from the original center and from the direction you're trying to go. so to me it was this image of spiral, circling, circling, never getting closer to the point, characterized very well our war on terror, that it started and was intended to, like all wars, end itself, somehow finish the job at hand d the violence and its act that continued on and on and that i thought was a vivid representation for what we've been doing now the last 15 years. >> how many wars have you actually seen up close? mark: that's a good question. i wrote about central american wars but i was there afterwards. i covered the bosnian war, the ball kahn war -- the balkan wars which were several wars and the political violence in

haiti though it never was a war was fascinating series of coup d'etats and revolutions and so on. and then the iraq war which itself was kind of several different wars, so i don't know what that number would be, three, four. depending what you consider wars and whatnot. >> and another question, what is your attitude about war? mark: well, from my last book which was called stripping bear the body, i based that title on a quotation by a haitian politician, fascinating man, who said political violence is like stripping bear the body, the better to remove the clothing to place the stethoscope directly on the skin. nerd, political violence including war is a way, it seems to me to see a society with clarity, to strip away the outside layers and see the various constituents of a society struggling with one

another. so i've always found it a fascinating phenomenon. i mean, on the one hand, there's the sheer excitement of it, the adrenaline pumping excitement of following a violent series of events, the end of which you simply don't know. and then there's what it shows about the society you're trying to understand. it shows people and tremendousists, it shows institutions and extremists and shows in general people and other phenomenon under stress and that's i think true in the u.s. on the war on terror as well, that a lot has been exposed about this country that we perhaps would not have hought 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 that only we can.

>> let me ask you a series of questions about war. if you were an aid to woodrow wilson before world war i and e said mark, what should i do, what would you have told him? mark: that's a wonderful uestion. >> i wish i would have said, though it doesn't seem so at the moment the interest of the american people are directly involved on what happens in europe and the united states will have the greatest degree of leverage at the beginning before things get very bad and we should intervene and very much against our interest to have a combrinding, terrible ar on the continent. and the best way to stay out is o prevent this conflict. i fear we would not have had

the perceptiveness. at the beginning of those wars i was firmly against the united intervening and didn't engage our national interest which is pretty much what wilson thought when he became president. the great challenge of a statesman is to be far seeing enough to see the country's interest at a time we can be sponsibly supported with a minimum amount of expenditure, blood and treasure. wilson was not in that position. his aids didn't tell him that clearly at the beginning of the first world war. f.d.r. saw it clearly but mainly because of his experience at assistant secretary of the navy and secretary of the navy under wilson. so how do you get to the point of being far seeing enough?

similarly with syria, the present conflict in syria, i think perhaps possibly president obama might have made different decisions if he'd seen how it would -- how it has evolved. he wouldn't admit that, i don't think but it's possible. brian: if you had been an aide to f.d.r. in 1940, what would you have told him when winston churchill kept saying we need you in this, we need you in this? mark: i think f.d.r. essentially had it right. his perception was churchill was right, that the united states was inevitably going to be drawn into this conflict but that the american public, litically speaking, wasn't 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 -- to reinstitute the draft, to do various things with the destroyers, the other

things that he did to keep the united states in a position of influence, and so it would be ready when the time came. of course then the japanese -- not only the japanese in their attack but hitler in declaring war which was a remarkable thing, he didn't need to declare war on the united states but he did, took the matter out of his hands. but i think he actually -- within the bounds of the politics of his time carried things off pretty well. and i think he knew -- he very much knew what he was doing, that the american public wasn't ready for another overseas engagement, and the only thing that made them ready was this clear and present danger that the japanese attack represented. brian: if you were an aide to lyndon johnson, i know we skipped over korea, but if you're an aide to lyndon johnson, you ran in 1964, implied we weren't going to send american boys to fight in vietnam even though we had some there, what would you have told

him? mark: i would have told him, mr. president, if you don't believe you can win, if you don't believe this is a winning prospect, you shouldn't do it. you shouldn't fear the political repercussions of not getting more deeply involved and of withdrawing. this is not the loss of china which is what really haunted johnson. in a d to richard russell phone call tape recorded they would impeach a president that ran out of there, this was 1965, he was pessimistic of what the results would be in vietnam. he never thought the u.s. would win, nor did his aides. he still got involved. i think that's the first i think i would have said, you don't have to do this, the political withdraw, the handful of advisors won't be as great as you think, it's not the loss in china, but if you do it if

