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Council on Foreign Relations
New York, NY
MODERATOR: Welcome to today's Council on Foreign Relations meeting.
This is a meeting that is on the record, I want to remind you. And I also want to ask, if you haven't done so already, please turn off your BlackBerrys or cell phones or any other wireless devices that you may have been enticed into purchasing the last number of years.
We'll have a -- since I'm up here, I will try to engage our two speakers for 20 or 25 minutes in a conversation, and then we'll open it up to questions from the audience.
Our speakers are -- and you have the bios on these two gentlemen, so I won't say an awful lot about them -- to my immediate left, Ambassador Jim Dobbins, who most recently -- is with the RAND Corporation at the moment, but most recently was assistant secretary of State in 2000-2001, and has held numerous positions in our government for many, many years. Also been involved in a number of situations where there has been some particular crisis, or where the president has needed particular expertise.
And to my far left, David Rothkopf, who is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment, is today the president and CEO of Garten-Rothkopf (ph), a(n) international advisory group. And he is also -- and I hope we will have some copies here soon -- the author of "Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council." I won't tell you that I got through all of it this weekend, but I did read most of it, and it is a terrific book. He has really done an incredible job with research, and I think he's interviewed everybody in the world that's been involved in foreign relations in our government in the last 20 years.
Let me begin by asking David, having written this book, being here tonight is somewhat timely in the sense that Colonel Wilkerson, you may have seen last week, the chief of staff of former Secretary of State Powell, severely criticized the current administration and its national security people. He said, using his own words, that this was a Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal, and that they had hijacked the national apparatus for their own purposes, and also used the word "dysfunctional."
You have written a great deal about this and thought an awful lot about it. What is your reaction to what Colonel Wilkerson said?
DAVID ROTHKOPF: Well, I think certainly "dysfunctional" is an applicable word. The apparatus was not used in the way that it works best.
There is some irony in this, in that I think you can argue that during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, it maybe was used in the way it worked best, where you had a diversity of views presenting the president with real choices. The president was therefore able to make informed decisions, and then the apparatus was able to oversee the implementation of those decisions.
This apparatus, with many of the same players, became skewed and off-center. A diversity of views existed, but it was not sought out; and in fact, in some respects it was suppressed. And rather than having multiple opinion, you had bitter internecine conflict. In fact, I would say that the infighting between the State Department and the Defense Department in the first term of the Bush administration was as bitter as it has been at any time in history, including Weinberger and Schultz, or other internecine rivalries such as Henry Kissinger and William Rogers.
Now having said that, there's a place where I depart from the Wilkerson analysis, and in this respect I think Dick Holbrooke and his piece in The Washington Post may have gotten it right as well: the cabal didn't take over the administration. The president of the United States gets to determine how he wants his government to function. It's not like he was sitting alone in the Oval Office with the door closed while Cheney and Rumsfeld got together, cooked up some policies, went off and did them, and he was, you know, watching television, although that may have happened from time to time. (Laughter.)
MODERATOR: I think what Holbrooke said was presidents get the advice they deserve.
ROTHKOPF: Well, but that's right, and the president picked this team. And then, rather demanding that all views get an equal airing, or demanding a kind of an analytical approach that would ensure that mistakes wouldn't be made and that the best intelligence would make its way to the top, he sought an approach that started with a conclusion and tried to manufacture the momentum necessary to see it through.
And what happened was that the national security apparatus and the communications and political apparatus got conflated, and we forgot which end was actually driving the process. And this White House Iraq Group, which is now at the center of this investigation which is going to come to a head this week, became the central point where we stopped knowing what was the cart and what was the horse.
MODERATOR: Jim, do you want to react to it?
JAMES DOBBINS: Well, I mean, I agree with David and with Dick Holbrooke that presidents get the national security structure that they deserve; and that the National Security Council in its end process has tended to reflect the -- you know, has tended to revive and morph reflecting presidential personalities.
I mean, if you look back, you know, Kennedy was an elitist who was disdainful of the permanent bureaucracy, and what you got was the best and the brightest.
Nixon was conspiratorial, secretive, cynical, and what you got was the Henry Kissinger-led National Security Council process.
Carter was both a micro-manager but somebody who was undecided in his basic orientation, and what you got was an administration riven by on the one hand micro-management, on the other a basic gulf on overall orientation.
