"Farm" life in the an age of economic depression

Begin quote:

Looking for a challenging and rewarding career or internship?

Have you ever thought about working for the Central Intelligence Agency?  Then join us for an information session! The Central Intelligence Agency is searching for intelligent and dedicated men and women from a variety of academic backgrounds to contribute to our National Security mission. Recruiters will be conducting an Information Session to discuss the CIA mission, employment and internship opportunities and the employment/security clearance process.

October 5th
5-7pm
Oak East Room
Tresidder Union

The Elders of Zion Strike Again?

On Sunday night I had the opportunity to attend a dinner with Stephen Zunes at which he spoke on what we can expect in terms of US-ME policy in the Age of Obama. The occasion gave me an opportunity to revisit the controversy that surrounded the John Mearsheimer and Stephan Walt argument that the pro-Israel lobby weilds a "heavy - and malign influence upon the formulation of US Middle East policy."

In terms of the Mearsheimer-Walt argument, it was of course refreshing to hear the obvious stated by the Deans of the Realist school of International Relations. But many of those who have spent decades studying the effects of US policy in the Middle East objected strongly to the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis, in that it overstated the influence of the Lobby and overlooked other factors such as American long-standing hegemonic designs in the region. What many of these critiques (from the Left) take special exception to, is the notion the US invaded Iraq because top level policymakers are beholden to the Lobby, and were therefore led to wage a war of aggression to "make Israel more secure" (in the words of Mearsheimer and Walt). For these critics, the Iraq invasion and other such policies must be explained in terms of US Grand Strategy- control of oil resources and access to military bases. In the words of Joseph Massad: "it is in fact the very centrality of Israel to US strategy in the Middle East that accounts, in part, for the strength of the pro-Israel lobby and not the other way around."

But I wonder, if the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis is overstated, then how do we explain Obama's June 4 address to AIPAC? I don't believe that that speech can be accounted for in terms of US Grand Strategy - I think there is something more insidious at work - it has to do with the position of Palestine within the dominant American political culture and the structure of the American state. I think we need to step back from the structural realism (though I am, for the most part, a structural realist...) of Hans Morgenthau, and look closely at American class structure and the nature of bureaucratic politics in the US.

I believe that there is a danger, in the analysis of Massad, Zunes, Plitnick and Toesing, et al., of overstating the rationality and coherence of the American State and its Grand Strategic Designs. There is a danger of reifying the State and its interests, and assuming that said interests (economic, security, or otherwise) are natural, self-evident, or can somehow be logically deduced from the structure of the international system, rather than seeing said interests as socially constructed in a process that is as much discursive as it is material.

To my way of thinking, it is not Israel as such (a strategic object on a Grand Chess Board), but rather "Israel" as a symbol of American nationalism -- the cultural resonance of the New Jerusalem and the City on the Hill run deep among America's dominant social groups -- Israel as a symbol of strength and continued expansion in the post-Vietnam era when apparitions of American hegemonic decline haunt all policymakers. Unconditional ("non-negotiable") support for Israeli expansion has become code for continuity with the the 500 year American tradition of frontier expansion. By supporting Israeli colonization efforts, US policymakers signal their own commitment to "strength" in the face of "barbarism." It seems to me that a radical redefinition of the terms of American nationalism is in order if we're to see a truly transformative change in American politics and society. Until we (the Left) confront the pernicious cultural hegemony of Manifest Destiny and its Evil Twin Zionism, we'll remain ineffective in the face of the organized Money Power of The Lobby- and Palestinians will continue to pay a price in blood for our cowardice.

SecDef Gates and the Politics of Counterrevolution

Roger Morris, a member of the National Security Council Senior Staff under Presidents Johnson and Nixon (he resigned in protest over the invasion of Cambodia) and bestselling author of biographies of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and the Clintons, offers a three part study of Robert Gates and the cultural and institutional history of the CIA.



“The Specialist: Robert Gates and the Tortured World of American Intelligence” (Part 1), 19 June 2007.

Morris comments on "the Baltic Syndrome":

"Washington sent its Kennans to study Soviet affairs at European universities. The "experts" they found there, however, were almost exclusively exiles from Tsarist Russia, expatriates by class, outlook, and personal history, loathing -- but also largely ignorant of -- Soviet rule, and often financially as well as sentimentally nostalgic for the fallen autocracy."

"From that corrupted tutelage, freshly minted U.S. specialists were commonly assigned to Latvia or Estonia, small Baltic states conquered by Russia in the eighteenth century but now (briefly) independent. These became Meccas for the anti-Soviet Diaspora, in many respects small replicas of the caste system and reactionary politics of Imperial Russia itself. So it was that America's diplomats, expected to understand and interpret the Soviet Union for vast stakes, were shaped not only by an insular and fearful American culture, but also by the pervasive lost-world bias of their trainers."

On the CIA and Orientalism:

"The CIA was not to be confused with -- or disposed to confuse the President and his top officials with -- genuine intelligence about countries of the world in and for themselves. The Middle East, Asia, Latin America, Africa -- a region mattered, for the most part, only as it related to the struggle with the Soviet Union. From the Vietnam War to Afghanistan and Iraq -- with scores of lesser-known disasters in between -- that willful negligence was, and remains, immensely damaging."

