The following is a transcript of
"WomenMatter, Facts and Trade-Offs
Women and the War Word: Fear, Facts & Action"

ANNOUNCER: WomenMatter, Facts &Trade-offs is the place where we take one issue at a time and find the connection between our personal lives and the facts of the bigger system we all live in, and recognize that every idea for making it better has trade-offs. In this show, we bring ourselves face to face with our personal role in the biggest long term challenges we must face – what to do about nuclear bombs, drugs, and now terrorists.

In each case, whoever is president of the United States has declared that these efforts are wars. Wars that challenge not only our quality of life, but life itself. As citizens in a democracy, we’re asked to follow our leaders and pay the bills for as long as the problem will last. And each of these are problems that have, and will, exist for years and years and years.

Dr. Nancy Bauer, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of WomenMatter, is the author of many textbooks in American history and social studies. For this show, she asks Dr. Michelle Berlinerblau, a psychologist who specializes in fear, to explain how our individual experiences as children end up affecting the way we decide whether to follow a leader, and whether we trust ourselves to understand the facts of each situation and the short and long term costs – the trade-offs – of every action.

NANCY BAUER: So we call this show Women and the War Word: Fear, Facts, and Action. War is a fearful word, and we women, who are 52 percent of the nation, are seldom among those who make the critical decisions. Do we know enough to vote for or against any one of these long term struggles that are not like any nation-against-nation war – the ones that we studied in school, and the ones that the founding fathers described in the Constitution.

Before we listen to the interviews with experts on what is and has been going on in government, we must turn our critical ability on ourselves. Do we dare to trust our own judgment? How do we women react when we are told that there is a war that must be fought, and all we have to do is let the government lead?

WomenMatter’s research tells us that women of all ages and stages share a perspective on life. And we hold responsibility for the safety and health of our families and communities. So if that’s the case, then what holds us women back from taking our responsibility as the majority that we are?

Dr. Michelle Berlinerblau, WomenMatter provides information three times a week, it takes five minutes to read each one of them and take action. Three times a week we tell women about what’s going on in government in plenty of time for us to weigh in with our representatives before they pass laws making rules about our daily life, and before they spend our tax dollars, and before they go into battle and borrow money to pay for it. Why, oh why, do we hold back?

MICHELLE BERLINERBLAU: You know Nancy, as we listen to the speakers discuss the current political situation, we need to be aware of both what is consciously going on within ourselves, but also what unconsciously might be resonating, as we listen not only for the words, but also the emotions and needs that get stirred up in all of us.

Childhood issues, such as the ability to trust, to question, as well as unfulfilled fantasies – the wish to be taken care of – get stirred up by political rhetoric. Ultimately to some degree, unconsciously most of us are still seeking the good and powerful, protective, maternal or paternal figure. If we are repeatedly disappointed, we sink into various degrees of hopelessness, helplessness, boredom, disinterest, and this may limit our responsiveness to the political situation.

BAUER: Wow. So what we’re saying is that these childhood experiences that we’ve had lead us to the expectations of what we expect from our leaders?

BERLINERBLAU: Exactly, and it’s not something that we’re conscious of. So it’s something that we have to, in a sense, develop what we call an observing ego – the ability to kind of step outside of ourselves and to wonder when we’re listening to someone. Are we dealing only with the current reality or is this activating within us something from our past?

BAUER: That’s really interesting, because so often we think that as long as women get the information they need, then they can immediately take action. And what you’re saying is, between the time we get the information and the taking action, which is either speaking up or emailing our Congressmen, or telling people at the dinner table what we think, we’re going to have an emotional reaction that we have to understand.

BERLINERBLAU: That’s exactly right. For example, if we’ve been repeatedly disappointed with authority figures, that’s going to limit our ability to trust. If we’ve had difficulties in childhood, whether it’s culturally or because of childhood experiences, in terms of our ability to question, then we may not question what the political figures are saying.

BAUER: So as we listen to Professor Geoffrey Stone, the leading scholar on the Constitution, on war and our personal freedom, and to Rensselaer Lee, who tracks the actions that get us into these long term initiatives that presidents always call war, we have to think about how we react and where we can make the difference. And then we’ll hear from Ambassador Swanee Hunt, who has had international experience in trying to get women to take the leadership for peace and the troubles that happen when you try to get that to happen, how difficult it is. So as we listen to these remarkable interviews, let’s watch for our emotional reaction to the facts.

