Background
Bob, welcome back to Berkeley.
Thank you.
Where were you born and raised?
I grew up in New York City, in Manhattan.
Looking back, how do you think your parents shaped your thinking about
the world?
I think my parents, Manhattan, the school I went to, all were important. The milieu of that time, the forties
and fifties in New York, heavily Jewish, left-liberal, not really red diaper baby, that is, not Communist but
left liberal, that was the dominant view, and involved in politics, if not running for office but certainly
campaigning, talking about it, reading two newspapers a day, arguing -- that was the whole milieu.
You mentioned a school. Was this in high school or ... ?
This was the Ethical Culture School. Ethical culturism is Jewish Unitarianism and the school was not
heavily influenced by that, but it was leftist. I remember Pete Seeger coming and singing "The Banks are
Made of Marble," and I sort of sang along, and later it occurred to me, "Hm, there's a political message
there."
Around the family table did you talk politics, or was it just
everywhere?
It was both. We certainly talked politics and whether I prompted my parents or the other way, I was always
interested. My almost first political memory is a false VJ Day, about a week before the war in Japan ended,
and I remember sharply the next couple of years quizzing my parents about what we should do [in response
to] Cold War [events]. When an American plane was shot down over the Adriatic, saying, "Well, what
should we do? Should we retaliate?," and all this. My parents probably thought this was odd but they did
encourage it.
It sounds like you got interested in international politics early.
Yes, very early from what was happening in -- well, whether I actually read the newspaper at age seven, I
don't know. But the world was so fascinating and in fouth or fifth grade a couple of friends and I would put
out a mimeographed (like a Xeroxed) newspaper commenting on, I remember, the Slansky trials in
Czechoslovakia, as the Soviets got their hold.
You couldn't escape the world, and if you wanted to, the world wouldn't let you escape. Friends of my
parents were called before McCarthy's hearings, and that was a milieu that was enveloping.
Where did you do your undergraduate work?
I went to Oberlin College. I entered in '58 and I thought having grown up in a big city, I really should try a
small town. No; mistake. I liked Oberlin, a very good education, but quite an experience.
And then on to graduate school at Berkeley, and I should have said
"welcome back" at the beginning.
Yes, it's always nice to come back to Berkeley. I really love it.
And you came to Berkeley in the early sixties?
I arrived in '62. I had choice of graduate schools, and unlike students today, I didn't know a lot about the
places, but I was attracted to Berkeley partly because it was 3000 miles away from my parents, who I was
close to, but still, it was away. My college roommate, Andy McFarland, who made a career in political
science, had decided to go to Berkeley, and the fact that the San Francisco demonstrations in -- what was it,
'60? -- against HUAC [the House Un-American Activities Committee].
Yeah -- or late fifties.
In '59 or '60. I thought that would be an interesting place to be.
When you were here you focused on international relations. Who were the
academic mentors who influenced you, whether they were in IR or not?
I was fortunate because I hadn't done a lot of research. In fact, the IR faculty at Berkeley, distinguished in
their ways, were not doing stuff that interested me. Ernie Haas was, of course, the big figure of towering
importance in the field, and great integrity, but with all due respect, I just didn't find then, and don't find
now, what he did terribly interesting.
That is, his subject matter.
Yes, the subject matter. Also, he was a reformer. Ernie was driven by the deep desire to change world
politics. To be honest, I've done a little consulting -- we can talk about it, I hope -- but I'm driven to
understand it. If I could understand international politics in the nineteenth century, I'd be happy as a clam. I
don't care what it means now. Ernie wanted to change it and did it in odd ways.
But Glenn Snyder was here as a visitor, and I took Glenn's classes, and he was my mentor and I dedicated
one of my new strategy books to him, and several others, and in many ways I owe a tremendous amount of
my intellectual development to Glenn and the two years that we spent together when he was here.
Doing International Relations Theory
Let's talk a little about international relations theory and doing it.
What does it take to do that work well, in terms of skills, in terms of
temperament?
That's interesting. Of course, now skills is one of the right words. A tremendous amount of [work] was
either formal, using game theory (and I use informal game theory, but a lot of people do it formally), and a
lot large statistical analyses. So, any young person has to learn that. I read the stuff. I'm -- you can tell from
my expression -- I'm ambivalent. It has produced some real value. There are a lot of different ways to
study, there's no one method, no one approach is best for everything, but it takes a fascination with
international politics. Every day I either pick up the newspaper or a history book and say, "I can't explain
that. Why did that happen?" You know: "What rules does that violate?"
It takes a combination of thinking about particulars and trying to think about the generalizations it fits with,
or can lead to, or can contradict. That playing back and forth between the particular and the general is what
is certainly most productive for me. It's a constant grounding in saying, "Well, wait a minute," keeping your
theory anchored in something.
