Re: WHO WILL TELL THE PEOPLE -- THE BETRAYAL OF AMERICAN
Posted: Thu Oct 31, 2013 1:00 am
PART FOUR: TRIUMPH AND LOSS
16. CRACKPOT REALISM
The end of the Cold War represents a rare opening for democratic possibilities; but it is also the source of new political crisis. This new epoch suddenly revives questions about the nature of American self-government that have been successfully evaded for two generations. Ready or not, American politics must change, for the world has changed around it.
The country has reached a satisfying end to a struggle that for four decades dominated our national priorities and permeated every corner of the political culture. The Cold War was the central engine driving the government's management of the economy. Fear was the political idea that unified national life for two generations. Now it is abruptly over. America has won; the Soviet Union has disintegrated as a global power.
Yet American politics has also been destabilized by the victory. The mobilizing fear has evaporated, but the institutional structure of government and politics remains on a permanent war footing. Massive armaments and American troops are deployed around the globe; $30 billion a year is devoted to spying and other intelligence activities. The industrial base is still propped up by defense spending; the routines of secrecy and political control developed by the national-security state are still the operating norm. It will not be easy to find a new purpose in the world that justifies these abnormalities as efficiently as communism did.
Nor will it be so easy to rationalize the grave damage the Cold War has done to democracy. The permanent mobilization has altered the democratic relationships profoundly, concentrating power in remote and unaccountable places, institutionalizing secrecy, fostering gross public deception and hypocrisy. It violated law in ways that have become habitual. It assigned great questions of national purpose to a militarized policy elite. It centralized political power in the presidency at the expense of every other democratic institution. The question is: Now that the enemy has vanished, is it possible that democratic order can be restored?
In addition to all the daunting obstacles and deformities enumerated in this book, the democratic problem is now compounded by these large questions about America's place in the world. The post-Cold War reality is actually eclipsed by an even larger force threatening national well-being -- the global economy. While governing elites struggled Obsessively against communism, the world changed in other ways that now threaten the nation with continuing economic loss and political impotence. The system of globalized enterprise, as the next chapter explains, directly undermines the widely shared prosperity that has been a prerequisite for America's political stability. But the global economy also steadily erodes the nation's sovereign control over its destiny.
Ready or not, Americans are now confronted with some unprecedented questions about self-government and whether the concept will continue to have meaning in the world.
***
Hardly anyone took note when Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan introduced his grandly titled legislation -- the End of the Cold War Act of 1991 -- because six days earlier the United States had gone to war again. The senator proposed to abolish the Central Intelligence Agency, the institutional agent and symbol of the Cold War, and fold the CIA's secret activities into the State Department and the Pentagon, where they might be more accountable to political oversight. His legislation set out to prohibit various irregular practices tolerated in government for four decades and to restore a sense of lawful legitimacy to foreign policy.
"The law of nations," Moynihan intoned. "Somewhere that got lost in the fog of the Cold War. It just got lost. We have become a national-security state, a country mobilized for war on a permanent basis, and we got into the business of saying everything is secret. Can we recover the memory of what we were before we became what we are now? Can we rediscover a sense of proportion in the national-security state? The task of purging the Cold War from our institutions is enormous. It will require a sustained and determined effort." [1]
The senator's timing was oblivious to the national mood. At that very moment, the nation was gathered before its TV sets, watching night flashes from the American bombing of Baghdad and the gunsight footage of "smart bombs" finding their Iraqi targets. Six weeks later, America was celebrating victory -- a splendid little war in which only a few hundred Americans died. The nation's military prowess was demonstrated for the world; its virtuous intentions were confirmed in the scenes from Kuwait of liberation and homecoming.
In that context, Senator Moynihan's questions seemed eccentric. The Cold War might be over, but now suddenly there was a new struggle to replace it. America is committed, the president announced unilaterally, to establishing and defending a "New World Order." The concept was scarcely defined, but popular support for the American military surged, as did popular support for the president.
Moynihan's questions, however, will return to haunt the country. Saddam Hussein, notwithstanding the barbarity of his regime, proved to be an inadequate substitute for the Cold War. When the Iraqi dictator seized neighboring Kuwait, George Bush invoked the specter of Hitler, a metaphor that resonated with the start of the Cold War forty years earlier. World War II was America's finest moment in world affairs and nostalgic memories of it powered the long struggle against Soviet communism on countless fronts. Now, President Bush explained, a new dictator was threatening the integrity of nations and must be confronted in the same spirit.
Events, however, failed to sustain the metaphor. For one thing, Hussein was defeated much too quickly and easily. He was also allowed to remain in power, an outcome impossible to reconcile with the president's histrionic rhetoric on the march to war. If Saddam was Hitler, why was he not killed or conquered and put on trial for crimes against humanity?
Other complicating facts developed in the aftermath: The Kuwaiti ruling family, whom we had fought to rescue, demonstrated again that it was itself a despotic feudal regime, contemptuous of the individual rights associated with democracy. The defeat of Iraq produced internal rebellions that eventually mired the United States in the awkward role of a neocolonial warden.
Above all, the war produced this contradiction: In the first year of the post-Cold War era, while the Soviet military apparatus was being withdrawn and dismantled, U.S. defense spending actually increased. The bloated defense budget would shrink eventually, as even the Pentagon leaders accepted, but not while the country was waging another war?
Furthermore, neither the end of the Cold War nor U.S. victory in the Persian Gulf could obscure the nation's deteriorating financial strength. The defense buildup of the 1980s had been financed largely on deficit spending -- money the federal government borrowed from the allied nations (Japan and Germany, principally) that the United States was defending, more or less for free. If America was now the world's only superpower, it was stuck in a most anomalous predicament. Wall Street financier George Soros described the contradiction: "There are many examples in history where military power was sustained by exacting tributes, but there is no precedent for maintaining military hegemony on borrowed money." [3]
The excitement of an occasional war is, in fact, one of the few remaining opportunities for alienated citizens to feel connected again with their nation's higher politics. So long as the wars are relatively quick and painless, they provide a rallying point for ordinary citizens, a momentary illusion of shared national purpose. The war making offers a fantasy of power for those who are, in fact, powerless. When the euphoria dissipates, as it always does, people resume their distance and disenchantment.
In the aftermath of the Gulf War, Americans did not rally around the "New World Order" proposed by the president. Nor did public opinion embrace the notion that U.S. firepower must police the world. On the contrary, people overwhelmingly expressed the opinion (85 percent to 11 percent in one survey) that military initiatives against global disorders should be led by the United Nations rather than the United States. Their own government, Americans said, should turn its attention to the problems at home. The national-security threat that most troubled ordinary citizens was America's deteriorating position in the global economy. [4]
***
In the 1950s, when the Cold War temperament was enveloping the thought and language of American politics, the sociologist C. Wright Mills derided what he called "the crackpot realism of the higher authorities and opinion-makers." Absurdities were cloaked in technocratic jargon and passed off to the public as brilliant insight or the fruits of sophisticated intelligence.
The ability of national-security experts to describe reality in arcane ways that ordinary citizens could not easily test for themselves, much less challenge, was a central element of power in the Cold War era and one of its most debilitating influences on democracy. "Crackpot realism" consumed trillions of dollars and built enough nuclear bombs to destroy life on the planet.
Huge, secret bureaucracies were created in government to discover the hidden "facts" about the dangerous world around us, especially the machinations of the Soviet empire, and to shape national-security policy accordingly. Much of this knowledge was considered too sensitive to share with the public, but provocative details were regularly communicated in the form of warnings about new' 'threats" that had emerged -- deadly new missiles pointed at America or revolutionary stirrings in Third World countries said to be inspired by Moscow. The history of the Cold War is a series of such alarums, based on espionage and classified documentation, and of the subsequent events that refuted them.
Given the insular nature of American society,. most citizens had little real knowledge of distant nations and no independent way to evaluate the government's description of reality, In the absence of clear contradictory evidence, people generally were prisoners of what the government authorities told them about the world. They accepted what the spies and analysts had discovered about the enemy, at least until the war in Vietnam devastated the government's authority. The alternative -- questioning the president while the nation was at war-seemed unpatriotic.
"Crackpot realism" has flourished right up to the present time and the Central Intelligence Agency was a principal source for it. As late as 1989, as Moynihan observed, the CIA reported that the economy of communist East Germany was slightly larger than the economy of West Germany -- an intelligence estimate ludicrously debunked a few months later when the East German regime collapsed and its citizens streamed westward in search of jobs, consumer goods and food. The following year, the CIA corrected the record by abruptly shrinking the threatening dimensions of East Germany by more than one third.
The same gross exaggeration was repeated, year after year, when the CIA made its estimates of the Soviet Union's awesome capabilities. The 1989 analysis claimed that the growth rate of the Soviet bloc exceeded western Europe's. But then the CIA had solemnly reported for four decades that the Soviet economy was growing faster than the U.S. economy -- almost half again faster. The result, it said, was a formidable industrial power -- second-largest in the world and much larger than Japan, according to the CIA.
