Dangerous Simplicity

Lisa McGirr & Kim Philips-Fein are two historians who've studied the new right. McGirr focuses on the grassroots movement (Orange County, CA, specifically) while Philips-Fein explores the big business-led development of the infrastructure enabling the right to gain power. Together, they provide a useful framework for interpreting the ongoing meltdown of the new right.

If one starts from a traditional, often fundamentalist Christian point of view, and accepts the premise that the US is perfect, any problems we face must be due to a sinister external force. The government is an easy target, especially since it embraced in the late 20th century a bureaucratic-technical approach to modernity, rather than emphasizing traditional church-based values.

Add to that the traditional conservative position that government is an inherent threat to individual liberty, and the western mythology of the rugged individual (contra the reality that the prosperity enjoyed by most Orange County conservatives was dependent on massive government spending in the form of defense manufacturing and the infrastructure required to support it) & it was easy for conservatives to feel that government programs aimed at amelioration of poverty represented confiscation of the fruits of their hard work and potentially a threat to their freedom (freedom largely being defined economically; the more fundamentalist among them were less concerned about freedom when moral concerns were involved). This is not to say, by the way, that there were/are no reasonable bases for concern about government threats to individual liberties; rather, the point here is that the threats perceived by modern conservatives have been generally imaginary (fluoridated water,gun rights, the Soviet Union as an imminent threat to the U.S. at the very moment the former was unraveling, etc.).

The inherent contraditions in these positions, as noted above, are pretty easy to see. Conservatives were generally hostile to the civil rights movement and many, including William F. Buckley Jr., infamously argued that efforts to expand rights to African Americans constituted government intrusion into individual rights of free association. Nor have many conservatives, despite their traditional zealotry about government encroachments on liberty, been similarly concerned about the potential for similar threats to individual rights by corporate power. The obviously selective choices of objects for conservative outrage lead many outside the movement to conclude that the stated motives for opposition are but smokescreens for racism, defense of socioeconomic privilege, and various other bigotries and fears.

It's kind of striking that movement conservatives depend on a manufactured sense of grievance and paranoia, and increasingly, a rejection of evidence & logic to maintain group cohesion & a sense of identity. Even after they got Reagan & then Dubya elected, the right continued to peddle conspiracy theories and nurture a sense of grievance. Now, after undeniable political dominance for 6 of the last 8 years (and really, considering the haplessness and complicity of many Democrats, it’s been more like 40 years), virtually every aspect of every policy enacted by conservatives stands revealed (to those willing to look honestly) as a total failure of massive proportions. Yet lacking a more sophisticated intellectual framework for interpreting the results, many on the right continue to resort to a belligerent form of denial. Hence the hysterical screeching, wild accusations and even occasional shootings we observe on cable TV and elsewhere. A simplistic template is inadequate for efforts to understand the complexities of the world we live in.

Torture Apologists Demolition Derby

Detail from the right ("Hell") panel of Hieronymous Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights" (c. 1500)

Ever since the photos from Abu Ghraib prison were revealed to the world, Bush administration officials repeated the mantra “the U.S. does not torture.”

Then President Obama released the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memos rationalizing the use of torture on alleged al Qaeda prisoners. Thursday, the Senate Armed Services Committee released its report on the torture memos. Its unanimous opinion was that the U.S. has indeed engaged in torture, and that those practices were initiated at the highest levels of the Bush administration—in other words, contra the claims of the Bush administration and its apologists, not as the result of misbehavior by a few low-level bad apples. We now have enough evidence to construct a detailed chronology of the events leading to the officially approved use of torture by the U.S. government and the reactions to that practice to present. (Note: The Foreign Policy chronology includes numerous links to various reports relating to the torture issue. The Senate Armed Services Committee report can be found here.)

Faced with an increasing body of detailed evidence, official Washington has responded in with various evasive strategies.

The congressional GOP has responded largely by trying to deflect attention from the issue of torture.

