Ron Suny is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago.

David Hendrickson (discussant) is Chair and Professor of the Political Science Department at Colorado College.

“September 11 -- One Year Later: Responding to Global Challenges” took place from Thursday, September 12, to Saturday, September 14.

Professor David Hendrickson: Good afternoon. Welcome to our first panel. My name is David Hendrickson; I'm in the Political Science department here. We meet today under rather strange circumstances amid unusually bitter controversy. The conflict between Israel and Palestine, so tragic in its implications for both peoples, reaches halfway around the world and embroils this little community in its enmities and accusations. That conflict is not irrelevant to a consideration of where we stand a year after the events of September 11th; in its awful hatreds and bitter intractability it symbolizes a larger predicament, and how the United States and the American people should approach that conflict is certainly a vital question for all of us.

It is however but one piece of the larger puzzle and it is that larger puzzle that this panel hopes to tackle this afternoon.

There is an old story about a Unitarian who died and was on his way to meet his maker and as he was approaching the Pearly Gates he saw one sign that said "Heaven." And out of the corner of his eye there was another sign that said "Discussion of Heaven." And being a Unitarian of course he dipped right into that other group for the discussion. Members of this college community whose daily bread is inquiry, critical analysis, reasoned argumentation will understand that choice.

In gathering rival voices from around the country and around the world to speak to us, we assert our belief that the airing of differences will assist us in our search for the truth of things. Buffeted by the strong winds of identity politics, we affirm our own identify in holding this symposium. We stand proudly behind the proposition that argument and debate are essential to us – essential to this college, if our students and faculty are to gain in comprehension of the complex issues presented by the events of the past year; essential to our country, if we are to respond with wisdom to the great challenges facing us.

For Americans, as indeed for the rest of the world, the most immediate question before us concerns the prospect of a second war with Iraq, the subject of President Bush's address this morning to the General Assembly and now the subject of heated debate in Congress and the country. Broadening out from that are questions arising from a still unfinished task of political reconstruction in Afghanistan, from a dangerous standoff between India and Pakistan, from the tortured relationship America has with its traditional friends in the Arab world with its traditional allies in Europe. All those conflicts are part of the new international disorder, part of the fractured and often terrifying landscape revealed by September 11th and its aftermath.

More broadly, we need to raise questions about the significance of weapons of mass destruction and how we should respond to the threat they pose. We need to think about the place in American strategy of preventive war as opposed to containment and deterrence, about the utility and justice of military methods as a response to conflict, about unilateral versus multilateral approaches to diplomacy and state craft, about the role that this country should play in promoting democracy and human rights in a part of the world whose peoples are estranged from us.

We are delighted to welcome two distinguished visitors, one of whom just made it, in opening the consideration of these questions. Ronald Suni is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and one of the foremost authorities in the world on the history of the Soviet Union and Imperial Russia. His intellectual interests have centered on the non-Russian nationalities within that geographic space, particularly those of the South Caucasus – Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. The national question was an area of study that was woefully neglected for many decades until the peoples of the periphery mobilized themselves in the Gorbachev years. Professor Suni's aim has been to consider the history of imperial Russia and the USSR without leaving out the non-Russian half of the population to see how multinationality, processes of imperialism and nation-making shape the state and society of that vast country. This in turn has led to work on the nature of empires and nations, studies in the historiography and methodology of studying social and cultural history, and a commitment to bridging the often unbridgeable gap between the traditional concerns of historians and the methods and models of other social scientists. He is the author of an extraordinary number of books and essays too numerous to mention here, and the father of one CC student, Sevan Suni.

Gideon Rose has been Managing Editor of Foreign Affairs since December 2000. From 1995 until 2000 he was Olin Senior Fellow and Deputy Director of National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. During that time he served as Chairman of the Council's Roundtable on Terrorism and director of numerous Council study groups. In 1994-95 Dr. Rose served as Associate Director for Near East and South Asian Affairs on the staff of the National Security Council. He has written widely for a variety of foreign policy journals on democracy promotion, conservatism and foreign policy, military strategy and terrorism. He is the co-editor of the recently published "How Did this Happen? Terrorism and the New War," and the author of an essay on foreign affairs in 1999 entitled "It Can Happen Here; Facing the New Terrorism."

I've asked our guests to speak for about 20 minutes apiece; I'll then make a few comments before throwing things open for questions and discussion.

Professor Suni.

Professor Ronald Suni: Thank you David; thank you Colorado College for this wonderful symposium and for the courage in staging it.

Well, it has been quite a ride, hasn't it, in the last twelve months? And we can say that the roller coaster has just come to the bottom of the first steep hill on its way up to the top of the second. The Bush foreign policy team is redefining much of conventional international security thinking in this year. For the first time in history the United States is openly proposing an unprovoked attack on another country, Iraq, which is declared an international menace. Washington seems at the moment prepared to obstruct diplomatic approaches to the disarming of Iraq, to dismiss the objections of its allies and friends, and to go it alone if necessary and to do all this with the absolute minimally necessary consultation with Congress.

Even as they announce that they want multilateral efforts against terrorism, the Bush Administration acts unilaterally in important areas like environmental policy, missile defense and international criminal justice. It wants a situation where every country would be under international law, except one. They've defined a war on terrorism even more broadly than the Cold War on Communism. This is not only a matter of containment with a defined goal in mind, but an unlimited, unending struggle that seems to stretch into an unknown future.

Now, it will be historians of the future that will have to decide the big question, What changed and how significantly did the world change after and because of September 11th? For most of us in this room in the present, I think we can say that in broad general terms, on the level of ideology or foreign policy, little has changed, at least for the United States. We're still the only superpower, the chief defender of global capitalism, the occasional backer of democracy in other countries. We still have the highest standard of living in the world, we're a wealthy flourishing democracy. We consume far more of the world's resources per capita than any other nation and we remain the number one polluter on the globe.

But for those of us who have lived through this year, this last year, and are still seared by the tragic events of September 11th, it certainly feels like things have changed. In conversations all over the country and reading what other people have written about their feelings, I sense a far greater anxiety and insecurity than before the attacks on New York and Washington. As many have put it – not least, by the way, my own barber – there's a loss of innocence, a realization that the rest of the world is not as far away as we used to think, a greater appreciation of the danger and threat from forces that we used to think were too far away to hurt us. We have now an alarm and a degree of hostility that we feel that others have towards us, and even hatred from other parts of the globe toward Americans. The conservative commentator George Will has called this the end of America's holiday from history.

This has led, this emotional shift, to greater public willingness to allow the expansion of the powers of the American state, and ironically by a conservative Republican administration, as well as the curbing of civil liberties, especially for foreigners and immigrants, and to an overwhelming support for an aggressive campaign against those labeled "terrorists." Goals and long-term policies have not changed maybe, but the range of opportunities for the US government has certainly expanded.

The first then and most palpable effect of 9/11 is this heightened fear and insecurity. These are powerful emotions that both motivate certain kinds of actions and, it must be noted, cloud our reason. Governments of course are affected by such an emotional state and sometimes, need I say, they cynically manipulate it to further their own ambitions and interests. The very language and meanings that are given to the event of September 11th have determined our responses, so I want to pay attention to the words we use. These words have made certain policies possible and in other ways limited our options.

We now say, for instance, that we feel that we are at war. We use words like "vigilance" – this has been employed all over in this undeclared war – it's a particular favorite of mine, vigilance, because in Russian the word vitelnost, vigilance, was used by Stalin in the 1930s to warn his citizens against those he labeled "terrorists." I wonder what vigilance actually means. Is it like its linguistic cousin, vigilante? Does it mean in practice, snooping on others, giving into suspicions of those who are different from us?

Domestically, the need to feel secure has diminished our democracy in some ways and given opportunities for the more authoritarian impulses of some officials. This is frequently associated with Attorney General John Ashcroft and the institution of military tribunals. For me, the most frightening sign of the hysteria that was produced by fear last year was a widespread and serious discussion of the justified use of torture on prisoners who might have information that would prevent further terrorist attacks.

As I mentioned at the beginning, in foreign policy the changes have even been more profound. A year ago – remember this – the idea of invading Iraq was considered by most politicians and the media to be the crackpot notion of Defense Department extremists like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Pearl, those that the columnist Maureen Dowd called "whack Iraqers." Today, an invasion of Iraq is being debated as an almost inevitable outcome of the war on global terrorism. Who'd have thought a year ago that George W. Bush would be nation-building in Afghanistan, or that the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, would agree to the deployment of American troops in the former states of Central Asia? Who would have imagined just a year before September 11th when Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak were negotiating with Yassir Arafat at Camp David and Taba the final agreements on the Palestinian question that the American government in 2002 would be supporting the Draconian security operations of Ariel Sharon that have destroyed the Palestinian authority and the Oslo peace process?

