Reagan’s Bloody Legacy
By David Corn
TomPaine.com

June 9th, 2004

Aren’t we mature enough as a democracy to memorialize our leaders with clear eyes? While the nation mourns one of its most popular presidents, it must be truthful in assessing his leadership. The very resolve being celebrated on op-ed pages across the country also led Reagan to ignore and sometimes sanction the brutality being committed in the name of fighting the “evil empire.”
I have a vision. On the day that the remains of Ronald Reagan are transported from the US Capitol to the National Cathedral for the funeral services, the hearse will pass 800 black crosses.

Each cross will represent one of the men, women and children who were killed by the Salvadoran military in the village of El Mozote in December 1981. Each would be a reminder that the dead man now celebrated in the media as a lover of freedom and democracy oversaw a foreign policy that empowered and enabled murderous brutes and thugs in the name of anti-Sovietism. Many innocents in other lands paid dearly for Reagan’s crusade.

Throughout his presidency, Reagan made nice with dictators - no matter how nefarious - as long as they parroted his opposition to communism. As soon as he entered the White House, his administration tried to normalize relations with Augosto Pinochet, the dictator of Chile, who was responsible for a bloody coup that overthrew a democratically elected (but socialist) government. The Reaganites also cozied up to the fascistic and anti-Semitic junta of Argentina, which tortured, slaughtered and disappeared its political opponents. And don’t forget Reagan’s attempt to woo Saddam Hussein, even after it was known that Hussein had used chemical weapons. (Reagan assigned this task to Donald Rumsfeld.)

Reagan may have pushed for democracy and human rights in the Soviet bloc, but he cared little for these values elsewhere. He dramatically urged the destruction of the Berlin Wall and supported the Solidarity movement in Poland. But he sent money and assistance to regimes that repressed and murdered their people. While visiting Ferdinand Marcos, the Filipino dictator, Reagan’s vice president, George H.W. Bush, toasted Marcos’ “adherence to democratic principles.” People lost their freedom or died because Reagan and his lieutenants could not see beyond their ideological blinders and cut deals with miscreants who shared their anti-Moscow mantra. Not only did Reagan embolden torturers and murders, the CIA, following his order to support the contra rebels in Nicaragua (who were trying to oust the socialist Sandinistas), worked with suspected drug traffickers. Who said so? Not conspiracy-theory nuts, but the inspector general of the CIA. Years after the contra war, the agency’s IG produced two reports that conceded the CIA had enlisted the assistance of alleged drug-runners. At the same time Nancy Reagan was preaching “Just Say No” to drugs.

As I noted in this column a few months ago - when there was a media hullabaloo over a schlocky biopic of Reagan - Reagan was AWOL on one of the important battles for freedom and democracy in the 1980s: South Africa. He defended the racist apartheid government there and claimed - as wrongly as could be - that South Africa had “eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country.” And when Republicans and Democrats joined together in Congress to impose economic sanctions on the government of South Africa, Reagan vetoed the measure. In response to that veto, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a leader of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, said, “Apartheid will be dismantled, and its victims will remember those who helped to destroy this evil system. And President Reagan will be judged harshly by history.” Not this week.

The El Mozote episode is, sadly, only one example of violence borne of Reagan’s foreign policy. The troops that did the killing were supported by his administration because they were fighting leftist rebels. A 1992 report produced by a UN-sanctioned truth commission described the awful event: “On 10 December 1981, in the village of El Mozote in the Department of Morazan, units of the Atlacatl Battalion detained, without resistance, all the men, women and children who were in the place”. Early next morning, 11 December, the soldiers reassembled the entire population in the square. They separated the men from the women and children and locked everyone up in different groups in the church, the convent and various houses.”

During the morning, they proceeded to interrogate, torture and execute the men in various locations. Around noon, they began taking the women in groups, separating them from their children and machine-gunning them. Finally, they killed the children. A group of children who had been locked in the convent were machine-gunned through the windows. After exterminating the entire population, the soldiers set fire to the buildings.”

The report noted that “the Atlacatl Battalion was a ‘Rapid Deployment Infantry Battalion’ or BIRI, - that is, a unit specially trained for ‘counter-insurgency’ warfare. It was the first unit of its kind in the [El Salvadoran] armed forces and had completed its training under the supervision of United States military advisors, at the beginning of that year, 1981.”

