[House Hearing, 110 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
SIX YEARS LATER: ASSESSING LONG-TERM THREATS, RISKS AND THE U.S.
STRATEGY FOR SECURITY IN A POST-9/11 WORLD
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON NATIONAL SECURITY
AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS
of the
COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT
AND GOVERNMENT REFORM
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
OCTOBER 10, 2007
__________
Serial No. 110-126
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/congress/
index.html
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COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM
HENRY A. WAXMAN, California, Chairman
TOM LANTOS, California TOM DAVIS, Virginia
EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York DAN BURTON, Indiana
PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut
CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York JOHN M. McHUGH, New York
ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland JOHN L. MICA, Florida
DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana
DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania
JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts CHRIS CANNON, Utah
WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri JOHN J. DUNCAN, Jr., Tennessee
DIANE E. WATSON, California MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio
STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts DARRELL E. ISSA, California
BRIAN HIGGINS, New York KENNY MARCHANT, Texas
JOHN A. YARMUTH, Kentucky LYNN A. WESTMORELAND, Georgia
BRUCE L. BRALEY, Iowa PATRICK T. McHENRY, North Carolina
ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of VIRGINIA FOXX, North Carolina
Columbia BRIAN P. BILBRAY, California
BETTY McCOLLUM, Minnesota BILL SALI, Idaho
JIM COOPER, Tennessee JIM JORDAN, Ohio
CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, Maryland
PAUL W. HODES, New Hampshire
CHRISTOPHER S. MURPHY, Connecticut
JOHN P. SARBANES, Maryland
PETER WELCH, Vermont
Phil Schiliro, Chief of Staff
Phil Barnett, Staff Director
Earley Green, Chief Clerk
David Marin, Minority Staff Director
Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs
JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts, Chairman
CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut
STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts DAN BURTON, Indiana
BRIAN HIGGINS, New York JOHN M. McHUGH, New York
TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania
Dave Turk, Staff Director
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
Hearing held on October 10, 2007................................. 1
Statement of:
Isaacson, Walter, president and CEO, the Aspen Institute;
Robert J. Lieber, Ph.D., professor and international
relations field Chair, Georgetown University; and Jessica
T. Mathews, president, Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace...................................................... 15
Isaacson, Walter......................................... 15
Lieber, Robert J......................................... 19
Mathews, Jessica T....................................... 38
Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:
Lieber, Robert J., Ph.D., professor and international
relations field Chair, Georgetown University, prepared
statement of............................................... 23
Mathews, Jessica T., president, Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, prepared statement of................. 42
Shays, Hon. Christopher, a Representative in Congress from
the State of Connecticut, prepared statement of............ 8
Tierney, Hon. John F., a Representative in Congress from the
State of Massachusetts, prepared statement of.............. 3
SIX YEARS LATER: ASSESSING LONG-TERM THREATS, RISKS AND THE U.S.
STRATEGY FOR SECURITY IN A POST-9/11 WORLD
----------
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2007
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign
Affairs,
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform,
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10 a.m., in
room 2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. John F. Tierney
(chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Present: Representatives Tierney, Higgins, Yarmuth, Braley,
McCollum, Cooper, Van Hollen, Hodes, Welch, Shays, Platts,
Duncan, Turner, and Foxx.
Staff present: Dave Turk, staff director; Andrew Su and
Andy Wright, professional staff members; Davis Hake, clerk; Dan
Hamilton, fellow; A. Brooke Bennett, minority counsel;
Christopher Bright, minority professional staff member; Nick
Palarino, minority senior investigator and policy advisor; and
Benjamin Chance, minority clerk.
Mr. Tierney. Good morning. A quorum now being present, the
Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs will
conduct its hearing entitled, ``Six Years Later: Assessing
Long-Term Threats, Risks and the U.S. Strategy for Security in
a Post-9/11 World.''
The meeting will come to order and I ask unanimous consent
that only the chairman and ranking members of the subcommittee
be allowed to make opening statements. Without objection, so
ordered.
I ask unanimous consent that the hearing record be kept
open for 5 business days so that all members of the
subcommittee be allowed to submit a written statement for the
record. Again, without objection, so ordered.
I am going to make a brief opening statement. I am going to
submit my remarks for the record and ask unanimous consent that
they be included in the record. Without objection, that is so
ordered.
This Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs
hearing is an attempt to have a series of meetings and
witnesses, as esteemed as those before us today, who can come
in and discuss our strategy going forward.
Even with the amazing amount of money and energy that has
been spent--and lives lost--on military engagements, homeland
security, and intelligence since 9/11, there remains somewhat
of an inescapable sense that our national security policy may
be adrift.
We have rising extremism and gathering terrorist storm
clouds; there is a question about whether or not al Qaida will
have a resurgence in Pakistan; there are innumerable anti-
American attitudes. And more than 6 years after September 11th
we still really don't have a bipartisan consensus on a
comprehensive long-term strategy to combat the grave threats
that exist or to put those threats in context, to assess the
priorities and move forward.
In the words of one of our panelists today, we have yet to
act with the ``burst of creativity'' that was the trademark of
the United States at the beginning of the cold war.
We have studies that have been commissioned, including the
work of the 9/11 Commission; analyses have been offered;
strategies have been published. The hard work of formulating
and forging and implementing a bipartisan national security
strategy, however, still remains lacking. So many people feel
that we haven't even yet had a robust bipartisan dialog about
that and so, in part, that is what these hearings are about, an
attempt to start that dialog and get people's attention
focused.
We encourage all the members on the panel, those present
and not present yet today, to share their own ideas for future
witnesses so that we can have a robust discussion. We want to
hear from top experts, people with real-world experiences and
innovative, creative ideas. I think our three witnesses today
hit those on all points and I think we are going to have a
robust discussion.
And there are a number of questions. I won't enumerate all
of them right now, but I think in the introductory memo, for
members of the panel here, that we had sent a number of those
out that we will, no doubt, be exploring with our witnesses
here today. We have to determine what is the process for
evaluating our performance as we move forward; we have to talk
about how our military may be stressed beyond the point that it
should; and we should talk a little bit today, hopefully, about
the attitude of the rest of the world toward the United States.
The Pew poll, in August 2007, found 68 percent of
Pakistanis hold an unfavorable view of the United States; 76
percent of Moroccans have an unfavorable view; 93 percent of
Egyptians share that unfavorable view; 64 percent of the people
in Turkey, a key NATO ally, believe that the United States
poses their greatest foreign policy threat, and a whopping 83
percent have an unfavorable opinion of the United States, up 29
percent since 2002.
Polls obviously aren't the end-all and be-all of how our
success should be defined, but it certainly gives us some
indication of what is going on with our attempts to win hearts
and minds.
So we have serious challenges. We have to use all of the
tools in our tool kit, as the 9/11 Commission said. I look
forward to the comments that our panel is going to make here
today, and I invite Mr. Shays to make his opening remarks
before we do hear from the witnesses.
[The prepared statement of Hon. John F. Tierney follows:]
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Mr. Shays. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I have
just tremendous respect for you and the efforts you are making
on this committee, and I just want to thank you, first, for
conducting this hearing. Also tremendous respect for all three
of our witnesses and the institutions they represent.
Having bought about 40 copies of Benjamin Franklin: An
American Life and given it to a number of my friends, I just
wish I had brought my own copy, Walter, to have you sign it,
but I will get back to you on that one.
Mr. Isaacson. Thank you, sir.
Mr. Shays. A great book that gives perspective on a lot of
things. I am stunned by the fact that Benjamin Franklin's own
son didn't see the light and was a Tory. It was troubled times.
Mr. Isaacson. Well, we parents understand those thing
sometimes.
Mr. Shays. Well, the fact that you can understand those
times then tells me you understand these times now.
Mr. Isaacson. Thank you, sir.
Mr. Shays. Almost 2 years ago, before the attacks of
September 11, 2001, the advisory penal to assess domestic
response capabilities for terrorism involving weapons of mass
destruction, headed by former Governor Gilmore, concluded the
United States lacked a coherent functional national strategy to
guide disparate counter-terrorism efforts. In testimony before
this subcommittee in March 2001, the Commission's vice
chairman, retired Lieutenant General James Clapper, said, ``A
truly comprehensive national strategy will contain a high level
statement of national objectives coupled logically to a
statement of the means used to achieve these objectives.''
During that same period, the U.S. Commission on National
Security Strategy, led by former Senators Hart and Rudman, and
the National Commission on Terrorism, headed by former
Ambassador Bremer, also concluded that the executive branch
required a comprehensive national strategy to counter
terrorism.
Mr. Tierney, I really appreciate your holding this hearing
and continuing the examination of U.S. national strategies
begun by this subcommittee before September 11th.
In January 2001, the Bush administration inherited a loose
collection of Presidential directives and law enforcement
planning documents that were used as a strategic framework for
a national strategy against terrorism, but that fragile
construct collapsed with the World Trade Center on September
11th. The brutal nature of the terrorist threat shattered naive
assumptions terrorists would be deterred by geographic,
political, or moral borders. A new strategic paradigm was
needed. Containment, deterrent, reaction, and mutually assured
destruction no longer served to protect the fundamental
security interests of the American people. In fact, it would be
absurd to think it could.
In September 2002, the Bush administration National
Security Strategy of the United States of America was
published, taking into account the events of September 11th.
This strategy was updated in March 2006 and is a fundamental
statement of broad administration policy, accompanying many
goals, including the need to counter terrorism.
Along with President Bush's first national security
strategy came a proliferation of individual strategies to
counter terrorism. In March 2003, witnesses told this
subcommittee the Bush administration had developed no less than
eight high level mission statements on national security:
military, strategic, global terrorism, homeland security,
weapons of mass destruction, money laundering, cyber security,
and critical infrastructure. So by early 2003, what we had was
an overarching strategy and a proliferation of individual
strategies to counter terrorism.
We held another hearing in March 2004, continuing to
examine these national strategies. In the realm of national
security, a large number of counter-terrorism strategies does
not necessarily mean we are any safer. Only if these strategies
guide us toward clearly articulated goals will they help secure
our liberty and prosperity against the threats of new and
dangerous eras.