George -- the first George Bush was the most experienced president in terms of prior foreign policy experience, having been head of the CIA and ambassador to both the United Nations and China. He was respectful of the permanent bureaucracy and was personally cautious, and what you got was a very orderly process which relied heavily on professional advice.
On I think Bill Clinton was, you know, an undisciplined polymath who learned only over time the importance of discipline in decision-making.
And George Bush came in uninformed, largely uninterested in the minutiae of foreign policy, with a management style that emphasized discipline, loyalty, and got a structure that was geared to those qualities.
I think that the structural -- the national security process works well when it is a disciplined adversary process in which all of the stakeholders have an opportunity to come forward to make their case, and in which the president makes decisions only after having listened to alternative viewpoints, and where wisdom is achieved through this dialectical process. The problem is, and the problem that all administrations face is, that in this increasingly open era, in which it's virtually impossible to keep an internal debate secret, this open dialectical controlled adversarial process works against spin control and the ability to build a broad national and international consensus for a potentially controversial course of action.
And there are trade-offs there. I think in this case the president decided early on on the course of action he intended to adopt toward Iraq, and designed a process designed not to illuminate that course of action and throw up its possible flaws, but rather one designed to promote maximum unity within the administration and support within the public and within the international community. And the result was a failure to examine alternative courses of action and what turned out to have been unjustified assumptions.
I think Wilkerson is wrong to suggest this was simply the product of a cabal because I agree with you that the president must have known what was going on and must have been comfortable with it, and must have been quite content to have the decision-making influenced by this informal process.
On the other hand, I think Wilkerson is right. He makes the case for what he calls a new Goldwater-Nichols act, one which would bring the same degree of structure to the National Security Council -- to the national security process, that Goldwater-Nichols brought to the process of going to war. That is, if we go to war, everybody knows who does what; there's a legislative division of labor. And that's missing, particularly in the post-conflict situation, where what State does, what AID does, what DOD does in -- once the shooting stops tends to shift from administration to administration.
And I think that he's on to something there. And the structure has evolved over the last 50 years, and it's probably worth trying to capture it again in a more fully articulated set of legislative guidelines which would ensure that it doesn't shift so rapidly, so fundamentally from one president to another.
MODERATOR: But let me bring you back to the national security apparatus because you raised an interesting question when you go through this president did that, that president did that. As we all know, most presidents come into office saying, I want to do it differently from the way that it's done.
We have a next president-elect, whoever he or she may be, and they'd call you up and say, how do I go about doing this? What characteristics do I look for? What am I trying to build here, or how do I try to build this apparatus, so that it works? And tell me about the lessons in doing that learned from this administration.
David, how would you -- how would you advise the next president-elect in trying to build a good national security apparatus?
ROTHKOPF: Well, when she calls -- (laughter) --
MODERATOR: I said he or she.
ROTHKOPF: Oh, excuse me.
My sense is that one of us -- it may already be too late at that point. The reality is that the last four out of five presidents that we've elected in the United States have come into office with no national security experience. Now that is kind of extraordinary. We are the richest, most powerful nation in the history of the world at the apotheosis of our power. Our relations with the rest of the world are absolutely essential to almost every aspect of our domestic life, as well as to the traditional concerns of international affairs. And yet somehow the American people don't think it's a job requirement for the president of the United States to actually understand how to work the national security system.
MODERATOR: Even though most presidents spend an awful lot of time --
ROTHKOPF: Well, they end up, A, drawn in to it to a large degree, and B, they end up liking it to a large degree because, among other things, it's one of the few places where they can meet with peers, and many aspects of it give them an opportunity to interact -- to take executive initiative without being burdened by the Congress. But the reality is that the place you begin to build an effective national security system is with a president who knows what they want and knows how to run that system.
You know, I don't know that, you know, after having studied this system in some depth for the past couple of years, that a massive amount of reinvention of the system is necessary. I agree with Jim, by the way, and I agree with the Wilkerson assertion; I think that Goldwater-Nichols, like innovations on the civil side of the government, to create that purpleness, that kind of jointness that exists successfully within the military, can be very helpful. And I think people need -- if you are in Treasury and you want to do your job in Treasury, it might be useful to spend some time at State or it might be useful to spend some time working the White House and so forth as part of your career path. It helps those agencies to function together.
