The Labyrinth of Forgetting

Vergangenheitsbewältigung

Because before it was disbanded, the Stasi shredded or ripped up about 5 percent of its files. That might not sound like much, but the agency had generated perhaps more paper than any other bureaucracy in history — possibly a billion pages of surveillance records, informant accounting, reports on espionage, analyses of foreign press, personnel records, and useless minutiae. There's a record for every time anyone drove across the border.

In the chaos of the days leading up to the actual destruction of the wall and the fall of East Germany's communist government, frantic Stasi agents sent trucks full of documents to the Papierwolfs and Reisswolfs — literally "paper-wolves" and "rip-wolves," German for shredders. As pressure mounted, agents turned to office shredders, and when the motors burned out, they started tearing pages by hand — 45 million of them, ripped into approximately 600 million scraps of paper.

...

As the enforcement arm of the German Democratic Republic's Communist Party, the Stasi at its height in 1989 employed 91,000 people to watch a country of 16.4 million. A sprawling bureaucracy almost three times the size of Hitler's Gestapo was spying on a population a quarter that of Nazi Germany.

Unlike the prison camps of the Gestapo or the summary executions of the Soviet Union's KGB, the Stasi strove for subtlety. "They offered incentives, made it clear people should cooperate, recruited informal helpers to infiltrate the entire society," says Konrad Jarausch, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "They beat people up less often, sure, but they psychologically trampled people. Which is worse depends on what you prefer."

That finesse helped the Stasi quell dissent, but it also fostered a pervasive and justified paranoia. And it generated an almost inconceivable amount of paper, enough to fill more than 100 miles of shelves. The agency indexed and cross-referenced 5.6 million names in its central card catalog alone. Hundreds of thousands of "unofficial employees" snitched on friends, coworkers, and their own spouses, sometimes because they'd been extorted and sometimes in exchange for money, promotions, or permission to travel abroad.

...

The truth is, for Poppe the reconstructed documents haven't contained bombshells that are any bigger than the information in the rest of her file. She chooses a black binder and sets it down on the glass coffee table in her living room. After lighting a Virginia Slim, she flips to a page-long list of snitches who spied on her. She was able to match codenames like Carlos, Heinz, and Rita to friends, coworkers, and even colleagues in the peace movement. She even tracked down the Stasi officer who managed her case, and after she set up a sort of ambush for him at a bar — he thought he was there for a job interview — they continued to get together. Over the course of half a dozen meetings, they talked about what she found in her files, why the Stasi was watching her, what they thought she was doing. For months, it turned out, an agent was assigned to steal her baby stroller and covertly let the air out of her bicycle tires when she went grocery shopping with her two toddlers. "If I had told anyone at the time that the Stasi was giving me flat tires, they would have laughed at me," she says. "It was a way to discredit people, make them seem crazy. I doubted my own sanity sometimes." Eventually, the officer broke off contact, but continued to telephone Poppe — often drunk, often late at night, sometimes complaining about his failing marriage. He eventually committed suicide.

European Education, Again

The German newsmagazine "Welt Online" published a poll of students in Berlin ages 15 to 17, in which, in answer to the question "The Berlin Wall was built by...?" a full 20% attributed it to the Allies, the USA, or West Germany. Only a little more than a third (34.9%) correctly identified the DDR as the wall-builder.

[Hat tip]

Witness

"Democracy needs support, and the best support for democracy comes from other democracies." -- Benazir Bhutto, 1989

She was a complex leader, and it is difficult for me from this distance to disentangle her socialist personality cult side from her sense of herself as part of a dynasty, or her commitment to her vision of her nation and to a strong, democratic, secular Pakistan. Some people say the democracy movement in Pakistan may stand a better chance now that the glare of her charisma cast shadows over everyone else.

I don't know what will happen in Pakistan. If you're looking for that answer, go read the other ten thousands bloggers who will tell you that, even though they don't know either. But her death, and the dramatic weeks that preceded it, remind me of what I admire about the Bush Administration. [I don't think the American domestic political angle is the most important part of the Bhutto tragedy. It just happens to be the one I'm fit to speak about.]

Through most of my youth, no American administration would have sent a Bhutto back to Pakistan when a Musharraf was in control. Some might have fantasized such a world, where American governments once again favored the troublemaking champions of democracy against cozy military dictators.

But after 1950 or so, none would have seriously suggested it as policy. We had a dangerous enemy, and the end of the world, through all of my youth, was never more than 20 minutes away. From what we've learned since the fall of the Soviet Union, our situation was as perilous as the most frightened among us believed it was. The military leadership of the USSR was convinced a nuclear exchange with the West, in which cities would blaze into pyres and hundreds of millions would die, would end in the victory of the Soviets. That their nation would still have enough left to function, and ours would not. Given their preparations for that and our lack of them, probably the marshals in Moscow were right about that.

That world lacked a place for niceties like a Mrs. Bhutto. Many ugly and necessary foreign policies prevailed in America. Many more prevailed that were ugly and ultimately unnecessary, but no one could know at the time which were which.

No president who was alive in my lifetime, from Truman through Reagan, would have sent a Mrs. Bhutto into a nuclear-armed and fundamentally unstable Pakistan to topple a Musharraf in the name of popular sovereignty.

I protested and wrote against many aspects of American policy during the Cold War. I was one who thought much of what we were doing was unnecessarily ugly. I may have been wrong about some of that; but I based my protest not on dislike of America but on reverence for what she ought to be.

Even before the Soviet Union fell apart, the Cold War pressure relaxed. And to his credit, President Reagan, who committed many excesses, began the process of backing away from the necessary evil of dictator-allies. He let Marcos fall when another president, in another time, might have dispatched the CIA to save him.

With Bush, this has become policy, with breathtaking idealism and absolute assurance, after 9/11 pointed out the awful consequences of letting old Cold War battlefields fester and ooze.

Another president in another time would have kept up Saddam's game of footsie. Or would have replaced him with a more predictable generalissimo.

He wouldn't have made trouble for Mubarak over elections and political prisoners.

He wouldn't have withdrawn U.S. troops from a crucial air base during wartime over a massacre of civilians, as the U.S. did in Uzbekistan.

After so many years of enduring detestable compromises during the Cold War, I finally got to see the country I love behave according to what ought to be its principles. And the administration that charged into that policy did it fecklessly, without any sense of the urgency or difficulty of the task, with the wrong people in charge, and with no broad and consistent attempt to rally the nation or its allies for a job more difficult than the Cold War.

What's wrong with Bush is not what's being done in our name. It's that it's being done so poorly that it will make the old short-sighted and cold-blooded cynicism that drove the coups in Guatemala and Iran look like the best foreign policy. It vindicates every Kissingerite shrug at the anonymous torture of some noble soul in a prison of one of our bad bargain anti-communist allies. Old enemies of the American experiment, from right-wing dictators to left-wing academics, are delighted at all the new "proofs" of the limitations of Western-style liberal democracy that tumble out of each new day's newspaper headlines.

The fact that the rest of the world professes to fear us more now, when we back popular democracy in Pakistan, and to urge us to return to ways that will revive the high esteem they had for us then, when we quietly paid to silence democracy activists in Latin America, shows me how much people choose to misunderstand, or forget.

Passive Voice

Joerg Wolf, a German journalist who is interested in engaging Americans in dialogue, has a piece on the anniversary of the end of the Berlin Wall. The peg on the story this year is that it's been 18 years since that dramatic event. A whole generation -- my son is one of them -- has grown to the brink of adulthood in a world without the Berlin Wall -- and all that it symbolized.

Wolf links to a few of the German publications that have written about this in the past week. Most, unfortunately, did not bother to translate these articles into English, perhaps presuming they were too homey to be interesting to an international audience.

What struck me in skimming them in German, though, was how focused they were on the leaders, the men in power at the time, who, these young people believe, created the post-1989 world in which they now live.

And Wolf notes:

Some US observers have criticized Germany’s previous Chancellor Schroeder for an adolescent behaviour. One think tanker wrote that “German foreign policy needs to grow up.”

I think perhaps those two things are connected.

First, I wish all Germans had a clear idea of who brought down the Berlin Wall.

They did. The German people. Not Kohl, not Reagan, not Gorbachev, not Bush I. They did; the insolent Berliners, east and west. The people of faith in Leipzig and Magdeburg. And the German soldiers and guards who had the guns but did not use them.

Erich Honecker's repressive communist government, like Castro's and Kim's, seemed likely to endure even as the Soviet Union faded. It won the May 1989 election with a ludicrous 98.95 percent vote. The state had big plans for its 40th birthday in October. State-run television was broadcasting a Chinese-produced documentary on the Tiananmen Square slaughter, praising "the heroic response of the Chinese army and police to the perfidious inhumanity of the student demonstrators."

