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Citizen Conversation With…Meghan O’Sullivan

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.

Citizen Conversation With…John Donahue

Interview Conducted by Matt Bieber, News Writer, MPP’11

John D. Donahue is the Raymond Vernon Lecturer in Public Policy and faculty chair of the HKS Case Program and the SLATE teaching initiative.His teaching, writing, and research mostly deal with public sector reform and with the distribution of public responsibilities across levels of government and sectors of the economy, including extensive work with the HKS-HBS joint degree program. He has written or edited ten books, including Disunited States (1997), The Privatization Decision (1989, with four translations 1990-92) and most recently, The Warping of Government Work (2008). He served in the first Clinton Administration as an Assistant Secretary and then as Counselor to the Secretary of Labor. Donahue has consulted for business and governmental organizations, including the National Economic Council, the World Bank, and the RAND Corporation, and serves as a trustee or advisor to several nonprofits. A native of Indiana, he holds a BA from Indiana University and an MPP and PhD from Harvard.

You’ve spent an awful lot of time at the Kennedy School. You’re an MPP, a PhD, and you’ve spent the bulk of your career here. How do you think the school is doing? In particular, how has it changed since the time you were an MPP, and what challenges is it facing right now?

Harvard had really lousy luck in when it decided to launch the Kennedy School – or rather, when it decided to scale it up – in that it went from being a small program to an avowedly large-scale initiative meant to create a new profession in the late 70s. (1979 is when the current building was built.) That was just about the time the bottom fell out of public service in the United States. Right at the point when the relative economic rewards of public service collapsed, and right when trust in government and the status of public service declined. So we couldn’t have done worse.

I always think it’s important to think of that background in calibrating how we’ve done relative to the mission. Given how strongly the tide has been running against us, we’ve been doing pretty well. Had the Kennedy School been started in, let’s say, 1941 or 1946, or maybe right now, I think it might have been a smoother launch. So that affects how I set par in my mind.

If I could push a little further on that in particular, what do you see as the legacy of a stumbled launch thirty-odd years later?

Any institution, if it doesn’t have a strong external constituency to keep it on track with its intended mission, will follow a path of least internal resistance and find something else to do. One thing about the Kennedy School is that there’s a strong gravitational pull exerted by the faculty of Arts and Sciences. Most of us come from there. We all respect the elegance of what they do. Without some other strong force offsetting that gravitational pull we end up—instead of orbiting at an appropriate distance around the arts-and-sciences world—getting pulled completely into it.

The Law School, the Medical School, and the Business School all benefit from the discipline imposed on them by a pretty robust and well-defined labor market they’re feeding into. Because we don’t have that, we’ve got to work extra hard to become something distinct from just a branch of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Do you think the Kennedy School has a clear picture of what it wants its students to leave the Kennedy School having learned? Is there a clear vision of a successful student?

Some parts do. I admire the MPA/ID initiative because of the clarity of its mission. I think it’s kind of a niche mission, but they know what they’re doing. I think the intentionality of the MPP program ebbs and flows. There are times that we have a clear fix on what we’re trying to do and we build it into the curriculum, and there are times when we sort of drift away from that.

We always do come back. This is a conversation that we always have, over and over again. It would be easier, again, if we had a thousand public-service organizations around the world that know exactly what they want in an MPP to keep us honest if we start to depart from that. In the absence of that external discipline, we need a little bit more internal focus.

Which areas of the MPP curriculum and of the MPP profile are well defined right now and which ones could use some work?

I think the pieces are well defined, but the whole is not as much greater than the sum of the parts as it ought to be. To the extent that the MPP offers something distinctive, it’s the reliable capability to integrate and apply the different disciplines in real world practice. I wish we did a better job at that. You get some practice at it in Spring Exercise, you get some practice at it in your PAE. In my ideal conception of the Kennedy School, we’d devote more time to this kind of integrated policy analytic work throughout the core, but that’s hard to do.

We all have so much within our areas that we think it’s urgent for you to learn. I’ve got my stuff I want you to learn in management, and other people have their stuff they want you to learn in economics, statistics, ethics, and so on. It’s a collective action problem, making way for the common curriculum of integrated policy analysis.

I’ve been impressed in the moments when our syllabi are coordinated – so that we’re talking about topics that integrate material that we’re learning in multiple classes at once. But I can imagine that doing that thing on a large scale is really hard to arrange.

You bet. It pays off big-time. If I had my way, that would happen closer to 90% of the time, instead of 10% of the time. But again, it’s a lot of work to get that done.

I actually have an ambition – not this year and not next year but probably the year after that – to do some experimentation with a single cohort that does a little bit more consistent integration and see if we can demonstrate the value of that.

Is that tied into your efforts to improve professional pedagogy more generally? And can you provide some background on that effort for our readers?

The case program was broken and we had to close it or fix it. The dean asked if I would become the faculty chair to try to help fix it, and I said okay. Then about a month later, the dean said, “While you’re at it, can you do something about faculty training and assessment?” I said, “Not by myself, I can’t. But if you will help me line up some reinforcements, maybe collectively we can..”

So we recruited two fabulous colleagues – Dick Light and Dan Levy—who joined with me as the core faculty team. Anne Drazen had been the head of IT at the Kennedy School and was sort of bored with running a mature process and raised her hand to do be the staff head of the effort. And we recruited Lee Warren, an ace teaching coach, to be the director of professional pedagogy.

We have an advisory board, chaired by Derek Bok, who understandably turned down everything else Harvard wanted him to do after his second time as president, but said yes to us because he cares so much about this mission. The dean, the executive dean, the academic dean are all strongly behind it.
What does the content of the training look like in particular? What gaps are you seeking to fill?
Well, case teaching for one thing, but not just the case method strictly speaking. The term we use is problem-based learning, which includes cases, but also includes exercise and simulations, and all kinds of teaching methods that have the students actively engaged in the learning experience, rather than passively receiving lessons from the professor.

We just finished the first case teaching seminar for faculty who wanted to use the method but didn’t know how. This past August and September we just did our second round of new faculty orientation for people to introduce them to the idea that this is a professional school, and what that institutional distinction means for how they might approach teaching.

