The Obfuscation Report

The right-wing is rallying around World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz by claiming that his critics disagreed with his anti-corruption agenda. Today, American Enterprise Institute scholar Kevin Hassett writes, “Wolfowitz’s One Sin Was Waging War on Corruption.”

This weekend on Bloomberg Television, conservative pundit Robert Novak went further, saying it was “a left-wing conspiracy to get rid of him.” Novak argued that critics simply want to replace an American with a European. He then chided columnist Margaret Carlson, telling her, “I bet you you want to get the Americans out too, so your European buddies can be as corrupt as they wanna be.”

Countering public corruption is a serious issue that unites progressives and conservatives. Fighting it requires moral, competent leaders — qualities which Wolfowitz lacks.

The question hanging over Wolfowitz’s head is whether a man who has made countering public corruption his top agenda item can continue effectively in his post when it has been revealed that he engaged in the type of act he is seeking to end. “Your credibility as a leader in the fight against corruption…is certainly harmed if there’s a perception” of actions inconsistent with good governance, said Frank Vogl, cofounder of the watchdog group Transparency International.

This weekend, a group of 42 former top World Bank executives wrote:

For the Bank to succeed, it must be effective, especially on matters of good governance which Mr. Wolfowitz rightly emphasized as crucial to poverty reduction. What staff objected to was not the principle — which they applauded. Rather it was that the policy was implemented with no consultation, and little transparency or apparent consistency.

Nobody faults Wolfowitz for trying to fight corruption. They have issues with him engaging in it.

Labels: American Enterprise Institute, corruption, general obfuscation, Kevin Hassett, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Novak, World Bank

by Glenn Greenwald

On Friday, Condoleezza Rice announced that Eliot Cohen has been chosen to be the new Counselor of the State Department. It is not hyperbole to say that Cohen is as extremist a neoconservative and warmonger as it gets. Even The New York Sun's Eli Lake -- in an article claiming that Cohen's replacement of Philip Zelikow signals a more militaristic approach for the administration -- points out that Cohen " intellectually is neoconservative" and that "he was an early supporter of the military intervention in Iraq and came out against recommendations from the Iraq Study Group in December to launch negotiations with Iraq's neighbors," i.e., Iran and Syria -- especially Iran.

But Cohen's record is far more extremist than just that. In a November, 2001 Wall St. Journal Op-Ed, Cohen criticized the attempts up to that point to name "The new War" -- all the names chosen were far too limiting and unglorious. Rejecting all the possibilities, Cohen insisted that "a less palatable but more accurate name is World War IV." Even back then, look at what was on Cohen's mind:

Afghanistan constitutes just one front in World War IV, and the battles there just one campaign. . . . First, if one front in this war is the contest for free and moderate governance in the Muslim world, the U.S. should throw its weight behind pro-Western and anticlerical forces there. The immediate choice lies before the U.S. government in regard to Iran. . . . The overthrow of the first theocratic revolutionary Muslim state and its replacement by a moderate or secular government, however, would be no less important a victory in this war than the annihilation of bin Laden.

Cohen's second priority -- after Iran -- was changing the government of Iraq, and he showcased what would be the false war-justifying propaganda before Don Rumsfeld, Doug Feith and Paul Wolfowitz began the process of feeding it to the President:

The U.S. should continue to target regimes that sponsor terrorism. Iraq is the obvious candidate, having not only helped al Qaeda, but attacked Americans directly (including an assassination attempt against the first President Bush) and developed weapons of mass destruction.

Cohen was most worried that Afghanistan would be the only real Churchillian war we would fight, rather than getting on with World War IV in all its glory: "if after the Afghan campaign ends, the government lapses into a covert war of intelligence-gathering, arrests, and the odd explosion in a terrorist training camp, it will be a sign that it would rather avoid calling things by their true name."

Over the next several years, Cohen became one of the most militant advocates of expanded regional war in the Middle East. A 2003 Asia Times article by Ahmad Faruqui called him "the most influential neoconservative in academe":

Cohen refers to the war against terrorism by a chilling name: World War IV (citing the Cold War as the third world war). . . . Cohen claims that America is on the good side in this war, just like it has been in all prior world wars, and the enemy is militant Islam, not some abstract concept of "terrorism".

