Norris Chumley: Thank you, Kelly Golnoush Niknejad, for agreeing to speak with us in our program today. We’re very interested in the intersection of religion and culture, and particularly in new media. And Tehran Bureau is a shining example of cutting-edge new media. Not just in Iran, but also in the United States and around the world.

So I would love to ask some questions about Tehran Bureau, which you’re the founder of and also the editor in charge of content. First, I would be very interested in hearing who’s the audience for Tehran Bureau? Who reads you?

Kelly Niknejad: That’s a really good question. I was told—you kind of hear things—people say it’s an Iranian-American audience. And most of the people who comment appear to be Iranian-Americans or Iranians who have a great grasp of the English language.

I was at a very glitzy Nowruz New Year’s party a few months ago, and the people who were there would be who I would think was our target audience, or those who would continue to be interested in Iran after the election. And I was surprised by how few people there had heard of Tehran Bureau. So even though I think that it’s Iranian-Americans, I don’t think so. I think it has a worldwide audience. I’ve had a chance to travel recently, and I’m always surprised by the people who know about it and who are following it. So it’s very difficult to say.

I think, based on the numbers, most of the hits are coming from the United States. And I think there’s probably an audience in Europe. And I think there’s an audience in Iran as well because since we started being hosted on the PBS server, the top ten countries that are accessing PBS—the Islamic Republic of Iran is in the top ten. So I think they’re probably coming to PBS to read Tehran Bureau or follow events on Tehran Bureau.

So it’s very difficult to say, but it’s an international audience. And I think that’s still kind of being worked out. It’ll be interesting to see who continues to be interested after Iran no longer is the headline story around the world. I think it’s gonna continue to be, because of the nuclear issues and all the changes that are taking place there, but still, it’s not going—I don’t want to predict things, but I can’t imagine it’s gonna be as big of an issue, as important, as it was last summer.

Chumley: Well, to put Tehran Bureau hosted by PBS and the PBS Series “Frontline” into a historic context, is it accurate to say that Tehran Bureau began when the Green Movement began, that is after the 2009 elections and protests over the election?

Niknejad: Oh, no, not at all. I think it actually started, the seeds were planted when I was at Columbia University as a journalism student. I was doing research on Iran. Any time I did any research on Iran, I felt like the narrative that was coming, that was emerging was different from what was being reported by the mainstream media.

And if you look at the mainstream media, they have correspondents who have to cover a lot of other things than just Iran. And every so often when they did report on Iran, it would kind of be a very simple story. And it was gonna be one story that covered something that might be interesting to an international audience. And then they weren’t gonna hear about it again until later on.

And it just seemed like there was a better way to cover Iran. And for those journalists who were going to Iran, there were a lot of problems because, you know, you want to be invited back. Your access is important. That’s what gives you the job that you have.

So because of everything that was happening with new media—I mean, I think every time I went to my Google or Yahoo! email and looked at the instant chat green lights that would go on next to the names of certain people, I’m like, wow! These people should be talking with each other! They’re not, but by just clicking on their names, I can start talking to them and asking questions. And it just seemed like new media was a great way to put people closer together and help us access people that we wouldn’t otherwise have access to. So it started long before—I was trying to raise funds for it long before the election.

But as the election was coming and nobody was willing to help with the funding, I just decided to move into my parents’ house and kind of launch it there as a blog because that was the cheapest way to do it. It was free and we could publish stories on it.

So, no, it happened before, but my theory came to a very quick test because of the election, because of all the problems that I had thought were inherent in covering Iran. And I just kind of got thrust into the whole thing before I thought I was ready, but I just had to go along with it and keep going along with it. And I was very lucky that the Frontline came to my rescue as soon as they realized I had no funding.

Chumley: You had worked as an associate producer on Frontline and worked for a 2007 program, “Showdown to Iran”.

Niknejad: Yeah.

Chumley: And I understand you’re working on a new Frontline program on Iran.

Niknejad: Well, we did. We did “Death in Tehran,” which is about Neda Agha-Soltan, the woman who was shot and caught on YouTube.

Chumley: Uh-huh. Yes.

Niknejad: So it was about the election, and it was about her and it was a little bit about social media. And it was very difficult because we had no access.

Chumley: Yes.

Niknejad: But I expect there will be more Frontline documentaries about Iran.

Chumley: You said in Harvard’s Nieman reports that, may I quote, “The media in Iran is often state owned and always closely supervised. Those newspapers not run directly by the state or associated with political parties and prominent figures whose factional rivalry sometimes spill over into the papers. Those in power often assert it by shutting down a rivals mouthpiece.”

Do you think that that’s changed since the elections and changed with the West’s concern about nuclear proliferation?

Niknejad: In terms of no longer being state-controlled and no longer being run by prominent political figures?

Chumley: Well, shall we say, biased and heavily censored?

Niknejad: No, it’s still—I think whatever it was it’s just a lot worse, and they’ve actually reduced the playing field so that there’s fewer political rivals who get to have a paper. I mean, they’ve shut down so many newspapers, and they’ve thrown so many journalists into prison. And there’s been such an exodus of people, especially journalists, coming from Iran. So, no, it’s gotten a lot worse.

Chumley: Also in Harvard’s Nieman reports you’ve said, quoting, “The work of any journalist or propagandist pale in comparison to the far-fetched scenarios swirling in Iranian living rooms, taxi cabs, and, above all, in the Iranian imagination. I’ve heard them all. And, believe me, reality is not always stranger than fiction.”

Could you talk about some of the homespun rumors? What are they and how are they generated?

Niknejad: Well, you know, generally, Iranians are very suspicious and they are prone to believe in conspiracies. They always think something is happening behind the curtain because it’s so inherent in our culture not to be transparent, to say one thing behind closed doors and to have a different persona in public.

I mean, this has been necessary for different reasons throughout history, and since the revolution in Iran, just the fact that you have to cover from head to toe, you have to be careful what you say in public—especially when I was living in Iran. I mean, for a time it was getting better, and it’s probably things have gotten much more severe since the election, but just to survive you have to have at least a double personality. And that has found its way into journalism, into what people say.

So they know that they can say one thing in public and then come home and when they’re chatting with friends or family, they can say something else. And they think that’s the same thing that goes on in media because you’re saying one thing, but you really mean something else. And you’re supposed to go in between—read between the lines and pull all kinds of crazy things out of it.

And when media is so limited, when it’s under so much control, it makes sense for people to think that the truth is not gonna be stated in media. So let’s try to find what’s going on. And people gossip. And, you know, maybe a lot of the gossip is true, but, again, it’s very Iranian, I think, to do that kind of thing. And so because of the way things are, it’s not possible to be as honest.

Chumley: Yeah.

Niknejad: And, of course, because of the rivalries there are, because of the political factions, the exiles who are here who can publish things that they want, who want to get rid of the regime, have always, you know—their websites are used to put out misinformation.

And a lot of people who left Iran and were involved with the Satellite television and the media that was beamed into Iran, their thinking kind of froze in 1979. And being so far away and not having the opportunity to go back to Iran, it was very difficult to see the changes, to feel the changes or to even give credit to the government if it was doing something correctly.

And so, as a result, you know, you had a group of people who were stuck 30 years ago putting out information about the way things are. And part of it—I mean, I’m not saying all of it is untrue. Part of it was true, but a lot of it just wasn’t reflecting the way things were going in present-day Iran. So that’s part of it.

Chumley: Yeah. Could you have Tehran Bureau in Iran? Why are you based in the US?

Niknejad: Well, I wish we could. I mean, the idea of having the whole Tehran Bureau was just because no one had been able to have a bureau in Iran, a full-fledged bureau because—it’s very difficult. The laws, the rules are—you don’t really know what you can get away with and what you can’t get away with. And they leave everyone playing that guessing game.

And in playing that guessing game, you’re always censoring yourself, you’re always kind of looking over your shoulder. It’s a very different culture. And I don’t think the government sees—it sees media as a tool, as an instrument to solidify itself. It’s not ready yet for criticism. It’s not ready for questioning, you know—

Chumley: Analysis.

Niknejad: Yeah. And it’s a country—well, the current government has been in power for 30 years. And if you look at any part in history, there’s different reasons why you’re going to have a very propagandistic type of media that dominates.

But no, I don’t know if I would be allowed to go to Iran and have this. And I don’t know—I’m trying to think of a more simple way of putting it. But, unfortunately, I don’t think so. Not now.

Chumley: Yeah. Shifting gears somewhat, in America we have this tenet of separation between church and state. In Iran and in other Middle Eastern countries this isn’t the case. Government and religion are linked. Iran, we all know, is a Muslim country. Is this one of the reasons that journalism and coverage of religion and politics in Iran are heavily restricted, do you think?

Niknejad: I’m not sure if that’s the reason. I mean, I’m trying to find a link between them. I don’t think that’s the fundamental reason. The fact that we don’t have separation of church and state, I think that is a problem fundamentally. And, in turn, it’s going to affect the kind of media we have, the kind of coverage that we have.

But when it comes to that, I think the roots are even more fundamental because in many ways Iranians are very secular. I mean, for the most part, Iran is an incredibly religious society. Even those who are secular have religion. Islam is part of their cultural background, but I don’t—for some reason, I don’t see the Islamic part being the hindrance. Because right now the most acrimonious exchanges, the most violent exchanges are happening between those who are actually religious. I mean, Mir-Hossein Mousavi is a very, very deeply religious man. And, you know, Karroubi is a cleric. So I think the religious issue, especially at this point, is moot in terms of Iran.

Chumley: Do you have coverage of religion Tehran Bureau? Do you think religion belongs in journalism?

Niknejad: Well, I think we should cover it. In fact, what we end up covering right now is based on our resources, and it depends—things are shifting so quickly, and they have been shifting so quickly since Tehran Bureau launched. So we’ve had to change to adapt to what was available.

And, you know, it’s actually a very important issue in terms of those who want reform, whether they want it to be within an Islamic, within a religious framework, and whether they want it to be extremely secular.

In fact, I think most of the tension that comes out in terms of where people are, Iranians are in terms of how they see religion comes out in the comment section with a lot of the stories, where even some of the secular people are acting more militant than the religious ones.

So it’s something that Iranians, Iran is having—it’s an issue that it’s going through, and it should be covered better. I don’t think we’ve been covering it as an issue, per se, but it’s something that we should cover because it is really important. And yeah, it’s very contentious.

Chumley: Yeah. I can really imagine. What’s your response to criticism that Tehran Bureau relies too heavily on citizen journalism, that it does not do enough to corroborate some of its reports?

Niknejad: I think those things are being said by people who don’t understand how it works. I’ve been very opaque about how the reports are coming and where they’re coming from. And so if they say it’s citizen journalism or if they say that we’re not corroborating the reports, it actually baffles me because when I read things in the mainstream media, things that you might find in the New York Times or the LA Times, they publish things that I wouldn’t publish because I haven’t been able to corroborate it.

I think because we have been influential in reporting on Iran, there are people who are trying to undermine that. And I think we’ve been very open and more than any other source about who it is that’s doing the reporting so that you can see the bias that’s there. I mean, there’s no one who is reporting on Iran who doesn’t have a bias, whether they cover it up or not.

Chumley: Yes.

Niknejad: And I think in this case, in particular, not covering it up is being more honest about what’s going on. And a lot of people learn something about journalism and then they think that that’s the way things are.

So like let’s say, you know, the example that’s always been used is the Holocaust. If you’re gonna cover the Holocaust, give 50% space to those who are denying it as well. And that just—you know, I think in that context, you see how ridiculous it is.

And I think if you put it on some of the issues that a lot of our commentators are—I don’t know if there’s a lot of them. There’s a few that are always there to comment on every story as soon as it’s published to say that we’re doing wrong, and they’ll link to propaganda and say, see, this happened.

We’ve had articles that refute, for example, what their findings were, but it’s much more. Can things be done better? A lot better. But I think the things that they’re actually criticizing—because I don’t know actually who it is who’s saying these things. Can you tell me where the source of that is? Because we don’t—you know, just off the record, I don’t talk about who reports for us, but they’re not citizen journalists.

And when I’m interviewed about it, I just say, I don’t want to talk about it because if you give a profile of who’s writing for you, then it makes it easier for the government to crack down on them. So most times we don’t even say whether the story was translated or not translated.

Chumley: Yes.

Niknejad: So I’d rather people, you know, say whatever they want, but I personally have very, very, very difficult standards. A lot of my colleagues in other newspapers publish things I wouldn’t publish because I don’t trust the people they’re quoting, I don’t trust the stories, and the information’s all coming from the same place. They’re all just translating opposition websites and whatever the official media’s putting out, which is, you know, the basis of their reporting.

Chumley: Yeah. In one interview that I read, you said something to the effect of “things happens so quickly”—I’m paraphrasing you here. Things happen so quickly, sometimes you only have time to just cut and paste from various things that you’ve seen in other places. Does Tehran Bureau have a vetting process not just for contributors, but also from Twitter posts and comments and blogs?

Niknejad: I know the article that you’re referring to. I wasn’t saying that I was cutting and pasting. I was saying that I didn’t have time to get the information that I was getting firsthand that I trusted. And I couldn’t sculpt it into a story.

So basically, I just took it and put it on a page. And that page became the basis of all the reports that were coming through. I didn’t say I was going and cutting and pasting from other places. I tried to talk to that one author about the accusations that he made. I mean, that same article was saying that somebody at Tehran Bureau had penned one of the fatwas, and we tried to talk to this person and they weren’t reasonable. And people that have been in this world much longer than I have said this is not even worth responding to, focus on what you’re doing.

Chumley: Yes.

Niknejad: I refuse to use people even that I’ve seen writing—I don’t want to name the names, but off the record, I’ve seen people who are writing in Newsweek, the New York Times who are people who I don’t trust because I’ve been in touch with them.

My standard of vetting any information is, I think, much higher than most places because I know that people are much more likely to be critical of what I do. It’s something new. It’s Iranian dominated, Iranian-American dominated. And so what they might not be critical of if it appears in another newspaper, they’re going to be critical of because it’s easier to kick around the small guy, you know, the new guy on the block, and that’s kind of what we are right now.

Chumley: Well, what’s the process? How do you decide who reports for Tehran Bureau? Do you have a set of published editing guidelines?

Niknejad: No. I think because of the circumstances that we’re operating under, I—it’s something that I don’t talk about at all because, again, it’s people that I have to trust completely. And when I have reason not to trust them anymore, I just don’t use them.

Chumley: Sure. Makes sense.

Niknejad: Yeah. So if I didn’t have that—there would be so much more interesting stuff on Tehran Bureau if I could just put up the things that are there. But because my standards are very difficult, something that might come from a reporter in Iran, I will not publish because I will tell this person that it’s not good enough. You know, it’s not good enough to say that you got it from this source.

I think we were one of the first to report about the nuclear scientist that defected, and it turns out I think he’s in the United States. But we were the first to do that. And I had to go from a completely different source that had nothing to do with the source who gave me that information to be able to independently verify that something strange was going on, and this person went missing in Saudi Arabia.

So it was only after we had completely gone through, you know—I knew from what context the information had come, and then I had independently verified it, and then we went with it. But there’s a lot of things that I haven’t been able to independently do, and so it hasn’t ended up on Tehran Bureau. But if I did, believe me, our content would probably see like a 70% boom of information and rumors.

And some of the ones that have come true, but if you actually look at what has been reported on Tehran Bureau and what has been reported on other news organizations over the past few months since the election, ours has been much more conservative than most of them.

So if I believed there was a basis around the things that people were saying, I would agree with you, but it’s unfounded. It’s completely unfounded.

Chumley: Does Frontline or PBS or any funding sources exert any editorial influence? Or do you have carte blanche and total control?

Niknejad: Tehran Bureau is independent from Frontline, so I have the final say on anything relating to what gets published on Tehran Bureau. But in terms of video or documentaries, that’s a different story.

Chumley: Yeah.

Niknejad: That’s theirs. They have complete editorial control on any documentaries.

Chumley: On the Frontline “about” page Tehran Bureau is called a “virtual bureau… connecting journalists, Iran experts and readers.” The executive producer of Frontline, David Fanning, calls this “convergence journalism.” Do you think this is the new type of journalism? In other words, do you think Internet-based citizens, the disenfranchised voices or unaffiliated reporters, independent journalists, bloggers, etc., is this the new wave of the future of journalism?

Niknejad: You know, I don’t know what the new wave of journalism is. I know that the Internet has allowed others to get into the game. You know, it’s loosened the stranglehold that mainstream media has had on whatever the news is, and it’s allowed people to set the agenda even when it’s wrong, as in the case of the fact that—you know, from the things that have been said about Tehran Bureau that are completely untrue and is kind of like being thrown back to me to try to refute.

There’s some things that get published because you let anybody publish whatever they want, I mean, because it’s a blog. And Google actually prefers to pick up smaller blogs than it does some of the other things.
So these unsubstantiated rumors or information or misinformation gets put out in the blogosphere. And sometimes you look at it and you go, this is too ridiculous to even respond to. But then it’s out there, and it becomes part of what’s out there about you, and you get questions about it.

So it does have that downside, but that I think that it’s gonna happen more often with the traditional ways of doing it too.

Chumley: Maybe it’s a sign of success when there’s controversy and disagreement. Maybe that means that people are really interested and engaged.

Niknejad: That’s the positive way to look at it. I remember the first time I got an email, my first email, and I go, oh, my God, this is a great way, a very inexpensive way to have a magazine to publish and then send to everybody who has an email address. And then we did see that that became the basis of a lot of news. Every news organization sends out its news that way now.

Chumley: Yes.

Niknejad: Has newsletters and everything. And I wish I were more technologically advanced so that I could look and say that this is the future, but I know for me it’s allowed—you know, I have an international audience for next to nothing. And I’m talking about before Frontline. I just went to Blogspot, and I could publish stories. I didn’t have to blog. It was called a blog, but I didn’t have to blog.

But I think in terms of how we’re going to be able to fund journalism, how it’s gonna pay for itself, who’s gonna pay for it, I think those are the issues that don’t seem very clear in terms of what’s going on. But it’s actually a very exciting time.

Chumley: How so?

Niknejad: How so? I don’t have to be a print journalist anymore, and I don’t have to be at the mercy of someone else who’s gonna say whether this is newsworthy or not. Anyone can get into the game. And I think if you’re really devoted to something, whatever it is, you have a better chance of making a mark in journalism than you did in the past.

And, at the same time, I think it makes journalism education much more important that it was in the past because if you have the opportunity to train at a big newspaper, you might not have that anymore. And because of the Internet, there are fewer filters between what you write and what you publish.

You know, it’s not gonna go through ten editors before it gets washed out and run through the attorneys and then published. And so you have to have that. You have to have that yourself. I think education is important because you learn what filters you have to apply yourself before you publish something.

So it’s a time of change, but it’s also very exciting because it is so much cheaper to have video, to shoot video, to edit, to have audio. When I started at Columbia, I had a newspaper print emphasis. And now I’m thinking about documentaries and thinking about video programs, about audio programs and thinking about print.

People say, for example, that because it’s the Internet, it shouldn’t be longer than 500 words. I’ve never allowed myself to be limited by that thinking because, if anything, being on the Internet means that you can go on forever. You can actually bring longer-form journalism back because it’s not that expensive to publish 10,000 words versus 500 words.

There’s just so many opportunities because of what’s there, but then you have to be more in love with what you do because sometimes, like acting, you might have to do other jobs in order to start something. But if you’re really into it and I think if you can do a good job at it, you’re much more likely to have an opportunity to have a say in this field that you’re most interested in.

Chumley: I have just have a couple more questions.

Niknejad: Sure.

Chumley: Our time is limited, and we so appreciate your time this morning with us. Does Tehran Bureau reach out to religious right-wing contributors at all?

Niknejad: I reach out to them every so often, those that have credibility. And by credibility, I mean those who really believe in what they’re saying. And there’s a lot of people out there—a few people, I should say—out there that think if they start writing for us, they might be considered as corroborating with the enemy.

I mean, who knows? Because the accusations that get thrown around in Iran are very serious, and so everyone has to watch their back. If the election had not unfolded the way that it had, I think we would have probably had a lot more.

In fact, we do have people who have very, very religious backgrounds, and we have people who do not, who voted for Ahmedinejad who are writing for us. But I think the election really changed the dynamic of how Iranians themselves—even those who are very religious, even those who are hardliners—think about what’s going on.
And that’s something that the people that are here that are critiquing it fail to see, that even within the very, very conservative hard-line camp, there are divisions. There’s a lot of disagreements with Ahmedinejad.

And, you know, just reflecting what is can be manipulated by them to say that it’s not. But every so often we do other sources within Tehran Bureau, reach out to them, and one day maybe they’ll come around, maybe when things are more stable.

But it has to be someone that I know is not—because I know some of these people, you go back to their writings or what they were saying just ten months ago and you can see that they’re just kind of changing their point of views depending on where the wind is blowing.

Chumley: Yes.

Niknejad: And so I’m not going to succumb to that. I’m not going to do that just to say, look, I’m giving coverage to the other side. But it’s something that I am and others are constantly working on. We’re just trying to find different and maybe more credible ways of doing it. And one of them is just having the Press Roundup section and translating what is in Iranian media, what is being said by the hardliners.

Once I have money for translators, then we can focus—do more and more of that and translate newspapers outside of Tehran, translate more of the conservative newspapers that might not have a website. And because the sources are so limited, we can’t get someone to go and cover everything that, you know, Kayhan is saying, or Etemaad is saying.

Chumley: Sure.

Niknejad: And it just depends on the most interesting thing that we found or was underreported to translate. So we’re trying to find different ways of doing this. It’s a continuous process. And I think people need to remember that I don’t have a lot of money to work with.

Chumley: Yeah.

Niknejad: In some ways I’m doing it out of thin air.

Chumley: Yes. That’s what’s really interesting about Terhan Bureau.

Niknejad: It means a lot of sacrifice. I mean, it’s like this is what I devote myself to all the time. I don’t have the money to hire somebody to come and help me with anything.

Chumley: You’re a woman on a mission.

Niknejad: Yeah.

Chumley: That’s really wonderful. We have to ask questions and present our program with a very long shelf life. It will probably be many months, probably at least six months or more before this is even released. So I can’t speak to specific current affairs or scenarios, but I did want to ask one more question.

Niknejad: Sure.

Chumley: In Mosques, Imams and Ayatollahs led calls of “Death to America” not so long ago. And it’s been clear that the US has been seen as power hungry and even as invaders. There have been various reforms attempted in Iran, efforts toward improving relationships, but not so much recently.

At one point in the history of the US, the Bush Administration labeled Iran as part of the “axis of evil” and even called Iranians terrorists. And there have been efforts toward peace and reconciliation in the last few years by the US Obama Administration.

Do you think the world’s superpowers will ever get along? Do you think that there will be diplomacy and the freedom to be able to speak and to write and to live unfettered by government oppression and censorship and bias?

Niknejad: Well,  I’m not an optimist [Laughter]. I’m not an optimist, so I don’t know if that’s the case. I think as long as politicians get a result by acting the way they do, they’re gonna continue to act that way. And as long as they think that they’re gonna stay in power by being able to manipulate an issue such as US-Iran relations, you know, or by amplifying the “Death to America,” they’re gonna do it.

And as long as those outside of Iran continue to respect that government—I mean, this issue came up during the election. I think a lot of Iranians were baffled by the fact that the United States appeared to be responding positively, or that they weren’t more critical of Ahmedinejad when they should have been critical.

I think in at that moment in time, a lot of Iranians realized that a lot of what Americans say about democracy and freedom and human rights is not true. It’s window dressing just as much as the “Death to America” is window dressing.

So as long as those things resonate, unfortunately, I don’t think there’s going to be diplomacy. I’m not that optimistic, especially right now. I mean, it’s been a very difficult year, and the election changed so much of the dynamics of what’s going on in Iran, what’s going on in the Diaspora. And it’s still kind of being mixed around and it’s not quite settled. We’re all still just—just when we thought we were getting our bearings, that came out. You know, the rug got pulled from underneath us, and we’re all just trying to kind of all figure it out, what’s going on. And so I don’t know the answer to that.

Chumley: Kelly Golnoush Niknejad, independent journalist, founder, editor of Terhan Bureau. Thank you so much for this conversation.

Niknejad: Thank you very much. I really appreciate it.

Mark Taylor: Welcome. I’d like to thank all of you for coming on this snowy evening. My name is Mark Taylor. I’m Chair of the Religion Department and Co-Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life.

This is the second year of the Institute’s operation, and we take as our mission to create structures of support for communication within the academy, but also take very seriously the responsibility for creating dialogue beyond the walls of the academy. And I can think of no one who better brings together, religion, culture and public life than our guest this evening, George Rupp, known to many of you here of course as the former President of Columbia.

George and I will engage in a conversation about a range of issues and then we will open it up for questions from you. The work that he’s doing is extraordinarily important and I think it’s really, really important for that work to be better known. In terms of our exchange I’d like to divide our conversation, although it all overlaps among three different areas, into the personal, the professional, and the political.

Life is strange. George and I have known each other for 42 years. We first came to know each other my first year at Harvard. We’re both Jersey boys, grew up in towns right next to each other, before Bruce Springsteen made Jersey cool, and Jersey Shore made it hot. I always say that New Jersey is a nice place to be from. George went to Princeton for his undergraduate work, majored, if I remember correctly, in German studies.

George Rupp: In comparative literature.

Taylor: Comparative literature. Took his doctorate or BD, Bachelor of Divinity, at Yale, and his doctorate at Harvard, which is where we met, along with our colleague Wayne Proudfoot, who was also in graduate school at that time. I always have said, and I’ve always meant it, that I learned more from George and Wayne in my years as a graduate student than I did from most of my professors. They were very, very generous with their time with me, and I’ve always appreciated that. I thought we might begin this evening by just asking you to reflect a bit, George, on what drew you to the study of religion at the time you were still an undergraduate.

Rupp: Well, I think we should start with New Jersey. I’m not sure that I’ve ever thought it’s a good place to be from, because at least while I was growing up every time you said you said you were from New Jersey people sort of figuratively held their noses. Because all they could think of New Jersey was—

Taylor: Turnpike.

Rupp: The turnpike going by Secaucus, and so I’ve kind of repressed that I’m from there. I didn’t take a single religion course as an undergraduate. So, it isn’t the case that I got interested in religion. I did get very engaged in social action of various sorts, and many of the most interesting people who were also engaged in that were from religious communities. I was extremely engaged in the early civil rights movement, including working in Jersey City and with a predominately black Episcopal church, and was in jail in Jersey City before the riots broke out in Jersey City because of protests that we’d made.

So, my way into the whole area of religion was in a sense through social action, activism, which then accelerated tremendously with engagement in opposition to the war in Vietnam. My parents had been religious, I had gone to a Presbyterian school, a Presbyterian church—another connection that we have in common. And my immigrant father, when much to his chagrin I decided I was going to go to seminary after college, said, “You will never put up with what you have to put up with, as a minister in this country.”

And, he was right. I fairly quickly learned that I did not really want to be a Protestant minister, but I got extremely engaged with religion, not only Christian religion, but also then the differences and similarities to other traditions. So, as you recall, we met the first time when I came back from a year in Sri Lanka studying Buddhism. And my life has always been informed by that interest in both my own identity and the way in which it relates to others. And my interest in emerging or developing countries dates back to that year that I spent in India and in Sri Lanka. And so the interest in religion continued, but it was not started as an undergraduate and I didn’t take work in religion.

Taylor: That’s interesting. I graduated from Wesleyan in 1968 and I hadn’t known this about your trajectory, but Wesleyan was out front on a lot of the social and political issues at that time. And all of that also came from the Department of Religion. The man who drew me into the study of religion, John Maguire, was a very close friend of Martin Luther King, and led one of the first freedom buses south. So, that’s interesting. I was going to raise the issue of Sri Lanka because I do remember that vividly, and I do think that it’s important to underscore that part of your background, because comparative study has become much, much more common in the years since then. But it was not all that common at the time. And indeed, among those of us who were studying religion at Harvard, the program at Harvard was structured into seven subfields related to various forms of Christianity—a history of world religion it wasn’t.

So, basically, you had seven areas of concentration—you know, history, theology, Old Testament, so defined, New Testament, and then everything else was grouped into one category. So, the early sensitivity to other traditions I think was very, very important. One of the other interesting things that we share, of course, is our fascination with Hegel, and I’m still trying to figure out what I started studying when I was an undergraduate. And I keep trying to tell my students, when we teach this stuff, that those figures, I think remain very, very important for helping us sort through and understand much of what’s going on today. Does Hegel still inform your imagination?

Rupp: Yes. I mean, I think at least Hegel as I have appropriated him over time, and it’s not the Hegel whom you sometimes looked at from the perspective of Kierkegaard. It’s the Hegel of the left-wing Hegelians. And it seems to me that Hegel was absolutely right in recognizing the fundamental basis of human experience in the historical development of the human race.

He also said that for a very critical period of time, the world spirit, that is the history of the human race, went through the West. And regrettably formulated that sometimes very incautiously, with phrases like, “This is the point to which the world spirit has come.” With the easily ridiculed notion that that—it had come to his thought, or his philosophy. And it seems to me; in fact Hegel quite astutely recognizes the extent to which world history did go through the West. And I don’t think anything about globalization or the hugely important triumphs of China before the hegemony of the West changes the fact that history went through the West for a period, and that has shaped the whole global community now. So, I think Hegel was correct about that.

He was an empiricist, and I think he would recognize that it moved through the West and it kept on going, and would be very interested in the fact that now it seems very much to be moving back either to a plurality of foci or moving through China is the next, as the next period. And there’s nothing in Hegel’s thought which would suggest that he wouldn’t see that, and report on it. And maybe even celebrate it, but at least not deny it.

