Keep in mind that key players in the US are trying to keep all of this in mind, learning from mistakes. You cannot go back, you can only try to find a way forward. Noticed this document today. The article on page 77, /The Critical Role of Cultural Orientation/, is excellent. http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/cgsc/carl/download/csipubs/TurningVictoryIntoSuc... The Critical Role of Cultural Orientation Edward L. Peck I have been asked to speak on the subject of culture, and the title I have chosen is “The Shock of Foreign Cultures—Especially Yours.” Yours may seem as strange to them as theirs may seem to you. No surprise there, but think about cultures and subcultures for a second. In my terminology, they are the result of multiple inputs on groups of people over a period of time. You learn, in the home, the neighborhood, the military, the State Department, as an American, as an Ethiopian, whatever, how it is you’re supposed to behave. Let’s just take religion. Religious beliefs will impact on the way you and your subculture see things. This is an important point to bear in mind. If there are 4,321 recognized religions in this world—and you should be aware that most, I think it’s about 86.213 percent, verbalized statistics are made up on the spot—if there are 4,321 recognized religions, then 4,320 of them are wrong. Because they can’t all be right, can they? Well, mine is and yours isn’t. Religion is going to make a difference. How about history? Think about Iraq for just a moment. The British occupation ended in 1932, which means that there are living Iraqis who remember what an occupation is. And don’t forget that they were occupied for almost 400 years before that by the Turks. So they’ve been there; this has been done to them. When you talk about occupation to those folks, they know what you’re talking about. It’s part of their cultural history, which is why our president, a year ago, apologized for using the word “crusade” in talking about our activities in the Middle East. Out there they know what that is, even though it was 1,000 years ago. In the Crusades, as some of you may remember, the Christians came down from Europe and killed every Muslim and Jew they could lay their hands on, plus any Christians that weren’t Christian enough. Now, the people of the Middle East have not forgotten. If you go down to Birmingham or Savannah, they will talk to you, very heatedly, about something they call the War of Northern Aggression. That was 150 years ago, but they have not forgotten it. And it has an impact on how they see things, because history, even though it didn’t happen to you personally, is one of the things that affects your view of things. How about languages? The word jihad in Arabic means “struggle.” It does not mean holy war. You can call it holy war, but that’s not what the word means. How about the political system? Whether it’s a titular head, whether it’s a king, whether it’s a democracy. How about the economy and how you’re living? 67 How about such things as prejudice? Now, this is not a dirty word, you understand. It merely means making a decision before you have all the facts. Anyone guilty of that over the last 48 hours raise your hand. Prejudice is going to color how people see things. So will class structure, or the lack thereof. So will education, or the lack thereof. All of these things, and the family, and geography, affect how cultures interact—their attitudes, their values, their behavior. These things are terribly important when you go to really different cultures. Cultural behavior is learned. Nobody teaches you this stuff. How come we all do the “V” for Victory this way? How come you don’t do it palm in? Because you learned to do it palm out. Winston Churchill brought us this gesture in World War II, and the reason he did it palm out is that, in the United Kingdom doing it palm in is an obscene gesture. You don’t need to know that; everybody does it the same way, and only that way. It’s a cultural thing. My oldest son has lived in Tokyo for 20 years. He says, “It’s not my skin or eye color or face that makes me remember I’m a foreigner, Dad. It’s more that I will never, ever know when to bow, how deeply, or how many times.” There’s no book for that, you just know it. It’s learned and it’s unconscious. You grow up that way. How many of you have been to Algeria? At birth, every Algerian male is taken to the maternal village, where his smile muscles are cut. Have you ever seen a smiling Algerian? They don’t smile. Now, go down to Charleston, South Carolina, like I did a couple of months ago. I’m walking through the park there, a lovely, sunny day and all the kids from the College of Charleston are out playing Frisbee and soccer and all of that. I’m walking up the path, with two very striking young women coming toward me. They give me a big smile, and say a few nice words, and I think, “Wow, I’ve still got it.” Then I realized that in Charleston everybody smiles and speaks to everybody: black, white, young, old. On their license plates it says, “Smiling faces, Beautiful places.” Those same two girls shouldn’t try that approach on the streets of New York City. One, it’s not going to work because no one’s going to make eye contact. But, if anybody does, they’re going to make assumptions about what those two girls are up to. It’s a cultural thing. It’s pervasive. Everybody does it like that. In Denmark, you smile, in Algeria, you don’t, but next door in Tunisia you do. Cultural behavior is pervasive, it’s accepted, and it’s slow to change. A brief digression about change. In America, we believe that not only is change possible, but it is good. There are other cultures in this world where you don’t change things because God decreed them that way: “It is written.” If you’ve got a child with a clubfoot and you’re really religious, you don’t take the child to an 68 orthopedic surgeon because God gave him that foot. As you know, in Hinduism, if you live properly you come back in the next life as a Brahmin; if you don’t, you come back as a dung beetle. Change is not something everybody accepts as being great, as we do. It’s not a question of right or wrong, it’s a question of cultural perception. Culture reflects every aspect of group behavior, of what’s