An End to Evil?

(Note 11/13/2014: This post originally appeared in six parts on the original Old Hickory's Weblog at AOL, which initially had tight on character limits. Those posts are now archived on Blogger. Minor corrections included here.)


Richard "Prince of Darkness" Perle

I'm going to do a review here of the new book by former Bush speechwriter David Frum (who's credited with the "axis of evil" phrase) and Richard Perle, a key Pentagon adviser, member and former head of the Defense Policy Board. Perle was famously nicknamed by his admirers "the Prince of Darkness." This book, modestly titled An End to Evil (2003), gives people a good chance to see why that might to be thought to be an appropriate nickname for him.

The conservative, prowar Daily Telegraph (UK) reported on some of the just-published book's key policy recommendations: Hawks tell Bush how to win war on terror (12/31/03). It accruately describes the book as "a public manifesto." A blurb for the book can be found at the American Enterprise Institute's (AEI) Web site.

Some bloggers have been commenting on the ideas in the Telegraph article. Steve Gilliard declares, "These People Crazy" - which could also serve as a good three-word review of the entire book. The Left Coaster calls it "a chilling vision": Perle Lays Out the Second Term Bush Foreign Policy.

I'll also mention Karen Kwiatkowski's comment on the book: Advance Praise for 'An End to Evil'. Her review is written as a sarcastic favorable plug for the book. Also, be aware that the LewRockwell.com site where it's archived is a neo-Confederate site, which includes conservative/libertarian criticisms of current US foreign policy. Although it's not in this particular review, Kwiatkowski at times seems to share some of the conspiracy-theory outlook of the far right on the Iraq War.

Bush speechwriter and hagiographer David Frum

A good background for the book would be the articles I mentioned in my previous post on Neoconservatives.

Here are my own formulations of the more concrete policy proposals for the United States.

United Nations: Force it to recognize America's right to conduct whatever military operations we want against whatever nations we choose. If the UN doesn't go along, "we should formally reject the UN's authority over our war on terror." (p. 271)

Europe: Actively promote divisions within the European Union and NATO to make them weak and ineffective. Regard France as essentially a hostile rival and "force European governments to choose between Paris and Washington." (p. 249) Block European efforts to create a common defense force. In particular, prevent Britain from becoming part of such a force and try to keep it outside the EU governmental structure.

China: Regard China as a better friend than France or Germany in the immediate future, but position the US to switch to a policy of military hostility at a time of America's choosing.

Pakistan and India: Keep Pervez Musharraf in power in Pakistan as long as possible. Accept India and Pakistan as permanent nuclear powers. Try to ignore the Kashmir conflict.

Russia: Start isolating Russia but keep on dealing with them not as "an alliance, not even a friendship, but rather a series of transactions" (p. 265) until US priorities change to allow us to become more hostile to Russia without inconveniencing higher priorities.

Iran: Regime change, probably through US military invasion, more-or-less immediately.

Syria: Regime change, probably through US military invasion, more-or-less immediately.

Libya: Regime change, probably through US military invasion, more-or-less immediately. The book doesn't address the recent Libyan agreement on "weapons of mass destruction." But Perle presumably had some knowledge of the progress that had been made over many months. Yet they write, "The illusion that Muammar al-Qaddafi is 'moderating' should be treated as what it is: a symptom of the seemingly incurable wishful delusions that afflict the accommodationists in the foreign policy establishment." (p. 117)

North Korea: If they don't immediately agree to American terms on nuclear disarmament, blockade them and prepare for military strikes on their nuclear facilities.

Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Give up the idea that any solution is possible except one imposed by force on the part of Israel. Don't worry about the Israeli settlements policy or the "security fence."

Saudi Arabia: We should treat Saudi Arabia as a more-or-less hostile power. Don't worry about them being the keepers of the holy cities of Islam or any of that kind of thing. The US should "ponder" trying to break off the oil-rich eastern and largely Shiite part of the kingdom from the rest. "Independence for the Eastern Province would obviously be a catastrophic outcome for the Saudi state. But it might be a very good outcome for the United States." (p. 141)

The US government: Give the FBI's antiterrorism function to the Department of Homeland Security. Give the CIA's clandestine operations function to Donald Rumsfeld's Department of Defense. Make the US military even more focused on airpower. Make the essential function of the State Department to promote the partisan positions of the Presidential party and stop worrying much about the information they may provide about the positions of foreign governments.

