More Irony in Iraq

  

More Irony in Iraq

Peter Schultz

 

                  The following is from James Bamford’s book A Pretext for War:

 

                  “It wasn’t just the small dumps that got overlooked; the United States also failed to secure Iraq’s single largest ammo dump, known as Al QaQaa…. After examining the bunkers, the troops simply left the doors open…. The looters and future insurgents wasted little time stripping the base. After learning of the problem in May 2003, an internal IAEA memorandum [alerted] Washington that terrorists might be in the process of helping ‘themselves to the greatest explosive bonanza in history.’ The White House, however, ignored the warning. Thus, intent on finding nuclear weapons that didn’t exist, Washington ignored the real weapons that did exist.

 

                  “Through such actions and inactions, the Bush administration turned Iraq into a grizzly death factory for Americans and innocent Iraqi men, women, and children. Its invasion created the insurgency, its brutal occupation kept it growing, and its utter lack of planning and foresight armed with a virtually unlimited supply of powerful weapons. This makes for bitter irony. The Bush administration invaded Iraq in large part to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists. Now because of its invasion and lack of planning, the Bush administration is responsible for weapons of mass destruction going into the hands of terrorists…. The result is a seemingly endless downward spiral.”  [400-403, emphasis added]

 

                  As some have argued, the political is the realm of the ironic. Obviously, the Bush administration and its leading neoconservatives had no appreciation for the ironical character of their war in Iraq. Had they been aware of the ironical character of their politics, had they had, that is, a more developed sense of humor, they would neither have failed so badly nor killed so many people.

 

 

The Idealism of the Realists

  

The Idealism of the Realists

Peter Schultz

 

                  The US war in Iraq illustrates as well as anything can just how idealistic our alleged “realists” are and need to be to justify their wars.

 

                  They are idealistic, first, in thinking that their intelligence is accurate, and, so, must be believed and acted upon. Without such idealizing of intelligence, the Iraq invasion would never have happened. Because the “intelligence community” (note the idealism in that phrase!) determined that Iraq had WMDs, Iraq had to have such weapons. It was “a slam duck,” to quote George Tenet of the CIA. If actually viewed realistically, however, any such intelligence should have been treated skeptically.

 

                  Our realists were idealistic in how they thought the war would unfold, as well as its aftermath. The war would be over quickly, using minimal number of ground forces, the Iraqi people would rise up and thankfully embrace the American forces and America, Iraq would then create a working democracy, and in the war’s aftermath the Middle East would be remade to the advantage of Israel and the United States. It is difficult to think of a more idealistic scenario for Iraq. All of “it” would work out, just as realists said it would at the Bay of Pigs, in Korea, and in Vietnam, to name a few other wars our idealistic realists embraced.

 

                  It is the height of irony to call those advancing and embracing the Iraq war “realists.” Maybe this explains why some people have called the political arena intrinsically ironic. And why the political cannot be understood without a sense of irony, i.e., without a sense of humor. Insofar as our “realists” need anything, it is a sense of humor. The lack thereof explains why realism and realists so often fail.

Secrecy and the Powerful

  

Secrecy and the Powerful

Peter Schultz

 

                  Secrecy is popular with the powerful because it protects them from being seen as failures, and failure is one thing that the powerful seek, mightily, to avoid. Avoiding or hiding failure might be even more important to the powerful than succeeding because failure undermines how the powerful want and need to be seen.

 

                  “In fact, as they later admitted, prior to September 11, 2001, ‘the CIA had no penetrations of Al Qaeda leadership, and the Agency never acquired intelligence from anyone that could be acted upon.’ It was George Tenet’s biggest secret. Not only was Al Qaeda never penetrated, neither the Counterterrorism Center nor Alec Station ever picked up a single piece of usable intelligence on bin Laden or his organization, the country’s greatest threat.” [221, Bamford]

 

                  So, secrecy helps to maintain the appearance of being powerful. So too does inactivity, which is facilitated by secrecy. Very often, in the time leading up to the attacks on September 11, 2001, secrets were learned, intelligence was revealed that was not acted upon.

