 |
| Volume XII,
Winter 2005, Number 4 |
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The New
Ivory Towers: Think Tanks, Strategic Studies and
“Counterrealism” |
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| Leila
Hudson |
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Dr. Hudson is assistant
professor of Near Eastern studies at the University of
Arizona.
"That’s not the way the world really
works anymore…. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we
create our own reality. And while you’re studying that
reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again,
creating other new realities, which you can study too,
and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s
actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just
study what we do."
Anonymous Bush administration
official1
"I said, why don’t we get
together and call ourselves an institute?"
Paul
Simon, “Graceland”
In his 2001 attack on Middle
Eastern studies in the United States, Martin Kramer
provided a provocative if superficial institutional
history of academic area studies.2 He wrote
Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern
Studies in America as a scholar in residence at the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), one
of several ideologically narrow think tanks that have
colonized the intellectual terrain first opened up by
interdisciplinary area studies, providing policy
recommendations, media performances and even
intelligence channels for U.S. interventions in the
Middle East. Kramer’s accusation of an academic “culture
of irrelevance” is ironic considering that the think
tanks systematically foster what might be called a
“culture of counterrealism,” with arguably disastrous
results on the ground. For all their bellicose claims to
the contrary, privately funded think tanks have - à la
Ibn Khaldun – occupied the ivory towers of area studies
and adopted an even more otherworldly culture than they
accuse their academic colleagues of indulging
in.3 From the RAND Corporation to the
American Enterprise Institute’s Project for the New
American Century, these institutions have substituted
strategy for discipline, ideological litmus tests for
peer review, tactics and technology for cultures and
history, policy for research and pedagogy, and
hypotheticals for empiricals.
The success of
these institutions in drowning out the voices of
academic Middle East studies has contributed to a
culture in which serious inquiry into the real world is
pushed aside in favor of fear, imagination and faith. It
is a culture in which investigation into the historical
background of the crimes of September 11, 2001, is
systematically avoided.4 It is the culture in
which the Iraq War was justified by a series of lies and
forgeries. It is the culture in which intelligence
professionals from Coleen Rowley to Valerie Plame are
sidelined, in which torture is seen as a defensible and
logical means of intelligence gathering. It is a culture
in which academic researchers are silenced in the name
of free speech. It is a culture in which the mainstream
media have forsaken their constitutional role of
checking government. It is a culture of looming logical
inconsistencies in which the public is assured by the
chattering elites that no price is too high to pay for
the illusion of Iraqi freedom, while no American
political freedom is too dear to be sacrificed to the
illusion of homeland security. As defenders of the Bush
policy assert, this is far too much to lay at the
doorstep of the philosopher Leo Strauss and the
simplistic concept of the noble
lie.5
The current generation of Middle
East think tanks and the strategic discourse that
emanates copiously from them can be traced back to the
Cold War. Strategic-studies think tanks functioned as
incubators for hypothetical responses to hypothetical
scenarios by scientists largely immune to the intimacy
with the object of study that flourished in the postwar
academic landscape. By steady work on the periphery of
the academy and outside, they were able to quietly build
a base from which to reclaim the territory opened up by
area studies for interdisciplinary work.
The
takeover of area studies by the field now known as
strategic studies was a paradigm shift on the order of
Edward Said’s critique of orientalism. Middle East
scholars should investigate the classic writings of
Albert Wohlstetter, the nuclear theorist who founded the
field.6 Originally conceived of as
“opposed-system analysis,” strategic studies may or may
not observe disciplinary protocols, but it generally
eschews the intimacies, local knowledge, and empathetic
solidarities that thrive in academic Middle Eastern
studies. Strategic studies and think tanks spend
virtually no energy on pedagogy, and harness for
ideologically driven policy and research the same desire
to win and dominate that propels talented people into
law, business and sports.
From its inception in
the 1950s RAND Corporation papers of Albert Wohlstetter,
the paradigm of strategic studies has evolved in and
moved through a series of environments from the office
of Democratic cold warrior U.S. Senator Henry “Scoop”
Jackson, to Team B at the CIA, to the decentered A team
in the Reagan administration, to the Office of the Vice
President and the Department of Defense’s Office of
Special Plans and their satellite Middle East think
tanks in the current Bush administration. What emerged —
the “clash of civilizations” — is an uncomfortable blend
of grand strategy, low tactics, imaginative gymnastics,
ideologically motivated private funding (on average 10
times greater per institution than the total public
investment in Middle Eastern Title 6 centers), and a
studied avoidance of Middle Eastern human realities.
