Host: Amb. Jeanette Hyde, President, American Diplomacy Publishers: I want to say good morning and to welcome you to American Diplomacy Publishers 10th Anniversary Celebration. Thank you for being here with us today. I'm happy to see all of you and I know there's many distinguished guests in the audience, but in particular I would like to recognize that our co-sponsor today, the International Affairs Council Members are here and the Executive Director of the International Affairs Council is here with us, Todd Culpepper. Could I ask Todd and the members of the International Affairs Council to stand, please, and let us recognize you. Thank you for all that you all do.
You know, it is a beautiful Saturday morning and it is a great day for a good, all-healthy-American debate. When American Diplomacy Publishers started discussing how to celebrate our 10th Anniversary, you know, we thought about throwing ourselves a party, of course; that's the first thing you think of, but then we decided that more in keeping with the nature of our business and our mission, we decided that a debate on a timely issue important to our country and the American people would be more in keeping, so we hope that you will enjoy our program today.
Many of you may not be familiar with American Diplomacy Publishers, so if I could just note very, very quickly: We publish an online journal on international issues. When launched in 1996, ten years ago, our journal had the distinction of being one of the few electronic journals in the world. Now I know this is hard to believe -- that just ten years ago we were one of the few electronic journals in the world, but it is true. Of course, today, ten years later American Diplomacy continues to thrive. Now, of course, among innumerable Internet publications our journal remains, we believe, a respected publication of its type, one whose small staff and board of directors work diligently to bring our readers from all over the world comment and analysis of foreign affairs, world events, and understanding of diplomacy, book reviews, the role of the American Foreign Service, historical happenings, as well as an opportunity for illuminating personal accounts from American diplomats serving abroad. If you have not been to our website, please do. We invite you to give us a hit.
The primary impetus for the online journal in 1996 came from Dr. Henry Mattox and Amb. Frank Crigler, both retired Foreign Service and retired to the Triangle to make their home. I would like to ask them to stand and would like to ask all founding members of the American Diplomacy to stand, and to remain standing while I call your names.
Henry Mattox, William Dale, Curt Jones, Bart Moon, Roy Melborne, Ed Williams, and Carl Fritz, and while our founding members are standing I would like to ask all current serving board members to stand and let us recognize you. Thank you, thank you so very much.
Our board actively manages and operates the journal today, and we have a staff of two people, just two people. They are with us today. Will our founding webmasters Sandy Johnson and Chris Kuster please stand. Thank you so much for your hard work.
I also want to recognize the important association with the University of North Carolina and of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies at UNC. Without the valuable link with UNC we could not be where we are today, and where are we today on our 10th Anniversary is with a broadening readership from all over the nation and all corners of the world. We have increasing hits to our website every year, we have eminent online contributors of material for publication, and we have vital financial support from private donors, including the Delavan Family Foundation of Washington, D. C.. Again, thank you for your interest, for being here.
We're pleased to offer the scholarly debate on a most timely foreign policy issue with a most knowledgeable and distinguished panel, and now it is my great pleasure to introduce our moderator for today's discussion. We are honored and happy to have Hodding Carter III, who now lives and teaches at UNC. He said for me to tell you that he was just an old newspaperman from Mississippi. I've known Hodding actually a long time, I guess about forty years, and indeed he is an old newspaperman. His family was in the newspaper business in Greenville, Mississippi, but he now…we are so glad to say, lives and teaches at UNC in Chapel Hill. You will remember him from his prominent role with President Jimmy Carter's Administration. He was Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and the State Department spokesman for the Carter Administration. We are sorry his wife Patt could not be with us because she is also a former U.S. State Department diplomat and also teaches at UNC. We're so glad to have them in the Triangle, please welcome the Honorable Hodding Carter, III.