But you know, the things that at the end of the day drive the process are politics, personalities and the possible. And so you have to look at, A, you know, the personality and the capability of the president; and then, B, the people around him.
When Jim and I were talking about this before, he said, well, the simple thing to do would be to just go and hire Brent Scowcroft again. And --
MODERATOR: But Brent is, you know, I think 80 now.
ROTHKOPF: And I think he's an excellent choice, and I think he's probably the guy who has done the job best, but he's probably not going to be available the next time around.
But there is some truth, also, in the selection of a guy like Scowcroft who has a lot of experience. And going with somebody -- and if he had -- the reason he was so successful under George H.W. Bush, beside any personal quality, because he'd done the job already. I mean, he's the only person that served in the job twice. And then the people around him had also a lot of experience with the process.
And you know, we just -- you know, we -- I think we have to leave the era in which we think somehow that the enlightened, well-intentioned amateur can manage this kind of extremely complex, extremely critical set of decisions. And we also have to leave the era in which we think that any one individual is going to be decisive. This is a corporation. You need to be hiring a senior management team that can work together, perhaps that have some history of working together, and that understands the apparatus that they're driving.
And so, you know, I would start with those kind of things as opposed to, you know, get out a blank sheet of paper, as is typical of the case, redraw the org chart. And as was done in most administrations up until the very last one or two, try and come up with new acronyms for presidential decision directives and other things to really put your stamp on the --
MODERATOR: And with every presidential directive that came down --
ROTHKOPF: Typically the thing that happened was that, you know, we rearranged the deck chairs.
Of course, we also have this insane system, right, where we fire everybody if he's in a senior position when we take over the government. I mean, can you imagine, you know, taking over a company and the first thing you do is fire the top 3,000 executives in the company, say, okay now we can really get down to the business of running this thing. (Laughter.) You know --
MODERATOR: And there are others who take the view that we don't want to do anything like the predecessors do.
ROTHKOPF: Right. But the reality -- you know, if you go -- if you become prime minister of Great Britain, which is perhaps unlikely -- (laughter) -- but were you to become, you know, and you go into No. 10 Downing Street, you know, there will be a staff there that tells you what's in the files. That's a helpful thing.
You know, George W. Bush gets the White House, and not only is nobody there, but the Ws are missing off the typewriters. You know, this is -- (chuckles) -- this is indicative of a fundamental problem in the way that we approach it.
MODERATOR: Jimmy, you obviously agree that you'd go back and get Scowcroft because you've spoken very highly of him also. But tell me, what lessons do I learn from the group that is there now as I go into selecting my team? There must be some things I can glean from that; I don't want to do this, I do want to do that.
DOBBINS: Yeah, I think -- I think you need -- if you can't get Brent Scowcroft, you ought to get somebody like him; that is, somebody who -- a rather self-effacing personality, a high level of competence and deep experience, and a reputation for wisdom.
I think the -- Rice, in -- Rice in describing her job in your book, but I think probably in other forums as well, has said she conceived of her first task as being the staffer to the president, second task was achieving the president's agenda, and third task was running the interagency process.
I would have a different set of priorities. I think the national security adviser's top priority is to prevent the president from making a really terrible mistake. He ought to conceive of that as his most important priority. His second priority ought to be achieving the president's agenda, but in that order.
Now obviously if you do too much of one, you don't do enough of the other, and there's a balance to be achieved there. But I do believe that preserving the president from the kind of horrendous mistakes that can be made when options are not sufficiently examined before decisions are made have to be looked at as the first priority of any successful national security adviser because those kinds of mistakes are all too easy to make.
The second point is recruiting a staff. I think David pointed this out. You need to -- you know, you need to recruit the highest possible quality staff. It should be mixed; it should have professionals from within the government, and it should have professionals from without the government. But it should be made up of professionals, which doesn't mean they have to be career employees. They may come from Capitol Hill. They may come, in some cases, from academia. But they are foreign policy professionals, ideally put in at the senior levels of the staff with considerable government experience, and they have to be the absolute best you can get. And patronage and ideological considerations shouldn't be predominant, which doesn't mean that they -- that you don't try particularly in your recruiting outside the career service to get people who are of the same general opinion as the president. But first-rate people are not going to be people who depend on patronage to get ahead, and first-rate people aren't going to be ideologically pure. And if those are your criteria, you are going to end up with a second-rate staff.
