, followed by a recent event with kellyanne conway and a group of women lawmakers discussing the election and their own influence in politics. ♪ >> this week on q&a, journalist and professor mark danner talks about his career and latest book "spiral: trapped in the forever war," about the u.s. war on terrorism. mark danner, your book "spiral" means what? guest: spiral is a figure that talks about emotion, beginning at the center, going around and around and getting ever farther away from the original center, from the direction you are trying to go. it was, to me, this image of

spiral, circling, circling, never getting closer to the point, characterized very well our war on terror. it darted, it was intended to, like all wars, and itself, finish the job at hand, and the continued andit continued and continued endlessly, circling itself on and on. that figure occurred to me and i thought it was a rather vivid representation of what we have in doing for the last 15 years. host: how many wars have you actually seen up close? guest: that is a good question. i wrote about central american wars, but i was there afterwards. i covered the bosnian war, balkan wars, and the political violence in haiti, which was never a war, but fascinating, a series of coup d'etat is,

revolutions -- coup d'etats, revolutions and so on. and the iraq wars, depending on what you consider wars and whatnot. host: what is your attitude about war? guest: well, from my last book, which was called "stripping strippingody -- bare the body," the better to remove the clothing to place the stethoscope directly on the skin . in other words, political violence, including more, is a stript seems to me, to away the outside layers and see the various constituents of a society, struggling with one another. i have always found it a fascinating phenomenon.

i mean, on one hand, there is the sheer excitement of it, the adrenaline pumping excitement of following a violent series of events, the end of what she simply do not know -- of which you simply do not know, and the society you are trying to understand. it shows people and extremists, institutions and extremists, in general, people and other phenomena under stress. that is true in the war on terror as well, a lot has been exposed about this country that we perhaps would not have thought before was true, and it happens during wartime, so i think, apart from the visceral excitement itself, it lets you see inside of things in a way only a crisis can. a series of ask you questions about war. if you were an aid to woodrow

wilson before world war i and he do?" "mark, what should i , like i would like to say to think i would have said, "mr. president, even though it does not seem so at the moment, our oferests, and the interests the american people are directly involved in what happens in europe and the united states will have the greater degree of leverage at the beginning before things get very bad, and we should intervene. it is very much against our interests to have a grinding, terrible war on the continent. the best way for us to stay out is to try to prevent this conflict and do everything we can to prevent it. that i fear that i would not fear i wouldut i not have had that type of erceptiveness.

i did not think that was our war , engaged our national interests, which is pretty much what wilson thought when he theme president, so i think great challenge of the statesman is to be farseeing enough that you can see the country path interests at a time when they can be responsibly supported with a minimum amount of expenditure, blood, and treasure. and wilson was not in that position. tell him that,ot clearly, at the beginning of the first world war. clearly at thely beginning of the second, but it is mainly because of his experience as assistant secretary of the navy and secretary of the navy under wilson, so how do you get to the point of being farseeing enough? similarly with syria, the present conflict in syria, i

think, perhaps, possibly president obama may have made different decisions if he had seen how it has evolved. he would not admit that, i don't think, but it is possible. host: let me go to fdr. if you had been an aid to fdr in 1940, what would you have told him when winston churchill kept "aying, "we need you in this. that: churchill was right the united states was inevitably going to be drawn into this the american that public politically speaking was not ready for it to happen yet, so he had to take interim measures, some of which may well have been unconstitutional, to keep the united states, you know, to reinstitute the draft, do various things with the destroyers, the other things that he did to keep the united states in a position of would be, and so, it

ready when the time came, and of course, than the japanese, not only the japanese in their attack, but hitler's declaring war, which was a remarkable thing. it took the matter out of his hand. , withinink he actually the bounds of the politics of his time, carried things off pretty well, and i think he knew what he was -- you very much knew what he was doing, but the american public was not ready for another overseas engagement and the only thing that made them ready was this clear and present danger that the japanese attack represented. host: if you were an aid to lyndon johnson. i know we skipped over korea, an aid to lyndon johnson, he ran in 1964 and implied we would not send american voice to fight in vietnam even though we had some there, what would you have told him? would have for him,

