CIS panel on 9/11 attacks

let let's get started as uh as folks continue to to to join us here i recognize a lot of faces in the audience folks who are who were here with us last wednesday uh the day after uh the terrorist attacks in new york and washington but as we reminded ourselves the day before we began to meet the dead and of course now we've begun to meet the dead we have names and we have faces and we have shed a great many more tears and i'm sure we're going to shed a great many more after we leave this room we began last week to try to make sense of where we are and what appears to be a new new world order and we reflected on on the great many ways in which we've been challenged all been challenged by these terrible events challenged in ways that that test our creativity and in ways that test our values and in ways that test our humanity and in ways that test our resolve uh and all in unprecedented ways and i suggested last week that because we're a member we're members of a university community we have a special kind of responsibility here and the special kind of challenge that challenge most directly being the challenge for us to construct analytically answers to three very fundamental questions and as we we addressed them last week they were who why and what now and we reconvene today as promised to continue that conversation because as we expected we remain short on answers to each of the questions the who question seems somewhat clearer now although we can be certain that we'll never know with certainty who uh the answers to the why question remain i think very unsatisfactory there are lame answers there are easy answers and we hear them all the time on the cable networks on on the broadcast networks muslims hate friends of jews or fundamentalists defend traditional values against the corrupt and debased standards of global capitalism that explains anger that explains resentment but it doesn't explain wholesale terror we need to know much more about why and the what now question was the one that i think got the most attention on our panel last week and i think given the composition of the panel and the urgency of this question in particular will again today but before i introduce the panel i do want to call uh everyone's attention to uh a series of teach-ins we've we've resurrected uh and identified ourselves generally generationally and have resurrected an idea uh whose time on alas has come again a series of teach-ins that are being organized by the center for international studies by the political science department with the help of the boston review with the help of the chancellor's office and the dean of the school of humanities arts and social sciences these are going to take place over the course of the next several weeks and each event is designed to comprise of a two-hour panel not unlike this one and like the one we did last week of course to be followed by smaller more intimate gatherings in the residence units over food over dinner which will allow students and faculty to continue the conversation as i say in a more intimate and hopefully useful context the schedule itself is going to be well posted and well publicized i just wanted to call your attention to it the first meeting is going to be on the media's role in reporting the events and in shaping our discourse more about that in just a moment a second will will provide us an examination by international students at mit about why there is so much animosity so much hatred of the united states in the rest of the world a third panel comprising some of the same folks uh you've met uh in the in these two sessions uh we'll examine options for u.s foreign policy a fourth we'll explore the relationships of technology terror and war a fifth we'll examine the economic implications of terrorism and a sixth panel will examine middle eastern identities getting a feel for the diversity within the arab world in particular these evident these events are going to be well publicized and we're we're hoping that many of you if not all of you will will participate actively before i introduce the panel and we get started henry jenkins who is responsible for the the media panel wanted to make an announcement about the preparations that they've done um hi i wanted to announce to this group the public the unlaunching of a new website called reconstructions the url is behind me on the blackboard it's web.mit.edu cms slash reconstructions this website was developed over the weekend by individual grad students faculty and community members in the comparative media studies program as part of our response to the events last week it is an act of warning not an act of cold analysis many there were many times over the weekend we've broken down interiors as a group over some of the things that we've tried we've been trying to cope with and write about this weekend but we felt it was important to provide this community and other communities with a guide for thing for studying and reflecting on the role that media is playing during these events the site does a number of things we've been contacting people around the world to send us summaries of how the coverage has looked in a variety of countries that's something that's ongoing and if any of you have if you look at the site and have have access contacts or knowledge of countries that we haven't represented yet please write me at henry3 mit.edu and we'll put you to work helping us to cover it but we felt very strongly that the american media coverage had often not paid attention to global responses had framed it as an american issue and not a global issue and we wanted people to hear simply the range of views that were being expressed through the media we've gone through our textbooks and pulled out key materials on the news how news covers stories how editing camera work sound affects our response to news and those are followed by study questions designed to encourage reflection on the role of news here we have worked with arab americans in the greater boston area and we've had camera crews doing interviews and we expect as the week goes along to put up digital cinema projects showing some of their perspectives about what has gone on we've been working with faculty and grad students to take out key phrases from the media coverage and the rhetoric and to provide some historical background on where those phrases have cropped up in previous political debates what their history is and we have offered our own personal statements on this along with guides for teachers and selections of images and we've been filtering some of the most thoughtful editorials that have come out about the incident and put them on the site along with resources to provide help for those in need so we'd urge you to take a look at the site and use it as you begin to reflect as a community on these events send suggestions to us about things that might be added and keep watching because the site's not done yet we're still hard at work and will be throughout the week so but we really appreciate any interest and support that we receive from this community thank you thank you henry we're going to proceed in the same use the same process we we used last week which is simply to go straight down the panel i've asked each of my colleagues to speak for no longer than three to five minutes with some opening remarks because we want to make sure that we can gather as many questions and declarations if you like from the audience as possible quickly by way of introduction i'm dick samuels and i direct the center for international studies i'm a professor in the political science department my colleague next to me professor stephen van evere also in the political science department and in the security studies program a specialist on u.s foreign policy and on war and peace professor balakrishnan raja gopal who is a professor in the department of urban studies and planning and directs the center's program on international human rights and justice professor professor nazli shukri a professor in the political science department and a specialist on international relations who's going to speak to us a bit about reactions within the moderate arab states uh professor barry posen also in the political science department a specialist on international affairs and military strategy who's in the security studies program as well and jeremy pressman who you heard from last week who is a graduate student in the political science department who is writing his dissertation specializing in in in the arab palestinian conflict uh israeli arab relations and greg koblenz who couldn't join us last week because he was at a conference in orlando florida on terrorism and was stuck ironically there he's taken buses and trains he has returned he too is a graduate student in the political science department and is writing his dissertation on domestic mobilization in response uh to terrorist events with that let me turn it over to each of our panelists hello everyone thanks for coming my my comments are going to be directed at the question of what to do next uh and i have two um main recommendations to uh all of us about what to do next uh well three maybe the first is that i believe that the al-qaeda organization which likely committed these acts is a very dangerous organization uh it's not appeasable and therefore we have only one option which is to defeat it so uh i i think that's the direction we have to go i have to focus like a laser beam on that task the second point is that if you're going to engage in an action like that this is essentially counter-terror action all of history of this sort of action teaches that you must legitimate your policy in the eyes of the societies from which the terror came if you're going to succeed it is essential essential that you behave in ways that you can explain to those societies as fitting right proper and just in their eyes if you are viewed by them as fundamentally corrupt or or wrong-headed or disregarding ethics they hold dear your efforts will fail your efforts will fail and i think the us should focus like a laser beam again on how to legitimate the counter-terror action it now needs to take against the against al-qaeda in the eyes of the societies from which it is common where it's now being held in haven we can't win this war by sending uh lots of uh special forces in to you know hunt around the vastness of of these regions and and uh uh you know chase people through through mountaintops that that ain't gonna work this is essentially gonna work only if we've persuaded others in the in the region that we have a good cause um and i'm worried that the bush administration are not thinking along these lines at all third point is we must not make too many enemies in doing this a wide crusade against all the bad guys of the world at this point would be a very unwise we must narrow the scope of the problem we're trying to solve and narrow the scope of the enemies we're pursuing tightly very tightly if you go after many people you will trample on the toes of their friends relatives associates and others in ways you may not even recognize there's a special danger that we're going to do that in this conflict because we're operating here in parts of the world and amidst cultures and peoples that we don't know much about don't know very well and that raises the risk of our own blundering in ways that are counterproductive to us i think we should all consider that al qaeda may be hoping and al-qaeda is the is the bin laden organization uh he's the head of that maybe hoping to bait us into some overreaction some blunderous thunderous overuse of force and violence and history's seen this before thucydides wrote in his book on the peloponnesian war how athens which was riding high and sitting pretty when all things began sent its forces to syracuse on a ruinous overreach and brought itself to ruin let us not do that okay little details few details here legitimate the policy uh there's a third more general point which is we need many allies to win this effort and um toward that goal we have to legitimate the policy i'll say a few more words you shut me up when you want um there are two major groups of allies we need to win here one is the russians and the other is the arab and muslim communities in the middle east and south asia toward the russians we need their help number one in locking down their nuclear arsenal once and for all so that we can be assured that there's no leakage of their material skills and weaponry uh in the direction of terrorists we've been dilly-dallying foolishly on this project now for a decade it's time to stop it uh the second thing uh is to we need their help actually in controlling things in southeast southwest asia to do that we must get rid of all irritants in russian relations with with the us and that means we must stop nato expansion and stop national missile defense these are these are you know indulgences we can do in normal times but not in an emergency and then i think we have to change our foreign policy toward the arab-israeli conflict we have to get this conflict off the agenda and we have to take a position toward it that we can defend as principle to all um i hesitate to say anything synoptic about that conflict because people assume i'm being unfair unless i give you the whole nine yards okay and i absolutely am not in favor of cutting ties to israel i'm in favor of in fact forming an alliance with israel but i think israel should now be asked to offer a more generous peace than it did last year should be asked to accept the green line that the the borders of 67 as the final peace lines i believe this is profoundly in israel's interest for a number of reasons i can outline if you want and profoundly in america's interests because the american role in this conflict is a fundamental factor in making america's counter-terror efforts elsewhere more difficult other things we need to do it is essential that we set up a major media project in the arab and muslim worlds to explain america's case to publicize the cruelties of al-qaeda to explain i think very few people in this part of the world understand that al qaeda murdered more than 200 africans three years ago in its horrific bombings in kenya and tanzania people there have never heard the the the the cries of the of the children and the loved ones of these victims they've never seen their faces uh they don't know how many muslims were murdered on tuesday and many were murdered on tuesday in new york we need to explain this to the arab muslim world we have no voice there today we need to explain our policy on iraq to them saddam hussein has been running wild in the in the media in this part of the world portraying the united states incorrectly as somehow injuring the children of iraq we need to we have a very strong case to make there we aren't making it we need to explain explain explain and always we must explain before we use force there must be no quick use of force here i saw in the news this morning that bush is giving the taliban until wednesday to surrender uh um bin laden this is a terrible blunder we must proceed with great sobriety and and and and uh move um uh slowly it's simply in order to be able to tell the world we've tried everything we went to every reasonable length to resolve this we're using force as an absolute last resort to appear as as quick force users especially when there's no urgency is a is a big mistake because of this fundamental legitimacy issue that we face so i got much more to say but i'll stop with that my comments are mostly uh with regard to what to do now also but let me just make one comment about the why which my colleagues here may um may be much better in explaining than i um i i just think that we need to refocus a little