important to that culture—their beliefs, their attitudes, their behavioral norms, their outlook, and their acceptance of both change and differences. Now, the point of all this is not to say that one culture is good and another is bad, but when cultures come into contact with each other, there can be problems in communications and behavior. But if one culture is attempting to impose itself on another, the problems are magnified greatly. Let’s just talk briefly about cultural generalizations. Everybody eats. That is a universal function. Some people eat out of a group bowl. If you’ve never done that, it’s quite an experience. Somebody in the dim light of a tent out in the desert hands you part of a sheep that you’re quite certain you’ve never eaten before, and may never even have seen before. Some people use a knife, fork, and spoon. Some use chopsticks or fingers. There is kosher for Jews, and halal, the same thing, but for Muslims. No meat, or no meat on Friday. Very hot spices in Thailand, or rotted fish in Norway. You get family style, adults first, fast food. Everyone should accept that people may eat differently, but they don’t because the right way is their way. You can only see 10 percent of a culture, the part that’s visible. The problems, the potential problems, are in the 90 percent that you cannot see. You can see how people dress—a bikini, an abayah, a skullcap, whatever. You can see their gestures (which can be highly misleading), facial expressions, public behavior, leisure activities, and so much more. This is all visible, but you may not really understand what you see. I was living in Baghdad when the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power. Shortly after that, we got this telegraphic CIA assessment that said specialists had been watching the Ayatollah on TV, and it was clear that he was dying and would not be around long enough to worry about. They knew this because they saw no changes in his facial expression and no noticeable body movement: he just sat there. But that’s the way Ayatollahs behave, in a very calm and motionless manner, and if you don’t know that you can leap to the conclusion that he’s dying. Well, he may well have been, but that isn’t how you tell. The folks making the report did not understand the cultural implications of being an Ayatollah. 69 How about Islamic headdress? Some women will wear the really severe covering, which looks like what nuns traditionally wear, and for the same reason: to cover all the hair. Islamic headdress can also be merely a scarf, a kerchief that looks very much like the babushka women wear in Russia, or Spain, or Argentina. It reflects how the wearer interprets what the Koran says. You cannot see, for example, concepts of leadership. How a leader is expected to behave depends on the culture. Is he supposed to be exactly like you, or does he get all kinds of deference and respect because he is the leader? You can’t have a real understanding of how a leader is expected to behave in a foreign culture. It can be significantly different from what we expect. How about the implications of history? I don’t need to go into any details here, but if you’re fooling with the Middle East, where almost every country has been colonized, several of them more than once, they have a different perspective. How about the importance of family? In the US, T-shirts say, “Be kind to your children. They will select your retirement home.” In some other societies, you care for your parents until they die in your arms. We don’t do it that way here, but it is not a question of good or bad, right or wrong, it’s just different. In the Middle East, for example, family is everything because of their cultural orientation. They do things for their extended family that Americans don’t even consider to be useful, let alone important. How about superior-subordinate relations? People understand, in their cultures, how that’s supposed to be done, whether collegially or by a direct order. That’s also personality driven, of course. But you cannot see how it is they’re supposed to behave. I went once to hear the president of Algeria make a speech on a hillside, and saw that policemen kept the crowd back by using three-foot sticks with three-foot knotted leather thongs. They kept the pressure off the people standing in the front rows by smacking people in the rows farther back right across the face. You would not want to try that in societies that are not accustomed to that sort of thing. How do you define justice? It depends. Should it be a slap on the wrist or 30 lashes? Do you cut off the head or use an electric chair? And what constitutes a really serious crime? You have no way of knowing, because you cannot see that part of a culture. How about the work ethic? We always laugh because, in some parts of the world, people don’t seem to be working as hard as Americans do. We’ll come to some of that in just a moment. But you can’t see it. What’s the definition of achievement? In America, it’s the big house on the hill, the big car, the swimming pool. Or is it inner peace and nirvana, or the love of your family? What constitutes being successful? Whatever it is, you cannot always see it. 70 Let’s go back up to the approach to problem solving. How many of you have been in Thailand, where they all seek consensus? I have gone to Malaysia and to Thailand several times over the years, to teach courses for the Ministries of Foreign Affairs on Effective Multilateral Negotiations using detailed role-play scenarios. In Kuala Lumpur it worked well, in part because the population is diverse; roughly 1/3 ethnic Chinese, 1/3 Indian, and 1/3 Malay. They are therefore good at role-playing and behave the way their instructions tell them to, so there is no way they can resolve the problems laid out in the game. (That’s done on purpose, to make a point.) In Bangkok, where quiet, gentle people are all pretty much of the same ethnicity, they quietly work on the problems and resolve them without contentious debate or raised voices. IBM set up a special school in Armonk, New York, brought in IBMers from all their various countries to train an international team that could go anywhere to work problems out. They had them engage in all sorts of team-building activities, and