Interview with Lincoln Bloomfield

Introduction by Richard Farson
Lincoln Palmer (Linc) Bloomfield is well known to those of us involved in the International Leadership Forum because he is a frequent and always substantial contributor to our discussions. An emeritus professor of political science at MIT, Linc has a distinguished career not only in education and writing but four years in the Navy (WWII), 11 years in State Department, later White House service on the National Security Council as Director of Global Issues. So he is no stranger to the heated policy wars among the top policymakers. His latest book is Accidental Encounters With History, and some lessons learned (Cohasset: Hot House Press, 2005). Linc is a policy heavyweight and we are fortunate indeed to have him as an ILF Fellow and our interviewee this week.

Let me ask the first question: Linc, to get right to the question that worries me most at this moment, with all the seeming build up justifying a US attack on Iran, do you think this is posturing for some other reasons, or do you expect us to actually go to war with Iran? Perhaps the question should be, are we already at war with Iran?

Lincoln Bloomfield
As to whether we are now at war with Iran, we couldn’t be even if we wanted to, The "surgical air strike" on their nuclear facilities some are pushing could not be followed up on the ground. given the way US forces have been both downsized and squandered. Nor should we be fooled by the present version of our traditional Open Door Policy. What can only be called the current Open Mouth policy generates tough talk, notably though the Vice-President’s office. And remember, military planners always game out possible scenarios, with Iran no exception. These rarely mean a decision to go to war, though no one ever accused Mr. Bush of completely rational behavior.

But let’s be clear. Unvarnished hostility has characterized Iranian policy toward the "Great Satan" since the 1979 expulsion of our client the Shah and takeover of our embassy and the country by the mullahs. Teheran is even less predictable than Washington. In theory a deliverable Iranian nuclear force could threaten US security in a way Iraq never even tried. On the other hand that capability is a good way off, and Lame Duck Bush has already had a deathbed conversion entailing proactive diplomacy and a potentially good outcome with North Korea. What I don’t rule out is a preemptive airstrike by Israel which, unlike the US, has been explicitly targeted by Teheran (Israel did just that against Iraq’s Osiraq nuclear facility in 1980, with mixed results). .

No American really understands the Iranian leadership, civilian or theocratic. When I was last in Teheran no American official seemed aware that the whole society would implode in a couple of years. Which doesn't make for much confidence that the present White House will get it right.

Kip Winsett
In your book "Accidental Encounters With History" you stated "Forces for moderation exist, if sometimes invisibly, within nations, and inside religious and ethnic groups, and I have to believe that in the long run history is on their side."

How can we best follow such an optimistic view in terms of policy when the short term threat posed by countries such as Iran is so apparent and potentially devastating?

Lincoln Bloomfield
Even accounting for wishful thinking, yes, I still believe it, The reasons can be summed up in two words: Internet and Globalization. Those forces help extremists organize and communicate. But they also reach millions of others for whom they may be the first sources of realism other than official propaganda. And short-term threats are the scary present reality. But am I right about what I called the long-run?

Al Qaeda obviously doesn’t feature a moderate wing. But consider the Muslim world. Iran is run by extremists, but half the population is under 25, Internet access is growing, and what I called "forces for moderation" hit the streets when Khatami was president. Iraq has an educated middle class that is so moderate they fled by the millions and are temporarily invisible. Turkish Islamists are out-flanked by the new Islamic governing party which has promised continued secularism And in the US and Europe, for starters, Imams are preaching moderation in their mosques to counter poisonous Wahhabi fanaticism. (In Libya Quaddafi typically supplied both extremism and moderation all by himself).

Elsewhere similar trends are visible. In China, like Iran, the Internet is subverting frantic official efforts at limiting access. In Venezuela the radical regime was almost toppled and may be again. In Ukraine the peaceful Orange Revolution in the streets, like the Velvet Revolution in Prague, overthrew the oppressive regime. Other examples can be cited. ..

Sic semper tyrannis rarely works in the short-term. But if you believe, with Thomas Jefferson, that education (broadly construed) correlates with democracy, hang on a while longer.

Richard Farson
We just completed an ILF conference on journalism where there was general agreement that journalism, our traditional protection against tyranny, may be losing its investigative power. It is almost gone in broadcast journalism, and most newspapers are cutting back sharply. Some predict the end of newspapers soon. Thomas Jefferson thought that the press was even more important than government. Linc, you seem to imply that the Internet may be keeping democratic hopes alive. If newspapers lose their investigative resources, do you think that the web will compensate, and give us the same protection?