Chris Matthews interviews (I almost said "interrogates") Mac Thornberry (R, Outer Obstructia) about accountability for torture in light of the release of the Senate Armed Services Committee's report about torture.

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Notice Thornberry's rhetorical defenses:

1. Refusal to use or acknowledge the word "torture."


2. Claim that investigating the issue will distract from the "war on terror."


3. Claim that prosecuting illegal acts relating to torture of detainees "changes the rules" and will demoralize the CIA in its pursuit of terrorists.


4. Claim it was the work of a few bad apples.


5. Refusal to acknowledge the obvious--that directions to use torture, embodied in the torture memos, are the responsibility of those at the top, including Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice et al. Refuse to acknowledge it even after Matthews reads to you (twice) the explicitly stated conclusion in the Senate Armed Services Committee report that the orders, and hence, responsibility for the use of torture came from the top of the chain of command.


6. The dog ate my homework.

Meanwhile Ta-Nahisi Coates has a video of an interview on MSNBC by O'Donnell O’Donnell with Liz Cheney which indicates clearly that Cheney is preparing to mount a very aggressive defense of his record in the White House, particularly with reference to torture.

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It's interesting to note Liz Cheney's approach to the evidence revealed thus far:

• O'Donnell: Are you prepared to admit that the OVP was the prime mover in the decision to use torture?


• Cheney: Obama never investigated “effectiveness” of “harsh interrogation techniques” before forbidding them. (Note that the response, whether true or not, is irrelevant to the question.)


• Cheney: The techniques did not constitute torture because they were used by SERE (ignoring the fact that SERE was set up to train U.S. military personnel to withstand techniques used by North Korea to exact FALSE CONFESSIONS from prisoners).


• O'Donnell: U.S. prosecuted people after WW II for waterboarding—it’s torture.


• Cheney: Waterboarding gave us valuable info. [She references Michael Hayden/Mukasey op-eds in favor of the use of torture (described euphemistically, of course). Note again that the response is irrelevant to the question.]


• O'Donnell: Dennis Blair op-ed stated that there's no way to know if other techniques could have gotten us the info.


• Cheney: Blair stated in an internal memo that "harsh interrogation techniques" were “effective”; the Obama White House censored the statement. Four former CIA directors approved the use of these methods. [Note shifting of blame again to Obama and use of simultaneous appeal to authority (former CIA directors) and appeal to the majority (four former CIA directors)


• O'Donnell: What was the role of the OVP in torture memos?


• Cheney: The CIA began the process, not the OVP; the OLC memos were very careful about what could be done & for how long. She claims that O'Donnell has been reading from AP headlines—not what the memo says, and stonewalls on the issue of the OVP as prime mover. Cheney then repeats that the interrogation approach was "a good program" which was widely supported. [Cheney's claim that the CIA initiated the process conflicts with evidence that the impetus for use of torture came from Dick Cheney. Moreover, there's evidence that the true motive for use of torture was to "find" evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda in the leadup to the invasion of Iraq. See Alice in Wonderland for reference. There is also substantial evidence that Dick Cheney weilded tremendous influence within the Bush administration from behind the scenes. See Barton Gellman's Angler for details.]


• O'Donnell: Use of torture by the US portends the future use of torture against US military personnel.


• Cheney: It's not torture. [This is the "La la la--I can't hear you" defense.]


• Cheney: Revealing our interrogation techniques gives info to our enemies. [A repetition of the McCarthyite insinuation used during the Bush administration that criticism equates to treason.]


• Cheney: Info gained via use of "harsh interrogation techniques" saved American lives. [This is contradicted in an op-ed article by a former FBI interrogator in the NY Times this week. ]

In short, Liz Cheney's defense amounts to:

1. Repeated denials that “harsh interrogation techniques” outlined in the torture memos and the Senate Armed Services Committee report are torture.


2. Claims that the techniques were effective.


3. Use of appeals to the majority (four former CIA directors, widespread support for the program).


4. Use of appeals to authority (former CIA directors support the program; accusations that the interviewer has been getting her information from “AP headlines” implicitly makes an appeal to authority—you don’t know what you’re talking about, but we do).


