U.S. Strategy in Iraq and the Global War on Terror

March 16, 2005

Unedited transcript prepared from a tape recording

Proceedings:
MR. DONNELLY:  Ladies and gentlemen, I guess we're going to have rather an informal event.  I'm sure we have some late arrivers and some people who are still munching.  That's quite all right.  That's not only tolerated but recommended, so we're going to go start it anyway.

This is kind of the latest in our installment of Iraq and Middle East discussions.  And we begin two years more or less after we went to war with Saddam Hussein.  Threw him out of power, and we're actually in the fourth year of what we are still pleased to call the Global War on Terror.

So it seems like a good time to take stock of where we've been.  Figure out where we are, and perhaps even more crucially figure out where we might be going.

My reading of the story in the Washington Post this morning, the poll story, makes me think that Americans remain ambivalent and uncertain about these issues, even though they still seem to be slightly willing to give President Bush the benefit of a doubt, and they're I guess very clearly heartened to see Iraqis taking their first steps towards what might be a democracy.

Today, I have invited two really close friends, Andy Bacevich and Peter Feaver, to help me and to help us all wrestle with these issues.  They're not only friends, but they're people that I regard as amongst the smartest I know when it comes to larger issues of strategy.  Andy teaches at Boston University; Peter endures at Duke, where I guess the penalties of the faculty lounge are offset by the pleasures of the basketball court.  I'm not going to go through their entire CVs.  They're in your packets, and I commend them to you.

Even when I disagree with my two friends, and even sometimes especially when we disagree, I learn a heck of a lot from them, and frustratingly they make me think.  And I think they're about to do that again, and I hope you will participate in this.

So I intend to play a rather backseat role, but I have been vested with the powers of the hall monitor, and I thus do want to frame the discussion a little bit and give some modest guidance to Andy and Peter.

First, as we agreed, there will be no use of the term risible, nor any references to Foucault.  And secondly, I enjoin you both to take a step back from the day's headlines a little bit and help us try to put together a larger picture of what's happening.  And what we're looking for are ways to think about the headlines and understand them a little better.

I also have hall monitor powers when it comes especially to the Q&A session part of our program, and I'll be excessively strict in enforcing the three AEI prime directives:  when you're called upon, wait for the microphone; ask a question; identify yourself for the purposes of the transcript.  I'm going to be particularly draconian about the ask the question directive.  We're here to listen to Andy and Peter and not pretend we're as smart as they are or to try to trip them up.

The use of the term risible is also forbidden to the audience.  In fact, references to Foucault or any other deconstructionist will be met with summary ejection.

So, with those very brief words, Andy, you get the first 15 or 20 minutes, followed by Peter.  I may ask a quick question or two when you're done, and we'll continue to two o'clock, using the balance of the time for questions and answers.  So, please enjoy your meal.  Andy, get us going.

DR. BACEVICH:  Thank you very much.  Thanks for having me today and for the opportunity to talk here.

I do understand what my role is, and my role is to offer a critique of U.S. foreign policy since 9/11, thereby, teeing up the ball that Peter is going to clobber.  And given the configurations of this particular ballpark, I'm sure that he's going to hit a home run.

Now from my distant blue state perch, I get the sense that Washington has been a city of pretty wild mood swings over the past couple of years.  If you happen to support this Administration's approach to foreign policy, there have been some very good days, and there have been some very bad days.  And of late, I gather that the mood is upbeat; that is to say we are told that in the Middle East freedom is on the march, thereby, vindicating the President, and, of course, vindicating his supporters.

I speak as someone who has disagreed emphatically with the President's policies, and I remain not only deeply skeptical of our prospects for success, but also convinced that he has set out on a course that's not good for the country.

Let me make four brief points to illustrate the sources of my unease.

The first point relates to a philosophy of history.  The President believes I take it that history consists of a foreordained narrative, according to which mankind is on a long journey, destined to culminate in the universal embrace of peace, democracy, and freedom, the latter largely defined as we define it here in the United States.

Furthermore, he believes that Providence has designated the United States to play a singularly important role in advancing this narrative; that is to say that it is our mission to deliver mankind to the Promised Land.

Well, I don't buy it.

Here I stand with Reinhold Neibuhr, who suggested a half century ago, at another time of great crisis, that it just might be a tad presumptuous of us to claim to understand God's plan, and that history unfolds; that it, in fact, does unfold in a frame of reference too vast for us to reduce to slogans and bumper stickers.

Indeed, the 20th century alone provides a mountain of evidence suggesting that history is more problematic or, to return to the religious comparison, that God's ways are mysterious and hidden.

Now I understand that there are some looking back the last six weeks or two months who can conjure up an argument that history has suddenly turned a corner, and is now decisively headed in the right direction.

This gets to the second source of my continuing unease, namely the difficulty of interpreting the meaning of ongoing events across massive social, cultural, and religious boundaries.

Here I am happy to associate myself with the views of Daniel Pipes, who knows infinitely more about the Islamic world than I do.  Many of you will have seen the Op Ed that Pipes published about 10 days ago that cautioned against being too quick to impose our own reading on developments in the Middle East.

If I understand Pipes correctly, he's saying that political change in the region does not necessarily imply democracy; that democracy is about to break out all over, and that even if democracy does appear, the results may be profoundly illiberal and contrary to the interests of the United States.  Bluntly stated, in a free vote, radical Islamists are likely to gain power in several countries from Egypt to Saudi Arabia and beyond.

The third source of my continuing unease relates to the use of military power.  This month my new book, which I am hereby shamelessly plugging, will begin to appear in bookstores.  It is called The New American Militarism.

My book argues that in the aftermath of Vietnam, we Americans embraced a set of attitudes about armed force, soldiers, and military institutions that are not only at odds with our founding traditions, but which are also wrong-headed and pernicious.  Among other things, well before 9/11, we had persuaded ourselves that we were the masters of war and that force, both force actually used and force threatened, offered a precise and controllable instrument for bringing about political change; indeed, for nudging history down its ostensibly pre-determined course.

This militaristic view is what made preventive war against Iraq seem, in the eyes of some, both possible and desirable.  Yet, notwithstanding the abundant evidence of error and miscalculation that has presented itself, notwithstanding the fact that we are now embroiled in a war that is costing us dearly and in which the prospects for military victory now appear negligible, I see little indication that our political elites have reexamined the dangerous assumptions underlying their thinking about force.  Unless and until we wean ourselves from militarism, the prospect of more costly blunders like Iraq will remain a real possibility, with consequences likely to be disastrous.

My fourth concern relates to the yawning gap between the Bush Administration's declared goals and its willingness or capacity to mobilize resources necessary to achieve those goals.

On the one hand, the Global War on Terror has now morphed into an even more ambitious Global War on Tyranny.  On the other hand, rhetoric aside, the Administration has clearly signaled to the American people that someone else's kid will go fight that war and that when it comes to paying for it, future generations are going to be stuck with the tab.

As a consequence, we have today a badly overstretched military that is beginning to show signs of cracking.  And we have an ostensibly conservative administration that is breaking all past records for its fiscal profligacy.

I'm not enough of an economist to say whether our reckless economic policies are sustainable, although they certainly make me uncomfortable.  But beyond such concerns the whole arrangement strikes me as morally objectionable.

If this crusade to eliminate tyranny is so all fired urgent, then the enterprise ought to entail collective effort and collective sacrifice, not sending people of color and the working class to fight, while the well-to-do get tax cuts and go off to Disney World.

I suppose that the morality of the arrangement doesn't matter as long as you can get away with it.  But the sharp decline in the willingness of African Americans to volunteer for military service is one indication that some folks are beginning to wise up.

Well, what to do?  With regard to Iraq, it seems to me that the script is largely written.  The only live option is to act with all due speed to liquidate our direct military involvement there, doing so in a way that obscures as much as possible the fact that we are engaged in a conflict that we cannot win, victory being defined as reducing the insurgency to the point where it is no more than a nuisance and no longer interferes with the political and economic life of Iraq.

