Big national security thinkers are asking why. One reason may be America's World War II formula for success has been ignored.”

Tom Ashbrook:  America’s World War II was over in 3 years and 9 months.  This time we’re nearly six years in and counting.  National security thinkers are asking, why?  … Later in this hour we will hear from historian and military thinker, Andrew Bacevich, politically conservative West Point grad, retired Army colonel, and long-time critic of the Iraq war.  His son died last month serving in Iraq.  But first, joining me in the studio is Stephen Van Evera, professor of Political Science at MIT and a big student of international relations and US national security.  He’s author of “Causes of War:  Power and the Roots of Conflict.”  His latest essay in the journal, Middle East Policy, is titled “The War on Terror:  Forgotten Lessons from World War II.”  … So, that was a great big war – 3 years and 9 months.  The American piece of it decisively won.  You’re looking at what we learned then and how we did it then and what we’ve forgotten.   …We all look back on the World War II victory as inevitable.  Was it?

Stephen Van Evera:  No, it wasn’t!  There were many ways we could have goofed the war up and either won at a much great cost or lost the war or lost the peace.  We would have had a much worse war if we hadn’t set priorities correctly.  The Roosevelt strategy was to go after Germany first because it was the biggest threat even though Japan was the first to attack.

TA:  Right. …It’s a very interesting way to get some perspective on what we’re doing now.  We’ve got half a dozen, eight, nine different areas where we may have diverged from World War II strategy and this is the first one.  Setting priorities:  describe what happened then and what you’re seeing now.

SVE:  Then, we were attacked by Japan but the Roosevelt administration judged Germany to be far the greatest threat and it pursued a strategy that was called, then “Germany First,” which was to check Japan and Asia but focus US resources on Asia.  The American thinking was that if Germany attended to first, it might defeat Britain and could dominate the Atlantic. 

TA:  So don’t go all out at Japan first, keep it back but pour US resources and attention on one primary target. 

SVE:  Correct.  And if the US hadn’t done that, Germany might have been able to consolidate its hold on the continent, conceivably even defeat the Soviet Union, and would have posed a much tougher problem down the road for a US invasion of Europe.  Possibly, even, Germany might have gotten atomic weapons. 

TA:  So choices were made.  Targets were prioritized.  And that lesson worked out pretty well! But is it being followed this time?

SVE:  No!  Today our most dangerous enemy is Al Qaeda and we aren’t focusing on Al Qaeda.  The Bush administration focused on Al Qaeda for the first few months after 9/11 by attacking Al Qaeda’s redoubt in Afghanistan, but then it lost focus and directed its attention to other projects.  It went after Iraq.  And it did that before it had firmly defeated Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.  It took resources away from the war in Afghanistan.  As a result, the Al Qaeda leadership escaped into Pakistan.  They’re still there.  They’re reasserting control over their global network.  And once again they post a very serious threat to the US. 

TA:  So the cost of ignoring this lesson from World War II – by your lights?

SVE:  That we still face this Al Qaeda threat. Al Qaeda is out there, they’re looking for weapons of mass destruction, they’re trying to bring them to our cities, they’re still able to hurt Europe as we’ve seen them do repeatedly.  And we have been unable to knock them out. 

TA:  Next strategy lesson from World War II?  Mobilizing resources.

SVE:  During World War II Roosevelt was unashamed of asking the American people to sacrifice heavily for the war.  He moved defense spending up from 2% of GNP to 54%…

TA:  …54…

SVE:  54%. Yes.  Most of what Americans were then producing was going to the war effort.  He instituted the draft in 1940 against a lot of opposition.  He instituted rationing.  He asked for sacrifice from everybody.  Today the Bush administration has not asked anyone to sacrifice except our armed forces, especially our reserves. 

TA:  With repeated tours of duty with 29,000 dead and injured at this point…

SVE:  Correct. And they are sacrificing.  But the rest of us aren’t.  The rest of us are being told to go shopping, if you recall, to pep the economy up back in 2001. 

TA:  So if it’s as important as World War II, if we’re drawing that analogy, we may be doing it rhetorically but when it comes to what we’re actually funneling to winning…?

SVE:  We’re not doing enough.  Both the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan have been waged on the cheap.

TA:  We’ve been told that we’re spending, what is it?  $2 billion a week?  Some astounding figure.  Is that really so small? 

SVE:  One rule about war is that you want to go in and win decisively at the outset.  If you don’t, it’s like a peat fire.  The mess you create goes underground…

TA:  And goes and goes and goes…

SVE:  And burns.  Yeah.  And you can’t get rid of it.  So what we’ve seen in Iraq is if we’d gone in with a big enough force at the outset, we might have been able to avoid the insurgency.  But now we face an insurgency and it’s much harder to get rid of than it would have been to prevent.  Same in Afghanistan.  The Bush administration under-resourced the war afterwork.  They put very few resources into giving Hamid Karzai the security help he needed or the economic help he needed.  Now we see the Taliban are back.  Now getting rid of them?  It’s like an infestation.   It’s going to be very hard to get rid of. 

TA:  World War II lessons being forgotten. Price being paid.  Next strategic point:  forging alliances and deals, then and now.

SVE:  We won World War II on the backs of our allies.  Americans think that World War II was won by the heroism of US troops.  In fact, US battle deaths were only 3.7% of the total deaths of the Allies during World War II. 

TA:  3.7%?

SVE:  Yes.  The US allies took over 96% of the battle deaths. 

TA:  We’re talking primarily Russia…

SVE:  Russia, China, Britain, France, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.  Those were the main allies. 

TA:  But this time our boys – and now girls…

SVE:  Yes…

TA:  … in the grinder.

SVE:  Yes, exactly.  There’s a larger lesson here.  America had great success in world affairs in the 20^th century because it was able to marshal allies to pay the biggest blood price and economic price for our success in World War II and in the Cold War.  (And World War I, for that matter…)

TA:  Do we have potential alliances like that now?  Nobody’s stepping up to take these losses, not that I can see…

SVE:  Well, because the Bush administration hasn’t made mobilizing allies a priority.  You’ll recall that after 9/11, our NATO allies voted a NATO emergency and announced that they were willing to declare themselves at war with terror and to send forces to Afghanistan.  And the Bush administration basically blew them off and said, “We don’t need your help.”   The view of the Bush people, early in the administration, was that allies are more of a hindrance than help. 

TA:  And never mind NATO allies.  In World War II, FDR worked with Josef Stalin, one of the country’s greatest avowed enemies! 

SVE:  He was willing to work with lots of bad guys.  Stalin – horrible man, mass murderer, Josep Broz Tito – the murderous leader of Yugoslavia, Chiang Kai-shek – odious leader in China.  So he’d make deals with the devil to beat the worst devil.

TA:  And we won, and the victory monuments are all over.  The cost of dropping that lesson from World War II? 

SVE:  Now we’re all alone.  Well, not completely alone, but we bear the prime costs of the war on terror, especially the prime costs of the war in Iraq.  Our losses are high and the dollar costs are huge because we’re doing this with small help from others.  Only the British are giving us really important help in Iraq.

TA:  It’s a rich list and it goes on… Next strategic point comparison:  waging the war of ideas, then and now.

SVE:  Roosevelt understood that shaping public opinion in the US and abroad was crucial to victory.  If the world thinks you’re the good guys and approves of your goals and thinks you’re working to make their lives better, they’ll help you.  He invested lots of energy in mobilizing Hollywood and other media resources to tell America’s tale to the world, to convince the world that the allied cause was the right cause.  He had Frank Capra making those famous films – you know, “Why We Fight…” and much of Hollywood was mobilized to this effort.

TA:  I can imagine people saying, “Yes, but Hitler was an easier target.  He was disgusting to the Islamic world…” Bin Laden doesn’t look potentially so odious. 

SVE:  It’s true that enemies in World War II were very grotesque and easy to paint as the bad guys.  But it’s true today! 

TA:  Shouldn’t it be, anyway!

SVE:  It should be!  Yes!  The idea that we’re losing a public relations war to bin Laden I think is a disgrace.  Bin Laden is, I think, a thoroughly grotesque figure.  He’s murdered thousands of Muslims; his political idea of an Islamist tyranny has already been tried in Afghanistan and in Sudan and in Iran and shown to fail.

TA:  You say:  “That the US is losing a public relations contest to such primitive thugs is an appalling failure and a disgrace to those US officials responsible…”  What have we forgotten here?  Is there some idea… we should pull out, why is it so hard to promote an attractive American vision that would eventually trump bin Laden?

SVE:  I think the Bush team, in the very early war on terror, didn’t think the war of ideas was important.  I think they defined the main problem in the Middle East to be that people weren’t sufficiently frightened of the US, that they didn’t put credibility behind US threats. 

TA:  “Never mind if you respect us, fear us!” 

SVE:  Exactly.  They had the Caligula theory of statecraft.  “Let them hate us as long as they fear us.”  And they were overlooking that we also need to persuade the world to come to our side.  They put very little money into this.  Only $1.3 billion is now being spent on diplomacy, to shape world opinion.  Even still today.  And only a small fraction of that is aimed at the Muslim world.  This is a tremendous blunder.

TA:  And if that idea battle is lost in the Muslim world, you’ve got a billion Muslims… what?…tilted against the US.

SVE:  1.3 billion, Tom!  Hate to give you the bad news!

TA:  Great.  God bless them.  But the battle of ideas is critical if you get a great big population that is just soured on anything to do with the US.  You’ve got built-in problems.

SVE:  We can’t end the terror problem against the US until we cause a change in the terms of debate in the radical wing of the Islamist wing of the Muslim world.  This is a prerequisite for success. 

TA:  Next piece here… “the soft landing for the defeated”… it looks anything but soft these days in Iraq and Afghanistan.

SVE:  Part of winning the peace in World War II was to reform the defeated states and bring them back to the civilized world and, in fact, mobilize them for the Cold War against Soviet Union.  The US put lots of effort, lots of money, and lots of talent into bringing German, Japan and also Italy and Austria into the western world and getting them going in the right direction. 

TA: …In a few minutes we’ll be joined by Andrew Bacevich… We’ve got through a lot already.  We come to a couple of others [strategies] here:  creating peaceful order and how the US approached that under FDR and Marshall, and bringing in the best people.

SVE:  FDR understood that it was important to work hard to create a peaceful order in the world that the US would dominate in 1945 and created institutions to insure that the new world would be peaceful.  And a new economic order so that free trade would flow.  A UN which had some peace-causing benefits.  The net benefit of these efforts was to create peace, not between east and west but within the west so that the west could be united.  FDR didn’t foresee this, but it was very important that these institutions exist so that the relationships among the western powers be well-oiled and therefore the west was ready for the Cold War and ready to contain the Soviet Union and in the end to defeat it.

TA:  And now he [Bush] was just over for the G-8 meeting and talking with the folks…?

SVE:   Well, the Bush team put very little effort in bring Iraq and Afghanistan to a peaceful solution, and they’ve also failed to understand that peace on the periphery of the Muslim world is very important.  Al Qaeda lives on war.  It thrives on war.  They recruit using the bloody shirt of those who die in wars involving Muslims in their recruiting message.  And so the Arab-Israeli conflict is gasoline for their fire.  The Kashmir helps their conflict – it helps them recruit and it helps them train.  The war in Iraq does.  The Chechen conflict does.  The US should be in the peace business.  If you want to defeat Al Qaeda, you want peace in the Muslim world and peace on the periphery of the Muslim world.  The Bush team has basically gone AWOL on the peace mission.  They have let the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fester.  They’ve done nothing to bring an end to the Kashmir conflict.  And they’ve gone into Iraq and started a war that Al Qaeda is thriving on.

TA:  “The best people.” Roosevelt put outstanding people in place.  He had Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, George Patton, Chester Nimitz and William “Bull” Halsey and many more…

SVE:  Yes.  FDR picked as his chief strategist in World War II General George C. Marshall who was a brilliant leader and a brilliant strategist who himself was a stickler for competence.  He was famous for his “little black book” which he kept for many years in which he took notes on every officer he ever met, judging whether this person was fit for command or not. 

TA:  And he was just one of a great team. 

SVE:  Marshall then selected the best team to ever run our armed forces in wartime, I believe.  Today I think Bush has tolerated poor performance by many people on his team.  He’s appointed people based on ideology not competence.  Then, after they perform poorly, he’s left them in office.  The best example is Rumsfeld who committed epic blunders in his management of the Iraq war.  The list is a yard long, ranging from not going in with enough troops, failing to plan the post war, disbanding the Iraq army, so on and so forth. 

TA:  “Uniting Americans.”  I was struck by this.  I didn’t know how Roosevelt had put aside his rather dramatic politics.  He declared that “Dr. Win-the-war” had replaced “Dr. New Deal.”  He put his politics on ice, to some extent.

SVE:  Yes.  He dropped his divisive domestic programs, the New Deal programs, and declared that he was now moving to a new program.  And he appointed Republicans to high positions in his war cabinet, including Frank Knox, who’d been the Republican vice-presidential nominee in 1936 – he made him Secretary of the Navy.  He made Henry Stimson, a Republican, Secretary of War.  He also brought in other Republicans to run the war – Frank Lovett and others.  And so he had a unity policy.  Whereas the Bush team has had a… they’ve not pursued a unity policy on the war.  They’ve basically excluded Democrats from consultation and policy-making.  And they’ve used the war as a political weapon in local campaigns. 

TA:  “Forgotten lessons from a world war well and quickly won.”  Let’s turn to Bill, calling from Holliston, Massachusetts.

Bill:  A question:  I think the history in and of itself is valuable and the points being made are valuable, but I’m just wondering about the comparison because the war seems so different.  We have a war on a concept like terror… and just considering the different presidencies comparing Roosevelt to George Bush…

TA:  On the basics… That’s a great question.  Here we’ve got not the armored ranks of German panzers and Japanese Zero fighters, but terrorists, guerrilla war.  We’ve got sectarian war to a greater extent we had in World War II by far. Are these apples and oranges?

SVE:  Bill’s right.  These wars are different in some ways but they’re similar in others.  The most important different way is that World War II was an interstate war against a major power; the war on Al Qaeda is basically a global guerrilla war, if you will, quite different in its nature.  But there are some eternities to war; some constants that are true in every war.  Setting priorities will lead to a better result than failing to do it.  You better go after your main enemy first, whoever that is.  You should find allies where you can and ask them to bear as much burden as you can.  This is always going to reduce your costs.  You should solve problems the cheap way instead of the expensive way, and often persuading people to your cause is the cheapest, easiest way to get their help instead of using force.   You need to appoint the best people, for sure, in every war – you’re going to do better when your finest are in charge rather than when your B team is in charge. 

TA:  So, whatever the parameters, these apply.  Jackie’s calling from Melrose, Massachusetts.

Jackie:  I think we’ve all forgotten that at the end of World War II, which we all supported, that Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and also President Eisenhower, our future Republican president, all said, “We must have no more wars!”  And yet, for no reasons, we’ve had eight wars, all considered preemptive wars, wars of choice. 

TA:  They may not have been all preemptive, but there sure have been a lot of them.  What do you take from that, Jackie?  Are we just too trigger-happy?

Jackie:  Let’s recall what Eisenhower said.  Beware the military-industrial complex.  And let’s not forget, I’m sorry to say, the Democrats (I’m a Democrat myself) enough Democrats voted for this war so that the war went on.  Although, of course, Congress did not declare this war.  The president just went at it after he got a certain kind of resolution…

TA:  Let us pick that up.  Steve, what about it?  Are we too quick to go to war?  It took Pearl Harbor to get us into World War II.  People have said 9/11 is like that…   Are we too quick?

SVE:  I think, down through the last century, we’ve been both too quick and sometimes too slow.  I think the US was too slow to mobilize against Germany in the ‘30’s.  But I’d love to review with you the Cold War.  I think the Vietnam War was a mistake – we should have stayed out.  I think crossing the 38^th parallel in 1950 was a mistake in Korea.  We should have gone into Korea, but we shouldn’t…

TA:  …should not have provoked the Chinese to step in…

SVE:  Exactly.  So we made big mistakes in the Cold War.  We always do.  That’s part of the warp and woof of managing world affairs – and it’s a great thing to talk about!  But it could have been a lot worse.  If FDR had not managed the endgame of World War II correctly, the Cold War could have been a much tougher business.  It could have been lost.  We could have failed to contain the Soviet Union.