When the school was small, when I was an MPP student, there were only around 25 people on the faculty. The Tom Schellings and Dick Neustadts and Fred Mostellers of the world were able to informally impart the ethos of professional-school pedagogy to the new folks. Then the school got big and that model didn’t work anymore. It took us a while to figure out that we needed a more structured institution to replace it. To their credit, this leadership team recognized that, set out to fix it, and is putting tons of support into the effort. It’s going to take five or ten years to see if it’s going to make a big difference, but so far, things are going very well.

Citizen Conversation With…Stephen Walt

Photo courtesy of Taylor Chapman, MPP’11. Interview Conducted by Matt Bieber, News Writer, MPP’11.

Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Rene Belfer Professsor of International Relations. He presently serves on the editorial boards of Foreign Policy, Security Studies, International Relations, and Journal of Cold War Studies, and he also serves as Co-Editor of the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs, published by Cornell University Press.

In an article and a subsequent book published a couple of years ago, you and John Mearsheimer argued that the Israel lobby exerts a power over U.S. foreign policy that can’t be explained in terms of American or Israeli interests, nor in terms of America’s moral obligations. So can you summarize your argument for our readers?
The basic argument of the book is that there is a powerful interest group—a coalition of different individuals and organizations—that seeks to maintain a “special relationship” between the United States and Israel. In particular, the special relationship means that the United States gives Israel extraordinary amounts of economic, military, and diplomatic support, and does so more-or-less unconditionally. No matter what Israel does, in short, it continues to receive economic, military, and diplomatic backing.
We argued that this special relationship was primarily due to domestic politics in the United States, and tried to explain exactly how that worked. We emphasize that the lobby’s activities were legitimate forms of political participation and far from unique– that there were lots of other interest groups that did similar things—though few groups were as influential.
We also maintained that the special relationship was not good for either the United States or Israel. It was undermining America’s interests in the Middle East and elsewhere, and encouraging Israeli policies that were not in Israel’s long-term interest. Accordingly, we argued that a more normal relationship would be better for both countries.
By writing the book, we hoped to get the subject more out in the open and get people talking about it, given that it had been something of a taboo subject for many years. Needless to say, the reaction of some of our critics confirmed that this is still a difficult subject to talk about in a calm and rational way, although I would argue that the discussion has become somewhat more open since our work was published.
Do you see Obama’s relationship with the Israel lobby as different than Bush’s was?
Maybe at the margin, but there has yet to be sharp break with past behavior. President Bush was as unconditionally supportive of Israel as any American president has ever been and yet he also did a number of things that were unintentionally quite harmful to Israel, and needless to say, to the United States as well. Not because he intended to, of course, but because the policies he pursued were not very smart.
President Obama has suggested on several occasions that he has a somewhat more nuanced view of this issue. For example, he has said that “Good friends ought to be able to disagree with one another, and that sometimes that’s the right thing to do,” which implies some recognition that US and Israeli interests aren’t identical. But I’ve yet to see him actually deliver on that sentiment. He has made some great speeches, but so far, the special relationship has not been affected one way or the other, and he has not been willing to use American leverage to try and advance the peace process in a significant way.
In your view, is there anything that American leadership can do to advance the peace process?
The United States has enormous potential leverage over most of the relevant parties. We have a lot of leverage on the Palestinians, who depend on us for economic aid and diplomatic backing because they’re almost powerless themselves. We’ve also played a constructive role in helping create a more reliable Palestinian security force. If we stopped doing that, that would be a real problem for the Palestinian National Authority.
So we have lots of leverage with them and we haven’t been shy about using it in the past. We’ve put pressure on the Palestinians for decades, both to recognize Israel’s right to exist before and then to make various concessions as part of the peace process.
We also have enormous potential leverage on Israel. Not only do we provide them with $3-4 billion in aid every year, but we’re also their principal diplomatic ally and protector. The problem is that no American president really has ever been willing to use leverage, mostly because they had been worried about the domestic political consequences of doing so. So you have this bizarre situation, where every president since Lyndon Johnson—including President Obama—says that Israel should stop building settlements. The Israeli government refuses and then all Obama says is, “Well, you know, that’s regrettable” and doesn’t do anything else.
If it wished, the United States could have actually ended this conflict a long time ago, but no American president had the political courage to do it. And that’s tragic. Dean Ellwood likes to talk about the need to “Act in Time,” and this is an obvious case where the United States has consistently failed to do so. The result is that the situation there has gotten steadily worse, and the two-state solution that Obama says he wants may no longer be possible.
Could an American president condition some portion of our support on Israel halting the construction of settlements and expect to survive the domestic backlash?
I think it would be difficult, but if an American president made it a priority and actively explained the situation to the American people—including Christian evangelicals and Jewish Americans who have been very supportive of Israel—many of them would support [the president]….Not all, but many of them would.
It would involve some use of the “bully pulpit” to explain why putting pressure on both sides was really necessary. You’d have to explain why doing so was in America’s interest but it was also in the Palestinians’ interest and in Israel’s interest. In particular, you need to point out that all of the alternatives to a two-state solution look substantially worse. If you do that, then I think an American president could succeed.