MODERATOR: Let me ask one additional question. And David, you brought this up in our discussion.
We are all waiting to find out this week whether or not there will be indictments for one crime or another. Potentially there are indictments of a lot of people involved in the national security apparatus group in this administration: Rove, of course -- the NSC reported to him; Libby, the chief of staff for the vice president; and the vice president himself; even Condoleezza Rice. I mean, we just don't know where this is going and how it comes out. But we do know that it is all about -- whether there are indictments or not -- keeping things secret, which is what the NSC staff and people are supposed to do.
What does this tell us about this group of people, whether there's indictments or not? Doesn't it something about the way they've operated?
ROTHKOPF: Well, I think that, you know, whether the legal process for this is indictments, we can certainly, using our own judgment, produce an indictment of the way the process worked.
And what I think is interesting to me is that here you have a process that has produced a number of serious problems. Take the one around the case of Valerie Plame, where you do have the deputy chief of staff to whom NSC activities now report, the vice president's national security adviser, his deputy national security adviser involved at the center of this issue. How they are involved is not clear, but they were involved.
You also have -- the first person that Karl Rove goes to when he speaks to a Time magazine reporter is he sends an e-mail to Steve Hadley, who's the national security adviser. So presumably there is some obligation -- or he's now the national security adviser; he was the deputy national security adviser then -- there is some obligation on people like, you know, really good professionals such as Steve Hadley to raise a red flag, to be concerned about what is going on here in this process.
And there hasn't been a story in the paper about whether or not this is indicative of a breakdown of the national security apparatus in a fundamental way -- the most fundamental, the ability to keep secrets, protect U.S. secrets -- and that the people atop that apparatus fundamentally failed in one of their core responsibilities to the United States and to the system that they serve.
And I think that that's something that needs to be looked at, even as we look at the technicalities, and whether there were cover-ups of cover-ups of cover-ups, which is typical of the way things go in Washington. Nobody ever gets indicted for doing something wrong; it's always for lying about doing something wrong, or you know, to a second or to a third degree. And you know, I think that's one area that we need to look at.
Of course, this was in the context of a much bigger set of breakdowns in which the national security apparatus was used to advance political goals as opposed to for -- in an even worse case, in lieu of -- doing what it should have been doing in terms of assessing circumstances properly, finding the facts, getting the facts before the decision-makers, getting the right decision made. And that comes -- that goes back to this point that I think is true in terms of this White House Iraq group and the conflation of the political communications apparatus and the national security apparatus.
You never -- nothing in Washington is apart from politics; that's naive. But you need to make every effort when lives are at stake and national interests are at stake to try to have the debate about what to do in as politics-free an environment as possible, to get as much of the truth on the table as possible, to strip away a lot of the ideological biases, then make the decision. Ultimately people will be driven by their ideological biases and their political agendas, but you need to try to step away from that because precisely the fact that it is distorted. And that broke down.
And to me, that's worse than whatever people are going to be indicted for in the context of this system. And of course, the whole rationale for going into Iraq and some of the assertions that later proved to be untrue raises much greater questions than anything raised in this particular case.
MODERATOR: Jimmy, you have any feelings about this?
DOBBINS: Yeah, I'm a little more sympathetic than David is, maybe because, after all, I recall that in the last administration, it was actually the president who got indicted.
ROTHKOPF: Well, it's early yet. (Laughter.)
DOBBINS: I saw a guy who was special -- I was special assistant for President Clinton from '96 to '99, which was throughout the whole period of the impeachment period, and watched that White House function under that kind of -- (inaudible) -- and actually it functioned quite well. I also recall that in the Reagan administration, the president's national security adviser was not only indicted, he was convicted and went to jail. So I think we have to look at this in a little perspective.
I am concerned about what has been, accurately I think, called the criminalization of politics in Washington; the use of normally fairly trivial charges -- and certainly the underlying charges in the Valerie Plame case, as in President Clinton's case, were fairly trivial -- in order to discipline the system and achieve political objectives. And I think that this is -- this makes it very difficult for people of good will and integrity, frankly, to function in that kind of environment. It drives people away from public service.
