MONDAY
E-mail a friendDr. Kiron Skinner
airdate October 29, 2004
Foreign policy expert Dr. Kiron Skinner is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a Hoover Institution research fellow. The Harvard Ph.D. is also a protégé of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and sits on the U.S. Defense Policy Board and the board of the National Security Education Program. While doing research for George Shultz's memoir, Dr. Skinner became interested in the story of the end of the Cold War, and subsequently became a scholar on former President Ronald Reagan.
Dr. Kiron Skinner
Tavis: Dr. Kiron Skinner is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University. She's also an advisor to the U.S. Defense Policy Board, and has edited several books on Ronald Reagan. Her most recent is 'Reagan's Path To Victory: The Shaping of Ronald Reagan's Vision.' Kiron, nice to have you on the program.
Dr. Kiron Skinner: Thank you.
Tavis: I want to talk about the book in a second, of course, but first let's talk about Iraq, if we might, since you're a foreign policy expert here. What do you make of the difficult path, I think it's fair to say, that we are on right now with regard to Iraq?
Skinner: I think it really--history is a good guide, and it's always difficult having a political transition from a dictatorship to a representative government. And it was President George Bush who mandated very early on that there be democracy in the Arab Middle East. Many said it was impossible. We're seeing the insurgency on the ground that's making it difficult, but at the same time there has been a march toward political representation, freedom in that country, in 2004, that can't be denied. The transitional administrative law that was adopted in the spring, followed by the early transition in authority, sovereignty to the Iraqis. The fact that there will be elections, that there's a national council that's broadly representative in the country. In fact, there have been municipal elections. All of this has taken place despite insurgency, and it's really remarkable that it has happened given the problems on the ground.
Tavis: When you speak of insurgency, this phrase jumps out at me, as I'm sure it did when you saw the other day. 'Gross negligence.' 'Gross negligence.' That's how the acting prime minister Mr. Allawi described what is fueling this insurgency, and, surprise, surprise, when he was talking about gross negligence, he was speaking directly about the part of the U.S. and our being grossly negligent. Now, you know, here's a guy that's supposed to be Mr. Bush's friend who is apparently turning? Opinion?
Skinner: I don't think it's necessarily turning. I think he's probably speaking the truth as he sees it in Iraq. War is extremely difficult, and I think we forget that. If you think back to World War II, the reconstruction in Germany, the Germans were starving in 1946. It took a long time to get the country up and running. We had the Berlin airlift. War is extremely difficult. It rarely goes well, even when you 'win,' and reconstruction is especially difficult. I think now in this kind of instant age of television and communications we want to see things going well very quickly, but it doesn't happen that way. There are a lot of missteps, there are a lot of things that you don't do right, there are other things that you do do right, and part of, you know, trying to protect a country like Iraq where it was somewhat of a black box for decades, I think the U.S. has done remarkably well under very difficult circumstances.
Tavis: Forget how we see it at the moment. What happens, though, when the guy running it says that we're grossly negligent? How do we interpret that as Americans?
Skinner: Yeah, but I don't think we interpret that that he has turned on us or that he's no longer the friend of the president. I think he's just talking about the real frustrations on the ground in that country trying to march toward political freedom and democracy. And he's still very much committed. You haven't heard him say anything against that.
Tavis: How do we interpret--how do we juxtapose President Bush's statement in the debates earlier where he said repeatedly--used repeatedly the number of officers--Iraqi police officers that are being trained by U.S. military personnel, and then we see just days ago, what, 50-51 of them, you know, murdered, shot in the head by the insurgents. How do we interpret that?
Skinner: I think in this larger context of trying to turn complete political and military sovereignty over to the Iraqis is as difficult as it has ever been when you move from dictatorship to a more representative government. I think it's really hard, but I don't think anything that Prime Minister Allawi said or what the president has said earlier or continues to say is in opposition to the fact that there will be a broader Iraqi security force in the country--will continue to grow, and I don't think that this devastating challenge will stop it.
Tavis: As you see it, what ought the course be in Iraq? Because as I have listened to Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry on the eve of this election, what I really hear is one singular, I think, distinct difference. Now that we're in Iraq, and, you know, we can debate whether we should've been there or not, but now that we're there, Kerry says, 'I'll get you out sooner.' President Bush says, 'It's gonna be hard work. We'll be there longer.' What ought to be the course then?
Skinner: I think we ought to focus on elections, and I think we ought to focus on not just the high-altitude democracy that we expect in a mature country like our own, but one where the civil society is put in place, where you have freedom of speech, freedom of the press, women being able to vote. I think we ought to work on those things and keep our eye on the ball because that is so important. I think it will be the biggest defeat for global terror to see in the Arab Middle East a country like Iraq turn to a more representative system.