you do get involved, the key thing is a political task which you know better than anyone which is to get the american people involved, get them onboard to persuade them of the importance of this issue, the reason why it's so important to send american young men to fight, and of course johnson did not do that. he announced the escalation in mid 1965 at the end of a press conference. he never gave a sober speech talking about the importance of vietnam until we were very much involved. i think i would have said don't do it if you don't want to do it but if you're going to for it, you better build the political support because it is going to be a long struggle. and you know, the amazing thing, there's a great book by cly bird called "the color of truth" about the bundy brothers and one of the remarkable facts that emerges from it is really that nobody was an optimist about the war at the top of the

administration. they weren't died in the wool pessimists but nobody thought it would be a quicken gaugement, would be easy to win. they couldn't conceive of defeat. but that the united states would be defeated but they weren't optimists. and i think the reasons johnson got involved at the end of the day had to do with the difficulty of withdrawal, that is that it was easier to go forward than it was to go back. and i think that's part of the tragedy. brian: did you ever face the draft? mark: i didn't. i was born in 1958. brian: what would you have done if drafted, do you think? mark: i honestly don't know. you know, when i think about the sort of role i played in college and where i was in the spectrum, i probably would have been involved in the anti-war movement, depending what year it was and so on. so i think it's likely i would have either gone to jail or i'd like to think i wouldn't have

gone abroad or anything but i think i might have gone to jail or maybe i would have gone and fought. i honestly don't know. when i was in college the war going on was the salvador war and i was very interested in that. i did a paper for stanley hoffman about, you know, the roots of the war and so on. i thought the u.s. shouldn't be involved in that and even though it was farther away in time. it's a good question. i honestly don't know. i remember as a child as i then was, my father saying we shouldn't be there but if we're going to be there we ought to win and get out. a lot of people thought that. what are we doing there? but there wasn't -- military force is one of the things i think 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.

anyone. >> it's not true it's an extraordinary military and very powerful but can only win in certain situations. and it can only really destroy things. it can't build a new order in its place. your first experience was in a call-in show of 1985 and i want to show it to you 35 years ago. mark: what i'm worried about right now is other countries coming of age in the nuclear weapon area that aren't negotiating with one another and could possibly, terrorism, for instance, is as great today and what about them guys?

mark: we've done a lot better than anyone could have thought in limiting the number of nations that have nuclear queps. it was president kennedy who said in 1963 that by this time -- or by 1980 that there would be 20 nations that had nuclear arsenals. that hasn't 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. [video end] brian: what's the update 31 years now in nuclear weaponry. how has it changed? mark: that was during the mid 1980's when there was an enormous amount of attention to the nuclear issue in part because ronald reagan had gotten into office and given the speeches about the evil empire and so on. there was a nuclear freeze movement and so it was popular,

a strong popular fear and interest in the nuclear issue. and it's remarkable now to me, having grown up with this prospect of nuclear weapons and nuclear tact as very real during the cold war how they've receded as an issue. i think president obama, to go back to your question, has done beginning at his least when he got in office and signed two agreements which pretty dramatically limited nuclear weapons. he made the speech in prague which he suggested the goal was elimination. he hasn't made much progress along that line. i would have hoped there would have been another treaty by now and he hasn't and in fact they're embarking on a preextremely expensive path to modernize nuclear weapons which i think frankly is a the wrong way to go and they should be limiting them more and should e eliminating the -- one leg

of the triad, the land-based part of the triad which is the most destabilizing should go and should just get rid of them and have just 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 it's not a vivid issue and you can have a presidential candidate who doesn't know what the triad is and to think this would have been impossible 15 years ago or certainly 30 years ago, so we continue to live ith them as if the threat is gone. the other thing i wish obama had accomplished was a policy of no first use which george bundy and robert mcnamara and other writers, george kennan called for in the mid 1980's and would have said we'll only

use nuclear weapons if they're first used against us and that is not the u.s. policy now. the u.s. policy remains that in certain situations after conventional attack, the u.s. would respond with nuclear weapons which i think is the wrong policy. brian: where did you grow up? mark: in utica, new york, northern new york state. brian: your parents did what? mark: my father was a general practitioner dentist. my mother is still with us, thank goodness, and was a school teacher. she taught spanish and both parents were huge readers. we went to the lie rather most evenings to -- the library most evenings to take out books and was a very happy, happy time in my life, happy upbringing. brian: what was their politics? mark: i'd say they were both democrats. my father was more of an f.d.r. democrat. his favorite president, though, was truman.