I'm familiar with your work, and we'll talk about some of it in a
minute, but I'm curious, given this background that you've just
described, there must be a fascinating interplay between the theorizing
you do and what's happening in the world or what has just happened.
Talk a little about that, and maybe give us an example of that, because
I know, for example, you've done a lot on nuclear weapons.
Let me give you two of my favorites. One is what I've written about in the misperception book and in other
articles about the security dilemma on the extent to which a conflict can be seen as irreconcilable conflict
of interest in which a defender of the status quo, to be crude about it, has to use threats and enforced
deterrence, versus what I call -- drawing on others, I am not original in this -- the spiral models.
But basically this is what I grew up with. When I asked my parents in 1947 -- the Russians have shot down
this plane over the Baltic, claiming it was a spy plane. How ridiculous that we would spy, of course not.
But leave that aside. What I was asking then was the same question, so that I'm still driven by those
questions.
The other one -- let me tell you the story -- I've written two books on nuclear strategy. I was interested in
my first book on the logic of images, very heavily influenced by Schelling and Goffman,always interested
in nuclear strategy, in IR and in that era you couldn't help it. But I started consulting for CIA in the late
seventies, partly on stuff on the Soviet Union, but I had a friend who was in the Pentagon at that point, a
former student. I went over to see him and he said, "This is not in my area but I know that the
administration's pushing the new missile, the MX. I can't figure it out. Give me the justification." He pulls a
paper out of the drawer, I read it and I say -- are you censored? -- I say, "This is a bunch of crap. This is
ridiculous." So, he puts it back and says, "All right," digs down deeper, pulls out another paper. So, I [took
a look and gave it] back to him and said, "Okay, this is better. It's still no good, doesn't answer the
fundamental questions." And he said, "Bob, you have just read the most sophisticated paper in the
government on this. This is so sophisticated, it won't leave program analysis in the Pentagon." And you
know, here I was 37 years old, I'd studied this stuff -- I was shocked. I really thought they were wrong, but
maybe they knew what they were doing. On the plane going back to LA -- I was teaching at UCLA at the
time -- I sketched out an article [outlining] why nuclear superiority doesn't matter, which led to those two
books.
Realizing that the government really didn't have a good rationale led me to think about arguments about
nuclear superiority, nuclear strategy, in a way that I'd never thought of it before. Now in principle I could
have gotten there without this silly paper, but for me, it's the constant engagement with what are the issues,
what do they mean, and then taking it to a level, deeper or higher than you get from even intelligent
discourse.
So, it sounds like there's a continuity in your life, because if you
were doing this when you were seven about events in the Cold War, and
so on, it's keeping that momentum. Of course, the
subject matter will change. So tell us a little - I don't have all of your books here, but let me
show one, Perception and Misperception in
International Politics. What got you interested
initially in this whole question of the way we
see the world? Obviously it's pivotal for
understanding international politics.
Yes, but I got into it backwards, because again, my interest was the central
Cold War arguments. In '64 when I was starting this, I wa pretty much of a
hawk. The arguments on the other side were called the spiral model, were done by social psychologists,
built partly on the security dilemma but heavily on the perception. I was going to rebut them. I thought they
were wrong on the Cold War (now I'm not sure) but it struck me that it was an interesting topic that IR
hadn't covered. So, I was led into it in that odd way.
At Berkeley you were getting a very good comparative politics education
-- I know because I know many of the people who were here with you at
that time. You focus on misperception, and often behind [misperception]
is ideology, and you were well grounded in that. I know you were
reading everything from Louis Hartz to probably Richard Hofstadter and
"The Paranoid Style." So, how do you find what is really important and
zero in on that, which is clearly what you're doing?
Well, that's interesting. We didn't do a lot on ideology but I was struck by the Louis Hartz book that Mike
Rogin, a marvelous Berkeley professor, assigned, and I still think Hartz's analysis of America and why it
can't see the world right because of its unusual social structure has a lot to be said for it. The great thing
about Berkeley then, and I hope now, is it left us alone, the graduate students, it didn't tell us what to do. It
said, "Here're a lot of things to read and think and talk about, and we'll help you, but you go out and
explore." In retrospect, it looks a little risky.
I was looking at your concluding section in Perception and
Misperception, and there you say, [though] it's hard to write a
conclusion, that empathy for the other side [is necessary]. That is,
however we understand why we're misperceiving, or our adversary is
misperceiving, we need empathy for the other side. Make assumptions and
predictions explicit, encourage the formulation of alternative images,
don't let interested parties define perceptions, and know the common
errors of perception. A short list there, very powerful, and it seems
like a lot of our policy makers still haven't learned those lessons.