Then, that summer, Hungarian authorities opened their border with Austria, intending to let their own citizens travel more easily. Instead, what poured through were East Germans, chugging into Hungary in their rattletrap Trabis and then walking across into Austria. They refused to go home. By September, 130,000 of them were in Hungary, many claiming asylum or bound for the West. Another 3,000 had crammed into the West German embassy in Prague.

The 40th anniversary came, and the Warsaw Pact leaders -- Gorbachev chief among them -- turned out in Berlin, only to see the crowds chosen for the parade abandon their prescribed slogans and start chanting "Gorby, help us! Gorby, stay here!" Gorbachev recalled:

These were specially chosen young people, strong and good-looking ... [Jaruzelski], the Polish leader, came up to us and said, "Do you understand German?" I said, "I do, a little bit." "Can you hear?" I said, "I can." He said, "This is the end." And that was the end. The regime was doomed.

On Nov. 9, the East German government, maneuvering for survival, took a step to ease tensions, relaxing rules for travel to the west. But in its haste, the government's order got misread to the media as saying GDR citizens were free to leave to the West "through any of the border crossings." Like lightning, word went out on the streets that the Wall was open. It was not. It was never meant to be. But the citizens marched to the border. The guards had no instructions about this. Crowds swelled. The guards in one place yielded and opened the gates, and the flood poured through, and back again. German people from both sides tumbled across that once-deadly space and reveled. They danced on the wall. Then they brought out hammers and beat it to rubble.

And that was the end. By the end of the year, the remaining communist regimes in Eastern Europe had fallen.

The German people. Not Kohl, not Reagan, not Gorbachev, not Bush I. They did; the rude Berliners, east and west. The Christians of Leipzig and Magdeburg. And the German soldiers and guards who had the guns but did not use them.

They redeemed so much of Germany's 20th century history in that one day. They paid a debt by dancing and walking and tearing down the symbol of ruthless, mindless, government authority. They all behaved like Bad Germans, and it was the exact right response.

Americans would be celebrating themselves for that till the end of time. Magdeburg Cathedral would be a national monument.

It is a tendency of written German to use passive constructions, but there is still something unjust in Wolf's wording: "1989: The Berlin Wall fell." As though it collapsed like a rotten, vacant building, or got blown over by an act of nature. It is typically German, perhaps, to have a moment of heroism and redemption, and somehow not notice it.

Germans perhaps have a collective tendency to think they are non-players in the world now, red-carded by the fouls of 1940-45. That has perhaps become a convenient situation for many of them, perhaps. Whatever happens now is not their fault, no?

An acknowledged redemption would bring back responsibility.

20th Century Hero

[posted by Callimachus]

America has been losing propaganda battles since before most of us were born. It seems to have less to do with the sophistication of the propaganda than the will to believe among the easily led. Back in the early Cold War, plenty of Europeans and Americans were willing to believe Stalin's Kremlin when it swore it sought "unity with the peace-loving peoples everywhere."

In 1951, when America was goading the new NATO allies to contribute more to collective defense, a front group for the Soviet Union sponsored a "World Festival of Youth and Students for Peace" in East Berlin. The motto of the festival was "For Peace and Friendship – Against Nuclear Weapons." Pop music played between the speeches extolling the leadership of comrade Stalin. Wishful thinkers everywhere looked at the American policies, and the Soviet youth festival, and concluded the real threat to world peace was on this side of the Atlantic.

They got snowed by Stalin. They still do.

In brief, the story that Roberts tells goes like this: Josef Stalin, uncontested leader of the Soviet Union from 1927 until his death in 1953, deserves to be remembered as a great statesman — indeed, as the greatest of the age. Although Stalin made his share of mistakes, especially in the early phases of World War II, he learned from those mistakes and thereby grew in wisdom and stature. Among allied chieftains, he alone was irreplaceable. He, not Churchill and not Roosevelt, was the true architect of victory, "the dictator who defeated Hitler and helped save the world for democracy."

Even Andrew J. Bacevich, who can't resist his own cheap shot comparison of Stalin to Bush in this review, finds this all a bit excessive.

In Light Of Recent Talk: Aug. 6 Meditation

[Posted by reader_iam]

Everyone is aware of the difficult and menacing situation in which human society--shrunk into one community with a common fate--now finds itself, but only a few act accordingly. Most people go on living their every-day life: half frightened, half indifferent, they behold the ghostly tragi-comedy which is being performed on the international stage before the eyes and ears of the world. But on that stage, on which the actors under the floodlights play their ordained parts, our fate of tomorrow, life or death of the nations, is being decided.
--Albert Einstein, in "The Menace of Mass Destruction"

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

Cold War Warmed Over

[posted by Callimachus]

Interesting opinion piece by Andrew J. Bacevich, who generally falls into my personal "wrong-but-worth-reading" file. Here I find him less wrong than I usually do.

I've never been entirely persuaded by the short list of things we supposedly did wrong in Iraq that then caused all the trouble. Disbanding the Iraqi army, for instance, clearly caused a set of problems we were slow to address. But not disbanding it -- leaving the corrupt and incompetent brigades with their arms and their sadistic colonels in place amid the masses they had massacred a few months before -- would have led to another, and I suspect worse, set of problems.

Bacevich takes on another platitude: That the U.S. military is too small to meet current challenges. Here, though he never mentions the name, Bacevich agrees with Rumsfeld. He notes the way this issue has become a touchstone for reliability by the mainstream Democratic candidates trying to out-flank the GOP on defense:

Presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama all promise, if elected, to expand our land forces. Clinton has declared it "past time to increase the end-strength of the Army and Marines." Edwards calls for a "substantial increase." Obama offers hard numbers: His program specifies the addition of 92,000 soldiers.

Bacevich takes a stick to this: "Any politician who thinks that the chief lesson to be drawn from the last five years is that we need more Americans toting rifles and carrying rucksacks has learned nothing." He says its the consequence of another failure of creative thinking: To see the current crisis in anything but "World War III" (or IV) terms.

This second consensus consists of two elements. According to the first element, the only way to win the so-called global war on terrorism, thereby precluding another 9/11, is to "fix" whatever ails the Islamic world. According to the second element, the United States possesses the wherewithal to effect just such a transformation. In essence, by employing American power, beginning with military power, to ameliorate the ills afflicting Islam, we will ensure our own safety.

I've had my own dalliance with the world war image, and certainly I've been enthusiastic for the transformative and elevating effects of freedom and popular control, as opposed to totalitarianism. But the depressing situation in Iraq and Afghanistan has me willing to look at alternative strategies.

Bacevich's prescription is another backwards-looker, however. Instead of World War II, this will be a new, multi-generational Cold War:

In fact, the great lesson of Iraq (further affirmed in Afghanistan) is that the umma — the Arabic name for the entire Muslim community — is all but impervious to change imposed from the outside. If anything, our ham-handed efforts to inculcate freedom and democracy, even if well-intentioned, have played into the hands of violent Islamic radicals. The Bush administration's strategy has exacerbated the problem it was designed to solve, while squandering American lives, treasure, moral standing and political influence to little avail.

Now I grew up in the Cold War, and I have no love for it at all. It was a necessary struggle, often brilliantly waged on our part, but just as often full of blunders, over-reactions, unwanted consequences, societal parasites, and crippling moral compromises. It warped this nation in ways that never will heal.

If Bacevich is going to go for that, he ought to honestly lay out the price to be paid, or some of the vicious policies of exclusion and endurance we will have to embrace. He doesn't. He goes no further than bland buzzwords like "limits of American power" ... coexistence without appeasement ... containment ... "quarantine."

"The candidate who can articulate such ideas might well merit respect and popular support," he writes. And I write, the candidate who tells you honestly what that will cost you, what you will have to accept in the name of your security, what your children will have to be taught to fear, what the people of the Declaration of Independence will have to take to bed with them -- the one who will tell you what even Bacevich blanches to spell out -- is going to make you sick.

"Tear Down this Wall"

[posted by Callimachus]

GayPatriotWest [corrected 6/20] was in Berlin that day 20 years ago -- I wish I had been. And he remembers another aspect of the scene, one which I can testify was universal in that time and place whenever any American political figure above the level of township supervisor dropped in for a visit.

Anyway, as the Gipper arrived in Berlin, I hiked up to the Kurfürstendamm, then the major boulevard in the free portions of the city. And I watched a rally that absolutely frightened me.

I saw hordes, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of young Germans marching to protest Reagan’s visit. They accused the Gipper of being a fascist and warmonger and deplored his decision to deploy U.S missiles in Europe. Many carried signs attacking the US while others chanted hateful anti-American slogans or shouted out against the then-incumbent U.S. leader. Replace “Reagan” with “Bush” and the rally would seem similar to many witnessed in recent years in European cities. (This crowd, however, was larger than some recent European rallies.)