"mr. president, if you do not believe you can win, if you don't believe this is a winning prospect, you should not do it. you should not hear the political repercussions of not .etting deeply involved this is not the loss of china, which is what really haunted johnson. he said to richard russell and a phone call that was tape recorded that they would impeach a president who ran out of there, wouldn't they? this is 1965. even though he was always pessimistic about what the results would be in vietnam, he never thought the u.s. would win, nor did his aides. he still got involved and i think that is of the first thing i would have said. you don't have to do this. the political damage of withdrawal, the handful of advisors will not be as great as you think. china,s not the loss of but if you do it, the key, if you do get involved, the key thing here, the key thing is a political task which you know better than anyone is to get the

american people involved, get them on board to persuade them of the importance of this issue. the reason why it is so important to send american young men to go and fight, and of course, johnson did not do that. he announced the escalation in 1965, mid 1965 at the end of a prep conference. he never gave a sober speech talking about the importance of vietnam and so on until we were very much involved, so i think i would have said "don't do it if you don't want to do it, but if you are going to do it, you better build the political support because it will be a long struggle. " there is a great book called "color of truth," about the bundy brothers, and one of the remarkable fact that emerges was an is that nobody optimist about the war at the top of the administration. i mean, they were not died in the world pessimist -- the wool

pessimists, but nobody could conceive of defeat, but they were not optimists. i think the reasons johnson got involved at the end of the day had to do with the difficulty of withdrawal. it was easier to go forward than it was to go back. i think that is part of the tragedy. host: do you ever face the draft ? guest: i did not host:. i was born in 1958. what -- in 1958. host: what would you have done if you were drafted? guest: i honestly don't know. i think about the role i would have played in college, where i was in the spectrum, i probably would have been involved in the antiwar movement, depending what year was and so on. so i think it is likely i would have either gone to jail or i like to think i would not have gone abroad or anything, but i think i might have gone to jail, but maybe i would have gone and fought. i honestly don't know.

and i was in college, the war that was going on with the i was veryr, and interested in that. i did a paper for stanley hoffman about the roots of the war and so on, and i thought the u.s. should not be involved in that. that was the after war, after vietnam, in a funny way, even though it was much farther away in time. but boy, that is a good question. i honestly do not know. i remember, as a child, because i then was pure it my father saying, "we should not be there, but if we are there, we ought to win." a lot of people thought "what are we doing there?" military force is one of the american public very often gets impatient about it because they really believe they have this trump card, this great military that can defeat anyone, but it is not true. it is an extraordinary military, very powerful, but can only win in certain situations, and it

can only really destroy things. it cannot build a new order in its place, so i think we demand of our military a lot of things a military cannot really accomplish and we get very frustrated when it does not. host: we did kind of a nasty thing from time to time and that is show video from years ago. your first appearance on c-span ,as in 1985 on a call in show and i want to show you the mark danner of 1985. what i'm worried about right now is other countries that are coming of age in the nuclear ra that are not negotiating with one another and terrorism, for-- instance, is great today, and what about them guys? >> we have done a lot better than anyone could have thought

in limiting the number of nations that have nuclear weapons. i think it was president kennedy who said in 1963 that by this time, by 1980, there would be 20 nations that had nuclear arsenals. that has not happened. there are now seven or eight, but there are bound to be more, and we just have to do our best to limit them. [laughter] guest: thank you for that. host: what is the update? nuclear weaponry. what has happened in your opinion -- how has that changed? guest: that was in the 80's when there was an enormous amount of attention paid to that. ronald reagan had given speeches about the evil empire and so on, and there was a nuclear freeze movement, so there was strong popular fear an interest in the nuclear issue, and it is remarkable now to me, having grown up with this prospect of

nuclear weapons and nuclear attack as very real during the cold war, how they have receded as an issue. has doneresident obama pretty well on his beginning, at least, when he got into office, and decided to start two agreements, which pretty genetically limited new -- dramatically limited nuclear weapons. he made a speech in which the goal was elimination. he has not made much progress along that line. i would have hoped there would have been another treaty by now, and he has been embarking on a pathy extremely expensive to modernize nuclear weapons, which i frankly think is the wrong way to go. it seems to me they should be limiting them more, i one leg of the triad, the most destabilizing