So we begin our hearing today using, as a basis, previous
examinations of national strategies and asking of the national
security strategy of the United States of America has the
fundamental characteristics of a coherent strategic framework,
one that clearly states a purpose, assesses risk, sets goals,
defines needed resources, assigns responsibilities, and
integrates implementation. Once this examination is
accomplished, we should evaluate the success of all our current
counter-terrorism strategies. If the answer to some or all of
these questions is no, then we need to change our approach in
countering terrorism.
Again, I would like to thank our witnesses and just say
that I think the biggest problem is not only the lack of
strategies that are clearly understood; there is no debate in
Congress, other than what you are doing here, no debate in the
public. We look at whether some performers should have control
of her child and not have her children taken away; whether Anna
Nicole Smith, who was the father of this child. We get into the
most absurd debates, at a time when we need to have meaningful
dialog. So thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Christopher Shays follows:]
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Mr. Tierney. Thank you, Mr. Shays.
We are now going to receive testimony from our excellent
panel of witnesses. Let me begin by introducing our panel
briefly, because if I went into everybody's credentials, we
would be here for the entire hearing.
Walter Isaacson, noted historian, former head of CNN,
former editor of Time Magazine, and current president and chief
executive officer of the Aspen Institute. A very abbreviated
introduction.
Professor Robert Lieber, former State Department
consultant, author of 14 books on foreign policy--even reading
all the book titles would probably keep us a while--currently
professor of----
Mr. Lieber. I have time.
Mr. Tierney. You have time? [Laughter.]
Currently, professor and international relations field
Chair at Georgetown University.
Jessica Tuckman Mathews, former Under Secretary of State
for Global Affairs, former journalist and columnist, current
president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Again, I could go on and on.
Welcome to all of you and thank you. It is the policy of
this subcommittee to swear you in before you testify, so, just
to keep with policy, I will ask you all to stand and raise your
right hands.
Mr. Shays. The only one we didn't swear in in 20 years was
Senator Byrd. I chickened out. [Laughter.]
[Witnesses sworn.]
Mr. Tierney. Thank you. The witnesses have all answered in
the affirmative.
Your full written statements will be put in the hearing
record. Dr. Lieber, I say that for yours, because it took me
the entire half hour. It was very long and very comprehensive
and good on that. So that written statement will be put on the
record.
You have 5 minutes. Obviously, we are going to be as
liberal with the clock as we can. And I may mention now, I
think we will be liberal as people are asking questions, also.
If there is no objection, we will go to 10-minute questioning
intervals. And except some interventions. If people have a
question they want to ask on point of something that is going
on, we are going to open that up a little bit and have a
discussion here if we can.
So, Mr. Isaacson, please.
STATEMENTS OF WALTER ISAACSON, PRESIDENT AND CEO, THE ASPEN
INSTITUTE; ROBERT J. LIEBER, PH.D., PROFESSOR AND INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS FIELD CHAIR, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY; AND JESSICA T.
MATHEWS, PRESIDENT, CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
STATEMENT OF WALTER ISAACSON
Mr. Isaacson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for doing
this, Chairman Tierney. It is an honor to be here, and I want
to thank Ranking Member Shays for those kind words. Also, last
time I testified before Congressman Shays, it was on New
Orleans recovery, and you were very open-minded. I appreciate
that as well.
I think that is it particularly relevant that it is this
committee, because it is one of the few committees with a
ranking member and a chairman who I can see can work together
in a bipartisan way for important national security and
strategic concerns.
I also want to thank the staff. I spent a lot of time with
the staff of this committee and they were deeply involved in
preparation for this, and I think I learned more from the staff
than they learned from me, which is why I was surprised to be
invited on this panel.
I am a little intimidated by the other two people on the
panel who are great foreign policy intellectuals, and
particularly intimidated by Congressman Cooper, who, for those
of you who don't know, was at graduate school with me studying
international relations, and did much better than I did. And I
think he is here because the last time I felt this way was when
I saw somebody about to give me an oral exam, and they were
sitting up on a podium like that. So I fear that the
Congressman from Tennessee has been waiting 30 years to give me
an oral exam on what we studied together.
About 60 years ago, the world was faced with a whole new
global threat, the threat of the expansion of Soviet communism.
And it came upon us rather suddenly. We had just been allies
with the Soviet Union in the greatest military victory over
fascism and the new president of the United States, Harry
Truman, was hit with the fact that, at Yalta and then at
Potsdam, and then in the Polish elections, we were faced with
another threat that was global in nature and a threat to our
very existence and our way of life. And he gathered a group of
bipartisan people, called the Wise Men, who worked together
with Congress, with Republicans such as Vandenberg and
Democrats, in order to create a new national security strategy.
That is what I see Chairman Tierney and Congressman Shays and
others using this committee to do. It is particularly important
because, in this day and age, we are not doing that burst of
creativity that we saw in 1947 to 1949.
They were faced with a global threat that came upon them
rather suddenly, and what they did was create institutions,
that were totally thought up and totally brilliant, to counter
the threat that they saw. For example, they created a military
alliance, NATO, a brilliant strategy of like-minded nations who
were going to contain the threat that they all saw and
perceived alike. That NATO military alliance worked very well,
but it was part of a context, and that context is what you are
trying to do today, which is a clear definition of the threat
and, as Congressman Shays said, figure out the purpose, the
risks, the goals, the strategies, the tactics, the commitments,
and the resources that will be needed for that.
When they did that, they started with the intellectual
underpinnings, people like George Kennan, the Jessica Tuckman
Mathews of his day. We were able to define why we were in a
struggle and who that struggle was against. It was just as
controversial as now, trying to figure out who the enemy was.
Was it Russia, an expansionist 600 year old Duchy of Muscovy
that had become a Russian empire? Was it communism as an
ideology? Was it the spread of Soviet communism that was the
threat? So with the help of George Kennan and others, they
defined the spread of Soviet-backed communism as a clear nature
of that threat.
They then went about forming a doctrine for how to counter
that threat, known now as the Truman Doctrine. The Truman
Doctrine was something that was accepted in a bipartisan way
by, I think, nine presidents, starting with Harry Truman until
the cold war ended with Ronald Reagan and the first President
George Bush. They also came to a very clear document, NSC 68,
which we every now and then ought to go back and look at, which
was a National Security Council document that explained, as
Congressman Shays did, exactly the type of military resources,
domestic, the risks, the strategies, the tactics you would have
to use.
Then they created new institutions like the Marshall Plan,
done in such a bipartisan way that when it was invented and
being kicked around, Harry Truman thought it was a great idea
not to call it the Truman Plan, but to call it the Marshall
Plan because it would get bipartisan support, and he said to
Robert Lovett, his Under Secretary of State, it means those
Republicans won't be able to throw it up against our face, at
which point Under Secretary Lovett said, you forget, Mr.
President, I am a Republican. And that was in the days when
Republicans and Democrats could work together and form a policy
and forget which party each one was. We see that on this
committee sometimes with the chairman and the ranking member,
but we don't see that in this Hill as often as we should.
They created financial institutions because they knew we
were trying to win a struggle that was not just a military
struggle of who could have enough troops at the Folger Gap to
prevent an invasion of Europe, or enough missiles. They knew we
had to have an economic in which our side would succeed. So
besides the Marshall Plan there was The World Bank, the XM
Bank, and other institutions that helped us win a struggle not
just for a military might, but for the pocketbooks and
loyalties of a new economy.
And it was a combination of realism and idealism. If you
ask was the Marshall Plan part of a realist tradition or an
idealist tradition, the answer is yes. It served both our
national interests and our national values.
Finally, they realized, too, that we had to win the
struggle for people's minds. They reinvigorated Voice of
America; they created Radio Free Europe; they created all sorts
of institutions that were totally creative in order that we
would win this struggle and convince people that our values
were shared by them.
We have now been hit, on September 11th, with an entire new
global struggle. You can debate whether it is as much of a
threat as the threat of the spread of Soviet communism, or more
of a threat or less, but it is a new type of threat, and we are
using the same old institutions, instead of being creative, in
order to try to counter it. As much as we may love NATO, it was
mainly designed to stop things in the Folger Gap, not designed
to win a struggle in the Middle East and other places against
the spread of global terrorism.
In fact, we haven't done what, at the very beginning, we
should do, and it has been longer since September 11, 2001 than
it was between Stalin's decision to cancel the Polish elections
and the creation of all the Wise Men's bipartisan policies in
the late 1940's. We still haven't even defined the threat very
well. You get disagreement; you don't have bipartisan consensus
on whether it is radical Islam, whether it is the Islamic Arab
world, whether it is terrorism in general that is our threat.
It would be nice to define that. It would be nice to define a
set of institutions with which we balance commitments and
resources and say here is what we need to fight that threat.
What we also should do is try to be just as creative. If we
went down a checklist, we could look at, OK, they had the
Marshall Plan. What economic programs do we have to win among
the moderate Arab world so that we can win the struggle against
Islamic fanaticism, as we are struggling to do?
I am involved with the State Department now on U.S.-
Palestinian public-private partnerships and investments. I
think those are good ideas, but they are no where near the
level of the Marshall Plan, the World Bank and the XM Bank that
we try to do. I commend the State Department and I look forward
to working more on those. I commend the Congress for funding
those, but it is not nearly at the level that the people of a
previous generation did when they were faced with such a
struggle.
And I could go on, but there is only one more point I would
make in terms of what they did. In terms of just winning the
value struggle. We are sitting here still wondering who is
going to run Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. We should
be enlisting the people who created Facebook and Google. We
should be enlisting people who understand social networking. We
should be creating a counterpart to Voice of America that will
win the hearts and minds of people around the world.
In 1989, when I was covering the collapse of Soviet
communism in Eastern Europe, I remember being in Bratislava, in
one of the hotel rooms they put foreign journalists, and it was
one of the few hotel rooms that had a satellite dish, which is
why they put us there, so we could see the outside world. I was
asked by one of the people working in the hotel could they use
my hotel room because the students like to come watch music
videos in the afternoon. I said, sure, that would be fine. I
came back early to meet some of the students. They weren't
watching music videos in my room; they were watching CNN and
what was happening in the Gdansk Shipyards and what was
happening in the rest of Eastern Europe. And I realized that
the ability to have a free flow of information was going to be
the strongest asset we had in that global struggle.
