Craig Unger's The Fall of the House of Bush

Craig Unger's new book on the Bush dynasty could probably be more accurately titled, The Iraq War and the Twilight on the Bush II Presidency. It's largely an account of how the influence of the neoconservatives and the Christian Right converged in the Republican Party to produce the Iraq War after the 9/11 attacks, using the latter as a justification for a far-reaching, radical foreign policy.

Unger has done his own extensive interviews with many of the key players in his story, as well as using the many available secondary sources to construct his narrative. He does a good job of telling the story, including the disgraceful role of the Establishment press, although he does seem a bit too wedded to conventional political wisdom on some points. He also gives credit to the liberal blogosphere for keeping questions and issues in play that the mainstream press was ignoring or underplaying, like the serious questions about the necons' claims about the now-infamous aluminum tubes.

These contemporary histories are important because they preserve a lot of current perspectives, including their limitations, in a way that will become a challenge to reconstruct some day. Especially since the Iraq War is such an historic disaster and everyone is already trying to distance themselves from the many failures involved. We can see already in Unger's account that the material that has so far leaked through Dick Cheney's thick wall of official secrecy makes the story of the Iraq War look much uglier than it did as it was unfolding. And to those who were really paying attention, it looked very ugly at the time.

Unger's narrative gives a good idea of the various factors that went into the Iraq War: neoconservative grand strategies of forcibly remaking Middle Eastern nations to be more congenial to the West and to Israel; access to oil supplies; the scams run by Ahmad Chalabi and other Iraqi emigrants; the lobbying efforts for Likud Party-oriented pro-Israel groups, especially AIPAC; and, Christianist notions about bringing on the end of the world and the return of Christ by escalating tensions in the Middle East. More subjectively, there were psychological factors including Bush's desire to outshine his father as a military conqueror; neocon group dynamics that led to shared assumptions not being adequately questioned; and, Dick Cheney's authoritarianism.

It would be inaccurate to reduce a political event as important as the Iraq War to psychological causes. But I was particularly intrigued by Unger's description of neocon group dynamics, which he describes as reaching a cultlike intensity. Because of their shared friendships and interlocking front groups (Unger uses the term), they created a kind of extended groupthink in which the fantastic and foolish notion was validated and revalidated that conquering Iraq and installing a subservient government would be quick and easy, and this would set the stage for a rapid series of regime changes in Iran, Syria and beyond.

Unger at one point seems to be saying that it was the grand neocon strategy of serial regime change that was the real reason for the Iraq War. But I don't think its meaningful to exclude those other factors. The role of oil has never given me the kind of contortions that it seem to induce in some people. It's pretty obvious to me that all American policies in the Middle East need to take oil supplies into account. It would be irresponsible not to do so. The fact that some oil companies may have colluded with Cheney to arrange oil deals for themselves is something that deserves detailed official investigation than it has so far received. But even if there are some players who turn out to be stereotypical cynical manipulators concerned only with oil riches, that doesn't eliminate the other factors as important.

Unger gives a good blow-by-blow description of how the measures the neocons and Cheney's office set up to "stovepipe" raw intelligence to policymakers while bypassing the elaborate vetting process of the official intelligence agencies. This process meant that the various neocons in the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President could cherry-pick data bits which fit their own narrow and unrealistic preconceptions and ignore others. No President should simply set policy based on intelligence recommendations. It's the President's job to make decisions based on a wide variety of considerations. But the "stovepiping" process is a real reminder how important it is to have raw intelligence information carefully vetted by people who are looking for factual information more than for bits of useful propaganda.

In dealing with present-day issues of transnational terrorism and nuclear proliferation, having accurate intelligence is especially important. The recklessness and destructiveness of Cheney and Bush in this regard is staggering, just based on what we already know. I shudder to think what the picture will look like when considerably more key information becomes public.

Unger also does a good job of highlighting the dubious role of longtime neocon player Michael Ledeen, another of the Iran-Contra veterans who have played destructive roles during this administration. Unger also weaves the story of the Joe Wilson mission to Niger and the subsequent Valerie Plame exposure into his narrative, which is one of the key things that reminds us how much uglier the story looks with the then-behind-the-scenes material included.

