Speeches

BETH-EL SYNAGOGUE
MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA
APRIL 19, 2007
THOUGHTS ON A LIFETIME OF REPORTING AND THE MIDDLE EAST

Thank you for that very kind and generous introduction. Maybe some of you have heard what Abraham Lincoln once said about introductions such as those “Never take the time to deny it—the audience will find out the truth for themselves soon enough.” And so it will be with all of you here tonight.

There’s a lot of ground I’d like to cover tonight, but before we get underway, it just isn’t in me, as we gather together on this Minnesota evening to talk about issues of war and peace, not to pause for a moment to give a thought to the many thousands of our men and women in uniform on lonely, dangerous duty tonight in Iraq and Afghanistan. I wonder if I could ask you to join me in just a brief moment of silence to recognize their contribution and their sacrifice on our behalf. Thank you.

I also know that the events in Blacksburg, Virginia weigh very much on the minds of Americans all over the country this week and here with all of you tonight, I’d like to acknowledge the story of one of the shooter’s victims, Professor Liviu Librescu, a Holocaust survivor who acted heroically in sacrificing himself so that his students might have a chance to escape. Heaven only knows what thoughts, what associations from terrible times past, went through his mind as he tried to stop the shooter from entering his classroom but his death underscores the senselessness and utter brutality of this tragedy. Let us remember his life and his example with solemn appreciation.

I want to thank you all for having me here tonight—it is an honor. And there are a couple of things I’d like to say at the outset. The first is a word of congratulations and appreciation to Beth El Synagogue for a tradition of hosting speakers at your fundraisers whom you invite and expect to discuss serious issues. This kind of fostering of public awareness is to be applauded, and an example worthy of emulation.

The second thing is: While I am honored to be with you tonight and am happy to share what insights I can about the world, it’s important to me that you know that I neither am nor claim to be any kind of expert. I hold a degree from Sam Houston State Teacher’s College—now Sam Houston State University—in Huntsville, Texas. There may be any number of people who are experts on any number of things, including the situation in the Middle East—and there are no doubt some in this room tonight—but you might be surprised how few of them attended Sam Houston State Teacher’s College. I am a reporter who got lucky, and the thoughts I have to share tonight are offered in that spirit—gained from, and necessarily limited by, a reporter’s vantage point.

In broad terms, one thing I’ve learned from a lifetime of reporting on news abroad is that there is really no such thing as a, quote, “foreign” news story.
I was fortunate in that I learned this lesson as a young boy, when a prolonged bout with rheumatic fever kept me in bed long enough to discover Edward R. Murrow’s now-legendary radio reports from the London Blitz.

Murrow’s reporting was absolutely instrumental in preparing the United States to join the fight against Hitler in Europe, and lest one ever doubt the power of words, it may be worth considering how much the words of Murrow, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill did to rally democracies to quite literally save the world.

I spoke last week at a symposium at Tufts University honoring Murrow’s memory, and I began my remarks with something that the poet Archibald MacLeish—who was then the Librarian of Congress—said to Murrow at a dinner thrown to honor his first three years in Europe reporting on the beginnings of World War II.

“You burned the city of London in our houses,” McLeish told Murrow, “and we felt the flames. . . You laid the dead of London at our doors and we knew that the dead were our dead. . . were mankind's dead. Without rhetoric, without dramatics, without more emotion than needed be. . . you have destroyed the superstition that what is done beyond 3,000 miles of water is not really done at all.”

MacLeish spoke these words on December 2, 1941; five days later, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

Destroying the superstition that what happens in faraway places somehow doesn’t matter, or doesn’t even really happen at all—seems to me to be the baseline mission of international news. That’s what we call it now—“international” news, instead of “foreign” news. And this is one case where the new way of saying things actually gets closer to the core truth than the old way—because nothing that happens “out there” occurs in a vacuum, and what we’re really reporting on when we go to a story thousands of miles away is how nations interact, and what it all means—whether we’re talking about humanitarian, strategic, or economic consequences.

