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War In a Time of Peace
With David Halberstam
Journalist and Author
Friday, Sept. 28, 2001; Noon EDT
American foreign policy and decisions about national defense are not made solely in the diplomatic, military or political arenas; they're made in all of them, and influenced by domestic priorities and the shadow of history.
In his new book, "War In a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals" (Scribner, 2001), journalist and author David Halberstam looks at post-Cold War foreign policy and influence on the decisions of the first Bush administration and the Clinton administration. Did the reluctance to sustain casualties in a ground war contribute to the way the impending "war on terrorism" is being mapped?
Halberstam was online Friday, Sept. 28 to talk about his book, the shaping of foreign policy and the history that's being made in front of us.
The transcript follows.
Halberstam is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of "The Best & the Brightest," a chronicle of the men who planned and executed American policy in Vietnam. He is also author of several other books, including "The Powers That Be"; "The Children"; "October 1964"; and "The Fifties."
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David Halberstam: Mr. Halberstam is delayed. Please watch this space; we'll be up and running with the discussion as soon as possible.
washingtonpost.com:
Good morning, Mr. Halberstam, and welcome. It's no secret that Vietnam was a huge gut check for the American people, and after it the idea of sustained American casualties in armed combat became unpalatable to citizens and politicians alike. For more than a generation we've been focusing more inward, and this new administration sought to distance itself even further from the Middle East peace process. What do we do now to be ready and responsive to a combat situation? How does our view of the world need to change, both to understand our place in it and to steel ourselves for combat?
David Halberstam: I think the idea of combat projects the wrong chapter that is beginning. The phrase I would come to is the John Kennedy phrase, "a long twilight struggle." And in terms of combat, the kind of image that we pull up -- World War II, Korea, Vietnam -- I think is the wrong one. This is a very complicated struggle, an elusive enemy -- an enemy from a ghost nation against whom our traditional military power is not easily applicable.
So what we should be thinking of is an application of all our strengths, in terms of intelligence, financial strengths, isolating the perpetrators from their surroundings -- the phrase being used now is "dry up the swamp." And being patient; not doing the things the enemy wants us to do. Bin Laden the terrorist wanted us to respond to that by lashing out, by exercising an immediate need for gratification, and thereby doing their recruiting for them. And alienating other people in the Islamic world. I'm pleased that we have been so far thoughtful and careful in our responses.
Morristown, N.J.:
President Bush has been running around with all this "wanted dead or alive" stuff, yet it's clear that no one is barreling forth into military involvement without some good planning. They're showing some healthy restraint. Can you talk about this idea of posturing publicly and how it contrasts with what really goes on?
David Halberstam: I think he's brought the posturing down a bit, after that early response. And I think it's time to be wise and shrewd, tough of mind, tough of spirit. To try and think like the new adversary, to understand what he wants us to do, and not to do it. To try and see our vulnerabilities and make them less vulnerable. And to start figuring out what his vulnerabilities are. We have this immense strength; we're a very strong country. It's not so easily applied in this case, as I said earlier, but there are ways we can apply our strength and there are ways we can make it harder for him to do the things he did.
I think it's about using our intelligence agencies well, upgrading our domestic security and intelligence, and looking for their vulnerabilities. You have to understand, this has been very low priority. We really have in a way been bingeing -- the people charged with paying attention to this have been lower in the hierarchy of national security than they should have been for about 10 years, because it hasn't gotten on our national public-political radar. And now it is most assuredly there, and it has our most urgent thoughts. That changes the equation; that gives us some real muscle for the first time. Democracies work in funny ways -- they're slower; innately, because of our geography and history, [we're] psychologically isolationist. We change errors slowly, we focus our attention slowly -- World War II was a very good example of that. Right before Pearl Harbor, the draft I believe had carried by one vote. Right after, it was like throwing a switch, and it was putting the vast energies of this country at work. And that showed very quickly at the Battle of Midway.
This crisis is harder to define. The enemy are more elusive. But I do believe the new era has begun.
Arlington, Va.:
Do you think the Cold War or Vietnam casts a larger shadow and influence over our foreign policy?