When two reporters - Raymond Bonner of The New York Times and Alma Guillermoprieto of The Washington Post - reported the massacre in January 1982, the Reagan administration denied it had occurred. Reagan’s point-man on Latin America, Elliott Abrams, told Congress that these reports were no more than commie propaganda. That is, he lied. (Today, Abrams, that lover of truth and human rights, is a staff member on Bush’s National Security Council responsible for Middle East matters.) A forensic investigation conducted in the early 1990s proved that the massacre had happened. And the truth commission’s report noted that “two hundred forty-five cartridge cases recovered from the El Mozote site were studied. Of these, 184 had discernable headstamps, identifying the ammunition as having been manufactured for the United States Government at Lake City, Missouri. …All of the projectiles except one appear to have been fired from United States-manufactured M-16 rifles.”

Thanks to Ronald Reagan, American tax dollars supported the murder of hundreds of El Salvadoran villagers. And the UN-backed commission, after examining 22,000 atrocities that occurred during the twelve-year civil war in El Salvador, attributed 85 percent of the abuses to the Reagan-assisted right-wing military and its death-squad allies. Similar patterns transpired in Guatemala and Honduras in the 1980s.

The El Mozote massacre, though perhaps the largest massacre in modern Latin American history, is a minor footnote in the history of the Cold War, but it is, as writer Mark Danner, author of The Massacre at El Mozote, observed, “a central parable of the Cold War.” It is also a telling tale of Reaganism. The lives of the people butchered in this small village by US-trained troops were worth as much of that of the man whose body now lays in a casket draped by the Stars and Stripes. Media commentators have been hailing Reagan as heroic, iconic, patriotic and optimistic figure who led an “American life.” It was indeed an American life but one with lethal consequences for others. That is as important a piece of the Reagan story - if not more so - as his oh-so-sunny and cheery outlook.

I doubt the villagers of El Mozote were thinking about Reagan’s wonderful disposition when made-in-the-USA bullets supplied to their killers by the US government, in accordance with Reagan’s foreign policy, were piercing their bodies and ending their non-American lives.

David Corn writes a twice-monthly column for TomPaine.com. Corn is the Washington editor of The Nation and is the author of The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (Crown Publishers).

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

The Saviour of Democracy Is Run By A Unilateral Bully
By Martin Wolf
Financial Times (London, England)

May 12, 2004

I am a huge admirer of the US. Freedom and democracy survived the 20th century only because of American actions and values. Without the US, Hitler or Stalin would have emerged as undisputed winners of the second world war. Thereafter, the US turned defeated enemies into allies and undertook the long - and ultimately successful - task of containing and defeating the Soviet empire.
I am also neither hostile to Republican administrations nor opposed to the use of force. On the contrary, I was heartened by Ronald Reagan’s efforts to liberalise the US economy and oppose the Soviet Union. I preferred Richard Nixon to George McGovern, in 1972, and George H.W. Bush to Michael Dukakis, in 1988. I supported the first Gulf war, though I opposed the one in Vietnam.

This personal history is of no intrinsic importance. But if I find the Bush administration’s foreign policy disturbing, so must the vast majority of humanity. If I feel Tony Blair has allied the UK too closely, then sympathy for this alliance must be perilously low.

So what is wrong with this administration? Put simply, it fails to understand the basis of US power, mis-specifies US objectives and is incompetent in executing its intentions. As a result, the position of the US - and so of the west - is worse, in significant respects, than it was the day after September 11 2001. Then, a huge proportion of humanity viewed the US as the victim of an outrage. Today, after the revelations of the treatment of prisoners in Iraq, it is seen as a perpetrator of them. Then it had the support of all its allies, now it can rely on the public’s sympathy in very few.

Let us start with the administration’s faith in the application of US military power. This is a double error. The first lies in its exaggerated belief in force. The US was able to defeat the armies of Saddam Hussein, but a civilised occupying army cannot coerce the obedience of a population. The second error lies in its belief in the irrelevance of allies. A country containing 4 per cent of the world’s population cannot impose its will upon the world. It needs permanent allies, not reluctant stooges, willing acceptance of its leadership, not sullen acquiescence. The contempt shown by leading members of the administration for those who disagree with it is now matched by the hostility of those whipped by their scorn.

Without military power, victory would not have been achieved in the second world war. Nor would the Soviet tanks have been kept at bay for more than 40 years. But the cold war was won not because the US had a bigger army than the Soviet Union, but because it offered a more attractive model. The more the US plays the unilateral bully, the more its attraction fades.

Turn then to definition of US objectives. Terrorism is a technique of the powerless adapted to the age of mass communications. A war against terrorism is as empty a slogan as one against crime, drugs or disease. But proclaiming a war against terrorism justifies the indefinite suspension of the rule of law, allows every thug on the planet to ally his repressive policies to those of the US, spawns new enemies and foments a war psychosis in the US itself.