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BAUER: WomenMatter welcomes Professor Geoffrey R. Stone, Harry Kalven, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, and former dean of the law school and provost of the university. Author of a critical book for our time called “Perilous Times: Free Speech and War Time from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism.”

Throughout the past generation Americans have been asked by resident after president after president to support long term wars, where the enemy is not some specific nation physically attacking our territory, and the effort we’re asked to support is going to last for years. We’ve had the “cold war,” “the war on drugs,” “the war on terrorism,” “the war on poverty,” and after we dropped the A-bomb, the effort to use our war power to stop other nations from what we term nuclear proliferation. We’re asked to do these things forever.

These are all scary. Every time we’re asked, “Trust the president.” Every time we are told that it is the job of the president under the Constitution to lead us in times of war. Professor Stone, we’ve all studied and forgotten our American history long ago. What do you want the public to know about the Constitution? What are war powers, and who has them?

STONE: Well, war powers are actually held under the Constitution by both the legislative and the executive branch. So both Congress and the President have war powers. But war powers, in some sense, state the very concept incorrectly. It’s really rather that the Congress and the President are given the ability to do things like raise an army and navy, in the context of the Congress, or to be Commander-in-Chief, to play the role of Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Navy, on the part of the President. But none of the, nothing in the Constitution actually addresses the idea that either the Congress or the President has extraordinary powers in wartime that are to trump ordinary civil liberties. So even thinking of war powers the way we often do tends to inflate the extent to which we think that those are intended by the Constitution to be extraordinary powers.

On the other hand, the framers of the Constitution were very thoughtful about the structure of government, and they were obviously aware that wartime is different from peacetime, and that there is a necessity to focus the energies of the nation when dealing with a foreign threat. And along that line, they clearly did intend the President to be the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy. But what they meant by that was not that he would be Commander-in-Chief of the nation, or that the nation would essentially go into a period of suspension in wartime, so that the President could exercise whatever authority he thought necessary to serve the ends of the government. Rather, they were very skeptical about executive power, and very nervous about the authority of the President in wartime, and so they clearly divided and separated the powers between the Congress and the President, to ensure that to the extent extraordinary steps were necessary in a time of war, that those steps would, to the greatest extent possible, be taken in conjunction by both the President and the Congressional branch.

BAUER: So, a President then can’t just make war.

STONE: A President cannot just make war. It’s generally recognized that the President has the authority to defend the United States against an attack, and that in this context of an emergency, where there is a direct attack on the United States, the President can call forth the military and do everything necessary to repel that attack. But once one goes beyond the question of directly repulsing an attack on the United States, then of course the power to declare war, under the Constitution, is given only to the Congress, not to the President.

And one of the complicated questions of Constitutional history is what does that actually mean? Does it suggest that the Congress has the power to declare war? But what can you do without a declaration of war? And the practical reality of American history is that presidents have frequently used American military forces in a wide variety of incursions and engagements and conflicts and wars without any formal declaration.

And so, the notion that Congress has the power to declare war has not been seen as a very strong constraint on the ability of the President to act.

On the other hand, Congress clearly does have the authority to restrain the President if it wishes to do so. It can do that both by the power of the purse, that is, only Congress has the power to appropriate funds, and if the Congress does not like what a President is doing it can simply cut off funds. And obviously that was a very contentious question during the latter stages of the Vietnam War. And the other thing, of course, the Congress can do if it doesn’t like what the President is doing is a veto. But as a practical matter, Congress has rarely been put in the position where it was asked to actually declare war. I believe the United States has formally declared war only five times in history.

BAUER: In our whole history?

STONE: In our whole history, even though the President has authorized the use of the military in over 150 incidents.

BAUER: So the Congress, it keeps going second.

STONE: Yes, except in World War I, World War II, the Spanish-American War, and the War of 1812 – basically Congress has given the President the lead. And more and more so over time. Partly because the need for quick action has become much more immediate in a world in which the nature of transportation, communication, and weapons has changed. And partly I think, quite honestly, and unfortunately because Congress has largely abdicated its responsibility.

Even in situations like Vietnam, it was obvious that the Congress could have taken, if it wished to, a stronger position, but it chose not. I mean the Congress has, for most of our history, and certainly since the beginning of the twentieth century, tended to allow the President to take the lead in these matters and act in kind of a second capacity. So in the war in Iraq, in the “war on terrorism,” for example, the Congress enacted the authorization to use military force, but that was not a formal declaration of war.