Now I don't know what the alternative is because I do think that, as David said, this investigation has illuminated ways of doing business which probably deserve that scrutiny. I think that clearly -- whether or not you call this a conspiracy depends on whether or not the activities were illegal, but clearly there was a concerted effort within the White House to undermine, for instance, Wilson's criticism by dragging in his relationship with his wife and her relationship with the CIA in these kinds of things. And it's unfortunate that the journalists involved were incapable of illuminating that particular activity without having to go through an extremely costly investigative procedure. But I think that this -- I think that the criminalization of politics is overall, I think, pernicious, and I think it is driving people away from public service.
MODERATOR: I agree with both those conclusions. Unfortunately, I don't think it's going to stop.
I'd like to open it up to questions from the audience. Please state your name and your affiliation. Here.
QUESTIONER: Winston Lord from the International Rescue Committee.
I think the comments by both panelists were --
Okay. I guess the room's small enough.
(Comes on mike.) Comments by both panelists were, on the whole, excellent. The other shoe is about to drop, but I thought very wise and perceptive.
And by the way, I will plug Rothkopf's book. It is really first rate. I mean that sincerely.
Jim, and many of your comments I agree with, including the criminalization problem which people face going into public office. But I was astonished to hear you say -- and I want to give you a chance to correct it -- (laughter) -- that you thought the underlying charges in the Valerie Plame case are trivial. The CIA didn't think it was trivial. They asked for an investigation. Letting someone's name out who is at least once and currently a covert agent risks people's lives, is a problem of national security. Then if you slide in and say, well, it's only perjury or obstruction of justice, that was pretty serious when Clinton was doing it, now we're going to have a double standard. So I'd like to give you a chance to correct what I found an astonishing statement, that these underlying charges are trivial.
DOBBINS: I think I'll standby my statement, Winston (sp). I think the fact that I don't think there's ever been a prosecution under this statute, despite any number of revelations of this sort over the years. The statute was put into effect because a CIA agent was apparently killed as the result of a revelation. I think the chances of that having happened in this case are negligible.
QUESTIONER: Including her contacts overseas? How do you know --
DOBBINS: I don't believe she was having any contacts overseas.
QUESTIONER: (Off mike) -- yeah, she was under cover -- (off mike) --
DOBBINS: I mean, it's a matter of opinion. First of all, I suspect that when we get the case, we're going to find that they didn't actually know she was a covert agent. In any case, I mean, on the grand scale of things, this is -- this strikes me as not justifying the degree of attention it's gotten.
Now I think, you know, that clearly -- you know, I've gone through my answer. I mean, I think it did reveal some underlying patterns of behavior that the public is well served to have learned more about.
MODERATOR: This gentleman, then I'll come --
QUESTIONER: John Temple Swing.
I would like to ask you to say a bit about the role of the Vice President -- not only the present vice president, but going back over the years -- because it seems to me that his powers have grown substantially, starting under Clinton with giving Al Gore much more responsibility. But now we have an entirely different situation. I'd be interested in your assessment of the vice president's role in the National Security Council's operations.
DOBBINS: Well, the vice president's role has changed over time and, I think generally speaking, has grown over time. I think, in fact, one thing that's happened to a greater and greater degree over time is that the White House has become more and more responsible for a lot of this decision-making that a number of decades ago they tried to spread out more among agencies simply because news cycles require decisions to be made close to the president. Because everything gets covered on the news, everything has political consequence, political advisors around the president want to have an oar in the water.
There's also, then, of course, the sort of secular trend of the vice president becoming more influential. And whether -- you know, you date it back to Mondale and the role that he played during the Carter administration or whether you, you know, want to cite some of the roles that George H.W. Bush played or Al Gore played or -- you know, there has been an appreciation of power.
Having said that, no vice president in American history even remotely approaches the influence of Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney had a national security staff that was larger in terms of number of professionals than the national security staff that John Kennedy started out with. Dick Cheney, in the words of the estimable Richard Haass -- (laughter) -- had, through his staff attendance at working level meetings and policy meetings, and then meetings in the Oval Office, sort of three swings at the ball every time. He was an activist and clearly the 800 pound gorilla in that group.