Likewise, when I went to China a few years ago and was in
Kashgar, a tiny village, I walked into a coffee shop and saw
four kids behind a computer screen. I asked what they were
doing. They spoke Weegar [phonetically]; we were talking
through the translator. They said they were on the Internet. I
said, well, let me try something. I typed in CNN.com and it was
blocked. I typed in Time.com, it said access denied. One of the
kids nudged me aside and said, type something in and, boom,
there is CNN and there is Time. I said, what did you do? He
said, well, we know how to go through proxy servers in Hong
Kong that the centers are clueless about.
We should be making use, as our previous generation did, of
the new information technologies to win the struggle we have.
When you go back to Benjamin Franklin, somebody I once
wrote about, Benjamin Franklin realized that he too faced a
great global struggle that he was dealing with in 1776, right
after they wrote the Declaration of Independence and he was
sent to Paris to get France in on our side in the war. We had
to enlist other countries back then, as we do now. And even
back then France was a bit of a handful, so they send old Dr.
Franklin over there and he carried with him the document they
had just written. He and John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were
put on the subcommittee to write the document.
With all due respect, it may be the last time Congress
created an awesome subcommittee like that. But Jefferson,
Adams, and Franklin wrote a declaration explaining why we were
in a war of independence, and it was pretty clear what they
were doing from the very first sentence, because they said a
decent respect for the opinions of mankind is why we are
writing this document; we have to bring them in to our side.
And they did a beautiful job writing that document, even
and balancing the values we were fighting for, the famous
second paragraph that says ``We hold these truths.'' Jefferson
writes the first document you can find in the Library of
Congress, the first draft said ``We hold these truths to be
sacred.'' You see Franklin's printer's pen crossing it out and
saying ``we hold these truths to be self-evident.'' And they
are trying to explain that it is a new type of value that comes
from the consent of the governed and rationality and reason; we
are not enshrining the dictates of any particular religion in
our new values.
But the sentence goes on, they are ``endowed with certain
inalienable rights.'' And there is John Adams' handwriting,
``endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.''
So even in that sentence they are doing a strategy statement
and a value statement in which they are balancing very
carefully the role of divine providence, the role of values and
religion, the role of a new type of nation that depends on the
consent of the governed. And what Benjamin Franklin does when
he gets to Paris, besides writing memos to Virjean on the
balance of power and why the Bourbon-pact nations have to come
in on our side, is he builds a printing press and he prints
thousands of copies of that document, which were a public
diplomacy document, a propaganda document, saying here is the
strategy, here are the values, here is what we are fighting
for.
To me, that is what we haven't yet done in this new global
struggle and what I hope this committee will, with these
hearings, further that process. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Tierney. If we have any document, we are going to call
it the Shays document, so people won't throw it back in our
face. Thank you. [Laughter.]
And you can tell, Doctor, we are going to be liberal with
the clock, because every minute of that was worth it, and I
suspect the same will be true with the next two witnesses.
Doctor, please.
STATEMENT OF ROBERT J. LIEBER
Mr. Lieber. Chairman Tierney, Ranking Member Shays, members
of the subcommittee, and staff, thank you very much for
providing me with the opportunity to present my views on the
crucial subject of long-term threats and risks and U.S.
security for the post-9/11 world. You have my testimony, so I
am going to concentrate in broad brush terms on what I think
are the long-term, even existential, realities of the world in
which the United States finds itself not just now, but
certainly for the next administration and whichever party
occupies the White House.
There are three, I think, realities in the post-9/11 world,
and realities which will continue for the foreseeable future.
The first of those, and the most important, I think, is that we
face a lethal and enduring threat, which is not going to go
away and is not chiefly a response to this or that policy or
diplomatic action or commitment.
The threat consists, I think, of three distinct but related
elements. The first of these is radical Islamist jihadism as an
ideology and in its organized forms; the second component is
mass casualty terrorism; and the third component is the long-
term danger of chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear
weapons being used potentially by non-state actors, possibly
aided by states or even by states themselves.
I would note that the 9/11 Commission itself, which was
unanimous and bipartisan in its conclusion in 2004, stated that
``The catastrophic threat at this moment in history is the
threat posed by Islamist terrorism, especially al Qaida, the al
Qaida network, its affiliates, and its ideology.'' I would also
note that leading experts across party lines have, for the most
part, also observed and warned about this.
I could cite numerous studies, but the most recent is in
the current issue of Foreign Policy, in which more than 100
leading terrorism proliferation and foreign policy experts
surveyed by the magazine said, of those 100 experts, more than
80 percent expect a 9/11-scale attack on the United States
within the next decade. You can agree or disagree about that
educated guess, but it suggests that serious people across
party lines draw the same conclusion to which I have pointed.
I also want to indicate that while some see these threats
as a result of our policies--good, bad, or otherwise--in Iraq
or vis-a-vis Middle Eastern regimes or vis-a-vis the Arab-
Israeli conflict, I think those assessments miss the deep
causes of threat. In my judgment, the threat ultimately is a
consequence of the failure of major parts of the Arab Muslim
world to cope with the challenges of globalization and
modernity. This is more acute in recent decades, but it is a
very long-term problem and will take a very long time to sort
out. There is also, in longer range terms, looking backward,
the sense of humiliation over four centuries of decline for
many of those areas of the world. And I think the consequence
is that those who are particularly obsessed or upset with it
express either individual or societal rage, which again takes
its form in radical jihadism, in the use of terrorism, and, I
would add, in efforts to inflict mass casualty terrorism.
So my first broad point is that we live and are going to
live in an environment of lethal and enduring threat, and this
needs to be a priority as we weigh various kinds of tradeoffs
and policies.
Second, despite the importance of cooperation with our
allies, with international institutions like the United
Nations, with the European Union,--and I would add that
collaboration is highly desirable and necessary--many of these
institutions remain ineffective in confronting the most urgent
and deadly threats. In shorthand terms, I would throw out words
like Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur as illustrations of that
reality.
Third, the United States possesses unique power and
capacity, even now. Despite the costs and difficulties of Iraq
and Afghanistan, of multiple challenges, of proliferation, rise
of regional powers, the growing strength of authoritarian
capitalist powers in Russia and China, and our bitter
bipartisan or political dis-census in the country; nonetheless,
the United States continues to possess remarkable strength and,
if you like, primacy. It doesn't mean we can do everything, but
it means that the United States has a unique role to play.
In the post-9/11 world, an American grand strategy has
emerged; sometimes in official documents, sometimes willy-nilly
. In broad brush terms, that grand strategy embodies roughly
the following four elements, as, for instance, noted by the
administration in its national security documents: one, the
maintenance of primary; two, the ability to use preemption, if
necessary, in the face of imminent threats; third, multilateral
cooperation--I would describe that as as much cooperation with
others as possible, but as much unilateral action as
unavoidable or necessary--and, finally, support for democracies
and democratization.
Now, let me note that citing those four broad points does
not necessarily give you a good specific answer to a policy
question. Implementation will inevitably be controversial,
requiring difficult judgments in the midst of incomplete
information and uncertainty. In the judgment of history, inept
or imprudent choices can be harsh. But I would also disagree
with descriptions that suggest a radical departure from past
American history. In response to attacks on the United States
and looking back at Harry Truman and the Truman Doctrine, which
Mr. Isaacson has rightly referred to, and looking back at the
Kennedy inaugural of 1961, at Reagan's State of the Union in
1985, I would note there is a bipartisan legacy on which a good
deal of contemporary grand strategy builds, even if there is
ample debate about implementation, policy decisions, and even
prudence.
There are problems, obviously. The United States has the
capacity to act and lead, but it requires all kinds of things
to be effective over the long term: an appropriate fiscal and
monetary environment; social cohesion and public support;
policy management and coordination of the sort that this
committee is seeking to focus on; skilled diplomacy. I come
from Georgetown University, and there is a saying about
diplomacy, that skilled diplomacy is the ability to tell
someone to go to hell in such a way that he looks forward to
the trip. I would submit that our diplomacy has not always had
that exquisite degree of skill and finesse.
Cooperation with others to the maximum extent possible, but
not beyond that extent; and we also encounter certain deficits
now. Our military is stretched, our public diplomacy is a
disaster, a legacy both of the fateful Clinton era decision to
do away with USIA and the inability of the current
administration to really turn that around. We need a new USIA
or its equivalent. I think that is an urgent matter.
We also have an utterly dysfunctional visa system which
tends to discourage or shut out the kinds of people with the
skills, commitment, and backgrounds that we need, while willy-
nilly tending to give, sometimes by the back door, avenues for
those who are less appropriate.
Importantly, we still lack an urgently needed energy
policy. Our energy policy over a couple of decades has been
disastrous. It represents a threat to our economy and our
national security in terms of the necessity of ratcheting down
our dependence on oil. It can't be completely eliminated, but
our current policy strengthens our adversaries and plenty of
others.
We can cope. America has, despite obstacles, in the past,
overcome huge challenges: World War II, creating the Marshall
Plan, the Apollo mission, and so on, not least because of our
attributes of flexibility and adaptability.
Let me conclude. The United States faces lethal and
persistent threats. Neither the United Nations nor any other
international organization is capable of effective action
without important use of state power. Multilateral responses to
common threats, for example, proliferation, can be effective
and necessary, but they are hard to achieve. The U.S. role and
U.S. power are unique. The crux is to use that power skillfully
and prudently, but not to assume there is a real alternative to
it. Whoever takes the oath of office on January 20, 2009, will
need to adopt a national security strategy that incorporates
key elements of the post-9/11 foreign policy doctrine.
America's own national security and the maintenance of a decent
international order depend on it.
Thank you for listening.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Lieber follows:]
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Mr. Tierney. Thank you very much, doctor.
Ms. Mathews, you have a minute. Only kidding.
STATEMENT OF JESSICA T. MATHEWS
Ms. Mathews. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I also would like to
commend you on the farsightedness of the plan to hold this
series of hearings and on the degree of bipartisanship that you
and Mr. Shays have established. He laid out the components of a
strategy, which begins, accurately, as he said, with
determining priorities. Of all the steps he laid out, I will
stop with the first one and try to lay out for you what seems
to me the top priorities for our security strategy.
If it had been me, I would have called these hearings
Threats, Risks, and Strategy in a Post-Iraq World, rather than
a post-9/11 world, because I think that the events of that day
have had far less impact on the real world than they had on the
American psyche. The Iraq war, on the other hand, is a very
different matter. It will be the turning point that changes the
basic parameters of our security picture for decades, I
suspect.
