The Salon Report on Kenneth Starr

The Salon Report on Kenneth Starr

Sept 18 1998

We now know more than we ever wanted to about the president's private life. Here's what the public should know about the prosecutor who may drive him from office.

BY DAVID TALBOT | There is much we now know about our 42nd president, William Jefferson Clinton. We know about his sexual proclivities and fantasies, his taste in women, his favorite erotic poetry, the size and topography of his reproductive organ and yes, his instinct to dissemble when his secret passions are revealed. Some of the endless stream of fact and rumor about the president's private life is of public relevance. Most, however, is not. And, as New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis observed on Tuesday, the urge to empty this president's -- or any president's -- inner life of all its contents is morbid and Orwellian. As Lewis noted, "Privacy is an essential ingredient of civilized human existence," a precious ingredient that has been steadily chipped away in modern American society.

Now Congress has been presented with an impeachment report on President Clinton that is apparently filled with a plethora of details about his once-private erotic life, and little else. (So much for the endless Whitewater probe, which started this entire national ordeal.) On the basis of this unprecedented inspection of the president's personal life, federal lawmakers will decide whether he may remain in office.

Ironically, while we are abundantly informed about the president's private life, we know very little about the man who may finally realize his long-sought goal of undoing the president's election -- independent counsel Kenneth Starr. His power to dominate the nation's attention and control its agenda seems untrammeled. And yet the media -- the voracious eyes and ears of the new era's Insatiable Curiosity -- shows scant interest in Starr. Perhaps this is because there is nothing sensational about the prosecutor's private life. But it is Starr's public life that should demand our attention. The front-page news about Starr is not his sexual fantasies -- we pray these remain forever locked away within the pious lawman -- but his political desires and intimacies. It's not his private lusts that should concern us, but the passionate fixations and excesses of his investigation.

The only criticism of Starr's performance that the elite media has been able to muster during the frenzy of the last several months is that the independent counsel is not PR-savvy, that he lacks the conniving political instincts of, say, President Clinton. (Even in this criticism there is buried the glow of approbation, a sense that there is something noble about Starr's naiveté.) And yet nothing could be further from the truth. Kenneth Starr is a consummately political being, and has been throughout his public life. And his goal from the moment he sought the independent counsel appointment was to hobble, if not destroy, a duly elected presidency that gave him and his conservative allies great offense.

The fact that Starr pursued this political goal during the first three years of his investigation with the key assistance of David Hale, a tainted witness who now stands accused of taking money and legal help from anti-Clinton activists with ties to Starr himself, is now the subject of another federal inquiry. But the media remains stubbornly indifferent to this startling story. Indeed, the New York Times appears to have issued Starr blanket immunity for any and all misdeeds committed in the course of his investigation. In a bland and unrevealing cover profile of Starr in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, staff writer Michael Winerip matter-of-factly asserted: "In the end Starr's motives no longer matter ... It no longer matters if malicious right-wingers consorted with [Starr's] office to lay a trap for the president ... Through Starr's doggedness, his relentless effort to amass every last fact, he has succeeded in making his investigation about Bill Clinton, not about Ken Starr." It may no longer matter (if it ever did) to the country's newspaper of record that a federal prosecutor with unlimited powers consorted "with malicious right-right-wingers" to overturn the results of the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections. But Salon takes a different view.

Ever since Clinton's Aug. 17 confession, the media have been thrashing around the White House like sharks smelling blood in the water. Now that Starr has "got" Clinton on Lewinsky, it's become an article of faith among the opinion elite that the prosecutor's unlimited probe has been completely vindicated and that any attempt to impugn him is folly. The only question allowed for debate in the national Clinton deathwatch is when the president will walk the plank. At the risk of putting a damper on this orgy of prurience and moral pomposity, we would like to remind the country of two salient points: First, Starr's endless investigation apparently found nothing improper about Clinton's role in Whitewater -- the sole reason a special prosecutor was appointed in the first place. This is why, after years of interrogations and hearings, there is apparently nothing about Whitewater in Starr's report to Congress. (But don't count on the New York Times editors' writing a front-page mea culpa about its irresponsible Whitewater coverage, as the less magisterial San Jose Mercury did when it retracted its "Dark Alliance" report on alleged CIA/contra drug trafficking.) Second, Clinton's personal misdeeds, while reprehensible, are simply nowhere near the stature of Richard Nixon's high crimes or the Reagan administration's efforts to fund a rogue war. Covering up a sexual affair is not an offense against the state. As Carl Bernstein commented recently, Zippergate is no Watergate -- the country will look back on this strange and feverish episode years from now and shake its head in wonder at how it convulsed Washington.

As Congress prepares to review Starr's report on President Clinton, Salon herein presents its own findings on the independent prosecutor. In considering Clinton's possible impeachment, lawmakers and those who elected them must also examine the motives, tactics and alliances of Starr himself. For despite Michael Winerip's puzzling assertion, the investigation that has entangled Washington throughout the year is very much about Ken Starr, not just Bill Clinton.

Over the past seven months, Salon has published a massive amount of information about Starr, his investigation and the conflicts of interest between his probe and the Arkansas Project, a secret $2.4 million project to undermine Clinton financed by Starr's former patron, Richard Mellon Scaife. Below is a summary of our special reports on Starr, which are primarily the work of Salon's own dogged investigator, Murray Waas. Other key reporting for Salon has been provided by our Washington bureau chief, Jonathan Broder, and contributors Joe Conason, Gene Lyons and Mollie Dickenson.

What these carefully documented investigative stories underline is essentially this: In his zealous pursuit of the president, Kenneth Starr defiled "the temple of justice," to use his own righteous rhetoric. Lacking a fundamental sense of fairness and judicial proportion, Starr sought first to build his Whitewater real estate case against Clinton using irredeemably corrupt testimony, and then, when this failed, he latched onto Paula Jones' ill-fated civil suit, and then when that failed, he wired Linda Tripp and finally snared Clinton on adultery -- a crime that if aggressively pursued in Washington would depopulate our capital as thoroughly as the Khmer Rouge emptied Phnom Penh.

Below is a fact sheet of what every American citizen should know about Kenneth Starr and his probe.

1. After successful lobbying by staunch conservatives such as North Carolina Sen. Lauch Faircloth, a three-judge panel dominated by Republicans replaced moderate Whitewater prosecutor Robert Fiske with Kenneth Starr in August 1994. Starr, former chief of staff to Reagan Attorney General William French Smith and a member of an ambitious circle of activist conservative attorneys, accepted the job despite the fact that he had opposed the independent counsel law when he was a Reagan official and helped prepare a brief arguing it was unconstitutional, vesting too much power in one unaccountable person.

2. At the time of his appointment as Whitewater independent counsel, Starr, a $1 million-a-year Washington attorney with the high-powered firm of Kirkland & Ellis, was advising the Paula Jones camp on her sexual harassment suit against Clinton and offered to write a friend-of-the-court brief on her behalf. He was also representing the tobacco industry, an ardent foe of the Clinton administration. Later, Iran-contra prosecutor Lawrence Walsh would comment that, considering Starr's conflicts of interest, he should have felt obligated to turn down the job of investigating Clinton.

3. Starr proceeded to build his Whitewater case against Clinton largely around the testimony of confessed felon David Hale, a corrupt municipal judge and businessman who claimed then-Gov. Clinton had pressured him into making an illegal $300,000 loan to Jim and Susan McDougal, Clinton's partners in the failed Whitewater real estate deal. Starr's Whitewater investigators unearthed a formidable amount of evidence casting doubt on Hale's testimony against Clinton, including the fact that Hale had falsely invoked Clinton's name on a separate occasion to win a $50,000 kickback from an Alabama health company seeking an Arkansas state contract. But Starr chose to overlook this inconvenient episode in Hale's past, as well as the fact that his star witness had turned his courthouse into a personal ATM when he served as a municipal judge, taking kickbacks from a private collection agency he had installed to gather fines.

4. William Watt, another former municipal judge implicated in the Whitewater scheme, was used by Starr to corroborate Hale's testimony during the trial of the McDougals and Gov. Jim Guy Tucker. But Watt would later tell Salon that Starr's investigators ignored exculpatory information he provided them about Clinton and tried to pressure him into telling a more incriminating story about Clinton: "I was told they didn't like the truth the way that I told it. I had my truth and they had their truth and I was told that they liked their truth better." Watt also told Salon that he regarded Hale as someone who would "lie and manipulate people. He was a pathological liar."

5. David Hale, while cooperating with Starr as his chief Whitewater witness from 1994 to 1996, would sometimes stay rent-free at a fishing resort in Hot Springs, Ark., owned by anti-Clinton activist Parker Dozhier, who passed on secret cash payments to Hale. This charge was made to Salon by Dozhier's former live-in girlfriend, Caryn Mann, and her teenage son, both of whom have repeated their testimony before a federal grand jury. According to Mann, the money came from conservative attorney Stephen Boynton and David Henderson, vice president of the foundation that owns the conservative American Spectator magazine. Boynton and Henderson oversaw the Arkansas Project, an anti-Clinton muckraking campaign lavishly funded by right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, who funneled his contributions through the Spectator.

6. "We're convinced that none of our people had any knowledge of any such [Arkansas Project] payments [to Hale]," asserted Starr's chief Arkansas deputy, W. Hickman Ewing Jr. But the first meeting of the Arkansas Project took place in the Washington law offices of Theodore Olson, a friend, political ally and former colleague of Starr's, whose relationship dated back to their days as young activist conservatives in the Reagan Justice Department. Olson and Starr were also both beneficiaries of Richard Mellon Scaife's politically inspired generosity. Starr was scheduled to take a Scaife-funded deanship at Pepperdine University until controversy about his connections to Scaife forced him to resign the post. Olson has served on the board and as the attorney of the Scaife-funded American Spectator as well as on the advisory boards of four other right-wing institutions funded by Scaife. Referring to Olson's oversight role on the Arkansas Project, one source told Salon, "Olson is somebody who Scaife would trust to see that nothing went wrong and that his money would not be wasted." Like Starr, Olson worked on the Paula Jones case. Last year, when Jones challenged Clinton's claim of immunity from civil suits while in office, Olson, together with Robert Bork, held a moot court to prepare Jones' lawyers for their successful argument before the Supreme Court.

7. Olson -- who, along with his wife, Barbara, is often called upon by the press to defend their friend Starr -- also represented David Hale when he was called to testify before the Senate Whitewater Committee. Later, Hale lied under oath about how he came to retain Olson while testifying at the trial of Tucker and the McDougals. Two sources told Salon that by lying Hale was trying to conceal his connection to the Arkansas Project. It was the project's Stephen Boynton and David Henderson who put Hale in touch with Olson. (Olson's Arkansas Project connection is never mentioned when the New York Times and other media outlets call on him for comment about Starr's investigation of the president.)

8. While Hale was cooperating with Starr's Whitewater case, the independent counsel aggressively protected the man he called "a model witness," despite all evidence that Hale was anything but. Starr and his deputies tried to stop an insurance fraud case brought against Hale by Arkansas state prosecutors, who charged that Starr's office tried to intimidate them into dropping the case. The trial, which Starr succeeded in delaying but not stopping, will now begin in October. It will certainly cast a further cloud on Starr's "model witness," for Hale is charged with bilking poor black clients in rural Arkansas out of their funeral payments.

9. Some of Starr's deputies were alarmed by the independent counsel's unquestioning embrace of Hale. They shook their heads in dismay when Starr argued in court for a reduced sentence for "Judge Hale," as he called him, telling the court, "I have witnessed his contrition. I believe, your honor, that he is genuinely remorseful of his criminal past. I have been impressed with his humble spirit." Taking issue with Starr, one Whitewater investigator told Salon, "With someone like Hale, you can never let down your guard. You should never get to a point where you begin to trust him."