If that were true, this nation was an adversary rightly to be feared, since it had the economic capacity, not only to match the U.S. arsenal, weapon for weapon, but to achieve something the experts called "superiority." Hundreds of billions of America's dollars, even trillions, were devoted to forestalling that dread possibility. [5]
Of course, it was not true. It was not true in the 1950s and it was especially not true in the late 1970s and early 1980s when America launched another massive arms buildup. Some journalists and scholars had been making this point about the Soviet economy for many years, pointing out the decay and malfunctioning that was visible despite the Soviet censors. But U.S. official authority and propaganda always succeeded in maintaining the enemy's strength.
When Gorbachev opened the Soviet society to full inspection, what western experts saw more nearly resembled a Third World country than a major industrial power. Its economy was a crude joke compared to the high-tech industrial systems of Japan, West Germany and the United States. The Soviet Union, aside from its size, was not second strongest in the world or third, probably not even fourth or fifth.
Americans, in other words, were propagandized by their own government for forty years. Were citizens deliberately deceived or were the CIA spies so befogged by their own ideological biases that they missed the reality themselves? This is one of the questions that a post-Cold War debate might take up for closer examination.
Senator Moynihan, though he raised the embarrassing facts, preferred to believe that everyone had acted in good faith. The senator had served himself as vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and, like most politicians, had believed fully in the Soviet threat right until the end. He had been a consistent and eloquent champion of the Cold War arms buildup and had disparaged anyone who questioned the need to keep enlarging the U.S. arsenal. Now, Moynihan disparaged the CIA, with the sharpness of one whose trusting nature has been betrayed.
"It would be pretty obvious," the senator said, "to cut their budget in half so they wouldn't pass around these silly reports."
The government's persistent inflation of the enemy made plausible many other versions of "crackpot realism" that emanated from intelligence experts and somberly ruled the political debate on national defense. A "missile gap" discovered by these experts in 1960 was eventually acknowledged to be illusory, but only after the Kennedy administration had launched a program to double America's nuclear missile force. A theoretical "window of vulnerability" that defense authorities identified in the late 1970s became the pretext for the trillion-dollar defense modernization of the Reagan presidency. Yet the Reagan administration's cornucopia of new weaponry never attempted to close the supposedly dangerous "window."
In the early 1980s, American intelligence discovered Cubans constructing a large airport on the Caribbean island of Grenada and concluded that it was to be a future launching pad for Soviet bombers aimed at America. After the U.S. invasion and conquest of that tiny country, the American government finished building the airport so it could be used for jumbo-jet tourist traffic, the purpose Grenada had always claimed for it. The most enthusiastic advocates of the U.S. surrogate war against Nicaragua, including President Reagan, described a "domino theory" of nations in which Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico would one by one fall to the Communists. If America did not defeat the Sandinistas, the Red armies would someday be massed on the border, poised to attack Harlingen, Texas.
For four decades, NATO defense policy was premised on a latter-day version of blitzkrieg -- a vision of the Soviet armies launching a surprise attack that sweeps across the plains of central Europe and swiftly arrives at the English Channel, just like Hitler. The allied generals earnestly prepared to fight World War II in Europe all over again, a burden that consumed nearly half of the U.S. defense budget.
Of course, the scenario was absurd, as the U.S. intelligence community itself belatedly acknowledged in November 1989 when the "threat" analysis was abruptly changed. Half of the Soviet divisions poised to strike from eastern Europe, it turns out, were actually manned at token levels -- 5 percent to 25 percent of their fighting strength. In order to attack the West, the Soviets would have had to transport 150,000 troops from the Soviet Union and activate 800,000 reservists in the Warsaw Pact nations. Nevertheless, President Bush was still insisting on the scenario (and proposing new and highly dangerous battlefield nuclear weapons for western Europe) only a few months before the Berlin Wall fell. [6]
The point of reciting such examples of exaggeration is not to reargue the Cold War, now that it is over, but to demonstrate what an overpowering idea the Cold War was. People believed and accepted the most threatening possibilities and the government acted on them. It was not that the dubious alarums were never questioned. But the concept of vigilance against an awesome enemy swept away critical opposition and, often, rationality.
American politics created a mythology and then was ruled by it. A senator or representative might safely challenge the Cold War on subordinate issues -- does America really need more aircraft carriers? -- but any politician would be vulnerable to defeat if his argument was not safely couched in the context of mortal struggle against a malevolent adversary. Political contests deteriorated into manly arguments over who was "hard" and who was "soft" toward this enemy. Mere citizens were mostly excluded from the dense technical esoterica of the defense debate, except on those crude terms. Most citizens, not surprisingly, preferred political leaders who seemed "hard."
From the beginning, the Cold War put citizens in the same weak defensive posture that characterized their position on large domestic issues. But the people did sometimes block the government's most outrageous plans. When the Reagan regime prepared for another war of intervention against Nicaragua, public opposition stood in the way and the government was compelled to mount a surrogate war, which it quaintly referred to as a "covert operation." Preventing a U.S. invasion constituted a victory of sorts for the citizens.
Still, as in Nicaragua, the Cold War's institutional apparatus produced an inevitable series of extralegal activities in the government, offending both domestic and international law. This was not simply the occasional misadventures of "rogue" intelligence officers who "went too far," as authorities always explained when the CIA was implicated in assassination plots or other covert actions that violated law and morality. In many ways, the institutional arrangements were created in order to allow the president to operate outside the law.
Some conservative Republicans recognized this danger at the outset and they were principled opponents to the legislation that in 1947 created the CIA (designed and promoted by liberal Democrats). In congressional debate, a handful of conservatives argued that the CIA, with its secret budget and cloaked activities, would give the chief executive enormous new powers to make foreign policy in secret -- and indeed to wage secret wars -- without submitting his decisions to the due processes of open political debate, authorization and appropriate and formal declarations by Congress.
The conservatives were right, of course, but then that was the idea of the CIA -- to empower the president by circumventing democratic processes. Conservatives have since embraced the all-powerful chief executive as the ideal, while many liberals have learned to question it, especially after the liberal debacle in Vietnam.
The illegal consequences of creating a secret government did not remain very secret, despite the popular lore of spies and their stealthful routines. The CIA helped engineer changes of government, sometimes violently, in Iran, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile and a long list of other nations. It was implicated in the counterrevolutionary massacres in Indonesia and the successful assassinations of at least three foreign leaders as well as other murder plots that failed. It managed a secret army in Laos and its agents laid the groundwork for the war in Vietnam, where, among other functions, the CIA supervised an infamous program of targeting and killing suspect citizens, without benefit of trial. The CIA ran the not-so-covert war against Nicaragua. It assembled an army and invaded Cuba with disastrous results.
At home, the CIA penetrated universities, private business corporations and other government agencies, especially the State Department, partly to obtain cover for its intelligence officers, partly to gather proprietary information and partly to compromise others. When asked to by various presidents, the agency spied on American citizens who were political dissidents, in the name of protecting the nation against subversion. It created scores of dummy corporate organizations to transact its business, so as to conceal the fact that an agency of government was illegally laundering money or transporting arms to overseas conflicts or doing deals with the Mafia. It infiltrated domestic political associations and tax-exempt foundations in order to advance the propaganda war against communism.
Abuses by the national-security state have continued right up to the present. In 1982, the FBI conducted a secret subversion investigation of Physicians for Social Responsibility because the group opposed Reagan's nuclear. weapons policy. PSR and its worldwide affiliates later won the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1986, the FBI fired an agent who refused to conduct a "domestic security/terrorism" investigation of two citizen groups opposing Reagan's policy in Central America. During the 19808, the FBI delivered data from its investigations of domestic political opposition to the White House. [7]
These are a sampling of the scandalous matters that are known and documented; some would insist there is a far darker portrait of the CIA to be drawn from outlaw behavior that is less well authenticated. The point of reciting the history, in any case, is to demonstrate the fundamental irregularity of this institution and its capabilities. When the nation is at war, unlawful measures are often accepted as necessary to national survival. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War; Roosevelt interned Japanese-American citizens in World War II. In the Cold War, however, it was the irregular institutional arrangement itself that committed the offenses, while it functioned to keep the nation at war.
Despite recurring scandals (always followed by appropriate "reforms"), the Central Intelligence Agency and allied components remain intact outside the normal structure of democratic accountability. It is available to any president who feels the need for extralegal activities of almost any kind. The president need only issue a secret executive order authorizing the venture; a handful of congressional leaders will be informed, but only upon their agreement to keep the facts from the public.
As president, Ronald Reagan issued 298 National Security Decision Directives -- secret edicts that are accorded the force of law. By private writ, the president is able to mobilize government resources for subversion or order surveillance of private citizens or launch aggressive wars against other nations, all without public debate or even public knowledge. [8]
The fundamental conflict is not about the need for intelligence gathering, but about respect for law, both domestic and international law. And the problem is not rooted in the CIA's peculiar charter, but in the White House and the nature of modern executive power. In the end, it was the presidents who authorized the lawlessness and who benefited politically from the corruption of regular democratic process. If the "New World Order" means the U.S. government is going to use its power around the globe to uphold law and promote democracy, it might usefully start at home.
If Iraq violated the "law of nations," as it did, then so has the United States. The invasion of Grenada, for example, "was the clearest possible violation of Article 18 of the Charter of the Organization of American States, a document as much of our drafting as was the Charter of the United Nations," Senator Moynihan wrote. "It was a violation of the latter also." [9]
American officials always claimed virtuous motives for their invasions of foreign countries and argued that there were justifying provocations, but the American interventions were always made unilaterally, decided by the chief executive alone, oblivious to the formal procedures by which such actions are sanctioned under international law or by the U. S. Constitution. When presidents authorized a covert aggression against another nation, the government did not even bother with public justifications, but pretended instead, with a broad wink, to official innocence.
