Rosa Brooks on Ambiguity In and Of Wartime

Episode originally aired August 13, 2019.

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Transcript:

August 13, 2019

ROSA BROOKS: The problem is—it’s not so much that, “Oh gosh, war has gotten outside of its box, so we’ll just shove it back in its box.” The problem is that if we live in a world in which it is more difficult to meaningfully distinguish between, “This is war, and that’s not war,” then we need to change what’s at stake in that nomenclature.

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MARK HANNAH: My name is Mark Hannah, and I’m your host for None of the Above, a podcast from the Eurasia Group Foundation. Today we’re stealing a regular guest away from the Deep State Radio podcast, Rosa Brooks. She served in the Pentagon during the Obama years and is now a professor of law at Georgetown where she runs a program on innovative policing. She is the author of the book How Everything Became War, and the Military Became Everything.

HANNAH: You worked in the Obama Defense Department for a while, and you were probably one of the few people who wasn't armed with this sort of IR theory background. Do you think that served you in a sense? It maybe enabled a certain kind—

BROOKS: Of je ne sais quoi?

HANNAH: Yeah. A je ne sais quoi—

BROOKS: A je ne comprend pas—

HANNAH: But potentially it liberated you from formulaic ways of thinking about the world…

BROOKS: I really like that theory. Yes, I absolutely—you know, knowing less makes me smarter! I mean, on the one hand, admittedly, that's a totally self-serving way to approach things—I say because I am blissfully ignorant, therefore I have been able to come at things with a fresh perspective.

HANNAH: It also has a benefit of being self-deprecating and charming and that sense too.

BROOKS: I mean, I think there may be some truth to it. I always—I do believe—I'm a very firm believer that diverse groups are stronger groups, and it’s beneficial having people in the mix, whether it's the at the Pentagon or any other setting, who come from different backgrounds, who will question each other's assumptions and say, “That may be obvious to you, but it's not obvious to me. I don't understand. Explain it.” Even when they're wrong, it can strengthen the group because it forces everybody else to take a step back and say “Oh, let me explain why I think this is obvious.” And along the way you realize it shouldn't be obvious; it's wrong. Other times you realize, “I'm going to double down on this.” But either way, one of the things that was a pleasant surprise and continues to amaze me about the military in particular is the autodidact. You know, sometimes they were people who hadn't gone through a lot of formal education in that field. That is what often made them really interesting. They weren't saying, “Well everybody knows that the only way to approach this is such and such. Everybody knows the only way to think about this is this way.” They really were thinking laterally. And I think finding institutional ways to cherish that, those pockets of weirdness, is really important to do.

HANNAH: I mean, you were the child of activists.

BROOKS: Still am.

HANNAH: Still are—still have activist parents. How how does that inform your experience or your vantage point when you're going into a cultural context that isn't famous for activism necessarily, whether it's the government generally or the Pentagon specifically.

BROOKS: Well I think one thing—I remember my younger brother, who is a journalist and a writer, saying one thing our mother taught us was that, “Everybody can think you're wrong, and you can still be right.” And I do think that growing up embattled—and we were certainly embattled. We lived in a very conservative blue collar town and had the crazy lefty feminist radical socialist—

HANNAH: Which state?

BROOKS: New York.

HANNAH: Oh!

BROOKS: You know, we were surrounded by cops and firefighters and nurses, and we did not fit in. And we got a fair amount of mockery throughout our childhoods. There are ways in which I think that's a healthy thing. It teaches you it's okay to not fit in and not be like everybody else and that you can survive it, and in fact, I sometimes worry about the opposite. I have two fantastic kids, both teenagers now. And I remember in 2008, when I was canvassing with them for then candidate for President Barack Obama—we live in Alexandria, Virginia—every house in our neighborhood had an Obama sign out front, more or less, and I thought, my children are growing up in a place where they're part of the majority. They have never—in their school and their neighborhood—known a time when they're not part of the majority culture in their little bubble. And you gain something—their lives have been easier and simpler. But I worry, sometimes, that you lose something. You get two things from being an outcast. One is the ability to recognize it's not the end of the world if people don't like you and make fun of you. There are things more important, and you have to be true to your commitments and values. But the sort of equal and opposite thing is you have to learn the skill of talking to people who are different from you, and who disagree passionately with every assumption you make, because otherwise you won't have any friends.