On the CIA in the Origins of Ba'thist rule Iraq:

"In Iraq, a CIA-supported corrupt monarchy, inherited from the British, stifled democratic stirrings in the 1950s; then, CIA-instigated Ba'ath Party coups in 1963, and again in 1968, killed reformers and reforms (along with any hopes of sectarian equity), and led to Saddam Hussein's tribal-clan despotism."

On the doctrine of plausible deniability:

"Deniability-minded postwar presidents were surely prone to Henry II's demure order -- "Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?" -- to his zealous knights to hack to death Archbishop Thomas Beckett in the sanctity of the cathedral."


“The CIA and the Politics of Counterrevolution: Robert Gates, The Specialist” (Part 2), 21 June 2007.

On Orientalism:
"Yet there was something more insidious than crude Eurocentric racism at work. Imbibed by a new generation of bureaucrats and analysts with winning-hearts-and-minds, career-making fervor was another kind of bigotry dressed in the clothes of scholarly authority and of knowledge in service to power. It took an eminent literary critic and expatriate from one of the most abused "areas" of the world to expose it."

"A revolutionary book when it appeared in the late 1970s, Orientalism by Palestinian Edward Said revealed the intellectual hollowness of the predominant Western view of the Arab world (and, by implication, of much of the rest of the globe as well). Professor Said's naked emperor proved to be the views of two centuries of Western academics and novelists, clerks and clerics, soldiers and tourists, diplomats and dilettantes that created a collective, stereotypical, paradoxical Muslim Orient -- stagnant yet ever-roiling; childlike yet cunning; femininely weak yet no less macho-menacing for that; indolent but agitated; always prone to feudal despotism, though available for capitalist liberation; congenitally terrorist and genocidal by nature; presumptively inferior; endlessly devious; and, above all, relentlessly alien. Said's Orient of Western mythology was what one author aptly called "the quintessential ‘Other.'"

"They're our boys bought and paid for, but you always gotta remember that these people can't be trusted," said Archie Roosevelt, Kermit's cousin and a CIA deputy for the Middle East in the later 1960s. His weary exasperation with the supposedly innate Arab traits of treachery and corruptibility -- he was speaking of Iraqi Ba'ath Party officers on his payroll in the 1963 and 1968 Baghdad coups -- caught an American official mood extending from the 1940s to 2007, from Iraq to Vietnam to Afghanistan and back to Iraq again. It was part of the territory, diplomats and spies understood, a cost of doing business beyond the English Channel with what many called, in the privacy of inter-agency meetings, the "rug merchants."

The colonial sociology of knowledge of the specialists, when placed alongside the cultural illiteracy of senior bureaucrats, policy-makers, and politicians -- to say nothing of a blanketing pro-Israeli bias -- produced a half-century of American patronage of repressive regimes in North Africa and the Middle East.

Stations in Cairo, Beirut, and Amman spent years plotting the February 1963 Ba'athist coup in Iraq that led to the murder of reformist Premier Abdul Karim Kassem, who was deemed too sympathetic to the left. ("The target suffered a terminal illness," a CIA officer quipped to a Senate committee, "before a firing squad in Baghdad.") That bloody succession led to the murder of thousands of Iraq's educated elite, communist and non-communist alike, from lists the CIA gave Ba'ath Party death squads. When that coup faltered, the Agency staged a further one in 1968, almost a month to the day before Gates began his job, installing a Ba'athist dictator -- along with his kinsman and protégé, security chief Saddam Hussein.

All in all, CIA intelligence on Vietnam was so shallow that, by 1969-1970, President Richard Nixon's White House policy-makers had essentially stopped paying attention.

CIA estimates elsewhere in the world, particularly in the Middle East after the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War, were no less suspect in the White House and the Pentagon -- except for reports passed on from CIA client regimes or kindred spy agencies. This was especially true of Israel's Mossad, widely (and mistakenly) believed in Washington to be omniscient, if not omnipotent, and invariably imagined to be synonymous with American interests.

"The Rise and Rise of Robert Gates: The Specialist" (Part 3), 25 June 2007.

Tower 7

Good news! They're about to figure out why Tower 7 fell. Now if they could just figure out how to explain how Muhammad Atta's passport managed to survive a fire hot enough to melt steel.

The Bush Doctrine in Lebanon

Angry Arab comments on the reemergence of Civil War in Lebanon. 

Conspiracy Theory

Hakim Bey: An Anarchists' perspective on the The Logic of Conspiracy Theory.

Bey may be on to something when he argues that historians must take conspiracy theories seriously -- virtually all regimes in the post-1945 Mid East came to power through conspiracy. But he is also right to remain attuned to chaos in the unfolding of historical processes- that is chaos theory probably brings us much closer to an accurate representation of the past than conspiracy theory. the question is, should the "vanguard" simplify for the "masses."  I'm not so sure, it seems that a historian worth his salt should be able to capture the dialectic between conspiracy (the power of conscious intent) and chaos (the law of unintended consequences) -- Marx set the bar pretty high in this regard: "Men make history..."

Likewise, I am less optimistic regarding the prospects of conspiracy as an organizational form for the radical Left. its seems that a small group of activists operating in secret is relatively easy to smash. Whereas a broad based social movement operating in the open and making full use of modern communications technologies represents a much more formidable political force (not to mention that a broad based social movement is more prone to taking democratic form- its a pretty small leap from vanguardism to authoritarianism).