The particular idiocy and recklessness of neocon bigwig Richard "Prince of Darkness" Perle also comes out clearly in Unger's narrative. For instance, Perle wrote an editorial that appeared in USA Today on 05/01/03, the same day as Bush's "Mission Accomplished" extravaganza on the USS Abraham Lincoln. It was entitled Relax, Celebrate Victory. The great strategic thinker wrote of the Iraq War, "From start to finish, President Bush has led the United States and its coalition partners to the most important military victory since World War II." To repeat, this was May of 2003.

Unger gives what's probably my favorite Perle quote, too, from just before the start of the Iraq War: "If we just let our vision of the world go forth and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy but just wage a total war, our children will sing great songs about us years from now." (my emphasis) What.A.Fool.

But let's give the Prince of Darkness credit. People are already singing songs about the Iraq War. The best-known ones and the ones that are likely to endure are those about what a horrible decision it was.

If I had to make just one criticism of Unger's book, it would be that in his very useful and informative sketch of the history of the Christian Right, he fails to make clear what a central role the politics of segregation and racism played in its formulation and the extent to which the neosegregationist outlook is identified with the Christian Right/Christian fundamentalist/Christian dominionist supporters.

This leads him astray, for example, when he repeats the press corps conventional wisdom about the 2004 election that it was primarily decided by "values" voters. He fails to ask how many of those who identified "values" as their key concern would ever have considered voting for a Democrat in any case, or how many of those were Southern and/or rural/small town whites. Because to a considerable part of the Christian Right base, "values" means "keeping us white folks safe from scary black people". Gays and immigrants may irritate them, too. But there is a heavy continuity between the old segregationist vote and today's Christianist vote. This is something the late Steve Gilliard was very good about reminding us. And he was right. You can't understand the Christian Right voting phenomenon without understanding its connection with segregationist and now what I call neosegregationist sentiments.

He also seems to be hanging on to the notion that Colin Powell is somehow a tragic but sympathetic figure who was victimized by the neocons. I have no sympathy for Powell's role in the Iraq War catastrophe. He knew that Cheney's people were trying to scam the country into war. And his presentation at the United Nations in February 2002 was key to enabling the war. He had every reason to know what he was going was irresponsible, and that he was facilitating an unnecessary and illegal war. But he did it anyway. To Unger's credit, despite his seeming sympathy for Powell, he describes how Powell's ignored his own State Department's intelligence specialists in the preparation of that infamous UN presentation.

Unger's acceptance of the misleading "values" version of the 2004 election leads him astray into accepting a flawed Culture War framework of American politics, with particular reference to 2004:

By 2005, for tens of millions of Americans, it was increasingly impossible to ignore the realities of what was happening in Iraq - the absence of WMDs, the escalating sectarian violence, the vast expenditures of blood and treasure in pursuit of a mission that was unclear at best, constantly changing, and had never been accomplished at all. Polarizing the nation more profoundly than at any time since the Vietnam era, the war had become a litmus test issue that defined and linked whole sets of belief systems — red state America versus blue, evangelical Christians, antiabortion activists, NASCAR dads, and other denizens of the Bible Belt versus the secular, post-Enlightenment America that has long been on the cutting edge of science and the embodiment of modernism. Those who questioned U.S. policies in the Middle East, as their foes saw it, were cut-and-run traitors who aided and abetted the enemy. On the other side were Neanderthals waging a holy war in the Middle East, shredding the Constitution, destroying civil liberties, rolling back not just the New Deal but the Enlightenment, all in the name of God.

This is an example of the journalistic habit of providing "balance" by making both sides of a controversy sound equally to blame or equally deserving of consideration. But the impression this view leaves is very misleading. For Christianist "culture warriors", the Iraq War does indeed serve as a litmus test for their rejection of the dirty hippies and rampaging evil black people of their fantasies. This is why what support their is left for the Cheney-Bush Iraq policy is restricted to conservative white Republicans, and even some of those have faltered.

Most Americans, though, have a far more pragmatic view of the Iraq War. You hardly need to approve of hippie communes with mass orgies on the weekends to see it doesn't make any sense to keep 160,000 American troops fighting in a conflict where the protracted conflict itself has become more of a problem than leaving could cause. There are "both sides" to culture war issues like gay marriage. But when it comes to the Iraq War, there's basically only one side that sees it as organically tied to abstinence-only education and literal interpretation of the Christian Bible.