And one of the problems, I should say, too, is that the concept of a war as it was understood more than 200 years ago typically involved, obviously, one country fighting against another country. And a great many of the instances in which the United States has used its military force around the world haven’t really fit that description. Even the Civil War was not a “war” in that sense, because the whole point of the Union was that the Confederacy was not a separate country, it was simply a rebellion within the United States. And of course the Korean War and the Vietnam War, even the attack on Afghanistan and Iraq, were not couched really as wars against another country. And so because they haven’t been couched that way, it’s been easy to circumvent the question of, is this really a war within the meaning of the Constitution? And the result of that is that a war within the meaning of the Constitution really has no legal significance anymore.

BAUER: And of course that brings us then to talk about these long term threats that have been labeled war, the latest of which is called terrorism. I mean the President, much of the Congress, and the press have labeled our shared concern about worldwide terrorism; they’ve called it a war. And they use the Constitution to defend some of the government actions, saying they’re going to prevent future attacks. And some of the things they do, they say they’re retaliating for 9-11, which was a past attack. So in order to catch spies, catch individuals, catch little groups or cells, the government says it has to gather information and not tell anybody else what it is. Are these actions an appropriate use of either our history or the war powers in the Constitution? I mean, is this terrorism any different from all the other military action in our history?

STONE: Well, I think that in my own view is that, you just cited the National Security Agency’s surveillance program. I mean, I believe that that program is unlawful, and that it is not authorized either by federal legislation or by the Commander-in-Chief power of the President, and that therefore “war on terrorism” or not, even in a war there are many things a President may not do. And I believe that the National Security Agency surveillance program is an example of an illegal program at the present time.

BAUER: And that’s the one that actually has the force of law. They actually passed a law saying there should be such an organization.

STONE: Right. In 1978 Congress enacted legislation that was designed to authorize the executive branch to engage in foreign surveillance in circumstances that were more sympathetic to the ability of the government to engage in such surveillance under ordinary criminal law. So they created a special court that was much more flexible. With respect to protecting secrecy, it gave the government the ability to initiate surveillance before it even had a warrant, for 72 hours. Those were things that ordinarily do not exist.

And if the government, after 9-11, had continued to act within the requirements that bind them, then it certainly would be acting lawfully. But the problem is that it has simply chosen to ignore going to the FISA, which is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. They’ve decided to ignore going to the FISA court for search for electronic surveillance, and simply declared, in effect, that the President has the authority as Commander-in-Chief to decide to engage in surveillance, even to the extent it intrudes on American citizens on American soil, because he’s the Commander-in-Chief. And even in the express defiance of a statute that limits that.

So I think we are seeing, in that example and in many others, including the detentions of American citizens, where I think the most dramatic illustration of the tension between this executive belief about the reach of his power and the appropriate boundaries of the Constitution, is the claim of this executive that it has the authority to seize an American citizen on American soil, bring that person to a military facility, hold him incommunicado, not tell anyone that he has been seized, deny him access to a counsel or a court, and hold him indefinitely, simply on the basis of a determination by someone in the executive branch that this citizen of the United States is something called an Enemy Combatant. And that is the most far-reaching assertion of executive authority, with respect to detention and secret detention of American citizens that any President has ever asserted.

And I don’t throw the phrase around lightly, but if I were to ask you to tell me what a Gestapo-like tactic is, it is defined by making a person disappear. And that’s precisely what the United States government in this administration has claimed for itself as a power of the Commander-in-Chief without any legislative authorization, and in its own view, without any oversight.

BAUER: So the assumption is, we can move somebody from being a citizen to being an Enemy Combatant because that’s somebody who doesn’t like the government. And so you change his status by fiat, and that—

STONE: Well it’s worse than being an enemy of the government, you change him into being a non-entity.

BAUER: Ah.

STONE: You turn him into someone who has disappeared. And of course the government would say that we, of course, make determinations as to whether somebody is an Enemy Combatant ourselves in a fair and accurate manner. But that’s why we have courts, and that’s why we have separation of powers, and that’s why we believe in due process. And not to allow the executive to make determinations on its own about whether individuals should be seized, detained and locked away indefinitely, in-communicado, without any access to the outside world. That’s simply an unprecedented assertion of authority by the executive branch.

BAUER: This is the first time we’ve seen this?

STONE: Absolutely.

