Laura Rozen, whose blog ‘War and Piece‘ I read regularly (and even agree with on occasion) has a column up at the Washington Monthly about the blindness of the neocons.
It’s called ‘Con Tract,’ and it lays the blame for the War in Iraq on … Leo Strauss.
I know, you’re shocked.
It stems from a community of academic/policy guys from the University of Chicago.
Shulsky and Schmitt [both U of C students] argue that such a belief system foolishly disregards the most important lesson from Strauss’s teachings: that the nature of the regime or government under analysis means everything in trying to predict its intentions. Rogue regimes and dictatorships, they argue, operate under totally different value systems and principles than do democracies like the United States. Tyrannies warp the very souls of those who live under and serve them. In fundamental ways, this makes subjects of tyrannies not like us. “Because of the importance of the regime, it would be foolish to expect to be able to deduce theories of political behavior that would be universal, i.e. that would apply to democracies and tyrannies alike,” Shulsky and Schmitt write.
Central to understanding the behavior of rogue regimes, Shulsky and Schmitt posit, is these regimes’ use of deception. Tyrannies are built on foundations of lies, and those who live under them must, for survival, speak in code, even when speaking the truth. The words and behavior of dictators and their henchmen, therefore, mask hidden meanings; they cannot be understood at face value. Rather than grasp this difference, they argue, conventional intelligence experts have adopted a flawed analytical strategy called mirror-imaging– “i.e., imagining that the country one is studying is fundamentally similar to one’s own and hence can be understood in the same terms.”
Shulsky and Schmitt have a point: Mirror-imaging is indeed a problem at the C.I.A. But nevertheless, much of their critique belabors a straw man. Mirror-imaging, though a real problem, is not a strategy which anyone at the C.I.A. or elsewhere in the intelligence community defends.
So, from Rozen’s point of view, our mistaken impressions about Saddam were amplifications of thin facts because of the (to her) Straussian attitude that finds deceit because it is expected.
The neocon policy intellectuals who came to power in the Bush administration were convinced that Saddam’s denials that he had reconstituted his nuclear or other WMD programs were an elaborate smokescreen. But unlike many other analysts, the neocons refused to be “fooled” by a general lack of hard evidence to this effect or that he had made alliances with Osama bin Laden. Instead, they imputed to stray bits of intelligence data–a reported meeting with a terrorist here, an aluminum tube there–an almost mystical significance, seeing each as evidence of Saddam’s boundless capacity for deceit.
Were the neocons fooling themselves? Or were they aware of the thinness of the evidence but willing to use it deceitfully to convince the public–and perhaps the president himself–to support the invasion? The neocons’ harshest critics believe the latter. They note, for instance, that Shulsky’s Special Plans office was borne out of the same Pentagon department where Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith once set up the equally mysterious “Office of Strategic Influence,” to send out disinformation to the enemy. That enterprise was quickly dismantled once lawmakers got wind of the fact that such an office could also–perhaps inadvertently –disseminate disinformation to the American public.
Rozen leaves one key factor out of this exercise which leads – me at least – to a far different conclusion.
And that is the fact that the ‘Con’ we ought to be discussing isn’t the ‘con’ in conservatism, but the one in con job.
Because, in the recent past, that just what was done to our intelligence agencies and diplomats. History, rather than philosophy might be a good discipline to study to see why the world was so sure Hussein had weapons.
Let’s go to the record, and talk about the flat misses by the intelligence community and the cases where deliberate misrepresentation led us astray – particularly about proliferation of various kinds.
Until 1995, Iraq denied having had any serious intention of building nuclear weapons, despite abundant evidence to the contrary uncovered by Action Team investigations. Then, after Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law and head of the Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization, defected in August 1995, his revelations about the scope and intensity of the nuclear weapons program threatened the credibility of the government’s denial.
In response to Kamel’s defection, the Iraqi government produced the so-called “chicken farm documents.” Several days after Kamel fled to Jordan, senior UNSCOM and Action Team officials were taken to Kamel’s farm, where a half-million-page cache of documents was stashed in a shed. The documents shed light on extensive programs to develop and build weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons.