they discovered that it didn’t work well because when they’d go to work on problems, culture kicked in: Brazilians, Americans, Swedes, and Germans would argue their positions, but Japanese and Thais would sit quietly, because in their cultures you don’t behave that way. Religious issues can be key determinants for behavior. Look at the role they’re playing in American domestic—and foreign—politics right now. A number of the topics we perceive quite differently are basically religious questions. How about appropriate behavior? There’s a tough one. Queen Victoria’s ambassador to Siam, going to the palace to present his credentials, was accompanied by the chief of protocol. They came around a corner of the road, and there, across the field, bathing in a stream, were a bunch of women with no clothing on. His excellency turned to the chief of protocol to ask if it wasn’t considered rude for women to bathe naked in public. The reply was that it was considered rude to look at women who have taken off their clothes to bathe naked in public. How about the handling of emotions? Is it okay to cry? Is it okay to scream? Is it okay to yell and shriek? You can’t really tell what the person’s feelings are unless you understand what the rules are in that culture for handling and displaying emotions. How about competition versus cooperation? When I went to Officer Candidate School, just after World War II, there were a lot of veterans in the class. They told us rookies there were two ways to get through this school, eliminate or cooperate, and that we were going to cooperate. Some people don’t see it like that and conclude that if they can get rid of another, they have a better chance. 71 How about the meaning of friendship? What does it really mean? How about such critical issues as rules for gender interaction? You don’t know if it’s really a foreign culture. I was part of the training team for a federalized National Guard brigade getting ready to go to Iraq. A number of officers who had been in Iraq were there to help prepare the new guys, and they repeatedly stressed the importance of never, never touching the women—unless you’re a woman. Otherwise you leave indelible scars because you break key cultural taboos without even thinking about it. If you’ve been there, you know that Brazilians prefer to stand closer to each other than Americans do. So you’ll see people at parties slowly moving around the room, as the Brazilian tries to get closer and the American tries to get farther away. It’s like a slow dance. How about notions of modesty? Can you picture high school boys in Saudi Arabia saying, “Man, did you see the earlobe on that girl?” An earlobe, compared to what happens here. Which is more demeaning to a woman, to require her to cover herself completely or to put her photograph in a magazine in a position that’s usually reserved for gynecologists? It’s a question of culture. How about status? You’ve got to understand that overseas, in other parts of the world, and even in some parts of our own country, these things make a real difference, and you can’t see it. At the National Foreign Affairs Training Center two months ago, a young student came up to say that she had just been assigned to Baghdad. She asked what she would have to do to really understand the importance and relative standing of families and tribes there. I told her that was easy: all you have to do is be born and raised there. Otherwise, you’re never going to know where to place a Brahimi or an Aduri. Age can give a person a great deal of status in a society, so it may not be a good idea to push old folks around. These are issues about which you know nothing, really. Situations may arise in which you can make major, unfortunate mistakes without knowing any better. Culture controls perception. Your culture, without you necessarily even being aware of it, is what determines how you perceive things. And perception controls everything else. You know this. Everything you do in your life is based upon your perception of what is the right thing to do. It doesn’t mean you’re going to be right; you may be wrong. You can also be afraid, and you can be coerced. But perception determines what you will do. Perception is how you choose a hairstyle, a car color, a necktie, a spouse. Somebody else comes along and asks why in the world you picked that necktie—or spouse. Their perception may be different from yours. But perception is reality; all you have to work with is what you perceive. That is largely a function of the culture in which you were born, in which you were raised, or in which you are working. 72 You know, verbal exchanges can cause problems, because there are different meanings in languages. You have misconceptions and/or false cognates. Those of you who speak Spanish know that the word embarasada means pregnant, not embarrassed. And you get unfortunate connections, when you turn to your Indian colleague and say, “Why that company is a real cash cow.” There are subjects that you just do not raise. Here is the result of a very massive series of studies that were done by people who know far more about this business than I do. And they came up with five categories of issues to think about culturally. Figure 1 The first one is Structure and Power in the culture, as seen in Figure 1. On the left, you have low dependence needs, inequality is minimized, and you don’t need/want much structure. You can see where the United States fits. Hierarchy is useful in a military organization, for example. Superiors are accessible. People have equal rights, and you get change by evolution. Now, at the other end of the scale there are high dependence needs where inequality is accepted, and hierarchy is needed/wanted. One of the things the culture wants is somebody in charge who tells people what to do. Superiors are inaccessible. Power equals privilege. Change is done through revolution. Here is a scale from low at left, high on the right. Look where the United States is in terms of these issues. Here’s Iraq and there’s Malaysia all the way to the right. There’s a big difference in the way Americans as a cultural group perceive these 73 issues as compared to Iraqis—or Malaysians. They are far more comfortable with strict leadership than we are. They accept—this