Perhaps it's worth emphasizing again that Frum and Perle are not obscure academics from some rightwing think-tank burning up money from wealthy donors. Frum was until very recently a Presidential speechwriter. Perle remains one of the most influential formulators of foreign and military policy in the United States.

Fanaticism is at the basis of the viewpoint expressed in The End of Evil. Not the hysterical, commies-are-under-every-bed variety. And not the stodgy, John Birch Society commies-have-been-under-every-bed-for-the-past-80-years kind. It's more like the grim fanaticism of authoritarian rulers who declare what the citizens are required to believe and then expect them to repeat it.

The basis of the Frum/Perle fanaticism appears to be the notion that a deadly movement motivated by a coherent ideology is out to destroy the United States. This evil is viewed as a vague, hostile force that conflates threats as diverse as Syrian Baathist secular Arab nationalism, the Shiite partial theocracy in Iran and al-Qaeda militant Islamic extremism with more familiar enemies of the last century:

Generations of extremist leaders in the Middle East - fascists, communists, pan-Arabists, now Islamists - have each in their turn made a bid to lead a unified East against the enemy West. Bin Laden follows where the [Nazi-sympathizing] grand mufti of Jerusalem [Haj-Amin al-Husseini], Gamal Abdel Nasser, Muammar al-Qaddafi, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and Saddam Hussein have preceded him. Bin Laden offers a new answer, but it is an answer to the same question. (p. 59)

The fundamental problem in the policy orientation they recommend is one that is also at the core of the Bush Doctrine as so far implemented (primarily in the Iraq War). That is the assumption that the terrorism which threatens the United States is a function of state sponsorship.

To illustrate this point, it is useful to quote General Wesley Clark from his most recent book, Winning Modern Wars (2003). He describes how, during the Cold War:

U.S. perceptions were chiefly shaped by our Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union and our strategic alignments in the Middle East, especially with Israel. Like Israelis, Americans looked first for state sponsors [of terrorism], because if we could deprive terrorists of bases, financing, and arms - all provided by states - we could drive them out of business, even if we couldn't penetrate their organizations or identify all their members. (Clark, p. 107)

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the initial intervention in Afghanistan, Clark says that the most urgent need was to bolster the weaknesses that had come to light in homeland defense preparedness.

Instead, many in the Bush administration seemed focused on the prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" - even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever - and the opportunity to "roll it all up." ...

As I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was further evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a "state sponsor," and it would be more effective to attack a state - with complete confidence that it can be taken down - than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations. ...

What a mistake! I reflected - as though the terrorism were simply coming from these states. Well, that might be true for Iran, which still supported Hezbollah, and Syria, complicit in aiding Hamas and Hezbollah. But neither Hezbollah nor Hamas were targeting Americans. Why not build international power against Al Qaeda? (Clark, p. 129-130)

Frum and Perle make the argument about state sponsorship of terrorism explicitly. "[B]ecause terrorism is difficult, terrorists almost always require some kind of support from a government somewhere." (p. 231; my emphasis)

The linkage between terror groups and terror states has become even more intimate as both terrorists and terror states seek and acquire weapons of mass destruction: nerve agents and other lethal chemical agents, anthrax and other biological agents, radioactive materials, and - the ultimate prize - nuclear weapons. (p. 232)

Many will recognize this argument from the run-up to the Iraq War. Saddam Hussein has a mighty stockpile of WMDs, we were told, and he might give them to terrorists that would use them against the United States. This, and the constant association of Iraq and the 9/11 attacks, allowed Perle and other supporters of the Iraq War to justify a conventional war against Iraq as part of the "war on terror." And that same argument is at the basis of this book.

Unfortunately, much of the shabby and even dishonest use of information that characterized the buildup to the Iraq War are also evident in this book - even making full allowance for the fact that it's a manifesto that doesn't pretend to be a balanced or scholarly treatment of the subject.