Now, certainly the world has changed. Most importantly, the ambitions of the United States in reordering a disorderly world have expanded. And the domestic restraints on the use of its military power, and even a discussion about them, have nearly disappeared. Now, I want to propose that much of what's happening in the world – Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel-Palestine, Chechnya, where the Russians are beating up on the Chechnyans, Central Asia – were of course trouble spots long before September 11th. Indeed, much of the danger we now face is really the residue of our actions during the years of the Cold War. 

Think of it, why Afghanistan? What happened in Afghanistan? For ten years, from 1979 to 1989, and I quote here from the New York Times, President Carter and Reagan and the first President Bush helped to "galvanize, finance and arm an Islamic war against Soviet forces, in the largest CIA operation since Vietnam." Out of our friends and allies of that time, the Mujahideen, whom we taught the tactics of guerilla warfare and supplied with stinger missiles, later came Al Qaida, Taliban and their various rivals for power in Afghanistan. And among them was an obscure Saudi millionaire, Osama Bin Laden, who it turns out not only hated godless Communism but the godless West as well.

The consequence of our covert war against the Soviets in Afghanistan was to arm and train Islamic militants, many of whom had a far more radical and threatening agenda than the aging Leonid Brezhnev. At the same time, the greatest democracy in the world backed to the tune of billions of dollars, dictatorial and monarchical regimes in the Middle East – Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey, Iraq and others – all in the name of anticommunist. This was a time, by the way, in the 1980s when we were good friends with Saddam Hussein, whose major enemy was the clerical regime in Iran. It's a time when we cautiously looked the other way when he employed poison gas against the Iranians. Today in the UN President Bush criticized Hussein's war against Iran, but we were actually on the same side. These were dirty days. When American intelligence agencies supported our own terrorists or governments that used terror of the most vicious kind against their own people in Guatemala, Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and elsewhere. And many of the architects of these policies, among them Elliott Abrams or John Negroponte have returned to the State Department in high positions.

Now, understandably, the Cold War today seems like ancient history; but history has a bad habit of blowing back at you if you don't pay attention to it. I called this somewhere "the revenge of the past." One of the greatest dangers to democracy is ignorance, avoiding unpleasant truths. Now, Americans have suffered in many ways since 9/11, and one of the ways I would say is from the failure to think through dispassionately what the causes and consequences of these events have been. If you turn back a year ago, you find that there was actually, right after 9/11, the beginnings of a discussion. There were some voices of caution about what we should do to answer the attacks, about a possible intervention in Afghanistan. The media discussed this – well, maybe not the Fox News Network – but in general, there was some discussion. The war, it was said, would be a dangerous undertaking. And people talked – do you remember about the difficulty of the terrain, the coming winter, the possibility of a long campaign, the likelihood of American casualties, the need for multilateralism, not unilateralism, don't be globally anti-Muslim, et cetera. Many others cautioned about the rhetoric about a clash of civilizations or crusades against Islam, which might be provocative. And many said that in order to deal with this problem, maybe what you first should do – among these people was in fact the Secretary of State – first you should deal with something that we can do something about, Palestine and Israel. Anitol Lieven, who earlier was scheduled to appear on this panel, concluded a week after September 11th that military action against Afghanistan will likely only increase the number of terrorist supporters. Therefore, any military action against Afghanistan, I quote, "however satisfying it might seem in the short run, will actually be a very serious defeat."

Now, with Democrats at times, more bellicose than the White House, the public discussion was shrill and thin. Now, there were some dissenting voices, even slightly critical ones, but they were almost immediately silenced or they unleashed a storm of protests. Maybe you remember the comedian Bill Maher's program, Politically Incorrect. Well, it was found to be politically incorrect. And in the commercial media he lost his sponsorship and it was taken off the air. Susan Sontag the critic was repeatedly reprimanded for questioning the courage of American pilots and the cowardice of the September 11th perpetrators. In a very interesting brief piece in the New Yorker, she warned about the growing one-dimensionality of the American debate. And here's what she said, and I remind you – "those in public office have let us know that they consider their task to be a manipulative one. Confidence building and grief management, politics, the politics of a democracy which entails disagreement, which promotes candor, has been replaced by psychotherapy. Let's by all means grieve together but let's not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened and what may continue to happen. Our country is strong, we're told over and over again. I for one don't find this entirely consoling; who doubts that America is strong? But that's not all that America has to be."

Now, there were some critics, maybe they were heard – I didn't hear Noam Chomsky on American TV, or Edward Said – they might have appeared. While I was trying desperately searching the channels to figure out what was going on, what I heard was a steady diet of Bill O'Reilly, Chris Matthews, Oliver North, Alan Keyes and other professional loudmouths who shouted and interrupted one another rather than carry on informative debate.

The question was asked early on, why do they hate us? And the Wall Street Journal actually tried an answer; they interviewed wealthy and privileged Muslims and they found out there was a long list of grievances against the United States – supporting Israel; thwarting the international consensus on a diplomatic settlement; the blockade and repeated bombing of Iraq, which we've continued; the support of repressive anti-democratic regimes throughout the Middle East, a leftover of the Cold War.

But you must remember that in the early days after September 11th it was very hard to raise your voice because questioning why the terrorists did these things, to understand their motives seemed – and not unreasonably – to justify or rationalize their actions and to blame the victims. So, rather than look for real grievances, those that Bin Laden and Al Qaida exploited to recruit people to their own causes, for their own purposes, the media often interpreted the hostility of Muslims as hatred of everything we stand for – democracy, tolerance, capitalism, pluralism, pleasure, Disneyland.

Now, there certainly are fundamentalists and militant Islamists, as Daniel Pipes was mentioning, who hate the West and the West's ideas of progress and prosperity, just as there are, by the way, fundamentalist Christians and Jews, as Hannan Ashrawi mentioned. The United States is hated – and, by the way, loved and respected at the same time, and often by the same people. It's loved and hated for its enormous power, its primacy among nations, and its prosperity. But at the same time, our culture and values are a threat to many. And some things we can't do anything about. Pluralism, for instance, is a threat to fundamentalism, fun is a threat to those who preach asceticism. Women in pants or miniskirts are an obscenity to those who want to keep them in burkas. There are probably people with views that in no way would be appeased or change their minds or their behavior, no matter what the United States and its allies do.

But on the other hand, that doesn't change the fact that much of the grievances and hostility in the Middle East and Muslim world, as well as in Africa, Asia and Latin America, are generated by specific policies of specific governments and they are something we can do something about. We do support dictatorial corrupt and oppressive regimes in the Middle East because of our oil and security interests. We have excused Israeli occupation and settlement policies and financially kept that society afloat to the tune over the years of about 100 billion dollars. There are policies that can be changed or modified once they are recognized as contributing to the problem rather than the solution. Will they get rid of terrorism altogether? No. Will they reduce the incentives for many to turn to terror? Certainly.

Now, the few who did advocate caution and attempted to broaden the discussion in the weeks after September 11th were pretty quickly silenced; not by any censorship, but by what you might call the politics of the moment, and later by the surprising success of the American military action in Afghanistan. We won a war with almost no casualties on the US side – I think 19 combat deaths. The Americans routed the Taliban; those who had feared the consequences of a protracted war had no ground to stand on. It turned out that regime was far more unpopular and fragile than many experts thought. I don't know anybody who liked the Taliban, but then I have a small circle of friends. This was, after all, a repulsive regime; whatever its initial appeal to militant Islamic students, it had become more and more vicious over time.

Let's think about that war and about the term "terrorist" that we use to apply to our enemies. Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, and his generals joined force with the motley alliance of warlords and Muslim militants, the very people by the way who had misruled Afghanistan after the collapse of the Soviet-backed regime. These former and once-again allies of the United States were thugs; almost everybody who knew anything about them agreed, but at least they were our thugs. And with additional gentle pressure from the US, a good-looking debonair leader Hamid Karzai, with almost no support in the country, was found for a new government of Afghanistan, a puppet regime to be sure, but probably at the moment the best hope for that beleaguered country.

It should be remembered that we went to war in Afghanistan not to liberate the country, not to establish democracy – those were positive downstream effects – but to retaliate for September 11th, to fight terrorists who had attacked us, and to install a government that unlike the Taliban would eliminate the terrorists. We had learned a lesson, at least for the time being, that we could not first intervene in the civil war as we did with the Islamists against the Soviets, and then walk away when our immediate interests had been satisfied; we couldn't allow vacuum states to develop, as in Somalia or in post-Soviet Afghanistan, where the very absence or weakness of state authority became a breeding ground for terrorists.

