Special Interview With Tom Malinowski, Human Rights Watch

Shortly after the Benghazi attacks, I had the good fortune to chat with Ton Malinowski, the Washington Director for Human Rights Watch. Tom has already earned an impressive CV, collecting important accomplishments like so many stamps, garnering both influence and respect. Before he made the leap to the world of NGO’s, Tom was a special assistant to President Bill Clinton and a senior director for foreign policy speechwriting at the National Security Council. He also worked as a speechwriter for Secretaries of State Christopher and Albright. Tom attended the University of California, Berkeley, and Oxford so he’s unusually literate for a political operative. (That really is a compliment.) He’s a lifelong liberal and so we have our divergences in worldview, sometimes distanced by half-steps and sometimes yawning chasms. Still, in my experience with him over the years he’s not just incredibly bright but ideologically unencumbered; he faithfully follows the evidence to wherever it might lead unjaundiced by dogmatic parti pris. I have learned something valuable from every one of our exchanges. I’m delighted to present a transcript of our lengthy and wide-ranging discussion.

Kenneally: So in the last couple of days I read an article that you had in Foreign Policy magazine sometime early in the month, and so I’m going to use that as a springboard for some questions.

Malinowski: Okay.

Kenneally: One of the big points you make from the very outset is that the Arab Spring, whether he wants it to be or not at this stage, is woven into the fabric of Obama’s legacy. What elements of Obama’s foreign policy do you think contributed to this and what elements of the Arab Spring were reactions to historical movements or strategies coming from the West that precede Obama’s presidency?

Malinowski: Yeah. Well, when I say that it’s his legacy, I don’t mean it in the sense that – I don’t mean that in the sense that I think he made it happen. I do think there are – you know, one can certainly look at America’s role in the Middle East under successive presidents, including Obama, and point to some impact on what ultimately happened in the last two years, and we can get back to that. But what I fundamentally meant was that these events are the most important international events that have happened during Obama’s first term in terms of their historical significance. And these are the events upon which American foreign policy in the last four years has had the greatest influence for better or for worse, right?

So when people look back at his legacy, this is going to be it. It’s not going to be – you know, I mean, it’ll be this and Afghanistan, Iraq and places where Obama’s intention was to gradually wind down initiatives that began in a previous administration. But in terms of positive legacy where he’s had to work his will on a part of the world where important things are happening, this is it. That’s what I mean, right?

Kenneally: Right, I understand that– obviously, there are lots of complex and dynamic causal factors that led to the Arab Spring. But do you think there’s anything specific to Obama’s interpretation of foreign policy that might have moved that along that you didn’t, say, find in his predecessors’ approach?

Malinowski: I think – you know, I don’t think it’s anything decisive …

Kenneally: Right.

Malinowski: … because I think the Arab Spring is largely – well, it is a response by people in the Arab world to conditions within the Arab world. It’s not something that was driven by any outside forces. But I do think that it was probably helpful to have a new president who did not begin with the baggage that the Bush Administration left in terms of the Iraq war and other policies, including counterterrorism policies that were a source of great tension with people in the Arab world. Objectively speaking, whether one agreed with those policies or not, they were a source of great tension.

And having a new president who reached out to the region in the way that Obama did in his Cairo speech and who had the kind of profile that Obama had made it a little bit harder for autocrats to constantly shift the anger of their people on the United States as they’ve traditionally done. It took the United States out of the conversation to an extent that was helpful in focusing the spotlight on what was deeply rotten about the regimes that governed most of these countries. I would not say that this is a decisive factor.

Kenneally: I understand.

Malinowski: But, you know, I think it was helpful.

Kenneally: So, beyond that kind of diplomatic initiative, it’s interesting that one criticism you often hear of Obama’s administration quoted both from certain quarters of the right and certain quarters of the left is that with respect to the Middle East and national security, there hasn’t really been an enormous or substantive shift from the previous administration. And so other than the very different way in which Obama communicates with the Middle East, do you see that there are hard strategic pivots that he’s made?

Malinowski: In the Middle East?

Kenneally: Right.