Tags: authoritarianism, bush administration, christianism, craig unger, dick cheney, fall of the house of bush, iran-contra, iraq war, michael ledeen, richard perle

The evolution (or creation?) of authoritarian Republicanism

Reagans and Nixons: the good old moderate pragmatic days of the Republican Party?

Former Republican - should I say "recovering Republican"? - Ariana Huffington writes in Midnight in America: the Mainstreaming of the GOP's Lunatic Fringe Huffington Post 10/22/07:

The most significant takeover of the past decade isn't to be found among the telecoms, the big oil companies, or in Silicon Valley. The reconfigured entity is headquartered in Washington, but we can see and hear the results everyday on your television, radio, and computer screen. And America is much the worse for it. I'm talking about the takeover of the Republican Party by its lunatic fringe.

Reagan's GOP has been replaced by the dark, moldering, putrefied party of Bush, Cheney, Rove, Limbaugh, Coulter, and Malkin. Morning in America has given way to Midnight in America.

Of course, there the Republican Party has always had it Jesse Helmses, Spiro Agnews, and Lee Atwaters. But they were the minority, far removed from the mainstream of the Party - Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, the first George Bush.

My first impression in reading something like this is to think, yeah, that's really what's happening.

But I feel like I need to restrain my enthusiasm in this case. Because Arianna, bless her heart, (that's what you say in the South when you about to criticize somebody) is using a polemical technique that been around for at least 40 years, and probably much longer. That's to go back 10 or 20 years and compare leading lights of the other party unfavorably to the degenerate specimens of today.

The political appeal of that is obvious. You're inviting people who used to support the other party to support yours without having to fully admit to themselves that they themselves have changed that significantly in their political outlook.

A classic usage of this technique is in historian Richard Hofstadter's famous essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics". Hofstadter was analyzing the Goldwater movement in the wake of Goldwater's landslide loss to Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 Presidential election. He used isolationist Sen. Robert Taft of the early 1950s as an example of a pragmatic conservative, in contrast to the dogmatic Goldwater of 1965. There was more of polemics than analysis in that comparison, which was largely frivolous.

During the Carter administration of 1977-1981, liberals using the same polemical technique would point to Barry Goldwater as the pragmatic conservative model in contrast to the dogmatic conservatives of the Reagan movement. Now, Arianna points to St. Reagan as the pragmatic conservative in contrast to the Dick Cheneys and the Karl Roves of the present.

The latter two comparisons are also more frivolous than serious, though not totally without merit. Goldwater had a strong skepticism toward religious activists in politics, surely influenced by his bitter opposition to the civil rights movement, in which religious leaders and organizations were prominent. He was never on good terms with Religious Right leaders like Jerry Falwell. Falwell's Moral Majority newspaper even once suggested than Goldwater was a closet partisan of "unilateral disarmament", which was an insane charge. Goldwater was also enough of a libertarian to dissent from his Party's anti-gay orthodoxy, saying for instance of gays in the military that what was important for soldiers was not that they were straight, but that they could shoot straight.

Likewise, Reagan did have some substantial achievement that were liberal, or at least non-conservative. His genuinely bipartisan Social Security reform of 1983, his post-reelection tax reform which included many basic ideas of liberal tax reformers, and most important his agreement with the Soviet Union on the Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty were key achievements that were not in line with vision of the dogmatic conservatives of his party. In the 1988 Presidential race, the liberal Democrat Michael Dukakis supported Reagan's 1985 tax reform and the Republican Old Man Bush opposed it.

But it's simply ahistorical to imagine that each of these lurches into authoritarianism and dogmatic conservatism by the Republican Party were discrete departures from normality. The Goldwater movement of 1964 failed in that immediate election. But it determined the direction of their Party to this day. Richard Nixon had a more pragmatic foreign policy than Dick Cheney could even imagine. But his Vietnam War policy was driven by dogma and vague notions of Will. And no administration had gone so far in its embrace of police-state methods as Nixon's prior to the Cheney-Bush administration.

