Picking up where Churchill left off, the liberal former senator from Wisconsin calls for vigilance against continuing threats from terrorists and in defense of our rights. Excerpt from the talk on March 1, 2012.

RUSSELL FEINGOLD, Former U.S. Senator (D-Wisconsin); Author, While America Sleeps: A Wake-up Call for the Post-9/11 Era

CHRISTOPHER EDLEY, JR., Dean, Berkeley Law School, University of California – Moderator

 

For the last 10 years, we certainly could have done a better job of focusing on the issues that were raised by 9/11, and we could’ve done a much better job of staying focused on the rest of the world. The fact that we haven’t done that is partly understandable. We had a terrible economic collapse in 2008, and we have continuing economic difficulties. But I think 9/11 showed us what happens when we don’t stay alert.

We all remember how it felt to be taken completely by surprise. We need to “walk and chew gum” at the same time. Even when you have difficult domestic issues, you have to continue to focus on what’s happening around the world as well.

Instead, we’ve gotten something very different. We’ve gotten a public and a government at odds with itself. We are divided; we are at war domestically, in effect. We refuse to come together to solve problems. We have gridlock, partisanship, obsession not only with the next election, but the next caucus or primary – on the Republican side in particular, as we have a Democratic president. We have the almost unprecedented corrupting influence of big money in politics.

I kept thinking about Winston Churchill’s book, While England Slept. It really wasn’t a book by Churchill; it was a series of 40 speeches that he gave in the House of Commons, warning the people of England about the re-arming of Germany and that they weren’t paying attention carefully. In one [speech], he says, “We must remember that we are, for the time being, no longer entirely masters of our own fate.” He says of the English, “We are an undefeated people. Nearly 1,000 years have passed since we were subjugated by external force. All our outlook for several generations has been influenced by a sense of invincible, inexpugnable security at home. That security is no longer absolute or certain, and we must address our minds courageously, seriously, to the new conditions under which we now have to dwell.”

That reminds me a little bit about how we have to think about our place in the world after 9/11. We know that we were asleep at the switch on September 11, 2001. It’s not like there weren’t clues that there was a problem. We tended to just observe and discount things, like the bombing of two American embassies in Africa in 1998. We sort of discounted the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen in the year 2000, where 17 American sailors were killed. I remember even trying to make sense of, or discount, the shocking act of destroying giant Buddha statues [in Afghanistan by the Taliban]. I thought, “They’re not going to do that. Hitler didn’t even blow up the Oxford colleges in Saint Paul.” I said, “Nobody would do that.” The clues were everywhere that this was different.

I especially remember being on a foreign relations trip to Nigeria in early 2001. We went up to the ancient city of Kano, which is one of the five or six largest Islamic cities in the world, and my staff members and I observed the streets there. Kids had postcards and pictures not only of Muammar Gadaffi but of Osama bin Laden. We ran into this in several places. I said to my staff member, “What’s going on with this? Can you get me a briefing on it?” It takes forever in Washington to actually get one of those briefings. They finally scheduled it for September 13, 2001. It never occurred.

I thought we got off to a pretty good start of waking up after this. President Bush’s speech in the Congress about three weeks after 9/11 was probably the best speech I ever heard by a president in that chamber. I thought his public conduct at the time was very effective, including in particular being very clear that Americans or Muslims or Arabs should not be mistreated as a result of this. The discussion of going into Afghanistan was handled in an appropriate way. Colin Powell ran it, and he carefully lined up almost every country in the world – almost every Islamic country – including some that weren’t with us for the Gulf War. 

Then we got off track. The Iraq war was an absurd attempt to link the events of 9/11 in a way that really had no factual basis. There was a particular environment of fear in Washington, because of the bunker mentality. My staff members and I were frequently required to leave the building because of a “suspicious package” every 15 minutes. Then we had the anthrax attack, and my office was the one other than Senator Daschle’s that actually had people who tested positive. Then of course days before the vote on the Iraq war, we had the D.C. sniper, which had nothing to do with this, but somehow it all created an environment that did not feel that way back in Middleton, Wisconsin; I think it had something to do with people making this judgment that, “Gee, I better vote for this, just in case this has something to do with al-Qaeda.”

