Well, my friends, it's often said, in paraphrasing Randolph Boren, that war is the health of the state.
And the spotlight article today on antiwar.com is just bringing that right home.
It's Robert Perry at consortiumnews.com, Iraq's laboratory of repression.
Welcome back to the show, Bob.
Thanks, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
It's great to have you on the show again.
First of all, consortiumnews.com.
Neck Deep is the name of your new book, The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush.
And I love reminding people, you're the guy that broke the Iran-Contra story back when I was a little kid, huh?
I mean, it makes me sound awfully old, Scott.
But the...
No, no.
It's just that I'm so young.
That's all.
I was at the Associated Press, and I did do a lot of the early stories that became Iran-Contra.
That's true.
And especially on the Contra side, Brian Barger was my colleague at AP at the time.
And I did many of those original stories that named North, described his operation.
We even did the first story about some of the Contra units getting hooked up in cocaine trafficking.
So yeah, we did a lot of stories that later proved out to be part of a much bigger scandal.
And something actually that we've talked about on this show before is how it almost seems like this entire Bush administration has been one big Iran-Contra scandal in terms of basically everything being off the books and run out of the vice president's office where no law can touch them.
Right.
I think Iran-Contra was in some ways a dress rehearsal.
Or if you look at it differently, it's sort of the missing link if you go from Watergate to the present, to the Iraq mess.
In between, you had Iran-Contra, which was an effort by some of the same people who are now back, people like Dick Cheney, people like Elliott Abrams, who then were testing out ways to get around the law, get around the Constitution, to assert this imperial presidency, even if that was in defiance of what the Congress wanted.
And they tested it out in Iran-Contra, and even though we did catch them a bit and some of them got in some trouble, they ultimately escaped more or less unscathed, and they learned they could beat both the Democrats and Congress, and they could handle the Washington press corps.
So that was a lesson they took with them and brought back when they returned under George W. Bush.
I remember in 2000 they were saying, well, I understand that the governor is sub-retarded, but he's surrounded by really good, really smart, capable people, so I think it'll be okay.
Right, the adults, as they used to call them, people like Dick Cheney.
But that was the idea, that the thinking was that Colin Powell and Dick Cheney and others who had been there under Reagan and the elder Bush would provide a kind of register or restraint on any impulses.
It turned out that in some cases, like Dick Cheney, they were part of providing the impulses, and in the case of someone like Colin Powell, he was what he always was, which was sort of an opportunist who wouldn't put his career on the line, even when the country needed him to.
Well, yeah, he sure wouldn't, and you know, it was clear, I think, in 2002 that the Colin Powell guys, or maybe not clear, but at least there were some indications that the Colin Powell guys and even the CIA guys were kind of opposed to this.
I remember George Tenet, I think even after the, well, maybe it was before, but I thought it was after the Congress had voted for the authorization for war, that George Tenet, the head of the DCI at the time, testified that, look, if Iraq has any chemical weapons, which we don't know, but if they do, we don't think they would use them unless we attack.
Right, that's true.
The CIA was a bit of a mixed bag on this situation in 2002.
They were buying in on a lot of what Bush was pushing, but they also still had some of that residual professionalism that had been sort of beaten out of them through the , you know, often going back to the 1980s.
That's when Bill Casey and his deputy, Robert Gates, essentially politicized the CIA's analytical product.
They destroyed the careers of many honest CIA officers who were trying to tell the truth about a number of issues that were getting in the way of the politics.
And coming out of that period, the CIA never really recovered its sense of being professional in terms of assessing information.
It was sort of a broken toy, if you will, that could be easily manipulated by unscrupulous people, and that's what happened in 2002.
All right, now, the biggest propaganda line that we've had to suffer, at least all through the summer, I guess, beginning in the spring, is that the surge is working.
The surge is working, the surge is working, and you indicate in your article that you're not quite buying that.
I wondered if you could attempt to dispute here.
Well, I mean, I think there's a certain probably, there is some evidence that in certain areas, some of the violence has died down, but there's a missing part of this story.
And it is that there has been a step up in repression inside Iraq.