The continuities are more important than the breaks. What we have from the Goldwater takeover of 1964 is a long-term trend of the Republican Party becoming increasingly authoritarian and rightwing. That nice moderate Jerry Ford had Dick Cheney as his chief of staff and Rummy as first chief of staff and then Secretary of Defense. Ford is as responsible for the stab-in-the-back myth of the Vietnam War as any civilian politician, a myth which has become absolutely central to the authoritarian Republican Party worldview.

Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense for Old Man Bush during the 1991 Gulf War. Though that was a very different kind of war than the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there are still important connecting trends between the two.

And the fundamental style, disregard of legality, extreme secrecy and unilateral arrogance that defines the entire Cheney-Bush foreign policy were all there in Reagan's Central American policy and the closely related Iran-Contra affair. Cheney took it much further after he started running foreign policy in 2001. But St. Reagan's Central American and Iran policies were the template for today's disastrous foreign policy approach.

St. Reagan and Old Man Bush

And whether or not you are convinced by the circumstantial evidence of the "October Surprise" in the 1980 campaign as described by Gary Sick in October Surprise: America's Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan (1991) and Kevin Phillips in American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (2004), the Bush Dynasty has been one of the most important connecting threads in the descent of the Republican Party into today's authoritarian state. The Bushes brought together the worlds of great wealth, the energy industry, the Republicans' Southern Strategy of appealing to white voters on a more-and-more explicitly racial basis, and covert intelligence operations in a way that has had a decisive effect on their Party and the country as a whole.

Walter LaFeber, in his The American Age (1989) that I've been quoting a lot lately, writes about other aspects of American foreign policy that will sound all too familiar to those who have followed the Iraq War fiasco:

William Clark served as NSC adviser during much of the president's first term, and while he was a close personal friend, Clark knew little about foreign policy and had even less experience in it. His one conviction was that the Soviet Union was "a bizarre and evil episode of history whose last pages are even now being written." Another powerful official, Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, had more sophisticated views, but they ended up at the same place: the Soviets could be handled through a major arms build-up; no serious talks should be held on arms control and little talk held on anything else except human rights inside Russia. Not one top Reagan official between 1981 and 1984 had significant experience dealing with the Soviet Union. (my emphasis)

Neocons like Richard Perle had a strong influence on Reagan's foreign policy, though they didn't prevail on policy toward the Soviet Union in the end. That last sentence in the quote also reminds us that foreign policy amateur hour, of making policy with grotesquely inadequate information and expertise about keys adversaries, didn't begin in the current Republican administration.

Speaking of Perle, if it had been up to him and like-minded policy advocates, the INF Treaty would never have been negotiated. Conservatives have their own favorite dogmas about what caused the Soviet Union to fall. But the relief in tensions that the INF Treaty in particular brought about surely pushed that process forward and allowed Gorbachev to pursue his reform policies. LaFeber explains:

As he began running for re-election in 1984, Reagan had not scored one important diplomatic success. During the previous year, his announced intention of building SDI (Star Wars) and, in September 1983. the Soviet shooting-down of South Korean Airliner 007, which killed 269 including a U.S. congressman, poisoned superpower relations. The Soviets claimed that the airliner, which was 350 miles off course, had intentionally strayed over some of their most sensitive military installations for the purposes of U.S. intelligence. The president countered that it was not an intelligence mission, and even if it had strayed off course, the Soviets should never have fired on a civilian airliner. U.S.-USSR relations reached their lowest point since the worst days of the cold war in the early 1950s.

Then, as both sides began to worry about rushing down a dead-end road that ended in a superpower confrontation, they searched for side exits. Reagan began softening his rhetoric. "The fact that neither of us likes the other system is no reason to refuse to talk," he noted in early 1984. which he then defined as "a year of opportunities for peace." Not wanting to frighten Americans during an election year, the president also declared that his military build-up had reached the point where negotiations could now be profitably held. (He doubtless, also realized that major budget problems prevented any such future arms build-up.) Shultz's State Department fought endless battles to check Perle and other in the Pentagon and White House who wanted to ignore the informal SALT II arms limits (signed in 1979) and to force the allies to get tough with Moscow. On at least two occasions, Shultz kept Reagan on the path to negotiations by threatening to resign if the president ditched efforts to cap the arms race. (my emphasis)

So, when tempted to recall the good old days of that moderate pragmatist St. Reagan, we should remember that the good old days often just aren't what they used to be.

