by Bill Moyers
You describe Ronald Reagan as the “modern prophet of profligacy, the politician who gave moral sanction to the empire of consumption.”
To understand the truth about President Reagan is to appreciate the extent to which our politics are misleading and false. Remember, he was the guy who came in and said we need to shrink the size of government. But government didn’t shrink during the Reagan era, it grew. He came in and he said we need to reduce the level of federal spending. He didn’t reduce it. It went through the roof. The budget deficits for his time were the greatest we’d experienced since World War II.
And wasn’t it his successor, his vice president, the first President Bush, who said in 1992 that the American way of life is not negotiable?
This is not a Republican thing, or a Democratic thing. All presidents, all administrations are committed to that proposition. Now, I would say that probably 90 percent of the American people today likewise concur. They insist that the American way of life should not be not up for negotiation.
What I would invite them to consider is this: if you want to preserve the American way of life, then you need to ask yourself, what exactly is it you value most? I believe that if we want to preserve that which we value most in the American way of life, then we will need to change the American way of life. We need to modify or discard things that are peripheral in order to preserve those things that possess real importance.
What do you value most?
I say we should look to the Preamble to the Constitution. There is nothing in the Preamble to the Constitution that defines the purpose of the United States of America as remaking the world in our image, which I view as a fool’s errand. There is nothing in the Preamble to the Constitution that provides a basis for embarking upon an effort, as President Bush has defined it, to transform the greater Middle East, a region of the world that incorporates something on the order of a billion people.
I believe that the framers of the Constitution were primarily concerned with the way we live here, the way we order our affairs. They wanted Americans as individuals to have an opportunity to pursue freedom, however defined. They wanted Americans collectively to create a national community so that we could live together in some kind of harmony. And they wanted future generations to be able to share in those same opportunities.
The big problem, it seems to me, with the current crisis in American foreign policy is that unless we change our ways, the likelihood that our children and our grandchildren are going to enjoy the opportunities that we’ve had is very slight. Why? Because we’re squandering our power. We are squandering our wealth. To the extent that we persist in our imperial delusions, we’re also going to squander freedom itself, because imperial policies end up enhancing the authority of the imperial president, thereby providing imperial presidents with an opportunity to compromise freedom even here at home. We’ve seen that since 9/11.
The disturbing thing that you say again and again is that every president since Reagan has relied on military power to conceal or manage these problems that stem from the nation’s habits of profligacy, right?
That’s exactly right. And again, this is another issue where one needs to be unsparing in fixing responsibility as much on liberal Democratic presidents as conservative Republican ones. I think that the Bush administration’s response to 9/11 in constructing this paradigm of a global war on terror, in promulgating the so-called Bush Doctrine of preventive war, in plunging into Iraq—an utterly unnecessary war—will go down in our history as a record of recklessness unmatched by any other administration.
But that doesn’t really mean that Bill Clinton before him, or George Herbert Walker Bush before him, or Ronald Reagan before him were all that much better. They all have seen military power as our strong suit. They all have assumed that by projecting power, by threatening to employ power, we can fix the world. Fix the world in order to sustain this dysfunctional way of life that we cling to at home.
This brings us to what you call the political crisis of America, and you say, “The actual system of governance conceived by the framers ... no longer pertains.”
I am expressing in the book what many of us sense, even if few of us are ready to confront the implications. Congress, especially with regard to matters related to national security policy, has thrust power and authority to the executive branch. We have created an imperial presidency. Congress no longer is able to articulate a vision of what is the common good. Congress exists primarily to ensure the reelection of its members.
Supporting the imperial presidency are the various institutions that comprise the national security state. I refer here to the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the other intelligence agencies. These have grown since the end of World War II into a mammoth enterprise. But the national security state doesn’t work. Despite all the money it spends and the people it employs, the national security state was not able to identify the 9/11 conspiracy. It was not able to deflect the attackers on 9/11. The national security state was not able to plan intelligently for the Iraq War.
The national security state has not been able to effectively prosecute this so-called global war on terror. So as the Congress has moved to the margins, as the president has moved to the center of our politics, the presidency itself has come to be, I think, less effective. The system is broken.
You write that no one in Washington knows what they’re doing, including the president.
What I mean specifically is this: The end of the Cold War coincided almost precisely with the first Persian Gulf War. Americans saw Operation Desert Storm as a great, historic, never-before-seen victory. It really wasn’t.
Politically and strategically, the outcome of that war was far more ambiguous than people appreciated at the time. Nonetheless, the war itself was advertised as this great success, demonstrating that the Pentagon had developed a dazzling new American way of war. This new American way of war ostensibly promised to enable the United States to exercise military dominion on a global basis in ways that the world had never seen.