should go, we should get rid of them and just have submarines and bombers, i think, and the numbers should continue to go down until you reach a stability in the mid hundreds or so, but the interesting thing is that .his is not a vivid issue you can have a presidential candidate who does not even know what the triad is, and to think this would have been impossible 15 years ago or 30 years ago, so ascontinue to live with them if the threat is gone. the other thing i was obama had obama haded -- i wish accomplished was a policy of no bundyuse, which mcgeorge and robert mcnamara, george cannon, called for in the 80's and would have said "we will only use nuclear weapons if they are first used against us," and that is not the u.s. policy now.

it remains that in certain situations after conventional attack, the u.s. would respond with nuclear weapons, which i think is the wrong policy. guest: -- host: where did you grow up? guest: northern new york state. , general was a dentist practitioner dentist. my mother was a schoolteacher -- still with us, think progress, and she was a schoolteacher. she -- thank goodness, and she was a schoolteacher. we went to the library most evenings to take out books and it was a very happy time of my life, happy upbringing. host: what was their politics? guest: i would say they were both democrats. my father was more of an fdr democrat, but his favorite president was truman. he got considerably more conservative as he got older. he was a big hundred and the

first amendment issue, i think, tended to make him more conservative. my mother remains a kind of fdr democrat, i would say. host: brothers and sisters? guest: i grew up with three sisters. i now have a sister who is a court reporter in santa fe, new mexico. was the news director of a radio station for in jackson, wyoming, so the family has kind of moved to the west. i partly live in california. host: how much of a pacifist are you? guest: i would not describe myself as a pacifist. i think i probably would call myself more of a realist, i think that u.s. power should be used fairly abstemious

ly to protect the country. i think, very often, we get our attemptcrossed and we to use military power in ways that it is not effective. i would not call myself a pacifist. became, covering the balkan wars, and interventionist when it came to bosnia. seizeght that sees -- should be lifted. this was a critical moment in american history after the cold war when the question of what you do with this, what are u.s. responsibilities around the world? going on, doess the united states have a responsibility to do some the about it or does the u.s. and lee act when it is vital -- when interests are affected? when it came to the question of involvement in bosnia, i really believed we had to do something

because of the masculine going on. for: you would be working jerry ford and maybe jimmy the pol pot, 2 million people slaughtered in cambodia was an issue, and we've just finished the vietnam war, and jerry ford said to you, "what should i do?" guest: that is a really hard question. matters thattical you have to look -- there are practical matters you have to look at first when you look at that particular genocide, essentially what it was, the fact is, the u.s. had reports of a lot of killing, but the country itself with isolated. you only had a few people getting out, very few. we knew or was things were going on, but i don't think we knew about the destruction by any means. -- we knew that there were

things going on, but i don't think we knew about the destruction by any means. we should not recognize them at the u.n. you know, we should direct the of the globeium against this particular regime. i don't know that the problem could have been solved with military force at the time. there was no domestic support to do that. eventually, the vietnamese invaded, and they ended it. we continued to recognize diplomatically the pol pot government, which is completely horrible. that is one of those situations where there was not a good option. speaking,olitically there was no military option. you would have had to, i don't know what you could have done militarily apart from bomb, which of course, we had done a great deal of already, which helped cause the installation.

the victim of the time your rouge. -- the khymer rouge. said, "mark danner, what should i do?" guest: i'm on record about that. , a seriesr comments of comments at the front of the magazine and i think most of mym were outside anyway, view was that bush's initial , a boycott, which was wilson's original idea, who we started with, i thought that was the way to go. war war, the post-cold the first major conflict and we

have this first major conflict with a country that relies, for its entire life, on one export, oil. oil, we canop the nonviolently strangle the country enforce them -- if we have a little bit of patience -- to withdraw from kuwait. that theyy position, went, they use military force much earlier than they needed to. in the event, of course, as always, it depends on how long your view is, but in the immediate term, it was a highly successful war. in the longer term, it left saddam in power and led to the second iraq war. imagine if six or eight months later they actually withdrew without a war. i think that would have been a huge victory for the international system, and for what george h.w. bush had called "the new world order."