That word "terrorist." Let's think about it. Terrorist is a very elastic and imprecise term, and it's pulled and twisted to mean many things. In its narrowest meaning, a terrorist is a non-state actor who uses illegitimate violence against civilians, noncombatants, to advance some political purpose. But today it's being used by the Russians against Chechnyan resisters to the brutal imposition of Russian rule, by the Israelis against Palestinians struggling against an intolerable occupation, as well as two bandits in the Philippines. And some terrorists aren't even discussed very much in the media, like the Tamil Tigers who by any definition would fit the term terrorist.

At the same time, the term terrorist conveniently exempts state actors who use helicopter gun ships to bomb or assassinate their opponents. On the one side, the killing of civilians by Hamas, suicide bombers, is considered criminal; rightly so. On the other, when villages are bombed from the air as in Chechnya or Afghanistan, or people crushed by bulldozers as in Palestine, it is euphemized as collateral damage. By the end of 2001, the Americans in Afghanistan had killed more civilians through collateral damage than perished in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers.

In Palestine, three times as many Palestinians have been killed as Israelis. Last month alone in August, 49 Palestinians were killed, 30 of them unarmed civilians. It's the Israelis who apparently who have a unique right to defend themselves, but not the Palestinians. It's not accidental that Putin, Sharon and Hamas use the example of the American war in Afghanistan to justify their wars against Chechnyans, Palestinians, and Israelis or that the removal of the Taliban has become the key source of legitimization for the proposed war on Iraq. Here's what a Hamas leader said about the US: "no one expected the US to refrain from violence after September 11th, so why do you expect me to react peacefully to occupation?" Here's what Sharon said, aligning himself with the Bush policy: "You in America are in war against terror; we in Israel are in a war against terror. It's the same war." And I could read statements from Putin and others.

In both terms of perception and justifications, Chechnya, Palestine, Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan have been intimately linked in a single scenario with a single global enemy – terrorism, global terrorism, an enemy worthy of a great power. It seems to me, however, that even given the global reach of Bin Laden and Al Qaida, at least before September 11th, most terrorism is actually a much more Balkanized affair with specific roots in specific societies and therefore must be dealt in a different way than a war against global terrorism. Indeed, I want to argue that war is an inappropriate, even dangerous metaphor for what we must do. As deplorable as the suicide bombers or Taliban torturers are – and they are – we must ask, does the use of massive violence by powerful militaries take us closer to a solution or does it reproduce the very forces it seeks to eradicate? Are there or were there alternatives to what now seems to have inevitably followed from September 11th? And we have to ask ourselves, has US policy since September 11th intensified the problems that contributed to the development of such terrorism or has the military response made the world safer?

And again we come back to emotions; we may feel safer because we've made such a muscular response to those who have made us feel less safe. But are we closer to a solution in Palestine than we were at Taba or Camp David? Are we going to make the Middle East more stable or less stable by invading Iraq? Is the frontier between Pakistan and India less volatile than a year ago? Now, in Afghanistan several good things have come out. We've eliminated the Taliban, Al Qaida is on the run, it's been battered, yet Afghanistan remains in a precarious state and everything, even Karzai's very life depends on the future of American resolve to look toward a long-term commitment in the area.

I'd like at the end of this talk to say something a little bit optimistic. As bleak as the future may seem in this post-September 11th world, there are actions that a powerful state like the United States can take that make sense, things that we can do to make the world and ourselves safer, and not just feel safe. And I have five points: one, first we have to remember that terrorism is about producing fear; that's what terrorists do best. They use a psychological weapon to reach their political goals. Now, if we're afraid or we react from fear, we're actually aiding the terrorists in their struggle against us. Actions taken out of fear or anger or a sense of retribution or revenge may give us temporary solace, may make us feel good about bloodying the other guy, but such heated reactions cannot be the basis of long-term policy. Certain decisions were taken a year ago when the level of excitement and anxiety in this country was very high; but a year has passed and we can now think as we contemplate a war against Iraq much more clearly about what we're doing, where we're going, then we did last September. And governments, the media, teachers at Colorado College and elsewhere should work to reduce fear, not use it as I heard on the dialog over here to promote a new feeling for revenge and warfare.

Second, we must realize that we cannot eliminate all terrorism; there will always be fanatics who cannot be appeased and with whom compromise is fruitless and, by the way, have advantages over us because they can hide and attack us at will. Terrorists have advantages that great states don't have – they act when they wish, they hit targets unpredictably and it's difficult to guard everyone, everywhere, every time against such random acts. Now where we can fight terrorism, we should fight it be carefully defining who the enemy is and choosing the appropriate weapons. For me and for many analysts, fighting terrorism is much more like police work than it is as a job for the military. It requires intelligence in both its meanings, knowledge of the enemy, the use of diplomacy and the creation of alliances and coalitions, the mobilization of the international criminal justice system.

By the way, one of the great successes we've have over this year, which had nothing to do with war on terrorism, was preventing through various laws and police work the flow of international money around the world that supplied the Tamil Tigers and Al Qaida and people in the Philippines. That's good, that has nothing to do with war, that's just good police work. War is an unpredictable event with unintended consequences. It should be undertaken only as a last resort when all diplomatic and other options have been exhausted. As political scientist Robert Jervis writes, "thinking of this as a war gets us thinking in the wrong terms."

Third, the most effective way to fight terrorists, besides arresting and killing them, is to undermine the broader support that they enjoy. Now, here's where a significant transformation in American foreign policy is required, especially a new look at our policy towards Israel and Palestine. We have to go back as soon as possible to return to the basic outlines of the Oslo accords and the Taba negotiations – a two-state solution, everyone knows that this is, they know what the agreement has to be – Israeli withdrawal to roughly the 67 borders, a shared Jerusalem, the withdrawal of settlements, some effort to deal with the right of return of displaced Palestinians, a move towards democratization of the Palestinian authority, which the Palestinians are undertaking themselves, and Palestinian responsibility for policing their own areas in order to prevent anti-Israeli terrorism.

Fourth, we have to realize that we Americans share also a degree of culpability for the way the world is. No nation is completely innocent or uniquely a victim. We have to really be truer to our own stated values, among them a sincere concern for democracy. We should be promoting democracy around the world, in the Middle East and elsewhere. We should be promoting secular education or a more tolerant religious education in Muslim countries. But we should also be humble and realize that democracy is not usually carried around the world on bayonets or nurtured by bombing from the air. Democratization takes patience and perseverance; it's a long-term commitment. We haven't been so good on some of these long-term commitments; we ran away from Somalia, we ran away from Haiti, we did a little better in Bosnia, in Kosovo. Let's hope we've learned our lesson, maybe Afghanistan is a place where we think we're saving ourselves, where we have a deep interest and will stay the course.

Finally, fifthly, we should urge the containment and disarmament of Iraq, but no war against Iraq unless and until there is an actual and imminent international danger from Iraq so understood by our allies and friends. The Bush Administration speaks of the proposed action against Iraq as a preemptive strike, but it's really something much more extreme. It's preventive war, action condemned by international law. A preventive strike, as David Hendrickson has written eloquently about, occurs when there is a clear and imminent danger of attack, while preventive war is taken to prevent another state achieving the capacity to attack. This war is being presented as if it's a preemptive attack, when in actuality it's preventive war.

Now here unfortunately I cannot be optimistic about what may happen. I fear the tanks are already rolling, that we're on the road to war, and only a massive public protest like we saw during the Vietnam years can halt this disastrous adventure. The United States is the richest and most powerful country in the world. This gives it a special role in international affairs at this time in history. And I finish by echoing the brave, wise words of Susan Sontag a year ago. Let's use our strength to promote what's best about this country. "Let's not be stupid together." Thank you.

Dr. Gideon Rose: While I agree with Professor Suni on a number of points, particularly about the need to match American power with responsibility in a sort of nobless oblige kind of way, I have a somewhat different tack. It seems to me that the events of last fall drove home three crucial points about the nature of the contemporary world. The first is that we are far more vulnerable than most of us realized to devastating unconventional attacks; the second is that there are a number of deeply committed people out there who wish us ill and who are determined to hurt us in whatever way they can; and the third is that we are paradoxically at the same time that we are vulnerable even stronger in terms of conventional power resources – military power, economic power and so forth – than most of us realized.

I think the Bush Administration got these points and, further, I think they understood, in my opinion, correctly that those points needed to be linked; that is, that the imperative of the moment was to marshal American power to reduce our vulnerabilities and defend ourselves against those who would do us harm. I don't, in other words, have a significant problem with some of the general thrust of the Bush Administration's response to September 11th and the new world that it thrusts us into.