What struck me then was the virulence of the anti-American attitudes expressed by the marchers. As I watched, I had flashes of films I had seen of Nazis marching (perhaps on the same street) a half-century previously. Many of the protesters wore nearly identical black outfits (some did sport more colorful attire) and marched in lockstep. It almost seemed that this generation of Germans has replaced “Jews” with “Americans.” Their anger was palpable.

We forget that now. We shouldn't.

Back in the DDR

[posted by Callimachus]

Hail, hail East Germany
Land of fruit and grape
Land where you'll regret
If you try to escape
No matter if you tunnel under or take a running jump at the wall
Forget it, the guards will kill you, if the electrified fence doesn't first.

One of my favorite Cold War stories gets a good re-telling here, and here. Dean Reed was a mediocre American musician who ended up a rock star in East Germany.

Yes, dear readers, before there was "Christian rap," in which everything is the same and nothing is the same, and the product does honor neither to religion nor rap, there was commie rock 'n' roll. Michael C. Moynihan, author of the "Reason" article, writes, "I get the impression that Reed was popular the same way grass soup is popular in North Korea ...." He's right. Take it from one who was there.

If Western military willpower contained the Soviet Union, it was Western pop culture that ate away its foundation while it was paralyzed in place, by capturing the minds and imaginations of its youth. The DDR sensedw this threat, on some level; its Ministry of Culture even established a Sektion Rockmusik to promote "youth music" without the subversion. Dean Reed, then, was a ham-handed bid at counter-cultural warfare: Hapless, but essential if the East was to stay Red.

Thank the gods it was all doomed to failure. A totalitarian rock 'n' roll may be theoretically possible, but it can't exist on a planet where the real thing is allowed to breathe, because, well, "You've gotta feel it in your blood and guts! If you wanna rock, you gotta break the rules. You gotta get mad at the man!" And "The Man" doesn't get any more The Man-ly than Erich Honecker.

The paradox of Dean Reed is that he owed his success to being an American, and at the same time to rejecting all his native American-ness except the shabby posture of a rock star. Only the Cold War's frigidity kept him from falling through the thin ice. As Moynihan writes, "For teens starved of an authentic native youth culture who were looking enviously west, that was, initially anyway, a mark of authenticity."

The Dean Reed story, as told by Moynihan (in reviewing "Comrade Rockstar," Reggie Nadelson's biography of Reed) goes like this:

In the late 1950s Reed-a moderately attractive, semi-talented guitar player and would-be actor from Colorado-set off for Hollywood with the distinctly un-Bolshevik goal of superstardom on the bubblegum pop circuit. There he met Paton Price, a Daily Worker-reading acting coach and party ideologue. Price schooled Reed in the socialist realism of Brechtian theater, left-wing politics, and, as Reed's sad filmic record suggests, little else.

After a short and largely unsuccessful stint with Capitol Records, Reed abandoned California for South America, where, inexplicably, his singles were outselling those of Elvis Presley. Possessed by his newfound ideology, he underwent a transformation among the bitterly impoverished natives: He shed his "false consciousness" and subsumed the artist's prerogatives beneath those of the Party. After a few years, Reed was expelled from Argentina for agitating against the government and moved to Italy, where he landed a string of minor film roles, including the lead in Karate Fists and Beans, billed as the world's first western/kung fu cross­over film.

Nadelson's account offers few details of what motivated Dean's political journey. Like many radicals of his generation, he claimed to have been inspired by that common inventory of 1960s grievances: Third World poverty, the Vietnam War, CIA machinations in Latin America. So when, in 1966, Reed was approached by a friendly Russian apparatchik offering a truly socialist variant of fame, he boarded a plane for the Soviet Union as an Officially Approved Rock Star -- the genuine American article, playing ersatz rock 'n' roll.

After making the rounds touring behind the Iron Curtain, Reed chose to settle in East Germany, where he became a compliant ward of the state, recording for the GDR's lone record label (Amiga) and propagandizing for the regime. As a reward for his boundless sycophancy, Reed was elevated to superstar status, afforded lavish recording and tour budgets and plum film roles (which he immediately turned to wood), and awarded the Komsomol Lenin Prize. Despite these achievements and an intense disdain for American capitalism, Reed privately craved a second shot at bourgeois success.

In 1985 Mike Wallace extended an invitation for Reed to appear on 60 Minutes. Asked to justify the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Reed happily obliged, arguing that it was merely a defensive action against American imperialism. Ditto for the Berlin Wall. By program's end Reed had successfully propelled himself from obscurity to minor fame as the Lord Haw-Haw of the Cold War.

It was all downhill for him after glasnost kicked in, but I won't spoil the ending.

Deja Vu: Don't take it so hard Nick, life is filled with it's little miseries, each of us in his own way must learn to deal with adversity in a mature and adult fashion. [Sneezes into hands, looks at it in horror, screams, and jumps out window]

Trabi Chic

[posted by Callimachus]

This is really arcane, but if you are one of the small pool of people who ever spent any amount of time in the old DDR, go read this list of Trabi jokes. It will give you a smile or two:

Q: Why do some Trabants have heated rear windows?

A: To keep your hands warm when pushing.

A Cold War Life

[posted by Callimachus]

Howard Hunt had lived outside the law in the service first of his country, subsequently of President Nixon. The way things had worked for him, in Mexico, in Uruguay, in Japan, was the way he expected them to work now. You break the law in pursuit of your country's interest as prescribed by your superior or by your cognitive intelligence of political reality. You get caught; and, if feasible, your government looks after you. If it's bail that's needed, it materializes. If it's looking after your widow and children, that is done. If you are in Washington, D.C., having committed a crime on the authority of the attorney general or the president, why — Howard Hunt was saying — somebody … does something. And the charge against you for trespass, or burglary, or whatever, washes away.

William F. Buckley Jr. on his former boss and former friend Howard Hunt.

The further we get from that age, and the men it forced on us, the more freely we can breathe.

Anarcho-Realists

[posted by Callimachus]

When my grandmother (b.1903) was a little girl and someone threw something on her dinner plate she didn't like, they told her to eat it and be grateful because there were "starving children in Armenia" who would love to have such a meal. When my mother (b.1933) was little, the starving children who hovered over the dinner table were in China. In my (b.1960) day they were African.

Now, Armenia's economic growth in 2005 was 13.9% (average salaries rose 24 percent and unemployment dropped by 18 percent), China has a dynamic consumer economy, and Africa -- well, we're working on that one.

I'm a Wilsonian, a Neo-Con, a nation-builder -- whatever you want to call us. I'm among the people who do believe in the American obligation to use its awesome power and its moment in history to help set the world in a better place -- all the more so because it is in our self-interest to do so, but it's the right thing to do anyhow.

I think of us as a people, not a government. A government has responsibilities only to its enfranchised citizens; a people has them to the future and the world. But the two ends can work together, and in our case generally they do. If, as the believers say, America has been "blessed," there it is.

Whenever I hear my liberal colleagues at the newspaper yowl about good jobs being in India now, or how this or that national economy somewhere in the world is out-performing ours in some sector, I say, "Great! What do you want to do? Go back to 1946, when the United States stood almost alone in prosperity and looked out over a world laid waste by totalitarianism, ignorance, and war? Do you think we should have hoarded our wealth forever?"

It's the best advertisement of our "empire" that its rising tide has lifted so many boats. Since the American "hegemony" began, more people outside the borders of America have become wealthier and healthier than at any time in history. That's no coincidence or accident. Even Romanitas only did you good if you lived behind the limes.

I used to think of my opponents as the Kissingerites, the cold-eyed realists who saw the world only through the lens of American government, not American people.

They're still with us, like The Man himself. But there's another strain out among us that I had not encountered during the Cold War, when I was growing up. What to call them? Anarcho-realists, perhaps.

Kissingerites were obsessed with stability. The Man's thesis hero was Metternich; his model was the Congress of Vienna. In a world with two superpowers armed to the teeth, balance at all costs made cruel sense, one could argue. Balance was national interest. I never accepted that entirely. And the Kissingerites made it a fetish, going so far as to see it where it was not.

But the Anarcho-realists are freed from the Cold War's constraints, and can see regional chaos as potentially in our national interest. I'll let Andrew Sullivan speak for them, in one particular case:

I've argued that withdrawal to Kurdistan, allowing the Sunni and Shia forces in Iraq to reach their own settlement through a real civil war with a real outcome, is something we need to think through. It may be less damaging to our interests than the surge. Its most important aspect is the way it changes the narrative of the war from Osama's "Islam vs the West" to "Islam vs itself". I think that's a strategic game-changer that may redound to our long-term advantage. It requires a United States prepared to let go of trying to control the region and stabilize it. I fear the president is unable to even think in such terms. But that doesn't mean we cannot.

He's right: It's "something we need to think through." But when we think about it, we ought to think, too, "is this the kind of people we are, or want to be?" Once having inserted ourselves into the situation, it becomes that much more our responsibility.