Moderator: Hodding Carter, III, Professor, UNC:
Thank you very much for that, and thank you for not getting much beyond that because in fact given the qualifications of our speakers, to go much beyond the journalist side would be a bad mistake in introducing me. Now I asked each of the speakers to give me three lines that if I absolutely had to introduce them and had nothing else to say would be what they wanted me to say, and that's what I'm going to read. I trust that everyone here is literate and you have some very nice programs which go further into the backgrounds of each of our speakers, and I hope you will read them, and in fact I can say on each one of them there are many more things that might have been in there. They were asked to curtail, as we all were, what we had in the program and I'm going to curtail it even further for the sake of the program, which is going to run like this:
Each of the speakers will speak from this microphone for ten minutes in the order in which you see them reading from your right to left as the program has it. We will have a short exchange between the four. Anyone who wishes…what are the words being used? In a civilized and discreet and very… In any case, it's going to be a civilized debate if they wish to go back and forth at each other, and then it is ours in a dialogue between the audience and the panelists. I will try to play ringmaster to a degree, though in fact if you want to ask a question, raise your hand and either the man with the mike, which will be a mobile mike moving among the crowd, Or I will recognize you if he doesn't see you. Make the questions as specific as possible. Make them as short as possible, and as moderator I assure you I'm going to cut you off about five minutes into any of your speeches, all right? So really try to make the questions be questions the conversation obviously can include any amount of opinion you want, but you want to keep it fairly short so that everybody can get a chance to participate.
I want to say one other thing briefly before I introduce the panelists, and that is that we are fortunate to be in this great facility, Exploris [in Raleigh, North Carolina]. One of the things they particularly want me to note given the nature of this meeting right now is that they are hosting an exhibit called “The Enemy Within,” which they obtained from the International Spy Museum and it will be running here through Thanksgiving. So for those of you who are interested in that notional aspect of the war that we are engaged in and have been in the past, there's an opportunity.
Now I'm going to get to the speakers in one second because I'm going to take my next forty-five seconds to say two things on my own. The title is “Should the United States use force to establish democratic governance?” and it is of course, the question of use force which is at issue. The United States has been in the business of trying to establish democratic governance in this world for a very long time directly and indirectly and since World War II quite directly in any number of ways which have felt by some governments in some places to be intrusive. It doesn't matter whether you're talking about human rights, or whether you're talking about funding political parties overseas, whether it's about in fact more direct subsidy of people who are attempting to establish democracy. We have been in this business for quite a long time. The question of military as a should is a question here, and should is the operative word because, of course, “should” raises some obvious questions in itself. That is, it implies at any rate a concern for consequences, a question about outcomes versus inputs, a question about ends and means. It implies the chance of success being central, I assume, to whether or not should has an answer which you can define in some reasonable way.
And so here we are. Should the United States in fact use force to establish democratic governance? There's no question that whether we should or should not, we are at this point by our own protestation as official policy using force to establish democratic governance. So we're past the threshold of “should” in the sense that government has already decided definitely we should. Now we're going to debate and discuss that particular question in a larger, more abstract field, though I assume it's going to have to rely on the examples of the specific instance in front of us, the participants in order that I'm going to say the three lines about each of them, and then have David begin the process.
The first is Congressman David Price, who describes himself as fourth district Congressman of the Triangle area, a former political science public policy professor at Duke and the ranking Democrat in the House Democracy Assistance Commission, working to strengthen parliaments in emerging democracies.
The next speaker will be Lt. Gen. James Lee, a West Pointer and Army War College man who saw combat in the Korean War, twice in Vietnam and was in World War II. He did a Legislative Liaison tour three times for nine years in Washington, four as Chief Director of the Army General Staff in '79-'83. I would add three tours in combat and three tours in Washington, I assume, are about equally stressful. Is that right, General? In any case, that's his three lines.
Joseph Glatthaar is Stephenson Distinguished Professor of History at UNC. He's also the chair of the curriculum on Peace, War and Defense, and he is a specialist in American military history. I would add in passing he noted to me in response to a recent magazine article about the diminishment in academia of the teaching of war studies and professors actually doing this with any competence, that some 4,000 students at UNC go through their [Peace, War and Defense] program, which is not, you know, small potatoes, no matter how large UNC might be.
And finally Robin Dorff, who is the past chairman of the Department of National Security and Strategy, currently senior advisor on Democracy Governance in Civilian-Military Relations, working on fragile and failing states and post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction. The point that he wished me to particularly stress, which is relevant here in some ways, is that he is currently starring as Richard Henry Lee and John Hancock in the local production of 1776, and I hope he'll sing a song or two before this is over.