American citizens cannot escape the consequences of a government that ignores the law. Twice in the last decade alone, the U.S. president was caught out in engagements that demonstrably violated either international law or U.S. law or both. Each event caused a political stir, but the president remained aloof.
In 1983, during the covert war against Nicaragua, CIA agents mined the harbors of that country, an action that is defined in international law as a direct act of aggression against a sovereign state. Clearly prohibited by international treaties, the mining also raised the constitutional question of who in the American government had authorized an act of war. When distressed senators complained, the CIA blandly promised not to do it again.
When Nicaragua prepared to take a formal complaint to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the Reagan administration announced peremptorily that it would no longer accept the World Court's jurisdiction over "disputes with any Central American state or arising out of or related to events in Central America." The United States thus set aside temporarily a treaty obligation it had accepted, by Senate ratification, in 1946.
The World Court heard Nicaragua's case, nonetheless, and ruled in 1986 that the United States had violated "general principles of humanitarian law" in numerous ways -- mining harbors, bombing oil installations, arming the Contras and distributing guerrilla-warfare manuals that encouraged the violent intimidation of Nicaraguan citizens. This was the first time in American history, Senator Moynihan noted, that an international tribunal had ever found the United States in violation of law. Yet the World Court's decision received only brief, passing notice within the United States.
The other episode of presidential lawlessness was more celebrated -- the Iran-Contra affair in which the Reagan White House ignored the legislative prohibition against providing further aid to the Contra army it had created in Nicaragua. Among the many complicated illegalities generated by the White House in that matter, one pointed unambiguously at the president's own failure to faithfully execute the law. Reagan personally authorized Cabinet officers to raise funds from foreign governments for the war, despite the congressional prohibition of U. S. involvement. "The plain fact," Moynihan wrote, "is that the president did invite and almost certainly deserved impeachment."
Actually, a resolution of impeachment was filed against President Reagan by Representative Henry Gonzalez, the Texas Democrat who compares the unbridled power of modern American presidents to that of the Roman Caesars. Americans, Gonzalez said, no longer have a republic in the original meaning; presidential power has trampled it beyond recognition. Gonzalez's complaint was ignored. Ronald Reagan continued in office and retired with honor, an affable Caesar who was much loved by the people.
When President Bush went to war in the Persian Gulf, Gonzalez filed another impeachment resolution against him. Gonzalez charged that Bush had violated law and constitutional process, first by unilaterally committing five hundred thousand troops to a foreign combat zone in violation of the terms of the War Powers Act, then by bribing foreign nations to accede to his strategy. A $7 billion loan to Egypt was forgiven without congressional approval. Zaire was promised military aid and partial debt forgiveness. Turkey was given a larger import quota for its textiles. China was assured of favorable trade terms if it did not veto the U.S. initiative in the UN Security Council. The Soviet Union was promised billions in aid so it would cooperate too. In the glow of victory, everyone assumed the president had the power to do these things -- that he is free to do whatever he wants in wartime. [10]
This overbearing nature of the modern presidency is what has most crippled democracy. But the permanent Cold War mobilization made the accumulation of power seem "normal," and over two generations the public memory of a presidency accountable to the Constitution has been nearly lost. The idea that democracy ought to function in any other way now seems eccentric.
The Cold War president became a mythological figure -- a warrior president surrounded by warriors, preoccupied with questions of global conflict above all others. As the Cold War cliche goes, "all our lives are in his hands," and, in those circumstances, people assigned mystical qualities to the warriors who were running things. Military officers became commonplace in the uppermost reaches of government. A general served as secretary of state, an admiral led the CIA. A CIA director became president.
The office of the president has many valuable qualities -- particularly the ability to educate and unify the nation -- but the institution cannot possibly carry the full burdens of democracy. It is too narrow and singular and, above all, too private in its actions, notwithstanding the TV images of presidential comings and goings that are provided daily. The centralized political power has encouraged the evasion and hollowness that permeate the domestic dimensions of government.
The White House has become a" convenient "safe house" for governing without any of the messy obligations required by a genuine democracy -- a sanctuary where things finally get decided privately and without public debate. This retreat encourages others in the political community to avoid hard decisions by passing on the toughest questions to the White House where the president can settle them in the protected reserve of the Oval Office.
The rich diversity of democratic dialogue has been collapsed into a single, opaque institution. Self-government has been reduced to a single mind and heartbeat. Dismantling the Cold War, restoring a democratic order, means cutting the presidency down to appropriate size.
***
From the beginning, the Cold War fulfilled an ironic purpose in domestic politics: It allowed all patriots to embrace a twisted, back-door version of socialism. The federal government claimed a rationale for intervening massively in the private economy, but without the usual debate over free enterprise and limited government. Washington stimulated economic demand with contracts and subsidies; it directed private investment through industrial planning and capital allocation. It created millions of jobs for workers. It built and owned scores of factories for private enterprises to operate.
Conservatives could ride along free on this arrangement without blemishing their ideological purity and, in time, conservatives became its most enthusiastic advocates. No one had to justify government-owned industrial plants and vast research laboratories and government-financed industrial development (including the occasional bailout of failing companies). It was all done in the name of defending the nation.
If the Cold War has truly ended and no great unifying cause can be found to replace it, then conservatives have lost their cover and the government has lost its rationale for steering the private economy through the federal budget. This economic reality will likely lead to a continuing political crisis, as many Americans discover how much their own economic well-being was dependent on the permanent mobilization and as political leaders search for saleable substitutes.
The modern defense budget, it is true, now consumes less than 5 percent of the gross national product, so it is often argued that even a major shrinkage in defense spending can be absorbed by the overall economy without great pain. That assumption misunderstands the socialist relationship.
For better or worse, the Pentagon is like a big rock propping up American manufacturing. Roughly one fifth of U.S. manufacturing output is purchased by the federal government via defense contracts. In 1985, for instance, the military spent $165 billion buying goods from a broad spectrum of 215 industries -- 21 percent of the manufacturing gross national product. Defense-related work employs one in ten of America's manufacturing workers.
The military allocates $38 billion a year for research and development and supports at least one in every four U.S. scientists. Defense pays for roughly 50 percent of the university research on computer science and electrical engineering. It provides 96 percent of the income for American shipbuilding. It accounts for about one fifth of the nation's modernizing capital investment. [11]
In other words, a forty-year addiction to socialist-style intervention is now threatened by cold-turkey therapy. If the defense budget shrinks drastically, it is going to leave a big hole in the American economy -- especially in the crucial realm of long-term development and investment. Who will buy the state-of-the-art machine tools? Who will pay for the basic science? The government will have to invent other rationales and methods for force- feeding private research and investment or else retreat to laissez-faire principle and hope that private enterprise somehow makes up the difference.
That is one dimension of the crisis that demobilization is bound to engender. Another dimension is the fierce politics of lost contracts and employment. Depending on how rapidly the defense budget shrinks, the shutdown of weapons production could eliminate more than five hundred thousand jobs for both skilled industrial workers and the technical professions.
These are the "good jobs" in the American economy -- premium-wage manufacturing jobs held by machinists, electricians, engineers and others. These workers will not easily find comparable positions in an economy in which heavy industry has been shrinking its employment base for the past decade. The overall effect could resemble another round of the deindustrialization and downward mobility that workers in steel, autos and other sectors have already experienced.
Given these harsh facts, the political response has largely been like an unreformed alcoholic's -- denial and avoidance. The president traveled now and then to defense plants where he congratulated the defense workers on the high quality of their work and assured them he personally wanted to keep buying their tanks or airplanes. This put him on the smart side of the short-run politics: When the defense contracts were canceled and the factories closed, George Bush would be able to say it was not his idea.
In Congress, roughly the same political strategy played out much more messily -- state by state, district by district -- as liberals and conservatives alike fought to keep open their factories and their military bases at the expense of someone else's. Long Island mobilized to keep alive Grumman's F-14, while the Pentagon kept trying to kill it. St. Louis mourned the loss of McDonnell Douglas's A-12. Newport News, Virginia, sued the Navy to save Tenneco's Seawolf submarine contract. General Dynamics announced, for obvious political effect, that nearly one third of its ninety thousand workers would be laid off, perhaps forever.
These dislocations and others were just the beginning, and the next round promised to be more severe. The Defense Department was planning a modest five-year reduction in the Cold War mobilization -- a 25 percent cut in the uniformed forces and a $15 billion decline in its budget authority. But that would still leave the defense budget around $280 billion -- still gigantic for a nation in debt, unable to finance a long list of competing domestic priorities and unable to identify a credible enemy beyond a few tinpot dictators. If the U.S. defense budget were cut in half, it would still be four or five times larger than that of the next-strongest nation. [12]
The dramatic cancellations of weapons systems occasionally reported in the news were mostly projects the country couldn't afford in the first place, even when the Cold War was flourishing. As defense budgets soared during the 1980s, each of the three services signed up for a dizzying wish list of new toys -- commitments so ambitious that, as one defense expert said, the Pentagon was trying to buy $400 billion worth of firepower on a $300 billion budget. This dilemma was well understood by defense experts (and politicians) for years and they responded to it by ordering procurement stretchouts -- buying fewer of each weapon every year so they would not have to cancel anybody's favorite. This approach naturally raised the per-unit cost of procurement and made defense production even more inefficient.