HANNAH: Barbara Ehrenreich, my editor, mentioned your mother who is famous for her book Nickel and Dimed, and she has another book that just came out about the epidemic of wellness. And there seems to be a commonality here in that they're both books about controlling things we ultimately can't control. In yours, it's the behavior of international actors, and you're basically writing in your book about how, through military means, we're trying to shape the world in a way that might not be achievable. Do you think there's a commonality between these two projects?

BROOKS: Well, I think the one thing that I have always admired about my mother—and I hope it's a quality that I have as well—is that she is comfortable with ambiguity. And she is very honest—very, very honest. She will never take the comfortable lie over the prickly, unpleasant, complex reality and truth. She doesn't go for the easy answer, and she's not willing to pretend the easy answer is the right answer. You know, what those two issues and most issues in life have in common is that often, the easy answer isn't the right answer. Reality is full of contradictions and ambiguities, and you have to acknowledge them. So in that sense I suppose, yes, and going back to your earlier very generous hypothesis that knowing less may make you more able to have a fresh view—

HANNAH: That's just a self-serving hypothesis.

BROOKS: I think we should go with it. You know my mom has a PhD in biology, cellular biology. She has written on subjects as varied as low wage work, the nature of war, wellness, you name it, and she is very much an autodidact. She's someone who is very much driven by sheer curiosity, always like, “Oh that's funny, I wonder why... You know, that's kind of funny, too; I wonder how that came about…” And you know, you lose something, in terms of a certain type of depth, but I think you can also gain something.

HANNAH: Quick follow up on that. We had Stephen Walt on the podcast, and he thought Barack Obama was quite similar in the sense that he's sort of driven by curiosity and really wants to set orthodoxy aside but wasn't able to find enough people in the foreign policy community that were in that. Do you agree with Walt that there's a prevailing orthodoxy that exists, and it cripples our ability to act rationally as a country?

BROOKS: I do, and I'm a big fan of Steve Walt and his book and his work in general. But then take a step back on Obama. I think the danger of the excessive acknowledgment of ambiguity is that it can be very paralyzing. And Obama is absolutely a true intellectual and keenly aware of the contradictions and complexities and ambiguities. I also think that when you're the president of the United States, for better or for worse, you are called on to make decisions and be a leader. And although God knows I miss him—boy do I miss Barack Obama—I think there were too many moments when his fascination with how darn complicated everything was got in the way of his ability to say, “Yes, and yes, but we have to make a decision here.” Blaming it all on the foreign policy establishment, which just wouldn't let Obama be Obama, or the blob, as Obama—

HANNAH: Ben Rhodes—

BROOKS: —Ben Rhodes put it, lets him off the hook a little too easily. I don't think he had the passion to figure out how to act in the face of all that ambiguity, and I think too often he was too willing to shrug his shoulders, and say “Yeah, well, it's so complicated. I guess we'll just have another meeting.”

Interlude featuring archival audio

BROOKS: The idea that we would have troop deployments for lengthy periods of time, even many decades—there's nothing in itself wrong with that. But I think what we have seen is three presidents in a row now who have not been able to articulate any clear vision: “Well what are we actually trying to do?” You know, Bush started out with, “Well, we're just going after the 9/11 bad guys,” then morphed into, “We're remaking Afghanistan into Sweden or some variant of Sweden…”

HANNAH: Bringing democracy.

BROOKS: Obama started out with, “Well, we're just going to finish the job and bring them home…”

HANNAH: He ran on ending the wars…

BROOKS: —and morphed into, “Well, maybe some of them, but not all them. And I'm not sure why,” and couldn't quite make up his mind. Trump just doesn't care, I think, one way or the other.

HANNAH: Well, this gets at a broader question about the use of the American military and distinguishing between wartime and peacetime. Talk a little bit about the research you've done, how different cultures sort of demarcate when a culture is at peace or at war, and if that's important in the U.S. Or should we be should we be tolerant of this ambiguity?

BROOKS: One of the most fun things about researching my most recent book was delving into the anthropological literature on how different societies have tried to make sense of war, what it is, and how to define it, and virtually every society had some mechanism that was pretty important to them of delineating the boundaries between war and not war. Almost without exception, human societies have found it important to police that line.