and i'd say he got considerably more conservative as he got older. he was a big hunter and the first amendment issue i think tended to make him more conservative. my mother remains kind of an f.d.r. democrat, i would say. brian: brothers and sisters? mark: grew up with three sisters. i now have a sister who is a court reporter in santa fe, new mexico. second sister was the news director of a radio station for a long time in jackson, wyoming. so the family has kind of moved to the west. i probably live in california now, too. brian: how much of a pass fist are you? -- a pacifist are you? mark: i think i call myself more of a realist, meaning i think that u.s. power should be ubseniuously and

when i say power, military power to protect the country and very often we get our motives crossed and we attempt, as i said a few minutes ago, to use military power in ways that it isn't effective. so i wouldn't call myself a pacifist. in covering the balkan wars i certainly was an interventionist when it came to bosnia. i thought that siege of share airo should be lifted and america had the air pow tore do it and this was a critical moment in american history after the cold war when the question was, what do you do with this -- what are u.s. responsibilities around the world, if a genocide is going on, does the united states have a responsibility to do something about it or does the u.s. simply act when its vital interests are somehow affected? i guess when it comes to that question, a realist would say

only vital interests and when it came to the question of involvement in bosnia, i really believe we had to do something because of the mass killing going on. brian: if you were with jerry ford -- no, you would be working for -- yeah, jerry ford the ybe jimmy carter and palpot -- two million people slaughtered in cambodia was an issue and we finished the war in 1975 and jimmy carter said to you, what should i do? mark: that's a really hard question. there are practical matters you have to look at first. when you look at that particular genocide, that's really what it was, the fact is the u.s. had reports of a lot of killing but the country itself was isolated. you only had a few people getting out, very few. we knew horrible things were going on. i don't think we knew about the scale of the destruction by any

means. i think i would have probably told the president we should be denouncing what's going on, question should -- we should not recognize them at the u.n. we should direct the moral aproprium of the globe against this particular regime. i don't know that regime -- the problem could have been solved with military force at the time. certainly there was no domestic support to do that. eventually the vietnamese invaded and they ended it and it's a shame of the united states when the vietnamese did that we continued to recognize diplomatically the palpot government which is completely horrible. i think that's one of the situations where there wasn't a good option. i think politically speaking there was no military option. you would have had to -- i don't know what you could have

done mill sterile apart from -- militarily apart from bomb which we had done a great deal already which helped cause the installation -- the victory of the kamaruge. that's a very hard question. brian: if you worked for george herbert walker bush and the original desert shield and all that business and kuwait was invaded by saddam hussein and he said mark danner, what should i do? mark: i'm actually on record about that. i was writing as a writer at "the new yorker" a staff writer and did their comments, a series of comments at the front of the magazine which is their editorials and they were unsigned at the time -- i think most of them were unsigned anyway. and my view was that bush's initial instinct which was to levy very heavy sanctions, and in effect a boycott which is, by the way, wilson's original idea, woodrow wilson's who we started with, thought that was

the way to go. i thought here we are in the post cold war world, this is the first major conflict, we have this first major conflict with a country that relies for its entire life on one export, oil. we can stop that oil we can nonviolently strangle the country and force them if we have a little bit of patience, to withdraw from kuwait. that really was my position that they went, they used military force much earlier than they needed to. now, in the event, of course, you know, as always it depends on how long your view is but in the immediate term it was a highly successful war and 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 it would have been a victory for the international

system and for what george h.w. bush had called the new world order. wilson's vision was boycott. you don't always need to fight. you can -- we can get this international organization that can boycott an evildoer and boycott an aggressor and choke off the lifeblood and cause the end of the regime or whatever without necessarily resorting to warfare. i think that would have been a remarkable opportunity to do hat. brian: had you worked for bill clinton when he was president and said rwanda looks bad right to nd they're going slaughter each other, what ould we have done there? mark: there are a few practical concerns which were difficult at the time which samantha power describes from her novel,