10. Starr deputy Hickman Ewing met quietly several times during the course of his Whitewater investigation with Rex Armistead, a private eye hired by the Arkansas Project to dig up dirt on Clinton. Armistead's investigation focused on allegations that then-Gov. Clinton had protected a cocaine-smuggling ring operating out of the Mena airport in rural Arkansas. The drug charges were examined and rejected by three separate federal investigations. One Whitewater investigator expressed concern about Ewing's meetings with the private eye, because of the controversial connection between Starr and Scaife and because not all the meetings were recorded in official files: "This was either the worst case of judgment or something worse."

11. At a critical juncture in Paula Jones' long-running legal battle with the president, the Arkansas Project's Stephen Boynton, David Henderson and Parker Dozhier intervened to find her experienced litigators, just before the statute of limitations on her lawsuit ran out. The suit was successfully revived -- and it in turn would later revive Kenneth Starr's flagging pursuit of the president. Another connection between the Jones case and the Arkansas Project surfaced when Salon reported that William Lehrfeld, a conservative attorney who has worked for Scaife and who served as legal counsel for the project, contributed $50,000 to Jones' legal fund from a little-known foundation he ran.

12. In early 1997, Starr's Whitewater case against Clinton had reached such a dead end that he made an effort to flee his job for Malibu's sunny Pepperdine campus. When his attempted escape provoked howls from his political and media supporters, Starr returned grimly to his Whitewater post. But his fortunes would dramatically reverse later in the year when the Jones lawsuit was green-lighted by the Supreme Court -- with help from Starr's friend Olson -- and Jones' lawyers subpoenaed Clinton and a then-obscure former White House intern named Monica Lewinsky.

And so the Clinton/Starr drama came full circle. By returning to the Paula Jones civil case that he had counselled before his appointment as Whitewater prosecutor, Kenneth Starr was finally able to get his man. Like Roger Chillingworth, the vengeful moralist who relentlessly pursued the adulterous Hester Prynne and her lover, the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale, in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter," Starr branded Clinton with the scarlet "I" -- for impeachment.

Most Americans, even longtime supporters of Clinton, are feeling estranged from the president these days because of his reckless Oval Office antics and his seven months of legalistic stonewalling. The national media -- from the foaming Christopher Matthews to the Monica-fixated Maureen Dowd -- are reinforcing this estrangement with a 24-7 barrage of anti-Clinton commentary. This blaring uniformity of opinion (the American media in the '90s is less politically diverse than China's) might well further erode Clinton's support, as Wall Street Journal apparatchik John Fund eagerly predicted this week. But there is still a strong bedrock of American common sense that resists all the hysterical sermonizing, that understands that Starr's enterprise was a political inquisition from its very birth, and that his marriage of limitless prosecutorial force and political vengeance is a much more dangerous spectre than President Clinton's libido. It's this sense of decency and balance that will, we hope, save the country from being torn apart over a matter that should never have been dragged into the public arena.

SALON
Sept. 10, 1998

The Grand Chessboard

The Grand Chessboard

Part #1
America's Role as the First, Only, and Last Truly Global Superpower
Part #2
American Culture and the Demise of Empire Cultural Decay and Motivating Empire. The Grand Chessboard

Part #3
Supranational Unions As A Stepping Stone
Part #4
Interdependence and the Luxury of War

by Brent Jessop
Global Research,

May 1, 2008

In Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997), he outlines his case for how current American global supremacy should be used to further a long running elite plan for the unification of the world under the dictates of the United Nations.

For those who don’t know, among many other things, Brzezinski was an advisor to John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, and Jimmy Carter. He was also the first director of the Trilateral Commission and board member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Currently he is a top foreign policy advisor to the Barack Obama campaign for presidency.

Controlling Eurasia With American Imperial Power

From The Grand Chessboard:

"In brief, for the United States, Eurasian geostrategy involves the purposeful management of geostrategically dynamic states and the careful handling of geopolitically catalytic states, in keeping with the twin interests of America in the short-term preservation of its unique global power and in the long-run transformation of it into increasingly institutionalized global cooperation. To put it in a terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together." - 40

"...the issue of how a globally engaged America copes with the complex Eurasian power relationships - and particularly whether it prevents the emergence of a dominant and antagonistic Eurasian power -- remains central to America's capacity to exercise global primacy." - xiii

"A geostrategic issue of crucial importance is posed by China's emergence as a major power. The most appealing outcome would be to co-opt a democratizing and free-marketing China into a larger Asian regional framework of cooperation." - 54

"In effect, Japan should be America's global partner in tackling the new agenda of world affairs. A regionally preeminent China should become America's Far Eastern anchor in the more traditional domain of power politics, helping thereby to foster a Eurasian balance of power, with Greater China in Eurasia's East matching in that respect the role of an enlarging Europe in Eurasia's West." - 193

False Choice

Like a good con man, Brzezinski insists that there is only one alternative to American imperial domination of Eurasia and thus the world. Of course, there is little time to take advantage of this "narrow window of historical opportunity".

"In brief, America as the world's premier power does face a narrow window of historical opportunity. The present moment of relative global peace may be short lived. This prospect underlines the urgent need for an American engagement in the world that is deliberately focused on the enhancement of international geopolitical stability..." - 213

"The sudden emergence of the first and only global power has created a situation in which an equally quick end to its supremacy -- either because of America's withdrawal from the world or because of the sudden emergence of a successful rival -- would produce massive international instability. In effect, it would prompt global anarchy." [emphasis mine] - 30

"In that context, for some time to come -- for more than a generation -- America's status as the world's premier power is unlikely to be contested by any single challenger. No nation-state is likely to match America in the four key dimensions of power (military, economic, technological, and cultural) that cumulatively produce decisive global political clout. Short of a deliberate or unintentional American abdication, the only real alternative to American global leadership in the foreseeable future is international anarchy. In that respect, it is correct to assert that America has become, as President Clinton put it, the world's "indispensable nation." " [emphasis mine] - 195

The Legacy of American Imperialism is United Nations Control

"Accordingly, once American leadership begins to fade, America's current global predominance is unlikely to be replicated by any single state. Thus, the key question for the future is "What will America bequeath to the world as the enduring legacy of its primacy?" " - 210

"Meeting these challenges is America's burden as well as its unique responsibility. Given the reality of American democracy, an effective response will require generating a public understanding of the continuing importance of American power in shaping a widening framework of stable geopolitical cooperation, one that simultaneously averts global anarchy and successfully defers the emergence of a new power challenge. These two goals-- averting global anarchy and impeding the emergence of a power rival-- are inseparable from the longer-range definition of the purpose of America's global engagement, namely, that of forging an enduring framework of global geopolitical cooperation." [emphasis mine] - 214

"In brief, the U.S. policy goal must be unapologetically twofold: to perpetuate America's own dominant position for at least a generation and preferably longer still; and to create a geopolitical framework that can absorb the inevitable shocks and strains of social-political change while evolving into the geopolitical core of shared responsibility for peaceful global management. A prolonged phase of gradually expanding cooperation with key Eurasian partners, both stimulated and arbitrated by America, can also help to foster the preconditions for an eventual upgrading of the existing and increasingly antiquated UN [United Nations] structures. A new distribution of responsibilities and privileges can then take into account the changed realities of global power, so drastically different from those of 1945." [emphasis mine] - 215

The final paragraph from The Grand Chessboard:

"In the course of the next several decades, a functioning structure of global cooperation, based on geopolitical realities, could thus emerge and gradually assume the mantle of the world's current "regent," which has for the time being assumed the burden of responsibility for world stability and peace. Geostrategic success in that cause would represent a fitting legacy of America's role as the first, only, and last truly global superpower." - 215

PART #2

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s described in his book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997), how the focus of American global primacy should be to unify the world under the dictates of the United Nations.

There are many problems associated with the emergence of the United Nations out of the ashes of the American empire. Brzezinski makes clear his distain for the limitations that "populist democracy" puts on his desired movements around the Eurasian chessboard and his revulsion at the potential for an "impotent global power".

"It is also a fact that America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America's power, especially its capacity for military intimidation. Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion" [emphasis mine] - 35

"A genuinely populist democracy has never before attained international supremacy. The pursuit of power and especially the economic costs and human sacrifice that the exercise of such power often requires are not generally congenial to democratic instincts. Democratization is inimical to imperial mobilization." [emphasis mine] - 210

"Indeed, the critical uncertainty regarding the future may well be whether America might become the first superpower unable or unwilling to wield its power. Might it become an impotent global power?" - 210

Four Key Dimensions of Power

"In that context, for some time to come-- for more than a generation-- America's status as the world's premier power is unlikely to be contested by any single challenger. No nation-state is likely to match America in the four key dimensions of power (military, economic, technological, and cultural) that cumulatively produce decisive global political clout." [emphasis mine] - 195

Little needs to be said about the first three dimensions of power; military, economic and technological. The fourth dimension, culture, is very important and rarely given appropriate attention. Brzezinski and the elite above and around him are well aware of the power of the creation and manipulation of culture. It is an essential component to convincing the American public to execute the elite designed imperial goals as well as the eventual and necessary removal of American primacy to make way for the emergence of the United Nations’ rise to dominance.

American Culture and the Demise of Empire

The current culture in America is aimed at the ruination of the American society and the empire few Americans realize they are a part of. This process requires many different things, but Brzezinski highlights the major themes; lack of association with empirical accomplishments and goals, lack of social cohesion, individual decadence, etc.

"Moreover, most Americans by and large do not derive any special gratification from their country's new status as the sole global superpower. Political "triumphalism" connected with America's victory in the Cold War has generally tended to receive a cold reception" - 36

"More generally, cultural change in America may also be uncongenial to the sustained exercise abroad of genuinely imperial power. That exercise requires a high degree of doctrinal motivation, intellectual commitment, and patriotic gratification. Yet the dominant culture of the country has become increasingly fixated on mass entertainment that has been heavily dominated by personally hedonistic and socially escapist themes. The cumulative effect has made it increasingly difficult to mobilize the needed political consensus on behalf of sustained, and also occasionally costly, American leadership abroad. Mass communications have been playing a particularly important role in that regard, generating a strong revulsion against any selective use of force that entails even low levels of casualties." [emphasis mine] - 211

"In addition, both America and Western Europe have been finding it difficult to cope with the cultural consequences of social hedonism and the dramatic decline in the centrality of religious-based values in society. (The parallels with the decline of the imperial systems summarized in chapter 1 [Rome for example] are striking in that respect.) The resulting cultural crisis has been compounded by the spread of drugs and, especially in America, by its linkage to the racial issue. Lastly, the rate of economic growth is no longer able to keep up with growing material expectations, with the latter stimulated by a culture that places a premium on consumption." - 212

Proper Motivation

Brzezinski’s geostrategic imperatives will require a final surge for the dying American empire. To accomplish this, he recognizes the need for the sudden emergence of a "direct external threat".

"Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multicultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstances of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat. Such a consensus generally existed throughout World War II and even during the Cold War." [emphasis mine] - 211

"It is also a fact that America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America's power, especially its capacity for military intimidation. Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public's sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization." [emphasis mine] - pg 35

This was provided four years later by the attacks of 9/11.

Terrorist threat

Brzezinski does however highlight nicely the inherent feebleness of today's direct external threat - Islamic fundamentalism.

"A possible challenge to American primacy from Islamic fundamentalism could be part of the problem in this unstable region. By exploiting religious hostility to the American way of life and taking advantage of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Islamic fundamentalism could undermine several pro-Western Middle Eastern governments and eventually jeopardize American regional interests, especially in the Persian Gulf. However, without political cohesion and in the absence of a single genuinely powerful Islamic state, a challenge from Islamic fundamentalism would lack a geopolitical core and would thus be more likely to express itself through diffuse violence." - 53

But, he does also underscore the usefulness of terrorism, or the threat of terrorism to push his ideas.