It is funny, I have not gone back and read that, but what I'm talking about later today is work I've done on
intelligence failures, and that list will be on the view graphs. Today it was on the conclusions when I did a
post-mortem for CIA on why they were slow to see the why the Shah [of Iran] would fall over twenty-five
years ago. People in CIA have read the book and the analysis, and really like it. Very hard lessons to
internalize, but you're right. I could put them right back on the view graphs for the Iraq WMD case.
And we're going to talk about that in a minute. Now you are in the
field of international relations. You are, I think it's fair to say, a
Realist. Help us understand what Realism is about in the way it sees
the world.
It really is very important for understanding current American foreign policy. Almost everyone, whether
they like American foreign policy or don't like it, sees it in terms of internal sources. You know: America,
we're doing good for the world because we're good internally; or the people who think that we're doing evil
in various ways trace it back to a tradition of American imperialism, like the genocide of the Indians.
You've had Chomsky on this program; we can go through the left-wing rap, it's pretty straightforward.
What almost no one does is say, "Wait a minute. The United States is a state, it is a country in international
politics. There is tremendous continuity. The U.S. is behaving like a normal superpower, which the world
has rarely seen." The core belief in Realism is, both from the international system and from human nature,
unless people or larger entities are checked externally by the world, they will gratify their whims and
impulses. It's what the U.S. is doing. It's what any Realist from Hans Morgenthau, or Thucydides, through
the Ken Waltz perspective would lead us to expect. Ken Waltz, in a way, predicted this in an article in '91.
It leads you to believe -- no, maybe not true -- that this -- yeah, much as I like Hartz and his American
uniqueness, the U.S. is neither uniquely good nor uniquely evil. It's what Britain did when it had the ability
to do it. It's what countries -- great powers -- will do.
The Consequences of 9/11
So, let's bring it up to date now, because the 9/11 attack by the al
Qaeda network changed us. But then another question is did it change
the world? So, let me hear you bring your Realist lenses here and help
us understand that.
Well, the first thing is, yes, it changed George Bush enormously. I know people who are to the other side, if
we want we can go into it, but I think it did. He says it changed him enormously; here, I believe him. Those
people, like me and many others, who had studied international politics for years, it didn't change us. We
were shocked but not surprised. We did not predict the day, the time, the method. We all predicted a large
terrorist attack on the U.S. But it did change Bush and American foreign policy.
I don't think terrorism is a world changing [phenomenon] -- it changes the world because it's changed
American foreign policy. The way I see it changing American foreign policy is it being one of a number of
possible events that triggered the U.S. to do what I would expect a great power to do at one time or another,
that is, decide to run wild, and there's nothing out there to check it. This is foolish because the terrorist
threat is much less than Bush claims and than the popular press has it. I think we're being almost paranoid,
or we've lost the sense of proportion on terrorism.
And we'll talk about this, but I want to unravel the pieces of this
ball of yarn. I guess one of the things that you
point out in your newest book -- which I
recommend very much and I'm going to use it in my
class; it's called American Foreign Policy in a
New Era -- one of the things that you are
emphasizing is because we are the hegemon in the
world, the sole superpower, that we, because of
our military, our economic and other powers, are
always able to act alone, even if we previously
acted otherwise. You just a moment ago said it
was about balancing our power, and the reality is
no one can do that now.
That's right. I think that is right. I know you were talking to Steve Walt a
week or two ago, and I agree with Steve normatively, that is, we would
like to see the U.S. cooperate more with others. I think Steve sees more of
the so-called soft balancing against the U.S. as occurring. I think a little of
it is, but I don't expect enormous [impact], because Europe isn't going to
unite and [oppose us]. I wish it would because I would like them to be able to check us, but I don't think
they're going to. The others all face a big public goods problem. I don't think anyone -- not [that] the U.S.
can do everything [we want], but we're not going to face the same external checks that other countries have,
and that's very dangerous.
I think 9/11 was almost, like I say in the book, an accident waiting to happen. That is, we were in a
situation where there were fewer external restraints than ever had been true in the world, and I think
sometime in the next generation, something would've triggered an expansion of American active deployed
power in the world as we've seen. That's exactly what Realism would lead you to expect, even if Realism
thinks this is foolish, bad for the world, and bad for the United States.
The important point here we should emphasize is that you as a Realist
see the world as anarchical. So the relative power you have to
everybody else makes a very great difference about what you can choose
to do. One of the ideas that has fully emerged during the Bush
administration, implicit before, is that we can act by different
standards than the rest of the world.