Malinowski: Well, the ending of US military involvement in Iraq was a hard strategic pivot. How much impact does it have on what ultimately happened in Cairo and Tunisia and Tripoli? I think not decisive. I think it definitely hurt the Bush Administration’s efforts to promote democratic reforms in the Middle East, which I believe were sincere efforts, that they became associated with the Iraq war in the eyes of many people in the region. And so having a president who [coughing] – excuse me. I’m a little sick.

Kenneally: Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.

Malinowski: … who didn’t have that baggage I think was modestly helpful but I wouldn’t, again, I wouldn’t say it was the decisive factor in the Arab Spring happening. I think these events were a long time coming. We always knew that these autocratic regimes in the Arab world were inherently unstable. One never knows when they begin sinking into the sand, to borrow Hillary Clinton’s phrase, but I think intelligent observers of the region always understood that it was bound to happen at some point.

Kenneally: Right.

Malinowski: And here it is. It happened on Obama’s watch, and then the rest of the very interesting history of how this administration has tried to respond and, where possible, shape those events.

Kenneally: So here’s a more general question. How hopeful are you? You obviously have a great deal of expertise, especially with these kinds of issues, and you’ve been following that region for a very long time. How optimistic are you for the prospects of something recognizable to us as Westerners as democracy taking root in that region? Or do you think, as some argue, that there might ultimately be cultural or historical or even ideological fences that prevent anything like what we would consider to be democracy, understood in the modern liberal sense, as taking root?

Malinowski: Right. Well, I’m … as a realist, when I believe that there’s a 20 percent chance of making something good happen in the world, that’s about as good as it ever gets, and we ought to move heaven and earth to try to improve the chances to 23.5 percent.

[Laughter]

Kenneally: Right.

Malinowski: That’s how I view this challenge. There are enormous obstacles to the emergence of stable, truly democratic societies, to societies in which institutions are more important than individuals. That has not been the history of this region in recent years, and history is a difficult thing to overcome. If history were impossible to overcome, then we would all stop trying whether our goal is promoting peace and security or democracy or the alleviation of poverty or whatever it is that we care to do in the world. So, I mean, I think those are all very important factors. I do think culture matters. I do think history matters, but I also think that historical and cultural patterns can be overcome. And one should also consider that if you polled 99 percent of Middle East experts a couple of years ago, most of them would’ve scoffed at the notion that a civil society-led movement could’ve gotten rid of Qaddafi in a year or even Mubarak or Ben Ali.

There are certainly many, many, many, many people in these countries and not just the more sophisticated westernized highly educated people, who understand the difference between having the rule of law and not having the rule of law to understand the value of freedom of expression and respect for differing views. They’ve learned a lot about the importance of those things by living with their absence for many years, and that’s what gives me hope that it’s at least possible.

Kenneally: A small variation or iteration on this question. When we talk about things like democracy and human rights, in your experience now as an advocate of human rights for some years, when discussions of freedom and human rights emerge in the Middle East, are they using the terms in a way that’s appreciably different from the way we here in the West would be using these terms? Is there something about their use of the familiar terminology that’s tinctured by a substantively different worldview? And is that difficult as a human rights advocate? Do you feel sometimes that you’re using heterogeneous terms?

Malinowski: No because when … the terms are often misunderstood, right? I mean, sure, there are a lot of folks who will go to a demonstration and cry out for their human rights and cry out for their freedom and cry out for justice. And they may not understand that those values require them to respect the due process rights of someone like Qaddafi, right, when he’s captured. They may just not get that. You have to work really hard to explain it to them, and they may still not get that. But if you ask most social scientists who study the understanding of the American people about the meaning of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution, you also find that there are a lot of gaps, right?

Kenneally: Right, of course.

Malinowski: So these are not – these are subtle concepts and I don’t think any society or culture has a monopoly on – well, I don’t think any society or culture in the world can say that it has achieved universal appreciation of those subtleties. So, you know, if you go to a country like Libya where it was isolated from the rest of the world for 40 years and people were fed with nonsensical ideology of Qaddafi’s green book, sure there’s a huge gap in understanding these concepts. And yet, somehow out of apparently what seems like nothing a civil society emerged in Libya. I’ll give you one example. And I keep coming back to Libya because in some ways it the toughest case, right?