As David Scheffer pointed out in the Financial Times last Thursday, the behaviour of the guards at Abu Ghraib is the natural, almost the inevitable, consequence of the position in which the administration has

in its pursuit of its war on terrorism - put detainees. These are neither prisoners of war nor criminal suspects. Instead, they are in a legal limbo for as long as the US decides that this so-called “war” continues. Interrogators have absolute power and, as Lord Acton pointed out, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Nobody, not excluding Americans, is immune to the temptations such power creates.

Now let us turn to the question of competence. In the short history of the war on terrorism, only one institution has shown its effectiveness - the US armed forces in “shock and awe” mode. Almost everything else has been a humiliating shambles. Afghanistan is, once again, in the arms of the war lords whose behaviour led to the Taliban invasion. The outcome in Iraq now looks far worse than that.

The decision to wage a war of choice, not of necessity, was a great risk. It could be justified only by discovering the weaponry Mr Hussein was alleged to hold or by leaving the country, if not a Jeffersonian democracy, at least in a reasonably stable condition. Having been so resoundingly wrong on the first point, the US must now succeed on the second. Always difficult, the chances of such an outcome now seem vanishingly small. What will Iraq be a few years from now - a military dictatorship, a theocracy, a divided country, an anarchy, or a permanent US occupation? Any of these, except the last, seems more plausible than stable democracy.

It is impossible to exaggerate the dangers attendant upon a US failure in Iraq: jihadis would conclude that they had now defeated a second superpower; friendly regimes would be shaken; and US prestige would be destroyed. Iraq is not another Vietnam. It is far more dangerous than that. While this venture was never going to be as militarily perilous as that war, this time dominoes could well fall. An incontinent US withdrawal could be a deciding moment in the relationship between the US and the Arab, if not the entire Muslim, world.

The US has, rightly or wrongly, staked its prestige not just on getting rid of Saddam Hussein, but on leaving behind a thriving country. If, instead, it leaves behind despotism or chaos, it will be a grievous defeat, with huge long-run consequences. Responsibility for such a failure must rest with the White House. It cannot be blamed on any subordinate department, not even the defence department. This is the president’s policy and responsibility. The buck stops there.

Crafting a foreign policy for a new era is hard. The last time this had to be done was in the time of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman more than half a century ago. The institutions they established and the values they upheld were the foundation of the successful US foreign policy of the postwar era. Now, a task even more complex has fallen on this president. He is not up to the job. This is not a moral judgment, but a practical one.

The world is too complex and dangerous for the pious simplicities and arrogant unilateralism of George W. Bush

Copyright 2004 The Financial Times Limited

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

The Hawks Loudly Express Their Second Thoughts
By John Tierney
New York Times

May 16th, 2004

Not long ago, the word “triumphalist” was being applied to the neoconservatives and other intellectuals who championed the war in Iraq. Now the buzzwords are “depressed,” “angst-ridden” and “going wobbly.”
After the setbacks in Falluja and Najaf, followed by the prisoner abuse scandal, hawks are glumly trying to reconcile the reality in Iraq with the predictions they made before the war. A few have already given up on the idea of a stable democracy in Iraq, and many are predicting failure unless there’s a dramatic change in policy - a new date for elections, a new secretary of defense, a new exit strategy.

Most blame the administration for botching the mission, and some are also questioning their own judgment. How, they wonder, did so many conservatives, who normally don’t trust their government to run a public school down the street, come to believe that federal bureaucrats could transform an entire nation in the alien culture of the Middle East? To these self-doubting hawks, the conservatives now blaming American officials for Iraq’s problems are reminiscent of the leftists who kept blaming incompetents in the Kremlin for the failure of Communism.

Some hawks are staying the course. Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, is still defended by The Wall Street Journal editorial page and columnists like Charles Krauthammer, of The Washington Post, and William Safire, of The New York Times, who has dismissed the idea of speeding the transition as “cut and walk fast.” Rush Limbaugh has accused liberal journalists of overreacting to the prison scandal.

When asked on Friday about the criticism from his fellow neoconservatives, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz acknowledged difficulties but seemed unfazed. “Saddam’s murderers and torturers who abused the Iraqi people for 35 years have proven to be a tough as well as ruthless enemy,” he said. “But no one should have expected a cakewalk and that’s no reason to go wobbly now. I spend most of my time with officers and soldiers, and they’re not defeatists - not even the ones who suffered terrible wounds in Iraq.”