How inter-national has news become? To take an example from the economic realm, I’m sure you recall that last month Asia’s stock markets plunged for a number of possible reasons, including a well-qualified statement by former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan that the U.S. economy could—not would, could—fall into recession by the end of this year.

Why would such a statement so spook China and other Asian markets? Because we in the United States are by far the biggest market for Asian manufactured goods. And with such heavy Chinese investment in America (such as more than $450 billion in Treasury bills, used to fund, among other things, the war in Iraq), a dive in the Chinese markets was bound to have a reciprocal effect here. One of the places you could see that reciprocal effect was on the U.S. and European commodities markets. They went down too—because we sell China the raw materials that it uses to manufacture the products that China then sells to US.

So we—and by “we” I mean the American press, the American government, and the American people—can only ignore what is going on in Asia, in the Middle East, in the horn of Africa at our own great peril.

These days, with the world so interconnected and interdependent, this adage may well hold true for just about any country, no matter how small or geographically isolated. But it holds particularly true for the United States, this nation of immigrants, with our incredibly complex web of global economic and strategic interests, and with our military forces deployed around the world.

We have approximately 150,000 men and women in uniform serving in Iraq, where they stand in harm’s way every day—and when they leave, how they leave, may determine whether or not the Middle East faces the prospect of a larger, regional war of Sunni Muslims against Shiite Muslims, involving (but not necessarily limited to) Saudi Arabia and Iran. Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq are no less than numbers one, three, and four on the world list of nations with the largest oil reserves. The focus always rightly belongs with the human toll in war, but one must also reckon the economic consequences of armed conflict, as they have the potential to be devastating in their own right.

We have about 70,000 men and women in uniform in the Pacific Rim, stationed primarily in Japan and South Korea, in a region made extremely volatile by tremendous competition for scarce resources and threatened now by the prospect of a nuclear and conventional arms race. The United States is bound by treaty to defend Japan or South Korea or Taiwan in the event that any of these nations is attacked. And when considering the Pacific Rim, consider this, too: With its tremendous reserves of U.S. currency and Treasury debt, it could be argued that China holds the health of our economy in its hands.

Further, we don’t think about it much anymore, but we still have approximately 100,000 men and women in uniform in Europe, a region that has seen two continent-wide wars in the past century and which gets more than 25 percent of its natural gas from Russia—a nation that has shown its willingness to cut this supply off; a nation that is headed by President Vladimir Putin, an ambitious leader with autocratic tendencies, who many believe has been directly or indirectly responsible for killing and at the least jailing his rivals in politics and in the press.

And finally we have 28,000 of our fellow citizens in uniform in Afghanistan, a place I recently visited. You may have heard news of recent fighting there, as our soldiers there try to seize the initiative in what they believe will be a sustained spring offensive by the Taliban. In many ways Afghanistan has become the “forgotten war,” but indications are that it will continue to re-emerge in the headlines again—and the fate of that country may well hang in the balance.

Deadly and potentially deadly rivalries are playing out all across the globe, driven by two of the mightiest engines of history—religious identity and the quest for scarce resources, in this case energy resources. And our armed forces, if they are not involved in these fights already, would inevitably become involved if fighting were to break out in the regions where the greatest tensions lie.

The other most important thing I’ve learned in a career of reporting on international news might seem too obvious to mention but in America, unfortunately, it needs to be said. And that is this: History matters. And even if it does not matter to too many of our fellow citizens, not to mention, as the record has shown, too many of our architects of foreign policy in the past and the present—it matters to other nations and their peoples, and that is why it must matter to Americans, too, if we are to expect successful outcomes in dealing with these countries.

In the 1960s I spent considerable time as a war correspondent reporting from Vietnam, where this lesson was borne out again and again, in the way we misread or were plainly ignorant of Vietnamese history—from that nation’s relationship with China to the roots of its nationalist movement—and, indeed, in our apparent amnesia regarding our own military history. The consequences of this failure to appreciate history were tragic in their scope.