bit about not just um why do they hate us in the sense that why do those people come hate the united states but uh also why there is so much hatred in general why is there that you know there is so much hatred in ireland uh why is there that there is so much hatred by uh by uh between hindus and muslims um the organization al-qaeda for instance has been training people not simply to send them as mercenaries against the united states in fact regularly they've been sending them to actually kill and maim people in the kashmir valley and that has been very well known for more than 10 years india has been supplying evidence and um this is something that needs to be confronted and the reason i mentioned that is that the responses that we adopt now depend very much on how we understand the whole problem of hatred um if you define it in a particular way we might decide that a military or a political response is adequate however if we define it in a different way we might think that what's needed here is a is a societal response and a moral response and that requires a wholly different sets of uh actors to be involved and policy responses to be crafted having said that just a couple of points on what to do now first what to do now internationally internationally as many of you know the administration has proceeded with much more caution than what most people suspected they haven't immediately lobbed a few missiles here and there but they're consulting and this uh as i pointed out in the first panel is very much in accordance with the way the direction in which the security council has been moving itself there have been many international legal initiatives since 1997 directed at curbing the growth of international terrorism there is a very strong element of political consensus in the security council and elsewhere that can be used to get to make right policies at this point as far as the requirements are concerned i totally agree with what steve said that what's needed here is actually abundant caution and restraint and a very step-by-step approach to how we go about tackling this problem a nato resolution that has been passed declaring that the attack against united states is an attack against the entire nato is not enough legally speaking for initiating military action even the security council resolution that has been passed so far i've taken a look at it that resolution is not enough for initiating military action the resolution was not even adopted under chapter 7 of the u.n charter and did not specifically authorize any military use there needs to be a further action by security council and that would depend on the extent to which u.s is able to produce concrete evidence linking the attack with particular people and organizations and countries um what if uh if there is such a consensus in what way will it likely emerge my guess is that it will be a combination of political military response and threats with clearly a direction towards establishment of some kind of a judicial process and i think that the security council itself calls for it in its resolution it says while condemning the attack in new york it calls on all states to work together urgently to bring to justice the perpetrators organizers and sponsors of these terrorist attacks so the question is what does that mean i mean how can we bring them to justice is there a court before which they can be brought the short answer is right now there isn't any but international law has been evolving in such a direction that it's certainly moving towards the establishment of all kinds of mechanisms for bringing perpetrators of mass crimes and this certainly would qualify as one and um one option here would be to think about the rome statute on international criminal court and to think about creatively interpreting both crimes against humanity as well as war crimes uh um not to mention the the the four geneva conventions that actually deal with uh this issue that is a it's an article in the geneva conventions that's common to all four geneva conventions that specifically target non-state entities from committing certain kinds of atrocities and there is a lot of scope here for expanding uh legal process and my uh hope and pleas that uh the response to these attacks will not always be uh violent responses um but they will actually be responses through international law and through a judicial process um if one additional point regarding what to do internationally relates to what i said about why this is happening and how a societal response is necessary and i would add that one critical component of that societal response is a an inter-religious uh response that actually takes an honest look at some of the problems that exist with all religions and some of the we know what's best and our path is better than us ideology that actually drives so many religions around the world a second issue is what to do domestically and here you know i would again urge extreme caution and restraint in urging for wholesale attenuation of civil liberties let's not confuse for example the sacrificing of conveniences such as curbside check-in with sacrifice of liberties they are completely different from one another and as far as the sacrifice of liberties is concerned as i again point out in the first panel that assumes that the laws uh there are there aren't adequate laws that actually give sufficient powers to law enforcement agencies that simply is not the case um and if you wish more details i can always provide it um but it's important that one should look more honestly at what exists and how they work before urging for further uh action in this way um so um i'll just again stop there i don't have a prescription for a response but i do want to share with you some of the dilemmas problems of the moderate arab states who are they what challenges do they face when is it going to be very relevant why and and in a way what next for them who are they you'd think that a question as simple as this might uh not be controversial but sometimes it does provoke a controversy one person's moderate regime might be another's radical or reactionary as the case may be but the short list of moderate regimes include egypt jordan tunisia morocco lebanon bahrain qatar abu dhabi that's my list you can expand or delete as may be as you see fit but they all have some very peculiar concerns uh that that they are that they worry about now none of these regimes qualify as your basic textbook democratic state with what we know as some form of political participation some independent judiciary protection for alternative views and so forth so there is an internal stress that cannot be ignored but given the competition they are considerably more open and within their own frame of reference clearly more democratic and and the term democratic here is in quotation mark marx i mentioned this because that term could turn out to be a very important asset um as we move from here on now what are the challenges that they face as you can imagine they all have their own all individual own individual bread and butter challenges having to do with modernization poverty scarcity inequality gender matters and governments that promise more than they can deliver and this last point is quite important because that might become an obstacle to internal cohesion as as a strategy emerges over the region also just as a footnote here many of these governments these regimes um do believe that they have some legitimacy uh concerns or or constraints uh and so none of them assume that the population supports them entirely absolutely under all circumstances and this is part of the reality that that we have to think about the moderate regimes by definition and by reality are all u.s allies but few may have the absolute support of their own populations for the alliance and that then brings me to the next question or point and that is when will these regimes feel most vulnerable they already feel vulnerable and that's quite rational there are too many converging trends events that could increase domestic opposition strengthen militant groups and maybe create more resentments and most important of all it might highlight their government's difficulties in meeting basic promises on on just basic social needs uh and requirements but these regimes are going to feel far more vulnerable as we see how the u.s afghanistan pakistan bin laden and company demands work themselves out but whatever the outcome these moderate regimes do understand that they have to tend to and address domestic sources of vulnerability and that these sources are not likely to disappear or to evaporate overnight now why does all this matter it matters of course for many reasons some obvious and some less obvious obvious reasons the checklist is these moderates really include some of the largest countries of the region and they all are solid or try to be solid u.s allies and willing to support appear to be supporting the emergent u.s and global strategy less obvious but important is that some of these moderate arab regimes may actually not be able to respond fully to two twin imperatives number one is to provide full support for and deliver on what the us and the allies will request demand in terms of a common response when these become clear and number two how to do that and at the same time manage domestic opposition that is already problematic for some of these regimes with respect to their own security and and their own stability now all of this matters because any strategic response that is to be effective will have to benefit from we'll have to draw upon the operational goodwill and the effective support of the moderate arab states now to conclude uh let me just add with one word on what now as i said when i began i don't have a prescription i just have a set of preferred elements factors um as we deal with the moderate arabs we should all pay attention to cohesion not cleavage to accord creating a court and of course not discord and to think about security strategies that do not breed unnecessary insecurity as they're put in place thank you people can hear me although there's been a lot of public and collective efforts to mourn the dead i don't think that process is over by any stretch of the imagination and although i've been to forums like this and been in you know interviews and things like that where i've been forced to talk about the next instrumental response what do you do next how do you sort out the politics and the strategy of this i nevertheless feel a little bit funny doing that i have to say and i want to say a couple of hard things here which are at odds with where we are in this process second i i think some of what i'm going to say is inevitably colored by my own intellectual past i there are a lot of people in this town and in this corridor this northeast corridor um who've been talking about terrorism of one kind or another for many years and have been predicting an event of this magnitude and i was always a skeptic about this this was not something i paid a lot of attention to i didn't doubt that terrorists had capability i didn't doubt that they had the interest to kill americans i always thought in contrast to some of my friends that in fact they would do it this way they would come with money and find the ingredients they needed for their action within our shores but i always doubted that a really large event would occur because i didn't believe it served the political interests of any group and this i was clearly wrong and i may be reacting to my wrongness since security studies is my business and i like the intelligence communities suffered some kind of intellectual failure this was a direct attack on the american people a direct attack for political purposes a direct attack on their government and their institutions an attack that aimed to kill thousands of americans i think it's really some kind of minor miracle of human endurance and western engineering that many thousands more aren't dead i mean it's just totally astonishing to me that we've been as i hate to say it as fortunate as we were in this event i mean just it's just it's incredible and one one day we'll hear that story or understand that story these people are skilled they are very highly motivated they are courageous these people who tried who did this event they will try again and regardless of the defensive preparations that the united states of america could take in terms of strengthening airport security or strengthening security at power plants or whatever a big civil society like ours is just a big maginot line and the other guy's gonna find a way around or through to do something else so long as the other guy is still in business so it's my view that if the united states of america its government and its people want to continue to have some kind of activist foreign policy in the world then a key component of that foreign policy is the destruction of these groups i think it's unavoidable now we could have a discussion and maybe we will later today or some other time about whether or not u.s foreign policy is right but if we're going to have the foreign policy that we have and i mean that in the broadest sense not the bush policy or the clinton policy but in the broadest sense then we're going to make enemies and some of those enemies clearly are very very dangerous and very very committed and we have no choice now but to root these enemies out wherever they are right however we can now i share the cautionary observations made by everyone on the panel to a greater or lesser degree you can't just saddle up the sky cavalry and fly all over the world and find these people in basements and jungle and mountain hideouts right a massive amount of assistance is going to be necessary intelligence assistance law enforcement assistance access bases over flight right and all of this has to be obtained somehow through diplomacy through cajolery through propaganda through public information through bribery through coercion right this is how great states fight great wars and build great coalitions and that's the requirement of this campaign and there's no doubt in my mind that to wage this campaign will require significant resources significant patience a willingness to take military casualties and the very strong possibility that even as we pursue both offensive and defensive measures the bad guys are going to try again and they may even succeed that's that's the price of of of this policy now beyond the question of finding these groups i think there is a very significant problem of the nation states who have supported and hosted these groups now nation states around the world have supported these groups to very to to varying degrees lesser greater tacit direct looking the other way to holding their hands and we surely cannot afford to treat every one of these states who may have done this kind of thing because of their own situation as enemies of the united states of america we have to see most of these states as allies potential allies or at least friends to be won over somehow to our cause across the united states of america but i do believe that there are some states that are unusually close to these groups and unusually supportive the taliban regime in afghanistan has been warned many times about the nature of this ben-laden person whom they have been hosting the pakistanis have also been told about the nature of this person and the nature of the taliban regime now i think in the interests of defending the united states of america in the first instance we have to give taliban the chance to produce bin laden and his three dozen closest friends right i think in the interest of defending the united states of america defending its people we have to give them a chance to produce bin laden and