But many hawks across the political spectrum are having public second thoughts. The National Review has dismissed the Wilsonian ideal of implanting democracy in Iraq, and has recommended settling for an orderly society with a non-dictatorial government. David Brooks, a New York Times columnist, wrote that America entered Iraq with a “childish fantasy” and is now “a shellshocked hegemon.” Journalists like Robert Novak, Max Boot and Thomas Friedman have encouraged Mr. Rumsfeld to resign.

Robert Kagan and William Kristol, two influential hawks at the neoconservative Weekly Standard, warned in last week’s issue of the widespread bipartisan view that the war “is already lost or on the verge of being lost.” They called for moving up the election in Iraq to Sept. 30 to hasten the transition and distract attention from American mistakes.

“There’s a fair amount of conservative despair, which I respect,” Mr. Kristol, the magazine’s editor, said in an interview. “My sentiments are closer to anger than to angst. My anger is at the administration for having made many more mistakes than it needed to have made. But we still have to win and we still can win.”

Andrew Sullivan, the conservative blogger, has questioned whether it was foolish to trust the Bush administration to wage the war competently. After the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Mr. Sullivan posted such pained thoughts questioning the moral justification for the war that he was inundated with e-mail messages telling him to buck up.

“Now I’m being bashed for going wobbly,” Mr. Sullivan said. “I’m still in favor of this war and still desperately want it to succeed, but when the case we made for war is undermined by events, we have to acknowledge that and explain why the case for war still stands. Sometimes politicians have to stick to scripts regardless of the facts, but a writer has an obligation to be more honest.”

These second thoughts seem a bit late to some non-conservative hawks like Kenneth M. Pollack and Fareed Zakaria. Although Mr. Pollack, a senior fellow at the Saban Center of the Brookings Institution, wrote an influential book urging war against Iraq, he called the administration’s plan ill-conceived before the war began. Mr. Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International, turned on the administration shortly after the occupation began.

“All the big mistakes were made in the first three or four months, when the administration didn’t send in enough troops and spurned international cooperation,” Mr. Zakaria said. “But the neoconservatives were cheering them on. Now that it’s going south, they’re simply blowing with the wind. In retrospect, the critics I have a lot of respect for are the realist conservatives who said long before the war that you’re opening up a hornet’s nest and the costs will outweigh the benefits.”

The columnist George Will suggested the administration get a dose of conservatism without the “neo” prefix, and Tucker Carlson, of CNN’s “Crossfire,” said he, too, had gained respect for old-fashioned conservatism.

“I supported the war and now I feel foolish,” Mr. Carlson said. “I’m just struck by how many people like me who were instinctively distrustful of government forgot to be humble in our expectations. The idea that the federal government can quickly transform the Middle East seems odd to me for a conservative. A basic tenet of conservatism is that it’s much easier to destroy things than to create them - much easier, and more fun, too.”

Mr. Wolfowitz disputed the notion that American officials had unrealistic expectations. “The purpose of this war wasn’t to remake Iraq any more than the purpose of World War II was to remake Germany and Japan,” he said. ” But having removed Saddam Hussein, we have to put something better in his place. Do they think it would have been realistic to continue with another 12 years of containment after Sept. 11?”

Samuel P. Huntington, the Harvard professor who famously predicted that the cold war’s end would be followed not by the global spread of Western capitalism and democracy but by a “clash of civilizations,” said he agreed with the need to combat foreign enemies with pre-emptive action in some cases. But he did not consider Iraq one of those imminent threats and opposed the invasion.

“We just didn’t realize how totally different the culture is in Middle Eastern countries,” he said. “Before the Iraq war, I predicted that we would quickly defeat Saddam Hussein and then find ourselves in a second war against the Iraqi people that we could never win.” A similar prediction was issued last fall by Owen Harries, the former editor of The National Interest. In an essay in “The American Conservative,” Mr. Harries quoted Edmund Burke’s classic essays on the dangers of remaking society at home or abroad.

“We may say that we shall not abuse this astonishing and hitherto unheard of power,” Burke wrote of the British empire in the 1770’s. “But every other nation will think we shall abuse it. It is impossible but that, sooner or later, this state of things must produce a combination against us which may end in our ruin.”

It would be hyperbolic to say that Burke’s heirs quite share his sense of doom. But they’re not sounding much cheerier these days.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

The One-Note Superpower
By Fareed Zakaria
Newsweek

February 2, 2004

A funny thing has happened. While the war on terrorism has dominated headlines, the great engine of globalization has kept moving.

