E-mail a friendEugene Jarecki
airdate November 11, 2008
An award-winning filmmaker, Eugene Jarecki tackles challenging topics. Walter Cronkite called his film Why We Fight—which won the '06 Peabody—"required viewing for every American." Jarecki is also a senior fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute and founder and executive director of The Eisenhower Project, an academic public policy group dedicated to studying the forces that shape American foreign policy. His book, The American Way of War, focuses on what can be done to get the U.S. back on track.
Author describes how the American people can go about putting the Executive Branch back in its place. (3:21)
Full interview. (10:53)
Eugene Jarecki
Tavis Smiley: Eugene Jarecki is an award-winning filmmaker whose credits include "Why We Fight" and "The Trials of Henry Kissinger." His latest project focuses on the use of military power throughout U.S. history. The book is called "The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril." Eugene Jarecki, nice to have you on the program.
Eugene Jarecki: Great to be here.
Tavis: Good to see you. Let me start by asking what the aim of this book is. What's the aim, the purpose of the book?
Jarecki: It's really to raise public consciousness, to inform people about a lot of what I've had the opportunity to learn about in the past few years of researching the very inner workings of America's massive military, industrial, and foreign policy machine, which is deeply troubling when you get to know it first hand, and very educational.
Tavis: There's a whole book here, obviously. Give me a shorthand definition, a shorthand translation for what the American way of war is.
Jarecki: Well, once upon a time, the term "the American way of war" was used by people to talk about what America did in World War II, which was really the American way of war was we brought industry to the battlefield. We did mass production, we had remarkable number of people on the home front working to support the war effort.
Well, that's all true and that did secure a remarkable victory in World War II, but what happened after that is the American way of war changed. It changed in nature and it started to undermine the American way itself. This country became a country in which the American way of war is so much a part of who we are that in many ways it's damaged our ability to be true to our founding principles.
Tavis: Tell me more about that latter point.
Jarecki: Well, the framers were very frightened of a country that could lose its way. The people who founded this country broke off from England and more than anything else they wanted to avoid the mistakes of past empires, namely that under the British crown they felt they had an out-of-control executive branch, basically.
They had an imperial figure in their midst who would go to war when he wanted to, who would station troops among them during peacetime, who would abridge their civil liberties, who would et cetera. And so if any of this sounds familiar today, we're living in a redux of what the framers most feared because George Washington himself said in his farewell address that we had to beware of overgrown military establishments -- that's his phrase -- that he thought were the enemy of republican liberties, and that's what I fear, and that's what I think the framers teach us to fear in the way our society has lost its way.
Tavis: Juxtapose for me now, then, Eugene, the formulation you've just offered that our framers were afraid of, and the Bush doctrine.
Jarecki: Oh. Well, the Bush doctrine could not have more grotesquely come to reflect the worst fears of our framers. To say that they'd be rolling in our graves today would be the understatement of a lifetime.
The problem, of course, is that what the framers were afraid of -- you may remember from when we were in high school they talked about that the framers said "Beware of foreign entanglements." I had no idea what it meant at the time. I now understand what they meant.
They meant if you let yourself, as a country, become involved in the affairs of other countries excessively -- it's not about whether you have to defend this people or that people at a time when there's a genocide or a time of persecution. But they're talking about if you allow your foreign policy to become involved in external affairs too much and become expansionist, what ends up happening is that all the more often the leader figure -- that executive big, bad guy who they fear -- all the more often he can say to all of us, "It's a time of war. There's no time to talk about civil liberties, there's no time to talk about the principles of our republic. All of that is on hold until we deal with this crisis."
And so they knew that essentially as Madison wrote to Jefferson in the Federalist Papers, war favors the executive. It's a very dangerous concept to understand that in the balance of power that they careful wrought between the executive, the legislative, and judicial branches -- if you and I are sitting here right now and we're talking about democracy and our hopes for the future, if a bomb fell outside the building right now or an economic crisis hit, or an epidemic, there's a part of both of us -- all of us, in fact -- that would say there's no time to deliberate; just do something.
We all have that in us. Well, when you decide not to deliberate and just do something, you make a move from the legislative branch, who deliberates, to the executive branch, who can just do something -- push a button. So what that moment does is it empowers the executive, and that's what we saw our Congress do in the lead-up to war in Iraq, and that's what the framers would have most feared about that bush doctrine, which puts so much power in the hands of an executive.
Tavis: Since your book is not just about -- is not just assessing the problem in an contemporary sense, it is a look back, tell me, then, how this devolved. How did we get to this place?
Jarecki: Well, in a lot of ways, it happened the way so many things in our lives happened. There's a term in the military called mission creep. Mission creep is what they use to describe a war in which you were fighting one thing -- like it was all about WMDs or about -- then that drifted, and it became liberating the Iraqi people, and then that drifted and then it became sort of arbitrating this civil war.
That drifting set of policy rationales, that's mission creep. You wake up one day and kind of wonder how did we get into this conflict, and I don't understand its purpose anymore.
