U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE

WASHINGTON : 

For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office

Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512–1800; DC area (202) 512–1800

Fax: (202) 512–2104 Mail: Stop IDCC, Washington, DC 20402–0001

47–590 PDF 2009

SIX YEARS LATER: ASSESSING LONG-TERM

THREATS, RISKS AND THE U.S. STRATEGY FOR

SECURITY IN A POST–9/11 WORLD

HEARING

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON NATIONAL SECURITY

AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT

AND GOVERNMENT REFORM

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS

FIRST SESSION

OCTOBER 10, 2007

Serial No. 110–126

Printed for the use of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform

(

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/congress/index.html

http://www.oversight.house.gov

(II)

COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM

HENRY A. WAXMAN, California, Chairman

TOM LANTOS, California

EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York

PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania

CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York

ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland

DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio

DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois

JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts

WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri

DIANE E. WATSON, California

STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts

BRIAN HIGGINS, New York

JOHN A. YARMUTH, Kentucky

BRUCE L. BRALEY, Iowa

ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of

Columbia

BETTY MCCOLLUM, Minnesota

JIM COOPER, Tennessee

CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, Maryland

PAUL W. HODES, New Hampshire

CHRISTOPHER S. MURPHY, Connecticut

JOHN P. SARBANES, Maryland

PETER WELCH, Vermont

TOM DAVIS, Virginia

DAN BURTON, Indiana

CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut

JOHN M. MCHUGH, New York

JOHN L. MICA, Florida

MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana

TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania

CHRIS CANNON, Utah

JOHN J. DUNCAN, JR., Tennessee

MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio

DARRELL E. ISSA, California

KENNY MARCHANT, Texas

LYNN A. WESTMORELAND, Georgia

PATRICK T. MCHENRY, North Carolina

VIRGINIA FOXX, North Carolina

BRIAN P. BILBRAY, California

BILL SALI, Idaho

JIM JORDAN, Ohio

PHIL SCHILIRO, Chief of Staff

PHIL BARNETT, Staff Director

EARLEY GREEN, Chief Clerk

DAVID MARIN, Minority Staff Director

SUBCOMMITTEE ON NATIONAL SECURITY AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS

JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts, Chairman

CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York

STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts

BRIAN HIGGINS, New York

CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut

DAN BURTON, Indiana

JOHN M. MCHUGH, New York

TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania

DAVE TURK, Staff Director

(III)

C O N T E N T S

Page

Hearing held on October 10, 2007 .......................................................................... 1

Statement of:

Isaacson, Walter, president and CEO, the Aspen Institute; Robert J.

Lieber, Ph.D., professor and international relations field Chair, Georgetown University; and Jessica T. Mathews, president, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace ....................................................................... 15

Isaacson, Walter ........................................................................................ 15

Lieber, Robert J. ........................................................................................ 19

Mathews, Jessica T. .................................................................................. 38

Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:

Lieber, Robert J., Ph.D., professor and international relations field Chair,

Georgetown University, prepared statement of .......................................... 23

Mathews, Jessica T., president, Carnegie Endowment for International

Peace, prepared statement of ....................................................................... 42

Shays, Hon. Christopher, a Representative in Congress from the State

of Connecticut, prepared statement of ........................................................ 8

Tierney, Hon. John F., a Representative in Congress from the State

of Massachusetts, prepared statement of ................................................... 3

(1)

SIX YEARS LATER: ASSESSING LONG-TERM

THREATS, RISKS AND THE U.S. STRATEGY

FOR SECURITY IN A POST–9/11 WORLD

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2007

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

SUBCOMMITTEE ON NATIONAL SECURITY AND FOREIGN

AFFAIRS,

COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM,

Washington, DC.

The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10 a.m., in room

2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. John F. Tierney (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.

Present: Representatives Tierney, Higgins, Yarmuth, Braley,

McCollum, Cooper, Van Hollen, Hodes, Welch, Shays, Platts, Duncan, Turner, and Foxx.

Staff present: Dave Turk, staff director; Andrew Su and Andy

Wright, professional staff members; Davis Hake, clerk; Dan Hamilton, fellow; A. Brooke Bennett, minority counsel; Christopher

Bright, minority professional staff member; Nick Palarino, minority

senior investigator and policy advisor; and Benjamin Chance, minority clerk.

Mr. TIERNEY. Good morning. A quorum now being present, the

Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs will conduct its hearing entitled, ‘‘Six Years Later: Assessing Long-Term

Threats, Risks and the U.S. Strategy for Security in a Post-9/11

World.’’

The meeting will come to order and I ask unanimous consent

that only the chairman and ranking members of the subcommittee

be allowed to make opening statements. Without objection, so ordered.

I ask unanimous consent that the hearing record be kept open

for 5 business days so that all members of the subcommittee be allowed to submit a written statement for the record. Again, without

objection, so ordered.

I am going to make a brief opening statement. I am going to submit my remarks for the record and ask unanimous consent that

they be included in the record. Without objection, that is so ordered.

This Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs

hearing is an attempt to have a series of meetings and witnesses,

as esteemed as those before us today, who can come in and discuss

our strategy going forward.

2

Even with the amazing amount of money and energy that has

been spent—and lives lost—on military engagements, homeland security, and intelligence since 9/11, there remains somewhat of an

inescapable sense that our national security policy may be adrift.

We have rising extremism and gathering terrorist storm clouds;

there is a question about whether or not al Qaida will have a resurgence in Pakistan; there are innumerable anti-American attitudes. And more than 6 years after September 11th we still really

don’t have a bipartisan consensus on a comprehensive long-term

strategy to combat the grave threats that exist or to put those

threats in context, to assess the priorities and move forward.

In the words of one of our panelists today, we have yet to act

with the ‘‘burst of creativity’’ that was the trademark of the United

States at the beginning of the cold war.

We have studies that have been commissioned, including the

work of the 9/11 Commission; analyses have been offered; strategies have been published. The hard work of formulating and forging and implementing a bipartisan national security strategy, however, still remains lacking. So many people feel that we haven’t

even yet had a robust bipartisan dialog about that and so, in part,

that is what these hearings are about, an attempt to start that dialog and get people’s attention focused.

We encourage all the members on the panel, those present and

not present yet today, to share their own ideas for future witnesses

so that we can have a robust discussion. We want to hear from top

experts, people with real-world experiences and innovative, creative

ideas. I think our three witnesses today hit those on all points and

I think we are going to have a robust discussion.

And there are a number of questions. I won’t enumerate all of

them right now, but I think in the introductory memo, for members

of the panel here, that we had sent a number of those out that we

will, no doubt, be exploring with our witnesses here today. We have

to determine what is the process for evaluating our performance as

we move forward; we have to talk about how our military may be

stressed beyond the point that it should; and we should talk a little

bit today, hopefully, about the attitude of the rest of the world toward the United States.

The Pew poll, in August 2007, found 68 percent of Pakistanis

hold an unfavorable view of the United States; 76 percent of Moroccans have an unfavorable view; 93 percent of Egyptians share that

unfavorable view; 64 percent of the people in Turkey, a key NATO

ally, believe that the United States poses their greatest foreign policy threat, and a whopping 83 percent have an unfavorable opinion

of the United States, up 29 percent since 2002.

Polls obviously aren’t the end-all and be-all of how our success

should be defined, but it certainly gives us some indication of what

is going on with our attempts to win hearts and minds.

So we have serious challenges. We have to use all of the tools in

our tool kit, as the 9/11 Commission said. I look forward to the

comments that our panel is going to make here today, and I invite

Mr. Shays to make his opening remarks before we do hear from the

witnesses.

[The prepared statement of Hon. John F. Tierney follows:]

3

4

5

6

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I have

just tremendous respect for you and the efforts you are making on

this committee, and I just want to thank you, first, for conducting

this hearing. Also tremendous respect for all three of our witnesses

and the institutions they represent.

Having bought about 40 copies of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and given it to a number of my friends, I just wish I had

brought my own copy, Walter, to have you sign it, but I will get

back to you on that one.

Mr. ISAACSON. Thank you, sir.

Mr. SHAYS. A great book that gives perspective on a lot of things.

I am stunned by the fact that Benjamin Franklin’s own son didn’t

see the light and was a Tory. It was troubled times.

Mr. ISAACSON. Well, we parents understand those thing sometimes.

Mr. SHAYS. Well, the fact that you can understand those times

then tells me you understand these times now.

Mr. ISAACSON. Thank you, sir.

Mr. SHAYS. Almost 2 years ago, before the attacks of September

11, 2001, the advisory penal to assess domestic response capabilities for terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction, headed by

former Governor Gilmore, concluded the United States lacked a coherent functional national strategy to guide disparate counter-terrorism efforts. In testimony before this subcommittee in March

2001, the Commission’s vice chairman, retired Lieutenant General

James Clapper, said, ‘‘A truly comprehensive national strategy will

contain a high level statement of national objectives coupled logically to a statement of the means used to achieve these objectives.’’

During that same period, the U.S. Commission on National Security Strategy, led by former Senators Hart and Rudman, and the

National Commission on Terrorism, headed by former Ambassador

Bremer, also concluded that the executive branch required a comprehensive national strategy to counter terrorism.

Mr. Tierney, I really appreciate your holding this hearing and

continuing the examination of U.S. national strategies begun by

this subcommittee before September 11th.

In January 2001, the Bush administration inherited a loose collection of Presidential directives and law enforcement planning documents that were used as a strategic framework for a national

strategy against terrorism, but that fragile construct collapsed with

the World Trade Center on September 11th. The brutal nature of

the terrorist threat shattered naive assumptions terrorists would

be deterred by geographic, political, or moral borders. A new strategic paradigm was needed. Containment, deterrent, reaction, and

mutually assured destruction no longer served to protect the fundamental security interests of the American people. In fact, it

would be absurd to think it could.

In September 2002, the Bush administration National Security

Strategy of the United States of America was published, taking

into account the events of September 11th. This strategy was updated in March 2006 and is a fundamental statement of broad administration policy, accompanying many goals, including the need

to counter terrorism.

7

Along with President Bush’s first national security strategy came

a proliferation of individual strategies to counter terrorism. In

March 2003, witnesses told this subcommittee the Bush administration had developed no less than eight high level mission statements on national security: military, strategic, global terrorism,

homeland security, weapons of mass destruction, money laundering, cyber security, and critical infrastructure. So by early 2003,

what we had was an overarching strategy and a proliferation of individual strategies to counter terrorism.