that was wilson's vision, boycott. you don't always need to fight. we can get this international organization that can boycott and evildoer, boycott an aggressor, and choke off the lifeblood and cause the end of the regime without resorting to warfare. i think that was then a remarkable opportunity to do that, but he did not take it. host: had you worked for bill clinton when he was president "rwanda looks bad right now, and they are going to slaughter each other," what should we have done their? e?"st: again, -- done ther there are an, thei few practical concerns. it happened very quickly, 75 days, but in fact, the u.s. not

only did not intervene, we prevented the canadians from intervening. we essentially prevented anyone else from intervening, and i would have acted differently. i think i would have intervened. probably, with the special forces force, a relatively small number of troops taking control .f the capital again, it is only a superpower that does not do something like that because of somalia. somalia has nothing to do with rwanda, but because the united case had had the black hawk down incident, nobody wanted to get involved in rwanda, that i would have intervened in that sense and he would have saved hundreds of thousands of people. i mean, 750,000 is the conventional number now that i thought to have died, and even though it happened very quickly, i think if you had gotten in with special forces, 82nd airborne, you would not have had to occupy the entire country. but the military would have hated it. the military hates missions like

this because what is the exit strategy? what are we doing? but i think that it's a good example of a situation where the united states was bound to act, to prevent huge loss of life. host: when is it worth losing american lives? again, a very difficult question. i think, you know, if you are using the military at all in a situation of violence like that, like rwanda, the president has to be in the position to say "this is worth losing american lives," because american lives are certainly going to be lost. i think the u.s. would have been able to get control of that situation quite quickly, but you have to be willing to say that this is worth the expenditure of american lives. i think, in general, you want the answer to that question to be in the great majority of cases, only when u.s. final interests are at stake, but the

problem with that is -- that is the realist litany, catechism -- but the problem with that is you can have disagreements with that vital interest. vital interests are tied up with other things. even george h.w. bush, our great realist president before obama, iraq, he did in even thoughoil," james baker said "jobs, jobs, said" george h.w. bush "this man is worse than hiller. this aggression will not stand." he stood on international principle. that was a case that had both oil, instability in the middle east, stopping of aggression, and to some degree, an idealistic side as well, although i said, you know, i think it would have been better to wait a little while and see if we could have accomplished it without going to war.

host: you wrote for the new york review books from time to time. it you worked at new york times magazine. when did you decide to start teaching, where do you teach, and what you teach? -- do you teach? guest: i was writing pieces about the bosnian war, the balkan war, and i had just gotten back from bosnia. i was in fort wayne, indiana, where my girlfriend then lived and i was writing pieces there and one day, the phone rang and it was orville schell, the writer i knew from the new yorker who had been named the dean of the graduate school of journalism at berkeley. he called me out of the blue and that "i would like you to come to tear," and i said come -- to i'm teach here," and i said not interested, i'm writing this

book. catherine, my then girlfriend, was walking by the room at the time, and she said "who is that?" and she said "are you crazy, what if you just try it? it will be wonderful." that is why i ended up going and i taught my first class was a coups, andlled "wars, revolutions," and it was writing about violent political change. it is an amazing thing. you spent the last 20 odd years about things, going around, and you don't know many things to you have just been traveling around, writing, and then you sit down and you have a table of very smart the students, and you start to talk, and you suddenly realize, "actually, i know a lot about this subject, i have been covering it for a long time," and i was amazed by how much i

enjoyed teaching. a lot of writers teach to earn a living, and for other reasons, but there is really nothing like a seminar that really starts to , in which people are arguing, people are taking issue. this issue of idealism and realism, why we intervene, you get 12 smart berkeley undergraduates or graduate students sitting around the table who have read eight of the same books, so for the last eight weeks, about intervention, you can really learn something. i think the thing i like most about teaching if i find myself learning immense amount all the time, and i teach both at the university of california berkeley and at bard college, where i am this fall and in both onces, i give one course politics. this semester, the course on politics is called "seeing the twilight war," about our ongoing war on terror, one seminar.