TA:  Why do you think the lessons of such an important war – all Americans and not just big security thinkers but everybody looks up to World War II and salutes it as the way it can and should be done.  How could we forget lessons of such war? 

SVE:  This gets into another subject, but I’m disturbed that American public culture doesn’t study diplomatic and military history more. Our colleges and universities are increasingly not teaching it as a subject.  History departments across the US are increasingly not teaching diplomatic and military history in their course offerings.  This is a very dangerous thing that’s going on. 

TA:  In our White House, in our Pentagon, in the “halls of power” – those people don’t know? 

SVE:  Well, there’s a broad public culture here, I think, of Americans not thinking that history is serious business and that studying the past is a serious thing to do… I also think that within the Bush team there is a bad feeling about past US policy makers.  They think in general that those who came before them were wimps and that they don’t have much to learn from past American policy makers.  So they tend to be somewhat dismissive of the need to study and learn from those who came before them.

TA:  We live and learn and the lessons can be painful.

[Break]

TA:  I want to turn now to another big security thinker…  Andrew Bacevich joins me in the studio.   He’s a professor of International Relations and History at Boston University.  A US Army veteran himself, he served in Vietnam and Gulf War.  He’s a retired US Army colonel, West Point graduate.  His recent op-ed piece in the Boston Globe is called

Andrew Bacevich:  Well, I think I’d pick up on one of the points Steve Van Evera was making about the quality of the leadership that is present in trying to guide this war.  I think you could make the argument that our senior military leadership has been tremendously disappointing.  The JCS -- the modern JCS – were created in 1947 as part of the reorganization of the national security apparatus post-World War II. 

TA:  Weren’t they created in part in response to the lessons of World War II?  We thought this was the way to go.  This was the FDR formula. 

AB:  It was the FDR formula.  And indeed yes, it was the appreciation of the role played by people like General Marshall and others of the “Joint Chiefs,” as they were then called, but only existed because Roosevelt said they should exist not because they had any Congressional, legislative basis…

TA:  …institutional structure? 

AB:  And so the idea in 1947 was that we were going to reinvent that institution, we were going to make it permanent, we were going to define it, we were going to create a body of senior military officers who would provide advice to the decision makers so the decision makers would craft wise policies, will avoid the war if it can be avoided, and will wage successfully those wars that could not be avoided. 

TA:  That is, the civilian decision-makers.  The “deciders.”  This was the interface at the top of the military with the top of our civilian structure.

AB:  The JCS are not commanders.  They are advisors to the civilian leadership that makes the basic decisions.   To the Secretary of Defense and to the President.  The defacto firing of General Peter Pace, the current chairman, to me is one more indication of the extent to which this institution, the JCS, has simply not served the nation well.  Now, when Pace is let go – I said fired but he’s simply not reappointed for what is usually a second two-year term – Secretary of Defense Gates appoints Admiral Mike Mullen to replace him and says, “Mullen’s a good guy.”  And Mullen is a good guy.  And this was going to fix the problem.  I think that even if Admiral Mullen is a “good guy,” this institution is so dysfunctional, has come to be so dysfunctional over its sixty years of existence, that a better approach is not to simply appoint a new guy to be in charge but to consider scrapping this system and create new mechanisms for providing military advice to the president.  Because we do want good military advice to be provided. 

TA:  … But we do have to have an interface between the civilian and the military.  They do need advice.  What’s wrong with this current structure and how would you begin to change it? 

AB:  I think the problem does indeed go all the way back to the 1940’s when there were tremendous struggles between the military and the senior leadership over a wide variety of issues connected to nuclear weapons, connected to budgets, debate about basic strategy, racial desegregation.  And the point is that the Joint Chiefs from the 1940’s have tried to intrude into arenas that in fact properly belong to the civilians. 

TA:   You said the history here is one of “conniving, double dealing, and mutual manipulation.”  You remind us of Dwight D. Eisenhower, of course a former general himself, and he left the presidency in his farewell address warning that the military-industrial complex could well “endanger our liberties, our democratic processes.”  You say that amounted to a tacit admission that he, as Commander-in-Chief, had lost control of his generals on the JCS.

AB:  Because when you look at the history of the administration, the civil-military history is one in which senior military leaders were constantly trying to undermine or to change Eisenhower’s basic policies.  A very good example of that… and the question here is not whether the policies were smart, the civilians need to decide.  But a good example of that is the strategy of “massive retaliation,” the reliance on nuclear weapons, and this hurt the Army in a budgetary sense.  Senior Army leaders like Matthew Ridgeway and Maxwell Taylor exerted themselves to find all sorts of ways – press leaks, going to Congress – to try to discredit the basic strategy of the President of the United States. 

TA:  But this time out, the dynamic feels the other way around.  It’s been military officers who’ve been discredited by civilian leaders!

AB:  The civilians have learned the lessons of the Eisenhower era, of the Kennedy era.  And the big lesson they have learned is to try to marginalize the military and what we see – and I think, sadly, General Pace is a good example of this – the way to marginalize the Joint Chiefs is to appoint to the JCS people who are pliable, people who don’t rock the boat, people who are accommodating.  Who will go along.  That’s what we’ve gotten into…

TA:  … Instead of our best advisors, our clearest thinkers, our strongest voices…

AB:  Instead of the people who would say, “Mr. President, this will fail.”  Or, “Mr. President, this enterprise”  -- let’s say the invasion of Iraq – “will produce complications that we cannot possibly foresee.

TA:  Of course Colin Powell talked like that!  He was that kind of chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

AB:  Well, he was.  But of course again Powell, as I tried to explain in the piece, Powell also overplays his hand by intruding into all sorts of areas where he should not have strayed.  Powell tried to make himself, if not the policymaker, at least somebody who could exercise veto power over the policies.  Presidents ever since, both Clinton and this president, have said, “We’re not going to have that problem.  We’re not going to choose smart, savvy, charismatic people to be the chairman…

TA: …Let’s turn to our listeners.  Bill is calling from Charleston, South Carolina. 

Bill:  …Andy, let me send my condolences to you.  Heartfelt.  What do you see as the decision mechanism if not the JCS?  Some independent form, like a Colin Powell sitting on the Hill somewhere? 

AB:  Well, again, it’s not decisions, it’s advice.  But frankly, yes.  What I suggest in the piece I wrote for the Boston Globe is that we separate the advisory function from the function and responsibility of managing the services, which is, of course, what the service chiefs do on a day-to-day basis.  And I think we might want to give some consideration to creating a form of wise men – wisdom is, above all, what we want to be able to provide to the president and the secretary of defense.  Wisdom.  And candor.  And, I think, the ability to rise above both parochial considerations and partisan considerations.  And so these wise men might be retired officers but I would say not necessarily retired 4-star officers.  4-stars aren’t necessarily the wisest people.  The wise men, and it could be women as well, might not even be retired officers, and might be people who have spent their lives studying warfare and military affairs.  But some separate advisory body that the president and the secretary of defense could turn to with a high level of confidence that they would be receiving sound advice, not tainted by partisan or parochial considerations. 

TA:  The key thing you’re saying there is you would separate the body of advisors.  They would not be involved in the day-to-day running of the military.

AB:  Correct.  And would have, in a sense, no axe to grind in terms of whether or not we should have more aircraft carriers or fewer jet fighters. 

TA:  But let me ask you about that. Someone might say, well, if they’re not involved in running the military, how are they going to know what we are actually going to do, our actual capacity.  Will they have that sort of tactile feel for what can be done? 

AB:  Well, again, I would imagine that these wise men and women would be students of military affairs and students of national security policy.  They may well – probably the great majority of them – will have been retired professional officers.  But again, some of them might be people who had served as civilians with the secretary of defense, or people who had been academics.  Not pushing the civilian… I’m just saying we ought to be able to think more broadly about who can provide that kind of advice, high quality advice.  And the answer is not necessarily people who are wearing 4 stars on their shoulders. 

TA:  In uniform.  In command. 

AB:  Correct. 

TA:  As I read it, it sounds wonderful.  But isn’t this problem, the place where civilian and military meet in the system is problematic by beautiful design, isn’t it?  I mean, how are you ever going to have advisors who are completely disinterested or who don’t have political agendas.  Is that achievable? 

AB:  It may not be.  And indeed, if we imagined that an administration came to power with its particular ideological point of view, then I suppose the president might just go ahead and pick advisors that he said… “I know these people think the way I think.”  I would hope that, under this system that I’m outlining, the set of advisors would have to be confirmed by the Senate.  And so there might be some efforts to insure that they weren’t simply political hacks, cronies, chosen by the president.  But let me also emphasize that to me the larger argument I’m trying to promote here is not that I have the answer to the problem.  What I’m really trying to promote is that there is a problem. 

TA:  Right.

AB:  There is a problem that the system we have evolved over the past sixty years, that we call the Joint Chiefs of Staff, doesn’t work. 

TA:  President Bush always says he’s taking the advice of his military commanders!  Is that a lie?

AB:  One hates to call the president a liar but I have real doubts, especially during the tenure of Secretary Rumsfeld, that military advice was being offered in a very forthright manner or was being welcomed.  I have serious doubts…

TA:  So what do you do in a situation where the civilian leadership seemed to really want this war?  In our system, do we want a military that’s really going to push back and say no? 

AB:  We want a military that is going to push back in the sense that these leaders will say to the people for whom they work, “This is our judgment.  This is what you must understand.”  But emphatically, the decisions must be made at the end of the day by the civilian leadership.

TA:  Are you sure those things have not been said within the Joint Chief?  In this war? 

AB:   No.  It’s difficult for us to say.  When the archives are opened in 50 years, the picture may look somewhat differently.  But you cited earlier the example of General Shinseki who was, at one moment, somebody who did speak up, who did say (he was testifying before a Senate committee), “This occupation is going to be uglier, more complicated, and more costly than we are imagining.”  And he was humiliated.

TA:  And we’re reading in the New Yorker Seymour Hersh reporting on General Taguba who, when he exposed Abu Ghraib – which was his job – was given the cold shoulder…

AB:  …was punished and basically shoved into retirement.  I suspect within the ranks of the flag officers in the various services they probably knew about his fate long before Seymour Hersh wrote about it in the New Yorker.

TA:  Chilling effect…

AB:  So again, to say that the JCS system is broken is not to say that the problem with our national security policy is exclusively reflecting a failure of the military.  Heavens no!  The primary responsibility for the debacle of Iraq rests with the president and with his inner circle of decision makers.  But I do believe that the senior military leadership owns a piece of the responsibility.

TA:  Let’s to Jeff in Buffalo, New York.

Jeff:  My question was about the parallels people seem to be making with a lot of politicians looking for victory in Iraq and it seems to me that the parallels when we go back to World War II to find victory there – it seems to me we’re having a hard time figuring out which side we’re on.  In many ways we are the invaders but we supported the insurgents back in World War II.  And in many ways it seems to me that we’re not able to see the big picture.  Which is maybe we’re fighting the problems that the Germans had keeping the land they had invaded.  I’m wondering if we’re not seeing something a little bit of something very ugly in history inside the people that are running our decision-making.

TA:  Okay… 

AB:  I endorse about 98.7 percent of what Stephen Van Evera said, making those comparisons and the principles that produced success there…  I do think one place where the comparison breaks down – I think you had a caller who was getting at this – is that this is not a war like that war.  The Iraq war is not a war like World War II.  More broadly, I think, the national security threat posed by Islamic radicalism is not like the national security threat posed by National Socialism in Germany and by Japanese imperialism.

TA:  Jeff is suggesting that the US is the bad guy this time.  Has it come to that? 

AB:  Well, no.  Judgments about good guys and bad guys are very, very difficult to make.  I’m afraid that we’re not the bad guy, we’re the stupid guy in terms of the way we’ve gotten ourselves into the predicament.  But the larger point is that there are real limits to the comparisons we can make with World War II in terms of understanding how to go forward in Iraq at this point.  As a matter of fact, I’d say that in an operational sense there are very few lessons from World War II that could be applied to the battleground that is Iraq today. 

TA:  10,000 pushing right now.  We’re told [inaudible] Al Qaeda outside of Iraq.  Stephen Van Evera looking at very basic things:  alliances, “the best people,” marshalling resources – I suppose these are almost indisputable.  I want to go to the other part of your recent argument.  We hear again and again, in the presidential debates, almost everybody standing up and saying, “We are going to build a bigger US military.”  On the Democratic side and on the Republican side.  Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Barack Obama, McCain, Giuliani, Mitt Romney… all saying this.  You say, “Wrong instinct!  Wrong idea!”

AB:  I think it’s a cheap applause line in a sense.  Everybody knows that US forces – land forces – are indeed overstretched.  They are.  Emphatically overstretched. So it becomes an easy applause line for a presidential candidate to say, I’ll expand the size of the Army…

TA:  But isn’t it clear we’re so overstretched people are going out over and over again?  Shinseki said we needed more troops at the get-go.  To a layperson, it can easily make sense.  By gosh, we’d better more people in there!

AB:  But to recite that applause line seems to me dodges the larger issue.  The larger issue is the strategic one.  If one thinks that, the way to win a global war on terror is to invade and “liberate” countries; if indeed we think that Iraq is a model for the future, then you betcha!  I mean, then the problem of these speeches is that we don’t need 100,000 new troops, we probably need about a half million or a million.

TA:  Which nobody is talking about. 

AB:  But the real question is, given the manifest failure of Iraq, what ought to be the principles that inform the way we are going to adjust to the treat posed by Islamic radicalism.  And invade and “liberate” countries ought not to make anybody’s list of what the principles are.

TA:  What’s your alternative vision? 

AB:  I think – again, my intent here is not to say “here’s the three easy steps for a simple answer” (if I could do that I’d be a famous guy!) – I think that rather than thinking of the response to Islamic radicalism as finding ways to use American power to fix Islam rather than trying to do that.  That really is what the Bush administration has been attempting,

TA:  Fix Islam with a rifle.

AB:  We ought to try to contain the problem, to limit the problem which both recognizes the limits of our own power and also recognizes that, to the extent Islam is going to change and evolve, as it is, it’s going to change and evolve in response to forces that come from inside the Islamic world.  What we want to do to try, as best we can, to nudge gently that process in a direction that will lead to congenial relations between ourselves and the people of the Islamic world.  That’s a long project.  It’s not in particular a military project. 

TA:  Let’s go to Sayeed in Boston.

Sayeed:  …I just want to make a comment and maybe inject some reality into the rhetoric that in general surrounds this war on terror.  My thought is that the US is allied with some of the most disgusting governments in the world – and with drug lords and warlords and people who are accused of war crimes.  For example, people in Afghanistan.  By betraying the true values of democracy in the West – equality, freedom, and justice and the rule of law…. Those debates are ignored and we’re talking about very detailed technicalities.  What’s happening is not a gentle nudge.  It’s really a grab for the helm, saying, “Make a radical turn our way…”

TA:  Regime change.  Pushing out the battle of ideas. 

AB:  I do think that would be a fair description of the thinking within the Bush administration probably roughly between September 12, 2001, and the president’s second inaugural address. 

TA:  Go for the head.

AB:  …That we were going to be the sponsors of freedom and democracy and it’s our way or the highway.  I think those notions have been utterly discredited by events.  Not simply events in Iraq but events in the West Bank and in Gaza and Lebanon.  The problem is now, in what really becomes its waning months, has no coherent set of principles to guide policy and really is now engaged in simply improvising and making things up from day to day.  We are, in that sense, adrift.

TA:  …How has your private loss [the recent loss of a beloved son in Iraq] has affected your thinking about this very public issue, this war, these challenges?

AB:  Well, I have to say it hasn’t affected my thinking at all.  One needs to try to evaluate policy based on a set of principles, informed by a sense of history, and the principles to which I subscribe – and the understanding of history that I have come to – persuaded me from the outset that this is an unnecessary war, and a wrong-headed war, and I long ago became persuaded that it’s an utterly mismanaged and bungled war.   Nothing that’s happened to me personally has changed that.

US withdrawal from Iraq: preparing for September 2007

US withdrawal from Iraq:  Run-up to September 2007

Hour-long discussion on the Diane Rehm show, May 29, 2007, on  “What it would take to achieve meaningful progress this summer, and what may happen without it.”

Diane Rehm with  James Kitfield, senior correspondent, "National Journal" magazine, Andrew Krepinevich, executive director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary assessments, and Michael O'Hanlon, senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution

__________

Diane Rehm:   President Bush signed new war funding into law after Democrats dropped a demand for a withdrawal timeline.  That leaves this summer for the American military and Iraqis to achieve progress before the political debate explodes again in the US.  A look at what US security operations are achieving in Iraq, and where things might stand come September. 

