Speech
before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on October 4, 2001:
Ken
Adelman
Former Director of Arms Control and Disarmament Agency,
Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations
I want to thank Chancellor Al Carnesale.
It just shows you the age-old rule that if you fund an academic he’ll
always be grateful to you. Many years later. But
that was a nice introduction, Al, that was so much nicer than an introduction I
had recently in Indianapolis where someone told about the time that I had spent
with Rumsfeld. I actually worked
with him three times in my life, and with Cheney, and with my membership on the
Defense Policy Board today, and he got very carried away, and so he said to the
audience, “So, listen up very closely: for the latest dope from Washington,
here’s Ken Adelman.”
Sometimes it doesn’t come out right, and sometimes I
think it’s a factor of translation. I
gave a speech in Tokyo about a year ago, I guess it was, on security in
Northeast Asia, and after the speech the head of the group stood up and he said
“Ambassador Adelman, for your remarks and for all you have done in government
we wish you that you deserve much clap.”
And I said, “Thank you very much.
Of all the things I want in the world I really don’t think I deserve
much clap, but I do appreciate the sentiment behind that wish.”
There was a time at the U.N. where language came up awfully
peculiar, and this has to do with my old love of Africa.
As Al mentioned, I lived in Zaire from 1972 to 1975, in the Belgium
Congo, now the Republic of the Congo, and one of the things the United Nations
really did awfully well in the l980s was to welcome new countries into the U.N.
There was Robert Mugabe, who is the new president of Zimbabwe, formerly
Rhodesia, appearing before the U.N. Security Council.
Jeanne [Kirkpatrick] was out of town so I sat in the United States seat,
and there’s Mugabe who says he could not believe all those years fighting
against the racist regime of Ian Smith, that he would be leading this
independent country, admitted to the United Nations, sitting before what he
called “this awesome organ of ours, the U.N. Security Council.”
So, after that time, every day I would go to Jeanne Kirkpatrick and I’d
say, “Jeanne, are you going to sit before the awesome organ of ours or should
I fiddle with it today?” One day
we were being interviewed for something and they were wondering what kind of
hanky-panky was going on so we stopped all that.
But it really is wonderful to be here and I have been at
the World Affairs Council in L.A. several times, including the times of arms
control. I think the whole world
has changed in such a radical way since I was last here, and even it has changed
in such a radical way since September 11th.
I thought what I would do is basically three things real quickly: first,
is to give you a setting, an emotional setting, kind of a philosophical setting,
of what we’re all experiencing and going through right now and do that in a
way I know best -- through Shakespeare, for a little bit. Second, what I thought I’d do is just tell you my views on
what we should be doing, what we should be thinking about, and how to proceed.
And, third, the kind of outlook that I would have, where we stand and
what we can expect in the future, and then open it up for lots of questions --
and hopefully we’ll have lots of time for questions.
To start out, I have been in government, as Al said, since
we all started out when we were very young in 1970 at the Office of Economic
Opportunity. I can’t remember a
time when the nation was so affected as we’ve been in the last three weeks.
I can’t remember a time where all of us have gone through experiences
of tears and of real emotional outpouring, worry, concern and an upsurge of
patriotism, an upsurge in reliance on our government and confidence in our
government as we’ve had since September 11th.
It is incredible. We had a dinner last night, I was telling some people about,
and we had the Solicitor General of the United States, Ted Olson, who not only
has performed brilliantly in government, but lost his wife in the attack on the
Pentagon. We gave her our prayers
and thoughts, but it was really a wrenching experience. But people in American have been going through that and
asking philosophical questions of how come this happens, how can we get used to
it in the sense of getting accustomed to understanding what’s going on, and
kind of cope with it.
Someone asked me the other day, “What passage is there
that relates to this?” It’s a
wonderful passage and I’m going to walk you through it real quickly, and it
comes from Macbeth. The
situation here is in the Fourth Act of Macbeth, where Macbeth has really
gotten power now, and he decides to go after Macduff as a competitor.
Macduff then escapes to England from Scotland and Macbeth, all he can get
a hold of is Macduff’s wife and children.
On stage, they are massacred by the henchmen of Macbeth.
It’s one of the few instances -- I think it’s the only instance I
know in all of Shakespeare -- where kids are murdered on stage.
Generally, all killings of Shakespeare, most of them, happen off stage,
especially with children. But this
is on stage and you feel very bitter.
Anyway, in this scene that I’m going to describe Macduff,
who lost his wife and children, comes in and he is working with Malcolm, who is
another opponent of Macbeth. As
they’re talking about going back and taking back Scotland, Ross, one of their
cousins, comes in and Macduff starts out and he says, “How does my wife?”
because he had left his wife right there.
Ross comes in, and he says, “Why, well.”
This was a very difficult thing, because he starts out lying about it
because he knows what happened. Macduff
says, “And all my children?” “Well,
too.” “Oh, so the tyrant has
not battered at their peace?” Now
Ross is starting to fudge a little bit and he says, “No, they were well at
peace when I did leave them.” Which
was true, but he heard subsequently what happened to them.