 

                  “Despite the importance of the operation, Rich [Blee] had never bothered to write up and distribute an intelligence report on it - … a TD or Telegraphic Dissemination. ‘A TD would have gone to a lot of people,’ admitted the senior intelligence officer, ‘but we didn’t do that.’” [227, Bamford]

 

                  Was this conspiratorial behavior? Hardly. It was merely ordinary, run-of-the-mill behavior meant to conceal how powerless the Agency was against potential terrorists. And such behavior continued: “Despite losing the key suspects, Rich [Blee] told senior CIA officials four days later, on January 12, that the surveillance in Kuala Lumpur was continuing. Two days later he again told his superiors that they were continuing to track the Al Qaeda suspects, but by then Alec Station had no clue where Almihdhar, Alhazmi, and Khallad were, and all tracking had ceased.” [228]

 

                  Conspiratorial behavior? Hardly. And finally: “Alec Station made no further attempts to locate the missing suspected terrorists.” [228] If you don’t try to locate suspected terrorists, you can’t fail at finding them. Using secrecy as a way of avoiding or hiding failure works well, particularly for the officials involved.

 

                  Ironically, often what the powerful do to appear powerful undermines their power. The Agency and its secrecy were in fact empowering its enemies, but not conspiratorially. CIA officials were behaving normally, that is, secretly. But they were, unintentionally, colluding with Al Qaeda and its terrorists. So, it goes.

CIA Operations and US Security

  

CIA Operations and US Security

Peter Schultz

 

                  How a CIA operation compromised US security by undermining attempts to prevent attacks on the US homeland.

 

                  The CIA, specifically Alec Station, was running an operation against at least two suspected terrorists, Almihdhar and Alhazmi. It was a surveillance operation that led to Kuala Lumpur and a meeting of suspected terrorists in January 2000. Questions were raised later about whether the Agency had notified the FBI of this meeting, with the CIA saying it had done so and the FBI contending it was not notified.

 

                  It is crucial to understand CIA’s “operations,” what they are and what they aren’t to understand what happened. Alec Station said regarding its operation that “we need to continue the effort to identify these travelers and their activities … to determine if there is any true threat posed.” [Bamford, 223]

 

                  Note needs be taken of the goals of this op: to identify travelers and identify “any true threat posed” and, of course, to achieve these goals secretly. The secrecy is why no thought was ever given to disrupting the travels and activities of these suspects. Besides, that was not “the op,” not the job, which was to identify and understand certain things. And this would explain why the CIA would not have notified the FBI, because that would violate and might compromise the secrecy required by the operation. As an FBI agent pointed out: “They didn’t want the bureau meddling in their business [i.e., their operation] – that’s why they didn’t tell the FBI.”

 

                  It needs be emphasized that “the op.” is the thing, the CIA’s thing, the thing to be protected, held close as is said, so it could be successful. The CIA’s goal was a successful operation, which required preserving the secrecy of the operation in every way possible. Sharing intelligence with the FBI could compromise that secrecy, so it was not to be done. Disrupting the travelers’ activities, that is, letting them know that they were being watched, would expose the operation and that would amount to its failure even if it helped stop potentially dangerous activities. But what better way to deter terrorists than to let them know that their activities are being monitored, that they are being watched and that they will be dealt with? Ironically, the CIA’s embrace of secret ops empowers those they are surveilling.

 

But because successful operations are defined as secret ops, such disruptive activities are unacceptable. Thus, the CIA’s embrace of secrecy, of secret operations undermined that agency’s ability to prevent attacks in the US. And that secrecy probably undermined the FBI’s ability to protect the US as well.

 

And so it goes: The secrecy trap.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ellsberg v. Oliver Stone

  

Ellsberg v. Oliver Stone

Peter Schultz

 

                  There is a fundamental misperception regarding the Vietnam war: That the U.S. and Hanoi, et. al., wanted the war to end and were working to end the war during 1968.