is all relative you understand—that power gives privilege. We accept it much less willingly. This is where cultural issues can become serious, for example, when it involves military actions and occupation. Figure 2 Let’s take a look at the very important second set of issues seen in Figure 2: Collectivism versus Individualism. On the left is collectivism, where people are “we” conscious. They value relationships over task completion. They’re concerned about group obligations, so that you lose face and you’re ashamed if you have failed to do something. On the right is Individualism, the “I” conscious. Guess where we fit? In our country, it’s “I,” and over there, in Thailand for example, it’s “we.” In the United States, private opinions are acceptable. And we have obligations to the self, to the individual. You lose self-respect, which is different from shame, if you fail. On the scale, there’s Iraq and there’s America, with major differences in how the two cultures perceive collectivism and individualism. It makes a difference in the way people behave and a big difference in the way they interact. The third category, Task and Achievement (Figure 3), will interest you, I think. Quality of life and service are important to the people who are on the left side. They strive for consensus and work in order to live. Small and slow is good, and there is sympathy for the unfortunate. Men’s and women’s roles overlap. On the right side, task orientation and ambition to excel is the goal, and that’s much more important than it is on the other side. You live in order to work. Big and fast 74 is good. Admiration for the achiever, men’s and women’s roles are separate. So here is the scale. You won’t be surprised to see Japan out there at the right end. And Iraq and the United States are not that far apart in this particular category of orientation. Figure 3 Uncertainty Avoidance is the fourth category (see FIgure 4). This is a major cultural issue, folks. On the left, we see that hard work by itself is not necessarily a virtue in a situation in which people are fairly relaxed in terms of uncertainty avoidance. Emotions, you don’t show much. You get a lot more passive expressions. Competition is good. They will accept dissent, and they are willing to take risks. Few rules are needed. On the right side, you’ve got an inner urge to work. You’re prepared to show emotions. Conflict is considered threatening. You have a need for consensus. You try to avoid failure; you have a need for rules and laws. Once again, the United States and Iraq are not that far apart. Singapore is very low and Greece is at the high end. It’s interesting, if you’ve been to those two countries, to keep this in mind when you deal with their people. The fifth facet is Confucian Dynamism and is seen in Figure 5. They never completed this particular part of the study in the Arab world, but it’s nonetheless interesting. On the left you have a belief in absolute truth, a pragmatic approach, and planning for the near term. You accept change and you expect results. You spend for today. On the other side, you’ve got many truths, traditionalism is more important than pragmatism, you plan long-term, stability is wanted, you persevere, and save for the future. And there is the scale. 75 Figure 4 Figure 5 The thing you might want to bear in mind, at this stage, is to understand that in every culture or subculture, its members believe strongly that theirs is the best one, the right one. When they have contact with other cultures, they still believe that theirs is the right one, the best one. And if they’ve had extensive contacts, they 76 know that theirs is the best one and the right one. And from time to time, they may undertake efforts to convince others, one way or another, that theirs is the right one. It’s called ethnocentrism and merely means that people tend to see things that way because they’re part of that culture. Now, cultural awareness. You know, cultures may create differences. Some of these differences are really very critical. Some of them are discernible. You can see them, you’re aware of them. Others you are unaware of, even though they may be significantly more important and meaningful. Some are predictable. Awareness helps to reduce or avoid problems and to increase benefits. Now, let’s talk a little about Iraq in general terms. The individual and the family are far more important there because they haven’t had a nation for very long (see Figure 6). And it consists of significantly diverse ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups, which have not developed yet the feeling of nationhood that we have here. But think back to the time when a man named Robert E. Lee said, “I am forced to give my sword to Virginia.” That’s the way it was here only 150 years ago. You fought for the state. And that’s what the War of Northern Aggression was all about, in a sense. The idea of fighting for a state is probably a little less prominent today than it was in the days of the Civil War. Figure 6 In this same category, it is useful to remember and consider the fact that the Koran, unlike the Bible, covers every aspect of life: social, cultural, political, and economic. Second, no one has ever welcomed an occupation. What’s the difference 77 between a liberator and an occupier? It kind of depends on which side you’re on. We are liberators, but some people in Iraq see us as occupiers. The difference is perception, strictly, only, always. Figure 7 Perception is everything. If you lose sight of that, so much of what we want to do in the world, as individuals and as a nation, is going to become infinitely more difficult to accomplish. There is no requirement that you change a policy, or abandon a policy, or modify a policy. But the point is this: If you choose to pretend that other people may not have differing perceptions, or worse, if you choose to ignore that they clearly do, you are merely making it that much harder to get to wherever you’re trying to go, that much harder to achieve your objective. Awareness of differing perceptions is something that isn’t always as necessary within the culture as it is cross-culturally, especially when you’re a liberator or occupier. We know without equivocation that our way is the best way, but