Sic Semper Tyrannis

Habakkuk on the origins of American political and strategic thought

Professor Brenner,

In response to Colonel Lang's observations on the way that Karzai has pulled the wool over Obama's eyes on the prospects of maintaining an American troop presence in Afghanistan, you raised the question of why, 'after more than a decade of deep immersion in the Islamic world,' American policymakers are still 'so dense.'  And you asked whether the problem was simply at the 'senior policy-making level', or whether it also extends to the 'experts' who brief and write papers for those actually making policy.<p>At the risk of lapsing into platitude or egregious error, due to the thinness of my knowledge, let me hazard some reflections in response to your questions.

American self-images reflect certain particular Western intellectual traditions. One of these, republican thought, is classical in origin and initially emerges from reflections in one troubled polity, fifteenth-century Italy, about another: Rome at the time of the transition to imperial rule. In it, a pessimistic view of human nature has ambivalent implications.  On the one hand, it leads to an immense suspicion of unchecked power. Controlling power is portrayed in part as a matter of balance - having opposing social forces, such as patricians and plebeians in the Roman republic, as well as different parts of government, limit each other - and partly a cultural matter, with an overwhelming emphasis on republican virtu.

Habakkuk on the Libor Scandal

 

In the wake of the eruption into full public view of the scandal over the fixing of LIBOR, as 'Harper' noted in a post some days ago, the Financial Times called for a return to the full separation of retail and investment banking, such as prevailed in the U.S. under the Glass-Steagall Act between 1933 and 1999. 

A report in the same paper has now suggested that traders at the British bank Barclays, which has been the principal focus of the coverage of the scandal so far, may have been the ringleaders in a coordinated effort to manipulate EURIBOR – the European equivalent of LIBOR. 

Banks involved in this collusive fraud, it is suggested, included Crédit Agricole, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, and Société Générale.  And this, together with the fixing of LIBOR – which it seems likely, came to involve a wide range of banks worldwide, including major American and Japanese institutions – appears to have been routinely practised by Barclays, prior to the onset of the financial crisis.

As the two benchmarks, calculated for a variety of currencies on the basis of an average of submissions from banks about how much it costs them to borrow from other banks, are the basis of which trillions of dollars worth of financial contracts are valued, the potential ramifications of the various investigations now underway into their fixing are immense.  And it is doubtless unsurprising that a recent report in the New York Times, under the title 'U.S. is Building Criminal Cases in Rate-Fixing' explained that the LIBOR case, 'presents a potential opportunity for prosecutors.'  It continued:

Given the scope of the problems and the number of institutions involved, the rate-rigging investigation could provide a signature moment to hold big banks accountable for their activities during the financial crisis.

It may seem curmudgeonly, cowardly, or both, to regard this prospect with anything less than unqualified enthusiasm.  However, an exclusive focus on the delinquencies of selected scapegoats during the financial crisis may divert attention from questions more directly relevant to understanding how the crisis came about and how what now seems an almost inevitable recurrence might perhaps be prevented.

Involved here, moreover, are not simply the actions of élites, but the way many of their members have become accustomed to think. And some of the issues raised by the LIBOR and EURIBOR scandals about how élites think about economics may overlap with questions about how they think about foreign affairs which have been discussed on SST over the years. 

A recurrent theme of Colonel Lang's posts has been the way that ideological blinkers, among them those involved in 'rational choice' theorising popular in areas of the 'social sciences', make impossible any kind of adequate understanding of alien societies. A question which needs to be confronted is whether such blinkers also make it impossible to understand our own.

Goldberg Variations

The fascinating discussion on this site of the piece which Jeffrey Goldberg published on Bloomberg on 19 March, under the title 'Israelis Grow Confident Strike on Iran's Nukes Can Work', sent me back to the article he published, under the title 'The Point of No Return', in the Atlantic in September 2010. 

Quite clearly, in both articles, Goldberg has been acting as a conduit for Israeli government propaganda.  As so often in contemporary journalism, the implicit deal appears to be that a favoured reporter is granted access, on the condition that he or she uncritically relays the messages which his or her sources want broadcast.  As a result, while Goldberg's interviews with Netanyahu and others are extremely useful for all of us attempting to assess what that Israel is likely to do in relation to Iran, the evidence they provide is difficult to interpret.

Perhaps ironically, given that the argument of the 'Point of No Return' article depended upon the use of 'proof texts' to establish that the Iranian government is a kind of Second Coming of the German Nazis, Goldberg provides a classic illustration of how difficult it can be to infer from what people say what they are actually likely to do.

What put the problem into the sharpest possible relief was the invaluable evidence presented on an earlier thread by jdledell.  Summarising conversations with contacts in Israel who had a proper grasp of the technical problems involved in an attack on Iran and were not in the propaganda business, he confirmed what Colonel Lang, and others, have argued time and again on this site.  On its own, Israel simply cannot expect to do significant damage to the Iranian nuclear programme.  Among multiple problems, the refuelling capabilities that would be required for effective strikes just are not there.

Quite clearly then, there can be no rational basis for the confidence which Goldberg attributed to the Israeli leaders about what can be achieved by acting on their own. To act as he suggests they may intend to do  would not only involve risking important military assets, but also court a humiliating demonstration of impotence which would mean that, far from providing a way out of the country's security dilemmas, Netanyahu and his associates would have been likely to have made its situation immeasurably worse.

As F.B. Ali noted, jdledell's comments – actually put up the day before Goldberg's Bloomberg article – suggested a variety of possible ways in which that article could be interpreted. In what follows, I am going to try to explore further a range of possible interpretations, and some of the issues they raise.

Habakkuk on the cult of the Shoah.

In response to comments made by Babak Makkinejad in the discussion of my post on the future of the Israeli lobby, I recalled earlier observations he had made on this blog about the central role played by a kind of secular cult of the Holocaust in the post-war West.  Responding, he suggested that the implication was that this cult was superior to Islam.  So not only were powerful Christian states – 'this time in their post-Christian pretension phase' – once again confronting Muslim sentiment, and indeed Islam, on the question of the political disposition of Palestine:  the issue was once again becoming 'one inspired by religious sentiment on all sides.'

And this, he went on to argue, was a costly policy for the Western powers, 'as in essence, it tells Muslims that they are an inferior people whose concerns in regards to Palestine are irrelevant to the Euro-Atlantic states.'

I would stress that I was not, in the comments to which Babak Makkinejad was responding, making a personal judgement on the objective value of the cult of the Shoah – and certainly not suggesting it should be seen as superior to Islam, or expressing contempt for the religion of Muslims.  On the question of the wisdom, or lack of it, of creating this impression, I would not disagree with him.  It seems to me quite evidently the case that the policies pursued by Israel, and also by the United States and to a somewhat but not so far greatly lesser extent the major European states, are such as to make very many Muslims feel they are seen as inferior people professing a contemptible religion. 

And that this is not a very clever thing for Americans and Europeans to do seems to be clear. It is yet another unfortunate manifestation of the widespread inability of contemporary Western elites to grasp how important a motivator religious and quasi-religious beliefs are for most people – and indeed, very frequently, for themselves.