David Halberstam: There are two separate things there. The Cold War is a huge chapter of our lives that began right after World War II, when we were brought kicking and screaming to the zenith of our power. A generation had fought, served overseas, seen their colleagues die and come to hate the pre-war isolationism that had been so costly. They became innately internationalist. In addition, the weaponry of the war made it impossible to be truly isolationist anymore. The combination of nuclear weaponry and modern rocketry meant that the most important part of our traditional barrier to the rest of the world -- the two oceans -- had been turned to ponds. What followed that period was a long bipolar struggle with the Soviets -- difficult, dangerous, but always guided and limited by the mutual capacity for destruction.
When the Berlin Wall came down, a new era began, one in which we felt that we were no longer threatened, the rest of the world did not matter, and we began to binge in self-absorption, both materially and in an entertainment society. That's the Cold War part.
Let's take Vietnam now. Vietnam was one of those tragedies that came out of the Cold War -- the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time, with a nation that was not a threat to us. It was produced by a very serious misreading of history and a belief that the Communist world was a monolith, which it was not. What worked for the other side in Vietnam, despite our enormous firepower and superior military technology, was their greater hold on Vietnamese nationalism. What that did to us -- when you fight a bad war -- was enormously damaging. It damaged the United States Army, which had to fight it. As someone once said in Korea, "We sent over a bad army in the beginning and got back a good army." In Vietnam, which was an unwinnable war with diminishing domestic support, we sent over a good army and brought back a bad one. It damaged the Democratic Party, whose leaders were the architects of it, and from whose ranks came most of the critics. Indeed, much of the current book is about the tensions between these two vitally important interests in society, both of which were damaged by the Vietnam War. And you really see it when in my book I talk about when Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who had spent two tours of duty in Vietnam, meets the new president, William Jefferson Clinton, who famously did not go.
What the Vietnam experience did was make us warier of any kind of foreign entanglement in a broad sense. Richard Holbrooke, who was probably the most successful and articulate of the Clinton foreign policy people, coined a very good phrase, taking Vietnam and Somalia together: "Vietmalia: a wariness of taking any casualties in any foreign entanglement. And of course, the fear of CNN or some other network filming the funerals. But that, I do believe, given the new threat, that sort of zero casualties syndrome is over.
Ft. Worth, Tex.:
Do you think Bush is relying more on the doves like Colin Powell or the hawks like Rumsfeld? How do you think this will play out? Do you think they will succeed incapturing bin Laden? Do you think it would be wise to try to overthrow the Taliban, given the Pakistanis don't like the northern alliance? How should the refugee crisis be handled?
David Halberstam: I think it's too early to tell; we need to let it play out. I said earlier that we need to be patient, and that includes not analyzing every little wind that blows through the White House.
There's no doubt that Powell's value and Powell's influence in the administration, which was being questioned right up until Sept. 10, has risen. They realize they can't be unilateral. They are engaged in the world. It is a complicated world. And I think there is a real awareness in the White House that lashing out can be counterproductive. I'd like to think back to that moment late in the Vietnam War when people were talking about hawks and doves, and Geoge Aiken, who was a Republican from Vermont, said he would prefer to be an owl.
Washington, D.C.:
Of Kissinger, Baker, Cheney, Powell, Christopher, Albright, Holbrooke, etc., who do you think has been correct in assessing the U.S.'s role in the world? Who has been far off?
David Halberstam: I thought the elder Bush team, which had a lot of time and grade, they'd gone into government in order to be involved in foreign policy. Bush himself, James Baker, Colin Powell, Cheney, Larry Eagleberger, Brent Scowcroft, were serious and accomplished. Some of my liberal friends are irritated at me for being so complimentary to them in the book. But I think that in fact they were quite up to speed. Although the Balkans caught them somewhat ill prepared for a new post-Cold War era.
One of the things that I think the book shows is how much the Democrats were damaged by Vietnam in terms of their potential national security bench strength, how divided they were over issues of foreign policy, and how slow they were to deal with the world of foreign policy challenges. Part of that comes from the fact that Clinton, so politically nuanced, read the results of the '92 election very accurately. He believed that there was no political currency in foreign policy, that his job was primarily to deal with the economy -- remember the phrase, "It's the economy, stupid" -- which was the mantra of the campaign and the early part of the administration. Accordingly, his national security team, unlike the teams that had preceded them over the previous four decades, never had the access to him until rather later. And they lacked the access that his economic players had. And that inevitably diminished their confidence and their effectiveness.