three dozen of his closest friends i think we should give him some time i don't think three days is enough i think 30 days is too many uh what the right number is is you know it's a complicated matter it's not obvious exactly what the number is right i don't believe they're going to produce these people i certainly don't believe they're going to produce these people unless they believe that something very awful is going to happen to them if they don't and i believe that in the interest of preventing future support by taliban to such groups and the interest of deterring other states who might for whatever reasons decide to lend significant support to these groups that the taliban regime has to understand that failure to cooperate will lead inevitably to their destruction as a government and the united states of america in the absence of such cooperation must commit itself to the destruction of the taliban regime now i'm prepared to even go one step further in this argument which is i believe that the united states of america cannot live in the world as it is and allow states groups to believe that attacks on the united states of america of this magnitude go unpunished i think it's a colossal failure of deterrence that this happened and if nothing is done there's going to be more failures of deterrence not just with al qaeda or the taliban right but with other states so it's it's it's really quite essential that a message be sent but you can't get away with doing this to the united states of america now we obviously have a dilemma here right because if we follow that logic to its ultimate conclusion we wouldn't care whether the taliban produced been laden or not but i think the higher purpose has to dominate which is the defense the united states of america which means the destruction of these groups and bin laden and his closest associates would be such a great uh boost to that project that we have to be willing to make the compromise if it's offered to us but that said i don't believe the compromise will be offered to us and therefore i believe that over the next 12 to 24 to 36 months the united states of america is going to be developing a project to destroy this regime and that project was going to look an awful lot like a normal war i doubt that the united states can or should use large numbers of ground forces to invade afghanistan i doubt that it's necessary there's a significant resistance in the country to be exploited we have a lot of long reach in our military assets that we can use to support these people both with logistics and with fire support i think you can come up with a difficult but not impossible plan to destroy this regime difficult very difficult but not impossible and i believe in the event that they don't cooperate as they're being asked we have absolutely no choice but to destroy this regime i want to try and uh look backwards a little bit more because i think in in looking backwards not only do we get some insight into what happens from here but we also can move away from the term that has been used a lot in the last week of mindless terrorism uh horrific terrorism certainly worse than than we've ever seen but not mindless it comes from a political context and i think it's important that we consider that so from where do these attacks on the united states emerge um i want to go into what's deep history for some of us in the room in 1979 the soviet union invaded afghanistan and at that time the coalitions were organized differently the united states saudi arabia and others provided military support to the afghanistani opposition that sought to expel the soviet union and they were ultimately successful 10 years later in 1989 the soviet union withdrew in defeat and what they left behind among other things was a group of soldiers militants whatever word you want to use many of whom believed that they had defeated the soviet union in the name of islam they were battle tested they were flush with victory over what was then one of the world's two superpowers not for much longer though and they were part of what had become and continued to develop into the 1990s of an international network linking figures in afghanistan the arab world islamic states and elsewhere and certainly in the west as well in the united states but let me be clear this is not the set up for uh sort of jihad vs mc world to talk about ben barber's book it's not just about the modern intrusion in traditional islam this from that time on becomes about the extension of american military power american economic power and a way of life around the world and the reaction from those who oppose the united states on those grounds it's about the u.s global role but it's about the u.s global role as it's been felt in the middle east and south asia and let me just highlight a few aspects of that how that global role has been felt um the persian gulf war in 1991 bin laden has talked for instance a lot about this war and a lot about the idea of saudi arabia home of islam's two holy shrines and medina holy cities serving as being allowed to serve as a base to attack another arab-islamic city leaving aside iraq's fidelity to religious islam but the idea of an arab islamic state coming under attack from the west and so the betrayal of saudi arabia in 1991 which later personally betrayed bin laden by revoking his citizenship secondly uh and this has been alluded to already the u.s support for egypt saudi arabia and other regimes in the region regimes that to varying degrees are not seen true to islam by by this organization by bin laden by others regimes that are seen as corrupt regimes that have repressed opposition movements and regimes that are linked to the u.s policy and the western policy in the persian gulf war thirdly and this is a sort of extension of the persian gulf war which is the containment of iraq over the last decade and the suffering which you see repeated references in the arab islamic called repeated references to the suffering caused by 10 years of sanctions repeated references to tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of iraqi children who have suffered fourthly u.s support for israel the use of u.s arms in particular in the last year we've seen this come to the forefront again the use of u.s arms by israel against the palestinians so in much of the arab islamic world when we talk about f-16s being used against palestinians it's very much not just about the israeli use of those f-16s but it's about the made in america stamp or made in georgia or made in florida uh wherever it may be on those on those weapons um and it's also finally you know about a clash a cultural clash about consumerism about capitalism it's another piece of it but it's there's a lot of material and power interests as well coming out of these not only do we get the kind of network that that is willing to support terrorism and and i think we make a mistake if we just focus on bin laden we don't really have a sense yet of how tied uh the hijackers were to bin laden it may have been a distant tie it may have been funding or it may have been something closer um and we see we see something else though in arabic islamic countries and i i would call it at least a three-part reaction one is widespread horror at the human toll of the attacks and the individual personal human suffering of the attacks secondly a connection to that suffering on the level of the suffering endured by arab and islamic peoples often at the hands of the united states or their allies so reference back to we understand what you're talking about because of what we've suffered in iraq because of what we've suffered at the hands of israel etc and thirdly a separation of the suffering and whatever sympathy there is about the suffering from the future in other words we sympathize with you but we don't think that the policies the retaliation that you're talking about in terms of use of force are legitimate let me just say a couple final things this is largely i think taking on a life of its own it's beyond just bin laden over the last decade we've seen adherents from a variety of countries many from arab-islamic countries but also some who spent years in the united states in the west and you keep hearing some of the terrorism experts talk about how the profile of suicide bombers or hijackers or whatever it is has to be changed and i think that's something that's going to come out of this is it's not just about a poor impoverished person locked in a room for a week who's then sent out with bombs it was much more sophisticated much more long-term and much more widespread and so if we go bomb afghanistan one wonders if we'll also be bombing germany uh with some of the ties of the hijackers um and i think this the other another implication is that this isn't just going to go away if the united states decides to pull up the stakes in the middle east and south asia there's a developed institutional antagonism now number one and secondly to start to pull the united states out for the united states to start to pull out of the middle east and south asia but particularly the persian gulf is a fundamental redefinition of u.s foreign policy that has global implications it may be something the united states should do i'll remain neutral on that it may be something the united states could do but i don't think it's likely in the short term and it's going to require something at that level i think to to change the intentions at all the other side if if that's even possible at this point the thing that i think it can be important too as you talk about some of these policies talk about tinkering and modifications is that it's not just about a battle between the united states its allies on the one side and the networks of bin laden and bin laden on the other side there's a whole world out there and as many of the panelists have talked about and alluded to the united states and both sides are really looking for public support for looking for people in countries all around the world and governments all around the world and so it is possible that changes in u.s policy and we could talk about those changes might increase maneuverability in states some of the states that professor shukri talked about states like pakistan as well um finally i think we should think about as the united states sort of looks across the globe in particular in the middle east and south asia at its foreign policy are there going to be sacrificial lambs it's interesting and i'll just close with this already we saw that the mayor of tehran sent one of the first or the first official correspondents uh to the united states to mayor giuliani expressing sympathy for this iran which for so many years has been a pariah in u.s eyes and a question of what are the sacrificial lambs what other changes might happen in u.s policy could there be iraq preshma with iran because the united states decides that's what's necessary to move against bin laden afghanistan and whoever else and it's worth considering what other possible changes might come about i'm going to be talking about the future of domestic preparedness in america after the september 11th attacks before i get to the what's what to do now i want to go back and give a little history and context to what has happened up till this date um u.s domestic preparedness efforts really began in earnest in 1995 following the oklahoma city bombing and the attack by the obscene riccio cult in japan on the the tokyo subway system using the nerve gas sarin following those two attacks there was concern that the combination of either domestic or natural terrorists could use weapons of mass destruction nuclear biological or chemical weapons on u.s soil this in part led to a presidential decision directive number 39 that established or formalized u.s counterterrorism policy in part this designated lead federal agencies to coordinate a response to terrorism and you've heard a lot about them the past couple days the fbi is responsible for crisis management which is the prevention of terrorism interdiction of terrorist threats and uh actually handling a uh the response to an actual threat and fema the federal emergency management agency is responsible for consequence management in support of state and local authorities they're the ones who are coordinating federal support to new york city at this point and new york city is really the lead in providing you know response and recovery and rescue assets there in 1996 uh there were a series of congressional hearings that were sparked by oklahoma city and the ontario attack which led to a new piece of legislation that's generally known as the nun luger domenici act which provides training and equipment to first responders all over the nation to be able to handle a nuclear biological chemical attack that program's been in place since 1996 and so it's about five years old now our efforts continued in 1998 a new presidential decision directive sought to increase the coordination over federal counterterrorism programs by creating a national coordinator for counterterrorism dick clark who is still on the job today and also a initiative was launched to prepare for biological terrorism and i'll get back to that a little bit later most recently earlier this year in may the president announced a task force will be formed by dick cheney to look at u.s domestic preparedness programs and policies and a report was supposed to be issued this october i don't know the status of that but presumably that is now a very high priority to give people a little bit of understanding of the scope of our counterterrorism domestic preparedness programs in uh this year in fiscal year 2001 the u.s is spending 9.7 billion dollars to combat terrorism uh with an additional 2.3 billion dollars being spent to protect critical infrastructure like dams and power plants and industrial facilities looking at what happened september 11th it's unprecedented not only in its savagery but also its sophistication and its magnitude and introduced several new elements uh to american domestic preparedness that hadn't really been at the forefront previously those elements include the use of suicide bombers the use of aircraft as actual weapons the infliction of massive casualties and multiple nearly simultaneous attacks on american targets those have been considered singly uh previously but never in a combination never of something of this this magnitude uh so it's there's definitely a sense in the domestic appearance community that this was this still was was not really expected we must now consider new forms of attack that could cause massive casualties such as the use of anti-tank anti-aircraft missiles the use of nuclear biological chemical radiological weapons and we have to look at new targets such as skyscrapers trains dams nuclear power plants sports stadiums malls uh all uh what you could call soft targets that could appeal to a terrorist group unfortunately the technical barriers to this sort of terrorism are rather low or they're or they're current constantly receding in the past it's been the motivational barrier that's prevented groups from carrying out these sorts of attacks and what we saw on september 11th was the final irrevocable breach of that barrier and we cannot assume that it exists anymore previously in the domestic appearance community the guideline was while these attacks are uh low probability but high consequence and therefore we must prepare but now we must accept the fact that these are high probability events and high consequence and that leads us to what what do we do now the next several weeks and months there's going to be a lot of debate about about what to do lessons learned how to prevent this from happening how to prevent other incidents and there's a huge uh array