the other one is called "writing darkness,"writing about prison camps, concentration camps, the narrative of a slave, frederick skiglas, destroy a dostoevsky, the type of literature that has been produced in those kind of conditions of captivity and the reason i am giving that course is because i have been interested in it, and what a wonderful thing to be paid to gather a dozen smart 20-year-olds around, all read the same thing, and debated. i have given class -- debate it. i have given classes with the

,oet bob quast, dostoevsky chekov, i had a wonderful time. host: bard is located where? guest: annandale on hudson, hudson river valley, near reich with, that area, -- near r ycliffe. aide tou are now an george w. bush. it is 2001, 9/11, he says "mark danner, what should i do?" 11, 2001, happens. "mr.: i would have said president, this has been a huge shock. everyone who works for you, everyone who supports you, understands what a shock this has been. 3000 americans have never been killed in an attack on our soil before, and we all feel great

pain about it. we feel guilt that we let it happen, but the important thing now is to respond intelligently, to respond in a way that is going to limit the chance of our being attacked again, and secondarily, but very importantly, is going to limit the number of jihadists there are in the world. what we don't want to do is respond in a way that will produce more of these militants, more of these militant organizations. they want us to overreact. they want us to occupy muslim countries so they can build their recruitment. they want us to torture people. they want us to do things that it is going to allow them to make their case against us. what we have to do is treat them like they are, 1000 riders and militants in the mountains of afghanistan. we have to go in and get them, destroy that organization. we can do it with our special

forces. we can do it with our highly trained troops. we can do it with limited use of air power, but we have to be discreet. we have to be directed. we have to go against our enemies in such a way that we al numberminimum numberlians, -- minimal of civilians, give them the minimum case against us. they want to get us to occupy afghanistan and have that become a quagmire where they can destroy us as they destroyed the soviet union before us, and so, we need to have a discrete lethal response and at the same time, we need to strengthen our relationships with muslim countries, moderate muslim countries. we have to realize that our enemy is extremism, extreme jihadist him. we have to -- jihadism. we have to do everything we can both to destroy our enemy and to prevent it from growing. because the wrong response will

help them, and they have attacked us to elicit precisely that wrong response. they have it in their minds that they are provoking us. this is the strategy of provocation and we have to keep in our mind what they want us to do and not do it." that is what i would say. host: did you write that before the war started? guest: i did not. i did a piece for the times op-ed page that said a little of that, that our response has to be discreet. formednot quite as fully , and what i said was enriched by monday morning quarterback news, no doubt about it. there is a lot we can talk about there, that i want to move to president obama, whose time is almost up in the white house. this is from january the 22nd, two days after he was

inaugurated, 2009, i want your reaction. 30 seconds. we are not, as i said in the inauguration, going to continue with a false choice between our safety and our ideals. we think that it is precisely our ideals that give us the strength and moral high ground to be able to effectively deal violenceunthinking that we see emanating from tourist organizations around the world. we intend to win this fight and we will win it on our terms. terrorist organizations around the world. we intend to win this fight and we will win it on our own terms. guest: prohibiting torture, ordering that guantanamo would be closed within a year, ordering that a study of

interrogation techniques, among other things. that was a single moment i remember vividly watching that live, probably on c-span, actually, and thinking "my god, he is really doing this, and he is giving it the kind of prominence it deserves." i think that was an extremely important moment, but it is important for what it does, what it did at the time, but it is also important to look back on it and realize that a lot of the things he was pointing to, he did not really achieve. i mean, guantanamo is one example, at least the difficulties of guantanamo, put it that way, that congress has reacted against him, or did react against him when it came to closing guantanamo, and would not give him a free hand in the opening days and years of his administration, and there's also the fact that he prohibited torture, which, as i described in spiral, is a very strange

word. could the president one should think, prohibit murder? the president could not prohibit murder because murder is against the law, so congress has prohibited murder. similarly, torture is against the law. congress has prohibited torture, title 18. it is against the law already. when the president prohibit torture, it tells you something. they told you that it has gone from an issue of law to a issue a policy. when mitt romney was running in 2012, it was leaked in october of 2012 that if inaugurated, he would reinstitute enhanced interrogation techniques. in the 2016 campaign, there has been a lot of talk about torture torture,nstituting so one of the changes that have happened in our countries and an 11 is about torture went from