Then there’s obviously on the stage something that disturbs him,
because Macduff says, “Be not niggard of your speech.
How goes it?” In other
words, there’s a reluctance to talk about it and he senses it.
They talk about a minute about something else, about the tyrant Macbeth,
and then Ross says, “I could answer this comfort with another comfort but
cannot do it. I have words that
would be howled out in the desert air where hearing would not lash them.”
Macduff says, “What concern they?
The general cause or is it a grief due to some single breast?”
And Ross says, “No mind that’s honest but share some woe, though the
main part pertains to you alone.” Macduff
says, “If it be mine, keep it not from me.
Let me quickly have it.” Ross
says, “Let not your ears despise my tongue forever which shall possess them
with the heaviest sound that ever they have heard.”
Macduff says, “Hmm, I guess at it.”
Ross gives it real fast, “Your castle was surprised, your wife and
babes savagely slaughtered. To
relate the matter were, on the quarry of these murdered dear, to add some death
of you.” And Malcolm, the other guy there, says, “Oh, merciful
heaven, what man? Never pull your
hat upon your brow,” he’s telling them “let your feelings out.” “Give sorrow words. The
grief that does not speak whispers the over-fraught heart and bids it break.”
Here is one of the amazing parts of these passages.
You will notice it takes McDuff a long time to really incorporate the
information he has had. The brain is just overloaded with it and cannot sort it out.
McDuff he says, “My children, too?”
Ross says, “Wife, children, servants, all that could be found.”
McDuff says, “I must go from hence,” then he stops and says, “My
wife killed, too?” and Ross says, “I have said so.”
And Malcolm, the other guy, says, “Be comforted.
Let’s make medicines of our great revenge so to cure this deadly
grief.” Then Macbeth roars with a
wonderful sentence, “He has no children.”
In other words, how are we going to get revenge on this guy?
He has no children. Then he
again goes back to “All my pretty ones? Did
you say all? O, hell-kite! All? What?
All my pretty ones? All my
pretty chickens and their dam, at one fell swoop?”
Malcolm says, “Dispute it like a man.”
Macduff says, “I shall do so but I must also feel it like a man.
I cannot but remember the things that were more precious to me.”
Then the great philosophical question of all time: “Did heaven look on
and would not take their part? How
could a just loving, all-knowing God watch something like that and could not
take their part?” And then he
says, “Sinful Macduff, they were all struck for thee” and he vows that
he’s going to “fell slaughter on their souls.
Heaven rests them now.” Malcolm
says, “Let your sword speak. Let
grief convert to anger. Blunt not
the heart.” Macduff ends the
mini-scene: “I could play the
woman, but gentle the heavens. Cut
short all intermission. Front to front, bring now this fiend of Scotland and
myself. Within my sword’s length
set him.” What he is doing at the
end of the scene is vowing to right this wrong, in a way.
The scene shows the tremendous poignancy of the loss, the difficulty we
have in incorporating a situation, the difficulty we have in really
understanding what lies behind a situation like we’ve all gone through on
September 11th.
There’s a wonderful line that I love from King Lear where
he’s howling out on the heath and he says, “What is there in nature that
makes these hard hearts?” Then it
kind of dribbles off and leaves that there, and finally you have the whole play
of Othello, with Iago who is almost the embodiment of evil.
People for four hundred years, great scholars, have been asking: what
motivates Iago? Well, he mentions various reasons throughout the play, but it
doesn’t seem like any of these reasons are at all sufficient and certainly not
very serious to the evil he does. Finally
Coleridge [who] lived about 150 years ago or so, wrote that it was motiveless
malignity; that there’s a strange evil that people can have, just a
viciousness, malignity that really is without motive.
So you have the situation that America is going through
right now, aside from the practical things that we’ll talk about, and you
really have tremendous questioning. I
think there’s a revival, as I say, of patriotism. I know there’s been a tremendous revival of feelings of
spirit, connection to religion, faith, trying to understand what this is and all
the kinds of questions that certainly Macduff and Lear tried to cope with.
What would I do on a practical basis seeing this kind of
situation? I would give you bits of
my perspective. Let me start off
with what I think are misconceptions in the current situation. I do not consider this as a manhunt. Certainly we want Osama bin Laden, but I don’t see the
whole exercise as revolving around one man or even one network at all.
Secondly, I don’t see this is as a legal proceeding, that we have to
have the evidence, that we have to show people convincingly our evidence, that
we have to have things that can be prosecuted.
I think we are in a situation of war and not of legal niceties or
justifications. Number three, I
think it is more harmful than helpful to talk about what the coalition
must do, or how the United States must act in a coalition.
This is not to say that other countries’ involvement is not important.
I think it is important, but unlike the Gulf War of ten-eleven
years ago there’s not going to be one coalition, and I don’t think
there should be. It think there
should be a whole series of coalitions, different countries supporting us in
different areas to different degrees from each other.
I think that from the United States’ point of view the coalitions
follow the mission, rather than the mission following the coalition.