Unfortunately, it seems to me, many of the policies that the administration crafted to implement their new vision were flawed by some problematic attitudes. The first was a tendency to bully the world rather than to lead it; the second was an unwillingness to ask important constituencies for necessary sacrifices that would further the policies they wanted to achieve; and the third was a rather idiosyncratic sense of priorities that to many people, including myself, seem somewhat out of sync with the tasks at hand. As a result of these problematic attitudes, it seems to me we've made less progress in protecting ourselves and in thwarting our enemies than we might have and we've squandered much of the global sympathy generated by the attacks and are increasingly at odds with much of the world, rather than in harmony with it.

However, unlike many of the criticisms in Professor Suni's talk, it seems to me that the answer or the solution to some of these problems lies not in a fundamental shift in course but rather in a more tactful, more sensible and more sensitive implementation of some of the special needs and policies that the administration has crafted. It seems to me that essentially, you could say, the administration understood that a bold aggressive response was necessary; something, if not exactly liberal imperialism then somewhat more akin to it than what they had wanted to do, was appropriate. And what they have failed to do is to live up to this vision and implement it as intelligently as possible.

So, let me go into these points a little bit further. About the fear that Professor Suni talked about, I disagree with him. It seems to me that as anybody who watched any of the video feeds and remembrance stuff from yesterday saw that we are vulnerable to incredible harm and anybody who could see the images of what happened on September 11th and not react, not just with shock and disbelief but with fury and with passion and with fear for what might come next, fear or fury at what happened, somehow is lacking some kind of basic internal – something is off kilter because those attacks demonstrated that whatever we might be doing, we might at the same time be vulnerable to extraordinary attack from people who have no scruples and who seem motivated by a hatred so extreme that they were prepared to kill thousands and thousands of innocent people simply to prove their point and to strike back in service of a larger and not quite "this world" agenda – partly this world, partly another world.

So, it seems to me that the vulnerabilities that were demonstrated, both by the attacks which nobody predicted and by the anthrax mailings afterwards, which many of us had worried about in terms of WMD terrorism, the vulnerabilities were real. And in many respects, those of us who lived through the Cold War in which we spent several decades living under a sort of nuclear sword of Damocles will be going forward in the 21st century with a similar kind of nagging fear at the back of our mind that something really terrible could be just around the corner. In that way, I think the 1990s will be looked on historically as an exception to the rule of post-World War II international and domestic life which is, there are very, very bad things that can happen and the world is potentially close to disaster at any moment and that vigilance does need to be achieved and maintained. Particularly biological terrorism; the more one looks at it the more one realizes, a) that it is rather easy and will be increasingly more easy over time, as various scientific techniques progress and are disseminated widely, and that it could be extraordinarily devastating.

So it seems to be that the vulnerabilities are real and that rather than forget them we need to address them. And it seems to me that while there are indeed many people who are dissatisfied with American policies and many people who would like us to behave in different ways, there is a small hard core of committed activists who are so driven by their own agendas that they are determined to strike at us in ways that simply cannot be accepted. And at that point those people need to be dealt with not necessarily through understanding and not necessarily through merely a change in policies, but rather through a concerted set of responses that range from intelligence and police work up to and including military action and perhaps even very vicious and unpleasant kinds of unconventional actions that lie in the gray area between law and force and diplomacy. Anybody who explores the world of Al Qaida – and there is a wonderful article in the current New Yorker about one of the key figures, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri – should understand that there are people that simply cannot be compromised with and who need to be taken out and that it is a matter of life or death, and that September 11th in their eyes was not the last step, but one of a number in an ongoing campaign of terrorism, and that unless something dramatic was done and is continued in the future, there could be future attacks, and even worse ones.

The final point however about American power is that what we learned in the wake of the attacks with regard to the extraordinary marshaling of defense budget and military power and projection of that power in Afghanistan and recovery afterwards economically is that the United States really no longer is one nation among others, no longer is even primus interparis, the way many people thought during the 1990s. It occupies a position in the post-Cold War world that is historically unprecedented. There has never been a state-within-a-state system that has this degree of relative power, in traditional terms – military, economic, diplomatic, and so forth. That both creates special opportunities and special responsibilities. And it seems to me that the task at the moment, given what we learned on September 11th, was, as I said, how to use that extraordinary power to protect ourselves from future attack, reduce our vulnerabilities, and essentially dismantle, among other things, the people who were trying to do this to us while making the world in general a less hospitable place for the kinds of extremism that these attacks represented.

The Bush Administration in many ways made a good initial start on this, but they faltered. And I think the reason they faltered is that these points about the post-September 11th world became subordinated to or overlaid by pre-existing attitudes among a number of administration officials about what international politics is and how it should be conducted. There was an almost visceral hostility to multilateral action, to international institutions, to cooperation with other countries that many members of the administration displayed well before September 11th and unfortunately continued to display after September 11th.

The fact that the United States is extraordinarily powerful doesn't mean that it can do everything it needs to do by itself and it certainly doesn't mean that it should do everything by itself. It is the most powerful country but it also is the most prominent country in the international system that it has largely shaped by its own previous policies and actions. The other major powers in the world by and large are advanced industrial democracies who share a broad community of interest. It is absolutely reasonable to believe that the United States can and should mobilize support for its policies on a number of issues from those other members of Western civilization, broadly defined, the advanced industrial democracies, broadly defined, and even other states that are aspiring to those qualities and positions but not yet there. And yet members of the Bush Administration essentially put a sort of prickly attitude towards American sovereignty above the important need to lead the international community against their enemies.

Richard Haass, who is now Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, articulated the notion of what America can and should be in the post-Cold War world as a sheriff who needed to raise a posse and go after specific problems. The Bush Administration unfortunately it seems only to have watched High Noon among Western movies and sort of sees that sheriff as the lonely actor who has to take on the bad guys all by himself and sees the rest of the world as a bunch of townspeople who are cowardly and craven and unwilling to help. Most other Western movies do have the sheriff actually raising a posse and leading a group in favor of law, in favor of order, against the outlaws. And that I think is the model the canon should be following.

Along with an unnecessary unwillingness to cooperate came an unwillingness to bear sacrifice or to call for sacrifice with key constituencies. There are things that we can and should do to protect ourselves. There are actions that others need to do to help us in that request, in that endeavor. But we should recognize – and I think the Bush Administration failed to do this – that other countries by and large are going to follow their interests just like we follow our interests and that the way to make them cooperate is neither to command them nor to bully them nor to assume that we are so wonderful and so sympathetic that they will naturally help us just as a matter of gratitude or goodwill. And therefore it seems to me we can and should understand that we need to purchase, as it were, the cooperation necessary through giving other countries some stake in the order that we are creating.

A perfect example of this is Pakistan. We have called upon Pakistan, a key country, to help us in the war on terrorism, and Pakistan – the Pakistani leader, General Musharraf, has to a large extent complied; not entirely, not nearly as much as we want, partly because he's facing a severe domestic Islamist problem at home and worries that cooperation with us to a great extent will undermine his own position. What we have failed to do is the rather obvious and simple – take the rather obvious and simple measures that we can to make ordinary Pakistanis feel that there is a reason they should cooperate with us. For example, one of the chief Pakistani exports is textiles and associated goods. We maintain very stiff protectionist trade barriers for textiles and we refuse to lower them, basically in deference to a few small political constituencies in the United States that wanted to protect their markets. The Bush Administration didn't want to confront these constituencies because it would have been a politically nasty fight, but as a result Pakistan didn't get very much, as it were, from the cooperation with us and we lost an opportunity to make others feel that we were willing to help them as they were helping us.

The same is true in a lot of variety of ways with Europe, in which we've asked for cooperation in some kinds of areas but have failed in any way, shape or form to take their views into account into a number of other areas. I'm not saying they're always right and I'm not saying we should change our policies necessarily because we are wrong. I'm saying that in the real world of give and take, if we want cooperation from others we need to extend some cooperation. And here is where the final point comes in, which is the Bush Administration's sense of priorities. What September 11th I think demonstrated is that certain kinds of threats which we had thought were extremely unlikely and extremely difficult to emerge were more likely than we thought – we still don't know how likely – and more possible. We need to take action against those threats because they aren't a lot of major things on the international agenda that are nearly as important as making sure that things like September 11th don't happen again.

The Bush Administration however instead of marshaling its resources diplomatically and otherwise to fulfill its promises with regard to the war on terrorism, the reconstruction of Afghanistan, the building of a coalition against Al Qaida, and so forth, continued to piss off the rest of the international community with actions on a whole variety of other fronts that were both tactless and unnecessary because they were essentially relatively unimportant compared to the fight against terrorism that was correctly engaged.