which happened in 75 days, very quickly. in fact did the u.s. not only intervene we prevented the canadians from intervening and anyone else from intervening and i would have acted differently. i think i would have intervened. probably with special forces for relatively small number of troops taking control of the capital. again, it's only a superpower that doesn't do something like that because of somalia. somalia has nothing to do with rwanda but because the united states had the blackhawk down incident no one wanted to get involved in rwanda. i would have intervened in that instance. and you would have saved hundreds of thousands of people. 750,000 is the conventional number now that are thought to have died. and even though it happened very quickly, i think if you had gotten in with special forces or 82nd airborne, you know, you wouldn't have had to

occupy the entire country. the military would have hated it. the military hates missions like this because what's the exit strategy? what are we doing? but i think that's a good example of a situation where the united states was bound to act or prevent huge loss of life. brian: when is it worth losing american lives? mark: a very difficult question. if you're using the military at all in a situation of violence like that, like rwanda, the president has to be in a position to say this is worth losing american lives because american lives are certainly going to be lost. i don't think very many. i think the u.s. probably would have been able to get control of that situation quite quickly. but i think 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. vital interests are at stake. but the problem with that is, and that's the realist kind of litany catechism. but the problem with that is you can have disagreements about vital interests and vital interests very often are tied up with other things. even george h.w. bush is our great realist president before obama. when he intervened in iraq, he didn't say oil, even though secretary of state james baker said jobs, jobs, jobs, george h.w. bush said this man is worse than hitler. this aggression will not stand. he stood on international principle. so i think that was a good example of a case that had both realist side which is oil and stability of the middle east, stopping of aggression, and to side gree an idealistic

as well, as i think it would have been much better to wait a little while and see if we could have accomplished it without going to war which i think is possible. brian: you were at harper's for a while and still write for the new york review of books from time to time and worked at "the new york times" magazine. when did you decide to start teaching and where do you teach and what do you teach? mark: you know, i was involved actually in writing pieces about the bosnian war, the balkan war and had just gotten back from bosnia. i was at fort wayne, indiana, where my girlfriend then lived. she'd grown up in fort wayne and i was writing pieces there and one day the phone rang and it was orville shell the china specialist and new yorker writer, who i didn't know very well, who had been named the dean of the graduate school of journalism at berkeley and he called me out of the blue and said, i'd like you to come teach here. and i essentially said, well, i'm not that interested in that, i don't want to teach,

i'm in the middle of this book writing on bosnia. and i put the phone down and katherine, my then girlfriend, was walking by the room at the time and she just happened to be walking by and said who's that? and i explained the phone call and she said are you crazy, you'll an great teacher, we'll go out to berkeley and it will be wonderful. and that's really why i ended up going. and i taught -- my first class was a seminar called wars, coups, and revolutions. and it was really about writing about violent political change. and you know, it's an amazing thing, you sit down, you spent the last 20 odd years writing about various things, trasming around and really don't think you know much, frankly. it's not as if you've got an law degree or something, you've just been traveling around writing and then you sit down, you've got a table of these very smart berkeley students around and you start to talk and you suddenly realize, actually, i know a lot about the subject, i've been covering it a long time.

and i was amazed, really, about how much i enjoyed teaching, that there's really nothing -- and a lot of writers teach to earn a living and for other reasons but there is really nothing about -- nothing like a seminar that really starts to hum in which people are arguing, people are taking issue, for example, this issue of idealism and realism and why we intervene, you get 12 smart berkeley undergraduates or berkeley graduate students sitting around a table who have read eight of the same books, so for the last eight weeks about intervention, you can really learn something. so i think the thing i like most about teaching is i find myself learning immense amounts all the time. and i teach both at university of berkeley and at bart college where i am this fall and in both places i usually give one course on politics, this semester the course on politics seeing the twilight

war, the ongoing war on terror, one seminar, and the other is called writing darkness, narratives of captivity, which is about the writing that's come out of prison camps, concentration camps, the logger , narratives of slave of frederick douglass narrative, for example, dufiesky, shallamoff and survival in uschwitz, and we'll go through huckerbeao timmermon and prisoner without a name in argentina. it's the literature that's come out of prisons and cells and what's been produced in those kinds of conditions in captivity. and the reason i'm giving that course is just because i've been interested in it and what a wonderful thing to be paid together with a dozen smart 20-year-olds around all reading the same thing and debate it.

