"Who controls the past controls the future:
who controls the present controls the past."
George Orwell
1984
Political Roots of September 11, 2001 in 1945:
From World War Keynesianism to Cold War Keynesianism to WTC
R L Norman Jr.
jmkeynes@secularstagnation.com
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1. Introduction
2. Fear of Depression In 1943: The Post World War ll Economy and Military
Demobilization
3. ‘Containment’ to Cold War: From Fighting Nazis to Fighting Communists
4. Cold War Bureaucrats and Presidential Politics After 1950
5. End of the First Cold War- 1970 and the End of Nixon- 1974. Jimmy Carter
in 1976: Global Human Rights as an Objective
6. Jimmy Carter in 1976: Global Human Rights as an Objective
7. Carter and Reagan in 1980: New Cold War- Back in the Saddle Again
8. Thank You, Cold Warriors and Friends
9. Adieu, Cold Warriors and Friends
10. George W. Bush and the new Axis, the ‘Axis of Evil’
11. Conclusions: From the Frying Pan and Into the Fire
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1. Introduction
This article is full of maybes and ‘possibles’ and out-and-out speculation and should be taken as such. The basic view of this article is that the Cold War evolved as much as a full-employment program for the country as from any external threats provided by the Soviet Union in 1945. This is not an apology for the prior Stalinist system, nor a pacificistic ‘give peace a chance’ plea, but a hard-headed look at the last 50 years. If these views are correct, the continued survival of the country is dependant upon a revisiting of the history of the early Cold War from 1947 to 1948 and a reconsideration of the role of the Cold War bureaucracies in the political system since then.
With the late 1940s inclusion of the Nazi spy apparatus of Reinhard Gehlen from Eastern Europe; after about 1950, serious, relatively unbiased analysis of the global situation became impossible within the intelligence system. But it was the domestic employment perceptions of the Cold War American bureaucracies which fed the flames around the globe, not some simple-minded pro-Nazi sentiment within the America system. The end result of fifty years of this ‘Cold War Keynesianism’ model was 911 at the Pentagon, a field in Pennsylvania and in southern Manhattan.
2. The Fear of Depression In 1943: The Post World War ll Economy and Military Demobilization
The most basic desire of most of the American elite in that year was to avoid
a return to the Great Depression and 25 percent unemployment. In a major 1943
book edited by Seymour Harris, Post War Economics, even the more conservative
writer Richard Bissell was unwilling to allow a post war free-market model to
return to 25 percent unemployment. Bissell later went into the intelligence
service. Having dodged this unemployment bullet throughout the war, there was
no desire whatever to see it return again after the war. I contend that the
political path which evolved out of this economic problem led the bureaucracies
which had prosecuted the war to seek bureaucratic ways of ‘surviving’
the normal ‘demobilization’ of most forces at the end of conflict
and the resulting peace.
This was as true for any single thinking member of the elite, as well as for the war-time bureaucratic system. In many ways, the war-time military-industrial complex was ‘Sovietized’ into a tax-eating machine, which needed new reasons to exist. And with the recent 1945 collapse of both major fascist powers, Germany and Japan, a new external ‘totalitarian’ military threat had to be found and quickly, lest the entire industrial system again slip into unemployment and the country into stagnation.
3. ‘Containment’ to Cold War: From Fighting Nazis to Fighting Communists
Not long after George Kennan’s 1947 ‘containment’ article in
Foreign Affairs; the ‘totalitarian’ view was established within the
academy, which applied the tar brush of fascism to Stalinism. A rather blatant
distortion was made into foreign policy and whatever chance the entire globe
had of recovering from the devastation of World War ll was lost. The countries
of Western Europe using the Cold War as an engine of growth, quickly rebuilt;
while the Soviet Union which had provided the vast majority of troops and casualties
in the anti-fascist effort, was forced to try to rebuild its previously weak
civilian sector under the threat of a new attack from the United States. While
it is true that Winston Churchill’s 1948 ‘Iron Curtain’ speech
also had a great influence in solidifying anti-Russian sentiment in the West;
in the main the very early stages of the Cold War had its roots in the fear
of a return to stagnation by economic elites in the United States.
However, once the Cold War got kicked into high gear in the United States by about 1950, the World War ll armed forces and intelligence services had evolved into a highly secretive, military-intelligence complex, which by the middle 1950s was basically out of control and accountable to no one. This era was later memorialized in the late 1950s movie, Seven Days in May, where an Air Force General attempts to pull a coup d etat, against a 'liberal' president, who is trying to make a treaty over nuclear weapons.