other people may not agree. That does not make them right, but it helps explain what’s going on. In the mid 80s, I was the deputy director of the Reagan White House Cabinet Task Force on Terrorism. This was in the days of the Achille Lauro, TWA 847, the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Red Army Brigades, the Sendero Luminoso, all kinds of terrorism all around the world. We met with Vice President George H. W. Bush, the task force chairman, to get our marching orders. He said we had carte blanche to go into every aspect of terrorism—except one: “Don’t worry about causes.” You could feel the atmosphere 78 in that room change. And that is exactly where we are today. Today we are told, endlessly, that they hate us because we have freedoms. I personally find that an insult to my intelligence. Why in the world would anybody hate us because we have freedoms? There are a lot of people out there who envy our successes, and some of them may resent our excesses. But nobody is going to kill and die for that. There are some people, however, who are prepared to consider killing or dying because, from their perception, we are responsible for their people dying and being killed, indirectly in Palestine for the last 50 years, and directly in Iraq for the last 14. And they don’t like it. It doesn’t make them right, but that’s the problem. If you want to deal with terrorism you must, however painful, consider what some of the causes might be to determine whether or not something could or should be done. And our nation still refuses to do it. In November 1990, after the United Nations passed the Iraq embargo resolution, President Bush said, “The embargo will remain in place until the people of Iraq get rid of Saddam Hussein.” That’s what it was for, to make life so intolerable for the Iraqi people that they would rise up against Saddam. Two problems with that. One is that they couldn’t: marches on the palace in Baghdad are extremely short, and you’re only around for one. Second, many people didn’t want to because they considered Saddam to be an OK guy. Think about this: No leader in the world has ever been as loved, admired, revered, and respected as he liked to think he was; no leader in the world has ever been as hated, despised, and detested as his enemies liked to think he was. Proof, the day before September 11th, President Bush had an approval rating of 54 percent. Twenty-four hours later it was at 96 percent. What had happened? When the nation is under attack, you rally behind the leader, even if you don’t like him. And that didn’t happen in Iraq? You bet your life it did. Leslie Stahl went to Iraq with her 60 Minutes crew in May 1996, four months before the Oil for Food program went into effect, when the embargo was still total. One of the things the Iraqis could not import was chlorine, the vital ingredient in sewage treatment and water purification. In addition, we had destroyed the Baghdad power grid in 1991, rendering the sewage treatment plants and water purification plants inoperative, so raw sewage flowed directly into the Tigris and came right out again into the water distribution system. And the people of Baghdad, in the millions, were drinking seriously contaminated water. A bad case of simple diarrhea can kill a child, but the children in Baghdad, suffering from massive gastro enteric infestations of a violent, virulent kind, were dying in droves. Stahl talks to British, UN, French, and American doctors, then 79 she comes back to New York and interviews American Ambassador to the United Nations, Madeline Albright. Stahl then says, “We have heard that a half a million children have died. That’s more children than died in Hiroshima. Is the price worth it?” Albright’s answer, “I think this is a very hard choice. But the price, we think the price is worth it.” That’s the coldest thing you ever heard in your life. The death of a half-million children is worth it. It is not a slip of the tongue, because she then goes on and explains why it’s worth it. This interview was shown in this country once. But it has been shown overseas hundreds of times, especially in the Middle East. And if you’ve never seen it, then it’s more difficult to understand why some people are unhappy with our policies. If you don’t think that got some people pretty upset with us, then you don’t understand human nature. I went to El Salvador with two members of the Terrorism Task Force Working Group, where four Marine guards had been killed a couple of months before. We were standing across the street from the embassy, and the embassy’s security officer said, “Ambassador Peck, gentlemen, the embassy you see there is invulnerable to an attack by anything less than a field army.” I turned to the Navy SEAL, a captain, and I said, “Lou, your job is to get the American Ambassador, and we’ve just found out the embassy is invulnerable. What’re you going to do now, big guy?” He said, “Gosh, I guess we’ll have to wait until he comes out.” And the Marine colonel said, “In the meantime, which way is the American school?” You want to play games with terrorists, homegrown or otherwise? There’s no way in the world you can totally defend yourself against them. What you need to consider is what we might be doing to generate this kind of problem. If there are such things, the question is whether you can or want to do something to fix it. If we choose to ignore the evidence that’s laid out before us, or should be laid out before us, then we will be left facing the consequences. Let me ask two questions, quickly. Peace and security, my definition, means that the parties to the dispute, whatever it is, are sufficiently satisfied with the resolution of that dispute and that any small groups which are not satisfied (and you can’t please all of the people all of the time) are either marginalized or, at a minimum, not supported. Now, on the basis of that definition, raise your hand if you agree with me that the world in general, and the Middle East in particular, will be a better place when Israel and her neighbors are living in peace and security. OK, raise your hand again if you are of the opinion that the current policies of the Israeli government will lead that nation to peace and security among her neighbors. And there’s the