Page 1 of
2 BOOK
REVIEW Non compos
POTUS Shadow
Warriors by Kenneth R Timmerman
Reviewed by Spengler
Oh, those
pesky demons! In response to the taunt that the
Eucharist resembled the cult of the wine god
Dionysus, St Justin Martyr (100-165) claimed that
demons had anticipated what Christian worship
eventually would be like, and therefore had
invented pagan practices prior to the birth of
Christ in order to discredit what later would
become Christian rites. The Catholic
Church
does not accept St Justin's reasoning. Neither
should we accept Kenneth Timmerman's account of
the demonic deeds of the American intelligence
establishment, whom he dubs "shadow warriors".
Timmerman's account of backstabbing in the
intelligence services of the Bush administration
briefly won 11th place in Amazon.com book sales.
Three weeks ago I reviewed a theological tract
which ranked 133,692nd, calling it the year's most
important book on strategy. [1] Despite its
cornucopia of detail - some which I know to be
accurate - Shadow Warriors is one of the
year's least important books. It tells us only
that nothing fails like failure. Those readers
will find it most rewarding who read the index
first, that is, to find out if and how they and
their friends are mentioned. For the
professional with a career interest in salacious
gossip, it is a treasure trove. The general
reader, though, will be confused rather than
enlightened.
"The White House knew the
shadow warriors were sabotaging their plans and
yet did nothing to stop it. Timidity?
Incompetence? Gross mismanagement? Call it what
you will. The results were foreseeable," Timmerman
writes. The President Of The United States (POTUS)
watched passively, if we are to believe the
author, while his intelligence services frustrated
his vision of a stable, democratic Middle East. I
have a simpler explanation for the POTUS'
passivity in the face of internal revolt. When
nothing works, you try everything.
Demons
are everywhere at work in Timmerman's world. The
Bush administration was embarrassed by the claim
that Iraq had bought yellowcake uranium from
Niger, the incident that led indirectly to the
Valerie Plame scandal and the perjury conviction
of Scooter Libby. The CIA knew this information
was false, Timmerman avers, and planted it on the
unsuspecting White House, the better to humiliate
the president when the hoax was exposed. Given
Timmerman's unflattering portrait of the POTUS, it
would seem that such machinations were
superfluous, and that the most efficient way to
undermine President George W Bush would have been
to encourage him.
Timmerman is shocked,
shocked to find foot-dragging going on inside the
permanent intelligence establishment. The
mandarins of the CIA and State Department opposed
the present administration's "war on terror", just
as their predecessors opposed president Ronald
Reagan's plan to bring down the Soviet empire
during the 1980s, and for the same reasons.
Bureaucracies are conservative entities. Careers
are made on the strength of received wisdom and
the network of intelligence relationships that
support it. Careerists dig in their heels against
a radical change that disrupts these
relationships.
Reagan won the intelligence
war, however, while Bush is losing. Reagan
succeeded where Bush failed because his overall
war strategy was successful, while the Bush
strategy is flawed. [2] Intelligence is an adjunct
of war-fighting; it cannot compensate for a failed
plan. Reagan broke the Soviet Union through sheer
military strength and the will to use it. American
avionics crushed their Russian counterparts in the
proxy war between Israel and Syria in the Middle
Eastern sky of 1982. Installing American
medium-range missiles in Germany in 1984 shifted
the nuclear balance in Europe. Russia lacked the
wherewithal to keep pace with Reagan's
anti-missile program.
Once Russia's
military decided that it could not win a war
against NATO, and that economic reforms were
required to match America's superior resources,
Russia's empire was on the way to ruin. Up to this
point, we now know with certainty, communist
intelligence services had done a better job of
subversion and corruption than their American
counterparts. The treachery of Aldrich Ames at the
CIA, Robert Hanssen at the FBI, and other traitors
crippled American espionage against the Soviet
Union.
Today, Cuba carries on the grand
tradition of communist espionage. Last March 19,
the Defense Intelligence Agency's top Cuba
analyst, Ana Belen Montes, pled guilty to spying
on behalf of Havana. Timmerman observes, "In the
mid-1990s, Montes was promoted to become the top
Cuba analyst for the entire US intelligence
community." Timmerman believes that Fidel Castro
has more highly placed agents in Washington. I
would be very surprised if he were wrong.
Clever people reared in the paranoid world
of autocracy develop the kind of sociopathic
habits that make for effective spies. It is
difficult for democracies to emulate such natural
training, and so it is no surprise that America is
second-best at skulduggery. America's cultural
peculiarities, I noted in the past, put it at a
disadvantage in intelligence matters (Why America is losing the
intelligence war, November 11, 2003).
Once Reagan began to win the war as such, he also
began to win the intelligence war, because
America's superior position became a magnet for
defectors.
The debate within the Bush
administration between neo-conservative
"idealists" and establishment "realists" shares a
false premise, namely that America's chief foreign
policy interest in the Middle East is stability.
The "realists" argue that the best way to achieve
stability is through selective support for
autocracies, such as that generous provider of
lucrative jobs for retired government officials,
Saudi Arabia. The "idealists" believe that Middle
Eastern democracy is the preferred path to
stability.
As Timmerman reports:
Former national security advisor
Brent Scowcroft typified the foreign policy
establishment and its rejection of the Bush
agenda. So did his former boss, the president's
father. In a bitter exchange with Condoleezza
Rice in 2003, Scowcroft berated her and the
president for promoting freedom.
"Condi,
you're not going to democratize Iraq," he said.
Rice replied that he was "just stuck in the old
days", and said that the president was
determined to change 50 years of US policy that
tolerated an autocratic Middle East. "But we've
had 50 years of peace," Scowcroft
moaned.
Fifty years of peace,
Timmerman observes, included "five major
Arab-Israeli wars, two Palestinian intifadas, the
introduction of the suicide bomber as a preferred
weapon of terrorist regimes, the 1979 revolution
in Iran", and a long list of other violent events.
Both sides are right, and both sides are
wrong.
My long-held view is that we have
not had nearly enough violence yet in the Middle
East (see More killing, please!,
June 12, 2003). The United States can do nothing
to foster stability in the Middle East, because
the slow-motion collapse of Islam makes the region
inherently unstable. If I am correct, both sides
in Washington must fail, and will devote an
inordinate portion of their day to blaming each
other.
Ronald Reagan, his CIA director
William J Casey, his national security advisor
William Clark, and others did not give a hoot for
stability in the Soviet empire. They set out to
destabilize it, and succeeded. Russian living
standards collapsed, its death-rate soared, its
birth-rate plunged, and indices of social
pathology
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mentioned. For the
professional with a career interest in salacious
gossip, it is a treasure trove. The general
reader, though, will be confused rather than
enlightened. 
