At Issue: America's role in the world
The limits of power
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The panel
H.W. BRANDS is Distinguished Professor of History at Texas A&M. He is the author of numerous books, including "The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin" (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) and "What America Owes the World: The Struggle for the Soul of Foreign Policy." His most recent book, "The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream," was published in August.
ADM. BOBBY INMAN holds the Lyndon B. Johnson Centennial Chair in National Policy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. He served in the Navy from 1951 to 1982, and was director of the National Security Agency (1977-81) and deputy director of the CIA (1981-82). He was chairman and chief executive officer of the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corp. in Austin for four years after his retirement from the Navy.
BRUCE STERLING is an author, journalist, editor and critic. He was, along with William Gibson, one of the founders of the "cyberpunk" movement in science fiction. His nonfiction books include "The Hacker Crackdown," an examination of computer crime, and the recently published "Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years."
STEVEN WEINBERG is director of UT's Theory Group. He received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1979 and is the author of "The First Three Minutes" and "Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries." He served last year on an independent task force examining the threat the United States faces from terrorism. The task force's report, "America — Still Unprepared, Still in Danger," can be found at www.cfr.org.
PAUL WOODRUFF is the Mary Helen Thompson Centennial Professor in the Humanities at UT and the author of "Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue." A veteran of Vietnam, he is a playwright, poet, writer of short fiction and translator of Plato, Thucydides, Sophocles and other thinkers and writers from ancient Greece.
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AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, February 22, 2003
austin360.com
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, three presidents and their administrations have struggled to define America's responsibilities as the world's only superpower. So far, nothing has been constructed that resembles the Cold War architecture built to counter the Soviet threat, but there is an evolving response to our times. Whether it is the right response is the subject of great debate.
The Austin American-Statesman invited five prominent Austinites to discuss America's role in the world, and to talk about how the Bush administration's policy toward Iraq reflects that role. Our panel consisted of historian H.W. Brands; Adm. Bobby Inman, former director of the National Security Agency; author and journalist Bruce Sterling; Steven Weinberg, winner of the Nobel Prize in physics; and Paul Woodruff, professor of philosophy. National editor Jody Seaborn moderated.
An edited transcript follows. This is an extended version of the transcript that appeared in our print editions
Jody Seaborn: Let's begin with an issue that illustrates America's role in the world, and perhaps will define our role and define us as Americans for the next several years, and that is Iraq. What does Iraq represent? Is Iraq only about a tyrant, or is it about something larger?
Adm. Bobby Inman: Iraq, right now, is at the heart of whether the United Nations is going to be a viable institution in this century. In 1991, at the conclusion of the Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein was expelled from Kuwait, there were a series of resolutions that were enacted and brought about the armistice. In '98, in direct violation of them, Saddam Hussein kicked the inspectors out of Iraq, and the U.S. did nothing, and the U.N. did nothing.
We now have at least regained where we were in '98, under new resolutions, and with inspectors back. I don't know where it's going to go from here, or what the impact will be, but I can tell you if it hadn't done this, the U.N. was well on its way to being a League of Nations.
Seaborn: Has Europe become enamored with, with "process," because since World War II they haven't had to deal with security directly themselves? We've provided their security.
H.W. Brands: I would say it has less to do with that than with the fact that for 40 years after World War II there was a very clear and direct threat to Western Europe, and the United States and its allies in NATO agreed on that fundamental fact, that the main thing that had to be opposed was Soviet expansion, Soviet aggression — whatever form it might be. Since the demise of the Soviet Union, there has been room for much greater disagreement as to what the structure of international affairs ought to include — whether it ought to involve punishing Iraq, for example, for its invasion of Kuwait, and how long the sanctions, which the form of punishment took, should be held in place. Europe was getting tired of the sanctions by '98, and the United States was too. So when Iraq threw the inspectors out, there was nobody who was willing to say this is something we must continue to do.
Following up on Bob Inman's remark, I think the critical question is what's the role, what's the future of the U.N., because the United States could invade Iraq, probably overthrowing the government of Saddam Hussein. But the question is what happens after that. And the United States, by its history, is in no position to police the Middle East indefinitely. The American public wouldn't stand for it. So the question is, can the United States bring the United Nations along?
Steven Weinberg: I think in 1998 there was some feeling that I heard a lot of people in government express, that the inspections weren't so important. The important thing was the sanctions — if the sanctions were keeping Saddam from the enormous flow of oil money that he could use to build up his weapons. And we did keep the sanctions on; we didn't remove the sanctions. We just allowed the inspectors to be taken out. But now I agree with you that accepting the removal of the inspectors, accepting the tearing up of the treaty that followed the Gulf War, was disastrous for the U.N.
Now, though, we have a choice of whether or not to deal with this situation by maintaining inspections forever or trying to change the regime. I'm not clear that either one is a good solution. I'm not opposed to either in principle. I'm not one of the people who feel that preventive war is always immoral. I think it can be a very good thing. But in this case, both alternatives sound pretty terrible, and, yet, I think we have to do one or the other.
Inman: I'm really torn on this one. What's the exit strategy? My introduction to military service was Korea, and we're still there.
Brands: And Korea was considered a success.
Inman: Is Saddam Hussein a bad guy? No question. Is he the greatest viable threat to Israel's long-term security? No question. Is he in flagrant violation of U.N. resolutions? No question. I'm somewhat ambivalent, but now we've got him tied down with a lot of inspectors back. I'm not sure that's a lot worse than going in to try to prop up a government or put one in place. I keep listening to these optimistic views about democracy flowering in Iraq. On what basis? Where are the seeds? There's never been any democracy in their history.
