Thom Shanker is the Pentagon correspondent for The New York Times.

Andrew Dunham (discussant) is a Professor of Political Science at Colorado College.

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

Professor Andrew Dunham: … The two speakers are Michael McCann, who is a professor of political science at the University of Washington, and Thom Shanker, who is the pentagon correspondent for the New York Times. He is also a CC graduate. (applause) There is work after college, just want to let you know, (laughter) even for political science majors.

War has been called politics by other means. And we have had a long history of the war on drugs, the war on cancer, the Cold War, the war on poverty. So what the president now calls the war on terrorism is part of a history of Americans talking about many major activities as war. On the other hand, we had the Korea police action, which was not called a war, so part of what I want you to think about is just talking about this and just deciding what words to use-- it is not all that easy. As politics as other means, that means it’s politics in the best sense of the term — that is, human beings getting together and collectively deciding what our purposes are and how we’re going to achieve those.

One of the things that implies is that we will disagree about what the goals are and disagree about the ends. That is, we have no disagreement that we want security but what is the best way to achieve security? Do we want to give up civil liberties? Do we have to give up civil liberties to achieve security? Will attacking Iraq mean more security or less security? And so, although politicians regularly say we need to support the president, and we can all agree on that, we don’t all agree on supporting the president exactly on what. So it’s both hard to talk about and we are likely to … it’s hard to decide on what words to use and hard to talk about because we disagree, and we disagree partly because it is so important. It’s often said, “It’s so important we need to get behind the president,” but it’s also the case that it’s so important, literally life and death, that’s why the term war is used.

It’s so important that we want to do it right. Hopefully also, wherefore we are going to disagree, we will disagree civilly. Despite everything, I thought this morning was very interesting because it was done relatively civilly. There was a certain amount of excitement on the Colorado campus, just what we like to see. What you would like to see is the speaker so I’ll get out of the way. We’ve agreed that Thom will go first, so Thom Shanker from the New York Times.

(Applause)

Mr. Thom Shanker: Thank you very much. It is a rare and unusual honor for me to be invited to speak to you here in Armstrong tonight. I’ve slept in Armstrong before; I’ve just never spoken here before. (laughter) Although, I think that my classmate Neil Weiner will tell you that the best naps were in Tutt, in the atrium, in those couches. Are those still there? I don’t know, but it’s so warm, the sun comes streaming in, anyway… But it’s also a rare opportunity for me to say thank you to an institution. The professors I had when I was here, thank you very much, my classmates and friends, some of which drove here tonight, thank you very much. When I think of all this community has to offer and I think back to my four years here, I’m really sorry about all the time I wasted studying (laughter) because this community does offer so very, very much. It was a springboard for me to a whole world that I didn’t know before, and I’m truly very grateful.

I do hope though that my efforts to be here tonight, leaving Washington and the Pentagon behind at this very dramatic time will be remembered especially by the scholarship committee when they see the applications from Sam Shanker and Dana Shanker (laughter) classes of 2012 and 2015, respectively. But I did want to share with you some thoughts I’ve gained, really, by having a front row seat at history for the last year. The theme of this evening, evaluating US responses to terrorism, is basically my job description, especially over the last 12 months. My only caveat, of course, is that I’m not an academic and I’m not a politician. Our first speaker today posed the question whether her comments, in the Aristotelian design, should be about what ought to be or what is. You’re looking at Mr. What Is. It’s what I do every day. My job is to see what's there and to describe it, analytically of course, but in a non-opinionated manner so that people like you can bring the full democratic power of the population to bear on your elected officials.

I’m not here to share opinions but rather to take you on a tour of this building with 5 sides and a million angles called the Pentagon, and then, if you’re really brave, we can go for a walk in Don Rumsfeld’s head. (laughter) It’s an incredible, really fascinating, dramatic, dark and complicated place. And it has truly driven American policy for the past 12 months. And as the Times’ pentagon reporter, I’ve had a really unusual opportunity to spend a lot of time with him, with the joint chiefs, a lot of senior military officers. I spent too much time in Afghanistan over the past year and that’s what I hope to share with you tonight and in some way, add to this discussion and to this conference.

You know, the first thing to remember, though, as we try to evaluate the U.S. responses to terrorism, in my 16 minutes left — I don’t want you to lose sleep at night, but — al Qaeda is still out there, the terrorist networks have not gone away. While operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan achieved absolutely the very specific purposes, announced the very first line of the war, which was twofold: to topple the Taliban, which had supplied safe haven for al Qaeda, and to rout al Qaeda from Afghanistan, which they had been using as a free port for many years to train and plan and, you know, effect their terrorist plans. That being said, al Qaeda is still out there and in fact, in some ways they are a more dangerous enemy today because they are dispersed, they are not in a single location. They are presenting a moving target, a shifting target, and that places a terrific burden on the Pentagon to come up with new ways to battle this very new kind of threat. Rumsfeld likes to say that al Qaeda “goes to school on you,” and in a classic Rumsfeld statement — and if you can match subject and verb here, I’ll buy you a beer afterwards (laughter) — he says “al Qaeda watches how you’re behaving and then alters and adjusts at relatively little cost, relatively little time, relatively little training to those incremental little changes we make in how we do things. Our changes at the Pentagon,” he says, “can be slower more costly and very visible. Their changes are cheaper, quicker and for a period — a longer period than in the military’s case — but for a period invisible.”