It is also in my view peculiarly stupid for Israelis to believe that their current superiority in power means that they can prudently treat Muslim sentiment with contempt.  And this, I think, reflects an inability to grasp that a short-term preponderance of power, however great, is something quite different from a strategic position sustainable over the long term.

Revision of "Habakkuk on the future of 'the lobby.'"

 
"If more American Jews recover sufficient imagination to realise that the implacable opposition by AIPAC and other elements of the Israeli lobby to any attempt to shift U.S. policy away from its current unqualified support for Israeli hardliners poses dangers to themselves, the position of the lobby may crumble."  PL quoting DH

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In response to the recent post in which Colonel Lang quoted Grant Smith's observation that the secret that AIPAC is an organisation that has been breaking US laws ever since its emergence in 1963 was "now officially 'out of the bag'", "The Beaver" linked to a most interesting interview with the former AIPAC lobbyist Keith Weissman. It was Weissman who, along with his colleague Steve Rosen, was indicted back in 2005 on charges of illegally conspiring to collect and disseminate classified secrets to journalists and to Israeli diplomats – charges that were dropped in 2009, in somewhat controversial circumstances.

As Smith suggests in a commentary on the interview, Weissman's account of his role in shaping AIPAC's Iran policy, in which she portrays himself as 'a lone progressive hero fending off the Israel lobby's push for regime change from AIPAC's Iran desk' merits a rather more sceptical treatment than the interviewer, Robert Dreyfuss, gives it.

However, this in no way detracts from the very great interest of Weissman's comment that the reason he is telling his story is that:

we may be going down a path, helped along by the American Jewish community, and maybe even Israel, that is going to be worse even than the one we're on now - some sort of military confrontation with Iran. That worries me. Because they will be able to blame [it] on the Jews, to a great extent.

Irrespective of whether Weissman is rewriting the historical record, his apprehension that a war with Iran – which he says would be 'the stupidest thing I ever heard of' – could provoke an anti-Semitic backlash is quite patently genuine and deeply felt. It may also be indicative of a changing climate. 

In the triumphalist period ushered in by the retreat and collapse of the Soviet Union, it came to be widely taken for granted – in my own country, Britain, just as much as the United States – that there was some natural course of history leading to the remodelling of the world in the image of the post-war West. It also came to be taken for granted that American military power could be used as a catalyst of this transformation.

So great was the climate of euphoria – whose classic statement was of course Francis Fukuyama's 'End of History' article – that the possibility that military ventures in the Muslim world might go disastrously wrong was largely ignored by mainstream opinion, non-Jewish and Jewish alike.  The warnings of people with real expertise and experience of the societies which were supposed to be remodelled by American military might about the problems involved were disregarded, and such people marginalised. 

So there was little reason for American Jews to be concerned that these adventures might have negative effects on them – and few were.

One discordant voice came in a strange, strangulated article entitled 'Leviathan' published in the New York Review of Books in May 2003 by the co-founder of that journal, Jason Epstein – who, curiously, also happens to be the husband of Judith Miller: the title being an allusion to ‘Moby Dick’, the classic tale of a suicidal quest to eliminate evil.

Among other things, Epstein described the way many German Jews shared the then prevalent enthusiasm for war in 1914 -- recalling Martin Buber's vision of it as a "sacred spring" which would finally unite Germans and Jews in a "joint historical mission": to civilise the Near East.

And Epstein went on to quote a comment by a notable Jewish opponent of the war, the great Viennese satirist Karl Kraus. In Kraus's view, that catastrophic conflict was the product of 'a disastrous failure of the imagination and an almost deliberate refusal to envisage the inevitable consequences of words and acts...made possible above all by the corruption of language in politics and by some of the major newspapers.'

As Weissman very fairly stresses, the positions taken by AIPAC have reflected the preferences of a minority of wealthy and right-wing American Jews, sympathetic to the Likud, who provided a very large share both of the organisation's funding and of Jewish funding of political parties and candidates. As he says, their views do not reflect those of the majority of American Jews.

However, it has also to be said that – at least until very recently, and still to a substantial extent now – evidence of deeply-committed and energetic opposition among other American Jews to the directions in which the Likud and its American fellow travellers have attempted to move not only Israeli but US policy has not been abundant.  There are of course glaring exceptions – prominent among them the admirable Philip Weiss – but these have remained relatively isolated.

One of Grant Smith’s complaints against Weissman is that he shows concern for the possible impact of a war on American Jews, rather than its ‘broader potential consequences’.  However, in the real world, our impulse to rise from lethargy and try to prevent situations developing in catastrophic directions is often very directly related to the extent to which we can imagine our own interests being directly at risk.

If more American Jews recover sufficient imagination to realise that the implacable opposition by AIPAC and other elements of the Israeli lobby to any attempt to shift U.S. policy away from its current unqualified support for Israeli hardliners poses dangers to themselves, the position of the lobby may crumble – and do so quite rapidly.  David Habakkuk

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Habakkuk has revised his earlier piece to make it more complete.  pl

 

A Poisoned Chalice by David Habakkuk

 
The proposals that Israel should be admitted to NATO, discussed by Clifford Kiracofe in a post not long ago, provide yet another illustration of the inability of so many of that country's most committed supporters, both in United States and elsewhere in the West, to grasp the suicidal nature of the course they have encouraged it to follow.

At a time when the waves of unrest sweeping the Arab world are calling fundamentally into question the ability of the United States to persuade governments in crucial countries – above all Egypt – to act in ways which Israel wants, support for that country in some of the traditionally most loyal allies of the US has been collapsing. Certainly, the Israeli government's presentation of its policies towards the Palestinians – and also Lebanon and Iran – as the unavoidable defensive responses of a beleaguered outpost of Western civilisation, confronted by that civilisation's implacable Arab and Muslim enemies, retains powerful traction, particularly among neoconservatives, in Europe as in the United States.

So in Britain for example a prominent neoconservative, Michael Gove – Education Secretary in the current Tory/Liberal Democrat coalition government – has argued in his influential polemic on the Islamist threat to Western civilisation, Celsius 7/7, that Israel must be defended all costs because it 'is an integral part of the West, a vessel for its values, an example of its virtues and is hated not for what it does but what it is'.

But neoconservatives like Gove – who in 2008 described the invasion of Iraq as ‘a proper British foreign policy success’ – are not being entirely successful in persuading their own peoples. While the events of the past decade have encouraged a wave of Islamophobia in Europe, as in the United States, this has signally failed to produce an increased sense of solidarity with Israel among the population at large. The annual poll of perceptions of the global role of different countries done for the BBC World Service, published earlier this month, showed a marginal improvement in Israel's worldwide rating, which still however left Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea as the only countries surveyed ranked as having a more negative influence.  Among the generally very negative views of the country in Europe, a particularly dramatic change was the increase in negative ratings in the UK from 50% to 66% – with only 14% now giving the country a positive rating.