The war or potential coming war with Iraq is something that could be seen in this area. I agree with Professor Suni that it is not linked to the war on terrorism but – and here's the but – the fact is that while Iraq is not connected to September 11th, wasn't connected, and while it is not connected to terrorism, it does represent a significant and major threat. It represents a threat that is growing because the containment regime that has kept it in check for the last decade is falling apart. And increasingly there will have to be some kind of choice made as to whether to move more aggressively to take out Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and perhaps the regime itself or to live in a world in which he has terrible destructive capabilities and hope that deterrence can keep him in line as it did the Soviet Union, the Chinese, and others who we felt hostile to during the Cold War and after and who had nuclear weapons.

The Iraq problem is real, it's getting worse, and it's something in which it seems to me one could make an exception to standard international rules of order and law because of its particular characteristics. Again here the Bush Administration it seems to me has erred, not so much in its basic desire to change the regime in Iraq, but rather in the way it has presented this. The Bush Administration, as Professor Suni said, has essentially argued that this canon should be the first case in a new doctrine of preemptive war, or preventive war, as he correctly argues. In other words, that there are some dangers that are so great that we need to go after them in advance and throw out the standard playbook of waiting for threats to become clear and present dangers or even respond to them before tackling them.

This is a radical new innovation in not just American foreign policy but international law, and so forth, and others I think are rightly skeptical that if indeed this is why we're doing Iraq and this is the justification, that it will be limited to Iraq. This might be, they see it, as the first in any number of similar operations in which we basically use our unfettered extraordinary power to depose any regime we don't like. Moreover, we ourselves should be very leery of setting such a precedent because other countries could react the same way to countries that they dislike or fear and want to do something about. Generally, since we are the strongest power in the world and the dominant power in the international system, general rules of world order benefit us more than others. We have a larger stake in international order than other countries precisely because we represent a larger share of the system and we live in that system and have global interests.

Nevertheless, the problem with Iraq is real and it is growing and it will have to be faced. It seems to me therefore what the Bush Administration should have done with Iraq, as it should have done in any of a variety of other areas, from the International Criminal Court to Kyoto and so forth, is not necessarily abandon its actual policy, is not necessarily adopt the policy of those who disagree with it, but rather explain in a far more tactful, a far more sensitive and a far more intelligent and honest way precisely why it thinks that this particular situation calls for a rather different policy.

It seems to me that the Iraq question has three characteristics that distinguish it from other potential cases of preventive war and so forth, and other potential cases of disaster. the first is the extraordinary strategic importance of the Persian Gulf. Professor Suni said that many of our policies in the Middle East are driven by our interest in oil; that's correct and there's nothing to be embarrassed about that. Oil is the lifeblood of the international economy, the Persian Gulf is the mainstay of world oil reserves, and there is every reason in strategic logic and world order concerns to make sure that the Persian Gulf is not under the control of a phenomenally hostile and erratic tyrant who might use the power over the natural resources that he has to devastate the world, the region, impose costs on ourselves and our allies. The Persian Gulf is simply different from other areas and recognizing that is the first step in forming sensible policy towards it.

The second step is understanding that Saddam Hussein himself is indeed rather unique among contemporary international leaders. There are a lot of bad guys out there but there are very, very few – perhaps only right now the leader of North Korea – who are in the same category as Saddam Hussein. This is a vicious, brutal tyrant, a serial aggressor, somebody who is so risk acceptant that deterrence has not worked well with him in the past always, and therefore this particular person may not be susceptible to some of the kinds of policies we've used in the past to contain comparable threats.

And, finally, we have with regard to Iraq tried practically every policy in the book, other than an aggressive policy or some kind of regime change, and it hasn't worked or they have eroded over time. And so it seems to me that the case to be made with Iraq is this is a unique case, not the first of many wars to be had, not the demonstration of unique freedom of action for our own whims, but rather the provision of a collective good for the region and the world that only we can aspire to provide precisely because given our power we have the ability to dare things, to dream bigger dreams and to risk things that others might not be willing or able to risk.

I'm not entirely convinced that we should go to war against Iraq; I go back and forth depending on the time of day myself. But I think that it's wrong to dismiss the case the administration might make – not the case that it has made, because it's botched that – but the problem is real and the threat is real, just as the threat of Al Qaida is real. And it seems to me therefore – and we can discuss specific issues such as the Middle East and so forth in the question and answer period – but essentially the problem with the Bush Administration's policies since 9/11 in my opinion has been less – their general aggressive thrust has been less their desire to focus American power on countering the threat that was revealed that day and other threats that might come down the pike. And rather the tactlessness and hubris and lack of sensitivity with which they have pursued this agenda which could otherwise have been sold, both at home and abroad, to far greater acceptance had better policies and tact been pursued. Thank you.

Professor Hendrickson: Thank you, gents. I have one announcement to make before proceeding. Because of this great turnout, Lief informs me that we've moved the panels scheduled for I think this evening in Gates to here, so everything is going to be – oh, I'm sorry, it was in Packard, it's here now – so everything is going to be in Armstrong with the exception of the Friday 12:30 session which will be in Gates; so just come back here.

We're a little pressed for time, so I want to keep my comments relatively brief. I wanted to start out really with a philosophical point which I think goes to what both Gideon and Ron have said in their comments regarding the unprecedented character of American power today. It really is an extraordinary situation in world history in that no state, as Gideon said, has ever dominated the international system in military terms quite as the United States does. And in one sense, that could lead to the conclusion that we're really perfectly free to do what we want and in a sense that's true in immediate terms; we are. There is really very little to physically stop the Bush Administration from going to war. The United States really does have a free hand, but if one looks at this in terms of Western political tradition, a subject I teach, it really does run contrary to a basic principle of that tradition, an idea that really is at the very core of it, which is that any situation of unbounded power is a dangerous thing. We know that from many examples in history and it's no knock really against the United States, I hardly think we're uniquely bad, but we're human beings like the rest of the world and so we need to figure out ways to place that power under constraint.

Now, if one looks at the American founding, it seems to me that that idea was instantiated in the founding, it was part of it. Again, one of the central ideas that informed the political thought of our founding fathers, and I think that if one looks to the creation of the post-Second World War order, a similar idea was imbibed by those who were responsible for the creation of the vast array of international institutions that we now enjoy and the American commitment to international law. Both of those things, the substantive commitment to the norms of international law, the commitment to institutions which entailed shared collective decision-making, are from this perspective ways of restraining American power, embedding it in a system of reciprocal restraints.

And that is why I think that American power has enjoyed the kind of legitimacy that it has enjoyed in the post-war era. That's a very unusual phenomenon; the normal phenomenon in international society is that when one state overawes the remainder of the international system, a powerful coalition gathers against it. And I think we see the outlines today of that coalition – relations with our European allies I think really are in their worst state and certainly a generation – I can't really remember any time when the kind of basic calculations, how you achieve security, of what force is good for, differ as widely as they now do.

Now, all of that bears I think very much upon where we stand now, and it's one of the reasons I'm alarmed by the course of the Bush Administration, because in respect to those two things that have given the United States such legitimacy as it possesses, they've departed, as I think both of our speakers recognized. The distinction between preventive war and using force in self-defense is basic, in many ways our whole self-understanding in the 20th century, our whole commitment to internationalism is explicable in terms of the depth of that American commitment to defensive war. And I agree very much with Gideon that if there is a case for going to war with Iraq, which I very much doubt, the administration certainly ought to have put that case on a kind of one-time basis; they should have restricted it to the instant situation, appealed to the highly unusual circumstances that we face with regard to Iraq, instead of articulating a strategic doctrine that essentially puts no bounds upon the use of American military might, which could be applied elsewhere in the world in which other states facing security problems that are just as serious as our own would be tempted to see as an example for them.

In the interests of bringing this to a fairly rapid conclusion, let me make a couple of other comments that were provoked in part by Hannan Ashrawi's comments this morning and also by what Professor Suni said. No one can look at this conflict between Israel and Palestine without feeling empathy really I think for both parties. It's true that I sometimes get disgusted with both parties, as I think all of us do, but both sides really do have a case and both sides have fundamentally legitimate aspirations – in the Israeli case, the right to existence, to security; in the Palestinian case, to self-determination, to live without occupation. And we recognize and I think can empathize with the legitimacy of the aspirations on both sides. The difficulty of course is reconciling the conflicting nature of those aspirations, since they conflict on that very small patch of territory that they live on.

I think there's some kind of expectation in Professor Suni's talk and also in Hannan Ashrawi's that we can impose a settlement, and I don't think we can. And I think that's part of the horror of the current situation that we face, that American formula for achieving some kind of peace, which was the land for peace trade in which the Palestinians would gain self-determination, the Israelis would get security. That basic formula that was embodied in Oslo broke down in the 1990s, broke down partly because of actions that were taken on both sides. But it seems to me that it's a fundamental requirement of a political settlement that both sides have confidence in the other. It's not something that can be imposed from the outside. If Israel is going to make the kind of sacrifices that are necessary for peace – and they must make sacrifices, they must give up the settlements – it still has to have confidence that there is a interlocutor, that there is a partner, that there is a group on the other side that can make those agreements stick. And I think the really tragic aspect of where we stand now in regard to that conflict is that that belief has been virtually demolished in Israeli public opinion and I really don't see a way of putting it back together and I don't see the way of doing it from the outside.