I take that to be, that is to say this looking for the way out, I take that to be the actual purpose of the Administration's current policy:  accelerate the creation of a viable Iraqi security force to permit an orderly extraction of U.S. combat forces.  Whether that effort will succeed before U.S. forces suffer grievous damage remains to be seen.  Will General Petraeus succeed in building an Iraqi Army before the U.S. Army begins to run out of warm and willing bodies?  By my reckoning, it promises to be a near run thing.

Now I should emphasize that ending our combat presence does not mean ending all involvement in Iraqi affairs.  When it comes to economic and security assistance, meaning training and materiel, Iraq will in all likelihood be dependent upon us for years to come.  In short, we will continue to pay and to pay and to pay, expending in Iraq resources that might otherwise have gone to other priorities, either here at home or abroad.

Whether all those hundreds of billions spent, along with many American lives lost, will yield a stable liberal democracy aligned with the United States is anybody's guess.  I'd put the odds against it.

Looking beyond Iraq, it seems to me that the United States must chose between very broad options.  One option says that notwithstanding any errors of judgment and operational miscues in Iraq, the United States ought to forge on with the President's declared project of rooting out tyranny wherever it might be found and spreading the blessings of liberty around the world--a project we are told that will take generations.

If that has become America's purpose, then let's get serious about the effort, for thus far we have manifestly not been serious.  We have not mobilized the means sufficient to achieve the great ends of our policy.  We have saddled the burden of implementing the President's policies onto a small minority of citizens.  We have passed on to future generations the responsibility of paying for that project.

The President has not rallied the nation to support his crusade for freedom, unless you define support as displaying yellow ribbon decals on the back of the family SUV.

So let us make a wholehearted national effort.  Let us put our money where the President's mouth is.

What would that imply?  For starters, a serious effort to eliminate tyranny around the world is unlikely to succeed with an active duty military force amounting to a mere 0.5 percent of the population.  Given the importance that we have come as a people to place on unconstrained global power projection, we need and will need to maintain indefinitely forces that are substantially larger than we presently have.  That is, we're going to need them if we're going to fulfill the President's ambitions.  Relying on the reserves to make up for the deficit in numbers is unfair and unsustainable.

So let us restore the military establishment to what it was during the later days of the Cold War, going from the current 1.4 million active duty forces back up to something like 2.1 million.  No doubt expanding the force in this way will not be easy.  But those eager to support this great cause will not shrink from the challenge.

Secondly, if we are indeed committed to the spread of freedom and to counteracting the impression that our actual intentions in Iraq and elsewhere are not quite so high minded, then we ought to give that freedom a meaning that looks beyond the establishment of political democracy.

During World War II, for example, Franklin D. Roosevelt's Four Freedoms very much included, featured, emphasized freedom from want.  Now when it comes to the support for development abroad to addressing the needs of those who are indeed wanting, the United States has acquired a reputation for being notoriously stingy.  If we are serious about spreading freedom around the world, we ought to correct that.

How to do that?  Well, one possibility might be to peg international assistance to the size of the defense budget, spending, say, one dollar to alleviate freedom from want for every five dollars that we spend on honing our capacity for coercion.

That would mean with present defense spending at a half trillion dollars a year, including operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, we'd earmark $100 billion a year for doing good deeds.  A large sum?  You bet.

But if we are indeed committed to our mission of spreading freedom around the world, more than justified.

Furthermore, we ought to fund both that larger military and our increased commitment to international development on a pay as you go basis instead of fobbing the bill off on to future generations.  If the campaign to end tyranny is vitally important, then we ought to pay for it, increasing taxes and cutting domestic  outlays so as to bring the budget into balance consistent with what conservatives once saw as a first principle of responsible government.

If on the other hand, the President is unable or unwilling to persuade the American people to provide this great crusade with the resources it deserves, then perhaps we ought to consider an entirely different approach.  And that brings us to our second broad option:  a foreign policy based on realism, modesty, and attention to the actual needs of the American people.

What does that imply?  Very briefly the following:

First, abrogate the Bush doctrine of preventive war and return to a policy of using force defensively and as a last resort, consistent with good sense and our moral traditions.

Second, reduce our commitments abroad, in particular by requiring the liberal democracies of Europe and East Asia to assume responsibility for their own security.  Bluntly, where there is no longer an immediate and pressing need for U.S. troops, bring them home.

Third, reconstitute our badly depleted forces and reconfigure them for national defense rather than global power projection.  Along the way, revive the tradition of the citizen soldier.

Fourth, treat terrorism as an international criminal conspiracy to be addressed chiefly, albeit not entirely, through an intensive police effort.

Fifth, define Islamic radicalism as a problem to be contained rather than as a disease that lies within our capability to cure.

Sixth, get serious about an energy policy, moving toward greater self sufficiency and thereby annulling the strategic significance of the Persian Gulf.  Personally, I would much rather spend $300 billion--I think that's the current cost to the Iraq War--$300 billion reducing our dependence on foreign oil rather than on vainly trying to pacify and rebuild Iraq.

Seventh, and last, make America the true exemplar of freedom for all to see and to emulate, which means focusing our power and energy and imagination on problems here at home rather than on problems on the other side of the globe.

I got about one more minute?

MR. DONNELLY:  You got 'til you're finished Andrew.

DR. BACEVICH:  Let me just finish with a little personal anecdote.

In late January, my wife and I went down to Georgia to attend our son's commissioning at Fort Benning.  He graduated from OCS and became a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army, and that night we drove up to Atlanta; and we took him and a buddy out for dinner.  And the next morning, he zoomed off to Fort Knox in his shiny new Mustang, much as I had done 35 years earlier in a shiny new Mustang.

And my wife and I decided on our way back to the airport that we would stop to see the Martin Luther King Memorial, which we had never visited.  Let me tell you the most striking aspect of the memorial to Dr. King.  It's the squalor that surrounds it--the crummy, crummy neighborhoods on that side of Atlanta, in which a large African American underclass continues to live in de facto segregation.

I find it difficult to understand why those who are so hot to spread the blessings of freedom in foreign lands are not equally hot to finish the work of giving substance to freedom here at home.  Max Boot, who many of you know, we know, wrote in his column a couple weeks ago of getting weepy as he watched the televised reports of brave Iraqis risking death to go to the polls, a very human reaction that speaks well of Max.

Why does the fate of our fellow citizens who enjoy freedom but live in want not elicit a comparable reaction?  It's something that I just don't get, because in this wonderful country of ours, there are, in fact, millions of people for whom life is a great trial, who go to bed hungry, who are beset with demons, who lack meaningful employment.  And these are our fellow citizens.

If we ostensibly have a great responsibility to those on the other side of the world, then what is our responsibility to those who live in Northeast Washington or in Dorchester, Massachusetts?

So on that sappy, liberal sounding note, I will conclude so that Peter can get in his licks.  Thank you.

[Applause.]

MR. DONNELLY:  Andy, I've never thought of you as a sappy guy.  I have to say.  Thank you very much for that presentation.

Andy may think he's in a hostile ballpark, and his view of what the ballpark looks like is probably somewhat distorted by living in Boston.  But he's obviously learned how to work the inside of the plate and maybe throw a brush back pitch or two.  So, Peter, dust yourself off and take that mighty cut that Andy foresaw when he began.

DR. FEAVER:  Being in a hostile environment that's where I spend most of my time.  I'm used to being on a panel where there's eight people saying more or less what Andy has said, sometimes shouting a bit louder, sometimes not quite so loud, and then I'm there as the token for another perspective.

But I wanted to--I was trying to get myself in the mood for being in a hostile audience, and I realized it's obvious: this is Terrapin country, isn't it?  So I should be begin by pointing out that the thing that I'm--yes?

DR. BACEVICH:  There's somebody wearing a Tar Heel jacket.  Yeah, I saw him coming in.

DR. FEAVER:  Last year around this time, in the rest of America, in the America that Andy claims he wants to defend, they're not talking right now about Iraq.  They're not really talking about the fact that it's a two-year anniversary since the beginning of the war.  They're talking about March Madness, and I want to point out that a year ago this time, I was one call away from being in ESPN's Top 50 in terms of calling the brackets.  If I had gotten one more first round pick correctly, I could have retired as a pundit because I would have been in the top 50 of ESPN.

And I say that because I want--that's my claim to fame, and I want to begin by pointing out where I've been wrong in more serious punditry, and that is I thought that Iraq had stockpiles of WMD, like the rest of the world, and I thought that was a powerful part of the argument, not the whole argument.  I thought that was powerful.