Our nation has unfortunately made many of the same kinds of mistakes in Iraq—failures to appreciate the sort of historical and cultural nuances that can spell the difference between policies that are successful and those that are not.

Maybe we don’t always give history its due because we are, still, such a young country. But we—and most importantly, our policy makers and elected leaders—need to understand that much of the rest of the world is steeped in history’s roiling waters, going back, in some cases, for millennia.

And perhaps nowhere do these things that experience has taught me—that there’s no such thing as a truly “foreign” story, and that history matters—nowhere do these lessons hold more true than they do for the Middle East.

In recent days, we have learned of the resumption of what are intended to be bi-weekly Israeli-Palestinian talks, fostered by the U.S. through Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. As many of you may have noted, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, came out of the first of these talks with generally positive words but ones that differed in terms of emphasis. Israeli officials stated that the focus—the initial focus, at least—of these talks was to be immediate and practical matters concerning security, economics, and the like, and not any of the so-called “final status” issues such as borders and the future of Jerusalem…while Palestinian spokesmen, on the other hand, put emphasis on the hope that these talks would produce a far-ranging solution to Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This is probably just a matter of what each side chooses to highlight for their own particular constituency but, if I could venture a few thoughts on this, it seems to me to be very important—especially in light of past history—that each side temper and manage the expectations of their people. Some may see it differently, but in my own personal view—clearly labeled as such—it is always preferable to have people, any people, sitting down for talk of peace, rather than rising up for acts of war, particularly at a time when there is so much, too much, of the latter in the region and in the world. But the political realities of this particular moment need to be recognized: Neither Prime Minister Olmert nor Palestinian leader Abbas appear to be coming into these negotiations with great reserves of political capital among their own people, and this is a condition shared by the Bush administration, in its role as interlocutor for the talks. One wonders just how much even the best intentions and good-faith negotiations can accomplish at this point, given the central characters in the talks.

As I say, I believe that when people sit down to talk of peace, anything is possible. But steps need probably to be taken on all sides to ensure that setbacks—and history, again, has shown that setbacks are perhaps inevitable—don’t result in the sort of crushing disappointment that could lead, for example, to another flare-up of violence.

Hope is a good and necessary thing for any people to have, but hope tempered by realism seems the best attitude for this moment in the history of the conflict. To that end, I think it is encouraging that Secretary Rice is now working with both sides to establish a list and schedule of confidence-building benchmarks—an incremental approach that has a chance of fostering precisely the kind of cautious, measured optimism that is called for.

I am aware that some may say—may already be saying—of the talks something along the lines of, “Well, haven’t we tried talks before, and haven’t they always failed?” And this is something that is hard to deny. But war has also been tried, and war has also failed—in the Middle East and elsewhere—to provide lasting solutions. War has, in fact, fostered and initiated its own, new cycles of violence. So it is infinitely preferable, in my view, that the parties are giving diplomacy a try—provided that diplomacy finds a way to confront some of the important issues that need addressing, such as the constant rocket attacks on Israel on the one side, and the ability of everyday Palestinian people and business concerns to move freely, on the other side.

It will take more than just a few meetings to sort out even the simplest issues, and it will require a commitment—a sustained commitment from the United States and Europe to do whatever they can to foster peace and confidence-building measures.

And while I don’t claim to have any particular insight on the thinking or inner working of President Bush’s foreign policy team, one cannot help but note that the impetus for this new round within the president’s administration of talks comes after a number of recommendations—including those put forward by former Secretary of State James Baker’s Iraq Study Group—that a renewal of conspicuous American involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process could enhance the chances for more favorable conditions in Iraq, and make more likely the cooperation of other Arab and Muslim states in the region in aiding with diplomatic and other issues bearing on Iraq.

