When can we end the empire?
by digby
Oliver Stone's Untold History continues to provoke the academic and political establishment into fits of mean girl nastiness. I imagine Stone is used to this, but it's still astonishing to see scholars dismiss documentary work out of hand. The latest is a review of the series and book by Bill Clinton BFF Sean Wilentz in the NY Review of Books which, in a nutshell, defends the US National Security State as if it had been ordained by God and complains that Stone and Peter Kuznick (his collaborator) are doing the devil's work by suggesting that engagement with the Soviets might have yielded benefits that the cold war could not. (I'm being somewhat facetious, obviously, but if you read the piece you'll see what I mean.)
Jonathan Schwarz has written a long piece on Wilentz's review that's well worth reading in its entirety but I'd like to focus on the important observation about the series' documented National Security through-line from the post war period to the Iraq debacle. He points out something that should be obvious to all of us and yet none of us (or very few) have actually noticed:
We can never know what might have come to pass had the U.S. adopted a different posture toward the Soviet Union, either after World War II or during the decades that followed. From the viewpoint of liberals like Wilentz, the answer clearly is: nothing good. The Soviets were determined to export their totalitarianism to the world, and any naive failure on our part to resist would end in disaster. Yes, the U.S. might have gone overboard here and there, but the overall story of the cold war was that the Soviet Union acted and we reacted.
But this is what we can know: if Wilentz's understanding of history is correct, U.S. cold war policies should have ended with the cold war itself. If the leftists were right, U.S. policies would have continued almost completely unchanged – except for the pretexts provided to Americans.
I think we know the answer to that, don't we?
The question reminded me of the many, many times during the past decade that I noted the odd fact that the national security establishment, the neocons in particular, saw everything in the world in terms of the old fight against totalitarianism. Back in 2004, I was complaining about this:
Many people have been writing recently, and some of us quite some time ago, about the fact that the Bush administration, instead of seeing the assymetrical threat of terrorism for what it was, simply applied their cold war tenets of nation state rollback to the new threat. It is an intellectual failure of huge magnitude and it will haunt us for many years to come.
If you look back at the PNAC manifestos of the late 90's that served as the guiding documents of Bush's policy you will see that terrorism per se was not perceived as a threat. Indeed, it was hardly mentioned. Richard Clarke and others have verified that the Bush administration did not take it seriously. But, what is most distressing is that they refused to let go of their erroneous notions of state sponsored terrorism even after 9/11 which led to the mistaken belief that the key to defeating al Qaeda was to overthrow the Taliban, (thus freeing them to go after what they perceived to be a real threat, the totalitarian dictator Saddam Hussein.)
There has been a lot of discussion about the "faith based" nature of this presidency, drawing parallels to unquestioning fundamentalist religion and cults of personality. There are obviously elements of all of this in explaining why the Bush administration has made so many huge strategic errors that were entirely predictable before any action was taken. However, it's more than that. You cannot explain intellectuals like Wolfowitz away with fundamentalist religion and there is no reason to believe that men like Rumsfeld and Cheney are subject to any Bush cult of personality. But, they all have one thing in common that is demonstrable throughout their public careers --- their relentless adherence to their beliefs, no matter what the facts may seem to show. Going all the way back to TEAM B and the Committee for the Present Danger, these people have been proven wrong --- proven, mind you --- again and again and yet they maintain their bedrock belief that the threat of totalitarian nations is the singular overwhelming threat to our country and they must be defeated militarily wherever they occur. These people are stuck in a fringe cold war mindset that nothing can shake. 9/11, it seems, did not change anything.
For instance, their beliefs about Iraq sponsored terrorism were not solely fometed by Laurie Mylroie. She neatly piggybacked her theory that Saddam the Stalinist was the root of all mid-east terrorism onto an earlier theory promoted by Claire Sterling which posited that all terrorism was sponsored by the Soviet Union. Her book, The Terror Network from back in 1980 made the case that terrorism could not exist without the support of a state sponsor and that idea has guided the Republican foreign policy establishment even until this day. Just as it is said that Wolfowitz and Feith encouraged everyone in the DOD to read Mylroie's book, William Casey responded to his analysts assertion that there was no Soviet terrorist conspiracy by saying,"Read Claire Sterling's book and forget this mush. I paid $13.95 for this and it told me more than you bastards whom I pay $50,000 a year." This is, then, an old story.
In those days I saw this as a peculiarly neo-conservative worldview. But the truth is that this was the rationale behind the bipartisan National Security Policy of the entire post-war period, which Untold History documents (and which I should have remembered --- hey,hey LBJ how many kids....) The neo-cons were just more aggressive about it and both sides created the illusion that there was a serious argument about these things for their own purposes.
It was awkward for a while after the cold war, trying to fit that old totalitarian square peg into the asymmetrical terrorist threat. The selling of Iraq was so terribly clumsy, consciously drawing upon Stalinist imagery with lugubrious rhetoric about rape rooms and "gassing his own people," because they were still caught up in their own fantasy, as if it was the only way they knew how to get off. It would appear that the Obama administration has gone a long way toward solving that problem with its antiseptic drone warfare that keeps the threat level high and the risk level low. We have adjusted now and no longer need totalitarianism to sell us on the need for our empire. Today it's all about us needing a "light footprint" on the ground and eyes in the sky all over the planet to keep us safe from the boogeyman.
I didn't see Stone's series saying that the containment theory was wrong in all respects but merely that there were missed opportunities, particularly at the end of the war and the decade following to try to seek a different path. The temptation to be a military superpower was too great and the industrial and political forces that wanted it were too powerful. (And anyway, you can't be a great hero without a great villain, right?) But even if it's absolutely true that the Soviet threat required two generation's worth of global military build up, it's also certainly true that one would have expected the period since 1989 to be one of withdrawal from empire. And that has not happened. Like Jonathan, I can't help but see that as just more evidence that much of the rationale for the National Security State was bullshit from the very beginning.
As he points out:
[E]stablishment historians like Wilentz play the same role today as they did during the cold war: not just refusing to ask critical questions about U.S. history and its effect on the present day, but shouting down those who attempt to do so. That's what Wilentz is doing with his review of Untold History. And it's what he did in October, 2001 when he explained why the U.S. had just been attacked: "To the terrorists, America's crime – its real crime – is to be America."
Or as George W. Bush put it:
I'm amazed that there's such misunderstanding of what our country is about that people would hate us. I am -- like most Americans, I just can't believe it because I know how good we are.
I'm sure the Soviets believed exactly the same thing.
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