But the more interesting area that I want to begin with is that I was wrong about how robust public support has been for this war, notwithstanding the poll results that you saw today in the Washington Post.  I'll speak to them in a second.  I'll be happy to in Q&A explain more what I mean.

But in this business of gauging American public support for the use of force, I'm probably one of the most bullish of the folks who work in this small area.  And I did, in fact, argue that the American people would have the stomach for Operation Iraqi Freedom, and I've been consistently arguing this since the beginning.

However, if this panel had taken place two years ago, and Andy had said, let me describe to you, Feaver, the following scenario: we invade.  We topple Hussein with less than 200 casualties.  We find then no significant stockpiles of WMD.  We suffer another 1,300 casualties in a bloody insurgency.  We get only limited help from the United Nations.  We endure the horrors of Abu Ghraib.  We still have multiple car bombs a week.  Now, tell me, Feaver, what will be the situation?  And I don't know what I would have said, but I can imagine I might have said that the new democratic president would have a public relations nightmare on his hands.  It hasn't worked out that way.

In the most--even in the polls today that the Washington Post says a majority, clear majority of the American people say, let's stick this out.  And let's win this.

So, while they have reservations about whether it was quote unquote "worth it," and they certainly believe that the level of casualties has been unacceptable, whatever that means, they don't say, as Andy would have them say, come home, America.  They say let us stick it out, and they believe we can win.

Public support, in other words, has been even more robust than I expect it, and it's wrong because, and this is in good Maoist fashion, you say you were wrong because you more right than you knew.  That is to say that the argument that my colleagues and I down at Duke have been making about why the American people are willing to pay the human costs of war; why they're willing to tolerate it--and I don't have time to develop that whole argument--it turns out that argument is more robust than we thought.  The main point of it is that the public is willing to bear the costs--the human costs of the war--provided that they believe we'll ultimately succeed in the effort.  That's sort of the long pole in the tent.  And enduring public optimism about the eventual outcome, despite Andy's best efforts I should say--Andy has been prolific in undermining--in attempting to undermine public optimism about what will happen.  Nevertheless, the public remains remarkably optimistic about what will happen and that is why public support for the war has remained fairly strong.

The other pole in the tent is presidential resolve and I think we have in President Bush one of the most resolved and dogged commanders in chief that this nation has seen in modern times, and that clearly matters.  But it's also, and this is where I want to go with my remarks, it's also the case that the public resolve in Iraq is a function of their belief, the public's belief, that Iraq is part of the larger global War on Terror, whatever that phrase means.

And in a survey we did right at the eve of the U.S. elections--my team and I down at Duke--15 percent of the Americans said that Iraq is the central battle in the War on Terror; 49 percent said it's an important part of the war, but not the central battle.  Only 26 percent said where Andy would have said that it's a distraction from the War on Terror, and only nine percent said it's neither a part of it nor a distraction.

Yes.  Senator Kerry won majorities in the latter two groups.  President Bush won majorities in the first two groups, and that's part of the reason why he won a second term.

What does that mean that Iraq is part of the global War on Terror?  Well, I'm going to--let me first deal with what it doesn't mean, at least what it doesn't mean primarily.

It doesn't mean what I hear every time I brief on the subject that, well, people--the American public is just misinformed about the truth, about Hussein's non-role in the 9/11 attacks.  You see that even in today's poll.  A remarkable percentage of the American people believe that Saddam Hussein was linked in some way to the 9/11 attacks.  And, as reported repeatedly by fair and balanced reporters everywhere, a significant fraction of those folks watched Fox News and so that poll finding that one of my friends did is sort of got a mini cottage industry around it.

Well, we looked, we did a follow-on look at that, asking a slightly more expanded version of the question.  You get a very interesting result.

Sadly, 31 percent of the public does think that Saddam Hussein provided direct help to bin-Laden in carrying out.  So that's about a third.  A little less than a third.  And yes, 36 percent of Bush supporters in the Iraq--in the 2004 election were in this camp.  But what is not as well known is that 27 percent of Kerry supporters were in that camp.

Moreover, when you give the full range of possible linkages between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda--that is to say you give them the opposite erroneous claim: that is Saddam Hussein had no connection whatsoever with Al-Qaeda--you get a different interesting result: 21 percent of Kerry supporters gave that response, despite it being rebutted by the 9/11 Commission Report.  And only three percent of Bush supporters gave that view.

So if you add that together what you get is 48 percent of Kerry supporters gave a response that was, to use Bob Herbert's derisive phrase, "voting without the facts."  Whereas, only 39 percent of Bush supporters were.

The remainder, by the way, embraced one of two options that seemed consistent with the facts as we know it today.  We gave them a fair range.  One of them is that Saddam Hussein didn't help with 9/11, but had contacts with Al-Qaeda, and might have helped them one day.  And the other option is Saddam Hussein didn't help with 9/11, did have contacts, but would not have helped with Al-Qaeda one way.

If you are--a reading of the 9/11 Commission Report would say one of those two is the quote unquote "correct" one.  And that's where the majority of Americans were in one of those two.

Well, it's not--in other words, it's not ignorance that's explaining public support.  What is it?

Well, for the rest of the talk, I'm going to move away from polling data, where I'm most comfortable, and develop an argument that I can't prove with numbers but that I think makes sense to me.

The public continues to see Iraq as linked to the global War on Terror, because the public understands that the global War on Terror is another Cold War, and it's not one of the alternative frames.

And I think this is what President Bush got the most right in the immediate aftermath after 9/11.  It got the proper frame of what the war is.  There were four frames that were offered at the time.  And the President rejected three and embraced the one as the Cold War.

The first frame was counter terrorism as a new crusade, and you heard Andy Bacevich use that.  Critics of the Administration have tried to impose that language on the Administration, and the Administration has been very careful to avoid it.  It's certainly the way Al-Qaeda would like to understand the conflict as a crusade.  But the Bush Administration has bent over backwards to avoid it, and wisely so.

The second one is that--is the one that Andy offered today, but it was offered in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and that is counter terrorism is law enforcement and police action.  Michael Howard [ph] gave a famous speech in October 2001, where he warned that all sorts of errors would happen if we didn't embrace the War on Terror as simply a problem for law enforcement and police action.  There would be an over reliance of military force.  There would be a launching of vicious cycle of reprisals and escalation.  We would be elevating terrorists as morally co-equal to us, as co-combatants, and, therefore, granting them privileges they did not deserve.

The reasoning behind this was always flabby, and in the Q&A I can come back to some of this more, but if you look at Howard's article, the idea that we were obliged to treat Hitler as morally equivalent because we were at war with him is nonsense.  Or the idea that the British policy in Malaya was law enforcement, and we should learn from that, or the idea that we could have applied in Afghanistan what Britain has yet to successfully do in Northern Ireland.  All of these sort of flabby reasoning behind this argument that you can treat terrorism as simply a problem for law enforcement is--that position doesn't withstand close scrutiny.

It was, however, the frame that the Clinton Administration bequeathed to us, and indeed it--the reason--the reason it was a dangerous frame is that it ruled out the possibilities of effective coordination across law enforcement and intelligence, which is essential for doing this; and it ruled out offensive action--military action in the form of Operation Enduring Freedom.  Andy confined most of his bombast to protesting Operation Iraqi Freedom, but the logic of his argument, and indeed the reason that Michael Howard, who first articulated it in the aftermath of 9/11, the reason that they argue it is they were arguing against Operation Enduring Freedom.  And understandably, if you take terrorism as a problem just for law enforcement, then Operation Enduring Freedom doesn't make sense.  And so they argued against it.

The third alternative was counter terrorism as World War III, and because--this language actually was used sometimes, and I think unfortunately so by the Administration, the analog between a Pearl Harbor and 9/11 was just too obvious and too evocative to avoid.  The problem with World War III, though, is that it implies that there will be some Battleship Missouri ending to it. It implies that everyone has--you're not really at war unless everybody has a victory garden.  Some of the logical fallacies in Andy's talk flow from a view that war must look like it did in World War II or else it's not really war.