Lincoln Bloomfield
As a non-expert, let me start with a political metaphor. During the Cold War the East German Communist regime built a large TV tower in, I believe, Leipzig the better to propagandize their subjects. Their subjects, however, used it to tune in to West German TV and subvert themselves without help. Cf. China and Iran today. The point being that, however bad or inadequate coverage in the US or elsewhere, the truth can be better approximated by diversity of sources. I leaned this in two places.

One was the old Soviet Union where on eight visits I observed massive efforts to keep the population ignorant of reality except as filtered through the official lie machine. It isn’t just communists: in South Korea just before democracy came, the officially okayed press distorted what I said. Dictators everywhere work hard to shut down free newspapers, radio and TV. But as the Voice of America, BBC, and other external sources began to penetrate, people without multiple sources became dependent on them and then on the Internet to correct for the party line.

My other lesson came in the US,, where a multiplicity of sources, good and bad. ink or electronic, is still available. But some of my students might as well have been in Moscow or Beijing. given their reliance on a single slanted source. I urged them to read, listen, and watch widely and then make up their minds. That’s hard. But the point is there are lots to choose among, and if you check out the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, or Fox and CNN. you can’t help being better informed, thus pleasing Mr. Jefferson..

Sir Isaiah Berlin wrote about another metaphor -- the fox, who knows many things, and the hedgehog who knows one big thing. With a range of available sources from left to right, we all have the capacity to be foxes even in an age of problematic -- but abundant -- journalism.

Richard Farson
You have had so many experiences in government that for those of us on the outside looking in seem surely to have been frustrating, even maddening, yet you continue to convey a moderate and hopeful attitude. How have you avoided cynicism?

Ralph Keyes
Linc, you said that the Israeli bombing of Iraq's nuclear reactor had "mixed results." I thought that their unilateral venture was generally thought to have crippled Saddam's nuclear aspirations to good effect, and that this example is foremost in the mind of those who would have the Israelis do something similar in Iran.

As for the Internet promoting democracy & moderation, I tend to agree. However, I was caught up short recently when reading that there is evidence indicating Hugo Chavez was able to manipulate electronic voting machine results to convert a loss to a win in the referendum seeking his ouster. If so, mightn't the political impact of new technologies be cutting in both directions (or, one might say, many directions)?

Lincoln Bloomfield
I confess that it sounds like a reverse case of delusional paranoia. On the other hand, clinical studies show that people who do not obsess about short term tactical setbacks live an average of seven days longer than those who do. The secret is to distinguish between the short-term and the long-term. In the short-term, to quote the principal architect of out Iraq disaster, "stuff happens" (Rumsfeld’s secret was to bowdlerize his language to disguise the lunacy of his policies).

But consider: From Jules Verne to HG Wells to Herman Kahn to JF Kennedy (20 nuclear weapons states by 1975), virtually every straight-line prediction of disaster has been wrong. My favorite is the 1860’s projection that, given the current mode of urban transportation, by the end of the 19th century American cities would be buried under 100 feet of horse manure. Happily, this turned out to apply only inside the Washington Beltway.

But one sector worries me mightily. The horrors of apocalypse are still possible, not because of the Book of Revelation, but if we allow nuclear proliferation to continue unchecked, or if the nuclear powers fail their treaty obligation to move toward nuclear disarmament. (Bush made non-proliferation harder by undermining his own policy in order to line up India as a counter to China,) Let me be cold-blooded. Another World Trade Center type attack will unnerve the country, but unless it is nuclear it wont cause any more casualties than an average battle in the Congo. On the other hand, if it goes nuclear, every nightmare becomes reality. Same if India and Pakistan, or Israel and Iran, let a crisis get out of control. The reason for pessimism is because only nuclear weapons could wipe out whole civilizations. On this most portentous global security threat you will look long and hard for leadership or even understanding from the supposedly security-minded White House nor for that matter from other acknowledged nuclear powers..

What would a serious, intelligent leader do who recognizes that this is the only area where national security is potentially at maximum risk? Give top priority to expanding Nunn –Lugar controls on Russian loose nukes; take decisive steps toward checking all cargos arriving in the US; give an imaginative lead in reversing the pernicious worldwide amnesia about the military uselessness and potential genocidal nature of nuclear weaponry by bold steps to reduce the US arsenal to a safe minimum.

Optimist or pessimist? How about realist?

