Haiti though it never was a war was fascinating series of coup detats and revolutions and so on. And then the iraq war which itself was kind of several different wars, so i dont 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 ive always found it a fascinating phenomenon. I mean, on the one hand, theres the sheer excitement of it, the adrenaline pumping excitement of following a violent series of events, the end of which you simply dont know. And then theres what it shows about the society youre trying to understand. It shows people and tremendousists, it shows institutions and extremists and shows in general people and other phenomenon under stress and thats 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 thats a wonderful uestion. I wish i would have said, though it doesnt 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 didnt 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 countrys 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 didnt 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 hed seen how it would how it has evolved. He wouldnt admit that, i dont think but its 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, wasnt 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 didnt 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 wasnt 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 youre an aide to Lyndon Johnson, you ran in 1964, implied we werent 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 dont believe you can win, if you dont believe this is a winning prospect, you shouldnt do it. You shouldnt 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 thats the first i think i would have said, you dont have to do this, the political withdraw, the handful of advisors wont be as great as you think, its 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 its 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 dont do it if you dont want to do it but if youre 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, theres 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 werent died in the wool pessimists but nobody thought it would be a quicken gaugement, would be easy to win. They couldnt conceive of defeat. But that the United States would be defeated but they werent 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 thats part of the tragedy. Brian did you ever face the draft . Mark i didnt. I was born in 1958. Brian what would you have done if drafted, do you think . Mark i honestly dont 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 antiwar movement, depending what year it was and so on. So i think its likely i would have either gone to jail or id like to think i wouldnt have gone abroad or anything but i think i might have gone to jail or maybe i would have gone and fought. I honestly dont 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. Shouldnt be involved in that and even though it was farther away in time. Its a good question. I honestly dont know. I remember as a child as i then was, my father saying we shouldnt be there but if were going to be there we ought to win and get out. A lot of people thought that. What are we doing there . But there wasnt 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. Its not true its an extraordinary military and very powerful but can only win in certain situations. And it can only really destroy things. It cant build a new order in its place. Your First Experience was in a callin show of 1985 and i want to show it to you 35 years ago. Mark what im worried about right now is other countries coming of age in the Nuclear Weapon area that arent negotiating with one another and could possibly, terrorism, for instance, is as great today and what about them guys . Mark weve 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 hasnt 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 whats the update 31 years now in Nuclear Weaponry. How has it changed . Mark that was during the mid 1980s 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 its remarkable now to me, having grown up with this prospect of Nuclear Weapons and nuclear tact as very real during the cold war how theyve 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 hasnt made much progress along that line. I would have hoped there would have been another treaty by now and he hasnt and in fact theyre 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 landbased 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 its not a vivid issue and you can have a president ial candidate who doesnt 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 1980s and would have said well only use Nuclear Weapons if theyre 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 id say they were both democrats. My father was more of an f. D. R. Democrat. His favorite president , though, was truman. And id 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 isnt effective. So i wouldnt 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 thats a really hard question. There are practical matters you have to look at first. When you look at that particular genocide, thats 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 dont 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 whats 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 dont 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 its 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 thats one of the situations where there wasnt a good option. I think politically speaking there was no military option. You would have had to i dont 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. Thats 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 im 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 bushs initial instinct which was to levy very heavy sanctions, and in effect a boycott which is, by the way, wilsons original idea, Woodrow Wilsons 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. Wilsons vision was boycott. You dont 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 t