On the bedside table:
Neo-Contamination
In 1972, President Richard Nixon returned from the Soviet Union with a treaty worked out by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the beginning of a process Kissinger called "détente." On June 1, 1972, Nixon gave a speech in which he said, "Last Friday, in Moscow, we witnessed the beginning of the end of that era which began in 1945. With this step, we have enhanced the security of both nations. We have begun to reduce the level of fear, by reducing the causes of fear—for our two peoples, and for all peoples in the world."
But Nixon resigned amid the Watergate scandal in 1974 and Gerald Ford replaced him. Ford then appointed a new Secretary of Defense (Donald Rumsfeld) and a new Chief of Staff (Dick Cheney) but kept Kissinger in his position as Secretary of State. The ensuing internal battle between them to control the country’s foreign policy signaled the beginning of the neo-con’s rise to power. The first shot across the bough, so to speak, had been fired. The result of this struggle would have far-reaching ramifications, stretching in to the present day. Unfortunately!
I spoke at length a couple of night’s ago about the philosophy that guided Leo Strauss and his neo-con disciples; that it is necessary for social stability that the masses be energized and given a collective purpose through the use of myths. Those myths are to be promoted and maintained by an elite vanguard. In the wake of the social unrest of the 1960s, the neo-cons believed it was their calling to recreate the myth of America as a unique nation who’s destiny was to do battle against evil in the world. In the infancy of this project, the source of evil would be America’s cold war enemy, the Soviet Union. Cheney, Rumsfeld, along with Paul Wolfowitz, represented the larval stage of the vanguard. In 1974 they set out to win/steal the hearts and minds of the American people in their quest for power.
They had one big obstacle in their way, Henry Kissinger, and he didn’t believe in a world of good and evil. Instead Kissinger held the view that only stark, pragmatic power was successful in world affairs. He wanted the U.S. to jettison its ideological battles. He believed that the super-powers should instead come together through engagement to create a new progressive kind of global interdependence.
As National Security Advisor under Nixon, Kissinger pioneered the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, seeking a relaxation in tensions between the two superpowers. As a part of this strategy, he negotiated the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (culminating in the SALT I treaty) and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Leonid Brezhnev.
As a means to that end, Kissinger needed to put diplomatic pressure on the Soviets. That requirement led him to engage the People's Republic of China one year prior, in 1971, to confer with Premier Zhou Enlai, then in charge of Chinese foreign policy. This set the stage for the groundbreaking 1972 summit between Nixon, Zhou and Chairman Mao Zedong. The result was the normalization of relations between the two countries, ending 23 years of diplomatic isolation and mutual hostility and resulting in the formation of a strategic Sino-American alliance. Today, Kissinger is often remembered by Chinese leaders as "the old friend of the Chinese people."
This of course was totally contrary to what the neo-cons felt was needed for Strauss’s vision to succeed. So Rumsfeld and Cheney began a concerted effort - first secretly and then openly - to undermine Nixon and Kissinger’s treaty for peace and to rebuild the state of fear and, thus, reinstate the Cold War. They did this by claiming that the Soviets had secret weapons of mass destruction that the president didn't know about, that the CIA didn't know about, that nobody but them knew about. And, they said, because of those weapons, the government must redirect billions of dollars away from domestic programs and instead give the money to defense contractors for whom these two men would one day work.
"The Soviet Union has been busy," Rummy explained to congress in 1976. "They’ve been busy in terms of their level of effort; they’ve been busy in terms of the actual weapons they’ve been producing; they’ve been busy in terms of expanding production rates; they’ve been busy in terms of expanding their institutional capability to produce additional weapons at additional rates; they’ve been busy in terms of expanding their capability to increasingly improve the sophistication of those weapons. Year after year after year, they’ve been demonstrating that they have steadiness of purpose. They’re purposeful about what they’re doing."
The CIA strongly disagreed, calling Rumsfeld's position a "complete fiction", pointing out that the Soviet Union was disintegrating from within, could barely afford to feed their own people, and would collapse within a decade or two if simply left alone.