[Oh, the fools who want to write the rough draft of history will insist this is who we all are anyhow. They're already busily pecking keyboards to that effect.]

Why is There Still a CIA?

[posted by Callimachus]

"I had the gravest forebodings about this organization and warned the President that as set up neither he, the National Security Council, nor anyone else would be in a position to know what it was doing or to control it." [Dean Acheson, "Present at the Creation"]

This year is the 60th anniversary of the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The Agency is a living relic of the first flush of the Cold War, along with the Department of Defense, the independent Air Force (was that really necessary?), and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And it's time to ask some serious questions.

Such as:

Is there any entity in modern America that has eaten up more money, wasted more lives, and done less good to the American people? Is there any group representative of America in the world that has brought more humiliation to our friends and more delight to our enemies? Is there any federal agency, however necessary, that is more untrue to the spirit of America? Any less accountable for its errors? Any that has brought down more blowback on our heads? Any that has done more to undercut the American people's belief in the essential decency of our public servants and the transparency of our government?

Who enacts U.S. policy in a given Latin American capital? The CIA station or the U.S. ambassador? If you ask the locals, what would they say? If you ask the ambassador, confidentially?

Is there any spy agency in the history of the world more reckless, amateurish, and incompetent? The two most effective Cold War presidents, Reagan and Eisenhower, largely ignored the CIA in dealing with the Soviet Union, and they made their best tough calls based on hunch and common sense. Just as well, since the CIA was consistently and potentially lethally wrong on Russian abilities and intentions throughout the period.

And will there ever be a president or a Congress strong enough to stand up to it? Even a vigorous and ruthless agency director like William Casey could not hack through the bramble of bureaucracy that surrounded the heart of the CIA. The bureaucrats knew they'd be standing after he was gone. As for U.S. presidents, none dared really try. Not even after the calamitous failures of 9/11. And what does the answer to that say about what we have let ourselves become?

In the beginning, the CIA had an arguably useful function, in countering the efforts of Stalin's USSR to subvert and bully the rest of the world into the Iron Curtain camp. American naively had expected the British to return to the ramparts after World War II and resume their traditional role in the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and South Asia. By 1947, it was obvious that wasn't going to happen, and the U.S. would have to inherit the Great Game. It did so with much more enthusiasm than its skills warranted.

The CIA subsidized friendly European labor leaders and writers and thus help firm up a Western European voice to answer the subsidized shouts of the Stalinists. It quietly sponsored seminars and colloquia that exposed global intellectuals and journalists to ideas and facts that Moscow never was going to show them. It underwrote tours of Western Europe by U.S. symphony orchestras to prove to our allies that we weren't the nation of deculturated yahoos they assumed we were.

Once upon the time the CIA even gave the White House useful, if too often ignored, analysis of the world. For instance, it warned Truman of something now tragically obvious about the early Cold War: America's goals in Europe (bolster the old powers against the Soviet threat) conflicted with its goals in Asia (encourage national independence and end colonialism). It noted that the money Americans sent France and the Netherlands to rebuild themselves after World War II curiously matched the amount those nations spent to reassert their colonial empires in Southeast Asia.

Of course, that was back before the CIA had played a Dr. Frankenstein role in creating the geopolitical realities around it, so the agency had less emotional investment in the status quo as its own handiwork.

But from the beginning, too, there were compromises, such as going along with the George Polk murder cover-up story in Greece. Even the behind-the-scenes financial backing of anti-communist political parties in France, Italy and Japan -- a vital and necessary counter-check to the elaborate Soviet push to repeat their success in Poland and Czechoslovakia -- had its downside in, for instance, the lingering corruption still at the heart of Japanese party politics.

But the CIA's success in the Guatemala coup of 1954 [corrected] assured the ascendancy of covert operations over analysis and espionage. Eisenhower certainly was more suspicious of the agency than most of his successors, but it was he who gave the CIA carte blanch to fight communism worldwide, which had the practical result of assuring the agency it would be operating day to day without accountability or oversight. CIA officials themselves soon were deciding what was authorized, and the dangerous notion began to take root that, "If the president says so, it's legal."

Once the commitment was made to engage the Soviets in their own game, the path down into the muck hardly could have been avoided. The Americans had studied their British forebears and learned all their morally repugnant aphorisms: "Have 'em rubbed out by a plausible enemy; best if it's religious, but you always can find somebody. The trick lies in the concealment."

But if the slippery slope was unavoidable, the toboggan ride down it was. I suspect that began with the creation of the Office of Policy Coordination, set up to merge political subversion and military activity (as distinct from the Office of Special Operations, which handled espionage and counter-intelligence). Again, the goal was to counter Stalin at his own game, but it was a far more vicious one than mere electoral monkey business in Paris.

Through this secret agency within a secret agency, America acted out its Mr. Hyde side, with most of the country and Congress standing aside in willful ignorance. U.S. covert actions became a process hermetically sealed from any oversight except the agency's own. And even within the agency, the demands of "security" trumped internal review and accountability.

The whole culture of the clandestine activities created a sense among the men doing them that they were a secret sect of superheroes. Expertise was sacrosanct, regardless of how little practical success it could demonstrate. What John le Carré calls "intellocrats" rose to the top: In too many cases they were eager amateurs with exquisite liberal arts educations and absolutely no knowledge of the world, much less of the nations they suddenly were assigned to operate on like drunken surgeons. They were able to glamor Congress after Congress into giving them more money without the least accountability for how and where they spent it. Neither were they accountable for the blood-pools they dragged the country into.

During the Kennedy administration (both brothers had a juvenile fascination with clandestine operations) it became part of the State Department's regular mission to block or derail White House plans to use the CIA to, for example, "take out" China's nascent nuclear program, perhaps by using "anonymous planes."

As soon as it turned to subversion, the CIA began to rack up an impressive record of incompetence. It tried to foment resistance movements in countries where the agency had no one who spoke the native language, no knowledge of the culture or geography, and no maps more recent than World War I. You could spot a CIA clandestine operation a mile away, because the fingerprints it left were all thumbs [i.e. a 1950s assassination attempt against Indonesia's Sukarno that blew up everyone but the target].

In Eastern Europe, Tibet, Angola, and a dozen other places the CIA attempted paramilitary sabotage and guerrilla campaigns against communist governments that only managed to bring down death and torture on local folks who were willing to trust America to help them. Totalitarian secret services in Europe scooped up every brave agent and partisan we parachuted over their borders.

The Bay of Pigs is only the best-known example. Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick's report, declassified in 1998, called the effort "ludicrous or tragic or both." Predictably, it was classified top secret for decades. The doctrine of plausible deniability also meant that the CIA agents responsible for these fiascos generally escaped responsibility for their decisions. George "Slam Dunk" Tenet was not the first CIA director to retire covered with honors after giving his president lethally flawed intelligence.

When Yuri Andropov took over the Soviet Union, he had headed the KGB for 15 years and thus had been the CIA's chief adversary and a crucial Politburo player. Yet the agency had no idea whether or not he spoke English, or even whether his wife was alive (until she showed up at his funeral).

The list of things the CIA got wrong or failed to see coming is almost a history of the later 20th century. A few months before the Missile Crisis, the CIA concluded it made no sense for the Russians to send nuclear weapons to Cuba. The CIA consistently underestimated the size of the Soviet nuclear stockpile by as much as 100 percent. North Korea fired up a three-stage rocket in 1998 just after the CIA determined its capability to do that was still 15 years in the future.

The CIA failed to predict the 1974 Portugal coup, the Shah's ouster in 1979, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the 1998 nuclear test by India, and the al-Qaida attacks on the embassies in Africa that year. It was on dubious CIA-provided evidence that President Clinton responded to those attacks by ordering a missile attack on a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum. The CIA let Russian contractors build the new U.S. embassy in Moscow in the early '80s, only to find it was so riddled with bugs, and of such sophistication, that the $400 million building never could be used.

The CIA agents and officers in East Germany were so inept they actually worried the Soviets, who began to wonder if the Americans didn't appreciate the importance of the East German military. The Iranians and Cubans have had no trouble eliminating or doubling the CIA's agents.

Illegal domestic spying? The CIA had been at it for decades. It's no coincidence that most of the Watergate burglars had ties to the CIA. The agency's 1963 manual on interrogation and the 1980s coercive techniques manual are enlightening reading for people who think this sort of thing only happens when George W. Bush is president. The latter publication's problems were compounded by poor translation for use in Central America, where the English "neutralize" unintentionally acquired a darker sense when rendered in Spanish.

