Reporters too often claim to be objective, but in fact none of us are. We are shaped and influenced by our upbringing, our race, gender, and religion or lack of one; our loved ones and friends; and the lives we have lived.
I had a successful, businessman father who, though he grew up in an orphanage and never finished high school, insisted I do well in whatever I did. I went to an Ivy League school, was drafted into the Army at the end of the Korean War, and trained as an interrogator in the Counterintelligence Corps.
I served here in Washington during the McCarthy period and have never forgotten that time. I twice took 18-month sabbaticals in the 1960s to run investigations for Sen. J.W. Fulbright (D-Ark.), then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The second involved investigating elements of the Vietnam War. Fulbright was the first of several individuals who deeply influenced my thinking about foreign policy and national security.
That Senate experience – as well as my time in the Army — gave me a brief but important insider’s look at government and the people who work in it. I saw firsthand how little we reporters knew about what was really going on. That knowledge has guided my reporting and writing ever since.
In 1966 I was hired by Ben Bradlee, then the newly-named executive editor of The Washington Post. Except for a six-year period between 1969 and 1975 – when I failed at starting a newspaper and edited The New Republic magazine—my career up to now has been almost entirely with The Washington Post.
Whom you work for is key. Independence for me to write my Fine Print column on what I believe is right is most important. I had it at The Post and I have it here at The Cipher Brief.
The Fine Print column, as I see it, is a way to raise not just controversial national security issues but also the facts necessary to understand those issues. A vast amount of information is published every day in Washington and elsewhere. The conceit of this column is finding some material – a speech, report, hearing, seminar, press conference – and drawing from it facts, analyses, and even opinions that have been overlooked by the general press. Where applicable and practical, I attempt to put the issues described in historic context, occasionally based on my own experiences. Finally, I sometimes have the nerve to suggest ways to deal with some issues.
Reading transcripts of national security sessions at last month’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, provided not only a preview of the range of issues I plan to take up in the future, but also some interesting insights into them.
I will start with terrorism.
At a January 22 session, Afghan President Mohammed Ashraf Ghani said today’s terrorism must be understood as a “medium-term” not a “short-term” challenge that will not be solved by “containment.”
Although he described it as “morally reprehensible,” he said terrorism has become a “sociological system” which has to be dealt with through both competition, i.e. harsh means, but also through cooperation, bettering people’s lives.
Most important, he pointed out that today’s terrorism has a “distinctive pathology…[that] is directed toward theater. The attack on Paris, Istanbul, the rest, what's the purpose? To prevent us from freedom of travel, to make us suspicious of our neighbors, to call into question the very bond between the state and the system where the state protects the system.”
Following Ghani was Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam, who also is Coordinating Minister for Economic and Social Policies. He pointed out that Singapore is “the most religiously diverse nation in the world,” but that means “we have every major religion that is at conflict with another globally within our 720 square kilometers.”
Up until now, Singapore, although majority Muslim, has had multiculturalism with a multi-religious compact. He described it as “part of our identity and part of the rules of the game from the time we became the country because if we didn't have it, we wouldn't have survived.”
That has changed. Singapore, he said, is not immune from what is going on in the rest of the world. While the vast majority of Muslims find terrorism abhorrent, he added, “We will face terrorism and that threat for a long time to come.”
He pointed out that if only 0.01 percent of a population supports terrorism, of 230 million people that comes to 23 thousand people, adding “and we know what 23 people can do.” He also pointed to the irony that many being converted to violent terrorist causes are coming from advanced countries, including Western democracies, where their legacy is decades of segregation and exclusion from the majority population.
Minister Tharman said that while rules can be changed to meet the terrorism problem, “culture can’t be changed quickly,” and today’s terrorism is a cultural issue, whether in the Middle East, South Asia, the South Pacific, or even within the U.S.
His proposed Singapore solutions are probably not applicable to the U.S., but they are worth noting. “We need to strengthen our defenses and that’s not just talking about the military,” he said. He then listed “stronger powers of surveillance…powers of preventive detention…clear rules against hate speech.” He recognized these as “compromises to preserve the larger liberty of living in an open society” that they needed to be “backed by judicial authority, not primal state power.”
But he also recognized something “far more fundamental” had to be done. “We've got to find ways of integrating people from the time they're kids to the time they're in the workplace, where they live, and everyone having that shared hope in the future.”
Reading what these two leaders from far distant countries said about dealing with terrorism led me to ask myself, how much of such serious thinking is being reflected in the current U.S. presidential campaign when the focus is terrorism?
Also at Davos, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter brought up a number of issues I will deal with over time in this column.
Carter’s discussion of his military agenda began with the Islamic State and the operational plan for Iraq and Syria. “Capturing Mosul [in Iraq] and…going to Raqqa in Syria…the so-called [Islamic State] capital," describing it as “part of the concept of defeating them where they are.” He called this dealing “with the metastasis,” though he added, “some of them will go back to the countries from which they originate, which sadly include many in Europe, a few — but a worrisome few — in the United States.”
He then ticked off other obvious areas that need serious discussion: Iran’s “malign influence in the region…and protecting our long-time friends and allies in the Gulf, to include especially Israel.” He added North Korea, Russia and China as areas where the U.S. faces situations “we don’t want to lead to armed conflict."
I will continue to deal with all those areas Carter mentioned and many more, including intelligence, nuclear weapons and, of course, defense budgets and how they are paid for.
My Fine Print column has a new, comfortable home and all are welcomed to continue to visit it.