President Dwight D. Eisonhower described this apparatus as a military industrial complex in his retiring speech around 1960. It is remarkable how even the major American military figure in World War ll was willing to so harshly criticize his own military in a public speech. Sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote a book during the late 1950s,which compared the American nuclear war machine to that of the Soviet Union as well, The Causes of World War lll.
4. Cold War Bureaucrats and Presidential Politics After 1950
What American presidents have faced since Truman, is this highly secretive intelligence system, which both pushes a highly militarized view of the United States global position and tries- in my opinion- to punish presidents who fail to sufficiently support this militarized world view. Each president, whatever his party, has had to contend with this very powerful but almost invisible force, whose continued reason d’etre compelled large scale foreign intervention as a way of keeping their ‘budgetary authority’ in tact .
In short, what occurred from about 1950 until about 1978, was that the intelligence view of the Soviet Union largely supported a war against any evolving Third World country, which sought to protect its own growth- whether ‘communist’ or not. Thus Mohammed Hossadegh of Iran was targeted, as was Nehru of India, but India had little oil, so its democracy survived the Cold War. Iran’s democracy on the other hand , was destroyed by American intervention by 1954 .
A 1970s book by Edward J Epstein, Agency of Fear, portrayed this bureaucratic battle over the future of anti-communism as a major cause for Nixon’s political problems. I believe that Nixon was hardly the first and certainly not the last president to face this problem.
5. End of the First Cold War- 1970 and the End of Nixon- 1974
A policy of deescalating the Cold War began with Richard M Nixon around 1970.
It had been President Nixon who had stabilized the troop buildup in Vietnam
in 1969 and who soon thereafter began the reapproachment with the People’s
Republic of China (PRC) and began laying the ground work for détente
with the Soviet Union. My belief, is that this attempt by the elected leader
of the United States to lower the threshold of the Cold War was opposed by elements
of the Cold War industrial complex and specifically by the intelligence system
which protected this industrial complex around the globe.
What we know as the Watergate scandal from 1973 and 1974, may actually have been no more than a fight over an evolving post-Cold War political policy; with the people wanting to continue the Cold War successful in having Nixon removed from office. Seen in this light, Nixon’s resignation was a victory for the Cold War paradigm branch of the military-industrial complex, in that the Russian détente policy was somewhat sidetracked in the ensuing political turmoil, but the road to normalization with the PRC stayed more on track.
I would argue that the reason this was so, is that the Soviet Union felt compelled to try to remain in the nuclear arms race with the United States during the 1980s, while the PRC understood that this was impossible. Had the SU made the decision in the early 1980s to simply let the U S military continue the build up- without trying to reply tit-for-tat; the damage to the then Soviet economy could well have been less and a smoother evolution out of a failing coummunist modernity model might have been possible.
6. Jimmy Carter in 1976: Global Human Rights as an Objective
In 1978, then President Jimmy Carter with Adm. Stansfield Turner, director of
the CIA, began returning to Nixon’s policy of minimizing the Cold War bureaucracy,
specifically that of the CIA Directorate of Operations (DO). It is the DO which
runs various ‘operations’ around the globe, from spying to political
blackmail and at least until the Church Committee hearings in 1978, occasionally
murder abroad. Around 2000 such members were ‘riffed’ from the Agency
payrolls. What resulted may have been the creation of an even more dangerous
system of former intelligence agents, who have may continued to interfere in
the presidential process- in attempts to further their political interests.
7. Carter and Reagan in 1980: New Cold War- Back in the Saddle Again
In 1980, after the Iranian hostages were returned the day after Reagan’s
coronation, the ex-CIA agents so recently fired by Carter may have sent Carter
a message- ‘don’t mess with us’. With Reagan in office, they
were truly ‘back in the saddle again’. The Cold War was revived with
a vengeance, providing lots of money for all sorts of military projects. Carter
may have been effectively deposed after a single term, 1976 to 1980, by the
same Cold War bureaucrats who may have so effectively deposed Nixon in 1974-
for largely the same reason- the desire by both presidents to stop the long
Cold War and move on. Reagan had two terms, with Nancy Reagan beginning to move
against the worst of the Cold Warriors by 1984 and effectively gutting the thrust
of the Star Wars program, but not materially affecting the Cold War mentality
of the intelligence bureaucracies.