5. McCarthyite insinuations that those who criticize the program, especially Obama, are either foolish or unpatriotic, and in either case, are weakening America’s security.

A few points:

1. The claim that torture is effective, whether true or not, is irrelevant to the question of the legality of such practices, as noted by Anonymous Liberal.

2. As noted above, a former FBI interrogator who broke Abu Zubaydah using standard, non-violent interrogation methods, has contradicted that assertion in the NY Times this week. Other interrogators have given similar testimony.

3. The choice to use torture was made based on mistaken notions of the SERE program, which, contrary to Liz Cheney, was designed to help U.S. service personnel withstand torture at the hands of the Chinese and North Koreans designed to elicit false confessions. In no way did use of torture techniques in the SERE program legitimize such methods; rather, the purpose of their use was to harden U.S. military personnel in the expectation that they would be subjected to such techniques, which our government--like all other signatories to the Geneva Conventions--considered illegal and immoral, as the United States did consistently until the administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

4. The extent to which former Bush administration officials and their apologists are willing to go to avoid use of the word "torture" is striking. It would be comical if the consequences of their sophistry were not so serious. As has been noted by a number of other observers, the United States prosecuted Nazis at the Nuremberg trials for waterboarding. It was considered torture by us then; how can it be that the same practice has been magically transformed into something benign by a handful of absurdly reasoned OLC memos?

5. Nor should we allow the torture mongers and their apologists to confuse the issue by considering any given torture practice in isolation. We now know that in practice, the various torture techniques approved by the Bush administration were performed in combination over an extended period of time--as they were intended to be. In fact, thanks to stellar work by Marcy Wheeler, we now know that Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 183 times (and someone else 83 times), apparently due to intense pressure from the Bush administration to find evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda.

6. The net effect of these practices? Over 25 people died in U.S. custody, some others committed suicide, and some were reduced to a vegetative state. Who were these people? As it happens, due to reliance on bounty hunters and lack of familiarity with the local languages, the U.S. military didn't know who was an al Qaeda member and who was not. The award-winning documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side, focuses on the beating death of a young Afghan cab driver at the hands of American interrogators using the practices approved by the Bush administration. There have been a number of other such cases. In addition to the direct physical effects of such brutality, our international reputation has been badly damaged due to our use of such techniques. We have lost the moral authority we used to rely on when condemning the use of cruel treatment by foreign governments. Who will take us seriously now when we make such complaints? What other country will be able to play such a role in our absence?

7. Given the above considerations, it is curious that the mainstream media continue, by and large, to avoid use of the term "torture." One might think they were adhering once again to that artificial, process-based formula for supposed absence of bias whereby the reporter, confronted with free use of a term by one party to a dispute, and strenuous objections to its use by the other, refrains from using the term in an attempt to avoid picking sides--regardless what the term is, what its widely accepted use is, or what its relation to a given context or topic may be. Thus the GOP objects (obviously, on purely tactical grounds) to use of the word "torture' to describe the SERE interrogation techniques adopted by the Bush administration, and in response, our toothless news media obligingly refrain--thereby enacting (however inadvertently) a consensual attitude of denial with reference to the issue of torture. One of the most shameful episodes in our country's history is treated by the mainstream media as The Unpleasantness That Shall Not Be Named at precisely the time when we have an opportunity to embark on an honest national conversation about what our values are and should be with reference to treatment of prisoners in particular, and human rights in general. See Glenn Greenwald for more on this.

8. Nor are many Democrats eager to take on the issue of torture--largely because of their own complicity in it. In fact, Obama himself has been rather tentative about the whole issue himself, delivering several seemingly contradictory statements about investigations of the authors of the torture memos.

9. All of which, it seems to me, indicates the need for a vigorous effort on the part of those of us who believe this issue is far too important for the United States to neglect, to pressure the Obama administration and Congress to conduct a thorough investigation via an independent prosecutor to ascertain responsibility for our government's adoption of torture techniques and to bring the guilty to justice. If we don't, we can be sure that this or something even worse will happen again in the future.