The U.S. military has been sweeping especially young military-aged males, they call them off the streets and locking them up.
The goal is to increase the prison population under the U.S. control from what was about 15,000, which is pretty high, when this started, to 50,000 by sometime next year.
So you have this idea of just sweeping people off the streets.
You also have an increased use of high-tech means for monitoring people's movements, and also high-tech means of killing people.
There has been this effort to use the drones, which are armed, they work with heat resonance imaging, as well as night vision optics.
They can follow people who are moving around Iraq, and if the behavior is deemed suspicious in some way, the AC-130 planes are brought in with the miniguns, and people are just eliminated in large numbers.
We've also seen more evidence now, something that had been talked about a year or two ago, the so-called using the lessons of El Salvador, the Salvador option it was called, which was to begin much more wholesale killing of suspected insurgents, or as they're called inside Iraq, terrorists.
So you have cases where American soldiers are taught or trained, given rules of engagement that allow them to kill on sight people, even if they're not acting as threats.
And we've seen cases recently where some of this actually has surfaced, this has been a classified kind of program, but it's surfaced in some of these cases, there have been efforts to prosecute a couple of the soldiers in Iraq and at Fort Bragg, and the defense of the soldiers has been, these are our rules of engagement, and they have been acquitted.
In other words, their officers handling these military trials are agreeing that these soldiers have been given these very loose rules of engagement.
In some cases, they are simply killing people who happen to walk in front of their sniper scopes.
So what we've seen is a step up in how the United States has tried to bring repression to Iraq, and that is sort of the dark underbelly, if you will, of the counterinsurgency programs that General Petraeus has touted.
There are, of course, nicer sides of that, there are efforts to work in a more pragmatic way with various groups, and to do some more efforts to what they call civic programs, where you go out and do things for the population.
But the dark side of this, as we've seen in other guerrilla warfare situations from Vietnam or you take Central America that I covered, is this idea of using very ruthless military force to kill indiscriminately, but also kill selectively, taking out individual people and just murdering them, having death squads in effect.
And that's what's been going on, in a sense, behind the scenes in Iraq.
Well, you know, the El Salvador option was first brought up, I think, in the beginning of 2000, well, I guess maybe the end of 2004?
Yeah, late 2004, early 2005, when the insurgency was, in a sense, getting out of hand for the U.S.
And the policy there was to arm and train the Shiite militias, particularly the bar core, to fight the Sunni insurgency.
But now you're basically saying, this is sort of the next edition of the El Salvador option, and now they're paying members of the Sunni insurgency to fight other members of the Sunni insurgency.
That's happening as well.
They're using these paramilitary groups, the neighborhood watch kind of things that we saw in places like Guatemala.
These are very similar tactics.
We saw it in El Salvador, too, where you would take people who were not, they were theoretically at least not directly tied to the military.
Often they had subrosed the connections to the military, and they would be sent out often in plain clothes to eliminate people who were considered enemies or problems.
If you remember, the guerrillas in Central America also were called terrorists often, and even though others would disagree with that, but that's what they were deemed.
So this idea of just taking people out and killing them was somehow considered proper and justified.
Well, this is really what helped get the sectarian war going.
I mean, if I remember the early years of this war correctly, the Shia Arabs were basically sitting it out going with the advice of the Ayatollah Sistani that we're in the catbird seat and the Americans are going to end up having to give us the power because we're the majority anyway, so don't fight.
It was the Sunni insurgency that was fighting the occupation.
And in backing the Shiite militias to help fight the Sunni insurgency, that's really what sparked the sectarian war and the massive bloodshed, you know, inter-Iraqi bloodshed that now we're taking so much credit for quelling.
Well, and some of this, of course, does predate the surge, the more pragmatic approach toward the Sunni sheikhs in more of the western side of Iraq, the idea of working with them and having them turn on al-Qaeda.
The whole point of al-Qaeda as an excuse to be there has always been rather dubious.
President Bush has tried to present them as part of this huge threat that they see Iraq as the central front in the war on terror, as he's often said.