Habakkuk responds to Batondor

"batondor,

Thanks for your comment. I would like to stress that I would certainly not want to identify the views of Jews in general – and certainly not of Jews in my own country, Britain – with those of the current Israeli government. It seems to me clear that attitudes among Jews here are ihn flux, and are also commonly conflicted. It is also quite difficult to be clear as to what is going on – particularly as people are often imperfectly candid about what they think, and even with very old and close Jewish friends I have found myself engaging in oddly elliptical conversations.What however I think is happening is that very old issues concerning Jewish identity are resurfacing, often in a very painful way. How far the position in the United States is or is not different from that in Britain is I think an interesting question.Since writing my original comment, I have read a discussion of the recently disclosed documents by Alastair Crooke – the former MI6 officer who created an organisation called Conflicts Forum – which draws heavily on the analysis of Professor Mushtaq Khan of the School of Oriental and African Studies here. I am not putting either forward as an unbiased observer, but I think their views give food for thought.(The Crooke article is at:http://english.aljazeera.net/palestinepapers/2011/01/201112412224387862.html;

Habakkuk on Hitler and Stalin

Neil Richardson, Phil Catter, LysanderPhil is quite right to stress that the way that events developed reflected Hitler's personal obsessions. And in looking at the shaping influence of his background amid the bitter racial tensions of the dying Hapsburg Empire, as well as his manic anti-Semitism one needs to take into account his virulent Slavophobia.There was a coherent alternative vision of a 'national socialist' global order, which was rooted in Prussian traditions, and which was championed by the so-called 'Ostlers' of the German Foreign Office. Of these, the most significant was the ambassador to Moscow in the years leading up to the invasion of the Soviet Union, Friedrich Werner, Count von der Schulenberg.There are fascinating – and readable – memoirs of Schulenberg's diplomacy by two of his erstwhile subordinates, Gustav Hilger and Hans von Herwarth, available in English. And what is essentially the German Moscow Embassy view of Stalin's diplomacy underpins Grand Delusion, a notable 1999 study of the events leading up to Barbarossa by the Israeli historian Gabriel Gorodetsky.At the risk of crass oversimplification, the 'Ostlers' tended to see the First World War as in substantial measure the product of the foolish abandonment by their own country of the traditional Bismarckian emphasis on good relations between Berlin and St Petersburg.

Habakkuk on "Holocaust Trauma"

"walrus,So basically what is being said here is that American intentions and thinking is perfectly visible to Israel, as was the German High Command's thanks to Turing s work on Enigma?It does indeed seem highly likely that no information on American ‘intentions and thinking’ can be hidden from Israel. How accurately the Israelis interpret it is, however, another matter.What we saw in Jeffrey Goldberg’s recent article in the ‘Atlantic’ was a vivid portrayal of an Israeli leadership utterly unable to escape from Holocaust trauma, by an American Jew who was almost equally the prisoner of the nightmares of the past. The article made vividly clear the way in which Arab and Muslim hostility to Israel is interpreted through the lens of the Holocaust, so that it is seen as driven by an annihilationist anti-Semitism essentially similar to Hitler’s.

Of Chess and Baseball - David Habakkuk

 A point which puzzles me. In the thread on Jeffrey Goldberg’s ‘Atlantic’ piece, not only the Colonel, but also F.B. Ali and Phil Girald, suggested that if Israel attacked Iran, the conflict would automatically escalate so that the United States would be drawn in. And all three, obviously, are people whose assessments carry very great weight. However, Lysander suggested -- as he has in earlier threads -- that the sensible strategy for the Iranians would be to attempt to prevent the United States being drawn in, by limiting their response to a withdrawal from the NPT, and that they might well do this.According to Steve Clemons, Ali Larijani once told him that Iranians play chess, and the Americans baseball – and ‘chess beats baseball.’ And reading Goldberg's article, I did find myself wondering on what basis Israeli intelligence believed that the Iranians would necessarily respond to an Israeli strike by ordering Hezbollah to fire rockets at Israeli cities – precisely because the clever ‘chess’ move might be to instruct Hezbollah to refrain from attacking, unless attacked.The thrust of the comments of the former Israeli air-force

"The Peace of Dives" Habakkuk

 Back in 1903 Kipling wrote his poem 'The Peace of Dives'. Despairing of the warlike propensities of mankind, the Lord releases Dives from Hell, to see if he can do any better than 'Saint and Seer and Prophet' in curbing them. And Dives succeeds triumphantly, binding human beings together in webs of interdependence, so that their greeds and fears, instead of impelling them to fight one another, make them avoid doing so, so creating a peace which Satan, try as he may, cannot disrupt.(See http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_dives.htm.) It was, of course, a spectacularly inapt anticipation. But then, in a real sense, it ought to have been true -- as it turned out, practically everyone in Europe had an immense common interest in avoiding the kind of major war which erupted a decade after the poem was written.After the retreat and collapse of Soviet power, there was a great deal of euphoric talk about the 'democratic peace', resting on the highly dubious proposition that democracies are inherently peace-loving. A more reasonable optimism might have been that, at least among major powers, a kind of 'peace of Dives' might take hold.It was always highly unlikely that either Russia or China would become Western-style democracies, in the forseeable future, if at all. But the greeds and fears of the new capitalist elites in those countries do not obviously impel them towards an enthusiasm for military conflict.It would, obviously, not be sensible for American policymakers to assume that such a 'peace of Dives' will take hold. But it would seem sensible to try to steer in that direction.This is not an argument for neglecting prudent defence preparedness -- the old joke applies, that it takes two to make a murder, a murderer and a murderee. But the requirement not to lead others into temptation through weakness needs to be balanced with that of avoiding getting into highly militarised confrontations which may develop a logic of their own. Putting the point another way, if 'deterrence' and indeed 'compellence' are part of a prudent statecraft, so too is 'appeasement'.In this connection, a peculiarly fatuous comment by Daniel Gouré is worthy of note. Arguing that it is 'simply silly' to suggest that 'the world is a relatively peaceful place or will become so in the next several decades', he comments that 'according to recent press reports, NATO has begun once again to plan for the defense of its members against potential Russian aggression.'It does indeed seem that leading American policymakers still want to treat the 2008 Georgian War as a case of 'Russian aggression'. In Tbilisi last month, Hilary Clinton described the Russian military presence in Abkhazia and South Ossetia as 'invasion and occupation'.In fact, these areas only became part of Georgia after the Soviet break-up as a result of arbitrary decisions by Stalin, and their inhabitants had no more wish to be part of Georgia than the Kosovo Albanians had to be part of Serbia.It would have been possible for the United States, after the 2004 'rose revolution', to have encouraged the new President, Mikhail Saakashvili, to have attempted to woo the two regions, giving them reasons to believe they would have a better future in Georgia than in association with Russia. Instead, wittingly or unwittingly, they pursued a course which was bound to encourage him in his clearly manifest intention to reincorporate them into Georgia by force.The diplomat most clearly associated with this catastrophic policy -- Matthew Bryza -- is now the Obama Administration's choice for the key ambassadorship in Azerbaijan. His wife, Zeyno Baran, was the author of a notable article in Newsweek in 2007 anticipating a military coup in her native country, Turkey -- seemingly with complacency, if not indeed enthusiasm.

Habakkuk

Habakkuk on reality in the ME

 mo,

thank you for that most interesting explanation of why Hizballah may indeed, as Nicolas Noe suggested in Asia Times last month 'believe that the next war can and should be the last one between Israel and its enemies.' 