Attempts to reform the agency in the 1970s only backfired, as the CIA responded by diligently dumping a cataract of reports every year on Capitol Hill, which no one had time to read and which still obscured the more unsavory aspects of fieldwork, such as complicity with the narcotics dealers and enablers whose products America was simultaneously fighting at home in the "War on Drugs." Thanks to the CIA, we kept company with thugs and sadists from Guatemala to Argentina far longer than was necessary if the goal was merely to oust Cuban-backed rebels.

One of the agency's few moments of competence, perversely, was over Afghanistan, when the agency in 1980 argued against putting sophisticated U.S. weapons in the hands of anti-Soviet guerrillas. In part, because it would leave the U.S. without a "plausible deniability." In part because the weapons were deemed too complex and powerful for the mujahidin to use. In part because the agency blanched before such a direct provocation of the Red Army. (In part, also, perhaps, to defend its turf against the Pentagon.)

Even if the CIA had done all this right, the damning case against it could be built solely on the catastrophic failure to smoke out its own moles, such as Aldrich Ames, who sold information to the KGB that led, among other things, to the execution of nine of the West's best agents and successful KGB double-agent efforts that pushed bogus information onto the Oval Office desk.

The agency, using expensive, super-secret spy satellites, never could get a viable picture of Soviet military activity. Meanwhile a Defense Intelligence Agency executive named William Lee cobbled together a workable model of the Soviet military economy by augmenting the meager secret sources with perfectly unclassified books, periodicals, government documents, and newspaper clippings. After the end of the Cold War, Soviet documents affirmed the accuracy of Lee's estimate of the Soviet military burden (about 28 percent of the USSR's GDP in 1988) over the CIA's (about 14 percent).

Even without the moles -- and the obliviousness to them -- the agency was arguably a liability. James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's long-time head of counterintelligence, was the classic Ivy League Brahmin obsessive who sank into paranoia.

KGB cadets in Moscow would be taught how Angleton had come to exemplify Lenin's theory that fervid, high-ranking anti-Communists would inevitably do more harm than good to their own cause. "He was our best asset," lectured one gray-haired colonel, explaining how Angleton had demoralized the Agency beyond Andropov's wildest dreams and how he had ruined counterintelligence to the extent that the Agency would end up having to pay compensation for his capricious firings. To make matters worse, Angleton had unwittingly deterred unknown numbers of defectors by his imprisonment of Yuri Nosenko, whose fate was apparent to all within the KGB. For the CIA to believe that Nosenko's plea for asylum was a sham also revealed to Moscow that the KGB itself had not been penetrated. Had Angleton done more harm than good? To answer this question, once he was pushed from office, the Agency undertook a six-year study in a vaultlike room that contained an even more secure inner vault. The public will never see the eleven volumes that resulted. [Derek Leebaert, "The Fifty-Year Wound," page 429]

All spy agencies have a James Bond fetish for the expensive, high-tech methods, but the CIA abuses the privilege. It was an inter-agency joke in the 1980s that the government was working on a secret new blockbuster satellite that would take pictures of unclassified Soviet writings in such a way that they would look like results of super-expensive space espionage, and thus assuredly come to the attention of high-ranking bureaucrats.

Perhaps even more disturbing is that in the years since, instead of learning from mistakes, the CIA has devoted itself to justifying them, or to undercutting its critics. Thanks to the flood of paperwork its officers were rewarded for producing, it's possible for the CIA to go back and pluck out some obscure report to prove that it anticipated anything. And it constantly does so, without mentioning the lack of urgency given to these odd lucky hits. It pours millions into dubious academic ventures like Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, which dutifully churn out impressive papers and conferences justifying the CIA's analysis. It still insists it knew more about the Soviet military than the ex-Soviet marshals who led it, who now write openly about what they were doing.

You can't learn from mistakes until you admit them. Instead the CIA clings to them with the tenacity of, well, duped art collectors:

Everyone wanted van Meegeren’s forgeries to be masterpieces. The buyers and curators wanted desperately to acquire a Vermeer for their collections. The critics wanted, no less desperately, to claim responsibility for adding one more work to Vermeer’s ­all-­too-­slim catalogue raisonné. And experts such as Bredius wanted to confirm their pet theories. Pride and ­self-­regard colored judgment, and no one truly saw what he was looking at, because no one dared look ­closely.

Many of the people responsible for the errors of the 1980s are in leadership roles today. Economic matters, the gist of the 1980s Cold War bungling, are just as crucial today, as the CIA undertakes to track jihadist terrorist finances. Military ones still matter, too, as the U.S. ponders the size and purpose of China's army.

All of which predates 9/11. The CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center was a paper-shuffling institution crippled by internal squabbles. The U.S. had committed roughly $10 billion every year to counter-terrorism from 1996 on -- money given without accountability, of course -- and got little to show for it on Sept. 11, 2001.

On that morning, by one insider's estimate, less than 1 percent of the agency's 18,000 employees had anything to do with counter-terrorism; fewer than 800 field officers worldwide were working on it, and only a handful of those had backgrounds in Middle Eastern languages and cultures. A measure of the CIA's failure was the vast, empty parking lot at Langley the following morning, when "non-essential" government personnel were told to stay home.

Since then, the only apparent change in the agency is to make it bigger and give it more money. Surely some of this is justifiable and being used well. But how will we ever know, unless we accept that "bigger and richer" always equals "smarter?"

Is it fair to blame a secret agency for what it didn't prevent, without regard for what it did? Surely the CIA saved us from other calamities and we don't know about it. Frankly, I don't believe there's much to the benefit of the agency on that ledger. Given the CIA's embarrassed scrupulousness in touting its triumphs, I doubt there's much it has done that it hasn't managed to tell us about.

If I had to think of one justification for the CIA's continued existence, it would be that such a confused and amateurish crew is a great disproof of the charge that America is an empire. Real empires have real spy agencies.

Twice in the 1990s, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, long-time member of the Intelligence Committee, introduced bills to disband the CIA and assign its functions to the Pentagon and the State Department. One of Moynihan's wisest and most serious proposals, is -- sadly, typically -- dismissed as an example of his charming eccentricity.

It's not. It's a profoundly patriotic position. It ought to be done.

Aspects of Suez

[posted by Callimachus]



I'm not going to give a detailed account of the whole Suez crisis of 1956. Probably Wikipedia can give you a decent summation. Most of the key participants told different versions of the events till the day they died, so any attempt at straight-up narrative explanation is bound to bog down in buttresses and dossiers.

But the background, and the consequences, are what matters most now, in terms of understanding how these things happen.

BRITAIN: Sir Anthony Eden could see the shapes of things straight enough but had a problem with scale. He was a politician trying to escape Churchill's bulky shadow, leading a nation in serious economic trouble and in need of a morale injection and proof that it still could be a world player independent of the U.S. Yet Eden was too honorable to be a Machiavelli, too conscientious to be an aggressor, too pro-Arab to stick with the Jews for long, and none of those things in sufficient measure to avoid trying all three.

[Paul Johnson -- Reader_i_am is a fan as well -- has an assesment of Eden's rivals that may amuse our British friends: Eden was "sandwiched between two would-be successors: the old Appeaser, R.A. Butler, who wished to pull the party in the direction of the Left, and Harold Macmillan, who wished to pull it in the direction of himself. Both behaved in character."]

Eden's wiser course would have been to use diplomacy to pressure Nasser, wait till after the American election, then get together with Eisenhower and hammer out a plan (remembering the American had graciously solved a British problem in Iran by toppling Mossadeq). But if Eden had thought of changing his mind, his old boss Churchill was still in the next room -- the lion may have been toothless by now, but he still had claws -- roaring about "appeasement."

FRANCE: The Fourth Republic was on its last legs. Tunisia was lost and Algeria was crumbling -- abetted by Nasser. Even more than Britain, the French needed a big, public showdown and they needed to win it.

ISRAEL: It was not entirely clear Nasser had done anything illegal with regard to the Suez Canal. However, his effective blockade of Israel's southern port and his refusal to allow its ships through the canal was illegal and a casus belli between two nations technically still at war. Egypt was sponsoring Fedayeen and commando raids from Gaza, and Nasser's October pact unifying the military command of Syria, Egypt, and Jordan was a prelude to an attempted war of extermination. Israel, typically for the times, didn't wait to be hit.

AMERICA: Washington was bidding for influence in Egypt, the pivotal state in the Arab world in those days. So were the Soviets. Nasser and his generals were not particularly ideological, but they were strong nationalists. By the time of Suez, the Americans largely had given up on wooing Nasser, who was playing the game perfectly.

But Dulles still felt the U.S. had a chance to assert its influence in the wider Arab world and thwart Nasser's pan-Arabist dreams. When the attack against Egypt came, Eisenhower fumed, "How could we possibly support Britain and France if in doing so we lose the whole Arab world?" [John Lewis Gaddis, "The Cold War," p.127]

Eisenhower also seems to have understood something his allies chose to overlook. In a warning letter to Eden on the eve of the crisis, he wrote, "Nasser thrives on drama." The French and the British may have looked on this escapade as a temporary expedient to pull them out of their global slides. For Nasser, it was his element.