DR:  James Kitfield, I know you’ve just returned from a two-week reporting trip to Iraq.  What can you tell us about the US-led security operations, in Baghdad where you were and in Anbar province. 

James Kitfield:  Well, in Baghdad they’re still receiving new units but they’re implementing this counterinsurgency doctrine where they get out into the neighborhoods with security forces alongside the Iraqis.  There is a lot of good that’s happening there.  I couldn’t help thinking – and this comment was made constantly – that we needed to have done this a couple of years earlier. 

DR:  “Done this?”

JK:   Basically get out there.  Instead of – and Andy has written a lot about this – instead of focusing on these big sweeps and targeting the “bad guys” if you will – the enemy – to actually securing neighborhoods, securing regions, so the Iraqis can get some semblance of a regular life in order.  What they’re finding is that they get out there with the Iraqi units, and as they take back these neighborhoods and stay there, they’re getting much better intelligence tips.  They’re able to be a buffer between the Sunnis-Shiite tensions in mixed neighborhoods.  They’ve stopped a lot of the ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods by the militias.  Murders have gone way down.  So some good things are happening but the bad news is that this is a very long term process – to take back a city like this.  I worry we don’t really have the time to see it through.

DR:  At the same time today you had two car bombings killing 38 people in Baghdad.  The military announced yesterday 8 soldiers died on Memorial Day – two in a helicopter crash and six in explosions.  Also you’ve got three German citizens working for a German computer company kidnapped from the Iraqi Finance Ministry in Baghdad.  So, while I understand you’re reporting the good news, what about what we’re also hearing in the news?

JK:  Two points, one of which is that fighting this way entails significant risk for American soldiers.  They’re out there among the populace in a way they weren’t before.  They’re not just doing targeting operations in the middle of the night.  They’re actually patrolling and trying to secure neighborhoods.  It’s more risky and we’re going to see more casualties, unfortunately. Also, where they had stopped some of the Shiite militias doing the death-squad activities they saw after last year’s bombing in Samara,  they have not figured out a way Al Qaeda from infiltrating with these bombs.  Until they do, unfortunately these IED’s, these roadside bombs, are going to continue.  They’ll wreak a terrible toll.

DR:  What can you tell us about the readiness of the Iraqi forces themselves?

JK:  The Iraqi forces are much progressed from what I saw in 2004 when they were kind of thrown into the fight when things got really bad, and they kind of melted away.  They’ve done significant things in standing up real forces.  They are standing and fighting.  I kind of broke it down to “can these people fight?  are they trained and equipped to fight? will they fight?” – I think the answer to those questions is yes.  Who they will ultimately fight for is what, I think, worries most US commanders here, because the sectarian influence is still strong throughout the Iraqi security forces. 

DR:  So they’re going back and forth, is that what you're sugg

JK:  Absolutely!  One of the advantages of this new doctrine is the Americans are hand and foot with the Iraqis now, so they see who are the good apples and who are the bad apples.  They’re having to use all their influence and pressure to get rid of the bad apples.  But the bad apples exist at the senior level.

DR:  …Turning to you now, Michael O’Hanlon, how many additional troops have actually reached Iraq since the president announced in January a troop surge?

Michael O’Hanlon:  About 20,000, Diane, which is close to the advertised number at the time.  Though as you may recall from the subsequent reporting, that was an underestimate because there had to be more support going along with the 21,500 combat forces that, if I recall correctly, was the number announced when the president and General Petraeus put forth the strategy in the wintertime.  I think we’re up at around 20,000. We have four of the five brigades now in Baghdad, if I’m remembering correctly – and James can confirm that.  And we have some of the additional marines in Al Anbar province plus some of that support.  So it’s probably in the 20,000 to 22,000 range.  Don’t forget, though, that we were at about 135,000 before this began.  A little lower than the overall four year average.  So I think we’re now up in the range of about 155,000. 

DR:  How many more do you believe will be sent for this surge?

MO:  There are two answers to that.  The short answer – the concrete, specific answer – is about 5,000 more – ballpark.  But then there’s also some talk about how, as we get into the fall, the various rotations will overlap or not, and we may see a temporarily higher number.  Of course, it’s going to be hard to say as high as 150,000 much longer because of the wear and tear on the forces, again, that Andy and others have written about.  But I think there’s a moment in the fall that we may be even higher than the 160,000 that’s projected for the summer.

DR:  …Now turning to you, Andrew Krepinevich:  To what extent were benchmarks actually incorporated into this war funding bill that the president signed on Friday?

Andrew Krepinevich:  Well, it was a critical issue for the Democrats – to have some kind of benchmark, some kind of metrics – which is the military term – that could be used to evaluate in the September timeframe whether or not we were making progress in Iraq.  And that’s something, quite frankly, that we’ve struggled with since the beginning of the conflict.  In this kind of war, as my colleagues have pointed out, operations are often messy.  As Jim Kitfield said, you have a doctrine now that says “we don’t really expect to see results for months, perhaps.”  So, again, you’re laying groundwork, you’re not really showing results.   But General Petraeus has got to report out in the September time frame whether or not he believes progress is being made.

DR:  Why is that September time frame so crucial?

AK:  Well, that’s when you get to the point where you’re talking about laying out a new supplemental for the coming fiscal year to support military operations in Iraq.  So that’s when the debate will be rejoined.  That’s when Congress comes back from their summer recess.  And, of course, that’s when we really get into the thick part of the campaign period for the presidential nominations.  So you have a number of events coming together.  The metrics that are chosen at the time are going to be interesting, I think.  Those are the ones you’re going to have to live with.  If you say “progress is occurring in Iraq” and you lay out that certain things are happening in September, then you’re going to be called to account in December and in March and in the following May:  how are these metrics trending?  And that’s something, quite frankly, that we’ve never been able to put our finger on.  Congress has required the Defense Department to report on the metrics.  The reports that I’ve seen are kind of a jumble of data.  You don’t really get a sense of how things fit together in a way that leads to us accomplishing our objectives.  And back to what James Kitfield said, these metrics really have to focus on intelligence.  The Army I grew up in – we always worried:  “Do we have enough tanks to stop the Soviets, or enough planes, or enough artillery,  and so on?”  That’s not the problem here.  We know who the enemy is and where the enemy is.  The war is over.  The problem is, we don’t know that.

DR:  Over the weekend, James Kitfield, we heard reports that in fact the administration is looking to reduce troop levels in 2008.  That was a report in the New York Times.  In the midst of the presidential elections in 2008, they’re looking to reduce troop levels to 100,000.  What do you make of that?

JK:  They’ve been “looking to reduce troop levels” since I was there in 2003.  There’s always a six to eight month horizon where they’re looking for things to turn around in a way that lets them start withdrawing force levels.  This level of force, as Michael said, is going to be very hard to sustain.  The army is stretched to the absolute maximum.  So that’s one thing driving the debate about when they start to reduce the levels next year.  They would very much like, in an election year, to get on a downward slope, hand off more security to the Iraqi forces and get on a downward slope in troop levels.  They wanted to do that before the 2004 elections and they had planned to do that.  But the situation on the ground didn’t allow them.  I think the situation on the ground, again, could be a problem in getting anything like the kinds of withdrawals – down to half levels… I don’t really see that.  But certainly there are plans.  They would like to do that.  If the surge works rather dramatically well, I think that would be their plan.  But so far their plans have always been a little more optimistic than the situation on the ground warranted.

DR:  So you’re saying that what we’re hearing sounds more optimistic than the reality that you saw?

JK:  If what we’re hearing is that they think things are going to allow them to reduce by half next year, I’d say yes.

DR:  …I want to understand a phrase that you, James Kitfield, used…. You talked about military being “stretched to the absolute maximum.”  Andrew Krepinevich, exactly what does that mean? 

AK:  That means that people are becoming concerned that the Army, in particular, which has the dominant role in Iraq, is getting perhaps perilously close to a red line, the line at which units start to become ineffective in the field.  The concern is even though right now they’re effective, and right now the Army has met its goals for recruiting and retaining people, that there are a lot of canaries dropping in the mineshaft.  The quality of the recruits has been going down, for example. 

DR:  What does that mean?

AK:  That means that the aptitude scores of the soldiers coming into the Army are lower than they’ve been in some time.  That means there are more waivers being given for moral issues like drug use and other problems…

DR:  … ”Waivers being given,” meaning that people are allowed in…?

AK:  Right.  People who would not normally meet the Army’s standards are being admitted.  Age waivers:  the Army would not have met its recruiting goal last year without admitting people over the age of 35 – which is not exactly the peak time you want to bring someone into a very physically demanding profession.  Other problems are the Army says, by its own metrics, that we need to have our troops back out of combat zone before sending them back into Iraq.  Right now, for many soldiers, that time is less than one year – not two years, less than one year. 

DR:  And what does that actually do to those men and women going back after less than two years?

AK:  Well, it becomes difficult for the soldier because you’re not getting the time to rest and recoup from being in that very stressful combat environment.  It puts incredible stress on families because these are men and women who are going off leaving their families – leaving their spouses and children – for a year.  So it’s stressful in a number of ways.  Then, on top of that, the equipment that the Army has is wearing out at an accelerated rate.  Picture someone who has a car who says “I’m going to commute ten miles a day” being forced to commute sixty miles a day.  The Army’s helicopters, its Humvees, all sorts of equipment being used up at a much higher rate.  What you have is a backlog.   The Army says we have $19 billion worth or work to do in terms of repairing worn out or damaged equipment or buying new equipment.  So what does it do?  It’s having to strip out equipment from units back here in the States to provide to those soldiers over in Iraq.  The soldiers in Iraq are fully equipped – they have the equipment they need.  But the soldiers back here who are training up to go to Iraq oftentimes don’t have their full complement of equipment until they actually get into the war theatre itself.

DR:  Michael O’Hanlon?

MO:  I just want to summarize, in a way – I hope this is fair to what Andy said – he’s given a lot of the specifics – the overall assessment I would say that no one knows how far we can push this force exactly.  Most of these measures are very hard to quantify.  The equipment shortfalls, yes.  The morale and perseverance of the troops and their endurance?  We can’t really quantify that.    A year ago I talked to four-star generals who at that time could not have imagined a surge because they thought it would be more than the Army could realistically bear.  They were against it just on force-rotation grounds alone.  Now they’re saluting.  It’s not that they are being dishonest.  It’s not that they’re going against their own quantitative, objection assessment.  It’s that they knew back then it was a subjective feel – how far they could push the force.  They thought we were already pushing hard enough with 135,000-140,000 troops in the field.  Some of those people have continued to be astounded at how much their own soldiers and marines will put up with.  But we all know we are pushing them harder than we would ever have envisioned four years ago, harder than we even would have envisioned a year ago, and harder than is prudent.  So what this says is that you can’t necessarily know when the force will break.  If you wait until you have proof the force has broken, you’ve waited too long.  We have to anticipate that, not wait for it to be proven.

JK:  Just two data points on the back-to-back-to-back deployments.  The Army’s own surveys show that the incidents of post traumatic stress syndrome [PTSD] increases 50% on the second tour.  A lot of the guys I saw were already on their third tour when I was in Iraq.  So you can extrapolate from that.  And on the equipment crisis that Andy’s talking about, we have no strategic reserve in this country anymore.  We have thrown everything into the fray.   There’s not a single brigade back in the US that is a strategic reserve in case a contingency arises with Iran or North Korea – take your pick!  That’s something we’ve never done before.  But basically, those units are not ready because they don’t have the equipment.

AK:  Just one final quick point.  As Michael pointed out, there is this red line.  Nobody can tell you exactly when you cross it.  But a number of generals have come to the conclusion that once you cross that red line, it’s like a snowball going down a hill.  It becomes extremely difficult to recover once the force hits that wall or starts to break down.

DR:  What does it mean to “hit that wall”?

AK:  It means that units start to become combat-ineffective.  You send a unit over to Iraq to perform a mission.  The unit now goes over and cannot perform that mission at an acceptable level…

DR:  Because?

AK:  Because you’re having trouble with discipline, because you have soldiers going AWOL – perhaps in some cases before their deployment, because the equipment just isn’t there or isn’t functioning at the necessary level of full effectiveness, because morale goes down and soldiers begin to lose confidence in their leadership.  There are a number of things.  And as Michael said, these aren’t quantifiable.  You can’t just come up with a formula or have data and say, Ah, it’s next Tuesday that we hit this problem…

DR:  All right.  Something that could be quantifiable, Michael O’Hanlon:  how much political progress is Iraq making in, for example, oil revenue sharing?

MO:  Still stuck.  The bill to allocate revenues is still not through Parliament.  I agree with your point.  Andy and James have been introducing some quantitative metrics.  We’ve been talking about the usefulness of these but also the limitations of these.  However, I would submit that in September, if the Iraqis have not delivered on these five or six big things – oil is one, a reform de-baathification process that’s a little gentler to midlevel Baathists would be another, allocating more control to the provinces and speeding up their elections a third.  If there hasn’t been demonstrable progress on at least a couple of these, I think it’s going to be pretty clear that, on balance, the mission is failing. 

DR:  How important is oil revenue sharing to national reconciliation?

MO:  I think it’s critical for any plan.  Even the soft partition plan that I favor in Iraq, you’ve got to have the Sunnis in particular, who sit on very little oil in the parts of Iraq that they inhabit, feel convinced that they are part of the future of Iraq.

DR:  And how effective, Andrew, has the new US ambassador, Ryan Crocker, been in helping the Iraqis to understand the importance of these metric dimensions?

AK:  So far, not that effective.  But as Michael says, this has been a critical part of the administration’s strategy.  What we want this civil war to be about is a civil war between moderate elements of the three major groups in Iraq:  the Kurds, the Shia Arabs, and the Sunni Arabs against their radical elements.  Unless we can bring that together, then we don’t have any government that shares our goals for the Iraqi security forces to be loyal to.  So, when the American forces have secured an area and begin to move on to secure other areas – which is part of the strategy – you have to have reliable Iraqi security forces to come in that are loyal to a government that represents the moderate elements of these three factions within Iraq.  Other wise, as Michael said, you’re just picking a side in a civil war. 

DR:  Yesterday the US and Iran met for the first time – first formal meeting in 27 years.  James Kitfield:  what do we know about that meeting and about that effort? 

JK:  Well, it’s a fledgling effort.  As you said, it’s the first meeting in many, many years.  The Iranians are doing lots of things in Iraq we find very unuseful.  Especially arming some of the Shiite militias, especially with these charges that are killing American soldiers.  They continue to do that.  The brigade I was with had just rounded up a stash of those that had been discovered in its area of operations.  So I think the talking is good.  I think there is one place where our interests interconnect with Iran’s.  I don’t think Iran has in its national interest an all-out civil war in Iraq.  That could easily spill over its own borders with its own minority problems.   But they do have a strategic interest in us being tapped and bled in Iraq.  They’re kind of torn between those two strategic objectives.  And just to follow up on Andy’s point on these benchmarks:  one thing that struck me when I was in Iraq was the level of skepticism about this government.  Every day Iraqis – and I talked to a lot of them – they don’t trust this government, they think it’s sectarian; they think these politicians are in it for themselves.  And that is the strategic objective:  to buy breathing room for this government to reach some reconciliation by September.  If it doesn’t – I’m with Michael – if it doesn’t, then the strategic goal here has failed.  The tactics could work on clearing and holding neighborhoods, but unless they use this breathing room to reach some reconciliation, the strategic objective will not be met.  And I must say I came back from that trip a lot more skeptical about this government ability to reach that reconciliation than when I came…

DR:  Andrew?

AK:  James is absolutely right.  We can train up all the Iraqi security forces we want.  If we don’t have a government that they can be loyal to, then we’re just going to training up factions that are going to be fighting in a civil war.

DR:  What kind of leverage, Michael O’Hanlon, can the US have with Iran in regard to Iraq while this nuclear issue regarding Iran is hanging over the two countries?

MO:  Unless you’re going to make a trade – “get out of Iraq and we’ll let you have your nukes” (which I don’t think we’re interested in making, though you might want to make a strategic argument that we might want to consider it) – unless you’re going to make that trade, I think you’re dealing with second and third level tools…

DR:  …Is that on the table?