The proper frame is the fourth one and that's the one that President picked, which is that the War on Terror was going to be primarily like the Cold War.  Now all analogies have problems with it.  I'll grant you.  There are limitations to this, but there are nine ways in which this frame, the global War on Terror as another Cold War hopefully frames the issue and steered the Administration away from mistakes that happily were not made and in the direction of some of the more important successes that they've got.

The first one was to recognize it will be long term with relatively few pitched battles.  Yes, in the Cold War, there were some pitched battles.  There was Korea or Vietnam, but hopefully there will be better outcome in this--in these pitched battles, but they'll be rare.  And unlike Andy, I don't see the United States as country eagerly waiting to invade the next country that ticks off the President.  I see those kinds of major combat operations as rare, in the way they were in the Cold War.

The second is that recognizing that it was as much an ideological contest as a military one.  So you could not have a limited tool box.  It was--it involved law enforcement, legal means, an active diplomacy, intelligence.  Unlike Andy, who advocates an approach to the world that is armed only with a screwdriver and so it, therefore, sees the whole world as something to be screwed, if you approach the global War on Terror as a Cold War, you recognize you need the full toolbox.  The military is one tool, but not the only tool, and, as the President has emphasized over and over again, not the primary tool.

The third point is that it requires an overarching strategy, including one that makes priorities and pays short-term costs to achieve long-term gains--resolve and patience in preparing the public for the long run was crucial.  And this Administration has over and over again talked about how long this will be.  It drives my friend Andy nuts when they talk about generational commitments as if that was a bad thing.

But I would argue that's a good thing, to indicate that this is not going to be over in the time of six months, and that we can ignore just as Ken and I identified at the start of the last Cold War that this was--there could be--you could have in view an ultimate success and yet recognize it might take a while to get there.

The costs will be large, not trivial, but ultimately worth it.  And that was the case for Cold War I.  Arguably, it will be the case for Cold War II.

The fourth insight from the Cold War is that the costs will be shared and not limited to soldiers in uniform.  Yes, soldiers in uniform will pay a horrific price, in some cases the full last full measure of service, but so far more American civilians have died in this global War on Terror than American military combatants.  And that's quite striking and that actually bears some similarity to the Cold War when the risks of that first Cold War, risks in the form of nuclear holocaust and living under the shadow of nuclear holocaust were shared equally and in some cases primarily those risks were shared by the civilian population.

The fifth point is that domestic support is crucial and cannot be assumed.  The fabled bipartisan consensus during the Cold War is precisely that: it's a fable.  Politics stop at the water's edge during a major combat operation like World War II, but in the Cold War there was only a bipartisan consensus on the importance of containing communism.  Everything else was up for grabs.  How to do it, why to do it.  All of the arguments that Andy is making today are fair game in war time, and are legitimate; and those kinds of arguments were and debates were raised during the Cold War, and we shouldn't be surprised that they go on now in the midst of a Cold War.  There will be bitter, in other words, debates about how to conduct this second Cold War.  We shouldn't shrink from those debates.  We shouldn't view them as unpatriotic.  But we shouldn't view their presence as problematic.  That goes along with the territory.

The sixth point is that balancing tough domestic security with concern for civil rights.  This was an early theme of the Cold War.  There's a great book by Harold Lasswell that I recommend called National Security and Individual Freedom that raises these concerns; where he talks about the fear that the United States will become a garrison state.  That is, all of--that there will--all of the things that are thought to have happened in McCarthyism would, in fact, happen.

What Lasswell missed, as Aaron Friedberg convincingly argues, and others have argued, is that during--that we could have great attention to national security as we did during the Cold War and yet also a flowering of civil rights at home.  And so you saw at the same time that the U.S. was fighting the Cold War, the U.S. was expanding civil liberties, first to the African American community and then more full participation to women.  There was a flowering of civil rights at home.  Quite the contrary-quite the opposite of what was worried about in--at the start of the Cold War.

And so I have a similar level of optimism.  I believe that we have to get the balances right.  I think that the Patriotic Act may need to be tweaked in places, but I'm very glad that we have an active watchdog community.  I'm very glad the ACLU sounds off and warns us about these things in the same--I'm glad about this because, in part, the absence of that kind of warning would make me more nervous.  As a dad, I know that silence from the kid's room is often more dangerous than noise.  So the fact that people are complaining gives me confidence that we've got a good checks and balances in place.

Let me quickly move on.  We must be tough on--the seventh point about the Cold War frame is that it tells you that you must be tough on the terrorists, but also tough on the causes of terrorism.  And I think one of the things that this Administration deserves credit for is that it has looked--it has not simply put in place a military strategy, but it is very much looking for an ideological strategy that addresses the causes, the root causes of terrorism, which are not just poverty; in fact, not chiefly poverty, but rather stunted political development.  I can't think of an Administration that has had a more long ranging view about political development and linked that better to our national security needs.

The last two are obvious: that intelligence is key, and there will have to be reforms in human intelligence, and the ninth one is that there--that you probably require revision and reorganization.  So just as the National Security Act of 1947 produced dramatic reorganizations, this new Cold War has produced dramatic reorganizations.

What does the Cold War frame not resolve?  I think it's a useful frame, but it doesn't, by itself, resolve everything.  The first thing it doesn't resolve and, here again the analogy to the Cold War is helpful, it doesn't resolve the balance--the proper balance containment and roll back.  As in the Cold War, there were seasons and phases and zones and theaters where containment were dominant and others where roll back dominated.  And I think a similar balance will have to be struck.

The second is what is tolerable terrorism and what's not?  What is socialism and what is communism is sort of the analog?  And I think these are very tough that the frame by itself doesn't resolve, and I think these are areas where actually Andy's critiques I think have the most bite, most--are the most helpful, and where I pay close attention to him the most.

Why don't I stop there, and then we'll go on.

MR. DONNELLY:  I want to suggest that I want to reserve maybe 10 or 15 minutes at the end for both of you to make kind of a general reply to one another.  But so with that promise, I want to get on to both the Q&A and to ask my questions.  Sorry to be selfish in that regard.

I have one for Peter and one for Andy.  Peter, first of all, I am--as you know, attracted to this Cold War analogy.  I do think, however, that Andy has got almost a--he's got a very telling criticism when he says the mismatch between strategic ends and military means is pretty substantial.  And, in fact, even his measure of what the full commitment to the Bush doctrine would reflect in military terms is simply a return to force levels and a--would stipulate overall defense spending levels roughly analogous to the late Cold War, which itself was hardly, you know, the same commitment as in Vietnam or Korea, the spikes of the Cold War.

So there is a disconnect between what the President says and what his Administration does when it comes to, you know, backing up and fulfilling the strategic ends that he has set forth, and if this is a Cold War, even if it's a long twilight struggle, how come we're still stuck at post--essentially post-Cold War levels of national commitment or at least military commitment and the overall societal sacrifices that that entails?

DR. FEAVER:  Well, I assume you mean, why didn't we raise the military--or now you're talking about raising taxes.  This is AEI after all.

MR. DONNELLY:  Well, I don't care how it's paid for.  Set aside the question of how it's paid for.  But--and I would--you know, just--

DR. FEAVER:  We don't care if it--

MR. DONNELLY:  Well, it's a separate question is all I'm trying to say.  But again, if this is like the Cold War why couldn't we at least have a late Cold War force, supported by levels of defense spending overall that were roughly analogous to or more closely analogous or parallel or equivalent to Cold War levels of spending?

DR. FEAVER: Well, I'm not sure that the logic follows directly that because this is another Cold War, we must spend at the same percentage of GDP that we spent in the last one.  It strikes me that the amount you spend should be proportional to the kind of threat that it is.  But the Cold War analogy helps us understand that it will be a--it won't simply be a military one.  And so, therefore, you might not, in fact, need to spend at a Cold War level in--on the modern military..

That being said, as I understand Secretary Rumsfeld's position--and I'm not privy to his inner thoughts on this--but his argument was that we had the personnel, but they were wearing maybe the wrong uniform or in the wrong MOS, and that the problem was not N-strength, but rather shifting people from functions and roles that were not needed to functions and roles that were needed.  And I've--that has a certain logic to it that I have yet to see careful dissection of it.