What you write, however, has the effect of further inflaming a suspicion which has been growing steadily stronger in me over the past weeks -- that the situation in the Middle East is rather like a smouldering volcano.  It may not erupt, but could well do so, and if it did, the eruption might come suddenly and unexpectedly, generating a conflict which could escalate out of control, possibly with totally catastrophic results. 

And the likelihood of catastrophe is, I think, greatly increased by the fact that many people are living in a fool's paradise, and do not grasp quite how dangerous the situation

Habakkuk on Sneh

 Andy,In my opinion, this oped likely represents another example of an unstoppable force (Israeli strategic doctrine) meeting an immovable object (the limits of Israeli military power).That a highly intelligent man like Ephraim Sneh should make quite fantastic claims about the ability of Israel, alone and unaided, to set back the Iranian nuclear programme is something which, I think, needs explaining. It may be that he has simply succumbed to hubris. But it is also possible that he is being less than candid.There is, it seems to me, no reason to question the sincerity of his claim that Israel is under 'existential threat', or to dismiss it as paranoia .Unlike Netanyahu, Sneh is not attempting to conjure up alarm by suggesting an Iranian nuclear capability would be under the control of irrational -- and by implication undeterrable -- fanatics. Rather, he is focusing on the crucial questions of the psychological impact of such a capability, and its impact on r isk-taking, in the context of Israel's intractable demographic problems: considerations to which the ability to deter deliberate attack is of very limited relevance.Certainly might dispute Sneh's conclusions, but they hardly self-evidently silly: Israel cannot live in the shadow of a nuclear Iran. Immigration will cease, more young people will emigrate and foreign investments will diminish.

Habakkuk on the end of the "Two State Solution"

We have the following from David Habakkuk as part of the ongoing discussion on the crisis of Zionism among various members of this committee of correspondence.  pl

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 "Clifford Kiracofe,Serious analysts do not believe a so-called "two-state" solution is possible any more. Simply put, the Israeli Zionists by now have stolen too much Palestinian land.There are only two possible options it would seem:1. a one-state solution2. the Israelis expelling Palestinians from Israel and the occupied West Bank. That is to say ethnic cleansing which hardliners call "transfer."I agree. The two-state solution is no longer like a patient in a hospital ward in critical condition -- rather it resembles a brain-dead victim of assault on a life support machine, which the doctors would like to turn off, but is kept going because various reasons -- some honourable, some dishonourable -- the family and friends do not want to recognise the true state of affairs.As you note, this leaves Israel with no good options. And this is all the more so, as the course the country is going down must open up deep underlying divisions within t he Zionist movement -- divisions which I suspect will destroy it.Remarks by Norman Finkelstein in an article entitled 'Israel Crackdown Puts Liberal Jews on the Spot' by Chris Hedges make the point better than I could:“The impact of the Goldstone report is tremendous,” the Middle East scholar Norman Finkelstein said when I reached him in New York. “It marks and catalyzes the breakup of the Diaspora Jewish support for Israel because Goldstone is the classical Diaspora Jew. He is a lawyer and upholder of human rights and a liberal. He has distinguished himself in the field of law and he is also a lover of Zion. He calls himself a Zionist. His mother was an activist in the Zionist movement. His daughter did aliyah. He sits on the board of governors of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has an honorary degree from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has said over and over again that he is a Zionist. He believes Jews have a right to a state in Palestine. His is a mostly emblematic profile of the classically liberal Jew.”“Liberal has a distinct connotation,” Finkelstein went on. “It means to believe in the rule of law. It means to believe in international institutions. It means to believe in human rights. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are liberal organizations. What the Goldstone phenomenon registers and catalyzes is the fact that it is impossible to reconcile liberal convictions with Israel’s conduct; too much is now known about the history of the conflict and the human rights record and the so-called peace process. It is impossible to be both liberal and defend Israeli policy. That was the conflict that confronted Goldstone. I very much doubt he wanted to condemn Israel.”  See

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/israel_crackdown_puts_liberal_jews_on_the_spot_20100315/

In a recent thread, N.M. Salamon noted the appearance of a new Jewish organisation, JNews, in Britain. Its chairman, Antony Lerman, explains the background as follows:But we are living at a time when the situation in Israel-Palestine is becoming increasingly desperate, and when the fallout from the conflict for Jews has never been more intense. In consequence, opinion among Jews has become increasingly polarised.On one side, we see the hardening of the view that Israel is singled out for grossly unfair treatment, expressed most starkly in the trashing of the Goldstone report and the character

Habakkuk on Iraq

Adam Silverman,Thanks for that most interesting and helpful clarification of the current state of play in Iraq.This may be a stupid question, but if the 'diasporan movements' don't have 'indigenous support bases' why do the 'indigenous movements' have so little power? And is this a stable situation over the longer term? Can the 'powers that are' permanently capture 'huge chunks of the Iraqi Security Forces' in such a situation? And can they hope to prevail over the 'traditional and/or tribal Sunnis and Shi'a' and the Sadrists?JohnH"That is certainly not part of any US end state I've ever heard of." Me neither! And that all by itself would lead one to be skeptical that it could actually be happening."The problem is not simply that, as the Colonel says, the ability of the United States to control history is far too limited for one to be able to infer from a given outcome either that the USG wanted it, or from the fact that the USG did not want it that it could not have happened.When one actor has overwhelming power, the name of the strategic game for many other actors will be to find ways of getting this power to act in their interests. Allying with it is one way.Others include using superior guile to outwit the overwhelming powerful actor, and make its own power work against it. One way of doing is a classic insurgency technique -- manoeuvre the security forces into a situation where they have to tread a narrow line between not responding and appearing weak, and responding in ways that make them the insurgents' recruiting sergeants -- very easy to do, particularly if you let yourself be baited into letting anger get control of you. Another is manipulating the overwhelmingly powerful actor into using its strength in one's own interests.The attacks on the World Trade Center are an interesting variant of the former approach -- although fortunately the sectarianism and cruelty of the jihadists, among other things, have limited their ability to capitalise on the success of their ploy to inveigle the United States into ruinous involvements in Muslim lands.Although definitive evidence is lacking, little that has happened recently has served to dispel suspicions that the Iranian exploitation of Ahmed Chalabi's ties to the neocons was one of the classic displays of the latter tactic of all time.To avoid being the victims of either tactic, it is necessary that the United States - and also my own country, Britain -- wise up. One central part of this is precisely grasping the limitations of one's ability of to influence outcomes in other societies. Another is shedding the deeply ingrained delusion that we 'modern', 'scientific' and 'rational' people understand the world, while others less fortunate do not. Where the kinds of understanding required to play Machiavellian games are at issue, this is commonly the precise reverse of the truth. The 'informational advantage' lies not with us, but with them.  David Habakkuk

"The Stability of MAD" Habakkuk

A central issue here is the stability of MAD. This is something in which I used to believe, but do not any more.

A major influence has been the writings of Bruce Blair, who before becoming a leading expert on nuclear command and control, served as a Minuteman launch control officer, back in the early Seventies. What he noticed then was that while the declared policy of the United States was deterrence based upon second-strike retaliation, almost all the drills he was called on to carry out involved weapons being fired when no Soviet attack had yet occurred. A wicked conspiracy to hide preparations for a first-strike behind rhetoric about 'deterrence' perhaps?