Taylor: The title of your book suggests the range of your interests, and the continuity of your interests. First, George’s first book, which grew out of his dissertation, was called Christologies and Cultures, and was deeply informed by Hegel, in which he develops a typology of different notions of God and self and their inner relationship. And what one needs underscore in a title like that is the plural in both “Christologies” and “Cultures.”

Rupp: I just should say, just as a historical footnote, I wanted to call it “Christ and Cultures,” which was the pluralization of H. Richard Niebuhr’s great book Christ and Culture. And that was a little too much for the publisher, or the editor, so he forced—talked me into going with “Christologies.”

Taylor: The typology that George had worked out in that book, which I have used a long time—he basically argued that everybody in the Western tradition, and perhaps beyond, could be put into one of those four categories. And he’s not wrong by that, and he’s not wrong with that. It’s a very, very interesting and helpful heuristic device. His next book, which again points to themes to which he alluded in terms of my interest in Kierkegaard as well as Hegel, is Beyond Zen and Existentialism, with a subtitle “Religion in a Pluralistic World.” So at least your pluralism remains important.

Then a book called Commitment and Community, which reflects again some of the issues that he has cited. And the last time he was in this room, he was giving a series of lectures which was eventually published titled Globalization Challenged: Conviction, Conflict, Community. You look at these books, and even in their titles you see themes and values that have remained consistent: critical reflection, comparative study and analysis, social responsibility, and engagement, religious pluralism, conviction, and community. Those seem to me to be issues of abiding importance.

But for the past 20 or 30 years they might not have gotten the attention that they deserve. And as a teacher for many years of undergraduates, one of the things that I have seen, and I think many of us have seen over these years, has been the lack of concern or commitment to many of these issues that George has devoted his life to and written about. And I just wonder, George, do you have any sense—of course you’re not interacting with college students on a daily basis anymore—for years my best and brightest either wanted to do dot-coms, or go to Wall Street; do you think this recent financial meltdown will provide any opportunity for reassessment on the part of young people for more socially responsible modes of engagement?

Rupp: I think it will have the practical effect of having the brightest and most able graduates of our best institutions look at a whole range of career choices, and I think that’s all positive. I think at the analytical level, or conceptual level, the meltdown has some important lessons to teach us.

I think that in the heyday of globalization, there was a sort of uncritical celebration of markets as the way in which people related to each other globally, and media as the direct way that people can relate to each other around the world. There was the development of a sense that the individual related directly to all other individuals, or not directly, because meditation is involved, but through global media. So there are virtual communities, rather than real communities. And that economic relationships transcend any intervening or mediating institutions.

And I think the collapse of that easy confidence, both in virtual communities, and in the market as a way of relating people to each other without any intermediation—that collapse is really important. And I think it does mean there’s a teachable moment for us all to recognize that the more particular communities, that too often seemed irrelevant in that globalized world, need to be nurtured in their own right.

And so family, or local communities, or even civic institutions that build to nations and then to world institutions—all of those in fact are critically important. And it’s an illusion to think we can satisfactorily relate to everybody else all over the world through these virtual communities, or through markets alone without any kind of regulation.

Now, admittedly, that pulls back to the themes that you’ve noted in my various writings, and I guess that you could argue I haven’t learned anything. But it does seem to me there’s a way in which the uncritical celebration, both of individualism and of the relationships between individuals through virtual communities and markets, has been called into question in a constructive way.

Taylor: All right. And you know, and clearly the heart of Hegelian analysis is precisely questioning that notion of the isolated or separated individual. Let me press a little bit, let’s separate the issue of regulation from the issue of these structures and networks. It’s obvious the extent to which this new—relatively new, that is basically since the early 1980’s—this new infrastructure, not just for financial instruments, but for the whole way in which we do all kinds of business, has been transformative and has led to many of the kinds of problems that we are currently trying to work our way out of. Do you see in those technologies either on the personal level, or in the professional level in terms of the kinds of organizational problems you faced, any potential value from those kinds of forms of connectivity?

Because another way to think about this is precisely that these technologies—I mean, I always say the Internet is Hegelian Geist bought to life in certain ways. That is, it sets up interconnectivity at a global level. Do you see that as creating opportunities for cooperation?

Rupp: I certainly do. And it seems to me—a utopian would say, well that’s how we have a universal community, everybody connected to everybody else through markets and through virtual communities. And that would bring me to the place where your question started, namely, let’s leave aside regulation. I think that’s the mistake. I think it is absolutely critical that there be political standards that set boundaries for the ways in which those unlimited communities, those potentially globally communities relate to each other.

Taylor: I didn’t want to set it aside, because it’s not necessary, I think it’s obvious—

Rupp: No, no, I understand. But I can’t leave it aside, because I think it directly shapes—I agree. None of us can fail to see the vitality, the dynamism of the Internet and other virtual communities. But completely separated from more proximate communities they lead to the kind of damage that we have been witnesses to.

Taylor: But in the part, and I want to come back to this later more specifically, but isn’t part of the problem in trying to think through regulatory reform in whatever area, whether it’s environmental issues or financial—the problem is that we don’t have global institutions for global realities, and therefore how does one go about regulating these structures that are global? I mean, I don’t know you go about it.

Rupp: I think it’s a huge problem. And the global institutions that we have, we have some, but they’re very inadequate.

Taylor: They don’t work.

Rupp: I guess here’s where I’m a kind of pragmatist rather than an idealist. It seems to me we have—take the UN and related ABCs—we have those and we need to make them work better. The idea that we will create altogether separate communities I think is an illusion. But when I talk about the political ascending boundaries for the virtual communities or for the markets, I don’t mean only global institutions. It seems to me really very important that there be much more localized civic organizations.

Taylor: I didn’t know it was that long.

Rupp: Four of our staff members were killed by the Taliban. It was traumatic for the whole organization and it demonstrates that we work in very unsafe settings. But the fact that it’s the worst staff casualty number in the history of the IRC says something about the way we do operate. We are in 1350 villages of Afghanistan, most of them in areas where Westerners are not allowed to go. The people there are 100 percent Afghan staff. And their security, those are unsafe places where they are, but their security is that they are embraced and supported by the local communities in which they operate.

And one of the standard programs we have in Afghanistan, and we had it in Rwanda, we’ve got it in Congo, is what we call community-driven reconstruction. And in Afghanistan it’s called the National Solidarity Program. And the way it works is, we have staffers go into a village, work with the village to push for elections, but sometimes it’s in other ways, select a community development council, which will decide what their highest priorities for development are. And it’s almost always a school, a sanitation system, a water system, a health clinic.

But they set the priority. And the resources then come—in the case of Afghanistan, although we can multiply it by others—come through the Ministry of Rural Development in this case, and the resources are very carefully audited and monitored, and allow the building of the structures, or the facilities, or the resources that that village community wanted to have.

I can tell you, it is really exciting to go to these villages, and see the pride they have in the projects that they selected and they have put the sweat equity into building, although with some resources that come in terms of technical assistance, and building materials and all the rest of it. And I don’t mean that there’s no chance that any of those projects will be destroyed by various militias or by the Taliban, but it basically hasn’t happened, because of the fact that these are valued. It’s no way to win the hearts and minds of those villages to destroy the projects that they’ve worked on themselves.

Now let me, as long as I’ve been that far into community driven reconstruction, let me tell you an interesting story about how it developed in Afghanistan. I think it’s fair to say, the most competent Minister in the Karzai government—and admittedly, you read the papers, so you know that there’s not a lot of competition for that honorific—but the most competent person in the government is a man named Hanif Atmar.

He was the first Minister of Rural Development, then was the Minister of Education, now he’s the Minister of the Interior. But he had been the head of IRC programs in Afghanistan before he joined the Karzai government. And he knew that we had developed this community-driven reconstruction program in Rwanda. Now, Rwanda had a very similar problem to Afghanistan. Namely, it had a competent central government—well, I won’t go so far as to claim that for Afghanistan. But Afghanistan was aspiring to have a competent central government. Rwanda had one, but it had very little reach out to the local villages. And so we designed and implemented this community-driven reconstructing program in Rwanda.

And Hanif as an IRC staff member, an Afghan obviously, knew about that program and so when he was Minister of Rural Development he had a team come from Rwanda, Rwandans, not expatriate staff. Rwandan staff came and advised on the design of a program, which became the National Solidarity Program in Afghanistan. The National Solidarity Program is now in over 20,000 villages in Afghanistan, so not just the 1,500 or 1,400 that we’re involved with, but many other implementing partners. And I think it’s certainly the most successful development program in a decentralized way in Afghanistan. We have a similar program in Congo, which is our largest program in the world. Enough about community-driven reconstruction, but it’s a good thing. You can bank on that.

Taylor: Are the recent decisions of the Obama administration to up the ante militarily in Afghanistan causing your programs problems?

Rupp: Very complicated question. And I would say that we have been extremely firm in insisting that our National Solidarity Program village programs have to be distinguished from what NATO and the US forces are doing, and that has taken some real argument. Because initially, the counterinsurgency program of General McChrystal envisioned having development as just one part of this whole operation. And given my description of the security of our staff, namely that they are integrated into the villages where we work, that was simply a nonstarter.

We informed the administration that we were just not willing to accept any resources if that was part of the deal. And after a fair amount of back and forth that now has been accepted. So that means that we continue to do what we’ve been doing, and do it as independent actors. And frankly we feel more secure in those areas that are furthest removed from the protection of ISAF or NATO and US forces.

I feel that vividly. The road where we lost four staff members a year and a half ago is a road I’d been down a number of times. And Gardez, which is a couple of hours south of Kabul, on that road, I visited the first time shortly after I went to the IRC in 2002. And under the Bush administration there was a program called Provincial Reconstruction Teams, which has continued into the present, and it’s in theory a way that all of the US assets, the military and development programs, are connected with each other. We’ve never been willing to take any funding that came through that mechanism, but it’s very clear when I went there in 2002, our staff on the ground, we’d been in that area for seven years before that—no, eight years. And our people said they felt much safer before the PRT was established in the neighborhood than after, because we had this kind of security that I’ve described rather than the kind of security that comes with a military that simply doesn’t bother to get to know the local communities. Now McChrystal’s theory of the case is that they will get to know villages and so on, and we’ll just have to see how that works, but at least we’re not connected with it.

Taylor: Can you speak of some other countries where, I mean the situation must approach the intractable in some of these situations. You mentioned the Congo in passing, I mean countries that really pose the most difficult challenges to you?

Rupp: Well, I think Congo is an enormous challenge. It is our single largest program. And we have many hundreds of staff in eastern Congo, and we are pursuing a program, again modeled on Rwanda, Afghanistan, community-driven reconstruction, and we also have a major program working with the Ministry of Health. I don’t want to be Pollyannaish about Congo. It has a very long way to go. But I am confident that everyday there are substantial numbers of Congolese who are significantly better off because of the efforts that we’re undertaking than they would otherwise be. And the areas we focus on are first of all community based, so that we work in the local villages, and work with them to develop, in a sense, democratic structures that set priorities. We focus on the kind of reconstruction I’ve described, but with a special emphasis on health, on education, and economic development, and that means predominately on agriculture, which is absolutely crucial for almost all the places where we work, and then on good governance, the rule of law. And I think that suite of programs without question makes the prospects or the odds of not only survival but flourishing far better than if that suite of programs isn’t implemented.

I tend—I guess part of my fascination with Hegel—I like to look at big pictures, but I have resigned myself that in the work we’re doing now it really starts person by person, family by family, village by village. The idea that we are going to transform the Democratic Republic of Congo after first Leopold II and then Mobutu Sese Seko destroyed the place, and then the Rwandan genocide spilled over into eastern Congo, with further terrible consequences—all of that’s going to take a long time to dig our way out of. But in the meantime, at the very decentralized level, I think we’re building human capital in a way that makes a big difference.

Taylor: We can make a distinction, as Haiti shows us, between so-called natural disasters and sociopolitical disasters. Looking ahead it seems to me that issues of climate change—and one of the things that I worry about a lot is water, and both its availability and its quality, and by extension food supply in many of the countries that you work in—there’s going to be a huge, huge problem as we move ahead. And I’m wondering how the issues like water and food supply operate in your current programs and looking ahead. I mean, it seems to me that those natural problems are going to lead to serious social and political conflicts. I mean, how do you see that side of the equation?

Rupp: I think you’re absolutely right. And, I mean, we as an agency are looking very carefully at the ways in which environmental degradation is, in the end, indistinguishable from the conflicts that erupt. Take an example that all of you read a lot about, Darfur. Darfur illustrates, you know, just a whole range of crosscurrents. One is just the center versus the periphery in Sudan. I mean there’s an elite in Khartoum that basically has exploited the rest of the country. So, whether it’s the south, which will almost certainly vote to secede, or in the west Darfur, or the northeast up by Red Sea State, there’s all those places have real antagonism against the central government. But there are also deep ethnic problems within Darfur, both within Darfur and between Darfur and the rest of Sudan. But along with those sorts of issues, and in the case of Darfur, there’s no religious issue, because it’s all Muslim. I mean the north, south debate it can be characterized in many ways as Muslim/Christian, although that’s also an oversimplification. But to your question, Darfur, the certification has exacerbated the problem in Darfur.

So there’s a basic tension between people who call themselves Arabic, and they’re pastoralists, and they migrate, and sedentary agriculturists, who are called Africans. I mean in the taxonomy there. But it’s very clear that the pastoralists have over time felt they had to encroach more and more on the agricultural land, because they simply couldn’t sustain their flocks as the Sahara moved further and further south. So, all of the other conflicts going on in Darfur are not really distinguishable from that root conflict, which is a fight over land and water and resources.

Taylor: And what about population issues as they bear on these? Because in certain ways they’re directly tied, obviously to environmental, and water, and food supply issues that cut in different ways and complicated ways?

Rupp: Yeah. Well, the population issues are going to vary hugely from place to place, but life is so harsh in places like western Sudan, that there actually is not population growth. If there were that would only exacerbate these resource problems. People have lots of children, and many children die, so that the mortality under five is very high. People have a lot of children because they want to have some children survive, but the end result is that the population is not growing significantly. And that’s not true in all countries, but I think in western Sudan it’s certainly the case.

Taylor: All right, one last question because I’m sure all of you have questions you would like to ask. Let me ask you to sort of put your previous life and your current together now for a minute. As a former university president, both here and at Rice, what role, if any, do you think should colleges and universities, faculty and students play in addressing the kinds of problems that you and the International Rescue Committee are dealing with day in and day out?

Rupp: Well, I think there is almost endless ways, but let me just mention a couple Columbia-specific ones. The single places where we recruit the most of our international staff are from the School of International and Public Affairs, and the School of Public Health, the Mailman School and SIPA here. We have, I mean people joke about it, because they somehow think—every time we have monthly staff meetings and we introduce new colleagues and the number of times it’s a Columbia alumna, usually for us alumna actually, is quite remarkable. And it doesn’t have anything to do with me. I mean we have sort of cultivated those relations, and what SIPA and the Mailman School do is prepare people with the skills, that we need to do our work. And basically we simply don’t send international staff abroad unless they bring special skills. If they’re water engineers, or if they’re public health professionals, then they bring something to the table that we need to have. So, one way is to do what universities do best, train people very well and with a broad horizon of where they could bring their education and training to bear.

The second is to address a whole range of intellectual issues. And as Jonathan knows we worked hard to establish the Columbia Earth Institute during our time here, and recruited Jeff Sachs, just at the end of the time, just before I left. Well, Jonathan was still here to oversee that transition. And I think that the Earth Institute embodies a kind of intellectual integration across a range of issues that are almost never connected to each other. So, the Earth Institute does exactly what you just asked about. It looks at environmental issues, or ecological issues, and how they relate to humanitarian issues and displacement and the rest. It also, for the first time, got the School of Public Health involved with this all-university set of issues, in a way that I don’t mean never happened before, but happened much more effectively. And in Jeff Sachs it has an appropriately controversial leader, so that it gets attention to itself. So that’s on the whole intellectual and research end of matters.

I would love to see universities do more of what the land grant universities in this country have been the best at doing. Michigan State, for example, has, you know, had very good programs that really developed agricultural economists and agronomists who have made an enormous difference in many parts of the world, but not yet in Africa where it is absolutely critical that that has to happen, and that’s a sad story.

Peter McPherson who was the President of Michigan State, who really pressed hard to move in this direction, had been the head of the US Agency for International Development, of all things, under Reagan. And AID under Reagan had very strong programs in agricultural development. And for all kinds of complicated reasons—Congressional earmarks, loss of attention, who knows what—AID just stopped funding agricultural development for about 25 years. And the new head of AID is a man named Rajiv Shah, who is actually a medical doctor, but he also had an agricultural background, worked with the Gates Foundation, agriculture, and then was in the Department of Agriculture, so there’s some home that there’ll be a renewed interest on the part of the US government on agricultural development. But that still requires universities to put their shoulders to the wheel in the way that Michigan State did in the 80s and continued to struggle to do into the 90s.

Taylor: Let me just ask, tweak that one for a bit, what role, if any, do the arts and humanities have in addressing these issues?

Rupp: Well, as is the custom of those of us who are in the arts and humanities, it’s sort of one level of abstraction up, it seems to me. But the set of issues that I described in response to your earlier questions about the economic crisis that we’re going through now apply to the arts and humanities and the soft social sciences, maybe even economists (I have to think about that). The focus that I think is crucial for understanding the value of communities—ranging from very particular ones, through civic ones, through national ones, to global ones—that whole set of reflections, I think the humanities and the arts and the social sciences are in the best position really to cultivate, and to educate a generation of students who really deeply get that.

Rather than what I think universities did do for three of four decades, namely to—it’s going to sound harsh, but to educate people whose default proposition was a kind of atomistic individualism that was, especially in its secular forms, sort of deracinated. And that I think is an impoverishment of human beings, and so it’s important to recover what was lost in that, and I think the arts and humanities are best positioned to do that.

Taylor: Okay. This has been very informative. Let’s open it up now to questions.

Audience Member 1: Can you please give us your personal opinion, I would like to have your personal opinion about Iraq, the status quo in Iraq and Syria?

Rupp: Yes, thank you. I will be happy to. The International Rescue Committee went into Iraq in 2003, when the war started, we were strongly requested, by the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, if we would be willing to go in, because we’d worked closely with them elsewhere and they thought it would be very important because they expected there’d be major uprooted population flows and the need for the usual speed of services that we do—namely water, sanitation, basic healthcare. But we agreed to go in only on the condition, explicitly signed off on by the administration, that we would not be part of the military, what became the Coalition Provisional Authority, which originally was ORHA, the Office of Humanitarian Affairs (there’s an R in there, I can’t remember what it was). Jay Garner was the head of it.

So, we got clear understanding that we would not be part of the coalition process, and we worked in places where the US military was not present. We recruited and trained almost all Iraqi staff, we worked across the various divisions. That is, we worked in Sunni villages, and Shiite villages, and in Arbil in the north. And once the reconstruction of Iraq under the Bush administration accelerated and it was clear it was going to be large contracts overseen by the CPA, we withdrew. We’d done what we went to do. I think we made some significant contributions; we found positions for most of our Iraqi staff and withdrew.

We are now back in Iraq and we are also in Syria and Jordan. And the reason we’re back is we started in Syria and Jordan, there are large numbers of Iraqi refugees in very desperate situations in Syria and Jordan. And it’s not because the Syrian government, or the Syrian people and the Jordanian people haven’t really put themselves out to try to be hospitable, they have—they won’t let them work is the major problem. But they have really taken on an enormous burden, and the international community including in particular the United States, has just simply not done enough to help those refugees.

So, we’re working in Syria and Jordan with the Iraqi refugees. We’ve also worked in this country with resettling Iraqi refugees, and now we’re back in Iraq, working with uprooted people inside Iraq, of whom there are probably two million. So, there are about two million uprooted people inside Iraq, close to two million in Syria and Jordan. This is in a country with a population less than 30 million, so the percentages, the proportions are enormous. And I was just in Syria, Iraq, and Jordan three or four months ago, and I’d been there a year before that, so I’ve got kind of a longitudinal sense of it. The Iraqis in Syria and Jordan are desperate where they are, and yet some of them have gone back to see if they could possibly make a go, and their houses are occupied, their neighborhoods have been taken over if they’re Shiite by Sunnis and vice versa. They feel completely insecure, they know people who have gone back and were killed. And so they’re really in a quite horrific situation in Syria and in Jordan, not able to go back to Iraq, not being accepted for resettlement, except in small numbers in the US and other countries.

So, I would say if you want to know more than you, even as a data hungry journalist want to know, go to our website. We have three reports and the first one was on the situation in Syria and Jordan. The second one was on the situation of Iraqis who have resettled in the US, and that one is called “In Dire Straights.” And it is very eye-opening. And the third one just came out, or is coming out today or tomorrow, on the recent visit we made as an update on the situation in northern Iraq, as well as all of Iraq, in Baghdad, northern Iraq, and then Syria and Jordan. That will give you lots of data and wonderful stories.

Audience Member 1: Excellent. Can I follow up with another question? Palestinian Iraqis from the border, you know, Syria wouldn’t allow them in, Jordan didn’t allow them in, and I believe the US accepted 1350 of them this year. Do you have a role in facilitating this, can you provide any services for them here in the US?

Rupp: Well, that small number that gets admitted to the US, we don’t resettle all of them, but we certainly get a significant slice of that pie. And you’re correct, Jordan has a, let’s say, a large refugee population, what they consider a refugee population, but nonetheless, a very large number of Palestinians, close to the tipping point in terms of majority of the population. And so they’re very sensitive about allowing more Palestinian Iraqis, or more Palestinians period, in. So I don’t know the situation on the border; we’re not working directly on the border with the Palestinian refugees, but my guess is they are in a very tough bind.

Audience Member 1: I was there in December and it’s terrible. But most of them have been resettled to several areas. The UNHCR is trying to facilitate that, and I just was wondering if you had a role in that process.

Rupp: Well, we’re the largest implementing partner globally for UNHCR, and we certainly work closely with them in Jordan and in Syria, and in Iraq itself. But I don’t think we’re working with them specifically with the Palestinians in the border area. I would have to double check. I don’t think we are. I didn’t visit any of them anyway, so you know more about them than I do.

Audience Member 2: I’m a first year SIPA student. I was wondering what you felt the role of the private sector was in conflict areas. Not so much related to refugee resettlement, but in reconstruction and rebuilding?

Rupp: Well, I think that the private sector can have an enormous impact. To be perfectly blunt, in the countries we work in, the private sector is just not a factor. I mean in many of them there’s no banking system. And we do some micro lending, and cash-for-work kinds of programs. But I think it will be a while before there is enough of an established governance system, and also market system, before the private sector will be a major force in most of the places where we’re working. We’re at the stage of intervention that will, we hope very much as soon as possible, lead to having a more robust economic sector. We have what we call technical units. We have a health one, we have one work with children, with women who have been abused, and one of them is economic recovery, and I’ve been pressing that unit to focus on agricultural development, because I think that’s kind of the first step that has to be taken before a more robust set of market systems can be developed. Now, I say most of the countries. We do work in Uganda, in northern Kenya, and there we are very focused on getting market mechanisms in place, and investments in, for example, ramping up the scale with which growers can produce their crop and then get it to appropriate markets without being completely exploited by middle people. So, we do some of that. But that’s not really a focus of what we do. There are very good agencies, Relief International among them, that do that work, but we do less of it. Partly, you just can’t do it at the earliest stage.

Taylor: Bashir, you’ve been jotting notes over there, do you have a question?

Bachir Diagne: I’ve been gathering my thoughts, you sort of answered in passing my questions. I had a question, which was how closely you usually work with UNHCR, and I was thinking probably Congo is just such a horrible situation, this is probably the case where, I’m wondering, you have all the taskforce on the ground working together. So, do you actively seek cooperation with them, and how does that work?

Rupp: The question was how much we work with UNHCR in particular, but then the also other UN agencies. And the answer is very extensive indeed. And maybe I could relate that to Mark’s question about global institutions, because UNHCR is an example of a global institution where—

Taylor: What’s the acronym?

Rupp: UN High Commission for Refugees, and the Commissioner is a man named António Guterres, who was a former Prime Minister of Portugal and is someone we’ve worked with very closely, and he is trying to get that agency to be a less inadequate global agency, and in particular to reduce the administrative overhead so more of the resources get into the field. And we work in Afghanistan, and Pakistan, Congo, Liberia, Cote d’lvoire, I mean across countries where we work, we are very close collaborates of the UNHCR. And to be honest we don’t have to go running to them—I mean, they come running to us. We’re the people on the ground who allow them to implement programs in a way that they really don’t—this is not a criticism of them, they don’t pretend to have the capacity. They have resources, and they have the ability to award grants, but they don’t have the kind of extensive, on the ground in-country staff that we have. And so we work very closely together.

More with UNHCR, UNICEF has always been a tough partner, but we’re getting to work better with them. UNICEF, is United Nations Children’s Fund, sorry, you know that. UNDP, United Nations Development Program, again very small, but we work with them in a number of places. So, we value our collaborations with the UN very much. And they play a very important role in a crisis. And the current crisis in Haiti illustrates both the good news and the bad news on that.

One of the reasons that it was a long time getting the Haiti response coordinating is because UNHCR had its building destroyed. So it wasn’t just that the capital itself, all of the instrumentalities of Haiti’s governance were destroyed, but the UN also lost many people. And so it took longer than normal to get the time of coordination mechanisms up, and the whole enterprise, the whole international humanitarian enterprise as a result, was slower getting going, than if the UN hadn’t lost its headquarters in the earthquake itself.

Audience Member 3: When the IRC works in refugee camps do you tend to hire refugees in the camp, or people from the host population, and I mean I would imagine that in both cases there are potential problems, could you maybe speak about that?

Rupp: Very good question and the answer is both. But one of the real challenges of refugee settlements is that the refugees are almost always prohibited from working outside the refugee settlement itself. So wherever possible, we employ refugees as our staff members. But we also don’t want to have a lot of tensions between the refugee camp and the surrounding community, so we also try to make sure there’s some level of employment for the community outside. I feel constrained to say a few things about refugee camps. Namely, they’re awful. I mean they’re very bad for men, women and children. And it’s only in certain circumstances that they’re the least awful alternative, but it is really one of our high priorities is wherever possible to move away from long term refugee camps.

I still remember the first large camp I visited, my first six or eight in the first trip I took to Africa with the IRC. And it was a camp for Burundian refugees in Tanzania. And, I just went away completely—I don’t depress easily, but I really was extremely down after being there. Because those people had been in that camp for over 20 years, lots of kids who were born there, grew up there, and actually got a better education, and better health care, than they would have gotten if they weren’t in the refugee camp, but as a result were incapable of going back to where their parents had come from and supporting themselves. I mean they had learned, but didn’t want to then go back and be farmers.

And so it’s a very complicated situation. And we are involved in a fair number of long-term refugee settlements, and wherever possible we work our way out of them. And so the first camp I visited in Tanzania with Burundians, they have now gone back to Burundi. They’ve had a very tough time getting back on their feet back in Burundi, and we’ve worked with them there, but it’s far better than becoming basically dependent on the international community, which is what happens if you’re in a refugee camp.

And that’s where UNHCR plays a very important role, and António Guterres, the High Commissioner, would agree completely that if we can possibly not have refugee camps it would be far better. It works in every way to get alternative arrangements. But sometimes, until it’s safe to go back there are no good alternative arrangements, for the same reason that the Iraqi Palestinians aren’t being allowed to go into Jordan or Syria, and they also can’t go back readily. So, refugee camps are very tough propositions.

Taylor: I don’t know if you noticed, but when he talked about depressing easily, he gestured to me.

Rupp: No, no, no—

Taylor: I thought it all goes back to Hegel and Kierkegaard in a different way. As we were walking over this evening I said to George, “You see what you see day in and day out, and dealing with what you deal with day in and day out, how do you keep hope alive?” And it’s a tough question. I mean again, he sees what we don’t, but the capacity to acknowledge these problems, to address these problems, and to pursue responsible action in situations that are incomprehensible, incomprehensibly difficult, I think, is admirable.

And George and his colleagues put us all in their debt and we thank you for coming this evening and sharing this, and just helping us to become more aware of what’s going on. Thanks George.

Rupp: Thank you very much.

Richard Locke: Over the past twelve years Philip Gourevitch has become one of the foremost American writers of what’s called Literary Nonfiction. He’s very much in the line of such predecessors as George Orwell and Joan Didion, and his work is notable for its flexibility, its variety, and its intensity. It makes full use of the literary techniques it shares with fiction and poetry. Such techniques as narrative, character development, dialogue, patterns of metaphor and imagery. And his work also comprises elements of a great range of other kinds of writing, bringing them together into a particularly electric and flexible combination.  Memoir, personal essay, travel writing, profile, reportage, biography, history, cultural commentary. The flexibility of the form that Philip has been engaged in developing is precisely that it can manage to have so many pieces of other kinds of writing existing within the framework of a personal communication—a real dialogue with the reader as much as it is with himself and with the subject at hand.

With his three books and his many articles and essays and short stories, Philip Gourevitch has become justly celebrated for his scrupulosity, his courage, his compassion, and his unblinking perspicacity. He’s one of our finest contemporary writers, and I’m delighted that he can be with us here tonight. What we’re going to be talking about is, as Mark said, why and how do we respond to terror, as in Rwanda, as in Abu Ghraib, with or through literature?

