CIAO DATE: 9/01

From CIAO's Board: Commentary on the Terrorist Attacks against the United States

Steven Weber
September 2001

University of California, Berkeley


Colleagues: I confess I don't see the real disagreement here. In fact (as oppossed to ‘in rhetoric’) I have no doubt that US policy is going to show that these different elements of an overall approach are in fact complementary. It's obvious -- the US is going to do some of all of these things. The question that will matter is how much effort goes where and what are the looming contradictions between them - and how they get managed and by whom. If I were to press the issue I’d press the issue in that direction; that’s where we're likely to get to the real heart of the disagreement.

None of the strategic actions alone might have prevented this disaster and none of them are going to prevent all such disasters in the future. But let’s remember for a minute, taking account of Steph’s point about the kind of knowledge that different people tend to bring to bear on a problem of this complexity, who we are dealing with as top decision makers. Many of us know Condi Rice well and we know the core of her world view when it comes to grand strategy. I don't know Powell personally but I feel I have some sense of the same issues for him. When someone comes forward at a national security council meeting and says ‘next time expect a mushroom cloud’ I believe I know how Condi will react (and I'm not entirely sure she is wrong). For better or for worse, the core of their decision analysis in the short to medium term is going to be a simple not a complex question: how do we degrade the capabilities of this terrorist network? I suspect that these decision makers, at least, are going to be willing to absorb quite substantial costs to do that.

I’m not saying that I think this is good or that it is the ‘right’ thing to do.

The practical risk is that the long term will get lost in the policy debate. And as several of these posts have pointed to, it is that the long term effects of some short term ‘fixes’ will be very expensive indeed. It’s a good time then to evaluate how much we really believe in sets of assumptions that are currently guiding lots of academic work on war initiation and war termination. What do we think the real parameters of decision makers’ discount rates are on these various kinds of costs? Is electoral success as strong a driving force on decision making as people like Goemans or Reiter or Smith or many others assume and build their work upon?

In any case the long term is clearly about addressing the kinds of political and economic situations that foster the beliefs and desires behind this kind of external behavior. I’d really like to point some of the discussion among us in this direction -- from an analytic/normative perspective. There is huge value in pointing out some of the downsides of short term fixes, and academics are very good at that. But could we tell ourselves a story that would convince ourselves, about how those inputs actually play a role in foreign policy decision making in this setting? Too much of that story is still implicit for me, I’d like to press some of this discussion towards getting it out in the open.

Commentary

Stephen M. Walt
Kirkpatrick Professor of International Affairs
John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

Bruce Jentleson
Professor of Public Policy, Duke University
Director, Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy

Response by Etel Solingen
Professor of Political Science
University of California, Irvine

Response by Stephan Haggard
Professor, Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies
University of California, San Diego
Steven Weber
Associate Professor of Political Science
University of California, Berkeley


Robert Keohane
James B. Duke Professor of Political Science
Duke University

Jack Snyder
Robert & Renee Belfer Professor of Political Science
Columbia University

Anders Stephanson
James P. Shenton Associate Professor of the Columbia Core
Columbia University

Stephan Haggard

Stephen M. Walt

Allan Goodman
President
Institute of International Education (IIE)

Helen Milner
Professor of Political Science
Columbia University

Stephan Haggard

Jack Snyder

Steven Weber

Robert Keohane

Response by Stephan Haggard
Response by Robert Keohane
Peter Katzenstein
Walter S. Carpenter Jr. Professor of International Studies
Cornell University




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