And whatever economic logic may have minimally justified the 1946 fears of massive unemployment, were long gone by 1980, but the twisted logic of bureaucratic political interests kept the Cold War moving forward into the late 1980s; compelling the Soviet Union into a failed attempt at matching the almost unlimited American military build-up surrounding the Star Wars programs. As the aging Soviet economy failed in the late 1980s, it began removing its troops from Afghanistan, permitting the rise of the fundamentalist Taliban regime and the further consolidation of the most serious threat ever faced by the United States in 200 our years; organized fanatics armed with weapons of mass destruction.
8. Thank You, Cold Warriors and Friends
As this Qeada menace began metasticizing in the 1990s, the intelligence bureaucracies
recognized its existence, but not the strategic nature of its threat. Spy flights
very close to the Chinese mainland continued even as Qeada was closing the gap.
This relative weakness in responding to the Osama bin Laden and al Qeada may
have begun under Clinton,. but continued under President George W. Bush until
September 11, 2001. For almost fifty years, the intelligence system fought with
one eye blind and the other focused upon ‘communism’, the surrogate
for Nazism for over fifty annual budget battles in Congress. When a real anti-modern,
strategic threat struck, the United State’s intelligence forces had barely
a clue of its existence and intents.
Today, America may survive literally from day to day, with Qeada rebuilding in Yemen, Sudan and Western and Southern Pakistan. No American soldier is truly safe any where in the Arab Muslim areas- except those areas in the former Soviet Central Asia; Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and that belt of countries on the southeastern fringe of Russia. Our forces are actually restarting the job begun by Leonid Breznev in Afghanistan in 1978, after Iran began slipping under the influence of Islamic fundamentalism.
Thank you Cold Warriors and friends.
Today, the world is a different place. Our former primary enemy, the once-vaunted Soviet Union, is now our most important ally in the war on terror- regardless of what the ex-CIA DO agents of the 1978 era may think. In fact, to the extent that the former Soviet Union was fighting Islamic fundamentalism on its southern border, they always were our most important ally; regardless of what the Cold War minions maintained. Seen in this light, the viscious attacks against the declining Soviet Union in the 1980s need to be seen as what they were- the strategies of Pyrrhus, that famous Macedonian king who won major victories against Rome, but with large losses; in the sense that every day we supported the rising fundamentalist Islamic movement against the Soviet Union, we were hastening the day upon which this same movement would slam into our own country and damn near destroy us as a civilization.
9. Adieu, Cold Warriors and Friends
It is time a message was sent to these ex-CIA DO agents from 1978- stop interfering
with the domestic politics of this country or look for another country to live.
What you have to offer the country is simply not in demand just now- in truth
it never was. We desperately need an intelligence system capable of analyzing
the global changes and developing a path through the impending economic downturn
and the ongoing Islamic war against the West- and the East. We have to have
a military system capable of rapidly mobilizing small, but extremely lethal
units and dispatching them, basically in near-real time. Fast, small, violent
and deadly is the future of American military operations in the war against
terror. Big, slow and clumsy will no longer cut the mustard and stupid intelligence,
blinded by bureaucratic imperatives is no longer a joke.
It is a serious question whether or not the strategic paragdigm which evolved in the late 1940s elite universities of the Northeast can be modified sufficiently raipdly by the people who grew up with this Cold War view. A new paradigm has to be developed ‘on the fly’ and it has to work the first time, or the United States may fall as far as the former Soviet Union did during the early 1990s.
10. George W. Bush and the new Axis, the ‘Axis of Evil’
Some may recognize a return of this pattern of ‘thinking’ evolving in the last year under current President George W. Bush, with a return to the ‘Axis’, an ‘Axis of Evil’ and an attempt to set up Iraq as the new global threat. In 2001 however, both the military and intelligence bureaucracies seem to have tried to resist this gross misapplication of history and theory. Today’s existing military-intelligence system seems to have learned something from the ongoing disaster of the Cold War and has NOT bought into Bush’s political line on Iraq. This resistance is to their ever lasting credit. Had these same bureaucracies been able to resist the misapplication of the theory of totalitarianism to communism in 1947 and 1948, then the 1950s might well have seen the ‘convergence’ of the Western and communist systems, an idea much bandied about during the 1950s.
11. Conclusions: From the Frying Pan and Into the Fire
That however is water under the bridge and daily survival in 2003 requires us to move forward with the existing military-intelligence system, taking note that the fools from the past did us few favors in the long Cold War and absolutely no good in the 1980s Cold War against the collapsing Soviet Union. Fifty years of incompetent post World War ll economics was going to bring down communism. The only question was what would be the new systems, in Eastern Europe, in Russia and in the Islamic areas on the southern border of Russia. Four airliners, a half dozen buildings, almost 1 ship and about 3000 casualties alter, we now have the answer.
Welcome to the post-communist world.