I would also argue that our current president is unusually well-equipped to do that. He’s very articulate, he’s very smart, and I think he understands the issues quite well. Unfortunately, he’s also got about nine million other things that he’s supposed to solve in the next three or four years, and they aren’t going to be easy either. So whether this issue will rank high enough on his list of priorities to get that kind of attention, I just don’t know. That’s why I’m not particularly optimistic about any real progress.
Can you describe what you think the world would look like if Iran did acquire a weapon? Are we overly concerned?
Yes, I think we are overly concerned. I don’t think an Iranian bomb would be a good thing, of course, and I would prefer Iran not acquire them. I can even make a case for why it’s not in Iran’s interest to go all the way across the threshold to a full nuclear capability. But if Iran did do that, it would not have particularly dramatic effects. They couldn’t use a weapon against anyone that we care about because we could retaliate. Or in the case of Israel, Israel could retaliate on its own.
And if you look at other countries that have acquired nuclear weapons, having a bomb didn’t suddenly give them extraordinary global influence. It didn’t let the Soviet Union blackmail anybody, and it didn’t let China blackmail anybody. It hasn’t made it possible for the United States [to] simply tell people what to do and get them to obey.
You occasionally hear this idea that if Iran got nuclear weapons, it would begin throwing its weight around and telling all these countries in the Middle East to do what it wanted….[B]ut no other nuclear power has been able to do that, so it’s fanciful to think Iran would be able to wield enormous influence just because it tested a nuclear device.
So again, an Iranian bomb would not be a good thing; I’d rather they didn’t [acquire one]. We ought to be looking for different ways to persuade them not to go all the way. But if they did, we would immediately find ways to live with it. In fact, we would start telling everyone that it didn’t matter very much.
I’d like to push back a bit in two ways. One, there are those who argue that if Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, it would immediately inspire an arms race among Iran’s neighbors in the region. What do you make of this argument? And two, do we need to worry about the possibility that Iran could use a nuclear capability against Israel in a way that would make Israel incapable of responding? Elliott Abrams used the phrase “a one-bomb country” to describe Israel when he spoke in the Forum several weeks ago.
A regional arms race might happen, but that isn’t inevitable. If you look at when other countries have acquired nuclear weapons, it hasn’t immediately led to regional arms races, either. North Korea is now testing nuclear weapons, but South Korea is not building a bomb and Japan is not [pursuing] a bomb. The Philippines aren’t trying things like that. So you don’t see this sort of “proliferation chain” happening automatically.
By the way, the possibility of a regional arms race is one reason why Iran might actually be better off not going all the way to an active nuclear capability. They are the most populous country in the Persian Gulf. They have the most economic potential there. Over time, they are likely to be the dominant power in that part of the world, which means if it remains a nuclear-free area, they’re going to have more influence than they would have if countries like Saudi Arabia acquired nuclear deterrents of their own.
You could make the argument that Iran ought to have the capacity to go nuclear if it ever had to but it should refrain from exercising that capability - the condition of nuclear latency.
As for the one-bomb argument, Israel is not so small that you drop one bomb on it [and] it would destroy everything, though it would certainly be a horrific event. But more importantly, Iran is not going to attack Israel because the Israelis would undoubtedly have ways to retaliate. The Iranians could never be certain that a dozen, two-dozen Israeli bombs wouldn’t find their way back to Tehran, completely destroying their society.
There’s never been any evidence whatsoever to suggest that Iran’s leaders are suicidal, and you’d be committing suicide if you attacked Israel with nuclear weapons. And for what? If you dropped a bomb on Jerusalem, you destroy the third holiest site in all of Islam. If Iran is led by a bunch of people who take Islam seriously, as we are led to believe, it’s hard to imagine that this is what they would do if they were to acquire a nuclear capability. So I think this is another case where we’ve suffered from a certain degree of threat-mongering.
One final topic: Afghanistan. Do you oppose the notion of sending more American troops to Afghanistan?
Yes.
What’s the best course of action for President Obama at this point?
I think President Obama should be looking for ways to end America’s military involvement in Afghanistan as rapidly as possible, but that can’t be done instantaneously. It doesn’t mean that our presence there would go to zero, but that basically, we should not be trying to fight a counter-insurgency war against the Taliban. We should be letting Afghanistan settle its own problems.
Our major objective in Central Asia should be to focus on anti-American terrorists, and especially Al-Qaeda. We should not be trying to determine the political fate of 32 million Muslims in Afghanistan, along with the 180 million Muslims located in Pakistan. We don’t have the knowledge or the capacity to socially engineer either of these societies and we are as likely to make things worse as to make things better, and at considerable costs to ourselves.
It sounds like you think that despite America having intervened in Afghanistan, we don’t have any ongoing moral obligation to stay.
No. There can be circumstances where there’s some moral responsibility involved, but there are clearly limits as well. In particular, the moral obligation is limited when you don’t really have the ability to improve the situation. I tend to analyze this situation in very straightforward cost-benefit terms. [The] costs there are substantial and rising. [The] benefits, even if we succeed, are relatively minimal. For Americans, the primary benefit would be helping to lower the risk of Al-Qaeda-based terrorism, and I don’t believe victory in Afghanistan makes much difference one way or the other. Victory will not eliminate Al-Qaeda and defeat isn’t going to make Al-Qaeda substantially more powerful.
Finally, we have to ask, “What’s the likelihood of success?” You’re not morally obligated if there’s nothing you could do that would actually make things better. In my view, waging a large-scale counter-insurgency campaign there is ultimately going to fail, and it is not going to make things better in Afghanistan.
There are things we can and should do, along with other members of the international community. We can continue to do economic development projects in the areas that are relatively stable. We can continue a modest effort to train Afghan security forces, but our presence should be as small as possible. I’d be aiming to try and have us out of Afghanistan about as rapidly as we’re getting out of Iraq, and make it clear that Afghanistan’s fate will be determined by the Afghans, not by us.