Weinberg: In Arab countries, I'm not sure that democracy is what we want. Right now in Jordan we have a situation where the king, who's ruling undemocratically, represents a stronger force for peace and reason in the area than the country would represent it if it were democratic. It is the people in the streets who are anxious to make Jordan into one of the aggressive, irredentist states of that region.
Paul Woodruff: I hate to hear people say what may very well be true, that the future of the U.N. hangs in the balance, because we can't lose an international organization at this stage in our history. We can't be the ones to put a new regime in Iraq. Anything that Americans do in the Middle East is going to be loaded in a way that makes it intolerably vulnerable. Without international agreement, what we can actually accomplish for the long term in the Middle East, it seems to me, is severely limited.
Inman: We went into Bosnia with U.N. approval, as part of the NATO organization. We're still there. We went into Kosovo, comparable kind of fight. We're in Afghanistan. There is a terrible juncture not far in front of us where the country has to decide how much can we carry the U.N., particularly if many of the other partners in putting it together are not prepared to do their share. They voted for resolutions all the way back to '91 forward. And you can't have a viable institution to maintain peace when whatever it puts out can be flaunted at no cost.
Woodruff: I agree.
Inman: I don't want go into Iraq. Let me be very clear. But I think we're in a situation where we don't have a lot of other options.
Weinberg: On the other hand, staying in Iraq with inspectors on an almost indefinite time would be vastly cheaper in terms of money and lives than having a war. Unfortunately, the administration, through its tremendous buildup and through its words and actions, has really painted itself into a corner. They've made it very difficult for themselves to accept a revised, renewed, revivified regime of inspections. It's hard to see how this administration is not going to start a war. They put themselves into a position where they can hardly not. It's a difficult problem. Lord knows, I wouldn't want to be the one in the position to decide what to do about Iraq. But even so, looking at it from the sidelines, this seems to me the most inept foreign policy that I have seen in, well, in my life really. The way that this crisis has been handled by our administration is unbelievably clumsy and stupid.
Bruce Sterling: I have to concur. May I ask my fellow pundits here, if any of you besides me actually went to that (antiwar) demonstration?
Weinberg: No. I haven't been to a demonstration since Berkeley in 1965.
Sterling: This one was on that scale. You may want to drop by just for the sake of a little nostalgic activism. I've been to my share of demos. I was at the European social forum in Florence, where they put a million people into the street. They just put three million into the streets of Rome and a million into the streets in London. This is the biggest and most significant event since 9/11.
Inman: The irony is that if, in fact, we want to avoid going to war, the demonstrators in the streets are probably the worst thing that can happen, because we know that Saddam Hussein in January '91 made his decision not to start withdrawing from Kuwait because he was watching on CNN demonstrators outside the Capitol and he said they'll never attack as long as there are demonstrators in the streets. So the threat of force had no bearing on shaping his —
Sterling: Six hundred cities. It was the largest demonstration in the history of the human race. I didn't see that covered on Fox News. Now, the people inside the Beltway have been drinking their own bath water. They believe their own hype. They have no idea that the first regime change they're likely to see is going to be Tony Blair's head on a platter.
Brands: I think there's an analogy to the period after World War II, when the United States and its allies were trying to decide how to deal with the Soviet threat. And there were two alternatives that were mapped out: one was containment and one was liberation. And liberation reflected the impatience of the American people with the idea that the United States might have to be in this business of dealing with a Soviet Union for the long haul.
The debate and the argument came to a head just after the 1952 election, because the Republicans replaced the Democrats and Dwight Eisenhower was elected with some support from people who argued that what the United States needed to do was to actively roll back communism in Eastern Europe. Eisenhower conducted a full-scale review of American strategy that took place in 1953 and the various alternatives were laid out, and Eisenhower came to the conclusion — which is actually no surprise to the people who had actually been studying this for a while, as opposed to people who had just been arguing about it politically — that the costs of liberation were too high, partly because it would raise alarmingly the risk of a nuclear war.
Now that's not what we're up against in the case of Iraq. But what Eisenhower proceeded to do is to pursue a bipartisan policy. And the United States maintained this policy for the 40 years necessary to delegitimatize the Soviet Union and its ideology. Everybody at this point agrees that containment worked. I think that's probably what we're up against in the war on terrorism.
Inman: Patience.
Brands: Exactly. Patience. And Americans are not patient by background, by temperament. But the lesson of the Cold War was that Americans can be patient when the alternatives are clearly laid out. When people recognize that this victory over, in this case, terrorism rather than communism isn't going to happen tomorrow. It's not going to be the result of one invasion of Iraq. We can't simply have done with this in six months. The threat of terrorism is going to be with us for quite a long time. And our policy has to be gauged for that long term.
Seaborn: How do you fight a war on terror? That is, how do you wage war against an abstract noun? Is it any more possible to win a war on terror than it is to win a war on drugs?
Weinberg: Well, we certainly can do a lot more than what we are doing to defend the United States itself. I was a member of a panel chaired by Warren Rudman and Gary Hart looking into the state of American defenses against terrorism that reported a month or so ago. In so many areas, we are spending, and our activity is at, a shamefully low level. We are vulnerable in many ways where our vulnerability can be at least ameliorated by active policies. Rearranging the federal government and putting the Coast Guard together with the Immigration and Naturalization Service doesn't seem to me to accomplish very much. What's needed is to spend taxpayers' dollars on things like improved inspections at ports and improved FBI computers, tightening up the U.S.-Canadian border. But even if we do all these things, we're still going to have a problem...
The rest of the discussion is available at...
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