For one reason, the war's monopoly on our political energy,
which has now stretched to 5 years, an eon in a time of fast-
moving global change, is one of the greatest uncounted costs of
this war, the degree to which it has sucked the oxygen from
almost every other issue. And unless a major effort is made to
reverse current trends, the fissures that are now stretching
across the global non-proliferation regime will, I think,
become the worst of these.
Among all the challenges that we face, only nuclear weapons
pose an existential threat, and a world of 20 or 30 or more
nuclear weapon states holds few prospects for avoiding nuclear
catastrophe. The stability that we enjoyed for 50 years of the
cold war didn't happen naturally; it happened because of
unrelenting effort on the part of the two super powers and some
very close misses. The likelihood that we could achieve that
with 20 or 30 nuclear weapon states, which we could easily get
to if the regime fails, is, I think, very close to zero; and
the probability that some of all that weapons fuel will end up
in the hands of terrorists is, I think, very close to one.
The President has called nuclear proliferation the greatest
risk we face. I think that is right. But only sporadic
attention has been given in the last half dozen years either to
the risks in North Korea and Iran, but, more importantly, to
the systemic weakness that is affecting the regime as a whole.
We had 30 very good years under the NPT; it kept the number of
nuclear weapon states far lower than its authors dared to hope.
The bad news is that the last 10 years have been very bad ones,
starting with the nuclear test by India and Pakistan in 1998
and then, 5 years later, the discovery of the A.Q. Khan
network, where you had businessmen and scientists selling
technology, bomb designs, and materials to whomever had the
money to buy; individuals, the sellers, from more than a dozen
countries.
The North Korean and Iranian programs that we came to
understand in that period used the cover of the NPT to hide
covert programs weapons and underlined that way the Achilles
heel, what we now know to be the Achilles heel of the existing
regime, which is that no safeguards, no safeguards, no matter
how good the IAEA is, can provide real protection when a
country has direct access to plutonium or highly enriched
uranium, weapons fuel.
The Bush administration made a radical change in our non-
proliferation thinking, and one that urgently, I think, needs
repair. In his 2003 State of the Union, the President described
the threat as the greatest danger facing America and the world
is outlaw regimes that seek and possess nuclear, chemical, and
biological weapons. This new formulation attracted very little
attention at the time, again, because we were already consumed
in the national debate over the Iraq war. But it was profound
change.
Past Presidents of both parties, all of them, had focused
on the weapons, but President Bush's new formulation shifted
the focus from the weapons to the regimes, from the what to the
who. And, of course, the United States got to decide who the
good guys are and who the bad guys, even though our judgments,
we know, change radically over the years, as they have, for
example, with Saddam Hussein.
But shifting the focus from the what to the who, from the
weapons to the regimes, means that it is a very short step to
regime change as the answer. This is the hole that we are in
today, one that diminishes our ability to deal with Iran, both
directly and with other key players who balk at taking small
steps in the fear that these will give legitimacy to a U.S.
attack, or who make bad deals with Tehran in the mistaken
notion that they are serving world security thereby.
But beyond Iran, there are two urgent threats that need
addressing. First is the growing disenchantment among the non-
nuclear weapon states who have come to believe, 15 years after
the end of the cold war, that the nuclear weapon states never
intend to uphold their end of the NPT bargain, i.e., nuclear
disarmament. They are increasingly wondering why they should
continue to uphold their end of the bargain.
The second threat is the glaring need to strengthen the
regime: to impose meaningful penalties on states that abuse it
as a cover for nuclear weapons programs, to eliminate direct
access to bomb fuel in the non-nuclear weapons states, and to
address the unanticipated threat from terrorists and corporate
networks.
The United States, however, right now is in no position to
lead on this effort. It cannot command followers. Before it can
do so, it needs to re-establish its own credentials in this
field, and there are four steps that it must take. First,
renouncing unilateral preventive war--preventive war, not
preemptive war; war in the absence of imminent threat declared
unilaterally--second, renouncing unilateral regime change for
the purpose of political change; ratifying the comprehensive
test ban treaty; and canceling new nuclear weapons programs.
The last because it moves in directly the opposite direction
from a treaty commitment that we made and re-established in
writing as recently as 1995.
Re-establishing arms control momentum with Russia is
another priority, both important in its own right and for
movement elsewhere around the World.
I have to add that the decision to base an anti-missile
system in Poland and in the Czech Republic derails, I think,
hope for much progress in this direction for the time being.
Pushing ahead with a system, that does not yet work, against a
threat from Iran, that does not yet exist, at the expense of
relations with a state, Russia, whose participation is
essential, if the threat is to be prevented, is a choice that,
in my view, can only be--these are all important, as is
recovering our ability to listen, to really listen, to other
countries and recovering our confidence in our ability to
pursue national ends through diplomacy.
But restoring the trust in American leadership that has
been lost so widely, as the chairman described at the outset,
will only come from deeds, and it won't happen quickly. The
good news in the nuclear area is that the critical steps that I
have outlined are all under our control; we can take them
alone, they don't have to be negotiated with anybody.
Let me turn much more briefly to three other challenges.
Any short list like this is somewhat arbitrary, but, to me,
these three issues, together with non-proliferation, stand out.
First, China. History has no examples, that I know of, of a
rapidly rising new power not producing at least tension, and
usually outright conflict, as it enters the circle of major
states. China knows this very well, and it has a strong desire
to avoid conflict; hence, its peaceful rise. Conflict is bad
for business, after all, and, above all, China wants to grow.
Yet, if the path is any guide--and I think it is--it is going
to be very difficult to manage China's rise peacefully,
especially in an energy-constrained world that must begin to
deal seriously with climate change.
The only silver lining to 9/11, I think, was that it put an
end to another period of growing sense that China was the
enemy, which, on September 10, 2001, was very much with us.
That ended overnight and substituted a real enemy for a
potential or imagined one.
We are on the right track now generally, I think, with
China, but if, by our behavior, we, over the coming years, turn
China into an enemy, if we get China wrong, that, other than
the failure to rescue the non-proliferation regime, will be the
single most dangerous worst mistake we can make.
The policies, on the other hand, that are currently wrong,
that urgently need to be turned right, deal with the Middle
East and the world of Islam. Olivier Roy, the distinguished
French expert in this field, points out that the West has tried
three different approaches with this area and with democracy,
and that all three have failed: we have tried to strengthen the
existing authoritarian regimes; we have tried reforming the
existing authoritarian regimes, almost, in some cases, to the
point of their collapse; and we have tried to impose democracy
from scratch. None have worked.
What we have not tried to do is to build democracy with the
participation of the prevailing political forces in these
states, and those forces today are Islamists. They cannot be
end-run; they must be engaged. We should be engaging with
moderate Islamist forces, and by that I mean those that have
renounced the use of violence as a political tool, even when we
find others of their views uncomfortable or even abhorrent.
The other precondition of success in the Middle East will
be a much more vigorous and engaged effort on Israeli-
Palestinian peacemaking, and one that is and is seen to be more
even-handed.
Finally, we have to tackle climate change, which means that
we, at long last, as Bob Lieber just said, need a national
energy policy. Voluntary policies are a joke. Research-only
policies are a cop-out. Research is necessary, but not
sufficient. And no serious national objective has ever been
pursued on a voluntary basis. The endless and fruitless debate
over whether to use price or regulation to pursue energy
policies should end with the recognition that an effective
policy requires a mix of both. The search for magic bullets,
from oil shale to fuel cells to biofuels should be seen as a
recurring hunt for a simple solution to a very difficult
problem that will never work. And the policy must begin, must
be built on, must be based on the recognition that, by far, the
largest, cheapest, most quickly accessible and most climate
sensitive energy resource that we have is drastic improvements
in energy efficiency in every sector.
So, Mr. Chairman, thank you for your patience. I hope these
thoughts, this identification of these, I think, four
overwhelming priorities for us are helpful to you as you pursue
this daunting security agenda.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Mathews follows:]
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Mr. Tierney. They are incredibly helpful to us. For all
three witnesses, thank you very much. I am almost inclined to
just get unanimous consent to let the three of you keep on
talking, without the questions, but being who we are, that is
not likely to happen.
I think we might retract the 10 minute period and go 5
minutes, but keep the caveat that people should feel free to
interject an intervention if they want. As long as that isn't
abused, we will let discussion flow as freely as possible.
Let me just ask one question to start. How would the threat
represented by 9/11 fit into the overall strategic priorities
that this country has? If you had to look and say that you had
the 9/11 threat and then you have all the other things we have
to attend, where would you fit that in and how would you
address that?
Whoever wants to speak.
Mr. Lieber. It seems to me that threat is overriding.
Inevitably, decisions about policy, large and small, involve
tradeoffs. For example, there is a genuine debate, as there has
been in this country for two centuries, about where you draw
the line or where you strike the balance between civil
liberties and our historical freedoms, and a long continuum
vis-a-vis taking strong actions to reduce our vulnerability and
so on. There are not easy answers to that, but I would say that
whether on that issue or a wide range of things that the three
of us have discussed, the importance of threat ought to be the
overriding concern.
By contrast, there are those who talk about terrorism as a
police problem. I respectfully disagree. So I don't have a
specific actionable response for you other than to say that
threat symbolized by 9/11 and incorporating the elements I
cited, of which proliferation, I think, is clearly part, has to
be the overriding consideration, whether you are thinking not
just about wiretapping, but about costs and tradeoffs or
gasoline taxes or forced deployments, or what have you.
Ms. Mathews. Mr. Chairman, as I suggested, I think 9/11
meant more to us psychologically than it means in purely
national security terms, and far less now than does the basket
of issues that have been created by the Iraq war. I don't mean
to suggest that terrorism is not important; it is. And Bob has
laid out a lot of the issues that swarm around it. But it
doesn't pose an existential threat to us, and nuclear weapons
still do. And we are on the verge of a breakdown, I believe, in
the regime. That is really the crux of the Iran problem. We
have now 12 countries in the Middle East that have gone to the
IAEA and expressed an interest in starting nuclear energy and
enrichment programs.
Mr. Tierney. May I interject something here?
Ms. Mathews. Sure.
Mr. Tierney. What is your opinion if the United States was
serious about working toward the imposition of a nuclear-free
zone in the Middle East, the impact that would have on the
larger problems that we are confronting?