Citizen Conversation With…Archon Fung

Interview Conducted by Matt Bieber, MPP’11

Archon Fung is Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Citizenship. His research examines the impacts of civic participation, public deliberation, and transparency upon public and private governance. Fung received two SBs and a PhD from MIT. [Biography courtesy of HKS]

Please tell me about the work you’ve done in the area of deliberative democracy.

I do work in public deliberation and deliberative democracy and citizen participation. [O]ne premise of that work…is that an appealing idea of democratic government is a government in which the laws and policies flow from deliberation and argument and reason among citizens.

People think of deliberative democracy as quite different from aggregative democracy, in which the laws and policies are products of just…“counting up heads”….The problem with aggregative conceptions of democracy is that they can oftentimes result in unjust policies or even unwise policies when [people’s] preferences…are either not well-informed, or maybe they’re unjust…

Recent experiments have actually put some of these notions of deliberate democracy into practice. Can you talk about some of those experiments?

[W]hen I began this work…I think it’s fair to say that in the academic world…a lot of people are already working on deliberation, but they were thinking about it as kind of an ideal of how societies ought to be. And one criticism is that these ideals and theories never quite touch the ground. And so what does deliberative practice look like, what does it look like when people actually deliberate, or policy-making is actually connected to deliberation…?

And in recent years, there have been some experiments, but not just experiments….[I]t’s become more and more common for some kinds of policy-making, especially at the state and local level, but also at larger levels, to incorporate elements of citizen or deliberation participation.

[Y]ou have some really old examples. The town meeting that everybody knows about, and even older [examples like] classical Greece…that’s one kind of face-to-face democracy. But now, you see examples and experiments springing up all over the place and all over the world.

…[A] famous example comes from Porto Alegre, Brazil, and that’s the participatory budget….[I]n…probably…the late 1980s, they changed how they formulate…the infrastructure portion of the city budget…to a system in which it’s not a planning department or a budgeting department or even a city council that decides how to allocate that money. But it’s allocated over a year through a structure of direct citizen participation, in which people from every neighborhood kind of show up and they say, “Well, for our neighborhood, the first priority is water,” or it’s electrification, or it’s schools, or it’s housing, or whatever it is. And then what they say gets added up across the city and that becomes the eventual budget for that year.

The problem that that structure solves is a problem of patronage and corruption…
What has happened since is that much, much more of the money has actually gone toward infrastructure spending, and there’s some evidence to show that the spending that results is much more closely aligned with what people want.

It’s such an interesting example because one of the first questions you hear in these sorts of conversations is about the extent to which the citizenry can be involved in complicated political decisions. You hear things like, “Well, the legislators are there full-time. They’re involved in these issues. They’re steeped in intricate insider knowledge. The average person is busy. He’s got a job or a family or both, and he just doesn’t have time to do that sort of thing.” And it sounds like the city of Porto Alegre put a pretty complicated question in front of these neighborhood groups, and the groups handled it with some aplomb.

Yeah, and they did. The advantage in Porto Alegre is that the issues that people are talking about are pretty palpable issues that affect their day-to-day life. You know, you can see whether or not the street needs paving….[P]eople know whether or not a community center or housing would be a good thing in their neighborhood…

…I think there is something to the argument that you offered, that professional legislators are – it’s their job to understand many complicated issues and to sort them out, and to sort out priorities. And unlike a lot of people who favor greater citizen participation, largely or exclusively for intrinsic reasons – that is, because they think more participation would just be a good thing in and of itself – I guess, I do think that, too. But I think that it’s most constructive to devote energy to creating direct citizen participation or popular deliberation in areas of governance and on issues where the representative machinery or the administrative machinery is broken…

Are there certain issues that strike you as so complicated that they will always require the attention of professional legislators? Or do you envision a culture in which notions of participatory democracy spread and average citizens become ever more willing and able to deal with complex public questions?

I don’t think it’s the difficulty of the question…. Although more complex issues require forms of participation that are much more demanding on people. They have to learn a lot more about it, become quasi-expert themselves.

Can you talk a bit more about the kind of commitments that citizens have to make in order to participate meaningfully in these sorts of experiments?

…[T]he success of the project…depends on a certain amount of good faith – that the citizens go in, embracing the objective of addressing that problem, that public problem, as their purpose and motivation for going, rather than with some different agenda. That’s important.

I think it’s important that – depending on the issue – that citizens, participants, be willing to learn and to invest energy in both thinking about the public issue and sometimes in acting to solve it. [S]ome of these initiatives and participation require not just…showing up for a couple of hours of your day but actually doing something afterwards, some kind of community action or civic action.

And then, I think the success of deliberating initiatives oftentimes requires respect for other participants with very different points of view, and patience and a willingness to listen and the openness to change one’s mind…in the face of new information or good reasons that one hasn’t considered before…
…[C]onversely, I think the responsibility is not just on the part of citizens but on the part of whoever convenes some public deliberation. I think the responsibility there, which is oftentimes not delivered, is that whoever convenes or organizes deliberation actually take what people say seriously and respond to it and act on it in some way….

Very broadly, do you have a sense of whether citizen participation and deliberative democracy initiatives tend to foster a culture of deliberative conversation better than, say, professional politics?

…[T]he quality of discussions varies a lot, depending on how they’re organized and the norms that people have when they enter a conversation….
So, I think, one mistake…when people think about citizen participation or public deliberation is they take some example…and think, “Oh, it’s always like that.” So you can look at the recent…healthcare town meetings…and say, “Oh, well, there – we shouldn’t do public participation or public discussion or public deliberation because look what happens, some people fight.”

[T]he quality, at least from a deliberative perspective or, I guess, from any perspective, just varies a lot, depending on how things are organized and who participates and what the issue is….And I think that a big job for us, as a society, and for political officials and…public leaders acting in any capacity, is to get better at constructing high-quality public deliberations.

I think that we, as a society, are not very good at that. Usually, we think of public participation, at least from the government perspective, as a box that you have to tick off, and it usually takes the form of a public meeting or a public hearing, which is one of the worst ways to organize a public conversation. It’s usually not a conversation at all.

And yet, there are many, many organizations and people who know, who have the expertise, the craft, to construct much better public deliberations. I think that…people [in] policy schools, people training to be politicians or training to work in government or training to work in NGOs that act in some sort of public capacity for the civic good ought to have a set of skills at convening and organizing and hosting deliberation, and that ought to be much more widespread. I think the quality of our democracy would improve if that were the case.

Do you think it’d be a good idea for HKS to mandate that students take some form of class work on developing these sort of skills?

Yeah, I think that would be a very good thing….

At Hillary Clinton’s first campaign event during the ’08 race, there was a huge banner that read, “Let the conversation begin.” Obama has talked and written about how he thinks of politics less as a contest of wills and more as a conversation in which we engage and learn from one another. I might be putting words in his mouth here, but it sounds like he thinks of politics as something that doesn’t really have a fixed endpoint, something that evolves with the changing circumstances in which we find ourselves. That’s refreshing, at least to me.

Yeah, it’s an appealing image, and certainly one that I endorse and hold to. The difficulty is, I think, constructing the institutions that enable that conversation to occur, that change some part of politics from a contest of wills to a conversation in which people are interacting with each other and open-minded about exchanging reasons and arguments and information. I think it does require the construction of institutions that displace some of the political dynamics that are primarily about a contest of wills and the ability to gain the most votes or marshal the most money, and there’s some fungibility between the two.