And the reality is, that very early on -- and certainly by 9/11 -- Condoleezza Rice had made a decision as national security adviser to stick close to the president; to staff the president, effectively. And so, as a consequence, it enabled the vice president and his former boss -- the secretary of Defense -- to step into the void and to drive the process to an unprecedented degree.
And I think -- I mean, whether you call it the Rumsfeld-Cheney cabal or whether you see it as an ideological crusade, I think those things are aside -- quite apart from the point. Every single person I spoke to in the administration -- and I interviewed over 40 people in the administration, many of whom were very supportive of much of what was done in the administration -- said this is the most powerful vice president in history. The vice president took a leading role in a lot of these decisions that we're talking about here today. They also felt that he was extremely intelligent and extremely competent and, you know, did everything he could to advance his view.
Now the difference between Dick Cheney the vice president and Dick Cheney the secretary of Defense is that there weren't countervailing views. You weren't able to get the benefit of his views balanced by other views. The arrow was pointing disproportionately in the direction of his perspectives because of his unique role.
QUESTIONER: I mean, that's the curious part about it. You both identify him as part of the national security team that you would hold out as one of the best if not the best in Bush 41 as secretary of Defense. And now he comes as vice president, he's very, very different and runs an entirely different operation.
DOBBINS: No, I don't think the vice president's influence in this administration has derived from his position as vice president. I mean, he could be White House chief of staff and exercise the same degree of influence. It's not his constitutional office that gives him this power.
I think that, you know, the position of vice presidents has varied, but they're largely not particularly influential -- even when they're quite well prepared, such as the elder George Bush in the Reagan administration, where he was more than ceremonial, but less than a key player on most foreign policy decisions.
It's true that the Clinton administration started the process of giving the vice president a substantial international security staff; rather than one or two people, giving him a dozen people or so. And the Clinton administration is responsible for that innovation, also responsible for giving these staffers access to the process. And they do have access to the process at every level, and that's a Clinton administration innovation.
I don't know that's one that successive administrations need to live with, although, you know, future vice presidents may come in with an expectation that they're going to enjoy a similar privilege. I was, frankly, uncomfortable with it in the Clinton administration. I worked for the National Security Council staff and I didn't see why I should be second-guessed by anybody from a vice presidential staff. But others were willing to live it, and it worked adequately in that administration.
But Cheney could be exercising the same influence in a different position if the president was prepared to accord him that degree of access and give that weight to his views.
MODERATOR: Yes? The gentleman there.
QUESTIONER: Hi, Ian Bremmer.
On how Bush foreign policy has been made, a lot of conversation about Iraq. And I'm wondering if we look outside Iraq, to what extent do you think that the structural issues remain as true? If you look at Bush foreign policy on China, for example, it seems from the outside I'd be much more diffuse, involved, and perhaps even leadership -- people like Zoellick and so forth -- aren't as obviously beholden to people like Cheney.
So if we can get off -- while the conversation has been on Iraq, obviously, given the Plame situation and so forth, how would you divide that up? Or is it just, you know, sort of what's left over and the dregs can be handled by people because we don't care as much about it?
And the second sort of related issue is to what extent do you think there's been a structural change with the second administration? I mean, as we see Wolfowitz sort of moved over to World Bank and Bolton in a different position and Rumsfeld not as obviously involved day to day in foreign policy issues, Feith gone, so forth. I mean, is that a real -- is there any structural change there at all, or is it just kind of more of the same but with slightly different characters?
ROTHKOPF: Well, you know, Iraq because of its nature, being interwoven with the war on terror -- you take those two things together; that sucked a lot of the oxygen out of the room during the first term of the administration. And it's not to say that other issues didn't get attention, but they certainly didn't get anywhere nearly the same amount of attention at the top. And so consequently, I think for reasons that you pointed to, you know, in some cases they may have benefited from the lack of attention -- (laughs) -- in the sense that certain people who were capable professionals and a little bit out of the limelight were able to handle them in a less ideological way.
I mean, I always find it kind of interesting when I hear Clinton administration officials -- you know, ex-Clinton officials -- assailing the Bush administration for their approach in Iraq and then simultaneously assailing them for the approach they took in North Korea, which was the approach they wanted them to take in Iraq. You know, there's a fundamental inconsistency there.