Congressman Price.
Congressman David Price (D-NC): Thank you. Good morning, everyone. It's great to be with you and I want to thank Jeanette and Hodding and the others who have put this program together. It's a challenging and timely topic and I appreciate the diverse audience here, too. The kinds of interest we have in this is encouraging and important. Should the U.S. government use force to establish democratic governments? The most straightforward answer to this question is no, particularly when one considers the blunders of the current administration. It's not appropriate for the U. S. government or any government to use military force or the threat of military force for the sole purpose of changing the government of a sovereign nation. Doing so violates central tenets of our own American experiment, namely independence and self-determination. Moreover, military force is a blunt instrument, excellent for overwhelming an enemy with force, but ill-suited for building political processes and institutions in a positive way.
But the question can take a more nuanced form. This is probably when I begin to get into trouble because I want to talk about some of those nuances, and some of the more difficult aspects of this as you think about it because, after all, our country is involved and will always be involved in the projection and the use of military force. We can debate about when and how that's appropriate, but in some form we will be utilizing military force or the threat of force in various of our international relations. It's legitimate, it's necessary. Moreover, our country is going to be involved in promoting democracy, and by the way, democracy means more than just holding elections. Democracy is a matter of standing for human rights. Democracy as we're doing, as we're realizing on our [Congressional] Democracy Assistance Commission, is a matter of strengthening parliamentary institutions. But in all of its complexity promoting democracy is also something our country is doing and should do.
So those are two facts of life, and surely they are going to be intertwined in certain ways from time to time. There are a number of cases I expect we can all think about where they are indeed intertwined, and where a simple yes or no answer is not sufficient. To get into a somewhat academic mode for just a moment, you could think, I believe, of two continua, not of a kind of use of force as a single concept or promoting democracy as a single concept. The independent variable in this equation is governmental means, and there's a range of governmental means. There are various kinds of use and projection of force. There are a range of other tactics with more or less coercion involved, all the way up to moral suasion, a continuum you might imagine. On the dependent variable side there's also a continuum, the political outcome, a democracy, not a simple thing, not one size fits all, but a range of governmental practices and institutions all the way up to the kind of autocracies that we know are all too common. So there's a matter of a range of governmental means, a range of desired ends, and how they mix and match in given situations, and that's not a simple matter. I want to suggest a few cases and a few questions which might help us begin to sort this out. Then we'll turn to the real experts.
One question is when military force is required for national security reasons. Is it appropriate to follow a military invasion with an effort to build a democratic government? There are instances we can all think of, most notably World War II, where we've invaded countries, have fought countries that posed a deadly national security threat, and then we've worked to establish democratic institutions in the wake of those conflicts. There are other instances where perhaps we should have intervened in ways we didn't. Read Madeline Albright's memoirs about Rwanda; think about the cases of genocide. Serbia was bordering on that if not actively engaged in classic genocide. So [there are] areas where we perhaps should have been more involved or been involved earlier. These have been situations where for good reasons our country became involved militarily, and the sitting government has disintegrated, and there's been a vacuum left of governance and the rule of law. In such cases establishing some form of government is not only appropriate, it's essential to the success of the military operation and the removal of the threat because the nature of these governments is very much related. Naziism, for example, and other examples we can think of -- the nature of these governments is exactly related, precisely related to the kind of threat that they represented to our security and to world order. So it's only natural and it's important in fact that the U.S. in instances such as this should work to shape the government to be democratic.
Secondly, is it ordinarily possible to do this? Or under what conditions is it possible to do this? It's certainly hard to do in a situation where democracy is a historically foreign concept. It's fair to ask, since World War II are there clear cases, any clear cases in which the U.S. has been successful in establish democracy through the means of force? Examples are pretty hard to come by. I think of Haiti, for example, the Clinton Administration's effort to restore a democratic government in Haiti. The initial result was the restoration of President Aristide to the presidency, followed by the election of President Preval, The democratically elected president did serve out a full six-year term, but as we all know, Haiti's democracy has since suffered, is now in a state of very poor repair. It's not clear whether that's a failure of our intervention or more likely a broader failure of a lack of staying power, given various historical conditions in Haiti.