 

                  Daniel Ellsberg, in his memoir, Secrets, forces us to wonder if that was the case. As Ellsberg makes clear, LBJ’s decision not to seek re-election in 1968, which he, LBJ, presented as part of his attempt to end the war, was not intended to do that. In fact, it was LBJ’s way of preserving the power of the established elites, the “cold warriors,” which would allow for continuing the war.

 

                  Hubert Humphrey, as well, could not afford to publicly seek the war’s end because “if he did declare some independence [from Johnson], ever so slightly, he faced … forms of retribution from an enraged president.” And this enragement from Johnson gives away his commitment to the war.

 

                  Hanoi, as Ellsberg points out “wasn’t acting as if it [wanted]… to get our bombing stopped or to end the war by making concessions…. Neither party was ready to make any significant concessions…. [222]

 

                  And Nixon wanted the war continued because that would help ensure his election to the presidency, which is why he worked covertly to get Thieu to reject any negotiations to end the war. And, of course, continuing the war was the key, Nixon knew, to his re-election in 1972.

 

                  So, when Oliver Stone, in his movie “Nixon,” melodramatically uses an alleged confrontation between Nixon and a young, female protester at the Lincoln Memorial to illustrate the power of “the system” – which produced a war that allegedly no one wanted – his melodrama misleads. Powerful human beings in Washington, Hanoi, and Saigon, for various reasons, wanted and saw to it that the war would go on.

 

                  So, even when “They did get into direct, formal talks, … that was what had happened: nothing. The war went on…. Thus, by itself, ‘stopping the bombing’ of the North altogether, unconditionally, permanently, was … a false issue, almost a distraction, when it came to ending the war.” [222, emphasis added]

 

                  When it came to ending the war, it did not end because the most powerful human beings did not want it to end. It was not that “the system” rendered these powerful human beings powerless. It was that these powerful human beings used their power to make war. They chose to make war, to continue to make war. So, if the war was “a quagmire,” it was a quagmire constructed, deliberately, by powerful human beings, who then used the “quagmire story” to disguise their embrace of an obscenely violent war.

 

                  And as a result of Johnson’s decision not to run in 1968 and because “we had two major candidates going around the country not talking about ending the bombing,” the war went on and even “more or less disappeared from the mainstream of American political debate as a major issue … [from] March 31,1968 to Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia on April 30, 1970.” [226] As Ellsberg points out: “The lack of public controversy … reflected a tenacious belief … that Johnson’s March 31 announcement … constituted a conscious and decisive turning point toward the prompt ending of American involvement in the war in Indochina.” [226] The lack of public controversy regarding the war was precisely what the established elites in Washington wanted because that allowed them to continue the war without threatening their power and authority by empowering antiwar activists and other left wingers. This conspiracy would be so successful in the long run that Richard Nixon would be rewarded with a historical landslide victory in the 1972 presidential election, a victory that buried the legitimacy of any left-wing political alternatives. Ultimately, that burial may be said to have made possible the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. So it goes.

 

 

 

 

 

March 1968: LBJ v. Tom Hayden, et. al.

 March 1968: LBJ Defeats Hayden, et. al.

Peter Schultz

In March 1968, LBJ defeated the likes of Tom Hayden and
helped extend the Vietnam War.

On March 25, BJ told "the wise men" that "The country is
demoralized. I will have overwhelming disapproval in the polls and
elections. I will go down the drain. I don't want the whole alliance and
military pulled in with it... Senator McCarthy and Senator Kennedv
and the left wing have informers in the departments. The Times and
the Post are against us. Most of the press is against us. How can we
get this job done? . We have no support for the war....

On March 31 LBJ announced that he would not seek reelection.
Tom Hayden, head of the SDS, claimed "We have toppled a
president... We have ended a war." But, as Daniel Ellsberg points out,
Hayden was wrong. The war was not over; it was not even ending.