It requires the creation of spaces and the construction of institutions that really are deliberative. And along with that, the existence of people, of public leaders in the public sphere, who have the impulse to convene public deliberation and the skills to do it. And I think that’s rare….It involves sharing power and it involves…a certain humility….[Y]ou do find that, but it’s rare. And I dare say, more rare in the United States than in many other countries and societies in the world….

During the last couple of years, politicians seem to be asking for more citizen input, particularly in the technological sphere….To my mind, there’s a lot of promise there. But there’s also something a little disheartening about this picture. Rather than convening publicly and doing the hard work of talking through the issues face-to-face, we’re being encouraged to do so in a relatively detached and isolated way. Do you think that technological mediation can help us develop some of the more robust political impulses we may lack? Or will it enhance our social isolation and disinvestment in the public square?

[F]or people interested in this question, I suggest you read Beth Noveck’s book, Wiki Government. She…is working in the White House, trying to advance some of these ideas of participation through new technologies…[and other means].

I think that the question of technology in participation, you might think of in two separate branches. One, this is a public or political application, but Wikipedia and similar kinds of platforms have drawn a lot of attention, and people have said, “[W]hat are those dynamics and how can we apply them to the public sector?”…

…I think that’s a very good question, and I think it’s an unanswered question, either in theory or in practice….I think it’s kind of a mistake to draw or try to draw too many lessons from the wiki model, because there’s, I think, a fundamental difference between a wiki-collaborative production dynamics on one hand, and political deliberation dynamics on the other.

…[A] central difference, is that politics and deliberation often begin with a set of interests…or a set of participants…that disagree with one another on moral issues, on political issues, on practical questions. Whereas, the collaborative-production model, and collaborative governance, begins with a large region of agreement; people are trying to pursue the same thing. They’re trying to get the truth right about black holes or cats….

With political deliberation, it’s a little bit different. People disagree, and in order to have a constructive deliberation, you need some way for people to engage fairly deeply, to learn about issues…and oftentimes, to undergo a little bit of transformation of their views…or their commitments, or even themselves…in some way.

And so, I’m agnostic about whether…one could create some technology, some sort of media platform that enabled high-quality deliberation from many, many people around subjects like healthcare, the war, or immigration, or tax policy, or what have you….We’re at the very beginning stages of that and nobody’s figured it out, number one. And number two…it’s probably a mistake to look for too many answers on the wiki side…because the beginning situations are quite different.

Citizen Conversation With… Dan Okrent

Interview Conducted by Matt Bieber, MPP’11

Daniel Okrent is the Visiting Murrow Lecturer of the Practice of Press and Public Policy. Before his appointment as the first Public Editor of the New York Times in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, he was editor-at-large at Time Inc.; editor of new media for all Time Inc. publications; and managing editor of Life magazine. Okrent was the first Hearst Foundation Fellow in New Media at the Columbia University School of Journalism, and was a Shorenstein Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2006. His six books include Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center, which was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in history, and Public Editor #1, an annotated collection of his Times columns. His forthcoming Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition will be published in 2010. [Biography courtesy of the Shorenstein Center]

Do news organizations have on obligation to ignore? To not to let the crazy fringes – the birthers, say – hijack meaningful public conversations? To keep debate at some level of reason and accuracy? To quote Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “You are entitled to your opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.” I might add that you’re entitled to your opinion, but you aren’t entitled to news coverage.

You used the word ‘ignore,’ and I think there are relative levels of ‘ignore.’ To ignore it entirely would be to deny a reality, which is that that there are a lot of people who believe that Obama was not born here. Whether they are right or wrong is, to a degree, irrelevant. If people are choosing not to vote for him or not to support his policies or not support what his government is trying to do because they have this notion, news organizations have to report that this is indeed so. To give credence to their position is a different matter. To say, “There are some who believe he was not born here” without adding, “Although all the evidence indicates otherwise,” or “They are wrong,” or, “This is a false assertion,” that’s a different matter. But I think ignoring it is more dangerous than giving it credibility.

You wrote a column in 2004 entitled, “It’s Good to be Objective. It’s Better to be Right.” In it, you lament the way that a fear of being labeled impartial leads many journalists to shy away from contradicting their subjects’ or sources’ claims, even when those claims are patently deceptive or inaccurate. I notice a parallel phenomenon in the way much of the media focuses on controversy - the emphasis is often on the fact of a controversy rather than an inquiry into which – if any – of the parties are in the right. How do you think about these issues, about the moments in which journalists come into an obligation to correct for inaccuracies?

We have a perpetual obligation to correct inaccuracies. If there is one thing that we can ask of journalists, it’s, “Get the facts right.” And whether that means, “How do you spell my last name?” or “Was Obama born in the United States?” the assertion of fact that is contrary to the impression left by partisans on one side is a necessary part of doing your job. But I get back to the point that liars are news. The misinformed are news. Hitler said that the Jews were an inferior race - does that mean we don’t cover Hitler? Pretty dangerous.

A Pew Research Center study published this week indicated that Americans now rate the accuracy of media coverage lower than at any point in nearly 25 years. Do you think the proliferation of partisan cable news shows, blogging, and other new forms of media have altered Americans’ overall view of media? And - perhaps given these changes - are Americans right to be more skeptical of media accuracy today?

We have greater access to the public square because of technological change, and greater access to the public square means more divergent voices. We are way past the era when all of America listened to Walter Cronkite at 6:30 every night. This is an America with thousands of different voices and thousands of different views, so of course that’s going to undermine the authority of what once was the established view. So I’m not surprised that the Pew study had that finding, even if it dismays me. I don’t think there’s been a material decline in the quality of news coming from the major news media. But there’s also the matter of what news media were they asking about?

The questions covered the major news networks, Fox, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and CNN….Respondents’ assessments of news outlets’ trustworthiness broke down pretty cleanly on partisan lines….From that same study: “…only about a quarter (26%) now say that news organizations are careful that their reporting is not politically biased, compared with 60% who say news organizations are politically biased. And the percentages saying that news organizations are independent of powerful people and organizations (20%) or are willing to admit their mistakes (21%) now also match all-time lows.” There’s a fairly stark partisan division in the way Americans see news outlets - roughly speaking, Fox News and the WSJ on one side, and the rest of the networks, the NYT, and NPR on the other.