of things to talk about i'll just limit my comments to four things uh on prevention uh in the area of uh aviation security which will receive a lot of attention uh obviously there are measures that could have prevented these attacks such as uh sealing uh the cockpit of airplanes uh before takeoff to prevent uh hijacking uh federalizing security at airports uh so you do you no longer have minimum wage poorly trained workers screening baggage and checking ids deploying more air marshals on board aircraft who will be undercover and armed and able to deal with with hijackers we also have to look at some more extreme uh things such as defending airliners against anti-aircraft missiles uh you may recall that during the uh war in afghanistan we've provided the more jadin with several hundred stinger missiles which are still unaccounted for and we must consider those a threat now as well and also we will have to probably take a look at re-establishing continental air defense preventing airliners from abroad from being turned into and turned into weapons against uh us are also a range of measures we'll have to look at in terms of maritime security uh border security immigration um which will uh require uh that is not my area of expertise so i'll kind of won't mention anything on there but those will be issues you're going to be hearing about finally we're going to have to look at hardening what's called soft targets such as skyscrapers and malls with what's called with physical security guns gates and guards and devices to detect guns and explosives and this will be possibly ubiquitous but the extent to which this happens is a matter of politics basically on intelligence which is going to receive a lot of attention given the lack of warning about this attack the current proposal is to expand the authority and the ability of law enforcement agencies particularly fbi in conducting surveillance on terrorism suspects and this a lot of this involves electronic surveillance there will also perhaps be a need to lower the threshold required to launch investigations of suspected terrorists or or groups a lot of these issues will require trade-offs with privacy and other civil liberties um but the bottom line is even if you implement the prevention measures and greater intelligence collection the u.s will reinvulnerable there's no way around it our society is too open to prevent access to our country and prevent people from doing the things that that they've done in the past so without realization we also need to look at how do we respond to these sorts of attacks in the future and i'll just highlight two issues here one is the role of the military currently the military response to domestic terrorist incidents in support of civilian authorities namely the fbi or fema which is what is happening now recently there was a national commission on terrorism which recommended that in certain circumstances the department of defense be given the authority and the charges lead federal agency to take over response to a terrorist attack and they would basically be in charge personally i don't think it's a good idea for several reasons there's nothing the military can do in a lead role that they can't do in support of civilian agencies and it would just also make terrorism response more confusing and difficult than it already is but this debate will re-emerge and uh we'll be very we'll be seeing a lot of this debate in the near future i can guarantee that um the last thing is uh preparing for nuclear biological chemical radiological weapons um this was the focus of a lot of domestic preparedness up till now obviously this attack did not involve that type of technology but uh we have to assume that groups that are interested in mass casualties will adopt this type of technology on the the the con in respect to chemical weapons our preparedness is fairly good because the capabilities you need are already resident in our hazardous materials units that are in fire departments and that sort of thing our ability to handle the consequences of nuclear detonation um i don't know of a good way to to handle that kind of incident um there's um there might be things you can do to prevent it and actually that's where the focus has to be is on prevention but once a weapon has gone off there's a little if anything you can do in the immediate aftermath the the key area where we can make a difference and where the threat uh in my mind is also very severe is dealing with biological terrorism and there are two areas where require further investment in the future to deal with that threat the first investment area is in public health because early detection of this sort of attack is crucial to saving lives the cdc began a bioterrorism preparedness program in 1999 so it's fairly young and it will have to be expanded and accelerated in the coming months the second area that requires investment is the medical system america's hospitals cannot handle a large scale outbreak of an infectious disease between managed care and the competition in the hospital industry they've been cutting beds they've been cutting staff and they don't have the resources to handle 200 300 a thousand more than a thousand people who come in uh who are severely ill with an infectious with infectious disease currently there's little of any federal money going to hospitals to prepare them for this it's really the big gap in our program and i expect to see a larger focus on that on that issue in the near future i'll leave it at that thanks very much greg the way we proceeded the last time and the way i propose we proceed this time is to collect two three perhaps even four questions from the audience and then uh turn it back to the uh to the panelists who would wish to to respond to them statements are more than welcome we have two microphones here so if you would come to the microphones i'd appreciate that it would make things easier first though we had one panelist who who asked to be removed from the panel because he feared that we would the panel would go on far too long and uh so josh cohen who is the head of the political science department um and the editor of the boston review i want to recognize him first ask him to to uh to address his remarks to the panel to the audience um and then we'll we'll carry on with the procedure despite our best judgment do you want me to talk with the microphone if you would use the microphone it would be it is indeed if my voice is louder i wanted to make three closely related points and i think of each of the three as uh uh in disagreement with things that barry posen said um two explicitly and and the first i think he would disagree with uh but i i preface that by saying that uh today as last week i greatly appreciate the force of uh barry's contribution uh which i think has been uh certainly very instructive uh for me so the first point that i want to make i i don't think that there's any easy way to say this and it's easy to misinterpret but i'll say it i think the worst thing that can be said about the events of last tuesday is not that they occurred on american soil or that americans were killed the worst thing that can be said about the events of last tuesday is that it was a slaughter of innocent people wherever it occurred whoever the people were who were killed it was a slaughter of innocence and there's no worse thing that you can do the set this leads me to a second point which does where i do want to disagree with something that barry said uh in the course of barry's remarks he said that we ought to respond and at one point to use the phrase however we can and i don't agree with that i think that's a mistake i think that's wrong because we ought never to respond in a way that involves the slaughter the intentional killing of large numbers of innocent people because if we do that if we do that we've done something which is as evil as the act that we're responding to now let me just not i think it's important to be clear about this no matter what we do militarily if we assuming that we're going to do something no matter what we do that involves the use of force innocent people are going to be killed that's the fact of life and i want to just be clear that when i say that we ought not to go in for the slaughter of innocents i'm not saying that we should that there should be no forcible response because i do think that there's a difference between the inevitable death of innocent people that's produced by the use of military force and the intentional slaughter of innocent people what happened on tuesday was the intentional slaughter of innocent people whether it's the goal of the action or as a means to some other thus far unknown goal but so recognizing that distinction i think it's simply untrue that we ought to respond however we can thirdly and this is a related point at one point barry identified the cause as he put in our cause as the cause of the united states of america and i think that's a mistake and it's a mistake on a par with the first two mistakes the cause here is not the cause of the united states of america the cause is not about the defense of individualism it's not about the defense of democracy it's not about the defense of the rule of law it's not about the defense of materialism or secularism or pluralism it's not about the defense of the open society versus its enemies the cause here is the cause of anybody who believes that the mass slaughter of innocent people is wrong and that's not a cause that belongs to the united states of america it's a cause that's shared by every religious outlook in the world it's a cause that's shared by any moral outlook in the world paraphrasing what lincoln said about slavery if it's not wrong to slaughter innocent people then nothing is wrong so if you believe that anything is wrong at all then you believe that that's wrong and that is what as i see it what the cause is here the the black thread that runs through these points is that i disagree with if i can put it this way the nationalist framework in which the goals of policy were described and i don't think i i don't as you know i'm not picking on you here this is a disagreement with a lot of people who are articulating the goals of uh policy it's a disagreement with that nationalist frame and it's it's a disagreement on two grounds first of all i think that that's wrong i think it's a misstatement of what the principles and values are and secondly for reasons that steve van evra gave i think it's practically a bad a very bad mistake to say that the cause that we're fighting for is the cause of the united states of america sign up for it if you take steve's remarks about legitimacy seriously that is about as is as guaranteed to be a losing argument as you can make and so either you take the issue of legitimacy seriously and you don't present the cause that way easy for me because i think it's the wrong way to present it but for pra on practical grounds as well you don't present it that way or you present some reasons for thinking that the issue of legitimacy is irrelevant legitimacy in the eyes of all the people who we're trying to ally with and who believe as many people do many billions of people do that the slaughter of innocent people is wrong having said that finally in the interests of complete candor though i agree on the practical point with steve i think that those of us who disagree about that point better have a way to explain how you focus laser-like on a dispersed diffuse geographically separated opponent then then has been explained thus far the metaphor of a laser-like focus is completely inappropriate to the nature of the people who committed this horrendous evil well barry [Applause] barry why don't you if you would respond to that and then we'll take a group of questions i want to make sure we are focusing laser-like on josh's questions well i guess passions and fears running as high as they are the phrase however we can can be interpreted in any number of ways i think people who know me will know that if i mean using nuclear weapons or i mean firebombing cities or i mean slaughtering civilians that's what i'll say right that's not what i meant it's not what i said right i do however agree with josh on the point that uh it is very likely that both phases of this fight the phase of the fight if it occurs that involves the destruction of the taliban regime and i think if you recall my remarks i always said the taliban regime not the afghan people or peoples right the taliban regime and i and that fight and other kinds of regimes should they emerge as well as the fight against these this group or this interlinked family of groups worldwide both of these struggles will surely involve the deaths of innocent people that's it sounds banal this is the this is what happens when you go to war uh i believe that the united states of america should and i think re in recent years not always but certainly in recent years i think since the end of the vietnam war has been reasonably careful in the way it goes toward not perfectly careful but reasonably careful i think in this situation that care should continue but i do believe that if the country decides to wager this struggle rather than do something else which is to say change its policies the country has to be ready for the regular appearance of situations where a judgment has to be made between military effectiveness or and collateral damage and i believe that if the war is serious then you're going to find yourself airing on the side of military effectiveness and not on the side of minimizing collateral damage within some set of constraints no one's going to destroy a city in the hopes of killing 8 or 10 people who you want to kill and that's we're talking about here i think it's uh i think it's sad to say now finally this question of how you view this attack in other words is it is this a mass slaughter attack uh a mass slaughter of innocence around which we should mobilize world opinion against mass slaughter of innocence i'm not going to tell you the perspective isn't right responsible whatever right but i guess i have in spite of everything i said i i have a problem taking this war out of the western philosophical context of what war is all about i believe these people attacked the united states of america i believe they did it for political purposes political objectives they have that have to do with the united states of america i don't think they attacked the united nations i don't think they found some other nice international meeting or institution to attack they attack the united states of america and i can assure you right that in the absence of leadership and money and the willingness to make hard moral choices and the willingness to to accept casualties right and the willingness to organize and to lead right no matter how much discussion there is about the awful mass slaughter not a bloody thing is going to happen so therefore in the first instance i believe that at least one important way to look at this one important perspective on this is that this was an attack on the united states of america to which the united states of america must respond if it it the united states of america does not wish to have its people attacked in this way again please come on down to the microphones identify yourself if you would and we'll take a few and and then uh carry on yes ma'am hi um first i just want to make a clarification you could just identify yourself my name is amy smith and i just want to clarify in case it's confusing to anyone um that i'm not of the muslim faith and i'm wearing headdress this is part of actually my cultural tradition as well although not as often as in some other faiths but i wanted to wear it today to remind everyone that people should have the choice to