i've given classes at berkeley with my friend the poet bob hass. e gave a seminar on dufiesky and toll toy and chekov. brian: bard is where? mark: annandale and hudson, near wine cliff, where washington irving stories take place. brian: you're now an aide to george w. bush and it's in 2001. mark: i knew we were getting to this place. brian: 9/11. he says mark danner, what should i do? september 11, 2001 happens. mark: i would have said, mr. president, this has been a huge shock. everyone who works for you, everybody supports you, unders what a shock this has been, 3,000 americans have never been

killed in an attack on our soil before. we all feel great pain and feel happen but the need to respond in a way to limit the chance of our being attacked again. and secondarily but importantly is going to limit the number of jihaddists there are in the world. what we don't want to do is respond in such 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's going to allow them to make their case against us. what we have to do is treat them like they are. there are a thousand ragged militants in the mountains of afghanistan. e have to go in and get them

we have to destroy their organization. we can do it with our special forces and highly trained troops and do it with a limited use of airpower but we have to discreate and corrected and go against our help mies in such a way we kill the minimum number of civilians and give them the minimum case to make against us. it's what they want to do. and it's on record, mr. president, they want to get us to occupy afghanistan and have us become a quagmire where they can destroy us as they destroyed the soviet union before us. so we need a discrete lethal response and we need at the same time to strengthen their relationships with moderate muslim countries and have to realize our enemy is extremism, is extreme jihadism and make sure it isn't perceived we're attacking the muslim world, that we're attacking everyday

arabs and have to do everything we can to destroy our enemy and prevent it from growing because the wrong response will help them and they have attacked us to illicit 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's what i would say. brian: did you write that before the war started? mark: no, i didn't but did do a piece for "the time's" op-ed page that said a little of that, that our response had to be discrete and wasn't quite as fully formed, and certainly some of what i said is enriched by monday morning quarterbacking and there's no doubt about it. i said a little of it in "the times." definitely. brian: there's a lot to talk about there but i want to move

to president obama whose time is almost up in the white house. this is from january 22, two days after he was inaugurated, 2009. i want your reaction. it's only 30 second. [video clip] president obama: we are not, as i said, in the inauguration. we want to continue with a false choice between our safety and ideals. we think that it is precisely our ideal that give us the strength and the moral high ground to be able to ffectively deal with the ongoing violence that you see emanated from terrorist organizations around the world. we intend to win this fight. we're going to win it on our terms. [video clip ends] brian: that was ell ken, his second full day in office in which he signed a number of orders, included prohibiting

torture and ordering guantanamo would be closed within a year and ordering the study of interrogation techniques among other things. it was a single moment and i remember vividly watching that live probably on c-span, actually, and thinking, my god, he's really doing this. and he's giving it the kind of prominence it deserves. i think that was an extremely important moment. but it's important for what it does, what it did at the time. it's also important to look back on it and realize that a lot of the things he was pointing to he didn't really achieve in the event. guantanamo is one example, at least the difficulties of guantanamo, put it that way, that congress has reacted against him -- 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.

there is also the fact that he prohibited torture, which as i describe in "spiral." it's a very strange word. could the president, one should think for a minute, prohibit murder? the president couldn't prohibit murder? why? because murders against the law, congress has prohibited murder. similarly, tortures against the law, congress has prohibited torture, title 18. it's against the law already. and when the president prohibits torture, it tells you something. it tells you that it's gone from an issue of law to an issue of policy. when mitt romney was running in 2012, it was leaked in october of 2012 that he, if inaugurated, would reinstitute enhanced interrogation techniques. in the 2016 campaign, there was a lot of talk of torture, of

course, and reinstituting torture. so i think one of the changes that's happened in our country since 9/11 is the torture went from being an inasma, something that was cursed and illegal, to being a policy choice. and he was not able to change that. you could ask how he could have changed it. establishing a truth commission, perhaps, having some kind of an official condemnation of what had happened. he could have gone a different route. but i think during the war on terror, as we still was and as we still are, that was politically extremely difficult and perhaps impossible. o that clip i think is -- boy, i feel moved watching it because it was a critical moment in american history. that moment george w. bush moment in 2006 when he gave a speech from the white house about torture, critical moment in american history.