You know, having said that, I do think that in the second term, you have seen some fundamental changes. I don't know to what degree they have to do with personnel changes and to what degree they have to do with lessons learned from the first term. The reality is that the Bush administration was beat up diplomatically because of a number of the decisions they took with regard to Iraq. They wanted to move from a more sort of militarily driven foreign policy to a diplomatically driven foreign policy for a variety of reasons. This necessarily shifted the balance from the Defense Department, where it typically -- you know, the balance of power lies in a -- when we're in a war footing, back more towards the State Department. And then, of course, there were a number of changes that took place; you cited some of them.
I think a lot of the factors that made Condoleezza Rice kind of a -- not a great national security adviser can make her a very effective secretary of State -- the closeness to the president, the fact that when she speaks to a foreign leader, they know she's speaking for him; when they ask her to pass on a message, they know that she can speak to him. And you know, frankly, I think she's revealed herself to be not as ideological as people have characterized her. I mean, Bolton was originally proposed to be the deputy secretary of State; she chose Bob Zoellick -- who's, you know, a real internationalist -- over him. She chose Nick Burns for the number three job, who's also a real traditional State Department professional. Brought in Phil Zelikow. Brought in a real sort of balanced internationalist team. And so I think there's a lot of, you know, evidence that she wasn't the ideologue neo-con and that you're getting a little bit more nuanced foreign policy from her, and the president -- or the vice president isn't quite (feeling his head ?) as much as he did before, and so that's being pulled back a little bit. You're getting a little bit more balance.
So I don't know if that answers your question, but I think we're seeing some progress. Clearly, if the administration is weakened by a series of indictments or a series of indictments and a hurricane and a problem over a Supreme Court judge and, you know, $90 barrel oil, it's going to make it more difficult to carry on an effective foreign policy, even if they're more inclined to do so.
DOBBINS: Three things that happen in second terms: first, they tend to move back toward the center; second, they become more professional and more experienced, the proportion of career people in top jobs goes up; and thirdly, they begin to pay for their sins in the first administration. So Nixon had Watergate, Reagan had Iran-contra, Clinton had his impeachment. And so we're seeing all three of these phenomena with the current administration.
MODERATOR: Pete. Mr. Peterson, I should say.
QUESTIONER: Pete Peterson.
However we may feel about how serious the transgression was on Mr. Wilson's wife, I think we would all agree that a far more serious question is did we go into this war in which the American people were not told the underlying reasons that we were going to war, and then the reasons we did give them were not based on facts -- I refer -- and I understand this is just a thesis, but when you read something like yesterday's piece by Frank Rich in which he suggests that they had decided to go to war even before the administration took over, under some conceptual notion of transforming the Middle East and getting control of oil, but they decided that that wouldn't play very well in Peoria, and therefore, we had to come up with a marketing strategy that scared the hell out of people when -- tying Saddam to al Qaeda and, you know, weapons of mass destruction. Now I'm not saying that's true, but I'm saying even the possibility that it's true should scare us mightily.
Now my question is: Going to war, as we've discovered here, is very serious business and costly in a lot of ways. Do we need some new process by which the decision is made to go to war? Does Congress need some access or something that reduces the possibility that the American people are being misled?
ROTHKOPF: Well, clearly, that's the more serious issue. And I think there's plenty of evidence to suggest that there was at least an inclination to move forward in this direction prior to the beginning of the administration, if not a coalesced plan. And they were opportunistic and I think hugely disingenuous in attempting to link the events of September 11th to the agenda in Iraq. And I think that that dishonesty certainly trumps any dishonesty that's associated with the Valerie Plame situation, and in fact is of enormous and deeply troubling severity.
Now in terms of how do you avoid this going forward, you know, I'm a little reluctant to suggest that we involve the Congress more in this, because I think that to the extent to which the executive branch is dysfunctional -- (laughter) -- the Congress is substantially more so, and that, in fact, one of the most troubling trends in Washington in the past couple of decades has been the fact that the center has become the fringe party and has atrophied, and that the extremes on both branches, of both parties have come to set the agenda to a far greater degree. And so to sort of put the reins in their hands is troubling.