Kip Winsett
I came across this recently. "As the information age deepens, a globe–circling realm of the mind is being created — the "noosphere" that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin identified 80 years ago. This will increasingly affect the nature of grand strategy and diplomacy. Traditional realpolitik, which ultimately relies on hard (principally military) power, will give way to the rise of noöpolitik (or noöspolitik), which relies on soft (principally ideational) power. This paper reiterates the authors’ views as initially stated in 1999, then adds an update for inclusion in a forthcoming handbook on public diplomacy. One key finding is that non–state actors — unfortunately, especially Al Qaeda and its affiliates — are using the Internet and other new media to practice noöpolitik more effectively than are state actors, such as the U.S. government. Whose story wins — the essence of noöpolitik — is at stake in the worldwide war of ideas." http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_8/ronfeldt/index.html

Do you agree that government is lagging in its use of the Internet to shape beliefs? Is there a moral dilemma for government’s outright use of the internet (propaganda) or is this an instance in which the interests of the nation trump such a charge?

Walter Anderson
Linc, I'm happy to get more of the famous Bloomfield approach to the world, which manages to be both hard-nosed realistic and refreshingly hopeful. My question (closely related to Kip's) is: what do you think the next administration can do to repair this country's success in capturing the role of global bad guy?

Lincoln Bloomfield
A set of fascinating related issues raised by Kip and Walt. But first Ralph questioning that Israel’s bombing of Iraq’s Osiraq nuclear reactor in 1980 had mixed results. Yes, the strike was successful. But in 1991 UN inspectors found an ongoing Iraqi uranium enrichment program that hadn’t existed before, Moral: one-time disarmament of an offending country often backfires. Witness Pakistan going nuclear after we denied them conventional arms (the so-called "Doves’ Dilemma") or Israel developing its own weapons industry after we temporarily cut them off in 1973.

Good point re misuse of the Internet. You could add many a marvelous invention in medicine, physics, chemistry, communication et al that turned out to have both benign and malignant uses. Most science and technology is morally neutral, and everything, as with life itself, depends on the character and values of the user. Plus, pace Mr. Bush, maybe a little governmental regulation to keep it peaceful.

Now the nagging issue of the American image abroad as severely darkened by the present White House. The stupidities and blunders run a broad gamut ranging from belligerent language that antagonizes rather than persuades, to failure to address the Arab word persuasively, to making Al Jazeera more credible than the Voice of America, to shutting down the cost-effective American libraries that blanketed the world until some idiot cut them back. ,Unpopular policies can’t be made popular any more than the proverbial lipstick can beautify a pig. But more than any other single factor that has undermined US credibility both at home and abroad is failing to tell the truth.

For my sins, I have lectured in 35 countries for the USIA and State Department as an independent professor. It is tasteless to denounce your country and its leaders abroad, whether or not you are officially sponsored as a cultural event. But you sure as hell don’t lie. Credibility is the core litmus test for overseas communication. Even where US policies are deplored, it is still possible to gain respect for America – if you tell the truth.

Conclusion: the world out there dislikes George W. Bush but still generally likes Americans, imitates our Constitution, and frequently wants to visit, emigrate, or send their kids to American universities. If a change in leadership brings with it some common sense about human communication undergirded with a sense of probity, plus a reopening of American libraries everywhere and proper use of our vaunted communication skills, . negative attitudes can be gradually reversed. Caution: the US cant make itself smaller or weaker than it actually is. But it can treat others with respect and dignity. If it carries a big stick, like TR it can also walk softly. And it can remember Mark Twain’s dictum that if you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

Kip Winsett
As the world becomes more complex it seems there is an increasing need on the part of those who govern to exercise more control. Technology obliges with an ever increasing variety of gadgets that allow government to more closely monitor us so the power to control is also increasing.

Do you think that today's more complex world actually does require that government exercise more control or is that simply a perception that arises because there are more ways to control?

Lincoln Bloomfield
Thoughtful question, Kip. I would broaden it to include what might be called "international governance" (NOT government!) to deal with transnational issues that no single nation can control such as global warming, nuclear non-proliferation, airline safety, cross-border epidemics and a zillon other functional sectors (the late Jeanne Kirkpatrick won Reagan's heart with her famous Commentary artcile denouncing all such "international socialism").

You are also right that there are more things to control, i.e. noisome private activities that get regulated as pubic goods. The perennial argument is between conservatives who want less government but demand subsidies, and liberals who want increased government controls but no intrusion into private matters. You are also right that microchips, to use shorthand, make it possible for government to both protect and irritate us.

