Citizen Conversation With…Meghan O’Sullivan
by Matt Bieber, News Writer on December 7, 2009 in Citizen Conversation with..., Features, News
Photo: Taylor Chapman, Photographer, MPP\'11
Interview Conducted by Matt Bieber, News Writer, MPP’11
Meghan O’Sullivan is Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs. Previously, she was at the National Security Council as Special Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan from 2004-2007. She has cumulatively spent two years in Iraq, including working for the Coalition Provisional Authority in 2003-2004 and helping negotiate the bilateral security agreement between Iraq and the United States in the fall of 2008. She also worked in Policy Planning at the State Department, where she was the senior advisor to the special envoy to the Irish Peace Process and her portfolio included Iran, Libya, Syria, and relations with the Muslim world. She is a member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations.
In your view, can the decision to go to war in Iraq be justified using traditional just war theory, or did it represent an extension, augmentation, or violation of that theory?
The departure was in moving from preemptive war — which is broadly considered to be a legitimate and justifiable type of just war — to preventive war. That’s the controversial bit. Post–9/11, senior U.S. officials believed they had a new set of security threats. And we did, in many respects.
After 9/11, people in charge pulled back and said, “We have to re-look at all of our threats in a new light.” Low-level threats in a pre-9/11 world were no longer considered to be low-level. Risk that was acceptable pre-9/11 was no longer considered acceptable post-9/11. This change encouraged the administration to conflate the concepts of preventive war and preemptive war. They’re not the same thing. But the relevant question was now “Is there anything about this new international security environment that actually makes the urgency of a preventive war akin to that of a preemptive war?” I think that’s the debate, which will probably go on for a long period of time.
Do you have a personal view about that?
I understand where policy makers’ heads were at the time. They believed, based on intelligence that was later proved to be wrong, that they were facing a threat in Iraq with some urgency. One of the questions was how to evaluate the urgency in the new security environment where you no longer could expect to identify all your threats as clearly as armies amassing at a border. President Bush described this challenge to me personally in some detail because he wanted me to understand how he was looking at the world in light of his responsibilities. In this 9/11 world, where his primary responsibility continued to be one to protect the American people, he saw it as his responsibility to counter threats before they materialized.
So, in some fashion, you can understand the logic here when your threats are no longer discernable in the sense they used to be. But in practice, the concept is extremely unwieldy. If you extend the logic, it really becomes very expansive….Think about what it might mean for how the situation with Iran is addressed in the next year or eighteen months or whatever the window is. If the United States or some other country were to take military action, to what extent is a preventive action going to be considered to be a justified action?
My sense is that many of the people who voted for President Obama perceived their vote as, in part, an effort to roll back aspects of the Bush Administration. I’m wondering whether for policymakers in the White House, policies are likely to have more staying power than the public may understand. We’ve seen that borne out in some notable examples - Obama retaining Bush-era policies surrounding detention for suspects and so forth. With all this in mind, what do you think of as the policy precedents and ramifications of Bush’s decision to wage a preventive war?
The first part of your question is true: particularly in foreign policy, there is almost certainly likely to be more continuity in policy between administrations than some people outside of government understand. This is not specific to the Obama administration.
And that is because the reality is, once you get into the White House, whether you’re President Bush or President Obama, you’re mostly concerned with national challenges and you largely have the same national capabilities. You’re dealing with the same information, more or less. You may have slightly different sources or perspectives, but you’re getting similar information. And at the end of the day, the most important element of your job is the same – protecting the American people.
So, in a lot of ways, it wasn’t surprising to me to see in some cases once President Obama came into office and was confronted with certain situations, he made somewhat similar choices. The reality is that President Obama didn’t have many more options than President Bush had before him a day earlier. President Obama did have increased international credibility and good will, and the good feelings that came in with his election. This did create some new options. But in general, there are some realities having to do with the threats the United States faces. There are some realities about our capabilities which are distinct from individual presidents.
In terms of Iraq being a precedent used by others to wage a preventive war, it’s a great question and I really don’t know the right answer to it. My immediate reaction is the concept has been discredited by how things went in Iraq. Iraq discredited, to some extent, intervention. It has discredited, in some respect, the use of military force. It has certainly discredited the idea of a preventive war. So there are all kinds of – we could call them casualties – associated with the Iraq War and with the complications that unfolded as a result of it.
So, on the one hand, I think that subsequent administrations will be loath to use Iraq as any kind of precedent. But really, in answering your question, we need to consider what if another administration is faced with the same perceived situation…. Incidentally, there are many things that are reasonable to criticize the Bush administration for regarding Iraq, but one of them which is not valid, is this notion that the administration did not really believe that Saddam had WMD. Senior officials and most others did think Saddam had WMD. The debate at the time wasn’t really about questioning the intelligence and whether or not Saddam had WMD – the debate was about what was the right response to this threat.
So what if President Obama or some subsequent president found himself or herself in a situation where he had some degree of certainty that there was a threat that was perceived in similar fashion? I think when you make the question more specific, it’s harder to answer that no president will ever wage a preventive war again. You know, I wouldn’t put my money on that.