Habakkuk on BAE, the Saudis and the Slush Fund

I think Harper is absolutely right in suggesting that, important though the corruption story may be, the political element -- centering around the 'slush fund' -- is the really significant element in this story. I am curious about, and slightly surprised by, his calling this a 'MI6 slush fund'. From what little I know of the story -- and I have not followed it closely -- it seems quite likely that we are dealing with linkages involving elements in Saudi Arabia, Britain, and the United States. Looking back at the coverage of the 'Welch Club' and related matters on this blog and elsewhere from a year back, I recalled a comment quoted in Seymour Hersh's 'Redirection' piece, from a 'Pentagon consultant'. There were, the 'Pentagon consultant' remarked: 'many, many pots of black money, scattered in many places and used all over the world on a variety of missions'. Given the involvement of Bandar both in Iran-Contra and recent hi-jinks, as well as Al-Yamamah, there certainly seem grounds for suspecting that one of the functions of the contract, from the outset, may have been to create such 'pots of black money'. An interesting discussion of the 'slush fund', in an article in the Financial Times last July by Stephen Fidler hardly dispels these suspicions. (See http://search.ft.com/ftArticle?sortBy=gadatearticle&queryText=yamamah+fidler&y=7&aje=true&x=15&id=070702000587&ct=0.)

Habakkuk on Sir John Scarlett et al

"J:  The British do not think that the U.S. is their 'colony/state to use and abuse at their whims.' The key divisions here are less between states, than within them. The problem is that the neocons have gained ascendancy both in your country and mine. In both, there is a very visible reaction against this. In Britain this has probably had less effect than in the U.S. at the level of high politics -- probably more at the mass level. Tony Blair really is a neocon -- so are influential figures around the Tory leader David Cameron. As for what used to be the conservative press: I go the Times website, and find Irwin Stelzer -- author of "The Neocon Reader". I go to the Telegraph website, and find Irwin Stelzer. I open the Spectator, supposed to be the Tory ideas magazine. Who do I find -- Irwin Stelzer! As to Sir John Scarlett,  there is an irony here -- in that he was case officer for Oleg Gordievsky, who was a double agent working for us, rather than the Russians. This was the reverse of the situation depicted in Le Carré's novel, where the 'bureaucratic whore' Percy Alleline is persuaded that the Russian spook who Bill Haydon runs is our double agent, while in fact Haydon is theirs. But the evidence produced by the Hutton Inquiry made clear that Scarlett is a 'bureaucratic whore' -- although perhaps 'corrupt courtier' would be a more appropriate term. As chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee -- supposed to apply a filter of critical analysis to material produced by the agencies -- Scarlett played a key role in the dissemination of the intelligence which suggested, quite incorrectly as it turned out, that Saddam had WMD he could launch at 45-minutes notice, and had sought uranium from Niger. In so doing, he played a played a significant role in getting both you and us into a disastrous war. That he should be colluding with elements in Israeli intelligence -- and doubtless, elements in the U.S. -- in what appear to be moves to soften public opinion up for another disastrous war is hardly surprising. Unfortunately there is a lot of evidence that the rot at MI6 goes a lot deeper -- as also the rot in British journalism. When Scarlett was appointed as head of MI6, the Observer journalist David Rose defended him against the suggestion that his role in the Iraq intelligence fiascos disqualified him for the job. Explaining why his colleagues had come round to think Scarlett the best man, Rose wrote: "What has changed? The biggest factor is the evidence to Lord Hutton, which suggests that if Scarlett did cross the politico-intelligence frontier, then others were also culpable - none more so than the current C, Sir Richard Dearlove. On 12 September 2002, in response to a last, desperate call for new content for the dossier, it was Dearlove who went to see Blair at Downing Street, bearing the false and fateful claim that Iraq could deploy its WMD within 45 minutes. "At the time, there had been no attempt to assess this report by passing it to the JIC's intelligence analysts, nor to the acknowledged WMD experts at the Defence Intelligence Staff - including David Kelly. Supplying raw intelligence to a Prime Minister 'is just never done,' one official says. 'It's rule number one. Dearlove was undermining Scarlett's position - and it's just not fair that Scarlett alone should be blamed.' "Moreover, the final dossier was 'signed off' by all the members of Scarlett's committee, Dearlove included, who had the support of all his most senior colleagues - some of them eventual rivals for Scarlett's new job. As for the Butler report, it will deal with methods, not individuals. If it did, all four men who were candidates to be the next 'C' might have been criticised." (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2004/may/09/davidkelly.uk.) So it seems that even if an incoming prime minister had actually wanted to appoint a head of MI6 who would tell him the truth, rather than what he wanted to hear, he could not have found one within the organisation. But apparently this does not worry David Rose one bit -- which is hardly reassuring, particularly as he writes for the independent Guardian group, not the Times or Telegraph. Not long after retirement, incidentally, Dearlove signed the Declaration of Principles of a new organisation called The Henry Jackson Society, which champions the agenda for 'global democratic revolution' beloved of the neocons, and involves both leading American neocons and their British fellow-travellers. I suppose if one has an intelligence chief who is happy to associate himself with the memory of 'Scoop' Jackson, whose record at threat inflation and the politicisation of intelligence is almost unrivalled, one should not be surprised that one ends up with a dysfunctional intelligence organisation. "  David Habakkuk

Sybil Edmonds 2 by David Habakkuk

"Americans who fancied themselves as masters of Machiavellianism have simply been taken to the cleaners by people whose command of the arts of duplicity is real rather than imagined."  Habakkuk

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This, above, from DH's comment below rather neatly sums up the true level of Washington efforts to "play" in the Big Game.  pl