It really hasn’t been defined, and it hadn’t been before in the language of asymmetrical threat, the terrorist threat and all that, what the Pentagon is trying to fight now. Remember that the Pentagon is kinetic power. It is a cement and steel building and it has circuitry and tanks and bullets and all these hard target capabilities. It’s trying to fight a new enemy that has budgets and command and control and certainly can wreak terrible havoc on America, just like an enemy with boundaries and territory. But it has none of those things. So how do you actually try to fight, what I like to call a ‘virtual enemy,’ that has no known location, no known address but can still carry out with incredible viciousness attacks that previously were carried out by nation-states themselves. A number of important changes have been carried out in American foreign policy very quietly over the past year.

I think that here is one value I can bring to the academic and intellectual discussion tonight if you will grant, you know, a newspaper guy, a total Gutenberg like myself to sort of try to share with you some academic analysis. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what is new and what is different and I’ve come up with 12 sort of rules, not yet official, some of which you’ve heard of, that sort of define the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld foreign policy view, the national policy view. I will share them with you without judgment. But I think if you follow them and understand them, you will be able to predict what they are going to do next and certainly understand their rationale for what they are doing.

First, this is so much a big break from how they view the Clinton administration: when attacked, the United States is going to be leaning forward not leaning back. The Bush administration feels that the Clinton administration was faint-hearted and risk-adverse; at the first sign of bloodshed they would cut and run. And that simply invited attack because the enemies were not deterred. Secondly, terrorism: it is impossible to defend at every place at every time against every conceivably brilliant, horribly brilliant, terrorist strike, and therefore the only way to defend against that is to take the war to the terrorists. You have to get them before they strike, is how this argument goes. And this of course is the rationale for the policy of preemption that Rumsfeld laid out to NATO, followed by a Bush speech, I think at West Point, or one of the Academies, and I would not be surprised if in the next week or 10 days if we see the formal roll out of a new national policy from the White House that has preemption as its centerpiece.

Next, the war on terrorism is going to be broad-based. It will apply every element of national power that this administration can bring to bear. It’s not going to be just military, it will be economic and diplomatic and intelligence and law enforcement and military and overt and covert. I think we will see a great expansion of the covert aspect of this. I think special operations forces will be sent into the field to take this preemptive strategy to the enemy in ways we’ve never before seen, in ways that used to be the domain of the Central Intelligence Agency alone but that are quickly expanding into the world of special military operations. I think this administration has said and believes that this war against terror will be long and hard and difficult, and they want to prepare the American people for a loss of life. This isn’t a new world war in their view. They’re not going to rule out anything ever as they pursue this. Certainly not boots on the ground as the previous administration ruled out after Kosovo.

A really interesting change is this administration’s view of coalitions. Rumsfeld’s bumper sticker is, ‘the mission drives the coalition, the coalition will not drive the mission.’ This is Rummy-speak for asking for allies, asking for partners, asking for friends. So I think it is really wrong to accuse the administration of being unilateralist because they are trying in a public way to gain allies and partners. However, those partners will not be allowed to detract or deny or in any way degrade the mission as viewed by this administration when it wants to carry it out. They don’t believe in lowest common denominator alliance, and America will be the leader. And if you want to join in, fine — that’s just their attitude. The clever version of this from the State Department, of course, is multilateralism a la carte. (laughter) Which is just a State Department way of saying the same thing, of course.

The U.S. will invite assistance from lots of countries, and it will never require those countries to say what they’re doing. In fact, the war in Afghanistan, the United States had secret bases throughout the region, some of which were never written about, some of which we don’t know. This is really important to think about as we move closer toward a possible war with Iraq. You will see reporters from Arab league meetings and Arab world leaders saying “We don’t support the war, we don’t agree with the war.” Let me assure you lots of very quiet negotiations are already underway for assistance from many states in the region, none of which are going to stand up at the Pentagon at the podium and say, “Oh yeah, our bases are open.” But these states do have an interest in taking down Saddam Hussein if it is done quickly and if it is done right, and I think the U.S. will get a lot done, a lot of support from that region, none of which will be public. In fact, at lot of public statements will be just the opposite. This administration feels that there is a link between terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and some of these enemy states, and that even if they don’t have evidence that Iraq was directly part of 9/11, I think that in the broader world view for this administration that a smoking gun is not required for action.

We’re already seeing them laying out the strategy. One of the interesting things, one of the afternoon discussions, the 2:30 session, we were talking about, you know, rolling out the reason for the war with Iraq and why it hadn’t been done before. My favorite line was Andrew Card in the New York Times who said, “We’re waiting for September because you never roll out a new product in August.” (laughter) So I think now we’re going to see the start of a very, very robust and muscular campaign to explain why they’re going to do this. Lastly, on this list and most importantly, September 11 in this view of the Bush administration resulted in a major shift in the world. They think that opportunities are now offered to establish new relationships and to reorder institutions in ways that will contribute to peace, stability and national defense. And most importantly, their redrawing of how the world operates in ways that we have never seen before. So it’s not just the hyper-power of the United States today. But the confluence of events since 9/11 allow them to act on a worldview that this is a unique opportunity in history for exerting America’s will in ways to redraw the map of the world — and how American foreign affairs are carried out. And I think we are in for some real drama. That’s the political side.