How many times has the story about Mohammed Atta's alleged meeting with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague been discredited? Yet there it is again on page 45, described as a "fact." They even haul out the crackpot argument by "our American Enterprise Institute colleague Laurie Mylroie" that the domestic terrorist and murdered Timothy McVeigh may have been supported by a foreign power - although they put it in a footnote and say, with magnificent understatement, that the evidence on that is "not yet conclusive." (p. 232n. For more on the dubious scholarship of Mylroie, see Armchair Provocateur byPeter Bergen, Washington Monthly Dec 2003 and an informative brief sketch by Joe Conason, Salon.com 12/03/03)

For anyone who's not already a cheerleader for this viewpoint - and how many Americans really are ready to invade Syria, Iran and North Korea? - these shabby claims are a red flag to ask tough questions about even the factual claims. Here again, it's valuable to keep in mind a characteristic of fanatical writing. Extremists are often copious in their use of sources and factual claims. Anyone who wades for the first time into those dark, swampy waters where Holocaust denial, neo-Confederate advocacy or anti-evolution polemics dwell may be surprised at the volume of seemingly scholarly citations.

The End of Evil is not that crackpot. But a large part of the book uses facts, half-truths and blatant fabrications in much this way. An example is the brief discussion on the CIA's evaluation of the Soviet economy. Those not familiar with the background would likely conclude from the description in Chapter 7 that the CIA had consistently dangerously misrepresented the power of the Soviet Union in ways that potentially jeopardized American security. The reality is that Richard Perle and like-minded strategic thinkers argued for a much more threatening worst-case scenario of Soviet capabilities and intentions than did the CIA - and even the CIA's estimates turned out to be exaggerated.

And that same approach also underlies the argument of this book. In the context of the Iraq War, Frum and Perle generalize this approach, which could have been catastrophic in dealing with the USSR in the 1980s, and which has proved quite catastrophic enough in Iraq: "Where intelligence is uncertain, prudent leaders will inevitably minimize risk by erring on the side of the worst plausible assumption. And rightly so." (p. 27)

It was sometimes a disorienting feeling reading this book to see pleas like this to rely on the integrity and caution of intelligence analysts, when Richard Perle himself was a key adviser and a member of Rumsfeld's rump intelligence group, the Office of Special Plans (OSP) headed by Perle protegé Douglas Feith, that took raw intelligence and cherry-picked it to bolster the case for war against Iraq. And in doing so they produced wildly erroneous results. Yet here is Perle, repeating chestnuts like the Mohammed Atta/Iraqi intelligence meeting in Prague.

And in describing his own OSP group, he doesn't bother to name it. Nor is it mentioned that one of the authors of the book was one of the "small team of independent analysts" whose work is described, though in several other points of the books anecdotes are identified as coming from Perle.

If Americans and Iraqis weren't dying daily - in no small part because of the OSP misrepresentations - it would be comical to see Frum and Perle accusing the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) of persecuting those four "independent analysts." Why, "they [CIA and DIA] cooked up specious charges and removed the security clearance of at least one of the analysts," say Frum and Perle. (p. 47)

This hopefully conveys some idea of the type of argument used in this book, whether defending the invasion of Iraq, discussing the threat of Islamic extremism, proposing their version of "the war of ideas," or telling people to stop worrying about the PATRIOT Act's threat to civil liberties.

The discussion of homeland security concerns provides a good illustration of how ideology overwhelms pragmatic concerns for American security at every turn. It also illustrates how silence functions in their argument. In general, it's a bit of a cheap shot to criticize a book like this for what it does not mention. One can always say, "The authors should have given more attention to..."

But sometimes what is not mentioned is a critical factor. And in dealing with an essentially fanatical intellectual construction, that can be especially so. Thus, in discussing problems in the immigration system, Frum and Perle mention some real problems that need to be addressed. They criticize former California Gov. Gray Davis for his undocumented-immigrant driver's license law. The California legislature has since repealed that law, primarily because of concerns about inadequate security checks.

But this section, too, is almost entirely polemical. "We need an identification system that makes it clear who is entitled to be in the United States and who is not and that expedites the removal of people who are not so entitled." (pp. 69-70) They express concern about the "hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants" annually to the US. And yet in proposing a far more comprehensive control of immigration, they manage to avoid so much as mentioning the words Mexico, agriculture or California growers. This shows a stunning lack of pragmatism, if not of all seriousness in addressing the topic.