Cohen argues that the US should throw its weight behind pro-Western and anticlerical forces in the Muslim world, beginning with the overthrow of the theocratic state in Iran and its replacement by a "moderate or secular" government. After September 11 he was one of the first neoconservatives to call for an attack on Iraq, even though there was no credible evidence linking Iraq with the attacks on the US or al-Qaeda.

It likely goes without saying by now that the reason Iraq was so quickly at the forefront of Cohen's mind in the aftermath of 9/11 was because invading Iraq and changing its government was long one of Cohen's dreams, and the 9/11 attacks became the pretext dressed up as the "justification" for Cohen's dream to come true.

This continues to be the most astounding, significant, and alarming trend -- as the recognition grows even in Beltway elite media circles that the people who designed and sold the Iraq war to the American public are completely untrustworthy and discredited figures, they are exactly the ones who continue to exert the most influence, by far, on the President, and their influence seems only to be growing. Here is a question which Tim Russert asked Lindsay Graham this weekend -- a question that is three years overdue but nonetheless welcome -- after Graham kept insisting that Americans give the Great Surge Plan " a chance" to succeed:

MR. RUSSERT: But many Americans will say that those who supported the war are saying, "Trust us, see this through," the same people who said, "There are weapons of mass destruction. General Shinseki's wrong, we don't need hundreds of thousands of troops. We will be greeted as liberators."

SEN. GRAHAM: Mm-hmm.

MR. RUSSERT: "The cost of the war," according to Lawrence Lindsey, "won't be more than $200 billion."

SEN. GRAHAM: Yeah.

MR. RUSSERT: "There won't be any sectarian violence." All those judgments were wrong. Why should the American people continue to believe in those same people who had so many misjudgments leading up [to] and executing the war?

The premise of Russert's question is exactly right, and it is one of the most crucial propositions to emphasize -- "Why should the American people continue to believe in those same people who had so many misjudgments leading up to and executing the war?" They should not, of course. And we know exactly who "those same people" are. Eliot Cohen is not just one of them, but he is one of their leaders. He has been wrong about everything. If he had his way, we would have far more wars than we have already.

The Cohen appointment is clearly another instance where neoconservatives place a watchdog in potential trouble spots in the government to ensure that diplomats do not stray by trying to facilitate rapproachments between the U.S. and the countries on the neoconservative War hit list. In that regard, behold the head-patting reaction to the Cohen appointment from one of the country's most radical Iran obsessives:

Michael Ledeen, a former government official and conservative scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said Cohen's appointment was good news.

"You want your leaders to hear disagreements," he said. "You don't want monotonous conformity."

Unlike the more political neoconservatives, who are very careful about what they say and go to great lengths to conceal their ultimate goals, Cohen has been an academic and thus more explicit about the theoretical underpinnings of his worldview. In a 1998 essay in (fittingly enough) The New Republic, Cohen called for the U.S. to build up and modernize its military capabilities faster and more aggressively, and to "justify" that plan, he laid out his neoconservative vision of the role of the United States in the world:

Another way to put it is that the United States needs an imperial strategy. Defense planners could never admit it openly, of course, and most would feel uncomfortable with the idea, but that is, in fact, what the United States at the end of the twentieth century is--a global empire.

Talk of "cooperative security" masks the reality that in any serious military confrontation, the central question is whom the United States asks to cooperate. . . . One cannot separate the so-called "soft power" of the United States--the global dominance of its culture, beginning with its language--from its military strength.

Rock fans around the world listen in English; so do fighter pilots. The same information technologies that make the Internet a decidedly American phenomenon provide the nervous systems of American military power. Free trade rests on common consent, to be sure, but would it exist absent America's military dominance?

Even Cohen recognized what a profound departure from America's founding principles it is to call for America to dominate the world as The Great Imperial Power:

The United States is today by far the most powerful state on the planet. If it chooses to remain so, citizen and soldier alike must brace themselves for the occasional imperial fiasco. More important, they will have to accept the uncomfortable notion that they are wielding military power in a way that is historically unusual for a country that has long viewed empires with proper republican suspicion. America's strategic vision will thus have to peer inward, as well as out, if we are to play our new role in the world successfully.

These are the radical principles laid out unabashedly by the Bush State Department's new Counselor, which are the same principles still driving the administration. We are in the middle of World War IV. We have numerous countries against whom we must wage war. The highest strategic priority is to change the government of Iran, with whom we can never negotiate. And the ultimate goal is to rule the world with our military force as the Supreme Imperial Power.