The Bush administration belatedly struggled to eliminate this "bubble" of false expectations from defense-budget projections. The next round of demobilization would be for real: bringing home troops that had been stationed abroad since the 1950s, closing scores of domestic military bases, shuttering more factories.
Aside from the president's vague talk about the "New World Order," neither political party offered a coherent strategy for how the nation might cope with this economic transformation. A few liberals introduced "conversion" bills that did little more than encourage communities and industries to plan for their post-Cold War future. Conservative thinkers concentrated, meanwhile, on trying to devise substitute "threats" -- Third World terrorism or nuclear proliferation -- that might justify continuing the nation's permanent war footing.
The Pentagon, ironically, was one of the few places where arguments over the economic implications had hesitantly begun, perhaps because the military itself would suffer the consequences first and most severely. As the defense budget shrinks, companies will fail or get out of the weapons business and the defense industrial base will shrink too. Thus, the unit cost of acquiring new weapons -- already grossly inflated -- is expected to spiral still higher. Without much hyperbole, the military planners envision a juncture where they will be buying fewer and fewer tanks and airplanes for higher and higher prices -- unable to maintain their force levels, even if their global mission is defined in less grandiose terms.
The transformation of high-technology production in the global economy, meanwhile, promises to make the United States more dependent on foreign producers for crucial weapons components, especially in the advanced technologies. If nothing else changes, one can predict a not-distant future when the world's only superpower is borrowing money from its allies to buy the high-tech weapons components they manufacture -- so the supposed superpower will be able to protect these allies from worldly harm. In a minor way, this was already the case.
The American public, if it ever caught on, would not be terribly enthusiastic about arming America with made-in-Japan electronics. Indeed, anxious members of Congress were already calling for a "Buy America" doctrine in defense procurement. Pentagon officials had to explain that "Buy America" would mean tanks or airplanes that were missing key parts.
For all these reasons, as well as their obvious self-interest, some of the conservative leaders of the defense community were beginning to flirt with a radically different economic doctrine -- government engagement in the private economy that would merge defense-production requirements with the broader objective of improving America's competitive position in commercial markets. Even Defense Secretary Richard Cheney, a conservative ideologue in most other matters, made an implicit pitch for some sort of industrial policy. "The United States," Cheney declared, "cannot persist in its current laissez-faire approach to the competition in advanced technologies without incurring major economic and security. problems of its own in the future." [13]
Jacques S. Gansler, an authority on the defense industry and chairman of the Defense Science Board's study on the advanced technology crisis, has argued for a radical restructuring in which defense manufacture and commercial production are fully integrated with each other -- both to preserve the defense industrial base and to foster the modernization of U.S. manufacturing.
Essentially what Gansler and others have proposed is that the government set aside some of the notorious fictions of the Cold War era and frankly acknowledge that it manipulates the private economy through defense spending but that it has been doing so in ways that are wasteful and ineffective, partly because the money was spent without regard to the nation's overall economic condition.
Some of the cold warriors of the Pentagon, a few at least, are hesitantly beginning to recognize that, while they were devoting the nation's capital to Cold War weaponry, another, more ominous threat to the national security was emerging from America's loss of economic power. [14] Pentagon reform -- harnessing defense procurement to economic competitiveness -- would at least lead to a more honest version of socialism or, more politely, a deliberate "industrial policy" that is more like those of Japan and the other allies who are America's global competitors.
But this approach contains large perils for democracy and for ordinary citizens -- the possibility of corporate socialism for entrenched economic interests. Given the deformed structure of political power that now exists, an industrial policy of any kind, especially one supervised by the Pentagon, might swiftly deteriorate into an extravagant program for taking care of the same old crowd, in the name of "competitiveness." In the global economy, furthermore, there is the more complicated question of which companies are really "American. " Why should American taxpayers underwrite the development of advanced technologies for multinational corporations if those companies are free to transfer the processes to their foreign plants and low-wage foreign workers?
An American industrial policy, in other words, is not a plausible solution in democratic terms unless politics has also confronted the questions about corporate loyalty. If American companies are not made to accept a stronger sense of national obligation -- the kind of commitment that Japanese or German companies routinely accept in their societies -- a new industrial policy might simply subsidize the continuing erosion of the American wage structure, using taxpayer dollars to finance corporate globalization.
The post-Cold War political question is: How can the nation begin to restore a peaceable economic balance and evolve toward a society that is not so relentlessly organized around the machinery of war? To put it another way, how might America begin to domesticate its military-industrial complex?
One way to accomplish the transition might be to encourage civic action by the military -- the assignment of domestic functions that could provide a practical justification for maintaining so many men and women in uniform, but would also take advantage of the military's natural assets. The armed services, aside from war-making capabilities, have many valuable qualities, including skills and experience and organizational cohesion that could be effectively applied to political problems at home.
The U.S. military, for one thing, is probably the nation's largest educational institution and its training methodologies are well tested and reliable. The military manages vast real estate at home and abroad. It knows how to build things, from roads and dams to hospitals and housing, on a mass-production scale. It knows how to take raw recruits, often ill- ducated young men and women, and prepare them to perform complicated tasks in a disciplined manner. It is the nation's most successful equal-opportunity employer and a crucial ladder of upward mobility for children of poverty.
These are assets that might all be usefully mobilized on the home front. The armed services, for instance, might be assigned a leading role in job training or drug therapy or as a manager of emergency employment. It could operate a civic-action corps that builds useful structures while it upgrades the skills and disciplines of recruits. It might, for instance, oversee a workforce, in or out of uniform, that tackles the massive backlog of damaged sites that need environmental cleanup, including the sites the military itself polluted.
If the nation does decide to change its priorities, there is much work to be done. The armed services have functioning infrastructures that already exist and might even reduce the costs of undertaking these new priorities. The military, likewise, enjoys political standing that might make it easier to sell these domestic undertakings. In turn, the military would benefit from a positive role in solving large, unattended public problems.
This approach, of course, has its obvious perils too. Commanders who are trained to fight wars regard civic action as a diversion from their real mission. Domestic political interests, meanwhile, fear the military as unwanted com- petition or, worse than that, an enveloping influence that might militarize peacetime endeavors. These are real risks, certainly, but so is the national dilemma of this moment in history. The dimensions of that dilemma are so profound that prevailing political prejudices may have to be set aside before the country can think clearly about its future.
The military institution exists, a huge and expensive reality that permeates the national political life. After four decades in place, the national-security state is not going to go away any time soon. The daunting question is how its components might be reintegrated -- in productive ways -- with the concerns and institutions of a regular democratic order.
Otherwise, if nothing much changes, there will be a continuing political imperative to seek out new conflicts that justify the existence of the national-security state. The CIA, if it remains independent and secretive, will keep churning out its inflated assessments of new "threats." The armed services, if not restructured and reduced in size, will inevitably be dispatched to fight again on dubious battlefields. The presidency, if its warrior prerogatives are not rescinded, will be free to continue the Cold War under some other name.
***
The triumph of World War II created a dynamic and satisfying parable for Americans, a story that described the nation as both strong and good. America was, therefore, obliged to take action on behalf of others, just as it had done against Hitler. The parable became the central vision behind the Cold War and motivated political action across two generations. It was shared by nearly everyone in the society, from top to bottom, and still dominates political imagination.
But the old parable, comforting as it was, is breaking up in visible ways, as other complications press in. It no longer resonates accurately with surrounding realities, as people are beginning to sense. Since early 1988, opinion polls have found that the American public now identifies Japan as the principal threat to the United States. The Soviet Union was far down the list of public anxieties-long before the Berlin Wall fell and long before political leaders were willing to adjust their thinking.
In the Cold War, while the United States was preoccupied with military power and spent its treasure on the defense of allies, the allies were tending to other business -- the development of modernized industrial economies. Indeed, the old adversaries of World War II are now the leading challengers to American hegemony in the world. They are also the leading lenders propping up American indebtedness. The parable has led the United States into a dangerous cul de sac.
Yet political elites were so successful adhering to the old story line, they are reluctant to abandon it. They are as yet unable to imagine a new parable for America that would match the new realities in the world. The transient euphoria generated by occasional war and parades does not change the fact that the United States has drifted into a dependent and vulnerable condition. With bad luck, this new condition is going to teach Americans some harsh lessons about economics and the real nature of global power in the post-Cold War world.
The stakes have thus been raised for American democracy, partly by events beyond anyone's control, partly by the long period of evasion when the economic realities were masked by Cold War propaganda. The nation's margin of error is now much smaller, its general abundance less secure. In addition to all the other burdens enumerated for conscientious citizens in this book, the task of restoring a vital democracy starts now from much greater disadvantages.
The spirit of the American parable -- a country that is at once great and good and active in the world -- can be carried forward in powerful new terms, but only if people recognize the full outlines of the democratic problem. It is not only the decay of domestic political institutions, the permissive legal culture, the privileges of concentrated power and the other pathologies that have subverted democracy.
In inexorable ways, as the next chapter reveals, American democracy is gradually being dismantled by the dynamics of global economics now astride the world at large. To salvage democracy at home, Americans must begin to think of themselves in much larger terms. They must learn how to act like democratic citizens of the world.