This may or may not be the Bush administration’s motivation, and it may or may not be the case that progress—or perceived progress—in Israeli-Palestinian talks has the power to create a better overall environment for regional progress, particularly in regards to Iraq. But just as I think it is important to manage expectations for progress among the respective parties it also seems to me essential—if any progress is to be lasting and sustained—to recognize that Israeli-Palestinian issues need to be addressed on their own terms, and according to their own timetable.

It is of course true that this conflict has wider implications for—and is informed and at times exacerbated by—other groups and interests in the region. But, particularly in the early going, it seems important to recognize that it has, at its core, issues and questions specific to the two groups at the center of the struggle. And as we find ourselves in the heat, already, of the political season here in the United States, this is something that not only President Bush and his team but also each party’s respective candidates for president might do well to bear in mind.

Is the Israeli-Palestinian issue the linchpin, as some claim and some hope, to the whole tangled skein of issues in the Middle East? I’ll tell you flat out that I don’t know—it is a question, and an answer, far above my pay grade and far beyond my knowledge of the region. Much better and more knowledgeable minds than mine have been working on this problem for years, with results that, regretfully, we can all see.

But as I look at the greater Middle East today, I am struck by how increasingly difficult, if not impossible, it is becoming to talk about the region now and in the future without talking about Iran.

First, if you are looking for a winner in the Iraq war, Iran is it. A deadly and unpredictable enemy has been removed from Iran’s border, replaced (with U.S. help and at U.S. cost in lives and treasure) with a friendly, fellow-Shi’ite Muslim regime. Iran can now look at itself, Iraq, and Syria—which is majority Sunni but Shi’ite-ruled—and see a solid geographical and political bloc of Shi’ite states. In the religious and secular politics of Islam, this provides a strategic counterweight to Sunni Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. As I alluded to earlier, the competition between Iran and Saudi Arabia for regional hegemony is becoming an increasing source of tension in the area and, in a worse-case scenario could even perhaps outright hostilities, directly or through proxy forces, as has been threatened and speculated upon in conjunction with the prospect of the U.S. withdrawing from a still-unstable Iraq.

U.S. commanders on the ground in Iraq have long said that Iran is involved—whether directly through its government, or indirectly through other means—of exacerbating the situation there…and Iran, through its support, along with Syria, of Hezbollah, also continues to play a destabilizing role in Lebanon, where the government there remains under constant pressure. Leaving aside, for the moment, the issue of Iraq, one must also ask oneself what a renewal of civil war in Lebanon would mean for the region.

And finally, of course, there is the Iranian nuclear issue—as potentially frightening an issue as there is facing the world today and which many in Israel, I know, understandably view as an existential crisis.

Barring a diplomatic breakthrough, if there are any good solutions to this problem, I, for one, am at a loss as to what they might be.

I mentioned earlier my belief—again, clearly labeled as my own—that diplomacy, even when the results are not guaranteed or immediately clear, is almost always a good thing. But in the case of diplomacy with Iran at this historical juncture, I will confess to being out of my depth. I do suspect that the U.S. missed an opportunity—an opportunity possibly even to avert the current crisis—when it failed to respond to the diplomatic overtures of President Khatami, who preceded Ahmedenijad as the secular head of the Iranian government. Whether talks with Iran at that time would have yielded fruit or not…there does seem to be evidence that rebuffing Khatami led Iran’s ruling theocrats to favor the current and dangerous hard-line approach being pursued by Iran now.

Here’s the thing to know about Iran: though its influence and power in the region is currently large and growing, internally, Iran has big problems. After nearly three decades of strict theocratic rule, Iran’s citizens are not happy with their leaders—particularly a new generation of educated young people, who are pressing ever more volubly and boldly for reform and change. I have seen Iran likened by some to the Soviet Union before it crumbled from within.