You can think about the Balkans where international forced intervened in Bosnia and Serbia. Those are both nations where democratic governments do seem to be taking root, but these are special cases. Civil conflicts were already underway here, there was some history of democratic governance. But still it's a case worth thinking about where there was an intervention, a military intervention on the part of our country and its allies for reasons that were, I think, justifiable, and then in the wake of those we had some potential to shape the kind of government that emerged. But you know, those are rare cases and it's hard to point to very many convincing examples of coerced democracy building.
Now there are many examples of democracy promotion. You understand I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the precise question posed today, which is the use of force and [the use] to the extent that can result in the emergence of democratic governance. What factors might contribute to the success of democracy-building efforts? I'll suggest three, and I'll just leave this for further discussion.
But I would say international unity, where this is not just a U. S. effort. International unity is likely a condition for success or at least it promotes success. The international community's involvement in Germany, and I'd say the international community's involvement at the present in Afghanistan, has been positive and has contributed to helping shape a democratic and responsive government, although the jury is still very much out in Afghanistan, of course. I think the international division in conflict in the case of Iraq has been one of many negative factors operating there, so international unity in the effort is one positive factor.
Staying power is another. Democratic governments aren't built overnight. U.S. military forces remain in Germany and Japan to this day, sixty years after World War II. They've remained in South Korea where a democratic government took decades to develop. Our work in Afghanistan has lasted five years and by all indications is not about to end. And I offered Haiti earlier as an example of what may happen when our exit is too early.
Then a third facilitating factor is stability and security. In Germany and Japan and the Balkans a secure environment was successfully established where the governments could function and could emerge. The lack of security, the lack of stability in Afghanistan is, of course, a major impediment at this very moment to the kind of government we would hope would emerge there, and of course, in Iraq the security situation is a disaster.
Finally, let me ask what's perhaps the most difficult question. It's a somewhat broader question than the one that is posed for the panel. What is the appropriate role of the U.S. in seeking to influence the form of other governments aside from the use of force? We do use diplomatic tools, and we should, to support the development of democratic institutions. It's clearly in our national interest in various ways to have more democratic governments. They're less likely to go to war, they're less likely to support terrorism, they're more likely to engage in mutually beneficial trade and other relationships. They also reflect values which we are convinced are not just American values but which have to do with our human condition, the rights of people to be free from torture and from oppression and from the denial of any kind of voice in how they're governed.
But what place does this promotion of democracy and human rights take in the array of objectives we are pursuing? Let me suggest just three cases, and I'll just mention them, which I think will indicate what I'm getting at.
- Burma. It's often said that our promotion of human rights in Burma is hypocritical because we don't do the same thing, or put the same priority on it, in a place like China, which is true. It doesn't mean it's hypocritical; it just means that there are more conflicted and conflicting objectives with respect to our relationships with those two countries which permit a more single-minded focus on human rights in the one instance than is perhaps possible in the other.
- Egypt. I hope we can talk about Egypt. That's a very difficult current example of the place that our devotion to democracy and human rights should take amid a whole array of other objectives, indeed imperatives.
- Uzbekistan is a case somewhere between the two, which is kind of in the balance right now as to what our priorities are going to be. I expect I've raised more questions than I've answered. That actually is my intention. I do believe firmly in human rights and democracy, yet I don't believe that one size fits all, and I understand that competing interests and values might be compelling. We need to understand fully the uncertainties and the tradeoffs and the limits of our own power. Spreading democracy will work best if we see it, I believe, as not something that we impose by any means but something that is a quest alongside our partners to find solutions that work in our mutual interests.
Lt. Gen. James Lee, U. S. Army ret.: I don't have the distance-vision reading that the Congressman does, so I'll be picking up my notes. Congressman Price, Professor Glatthaar, and Dr. Dorff, and Mr. Hodding Carter, I praise you, I recognize you. When Edgar Williams and Bill Dale were working with me to get to speak today over the phone, my constant reply was that I'm like a fish out of water in that group. I'm out of my league, and little did I know after reading these biographies here that I was so right. I want to point out that we have on this panel four professors - a professor of Duke University, Hodding Carter, Congressman Price, twelve years I think in political science in Duke University, and we have two real buddies of mine down here who're affiliated with the Army War College, which is the place that I graduated. But when you consider the hours, probably totaling years, that they've been on the lecture platform, speaking on these subjects, you bring in a poor general who mostly what he did was Congressional relations and leading infantry troops, there may not be a contest. I just want to warn you on that.