For the military side — and my time’s running out so I’ll zip through this very quickly — the real difference between how the political civilian leadership views this and the military side … the military side is responsible for carrying out the war and for fighting the war. And unlike the cliché that lots of people have, that I had when I was here, the military is often one of the least interested in starting conflict. They have a metric of risk that is sort of a real bottom line. If I screw up a correction on page two, very embarrassing, reprimand from the boss, you know, job security. Businesses fail, it’s bankruptcy. The measurement of the risk for a military officer is the body bag, and you get no more basic than that. That allows them to focus their attention, and they can argue their point of view with a certainty that the civilians don’t have. And I think that’s one of the reasons we’ve seen so much debate about, with Iraq. I’m going to take a minute and describe the three camps for military options for going against Iraq. One is the Afghan option. It’s often called the Downing plan after General Wayne Downing, who was the National Security Council’s anti-terrorist czar. He’s now out of a job, which I guess means his plan is probably not the one they’re going to use. Basically it was heavy air power, just like we saw in Afghanistan, small numbers of special forces troops organizing proxy forces on the ground, the Kurds in the north, Shiites in the south. That would prompt Saddam’s forces to amass, we would blow them up, and the war would be over, which is not going to happen. The Iraqi army, even though not a fraction of what it was in the first Gulf War, is still a real army compared to what the Taliban was. That option’s simply not going to happen.

Next is something that, when David Sanger, our White House correspondent, and I first uncovered and wrote about, there really wasn’t a name for it yet so we called it ‘Baghdad first’ or ‘Inside Out.’ I think that, probably, this is where most of the military thinking is coalescing right now. It would be the opposite of the Gulf War. Remember those big maps on CNN where there were arrows coming in from three sides and all of this? Well, there would be no arrows coming in from anywhere. It would be capitalizing on the maneuver warfare concepts first shown in Panama and which the military specializes in now. It would be air drops; it’s just racing to the capital. You wouldn’t even try to take bites of Iraq as you go in; you’d go after sites of weapons of mass destruction, you’d go after the man in control. It’s in a sense decapitation, and hoping that the popular support for Saddam Hussein would wither so rapidly that you wouldn’t even have to hold territory, you could just take Baghdad and a few other sites and the whole regime would collapse. That could be done with perhaps 80,000 to 100,000 troops, no one knows for sure.

And of course the third option is Gulf War Lite. Not the full half million of the Gulf War but something in the 200,000 to 250,000 range. That, I think, is basically the one that most senior military officers are most comfortable with because it allows them to reduce risk by having extra forces. Also it would require having a much larger logistics trail, time to build up and all that sort of thing. And even with the smaller plans, you might have to eventually mobilize that largest number, just in case, just in case. And that’s what the military gets paid to figure out. OK, let me skip over a few things here, peace on earth (laughter), washboard abs without working out (laughter) …

Just a little bit on the whole secrecy, because it really … as we move toward conflict…. I was talking with some classmates at dinner, and they kept asking, “Are we going to war with Iraq?” Well, friends, we’re already at war with Iraq. We have bombed Iraq 42 times this year as of the day before yesterday. Back where I come from, that’s called war. You know, the preparations are there, so the real question is will we go to a major ground offensive with regime-change-march-to-capital as the goal. And as a part of that process, we the media will be trying to serve you by creating an intelligent discussion.

As you know, or maybe you don’t, the New York Times is the subject of a number of leak investigations right now, although I don’t really care for the word leak. It makes it sound like, oh, all I do all day is sit around with my feet up on the desk drinking cognac, and some general calls and says “Oh, I have the war plans for you.” It’s more of a puncture, really. Eric Schmidt, my colleague at the Pentagon, Eric Sanger, our White House correspondent, and others, we spend all of our day piecing together and talking to people. And we’ve written a series of stories that have quite flustered and frustrated the administration but which we feel are important to you because there truly is no more critical decision that this government takes than the decision to invest the national treasury and the lives of sons and daughters and mothers and wives into going to war. And when that is taken, it should be taken with great wisdom and great public discussion, and, in fact, even though there was a lot of what the military calls ‘pucker factor’ when we wrote our stories, it’s really calmed down quite a bit.

Rumsfeld has evolved from criticizing the media to criticizing those within the military and those in the Pentagon bureaucracy who talk to us. That’s fair enough. He’s the boss, he runs his organization, he can yell at them all he wants, that’s perfectly fine. But just let me tell you that when the New York Times embarks upon these stories, we scrub them mercilessly, and we very carefully remove any kind of operational detail that we feel would risk lives. We take our part of this bargain and relationship with you very seriously, too. We want to inform you and help you, but we do not want to be responsible for the deaths of Americans either. I know that you know that we take that trust very, very carefully.

In conclusion, I just wanted to digress just very, very briefly and come back to my time here at Colorado College. I sat in this hall my very first week of freshman year. They were doing orientation, and the professor stood right where I am standing and talked about liberal arts and what it’s for, and he said, “Look, we hope that when you leave here, you’ll become productive members of society. You’re not going to be bums or worse, but you’re going to be the kind of people who, when something goes wrong, you have the strength and knowledge to stand up and say, ‘Yes, but….’” I thought about that a lot. I spent two years covering the war in Bosnia and, when that was over, returned to my family in Berlin, and I was just trying to make sense of this absolutely horrific experience. I mean, genocide, mass murder, mass rape, in Europe, in the 20^th century in what had been a very cultural country.