"It is also noteworthy that international conflicts and acts of terrorism have so far been remarkably devoid of any use of the weapons of mass destruction. How long that self-restraint may hold is inherently unpredictable, but the increasing availability, not only to states but also to organized groups, of the means to inflict massive casualties-- by the use of nuclear or bacteriological weapons-- also inevitably increases the probability of their employment." - 213

Creating the New Global System With Culture

The planned decay, or collapse, of the American empire must coincide with the emergence of the United Nations. Brzezinski mentions the tool to be used to generate a more international culture required for the acceptance of and obedience to global government.

"These efforts will have the added historical advantage of benefiting from the new web of global linkages that is growing exponentially outside the more traditional nation-state system. That web-- woven by multinational corporations, NGOs (nongovernmental organizations, with many of them transnational in character) and scientific communities and reinforced by the Internet-- already creates an informal global system that is inherently congenial to more institutionalized and inclusive global cooperation." [empahsis mine] - 215

The use of multinational corporations should need no explanation with the almost daily international corporate mergers, interdependence derived from the separation of production and consumption, and the uniformity of products across the entire globe. NGOs and the scientific communities are hard at work pushing for international institutions in their rabid campaign against global warming. The internet too, is a powerful tool in promoting a global digital culture.

My next article will draw attention to Brzezinski’s call for the expansion of the European Union and NATO, the establishment of an Asian Union, and his work with the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission in forming an American Union.

PART #3

An important step in establishing a world government run by the United Nations is the development of smaller multinational trade and political unions. This step allows for a gradual weakening of nationalistic emotions in the respective countries as borders are slowly erased. It also develops a sense of normalcy with having multinational bureaucracies replacing the roles that national governments formerly played.

This process is strongly supported by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997). As discussed here, Brzezinski makes it plainly clear that the role of the American empire is to pave the way for the emergence of the United Nations as a world government. The tools used for this as well as the necessary fall of the American empire were previously discussed here.

European Union

From The Grand Chessboard:

"By pioneering in the integration of nation-states into a shared supranational economic and eventually political union, Europe is also pointing the way toward larger forms of postnational organization, beyond the narrow visions and the destructive passions of the age of nationalism." [emphasis mine] - 57

Brzezinski makes clear the need for the expansion of the European Union into central Europe and especially the absorption of a newly independent Ukraine. The expansion of the European Union eastward was to be preceded by the expansion of NATO. All of these objectives are slowly being implemented as can be seen by events like the “Orange Revolution” in the Ukraine.

"In the current circumstances, the expansion of NATO to include Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary -- probably by 1999 -- appears to be likely. After this initial but significant step, it is likely that any subsequent expansion of the alliance will either be coincidental with or will follow the expansion of the EU. The latter involves a much more complicated process, both in the number of qualifying stages and in the meeting of membership requirements (see chart on page 83). Thus, even the first admissions into the EU from Central Europe are not likely before the year 2002 or perhaps somewhat later. Nonetheless, after the first three new NATO members have also joined the EU, both the EU and NATO will have to address the question of extending membership to the Baltic republics, Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Slovakia, and perhaps also, eventually, to Ukraine." - 81

"It follows, therefore, that states that are in a position to begin and are invited to undertake accession talks with the EU should automatically also be viewed henceforth as subject in effect to NATO's presumptive protection." - 83

"Given the growing consensus regarding the desirability of admitting the nations of Central Europe into both the EU and NATO, the practical meaning of this question focuses attention on the future status of the Baltic republics and perhaps also that of Ukraine." - 50

Asian Union

"A geostrategic issue of crucial importance is posed by China's emergence as a major power. The most appealing outcome would be to co-opt a democratizing and free-marketing China into a larger Asian regional framework of cooperation." [emphasis mine] - 54

American Union

Brzezinski's roles as the first director of the Trilateral Commission and a board member of the Council on Foreign Relations directly involves him in the current process of creating the North American Union. A nice video summary of the process and some of the important players can be watched here. This plan includes the creation of a single currency tentatively called the Amero, which was recently stated publicly as a 'possibility' by the governor of the Bank of Canada, David Dodge.

It should also be stressed that the formation of the North American Union is a stepping stone to a wider American Union encompassing the whole of South America. Much the same way the European Union initially began as a Western European Union.

Inter-Union Integration

The establishment of the three main economic and political blocks will gradually be united into a single global form. This process recommended by Brzezinski is the exact same process used to initiate the three separate unions; free trade agreements.

"...the United States would do well to consider the adoption of an American-Japanese free trade agreement, thereby creating a common American-Japanese economic space. Such a step, formalizing the growing linkage between the two economies, would provide the geopolitical underpinning both for America's continued presence in the Far East and for Japan's constructive global engagement." [emphasis mine] - 192

"Tokyo can carve out a globally influential role by cooperating closely with the United States regarding what might be called the new agenda of global concerns, while avoiding any futile and potentially counterproductive effort to become a regional power itself. The task of American statesmanship should hence be to steer Japan in that direction. An American-Japanese free trade agreement, creating a common economic space, would fortify the connection and promote the goal, and hence its utility should be jointly examined." [emphasis mine] - 208

"A Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement, already advocated by a number of prominent Atlantic leaders, could also mitigate the risk of growing economic rivalry between a more united EU and the United States. In any case, the EU's eventual success in burying the centuries-old European nationalist antagonisms, with their globally disruptive effects, would be well worth some gradual diminution in America's decisive role as Eurasia's current arbitrator." [emphasis mine] - 200

Once this process fully takes hold and American primacy fades the United Nations will emerge as a global government.

"In brief, the U.S. policy goal must be unapologetically twofold: to perpetuate America's own dominant position for at least a generation and preferably longer still; and to create a geopolitical framework that can absorb the inevitable shocks and strains of social-political change while evolving into the geopolitical core of shared responsibility for peaceful global management. A prolonged phase of gradually expanding cooperation with key Eurasian partners, both stimulated and arbitrated by America, can also help to foster the preconditions for an eventual upgrading of the existing and increasingly antiquated UN [United Nations] structures. A new distribution of responsibilities and privileges can then take into account the changed realities of global power, so drastically different from those of 1945." [emphasis mine] - 215

PART #4

The following is a series of loosely linked topics taken from Zbigniew Brzezinski’s book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997). These topics did not fit in to my previous articles about this book but are important topics in their own right and still should be addressed.

The first three articles in this series described the use of American imperial power to bring about world government, the techniques used to bring about the fall of the American empire and the rise of the United Nations, and the purpose of supranational unions within that agenda.

War, a Luxury of the Poor

War is an extraordinary tool for changing the culture of nations into the designs of the elite. The side being attacked and the side doing the attacking are both drastically altered by the process. With this in mind, the statement by Brzezinski, highlighted below, is referring to the usefulness of war to the elite of those countries and is coldly serious.

From The Grand Chessboard:

"That lack of confidence has been intensified by widespread disappointment with the consequences of the end of the Cold War. Instead of a "new world order" based on consensus and harmony, "things which seemed to belong to the past" have all of a sudden become the future. Although ethnic-national conflicts may no longer pose the risk of a central war, they do threaten the peace in significant parts of the globe. Thus, war is not likely to become obsolete for some time to come. With the more-endowed nations constrained by their own higher technological capacity for self-destruction as well as by self-interest, war may have become a luxury that only the poor peoples of this world can afford. In the foreseeable future, the impoverished two-thirds of humanity may not be motivated by the restraint of the privileged." [emphasis mine] - 213

Welfare State

"By the mid-nineties, however, these impulses had faded. Economic recovery by and large has been achieved; if anything, the problem Europe increasingly faces is that of an excessively burdensome welfare system that is sapping its economic vitality..." [emphasis mine] - 60

I highlighted the above quote by Brzezinski because he is currently a top foreign policy advisor to the Barack Obama’s campaign to be the Democratic party’s presidential candidate. Would those words not flow nicely out of an angry right-wing TV commentator? Just one more reason not to believe in the false left-right paradigm.

Global Interdependence

One of the favourite buzzwords, never too far from the lips of the globalists, is interdependence. Brzezinski demonstrates that the real purpose is to create dependence, and therefore servitude to the organizing body. He discusses this in the context of the break up of the Soviet Union.

"In its narrowest form, the "near abroad" priority involved the perfectly reasonable proposition that Russia must first concentrate on relations with the newly independent states, especially as all of them remained tied to Russia by the realities of the deliberately fostered Soviet policy of promoting economic interdependence among them. That made both economic and geopolitical sense. The "common economic space," of which the new Russian leaders spoke often, was a reality that could not be ignored by the leaders of the newly independent states. Cooperation, and even some integration, was an economic necessity. Thus, it was not only normal but desirable to promote joint CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States] institutions in order to reverse the economic disruptions and fragmentation produced by the political breakup of the Soviet Union." [emphasis mine] - 106

The RAND Corporation: America's University of Imperialism

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ALTERNET

The RAND Corporation: America's University of Imperialism

For decades these self-professed saviors of the Western world helped precipitate U.S. foreign policy disasters like the Vietnam War.

Posted April 30, 2008

By Chalmers Johnson,
Tomdispatch.com.

The RAND Corporation of Santa Monica, California, was set up immediately after World War II by the U.S. Army Air Corps (soon to become the U.S. Air Force). The Air Force generals who had the idea were trying to perpetuate the wartime relationship that had developed between the scientific and intellectual communities and the American military, as exemplified by the Manhattan Project to develop and build the atomic bomb.

Soon enough, however, RAND became a key institutional building block of the Cold War American empire. As the premier think tank for the U.S.'s role as hegemon of the Western world, RAND was instrumental in giving that empire the militaristic cast it retains to this day and in hugely enlarging official demands for atomic bombs, nuclear submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers. Without RAND, our military-industrial complex, as well as our democracy, would look quite different.

Alex Abella, the author of Soldiers of Reason, is a Cuban-American living in Los Angeles who has written several well-received action and adventure novels set in Cuba and a less successful nonfiction account of attempted Nazi sabotage within the United States during World War II. The publisher of his latest book claims that it is "the first history of the shadowy think tank that reshaped the modern world." Such a history is long overdue. Unfortunately, this book does not exhaust the demand. We still need a less hagiographic, more critical, more penetrating analysis of RAND's peculiar contributions to the modern world.

Abella has nonetheless made a valiant, often revealing and original effort to uncover RAND's internal struggles -- not least of which involved the decision of analyst Daniel Ellsberg, in 1971, to leak the Department of Defence's top secret history of the Vietnam War, known as The Pentagon Papers to Congress and the press. But Abella's book is profoundly schizophrenic.

• On the one hand, the author is breathlessly captivated by RAND's fast-talking economists, mathematicians, and thinkers-about-the-unthinkable;
  
• on the other hand, he agrees with Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis's assessment in his book, The Cold War: A New History, that, in promoting the interests of the Air Force, RAND concocted an "unnecessary Cold War" that gave the dying Soviet empire an extra 30 years of life.

We need a study that really lives up to Abella's subtitle and takes a more jaundiced view of RAND's geniuses, Nobel prize winners, egghead gourmands and wine connoisseurs, Laurel Canyon swimming pool parties, and self-professed saviors of the Western world. It is likely that, after the American empire has gone the way of all previous empires, the RAND Corporation will be more accurately seen as a handmaiden of the government that was always super-cautious about speaking truth to power. Meanwhile, Soldiers of Reason is a serviceable, if often overwrought, guide to how strategy has been formulated in the post-World War II American empire.

The Air Force Creates a Think Tank

RAND was the brainchild of General H. H. "Hap" Arnold, chief of staff of the Army Air Corps from 1941 until it became the Air Force in 1947, and his chief wartime scientific adviser, the aeronautical engineer Theodore von Kármán. In the beginning, RAND was a free-standing division within the Douglas Aircraft Company which, after 1967, merged with McDonnell Aviation to form the McDonnell-Douglas Aircraft Corporation and, after 1997, was absorbed by Boeing. Its first head was Franklin R. Collbohm, a Douglas engineer and test pilot.