Covered in blankets of snow, Davos was looking stunning last weekend. The sight even moved the normally unflappable vice president of the United States. Dick Cheney began his speech to the World Economic Forum noting reflectively that settings like these force one to step back from day-to-day pressures and take “the long view.” Unfortunately, his own address, well-crafted and thoughtful on its own terms, did not really take up that challenge.
Cheney spoke intelligently about the dangers of terrorism. He noted that today’s technology makes possible the killing not just of 3,000 people, but 300,000. His solutions were persuasive: help end the ideologies of violence by promoting reform in the greater Middle East; increase cooperation among countries to battle terrorism, and if and when diplomacy fails, take decisive (meaning military) action.

But the speech fell flat. It’s not that people at the conference disagreed with it. But it seemed quite disconnected from what they-politicians, businessmen, religious figures, social activists and writers from around the world-had been talking about and grappling with over the previous few days. You see, a funny thing has happened around the world over the past two years. While the war on terrorism has dominated headlines, the great engine of globalization has kept moving, rewarding some, punishing others, but always keeping up the pressure by increasing human contact, communication and competition. For almost every country today, its primary struggle centers on globalization issues-growth, poverty eradication, disease prevention, education, urbanization, the preservation of identity.

On all these, America is now largely silent. “It’s not that we don’t worry about terrorism,” a head of government (of a pro-American country) said to me. But for him, as for other leaders, it’s not how he sees the world: “I have to grapple with a different set of issues. And I have the feeling that the United States has gone off into its own universe and cannot hear or say anything to me about my problems.” There is a disconnect between America and the world.

Of all the leaders who attended this meeting, no one could be more concerned with terrorists than President Musharraf of Pakistan. They have, after all, repeatedly threatened his life. Yet his schedule of private meetings, which were mainly with businessmen, reveal his priorities: investment, growth and development. Turkey has recently suffered terrorist attacks. But Prime Minister Erdogan wanted to impress on his audience Turkey’s determination to meet the European Union’s criteria for membership. Both leaders are showing flexibility on longstanding political disputes (Kashmir and Cyprus) because they realize that these are obstacles to their most important goal: modernization.

Most countries and companies see that globalization is creating enormous opportunities, but also new problems. “We have increasing global trade and commerce, but we still have a hodgepodge of differing standards for everything from earnings to ethics,” said Jurgen Hambrecht, chairman of the board of the German company BASF. But Washington is not likely to take the lead on creating new standards or solutions, presumably because it somehow smacks of world government. Even in the war on terror, where the United States seeks (in Cheney’s words) “greater cooperation,” it has not tried to create a global system that shares information and creates common standards of security. Instead it prefers ad hoc measures. This lack of leadership means, ultimately, a less secure world.

Even in the economic realm there is no clear vision, and so countries are freelancing, jockeying for advantage. Developing nations that once feared globalization are beginning to learn how to use it to their advantage, sometimes ganging up during trade negotiations. Others cleverly combine populist measures with pro-growth policies. Thus Vladimir Putin jails oligarchs, yet opens up parts of Russia’s economy. Brazil’s Lula and Thailand’s Thaksin speak of solidarity with the people even as they liberalize the economy. Most important, China is gaming the global capitalist system to its benefit, devoting immense resources and brainpower to its negotiations on trade, commerce and business law.

While Washington worries about traditional problems of empire, disorder on the periphery, there is a new globalizing world slowly taking shape, in search of leadership.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Study Published by Army Criticizes War on Terror’s Scope
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer

January 12, 2004

A scathing new report published by the Army War College broadly criticizes the Bush administration’s handling of the war on terrorism, accusing it of taking a detour into an “unnecessary” war in Iraq and pursuing an “unrealistic” quest against terrorism that may lead to U.S. wars with states that pose no serious threat.
The report, by Jeffrey Record, a visiting professor at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, warns that as a result of those mistakes, the Army is “near the breaking point.”

It recommends, among other things, scaling back the scope of the “global war on terrorism” and instead focusing on the narrower threat posed by the al Qaeda terrorist network.

“[T]he global war on terrorism as currently defined and waged is dangerously indiscriminate and ambitious, and accordingly . . . its parameters should be readjusted,” Record writes. Currently, he adds, the anti-terrorism campaign “is strategically unfocused, promises more than it can deliver, and threatens to dissipate U.S. military resources in an endless and hopeless search for absolute security.”

Record, a veteran defense specialist and author of six books on military strategy and related issues, was an aide to then-Sen. Sam Nunn when the Georgia Democrat was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

In discussing his political background, Record also noted that in 1999 while on the staff of the Air War College, he published work critical of the Clinton administration.

His essay, published by the Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, carries the standard disclaimer that its views are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Army, the Pentagon or the U.S. government.