I was doing a lot of reading about the Nuremberg tribunal, and I came across a guy of the name, Robert Kempner. And Kempner had been (inaudible) in the ministry of the interior of Prussia in the late 20’s, and he’s the one who had exiled this fellow named Hitler as a political undesirable. Of course, Hitler did return from Austria, and being a man of long memory, he then exiled the Kempner family. And Kempner moved to Italy and then to the University of Pennsylvania where he taught law throughout World War II. At the end of the war, when Justice Jackson was setting up the Nuremberg tribunals, he wanted someone who understood German law. He was very conscious that the ‘victors’ justice’ would be an accusation, and he wanted to have someone who understood the German legal system. He called on Kempner, and it was Kempner’s research in the Nazi archives that uncovered a box of documents on a small lake outside of Berlin called Wannsee where indeed the Final Solution was cooked up. It was the only set of documents that absolutely linked the Nazi high command to the Holocaust. And I asked Kempner — I went and interviewed him, he was living in Frankfurt, quite elderly, quite infirm but still very sharp and a very wonderful man — I asked him about his experience.

And I finished the interview, went back and filed the story, and Robert Kempner died two days later. I was certainly the last person to ever interview him, the last, and I will never, ever forget what he told me, what he said to himself as he walked into the Nuremberg Palace of Justice that day. He said, “My goal, Tom, was just to put a little piece of justice back into the world.” And so I hope that conferences like this, and institutions like this, teach us to do a little more than just say “Yes, but…” but to actually put a little piece of justice back into the world. Thank you.

(Applause)

Professor Dunham: Thank you very much for that. I think we’ll hold questions until the end, so without further ado, the next speaker.

Professor Michael McCann: Well, I would like to echo what other speakers before me have said in congratulations to Colorado College for the wonderful event, to say that I, too, am very honored, and it’s a great pleasure to be here. This is a marvelously well-organized event. That was said earlier, and I want to reiterate that. I have organized a number of similar events on my campus, and I’ve never been part of an event as well organized as this. I also want to laud all of you who are here. It’s been a long day, and I think most of you have been at the events all day long. I’m exhausted, and I assume most of you are exhausted. I think it’s a great credit that you would be here at this hour and still listening and participating in this wonderful conference.

The topic of my talk is somewhat different, at least at face value than everything that’s been part of this conference before. But if I’m successful in what I have to say, I hope that the seeming differences will dissolve and you’ll see some real similarities in the themes I want to raise and the questions I want to pose in the ways I think the discussion has gone so far. I want to do something, that is, to tell you in about one minute what the entire talk is going to be about. And that’s because since Thom’s already warned us that he has an inclination to sleep in this auditorium, that those of you who want to go sleep, you can hear the talk (laughter) or if I get lost along the way you can at least know where I was intending to go.

The topic of my talk: it’s about the domestic implications of 9/11 and the response to 9/11. Almost all of the talks have been about foreign policy and the ordering and reordering of the world and how America’s acting and that newly constructed order and the response to terrorism and to other changes. My interest is in, what does this mean for domestic politics? What does this mean for our organization and our policy agenda at home in the United States specifically? And even more specifically than that, I’m interested in issues of civil rights and social justice and I’ll say in a minute why those issues in particular are important.

What I’m going to argue is this — what our leaders and our pundits have told us is that since 9/11 everything has changed. But how has everything changed? We’ve talked a lot about the international order, but what about at home? And what I’m interested in here is, in recent years, prior to 9/11, there was an outpouring of scholarship on the Cold War. And there are at least 6 books I know that make this their central topic of concern, and then another number of books and reviews and articles that have been generated around this general thesis. And the thesis was primarily about the Cold War. The argument was a re-evaluation of the Cold War, identifying that the Cold War was a very important catalyst to the expansion of social justice and civil rights at home, that the civil rights movement and the broad array of issues we identify with the 1950s and ‘60s received a tremendous impetus from the Cold War itself. I’ll tell you in a minute more about that argument.

But others have taken this and argued that the only times we see real moments of the expansion of the civil rights agenda, the social justice agenda, in this country — more democratic and inclusionary kind of politics — is in times of crisis and specifically in times of war. And most of this research was done before 9/11, but it raises the question: Is this a moment in the post-9/11 era, this time of crisis, a new kind of war when we are likely to see more democratic and inclusionary politics, a revitalization of civil rights, civil liberties, and a broader social justice agenda? As many people have argued, not only is this true of the early Cold War but of other times of war in American history. And my answer is going to be really simple, and it’s going to be: No.

I think for a variety of reasons we’re not likely to see that kind of domestic politics attend the period in which we find ourselves, at least not in the near future. So I want to go on and develop that thesis. Basically what I’m going to argue is that the construction of the post 9/11 world has really contributed to the emphasis on domestic security, specifically the obsession with crime and crime control that dominated the American agenda during the Cold War — especially that dominated the last 25 years of the Cold War — and rather than revitalizing a commitment to civil rights and social justice, especially for the least advantaged part of our population, that the experience of 9/11 and the shadow of 9/11 will only further distance us from commitments to democracy and inclusionary, rights-based kind of politics. So that’s what I want to go on and discuss.

Now one thing at the outset: Why am I not doing what would be the normal thing, which would be to talk about civil liberties? I am going to talk about civil liberties, and civil liberties are part of the agenda I want to raise. But I want to talk about civil liberties not broadly cast for all of us in the room, but civil liberties specifically for those people who matter the most, the most disadvantaged in society, because it is their civil liberties that are most often jeopardized in times of crisis. So I want to look at civil liberties with more focus on issues of power and inequality and position in society.