Tags: authoritarianism, neoconservatives, republican party, richard perle, ronald reagan

Oh, the future used to be so bright, we had to wear shades (Updated)

I came across a note I had made about this article, from my pre-blogging days. It appeared just after the invasion of Iraq. And it's from Richard "the Prince of Darkness" Perle, then chairman of Rummy's Defense Policy Board, United They Fall Spectator (UK) Online 03/22/2003. Perle is one of the leading neoconservatives and one of the chief instigators of the war with Iraq.

The topic is Perle's sneering at the United Nations. They guy thought he was one of the Masters of the Universe back then. (Probably still does, come to think of it.) He wrote in those heady days:

Saddam Hussein's reign of terror is about to end. He will go quickly, but not alone: in a parting irony he will take the United Nations down with him.

Well, not the whole United Nations. The 'good works' part will survive, the low-risk peace-keeping bureaucracies will remain, the looming chatterbox on the Hudson will continue to bleat. What will die in Iraq is the fantasy of the United Nations as the foundation of a new world order.

Yeah, those pathetic wimmen and sissies over at the UN will still be doing their silly social work. But us real men are gonna show them how we run the world.

As free Iraqis document the quarter-century nightmare of Saddam's rule, as we hear from the survivors able to speak from their own soil for the first time, let us not forget who was for this war and who was not, who held that the moral authority of the international community was enshrined in a plea for more time for inspectors, and who marched against 'regime change'. In the spirit of postwar reconciliation that diplomats are always eager to engender, we must not reconcile the timid, blighted notion that world order requires us to recoil before rogue states that terrorise their own citizens and menace ours. (my emphasis)

Absolutely, sweet prince. I hope it will be a long, long time before the world forgets "who was for this war and who was not". And I also hope we don't fall prey to some diplomat's disease and push some kind of superficial "postwar reconciliation" that leaves responsibility unassigned and crimes unprosecuted. I certainly hope not.

He sneered at some commentator he had seen on television - Lord, these Republicans love to sneer - describing her position and then his manly-man's response:

A willing coalition of liberal democracies isn't good enough. If any institution or coalition other than the UN Security Council uses force, even as a last resort, 'anarchy', rather than international law, would prevail, destroying any hope for world order.

This is a dangerously wrong idea, an idea that leads inexorably to handing great moral - and even existential politico-military decisions - to the likes of Syria, Cameroon, Angola, Russia, China and France.

Now, Perle was talking about those countries' votes in the UN. But I would also note that "Syria, Cameroon, Angola, Russia, China and France" - France was considered a rogue state, too by the manly Mr. Perle - all have political systems from the one Perle's War has created in Iraq. Is there anyone in the world who would choose Iraq's current system over the ones in those countries now?

Oh, and what a grand design the neocons had in those triumphal moments! Glorious wars of liberation, one right after the other:

This new century now challenges the hopes for a new world order in new ways. We will not defeat or even contain fanatical terror unless we can carry the war to the territories from which it is launched. This will sometimes require that we use force against states that harbour terrorists, as we did in destroying the Taleban regime in Afghanistan.

And lets not forget, not only "who was for this war and who was not", but how honest and reliable what the Richard Perles of the world told us was:

The most dangerous of these states are those that also possess weapons of mass destruction, the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons that can kill not hundreds or thousands but hundreds of thousands. Iraq is one such state, but there are others. (my emphasis)

And how those glorious wars would strike fear into the hearts of evildoers everywhere:

Whatever hope there is that they can be persuaded to withdraw support or sanctuary from terrorists rests on the certainty and effectiveness with which they are confronted.

Perle and other fools and knaves like him are the people who gave us the disaster we now call the Iraq War.

But on that one thing, he was absolutely right: "let us not forget who was for this war and who was not".

Tags: iraq war, neoconservatives, richard perle

Marketing American Foreign Policy

I've been thinking lately of the public-relations campaign that the Bush Administration began soon after the 9/11 attacks to convince people in Muslim countries how wonderful America was. They got commercial advertiser Charlotte Beers to head up the initial effort as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, . She was no slouch in the advertising world. She had been chairwoman of Ogilvy & Mather and J. Walter Thompson.