I would never want a decision that we decide is right for us that is not
done because other members of the coalition object to it. I’ll be happy to give you details on that.
That was done in the Gulf War and I understood the reasons for it, but I
think this is a totally changed situation.
So what would I do? What
I would do is to look at the broad situation.
That is, we have two top priorities.
Number one is to eliminate the international terrorist network, and
number two is to eliminate weapons of mass destruction that are developing
around the world. Why do I include
the latter? Because they are the
ultimate terrorist weapon. I mean,
nuclear weapons, biological weapons, chemical weapons.
How do you go about doing this elimination of those two and how
universally to do it? That’s the
question and it gets to the big policy debate we’re having in Washington: how
particular do you make the attack on the network, or the man, or Afghanistan?
My inclination would be to go very broad.
By that I mean that I would go after international terrorist networks and
weapons of mass destruction that are hosted and supported by governments.
I would certainly have as a goal of U.S. foreign policy in
the coming months a regime change in Afghanistan, and I would have the goal of a
regime change in Iraq as well. I
would go after various sites in Sudan, Beka’a Valley and other places, but I
would think those two countries. Saddam
Hussein would be gone, and certainly the Taliban would be gone.
Now why do I have to go after those two?
Because in the past we have gone after individual terrorists after the
fact, but these terrorists swim in a sea out there.
They’re in lands that governments control; they have finances that
sometimes come from governments and certainly financial institutions that
governments provide. They may get
arms from governments. They are
hosted in a way by governments. What
you have to do is say, these terrorists themselves are willing to totally commit
suicide and in a kamikaze or World Trade Tower or Pentagon crashes that we’ve
seen. But the host governments,
I’m not so sure are willing to commit suicide.
I think they’d like to stay in power by and large.
I think if they realize that others lose power, if they continue
supporting international terrorists and weapons of mass destruction, there’s a
lesson there that will make it far more difficult to work around the world in
international terrorist networks. So,
I would go after them in an enormous way.
I also think
that, obviously, intelligence networks and the intelligence community need to be
changed. I, myself, still think we
need ballistic missile defense. You
know, we’ve talk about that since the Reagan administration with SDI and the
big debate the first few months of the Bush administration here and the
ballistic missile defense, and there are arguments on both sides but I think we
certainly need it. Probably now
more than ever. But the important
thing is to go after these targets in a very vigorous way militarily and, in my
point of view, the sooner the better. So
I would go soon and very hard against these sites.
What do I think is going to happen?
I think that as time goes on that obviously the Bush administration wants
to start out in a particular way, very careful about Pakistan, very careful
about the sensitivities of the region right there, would love a regime change in
Afghanistan, especially if it’s tied in some way to drying up or even
capturing the Osama bin Laden network there.
But I think that the big decision will be, after that stage is done,
whether to go as large and as hard as I would like it to do.
I can’t give you a guess. I
can give you the rationale I have for going on to Iraq, for example, for a
regime change right there.
Let me end and mention to you that when all is said and
done I believe that the United States is getting prepared to combat this kind of
war, and I think we are far more aware of the dangers in the world than we were
before September 11th. We’re
taking a lot more protective action than we were before September 11th.
I think that it is always better in life to face problems directly and to
start coping with them rather than to think we live in an ideal world where
things are going to go on and the United States is invulnerable and we don’t
have to care much about foreign affairs any more, and all we really have to care
about are relatively minor changes in domestic law or something like that, but
the big issues of history, the big issues of American security, have been over.
I think we’ve all learned that that is not the case and will not be the
case again for many years to come, if ever.
I think that facing our problems and getting on with this
task is a very helpful sign. I
believe that we are in a stronger position now than we were one month ago
because of the trauma, the shock, that we have had.
I believe in my heart of hearts that the United States is going to do
very well against this war on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.
I would leave you, before the questions, just with the interesting final paragraph of probably the greatest living military historian, John Keegan, who write The Faces of Battle and about ten [other] books. He’s British, used to be a professor at Sandhurst, and he has just got a book out called Fields of Battle: The Wars of North America, and he ends the book with this: “Americans are proficient at war in the same way that they are proficient with work. It is a task, sometimes a duty. Americans have worked at war since the 17th century to protect themselves from Indians, to win their independence from George III, to make themselves one country, to win the whole of their continent, to extinguish autocracy and dictatorship in the world outside. It is not their favorite form of work. Left to themselves, Americans build, cultivate, bridge, dam, canalize, invent, teach, manufacture, think, write, lock themselves in a struggle with eternal challenges that man has chosen to confront and with an intensity not known elsewhere on the globe. Bidden to make war their work, Americans shoulder the burden with intimidating purpose. There is, I have said, an American mystery, the nature of which I can only begin to perceive. If I were obliged to define it I would say it is the ethos, pervasive, unrelenting, of work as an end in and of itself. War is a form of work, and Americans make war, however reluctantly, however unwillingly, in a particularly workman-like way. I do not love war but I love America.”
That’s a nice way to end.