In May 1948, RAND was incorporated as a not-for-profit entity independent of Douglas, but it continued to receive the bulk of its funding from the Air Force. The think tank did, however, begin to accept extensive support from the Ford Foundation, marking it as a quintessential member of the American establishment.

Collbohm stayed on as chief executive officer until 1966, when he was forced out in the disputes then raging within the Pentagon between the Air Force and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. McNamara's "whiz kids" were Defense intellectuals, many of whom had worked at RAND and were determined to restructure the armed forces to cut costs and curb interservice rivalries. Always loyal to the Air Force and hostile to the whiz kids, Collbohm was replaced by Henry S. Rowan, an MIT-educated engineer turned economist and strategist who was himself forced to resign during the Ellsberg-Pentagon Papers scandal.

Collbohm and other pioneer managers at Douglas gave RAND its commitment to interdisciplinary work and limited its product to written reports, avoiding applied or laboratory research, or actual manufacturing. RAND's golden age of creativity lasted from approximately 1950 to 1970. During that period its theorists worked diligently on such new analytical techniques and inventions as systems analysis, game theory, reconnaissance satellites, the Internet, advanced computers, digital communications, missile defense, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. During the 1970s, RAND began to turn to projects in the civilian world, such as health financing systems, insurance, and urban governance.

Much of RAND's work was always ideological, designed to support the American values of individualism and personal gratification as well as to counter Marxism, but its ideological bent was disguised in statistics and equations, which allegedly made its analyses "rational" and "scientific." Abella writes:

"If a subject could not be measured, ranged, or classified, it was of little consequence in systems analysis, for it was not rational. Numbers were all -- the human factor was a mere adjunct to the empirical."

In my opinion, Abella here confuses numerical with empirical. Most RAND analyses were formal, deductive, and mathematical but rarely based on concrete research into actually functioning societies. RAND never devoted itself to the ethnographic and linguistic knowledge necessary to do truly empirical research on societies that its administrators and researchers, in any case, thought they already understood.

For example, RAND's research conclusions on the Third World, limited war, and counterinsurgency during the Vietnam War were notably wrong-headed. It argued that the United States should support "military modernization" in underdeveloped countries, that military takeovers and military rule were good things, that we could work with military officers in other countries, where democracy was best honored in the breach. The result was that virtually every government in East Asia during the 1960s and 1970s was a U.S.-backed military dictatorship, including South Vietnam, South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Taiwan.

It is also important to note that RAND's analytical errors were not just those of commission -- excessive mathematical reductionism -- but also of omission. As Abella notes, "In spite of the collective brilliance of RAND there would be one area of science that would forever elude it, one whose absence would time and again expose the organization to peril: the knowledge of the human psyche."

Following the axioms of mathematical economics, RAND researchers tended to lump all human motives under what the Canadian political scientist C. B. Macpherson called "possessive individualism" and not to analyze them further. Therefore, they often misunderstood mass political movements, failing to appreciate the strength of organizations like the Vietcong and its resistance to the RAND-conceived Vietnam War strategy of "escalated" bombing of military and civilian targets.

Similarly, RAND researchers saw Soviet motives in the blackest, most unnuanced terms, leading them to oppose the détente that President Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger sought and, in the 1980s, vastly to overestimate the Soviet threat. Abella observes, "For a place where thinking the unthinkable was supposed to be the common coin, strangely enough there was virtually no internal RAND debate on the nature of the Soviet Union or on the validity of existing American policies to contain it. RANDites took their cues from the military's top echelons." A typical RAND product of those years was Nathan Leites's The Operational Code of the Politburo (1951), a fairly mechanistic study of Soviet military strategy and doctrine and the organization and operation of the Soviet economy.

Collbohm and his colleagues recruited a truly glittering array of intellectuals for RAND, even if skewed toward mathematical economists rather than people with historical knowledge or extensive experience in other countries. Among the notables who worked for the think tank were the economists and mathematicians Kenneth Arrow, a pioneer of game theory; John Forbes Nash, Jr., later the subject of the Hollywood film A Beautiful Mind (2001); Herbert Simon, an authority on bureaucratic organization; Paul Samuelson, author of Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947); and Edmund Phelps, a specialist on economic growth. Each one became a Nobel Laureate in economics.

Other major figures were Bruno Augenstein who, according to Abella, made what is "arguably RAND's greatest known -- which is to say declassified -- contribution to American national security: ... the development of the ICBM as a weapon of war" (he invented the multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle, or MIRV); Paul Baran who, in studying communications systems that could survive a nuclear attack, made major contributions to the development of the Internet and digital circuits; and Charles Hitch, head of RAND's Economics Division from 1948 to 1961 and president of the University of California from 1967 to 1975.

Among more ordinary mortals, workers in the vineyard, and hangers-on at RAND were Donald Rumsfeld, a trustee of the Rand Corporation from 1977 to 2001; Condoleezza Rice, a trustee from 1991 to 1997; Francis Fukuyama, a RAND researcher from 1979 to 1980 and again from 1983 to 1989, as well as the author of the thesis that history ended when the United States outlasted the Soviet Union; Zalmay Khalilzad, the second President Bush's ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the United Nations; and Samuel Cohen, inventor of the neutron bomb (although the French military perfected its tactical use).

Thinking the Unthinkable

The most notorious of RAND's writers and theorists were the nuclear war strategists, all of whom were often quoted in newspapers and some of whom were caricatured in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. (One of them, Herman Kahn, demanded royalties from Kubrick, to which Kubrick responded, "That's not the way it works Herman.") RAND'S group of nuclear war strategists was dominated by Bernard Brodie, one of the earliest analysts of nuclear deterrence and author of Strategy in the Missile Age (1959); Thomas Schelling, a pioneer in the study of strategic bargaining, Nobel Laureate in economics, and author of The Strategy of Conflict (1960); James Schlesinger, Secretary of Defense from 1973 to 1975, who was fired by President Ford for insubordination; Kahn, author of On Thermonuclear War (1960); and last but not least, Albert Wohlstetter, easily the best known of all RAND researchers.

Abella calls Wohlstetter "the leading intellectual figure at RAND," and describes him as "self-assured to the point of arrogance." Wohlstetter, he adds, "personified the imperial ethos of the mandarins who made America the center of power and culture in the postwar Western world."

While Abella does an excellent job ferreting out details of Wohlstetter's background, his treatment comes across as a virtual paean to the man, including Wohlstetter's late-in-life turn to the political right and his support for the neoconservatives. Abella believes that Wohlstetter's "basing study," which made both RAND and him famous (and which I discuss below), "changed history."

Starting in 1967, I was, for a few years -- my records are imprecise on this point -- a consultant for RAND (although it did not consult me often) and became personally acquainted with Albert Wohlstetter. In 1967, he and I attended a meeting in New Delhi of the Institute of Strategic Studies to help promote the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which was being opened for signature in 1968, and would be in force from 1970. There, Wohlstetter gave a display of his well-known arrogance by announcing to the delegates that he did not believe India, as a civilization, "deserved an atom bomb." As I looked at the smoldering faces of Indian scientists and strategists around the room, I knew right then and there that India would join the nuclear club, which it did in 1974. (India remains one of four major nations that have not signed the NPT. The others are North Korea, which ratified the treaty but subsequently withdrew, Israel, and Pakistan. Some 189 nations have signed and ratified it.) My last contact with Wohlstetter was late in his life -- he died in 1997 at the age of 83 -- when he telephoned me to complain that I was too "soft" on the threats of communism and the former Soviet Union.

Albert Wohlstetter was born and raised in Manhattan and studied mathematics at the City College of New York and Columbia University. Like many others of that generation, he was very much on the left and, according to research by Abella, was briefly a member of a communist splinter group, the League for a Revolutionary Workers Party. He avoided being ruined in later years by Senator Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI because, as Daniel Ellsberg told Abella, the evidence had disappeared. In 1934, the leader of the group was moving the Party's records to new offices and had rented a horse-drawn cart to do so. At a Manhattan intersection, the horse died, and the leader promptly fled the scene, leaving all the records to be picked up and disposed of by the New York City sanitation department.

After World War II, Wohlstetter moved to Southern California, and his wife Roberta began work on her pathbreaking RAND study, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (1962), exploring why the U.S. had missed all the signs that a Japanese "surprise attack" was imminent. In 1951, he was recruited by Charles Hitch for RAND's Mathematics Division, where he worked on methodological studies in mathematical logic until Hitch posed a question to him: "How should you base the Strategic Air Command?"

Wohlstetter then became intrigued by the many issues involved in providing airbases for Strategic Air Command (SAC) bombers, the country's primary retaliatory force in case of nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. What he came up with was a comprehensive and theoretically sophisticated basing study. It ran directly counter to the ideas of General Curtis LeMay, then the head of SAC, who, in 1945, had encouraged the creation of RAND and was often spoken of as its "Godfather."

In 1951, there were a total of 32 SAC bases in Europe and Asia, all located close to the borders of the Soviet Union. Wohlstetter's team discovered that they were, for all intents and purposes, undefended -- the bombers parked out in the open, without fortified hangars -- and that SAC's radar defenses could easily be circumvented by low-flying Soviet bombers. RAND calculated that the USSR would need "only" 120 tactical nuclear bombs of 40 kilotons each to destroy up to 85% of SAC's European-based fleet. LeMay, who had long favored a preemptive attack on the Soviet Union, claimed he did not care. He reasoned that the loss of his bombers would only mean that -- even in the wake of a devastating nuclear attack -- they could be replaced with newer, more modern aircraft. He also believed that the appropriate retaliatory strategy for the United States involved what he called a "Sunday punch," massive retaliation using all available American nuclear weapons. According to Abella, SAC planners proposed annihilating three-quarters of the population in each of 188 Russian cities. Total casualties would be in excess of 77 million people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe alone.

Wohlstetter's answer to this holocaust was to start thinking about how a country might actually wage a nuclear war. He is credited with coming up with a number of concepts, all now accepted U.S. military doctrine. One is "second-strike capability," meaning a capacity to retaliate even after a nuclear attack, which is considered the ultimate deterrent against an enemy nation launching a first-strike. Another is "fail-safe procedures," or the ability to recall nuclear bombers after they have been dispatched on their missions, thereby providing some protection against accidental war. Wohlstetter also championed the idea that all retaliatory bombers should be based in the continental United States and able to carry out their missions via aerial refueling, although he did not advocate closing overseas military bases or shrinking the perimeters of the American empire. To do so, he contended, would be to abandon territory and countries to Soviet expansionism.

Wohlstetter's ideas put an end to the strategy of terror attacks on Soviet cities in favor of a "counter-force strategy" that targeted Soviet military installations. He also promoted the dispersal and "hardening" of SAC bases to make them less susceptible to preemptive attacks and strongly supported using high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft such as the U-2 and orbiting satellites to acquire accurate intelligence on Soviet bomber and missile strength.

In selling these ideas Wohlstetter had to do an end-run around SAC's LeMay and go directly to the Air Force chief of staff. In late 1952 and 1953, he and his team gave some 92 briefings to high-ranking Air Force officers in Washington DC. By October 1953, the Air Force had accepted most of Wohlstetter's recommendations.

Abella believes that most of us are alive today because of Wohlstetter's intellectually and politically difficult project to prevent a possible nuclear first strike by the Soviet Union. He writes:

"Wohlstetter's triumphs with the basing study and fail-safe not only earned him the respect and admiration of fellow analysts at RAND but also gained him entry to the top strata of government that very few military analysts enjoyed. His work had pointed out a fatal deficiency in the nation's war plans, and he had saved the Air Force several billion dollars in potential losses."