In the case of the Soviet Union, though, it must be remembered that, while the conditions had been there for some time it took a Gorbachev to catalyze them into monumental change. Whether there is a Gorbachev-like figure on the horizon in Iran is a big question, with the corresponding question of whether the world can wait for such a figure to bring change in Iran from within.

But on the matter of diplomacy, it may be that the current U.S. resistance to engage in talks with Iran is adding to the pressure on Ahmedenijad, who is increasingly unpopular within certain segments of the Iranian populace—elements of which regard his bellicose talk with the same kind (if not degree) of alarm with which it is greeted here, and in Israel.

But no matter what the outcome of the Iranian nuclear standoff, a larger and more subtle bit of damage to the Middle East may already have been done—and that is the igniting of a regional nuclear arms race.
As reported in the New York Times this past Sunday, no fewer than a dozen Middle Eastern states have expressed interest in starting their own nuclear programs—among them, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey, which all have taken quick and concrete steps to build their own nuclear reactors. As King Abdullah of Jordan recently told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “The rules have changed. Everybody’s going for nuclear programs.”

Nuclear proliferation has already become one of the defining—and most frightening, most difficult—problems of this young century. But concerning a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, it’s hard for me to think of a worse idea.

And yet, if one looks at the strategic points of view of the nations involved, it must—to them—a certain amount of sense to possess a nuclear deterrent. Once again, the Shi’ite-Sunni rivalry plays heavily into this thinking. Sunni states see the ascendancy of Shi’ite nations, led by Iran, and feel they need a countervailing force. The problem, of course, is that history has shown that when there is an arms race, there often comes a time when those arms are actually put to use.

One can see the conditions set for the same kind of unsettling dynamic today in the Pacific Rim, where Japan and South Korea must weigh their own strategic and security interests in light of North Korea’s emergent nuclear threat.

One doesn’t hear much about this, but I think it is worth noting an important way in which these regional nuclear arms races—if they are allowed to develop—are different from the long standoff between the United States and the onetime Soviet Union, and that is in regard to the geographical distance involved.

Geographical separation was instrumental to the morally suspect but apparently successful shared policy of M.A.D.—Mutually Assured Destruction. This was the understanding that each side had a nuclear arsenal sufficient to inflict unacceptable amounts of death and destruction upon the other, should either side strike first—which meant that neither side had an incentive to strike first. But M.A.D. only worked because each side was confident in its ability to get its own missiles out of their silos and in the air upon word of a strike by the other side—the 10- to 15-minute window afforded by the distance between the U.S. and Russia made this possible.

Further, both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. took care, over the years, to put in place a system of hotlines and other measures that would enable each to determine with as much confidence as is possible whether a suspected missile launch was, in fact, the real thing or merely a false alarm. There are indications that there were, in fact, several false alarms on each side during the years of the Cold War, and one shudders to think what might have happened if A) these measures had not been in place and B) if our respective nations had not had a window of time, however short, to use these measures and use considered judgment.

So when you hear of the possibility of nuclear arms races in regions as closely packed geographically and as mired in conflict politically as the Middle East, I would submit you also need to factor in the risk that some nation, somewhere, will think it can make a successful first-strike without facing destruction itself and that the potential for a nuclear accident, based on a false alarm, is far greater. It is precisely for these reasons that the introduction of nuclear weapons on both sides into the longstanding enmities between India and Pakistan is such a great cause for concern.
Now I want to take a step back here, because one thing that I do not want to do is leave you here tonight with a feeling of doom, gloom, and hopelessness. I am, by nature and by experience, an optimist. When one looks at all the obstacles and adversities overcome by the United States and our allies over the years, it is hard not to be optimistic, even if that optimism is tempered by a very healthy dose of realism.

What I do hope to leave you with tonight is a sense of urgency—for our nation and for our world. Not unreasoned panic, or fear, but sober urgency. And it is here that I believe the American press has a great role to play, a mighty responsibility to uphold, and a lot of work to be done.