It strikes me that there--when the Navy and the Air Force are downsizing, with apparently no loss of functionality, you're shifting those--

[TAPE FLIP.]

MR. DONNELLY:  --which would be entirely consistent with the Rumsfeld vision, as I understand.  That seems to me that that would go a long way to addressing the concerns you raise and that--maybe it should have been done faster, maybe it should have been done more effectively, but it strikes me that that's different from saying we need to spend at Cold War I levels.

MR. DONNELLY:  Let me invert the question and say in your judgment do you believe that a successful prosecution of the war, the GWOT as we call it, properly ought to get--even allowing for reallocating resources within the current top line and within the current military structures, even allowing that, do you think that is a sufficient level of effort?  And even allowing for the fact that this is going to be a long war, you know, just--are we making progress fast enough and ought to be working a little harder, or to use Andy's terminology, sacrificing a bit more?

DR. FEAVER:  If you think that we need to do more Iraq equivalents, that is to say major combat, taking down a major state and then doing so with where the lion's share of the occupation force must be the U.S., where there won't be indigenous forces--if that--so exactly what happened in Iraq, if you say that's the model for what we're going to do multiple times, then yes, we need a larger force.

But if you say that--we're not going to do it that way.  That's not the model.  There are very few scenarios that fit that, then it's possible to imagine that what we are going through is a stressor period--and it's an acutely stressor period--but in 18 months the stress will be relaxed.

MR. DONNELLY:  Yeah, Peter I'm asking what you think the model is.  But we'll get back to that.

DR. FEAVER:  I think the later is more credible.  I don't see us --I never bought the idea that the Administration's critics have peddled that the Administration was keen to--was just looking around to invade, and while we're over there, let's take down Syria and Iran and keep going.  That didn't make sense to me.  That didn't--that wasn't logically necessary from the strategy, and, therefore, I don't think that it's--it's not the one I would endorse.

MR. DONNELLY:  Andy, I kind of want to follow on on that same subject, but ask you to protect my moral self regard in this.  If this is a Cold War that inevitably will require compromises, both strategic and political, does that invalidate our claim and our desire to regard ourselves as liberators or champions of freedom and liberty, even if we define it narrowly as political freedom for the great Middle East?  I mean, in other words, am I going to lose my virtue if I am content to wage a Cold War?

DR. BACEVICH:  Sure, because you're going to do what we did in the Cold War, which was to make common cause with all sorts of nasty people who did not represent freedom and democracy, but were convenient.  You know, whether you're talking Marcos or you're talking Somoza or you're talking whoever.

The thing about the Cold War frame that Peter has invented and attributes to the President is an interesting and imaginative way of thinking about what's going on, but we need to remind ourselves that this is Peter Feaver's frame.  It's not the Bush Administration's frame.  They never talk about a Cold War.  They talk about a global enterprise that was first described--at times has been described by the President as ending evil.  It was more generally described as eliminating terror, which is a tactic.  And of late has come to be described as ending tyranny.

So it doesn't strike me that it fits in with the long twilight patient resolve.  Rather it is an Administration that granted over a substantial period of time is committed to the proposition of using American power to transform the world to make it more accommodating to our sense of what values ought to prevail.

So it makes Peter happy to call it a Cold War.  But let's not delude ourselves that that's what the Bush Administration thinks they're engaged in.

And even if it were a Cold War, if you want to buy into Peter's frame, then it's useful to ask yourself where the Cold War was won, and I would make a strong argument.  I would want to side with President Eisenhower, who may have been our greatest Cold War President, who clearly understood that this long-term competition with an ideological adversary was going to be won right here.

And so that the priority that deserved attention is what kind of country are we; what kind of country are we becoming?  And, again, it strikes me that despite sort of occasional, you know, hand waves at issues like gay marriage or education, this Administration has little serious interest in what kind of society we are, and what kind of country we are becoming.

MR. DONNELLY:  Gentlemen, as I promised, we will return in the last few minutes for rebuttal and argumentation, but let's take a few moments to get the audience participation going.

Please wait for the microphone.  Boy, we couldn't have a wider spread out set of hands.  Lauren, let's just begin with easy one.  Right here.

MR. FAIRFAX:  Thank you.  Both speakers have mentioned--Ben Fairfax, State Department.

Both speakers have mentioned the costs and the benefits of the current policy.  I wonder if the would be a little bit more specific in the costs in terms of dollars and manpower, over how many years they would consider that we would be successful in this policy.  What are the eventual benefits that they would foresee, and how long will it take to get those?  And what are the risks if the policy is not successful in terms of United States interests?  Thank you.

MR. DONNELLY:  That sounds like four questions embedded in one.  Peter, why don't you go first, and--

DR. FEAVER:  Well, I'm not an expert on dollars and cents, so I won't even speculate there.  I--to show you how little an expert I am, I rely on stuff that Tom and Vance have written on this subject.

But it strikes me that the benefits are pretty obvious.  We have a determined foe that would like to do us harm, and would like to increase their capacity to do us harm; and viewed 9/11 as a modest step that they would like to improve upon.  And so one of the benefits would be eliminating their capacity to do that so that we can live in a country where people spend most of their time haggling over March Madness brackets.  I think that's a real benefit, and so it strikes me that the vision of success here is one where increasingly the people in the world view that--the form of attack that was made and supporting people who would make those kind of attacks as beyond the pale.  And so that that's what my vision would look like, and it strikes me that we've made significant progress.  I think Operation Enduring Freedom has been a stunning success, and I remind you to read more closely what Andy has written about that.  He views that as a disaster waiting to happen.

My complaint about Andy is that he's always willing to punt on first and ten.  He's declared defeat many, many times, and, at some point, he may be right.  But I would point out--I would suggest that Operation Enduring Freedom is a little more of the kind of success that I'm talking about.

DR. BACEVICH:  Yeah, but the problem with the charge is that it' false.  I mean, the problem with the argument made against the--what you call it the frame of police action--is that advocates--I'm an advocate of that--advocates of that frame have maybe Michael Howard is an exception have almost never suggested that Operation Enduring Freedom was beyond the pale.  I have always said that Operation Enduring Freedom was essential.

I certainly have not said that Operation Enduring Freedom should lead to a long-term presence, but once we said to the Taliban you guys got to cough up Osama bin-Laden, and they said no, then there was no alternative but to go in and take down the Taliban as a demonstration that support for terror of that type is unacceptable.

MR. DONNELLY:  Andy, if I could follow up on that?  So what is your assessment of the strategic wisdom of what--just in regard to Afghanistan of what has happened since?  Were we then obligated after going into try to get Osama justified either morally or as a question of good strategy in replacing the Taliban or booting out the Taliban and then trying essentially, you know, what is an analogous project to what we're doing in Iraq.  I mean, the curious thing to me is, just having returned from Afghanistan, we seemed to have had a huge amount more success in this promulgation of freedom and nation building or whatever you want to call it in a place that looked like a much bigger prospect than Iraq, which was supposed to be full of, you know, westernized, well educated, great infrastructure, you know, again the place where we thought we were going to have the greatest success has been the far harder of the two and, you know, Afghanistan now looks like, you know, the model for success rather than Iraq.

DR. BACEVICH:  Isn't Afghanistan once again the largest producer of heroin in the world?

MR. DONNELLY:  It is, but--

DR. BACEVICH:  It's a limited definition of success?

MR. DONNELLY:  Yeah.  But it was a big producer of heroin before.  But it's no longer a producer of, you know, terrorists who attack the United States.

DR. BACEVICH:  Well, to answer the question, yeah.  Once you intervene, you have--there's a political imperative as well as a moral obligation to create some sort of an order before you leave.

My own sense is that it's suffices to satisfy our interests if that order sort of meets the standard--a minimum standard of decency, along with stability, rather than a more ideological proposition that says that only when democracy has taken root and women's rights are respected, can we begin the process of disengaging.

That sets a very high standard and tends to, therefore, lead to a very long and indeed perhaps quasi permanent presence.  You know much more than I do about why Afghanistan has gone relatively better than Iraq has.

MR. DONNELLY:  Well, Lauren, where are you?  Okay.  Well, let's work this side of the room a couple times.  And I think actually the gentleman closer to the back was the first in the air.  Keep going.  Keep going.  Keep going.  Yeah.  You, sir.  Correct.