torture 2011 is that went from being something that was anathema to being a policy choice, and he was not able to change that. you could ask how he could have a truthit, establishing commission, perhaps, having some kind of a official condemnation of what had happened. he could have gone a different route, but i think during the war on terror, as we still are, that was politically extremely difficult and perhaps impossible, so that clip, i moved boy, i feel watching it because it was a critical moment in american history. that moment, george w. bush's moment when he gave a speech from the white house about torture, critical moment in american history, and i look out that, and i think he wanted to do much of what i wrote about in

that book, i think. there is a significant part of president obama that wanted to end the war on terror. "this war must end." but he found himself unable to do it, not only because of the actions of our enemies come about because of the actions of our government itself in the policy that had preceded him. host: why do you use that quote on the front page of part two of your book? obama normalizing the exception? atrns out i was really good killing people. it did not know that would be a strong suit of mine." guest: president obama said that during a meeting. clemens' ed in dan book. he was talking about the drone program, in which people, mostly on the other side of the world in afghanistan, pakistan, yemen,

somalia, are killed remotely using these unmanned vehicles , has been these signal expansion of his presidency. it was used under george w. bush, but not extensively. under obama's presidency, the numbers are in thousands. we probably all 4000 people, something like that, using drones, and i think the questions why he used that as a quotation is because i think his own position with respect to the war and the policies he has implemented when it comes to the ironic one.ewhat he thinks he gave a speech at the national defense university in which he essentially said "we we cannot be in a state of perpetual war. we have to end this war." it was a very eloquent speech and we think, "you are the president, why can't you end it?" there is a certain sad irony in

what he says about some of his policies. i think there is an irony in the know, he will be leaving office with troops in iraq and afghanistan. excuse me. host: i think that statement -- i think that statement is part of that irony. like, who would have thought this? and i think he felt himself forced into it, that -- excuse me -- he got into office and he wanted to end the big wars, and the iraq war, and the afghan war , even though he expanded it when he first went into office, but his goal was to end the big shooting wars and develop what we now call the light footprint, which is the use of drugs, the use of special forces operatives on raids, and this study low-level war that is going on in a half-dozen countries around the world, that the united

states is propagating, and it does not get a lot of headlines, it is not a big little issue, not something you campaign on, but it is going on, and it is very relevant, it seems to me, to our national discussion, and it is relevant when you talk about him, because i do not think he would have predicted he would have been in this position at the end of his presidency. host: one of the footnotes in your books suggests that osama bin laden wanted to bring this country to bankruptcy. first of all, should we have killed osama bin laden? osama bin laden, would you feel like you had accomplished what you wanted? guest: the answer to the first question i think is yes. i do not particularly like the phrase "we brought him to justice" because i think when you bring somebody to justice and the american system, you try them and so on. i don't like hearing it

described that way, but i think under the circumstances, the raid, which killed him, was justified. i think there would have been advantages to capturing him, but i do not think it was possible, and they do not think the seals -- that was part of their mission. i think they were going there to kill him. so, yeah. i think that was justified, but the second part of the question -- host: i will ask you another one similar to it. guest: the one you just asked was interesting, but i'm -- kind of lost it. what gradee interim, is president obama deserve based on what he promised he would do when it came to wars and all of that? what kind of grade would you give him after eight years? from your perspective? plus, i would say c maybe. i would say things developed in a way she did not expect -- he

did not expect. i think that, my view is that it would have very much been in american interests to limit this war and there is a self-perpetuating quality to it. we have essentially adopted tactics in place of a strategy. a tactic is a drone attack. you say "here is this organization in afghanistan, if i kill the head of this organization, it is called the strategy of the capitation -- strategy of decapitation. they will be knocked backward and fight about leadership so they cannot plan an attack against us, so let's kill him." two months later, you do that again. what you're constantly doing is bringing up younger members, who are often more militant and angrier, number two, you are killing civilians, which means politically speaking, you are helping them.