But the reality is, and we know some of this because some of their documents were intercepted, and those documents don't support what Bush has claimed.
It appears that from the letters written by people like Zawahiri, and there was a letter from a guy named Mattia who was a top aide to bin Laden, those indicate that al-Qaeda sees Iraq as a diversion for the United States, not as any kind of central front.
And al-Qaeda's not seeing that they're going to jump from Iraq to having some caliphate, as Bush likes to say, that stretches from Spain to Indonesia.
These are ludicrous fantasies, and they're meant to frighten, I guess, the American people into supporting whatever he wants done, but they're not, in an intelligence sense, they're not practical.
These are propaganda devices that he claims.
But the reality that you see when you read the documents is quite different.
And also that al-Qaeda had a very fragile position, even before Zarqawi was killed in 2006, that the al-Qaeda position in Iraq was extremely fragile.
It was always likely that once the U.S. withdrew, that the al-Qaeda forces, and this was discussed even internally in their own memos, that they were afraid that the young Arabs who'd come to help out would just put down their guns and go home.
Zawahiri used to warn about that to Zarqawi, and say you have to give them something to look for, which was when they started talking about the... it was always an exaggeration that the Bush people had used.
It did not fit with the intelligence they had.
They were always playing games with it.
I guess they've always said that the Iraq War was a hope for an unexpected gift to Osama bin Laden, but his strategy always was to bog the Americans down in Afghanistan, where they have mountains to hide in, right?
Not on a flame-flat desert out there.
People take this war, but when this war is over, they mean to continue fighting from the mountains in Afghanistan.
Right, and the longer the United States used up its military in a place like Iraq, which was not something that al-Qaeda really ever saw as central to their plan, this was a surprise gift in a way that the Americans handed to them.
They were mostly concerned about operating where they were, in Pakistan and in the mountains of Afghanistan, and maintaining a base there, and keeping the Americans away from them.
There was an even interesting part with one of the Zawahiri letters, where he's asking the al-Qaeda contingent in Iraq to send money back to headquarters.
He wanted $100,000, and you would think that if they really viewed Iraq as their central front, the money would be going the other way, but even though the al-Qaeda forces were embattled and not really very strong in Iraq, they were being asked to send what money they had back to keep the operation in Afghanistan and Pakistan going.
So, the evidence has never really supported this myth that Bush has promoted about Iraq being the central front.
It was just a way for the Americans to lose their way in any serious fight to get bin Laden.
Part of this is what's happening.
You talked about taking a more moderate policy against the Sunni insurgency.
I guess this is what Seymour Hersh calls the redirection.
They found where local Sunnis were fighting al-Qaeda guys and finally befriended them.
I guess, as you indicated, the surge is taking credit for this or what have you, but this was already happening long before the surge.
Really, beginning in 2006, there were reports of local Sunnis turning on the al-Qaeda types.
But I wonder, in the larger strategic or maybe the smaller tactical, I'm not sure, I was never in the military sense, what's going on here with this redirection toward the Sunni insurgency?
As we're arming and financing the former dead-ender terrorist guys, who are now the good guys, we're still backing the Maliki government, basically the Badr Brigade government loyal to the Iranians.
It's not as though the former Sunni insurgency, good guys, whatever we call them now, are about to submit to the authority of Nouri al-Maliki and turn their militias over to the Iraqi army or what have you.
Is this just a pause in waiting for further warfare to break out?
Well, I think to some extent it may be.
There are conflicting elements to this policy.
However, the thinking may be that a modus vivendi would develop, that the two sides would have a new equilibrium that would be established in a defacto sense.
And we've seen some of this, where we've had reports in Baghdad where some of the neighborhoods that are being ethnically cleansed, instead of stopping the ethnic cleansing, the U.S. forces have facilitated it.
They've helped guide the groups, the groups that are under attack, to other areas.
In other words, they've given off a safe passage, in a way, out of where they lived to some other place where their sect was locating.
So you've had this almost sense of, well, this is what we're going to have to put up with.
But there's also this other side, which is that once the fighting can be reduced through these various means of being a little more pragmatic, if one might call it that, that the United States military can stay there indefinitely, that the United States can become essentially an imperial force in Iraq and projecting power through the region.
