The Making of a Mess

The Making of a Mess By Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet

by James Mann

Viking, 426 pp., $25.95

A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies

by James Bamford

Doubleday, 420 pp., $26.95

After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order

by Emmanuel Todd, translated from the French by C. Jon Delogu, with aforeword by Michael Lind

Columbia University Press, 233 pp., $29.95

Who got us into this mess anyway—our headlong plunge into preventive war against Iraq? The formal, and facile, answer is George W. Bush. But our president campaigned four years ago on a promise of humility in foreign policy and a rejection of nation-building as social work. Who persuaded him to change his mind? Mann and Bamford agree in their skepticism about the neocon fantasy that the establishment of democracy in Iraq will have a domino effect and democratize the whole Islamic world. Mann attributes the visionary delusions of the neocons to the influence of Leo Strauss (1899–1973), the German refugee philosopher who finally found a home in the University of Chicago. Strauss taught his disciples a belief in absolutes, contempt for relativism, and joy in abstract propositions. He approved of Plato's "noble lies," disliked much of modern life, and believed that a Straussian elite in government would in time overcome feelings of persecution. Strauss's teachings can be found in vulgarized form in Allan Bloom's 1987 best seller, The Closing of the American Mind, a book notable for the total exclusion of the two finest American minds, Emerson and William James.

Strauss's German windbaggery has had much the same effect on more empirical thinkers that Hegel had on William James (see James's "On Some Hegelisms"). "Strauss's influence is surprising," Mann writes, "because his voluminous, often esoteric, writings say virtually nothing specific about issues of policy, foreign or domestic." Yet students of Strauss and Bloom—William Kristol, the editor; Robert Kagan, the anti-Europe polemicist; Francis Fukuyama, the "end of history" prophet; Paul Wolf-owitz, the strategic planner—inspired perhaps by the Straussian vision of philosopher-kings, flocked to the Wash-ington of Ronald Reagan, were discontented during the presidency of the elder Bush, and came into their own under the younger Bush.

Anne Norton, a political theorist at the University of Pennsylvania, did graduate work among the Straussians at the University of Chicago. In her well-informed and witty book, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire,^[1] she lists more than thirty Straussians influential in Washing-ton as of 1999. Given the practice of ideological hiring reminiscent of the Communist Party, there must be more than double that number today scattered among government agencies, military academies, war colleges, and think tanks.

There is a puzzle about the transmutation of traditional conservatives into neoconservative philosopher-kings. "Conservatism reverenced custom and tradition," Anne Norton writes. Conservatives "distrusted abstract principles, grand theories, utopian projects." American conservatism used to be Burkean in its respect for the moeurs, for the wisdom embedded in long-established habits and institutions. But the Straussians changed all this. Appeals to history and memory came to seem antiquated. "In their place were the very appeals to universal, abstract principles, the very utopian projects that conservatism once disdained." ………………

James Bamford in A Pretext for War does not mention Leo Strauss at all. Perhaps he did not encounter Straussians in his tour of the intelligence agencies. On the other hand, he has some blunt pages describing pressures brought by the war party in Washington on CIA analysts—for example, a cynical instruction issued at a CIA staff meeting: "If Bush wants to go to war, it's your job to give him a reason to do so."

Bamford places considerably more emphasis than Mann does on the role of Israel in getting us into this mess. Mann's index has only ten references to Israel, covering eleven pages. There are twenty-one references covering thirty-seven pages in Bamford's index. Defenders of the hard Israeli line seek routinely to silence criticism of Ariel Sharon and Likud by accusing critics of anti-Semitism. But surely the American identification with Sharon's Israel is a major cause of Arab hatred of the United States, even though Arab governments have not demonstrated much sympathy themselves for the Palestinians. Bamford and Norton confront the Israel question frankly and without a trace of anti-Semitism.

Norton has a chapter, "Athens and Jerusalem," in which she discusses the post–September 11 strategic plan of Paul Wolfowitz as

built conceptually and geographically around the centrality of Israel.... This strategy could be understood as advancing American interests and security only if one saw those as identical to the interests and security of the state of Israel.

An appealing argument can be made that the United States has an obligation to defend a democratic nation against undemocratic forces. But among the Straussians, Norton writes, "Israel is often admired the more for its less than democratic qualities. Israel has the toughness that America lacks." ………………..

despite the fact that Israeli intelligence, like that of the United States, had no evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the Israeli government, along with the media, deliberately hyped the dangers of Iraq before the war. …………..

. The neocon vision is that the United States as the supreme military superpower is bound to work its will on the rest of the world. Comparisons are often made to the Roman Empire and to the nineteenth-century British and French Empires. Is the so-called American Empire a fitting successor? The neocons expect it will be, and Niall Ferguson, the economic historian, author of Colossus: The Price of America's Empire^[2] and admirer of liberal empires, summons reluctant Americans to rise to their historic responsibility. …………………….

Washington, far from ruling an empire in the old sense, has become the virtual prisoner of its client states.

This was the case notably with South Vietnam in the 1960s, and it has been the case ever since with Israel. Governments in Saigon forty years ago and in Tel Aviv today have been sure that the United States, for internal political reasons, would not apply the ultimate sanction by withdrawing support. They therefore defied American commands and demands with relative impunity.