BAUER: And under the grounds that there’s something different about worldwide terrorism. Let me ask you this, I mean one of the things we hear from the government is the reason why we need to do these things we’ve never done before is because there’s new technology now, we’ve got this Internet and cell phones, and therefore we can’t do the stuff we used to do. Does this new technology really make any difference when we’re talking about basic rights?

STONE: The truth is, the bigger issue in my view, in terms of the reason why the government believes it needs to do these things, is something that does need to be taken quite seriously. And that’s that in all of our history in the past it was never possible for a relatively small group of individuals to have access to weapons that had the capacity to kill thousands, or tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people.

In the past, when we talked about anarchists and so on, we were talking about somebody that might throw a bomb that might kill a couple of people, maybe even a dozen people. Not to minimize that, but it’s quite different than a chemical, biological or nuclear weapon. And so the basic claim is less one about the changes in technology than it is about the changes in danger. And that if you fail to catch a person who is going to set off a bomb that will kill 10 people, that’s different than if you fail to catch a person who’s going to set off a bomb that’s going to kill 100,000 people. And therefore, the argument from the government’s perspective is that those rules that were perfectly appropriate for dealing with a very different world are no long appropriate in a world in which the dangers are so much greater than they’ve even been before. And that’s a serious argument that does need to be taken seriously.

My objection is that instead of presenting that argument and directly addressing that question to the Congress and to the courts, as it should, instead what the President has done is to assert inherent authority to make those judgments for himself and by himself, and to impose them on the country, without having that debate take place and without having Congress and the courts play their appropriate Constitutional roles in evaluating the Constitutionality or desirability or legality of these types of actions.

BAUER: So the message we’re getting then, is that presidents have always pushed, and often Congress has always caved. Clearly, Professor Geoffrey Stone, you have taught us today that we need to know our history and know our Constitution. We have to push Congress to speak up early and not cave. And American public and the women of WomenMatter have got to know this and speak up so we can command the press to pay attention, and that waiting for reelection, waiting for impeachment, is waiting too late.

Many, many thanks to you, and we look forward to discussing this in the future.

STONE: My pleasure, thank you so much for having me.

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BAUER: WomenMatter welcomes Dr. Rensselaer Lee, Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Dr. Lee, you’ve studied so many of the wars on unsolved, long-term problems – the “war on drugs”, the “war” on nuclear proliferation, and now this long-term “war on terrorism”? As you look at them, do they show a pattern?

RENSSELAER LEE: Well, I think that there is a pattern here, and the pattern is that here we have basically an international campaign in which the United States sets the agenda, the priorities, and provides a lot of the funding. But unfortunately powerful interests in a number of the target countries or regions may really not go along with our initiatives, and they even oppose them.

For example, with the “war against drugs”, we’ve seen what’s happened in South America. We have an industry, the cocaine industry and other drugs, that bring a lot of money to the region. And large constituencies have developed around the drug traffic – not just the traffickers themselves but the people they hire, the officials that they pay off. There are multiplier effects that ripple through the economy and so on and so forth, and so we find that we don’t get a fully cooperative response from these countries.

You look at the “war against terrorism”, same thing. A number of countries, especially in the Middle East, are providing support of one kind or another to groups that we consider to be terrorists. For example, Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and even wealthy donors still in Saudi Arabia and other countries providing money to Al Qaeda.

And also, our efforts to stop nuclear proliferation. Well, I think these may be working to some extent, certainly I hope that we do. Certainly the information is not all in yet. But we see cases where countries, for example, such as Pakistan – or rather key officials in Pakistan provide nuclear technology equipment, nuclear bomb designs even, to foreign countries. So our efforts are being undermined there. Also in Russia, there have been allegations that high officials are corrupt nuclear managers have tried to, or may try to sell nuclear materials, highly enriched uranium and plutonium, to which they have access.

So I mean it’s not a very pretty picture all the way around. And again the fundamental problem is that we are trying to really do things at our end, we’re making a heroic effort around the world trying to muster support for these efforts. And I think the efforts are well meant, but unfortunately our interests don’t exactly coincide with those of the countries where we’re trying to get these programs moving. There are powerful interests within these countries.

BAUER: Right. Well let me ask you then, if it begins with the president of the United States, who gets elected to that office, making a decision that we are going to be the leader of the “war on drugs”. We are going to be the leader, even though we dropped the bomb, on the nuclear proliferation, so other people can’t have it. And we’re going to be the leader in affecting something about worldwide Islamic terrorism.