Ok, so with that said, let me begin by saying a few things about the Cold War and this analogy that’s often been made between the Cold War and the present period. There’ve been a series of books as I mentioned, the most famous by a scholar named Mary Dudziak, who’s a law professor at USC and it’s called Cold War Civil Rights. But there’s been a whole bunch of other books that are very similar in their thesis. And their thesis is a very simple one, that the Cold War was largely an ideological battle. That it was a battle between two competing world visions — two competing visions of social order that were competing for world dominance or at least survival. And that battle was fought out in terms of ideas to a large extent. That means that the United States, which was a participant as a representative of the free world, participated in such a way that it made a big deal, that it projected itself in such terms of claiming itself to be a free society committed to equal opportunity, that was inclusionary and non exclusionary, non-racist against the communist vision that was hierarchical and un-free and exclusionary and brutal. And so it was freedom vs. totalitarianism — a society of opportunity where everyone can make it versus a society where people were condemned into very static and unproductive kinds of lives.

The importance of these arguments that these scholars make is that in the importance of the world, primarily in the hearts and minds of potential allies, this was a battle for parts of the third world and the struggle against communism. Because the U.S. took this very idealistic position, it created a problem for our foreign policy. And the problem for the foreign policy was that, when a country looked at American foreign policy, it found reason to allege hypocrisy. The primary problem was the history of race relations in the South, the legacy of slavery and subsequently of institutionalized segregation in the South. This created a fundamental problem and hypocrisy in America’s position in the world. Other nations were very quick to exploit it. The Soviets and the Chinese pointed out again and again that the U.S. was just a bunch of liars and hypocrites, that they talked about inclusionary politics and democracy, but just look at the way they treat people of color in the South, look at the poverty in the inner cities, and so forth — what’s so great about American society?

And what these books have pointed out, and very compellingly, is that there were tremendous pressures in the foreign policy establishment, in American society, that were primarily aimed at presidents but that spread to policy makers and legislators and government to do something about the race question in the South. It was really undermining the battle against communism abroad. It was easily undermining our credibility and making it hard to believe the American position.

And I can give a lot of examples. There was a great newspaper with a cartoon on it that said, “America has an Achilles heel, and the heel is quite Black.” And they used that kind of position to deny alliance with the U.S. and to support a kind of left-leaning politics and even sympathies with the Soviet Union. The situation was manifested and even created by the civil rights commission during World War II. For example, Robert Crispin wrote an article that got a lot of attention in the New York Times. He wrote, “Our nation finds itself the most powerful spokesperson for the democratic way of life in the world as opposed to the principles of the totalitarian state. It is unpleasant to have the Russians publicize our continued lynchings, our Jim Crow statutes and customs, our anti-Semitic recriminations and witch hunts, but is it undeserved?” And that created a little bit of controversy. Prominent Black leaders also recognized this apparent contradiction — the fact that other nations were pointing out this contradiction with cartoons in the Soviet press and the Chinese press, and the other countries were quite critical of the actions of the police in the South — and all of this stuff was making for bad headlines. It was really compromising the Cold War battle, and the black leaders would exploit this to some degree.

So the idealism of the Cold War, the ideological nature of the battle, created a situation, both the opportunities and the pressures to do something about this problem. For example, in 1947, the NAACP with W.E.B. DuBois as its principal author petitioned the United States announcing, “Racism in the U.S. is not only indefensible but barbaric, as bad or worse than the United States’ proclaimed enemies.” It went on to say, “It is not Russia that threatens us so much as Mississippi. Internal injustice done to one’s brothers is far more dangerous than the aggression from abroad.” In other words, saying that if the United States is going to fight this battle for democracy, it really ought to take that issue seriously at home before they are going to win allies throughout the world. Many politicians began to make this an issue in their own campaigns for office. For instance, congressman Jacob Javits from New York uses in his speech with quotes in the New York Times: “With communist China as a propaganda base, segregation, discrimination and grounds of race, creed or color in the U.S. can be used to bend millions to the communist cause. The problem of racism,” he says, “is of great interest to the foreign policy of the U.S.”

So that the idealism of the ideological battle that was waged by the United States abroad created pressures to deal with the race issue. And these scholars have gone on to show, again very convincingly, that the opportunities and the pressures led President Truman followed by Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy and up through Johnson to appoint commissions to deal with the race issues. The most important strategy — again because they knew that this would be a difficult program, especially for the Democratic Party, given the importance of the South to the Democratic coalition — was to appoint judges and let judges deal with the race issue because they would not suffer the same vulnerability in elections, and it would not bring down the Democratic Party by bringing these changes in policy to the southern United States — and these books well document this dynamic.

And this dynamic has been amplified in a terrific book, a book that’s won several awards, by Roger Smith and Philip Klinkner called The Unsteady March, and it’s about the rise and decline of race in the United States. And they make the argument that, throughout the history of the United States, there’ve been these spurts of democratic, inclusionary politics and civil rights and social justice during times of war that have been followed by periods of retrenchment. They make the point especially again about the Cold War. Many scholars took from that a lesson: the only way we’re going to see a resurgence of social justice politics in the late 1990s or into the new century was we needed a new enemy. If there’s a new external enemy and a new war then there would be a chance for generating new social justice politics. There was one scholar, I won’t name him, who wrote in a journal that just came out a week before 9/11. He wrote, “The expansion of civil rights and social justice is similar to the Cold War, which will create a better environment for more progressive notions of equality,” and he goes on somewhat eerily, “As a matter of history, progressives do not triumph by restoring the old progressive surge but by taking advantage of the conditions that promote a new progressive surge. Central to these conditions is an enemy that can be understood as racial in egalitarian doctrines, an enemy that does not appear on the horizon.” That was a week before 9/11.

