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.

Right-wing revolt threatens Bolivia

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Right-wing revolt threatens Bolivia "The imperialist project is to carve up Bolivia and carve up South America" by Federico Fuentes

Global Research, April 28, 2008

Green Left Weekly

"Bolivia is on the verge of exploding", Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez warned on April 21.

Speaking on the eve of an extraordinary summit of the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas (ALBA — the alliance made of Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Dominica) that was partly called to discuss the situation in Bolivia, Chavez stated the landlocked Andean country was "once again under fire — for daring to dream of retaking the path of dignity, liberty and real independence".

"The empire wants to put a brake on the integration of South America", Chavez argued, and has chosen Bolivia as its immediate target. "Today the cause of Bolivia is the cause of the dignified people of Latin America who fight for unity and liberty." Chavez said that, "We are and will continue to be with Bolivia and we extend our hand and our heart" to the Bolivian people.

Illegal referendum

At the heart of the latest round of tensions in Bolivia are the plans by the elite in the eastern department of Santa Cruz (a stronghold of Bolivia's oligarchy) to push ahead with a referendum on "autonomy" scheduled for May 4.

Despite the referendum being declared illegal by the national electoral court, the Santa Cruz electoral court has stated it will press ahead with the vote, which many fear is aimed at fracturing the country.

The right-wing campaign of destabilisation against the indigenous-led government of President Evo Morales — which the referendum is one component of — has intensified in the last few weeks.

"Leaving clear the success of the bunkering-down by the business sectors in Santa Cruz", wrote Pablo Stefanoni on April 19 in the Argentine daily Clarin, "Morales yesterday had to pull out his vice minister for land, Alejandro Almaraz, from the Bolivian Chaco". "Days before, the functionary tried without luck to enter the hacienda of the US citizen Ronald Larsen in order to verify compliance of his land in regards to its economic and social function, but was received with stones and armed picket lines, and had to take refuge in military quarters."

Stefanoni also reported that the president of the Chamber of Exporters of the East, Ramiro Monje, threatened that "after May 4, another economic model will begin to function".

Sectors of large agribusiness have been on a war footing against the government following recent moves to restrict exports of certain food products — in order to tackle food shortages provoked by agribusiness.

While loosening some of the restrictions, Morales threatened to nationalise companies that "are provoking a bosses lockout" by enforcing a holiday on May 4.

Defending unity

An April 24 ABI news service article reported that the commander of the Bolivian Naval Force, Vice Admiral Jose Luis Cavas Villegas, said that "we are the people in arms, in order to defend the internal security of our population, the Armed Forces are with the people … behind the [national flag], we will defend unity all our lives".

Through the build-up of tensions, the position of the government, the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS — Morales's party) and the social movements aligned with the government has oscillated between threatening to stop the referendum going ahead to dismissing it as simply an opinion poll.

For now, it seems rallies will be held on May 4 in favour of "national unity" in all capital cities — except in Santa Cruz, in order to avoid confrontations. Nevertheless, the opposition have established "civil guards" to defend the polling booths in the department, just in case.

Since Morales inauguration in January 2006, the economic and political elites whose power has been threatened by the rise of Bolivia's first indigenous government — despite the impoverished indigenous people making up around two thirds of the population — have entrenched themselves in the east of Bolivia.

'Democratic and cultural revolution'

As the Morales government has continued to take steps forward in his self-proclaimed "democratic and cultural revolution" — through the nationalisation of gas, the convocation of a constituent assembly to "re-found" Bolivia and the implementation of important social programs aimed at tackling poverty and centuries of oppression — the elite have stepped up their campaign of destablisation.

In particular, the government's land reform, which has redistributed hundreds of thousands of hectares of land owned by the state or large landowners to poor campesinos (peasants), has aroused opposition. Key leaders of the push for "autonomy" in Santa Cruz are also large landowners.

Behind the calls for autonomy are economic interests hoping to give greater power to the opposition-controlled department governments on questions of control over natural resources and productive land, the majority of which is located in the east.

Bolivia sits on top of the second largest gas reserves in South America, after Venezuela.

By pushing for autonomy the elite hopes to weaken and bring down the popular Morales government. However, their campaign is also part of laying the groundwork for a plan B — the break up of Bolivia through the creation of an independent state in the east, taking with them the majority Bolivia's natural resources.

Under this banner, they have also sought, successfully, to unite large sections of the predominately white population of the east against the central government. Tapping into a long held sentiment for autonomy, and whipping up racism and fears of an "indigenous revenge", they have been able to mobilise large numbers in the east around the "autonomy" demand.

A recent poll by Equipos Mora showed that in Santa Cruz, 84% of the population say they will vote in the referendum, with 76% in favour of the autonomy statutes.

Solidarity

Pointing to the declaration of solidarity and support for the people of Bolivia, approved in the ALBA summit, Chavez stated that it expressed "the will … of millions of Bolivians, Nicaraguans, Cubans and Venezuelans."

During the summit, Chavez proposed the creation of a defence council and military force of the ALBA countries, "because our enemy is the same, the empire".

The declaration states that the nations in ALBA "reject the destabilisation plans that aim to attack the peace and unity of Bolivia". It stated ALBA nations would not recognise "any juridical figure that aims to break away from the Bolivian national state and violates the territorial integrity of Bolivia".

"The imperialist project", Morales said, "is to try and carve up Bolivia and with that carve up South America, because it has converted itself into the epicentre of the great changes that are advancing on the world scale". "I believe in the consciousness of the people and the wisdom of our social forces and of the indigenous movement, and above all of the patriots that are fighting for the dignity and sovereignty of our people."

To add your name to an international statement in solidarity with Bolivia, visit http://todosconbolivia.org. Federico Fuentes is editor of http://boliviarising.blogspot.com.

Federico Fuentes is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Federico Fuentes

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