The Iraqi government said it had not made a decision to manufacture nuclear weapons. The government said, in effect, that it had been duped–that Kamel had developed these programs without authorization and had hidden the incriminating evidence at his farm.
or this:
The international community discovered after Iraq’s defeat in the 1991 Persian Gulf War that Iraq had a much more advanced nuclear weapons program than either the United States or the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had suspected. The IAEA was charged with undertaking inspections to ensure that Iraq complied with disarmament requirements mandated by UN Security Council Resolution 687, but the United Nations withdrew the inspectors in December 1998 after Iraq stopped cooperating with them. The agency, however, reported in 1999 that, based on the inspectors’ work until that time, there was “no indication that Iraq possesses nuclear weapons or any meaningful amounts of weapon-usable nuclear material, or that Iraq has retained any practical capability (facilities or hardware) for the production of such material.”
And it’s not just about Iraq. Korea cheated, as well. India’s decision was a surprise to us – as he Rozen article itself notes. Libya has a more advanced program than we knew about until Pakistan started cooperating with us.
Given that less-than-stellar track record of compliance and certainty on our part, one thing that must be factored into the decisions made on the basis of incomplete information isn’t just the inherent philosophical bias of the decision-maker, but the facts as they are presented in recent history.
Everyone on my side of the issue is vulnerable on the issue of WMD; we have to acknowledge that the failure to find them or demonstrate he had them is material.
But it’s just silly to suggest that the suspicion was purely ideological, rather than practical.
Her analysis seems to overlook one critical point — EVERYONE thought Saddam restarted his WMD programs after kicking out the inspectors.
We can blame Chalabhi and his lying thugs a little bit for feeding us bogus intel, but it certainly wasn’t just the Neo-Cons that thought Saddam had WMDs.
What everyone else seems to overlook is that our analysis should have changed after Bush got the inspectors back in, and they found very little.
(I thought Bush’s plan all along was to act so ready to invade that we wouldn’t have to — he scored a huge triumph when he forced Saddam to back down. Then he would keep a foot on Saddam’s neck while focusing on destroying the Islamic terrorists. Boy was I wrong.)
No one is saying that suspicions were purely idealogical; rather, it is the representation of those suspicions as fact that was clearly so.
“Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.”
“GW Bush, March 7, 2003”:http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030317-7.html
Leaves no doubt.
Please refrain from trying to re-write history to suit your narrative. That is what is silly.
A.L., it is the nature of intel analysis to be conservative. Consider Type A and Type B error. Type A is ‘you say it is when it isn’t’, Type B is ‘you say it isn’t when it is’. Now which of these could have the more disasterous and horrific consesquences? IMHO, most intel analysis seeks to protect against Type B. So we err on the side of caution, always.
That’s funny, Jinderella.
I wonder what kind of person views the commitment of 90% of our active armed forces and $200+ billion dollars to invade an Arab country in the heart of the Muslim world after we were attacked by stateless jihadist terrorists as “erring on the side of caution”?
Let me answer my own question: A Bush supporter.
“… they imputed to stray bits of intelligence data–a reported meeting with a terrorist here, an aluminum tube there–an almost mystical significance, seeing each as evidence of Saddam’s boundless capacity for deceit.”
What is this? Is Shulsky claiming that these mystical rituals took place in his presence? Maybe with a seance to invoke Leo Strauss’s ghost?
Obviously, whatever Shulsky’s involvement in decision-making, he must have come out on the losing end of the argument for war against Iraq. And the guy who lost the argument is not generally the best one to tell you what the argument was all about. (See also CLARKE, RICHARD)
VT, Can’t I be a Bush supporter? You are a Kerry supporter, aren’t you?
Oops! Forgot– you’re not supposed to talk to me, remember?