Thus the policy-making think tanks and the strategic
studies mentality that they insulate are guilty of a far
more dangerous disregard for reality than Kramer’s
alleged “culture of irrelevance.” They have become the
new ivory towers producing cheap, flawed policy that
makes the traditional academy — populated by
interactive, overworked, competitive, scheming,
inefficient purveyors of theoretical cogs and widgets —
look very much like the real world.
Martin
Kramer’s attack on area studies, Daniel Pipes’ ongoing
attempt to intimidate through Campus Watch7 ,
David Horowitz’s campaign for “campus diversity,” the
David Project’s attempt to smear the Columbia University
Middle East studies faculty, and the righteous monopoly
by neoconservative strategists, terrorism experts and
their allies in the talking-head market amount to a
failed attempt at pre-emption of one of the main camps
of pragmatic realism: Middle Eastern studies post-Edward
Said.
Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle have
pointed out clearly8 that the direct and
influential link of contemporary Washington to 1960s
Chicago is not through Leo Strauss but through Albert
Wohlstetter. Even as he identifies Wohlstetter as the
more relevant figure, Wolfowitz summarizes Wohlstetter’s
main contribution as the “recognition of the importance
of accurate weapons.” While important, this downplays
the major contribution of Wohlstetter’s intellectual
legacy: the foundation of a paradigm of knowledge
production that has superseded, in terms of influence
over academic and policy circles, both the paradigm of
orientalism critiqued by Said and the paradigm of area
studies critiqued by Kramer. In strategic studies, the
only knowledge that is valued is that which seems to
promote victory. In the old orientalism, one objectified
the people one studied generally. In strategic studies,
one assumes a pointed dynamic adversarial
relationship.
Albert Wohlstetter, as a RAND
Corporation mathematician in the 1950s, thought about
the strategy of the nuclear first strike before
embarking on a long career at the University of
Chicago.9 He mentored Wolfowitz, Perle, U.S.
Ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad and
Iraqi National Congress head Ahmad Chalabi. He provided
the link between Wolfowitz and Perle and their first
practical policy experience in Sen. “Scoop” Jackson’s
office, and then helped them organize the Team B
experiment with classified information and nuclear
strategy. The key elements of Wohlstetter’s thought and
method, presented in the bewildering language of
bombers, missiles and bases, were, in the words of
Khurram Hussein, "probabilistic reasoning and
mathematical modeling that utilized systems analysis and
game theory, signature methodologies developed at Rand.
The designs or intentions of the enemy were presumed, or
presented as a future possibility. This methodology
exploited to the hilt the iron law of zero margin of
error that was the asymptotic ideal for nuclear
strategy. Even a small probability of vulnerability, or
a potential future vulnerability, could be presented as
a virtual state of national
emergency."10
Uncertainty was the
enemy, and the perceived consequences of failure to
prepare for all eventualities were apocalyptic in scale,
although survivable in theory. In his seminal essay “The
Delicate Balance of Terror,” which both Wolfowitz and
Perle have cited for its transformative effect on their
young minds, Wohlstetter addresses not the now-familiar
concept of terrorist political violence, but rather the
nuclear brinkmanship of the Cold War era and the
possibility of nuclear confrontation between the United
States and the Soviet Union. In the essay, Wohlstetter
argues against the conventional wisdom of Mutually
Assured Destruction (MAD) as an effective deterrent to
nuclear war. Deterrence, Wohlstetter reasoned, is not
automatic due to numerous barriers to a successful
response to a surprise nuclear attack, and therefore
planning based on that premise is flawed.11
Because nuclear war is survivable, planning must prepare
effective responses for surprise attacks, rather than
avoiding thoughts of the unthinkable. Furthermore,
Wohlstetter derided the idea that bumbling and
cooperative Soviets would produce what he called
“Western-preferred Soviet responses.” The United States
must be prepared for a devastating attack by coldly
calculating and ruthlessly efficient Soviet planners.
