Page 3 of 5 THE
UNDERTAKER'S TALLY, Part 1 Donald Rumsfeld's sharp
elbows By Roger Morris
young Jackson aide named Richard Perle.
Perle's somber, if oily, manner hid his own
considerable lack of intellect or knowledge about
either Russia or the Middle East, but his hardline
anti-Soviet and Zionist zeal gave him, as
Jackson's policy broker in the politics of the
moment, a cachet and following far beyond his
meager substance. Rumsfeld's collusion with
Jackson would thus introduce him to some of the
still-marginal publicists, ideologues
and
Washington hangers-on who would take the term
"neo-conservative" as the label for their
career-plumping chauvinism and, less audibly,
their tragically intermingled allegiances to right
wings in both the US and Israel.
In
Rumsfeld's early tie to this
wanna-be-establishment claque were omens of the
history they would make together after 2001. It
was his "sharp elbows" that were thrown to create
the notorious "Team B", a collection of incipient
neo-cons and Russophobes in and out of government,
including Paul Wolfowitz. They were summoned to
offer a fearsome analysis of Soviet capabilities
and intentions that would be an alternative to
comparatively unfrightening (and accurate) CIA
assessments being attacked by Ronald Reagan and
his right-wing minions in the 1976 campaign. In
this surrender to election-year demagoguery could
be found the hands of the White House and the
elder Bush at the CIA (more Ford regime shame
politely forgotten in the mournful,
anxiety-ridden, anyone-compared-with-George-W
fin de 2006 moment), but Rumsfeld's role
was crucial - and the consequences historic.
The absurdity and ideological corruption
of Team B's "analysis" of the Soviet bogeyman
(along with a desired future confrontation with
China, a nakedly racist, in essence right-wing
Israeli view of the Arab world, and a refusal to
face the Vietnam defeat) would be plain even then;
though decades later, the post-Soviet archives
would definitively reveal it for the fraud it was.
As it was meant to, it fed the massive arms
buildup of the Reagan '80s, and with it the
engorging of the military-industrial colossus
that, in turn, filled Republican campaign coffers.
And all of this, of course, including the ensuing
distortions in domestic priorities, would pave the
way for Rumsfeld's eventual return to power.
The "Team B" scandal also foreshadowed an
insidious post-September 11 plague, the right-wing
assault on relatively non-ideological national
intelligence that was to lead to the blatant
substitution of alternative "intelligence"
operations in Rumsfeld's Pentagon and Cheney's
vice-presidential office (full-time versions of
"Team B", as it were), as well as the coercion and
corruption of conventional CIA channels.
In 1976, Rumsfeld worked assiduously to
undercut any intelligence that challenged his
right-wing bias and, with Cheney helpfully in the
background at the White House, fought hard to
drown any meaningful intelligence reforms after
mid-1970s hearings chaired by senator Frank Church
and congressman Otis Pike offered shocking
revelations of CIA covert-operations abuses. The
resulting half-measures and truncated
accountability sent unmistakable signals through
Washington, setting the stage for various CIA
rampages of the 1980s under Reagan campaign
manager William Casey (and one of Casey's
ambitious, agreeable aides named Robert Gates).
The direct consequences in blowback and loss of
professional integrity would be felt for decades
to come.
Then there was the Middle East.
In mid-1976, exiled Palestinians allied with a
Lebanese nationalist coalition to challenge
politically and economically the traditional
privileged rule of the West's Christian-dominated
client regime in Beirut. Faced with this, the US
secretary of defense was decisive in the secret
US-Israeli instigation of a Syrian military
intervention meant to thwart both the Palestinians
and the Lebanese rebels. Rumsfeld muscled the
covert action through, despite Kissinger's initial
hesitation. It ushered in a three-decade-long
Syrian occupation of Lebanon, with relentless
machinations in the Levant involving the Israeli
intelligence service, Mossad, the CIA and,
beginning under Rumsfeld as never before, the
Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
Already significant in the 1950s, the
CIA-Mossad collaboration in Lebanon and elsewhere
certainly predated Rumsfeld, and crucial decisions
in the deepening collusion would come after him.
But the 1976 intervention, which he backed so
strongly, would take the complicity to a new
level, with a twisting sequel of tumult and
intrigue that directly paved the way for the 1982
Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and thus for the
eventual rise of Hezbollah.
At the same
time, Rumsfeld avidly stepped up ongoing US arms
shipments to the shah of Iran's corrupt,
US-installed oligarchic tyranny - its
torture-ready SAVAK (Organization for Intelligence
and National Security) secret police intimately
allied with Mossad, the CIA and the DIA. In 1976,
Rumsfeld also pressed the sale to the waning shah
of up to eight nuclear reactors with fuel and
lasers capable of enriching uranium to
weapons-grade levels. Ford was prudently uneasy at
first, but relented under unanimous pressure from
his men. Cheney backed Rumsfeld from the start in
urging an Iranian nuclear capability; and, in this
at least, they were joined by their arch-rival
Kissinger, ever solicitous of his admirer the
shah, ever oblivious to internal Islamic politics
- he himself primed by an obscure but vocal
33-year-old State Department aide named Paul
Wolfowitz.
At its Rumsfeldian peak in
1976, US weapons and intelligence trafficking with
the rotting Iranian imperial regime took up the
time of some 800 Pentagon officers. Barely two
years later, the shah's regime would fall to the
ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's Islamic Revolution,
in part under the sheer weight and waste of the
Pentagon's patronage. Like CIA-DIA connivance with
SAVAK - which included coordinated assassinations
of Iranian opposition political figures or clerics
and, in 1977, even Khomeini's son - Pentagon
complicity with the hated old order made all but
inevitable the widespread anti-American sentiment
in Iran that would in the future be so effectively
exploited by the Islamic regime's propaganda.