And that's where the neo-cons seem to be right now.
This is what they always intended.
They just thought it would be easier, that the Iraqis would accept their occupation by the United States, or at least the presence of American military bases, and that then Iraq could be used as kind of the land-based aircraft carrier, if you will, for projecting American power to Iran, Syria, and elsewhere in the region.
And now, of course, you're seeing some of the neo-cons talking about the need to go into Pakistan.
Oh, yeah.
Now, hold that thought now.
So, basically, what's happening in Iraq is, I'm kind of paraphrasing the conversation here, what's going on.
The American general tells the leaders of the Sunni insurgency, listen, we're not going anywhere, but as long as we're here, we're not going to make you submit to the authority of the Maliki government.
So it's better us than them, right?
Now, we can ally ourselves with the Sunni insurgency and with the Maliki government, and then, now that most of the ethnic cleansing has been done, we can try to keep them separated as we engage in an eternal occupation.
Is that about it?
That seems to be the direction.
Well, I'm not sure, eternal, but certainly a long-standing, open-ended kind of occupation.
I think that really is the plan, if you look at what the Bush people are saying.
They're not talking about getting out any time soon.
And of course, they have supported all along the Supreme Islamic Council and the Dawa Party, who are loyal to Iran, basically have openly called for a strong federalist system, where they have pretty much open autonomy, rather than Mu'tad al-Sadr and the Mahdi army, who are the nationalists who have been trying to create a coalition government with the Sunnis.
Right, and they also want the Americans to leave.
They've been pressing from the very beginning to get the Americans out, and there's been that occasional flare-up of violence between the Americans and Sadr's group.
But I think that is the way it's broken down, and right now, the U.S. generals seem to be sort of taking a pragmatic view.
How do we reduce the American casualties to get them down to what might be considered a more acceptable level?
I was hearing from intelligence people over the summer that there had been a real decline in the sort of dangerous operations that the Americans had been expected to undertake.
There was a little bit of everyone standing down to reduce the violence.
There are more selective kinds of attacks, using high-tech means to kill people that are considered problems, but not in ways that endanger American troops too much.
And there were, of course, these large sweeps of arrests.
When they would go into areas, they would just arrest large numbers of young men and put them in these growing prisons.
So you had a variety of tactics that were used, and when you sweep a neighborhood and arrest all the young men, you're very likely to get some people who were insurgents, as well as a lot of people who were just going about their business.
And that would tend to reduce the levels of violence.
If you were going to an American city and arrested all the young men, you probably have less street crime.
Of course, you'd also end up with a lot of innocent people in jail, but that seems to be the approach that's been taken, in a sense more pragmatic, but with an eye toward extending the American presence, reducing it as a political issue in the United States.
Now, here's where we get back to war as the health of the state.
When you talk about these sweeps and all these high-tech weapons, drones and retinas scans and that kind of thing, this is the sort of thing that I have the feeling will be coming home for use by local police departments.
There's already stories of using drones over the Mexican border.
It won't be long before they're patrolling American cities with this kind of thing, scanning our eyeballs like that Steven Spielberg movie.
Well, I think some of those things are planned.
I think when you modernize techniques of repression, they can be replicated in many places, and that seems to be one of the things that the war on terror is about.
Some of these things don't get much attention in the American press corps, but there was a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal a few months ago about the Bush administration obtaining the right to use spy satellites domestically, instead of having to use them only for weather and things of that sort.
They can now be used to supposedly spot terrorist training bases inside the United States, but there's an obvious other reality to that, that you can also monitor all kinds of things once you've sort of crossed that threshold, and it was a threshold that Americans had resisted allowing the government to do.
So now you have satellites that can essentially spy domestically as well as spying elsewhere.
So those kinds of techniques and technologies of repression can be applied in any number of ways.
I mean, really, the national government of the United States is at the forefront of every one of these technologies, and it seems like the only thing that was ever holding them back was old laws.
And if we're not going to have old laws protect us from them using satellites and drones and whatever else against us, then, well, what do we have?