Kenneally: Yes.

Malinowski: One would expect greater understanding in Egypt or Syria or Bahrain because these were more cosmopolitan societies, more comparable to the West.

Kenneally: Right, their urbanization is already a step towards modernity.

Malinowski: But in Libya after the revolution won, the new government, one of the laws it passed earlier this year was a law that criminalized any so-called glorification of the former Qaddafi regime and also criminalized any criticism of the revolution that overthrew Qaddafi. And in writing this law, they simply took a law that Qaddafi passed in the early 1970s, which criminalized criticism of his revolution and cut and paste it. So now that’s an example of exactly what people fear: that the new boss is the same as the old boss, that people may use the language of human rights and of the rule of law. But they don’t really fundamentally understand that those concepts only have meaning if they are applied to your enemies as well as your friends.

Kenneally: Yes, the notions of equality, mutual recognition and reciprocity.

Malinowski: So that was kind of depressing.

Kenneally: Of course.

Malinowski: But what happened after that, a group of Libyan lawyers and civil society organizations challenged the law before the new Libyan Supreme Court, and the Libyan Supreme Court struck it down. So here you have the beginnings of an independent judiciary. Lawyers and ultimately judges who did get it did understand that if we’re going to have a liberal democratic system in this country, that means people get to criticize the glorious revolution. They even get to say nice things about Qaddafi. And you have Marbury v. Madison.

Kenneally: Right, right. The slow unfurling of democratic process, however messy.

Malinowski: This case was the first case in which the court struck down an act of the new government’s legislative body, and it was a very popular law, right? You could imagine the populist point of view. This was very in keeping with where most Libyans are emotionally. And the government fully accepted the decision, and the law is no more, right? The government didn’t have to just like the Jefferson Administration didn’t have to accept Marbury v. Madison, right? That was a question mark in the early days of our democracy.

Kenneally: Right, so not just democracy but Madison’s “moderations of sovereignty”….I see….

Malinowski: The Supreme Court had no army to enforce its decision after all, right? So that whole anecdote shows both sides of the equation. It shows that there’s still a lot of people who don’t get it, that there’s a lot of history to be overcome, a lot of education that needs to be done, but also that there are people who do get it and there is at least the possibility of building strong and accountable institutions in these countries, even in the country where arguably it should be the hardest. So that’s where I get to my 23.5 percent.

Kenneally: So here’s another question. Even before the protests in Tunisia, which seemed to get the whole historical ball rolling, there was also the controversial reelection of Ahmadinejad in Iran and the protests that viscerally responded to that. Do you think that that was a missed opportunity for the Obama Administration to capitalize on the feelings of resentment against tyranny, not to mention electoral condescension, that were, obviously, already kind of smoldering in the Middle East?

Malinowski: Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think … look, I think there was an overcorrection in the first months of the Obama Administration, the first year. There was a perception among the new administration that the previous one had been too arrogant and imperious, that there was too much of an effort under Bush to somehow impose American values on the region. Again, the way in which the war in Iraq became seen as part of Bush’s freedom agenda should be the perception. And so the Obama team felt that there needed to be a correction, that there needed to be a period in which the United States appeared a little bit more humble, a bit more focused on dialogue and reaching out to people who had lost … to people who were less friendly to the United States. And I think to some extent they were right, but I think there was an overcorrection. I think one thing that they forgot about was that the most enduring source of tension between the United States and the people of the Arab world was not anger at the Bush Administration. The enduring source of tension, which well preceded the Bush Administration, was the resentment over America’s support for dictators in the region. I always thought that that was probably an even greater factor in America’s estrangement from the Muslim world and anger over US support for Israel although that’s certainly a factor as well.