We went off track, because after the fact, we had to justify this Iraq thing – or at least the Bush administration thought that. We came up with an idea of dealing with al-Qaeda where we’d invade one country at a time, even though the president himself had said that al-Qaeda was active in over 60 countries. It included countries like Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Algeria, Ireland. Of course, there was one country that wasn’t on their list – that was Iraq – but, you know, whatever. [Laughter.] Instead of looking at this as an international network – essentially, a criminal syndicate – what did we do? We decided that we would invade countries.

If you’re good at the game of Scrabble, as one guy once told me who played the game with me and was much better than I was, “You must always think in two directions.” That’s what we have a hard time doing. It seems to be, “All right; we’re out of Iraq; we’re in bad shape in Afghanistan; now it’s going to be Iran. We’re going to either invade Iran, or we’re just going to think about Iran,” but that’s not the way this situation works.

Take the case of Algeria. “Algeria? Why is he talking about Algeria?” Well, Algeria had, of course, a terrible war to throw off the French rule, but, in the 1990s, what’s less known is that an Islamic party was starting to do well electorally there, and it won fair and square in some elections; the regime there canceled the subsequent elections. A group of extremists who were connected with the completely legitimate political party there decided to exploit the situation. They created a group called the GSPC [Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat (Group for Call and Combat)].

Now, why do I say “two directions”? Well, they were Algerians, but they hadn’t just been in Algeria; they had gone with Osama bin Laden to train to work with him for many years – 3,000 of them. They all came back to Algeria and started this organization, and for many years they were terrorizing the country, and, frankly, the regime there was terrorizing the country, too; it was very brutal. They finally got diminished, but what did they finally do? They went to places like Mali and Chad. What did they do? Well, they became a franchise recently: al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. If you think about this only as “this country” or “that country” and don’t see the connections, you will never understand the nature of this threat, and the threat is not over.

The other problem is, we have an attitude that when we go into a country, we have to go in there and stay there forever, and somehow it’s a sign of weakness if you try to do something less than a full invasion of a country. I give President Obama great credit for the way he handled Libya. It wasn’t easy. Everybody was pushing him: “You’ve got to go in there; you’ve got to send troops in.” He realized that Gadaffi was at a tipping point, and instead of having boots on the ground, he used something that was a more measured, intelligent, mature approach that actually got the job done of getting him out of power. I’m optimistic that this president has a different vision of how to do this, but again, people ask me about Syria, of course, another situation where I don’t think it has to be the complete invasion. I’m concerned about the fact that our policy has never adapted to the threat.

 

Problems at home

The domestic side of this is where 9/11 has been exploited for purposes of domestic political agendas and other agendas. One of those was the passage of the U.S.A. Patriot Act. I actually did this weird thing at the urging of my staff member, and another who’s here today: I actually read the bill. [Laughter.] It was an interesting experience, for a legislator. I found in the bill things like people’s library records being able to be obtained who have done absolutely nothing wrong and have no connection to terrorism at all; that’s never been changed. Even Bob Novak, the conservative columnist, said at the time, “This thing was an old wish list of the F.B.I.” And it was; it [included] provisions that never would have passed. In fact, the purpose wasn’t to use it to go after terrorism; it was for domestic drug cases, and so on.