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Still a lot to digest, as Cold War Zoomie says. Re charlottemom's puzzlement at the fact that Murdoch newspapers are reporting on this. A bit of background on British newspapers. Unlike the Telegraph group, which sticks rigorously to the neocon 'party line', even despite Conrad Black's departure from the scene, the Times' papers will from time to time publish strong stories which do not fit with it. The classic example, of course, is the Downing Street memos. Like Cieran, I would give Andy a certain amount of slack on the possibility that an operation to penetrate and disrupt groups trying to acquire U.S. weapons technology was involved. But the fact the Sunday Times is prepared to run with a story so damaging to their proprietor's close political allies is I think a potent reason for taking it seriously. As I pointed out to Andy in our earlier discussion, a key statement in the original Sunday Times story is that the nuclear network Edmonds describes 'has been monitored for many years by a joint Anglo-American intelligence effort. But rather than shut it down, investigations by law enforcement bodies such as the FBI and Britain's Revenue & Customs have been aborted to preserve diplomatic relations.' In addition to this, there is the 'small team' investigating the 'same procurement' network referred to in the third story -- to which Valerie Plame belonged, and for which Brewster Jennings was a front company. One quite possible explanation for the appearance of this story in the Sunday Times is that important elements in this 'joint Anglo-American intelligence effort', either in London, or in Washington, or in both, decided they wanted this network shut down, and saw the disclosures by Edmonds as a means of securing this end. Be that as it may, we can I think be confident that British and American officials involved in getting this story into the MSM are not impressed by the notion that they are contributing to destroying a valuable intelligence operation. This could be partly because, if an operation sufficiently major to account for the material Edmonds collected had been in progress prior to 2002, more substantial results might have been expected by 2008. Moreover, the notion that a penetration operation was involved does not establish that the claims Edmonds makes can be discounted. Such a penetration operation, by its very nature, would of course involve the disclosure of valuable information -- as is commonly the case with deception operations in intelligence. But precisely because of this, deception operations played against superior players can backfire. One can recall the immortal quotation from Richard Perle in the long piece Dexter Filkins did in the NYT on Chalabi in November 2006. According to Filkins, Perle 'discounted the idea that Chalabi might be a double agent. "Of course Chalabi has a relationship with the Iranians - you have to have a relationship with the Iranians in order to operate there," Perle said. "The question is what kind of relationship. Is he fooling the Iranians or are the Iranians using him? I think Chalabi has been very shrewd in getting the things he has needed over the years out of the Iranians without giving anything in return."' It is I think perfectly possible that as with the intelligence on Iraqi WMD, rather naïve Americans who fancied themselves as masters of Machiavellianism have simply been taken to the cleaners by people whose command of the arts of duplicity is real rather than imagined. Another claim about the role of senior Pentagon officials in the original Edmonds story is to the point: 'The handlers, who were part of the diplomatic community, would then try to recruit those people to become moles for the network. The lists contained all their "hooking points", which could be financial or sexual pressure points, their exact job in the Pentagon and what stuff they had access to.' This is how one would expect the kind of network which clearly exists to operate. Its members corrupt people by playing on their weaknesses, getting them to cross the line in small matters which leave them compromised, and in a position where they have no way back. Once this point is reached, turning them into outright traitors may be easy -- and they may also help corrupt others, in order to try to rescue their self-respect. As to CWZ's very relevant question as to the relationships and motives. I think we are liable to get into problems by assuming underestimating the extent to which public and private have got confused. 'What's in it for Turkey?' does indeed seem a very relevant question. But how far are we dealing with agencies which act on behalf of the state, how far simply with individuals? Meanwhile for some of the end destinations, such as the Pakistan ISI or indeed the Israelis, nuclear secrets may well be of enormous value -- and as a result, they may be prepared to pay a great deal, be it in money -- or indeed in other kinds of trades.

David Habakkuk

Habakkuk on the neocons' use of intelligence

Andy

Whether or not one should argue with people who do not argue in good faith is an interesting question. My view, for what it is worth, is that one should.

However, it is both true -- and important -- that many of those who are commonly called 'neocons' do not argue in good faith: that they prefer, rather than confronting the arguments of others, to use smear tactics, and also that they are remarkably unwilling to consider evidence that calls into question their preferred theories. This is a crucial fact about them which is still very inadequately appreciated -- not least because of the deference which has been paid to their views in the mainstream media. So, on the many occasions when they are clearly either in bad faith or plain wrong, it is important to point this out.

If this seems over the top, I can perhaps illustrate by reverting to an earlier discussion on this blog.

A good example of familiar neocon approaches was the hatchet job done on Sherman Kent, a pivotal figure in the wartime R&A branch of the wartime OSS and in shaping the analytical side of the CIA, by Carl Schmitt and Abram Shulsky -- the latter of whom headed the Office of Special Plans, through which much of the bogus intelligence used to justify the Iraq War was channelled. Their article Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence suggested that Kent's conception of intelligence as research involved a naïve faith in the ability of a 'social science' method to generate reliable predictions about the behaviour of adversaries -- and this, they claim, led him to discount the importance of espionage, and the interception and deciphering of enemy communications.

When I read Kent's book, I discovered that most of their charges were based upon a total misrepresentation of what Kent said. Certainly some of this may be due to intellectual incompetence. Anyone with any grasp of the context in which Kent was writing should be aware that the last thing he could have been expected to produce was a candid discussion of the crucial contribution of codebreaking to victory against Germany and Japan. A generation after he wrote people who had worked at Bletchley Park still did not talk about it even to their immediate families. It could be that the inability of Schmitt and Shulsky to grasp this is simply a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the Straussian disbelief in the importance of context -- who can say? However, some of the distortions are so flagrant that it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that one is dealing with people utterly devoid of the standards of intellectual integrity that university education is supposed to instil.

What Kent was actually stressing was a very simple and crucial point -- that in intelligence gathering as in other forms of intellectual inquiry, it is important to get clear the questions you want to answer, and then look at all the available means by which you can answer them. He also argued that, commonly, ingenuity in the exploitation of open sources yields far more information than espionage -- although he never said that this was necessarily the case. He stressed that the relative importance of secret intelligence and open sources depended upon the specific problem you were confronting.

In attacking Kent's fundamental argument, Schmitt and Shulsky were not making useful criticisms of the inadequacies of the CIA -- they were striking at the basic foundations of good intelligence practice, and thereby doing their level best to turn the United States into a kind of self-blinded giant: a danger to others and to itself. And their appalling theory was reflected in Shulsky's absysmal practice -- the fact that the neocons were led by the nose by Ahmad Chalabi, who may well have been in the instrument of a well-planned Iranian deception operation.

I developed the argument at some length in a piece which Colonel Lang posted -- see http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2005/11/habakkuk_onleo_.html

Neoconisme - A "perverse Secularization of Christian Concepts?"

David Habakkuk sends us this:

"Michael Murry,

You are I think absolutely right about opportunism of the enthusiasm of people like Krauthammer for alliance with the Armageddonites -- and also its incautiousness.

An old limerick goes:

There was a young lady of Riga
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger
They returned from the ride
With the lady inside
And the smile on the face of the tiger.

Moreover, one perhaps neglected effect of neocon strategy is that it puts Jews in America and Europe whose political affiliations are with one variety or another of the heritage of the Enlightenment in an increasingly impossible position. Commonly, they are tied to Israel by a complex mixture of emotions -- among them residual fear and that very deep loyalty people often have to the dead. But one cannot in the end combine identification with liberal or leftist principles in an American or British context with a commitment to what is essentially an ideology of 'Blut und Boden' in the Middle East. And in terms of pure political expediency the neocons' choice of political allies may very well turn out to be peculiarly shortsighted.. Up until recently, the political alliances of Jews in the United States or Britain were largely either with secularists -- be they liberal, leftist, or pragmatic conservative -- or with the kind of Christians who had no desire to put ideas of 'crucifixion denial' at the heart of their faith. To abandon such alliances in favour of an alliance with people for whom conceptions of 'crucifixion denial' -- with their strong historical relation to antisemitism -- are central to their conception of Christianity seems a risky strategy, to put it mildly.

One can see the tensions being worked out in the writings of a number of interesting Jewish intellectuals. Tony Judt is an obviously example, so too the Time correspondent Tony Karon -- whose blog is called 'Rootless Cosmopolitan'. There is also an interesting article by Philip Weiss in The American Conservative, (at http://www.amconmag.com/2007/2007_06_04/feature.html. And Norman Birnbaum's article last year in 'The Nation' confronts the problems head on (at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060814/is_israel_good_for_the_jews).