express their religion in the way they see fit and that people are being killed in this country for you know how they choose to you know express through and not harming anybody else and they're being killed so far four people have been killed in hate crimes and i want to do my part to make that not [Applause] happen and so also regard me as an individual my comments don't reflect on obviously anyone of a different faith than my own or individuals of that faith and furthermore my dress is from india a place that i have visited and lived in for a short period of time and this is something i wanted to wear as a symbol of while i have a great pride in many of the people in my country and many historical facts about my country i see this event as something against humanity and i wanted to express that i am a member of humanity first and that nationalism is a very dangerous trend that can lead to more exactly such incidents as happened on tuesday i guess there's so many things that i heard today that are troubling and there's many people here and i don't want to take too much time so um but i i really am concerned about uh certain kinds of language such as this being an attack on america um what many people could see it as a counter attack on america because of the way our government has continued to slaughter innocent civilians throughout this whole century and i'm not a great expert at history but at least that statement is fair to make so i'd really like people to do the very hard task if you're an american citizen it's a much harder task i know i share that to really look critically at our history and seek out other kinds of sources about our history talk to your friends who are from other countries and get their opinion and learn more about basically the shadow that our government casts upon the world and how many innocent people suffer and die from that shadow and how we can all come together in a positive constructive peaceful way to prevent these kinds of things from happening ever again to anyone anywhere i cried on tuesday but i cried you know two years ago when we were bombing in serbia i've cried many times over the past 10 years that we've been starving children to death in iraq and if you don't agree that our country is behind it then you're going to have to ask dennis halliday why he resigned from the oil for food program as a protest that it was a genocidal campaign that was 90 percent the responsibility of the u.n policy directed by the u.s and only 10 percent of the blame could be put on saddam hussein the man that we armed and installed in the first place through our government so looking to the future i think we have to you know think about international agreements why did bush not sign the biological weapons verification treaty so uh we're worried about biological warfare we build up defenses why don't we work as a community as a member of an international community to prevent the proliferation of these dangerous things as well as work on security at home why don't we support a world court why does the united states not support a world court which president of the united states over the last 50 years would not be condemned by such a world court i think is the answer to that question so we need to guide our policy in a manner that would make it possible for us to not be convicted by a world court for crimes against humanity and you know these are the things we need to work on if you're interested in working with other people at the school for peace there's a website web.mit.edu justice where you can get in touch with people you can get lots of information you can read statements from dennis holiday about his experience working in iraq and seeing people firsthand and 10 times the normal rate of leukemia because of the depleted uranium which contains plutonium being rained down on the people and you can learn about a lot of other things but whatever you do please keep learning and looking and talking to people and getting different sides of the story and don't trust the corporate media [Applause] hi my name is jan altkalt and i'm really upset as well my heart was just pounding i was expecting more of an analysis this is mit there are supposed to be a lot of smart people here you've hardly discussed the why at all and i agree with the previous speaker on much of what she just stated i'm a canadian american and i can tell you there are a lot of canadians who don't like americans very well either not americans per se per se it's not me it's not you it's the american government and their militaristic corporate policies that have impoverished so many people in the world that have caused untold deaths um i actually saw this attack not as an attack on myself as an american and i don't even think it was an attack on americans it was an attack on an american system run by very greedy very wealthy people who are uncontrolled who are essentially running a third world government right now you're not you haven't discussed this at all you haven't discussed the whole history of american atrocities in el salvador i honestly i think one thing that's actually a miracle is that something on this nature hasn't happened earlier and i think the reason it hasn't is that the people in el salvador didn't have the money to come up here and fight back on such a grand scale when they were being torn apart by cia-backed death squads okay in this case these people have gotten the money to do this i agree that it's very complex i know that there's a lot of extremism but i want to point out one statement that a very senior member of the cia made in reference to afghanistan and he said it's very easy to find recruits for an extremist organization there there are so many very poor and desperate people there they're a dime a dozen the poverty level in afghanistan and that means like starvation is 25 percent of 25 million people okay the people who will die i i really wish you would stop using the term collateral damage let's just call it killing civilians that's what it boils down to okay the people who will die in collateral damage are the people who have can't get out because they're crippled by land mines because they're too poor to move or too sick to move all right the people in power are long gone they're probably already in iran or wherever they are taking shelter i just think we really need to look at this in a much more um analytical and historical manner than has been done today thank you [Applause] all of you or almost all of you are political scientists i know that some of you also have a close to an insider's understanding of the institutions and individuals in washington dc who'll be formulating our response i was just wondering what is your degree of confidence in the current administration to enact uh appropriately and efficiently the very difficult solutions that you guys have uh discussed here today we'll take one more and then we'll turn it back to the panel yes sir hi i'm sorry because this gentleman had his hand up even when steven ever was speaking in at the very beginning and i didn't uh you were sitting please we'll come back to you first in a moment this is a very brief comment we have to stop using the word crusade [Applause] in that case in that case let's let's do take this last question wondering if you can address the tensions between the requirements for openness and judicial process and the requirements of centrifuge and deception to wage and win war as is being talked about right now okay um let me let me recapitulate very briefly and turn it to the panel and a lot of people have spoken here i just want to crystallize what they've spoken into three questions which i would like the panel to address one was a lot of you talked about a military response and some of you talked about negotiation and coercion i want to know if neither of those work what then what then will the united states do two a question uh professor raj kopal raised was that these kind of activities have been going on in kashmir valley we we live in a globalized world i'm going to say we live in a media savvy world i want to know why foreign policy or none of the developed countries have ever addressed this issue before i would like some of the panelists to address this and you talked about a lot of measures of security they sound very good to me but i want to know that globally all the countries seem to have different levels of security how then will you develop this kind of a secure global security which will prevent civilians from being attacked by terrorists i don't see how you can achieve this globally thank you okay thank you um to recapitulate uh the first questioner asked the panel to be to redirect itself away from nationalism and and toward our common humanity um spoke i thought poignantly about this being not an attack on america but a counter-attack on america and and use the metaphor of the shadow of the american government the shadow that the american government has cast upon the world uh a theme that uh that came back again uh in with later questioners second uh asked us to focus more on the why um than we than this panel did today the third and and raised the issue about uh again this the shadow that the united states has cast and implored the panel not to speak of collateral damage uh as a euphemism for killing civilians and uh the next person asked to ask the question what level of confidence do the panelists have in the ability of the administration uh to undertake successfully the kinds of measures that they've suggested were necessary if um if we are to prevail fourth was the issue of openness versus the costs to openness of prosecuting war um and finally after uh a request that the the word uh crusade not be applied uh to uh to this situation and to america's response the questions were asked about what what does the panel think can be done if legitimacy the sorts of legitimacy that in particular steve van evere suggested was necessary can't be found um and how to develop global security i'm sorry i i missed the the second point in that process but we have a full plate let me turn it back to the panel steve i'll react to this idea that this is a counter attack rather than an attack and i think there's some truth in that but i think you can go you can't go too far with that and i think that those who advance this view go much farther with it than i think history supports just for the record i i'm one of those uh people who was strongly against a number of the uh american policies that were mentioned here the war in nicaragua the war in el salvador the war in guadalajara cambodia angola the reagan doctrine wars the vietnam war in fact i'm that old i was against it and god knows many of the people of those countries in my view have plenty of reason to be angry with us i also think that we we do come to the middle east and the south asian region with somewhat dirty hands on some issues as i said i think our policy toward the arab israeli conflict has been fundamentally unprincipled and again i know that will set a lot of people off but i believe it has been i think our policy toward afghanistan also was very unprincipled we did the right thing early by helping large numbers of afghans who themselves wanted to fight the soviets to do it we then needlessly continued that war far longer than it needed to go on and then we walked away from the situation once it served our once it had served our geopolitical interests and made no effort to patch things up end the conflict and and and and restore those that society to normalcy we we weren't good imperialists we just walked away from the mess we'd made and i think we're paying for it now but in the larger sense i think that uh america what's striking here is the level of attack on america here by people who don't have a historic grievance against the united states we see a great deal of anti-americanism among the islamic fundamentalists in pakistan well what has the u.s ever done to pakistan well it's been pakistan's ally for many years uh in the cold war it's it's been uh it's it's been an aid partner it's it's overlooked pakistan's nuclear program it has no history of intervention there yeah so uh it's a hard one to hard when to pin and regarding iraq i think that everything said here is totally wrong historically uh and this just shows that saddam hussein's propaganda really has infiltrated our own public media as well as the arab world you all should realize the sanctions that have been set up are set up so that saddam hussein can buy all all the medicine and all the food he wants at any point in time the only guy who who needs to make the decision to to solve the medical problems in that country is saddam hussein and the only excuse for not doing it that he could give is that he doesn't have the money and i ask you all does he have the money he's built 60 palaces and maintained at great expansion huge effort to build nuclear weapons so what's the problem here okay i'm sorry the problem is not our sanctions the problem is that we haven't explained this to people my wife who studies these matters says maybe we need to do something really dramatic here and actually load some ships up with food and medicine and send them to iraq okay and offer to give this stuff for free so that this propaganda can't continue because it's completely false and i think that uh and i i'm generally very leery of economic sanctions which are broadly cast and catch civilians in the net i think they're a weapon of mass destruction but these are being mischaracterized and to me the main thing the us needs to do is to find its voice and explain the uh sort of um uh it's side of the story on that issue uh people actually as innocent as josh called it i think racist some basic issues about the direction of the u.s are in choosing literally between the uh the the more unilateralist part that it has pursued so far and the more multilateralist options that exist and i think that in many cases this uh uh what happened last tuesday actually provides a great opportunity for the people of this country to actually have a genuine debate about the unwisdom of the very unilateralist part that the us has been pursuing and which has taken on more and more vigorous and more dangerous forms in the last uh six to eight months since the new administration came to power and i think that this is an issue that must be squarely tackled and it has implications that actually extends beyond simply signing on to treaties because in the issue of terrorism for example if we extend the principle of a common responsibility all the way to its logical limit then it would mean for instance that if states that harbor terrorists are actually responsible so are the states that actually promote and protect the states that commit state terrorism and the us's record in that case is actually as we all know uh uh not at all exemplary um the uh other issue the second issue that i wanted to briefly uh say something about is uh whether there is in fact too much openness uh uh in or the extent to which openness can be compatible with the need to adopt measures against terrorism and um the one one thing i could say is that from the perspective of someone who has seen counter terrorism measures in many parts of the world uh when i was with the un system and also in india itself um i could say that the history of states that have actually been engaged in adopting counter-terrorism measures is very ugly essentially um and it's perpetually being used to uh to target uh political opponents and to kill and uh to jail more innocent people than uh people who are actually responsible for any kinds of attacks and part of the problem with these uh so-called laws is that much of what happens is in secret the evidence secret the the courts are held uh