16. CRACKPOT REALISM
The end of the Cold War represents a rare opening for democratic possibilities; but it is also the source of new political crisis. This new epoch suddenly revives questions about the nature of American self-government that have been successfully evaded for two generations. Ready or not, American politics must change, for the world has changed around it.
The country has reached a satisfying end to a struggle that for four decades dominated our national priorities and permeated every corner of the political culture. The Cold War was the central engine driving the government's management of the economy. Fear was the political idea that unified national life for two generations. Now it is abruptly over. America has won; the Soviet Union has disintegrated as a global power.
Yet American politics has also been destabilized by the victory. The mobilizing fear has evaporated, but the institutional structure of government and politics remains on a permanent war footing. Massive armaments and American troops are deployed around the globe; $30 billion a year is devoted to spying and other intelligence activities. The industrial base is still propped up by defense spending; the routines of secrecy and political control developed by the national-security state are still the operating norm. It will not be easy to find a new purpose in the world that justifies these abnormalities as efficiently as communism did.
Nor will it be so easy to rationalize the grave damage the Cold War has done to democracy. The permanent mobilization has altered the democratic relationships profoundly, concentrating power in remote and unaccountable places, institutionalizing secrecy, fostering gross public deception and hypocrisy. It violated law in ways that have become habitual. It assigned great questions of national purpose to a militarized policy elite. It centralized political power in the presidency at the expense of every other democratic institution. The question is: Now that the enemy has vanished, is it possible that democratic order can be restored?
In addition to all the daunting obstacles and deformities enumerated in this book, the democratic problem is now compounded by these large questions about America's place in the world. The post-Cold War reality is actually eclipsed by an even larger force threatening national well-being -- the global economy. While governing elites struggled Obsessively against communism, the world changed in other ways that now threaten the nation with continuing economic loss and political impotence. The system of globalized enterprise, as the next chapter explains, directly undermines the widely shared prosperity that has been a prerequisite for America's political stability. But the global economy also steadily erodes the nation's sovereign control over its destiny.
Ready or not, Americans are now confronted with some unprecedented questions about self-government and whether the concept will continue to have meaning in the world.
***
Hardly anyone took note when Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan introduced his grandly titled legislation -- the End of the Cold War Act of 1991 -- because six days earlier the United States had gone to war again. The senator proposed to abolish the Central Intelligence Agency, the institutional agent and symbol of the Cold War, and fold the CIA's secret activities into the State Department and the Pentagon, where they might be more accountable to political oversight. His legislation set out to prohibit various irregular practices tolerated in government for four decades and to restore a sense of lawful legitimacy to foreign policy.
"The law of nations," Moynihan intoned. "Somewhere that got lost in the fog of the Cold War. It just got lost. We have become a national-security state, a country mobilized for war on a permanent basis, and we got into the business of saying everything is secret. Can we recover the memory of what we were before we became what we are now? Can we rediscover a sense of proportion in the national-security state? The task of purging the Cold War from our institutions is enormous. It will require a sustained and determined effort." [1]
The senator's timing was oblivious to the national mood. At that very moment, the nation was gathered before its TV sets, watching night flashes from the American bombing of Baghdad and the gunsight footage of "smart bombs" finding their Iraqi targets. Six weeks later, America was celebrating victory -- a splendid little war in which only a few hundred Americans died. The nation's military prowess was demonstrated for the world; its virtuous intentions were confirmed in the scenes from Kuwait of liberation and homecoming.
In that context, Senator Moynihan's questions seemed eccentric. The Cold War might be over, but now suddenly there was a new struggle to replace it. America is committed, the president announced unilaterally, to establishing and defending a "New World Order." The concept was scarcely defined, but popular support for the American military surged, as did popular support for the president.
Moynihan's questions, however, will return to haunt the country. Saddam Hussein, notwithstanding the barbarity of his regime, proved to be an inadequate substitute for the Cold War. When the Iraqi dictator seized neighboring Kuwait, George Bush invoked the specter of Hitler, a metaphor that resonated with the start of the Cold War forty years earlier. World War II was America's finest moment in world affairs and nostalgic memories of it powered the long struggle against Soviet communism on countless fronts. Now, President Bush explained, a new dictator was threatening the integrity of nations and must be confronted in the same spirit.
Events, however, failed to sustain the metaphor. For one thing, Hussein was defeated much too quickly and easily. He was also allowed to remain in power, an outcome impossible to reconcile with the president's histrionic rhetoric on the march to war. If Saddam was Hitler, why was he not killed or conquered and put on trial for crimes against humanity?
Other complicating facts developed in the aftermath: The Kuwaiti ruling family, whom we had fought to rescue, demonstrated again that it was itself a despotic feudal regime, contemptuous of the individual rights associated with democracy. The defeat of Iraq produced internal rebellions that eventually mired the United States in the awkward role of a neocolonial warden.
Above all, the war produced this contradiction: In the first year of the post-Cold War era, while the Soviet military apparatus was being withdrawn and dismantled, U.S. defense spending actually increased. The bloated defense budget would shrink eventually, as even the Pentagon leaders accepted, but not while the country was waging another war?
Furthermore, neither the end of the Cold War nor U.S. victory in the Persian Gulf could obscure the nation's deteriorating financial strength. The defense buildup of the 1980s had been financed largely on deficit spending -- money the federal government borrowed from the allied nations (Japan and Germany, principally) that the United States was defending, more or less for free. If America was now the world's only superpower, it was stuck in a most anomalous predicament. Wall Street financier George Soros described the contradiction: "There are many examples in history where military power was sustained by exacting tributes, but there is no precedent for maintaining military hegemony on borrowed money." [3]
The excitement of an occasional war is, in fact, one of the few remaining opportunities for alienated citizens to feel connected again with their nation's higher politics. So long as the wars are relatively quick and painless, they provide a rallying point for ordinary citizens, a momentary illusion of shared national purpose. The war making offers a fantasy of power for those who are, in fact, powerless. When the euphoria dissipates, as it always does, people resume their distance and disenchantment.
In the aftermath of the Gulf War, Americans did not rally around the "New World Order" proposed by the president. Nor did public opinion embrace the notion that U.S. firepower must police the world. On the contrary, people overwhelmingly expressed the opinion (85 percent to 11 percent in one survey) that military initiatives against global disorders should be led by the United Nations rather than the United States. Their own government, Americans said, should turn its attention to the problems at home. The national-security threat that most troubled ordinary citizens was America's deteriorating position in the global economy. [4]
***
In the 1950s, when the Cold War temperament was enveloping the thought and language of American politics, the sociologist C. Wright Mills derided what he called "the crackpot realism of the higher authorities and opinion-makers." Absurdities were cloaked in technocratic jargon and passed off to the public as brilliant insight or the fruits of sophisticated intelligence.
The ability of national-security experts to describe reality in arcane ways that ordinary citizens could not easily test for themselves, much less challenge, was a central element of power in the Cold War era and one of its most debilitating influences on democracy. "Crackpot realism" consumed trillions of dollars and built enough nuclear bombs to destroy life on the planet.
Huge, secret bureaucracies were created in government to discover the hidden "facts" about the dangerous world around us, especially the machinations of the Soviet empire, and to shape national-security policy accordingly. Much of this knowledge was considered too sensitive to share with the public, but provocative details were regularly communicated in the form of warnings about new' 'threats" that had emerged -- deadly new missiles pointed at America or revolutionary stirrings in Third World countries said to be inspired by Moscow. The history of the Cold War is a series of such alarums, based on espionage and classified documentation, and of the subsequent events that refuted them.
Given the insular nature of American society,. most citizens had little real knowledge of distant nations and no independent way to evaluate the government's description of reality, In the absence of clear contradictory evidence, people generally were prisoners of what the government authorities told them about the world. They accepted what the spies and analysts had discovered about the enemy, at least until the war in Vietnam devastated the government's authority. The alternative -- questioning the president while the nation was at war-seemed unpatriotic.
"Crackpot realism" has flourished right up to the present time and the Central Intelligence Agency was a principal source for it. As late as 1989, as Moynihan observed, the CIA reported that the economy of communist East Germany was slightly larger than the economy of West Germany -- an intelligence estimate ludicrously debunked a few months later when the East German regime collapsed and its citizens streamed westward in search of jobs, consumer goods and food. The following year, the CIA corrected the record by abruptly shrinking the threatening dimensions of East Germany by more than one third.
The same gross exaggeration was repeated, year after year, when the CIA made its estimates of the Soviet Union's awesome capabilities. The 1989 analysis claimed that the growth rate of the Soviet bloc exceeded western Europe's. But then the CIA had solemnly reported for four decades that the Soviet economy was growing faster than the U.S. economy -- almost half again faster. The result, it said, was a formidable industrial power -- second-largest in the world and much larger than Japan, according to the CIA.
If that were true, this nation was an adversary rightly to be feared, since it had the economic capacity, not only to match the U.S. arsenal, weapon for weapon, but to achieve something the experts called "superiority." Hundreds of billions of America's dollars, even trillions, were devoted to forestalling that dread possibility. [5]
Of course, it was not true. It was not true in the 1950s and it was especially not true in the late 1970s and early 1980s when America launched another massive arms buildup. Some journalists and scholars had been making this point about the Soviet economy for many years, pointing out the decay and malfunctioning that was visible despite the Soviet censors. But U.S. official authority and propaganda always succeeded in maintaining the enemy's strength.