"Richly and Royally Fooled" - Habbakuk

"If in eliminating the Ba'ath Chalabi was seeking to marginalise not simply secular Sunnis but secular Shi'a -- who were of course supposed by his champions in Washington to be his power base -- then the suggestion that he duped the neocons in particular and the Bush Administration in general acquires a wholly new dimension.

Whether or not Chalabi is 'power mad', it is certainly plausible to suggest, as Wayne White did earlier, that Chalabi was pursuing his own personal agendas, and not as it were working as an Iranian agent. But the remarks of the former CIA official quoted by Richard Sale drive home a fundamental point which has been apparent for some time. The relations between Chalabi and the Iranians were rooted in a real commonality of interest, so that the question of whether they or their Iraqi clients needed to trust him was in a sense marginal. Getting rid of Saddam suited both the Iranians and Chalabi. Meanwhile, those Iraqis -- both Sunni and Shi'a -- most likely to oppose Iranian clients were also those most likely to resist any significant role for Chalabi in the new Iraq. But precisely because Chalabi's interests coincided largely with those of Iran, the appearance that they coincided with those of the United States -- or indeed those of Israel -- could only be sustained by creating a fantasy view of political realities in Iraq.

Chalabi is, I think, a past master at identifying what people want to be hear, and telling them it.

Taking the Israeli element in the equation, there is one point on which the neocons are clearly right. Looking longer term, Israel is quite patently under 'existential threat'. Among the many reasons for this is the country's dependence on American support. Doubtless this is reliable for now, but if one looks decades ahead, it is hardly a solid foundation for Israeli security. And if one looks closely at the 1996 Clean Break paper, a central goal is quite patently to create a situation where Israel is no longer dependent on the United States. To achieve this end, however, the 'Clean Break' authors relied upon the exploitation of the current close alliance between the two countries to use American power to remodel the Middle East.

Tragically for Israel -- in my view -- precisely the availability of unquestioning American support encouraged the belief that one could avoid the difficulties of dealing with the Middle East as it was, and create a new Middle East, in which leaderships hostile to Israel were replaced with ones friendly or at least accepting. And it was in large measure this fantasy which created openings for Chalabi's myth-making talents. At the heart of the 'Clean Break' paper there was the remarkable conception of the Iraqi Shi'a welcoming a Hashemite restoration in Iraq because King Hussein was a direct descendant of the Prophet. This was then supposed to lead to the Shi'a of South Lebanon being weaned away from Hizbullah, and the end of all Israel's problems. Subsequently Chalabi switched tack, and sold the neocons a new vision of the Shi'a as unqualifiedly secular (remember Wolfowitz on the absence of holy cites in Iraq?) and prepared to welcome him as their de Gaulle. The new s ecular Iraq was supposed to recognise and cooperate with Israel, and also to become a dagger pointed at the Tehran regime, and perhaps also the Saudi regime, leading on to the collapse of Hizbullah and Hamas -- and again, the end of all Israel's problems.

As strategies based on fantasy often do, this 'Clean Break' strategy backfired dramatically. The kind of preemptive military action the paper recommended was tried against Hizbullah, which however saw off the Israeli attack. It appears that Hizbullah is now constructing a system of fortifications north of the Litani which are likely to make Israeli air power even less effective -- and from which, as increasing accurate missiles become available, larger and larger swathes of Israel can be attacked. Against Iraq, the strategy of preemptive war has led to a vast increase in the power of Iran. It has also maximised the incentives for the Iranians to acquire nuclear capabilities, while rendering it far more difficult for the United States to prevent them doing so. So the supposed 'clean break' has tended to produce the precise reverse of the results intended. The combination of Hizbullah missiles and an Iranian nuclear capability threatens to turn the 'existential threat' to Israel from a longer-term to a relatively near-term possibility, and indeed to lead to the kind of 'eroding national critical mass' which concerned the 'Clean Break' authors. As the Deputy Defense Minister Ephram Sneh said last November, a 'dark cloud of fear' could easily lead to emigration -- particularly among the highly educated elites on whom the country depends, whose skills are much in demand in safer places, like the United States or Britain.

Unsurprisingly, Sneh expressed scepticism about the effects of international sanctions or diplomacy in curbing Iran. But the effect of the strategies which were supposed to benefit Israel has actually been to not only to make military options far more problematic -- but to make the use of military threats in support of diplomacy difficult. In effect, these strategies have left both Israel and the United States boxed into a corner: caught between the rock on which they could be easily be wrecked should an attack on Iran misfire, and the hard place of accepting there is no effective way to prevent a nuclear Iran. If the kind of fantasies of easy solutions underpinning the attack on Iraq lead to an attack on Iran and this goes badly wrong, the damage to American -- and Israeli -- interests -- could dwarf that already incurred.

I think it is perfectly possible that with the wisdom of hindsight people will look back on the 'Clean Break' paper as a kind of suicide note. And while I would agree with the tusked one (Walrus) that one should be cautious about assuming that rhetorical agendas are real ones, I do think that the suggestion that the current shambles is the product of 'deliberate policy' is implausible -- because actually this shambles is not in the interest of the United States or of its Israeli 'client'.

I do think it is actually difficult to exaggerate the sheer ineptitude of Feith, Perle, Wolfowitz et al. The contributions by Richard Sale and the discussion of his first posting seem to make amply clear that by the time of the invasion of Iraq, it should have been clear to anyone reasonable rational in Washington -- or indeed in London -- that one became involved with Chalabi or his associates (including Kanan Makiya) at one's own risk. Today this should be even clearer. Moreover, the fact that Chalabi's interests mesh with those of the Iranians and their clients, rather than those of the United States, should by now be indisputably clear. The suggestion by Wayne White that in impeding rehabilitation of elements of the Ba'ath Chalabi is seeking to cultivate his political constituency among the Shi'a seems eminently plausible. My only caveat would be that Chalabi is both unlikely to acquire a mass constituency of any kind -- but also may not actually need one. So lon g as the Iranians and their Iraq clients are convinced that his objectives and their own run in parallel, his vast accumulated expertise and contacts can be very useful to them -- and surely he can expect, as quid pro quo, to find Iraq a fertile ground for his business ventures?

And of course this means that precisely what many of the neocons want -- an American attack on Iran -- is what Chalabi cannot afford to be seen to countenance. One would accordingly have thought that there would have been a clear split between Chalabi and his erstwhile allies among the neocons, and other elements in Western security establishments who were diddled by him. But, remarkably, this seems only to have happened to a limited extent.

In the piece by Dexter Filkins on Chalabi that appeared in the NYT last November, Richard Perle said the question was 'is he fooling the Iranians or are the Iranians using him?' -- and went on to suggest that 'Chalabi has been very shrewd in getting the things he has needed over the years out of the Iranians without giving anything in return.' As Iran's great enemy Saddam has been destroyed, and as the U.S. continues to fight the Sunnis who are the implacable opponents of the Iranians, and also appear implacably hostile to the most 'nationalist' of Shi'a leaders, al-Sadr, Perle's remark is simply surreal. One really has to ask what it would take to persuade Perle that Chalabi might have given the Iranians as much as he has got out of them -- American generals taking direct orders from Tehran, perhaps?