What’s really interesting to me about The Wall Street Journal particularly is, I don’t think there’s been a material decline. I think their stories are getting shorter, but there hasn’t been a material change in the partisanship of their news coverage. But people have an impression of the Journal and trust or mistrust its news because they like or dislike its editorial page — which tells us a lot about how people are coming to their conclusions. Which is to say that the same facts may appear in the Journal and in the Times, but if you’re on the right, you’re going to trust them more in the Journal because you make this association with the editorial page. There’s no justification for that, but we have lined up in partisan camps. Rupert Murdoch did a brilliant thing with Fox - by setting up on the right, that suggests that everything to the left of that is… the left. There is no center. If you start where everything is in the presumed center, and then you create something on the right, then the center becomes the left.

Would you suggest that no news organizations on the left have tried to deliberately position themselves in opposition to -

Well, no. Clearly MSNBC has done so. MSNBC saw a market opportunity. It wasn’t, I don’t think, that the people at MSNBC had this passionate belief that Keith Olbermann was the voice of god. No, they saw the success of the ranting on the right, and decided to try some ranting on the left. Which has been good for CNN - to have somebody positioned to the left of CNN suggests that CNN might be toward the middle — even though Fox has been trying to maintain since they were created that CNN is the left. There are absolutes, and there are relatives, and readers and viewers have come to believe that everything in the news media has become ideologically relative: is it to the right or to the left?

If I remember correctly, CNN had the highest overall favorability rating among respondents. But on the same topic, it’s worrying to me - and I’m wondering if it’s also worrying to you - that we don’t seem to have a media outlet that’s trusted relatively equally across partisan lines.

I think this is a terrible, terrible thing. And I think that those media who are in a position to do so have not responded to this. This is an expression of my own personal issue, with my beloved New York Times. If you have an op-ed page and an editorial page that is so consistently mainstream Democratic left, then that affects the perception of the whole newspaper, just as The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page affects the perception of The Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times newsrooms - really, they’re not that different, but we have these perceptions because of something that is extrinsic to the news reporting, namely the editorial policy. And, in fact, in both places…the editorial pages, and the people who manage them, have nothing to do with the news coverage.

You wrote about that in some of your columns when you were public editor, about how there’s this perception that the editorial board dictates the tone of news coverage.

Right, there’s a real wall. Now it’s true, and some of the critics when I wrote about it pointed out that the same Arthur Sulzberger who runs the newspaper and appoints Andrew Rosenthal to be the editorial page editor also appoints Bill Keller to be in charge of the news operation. So to say that they are from different planets isn’t fair - they have the same genealogy. But, you know, cousins and siblings sometimes don’t think the same way, and there is nothing to suggest that because Andrew Rosenthal and his colleagues at the editorial page think a certain way that Bill Keller and his colleagues think a certain way. Now there is, as I wrote - quite controversially - there is a general worldview that journalists have, and particularly journalists in New York have, and that’s an inescapable reality, very hard to get around. But I think they make an effort, just as the reporters at the Journal make an effort, to do work that has nothing to do with the editorial views of ownership or of the people who edit the editorial page.

I’m not quite sure how to phrase this, but I want to resist what you said just now a little bit. I can imagine that journalists from, say, the far right and from across the country would be more than happy to move to New York to take a job at the Times. In other words, it’s not as if there’s a shortage in -

Oh but there is a shortage of conservatives working in the news media — or, I should say, an imbalance between liberals and conservatives. The last survey I saw was on the ‘04 election - I don’t know what it was in ‘08 - but in ‘04 something like 75 percent of working journalists at daily newspapers voted for the Democrat. I mean, you can’t deny this. It’s a reality.

In recent years, the Times made what I took to be a pretty blatant effort to change the public perception about the paper, and about the editorial board in particular -

How?

By hiring, say, Bill Kristol a couple of years ago.

But Bill Safire had been there for 30 years. And so he leaves, and management thinks we have to hire somebody to replace Bill Safire. Now I’m not equating Safire with Kristol exactly, but in fact there’s long been a conservative spot on that page.

Almost like the Supreme Court.

Yeah, that there’s a view that the columnists can’t all be to the left . There are some who make an arguable case that they’re in the middle, but generally it’s a left-tilting page. There’s always been the presence of at least one, and sometimes two - depending on how Brooks feels that morning - conservatives on that page, as it is now. Kristol’s gone and now it’s Douthat. Now, why they picked Kristol specifically is a different issue altogether, but there was an acknowledgement, just as The Boston Globe chose Jacoby to hold down its right flank, they don’t want to be exclusively left on that page.

Do you think if there were fewer unsigned editorials by the editorial board - basically if the page were just a series of individual columns signed by individual authors - might the page seem more like a general marketplace of ideas rather than a place in which the paper speaks as a monolithic institution?

Well, it depends who the authors are. When I was at the Times - my term there ended four years ago - everybody on the editorial board was a Democrat. I asked Gail Collins, who was then the editorial page editor, “Why don’t you have a greater ideological variety and philosophical variety so you can have richer debate on the page?” And she said, “If I had a couple of conservatives on this page, they’d be unhappy all the time. They’d either have to write something that wasn’t their view, because we decide our view consensually, or they’d never get to write. So, what’s the point?” Now, Gail knows a lot better than I the dynamics of coming to an editorial position, but it would seem to me that, if for no other reason than to challenge the conventional thinking that may - and I stress the may - dominate the conversation on the editorial board, it’d be nice to have somebody else there who might say, “Well, here’s another point of view.” Now if your editorial page was like an op-ed and offered a wide range of opinion, that would be, to me, a much more satisfactory way to go. But it’s ingrained in the American tradition that there is an editorial voice that is the voice of ownership or the owner’s designee, that endorses candidates, that takes positions on legislation, that uses the one word which as a journalist just makes my skin crawl, which is ’should’: Congress should do this, the State Department should do this, Israelis and Palestinians should do this. It sounds like my mother telling me how to behave. I can’t argue that mine is a sensible position, but I’m a believer in facts and reporting and analysis that leads the reader to arrive at his or her own conclusions, rather than having the conclusions presented to them as if tablets from Mount Sinai.