MO:  No.  No.  So I think your only real options are to remind Iran that the degree to which you work hard to put economic pressure on them over nuclear matters could be to some extent dependent on what they do.  Even if you’re always going to oppose their nuclear program, how hard you try to oppose it could be to some extent a function of what they do.  And just use reason!  These people have an interest in a reasonably stable Iraq.

DR:  And at the same time – today – Iran announced espionage charges against three Iranian-Americans.  We have a caller, Paul, from Jacksonville, Florida.

Paul:  Everyone in this country at the 2006 November elections – both Republicans and Democrats – agreed that it was a referendum on the Iraq war and that the people of the US want this war stopped.  Bush’s response to the election was to order a surge, send more troops into Iraq! Now the Democrats have caved and given Bush what he wants.  We need to take a good hard look at this system that allows the president and Congress to thwart the will of the American people like this.  I don’t know how many of your listeners are aware, but Cindy Sheehan on Memorial Day quit the Democratic Party in disgust and then the antiwar movement yesterday because of their caving to Bush and his policies.

MO:  I certainly respect the caller’s viewpoint.  But I disagree.  I don’t think last November’s referendum said that we have to end this war immediately.  Last November the voters said, “The war is not going well, Mr. President.  It’s time to change.”  Now, I grant it’s ironic that the response to that would be an escalation, which is in fact what happened.  But the American public put pressure on the president:  “you better deliver results fast!”  And in a sense, what the President is trying to do – I don’t have any great regard for his presidency on this issue but what he’s trying to do is come up with a new strategy.  He admitted two months after the election that the strategy at that time was failing.  Now I think he has until September to show some results from the surge.  If there aren’t big results by then, I think the same kind of pressure the caller talked about is in fact going to lead to the logical next step which is a lot more pressure on the money.

AK:  I met with the new members – the freshmen members – of the House of Representatives in January.  At the time I said, “You campaigned on a platform of criticizing the administration’s performance in Iraq.  Part of that criticism was the president had no plan for Phase 4:  what would happen after Saddam Hussein was toppled.  And we’ve been muddling through ever since.”  I said, “You’ve campaigned on a platform of withdrawal.  But did you clearly say to the American people the potential for consequences of what happens after withdrawal?  What’s your plan for Phase 4?  What is your plan for the day after we withdraw? “  And I said, “If you don’t have one, and if you don’t do justice to the American people by explaining the potential consequences, then you’re no better than the administration you criticize for not having a plan itself.”

DR:  So do you then agree with Michael O’Hanlon’s point that the president did listen to the American people, but his reaction to that 2006 election was simply not what the American people expected?

AK:  Absolutely.  I don’t think they expected that.  But, as Michael said, the president looked at this and said, “The message I’m getting here is that my time horizon has shrunken dramatically.  We don’t have years to get results in Iraq, we have maybe months.”  The surge, in the president’s mind, I believe, is the last best hope to turn it around.  It’s a gamble.  It’s high risk, as James was saying.  In a sense it’s all or nothing.  “I’m willing to stretch and strain the Army to the max in the hope of getting results quickly so I can get better support from the American people on this war.”

DR:  …We’ll go right back to the phones.   Let’s go to Charleston, South Carolina.

William:  In September, when the benchmarks are deemed to have failed and election politics kick in, it seems there’s no doubt we’re going to pull out from Iraq.  But I wonder what’s going to happen, particularly with Karzai in Afghanistan, Musharraf in Pakistan, the Iranian position vis-à-vis of course the folks in Iraq and other places – what’s going to happen with the Kurds vis-à-vis the Turks.  And what about the Gulf State nations, the Sunni nations who have said they’re going to acquire nuclear weapons now to counter the nuclear weapons of the Shia.  It seems to me that we cannot depart the area.  As General Zinni said,  “To leave the area completely is to be naïve.” 

DR:  James?

JK:  I actually agree with that.  I think there is an unfortunate tendency in the debate in Washington to be, “when we decide to withdraw, that’s the end of it.”  And that really is just the beginning.  When we decide to withdraw, we have to then think through what we’re going to leave in our place.  What kind of power vacuums do we create?  And there’s a lot of serious planning that needs to go into how to do that in a way that gives the best chance of this thing not imploding into an all-out civil war that draws in its neighbors.  Everyone knows that’s a possibility.  I would just encourage people, when they talk about withdrawing, to think through what that means.  Because there are ways you can do it to minimize your risk.  But they all require tough decisions. 

DR:  Here’s an email questioning that whole perspective from Philip who says, “The Republicans are convinced Iraq will erupt into chaos if or when the US leaves ‘precipitously,’ whatever that means.  The Democrats are afraid the Republicans might be right! But this debate is going on only in the US.  If Iraq goes to total chaos, the whole civilized world will be endangered.  If this is a real issue, why aren’t other countries, e.g., NATO, speaking up?”

MO:  NATO feels this is our war.  Bottom line.  We are allies; they want to be helpful; they loved to be helpful in Afghanistan and some are even prepared to fight there – not too many, but a few!  But they think of this as our war.  I don’t think that would have changed if John Kerry had won in ’04.  I don’t think that’ll change no matter who wins in  ’08.  The NATO countries are down to about 10,000 troops, total, in Iraq.  Total foreign presence there is about 14,000.  It used to be in the 25,000 range.  No one is anxious to help and of course even Tony Blair’s government is pulling out in its last stages.  I think the kind of hope you might have is if you do go to a different kind of political strategy.  Maybe if you have a UN mediator go in and beyond the existing Iraqi constitution try to come up with a new Plan B, something like a soft partition as we had in Bosnia.  And you have the regional security forces reformed so they can defend their own homelands, their own cities, stay near their own families when they’re fighting.  That kind of a plan may work and may bring in more international support.  Otherwise, people think of this as our war. 

AK:  Michael’s right.  Our NATO European allies are rich, but they’re weak.  I was talking to the #2 officer in the French Defense Ministry.  He said, “Look, even if our policy changed 180 degrees tomorrow and we were fully supportive, quite frankly France doesn’t have very much in the way of military force that they could send to Iraq.  We have deployments in Africa, in Afghanistan, in the Balkans.  Our military is not what you think it is.”  When I spoke to a British MP last summer, he said, “We’re scraping to get a few helicopters into Afghanistan.”  These aren’t the empires they once were.  They are stretched thin as well. 

DR:  Then the question becomes:  what happens come September if things have not improved?  And in fact, things have gotten worse?

JK:  I think we will start giving ultimatums at some point. 

DR:  To whom?

JK:  To the Iraqis.  “You didn’t reach reconciliation so we’re going to start a troop draw down.”  And you can do this I a way that will get their attention.  We have massive support for their security forces now that we use as a spigot to try and influence their decisions and get rid of some of the people who are bad apples in the Iraqi security forces.  So I think what happens politically, as a number of moderate Republicans come to the White House and say, “This didn’t work…”…

DR:  …They already have, haven’t they?

JK:  Well, they basically said, “This has to work by September or show some progress or our support will start to falter.”  No Republicans want to run on status quo next year.  So I think Petraeus is going to make an argument that good things have happened.  I’m almost certain of that!  And they’ll point to some of these neighborhoods, some of the murders dropping in areas.  But again, it’s the political reconciliation that is the strategic goal here. 

DR:   But even if you have the kinds of progress you’re talking about that General Petraeus may report on, and you’re continuing to have US soldiers’ deaths increasing, is that going to satisfy the president?  The American public?  The Congress? 

MO:  Absent the political reconciliation, no I don’t think it will, which is why I think we’ll start to announce a different posture if they don’t act.

DR:  All right.  So, Andrew, if the US begins a gradual draw down in September, what do you expect to happen?

AK:  There’s an old saying that power abhors a vacuum.  And the US will be leaving a power vacuum in Iraq.  That vacuum will be filled, I think, by other countries.  The Turks have already said, in a number of ways, “We’re not going to allow an independent Kurdistan to exist in northern Iraq,” so they have that problem.  The Iranians, who are funneling money and have the best intelligence organization in Iraq, they’re funneling money into all groups.  As James says, they don’t want an unstable Iraq on their border.  They’ll try and pick a winner, back him strongly, and insure at least that the Arab part of Iraq is friendly toward Iran.  You have a number of Sunni Arab states that hoped the Americans would do their bidding and somehow  reconciliation with the Sunni Arabs would be taken care of, if you will.  They’ll have a decision to make – whether or not to support the Sunni Arab population in Iraq in its bid to return to the “glory days” of Saddam Hussein.  A 20% of the population, Sunni population, which believes that it knows how to run Iraq, and trying to get financial support from countries like Saudi Arabia – and perhaps even manpower support from other countries in the Arab world to help, again, retake power.  But this thing could become a kind of slow-motion 1914 where more and more countries and powers get involved as time goes on.  You start to see a regional conflict instead of a local conflict.  We haven’t even talked about Israel yet, for example.

DR:  Michael O’Hanlon, how might the presidential campaign affect what happens in Iraq? 

MO:  Diane, there are two big things that have to happen.  One is for the Congress to figure out, come September, its strategy.  That’s going to be something which happens, of course, before the candidates really get into their groove in Iowa and New Hampshire – just before they do.  If the Democrats don’t like how the war is going in September – and they probably won’t – they may feel very strongly about it – then they have three choices:  cut off the money outright, support the president with the money but criticize him rhetorically so he still has policy ownership but we can still say we’re going what we need to do to be true to our own principles, or look for a Plan B.  How do you find a Plan B using just the power of the purse?  What kind of huge constitutional questions get raised if the Congress tries to mandate a 50% cut in forces and then Mr. Bush goes to the Supreme court and says, “Congress doesn’t have the power to do that.”  There are all sorts of very interesting fights.  And the candidates are probably going to have to weigh in in the context of that ongoing fight between the Congress and the Executive. 

JK:  There’s an old saying that in a democracy, the people get the government they deserve.  And in a sense the American people, I think, have been too willing to accept the administration’s argument that we can have victory on the cheap, and too willing to accept the opposition’s argument that we can have withdrawal without consequences.  The American people need to demand that our political leadership in this country come up with, as Michael said, a serious Plan B, a serious discussion and debate about the options and not reduce this important national security issue to sloganeering. 

DR:  So what if you had a new president in the White House?  What if you had a Democrat in the White House?  How might the situation in Iraq change?

AK:  I think a Democrat in the White House is going to go to a strategy that says, “Okay, we tried to clear and hold the neighborhood.  We’re going to hand it off to the Iraqis.  We’re going to focus on phased, methodical withdrawals while retaining the missions of supporting and training the Iraqi forces to fill the security vacuum as we withdraw.  And also some residual ability to go hammer Al Qaeda when and if you can find it.  That’s kind of what we did in Vietnam.  We started to hand over, the latter stages of that war to the South Vietnamese army and basically focused on providing them air support, providing them logistic support, providing them command and control….

DR:  So you’re saying troops would remain?

MO:  Significant troops would have to remain. But you could probably start talking about – if your mission set changed like that – cutting your levels in half over a year. 

DR:  Let’s go to Tallahassee, Florida.

Michael:  I feel that the range of discussion is so artificial and narrow.  We’re continuing the military occupation of a country that was a victim of our criminal invasion and war and then abandoning them and washing our hands because they’ve not been able to pull together a country that basically we’ve destroyed.  I feel that pragmatically and on principle that this is very unfortunate. 

JK:  This is an extremely unfortunate bind we’ve gotten ourselves into.  We are responsible for what’s going to happen in Iraq.  It’s Colin Powell’s rule that he told the president:  “You break it, you own it.”  We own this, so whatever happens in Iraq is going to be part of the legacy of our intervention there.  We’ve gotten to a really bad place where democracy – where the support for it has gone south with the war.  We can’t find a consensus to sustain it at this level of effort.  And we can’t find a consensus to get out.

DR:  Caller in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Eric:  I want to make two comments.  The first is, it seems to me that over the past twenty years – my father’s a military war buff and I recall watching TV and reading articles about how the military was training for an unconventional war where you’re fighting in the streets and fighting in urban centers – it seems to me that this is the perfect scenario that the military has always wanted.  And it seems like the government and the military have really run amok trying to fight this war.  The second is, where are the American people really speaking out against what’s going on here?  Your guests have already said that we’re near the breaking point, our military funding is in question, certainly the vote in the last election says the American people are getting tired.  But it seems to me that the American people haven’t responded.  I wonder – maybe, Diane, you could respond – why don’t the media help the American people, at least giving them all the information they need to really speak out against the war?  Or are the American people just complacent?

DR:  Eric, let me ask you what you mean by having the American people speak out?  When they voted last November? And spoke out very forcefully?  You’ve seen protests around the country.  They have not been huge, but you’ve seen some.  So what would you like to see, to have happen?

Eric:  I’d say more of the same and louder!  More protests in the major cities of America – San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Chicago, Washington…

DR:  All right.  As this whole thing goes on, do you expect to see more protests in the streets?  Michael?

MO:  This won’t satisfy many people.  I’m an admirer of how our political process has handled the last year.  We’ve created a lot of pressure on politicians.  But we’ve also been prepared to listen to someone like General Petraeus who spent a lot of years developing this sort of strategy, and give him once last chance.  Most people in the Democratic Party are unhappy about it.  Many Republicans are skeptical it can work.  But there’s a big moment of truth coming in September and I hope that we will focus intently on that and if things aren’t working much better than they are now, have a big debate about Plan B, whether that’s soft partition or quick withdrawal or something else.  So far, I admire the American people pretty much even though the political leadership has to come up with serious thinking, as Andy’s been saying.

DR:  Andrew:  on this unconventional warfare training…

AK:  I think the caller is mistaken on that idea.  Essentially we got out of the business of waging unconventional war after Vietnam.  The phrase was “no more Vietnams!” We had the Powell doctrine, the Weinberger doctrine that said, “get in big and get in fast and get out fast!”  In the 1990’s, exit strategies.  And in terms of urban operations, we do have some small urban training centers.  But that’s a world apart from training for irregular warfare and protracted conflict.  Essentially, we built an army between the end of Vietnam and the beginning of this war to run a sprint – to fight a short, hard-hitting war.  And, quite frankly, the enemy showed up wanting to run a marathon.  The world’s best sprinter is not the world’s best marathoner. 

DR:  Is what we’re doing now akin to what we did in Vietnam? 

AK:  In the broad sense that I think we’re finally starting to get it right in Iraq, in terms of General Petraeus having our best commanders in the field, having a doctrine for how to win this kind of war.  But we’ve wasted too much time.  We’ve exhausted the patience of the American people.  They’ve lost confidence in the political leadership’s ability to wage this war effectively.

Christopher Fettweis and "post-traumatic Iraq syndrome"

The following is an interview with Christopher Fettweis by Tom Ashbrook of WBUR's discussion and call-in show, On Point,  June  14, 2007.

Guests:    John Anderson, Washington Post correspondent in Baghdad;  Christopher J. Fettweis, assistant professor of national security affairs at the US Naval War College; and David Kennedy, historian at Stanford.

Tom Ashbrook:  The bombing and shooting and dying aren’t over. And political leaders are still talking about the necessity of success. But in high-level strategic circles, there is plenty of talk that America has already lost the war in Iraq.

Christopher J. Fettweis, a grand strategy guru at the US Naval War College, takes that as a given - American defeat. And when the whole country wakes up to that, he says, there is going to be hell to pay. An "Iraq syndrome" that could make America's post-Vietnam blues look like peanuts.

We don't wish it. But odds are, he says, it's coming.

_____ 

Tom Ashbrook:  …At some point, even in Iraq, it’s all over but the shouting. Never mind a September report, says my guest today from the US Naval War College, the odds are more than heavy that the US has lost this war.  When the country wakes up to what that means, he says, it’s going to be ugly.  After the fighting, we bracing for the post-Iraq war world.  …Who’s going to pay the piper?  How do we recover?  What is realism here and what is “defeatism”?  First, we go to Baghdad on the day after the big bombings of a Shia holy site in Samara.  John Ward Anderson is a reporter for the Washington Post.  …John, what’s been the mood there on the day after the huge bombing of the minarets in Samara? 

John Anderson:  You know, there’s been some scattered demonstrations around the country in some of the big cities, some demonstrations actually here in Baghdad despite the curfew over in Sadr City…  But for the most part the visceral backlash after the last time we saw this shrine hit in February 2006 hasn’t happened.  There hasn’t been the massive wave of sectarian violence although there have been a few strikes at some Sunni mosques around the country.  But no massive wave at this point of sectarian anger. 