Your first book, We Wish to Inform You Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families has a subtitle, “Stories from Rwanda.” This makes it clear that you’re going to be using narrative as a literary and a cognitive device. As you say in the book, quote, “This is a book about how people imagine themselves and one another. A book about how we imagine our world. This is what fascinates me most about existence,” you write. “The peculiar necessity of imagining what is in fact real.” And then in the new book you take it one step further. There’s a corollary to that perception, because in Standard Operating Procedure you write, “There’s a constant temptation when rendering an account of history to distort reality by trying to make too much sense of it.” Could you elaborate? All or nothing.

Philip Gourevitch: It seemed kind of self-evident that the kind of lines you write and think, maybe you should keep them out because they’re so obvious. Why respond to anything through literature? I suppose because I don’t know how else, or that seems the best way. I don’t mean that to sound flip or arch at all, but somewhere fairly early on it occurred to me that the responses to the world that meant the most to me were in books. And ninety-nine out of a hundred of them, and there were hundreds, were probably novels. Novels seemed to not require the categorization of human experience and the slicing of it one way as opposed to another, or one angle of regard as opposed to another. They allow a kind of comprehensiveness, the intersection of public and private life, of interior and exterior experience of cataclysmic history and utterly petty personal or private perception or grand personal nobility. All of these things could operate simultaneously in conjunction with one another in fiction, but achieve truth, some kind of verisimilitude. Novels gave the idea that in fact one was experiencing life, albeit distilled and shed of some of the boredom that exactly entails. And shed of some of the fear and some of the other sort of nasty experiences that you don’t usually have when you have the time to read a book.

Why does one become a writer? Because at some point you feel like the most meaningful experience you’re having has something to do with reading about the world, and you want to be doing what they’re doing. You want to be in that conversation. I suppose that’s why people play ball, or why people do other sorts of things. They think, “I want to do that,” you know? And you obviously feel like in some way it speaks to you quite complexly as an approach. And specifically I found that, when you’re in college, and you’re actually encountering these things broken into academic disciplines…

I studied ape behavior because it was the closest thing to novel writing I could get to without actually declaring myself a writer when I hadn’t written anything. That’s what I started with, and then human history, which is the closest thing to ape behavior you can get without having to tell your parents you want to go to Rwanda when you’re eighteen, and so forth. It all seemed to me that it kept coming back to novels, to a certain approach to human experience. And then I started to discover that there was a literature that was more directly observed.

If you think about the really great novels, certainly of terror—it wasn’t at all clear to me that that would be a subject that would absorb me particularly when I got started. But there were characters in some of the novels that mattered to me most, like the character of the terrorist Chen in André Malraux’s Man’s Fate. Or characters in some of Conrad’s or Dostoevsky’s books, or more contemporary books, like characters in Naipaul novels, where you feel that the writer is writing from an extremely intense personal experience of action. And that’s why some of the novelists that are more contemporary who address this seem to me to be entering it abstractly. They’re questioning the terrorist or the impulse to act, the impulse to violence. It comes from completely outside their humanist bubble. And I was always drawn to this quality in writing and literature that lets you become close to the actor, not just the good guy, but the villain as well. To understand terror not as something inhuman or an experience that troubles one. Not as something that is external, but as something that is internal. And I don’t mean in the simplistic way that everybody says, “I guess we all have the potential to be nasty.”

I’m more interested in the political formation of these things because we may all have that potential, but there are certain moments in history when it sure gets harnessed awfully vigorously into a defining force for an entire people or a civilization or a culture at that moment. That interests me, and I thought that for me, that had to be something observed. Writers who matter to me at times, like Primo Levi—Primo Levi’s a memoirist. I hope never to be a memoirist of any of the subjects I’ve written about. I would hope that never should befall anybody here. And yet these things are part of our experience in this time. And so something like Rwanda happens, and—I had been writing about Holocaust commemoration at the time. I’d been looking at the way that it was getting absorbed in the early nineties into our culture. You had the museums popping up, the execrably named Museum of Tolerance out in LA, as if tolerance was somehow or other the ideal to which we should aspire. In other words, “I can tolerate the fact that you’re a Jew.” You know, that’s supposed to be this wonderful thing that we’ve learned from the Holocaust. And then in Washington they have the Museum to the Extermination of Jews in Europe, which didn’t seem to me to belong to the Mall.

And you had President Clinton at the opening of that preaching over it, saying, “This stands as proof that we will never let these things happen again, and that we stand guard against these things, and that it’s outside our traditions.” You had the Spielberg movie where you were told that in the unfortunate event that you should find that you’re a Nazi, you would at least the opportunity of identifying with a nice Nazi who, while profiting extensively financially from his Jews, also saved them from extermination. Which is a good thing! But it is a limited good thing, and it is a movie that creates a fiction, which is the fiction that there is an out. That there is always for you the opportunity to identify in some important way with either the victim or the whistle-blower, the better than bad guy, the bad guy with a conscience or an uneasy conscience. And I felt like none of these things were telling me about this world. And that’s where I felt that we were failing to imagine it.

Locke: Right.

Gourevitch: That’s what the first quote in the Rwanda book really is about. That reporting is an act of engaging with factual documentation and with fact-checkable documentation. That is the burden of nonfiction as opposed to fiction. But in order to be truthful, you’ve got to get at it by using your imagination. And as far as the distortion of reality by making it more real, I suppose that’s a way of saying that we intend to simplify and over-tidy-up our view of the world, and that there is a way in which we explain ourselves to ourselves in ways that are false in order to make it seem neat and orderly. And make too much sense of it. To come up with a theory. There are a lot of theories. There were the theories that were kicked around about Abu Ghraib. Philip Zimbardo’s theory that if you are a Stanford graduate student presided over by a person who wants you to commit atrocities, you may in fact do so. This was the Stanford prison experiment where he set his graduate students in a situation that he controlled and then watched them misbehave, because he put them in a situation where they would and extrapolated from that that this had something to do with military behavior. It doesn’t. I felt that the theories, people found comfort in them, and they were wrong. And so I felt that, in a sense, the elaboration of reality by reporting and writing about it as much as possible from imagining the insides of the people who were involved in it is the best I can do with it.

Locke: But you make a connection then between the psychology of such violence and a larger political context.

Gourevitch: Well, there is.

Locke: For example, at one point in the first book, you said, “Power largely consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality, even if you have to kill a lot of them to make that happen.”

Gourevitch: Yeah, that comes in a chapter on the history of Rwanda and the falsification of that history into national myths or legends or what have you. I use those words because they’re twisted stories. They’re deceptions. And they’re propaganda. And if you combine a very monolithic narrative structure, i.e., a government with one voice and a cowed, compliant population that is brutalized by violence to accept an account of things, they’ll accept that account. And of course it’s also a comment on what I do. That some people like to say the pen’s mightier than the sword. I’m not convinced of that, but I think it’s an ongoing struggle we’re involved in. But I do think that I don’t kill a lot of people to try and get people to occupy my version of reality. I try to make it more persuasive. And that’s why it’s not always a winning battle. And I do keep lists, of course, of those I’ve spared.

But no, I’m serious about this. When you’re trying to understand Rwandan history, you start to see these distortions, and the creation of identities that are set against each other, and the creation of two groups within that population that are actually turned into mortal enemies by a mixture of storytelling and violence, where the blood makes the fiction true. Then you have to start to understand that that’s what that kind of power is. It becomes real. So at the same time as you’re explaining that it’s constructed as a fiction, you’re also explaining that it is real, and you don’t want to say one or the other. To say it’s a fiction is a fiction. To say it’s real is to ignore that it’s also a fiction. And so it’s a real fiction. That’s where people are living, and that’s where people are actually being killed.

Locke: You say in that book at one point, “Genocide is an exercise in community building.”

Gourevitch: Yeah. I say that because it occurred to me that at some level we make this mistake in thinking of the crime, and political crimes in general that involve mass violence, as being equal to other crimes that are done without an ideal, or without a Utopian overlay. And so when you’re obeying a political order by committing murder or extreme violence against someone, you’re not committing a crime according to that political order and its laws and its rules. You are obeying its laws and its rules. You are serving its cause. And so at that point there is the definition of some enemy, some group that is to be eliminated. It’s almost always presented in genocide in particular, which is a very extreme form of this, as a purging, a cleansing, the expulsion of an alien body, and the bringing together of us by the identification and extermination of them.

And in fact, in the case of Rwanda it’s actually pretty explicit, where you see that the times where violence is harnessed as a tool by the majority Hutu population, throughout its post-colonial history, are times not when Tutsis are getting rowdy on the edges of Hutu power, but when Hutu power, with a small ‘p,’ is actually starting to deteriorate and fragment and there’s contest and struggle amongst the Hutu polity. And so the way that you unify them is by the creation of a common enemy and the call to a common struggle.

Locke: But then there becomes the next step because you also said that, “My aim, as a writer, is to make readable, even beautiful books that take a deeply pessimistic view of history.” Why are you drawn to what you yourself call these repellent subjects? How and why can beauty be ever created from such repellent subjects?

Gourevitch: Well, the subjects don’t become beautiful. I hope that sometimes the books do, or maybe a page or a paragraph or a sentence within them, because ideally, if they do, they will help a reader imagine what I’m trying to get at, which is some pretty essential aspect of the human experience. I don’t know exactly why I’ve been drawn to these things, why it happens that two out of my three books happen to deal with pretty atrocious behavior, and the other one happens to deal with localized atrocious behavior. But leaving that aside, they’re really interesting matters. They’re matters that actually define our world in a very big way. The extermination in Rwanda took place, and it vanished from our news, and at the same time, as I said, we were telling ourselves that we were in this age where we stood against genocide, where the lessons of the past had been learned and all of this. I thought, wait, we’re telling ourselves something that actually means we’re in a dangerous situation. The story we’re telling ourselves about how we are now safe from this because this happened, and we’ve learned never to allow it to happen again, is a false story.

And it just happened. Maybe we don’t even believe it. Maybe the terrible lesson of Rwanda is that there is no such thing as common humanity, and that it just doesn’t matter. Maybe the most horrible, pessimistic thing about Rwanda is that there is no price to pay for standing around and watching this happen somewhere halfway around the other earth to people you didn’t know existed before you found out they were in trouble or gone. Maybe there is no price to humanity. Maybe humanity is actually much coarser and cruder and scarier than our wish for it. And so I think that that’s actually, leaving aside, as I say, for the moment, the question of why I’m drawn to it, why addressing it becomes compelling. Because it plagues one’s mind. It touches on many of the ultimate questions one asks oneself about what it means to be a human, what it means to be in societies, what it means to be in a powerful country where perhaps someone’s supposed to have some concern for others beyond its borders. What it means that we have a lot of, again, stories we tell ourselves, and these stories take the form of international laws and international treaties.

We tell ourselves that we actually stand for these things, and we sign on the line, and then we don’t hold them up. Where does that leave us, and what does that mean about ourselves? Those things do interest me. They do engage my imagination. They engage my observation, and I find that trying to interrogate them directly, by going to the place and talking to the people, invariably turns out to be enormously surprising and rewarding. Making that beautiful afterwards? You do your best. I mean, I don’t know if I do, but the alternative is that you make it ugly, and that you write a bad sentence. Wouldn’t want to wish that Goya had made worse etchings in the horrors of war. That he had made them crumbier art. That he was less talented. That he had tried to use his talent less in order somehow to communicate that he was disgusted. No. We wouldn’t feel all those things.

Locke: Well what you’re doing, of course, is disputing a received notion of a beautiful, or at least a smooth story. And what you’re discovering is a method of interrogating that leads you yourself to propose an alternative act of understanding, yet also the shaping of another story, an alternative story according to perhaps different rules, or different presuppositions.

Gourevitch: Yeah. I mean, I don’t think it’s such a beautiful story. It’s a cover-up. It’s a papering over. It’s sort of like, “Yeah, we’re all alright, and it feels better that way.” I say pretty early, I think, in the book, that some of the words that are used a lot in Rwanda, they crop again when you start dealing with Abu Ghraib. These are stories that one’s inclination is to look away from. And these so-called beautiful stories are instruments of looking away. And when you have words like unthinkable and unspeakable and unimaginable, well, our business is to think, speak, and imagine. And that’s what we’re supposed to be doing, and so we’re telling ourselves with these words, “You’re off the hook. Don’t worry about it. It’s beyond us. It’s just a bunch of animals behaving insanely. These are aberrant. These are not really us.” In one form or another. That’s wrong. It’s also one of the reasons I like the villains, too, you know. The villains are interesting. They’re not interesting as sexy villains. They’re interesting because they disarm you by being straightforward about their villainy.

Locke: Why don’t you think then that political science or anthropology or history are sufficient responses? For example, why do you have no footnotes or indices in your book?

Gourevitch: Well, that’s just for people who want to reread them. No, the honest truth is, because the books I read that mattered to me never had indexes — I mean, in literature. A publisher at one point wanted to make an index for the Rwanda book, and it made it look fifteen times more anthropologically African. Every name was foreign, suddenly, and it compressed the foreignness of it because all it dealt with is place names and people names. And then there were these people names, who basically exist in no account of the history of the place except my reporting, because I stumbled on them, and they’re kind of accidental, except that they represent a bunch of voices in addition that I heard that I don’t quote. So to put them into an index, it all just seemed like the index created some kind of pull-out skeleton that was false. It created another account of my book that wasn’t my account of my book. And if people want to do that, that’s their business, but it’s not my business to offer it up. That I really felt. I have no reproach whatever with any other discipline. That’s silly for me to present this as this versus that.

One would never imagine you sitting here and asking an anthropologist or political scientist why he’s not writing a novel or a narrative that doesn’t have these damn footnotes, so really, it’s because that’s my medium. And when you write these things, when you write a New Yorker article on something, you read a lot of the academic and other expert scholars, the work that’s come before. You absorb it. And on some level, in the back of your mind, you hope you aren’t seen as an amateur, a punk. You want to say something that might interest them. You hope that they find it interesting. You don’t necessarily expect to tell them anything new because their job is to pay attention to the level very different from your readership. But you’re trying to simultaneously talk to people who may never have thought about this before, and to whom you think it is rewarding for them to think about it, as opposed to somebody who is generally writing for an audience of people who have thought about it at the same level of immersion. And that’s just a completely different undertaking.

Locke: How would you describe the project of actually writing Standard Operating Procedure, working with the interview takes that the filmmaker, Errol Morris, was using? What techniques did you employ? How did you begin to think about matters of structure?

Gourevitch: That’s a good question. Maybe I should explain for a second how the whole thing came about.

Locke: That’s what I’m thinking. To start with.

Gourevitch: The book Standard Operating Procedure came about when Errol Morris, the filmmaker, started sending me transcripts—lengthy transcripts of interviews he’d been conducting with American soldiers who’d served at Abu Ghraib, including those who’d appeared in and taken the photographs of prisoner abuse in the fall of 2003 at the prison in Iraq. And he was partway into what became a monumental interviewing project. It generated about two and a half million words of transcript, and just to give you a sense if you’re not in the business of what that means, this book is about a hundred and ten thousand words. So, a lot. A shelf of these books. And he sent them to me, and I started reading them, and I found it instantly fascinating to hear the voices of these soldiers. I realized almost immediately, although I don’t remember what he sent me first, that they didn’t really seem to tell the story; they seemed to tell a story I hadn’t heard.

I hadn’t heard these voices. I hadn’t heard this level of detail. I hadn’t heard this level of uninterrupted narrative from the voice of people inside the experience. And he then said, “Well, I’ve got a two-hour movie I’m making.” He does a lot re-enactments and other stuff, so it’s not even two hours of interviews. “You know, this should be a book.” I then started working with these—well I went to a lot of the interviews for their filming—and working with these transcripts as they accumulated and trying to figure out how to tell the story, heavily based on these interviews, on these voices, wanting them to sound off for very long periods, but also feeling the need to take a kind of control of them.

One of the first things that really struck me was the intense claustrophobia of the physical setting of this prison, a prison at the end of the supply lines, in the heart of the Sunni Triangle, under constant attack. Undermanned, undersupplied, in every way underequipped, with untrained soldiers, who are told, “These are the worst of the worst of the Iraqi terrorists and insurgents. Guard ‘em, soften ‘em up for interrogation,” given instructions that it’s a whole new order, etcetera. It was a kind of horror that was taking place there that was created by American policy, and by deliberate policies of the administration and the military there. And these soldiers entered this, and they had no view from the outside. They didn’t know what the policies in Washington were that were forming them.

Almost all of the accounts that I’d seen written of the war on terror focused heavily on the torture memos of Rumsfeld, the sort of Sy Hersh and Mark Danner and Jane Mayer, who’d gotten some great documentation of the perfidy in Washington, and the administration’s deliberate undermining of hundreds of years of American jurisprudence and principle in order to create this terror regime. But what one hadn’t seen is how that actually was experienced by the little guy at the end of the thing. And, mind you, this little guy was the only guy who’d ever gotten held to account and gone to jail. These were the only people who had ever gone to jail, who were below the rank of Staff Sergeant and had never seen a policy. So it pissed me off, as well, which is always good fuel when you’re writing. So I felt that there’s something about the claustrophobia, and the blindness was part of what I wanted to capture—the idea that we were dealing with people who had been made into instruments of a very great injustice. Some of them had gotten into it; some of them had not liked it at all, but who had then become victims of a great injustice at the same time, a different one. And I tried to figure out, How do you make sense of it all? Two and a half million words. So I created folders and folders and folders on my computer, and I dropped and dragged interviews into these folders. There was a folder called ‘dogs,’ and a folder called ‘women at Abu Ghraib,’ ‘children at Abu Ghraib,’ ‘October 24^th,’ ‘October 25^th,’ ‘naked pyramid,’ ‘AQ’ for this prisoner, and ‘Gus’ for that prisoner, and ‘Gilligan’ for that prisoner, the prisoner on the box.

And I took these different interviews, and I would go through, and every time somebody would mention any of these particular things, I would put them into this same folder identifying who the speaker was, and then they’d be things just like, ‘On Photography.’ I had things that didn’t really end up happening, like ‘The Pleasure Principle’ was a folder I had where I sort of tried to pull out all the quotes about people who were upset about this because it looked like the soldiers were having fun. I became interested for a while and decided to kind of leave it aside because it became too intrusive. The question of whether it really makes any difference at all if they’re having fun—so what? If I come up to you and I cut your head off and say, “That was awful,” or I come up to you and I cut your head off and say, “That was excellent!” Is it a greater crime? And if I stand around for my portrait looking sad or happy next to your severed head, does it in anyway diminish the severing of your head or increase it? I don’t know. I don’t think so, but it’s really interesting that we all think so. It segues into the whole question of contrition at trials. “He didn’t show contrition. He wasn’t sad that he killed his mother. So, therefore, he must hang. He was sad that he killed his mother, and he said all the right things to his mother’s relatives, therefore he’s a good boy.” And so I found that interesting. So you’d have all these folders, and you’d start to look at the places that overlapped and the places that obviously didn’t and try to understand them and construct the thing out of it.

Locke: But it’s a lot more than simple a collage of different voices.

Gourevitch: Yeah.

Locke: For example, I think it’s important to emphasize that this book does begin with Saddam Hussein’s 2002 release of prisoners from Abu Ghraib, who come roaring out in your first three pages right into the laps of the reader. And immediately after that, after these people have been released, and there have been mass weddings even at the same time as all these people have been let out of jail in all sorts of elaborate ways, the very next thing, you turn the page, and you’re suddenly with two guys from the Utah correctional facilities who are about to recreate Utah correctional jail in what is left of Abu Ghraib. Why did you choose to begin with Saddam Hussein 2002 instead of let’s say, some tremendous quote from some poor schnook whose uh, who’s managing to cut someone’s head off at the same time. Why did you choose there?

Gourevitch: I mean, hearing you paraphrase it, I suppose part of it is because it’s funny. I mean, honestly, this is such an absurd war. It’s truly absurd in the theater of the absurd sense in all of its claims. So part of what I was up against is, there are layers and layers of frame around the way that we look at this thing. There were hundreds of thousands of reasons given for this war. None of them have made any sense. None of them have held up. They were thrown out there—the reason we went to war—who knows? Some guys in Washington wanted to, and they could, and they did, and they dragged us into it, and they never bothered having the respect for us to explain why, or to actually make any of it make sense. They just bagged it part way in there. They fucked it up, frankly, and they left us all to deal with that, and they left these soldiers to deal with it, and they made a horrible mess of it.

But around this is a kind of epic Mesopotamian drama. This is a serious place. This is a place with its own history. It’s a place with a tremendous background. And we thought, “Ah, Saddam, he’s a dupe!” We made him out to be some kind of cartoon character, you know, a tin horn crook, or a tin pot dictator—these are the kind of things that you hear, you know, “We’re gonna smoke him out!” And in fact he was playing us like a cheap violin right then and there. He let out everybody from prison. It was like the Mariel Boat Lift from Cuba, you know. Everybody was saying, “Oh, he’s keeping his people in prison. It’s a terrible police state.” So OK, fine. Here come all the car thieves and rapists and mentally disturbed and psychotic, drug addicts. We’ll put them on rafts, send them to Miami, and you can put ‘em in your jails.” And you know, we were stuck with them. It was a kind of brilliant rhetorical action. I’m not advocating it, or approving of it, or saying that he doesn’t run a police state. I’m saying, it was a clever move. And he kind of had the last laugh and got rid of a bunch of people he was very happy to be rid of.

Saddam did this incredible thing. He let them out, at the moment where he’s still playing this brinksmanship. And remember, this is a man who’d successfully played brinksmanship with a lot of people, for a long time, and always figured we just didn’t have the stomach for it. And he got away with it, and he lets all these people out of jail. And it shows you the jail. It lets you see inside this place that now is supposedly what we’re fighting against. At the very core of it, this is what we’re fighting against. And we go in with this sense that look, we made him open his prisons even without firing a shot, and immediately, almost blindly, we start to recreate this thing. And you have these guys who come in, poor, decent guys, these guys from the Utah prisons. I mean, they got ridiculed in The Nation magazine as having imported torture from Utah to Abu Ghraib: absurd. But they were in fact these guys who had been brought in on contract for the justice department to try and create a new criminal justice system in Iraq. So I also thought it was important to start with, where did this come from, how did we end up in this prison?

A lot of people had this strange notion, you might remember, there was a lot of posturing in Washington after the Abu Ghraib pictures came out, with congressmen saying, “We should blow up that prison and raze it as a symbolic act.” As if the problem was the prison, not the way we behaved at the prison. And that the place was sort of haunted and spooky and did bad things to people. That didn’t make a lot of sense to me. And they were going in there, and they didn’t even see what they were doing. And they actually believed. And so there’s also something about American idealism that I want to remind us of. This is not hostile to American idealism. It’s hostile to people who are hostile to it by creating large, violent messes. I thought of this book as kind of a patriotic book, and so I open up with that tableau to remind us, this is a place we never thought about. It’s not a place we imagined or understood. The people who went in here had no idea what they were dealing with. Here come these guys, perfectly decent guys. These soldiers. I’ve got no problem with most of these soldiers. The soldiers who behaved appallingly and treated prisoners criminally, none of them had a record of doing that until they got into a situation where it was ordained from on high. None of them ever acted like this on their own or outside of a political context. That’s the story, and to be reminded of that, where it’s our image versus theirs.

Locke: It had been said at the beginning, when some of the first reports came out, that the photos said it all. In large part your entire book is a refutation of that reduction. The book itself is a series of frames, getting closer and closer to some idea of the way in which the official stories, one layer after the other, can be refuted. But in the middle, or in our perception of Abu Ghraib, there’s always, there has to be explication of the photos. In some sense, the book is a refutation of that. In what sense is your book more than an account of the photos? And for that matter, why are there then no photos at all in the book?

Gourevitch: Well, the photos are hideous. And I really didn’t like looking at them. That’s—to be really honest—a certain level of it was I didn’t want to have a book that made you want to slam it shut. I wanted to have a book that made you think, “OK, I’m not sure I’m up for this. This is a repellent subject.” And as you started to read it, you start reading about this thing about Saddam, and you think, “Oh yeah, maybe I’ve read about that in the Times,” or maybe, “How come I didn’t know that?” You read about these guys from Utah. They’re not the people you expect. So you start to soften up your resistance, as they would say at Abu Ghraib. And you start to enter the story. I don’t break you, but you know, I get you in there a little bit. Which is true. None of it’s made up. I mean, it’s interesting in how it got there. So I felt that, and I also felt that that the photographs had so dominated our perception of this story from the very beginning, and they completely contained our perceptions. And I wanted, as it were, to put them in their proper place, which is as artifacts of something much much larger.

The fact is they’re visually very powerful. And they’re very repellent. And they are shocking. They continue to shock, even when you’ve seen a lot of them a lot of the time just on your screen, moving past them, whatever. And so to put them in there meant that you would always be elbowing against them. You’d always in a sense be arguing with their framing of the thing, rather than simply describing the story around them. And I didn’t have to wonder about whether I was presenting or not presenting them because they exist. They’re out there. You can find them. There was no question of me withholding an image or images that don’t—that you might otherwise be deprived of, as journalistic data. So I was relieved of that. But I feel that the story is much larger. It’s a story of American policy that begins with a long section that kind of winds its way back.

I started to look at the period around May ’03 when the war changed, and that’s the moment when Bush appeared on the aircraft carrier and made a speech about the end of major combat operations in Iraq. People saw it, this Mission Accomplished banner, as premature triumphalism. But I realized it was actually a legal frame that he was creating because it meant that you were moving from traditional combat operations, a major combat operation meaning against a sovereign foe, when you take prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention. Those prisoners were suddenly being released as of May 1st, and instead we move to this dodgy war-on-terror frame where you have this constructed fiction called the “enemy combatant,” “illegal combatant,” who is a security detainee. These became the people at Abu Ghraib who were there. So all of this stuff is going on in the book that explains in a sense what the photographs show. The photographs are actually pictures of American policy. Right? That doesn’t sound very interesting if you wanted to see a picture of a policy. But they are photographs of an American policy, and I wanted you to feel that.

And I also wanted you to re-individualize, to some extent, these people. And not because I was worried about their individuality so much, but because there’s a tendency to talk about “the bad apples,” “the soldiers,” “the prisoners.” These groups through which the fact that events take place by a combination of very different minds interacting gets lost. And ultimately, I wanted to close off some of the oxygen on the idea that if I was there I would’ve done differently. Which everybody claims. Who knows?

Locke: One of the most interesting and immediately palpable things about the book is the extreme differences among the different individual characters at Abu Ghraib. I mean, you’re full of minor characters, not just those up the chain of the command. Not even the celebrated few who took the rap. And there’s a great variety of the kinds of information that we get about each of these characters. We begin to get a sense of who they are, how you build them literarily. You’re using a whole variety of different kinds of techniques of information gathering, but then putting them forth as some kind of palpable characters of the sort that we might follow in a work of fiction. You not only hear about Sabrina Harman or Graner or Lynndie England, but there are all these prisoners who are suddenly more than just images in the photographs, but each one of them begins to take on a kind of mad identity of their own, and there’s an enormous variety of them.

I mean, you’ve got people like “Gilligan” or “Taxi Driver” or “Gus” or “Santa Claus,” you’ve even got this psychotic—you once said he was like a performance artist—this guy that everybody called “Shit Boy” because he spent his time covering himself in all kinds of excrement and behaving in almost what appeared to be a kind of mad parody of his own torture. So that the levels of self-representation become both aesthetic and at the same time so clearly psychotic. And the two begin to interact, one with the other, within the frame of the policy that’s memorialized, if you will, in these photographs. I was also, of course, struck that there was a ten-year-old boy around there being used, incarcerated in the prison and simply being used to intimidate his father as best he could. My point is that the story’s much more—much richer than the photographs, and much richer than the narratives that have been imposed upon it.

Gourevitch: Well, much of the worst stuff that was happening there was in fact not on camera. I mean, to me, the fact that you are holding thousands and thousands of prisoners, without charge, without properly identifying them, without in fact the army believing for a minute—the army, by its own admission, has described more than sixty or seventy percent of them as having been there with no cause at all. That they posed no threat to the security of the occupation forces. We were holding innocent people without charges, having arrested them in mass sweeps, in bestial conditions, concentration camp conditions. And I don’t mean extermination camp conditions. I mean, you take a lot of people and you concentrate them at one point so they’re no longer out there. Beyond barbed wire, in outdoor facilities, where they were under constant mortar fire from insurgents outside the prison walls. Prisoners were being killed. Prisoners were being fed garbage. Literally, the contractors were bringing in dumpsters.

Of course, we no longer actually use soldiers to do ninety percent of the tasks that soldiers used to do, so we hire either international contractors to do illegal things, or we hire local contractors to misserve our cause. And they were rioting, and we were using live ammunition on them. And these things struck me as in some ways greater outrages than some of the humiliations bordering on physical torture that were captured on film and whose shock value is largely from their sexual prurience and nastiness. And I wanted to get past that because again, the story to me is not about a couple of guards and their perverse moments on the night shift. But it’s about a kind of larger political system that placed them there. And that’s another reason that I draw attention away from the photographs while circling those photographs as the evidence. Because, I also think the photographs have been misunderstood in one really important aspect.

I mean, the simplest way of putting it is, had they been taken by somebody in my line of work, it would’ve been a great scoop, right? We all know that. If a photojournalist had taken them, they are the iconic photographs of the war on terror after 9/11, after the fall of the towers. They’re the book-end to those photographs. They’re the most-seen photographs since then, most reproduced, most melded into iconography. But to me, it’s not cultural studies. It’s not about, you know, the question of imagery and the regard of the viewer, and the idea of the way that this fits into our imagery. Really interesting things could be said about digital photography culture amongst kids who are in the army these days who swap these photographs and so on. But to me it really was, these photographs performed a public service. If they were staged, if they actually didn’t show the worst of it, what they did was they told us torture was happening at Abu Ghraib, and they were right. Even if what they showed us were fictional moments, it was still right. Even if a lot of quibbles could be had with what’s happening in each frame, so that it turns out that the naked man that Lynndie England is dragging on the leash isn’t really being dragged around on a leash for his sexual humiliation, but is being extracted from a cage, etcetera.