So the question that this raises, given all the attention to his basic thesis, in the context of 9/11: We have an enemy, we have an enemy that is brutal, that have been characterized as thugs — much of the rhetoric of the Cold War that was applied to the Soviet Union has been applied to an enemy, even though they’re quite different in some ways. And in fact, the parallels between the new war on terrorism and the Cold War have been drawn by our political leaders. This is in reference to the post-post Cold War, to the new Cold War, to the Cold War and the war on terrorism — as bookends to an ongoing struggle, often articulated by our leaders. And might this be a period like the early Cold War that could provide a catalyst to more egalitarian, inclusionary democratic politics? So let me go on with that context and suggest why I think that’s not likely to happen.

The first part of what I have to say on that really turns on a different reading of the Cold War. What is interesting about all these books — about this thesis around the relationship between the ideological battle and the Cold War and its catalyzing effect on internally democratic politics — was that in all these books the Cold War ends around 1962 or 1964, and then you get a backlash or retrenchment, as if the Cold War was somehow connected to what happens in subsequent years. And I think that that is a problematic misreading that has really some relevance for the issue that I’m raising here. Especially the book by Smith and Klinkner — it certainly documents that there was a backlash of the civil rights movements of the ‘50s and ‘60s, that there was a politics of retraction and retrenchment that took place and rolled back and put a hold on and raised new kinds of agendas, but they are all talked about being separate from the context of the Cold War, which is pretty surprising because most people really identify this beginning of the retrenchment at the beginning of the late 1960s. They use the 1968 presidential election as just a handy marker in history.

But you know, we know, we were in the midst of the Vietnam war, which had something to do with the Cold War, I believe at the time, when that was a very hot point in the Cold War, but nevertheless was part of the whole anti-communist effort. The two presidents most identified with that retrenchment in commitment to civil rights, Richard Nixon and Ronald Regan, were, of course, two politicians who made their names and really their whole political identities out of Cold War politics. They were quite explicit in making the Cold War part of their agendas during their terms as president and while campaigning for the presidency. And I want to suggest is that, in fact, the Cold War had a lot to do with that retrenchment itself. I think that requires a much more complex reading of history.

I think that it’s true that the pressures that were created were conducive to civil rights and produced the responsiveness to the civil rights movement and the other rights-based movements, the expansion of civil liberties, and the great society — all that was tied to one construction of the Cold War. But at the same time there was another very powerful construction of the Cold War that went on that affected domestic politics, linked to McCarthyism, linked to the Southern reaction against the demands for integration and the abolition of segregation. And that was a very powerful part of politics that coexisted, for a moment, with this more liberal civil rights agenda that did seem to prevail from the late 40s and through the 1950s and began to crumble in the 1960s. But what takes form as the retrenchment in the late ‘60s and continues on to the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s was itself very much influenced by the Cold War itself. It was linked very much in the minds of those who were the advocates of that basic agenda. If I had a lot more time I would trace this through.

 If you look at the rhetoric of the Southerners who opposed the civil rights agenda, they make a clear link between the demands to abolish segregation by people of color or by African Americans — they treated them as criminals, they were protestors who were disrupting order. And they usually treated this as a communist plot.

For example, Robert Patterson, an important local GOP leader in the South, talked about “the dark cloud of integration that reeked of a communist theme of Mongrelization.” Southern Democrats were no less prone to this than Southern Republicans. For example, governor Herman Talmadge in his 1955 book Segregation and You said that, “For over a decade now, we have been undergoing a vicious and dangerous brainwashing directed by international communists. Only one group stands to benefit from the attacks on the Bill of Rights presented by Brown v. the Board of Education. That group is the communist party and its fellow travelers.”

In other words, it was capitulation to the communists that gave rise to responsiveness to the civil rights movement, the Great Society. And it was all part of complicity with the communist plot. The whole effort to desegregate the South was linked on one hand to crime and on being soft or complicit to communism on the other. And that was language that actually took on greater and greater power during the ‘60’s at the national level. We often read the civil rights movement as triumph of Northern style, culture and commitments to non-segregated society over the South.

At the same time, I think there’s at least as much thought as the Southern reaction becomes nationalized and becomes part of our national rhetoric. And we can see this during the 1960’s as law and order in particular becomes part of the increased focus of domestic policy. Where the politics of the ‘50s and the ‘60s was about Great Society — social welfare, social rights — law and order increasingly becomes the overall condensation, symbol, the rhetoric of a new agenda that becomes dominant and I think is dominant into the 90s and the present period. This new theme of law and order is based on linking together, again, being soft on dissidence, on communists, on criminals, and on members of the underclass.

I remember the Moynihan Commission in the 1960s that talked about the pathologies of minority communities, especially blacks in the South that explicitly link, and I’m quoting from the report, “crime, violence, unrest, disorder…” [end of audio tape] …promises to be tough on crime. And it’s not long before you find politicians pretty much constantly engaged in duels as to who can be tougher on crime than the next person. That was more common among Republicans in the early period, but it was quite common among Southern Democrats, and by the ‘80’s the Democratic Party had pretty much fallen in line. I would read much of Bill Clinton’s agenda — and certainly much of his rhetoric was every bit as much within — there’s two planks of changing welfare as we know it and being tough on crime. Bill Clinton, who promised to hire more police, invest more money — traditionally, most policing had taken place on the local level — and that’s one of the major changes that takes place. So we have an increasing focus on crime and security.