And so when the Green Revolution in Iran happened, I think it took a little bit of time for the Obama Administration to make the pivot to understand that in that kind of moment the only way to do what the president clearly set out to do beginning with his Cairo speech was to side clearly and unequivocally with the people of the country against their oppressive leaders. And I think by the end within a couple of weeks of the start of the Green Revolution, Obama had begun to make that rhetorical pivot, but I think it is a lesson that the administration had to learn from events.

Kenneally: With respect to Israel, not too long the infamous Wikileaks came out revealing candid conversations between Arab nations and the American State Department. And one of the things I thought was really interesting is how they – many of them are actually pining for Israel to aggressively pressure Iran with respect to its nuclear weapons program, with respect to its general goal of hegemony in the region. Does that make for historic opportunities for collaboration in that region? I mean, is it absolutely necessary that so much of the Arab world and Israel be in this kind of tinderbox opposition to one another?

Malinowski: Is it necessary? Is it inevitable you mean?

Kenneally: Yeah, is it inevitable? Is there any sets of policies or opportunities for common ground that would overcome what often seems like an ancient, existential conflict?

Malinowski: Yeah. Well, resolving the conflict would help. That doesn’t seem to be – I mean the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That does not seem to be in the cards right now. But I do think one lesson of the last few years is that while people and Egypt and Syria and Libya and Tunisia and Iran do care a great deal about Israel and the Palestinians – it is important to them – it’s not as important to them as what is happening in Egypt and Libya and Tunisia and Iran, right? And that once it became possible for them to do something about the injustice and poverty and oppression that they faced in their daily lives, that’s what they became preoccupied with and that to the extent the United States could align itself with them in that struggle, it could go a long way to easing the fear and loathing of the United States that has predominated in the region. It doesn’t make the issue go away. It’s still going to be important, but it’s certainly created an opportunity for the United States to do some of what Obama set out to do at his Cairo speech even in the absence of progress in the Israeli-Palestinian front.

Kenneally: So, on the basis of a pretty cursory scan of both American and Israeli newspapers it’s very hard not to walk away with the sense that more than before Israel and Iran are spiraling towards a violent conclusion to their problems. Is that the sense that you’re getting from your perch?

Malinowski: I don’t think from my perch I have any special insight on that. It’s not an HRW issue.

Kenneally: Right.

Malinowski: Obviously, we watch it along with everyone else because the war would have enormous consequences. Among other things, we fear that it would have negative consequences inside Iran, that it would probably strengthen the hardliners and delay the day in which the Green Movement can prevail so …

Kenneally: With respect to Syria, one of the difficulties from an American perspective seems to be this: if we want to lend support to the opposition forces there, the lack of univocality on their part makes that virtually impossible. Does that seem to you to be a problem, finding reliable allies within that fractured movement?

Malinowski: Well, the problem is that it’s fractured. I think anyone looking for allies can find allies, but the problem is that the movement itself lacks a unifying structure. There are plenty of people within it with whom the US government, I think, would be very comfortable working and others with whom it would not be comfortable working. And I think many people are wary of getting deeply involved in an effort to assist the rebels for that reason because they’re not sure where the assistance would end up going. They’re not as confident as they might want to be that that it wouldn’t go to the wrong people. I’m describing objectively concerns that are commonly expressed in Washington. I do think that it’s a bit of a Catch-22 for the Syrian opposition because on the one hand they feel like in order to become more coherent, they need help in – that they need space within Syria in which they can meet and organize and begin to govern in the way that the Libyan rebels had in Benghazi.

Kenneally: Right.

Malinowski: And to get there, they need assistance from the international community, but then that assistance is held back because they’re not coherent, right?

Kenneally: Okay, good. So you have some experience, obviously, before your current post at the Human Rights Watch working in government. I think what’s interesting about the extraordinary controversy now surrounding the embassy attacks in Benghazi is that Americans have a difficult time understanding how precisely these embassies are structured, how the security details are structured, what are the sometimes complex legal statuses of embassies, of American assets in foreign lands, the chain of command, and all of this. And so it’s been very difficult for Americans to have a good sense of what precisely happened over there, partly because of that unfamiliarity. And so that in and of itself, plus the administration’s bungling of the press in the aftermath stoked concerns of misdirection, mendacity. What’s your general perception of how that went down?