Biologists speak only to chemists,
Chemists speak only to physicists,
Physicists only to mathematicians,
And mathematicians only to god! 🙂
VT yes invasion was the act of caution.
The predictied 10,000+ possible dead and wounded we anticiapated going in (we had no idea his army would melt) was far safer than a terorist nuking new york and getting 20 million with one go..
But then again, your a lib, while they rape your little girl and cut off yoyr wifes head, you go buy a book on islam..
And no, wasiting was over, wee had been delayed by those at the UN who was taking bribes and selling arms to use against us, so much that our weather window was running out.
BTW to be against taking down a state that has mass graves of kids put there by a socialist make you a typical leftist, tooting past the graves of crimes agaist humanity by a Baath Socialist dictator, just as you would be against taking down any other typical socialist dictator with their own killing fields.
You and I .. we are totaly different creatures.
[Comment Deleted by A.L. – Raymond, this is a public warning that I’ll ban you from my threads – and possibly from WoC – if you keep this up. Please see my email for more]
Her point re: neo-conservative political insights deserves further highlighting. Yes, some regimes are so constituted that aggression and deception are in their political DNA, and it is wise to treat them as such. As “Gideon’s Blog put it”:http://www.gideonsblog.blogspot.com/2003_09_01_gideonsblog_archive.html#106279543155308198
bq. “”The chief neo-conservative insight in foreign policy is that the internal character of a regime determines its foreign policy…. The implication of this understanding – that some regimes are so constituted that they necessarily wage war, and are therefore a threat (to the extent that they have power) by their mere existence – is that some regimes must be obliterated as a matter of self-defense…. When dealing with radical enemies like these, the only defense is a good offense.”
He goes on to note that the neocons’ opponents also have an important insight to offer, so you can follow the link if you want the whole thing.
This was a key insight that caused Reagan’s policy reversal during the Cold War, and led ultimately to the collapse of the Soviet Union: the realization that totalitarian systems are not “normal” states. They are intrinsically aggressive by their very ideology, which is one of violent conquest and expansion. They also have a political culture wherein deception is a critical survival skill for all, and deception and murder are normal paths to advancement. This rationale is borne out by behaviour and history, and has theoretical roots that are explained amply by Hayek (The Road To Serfdom, Chap. 10, “Why the Worst Get On Top”) and other scholars besides Strauss.
You cannot deal with such people the way you would deal with even Jacques Chirac or some other unsavory kleptocrat, or some garden variety dictator. While mirror-imaging wasn’t defended, it was consistently practiced – until various theorists stepped in and put in place a framework that provided an active mental defense against mirror imaging, and not just a passive one.
Once understood and accepted, this insight created a shift from detente and treaties (which were generally broken or poorly enforced) to opposing the Soviet system whenever possible, treating treaties as tools to be used cautiously and verified rigorously (or not signed), delegitimizing their system, and generally playing to win. Which the USA did, once the USSR found itself under real pressure on all fronts and unable to depend on Western aid and assistance to get it out of crises as it had in the past.
Of course, liberals and leftist accepted none of this, and screamed the whole way through. But they were wrong, and America won because it listened to others’ counsel, and some liberals and even leftists had the grace to admit that during Reagan’s funeral.
Others, it seems, have learned nothing.
Nevertheless, these insights have carried over into the war on Islamofascism (in both its direct Ba’athist fascism incarnation and its hybridized religious fascism incarnations), and still guide many conservative (and to a lesser extent, neoliberal) perceptions today.
Properly so, in my opinion, because mirror imaging is alive and well. If I had a dime for every leftist boob who insisted that way to make Osama happy and stop terrorism was to enact their pet political programs, I could retire. Past CIA mistakes with Saddam also suggested that mirror imaging remained a problem there as well, and that additional policy risks had to be associated with leaving unknowns around Iraq’s capabilities.
Now, of course, we don’t have to worry about that. Good.
That your friend thinks this stuff all comes from Strauss is funny in a creepy groupthink kind of way, but whatever….
[Comment Deleted by A.L.]