problem: you can’t talk about this, despite the fact that everyone recognizes that you cannot get there from here. It’s not going to work. 80 It distresses me when I hear people saying, “What we’re doing in Iraq is going to lead to a spread of democracy all over the region.” Yeah, unless you stop to think that there are two democracies actively at work in the Middle East, busily violating every precept of law and rule that they insist is important: the United States in Iraq and the Israelis in Palestine, with our extensive help. Our actions there are not going to leave people fully satisfied with the way we behave. They don’t hate us; they hate our policies. In the same way, we bombed and killed Iraqis, not because we hated them but because we didn’t like Saddam’s policies. But America is not the problem: it’s not who we are that they reject, but what we do. And over there, we are doing a lot. That does not mean that we are wrong or evil. From our cultural perspective, from our government’s perspective, we’re doing the right thing. But that perception is not the same on the other side. This causes problems. As the global hyperpower, we can do whatever we want, wherever we want to do it, and whenever. And we cannot be stopped, even if they work together. But there are small groups, and it doesn’t take many, who will look around for ways to make us sorry we did it. They have, and they can, and they are, and they will. And I hope I’m wrong. So, I’ll take questions. 81 Peck Question and Answer Session Question: Mr. Ambassador, I would gather that one of the canards, one of the most recent canards, is that everything has changed since 9/11. The world isn’t the same as it was. I would assume you would argue that, to the contrary, our perceptions of the world have changed. The shock of 9/11 has just changed our perceptions of the world. Is that accurate? Answer: I think that certainly is part of it. You know, the horror of 9/11, the real horror of it, was that we could see it. December the 7th we saw afterward. So 9/11 went down, and the nation was justifiably horrified and shocked and stunned. And you look around for some way to strike back at the people you’re going to go after. And the world changed largely because we decided it was going to. I’m now stepping into the realm of politics, for which I apologize in advance. If you have ever read Program for a New American Century, the document written in the 90s by the people who now run the government, you know it says that with the demise of the Soviet Union, it’s now time for us to run the world. Anyway, they all signed this document and are in positions of responsibility now. (By the way, it’s on the web at NewAmericanCentury.org if you’re interested in that kind of thing.) And it says in there that you start the process in Iraq, which becomes the base from which we accomplish three objectives: control the flow of oil, guarantee Israel’s security, and start a program of regime change throughout the region. Now that last part is guaranteed to generate respect and admiration by our friends in the Middle East. Regime change, right. If we had contented ourselves with Afghanistan, the world would not have changed so dramatically. But you just invaded Iraq for no reasonable reason that anybody’s been able to produce, and you’re in there doing things to the Iraqis that they don’t appreciate. I was on CNN a couple of months ago, and one of the moderators asked what I would do in Iraq. I said I would get out, and he said, “You can’t get out. There would be chaos.” I waited a moment and asked, “What do you have now? Chaos with us killing them and them killing us. Every day you stay it’s going to get worse, because they’re not going to accept it.” How do I prove this to you? Northern Ireland. And they’re all Christians up there. How long has that been going on? 200 years? Hey, you don’t do it like this. It doesn’t work, history shows you, without equivocation. Unless you kill them all. Colonel [David] Hackworth (USA, Retired), writes good books, novels. He and I were on television once, and he said, only partially jesting, “The solution for Iraq is simple. Kill them all, make it a parking lot. Problem solved.” I said, “Okay, 83 two conditions. One, you better make damn sure you’ve killed them all. Second, you better make absolutely certain you’ve killed everybody who is unhappy that you killed them all. Then your problem is solved, not before.” You just cannot do it like that. Question: Sir, in the past, and it seems in the present as well, Americans have conceived of nation building frequently in ethnocentric terms. I wondered if you could comment. Do you think it’s possible for Americans to do nation building without ethnocentrism, and what might a nation building program. . .if it’s possible to do. . .what might it look like? Answer: Those are powerful, heavy questions. Let me see. I was down in Sarasota, Florida, talking to 600 people in the Institute of Lifelong Learning. Somebody asked, “In your opinion, how long will it be before Afghanistan has a fully functioning democratic government?” And I had one of those podium epiphanies. I said, “How many of you in this audience, you’re all well-to-do, you’re all retired, you’re all educated people, how many of you are fully comfortable using a cell phone?” Fifteen hands went up, several of them slowly. I said, “Think about this. A cell phone is a piece of hardware which you can hold in your hand, and it comes with a beautifully detailed instruction book that tells you precisely how to make it work. But you’re not comfortable using it because you’re not used to it. People of my generation look at a cell phone with the same level of comprehension a squid looks at a nuclear submarine. When I use my cell phone, when I remember to take it with me—and remember to turn it on, I do it with my index finger, and my kids laugh because you’re supposed to do it with your thumb. Now, democracy is not a piece of hardware. There is no instruction book. It’s psychological, it’s historical, it’s philosophical, it’s experiential. How long will it be before the Afghanis have a functioning democracy? It could be days. They don’t even know what you’re talking about. And further, here is a key point to consider: Who says that