A few years later, Wohlstetter wrote an updated version of the basing study and personally briefed Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson on it, with General Thomas D. White, the Air Force chief of staff, and General Nathan Twining, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in attendance.

Despite these achievements in toning down the official Air Force doctrine of "mutually assured destruction" (MAD), few at RAND were pleased by Wohlstetter's eminence. Bernard Brodie had always resented his influence and was forever plotting to bring him down. Still, Wohlstetter was popular compared to Herman Kahn. All the nuclear strategists were irritated by Kahn who, ultimately, left RAND and created his own think tank, the Hudson Institute, with a million-dollar grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

RAND chief Frank Collbohm opposed Wohlstetter because his ideas ran counter to those of the Air Force, not to speak of the fact that he had backed John F. Kennedy instead of Richard Nixon for president in 1960 and then compounded his sin by backing Robert McNamara for secretary of defense over the objections of the high command. Worse yet, Wohlstetter had criticized the stultifying environment that had begun to envelop RAND.

In 1963, in a fit of pique and resentment fueled by Bernard Brodie, Collbohm called in Wohlstetter and asked for his resignation. When Wohlstetter refused, Collbohm fired him.

Wohlstetter went on to accept an appointment as a tenured professor of political science at the University of Chicago. From this secure position, he launched vitriolic campaigns against whatever administration was in office "for its obsession with Vietnam at the expense of the current Soviet threat." He, in turn, continued to vastly overstate the threat of Soviet power and enthusiastically backed every movement that came along calling for stepped up war preparations against the USSR -- from members of the Committee on the Present Danger between 1972 to 1981 to the neoconservatives in the 1990s and 2000s.

Naturally, he supported the creation of "Team B" when George H. W. Bush was head of the CIA in 1976. Team B consisted of a group of anti-Soviet professors and polemicists who were convinced that the CIA was "far too forgiving of the Soviet Union." With that in mind, they were authorized to review all the intelligence that lay behind the CIA's National Intelligence Estimates on Soviet military strength. Actually, Team B and similar right-wing ad hoc policy committees had their evidence exactly backwards: By the late 1970s and 1980s, the fatal sclerosis of the Soviet economy was well underway. But Team B set the stage for the Reagan administration to do what it most wanted to do, expend massive sums on arms; in return, Ronald Reagan bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Wohlstetter in November 1985.

Imperial U.

Wohlstetter's activism on behalf of American imperialism and militarism lasted well into the 1990s. According to Abella, the rise to prominence of Ahmed Chalabi -- the Iraqi exile and endless source of false intelligence to the Pentagon -- "in Washington circles came about at the instigation of Albert Wohlstetter, who met Chalabi in Paul Wolfowitz's office." (In the incestuous world of the neocons, Wolfowitz had been Wohlstetter's student at the University of Chicago.) In short, it is not accidental that the American Enterprise Institute, the current chief institutional manifestation of neoconservative thought in Washington, named its auditorium the "Wohlstetter Conference Center." Albert Wohlstetter's legacy is, to say the least, ambiguous.

Needless to say, there is much more to RAND's work than the strategic thought of Albert Wohlstetter, and Abella's book is an introduction to the broad range of ideas RAND has espoused -- from "rational choice theory" (explaining all human behavior in terms of self-interest) to the systematic execution of Vietnamese in the CIA's Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War. As an institution, the RAND Corporation remains one of the most potent and complex purveyors of American imperialism. A full assessment of its influence, both positive and sinister, must await the elimination of the secrecy surrounding its activities and further historical and biographical analysis of the many people who worked there.

The RAND Corporation is surely one of the world's most unusual, Cold War-bred private organizations in the field of international relations. While it has attracted and supported some of the most distinguished analysts of war and weaponry, it has not stood for the highest standards of intellectual inquiry and debate. While RAND has an unparalleled record of providing unbiased, unblinking analyses of technical and carefully limited problems involved in waging contemporary war, its record of advice on cardinal policies involving war and peace, the protection of civilians in wartime, arms races, and decisions to resort to armed force has been abysmal.

For example, Abella credits RAND with "creating the discipline of terrorist studies," but its analysts seem never to have noticed the phenomenon of state terrorism as it was practiced in the 1970s and 1980s in Latin America by American-backed military dictatorships. Similarly, admirers of Albert Wohlstetter's reformulations of nuclear war ignore the fact that that these led to a "constant escalation of the nuclear arms race." By 1967, the U.S. possessed a stockpile of 32,500 atomic and hydrogen bombs.

In Vietnam, RAND invented the theories that led two administrations to military escalation against North Vietnam -- and even after the think tank's strategy had obviously failed and the secretary of defense had disowned it, RAND never publicly acknowledged that it had been wrong. Abella comments, "RAND found itself bound by the power of the purse wielded by its patron, whether it be the Air Force or the Office of the Secretary of Defense." And it has always relied on classifying its research to protect itself, even when no military secrets were involved.

In my opinion, these issues come to a head over one of RAND's most unusual initiatives -- its creation of an in-house, fully accredited graduate school of public policy that offers Ph.D. degrees to American and foreign students. Founded in 1970 as the RAND Graduate Institute and today known as the Frederick S. Pardee RAND Graduate School (PRGS), it had, by January 2006, awarded over 180 Ph.D.s in microeconomics, statistics, and econometrics, social and behavioral sciences, and operations research. Its faculty numbers 54 professors drawn principally from the staffs of RAND's research units, and it has an annual student body of approximately 900. In addition to coursework, qualifying examinations, and a dissertation, PRGS students are required to spend 400 days working on RAND projects. How RAND and the Air Force can classify the research projects of foreign and American interns is unclear; nor does it seem appropriate for an open university to allow dissertation research, which will ultimately be available to the general public, to be done in the hothouse atmosphere of a secret strategic institute.

Perhaps the greatest act of political and moral courage involving RAND was Daniel Ellsberg's release to the public of the secret record of lying by every president from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Lyndon Johnson about the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. However, RAND itself was and remains adamantly hostile to what Ellsberg did.

Abella reports that Charles Wolf, Jr., the chairman of RAND's Economics Department from 1967 to 1982 and the first dean of the RAND Graduate School from 1970 to 1997, "dripped venom when interviewed about the [Ellsberg] incident more than thirty years after the fact." Such behavior suggests that secrecy and toeing the line are far more important at RAND than independent intellectual inquiry and that the products of its research should be viewed with great skepticism and care.

See more stories tagged with: soviet union, nuclear war, cold war, military, ellsberg, rand corporation

Chalmers Johnson's latest book is Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, now available in a Holt Paperback. It is the third volume of his Blowback Trilogy. To view a short video of Johnson discussing military Keynesianism and imperial bankruptcy, click here.

"Hero" John McCain as Phony and Collaborator: What Really Happened When He Was a POW?

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"Hero" John McCain as Phony and Collaborator: What Really Happened When He Was a POW?

ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Counterpunch

Monday, April 21, 2008

John McCain’s been getting kid-glove treatment from the press for years, ever since he wriggled free of the Keating scandal and his profitable association – another collaboration, you might say -- with the nation’s top bank swindler in the 1980s. But nothing equals the astounding tact with which his claque on the press bus avoids the topic of McCain’s collaborating with his Vietnamese captors after he’d been shot down.

How McCain behaved when he was a prisoner is key. McCain is probably the most unstable man ever to have got this close to the White House. He’s one election away from it. Republican senator Thad Cochrane has openly said he trembles at the thought of an unstable McCain in the Oval Office with his finger on the nuclear trigger.

What if a private memory of years of collaboration in his prison camp gnaws at McCain, and bursts out in his paroxysms of uncontrollable fury, his rantings about “gooks” and his terrifying commitment to a hundred years of war in Iraq. What if “the hero” knows he’s a phony?

Doug Valentine has written the definitive history of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. He knows about the POW experience. His dad, an Army man, was captured by the Japanese and sent to a POW camp in the Philippines for forced labour. Many of his mates died. Doug wrote a marvellous book about it, The Hotel Tacloban.

Now Valentine has picked up the unexploded bomb lying on McCain’s campaign trail this year. As he points out, he’s not the first. Rumours and charges have long swirled around McCain’s conduct as a prisoner. Fellow prisoners have given the lie to McCain’s claims. But Valentine has assembled the dossier. It’s devastating.

Some excerpts from Valentine’s indictment.

“War is one thing, collaborating with the enemy is another; it is a legitimate campaign issue that strikes at the heart of McCain’s character. . .or lack thereof. In occupied countries like Iraq, or France in World War II, collaboration to that extent spells an automatic death sentence.. . .The question is: What kind of collaborator was John McCain, the admitted war criminal who will hate the Vietnamese for the rest of his life?

“Put it another way: how psychologically twisted is McCain? And what actually happened to him in his POW camp that twisted him? Was it abuse, as he claims, or was it the fact that he collaborated and has to cover up? Covering-up can take a lot of energy. The truth is lurking there in his subconscious, waiting to explode. ”

“McCain had a unique POW experience. Initially, he was taken to the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison camp, where he was interrogated. By McCain’s own account, after three or four days he cracked. He promised his Vietnamese captors, “I’ll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital ...

“His Vietnamese captors soon realized their POW, John Sidney McCain III, came from a well-bred line in the American military elite. . .The Vietnamese realized, this poor stooge has propaganda value. The admiral’s boy was used to special treatment, and his captors knew that. They were working him.”

“. . .two weeks into his stay at the Vietnamese hospital, the Hanoi press began quoting him. It was not ‘name rank and serial number, or kill me’. as specified by the military code of conduct. McCain divulged specific military information: he gave the name of the aircraft carrier on which he was based, the number of U.S. pilots that had been lost, the number of aircraft in his flight formation, as well as information about the location of rescue ships.”

“…McCain was held for five and half years. The first two weeks’ behaviour might have been pragmatism, but McCain soon became North Vietnam’s go-to collaborator…..McCain cooperated with the North Vietnamese for a period of three years. His situation isn’t as innocuous as that of the French barber who cuts the hair of the German occupier. McCain was repaying his captors for their kindness and mercy.

“This is the lesson of McCain’s experience as a POW: a true politician, a hollow man, his only allegiance is to power. The Vietnamese, like McCain’s campaign contributors today, protected and promoted him, and, in return, he danced to their tune. . .”

Alexander Cockburn is a well known social and political critic, and has established a reputation as one of the foremost reporters and commentators of the left by writing newspaper and magazine columns for the past decade. His essays have appeared in many publications in Britain, Europe and the Americas. Born in Scotland. Cockburn grew up in Ireland and graduated from Oxford in 1963 with a degree in English literature and language. He is co-editor of CounterPunch, whose web site, has a world audience in the millions. Cockburn has authored a number of books which include: 'The Politics of Anti-Semitism' and 'Imperial Crusades' His views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have often aroused controversy in some quarters

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An Exclusive Interview with Robert Fisk: Fisk Fighting

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An Exclusive Interview with Robert Fisk

Fisk Fighting

April 26 /27, 2008

By WAJAHAT ALI

"One thing I’m going to say to you now, please make sure – and I hope you’re tape recording this – but please make sure you’re quoting me accurately. Don’t even for the basis of shortening something make me say something I haven’t said,” orders celebrated journalist Robert Fisk.

I reply, “You won’t be misquoted, and if you want I’ll -”

“Because the biggest problem I have in journalism is being quoted or misquoted and then being asked to defend something I haven’t said.”

I assuage him, “I’ve taped every single word, and I’ve got what you’ve said down, and so far no interview has -”

“And when you’re putting it together, because you’re not going to use it all, try to make sure my counteracting points are there. So, if I call Ahmedinjad a “crackpot” keep it in, but make sure I’m also talking about Iran in general. Where I’m criticizing the Israelis, make sure I also criticize the Arabs.”

Throughout the interview I kept thinking the world’s most decorated foreign correspondent would have an equally brilliant career as a headmaster or drill sergeant.