Yes. It's interesting that they have made this explicit, and in a way this is intellectually honest. I think it's
fair to say the Clinton administration, to the extent that it had a foreign policy, it was really very slight.
They wouldn't want to say that. Madeleine Albright occasionally came close but [it was] considered bad
taste. In some ways John Bolton is typical of this administration in not only being forthright but believing
that that's good, believing that you should speak the truth as you see it, very unlike normal diplomacy, but
that's exactly right. We've said, in effect, "Preventive war? Yes, we can do it. No one else can do it. It's not
a matter of fairness. As the major power, that's our role. But we take care of everyone's problems. They're
not going to be able to do this."
We should explain to our audience what "preventive war" means. Although
the administration and its documents have called it preemption, it's
really prevention. [It means] we can choose the time and the place to
prevent something from happening that we perceive is a long-term
threat.
Preemption is short-term. You attack now because you expect to be attacked in the next few days. That has
a great legitimacy to it, is very close to self-defense. Preventive is [based on the perception that] there are a
lot of bad things that could happen four, five, ten years from now; we are going to maintain the world order
that's good for us and good for everyone. So, we're trying to re-write the non-proliferation treaty rules in a
way that would make some sense if we could do it, but is very different from what's written, the sort of
equality that's written down in the treaty. It's a very different world they have in mind.
Your book is one of the few books, in my view, and I've read a lot of
them, that lays out the elements of this hegemonic position so
thoroughly. You say that as power expands -- and you've just explained
that in the contemporary situation that power is unparalleled and
unmatched in the history of the world -- then the statement of interest
also does. So, the bigger, the more powerful you are, the more you
think you have to do.
Yes. It's a phrase that I'm not sure who first came up with, but I remember Bob Tucker, a marvelous
Realist, arguing that there isn't a corner of the globe that something that happens doesn't touch American
foreign policy. Again, the heart of Realism: partly for structural reasons (no world government), partly for
human nature, as your power expands, there are more things you're involved in. A revolution in
Kazakhstan, oops, American bases are there, or implications for American interests. Remember, Kissinger
in the Cold War, when Allende was first elected and he joked, "Chile is a dagger pointed at the heart of
Antarctica," and later he said, "Oops, I didn't mean that ... " What's happening in Chile affects the U.S.
So, everywhere -- and it's, in a way, even more true now without the Soviet Union, because we didn't care
about Kazakhstan in the Cold War, it was part of the Soviet Union. Where's a part of the world we don't
care about? Doesn't exist.
The other element that you add to this equation in your book is that
this is also true of fear, that in other words, you can be more
fearful, you can use fear as a way of policy, and you can spread that
fear widely.
Fear is an enormous driver in international politics. Again, I go back to Thucydides, the cause of the
Peloponesian Wars, the growth of Athenian power and the fear it created in others, what we call the
security dilemma which is the way in which one country increases its power and makes others less secure. I
think this isn't the root cause but it's one of the two or three root causes of international politics, and living
in New York especially, you saw fear and what it did and what it does. You saw the Bush administration
feel it in their gut, partly because there were all the stories about nuclear weapons planted in Washington.
None of us knew this but I've heard enough now -- I don't know the sources, but they really did believe it.
So, they felt the fear in their gut, and then I think they did manipulate it for their own purposes.
International politics is a great home of fear.
I want to pick up briefly on this fear because it must also be
important that the Pentagon itself was under attack and they did not
know if the next target was the White House.
Yes.
So, there's a personal element here beyond everything that they had
prepared for by all the different roles they had played in national
security. So, I guess before we go on to talk about their response and
how a Realist would grade that response, I want to draw on your
education at Berkeley and ask you to what extent are there elements in
our political tradition that make us more susceptible [to fearmongering]?
There are at least three. One, probably the least important; the separation of powers. The president always
has to persuade Congress. Ted Lowi, a famous political scientist, has written very well on that. It leads to
what Ted called overselling problems and overselling solutions. The second tradition is our previous
geographic isolation, very different from others' geography. We didn't live in world politics until 1945. I
think it tends to make us lose perspective more. And there's more American nationalism and unilateralism,
so I think those magnify [our fears].
In looking at your misperception book that we were just talking about,
some of this is about pulling to consciousness things that are latent.
What is the problem in this? Is it the American hegemon that has such
difficulty in understanding a lot of what we've just been talking
about?
I can't fully answer. When I was working on some of these [issues] in my book, I had a conversation with
Steve Krasner who now is head of policy planning in the State Department and very close to Condie Rice.
Steve's a marvelous political scientist.
A professor at Stanford.
Yes. Unfortunately not at Columbia. Anyway, I was talking to him in the fall of 2002 when it was clear to
me that we were going to invade Iraq. I said, "This is crazy," and Steve got upset, I mean, irate, and he said,
"No, you can say we're wrong but not crazy." I thought about it quite a bit, and I think there's a lot to that.