However, I think the subject is a fascinating one, and I will go through the logic that I use, my premises, my postulations in answer to the question, but then [I'll] go into some other aspects of the question.
I've got them in one, two, three order here…my thoughts. Should force be used to establish democracy? That is the issue, that is the question. One, I say that force should be used overseas as necessary to guarantee the safety and freedom of the American people. That's one. Two, regime changes only at times are necessary to achieve that. Three, it is almost always best to try to create a democratic government, often to the defeat of the old regime. After the defeat of the old regime, it is best to try to create a democratic government. As the Congressman says, a prime example of that is Afghanistan.
President Bush has mentioned that democracies don't go to war with each other and, therefore, they are a force for peace. I've sort of cursorily tested this theory by skimming through my knowledge of history, and I can be helped out but I can't think of a war in which one side was a totalitarian state either fighting other totalitarians or a democracy. In other words, there is always an imbalance there. I am sure that some of you can come up with situations, especially these professors here -- these fine, brilliant gentlemen, and they certainly are and I admire and respect them all --in which a democracy has been fighting another, and I'm willing to accept that when it's mentioned.
Therefore, in answer to the theme's question, should force be used to establish democracies …force by the United States, that is…I say that to use force solely to establish democracy; i.e., to achieve democracy for democracy's sake, is not justified. I think that's very close to what the Congressman said in some of his remarks, but that acting with force in the security interests of the United States and yes, the rest of the world, democratic government is the preferred outcome and indeed can be a step toward maintaining world peace.
Finally, just a word or two about the use of force. That is at the heart of this question. Is it good? Is it bad? As we say in the military, it depends upon the terrain and the situation. You've got to look at each situation individually and put it to the test. If democracy is gone after by diplomacy, I would call [that] a soft-line approach. Democracy only and it works, that's great, but if it doesn't and our national interests are at stake, then we should use force. I mentioned the Army War College. In 1963, I finished a tour on the Hill in Congressional Relations. I had an office over in the House Office building, and I meant to ask the Congressman [today] if we still have our offices over there; I hope so. And I worked the offices in the House and the Senate, and when I got through there I was assigned to Vietnam via the Armed Forces Staff College at Norfolk, Virginia. My term paper at Norfolk was how to solve the situation in Vietnam. My professors and I used a purely academic approach -- went to the library, read books, made notes, did this, did that, and came to the conclusions that oh, yeah, the way to be successful in Vietnam is to go over there and win the hearts and minds of the people, [with] force playing something of a minor role. Then I went to Vietnam and had my mind changed, up against a terrorist-based force that will use any tactic to achieve their aims. Force is absolutely necessary. When I came back to the States years later and went to the Army War College, my term paper had to do with the absolute necessity of the use of force in Vietnam. I still have those papers in my files at home; in other words, one was in direct opposition to the other, based on reality, based on being there and seeing what was going on.
And the second point I'll make and I'll sit down is on intellectualizing questions. To arrive at the correct conclusion, I think it's first absolutely necessary that we get our history straight. Some cynic once said that history is a lie agreed upon. That comes to mind when I think about the history now that is received wisdom, conventional wisdom. . . is that going to Vietnam was a mistake, that we lost the war in Vietnam. My view is that we went there for perfectly legitimate reasons in keeping with our policy of the time of Containment. Communism was expanding all over the world and it had to be stopped somewhere. I thought it was correct to go into Vietnam.
