Q&A: Wrestling with the Unthinkable
L. Paul Bremer and the War on Terrorism
In June 2000, when the National Commission on Terrorism
released its report, the commission’s chairman, L. Paul (“Jerry”)
Bremer III (MBA ’66), issued a warning. “There’s
a chance terrorists will try to stage a catastrophic event in
the United States in the future,” Bremer stated. “Thousands
of casualties,” he said, would be the likely result.
Counterterrorism and international affairs have been central elements
of Bremer’s career. Entering the diplomatic service immediately
after graduating from HBS, he embarked on several tours of duty
overseas as a political, economic, and commercial officer at U.S.
embassies before becoming deputy ambassador to Norway from 1976
to 1979. He was selected in 1983 by President Reagan to be ambassador
to the Netherlands, where he served until 1986 when Reagan appointed
him ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism, making Bremer his
top advisor on terrorism.
Bremer, who has also worked as a special or executive
assistant to six secretaries of state, entered the private sector
in 1989, becoming managing director of Kissinger Associates, a
strategic consulting firm. In 2000, he moved to Marsh & McLennan
to take charge of that firm’s political risk business; last
October, he was named chairman and CEO of Marsh Crisis Consulting,
a unit of Marsh & McLennan that provides a full range of services
to corporate clients to help them avoid, plan for, and manage
crises such as natural disasters, product recalls, and terrorism.
A Yale graduate and Connecticut native, Bremer serves on several
boards, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and is
the founder and president of the Lincoln/Douglass Scholarship
Foundation, a Washington, D.C.– based nonprofit that provides
scholarships to inner-city youths. Married and the father of two
grown children, he resides in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
What are the key nonmilitary components of fighting terrorism?
Above all else, the key is good intelligence.
The objective is to stop terrorists from attacking in the first
place, and that means you need to be aware of their plans before
they carry them out. You need an informant — and that probably
means you have to know a terrorist.
I’ve been involved in foreign policy for more than 35 years.
There is no field more dependent on good intelligence than counterterrorism,
and I’ve never seen an area where intelligence was more difficult
to get. Our intelligence community has become too risk averse,
and we’ve erected legal barriers that prevent us from dealing
with the very kind of unsavory individuals who have access to
the sort of information we need. Those shortcomings must be
corrected.
Is America hampered in this fight by its concern for civil rights
at home or creating civilian casualties overseas?
The President has to find an appropriate balance
between taking steps that are effective and respecting our civil
liberties. Abraham Lincoln posed the central question in an 1863
speech: Must government either be so strong that it offends our
civil liberties, or be so weak that it can’t protect our
security? As in the fight against any kind of organized crime,
we must find the right balance.
The National Commission on Terrorism that I chaired found that
the use of military force in responding to terrorism over the
last decade has been episodic and not very well planned. In the
wake of the embassy bombings in Africa, for example, our responses
were so timid that they made us look weak. That said, the use
of military force has to be handled very carefully, including
keeping civilian casualties to a minimum, commensurate with military
goals.
Can the U.S. economy grow if the war on terrorism is prolonged
and inconclusive?
Because the American economy rides on the back of the
American consumer, the fundamental issue is whether we can restore
consumer confidence, to get people back to spending money now
for their future. If terrorism continues in America, it will take
longer for consumer confidence to come back and will delay the
return to a robust economic cycle.
In terms of what economic decisions ordinary citizens can make
to support the country, the most important is what the President
has said: People should go about their business and not give in
to the fear that terrorism attempts to engender in us.
Are imprecise government alerts regarding potential terrorist
attacks constructive?
Government has an exquisite problem here. I’ve
sat in that chair, where there’s a flood of intelligence
coming in, and you have to make a judgment. If government receives
credible intelligence of a possible attack and says nothing and
an attack occurs, then its credibility suffers. Same thing if
government officials issue warnings and nothing happens. So they
must have calculated that the risk of keeping silent carries more
potential negatives than speaking out. That’s their dilemma.
In these times, should American business leaders sometimes put
aside pragmatic decisions for “patriotic” ones, such
as not laying off workers?
We are at war. The more American citizens and companies
recognize that reality and factor it into their decisions and
their daily lives, the better. This is going to be a very long,
drawn-out campaign; the Afghan part is just the beginning of the
beginning. To the extent that decision-makers can say to themselves,
“We are, after all, at war,” and consider the consequences
of what they’re doing in that regard, that’s good. They
ought to try to put their decisions in that broader framework.
At Marsh Crisis Consulting, what are you telling clients?
September 11 was a wake-up call for the United States,
in terms of the security threats we face. But it should also be
a wake-up call to businesses about what can happen when a crisis
hits and they’re not ready.
A crisis could be triggered by terrorism but also by an earthquake,
a product recall, or anything that constitutes a serious risk
to a company’s reputation, brand, or financial performance.
Surveys show that a corporation will experience a crisis once
every four to five years. That means that every CEO will likely
face a crisis during his or her tenure. How they respond may be
the most important thing they do during their entire tenure because
the stock market and investors punish companies that do not handle
crises well.
Terrorism is probably as old as civilization. Is it useful to
demystify it?
What’s useful is to delegitimize it, to say that
no matter what the cause is, nothing justifies the intentional
killing of innocent civilians as a way to draw attention to a
cause. Terrorism will always be there, just as crime will always
be there. What you have to do is keep it down to as low a level
as you can.
How do you cope with your own fears?
I don’t lose any sleep these days. I have been
dealing with ugly issues going on twenty years now.
— Garry Emmons(send e-mail to the author)