the the the courts actually hold their proceedings in secret there are none of the public safeguards that we one might take for granted that actually exists in public judicial or legal processes the law that exists right now for example the 19 uh the the the uh the so-called aedpa uh the anti-terrorist law that exists uh in the united states right now for instance allows for secret evidence to be led and uh the result has not been pretty um as some of the more recent assessments of the working of the legislation are beginning to show so i would just leave it at that nicely just uh just two very brief comments the first is on the the term crusade i have found that as the one of the speakers had mentioned not only inappropriate but potentially extremely dangerous so i'm very pleased that um from the floor raised that a second many years ago it could be as many as 10 if not more the late professor myron weiner who was then head of the center for international studies at here at mit organized a program a research project actually on reconstruction in afghanistan five or six of us were involved from different parts of the institute and at that time the idea was to try to understand what a viable reconstruction strategy might look like and i actually spent some time in peshawar a quite challenging experience i would like to tie that to the point that professor vanevera made when he said we walked away from the situation that's exactly what happened uh in that context once the i think it was a state department i'm not quite sure there was a policy shift that afghanistan really no longer mattered and everything came to to a halt of course there were two concerns in the research team at the time one was the obvious concern about research being halted and this was interesting and challenging uh work but the second and far more important uh reaction that the team as a whole had is that we would be missing an extremely important opportunity to try to put some intellectual framework and some logic to a reconstruction strategy that if successful if effective might avert more serious problems in the future honestly while you have the microphone i just want to press you a bit and really impress some of the other panelists too because the question was raised from the audience about uh about the issue of legitimacy it was a an important part of steve's analysis and i want to come back to it because it was an important part of yours as well you uh you suggested unambiguously that the moderate arab states in particular may not be able to provide full support to the united states and to their allies might not be able to to uh to declare uh sides uh in in this conflict and the question i have for you and really for for others on the panel is in the event that the desired um construction of legitimacy of the cause whether a national cause or a cause of of a cause a common cause against the destruction of innocent people however framed to the extent that the legitimacy of the american response cannot be constructed should the united states abandon the effort an effort of this short of this sort uh should not be abandoned uh but i would like to clarify perhaps the way in which i phrased the issue to begin with i think there are two parts to the legitimacy question from the point of issue from the point of view of the arab the moderate arab regimes part one has to do with are they willing to buy into and to take sides on the us-led global response that's part one part two is are they able to deliver are they able to actually perform i think the first question will be rather easy to answer in the next few days we will see what the public responses are official responses are the second is more complicated not only because of the logistics of domestic difficulties perhaps but because we must remember that these regimes are really overloaded in terms of day-to-day performance and so it's rather important to take into account both the willingness as well as the capacity or intent as we evaluate what's going on thanks are there other responses on the panel to the questions from the floor jeremy or barry did you want to very first we'll just go down the road uh i wanted to at least try and say something about the question of uh you know what are the odds that the that the bush administration will do this right whatever that means right in the sense of essentially telling our story to the world right in the sense of sorting out some of our lesser diplomatic conflicts in order to focus on the larger conflict right in the sense of really trying to organize a big coalition right in the sense of being selective in the use of violence right in the sense of avoiding collateral damage the deaths of innocent civilians and the destruction of civilian buildings where are the odds i guess i think the odds are about two chances in three they'll do it right some of the signs are good they've tried to build a coalition they understand the importance of intelligence they're doing a little bit to tell their story they're telling the right story to the american people that there it's not likely to be a big decisive battle it's going to be a long series of small fights there'll have to be a lot of patience that the cost will be significant so a lot of that looks like the direction is right there's a lot of subtleties that are missing and that's part of the problem the direction looks right and what about the subtleties uh i think this question that was raised about the word crusade is exactly right it's right on the money right the introduction of this term basically indicates on the part of the person who introduced it as far as i can tell it's the president right the fact that there is no actual internalization of much of what's happened in international politics over the last 50 years i mean he he has he has no and i'm not you know i'm not i mean i didn't vote for the man but uh you know i'm trying to beat him up here to make points i just think that there's a very deep problem here that he and his administration are going to have to confront and that problem has been represented in this whatever the term is you know they're they're either unilateralists or selectively multilateral and selectively unilateral their own terms all kinds of you know gobbledygook uh but uh the the that sign is not good right uh and that's the thing that could get him into trouble if they're gonna do this right they have to give up a lot right and and that's going to be the big question for them can they give up sort of ideological sacred cows for the american political conservative movement can they give up unilateralism can they be more cooperative in international treaties can they try and develop some position on the international criminal court that doesn't make them look like you know essentially criminal wannabes or criminal supporters or whatever uh there's a there's a they've made a lot of mistakes in the last six or eight months with which many people disagreed including me but they could get away with it because they were very powerful they didn't have any other problems united states is very powerful it doesn't have it didn't have a lot of other problems you know you could kind of blunder around making different constituencies happy in the country and not worry too much about consequences but that's not the situation anymore if they want to succeed right and that's something that they need to understand now how are they going to understand it right now that's on the positive side of the ledger people on this panel people we know people in the news media people who worked for his father i mean almost everybody under the sun is sending him these messages the question will be whether these half a dozen people at the core of this administration only one or two of which are really impressive uh uh are going to get it right right and and that's the issue i mean i you know uh that that that's the issue so i i think that the odds are two and three maybe a little better but in a way uh the the american system the pluralist system the chattering classes the academics the journalists there's a lot of people who seem to understand what needs to be done they have to just shout it from the rooftops of these people or they're going to get it wrong right so i think that's key whether you agree with my characterization my earlier characterization of what needs to be done or some other you know less belligerent characterization nevertheless if there's going to be a sustained campaign of any kind it's it's going to be multifaceted and it's got to have some subtlety to it and it's not the natural first instinct to this crowd they seem to get some of it but i think they're not going to get all of it unless they're they're regularly reminded jeremy let me make two quick points uh the first is i think it's a false dichotomy to talk about the slaughter of innocence versus a nationalist or a presentation of this this is both a slaughter of innocence and an attack on the united states and if we want to try and understand what happens from here i think we have to keep both in mind why is it that what happens in cashmere valley doesn't get any attention and what happens to the world trade center does part of it obviously has to do with how those killings take place but part of it has to do that this was attack on the united states and it wasn't an attack in cashmere valley and and the resources that the united states and the american media have are just fundamentally different and i think more importantly uh slaughter of innocence suggests that there's an international norm about it but when you start to look at how people understand innocence around the world there's not a universal understanding of that and we see that regularly in the israeli-palestinian conflict if you talk to people israelis about palestinians and palestinians about israelis there's differences among israelis and among palestinians and between the two groups about what innocence is and who's when a particular attack is a slaughter of innocence so while we can talk about uh this is as a larger issue i think on a on a practical level it actually breaks down because there's so many different visions of what innocence is around the world um just on one other one other point about how successful the united states will be undertaking these measures i just raised two things one is that as horrific as this was as an attack i think there's going to be issue fatigue in the united states and there's going to be a time whether it's a month from now or five years from now that the american people and obviously other people around the world are going to be somewhat tired of this and mobilization is going to be harder and i think part of that is going to be we're going to see a breakdown in the by what you might call the bipartisanship in the united states that has prevailed so far the fact that there was a single congressional vote one congressional vote against a pretty broadly worded resolution i think is is going to change and there's going to be as the united states decides what to do and how specifically to do it there's going to be a breakdown in the bipartisanship thanks greg if i could just address the question about the uh achieving global security against terrorism um obviously the u.s has not succeeded in that and uh you know very few other countries couldn't succeed in that either but there's a long-standing international cooperation on this matter both bilateral multilateral the u.s works with uh you know europe india russia japan a whole range of countries on this and an international forum as well the u.n security council has dealt with this issue uh there are numerous treaties on uh either terrorist financing or terrorist bombings or hijackings or nuclear terrorism uh that a great deal of countries have signed up for and maybe it's a time that you know we need a little more teeth to these things and not just pieces of paper and just in that regard let me just remind everyone or tell everyone about a famous quote by a terrorist reportedly from the ira who said you have to be lucky always we have to be lucky only once thanks let's go back to the audience collect a few more i think it was the turn of this side of the room and then we'll go back and forth and try to accommodate as many as possible thanks so in order to accommodate as many as possible if you can compact your your remarks as as best you can it would be very helpful for everyone thanks yes sir and identify yourself hi my name is martin luther and i'm from the economics uh is that better can you hear me okay and i have got the question about whether we are giving the right type of support to israel which has been a very close and long-standing ally of ours and the reason that i ask it is if you compare the two societies there's something pretty cool about america there are two things which i found really good and that is that it's a fairly multi-racial society and all of us on a day-by-day basis we learn that there is no such thing as a as a bad country or as a bad culture or as an evil traditional and evil society we see the people all the time and we see that if we treat them well we can get along with them very very well and the other pretty cool thing that i find about about the united states i'm not from here i'm from germany but i really like that here is that america has the strength uh when they do something wrong after a while they revisit the issue and they have the strength and they've got the power to ask themselves was that right and sometimes it takes ages yeah it took ages to to get away with slavery it took ages to overcome all the civil right and racial discrimination but sometimes it happens now if you look at israel on these two two areas israel is very very weak i don't want to offend anyone but uh it seems to me that they are very very weak on that uh the central message that we get from israel is us against them us we are humans and them that it's like a grey mass of androids who are invariably hostile against this uh they always want to slaughter us they always want to kill us regardless what they do it is always a hostile action against us now the other thing uh that i find quite striking is that israel is not very open to criticism neither safe criticism nor from outside whenever you come to to to and tell them okay folks what you did there was really bad yeah it is a war crime or maybe it's just just a normal crime or it's just an immoral thing then these guys freak out yeah you're an anti-semite uh you're one of them you're one of those who are hostile against us you're one of those who want to harm us now quite frankly i think if america if israel were more like america in the sense of the strengths that i described we wouldn't really have a middle eastern conflict because they they would recognize that not all palestinians by default are bad people and that quite frankly i think that they have some grievances which are very very real right also it just creates a lot of hate if you do something to people which is not nice and then just deny the nature of it and the way that the israeli american relationship has been is that we have given them a lot of support but i think sort of the wrong kind we gave them airplanes and we gave them weapons and we give them a lot of money to live out their weaknesses but we do not help them to overcome these weaknesses which in the end are really what what causes a conflict down there and i wonder don't we have a superb you put opportunity now to change that once and for all right because this is very deeply ingrained in israeli society and it will take something to overcome that and now i think by education we we won't manage but right now we have an opportunity to simply tell them folks as long as