TA:  It’s only about a day and a half since the minarets came down.  Of course last year, when the Golden Dome at the same site was blown, it unleashed an enormous sectarian backlash.   Tens of thousands died.  Here we are, a day and a half later, is there some confidence that things have changed?  That there won’t be a backlash this time?  Shiite on Sunni?  Or what, John? 

JA:  It could be that things have changed.  Remember that the attack in February 2006 was one of the very first attacks against a religious shrine.  I think people at that point were stunned and there was sort of an emotional outburst.  This time we’ve gone through almost another year and a half where – I hate to say it – attacks on religious structures have become more or less routine.  And so I think people have become a little bit immune to the idea that they need to go out and strike back when a shrine has been hit.  In fact, the religious leaders, the political leaders, have been a unified voice saying  “don’t strike back, don’t rise to the bait, don’t let this get out of control into another cycle of sectarian bloodshed.” 

TA:  It’s awfully early to say, but do you see that as a hopeful sign that the kind of reconciliation between Shiites and Sunnis that US generals say they have to have to make progress there may in fact be happening?  Is this in fact positive evidence in that quadrant?

JA:  (laughs) I don’t want to climb out on the limb, to tell you the truth!  I think it’s less evidence of reconciliation than it is of fatigue.  There’s very little sign of reconciliation here.  There are all sorts of political moves underway that are basically not going anywhere.   There’s really no progress on a lot of the political reconciliation that people are trying to achieve.  What there is, though, I think – after a war that’s lasted four years, that’s maybe killed as many as 65,000 people.  I think there’s fatigue.  I think people are tired of the killing, I think they’re tired of living without electricity, they’re tired of sitting on the third largest oil reserves in the world and having to wait five hours for gasoline.  They’re just fatigued. 

TA:  John, we’re going to talk in a moment with a professor at the US Naval War College who’s saying, “Look, …more than heavy odds we’ve lost this war and we’re going to have to get used to it.  Do you hear that… among US troops, officers in Iraq?  Are they articulating anything like that or is it still gung-ho, “we’re going to hang in, we’re going to be successful”? 

JA:  I think… the question among the senior officers here is how to leave.  Nobody wants to admit defeat and go home with their tails between their legs.  I think they figure that we came in here on a plan that wasn’t very well thought out.  If we’re going to leave, we need to leave of what we want to happen and not just go out and leave it to utter chaos. 

TA:  Well, there’s the word from in the barracks, in the officers’ quarters.  …  Joining me how from Providence, RI, is Christopher Fettweis, assistant professor of national security affairs and specialist in grand strategy at the US Naval War College.  He recently published a tough essay in the LA Times headlined “Post-traumatic Iraq syndrome.”  His forthcoming book is “Angel Triumphant:  International Politics of Great Power Peace.”  Christopher Fettweis, so you’ve lifted a curtain here on a pretty ugly scenario.  I wish you’d walk us through this essay a little bit meticulously.  You open up preparing us for what’s going to come.  Your first line is “Losing hurts more than winning feels good” and you go right on from there.  Lay out what you’ve got to say in this essay, Professor!

Christopher Fettweis:  Well, I had a couple of points as it unfolded.  The first one, as you said, was borrowing some wisdom from that amateur philosopher and baseball Hall of Famer, Sparky Anderson, who’s credited with saying, “Losing hurts twice as bad as winning feels good.”

TA:  Whether it’s finance or sport or love or war, you say.

CF:  I think there’s something to that.  Whether you think about the great sports events of your life, the losses seem to hurt and haunt you more than the victories make you feel good. 

TA:  You say defeat in war damages societies quite out of proportion to what a rational calculation of cost would predict.” 

CF:  Exactly.  Yes.  I think that’s true.  I don’t think you have to look too much further back than Vietnam.  In Vietnam, the material losses to the US were fairly minimal.  We didn’t have… The dominoes that fell, Laos and Cambodia fell, but they were even more irrelevant than Vietnam.  Nothing much happened in the overall Cold War balance of power.  But the consequences for US domestic policies were quite profound …because lose?  People are haunted by loss, whether it’s love or money or, in a big sense, war. 

TA:  That haunting and what may come of it is what you’re focused on here.  All that’s hypothetical and historical.  But then you get very current.  You write, “The endgame in Iraq is now clear.”  And we’re paying attention to you.  You’re at the Naval War College.  You say, “It appears that the heavily favored US will be upset.”  Everything else you write hinges on that.  Make your case for that.  You’re talking about US loss here.  Nobody likes to do that!  The charges of defeatism fly fast and furious in the political realm when you touch that rail!  Here you are at the Naval War College…  You’re saying it.  Why?

CF:  Well, I’m saying it for a couple of reasons and I ought to put first the standard disclaimer that these are my thoughts and the thoughts of no one else…

TA:  Not no one else!  I’m looking through the clips here:  you’re not the only one who’s thinking and talking about this.  But with reference to the Naval War College, we’ve got it!  Okay!

CF:  There seems to be no historical example that I’m aware of that a democracy is able to sustain a war in the face of popular discontent.  When the people turn against a war, eventually the democracy has to pull out.  It can’t sustain it.  And obviously the last few months every single poll – the last couple of years! – Has had about two thirds of the American people think not only that this war was not worth fighting but that we should start pulling out.  So the end is not determined but the overall outline of it is clear.  There’s also no example I’m aware of – and I’d be happy to be proven wrong because obviously I take no joy out of any of this -- but there is no example of a modern democracy changing its mind, once it has turned against a war. 

TA:  Even when the stakes are as high as this one?  Even with people like John McCain saying to the country “we cannot lose this! We cannot strategically lose this!”  Even then?  The country won’t change its mind?

CF:  I’m not sure the country believes him and I think the country is probably fairly right in that – which we can get into a little later.  But I don’t think people think it was worthwhile, that it is worthwhile.  Now whether that’s right or not, it doesn’t particularly matter.  I should say, too, that I don’t think it’s particularly appropriate to talk about war in terms of “loss” and “victory” as if it were a cribbage match or a football game.  Winning and losing is not particularly appropriate, especially when we’re talking about a guerrilla war like this.  It’s going to be blurry.  It’s going to be gray.

TA:  Blurry – it’s your word.  But you say we ought to come to grips with the meaning of losing -- your word – in Iraq. 

CF:  It doesn’t matter whether I think it’s appropriate or not.  That’s irrelevant because people will interpret it as a loss… People look on war in terms of defeat and victory.  If it unfolds, as it appears it will, people will see it as a loss and the consequences for our domestic politics and our sort of national psyche, if you will, will be out of proportion to any material consequences for the US – which I think are likely to be fairly minimal.

TA:  You say, “the consequences for the national psyche are likely to be profound, throwing American politics into a downward spiral of bitter recrimination, the likes of which it has not seen in a generation.”  Like what?

CF:  Defeat has to be explained and blame has to be placed.  The coach can be fired or you can trade your third baseman if you’re a baseball team, but in war somebody has to have been wrong.  Fingers are going to be pointed about what went wrong or why the US lost.  It has to be explained.   We see that in Vietnam when people blamed the media, the generals, the South Vietnamese, the American soldier.  People point at the “lefties” on campuses.  People point fingers in all directions trying to explain why we lost.  Because once you understand why, it becomes easier to live with.  It wasn’t the fault of the US – we’re still a great country.   But we understand how we lost to make sure it doesn’t happen again, in order to come to some peace with it.    The coach can be fired or you can trade your third baseman if you’re a baseball team, but in war somebody has to have been wrong.  Fingers are going to be pointed about what went wrong or why the US lost.  It has to be explained.   We see that in Vietnam when people blamed the media, the generals, the South Vietnamese, the American soldier.  People point at the “lefties” on campuses.  People point fingers in all directions trying to explain why we lost.  Because once you understand why, it becomes easier to live with.  It wasn’t the fault of the US – we’re still a great country.   But we understand how we lost to make sure it doesn’t happen again, in order to come to some peace with it.  You have to learn lessons from defeat in a way you don’t have to learn lessons from victory.  We’re going to go through a national period of soul-searching.  We shouldn’t overstate it.  It’s not going to be permanent.  It’s not going to tear the country down.  We entering a divisive time in American politics when people are going to blame the media, they’re going to blame individuals…

TA:  …You say the battle for interpretation of the war will be fierce and it’s already begun.  Where do you see it?

CF:  I see it in hastily written memoirs coming out with everybody pointing fingers in various directions.  Officials who were very decisive in propagating the war in the beginning… showing that they weren’t at fault.  It was other people who, in effect, screwed up their war.  And I think it’s very important at this stage that we have the potential to have a conversation after the war’s over about the proper use of US power in the world, about the proper grand strategy for the US.  I think it will get lost.  I worry, number one that it will get lost in the middle of a political conversation that’s going to be absolutely deafening!  I bore my students with a lot of things and one of the things I bore them with over and over is that politics is the enemy of strategy.  You can’t really have a thoughtful, productive conversation about strategy in a political atmosphere. 

TA:  And here we are with the war going wherever it’s going in the middle of a presidential campaign again, so you are guaranteed to have it in a political atmosphere.  You write that the war’s supporters have staked out a clear position:  attacking Iraq was strategically sound but operationally flawed.  You’re the grand strategy expert.  What do you say to that argument?

CF:  I’m glad you brought that up because that’s the interpretation of the war that I think is the most dangerous – to think” it was the right thing to do, but done ineffectively with not enough troops, de-Baathification too early, not coming in from the north, the Iraqis let us down, the media stabbed us in the back” -- none of that matters.   None of that is particularly relevant.  The war itself was the mistake.  That’s the main lesson that ought to be coming in this debate that we’re going to have, this national conversation, after this war is effectively over.  This crusade itself was a mistake.  … But either way, if we have a more broad conversation about the use of American power, we may come to the conclusion that this kind of thing wouldn’t be the kind of thing the founding fathers, for instance, would have preferred us to do…

TA:  A fundamental mistake, you’re saying, then.  You’re saying historians will certainly agree that the war was a catastrophic mistake.  So a mistake of what dimensions?

CF:  It has the potential to be a catastrophic mistake.  I’m sort of an optimist at heart despite what I might be saying now.  I don’t think it’s going to be too catastrophic.  But it has the potential to be worse than Vietnam.  Before Vietnam, every prominent “realist” in the ‘60’s, was saying “Don’t do this, Vietnam is strategically irrelevant.”  And every prominent realist with the possible exception of Henry Kissinger before this war was saying, “Hey, don’t do this!  This is not a good idea.  This is not what we should be doing.”  And we may be coming out of a similar outcome. 

TA:  You say the only significant question still hanging is whether Iraq will turn out to have been the biggest strategic mistake in US history.  Your words.  So, again, what’s the fundamental strategic mistake you see – or saw – here?

CF:  If it is true that worst case scenarios do happen, as many people are now predicting, and this war destabilizes the Middle East, the most crucial region in the world, in a lot of ways, then this will have been a far larger strategic mistake than Vietnam or anything we have done before.  For decades, the main US goal in the Middle East was stability.  Bush 41, as they say in certain strategic circles, fought the first Gulf War in order to maintain stability in the Gulf.  After September 11^th, our strategic thinking changed and we began to think, Well, now that strategic thinking is unacceptable.  We wanted a new kind of stability; create some positive momentum for democracy and freedom in the Middle East.  And a lot of realists were saying, look, that’s a bad idea – that’s going to take a miracle.  And unfortunately, in international politics, miracles are rare events.  So we should not be surprised that this didn’t work out because it would have taken a miracle. 

TA:  You call it “neo-conservativism’s parting gift to America.”  Or maybe the parting gift will be a reconsideration of that strategy as our public life gets focused on what happened there.  But you go to Vietnam – the Vietnam syndrome did haunt the country for years.  President Bush’s father said he finally licked it with the Gulf War.  You say:  “Saigon fell but no dominoes followed.  “The balance of Cold War power did not change.”  So, some might way, maybe we can waltz out of Iraq and we’ll be fine, thanks!

CF:  And it’s entirely possible.  I sincerely hope the worst case scenario that I alluded to there turns out to be wrong – and I suspect it will.  We tend to overestimate the threats and overestimate the dire consequences of our actions.  I don’t think it would be catastrophic when this war comes to a conclusion if there is an optimism that we can take away from this.  I don’t think that the terrorists are going to follow us home, for instance!  Or that the region is going to descent into absolutely unprecedented regionalized war.  That’s still fairly unlikely but not impossible.  And if that happens – that’s why the question is still open – this will turn out to be a major strategic disaster.  As it is now, it’s just a maybe-perhaps minor strategic blunder.  Although the people of Iraq obviously wouldn’t feel that way.

TA:  …Mark is calling from Acton, Massachusetts. 

Mark:  …I read Professor Fettweis’ piece.  I think it was very informative and I think he’s right to focus on the contrast between winning and losing. Just as I think one of the lessons we should take out of this, to help us in the future, is to focus on the costs and benefits of ventures like this.  On the run-up to this war, the benefits were always laid out but the costs were hidden.  It was a concerted effort to conceal the price of the war.  It was off the books.  When the bodies came home, they were concealed from the cameras.  Most Americans think there were are about 145,000 troops in Iraq. In fact, there are about 130,000 private contractors who are doing some of the support work and in some cases some of the fighting.  We really have the equivalent of a 275,000 army…

TA:  …and 29,000 dead and wounded at this point.

Mark:  That’s right.  And so I  hope… There are going to be recriminations, of course.  I hope they’re productive recriminations and they are directed at the people who concealed the true costs.  You may remember how we were told it was going to be “a cakewalk” and when Shinseki said “several hundred thousand troops” Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld said he was wildly off the mark.  That’s where the recriminations need to go – at the people who underplayed the costs of this war and the news media that failed to publicize them.

TA:  Mark, we’ve got it.  And there’s a prayer for productive recriminations, if that’s what it’s going to be.   Let me get a call from Simsbury, Connecticut.

Kevin:  I just want to make one point here.  I was a military veteran.  I joined in 1979 in the post-Vietnam era.  I had a couple of friends call me “stupid” for going into the military.  I’m afraid that after the Iraq war, the same thing is going to happen here.  The psyche of the military is going to be damaged for a while.   Again… George Bush, Sr., said he did wonders in the Gulf War to shake off the ghosts of Vietnam.  I think it’s going to be a long time to shake the ghosts of Iraq. 

TA:  Kevin, that’s exactly the fear here.  And we are going to look at it.  Thank you for putting that on the board.  We’ll come back to the military ramifications.  Let me get a call from Des Moines, Iowa. 

John:  …First of all, I appreciate of the professor.  But I think we’re kind of missing a bigger issue here.  I’m going to draw an analogy first.  If you’ve got  kid that grows up and is kind of a bully.  His parents try to do their best to raise him.  And they make college and option for him but he goes and drinks and parties and doesn’t take advantage of that, who loses?   Do the parents lose or does the kid lose? 

TA:  So who’s the bully-boy kid here, Iraq? Iraq is an unruly teenager? 

John:  No!  Saddam!  We did not go over to conquer Iraq.  We had no intention of subjugating that country.  We were trying to displace a dictator who had gone into Kuwait, who had…

TA:  But what are you saying now?  Saddam is dead!  At this point are you say, it’s not our loss? It’s the Iraqis’ loss?

John:  The reason we stayed there beyond Saddam was to try to set up a democracy so they could have democratic principles in the Middle East.  And I do think that’s a wonderful vision.  I think it was somewhat foolhardy at this point in time because of vested interests.  You look at how many people who are Muslim over there who will do anything to keep western influence from getting…

TA:  But John, if that doesn’t work, how do you feel about it?  Can we just smack our hands and walk out and say, “Well, we gave it our best shot – no problem”?

John:  Well, I’m probably not going to be very popular with this.  But I lived through the ‘70’s and the oil embargo and I’m amazed that America, and to a lesser degree Europe, didn’t take a wake-up call then and say we’ve got to get independent from their oil.  That’s what gives them their power…

TA:  …Well, that would be great, but we won’t be standing there immediately, as we can see.  But it’s an interesting perspective.  Christopher Fettweis, it’s widely articulated now.  Just in recent days, the politicians in Washington are saying, “If this is a loss, it isn’t our loss, it’s their loss!”  Iraq has failed here, not the US.

