| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Michael Nacht Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Page 5 of 7
Let's talk now about the post-9/11 developments in the context of what we've been talking about -- ideas, bureaucratic politics, and so on. Because of the media, we have a sense of how 9/11 affected the public, but I wonder if you can give us some insight into how it has affected the national security establishment, both the political leaders and the national security technocrats and intellectuals? What has that event meant for them in sort of shaking them up?
It's definitely energized them. It's terrorized them. Some of their worst nightmares have been realized. Many now see this war on terrorism as the organizing principle of the post - Cold War world. That basically, we had a Cold War for forty-five years, and then we had about a ten-year period of something which we couldn't put a label on, so we called it the post - Cold War world. And now we are in this age of, I don't know what you'd want to call it, whether it's extreme terrorism or whatever. But, clearly, we have a situation of people who are deeply hostile to the United States, deeply hostile to Western values, and they're willing to not only use force, they're willing to kill themselves to implement their policies. This is a threat of a character and scope I don't think we fully appreciated until 9/11.
Is it that many of the issues were being considered by intellectuals or policy wonks off here in a corner somewhere, and that now everything has opened up, and the importance of what was being said in some places in the government has become apparent?
Well, there has been quite a bit of a flip-flop. Frankly, until 9/11, just in terms of career prospects, whether you were in academia or you were in government, you worked on the major powers and the major players. That was where the action was, that was where you would be rewarded, that was where the best minds seemed to be, that was what the most interesting things were about, whether it was about our potential adversaries, Russia and China, or whether it was about Europe and NATO, whether it was about the Japanese, or, of course, the horrible Middle East conflict, the Arab - Israeli conflict, which has gone on since the inception of the State of Israel in 1948. Those were the key issues.
Terrorism was viewed, I'd say, as an important but secondary issue. It was interesting: it could lead to deaths; not huge numbers, but, you know, a businessman could be killed in Colombia, and even the World Trade Center could be attacked in 1993. But it was second order, and it really wasn't something where you could become a superstar in the field. There were directorates set up to study terrorism in all the major agencies of government; they were never chaired by people who rose right to the top. That has now changed. Now, that becomes the essence of the challenge.
Unfortunately, it's not the only challenge, because the other problems haven't gone away, as we've seen with Iraq or with North Korea. So you have a dueling situation of competition between those who think that international terrorism is the problem versus those who think state governments who are hostile to the West are the problem.
Without saying that you were clairvoyant, I'm curious, do you in retrospect feel that you were more sensitive to these issues because of the portfolio that you had had, working with Soviet nuclear weapons?
Frankly, no. Frankly, no. I don't think that what was orchestrated on 9/11 was something that I believed really could happen. Now, I've read that George Tenet warned President Bush of a catastrophic attack on the territory of the United States, by bin Laden, as the top priority of his presidency. So he obviously had information that I was not aware of. But I would say he would be among the very few who would have put that on the top of the list. Emerging tensions, even potential conflict with China? Absolutely. Still dealing with a Russia that had not fully democratized and that seemed very corrupt, and that had mafia characteristics and all that? Absolutely. A need to somehow move toward some sort of peace settlement in the Middle East? Absolutely. This was the classical agenda, slightly modified in the post - Cold War world.
As I said, it is the magnitude of the forces that are arrayed against us, what to do about them and their willingness to kill themselves; martyrdom terrorism was not appreciated until 9/11 on a wide scale.
We were talking before the program about paradigmatic shifts. I would think if Thomas Kuhn were here -- it's sad to say, he passed away a while ago, but almost all of us have read his book on the structure of scientific revolutions, and then tried to apply it to this field -- there was a paradigm. It really was sovereign states where it was mostly [focused]. There were important other sides, and there were many scholars who talked about transnational relations and international organizations and all that, but they were like, you know, the cauliflower, but the major powers were the steak. And now, the whole dish is being scrambled, it's more like a soufflé, and it's not quite clear what the steak is.
In particular, this whole question on the role of Islam: we are so ill-prepared to deal with it because our knowledge is limited. There are only -- what? -- a few million Muslims in the United States, there are very few in any positions of authority in the federal government or in the Congress. We have to understand a whole religion, a value system, to understand what is relevant from that system to what happened on 9/11, and what is irrelevant to it. There are already major debates among scholars as to how much of this really reflects Islam at all. Some say it's just a total aberration, some say it's not such a total aberration. And then, what to do about it? I think we are just in the embryonic stages, the nursery school stages, of this terrible problem.
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