Well, we all have this in our everyday lives. We all have relationship creep, job creep, marriage creep. Things happen in your life that you wake up one day and think wow, it's not quite what I thought it was, and what do I think of it now?
Well, I think we're experiencing that right now as a country, where we're asking ourselves both where are we in this particular contemporary moment of the war in Iraq and so many other rather unsettling aspects of our domestic and foreign policy, but also to look at the country as a whole. The country drifted over our founding to now. I think we've undergone a kind of national mission creep.
Tavis: Since, to your point, we all have creep in our lives in a variety of ways, let me enter into this conversation now this notion of executive creep -- presidential creep. Back to this Bush doctrine.
Jarecki: And that's not just an insult to Bush. We're not saying presidential creep -- that's something else.
Tavis: Exactly.
Jarecki: No pun intended. (Laughter.)
Tavis: I'm not calling the president a creep; I'm talking about executive branch creep.
Jarecki: Okay.
Tavis: And what I mean to get to is this -- we were talking about the Bush doctrine a moment ago; this whole notion of we strike first if we think you are going to do something to us -- we'll ask questions later on. There hasn't been, to my mind, at least, a whole lot of criticism of that. He got pretty much what he wanted from this Democratic Congress, so I've not seen -- there have not been hearings.
For all the complaining about George W. Bush and he's got to go and eight years is enough, there's not been a lot of talk, as you know, about this Bush doctrine and whether it's wrong for America. And the reason why that concerns me is because no president ever -- I can't think of a single president who wants to give back executive power.
If one executive grabs a hold to it, the next one surely is going to hold on to it. You see where I'm going with this?
Jarecki: You're asking an extremely important question, and I'll say for the record that my book looks at what the Bush administration did in a historical context. So to some extent, when you read the book, it's not a Bush-bashing book; it's a book that really says here's the Iraq war, and in fact a lot of it is new that happened but a lot of it is not so new.
Some of it is an extension of things that came before; a slippery slope that sort of started around World War II and has led us on this path to sort of permanent war making, the way we're finding ourselves. But at the same time, I have to say that the reforms that I seek, and the book talks about some of the reforms that I think are crucial, none of them can happen unless the Bush administration is held accountable for the crimes and wrongdoings and errors of the past eight years, and it is a moral failure in America that not more people are talking about that.
It's a moral failure that the church and that the general clerical community is not talking about it, and it's an obvious failure of Washington that Washington has so lost its moral compass that these kind of transgressions can happen, from torture to a misbegotten war, to people dying, people getting maimed, and we're sitting here not having those national conversations.
Tavis: So how do you scale back, then, from the creep that the Bush administration has essentially gotten away with, this notion of the Bush doctrine? If one president can get away with this -- we hit you first, we ask questions later -- why, with all due respect to Obama, why couldn't Obama or anybody after Obama -- again, nobody wants to give that up. So how do you reel that back in, is my question?
Jarecki: Sure. Well, I think it comes from --
Tavis: Can you put the genie back in the bottle?
Jarecki: I think you can, and it comes from you and me. And revolutions throughout history have put genies back in bottles. It would have seemed impossible to tell the colonists of America that they would triumph over the British empire and put that genie back in that bottle. It would have seemed impossible to tell the black South Africans that they would triumph over a system of apartheid; put that genie back in the bottle.
So the fact is this can be done, but it's never done, as you point out very astutely -- it's never done from the executive down. Change is not trickle-down; change is trickle-up. So change will require, as we're now being faced with the prospect of it, it will require that all of us who care about, for example, putting the executive branch back in its place, that we are putting that pressure on the White House, an Obama White House, to say I know you disagree; I can tell from your body language that as a human, Barack Obama, you disagree with what the president just did -- President Bush, that is; the former president.
I can see that you disagree with it, but what will you do now that you're in those shoes? And I think if the public is demanding a restoration of the basic balance that is the lifeblood of our society, I think Barack Obama will have to hear that. But that's true of all the aspects of change that we seek -- it will all come down to all of us as individuals, and in small groups working together to put that pressure upward on our local, state, and federal thinkers and leaders to make this change happen.
Tavis: My time is about up, so top-line for me, then, the reforms that you drill down more on in the text.
Jarecki: Well, one of the things I look at in the book is the extraordinary corruption of Washington and the way in which our members of Congress are really on the payroll of the corporate sector, and the way in which that makes it almost impossible for them to make truly sound decisions in the public interest, because frankly they're answering to the private sector all the time.
And so we have to interrupt that unholy alliance between corporate America and our members of Congress, because what that does is fulfill Eisenhower's fear -- and you see Eisenhower is in the book a lot -- it fulfills Eisenhower's fear of what he called the military industrial complex, which can poison public policy by what private institutions want.
Well, I call it a sort of corporate political complex, and we've got to sever, both through campaign finance reform and through stopping some of the shenanigans of the defense sector, we've got to stop that unholy alliance from eroding the sanctity of our public policymaking.
Tavis: The new book from Eugene Jarecki is called "The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril." Eugene, nice to have you on the program.
Jarecki: It was great to be here, Tavis.
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