The Long Road to Baghdad

Many books and articles have been written about the Iraq War focusing on the military, diplomatic, political, moral and other aspects of the conflict and its aftermath. I know of no other book besides Lloyd Gardner’s The Long Road to Baghdad, however, that views the Iraq War in terms of continuities in foreign policy thinking among American leaders from the end of the Vietnam War to present. Nor have I read any other book that examines the results of our adventure in Iraq in terms of their implications for the future of American democracy. [Disclosure: I studied with Professor Gardner about 20 years ago.]

Professor Gardner, one of the most widely respected historians of U.S. foreign policy, sees the roots of the Iraq War in America’s Vietnam defeat. Eugene Rostow, JFK’s national security adviser, thought modernity could be forced on underdeveloped countries via military power. After the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam, he argued that our defeat was due to lack of willpower, a recurring theme. (19-22) In the aftermath of Vietnam, Rostow’s confidence (he had coined the phrase “The New Frontier” for JFK) gave way to national uncertainty during Jimmy Carter’s term in office, according to Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. The latter decided to demonstrate U.S. resolve in the face of what he saw as the Soviet Union’s primary threats--to the Third World and particularly the region from Turkey to Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, which he termed the “arc of crisis.” These efforts, observes Gardner, ignored the lives and interests of the inhabitants of the countries involved and resulted in intensification of the conflict in Angola, confusion in a conflict between Ethiopia and Somalia, impotence in the face of the fall of the Shah of Iran, and contributed to the defeat of Soviet forces in Afghanistan at the cost of the arming, training and mobilization of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. Ronald Reagan engaged in a massive military buildup accompanied by strident anti-Soviet rhetoric, then reversed course after his efforts led the world to the brink of thermonuclear war in 1983. (He then worked out dramatic reductions in nuclear weapons with Mikhail Gorbachev, a fact conveniently forgotten by his conservative worshippers.) President George Herbert Walker Bush was similarly concerned with the problem of will--ending what he termed “the Vietnam Syndrome”: the widespread reluctance of the American public after Vietnam to support military adventures abroad. Similarly, Bush pere’s national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, saw the end of the cold war as a “defining moment in world history,” and argued that dealing successfully with the Bosnian war was “a matter of will.” (97-98) The theme of willpower would arise again under President George W. Bush, in his stubborn refusal to change course in Iraq, his rationalizations for aggressive action, criticisms of past policies and when accusations of the lack of will would be used to silence dissent. In each case, belligerence arising from a felt need to demonstrate willpower led to folly.

Running through the history up to and including the current Iraq war, argues Gardner, is a national myth of progress--the notion that American history is characterized by continual progress, and a sense of mission arising from a combined faith in religion and technology—in the service of imperial power. Rostow’s notion of “creative destruction”--the idea that modernization of underdeveloped countries required externally generated force--was predicated on the superiority of military technology that the U.S. could unleash on a given country and was awfully convenient to advocate when one’s role was delivery rather than reception. (19-22) Brzezinski perceived an “arc of crisis,” the center of which was the Persian Gulf, as not only a crucial source of oil for the U.S., but the site where the Cold War would be concluded. Needless to say, the interests and perceptions of the inhabitants of that expanse of terra firma were beside the point. The neoconservatives, who began their rise to power in the 1970s, also argued for creative destruction as a replacement for Cold War realism during the first Gulf War, while firmly rejecting all foreign policy thinking that predated Reagan. Gardner notes acerbically that

In truth, there is no substantive ‘realist’ tradition in American history. The tradition ran along other lines, combining faith and experience, faith in technology and the experience of ever-expanding frontiers. While the neoconservatives now held aloft the banner under which the second President Bush would go to war to finish the job, it displayed the same set of beliefs that Walt Rostow had put at the top of his policy papers when he penned the slogan “The New Frontier” and urged Lyndon Johnson not to forsake the cause of progress in Vietnam.(26)