But retired Army Col. Douglas C. Lovelace Jr., director of the Strategic Studies Institute, whose Web site carries Record’s 56-page monograph, hardly distanced himself from it. “I think that the substance that Jeff brings out in the article really, really needs to be considered,” he said.

Publication of the essay was approved by the Army War College’s commandant, Maj. Gen. David H. Huntoon Jr., Lovelace said. He said he and Huntoon expected the study to be controversial, but added, “He considers it to be under the umbrella of academic freedom.”

Larry DiRita, the top Pentagon spokesman, said he had not read the Record study. He added: “If the conclusion is that we need to be scaling back in the global war on terrorism, it’s not likely to be on my reading list anytime soon.”

Many of Record’s arguments, such as the contention that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was deterred and did not present a threat, have been made by critics of the administration. Iraq, he concludes, “was a war-of-choice distraction from the war of necessity against al Qaeda.” But it is unusual to have such views published by the War College, the Army’s premier academic institution.

In addition, the essay goes further than many critics in examining the Bush administration’s handling of the war on terrorism.

Record’s core criticism is that the administration is biting off more than it can chew. He likens the scale of U.S. ambitions in the war on terrorism to Adolf Hitler’s overreach in World War II. “A cardinal rule of strategy is to keep your enemies to a manageable number,” he writes. “The Germans were defeated in two world wars . . . because their strategic ends outran their available means.”

He also scoffs at the administration’s policy, laid out by Bush in a November speech, of seeking to transform and democratize the Middle East. “The potential policy payoff of a democratic and prosperous Middle East, if there is one, almost certainly lies in the very distant future,” he writes. “The basis on which this democratic domino theory rests has never been explicated.”

He also casts doubt on whether the U.S. government will maintain its commitment to the war. “The political, fiscal, and military sustainability of the GWOT [global war on terrorism] remains to be seen,” he states.

The essay concludes with several recommendations. Some are fairly noncontroversial, such as increasing the size of the Army and Marine Corps, a position that appears to be gathering support in Congress. But he also says the United States should scale back its ambitions in Iraq, and be prepared to settle for a “friendly autocracy” there rather than a genuine democracy.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Leo Strauss’ Philosophy of Deception
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
May 19, 2003

What would you do if you wanted to topple Saddam Hussein, but your intelligence agencies couldn’t find the evidence to justify a war?

A follower of Leo Strauss may just hire the “right” kind of men to get the job done - people with the intellect, acuity, and, if necessary, the political commitment, polemical skills, and, above all, the imagination to find the evidence that career intelligence officers could not detect.
The “right” man for Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, suggests Seymour Hersh in his recent New Yorker article entitled ‘Selective Intelligence,’ was Abram Shulsky, director of the Office of Special Plans (OSP) - an agency created specifically to find the evidence of WMDs and/or links with Al Qaeda, piece it together, and clinch the case for the invasion of Iraq.

Like Wolfowitz, Shulsky is a student of an obscure German Jewish political philosopher named Leo Strauss who arrived in the United States in 1938. Strauss taught at several major universities, including Wolfowitz and Shulsky’s alma mater, the University of Chicago, before his death in 1973.

Strauss is a popular figure among the neoconservatives. Adherents of his ideas include prominent figures both within and outside the administration. They include ‘Weekly Standard’ editor William Kristol; his father and indeed the godfather of the neoconservative movement, Irving Kristol; the new Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Stephen Cambone, a number of senior fellows at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) (home to former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle and Lynne Cheney), and Gary Schmitt, the director of the influential Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which is chaired by Kristol the Younger.

Strauss’ philosophy is hardly incidental to the strategy and mindset adopted by these men - as is obvious in Shulsky’s 1999 essay titled “Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous)” (in Greek philosophy the term nous denotes the highest form of rationality). As Hersh notes in his article, Shulsky and his co-author Schmitt “criticize America’s intelligence community for its failure to appreciate the duplicitous nature of the regimes it deals with, its susceptibility to social-science notions of proof, and its inability to cope with deliberate concealment.” They argued that Strauss’s idea of hidden meaning, “alerts one to the possibility that political life may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception.”

Rule One: Deception

It’s hardly surprising then why Strauss is so popular in an administration obsessed with secrecy, especially when it comes to matters of foreign policy. Not only did Strauss have few qualms about using deception in politics, he saw it as a necessity. While professing deep respect for American democracy, Strauss believed that societies should be hierarchical - divided between an elite who should lead, and the masses who should follow. But unlike fellow elitists like Plato, he was less concerned with the moral character of these leaders. According to Shadia Drury, who teaches politics at the University of Calgary, Strauss believed that “those who are fit to rule are those who realize there is no morality and that there is only one natural right - the right of the superior to rule over the inferior.”