When Gorbachev opened the Soviet society to full inspection, what western experts saw more nearly resembled a Third World country than a major industrial power. Its economy was a crude joke compared to the high-tech industrial systems of Japan, West Germany and the United States. The Soviet Union, aside from its size, was not second strongest in the world or third, probably not even fourth or fifth.
Americans, in other words, were propagandized by their own government for forty years. Were citizens deliberately deceived or were the CIA spies so befogged by their own ideological biases that they missed the reality themselves? This is one of the questions that a post-Cold War debate might take up for closer examination.
Senator Moynihan, though he raised the embarrassing facts, preferred to believe that everyone had acted in good faith. The senator had served himself as vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and, like most politicians, had believed fully in the Soviet threat right until the end. He had been a consistent and eloquent champion of the Cold War arms buildup and had disparaged anyone who questioned the need to keep enlarging the U.S. arsenal. Now, Moynihan disparaged the CIA, with the sharpness of one whose trusting nature has been betrayed.
"It would be pretty obvious," the senator said, "to cut their budget in half so they wouldn't pass around these silly reports."
The government's persistent inflation of the enemy made plausible many other versions of "crackpot realism" that emanated from intelligence experts and somberly ruled the political debate on national defense. A "missile gap" discovered by these experts in 1960 was eventually acknowledged to be illusory, but only after the Kennedy administration had launched a program to double America's nuclear missile force. A theoretical "window of vulnerability" that defense authorities identified in the late 1970s became the pretext for the trillion-dollar defense modernization of the Reagan presidency. Yet the Reagan administration's cornucopia of new weaponry never attempted to close the supposedly dangerous "window."
In the early 1980s, American intelligence discovered Cubans constructing a large airport on the Caribbean island of Grenada and concluded that it was to be a future launching pad for Soviet bombers aimed at America. After the U.S. invasion and conquest of that tiny country, the American government finished building the airport so it could be used for jumbo-jet tourist traffic, the purpose Grenada had always claimed for it. The most enthusiastic advocates of the U.S. surrogate war against Nicaragua, including President Reagan, described a "domino theory" of nations in which Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico would one by one fall to the Communists. If America did not defeat the Sandinistas, the Red armies would someday be massed on the border, poised to attack Harlingen, Texas.
For four decades, NATO defense policy was premised on a latter-day version of blitzkrieg -- a vision of the Soviet armies launching a surprise attack that sweeps across the plains of central Europe and swiftly arrives at the English Channel, just like Hitler. The allied generals earnestly prepared to fight World War II in Europe all over again, a burden that consumed nearly half of the U.S. defense budget.
Of course, the scenario was absurd, as the U.S. intelligence community itself belatedly acknowledged in November 1989 when the "threat" analysis was abruptly changed. Half of the Soviet divisions poised to strike from eastern Europe, it turns out, were actually manned at token levels -- 5 percent to 25 percent of their fighting strength. In order to attack the West, the Soviets would have had to transport 150,000 troops from the Soviet Union and activate 800,000 reservists in the Warsaw Pact nations. Nevertheless, President Bush was still insisting on the scenario (and proposing new and highly dangerous battlefield nuclear weapons for western Europe) only a few months before the Berlin Wall fell. [6]
The point of reciting such examples of exaggeration is not to reargue the Cold War, now that it is over, but to demonstrate what an overpowering idea the Cold War was. People believed and accepted the most threatening possibilities and the government acted on them. It was not that the dubious alarums were never questioned. But the concept of vigilance against an awesome enemy swept away critical opposition and, often, rationality.
American politics created a mythology and then was ruled by it. A senator or representative might safely challenge the Cold War on subordinate issues -- does America really need more aircraft carriers? -- but any politician would be vulnerable to defeat if his argument was not safely couched in the context of mortal struggle against a malevolent adversary. Political contests deteriorated into manly arguments over who was "hard" and who was "soft" toward this enemy. Mere citizens were mostly excluded from the dense technical esoterica of the defense debate, except on those crude terms. Most citizens, not surprisingly, preferred political leaders who seemed "hard."
From the beginning, the Cold War put citizens in the same weak defensive posture that characterized their position on large domestic issues. But the people did sometimes block the government's most outrageous plans. When the Reagan regime prepared for another war of intervention against Nicaragua, public opposition stood in the way and the government was compelled to mount a surrogate war, which it quaintly referred to as a "covert operation." Preventing a U.S. invasion constituted a victory of sorts for the citizens.
Still, as in Nicaragua, the Cold War's institutional apparatus produced an inevitable series of extralegal activities in the government, offending both domestic and international law. This was not simply the occasional misadventures of "rogue" intelligence officers who "went too far," as authorities always explained when the CIA was implicated in assassination plots or other covert actions that violated law and morality. In many ways, the institutional arrangements were created in order to allow the president to operate outside the law.
Some conservative Republicans recognized this danger at the outset and they were principled opponents to the legislation that in 1947 created the CIA (designed and promoted by liberal Democrats). In congressional debate, a handful of conservatives argued that the CIA, with its secret budget and cloaked activities, would give the chief executive enormous new powers to make foreign policy in secret -- and indeed to wage secret wars -- without submitting his decisions to the due processes of open political debate, authorization and appropriate and formal declarations by Congress.
The conservatives were right, of course, but then that was the idea of the CIA -- to empower the president by circumventing democratic processes. Conservatives have since embraced the all-powerful chief executive as the ideal, while many liberals have learned to question it, especially after the liberal debacle in Vietnam.
The illegal consequences of creating a secret government did not remain very secret, despite the popular lore of spies and their stealthful routines. The CIA helped engineer changes of government, sometimes violently, in Iran, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile and a long list of other nations. It was implicated in the counterrevolutionary massacres in Indonesia and the successful assassinations of at least three foreign leaders as well as other murder plots that failed. It managed a secret army in Laos and its agents laid the groundwork for the war in Vietnam, where, among other functions, the CIA supervised an infamous program of targeting and killing suspect citizens, without benefit of trial. The CIA ran the not-so-covert war against Nicaragua. It assembled an army and invaded Cuba with disastrous results.
At home, the CIA penetrated universities, private business corporations and other government agencies, especially the State Department, partly to obtain cover for its intelligence officers, partly to gather proprietary information and partly to compromise others. When asked to by various presidents, the agency spied on American citizens who were political dissidents, in the name of protecting the nation against subversion. It created scores of dummy corporate organizations to transact its business, so as to conceal the fact that an agency of government was illegally laundering money or transporting arms to overseas conflicts or doing deals with the Mafia. It infiltrated domestic political associations and tax-exempt foundations in order to advance the propaganda war against communism.
Abuses by the national-security state have continued right up to the present. In 1982, the FBI conducted a secret subversion investigation of Physicians for Social Responsibility because the group opposed Reagan's nuclear. weapons policy. PSR and its worldwide affiliates later won the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1986, the FBI fired an agent who refused to conduct a "domestic security/terrorism" investigation of two citizen groups opposing Reagan's policy in Central America. During the 19808, the FBI delivered data from its investigations of domestic political opposition to the White House. [7]
These are a sampling of the scandalous matters that are known and documented; some would insist there is a far darker portrait of the CIA to be drawn from outlaw behavior that is less well authenticated. The point of reciting the history, in any case, is to demonstrate the fundamental irregularity of this institution and its capabilities. When the nation is at war, unlawful measures are often accepted as necessary to national survival. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War; Roosevelt interned Japanese-American citizens in World War II. In the Cold War, however, it was the irregular institutional arrangement itself that committed the offenses, while it functioned to keep the nation at war.
Despite recurring scandals (always followed by appropriate "reforms"), the Central Intelligence Agency and allied components remain intact outside the normal structure of democratic accountability. It is available to any president who feels the need for extralegal activities of almost any kind. The president need only issue a secret executive order authorizing the venture; a handful of congressional leaders will be informed, but only upon their agreement to keep the facts from the public.
As president, Ronald Reagan issued 298 National Security Decision Directives -- secret edicts that are accorded the force of law. By private writ, the president is able to mobilize government resources for subversion or order surveillance of private citizens or launch aggressive wars against other nations, all without public debate or even public knowledge. [8]
The fundamental conflict is not about the need for intelligence gathering, but about respect for law, both domestic and international law. And the problem is not rooted in the CIA's peculiar charter, but in the White House and the nature of modern executive power. In the end, it was the presidents who authorized the lawlessness and who benefited politically from the corruption of regular democratic process. If the "New World Order" means the U.S. government is going to use its power around the globe to uphold law and promote democracy, it might usefully start at home.
If Iraq violated the "law of nations," as it did, then so has the United States. The invasion of Grenada, for example, "was the clearest possible violation of Article 18 of the Charter of the Organization of American States, a document as much of our drafting as was the Charter of the United Nations," Senator Moynihan wrote. "It was a violation of the latter also." [9]
American officials always claimed virtuous motives for their invasions of foreign countries and argued that there were justifying provocations, but the American interventions were always made unilaterally, decided by the chief executive alone, oblivious to the formal procedures by which such actions are sanctioned under international law or by the U. S. Constitution. When presidents authorized a covert aggression against another nation, the government did not even bother with public justifications, but pretended instead, with a broad wink, to official innocence.