My second thought is we did not lose Vietnam militarily. I remember back in, I guess it was 1995 maybe or '85. Anyhow, it was the 25th anniversary of our pullout from Vietnam, and our local newspaper, The Wilmington Star, carried a picture and it showed China Beach. I know China Beach well. It's near to Danang and I was stationed in Danang for six months during the Vietnam War. It says “China Beach where in 1975 American troops fled the country.” Of course, our history was all messed up. We pulled out militarily in 1973 or in that area, it began in 1973 at least. The only thing we had in Vietnam was the embassy and a small logistics force that had the responsibility of taking arms and ammunition that we supplied Vietnam and distributing them to the South Vietnamese government. So the pictures that you remember of people hanging off of the skids of helicopters to get out of there was brought about by the fact that between 1973 and 1975 the United States pulled out of South Vietnam after promising that it would stay, and it did so by withdrawing funding for the war to the South Vietnamese. We cut off the monies, $700 million as I remember, or Congress did, for ammunition, and then another appropriation for some equipment, leaving the South Vietnamese army totally without supplies. Sure enough, they lost. In violation of the Treaty of Paris, the North Vietnamese had brought a huge conventional force down there and they beat South Vietnam. So we went in as one for the security of the United States of America in Vietnam We tried to create democracy there; there was a democratic election, a truly democratic election which later failed, but it was in force when the North Vietnamese won militarily. So I just throw that out, that when looking at this question of force, let's get our premise correct and our facts straight before we start the logical process as coming to a conclusion.
Thank you.
Dr. Joseph Glatthaar, chair, UNC Program in Peace, War and Defense: Thank you very much for having an opportunity to share the stage with such an august body and for you for attending this American Diplomacy panel. Winston Churchill once said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others, and I tend to agree with that. But the question isn't whether the United States should promote democracy, it's whether the United States should use force to establish democracies. Unfortunately, I do not approve of using American lives to serve as the world's policemen. The idea that we should force a democracy on a society and a people smacks of extraordinary arrogance and quite frankly of insensitivity to cultures and societies other than our own. The American government and its people need to understand that our governmental system, society, culture, and brand of capitalism mix and shape each other. Our brand of democracy is well suited to our brand of capitalism, and those elements have shaped our society and culture, just as our culture and society have shaped capitalism and the government. The U.S. wants to share its system with other countries, in some regards a truly noble mission, but it neglects the fact that our form of government is not necessarily suited to people of different cultures or social makeups. We should be encouraging countries and people to embrace human rights, not exporting democracy by force, employing nonviolent means available to nations to encourage a respect for civil liberties.
Back in the early 20th century, President William McKinley asked a New York lawyer named Elihu Root if he would take over the scandal-laden War Department as Secretary of War. Root replied to the messenger, “Thank the President very much, but it is quite absurd. I know nothing about the military.” Root was right. As a young adult he had attended college and didn't fight in the Civil War. McKinley later explained to Root that what he wanted was Root's legal expertise. The United States had received colonies from Spain in the War of 1898. McKinley needed Root's legal talents to form different types of governments and draft different constitutions for each of those colonies based on their educational system, their cultural practices, their levels of literacy and other considerations. Like so much in our lives today, we have forgotten the lessons of the past. A democracy requires a willingness in spirit to compromise in order to work. It is not about what you want, it is about what you will settle for. Until people embrace this notion, a democracy simply will not work.
Having studied military history for the past three decades, I've come to the conclusion that one of the most brilliant proposals in the 20th century came from the pen and throat of a former head of the Office of Management and Budget with a reputation for slicing fat and some gristle and even muscle. On November 28, 1984, Caspar Weinberger was the Secretary of Defense for Ronald Reagan, and his military aide was none other than Major General Colin Powell. In the course of a speech to the Press Club, Weinberger laid out six tests that should be passed before the United States committed its forces to combat.
One, the country's vital interests must be at stake.
Two, the U.S. must be willing to commit enough forces to win decisively.
Three, military and political objectives must be clearly defined.
Four, military forces must be sized to achieve those objectives.
Five, there must be reasonable assurance the American public would
support the action; and
Six, the U.S. Armed Forces should be committed only as a last resort
People may try to argue that times have changed, that the United States must be proactive in the use of force. I disagree. Times have not changed all that much. In fact, every time I read Weinberger's test for military deployment and combat, all I see is wisdom.