Eden hatched a scheme that, combined with his nature, guaranteed the worst possible outcome. Derek Leebaert writes, "Britain and France caused the maximum grief for themselves and everyone else, especially America, by mounting a great reassertion of empire, then losing their nerve as they faced threats from both the United States and the Soviet Union." ["The Fifty-Year Wound," p.203]

U.S.S.R. Moscow, wringing its hands over Hungary (and Yugoslavia, and China) was in no position to help its new client in Cairo, except by nuclear sabre-rattling, which is what it did. The menacing letter to London arrived after the British and French already had realized they must cave in to the Americans, but the Soviets always believed it was their threat that had turned the Suez situation around.

"Father was extraordinarily proud of his victory," Sergei Khrushchev recalled. The lesson he learned and applied in later crises was both that nuclear weapons were all-powerful and that he didn't need many of them. [William Taubman, "Khrushchev," p.359]

The crisis confirmed the Soviets in another belief as well. Those "with the strongest nerves will be the winner. That is the most important consideration in the power struggle of our time. The people with the weak nerves will go to the wall."

Khrushchev (through Bulganin) also proposed joint U.S.-Soviet action to end the fighting. The Americans rejected this, as the Soviets anticipated they would when the proposal was made. The Soviets then gloated over the revelation that Americans weren't truly interested in peace and justice after all. "We had unmasked them!" Khrushchev exulted.

In the American leadership's minds, the relatively minor real role of the Soviets in this imbroglio seemed magnified. It further confused the already muddy conflation in Washington of "anti-colonialism" and "communist conspiracy" which would be a haunting and deadly error in the Cold War.

CONSEQUENCES: The big victors were Nasser, and Arab nationalism generally. Nasser emerged as the Third World's anti-imperialist champion. None of his worshippers seems to have noticed that his shiny new Soviet-supplied military had been pounded to scrap iron by the Israelis in less than a week. The Arab world, and the U.N. leadership, also felt themselves confirmed in the prejudice that Israel was nothing but an outpost of the old imperial power.

However, Nasser, and the movement he embodied, did not survive the debacle of 1967, and the Arab world's subsequent turn away from a quest for secular, nationalist solutions, and toward jihad.

Gaddis, in keeping with his theme that "Cold War superpower" is a misnomer because, while capable of destroying the world, the U.S. and the USSR were hamstrung in diplomacy and practical action, focuses on Nasser's triumph:

[B]eing a Cold War superpower did not always ensure that one got one's way. There were limits to how much either Moscow or Washington could order smaller powers around, because they could always defect to the other side, or at least threaten to do so. The very compulsiveness with which the Soviet Union and the United States sought to bring these states within their orbits wound up giving those states the means of escape. Autonomy, in what might have seemed to be inhospitable circumstances, was becoming attainable. Tails were beginning to wag dogs. [p.128]

Paul Johnson writes in "Modern Times": "The real loser in the long term was the United States. Eisenhower appeared to act decisively, and he got his way fast enough. Britain came to heel. He preserved his reputation as a man of peace. But in the process he helped to prepare a mighty scourge for America's own back, in the shape of the tendentious concept of 'world opinion' ..."

Especially in the form of the United Nations, into whose lap the whole Suez problem fell. The U.N. ignored its own earlier resolutions seeking fair access to the seaways for Israel, ignored the ongoing Soviet invasion of Hungary, and harshly rebuked the British, French, and Israelis. [Eden had expected the Americans to run interference for them in the U.N., as the British had for the Americans two years earlier over Guatemala.]

NATO ties frayed. A few years later the Kennedy administration, obsessed with Fidel Castro and perhaps having read too many James Bond novels, asked MI5 to get involved in assassinating him. "We're not in it anymore," was the blunt British reply. "We got out a couple of years ago, after Suez."

In France, the fiasco helped bring the national crisis to a head. And the unwritten last testament of the Fourth Republic willed Vietnam to America. As soon as 1967, when the next general Arab-Israeli war broke out much as the 1956 attack did, France, which in 1956 had been Israel's principal military supplier, denounced the Jewish state's "aggression" and, incredibly, blamed the U.S., because its presence in Vietnam supposedly set the example that instigated Israel's air strike against Nasser.

Whether the Suez Crisis tied America's hands in dealing with the simultaneous rebellion in Hungary is a doubtful matter. Even before Suez, Eisenhower and Dulles never considered lifting a finger to help the Hungarians. It can be said Eisenhower and Dulles showed consistency in their handling of the simultaneous crises: In each case the goal was to keep a regional flare-up from turning into a global war.

But at what a cost. The juxtaposition showed something ugly and conflicted in U.S. policy: America left the Soviets a free hand to crush the uprising it had helped inspire in Hungary, while it blustered mightily about the "imperialism" of its own allies. As Khrushchev said after the crisis, the Americans help their allies "the way the rope helps the man who is being hanged."

But the immediate, and most tragic, consequence of Suez was the chaos that resulted from the overnight deflation of the two empires that had been, when Eisenhower was a boy, the world's true superpowers.

Paul Johnson calls Suez "one of those serio-comic international events, like Abyssinia in 1935, which illustrate historical trends rather than determine them." That's essentially true, but once trends get highlighted so emphatically, and a broad swath of the world suddenly becomes aware of them, the trends become stampedes. And the change can have consequences.

Suez definitively uncovered how much the postwar greatness of Britain and France had been resting on habit and bluff. ... Suez was the deathwatch of Britain's sense of itself as the third of the Big Three. Within a matter of weeks, observed political commentator Alan Watkins, bright young people were no longer dressing for dinner. [Leebaert, p.204]

The catastrophic sudden imperial withdrawal from India in 1947 was repeated on a global scale. Forty new nations tumbled out of the old empires in rapid succession -- 19 in 1960 alone -- most of them doomed to fall into the hands of what Ghana's George Ayittey coldly summed up as "crocodile liberators, Swiss bank socialists, quack revolutionaries and grasping kleptocrats."

It was idle to believe that imperial power, established by shattering what indigenous legitimacy had existed, could, just by the fact of European departure, be transformed into deeply rooted constitutional authority. The sudden abandonments propelled by the Cold War ensured a freezing of colonial boundaries, which were often inauthentic ethnically or economically but were nervously consecrated thereafter because of the trouble that would be let loose if any border came under challenge.

The Cold War did not so much accellerate change in the not-particularly-developing world as create it a generation ahead of schedule, short-circuiting what might have been a more considered process. [Leebaert, p.204]

Cold War Anxieties

[posted by Callimachus]

RIA's excellent reflection on being a parent -- and a child -- during wartime sent me up to the attic. Literally.

Back when I was 18 or 19, opinion surveys of my age group began to appear in print for the first time. There we were, a collective voice, a slice of a generation. It was enlightening to measure myself against my peers in some sort of objective way. And so I saved them, in a manila file, in a filing cabinet. Nowadays, you'd just copy the file to your computer, of course, but this was circa 1979.

I had lots of manila folders back then, for various subjects that interested me. They've followed me through three houses and who knows how many apartments. Last night, I went up in the attic and dug this one down and dusted it off. I read through the articles and reports in it while my wife went up in the attic to rescue the cat, which I had accidently locked up there.

Because I wanted to see if something I remembered was true.

It was. In one 1982 poll of high school seniors, 30 percent said they "worried often" about the chance of nuclear war. That figure was the same across the board -- men and women, college-bound and non-college-bound.

RIA and I have discussed this before, privately. We're roughly the same generation, though I'm a few years older. Our memory of one thing is strong and plain: We both basically grew up thinking there was a pretty good chance, maybe 50:50 or worse, that the whole world was going to go up in a nuclear fireball holocaust some day in the near future, without any warning to any of us.

The 30 percent figure appeared in the tables of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan's annual survey of 17,000 high school seniors in 130 schools nationwide. Yet it rated only a single sentence in the report's text. Probably the figure was so self-evident as to be uninteresting. Instead, the authors, like good academic children of the '60s, bemoaned my generation's lack of sit-ins. The title of the report was "Fewer Rebels, Fewer Causes."

Forty-five percent of us agreed that there would essentially be a world war in the next ten years. Newsweek's "On Campus Poll" in 1982, conducted by Gallup, showed 21 percent of college students (I was one that year) "frequently think and worry about chances of nuclear war," and 49 percent said, "While concerned about the chances of nuclear war, I try to put it out of my mind."

Only 29 percent said they thought the chance of nuclear war was remote. The same polls showed very few of us thought we could survive even an initially limited nuclear war. As recently as 1987, 62 percent of American adults "worried often" about the chance of all-out nuclear war.

In the Michigan poll, 36 percent of high schoiol seniors agreed nuclear or biological annihilation "will probably be the fate of all mankind within my lifetime."