Locke: And that it took twenty-two seconds—

Gourevitch: Doesn’t matter. Naked prisoners were being strung up and kept in cages at Abu Ghraib in violation of all US Military doctrine, standing principles, and law. And that’s what mattered. And one had to always pull back from the kind prurient distraction of the photographs to the actual substance of the core of those photographs.

Locke: In thinking about these matters in all of your books, you usually really resist the invocation of the word “evil.” And you once said, I thought quite surprisingly, that yes, that “evil” is totally inadequate, and not something that you feel should be trotted out as a be-all and end-all explanation for what’s happening. But you also said something just immediately after that:  ”what really matters is leadership.” That leadership matters. You even quote the Rwandan General Paul Kagame saying that people can be made bad, and they can be taught to be good. For someone who’s saying that you’re drawn to subjects that are particularly expressing a pessimistic view of history, this seems rather surprisingly optimistic.

Gourevitch: Well I think Kagame, who’s now the President, meant it that way. But he was speaking about taking genocidal killers and giving them a little bit of training and new uniforms and making them national soldiers in the post-genocide army. And I was saying, “Can you really do this?” And he said, “People can be made bad and taught to be good.” And I thought, you know, it all depends where you sit and who’s saying it. It can be the single most cynical or the single most hopeful thing you can say about people—that people are deeply malleable. And therefore leadership does matter. And people are malleable especially in groups and in tightly controlled situations that are frightening and physical and have large political power behind them. So when I say that I don’t like the word evil, particularly, I don’t have anything that strong against it, except that I feel that the problem of the word “evil” is that it often describes something external that possesses one. It gets you off the hook from having to think the thing through.

I’m not saying that there isn’t, broadly speaking, perhaps, some kind of cosmic struggle in the way that we experience our world. There were times when looking at General Kagame, for all of the violence and faults that I at times saw, I felt that he was at the front line of that fight for us. This guy was out there, while we were all dithering around preaching about common humanity, and this and that. He was killing these Genocidaires and stopping it. He was stopping it. He was keeping creation somewhat wholer. Because they talk about crimes against humanity: genocide’s a crime against creation. It’s an attempt to eliminate an entire component of it. And that seems to me to be something you mess with at your peril. And he was the one who actually put that peril there, and I think we owe that particular moment of those people who fought that fight our very full attention and some respect.

I find boring the phrase “the banality of evil,” mostly because I don’t think it’s what she meant. I think she meant “the banality of evil-doers,” not of evil. She meant this little owlish guy, this petty bureaucrat. So banal. Not evil itself. The Holocaust wasn’t banal. I don’t think even she would think so. So it seems to be one of those words that just doesn’t explain enough and that we use to cover ourselves from actually having to get inside it. Wicked is good enough. But it doesn’t suggest an external force. We don’t talk about the force of wicked, you know? Or wickedness was rife upon the land. And so yeah, I really do think that that’s where my pessimism comes in, from the fact that—as I was saying earlier—this idea that we have, that we will behave well. That we, even the people who read these books. You read these books, you go to those museums, you see those movies, and you’re going to be on the right side. You’re always given somebody to identify with. You’re always somehow told that you are—that there’s this humanist exception for you—and you don’t know that. Hopefully you won’t know that.

What I would say is that leadership matters because ideally, with good leadership, the fewest number of us will ever be put to the test of whether we’d behave decently under pressure or not. That is what political organization seems to me to be for. To get us to a place where as few of us as possible ever get found out for actually being quite dangerous to others under pressure. Because what does history really tell us? That the great mass of Europeans lived with it. Took part in it. Had no problem with it. That the ordinary soldier put in a situation where at the very least they’re asked to look the other way, where they’re not supposed to ruffle the chain of command, where the chain of command reinforces it, lives with it. “They blew up our buildings. They’d have cut off our heads if they took us prisoner.”

So that became the standard. The line I say in the book is, when you’re fighting terror with terror, how do you know which is which? I think that was very much the rationale we got into as we rationalized it. But we’re not far from that, we live with it. And I think one of the reasons we should be nervous about it is that it’s not an issue that’s had much traction in our public life because I think people don’t mind.

Locke: There’s that extraordinary moment when one of the young women, I think it’s Sabrina Harman, says that she really felt that she couldn’t really cope with what was going on. She didn’t really feel she wanted to participate with it anymore. And she would see other people sailing into action against these various detainees, and she felt that it was a lack in herself that she couldn’t really participate enthusiastically in any way. And her finally excuse was, “I guess they were just more patriotic than I was.”

Gourevitch: Yeah, she sort of felt like, if she’s told to do something she doesn’t like, she felt maybe it was a bad form of individualism, that she was saying, “I’d rather not.”

Locke: Both of your books, they’d be the first and the third, end with acts of refusal. People saying no into the face of extreme coercion. A group of school girls, both Tutsi and Hutu, at the very end of We Wish to Inform You, are together, and they’re asked by people, at the point of a gun, to please separate themselves into the two ethnic groups. And all these girls in this mixed school refuse to do it. And they’re then massacred. But they refuse to identify themselves as belonging to one group or the other. In the very end of Standard Operating Procedure, you have again someone that’s speaking out, one of the prisoners, who refuses to comply in any way. You spoke to me and you said it’s sort of like your Bartleby moment.

Gourevitch: I think of him as Bartleby.

Locke: Explain why you felt he was the only free man there.

Gourevitch: There’s this guy named “Gus,” who is the guy you may know from the photograph of Lynndie England with the man at the end of the leash, the naked man at the end of what looks like a dog leash, being pulled out of his cell. And these nicknames, by the way, were the nicknames that were used by the American soldiers for these Iraqis. And I don’t use their Iraqi names in the book, although through prisoner number and correlation charts we were able to figure them out, because presumably these people were innocent. Why identify—there’s nothing really gained by it. It’s one of those kind of facts that makes you feel like you lose something when you don’t actually know something. You don’t really know more about who they are. And I wanted to stay inside the American heads. I wanted you to feel always that sense of them with their prisoner names.  “Gus” refuses to eat. He refuses clothing in this place where everybody’s otherwise being forced to strip naked.

He would always say, “I will kill you! I will kill you, Americans! I will kill all the Jews. I will kill all the Americans!” And they thought he was some big Al Qaeda guy, or maybe an old Ba’athist heavy from Saddam’s interior security forces, until they found out that he was actually just a local town drunk who’d been picked up and thrown onto the back of an American military truck. But he just didn’t like being in captivity very much. They had to force-feed him with IV bags. He was on a complete hunger strike, effectively. And they panicked about this at one point. They loaded him into the back of an ambulance—he said, “I’ll eat if you take me to Baghdad. I want to be taken to Baghdad.” So they drove him all around the prison yard for about half an hour to a hospital that was about twenty feet from the prison cell, and let him out and said, “You’re in Baghdad,” and he started to eat. And then the doctor said, “Why’s this guy here?” and returned him to the prison, at which point he didn’t trust them very much anymore. He would always say, “I refuse.”

And there was this one guy, Hydrue Joyner, in his interview he clowned a lot. But he just kept saying, “I refuse. I refuse,” as he quoted him, and I thought, “He’s Bartleby.” He’s Bartleby, who says, “I would prefer not to.” And winds up in the tombs. And “I would prefer not to. I would prefer not to.” And I felt—at one point I say, this prisoner, maybe he’s the only truly free man at Abu Ghraib because he’s the only guy who in some ways is refusing the order of the place. And I say, we all made our accommodations. And at that point I do this “we,” I think it’s the second or third last line, but to include us—us way beyond the place who didn’t really have anything to do with it at the time. And he refused. Bartleby died. That great story of Melville’s [Bartleby the Scrivener] is really the original work of what now is known as “dissident literature,” but he died in the tombs. Melville had a better last line—what can I say? Alas Bartleby, alas humanity. I couldn’t go that far.

Locke: I think maybe we should take some questions.

Question 1: I’m curious about your problem with the word “evil” as describing something external in life. I’d certainly think of it as being scary because we think of it as something internal, something inbuilt, something natural to human beings. And I wonder also about your pessimistic view of history. I wonder if you can tell us a little bit more, what it means to really have a pessimistic view of history.

Gourevitch: Well, Richard’s getting me in trouble for that just because—it was in an email—I didn’t publish that.

Locke: That’s true. Forget it.

Gourevitch: No, it’s true. Yes, I suppose evil is often described as being inside one and therefore that that’s part of it’s danger or risk. What I meant is that it’s a kind of disembodied force, that it is something for which we are not individually responsible, but something by which we are possessed. And it’s the sense of possession that gave me a sense of something external. That’s really what I meant. Whether the possession is internal or external, it’s in a sense impervious to any kind of choices or decisions or actions or political structures or social organizations through which it’s exercised. And that people have a capability for terrible behavior and for great inhumanity, as well as, to some extent, in differing degrees in different people, great acts of humanity and nobility and so forth, that I think is true.

But I don’t think of these things as beyond us. And even if it’s inside you, it sounds odd, usually, when people describe it as something from within, as a force, as evil, as opposed to just a capability of some kind. Which, if people say people have a capacity for evil, fine. I wouldn’t argue with the word at that point. My pessimistic view of history I suppose simply means that I don’t see us on a great trajectory of the world improving steadily in its lot. Now, I’ve been corrected by various people. My wife points out that the world for women has improved greatly, at least from a medical, and largely from a social and political point of view in the last hundred years—those kinds of improvements, absolutely. But the overall fate of the species, I don’t simply think—there are a lot of people who look at trouble in the world with the idea, well, we’ve just gotta figure out what went wrong and fix it.

What are the lessons of Rwanda? I cannot tell you how many ‘lessons learned’ sessions have been held in international organizations and by humanitarian groups and this and that over the million dead in Rwanda. And I’m not sure that the lessons they’re teaching have been learned, which is that we’ve got to act quicker on this, there’s got to be more political will in there, you know—this that and the other thing. And if we just had the trucks there in time, and so forth. And to me that’s not the lesson of Rwanda. To me, the lesson of Rwanda is that people who depend on the outside world for their protection, if they’re in real danger, they stand unprotected. Perhaps it is something about political organization that leads to that, and the way that people are prepared to take part in that. Perhaps it is that—far from being something we will not see again because we once saw it clearly, this is something more like a disease—I’ve thought of it sometimes medically.

If a disease occurs, a new disease, a new affliction occurs to the body, medical science does not say, “well, now that we’ve seen that and had a good look at it and understood its causes, we’re done with it.” They think, wow, we’re gonna face epidemic outbreaks of this thing all over the place. We’re stuck with this thing. It’s gonna erupt left, right, and center. It’s gonna mutate. It’s gonna come back at us by violence, cunning, and everything else at different angles, and we’ve got to figure out how to be on our toes to watch out for it. And the notion that we have in the nice stories, as you said earlier, that you can just immunize yourself by good will, seems to me actually to put us in greater danger. Therefore I’m not overly pessimistic, but I’m very cheerful.

Locke: Yes, Akeel.

Akeel Bilgrami: I agree with you that evil doesn’t help you in contemplating these things. But one of the things that makes it so distinct as a force, even if you describe it as a force, is that in the Western literary tradition, ever since Milton’s Satan, evilness is not just a force that is the opposite of good, but it is supposed to oppose the good because it is good. So it’s not just a stark contrast with the good, but it opposes the good precisely because it is the good. And in Bush’s government’s self-serving use of the word evil to call various people evil, that’s precisely what they had in mind, that they oppose us because we’ve got our freedoms and so on. So it is a force, but it’s got a very specific resonance in our literary understanding of it. It’s a religious notion with a very specific force.

Gourevitch: That’s true. And I think you’re absolutely right that it was hijacked and abused in the administration’s rhetoric about evil-doers, and so forth, but perhaps that’s part of what makes me shy away from it as a word in my own work. None of the things that I’ve written about or the characters feel like they achieve the quality of Miltonian evil, or an Ahab. These sort of petty thugs of Hutu power in Rwanda who managed to create some pretty grandiose destruction were no Ahabs, were no Milton’s devil, or Satan. They were not up to that order of things. They really are in that tradition talking about cosmic forces, and yes they are opposed to good, as they say.

And maybe people didn’t fully hear the question, but the point was that in the literary tradition from Milton onward, the idea of evil is opposed to good because it’s good. That part of the idea of an evil force or an evil character is not just that it’s the antithesis of good, but that it is opposed to that which is good because it’s good. And I just don’t see that the kind of vile behavior that we’ve seen rates that high, and I think therefore the word’s been diluted and weakened to a degree that even if we ran into the real thing, we’d need to come up with a new way of putting it, sometimes by a few simple words.

Locke: There’s also kind of gleeful, lurid theatricality about the term evil that also affords a refuge from really having to do anything more than just appreciate its sheer exuberance.

Gourevitch: Yeah. It’s a word that’s kind of too good to—

Locke: To waste.

Gourevitch: Yeah.

Question 2: How do you think history, or the future, will regard the policy makers, the people who actually wrote the policies that went into Abu Ghraib? It seems to me that one of the problems is that it’s been very difficult to accept that these policies and strategies are as bad as they seem. It seems like we would rather assume there’s some rationale for them, and they’re really not as horrible as they seem. But do you think that it will come to light that they are, or won’t because of the context?

Gourevitch: Well, there’s been a lot of documentation of how bad these policies are, how they came about, how they’ve been structured, how they came out of the Vice President Dick Cheney’s legal shop, and the justice department, primarily under Gonzales. Ashcroft seems to have had some problems with all of this, which might be why he didn’t get a second term. No, seriously. And Rumsfeld’s Pentagon. More and more and more memos. There were actually considerable legal debates about all of this, and there were of course people who dissented, or objected, or who dug in for the way things have always been, or used to be, who lost. And some of them have been great leakers. I actually thank the leakers in my acknowledgment because I think democracies to some extent depend on them, especially at a time when leaking becomes the crime.

Rumsfeld’s outburst in response to the Abu Ghraib photographs, “These illegal photographs, which were illegally passed around!” That was the thing. You look for the leak. You don’t correct the policy. The combination of lawyers and the policing of people who leak tells you that this is very deliberate. How will history look at the people who authored these things? I think dimly. There are people who argue much more than I do that they will be brought to trial. I don’t believe that. I don’t believe they’ll be brought to trial because I think part of what’s broken is the extent to which, once you’re at a certain level of power, you are beyond a certain kind of accountability. You could be brought to trial for having a mistress, and you could be brought to trial for tax evasion, you can be brought to trial for bribery. But you cannot be brought to trial for mass political crimes. That’s called policy, and nobody wants to do that. Nobody has the courage to do it.

You had Watergate, was about a burglary. You had the impeachment of Clinton for supposedly lying about his sex life. Basically, they were both—these were minor crimes compared to the larger crimes certainly that have been committed in this case. But I do not see that happening. There’s talk about, oh, well, the international legal order will kick in, and they’ll get Rumsfeld when he’s traveling in Belgium, or something. You know, they tried that, and I think the Americans sent some sort of a signal that it would be unfortunate for Belgium if we withdrew NATO headquarters, and that law didn’t hold up so well. These guys may not be able to travel quite as freely for a little while. I don’t know if Kissinger can’t go some places. But it doesn’t seem to restrict them very much. And I don’t see that happening. And I think that what’s most important is that one actually attempts to recriminalize some of the things that have been decriminalized. One tries to reinstitute some of the policies and training that for years have been at the core of American military doctrine.

One reasserts, to use another abused word like evil, values that have been at the core of these things. And frankly some of the most fierce outrage and objection to what happened at Abu Ghraib was from within the military. I’ve had notes from military people who sign or who have these military email addresses who say, those guys up the chain of command should be completely held to account. Because they feel that their whole profession has been dishonored. And they don’t feel that this is what they’ve served and how they’ve served. And they don’t see how you can actually win a war on terror that of course has to also be an international struggle for global opinion and instead is taking the form of this kind of nonsense.

When you see an administration lawyer up like this to break the law, it’s very different from when you just see people here and there taking a little bit of executive leeway to do something dark and dirty. They’re creating a totally new structure. They are trying to dismantle the legal framework of the Geneva Conventions, of the international laws, of American military doctrine, all of these things. And what worries me is that always in this administration the lawyers who have been the masterminds are great advocates of expanded executive power. That legal theory is held by relatively few theorists, but they’re in the right positions these last eight years. In tandem with the physical abuse that they advocated for the ordinary soldier, was the idea of a President who is basically unchecked by the law, has supreme executive power in wartime. A kind of idealized notion of a wartime executive, and I find that what worries me is that it’s very hard once you’ve loosened up executive power to put it back in the bottle. And I don’t see anybody running for office suggesting that that’s what they’d like to do.

It was very interesting that when, in the primary, Hillary Clinton was for domestic wiretapping, and Obama was against it. And obviously Hillary Clinton thought she was going to be in the White House, where she would want her executive power unchecked. And as soon as she lost the primary, and the vote came up for renewal of domestic eavesdropping, she voted against it, because now she’s a legislator, and a legislator wants legislative power to check executive power. And Obama, who’d always been against it, suddenly took a pass on it. Which I think is one of the real strikes against him. It makes one very worried, honestly. That doesn’t mean one isn’t much more worried about the alternative. But it’s important when one thinks, like, we’ll go vote for Obama, and the world will suddenly change into this wonderful happy place where all the problems of the last eight years will no longer be our heritage and our responsibility. No. I don’t see anybody planning to get the job at the White House and roll back executive power. And so that’s actually something that the framers and the founders and centuries have held in place against considerable pressure not to. And it’s broken at other times. Lincoln broke it. Others have broken it. One has to seek it back. That’s the best one can do. And I think history will judge this very, very harshly.

Question 3: I really enjoyed your book, and I’d like you to talk a little bit about the role of technology, from two aspects. One being the idea of sort of a distancing from responsibility. You have the quote of the one woman who says, well, she documents it, and it sort of distances her. And I think any reasonable person would think, oh, if I take pictures of this and show it to my superiors and people back home, someone will stop it. And the other is the idea of the war for hearts and minds being a war of media. In some ways the people in Abu Ghraib understood that better. Their pictures and videos counter the beheading videos much better than anything that we could produce.

Gourevitch: Well, unfortunately the sequence was the other way around. The beheading videos followed the release of the Abu Ghraib videos, and the Abu Ghraib soldiers were suddenly blamed for the beheading of Americans, as well, especially when Nick Berg’s body was dumped at the gates of Abu Ghraib, beheaded, and it was said that this was revenge for that. Many of the crimes of the war, I mean, many of the escalations of the war in the next months were blamed on these soldiers, as if it was these soldiers who’d done it. But the role of technology, it’s a huge subject obviously. There’s an essay I love by Mark Twain that he wrote in 1903, during the whole period when the human rights movement was getting started. It was very focused on Congo and the abuses of Leopold, King of the Belgians, in the Congo, which he ran as his own turf. If you’ve ever read Adam Hochschild’s book, he goes into great detail. And people were cutting off the hands of these workers at the rubber plantations when they didn’t meet quota, and millions of people were being killed, and the society was being torn asunder. There was a lot of pamphleteering, and the whole rise of the modern human rights movement is built around this Congo protest movement in the late 1890s and so on.

So Mark Twain, he contributed a pamphlet to this, and his pamphlet took the form of King Leopold’s soliloquy, in which King Leopold sits on a throne, and he’s surrounded by pamphlets of protest literature. And he picks them up and reads them, and he’s like, “Ah, look at this! They say that all the skeletons, finger to finger, would wrap three times around the world from what I’ve caused, and they say this,” and he reads all these atrocities off, and he sort of scoffs at them. As if written by Shaw, he’s kind of a delighted maniac. And he keeps saying, “But it doesn’t matter! This is just a bunch of little whiners! We control all of the presses. We control all of the pulpits. We have never had any problem suppressing this nonsense and going on with our looting.”

And then, after a rather long soliloquy, he opens a pamphlet and he says, “Damn, the Kodak! The uncorruptible Kodak! The only witness I ever found that cannot be bought off or silenced.” And there’s a sheet of photographs of these people whose hands have been cut off. And right then, in 1896 or something, Kodak had created it’s first small, portable camera, the predecessor of the Brownie box, and people were able to carry them around. And he said, you know, we just can’t silence a photograph. Now, this is long before people figured out how to silence photographs very successfully in King Leopold’s role. And we have much more skilled King Leopolds these days. It’s really interesting that in 2003, right as this war was breaking out, if you look back at advertising supplements even, 2002 was the advent of the cheap, portable digital camera, and everybody went to war with them. And with it came a culture that is alien to the rest of us, which happens for reasons that I can’t quite figure out the technological link, but also involves a great deal of exhibitionism, right?

The idea that you constantly document yourself doing everything, and that you pass that around to all of your friends, and that you don’t really think about the fact that a photograph that is electronic can be passed infinitely, but that’s just part of what’s strange and cool about it. And people who sort of flick through their photo albums where they have a puppy, and somebody having sex, and a beheading, and a fire down the road, and they’re like, it’s all kind of equal and cool. Cool, weird photograph. Wicked. There was a site that was run out of Florida where soldiers used to send their most shocking photographs from the war. A lot of them were somewhat pornographic, them posing, especially now that you also have a sexually mixed army. People posing on military equipment or on battlefields. A lot of it was battlefield horror. And it was called thatsfuckedup.com.

That was the name of the site. And people put these up like, “man, if you think about it, that’s messed-up.” Man, look at this messed-up picture. So this all was in play. The extent to which taking pictures of yourself was a kind of relief and distancing and at the same time was a kind of documentation and proof. Graner and Harman, who took a lot of the pictures, both talk of it with very different ideas of what that means as proof. As some proof that it was what they were supposed to do. The soldiers thought that the photographs that they were taking would show that they were doing what they were supposed to do. In some way, even if they thought that they were also pushing the envelope, and even if they were staging some of the photographs to shock and sensationalize and play Cindy Sherman, they were also doing that. And the interesting thing is, at the end, where did the photographs come to us from? From the soldiers’ families. The soldiers were segregated, locked away when the photographs came to the command structure’s eyes in January of 2004. And then they faced this problem.

If we bring them to trial, we have to release the photographs. We do not want to release the photographs because they will be a great public relations disaster for the Army and for America, so we cannot charge them and bring them to trial. And so they held them. And they thought, but if these photographs get out, we’ve got to have these guys held and pending charges. So they had the charges all leveled. I remember when the photographs came out, the big story was, “The Army’s taking care of it. We’re on the case. We’ve got them charged. They’re awaiting trial.” And they railroaded this guy who hadn’t even done anything, Jeremy Sivits, gave him a year in jail. He had actually saved a bunch of people from being beaten worse on the night of the human pyramid, so they put him in jail for a year because he was the most defenseless of the bunch. Those photographs were leaked by the family of the soldiers when they were saying, our guys are being segregated and getting prepared for some kind of framing, and nobody is getting access to them. There is something messed up here. We’re gonna get these pictures up to show that it’s a larger story. And boom, they got them out into the hands of our King Leopold’s master framers, who said, there it is, it is in the photograph, it is all you need to know. Bingo. Those are your villains.

And so technology is huge. The other thing they did is they sent people out trying to recover all the photographs. They actually sent out Criminal Investigative Division agents of the military and knocked on the doors in America of family members, lovers, friends, etc., of the soldiers who had had these photographs at Abu Ghraib. Knocked on their doors and asked for their hard drives.  Which is illegal. It’s sort of legal, but you’re not required to give it up. They didn’t understand digital photography. They thought they could get them all back. And then they started to realize at some point that this is some sort of viral thing. We can’t control it. That was their concern was: to suppress the photographs, not the behavior or the policy.

Dohra Ahmad: Welcome, everybody. In addition to the conversation, Dalia has graciously agreed to read a few passages that will help set the tone, and the first one specifically will set out the story and the tone for any of you who haven’t read the book, The Septembers of Shiraz. I’m a teacher; I can’t help teaching. So I’m gonna ask all of you guys to listen to the weight and specificity of the details and the descriptions in this section, which is from the opening of the book.

Dalia Sofer: Just to set it up, this is the story of a man who’s wrongly imprisoned in Iran after the revolution in ’79:

When Isaac Amin sees two men with rifles walk into his office at half past noon on a warm autumn day in Tehran, his first thought is that he won’t be able to join his wife and daughter for lunch, as promised.

“Brother Amin?” the shorter of the men says.

Isaac nods. A few months ago they took his friend Kourosh Nassiri, and just weeks later news got around that Ali the baker had disappeared.

“We’re here by orders of the Revolutionary Guards.” The smaller man points his rifle directly at Isaac and walks toward him, his steps too long for his legs. “You are under arrest, Brother.”

Isaac shuts the inventory notebook before him. He looks down at his desk, at the indifferent items witnessing this event—the scattered files, a metal paperweight, a box of Dunhill cigarettes, a crystal ashtray, and a cup of tea, freshly brewed, two mint leaves floating inside. His calendar is spread open and he stares at it, at today’s date, September 20, 1981, at the notes scribbled on the page—call Mr. Nakamura regarding pearls, lunch at home, receive shipment of black opals from Australia around 3:00 PM, pick up shoes from cobbler—appointments he won’t be keeping. On the opposite page is a glossy photo of the H?fez mausoleum in Shiraz. Under it are the words, “City of Poets and Roses.”

“May I see your papers?” Isaac asks.

“Papers?” the man chuckles, “Brother, don’t concern yourself with papers.”

The other man, silent until now, takes a few steps. “You are Brother Amin, correct?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Then please follow us.”

He examines the rifles again, the short man’s stubby finger already on the trigger, so he gets up, and with the two men makes his way down his five-story office building, which seems strangely deserted. In the morning he had noticed that only nine of his sixteen employees had come to work, but he had thought nothing of it; people had been unpredictable lately. Now he wonders where they are. Had they known?

And I’ll skip ahead to a passage where Isaac is being held in a temporary detention center:

Isaac rests his head against the wall. How odd that he should get arrested today of all days, when he was going to make up his long absences to his wife and daughter by joining them for lunch. For months he had been leaving the house at dawn, when the snow-covered Elburz Mountains slowly unveiled themselves in the red-orange light, and the city shook itself out of sleep, lights in bedrooms and kitchens coming on one after the other, languidly at first, then gaining momentum. And he had been returning from the office long after the supper dishes had been washed and stored away and Shirin had gone to bed. At night, walking up the stairs of his two-story villa, he could already hear the television buzzing, and in the living room he would find Farnaz, in her silk nightgown, cognac in hand, soaking up the chaos of the evening news.

The cognac, she said—its stinging vapors, its roundness and warmth – made the news more palatable, and Isaac did not object to this new habit of hers, which, he suspected, made up for his absences. In the living room he would stand next to her, his briefcase an extension of his hand, neither sitting beside her nor ignoring her; standing was all he could manage. They would say little to each other, a few words about the day or Shirin or some explosion somewhere, and he would retire to the bedroom, exhausted, trying to sleep but unable, the television’s drone seeping into the darkness. Lying awake in bed he would often think that if she would only shut off the news and come to him, he would remember how to talk to her. But the television, with its images of rioting crowds and burning movie theaters—with its wretched footage of his country coming undone, street by street—had taken his place long before he had learned to find refuge in his work, long even before the cognac had become necessary.

Ahmad: Thank you so much. I felt—as that passage exemplifies—I felt that The Septembers of Shiraz was more than anything else a novel about time and about memory. You have all these references to Proust in the novel itself and in the author’s note as well, and so many instances of objects that elicit specific memories—sometimes triggering lost memories. A slim-waisted glass, cufflinks, photographs—even sometimes a particular date. There are a lot of instances where items reappear later on as markers of time passing.

For example, we’ll see that same cup of mint tea later on, after Isaac’s imprisonment, filled with greenish layers of fungus, so these objects mark the passage of time and the lost memories or recovered memories. It almost feels as though violence has a compensatory function of recovering memory. There is for example an instance of a lost silver tea pot found by soldiers who are searching the house, and I wondered: was that act of recovery one of your conscious aims in writing the novel? Or was it just something that happened as you went along?

You say at the end of the novel, “The Septembers of Shiraz, unlike this September, held in them the promise of return.” I was wondering whether the purpose of the book was to effectuate that impossible return?

Sofer: I think in a way it was, though I didn’t set out to do that. We all know that Proust coined the term of involuntary memory that’s triggered by the senses—by touch, smell, etc. In this book, I think the opposite happens, where deprivation actually leads to memory, so that when all is gone—as it is for Isaac when he’s in prison, but also for the family members—they turn inward. So all the sensory effects are actually taking place in the past, but they are recovered in the absence that’s surrounding them.

And the book in itself, to me, in a way, is a kind of memorial. There is a quote by Sébillet that I like a lot that says—and this is not verbatim—that the writer pledges himself to building a memorial, and that really rings true for me. Though the memorial may not always be accurate, because memory is tricky.

Ahmad: Yeah. There’s a passage which I’m hoping you’ll have time to read today where the young girl, Isaac’s daughter, Shirin, is forced to destroy a photograph of herself, and I guess I was reading the novel as a reconstruction—a literal putting back together of those memories that were broken, that were destroyed.

Sofer: Yeah, that really was what prompted the book, you know. I had such scattered memories. This is partly autobiographical, but it’s mostly fictional. But from the events that actually did happen, I had very scattered memories, and so this was an attempt to put things together. And once I had done that as best I could, to then fictionalize and create this universe.

Ahmad: It seems that literature has a compensatory function, then, in the face of violence and loss.

Sofer: I think so. It helps to bring things together, maybe; some sense of understanding.