We're basically helpless before this leviathan, aren't we?
Well, I'm not sure helpless at this point.
I mean, that may be a little extreme, but I think if one follows the logic and the argument of the Bush administration that the war on terror is both unlimited in time and in space, that is, there is no front line to it, they have made a point that the war is being fought domestically in the United States as well as overseas.
And that's why they have waived the Constitution, in effect, when it comes to, say, rounding up people they might call enemy combatants.
They arrested José Padilla in Chicago, remember, when he got off an airplane.
If you're saying that there are no limits, it's not like you can talk about, well, this is happening at the front line of a war, they're saying the war is everywhere.
And they're saying it will go on forever.
And so if you follow that logic of the idea of the plenary powers of the Commander-in-Chief at time of war, that he can waive any law he wants and ignore the Constitution under his powers under Article II, that what they're saying is that the rights that we've assumed that were ours at birth as Americans, the inalienable rights, the founders called them, that those rights no longer exist, that they are selective rights, they're rights that are granted to us by the President, not something that we have.
And that's a fundamental change in our system.
Now whether or not that translates into ever a fuller, wider application of the implications of that, that remains to be seen, and obviously the political process in the United States can react to it, but that is the bottom line of what the Bush people are saying, that we have no inalienable rights anymore, that they can do whatever they feel is needed in pursuing this endless war that they've talked about.
Well, and I guess I didn't mean to say we're already completely screwed, just that if we don't have our law anymore, which I guess is what you're saying, we're already at that point where they're claiming dictatorial powers, if not outright implementing them in large scale, but that basically, that's what I was saying, if we follow their premise and their technology that they already have readily available, if we were to let them treat us like fallusions, they certainly have the capability to do it if we don't have the law to prevent them from doing it.
Right, there is a parallel with what's going on in Iraq.
I think another aspect of why there's been perhaps a decline in resistance, if you will, in Iraq, and that may be optimistic in some sense, but a certain amount of it is that people tend to get tired of trying to fight or resist, even when it's a just cause.
Let's say that many Iraqis look and they see a foreign occupying military, which is pretty much free to shoot them at will, as we've seen with certainly the Blackwater people and some of the American military operations, that after a while you just kind of give up, and maybe Iraq will reach that point where substantial numbers of people will want some kind of normal life, and they will accommodate to the fact that there is this imperial force in their midst.
It's happened historically in the past, and it could happen again, where violence in Iraq would sort of decline, where they'd be more sporadic, but I'm not sure that's a particularly pretty picture.
I think the American people, without putting up as much resistance as the Iraqis have, may be sort of coming to some degree to that kind of position vis-à-vis the government that it's just too hard, it's just too unpleasant to constantly try to deal with this situation.
You learn to accommodate to it, you learn to accept it.
Yes, there will be some people who don't want to and will do what they can not to, but people tend to adjust to a lot of unpleasant realities, and they don't always necessarily stand on principle.
When you talk about the neoconservatives and their confidence in the current situation on the ground in Iraq, you say this has led them to believe that they're ready to go ahead and expand the war, if not to ranch in Pakistan?
Well, there was a piece written by Frederick Hagen and Michael Hanlon that appeared in the New York Times' We Can Review section this Sunday, and if you remember Frederick Hagen, who was part of this very prominent neoconservative family, Frederick Hagen was one of the authors of The Surge.
He was one of the big promoters of that, and Hanlon, who was at the Brookings Institution, appeared somewhat more of a democratic neocon, had been a big supporter of The Surge and did a very influential piece over the summer saying that The Surge was working great.
Now, the two of them have teamed up for a piece about the need to have some kind of military planning and operation for Pakistan.
Clearly, Pakistan represents a serious danger in the sense that because of very lax U.S. policies in the 1980s, in particular, Pakistan was allowed to develop the nuclear bomb, and now the question becomes what happens if the Musharraf government collapses and there's disarray inside the country.
Anyway, so what Hanlon and Hagen are talking about is to have American forces go in and secure the center of the country and then possibly go off and take on the more border areas where the extremists are based.