However bad the world is now, whatever fears haunt my children's nightmares, however necessary the Cold War was -- I am grateful to have outlived a time when more than one-third of the children go to bed at night expecting their parents to blow up the whole world and them in it.

Up in the attic I also found a dream journal I kept when I was a teen-ager. More than a few of the nightmares I wrote in it involved the missiles coming down out of the cloud, the desperate sprint for some sort of shelter and the certainty that there really was nowhere to run.

Like all dreams, perhaps, they were symbolic. But what better way to know a person's realities, his times, than by the metaphors the unconscious mind reaches for in dreams?

People in every generation may have a notion of an impending end of the world. Religions with apocalyptic stories woven into their texts, Christianity or Norse god-worship, have them more prominently.

But here, with us, the fear was clear, specific, and immediate. There was no rapture. It was an open question of debate among my friends and me, whether it would be luckier to die in the first flash or to manage to survive it and linger in the wasted world.

And it would be an act not of god, but of us.

This, I am sure, had its effects on us, on me. They may be different in different people. But perhaps they are too little unappreciated now in considering the generation that grew up with fallout shelter placards on our school walls and that now rises to power in the world.

I'll tell you one time I felt it affect me as an adult: When I was young, it seemed the whole point of American military might and the billions we poured into it was to be able to survive just long enough to bring down the hammer on the people of Russia, to kill all of them as they killed all of us. Submarines parked silently on the Arctic Sea floor, missiles hidden among grain fields in the Dakotas, army radar dishes scanning north from Maine. Trigger fingers in the ultimate Mexican standoff. To save the world by being forever one phone call away from obliterating it.

During the Iraq War, and Afghanistan, and the Asian tsunami, when the U.S. military poured its might into setting people free, giving them a hand up, redeeming old wrongs, I felt it, in a small part, like a personal joy. The sense of re-waking from the Kissinger realist nightmare was exhilarating.

They Were Guilty

Get over it.

Who? Alger Hiss. The Rosenbergs. You don't have to like Nixon or McCarthy to accept the evidence that they were right. But it takes a mature mind to do so. And that still seems to be out of reach for some folks.

For Americans who came of age in the 1930s (as for many who came of age in the 1960s), the spy trials have been litmus tests for a range of issues: Nixon and McCarthy, to be sure; the Cold War and the nature of the Soviet Union as well. Even more viscerally, the Hiss case pointed to the cleavages in American history represented by the Depression, the New Deal, and even Vietnam. The last is not an anachronism, by the way, but a reflection of the degree to which the past is ever active, continually reviewed and refocused in our minds. “Which side are you on?” Woodie Guthrie asked, and an opinion on the Hiss case or any of the other trials of the 1940s and 1950s could answer that question across the spectrum of American public policy issues.

Yes, and some will go to their graves believing O.J. was framed. But ...

Postmodernists will reject the very idea of truth, but new generations of historians may discover that its pursuit and even its imperfect image have value beyond the nihilism current in so much contemporary historical typing. ... In the end, it is truth that sets us free of the dualism that has clouded American discussion of these issues for so much of this century. For too long, the demagoguery of Joseph McCarthy has been used to argue the innocence of Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs. The truth, in the end, is more complex and even more interesting: McCarthy was a demagogue, and Hiss and his colleagues were traitors.

Kennedy in Berlin

Two generations have eaten most of the gold plating off the JFK idol, but there's one moment in his movie-life I'll always revere.

When I was in West Berlin in the '70s I made sure to visit the big Rathaus Shoneberg, down in the southeast suburbs, where Kennedy stood on the balcony in 1963 and looked out over a crowd of 150,000 rattled citizens -- it seemed like everyone left in the city was there -- and spoke words that had welled up in his head just hours before:

There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that Communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin. And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin. And there are even a few who say that it is true that Communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress. Lass’ sie nach Berlin kommen!

By God it was great! Even in the old newsreels, you can feel the force of fury and euphoria. It was real -- There aren't many moments anymore when you get to see an American political figure being himself and being great all at once: When George W. Bush is real, I cringe. I don't think John Kerry remembers what real was.

But there was Kennedy, jabbing at the podium and not so much working the crowd as letting it be lifted up by the tailwind of the electric force he couldn't keep inside.

Because he might have stifled it if he'd had another hour before he spoke. Here's an account of the speech in American Heritage that emphasizes just how spontaneous it was.

Kennedy's stop in West Berlin came during the mutual walk back from the brink of the Cuban Missile Crisis. He and Khrushchev had privately and publicly discussed nuclear test bans. His public speeches that year had been tempered, conciliatory, delivered on a bed of olive branches.

It was in this spirit that he left on the 10-day European trip that would take him not only to West Germany but to Ireland, Britain, Italy, and the Vatican. He intended to deliver a conciliatory speech in Berlin meant for the ears of the Soviets and East Germans.

But then he saw the place. He climed up one of the platforms on the west side and peered over the concrete and barbed wire. The platforms were still there 15 years later when I stood on one. The view in 1977 was the same one. The newsreel narrator in 1963 had said Kennedy looked down on “the symbol of man’s degradation under a dictatorship.”

“I once heard McGeorge Bundy [Kennedy’s director of the National Security Council] say that in Berlin President Kennedy was affected by the brute fact of the Berlin Wall,” recalls Frank Rigg, a curator at the Kennedy library. “He was affronted in a very direct way by the wall, the reason for it and by what it symbolized.”

When the time came to speak, Kennedy blew through the diplomatic pleasantries, and threw down a white-hot 600-word gauntlet the Soviets never dared pick up. And when he stepped down he'd just turned six months of careful detente-work on its head.

“Oh, Christ,” the President exclaimed, when he realized what he had done.

The Cold War involved America and its leaders in a global lie of the legitimacy of the Soviet system. To do otherwise was to risk burning the entire human race. In time, many people in the West came to really believe in that sham legitimacy. Yet every now and then, in some time and place, the lie broke apart. Even if JFK's words that day strayed from the path of security and safety and peace, he had cause. He had stared at an irrefutable fact, and then he had told the truth about it.

Eisenhower's Ghost

When President Bush visited Hungary, he helped the nation commemorate its failed 1956 uprising against Soviet domination. But Charles Gati wrote that a Clinton-style apology would have been more in order:

The truth is that at a critical juncture in the Cold War, when Hungarians rose against their Soviet oppressors, the United States abandoned them. After 13 days of high drama, hope and despair, the mighty Soviet army prevailed. For its part, Washington offered a sad variation on "NATO": no action, talk only. The Eisenhower administration's policy of "liberation" and "rollback" turned out to be a hoax -- hypocrisy mitigated only by self-delusion. The more evident, if unstated, goal was to roll back the Democrats from Capitol Hill rather than liberate Central and Eastern Europe from Soviet tyranny.

Gati is an academic and a researcher. It is apparent from his column that he's formed his opinions about 1956 at least in part from digging he's done in the CIA's archives to research a book. They also owe much, it seems, to material from Soviet archives that were available to researchers after the fall of the USSR.

We now know from Russian archives that the Hungarians did have a chance to gain some of what they sought.

I have every sympathy with the Hungarians. I remember reading a white paper account of the events of 1956 when I was a teenager and thinking it was one of the great tragedies of the Cold War. And seeing how the Red Army brought in its Asian units to grind the boot down on genuine factory workers gave the lie to the whole cardboard edifice of Marxist-Leninist rhetoric.

But Gati seems to me to be in violation of one of my cardinal rules: In judging the acts and words of people of the past, judge from what they knew, not what you know now.

The United States, according to the usual version of what happened, could not help the Hungarians because any action would have triggered a military confrontation with Moscow. This explanation misses the point: There were actions short of war that Washington might have taken. It could certainly have urged the Hungarians to temporize and pursue limited, evolutionary goals. It could have taken the issue to the United Nations before, and not after, the Soviet crackdown. In an imaginative move toward post-Stalin detente, it could have proposed immediate talks about withdrawing American forces from a small Western European country in exchange for Soviet withdrawal from Hungary.

Instead, Gati writes, and probably correctly, "[T]he United States had no means available to aid, let alone 'liberate,' Hungary. For despite all the talk about 'liberation' since 1952, neither the National Security Council nor the State Department had devised plans for diplomatic or any other form of assistance. Nor was the CIA ready."

Thanks to people like Gati, we know what the American and Soviet leaders of 1956 said among themselves. But they couldn't hear each other at the time.

Gati says other U.S. approaches to the Hungary crisis would have succeeded. But even after you've read all the archives, you don't know that. Once you take a single step outside the historical flow of events, once you introduce a single "what-if," the butterfly effect kicks in and the entire course of events becomes utterly unpredictable.