Ahmad: Shirin at one point asks her father why he keeps a copy of Rembrandt’s painting, Portrait of an Old Jew Seated. She says, “I don’t understand why you have this, even though it’s so sad,” and he replies, “One day you’ll understand it, and then you will find it beautiful.”  That made me wonder whether you feel there’s a necessary coexistence of sadness and beauty, or is that something that’s particular to this book?

Sofer: It’s been my experience that it’s often mixed, so that’s how I see things, usually. And she, Shirin, finally understands it when he returns from prison so changed; she does understand what the painting meant.

Ahmad: I also found it a very interesting meditation on whether material objects matter, and how much material objects matter, which is a philosophical question, and it’s a political question at the same time.

Sofer: Right.

Ahmad: There’s a reevaluation of the period of wealth and comfort under the Shah, so that’s where the politics of materialism comes in.

Sofer: Yeah.
Ahmad: There’s a quote that recurs twice that we’ll hear later today. “If we leave this country without taking care of our belongings, who in Geneva or Paris or Timbuktu will understand who we once were?” So on the one hand, the novel itself is structured around these memorial artifacts—objects that were lost or threatened that serve as the container of memories. On the other hand, it seems like there’s a running critique throughout the novel of this kind of decadent or compromised lifestyle that many of the objects represent; whether they’re gems or the silver tea pot or the glass of cognac. Are they things that make us human? Are they commodity fetishes? It’s something that you seem to portray from both sides throughout the novel.
A soldier comes to search the house and asks, “Why so many objects?” And the answer that Farnaz gives is a very humanizing answer. “These objects, she had always believed, are infused with the souls of the places from which they came, and of the people who had made or sold them. Living among them assured her that hers was a populated world.” And I was curious whether you meant to convey both points of view regarding material objects, or as a novelist, are you more automatically sympathetic to the point of view that values those objects as containers for experience?

Sofer: Well, what I personally value is probably irrelevant. But the material objects do serve those two functions that you mentioned, and they do so through two characters, mainly.

There’s Farnaz, for whom the objects contain memories and experiences, and at the other extreme, the sister-in-law Shahla, who is more concerned with wealth and status and so on. And through her I wanted to bring that aspect of the society, which is very materialistic, very hierarchical, and in large part, was responsible for bringing about the revolution. At the same time, while people criticize that kind of materialism, everybody aspired to it.

So while people made fun of Shahla in a way, they also attended her parties, because they wanted to be seen with her, so. And people come to identify themselves through their objects, and so she thinks, “Well, if we leave, who are we gonna be without our status?”

Ahmad: But she says it in a way that really makes sense. I think you don’t minimize her and you don’t condescend to her.

Sofer: No, because it is a valid point. People attain a certain status, and then they move, and they lose their name—which is also very important in that kind of society, the family name—and they lose their material—I mean their social status. So it is a radical shift; not an easy one.

Ahmad: So the whole novel is sort of haunted by this future position of exile; it’s a very placed novel, I felt. It’s very rooted in Tehran, but there’s always, throughout the novel, the hint that that emplacement is gonna be taken away from the characters. That those kinds of connections that you talked about—social position—are gonna be taken away. Edward Said has written in After the Last Sky and elsewhere about the ways in which memorial objects, and memory more generally, become fraught in the context of exile.

I’m wondering what it was like to write a novel about Tehran in 1981 in New York City in the early 21st century—whether the distance of time was harder to overcome, or the distance of space, or whether perhaps you found either of those distances to be productive?

Sofer: Being in exile is a very tricky thing, because you’re almost living in two spaces, literally, and two times, so you’re having parallel lives consistently. So I don’t know whether it helped me or not, but I found it was something that I needed to do; to revisit that part of my life, which, because it ended so abruptly, felt like a dream or something surreal that never happened. And because I didn’t have a chance to go back and visit, it made it even less attainable. So this was in a way a concrete way for me to tell myself it existed.

And I think part of the reason why it came out in present tense, actually, is because for narrative purposes it made it more immediate. But for me I think it’s because it’s still going on, so that’s how it came out.

Ahmad: Because you didn’t have a chance to see it in the interim.

Sofer: Yeah, and also everything was so scattered and ended so abruptly, that in some ways it’s still going on in my mind.

Ahmad: I think you made a really fascinating choice not to begin and end only with the girl’s point of view, which was the more autobiographical angle. In some ways, it seems that Shirin, the 9-year-old, is your passport in. There’s a fascinating moment towards the end where Isaac says to smugglers who were gonna get him out of the country, “Our passports were confiscated when the Revolutionary Guard searched the house, but our daughter’s passport still exists, and I can make a family passport out of that.”

And it seems to me that you took the opposite direction coming back into Iran through the daughter as a conduit out to the rest of the family’s experience. And for anyone who hasn’t read it, it’s a beautiful form in which the story is conveyed in a woven or braided structure that alternates among the points of view of Isaac, who’s in prison, his privileged and dependent wife, Farnaz, their 9-year-old daughter, and their older son, who’s living in Brooklyn with a Hasidic family and attending graduate school. You had said in an interview that Shirin was the hardest character to write, even though it was she who approximated your own experience. I’m wondering was there ever a point where the novel was going to be hers entirely? Did you always know that you wanted this kind of collective structure? Did you ever think about dropping Shirin’s voice out entirely when you were struggling with her? Can you just talk about form?

Sofer: Well, actually, the novel was going to be Isaac only, and still, to this day, Isaac is the main character for me. Shirin was the hardest to write—mostly also because she’s a child, and writing from the point of view of a child is difficult. But I think also because just chronologically she was closest to me. But I chose the four points of view because I felt it was important to show how the same event can be experienced differently by four different people of the same family. And also I realized after I wrote it that the four hardly ever interact with each other, except in memory, once again. In the present story, they don’t; there’s hardly any dialogue. And this wasn’t intentional, but I think it was because the novel is so much about imprisonment that the structure dictated itself. The structure and the subject matter sort of reflected each other. So they’re all in their different kind of imprisonment; Isaac literally, but each of them emotionally, and in the son Parviz’s case geographically.

Ahmad: That’s really interesting, actually. When I was taking notes on the novel, I wrote each character and their own constellation of characters, and I guess I hadn’t consciously been noticing that that was happening.  But right, each one has a group of people with whom she does or does not communicate.

Sofer: Right.

Ahmad: And primarily interacts. And then you’re right—there’s not that much overlap, is there?

Sofer: Yeah. And that really wasn’t intentional. Someone pointed it out to me later and I thought, “Oh!”

Ahmad: I think this would be a good time for you to read the passage about Farnaz’s imprisonment in her social structure.

Sofer: This is a passage where Farnaz goes to see Isaac’s sister and her husband, whose father was a minister of the Shah, and she has just told them that Isaac has been imprisoned.

“How awful,” Shahla gasps. “Why didn’t you tell us earlier?”

“I didn’t want to get you involved. Once they get someone, friends and family become targets too. I haven’t told anyone, not even your parents. How could I tell Baba Hakim and Afshin-khanoum that their son is in jail? But I knew I needed to warn you. You could already be in great danger, Keyvan-jan, given your father’s connections to the shah.”

“Yes, I know,” Keyvan says. “But we can’t leave now. My father has asked me to liquidate his houses and belongings before we join him and my mother in Switzerland.”

The housekeeper arrives with a silver tray that she places on the coffee table. On it is the familiar tea set, of yellow porcelain with a garden motif—passed down to Keyvan by his great-grandfather, a court painter during the reign of the Qajar king Nasir al-Din Shah. The set was a present from the king to the artist, upon the king’s return from Europe. Farnaz looks at the set, and at the plate of sweets accompanying it—browned madeleines, buttered and plump, made more golden by the soft light of the table lamp—and she thinks, here, on this tray, like the country’s aspirations as well as its demise, its desire for cosmopolitanism and its refusal to see itself for what it has become—an empire that has grown smaller with each passing century, its own magnificence displaced by that of other nations. For what is a housekeeper named Massoumeh, born in Orumiyeh, in the province of Azerbaijan, doing preparing madeleines, that most popular of French pastries?

And I’ll skip ahead a little bit.

“Maybe we should forget about the houses and belongings and just get out now,” Keyvan says. He looks pale and thin, his collarbone visible through his cotton sweater—the kind of man, Farnaz thinks, who would not survive prison.

Shahla picks up the teapot and fills the cups. “We can’t just leave,” she says as she pours. “How will we sustain ourselves—with love?”

She extends a cup to Farnaz but looks at her husband, who glances back at her for an instant before turning his gaze to a painting on the wall, of the Qajar king Nasir al-Din Shah, made by his great-grandfather in 1892.

“This painting alone is reason enough to stay,” Shahla says. “How can you leave all this family history behind?”

He rubs his forehead, resting his fingers on the large, visible veins on his temples. “But what if they arrest me? How will this painting—and all the pages I’ve written about it in all those useless art magazines—help me in jail? Or this tea set, or that chandelier, or this stupid eighteenth-century chair—what will they do for me?” His voice rises—dusty and trembling—a voice untrained for such a pitch, and strained because of it.

“Shhh!” Shahla says. “You want the whole neighborhood to hear you?” She sips her tea, then helps herself to a madeleine, which she brings to her mouth slowly and with deliberate calm. “Can you even imagine your father’s face when he sees us at his doorstep in Geneva, empty-handed?” She takes a bite out of her cake, cupping her hand under it to catch any crumbs. “These mullahs have no reason to come after us,” she says, bringing the matter to her desired conclusion, as she so often did.

“What reason did they have to come after Isaac?” Farnaz asks.

Keyvan stirs his tea absentmindedly. “My only crime is being my father’s son,” he says, looking down.

Shahla wipes her hands, then reaches for a cigarette and lights it. “Why all the drama, Professor?” She exhales in her husband’s direction, freeing her chest of not just smoke but also acrimony. “Who would you be without your father? And your grandfather and your great-grandfather? Stripped of your lineage, what would you have achieved? You think people would care about your opinions on art if it weren’t for your last name? If we leave this country without taking care of our belongings, who in Geneva or Paris or Timbuktu will understand who we once were?”

Ahmad: Thank you. I feel like that passage does what you described earlier, which is to level a class-based critique of the Shah’s regime, and perhaps indirectly suggest that those years set the stage for the Islamic revolution of 1979. I felt that the characters had so much ambivalence regarding that period, so so much of what the novel was doing was reevaluating the period of the Shah. It was comfortable; it was also decadent and ruthless. Did you feel any responsibility to depict it in a certain way?

Sofer: I didn’t, no. I didn’t feel I have a responsibility.
I just felt like I’m going to portray it as I saw it, because it had positive elements about it. It did bring progress to the country. It Westernized. It brought education—economically it did a lot. But at the same time, the gap was really growing between the poor and the rich, and there were many, many people who were not served by what the Shah was doing. And ultimately, it was bound to fall, because it was an autocratic regime. So I tried to depict it as I thought it was. It was neither good nor evil, but it was bound to fail.

Ahmad: Did you start off in the same place before you were writing as perhaps where you got? Each character seems to go through this process of reevaluation; even the child. Even Shirin notices at some point. She says, “Until recently, housekeepers sat on the floor. People like Shirin and her family sat on sofas. The king sat on a throne. This was once the order of things, and it had seemed right.” And I found that such a fascinating phrase, because we’re seeing this 9-year-old able to read the physical cues of class inequality right around her; ones that had previously been invisible or naturalized. We see Isaac go through the same kind of awakening, political awakening, in prison, when other prisoners who were Communist say accusations like, “To live well under the Shah means you had to shut your eyes and ears. You had to pretend the secret police didn’t exist.”
The concept of complicity is never named outright, but it’s a concept that comes up very frequently. So is that process of reevaluation something that you went through in your own writing at all, thinking about the ways in which that privileged class sat by during the period of the Shah, which then perhaps facilitated the excesses of the revolution?

Sofer: Yeah. I mean there is definitely the idea of guilt, you know; to what extent is any person guilty? For Shirin, things just are incomprehensible, so that’s why she just doesn’t understand that the order has shifted. For Isaac, though, he has to—he’s faced with death every day, because he’s hearing people being executed; and so he does have to reevaluate his own choices in life, and whether they were right. And to what extent is he guilty? Did the fact that he accumulated wealth and closed his eyes to what was happening politically, did that have anything to do with what ultimately happened? So yeah, everyone is evaluating their role in the outcome, because everybody does have a role.

Ahmad: The novel seems to remain very neutral. At the end, there’s an exchange where the couple goes out to their beach house and some other people have occupied it. And the man who’s taken it says, “You already have a house. Why do you need another one?” And I thought that sentence is so nicely able to be read in both directions. You can understand that response from the point of view of property rights; you can also understand that sentence from the point of view of equality. So you can really see Isaac’s reaction and Farnaz’s reaction of outrage, as well as the sense of entitlement to the house in the first place.

Sofer: Yes. Right. I mean that was only an example of injustice in terms of material, not human rights. But to just have your house taken away – there is outrage about that, you know. So all he can do is laugh about it, but with some violence in him. So yeah, you can read it both ways, and I think that was my intention.
Ahmad: And I think that’s true throughout the novel; we see little glimmers of even an interrogator’s point of view, a soldier’s point of view.

Sofer: Yeah, because the interrogators themselves have a story, and I’m not trying to make them, you know, saintly in any way, but it is a fact that many people were tortured under the SAVAK, and then they ended up working for the revolution. So there is a lot of gray in the whole spectrum.

Ahmad: I think you represent that perfectly. I was also interested—the author notes at the end recommend a book on the 1953 CIA overthrow of Mosaddegh, but that episode doesn’t come in any direct way into the novel itself. And I was wondering, do you feel that 1953 set the stage for 1979? If so, did you feel that it was important to keep that episode invisible and undiscussed in the novel, even if it informed your writing of it?

Sofer: Yeah. At first I was actually working on leaving it in, but then it was becoming too weighted in that time. But I do think it is important, because there was one man who really had democratic ideals, and he wanted to nationalize the oil companies; and ultimately he was overthrown by the CIA. Had that not occurred, Iran’s history may have been very different, because it would’ve worked itself toward a democracy—a real democracy as opposed to just putting the Shah in there. And the Shah was very much recognized as the—you know, they call him the puppet of the West. And that may be extreme, but in a way it was true, because he was giving kickbacks to the British and the Americans—the oil.

Ahmad: So in the version where you were incorporating that, were you feeling that it was becoming too didactic?

Sofer: Yeah, and one of the challenges of writing this was weaving in all the history and political aspects without giving history lessons. So it either had to come through dialogue or through memory or through somebody remembering an explosion or something, you know. But it does weigh the book down if you don’t weave it in.

Ahmad: Well, it’d have to be true to the characters’ experience.

Sofer: Yeah, it was becoming too much.

Ahmad: Also we didn’t know as many details about it until all the documents were declassified, which was only about ten years ago. So this really was true to the characters’ knowledge of the period.

Sofer: True, yeah.

Ahmad: Were there ways in which you felt that you had to educate your audience, or counter any stereotypes that they might’ve run into before? Was that something that you were conscious of as you were writing?

Sofer: Well, as I said before, it was to present a bit of the history, but more open—because you know people read the news and they read headlines. So it’s sort of opening up those current events—or not so current any more—and presenting how the historical seeps into the personal, so that you have ordinary lives in an extraordinary setting. That was my intent.

Ahmad: I think one of the things that was really successful—the ways in which these ordinary lives are so believable—was the complexity of the characters and the fact that you refused to romanticize anything, whether it was life before the revolution, or Parviz’s experience with a Hasidic family in New York, or even—as we saw in the first reading—the state of Isaac and Farnaz’s marriage before Isaac’s arrest. So there’s a way in which it had already been falling apart; they had already been a couple who was occupied by stuff and status. They have a fight where Isaac says that Farnaz can’t live without her stuff, and she replies that he can’t live without his status.

And yet they’re sympathetic characters—very sympathetic. I wonder if that’s a challenge you deliberately set for yourself, or was that just how the story told itself?

Sofer: It was how the story told itself, but I think I was also conscious of not making them too perfect—you know they’re the victims, and here are the bad guys. And they’re imperfect and they have problems. And the other thing is, often when these kinds of historical things happen people blame everything on what’s happening, so it’s like, “oh, well, our marriage is falling apart because of the revolution.” But that’s not the case—it’s just adding its own weight, but these two people had problems beforehand. And the fact that the family doesn’t communicate very well—you know all of these existed before. It’s just being exacerbated. So I was aware of trying to balance all of that; yeah.

Ahmad: I think one of the most telling quotes about Farnaz was her realization after Isaac comes back from prison that her husband would have the monopoly on grief, which is such a de-romanticized, believably repugnant thing to think. Were you ever worried that people wouldn’t like her?

Sofer: No, I never worried about that, because that doesn’t matter to me—as long as they can understand her or find her a complex character, I don’t really care if they like her or don’t like her. So that wasn’t a concern, but the idea of grief, you know there is this idea of space within a relationship, and how much one person can claim of it. And in this case, Isaac is claiming that area of the relationship, and she either has to accept or have a tug-of-war with him, emotionally. So she decides to let him have that space.

Ahmad: We talked a little bit about form already, and the decisions that you made in the structure of the story, but I’m also interested in the choice of fiction in particular. It’s a novel. It has to be a novel. It’s a novel about memory and about specific events. But there are so many references throughout to poetry as well—the ghazals of Hafez; you have Yeats, you have William Carlos Williams. Isaac is someone who had wanted to be a poet. And yet you felt that fiction was the right medium for conveying the story. Are there things that you felt a novel would do that other genres wouldn’t do? Have you been drawn to poetry in particular, or drama?

Sofer: Well, I think it’s just the form that I’m most comfortable with, though I really enjoy reading poetry. And poetry is such a part of Iranian culture. You have people reciting poems just out of the blue, and these are not necessarily very educated people—it’s just part of the culture. And so there is that scene in the prison where the poetry brings all the cellmates together after they’ve been arguing. So I think that kind of sets the background, because it is the background of that culture also.

Ahmad: Okay. So it’s not as much about what you wanted to do as a writer as much as the content of the life you’re conveying.

Sofer: Well, again, it’s that whole thing of form and subject matter sort of reflecting each other. I think, because I’m drawn to it as well, and it does reflect the culture, I chose to put it in.

Ahmad: How do you feel the medium of language impacts on them? Did you ever feel that English was an impediment to the process of reconstruction that we’ve been talking about?

Sofer: That’s an interesting question. I don’t know that it would be an impediment, but it is tricky to write a book in one language when it’s taking place in another language, or in another place, and most of the memories are in another language.

Ahmad: Sure.

Sofer: So I think the language also imposed itself. Even though it is in English, it’s formal, somewhat—at least the dialogue is, and that’s because a lot of the dialogue, I would hear it in Farsi, so Americanizing it wouldn’t work at all. So it may come off formal, but that’s again a reflection of that culture. So I think everything kind of imposes itself whether you want it or not, you know.

Ahmad: Right—they’ve gotta be structures that you can work with. I noticed even you have to make a choice of course about what to translate and what not to translate.  I had seen that words for relationships—whether it’s agha or khanoum—those are words that you felt couldn’t be translated, that you had to include in Farsi.

Sofer: Yeah. This initially just—

Ahmad: And baba.

Sofer: It’s because they recur, and you know it may be irritating for some readers to keep thinking, “What is that?”  But they are very common parts of speech there.

Ahmad: I noticed the translations of Hafez are all from Gertrude Lowthian Bell, a 19th century translator.

Sofer: Well, that also had to do—it was very hard to pick a translation because it is so tricky to translate Hafez because of the form, which is the ghazal, and also the meaning. So either you lose the form or you lose the meaning; it’s very hard to get both. So finally I settled on those, also because of copyright reasons, so it was also logistical.

Ahmad: Public domain, right.

Sofer: Yeah, it made it easier for me and my publisher.

Ahmad: But it’s a funny thing to have this kind of colonial legacy. She was a contemporary of Lawrence of Arabia, and she helped set out some of the borders that we’re still stuck with.

Sofer: True.

Ahmad: And if you don’t wanna pay copyright, that’s what you’re stuck with, right?

Sofer: Right.

Ahmad: As you know, the rubric of the series, which has also featured Salman Rushdie and Jonathan Safran Foer, is literature and terror. Obviously you can’t speak for your profession as a whole, but would you say there are ways in which a novelist might approach the topic of terror and terrorism as opposed to a historian or a political scientist?

Sofer: Well, I think what the novel can do, as I was saying before, is to open up the topic. So you hear of a fact or an event, but then the novel would help to portray how those facts are affecting real people, so you pick two or three or however many characters you want, and it humanizes it. And it becomes something that the reader hopefully can relate to no matter where they are, so even if they’re not personally exposed to the event, they can relate to the character on some level.

Ahmad: I’d love to have you read the section with Shirin and the photographs.

Sofer: Okay. This is a chapter where Isaac has been in jail for some time, and Farnaz is trying to destroy anything that she thinks might be viewed as evidence against him, because revolutionary guards would—once someone had been imprisoned, they would come and just search the house and collect evidence. So evidence can be anything from Western literature to a photograph of the Shah to anything that mundane. And so here Shirin hears her mother ripping her father’s documents:

She sits next to her mother and rips. They tear up account balances, names and telephone numbers of her father’s friends, holiday greeting cards, and photograph—mostly of people she doesn’t recognize or recognizes only after looking at them for a long time. Baba-Hakim was young once, she thinks, even handsome. And Uncle Javad was a skinny boy with messy hair. One photograph, of a young woman—not her mother—in a see-through white dress, taken from the back, makes her stop. The woman is climbing a dune by a beach, a fierce wind whisking her dress and clinging it to her legs. Her hair is wrapped in a sheer scarf tied behind her neck, and she’s holding it in place with her left hand, while her right hand swings in midair like a dancer’s. She likes that the photograph was taken from the back, that at the moment the shutter snapped, the woman had no idea that she was being captured by a curious eye, probably male, probably her father’s. And she is stunned suddenly, to think that this man whom she knows as her father, who wears suits and goes to work and reads the paper, has lived for such a long time before her, has seen so many things she will never see, has known—maybe even loved—so many people she will never know.

There are other photographs, of her parents in the South of France; Keyvan and Shahla sunning by their pool; and her parent’s friends Kourosh and Homa, on a ski slope, somewhere. Kourosh, she knows, was killed in prison. What she remember of him is the nickname “Aghaye Siyasat—Mr. Politics.” He would begin any conversation with “did you hear of so and so’s election?” or “What did you think of such and such assassination?”—things she did not understand but which prompted discussions that continued well into the night, long after she had gone to bed, when she would like in her dark bedroom and listen to the adults’ voices, punctuated by the clink of ice cubes in whiskey glasses. The night she heard of Kourosh’s death was the first time she heard her father cry. Lying in her bed behind the closed door she heard the sobbing, which at first she could not believe could come from her father, and then his voice, “They killed Kourosh, they killed Kourosh. I can’t believe it.” Of Kourosh’s wife, Homa, she remembers a white mink coat, and that round, perfect mole above her lip. Homa, she knows, had died in a fire. Everyone knows about the fire.

A photograph of herself on the ice-skating rink makes her stop. Where would she begin ripping, in the middle—first tearing it in half and then into pieces, a lock of hair here, a squinting eye there? She leans back and examines the room: the open drawers, the overflowing desk, heaps of paper on the floor. Has her mother gone mad? What will her father think if he returns home and finds his life torn up?

“Are you sure we should do this?” she says.

Her mother drops a paper on the desk. She reaches for a cigarette and brings it to her mouth. “No, I’m not sure,” she says.

I’ll stop there. Or shall I go on?

Ahmad: Maybe just the last paragraph; I thought that was beautiful.

Sofer: The last paragraph?

“I’m not sure what’s right anymore, Shirin-jan,” Farzan says as she exhales, looking out the window and quietly crying. Shirin notices that her mother is still in her pajamas. The polish on her toenails has chipped. Why had she questioned her mother’s judgment, like that? She takes that photograph of herself and rips.

Ahmad: This is what I thought the novel did so effectively—putting back together what was torn apart by history. I think at this point we could open to questions from the audience.
Question 1: I really appreciate the way that you tried to show the story in a human way, even though Iran is such a politicized country here. And it reminds me of a conversation I had with a Palestinian friend about The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, which I adored and he found very problematic, because what he thought was that it was justifying the American engagement in Afghanistan by making Afghanistan look terrible under the Taliban. So I’m wondering if you thought about that at all and if that influenced your writing, because I know there is a temptation to try to be didactic when you’re jumping into something which is already so distorted in the American mind. But at the same time, as an artist you don’t want to be didactic. So I guess what I’m trying to say is did you think about American stereotypes about Iran and stereotypes about Islam and the political possibility of interfering in Iran, and whether this novel would contribute to any of that?

Sofer: No, I have to say that while I was writing I really didn’t think of such things. I tried to portray it as I saw it and as I felt it, and hopefully that’s why there’s a human aspect to it on all sides. So no, I never saw it as a document for one side or the other – although some people interpret it that way, or people can read it any way they like. But that was never my intention.

Ahmad: I had the same question, and I wonder—I think that’s something that has to go through a lot of people’s minds if they’re in a public or representative function. But I think what gets the book off the hook is the fact that it’s so historically grounded, and it’s not setting up this kind of eternal Iran—“it’s always this way.” You know, this place in need of rescue from the West. Whereas this is really a novel about the years just after the revolution, right? It seems to me so much about 1980-1981.

Sofer: Yes. It really takes place over that one year, and I think what weaving in the historical aspects was to show, you know, Iran has had a long history, and it’s gone through many ups and downs. So it’s not necessarily crying for rescue at this point.

Question 2: You said at the beginning that the novel was semi-autobiographical. Could you just elaborate a little bit more on maybe your family or what aspects?

Sofer: Sure, just briefly. I was born in Iran. I did live through the revolution, and my father was imprisoned, but his experiences were very different from my character’s experiences. But the genesis was there, and we did ultimately run away through Turkey, so those events were autobiographical. And from there, I took those and created new characters and fictionalized it, but that part is true.

Question 3: Earlier you were talking about the problems that you had with translation, translating from what you understood it in Farsi to English. I’m wondering why you didn’t write the novel in Farsi because I figure that language is relevant to the Iranian diaspora, and there’s so many people now that have escaped the country and are living that experience. Why not write it in Farsi so that it can be accessible to that audience instead of working to translate it to a Western audience?

Sofer: Simply my Farsi is very bad, I think. I can’t write in Farsi. I think in different languages, and it’s all very mixed for me. But I wasn’t in a position to write it in Farsi at all just in terms of skill.

Question 4: Who was your intended audience? Did you have a particular idea of who would benefit from the novel?

Sofer: No, I really didn’t have a target—no. When I was writing this I was writing very much in a vacuum, and it was—chronologically you can’t say that it felt urgent, because it took me seven years to write it. But the feeling was very urgent, and I wasn’t thinking of the aftermath. It was just something I really felt I needed to do, so I wasn’t thinking. I was hoping that—you always have an anonymous reader somewhere, and I was writing to that reader, whoever that may be. It wasn’t a specific person.

Ahmad: Were you worried at all about your father’s reaction to it?

Sofer: A little bit, yeah. I didn’t show it to him or anyone else in the family just because I wanted to keep it apart, but yeah, I did worry how it would feel for him to read—again, even though it’s different. Some of it did stem from his experiences, but I didn’t let that alter—

Ahmad: But he wasn’t the reader that you were picturing.

Sofer: No. Maybe in some parts. Or at least he was the voice in my head, or I was sort of carrying him.

Ahmad: Amy Tan has a beautiful essay about negotiating with different Englishes that she uses—it’s called “Mother Tongue”—where she talks about how in order to come to the language that she wanted, she pictured her mother reading it, and I guess I was wondering—it almost feels like a gift to him.

Sofer: In some ways, I think it was. I was never sure exactly what it was; it was always very complicated. But I think in some ways, it was, yeah.

Question 5: I’ve come across descriptions of your book where the autobiographical aspects are emphasized. I’m wondering if you prefer that emphasis on biography or whether the question might possibly take away from the creative value of the book?

Sofer: Yeah, I think definitely the latter is true for me, but somehow there is a fascination with truth, and people really wanna know what part is true. What really happened—what didn’t happen? And I was even at one event where the person that was introducing me really wanted to know, and finally I said, “I’m sorry, it’s all mixed. I can’t point out what’s true, but it’s mostly fictional.” And finally she got really annoyed, and she said, “Well, that’s very disappointing.” She really wanted it to be true. “I’m sorry I’m here now,” you know. So yeah, I don’t know what that’s about, but.

Ahmad: I think that’s something that happens with writers of color in particular. You’re asked, you’re demanded to take on this representative function. You guys are asking such good questions.

Question 6: It’s a comment, not a question.

Ahmad: Okay, that’s cool.

Question 6: I wanted to applaud you more than anything for being the voice of a population that is so rarely represented. Just recently in The New York Times there were a couple of op-ed pieces about Iranian Jews, and we are truly a population that is not spoken of or represented. Not positively or negatively—just not represented. So I applaud you for becoming such a prominent figure in the literary world. It’s so important, I’m so grateful.

Ahmad: I think that’s very nice comment.

Sofer: That is nice, thank you. But again, that comes with a kind of weight attached, because I don’t want to be the representative of any group, though I’m grateful that the result has been this. Yeah, again, it’s complicated.

Question 6: My issue is that because we are living in diaspora, it’s becoming more and more removed from the life that we had as Jews in Iran. Now we’re just Jews like anyone in LA or New York or Great Neck, wherever we are. There’s a few writers who represent us. Maybe your story is different from mine, but at least it’s a story that is being told. Whereas I’d rather have at least you tell it than frankly somebody who doesn’t know anything about it.