But Rumsfeld and Cheney wanted Americans to believe there was something nefarious going on, something we should be very afraid of. To this end, they convinced President Ford to appoint a commission, led by their old friend Paul Wolfowitz, to prove that the Soviets were up to no good.
According to the BBC, Wolfowitz's group known as "Team B," which featured the famous anti-Kremlin author Richard Pipes, came to the conclusion that the Soviets had developed several terrifying new weapons of mass destruction, featuring a nuclear-armed submarine fleet that used a sonar system that didn't depend on sound and was, thus, undetectable with our current technology.
At the time, the BBC asked Dr. Anne Cahn of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency about her thoughts on Rumsfeld's, Cheney's, and Wolfowitz's story of the secret Soviet WMDs. Here's a clip from the transcript:
“They couldn't say that the Soviets had acoustic means of picking up American submarines, because they couldn't find it. So they said, well maybe they have a non-acoustic means of making our submarine fleet vulnerable. But there was no evidence that they had a non-acoustic system. They’re saying, 'we can’t find evidence that they’re doing it the way that everyone thinks they’re doing it, so they must be doing it a different way. We don’t know what that different way is, but they must be doing it.'
"What Team B accused the CIA of missing was a hidden and sinister reality in the Soviet Union. Not only were there many secret weapons the CIA hadn’t found, but they were wrong about many of those they could observe, such as the Soviet air defenses. The CIA was convinced that these were in a state of collapse, reflecting the growing economic chaos in the Soviet Union. Team B said that this was actually a cunning deception by the Soviet régime. The air-defense system worked perfectly. But the only evidence they produced to prove this was the official Soviet training manual, which proudly asserted that their air-defense system was fully integrated and functioned flawlessly. The CIA accused Team B of moving into a fantasy world."
"I would say that all of it was fantasy. I mean, they looked at radars out in Krasnoyarsk and said, 'This is a laser beam weapon,' when in fact it was nothing of the sort. ... And if you go through most of Team B’s specific allegations about weapons systems, and you just examine them one by one, they were all wrong. I don’t believe anything in Team B was really true."
Nonetheless, as Melvin Goodman, head of the CIA's Office of Soviet Affairs, 1976-87, noted to the BBC:
"Rumsfeld won that very intense political battle that was waged in Washington in 1975 and 1976. Now, as part of that battle, Rumsfeld and others, people such as Paul Wolfowitz, wanted to get into the CIA. And their mission was to create a much more severe view of the Soviet Union, Soviet intentions, Soviet views about fighting and winning a nuclear war."
Kissinger’s vision had been defeated (it’s a sad day when Kissinger looks good, but the neo-cons succeeded in making him look almost saintly). Even though Wolfowitz’s and Rumsfeld's assertions of powerful new Soviet secret weapons were unproven - they said the lack of proof proved that undetectable weapons existed - the neo-cons insisted it was all true.
Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976 on the strength of voter dissatisfaction with the Republicans after Watergate. While ousted temporarily from power, the neo-cons organized a group - The Committee on the Present Danger - to promote their worldview. The Committee produced documentaries, publications, and provided guests for national talk shows and news reports. They worked hard to whip up fear and encourage increases in defense spending, particularly for sophisticated weapons systems offered by the defense contractors for whom many neo-cons would later become lobbyists. Much to their advantage, Carter's military failures in the Iran Hostage crisis laid the groundwork for their return, with renewed vigor, in the Reagan Administration.
When Reagan re-acquired the White House in 1981 they succeeded in recreating an atmosphere of fear in the U.S., and in making themselves and their defense contractor friends richer than most of the kingdoms of the world. In the 1980s the neo-cons working in the Reagan Administration continued to crank up the fanatical rhetoric and pressure on the Soviets; they supplied weapons to, and trained, the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan (inventing the term “Freedom Fighters”), which has now come back to haunt us (but provides the new evil enemy myth for the neo-cons), they supported a bloody war in Angola which left many thousand dead or homeless and they circumvented the Congress and the will of the people in the Iran-Contra scandal, which was the culmination of an unauthorized covert war against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas.