It is possible to see similarities between the 1956 uprisings in Poland and Hungary and the events of 1989: A new leader in the East was denouncing old tyrants, admitting mistakes, and promising more openness and better lives for people. Subject populations reacted by rising up not only against their local overlords but the entire Soviet system.

But the similarities mask deep differences. Khrushchev, for instance, was under intense pressure from Mao not to let the Soviet system run off the rails. The audacity, or genius -- or luck -- of Reagan was to see that the moment had come to press against the rotten regime. The mass rising from below in Eastern Europe was strong enough in 1989, and the change at the top was real enough, and the hollowness of the regimes was so advanced, that the circumstances were just right.

But the main thing Gati seems to have forgotten is the awful dilemma that chilled every day of the Cold War. Every international crisis brought a risk of nuclear annihilation. After a few of them in the first post-war years, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. learned to avoid them -- without making that too obviously the main rule of the game.

Stability always is the ideal for world powers, in any era, but in the Cold War it became the only guarantee of survival. Both sides, though they occasionally tested each other (especially at times of a change in administration in Washington) quickly retreated into the fetish for stability. When the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, Kennedy in public used it as an excuse to, correctly, lambaste the Soviet "worker's paradise" ideal as a sham. But privately he accepted it: "It's not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war."

The U.S. invested thousands of lives and millions of dollars in maintaining a status quo that was morally indefensible and that compromised our ideals. We muzzled our commitment to democracy and embraced dictators if they pronounced themselves anti-communists. And what was the inhumane doctrine of "mutually assured destruction" but hostage-taking on a global scale?

It was a system that elevated stability over justice. What was the alternative? Bold moves only drove the world closer to the thermonuclear precipice. Before it's all forgotten, let someone write down the helpless terror felt by average people during the Cuban Missile Crisis; how my parents said good-bye to each other every morning as he went to work, crying and thinking this would be the day the skies blossomed obliteration all over them.

The Cold War need to deter a nuclear war at all costs short of surrender evolved in the minds of leaders from being a temporary and very regrettable condition, to a necessity, to a proper relationship, and finally to a positive good.

In 1956, it had at least reached the level of "necessity." John Foster Dulles said in a public interview during the crisis that American military intervention to free the Hungarians would "precipitate a full-scale world war and probably the result would be all these people wiped out."

The lines had congealed on the map when the armies halted in 1945. As Gati writes the rhetoric was launched over the barbed wire, but not the soldiers. Dean Rusk, later and in another context, said what happened in Eastern Europe had "never been an issue of war and peace between us and the Soviet Union -- however ignoble this sounds."

Do you wonder why some of us literally felt born-again in 1989, and why we still prefer the current idealistic follies in the name of freedom and gambles on nation-building? Better that than the grim death match grappling of the Cold War. Yet many people yearn for the "balance" of the past, and want something/anything -- Europe, the U.N., even the Islamists -- to rise up and force America to back down and return to all talk, no action.

Gati rails against the hypocrisy of an America that talked a good game of liberation and the rights of people everywhere to live free, but was unwilling to put any muscle into the promises:

The president should tell the Hungarians that in the 1950s Congress issued politically inspired "Captive Nations" resolutions and held self-satisfying "prayer breakfasts," while Eisenhower delivered empty promises about "liberation" during presidential campaigns in 1952 and 1956 to please Hungarian (and other Eastern European) ethnics in Ohio and elsewhere -- with no plans to carry them out.

The Hungarians need to hear what happened 50 years ago -- and Americans need to hear that in the future we will not say we seek clearly unattainable goals abroad for political ends at home.

That's an artful conclusion. It can be read two ways: "We should back up our talk with robust action," or "we should stop talking about freedom being a human right since we're not sincere about helping make it happen."

Preaching and Practice

This runs as a deep, unconscious current in the modern American psyche. In Europe, it flows the other direction, and very much on the surface.

Timothy Garton Ash, writing in "Commentary" in 2005 (article since vanished behind subscription wall) noted that American wars -- especially the Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War -- ultimately have been seen in their outcomes as "morally redemptive."

America's wars are exceptional in that they've generally turned out victorious and generally been fought elsewhere. Without doing irrecoverable damage to the homeland, they have made American society stronger, better, more true to its virtues.

[Yet the South, which did suffer horribly in a war it lost, also found a sense of moral cleansing, as well as a strengthening mythology, in the long struggle and inevitable defeat.]

Especially in the realm of social equality, the Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War shamed or forced Americans into doing what we know ought to have been done long before, but which we were too lazy or distracted to accomplish.

George Kennan foresaw such consequences at the start of the Cold War:

Much depends on health and vigor of our own society. World communism is like malignant parasite which feeds only on diseased tissue. This is point at which domestic and foreign policies meet. Every courageous and incisive measure to solve internal problems of our own society, to improve self-confidence, discipline, morale and community spirit of our own people, is a diplomatic victory over Moscow worth a thousand diplomatic notes and joint communiqués.

He knew, to win it, we'd have to start practicing more of what we preached. And so concern over how America would be perceived abroad maneuvered a reluctant Eisenhower into backing Supreme Court desegregation with presidential authority.

Great advances in civil rights also were made in the immediate wake of the Revolution and World War I. It was the years of peace that allowed reaction's tide to rise and roll them back.

The contrast with Europe, as Ash pointed out, couldn't be more stark:

[M]uch of present-day European consciousness is still shaped by the senseless slaughter of World War I and, in Germany, by the Nazi debacle. Thus, in the decades after 1945, the Germans sought to reclaim their moral standing by, as it were, unloading their sovereignty onto a host of international institutions and by turning their children into pacifists. Since this was a transformation we applauded, it should not surprise us that Germans now denounce the American strategy of preemptive war.

Principled wars are one of the major engines of progress in America. It doesn't mean wars ought to be sought. But when they are forced on us, they have undone decades of social sloth in a few quick, hard years.

Which is one reason it depressed me to see the progressives so utterly reject the bid to overthrow Middle Eastern tyranny and bring democracy to Iraq, and even in some cases to deny that there was such a thing as a "War on Islamist Terroism." And which is one reason it depressed me that, after Sept. 11, Bush simply told Americans to go about life as usual, and still hasn't spoken in any large way of sacrifices or collective efforts.

That fight necessarily involves the Bush Administration with allies such as European homosexuals hounded by Islamists, feminist Muslims, persecuted black Africans in Darfur, and non-Christian religious minorities in Iran and elsewhere. It involves the White House in a core conflict against the very idea of theocracy and religious fundamentalism.

And holding the moral high ground in such a war will force us to straighten up and fly right at home. It offers progressives the leverage they need to effect changes that have waited years for their chance.

Cold War Legacy

Forget Leo Strauss. Meet Albert Wohlstetter, "a mathematician who became a RAND Corporation international-relations theorist in the 1950s and 60s."

Wohlstetter made his mark by arguing for a more aggressive nuclear strategy against the Soviet Union than "mutually assured destruction." MAD, which presumed that our nuclear capability would prevent the Soviets from launching a nuclear war against us, just as theirs would have the same impact in reverse, could only work if the two sides were rational. But the Soviet Union was too expansionist, as well as too evil, to be treated as a rational actor, in Wohlstetter's view. He also argued that increased technological capability would enable the United States to rely on precision bombing as a weapon of war, thereby enabling it to use force without the risk of losing large numbers of ground troops in intensive, land-based combat. Late in life, Wohlstetter became interested in the Middle East and the Arab world. "He and his students," Fukuyama writes, "played a critical role in translating a broad, general set of neoconservative ideas into specific foreign-policy preferences."

Three of Wohlstetter's students were instrumental in applying his principles to the situation in Iraq: Richard Perle and Paul D. Wolfowitz, at the Department of Defense, and Zalmay Khalilzad, first an envoy to Afghanistan and now ambassador to Iraq. All three, along with William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and, for that matter, Fukuyama himself, signed a 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton, which viewed Iraq the same way foreign-policy hardliners had once viewed Communism; like America's previous enemy, they argued, Saddam Hussein was too irrational to be deterred by normal diplomatic means, and the only effective alternative was to remove him from power. In the wake of September 11, 2001, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney quickly bought into those neo-Wohlstetterian ideas. So did Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who believed that the United States could win in Iraq without deploying vast numbers of troops.

It's axiomic that generals always go into battle with their heads full of the previous war, and the first few encounters in a new conflict do little more than shake out the old notions that no longer make sense. Oh, and kill thousands of young men. It took First Bull Run through Malvern Hill to begin to make the point to American generals on both sides that sending infantry charges against dug-in artillery was murder.

This time, though, the battlefield generals got it right. But the diplomats and statesmen were still in Cold War mode. There's an axiom for that, too. If a nation hits on a foreign policy plan that succeeds spectacularly, as Reagan's did against the Soviet Union in the '80s, that nation is doomed to continue trying to repeat that policy until it runs into a mistake that leaves it thoroughly discredited.