and i look at that and i think he wanted to do much of what i wrote about in that book, i think. there's a significant part of president obama that wanted to end the war on terror. he said it several times. this war must end. this war, like all wars, must come to an end. but he found himself unable to do it. not only because of the actions of our enemies but because of the actions of our government itself and the policy that had preceded him. brian: why did you use this quote on the front page of part 2 of your book, obama normalizing the exception. turns out i'm really good at killing people. didn't know that was going to be a strong suit of mine, september 30, 2011, barack obama. mark: president obama said that during a meeting, it's quoted in dan cledman's book, i believe. and he was talking about the drone program. the drone program in which

people mostly on the other side of the world in afghanistan, kistan, yemen, somalia are killed remotely using these unmanned vehicles, has been the signal expansion of his presidency. it was used under george w. bush but not extensively. under obama's presidency, the united states is probably -- the numbers certainly are in the thousands. probably killed 4,000 people, something like that using drones. and i think he was -- the question is why he used that as a quotation. because i think his own position with respect to the war and the policies he has implemented when it comes to the war is a somewhat ironic one. he thinks he gave a speech at the national defense university in which he essentially said we have to -- we cannot be in a state of perpetual war, we have to end this war. and you watch this and -- it

was a very eloquent speech. and you think you're the president, why can't you end it? there's a certain sad irony in what he says about some of his policies. i think there's an irony in the fact that, you know, he's leaving -- he'll be leaving office with troops in iraq and afghanistan. and i think that statement that turns out i was pretty good at killing people is part of that irony, like who would have thought this? and he feels himself -- i think he felt himself forced into it, that he got into office, he wanted to end the big wars, and the iraq war and the afghan war even though he expanded it when he first entered office. but his goal was to end the big shooting wars and develop what we now can call and what i call in the book the light footprint which is the use of drones, the use of special forces, operatives, on raids and this kind of steady low level war

that's going on in a half dozen countries around the world that the united states is prosecuting and doesn't get a lot of headlines, it's not a big political issue, you know, it's not something you campaign going on and very relevant to our national discussion and relevant when you talk about him because i don't think he would have predicted he would be in this position at the end of his presidency. brian: a footnote suggests osama bin laden wanted to bring this country to bankruptcy. first of all, should we have killed obama as a country and that was president obama, and if you were obama and were -- if you were osama bin laden and were alive, would you feel like you had accomplished what you wanted? mark: the answer to the first question is yes. i don't particularly like the

phrase we brought him to justice. i think when you bring someone to justice in the american system is you try them and so on. i don't particularly 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 don't think it was possible and i don't think the seals were -- that was part of their mission. i think they were going there to kill him. so yeah, i think that was justified. the second part of the question? brian: well, i'm going to ask you another one similar to that. mark: the one you just asked was interesting. i kind of lost it. brian: in the interim, let me ask you this. what great does president obama deserve based on what he promised he would do when it came to wars and all that, what kind after grade would you give him after eight years? from your perspective?

mark: c plus maybe. i'd say things developed in a way he didn't expect. i think that, you know, my view is it would have been very much in american interest to limit this war and that there is a self-perpetuating quality to it. we've essentially adopted tactics in place of a strategy, but a tactic is a drone attack. you say here's this organization in afghanistan, if i kill the head of this organization, this is called the strategy of decapitation. if i kill the head of this organization, they're going to be wrong-footed and knocked backwards and have to fight about leadership so they can't plan an attack against us. so let's kill them. and then two months later you say the same thing and you kill them again. the head of it. well, what you're constantly doing, you're doing a couple things. one, you're bringing up younger members who are often more

militants and angrier. number two, you're killing civilians which means politically speaking you're helping them. but number three, you're not adopting a strategy that will reduce the numbers in these groups. you're in effect helping them politically. so, you know, the israelis have a name for this kind of strategy which they use in gaza called mowing the grass. grass grows up, you mow the grass. grass grows up, you mow the grass. the problem is you're not uprooting the grass. the grass is still there and always will be there. i think we've adopted this kind of tactic in lieu of having a broader strategy to try to lessen the flow of young men into these jihaddist organizations. brian: that second question was whether or not if you were osama bin laden and still alive, would you feel like you accomplished what you set out to do? mark: that's a very good question. imagine osama bin laden on the day after 9/11, right, on september 12, 2001.