MR. ALYAMI:  Ali Alyami from the Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia.  Mr. Bacevich, is it--you pronounce your name.  My kid is one of those kids who are in Iraq so I kind of feel your feelings about the [inaudible] at that level.

To leave the Middle East to the device of the dictators, including especially the Saudis, at this time would be moral, strategic, and political blunder.  We just can't I think afford to do that.

MR. DONNELLY:  Sir, we really do need questions rather than statements.

MR. ALYAMI:  For Mr. Feaver, my question for Mr. Feaver is this:  we send double talk to the people of the Middle East.  Saudi Arabia is one of the biggest human rights violators, the government of Saudi Arabia.  Yet, the Saudi reformers are languishing in Saudi prisons.  The United States and the President of the United States and Condoleezza Rice have never said anything, have never mentioned their names.  Yet, the Saudi policies are probably the most dangerous policies to the stability and democracy of this country.  And I would like you to tell me why double standards and why double talks?

DR. FEAVER:  Well, it seems to me that it's a bit unfair to accuse this President of not talking about democracy in the Middle East enough because it strikes me that he has said more on this and broken more taboos than all previous presidents combined.  He has gone a lot further to critiquing some of those double standards that you've described than any other president certainly in my life, maybe in Andy's life.  He's lived longer.  He can remember someone who was bolder.

But it strikes me that he's gone a long way, and precisely because he doesn't fit the caricature that Andy and other critics would have him of a hot head who will--a hot head idealist who can't live in the real world.  He has some measure of pragmatism, so he sets a bold ideal.  He has I'd say advanced the ball further than any of the others, but he's not going to try to rush and get everything there immediately, because that's beyond American power.

So I would say he is on precisely the issue you're describing, he is a remarkable or the Administration has had a remarkable blend of idealism and pragmatism.  And it's been a welcomed change from what we've had for the previous 50 years, which was all pragmatism.

MR. DONNELLY:  I would just like to say before we go to the next question that the previous question got perilously close to the line between statement and question.  And so I promise to be less generous next time around.  Lauren, let's try the gentleman who is I think right in front of the previous gentleman.

MR.          :  In the Cold War conflicts, there was an ideological aspect, and we got involved in terms of values.  In the War on Terror, Global War on Terror, there is also ideological aspect we are fighting and we are standing against, because the militant Islam stands for a specific ideology.  What is the role, what is the strategy in our War on Terror to counter that ideology?  What is the new ideology for better life for the people who are suffering as victims of militant Islam in the Muslim world itself?

MR. DONNELLY:  Andy, do you want to?

DR. BACEVICH:  That's got to be Pete's question.

MR. DONNELLY:  Well, I'd just--I would like you to elaborate on your expanded definition of freedom when you get--if you have feel so inclined.  But, Peter, if you want to go first.

DR. FEAVER:  Well, let's be clear.  The ideology that is the problem is not Islam.  But it's rather a narrow perversion of Islam.  That's the problem.  And that point needs to be stated over and over again, lest someone miss it.

That being said, what is the long-term strategy for dealing with that perverted form that seeks to impose its will through sort of an apocalyptic violence is to provide political development opportunities for the states in the region.  I mean, it strikes--what this Administration got right in the War on Terror was recognizing that you couldn't just have a military strategy; that you had to have a political strategy.  And the larger political strategy was recognizing that the causes of terrorism are not American misbehavior but rather stunted political development, stunted opportunities in key societies around the world.

And so they have put in place a complicated strategy that's heavily economic, heavily diplomatic to create more opportunities.  And that's the strategy.  That's the ideological component of the strategy.  Promoting political pluralism in key parts of the world that is the ideological struggle.

MR. DONNELLY:  Andy, do you want to--

DR. BACEVICH:  Well, I mean, if you believe that's true, if you believe that there is this sophisticated strategy to promote pluralism, then I think we come back to the issue of the gap between means and ends, because the means, the effort, the energy, the imagination, the bucks being invested in that piece of this sophisticated strategy would strike me to be miniscule compared to the bucks being invested in the military piece of the strategy.

I myself think that actually most of that is smoke and mirrors; that this is an Administration that is infatuated with military power and believes that through the use of military power and the threatened use of military power that it can drive a wedge into the region and put the United States in a position where it can bring about change.  I think that effort is doomed to fail.

That's why the alternative that I would support is the notion that--really the same notion from the Cold War that the best way to bring about the ultimate demise of this threat is through containment.  Islamic radicalism in my judgment cannot satisfy the desires of the people in that part o the world.  It is doomed to fail.  And all we need to do is to contain it until that day comes about, which is what we did in bringing about the demise of the Soviet Union and the failure of communism.

DR. FEAVER:  Andy, I want to pursue that idea of containment a little bit, and ask whether, you know, the object of containment in this case is as appropriate for the strategy as the Soviet Union was during the Cold War.  The Soviet Union couldn't really produce anything of value except armaments.

The Middle East, like it or lump it, and even if we--which I will quite probably support, you know, developed an energy policy that reduced our dependency and the industrialized world's dependency, not just the United States, dependency on fossil fuels produced in the Middle East and other unstable places.  Applying containment under these circumstances would seem to have some problems.

These guys are going to have--they've already gotten a lot of money, and they've done pretty bad stuff with it.  And they're going to continue to get a lot of money, if not from us then from somebody.  So, in some cases, you know, Felix is already out of the bag and putting him back in might be the first step even if we wanted to contain it afterwards.  What would you say on that?

DR. BACEVICH:  Well, I mean, again, you put your finger on it.  Were it not for energy, for fossil fuels, this region of the world would be of less significance to us than sub Saharan Africa, and I don't mean to minimize the challenge of trying to wean ourselves from our dependence on oil, our dependence, the developed world's dependence on oil and specifically on that part of the world.

But I'm not as quick as you are to sort of assume that there really is no way to do that.  Again, I mean in an audience of presumably mostly conservatives and people who, therefore, are--

MR. DONNELLY:  We let all kinds of [inaudible].

DR. BACEVICH:  Well, okay.  I'll identify myself as a conservative and therefore presumably somewhat skeptical about the capacity of state power to accomplish great things.  There has come to be in this city or in this Administration at least the notion that the United States can wield state power so as to implement this sophisticated political strategy that is going to bring about the liberalization of the Islamic world, which is a stupendous project.  Well, if, indeed, our capacity to act is so great, then why can't we focus it on a serious energy policy?  And I don't mean to imply that that means day after tomorrow things are fixed, but, again, we've spent $300 billion in Iraq--I think it's what--$3 billion or $4 billion more per month.

DR. FEAVER:  I think actually the per month cost is more like--it's like five or six.

DR. BACEVICH:  Five or six a month, and it just seems to me that one could take that sum of money and probably have accomplished a lot in a far-reaching, far-sighted energy policy.  So I'm not willing to just assume that we are permanently wedded to Middle East oil.

DR. FEAVER:  The [inaudible], though, Andy, that I don't understand, and I guess we just lived through different Cold Wars, but in the first Cold War the containment strategy was not the fortress America, head in the sands kind of policy you're advocating for us to follow this time around.  It involved, as near as I can--

DR. BACEVICH:  Check my script.  [Inaudible.]

DR. FEAVER:  Ostrich I think was what you called it.  Now, as I recall the containment policy involved the global positioning of U.S. forces everywhere around the world, with-and your favorite President was involved in the alliance race.  It involved a proactive policy that is every bit as vigorous, every bit as global and deployed--forward deployed as anything this Bush Administration has proposed.

So it strikes--if that's what you mean by come home, America.  So come home America, but go abroad as much as you did in the first Cold War, then I think there's no disagreement between us.

But if you mean, in fact, what you say, then you're talking about a very different kind of containment than what was done during the first Cold War.

MR. DONNELLY:  Peter, you came very close to using risible--you now have one yellow card.

DR. FEAVER:  Okay.

MR. DONNELLY:  Let's do--actually let's do this young lady here and the gentleman in the bow tie.  We'll take two questions at once, and then I promise we'll move to the other side of the room.  Please be brief.  Please ask a question.