Ms. Mathews. I think a nuclear weapons-free zone is doable
over the long, longer term. Right now, we are in no position to
push for that or anything else, as I suggested. We don't have--
the Carnegie Endowment, 2 years ago, did a major study on
nuclear proliferation called Universal Compliance. We took the
draft of that study to 22 countries. We talked all over the
world about it. We had 33 countries at our non-proliferation
conference this past June, and the feeling that I described of
utter unwillingness to consider any steps to strengthen the
existing regime and, indeed, in many cases a sense of real
outrage at the nuclear weapon states for not doing their end of
the bargain; and then, on top of it, to the United States both
with respect to the CTBT, which countries are very well aware
of, and the new nuclear weapons programs. To lead, you have to
have followers, and we are not in a position to command
followers right now on this set of issues. And, of course, I
think a nuclear weapons-free zone, realistically, will require
an Israeli-Palestinian peace and some resolution of the current
Iranian program. So it is way down the road.
Mr. Tierney. So you see that as a subsequent step as
opposed to an initial step?
Ms. Mathews. I do.
Mr. Tierney. Thank you.
I have very little time left.
Mr. Isaacson, I don't know if you wanted to interject on
that, on the question of how it fits into the overall privacy.
Mr. Isaacson. [Remarks off microphone.]
Mr. Tierney. OK.
Mr. Shays. Mr. Duncan.
Mr. Duncan. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Georgie Anne Geyer,
the very respected foreign policy columnist, wrote, in 2003, a
few months after we had gone to war in Iraq, at this time, that
Americans would inevitably come to a point where they had to
decide whether they wanted a government that provided services
at home or one that seeks empire across the globe.
Ann McFeatters, a columnist for the Scripps Howard
newspaper chain, wrote a couple of years ago that we were
headed for what she described as a financial tsunami when the
baby-boomers started retiring in heavy numbers in 2008 and in
the years following.
Before the first Gulf war, which I voted for, I heard
briefings from General Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell and others
about Saddam Hussein's elite republican troops and how great
the threat was. And then I watched those so-called elite troops
surrender to CNN camera crews and empty tanks, and I thought
then that the threat had been greatly exaggerated. Now, before
this Gulf war, I was at the White House and they told me that
Saddam Hussein's total military budget was a little over two-
tenths of 1 percent of ours, most of which he spent--they
didn't say this, but most of which, it turned out later, he had
spent building castles and protecting himself and his family.
Now we have hundreds of registered homeland security
lobbyists and we have thousands of defense lobbyists all
pushing us to spend more, and, yet, we have these estimates
that this war is--we are already at $750 billion or so, and now
we are soon going to be asked for $200 billion more; and
counting future military costs and medical costs and so forth,
they are talking about $2 billion. Then we have some people
wanting us to take action against Iran that could potentially
be even more expensive.
What I am wondering about is this. How do we achieve the
balance? Because the politically correct, politically popular
thing to do is, when they use the word security, always say
that we are not doing enough and always say that we need to do
more. In fact, the Wall Street Journal wrote, a few months
after 9/11, that we should give four times the scrutiny to any
bill that has the word security in it because they saw that
every department and agency was coming to us asking for more
security funding.
Yet, some of us wonder if we are going to be able to pay
our veterans' pensions and our social security and our Medicare
and Medicaid and so forth in the years ahead if we don't
somehow look at these threats realistically. We can't spend the
entire Federal budget just because somebody--keep increasing
this spending just because somebody says security or threats.
How do we achieve that balance?
Second, I read a column by Walter Williams, the
conservative columnist, that said al Qaida--this was a year or
so ago--that al Qaida was now less than 3,000 members, most of
whom were people living at home with their parents and had
almost no money. I heard a talk last week by Larry Johnson, the
former CIA analyst who is now a Defense contractor, who said al
Qaida was now down to about 600. I know they have thousands of
al Qaida sympathizers, but I am wondering if you know how many
people are in al Qaida.
And then, just so I get it all out, third, I am wondering
what your predictions are for Iran. Do you think that we will
be making what are politely referred to sometimes as searchable
strikes and taking out nuclear facilities any time within the
next 2 or 3 years? I would like your predictions.
That is three questions. Mr. Isaacson, we will start with
you, I guess.
Mr. Isaacson. OK. I think your challenge here is to balance
an emotionalism that comes both after 9/11 and from the
existential threat that we might feel from radical Islamic
jihadism, as Bob so aptly described it, and a realism that says
how do we effectively counter it. And this is a very difficult
question. If you ask me is our invasion of and continued
presence in Iraq doing more to help or to hurt radical Islamic
jihadism in this world, I am not sure there is a clear answer.
So it is not simply a matter of spending billions more on
military in Iraq.
This is not for me getting into the argument about Iraq, it
is just that this is a complex problem, when you say does it
help or hurt the threat of radical Islamic jihadism.
So I think we have to be very realistic. As I think you are
suggesting, we need to inject a note of realism in this. This
is a threat, but not one that demands us abandoning the economy
of the United States and other priorities. And in answer to
both the chairman's question and others, how do you put this in
the ranking of priorities, General Powell has said repeatedly
that the jihadists cannot destroy American society; only we can
destroy American society by betting too contorted in this war
against the jihadists. So I think there is a note of realism
that you are trying to inject that I would agree with.
On Iran, I think that if I look at this panel and on this
panel, I may be the person least qualified to guess what we are
going to do surgically in Iran or not, so I am not going to--
especially with people recording what I say--try to pretend an
expertise in that.
Mr. Lieber. Congressman Duncan, let me respond to part of
your list of really comprehensive and vital questions. First,
on the financial side, it is certainly the case that America
needs money spent on its foreign policy needs and security, to
be spent as widely and as prudently and efficiently and
effectively as possible.
I would note, in terms of affordability, that despite the
enormous costs that the United States now faces for defense for
the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, for rebuilding its own
forces' equipment, right now we are spending approximately 4.2
percent of gross domestic product. That is contrasted to about
2.93 percent just before 9/11. But you have to set it against a
prior crisis in American history. During the height of the
Reagan buildup in the mid-1980's, the number was about 6.6
percent, and for large portions of the Truman, Eisenhower, and
Kennedy administrations it was into double digits, 10 percent
or sometimes more.
We have the capacity to spend that without destroying our
economy. But this brings up an issue that Aaron Friedberg of
Princeton University has recently written about knowledgeably:
the urgent need for a much more effective mechanism for policy
management and coordination, which combines military and
defense issues, political dimensions, economics, and so forth.
Because of the complexity of the way the executive branch is
organized, the complexity of the committee structure in
Congress, and the nature of the issues themselves, we haven't
had the degree of coordination that ought to be the case and
compared to what existed sometimes in the past.
Very briefly on one other point. Bruce Hoffman at
Georgetown, who is a prominent and superbly qualified member of
our faculty in security studies and one of the country's
leading terrorism experts, has recently said that al Qaida is
back. They were badly damaged initially, but they have
recovered a good deal in terms of capacity and so forth. So I
think there is a very real al Qaida risk.
Finally, I would quote the dean of our Georgetown School of
Foreign Service, my colleague, Bob Gallucci, who was an
opponent of the use of force in Iraq, but who has written that
he is very concerned about the risk of a concealed nuclear
device going off in one or more American cities sometime in the
next 5 to 10 years. That is related to terrorism. So I don't
think, despite the relatively small size of al Qaida overall,
that we ought to minimize or otherwise overlook the gravity of
the risk it represents, all things considered.
Ms. Mathews. I am trying to choose among all the questions
that you have asked.
Mr. Tierney. You are probably going to have to put that on,
Ms. Mathews, your mic.
Ms. Mathews. Sorry.
What to say? Bob is certainly right that, as a percent of
GDP, we have spent much more. We haven't spent it in a
globalized economy before and we have much higher spending on
other priorities, particularly healthcare, now than we have
before.
If Congress wanted to save $200 billion a year, it could,
for the same security, out of the existing $600 billion defense
budget, but there is a whole lot of politics buried in that.
But I think every close student of the defense budget believes
that at least a third is wasted. But I recognize that is a
politically unrealistic thing, perhaps, to say.
Since the others haven't, let me address Iran. I don't
think that it is likely that we are going to attack Iran,
because I think the arguments against it are so overwhelming
and so overwhelmingly obvious. I should say that I also didn't
think we were going to go into Iraq, because it seemed to me
really quite stupid at the time. So you take this for what it
is worth. But we have a very limited target set in Iran. There
are probably facilities that we don't know about. We do not, of
course, have the troops to go on the ground, and air strikes
without ground forces are a minimal, modest utility.
We are currently dealing in a world of Sunni terrorism, and
if we attack Iran, we will add a whole new layer of Shiite
terrorism. They have made that very clear, and they clearly
have the capacity to unleash it.
And, finally, we will take a country that hasn't, to the
best of our knowledge, made a firm decision either way on
whether their security requires nuclear weapons, and create one
that is absolutely 100 percent permanently committed to having
them. And, finally, it will underline the lesson to other
countries that if you think you have a serious opponent, a
serious enemy in the United States, you need nuclear weapons to
protect yourself.
So, for all those reasons--I also think the military has a
very clear appreciation of all of those points. So I think it
is unlikely. I also think it would be, it is probably obvious,
a catastrophe for the United States.
Mr. Tierney. Thank you, Ms. Mathews.
Mr. Duncan, I can tell you that we have some plans to
perhaps have some hearings on that issue of Iran and
consequences and plans as well, so we will keep you informed of
that.
Mr. Cooper, Mr. Isaacson is ready for his exam, his orals.
Mr. Cooper. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am grateful to you
for having this very important hearing. I am sorry it is
perhaps not getting the attention that the hearing down the
hall is that is more involved with using foreign policy and
security issues as a domestic political club.
I am proud that Walter is here. I have been in awe of his
career for a long time. He brought an excellence to journalism
that is rarely seen. I also liked his four books, isn't it?
Kissinger, Wise Men, Ben Franklin, and the latest and greatest,
Einstein. If he can humanize that genius, you are an amazing
writer, and you are. So this will not be an exam. I am
delighted to get this wisdom in three parts.
I have a particular personal interest because on the Armed
Services Committee they have recently established a panel on
roles and missions, and that is Pentagon speak for redoing the
National Security Act and Goldwater nickels and things like
that involve not only Pentagon, but other agencies. So I
welcome your expertise in that area as well.