The fact that Perle still cannot grasp that he has been richly and royally fooled by Chalabi is testament to the extraordinary combination of arrogance and imbecility which has characterised neocon policymaking from the start. That the Iranians and Chalabi were both using each other, for essentially complementary purposes, also seems evident. How far the gains achieved by the Iranians were the product of a deep-laid Machiavellian strategy is of course another question. But I think one can say that one is rather more likely to find effective Machiavellianism today in Tehran, than in Washington or London."

David Habbakuk

Habbakuk on Ideological Blinkers

Our friend DAvid Habbakuk writes from England to comment on my "Foreign Policy" piece.  pl

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"Colonel Lang:

This is a brilliant piece: the argument about the roots of neoconservative success in widely held beliefs makes it an invaluable extension of the argument of the Drinking the Kool-Aid paper.

anna missed:

The argument that precisely because of its ethnic diversity the United States not only was but had to be held together by an ‘American creed’ based upon the notion of the equality was put forward by the English Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton back in 1922. An extract is online at http://www.libertynet.org/edcivic/chestame.html. If then the notion of equality becomes conflated with that of identity – and this is already hinted at in Tocqueville – one may end up on the horns of a dilemma. It may be that the beliefs which hold the United States together also make it difficult to – in Colonel Lang’s words – ‘deal with alien peoples on their own terms, and within their own traditions’, and tend to create a propensity to ignore reality in favour of the ‘dream versions’ to which he refers. This was hardly a problem in 1831 or 1922, but becomes a major one if the United States is attempting to be a hegemonic power in the world system – and particularly if in so doing it relies heavily upon military force.

The argument of Colonel Lang’s paper would also seem to suggest that, in exploring the questions about intelligence raised in his earlier ‘Bureaucrats and Artists …’ paper, one needs to look further at the roots of ideological blinkers created by ideology: our own, as well as that of those we attempt to interpret. This problem gets greater the closer one gets to government, because political leaders necessarily must talk in terms of ideological simplicities.

An article by Michael Vlahos in The American Conservative deals with some related matters – online http://www.amconmag.com/2007/2007_02_12/feature.html: although I rather feel that the sharp distinction he uses between modern and non-modern is part of the problem. It tends to lead to a view of everyone outside the bright lights of Western ‘modernity’ as hopelessly atavistic and thus essentially threatening; as well as a propensity grossly to exaggerate the extent to which our own societies actually fit the stereotypes of ‘modernity’.

Some excerpts from Chesterton – who was of course writing before the advent of ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘political correctness’:

“America is the only nation in the world that is founded on creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just ……

“Now a creed is at once the broadest and the narrowest thing in the world. In its nature it is as broad as its scheme for a brotherhood of all men. In its nature it is limited by its definition of the nature of all men. This was true of the Christian Church, which was truly said to exclude neither Jew nor Greek, but which did definitely substitute something else for Jewish religion or Greek philosophy. It was truly said to be a net drawing in of all kinds; but a net of a certain pattern, the pattern of Peter the Fisherman. And this is true even of the most disastrous distortions or degradations of that creed; and true among others of the Spanish Inquisition. It may have been narrow about theology, it could not confess to being narrow about nationality or ethnology …

“Now in a much vaguer and more evolutionary fashion, there is something of the same idea at the back of the great American experiment; the experiment of a democracy of diverse races which has been compared to a melting-pot. But even that metaphor implies that the pot itself is of a certain shape and a certain substance; a pretty solid substance. The melting-pot must not melt. The original shape was traced on the lines of Jeffersonian democracy; and it will remain in that shape until it becomes shapeless. America invites all men to become citizens; but it implies the dogma that there is such a thing as citizenship ….

“When we realize the democratic design of such a cosmopolitan commonwealth, and compare it with our insular reliance or instincts, we see at once why such a thing has to be not only democratic but dogmatic. We see why in some points it tends to be inquisitive or intolerant….

“This idea is not internationalism; on the contrary it is decidedly nationalism. The Americans are very patriotic, and wish to make their new citizens patriotic Americans. But it is the idea of making a new nation literally out of any old nation that comes along. In a word, what is unique is not America but what is called Americanization. And the process, as I have pointed out, is not internationalization. It would be truer to say it is the nationalization of the internationalized. It is making a home out of vagabonds and a nation out of exiles …

“.. the idealism of America, we may safely say, still revolves entirely round the citizen and his romance. The realities are quite another matter, and we shall consider in its place the question of whether the ideal will be able to shape the realities or will merely be beaten shapeless by them ….”"

David Habbakuk

Habakkuk on"Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence"

In 1998 Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt wrote an essay titled as above.  The burden of this essay was a detailed challenge to the methods of intelligence analysis followed by the US Intelligence commmunity since the immediate post-war era when it was largley codified by Sherman Kent.  The S&S essay was largely an attempt to persuade that a "social studies research" approach to intelligence analysis was inadequate and that something else should be substituted.

Why is this of interest?

Abram Shulsky was an important member of the "Office of Special Plans" (OSP) in the Pentagon under Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld.

Gary Schmitt is a major figure in the "Project for a New American Century."  (PNAC).  This group is part of the "galaxy" of organizations inhabited by or created by the Jacobin neocons.

Here is the S&S paper.

Pat Lang

Download leo_strauss_and_the_world_of_intelligence.pdf

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I have asked David Habakkuk, a British journalist and scholar specializing in the history of intelligence services to comment on this paper.  His remarks are available below, first in excerpt, then through download.  He mentions my paper "Bureaucrats versus Artists," so I here offer a link to the paper.

Download artists_versus_bureaucrats....pdf

Pat Lang

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"I stress this, because a characteristic of the neocon approach is that wherever we are, we are back in 1938.  Every threat ends up being, in one form or other, Hitler reincarnated.  It is difficult to be clear here how far one is dealing with genuine misperception, and how far with manipulative rhetoric.  One might say that the S&S paper itself involves a major problem of ambiguity of evidence, in that it is deeply unclear how far one is dealing with conscious distortion or incomprehension:  is this an ill-calculated attempt at dealing with intellectual issues relating to intelligence, or a well-calculated piece of propaganda designed to use the technique of the Big Lie in a war against the CIA?  What is clear, and in some ways frightening, is the shamelessness.  In her 1988 study of 'The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss', Shadia Drury portrayed Strauss as an interesting if deeply flawed thinker, but suggested that what was fundamentally unfortunate about him was that 'he corrupts'; more specifically, he 'seduces young men into thinking that they belong to special and privileged class of individuals that transcend ordinary humanity and the rules applicable to other people.'"  David Habakkuk

Download sspaper.pdf

Download CV1.pdf

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I also asked Richard Sale to comment upon both the S&S essay and Habbakkuk's comments.  These appear below first in excerpt and then by download.  Pat Lang

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" The tragedy of pre-war intelligence was that it was that this tragedy was so willfully entered into. The senior officials of the first Bush administration would tolerate around them only people who were in tune with their views and predilections. People who presented rebutting evidence were not seen as simply making an honest mistake or havein different views but rather as embodying a perverse will that was ignoring truth out of pride and spiteful wickedness. This is hardly the path to humility before the facts that is part of the intellectual equipment of the good intelligence analyst."  Richard Sale

Download the_paper_of_david_habbakuk_contains_stunning_points.pdf

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Judge for yourself.

Pat Lang