The people in the Pentagon developed a phrase to describe this. They called it “full-spectrum dominance,” meaning that the United States was going to demonstrate outright supremacy, not just capability, across the full spectrum of warfare. This became the center of the way that the military advertised its capabilities in the 1990s.
The whole thing was fraudulent. To claim that the United States military could enjoy such dominance flew in the face of all of history. Yet in many respects, this sort of thinking set us up for how the Bush administration was going to respond to 9/11. If you believe that the United States military is utterly unstoppable, then a global war to transform the greater Middle East might seem plausible. Had the generals been more cognizant of the history of war, and of the nature of war, then they might have been in a better position to argue to Mr. Rumsfeld, then the secretary of defense, or to the president himself, “Be wary. Don’t plunge in too deeply.” Recognize that force has utility, but that utility is actually quite limited. Recognize that when we go to war, almost inevitably unanticipated consequences will follow, and they’re not going to be happy ones.
Above all, recognize that when you go to war, it’s unlikely there will be a neat, tidy solution. It’s far more likely that the bill that the nation is going to pay in lives and in dollars is going to be a monumental one. My problem with the generals is that, with certain exceptions—one could name General Shinseki ...
Who said we are going to need more than half a million men if we go into Iraq. He was shown the door for telling the truth.
By and large, the generals did not speak truth to power.
One of the things that comes through in your book is that great truths are contained in small absurdities. And you use the lowly IED, the improvised explosive device, or roadside bomb, that’s taken such a toll on American forces in Iraq, to get at a very powerful truth.
Wars are competitions. Your enemy develops capabilit
ies. And you try to develop your own capabilities to check him and gain an advantage. One of the striking things about the Iraq War, in which we had been fighting against a relatively backward or primitive adversary, is that the insurgents have innovated far more adeptly and quickly than we have.
The IED provides an example. It began as a very low-tech kind of primitive mine, and over time became ever more sophisticated, ever more lethal, ever more difficult to detect. Those enhancements in insurgent IED capability continually kept ahead of our ability to adapt and catch up.
And I think you say in your book that it costs the price of a pizza to make a roadside bomb. This is what our men and women are up against in Afghanistan.
The point is that war is always a heck of a lot more complicated than you might imagine the day before the war begins. And rather than imagining that technology will define the future of warfare, we really ought to look at military history.
And what do we learn when we look to the past?
Preventive war doesn’t work. The Iraq War didn’t work. Therefore, we should abandon the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. We should return to the just-war tradition, which permits force only as a last resort, which sees war as something that is justifiable only when waged in self-defense.
How, then, do we fight what you acknowledge to be the real threat posed by violent Islamic extremism?
I think we need to see the threat for what it is. Sure, the threat is real. But it’s not an existential threat. The nineteen hijackers that killed three thousand Americans on 9/11 didn’t succeed because they had fancy weapons, because they were particularly smart, or because they were ten feet tall. They succeeded because we let our guard down.
We need to recognize that the threat posed by violent Islamic radicalism, by terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda, really is akin to a criminal conspiracy. It’s violent and dangerous, but it’s a criminal enterprise. Rooting out and destroying the conspiracy is primarily the responsibility of organizations like the FBI, and of our intelligence community, backed up at times by Special Operations Forces. That doesn’t require invading and occupying countries. One of the big mistakes the Bush administration made, and it’s a mistake we’re still paying for, is that the president persuaded us that the best way to prevent another 9/11 is to embark upon a global war. Wrong. The best way to prevent another 9/11 is to organize an intensive international effort to dismantle that criminal conspiracy.
In fact, you say that instead of a bigger army we need a smaller, more modest foreign policy, one that assigns soldiers missions that are consistent with their capability. “Modesty”—I’m quoting you—“implies giving up on the illusions of grandeur to which the end of the Cold War and then 9/11 gave rise. It also means reining in the imperial presidents who expect the army to make good on those illusions.”
People run for the presidency in order to become imperial presidents. The people who are advising these candidates, those who aspire to be the next national security advisor, the next secretary of defense, yearn to share in exercising this great authority. They’re not running to see if they can make the Pentagon smaller.
I was in the White House back in the early ’60s, and I’ve been a White House watcher ever since. I have never come across a more distilled essence of the evolution of the presidency than in just one paragraph in your book.
You write, “Beginning with the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960, the occupant of the White House has become a combination of demigod, father figure, and, inevitably, the betrayer of inflated hopes. Pope, pop star, scold, scapegoat, crisis manager, commander in chief, agenda setter, moral philosopher, interpreter of the nation’s charisma, object of veneration, and the butt of jokes ... all these rolled into one.” I would say you nailed the modern presidency.