Sofer: Well, thank you.

Ahmad: As I’m sure you know, there are several books that fall into the category of Iran escape novels. I’m thinking about Not Without My Daughter, Reading Lolita in Tehran. I wouldn’t put your book in that category by any means, for many, many reasons, one of which is the love that Isaac and Farnaz have for Iran and the complicated flavor of their departure, which is in utter contrast to the pure and total relief in something like Not Without My Daughter, which was this horrible Sally Field movie from the 1980s. Have you read or seen any of those? Did you have them bouncing around in your head at all, or were you able to just write free and clear without those kinds of negative models?

Sofer: Well, I’ve seen Not Without My Daughter, unfortunately, and I tried to veer away from that as much as possible. Reading Lolita in Tehran, I actually hadn’t read it until I finished writing, and afterward I did, and that’s a memoir, and it’s quite a different thing from what this is. But she makes a lot of insightful points, the major one being the idea of one person confiscating the life of another. She says this regarding the novel Lolita, but also in reference to the government of Iran sort of confiscating the lives of its population—especially the women. So that’s a good book, but a very different book, I think.

Question 7: Do you have any opinion as to why there are so few male Iranian authors who are published in the United States as opposed to female?

Sofer: Yeah. I don’t know. I’ve been asked that before, and I’m really not sure. It may be because women now feel more freedom to speak, or because they were silenced for so long; now there’s a new generation of women that are writing. I don’t know exactly why. I know there may be more in Europe than there are here, and I need to investigate further. I don’t know why.

Question 10: When is your next book coming out?

Sofer: Many years from now. I’m working on it, yeah.

Question 10: Similar style?

Sofer: No—very different. Yeah—I’m trying something else.

Ahmad: Thank you all so much for coming.

Sofer: Thank you.

Randall Balmer: Well, John, always a pleasure. I guess my first question is, how do you do it? How do you do everything you do and have done–you know, winning the Pulitzer Prize at the age of six and things of that sort?

Jon Meacham: That’s very kind. I am incredibly lucky, incredibly fortunate. Thank you, professor. I am really about 72. I’m just sort of trapped in this body.

Balmer: And I have to ask about the Treaty of Tripoli.

Meacham: I love the Treaty of Tripoli.

Balmer: How did you come across it?

Meacham: Article 11, I think it was. Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli was that a government of the United States is in no sense founded upon the Christian religion and so therefore shall have no freestanding claim of controversy against nations which do not, Muslim nations.

Balmer: Or Mussulman as they call it.

Meacham: Mussulman, that’s right. Later we’ll do a more dramatic reading of this treaty if you all want to stick around.

Balmer: How did you discover this? I’ve read in this field for years and the Treaty of Tripoli has never come up.

Meacham: Really? I broke the Treaty of Tripoli news for you?

Balmer: I think you did.

Meacham: I’m gonna tell my kids to comp that. Just running through the church/state stuff. I don’t remember exactly where but it was funny. It was 1797 so it was right after Washington had left and Adams had become president, and it was negotiated by a man named Joel Barlow. I’ve always loved this description of him: everyone describes him as a “poet diplomat.” I aspire to be a “poet diplomat.”

He was a great friend of Tom Paine’s and had written this into this Barbary pirate war treaty, and it had been left out of some published versions so therefore some more conservative folks have said, ”Oh, well you can’t”—that it wasn’t real. It was read out loud to the senate. It was published. It was voted on that way. And it was a clear statement of the secular nature of the federal establishment early on.

And we forget sometimes—if I can maybe anticipate something. I would argue that one of the most wondrous things about the American founding is the devotion to liberty of conscience. The right to believe or not believe.

Now it’s part of the air we breathe so we don’t acknowledge what remains a great victory because it should be part of the air we breathe. But in the context of the time, when kings were seen as ordained of God and divine right, the idea that this group of quite, I think, religious folks were able to find this balance between grounding human rights and the divine (“endowed by their creator” and “the laws of nature and of nature’s God”), which made those rights inviolate and put them beyond the reach of either the hands of the king or the hands of the mob, while creating secular government, is arguably one of the greatest achievements in human history.

Balmer: Utterly unprecedented.

Meacham: Yeah, yeah.

Balmer: Picking up on that, I want to talk about your essay, “The End of Christian America.”

Meacham: Get in line.

Balmer: Just to refresh folks’ memory on this, the peg was the survey that showed a decline in the percentage of Americans who call themselves Christian from 86 to 76 percent since 1990. You point out, thank you, that there are twice as many atheists as there Episcopalians in America.

You talked about Americans describing themselves as spiritual rather than religious, and then I want to read a couple of excerpts here. “I think this is a good thing—good for our political culture, which, as the American Founders saw, is complex and charged enough without attempting to compel or coerce religious belief or observance. It is good for Christianity, too, in that many Christians are rediscovering the virtues of a separation of church and state that protects what Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island as a haven for religious dissenters, called ‘the garden of the church’ from ‘the wilderness of the world.’”

When I usually talk about this I often emphasize that Puritans did not have romantic views about wilderness. He wanted to protect the garden of the church from the wilderness of the world.

You go on later, “The decline and fall of the modern religious right’s notion of a Christian America creates a calmer political environment and for many believers may help open the way for a more theologically serious religious life. The American culture of religious liberty helped create a busy free market of faith. By disestablishing churches, the nation made religion more popular, not less.”

And finally, “The American public life is neither wholly secular nor wholly religious but an ever-fluid mix of the two. History suggests that trouble tends to come when one of these forces grows too powerful in proportion to the other.” And I’m not sure what my question is other than to have you comment further on that.

Meacham: I agree with everything you just read.

Balmer: You agree with everything. Yes. Okay. But this article created quite a stir and a lot of negative attention as well as, I’m sure, positive.

Meacham: Right. But no, the positive I’m still waiting on. It produced my favorite headline ever which I have on my office wall that says, “Christian Media Calls for Meacham Firing.” So that was a good one.

It did because people thought I was saying that Christianity was dead. Which, no—if you would read the thing you would see what I was saying. I think the attempt to create an enduring religious right in the political life of the nation that is decisive, a decisive force, is over. Is over for now. It’ll come back obviously because everything does. But in the way of our country, in the way of the Madisonian construct, we’ve had this battle. We’ve had this argument.

And I believe we are a center-right nation. The other side gets mad at me for that. Culturally I think that our tendency is to be conservative. And so it makes it all the more remarkable in many ways that an explicitly religious political force has found itself spent after 30 years. And I believe very firmly that if one is a Christian—we’re talking a lot about Christianity here because that’s the predominant force in these terms—if you believe all this stuff you believe, you’ve pledged to things that would make these folks just go crazy. If you believe that it is quite possible that the Son of Man is gonna come descending upon clouds of glory possibly one day when you’re crossing Broadway, doesn’t that put everything else into context? To some extent.

I mean, we say the Lord’s Prayer. I say the Lord’s Prayer every day with my children, but it’s quite apocalyptic when you actually pull the thing apart. “Thy kingdom come.” That’s a prayer, in terms of the kingdom theology of 1st century Judaism, for the apocalypse. Or for a Davidic Son of Man military figure to emerge, carry on a battle that would be both against ghosts and spirits and on earth in order to bring about a general resurrection of the dead and an upturning of everything we know. Good night, sweetheart!

You know? There’s great contrasts in this and so I take it very seriously. I think that to some extent we have domesticated religion in this country, and it’s not about prayer breakfasts. I’m not being unkind. I’m not being harsh about this, but religious faith in all the great world religions, with possibly some exceptions of ones that began in the East, are difficult and contradictory and about the final, final things.

And we have been lucky, as Karen Armstrong and others have argued, to have distilled a message of care and concern for one another from those traditions, but you can’t separate them. You have to at least intellectually engage with the fact that religious faith often calls on followers to do reprehensible things. If you take it literally.

And that’s why most people, it seems to me, most sensible religious believers don’t take it all literally. You read Leviticus in context. You read Revelation in context. You read the Gospels in context. These were documents that were not FedEx’d down from heaven. They were written in a time and a place by men and women, followers who had particular concerns and particular passions and particular insights at that given moment.

And so to therefore take something written in haste during a great captivity or during a great time of crisis in the life of a small community and say, “Therefore here we are in the 21st century and we’re gonna do exactly this,” doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

Balmer: Let me invite folks to come up and to ask their own questions, and as you’re doing that I’ll lob one final topic question in your direction. What is your take on the Vatican’s overture to Anglicans and Episcopalians?

Meacham: Don’t they have enough problems? [Laughter] Without having all of us over there? I thought it was interesting. I almost admired the Vatican’s basically saying, “Look, you’re essentially Catholics so just come on over. And we’ll let you keep your costumes and your stage sets.”

Balmer: Yeah.

Meacham: That’s what it was. You can keep your costumes and you can keep your stage sets and—

Balmer: And your wives.

Meacham: And your wives. Yeah. Depending on the day that’s a good or bad thing for me. My wife would say the same. Only the other way.

I think it’s most harmful, frankly, potentially harmful, not in the United States or in England even but in the developing world where moderate Christianity has a hard enough time. And if you’re a Christian denomination trying to take your place in the world against forces of potential extremism in another faith, to be invited to join an even harder-line group seems to me unfortunate.

Balmer: Open it to the floor. There are microphones up here please.

Audience Member 1: Hi. I have a question about the future of print media. You touched on this a little earlier, but isn’t there the feeling that print media can be compared to the Titanic because it’s doomed? So do you agree? Do you agree with that kind of logic?

Meacham: I haven’t seen that at all. I’ll give you my opinion. For what is it worth. We are not doomed. We face a challenge that requires us to rethink how we do things, how we gather news, how we present it. How we gather it and how we get it to folks.

And we also have to redefine to some extent what we mean by news. News is largely a commodity. If you’re in a community, if you’re in the broad community of people who are likely to be most engaged you’re probably gonna know the headlines through the day. And at night you’ll catch up with them all at once very quickly.

So where does that leave a magazine? My friends in the newspaper business can speak for themselves. They have plenty of things to worry about too. I sometimes turn the phrase “news magazine,” which is a term coined in the 1920s by the co-founder of Time, Briton Hadden, into thinking that we do best in my shop when we think of ourselves not as a news magazine but as a magazine about the news. About things that are going on and that we are adding whether it’s our perspective or facts or a narrative that you did not know.

Simply taking note of things and figuring that our presentation is marginally better than someone else’s will not surprise you, engage you. Horace said the function of poetry is to delight and instruct. And at our best we can entertain and instruct. I think that, Lord knows, people make mistakes. We will always because we’re human. We’ll always be vulnerable to that.

But I think people will always need a place to go to or have something come to them on a device of some kind that will offer them ways to think about the world and things they care about that they might not have thought of.

Audience Member 1: And does it involve doing away with print?

Meacham: Oh, physically?

Audience Member 1: Yeah.

Meacham: I don’t know. The cool thing to say is, “No.” But I’m not very cool, as you can see. So it’s hard for me to imagine that the world Gutenberg gave us goes away in my lifetime. I think I’ll still be reading things on paper.

Will my children, who are all under the age of seven? They will because I’m gonna give ‘em everything I’ve got that hasn’t been thrown away. I will inflict many, many books on them. My wife’s convinced because I’m a high church historian all of my children are gonna become atheist fortune tellers out of a pure reaction.

But the question you ask is hugely important because in terms of digital technology, and forgive my possibly overly facile analogy here, one way of looking at digital delivery of the printed word is that we are kind of where a Sony cassette/Walkman was. You may not remember that in here but that’s okay. Professor Balmer will explain.

There was this thing called a Victrola. There will be I think an interim step which would be a CD Walkman. And then it seems to me there’s gonna be an iPod and I don’t know whether it’s just gonna be like a Kindle or like the Tablet coming from Apple, HP has one, Sony has one.

So the question is, and this goes to your print question: will the magazine genre—that is having an editor, a designer, putting together pictures, words, graphics, using typography to make some kind of intellectual or editorial point, which is what a magazine is—will that genre survive? Is it translatable? Is it deliverable, producible in an electronic way?

We may be living in a world where very soon there’s electronic paper and, yes, Newsweek is beamed to you. You look at the page and you push it and it comes and goes. The idea that we would have been expecting we’d be so comfortable with iPods, etc., even five years ago, ten years ago, certainly was fanciful.

If we’ve learned anything in the information revolution starting in the late 1980s going forward, it’s that nothing should ever be dismissed as fanciful. The Jetsons were right.

Audience Member 2: I was wondering, how many books have you written? Which one is your favorite? And I’ll ask the second question to save time. Do you have any World Series predictions?

Meacham: I know. It’s 27 minutes until the first pitch. Not that I’m watching the clock. We have a bet in the office, actually. The editor of the front of the book says the Yankees in six. The man I think is probably right says the Phillies in seven. You know, baseball’s interesting. Baseball has changed. But then it hasn’t, you know? So in all these questions it’s important to look around and see there are institutions that can adapt and change and still be very much a part of the fabric of the nation.

Favorite book. No, I don’t and I refer us to one of the great Lyndon Johnson stories, when he visited Vietnam I think in ‘65, maybe ‘66. He was on an airstrip and he was turning to walk to an airfield helicopter and thought that this was his, and he got in and the aide said, “Mr. President, that’s not your helicopter.” And Johnson said, “Son, they’re all my helicopters.” [Laughter]

They’re all my books so I love them. Very lucky. Thank you.

Audience Member 3: In my academic work on religion a dilemma that I kept having was whether the best way to approach something that had to do with religion was seeing it as being about religion, per se, or seeing through the lens of something else such as economics. And even formed by some knowledge about other religions and that sort of thing.

When I see these questions now about journalists and I see the firing of religion reporters, I wonder whether a dedicated religion beat really is the best way, or whether the way is to have reporters on other desks at other beats more informed about religion. And I just wonder how you think about that topic. In some ways I think that the religion desk is kind of best suited to following the picnics.

Meacham: Yeah, yeah.

Audience Member 3: Because they’re not following economics and politics and all the things that are enmeshed, what makes religion more explosive.

Meacham: Right. I think that is a great question. I’ll get in trouble with this but why not. To me to think of religion as an academic question through some other lens—religion as a sociological portal—is a little like political science which is sort of history without the fun. [Laughter] Let’s take all the characters out and all the cool stuff and make it a science—there are other analogies I could use, like the old movies and you go through cutting the interesting parts.

But anyway I think you’re exactly right about the desk. I’m sorry I didn’t answer earlier, but this goes to the point of a liberal education. The journalists who are gonna survive, thrive, and do very well in this era are a lot like the journalists who have survived and thrived and did well in others, which are people who are able to think holistically about something and not simply through a narrow lens.

If you’re a business reporter now the best business reporters are great biographers with a great eye for human drama who understand the politics of something. They don’t just understand the numbers. That’s a critical part of it, but the great people we read are people who are able to take a view that a humanist would have taken four or five, six centuries ago.

And so a liberal education I think is the best way to do that. I would think that—that’s what I had, so take that into account. I think you put your finger on it. If you’re gonna write about politics you have to understand that economics, religion, geography, partisanship, someone’s health, someone’s spouse, someone’s family are all relevant.

Now this is a man who writes biographies talking, so I would say that. But if you think about the books you’ve read and remember and the pieces you’ve read and remember where there was a clear authorial voice that came through, I bet you those folks were, if not literally then figuratively, “liberal arts reporters.”

Audience Member 4: I have a question about the discourse in the United States around Islam which seems to me to be going in a direction that is not conducive to pursuing good relations at a time when they are particularly important. Just to give you an example of what I am talking about, at a town hall during McCain’s 2008 campaign in response to a comment about Obama being an Arab, the response that was given was, “No, he’s not. He’s a good man.”

And the implication there to me is that the two are mutually exclusive. And what struck me was that the focus in the media and in general was on the question rather than the response. I’ve heard similar things from other politicians as well and I was wondering what are your thoughts are, and how the media can contribute to a discourse that is more conducive to fostering better relations with Islam.

Meacham: That’s a great question. I don’t remember the incident. I remember vaguely. I will say this for Senator McCain. I don’t know if you’ve ever been out on the presidential campaign trail. It’s madness. And we should basically get to the end of the campaign and then take people who didn’t run because they’re better rested and they’re saner.

John McCain was standing there. He had some person say something that as he heard it I’m sure it was something along the lines of the birthers or the terrorist accusations. Remember that terrible look on McCain’s face when he heard “terrorist” late in the campaign? So I wouldn’t parse—and I know McCain. He doesn’t think that.

There are two great questions of our time. Right? One is, will China just come and take everything? That’s one. The rise of China and whether it will have traditional nation-state ambitions that will affect the balance of power.

And the other is a tangle of issues that are related but not causal involving a part of the world in which extremism from a very few, by a very few, and their quite violent ambitions have defined now a decade-long struggle. It is in a way shocking to me when I think back and I think how little we knew about Islam at all on the 12th of September in 2001.

And that just goes to your point—that that context would lead us, that we would have to learn about it in a context of an unimaginable terrorist act. And so I might argue that what’s remarkable is that it hasn’t been worse, which is not the premise of your question. But I remember us being so ready when we did stories on it for the wave of hate crimes and terrible things, and there were some, and it was horrible. But I think by and large the country—America and I think the press—has done a better job than not in dealing with those kinds of concerns.

But the harsh view of that would be to denounce all of Iran. Terrible regime, terrible country, what are we gonna do about it. But it’s a really complicated country, as we all saw in the aftermath of the elections. So the Islamic world is a lot like our own world domestically, geographically here in that it’s really complicated.

And I think the more we can do to foster a climate in which complexity is acknowledged and understood then the fewer birther nuts and “palling around with terrorists”—is that Palin’s line? God Almighty, you know, it’s embarrassing.

And I think the broad reaction to Governor Palin goes to these points as I understand them. I mean she’s about to hit us with a book tour.

Balmer: Right. And how will you cover that?

Meacham: We’re thinking about getting Levi to go blog it. [Laughter]

Balmer: And with an eye on the first pitch at 7:57, perhaps we’ll take this as the last question.

Meacham: Thank you.

Audience Member 5: I just was gonna say that I liked American Lion a lot. I spent a lot of time on beaches reading it. But when you talk about complexities—

Meacham: Maybe the youngest reader of that book.

Audience Member 5: I don’t think I am. My question this time is about complexities. America is a complex issue especially when it comes to religion. My question is on religion in America. I studied religion as an undergrad and it seems to me that the faithful are becoming more faithful and the faithless are becoming more faithless. We see these really feeling religions like Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism, and in some sense Catholicism, growing, and at the same time you get books like The End of Faith topping the New York Times bestseller list. And I was wondering how you would characterize modern religious life in America. Do you agree or am I totally off base?

Meacham: No. You’re not totally off base at all. You’re not even vaguely off base. I think that the faithless being more faithless and the faithful being more faithful—you could probably argue that with integrity. There are a number of unaffiliated people in that survey we talked about that want to be spiritual without being religious and all that. My bet is that the people who are buying Christopher’s book or Sam’s probably know what they think going in. Sam Harris is a friend and I’ve said this to him so I don’t mind saying it publicly. His first book is really formidable. It’s an intellectual argument about the kind of extremisms that led to September 11 and beyond. The second book is one that basically calls me an idiot on the first page and then wants me to give him $17.00 so he can do it for 80 more pages. Saying that anyone who is religious is hopelessly stupid, superstitious. It’s a polemic, it’s not an argument.

And so I don’t think a lot of mega-church followers are thinking, you know, I’m having some doubts about the Trinity. I think I’ll go read Sam Harris and see if I can work this out. Maybe there are but I don’t know. I doubt it.

You bring out something I hadn’t thought of in this way. I wonder if the rise in unaffiliated—which is a 10 or 11 percent spike—is in reaction to this. Where if you’re in the pews, if you’re in these communities, you are becoming ever more devout, which is a testament to Father Balmer and his fellow clergy. And the other is a reaction to that. And then on the other side they feel uncomfortable with the heat of the rhetoric of the atheists. We did a piece on Dawkins the other week. Dinesh D’Souza has a book out on the scientific evidence of the afterlife. It’s not even a one-liner. [Laughter] It is the case. So I think that might drive a small group.

But I’d argue, in closing, that one of the frustrations—and this is taking off my journalist hat and talking as me—I think one of the frustrations for people who come from the kind of religious heritage that Randy and I do is we just feel as though we are so eminently reasonable, and why can’t anyone else see it? And maybe they do and they think, “Oh, we don’t know if…”

I live in my personal life in a great tension between intellectual conclusions that make me think that a way I spend a great deal of my time is hopelessly superstitious. I have made the decision culturally that this is the faith of my fathers and it leads me to do better things than I would otherwise. If it led me to do worse things I would reevaluate.

I am more generous because of it. Maybe it’s a low bar . And we don’t understand—I don’t want to speak for you. Episcopalians don’t understand and Unitarians don’t understand and Methodists don’t understand—why don’t more people who we know are like this, why don’t they come to the party? There’s an enduring mystery and one that mainline Protestantism—or what did Father Neuhaus used to call it? “Dead line”—something-dying Protestantism—”oldline.” We stand in this kind of mushy middle and that’s a tough marketing message. Come, doubt with us. [Laughter] But it’s where reality is for me anyway. And I think for a lot of people.

Balmer: Please join me in thanking Jon Meacham.

Below is the transcript of a public conversation Traub held with Jack Snyder, Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations at Columbia University, on October 6, 2009, in an event co-sponsored by the Columbia Journalism School, the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration and Religion, and the IRCPL.

Jack Snyder: I’m really looking forward to this conversation, in part because we do have so many interests in common, in part because you’ve written, and are still writing, on many of the most important issues facing the republic today. And what’s especially compelling about your writing is that you are digging underneath the surface of the news to give us the kind of depth, background, that we need to really understand. I want to start with something that’s very timely, but that also addresses timeless questions of foreign policy.  That is the piece that you just published on the Afghan troop reinforcement question, where you mentioned that President Obama has been going around saying that he’s been enjoying reading the works of Reinhold Niebuhr, the theologian who underpins a lot of the thinking of the so-called realist school of American foreign policy.

So the question that I want to ask about that is in the debate over Afghan troop reinforcement, who is the realist?  Is it General McChrystal, who wants more troops in order to do counter-insurgency in an effective, realistic, pragmatic way, or is the realist Joe Biden, who you’ve spent some time with and probably know his views quite well. Joe Biden wants to scale down the troop presence of the US in Afghanistan, not contest every inch of space that’s controlled by the Taliban, but rather focus on the parts of the country that we can effectively establish control over.  Who’s the realist there?

James Traub: Well, that’s a very good question, and first I just want to thank Mark for having invited me here and for that very gracious and generous introduction.  And also thank Jack, who I only now realize is the co-author of a very important book on the question of democracy, which I think Mark mentioned, and which I also refer to in my book, and probably says something Jack and I can argue about.  So, the realist: Now, the funny thing about these words that we use to describe foreign policy positions is it was a lot easier back in the ‘60s when you could say you were a hawk or a dove, right?  Hawks meant you kind-of feel okay about the use of force and you like war, or so doves thought, and doves meant you believed in peace and getting along with people and so forth.  And people kind-of knew what they were.  Now, these terms don’t mean very much anymore, and we haven’t really coined new ones.  And it’s interesting that the old ones, that pre-date hawk and dove turned out to be quite useful: “realist,” and some other thing, which we tend to use the word “idealist” for.  Well, everybody wants to be a realist, of course, and everybody wants to be an idealist, which is why during the debates I noticed that whenever McCain or Obama were asked, “Are you a realist or are you an idealist?” they would say, “Well, both, of course.  A proper policy has to be realistic and has to also advance our ideals.”

The word “realist,” though, has a narrower and more specific meaning in the world of international relations.  It’s actually a useful word, that way.  The realists, originally, were this set of post-war figures: Niebuhr is one; George Kennan is the one I mention most in this article that Jack referred to; Hans Morgenthau, the famous international relations theorist.  And their underlying principle was that states were actuated by rational, realistic calculations, and, yes, of course statesmen had beliefs and ideologies and so forth, but actually they turned out mostly to be means whereby they would advance the state’s realistic interests. And so foreign policy had a lot to do with managing the inevitably clashing national self-interests of states, and that tended to move you away from thinking, “We’re right and they’re wrong; we’re good and they’re evil; we have a historic destiny, a manifest destiny; we have to make the world safe for democracy…”  That all seemed rather vain to the realists, who said, “No, we live in a world where people have interests; their interests are inevitably going to conflict with ours; we do the best we can to manage those interests; we have to acknowledge them; we have to study very carefully to understand what the nature of those interests are.”  And so realism has always been a council of restraint, of modesty, of prudent management, a council against adventures, against recklessness and so forth.

It’s interesting that Obama—one of the reasons, one of the many things that makes him so interesting—and I suspect, one of the reasons he’s really divided over this Afghanistan question—is that he is something of a host body for both this chastened realist sense, which in his case is very much connected to his upbringing being on the receiving end of American power, that great designs go wrong, that great designs of men cannot be trusted, and that one should always have a cautionary sense in the face of one’s own ideals.  And he has said, the one time I interviewed him, back in the late summer of 2007, that the figures he admired the most were those around George Bush 41, meaning James Baker, Brett Scowcroft, the realists, the managerial types, and he’s, I think, skeptical of people whom he deems romantic.  So there’s that side of him.  And, in fact, his objection to the war in Iraq, when he first spoke out against it in 2002, was not, “we have no right to be doing that; we have no right to be overthrowing Saddam Hussein.”  No, it was, “it’s not going to work out the way these guys think it’s going to work out.”  If what they thought would happen would happen, he’d be in favor of it, but he said, “It’s a messy part of the world, and these fantasies we have about marching in and having people throw flowers at our feet are just ridiculous.”  Obviously, his sense of the world was mighty accurate, in that regard.

So there’s that.  But he also, clearly—the thing that draws people to him so much—is that he has this transformational sense.  He has this very immodest sense of himself (though I don’t know that it makes him personally arrogant), but of himself as a kind of “agent” of transformation.  He’ll always say, “It’s not about me, it’s about you,” but it’s about him as the means whereby transformative things happen.  So he does have this vision of America as having a great and historic and special role in the world, but he is also very, very aware, has this Niebuhrian sense of man’s fallenness.  And so that’s a very roundabout way of not answering the really difficult question that you just posed to me, but I guess if I’m now going to give an actual answer to the actual question that you asked me, I would say that the more people have examined it and the more I’ve thought about it, the more unlikely the McChrystal vision has come to seem.  That’s not to say that I think we shouldn’t do that—I’m frankly really torn about this whole thing.  I really don’t know which side I come down on, and the article allowed me to have a kind of cop-out ending. But, the idea that the unrealistic thing is not that we can bring greater security to Afghanistan with the 40,000 more troops—we can.  But the underlying premise of that is that while we are doing that we are engaged in this state building activity so that, after a not-too-long period of time, we can turn it over to them.  Well, there’s not a lot of great history to prove that that is a likely venture in general, and you couldn’t easily choose a more implausible subject to play out this experiment on than Afghanistan.  So I would say, in that sense, the burden is on McChrystal, and his like-minded ones, to show, not so much that the security part, but that the civilian state-building part, which is indispensible to his vision, is in fact as attainable as he seems to feel it is.

Snyder: So, you talked about the “can we do it?” question.  Say a little bit about what our objective is.  As I understand it, there are two objectives that get talked about.  One is to prevent safe havens for Al Qaeda or any other international terrorist that would come attack us using Afghanistan as a base.  Critics of that objective point out that there are plenty of anarchic places around the world—Somalia, Sudan, for that matter, Pakistan—that offer potential safe havens for terrorists.  What’s so special about Afghanistan? And then, the other objective that people talk about is the consequences of Taliban success in Afghanistan for destabilizing Pakistan, and there the precise argument for me gets a little hazy.  Even if we succeed in counterinsurgency in parts of Afghanistan, what does that imply for the stability of Pakistan?  So, I’m asking for your own views if you want to give them, but I’m also asking if you can help clarify how these debates are understood by people at the heart of the decision making who you’ve talked to.

Traub: Yeah, I think one of the slightly bewildering aspects of this is that when Obama came into office, or actually after he was elected during the transition, his top national security people sat down with Douglas Lute, who was the guy who had been entrusted with Afghanistan by the end of the Bush administration, and they said, “Okay, what’s our policy?”  Apparently, according to them, he kind-of said, “Everything, nothing…” you know, it really wasn’t clear.  Biden went to Afghanistan, he came back and he said, “I heard eight different things from eight different people.”  So there was this sense of, “We don’t even know what the heck our policy is—what are we trying to accomplish?”

So they then had this thought process, which resulted in this thing called AfPak, their study of what we’re going to do in Afghanistan.  The premise of this thing was: “Let’s pare down our goals.  Let’s separate what we really wish would happen, and what has to happen.”  So they threw out the democracy part and all that stuff, the kind-of Bush ideology, and said, “The goal here is to prevent another 9/11.  So, what to do we have to do in Afghanistan in order to prevent it from becoming the kind of uncontested base for Al Qaeda that would allow them to launch attacks against us?”  Now, the irony of this is that, when you actually look at what they said you have to do in Afghanistan to prevent that from happening, it’s not so terribly different from the very ambitious nation-building enterprise which the Bush administration had. And for a good reason, which is: the only way that you can assure that the country does not fall, let’s say, does not fall into the hands of the Taliban, given the then accompanying assumption that they will make it a lot easier for Al Qaeda to operate with impunity—the only way you can do that is to create a legitimate government in Afghanistan, and the only way you can create a legitimate government in Afghanistan is to have a government that can deliver services and so forth.  Right now, when you have an incredibly enfeebled government, and a corrupt government, and a government whose writ hardly runs beyond Kabul, you’ve got a lot of work to do.

