20 February 2005Alright. I owe you all. DEADLY CONCEITSThe arrogance of our self-styled democratic leaders is tremendous. Let's not touch on their narcissism just yet. Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of War and exponent of his own brand of "fuzzy logic" (in keeping with a fully techno-savvy Pentagon), amply illustrated their self-righteousness and self-importance this past week. He performed for us not just once but rose to two encores on Capitol Hill last Wednesday and Thursday. He was called to give testimony to the House Armed Services Committee, the Senate Appropriations Committee, and the Senate Armed Services Committee. In the first and last venues, he was supposed to answer specifically questions about what American armed forces were supposed to be doing around the world during fiscal year 2006 (which begins in October) and how money would be spent on them. Before the Senate Appropriations Committee, he was supposed to explain the $82 billion supplementary defense-spending request that the Bush administration slid under Congress's door after they had transferred the official 2006 budget to the Legislature with much fanfare about its fairness and parsimony. Typically, the administration was trying to avoid being held to account by pretentious mere mortals - in this case, the House Budget Committee. In every performance Rumsfeld treated the members of the committees of both houses in a manner of contempt until recently reserved for journalists who took their job description seriously. It seems the Bush administration is so intent on world domination that the US Congress does not even deserve a half-arsed excuse. (It would be nice truthfully to be able to use some shorthand for the administration's policies that doesn't involve terms unfortunately associated with conspiracy nuts.) Rumsfeld came under the most sustained questioning and criticism from members of the very political party now ruling from the White House. Nevertheless, he couldn't be bothered to give a positive response to most of the questions that were put to him, and when he did deign to answer, feigning weary annoyance, he was vague and confusing. After reading an opening statement that chastised Congress for "an increasingly casual regard for the protection of classified documents and information," he then seemed to flaunt the power of secrecy before the House Committee. When Democrat Ike Skelton of Missouri asked him for an estimate of the size of the insurgency against American forces in Iraq, Rumsfeld replied, "I am not going to give you a number for it, because it's not my business to do intelligent [sic] work." Skelton then pursued his question, asking Rumsfeld about reports supplied to him by US intelligence agencies. Rumsfeld responded, "I've got two of them here in front of me." Could he tell the Committee what they contained? "Not just now," answered Rumsfeld, "They're classified." Later, when he decided that he had had enough of lines of questioning both about the number of insurgents and whether America meant to make a permanent military base of Iraq, he announced unceremoniously that he and his coterie were going to lunch, and he began packing up his secret briefing papers. He left promptly at one o'clock, with a dozen of the Committee's 62 members still waiting to pitch their two cents worth in. The abrupt self-dismissal left the Chairman, Duncan Hunter, Republican from California, apologizing to the Committee members on behalf of his partisan comrade Rumsfeld, That afternoon, Rumsfeld appeared before the Senate Appropriations Committee, where he gave terse answers to every non-trivial question. He confessed ignorance of the figures for the increase in soldiers' families' death benefits. When the issue of a timetable for withdrawal of American troops from Iraq came up again in this setting, Rumsfeld gave the now characteristic "whenever" answer. Mostly he said, "I don't know," without a hint of apology. His testimony, if that term isn't an overstatement in itself, to the Senate Armed Services Committee told more through its evasiveness and doubletalk. When examined by John McCain (Republican, Arizona) about the reports of the size of the Iraqi rebellion, with which he had tantalized the House Committee the day before, Rumsfeld made two rejoinders that were dissatisfactory in their own particular ways, and both of which were so disingenuous as to bode of a more sinister, simple answer. On the one hand, he said that the "disorganized nature of the insurgency made it difficult to pin down a reliable, specific estimate," and then, as if stating the obvious was going to get him off the hook, he added, "They're not static. The numbers change." On the other hand, he declared that it was not his place to declassify the numbers provided to him (which he had in front of him the day before, at least), though he clearly felt secure in saying that the rebellion had a "limited capacity" (limited to "only" 50 to 60 attacks per day!). That he had briefing papers at all was evidence that someone in government had not been dissuaded from trying to do "intelligent work." Indeed, various offices had come up with fairly precise, though admittedly inconsistent numbers, and it was clearly Rumsfeld's intent to deflect attention away from these. He