“We must expect a vast increase in the weight of attack
which the Soviets can deliver with little warning, and
the growth of a significant Russian capability for an
essentially warningless attack.”12 This
framework does not reduce the “target culture” to a
lifeless, passive entity, as Said asserted the old
orientalism did, but rather imbues it with a rigorously
imagined aggressiveness.
Wohlstetter argued that
the United States must be prepared for devious and
improbable enemy moves, and that the logic required was
not a cultural logic — that of the Soviet character
analysis or Kremlinology practiced by intelligence
agencies — but an understanding of probability,
uncertainty and surprise. To maintain deterrence, he
argued, the United States needed overwhelming systemic
superiority. The heavy investment in diverse weapons
systems that he advocated would allow survival of a
surprise Soviet attack, but would require steady
peacetime commitment to developing weapons systems that
could survive enemy attack; decision-making power
capable of regrouping and functioning after a surprise
enemy attack; and the ability to reach enemy territory,
evade the enemy’s defenses and hit enemy targets in the
aftermath of an attack. “Prizes for a retaliatory
capability,” he wrote, “are not distributed for getting
over one of these jumps. A system must get over all
six.”13 The essay trails off into particulars
of 1960s weapons systems and the geography of U.S. bases
around the Soviet Union, but the point that so grabbed
the attention of Wolfowitz and Perle had been made.
Expect and prepare for the worst case
imaginable.
Paul Wolfowitz, growing
intellectually away from Leo Strauss, met Wohlstetter at
the University of Chicago in 1965. Wohlstetter asked him
at a faculty-student tea if he knew Jack Wolfowitz, with
whom Wohlstetter had studied mathematics. With that
exchange, Wolfowitz found a new father figure, who,
unlike the elder Wolfowitz, saw clearly the nexus
between the real science of mathematics and the soft
science of politics. 14 Paul Wolfowitz would
write his dissertation for Wohlstetter on the question
of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East; it took the
form of an extended argument against an Israeli bomb.
After the Israeli development of a nuclear program (was
this perhaps when Wolfowitz was mugged by reality?), his
thought seems to have taken a hard-headed strategic tack
toward total domination of adversaries through weapons
systems and information advantage.
Richard Perle
was even younger and more impressionable than Wolfowitz
when he encountered his intellectual mentor in
California in the early sixties: "It was Albert
Wohlstetter’s swimming pool in the Hollywood Hills.
Albert’s daughter Joan was a classmate at Hollywood High
School. We sat next to each other in Spanish class. She
passed, I didn’t, but she invited me over for a swim,
and her dad was there. We got into a conversation about
strategy, a subject I really didn’t know much about.
Albert gave me an article to read; that was typical of
Albert. Sitting there at the swimming pool I read the
article, which was a brilliant piece of exposition and
obviously so. We started talking about it and…It was
called “The Delicate Balance of Terror.” It became quite
a famous article in foreign affairs, and it was a way of
looking at the strategic relationship between the United
States and the Soviet
Union…"15
Further explaining
Wohlstetter’s role as a mentor, Perle elaborated, “It
happens that a number of people who like to regard
themselves as protégés of Albert’s can probably be
described as hawks, but it isn’t so much that Albert was
a hawk, it’s just that Albert was extraordinarily
rigorous. For Albert, it was just impermissible to
assume anything.”16 Both students would move
away from the particulars of weapons systems and zero
margins of error, but the legacy of rigorous
consideration or dogged anticipation of every
possibility of confrontation would be revived decades
later.
Albert Wohlstetter was part of a team.
While he peered into the future, trying to chart every
possible outcome of conflict, his partner studied past
attacks for lessons. His wife Roberta was a historian
and also a student of surprise. Roberta Wohlstetter’s
work Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision is a historian’s
fleshing out in case-study form of the informational
economy of a successful first strike, in this case that
of Japan on the United States.17 Her main
contribution is that “we failed to anticipate Pearl
Harbor not for want of the relevant materials but
because of a plethora of irrelevant ones.”18
“There is a difference, then, between having a signal
available somewhere in the heap of irrelevancies and
perceiving it as a warning; and there is also a
difference between perceiving it as a warning and acting
or getting action on it. These distinctions, simple as
they are, illuminate the obscurity shrouding this moment
in history.”19 Her work stands as a
counterargument to those who assert that the breaking of
the Japanese diplomatic code (known as Magic) and access
to information on the coming attack on Pearl Harbor
meant treacherous complicity by the Roosevelt
administration.