Especially in a democracy such as ours, our elected representatives and our citizens alike need to be fortified with as complete an understanding of the world and its inter-dependent relationships as is possible if we are to make the correct decisions about our shared future, and choose the correct course when the waters get rough.

For the early part of our history, the geographical isolation afforded by vast oceans inoculated our country from much of the world’s troubles. Now, though, we live—in virtual terms—in a situation not unlike that of the great European powers at the turn of the last century. Our interests and our alliances place us closer than is sometimes comfortable to our competitors and to our enemies. We feel the effects of upheavals in nations that we count as friends and foes alike, as if they were as near as our borders.

During the Cold War, I think we had a sense of what was at stake and our news media both informed this sense and responded to it.

Today, however, I am struck by how much more there is to do to educate citizens about the world in which the United States operates, and how we are all connected.

Ironically, though, our American understanding of the world—and news organizations’ commitment to increasing that understanding—has been shrinking at precisely the time when it has become more important than ever. And despite the sense, since 9/11, that we cannot afford to be ignorant of the larger world, the commitment to international coverage among major news outlets is not nearly what it was years ago.

I can remember when the major network news organizations maintained permanent, fully-staffed bureaus in places such as Cairo, Jakarta, Beirut, and Bonn. Now those datelines, and many more, seem to belong to another era. It’s not that news has stopped happening in these and other neglected datelines around the world—far from it. It’s that major news organizations, electronic and print, have stopped covering international news with the depth and intensity they once brought to bear.

There has for some time now been an attitude—and I think an unfortunate one—of, if big news happens somewhere where we don’t have a presence, we can always send a team there quickly, and they can get caught up along the way. This may be better than nothing, but it’s an approach that practically ensures a relatively superficial treatment of any story, devoid of the international context and historical, cultural nuance that a lifetime of reporting has told me are so important.

When major news organizations treat international news in this way, they are by necessity lurching from one crisis to the next, and their audiences along with them. The presence and maintenance of international bureaus, by contrast, made it possible for journalists and their audience alike to gain a sense of the context and continuity of not only news events but also life as it is lived in other places. Bureaus added depth. The fact that the reporters who covered a given country were actually living, for extended periods, in that country, made for better reporting. And the opportunity to watch newsworthy situations develop, over time, meant, I believe, that potential crises didn’t have to develop into full-blown crises before they reached the eyes and ears of the American public.

These international bureaus have been shut down because they are expensive. And because the public has not demanded more—and better—international news coverage from our news outlets. So I end my talk tonight with a two-pronged plea: The first part of it is, if you believe, as I do, that quality, in-depth international coverage is not only important but downright vital to our world—not only in the realms of war and peace, but in those of economics, the environment, and culture as well—then please make your views known. I know from firsthand experience how often the owners, managers, and top-line producers, publishers, and editors of news organizations get inundated by phone calls, emails, and letters from interest groups with a particular axe to grind…and I know that these pleas are heard and, for better or for worse, they can have an effect on the news you see, read, and hear.

If you want more, want better, international coverage from the news you read, hear, and watch—demand it. And if you see a news organization making the effort to present international news in a meaningful way, let your praise be known, too—international news is expensive, and your voice could be the countervailing force against a budget-cutter who is poised to slash the funding for that international coverage you so admire.

And finally, vote with your patronage. Subscribe to, watch, and listen to those stations that are providing quality international coverage. And turn off; tune out, those that offer nothing but shallow sensationalism, when they cover international events at all. Better still, let the offenders know why you are tuning them out.

I believe that this trend in coverage of the world beyond our borders will and must change, and it will change either on our terms…or the world’s terms: We can decide to direct our gaze outward, to focus more on international events as a matter of foresight—because it is the wise thing to do…or we can do it, inevitably and reflexively, in response to crisis and catastrophe. The choice, for now, remains ours to make.

You’ve been a fantastic audience, and I want to thank you very much for your attention, and for your time.