It took nearly a week of phone tag to secure interview time with Robert Fisk, the Middle East correspondent for The Independent who has lived in the region for nearly three decades. Each time I called him, he seemed to give me multiple numbers, one land line in Ireland and another cell line in Lebanon, and ever changing appointments due to his frenetic travel schedule. He finally agreed to a fifteen-minute interview that quickly ballooned into a lengthy, hour plus conversation and an enlightening and entertaining Middle East history lesson by the celebrated reporter.

Allow me to state that rumors of Fisk’s passionate, opinionated garrulousness are indeed fact. Some detractors claim his personality infects his writing with a biased bombastic flair reflecting arrogance, while his supporters, who are many, highlight his impassioned voice as authentic and refreshing. The seasoned veteran couldn’t resist giving this ingénue unsolicited pointers and tips, both concerning journalism and Middle Eastern history.

This is an exclusive and candid conversation with one of the few journalistic authorities on the Middle East.

ALI: A recent British report said Gaza is in its worst condition since the last 30 years. Just last week, a seminary was targeted and several civilians were killed. Americans see this and think “Arabs vs. Jews, they’re just always killing each other.” What’s the ground scene reality regarding the current volatility? Is one side to be blamed more than the other for the recent conflagration?

FISK: Oh, God! Sounds like a CNN question! You know, this is about history, this is about the way our societies develop and what we’re told and what we’re not told. You’ve got the same situation in The West Bank, Gaza, Israel or “Palestine” as you had after the end of the First World War. Two groups of people want to live on the same piece of real estate and they have conflicting claims,

• one of which is based largely on deed which goes right back to the Ottoman period and the British period.
  
• And the case of settlements seems to be based on the idea of what God has promised.
  

And those two things don’t work out. You can’t say on the one hand, well, I have got the deeds to the land, but no God’s actually given it to me. That’s the end of conversation, isn’t it? From there on, you can spin out to all sorts of historical allegories, and ways of reporting, and ways of reporting history, and it doesn’t go anywhere. Each time we’re told we have to start again, we have to start the clock from now and we have to forget the past. You can’t forget the past anymore than you can in Iraq or you can in Europe or America.

The Second World War is and was constantly being drudged up by Blair and Bush to rationalize the invasion of Iraq. Well, you can’t constantly go back to WW2 and call Saddam the Hitler of Baghdad, and then on the other hand say we aren’t going to go back to history to other parts of the Middle East, because that’s inconvenient, so we’re just going to start from here. We always hear people say, “Let’s move forward.” (Laughs.) The psychobabble language of marriage guidance counsellors, you know, only look to the future let’s not look at the past even though so much sorrow has happened. I’m afraid you have to.

The Middle East is a land of great injustice. The Israelis can claim, or wish to at least, that Lord Balfour’s Declaration of 1917 promised Britain support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which didn’t just mean the left hand bit that became Israel. Many Israelis now and would be Israelis they could claim that Palestine meant everything up to the Jordan River. It was Chaim Weizmann’s hope that Jewish settlements would be allowed East of the Jordan River after the Cairo conference held in 1921. You have two groups of people who were made conflicting promises by the British. One for Arab independence and promises that Jewish immigration would not in any way make the indigenous Arabs dispossessed or suffer in any way. And the other which was a promise by Britain for support of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Those things are as impossible to integrate then as they are today.

We keep going around the Middle East and setting up our various dictators, whether they be the Kings of Arabia, or whether they be King Farooq in Egypt, or King Idris in Libya. Then, when people didn’t want the various kings, we brought in the various generals. General Sadat and Colonel Kaddafi. King Abdullah was a soldier, King Hussein was a solider. So, we get surprised when people say, “Enough is enough!” But, in the end of the day, when you say, “Who is right and who is wrong?” It’s history that is wrong. It’s the mistakes we’ve made and the injustices we’ve committed in that region. You can start it off with the Ottoman Empire, you can start it off in post WW1, and you can start it off with the Americans. And as you look back in history, the papers get more thin and fragile, don’t they?

ALI: You’ve been in the Middle East for decades. You’ve seen both Republican and Democratic foreign policy –

FISK: What’s the difference? There’s no difference. Where’s the difference between Clinton and Bush? It’s like people saying Labour government is going to come in Israel and be different than Likud, and it turns out not to be different at all.

ALI: Well, Obama as you know before his run as President, was more partial towards Palestinian rights. But, last month along with Clinton, he wrote a letter strongly condemning Palestinian violence. Many wonder, if he or even Clinton wins, is there going to be any change in policy?

FISK: Here’s the thing that’s going to be different in policy regarding the Middle East in the United States whoever wins the election: it’s utterly irrelevant.

ALI: Lebanon seems to be a forgotten story. In 2006, it had a struggle with Israel which devastated a large part of that society –

FISK: Hezbollah did. I don’t know if Lebanon did at all, but Hezbollah did.

ALI: Has the Lebanese society been able to recover in the past 2 years, or has it only strengthened Hezbollah?

FISK: Well, it certainly strengthened Hezbollah, but their political performance since then has been so ambiguous in that whatever it gained militarily in terms of prestige it has substantially lost politically inside Lebanon itself. Look, the only good news in Lebanon is that civil war hasn’t restarted. Lot of people thought it would, and I thought it would, but it hasn’t. This could mean that they have realized the folly of war: that you don’t win. It’s all about death; it’s not about victory. It also means that an awful lot Lebanese who were sent away as children to be educated during the civil war – you know to Paris, London, Geneva, and Boston wherever – have returned to Lebanon and said, “I don’t want this sectarian nonsense, and I want to live in an ordinary country without any more war.” To that extent, Lebanon – the fact it has not disintegrated like Gaza or Afghanistan or Iraq despite the wish of the Americans and Iranians to use it as battleground - which was what 2006 was about – is quite a tribute to Lebanon and the Lebanese. Whether they appreciate their good fortune is quite a different matter.

ALI: You have experience in Kosovo and Serbia, and you know Kosovo declared independence and sovereignty from Serbia on Feb 17. Do you believe there is complicity of Western agents in its prolonged suffering? Is this a new chapter signalling hope? And could it have come earlier?

FISK: I have a book coming out in two and a half years time which is going to involve quite a lot of things about Kosovo and Bosnia and particularly Islam. It’s going to be called “Night of Power” which you don’t need me to explain. They are very different places, of course. The Serb actions in Bosnia were not driven by the same political motives as the Serb actions in Kosovo, which Serbs believe is part of Serbia, and you can argue that until the cows home. I don’t know about “Agents” being complicit in anything. On one hand I never totally dismiss the “plot” unquote because we know, for example, the CIA and the British were involved in overthrowing Mossadegh [Democratically elected leader of Iran overthrown by the CIA] and bringing in the Shah in 50’s Iran. That’s all true. But the idea you can manipulate states into independence is probably pie in the sky.

The treatment of the Kosovars was such that Europe was bound to extend its support for independence in one form or the other. Now, we know in the Balkans, as always, regional European powers have their fingers in it. Just as the Germans supported the Croation independence, and we know why historically. We know historically many Albanians entered Kosovo during and before the Tito Period and changed its ethnic makeup. But, then again, how far do you go back in history when it was the other way around?

I think this is really an Ottoman story and the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, which began the First World War. When the Ottoman Empire began to fray inside Europe, and I’m talking about Bulgaria as well as Serbia, it didn’t do so in a neat way. It did so with massacres and horrific killings, which if you read the contemporary accounts seems to be what we were writing about Bosnia in the 1990’s. There was a considerable historical heritage left over, unfortunately blood that most dealt with in an imperfect and unjust way. I think that Kosovo contains the seeds of further hostilities because of course I can’t imagine any Serbian leader denouncing Serbia’s right to regard Kosovo as part of the historic homeland of Serbia. And I don’t think Bosnia has been solved for that matter. It’s just an independent state in one federal illusion, isn’t it? Everyone is illusory in the Ottoman empire of what it was. You have to go back to the Ottomans to work all this out.

There’s this very interesting book that came out called Jerusalem 1912 and it argues quite persuasively that fundamental issues of land ownership and Jewish immigration became major issues before the First World War, before the British and Turks were at war, before the Ottoman Empire disintegrated. And I think you have to see the problems in the Balkans, although they don’t involve Arabs or Jews, in a similar light. We are constantly trying to cope with what our fathers or our grandfathers did. I wrote the book Great War of Civilization, and my father was a solider in the First World War which produced the current Middle East – not that he had much to do with that – but he fought in what he believed was the Great War for Civilization.

One of the problems that current leadership has is that in the past they had time to reflect and discuss what they were going to do and how best to deal with a particular situation. Their decisions might have been grotesquely unjust or wrong, but at least they took them based on considered reflections, whether they be in London clubs or Downing Street or while reading Shelley in bed, but at least they had an opportunity to reflect on what they were doing. Today, we live by Press conferences, TV prime time, News at 10, CBS news, ABC, CNN exclusives whatever it might be. We get pumped up by Presidential elections, Primary elections, so policies are made on the move – in the backs of cars, on mobile phones, over drinks before a hurried dinner when you have another press conference afterwards. This is why you have this cult of – and I don’t like this phrase – “spin doctors,” a man who comes up with an easy phrase. So, instead of having reflective decision making which takes into consideration what will happen tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and the year after next, the decision making is taken on the basis on how to respond to some criticism one minute ago based on a Press conference. For this reason, you don’t have any long term planning.

That’s why we didn’t have any plan for post war Iraq, because we were too busy going on CNN announcing victory, so we hadn’t thought about that. There is an excellent academic pamphlet by Corelli Barnett, who is a prominent British historian, which goes step by step from archive documents in the British Public Record Office and National Archives from the Cabinet papers of 1941. And Churchill in 1941, when Britain still expected invasion by Nazi Germany, and before Hitler invaded Russia, before America was in the war after two long and profitable years of neutrality, Churchill appointed a Cabinet committee in London under Nazi bombardment to plan the post War government of Occupied Germany. Now, there’s forward thinking!

There’s a sign of how governments used to behave. Four years before the end of the War, when it looked as if the Germans were going to win, Churchill and the British, alone without any American involvement in the War, he was planning post War Germany. And as British troops moved under fire into the German city of Cologne in 1945, British Civil Servants in flak jackets went with them to take over the Town Hall, because they wanted civil administration to resume immediately. To get the fuel running, get rationing, get the people fed. It worked, and people didn’t die. I mean the Germans were poor and hungry, but they didn’t die. There’s a classic example of how before the age of instant television, news press conferences, spin doctors, etc., people planned for the future and generally it tended to work; by and large, it was successful. That was four years before the end of WW2. Four days before the Americans occupied the centre of Baghdad, they didn’t have a coherent plan. They had an odd committee set up in the State Department, but no one listened to it and it had 20 people. So, you’re carried along on this instant decision making: “So, whaddya’ gonna’ do, Mr. Bush? How do you respond to this?” And Bush has had 5 minutes before hand to bone up on what he is going to say.

We have a program in Britain called Desert Island Discs on the BBC, where basically you are allowed to choose 8 records that you play on a desert island if you were marooned. One of my records I chose was Winston Churchill’s speech to the British on June 18, 1940 when Dunkirk was finished, and the British were alone in the War against Nazi Europe. And I played it, because Bush and Blair keep claiming they are Churchill, but here was the real thing. And Churchill’s voice immensely tired and maybe he had a few glasses before he spoke, and you have this extraordinary feeling of power and a man who is using his knowledge of history and imbuing it into other people. What knowledge of history does Bush have? He confused Cambodia with Vietnam. He talks about Vietnam but he managed to avoid going there, as we know Cheney did.