A similar problem occurred when President Bush, with the help of the Office of Legal Counsel, was able to come up with a new theory about the Constitution going completely to the opposite of Justice Jackson’s opinion of the Youngstown case, which boils down to this: If Congress passes a law, and it’s explicit about what the law is, the president can’t just ignore it under the Commander in Chief power. Well, the Bush White House said, “Nope; that’s not right. Because we are in a war on terror” – which, of course, has no end – “the president can pretty much do what he wants, regardless of statute – because of the war – so he can create an illegal, warrantless, wire-tapping program. He can authorize torture against the laws of the United States and our treaties.” It was a direct attack on our Constitution and our system of government, and that hasn’t been fixed, either. Even though I am one of the chairmen of the president’s re-election campaign – I really want him to win – he needs to step up his game on this one.

Unfortunately in the last couple of years, another thing has happened. It’s suited a certain people’s agenda to start trying to make Muslims in this country feel like they’re not welcome, which is foolish. I’ve always thought [that] taking on a billion people is not a good idea [Laughter], particularly when they have absolutely no inclination in this regard. The mosque incident in New York was one of the worst I’ve ever seen. How in the world, when you know all the different things that are in that part of Manhattan, could anyone say that it is inappropriate for somebody to build a house of worship there? This has made many members of our community feel uncomfortable at a time when we need their alliance, their help and their friendship more than ever.

 

In defense of foreign policy

Finally, foreign policy has been trivialized as a subject – particularly by the conservatives, but not only. Instead of having a real, consistent view about what the world should look like – or what a Republican president would do – what they do is try to say, “The president always apologizes for everything.” Now, he did actually apologize the other day for something, which of course I thought was reasonable, but they take his words that have nothing to do with apologies. When he says something in Cairo like, “We could have done a better job on this,” you know, that’s not an abject apology.

The other thing they do is mock presidential trips. We didn’t mock presidential trips based on political party. When John Kennedy said, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” we didn’t mock it. When President Nixon – even though I was hoping he’d lose – went to China, we were proud of that initiative. When Ronald Reagan told Mr. Gorbachev to take down this wall, we did not mock him. When Barack Obama goes to India, they make fun of him because the president and the first lady did a traditional Indian dance with some people in a village, which is probably a good thing to do. India’s kind of important. The president should be there.

Finally, the capper is the repetition of the mantra American exceptionalism. Do you have any idea how that goes over overseas? Whatever happened to “Walk softly and carry a big stick”? Whatever happened to George Bush’s excellent comments about humility? Instead, it’s just this mantra of fealty to some kind of a right-wing agenda that specifically rules out thoughtfulness with regard to foreign policy, even though of course I think America is exceptional and the greatest country in the world.

Then we get to the last couple of years – and that’s the rise of the Tea Party. Notice, we all have talked about the way the Tea Party rather cleverly said, “We’re not going to talk about social issues.” That was their plan, and it worked in 2010. They did not talk about guns, God and gays. They ruled that out. The reason for that was [that] they wanted to just blame Obama for the economy.

This was a conscious plan, but what’s less noticed is [that] they also didn’t want to talk about foreign policy – partly because of Bush and what he had done, but also partly because President Obama’s had a pretty successful run on foreign policy. This has been an intentional narrowing and slumbering into not talking about the rest of the world and the threats we face 10 years after 9/11. The threat is not over.

My book is not only about one particular kind of threat, a terrorist threat or even al-Qaeda. I’m concerned about what China’s intentions are in Africa. What is Iran trying to do in Latin America? Are we going to take advantage of the fact that Africa has a chance now to really emerge and have the kind of relationship with those countries who have a very positive image about the United States generally?

All of these things are important, but let me just take the one example of what is happening in Kano, Nigeria. There is a group there called Boko Haram. Boko Haram, in the last year, has pulled off some 60 or 70 attacks. They have started attacking Western facilities, a U.N. facility. They killed 180 people in one day on January 20 in six different locations at the same time. It appears that they are affiliated with al-Shabaab in Somalia, which is affiliated with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Who’s talking about it? What does this remind you of? It reminds me of the same blinders that we had when we couldn’t see something that was right in our face. That’s the same place, Kano, where I noticed [those] people years ago.