One final point with regard to the International Criminal Court which Mrs. Ashrawi supported; I have really profound reservations over what the Bush Administration has done with regard to the ICC. They've adopted a kind of maniacal approach; they've sought to divide our allies from one another. They've threatened really the whole system of international cooperation over what I think is a fairly minor issue. But there's something that Mrs. Ashrawi said about our approach to conflict and the necessity of forgiving previous injuries, the necessity of not employing an eye for an eye and following the logic of conflict, acting on the last insanities of unforgiving passion; praise from the historian Herbert Butterfield.

It seems to me that the ICC is in tension with that, that the ICC represents an attempt to secure justice that's kind of disembodied from the requirements of political conflict. And I think it's a disturbing thing that that court can bring a suit, even in the aftermath of the settlement of some horrible political conflict, and charge one or the other of the parties with having violated the laws of war, with being war criminals of various kinds. To which my answer is, it's in the very nature of these conflicts that frequently horrible things do happen, that crimes are committed, and if we're to move forward to peace we need to sometimes waive those injuries, we have to provide amnesty. I think in the history of the world, most conflicts that are negotiated, where a settlement is negotiated among the parties, have that as one of their central features.

So, I think there are proper reservations about the International Criminal Court and it's something that the – that's not the ground of the American opposition to it, that's not the ground that the Bush Administration has taken; they've taken a much more partial view of the matter. But I do urge you to think about how we go about the settlement of conflict and whether we can indulge in our desire for justice, whether that at some point comes to be in tension with our desire for political settlements and security.

Well, I have a few other things to say, but I think I'll stop there and let you all say something. It seems appropriate at this time. So, let me invite you to come to the microphone and we'll proceed. Yes, sir?

Speaker: Guess I'm first here. I have a two-part question, I guess, for Dr. Rose. One, how does one get to be a believer, I guess, in what I would characterize your world view as I gathered it to be kind of real politique, no-nonsense. Even though we're only 5% of the world's population, somehow we got to be in charge and we just kind of need to fine-tune our act a little bit. And the second part is, after one gets to believe that – and I'm laying something on you, I understand – but how do you think that can work when 5% of the world's population is going to have to keep the lid on a world in which – I'm sorry, I don't agree with you that there's – you know, 20,000 children under five starve to death in this world, very horrible deaths every day. They do experience something like 9/11 every day. So my question is, how do you believe long term that – kind of a "lid-ism" or a keeping the lid on this boiling pot of problems is going to work?

Dr. Rose: Actually, rather easily – both points, because I think they're linked. And I think that American power is the best route ultimately for those children to get out of poverty and live healthy, secure, stable lives in healthy, stable polities. David said that the history of American political thought and other kinds of thought, Western thought, argues that unchecked power is bad and therefore that the United States with its extraordinary power position needs to be restrained. If the rest of the world looked like Northern Europe, I would agree with that because I think there are indeed extreme dangers from unchecked power. The Bush Administration, it seems to me, is a perfect example of the ways in which a degree of power can give you hubris that allows you to ignore and trample on others' concerns.

And yet the rest of the world, by and large, does not look like Northern Europe. There are whole swaths that are mired in poverty, that are mired in repression, and that are devoted not necessarily towards peace, security and stability but to their opposite. And I think American power, by and large, has been a force for good in the world. I think in both world wars, in the Cold War, and even in the post-Cold War world America, by maintaining a strong, open, liberal trading order generally supporting the suppression of major tyranny and suppression of major great power war has provided the conditions in which political and economic liberalization and modernization can occur and has created a world in which many regions have brought themselves out of poverty, have brought themselves out of tyranny into something better. And I think the answer is that we need to continue those kinds of policies and maintain a world order in which the answers can be found for countries to develop on their own.

What we have learned is that the best route out of poverty is economic development. And what we have learned is that the best route out of repression is some kind of political liberalization and democracy. And we've also learned that those go well together. And I think that American power creates, when used properly, a world order in which liberal capitalist democracies can flourish. And therefore I see, if marshaled well with tact and a due respect for the opinions of mankind, American power as a force for good in the world that will help those children ultimately lead the kinds of lives that we lead, which I think is a good thing, compared to what we might have led a couple of hundred years ago.

Professor Hendrickson: Ron, do you want to …?

Professor Suni: Well, my view of the world is so fundamentally different that I wouldn't know where to begin. There have been occasions, and maybe if you took a balance sheet, American power has done more good than evil in the world. I, as an American, am concerned about the evil we do, during the Cold War particularly, not so much in the 1990s. It was interesting; there was a kind of hiatus. I found for the first time in my adult life I could actually support American foreign policy in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union when we actually had – largely during the first Bush years and then the Clinton years – we actually were promoting democracy, and regimes all over the world had a sort of incentive to democratize. And we of course did that also to create market economies which we consider in our interest, and so forth. But that was a period when I felt sort of sanguine about American policy.

Now, I have not felt that way lately, certainly not in the last year since 9/11; I tried to express that in the talk. If we are supporters of democracy, why were we cheerleading when a coup was carried out against Chavez who was the democratically elected leader in Venezuela? This regime, this Bush regime, was embarrassed when the leaders of Latin America were gathered, were meeting somewhere in Central America and they protested, and eventually the people came down from the hills and they stopped it. Chavez is a disaster, by the way, it turns out. But he was democratically elected and that doesn't seem to be promoting democracy.

Our dear friend Musharraf, who sponsored and helped finance the Taliban, was forced by us to turn against the Taliban, who finances and promotes terrorists in Kashmir, who has just recently changed the constitution of Pakistan so that he can stay in power. We in our policy toward Pakistan have totally ignored the civil society in Pakistan in favor of this dictator because we've gone back to an old Cold War scenario in which stability and pro-Americanism is more important than democracy; as long as there are still capitalists, of course.

Speaker: My question is about the Iraq issue and whether or not we really have a choice in the matter anymore. Numerous sources, including the New York Times, have come into things through various leaks, but I want to focus on some things that former UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter has said during the past few months, and one of those things is that while he was there he effectively believes that they wiped out over 90%, if not 95%, if not 99% of the weapons – chemical, biological and nuclear – that were in existence then and hence the administration has no grounds to use that as a legitimizing factor. And second, that 20,000 marines have been issued orders to move into the Iraq and Gulf region by mid-October and that the Air Force is completing orders – or that Boeing is completing orders for the Air Force by the end of September, so that they can use them in mid-October. And if this action is really underway, or if you could just respond to some of that, please?

Dr. Rose: I've won a bet a couple of times this year with some people who feared imminent action. I've always felt that if there was action it would probably be early next year rather than any time this year. So I doubt the October scenario for a variety of reasons. With regard to the former, Scott Ritter is a smart guy with a great deal of knowledge and he did some heroic work inside Iraq as weapons inspector. The positions he's taking now tend to be out of sync with many of the people he worked with and while I would not dismiss his views, I would simply point out that there are a number of people equally well qualified with an equally good knowledge of the situation who strongly disagree with him.

On Iraq, what I would say very simply, because we can't get at all the issues here, there is a book coming out in one month from Random House by a younger Middle East security expert named Ken Pollack, which is far and away the best treatment of the Iraq issue that I have seen anywhere. He happens to be in favor of invasion, although in a very different way with very different style than the administration. But I would strongly urge you all to read it. It's called The Threatening Storm, the Case for Invading Iraq. It will be out next month from Random House and it really is – whatever your position on Iraq, it's the best discussion of all the issues relevant to the Iraqi case that I've seen anywhere, and so I would recommend those of you interested in Iraq to read that. And I don't think there will have been major decisions about the exact kind of war or even war itself made before it comes out. 

Professor Suni: I'm opposed to a war in Iraq for a number of reasons. Scott Ritter's a very interesting and courageous guy, a little bit of a cowboy, but he is one of the few voices that you can hear that talks somewhat authoritatively on this issue of whether the weapons are there or not. Now, the Bush Administration has retreated in the last weeks if you notice. As they're making their case, first they had the weapons, then they had capacity for weapons, now they have only intention to make the weapons. Watch the language carefully. In other words, they're lowering the bar for the reason to go into this war.

