Conversations with History Blog

Ambassador Joseph Wilson and the Clash of World Views

The Bush Administration's foreign policy is unraveling, and its primary architect, Vice President Cheney may soon be a defendant in a civil suit brought by former CIA operative Valerie Plame and her husband Ambassador Joseph Wilson, IV.  In the conflict between two former public servants--Plame and Wilson--and officials of the Bush administration--Cheney, Rove, and Libby-- it is worth recalling that Ambassador Joseph Wilson, in going public on the abuse of intelligence by the Bush administration, represented a different world view of how U.S. foreign policy should be conducted.  The Conversations with History interview with Ambassador Wilson, taped May 27, 2005, explores his career in the foreign service and how that career shaped his perspective on the use of intelligence, multilateral versus unilateral responses to global probems, and the role of secrecy in subverting policy debates.  http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people4/Wilson/wilson-con0.html

Debating the influence of the Israeli Lobby

Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Professor Stephen Walt of Harvard University have launched a national debate on the impact of Israel and its supporters on United States foreign policy.  In the community of international relations theorists, both are realists with distinguished publishing records.  Before the start of the Iraq War, they  opposed the Bush administration's plan to depose the Iraqi dictator arguing that the containment strategy of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton had kept Saddam Hussein in a box where he was not an imminent threat to U.S. national security.  They took their case to the Council on Foreign Relations where they debated leading neocons Max Boot and William Kristol. Both scholars have been guests on Conversations with History.  Their interviews provide background to an understanding of their scholarship on international politics. Mearsheimer's interview is here http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people2/Mearsheimer/mearsheimer-con0.html and Walt's interview is here http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people5/Walt/walt-con0.html

Understanding Terrorism

A transcript of  a recent interview with Berkeley Professor Neil Smelser has been posted to the Conversations with History Archive at  http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people5/Smelser/smelser-con0.html   A sociologist and psychoanalyst, Smelser, under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences, has been focusing how the social sciences can contribute to our understanding of terrorism. His book will be published this spring.  In the interview, Smelser talks about his intellectual odyssey and how his interest in cultural trauma and social movements facilitated this new focus on issues raised by the 911 attack.

Words Matter

The recent debate within the Bush administration about whether we are in a war on terrorism or a global struggle against violent extremism is important for understanding the struggle over means and ends in foreign policy in the aftermath of the 911. How much military capability do you need? With military capability at hand, what strategic goal does the military serve?  Is military power the solution to every problem? The consensus in the foreign policy establishment is that the United States has a special role to play in the world.  Democratization is one important goal, and in the 1990’s we learned that goal depends on our military.  In the decade after the end of the Cold War, Presidents G.W. Bush and Clinton did not significantly cut back our military forces as was the American tradition when victory was achieved. Consequently, the United States in the post Cold War world was not only the sole superpower but militarily positioned to act depending on the dominant forces within the administration. But the military, as a consequence of its experience in the Vietnam War, was not always ready to play their part without guarantees of political support and an exit strategy.  During the Balkan crisis, for example, Secretary of State Madeline Albright confronted a reluctant General Colin Powell with this question: why do we maintain the splendid military force if it couldn’t be used for humanitarian goals. Chalmers Johnson argues that by not reorganizing the military and cutting back on its costs what remained and continued to grow was an “Empire of Bases” which poses a long term threat to democracy and to the long term interests of the country; see the Conversations with History interview with Chalmers Johnson at http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people4/CJohnson/cjohnson-con0.html .  Andrew Bacevich sees a militarization of American society and culture; See the Conversations with History interview with Andrew Bacevich http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people5/Bacevich/bacevich-con0.html. During the Clinton administration, in the struggle over goals and capability, the dominant force in foreign policy became those groups advocating humanitarian intervention. See the Conversations with History interview with David Rief http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people3/Rieff/rieff-con0.html. In my Conversations with History interview with former Bush speech writer David Frum, he emphasized the importance of Bush’s definition of the post 911 challenge as requiring a war on terrorism.  http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people4/Frum/frum-con0.html The problem of terrorism would require a military solution, and using the military would allow the President at his discretion to transcend the barriers that prevented decisive action at home and abroad. This was the Bush answer to the means and ends question in foreign policy. The answer was decisively influenced by the alliance of administration nationalists and neoconservatives. This rationale provided a statement of mission under which the President could rally the people and the military according to his choosing. On the ascendancy of the neoconservatives, see the Conversations with History interview with Jonathan Clarke http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people5/Clarke/clarke-con0.html.  On the views of the nationalists, see the Conversations with History interview with James Mann. http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people5/JMann/jmann-con0.html The problem of means and ends in foreign policy was not solved, and history tells us why.   In a Conversations with History interview, UCLA historian/sociologist Michael Mann described how such terminology, which may in the short term resolve the domestic debate, goes against the lessons of history because it confuses terrorism as a global, transnational force with national liberation movements that use terrorism as a tactic to succeed at the national level. http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people4/Mann/mann-con0.html  So the language “War on Terrorism” does not help policymakers decide when and where to intervene.  A broad goal such as “War on Terrorism” by ignoring the local reality has the potential to confuse important strategic questions about where and when to intervene.  What is perceived as a battle in the fight against global transnational terrorism may only be a about nationalism and national liberation.  To confuse the two is an invitation to enter a quagmire which will only undermine the military capability of the global superpower. Thus, the “War on Terrorism” when applied to Iraq confronts nationalism, tribalism, and the traditional nature of Iraqi society.  What is efficient for United States domestic policy decisively settling for the short term the debate about ends and means becomes bad foreign policy, and a botched intervention is the likely outcome. 