We held another hearing in March 2004, continuing to examine

these national strategies. In the realm of national security, a large

number of counter-terrorism strategies does not necessarily mean

we are any safer. Only if these strategies guide us toward clearly

articulated goals will they help secure our liberty and prosperity

against the threats of new and dangerous eras.

So we begin our hearing today using, as a basis, previous examinations of national strategies and asking of the national security

strategy of the United States of America has the fundamental characteristics of a coherent strategic framework, one that clearly

states a purpose, assesses risk, sets goals, defines needed resources, assigns responsibilities, and integrates implementation.

Once this examination is accomplished, we should evaluate the success of all our current counter-terrorism strategies. If the answer

to some or all of these questions is no, then we need to change our

approach in countering terrorism.

Again, I would like to thank our witnesses and just say that I

think the biggest problem is not only the lack of strategies that are

clearly understood; there is no debate in Congress, other than what

you are doing here, no debate in the public. We look at whether

some performers should have control of her child and not have her

children taken away; whether Anna Nicole Smith, who was the father of this child. We get into the most absurd debates, at a time

when we need to have meaningful dialog. So thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[The prepared statement of Hon. Christopher Shays follows:]

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

Mr. TIERNEY. Thank you, Mr. Shays.

We are now going to receive testimony from our excellent panel

of witnesses. Let me begin by introducing our panel briefly, because if I went into everybody’s credentials, we would be here for

the entire hearing.

Walter Isaacson, noted historian, former head of CNN, former

editor of Time Magazine, and current president and chief executive

officer of the Aspen Institute. A very abbreviated introduction.

Professor Robert Lieber, former State Department consultant,

author of 14 books on foreign policy—even reading all the book titles would probably keep us a while—currently professor of——

Mr. LIEBER. I have time.

Mr. TIERNEY. You have time? [Laughter.]

Currently, professor and international relations field Chair at

Georgetown University.

Jessica Tuckman Mathews, former Under Secretary of State for

Global Affairs, former journalist and columnist, current president

of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Again, I could

go on and on.

Welcome to all of you and thank you. It is the policy of this subcommittee to swear you in before you testify, so, just to keep with

policy, I will ask you all to stand and raise your right hands.

Mr. SHAYS. The only one we didn’t swear in in 20 years was Senator Byrd. I chickened out. [Laughter.]

[Witnesses sworn.]

Mr. TIERNEY. Thank you. The witnesses have all answered in the

affirmative.

Your full written statements will be put in the hearing record.

Dr. Lieber, I say that for yours, because it took me the entire half

hour. It was very long and very comprehensive and good on that.

So that written statement will be put on the record.

You have 5 minutes. Obviously, we are going to be as liberal

with the clock as we can. And I may mention now, I think we will

be liberal as people are asking questions, also. If there is no objection, we will go to 10-minute questioning intervals. And except

some interventions. If people have a question they want to ask on

point of something that is going on, we are going to open that up

a little bit and have a discussion here if we can.

So, Mr. Isaacson, please.

STATEMENTS OF WALTER ISAACSON, PRESIDENT AND CEO,

THE ASPEN INSTITUTE; ROBERT J. LIEBER, PH.D., PROFESSOR AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS FIELD CHAIR,

GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY; AND JESSICA T. MATHEWS,

PRESIDENT, CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL

PEACE

STATEMENT OF WALTER ISAACSON

Mr. ISAACSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for doing

this, Chairman Tierney. It is an honor to be here, and I want to

thank Ranking Member Shays for those kind words. Also, last time

I testified before Congressman Shays, it was on New Orleans recovery, and you were very open-minded. I appreciate that as well.

16

I think that is it particularly relevant that it is this committee,

because it is one of the few committees with a ranking member and

a chairman who I can see can work together in a bipartisan way

for important national security and strategic concerns.

I also want to thank the staff. I spent a lot of time with the staff

of this committee and they were deeply involved in preparation for

this, and I think I learned more from the staff than they learned

from me, which is why I was surprised to be invited on this panel.

I am a little intimidated by the other two people on the panel

who are great foreign policy intellectuals, and particularly intimidated by Congressman Cooper, who, for those of you who don’t

know, was at graduate school with me studying international relations, and did much better than I did. And I think he is here because the last time I felt this way was when I saw somebody about

to give me an oral exam, and they were sitting up on a podium like

that. So I fear that the Congressman from Tennessee has been

waiting 30 years to give me an oral exam on what we studied together.

About 60 years ago, the world was faced with a whole new global

threat, the threat of the expansion of Soviet communism. And it

came upon us rather suddenly. We had just been allies with the Soviet Union in the greatest military victory over fascism and the

new president of the United States, Harry Truman, was hit with

the fact that, at Yalta and then at Potsdam, and then in the Polish

elections, we were faced with another threat that was global in nature and a threat to our very existence and our way of life. And

he gathered a group of bipartisan people, called the Wise Men, who

worked together with Congress, with Republicans such as Vandenberg and Democrats, in order to create a new national security

strategy. That is what I see Chairman Tierney and Congressman

Shays and others using this committee to do. It is particularly important because, in this day and age, we are not doing that burst

of creativity that we saw in 1947 to 1949.

They were faced with a global threat that came upon them rather suddenly, and what they did was create institutions, that were

totally thought up and totally brilliant, to counter the threat that

they saw. For example, they created a military alliance, NATO, a

brilliant strategy of like-minded nations who were going to contain

the threat that they all saw and perceived alike. That NATO military alliance worked very well, but it was part of a context, and

that context is what you are trying to do today, which is a clear

definition of the threat and, as Congressman Shays said, figure out

the purpose, the risks, the goals, the strategies, the tactics, the

commitments, and the resources that will be needed for that.

When they did that, they started with the intellectual

underpinnings, people like George Kennan, the Jessica Tuckman

Mathews of his day. We were able to define why we were in a

struggle and who that struggle was against. It was just as controversial as now, trying to figure out who the enemy was. Was it

Russia, an expansionist 600 year old Duchy of Muscovy that had

become a Russian empire? Was it communism as an ideology? Was

it the spread of Soviet communism that was the threat? So with

the help of George Kennan and others, they defined the spread of

Soviet-backed communism as a clear nature of that threat.

17

They then went about forming a doctrine for how to counter that

threat, known now as the Truman Doctrine. The Truman Doctrine

was something that was accepted in a bipartisan way by, I think,

nine presidents, starting with Harry Truman until the cold war

ended with Ronald Reagan and the first President George Bush.

They also came to a very clear document, NSC 68, which we every

now and then ought to go back and look at, which was a National

Security Council document that explained, as Congressman Shays

did, exactly the type of military resources, domestic, the risks, the

strategies, the tactics you would have to use.

Then they created new institutions like the Marshall Plan, done

in such a bipartisan way that when it was invented and being

kicked around, Harry Truman thought it was a great idea not to

call it the Truman Plan, but to call it the Marshall Plan because

it would get bipartisan support, and he said to Robert Lovett, his

Under Secretary of State, it means those Republicans won’t be able

to throw it up against our face, at which point Under Secretary

Lovett said, you forget, Mr. President, I am a Republican. And that

was in the days when Republicans and Democrats could work together and form a policy and forget which party each one was. We

see that on this committee sometimes with the chairman and the

ranking member, but we don’t see that in this Hill as often as we

should.

They created financial institutions because they knew we were

trying to win a struggle that was not just a military struggle of

who could have enough troops at the Folger Gap to prevent an invasion of Europe, or enough missiles. They knew we had to have

an economic in which our side would succeed. So besides the Marshall Plan there was The World Bank, the XM Bank, and other institutions that helped us win a struggle not just for a military

might, but for the pocketbooks and loyalties of a new economy.

And it was a combination of realism and idealism. If you ask was

the Marshall Plan part of a realist tradition or an idealist tradition, the answer is yes. It served both our national interests and

our national values.

Finally, they realized, too, that we had to win the struggle for

people’s minds. They reinvigorated Voice of America; they created

Radio Free Europe; they created all sorts of institutions that were

totally creative in order that we would win this struggle and convince people that our values were shared by them.

We have now been hit, on September 11th, with an entire new

global struggle. You can debate whether it is as much of a threat

as the threat of the spread of Soviet communism, or more of a

threat or less, but it is a new type of threat, and we are using the

same old institutions, instead of being creative, in order to try to

counter it. As much as we may love NATO, it was mainly designed

to stop things in the Folger Gap, not designed to win a struggle in

the Middle East and other places against the spread of global terrorism.

In fact, we haven’t done what, at the very beginning, we should

do, and it has been longer since September 11, 2001 than it was

between Stalin’s decision to cancel the Polish elections and the creation of all the Wise Men’s bipartisan policies in the late 1940’s.

We still haven’t even defined the threat very well. You get disVerDate 11-MAY-2000 13:57 Mar 24, 2009 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00021 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\47590.TXT KATIE PsN: KATIE
18

agreement; you don’t have bipartisan consensus on whether it is

radical Islam, whether it is the Islamic Arab world, whether it is

terrorism in general that is our threat. It would be nice to define

that. It would be nice to define a set of institutions with which we

balance commitments and resources and say here is what we need

to fight that threat.

What we also should do is try to be just as creative. If we went

down a checklist, we could look at, OK, they had the Marshall

Plan. What economic programs do we have to win among the moderate Arab world so that we can win the struggle against Islamic

fanaticism, as we are struggling to do?

I am involved with the State Department now on U.S.-Palestinian public-private partnerships and investments. I think those are

good ideas, but they are no where near the level of the Marshall

Plan, the World Bank and the XM Bank that we try to do. I commend the State Department and I look forward to working more on

those. I commend the Congress for funding those, but it is not

nearly at the level that the people of a previous generation did

when they were faced with such a struggle.

And I could go on, but there is only one more point I would make

in terms of what they did. In terms of just winning the value struggle. We are sitting here still wondering who is going to run Voice

of America and Radio Free Europe. We should be enlisting the people who created Facebook and Google. We should be enlisting people who understand social networking. We should be creating a

counterpart to Voice of America that will win the hearts and minds

of people around the world.

In 1989, when I was covering the collapse of Soviet communism

in Eastern Europe, I remember being in Bratislava, in one of the

hotel rooms they put foreign journalists, and it was one of the few

hotel rooms that had a satellite dish, which is why they put us

there, so we could see the outside world. I was asked by one of the

people working in the hotel could they use my hotel room because

the students like to come watch music videos in the afternoon. I

said, sure, that would be fine. I came back early to meet some of

the students. They weren’t watching music videos in my room; they

were watching CNN and what was happening in the Gdansk Shipyards and what was happening in the rest of Eastern Europe. And

I realized that the ability to have a free flow of information was

going to be the strongest asset we had in that global struggle.