Two questions primarily. First of all, the list of threats
that are on page 2 of Dr. Lieber's testimony is so startling
that I often think that we here on the Hill let down our guard.
Like if the group of 100 foreign policy experts is correct,
that 80 percent chance of a terrorist attack on the scale of 9/
11 within a decade; and then another panel of experts, within
10 years, 29 percent chance of a nuclear attack in the United
States, 40 percent of a radiological attack, 70 percent of some
kind of CBRN event. That, plus the Gallucci statement, all
those are total game changers.
So I would like ask the other panelists if you share Dr.
Lieber's perception, that grim view of our near term future, 5
to 10 years, facing threats with that level of probability.
Ms. Mathews. I have a modest view of those sorts of numbers
because I know how I feel when I agreed to answer one of those
polls, which is, you know, you look at it and you sort of pick
a number out of the damp air.
Mr. Tierney. Is your mic on, Ms. Mathews?
Ms. Mathews. Sorry.
Mr. Tierney. Thank you.
Ms. Mathews. So I just don't believe them. But, yes, one of
the big reasons why non-proliferation is so important is
because of the terrorist threat. But terrorism without nuclear
weapons is not either an existential threat nor, I would argue,
even a strategic one. So that is the context in which I put it.
Imagine 9/11 without the Twin Towers designed in the way they
were, engineered in the way they were. It would have been a
totally different event. So that is one of the serious reasons
why I put the emphasis on the non-proliferation needs, and
there we do face a really serious set of threats that deserves
far greater attention than we have given it.
Mr. Cooper. Walter, do you have such a view?
Mr. Isaacson. Yes, I would like to say, as Jessica did in a
way, that we are entering a world where we are faced with a
great deal of threat and hatred from radical Islamic jihadism,
and a new type of world in which non-state actors and cross-
border--not nation states, but others, are doing that threat.
And, as Jessica said, I see the biggest problem there being the
spread of weapons of mass destruction, most particularly
nuclear weapons.
I do feel that it is likely we are going to have terrorism
in this country. There are going to be terrorist attacks. And I
am going to say something that I think would be difficult for
perhaps others to say, those of us in think tanks or more
insulated: we have to keep that in perspective, that you and I
lived in Great Britain in a time in which there were lots of
terrorist attacks in Northern Ireland. What makes a terrorist
attack an existential threat, as Jessica said, is when it is
combined with things such as nuclear weapons.
So I know that Bob Gallucci is talking about chemical,
biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons as possible
notions of attack. I think that we should not contort ourselves
so much to fear terrorism as an existential threat as, instead,
to define it more specifically as jihadist groups acquiring
nuclear weapons and combining that with a desire to attack the
United States.
Mr. Lieber. Congressman, may I followup?
Thank you for citing those passages. I think the point is
important. I would note, of course, these are educated guesses
by smart people. We are not talking about the laws of physics,
but I think those guesses or projections or estimates do need
to be taken very seriously and with the gravity they suggest.
I think I have a slight difference with my colleagues on
the panel, Jessica and Walter, in that I don't think we should
minimize what the disruption of 9/11 was all about, even though
it wasn't nuclear. Not only did 3,000 people die, but it
paralyzed the American economy, transportation system,
communications for periods of time. By one estimate, it may
have cost as much as $1 trillion in overall effects and so
forth.
Obviously, nuclear terrorism is in a class by itself. We
should not minimize the peril that mass casualty terrorism
represents to a very complex, very sophisticated economy with
considerable vulnerabilities.
One more point. Our European brothers and sisters often
point to things like the IRA, ETA in Spain, the Red Brigades
and say, oh, you Americans have just lost your virginity and
you are overreacting. Well, I beg to disagree. In those
instances the things that those groups were doing did not
represent the kind of impact that 9/11 and potential future
attacks could represent. Moreover, the things that al Qaida and
radical Islamists want are things that no American government
could ever, I think, concede to, because they are so
fundamental to the nature of our society.
Mr. Cooper. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Tierney. Thank you, Mr. Cooper.
Mr. Higgins.
Mr. Higgins. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I too want to commend
you on this very important hearing, an extraordinary panel, and
very, very good questions about a profound problem that is not
only pervasive, but seemingly growing.
I remember the former defense secretary said that the
measure of the effectiveness on the war on terrorism, are we
capturing, are we detaining, are we stopping more terrorist
activity than is being created. It seems like, particularly
with the situation relative to al Qaida, al Qaida is morphed
into al Qaidaism. There are groups that are al Qaida inspired,
al Qaida linked, and they have also found themselves to be a
global influence. You know, there are intelligence reports now
that say that al Qaida is in the Sudan. Al Qaida is obviously
in Iraq. It is an ideology. I often wonder if this is an
ideology that is based on a twisted interpretation of the
Quran, where are the moderate voices within the Arab Muslim
community that are standing up to this? What is our role in
helping to influence a challenge internally to this threat?
The other thing that I am struck by, when you visit places
like Afghanistan, when you visit places like Iraq, when you
read about places like Iran, is the relative youth of the
population. We just visited, a group of members of this
subcommittee, Afghanistan and Pakistan last month, and I was
very impressed by the U.S. military, with their level of
sophistication, with their acceptance that you don't win this
war by the use of military force alone. This is, as many of you
have said in different ways, a battle for the hearts and minds
of the population, the imagination of the people there, who
have been humiliated, who have been disaffected through
centuries of oppression. I think it requires, in terms of U.S.
foreign policy, a much more sophisticated mind, a much more
strategic approach.
When we left Afghanistan, after we thought we defeated the
Taliban and al Qaida, to divert resources to Iraq, supposedly
to give breathing room for the National Unity Government to
achieve political reconciliation, it seems as though we gave
breathing room in Afghanistan for the regrowth, for the
reconstitution of al Qaida and other terrorist groups.
My question is, is it too late? Have we allowed this thing
to evolve to the point where we have lost control of it?
Because the next al Qaida attack on the United States likely
won't come from Afghanistan, likely won't come from the Middle
East; it could come from Madrid, it could come from London,
England. This is a problem. Are we prepared for it? What
lessons have we learned and what lessons can we learn moving
forward?
Mr. Isaacson. Let me take the first crack, which is I don't
think it is too late, but I do think that what you have put
your finger on is that, like the cold war, this is going to be,
as they called it back then, a long twilight struggle. It is
not going to be in 5 years we declare victory against Islamic
jihadism and get to come home; it is a 40, 50-year, two
generations, just like the cold war was. And that is because it
comes in two components like the cold war. The first is a real
security component, you know, protecting against Soviet
missiles in that case; in this case protecting against
terrorism with defensive measures and some offensive measures.
But, second, like the cold war, it is a long ideological
struggle and, at the moment, as you said, the former secretary
of defense's question may be right, we may be creating a
broader range of terrorists by some of what has happened
recently.
So I think we have to focus on a long ideological fight for
our values in a world in which it is going against us right now
with the spread of al Qaidaism, as you put it, and that
includes the values of tolerance, that people can have
different religious or other beliefs and you can live in a
society with them; and the basic sense that individual rights
should be protected. And we are going to win that battle
economically, morally, and through the expressions of our
values, but we have to really engage in that struggle, which is
not something I see us doing right now.
Mr. Lieber. Briefly. I agree, by the way, completely that
it is going to be a long struggle. The analogy with the cold
war is inexact, but not bad. It is probably the most useful
analogy if you want one. It is a struggle ultimately for the
future of Arab Muslim world, with some extensions, for example,
Pakistan. We can influence, we can help, but ultimately that
struggle is going to be played out within those societies.
It is also worth noting it is not only or all about us.
Think of the murder of Van Gogh in The Netherlands, eviscerated
on an Amsterdam street; or the threats to the very courageous
Somali-Dutch woman, Hursi Ali; or bombings in North Africa; or
the killing of children in front of their parents in
Afghanistan or Algeria; or the London and German bombers,
Glasgow and London Airport or the thwarted attempt in Germany
where you had indigenous people with German and British
citizenship; or al Qaida of Iraq killing Shiites and blowing up
Shiite shrines like the Golden Dome in Samarra.
The 2002 Arab Human Development Report, written for the
U.N. Development Program by 15 Arab economists, referred to
three desperate deficits in the Arab Muslim world: one, in the
role and treatment of women; two, in knowledge and information;
and, three, in liberty and political freedom. There is a core
problem which is very deep-seeded.
One other point in passing, but I don't think this should
all be gloom and doom. I think one very encouraging sign of the
past 6 years is that while there have been a number of
instances in Europe and elsewhere where indigenous and
sometimes ostensibly well integrated Muslims or Arabs who
sometimes were citizens of this country, sometimes not, carried
out terrorist attacks or were interrupted in major attack
plans, that we have been blessedly largely free of that in the
United States; and I think a lot of that has to do with the
nature of American society: adaptable, flexible, and which
gives its Arab and Muslim immigrants and citizens the sense
they are Americans and are fully accepted. I think that is the
strength of America, and it is certainly one element, I think,
of why we have not, so far, faced a repeat of 9/11.
Mr. Tierney. Thank you, doctor.
Thank you, Mr. Higgins.
Mr. Welch.
Mr. Welch. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank all of you.
Listening, I don't want to say it is depressing, but I will
make an observation. Everything you are saying that we should
be doing we are not. Basically, institution-building for the
modern threats, there has been none; the definition of what the
conflict is is still debated, but, actually, there has been, I
think, an operational conclusion that it is all military all
the time; and there has been a relaxation on the effort to stop
the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
I am interested in whether the other panelists agree with
Dr. Mathews on this question of whether Iraq simply has to be
dealt with before we are going to be able to address these
profound transformational foreign policy questions for
security, because it certainly is the sense that I have,
sitting here, that it is all Iraq all the time and it is just a
powerful impediment to any clear thinking.
On one of these trips when we were in the Middle East, when
we went over there, we met with the King of Jordan, and I was
thinking that he was going to be talking about Iraq and how
that had to be dealt with. Of course, they have to deal with
hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees and it is very
unstable, and that was third in his list of problems. The first
one for him was the Arab-Israeli conflict; second was Lebanon;
and then a distant third was Iraq. And, of course, over here it
is all Iraq all the time.