LEE: Yeah, we’re a big and powerful country, and people are certainly going to pay lip service to the agenda and goals of these international campaigns. But the fact of the matter is people do not see these problems in exactly the same way that the United States perceives them.

BAUER: And what about Congress?

LEE: And, and we’ve spent-- let me just run through just a couple of things. I mean, we are spending about 4 billion dollars a year trying to keep drugs from coming to the United States. And these efforts have really been largely unsuccessful. There’s plenty of cocaine, there’s plenty of marijuana, plenty of methamphetamines, plenty of everything here in the United States. These efforts are not working. I think they’re well meant, I applaud the intent behind them, but I think that in terms of their actual effect on consumption here in the United States the efforts are largely symbolic.

BAUER: Can we call them wars, the way in which we go about this thinking that our president can declare a war on something, Congress then votes the dollars for it?

LEE: That’s right.

BAUER: And then are we naïve to tell the world, “This is what we’re going to do,” and then the world says, “No.” I mean do we need a resident anthropologist looking at these things and saying, “Have you looked at the rest of the world and do we know what’s going on there?”

LEE: Well, I think we do, but the point is that if Congress votes the money for these programs, whether it’s a war against drugs or terror or Afghanistan or Iraq or something else, these programs acquire a life of their own.

BAUER: Aha.

LEE: They acquire a life of their own. And this means that people who live in the United States and who work for the government, or who are contractors for the government, or who have some relationship, I mean we’re all trying to dip into this, into these funds one way or another. Because that’s the way the system works.

But if you go back and you look at the actual strategies, I come up with certain conclusions. First of all, I don’t think that it’s possible to stop drugs from coming into the United States. You have millions of people in South America and other parts of the world trying to sell the drugs, and you have millions of people in the United States who want to consume the drugs. You have the government trying to stand somewhere in between – no way that this is going to work.

BAUER: And is terrorism the same way?

LEE: No, well terrorism is a very different issue. I mean if you go back and you look at what happened after 9-11, the president, I think, made the only decision that he could make in a case like this, and he went into Afghanistan, sent American troops into Afghanistan. And we really wiped out, I think, a number of base areas, training areas that Al Qaeda was managing in that country, and put them into a situation where we haven’t caught Osama Bin Laden yet, but he’s not really very active any more, and Al Qaeda doesn’t have the same, shall we say, structural control over the international jihadist movement that it had at one time. So we did the right thing.

Then we did the wrong thing. We went into Iraq. We spent, what, 200, 250, 300 billion dollars in Iraq, and the insurgency shows no signs of ending. The country seems to be right now on the brink of civil war, and in fact, Iraq, the war in Iraq is becoming kind of a magnet for jihadist, extremist elements everywhere. So that has a certain self-perpetuating quality. And that was badly thought out.

BAUER: So we the American public need to understand sooner then where can we intervene?

LEE: Well the American public has to intervene and say, “let’s stop, we are spending this money foolishly.” The problem is, how to do you reverse a policy that was mistaken to begin with? But when you get into a situation in Iraq, what would be the consequences of pulling out tomorrow, pulling out next year, versus continuing along the road that we’re going?

Certainly I think one solitary lesson of the Iraq morass is that we’re going to think twice before we try to get involved in some other country, like going to war with Iran, which some people -- you hear that kind of shrill noises from some elements here in Washington, that we should maybe consider military action against Iran. But I don’t think that’s going to happen. I think the American public will have, by this time, lost its taste for long-term and hopeless intervention overseas like what we’ve seen in Iraq.

BAUER: So we’re talking then about the public educating itself, and of course that’s what WomenMatter’s business is.

LEE: Well I mean, to the extent that women, or some women, might have more time to think about these issues, they should get out and vote and they should get out and elect more people who have more sense about these things.

BAUER: So it’s the relationship of the people and what we know, to the Congress and what they know, and acting soon enough to make a difference ahead of time rather than having them just cave in and then we’re all sorry afterward. So when a problem reaches crisis proportions as you’ve described, the government tries to highlight the threat to the public, rather than admitting that we didn’t pay attention sooner, and now we have to build a future.

LEE: Yeah, adding up all the money we spent. I mean you talk about getting rid of the drug problem, or problems like that, other illegal activities, like international counterfeiting, immigration, white slavery and so on. These are really market type issues. I mean you can’t wage war against a market. A market is a mechanism, and what we have to do with drugs is to get people to stop using them. And this means education programs, but it means more than that, it also means improving the quality of life for people in inner cities and rural areas and so on and so forth.