I think the troubling part is that the president has become what we have instead of genuine politics, instead of genuine democracy. The cult of the presidency has hollowed out our politics and, in many respects, has made our democracy a false one. We’re going through the motions of a democratic political system, but the fabric of democracy really has worn very thin.
Would the imperial presidency exist were it not for the Congress?
No, because the Congress, since World War II, has thrust power and authority onto the presidency.
Here is what I take to be the core of your analysis of our political crisis. You write, “The United States has become a de facto one-party state, with the legislative branch permanently controlled by an Incumbents’ Party.” And you write that every president “has exploited his role as commander in chief to expand on the imperial prerogatives of his office.”
One of the great lies about American politics is that Democrats genuinely subscribe to a set of core convictions that make Democrats different from Republicans. And the same thing, of course, applies to the other party. It’s not true.
I happen to define myself as a conservative. But when you look back over the past thirty or so years, said to have been a conservative era in American politics, did we get small government? Do we get balanced budgets? Do we give serious, as opposed to simply rhetorical, attention to traditional social values? The answer’s no. The truth is that conservative principles have been eyewash, part of a package of tactics that Republicans employ to get elected and to then stay in office.
And yet you say that the prime example of political dysfunction today is the Democratic Party in relation to Iraq.
Well, I may be a conservative, but I can assure you that in November of 2006 I voted for every Democrat I could find on the ballot. And I did so because the Democratic Party, speaking with one voice at that time, said, “Elect us. Give us power in the Congress, and we will end the Iraq War.”
The American people, at that point adamantly tired of this war, did empower the Democrats. And Democrats absolutely, totally, completely failed to follow through on their promise.
You argue that the promises of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi proved to be empty. Reid and Pelosi’s commitment to forcing a change in policy took a backseat to their concern to protect the Democratic majority.
Could anybody disagree with that?
This is another one of my highlighted sentences: “To anyone with a conscience, sending soldiers back to Iraq or Afghanistan for multiple combat tours while the rest of the country chills out can hardly seem an acceptable arrangement. It is unfair, unjust, and morally corrosive.” And yet that’s what we’re doing.
Absolutely. And I think—I don’t want to talk about my son here.
You dedicate the book to your son.
My son was killed in Iraq. That’s a personal matter. But it has long stuck in my craw, this posturing of supporting the troops. There are many people who say they support the troops, and they really mean it. But what exactly does it mean to support the troops? It ought to mean more than putting a bumper sticker on the back of your car. I don’t think we actually do support the troops. What we the people do is we contract out the business of national security to approximately 0.5 percent of the population, about a million and a half people who are on active duty. And then we really turn away. We don’t want to look when our soldiers go back for two or three or four or five combat tours. That’s not supporting the troops. That’s an abdication of civic responsibility. And I do think there’s something fundamentally immoral about that.
Again, I think the global war on terror, as a framework of thinking about policy, is deeply defective. But if the global war on terror is a national priority, then why isn’t the country actually supporting it in a meaningful, substantive sense?
Are you calling for a reinstatement of the draft?
I’m not, because I understand that, politically, the draft is an impossibility. And to tell you the truth, we don’t need to have an army of six or eight or ten million people. What we need is to have the country engaged in what its soldiers are doing. That simply doesn’t exist today.
Despite your and your wife’s loss, you say in this powerful
book what to me is a paradox. You say that “ironically Iraq may yet prove to be the source of our salvation.” Help me to understand that.
We Americans are going to have a long argument about the Iraq War, not unlike the way we had a very long argument about the Vietnam War. And that argument is going to cause us, I hope, to ask serious questions about where this war came from and what it has meant. How did we come to be a nation that fancied our army capable of transforming the greater Middle East?
What have been the costs that have been imposed on this country? Hundreds of billions of dollars. Some project $2 to $3 trillion. Where is that money coming from? How else could it have been spent? For what? Who bears the burden? Who died? Who suffered loss? Who’s in hospitals? Who’s suffering from PTSD? And was it worth it? There will be plenty of people who are going to say, “Absolutely, it was worth it. We overthrew a dictator.” But I hope and pray that there will be many others who will make the argument that it wasn’t worth it.
My hope is that Americans will come to see the Iraq War as a fundamental mistake. That it never should have been undertaken. And that we’re never going to do this kind of thing again. That might be the moment when we will look at ourselves in the mirror. And we will see what we have become. And perhaps undertake an effort to make those changes that will enable us to preserve for future generations that which we value most about the American way of life.
ROBERT WRIGHT
When hysteria broke out over the building of an Islamic cultural center near the site of the 9/11 attacks in New York, right-wing Christians and Jews—and the politicians who kowtow to them—sounded as if they were holding all Muslims collectively guilty of terrorism. We were once again reminded why trying to understand religious experience is crucial to navigating the treacherous waters of the twenty-first century.