Likewise, when I went to China a few years ago and was in

Kashgar, a tiny village, I walked into a coffee shop and saw four

kids behind a computer screen. I asked what they were doing. They

spoke Weegar [phonetically]; we were talking through the translator. They said they were on the Internet. I said, well, let me try

something. I typed in CNN.com and it was blocked. I typed in

Time.com, it said access denied. One of the kids nudged me aside

and said, type something in and, boom, there is CNN and there is

Time. I said, what did you do? He said, well, we know how to go

through proxy servers in Hong Kong that the centers are clueless

about.

We should be making use, as our previous generation did, of the

new information technologies to win the struggle we have.

19

When you go back to Benjamin Franklin, somebody I once wrote

about, Benjamin Franklin realized that he too faced a great global

struggle that he was dealing with in 1776, right after they wrote

the Declaration of Independence and he was sent to Paris to get

France in on our side in the war. We had to enlist other countries

back then, as we do now. And even back then France was a bit of

a handful, so they send old Dr. Franklin over there and he carried

with him the document they had just written. He and John Adams

and Thomas Jefferson were put on the subcommittee to write the

document.

With all due respect, it may be the last time Congress created

an awesome subcommittee like that. But Jefferson, Adams, and

Franklin wrote a declaration explaining why we were in a war of

independence, and it was pretty clear what they were doing from

the very first sentence, because they said a decent respect for the

opinions of mankind is why we are writing this document; we have

to bring them in to our side.

And they did a beautiful job writing that document, even and

balancing the values we were fighting for, the famous second paragraph that says ‘‘We hold these truths.’’ Jefferson writes the first

document you can find in the Library of Congress, the first draft

said ‘‘We hold these truths to be sacred.’’ You see Franklin’s printer’s pen crossing it out and saying ‘‘we hold these truths to be selfevident.’’ And they are trying to explain that it is a new type of

value that comes from the consent of the governed and rationality

and reason; we are not enshrining the dictates of any particular religion in our new values.

But the sentence goes on, they are ‘‘endowed with certain inalienable rights.’’ And there is John Adams’ handwriting, ‘‘endowed

by their creator with certain inalienable rights.’’ So even in that

sentence they are doing a strategy statement and a value statement in which they are balancing very carefully the role of divine

providence, the role of values and religion, the role of a new type

of nation that depends on the consent of the governed. And what

Benjamin Franklin does when he gets to Paris, besides writing

memos to Virjean on the balance of power and why the Bourbonpact nations have to come in on our side, is he builds a printing

press and he prints thousands of copies of that document, which

were a public diplomacy document, a propaganda document, saying

here is the strategy, here are the values, here is what we are fighting for.

To me, that is what we haven’t yet done in this new global struggle and what I hope this committee will, with these hearings, further that process. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. TIERNEY. If we have any document, we are going to call it

the Shays document, so people won’t throw it back in our face.

Thank you. [Laughter.]

And you can tell, Doctor, we are going to be liberal with the

clock, because every minute of that was worth it, and I suspect the

same will be true with the next two witnesses. Doctor, please.

STATEMENT OF ROBERT J. LIEBER

Mr. LIEBER. Chairman Tierney, Ranking Member Shays, members of the subcommittee, and staff, thank you very much for proVerDate 11-MAY-2000 13:57 Mar 24, 2009 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00023 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\47590.TXT KATIE PsN: KATIE
20

viding me with the opportunity to present my views on the crucial

subject of long-term threats and risks and U.S. security for the

post-9/11 world. You have my testimony, so I am going to concentrate in broad brush terms on what I think are the long-term,

even existential, realities of the world in which the United States

finds itself not just now, but certainly for the next administration

and whichever party occupies the White House.

There are three, I think, realities in the post-9/11 world, and realities which will continue for the foreseeable future. The first of

those, and the most important, I think, is that we face a lethal and

enduring threat, which is not going to go away and is not chiefly

a response to this or that policy or diplomatic action or commitment.

The threat consists, I think, of three distinct but related elements. The first of these is radical Islamist jihadism as an ideology

and in its organized forms; the second component is mass casualty

terrorism; and the third component is the long-term danger of

chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons being used potentially by non-state actors, possibly aided by states or even by

states themselves.

I would note that the 9/11 Commission itself, which was unanimous and bipartisan in its conclusion in 2004, stated that ‘‘The catastrophic threat at this moment in history is the threat posed by

Islamist terrorism, especially al Qaida, the al Qaida network, its

affiliates, and its ideology.’’ I would also note that leading experts

across party lines have, for the most part, also observed and

warned about this.

I could cite numerous studies, but the most recent is in the current issue of Foreign Policy, in which more than 100 leading terrorism proliferation and foreign policy experts surveyed by the magazine said, of those 100 experts, more than 80 percent expect a 9/

11-scale attack on the United States within the next decade. You

can agree or disagree about that educated guess, but it suggests

that serious people across party lines draw the same conclusion to

which I have pointed.

I also want to indicate that while some see these threats as a result of our policies—good, bad, or otherwise—in Iraq or vis-a-vis

Middle Eastern regimes or vis-a-vis the Arab-Israeli conflict, I

think those assessments miss the deep causes of threat. In my

judgment, the threat ultimately is a consequence of the failure of

major parts of the Arab Muslim world to cope with the challenges

of globalization and modernity. This is more acute in recent decades, but it is a very long-term problem and will take a very long

time to sort out. There is also, in longer range terms, looking backward, the sense of humiliation over four centuries of decline for

many of those areas of the world. And I think the consequence is

that those who are particularly obsessed or upset with it express

either individual or societal rage, which again takes its form in

radical jihadism, in the use of terrorism, and, I would add, in efforts to inflict mass casualty terrorism.

So my first broad point is that we live and are going to live in

an environment of lethal and enduring threat, and this needs to be

a priority as we weigh various kinds of tradeoffs and policies.

21

Second, despite the importance of cooperation with our allies,

with international institutions like the United Nations, with the

European Union,—and I would add that collaboration is highly desirable and necessary—many of these institutions remain ineffective in confronting the most urgent and deadly threats. In shorthand terms, I would throw out words like Bosnia, Rwanda, and

Darfur as illustrations of that reality.

Third, the United States possesses unique power and capacity,

even now. Despite the costs and difficulties of Iraq and Afghanistan, of multiple challenges, of proliferation, rise of regional powers, the growing strength of authoritarian capitalist powers in Russia and China, and our bitter bipartisan or political dis-census in

the country; nonetheless, the United States continues to possess remarkable strength and, if you like, primacy. It doesn’t mean we

can do everything, but it means that the United States has a

unique role to play.

In the post-9/11 world, an American grand strategy has emerged;

sometimes in official documents, sometimes willy-nilly . In broad

brush terms, that grand strategy embodies roughly the following

four elements, as, for instance, noted by the administration in its

national security documents: one, the maintenance of primary; two,

the ability to use preemption, if necessary, in the face of imminent

threats; third, multilateral cooperation—I would describe that as as

much cooperation with others as possible, but as much unilateral

action as unavoidable or necessary—and, finally, support for democracies and democratization.

Now, let me note that citing those four broad points does not necessarily give you a good specific answer to a policy question. Implementation will inevitably be controversial, requiring difficult judgments in the midst of incomplete information and uncertainty. In

the judgment of history, inept or imprudent choices can be harsh.

But I would also disagree with descriptions that suggest a radical

departure from past American history. In response to attacks on

the United States and looking back at Harry Truman and the Truman Doctrine, which Mr. Isaacson has rightly referred to, and looking back at the Kennedy inaugural of 1961, at Reagan’s State of

the Union in 1985, I would note there is a bipartisan legacy on

which a good deal of contemporary grand strategy builds, even if

there is ample debate about implementation, policy decisions, and

even prudence.

There are problems, obviously. The United States has the capacity to act and lead, but it requires all kinds of things to be effective

over the long term: an appropriate fiscal and monetary environment; social cohesion and public support; policy management and

coordination of the sort that this committee is seeking to focus on;

skilled diplomacy. I come from Georgetown University, and there

is a saying about diplomacy, that skilled diplomacy is the ability

to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that he looks forward

to the trip. I would submit that our diplomacy has not always had

that exquisite degree of skill and finesse.

Cooperation with others to the maximum extent possible, but not

beyond that extent; and we also encounter certain deficits now. Our

military is stretched, our public diplomacy is a disaster, a legacy

both of the fateful Clinton era decision to do away with USIA and

22

the inability of the current administration to really turn that

around. We need a new USIA or its equivalent. I think that is an

urgent matter.

We also have an utterly dysfunctional visa system which tends

to discourage or shut out the kinds of people with the skills, commitment, and backgrounds that we need, while willy-nilly tending

to give, sometimes by the back door, avenues for those who are less

appropriate.

Importantly, we still lack an urgently needed energy policy. Our

energy policy over a couple of decades has been disastrous. It represents a threat to our economy and our national security in terms

of the necessity of ratcheting down our dependence on oil. It can’t

be completely eliminated, but our current policy strengthens our

adversaries and plenty of others.

We can cope. America has, despite obstacles, in the past, overcome huge challenges: World War II, creating the Marshall Plan,

the Apollo mission, and so on, not least because of our attributes

of flexibility and adaptability.

Let me conclude. The United States faces lethal and persistent

threats. Neither the United Nations nor any other international organization is capable of effective action without important use of

state power. Multilateral responses to common threats, for example, proliferation, can be effective and necessary, but they are hard

to achieve. The U.S. role and U.S. power are unique. The crux is

to use that power skillfully and prudently, but not to assume there

is a real alternative to it. Whoever takes the oath of office on January 20, 2009, will need to adopt a national security strategy that

incorporates key elements of the post-9/11 foreign policy doctrine.

America’s own national security and the maintenance of a decent

international order depend on it.

Thank you for listening.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Lieber follows:]

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

Mr. TIERNEY. Thank you very much, doctor.

Ms. Mathews, you have a minute. Only kidding.

STATEMENT OF JESSICA T. MATHEWS

Ms. MATHEWS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I also would like to

commend you on the farsightedness of the plan to hold this series

of hearings and on the degree of bipartisanship that you and Mr.