Malinowski: Of how what went down exactly?

Kenneally: The sequence of events following the terror attacks on the embassy in Benghazi. Do you feel that the administration was doing a poor job of communicating or was there – to paraphrase Hillary Clinton – difficulties produced by the hazy fog of war or was there some political strategizing about how that information was going to be packaged because we’re in a contentious election season?

Malinowski: Well, I do think there was a lot of fog, and I think the fog was inevitable. One rarely knows a day or even five days after an event like that enough about what happens to be able to speak authoritatively. So I think they shouldn’t have – I think they should have said much less than they actually said. I think that’s clearly a mistake. They should’ve answered reporters’ questions in the way that reporters most hate, which is there’s an investigation underway and it’s really too early to prejudge rather than conveying what the intelligence community was saying to them on any given day. And perhaps they felt they needed to do that because of the pressures of the campaign.

Kenneally: Right.

Malinowski: I don’t know. I mean, the issues was politicized by Romney and his folks on Day 1 in ways that I thought were very irresponsible. And so all of this was being debated publicly in a very political context. Hard to imagine that conversations within the administration didn’t take that into account. But I also have no reason to believe that they were deliberately misleading anyone or that they were sort of cherry picking the intelligence to provide a particular explanation that might be better than some other explanation so that would be my take. Clearly, it would’ve been far better both substantively and politically had they said much less until more information became available.

Kenneally: Right, right, I understand your perspective

Malinowski: Even if that meant they would’ve been criticized for not answering people’s questions. It’s still not perfectly clear what happened.

Kenneally: Right.

Malinowski: It’s my best guess from everything I’ve seen and from my knowledge of the place is that it was a militant group that decided it wanted to burn down the US Consulate. It was an act of terrorism, but that doesn’t preclude the possibility that the individual attackers were angered by the video. There’s certainly evidence that they were, that they were using that as at least pretext. And just because there may be loose connections between that group and al-Qaida in the sense that people talk to people each other on the phone doesn’t mean that this was an al-Qaida attack necessarily. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. People are quite capable in Libya where everybody has a gun …

Kenneally: Right.

Malinowski: … and many people who are refugees wake up one morning and say, “Let’s go burn down the US Consulate because we’re just … it’s a good day to do that.”

Kenneally: Yes.

Malinowski: So I think we still don’t know.

Kenneally: One big concluding question: So much of foreign policy journalism focuses on the Middle East. But obviously, the Human Rights Watch has a mission that extends far beyond that region. Outside of the Middle East, is there one major concern that your organization has regarding human rights, either with respect to a particular region or just with respect to some not necessarily region-specific development?

Malinowski: If I had to pick one thing, I would say it’s the multiple possible futures of China, the world’s most important emerging power, a country that is going to … a country whose development will shape the character of the coming century in ways that are perhaps comparable to how the United States shaped the character of the 20^th century. And therefore, I think it’s profoundly important to know what political values this emerging power will be associated with and will be promoting by its example. Just as America’s association with the values of liberal democracy shaped, you know, contributed to the spread of those values in the 20^th century, the values that China’s associated with will also be very influential in the 21^st century.

Kenneally: I understand.

Malinowski: So I think that’s probably the most important geo-strategic human rights issue that we face, and I see it very much in those terms. And there are many different ways in which Chinese politics could go in the next 20 years.

Kenneally: Right.

Malinowski: We, obviously, don’t think it’s inevitable that a market economy in China will produce liberal politics. At the same time, there’s I think an enormous yearning among particularly young people in China for greater access to information, greater freedom of expression, more accountable government, less corruption and abuse of power. So that’s what I would say is probably the single most important thing.

Kenneally: Well as always, Tom, thanks so much. I really appreciate your time.

Malinowski: Great.

Kenneally: And really, a lot of valuable insights as always and I’m always thankful.

Malinowski: Oh, sure.

Kenneally: And I hope you feel better soon.

Malinowski: Oh, thank you. So do I.

Malinowski: Great to talk to you, Ivan. Okay, bye-bye.

Kenneally: Bye.

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