And I spend a lot of time detailing that in the book. That story about Clinton's meeting with Lee Hamilton is the most telling. There's a complementary story: when Milosevic folds, Clinton takes a call from Joe Biden (D-Del.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And Biden says congratulations, you've got your sea legs to the president. He'd almost been without equal in urging the administration to act in the Balkans. Clinton said, you guys have been pretty rough on me. He said, "Remember, I came in as a governor, and I didn't have any experience in foreign policy." It's a nice friendly call, and it took place in the seventh year of Bill Clinton's presidency.
Alexandria, Va.:
I found your earlier comment about totalitarians misunderstanding democracies as weak and decadent well taken.
Why do we get in this cycle of complacency, violence, and restoration of order? Is it an equilibrium about the limits of power? Must we test if we are the early roman republic or the late empire?
David Halberstam: I think it's natural, and almost healthy, to not be a security state. And in addition, again, back to geography -- we're not a European nation surrounded by hostile adversaries who are different ethnically and linguistically and wish us ill. We are surrounded by those two giant oceans. We have to the south a relatively weak nation, which is not, at least in a military sense, a threat. And we have to the north a neighbor which albeit a separate nation, is not foreign, and is in many ways a brother nation, an extension in so many ways of our values. And because of that, except for the Cold War period, we have felt less threatened than other nations, and the carnage of much of the last brutal century took place overseas.
When I was a young man, my first assignments were in covering tensions which emanated between the Third World and the First World. And I had to go all the way to the Congo, n the heart of Africa, and then 12,000 miles away to Vietnam. And now, in a different way, these tensions, though they are really in some ways more cultural than they are pure First World-Third World, have come to my doorstep.
Washington, D.C.:
I always remember a great quote from your previous book, "The Best and the Brightest." Regarding our mistakes in Vietnam, you wrote that our efforts there were "brilliant strategy that defied common sense." Hopefully we are not about repeating this sort of mistake. I think the title of your new book "War in a Time of Peace" perhaps suggests a better framework for how we should attack terrorism now, instead of the all out war perspective that is so prevalent. Would you agree that our strategic framework should recognize that we are still in what is essentially a time of peace, but that at the same time we must fight a targeted, conclusive war against terrorism?
David Halberstam: Yes. It is a time of peace, and war has been declared on us. I view what happened on Sept. 11 as an act of war. I don't see how you cannot. Four missiles attacked, three successfully, critically important symbols of our society. We are at war, but we're not going to put six of seven million men and women at arms, we're not going to put eight or nine million in the field, as we did in World War II.
There are no immunities in the world. We can't be a free society and airtight. We cannot assume that this is the first and therefore last incident in which the adversary has some success against us. We have to assume that the very fact that we are so open makes us still vulnerable; goes with the territory. But we can be more careful, and put pressure on those who would like to make us fearful, those who would like to make us lose our sense of freedom and [prey] on our sense of fear that we cannot live the lives that we ought to live.
Washington, D.C.:
I saw the Modern Library edition of "The Best and the Brightest" in my local bookstore recently. I am thinking of buying it but wanted to ask you if you think your history has held up over the years since publication in light of further disclosures and scholarship. Thanks.
David Halberstam: I think the amazing thing is how accurately it has held up. There have been all kinds of books published and all kinds of transcripts released that show how accurate the book is. I'm very proud of how accurate that book is and how hard I worked on it.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) wrote the introduction to the new edition. And Colin Powell put it on his short list of favorite books. When I was first a reporter in Vietnam I took a huge amount of heat for being more pessimistic and therefore a critic. And the fact that John McCain wrote the introduction makes me whole. That's hard-won stuff. It's 39 years ago, but I was sort of described as an enemy of the people by very powerful people in the government -- Lyndon Johnson called me a traitor to my country. John Kennedy asked the publisher of the New York Times in October 1963 to pull me from Saigon and send me to another assignment. I'm very grateful to John McCain for writing that introduction. I'm proud of it.
Herndon, Va.:
Mr. Halberstam: I served in Vietnam (U.S. Army) and believe "The Best and the Brightest" is the best book written on the U.S. involvement there. At one time, our armed forces were losing 200 dead a week or more. Would the American public accept that today, even in an all-our war on terrorism?
David Halberstam: First, thank you for the kind words. I feel somehow connected to people who were in Vietnam, even though if you're a correspondent you have a lot easier war than a grunt.