Shays have established. He laid out the components of a strategy,

which begins, accurately, as he said, with determining priorities. Of

all the steps he laid out, I will stop with the first one and try to

lay out for you what seems to me the top priorities for our security

strategy.

If it had been me, I would have called these hearings Threats,

Risks, and Strategy in a Post-Iraq World, rather than a post-9/11

world, because I think that the events of that day have had far less

impact on the real world than they had on the American psyche.

The Iraq war, on the other hand, is a very different matter. It will

be the turning point that changes the basic parameters of our security picture for decades, I suspect.

For one reason, the war’s monopoly on our political energy, which

has now stretched to 5 years, an eon in a time of fast-moving global

change, is one of the greatest uncounted costs of this war, the degree to which it has sucked the oxygen from almost every other

issue. And unless a major effort is made to reverse current trends,

the fissures that are now stretching across the global non-proliferation regime will, I think, become the worst of these.

Among all the challenges that we face, only nuclear weapons

pose an existential threat, and a world of 20 or 30 or more nuclear

weapon states holds few prospects for avoiding nuclear catastrophe.

The stability that we enjoyed for 50 years of the cold war didn’t

happen naturally; it happened because of unrelenting effort on the

part of the two super powers and some very close misses. The likelihood that we could achieve that with 20 or 30 nuclear weapon

states, which we could easily get to if the regime fails, is, I think,

very close to zero; and the probability that some of all that weapons fuel will end up in the hands of terrorists is, I think, very close

to one.

The President has called nuclear proliferation the greatest risk

we face. I think that is right. But only sporadic attention has been

given in the last half dozen years either to the risks in North

Korea and Iran, but, more importantly, to the systemic weakness

that is affecting the regime as a whole. We had 30 very good years

under the NPT; it kept the number of nuclear weapon states far

lower than its authors dared to hope. The bad news is that the last

10 years have been very bad ones, starting with the nuclear test

by India and Pakistan in 1998 and then, 5 years later, the discovery of the A.Q. Khan network, where you had businessmen and scientists selling technology, bomb designs, and materials to whomever had the money to buy; individuals, the sellers, from more than

a dozen countries.

The North Korean and Iranian programs that we came to understand in that period used the cover of the NPT to hide covert programs weapons and underlined that way the Achilles heel, what we

now know to be the Achilles heel of the existing regime, which is

39

that no safeguards, no safeguards, no matter how good the IAEA

is, can provide real protection when a country has direct access to

plutonium or highly enriched uranium, weapons fuel.

The Bush administration made a radical change in our non-proliferation thinking, and one that urgently, I think, needs repair. In

his 2003 State of the Union, the President described the threat as

the greatest danger facing America and the world is outlaw regimes that seek and possess nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. This new formulation attracted very little attention at the

time, again, because we were already consumed in the national debate over the Iraq war. But it was profound change.

Past Presidents of both parties, all of them, had focused on the

weapons, but President Bush’s new formulation shifted the focus

from the weapons to the regimes, from the what to the who. And,

of course, the United States got to decide who the good guys are

and who the bad guys, even though our judgments, we know,

change radically over the years, as they have, for example, with

Saddam Hussein.

But shifting the focus from the what to the who, from the weapons to the regimes, means that it is a very short step to regime

change as the answer. This is the hole that we are in today, one

that diminishes our ability to deal with Iran, both directly and with

other key players who balk at taking small steps in the fear that

these will give legitimacy to a U.S. attack, or who make bad deals

with Tehran in the mistaken notion that they are serving world security thereby.

But beyond Iran, there are two urgent threats that need addressing. First is the growing disenchantment among the non-nuclear

weapon states who have come to believe, 15 years after the end of

the cold war, that the nuclear weapon states never intend to uphold their end of the NPT bargain, i.e., nuclear disarmament. They

are increasingly wondering why they should continue to uphold

their end of the bargain.

The second threat is the glaring need to strengthen the regime:

to impose meaningful penalties on states that abuse it as a cover

for nuclear weapons programs, to eliminate direct access to bomb

fuel in the non-nuclear weapons states, and to address the unanticipated threat from terrorists and corporate networks.

The United States, however, right now is in no position to lead

on this effort. It cannot command followers. Before it can do so, it

needs to re-establish its own credentials in this field, and there are

four steps that it must take. First, renouncing unilateral preventive war—preventive war, not preemptive war; war in the absence

of imminent threat declared unilaterally—second, renouncing unilateral regime change for the purpose of political change; ratifying

the comprehensive test ban treaty; and canceling new nuclear

weapons programs. The last because it moves in directly the opposite direction from a treaty commitment that we made and re-established in writing as recently as 1995.

Re-establishing arms control momentum with Russia is another

priority, both important in its own right and for movement elsewhere around the World.

I have to add that the decision to base an anti-missile system in

Poland and in the Czech Republic derails, I think, hope for much

40

progress in this direction for the time being. Pushing ahead with

a system, that does not yet work, against a threat from Iran, that

does not yet exist, at the expense of relations with a state, Russia,

whose participation is essential, if the threat is to be prevented, is

a choice that, in my view, can only be—these are all important, as

is recovering our ability to listen, to really listen, to other countries

and recovering our confidence in our ability to pursue national

ends through diplomacy.

But restoring the trust in American leadership that has been lost

so widely, as the chairman described at the outset, will only come

from deeds, and it won’t happen quickly. The good news in the nuclear area is that the critical steps that I have outlined are all

under our control; we can take them alone, they don’t have to be

negotiated with anybody.

Let me turn much more briefly to three other challenges. Any

short list like this is somewhat arbitrary, but, to me, these three

issues, together with non-proliferation, stand out. First, China. History has no examples, that I know of, of a rapidly rising new power

not producing at least tension, and usually outright conflict, as it

enters the circle of major states. China knows this very well, and

it has a strong desire to avoid conflict; hence, its peaceful rise. Conflict is bad for business, after all, and, above all, China wants to

grow. Yet, if the path is any guide—and I think it is—it is going

to be very difficult to manage China’s rise peacefully, especially in

an energy-constrained world that must begin to deal seriously with

climate change.

The only silver lining to 9/11, I think, was that it put an end to

another period of growing sense that China was the enemy, which,

on September 10, 2001, was very much with us. That ended overnight and substituted a real enemy for a potential or imagined one.

We are on the right track now generally, I think, with China, but

if, by our behavior, we, over the coming years, turn China into an

enemy, if we get China wrong, that, other than the failure to rescue the non-proliferation regime, will be the single most dangerous

worst mistake we can make.

The policies, on the other hand, that are currently wrong, that

urgently need to be turned right, deal with the Middle East and

the world of Islam. Olivier Roy, the distinguished French expert in

this field, points out that the West has tried three different approaches with this area and with democracy, and that all three

have failed: we have tried to strengthen the existing authoritarian

regimes; we have tried reforming the existing authoritarian regimes, almost, in some cases, to the point of their collapse; and we

have tried to impose democracy from scratch. None have worked.

What we have not tried to do is to build democracy with the participation of the prevailing political forces in these states, and those

forces today are Islamists. They cannot be end-run; they must be

engaged. We should be engaging with moderate Islamist forces,

and by that I mean those that have renounced the use of violence

as a political tool, even when we find others of their views uncomfortable or even abhorrent.

The other precondition of success in the Middle East will be a

much more vigorous and engaged effort on Israeli-Palestinian

peacemaking, and one that is and is seen to be more even-handed.

41

Finally, we have to tackle climate change, which means that we,

at long last, as Bob Lieber just said, need a national energy policy.

Voluntary policies are a joke. Research-only policies are a cop-out.

Research is necessary, but not sufficient. And no serious national

objective has ever been pursued on a voluntary basis. The endless

and fruitless debate over whether to use price or regulation to pursue energy policies should end with the recognition that an effective policy requires a mix of both. The search for magic bullets,

from oil shale to fuel cells to biofuels should be seen as a recurring

hunt for a simple solution to a very difficult problem that will

never work. And the policy must begin, must be built on, must be

based on the recognition that, by far, the largest, cheapest, most

quickly accessible and most climate sensitive energy resource that

we have is drastic improvements in energy efficiency in every sector.

So, Mr. Chairman, thank you for your patience. I hope these

thoughts, this identification of these, I think, four overwhelming

priorities for us are helpful to you as you pursue this daunting security agenda.

[The prepared statement of Ms. Mathews follows:]

42

43

44

45

46

47

Mr. TIERNEY. They are incredibly helpful to us. For all three witnesses, thank you very much. I am almost inclined to just get

unanimous consent to let the three of you keep on talking, without

the questions, but being who we are, that is not likely to happen.

I think we might retract the 10 minute period and go 5 minutes,

but keep the caveat that people should feel free to interject an

intervention if they want. As long as that isn’t abused, we will let

discussion flow as freely as possible.

Let me just ask one question to start. How would the threat represented by 9/11 fit into the overall strategic priorities that this

country has? If you had to look and say that you had the 9/11

threat and then you have all the other things we have to attend,

where would you fit that in and how would you address that?

Whoever wants to speak.

Mr. LIEBER. It seems to me that threat is overriding. Inevitably,

decisions about policy, large and small, involve tradeoffs. For example, there is a genuine debate, as there has been in this country

for two centuries, about where you draw the line or where you

strike the balance between civil liberties and our historical freedoms, and a long continuum vis-a-vis taking strong actions to reduce our vulnerability and so on. There are not easy answers to

that, but I would say that whether on that issue or a wide range

of things that the three of us have discussed, the importance of

threat ought to be the overriding concern.

By contrast, there are those who talk about terrorism as a police

problem. I respectfully disagree. So I don’t have a specific actionable response for you other than to say that threat symbolized by

9/11 and incorporating the elements I cited, of which proliferation,

I think, is clearly part, has to be the overriding consideration,

whether you are thinking not just about wiretapping, but about

costs and tradeoffs or gasoline taxes or forced deployments, or what

have you.

Ms. MATHEWS. Mr. Chairman, as I suggested, I think 9/11 meant

more to us psychologically than it means in purely national security terms, and far less now than does the basket of issues that

have been created by the Iraq war. I don’t mean to suggest that

terrorism is not important; it is. And Bob has laid out a lot of the

issues that swarm around it. But it doesn’t pose an existential

threat to us, and nuclear weapons still do. And we are on the verge

of a breakdown, I believe, in the regime. That is really the crux of

the Iran problem. We have now 12 countries in the Middle East

that have gone to the IAEA and expressed an interest in starting

nuclear energy and enrichment programs.