That is the neoconservative vision at its core. And the untold damage it has wreaked on our country has not diminished their influence in any way in this administration. They are still in control, particularly in the area they care about most -- the Middle East. And they have dealt with their greatest fear -- war-avoidance with Iran prior to regime change -- by installing one of their very own extremists to scrutinize and check the State Department.

This is really the debate America needs most, but is also the one we are furthest away from being able to conduct -- is the goal of the U.S. really to maintain and expand imperial world domination? The dangers to our country from that pursuit are grave and obvious. They are precisely the ones about which, among others, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Dwight Eisenhower most urgently warned, and Jefferson similarly emphasized continuously that the most important obligation a country has is to avoid war except when the nation's security is directly attacked.

But that, more than anything, accounts for the current predicament of America. We have ceased adhering in these matters to the principles of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Dwight Eisenhower, and have instead become a nation of Dick Cheneys, Victor Davis Hansons, Richard Perles, and Eliot Cohens.

These are -- to use Russert's phrase -- "those same people" who caused the Iraq disaster and have their sights set on further damage still. They do not want to avoid war at all, but instead believe that it's glorious and elegant and empowering. They want to ensure a state of Permenant War, complete with all of the internal constrictions of liberty which wars inevitably entail, because they view the United States not as a republic, but as an empire which -- in order to fulfill all sorts of agendas -- can, should and must rule the world with superior military force. There is a temptation to dismiss "those same people" as irrelevant extremists, but as Cohen's Friday-announced appointment reflects, they are anything but irrelevant.

UPDATE: Over at This Modern World, Jonathan Schwarz cites an anecdote from Gen. Wesley Clark which reflects both the radicalism and (one must never forget) the sheer ineptitude that has driven this administration's Cohenesque War project from the start.

UPDATE II: Unrelated (mostly, not completely) to the topic of this post, The Washington Post's media critic, Howard Kurtz, will be hosting his weekly chat today at 12:00 noon EST, where readers can pose questions to him regarding his column.

Labels: American Enterprise Institute, Eliot Cohen, imperialism, neocons, World War IV

by Glenn Greenwald

There is a fascinating (and increasingly vitriolic) argument bubbling over in National Review's Corner between Andrew Stuttaford, on the one hand, and the roster of tough-guy Cornerite Warriors (Andy McCarthy, Mark Steyn, and Iran-obsessed Michael Rubin of the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute) on the other, concerning the Bush administration's participation in an upcoming regional diplomatic conference to include both Syria and Iran. And just incidentally, Brit Hume last night eagerly sought to assuage the concerns of worried Fox viewers by conveying his colleague Tony Snow's assurances that this was all planned long ago.

Over at the Corner, Stuttaford has been arguing for the wisdom of negotiating with the Iranians, the gravest neoconservative sin there is. And the Churchillian Warriors, of course, have declared this to be the ultimate act of Chamberlain-ish appeasement -- it's the same as sponsoring a group hug with bin Laden and Hitler at the same time, etc. -- and are mocking Stuttaford for failing to realize that Iran represents such Pure Evil that no negotiations with them are possible. That is all standard warmonger fare.

But what is so notable here -- and what one finds in almost every debate about Iran -- is that while the Warriors will mock and oppose every attempt to resolve the U.S.-Iranian conflicts short of war, they never have the courage to expressly say what it is that they actually favor. The reason for that refusal is clear: they oppose negotiations because they crave full-on military confrontation with Iran (or, at the very least, the use of force to bring about regime change), but they know that expressly advocating that will cause them to be stigmatized as the dangerous radicals that they are. So they keep using code to talk about the need to show strength and toughness towards Iran and never appease them -- and they mock every option designed to avoid war -- while lacking the courage of their convictions to say what they actually think.

For that reason, Stuttaford has been repeatedly asking the Warriors what they think we ought to do about Iran if negotiations are so misguided, and they keep refusing to answer. Finally Rubin was forced to address the question, and he began this way: "What would I suggest? When it comes to economic measures, Patrick Clawson provides some useful suggestions." He does not, of course, say that we should confine ourselves to those "economic measures," because that's not what he believes. He thus proceeds to reject various other measures (while never saying which ones he favors) and then finishes with this pronouncement:

Nor do I believe it in U.S. interests to acquiesce to the Revolutionary Guard and Office of the Supreme Leader with nuclear arms. Their ideology matters; it would be unwise to project our own values upon those circles in Iran which would control such capability. With regard to much more precise options, such things are better discussed in private, and I would be glad to do so.