I mean if drugs are a real, terrible problem in this country, and you say well, ‘how do you go about doing that?’ Well, if you look at all the money that we’ve been spending uselessly on this international “war against terrorism”, specifically and particularly the hundreds of billions of dollars we’ve spent in Iraq, the money is out there to do something to make a start in improving the lives of people who are hopelessly mired into this cycle of drug use and urban and rural decay.

BAUER: So we have to be in constant touch with our legislators, we have to know exactly what they’re doing. We have to speak up soon enough.

LEE: Yeah complain, I mean just complain! Look at the way the money is being spent. I mean it’s not being spent on human needs. This Iraq campaign was absolutely atrocious. It was sold to the American public as a war to protect American national security against an Iraqi regime armed with weapons of mass destruction. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

And basically we were getting information from foreign intelligence services and from other sources that these weapons were there. Well they weren’t there. And we were being dragged into this war by people who, I think, had a rather distorted or perverted strategic view of the realities in the Middle East, and about our American security in relation to these, to the situation around the world.

But the trouble is, the trouble is it’s going to be hard to get out of Iraq now. How do we do that? That’s where we have to think.

BAUER: And we will, and we need to think together about these things, but the fact is that you have pointed out to us that the necessity for Americans, and particularly for the women who take a very pragmatic view of policy, to take a look at where the money is spent, and to do it soon enough. But that means knowing enough early enough, and you’ve helped us see that there is naivete, even if it is well meaning.

WomenMatter is nonpartisan. We’re not talking about are we for or against one party or the other, we’re talking about knowing enough to know what’s going on soon enough that we can demand from our legislature, where we have the actual connection: we elect them, we pay for them, we’re in constant contact with them. And this is why WomenMatter exists, to make it possible for the information to get to women but also to make it easy for women to get to that branch of the government where they can make a difference soon enough.

Dr. Rennsselaer Lee, thank you very much for helping us understand when an international campaign becomes a major decision in which we get caught, and how we have to deal with these long-term problems in more sophisticated ways, understanding what’s up. Thanks a lot.

LEE: You’re welcome.

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BAUER: This show is called Women & the War Word: Fear, Facts, and Action. And women of WomenMatter, it is my pleasure and privilege to introduce you to ambassador Swanee Hunt, former American ambassador to Austria, director of the Women and Public Policy Program at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and founder of Hunt Alternatives Fund and its major program with its intriguing title, Initiative for Inclusive Security, bringing women across divisions together, and then together to the peace table.

Ambassador Hunt, WomenMatter is based in our research that tells us that women in the United States across all demographic and political divisions share a very pragmatic view of what happens in their lives. And they don’t take action without knowing the details of what’s going on. They may be active in their local communities, but they don’t see themselves as part of the body politic. You are a major catalyst, engaging women in the political process in this country and in the larger world, and let me ask you on behalf of WomenMatter, how do you get women into the process before war happens?

SWANEE HUNT: Our sense is that women are very much oriented towards relationships, and that includes their families and their friendships, their communities, and then struggling with what you said about the body politic, that it’s a further stretch to get them to think in terms of shaping public policy. Often they feel intimidated by that idea, so you can bring them into the shaping of the policy through relationships. By saying, you know the adage, “One snowflake may melt, but together they stop traffic.” And women are like snowflakes, so you’ve got to help them see themselves as part of a mass.

BAUER: Where and how then do they get the information they need to know, that there are a lot of other snowflakes out there. I love the metaphor. I mean you do a lot of work in conflict prevention and non-violent transformation. And they need information to know how to do that, information they can trust. How do you get it to them?

HUNT: We were very intent in our initiative in not simply recycling adages and common sense kinds of attitudes, but rather going on to research what the difference women have made in actual conflict situations. So we have sat down, as teams, research teams into conflicts. Because our interest is, how do you get women active in the peace process on negotiating peace and really influencing the policy makers? So we sent out these fifteen teams to places like Sierra Leone or El Salvador, Cambodia, Rwanda. And then we created a website, which is www.womenwagingpeace.net, and net is for network. And if you go into that website you can download all kinds of information, you can read the research about the difference women have made, but you can also actually get into the lives of individual women who are the change agents.

The idea is for women of the U.S. to be inspired by what women activists are doing in Colombia, or in Burundi and to be able to take those models to use themselves.

BAUER: And so once they have information, and before they take action, what’s the emotional reaction of women to learning what they might accomplish?