Mr. TIERNEY. May I interject something here?

Ms. MATHEWS. Sure.

Mr. TIERNEY. What is your opinion if the United States was serious about working toward the imposition of a nuclear-free zone in

the Middle East, the impact that would have on the larger problems that we are confronting?

Ms. MATHEWS. I think a nuclear weapons-free zone is doable over

the long, longer term. Right now, we are in no position to push for

that or anything else, as I suggested. We don’t have—the Carnegie

Endowment, 2 years ago, did a major study on nuclear proliferation

called Universal Compliance. We took the draft of that study to 22

48

countries. We talked all over the world about it. We had 33 countries at our non-proliferation conference this past June, and the

feeling that I described of utter unwillingness to consider any steps

to strengthen the existing regime and, indeed, in many cases a

sense of real outrage at the nuclear weapon states for not doing

their end of the bargain; and then, on top of it, to the United States

both with respect to the CTBT, which countries are very well

aware of, and the new nuclear weapons programs. To lead, you

have to have followers, and we are not in a position to command

followers right now on this set of issues. And, of course, I think a

nuclear weapons-free zone, realistically, will require an Israeli-Palestinian peace and some resolution of the current Iranian program.

So it is way down the road.

Mr. TIERNEY. So you see that as a subsequent step as opposed

to an initial step?

Ms. MATHEWS. I do.

Mr. TIERNEY. Thank you.

I have very little time left.

Mr. Isaacson, I don’t know if you wanted to interject on that, on

the question of how it fits into the overall privacy.

Mr. ISAACSON. [Remarks off microphone.]

Mr. TIERNEY. OK.

Mr. Shays. Mr. Duncan.

Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Georgie Anne Geyer,

the very respected foreign policy columnist, wrote, in 2003, a few

months after we had gone to war in Iraq, at this time, that Americans would inevitably come to a point where they had to decide

whether they wanted a government that provided services at home

or one that seeks empire across the globe.

Ann McFeatters, a columnist for the Scripps Howard newspaper

chain, wrote a couple of years ago that we were headed for what

she described as a financial tsunami when the baby-boomers started retiring in heavy numbers in 2008 and in the years following.

Before the first Gulf war, which I voted for, I heard briefings

from General Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell and others about Saddam Hussein’s elite republican troops and how great the threat

was. And then I watched those so-called elite troops surrender to

CNN camera crews and empty tanks, and I thought then that the

threat had been greatly exaggerated. Now, before this Gulf war, I

was at the White House and they told me that Saddam Hussein’s

total military budget was a little over two-tenths of 1 percent of

ours, most of which he spent—they didn’t say this, but most of

which, it turned out later, he had spent building castles and protecting himself and his family.

Now we have hundreds of registered homeland security lobbyists

and we have thousands of defense lobbyists all pushing us to spend

more, and, yet, we have these estimates that this war is—we are

already at $750 billion or so, and now we are soon going to be

asked for $200 billion more; and counting future military costs and

medical costs and so forth, they are talking about $2 billion. Then

we have some people wanting us to take action against Iran that

could potentially be even more expensive.

What I am wondering about is this. How do we achieve the balance? Because the politically correct, politically popular thing to do

49

is, when they use the word security, always say that we are not

doing enough and always say that we need to do more. In fact, the

Wall Street Journal wrote, a few months after 9/11, that we should

give four times the scrutiny to any bill that has the word security

in it because they saw that every department and agency was coming to us asking for more security funding.

Yet, some of us wonder if we are going to be able to pay our veterans’ pensions and our social security and our Medicare and Medicaid and so forth in the years ahead if we don’t somehow look at

these threats realistically. We can’t spend the entire Federal budget just because somebody—keep increasing this spending just because somebody says security or threats. How do we achieve that

balance?

Second, I read a column by Walter Williams, the conservative

columnist, that said al Qaida—this was a year or so ago—that al

Qaida was now less than 3,000 members, most of whom were people living at home with their parents and had almost no money. I

heard a talk last week by Larry Johnson, the former CIA analyst

who is now a Defense contractor, who said al Qaida was now down

to about 600. I know they have thousands of al Qaida sympathizers, but I am wondering if you know how many people are in al

Qaida.

And then, just so I get it all out, third, I am wondering what

your predictions are for Iran. Do you think that we will be making

what are politely referred to sometimes as searchable strikes and

taking out nuclear facilities any time within the next 2 or 3 years?

I would like your predictions.

That is three questions. Mr. Isaacson, we will start with you, I

guess.

Mr. ISAACSON. OK. I think your challenge here is to balance an

emotionalism that comes both after 9/11 and from the existential

threat that we might feel from radical Islamic jihadism, as Bob so

aptly described it, and a realism that says how do we effectively

counter it. And this is a very difficult question. If you ask me is

our invasion of and continued presence in Iraq doing more to help

or to hurt radical Islamic jihadism in this world, I am not sure

there is a clear answer. So it is not simply a matter of spending

billions more on military in Iraq.

This is not for me getting into the argument about Iraq, it is just

that this is a complex problem, when you say does it help or hurt

the threat of radical Islamic jihadism.

So I think we have to be very realistic. As I think you are suggesting, we need to inject a note of realism in this. This is a threat,

but not one that demands us abandoning the economy of the

United States and other priorities. And in answer to both the

chairman’s question and others, how do you put this in the ranking

of priorities, General Powell has said repeatedly that the jihadists

cannot destroy American society; only we can destroy American society by betting too contorted in this war against the jihadists. So

I think there is a note of realism that you are trying to inject that

I would agree with.

On Iran, I think that if I look at this panel and on this panel,

I may be the person least qualified to guess what we are going to

50

do surgically in Iran or not, so I am not going to—especially with

people recording what I say—try to pretend an expertise in that.

Mr. LIEBER. Congressman Duncan, let me respond to part of your

list of really comprehensive and vital questions. First, on the financial side, it is certainly the case that America needs money spent

on its foreign policy needs and security, to be spent as widely and

as prudently and efficiently and effectively as possible.

I would note, in terms of affordability, that despite the enormous

costs that the United States now faces for defense for the wars in

Afghanistan and Iraq, for rebuilding its own forces’ equipment,

right now we are spending approximately 4.2 percent of gross domestic product. That is contrasted to about 2.93 percent just before

9/11. But you have to set it against a prior crisis in American history. During the height of the Reagan buildup in the mid-1980’s,

the number was about 6.6 percent, and for large portions of the

Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations it was into

double digits, 10 percent or sometimes more.

We have the capacity to spend that without destroying our economy. But this brings up an issue that Aaron Friedberg of Princeton

University has recently written about knowledgeably: the urgent

need for a much more effective mechanism for policy management

and coordination, which combines military and defense issues, political dimensions, economics, and so forth. Because of the complexity of the way the executive branch is organized, the complexity of

the committee structure in Congress, and the nature of the issues

themselves, we haven’t had the degree of coordination that ought

to be the case and compared to what existed sometimes in the past.

Very briefly on one other point. Bruce Hoffman at Georgetown,

who is a prominent and superbly qualified member of our faculty

in security studies and one of the country’s leading terrorism experts, has recently said that al Qaida is back. They were badly

damaged initially, but they have recovered a good deal in terms of

capacity and so forth. So I think there is a very real al Qaida risk.

Finally, I would quote the dean of our Georgetown School of Foreign Service, my colleague, Bob Gallucci, who was an opponent of

the use of force in Iraq, but who has written that he is very concerned about the risk of a concealed nuclear device going off in one

or more American cities sometime in the next 5 to 10 years. That

is related to terrorism. So I don’t think, despite the relatively small

size of al Qaida overall, that we ought to minimize or otherwise

overlook the gravity of the risk it represents, all things considered.

Ms. MATHEWS. I am trying to choose among all the questions

that you have asked.

Mr. TIERNEY. You are probably going to have to put that on, Ms.

Mathews, your mic.

Ms. MATHEWS. Sorry.

What to say? Bob is certainly right that, as a percent of GDP,

we have spent much more. We haven’t spent it in a globalized economy before and we have much higher spending on other priorities,

particularly healthcare, now than we have before. If Congress wanted to save $200 billion a year, it could, for the same security, out of the existing $600 billion defense budget, but

there is a whole lot of politics buried in that. But I think every

close student of the defense budget believes that at least a third

51

is wasted. But I recognize that is a politically unrealistic thing,

perhaps, to say.

Since the others haven’t, let me address Iran. I don’t think that

it is likely that we are going to attack Iran, because I think the

arguments against it are so overwhelming and so overwhelmingly

obvious. I should say that I also didn’t think we were going to go

into Iraq, because it seemed to me really quite stupid at the time.

So you take this for what it is worth. But we have a very limited

target set in Iran. There are probably facilities that we don’t know

about. We do not, of course, have the troops to go on the ground,

and air strikes without ground forces are a minimal, modest utility.

We are currently dealing in a world of Sunni terrorism, and if

we attack Iran, we will add a whole new layer of Shiite terrorism.

They have made that very clear, and they clearly have the capacity

to unleash it.

And, finally, we will take a country that hasn’t, to the best of our

knowledge, made a firm decision either way on whether their security requires nuclear weapons, and create one that is absolutely

100 percent permanently committed to having them. And, finally,

it will underline the lesson to other countries that if you think you

have a serious opponent, a serious enemy in the United States, you

need nuclear weapons to protect yourself.

So, for all those reasons—I also think the military has a very

clear appreciation of all of those points. So I think it is unlikely.

I also think it would be, it is probably obvious, a catastrophe for

the United States.

Mr. TIERNEY. Thank you, Ms. Mathews.

Mr. Duncan, I can tell you that we have some plans to perhaps

have some hearings on that issue of Iran and consequences and

plans as well, so we will keep you informed of that.

Mr. Cooper, Mr. Isaacson is ready for his exam, his orals.

Mr. COOPER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am grateful to you for

having this very important hearing. I am sorry it is perhaps not

getting the attention that the hearing down the hall is that is more

involved with using foreign policy and security issues as a domestic

political club.

I am proud that Walter is here. I have been in awe of his career

for a long time. He brought an excellence to journalism that is

rarely seen. I also liked his four books, isn’t it? Kissinger, Wise

Men, Ben Franklin, and the latest and greatest, Einstein. If he can

humanize that genius, you are an amazing writer, and you are. So

this will not be an exam. I am delighted to get this wisdom in three

parts.