Roberta Wohlstetter argued that
it is banal aspects of information perception, rather
than conspiracy, stupidity or negligence, that explain
the surprise at Pearl Harbor and the difference between
the clarity available after the fact and the obscurity
before the fact. Parallelling Albert’s list of barriers
to successful retaliation, she presented a list of
barriers to the perception of warning signals. First,
like Albert, she cited the human tendency to see only
what one prefers to see: “Human beings have a stubborn
attachment to old beliefs and an equally stubborn
resistance to new material that will upset them.” There
is a reluctance to expect and therefore to accept
indications of the worst.
Secondly, the clear
signal of intention is embedded in noise. “Even at its
normal level, noise presents problems in distraction… in
addition to the natural clatter of useless information
and competing signals.” Roberta cites other factors that
raise the confusing noise level: false alarms, sustained
tension, secrecy of the plan, spoofs and false traffic,
bureaucracy, quick changes in plan and last minute
reversibility by the opponent.20 As if
chiding her husband’s war on uncertainty, she ends her
work with the warning, “We have to accept the fact of
uncertainty and learn to live with it. No Magic [sic.],
in code or otherwise, will provide certainty. Our plans
must work without it.”21
The
management of noise — irrelevant signals — would be the
key to how those plans would work. The Wohlstetter
partnership brought together Roberta’s insights about
barriers to communication and Albert’s focus on barriers
to accurate and effective strikes to codify a series of
obstacles to accurate strikes and responses, and to the
effective transmission of signals. This checklist would
be important in future projects of their protégés.
Surprise, uncertainty, wishful thinking and noise were
all to be avoided. Better yet, they were to be managed,
avoided by the home team, augmented for the opponent. It
is easy to mistake this for the legendary Straussian
illusion of the “noble lie”; but it is a far wider
project of investment in systems and information
management that cannot be reduced to a single falsehood
or to mere propaganda campaigns. Together, Albert and
Roberta inspired students to learn to strike accurately
in halls of mirrors and echo chambers, in which the
truth is confusingly presented and represented. Without
Roberta’s work on noise, Albert’s work looks
uninteresting to Middle East scholars. But, of course,
everyone tends to forget the wife.
All except
Wolfowitz. In the summer of 2001, just two months before
September 11, Paul Wolfowitz summarized Roberta
Wohlsetter’s work on Pearl Harbor for a commencement
address at West Point. “Interestingly,” he told the
graduates, “ that ‘surprise attack’ was preceded by an
astonishing number of unheeded warnings and missed
signals….Surprise happens so often that it’s surprising
that we’re still surprised by it.” He then reiterated
Albert Wohlstetter’s argument against complacency and
called upon America to “replace a poverty of
expectations with an anticipation of the unfamiliar and
unlikely.”22 In May of that same year,
Wolfowitz’s boss, the new defense secretary, Donald
Rumsfeld, had distributed copies of Pearl Harbor:
Warning and Decision to the members of the House Armed
Services Committee at a closed-door session in which he
emphasized the importance of preparing for the
unexpected. The murderous attacks of September 11 would
validate the Bush administration’s “new” Cold War
lessons.23
In the 1960s, Wohlstetter
was a colleague of Leo Strauss at the University of
Chicago, and he sent his protégés Wolfowitz and Perle to
Senator “Scoop” Jackson’s office in 1969 to “draft a
report on the current debate shaping up in the Senate
over ballistic missile defense.”24 The eleven
years that Perle spent with his new mentor, “the senator
from Boeing,” saw the strategic mentality applied to a
number of issues. Scoop Jackson embodied the neocon
prototype, what Irving Kristol has called a liberal
mugged by reality. Jackson was liberal on domestic,
constitutional and spending matters but paranoid on
matters of foreign policy, particularly concerning the
Soviet Union. According to Perle, “Scoop disagreed
profoundly with Kissinger’s effort to draw the Soviet
Union into a relationship characterized by many
interactions that together would, in the Kissinger
theory, tie the Soviets down.” In the developing rivalry
between realpolitik and counterrealism, engagement won
out over the attempt to preserve a rigorously imagined
adversary, but Jackson’s opposition to the SALT 1
agreement resulted in the amendment that attempted to
preempt future agreements seen as favoring an
asymmetrical status quo. Interest in the Jackson years
has recently been piqued by the declassification in 2004
of papers from the Scoop Jackson library archives in
Washington state.25 The congressional office,
from which one could target policy obliquely from the
sidelines in relative obscurity, shared characteristics
with the think tanks of the future.