HUNT: Remember in the seventies that there was this whole generation of us who were involved in assertiveness training, empowerment training, and we actually would go to assertiveness training workshops or groups that met week after week? And it changed, very much, the sense of self. I think that getting women active in attempts to decrease war and to elevate a more civil way of seeing our world and being in the world, is very empowering, and it changes the individual women. They grow stronger and they’re involved. Their voices are more confident. So it’s not just the policy at the end that is the beneficiary, but it’s also the women themselves who are affecting the policy.

BAUER: So learning to trust ourselves, I mean this is the tough one, I think, when we’re not used to having that kind of power. But coming together, gaining power collectively rather than one at a time, as you were saying earlier, do you see this becoming a grassroots movement? That is, people need to get together where they already are before they can then get together and tell their legislators what they want them to do?

HUNT: Well there are a number of ways that you can influence a system. There are women who are very happy to not get together locally, but rather to be writing letters or making calls or even going to Washington, or meeting with legislators as they come back home. But for the most part women thrive on working collectively in groups.

BAUER: And they feel more comfortable with the groups where they live and where they are. And that’s where it gets us to the point about the work that you do then in pre-negotiation and the negotiation process. Can women wage peace before a war happens? Can they prevent it?

HUNT: The forces are so enormous in terms of the whole military and the industrial complex that supports it. The, when we say “Can women prevent war?” we certainly know of situations where, like in Russia, the women have gone in and organized to stop the first war in Chechnya. That was a committee of soldiers’ mothers. And the U.S. ambassador there credited them, that organization, with having so prevailed on Yeltsin and so embarrassed him that he pulled out of Chechnya. So there are certainly examples like that, yes.

BAUER: So that the lesson for Americans, and this is very interesting, in our conversations with the people who are tracking both the law and the Congress and what’s happening in the world today, and particularly in this country, what we’ve learned from the other interviews on this show as well is that it’s the legislature that we’ve got to put the pressure on. Because all presidents have taken the liberty of doing things that are not necessarily spelled out in the Constitution and over the history of this country it’s happened over and over and over again. But the legislature tends to cave in on the assumption that presidents know something that nobody else knows, or that presidents have insider information and plans that nobody else knows. And legislators are afraid to counter that unless they think that the people who vote for them are paying attention day by day by day to what’s going on. WomenMatter is there to serve in this way, that is, as an information and education service, nonpartisan, to women across the country.

And so that do you see the work that you’ve done being kind of a model for what we can do in this country? That the kinds of things that you’ve done, built on relationships as you said, women relating to each other and then personally to those issues, that they can, in a sense, be at the table virtually, if not at the table running for office each time?

HUNT: I definitely think that. You know I was just yesterday at the U.N., and we were talking about why the Secretary General has not made progress on appointments to the highest associations. There are about forty of these special representatives to the Secretary General and I think the most that have been women are two. You know it’s disgraceful, and there are Security Council resolutions demanding that that be changed. Every year there’s a big push to get this changed. The reality is that it doesn’t change. And so as I was talking with various undersecretaries general and the like-- you know, Kofi Annan is a great person, really wonderful person, he wants to do the right thing-- and they said, “You know the issue is that when it comes time to appoint, there are all of these political pressures.” People say, “You know the Japanese haven’t had anyone in a long time.” Or, “There should be an African,” or this, you know. And so they start narrowing and pushing, and then there’s this person who didn’t get this other position, and so that person should be considered. And the whole question of gender balance just gets pushed down, down, down. It’s not that it completely disappears. But it’s not one of the issues that must be satisfied.

And it has everything to do with pressure and voices, and the number of emails and the number of phone calls. And that’s where women could really make a difference.

BAUER: Well we are going to bring your message and your experience to a large population in this country. WomenMatter can and will put our spotlight on www.WomenMatter.com, .net, and .org, on these women and your work, both at the Women and Public Policy at Harvard, and in this remarkable Initiative for Inclusive Security, including all of us, as we provided continuous information day by day by day, in a safe environment where women can connect to each other in this country, across all divisions. And then I hope with you, to women globally. And we can take the responsibility that our fifty-two percent of this country gives us to get our insights and our day by day experience to our government. Thank you Ambassador Swanee Hunt, and good luck in the wonderful work that you do.

HUNT: Thank you so much.