I have a particular personal interest because on the Armed Services Committee they have recently established a panel on roles and

missions, and that is Pentagon speak for redoing the National Security Act and Goldwater nickels and things like that involve not

only Pentagon, but other agencies. So I welcome your expertise in

that area as well.

Two questions primarily. First of all, the list of threats that are

on page 2 of Dr. Lieber’s testimony is so startling that I often think

that we here on the Hill let down our guard. Like if the group of

100 foreign policy experts is correct, that 80 percent chance of a

terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 within a decade; and then anVerDate 11-MAY-2000 13:57 Mar 24, 2009 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00055 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\47590.TXT KATIE PsN: KATIE
52

other panel of experts, within 10 years, 29 percent chance of a nuclear attack in the United States, 40 percent of a radiological attack, 70 percent of some kind of CBRN event. That, plus the

Gallucci statement, all those are total game changers.

So I would like ask the other panelists if you share Dr. Lieber’s

perception, that grim view of our near term future, 5 to 10 years,

facing threats with that level of probability.

Ms. MATHEWS. I have a modest view of those sorts of numbers

because I know how I feel when I agreed to answer one of those

polls, which is, you know, you look at it and you sort of pick a number out of the damp air.

Mr. TIERNEY. Is your mic on, Ms. Mathews?

Ms. MATHEWS. Sorry.

Mr. TIERNEY. Thank you.

Ms. MATHEWS. So I just don’t believe them. But, yes, one of the

big reasons why non-proliferation is so important is because of the

terrorist threat. But terrorism without nuclear weapons is not either an existential threat nor, I would argue, even a strategic one.

So that is the context in which I put it. Imagine 9/11 without the

Twin Towers designed in the way they were, engineered in the way

they were. It would have been a totally different event. So that is

one of the serious reasons why I put the emphasis on the non-proliferation needs, and there we do face a really serious set of threats

that deserves far greater attention than we have given it.

Mr. COOPER. Walter, do you have such a view?

Mr. ISAACSON. Yes, I would like to say, as Jessica did in a way,

that we are entering a world where we are faced with a great deal

of threat and hatred from radical Islamic jihadism, and a new type

of world in which non-state actors and cross-border—not nation

states, but others, are doing that threat. And, as Jessica said, I see

the biggest problem there being the spread of weapons of mass destruction, most particularly nuclear weapons.

I do feel that it is likely we are going to have terrorism in this

country. There are going to be terrorist attacks. And I am going to

say something that I think would be difficult for perhaps others to

say, those of us in think tanks or more insulated: we have to keep

that in perspective, that you and I lived in Great Britain in a time

in which there were lots of terrorist attacks in Northern Ireland.

What makes a terrorist attack an existential threat, as Jessica

said, is when it is combined with things such as nuclear weapons.

So I know that Bob Gallucci is talking about chemical, biological,

radiological, and nuclear weapons as possible notions of attack. I

think that we should not contort ourselves so much to fear terrorism as an existential threat as, instead, to define it more specifically as jihadist groups acquiring nuclear weapons and combining

that with a desire to attack the United States.

Mr. LIEBER. Congressman, may I followup?

Thank you for citing those passages. I think the point is important. I would note, of course, these are educated guesses by smart

people. We are not talking about the laws of physics, but I think

those guesses or projections or estimates do need to be taken very

seriously and with the gravity they suggest.

I think I have a slight difference with my colleagues on the

panel, Jessica and Walter, in that I don’t think we should minimize

53

what the disruption of 9/11 was all about, even though it wasn’t

nuclear. Not only did 3,000 people die, but it paralyzed the American economy, transportation system, communications for periods of

time. By one estimate, it may have cost as much as $1 trillion in

overall effects and so forth.

Obviously, nuclear terrorism is in a class by itself. We should not

minimize the peril that mass casualty terrorism represents to a

very complex, very sophisticated economy with considerable

vulnerabilities.

One more point. Our European brothers and sisters often point

to things like the IRA, ETA in Spain, the Red Brigades and say,

oh, you Americans have just lost your virginity and you are overreacting. Well, I beg to disagree. In those instances the things that

those groups were doing did not represent the kind of impact that

9/11 and potential future attacks could represent. Moreover, the

things that al Qaida and radical Islamists want are things that no

American government could ever, I think, concede to, because they

are so fundamental to the nature of our society.

Mr. COOPER. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. TIERNEY. Thank you, Mr. Cooper.

Mr. Higgins.

Mr. HIGGINS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I too want to commend

you on this very important hearing, an extraordinary panel, and

very, very good questions about a profound problem that is not only

pervasive, but seemingly growing.

I remember the former defense secretary said that the measure

of the effectiveness on the war on terrorism, are we capturing, are

we detaining, are we stopping more terrorist activity than is being

created. It seems like, particularly with the situation relative to al

Qaida, al Qaida is morphed into al Qaidaism. There are groups

that are al Qaida inspired, al Qaida linked, and they have also

found themselves to be a global influence. You know, there are intelligence reports now that say that al Qaida is in the Sudan. Al

Qaida is obviously in Iraq. It is an ideology. I often wonder if this

is an ideology that is based on a twisted interpretation of the

Quran, where are the moderate voices within the Arab Muslim

community that are standing up to this? What is our role in helping to influence a challenge internally to this threat?

The other thing that I am struck by, when you visit places like

Afghanistan, when you visit places like Iraq, when you read about

places like Iran, is the relative youth of the population. We just visited, a group of members of this subcommittee, Afghanistan and

Pakistan last month, and I was very impressed by the U.S. military, with their level of sophistication, with their acceptance that

you don’t win this war by the use of military force alone. This is,

as many of you have said in different ways, a battle for the hearts

and minds of the population, the imagination of the people there,

who have been humiliated, who have been disaffected through centuries of oppression. I think it requires, in terms of U.S. foreign

policy, a much more sophisticated mind, a much more strategic approach.

When we left Afghanistan, after we thought we defeated the

Taliban and al Qaida, to divert resources to Iraq, supposedly to

54

give breathing room for the National Unity Government to achieve

political reconciliation, it seems as though we gave breathing room

in Afghanistan for the regrowth, for the reconstitution of al Qaida

and other terrorist groups.

My question is, is it too late? Have we allowed this thing to

evolve to the point where we have lost control of it? Because the

next al Qaida attack on the United States likely won’t come from

Afghanistan, likely won’t come from the Middle East; it could come

from Madrid, it could come from London, England. This is a problem. Are we prepared for it? What lessons have we learned and

what lessons can we learn moving forward?

Mr. ISAACSON. Let me take the first crack, which is I don’t think

it is too late, but I do think that what you have put your finger

on is that, like the cold war, this is going to be, as they called it

back then, a long twilight struggle. It is not going to be in 5 years

we declare victory against Islamic jihadism and get to come home;

it is a 40, 50-year, two generations, just like the cold war was. And

that is because it comes in two components like the cold war. The

first is a real security component, you know, protecting against Soviet missiles in that case; in this case protecting against terrorism

with defensive measures and some offensive measures.

But, second, like the cold war, it is a long ideological struggle

and, at the moment, as you said, the former secretary of defense’s

question may be right, we may be creating a broader range of terrorists by some of what has happened recently.

So I think we have to focus on a long ideological fight for our values in a world in which it is going against us right now with the

spread of al Qaidaism, as you put it, and that includes the values

of tolerance, that people can have different religious or other beliefs

and you can live in a society with them; and the basic sense that

individual rights should be protected. And we are going to win that

battle economically, morally, and through the expressions of our

values, but we have to really engage in that struggle, which is not

something I see us doing right now.

Mr. LIEBER. Briefly. I agree, by the way, completely that it is

going to be a long struggle. The analogy with the cold war is inexact, but not bad. It is probably the most useful analogy if you want

one. It is a struggle ultimately for the future of Arab Muslim world,

with some extensions, for example, Pakistan. We can influence, we

can help, but ultimately that struggle is going to be played out

within those societies.

It is also worth noting it is not only or all about us. Think of the

murder of Van Gogh in The Netherlands, eviscerated on an Amsterdam street; or the threats to the very courageous Somali-Dutch

woman, Hursi Ali; or bombings in North Africa; or the killing of

children in front of their parents in Afghanistan or Algeria; or the

London and German bombers, Glasgow and London Airport or the

thwarted attempt in Germany where you had indigenous people

with German and British citizenship; or al Qaida of Iraq killing

Shiites and blowing up Shiite shrines like the Golden Dome in

Samarra.

The 2002 Arab Human Development Report, written for the U.N.

Development Program by 15 Arab economists, referred to three

desperate deficits in the Arab Muslim world: one, in the role and

55

treatment of women; two, in knowledge and information; and,

three, in liberty and political freedom. There is a core problem

which is very deep-seeded.

One other point in passing, but I don’t think this should all be

gloom and doom. I think one very encouraging sign of the past 6

years is that while there have been a number of instances in Europe and elsewhere where indigenous and sometimes ostensibly

well integrated Muslims or Arabs who sometimes were citizens of

this country, sometimes not, carried out terrorist attacks or were

interrupted in major attack plans, that we have been blessedly

largely free of that in the United States; and I think a lot of that

has to do with the nature of American society: adaptable, flexible,

and which gives its Arab and Muslim immigrants and citizens the

sense they are Americans and are fully accepted. I think that is the

strength of America, and it is certainly one element, I think, of why

we have not, so far, faced a repeat of 9/11.

Mr. TIERNEY. Thank you, doctor.

Thank you, Mr. Higgins.

Mr. Welch.

Mr. WELCH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank all of you.

Listening, I don’t want to say it is depressing, but I will make

an observation. Everything you are saying that we should be doing

we are not. Basically, institution-building for the modern threats,

there has been none; the definition of what the conflict is is still

debated, but, actually, there has been, I think, an operational conclusion that it is all military all the time; and there has been a relaxation on the effort to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

I am interested in whether the other panelists agree with Dr.

Mathews on this question of whether Iraq simply has to be dealt

with before we are going to be able to address these profound

transformational foreign policy questions for security, because it

certainly is the sense that I have, sitting here, that it is all Iraq

all the time and it is just a powerful impediment to any clear

thinking.

On one of these trips when we were in the Middle East, when

we went over there, we met with the King of Jordan, and I was

thinking that he was going to be talking about Iraq and how that

had to be dealt with. Of course, they have to deal with hundreds

of thousands of Iraqi refugees and it is very unstable, and that was

third in his list of problems. The first one for him was the ArabIsraeli conflict; second was Lebanon; and then a distant third was

Iraq. And, of course, over here it is all Iraq all the time.