Let’s switch our area focus for a moment. There’s a famous Henry Kissinger quote that goes, “High office teaches decision making, not substance. It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make.” Can you describe the intellectual environment in the White House during your time there? Did you feel like there was space for reasonably paced intellectual discourse? Or were things too fast for that?
You don’t want to say, “There’s no time for intellectual discourse.” But the reality is that true intellectual discourse is rare in policymaking. It is not impossible, and I can give you examples of where it happened. But often, you are reacting to a crisis and you are not in a position to be reading books and contemplating theories. Occasionally, you are able to look out and say, “I’ve got a strategic vision,” or “This is something that’s coming down the road, and therefore, we need to mobilize people. We need to marshal resources that have other immediate applications for this issue down the road because the world is changing – threat, opportunity, whatever it is.” That can be a more intellectual endeavor in some respects.
It also depends where you are in government. I started government in a place called Policy Planning, which is basically like a think-tank for the secretary of state and the State Department. That was an environment in which my colleagues and I had much more scope to think intellectually, because in that environment, we, in general, were not operational, meaning that we didn’t have any responsibilities for executing policy. Our job in Policy Planning was to think of good ideas, to try to critique our own government’s policies, and to propose creative solutions to things. And it was a fabulous job and it was a great introduction to government. I came from Oxford, then I went to a think tank, and then I went to this part of government – it was a perfect slow immersion into the realities of government and policymaking.
That sort of work is very different than being in the field. I spent a total of two years in Baghdad, and no day in Baghdad went nearly the way I expected it to. In the field, especially in place like Baghdad, you’re trying to help build something that’s very long-term, but you’re buffeted by daily, hourly, and sometimes, by-the-minute forces. So it’s a constant challenge to balance the immediate and the strategic.
I actually am a huge subscriber to Kissinger’s sentiments. The longer you’re in government, especially depending on what kind of job you’re in, the harder you have to work to maintain your ability to look at ideas afresh when they come to you. People who have been in government a long time can have a tendency to quickly say, ”We’ve tried that. We’ve done that. This didn’t work.” I worked hard not to do this. Instead, I tried to keep an open mind to the idea that just because something didn’t work in 2005, doesn’t mean it’s not going to work in 2007. The context may have changed. You have to work hard to really be able to digest ideas over and over again to really appreciate the nuances and complexities of things.
How does it feel to come out of such an intense and highly bonded work environment? Does it make it difficult to get used to the notion that you’ve relinquished power and that it’s in someone else’s hands now?
No one is in a high government job forever, and you go into one of those jobs knowing that it is a privilege to serve in that job, and that there will come a time when you’re not in that job and that you should have respect for person who does that job subsequent to you.
It’s nice to hear that, particularly given the way the media covers Washington — you can easily get the impression that participants at that level think of the opposition party as the enemy and root for them to fail.
It is Washington and there is some of that. But in the executive branch, there is probably less of that on both sides than people think. We’re talking about people at a very senior level in the executive branch. Once you get one of those positions, you don’t wake up every morning saying, “I’m a Republican” or “I’m a Democrat.” If you’re somebody who’s working on the policy side and you’re working foreign policy, your morning thought is about the American interest. It’s not a partisan thought.
I know some people find it very hard to believe that in the Bush White House people weren’t sitting around and talking about how to hand a blow to the Democratic Party. I mean, maybe they were, but certainly not in my office on Iraq and Afghanistan. We were talking about how to shift the momentum, how to correct the flaws, how to garner more resources to help America, our coalition and Iraqi partners succeed in Iraq.
You mentioned 18-hour days. I read an excerpt of a study recently on high-level British officials; the study estimated that the pace at which senior government officials work is so damaging to the body that it can be the equivalent of working with a blood alcohol level of 0.1. Two questions: Did you have the strength and endurance to deal with the incredibly complicated and nuanced problems that were on your desks? And if that capacity was diminished by sleep deprivation or overwork, did you have strategies to deal with those challenges?
When I went into government, I saw a few colleagues who’d been in government a long time under very stressful conditions, and they had burned out but were still in their jobs. I remember saying to myself, “I’m going to leave before I burn out.” And every year, I checked in with myself and asked, “How close am I to that level?” It’s a part of the reason why I left in 2007 and not in 2009. I wanted to feel that I had done the best job that I good do on both my first day and my last day.
When one of my old bosses, Bob Blackwill, talks about things he looks for in a person he’s looking to hire, he always mentions physical stamina. It sounds like not really an important thing for a policy person, but really, the ability to work those hours for that length of time without being demoralized, disheartened, or losing your judgment is something that requires physical stamina. Perhaps even more importantly, it requires a certain psychological perspective and resilience. There are lots of tactical defeats in foreign policy. You can’t be demoralized every time something doesn’t go the right way.
During my first stint in Iraq – from early 2003 to mid-2004 – I, and all my colleagues, worked seven days a week, easily eighteen hours a day, sometimes twenty hours a day. I came back, I went directly to the White House – I had a few days off in between. Then I started to work a similar schedule again, but soon I realized this is not actually sustainable and I had to find pockets in the week, however small, to rejuvenate. For me it was a long Sunday afternoon run….I don’t think it requires having ten consecutive nights of twelve hours of sleep, but you need some point to recalibrate, and I think everybody finds it in a different way. The people who don’t find it, I think, cannot last nearly as long.
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