and you were sitting there having tea with him and said, you know, i have a vision 15 years from now. the years from now, situation will be the following, al qaeda will still exist and be a little larger. it will be this worldwide terrorist network with an internet presence and still recruiting, all the rest of it. but there will be a second worldwide terrorist network in 30 countries which will have been the spawn, you know, the product of al qaeda called the islamic state which will actually control a territory the size of great britain, govern a population the size of new zealand and will call itself the new calisade. you have many other jihaddist organizations and the islamic state will be 30,000 men under affirms -- under arms and then

you have four countries in the middle east in chaos that are targets of opportunities, yemen, syria, iraq, think of that, somalia will be going to hell. we'll have all these targets of opportunity in which the united states will be trying to hold its own as a status quo power but we will be on the attack. what do you think of that vision, osama, after 15 years from now? i think he will be happy with that. i think that it represents from their point of view a great deal of progress. you know, they've had a lot of setbacks as well, but the fact is it you would describe that point of view to an american official the day after september 11, i think there would have been an acknowledgement that this is not what we want to achieve. of course that american official might describe the situation now quite differently and would say what if in 15 years there had been no major

attacks on american soil, no mass casualty attacks at all and had been some smaller lone wolfe attacks and were tragic and terrible and one of which killed 50 people but in general the country was much more secure and though terrorism had increased dramatically around the globe, which it has, in fact in the united states, we are relatively safe after 15 years. would you take it? and it's probably true that many officials after september 11 would have taken that because they thought this was the beginning of an age of terrorism in which a lot of people would be killed. brian: in this year and it couldn't vary by one or two, when we're talking, there have been about 11 people killed, americans, in afghanistan and about 11 killed in iraq. you were the parent of one of those 11, would it be worth of us being in either one of those

places now? mark: that's an agonizing question, an agonizing question. brian: and we're frankly not paying a whole lot of attention to either situation. mark: i was actually going to say that, it's amazing the way the attack on mosul is -- has been covered as if the united states isn't directly involved. in fact, there are american forces there, there are 5,000 americans in iraq right now. and i think, is it,000 or afghanistans, i'm not sure the exact number. i have young children and the notion of losing a child in a conflict itself is agonizing to me. but to lose someone in a conflict like this when people aren't 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 wouldn't

seem worth it. i think one has to tell one's self that, you know, my son or daughter was there fighting for something they believed in and that loss was meaningful. but it just strikes me as extremely, extremely painful. brian: we're right between presidents but a president in this time period calls you into the oval office and says mark danner, what should i do about drones? mark: i would say, mr. president, use them less, realize that the decapitation strategy has its own downsides. they should be used ideally in situations in which there really is -- we really do know about an imminent attack being planned. theoretically that's when they're used but they're now using a concept called

elongated emnins and would seem to contri dictate eminence and they shouldn't be the basis of our strategy in yemen and pakistan and 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 didn't. we simply felt this would wrong-foot them for a certain amount of time and in fact that death may have been against american interests rather than for it. i would say long term, mr. president, we want to develop a strategy of deterrence when it comes to these groups. i know very well you think these groups are simply suicide bombers and have no vision of their own self-interest necessary to have deterrence but in fact you can develop a strategy of deterrence. the basis of the strategy must be if you're not attacking our interests or even our homeland directly, we will not attack you directly. that is not the whole policy. needless to say. but you have to start giving