this conflict is going on we will never be very successful in rooting out this terrorism when we go and start a big big military action right now it will just create more terrorists as long as this thing is isn't gone can't be simply asking okay we are your allies we need this now make peace and this gives you the opportunity for 15 years to to live in peace and then you'll find out that it's actually pretty good wouldn't that be a lot more effective than giving them more money and more airplanes thank you thank you to this side hi um i have a comment about something that is frightening me for last couple of days and that is the rise of nationalism in this country rise of nationalism um i'm not an american i'm a from an ally nato country and i feel that the u.s media doesn't portray enough what how people feel in other countries around the world i i feel it over like i talk to people at home and they tell me they've donated blood and there's been a candle vigil in the main square where hundreds of thousands people showed up i hear people putting donations together and our armies getting together to help and support united states but i feel that the american media does not portray enough of that they don't portray that although it has been attack on america the ideals that america has is shared by many many other countries and i'm not going to talk about whether they're wrong or or good but it is the fact that i feel that people here are not um they don't have enough information about the fact that there are many people around the world who feel it has been an attack on them as well and it's important for us to realize that this is this is true and i think um i've heard many comments from my friends that have changed overnight by going to you know blast them all just kill them all we don't care just you know they shouldn't mess with the us i feel that that's just that's a blind statement and it really worries me about what's going on and uh that's just a comment i wanted to bring up then i had a question about buyer you said in the beginning and i'm sorry i'm returning to this again about the destroying the regime and destroying the taliban government and i do agree that something of you know those terms should be done but i feel that nobody on the panel has really addressed of how exactly it should be done and how exactly should be done without harming this you know what we call civilians or people who might not necessarily be directly involved in just having to live nearby and you know shouldn't we regard those people as you know if they are going to die for you know as a prize for our security and security in the world because they're going to have to be sacrificed [Music] i would like somebody to comment on this as well thank you back to the side margaret i'm margaret burnham and i first want to say that i uh related quite strongly to what uh professor bonesen posed and said at the beginning of his remarks that we find ourselves in a really difficult moment when uh we very much need to talk about this but when some some in some respects uh words are as has been said often so often on the tv words are sometimes not enough but they also in some ways speak uh so that we've had a lot of sort of reductive uh talk about uh things like freedom and security and democracy uh which don't really uh help us understand or grasp where we are at this moment and where we have to move and i i it struck me that that the use of the term repeatedly the united states of america in a room like this when we all know where the united states of america was is in a sense a response to anger and to a patriotism that um that is in some ways um understandable and and and important but uh but also frightening in the kinds of uh policies that it can lead to and so so i it just struck me as a bit chauvinist in in this context uh i i want to make two points one is maybe two out of three on is is something we can't risk when the cost of of missing making mistake of going the wrong way would be is unimaginable and maybe we do need to think more closely and to discuss uh more seriously the alternatives which include certainly as raj has pointed out an appeal to the criminal process through the international criminal court and some association of course with that court is clearly manifestly called for at this moment so that's one and second of course and perhaps an approach that would require far more patience but might be more yielding in the long run uh would be one that looks not only to where we move from here but really does look more more seriously at the economic global economic conditions out of which all of this emerged osama bin laden didn't emerge from an evil hell he merged out of a social context and perhaps american policy ought to be directed towards thinking thinking more closely about that social uh context in its response and then the final point that i want to make is when we talk about collateral damage as americans we also need to think about the long-term and imponderable collateral damage to our own freedom and democracy the blank check that congress gave the president the other day included not only and an authority to go get them but it also included a thought an authority to increase our security measures here at home and that's always the case fdr's weakest moment was in the wake of world war ii and when the japanese japanese americans were interned the palmer reigns are our experience the excesses of the uh of the witch hunt against communists in this country all that is part of our experience and we are now at so vulnerable a moment when there is unanimity in washington for assassinations of leaders for funding human rights violators like osama bin laden who our government created once again for funding human rights violators and all and those will have ramifications back at home not only in delays at airports but in restrictions on immigration in increased racism in in our own communities and all these are the sort of collateral consequences which it will be impossible to unravel once we go there get go that go down that line too quickly so just in conclusion it is for all of us for whom language is so much a part of what we do professionally and so much a part of what we can give as intellectuals to our country at this moment to understand both its reach and its potential as well as its its dangers and to to try to avoid productive uh and reductive language thank you yes sir um yeah professor poston um you made the proposal seem to be making the proposal that we bring down the taliban regime by funding opposition groups within afghanistan and we have a history of doing that kind of program in a lot of places and often we end up of doing that without thinking about who it is that we're supporting and funding and so um and often ending up with despots here and there different parts of the world so i'm curious who these groups are that we're you know if if we take the approach of funding opposition groups to the taliban who are we funding and what is uh thank you i i everyone as i see people leaving um i want to acknowledge that we know that we've already reached um the time when we promised we would end but this is an important and lively and ongoing discussion i would like to propose that we continue with the questions and give the panelists a chance to answer if you can stay please do we've already we extended this a half hour longer than we did last week and still it's not enough time and i i don't think any of us should be surprised but uh yes sir okay i'm jim meyer i'm graduating in mechanical engineering my question is specifically uh we've seen an outpouring of condolences from a number of countries including libya and iran including the message from tehran to mayor giuliani which was one of the first formal communications between the countries in a long time what are ways that the united states and iran can can build on this and capitalize this on this for our mutual benefit in the relationship and also with other countries uh in the same state as they're on good thanks yes sir and i'll go to you and then to you and then we'll cut it off and allow the panelists a chance thank you two more okay my name is raheem chaldras i'm a freshman at mit and i just wanna like draw a parallel between what israel is doing in palestine to who the americans are dealing with now we're dealing with people who are motivated to die as you mentioned they're not afraid to die and so we saw how israel is dealing with it by using violence and to like violence to against violence and it's not working you have if they if the israeli the israeli government is trying to kill the jihad or hamas leaders they've succeeded in killing like 40 or 50 jihad and hamas leaders but what's the side effect of that 800 palestinians have died and 200 israelis have died and those figures are still rising so if you if you're thinking of if the united states government is thinking of targeting afghanistan and killing and like just bombing afghanistan and trying to get to those terrorists there's a lot of more anger that's going to be created and i don't think any american would accept to live in the states with with the fear of being bombed on the bus fear being bombed on a plane any mall which is happening now in israel and although israel is a powerful democracy in the in the world now and it's it's on on the highest levels of security alert now terrorist terrorist actions are on the rise and i think if the united states decides to bomb afghanistan you have a lot of more anger building up and more terrorist actions taking place in the united states which will which will like cause more problems than they will try to solve so my question is what what's your like what's your point of view on that and how what's the solution what's i know there's no easy solution but what could be done thank you yes sir every day i come to work and i pray a decade of the rosary for patience thank you for providing another opportunity to exercise it ladies and gentlemen my name is benson and i am a soldier i have served our country for 24 years we do not engage in mindless slaughter we do not slaughter innocents the use of force is not inconsistent with the maximum use of intellect that's why i'm here to study my question because i'm rather interested in it seeing that after this year i will return to the line can you articulate uh some points some concrete points because i agree with one of the previous speakers let's deal in some actual specifics on which we can build a coherent executable and coordinated national strategy that combines all of the uses of national power and if we are truly going to engage in a campaign can we articulate some specifics and that's what i would like to hear aside from another comment that i'm so glad that we can engage in stuff like this i really am because i've served in countries where you cannot i just want everyone to think about that too there was a line from james webb's book where he had his character senator addressing an anti-war rally at harvard if i may senator said i didn't see any of you in uniform but i saw dudes from boise from downtown philadelphia from small country towns united states those are the soldiers that i am privileged to lead and train and i've only seen one mit graduate in uniform in 24 years of service thank you thank you uh eric a um hopefully fruitful but likely fruitless recapitulation of a very vast terrain quickly uh the first um questioner wanted us to to speak to the difference we wondered how israel might be uh made to look more like america the difference between a flexible reflective united states and a more and battered and bittered and less flexible israel could could out of this come an israel uh that would acknowledge its its mistakes and its weaknesses and overcome them the second um was an expression from from a woman who was concerned that uh who who who acknowledged that that the rise of nationalism she's seeing on a daily basis is quite frightening to her that america's ideals are widely shared she's not an american she said america's ideals are widely shared that many feel that this was an attack on on all of us um and and asked in particular how should hostile governments harboring governments uh be dealt with asking for specifics the third intervention was was a concern about language the kind of language that um that we're hearing talk of freedom of democracy of patriotism and appeals to those um uh were a source of concern um vis-a-vis the sorts of policies that they uh in the speaker's view naturally led to she asked that we considered the alternatives um in particular some that were mentioned on the panel appeal to international criminal courts um asked us to consider ways to to uh respond to the social injustice that is at the root of uh some of this maybe all of this and uh the question is should there be a blank check to rescind civil liberties at home which is uh what she suspected was underway with the interaction between congress and the president this week the next person asked if we had any alternatives to the taliban who is going to be our friend if the taliban is our enemy in afghanistan the next person asked how might the united states in iran capitalize on this by drawing themselves closer to each other something which has been uh impossible uh since the late 1970s the next person asked about parallels between israel the israeli situation and the american situation and warned us that violence begets violence it doesn't work and and raised the issue which we heard last time in our in our um open forum that there's the danger always of creating even more anger and even more violence by reacting with violence and finally the speaker asked the soldier who spoke um took took offense at the argument that the use of force um was uh i'm sorry that that that that american soldiers slaughter innocence or the insinuation that american soldiers do arguing that the use of force is not inconsistent with the use of intellect and asked in particular if we might be able this panel might be able to articulate some kind of a specific blueprint for an integrated um uh approach strategy uh to resolving uh this crisis a long uh list which we will not be able to to uh to address in its in its full context again will return but let me turn it back to the panel well so many points uh to respond to i'll just say a couple of things first um i've just been listening to sort of everything that's been said and i want to say something that will leave people with a bad memory but i i do think that the discussion here uh i'm not sure it's fully reflected what um what is worrying many close to this situation what's worrying them is that the next attack is going to be with the weapon of mass destruction and this isn't a fantasy it's not it's not a something that only frank gaffney is worried about it's it's a real concern and our whole discussion about what to do in the context of this difficulty we're in has to take account of the fact that if we fail to deal with it well i see two enormous dangers one is that we will fail to head off that danger because i believe this organization that's coming after us is immensely dangerous and ruthless uh the second is that we will overreach in the arab and muslim worlds and get us get ourselves in a horrible mess horrible mess so they're too dangerous here and they're very large second point is i'm just reflecting back on this notion that the united states is now facing a counterattack and i also do agree to some extent that it's facing a counterattack to something else which is the presence of american culture in the urban muslim worlds this may seem like a small point but i think we need to rethink this whole notion that we have a right to export our culture