LBJ's decision was taken not to end the war but to extend it. He
knew he himself couldn't do that. As he said, "I will go down the
drain." By not seeking reelection, LBJ said he would be working for
peace, thereby displacing the left wing groups, like SDS, who were
also working for peace. LBJ, by resigning, made working for peace
mainstream, a task to be entrusted not to "lefties" like Hayden or
Senators McCarthy and Kennedy, but to mainstream, non-left wing
politicians like Hubert Humphrey or Richard Nixon. And those
politicians would not be burdened as LBJ had been, and as Nixon
demonstrated, the war could be extended, even for four more years
as the quest for peace, "peace with honor" went on. And Nixon and
other mainstream politicians would reap the glory of ending the war,
not the left wingers. Nixon, et. al., buried the left wing peaceniks, and
they remain buried even until today.

By resigning then, LBJ outplayed the likes of Hayden and other
left wingers, so that the predominant forces, "the whole alliance and
the military" were not undermined by left wing ideologues like the
SDS. And, by the by, BJ demonstrated that duplicity was - and is
the coin of the realm. It is how the political game is played

Enemies II

  

Enemies II

Peter Schultz

 

                  The political world is filled with “enemies,” a concept that is packed with meaning. Are there “friends” in the world viewed and lived politically? Doubtful. “Allies?” Yes. “Enemies?” Yes. “Friends?” No.

 

                  Central to politics, to power politics especially is identifying, controlling, fighting, and eliminating enemies. This is the citizen’s view, his or her reality, his or her way of life. Once the US treated the Vietnamese as enemies, “My Lai’s” were only a matter of time. One way or another, enemies must be defeated and eliminated. Enemies are central to imperialistic politics.

 

                  Rick, at the end of Casablanca, was wrong: his interaction with Frenchy, like the US relationship with France, was not “the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” Friends, unlike enemies, are not intrinsic to a world lived in politically. In fact, they are nowhere to be found. As later confirmed when the US considered eliminating De Gaulle, perhaps even with “extreme prejudice.”

 

                  In a world lived in politically, Elizabeth and Darcy would not be lovers. Politically, their love would have been impossible, as illustrated by Lady Catherine De Bourgh’s view of Lizzy as a potential polluter of Pemberly, Darcy’s estate. British politics, Britain lived politically “disses” love and romance, as was illustrated recently by the television series The Crown, as well as by Austen’s novel, Persuasion and her anal sex joke about the British navy. In Britain, and perhaps elsewhere, living romantically or even lovingly is radical. [For another representation of this, see the movie “The American President.”] While living ambitiously and avariciously is all-too conventional and repeatedly praised as central to living politically. Hence, the avaricious and the ambitious dominate politically. So it goes.

 

                 

Enemies

 Enemies

Peter Schultz

From Daniel Ellsberg's book, Secrets:
"I heard her say, 'I come from a culture in which there is no concept
of enemy.

"A strange statement. Hardly comprehensible. No concept of
enemy? How about concepts of sun and moon, friend, water? I came
from a culture in which the concept of enemy was central, seemingly
indispensable - the culture of Rand, the U.S. Marine Corps, the
Defense and State Departments, international and domestic politics,
game theory, and bargaining theory. Identifying enemies,
understanding and predicting them so as to fight and control them
better, analyzing the relationship of abstract enemies: All that had
been for years my daily bread and butter, part of the air I breathed.
To try to operate in (a) world ... without the concept of enemy would
have seemed as difficult, as nearly inconceivable as doing
arithmetic, like the Romans, without a zero." (P. 211) (emphasis
added)

The regime, the way of life Ellsberg is in revolved around the concept
of enemy, the alleged reality of "enemies." And isn't that concept
intrinsic to the political? At least it was for Carl Schmitt, et.al. As
Ellsberg notices, the enemy concept permeates the U.S. way of life,
the U.S. regime and its thinking and institutions.