Detonating in the 1979 seizure of US Embassy
hostages in Tehran, popular Iranian hostility
would burn out of a history of intervention and
intrigue few Americans ever knew the slightest
thing about.
In this way, Rumsfeld and
others, including Gates and his slightly mad
patron Casey at the CIA, would all, in some
degree, become policy godfathers of the mullahs'
regime in Tehran as well as of Hezbollah.
'The Dark Ages' Even more
costly would be the toll the Rumsfeld interregnum
would exact deep inside the US military. However
brief, Rumsfeld's mid-1970s rule over the Defense
Department proved, in certain respects, the most
crucial moment at the Pentagon since World War II.
In seven tumultuous years from Johnson's fall to
Nixon's, spanned by defeat and de facto mutiny in
Vietnam, four secretaries would troop through
Defense, each consumed by war or politics, none
engaging the institution's historic plight.
Taking office six months after the fall of
Saigon, Rumsfeld would inherit the first truly
post-Vietnam military. Fittingly, the
institutional crisis he faced had come into being
over the full two decades of his adult life since
the 1950s. By the time he settled in at the
Pentagon, that crisis had already been extensively
studied and well documented. Conclusions were
available for the asking - or hearing or reading -
in any Pentagon ring, at any military post at home
or abroad as well as in Congress, the White House,
and the press, not to speak of the American
public. It was unmistakable in the searing
experiences of a war whose dark-soil graves at
nearby Arlington, Virginia, were still fresh.
By any measure, Rumsfeld arrived at a rare
and exceedingly fleeting moment when the enormous
US war machine might have come to terms with its
past, and so the future. The failure to do so -
hardly Rumsfeld's alone, but his role was decisive
- would haunt the United States and the world into
the 21st century.
Vietnam had laid bare
the malignant decaying of America's armed forces
that began in the wake of their first unwon war in
Korea. There was "no substitute for victory",
General Douglas MacArthur had written a
congressman in the letter that finally prodded
president Harry Truman to fire him as commander of
US-United Nations forces in Korea in 1951. The
services nonetheless promptly found a perfectly
reasonable substitute - for a while - in the warm
bath of a careerist managerial ethic.
Ruled in World War II by an ever-growing
bureaucracy, ever more inhospitable to the officer
as individual, America's superpower military was,
as the Korean War began in 1950, already a
sclerotic giant. "A glandular thing" was how
secretary of defense Robert Lovett would describe
it a decade later to John Kennedy. The brutal
Korean stalemate, following on the early rout of a
billet-flabby, semi-demobilized occupation army
from Japan, and later the frozen, bloody retreat
from a heedless, MacArthur-led advance to conquer
North Korea right up to the Chinese border, added
to the curse.
Faced with the demanding,
unnerving politics of a nuclear-armed peace, a
supposedly matchless force met its match in Korea
not just on the battlefield, but in the murky
realms of political sophistication. In response,
grappling to redefine its place (and reassure
itself at the same time), the US military in the
1950s came to produce a preponderance of what one
critic called the "formlessly ambitious" officer,
one who saw climbing the military ladder like
ascent in any other corporate culture. To a blight
that Charles de Gaulle once deplored in his French
army as "solely careerism", the post-Korea US
military added the fetish and pseudo-science of
"management" - warriors astride desks, commanding
paper flow and brandishing the numerology of
budgets with ever more expensive weapons systems.
Procurement plunder and corruption, the
venal revolving door between senior officers and
corporate contractors, the inveterate lack of
authentic accounting and accountability at almost
every level - all the old Pentagon scourges now
ran rampant. The good staff life rather than
active command, "ticket punching", the right job
at the right time - all of this fostered an
officer corps overwhelmingly pursuing rank as an
end itself, at pains to do no more than what one
embittered combat colonel recalled as "a necessary
but minimal amount of field duty".
As
credentials merely accumulated, as efficiency
reports inflated and grew meaningless, there was
the inevitable atrophy of ethics and the military
art. Oddly enough, management itself, the faith
and practice of the new creed, was the first
casualty of institutional shallowness and
self-protection. Winners emerged compromised and
cynical; losers, alienated and contemptuous of
superiors. General morale, credible command
authority, and old-fashioned elan as well as
esprit de corps were decimated in the
process. Graduates and non-graduates alike trained
their disillusion on such institutions as the
United States Military Academy on the Hudson River
at West Point, New York, which by the early 1960s
many privately mocked as the South Hudson
Institute of Technology - SHIT. The academy's
sacred "duty, honor, country" now seemed eclipsed
in practice by any mammoth organization's
immutable rule of survival: cover your ass.
Despite the need to understand the history
and politics of vast new arenas of US policy -
regions of potential military embroilment such as
Asia or the Middle East - once-elite service
graduate schools such as the war colleges became
what one study termed "usually superficial and
vapid". There would be no 20th-century American
Carl von Clausewitz, wrote Ward Just, the best of
the era's military-affairs journalists, surveying
the wreckage of a US defense establishment driven
by corporate inanity, "because the writing of
Von Krieg (On War) took time and
serious thought".
Much of this
bureaucratic decadence overtook other arms of the
US government in the 1950s, not least the State
Department. As
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