that’s the best way to do things? Who says it’s the only way to do things? Think about this. Democracy has become our nation’s secular religion. We are prepared, if necessary, for conversion by the sword. You will be democratic. Ladies, gentlemen, by definition, you cannot impose democracy. An imposed democracy is a dictatorship. You can’t force people into a democracy. To think so is ethnocentrism carried to a high degree, in the sense that we know that democracy is the best way. It works for us, but that’s our way. It doesn’t mean that they have to go for this. And remember that, in Islam, the church is the state. The Koran covers all of this. So, when we come running in, pushing for separation of church and state, they say, “Whoa, whoa, God says this is the way it’s supposed to be, and you’re bringing us something that human beings have created. We’ll take God’s 84 way first.” So I think that this is massively ethnocentric. We want the Palestinians, for example, to have new elections because we do not accept the guy they elected. On 24 June 2002, the President of the United States said the Palestinians have to have new elections and choose anybody they want, except Arafat. What kind of democracy is that? Can Saddam run in Iraq? Absolutely not. We are dealing with issues that are so far beyond our canon, our experience, that it’s difficult to understand. Americans, unless you’re a Native American, you all came from somewhere else, and you left behind your village hatreds and memories. Americans don’t understand why people butcher each other for possession of some stony hillside with a couple of trees on it—because that was my great-great-great grandfather’s until his great-great-great grandfather took it away, and now we’re going to get it back. How can you tell the difference between a Bosnian and a Croatian or a Serb? They know, they can tell, because they live there. Question: Mr. Ambassador, I’ve enjoyed your talk very much, and there’s a great deal you’ve said that I agree with, but there are a couple of points that are troubling me. One is that you’ve really implied rather strongly that the major causes of terrorism directed against the United States are our actions in the world. I have a little bit of a hard time fully accepting that, because having read a little bit, and I’m much less of an expert than you are I’m sure, but having read a little bit in the writings of Zawahiri and some of the things that Khomeini has written, these people were identifying us as the Great Satan and the seducer of the Muslims, and the epitome of all that is evil, and something that needs to be targeted and attacked. And, in Sayad Kudib’s case, long before we had anything like the sort of dramatic impact and footprint in the Middle East that we’ve had now. In Khomeini’s case, not primarily in response to the sorts of things you had been describing, but primarily, I think, in response to what we had been doing in Iran. I’m not going to hold that up as something that was extremely praiseworthy, but I am going to say that the situation seems to me a little bit more complicated than that we support Israel, and Israel does bad things to the Palestinians. We invade Iraq, therefore these guys don’t like us and otherwise it would be okay. Because there does seem to be a rather well developed strand of ideological thought that has played a powerful role in generating these terrorist movements against us and in supporting them as they continue. It’s not clear to me that that would go away if we simply stopped doing the things that they complain about. And a couple of things in there that bother me. First of all, the French, who have been steadfastly opposing us at every turn and attempting to mitigate our influence in the Middle East and generally supporting the Palestinians and not supporting the Israelis, nevertheless had two reporters taken hostage and threatened with beheading because they imposed a ban 85 on headscarves in France. And this leads me to the question, it may be that things that we do are going to bother these people, but can we really afford to allow their prejudices and desires to edit what we do in the world to such an extent, because after all, they are representative of a tiny fringe as well? That’s the main question I want to pose to you, but I want to tack one other thing on. As a member of the project of the New American Century group that put that report together, I think you’ve simplified it a little bit; and I would also like to clarify that virtually none of the people in senior positions in the administration today played any significant role in the formation of that document. Some of them signed it, but virtually none of them played any important role, and virtually none of them, in fact, came to any of the meetings. So it is absolutely a myth. By the way, neither did they implement about 99 percent of the things that were proposed in that report. It is absolutely a myth that that report has been the blueprint that the neocon conspiracy took into Washington and that has guided all of our actions ever since. Answer: You may be entirely correct. Three things, Dr. Kagan. Returning the compliment, I was very impressed with your presentations. And I was grossly oversimplifying. We only have a little bit of time here. If I had a whole college course, I could do a better job. And I’m trying to lay out some points. Let me start with something else. It is perfectly clear to me that there are in all kinds of groups—what’s the medical phrase?