When I say it's crazy, it means it's unique either to Bush, and we can go back to that, or to the U.S. I
interpret Steve's one-word [objection] about being "wrong" [but not "crazy"] is what I've talked about so
far, that "No, no, it's what countries do in these situations." And I do go back and forth. I started on the
[idea of it being] uniquely American, but the more I thought, and the more I thought of Realism, I came to
stress the -- well, the general.
So, you're agreeing with Steve.
Yes, I am. I am. But I think the uniqueness -- the American things, and Bush himself, his personality,
certainly magnifies it.
I'm giving you an explanation I don't like. I've got too many factors explaining the same outcome. They are
both involved and I do see those -- the structural as the foundational -- but I think there are unique things
about the United States that make it even worse. Some of the behavior of
the European countries, in a very mini way, a micro way, parallel the
Unites States. The reason I stress the Realism is so many people explain
what we're doing in American terms, and I don't think that it's wrong or
unimportant, but it's the wrong way to start.
You've worked a lot on nuclear weapons, and you
were going to talk about the Bush doctrine and
the failure of intelligence. But one of the
things that there seems to be universal consensus
about is the fear of terrorists with weapons of
mass destruction.
Yes, absolutely.
Now that link between these two phenomena -- to
what extent is that also driving this fear, and
if so, is that legitimate? Is that a new concern?
Yes, it is very important, because what you've got to start with, and is implicit in what you said but I want
to say it, which is terrorists without WMD are -- I don't want to say a nuisance; it seems like it's debasing
the memory of the 3000 who died, but it is a nuisance. The number of people who died on 9/11 is the
number of people who die in less than a month of auto accidents. It's a terrible thing, something to work on,
but it's not a driver of American foreign policy, it's a cost of doing business.
What you said about WMD is right, but it isn't all WMD. You really can't do it with chemicals. Anthrax -you can stop that if you get detectors. It's only communicable biological agents and nuclear weapons. It
isn't even a dirty bomb, because a dirty bomb won't kill many people. A dirty bomb in New York would
would be terrible for me because it would ruin what I'm passing on to my children, which is the value of
my apartment on Fifth Avenue. I'm not in a fashionable part of Fifth Avenue, but it does overlook the park,
nevertheless, and it won't be worth anything if there's a dirty bomb. But a dirty bomb won't kill many
people. It panics people.
The real fear for deaths obviously are terrorists with real nuclear weapons, and one of the many shames of
this administration is it hasn't worked that problem right. The main source of nuclear weapons are loose
nukes in Russia. This is one of the things the Clinton administration did pretty well. The Bush
administration did not put the priority on that, [but] that is the linchpin. It is the horrible scenario. But we
should remember that even this, horrible [as it is], is nothing like what you and I grew up with. In the Cold
War, if there were a war, [it would mean] the end of civilization. Even a terrorist nuclear bomb is a horrible
thing, but it is not anything like the end of civilization. It's probably less than the tsunami, maybe kills
fewer people than the earthquake in the subcontinent. I don't in any means want it, or say we shouldn't
worry about it, but I'm not sure even that should be the driver of American foreign policy. But it sure as hell
is one of the top things you worry about.
The Bush Administration's Response to
9/11
Let's look at the responses of the Bush administration to these events,
and in particular what became known as the Bush Doctrine. Let's put on
our Realist IR cap, and help us understand what you see as the
assumptions of that doctrine and whether it merits an A or a C, or what
grade.
There are several elements and I want to save one of the most important for last because several of them fit
with Realism. Preventive war, I think, we've carried to an extreme, but it's a traditional Realist thing. Act
now while you can, it'll be harder to act later. The unilateralism has roots in America but is, again,
understandable given the structure of the system, the attempt to spread a form of order and discourage peer
competitors, by which we mean not only China but a united Europe -- standard Realism. I think those are
good things that this administration has carried to an extreme. I don't think they were needed. I think a more
cooperative approach would've done the trick.
The other element is the one that boggles the mind of any Realist, but it's very American, and that is
spreading democracy around the world. This is anathema to Realists, that is, not that Realists don't like
democracy, but they believe the international system is very important and that countries react to the
system, the external environment, much more than to their domestic environment. Realists believe by and
large that democracies aren't going to behave that differently from non-democracies, and also tend to
believe you can't spread democracy by force, and also worry if you make Egypt a democracy, oh, be careful
of what you wish, you may get it. That is as likely to be some sort of "Islamic fundamentalism." This drives
Realists up the wall, including me.