But I think you do get to a core issue -- a tougher one, though -- and that is how do you keep the American people from being duped? When we went to war in Afghanistan, 83 percent of Americans between the age of 18 and 24 couldn't find Afghanistan on a map. Forty percent couldn't find the Pacific Ocean on a map! This is the Council on Foreign Relations and we know that it's the largest thing on any map. But it's indicative of a problem. More Americans get their news from the "Daily Show" than from The New York Times. We've got a fundamental problem in terms of how the American people have been educated to be the people to whom this apparatus reports, because at the end of the day, the NSC and the president do report to a higher power; they report to the American people. And if the American people don't understand the issues, don't think understanding the issues are important, haven't had the education, can't see through it, are able to be cowed by this kind of callous and extremely shallow campaign to equate debate with treason, which was essentially at the centerpiece of American politics for a couple of years, we're going to continue to get bad results. And so I think the problem exists outside the government and reflects itself inside the government, as opposed to being one that can be fixed inside the government.
DOBBINS: I think the failure to have conducted an illuminating national debate on Iraq before the war is a bipartisan failure for which the Democrats are almost as guilty as the Republicans. There was a congressional resolution; it authorized the president to do exactly what he did, and it was voted overwhelmingly, without any significant debate. It's hard to know (what ?) more one might want. Now, I think we could -- I think you can make an argument that we should go back to a stricter interpretation of the Constitution, which lodges in power -- in Congress the power to make war, to declare war, and to say, you know -- during the Cold War, we move away from this on the argument that the president of the United States might have to make a decision to launch a nuclear strike on a moment's notice and these decisions couldn't be subjected to the process of congressional debate and decision. But the war in Iraq is a classic war of choice, and there's absolutely no reason why, instead of submitting a resolution, the president couldn't have been required once, he'd made a determination, to submit a declaration of war and have Congress vote on it. But I do think that the failure was a truly bipartisan failure.
MODERATOR: We'll take one more question. Yes, sir?
QUESTIONER: Thank you. Marcus Mabry from Newsweek.
My question is, given the fact that -- at least Mr. Rothkopf, you believe that the administration, at very least, had an inclination toward this war even before they took office -- from what we know, from what you know from your research with regard to the secretary of State, current secretary of State, when she was national security adviser -- assuming she was not part of that neo-con -- she didn't have that neo-con background that other people did who had those inclinations -- what role did she play in her role at that time with regards to the going to war? Did she basically see this is where the train was going and she stepped out of the way, or did she try to actually have some part in refereeing it, or did she stay out of the debate effectively?
ROTHKOPF: Well, first of all, you know, I want to say that although I used the term neo-con, I tend to shy away from it because it's one of those labels that's taken a -- you know, it means something different to everybody. And you know, some of the people who are called neo-cons were neo-cons. Sometimes the term neo-con is used just to mean "pro-Israel; Jewish guys I don't like" -- (laughter) -- which -- and that's, you know, not -- I don't think constructive. (Laughter.)
You know, Condoleezza Rice has some inclinations that are rather conservative. She has a system of beliefs that overlaps to a large extent with everybody else that was in the mix. The question is, on key issues, where were you? And I think that one of the -- and by the way, in my conversations with her and talking to people about it, this is a very professional, thoughtful, intelligent woman who is extremely qualified to be doing the job that she's doing. Did she stand up and advance the right issues at the right time? Did she provide the right balance? I don't think so. Did she manage the process in the way that it needs to be managed by an effective national security adviser? Did she serve as the honest broker? I don't think so.
She said to me: "I was the baby of the group," you know. I mean, you know, if you think about it, Colin Powell and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, on average, were 20 years older; they'd been in the system a lot longer; they knew how to work the system. And so I think she was outplayed in this thing, and that if there was one character trait of hers that let that happen, it wasn't being neo-con; it was being deeply loyal to the president, and that she was drawn right up to his side and she wanted to advance his policies; she wanted to support him. And in so doing, I think she failed to do what Jim asserted was the first job of the national security adviser, and that's protect the president by keeping him from making a terrible mistake. Of course, that's of great consequence because it also is protecting the American people and the rest of the world from the consequences of that great mistake.
MODERATOR: Jim, do you -
I'm told to bring this to the end right on time. And gentlemen, David, Jim, thank you very much for being here.
ROTHKOPF: A pleasure.
DOBBINS: Thank you. (Applause.)
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