For perspective, the US was founded on the principle of limited government so that the likes of George III would never again get in its face. The 10th Amendment to the Constitution reserves all undelegated powers to the states. But of course as society got more complex central power multiplied. The Progressive Movement that blossomed in the era of Republican Teddy Roosevelt, vastly increased governmental powers to fight corruption, bust trusts, establish the progressive income tax, and enfranchise women and ultimately everyone.

Bottom line: In a time when the microchip tilts the scales in favor of ever-more intrusive government. Americans still want two contradictory things: government help for a growing range of services and subsidies, and to be left alone by government. The ability to do both should be on the next administration's job description.

Richard Farson
Linc, your last line sounds like an impossible task, but it is possible to go in opposite directions at once, isn't it?

Richard Farson
Because you have been involved in mass media with your Fifty Years Ago Today television broadcast, and also involved in extensive game building with your POLEX and other cold war simulations, I wonder if you ever think that the two...mass media and gaming...could be combined in some way now to better prepare the public for democratic responsibility?

Lincoln Bloomfield
Dick my split personality will consider your challenging bipolar thought as soon as I return from a brief away day tomorrow

Lincoln Bloomfield
Dick, your question is truly mind-boggling, and integrates well with your previous query about typical American ambivalence. How can the technique of political gaming be fruitfully used as a means of public education via mass media? Let me sneak up on that challenging question by unbundlng it.

My own target in developing the so-called POLEX was educational, but in the sense of broadening the sensibility of the small population of policy officials and scholars (including multiple nationalities) by forcing them to temporarily get inside the heads of another culture. My OpEd piece last year in the Christian Science Monitor urging gaming at the White House level was also aimed at a tiny elite audience, which isn't what you are talking about

The Monitor Channel’s daily TV feature "Fifty Years Ago Today", which I hosted, sought to entertain a wider audience while smuggling in some oft-forgotten or mis-remembered history, a combination many viewers came to enjoy. But I never used gaming in that show.

So how combine decision-making all-human role-playing gaming with the wide educational potential of mass media? The Council on Foreign Relations has tried, by publicly airing a program showing staged simulations of policy-making using ex-officials and pundits as the players. Not bad, but the trouble is that the audience is a pretty elite one, in the sense of Gabriel Almond’s classic "attentive public". Moreover, a bunch of heavy thinkers sitting around a table heavily thinking is likely to be a room-emptier.

I actually tried a few times to combine the two. In 1985 HBO produced an Ace Award-winning TV special called "Countdown to Looking Glass" whose script I developed. It showed a progression of fateful decisions that led to an unwanted nuclear exchange between the superpowers. Afterwards I screened the film to varied audiences in and out of government, stopping periodically to let them role-play the options for the next bit, which was very successful as an educational tool greatly enhanced with a high-octane dramatic show as backdrop.

So one could conceive of a show like, say, "24 Hours" periodically stopping to stage a simulated role-playing decision-making debate by non-actors that generates a policy decision which the show would somehow pick up. Would you need a Pirandello to write it? Perhaps a Farson…………….

Richard Farson
As you probably know, Linc, here at WBSI we experimented with gaming and simulation and deterrence strategies for he Joint Chiefs in the cold war, and also with uses of mass media for mental health pursuits, but we didn't marry the two interests. Now I'm encouraged to read that you think with the proper writing and staging that such a scenario is not out of the question. I've all along thought choosing among dramatic scenarios instead of candidates would be a better way to elict the intelligence of the voters.

I asked earlier if you thought that it would be entirely possible, even appropriate, to employ seemingly opposite strategies in both foreign and domestic arenas at the same time. An Israeli management theorist, Alexander Laufer, author of Simultaneous Management, suggests that strategy in the management of projects....setting two or more teams on very different approaches to the same goal. I don't remember seeing such a strategy in either foreign or domestic political management, but thought you might have experience or an opinion on that.

Lincoln Bloomfield
Introducing a built-in reality check into the foreign and national security policymaking machine would be a huge plus. Paradoxically, serious challenge mechanisms are in fact built into the governmental system -- but only at the working level, not at the top where it’s really needed.