To help our audience understand this, Realists see the units, in a way,
as black boxes.
Yes, billiard balls is the phrase,
Billiard balls, right. What that means is that the color of the
billiard balls does not matter in winning the game. What matters -- and
I guess here we'll have to move the metaphor along a little further -is your relative standing, what you're able to do to them, whether
you're able to balance their power, what sort of threat they pose. But
it doesn't matter, whether you're a democracy in the Middle East or
whether you're a dictatorship.
That's right. Exactly. The schools of thought become straw men, but they're useful straw men because they
get at important things. Realists looked at the Cold War and said "The Soviet Union's immoral, deeply, and
the U.S. much less so, but their international points of behavior are very similar: Vietnam, Afghanistan,
their nuclear strategies, the same use of covert action, you name it, their international behavior is very
similar." So, there's a democracy.
The other side of the coin, Bush says we must demolish evil in the world, and he said that in the first
speech after 9/11. Realists think, "We're never going to demolish evil." Evil is partly in our nature, and you
don't have to believe our Bible to think that most people have impulses for evil in them. DNA, unless we
get genetic reconfiguration, that's going to be there. The international system encourages this. Furthermore,
the attempt to abolish evil is going to make the world much worse, and democratic regimes do evil all the
time.
So, what are the basic contradictions here in this policy? We've made
clear that it doesn't fit with the way the world works.
The doctrine does have a real contradiction, and contradiction does matter. It doesn't bother only us
theorists. I talked to one person who had a mid-level position in the administration in the fall of '02, and I
said, "I understand these three elements but the first one in this security document definition is democracy."
He said, "Oh, Bob, no one around here takes that seriously." Well, he was wrong. And those things will
come to contradict each other out in the real world. Now, most of us were surprised that the U.S. has
pushed democracy as hard as we have in the Middle East. We haven't pushed it on Pakistan yet, but we
could easily get to a position where that does contradict the other elements. And it is unclear how in the
next three years the administration is going to handle that mixture.
Now at the core of this, once you go down this road, is -- and let's
use an interpersonal analogy here -- if I fear that you're going to
attack me and I want to attack you first or prevent you from doing
that, as all of your work in the social sciences would point to, we
really are very dependent at this point on information. I have to know
what it is you intend, what your capabilities are, what is the history
of the way you've acted toward me, on and on. So, as soon as you go to
the public and say this is about weapons of mass destruction -- and we
know that the administration did that, according to what Paul Wolfowitz
told Vanity Fair, because there was the greatest consensus in the
government on that issue -- but once you do that, you have to act on
information. And so, you have to gather that information, which leads
us to the other big problem here.
Yes. As you know, as background, I consult for the CIA. I want to say that clearly because some people
think you shouldn't, which is fine, but I believe that you can talk about it, it's legitimate, and I don't want
anyone saying, "Oh, he covered what he does." So, I have looked at the WMD issue in the Iraqi case for the
CIA. In fact, most of the story is public, and through government reports that are either whole or in part
declassified, and I'll have an article coming out in Journal of Strategic Studies [about this]. But when you
step back for the specifics on what was wrong, the main thing that hits you time and time again is ...
Why the information was so bad.
Yes. It's very, very hard. That has really got to be the starting point. You know, you'd think it's sort of easy
to find a country with nuclear weapons. Well, it isn't. They're trying to keep it secret often, or they're trying
to bluff you. North Koreans have said they have nuclear weapons. Do they? Well, I've talked to the people
who know the most about it in the U.S. government, and they smile, not because they can't tell me what
they know -- they can -- but because they can't be sure. They've said it. I mean, how would you know?
You'd know if you had an agent who was high up in the program. You'd know maybe if you had someone
who was a technician who'd gone in there and patted the bomb and said, "Oh, it's warm. Okay, there's
plutonium in there." It could be an elaborate bluff. It's very hard to know that. And in the Iraq case it was
all sorts of inner games he was playing, Saddam Hussein; it was very hard to penetrate. So, you need good
information and you can't get it, and decision makers psychologically have to pretend they have it because
they have to persuade people and they have to act, and they can't psychologically face up to how little they
know.
You've studied this and it's very clear that one of the things going on
here was that everybody had the same assumptions and they were
essentially sharing almost the same pieces of information. So, we had
no B team, no team saying, "Let's challenge what's being said." We had
no way to think out of the box. Is that a fair summary?
It is. According to Hans Blix, the only person he knew who doubted [WMD programs] was not him. He
thought they had them but serious programs, but the only person he knew who doubted it was Chirac. He
said Chirac said that, and Blix looked startled, then Chirac said, "My intelligence service tells me they have
it but I don't believe them. These intelligence services, they intoxicate each other."