So Rubin is unwilling to say publicly what he thinks the U.S. should do with regard to Iran. He is willing to unveil his great insights only in secret, closed-door meetings at the AEI at shadowy gatherings of our nation's neoconservative foreign policy geniuses, but is not willing to advocate those ideas to his fellow citizens in public forums.

What could possibly account for such timidity? Rubin is not a government official. He resigned from the Baker-Hamilton Commission in petulant protest over the Commission's bizarre and oh-so-inexplicable refusal to follow his neoconservative wisdom in light of all the great things it has accomplished in Iraq and elsewhere (as Greg Djerejian put it at the time: "James Baker and Lee Hamilton, doubtless, must have been crushed--that the penetrating insights Rubin would have brought to bear are now lost forever").

Rubin is just a private citizen. His opinions are not classified. If he really believes so much in the grave threat posed by Iran to the U.S., why wouldn't he be willing -- even eager -- to use his platform at National Review and the AEI to publicly advocate to his fellow citizens what he thinks we ought to do about Iran? Why keep his special insights a secret?

Many neoconservatives lack the courage of their convictions this way about many topics -- they hint at their extremist ideas without having the courage or honesty to expressly state them. That practice is consistent with the founding principles of neoconservative theory. Neoconservatism does not believe in the virtues of democratic debate, but instead views itself as the vanguard of a superior elite which formulates wise policy in secret and then deceitfully packages it in digestible Manichean form to the idiot masses (that is how we travel from a long-standing, pre-9/11 desire to invade Iraq for all sorts of geopolitical reasons to a marketing product "justifying" that invasion based on the claim that 9/11 Changed Everything, Saddam was connected to those attacks, he would give his Bad Weapons to the Terrorists, and Freedom is On The March).

This sort of intellectual cowardice and deceit is illustrated by another example. Several days ago, Mark Levin, writing at National Review, complained about a New York Times article reporting on U.S. actions against Al Qaeda in the Horn of Africa, claiming that the Times "gives up more of our strategic secrets." After excerpting part of the article, Levin -- following the "kill-the-traitor" code which Frank Gaffney has been urging -- concluded as follows:

Oh, do I long for the good old days when Abraham Lincoln, our greatest president, punished such acts of betrayal. And no, I am not joking. This is a wholly gratuitous assault on our national security by the reckless Times corporate management. There is simply no public interest in disclosing any of it. For all the liberal talk about the need to build coalitions and work more closely with other countries, when we do the Times and media outlets like it are the first to try to destroy those relationships. The Washington Post did the same with black sites in Europe.

As usual for neoconservatives, Levin is brave enough only to talk in code. He "longs" for the day when our government "punished such acts of betrayal" -- by the Times and Dana Priest of the Post -- but he stops short of specifying what he means. What punishment would he like to see, and against whom? After I read Levin's piece, I wrote him the following e-mail (with the subject: "Interview Request - Salon"):

Mr. Levin - I'm working on a piece for Salon about the argument being made by some conservatives that the Bush administration should follow the steps taken by Abraham Lincoln with regard to those who undermine our military missions (either generally in the war on terror or in Iraq), and that the administration should take more aggressive steps to punish disclosure of classified information.

I'm focusing on several articles written lately by Frank Gaffney in The Washington Times about Lincoln and treason, and I would like to include your post from several days ago (this one) in which you say: "Oh, do I long for the good old days when Abraham Lincoln, our greatest president, punished such acts of betrayal. And no, I am not joking."

Would you be available for an interview, or even just by e-mail, could you specify which specific punishments you think are appropriate here for the NYT? And which types of punishments do you think are appropriate for similar instances of prior disclosures of classified information by the Times (NSA, Swift, etc.) and those of other papers (such as the Post's disclosures of the secret Eastern European prisons for terrorists).

Thanks -

Glenn Greenwald

It's been a couple of days and Levin has not responded (I sent a similar email to Frank Gaffney asking about similar remarks in his last Washington Times column, and he has also not responded). There may be several reasons for the lack of response -- time constraints, an unwillingness (for whatever reasons) to be interviewed by me, etc. But whatever the explanation is, people who advocate things like Michael Rubin, Andy McCarthy, and Mark Levin always find ways to evade saying expressly what they are really advocating. They like to speak in code and stir up extremist sentiments but lack the courage to follow through on their argument and say what they mean.