A lot of ’should-ing’ goes on in individual op-eds as well; why is it meaningfully different in the case of a collectively produced, unsigned editorials?

Because if you have a wide variety and the individuals are saying ’should do this,’ ’should do that,’ then you’re going to have - I mean, I’m not crazy about their doing it either - but at least its gets a dialogue going. Editorials are not a conversation; editorials are pronouncements. Maybe that was really important in the era of a less informed public, but I think we’re pretty informed today. This is not to say that a lot of the analysis they do on editorial pages isn’t really fine analysis, but you know, keep it to the analysis, don’t tell me what to think. The one place where I do think the editorial pages of America do perform a function is in endorsements for down-ballot positions. How am I to know whom to vote for for civil court judge in Brooklyn? So, if I’m aware that The New York Times thinks the way I do [and] The New York Post does not, I’ll vote for the guy the Times tells me to vote for.

So back to the question about the fact that we don’t have a news outlet that’s relatively equally trusted across partisan lines. If we can’t agree on what the news is and what the facts are, it’s difficult to have a productive conversation about what to do in response. So what can we do about that problem?

I would turn to the people who run the news organizations of America and ask them to be absolutely assiduous about the way they present the news and avoid giving a logical opening to the inevitable criticism from the other side. If you have an editorial page and an op-ed page that seem to be working in behalf, or against, the Obama Administration, it’s going to color the way people view your news coverage. So I suppose one answer is, get rid of editorial pages, or have much more varied op-ed pages.

It sounds like you’re not committed to preserving op-ed pages at all.

Well, certainly not in the form they are now. If I owned the Times I would really have a balanced range of views in there. I would not have - you know, I listen to people say, “I love the Times, but that guy, that Douthat, he’s a conservative, and David Brooks is a right-winger - well, if you only want to read people who agree with you, read The Nation. If it’s to survive and flourish, the Times has to be an honest broker, and the perception left by that op-ed page and the adjoining editorial page is that it’s not.

But we’re not starting from a blank slate and creating wholly new perceptions. How to contest the fact that there’s already this deep-seated, widespread distrust?

You can only contest it with the work that you do. And so that means maybe changing the lineup of op-ed writers and also being really careful in the news pages….We see what we see because of the way we stand. If we’re facing east in the morning we see the sun rise, and if we’re not facing east the sun isn’t rising. So when you put together a news staff, you have to ask where do your people stand? Are you getting people who are, together, looking in all directions? Are we getting a really representative newsroom? When I was at the paper I criticized it pretty strongly for not having ideological diversity or religious diversity on the staff. The same reason we would want racial diversity , to provide different perspectives on the world, would suggest that we want the same thing religiously and ideologically and philosophically. And I was very roundly criticized by some people on the left about that, people who thought it was an outrage that I was suggesting that the Times hire more conservatives. Why is that an outrage? Why is it an outrage to get a more varied view of the world? We want a varied view if we’re going to be good citizens, if we’re going to have a functioning democracy. We must have a varied view.

Thank you.

Is that persuasive?

I think you and I probably disagree about the extent to which we’re capable of arriving at best answers and then describing them in a public forum. To my mind, at least with regard to some public questions, there are best answers, and in other cases there are best choices among unpalatable choices.

I don’t disagree with that.

Perhaps I misinterpreted, but it did sound a bit like you don’t want newspapers playing that role - of not only providing analysis but also coming to some recommendation about what to do as a result of their analysis.

I think if the analysis is good, then the recommendation is implicit, and you don’t need to come out and say ’should’. I disagree only…from a rhetorical point of view. I think that the language one uses to make one’s recommendation needn’t be prescriptive to make the same point. I think you’re more effective if you’re not prescriptive….Did you read the clean water series they did last week?

No.

Almost nobody did. [T]hat’s one of the problems with these big acts that go on for four pages. But it presented an inarguable description about how awful our water systems are and what needs to be done, but there wasn’t a ’should’ in it. If you just give the facts - obviously we all select our facts, and we can select one set or the other - you’re much more likely to be persuasive with those people who don’t trust you because you disagree with them on other issues. You tell me how you think on same-sex marriage and I’ll tell you how you think on many other issues — unless you’re Theodore Olson. This comes across in the way that people perceive our news media. ‘Well, I know they take this position and therefore, they’re over there and I’m over here. I don’t need to listen to them, I don’t trust them, I don’t trust their facts.’ They [the news media] undermine their own authority by declaring themselves.

I’m wondering whether - with the rise of what you called ‘the ranting right’ and ‘the ranting left’ - whether Americans turn to news organizations as much for facts as they do for opinions.

I worry about that. I think that has been one of the consequences of the fractionalization, and its particularly visible online and at the cable news networks. You know, my friends watch MSNBC to agree with Olbermann and Maddow. That’s not about facts.

It’s much more about partisan solidarity, finding a community of like-minded people.

I suppose here’s an argument you can make that, well, if I’m on the left and I read The Nation, my arguments will get stronger. And people on the right can probably say the same thing about National Review or about The Weekly Standard. But beyond that, it is affirmation and community that people are after when they’re watching cable news.

There’s something troubling and dangerous about the prevalence of media organizations that are now in business basically to make you feel more comfortable with your own opinions.

Yes — it’s terrible! One of the things that most upset me during the presidential campaign was that moment during the primaries when Fox was going to host a debate, and there was an outcry among Democrats, and the debate was cancelled. These Democrats might as well have said, “Let’s not try to persuade the people who disagree with us. Let’s only talk to our own people.” Here they had a chance to be watched by people who don’t vote Democratic - well, don’t you live for that opportunity, if you’re a politician? To change minds?

Citizen Conversation with… Eric Rosenbach

Interview conducted by Jake Stefanik, MPP’10

Eric Rosenbach is the Executive Director for Research at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Prior to his work at the Belfer Center, Rosenbach was a professional staff member on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and served as the national security advisor for U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel. As a Fulbright Scholar, Rosenbach conducted post-graduate research on privatization programs in Eastern Europe. He completed a juris doctor at Georgetown University Law Center and a master’s in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is a proud graduate of Davidson College, where he played football.