The use of military forces to establish democracies is a euphemism for nation-building. That is inevitably a long, costly and exceedingly difficult if not impossible task to accomplish by outsiders. It is also a roundabout way of embarking on a preventive war. The U.S. does not like the government in place, it assumes that it presently does not get along with this government and that down the road it will get along with this government worse. Therefore, it should launch a preemptive war to destroy the existing government and replace it with one more to the liking of the United States, preferably a democracy. Yet in real life the United States has often courted non-democracies that did its bidding around the world, and I dare say we will continue to do so.
There's also a limit to the power of the United States. We learned that lesson in Vietnam, we have learned it over the past few years, and I think we will re-relearn it some years down the road, regrettably. One of the great soldiers of the 20th century warned of the fallacies of the preventive war:
“To me nothing could more tragically demonstrate our complete and utter moral bankruptcy than for us deliberately to initiate a preventive war. Once we take that absolutely fatal step, our civilization would be doomed. We would have to rely on conquests for survival from then on until our society crumbled as the empires of Alexander and of Rome crumbled from their own inner decay. In all the history of the world, no civilization based on conquest has long endured. America would be no exception.”
Those potent words are from General Matthew Ridgeway. They are words to heed.
The United States must preserve its high moral standing within the international community so that when we must send our nation's armed forces into harm's way we do so with the support, the prayers and the full cooperation of the vast majority of the world. The best means to insure this is to apply the Weinberger doctrine to our international problems. Our soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen deserve nothing less.
Thank you very much.
Dr. Robin Dorff, Exec. Dir., Inst. of Political Leadership, N. C. State Univ.: Well, thank you very much, and I want to thank the sponsors and organizers for inviting me. I think as everyone has said, this is, I think, an august group, not just those of us on the panel, but people who are attending here today. I'm happy to say I think it was ten years ago today that American Diplomacy published one of my articles. I can't remember if it was the first issue, but it probably wasn't much past the first or the second, and I did want to start off by saying that that article was on promoting democracy and the challenges of ungovernability. I'm sorry to say that many of my thoughts here today on this topic haven't changed very much since then. It probably says something about the lack of depth in my thinking, but I'd like to think, or at least I'll try to argue here in my comments, that it really has to do with the real challenges that underlie this notion of promoting democracy, and so that's what I will try to do.
It's a challenge going last with a panel like this. It can be a bad thing because all of the good points have already been made, and I must say that I share many if not all of the concerns that the panelists have already expressed this morning. But perhaps it's good because you won't see how obvious it is that I have little to offer to the debate after this. I am going to try to do something, though, a little bit differently since so many of, I think, the really essential points on this question have been made. I'll leave it up to you to judge if I have done that at the end of my allotted time here.
The use of military force is and must always be a political act. We too often think of it in terms of the patriotic symbols that go along with putting our blood and treasure in the lives of people on the line, but ultimately it is a political act, and ultimately at root the objectives of the use of military force must be fundamentally political, and I think we've heard that in the comments already today. The question, though, that is put to us as part of this panel challenges us to focus on the specific use of force to establish democratic governments. My problem with the question reflects my broader concerns with the policy objective itself. I have a few points that I just want to make on that. It will echo some points that have already been made.
Democratic government cannot be established; it must be developed. It must be grown. It must be nurtured, and this is something that I think is not as often debated as it really should be. Force alone can never establish democracy and in many cases force, the use of military force, can make growing that democracy more difficult. That is not to say that there aren't occasions historically and perhaps today and in future moments when the use of force will be linked to an ultimate outcome of helping establish at least the seeds of a democracy -- a term I'll come back to in a moment that I prefer using to legitimate governance. I couldn't agree more that when we start talking about promoting and exporting democracy, we tend to be talking about our own form of government. I think there are many forms that sort of legitimate governance in democratic institutions and processes can take other than our own, but just simply using force isolated from a lot of other necessary policy decisions and means to achieve them, I think, frames the question a little improperly. The answer, I think, clearly to that is “no.”
These first two points, that you can't just simply establish democratic governments, and secondly, that force alone can't establish it all by itself points to the importance of the fundamental role of attitudes, norms, and patterns of behavior. And as was just noted, really what we have in our form of government are those attitudes, those norms, and those patterns of behavior that are not just simply there because it's written in the Constitution. They're not just there because there are laws that are on their books. They're there because you and I and most of us believe that they are legitimate. Most of the time we observe and follow them, not because we fear punishment, but because we believe they are the right things to do.
