Why did you choose Sergio Vieira de Mello as the subject of your new book?
I think to some degree our models are off. We still talk a lot about transnational stress, global demons and things crossing borders, and yet our instincts are to focus on statesmen or people who operate within boundaries. We don't have models or instruction from people whose lives are themselves commensurate to the challenges that we recognize as the major ones on the horizon.
You've talked about what a great teacher Vieira de Mello is. What has he taught you?
I think Sergio makes me see dignity. His great line, and actually my favorite line in the whole book, is, "Fear is a bad adviser." I love that. It's so simple. And then that humility and curiosity are very important -- but also a sense of fallibility without paralysis.
I think Obama has all those things in spades. I like to think that as I get older I'm getting better at spending time with people who have qualities that make them worth spending time with. My decision to leave Harvard and go work on foreign policy, in the minority party in the U.S. Senate at that time, it was a terrible year. Obama was great, but on national security the Republican committee chairmen were so deferential to the president that it was hard to get anything done. It was the worst year of my professional life, but it was the education of Samantha Power. You spend time with Obama and you learn things. And hopefully I could bring a little bit of what I learned from Sergio to him as well.
In the book you cite Vieira de Mello as saying that countries will kick and scream at the United Nations, but that at the end of the day they get the U.N. they want and deserve. As a career U.N. diplomat, what kind of reforms was he advocating?
Nothing will happen at the U.N. as such, in that building, until and unless states change. The major reform, the first reform would have to come from this country deciding that it's in our interest to have a stronger body to deal with international threats. We haven't come to that conclusion. We have to believe in international law and binding ourselves to international standards in the interest of getting others bound to those same standards. We haven't made that decision yet.
We have to pay our dues on time. We really have to want the U.N. to be well-endowed, and then we can use our diplomacy to make others invest in it, too. The real [potential for change] that Ban Ki-moon, the secretary-general, has is minuscule compared to what specific countries within the U.N. have. But for the last 60 years the debate about U.N. reform has occurred at the U.N. instead of in world capitals.
The Bush administration has a long-standing policy that it doesn't engage with terrorists or dictators. Is there a time when the United States should?
Absolutely. I'm with Barack on this. But it's not indefinite. Barack's point is you don't treat meeting with America as if it's in and of itself some great reward. It doesn't buy the other side anything. In fact, today it hurts a lot of people to be in business with the United States. So what you do is you meet in order to achieve things. You meet in order to know your foe, if it's a foe. You meet in order to get international wind at your back so that America is not seen as the problem -- [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad is the problem. You meet because you want to stop lumping together the unlike -- al-Qaida, Hamas, Iran, Iraq.
You recently wrote in Time magazine that the U.S. needs to "rethink Iran." What did you mean?
We lunge between two extremes, neither of which is helpful. One is the Bush-Cheney saber rattling -- hyping of the threat, alienation of international stakeholders because of the sense that this is about ideology rather than about problem solving. In saber rattling we're ultimately strengthening Ahmadinejad's base, because the one thing that will unite Iranians -- whether secular, moderate, Islamic or nationalist -- is the idea that we're going to come and attack their country.
On the other hand, there are people who are so disgusted and disillusioned with the Bush years that they romanticize in some way this wily Iranian head of state instead of acknowledging that the Iranian government is by all accounts a supporter of terrorist acts, or that Ahmadinejad is a head of state who denies the occurrence of the Holocaust and has made no secret of his militant animosity toward Israel. My feeling is that we need something in between the extremes that acknowledges that this individual, this regime, is dangerous and unconstructive -- but that also acknowledges we have strengthened its hand by saber rattling, invading Iraq, dislodging the Taliban and rendering Iran the regional heavyweight.
To neutralize the support Ahmadinejad has domestically, we need to stop threatening and to get in a room with him -- if only to convey grave displeasure about his tactics regionally and internationally -- and then try to build international support for measures to prevent him from supporting terrorism and pursuing a nuclear program. If we're ever going to actually put in place multilateral measures to contain Iran, the only way we're going to do that is if we do it in a more united way with our allies.
How do we get out of Iraq?
We have to put Iraqis at the center of our planning and our thinking, which is not something we've done naturally at all -- from the '80s when we supported Saddam Hussein, when he was using chemical weapons against his own people, to the '90s, when we had sanctions against the regime and paid very little attention to the toll of those sanctions on Iraqi civilians. And then, in the decision to go to war and the way we went to war -- which was so not about Iraqis, as shown by our refusal to protect civilians and our failure to do adequate postwar planning.
We need to be incredibly sensitive as we leave Iraq to the welfare of Iraqis who are going to be left in our wake. That potentially entails the idea of sectarian or ethnic relocation if people are in a mixed neighborhood and feel that they'd be safer in a more homogenous neighborhood. Also, [it entails] massive support for neighboring countries that have taken in 2 million refugees, and some very systematic effort between now and the time we begin leaving to build funding and resource streams to internally displaced people.
We have shown again and again that we care about Iraq only insofar as it serves our interests. But I think it's time to show not only Iraqis but the rest of the world that at least as we leave, we're leaving with a very vigilant eye on how to mitigate the consequences of our actions.
About the writer
Leigh Flayton is a writer and editor based in New York.
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