jihaddist groups an interest in not attacking the united states and to realize that you can have jihaddist groups that aren't necessarily have as a policy direct attacks on the united states rather than the near enemy which is their immediate muslim enemies in cairo or rihad, so on. brian: what's your attitude about classes? you have 20-year-olds at berkeley, do you have a requirement to give them both sides of an argument? mark: i certainly have a personal requirement. and to me, you know, i often will have debates in the class, should we have tortured, for example? and i'm always delighted by the fact that very often 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 at bard has a program in jerusalem, east jerusalem, and i once had a debate like that with palestinian students when the pro torture side was -- even though the class unanimously rejected torture, the pro's torture side in the debate was judged by the rest of the class to have won the debate. i try to emphasize that when it comes to policies i disagree with, these policies were -- one of the bewildering things and 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 is certainly true of policy after 9/11. and the question i like to ask is well, 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. that there was a certain vision. as you know, i was opposed to the iraq war before it. and then i covered it. but there was a certain vision about reordering the middle east that was thought to be an answer to the political roots of terrorism. of jihaddist him. that is it we can reorder the middle east and produce representative governments, destroy these old you a talk cents, we -- these old autocracies. so for everything we say about it, i was against it and it was a catastrophe, for what you can say, it did attempt to confront the political roots of jihaddist him. -- jihadism. i try to get my students to understand this. if they come in hating american mill tarism or whatever, i like them to go out never using a term like that in understanding why certain american policies have come to be.

we had a discussion the other day about the carter doctrine which is really the beginning of american military policy in the middle east which was instituted in 19830. and you know they hadn't heard of this and hadn't heard of a central command where this all came from. so i generally find when you get into these issues that are matters of debate among themselves and show how complicated they are and this higher level of complexity that they respond very positively to that. but you have to try to show both sides, i think. brian: of all the people we talked about and the leaders and presidents and someone we haven't talked about, if you had to put somebody at the top of list who dealt from your perspective in a way that came to war which you thought was the right way to go, who would you name? mark: the people we've talked about -- brian: doesn't have to be just that but in your studying of

this country and you will that stuff, who would you put at the top and has done the best under the circumstances? mark: god bless my father, may he rest in peace. 'm going to say truman because truman, 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 bring in american allies, to create and solidify alliances, to try to ensure that hostility or aggressive tendencies wouldn't necessarily lead to war. he was a great institution builder. his administration was. having said that, there was a

lot -- he promulgated the truman doctrine which essentially was an ideological clarion call. george kennin, the great diplomat and father of containment hated the truman doctrine because he thought it would put politicians -- would limit their flexibility. and this is what happened, we talked about the fall of china and how it haunted lyndon johnson and he thought the fall of saigon would destroy him and that was partly the truman doctrine. we're called on to defend freedom wherever it is threatened and that was certainly much more broadly ideological and capacious than it should have been and should have been tailored to american interests and i think he in building institutions he was an admirable figure. again, having said that, you know, he began the cold war and there are many downsides to his policy as well. i think f.d.r. was a very

effective president as well, obviously, in fighting the second world war. i'm cognizant of the fact i'm talking about people who we're talking about 60 or 70 years ago and i wish i could come up with somebody more recent, a estatesman of more recent vintage. i think james baker is a very able statesman, actually. sort of smart and very keen to protect american interests. and i think george h.w. bush will probably be more highly respected as the gears go on. you know in basketball how sometimes the commentator will say good, no foul. good no foul on the initial part, that it was smart that the official didn't call that foul. there's a sense in which george h.w. bush did a lot of things that prevented catastrophes that might have happened at the end of the cold war. so in a sense these were

negative achievements. these were dogs that didn't bark. and i think he will go down as better than we now think of him. brian: our guest has been mark danner, professor at u.c. berkeley and also at bard, written all of his life, grew up in utica, new york, harvard graduate. and we thank you. your book is called "spiral, trapped in the forever war." thank you very much for joining us. mark: my pleasure. it's good to be here. ♪ [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national

cable satellite corp. 2016] >> if you enjoyed this week's q&a, here are some others you might like, retired general daniel bolger talks about his book "why we lost" a general's inside account of iraq and afghanistan wars. "new york times" london bureau chief john burns talks about covering military efforts in iraq and afghanistan. and former defense secretary donald rumsfeld on his book "known and unknown" about his life in public service. you can watch these any time online and search our entire video library at c-span.org. >> "washington jump" is next. on today's program, dan lamon the, national security writer for "the washington post" looks

at defense issues facing the trump administration. nd joe plenzeler, worked extensively with general james mattis, donald trump's nominee to head the defense department. host: good morning this is december 26. today we begin a weeklong long series on key issues facing the administration of donald trump. he will take office in an few weeks. a look at national security. the question for you today, what are the biggest national security concerns you have headed into the new year. , democrats are numbers 202-74 8-8000 and independents, to a two-74