The authors' attitude toward civil liberties in relation to the so-called Patriot Act can be accurately illustrated by quoting one sentence: "The privacy of the American home is millions of times more likely to be invaded by an e-mail spammer or a telemarketer than a federal agent." (p. 74) Anyone who needs to have it explained to them the difference between the latest hourly cyber-offer for low-priced Viagra and federal agents investigating them for possible terrorist connections is not going to be capable of even having a conversation about the subject. This is another sign of fanaticism, a worldview largely untroubled by normal reality-checking.

It won't surprise a reader of normal comprehension that the authors ridicule critics of the abortive TIPS program (that would have asked people to report vaguely-defined "suspicious" activities) without mentioning one of the most serious concerns about it: that it would generate a huge volume of more-or-less useless tips that would consume investigators' time in a highly inefficient manner.

Again, in dealing with fanaticism or abstract ideological/polemical formulations, what is not mentioned is often very telling. One should give the authors credit for a moment of lucidity in the same section of the book: they do recognize that racial profiling in airports would be a foolish, risky practice to adopt for the very sensible reason that not all high-risk terrorist suspects are "Middle Eastern"-looking.

I find myself asking, what is the right approach to understanding and countering this kind of argument? Although I'm very troubled by the far-reaching implications of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the ongoing loss of American and Iraqi lives in a war based on lies about non-existent "weapons of mass destruction," I'm not in a mood of despair. One of the greatest strengthsof democracy is the fact that we have a citizen Army, and those leaders who prosecute even the most popular of wars must account to the voters for their conduct of foreign and military policy.

And while the advocates of war and militant conservatism are well-financed, people can still read and ask questions. Those not consumed with fanaticism can still ask why Perle and his fellow advocates of war against Iraq were so convinced that Iraq had massive quantities of WMDs. And why, in this book completed near the end of 2003, he seems to show no appreciation of the implications of such a vast intelligence failure, for which he himself is in significant part responsible.

The authors make a telling argument about the Saudi royal family's support for Islamic extremism, again notable for what the silences tell. They argue that support of extremist groups allows the Saudi royals to maintain their corrupt lifestyles in contradiction to the austere version of Islam they defend. But more relevant to American policy is the fact that support to extremists outside Saudi Arabia has allowed the Saudis to divert extremist attention from targeting the Saudi monarchy.

And in a longer-term sense, the United States actively encouraged the Saudis to finance the "anti-Soviet freedom fighters" in Afghanistan.

Keeping those facts in mind makes a difference. Frum and Perle encourage us to see the Saudis primarily as supporters of anti-American Islamic extremism - which they unquestionably are. But if Islamic extremists, Osama bin Laden not least among them, want to overthrow the Saudi monarchy, American policy-makers should be very careful about pursuing an end that coincides with their goals. That's not to say that American goals would never happen to coincide with Bin Laden's in a particular case. Perle and his fellow Iraq hawks, in fact, shared Bin Laden's desire to overthrow Saddam Hussein's secular dictatorship in Iraq. But it does mean that we should have our eyes wide open in those situations.

In a longer-term sense, we need to have a more consistent long-term strategy toward the Middle East and the broader Muslim world. We allowed our fixation on the Soviet threat to let us promote a virulent form of Islamic extremism in Afghanistan - where Soviet intervention, however heinous we may have considered it in itself - was only a marginal risk to vital American interests.

Similarly, our reaction to the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which "neoconservatives" viewed as further Soviet aggression (!), led us to back Iraq as a secular alternative to Muslim extremism, and as an enforcer of the American-desired order in the Middle East. The upshot of those policies in both Afghanistan and Iraq involved considerable "blowback" against American interests in the long term.

Perhaps those instances should be cautionary examples to us in considering whether we should accept the advice of those who want an American jihad against Syria, Iran, Libya, the Saudi monarchy, France and an endless set of further enemies. All under the name of the "war on terror."

But that kind of pragmatism in pursuit of American goals is alien to men like David Frum and Richard Perle, who write:

For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil [to be fought by the means described in this review], our generation's great cause. We do not believe that Americans are fighting this evil to minimize it or to manage it. We believe they are fighting to win - to end this evil before it kills again and on a genocidal scale. There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or holocaust. (p. 9, my emphasis)

A world at peace; a world governed by law; a world in whch all people are free to find their own destinies: That dream has not yet come true, it will not come true soon, but if it ever does come true, it will be brought into being by American armed might and defended by American might, too. (p. 279, my emphasis)

Tags: an end to evil, david frum, richard perle