What We’ve Got Here is a Failure to Communicate

by Jessica Kramer

To rate or comment, view full size.   |   or make your own.

America has failed – failed in protecting its citizens against terrorism, spending the budget wisely, coping with outside threats, and much more, as decided by a panel of authors and politicians, including New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, at New York University’s Law School Monday, April 28, 2008.

The afternoon event held in the Tishman Auditorium was the second in a series of Cohen-Nunn Dialogues featuring William Cohen, the former U.S. Secretary of Defense, and former U.S. Senator (R-Maine) and Sam Nunn, Chairman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies Board of Trustees and former U.S. Senator (D-Ga.) as the hosts. This was called Preserve, Protect, and Defend: The Challenges to America’s Homeland Security, and this time, Bloomberg, Stephen Flynn, author of America the Vulnerable, and Jessica Stern, author of Terror in the Name of God, were the discussants.

NYU President John Sexton opened the night saying, "According to recent surveys, nearly 70 percent of Americans believe that our nation is headed in the wrong direction … Civil discourse seems to have collapsed into talking points. The panel will attempt to elevate the discourse [and] help drive public policy into a better place.”

David Berman, Associate Director at the Center for Catastrophe Preparedness and Response at NYU, started organizing the event with NYU over a month ago. Berman helped host the event and organize the telecast on CNN.com, the NYU webpage and the CCPR website. He said the 400 seats were at capacity.

Admiral James Loy, Former Deputy Security of the Department of Homeland Security, introduced the event. “The panel will focus its discussion around three basic points: the terrorist threat itself – understanding it, defining it, comprehending it; second, protecting Americans against that threat; and lastly, responding to catastrophes if and when that must be the case.”

Debbie Boylan, who works for the Howard Gilman Foundation who sponsored the event and help select the panelists, said they started planning for the event two or three months ago. “The organizers got together [looking for the] best venue in New York.” Last month the first dialogue was held at George Washington University. The intention is to have them at colleges and get youth involved. “I think it was very successful. [There was a] very high level panel and great questions from the audience.”

The professionals had much to consider. Cohen said the first obligation of the government is to remain secure physically, fiscally, economically, and environmentally. We should evaluate our threats: what have we done, what have we failed to do, where do we go from here?

Nunn asked, “What does winning mean in terms of the fight against terrorism? Does it mean getting down to zero risk? I don’t think so.”

Flynn mentioned this “exclamation point” of a fact: the total GDP of Iran is just under $600 billion last year, which is about 15 to 20 percent less than our defense budget.

“We need to be very mindful of the current terrorist threat … but as a society come to broader grips with the fact that confronted power increasingly is going to have this civil, economic component to it,” he said, “and is going to require a far different strategy than the hunt and destroy missions around the planet for anybody who may pose as a threat.”

Stern has talked extensively with jihadists, and said the term is not always correct as many “are not completely committed to the mission they do.”

But some are. One young member of the Mujahideen told Stern something she said she would never forget. “The same way you’re addicted to writing, I am addicted to jihad,” he had told her.

She said we should make it clear that “the main victims of … jihadi terrorism are the Muslims themselves.”

Things we might think are related to terrorism, such as lack of education, are not risk factors for it, she said. And what’s more, studies show that people who support terrorism may be slightly better educated than those who do not, but nobody has looked at the content of that education. Lack of democracy is also not a factor. “In fact, autocracy is a better bulwark against terrorism than democracy,” she said.

As to whether Osama Bin Laden hates us for who we are (with our freedoms) or where we are (involved in the Middle East), Stern quoted the man himself. “I am not opposed to … liberal democracy,” he had said. “If I were I’d be attacking Sweden.”

Youssef Cohen, an associate professor of politics at NYU, has somewhat contradictory views of our protection. He thinks we should have the surveillance and security currently in place to protect us from terrorism, yet he also believes everyone in the country should be legalized and given legal papers.

Elizabeth O’Callahan, who is currently unemployed, came to the event because she would like to work in disaster services, and said, “I was hopeful in the beginning [with] Senator Cohen talking about four different areas he’s concerned with.” But he only focused on two of those, she said, the physical and environmental, and he didn’t talk to the degree she hoped for with the latter. “It was more or less what I expected, not necessarily what I hoped for,” she said.

A CAS freshman, Heather Hodder, attended the event because she was covering it for WSN and because she wanted to see the mayor. “I think they addressed the topics well … [and] answered the audience questions well,” she said. “It wasn’t totally dry, political debate. Every time Bloomberg spoke people clapped in the audience. I thought that was really interesting.”

Patrice Fyffe, an after school drama teacher and student advocate at Harlem Children's zone, came because she wanted to hear what the politicians had to say, and thought it was great. “There were a few points I wasn’t aware of [such as] how much we’re spending on the military,” she said. But she noticed there were pressing questions that didn’t get answered by far more people who had their hands raised.

Responding to a question on what the Bush administration has done correctly, Cohen explained, “There hasn’t been an effort on our part to try to identify what the administration’s done right or wrong, to pin the tail on the donkey so to speak – or the elephant, in this particular case,” he added with a smile.

Cohen explained the motivations of the dialogue and the current political climate. “We’re doing this because we’re concerned that the political process today is defeating the other party, … we need to get back to the center … If you watch the political processes unfolding, you’ve got a focus on something that’s quite trivial compared to what we need to find out: how are the candidates … going to bring the country together? What’s going to be required in terms of leadership?”

He reiterated some of Flynn’s earlier statements, saying we should be mobilizing the American people. “Not to appeal to fear,” he explained, “but to build a resilient society that can cope with anything that Mother Nature throws at us, or what the jihadists or others may throw at us.”