MS. KHALIL:  Rheem Khalil.  I have a question that's maybe due to my ignorance, to you Andy.  I am just--I do understand the Bush doctrine and why are we in war and what are we trying to achieve.  If I hear you I would have to say that we are in war only for some fuel or gas problems that we are trying to solve which I don't doubt we are trying to do that.  But at the same time, we are in war because you have a terrorist situation that occurred here.  And I don't understand how do you solve the terrorist situation by containing terror cells.  I mean, I understand how you solve Cold War by containing a state.  But terror cells seems to me uncontainable, unless you take out the reason for their existence.  So can you comment on that?

DR. BACEVICH:  Yes.  Thank you.  Oh, I'm sorry.  You wanted to do two.

MR. DONNELLY:  Well, we'll--go ahead.  Just go.

DR. BACEVICH:  Well, this gets back to another of--the--Peter's canard about the distorted description of police action in his frames.

You can't contain terror cells.  You got to go get them.  They weren't in Iraq.  They are in other places around the world.  The nations of the world, democratic or not, have a common interest in eliminating that sort of activity.  So the opportunity was there on September 12th, 2001, and I believe is there today to mount a massive international effort, chiefly a police effort, but also incorporating Peter so that you will not distort this, okay--also incorporating intelligence activities and on occasion military activities to go root them out and kill them.  That's what you got to do to terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda:  go root them out and kill them, but I don't think you do that chiefly by invading countries.

MR. DONNELLY:  I think the risible score is almost one to one, but--

DR. BACEVICH:  I'll just clarify--

MR. DONNELLY:  Good.  Good.

DR. FEAVER:  That--he used the word canard.

MR. DONNELLY:  Yeah.  You were seen hitting your brother in the backseat.  Okay.

MR. LEVENTHAL:  Paul Leventhal, Nuclear Control Institute.  The discussion today hasn't raised other than tangentially the subject of Iran in looking at Iraq and the relationship with the Global War on Nuclear Terror.  And I'd like to raise this issue, particularly in the context of the nuclear threat.  Just as a quick aside to Peter Feaver, while WMD have not been found in the Iraq, there's no question that the nuclear knowledge and even according to the IAEA and the Doffer [ph] Report, some of the components and designs and such of the nuclear weapons program are still unaccounted for, and that 200 nuclear Ph.D.s are still there.

So from Iran's perspective, they see a potential nuclear threat from Iraq.  And there is surely a potential nuclear threat from Iran, not only on a state basis, but potentially on a terrorism basis.

So my question is how does Iran factor into the frame, Peter that you raise, and does the Cold War analogy still fit?  What type of military response do you foresee as being appropriate, if one is needed, if the diplomatic route does not actually work?  How does Iran and the potential nuclear threat from both countries figure into this?

DR. FEAVER:  Well, apropos the stockpiles, one of my closest friends says that on my gravestone is going to be read the--is going to be the epitaph, "they haven't been found yet," because I was saying that long after it was politically astute of me to say that.  I don't think we know we know the whole truth yet about all of those things, and Tom and I were just speculating earlier about what the New York Times story was--was it yesterday or two days ago--about the organize--that just strikes me as curious and raises questions, and gives me the yet sign again.

On Iran, it strikes me that Iran is a classic example of why the axis of evil speech was misleading if it implied that you use the exact same tools to deal with each one; that we link--by calling them an axis of evil that means we're going to follow the exact same protocol for each one.  I don't think that's what the speech logically implied.  I don't think that's what the Administration meant, and it's certainly not what they've done.  They have followed a very different protocol, depending on the political realities and the technological and, in some cases, the military feasible realities.

I think that the jury is still out as to whether--in D.C. that's the biggest cop out phrase--the jury is still out--but I'm here, and so I'll use it.  The jury is still out as to whether the diplomatic effort will succeed or not, but I think we--the Administration appears to now be completely behind attempting the diplomatic route with Iran.  And I, for one, would like to see it tried, and I hope it succeeds.  But I would say the jury is still out as to whether it will.

If it doesn't succeed, I guess you can invite us back for another panel to speculate on what to do then.

MR. DONNELLY:  The thought had occurred.  Andy, how would the Bacevich Doctrine deal with the case of Iran?

DR. BACEVICH:  It's the same with Peter.  We have to support our European friends.

DR. FEAVER:  See.  Can I just--I think this is the real issue with Andy.  Andy and I have been arguing over this for years and years.  This is the problem with you walking in on a longstanding argument with lots of cheap shots and kicking under the table.

But I think Andy's--when he's in a happy mood, his description of what we should do applies perfectly to what the Administration has done in the War on Terror, except for Iraq.  The real--your real critique is Iraq, and the rest of everything you're describing--law enforcement, intelligence cooperation--all of that they're doing.  It's Iraq is the issue for you.  It's not the Global War on Terror.  It's Iraq.

DR. BACEVICH:  That's probably 90 percent--I mean, I--yes.  I put myself in the camp of people who view that not simply as unnecessary and mistaken and tragic, but as profoundly, profoundly reckless and contrary to our interests.  And, yes, I have to concede the point, and, therefore, I think it colors very much my overall evaluation of the Administration.

Now--and part of the reason I think that the anger that some of us feel does not wane, and, therefore, maybe from your point of view, we remain unable to give the Administration a fair break is because from our point of view there has not been an iota of concession, recognition, rethinking that has manifested itself.  Rather it is despite the ever shifting rationale for why the war was necessary, yes, it was necessary.  Yes, it's a wonderful thing.  Yes, it's just going swimmingly well.  And all those who say nay are sort of cast beyond, you know, outside of respectable opinion.

So, yeah, the Iraq War, I'm not speaking for other people, for myself, it really sticks in my craw, big time.

MR. DONNELLY:  Well, that was good.  All risible points are eliminated.  That is not an incentive to build up more.

Lauren, there was a guy way, way in the back who had one of the first hands up, and if he's still there, and I can still see him.

DR. FEAVER:  I think he went and got another sandwich.

MR. DONNELLY:  Okay.  Well, then, let's start in the mid back, and we'll work forward.  We have about eight more minutes for questions, before final summation, so I ask people to be even briefer than the previous questioners.

MR. STEINBERG:  Jeff Steinberg with EIR.  One of the things that's not commented frequently in the debates over Iraq and the War on Terrorism is the fact that many of the most vocal critics of the whole Iraq policy have been senior military people--two former SINCCOMS among others, two former JAGS have joined the lawsuit as of counsel against Secretary Rumsfeld around the Abu Ghraib business, and I want to comment from Colonel Bacevich about an article you wrote a number of months back in the L.A. Times warning about the erosion of our military capability through exposure to a dirty war kind of situation.  You drew the analogy to Algeria.

DR. BACEVICH:  Well, I mean, that's what I think.  And I think that we're seeing some evidence of that.  Again, the Algeria comparison was done hyperbolically, but when I--this morning in the Globe, there was an article that we have 26 alleged homicides in American-controlled prisons.  And in either yesterday's paper or today's paper, the young lieutenant who was court marshaled for having three Iraqis jump off a bridge into the river and one of them drowned.  He got a grand total of 45 days in jail, and a $2000 fine.  There are these continuous new allegations about abuses.

We have I believe underreported, but certainly very real circumstance in which U.S. forces are shooting first and asking later that is unquestionably maiming and killing innocent civilians in Iraq, so one could argue that these sorts of things happen in these kinds of wars.  I think historically that would be the case.

But it's troubling and in some respects breaks one's heart to see it happening.

MR. DONNELLY:  Well, Peter, I'd like to pick up on the first part of the question.  The questioner noted that retired military leaders have spoken out increasingly, and so since I've got you both here, I'd like you both to comment briefly on whether you believe that the Iraq War and the Global War on Terrorism has posed an increasing problem for civil-military relations overall?

DR. FEAVER:  Ah, this allows me to plug my book, which sells about one for every 10 that Andy's does.  It was called Choosing Your Battles, co-written with Chris Gelpi, that looks exactly at the civil-military challenges and the use of force. And it strikes me that Iraq fits a longstanding pattern. Rather than being uniquely challenging to civil-military relations, it's just as challenging and fits the same pattern that every other military operation and every one that we contemplated, but didn't do, posed for the U.S. in the past.