Two comments on the nuclear component of WMD in regard to Iraq, Iran, and terror groups (at least).
We seem to have forgot the fury with which Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons–outside the ken of US intelligence services–was met. From nearly every quarter the CIA was accused (correctly) of sloppiness and ignorance. They were pretty well reamed a new one, along the lines of “Don’t you ever dare even thinking about letting another country develop nukes without our knowing about it. Got that?”
With regard to Saddam’s nuke program US intel services were doing what they were told (in no uncertain terms) to do — err on the side of caution and suspicion. Make the rebuttable presumption that there _is_ a program, and proceed accordingly.
The reason, from an American security point of view, is that there is a profound difference between the nuclear weapons in places like Britain, China, or even India and even the _*possibility*_ of nukes in countries like Iraq, Iran or in the hands of non-state islamists.
The big question with countries like France or China is not their _ability_ to manufacture and use nuclear weapons, but their _intent_. In the current environment none of those acorst intends to attack the US with WMD.
Iran, Iraq, and the islamists on multiple occasions have made clear their _intent_ to use nukes against American and Israeli interests. Consequently the primary issue becomes their _ability_ to obtain such weapons.
It is incumbent upon America in such situations of clearly stated intent to do whatever is necessary to inhibit the adversary’s ability to obtain nuclear or other WMD capability. This requires a presumption of guilt, and periodic pre-emptive action.
If others don’t like it … too bad.
If I had a dime for every leftist boob who insisted that way to make Osama happy and stop terrorism was to enact their pet political programs, I could retire.
Who is saying such a thing?
Praktike, Many in print, and many in person to me…I’ll start highlighting that sort of thing in future posts on Winds; maybe it will become clearer.
The whole “maybe if America gave more development aid and paid its UN dues” line is one branch of it, but there are others.
I guess I just don’t recall ever seeing anyone talk about “making Osama happy.” Whoever they are, they are super, super dumb and/or insane.
No, they don’t talk about Osama personally. They talk about “terrorism” in the general sense, which of course includes Osama without mentioning him by name, especially when the reference is being made to America’s war on terror specifically. The rest just seems to flow out from there on a sort of surreal autopilot: more foreign aid, more diversity programs at home, if only we hadn’t elected politicians I hate, etc., etc.
It was particularly apparent in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and if you see less of it now it may be because other issues have overshadowed it. It’s still there now, sotto voce, but definitely hovering in the background. You’ll see more of it in Europe, of course, and I include that region in my statement.
Assuming that the answer to an explicitly religious terrorism is the offer of materialist reward as a pacifier strikes me as the essence of mirror imaging, often from people who have lost connection to any religion to such an extent that they casn no longer grasp a non-materialist frame of reference. It’s part of a mentality that really does not grasp the nature of our opponent or want to see it on its own terms – and one of LGF’s chief virtues, whatever faults you may attribute to it, is that reading it regularly makes it impossible to continue with that ostrich-like position. After you’ve read the umpteenth Ummah Kampf rantings from some of the most prominent clerics and media in the Islamic world, you’re pretty sure that more foreign aid isn’t going to fix this.
I’m wondering out loud here if some of the “bad philosophy” things AL sees might be connected… could the romanticist lionization of “passion” without context come from people who sense they’re missing something, but lack a strong non-materialist frame of their own and so cannot make distinctions between the “passion” of an American Communist Party member in 1980 and the “passion” of a Mormon abroad on mission in 1980 (and indeed, may see the LATTER as the creepy example)? Dunno.
But whatever the deeper roots and connections may be, it’s probably worth a quiet project to start highlighting its appearance re: the War on Terror over time, and targeting it.
The Con Tact article is dated October 2003 when I access it. It is not the only article along the same theme. Sy Hersh published a similar article in May 2003. As did James Atlas in the NYTimes, based on an article in Le Mond.