everywhere and think seriously about ways to allow others to opt out of it uh part of the backlash against united states especially among fundamentalists islam is that our media exports are to them utterly repulsive um frankly i i know a lot of parents to whom a lot of the you know media exports the united states uh are repulsive even you know here uh we need to rethink this question of whether we should be imposing by our free trade uh uh policy uh that others should you know be swimming in mtv and swimming in uh uh melrose place and swimming in baywatch baywatch is the most widely watched tv show in the world did you know that and i'm sure you've all seen it it's just something we should be so proud of as americans and my view is let us let others opt out of this sewer okay it is part of the problem let's let them opt out i understand that they want to opt out let's let's find new technology to allow people to turn off the satellite downlink so that the whole country can just not be watching that you know looking in that sewer uh and that's another aspect of this um uh uh you know culture there's a culture clash here to which for which we are 100 responsible and we need to rethink the way we're doing business and you know stop listening to jack valetti and the hollywood lobby and all the rest and that you know free traders who don't know when to stop there you go [Applause] just a brief comment about the media again because i've been just watching two contradictory uh or two different things happening after the attack one of which has been very impressive and that has been generally the public reaction of leaders in the united states from the national level down to the local level many of whom have taken a proactive approach in making it clear that groups should not be scapegoated and people should not be blamed simply because they happen to belong to the same groups just because they're muslims for instance um and i i i was just having very interesting conversation with a friend of mine who's a senior journalist in india and we talked about how different distract how different this is to the usual response to say a moment is religious even such as the destruction of the babri masjid for ins for instance in india where usually the response would be that the opposition would first accuse the government of having failed and demand resignations and then that would be followed by a whole bunch of recrimination from both sides and almost no one would be actually encouraging the society to actually back off and not escape good and i think that that's actually one of the positive things um that actually happened uh but the negative side is that that all this public exhortation has not really stopped hate crimes and there have been a lot of people who have been targeted and of the other people who have died have been some indians in fact will be mistaken to be arabs because they happen to have brown skins and dark hair and i think that it's actually uh an issue that needs to be directly confronted and that brings us back to each other media in many ways and also the education system um what is it that that actually makes this perception grow that terrorism is actually a unique problem that's that's actually attributable to this cultural or racial or this particular group and i think that questions of race and culture cannot be disassociated particularly when one faces the facts let's take like take one to give one example about the facts according to fbi's own statistics between 1984 and 1998 uh 87 terrorist attacks were committed on the soil of the united states do you know how many were commit committed by those who were with arab background or with any arab connection two of 87 one was world trade center bombing earlier and the second was the hostage taken by five iranians of the iranian embassy in 1992 which did not affect any american lives or property um so what is it that that leads to the perception of the islamic terrorists as being the quintessential one now after this attack it may be hard to for some people imagine this as an issue because people might say well 87 people 85 people may conduct small terrorist attacks but one major hit equals all 87 or even more but you know the perception that terrorists are islamic is not something that was formed after last tuesday just just a very minor matter of disagreement with another speaker with steven evra i really don't think do not think that the cultural differences are the culprits here i really do not think that the cultural cleavages can be thought of as the a key causal factor or a key element in in the strategy to be developed quite on the country i think that the region as a whole with a with a few notable nutty exceptions has been able to not so much accommodate but accept and distance itself at the same time from those aspects of american and western culture that individual countries did not feel comfortable with and i'm referring primarily to the moderate arab regimes not not to the rest of the crowd there's a lot of a lot of points i guess i'd like to just try and speak for a second of the question of uh nationalism and patriotism and chauvinism there's a lot of you know fine distinctions here across these isms i think it's very hard for a country modern country to embark on a big project particularly a let's face it we'll call it a war without summoning up some collective feeling i think the trick is to sum it up a collective feeling that even though it's oriented towards destruction and let's be honest about it uh still does not drift into the worst exact nationalism which is a denigration of other groups denigration of other nation states patriotism for me is a kind of a positive love of country for the good things in your country and i think in the united states of america it also means some awareness about the warts and uh i think our country has gotten better and better at recognizing the warts although i wouldn't say that you know you spend a lot of time necessarily solving every one of those problems so i do believe there's been a rise in patriotism and i think it's understandable and i think it's necessary and i think my use of the term united states of america in discourse is uh not only affected by that patriotism it is meant to affect that patriotism i'm not sorry about that i am an american patriot i think the term and the arousal of patriotism is scary because i think it's easy for it to slide into something else it's easy for it to use its destructive power in an undifferentiated way it's easy to turn inside itself there's all kinds of bad things that happen when you mobilize this ism but uh i don't think you can go to war without it um i i i really don't uh i think it is true that uh even in this situation where i think at least for the first few days of this terrible tragedy the american media i think i won't say it was its finest hour but it was pretty close i do think that this point that not enough has been said about overseas reactions to this event you know sympathetic overseas reactions is true and i think it reflects a deeper problem with the american media that uh it just doesn't pay that much attention to the rest of the world most americans don't hear enough about the rest of the world when they do hear about it hear about it episodically there's some new drama you're gonna go solve the drama do something exciting come home go back to your business and i think the failure that failure is you know helps stoke this these events that raj was talking about it makes it easy for americans who are not very informed and are emotionally aroused to turn their anger on uh citizens or visitors to this country who have nothing in common other than with these terrorists other than that they look a little different from the small town person that used to show up in life magazine in 1951 right so this is a this is a real danger and it may be that you know it's sort of foolish to look for you know good in something as bad as this but uh i think americans have probably learned that they don't have the luxury of ignoring the rest of the world uh uh it's a sad way it's a sad way uh to learn that lesson uh the point was made that my use of the term united states of america is frightening the invocation of patriotism is frightening and i think i said a second ago that yes i understand it is frightening because it can go awry but i also would say that it's meant to be frightening right i mean i think other countries who get involved in this business and groups that get involved in this business they should be afraid uh because i think the united states of america is probably going to come after them we may not i mean this may all dissipate i mean we've sat around this table we've talked about the difficulties and the subtleties the barriers the ways it can go wrong and embarking on a war even a war of this kind is a big thing it requires enormous commitments of of national will of leadership of of uh of organization of prioritization right and uh we're just we're not accustomed to that in this country and it it it wouldn't be difficult from my point of view for this energy that we've seen in the last week to dissipate in a hundred different directions um and it's hard to say i mean i don't think that would be for the best but it might be for the best it might i don't think it is for all the reasons that steve and others have said but but but but it might be it might be for the best uh i finally i guess i should say something about this question of doesn't doesn't uh violent engagement with with the opposition uh since you know yeah some people may view that some members of the opposition in israel are not terrorists and some are terrorists some of our opposition are terrorists and some aren't terrorists but violent engagement with the opposition creates more opponents particularly the more indiscriminate you are i think that there's an element of truth in that i think you have to make a kind of a calculation about whether or not you have the option of avoiding the fight my view of what's happened here is or my analogy or image is that you know osama bin laden and the people groups who support this man in the united states of america are locked in a wrestling match for a single knife whoever lets go of the knife is going to get stabbed right i i don't think we can let go now without getting stabbed unless we want to let go and say we're leaving the ring the ring is yours right and this is a question that i think we're going to discuss in future weeks and someone asked the question which is do you want to leave the ring right and and i i think people who believe that i i think they they should make the argument and i don't think it's impossible to make the argument i don't share the argument i don't agree with it but i don't think it's impossible in this time to make the argument that this this fight is more than the united states of america wants it involves all kinds of difficult moral and ethical choices a lot of people are going to get hurt a lot of capital is going to get destroyed however much we disagree with osama bin laden or taliban or anything else they're organic to the region they grew this ideology out of some combination of nationalism and and and religion uh we don't need to be there we don't need to be involved in the arab israeli dispute we don't need to be in europe we don't need to be in the balkans we don't need to be in these places right but we have to have that discussion about do we or do we not think we need to be in those places because there is an alternative here if you don't want to get your hands dirty and that's come home on the point of iran in the united states i think it's early but we're starting to see signs that uh the united states is is going to pull the allies together that it thinks it needs to uh to accomplish the task at hand and if that means um cozying up to pakistan after distance distancing itself from pakistan because of new pakistan's nuclear proliferation then it'll do that and if it means choosing some or all of the opposition within afghanistan to the taliban and supporting them with aid in arms and the united states will probably do that and if it means that there's going to be some kind of approachment between iran and united states then i think yeah we could see it what what in other contexts would be a sea change after uh 22 years of of hostility there have been some evidence of a different relationship over the last five or six years but it would certainly be a seat change so yes the united states is going to look for the allies that it needs and that may involve what in other contexts would have seemed like dramatic changes i just want to second what barry said about the media if you look across a range of issues for years the u.s media has been focused on the united states and does not do a good job of presenting what is going on in the rest of the world and i think one lucky technological development is emailing the internet because it gives us direct access to too many things that we we couldn't get access to before and it's certainly not the same as being in another country but at least it's more eye-opening than simply watching cnn or cnn headline news or cnn airport channel or whatever mode you choose um lastly on margaret burnham's point about the sort of letting the rule of law work i respond to this not as someone trying to advocate the opposite i think there's a lot of this is a crucial question um but but i i just i just want to articulate part of what i fear which is that um as the rule of law works attacks happen and um we were watching now and we're seeing the evidence of that the rule of law was working uh to stop this attack there were some of these suspects who were on uh immigration watch lists but they slipped into the united states there were probably a couple of them who the fbi was actually trying to arrest but failed to get to in time so it's it's an incredible tension and it goes i think to the heart of what the united states is going to stand for and what it is that the united states is defending or or advocating when it chooses its policy response to this it's an important point but i think the the the important other part of it that has to be addressed is as the rule of law takes time to work and makes mistakes how big are the costs going to be and i think the fear is well yesterday's terrorist attacks seemed minor to talk about you know even a couple hundred people dying now seems you know trivial when people look at at the footage over and over again of thousands dying um it still raises that same question of the timeliness and so i don't i don't at all have an answer and i don't advocate either side but just it's a clear tension i think between the two sides thanks jeremy greg well to no one's surprise at least of all my own there are many many more questions than there are answers and i do think though the issues before us are that much more sharply etched now that we've begun this conversation i want to remind everyone or at least inform everyone that that the next time we will convene a panel it'll be a a differently configured one uh but we will be confi convening a panel on october 4th as part of these ser the series of five teach-ins um at the institute uh on these issues and we're going to be focusing on the question that barry uh raised in the last forum and has raised again uh today which is whether or not the united states wants to be in that ring and if so how do you justify staying there thank you ever thank you everyone thanks panel [Applause] you

Channel: MIT Center for International Studies

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Id: 9t-N5eiKR98

Length: 143min 3sec (8583 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 27 2021