Page 2 of
2 BOOK REVIEW Non compos
POTUS Shadow
Warriors by Kenneth R Timmerman
Reviewed by Spengler
soared. Russia may never recover as
a nation from its defeat in the Cold War.
Unlike the intelligence establishment of
the 1980s, Reagan and his people believed the
strategic balance to be inherently unstable.
Nuclear deterrence, the received wisdom from the 1950s
through the 1970s, offered the
false appearance of stability. Deterrence works in
the case of two players who can destroy each other
with a clear tripwire. But the nuclear tripwire in
Cold War Europe was frighteningly fuzzy. Russia's
war plan, if it came to that, began with a nuclear
bombardment of West Germany. The objective was to
harness the vibrant economy of West Germany to the
creaking cart of the Russian economy. The treat of
invasion or bombardment was enough to break the
will of the West Germans.
In 1981, the
leaders of then chancellor Helmut Schmidt's inner
circle were ready to fold to the Russians. The
Germans knew that the Russians knew that there was
no clear tripwire at their border. Rather than
stability, Europe was playing a game of "chicken"
... the Russians threatened to invade (and
destabilized through their subversion forces in
the West) and offered "trade deals" which amounted
to harnessing the German economy to the Soviet
empire. If the US had not used covert resources to
keep the Germans in line, Germany would have
accepted Russian terms.
It came down to
letting the Russians bluff (and perhaps even
fight) their way into control over Germany and
perhaps the rest of Europe, or taking aggressive
action, in the form of installing medium-range
nuclear missiles in Germany. The Soviets seriously
considered a military response to the medium-range
missiles in the famous 1983 "war scare". The phony
equilibrium of "mutually assured destruction"
masked an underlying instability, and it was
Reagan's genius to destabilize rather than to
pursue the phantom of stability.
War with
the Soviet Empire was too horrible to contemplate,
but the Reagan administration took that risk. The
outlines of the story can be found in CIA
historian Benjamin Fischer's monograph, A Cold
War Conundrum: The 1983 Soviet War Scare. [3]
German horror at American policy was not feigned,
for in the event of war, the Germans never would
have found out who had won. Establishment
objections were not hysterical; it was reasonable
to believe the risk was too great. Nonetheless,
Reagan’s visionary plan succeeded, and in
retrospect we can say it was worth the terrible
risk.
A century of instability in the
Islamic world also is terrible to contemplate,
although not quite as terrible as the prospect of
nuclear war with an equally-matched world power.
But no one in the present administration has the
iron guts to abide this idea. It is silly to blame
a mythical pro-Israeli cabal inside the Bush
administration for America's war plans. Although
Ariel Sharon used to speak of a century of war,
the prospect of prolonged conflict with the Arabs
is too painful for Israelis to consider.
By taking responsibility for political
stability in Iraq, America is stuck with a painful
and costly occupation. Timmerman tells us that
Bush originally wanted only to liberate Iraq, not
to occupy it. If only the US had supported the
Iraqi dissident Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi
National Congress, he believes, Iraq would have
had a democratic government. His account of the
mandarins’ efforts to vilify Chalabi rings true,
but it stretches credibility to claim that all
would have been well if only Iraq's future had
been left in his hands.
Timmerman's story
starts to fall apart just after the American
invasion of Iraq, when retired General Jay Garner,
one of Timmerman's good guys, arrived in Baghdad.
"[Secretary of defense Donald] Rumsfeld made it
crystal clear: the United States had no intention
of occupying Iraq. Our job, he said repeatedly, is
to get rid of Saddam and create the conditions for
the Iraqis to take over."
Timmerman blames
"faulty intelligence provided by the CIA" for the
surprises that awaited Garner. "The United States
never expected it would have to fulfil the
functions of the police and the army after
Saddam's regime fell." As he observes,
... after the United States removed
the Ba'ath party stooges who ran the police and
the army under Saddam, both institutions simply
collapsed. Where they had expected to capture
entire army units intact, US troops instead
found empty uniforms, neatly piled in rows, some
even with their rifles carefully set alongside.
The Iraqi soldiers had apparently been ordered
by their officers to simply change into civilian
clothes and go home.
The Bush
administration expected to cut off the snake's
head, and take control of the body, as Timmerman
put it. The "body" of Iraq, the whole of its civil
society, was constituted by the Ba'ath Party, the
only institution of public life in Saddam's Iraq.
Yet Timmerman denounces the State
Department for opposing "de-Ba'athification", that
is, the destruction of Saddam's totalitarian
regime. Whether this was a good idea, a bad idea,
or neither, de-Ba'athification left Iraq without
the fragile endoskeleton of civil society it had
possessed under Saddam. The Iraqi army did not
simply disappear. Large parts of it went
underground, or reverted to militias of tribe and
clan.
In short, Timmerman admits that the
US failed to understand how Iraq would implode in
the absence of the Ba'ath party, which means that
its plan for liberation without occupation was
delusional to begin with. Timmerman rakes a good
deal of high-quality dirt in the field of
infighting among intelligence services, but his
overall view is unsatisfying. Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice is portrayed throughout as a
loyal supporter of the Bush "freedom agenda",
while her deputy, John Negroponte, becomes a
monster of depravity. Yet some of the wicked
Negroponte minions portrayed by Timmerman were
appointed by Secretary Rice before Negroponte
joined Rice's State Department. The Good Guy/Bad
Guy division simply doesn't stand scrutiny.
Because of a social slight at a Yale
student fraternity, Timmerman claims, Negroponte
bore a forty-year grudge against Porter Goss and
conspired to end his short-lived career as
Director of Central Intelligence. In Timmerman's
account, Goss resigned to chief of staff Josh
Bolten before the president knew anything about
the matter. Ronald Reagan at least hired and fired
his own CIA directors.
Final note:
Timmerman incorrectly attributes to Ludwig
Wittgenstein the conundrum as to whether a tree
that falls in the forest makes a sound if no one
is there to hear it. This of course was said
centuries earlier by George Berkeley (1685-1753).
The error suggests that Timmerman has not studied
philosophy, an impression that is reinforced by
the mutually contradictory nature of some of his
assertions as cited above. He would do well to
learn a few basic precepts, starting with the Law
of the Excluded Middle.
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