That is part of it, and it became so deeply rooted in conventional wisdom that almost none of the opponents
of the war challenged it, partly because it didn't make sense. If Saddam didn't have an active nuclear
weapons program, why was he committing suicide? Why didn't he not only let the inspectors in but
welcome them (which he didn't), show them everything? He could've shown that he didn't have nuclear
weapons, the same way that Libya, when they made the agreement, pretty much convincingly showed what
it had. Why didn't Saddam do it? The Duelfer Report has some answers, not very convincing, but at the
time, if you produced what we "know now" and put it on a decision makers desk, he or she would've
laughed. It seemed wildly implausible.
But this comes out of the Duelfer report, that one element amidst all
of his irrationality was not letting his potential adversaries in the
region know what he didn't have.
Yes. It looks like one of the things he wanted [was] to deter Iran, but in the whole scheme of things, if I had
been his advisor I would have said, "Boss, Iran is third order on your problems, and anyway, Iran isn't
going to attack, and if it does the U.S. actually will have to protect you." So, the idea that he would do this
to protect from Iran partly shows how cut off from reality he was. So, the intelligence made a lot of errors,
which I'll [discuss] for the session this afternoon and in my article. But boy, this was a harder one than
many of the others, but the essential point is intelligence is going to be wrong a lot. Decision makers have
trouble understanding the limits of that because it's very scary to sit [and say], "I'm going to make a war
and peace decision on the basis of information that's what, 60 percent reliable?"
Now there's an irresponsibility here within the political system, if
not fully in the Bush administration, in the sense that, first of all,
if they had said, "We're going to go in because democracy works," then
they wouldn't have needed the intelligence -- and you point that out.
So, you would not have to have the evidence. Then you also point out
that if Bush had been honest and said, "Well, look, we really don't
know this but because of 9/11 I'm really worried, this is my job, I'm
going to ... ," but he didn't do that. So, now what everybody in the
political system seems to be doing is looking for a whipping boy so
that they are not accountable when the next election is held. Is that
fair?
I think that is. Now maybe because I do consult for CIA on a number of things, I have perhaps excess
sympathy for them, but the Senate report which really rips them up one side down the other overdoes it. I
mean, there are things wrong, but the CIA's a marvelous whipping boy. First, it can't fight back because
they're not allowed to go in public and it's great for Bush, the Democrats can dump on them, everyone likes
to, so they're everyone's favorite whipping boy. It's frustrating for them.
I want to draw on a picture of yourself that you've shown, asking all
these questions, and this big question of the politicization of the
decision to go to war. What does an analyst such as yourself, looking
at this -- what was it about the administration, and what it was doing
that created a perception of imminent threat? Was that an impression
that they just created, or did they actually believe that? Even if you
have the definitive answer, help me understand how you would try to
sort this out, if you're going to write a paper in a few years.
Clearly, they created the view. They very consciously, as many have pointed out, linked 9/11 and Saddam
in ways that were extraordinarily clever. I have a whole file on that. It's really brilliant, the way they did
this -- totally dishonest but really brilliant, brilliant in the sense that when you say to them Saddam and
9/11 aren't linked, they could say, "We never said they were." But they use 9/11 and Saddam in the same
sentence. They would make paragraphs that moved from one to the other. I'm in awe, I assign these
speeches in my class. It's incredibly powerful political rhetoric, and we know that right after 9/11 the public
opinion showed that the public didn't see any connection, and that as Bush and his colleagues put out the
line it was believed. So, this was an extraordinarily effective selling job. We know also they pushed
intelligence hard, not on WMD, they didn't need to. That's where a lot of the critics kept things confused.
Where they pushed very hard was on this connection.
The connection?
Between Saddam and al Qaeda. What we also know was that CIA said no, no; then they came back, said
"Look at this," and they said no. I believe CIA. Now the national intelligence officer who was in charge and
who has recently left the government, a political science Ph.D. named Paul Pillar who led this and refused
to cave. They said, "There is no evidence for this. The things you point to are dribs and drabs, they're
unconvincing," so they stood up to that but of course, they couldn't make this public. Did Bush and his
colleagues believe it? I guess where I come down from my psychology, not so much this book but in a later
book -- it's called motivated bias -- they talked themselves into it in a way in which it will be very hard to
unravel what they "truly believe."
I have an article coming out in Political Psychology about sincerity of beliefs. It's very hard -- I don't think
the document trail will tell us, and they won't tell us, and they won't even know a year later what they
believed. This is going to be one of the abiding mysteries, how they came to believe what they say, because
I think they'd pass a lie detector test on it. How they came to believe these things and whether they really
believed the Iraq/al Qaeda connection in the face of a large amount of evidence. I don't know.