—“nut cases” who are prepared to do nasty things to someone because of something that his group has done. This is in the field of religion, surely. The Iranians have some feeling that we may have had a hand in getting rid of the people and putting the shah back on the throne. And, yes, it turns out that we did. And the Iranians remember this. The Iranians remember the CIA’s involvement in the overthrow of Mossadegh and putting the shah in power and why we did that. It was because of oil . . . they say. So they remember this. I was on NBC with Tom Brokaw one night, and he said to me, “Why would the Iraqis launch this unprovoked scud-missile attack on Israel?” And I said, “Well, whatever else it may be, it is not unprovoked.” He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well, 10 years ago, Israel bombed the reactor in Baghdad. Now, we may have forgotten about that, but the Iraqis haven’t. Because it happened to them. I’m not justifying it. You can call it retaliation, but it’s not unprovoked because they were already bombed. And Americans have forgotten about this. So, if you look at the Middle East, where we have been propping up harsh regimes, where we have been participating in the suppression of an occupied people in Palestine, providing the arms and the money, they don’t like that. And their reaction is, why are those people doing that to our people? Nobody’s attacking Ecuador, as far as I’m aware. People are not launching 86 bombs on Australia. But the Americans are out there doing things, directly and indirectly, to the residents that those residents perceive as being hostile. And maybe even hostile to their religion. You know, a person who wraps himself in the flag of Islam and goes and blows himself up is violating Islam, if you’ve read the Koran. But, we are on the verge, I’m afraid, of making this into a religious war. And if you do that, and you bear in mind that there are a billion and a half Muslims in this world, things do not bode well for peace, harmony, justice, and the growth of free trade and free-market economies. Question: I wonder if there’s a phony dichotomy between who we are and what we do. Because at the point where people take up arms against you and become suicide bombers, they have been committed to a position that isn’t going to be changed by reform. The only thing that’s going to change them is elimination. But there will continue to be people recruited into that, in the long run, if there are not reforms. Consequently, you have to have a long-term policy of reform, a short-term policy of restraint toward these populations, and then a focused ruthlessness on those who are attacking you. I don’t see any other alternative than that. People who are that committed do, indeed, hate you for who you are. It has become an issue of their form or their distortion of Islam. It’s there in the writings. I don’t know how you deny that. On the other hand, how in the world can you turn off the spigot that turns out these people without the kinds of reforms that you’re talking about and that I particularly would feel are essential. Answer: Not too long ago, this Palestinian woman blew herself up in one of the little seaside cities in Israel. She blew herself up. She was a lawyer. The people in Jenin told us about her. She lost her husband and her brother in the Israeli incursion. They were killed. Six or seven weeks afterward, her aged father, who lived with her, had a heart attack, and he died at the checkpoint as she tried to get out of the city to the hospital. Because the people wouldn’t let her through. I’ve got to tell you, if you had to go through those checkpoints several times a day, you’d be a little steamed. But this woman lost it all. Essentially she said, “You’re going to die for this.” And she didn’t attack the people who did this to her; she attacked the people she could get to, which is what folks do in this kind of business. I do not want anything bad to happen to the state of Israel. I don’t want bad things to happen to us, but I think they will. That’s part of it. So if you look carefully at the situation, you might decide that, well, maybe we shouldn’t be doing this. But if you don’t want to look at the issues, then you can’t even consider the question of continuing or changing a policy. In the Middle East, they see us as hostile and they have proof of it all through the area—now in Iraq and in Palestine. That’s going to motivate some people to 87 become aberrational—that’s the word we’d have to use. These people are worthy of being gotten rid of, if you can figure out who they are beforehand. But you can’t. Question: I’d like to compliment you on most of what you’ve said today. I think the emphasis on cultural differences is extremely valuable. But I think it needs a couple of caveats. I’ve always held as a principle that facts never speak for themselves. There’s always a ventriloquist. And, in part, we see, especially in an age of media-driven demagoguery, that certain aspects of culture can be emphasized. Milosevic was one of the prime examples. You had very considerable intermarriage among Serbs, Croatians, Bosnians, Muslims, Christians within Bosnia, et cetera. You had a society that was moving in one direction, and Milosevic playing on one part of the culture helped to push it very hard in another direction. Let me suggest, also, that our own experience in the American south, things that were seen as immutable in American southern culture vanished within an amazingly short time, in part thanks to political leadership, in part thanks to media, in part thanks to education, in part thanks simply to the pressures of cold reality. So I think one of our real tasks is to almost understand the prayer of St. Francis, to know what cannot be changed, but also to know what can be changed, and how to do it. Answer: I agree with you totally, sir. Yet, there are some people who are die-hards who don’t let go. That’s why this idea of let’s find these people and take them out . . . Who are they? Some of them are just growing up. You remember what one Serb said when they accused him of killing all these little Croatians in Bosnia. He said, “Kill them when they’re young. It’s much easier. They don’t get a chance to grow up.” This is bloody stuff. Americans have a hard time understanding it. How can they possibly feel that way? They do, and they’re driven by things which may not even be anything more than class hatred or ethnic hatred. We, on the other hand, are doing physically measurable, discernible things, which I do not think are in our interests. In closing, I do suggest that the cultural differences I started with are so vast, and so profound, and so serious that you ignore them at your peril. Now, some of you guys in uniform are still doing what I used to do. I enjoyed that trip very much. My years in the Army and my years in the civilian service of my country. I envy you your opportunities to go on down this path. I’ve already completed the trip. Enjoy it. Thank you very much for your attention. sdw