* * *

BAUER: Now that we’ve heard these remarkable experts talking about how we get into war, how we affect war, how the war word is used to apply to initiatives that have been happening over the years, and how officials do that, and what we can do about it, Michelle Berlinerblau, what are our elected officials actually doing with us and the war word? We hear it all the time.

BERLINERBLAU: You know Nancy, as we’ve been listening to the different wars that have allegedly been waged on our behalf, ultimately no wars, the undisclosed war, the secret war, is the war on our emotions, which are propagated by authority figures, are promoted by narcissistic, or what we call self-needs. Which include, among others, the need for power, for glory, and for revenge.

BAUER: So that they say that they’re fighting the wars on our behalf when they actually are using the word to reach us emotionally and get us to follow them. What causes the leaders to do this?

BERLINERBLAU: There’s an understanding of what our vulnerabilities are. You know as a nation fractured by 9-11, our vulnerability to threats to our security is a traumatic trigger. Images of the two planes impaling the World Trade Center are a shared reality irrespective of race, gender or political orientation. Dormant childhood wishes like the wish to be taken care of, the wish to be protected, can be reactivated in all of us to varying degrees by authority figures who, to borrow from part of a phrase from Dr. Stone, may exhibit extraordinary power.

BAUER: So that each of these people who is in office at a time when there is trouble, and of course the fact that it was on television in everybody’s living room, so we all felt that we were attacked, are saying, “You’ve seen it, you saw it happen, it happened to you, I know you’re emotionally upset,” and they go back and then say, “Trust me and I will take care of it for you.” And for those of us who want to be taken care of, I guess everybody wants to be taken care of, but for those of us who expect it, or hope for it, that we tend to follow without actually paying attention to what the facts are and whether or not this is a good idea?

BERLINERBLAU: Well we listen to the facts, but the more sort of secret part of us is that we all exist in an emotional realm ranging from reasonable to pathological needs. In the same way that politicians interpret events based on their needs, we will interpret what we hear not only based on our current needs and conflicts and fantasies, but on past needs, conflicts and fantasies, again, such as the need to trust, the need to question, the need to remain silent. A pathological need to trust or a fear of authority figures may silence our ability to question.

BAUER: And may silence our ability to take responsibility as well.

BERLINERBLAU: Exactly.

BAUER: So that instead of spending a lot of time as pundits do, and television does, trying to figure out what is in the head of the president of the United States over all these years, what we’re really talking about and heard from our interviews, is that we can take responsibility based on the facts, and that’s what the legislature does. So instead of treating the president of the United States, be it male or female, as the one person that can save us, that’s not Mommy and it’s not Daddy, that’s somebody in office. And that person, male or female, has his or her own issues to deal with, that’s why they wanted to run for that office in the first place.

So this show, which is about women and the war word, says get a look at our own fears, where did they come from? Take a look at the facts of history, which is the facts of what’s going on, and it is the legislature that holds the collective responsibility of all of us, and it is the legislature with which we can deal directly and we can take action without having to play out this game of which of the men or women on television would you really like to invite to the family barbecue or which one seems sincere, all of those things. As we’ve been told long ago, Abraham Lincoln, if he’d been on television with his high-pitched voice, would never have been elected.

So we shift the responsibility now to trusting ourselves, to understanding our own history. To knowing how we react to authority. To learn how to question, and to trust ourselves to question, and to take responsibility. Because we’re observers of our own emotions, and each one of us knows what pushes us, what causes us to wince, and we can take our own selves into the body politic as an experienced voter, understanding our emotions and understanding our reaction to authority.

So the message of this show, “Women & the War Word”, is we should know our history and know the history of the country and know the facts. And know them as they happen. Don’t wait for the election and the campaign that promises to protect and has negative things to say about all those individuals who are running for office. War, for a democracy, is no different from any other decision. It has to be made by informed citizens.

Women of WomenMatter, WomenMatter trusts you and you can trust us. We are nonpartisan, and we provide for you and for ourselves five minutes three times a week, on www.women.com, the information you need about what the legislature is doing and about what’s happening in the executive branch and in the judicial branch of the government. But it’s the legislature that depends on us. And it’s the legislature that listens to their emails and their phone calls. They control the money and they are responsible for preventing irresponsible leadership. So on womenmatter.com you will know what’s happening before it is too late to make a difference.

ANNOUNCER: WomenMatter is always nonpartisan, based in history with a hard, clear-eyed look at the facts and the trade-offs. We make the complex clear, not simple. For WomenMatter, Facts & Trade-offs, this is Victoria Jones.

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