So, we're talking about a whole new, very gigantic front of the war on terror about to open if these guys' ideas are followed.
Just a few weeks ago, I talked with Eric Margolis, who is an expert in that region, and he told me that he thought it was very unlikely that if Musharraf fell, that the nukes would end up in the hands of crazies.
They would end up in the hands of people who are just like Musharraf.
Well, I think it's probably most likely.
But clearly, there's a danger, and it was one of the points that some of us made early on when the Bush administration turned its attention to Iraq, which was not proceeding on any basis, any serious basis anyway, to develop a nuclear weapon.
There was a case that here was Pakistan, which had signs of instability where some of the Pakistani intelligence services had worked hand in glove with the Taliban in Afghanistan and with Al Qaeda.
People forget that Al Qaeda was originally formed because it was an ally of the Reagan administration.
Back in the 1980s, the Reagan administration, which was exaggerating then the danger from the Soviet Union, was casting all of their concerns aside to get support for the Afghan rebels who were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Bill Casey at CIA was promoting Islamic fundamentalism.
He was bringing Qurans into the region, not just into Afghanistan, but also into the Muslim areas of the Soviet Union, hoping that would help cause them to break away, which ultimately they did, by the way.
All the Stan countries were Muslim territories in the Soviet Union.
So that was their strategy, and part of that was to bring in jihadists from around the Middle East, people like Osama bin Laden who was there working hand in glove with the Americans.
The idea was that this was a great, clever idea to hurt the Soviet Union.
The Pakistanis were the conduit of the aid to these jihadists and the Afghan rebels.
There you had the core of this, and part of the price the United States paid was to look the other way as Pakistan developed its nuclear bomb.
I deal with this in my previous book, Secrecy and Privilege, we touch on some of this also in Neck Deep, but looking at what happened to the intelligence community, the CIA was picking up these things and warning the Reagan administration.
What happened was that the analysts who were issuing the warnings were marginalized and punished and in many cases purged from the CIA, so Casey could continue on, and the key guy helping him, and this was Robert Gates, who has come back now as Defense Secretary.
But that was how it worked, and so the United States in a way set the stage for the current troubles, and part of those troubles are that Pakistan and its intelligence services have these relationships with the people that are now considered the enemy of the United States, and there are nuclear bombs in this mix.
It really was a case of creating a cauldron of witch's brew, almost, and allowing it to bubble away for way too many years.
How crazy is the idea of going ahead and invading that country in order to solve the problem?
Well, Pakistan is a heavily populated country.
It's much larger, both in terms of territory and people, than Iraq.
Well, they'll greet us with flowers and candy, though, right?
Right.
Again, the options that are now presenting themselves to the US policymakers get grimmer and grimmer.
Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes the United States has ever made militarily and strategically occurred when Bush failed to block the escape routes for al Qaeda.
Now, some people think that if you favor the idea of transforming the United States into more of a repressive society, that may have actually been a good thing, because it kept alive this boogeyman, al Qaeda, that Bush could cite whenever he wanted to roll back liberties in the United States, and when he wanted to go wage war elsewhere.
But from another perspective, from what might be called the real national interest, it was a terrible blunder, and what it's led to, and then followed up by the diversion of forces to Iraq, has been an incredibly complicated, dangerous situation in a region of real importance.
Well, now, in this Kegan O'Hanlon piece, they kind of talk about maybe doing it a couple of different ways, right?
Maybe they could just come in.
I'm not really sure what the hell they're getting at.
In a way, I guess they have two different options.
One of them is the flowers and candy option, and then the other is a million-man army invading or something.
Right.
I mean, they do sort of lay out confusing options, and in some cases, these don't seem like they would work.
I think one of their ideas was to take the bombs off to New Mexico, which they agree the Pakistanis probably wouldn't let them do.
Then they talk about maybe having a place in the center of the country where they would stick the bombs, and then the Americans would go in to guard the bombs, and that's when they suggest that if that works, they could consolidate that, then the U.S. could go branch out from there to attack the border areas.