The military uses so-called Murder Boards to try to tear apart proposed military concepts or programs. Far from punishing the challengers, these are the intellectual equivalents of the Red Team in a war game whose job it is to put proposed strategies or tactics under artificial stress. (A less edifying non-military example is the "Team B" created in the 1980’s to advance hardline positions toward the Soviet Union by creating an alternative bureaucratic pathway. The trouble was that it was a period of Soviet rot and collapse clearly visible to those of us who were present there at the time)

A variant of that Team B would be Rumsfeld’s creation of a new intelligence shop within the office of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. Once again, the point was to create a preferred reality by cherry-picking intelligence to support the Pentagon and Vice Presidential WMD-based argument for invading Iraq.

This president’s allergy to contradiction rules out any policy challenge, real or artificial. But even a larger-minded leader would find nothing in place like a systemic challenge machine. The committee system is supposed to consider relevant options and, through some alchemy, transform the bureaucratic dross into a golden solution for the president. Sometimes that works. But Yale psychologist Irving Janis helped us understand the pathology of "Groupthink" that makes it almost impossible to seriously examine options that are contrary to the wishes of the boss.

Here again the only acceptable technique I know of for getting outside that trap that is the POLEX, and that only at medium levels. Unfortunately, a good professional game is more likely to replicate the in-house consensus process than to come up with a serious challenge to conventional thinking. Are there no fixes that might work better?

One technique I experimented with at MIT is reminiscent of the one Dick mentions. It was to have two US teams playing independently against the scenario, with one crucial variable changed for one team but not the other One example was having the president’s senior domestic policy adviser a major player on team A but not Team B. Introducing crucial socio-economic factors into an otherwise purely "national security" debate created a measurable effect that was interesting enough to warrant retrying. But it created some understandable brain damage in the increasingly schizoid Control Group, and I never dared use it in the top-level games I ran for the Joint Chiefs, the Soviets, or other foreigners. Try it at WBSI!

Ralph Keyes
The Catholic Church, of all institutions, has a reality check built into its consideration of candidates for sainthood - the co-called devil's advocate (the source of that term)- who is brought in from the outside to pose the most stringent possible challenge to the candidate's saintly credentials. To their credit they hired Christopher Hitchens as the devil's advocate for Mother Theresa.

It's always fascinated me that institutions we might consider the last word in closed-mindedness - the Vatican, the military, some corporations - can be quite vigorous in their self-scrutiny; much more so than the average academic institution. This has always struck me as a form of institutional self-confidence, one sorely lacking in the current administration, as you've reminded us so eloquently, Linc. As part of your work along this line, what are the most effective ways you've come across, or conjured, to make sure that outside points of view are considered within ingrown institutions?

Lincoln Bloomfield
Ralph, your two points are very compelling -- Murder Board aka Devil's Advocate, and the surprising suppleness of some unlikely institutions, famously not including government bureaucracies and certainly not the present Manichean-minded White House.

You ask if there is any really viable way of insinuating outside ideas and opinions into the closed circuitry of high officialdom? Sure: witness JFK calling in outsiders during the missile Crisis, Dean Rusk living with his in-house devils advocate George Ball, Clinton inviting diverse views to his endless seminars, and even this president recently asking in some outside experts -- well after his initial sequence of decisions created the present monumental predicament for this country.

But in all fairness, at least in the national security sphere even previous infusions of outside juice into what you call ingrown institutions have been temporary, ephemeral, and about as lasting as a Chinese meal. Maybe leaders get so wedded to their own "gut feeling" (to quote WE) or committees to their consensus, that they all suffer cognitive dissonance when contradictory information tries to penetrate.

I do remember one Homeric effort by State when undersecretaries and assiatant secretaries were dispatched to cities like Pittsburgh to meet with the natives and this time NOT give a speech, but rather sit there and listen before opening their mouths. It was financed by the Kettering Foudation and I happened to go along as a consultant to both State and Kettering. It was fascinating. The senior officials were so concerned that they would be stressed by the unfamiliar and even threatening format that they brought along a Deputy Assistant Secretary who was a psychiatrist (and who also happened to be a former grad student of mine at MIT). I don’t think the experiment was ever repeated.

Not a perfect note to end on, but just one more unmet challenge to thoughtful people like the denizens of the ILF to think of better ways to break into bubbles and cocoons for the greater good. Thanks for listening......Linc

Kip Winsett
Linc, thanks so much for taking the time to answer our questions. You've given us some truly brilliant comments here. Just as you did in your book "Accidental Encounters With History" you've managed to combine concise historical perspective with clear cut and pragmatic assessments of current events.

Richard Farson
Let me add my thanks, Linc. Your interview is a study in wit and wisdom. We look forward to its publication in our ILF Digest.