CF:  I think there’s a lot to that.  I think John is right that we went in to get rid of Saddam Hussein and succeeded in doing that.  I think it would be better if we were to have a conversation in terms of where did we succeed and where did we fail.  But that’s not how people think about war.  People think about it in terms of winning and losing.  Now we’ve let the war be defined as the only way we can win is if we leave behind some flourishing, Jeffersonian democracy.  It that’s victory, that’s going to be very difficult to achieve at any level.  So I think John is exactly right that we went in there to get rid of Saddam and succeeded.  What we didn’t realize – though a lot of people did – was that Iraq was a society teetering on the edge of the abyss, thanks to Saddam Hussein’s misrule and tyrannical policies.  And we went in there and pushed it right over… Now we’re looking at a completely broken society which is going to take a long time to put back together and we have to decide whether it’s even in our interest to get in there and do it.  … One quick thing about the second caller, there, and the military ramifications he was talking about.  I think the country has changed in some ways about this.  I think we, as a nation, feel guilty about what happened to the Vietnam vets when they came back and the attitude towards the military in this country in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s – early ‘80’s at least.  We are quite conscious of that and there has been no or very, very little anti-military sentiment in this country.  The fingers of blame, when they are pointed at the military, are quite quickly rebutted. 

TA:  Yet there’s a morale issue.  And if it gets interpreted as defeat, then we know from history that is a tough thing to carry.  I want to get an historical perspective here… David Kennedy from Stanford in California.  He’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of American history and professor at Stanford University, author of “Freedom from Fear” and “Over Here.”  …David Kennedy, “post-traumatic Iraq syndrome”?  You may have seen the headline:  “The war is lost.  Americans should begin to deal with what that means.”  Are you prepared?  Are you ready to look at it that way?

David Kennedy:  Well, I did read Professor Fettweis’ quite provocative piece and yes, I think it’s quite likely – to paraphrase and expand upon a famous phrase of General Omar Bradley, in a different context – that Iraq will be judged by historians as the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong enemy fought for the wrong strategic objectives and fought with a wrongly-configured force.  It will add up to a really huge catastrophe of the first order. 

TA:  …If all that comes to pass, and we may be on the chute right now – sometimes I feel like Wile E. Coyote, already out over the canyon, just not realizing there’s nothing under there yet, how to you feel this country will deal with that kind of outcome this time?

DK:  Well, all that said, without disagreeing with Professor Fettweis, I think the first order of debate is going to be how to describe the outcome in Iraq.  It will not be victory in any conventional sense.  But it’s possible, at least, that it could be spun as something less than total and absolute defeat as well. So I think that will be the first order of the day – to define the terms by which we describe the outcome.  But I think Professor Fettweis’ larger point is one that really we should focus on.  Whatever the nature of the debate after the exit from Iraq – whatever shape that takes – it’s going to confound and confuse a much more necessary debate about the future of American national security policy and foreign policy.  I think there is very little doubt that Iraq has already – and probably even more so in the future – alienated two very important constituencies, absolutely indispensable constituencies.  One is the network of our friends and allies that we have carefully cultivated for half a century and who are now very disillusioned with us and very disillusioned with our departure from or weakening of our ties to a whole range of multilateral institutions that we painstakingly put together in the last half century.  The other goes back to Professor Fettweis’ principle point: we are in danger of some kind of reversion to a neo-isolationist posture at home where the American public simply will be so disgusted with all kinds of active internationalist foreign policy that they will refuse to sanction any sort of international presence in the future, of the nature that this country conducted after World War II.

TA:  And if we get out of that storm in Iraq, Christopher Fettweis writes, “We’ll need to be prepared for divisiveness, vitriol, self-doubt, and recrimination…”  Those will all be the symptoms, he says.  Those, he says, will be “the Bush administration’s parting gift to America.”  You’ve seen the history. What do you expect on the backside of this war? 

DK:  It used to be said that that the only segment or section of this country that had any experience with military defeat was the South, the post-Civil-War South.  And that that was one of the defining characteristics of the South’s regional identity.  Indeed, to this day – well over a century on after the conclusion of the Civil War, that still constitutes some part of  Southern identity, I believe.  So these traumas go very, very deep.  They’re long-lasting.  They’re multi-generational, at least potentially.  We certainly saw something of this nature in the post-Vietnam era.  It had real consequences for the configuration of the military, for national security policy, and things like the War Powers Act of 1973, the shift to an all-volunteer force, the so-called “Total Force Doctrine” that integrated the reserves and the active duty forces in a way that was designed to restrain the Executive from more ambitious military policies…

TA: … And for American politics, though, a kind of backlash that helped put Ronald Reagan ultimately in the White House.

DK:  That’s right.  And one of the callers just mentioned that the Bush 41 war, the first Gulf War, was thought to have exorcised the ghosts of Vietnam.  I think that’s true in a limited sense.  But in a deeper sense, I think even that war could be construed, successful as it was in its own terms, as having some less than healthy consequences.  Because it once again awakened this feeling in much of the American public and the leadership that there was nothing we could not accomplish in the world.  I think that’s a very dangerous attitude…

TA:  …Jack in Moline, Illinois

Jack:  I’d like to respond to what you and your guests are speaking about this morning, about how long it might take post-Iraq to repair America’s reputation.  I think there is some confusion about what post-Iraq is going to be.  We’ve talked about Vietnam.  We’ve talked about Korea.  Americans don’t want another Vietnam.  We don’t want to see helicopters go over the edges of buildings as we exit Iraq.  And I don’t think it’s going to be Korea, because Korea is too friendly!  Iraq is a very dangerous place.  But I think the world is waiting for the US to take leadership.  The world is waiting to see the true American spirit come out. 

TA:  What would that look like and what would it mean for Iraq if it did?

Jack:  Post Bush, it would look like a US humanitarian effort.   Bring in the US.  Bring in the Arab neighbors.  Bring in the world as an American cooperative effort.

TA:  And you think Al Qaeda’s going to stop bombing mosques and the sectarian violence will end if we bring in the Peace Corps?

Jack:  Well, Maliki is holding out because he doesn’t want to sign oil revenue bills.  The Iraqis are holding out.  They’re going to keep bombing until the Americans give up on the oil revenue bill.  They don’t want to give up 75% of their national wealth.

TA:  Jack, let us put that on the boards and we’ll come to it.  Change our stripes and there may be a better way?  Alex is calling from Washington, DC. 

Alex:  …Cheney was saying on one of these talk shows that we brought all the members of the Iraqi government from Iran because that’s where they all used to live.  And actually, to go further, the  only reason the Iranian government allowed them to live in Iran and go to Iraq was because they worked for the Iranian secret police.

TA:  So where are we headed?

Alex:  The way it’s happening is, we bog down in Iraq, nobody believes us about Iran, and we’re handing Iraq, now, to Iran, according to Cheney.  And Mayor Giuliani in the debate was saying that Iran is the world’s biggest sponsor of anti-American terrorism, and is going to give the bomb to its subcontractors.

TA:  So, if all that is correct and Iraq goes to Iran, it hardly sounds like a victory?

Alex:  Well, that sounds like we use our military to give success to the terrorist government in Iran.

TA:  Alex, we’ve got that.  Let’s go to another call here.  Daniel in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Daniel:   I wanted to ask if a politically polarized nation can ever learn anything from the loss of a war.  Thinking about the Vietnam syndrome, I realize there was a national depression, there was a lack of military confidence, there were fifteen years of military reticence [sic] after that, but I think the real tragedy was that the right and the left never agreed what happened.  The right thought the loss of Vietnam was due to hippies and the press and peaceniks,  that we should have bombed Hanoi, and the left blamed imperialism and fantasized political philosophies.  And that right/left syndrome, I think, allowed another war to happen when the political right fully came back to power.  So I’m wondering if any Iraq syndrome again will be kind of a useless political phase in our history, or will it really do something in some kind of intrinsic way.  Will people just think, Well, next time we’ll just have to elect a commander-in-chief who’s a little bit smarter than George Bush.

TA: That’s a great and deep question.  We’ve got it on the boards as well.  One more call and we’ll turn to all of it.  Gabrielle from Boston.

Gabrielle:  I think this really follows on the last caller.  I’m responding to the professor and the Iowa caller who talked about getting rid of Saddam Hussein as a victory.  My question or comment – and it’s  a little of each – is we knew at the time there had to be repercussions, there would be repercussions.  Why was our government not aware and not responding to their own experts, paying attention to the fact that that country was going to fall apart?

TA:  What do you think is the answer to that question? 

Gabrielle:   I think it was a way of keeping us from the truth.  I think more important than what the government did – what George Bush did – more important than that is what the populace did.  People had the information in this country to know and they did not respond to that.  That is really important.  What is really important going forward is that we act like an electorate that has half a brain. 

TA:  …Christopher Fettweis says the loss of support from that public is the number one reason that this war may well be doomed.  … Professor Fettweis, first from you.  Jack the caller from Illinois says there’s still room for optimism here.  We can change our stripes in Iraq, bring in the neighbors, stop shooting, start helping, and pull this thing out.  Do you see a chance of that? 

CF:  I wish I did.    I’m not too optimistic about any of the proposals I’ve heard so far and I’m not sure why the region would want to see anything but an American pullout at this point.  The Iranians don’t have a whole lot of incentive to see that this thing goes well.   But they don’t have the incentive to see Iraq totally implode either.  We shouldn’t think they’re going to march right in after we march out. 

TA:  Let me put Alex’s point to you as well.  That an American loss, if that’s how it gets framed here or if that’s what it is, is an Iranian win. 

CF:  Yes. There will be people who interpret it that way.  I don’t think we should get too bent out of shape about that.  I don’t think an Iranian win in the long term helps them any more than a US loss would hurt us in the long term.  The interpretation – I think it was Daniel in Somerville who was saying it’s going to be very difficult to have a conversation about what the meaning was, what actually happened.  In the political atmosphere after this war there’s going to be so much emotion.  It’s going to be so raw.  People are going to be so angry.  It’s going to be very difficult really to have any kind of agreement.  Which is why we’re going to have a very divisive, very vitriolic political discussion.  Which will just obliterate any kind of coherent strategic discussion that we maybe  would have been able to have. 

TA:  We’re going to root for that coherent discussion and try to bring it on.  David Kennedy, what about Daniel’s point?… He sees after Vietnam a gigantic left-right gulf opening up, polarization, never could agree on the war.  And then couldn’t agree on anything much else either.  Do you see a repeat of that post Iraq?  Or some other dynamics?

DK:  I think the post Iraq situation unfortunately has the potential to be even worse than the post Vietnam situation.  Perversely enough, the conclusion of the Vietnam war actually solidified and stabilized what we call the environing structure of international relations, or the international system, at the time, which went by the name of the “Cold War.”  We got détente.  We got certain stabilization adios of regime.  There’s no such environing structure here.  And indeed much of the confusion, contradiction, and murkiness about why we went into Iraq in the first place, what were the stated reasons and the real reasons for being there – that debate is still not resolved and wasn’t at the time.  So there’s going to be a much messier debate, it seems to me, about the meaning of Iraq, why it was undertaken in the first place, and what the consequences are.  And we don’t have, unfortunately, a kind of agree international strategic structure that we and others believe in as a way of making sense out of this event.  I believe anti-terrorism, for example, is no kind of grand strategy.  We don’t have a grand strategic structure in place with which we can make sense out of this event.

TA:  Set aside the grand world structure, what about American politics?  Fareed Zakaria has the cover story in Newsweek coming out next week, and it’s “How to restore America’s place in the world.”  He looks at Rudy Giuliani telling audiences all around the country, “They hate you!  They want to kill you!”  And he says this is really dangerous.  This is a furtherance of the path that we’ve been on.  And yet it’s out there and a lot of people are going to that.  Do you see a right/left divide again, David Kennedy, or some new political configuration in this country?  Maybe even unity because the stakes look so high?

DK: Well, I do think Zakaria has it right.  He’s not the only one to say this.  The challenge for the next administration, whoever it is, whatever party it is, will be to extricate ourselves from the Iraq situation in such a way that does not further damage and dismantle the structure of international institutions that we’ve helped to build up and the confidence of our own people that our leadership know what they’re doing in foreign policy and national security policy.  I think there are some very significant things at high risk here.

TA:  Christopher Fettweis, our caller, Gabrielle in Boston, comes right around full circle to the American people and says, you know, there was support for this war.  And now you point to the falling away of that support as the number one reason for failure.  If that’s where we’re headed, what about the American public?  How should they be scratching their own heads after we kick the administration for doing it or doing it wrong, and kick the neocons for lighting the way?  Should we kick ourselves?  What needs to be learned here?

CF:  I don’t think we should spend too much time kicking the American people.   Remember a couple of years ago September 11^th was still pretty fresh in everyone’s mind and I think this never would have happened without September 11^th  happening before it.  That obviously doesn’t excuse what happened but remember, at the same time, there were very few people in any part of the political spectrum, anyway,  what opposed the war very vociferously or very strongly. 

TA:  But sobriety is still important, even in times of crisis.  “I burned the house down because I was mad” – we may face more terrorism and we can’t afford just to go popping off in anger or emotion when the stakes are this high.

CF:  I think that’s very well said, and I think one of the big dangers in policy making is when policy is made based on emotion.  President Clinton used to say his worst decisions were made in isolation, based on emotion.  And in general, when you make foreign policy choices based on emotion, that’s going to lead to disaster.  You have a higher probability of it leading to disaster.  The Vietnam syndrome finally came to an end.  It may be a generational thing, but I think the Iraq syndrome will as well.  We’ll be able to have eventually a conversation about how to use America power in the world that we won’t be able to do in its immediate aftermath.

TA:  That eventually… these are generational terms you’re talking about.  Eventually, as the Great One said, we’ll all be dead!  Steve’s calling from Camden, South Carolina. 

Steve:  …I can’t understand why the United States, or at least our leadership can’t figure out something that basically all of our enemies have figured out.  That’s that you don’t have to beat the US up militarily.  All you have to do is play a psychological game and keep the war dragging on, and eventually we’ll get tired and go home.  It worked in Vietnam.  It’s working now.  And why we can’t figure that out, I don’t understand.

TA:  We got it… Christopher Fettweis, how about it?  There are lessons learned in this country, there are lessons learned abroad already.  How do you see those playing out and what about Steve’s point?

CF:  I think his point’s a good one and a widely thought one.  But I don’t believe at all that the US doesn’t have the ability to fight war, if we see it as important.  I think the big point of this war is that the support fell away because we started asking, What are we doing this for?!  We are not going to be able to drum up popular support in the long term for unnecessary wars.  And rightly or wrongly, this one is seen as an unnecessary war. 

TA:  But even if the reason to go to war fell away once we got there, once you’re sitting on top of the world’s oil patch, is it not important?  You’re talking about a risk of regional meltdown right on top of the core resource that the world economy runs on these days.  Like that or hate it, that’s the way the world works.  That’s not important?

CF:  Oh, it’s very important.  A short-term regional meltdown would obviously be catastrophic.  In the short term.  But whoever wins – and this is a point Professor Kennedy mentioned a little bit ago, about the possibility of a return to a sort of isolationist sentiment – I don’t think that would be so bad.  Because whoever wins, whether it’s some kind of Iranian-dominated region or hopefully some sort of democratic Iraq, whoever wins needs to sell the oil.  They need to sell it.  We need to buy it.  In the long run everything is going to be fine.  Oil does nobody any good in the ground.

TA:  Boy!  That long run is a scary long run.  David Kennedy, there are a couple of giant points there.  Number one, Steve in North Carolina says lesson learned here, the US doesn’t have the psychological stick-to-it-iveness to win a war.  And then, in the long run we’ll be fine.  What do you say to those? 

DK:  Well, I think in fact is that in the Iraq war, the US did win the conventional military victory and won it quite handily in a matter of days, really.  So that in conventional terms, the way these things are usually measured, it was a victory.  And that “mission accomplished” business on the aircraft carrier was, in its own terms, quite accurate.

TA:  In a way, it felt like “so what!”  It just…

DK:  Exactly!  I’m just reading a terrifically insightful book by a retired British general called “The Utility of Force.”  His name is Rupert Smith.  The key word of the title is “utility.” One needs to have force configured in such a way that it actually achieves the stated objective and not just overwhelm the enemy and then you’re saddled with the problem of long-term occupation of a sullen and resentful nation.  Which is exactly the situation we’re in.  So I think Professor Fettweis has pointed to a future in which we’re going to have to have a searching debate about the whole palette of foreign policy and national security tools and instruments that we have, the configuration of the armed forces, the balance between soft power and so-called hard power.  This needs to be a really serious and deep debate.  I hope we can have it in a context other than a lot of bitter recrimination. 