Pakistan, Taiwan, Egypt, South Korea, and the Philippines are similarly unimpressed, evasive, or defiant. For all our vast military strength, we cannot get our Latin American neighbors, or even the tiny Caribbean islands, to do our bidding. Americans are simply not competent imperial-ists, as we are demonstrating in Iraq in 2004. The so-called American Empire is in fact a feeble imitation of the Roman, British, and French Empires.

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The neocons, with their imperial dreams, might take a look at Emmanuel Todd's After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order. It is not an anti-American rant by an aggrieved French intellectual. Todd has a formula by which, through an analysis of demographic and economic factors, he accurately predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union in his first book, La Chute Finale. This was in 1976 when the neocons' Committee on the Present Danger and the CIA's Team B were predicting that the Soviet Union would very likely win the arms race.

In his new book Todd applies a similar formula to the United States. He may underrate the resilience of the American economy, but in a not unsympathetic way he raises intelligent and disturbing questions about the American future. Regarding the Iraq War, Todd writes, "The real America is too weak to take on anyone except military midgets...such outdated remains of a bygone era as North Korea, Cuba, and Iraq." Even war against a pathetic Iraqi opponent seems to have strained our military manpower to the limit. Todd concludes, "If [the US] stubbornly decides to continue showing off its supreme power, it will only end up exposing to the world its powerlessness." ………………

None of these authors mentions an issue that erupted after their books were written. The disclosures about the torture practiced by US soldiers have intensified the awareness of the mess in Iraq and deepened perspectives on the meaning of the war. Torture escaped the attention of the allegedly intrepid American press and television. We now know that there was considerable debate behind the scenes, with memoranda flowing back and forth among the Departments of Defense and Justice and the White House about stretching the ban on torture to permit coercive techniques of interrogation.

This seemed plausible because George Bush and Tony Blair, as "sincere deceivers" in The Economist's phrase, had honestly believed the tall tales about WMDs. They must have radiated the impression that if interrogators only tried hard enough, they could extract the WMD hiding places from detainees at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. This view must have percolated down the ranks. Hence the appalling episodes that have disgraced the United States and made our talk about human rights appear arrant hypocrisy in the eyes of the world.

At first the Bush administration tried the "bad apples" defense. It was all the fault of a few vicious soldiers acting on their own. In due course a pattern of torture in widespread locations began to emerge. The revelations by the Red Cross and in US reports of systematic abuse undermined the "bad apples" defense; nor did the military act promptly to halt the abuses and punish the abusers. There is an obvious need for a full-scale congressional investigation.

There are at least three reasons that the US should not be involved with torture. The first is that the Geneva Conventions protect American GIs who fall into enemy hands. Terrorists of course do not observe the Conventions, but the revelations about Abu Ghraib fatally weaken our case against terrorism throughout the world and expose the men and women in our armed forces to being tortured themselves. The second is that information extracted by torture is often worthless. Tortured people will say anything that stops the torture. A third reason is that the abuse of captives brutalizes their captors; the heart of darkness can be corrupting and it is contagious. ……………… The Bush administration, fearful that evil states might hide WMDs in hardened bunkers buried deep in the ground, called for a low-yield nuclear weapon known in the patois of the Pentagon as a Robust Nuclear Earth penetrator, a description often abbreviated into Bunker Buster. Mini-nukes of course can be used additionally as tactical weapons for the battlefield. In May 2003, the Senate Armed Services Committee voted for repeal of the prohibition on mini-nuke research. Senators Dianne Feinstein of California and Ted Kennedy then submitted an amendment restoring the original language of the Spratt-Purse amendment.

Supporters of the Feinstein-Kennedy amendment pointed out that mini-nukes were not toys, that five kilotons represented one third of the explosive power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, that the activation of mini-nuke research would run counter to US anti-proliferation policy and would "release a chain of reactions across the world in nuclear testing" (Kennedy), and that there was "no such thing as a 'usable nuclear weapon'" (Feinstein). Nevertheless the Senate tabled the Feinstein-Kennedy amendment. The fight was resumed on June 3 and 15, 2004. Kennedy made a powerful statement:

America should not launch a new nuclear arms race.... Even as we try to persuade North Korea to pull back from the brink—even as we try to persuade Iran to end its nuclear weapons program, even as we urge the nations of the former Soviet Union to secure their nuclear materials and arsenals from terrorists—the Bush administration now wants to escalate the nuclear threat.

The director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations, compared the US to "some who have continued to dangle a cigarette from their mouth and tell everybody else not to smoke." ……………… Most observers regard the Bush Doctrine as dead. President Bush does not, as he made clear in the unre-pentant speeches he delivered in June at the Air Force Academy and in July in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. "We must confront serious dangers," he said, "before they fully materialize." But how many nations is he likely to assemble in his next "coalition of the willing"?

Never in American history has the United States been so unpopular abroad, regarded with so much hostility, so distrusted, feared, hated. Even before Abu Ghraib, Margaret Tutwiler, a veteran Republican who was in charge of public diplomacy at the State Department, testifying before a House appropriations subcommittee in February 2004, declared that America's standing abroad had deteriorated to such a degree that "it will take years of hard, focused work" to repair it. After Abu Ghraib, it may take decades.