For those who are not familiar with the Belfer Center, could you describe what the Center does and what sort of issues faculty and fellows will be focusing on this semester?
The Belfer Center has two missions. The first is to conduct policy relevant research in the areas that are most pressing to the world where there is some nexus of international affairs and science and technology. The second part of the mission is to develop the next generation of future leaders in the international arena. Some of the projects we are engaged in focus on trying to prevent nuclear terrorism. Some of the biggest names in that space are at the Belfer Center, like Graham Allison, our Director; Rolf Mowatt-Larssen who used to be the Director of Intelligence at the U.S. Department of Energy; William Toby who was the Deputy Administrator for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation at the National Nuclear Security Administration; and others. We also do a lot of work on energy and climate change. And this year in particular, we are doing a lot of work on Pakistan and Afghanistan in conjunction with the Carr Center.

You recently published a series of background memos on the Intelligence Community (IC) entitled “Confrontation or Collaboration? Congress and the Intelligence Community.” What key areas should members of the 111th Congress examine to assess the effectiveness of the intelligence reform legislation that was passed nearly five years ago?
A little bit of background on the publication is that before I came to the Kennedy School to be the Executive Director here, I worked on the Hill for the Senate Intelligence Committee. I noticed that there were a lot of things that were surprising to me in terms of Members’ level of knowledge, how partisan things were, and the overall lack of ability of Congress to work constructively with the IC. So the idea behind that book was to put together something short and succinct, and mimicked what students learn here in terms of writing memos that communicate a lot of information, so that new Members of Congress could learn and thus be more effective at providing oversight of the IC. I think Members of Congress need to work hard at being less partisan, and this applies to both Democrats and Republicans, to learn more about the IC and how it works in a very technical manner so that they understand the way that operations work, and to think about how they can bolster intelligence rather than using it as a political football.

To improve congressional oversight of the intelligence community, the 9/11 Commission recommended giving the full appropriation responsibility to the intelligence oversight committees in order to capitalize on the expertise within the authorization committees. Would you give better odds of Congress implementing this change or Davidson football winning the Pioneer League?
[Laughs]. That’s a great question. Davidson has not always been a football powerhouse. This year, unfortunately, they will probably not be a football powerhouse. But the odds of Congress actually giving appropriations authority to the intelligence oversight committees is about one percent…so I’ll have to go with Davidson.

We have talked about Congress and their relationship with the IC. From the IC’s perspective, what steps can they take to rebuild trust with Congress, given recent press coverage on their lack of candor with oversight committees?
I think that the IC and the CIA in particular need to work at improving the transparency in which they conduct especially sensitive operations. In a lot of areas of national security law it is not exactly clear when the CIA needs to brief Congress about sensitive operations. But if you have that choice and it’s a judgment call, it is in their own interest to do it for a couple of reasons. First of all you can get buy in from Congress. Second, if something goes wrong you can say that you had briefed Congress and they were completely informed of what was going on. Third, and probably most important, a lot of questions related to intelligence nowadays are controversial and not clear cut. If you have the opinion of people who represent the general public, it is less likely then down the road to become a big political partisan issue. And that is what you want in national security – to take the politics out of it.

As a former Kennedy School MPP, and also I understand, last year’s recipient of the “Advisor of the Year Award,” what advice would you give first year students who are beginning their graduate school experience here at HKS?
I think there are three principal pieces of advice that I give. The first is that it is very important that you study hard and take your classes seriously. But MPPs in particular sometimes worry a lot about their grades and only their courses and will take five, six, or seven classes, and miss a lot of what the Kennedy School is about – which is building relationships, exploring new areas intellectually, getting to know people, and working on research. So don’t get too wrapped up in what you may think school is all about, which is coursework. This may sound counterintuitive from someone who teaches a class, but be it as it may.
The second thing is that Kennedy School students sometimes don’t think about the fact that there are a lot of students who come through and sometimes expect help without first offering help. So a good lesson to learn here, and probably throughout life, is that if you want to work hard for someone at the school who is a towering figure in foreign policy, the best way to build a good relationship is by offering to really help them out.
The third thing is to think long term about what you want to do and what an MPP or an MPA equips you for and to be very realistic about how difficult it is to get some of these really sexy high-profile jobs, like working at the National Security Council or other places. So you have to think what is my first step, what’s my backup, what’s my alternative job, and how through a series of different paths can I get to where I ultimately want to go.

A Citizen Conversation with… Frederick Ouko Alucheli

This year’s student-organized Bridge Builders Conference brought social pioneers from 10 countries together to participate in workshops and panel discussions on social justice. The Citizen caught up with one of these Bridge Builders, Frederick Ouko Alucheli, who is the founder of two NGOs in Kenya that work with youth. Read more

The Citizen Conversation with… Rory Stewart

Rory Stewart is the Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Practice and the newest director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. The founder and chief executive of the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the regeneration of Kabul, Afghanistan, Stewart has served in the British Army and the British Diplomatic Service. He also covered 6,000 miles on foot across Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal and wrote about his experience in his critically acclaimed book, The Places in Between. Read more

Citizen Conversation with… Professor Daniel Hojman

Prof. Daniel Hojman is an economist and professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he has been on the faculty since 2005. Prof. Hojman’s research centers on theories of behavioral welfare economics. He also focuses on political economy issues such as media markets and polarization. The Citizen caught up with Prof. Hojman to discuss the financial crisis, his teaching, and his thoughts on Harvard. Read more

Written by Syon Bhanot, News Editor · Filed Under Citizen Conversation with..., News | Leave a Comment 

Citizen Conversation with… Christopher Bizzacco

by Victoria Criado, Editor-in-Chief on February 11, 2009 in Citizen Conversation with..., News

Christopher Bizzacco is a first-year MPP. As a junior at Brown University in 2002, Bizzacco took a leave of absence to serve as the campaign manager for then State Representative David Cicilline’s race for Mayor of Providence, Rhode Island.  In 2003, Bizzacco accepted the position of deputy chief staff with the Mayor’s office, and later served as chief of staff before enrolling at HKS Read more

Written by Victoria Criado, Editor-in-Chief · Filed Under Citizen Conversation with..., News | Leave a Comment 

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