She resigned her post last year. But before she left, she produced such efforts as the "Shared Values Initiative" (video ads about how nice things are for Muslims in America) and a series of "Mosques in America" posters. A research at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley characterized the ad campaign this way: "The premise of U.S. propaganda in the Middle East is that Muslims and Arabs are idiots -- simple-minded, feeble-minded idiots. ... Arabic newspapers crack jokes about these ads all the time." (One might wonder why an American ad exec might take that approach to a target audience.)

The same researcher pointed out that the basic problem in the Beers approach was that it didn't address the substantive policy issues that affect US relations to the Arab world, especially the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "Even if they send dancing monkeys, even if they send Britney Spears to live for five years in the Middle East, it's not going to change how people feel," he said.

In their book Weapons of Mass Deception (2003), Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber describe how Beers' campaign fell short in practice:

These activities ... did little to persuade most Muslims, who found the war in Afghanistan more disturbing than anything that handshakes or posters could address. The irony is that of all the military activities in which the United States has engaged during the last 50 years, the war in Afghanistan was certainly one of the easiest to defend on its merits. The terrorism of 9/11 had provoked the U.S. well beyond the point at which any nation capable of responding militarily would feel compelled to do so.

Moreover, the Taliban that ruled Afghanistan not only harbored Osama bin Laden but had a record of such brutality that a war to drive them from power would likely save more lives than it would cost. Nevertheless, much of the Muslim world reacted to the war with mistrust, and the Beers communication strategy did not even attempt to justify it. The most frequent issues raising alarm in the Arab world were U.S. support for Israel, U.S. backing of authoritarian regimes such as those in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and America's reputation as a bullying superpower. The Beers branding strategy offered feel-good imagery but avoided those key issues entirely. (p. 27)

Rampton and Stauber stress that the problem was not that the items in the various ad campaigns were false. But rather, any positive potential from such an ad campaign would have to come from addressing "the issues at the core of Muslim resentment of the United States - the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the history of U.S. intervention in the region." (p. 31)

But those warriors against Evil, David Frum and Richard Perle, have a different take on Beers' efforts in An End to Evil (2003). In the somewhat paranoid view of the world communicated by their book, even Charlotte Beers was way too soft on the evil Muslims. According to Frum and Perle, the basic problem of her approach was that it was founded on the assumption that "[t]he most important reason extremism flourished in the Muslim world was that Muslims believed we were hostile to them." (p.148)

Frum and Perle say it was all well and good to make ritual appeals for tolerance for Muslims in America. But going beyond that to "active propitiation of Muslim opinion at home and abroad was not merely undignified, but dangerous." (p. 148) Why should the Greatest Country in the World, as our politicians of both parties routinely (and oh-so-humbly) describe the United States, have to explain to anybody why we're doing what we're doing?

Frum and Perle explain with relief that Beers, who they don't name but describe as a "high-powered advertising exec", resigned and that her State Department office of public diplomacy "has reverted to its accustomed (low) place in the bureaucratic scheme of things." (p. 150)

Is it adequate to say of their view that it implies that America shouldn't have to explain itself? Or do they really mean that America shouldn't have to explain itself in any way that implies a trace of humility or recognition that some Muslim grievances against the US may be based in reality? Actually, the former is more accurate.

In words very reminiscent of Gen. William Westmoreland's notorious statement that Asians just didn't put the same high value on human life that us good Americans do, Frum and Perle explain that "the people of the Middle East" don't care about innocent people getting killed as long as they aren't Muslims. They ridicule the notion that America should stress that attacks like 9/11 are "un-Islamic." Frum and Perle are going for a "highbrow" tone, so they don't use the language of a Michael Savage or a Rush Limbaugh. But they're clearly telling their readers that those Muslims just don't care about human life the way us Good People do.

They conclude by saying essentially that Those People (Muslims) don't understand anything but force. After a few pages of polemics about how backward and generally evil Arabs are, they conclude: "Confronted with such obdurate unreason, it may seem doubtful that other ideas can gain even a hearing, much less real influence. Yet we have seen many times how evil ideas that seemed to hold millions in their grip have yielded to new realities - or been smashed by unexpected defeats." (p. 157)

These two fans of war seem to be interested only in what anarchists used to call "the propaganda of the deed."

Tags: charlotte beers, david frum, john stauber, richard perle, sheldon rampton

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