TA:  Christopher Fettweis says he would welcome a little isolation on the US part.  Can we do that in a period of globalization? And be successful? 

DK:  If by isolationism we mean an increasing reluctance on the part of the American people to deploy conventional military force as our preferred instrument of foreign policy, I think that would be a healthy thing.

TA:  Do you see it coming, Christopher Fettweis?  Do we have a choice?  Is our military so beaten up that we’re going to have to sit back for a while here and restore?

CF:  We’ll certainly have a choice.  Whether or not the choice will be made wisely, I don’t know.  I think Professor Kennedy is exactly right.  Nobody says we should be retreating behind walls and stopping trade and eschewing our moral responsibilities.  But we can start defining what is truly in our interest a little bit more narrowly.  We’d probably be better off.

“Nation of Secrets” – has democracy been reduced to a crapshoot by government secrecy?

Ted Gup, is a professor at Case Western, an investigative reporter, and a writer who has traced a trend of growing secrecy he says endangers democracy.  He is interviewed here, on the Diane Rehm show, by Steve Roberts.

______________

Steve Roberts:  The literal cost of government secrecy tops $7 billion a year.  Investigative journalist, Ted Gup, argues that it costs our nation much more than dollars.  He says it’s not just government secrecy we need to worry about. … His new book is called “Nation of Secrets:  The threat to democracy and the American way of life.”…  He’s a former investigative reporter for the Washington Post and at Time magazine.  His last book was called “The Book of Honor.”  Ted, you’ve talked at the core of this book as though there’s been a sort of an expansion of secrecy, a rise of secrecy.  What are some of the signs of that and what’s behind it?

Ted Gup:  Good question.  The signs are everywhere.  They affect our institutions.  They affect our daily lives.  I drive a Ford Explorer.  The tires were recalled because people were killed using those tires.  My wife can’t use her shoulder fully because of a medicine she was on.  She was not told that it could do muscle damage.  That’s in our little lives.  You multiply that across the country.  This is information that is being withheld.  That has many names, and secrecy is one of them.  What I attempted to do in the book is look at the sort of sea-change, the paradigm shift, from a country in which we talked about the right to know, to a country in which we talk about the need to know. 

SR:  But one of the obvious motives here is 9/11, the war on terrorism for the Bush administration.  Talk about that dimension.  Government recalls are more corporate or privte issues.  But at the heart here is the issue of national security.

TG:  Right.  I agree with you completely, although I will say that what happens is that people’s threshold and tolerance of secrecy increases, and it will start with national security but then it moves beyond that.  The national security issue – 9/11 – we all know that engendered a new security consciousness.  But I don’t think people have really focused on the impact because our entire industrial nation, our entire financial structure, our infrastructure are all now potential targets.  We’re talking about ports, railways, storage facilities, water reservoirs, airports, railways… you name it!  Because of that, secrecy has migrated from the traditional reservoirs of the CIA, State Department, Defense Department and out into the country.  It intersects with all the corporations that manage and operate those.  All of the state governments and municipalities that govern those.  And so secrecy post 9/11 is no longer the preserve of the federal government alone, it is now a part of our daily lives across the country. 

SR:  But if Vice President Cheney were here… he’d say, “Look, you’re just being naïve.  We are facing a real enemy.  It’s an insidious enemy.  It’s not a state enemy that we can see and hear.  And secrecy, both in terms of protecting national secrets and investigating potential threats, is essential to safeguarding the liberties we hold dear.”  How do you answer that?

TG:  That’s where Dick Cheney and I agree!  But I think there’s a core of secrets (and this is where we may disagree!) that need to be robustly defended and safeguarded.  The greatest threat to protecting that core of secrets, that is, for example, blueprints for nuclear weapons, troop movements, that sort of thing – those need to be robustly safeguarded.  The largest threat to protecting those secrets is the profusion of counterfeit secrets.  The true secrets get lost.  When you produce 14,000,000 a year, the real ones get lost.  McGeorge Bundy, the former National Security advisor once said if you guard your toothbrushes and diamonds with equal zeal, you’ll lose fewer toothbrushes and more diamonds.

SR:  So part of what you’re arguing is that the whole concept of secrecy which has great value if done well and with care is being devalued and squandered because it’s being overused for less than good reasons.

TG:  That’s absolutely true.  If you look at recent history now, you’ll see that the people charged with keeping the secrets show the greatest contempt of the system of classification and secrecy.  Look at the Valerie Plame situation.  Look at John Deutsch taking home and putting unsecured documents on his home computer from the CIA. 

SR:  …Former CIA director…

TG:  Yes.  Look at Sandy Berger, former National Security advisor, stuffing classified documents in his socks and walking out of the archives with them.  These are people who have the knowledge but also have contempt for the system because they’ve seen so much classification that they’ve begun to substitute their individual judgment for institutional judgment about secrecy.  This is a threat to protecting our secrets.  Let me just point out one other thing which I think is a classic example:  The CIA defended and resisted declassifying the oldest document in the US archives.  It was the World War I formula for invisible ink.  Now, if they’re still using that in the internet age, we’re in a lot more trouble than I thought!  At the same time…

SR:  …But what’s behind that impulse, Ted?  It makes no sense at all.  Why would they do it?

TG:  It makes from their vantage point – which is the “slippery slope” argument.  If they give a little, they give a lot.  So they give nothing.  But the problem is that the indiscriminate resisting of disclosure undermines their credibility and respect for the system. 

SR:  When I covered Capitol Hill years ago, I always used to cherish, for many reasons, the late Senator Pat Moynihan.  He always used to talk, with his typical florid style, about how you could go down to the Senate stationery store and buy a “SECRET” stamp and that the whole process had been so expanded, as you point out, and devalued.  It lost its meaning. 

TG:  Moynihan is one of my heroes because he sounded and saw, early on, the peril that was coming. But the interesting thing about the book, my research, my reporting on this, is that I was helped along here not by a lot of left-wing liberals but by a lot of very conservative individuals within the national security apparatus who were deeply concerned about this problem.  This is not a partisan issue.  This is not about Republicans and Democrats.  This is about national security.  It’s about protecting the country.  It’s about preserving democracy.

SR:  As you pointed out earlier, this is not just a government issue, although that is where it’s front and center because of the “war on terrorism” and high visibility cases of the government trying to keep certain secrets and journalists trying to reveal them.  One of the areas that we also saw – I know you write about this in the book because you have a chapter on universities where you teach at one and I do too – and that’s where secrecy morphs into privacy rights.  They are, in some ways, two sides of the same coin.  A lot of people during the Virginia Tech and in the aftermath said that one of the things that has to be revisited is the balance of privacy rights which prevented the university and prevented the gun registry from knowing a lot of the details about that tragic shooting.

TG:  Right.  This is an area I try to get into in the book.  It’s fraught with complexities.   There are a couple of things I’d say.  One is that I don’t pretend to have any answers on this – it’s very  complicated.  But I do think it’s a subject that should be discussed by the country and not behind closed doors.  I have students on occasion that have severe mental difficulties.  If I see a kid spiralling downward and I want to intercede and help, I cannot flag the parent.  I have restraints on me that way. How do we protect these students and how do we protect the community from these students if they pose a threat?  What are the limits of privacy?  I’m a staunch advocate of privacy but this debate needs to go on beyond just the legislative corridors.  The public needs to enter the fray and figure out where the lines are to be drawn.  Because right now I think that secrecy prevails.  Universities are very sensitive about their public image, extremely sensitive because it affects development, standing, all these sorts of things.  And so they also err on the side of suppression not withstanding that so many have mottos of “light and truth”!

SR:  But as you point out, when you use the word “secrecy,” often civil libertarians or others will say “secrecy is bad – things should come out into the light and share and open discussion.”  Certain national policies or, as you pointed out earlier, corporate practices.  But when you call it privacy, it becomes – it’s weighted with a different meaning.  Like you,  I run into the same thing at the university where the limits on professors and on guidance counselors and on therapists are very strict.  That does preserve certain rights, but it puts other rights in jeopardy – as you point out, the right of the community to protect itself.

TG:  This is the nature of a democracy.  No one elected me to anything!  But as a journalist and as a citizen, I think it’s incumbent upon other citizens to engage in this debate because it affects them on a lot of fronts.

SR:  The example I always remember… I had a friend years ago who had a son, a troubled young man, at college.  She, because of the privacy laws, was not even allowed to know what medications he was taking.  She did not know that one of the medications he was taking could have the side-effect of creating suicidal impulses.  This young man walked into a gun store, bought a gun, and shot himself in the parking lot.  His mother didn’t even know he was on the medication.  That’s an extreme case but it does raise some of the tensions you’re talking about.

TG:  Believe me, it is extreme but in no way unique.  In my research I found almost every university campus in this country has multiple stories like that, where the restraint of information – whether you call it secrecy or privacy – has not been to the benefit of the student or the university. 

SR:  Ted, your book is called “Nation of Secrets.”   I want to ask you about some of the journalistic dimensions of this because you teach journalism as well as  being an investigative reporter yourself. …There are some things in this book that people don’t know about.

TG:  There are a number of things that are unknown, that I stumbled upon.  One of them… and some of these are obscure and historical and some are not …one of them involves a covert operation the CIA ran back in the ‘60’s in India which may have had a profound effect on the government of India.  It went awry and I won’t go into all the details… but a Prime Minister named Shastri died suddenly.  A covert operative tells me that he fears that this covert operation than went awry may have contributed to the death of the prime minister.  Which, if true, is extraordinary.  Another thing I discovered in my research:  I went into the Library of Congress, their manuscript room, and I had a most unusual request.  I asked for everything I wasn’t allowed to see!  They brought me a print-out of all the things that were removed for national security reasons that were deemed “classified.”  And some of them were amusing, like  something from Claire Booth Luce marked 1953, still marked “top secret.”  But more disturbing were some works by investigative journalists who had donated their papers that had been culled for things deemed “classified.”  Among the journalists were four Pulitzer Prize winners whose papers they’d contributed to the Library of Congress …among them New York Times writer (at the time) Hedrick Smith, Neil Sheehan, William Safire, and Washington Post reporter, George Lardner.   These are materials that contributed to headlines or best sellers 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago which are now put in the vault at the Library of Congress.  And I’m told that not even the authors can get at them now! The donors of these papers!  Unless the government formally declassifies them.

SR: I asked you earlier (off air) what was behind this and you said, Well, some of it is due to the slippery slope people who care about these things and say, “Well, if we let some of these things out, it just leads to more demands!”  Which is the whole point of the Freedom of Information Act.   But is there something more going on here? Beyond that?

TG:  Well, there are a lot of things going on here!  One of them is that people in power don’t like to be held accountable.  And if no one is going to put their toes to the fire, secrecy will expand.  Many of the checks on secrecy have been disabled.  The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to some degree has been eviscerated now.  The presumptions have been reversed.  The presss, because of financial woes, has suffered a lot of cutbacks. So they’re not performing up to par.  There aren’t as many people in the field. 

SR:  Investigative reporting is very expensive and you’ve got to be willing and able to invest a lot of money.  It’s like exploring for oil.  You’ve got to live with a lot of dry holes.

TG:  Absolutely.  And also you have a single political party in dominance for many years.  Congressional oversight has been woefully absent. These were all checks on secrecy and, in their absence, secrecy has grown like topsy.

SR:  It’s interesting that you mention Congressional oversight because with the advent of the Democratic Congress, I’ve always thought the single most important change we’ve seen so far can be summed up in one word:  “subpoena.”  And you’ve seen already someone like Monica Goodling, the young Justice Department official, being grilled about things that were secret up until the day she was called to testify.  Do you see a difference with the Democrats in control?

TG:  I think the tendency towards secrecy attends power.  Whoever is in power tends to secrecy.  I think it’s a sanguine development that you don’t have one party in control. 

SR:  They check each other.

TG:  Right.  I’m delighted that’s the case, but I will note that after Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House,  and others came to power, they immediately called for greater transparency and then, not long after, had several closed sessions.  I do think that wherever there is power,  there is a tendency towards secrecy unless there’s a check on it. 

SR:  And one of the checks you’ve already mentioned are investigative journalists.  This raises a very thorny question.  Lewis Libby, the former aide to Dick Cheney, convicted of obstruction of justice, about to be sentenced, so this case is now in the news again.  That case raised, for many journalists, the conundrum of “anonymous sources.”  If you use anonymous sources – which are secret – to unearth other secrets, how do you reconcile this conflict.  Talk about it!  You teach journalism.  Talk about the whole issue of anonymous sources.  Are you for them?  Against them?  Are they overused? Underused?

TG:  “Fer ‘em or agin ‘em!”  I have to say that it’s like the La Brea tarpit.  When you have pervasive secrecy in a government, everyone gets sucked in, including the press.  It’s not whether you’re for or against them, you have to use them in an environment that’s defined by secrecy.  This current environment is clearly defined by secrecy.  So you have no alternative but to resort to accepting alternative sources.  But:  the press has abused that, left and right. It is now the default position of the press, often times, to preemptively offer “off the record” to people they call.  I’ve talked to people in government who say that when they get a call from a reporter, the first thing the reporter says to the government official is,  “This is off the record.  I wanted to talk to you about…”  Well, since when do reporters offer that before it’s asked!  And when that becomes the habit, people in government will insist upon it as they are now.  So it’s rampant.  It undermines credibility.  And it gives rise to things like the Plame affair.

SR:  Isn’t there also a trade-off?  You look at two of the Pulitzer Prize-winning stories of the past year, the Washington Post – your former colleague, Dana Priest and her story about the secret prisons in Europe, the New York Times story revealing the eavesdropping program which we now learn even Attorney General John Ashcroft thought was illegal.  Neither of those stories – which were secrets – could have been unearthed without those reporters promising secrecy to the sources, right?

TG:  Yes.  But you can see the corrupting influence of secrecy on both of those stories, one to a greater extent than the other.  The Times story about surveillance was held for a year at least, without any satisfactory explanation as to why it was held.  Shouldn’t the country have known in that entire intervening year that this was going on?  It was even during the course of an election, we think.  But we don’t know, because the editor isn’t saying.  What triggered the publication was not some high-falutin’ ethical concern but the imminent publication of a book that was going to disclose it.  They didn’t want to be scooped by one of their own reporters, so the Times wrote the story.  That’s problematical!  With regard to Dana Priest – who I think walks on water! She’s one of this country’s national treasures as a reporter – nonetheless the Post decided not to disclose the countries where those prisons were.  And I think that is problematical because when you withhold secrets in that way, you become a kind of confederate to those secrets.  And I think that’s corrupting.

SR:  Isn’t there a responsibility for anybody who covers national security if, as journalists, we all claim immunity from any official limits?  The Pentagon Papers case stands out there as the most signal attempt by government to exert prepublication censorship.  The Supreme Court knocks it down.  We claim so many rights as journalists.  Isn’t there a counter argument that Dana Priest or the New York Times have to take into account legitimate national security reasons?

TG:  Of course.  On my book on the CIA, I deleted the last chapter at the request of George Tenet who said it would compromise national security.  We’re all sensitive to these issues.  The problem is that we get trapped in these arguments about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin because we’re dealing in a system which is toxic to democracy.  We should not be having this discussion about which story we can print and which we can’t.  We should be having a discussion about why the government as a whole isn’t providing more information, and why it is operating so much in the shadows.  Why the rendition – that is, the secreting of prisoners overseas in secret prisons – why that went on so long, and why surveillance went on for so long.  We should be asking why it wasn’t routed through Congress.  Why was that not done openly and transparently? You don’t need to compromise the details of these operations but there should have been a national debate about the underlying conflicts and values that led up to it.  How do we feel about torture? That should have been public debated.  How do we feel about rendition?  How do we feel about surveillance?  Those debates weren’t held.  They were just transacted.  What happens is the press gets left holding the bag, trying to discriminate between this tiny detail and that detail. 

SR:  But as you say, you went to the CIA in your previous book.  You did delete information that might have compromised national security.  Isn’t it important, particular at a time when American troops are in harm’s way, for journalists to handle their responsibilities with a significant understanding of national security?  In the case of Dana Priest, I happen to think she did the right thing in withholding those names because she published the bulk of the story.  But it’s part of a process that honorable reporters go through, as you did yourself.