You know another problem we have at the moment is that I don’t think there’s a single senior Western statesmen, which might change if McCain becomes President, who has ever been in a war. All of the Middle Eastern leaders have been in wars, I promise you. But none of the Western leaders have been in war. You see, their knowledge of wars, The Bushes and the Blairs, are from TV, Hollywood Movies. When Churchill committed people to war, he had been in the trenches in WW1. Theodore Roosevelt had direct experience. Eisenhower certainly did, I mean he was Supreme Allied Commander of WW2. So, you had in the post war years, you had Western leadership that knew what war was about: it was about death and screaming and loss and sorrow. Now, for people like Blair whose shadow lingers over the dull and boring Gordon Brown in London, war was a policy option: something you did if you couldn’t get in with the United Nations. “Do we need a second revolution or not?” That wasn’t the way people used to go to war. (Laughs.)

One of the things that is lacking today is common sense. Anybody with common sense, anybody who sat down would’ve said, “Don’t – Attack – Iraq.” Bush actually did start talking about democracy in Iraq before he invaded, despite what the lefty commentators say, he didmber I wrote a piece in November 2002 asking, “He wants a democracy in the Middle En’t say we want democracy but he said, “We want democracy in the Middle East.” I remeast, and he wants to start in Iraq?!?” which is not common sense. I think a lot of the problems we have in the moment is a failure to have a long-term view of anything.

Even if you take the Israeli government who says, “We are going to root out the evil weed of terror, terror, terror,” I mean they’ve been saying that since 1948. How many air raids have there been over Lebanon since 1948? Thousands and thousands and thousands. And they’ve achieved nothing, because still we’re told we have to root out the evil weed of terror. Because it gets repeated ad nauseam on television it has become normal. Nobody says, “Hang on a minute, there’s a problem here. If Israel’s still at war 60 years after it came in existence, there is a problem there.”

ALI: You have this quote, “There’s this misconception that journalists can be objective.” You also say, “What journalism is really about –

FISK: I think what I said is “impartial.” We should be partial on the side of justice. One of the problems we have in the Middle East in the moment, partly because of the pressure put on journalists particularly in the United States by lobby groups. I’m including the Israeli Lobby, and there is an Arab Lobby, as we know. Partly because of this awful trend of American journalism where you have to give 50% of your time to each side, you end up producing a sort of matrix, a mathematical formula which is bland, lacking in any kind of passion or realism, and is a bit like reading a mathematics problem. Much of the Middle East is reported like a football match: this side did this, they kicked a goal, they replied back, the ball went through the goal post, etc. Giving equal space in your report to two antagonists is ridiculous! I mean if you were reporting the slave trade in the 18th century you wouldn’t give equal time to the slave ship captain, you’d give time to the slaves. If you were present at the liberation of a Nazi extermination camp, you don’t give equal time to SS spokesman, you go and talk to the survivors and talk about the victims.

If you were present as I was in 2001 in West Jerusalem when an Israeli pizzeria was blown up and most of the victims were school children. I was just down the street. I reported about the Israeli woman who had a chair leg through her, and an Israeli child who had his eyes blown out. I said in my piece, “What did this child ever do to the Palestinians?” And do you think I gave equal time to the Islamic Jihad spokesman? No, I did not. Nor when I was in Sabra Shatilla [Massacre of Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon overseen by Ariel Sharon] did I give time to Israeli spokesman? If we walk as ordinary human beings out of our house and we see an atrocity, we are angry. Well, we journalists should be angry too if we feel that way about it. Not say, “Well, on the other hand, we just balance this by X,Y,Z.”

ALI: Can’t someone say that we readily dismiss FOX News as being biased and right wing, then can’t we just as readily dismiss you since you’re not an objective, unbiased voyeur?

FISK: The thing about FOX news is that they have a predetermined version. They aren’t interested in justice; they are interested in the “right,” aren’t they? They’re interested in the right wing of the Republican side, unless a Democrat happens to be right wing enough for them. They have a political slant. I’m not left wing. I’ve never voted in an election in my life. If I’m in the Israeli part of Jerusalem, I write with great passion and you can look up the story in my book The Great War for Civilization about the bombing of the Israeli pizzeria. I was in Bosnia and wrote passionately against the murderous Serbs, I mean those Serbs who were murdering. But if you report on Serbia during the NATO bombing I report with great feeling about the Serb civilians who were done to death by NATO and knowingly done so. NATO knew they were killing civilians in Serbia during the Kosovo war. And I also reported what was being done to Kosovo Albanians. That’s not what FOX News does. FOX News has a certain agenda.

ALI: Many of your critics, specifically some Zionist critics, say that you’ve lived in the Middle East for so long that you’ve become partial and succumbed to “their” narrative.

FISK: Same old, tiresome, boring old thing, you know. This always comes up. If you arrive at a place, and you don’t write satisfactory one week after arriving, they say you can’t see the woods for the trees. And if you do understand enough after two weeks, they say you’ve gone native. I haven’t risked my life in the most dangerous parts of the world to become a partial reporter politically. I’d be out of my mind if I did that. By the way, you keep talking about my critics and what the Zionists say. I don’t read blogs, because I don’t use the Internet because I think it’s crap. But I know there are two or three writers in the UK and I know there are three or four in America who regularly attack me, but that’s about it. I mean if you see my mailbag which comes in at 250 letters a week, maybe two or three are very critical, and the rest are either nice or helping or suggesting stories. What I’m saying is that one of the problems I have is the people will exaggerate the numbers and say, “Well, your critics say…” which makes it seem there is an army out there of 600 people constantly writing articles and commentary. And, it’s not true. There aren’t. I come to the States that averages every three and half weeks for lectures, and I don’t come across these people. The last one who was really obnoxious was in Texas for an interview, and the second cameraman came over to me after the program and said he wanted to hit me. (Laughs.) I said turn back the cameras, and we’ll do this live, but be careful when you do. Most people don’t care a damn about the Middle East, I’m sorry to say.

ALI: In America or the world?

FISK: Pretty much everywhere, particularly in America I’m sorry to say. And also in Europe, I mean how much of my daily paper is on the Middle East? And this idea that there is an army of critics or an army of supporters is simply untrue. By and large, people read you and they move on to read something else. What percentage of people read The Independent either online or on paper? I have no idea. I probably get more mail from America than I do from Britain, which is interesting. I’m read in the Arab world as well as in Israel. I think I’ve had two anonymous phone calls in my life in 32 years both from Turkey objecting to what I’ve written about the Armenian genocide. One of them was objecting to criticism of the Turkish Army, and one of them was objecting to my coverage of the Armenian Genocide, which obviously occurred a few years before I was born to put it mildly.

There are campaigns occasionally for accuracy, some outfit that operates somewhere in Boston, and you get city postcards from people writing to the editors, “I will never buy you magazine again” signed so and so from Houston, Texas. Firstly, we are not a magazine. Secondly, alas, we do not circulate in Houston, Texas, so this person hasn’t been buying it anywhere, but he’s just been encouraged to write this silly postcard which goes in the bin. But when you have a campaign organized by a lobby group, you tend to take it seriously in America, we don’t. We put it in the rubbish bin. We are interested in individual, serious letters by people. So am I. I encourage them in the paper. If the letters, especially if they are critical or have a certain mischief about them, I insist we run them, and I think it’s good. I think it makes people think and stirs up their idea of questioning about what’s going on in the Middle East.

The honest truth is I don’t use the internet, so I don’t see all the blogs or Googles or whatever they are. I can tell by, obviously, traveling and people coming up to me in airplanes, but I don’t pay any attention to it. I’m a journalist and a reporter and one of the great advantages I have on the paper is that my editor likes me to write opinion columns and also wants me to be a street reporter. So, when there’s a bombing explosion in Beirut or a war in Iraq, I’m there. Which is in a unique position to be in, because most reporters might be on a story but they don’t have an opinion column. And most of the people who write columns don’t go out on the beat.

ALI: You call them “hotel journalists,” correct?

FISK: No, that’s not true. What I said was that journalists, who worked in Baghdad and who, for perfectly good reasons, were unable to leave their hotels, i.e. security concerns, insurance companies hired by the papers to insure their lives, all their special security detail like the ex-military people who guard them. They find themselves effectively using their mobile phone from their hotel room, a guarded hotel, right? The problem is they don’t tell their readers, their listeners, their viewers that they’re reporting from the hotel. They give the impression when they give a “Baghdad Dateline” that they’re driving around the streets. You find articles written by someone who is sitting in an office with sandbags around the walls and aren’t let out. The much more serious side is that readers are entitled to believe, if they see it, “Dateline: Badghad” or Basra or whatever – that the reporter has movement. That he can go around and check out stories. But in fact if you read it, it’s just a police source that says, “American military says…American government says” and end of story. And it becomes echo chamber for what anyone in the Green Zone says. I mean I can live in the West of Ireland with a mobile phone and ring the Green Zone and produce the same report. (Laughs.)

ALI: They’re touted as experts in the American media.

FISK: I don’t know. Look, I have American colleagues, one of them in the New York Times, who goes out and gets good stories. So, I’m not pasting my criticism on all journalists. There’s lots of people trying to do what I’m trying to do. But, I do object to reporters who do not leave their hotels, but do not tell their readers that they do not leave their hotels. That’s what I call “hotel journalism.” I’m not talking about any reporter on the beat anywhere as being a hotel journalist.

What’s happening now as stories get more dangerous in the Middle East – and The Middle East is getting more lethal for reporting – as stories get more dangerous, more and more the Western correspondents are sending the local people out to do the story. In other words, Iraqis are on the streets in Baghdad reporting back to the New York Times reporter what they see. I noticed last year you will remember there was an Al Qaeda type organization that started an uprising in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli and took over apartment blocks. And I jumped in a car, and they had taken over an apartment block in Tripoli and were shooting at the Army, and I raced up to Tripoli. I know Lebanon very well, I mean I’ve been living there for almost 32 years. And I got into center Tripoli, which is very Sunni Muslim city, very pro Saddam I might add with [his] pictures outside the window. And there were bullets whizzing around the streets, and there were dead bodies, the armies were about to storm inside this building.

By pure good luck or bad luck, depending on your point of view, I knew the Lebanese Colonel who was going to take the army unit into this apartment block and storm into it and take it back. I’d been to his wedding, actually, which means I’m his friend. (Laughs.) “Robert, do you want to come with us?” I didn’t use a flak jacket because it is too bloody hot. So, I suddenly found the ridiculous Robert Fisk storming into this building with these soldiers, and I never carry a weapon or flak jacket or anything, and seeing the most incredible things.

Afterwards, I was out there in the street with all these dead bodies on the street. What astounded me was that I was the only Western reporter there. Most of the other reporters were either from Lebanese newspapers or Lebanese working for Western news organizations. I was the only blue eyed, Anglo Saxon guy there. My Western colleagues were there and they were in the hotel, and I’m not criticizing them. What was interesting is that on the very first, critical day of the Al Qaeda take over, I looked around the street and I didn’t see another Westerner. There were lots of Lebanese soldiers, policeman, people standing by, other journalists, camera crew, they were all Lebanese. Now, twenty years ago that wouldn’t be the case.

ALI: You just gave a really good microcosm example of how you’re on “the scene.” You’re one of the very few people who is “lucky” – well, I don’t think that is the proper word, I don’t even what the proper word is – to meet Osama Bin Laden and have an interview with him.

FISK: It’s definitely not lucky. (Laughs.) No, it’s not. I’ll tell you this guy will follow me for the rest of my life. It’s more and more unlucky I’ll let you know.

ALI: You interviewed him three times in total, and he made some very interesting comments about you. I don’t know how you feel about that, but he was quite reverential. In America, we see Osama as the horned devil himself, and in certain parts of the Muslim world –

FISK: He sees Mr. Bush pretty much the same way, of course.

ALI: Well, certain parts see him as a halo-wearing messiah. Steve Coll has a new book out on Bin Laden, and in my interview with him he told me one of the main reasons for his charismatic leadership is his ability to be multicultural, to understand the ability to look beyond ethnicity and race in his global jihad.