All of these articles were coded attempts to tar the Bush administration with ancient brush of anti-Semetic conspiracy.See:
The Neoconservative-Conspiracy Theory: Pure Myth, By ROBERT J. LIEBER
Israel’s Role: The ‘Elephant’ They’re Talking About, By AMI EDEN, FORWARD STAFF
Toxic Talk on War, By Lawrence F. Kaplan, Tuesday, February 18, 2003; Page A25
Of course in the all out war against the REAL ENEMY, George Bush, logic is not a limitation; so he can be tarred as a Zionist stooge and a willing dupe of the Saudis by the same men at the same time. Not 15 minutes ago I heard an anti-Bush commercial rehashing the bin ladden family evacuation flight urban legend.
The article attempts to turn Leo Strauss zt’l, one of the greats of the generation of emegree scholars who brought european learning to America into a svengali figure. It is ridculous beyond belief. Good Articles on Strauss are available.
One is by his step-daughter The Real Leo Strauss, By JENNY STRAUSS CLAY. A good article introducing the real Leo Strauss’ thought is: What was Leo Strauss up to? By Steven Lenzner & William Kristol
I was an undergraduate at Chicago in the late 1960’s. I was a history major, but I took a few Poli Sci courses. Leo Strauss retired from Chicago in 1966 (my freshman year). I took a History of Political Theory from Joseph Cropsey, who was Strauss’ colleague and co-author for many years and taught his courses after he retired, in 1970, it was one of the most important and most exciting intellectual events in my life. Although, I do not accept the fundamental epistemological basis of Strauss’ system as Cropsey taught it.
Who is a Straussian? If somebody was a student of Leo Strauss, Joseph Cropsey, Harry Jaffa, Alan Bloom, Harvey Mansfield, etc. and espouses the ideas he learned from his teacher then it is fair to call him a Straussian. But all of the Straussians in the country could probably meet down at the Elks Lodge and not overcrowd the place. I took, one course from Joe Cropsey. I do not think that it qualifies me as a Straussian, even though I am a staunch conservative.
I think my contemporary Anthony Grafton nails Strauss’ real significance in his New Republic book review of a collection of Gershon Scholem’s letters
“. . . the stories of the exile scholars, almost all of them Jews, who grew up in Germany, Austria, France, and Italy during World War I and just after it. They carried out a translatio studii without precedent in Western history–one so effective that it lifted the humanities departments of a good many American and British universities, and the offerings of a number of learned presses, above the level of mediocrity for a generation. None of them is easy to tell, at least in modest space and in a modern idiom. The heroes of these stories were indeed wonder-working sages, men and women who performed miracles in their writings and in their classrooms.
“The tales of these intellectual giants include dramatic metamorphoses, as writers somehow managed to change not only their addresses but also their languages, and emerged as great writers a second time, masters of a completely different idiom (Arnaldo Momigliano, on a monograph from Oxford on Greek history: “This is the most delightful book about Oxford since Zuleika Dobson”). They all involve intricate questions of discipleship. Around each sage there grew circles of students, large or small, mostly American but also Israeli, British, and French. They sat at their teachers’ feet, won their love and provoked their fury, and sometimes proved that they could emulate their masters’ massive learning and creative energy. Think of the extraordinary cohorts of Renaissance scholars formed by Paul Oskar Kristeller, the art historians trained by Erwin Panofsky, the architectural historians instructed by Richard Krautheimer and Rudolf Wittkower, the historians of the exact sciences taught by Otto Neugebauer–all parallels to the Kabbalistic scholars who studied with Scholem.
“To tell these stories, we must find our way back into the labyrinthine sunken worlds of art and learning, music and literature, that their polymathic protagonists inhabited. Every one of them benefited from an education unimaginably more rigorous than ours, read the forgotten classics of literatures whose existence is hardly known to us, burned with rage at the pamphlets of forgotten radical sects–and then used the shining, drop-forged tools that they had mastered in Gymnasium and liceo and yeshiva to break every rule and to transgress every boundary. Their mental and moral qualities challenge comprehension now–as they often did in their own day. Gullivers in a variety of Lilliputs, the exiles discovered before they even left Europe that they had the right and the duty to embark on unconventional intellectual careers, in the teeth of family opposition, anti-Semitism, inflation, Fascism, Nazism. How did they know? How did they dare? And how will we convey whatever we can learn of their accomplishments intelligibly and attractively to readers to whom the traditions of Jewish and European learning are an unknown country?