American citizens cannot escape the consequences of a government that ignores the law. Twice in the last decade alone, the U.S. president was caught out in engagements that demonstrably violated either international law or U.S. law or both. Each event caused a political stir, but the president remained aloof.
In 1983, during the covert war against Nicaragua, CIA agents mined the harbors of that country, an action that is defined in international law as a direct act of aggression against a sovereign state. Clearly prohibited by international treaties, the mining also raised the constitutional question of who in the American government had authorized an act of war. When distressed senators complained, the CIA blandly promised not to do it again.
When Nicaragua prepared to take a formal complaint to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the Reagan administration announced peremptorily that it would no longer accept the World Court's jurisdiction over "disputes with any Central American state or arising out of or related to events in Central America." The United States thus set aside temporarily a treaty obligation it had accepted, by Senate ratification, in 1946.
The World Court heard Nicaragua's case, nonetheless, and ruled in 1986 that the United States had violated "general principles of humanitarian law" in numerous ways -- mining harbors, bombing oil installations, arming the Contras and distributing guerrilla-warfare manuals that encouraged the violent intimidation of Nicaraguan citizens. This was the first time in American history, Senator Moynihan noted, that an international tribunal had ever found the United States in violation of law. Yet the World Court's decision received only brief, passing notice within the United States.
The other episode of presidential lawlessness was more celebrated -- the Iran-Contra affair in which the Reagan White House ignored the legislative prohibition against providing further aid to the Contra army it had created in Nicaragua. Among the many complicated illegalities generated by the White House in that matter, one pointed unambiguously at the president's own failure to faithfully execute the law. Reagan personally authorized Cabinet officers to raise funds from foreign governments for the war, despite the congressional prohibition of U. S. involvement. "The plain fact," Moynihan wrote, "is that the president did invite and almost certainly deserved impeachment."
Actually, a resolution of impeachment was filed against President Reagan by Representative Henry Gonzalez, the Texas Democrat who compares the unbridled power of modern American presidents to that of the Roman Caesars. Americans, Gonzalez said, no longer have a republic in the original meaning; presidential power has trampled it beyond recognition. Gonzalez's complaint was ignored. Ronald Reagan continued in office and retired with honor, an affable Caesar who was much loved by the people.
When President Bush went to war in the Persian Gulf, Gonzalez filed another impeachment resolution against him. Gonzalez charged that Bush had violated law and constitutional process, first by unilaterally committing five hundred thousand troops to a foreign combat zone in violation of the terms of the War Powers Act, then by bribing foreign nations to accede to his strategy. A $7 billion loan to Egypt was forgiven without congressional approval. Zaire was promised military aid and partial debt forgiveness. Turkey was given a larger import quota for its textiles. China was assured of favorable trade terms if it did not veto the U.S. initiative in the UN Security Council. The Soviet Union was promised billions in aid so it would cooperate too. In the glow of victory, everyone assumed the president had the power to do these things -- that he is free to do whatever he wants in wartime. [10]
This overbearing nature of the modern presidency is what has most crippled democracy. But the permanent Cold War mobilization made the accumulation of power seem "normal," and over two generations the public memory of a presidency accountable to the Constitution has been nearly lost. The idea that democracy ought to function in any other way now seems eccentric.
The Cold War president became a mythological figure -- a warrior president surrounded by warriors, preoccupied with questions of global conflict above all others. As the Cold War cliche goes, "all our lives are in his hands," and, in those circumstances, people assigned mystical qualities to the warriors who were running things. Military officers became commonplace in the uppermost reaches of government. A general served as secretary of state, an admiral led the CIA. A CIA director became president.
The office of the president has many valuable qualities -- particularly the ability to educate and unify the nation -- but the institution cannot possibly carry the full burdens of democracy. It is too narrow and singular and, above all, too private in its actions, notwithstanding the TV images of presidential comings and goings that are provided daily. The centralized political power has encouraged the evasion and hollowness that permeate the domestic dimensions of government.
The White House has become a" convenient "safe house" for governing without any of the messy obligations required by a genuine democracy -- a sanctuary where things finally get decided privately and without public debate. This retreat encourages others in the political community to avoid hard decisions by passing on the toughest questions to the White House where the president can settle them in the protected reserve of the Oval Office.
The rich diversity of democratic dialogue has been collapsed into a single, opaque institution. Self-government has been reduced to a single mind and heartbeat. Dismantling the Cold War, restoring a democratic order, means cutting the presidency down to appropriate size.
***
From the beginning, the Cold War fulfilled an ironic purpose in domestic politics: It allowed all patriots to embrace a twisted, back-door version of socialism. The federal government claimed a rationale for intervening massively in the private economy, but without the usual debate over free enterprise and limited government. Washington stimulated economic demand with contracts and subsidies; it directed private investment through industrial planning and capital allocation. It created millions of jobs for workers. It built and owned scores of factories for private enterprises to operate.
Conservatives could ride along free on this arrangement without blemishing their ideological purity and, in time, conservatives became its most enthusiastic advocates. No one had to justify government-owned industrial plants and vast research laboratories and government-financed industrial development (including the occasional bailout of failing companies). It was all done in the name of defending the nation.
If the Cold War has truly ended and no great unifying cause can be found to replace it, then conservatives have lost their cover and the government has lost its rationale for steering the private economy through the federal budget. This economic reality will likely lead to a continuing political crisis, as many Americans discover how much their own economic well-being was dependent on the permanent mobilization and as political leaders search for saleable substitutes.
The modern defense budget, it is true, now consumes less than 5 percent of the gross national product, so it is often argued that even a major shrinkage in defense spending can be absorbed by the overall economy without great pain. That assumption misunderstands the socialist relationship.
For better or worse, the Pentagon is like a big rock propping up American manufacturing. Roughly one fifth of U.S. manufacturing output is purchased by the federal government via defense contracts. In 1985, for instance, the military spent $165 billion buying goods from a broad spectrum of 215 industries -- 21 percent of the manufacturing gross national product. Defense-related work employs one in ten of America's manufacturing workers.
The military allocates $38 billion a year for research and development and supports at least one in every four U.S. scientists. Defense pays for roughly 50 percent of the university research on computer science and electrical engineering. It provides 96 percent of the income for American shipbuilding. It accounts for about one fifth of the nation's modernizing capital investment. [11]
In other words, a forty-year addiction to socialist-style intervention is now threatened by cold-turkey therapy. If the defense budget shrinks drastically, it is going to leave a big hole in the American economy -- especially in the crucial realm of long-term development and investment. Who will buy the state-of-the-art machine tools? Who will pay for the basic science? The government will have to invent other rationales and methods for force- feeding private research and investment or else retreat to laissez-faire principle and hope that private enterprise somehow makes up the difference.
That is one dimension of the crisis that demobilization is bound to engender. Another dimension is the fierce politics of lost contracts and employment. Depending on how rapidly the defense budget shrinks, the shutdown of weapons production could eliminate more than five hundred thousand jobs for both skilled industrial workers and the technical professions.
These are the "good jobs" in the American economy -- premium-wage manufacturing jobs held by machinists, electricians, engineers and others. These workers will not easily find comparable positions in an economy in which heavy industry has been shrinking its employment base for the past decade. The overall effect could resemble another round of the deindustrialization and downward mobility that workers in steel, autos and other sectors have already experienced.
Given these harsh facts, the political response has largely been like an unreformed alcoholic's -- denial and avoidance. The president traveled now and then to defense plants where he congratulated the defense workers on the high quality of their work and assured them he personally wanted to keep buying their tanks or airplanes. This put him on the smart side of the short-run politics: When the defense contracts were canceled and the factories closed, George Bush would be able to say it was not his idea.
In Congress, roughly the same political strategy played out much more messily -- state by state, district by district -- as liberals and conservatives alike fought to keep open their factories and their military bases at the expense of someone else's. Long Island mobilized to keep alive Grumman's F-14, while the Pentagon kept trying to kill it. St. Louis mourned the loss of McDonnell Douglas's A-12. Newport News, Virginia, sued the Navy to save Tenneco's Seawolf submarine contract. General Dynamics announced, for obvious political effect, that nearly one third of its ninety thousand workers would be laid off, perhaps forever.
These dislocations and others were just the beginning, and the next round promised to be more severe. The Defense Department was planning a modest five-year reduction in the Cold War mobilization -- a 25 percent cut in the uniformed forces and a $15 billion decline in its budget authority. But that would still leave the defense budget around $280 billion -- still gigantic for a nation in debt, unable to finance a long list of competing domestic priorities and unable to identify a credible enemy beyond a few tinpot dictators. If the U.S. defense budget were cut in half, it would still be four or five times larger than that of the next-strongest nation. [12]
The dramatic cancellations of weapons systems occasionally reported in the news were mostly projects the country couldn't afford in the first place, even when the Cold War was flourishing. As defense budgets soared during the 1980s, each of the three services signed up for a dizzying wish list of new toys -- commitments so ambitious that, as one defense expert said, the Pentagon was trying to buy $400 billion worth of firepower on a $300 billion budget. This dilemma was well understood by defense experts (and politicians) for years and they responded to it by ordering procurement stretchouts -- buying fewer of each weapon every year so they would not have to cancel anybody's favorite. This approach naturally raised the per-unit cost of procurement and made defense production even more inefficient.