But, trillions of dollars and years later, it was proven that they had been exaggerating the threat all along. Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, Kristol, Podhoretz, Kagan, Bennett, and Kirkpatrick lied to us for two decades about the Soviet threat. Not only do we now know that the Soviets didn't have any of the new and impressive secret weapons claimed by the neo-cons, but we also now know that they were, in fact, decaying from within, ripe for collapse any time, regardless of what the US did - just as the CIA had predicted years earlier. The Soviet economic and political system wasn't working, and their military was disintegrating. Yet the Cold War had been good for business, and good for the political power of its advocates, from Rumsfeld to Reagan.
Does any of this sound familiar? It should, similarly, the War On Terror is the same sort of scam, run for many of the same reasons, by the same people. And by hyping it - and then invading Iraq for oil- we may well be bringing into reality terrors and forces that previously existed only on the margins. In addition, today’s revelation about wide-spread domestic wiretapping brings home, once again, the covert, illegal and unconstitutional practices used by the neo-cons as they once again use the smokescreen of fear to justify other, more secret power agendas.
Interestingly, the relationship with Russia appears to have come full-circle. Yesterday, Putin addressed his nation and used similar mythical, fearful, terminology to describe the US and suggested that new weapons systems will be needed to defend the country from the hungry American “wolf.” It seems that the Russian leader has been studying the tactics of the neo-cons:
Putin Hits Back, Criticizing U.S. In Yearly Address
Russian Leader Calls for Stronger Military
By Judith Ingram
Associated Press
Thursday, May 11, 2006; A20
MOSCOW, May 10 -- President Vladimir Putin took a swipe at the US in his state of the nation address Wednesday, bristling at being lectured by Vice President Cheney and comparing Washington to a wolf who "eats without listening."
During an emotional moment in the nationally televised speech, Putin used a fairy-tale motif on building a fortress-like house to illustrate Russia's need to bolster its defenses. He also suggested that the US puts its political interests above the democratic ideals it claims to cherish.
"Where is all this pathos about protecting human rights and democracy when it comes to the need to pursue their own interests? Here, it seems, everything is allowed, there are no restrictions whatsoever," Putin said, smiling sarcastically in the address to both houses of parliament.
"We are aware what is going on in the world," he said. "Comrade wolf knows whom to eat, he eats without listening, and he's clearly not going to listen to anyone."
Putin's speech came nearly a week after Cheney took a verbal slap at the Russian leader, saying on May 4 that the Russian government was trying "to reverse the gains of the last decade."
Putin pointed out that Russia's military budget is 25 times lower than that of the US. Like the US, he said, "we also must make our house strong and reliable."
"We must always be ready to counter any attempts to pressure Russia in order to strengthen positions at our expense," he said. "The stronger our military is, the less temptation there will be to exert such pressure on us."
Putin said the government would work to strengthen the nation's nuclear deterrent as well as conventional military forces without repeating the mistakes of the Cold War era, when a costly arms race drained Soviet resources.
He said Russia would soon commission two nuclear submarines equipped with the new Bulava intercontinental ballistic missiles -- the nation's first since Soviet times -- while the land-based strategic missile forces would get their first unit of mobile Topol-M missiles.
The new missiles and warheads, which can foil defenses by changing direction in flight, would allow Russia to preserve a strategic balance without denting the nation's economic development goals, he said, adding that Russia needed a military capable of answering all modern challenges.
Cite: The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Power of Fear. BBC Documentary Autumn 2004 (curiously, this documentary was never picked up by PBS, run by Republican Ken Tomlinson, a close friend of Karl Rove, at the time, or by the networks or cable. Therefore, this documentary never aired on US TV, it was effectively banned from U.S. Broadcast) (it is now available online at: http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares)
Wikipedia
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