Is there an element here that in a way they were Realists but either
misguided or C+ students? I want to get back to this whole question of,
well, if you have terrorism, you have to have a state that actually was
a patron so they were coming from that position. Right?
I think that's very important. Before 9/11 they paid no attention to terrorism -- well, almost none -- and to
the extent they did it was exactly that, the linkages to states. Their foreign policy was heavily state-driven,
and I think that predisposed them to see state to state sponsorship, and that though Bush abandoned a lot of
his pre-9/11 views, that one may have stuck with him. But really, Iraq remains a mystery and my terrible
fear is that the next generation is going to believe we fought Iraq for oil and Israel, and I do not believe that
is true. I can't say I could disprove it, I don't believe it, but looking back, people are going to say, "Well,
can't have been WMD." I don't believe if they believe the al Qaeda connection -- could they really believe
that we could transform the Middle East by this? Think what's left. It's a wrong explanation and I think it
will produce a sort of cynicism that isn't helpful, but I bet in ten years that'll be the conventional wisdom.
What I'm hearing you say when we look at your structural argument is
that this behavior is what one could expect from a hegemon. To what
extent was this group -- whoever they are, the nationalist
conservatives or the neo-cons, this group of people that Bush gathered
around him -- to what extent were they a major break with the foreign
policy tradition that had developed since the beginning of the Cold
War?
It's a very interesting question. You had a book by Stephan Halper and Jonathan Clarke on this question.
It's a mixed picture. The spreading of democracy does have deep roots in the U.S., and again, Wilsonianism
and Reagan -- this belief was an important part of Reagan. Reagan's view of the Soviet Union changed not
as its foreign policy changed but as he saw the cracks opening domestically. So, in that way I do believe
they pick up on this.
But there was, I believe, a deep pragmatism in the Cold War, and always a fear that the American public
would get too riled up at various stages, and a realization that you moved incrementally and that you didn't
try to abolish evil, that in the end evil collapsed itself. In that way, I think they are a break. One of the
things, though, that's very hard to understand is Cheney and Rumsfeld, because they're children of that era
and they're the ones that are particularly puzzling.
Can we bring in your argument from before, namely that internationally
there's no balancer, and that if we take the Realist argument, apply it
domestically, which may not be appropriate, there's no balancer,
especially after 9/11, no opposition party or group saying no?
Yes, that is part, and that's why -- I don't think Gore would have invaded Iraq, but eventually, given this,
the U.S. would've done things that were most unfortunate. But Cheney and Rumsfeld were both
experienced in the Cold War and had, I thought, some forms of moderation drilled in; but no. I think it's a
combination of fear and opportunity. They did have fear, and even if they half made up the al Qaeda
connection, they could at least say, "Disprove it." Well, you could never disprove it. So, there was a strong
element of fear and this combination of fear and opportunity. Right? That's very, very powerful.
Mission. A mission, yeah. And so, I guess the question is, looking down
the road, where will the balancing come? Do we wait twenty or thirty
years for China to rise? Is it that there will be a reaction, an inner
balancing within the political system? Is that where we have to look?
[To quote] Yogi Berra, my favorite one: "Prediction's difficult, especially about the future." But yes, I think
the Bush doctrine will collapse, I think it is collapsing. There's a very good article in the current issue of
Foreign Affairs by John Mueller, and if you ever get John out here, you've
got to do him. He's just marvelous. He's, among other things, an expert on
public opinion. He points to the inevitable fall of support in the article
titled, "The Iraq Syndrome" that there's going to be a pulling in of horns in
a way that will be good and will be simultaneously be bad. I think that this
is inevitable, we probably are not going to stop Iran from getting nuclear
weapons -- we could set them back another ten years by bombing; I don't
think we're going to do it but I can't be sure. I think you'll find the
American public isn't going to support adventures and you will get, as Ken
Waltz would predict, nuclear weapons spreading because when Iran gets
them, others will get it, and that will increase the cost for the U.S. of
intervening. That's the way that combination of the U.S. pulling back,
others engaging in self-protection and self-aggrandizement -- you could
argue a world would be better if the U.S. could do a consistent Bush
doctrine, consistent hegemony. Domestically the U.S. cannot follow a
consistent policy. So, whether that other world's going to be better than a
real Bush world, I don't know, but we can't have a real Bush world. The
U.S. domestic system will not support it.
On that note, Bob, I want to thank you very much for coming back to
Berkeley this week, and also, thank you for being on our program. Thank
you, and I want to show our audience your book again, American Foreign
Policy in a New Era, which I read and heartily recommend. So, thanks a
lot, Bob
Well, thank you, Harry -- really enjoyed it.
And thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with
History.
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