What did they know and when did they know it?

In a previous post http://conversationswithhistory.typepad.com/conversations_with_histor/2005/07/ambassador_jose.html I discussed the CIA choice of Ambassador Joseph Wilson to check out the "yellowcake" story. The ensuing clash between Wilson and the administration's leading lights was grounded in two very different perspectives on the conduct of U.S. Foreign Policy.  Previously, in its diplomacy,  the U.S., while mixing ideology and national interest,  was, not immune to looking at the evidence that American ambassadors gathered through  contacts  they created while posted abroad.  As a former Ambassador to Niger, Wilson was a logical candidate for determining whether Saddam Hussein was in the market for African uranium. After all, since Renaissance times, this is how ambassadors  facilitate relations between states.  The Bush administration, on the other hand, represents a different tradition.  Define national interest through the lens of ideology and ignore the evidence if it contradicts what that ideology defines as the national interest.

Last week, new details of the controversy emerged in the Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/20/AR2005072002517.html

When news of Wilson's trip became public through his New York Times op ed piece,  Karl Rove and Scooter Libby became interested  in information about Wilson, Mrs. Wilson and the Niger trip.  The work of the special prosecutor seems  to point to special interest in a State Department memo chronicling the Wilson mission and containing a footnote describing Mrs. Wilson's job  at the CIA.  The memo took center stage  not as information useful for making foreign policy but rather useful for destroying the legitimacy of contradictory evidence and the messenger who brought it to the public's attention.

This story calls to mind James Fallows's article, "Blind into Baghdad," (Atlantic Monthly,January/ February, 2004) which chronicles what we can call the Bush Administration's information strategy in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy during its first term.  Fallows demonstrates that the Bush team, prior to the start of the war,  ignored all government information that might inform U.S. policy toward Iraq--especially, if this information contradicted the decision to go to war and the Rumsfeld doctrine of using a limited force.  For the Fallows piece, see http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200401/fallows

With this information strategy in place,the sequence of events in the outing of Mrs. Wilson begins to make sense. Blind sighted by the Wilson op ed piece, the administration found the State Department memo very useful indeed. The prior choices-- about what to do in Iraq, about secrecy in implementing the decision for war, and about how to deal with the rest of the U.S. government--helps us understand the environment in which crimes might have been committed that required a special prosecutor.

For more on this aspect of the Bush policies see my interview with James Fallows in the Conversations with History Archive http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people5/Fallows/fallows-con0.html For parallels with the Vietnam War, see my 1988 interview with Neil Sheehan http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/conversations/Sheehan/ and my 1998 interview with Daniel Ellsberg http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Ellsberg/ellsberg98-0.html

Odyssey of a Diplomat

In May of 2004, I interviewed Ambassador Joseph Wilson on the occasion of the publication of his book, the Politics of Truth. The interview is posted at http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people4/Wilson/wilson-con0.html  You can also find the podcast at http://feeds.feedburner.com/UCBerkeley

In the bitter, acrimonous controversy surrounding the revelation of his wife's identity by high officials in the Bush administration, there is, for obvious reasons, an emphasis on "Who Done It?"  The "IT" being the felony of outing a covert CIA agent.  There is also an emphasis in the debate on the party preferences of the combatants:  Rowe (Republican brain) versus Wilson( Democratic Advisor to John Kerry).  What is not being emphasized sufficiently is that because of his lifelong career in diplomacy, Wilson embodies a tradition of diplomatic service and leadership, a tradition that has marked the foreign service, especially since the end of World War II.  That tradition  involves courage (see Wilson's discussion of his role as Deputy Ambassador to Iraq before the first Iraq War) but more importantly a commitment to multilateral negotiations that necessitate a sifting of evidence and a weighing of the interests of different states and actors within those states.  In picking Wilson to check out the Niger yellow cake story, the CIA was designating a former U.S. Ambassador to go back to a former posting and check out the facts. This hearkens back to the work of many of our post war diplomats:  men like Philip Habib, Jack Matlock, Samuel Lewis.  To get a sense of this tradition, check out the Conversations with History diplomacy archive at http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/PubEd/research/diplomacy.html