number three, you are not adopting a strategy that is going to reduce the numbers in these groups. you are, in effect, helping them politically. so, the israelis have a name for this kind of strategy, which they use in gaza. they call it "mowing the grass." the grass grows up, you mother grass. you are not uprooting the grass. it is always going to be there. i think we have adopted this of havingctic in lieu a broader strategy to try to lessen the flow of young men into these jihadist organizations. host: that second question was whether or not you were osama wouldden and still alive, you have thought your compass what he set out to do? guest: imagine a osama bin laden on the day after 9/11, 2001. and you were sitting there, having tea with him, and you said "you know, i have a

vision of 15 years from now, and 15 years from now, the situation all be the following -- qaeda will still exist, be larger, be this worldwide arrorist network with presence and recruiting and all the rest of it, but there will be a second worldwide terror erroristwork -- trer networks, the islamic state, which will govern a population the size of new zealand, and we will call -- and it will call itself the new caliphate, so you will have the two large organizations all over the world and many other jihadist organizations, and the caliphate , and you have five countries, or four countries in the middle east that are in chaos, targets of opportunities -- of our

opportunity. yemen, syria, iraq. i mean, think of that. somalia will be going to hell. we will have all of these opportunities were the united states will try to hold its own as a status quo power, but we've will be on the attack. what do you think of that vision, osama, 15 years from now? " i think he would be happy with that. from their point of view, a great deal of progress. they have a lot of setbacks as if youut the fact is, would describe a point of view to an american official the day after september 11, i think there would have been added knowledge meant that this is not what we want -- an acknowledgment that this is not what we want to achieve. what is in 15 years, there had been no major attacks on american soil, no mass casualty attacks at all? smaller lone wolf attacks, which

were very tragic and terrible, but in general, the country was much more secure and though terrorism had increased dramatically around the globe, it has, has, -- which in the united states, we are relatively safe after 15 years. would you take it? true that many officials after september 11 for have taken that because they thought that this was the beginning of an age of terrorism in which a lot of people would be killed. host: there have been about 11 people killed -- americans in afghanistan -- and 11 killed in iraq. if you were the parents of one of those 11, would it be worth as being in either one of those places now? guest: that, i think, is an agonizing question. agonizing question. host: we are not paying a whole

lot of attention to either situation. guest: i was going to say that. it is amazing the way the attack on those old -- on mosul has been covered as if the united states is not directly involved. there are american forces, 5000 americans in iraq right now. there is 11,000 afghanistan -- measure the exact number. i have young -- children and the notion of losing a child in the conflict butlf is agonizing to me, to lose someone in a conflict like this when people are not even paying attention and when it seems like something very far from american concerns, i think would be very, very, very painful. i think it probably would not seem worth it. i think one has to tell oneself that, you know, my son or daughter was there fighting for

something they believe in, and , but its was meaningful just strikes me as extremely, extremely painful. host: we are right between but a president in the time period cause you into the oval office and says "mark danner, what should i do about drones?" guest: i would say, "mr. president, use and less. -- use them less. realize that the decapitation strategy has its own downsides. they should be used in situations in which there really is -- we really do know about an eminent attack being planned. theoretically, that is when they are used, but they are now using elongated eminence, which would seem to contradict the idea of

eminence. i would say they should not be the basis of our strategy in yemen, in pakistan, in afghanistan. when we killed the leader of the taliban, did we know who was going to replace him? the answer to that is no, we did not. we simply thought this would wrong foot them for a certain amount of time. in fact, that death they have been against american interests rather than for it. a, mr. president, we want to deterrence. they have no vision of their own self, but you can develop a strategy of deterrence. the basis of the strategy must be, if you are not attacking our interests or our homeland directly, we will not attack you directly, and that is not the whole policy, needless to say, but you have to start giving jihadist groups and interest in not attacking the united states

and to realize you can have jihadist groups that do not necessarily have as a policy directive attacks on the foreign enemy, which is the united states, rather than the near enemy, muslim enemies in cairo and so on." host: what is your attitude about your classes? you have 20-year-old at bard or uc berkeley. do you have a requirement to give them both sides? of an argument? guest: i certainly have a , and to me,uirement you know, i often will have debates in the class. "should we have tortured?" for example. i'm always delighted by the fact that the people on the pro-torture side tend to seem to win in the class, which i actually had a debate like that once teaching -- bard has a