The fact that active--or sorry--retired military officers have been critiquing the policy is par for the course.  Where you have a serious civil-military problem--and I worry about sometimes the timing and, particularly when it's involved in a campaign setting that makes me nervous--but retired military critiquing policy that strikes me as perfectly legitimate.

It's when you have active duty military critiquing the policy that I get--that you have a serious civil-military crisis, and I think there's been relatively little of that considering just how the force has been stressed and strained.  I agree that Iraq has been much, much harder than certainly than I thought it would be--has posed more serious strain on the U.S. military; and yet the civil-military damage of that internal is not proportional to the strain thus far.

MR. DONNELLY:  Andy, are the stresses of dirty war, as you call it, particularly dangerous in this regard and do you agree with Peter that considering the stresses that we're doing okay.

DR. BACEVICH:  Well, I actually agree with Peter, with--I mean, I think you are referring to--using civil-military in terms of the relationship between senior officers and senior civilians and I agree with that.

My dirty war argument is not the generals and the Defense Department officials.  It is that this type of conflict places great stress on the professional military ethic and invites--and again I am, you know--I do not wish to be seen as standing in judgment of people who are under tremendous stress day after day after day.  But the fact is I think historically these kinds of wars tend to erode the professional military ethic and to create conditions that breed indiscipline and misconduct.

Now I know, as Peter always tells me, that I am a pessimist and sort of tend to see the glass mostly empty, but it does seem to me that there are signs of that in Iraq today.

MR. DONNELLY:  I think we have time for one more question from the audience.  Let me get the gentleman--I'm sorry to everybody else--Lauren, right underneath the cameraman.  Okay.

MR. CORBER:  Stanley Corber [ph] with the Cato Institute for Mr. Feaver.

You mentioned the public support for the war.  Fair enough.  But isn't the real question how many people are willing to enlist and reenlist in the Army, where we're running into problems?  You know, during Vietnam people asked what if they gave a war and nobody came.  Is there a possibility we could find out?

DR. FEAVER:  Well, I think that enlistment is a challenge, but, as you know, I'm sure from the research that what drives enlistment challenges principally is economics.  And so while the war is certainly exacerbating a problem, the real problem has been the revival of the economy, and that is--the research on this is pretty longstanding and substantial.  In an all-volunteer force, you face recruitment and retention problems when the economy is strong and growing.  And you face not such problems when the economy is weak.

So I would say that a significant portion of our problem, not all of it, but a significant portion of our recruiting problem is due to our economic success.

That being said, it strikes me that there are--they're going to have to make innovations in the way they do recruiting and think more creatively about the way they staff the force.  I've long advocated a more flexible in and out, an in and out kind of arrangement, for people to come in and then leave and then go back into the military; that it strikes me that we have an old industrial-aged mobilization personnel system which is just not flexible enough for it.

I suspect if you make those reforms, you'll actually be able to satisfy the personnel requirements for the war.

MR. DONNELLY:  Peter, you may present your summary statement, so we'll reverse the order, and just continue.

DR. FEAVER:  Well, some of the things I want to say will sound [inaudible] 'cause we were able to achieve two areas where Andy and I agreed.  And I--that is a signal achievement.  I hope it's not lost.  I'm glad it's recorded for posterity.

That being said, I encourage you all to read Andy's corpus, because he's a very important essayist in this area.  He's a very important critic of the Administration.  I always benefit from reading them.  And when I reviewed them, that being said, when I reviewed his oeuvre, I--am I allowed to use that word?

MR. DONNELLY:  Simply because it's your summary statement.

DR. FEAVER:  There are three repeating or recurring fallacies that I would guide the reader to look at.

The first one is the damned if you do, damned if you don't' fallacy.  Some day I would like to ask Andy Bacevich, who fumes bombastically about our miserliness abroad, to debate the Andy Bacevich who argues that we should stop spending money abroad and start spending it at home.

There's a sort of an all purposes critique--the common ideology that links those two is that whatever we're doing is wrong.  But otherwise, it's hard for me to see the logical consistency.

The second is what I would call the omission versus commission fallacy.  This is the mistaken believe that moral analysis only consists of analyzing acts of commission.  So if we want to evaluate American military action, we look at all of the times when we did do military action, then we must conclude some subset of that was doubtless wrong, and then that ends our moral judgment.  Of course, more robust, sophisticated moral analysis would consider acts of omission.  There's possibly many times that military action was not considered.

So Andy's conclusion that we're militaristic in the post Cold War, sort of that last decade or so--and I've run the statistics by him before.  He's not persuaded by it.  But you all haven't heard it.

Roughly 76,000 enemy combatants at the hand of the U.S. military, not counting OIF.  But a million people died in those conflicts before the U.S. did anything about it.  And roughly--somewhere between seven and 12 million people died in the conflicts that we did literally nothing about.

And it strikes me that if you're evaluating American militarism and happy-go-lucky overeagerness to use military force, you should at least weight the moral consequences of our reluctance to use our coercive military power, a reluctance that translated into some 12 million people dead in the last decade.

And the third fallacy is the unpredictable consequences fallacy.  This is the idea that military action involves negative, unpredictable consequences always, and that's true; but that failure to use military action does not.  And that's the fallacy.

So if you--by this reasoning allows you to conclude that using the military is always dangerous, but not using the military is always safe.  In fact, history is replete with examples where delay in using decisive force made the problem worse; made the problem harder.  I would say that we essentially used Andy's preferred strategy on the Global War on Terror in the 90s.  That was--describes how we approached, and that was not sufficient to stop 9/11.

MR. DONNELLY:  Andy, before you begin, although Peter tried to use a misdirection play by using the French word "oeuvre," he did come close to the risible standard on three occasions, and I want you to know that if you can avoid or use only two such violations, you'll be declared the winner on a technicality.  So your fate is your hands.

DR. BACEVICH:  Well, I'll try to--I want to try to clarify what I--where I've sown confusion.  The damned if you do, damned if you don't fallacy is, to my mind, more a query, a question.  What are about?  What is our responsibility?  What is our constitution call upon us to be as a body politic.  And if it is to, you know, transform the world, then it seems to me that--if indeed that is our purpose as a people, then we really are very niggardly [sic] in our approach to doing that.  And we really are very sort of selfish and live a style of life which is an insult to those people around the world, who, from that point of view, we're responsible for.

But it seems to me that there is another alternative and that one says that the constitution calls upon us to be the

[TAPE FLIP.]

DR. BACEVICH:  --for the rest of the world is limited.  And so it's not damned if you do, damned if you don't.  Rather it is, I think we ought to pay a lot more attention to what goes on here at home, and I wouldn't damn anybody if that was their priority.

You've explained this we need to intervene more frequently thing to me 10 times now, and I still don't grasp the concept, all right, that somehow we are responsible for the--if we had simply gone to more war more frequently, these 12 million people would not have died, and somehow their deaths are our responsibility.

But it does seem to me again to be the question of whose work is this?  I mean to some degree, we are not responsible for bad things that happen.  And indeed, if we make ourselves responsible, if we say that the appropriate response--early response, preemptive response is to use force around the world, then it seems to me at least plausible to argue that we will end up being something quite contrary to what we have defined the nature and purpose and values of our country.  We really will end up being the bully of the globe.  We really will end up being overstretched.  We really will end up being irretrievably militarized and I'd like to avoid that.

MR. DONNELLY:  Thank you, Andy.  Thank you, Peter.  I confess that this discussion is intellectual catnip to me so I could add and, in fact, we do, as was alluded to earlier, essentially have this argument on a pretty regular basis.

But I do find it incredibly illuminating, and it is actually quite remarkable to me that two years, four years, however many years after we've embarked upon whatever it is we've embarked upon, there's still such a debate and a dialogue about what we're doing and what the purpose is.

I want you to thank me--

DR. FEAVER:  Thank you, Dan.

[Applause.]

DR. FEAVER:  You did wonderfully.

MR. DONNELLY:  I thought I could make it through the end without making a mistake like that.  But I want you to join me in thanking Andy and Peter, not simply for being remarkably well behaved, but for sharing the benefits of their wisdom and insight with us.  So thanks, both.

[Applause.]

MR. DONNELLY:  Meeting adjourned.