Saddam Hussein – and I agree here very much with my colleague – Saddam Hussein is a menace, mostly to the Iraqi people. There will be cheering in the streets as there was in Kabul if we go in and liberate. That will be the first day, the second week, the third week. Then I don't know what will happen; all hell may break loose. It's a very fragile country, it's three countries in one – there's Shiites in the south, Sunni Muslims somewhere in the middle, Kurds in the north. The Turks don't want the Kurds to be independent because – and they're of course a loyal ally. It's a very complicated situation. I do not believe, I don't think anyone has shown, that there is a significant danger from Iraq at this moment or in the near future – there may eventually be – that requires this kind of preventive warfare. What we do see is that Iraq is a regime that may respond and did respond for some time up to four years ago to containment and a disarmament regime. We have to try that route.

Now, this morning Bush – I only heard part of his speech, but as I understood, he did say this morning that, you know, that we should go with the inspectors. So, he's retreated there a little bit. So, first the inspectors; and if this thing doesn't work, if there's actually signs that there's a danger, if our allies who are apposed to this almost universally, except for Tony Blair, and he can't even get his own labor party to agree, then things may change. But at the moment, to launch preventive war, we go into the scenario that David so eloquently said; this will change the nature of the United States' foreign policies since the Founding, practically, about defensive war.

We may be the most powerful country in the world, but what I'm afraid of is this is going to be one of the shortest lived empires in history.

Speaker: Actually Professor Suni just touched on this question, but my question was if and when we go to a war with Iraq, will the Kurds be our new northern alliance, and what implications will that have for Turkey with their large Kurdish population itching for independence?

Dr. Rose: The Kurds won't be our new northern alliance because they simply don't have the kind of fighting power that can be marshaled in a serious way against the Iraqi regime. They're far weaker than the northern alliance and the Iraqi regime is far stronger than the Taliban, so they will be our northern alliance in the sense of local allies in the war, but they're not going to play the kind of significant role in the war itself that the northern alliance plays.

Speaker: You don't think we'll give them weapons and tanks to help us?

Dr. Rose: I think that if we do do it, we'll do it ourselves, by and large, because that's the best way to cheat – this is the kind of point that Pollack makes about why much of the administration's policy is idiotic, because you simply can't repeat the Afghan campaign in Iraq. But ultimately we will not do anything that fundamentally disturbs Turkey, because Turkey is more important than the Kurds in a variety of geopolitical ways.

Let me say one last point about Iraq and the UN which is, one thing that the president said in his speech today which I haven't fully seen myself but I heard about it, was that if the United Nations doesn't act rather boldly in Iraq in the near future it risks becoming the new League of Nations. And I think that's an important point because while I agree in many respects with what Professor Suni said about the radical nature of this, the somewhat non-immediate nature of the Iraqi threat, and so forth, it's important to recognize the alternate scenario as well; which is, a) with regard to Iraq, that at some point they almost certainly will get significant weapons of mass destruction and be in a position to use them or threaten to use them; b) that the United Nations has put itself on record as saying Iraq cannot have weapons of mass destruction and Iraq has demonstrably and continually flouted the will of the UN. And if, if we decide for a variety of reasons not to enforce UN resolutions to the full extent possible, then essentially the UN will be correctly regarded as nothing more than a talk shop that has absolutely no influence, absolutely no authority and legitimacy, and actually cannot do anything about actual problems in the real world.

The reason I worry about Iraq is that I think there's a significant chance, a large chance that the question is not should we fight a war against Iraq, but should we fight a war against Iraq now or a war against Iraq later on worse terms? I'm not certain that we will have to, which is why I'm not entirely in favor of the "invade Iraq now" policy. But if you don't think that Iraq, if we don't invade now, will come back to haunt us at some point down the road almost certainly, then you're kidding yourself.

Professor Suni: Just one small point about the UN. It's a good point; the UN has to do something. But one has to think, what power in the world has most acted to thwart the UN in the last decades? Right? What power in the world doesn't pay its UN bills, doesn't pay it's UN bills so Ted Turner has to pay them? What power in the world has actually issued more vetos than the Soviet Union did – and we're talking by some magnitude here? And it's the United States, in case you didn't get the point.

Professor Hendrickson: Kai, before you jump in, let me make a couple of points here. One is with regard to Saddam's motivation. I mean, the assumption that he's acquiring these weapons with the idea of securing dominance over the Middle East is widely taken for granted and the focus is invariably on the state of the program rather than the motive.

Now, I think he has actually a fairly intelligible motive for acquiring these weapons; it may be a mistake in calculation at the end of the day, but he thinks that they will give him protection; and they do in fact. The administration says this, acknowledges that they would provide him protection. If you assume – and I think that Saddam's record bears this out – that his foremost priority is to maintain himself in power, then it strikes me that it's quite possible to live for a very long period of time just as we lived for a very long period of time with the Soviet possession of nuclear weapons, the Chinese, without bringing things to a head.

The danger of preventive war is that these weapons are most likely to be used in circumstances of war. The one moment when he has sort of a rational motivation for committing mass destruction is precisely is when he's in the bunker facing the end of his life and his regime. And before that time, he has a compelling motivation not to use them because he knows that the United States does indeed have the power and would have overwhelming world support to destroy his regime were he to lash out and were he to use these weapons.

So I think that, you know, that's a much safer method; that's tried and true. Preventive war strikes me as being a gambler's substitute. The risk is not negligible I think even now with his chemical and biological weapons, such as they are, that the American use of force could cause or bring about or precipitate a very considerable degree of destruction and that would make the – I think we would incur a responsibility for that and it would make the task of political reconstruction all the more difficult.

The second point about the UN; when the United States says that the United Nations risks irrelevance unless it does our bidding and follows our policy, I think that that itself is a policy that basically says, you know, we are the ones who get to make the decisions. We're not really asking for the consent of others, we're not really soliciting their views. The administration got worried in the summer about the charges of critics that it was risking the legitimacy of American power by proceeding unilaterally, and thus they made the approach to the United Nations that we've seen elaborated in the past week. But, you know, if you say that, yeah, we're going to seek the consent of the United Nations but that we're going to go ahead and do anyway what we intend to do, it's very difficult to take that as a declaration that will not severely undermine the UN's authority and I think the administration quite mistakenly is perfectly happy to accept that outcome.

All right. Kai?

Speaker: Both of you mentioned the International Criminal Court and the Kyoto Protocol. You didn't mention our scuttling of the biological and toxin weapons enforcement protocol, our boycott of the nuclear test ban treaty meetings, our refusal to let chemical weapons inspectors access our facilities, the Pentagon's building of illegal germ weapons, and our plan to build bunker-busting nuclear weapons for conventional warfare. Would either of you like to comment on how our own weapons of mass destruction policy helps persuade our allies that we should invade Iraq because it potentially has weapons of mass destruction and will not submit to the consensus of the international community?

Professor Suni: I'm glad you mentioned all those things; I had so many things in the talk – I'll let Professor Rose talk about these specifically. But what worries me, of course, is the kind of double standard or that there can be an international law, international systems regime that applies to everyone except one superpower. And I think this is the point that David has made eloquently over and over again and is very well laid out in an article that's about to be published. We have in a way examples of countries that take law into their own hands, that think they're above the law; I won't mention any particular name, but it's been talked about quite a bit today. I don't think that carrying out those kinds of policies, as much as you feel threatened, actually increases your security, especially when you carry out these kinds of military actions against a largely unarmed population at a moment when you have no real end gain; you're not making any serious proposals about what your solution is. And it seems to me that we are in a sense repeating those kinds of mistakes, that we should think far less like Sharon and much more like Rabin after the Oslo agreements.

Dr. Rose: Let me just make a very brief point about the question. This is a very tough issue. If you think it's not, you're kidding yourself. Nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction are not going to go away, general disarmament is not a realistic possibility, and at the end of the day the question is, what kind of world are we going to live in and what kind of rules and forces are we going to rely on to keep peace and stability in that world? Essentially, there is a whole set of nonproliferation treaties and legal documents and steps towards disarmament that are based on the notion that rules of law, international law, inspections and a variety of other kinds of regimes can control the nuclear menace. And I would like to live in a world in which that was true. I'm not sure it is and I'm not sure that almost anybody connected to American foreign policy, actually the making of it, believes that it is.

And so I think as a good insurance I'm very glad we have a large number of nuclear weapons. And I'm not sure about how we should respond to various kinds of future proliferation; it's one of the great issues of the future. And I think again that there are strong arguments to be made on both sides because it's not just a question of, oh, we're violating treaties and international law and behaving like a rogue, because the question has to be asked, would adherence to the treaties, not behaving like a rogue, putting faith in international law and existing regimes be sufficient to contain the current and future threat that those weapons in the hands of people who would be not necessarily trustworthy in using them, is that a risk you're willing to take?

