Sic Semper Tyrannis 2008

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