One of the problems with the neo-cons has been that they have a very grandiose view of American military power and what it can accomplish, and they also have a rather contemptuous view of the value of life in the Muslim world.
I don't think these kinds of easy slaughters that they seem to prescribe would be accepted pretty much anyplace else.
There's almost a hostility, one might even call it a racism, toward people in that part of the world.
It's really strange, too, you know, guys like O'Hanlon and Bill Kristol, they look like such nice guys, don't they?
Yeah, and they're very bright and, in a sense, kind of charming.
Because of where I was when I was doing back in the late 70s and early 80s, I happened to get to know some of them.
In a sense, what Ronald Reagan did when he credentialed them into the U.S. government in the early 80s was to give them Central America to play with.
He did not really give them the Middle East to play with.
He left the Middle East in the hands of people like Jim Bakker, so-called realists, people like Philip Habib, the famous diplomat.
But Reagan let the neo-cons go to test out their wares in Central America, so he had the beginnings of this idea of the perception management being used there, how to manipulate information, the cherry-picking concepts were evolving.
There are some documents that came out during Iran-Contra that I deal with mostly in Lost History, the book I did back in the late 90s, which describes from their own records and documents how they would set up these public diplomacy teams that would go through and look for what they called exploitable themes out of cable traffic coming in from Central America.
They would pull out facts out of context and use them to try to, they call it hot-button issues, they would use them to sort of excite the American people or anger the American people toward the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, for instance.
So they were working those techniques, essentially they're very smart, they're very much elitist, some of them come from a left-wing background originally, kind of from a Trotsky-eyed background, so they have this concept of them being the vanguard party, they're like the vanguard, to take the average Americans and whip them into positions to follow.
They also come out of the Straussian theories at the University of Chicago, and Leo Strauss was this political philosopher who believed that sometimes the people needed to be lied to to be guided in the proper direction for their own good.
And so that's sort of an attitude that the neo-cons have espoused, so they're very bright, they're very glib, they're very presentable at dinner, but they have these theories that are essentially contemptuous of what many of us would call democracy.
Or human liberty at all, in any sense.
Right, they don't see the average person as being as good as them.
That's really the Straussian angle, right, is the rejection of the Enlightenment, the rejection of individualism, and we have to go back to the ancients to find out what the real deal is, and the real deal, according to Plato, is that we're supposed to boss everybody else around.
That's basically the sum of it, right?
Right, that the elites know best, and that democracy, in the sense that the idea of democracy was that the average person, given enough information, could make collectively a wise decision.
The view that the neo-cons bring is essentially contemptuous of that, that they feel that what has to happen is that you have to manipulate the people to follow in the direction that the smart folks feel is the right direction.
So that's a big part of how they view things, and it also flips the empirical concept on its head that many of us from the Enlightenment believed that what you do is you look at the evidence as fairly and honestly as possible, and then make decisions based on objective reality.
The neo-cons flip it on its head.
They essentially say, here's what we want to do, here's what's good, what we decide is right, and now we're going to look at the facts and cherry-pick them, pick the ones that help us, discard the ones that don't, and then use that to get the public to fall in line.
And that the neo-cons have been really working on since the mid-70s, when their first real emergence was with the so-called Team B experiment at the CIA, where the senior George Bush was director of CIA at the time, and he let in this group called Team B, a bunch of ideologues, who looked at the evidence on Soviet power, and the CIA was seeing signs of Soviet decline, which really informed the policy of detente, because if the Soviets were declining and their technology was failing, they weren't able to mount a real serious threat, that would allow you to negotiate with them, effectively at least the most dangerous aspects of the Cold War.
And that's what Henry Kissinger wanted to do, and that's what Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford wanted to do.
But the hardliners, both the old coal warriors and their military contractor backers, and this new, bright group called the neo-cons, got together, were allowed into the CIA, and despite all the evidence pointing to a Soviet decline, they reached the opposite conclusion that the Soviets were a juggernaut that was going to surround and defeat the United States, and therefore the only answer was a massive military buildup, aggressive attacks against leftist movements in places like Central America or Angola, going after the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, and much of what has really paved the way to the current situation.