called Iraqi General Mohammed Abdullah Shahwani's recent estimate of 40,000 insurgents and 200,000 "part-time supporters" an exaggeration, since it is higher than both the CIA's and the DIA's estimates. CNN, the Washington Post and other media outlets, however, have reported the Gen. George Casey's official estimate of 15,000 insurgents killed or captured last year, a large portion of whom, the army claimed, came from Fallujah alone. Even if this number represented all of last year's crop, not only would it be more than the metaphorical "handful" of "bad guys," but it would also be almost half of Gen. Shahwani's "high" estimate of 40,000. Furthermore, essentially the same sources reported in early February US assessments that produced a figure of 12,000 to 15,000 active insurgents. This number is both fairly precise, concerning groups that are secretive by nature, and (again) in the same order of magnitude as the liberal, Iraqi estimate. It could also mean that as many as one in every 1000 Iraqi men are actively engaged in armed struggle, even if taken as a conservative estimate. The proportion is very likely higher in populations that are famously hostile to the American occupiers, like the Sunni Arabs of central Iraq. One can't avoid the conclusion that the US authorities either don't know or won't tell. The first option seems unlikely, given that the CIA and the DoD undoubtedly have a lot of pointy heads working on these assessments, putting their specialized socio-technological skills to effective use. It seems to me that what is more likely than pure ignorance is something akin to the distortion of the National Intelligence Estimate concerning WMD in Iraq but in mathematical reverse. Chances are that Rumsfeld has seen studies compiled by several teams, and even the lowest insurgent count does not seem easily saleable either to Congress or to the general public. Just as it was more expedient to scare people with visions of a nuclear mushroom cloud, so too do cabinet secretaries find it easier, at least in the short term, to lead everyone to believe that the insurgency is still due to a few "hardcore," "Terrorist" elements. However difficult this will be to sustain, it already poses a problem for one of the few prolix answers that Rumsfeld made to the Congressional committees. He wants us to believe both that the numbers are relatively low (though he won't divulge exactly how low) and that the organization of the resistance is so complex as to defy accurate calculation of its parts at any moment. It occurs to me that the relations between a handful of Zarqawiites and those Baathist honchos not currently employed by the American-designed Iraqi Army cannot become very complex and still permit them to be effective. Yet effective is what they seem to be so far, at least in terms of killing Americans, maintaining a state of emergency, and suppressing American designs on the national economy. Rumsfeld's protestations before Congress to the effect that the insurgency is seems "disorganized" and fluid (if the latter isn't just some kind of sweeping Herakleitian observation that "everything flows") may betray some truth, even if they were deployed at the time to justify hiding the numbers implicated. In short, it is likely that the administration doesn't understand the nature of what it is up against, in spite of the best efforts of the bean-counters. Shahwani's comments may well be accurate to the extent, at least, that he, unlike many American bureaucrats, recognizes that the insurgency has support in a network of ordinary civilian non-combatants. There is the added problem that Rumsfeld and his kind may wish to believe their own lies and prevarications and adhere, conveniently, to their own simplistic models and double-think, if for no other reason than to save their own vainglorious faces. Viet-nowComparisons with the US war in Vietnam are obvious to the point of seeming facile at times. Nevertheless, I think that a valuable lesson can be learned from studying the CIA's assessment of the strength and numbers of the "Viet Cong" in South Vietnam during the American war there. Former CIA analyst Ralph McGehee, one of the founders of the non-governmental National Security Archives, made this the main topic of his memoir Deadly Deceits. McGehee arrived in Vietnam in October of 1968, a few months after the famous Tet Offensive, when rebel forces breached the walls of the US embassy compound. He describes this "green zone" of that era, "with its ten-foot-high concrete fence, its circular gun turrets, its roof-top helicopter pad, and its thick white outer concrete shell designed to defend against any incoming artillery or rockets." McGehee perceived two fatal, inextricably linked problems in the US government's comprehension of the insurgency in Vietnam. Firstly, analysts are bureaucrats fixed their attention on the number of armed insurgents or enemy soldiers there were, while attributing non-combatant support to a few Communist agents. This assumption fueled the methodology they used for estimating the scale of the resistance. He writes, The [CIA] station's intelligence briefings on the situation in South Vietnam confirmed all my fears. Intelligence analysts giving the briefings talked only about the number of armed Viet Cong, the