At the same time I’d suggest, just as it had been in the first reaction to the civil rights movement, that the issue of crime is increasingly racialized and that the discourse about crime is increasingly racialized. There have been many studies showing how the media treats issues of crime, linking it to race, and how politicians make those lines, sometimes quite subtly, sometimes not so subtly. Probably the best-known incidence was the Willie Horton image, making this link between fear of people of color and fear of crime — and linking that also with fear of dissidence. At the same time that crime becomes a central issue on the domestic agenda pushing off other issues, the discourse of crime parallels the discourse of the Cold War. It becomes a rhetoric of war. To deal with crime we need a war on crime, and then we need a war on drugs.

The language of that is very important. We begin to talk about fellow citizens who commit transgressions, an increasing number of transgressions are criminalized, especially various forms of drug possession that aren’t criminal in other countries. Various other kinds of penalties are increased, more and more punitive policies are turned into law and put into practice. And increasingly, the battle to deal with crime becomes one of war — that engages a war against enemies. Now the criminals become domestic enemies. And, again making those linkages between external enemies and internal enemies, that the wars against those on the outside and those on the inside are parallel and interrelated. And the final thing that I don’t really have time to talk about was the ways in which the policing techniques — anybody who studied policing over the last 30 or 40 years — there’re some dramatic shifts in how police carry out their activities, increasingly using the hardware and using the techniques, using the strategies that were pioneered by the military. I’ll say more about that in a minute.

And this isn’t just rhetoric, it isn’t just a shifting of the agenda; it’s really a shifting of course of the domestic dollars and budgets. It represents first of all a major shift from local politics as the center of crime control moves to federal levels and increasing investment of federal money. Between 1980 and 1991, total law enforcement budgets for the war against crime rose two and a half times to nearly six billion dollars. Between 1980 and 1994, the incarcerated population in the United States grew by three times, from half a million to one and a half million — that’s in a period of 14 years. I read just the other day that the most recent figure was that, since 1980, the size of the population that’s under custody is now quadrupled, by 2000. The United States through the 1990s held the dubious distinction of having incarcerated the second largest percentage of its population; the highest population was the Soviet Union. About 3 years ago, the U.S. took over number one. We incarcerate a higher percentage of our population than any other large nation.

The war on drugs becomes a major part of this. A large part of the expanding prison population is for drug possession and small time drug peddling. And punishment becomes very highly correlated with class but especially with race. In 1997, over half of the prison population was Black or Hispanic, twice the percentage of 1930, which puts it in a kind of relief when you think about the gains of civil rights with regard to the incarcerated populations and so forth. A lot more can be said about that. It is also the era of the return and revitalization of the death penalty. This becomes a central symbolic issue in American politics. At the same time that we are investing in law and order, law enforcement, punitive policies, corrections and prisons, we are also disinvesting in other areas. For example, in the same period, the same percentage of state budgets that increase dramatically in policing and corrections and criminal justice … education shrinks by 12% and investments in welfare for the poor shrink by 41%. So we see a major shift in discourse in the public agenda and investment during this time.

OK, so the point I want to make is that all this happens in the Cold War, and it’s tied into the rhetoric and the policies and the logic as we become increasingly mobilized against enemies from without and we become increasingly mobilized to deal with threats of insecurity internally, and it’s linked up with the logic of dealing with subversion and the dangers and criminalization and all those kind of things.

The important point of that is, first of all, that this is the context in which 9/11 happens. That unlike the early Cold War — which provided the catalyst for social justice politics, which was in the period following the New Deal, when there had been a change in the public agenda to a more redistributive agenda, concerned with those at the bottom of society to some degree — it was a very different context. The context in which 9/11 happens: after 30 years of massive investment, in fears of crime, of domestic disorder, domestic violence, an investment of dealing with law enforcement, and huge amounts of money shifted to police and prisons and away from the social infrastructure. And that’s of major significance.

What I want to suggest is that 9/11 becomes reinterpreted in that frame of the late Cold War rather than the internal Cold War because that was established by the politics of that time — that 9/11 becomes interpreted in the frame in which it was already existing. And it’s very easy to see the various ways that’s true. The dramatic investments not only in national defense, dealing with external enemies, but also in domestic defense are quite staggering. Not only is there a huge amount of money invested into the largest buildup of the military since the Cold War period, but also $36 billion for homeland security, another $100 billion for police and military and technology, and such things.

It’s hard to keep track of exactly what’s passed, but certainly something like that. And that’s all at the same time that that money is — just as in the earlier period — coming out of other kids of investments. Perhaps at a time of economic boom, of the ‘90s, there wouldn’t have been such a trade off, but a period of economic recession would have begun prior to 9/11, and it’s been accelerated for a variety of reasons. All of that investment, not only in national defense against external enemies but at home to deal with these issues of domestic security, is taking money away from other kinds of investments in education and social welfare and a whole variety of issues related to the social welfare state.

 Also, I would suggest that there has been a continuation of the same kinds of pressures to blur the distinction between domestic security policing and intelligence activities of the CIA abroad and in military activities — an increasing collapsing of two different kinds of proceedings. Then increasingly — and we can see this in the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Death Penalty Act and then further expanded in the Patriot Act — there was, subsequent to 9/11, a dramatic expansion of police powers subject to relaxed checks and balances by courts and other kinds of third parties, increased discretion invested in policing authorities, and increased grounds for establishing guilt by association. Increasingly, authorization provided that use of information that is obtained in intelligence gathering about terrorists can be used against domestic criminals where there’s no connection to terrorism.

