I think you have to separate the issue into the necessary conditions for success on the ground and the necessary conditions to have a political base for intervention. I would certainly argue that international law and basic morality call for intervention in the face of genocide, regardless of the security and economic issues at stake. On the other hand, here in Washington, I think humanitarian claims alone are, unhappily, an insufficient basis for intervention. You are simply unable to rally enough political support in the US Congress or in the public; you have to be able to make the argument that it is both humanitarian and in US interests. Sadly, I think Rwanda in 1994 is an example, of which I am not proud, where nobody within the US executive branch, the US Congress, among editorial writers, or among NGOs was calling for intervention. You unfortunately can see a similar situation now in the eastern Congo, to which we give so little attention.

During your time as US National Security Adviser, the US was presented with conflicts not only in Bosnia, but in other places as well, such as Somalia, Rwanda, and Haiti. What made the Somali conflict more difficult than interventions?

One thing that made it difficult is that we inherited an intervention that had a clear, humanitarian, short-term purpose: to prevent a mass starvation. That intervention, carried out in the last days of the first Bush administration, saved hundreds of thousands of lives, and we should be proud of that. But beyond that goal, the intervention had no clear purpose and no clear timetables. We created the purpose of helping to establish a situation in Somalia where the Somalis could feed themselves and be relatively stable in the future. This involved nation-building. In retrospect, I do not think that was a bad decision.

We got side-tracked when we became preoccupied in our efforts to capture the Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid, who was responsible for the murder of Pakistani peacekeepers. Rather than concentrating so much on resolving that problem militarily, we should have resolved it politically and concentrated on creating a period of security in which the Somalis could resolve their political and economic problems. We were moving toward that in the end. I remember a meeting—before the street battle in Mogadishu—between US President Bill Clinton and UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in which Clinton was urging a move towards a political solution. But it was too little, too late. There is a myth about what happened after the Mogadishu battle. The cliché is that as soon as it happened, Clinton decided we had to get out of Somalia. In fact, it was the US congressional leadership that started to push very hard for us to get out immediately. Clinton resisted, and we had very difficult negotiations with US congressional leaders. We finally reached a compromise date that allowed us to build up our forces and conduct a more orderly exit. I still wish we could have had a later date so we could have done more for the Somalis themselves.

In your book 6 Nightmares, you outline major threats to US security. Did the events of September 11, 2001, change what threatens the United States, or did they just change the US perception of the outside world?

I think the changes have been taking place for over a decade, at least in terms of terrorism. Of course there are many other threats out there such as HIV and AIDS. But throughout the 1990s, there were several shifts in the nature of terrorism. One was the emergence of Al Qaeda and other transnational terrorist groups. They do not engage in state-sponsored terrorism, which is more concerned with a narrow political goal, as the Irish Republican Army and Hamas are. Al Qaeda practices what I have called “existentialist terrorism,” which is destruction for its own sake and to lash out against the forces of the West, mostly in reaction to Western cultural, political, and economic incursions. The latter is much more difficult to deal with because Al Qaeda, for example, does not generally take responsibility for its actions while the more politically inspired terrorists groups do. These new groups are not self-deterred in the same way as politically organized terrorist groups, which do not want to take extreme actions that might limit their political standing. Al Qaeda is not limited by this concern and, in this sense, is more dangerous. I think September 11 was a shock of recognition that we do face a new and more dangerous kind of terrorism. Unfortunately, after September 11, the Bush administration’s focus on Iraq portrayed a threat that was state-sponsored. It presented Al Qaeda as a more traditional kind of terrorism and therefore diverted our attention from the real nature of the threat.

What prescriptions do you have for dealing with the threats that have gained recent attention in the media, such as biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction? Should military or political action be taken, and if so which should be prioritized?

I do not think you should separate military and political action. To be effective in dealing with state-sponsored terrorism or state-sponsored proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, you need both political action and the threat of military action. I do not think we would have achieved the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea—which, although imperfect, did greatly delay their ability to build nuclear weapons—if we had not left the threat of military action on the table. We may not need to think in terms of military action, but certainly in terms of using the threat of sanctions with Iran to try to achieve some type of political or diplomatic solution to their potential to develop nuclear weapons.

Is pre-emptive action the answer? I think it could be in some cases; we left it on the table in North Korea. We should never take it off the table in principle. But I do not believe it is useful as a doctrine. First, it pushes states into the development of nuclear weapons if they are on formal notice that we might preempt against them. Second, it puts a huge burden on our intelligence services to always get their information right, which, as we have seen in Iraq, is not quite the case. Third, a doctrine makes it much harder to bring along other states in the common effort to deal with proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.