And so it turns out, even when you pare it down to that one basic goal, “Let’s keep Al Qaeda from gaining a big, powerful foothold there,” you still may have to engage in this big and very difficult, dubious enterprise.  And so that then forces you to ask, “Well, okay, if you’re saying we can’t do this, I mean nation building, it’s beyond us, it worked in Japan and Germany after World War II, it’s worked in a lot of places, it’s not going to work well enough here, or its going to take too long, or something.”  If you say that, and if you say, “But, you still have to do that stuff, in order to prevent this apocalyptic outcome,” then you have to say to yourself, “Okay, can we live with the apocalyptic outcome?”  That becomes the question.

I just had this conversation with a guy named Leslie Gelb, he was a New York Times reporter, an editorial writer, a Carter administration official, and the head of the Council on Foreign Affairs for many years, and a very wise person who I admire a lot. And I said, “Wes, this is not like the fall of Saigon because it turned out that people had fantasies about global communism, there was really no such thing, we were fighting the Vietnamese here, it was quite separate from what was going on in Moscow and Europe, and there were no dominoes to fall.  We left Saigon, it was humiliating, it was terrible, it was painful, but it was the right thing to do and there were no bad consequences. That’s not true here.”  And he said, “You’re wrong. Everybody said in 1975 that this is going to be a catastrophe for America, and three years later we were in a better position in Asia than we had been in before. It’s going to happen here too.” He said, “I hope that it doesn’t happen, but if it does then we will do all the things, Jack, that I think your question was implying, we will have to engage in some combination of police activity, intelligence activity, all the things that you have to do in all the other countries where there are all the other vacuums that Al Qaeda will seek to fill.  And if we do that then it may be that if in fact we end up losing Kabul, in the sense that we lost Saigon, it would be a terrible mishap, it would be a terribly painful thing, and it would constitute a terrible abandonment of the Afghan people, but it would not be as catastrophic as people think it is.  So long as we didn’t think it’s that or nothing, but we said, ‘No, we’re not going to focus on this question of keeping a state on our side or not. No, we’re going to recognize that in this type of battle, it’s a global battle; we have to fight in many different places with many different kinds of weapons but not state warfare. It’s the wrong weapon for this moment.’” So I’m not confident that he has the right answer to that question, but I am confident that that is the threshold question, “How bad would it be if Kabul fell?”

Snyder: Thank you. I’m going to switch to a different topic, our common interest topic of democracy assistance. Your book says that we should promote democracy but not the way Bush did, which is a point of agreement between us. The audience might be impatient with this topic because they might be so jaded with democracy assistance that they can’t see why we would even be talking about it.  It’s been a bad week for democracy promotion given the apparent theft of the election in Afghanistan, however I will remind you that earlier in the year there were some successes for democracy in unlikely places. In Iraq, the parties that were the so-called National parties rather than the narrow sectarian parties did well in the last election, in Lebanon the people who wanted to kowtow to Hezbollah did poorly in the election and the people who wanted to stand up against Hezbollah did better, in Iran the election was also stolen, hardly free and fair, but was arguably a blow struck for eventual reform in that it helped energize opposition to the regime, so one could say that there actually has been some good news for democracy in that region this year. So it’s worthwhile as a subject for us to spend a few minutes on.  Now, you say that democracy assistance should not be out of the barrel of a gun but that it should be quiet, steady, institution-building but also that sometimes we need to stand up and use the bully pulpit to argue the benefits of democracy in a louder voice. So to get us started, could you just flesh out a little bit your views on what kind of democracy assistance is appropriate, if not the kind that Bush did?

Traub: First, I think it is so true that the word has become toxic, so the terrible thing is that people who actually do this kind of thing for a living and give aid around the world are almost unwilling to use the word democracy because Bush has taken the most noble of all brands and stigmatized it, made it a swear word, so you have to find some other language, though I still insist on using that one. So the really easy question is, “Should we give aid to human rights NGOs and to women’s groups and so forth all over the world?”  Well of course we should, that’s not hard. The hard stuff comes in issues like this: I spent time in Egypt a couple of years ago. The pejorative view is that Iraq was the heart of the democracy promotion campaign on the part of the Bush administration, it’s their fault we think that but it’s actually not so.  They went into Iraq for a lot of reasons; democracy was an afterthought.  But in the period of 2005-2006 there was a huge effort on the part of the Bush administration to really push for more democratic outcomes in Egypt, and that was really interesting because Egypt is an ally.  Egypt was a country we depend on, but Egypt was also a country that depends on us hugely, so we had levers there, and it was kind of a test of how far we could push an autocrat—who had no wish to not be autocratic and indeed saw democracy as his own demise—to actually make a difference.  And we did make a difference. The Egyptians had elections that were more open than they were before, there was the growth of new media, it was possible to criticize the state, and then we got scared. We got scared because we also pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories and the wrong team won, Hamas won, and that was not supposed to happen.  And so suddenly democracy, as Jack has pointed out in his book, has all sorts of dangerous unforeseen consequences. So suddenly Egypt became a casualty of this rather belated recognition.

You can take one of two conclusions from that. One would be the realistic ‘Kennanite’ conclusion that Hosni Mubarak, the President of Egypt– democracy is not in his interests so why try to persuade him otherwise?  You can’t persuade him otherwise and in the end if you push hard enough he’s going to push back, so don’t do it. You can give nice speeches, you can go to Cairo and say we believe in democracy and so on, that’s fine, it doesn’t hurt anybody.  But don’t do things like condition aid on reform, don’t publicly criticize Mubarak as Condoleezza Rice did in a famous speech in Cairo in 2005.  It’s not worth it, you’re just making yourself feel good, but you’re not going to change the world.  My sense is that that’s kind-of where Obama stands right now. That’s certainly the tone they’ve taken towards Egypt, it’s the tone they’ve taken towards China, it’s the tone they’ve taken towards a number of countries which previously, the Bush administration had been tougher on. I probably would part ways with them there.  I would rather that we, for example, insist on giving aid directly to pro-democracy groups in Egypt rather than doing what we essentially do now, which is giving money to the government and saying, “You do with it what you wish.”  I think we should still publicly criticize them even when recognizing the limits of doing so.

So in that sense I come out on the more idealist, democracy-promotion side of that debate, which by the way is kind-of a debate between 40-yard lines; Bush described one end of the field that now everybody is fleeing from.  The question is how far away do you flee from that? Do you abandon it altogether except for some harmless hortatory language or do you say, “No, this is something that is profoundly in our interests, and it’s profoundly in our interests to be seen doing it, and it’s profoundly in the interests of those we wish to help”?  So I probably would be more on the side of public language, public gestures, the use of aid as a tool to promote democracy, things like that.

Snyder: I wanted to ask a little bit more about the gradual institution-building part of your argument. Critics of this kind of gradual approach will point to places like Iran and Egypt and they’ll say, “You can’t get any traction with gradualism there because the people running the country just say no to gradualism,” that you in fact need to take a more table pounding, out-in-the-streets approach to break the power of the old system, and that there’s no way to promote democracy without a more forceful political presence and maybe even with violence.

Traub: Well, definitely not with violence. It’s a dangerous chemistry experiment which is probably going to blow up in everyone’s face, as happened with Iraq. My answer to that would be no, it has to do with being opportunistic. When the people of Pakistan, when hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis took to the streets in early 2007 in a demonstration of constitutionalism—this was a set of huge public demonstrations after the chief justice was forced to resign by then-General Musharraf—people stood up for the constitution.  Well, that was a moment of leverage, and it was also a decisive moment, where we had no choice but to declare ourselves, one way or the other.  And for all of the grandiose language of democracy promotion, the Bush administration was silent, because they thought, “Musharraf, he’s our guy in the war on terror.  We don’t want to tip things in the other direction.”  That sends a perfectly clear message, then, which is, “You think this democracy stuff is really good, until it comes into conflict with something really important, i.e. terrorism, and then suddenly it has no weight whatsoever.”

And in that regard also this vexed question of elections is something that I think divides people, and there’s a lot of confusion about it.  Obama himself has said, “Elections aren’t democracy.” And one of the problems of the Bush Administration is that they thought elections were democracy, and that you had an election and then you could go away, as opposed to the slow work of state-building and so-forth.  Well, that’s probably a fair accusation, but elections matter enormously, sometimes badly, but sometimes in a galvanic way.  Now, the situation in Iran has not played itself out, but how can anybody doubt the power of that election?  The election gets stolen, and people won’t accept it.  We saw that happen in the Balkans and in Eastern Europe.  Now in those places you had a very different alignment of forces, so in the end that led to Milosovich and others being overthrown and to a democratic force taking its place.  That’s not going to happen in Iran, but those electoral moments, which often serve as a means whereby disparate folks with hopes for a democracy come together, new organizations form, new Internet coalitions form, all this new stuff that was inchoate before suddenly gets knitted together.  It’s really powerful.  And there are innumerable examples of dictators who think, “Oh, I’ll call an election and we’ll just roll those guys like we always do,” and then, low and behold, they don’t.  People rise up, and so I am not one who dismisses that “just elections” argument, and I think those are the kinds of moments—although not only then—when we are presented with an opportunity where we have to make a decision as to what we are going to do.  And know that saying, “We have to stand apart”—that’s also a decision, and we have to reckon with the consequences of our saying, “Not our business.”

Snyder: So, beforehand when we were talking, you said that you thought that the EU’s approach to democracy-promotion among its neighbors was perhaps the most successful approach to democracy-promotion that we’ve seen.  So I want to ask you to explain what you mean by that, but also I want to raise the criticism of that which was, people will say, “That was an excellent way to promote democracy in a handful of East European states, but that strategy, or anything like it, is extremely limited because you can’t extend it to the Middle East.  You can’t extend it even to Central America.”  So is this an inherently limited strategy, or, with creativity, could we come up with the functional equivalent for other parts of the world?

Traub: Yeah, that’s a really good question.  The thing that we’re talking about here is, what’s the big lollipop you get?  Democracy is a really hard thing, and obviously for an elite, which is accustomed to having things its own way, saying, “You should be willing to deal yourselves out of power,” is a problem.  Moreover, saying to a public which is angry and frustrated and has had it up to here with a hopeless life, “This democracy thing is going to help”—well, there’s gotta be something; there has to be a payoff.  What’s so great about democracy?  Yes, people do care a lot about having a voice, but it also matters that you can say, ultimately, there are benefits.  Now, the EU is this great instrument for delivering benefits, and the mark you have to hit to get in is not exactly called democracy, it has to do with a set of market reforms, it has to do with a whole bunch of things, but the political issues are quite fundamental among them.  And so the states like Bulgaria, which is in, and Romania, which is in, and Serbia, which is on the bubble, to say to them, to the finely opposing forces there, “Well guess what, if you guys go the democracy route, you get all these fabulous benefits that come with the EU,” that’s really powerful.

So then the question becomes, how can you generalize that principle: what are the goodies that you get for making this hard decision?  Now, one of the few good things that the Bush administration did in the realm of foreign policy was to create this thing called the Millennium Challenge Account.  Now, the Millennium Challenge Account is a new way of thinking about foreign aid, which says, “We’re going to define a group of countries which we think is going to use this aid well and not just piss it away, not just have it go away into corruption.”  So you can’t even get the aid in the first place, unless you cross a series of thresholds, which are very heavily politically denominated.  They have a lot to do with classic liberties.  Once we’ve agreed that you’re the kind of country that we want to help and that will use the help wisely, then a corollary of that is that it shouldn’t be us telling you what to do with the money.  It should be us working with you to make sure that the money is spent wisely, but it should be you guys coming up with the project, and you guys running the project, and you guys doing the bidding process, and so forth.  And so that is both a powerful incentive, and, I think, also one which fully respects the recipient country, though there has to be enough checks and balances and looking over the shoulder that you don’t go overboard with the respect thing and wind up allowing folks to do stuff that you don’t anticipate or want them doing.  Now, that’s been underfunded, its been really slow to get off the ground, it’s had problems, but that’s a way of thinking about the answer to your question, which is, how do you generalize this idea that if you go the democratic route its in your interest to do so and we’ll make sure its in your interest to do so?

Snyder: Now I’d like to ask about a question that bears on American democracy: a few weeks ago you wrote a piece in the Sunday Times Magazine on the Israel lobby, only with a twist—what you call the pro-Israel, pro-peace wing of the Israel lobby—

Traub: Well that’s what they call themselves.

Snyder: Okay, what they call themselves, and since we’re in the Journalism School I wanted to ask a question about the Israel lobby phenomenon that bears on the media.  One of the criticisms of the so-called Israel lobby has been that any criticism of Israel coming from the United States is immediately equated with anti-Semitism, or, at a minimum, insensitivity about the Holocaust and insensitivity to the security threats that Israel faces, and it’s alleged that this kind of reaction has had a chilling effect on American public discourse, including the American media in reporting on issues touching Israel, and has stifled public debate.  So, I was wondering if you could comment on this, since you’re a journalist, and we’re in a journalism school, not only with respect to the Israel lobby, but with respect to the broader charge that in the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq, with the groundswell of public anxiety about international terrorism and the feeling of support for the president’s attempts to do something about it, that somehow this had had a chilling effect on American journalists, and that the proposals to invade Iraq were not held up to adequate scrutiny in the press?

Traub: I would say those two things are really incommensurate–that is, the chilling effect that the Israel lobby has had on the American media is pretty indirect.  I would say the chilling effect they’ve had on debate in Congress is incredibly direct.  The sense of “It’s just not worth my going there” which congressmen have about issues about Israel is overwhelming.  It’s just not worth, it, because the world is going to come down on them like a ton of bricks, and they’re never going to hear the end of it, and so I think it’s had a terrible effect, which is only now falling out a little bit.  In the case of the media, I think its much more (I don’t have this problem the way people who are, let’s say, a big daily newspaper correspondent in Tel Aviv have) every word they write is going to be scrutinized and so it’s an agonizing process.  I mean, I just by coincidence happened to be on the website just before coming here, of something called CAMERA, which is all about honest reporting from the Middle East, and its all done from a very classically kind-of conservative, pro-Israel perspective, and they have a whole separate box about how the New York Times UN correspondent didn’t give nearly enough prominence to the speech that Benjamin Netanyahu gave at the General Assembly, other newspapers did, why not you?  And so, you do get a lot of that.  Now, I don’t think the effect is quite as bad as it is on Congress, it’s just it probably does make you more careful.

That, though unfortunate and frustrating, I think is small potatoes compared to that moment from 9/11 until quite a while later, unprecedented in my lifetime, when the press felt that it was part of a national—effort is too small a word, but crusade is not quite right either—but this national moment when we had to respond under supreme duress.  And so at that moment, the normal journalistic instinct to ask the grouchy question and to undermine the swiftly-forming consensus got suppressed, and I’m sure lots of people have gone back and looked at those terrible moments and those press conferences and so forth.  I have not, I have not seen anyone doing so, but it would be really powerful for the press to remind itself of how thirty years of the tradition of post-Watergate questioning of authority fell away with amazing speed.  And it was partially because of the Bush administration’s “you’re with us or you’re against us” rhetoric, there is no question.  It would not have been as frightening to speak your doubts in a different setting.  But, it was also true that it was this unprecedented national moment: “We have been attacked; we must respond. Everybody has to be part of that.” And I think that we probably have not reflected enough on how that licensed a failure to ask tough questions—because you were afraid to, because you thought it was inappropriate, however you want to express it.  That was a really remarkable moment, and an embarrassing one, in retrospect.

Snyder: So at that time, in that very different public climate, we were debating things like whether or not Saddam Hussein could be deterrable, if he had nuclear weapons, and now, admittedly, in a very different public climate, we are debating questions like whether Iran could be deterrable if they got nuclear weapons.  And so this afternoon I had a wrenching disjuncture: I taught a class for my very smart Columbia College seniors majoring in International Relations on nuclear proliferation, and after we went through the historical and theoretical literature on deterrence they pretty much concluded that if Iran had nuclear weapons they would be deterrable and they would not be able to use them for blackmail to get political advantage.  But when I came back from class and I sat down and turned on my computer I saw on my screen a brand new public opinion poll saying that the American public would like to negotiate with Iran first but don’t think that it will work, and that seventy percent of the American public want to undertake military action if the negotiations fail.  So I’m wondering why my really smart seniors in Columbia College who’ve done their reading have come to an opposite conclusion from the American public and is there somehow still a failure of public debate on this kind of issue in the country?

Traub: Do you think on most issues Columbia University is right where America is? [Laughter]  I’m not sure I recognise this as being as paradoxical as you think.

Snyder: Columbia was right the last time, and–

Traub: No, I’m not questioning whether it was Columbia that was in the right as opposed to the other ninety-nine percent of America, I’m just saying that this is something that history would bear out.  I hadn’t seen that poll, and it’s alarming.  It shows how much work Obama’s going to have to do, because I was really heartened by this offer that Iran made—although they kind-of unmade it a couple minutes later.  It’s not clear they actually have really agreed to send three quarters of their low-enriched uranium to be enriched by Russia and France and all that—so my assumption is that this negotiation, which we must have, will end in failure.  And then we will seek to impose crippling sanctions, and that will not happen because the Russians and Chinese will not agree, and then Iran will continue doing whatever it does, and then one of the great questions is: is Israel going to hit their nuclear complex?  Which they might.  If they don’t, then we’re going to be in the same situation that your students were contemplating, which is Iran is going to join the list of rogue nuclear powers—nuclear powers that do not accept the limitations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Then the question is, can you unify everybody against Iran in such a way that you would actually have to have a true maniac, to be such an irrational calculator that he would—not even drop the bomb on Israel, I don’t think that’s the issue—the issue is that he would give it to someone else that would do that, knowing that if that happened, Iran would be destroyed. It would be overthrown if nothing else.  So yeah, it’s kind of like the question about Afghanistan, in that if you can’t do it then you can’t do it, and then the answer is not “nothing”, the answer is, “OK, what do you do?” What’s the solution to containing Iran until such time as—I have to say from my one time there—this extraordinary country throws off these nuts, the mullahs who run it, and Iran is delivered to what I think is actually quite a majestic destiny. And so can we ride out that historical moment, as we rode out the historical moment of the Soviet Union? I think that’s what we’re going to have no choice but to do, though you don’t want to be Barack Obama trying to explain that to Benjamin Netanyahu as well as the 70% of the American people who, according to this poll, think we should go to war.

Snyder: I have just one more topic that I want to raise before I let the audience ask their questions. It’s about your book’s very sympathetic portrayal of Kofi Annan, who you present as one of the two fully estimable Secretaries General of the United Nations, along with Dag Hammarskjold.  But although you praise Annan for a lot of his work you also make the case that he was more of a manager than a visionary strategist, and you’re quite critical of some of the peace and security strategies of the UN under his watch, even as you’re complementary about other UN accomplishments. So I just wanted to give you an opportunity to reflect on UN reforms, innovations, a different mindset for the organization: what should they be doing looking forward?

Traub: Well the first thing that I would say is that the current guy makes his predecessor look great, so the process of selection is an almost wholly negative one, that is the states that matter—the United States and a couple others—try to find someone who won’t do any harm, and won’t get in their way, and won’t have unpredictable beliefs or do unpredictable things. This has been true from the beginning and they’ve mostly hit the mark and found rather, not necessarily ordinary people as people, but people who would turn out to be not very powerful, effective leaders of this institution, which is an inherently tough thing to lead anyway. Kofi was actually a surprise, he turned out to be a far more passionate person, far more morally driven, far more charismatic, far more able to command public attention, than the Clinton administration, which put him there, had thought. For all of his flaws, I give him high marks. As Jack said, Hammarskjold occupies a position of his own in my view, and there’s kind of a blank space, then there’s Kofi, then there’s some more blank space and then there’s the other guys.

In the case of Ban Ki-moon, the incumbent, they really hit the mark, they found a person whose fundamental mentality is bureaucratic, and who cannot grasp the nettle of the kind of public, emblematic standing that is required of a Secretary General if he is to actually do something. And so this guy also was said to be a good manager, I mean he’s Korean, of course with Koreans people think they’re bureaucratic, they’re good managers, they’re very low key, but he actually has made a series of rather clumsy missteps in that regard, and the institution is actually quite stalemated right now between this fellow’s Chief of Staff and his Assistant Chief of Staff, who are always fighting with each other. And so the hope that we can reform the culture of the UN is really—you wouldn’t want to put a big bet on it.

The more immediate pressing, and also the way sexier question, is do you have to change the composition of the Security Council?  That’s the big issue and it’s been the big issue for seventeen years, but it’s becoming way more intense and unavoidable now because of the legacy element. You’ve got these five countries that were the five countries in 1946, with the difference that it used to be nationalist China and then it became communist China, but outside of that it’s France, which obviously is not the fifth most important country of the world, and it’s not Japan, it’s not Germany, it’s not India, it’s not Brazil and so forth. At a certain point that becomes just unsustainable.  I don’t think that’s now, yet, but clearly we have to find some way—because after all, this is the highest committee in the world, the Security Council is number one, for all of it’s problems there’s no greater prestige that attaches to anything than that.  So for me the big problem is that my fear is as you make it more inclusive—you include India, Brazil and so forth—these are countries that are possibility going to be even less willing than the incumbents are now to engage in the kind of robust peacekeeping and the kind of human rights actions which we want the Security Council to do.  So there’s a real danger that we’ll succeed in making it more inclusive and thereby make it less effective, and that raises some tough questions about, can you create criteria for membership?  “We will let you guys in, if…”  But can you do that without seeming colonialist and paternalistic and so forth?  It will not be easy, so let me stop there.

Snyder: OK, we’re going to cease being paternalistic now and let you folks talk. And I believe we are asking you to come to one of the mikes and ask your questions, so please feel free to step up.

Question 1: I want to return to this hemisphere, and your point about the Millennium Development goals and certain thresholds. I was in Colombia a couple weeks ago, and I was alarmed to see that Colombia has the the second largest embassy in the world after that in Iraq. We’ve been pumping a lot of money in for Plan Colombia, but from what I was hearing on the fringes there’s been gross human rights violations. Obviously, I think we have a lot of personal, political interests in that part of the world.

Traub: The first answer to your very good question is, I don’t know a whole heck of a lot about that part of the world, I have never been to Colombia so I should just begin by professing my ignorance. There is a kind of general point here, which is the war on drugs just doesn’t work the way we fight it, and that’s become transparent in Afghanistan.  Richard Holbrooke, whose job it is to think through Afghanistan and Pakistan, has said, “We have to stop fighting this war of poppy eradication, it’s not getting us there.” So I think in the case of Colombia, my impression is that our full-throated support for the war on drugs tends to promote the more militaristic aspects, and the least democratic aspects, of the culture, and so it’s probably also a good example of a certain element of democracy promotion, which is that it’s not just about trying to bring democracy to authoritarian countries. Colombia is a democratic country, but its a democratic country with some deeply undemocratic currents, so we can be much more effective at trying to make fledgling, weak, conflicted democracies better ones than we can at trying to somehow drag authoritarian countries into being democratic. But I don’t think I should speak beyond that because I just don’t know enough.

Question 2: I have a journalism question, which is, has the transitional journalism industry’s financial problems affected your form of reporting, or disproportionately the form of reporting in general, and what does that mean for nuanced popular American understanding of what’s going on in foreign countries?

Traub: I think what you’re going to have is a lot more opinion, and a lot less…fact, for example. We’re right now so in the middle of this that it’s really hard to see where we’re going. There are some things that are obvious, which is a lot of newspapers can’t afford to have foreign bureaus anymore.  And so European countries that once had lots of bureaus, they have almost none. Outside of the Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal less so, there aren’t a lot of newspapers who can afford to do this, so there’s this process of enclosure—not enclosure, but just kind of in-gathering—where you’re going to be getting less and less real reporting from the field. Now, so far, The New York Times Magazine has been willing to spend a lot of money sending me to Iraq.  It’s really expensive, but its working for them. My feeling is that the curve of The New York Times’ existence may approximately track that of my own professional career, so that when they cease to exist, I will no longer be working, so then I can look upon the whole thing with detachment. But I promise I wouldn’t be talking that way if I was at almost any other publication. The Times, these physical newspaper-paper things, perhaps they’re all going to disappear. The Times will just be the last one to go, and the form they will be taking? We don’t know yet, we really don’t know.

Question 3: I wonder if you have any idea what happened with the Obama administration in North Korea, because Robert Carlin talked about how he was one of the negotiators under Clinton, and he’s written something that shows there was substantial negotiation up until the end of the Clinton administration, until Bush came in and it was all gone.  But Obama came in and everybody was saying, “North Korea doesn’t live by the rules,” but in fact they had followed a set of rules with regard to the satellite launch they did, and they weren’t launching a ballistic missile, and it seemed like he really came down on them. I just wondered if you have some understanding of why this happened, and why the reporting of this …

Traub: [interrupting] Well, I’m not sure I would accept your premise. First of all, you have to come down on somebody and North Korea’s a good candidate. But beyond that the fact is that Obama and the administration have succeeded in getting unanimous Security Council backing for really tough sanctions on the North Koreans. Now, is that going to work? I don’t know, we don’t have a whole lot of good options there either. But, it seems to me the key thing here is that quite a few other countries, and above all the neighbors—Japan, Korea, but also China—are really frightened of these guys having and being able to use nuclear weapons, because they are the closest thing to a crackpot regime. I mean I think the Iranians are far more rational in that regard, and they run a much bigger enterprise. So it is terribly important that there be a collective coherent sense that this is a terrible dangerous prospect and that we must all act to stop this. The Chinese are very reluctant to crack down on North Korea, for one thing they think if the country gets any worse then just millions of people will pour across the border into China.  They have various reasons why they’re concerned, many of them will seem illegitimate to us, but they are also really scared of the North Koreans, so right now we are acting in concert, and that is a good thing.

Question 4: Hi, I’m just going off your comment about the Israel lobby and looking at the coverage of the Israel-Iran tension, I was just wondering if you think this comment would be reasonable: if a martian came down and looked at the media coverage of this, where Iran is seen as this major threat to Israel, and said, “Has Iran got any nuclear weapons?” “Well no, not yet.” “And has Israel got any nuclear weapons?” “Yes, they’ve got two hundred.” But somehow the whole paradigm is that Iran is this enormous threat to Israel, so there’s a certain bizarreness about the thing. Do you think that’s a reasonable comment?

Traub: I guess I’d say two things. One, objectively Iran is a more threatening country than Israel. I really don’t think that there’s reason to worry that Israel would use nuclear weapons save the most extreme case of self-defense. I don’t think Iran would either, but there is greater reason to fear that they would. But here’s the second answer to your question. A global nuclear regime which says, “It is OK for good-guy countries to have nuclear weapons, it is not OK for bad-guy countries to have nuclear weapons,” which has actually worked quite well for the last 50 years, just isn’t going to keep working forever. You can’t say, “You know what, these rules actually don’t apply to India because we feel pretty good about India, they’re a liberal democracy and we trust them and all that, but they sure DO apply to you nutty mullahs over there in Iran.” They perhaps apply even more to Pakistan, because we grant India certain privileges that we don’t grant to Pakistan. I don’t quarrel with those objective political judgments, I just don’t think you can have a system that’s going to last forever that way.  Which is why I think Obama has, quite rightly, focused on non-proliferation as a central issue for his administration, and has said that it can’t be anymore the way the Bush administration wanted it, which is we are going to sign up some fellow right-thinking countries to go after the bad guys, and then we are going to do whatever we think is right for us.  No, we all have to be bound by treaty obligations, and the non-proliferation treaty says that we will seek to eliminate nuclear weapons from the world while at the same time guaranteeing the peaceful use of nuclear energy.  And that means us, and it means France and the UK, and it means Russia and China, and it means the undeclared countries like Israel, and it’s going to be really hard to get there, but I think you have to begin by saying, “We take seriously this compact, these obligations binding upon all.”

Mark Taylor: Jim, I’d like to ask you to reflect on a little bit of a different level with a question that involves looking at your own career over the past years. Jack mentioned his engagement with bright undergraduates here at Columbia, which many of us have the privilege to do. You and Jack both went to Harvard—separated by a few years I believe—and you also said in response to a previous question that the dilemma we may have is between opinion and fact. I don’t believe that opposition is…I mean, that might be where we end up, but the important space is as always in between, which is analysis and interpretation. The greatest loss, it seems to me, is that cable news and the Internet and everything, is parasitic on what you guys do, and recycles this, and having the kind of intelligent, sensitive, critical and self-critical press that we have had is I think essential to democracy. Part of that also, it seems to me, is those of us involved in undergraduate education have a strong sense of the importance of the kind of broad cultural, historical and critical perspective that liberal arts gives one, which is also under huge pressure today given the really dire situation of higher education, which is much worse than people realize.  Reflecting on your own life and career, how has the experience that you had as an undergraduate, studying the kind of things that you would at Harvard, shape what you do and how you do it, in your journalistic career?

Traub: That’s a really interesting question, and I guess I would answer it a little bit historically, generationally, and then a little bit Harvard…that word I try not to pronounce. So part of it is that I would say—I’m 54, so I was born in 1954—so I grew up in a time when politics, justice, social justice, this was the heart of everything.  A big impulsion for me was this notion that the purpose of life is to do justice, is to clarify, delineate what is just and right as opposed to what is wrong, so that big piece is just history acting on me.  And then, the thing I always do say about college, is that it taught me how to think, and what thinking was, and I now—it’s true, when I contemplate this new technology world that a woman asked about—I do think that my notion of what thinking is, which is reflecting upon one’s self, never taking for granted things that happen to be useful or convenient for you, because you would like them to be true… a kind of relentless examination and self-examination.  I’m not implying that somehow these qualities don’t exist anymore but I do fear that the velocity with which the world of information is now produced and consumed means that those qualities seem quaint. So for example, against my justice-thing, is this notion that I phrase to myself as a kind of position of principled impartiality, neutrality is not the right word, it’s not about difference-splitting, it’s about the recognition of the need to stand apart from your own interests, and also stand apart from the interests of people you’re examining, in order to find some position of principled neutrality.  You end up taking this side or that side, but you have to begin by accepting there is such a thing as that posture, which strikes me as a basic form of intellectual integrity, and the world of arguing puppets of left and right, and Beck and Rush Limbaugh, but even Keith Olbermann and all that, makes ridiculous the idea that there is such a place as principled neutrality, there’s just, “You’re right” or “You’re wrong.” And so I do worry that these assumptions that I have carried through life feel increasingly archaic in the world that I’m moving into.