So my question, I guess, to Mr. Isaacson and Dr. Lieber is
whether you are in agreement that if we are going to even start
considering the recommendations you are making, somehow,
someway, we have to get Iraq behind us.
Mr. Isaacson. I am not sure I would take fully that premise
from Jessica's testimony, so I don't want to put the words in
her mouth, but let me address the question.
Mr. Welch. Well, she can respond too.
Mr. Isaacson. I do believe, personally, that this is a
multi-pronged approach, and the resolution of the Israeli-
Palestinian issue is very important right now, and you see some
hopeful signs, I would say, in Dr. Rice's trip. I also agree
that there is an enormous amount we should be doing that we
aren't, whether it is their building madrassas around the world
and, you know, we are not even close in figuring out how we are
going to have education programs, English language, technology
programs. The fact that we cannot compete with the madrassa
movement, when we know how to do things like that, we are just
not doing it, is appalling to me; and that we are letting more
of their education, as opposed to us having technology centers,
education centers. We are doing some of that, and I am involved
with some of that, but I just wish it were 100 times more.
On Iraq, I don't think it has to be solved totally first,
before you get on to anything else. I think it would be a very
unwise approach. I do think that the current implementation of
our Iraq strategy and the current occupation strategy--I don't
mean occupation to be a loaded term, but what we are doing
there--is actually very bad right now for us dealing with the
other problems.
Mr. Welch. Thank you.
Mr. Lieber. I share your sense that there is--there is a
term I like to use, the problem of the reductio ad Iraqum.
Mr. Welch. Oh, I use that all the time too. [Laughter.]
Mr. Lieber. Two years of Latin in Chicago public schools
serves me well.
It is certainly true that Iraq is the elephant in the
living room. There is a tendency to see everything else through
that lens. I think the virtue of the hearings that this
committee has called is to encourage us to not ignore Iraq, but
to try to look beyond it, especially for whoever is responsible
for the Presidency in January 2009.
I would also note, if we look back, that at the time we
went into Iraq, 70 percent of the American public, more than
three-fifths of the Congress, two-thirds of the European
governments supported that judgment. It proves to have been a
very fateful decision. The consequences of our involvement in
Iraq are still not entirely clear, and the judgment of history
may be ultimately quite harsh or it may not be.
I am a little more cautiously optimistic about the current
strategy or tactic in Iraq. I think that after the fall of
Baghdad there were serious failures in what to do, but that the
policy being followed by General Patraeus has at least the
possibility that it may be turning things around. I use lots of
cautions, and I think the advantage is to know what you don't
know. It remains to be see what will occur in Iraq. There is at
least a possibility that the situation will stabilize.
Clearly, Iraq is having an impact elsewhere, but I think it
is also the case, as was mentioned in the question, that other
countries are looking at other issues. I suggested some of
them, Jessica has suggested others of them, and I think there
is more of a willingness to look beyond Iraq.
Last, in Europe, for instance, for those of us who travel
and go there a good deal, the kind of bitterness and heated
debate that marked the years 2002, 2003, 2004 has subsided, and
I think there is a willingness to try to look beyond Iraq,
rather than focus on that to the exclusion of other priorities.
Ms. Mathews. I didn't mean to suggest there is nothing we
can do, because----
Mr. Welch. I didn't hear that.
Ms. Mathews. And I want to add to my earlier remarks a
couple of other things I think we can change. But I do believe
that everything we are doing, as you suggest--I mean, the big
cost is simply the oxygen. It is just impossible to get away
from. And the amount of political capital that we all, as a
country, have to focus on this, there is very little left over
for other huge priorities.
And I am under no illusion that we could stop terrorism by
changing U.S. policies, but we can affect it in a big way by a
number of what I think are really, really bad policy choices,
and I want to add also to the prior question three.
One is the question of a permanent U.S. presence in Iraq.
At the end of Iraq week up here, a lot of the media said, oh,
gosh, you know, Patraeus came and talked for hours and hours
and nothing changed. But, in fact, in my judgment, something
very big changed in the President's speech: when he said we are
going to have fewer troops and a bigger mission. He said what
Secretary Gates said at the beginning of June, which was a
long-term presence on the model of Japan and Korea.
The whole Arab world believes that we went into Iraq in
order to dismantle the most powerful Arab state and get our
hands on its oil for Israel's benefit and our own. That is what
they believe already. And, of course, one of the reasons that
we chose to go in was because of the problem of the current
American presence in Saudi Arabia, military presence.
If we choose to do this, and do it without public
discussion, without involvement of the Congress--and, as far as
I know, there has never been a national security meeting on
this subject or a debate within the administration on the
wisdom of building permanent U.S. presence in Iraq--it will be
one of the biggest mistakes of this whole business.
The passage of amendments forbidding the spending of money
to create a permanent presence is a waste of time, because the
administration has figured out who can say what is permanent.
Fifty years, not permanent. But 50 years is a great big
mistake, in my judgment. If it were me, I would be up here
having bicameral, bipartisan hearings on the wisdom of this
choice. Not in the context of the administration's position,
necessarily, but whether this is something the United States
wants to do. I think it has everything to do with the supply of
people to al Qaida.
Second, we need a new policy on democracy promotion. In
particular, we need a set of policies to separate democracy
promotion from regime change, which is what it is believed to
be in most of the rest of the world, not just the Middle East.
Russia, for example; China. This is a subject where we can
affect our destiny and the likelihood that we will face
terrorist attacks.
And, finally, Pakistan. I am a deep, deep, deep pessimist
about our ability to turn Afghanistan. Again, history tells me
this one is going to take 10 times what we are willing to give
it. But Pakistan we cannot afford not to be paying an awful lot
more attention to. And I think we do have some levers to affect
the supply of terrorists in Pakistan.
So my point is while we are paying a terrible price in
Iraq, and will continue to for many, many years, there are
things that will make it either better or rose.
Mr. Tierney. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Welch.
Mr. Welch. Thank you.
Mr. Tierney. Mr. Turner.
Mr. Turner. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank you
for holding this hearing and the great job you have been doing
on this subcommittee. It certainly has been very helpful for
all the Members.
I appreciate your last comment about Pakistan. I just came
from an Armed Services Committee hearing where the issue is
Pakistan, its stability, our relations with Pakistan, and the
issues of the war on terror, Taliban, and our ability to be
effective in Afghanistan, al Qaida, and perhaps even Osama bin
Laden himself seeking or having refuge in Pakistan.
One of the discussion topics has been the problems and
difficulties that Musharraf is having in his own country, and I
was wondering if you might each comment for a moment on the
issue of the difficulties there. And I am particularly
interested in if you de-couple his relationship with the United
States, does he still have problems, and what are those
problems, and how should we look to our policies to affect a
greater relationship with Pakistan and an acceptance of greater
respect and view by the people of Pakistan of the United States
as an ally and a friend.
Mr. Lieber. There is a lot of uncertainty here, but in the
first instance it would be my sense that his problems are
overwhelmingly internal. They have to do with the nature of
Pakistani society, the fact that the military has ruled, either
directly or behind the scenes, that country for a very long
time with the very unequal distribution of wealth in that
society, which is really quite extraordinary; the role of the
intelligence service, the ISI, and so forth. The embrace of the
United States probably adds something to his problem
internally, but in other respects can be a source of strength
because of economic and military support.
The problem there, as in some other countries in the Middle
East, is that some Middle Eastern, Muslim, and Arab leaders
have used a deliberate tactic--it is true, I think, in Egypt--
of apres moi le deluge, that is to say, deliberately cracking
down on moderate opposition elements who would like to use the
democratic process, be non-violent and so on, in order to say,
look, you may not like what I am doing, but the people who are
out there who would take over otherwise are the really, really
bad guys. Sometimes that is very exaggerated and sometimes not,
but I think it is something you have to weigh.
There is an argument about Pakistan that if Musharraf fell,
it would not be the extreme radical Islamists who would seize
power, and that there are other oppositional elements, but both
civil and military leaders of Pakistan in the last four decades
have left a lot to be desired vis-a-vis their own people.
Ms. Mathews. I agree with all of that. Certainly, his
problems go beyond his connections to the United States. I just
would underline something Walter said earlier. A huge part of
our problem with Pakistan's problem has come out of Pakistan's
failure to have an educational system. This is not beyond our
ability to--I mean, when you put it in the context of the Iraq
war, those costs of substituting a functioning public education
system for the madrassas is trivial. But this is going to be a
terribly tough problem for exactly the reasons that Bob just
described, is the alternatives are not great.
I think we should have, 4 years ago, pushed Musharraf much
harder in the direction of the reforms that he had promised,
but it would have required a balancing against our anti-terror
goals, which, of course, is what foreign policy is all about.
But we don't have the luxury of not giving Pakistan whatever
attention it demands because of its nuclear weapons.
Mr. Isaacson. I come at this with a strange historical
conflict of interest, which is--and I could embarrass
Congressman Cooper if he were here. When we were in graduate
school, the first politics I ever did was that I ran Benazir
Bhutto's campaign for the head of the debating union at our
graduate school, and Jim Cooper helped me.
I do think that Benazir Bhutto and others coming back as a
democratic opposition, adds to the turmoil in Pakistan but is
inevitably part of the process there, and probably a good part.
I agree that General Musharraf's problem is not simply the
embrace of the United States, because Mrs. Bhutto and others
are not necessarily running on anti-American platforms, as far
as I can tell, or trying to stoke up anti-American resentment.
If you look at Pakistan versus India, you see the model we
are trying to create. When I was in India a couple of times
ago, I was there for the election, and what happened was a
Hindu prime minister was defeated by a Roman Catholic woman,
Sonia Ghandi, who stepped aside for a Sikh prime minister, who
was then sworn in by a Muslim president. That is a pretty
awesome shining light of what we have to get to in terms of
pluralism in this world if we are not going to have the type of
threats that will face us over the next two generations.
And I guess I am being egotistical here, but I would second
Jessica's seconding of what I said earlier, which is if we are
not going to win the battle against the madrassa movement by
competing with them in Pakistan, that is where we are
surrendering this ball game.
Mr. Turner. Mr. Chairman, if I might for just a moment.
I just want to thank all of you for making those points,
because I think so many times in our U.S. policy view, we are
so narcissistic as to believe that all problems result from a
relationship with our country, and that clearly, in this
instance, there are other factors at play, ones that we need to
pay attention to. So thank you.