FISK: No, that’s not – that’s a very trendy explanation. It’s very simple why Bin Laden is popular in the Arab world; it’s because he says things that local presidents and kings won’t say.

ALI: What does he say?

FISK: He speaks about the injustice to Muslim people in a way that Mubarak or King Abdullah would never say. Because of course they’re basically run by us, aren’t they? He presents what millions of Arabs think. I’m not implying a million of Egyptians and Gulfies want to actually fly airplanes into tall buildings – they don’t. But when he describes the collapse of the Caliphate, which was the Ottoman Empire, when he talks about the immorality of the Gulf princes and kings, when he talks of the political or military or psychological occupation of the Muslim world by the West, he’s saying things which millions and millions of Muslims agree with. But they don’t hear their own leadership: the Khaddafis, the Mubaraks, or the King Abdullahs, or the Assads saying.

This doesn’t mean Bin Laden is particularly intuitively brilliant. I mean Ahmadinejad says a lot of things which are absolutely bullshit, but they probably catch somebody’s eye. I mean Ahmadinejad is outrageous, I mean he’s a crackpot. When he starts questioning the Jewish Holocaust, it’s similar to the Turks questioning the Armenian Holocaust, or the Israelis saying that they never drove the Palestinians out of Palestine, they left on their own accord because they were going to wait until the Jews were driven to the sea and they obeyed all the radio instructions. You know the story.

But, you know, Bin Laden has a voice, because the leadership of the Arab world doesn’t have a voice. Or if it does, it’s a weak one supporting the United States in general. I mean, the Mubaraks and the Abdullahs are allowed to say, “ If the war continues in Gaza, there will be an explosion in the Middle East.” That’s all right, that’s part of the course. They said it 70 times and it doesn’t even get reported very often. But the moment they start to talks seriously about the fact that people feel they are under the thumb of theWest, which they do, then they are in trouble. I mean the fact we only express our criticism of Mubarak is when the police lock up the wrong person who has a PhD from Boston or Harvard or whatever.

By and large, you see there is no Arab representative. Nor has there been for decades. It’s very interesting after the First World War, the Egyptians kept wanting democracy, and they kept saying they wanted the King out. So, the British locked them up. And the same thing happened in Iraq in the 1920’s, you the know the British arrived after they invaded in 1917 and the Iraqis said, “You encouraged us to want independence, and when we say we want independence, you put us in prison!” Which is true of course.

Naturally, if you go back to the 20’s and 30’s, where I think a lot of the history also beings, anyone who wanted a real freedom was imprisoned. So, the only way the Arabs learned you can have a change was through a revolution. Which meant no democracy of course. Meant you did everything in secret, whether you did it in office or clubs or a basement of a mosque is irrelevant. So, the failure of the Arab world to have a democracy is partially our fault.

You have to remember before the First World War, Egyptian academics and thinkers and philosophers were returning from France with the most extraordinary sort of Republican – which I’m using in the French Republic sense – views of liberation, freedom and equality. This is the decade where women didn’t want to wear the scarf in Cairo and other cities in Egypt. Where they had willingly embraced the West. You have to go back to the Ottoman Empire, and the biggest, industrial construction in the world was the Suez Canal. It was built by the French but under the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans imported state of the art steam locomotives from Switzerland to Lebanon. In Constantinople, the pashas were learning to paint and play the piano – they wanted to be like us. So we destroyed them. You see? We like it the way it is now. We don’t have to have too many occupation armies, but they all do what they’re told, and if they don’t, then we bomb them.

ALI: If Bin Laden’s grievances against the U.S. and the West are removed, and maybe you can tell us his major grievances since you’ve met him, then -

FISK: The world doesn’t work like this. Bin Laden justifies his actions on certain grounds. Whether it be the corruption of the Saudi Royal Family, the “Crusaders” to use his phrase, he says “Western forces” in the Muslim World. And remember, one of his achievements is that he’s brought Western forces into two more Muslim countries that they weren’t in before – Afghanistan and Iraq. And I used the word “achievement” ironically when I said that.

His raison d’etre will change, like we all do. To suggest that Bin Laden is out there as a negotiable figure is ridiculous. He doesn’t want to negotiate. One of the main problems with Al Qaeda is that there is no negotiation. We still haven’t learned that Bin Laden isn’t important anymore. He’s created Al Qaeda. That’s it. It’s over. It doesn’t matter if he dies of kidney failure, or whether he’s bombed or dies of old age or gets bored or gets assassinated or anything else, it’s over. Al Qaeda exists. And unless we deal with the injustice in the Middle East, there will always be an Al Qaeda. It might not be called Al Qaeda, it could be called “Al Qaeda Al Ummah,” “Al Qaeda Saudia,” “Al Qaeda in Iraq.” The very word is intrinsically rather boring, its foundation doesn’t set me off on a romantic thought. But, I always use the phrase “Al Qaeda-like”, which is inspirational but not card membership type connections.

Still we think, “If we capture Bin Laden and Mullah Omar, then we’ll be ok.” And it’s not true. There was a very fine French historian of the First World War, and he did a very good interview in Le Pointe some months ago, and he said you know we haven’t realized the world has changed militarily. But in the past, after the first and second World Wars, we thought we could have foreign adventures and be free. We could go to Vietnam. No North Vietnamese ever blew themselves up in front of the White House. We went and fought in Korea, but no North Korean soldier came and blew himself up in the London Underground. But today we can’t do this anymore, if we send our soldiers into Iraq, we are not saving Gloucester or Denver. That’s not going to change. We’re not going to back to nice, friendly left wing nationalists who wouldn’t dream of setting off bombs in our cities anymore. That’s gone.

Whether you regard this as increasing immorality of our opponents that is entirely up to you. But factually, we’re not safe at home anymore.

ALI: So, this is the future? We have to face the future and this is how it’s going to be?

FISK: Well, you’ve got to think of the years to come, not just about the next press conference. We’re going back to the same point I made to you earlier.

ALI: I had an interview with Seymour Hersh and asked him about Iran’s activity in the Middle East. He said Iran is doing what it’s always been doing in supporting the Shias. That’s what it’s doing in Lebanon and in Iraq. Now, you mention Ahmadinejad as being a “Crackpot” and –

FISK: I think he’s a crackpot, yeah.

ALI: People say Iran has its fingers in the cookie jar in helping Hezbollah and helping the Iraqi insurgents. Is Iran completely innocent? Should it be attacked? And what would –

FISK: You’re doing what CNN and FOX do. You’re producing a sustained government narrative and then asking a question about it. Yes, they do support Hezbollah financially, militarily, and in training, we know that. Do they support the Iraqi insurgency? Morally perhaps. I mean, mentally they might, but they don’t need to teach the insurgents how to blow up vehicles. I mean Iraqi insurgents, many of them in the Army, fought Iranians for 8 years. They know how to blow up vehicles and put bombs together. They don’t need help from the Iranians. So, from the start you have to disentangle this conventional wisdom on how Iran is this big, dark nation that is manipulating the Shias through out the Middle East. I don’t think the Shias of Iraq need military help from Iran. I don’t think they need money actually. And besides when you have a situation when most of the Iraqi government is beholden to Iran, what the hell are you worried about the insurgents for? When Ahmedinejad took the car from the airport like any normal human being, instead of being flown in armored helicopter, which was quite impressive, the American press didn’t make a lot of it, but it’s there.

You have to go back again. When the Shah was in power, the West wanted Iran to be nuclear power. He was our policeman in the Gulf, wasn’t he? The Shah went to New York and gave an interview saying he wanted Iran to have nuclear weapons, because after all Russia and America had them. And there wasn’t a complaint from the White House. In fact, shortly after he met Carter in the White House. And we in Europe, in particular, climbed over each other’s shoulders to supply the nuclear hardware to produce nuclear power stations.

When Khomeini came to power and the Islamic Revolution, before the Iran-Iraq War, and I actually was present as he said this in Tehran. He said nuclear weapons are gifts of the devil and we will close them down. And all nuclear instillations, and they weren’t nuclear weapon instillations, they were just nuclear instillations for power generation, were closed down under Khomeini’s orders. At the height of the Iran-Iraq War in 1986, when Saddam was supported by Britain and the United States, and was using gas, a weapons of mass destruction, against the Iranians, the Iranian High Command came to the conclusion that he was using these weapons, then Khomeini reluctantly reopened the nuclear establishment in Iran as a direct result of our friend Saddam using gas and chemicals. Which in some cases were supplied by companies on the East Coast of the United States. That’s what put the Iranians in the nuclear game.

Now, when you see it from this historical perspective, they’re getting a bit of the raw deal, aren’t they? All the mullahs want their hands on weapons (Laughs.) That wasn’t the case originally. I don’t see any particular reason why the Iranians want to make nuclear weapons at the moment. Because if they fire a weapon at Tel Aviv, they know Tehran will be destroyed. On the other hand, if you look at North Korea, quite clearly you will not be invaded if you have a nuclear weapon. Then again, you have to stand back and look at the long term and ask, are we, or our children or our grandchildren, our future generations always going to around saying, “Well, he can have nuclear weapons, because he is nice and is on our side on the War on Terror and his name is Musharaff. And they can’t have nuclear weapons because they have turbans on.”

I mean are we going to do this A-B-C joke every year deciding who may or may not have these things. If we deal with a world that deals about justice, and this can apply to Eastern Europe, the Far East, Latin America, or the Middle East, the whole institute of worrying about nuclear weapons begins to diminish. After the rising of 1798 in Ireland, where I am now, every Irishman who was found even to have a pitchfork that could be used as a weapon was hanged. But, in pubs you can see them on the walls. Because it’s become irrelevant. There’s this peace here. If you go to England, you can find swords from the English Civil War. Well, if in the aftermath of that war and we’re talking about the 17th century, if you had been found with that sword, you would’ve been executed. But now it’s in a pub on the wall of a bar.

You know, I’m not trying to be naïve when I say this, but with the whole issue of nuclear weapons, once the purpose of the weapon has disappeared, the weapon is pointless. If Iran didn’t feel itself surrounded by the Americans, which it is because the Americans are in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Gulf, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, I mean I don’t think they’d worry so much about defending Iran. Although, of course, you realize getting rid of the Taliban and Saddam, both enemies of Iran, means Iran basically won the American war in Iraq. You’ve got to start your questions not with a narrative: “Are they supporting the Iraqi insurgency?” Probably not. “Are they supporting Hezbollah?” Definitely. But, then again who is supporting the Israelis? The Americans.

There’s no doubt that the missile which the Hezbollah fired at that Israeli gunboat in the 2006 war, which almost sank it by the way, was from Iran. But don’t tell me that the bombs dropped on Hezbollah weren’t from the United States, they were of course. With all these questions you’re asking me, and I’m not trying to be critical of you, you need to go three steps back where you start asking the questions.

As the interview ends, Fisk complains, “And there’s nothing worse than the immortal phrase, ‘I never said that.’ Because people say, ‘Ah, that’s what he says now.’ And you’ll be surprised at the number of people, who might be quite sympathetic to what you’re saying, who manage to blunder into one single quote which they [an interviewer] slightly touch up or forget something quite innocently, and I am fighting off the problems that creates for the next 6 months long after you’ve forgotten ever talking to me. So, please, please be careful and make sure you’re very accurate in what I say, and it’s balanced out.”

“I’ll keep it very fair. I’ll quote you, and I won’t delete a word,” I promise.

“Fine. That’s all I need to hear.”

And with that, the class ends and the student finally exhales.

Wajahat Ali is Pakistani Muslim American who is neither a terrorist nor a saint. He is a playwright, essayist, humorist, and Attorney at Law, whose work, "The Domestic Crusaders," (www.domesticcrusaders.com) is the first major play about Muslim Americans living in a post 9-11 America. His blog is at http://goatmilk.wordpress.com/. He can be reached at wajahatmali@gmail.com

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