David said that he thinks the risks of invading Iraq are far greater than the risks of not invading. I go back and forth. I think that all the arguments he mentioned are valid. I think there's a strong case to be made for not invading Iraq, but let's not kid ourselves. The policy we've had over the last ten years has been a kind of supersized version of containment that really is more akin to quarantine. If we don't do something about Iraq now in a significantly way, the policy we will be falling back on is containment the way it was during the Cold War, which is really sort of essentially deterrence, and that carries risks as well. And I'm not entirely comfortable living in that world either. You're dealing in the real world with a balance of risks. There is no easy simple set of answers, and there is not a simple set of policies which can eliminate the threat, and therefore you're always going to be balancing risks. The question you have to ask yourself is, when you tote up all the different risks on all sides, which are you more comfortable accepting?

Professor Hendrickson: Yes, sir?

Speaker: How do you guys think that Israel should respond to terrorist attacks – like, should they use border checks, curfews, state assassinations or state-sponsored assassinations? And especially since the Palestinian government and Yassir Arafat specifically have been not reliable peace partners, how should Israel move on with the peace process now that this information is available?

Professor Suni: It's a good question, and of course everyone is worried about this question and what they can do. First of all, Hannan Ashrawi pointed out very well this morning that what we're actually talking about is 22% of the former Palestine, right? In 1947, the Israelis were given 55% for a population roughly 39%; they were going to be given a state which had 400,000 Arabs and 500,000 Jews. They weren't that thrilled with it but people danced in the street at the time. Ben Gorion was not too happy with it. The Arabs were so appalled that a larger population would get even a smaller amount of land that they went to war, and we all know the consequences. The Arabs time after time after time have misused opportunities and lost over and over again. And now the debate is about 22%; so the Israelis have 78% and the whole discussion is about the other 22%. And the current regime, though it talks about a Palestinian state, is not interested in giving them that 22%; it wants to maintain settlements, it wants them to live in disjointed parts of the West Bank and Gaza. This is the problem. And it seems to me that all we have to is go back to where they were at Taba and talk about a viable Palestinian state.

Now, what should Israel do to respond to terrorism? First of all, there are two parts to the question; one is, what causes this terrorism? How does Israeli policy actually contribute to the terrorism or does it help restrain the terrorism? I have my own view on that. When there is a terrorist attack, you also use what I would say is criminal or police activity. You also don't destroy the Palestinian authority, which is the one agency that could and was supposed to – though they didn't do a completely good job about it – to police within the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

Now, there were moments when the Palestinians actually were patrolling and controlling most of the terrorism, but they were continually frustrated by the continued building of settlements, the political assassinations on the part of the Palestinians, and it was very hard – we'd have to go through the whole history to see what can be done. What would you do at the moment? I'm actually very pessimistic at the moment. I don't think anything is going to happen or change for the next four years at least until Bush leaves the White House and Sharon leaves the prime ministership. After that, maybe we can go back to some kind of – (interruption) what?

Well, Arafat is being actually contained by his own legislature at the moment. Arafat is a problem. But let’s not forget, Arafat, for all of his problems – corruption, dictatorialness – I mean, things that Hannan Ashrawi mentioned this morning – Arafat made the historic compromise in the early 90s of recognizing Israel and going for a two-state solution. That was an extraordinary event and, by the way, alienated him from the Hamases, the Islamic jihads, many of the refugees outside the West Bank. So, Arafat is one you have to deal with because he is a symbolic and current elected head of the Palestinian authority.

Dr. Rose: With regard to how you deal with terrorism and terrorist groups, a huge amount depends on the specifics of a particular situation; different kinds of groups call for different kinds of responses – Al Qaida calls for a different response from the PLO, which calls for a different response from Hamas, which calls for a different response perhaps from the Palestine Islamic jihad, different kinds of groups have different characteristics, present different threats and so forth, have different degrees of legitimate political grievances.

With regard to the situation in Israel more generally, I don't have an answer and I don't know anybody else who does. The Israelis should abandon the settlements; the American government should much more strongly encourage them to do that. The Israelis should pay a great deal more attention to making life better for the Palestinians in the territories and should make even more efforts to make sure that the Palestinians within Israel feel like full free citizens. And yet, given all those criticisms that I just made and all those things that I would like to see done, even if all those things were done, the core of the problem right now lies not on the Israeli side but on the Palestinian side. The peace process broke down not because the Israelis maintained settlements but because the Palestinian leadership made a decision to abandon the peace process and resort to force. And the reason that going back to Taba is not simply an option at this point is because it didn't go anywhere at Taba largely because Arafat was not willing to go to the full extent of the policies that he initially signed on to with the Oslo accords.

And what one does with the Palestinian community, or significant sections of the Palestinian community, that is so enthralled to a kind of ideology of martyrdom that it is willing to sacrifice itself and its children in pursuit of goals that are not just limited to the West Bank at this point, but almost certainly for a large number have gone on to include the destruction of Israel itself, is unclear. I don’t know – nothing the Israelis have tried have worked. They should be far more forthcoming, they should match their sticks with far more carrots. But, even if they did, it's not at all clear that that would work. The problem of Israel and the Palestinians is the single most complex and difficult problem to deal with in the entire diplomatic arena today. I do not know of anybody who has a good answer to that.

I teach a course in American Foreign Policy this semester at Columbia; I put the Arab-Israel conflict at the last part of the class because I want the kids to know a lot about foreign policy before they do it because in some ways the more you know about foreign policy, the more you realize just how tough a nut to crack the Arab-Israeli conflict is.

Speaker: Yes, first of all, thank you both for coming here; we appreciate it very much.

The title of this symposium is "September 11th, One Year Later," and the title of this particular discussion is "The New International Disorder," but it seems to me that we've spent the bulk of the discussion criticizing Bush foreign policy. Now, given the fact that Bush had been in office only eight months when the Twin Towers were attacked, it's a little bit myopic in my opinion to spend the bulk of our time blaming international disorder on Bush foreign policy. I'm curious. There's another organization that I haven't heard mentioned very often today, and that's Al Qaida. Does Al Qaida bear any responsibility for the current international disorder or is everything American's fault? Thank you.

Professor Suni: That must be to me. No, everything is not America's fault. What I was arguing is that we are dealing with the leftovers, the residue, the blow back of the Cold War, so it has a longer history. In some ways, Al Qaida, as reprehensible as they are and as terrible a thing they did on September 11th, in some ways that is part of the Third World in its most perverse and militant form coming back at us. In fact, if you are such a great power and you have such a great influence over the world, you also take a lot of responsibility, right? We can't avoid that.

Now, that also means we have enormous power to right these things or to try to change these things. It's not easy; it's certainly not easy if we see everything only in our own interests and don't think more broadly. So, if I look at the Israeli-Palestinian question and I think, where does blame lie, well there's a power differential between this mighty powerful Israeli state backed by the United States and the Palestinians who've been devastated and are largely disarmed, and a few terrorists, right? So I think Israel has the initiative, Israel has the agency, Israel has the power to do more. Do the Palestines have responsibility? Absolutely. They've made the kinds of mistakes that Gideon Rose mentioned, absolutely. But there's a power differential.

In the rest of the world the United States, which is this hegemonic power which is acting unilaterally all over in many areas, they have agency. Now, the Bush Administration has exaggerated and promoted precisely that kind of unilateral action, though at moments they step back as well. And Iraq is an example; I mean, is Iraq guilty for some of that? Of course. But the United States has these kinds of choices precisely because it has such great power. So that's why a lot of the emphasis falls on the Israeli side, in my view, or on the American side.

Dr. Rose: Al Qaida is a vicious gang of near-lunatic criminals who need to be hunted down and either captured or killed, and until that task is accomplished, we're all going to be living in a far more dangerous world than we should be. That said, there are ways that are more likely to accomplish that goal than others and there are other problems as well. And even when that is all done, there will still be a lot of trouble out there. I don't think they're just a product of US policies in the Cold War; they're more like the offshoots of modernization gone awry. And much of the problem that we will have in the next several decades is helping the Muslim world to come into modernity in a way without the kinds of destructive traumas that our own passage to modernity in the West was accompanied by. How we go ahead and do that is not – you know, Al Qaida has to be tracked down and countered on an individual level, but even when that is done the broader question of political change and development in the Muslim world will still remain and will require a complex mix of policies that are far too complex to get into right now.

Professor Hendrickson: Let me also add that we are, after all, American citizens. We have a responsibility for the policy of the United States that we don't have for Al Qaida. And so it's proper for us to think about the kind of role that our country should play, considering the fact that we are citizens and that we have to kind of bear the consequences of the choices that our political leaders make.

On that note, I think I need to bring this to an end; we are at 4:30. I think that all of us would be happy to stick around and talk to you all if you have a few more questions, but I want to thank the participants very much for coming and for the audience for being here as well.

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