Mr. Tierney. Thank you. I just want to make mention with
the great work of our staff here and a number of the members of
this committee on both sides of the aisle, we were able to put
a substantial amount of money into the budget this year and to
enforce some education in Pakistan. The problem we are now
going to have is making sure that is delivered in an effective
way where it can be monitored and actually implemented without
great waste or whatever. So we are moving in that direction. We
still have some challenges on that, but it is a fight worth
having, for sure.
Mr. Isaacson, are you still squared away with us here for a
while?
Mr. Isaacson. I am actually hosting a lunch, which I
wouldn't mind--a foreign policy lunch somewhere. So maybe 5
minutes, if I could; 10, 10. Fine, fine. Sorry.
Mr. Tierney. Ms. McCollum, you have 5 minutes, and then Mr.
Shays has 5, because he is going to grill Mr. Isaacson.
Ms. McCollum. Well, I appreciate your being able to stay,
and I really found your July editorial in The Washington Post,
where you argued that America needed a new creative solution to
match the challenge of global terrorism very insightful. In the
editorial you outline several strategies, including the
creation of new public diplomacy organizations for the global
age, and I strongly agree that we need an effective public
diplomacy that is indispensable in America's toolbox in its
fight against terrorism.
During the cold war--and the cold War has been discussed--
the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe helped win the hearts
and minds by giving invaluable information out to people
regardless of their income and their occupation in those
countries. U.S. policy was able to spread information about
America, culture and values, which is democracy.
The current crisis in Burma, though, to me, is more than
ever demonstrating that a proven low-cost strategy like Voice
of America radio is still essential. The BBC reported in recent
days that less than 1 percent of the Burmese people have access
to the Internet, and the government has blocked Internet
traffic into and out of the country. Radio Netherlands is
reporting that Burmese stores are sold out of shortwave radios
because people want news and information, and that is the only
way they can receive it. Laura Bush and Chairman Lantos both
recently broadcast to the Burmese people on Voice of America.
Now, I bring this up because I do agree with you we need to
look at all the tools in the toolbox. Yet the Broadcasting
Board of Governors, which oversees Voice of America with
absolutely no transparency--no transparency--is rushing to
close down radio transmitters all around the world, and I can
supply you with the proof. You look shocked. I was shocked to
find that out too. The BBG is silencing America's voice in a
time when reaching the poor and oppressed populations in the
world is even more important.
Now, I have introduced a bill to try to get the Board of
Governors' attention, and it is H.R. 3598. We need to do
exactly what you were suggesting, Mr. Isaacson, make big
investments in new public diplomacy efforts. But I believe we
must renew our commitment to Voice of America Radio and other
proven cost-effective strategies. Voice of America is only $10
million in a $688 million budget. That is less than the
inflationary increase of the GBG's administrative expenses in
2008, and they are cutting it.
I know you believe in using everything that is available
out there and I want to make sure that we have your voice heard
clear on Voice of America.
Mr. Isaacson. Let me make it extremely clear. I love radio.
I think it is an awesome and effective technology. I agree with
Bob to my left, that the dismantling of the U.S. Information
Agency was a very bad problem; and that is another thing that
perhaps you can look at. I think the BBG has not risen to the
task in the past of winning the hearts and minds battles, but I
absolutely--I am a believer in a lot of old technology,
including even print, believe it or not, but radio will be, for
the next 100 years, an incredibly effective way to communicate.
So let's not disparage radio.
Mr. Lieber. No, I strongly agree with your point about VOA.
VOA, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and the other radios are
of immense importance. We ought not to be cutting services and
broadcasts and budgets, but increasing them. They are an
extremely important long-range investment.
One other point in passing, some disagreement with Jessica
about China. China has played a very negative role in Burma, in
Darfur, and some other third-world environments, sustaining
repressive regimes for reasons that are, at times economic, at
times political. We don't control the situation in Burma. China
is a country with huge influence and, alas, it appears, to the
extent we can tell, not to have used the leverage it might have
to improved things, rather than allow them to get worse.
Mr. Tierney. Thank you very much.
Mr. Shays.
Mr. Shays. Thank you.
Mr. Isaacson, thank you for waiting up. I would love to ask
why isn't there a public debate about the threat and what we
should do about it? And whose responsibility is it? Is it
Congress, is it the White House, is it just that the press
isn't into it?
And then I am just going to say that it seemed to me, born
in 1945, the 1950's were kind of like sorting it out. I mean,
you know, I came from an area where everybody built these
shelters that were really basements that nobody would want to
be in unless they were crazy. So it seems to me that we didn't
come to agreement on it until maybe when Kennedy tried to
outmaneuver Nixon and be on the right side, so they were both
in agreement, you know, we needed to confront and so on. So I
would love to know that.
I would love to know if Sputnik wasn't--did we start out
having to be an economic military effort against the Soviet
Union expansion, and then did Sputnik add a third element,
education, or was education and technology always a part of it?
And the last question is why are terrorists so
unimaginable? And does that suggest that I fear them more than
I should? In other words, I can tell you an umpteen number of
ways to totally shut down this Government with very little
amount of work, and yet they don't seem to figure it out.
Mr. Isaacson. Well, let's not spread the word on the
various ways.
I do think that the entire cold war period--in this room,
for example, whether you are talking about the Democratic or
Republican chairs of Armed Services and everything else--had a
great consensus and discussion of the long-term threat, and
that is something that is rarer today. And I don't think it
really--you may be right, but in my reading of the history,
having written about the Truman administration into the
Eisenhower administration, I think there was a serious
understanding of how to deal or the need to deal with that
threat.
Mr. Shays. Well, let me quickly ask you this. If we hadn't
gone into Iraq, is that when we kind of got sidestepped?
Mr. Isaacson. This is what I was going to say. The reason
for----
Mr. Shays. I mean, in other words, with Republicans and
Democrats working together.
Mr. Isaacson. The polarization is what you are talking
about, and the polarization is one reason we are not having a
reasonable national debate, not just on the Hill. I left being
in the media partly because I realized that our job in a new
media age was to shout as much and be divisive enough as much
as possible in order to get high ratings or readership. I think
that the media has not played a unifying role nor a role of
deepening some of these issues.
You referred to that, I think, in your opening statement,
but, to me, there are many people to blame for the fact that a
reasonable, intelligent, non-partisan--I don't just mean
bipartisan, I mean rising above partisanship--debate has not
occurred. I think that talk radio and cable TV, having been a
member of that part of the media for a while, is not helpful in
that regard. And even though I love the Internet, I think the
Internet encourages divisive debate and shouting more than it
encourages the formation of consensus.
So I think I will say we in the media or we in the
recovering media--I am sort of a recovering journalist--are
responsible. I think, you know, Congress, by the way it is set
up, people playing to the base, districts that are more
gerrymandering than they were when I was growing up, and you
had a person who sat in that chair, Hale Boggs, who had to
represent suburbs as well as inner city. That whole process has
led to greater partisanship and less depth in the public
debate, and I despair a bit, but I think there are many ways to
overcome that.
Mr. Shays. That should be your next book.
Mr. Isaacson. Thank you, sir. Well, with my Benjamin
Franklin book, that was the point of the Benjamin Franklin
book.
Mr. Shays. Yes, but do a modern one.
Mr. Lieber.
Mr. Lieber. If I may.
Mr. Shays. Mr. Isaacson, you can leave.
Mr. Isaacson. I will hear what Bob has to say and then I
will dash to my lunch.
Mr. Lieber. America has always had a tradition of robust,
and even bitter and sometimes unfair, debate, if you think
about debates going back to the late 18th century. Also, let's
not forget that during the early cold war, the architect of the
institutions and policies, Dean Atchison, was denounced in 1952
by Richard Nixon, then running for vice president, who referred
to Dean Atchison's College of Cowardly Communist Containment.
There was plenty of Republican-Democratic animosity in the late
1940's and early 1950's. Reagan was often denounced from the
left; Jimmy Carter was denounced from the right, and so on.
I do think, though, in response to your point, that the
Iraq war has clearly, and I think dangerously, intensified the
partisan anger and made it much harder to debate these things.
I find that, since I take part in a lot of debates, that all
too often these very important and difficult issues are framed
in ways that are outlandish and hyperbolic. So Iraq has
worsened that situation, but we need to remember that America's
freedom and traditions have always involved a good deal of cut
and thrust, even when there was a rough consensus.
Ms. Mathews. I just would add that I think the degree of
consensus in the cold war looks much bigger, in retrospect,
than it was living through it. Much bigger. And while there is
always value for another Walter Isaacson book, Bill Bradley has
written, in his New American Story, of a lot of the issues that
you and Walter just exchanged on, in particular, I think part
of--and you know better than I how long it may take to change
this, but the legacy of 20 years of redistricting is, at least
on the Hill, has had a tremendous cost on our ability to act in
a bipartisan way, because so few people represent really
districts where they need to appeal to both sides.
Mr. Shays. Come to my district.
Ms. Mathews. But I also think Walter is right to draw
attention to the effect of these new technologies in the
communications world, because the smaller the niches, the less
that you can reach across them, and people are living now in
tinier and tinier niches, where they only reach stuff that they
agree with, and this is a terrible cost for the country. So I
think it is very important to focus on.
Mr. Tierney. The Internet was an example that I had such
great hopes of the Internet broadening out the debate and
balancing it out, and it went just the other way; it went just
to the respective corner and read just the blogs or sites that
they thought reinforced their view and intensified the action
back and forth.
We obviously have to vote. Mr. Shays and I may be missing
the first vote, but I want to ask one quick question of each of
you. If you had to name one essential thing that this country
should be doing differently than it currently is, what would
that be?
Ms. Mathews. Addressing non-proliferation in the ways that
I described here, no question.
Mr. Tierney. Dr. Lieber.
Mr. Lieber. Taking profound steps about energy security in
the way I referred to.
Mr. Tierney. I can't thank you both enough, and Mr.
Isaacson as well. It has been a very informative hearing. I
think that we have all benefited extraordinarily from it, and I
hope that we get the chance to have each of you back again to
followup on this and for other reasons. You do a great service
to us in your respective roles, and I know you are appreciated
by a great many people. So thank you very, very much.
Mr. Lieber. Thank you.
Mr. Tierney. The meeting is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 12 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]