If an American believes that our country is being gravely threatened by the New Nazi Germany in Iran and that nothing short of military action will save us, I would think they would be eager -- even feel compelled -- to go out and make that case and try to awaken their fellow citizens from their slumber in the face of this Great Persian Threat. And if someone believes that there are traitors in our media -- or in our Congress -- who should be prosecuted, convicted, and hanged, I would think they would be out making that case by specifcally fingering the Media or Congressional Traitors and specifying the fate they deserve. Those who believe that there are influential people in our political institutions breaking the law and who deserve prosecution ought to make that case clearly.

One of the principal reasons why political extremists are able to masquerade as mainstream figures is because they are permitted to engage in this intellectually dishonest exercise where they advance radical and contemptible ideas only through innuendo and code. Their meaning is clear, but they are able to maintain a safe distance from the arguments they are pushing because they lack the courage to embrace them openly (Michael Rubin: "such things are better discussed in private, and I would be glad to do so") and are never pressed to be more explicit.

Anyone who mocks the idea of negotiating with Iran while insisting that it is "intolerable" to allow them to acquire nuclear weapons or continue to "meddle" in Iraq should be pressed to say clearly what they do advocate. And those who spew dirty little innuendo about "punishment" and "accountability" for those who "undermine" the war and troop morale or who "give comfort to the enemy" ought to be asked precisely who they mean and what "accountability" they favor exactly.

The fact that an idea is radical or held by a tiny fringe does not prove that it is wrong. But when advocates of such ideas are too afraid to express their ideas honestly and out in the open, that is a pretty compelling sign that even they know how rancid and repugnant those ideas are.

Labels: American Enterprise Institute, cowards, liars, neocons

Today, President Bush delivered a speech on Afghanistan at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. AEI and the Bush administration are deeply entwined, something Bush admitted during his speech. “I admire AEI a lot,” Bush said. “After all, I have been consistently borrowing some of your best people. More than 20 AEI scholars have worked in my administration.”

Below are a few examples of the people and ideas that AEI has shared — or tried to share — with the Bush White House over recent years:

– Escalation. President Bush’s escalation plan is based on a report by AEI scholar Frederick Kagan. CNN reporter Suzanne Malveaux said of AEI’s influence on Iraq policy: “One conservative policy group that has the president’s ear and is influencing his thinking is the American Enterprise Institute.”

– The Cheneys. Dick Cheney served as AEI Senior Fellow from 1993-1995, and his wife Lynn currently serves as Senior Fellow studying education and children. “Both Lynne and I have a long history with the American Enterprise Institute, and we value the association,” Vice President Cheney said in 2005.

– Bomb Iran. “We must bomb Iran,” AEI Resident Scholar Joshua Muravchik wrote in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times. Muravchik called for an “air campaign against Tehran’s nuclear facilities”

– Richard Perle. Perle has been at AEI since 1987, and currently serves as a Resident Fellow. A leading neoconservative, Perle was a fierce proponent of regime change in Iraq. He served as Chairman of the Defense Policy Board from 2001 to 2003.

– John Bolton. Served as Senior Vice President of AEI before coming to the Bush administration. Bolton currently serves as a Senior Fellow at AEI. “There is no such thing as the United Nations,” Bolton said. “If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.”

– Climate change inaction. AEI offered $10,000 to climate change deniers to speak out against the recent IPCC climate change study.

– Karl Zinsmeister. Worked for 12 years at the American Enterprise magazine. He became Bush’s top domestic policy adviser, but only after he admitted to padding his resume.

– Social Security privatization. AEI has long been a vocal supporter of Social Security privatization.

– Greg Mankiw. A visiting scholar at AEI, Mankiw served as Bush’s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2003 to 2005. In 2004, Mankiw said the outsourcing of U.S. jobs overseas was “probably a plus for the economy in the long run.”

– John Yoo. Currently a visiting scholar for AEI, and a former deputy assistant attorney general in the office of legal counsel of the Department of Justice. Yoo authored the infamous torture memo that argued interrogation techniques only constituted torture if they are “equivalent in intensity to…organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.”

Labels: American Enterprise Institute, the man