The Bush administration belatedly struggled to eliminate this "bubble" of false expectations from defense-budget projections. The next round of demobilization would be for real: bringing home troops that had been stationed abroad since the 1950s, closing scores of domestic military bases, shuttering more factories.
Aside from the president's vague talk about the "New World Order," neither political party offered a coherent strategy for how the nation might cope with this economic transformation. A few liberals introduced "conversion" bills that did little more than encourage communities and industries to plan for their post-Cold War future. Conservative thinkers concentrated, meanwhile, on trying to devise substitute "threats" -- Third World terrorism or nuclear proliferation -- that might justify continuing the nation's permanent war footing.
The Pentagon, ironically, was one of the few places where arguments over the economic implications had hesitantly begun, perhaps because the military itself would suffer the consequences first and most severely. As the defense budget shrinks, companies will fail or get out of the weapons business and the defense industrial base will shrink too. Thus, the unit cost of acquiring new weapons -- already grossly inflated -- is expected to spiral still higher. Without much hyperbole, the military planners envision a juncture where they will be buying fewer and fewer tanks and airplanes for higher and higher prices -- unable to maintain their force levels, even if their global mission is defined in less grandiose terms.
The transformation of high-technology production in the global economy, meanwhile, promises to make the United States more dependent on foreign producers for crucial weapons components, especially in the advanced technologies. If nothing else changes, one can predict a not-distant future when the world's only superpower is borrowing money from its allies to buy the high-tech weapons components they manufacture -- so the supposed superpower will be able to protect these allies from worldly harm. In a minor way, this was already the case.
The American public, if it ever caught on, would not be terribly enthusiastic about arming America with made-in-Japan electronics. Indeed, anxious members of Congress were already calling for a "Buy America" doctrine in defense procurement. Pentagon officials had to explain that "Buy America" would mean tanks or airplanes that were missing key parts.
For all these reasons, as well as their obvious self-interest, some of the conservative leaders of the defense community were beginning to flirt with a radically different economic doctrine -- government engagement in the private economy that would merge defense-production requirements with the broader objective of improving America's competitive position in commercial markets. Even Defense Secretary Richard Cheney, a conservative ideologue in most other matters, made an implicit pitch for some sort of industrial policy. "The United States," Cheney declared, "cannot persist in its current laissez-faire approach to the competition in advanced technologies without incurring major economic and security. problems of its own in the future." [13]
Jacques S. Gansler, an authority on the defense industry and chairman of the Defense Science Board's study on the advanced technology crisis, has argued for a radical restructuring in which defense manufacture and commercial production are fully integrated with each other -- both to preserve the defense industrial base and to foster the modernization of U.S. manufacturing.
Essentially what Gansler and others have proposed is that the government set aside some of the notorious fictions of the Cold War era and frankly acknowledge that it manipulates the private economy through defense spending but that it has been doing so in ways that are wasteful and ineffective, partly because the money was spent without regard to the nation's overall economic condition.
Some of the cold warriors of the Pentagon, a few at least, are hesitantly beginning to recognize that, while they were devoting the nation's capital to Cold War weaponry, another, more ominous threat to the national security was emerging from America's loss of economic power. [14] Pentagon reform -- harnessing defense procurement to economic competitiveness -- would at least lead to a more honest version of socialism or, more politely, a deliberate "industrial policy" that is more like those of Japan and the other allies who are America's global competitors.
But this approach contains large perils for democracy and for ordinary citizens -- the possibility of corporate socialism for entrenched economic interests. Given the deformed structure of political power that now exists, an industrial policy of any kind, especially one supervised by the Pentagon, might swiftly deteriorate into an extravagant program for taking care of the same old crowd, in the name of "competitiveness." In the global economy, furthermore, there is the more complicated question of which companies are really "American. " Why should American taxpayers underwrite the development of advanced technologies for multinational corporations if those companies are free to transfer the processes to their foreign plants and low-wage foreign workers?
An American industrial policy, in other words, is not a plausible solution in democratic terms unless politics has also confronted the questions about corporate loyalty. If American companies are not made to accept a stronger sense of national obligation -- the kind of commitment that Japanese or German companies routinely accept in their societies -- a new industrial policy might simply subsidize the continuing erosion of the American wage structure, using taxpayer dollars to finance corporate globalization.
The post-Cold War political question is: How can the nation begin to restore a peaceable economic balance and evolve toward a society that is not so relentlessly organized around the machinery of war? To put it another way, how might America begin to domesticate its military-industrial complex?
One way to accomplish the transition might be to encourage civic action by the military -- the assignment of domestic functions that could provide a practical justification for maintaining so many men and women in uniform, but would also take advantage of the military's natural assets. The armed services, aside from war-making capabilities, have many valuable qualities, including skills and experience and organizational cohesion that could be effectively applied to political problems at home.
The U.S. military, for one thing, is probably the nation's largest educational institution and its training methodologies are well tested and reliable. The military manages vast real estate at home and abroad. It knows how to build things, from roads and dams to hospitals and housing, on a mass-production scale. It knows how to take raw recruits, often ill- ducated young men and women, and prepare them to perform complicated tasks in a disciplined manner. It is the nation's most successful equal-opportunity employer and a crucial ladder of upward mobility for children of poverty.
These are assets that might all be usefully mobilized on the home front. The armed services, for instance, might be assigned a leading role in job training or drug therapy or as a manager of emergency employment. It could operate a civic-action corps that builds useful structures while it upgrades the skills and disciplines of recruits. It might, for instance, oversee a workforce, in or out of uniform, that tackles the massive backlog of damaged sites that need environmental cleanup, including the sites the military itself polluted.
If the nation does decide to change its priorities, there is much work to be done. The armed services have functioning infrastructures that already exist and might even reduce the costs of undertaking these new priorities. The military, likewise, enjoys political standing that might make it easier to sell these domestic undertakings. In turn, the military would benefit from a positive role in solving large, unattended public problems.
This approach, of course, has its obvious perils too. Commanders who are trained to fight wars regard civic action as a diversion from their real mission. Domestic political interests, meanwhile, fear the military as unwanted com- petition or, worse than that, an enveloping influence that might militarize peacetime endeavors. These are real risks, certainly, but so is the national dilemma of this moment in history. The dimensions of that dilemma are so profound that prevailing political prejudices may have to be set aside before the country can think clearly about its future.
The military institution exists, a huge and expensive reality that permeates the national political life. After four decades in place, the national-security state is not going to go away any time soon. The daunting question is how its components might be reintegrated -- in productive ways -- with the concerns and institutions of a regular democratic order.
Otherwise, if nothing much changes, there will be a continuing political imperative to seek out new conflicts that justify the existence of the national-security state. The CIA, if it remains independent and secretive, will keep churning out its inflated assessments of new "threats." The armed services, if not restructured and reduced in size, will inevitably be dispatched to fight again on dubious battlefields. The presidency, if its warrior prerogatives are not rescinded, will be free to continue the Cold War under some other name.
***
The triumph of World War II created a dynamic and satisfying parable for Americans, a story that described the nation as both strong and good. America was, therefore, obliged to take action on behalf of others, just as it had done against Hitler. The parable became the central vision behind the Cold War and motivated political action across two generations. It was shared by nearly everyone in the society, from top to bottom, and still dominates political imagination.
But the old parable, comforting as it was, is breaking up in visible ways, as other complications press in. It no longer resonates accurately with surrounding realities, as people are beginning to sense. Since early 1988, opinion polls have found that the American public now identifies Japan as the principal threat to the United States. The Soviet Union was far down the list of public anxieties-long before the Berlin Wall fell and long before political leaders were willing to adjust their thinking.
In the Cold War, while the United States was preoccupied with military power and spent its treasure on the defense of allies, the allies were tending to other business -- the development of modernized industrial economies. Indeed, the old adversaries of World War II are now the leading challengers to American hegemony in the world. They are also the leading lenders propping up American indebtedness. The parable has led the United States into a dangerous cul de sac.
Yet political elites were so successful adhering to the old story line, they are reluctant to abandon it. They are as yet unable to imagine a new parable for America that would match the new realities in the world. The transient euphoria generated by occasional war and parades does not change the fact that the United States has drifted into a dependent and vulnerable condition. With bad luck, this new condition is going to teach Americans some harsh lessons about economics and the real nature of global power in the post-Cold War world.
The stakes have thus been raised for American democracy, partly by events beyond anyone's control, partly by the long period of evasion when the economic realities were masked by Cold War propaganda. The nation's margin of error is now much smaller, its general abundance less secure. In addition to all the other burdens enumerated for conscientious citizens in this book, the task of restoring a vital democracy starts now from much greater disadvantages.
The spirit of the American parable -- a country that is at once great and good and active in the world -- can be carried forward in powerful new terms, but only if people recognize the full outlines of the democratic problem. It is not only the decay of domestic political institutions, the permissive legal culture, the privileges of concentrated power and the other pathologies that have subverted democracy.
In inexorable ways, as the next chapter reveals, American democracy is gradually being dismantled by the dynamics of global economics now astride the world at large. To salvage democracy at home, Americans must begin to think of themselves in much larger terms. They must learn how to act like democratic citizens of the world.