And this is especially important for the war on drugs. Now there’s a whole new arsenal for dealing with drugs that can be used at the discretion of the police to pursue ordinary drug peddlers and possessors under the aegis of, “Oh, we suspect this person may be tied to terrorism.” Many of you may have seen the ads that have been running and the increasing discourse that those who buy drugs and sell drugs are actually contributing to terrorism because many of the drugs come from countries where terrorists are and that are supportive of terrorists. So that those who are involved in drugs become complicit in terrorism themselves, and this becomes further a kind of cover for carrying on the domestic security, law enforcement, state kinds of activities.

Finally, it seems to me quite clear also that the discourse has really shifted — or is repeating — and it’s the same kind of thing we saw in the later Cold War period. That the primary language to construct 9/11 has been primarily a language that’s more punitive and militaristic and self-interested, rather than a language that’s more ideological and idealistic, as it was in the early Cold War. That earlier period, that provided the catalyst to a more expansive civil rights agenda and a more inclusionary kind of politics, depended on the idealism of the early Cold War — that America projected itself as a free nation that believed in the equal opportunity for all.

We don’t find that in the constructions of this post-9/11 era. And a lot of what was said in earlier panels today bears that out very clearly, that this has been interpreted as a mix of self-interest, realpolitik, and of a kind of righteousness — the language, you know, of dealing with the Evil Empire, or irrational people you can’t bargain with and want them dead or alive, want to root evil out of the holes in which they buried themselves in, and all these kinds of things. It is not exactly a language of idealism. It’s not a language that celebrates rule of law, justice, civil rights — as was the language of the early Cold War. Now in some ways that’s not entirely surprising because the nature of the enemy is really quite different in the terrorist age than it was in the communist age.

Although some people may really want to take issue with that, while the terrorists may not have a world vision that we really want to honor and do battle with, they are at least speaking to people who have an alternative world vision. Regardless, that has not been the construction of this, so that the U.S. really hasn’t responded in a way that it’s established itself in the world as a moral leader. And that was the thrust of much of what was said in the earlier panel today: even those who are getting the job of defending some of the Bush policies … some of the primary points of his talk were that they haven’t done a very good job of justifying — providing the justifications and the reasons and what is this all about — and providing the kind of moral leadership that was characteristic of the earlier period.

As a result, that has reduced the pressures of having to take seriously those ideals with regard to internal policies. And we can see the ways in which, as the concern about security has increased, the issues of civil rights — social justice, the problems of the poor, race relations, ongoing social problems such as Social Security, providing for health care — issues that had a little place in the 90’s but have been marginalized for long period of time in American politics — are even further pushed off the agenda.

I could give lots of examples, but let me give just one: the State of the Union address was very interesting. This is where social scientists … I’ll do a little bit of quantitative analysis — I counted words in the State of the Union address. The State of the Union address is an address that, not surprisingly, was all about security and retribution. That, if you look at the address, the words that were used more often were: “security,” it was used 14 times; “terror” was mentioned 20 times, 17 times in the first third of the speech; and “freedom” does show up a lot of the time, but freedom was almost always used in the context of freedom from fear, freedom from violence, freedom from the threat of the terrorists, rather than in some more robust domestic kind of sense.

What’s interesting is not just what was used but what’s not used. For the State of the Union address, or for any major national politician’s speech, the term “justice” shows up five times, every time in terms of retribution — never in terms of social justice and a commitment to deal with social justice at home. There’s no mention of civil rights, there’s no mention of civil liberties, and there’s no mention of the policies that we would identify with those basic logics. The whole speech was organized around three different kinds of security, and then that becomes the dominant theme, which is not entirely surprising. But what’s important is what’s not there, what becomes further marginalized.

 I would suggest again that that is more than an extension of the kind of rhetoric and policy agenda from the later period of the Cold War, from the late 60s or 70s on, than it was that earlier period. And that, I think, is the primary implication of what we see in politics in the contemporary period. In some ways we don’t notice it because we are so used to it. That, far from changing everything, that what we see is a reinforcement of the domestic agenda that is highly security-oriented, highly mobilized around dealing with people’s fears, and increasingly silent — or continues the relative silence about a whole variety of issues that have had greater prominence at other times.

Let me emphasize that I don’t want to suggest that that’s really a partisan issue. What it is … the agenda that both parties deal with over time has really shifted dramatically in the last 40 or 50 years. So my point is that, contrary to what a number of scholars a few years ago would have predicted, that the next crisis might provide a real opening or a real set of pressures for more social justice-oriented kind of politics. I don’t think that 9/11 has provided that kind of catalyst, that kind of opportunity, that set of pressures. I don’t think that we are likely to see that in the contemporary period.

I think that the dominant rhetoric at home mirrors, in some ways, that abroad. It’s not about human rights or civil rights, it’s not a discourse about the rule of law, and it’s not a discourse primarily about democracy. It is a discourse about what people have talked about today, about security, about self-interest — and tinged with some righteousness and retribution. And it seems to me that that has continued and reinforced where the domestic agenda was before that. I say that with a certain amount lamentation. Again, far from changing everything, I lament the fact that 9/11 didn’t have nearly as much impact to change what our domestic policy agenda is.

(Applause)

Professor Dunham: Thank you, Michael. I’d be interested in having this opened to questions right away. Michael mentioned, earlier mentioned, how interesting, how the first program was this morning, but thought that basically the questions were pretty softball — that he was used to more rowdy kinds of questions. So I think if any of you, I’m not sure about being rowdy, but if you want to ask hardball questions, I’m sure the panelists will be glad to answer.

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