I don't think that we're going to have the kind of combat that was parallel to World War II or Korea or Vietnam. But in the very unlikely event that we had a shooting part of this war, I think the American people would take very high casualties to stop this threat. I don't think that's going to happen because I don't think we're going to engage it in a traditional military way. And I think it would be a great mistake to be pulled into a shooting war in Afghanistan.
Perhaps one of the most telling stories I've read since all this began was in The Washington Post about three days after the bombing. It was by a correspondent at The Post in Moscow, and it was an interview with a bunch of Russian generals who had fought there. And it was a portrait of a graveyard for foreign troops. A level of bitterness that is beyond anything I've ever seen in American generals talking about Vietnam -- a truly cautionary tale. I do not choose the word "graveyard" casually. Very good piece of reporting.
Washington, D.C.:
What's the biggest mistake that Bush Sr. and Clinton made with the military during their administrations?
David Halberstam: I think Bush Sr. in fact dealt very well with the military, by and large. I think for Clinton it was a constant cultural problem. I think you had two very different Americas dealing with each other when he met them. They represented very different things culturally, and they activated all the ghosts of Vietnam.
Boston, Mass.:
Bin Laden has hijacked the misery of the world in order to incite a world war. The misery of the poorest people is as much at the root of the current crises as any "clash of civilizations." Is there any evidence that any of our leaders understand this? The American people have shown solidarity with the president's actions, yet the party of the president is suggesting even lower taxes for the super-rich. If modernity cannot moderate its excesses and focus on the basic needs of all the people of the planet, we are bound for a new dark age, or even extinction.
David Halberstam: I think it's a very interesting question, and it's beautifully phrased. I think one of the interesting things about this moment is that it's a time when we ought to be thinking about some degree of sacrifice, and not be thinking of greater immediacy of gratification, particularly toward the managerial CEO class, which has had an unparalleled decade of rewarding itself, often at the expense, oddly enough, of quality product, i.e., in order to drive the stock of the networks up, the quality of the programming has become more trivial. And a lot of people who are feather merchants in terms of what they report about, have been most handsomely rewarded.
On the larger question here of culture vs. Third World poverty, it's both. It is a clash of culture, and the Islamic fundamentalism has a quality that reflects the clash of civilizations. But also, a lot of this is born in extreme poverty and deep alienation. And much of that alienation is from their own countries, but it has been bent in an odd way to target us with the connivance of other governments in the Middle East who are only too happy to have these people angry at us instead of at them.
Philadelphia, Pa.:
Do you expect the intelligence community to gain more freedoms and leeway to investigate suspected terrorists in this country? According to the CIA's charter, it's not supposed to investigate domestically. Do you think the new homeland security agency will help the process or add to chaos?
David Halberstam: I think the CIA will have more leverage, and it is mandatory that the CIA and the FBI cooperate at a greater level than they have in the past. It is absolutely mandatory. If there was ever a time for cooperation and not playing bureaucratic games with each other, this is it. And to overcome that innate bureaucratic instinct to be territorial. And that's really the job of the president and the national security team.
Ft. Worth, Tex.:
Do you think that bin Laden is being used as a scapegoat because of the enormous pressure to find somebody and do something? Are you at all troubled by the fact that the U.S. govt has not released any of the evidence they have to support his guilt, and since getting bin Laden is by no means the end of this crisis, what do you think they should be focusing their efforts on?
David Halberstam: I think it's easier to think about him than some of the grayer images that would naturally be part of something so difficult and distant. But I think he's much more than a scapegoat. I think he is a very real player, a very real threat, smart, wealthy and deeply committed to damaging us. I take him very seriously. That is not to say that if we "got him" and a couple of his top people, this particular problem would go away. It would not go away. It would be a major setback for them. But I take who he is very seriously.
Washington, D.C.:
George W. Bush has talked a lot about combat readiness and using the U.S. military for combat, not peacekeeping or humanitarian missions. Do you think he's right, or can the military fulfill more than one mission?
David Halberstam: The military can obviously fulfill more than one mission, but right now there is an enormous preoccupation with the immediacy of this new threat, and rightfully so. And other roles for the military will go on the back burner. This is a new era, and how we meet it will really define us and define our future.
washingtonpost.com:
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