The neo-cons did not want the CIA to report the truth, which was that the Soviets were in rapid decline, so major battles were fought in the 80s inside the CIA Analytical Division, where Gates and Casey crushed the analysts who were seeing the reality, because the reality wasn't helpful to the policies that the neo-cons and the coal warriors wanted to pursue.
Ironically, when the Soviet Union collapses in 1989 to 1991, people made fun of the CIA for missing it, but it wasn't that they missed the collapse of the Soviet Union, they essentially had their eyes gouged out, they were blinded to the reality of the collapse of the Soviet Union, because it didn't fit the goals.
Now, ironically, once that happened anyway, the neo-cons adjusted their narrative to say, well, the reason this happened was because of all the great things we had wanted to do with the major military build-up under Reagan, Reagan told Gorbachev to tear down the wall, they created a mythology around Reagan.
The narrative that still reigns to this day, really.
Which still reigns to this day, that's the narrative that a lot of people buy into, it's this neo-con narrative.
Alright, now, Bob, let me stop you right there, we're already up against the time wall, and we may get kicked off the radio here, but I want to ask you one more thing real quick here to wrap up, you brought up Bob Gates earlier, as the guy who helped Bill Casey politicize the analysts at CIA in the 1980s, you brought up this fight between the neo-conservatives and the establishment types in terms of Soviet policy in the late 70s and the 80s, and also various splits really have been discussed in terms of modern Middle East policy between the James Baker types and the neo-conservatives, so now I mean to ask you about Admiral Fallon's recent statements to the Financial Times, whether you think he had the permission of Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense, to make those, and does it seem to you like the establishment is now through the person of Robert Gates trying to fight back against Dick Cheney and the neo-cons, and do they have a prayer?
Well, I think the analysis about Gates has been 180 degrees wrong, at least as the Democrats carried it forward, and I'll try to be really quick, if you remember the sequence of events November 7th of 2006, the Democrats win control of Congress.
November 8th, the next day, Bush fires Rumsfeld and hires Gates.
The assumption the Democrats then held close to their breast was that Gates was the realist coming in to end the Iraq War, get rid of the crazy Rumsfeld approaches.
What we now know, based on documents that came out subsequent, is that Rumsfeld had gone soft on the war, that he had sent Bush a memo dated November 6th.
The same day he did resign that day, not November 8th, he was calling for an end to the Iraq War, essentially the phase-down, very much like Mirtha.
He was supporting a Mirtha-style approach to reduce U.S. involvement in Iraq and essentially start moving the troops out.
So the Democrats misinterpreted what was going to happen there.
Gates was buying into Bush's Iraq surge and a willingness to do what Bush wanted.
Gates is a careerist.
He saw this as a big career move.
Now, I think Gates is also reflecting somewhat the view of the Joint Chiefs, and the Joint Chiefs do not want to go charging off into Iran because, for obvious military reasons, they think it would be a disaster.
So I think Gates is quite a bit in the middle.
So this isn't really the establishment fighting back against the neocons as much as just the brass fighting back?
Right.
I think the brass is looking at what's happened to the military, sees the destruction that's been caused.
They're the ones who write the letters to the families of the dead soldiers, so they're not as eager to go charging around, starting wars that can't be easily won.
The neocons operate on a more theoretical level, and that's why it's easier for them.
Gates, I think, is the person who both wants to keep his good graces with Bush, because Bush pulled him out of Texas A&M.
He really didn't want to stay in Texas A&M the rest of his life.
He was much happier coming back to Washington.
He tried to pretend the opposite, but that's the reality.
And so Bush gave him a chance to get back into the game.
So he has a loyalty to Bush, and that's his stuff he's done around the surge, and he's been very supportive of Bush.
But he's also reflecting somewhat the reticence of the Joint Chiefs about expanding the war into Iran.
All right.
We have to leave it there.
Thank you very much, everybody.
This is Robert Perry, ConsortiumNews.com, the books are Secrecy and Privilege and Neck-Deep, the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush.
Thanks very much for your time today, sir.
Thanks, Scott.