HANNAH: You mentioned specifically Native American groups like the Cheyenne and the Choctaw and the Iroquois, who divided authority between peace chiefs and war chiefs. And when the tribe transitioned from war to peace the power would shift. We don't have that in the current American government. Should we? Should we have a Secretary of Peace? Should we have a way of distinguishing when we're at war and not at war?

BROOKS: To me it's not necessarily a terrible thing that we have trouble applying our categories —war, peace—in a neat way to what's going on. We can get really hung up on what we're calling things, and here's the problem. We have these binary categories—war, peace, military, civilian—and we have institutions and laws that are structured around these binary categories. And legal frameworks for wartime and for conflict are very different in terms of the degree to which it protects individual rights, the degree to which it restrains state coercion, and the use of lethal force.

And since you have legal frameworks in which things that are permissible and praiseworthy in wartime are impermissible, unlawful, and immoral in peacetime, a lot hangs on your ability to say, “Aha, this is in the war basket; this is in the peace basket.” The problem is not that the world is blurry. The problem is that we have a rigid—and at this point, in some ways, antiquated—set of categories and institutions that don't work very well in the current geopolitical environment.

HANNAH: You're a lawyer and a law professor, and so you understand these legal categories. There might be some things—rights or enjoyments—Americans are willing to sacrifice in moments of emergency or war time that they might not be comfortable…

BROOKS: ...doing forever.

HANNAH: ...doing forever.

BROOKS: No, no. And I think that's exactly the more important question to ask ourselves.

Interlude featuring archival audio

BROOKS: We've ended up in a situation where three presidents in a row have tended to err on the side of putting more in the basket labeled war. And so a whole set of restrictions—on individual freedom and expansions of the power of the state—which most people would be perfectly fine with on a temporary basis, have come to be extended and extended and extended, so that the state of emergency becomes the norm. That, I think, is the dilemma. And that's a legal problem, but it's also an institutional one, in that we have these institutions and roles for them that stopped making sense when those categories get blurred.

Take U.S. drone strikes for counterterrorism purposes. A U.S. drone strike against a suspected terrorist target in Yemen or Somalia or Libya or Syria or wherever—if we think that person is a combatant in an armed conflict, or even a civilian who is actively participating in hostilities during an armed conflict, a U.S. drone strike against that person is morally and legally identical to an American soldier on the beaches of Normandy shooting at a German soldier. You don't have to have a court. You don't have to have a judge. You don't have to have a warrant. You don't have to have evidence. You get to kill that guy because you think he might be the enemy. End of story. Simple.

On the other hand if we're not sure that guy is a combatant, or we're not sure we can call this a war, well, then we're in a totally different moral and legal universe in which the U.S. is going around the world murdering people, which is not cool. And most of us really want to be on one side of that, not on the other side of that.

Having said that, I don't think that should be the end of the story. I think all of our instincts about, “Well, you can’t have a court on the battlefield,” or something, makes sense on the beach at Normandy as a statement. It makes no sense with regard to most counterterrorism drone strikes, which are planned weeks, months, sometimes years in advance, during which you absolutely have time for due process and so forth that you wouldn't have time for in a stereotypical World War II battlefield.

HANNAH: And the defenders of the drone program will argue that there are fewer civilians who get injured than in conventional warfare. Of course there's no way to necessarily verify with boots on the ground if you're so far up in the sky…

BROOKS: I think that's probably true. But I also think it's sort of irrelevant to the broader rule of law question. Take an analogy to domestic policing law enforcement. If I'm a police officer, and I say, “You know, I've got a great idea. I have a pretty darn good idea as a result of my time on the streets—there are really fifteen people behind most of this violence, and it's gang related. So I'm going to kill those fifteen people. And it's possible that as I kill them I might accidentally kill some of their kids or something, which would be really sad, and I feel bad about it. But the good news is that's going to mean hundreds fewer people are violently mugged or shot or whatever. Are you cool with that?”

You would say, “No I'm not cool with that,” right? To me the issue is not, “Are there fewer dead people overall?” Maybe so. The issue is somewhat different.

HANNAH: Right. And if you think every human life has worth. OK, I want to ask you more about policing, but I really want to get to our lightning round so...

Rosa Brooks, lightning round. You're a writer. Simple first question. Favorite place to write? How do you block off the time? Where and when do you write?