This dichotomy requires “perpetual deception” between the rulers and the ruled, according to Drury. Robert Locke, another Strauss analyst says,”The people are told what they need to know and no more.” While the elite few are capable of absorbing the absence of any moral truth, Strauss thought, the masses could not cope. If exposed to the absence of absolute truth, they would quickly fall into nihilism or anarchy, according to Drury, author of ‘Leo Strauss and the American Right’ (St. Martin’s 1999).

Second Principle: Power of Religion

According to Drury, Strauss had a “huge contempt” for secular democracy. Nazism, he believed, was a nihilistic reaction to the irreligious and liberal nature of the Weimar Republic. Among other neoconservatives, Irving Kristol has long argued for a much greater role for religion in the public sphere, even suggesting that the Founding Fathers of the American Republic made a major mistake by insisting on the separation of church and state. And why? Because Strauss viewed religion as absolutely essential in order to impose moral law on the masses who otherwise would be out of control.

At the same time, he stressed that religion was for the masses alone; the rulers need not be bound by it. Indeed, it would be absurd if they were, since the truths proclaimed by religion were “a pious fraud.” As Ronald Bailey, science correspondent for Reason magazine points out, “Neoconservatives are pro-religion even though they themselves may not be believers.”

“Secular society in their view is the worst possible thing,'’ Drury says, because it leads to individualism, liberalism, and relativism, precisely those traits that may promote dissent that in turn could dangerously weaken society’s ability to cope with external threats. Bailey argues that it is this firm belief in the political utility of religion as an “opiate of the masses” that helps explain why secular Jews like Kristol in ‘Commentary’ magazine and other neoconservative journals have allied themselves with the Christian Right and even taken on Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Third Principle: Aggressive Nationalism

Like Thomas Hobbes, Strauss believed that the inherently aggressive nature of human beings could only be restrained by a powerful nationalistic state. “Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed,” he once wrote. “Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united - and they can only be united against other people.”

Not surprisingly, Strauss’ attitude toward foreign policy was distinctly Machiavellian. “Strauss thinks that a political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat,” Drury wrote in her book. “Following Machiavelli, he maintained that if no external threat exists then one has to be manufactured (emphases added).”

“Perpetual war, not perpetual peace, is what Straussians believe in,” says Drury. The idea easily translates into, in her words, an “aggressive, belligerent foreign policy,” of the kind that has been advocated by neocon groups like PNAC and AEI scholars - not to mention Wolfowitz and other administration hawks who have called for a world order dominated by U.S. military power. Strauss’ neoconservative students see foreign policy as a means to fulfill a “national destiny” - as Irving Kristol defined it already in 1983 - that goes far beyond the narrow confines of a ” myopic national security.”

As to what a Straussian world order might look like, the analogy was best captured by the philosopher himself in one of his - and student Allen Bloom’s - many allusions to Gulliver’s Travels. In Drury’s words, “When Lilliput was on fire, Gulliver urinated over the city, including the palace. In so doing, he saved all of Lilliput from catastrophe, but the Lilliputians were outraged and appalled by such a show of disrespect.”

The image encapsulates the neoconservative vision of the United States’ relationship with the rest of the world - as well as the relationship between their relationship as a ruling elite with the masses. “They really have no use for liberalism and democracy, but they’re conquering the world in the name of liberalism and democracy,” Drury says.

Jim Lobe writes on foreign policy for Alternet. His work has also appeared on Foreign Policy In Focus and TomPaine.com

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

By Andrei K. Sitov; Washington Bureau Chief for ITAR-TASS News Agency of Russia.
The views exressed in the article are his own.
August 4th, 2003

For the past 20 years I’ve been covering the US first as a Soviet and then as a Russian reporter. Since the end of the Cold War my country has been trying to become more like America. Meanwhile the US, especially after 9/11, increasingly resembles the old Soviet Union.
Please consider:

- The US acts as if it believes it knows what’s best not only for the Americans but for the rest of the world and shows a willingness to force this belief down other people’s throats. For a while - until the terrorist attacks - its “elite” even toyed with the ridiculous notion of an “end of history”. This is an idea common to all totalitarian regimes (some scholars say it is rooted in the Armageddon prophecy in the Bible). At least Fukuyama’s version did not envision a blood bath.

- The US continues to define its national greatness through military strength - as witnessed by the new National Security strategy. The Soviet Union always used to do that; Dr. Rice told me she thought it would be a grave mistake for Russia to act in a similar manner. To me it seems to be an example of “do as I say, not as I do”.