So my question, I guess, to Mr. Isaacson and Dr. Lieber is whether you are in agreement that if we are going to even start considering the recommendations you are making, somehow, someway, we

have to get Iraq behind us.

Mr. ISAACSON. I am not sure I would take fully that premise

from Jessica’s testimony, so I don’t want to put the words in her

mouth, but let me address the question.

Mr. WELCH. Well, she can respond too.

Mr. ISAACSON. I do believe, personally, that this is a multipronged approach, and the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian

issue is very important right now, and you see some hopeful signs,

56

I would say, in Dr. Rice’s trip. I also agree that there is an enormous amount we should be doing that we aren’t, whether it is their

building madrassas around the world and, you know, we are not

even close in figuring out how we are going to have education programs, English language, technology programs. The fact that we

cannot compete with the madrassa movement, when we know how

to do things like that, we are just not doing it, is appalling to me;

and that we are letting more of their education, as opposed to us

having technology centers, education centers. We are doing some of

that, and I am involved with some of that, but I just wish it were

100 times more.

On Iraq, I don’t think it has to be solved totally first, before you

get on to anything else. I think it would be a very unwise approach.

I do think that the current implementation of our Iraq strategy and

the current occupation strategy—I don’t mean occupation to be a

loaded term, but what we are doing there—is actually very bad

right now for us dealing with the other problems.

Mr. WELCH. Thank you.

Mr. LIEBER. I share your sense that there is—there is a term I

like to use, the problem of the reductio ad Iraqum.

Mr. WELCH. Oh, I use that all the time too. [Laughter.]

Mr. LIEBER. Two years of Latin in Chicago public schools serves

me well.

It is certainly true that Iraq is the elephant in the living room.

There is a tendency to see everything else through that lens. I

think the virtue of the hearings that this committee has called is

to encourage us to not ignore Iraq, but to try to look beyond it, especially for whoever is responsible for the Presidency in January

2009.

I would also note, if we look back, that at the time we went into

Iraq, 70 percent of the American public, more than three-fifths of

the Congress, two-thirds of the European governments supported

that judgment. It proves to have been a very fateful decision. The

consequences of our involvement in Iraq are still not entirely clear,

and the judgment of history may be ultimately quite harsh or it

may not be.

I am a little more cautiously optimistic about the current strategy or tactic in Iraq. I think that after the fall of Baghdad there

were serious failures in what to do, but that the policy being followed by General Patraeus has at least the possibility that it may

be turning things around. I use lots of cautions, and I think the

advantage is to know what you don’t know. It remains to be see

what will occur in Iraq. There is at least a possibility that the situation will stabilize.

Clearly, Iraq is having an impact elsewhere, but I think it is also

the case, as was mentioned in the question, that other countries

are looking at other issues. I suggested some of them, Jessica has

suggested others of them, and I think there is more of a willingness

to look beyond Iraq.

Last, in Europe, for instance, for those of us who travel and go

there a good deal, the kind of bitterness and heated debate that

marked the years 2002, 2003, 2004 has subsided, and I think there

is a willingness to try to look beyond Iraq, rather than focus on

that to the exclusion of other priorities.

57

Ms. MATHEWS. I didn’t mean to suggest there is nothing we can

do, because——

Mr. WELCH. I didn’t hear that.

Ms. MATHEWS. And I want to add to my earlier remarks a couple

of other things I think we can change. But I do believe that everything we are doing, as you suggest—I mean, the big cost is simply

the oxygen. It is just impossible to get away from. And the amount

of political capital that we all, as a country, have to focus on this,

there is very little left over for other huge priorities.

And I am under no illusion that we could stop terrorism by

changing U.S. policies, but we can affect it in a big way by a number of what I think are really, really bad policy choices, and I want

to add also to the prior question three.

One is the question of a permanent U.S. presence in Iraq. At the

end of Iraq week up here, a lot of the media said, oh, gosh, you

know, Patraeus came and talked for hours and hours and nothing

changed. But, in fact, in my judgment, something very big changed

in the President’s speech: when he said we are going to have fewer

troops and a bigger mission. He said what Secretary Gates said at

the beginning of June, which was a long-term presence on the

model of Japan and Korea.

The whole Arab world believes that we went into Iraq in order

to dismantle the most powerful Arab state and get our hands on

its oil for Israel’s benefit and our own. That is what they believe

already. And, of course, one of the reasons that we chose to go in

was because of the problem of the current American presence in

Saudi Arabia, military presence.

If we choose to do this, and do it without public discussion, without involvement of the Congress—and, as far as I know, there has

never been a national security meeting on this subject or a debate

within the administration on the wisdom of building permanent

U.S. presence in Iraq—it will be one of the biggest mistakes of this

whole business.

The passage of amendments forbidding the spending of money to

create a permanent presence is a waste of time, because the administration has figured out who can say what is permanent. Fifty

years, not permanent. But 50 years is a great big mistake, in my

judgment. If it were me, I would be up here having bicameral, bipartisan hearings on the wisdom of this choice. Not in the context

of the administration’s position, necessarily, but whether this is

something the United States wants to do. I think it has everything

to do with the supply of people to al Qaida.

Second, we need a new policy on democracy promotion. In particular, we need a set of policies to separate democracy promotion

from regime change, which is what it is believed to be in most of

the rest of the world, not just the Middle East. Russia, for example;

China. This is a subject where we can affect our destiny and the

likelihood that we will face terrorist attacks.

And, finally, Pakistan. I am a deep, deep, deep pessimist about

our ability to turn Afghanistan. Again, history tells me this one is

going to take 10 times what we are willing to give it. But Pakistan

we cannot afford not to be paying an awful lot more attention to.

And I think we do have some levers to affect the supply of terrorists in Pakistan.

58

So my point is while we are paying a terrible price in Iraq, and

will continue to for many, many years, there are things that will

make it either better or rose.

Mr. TIERNEY. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Welch.

Mr. WELCH. Thank you.

Mr. TIERNEY. Mr. Turner.

Mr. TURNER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank you for

holding this hearing and the great job you have been doing on this

subcommittee. It certainly has been very helpful for all the Members.

I appreciate your last comment about Pakistan. I just came from

an Armed Services Committee hearing where the issue is Pakistan,

its stability, our relations with Pakistan, and the issues of the war

on terror, Taliban, and our ability to be effective in Afghanistan,

al Qaida, and perhaps even Osama bin Laden himself seeking or

having refuge in Pakistan.

One of the discussion topics has been the problems and difficulties that Musharraf is having in his own country, and I was wondering if you might each comment for a moment on the issue of the

difficulties there. And I am particularly interested in if you de-couple his relationship with the United States, does he still have problems, and what are those problems, and how should we look to our

policies to affect a greater relationship with Pakistan and an acceptance of greater respect and view by the people of Pakistan of

the United States as an ally and a friend.

Mr. LIEBER. There is a lot of uncertainty here, but in the first

instance it would be my sense that his problems are overwhelmingly internal. They have to do with the nature of Pakistani society, the fact that the military has ruled, either directly or behind

the scenes, that country for a very long time with the very unequal

distribution of wealth in that society, which is really quite extraordinary; the role of the intelligence service, the ISI, and so forth.

The embrace of the United States probably adds something to his

problem internally, but in other respects can be a source of

strength because of economic and military support.

The problem there, as in some other countries in the Middle

East, is that some Middle Eastern, Muslim, and Arab leaders have

used a deliberate tactic—it is true, I think, in Egypt—of apres moi

le deluge, that is to say, deliberately cracking down on moderate

opposition elements who would like to use the democratic process,

be non-violent and so on, in order to say, look, you may not like

what I am doing, but the people who are out there who would take

over otherwise are the really, really bad guys. Sometimes that is

very exaggerated and sometimes not, but I think it is something

you have to weigh.

There is an argument about Pakistan that if Musharraf fell, it

would not be the extreme radical Islamists who would seize power,

and that there are other oppositional elements, but both civil and

military leaders of Pakistan in the last four decades have left a lot

to be desired vis-a-vis their own people.

Ms. MATHEWS. I agree with all of that. Certainly, his problems

go beyond his connections to the United States. I just would underline something Walter said earlier. A huge part of our problem

59

with Pakistan’s problem has come out of Pakistan’s failure to have

an educational system. This is not beyond our ability to—I mean,

when you put it in the context of the Iraq war, those costs of substituting a functioning public education system for the madrassas

is trivial. But this is going to be a terribly tough problem for exactly the reasons that Bob just described, is the alternatives are

not great.

I think we should have, 4 years ago, pushed Musharraf much

harder in the direction of the reforms that he had promised, but

it would have required a balancing against our anti-terror goals,

which, of course, is what foreign policy is all about. But we don’t

have the luxury of not giving Pakistan whatever attention it demands because of its nuclear weapons.

Mr. ISAACSON. I come at this with a strange historical conflict of

interest, which is—and I could embarrass Congressman Cooper if

he were here. When we were in graduate school, the first politics

I ever did was that I ran Benazir Bhutto’s campaign for the head

of the debating union at our graduate school, and Jim Cooper

helped me.

I do think that Benazir Bhutto and others coming back as a

democratic opposition, adds to the turmoil in Pakistan but is inevitably part of the process there, and probably a good part. I agree

that General Musharraf’s problem is not simply the embrace of the

United States, because Mrs. Bhutto and others are not necessarily

running on anti-American platforms, as far as I can tell, or trying

to stoke up anti-American resentment.

If you look at Pakistan versus India, you see the model we are

trying to create. When I was in India a couple of times ago, I was

there for the election, and what happened was a Hindu prime minister was defeated by a Roman Catholic woman, Sonia Ghandi, who

stepped aside for a Sikh prime minister, who was then sworn in

by a Muslim president. That is a pretty awesome shining light of

what we have to get to in terms of pluralism in this world if we

are not going to have the type of threats that will face us over the

next two generations.

And I guess I am being egotistical here, but I would second

Jessica’s seconding of what I said earlier, which is if we are not

going to win the battle against the madrassa movement by competing with them in Pakistan, that is where we are surrendering this

ball game.

Mr. TURNER. Mr. Chairman, if I might for just a moment.

I just want to thank all of you for making those points, because

I think so many times in our U.S. policy view, we are so narcissistic as to believe that all problems result from a relationship

with our country, and that clearly, in this instance, there are other

factors at play, ones that we need to pay attention to. So thank

you.

