the interview
I don't think fear works in the end. I think what got us through the Second World War was FDR: "All we have to fear is fear itself." The success of the Reagan administration may be that he built a sense of confidence, you have a feeling that "we're going to get through this; the things that we face we're better than; we can overcome it; we may make mistakes but we'll learn from our mistakes and improve." I think the American people want to hear that.
The case you made about initially the fear which certainly was there -- I remember in first grade going to school with a pillowcase because we had to pull it over our heads, dive under the desk, [yet] we ended up building this confidence [in our] ability, that we will prevail, the things we believe in -- democracy, the freedoms that we hold -- eventually will win out. I think what we haven't done, given this administration -- we played to the fear, we haven't done enough about the confidence. Again, this nation hasn't been taken to war, and war may be the wrong metaphor for what we face today because it tends to lead people to believe that it's going to be won or lost on a battlefield somewhere, and I don't believe that's the case here. There will be battles but it's part of a conflict that has many other dimensions, maybe dimensions that will be more effective in determining outcomes than just the military or security side of these sorts of things.
That that's been the mistake. The administration has been groping to define this. Think about what's going on now. They began by calling this the global war on terrorism. We declared a war on a tactic. It doesn't make sense. I mean, FDR didn't declare war on kamikaze attacks, or Wilson on U-boat attacks. They saw it much differently, broader, the scope wider. If you think of it in terms of a tactical level, then you fight it at a tactical level. Osama bin Laden probably understands clearly that his strength comes from this endless flow of angry young men, and the anger is generated by the political, economic, or social set of conditions. If the anger isn't dealt with, then he's not going to have a problem, he may be defeated tactically in some ways, but eventually this thing morphs from an organization to a movement to an ideology, which has happened now over time.
If you don't get the context and you don't understand it, [then] you don't think through how you can overcome it, operate in that environment, succeed, and then communicate your point to the people. You can't underestimate the American people's ability to grasp that. One of the mistakes we made in Vietnam was that the justification became this Gulf of Tonkin ginned-up excuse, and later when that was disproved your credibility's gone. This has been [the same], to be kind: embellished, exaggerated intelligence on weapons of mass destruction and association with al Qaeda that was never there -- I saw intelligence, right up to the day of the war, was never there. The Vice President was talking about Saddam amassing weapons of mass destruction along his borders to threaten his neighbors, I mean, totally untrue, "mushroom clouds," the spin and the evoking of these images that had no basis in intelligence fact. Once that's discredited you've lost the people.
If your rationale for doing this was strategic, and it probably was, you have to explain that strategy. The American people understood the strategy during the Cold War, they understood deterrence and containment, basically, and we operated within that strategy. We've articulated no strategic vision and no description of the new world and its changes. And so, we have a populace that basically still has its mind in the Cold War era, a government that's structured the same way, and we're trying to operate in this different environment and era.
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