- The US shows a dislike for international agreements across the board from arms control to the International Criminal Court and from Kyoto protocols to tobacco trade. The Soviet Union also seemed to comply only with those international obligations that it liked. To be fair, as Secretary Powell pointed out to me, Americans don’t break agreements - they either don’t sign them or withdraw from them.

- The US now liberates other nations without being asked. The Pentagon advisor Mr. Perle told me that “there are more important things than national sovereignty”. Of course the late Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev had a “doctrine of limited sovereignty” named after him. Mr. Perle also said the US always leaves the lands it occupies. I shared that opinion with a Mexican colleague; he begged to differ.

- The US has a curious relationship with its allies. It often carries their water for them - and gets resentment and ridicule in return. The Soviet satellites used to pay lip service to their “unbreakable alliance” with the USSR and sneer behind our backs. They also had a higher standard of living. The transatlantic partners of the Americans say the US is indispensable (Secretary Albright was actually vain enough to repeat it publicly; when I challenged her, she said “other countries call us that”). In the meantime the Europeans at least once in the last decade managed to get the US actually go to war for them - in former Yugoslavia. They also believe they live in a much better and more civilized way than the Americans do. Personally I think the Americans (like the Soviets in the past) have only themselves to blame for this situation. They get what they asked for and shouldn’t complain about it.

- The US conducts a large-scale propaganda effort that may not always be entirely truthful. It uses purely totalitarian slogans such as “Who’s not with us is against us”. The government effort is directly coordinated by the White House though a special office that sends out “Daily Messages” with key talking points (in Soviet days this was a standard operation procedure for the Kremlin; it is still used in some post-Soviet states). The latest press conference of President George W. Bush was by his own admission orchestrated (this was written before the press conference on July 30th which was also carefully staged - AS); the White House was never really challenged on it. The press seems to have accepted new rules of the game which generally conform to the so called “patriotic consensus”. The coverage of the war in Iraq by “embedded” journalists (even we at ITAR-TASS had one at an air carrier) was a perfect example. The reporters were filing directly from the front lines. Yet it seems nothing that the government wouldn’t want to be known made it to TV screens and newspaper pages. At least one myth - the Jessica Lynch story in the original propagandistic version - flourished for a surprisingly long time. There’s at least one genuine taboo in American journalism: admitting that the 9/11 highjackers were personally brave and committed to their murderous cause.

- The US now has a new “super agency” - the Department of Homeland Security - whose name is best translated into Russian as an equivalent of the old KGB. It also has some of the KGB functions. A color-coded system of alerts adds to the feeling of permanent anxiety, the expectation of new threats from external and internal enemies. Internal security has been tightened dramatically. Borders are being sealed off; the rules of immigration and international travel are hardened. Spying and informing on your neighbors - a staple of any totalitarian regime - is encouraged. A government-run “total information awareness” system has been created. It’s reportedly designed to hold the amount of data - much of it on private citizens - equal to all the Internet pages over the past 5 years.

- The US government seeks and receives additional powers to interfere into people’s lives both through new laws and a more restrictive application of old ones. It runs a detention camp at a legal no-man’s land in Guantanamo, Cuba. The foreign detainees including some Russians have no legal status and allegedly can be held indefinitely. Some of the detainees are now nearing a trial by military tribunals potentially facing death penalty.

- As a result of all of the above the doctrine of containment created to confront the Soviet Union is now increasingly applied by the outside world to the US - in practical policy if not in name. On numerous occasions people from the third world and even Europe told me they wished the USSR was back - not for its own sake but as a counterbalance to America. I believe the Soviet Union collapsed largely because it was not telling the truth about itself either to its own population or to the world. The Russians do not like to think of themselves as losers in the Cold War (after all they peacefully rejected communism and won their freedom). But generally speaking, from a moral standpoint, losing may actually be preferable to winning. If you lose, you have to ask yourself why it happened and face your own shortcomings, weaknesses and lies. Meanwhile the illusions, propaganda and lies of the winning side are usually justified and reinforced. Besides, current American policies seem to give comfort to a number of less than democratic nations around the world including some former Soviet states. Americans may not recognize their own country in my description. I know for a fact that many Russians also refuse to believe it. After all America embodies the best values and ideals that we wanted to make our own when we started our post-communist transition. That is exactly why I’m worried about the seeming “Sovietization” of America. If not yet a reality, it’s a dangerous trend, a spooky “specter”. And I think the Americans would be well advised to recognize the threat and take it seriously. They have everything they need to defeat it while safeguarding their legitimate security interests and to win back the confidence and admiration of their friends and partners around the world.

By Andrei Sitov

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)