TG:  Of course.  I think that this is, to some degree, a massive distraction because I think the real argument should preempt this.  The real focus should be on transparency in government, not on exactly how we handle it when we learn some element of what government’s doing. We should be debating the much larger question about what it is that the government owes its citizens in the way of disclosure.  Not what is it that we can find if we’re lucky and how we should deal with it. 

SR:  Ted, as we mentioned, you teach journalism.  All of us who teach in this subject have had to alter a lot of what we do based on new technologies and what is known in the trade as “user-generated content.”  Given your whole analysis of secrets, you look at two or three prime examples recently where secrets were uncovered not by journalists but by individuals.  The photographs in Abu Ghraib.  The cellphone photos of Saddam Hussein’s hanging.  The photographs of coffins being shipped back from the battlefield, those photos being taken by one woman from Seattle.  Just three examples where secrets were unearthed by individuals.  Given the technology, the fact that any individual now with a laptop and a cellphone can take pictures and transmit information:  how does that impact this landscape of secrecy you write about?

TG:  That’s a great question.  It has contradictory impacts.  One impact, it deputizes the entire world to be journalists.  That makes it much more difficult to suppress  information.  And the examples you cite are ringing examples of it.  On the other hand, the same technology can be used to increase the stranglehold on information.  Let me give you an example.  At the Pentagon, where the internet is one of the primary sources of transmitting information now, it used to be that they identified individual paragraphs for classification.  Now, because of the formatting procedures of headers and footers, entire pages are automatically classified.  So it exponentially increases the mass of information that is classified.  That’s technology!  Let me give you another example.  In the federal courts – and this is troubling, I think – there are 26 cases in the federal courts that are handled by an automated system, a case management system.  Those cases – if they’re sealed – the people who run the courts don’t want the public to know about those cases.  So they have put a formatting in there with a default position where if you ask for those cases,  “no such case exists.”  That is untrue.  That is overt deception.  It’s using computers to increase the grip of secrecy.  And that’s the courts!

SR:  …Let’s hear from some callers who have been waiting to talk to you.  We’ll start with Kathleen in Athens, Ohio.

Kathleen:  I want to ask your guest… Say, for instance, somebody like Bob Novak who printed that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent.  What would happen if we had an official secrets act, as Britain does, in regard to journalists such as Judy Miller with agendas? 

SR:  The official secrets act interestingly – just to add to the question – just recently British journalists were convicted, I believe, under the Official Secrets Act.

TG:  That’s right.  For leaking a memo about a meeting between Tony Blair and President Bush.  I’m obviously opposed, as a journalist, to an official secrets act.  I think that we exercise restraint and discretion.  I know I have, and I know that most of my colleagues have.  The public sees only what we published, and they assume that everything we know is published.  They don’t see what we don’t publish and the restraint – it’s a little like the CIA argument “you only know our failures because we can’t boast about our victories!”  The truth is that most journalists who cover national security in the course of their work learn things which they showed the restraint of not publishing.   We are remarkably responsible, I think, as a profession when it comes to secrecy. 

Kathleen:  On that note, I would say we haven’t dealt with Bob Novak or Judy Miller.  Neither one of them has really been held accountable, Judy for printing non-truth, and Bob Novak for releasing Valerie Plame’s identity.  But here’s my other question.  I watched the Bolton hearings. As I was watching them – I watched Senator Biden’s and Kerry’s and Lincoln Chaffee’s and even our senator from Ohio, Voinivich’s faces, when they were demanding the NSA intercepts having to do with …the illegal wiretapping program.  I understand why I can’t have access to secret information.  But when our reps can’t get access to critical information, I would think Americans would become very deeply concerned. 

TG:  I think that you are correct that Congress has been remarkably and even deplorably submissive in these regards.  I think it should be much more assertive and aggressive on behalf of its citizens to get at this information.  I don’t think there’s an excuse.  There are a lot of reasons – political opportunism and such – but I don’t think there’s an excuse.  They are there as our proxies.  The citizens have a right to know this and they have just rolled over.

SR:  To take the other question that she asked, when you talk about accountability.  A lot of journalists might have disapproved of what Robert Novak did.  But when you start talking about being held accountable or being punished, then you get into very difficult territory, don’t you!  Who does the punishing and who sets the standard and who decides what the penalties are?  All of which are dangerous precedents. 

TG:  I think that’s exactly right.  We’re not looking for punitive measures against these folks.  And in fact, both have paid, I think, a dear price within the ranks of their profession and the country.  I don’t envy the position of either one.  I’m not sure that’s a substitute for legal proceedings, but I’d be opposed to any legal proceeding in either case. 

SR:  And that’s – when you talk about the web, an element in this – there is a self-correcting mechanism there.  To take one example, the misreporting of Judy Miller has been severely criticized on the web.  A lot of information has come out about how she operated.

TG:  Yes.  In fact I’m the last person in the world to defend Judy Miller, I’ll assure you of that!   But she [Kathleen?] has such excellent company across the country and throughout the ranks of journalism, Congress, and the rest of government, that I think to some degree she represents us all.

SR:  Ted, we’ve got a number of emails.  Here’s an interesting one from “Bob.”  “As a worker in the DoD (Department of Defense), the main reason for classifying things is laziness.  It’s easier to classify than to go through the process of vetting the material.  It’s easier to just stamp ‘classified’  on a document, even if it is obvious that theinformation is generally know, available in the public domain, or just common sense.”

TG:  Well, I think that’s a good point but I wish that were the full reason.  I think some of the reasons are more sinister.  I think what’s happened today is that anything that’s not classified is ignored.  And if it’s just “secret,” it goes to the bottom of the stack.  To get attention, a document has to be highly classified.  It inures to the status of the office as well as the document.  And the other thing that’s fascinating about secrecy is that people think that because of the attendant security that it has somehow higher credibility, because it’s guarded.  The truth is, it’s lower credibility because it isn’t tested in the crucible of open debate and the reason a lot of things are made secret is because they couldn’t stand scrutiny.  So it’s completely contrary to that presumption that it’s truer because it’s protected.

SR:  Here’s another email in a similar vein but another viewpoint.  “Skip” in Chesterland, Ohio, writes, “My question is why should a journalists who have no background or experience in protecting the nation be the ones who decide these questions.  We have professionals charged with protecting us.  We should let them do their jobs.  I, for one, do NOT want journalists or others to have information that presents a security risk for me or my family.”

TG:  Well, I could extrapolate from that question and say that the only people who should govern are the professionals.  But in a democracy we believe that citizens have a role to play and I would not defer to the professionals alone.  Let me give an example.  The professionals, that is, the Joint Chiefs of Staff back in the ‘60’s, came up with something called “Operation Northwoods.”  In 1962, after the Bay of Pigs invasion failed to topple Castro, the Joint Chiefs sat around coming up with pretexts for going to war including the idea of shooting down a civilian airliner or sinking a passenger ship and blaming it on Castro to justify going to war.  Those are the professionals.  I’m glad that the professionals didn’t have their way.  And I’m glad that the rationality of the citizens prevailed.

SR:  When you talk about this subject, when you put it in the context of 9/11 and the struggle against terrorism, but as you point out in your book, this issue of government secrecy has been with us since the founding of the republic.  It’s one that the founding fathers themselves talked about. 

TG:  Right. And that’s one of the great myths of America.  That the founding fathers, fullblown like the birth of Athena, imagined democracy mature and with full transparency.  On the contrary, they inherited a system which naturally gravitated towards secrecy.  It took them years – decades – to extricate themselves from that.  That struggle continues to this day.

SR:  Let’s talk to some more of our callers, Ted.  Let’s go to Greg in Burlington, North Carolina.

Greg:  Pertaining to local politics, maybe you could enlighten me a little bit.  They have a law in our town, secret meetings of the town council.  We have a local paper trying to get information about these meetings and the town is steadfast against it.  And the local paper feels the taxpayers have a right to know.  Can you talk about anything along these lines, about the local secrecy laws of town government?

TG:  I can tell you they vary radically from town to town and municipality to municipality.  The sunshine provisions – some of them related exclusively to personnel matters, to ongoing litigation, etc., but it’s a quiltwork that’s very diverse.  Usually the engines of changes are either the citizens or the newspaper or the two working together to try to expand the public’s right to know in municipalities.

SR:  Let’s talk to Catherine in Keene, New Hampshire. 

Catherine:  I want to thank you first for a wonderful show.  You guys always do such a great job.  I always learn something and always turn off my radio feeling very outraged after!  What I wanted to say was that we’re in this war right now because, I believe, the press was complicit.  If they hadn’t covered the 9/11 attacks the way they did, we probably wouldn’t be in this war in Iraq.  I wish journalism would get back to its real job and that’s informing the public, and being investigative and reporting. 

SR:  This is something that you hear from a lot of press critics.  There was a failure of the press before 9/11 and after 9/11.  How do you answer Catherine?

TG:  First of all, I’m sorry Catherine is outraged – I hope she feels empowered!  I think she’s absolutely right that we failed and I don’t think there’s any way around that.  We failed – as Congress failed and as all of the branches of government failed and as the citizens failed.  We simply didn’t exercise the sort of skepticism that is so important.  Journalism has a standard to meet.  That bar, when it comes to issues of war and peace, is not lowered, it should be raised.  Unfortunately, many journalists are afraid of either appearing to be unpatriotic or fear being unpatriotic.  They lower the bar and are more compliant with government at precisely the time when they should elevate the bar and be more skeptical.  If  you’re going to put our men and women in harm’s way, we journalists have a paramount responsibility to push the truth and test it to make sure it is indeed the truth.  There is nothing greater to fear, really, than consensus and a kind of orthodoxy.  In this case, the presence of “weapons of mass destruction.”  The head of the editorial staff of the New York Times, Gail Collins at the time, has said that her greatest regret was not being more skeptical and not paying closer heed to those on her staff who expressed misgivings or questions.  And when she expressed that candor, I respect it.  I don’t respect the situation described.  But that was repeated across the land.

SR:  I don’t think the Bush administration today would describe the press as “compliant” with respect to the Iraq war.  There has been a change in tone, don’t you think, and more aggressiveness on the part of the press as the war has turned sour?

TG:  I think there has been a change in tone but I’d like to see more of a change in substance.  Part of the problem is that we’re a bit hamstrung in the press because of our financial woes.  We don’t have the troop strength that we once did to deploy to investigate and report.  We’ve been highjacked by some of the entertainment fixation that affects so many of the news networks and newspapers.  We should… I really do think that the issue of transparency may well be the single most important question of the era.  Because it is the filter through which we judge all other events, war and peace, health, the economy, etc.  If we can’t get information and candor from the government, then democracy is reduced to a crapshoot.   Because information is what it’s all predicated upon.

SR:  Let’s turn to Debra in Mooresville, North Carolina.

Debra:  If you could just revisit the topic he touched on earlier about the secrecy in mental health laws.  When I went to college, I was under my parents’ health insurance.  I think most kids are. As a result of that, if my parents are footing the bill for my insurance, then I don’t understand why they should not be privy to what’s going on in my life.  Being in the healthcare profession, I know, specifically with mental illness and especially depression, that you just don’t treat the disease, you treat the whole person.  Sometimes that includes the family.  So it just doesn’t make any sense to me that you would have somebody out there who was only being half treated and for the parents to be put through all of this and not be privy to any information about what their child may be suffering.  I wonder what your opinion was about that?

TG:  I certainly agree with your assessment and description.  There’s nothing barring the child from sharing his or her condition with a parent or the parents getting involved directly.  The bar arises with regard to the behavior and conduct of the institution – the university – under FERPA privacy restrictions.  And that’s where some attention needs to be directed.   But you’re absolutely right.  It isn’t just a question of pecuniary interests or insurance, it’s a question of what’s best for the child.  Clearly parental involvement in most cases is going to inure to the benefit of the child/student.  So I agree with you!

SR:  But any university president or guidance counselor or therapist will tell you that they are very limited by that law.  You gave the acronym “FERPA.”   That law is a source of enormous frustration to a lot of university administrators.  …We’ve got Jim on the line, another Ohioan.  Ted teaches at Case Western.  Jim is from Kent, Ohio.

Jim:  I’d like to know whether this excessive secrecy may not be doing so much for concerns about national security as much as exposure of their own criminal actions.  In a lot of cases – like “Operation Northwoods” which you mentioned.  It seems to me that would have been a top secret, a highly classified secret which they wouldn’t want released – not because it would harm national security but because the people who were responsible for it – in this case the joint chiefs – were responsible for treason.  So they’d naturally want to cover that up.  It seems to me that in the current situation – Abu Ghraib, renditions, torture, and all that – Bush is probably more concerned with his own skin that with national security.  He knows he could be impeached and possibly put on trial in The Hague for what he’s done.

TG:  Well, I respect your opinion.  I think I would disagree in terms of motivation there.  I think that part of the issue, and a not insignificant part particularly in the matters you describe, is that people in power are controversy-averse.  They have an agenda and they want to fulfill it.  Nothing is messier than a democracy and debate.  And so the way to restrain that – the highest efficiency – is to be attained by secrecy.  If you can squelch the debate, nip it in the bud, then you can go ahead and implement your policies.  I think it’s not to avoid criminal liability, I think it’s simply to be able to implement policies without the messy affairs that attend democracy. 

SR:  Another email, this one from “Ronnie,” says “One secret I just don’t understand is why Dick Cheney’s energy commission was so secret and why nobody but the ACLU called him out on it and took it to the Supreme Court.”  Talk about that issue which has been there since the beginning of the administration.

TG:  I think that pretty well set the tone for the administration.  And it was a wonderful test case. The problem with it was not merely that the country was excluded from a formative discussion about energy policy, but of more concern was that it set a precedent which emboldened the administration to conduct so much more of its activities and policies behind closed doors.  Once it was greenlighted that way, once Congress showed that it could not penetrate and the courts would not force it, then the administration was emboldened and I think that we have seen the result in the profusion of secrecy in the [inaudible] policy.

SR:  Another email from “Howard” for Ted Gup.  “Is there any evidence that sensitive stories will go unreported if reporters do not grant anonymity?”

TG:  I think that there are stories that if you don’t grant anonymity probably will not be reported.  But I think if reporters are forceful that in most cases there are ways you can get records on the source or at least cite records.  I did a book about covert operatives who were killed in the line of duty at the CIA.  It’s a very sensitive book.  The CIA did not want me to do it.  There is not one unnamed source in the book.  And the CIA asked everyone not to cooperate or help me.  There were no reprisals against anyone who cooperated with me.  I think you can push.  I don’t want to be naïve.  There are stories that cannot be done without grants of anonymity.  But I think they represent the minority of the cases in which anonymity is in fact used. 

SR:  Any of us who have been Washington reporters -- as both of us have -- understand that you’re often balancing here by withholding information about your source which is secret.  You cannot unearth other information which is to the benefit of your listeners or readers and that’s a … constant balancing act as to which core interest serves the public better.  As you pointed out earlier, reporters take this very seriously and are constantly examining that calculation.

TG:  Right.  Because we know, from experience, that when people go off the record and on “deep background” that there’s a reason.  Now, it may be a fear of retribution from their superiors, but it may be a more nefarious motive.  It may be a kind of political assassination.  They might want to knock off a political rival, discredit him.  So there are a lot of reasons, not all altruistic.  We are charged with factoring that into our computations. 

SR:  One of the other issues you deal with in the book is the whole phenomenon of whistleblowers who have been protected by a variety of laws.  There’s a government agency designed to protect them.  But one of your concerns is that the protections for whistleblowers is also under attack.

TG:  I think that’s right.  And I think if you look at the pattern of people who have come forward exposing vital information in the country, you’ll see that they have suffered dearly.  A few years ago there was a cover story on Time magazine that featured three women whistleblowers.  Two were corporate and one was FBI.  They were the Persons of the Year.  What they shared in common was that all three were ignored and all three suffered reprisals.  That’s a sad commentary about the ability of whistleblowers to get their information out in a timely fashion so that it’s actually taken advantage of. 

SR:  A final word here, Ted.  Where do you see the trend-line going?  You’ve talked about increasing secrecy.  Now, with Congress in Democratic hands, more of a check and balance, maybe the press more aggressive certainly on national security.  Where are we going on this subject? 

TG:  I think we don’t know.  Right now there’s a real risk that this could be the permanent landscape of America  because, unlike World Wars I and II, the “war on terrorism” is not going to end in an armistice and a truce signed on a battlefield.  In the end, I think if we’re going to push back secrecy, it’s going to be up to the citizens.  That’s really why I wrote the book.  I think people need to think about this issue and express themselves through their elected representatives.