All of the above themes were repeated in the lead-up to the Iraq War. Scowcroft said during the first Gulf War that the U.S. should rely on “shifting coalitions” to deal with a changed world, another theme that would recur. Paul Wolfowitz and Zalmay Khalilzad argued in their 1992 Defense Planning Guidance that the U.S. needed to maintain global dominance. Their chosen mechanism, echoing Scowcroft, was shifting coalitions. Around the same time as the DPG, Francis Fukuyama wrote his End of History essay (102), arguing that Western liberal democracy was universal (echoing Rostow) and criticizing George Kennan’s containment concept. Interestingly enough, Richard Holbrook echoed these views himself. (104) The Project for a New American Century, a neoconservative pressure group including many future top officials in George W. Bush’s administration (including Wolfowitz and Khalilzad), argued for U.S. dominance of the Middle East. They promoted a book claiming Saddam Hussein as the source of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, sent letters to President Bill Clinton urging him to overthrow Saddam Hussein, promoted Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress as replacements for Saddam Hussein, and argued for rejection of the UN and containment. For their parts, President Bill Clinton and his Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, also built up Saddam Hussein as a threat to the U.S., although Clinton was more cautious about engaging U.S. forces directly in a conflict in the Middle East. Through all these twists and turns, one hears recurring echoes of Rostow’s creative destruction, the universality of U.S. interests, the need for shifting coalitions and the importance of willpower.

Gardner rejects calls by some, in response to the Iraq War, for American policymakers to return to the logic of Cold War realism, arguing that such reasoning was specific to a time and place; he also observes that realists in JFK’s administration led us into Vietnam. Further, returning to the pre-Gulf War I status quo ante does nothing to enable our understanding of why U.S. foreign policy led from Vietnam to Iraq. He also points out that identifying the process leading to the Iraq War as imperialist does not, in and of itself, yield us greater self-understanding.

Another response to the Iraq War has been the call to focus on an exit strategy, ignoring the causes of the conflict. Gardner responds that seeking a global response to a local conflict is basically circular and the attempt to divert attention to an exit strategy is similar to arguments made with reference to Vietnam. The similarities between the underlying assumptions in both conflicts is revealed by the dissolving “coalition of the willing.” (6-7) Common to both conflicts are the facts that coalition members in both cases were paid to participate and the leader of each coalition (i.e., the U.S.) was one of dominance. Moreover, each coalition was essentially camouflage for neocolonialism. Gardner notes that in 2003, the U.S. had over 700 military bases worldwide, enabling rapid deployment of military force to any part of the world. He notes:

Imperialism had always been about enjoying markets and raw materials and political stability without interference. In the twenty-first century it was characterized by a new emphasis on producing cheap manufacturing abroad, controlling energy resources, and selling expensive hi-tech weapons to compradors. These were the signature marks of the quest for a new American century. (7)

The obvious objection to this claim is that the costs of maintaining an empire exceed the profits. Garner responds that such an argument overlooks the issue of who really pays the bills.

Given the above, what was the motive for the Iraq War?

In the case of the Iraq Wars, the quest has been to find a safe landing zone for American influence throughout the Middle East in the aftermath of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. (8)

Gardner notes that control of oil resources is inseparable from the considerations listed above.

What have been the results of our adventure in Iraq? In furtherance of his aims, Brzezinski expanded the role of national security adviser, which would have implications for the future. Gardner notes changes to our military, such as the increasing reliance on private contractors and unaccountable special sub-units (SOCOM) that raise questions about the future of civilian control of the military, one of the most fundamental concepts upon which this country was founded. There are questions, argues Gardner, as to whether the Pentagon can manipulate public opinion to such an extent that our republic is replaced in the future by an imperial presidency.