Tavis: I want to turn to the book, and before I get into the details of the book, let me start by asking a question that fascinates, I suspect, some of our viewers. The African American community is not a monolith, thank God. I'm glad we don't all think or act the same, not unlike any other community, but I think it is fascinating when you have a conversation about Ronald Reagan that an African-American female is a fan of Ronald Reagan. Tell me how you got to be so conservative in your views, and why you, as a black woman, so admire Ronald Reagan to have written a number of books about this guy.
Skinner: Well, first let me correct you. I don't see myself as particularly conservative in my views. I think it was right when you said that black Americans aren't a monolith in terms of how they think about things. I'm actually a registered Democrat. I come from parents who were civil rights activists. My father is a historian of the African-American experience in the United States. And so I don't necessarily see myself as a conservative. I came to the story of Ronald Reagan knowing very little about him, but being a student of international relations and the end of the cold war, I wanted to understand how we could get a transition of the international system without nuclear war. Because most of our theorists had said that there had to be some major hegemonic conflict before we could get political transition. And, in fact, we had this historic moment where the adversary in a great-power dyad essentially gave up the fight and joined the community of free states. So I got interested in that. Mrs. Reagan gave me access to President Reagan's private papers to work on the end of the cold war, at the urging of Secretary George Shultz--a mentor of mine--and along the way I found thousands of pages of writing by Ronald Reagan that gave birth to the 5 books I've done on him.
Tavis: That story's even more fascinating for me because now that I've learned you are a registered Democrat, one would not think that--and again, that's probably why we shouldn't be so wed to labels--but one would think that one who is a student of George Shultz, who's written books on Ronald Reagan, who's at the Hoover Institution--one would not think that person to be a registered Democrat. Maybe that's part of Ronald Reagan's enduring legacy, that persons who at least are more conservative on foreign policy who happen to be Democrats could still be fans of Ronald Reagan. Is that part of his legacy?
Skinner: I think that's part of his legacy, but I think his legacy is much more that he is just so fundamentally American. And though he won by a landslide in 1980, we know that he did not win by a landslide in the black American community. But he did resonate with so many people, and I think over time he became much more popular in a broad-based way. Remember, there were the Reagan Democrats. In 1980 he took the female vote, the Catholic vote, Protestant, union workers, the business community. It was a broad-based coalition that, in fact, supported him. And I think they supported Reagan because he tapped into American values of individualism, liberty, equality. Those are things that he really cared about deeply, and he talks about them in the radio essays as well.
Tavis: What would Ronald Reagan say about this so-called Bush doctrine? Because there are many who argued--and I think legitimately so--that on many issues, George W. Bush is even more conservative than Ronald Reagan was on many fronts. But what would Reagan say about this so-called Bush doctrine of preemptive strike?
Skinner: Yeah, I think that that's a really tough question to answer as a scholar, to kind of impute Reagan onto the current president. I will say, though, I think on certain issues related to the global war on terror that Reagan would kind of give a blessing. I think the idea of trying to bring democracy to Iraq is something that Reagan would have supported, and he would have focused on the kind of political achievements. He would have done, I think, a better job, maybe, than our current president in explaining and telegraphing to the public what those achievements are. I think it's very difficult in the fog of war to talk about political victory when you're having insurgency on the ground. So I think he would have supported him in that way. On the specific issue of preemption, I think that he would really say when an imminent threat--if you deem an imminent threat to exist the way that President Bush did with Iraq, whether you agree with him or not, that the first responsibility of the sovereign is self-preservation, and you've got to strike.
Tavis: Given that Ronald Reagan, to your point, was the great communicator, how do you think, given his writings, that he would have gone about communicating to the American people what his mission was, what his motive was? If he had done the same thing that George W. Bush had done, how would his communication of that differ from the way that President Bush has either succeeded or failed at delivering his message to the American people?
Skinner: Well, I think Reagan, along with a few others in the 20th century--Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson--really stood out as great communicators, and when you look back at that century in the American experience, they are--they tower above everyone else.
Tavis: Those are 3 names you never hear together: Reagan, Jackson, and King. But anyway, go ahead.
Skinner: Well, actually, I did a 'New York Times' op-ed on Reagan and King earlier, and I think that it was received well because there were some commonalities about how they looked at American values, and how they linked up their belief in God to those values. But on to this point about communication. I think Reagan was really unique in communicating hard decisions to the American public. But I think he would have given a blessing to much of what this president has said, though Reagan was just so much more of a powerful orator because he had spent much of his life--he was a radio host, like you, his first job out of college. And these are radio essays. He supported himself after he stepped down as governor, from ‘75 through ‘79, through the radio. That was the main way in which he communicated with people and had a source of income. So I think he was just so prepared, in an unusual way, to communicate hard and tough decisions to the public.
Tavis: Is the moral of that story that maybe I can be president one day?
Skinner: I think so.
Tavis: OK.
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