BROOKS: I never write at a desk. I write on a sofa with my feet up on a coffee table or something and my laptop on my lap. I need to be close to horizontal to write. And I'm embarrassed to say I can only write in sort of intense, obsessive compulsive spurts in which I shut myself up.

HANNAH: While you shut down the Wi-Fi.

BROOKS: I don’t shut down Wi-Fi because I need to Google stuff. But I have to be alone. I go to great lengths to hide from my family every now and then. I actually rented a cabin in Wyoming for two weeks by myself last summer to work on a book.

HANNAH: That sounds amazing. The weirdest thing the Pentagon supplies?

BROOKS: Chocolate sculptures of fighter jets and drones.

HANNAH: Seriously? Interesting. What do you think is the most normal thing to do that is considered a crime?

BROOKS: I discovered to my shock and horror that it is a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail in Washington D.C. to have a dog on a leash the length of which exceeds six feet.

HANNAH: Wow. Interesting. You had a long leash?

BROOKS: I do have a long leash. And now I'm nervous.

HANNAH: We've threatened to go to war in this Administration, the Trump Administration, with nearly everybody, it feels like. Which is the most absolutely disastrous conflict to get involved in, of all the ones we're contemplating right now.

BROOKS: Oh, gosh. I think a military conflict involving North Korean nuclear weapons would be pretty catastrophically awful. China, in the long run, has the power to be more of a threat. But I don't think the Chinese are remotely crazy. Whereas, the North Koreans are somewhat crazy, and Trump is too…

HANNAH: What connections do you see between how the United States polices domestically and how our foreign policy is conducted?

BROOKS: I think just as we have come to view the military as the sort of 24/7 Walmart answer to all of our problems internationally, whatever it is, domestically, we are increasingly expecting the police to solve all problems. And you get a very similar phenomenon with these vicious circles. You know, as funding is cut for civilian agencies, their capabilities dwindle, and we turn to the military, which shifts resources and authorities to the military, which further starves the civilian agencies. It's not a not a great outcome.

HANNAH: Yeah, it's kind of a solution that creates the problem to some extent. In your opinion, how do you conquer fear of someone who is different from you?

BROOKS: Yeah. We have this program in which young police officers in Washington D.C. come and go through intensive workshops on all the issues they don't talk about at the police academy, like race and policing and alternatives to arrest, and some of the law students from Georgetown work with them and with police recruits at the police academy. If you put them in the room together in the right circumstances, saying to everybody, “Hey, you're different, but talk to each other. More curiosity, less judgment,” pretty amazing things start happening. By and large, both groups tend to come out of the room saying, “Wow, I had no idea those people who I thought were completely different from me were worrying about so many of the same things,” and it's true for police interacting with community members, too. More curiosity, less judgment. Find out why. “Huh. What made you decide to do that? How does that make sense to you?” And you often end up finding there is a better solution than slapping somebody in cuffs.

HANNAH: From your time at the Pentagon, what lessons do you think the U.S. military could learn from the program on innovative policing?

BROOKS: Gosh, I think in some ways the lessons should maybe go the other way around. I always think it's so funny when people complain about the militarization of policing—by which they usually mean they don't like the uniforms, and they don't like the fact that this police department has officers riding around in a Humvee.

HANNAH: Surplus military equipment—

BROOKS: Yeah, they're right not to like all that stuff. That's stupid, mostly. But I actually think that if domestic policing imported more of the lessons learned by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan about stability operations and counterinsurgency—lessons like, legitimacy matters, population protection matters, consulting the community matters, and local ownership matters—it would in fact be a lot more community-friendly and community-oriented than it very often is. So in that sense, I think there are certain ways in which the domestic law enforcement community could learn from some of the military's experiences.

HANNAH: So are you advocating for the militarization of police departments? And if so that's going to be the, kind of, clickbait title for this episode. And on that, I want to thank Rosa Brooks, our guest, for joining us on None of the Above. Rosa, thank you very much.

BROOKS: My pleasure. Thank you, Mark.

HANNAH: Thanks again to Rosa Brooks. Keep an eye out for her new book about policing. I’m Mark Hannah, and this has been None of the Above, from the Eurasia Group Foundation. If you want to hear more episodes like this, please visit our website, noneoftheabovepodcast.org. Subscribe and review us anywhere you get podcasts. Tell all your friends and family. Tweet us out @EGFound or @ProfessorHannah. Thanks for listening.

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