Gardner concludes by meditating on the meaning of the Iraq War. Quoting William Pfaff, he argues that ideological conflict necessitates abandonment of morality in favor of “a utopian vision.” (255) Notes Gardner,

Going to war with a preemptive strike against an enemy who might have done us harm while leaving unfinished an effort to search out an enemy who had done us harm qualified fully as some form of a utopian vision...Now it was there for all to see that the axis of evil speech was a brochure advertising Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. (255-256)

The utopian vision has always been expressed, however, as a form of Wilson’s famous assertion that America’s duty was to make the world safe for democracy...Call it the “new American century,” or whatever, the newest meaning of the Wilsonian creed in our time has come to be to make the world safe for our democracy, using a shifting coalition of the willing. (256)

He concludes by saying,

The invasion of Iraq in March 2003 had its origins in the Vietnam defeat and the perceived need to reassert American primacy over the Soviet Union in contests in the third world, but this drive was also connected root and branch to a need to reassure the nation that what had not been lost in Vietnam was confidence in the American metaphor of progress. (265)

It failed due to the limits of power and a set of false assumptions: Eugene Rostow’s idea that Vietnam represented the end stage of Soviet antiliberal revolutions (266); Zbigniew Brzezinski’s notion that “strong Islamist movements could block communism”; (266) the neoconservative idea that removal of Saddam Hussein would lead to democratization of Middle East;(266) and, most dangerous, in Gardner’s view, Dick Cheney’s vision of the presidency as autonomous of and more powerful than the other two branches of government.

Gardner’s account is the only one I’ve read that situates the Iraq War in the ongoing struggle within U.S. foreign policy circles to accommodate the Vietnam debacle to the national narrative of ongoing progress. That effort remains unresolved, partly because the immediate post-Vietnam response to that defeat was to change the subject or otherwise refuse to engage the issue in a context inhibited by the ongoing Cold War. Thus Jimmy Carter sought to reorient American foreign policy in the service of morality in his Notre Dame speech, but met with conservative resentment at home of his discussion of foreign policy failures while earning suspicion from the Kremlin. Nor did Walt Rostow’s ex post facto claim that our defeat in Vietnam was due to a lack of will open the way to meaningful introspection. Indeed, a deeply held popular belief in the inevitability of American progress led to a widespread refusal to admit that we’d lost the war in Vietnam at all. That refusal was the source of the claims (true, but misleading) that our soldiers had never lost a battle on the ground in Vietnam, as well as the enduring controversy over POWs-MIAs, which continued until diplomatic relations between the two countries were restored in 1995.

The neoconservative approach to foreign policy was predicated on a Jacobian division of foreign policy thought into categories marked Before and After Reagan. It was based on a blind faith in the myth of national progress and an implicit rejection of the idea that anything other than deficiencies in moral character could account for any failure of the U.S. to achieve its aims. Consistent with a long-running theme among American conservatives, the neocons rejected diplomacy as a sign of weakness and an opening for threats to American interests. The preferred method of attaining U.S. objectives was force. Faced with this sort of thinking, one could agree, acquiesce or be damned as a weakling and traitor. Such a frame of reference made ruthlessness leading to the falsification of evidence for war, the approval of torture and the outing of Valerie Plame inevitable. It has also led, as Gardner points out, to the mutation of the American military into something considerably more privatized, intrusive and isolated from the country it was created to protect. Similarly, the undermining of this country’s constitution, the use of facilities outside the United States to detain people without accountability, reliance on now unlimited domestic wiretapping, the use by George W. Bush of signing statements to declare his refusal to obey the laws he signed, all combine to present unprecedented challenges to the oldest representative democracy on this planet. Whether we can reclaim our country before it slips out of our hands altogether depends entirely on our willingness to confront the things that have been done in our name—in Iraq as well as in Vietnam, and at every stop in between.

In addition to discussion of the ideologies involved and the implications of the war for our society, I really appreciated Professor Gardner’s extensive discussion of SOCOM, which I’d not seen before anywhere. I would have liked the writing in the introduction to be a bit less elliptical in the introduction, but that is a minor quibble. Overall, Lloyd Gardner’s The Long Road to Baghdad is a valuable addition to the literature on this most misbegotten of military adventures and is essential to our understanding of modern U.S. foreign policy.