This brings me to my last point on this, which is to say that even if force followed by a number of other steps then could in fact develop, or help develop, and nurture democracy or legitimate governance, we have a problem in the United States today, I believe, in that our U.S. national security apparatus is very poorly organized to accomplish that. The use of force, if we want to talk about what happens after the war, after the use of force, then we ought to look at how we are organized to do that as a government today. We are still operating with a national security apparatus that was created in 1947. The Congressman has been involved in some important reforms to that, but fundamentally the world that we are dealing with today is not the world of 1947,
I'll conclude with this point. I believe and I have written and spoken on this for quite a while, that a larger international community consisting of more legitimate governance, that is states where the people believe that their rulers, their governors have a legitimate right to govern them, and institutions that reflect their cultures, but also reflect human rights, yes, but also reflect those kinds of underlying attitudes of compromise, bargaining, etc. A world in which there were more countries like that would be a world that would be safer for us, and it would be a world in which U.S. interests would be better protected.
But we cannot bring about that kind of world if we really only focus on the use of force. Until and unless we recognize that our security apparatus needs to be structured so that the social, the economic, the political, and the informational elements that go into nurturing a society in which legitimate governance functions, I'm afraid that we will continue to follow somewhat that old Russian saw that if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. And in the world today I do believe that our grand strategic objective should be ultimately the promotion of more legitimate governance, not democracy as we understand it, and we need to organize and resource our efforts in such a way to accomplish that objective.
Let me, since I did point out that I'm involved in the production of 1776 right now…no, I'm not going to sing a song… My one featured number is the one that is absolutely there for comic relief. If you've seen the show, that's Richard Henry Lee's song “FFV, the First Family of Virginia,” so it has nothing to do with the substance of the show. But as I was doing this show and thinking about this panel, I am reminded that though we like to think of 1776 as the date and the events surrounding to include war, by the way as the creation of democracy, it was not in fact about democracy. It was about a clash of values, of ways of life, some of which included slavery, some of which includes rights that would be for a long time limited to white, male property owners. We think of it, and since we started with this point, and it's a very apt one, to understand history correctly, what did we go through and what have we still yet to go through to create the system that we have today with its continued flaws and challenges and problems? The use of force to establish democratic governments cannot possibly be the sole answer. When we have to use force, it should be to protect and promote the security interests of the United States, and it should always, always be worth the sacrifices that we know will have to be made. When we go to war, when we use military force, though, to quote former chief of staff of the Army in a book that's certainly worth reading called “Hope Is Not A Method,” we should not be left to hope for what will happen once the fighting ceases.
Thank you very much.
Moderator: We're going to have a few minutes here in which the participants can, I think from here on, folks, sort of speak from your seats, and to make it easier for you to be responsive as well, I'm going to move this mike down, and this mike closer to the middle, and both of you guys can work it back and forth. Now we can compromise on that.
One passing observation before we go into this: When Cap Weinberger enunciated that doctrine, it was at the height of my own personal interventionist fervor and I was really quite unamused by the entire thing. As I hear it now I am completely taken by his brilliance. Circumstances alter cases is what I'm trying to tell you, but what also alters cases is a period of time in and out of power. For five years I ran an annual show for The Southern Center on International Studies out of Atlanta with former secretaries of defense. It was a three-hour discussion program compressed into a one-hour public television show. I can quote you chapter and verse from the Bibles of our current Secretary of Defense and our current Vice-President arguing with great passion against the use of American military force for any purpose, and certainly against the purpose of democracy-building -- against any purpose other than the defense of our immediate security interests. Mr.Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld were quite brilliantly eloquent but then again I thought they were wrong, which just goes to show again how circumstances alter cases.
But this is not fixed doctrine for a lot of people, and I want to say that because I wanted to say so all of you would hear me that in different times at different points I have sort of thought that I was closer to the general than I was to the last…to the gentleman of the Academy, and today I'm much closer to the people in the Academy, and I expect there are a lot of people here who have gone around circles on this, depending on circumstances.
Now, gentlemen, you all have some debating to do if you wish to, so just speak right up, or not.
END
American Diplomacy