“These questions have become more pressing in the last decade and more, as the last survivors of this generation have died and their biographies have begun to appear. But they are hardly new. I have been pondering them, in some sense, ever since I came, as an undergraduate, to the University of Chicago. Students there regularly had the opportunity to see and hear famous emigres such as Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, and Hans Morgenthau, all of whom taught at the university. Others, such as Peter Gay and Arnaldo Momigliano, came as guest speakers (Momigliano later joined the faculty). But we also learned directly from others, unknown to fame but marked by the same historical experience–such as Christian Mackauer, the extraordinary teacher whose legendary course on the history of Western civilization came as a revelation to me, as it did to so many others. In our age of politically correct gentility, when we call our students by their first names and fear to challenge their beliefs and their tastes, it is hard to convey what an inspiration it could be when a brusque man who called you “Mr. Smith” or “Miss Jones” slapped you down without hesitation or mercy for misinterpreting a line of Homer or Plato. Even then, it seemed hard to connect these individuals and their experiences with the university world we lived in–and in those days the giants still walked among us.”
The number of Straussians is tiny, they have been much more oriented to teaching than to research and they have been out of fashion for a very long time in the academy and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. The University of Chicago itself has no Straussian alumni and only one active Straussian on the faculty of its Political Science Department.
Over the past generation humanities and social sciences academics have dug themselves a very deep hole that has filled up with an enormous amount of slop. The fact is that for every Straussian there are 35 multi-cultural trans-gendered post-colonial queer theorists, and the average age of the former is 67 and the later 34. Leo Strauss stood for a couple of things. One of them was his political theory and epistemology. It is not my cup of tea and I believe myself to be a very thoroughgoing conservative. More importantly, he advocated a close and careful reading of the classics on their own terms. And that is something that I believe is of immense and eternal value. If we are ever to drain the academic swamp, we will need to recover that.
You have failed to connect the dots.
Chalabi and Ashcroft are both UC educated.
In addition I have had a similar honor.
Ya see it’s a plot. 🙂
–==–
From a military point of view considering this a phase in a 50 years war, Iraq has what is most important for military issues: location, location, location.
Now WMDs are a good issue and the point of the war. And Democracy is important for the long term. However Iraq’s immediate importance is its location in the heart of enemy territory.
Forget Strauss.
Look at a fookin’ map.
You have failed to connect the dots.
Chalabi and Ashcroft are both UC educated.
In addition I have had a similar honor.
Ya see it’s a plot. 🙂
–==–
From a military point of view considering this a phase in a 50 years war, Iraq has what is most important for military issues: location, location, location.
Now WMDs are a good issue and the point of the war. And Democracy is important for the long term. However Iraq’s immediate importance is its location in the heart of enemy territory.
Forget Strauss.
Look at a fookin’ map.
You have failed to connect the dots.
Chalabi and Ashcroft are both UC educated.
In addition I have had a similar honor.
Ya see it’s a plot. 🙂
–==–
From a military point of view considering this a phase in a 50 years war, Iraq has what is most important for military issues: location, location, location.
Now WMDs are a good issue and the point of the war. And Democracy is important for the long term. However Iraq’s immediate importance is its location in the heart of enemy territory.
Forget Strauss.
Look at a fookin’ map.
Sorry for the multiple posts.
The usual reason – it looked like nothing was happening.
more foreign aid isn’t going to fix this.
Well of course more foreign aid isn’t going to “fix” it, but it will certainly help. Replacing madrasas with proper schools springs to mind. The better not to create more Islamist radicals who are good for nothing but memorizing the Koran an dkilling infidels.