slowly increasing North Vietnamese regular army, and the occasional member of the "Communist infrastructure," i.e., the lone tax collector or party member who "terrorized" the population into cooperation with the Communists. They made no mention of the mass-based Farmers' Liberation Association, the Women's Liberation Association, or the Communist youth organizations, all of which in some areas certainly included entire populations To be sure, there is no obvious focal point of rebel organization in Iraq today, like the Communist Party in South Vietnam (though the day is young still), but as in Iraq today, the paper-pushers seem to have failed to notice that the resistance was indigenous and deeply rooted. McGehee writes about the euphemistically named Civil Operations and Development Support group, or "CORDS," which presumably coordinated the interests of the various US agencies represented in South Vietnam, from the CIA to USAID. The participants in these meetings bandied about figures provided to them by literal headhunters, from which extrapolations about the size of the insurgency supposedly could be made, rather than on the basis of a comprehensive study of social movements: The CORDS meetings, the killings by the CIA's assassination teams - the Provincial Reconnaissance Units - and the absurd intelligence-collection activities progressed as in a Greek tragedy. No one seemed to understand what was going on. Yet people died, reports flowed, meetings convened, and the gods frowned The resonances with contemporary Iraq here are several, not least the mention of the so called "Salvador Option," which might as well be called the "Saigon Option." None of this meant that the CORDS officials and their superiors in Washington were always happy even with their underestimates. The review of the secret figures from the National Intelligence Estimates, Special National Intelligence Estimates, and Current Intelligence Weekly Summaries published by Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers reveal a gross underestimation of the overall movement, ranging from 10,000 to 72,000 persons over the course of the 1960s. In fact, the membership of the South Vietnamese Communist Party during the period ranged from 350,000 to 500,000 persons. To McGehee's way of thinking, this was evidence of deadly self-deception, beyond the propagandistic uses to which the figures could be put. Recollecting a casual conversation over cocktails with then CORDS director William Colby, later Direction of Central Intelligence during the CIA's "times of trouble" from 1973 to 1976, McGehee writes, All the time I was thinking, you dumb, blind son of a bitch, do you believe all the garbage in your book of statistics? Don't you know that the Agency's intelligence is misleading everyone? ... I was thinking, here we are running around shouting statistics that disprove the reality. Am I, is he, a inmate in this asylum or a keeper? Or is there any difference? I suggest that McGehee has here evidence of how the arrogance of American imperial agents blends with their narcissism. They are both absolutely sure they are right and that they are beautiful and should be loved and emulated by everyone, their movement through the world suffused with an angelic light and grace. This combination of unquestioning attitudes - one of which demands, the other of which assumes and seizes - makes up a deadly self-conceit. McGehee's allusion to Greek tragedy is apposite: this is the chemistry for monstrous hubris. Looking out of the plane window as he flew out of Vietnam to his next job, he observed, How many more Vietnamese and Americans would die here? How may civilians would we kill, how many children would we napalm? Nothing seemed capable of stopping the US juggernaut from pursuing it s own fantasies. His rhetorical questions should make the blood run cold in the present day, and yet such questions seem to fall on too many deaf ears. What is more, the mandarins can only make sense of the world as though it were created in their own image - hence their obsession with individual actors, hence their incomprehension of the social bases of resistance to domination. It is up to us who want the world to be different not just to tell these people that they are wrong, but also, in a sense, to remind them of how they are ugly, unlovable, and willfully blind and deaf. The first task is easy, if we are allowed to know what they are actually doing, since it only involves working with a fairly clearly coded common system of values and ethics. The second is much more difficult, since it means examining how people - including ourselves - actually accrue the power for setting the times, places, and general terms of discourse, and by extension how we conceive of ourselves as doers and sayers in the world, in relation to others. It means not just sharpening our intellects and our rhetorical and typing skills, but also, sometimes, pulling on the loose threads of the social fabric in which our precious selves have long been swaddled. Only then, with the help of others, we can weave a new cloth. Feedback should be sent to me, Michael Lane, at mflane@acephale.org | ARCHIVESMarch 2006November 2005July 2005May 2005February 2005October 2004September 2004August 2004July 2004June 2004May 2004 |