Mr. TIERNEY. Thank you. I just want to make mention with the

great work of our staff here and a number of the members of this

committee on both sides of the aisle, we were able to put a substantial amount of money into the budget this year and to enforce some

education in Pakistan. The problem we are now going to have is

making sure that is delivered in an effective way where it can be

monitored and actually implemented without great waste or whatVerDate 11-MAY-2000 13:57 Mar 24, 2009 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00063 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\47590.TXT KATIE PsN: KATIE
60

ever. So we are moving in that direction. We still have some challenges on that, but it is a fight worth having, for sure.

Mr. Isaacson, are you still squared away with us here for a

while?

Mr. ISAACSON. I am actually hosting a lunch, which I wouldn’t

mind—a foreign policy lunch somewhere. So maybe 5 minutes, if I

could; 10, 10. Fine, fine. Sorry.

Mr. TIERNEY. Ms. McCollum, you have 5 minutes, and then Mr.

Shays has 5, because he is going to grill Mr. Isaacson.

Ms. MCCOLLUM. Well, I appreciate your being able to stay, and

I really found your July editorial in The Washington Post, where

you argued that America needed a new creative solution to match

the challenge of global terrorism very insightful. In the editorial

you outline several strategies, including the creation of new public

diplomacy organizations for the global age, and I strongly agree

that we need an effective public diplomacy that is indispensable in

America’s toolbox in its fight against terrorism.

During the cold war—and the cold War has been discussed—the

Voice of America, Radio Free Europe helped win the hearts and

minds by giving invaluable information out to people regardless of

their income and their occupation in those countries. U.S. policy

was able to spread information about America, culture and values,

which is democracy.

The current crisis in Burma, though, to me, is more than ever

demonstrating that a proven low-cost strategy like Voice of America radio is still essential. The BBC reported in recent days that

less than 1 percent of the Burmese people have access to the Internet, and the government has blocked Internet traffic into and out

of the country. Radio Netherlands is reporting that Burmese stores

are sold out of shortwave radios because people want news and information, and that is the only way they can receive it. Laura Bush

and Chairman Lantos both recently broadcast to the Burmese people on Voice of America.

Now, I bring this up because I do agree with you we need to look

at all the tools in the toolbox. Yet the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees Voice of America with absolutely no transparency—no transparency—is rushing to close down radio transmitters all around the world, and I can supply you with the proof.

You look shocked. I was shocked to find that out too. The BBG is

silencing America’s voice in a time when reaching the poor and oppressed populations in the world is even more important.

Now, I have introduced a bill to try to get the Board of Governors’ attention, and it is H.R. 3598. We need to do exactly what

you were suggesting, Mr. Isaacson, make big investments in new

public diplomacy efforts. But I believe we must renew our commitment to Voice of America Radio and other proven cost-effective

strategies. Voice of America is only $10 million in a $688 million

budget. That is less than the inflationary increase of the GBG’s administrative expenses in 2008, and they are cutting it.

I know you believe in using everything that is available out there

and I want to make sure that we have your voice heard clear on

Voice of America.

Mr. ISAACSON. Let me make it extremely clear. I love radio. I

think it is an awesome and effective technology. I agree with Bob

61

to my left, that the dismantling of the U.S. Information Agency

was a very bad problem; and that is another thing that perhaps

you can look at. I think the BBG has not risen to the task in the

past of winning the hearts and minds battles, but I absolutely—I

am a believer in a lot of old technology, including even print, believe it or not, but radio will be, for the next 100 years, an incredibly effective way to communicate. So let’s not disparage radio.

Mr. LIEBER. No, I strongly agree with your point about VOA.

VOA, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and the other radios are

of immense importance. We ought not to be cutting services and

broadcasts and budgets, but increasing them. They are an extremely important long-range investment.

One other point in passing, some disagreement with Jessica

about China. China has played a very negative role in Burma, in

Darfur, and some other third-world environments, sustaining repressive regimes for reasons that are, at times economic, at times

political. We don’t control the situation in Burma. China is a country with huge influence and, alas, it appears, to the extent we can

tell, not to have used the leverage it might have to improved

things, rather than allow them to get worse.

Mr. TIERNEY. Thank you very much.

Mr. Shays.

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you.

Mr. Isaacson, thank you for waiting up. I would love to ask why

isn’t there a public debate about the threat and what we should do

about it? And whose responsibility is it? Is it Congress, is it the

White House, is it just that the press isn’t into it?

And then I am just going to say that it seemed to me, born in

1945, the 1950’s were kind of like sorting it out. I mean, you know,

I came from an area where everybody built these shelters that

were really basements that nobody would want to be in unless they

were crazy. So it seems to me that we didn’t come to agreement

on it until maybe when Kennedy tried to outmaneuver Nixon and

be on the right side, so they were both in agreement, you know,

we needed to confront and so on. So I would love to know that.

I would love to know if Sputnik wasn’t—did we start out having

to be an economic military effort against the Soviet Union expansion, and then did Sputnik add a third element, education, or was

education and technology always a part of it?

And the last question is why are terrorists so unimaginable? And

does that suggest that I fear them more than I should? In other

words, I can tell you an umpteen number of ways to totally shut

down this Government with very little amount of work, and yet

they don’t seem to figure it out.

Mr. ISAACSON. Well, let’s not spread the word on the various

ways.

I do think that the entire cold war period—in this room, for example, whether you are talking about the Democratic or Republican chairs of Armed Services and everything else—had a great

consensus and discussion of the long-term threat, and that is something that is rarer today. And I don’t think it really—you may be

right, but in my reading of the history, having written about the

Truman administration into the Eisenhower administration, I

62

think there was a serious understanding of how to deal or the need

to deal with that threat.

Mr. SHAYS. Well, let me quickly ask you this. If we hadn’t gone

into Iraq, is that when we kind of got sidestepped?

Mr. ISAACSON. This is what I was going to say. The reason

for——

Mr. SHAYS. I mean, in other words, with Republicans and Democrats working together.

Mr. ISAACSON. The polarization is what you are talking about,

and the polarization is one reason we are not having a reasonable

national debate, not just on the Hill. I left being in the media partly because I realized that our job in a new media age was to shout

as much and be divisive enough as much as possible in order to get

high ratings or readership. I think that the media has not played

a unifying role nor a role of deepening some of these issues.

You referred to that, I think, in your opening statement, but, to

me, there are many people to blame for the fact that a reasonable,

intelligent, non-partisan—I don’t just mean bipartisan, I mean rising above partisanship—debate has not occurred. I think that talk

radio and cable TV, having been a member of that part of the

media for a while, is not helpful in that regard. And even though

I love the Internet, I think the Internet encourages divisive debate

and shouting more than it encourages the formation of consensus.

So I think I will say we in the media or we in the recovering

media—I am sort of a recovering journalist—are responsible. I

think, you know, Congress, by the way it is set up, people playing

to the base, districts that are more gerrymandering than they were

when I was growing up, and you had a person who sat in that

chair, Hale Boggs, who had to represent suburbs as well as inner

city. That whole process has led to greater partisanship and less

depth in the public debate, and I despair a bit, but I think there

are many ways to overcome that.

Mr. SHAYS. That should be your next book.

Mr. ISAACSON. Thank you, sir. Well, with my Benjamin Franklin

book, that was the point of the Benjamin Franklin book.

Mr. SHAYS. Yes, but do a modern one.

Mr. Lieber.

Mr. LIEBER. If I may.

Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Isaacson, you can leave.

Mr. ISAACSON. I will hear what Bob has to say and then I will

dash to my lunch.

Mr. LIEBER. America has always had a tradition of robust, and

even bitter and sometimes unfair, debate, if you think about debates going back to the late 18th century. Also, let’s not forget that

during the early cold war, the architect of the institutions and policies, Dean Atchison, was denounced in 1952 by Richard Nixon,

then running for vice president, who referred to Dean Atchison’s

College of Cowardly Communist Containment. There was plenty of

Republican-Democratic animosity in the late 1940’s and early

1950’s. Reagan was often denounced from the left; Jimmy Carter

was denounced from the right, and so on.

I do think, though, in response to your point, that the Iraq war

has clearly, and I think dangerously, intensified the partisan anger

and made it much harder to debate these things. I find that, since

63

I take part in a lot of debates, that all too often these very important and difficult issues are framed in ways that are outlandish

and hyperbolic. So Iraq has worsened that situation, but we need

to remember that America’s freedom and traditions have always involved a good deal of cut and thrust, even when there was a rough

consensus.

Ms. MATHEWS. I just would add that I think the degree of consensus in the cold war looks much bigger, in retrospect, than it was

living through it. Much bigger. And while there is always value for

another Walter Isaacson book, Bill Bradley has written, in his New

American Story, of a lot of the issues that you and Walter just exchanged on, in particular, I think part of—and you know better

than I how long it may take to change this, but the legacy of 20

years of redistricting is, at least on the Hill, has had a tremendous

cost on our ability to act in a bipartisan way, because so few people

represent really districts where they need to appeal to both sides.

Mr. SHAYS. Come to my district.

Ms. MATHEWS. But I also think Walter is right to draw attention

to the effect of these new technologies in the communications

world, because the smaller the niches, the less that you can reach

across them, and people are living now in tinier and tinier niches,

where they only reach stuff that they agree with, and this is a terrible cost for the country. So I think it is very important to focus

on.

Mr. TIERNEY. The Internet was an example that I had such great

hopes of the Internet broadening out the debate and balancing it

out, and it went just the other way; it went just to the respective

corner and read just the blogs or sites that they thought reinforced

their view and intensified the action back and forth.

We obviously have to vote. Mr. Shays and I may be missing the

first vote, but I want to ask one quick question of each of you. If

you had to name one essential thing that this country should be

doing differently than it currently is, what would that be?

Ms. MATHEWS. Addressing non-proliferation in the ways that I

described here, no question.

Mr. TIERNEY. Dr. Lieber.

Mr. LIEBER. Taking profound steps about energy security in the

way I referred to.

Mr. TIERNEY. I can’t thank you both enough, and Mr. Isaacson

as well. It has been a very informative hearing. I think that we

have all benefited extraordinarily from it, and I hope that we get

the chance to have each of you back again to followup on this and

for other reasons. You do a great service to us in your respective

roles, and I know you are appreciated by a great many people. So

thank you very, very much.

Mr. LIEBER. Thank you.

Mr. TIERNEY. The meeting is adjourned.

[Whereupon, at 12 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]

Æ