program in jerusalem, east arusalem, and i want had debate like that with palestinian students. when the pro-torture side -- even other class unanimously rejected torture -- the the debate.side won when it comes to policies i disagree with, these policies, one of the bewildering things, interesting things about these policies, is they were almost universally put in place by very smart people who had the best interests of their country at heart. this was true with policy after 9/11. the question i like to ask is "why did they choose to do this?" particularly with some things that seem to be misconceived. the iraq war is a good example of that. iere was a certain vision --

mean, as you know, i was opposed to the iraq war before it. i covered it. there was a vision about reordering the middle east that was thought to be an answer to the political roots of terrorism, jihad is him. if we can reorder the middle east, produce representative government, it destroys old thisracies, we can end broader threat. for everything you can say about it was aas against it, catastrophe for american policy, among other things -- but for everything you can say about it, it did attempt to cool front the political -- confront the political roots of jihadist them. jihadism. iet -- tried to get my students to understand it. i wanted them to understand why certain american policies have come to be. we had a discussion about the carter doctrine, which is really the beginning of american

military policy in the middle east in 1980. they had not heard of the central command and where this all came from, so i generally find when you get into these issues that are matters of debate amongst themselves and show how complicated they are, and this higher level of complexity, that they respond very positively to that, but you have to show both sides, i think. host: all of the people we have talked about, leaders, presidents, if you had to put somebody at the top of the list who dealt, from your perspective, in a way, when it came to war, that you thought was the right way to go, who would you name? [laughter] guest: of the people we have talked about -- host: it doesn't have to be just that. in your studying of this country and all of that stuff, who would you put up the top who has done the best under the circumstances?

boy, god bless my father, may he rest in peace, i'm going truman,ruman, because given the situation he was faced with at the beginning of the cold war, he put in place institutions that were lasting and that were designed to safeguard american interests in the broadest sense, which is to say, to bring in american allies, to create and solidify a alliances,- solidify who show that aggressive tendencies would not necessarily lead to war. he was a great institution builder. his administration was. having said that, he promulgated the truman doctrine, which essentially was an ideological clarion call.

george cannon, the father of containment, hated the truman doctrine because he thought it would put politicians, it would limit their flexibility. that was, this is what happened. the fall we talked about, the fall of china, and how it haunted lyndon johnson, and he felt the fall of saigon would limit him. we are called on to defend freedom wherever it is certain -- it is threatened. that is much more broadly ideological and capricious than it should have been. it should have been tailored to american interests. he, in building institutions, he was an admirable figure. having said that, he began the there are many downsides to his policy as well. i think fdr was a very effective president as well, obviously, in fighting the second world war.

i am cognizant of the fact i am talking about people from 60 or 70 years ago and i wish i could come up with somebody more recent. a statement of more recent vintage. i think james baker was a very able statesman, actually. disorder smart and very keen to protect american interests -- sort of smart, and very keen to protect american interests. in basketball, you know how sometimes the commentator will say "good no foul on the official part," that it was smart the official did not call foul. there was a sense in which george h.w. bush did things that prevented catastrophe that might have happened at the end of the cold war, so in a sense, these were negative achievements, dogs

that did not bark, and i think he will go down as better than we now think of him. host: our guest is mark danner, a professor at uc berkeley and d, grew up in utica, new york. harvard graduate. we thank you. your book is called "spiral: trapped in the forever war." thank you very much for joining us. guest: my pleasure. glad to be here. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2016] >> for free transcripts or to give us your comments, visit us at q&a.org. they are also available as c-span podcasts.

announcer: if you enjoyed this week's q&a, here are others you might like. retired general talks about his book about the iraq and afghanistan wars. burns talks about covering military efforts in iraq and afghanistan. former defense secretary donald rumsfeld on his book, known and unknown. you can watch these anytime online and search our entire video library at www.c-span.org. sunday, january 1, in-depth will feature a live discussion on the presidency of barack obama. we're taking her phone calls, tweets, emails and face the question spirit our panel includes --