Snyder: I’d like to ask a follow up on that, because this same question comes up of course in academic life, where we’re supposed to have objectivity and neutrality with respect to our subject matter, but in fact we all know that we choose our topics based on our personal proclivities, and we go to our research with hunches, and that even when we study things with statistics, we almost always find that our hypothesis was proved correct by our research. So when my students agonize over how they can be objective, generally what I tell them is that the important thing is not to be objective but to be transparent in your sources and methods, and to open yourself up to critique and response in the marketplace of ideas. I was wondering how much you think the objectivity of journalism depends on internalizing this standard of objectivity deep in the soul of the individual journalist and how much it depends on being part of a system where you can get sued if you say the wrong thing, or you can lose credibility in the eyes of your editors and your readers if you’re caught out being biased.

Traub: And thank God there are those external restraints, because if you only had to depend on each person’s conscience you’d probably be in a bad way, and so yeah, places like the journalism school are means by which you have inculcated in you a set of professional ideas. And then as you say there are these powerful disincentives, like you can be beaten up if you really cook the books of your article and things like that; there are all these external forces that really do, in the case of classic American journalism, at least at its higher echelons, shape something like objective journalism. Beyond that there is this internal thing, as you rightly say there is the idea of transparency, but even more I think the honesty before your own discoveries. For me one of the great satisfactions is going into an article with a set of assumptions that I do not emerge with, and I find out I was wrong. If anything, that’s so satisfying for me that I have to guard against frivolously overturning my ingoing assumptions, which actually turns out to be rather oddly easy to do. For example, I think Mark in his introduction may have mentioned a book I wrote about City College, which is really about the idea of open admissions, and I went in thinking that it’s a really hard question as to whether this whole experiment they did with open enrollment at City College was a good thing or a bad thing but that, on balance, it was a good thing. Then I spent a year living in the place, and I came to the conclusion that actually, on balance, it was a really bad thing, but such were the politics of it that you couldn’t admit that it was a bad thing. And so in the end, that thought process is probably the only thing that you can depend on.  It is a thing you seek in yourself, but if anyone were to ask, “Is that what you’re saying everybody does, so journalists should be trusted?” No, some people are like that, and some people aren’t like that, whether its journalism or not journalism, it’s just that as a journalist you have an obligation to try to cultivate that in yourself.

Mark Taylor: Just to close, you’ve travelled more widely and talked to more people than most of us do, I think. What keeps you awake at night?

Traub: Can I just say, there was a gentleman who wanted to ask a question. Do we have time for him to ask one more question?

Mark Taylor: Do you want to hold this one?

Traub: : Yes, because I have no idea what the answer is, so I want him to ask a question so I can think about that while he asks his question.

Question 6: Going back to Afghanistan and Pakistan, there is a growing resentment within Pakistan that the United States is becoming very paternalistic, the presence of Americans in Islamabad is growing, and they are starting to bring their private security contractors.  It’s becoming sort of a presence like it was in Iraq, and that with this new AfPak policy it treats the two countries very much the same, and there is this resentment that Afghanistan—I mean it’s poorer, it’s smaller, it’s been unstable—but Pakistan is much bigger, they’re not the same, it’s a nuclear power, so what would your comments be on that?  Is the U.S. not being as sensitive to this particular set of sensibilities within Pakistan? And relating that to journalism, these debates that go on within the media there, they are very rarely seen within the media here, so what is the responsibility of journalists covering the region to give a broader sense of the debates going on in places that are really important but in the discourse here are very much within the framework of assumptions that are dominant here?

Traub: I guess I can get out of Mark’s question by saying, Pakistan keeps me awake at night. Though, if I were the type to stay awake at night, which my wife who’s here can testify I’m not, that would be one of the examples. I think at the heart of your question was this sense of what it is like to be on the receiving end of America’s supposed benevolence. It always looks really benevolent to us, it rarely looks as benevolent on the receiving end for a number of reasons.  One is just that being on the receiving end is an inherently ambivalent thing, even if you actually believe that this country is benevolent. And of course the Pakistanis have good reason for not thinking of us as benevolent, we’ve been supporting military dictators there for fifty years, though frankly I do think there’s an incredibly inflamed sense of nationalism going on there that is really self-destructive.  People are willing to believe absolutely anything about the American role in Pakistan, and I get that when I talk to people there. Frankly I think it’s a place where the truth has been so distorted for so long, there’s such a poor market of political truth, that any kind of paranoia flourishes. You used to find this in India, but you do not find it now in the same way as you did then.  Part of that Pakistani thing is I think a consequence of various domestic political failures.  But to go to your point, which is Americans learn far too little about what it is people on the other end, that they are hearing about, are actually themselves saying to each other, and what the media is saying, whether it is in Pakistan, or Egypt, or in Colombia, or whatever, I think that’s really true.  And maybe this actually is a good thing about the globalized, Internet, highly-connected world that we are moving into, our realities will be more transparent to one another than they are now, and we will inevitably—not because somebody decrees it—learn more about the experience of countries far away from us, Pakistan or others, than we would otherwise. But nevertheless, as a criticism I think you’re quite right, and I take your point.

Now I’ve avoided Mark’s question for about as long as I can, I mean the problem is that I’m a weirdly—I guess the right word is blithe, would be the truth. I wouldn’t even say optimistic, it’s more of a temperament thing than an intellectual thing. I really don’t stay awake at night, and so I could give you an answer, but I would probably accuse myself of a false portentousness because there are a lot of things that I worry about in my way, but I’m not an epic-level worrier, so I’m just not going to come up with a satisfying answer to your very good question.

Snyder: So we have time for one more quick question and a quick answer.

Question 7: So there’s a demand on the left that says that America would be better if it brought its troops and resources home and improved its democracy at home, and I’m reminded of the end of the Second World War where a similar argument was made, it was the beginning of the decolonization, and we had a more segregated society. And so therefore it was necessary in order to have any appeal to the world that the U.S. be less segregated and there be less racism, so there really was support for the Civil Rights movement within structures within the government. Is there a comparable situation where the American democracy could be improved and that would therefore make its case to the world better?

Traub: That is a great question and I think your premise is absolutely right, that there was a kind of Cold War argument for political reform, that if we are going to be able to tell people in the Third World, non-Caucasian people, that this thing that we do is a good thing, how can we do that if we’re not demonstrating that towards minorities in our own country? And so there really were Cold War liberals, who said we beat the Russians by behaving in the right way towards needy people or marginalized people at home. And God knows that is as true now as it was then. If this war on terror, so-called, is anything, it is a war of ideas about what’s the right way to live.  That was the paradox, the contradiction at the heart of the Bush administration. They said, “We’ve got to win this war of ideas,” and yet they made America seem like a thoroughly unattractive country. And so the best way to win the war of ideas is to show the way you behave at home, because otherwise it seems like hypocrisy. And we live in a far more transparent world that we did back in the Cold War, so we will be judged by how we behave in regard to ourselves.

Snyder: Well, thanks to both Jim and the audience for a stimulating evening.

Below is an edited transcript from the public discussion Kristof had with Sheila Coronel, Professor of Professional Practice at the Columbia Journalism School, as part of the “Covering Conflict” series sponsored by IRCPL.

Sheila Coronel: Welcome, Nick, to the journalism school.Nicholas Kristof: Thank you.

Coronel: Let’s start with your book… The book is on the bestseller list and it’s in its seventh printing.

Nicholas Kristof: Twenty-first, actually.

Sheila Coronel: Oh, my information is obviously dated.

Nicholas Kristof: It tapped a market that nobody—neither we nor the publisher—really knew existed. It really struck a chord.

Sheila Coronel: Twenty-first printing, that means how many copies?

Nicholas Kristof: About 230-some thousand sold.

Sheila Coronel: Wow, that’s amazing, and the book was launched just late last year.

Nicholas Kristof: Yeah.

Sheila Coronel: Wow, that’s great. So the book has been on the bestseller list. It’s gotten a phenomenal audience. Yet it is about something that is—especially for someone like me, who comes from that developing world—something that is so commonplace, something so entrenched and so widespread that most journalists don’t even consider it as news.

You’ve talked about more girls being killed as girls, because they are girls, than people who perished in the wars of the 20th Century. But why this book and why now?

Nicholas Kristof: You know, really it was a gradual process for Sheryl, my wife, and me. We spent a lot of time abroad and I think it gradually snuck up on us that really the central human rights cause, and it seemed to us more broadly that the central moral challenge of our times was this kind of gender inequity.

And when I say that I think people always think this is really meant in some kind of hyperbolic sense, but can I ask you folks a question? Are there more males or females in the world today? Come on. Let’s have a show of hands. If you think there are more males in the world today can you raise your hand? And if you think there are more females in the world today can you raise your hand?

I’m afraid this latter group is wrong for the reason that Sheila just mentioned. In the U.S. there are more females, in Europe there are more females, in this room I think there are pretty much more females; given equal access to food and health care, women live longer.

In an equal world there would be more women, but it’s not an equal world and when we began to realize the toll of this and realize that there are somewhere between 50 and 110 million women missing from the globe—that in any ten years there are more girls who are discriminated against to death than all the victims of all the genocides of the 20th Century.

Just the scale of it struck us as something that really deserved more attention, more coverage, and I think it was some combination of that intellectual realization of the scale of this, and a couple of things we encountered that made us think that this is something that we wanted to write about.

Essentially, as writers, we have a spotlight. You get a lot more bang for the buck when you illuminate something that is not illuminated, that is in the dark, and help draw attention to it.

Coronel: But why now? Haven’t there been more strides that have been taken by women in the last generation or so than there had been, say, in the last hundred years? Aren’t there more women, as you can see, in colleges, more women in schools, at least in many parts of the world, women in the professions, more women who are taking on leadership roles in governments, in companies?

Kristof: Yeah, I mean, I think that this book could have been written at approximately any point in the last 400,000 years. Since Gutenberg anyway—it would have worked better since Gutenberg.

One answer to that is our appreciation of the issue. I mean, not ourselves, but in general I think the public has become increasingly aware of this. And part of it also is that, aside from the issues of injustice that are out there—human trafficking, girls being discriminated against to death—the other side of the coin is a more optimistic one. There is an increasing appreciation, I think, that if you want to address global poverty, civil conflict in society and terrorism, then there’s no magic solution, but educating girls, bringing those educated women into the formal labor force, probably accomplishes more than any other single strategy you can pursue.

And I think the contrast between Pakistan and Bangladesh is an interesting one in that respect. I mean, there are various differences, but one is that Bangladesh really went out of its way to educate girls in a way that Pakistan did not. And that in turn helped revitalize Bangladesh’s economy, Bangladeshi civil society. I think that is one reason why Bangladesh is rather more stable today, although I don’t want to exaggerate that too much.

And New Yorkers were all up in arms about this red-tailed hawk being homeless. And I couldn’t get people to care nearly as much about hundreds of thousands of people. And so that was enormously frustrating. And it drove me to try to understand, what resonates in us? What makes us act or care about an issue? And I came across work, a little bit in neurology but mostly in social psychology, that goes to exactly this question.

And I think that one of the mistakes that humanitarian organizations make is that they overdo the misery and the tragedy of it. People really don’t want to be a part of something terribly sad. So that’s really the reason why so many anecdotes in our book take this course, where it’s somebody whose trajectory plumbs the absolute bottom of humanity, but then manages to rise above it, to overcome this, to really be inspiring, heartwarming, positive.

And it was a reflection of this research in social psychology that that’s what we kind of yearn for. And the book was kind of an experiment in whether that would resonate.

Coronel: Has it been successful in achieving this aim? In getting people to sympathize with this woman and doing actually some of the things that you ask them to do in the book? Which is to contribute to these organizations, to help women out in developing countries and so on?

Kristof: Yeah, I think it’s been very successful in opening people’s eyes to things happening a long way away, and in getting some people to connect with these issues. We wanted to, in effect, write a sort of do-it-yourself guide to foreign aid or foreign policy. And I think one of the other potential pitfalls or minefields is that there’s a tendency with any good cause for people to exaggerate and make it seem more important or easier—in other words, to oversell.

And I think that people on the fence are very skeptical of that. They sense it, and when we looked at historical analogies, one of the things that had worked was those efforts that had, if anything, undersold rather than oversold.

And so we try to acknowledge that helping people is harder than it looks. It doesn’t always work, and yet these are some of the kinds of interventions that have the best record, here’s what you can do yourself. And it’s been particularly exciting for us that there are a lot of young people who, after reading the book, have then wanted to give their parents gray hairs and go off to Ghana, Somaliland, wherever it may be.

Coronel: The way you’re talking now is very different from the way a lot of American journalists I know, at least a lot of the journalism professors in this school, have taught. I mean, you’re talking about marketing causes. You’re talking about getting people to actually do something. You’re going beyond opinionating, if there is such a word, to asking people to take concrete action based on what they’ve read.

Kristof: Yeah, I think that’s true. I think that—

Coronel: I mean, are you blurring that line between advocacy and journalism?

Kristof: To some degree it’s a fine line, and I must say that people will periodically come up to me and say, “Nick, you’re such a great crusader” or something, and I will flinch at that. Because that suggests a notion—as does “advocate”—that maybe one’s primary loyalty is to a cause or an issue and that one becomes somewhat less skeptical of that along the way.

And I think that kind of journalistic skepticism is incredibly important at every step. On the other hand, Sheryl and I wrote Half the Sky not just to inform people, but ultimately because we really do think this is a moral challenge.

Human trafficking, for example. You go out and meet girls who are locked up in brothels and who are gonna die of AIDS as a result. And it doesn’t just feel like an important story, it feels like an horrific human tragedy. And I think a lot of us went into journalism to some degree wanting to make a difference. It’s a very fine line how you pursue that.

You can’t cover every city council meeting trying to make a difference. But on the other hand, you do hope that you do have some kind of a larger contribution, that it makes the world a better place. And on some of these issues that I gravitated to, yeah, I want to make people spill their coffee when they read a column. And after they read the book, I do want them to go and donate, volunteer, whatever it may be—help chip away at some of these problems.

Coronel: Before we leave the book, let’s talk about some of the criticisms that have been made about it, if only to save them the trouble of asking the questions. First, U.S. feminists say it underplays or makes light of women’s oppression in the U.S. You say that women are so oppressed in third-world countries while American families are more concerned with the glass ceiling and not life-threatening issues that threaten women elsewhere.

Kristof: I do think that American feminism and the human rights community traditionally both didn’t focus enough on the issue of women’s rights around the world. I do think that actually in both cases, over the last 10 years or so, they’ve become more attentive to these issues.

Clearly there’re enormous problems within this country. I think in the case of women’s rights, the two probably most serious ones are domestic violence—a vast problem—and trafficking, which is also a vast problem. I don’t mean to suggest that we should be trying to end trafficking in India and not in New York. But it’s also true that if one looks at the scale of the problem, there’s no question that the most egregious kinds of violations are abroad.

Coronel: The second criticism, from the more structural school, is that the solutions which you offer are Band-Aid solutions—increasing spending on education for women, removing fistula operations, what else? Salt iodization. Solutions that do not address the underlying causes of poverty and inequality in the world.

Kristof: I’ve become more sympathetic to Band-Aids over the years.

I think that especially when—for example, when I was in the university there was a tendency to seek overarching solutions to problems. And frankly, the result was often things that were somewhat symbolic. It was to hold a conference or to pass a law. And there’s clearly a role for laws and conferences, but on the other hand, I think that actually your generation—those of you who are students—have been better at actually doing something that makes an incremental difference for real people somewhere.

That instead of having a conference on ending female illiteracy, you’ll sponsor a third grade class in a particular refugee camp somewhere. It’s not gonna end the global problem, but for those third graders, it is transformational. And over time I’ve become more sympathetic to the idea that that is something that actually makes more of a difference.

I don’t think one should ignore the other end—

Coronel: The larger end?

Kristof: —especially in the case of health. Clearly some kind of intervention needs to be top down—vaccination campaigns, whatever. But there is an awful lot to be said for these kinds of individual Band-Aids, if you will. Can I tell a really hokey story?

Coronel: Sure.

Kristof: I traveled a lot with a Hawaiian cameraman and we used to debate this issue a lot. You know, about helping individuals. He used to tell this utterly hokey Hawaiian parable, which I’m sure some of you have heard. But it very much resonates with me about these issues. And it’s about a boy walking along the beach and all these starfish have washed up—you know this?

The boys is frantically throwing the starfish back into the water and a man comes up and says, “What are you doing? There are millions of starfish that have been washed up. You can’t make a difference.” Boy throws in another one and says, “Well, sure made a difference to that one.” I think there’s a lot to be said for that.

Coronel: But it’s the sort of hokey-ness and these kinds of stories that you bring out in your book that cause more cynical development workers to say that you’re treating the issue of women’s human rights like it was your personal discovery, when people have been working on this for the last two generations.

Kristof: Yeah, I think that there is genuinely some discomfort—and I sympathize with it. I mean, there have been so many people who have been working in their field for decades, for their lifetimes. And then it is frustrating to have some guy come along and write a book and then everybody starts talking about it.

And they’re right, I sympathize with it—I mean truly, the success of Half the Sky is very much a credit to the groundwork that so many NGOs have done for years, for decades, building awareness, building up evidence that these interventions do work.

On the other hand, I think that it is really important—one of the reasons I write about these issues in the Times and why we wrote the book is that if only women write about women’s rights, then the cause is marginalized immediately. If one wants to get broad acceptance, it is really important to have, you know, “dead white guys” write about these kinds of issues. I think there’s a bit of an analogy with gay rights.

Gay rights began to get broader traction when you had a lot more straight people writing about them. And in the same way, more broadly—the holocaust wasn’t a Jewish issue. Civil rights weren’t a black issue. And when you have a hundred million women discriminated against to death around the world, that obviously isn’t just a women’s issue. And I think it is important that this really broad coalition try to bring about change.

Coronel: So what you’ve done is actually mainstream the issue into popular consciousness in the same way that Rachael Carson embedded an environmental awareness in the 1960’s.

Kristof: Well, that is the aim; that is the goal.

But I don’t say what village they’re from, what tribe they are, their father’s name, things that the authorities can use to track them down. And, you know, so far, so good. Nobody has gotten in trouble. But that’s one of those things I do lose sleep over at night.

Audience Member 9: I commend you for your columns and the amount of compassion and empathy you show for victims, but I have a question about it. Do you have a sense that the victims that you concentrate on are third-world, let’s say terrorism victims, as opposed to first-world, western victims of terror or Israeli victims of terror as opposed to third-world victims? Does it go by culture or is it the individuals themselves and the needs that they have and the problems that they have?

Kristof: I tend to focus on the issues that I choose largely because they tend to be neglected, and by shining my light on something that people are not paying attention to, I can change the dynamic, get more resources applied to them. And so that tends to affect how I allocate those resources.

I’ve been thinking that I should probably do more on some of the domestic poverty in this country, for example. I’ve been playing around a little with education in this country. I’ll probably go to Pine Ridge Reservation in this country, which is probably the reservation with the most desperate poverty in this country. I’d like to do more on some of these issues.

But it’s really this question that—I think I can get the most bang for the buck, the most impact for my real estate and op-ed page by focusing on things that are completely neglected.

Audience Member 10: Hi. First of all I wanted to thank you for all of the writing that you did on healthcare in this country. That really affects this country and your writing was powerful and I was able to use it and forward it to people and change their minds about that.

But what I wanted to ask you is about crowd-sourcing. I’m one of your Facebook fans and one of your many Twitter followers. And there’s a lot of very optimistic things being said about crowd-sourcing, especially after the Iran election and the Haiti earthquake. People were able to get information that they wouldn’t have been able to get other ways.

And I hear many more optimistic things about it.  So, the pessimistic things: I looked up Darfur in Wikipedia, and the entire entry didn’t use the word “genocide” at all. Which I found really surprising, as maybe an example of crowd-sourcing not working, or maybe there’s something I didn’t understand. I didn’t really know, but I was just wondering what your take on it was as a whole.

Kristof: Well, I mentioned going to Pine Ridge—actually, that was suggested when I asked people on my Facebook page: should I do more domestic stuff? And people had different views but somebody gave Pine Ridge as an example of a good place, and I said, “Yeah,” you know, “that’s right.”

And so I can’t guarantee that if you’ll rush up to my Facebook page and put in your favorite cause that I’ll necessarily be swayed. But there are times when really good ideas come up like that.

I think better ideas tend to come up on Facebook than on blog entries, probably because Facebook has more accountability. Your friends see what you’ve done on Facebook and tend to have smarter ideas.

It doesn’t always work. I am planning my next “Win a Trip” journey and I was trying to figure out how long it takes to get from Libreville, Gabon to Brazzaville, Congo. I asked on Twitter and I got a zillion people who said, “Oh, according to my map it’s X number of miles.”  Well, I was actually trying to figure out how many days it was gonna be. Finally several people seemed to have a consensus that in one day’s drive you could get from Libreville to Brazzaville. And so I began plotting my journey on that basis and, well, so much for my Twitter readers. It looks like it’s at least three days drive depending on the roads. So it’s a mixed bag, but there are times when I’ve certainly benefited from it.

Audience Member 11: Thanks very much for coming. What are some specific professions that are helping the most people the most?

Kristof: I think one can do a lot of work in a lot of different fields. Obviously, for me, journalism has been a way that I feel like I can chip away at some problems in the world. But for others it’s teaching, it’s medicine, it’s public health, it’s advocacy, it’s public services. And I also think that it’s business, for that matter.

And I think it’s up to everybody what they want to do and how they want to do something. But one thing I really would suggest is that you find some niche in your life to connect with a cause larger than yourself. And don’t just think, “I’m gonna work really hard for the next 40 years and then I’m gonna retire and spend money on good causes.”

I think that for your own sake, as much as anybody else’s, it is really good to have at least one element of your life be something that has some kind of a higher social purpose. Not just because it does good to other people, but because it does good to you. It helps lend a thread of fulfillment in your own life.

Audience Member 12: Hi, thank you so much for coming. My question kind of combines two that were already asked in another way. With the media landscape so different than it used to be, and constantly transforming day-by-day, someone who wants to get involved in international reporting, but isn’t an established journalist yet, doesn’t necessarily look for a newspaper—

It almost seems overwhelming to even consider how you would get started doing this sort of work. It used to be that you could just go apply for a job as a reporter and then you—hopefully—go and cover whatever you wanted to cover. Now, if you want to cover something it seems as if there are many different ways to go about that.

So for someone who does want to cover international stories and be an international reporter, what would you advise them to do?

Kristof: I don’t have any brilliant silver-bullet solutions, but obviously what some people do is they actually go off and work for a newspaper that is based abroad, typically an English language paper. The Cambodia Daily has a long tradition of taking really smart young Americans who go over and work on the Cambodia Daily for a while and just enjoy the thrill of being in Cambodia and then usually parlay that into a journalism job back in the States after a few years.

And the same thing happens in a lot of places. Increasingly, obviously, you need to have some kind of multimedia experience. I think social media are important.

The other thing that I’d say is that as television drops the ball, more and more of what we think of as journalism is gonna be provided by a combination of think tanks and maybe advocacy groups. Aid organizations could be doing an awful lot more of what we think about as journalism just with aid workers in the field, because they’re actually there. If they entrust them to blog, to Twitter, to Facebook, to shoot videos, that could be a really powerful tool.

There is a chance now for YouTube videos to go viral if they’re really well done. And if I were running an aid group I would hand out flip cameras and try to get people on the ground who could put together some really cool videos that might go viral, might spread the word. But unfortunately I’m not running an aid group. So can’t hire you. But there are options out there, I think.

Audience Member 13: Hi, I’m an undergraduate here at Columbia College. I’ve not yet read Half the Sky but I have a question about yours and Sheryl’s choice in titling the book. It’s a reference to an oft-quoted Chairman Mao saying, oft-quoted in China at least. And maybe some members of the audience don’t think of China as an examplar of human rights. I don’t wish to make a definitive statement about China’s human rights records but I will say that in my time in the countryside in China I do see a lot of slogans encouraging people to see their daughters to school and even saying, “We’ll pay you to send your daughters to school.”

Were you and Sheryl trying to hold up China as an example of a country that has succeeded in educating its girls, and if so, how can other developing countries follow through?

Kristof: Part of it was simply that we were desperately trying to come up with a title, and the publisher didn’t like our suggestions and we didn’t like their suggestions, and we all thought Half the Sky was kind of lyrical and it kind of worked.

But the broader part of it is that—and this is something we talk about in the book—one of the real impediments is that we psych ourselves out, because we think that oppression against women is embedded in some foreign cultures and you can’t fight culture.

And China is, I think, a good example of the opposite. A hundred years ago China was arguably the worst place in the world to be born female. You had foot binding, you had child marriage, you had female infanticide, concubinage, the whole works. And these days it’s one of the better places in the world to be born female, and it is precisely because of those kinds of changes that China has had, it’s economic boom.

Those factories in coastal China—70 percent of the employees in those factories are young women from the villages, from Hunan, from Guangxi and so on, who ended up getting those jobs. That economic boom was very much on the backs of these young women, and there was a larger point we were trying to make as well.

Audience Member 14: I have a somewhat difficult question; I’m surprised, actually, that it hasn’t come up yet. I’ve been following the recent scandals with the Vatican, and Maureen Dowd and others, especially the latest Newsweek, have suggested that if women were in positions of leadership within the church that things would have taken a different turn earlier and some of these things could have been prevented.

As someone who’s done all this research on positive roles of women in positions of leadership, what are your views on whether this still applies in a religious areas versus say the political arena?

Kristof: It seems to me that religion is indeed part of the problem in much of the world. Religions typically evolved at times of great inequality and tended to sanctify that inequality, and tended to sort of say, “This is God’s will.”

And in particular, in addition, one religion after another has the willies about menstruation, and that tends to add to this notion of women as ritually unclean in some respects, and adds to this sense of women as second class citizens. And I think if one doctrinally is taught all the time that God sees husbands as in charge of their wives, that does have some kind of a broader effect on one’s values, one’s attitudes. So I think that religions have truly been indeed part of the problem, one of the reasons for these kinds of inequities.

Having said that, if you try to look at what the solutions are, it’s also very clear that religion is part of the solution. In Afghanistan, if you were trying to get more girls into school, or Pakistan, you’re not gonna do it if you have a bunch of Americans who march in and just say, “Get your girls to school.” The people who have the greatest influence there are precisely the clerics. And the clerics are disproportionately educated and partly as a result, in many cases, they do favor much broader girl’s education.

Likewise in Africa, for example, the fastest growing religion—maybe in the world—is Pentecostalism. And there I don’t agree whatsoever with Pentecostal theology—I mean, a lot of the teaching is actually very traditional about men being in charge.

But the reality is that in Pentecostal churches, women are very much invited to speak up in church. And the upshot is that very often this is the first chance that an illiterate woman has ever had to speak up and to be given a sense of moral authority. And to have people listen to her.

And because Pentecostalism has spread so far in Africa and Latin America and elsewhere, it has become, it seems to me, a real vehicle for women’s empowerment in much of the world despite the very conservative social tone of so much of its teachings.

So I think it’s a complex issue, a complex picture. It’s certainly part of the problem, but I think we also have to acknowledge that it’s also gonna be part of the solution.

Coronel: Well, thank you Nick for answering all these questions. Thank you very much.

[Applause]

Mark Taylor: I’d like to thank both Nick and Sheila.

In these last remarks Nick used the word “complex” twice. We live in an extraordinarily complex world, but nevertheless love simplicity. One of the pressing things about so much of what’s going on in journalism, I think, has been the loss of support for the kind of time that it takes to give reflection. The kind of reflection you’ve seen Nick give tonight to these complex problems is all too rare.

It takes time and it takes reflection, and the depth of thought and the depth of commitment that you show in your writing and have shown tonight—we’re deeply in your debt for all of that.

The first book in IRCPL’s publication series with Columbia University Press After Pluralism offers a critique on how religious difference is often framed as a problem only pluralism can solve. Its essays treat pluralism as concept historically and ideologically produced and explore it as a term that sets the norms of identity and the parameters of exchange, encounter and conflict. Contributors locate pluralism’s ideals in diverse sites—Broadway plays, Polish Holocaust memorials, Egyptian dream interpretations, German jails, and legal theories—and demonstrate its shaping of political and social interaction in surprising and powerful ways. To be published on October 15, 2010.

Co-moderators:
Cathy Cohen, University of Chicago
Josef Sorett, Columbia University

Seating is limited. To RSVP, send email to: dwm2110@columbia.edu

If you would like to organize a faculty seminar in the Fall 2010 or Spring 2011, please submit a proposal with a 1-2 page description of subject and a list of likely participants. It should also indicate anticipated results of the seminar, such as particular courses, a collection of essays, public lectures or symposia. Each seminar may have up to two organizers, who will each receive a stipend of $2000. Each seminar will also be provided with $2000 for expenses such as books, catering and materials.

Proposals due to Emily Brennan at eb422@columbia.edu