The 1970s
offshoot of the embryonic neoconservative movement was
an experiment called Team B, which second-guessed George
H.W. Bush’s CIA. This, as much as the RAND Corporation
and the legislative office, was an ancestor of today’s
think tank — a temporary institution, informal, beyond
accountability, with a specific tactical role to play,
freedom to fail, and no long-term institutional
interests. History and politics were reincorporated into
the imagination of opposed systems to buttress the
somewhat counterintuitive and dry anti-détente stance.
Team B, selected and advised by both Wolfowitz and
Perle, was headed by Richard Pipes, a displaced Polish
Jew who knew very well the dark side of the culture and
history of Nazi Germany and the USSR.
Sen.
Jackson’s aide Dorothy Fosdick was impressed by Dr.
Pipes’s uncompromising academic stance on the
impossibility of convergence between the Soviet mission
and America’s destiny, so when Jackson needed
substantive support for his opposition to détente, he
called on Pipes to testify at a March 1970 hearing on
the proposed SALT treaty. “In my testimony,” wrote
Pipes, “I tried to get across that what mattered were
not the capabilities of weapons but the psychology and
political mentality of the people wielding them.
Communists could not accept the notion of parity basic
to American nuclear strategy because to do so would
create a military equilibrium, and a military
equilibrium meant that they could no longer count on
victory in the global conflict which served as
justification for both their dictatorship and the
poverty in which they kept their subjects.”26
In Pipes’ thinking, we see the marriage of early Cold
War “clash of civilizations” theory with the systems
assessment brought to Jackson’s office by Wohlstetter,
Wolfowitz and Perle. Pipes subsequently became a
consultant to Jackson’s Committee on National Security
and International Operations, publishing a key paper,
“Some Operational Principles of Soviet Foreign Policy,”
which combined attention to strategy with the
historian’s perspective on culture. Between 1973 and
1975 he was attached to the Stanford Research Institute
(SRI), which had a Center for Strategic Studies in
Washington, where he studied Soviet grand strategy, a
subject unpopular in academic centers and the State
Department.
SRI’s director, Richard Foster,
recruited Pipes in the summer of 1976 to head Team B.
This experimental body had been envisioned by
Wohlstetter in the early seventies. Under Pipes’s
direction, three B teams of “outside experts” competed
with three A teams from the CIA to interpret highly
classified data on Soviet weapons systems. The new CIA
chief, George H.W. Bush, agreed to the experiment even
as the Ford administration fought off the Reagan
campaign in the 1976 primaries. Discourse on a dangerous
and aggressive Soviet buildup, which would become
standard fare in the 1980s, was first leaked to the
Committee for the Present Danger from the Team B
experiment.
When released through a Freedom of
Information Act to journalists at the Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists, the Team B papers were found to be a
systematic exaggeration of the existing Soviet threat.
Reflecting Pipes’ inclination away from systems-data
analysis to prewar notions of culture and psychology,
Team B interestingly accused the CIA of focusing too
heavily on technical or hard data rather than
contemplating Soviet strategic objectives in terms of
the conception of “strategy” as well as Soviet history,
the structure of Soviet society, and “the pronouncements
of Soviet leaders.” In Anne Cahn’s words, “Team B found
the Soviet Union immune from Murphy’s law.”27
Team B’s failure to find a Soviet non-acoustic
anti-submarine system “was evidence that there could
well be one.” Team B’s interpretation rested on the
false premise of a “large and expanding Soviet GNP,”
which was illusory.28 In another telling
remark, Pipes claimed that “the Soviet leaders did not
think in the stark dichotomies common to our culture
(war vs. peace, confrontation vs. détente) but
dialectically.”29 He made such broad
statements as this: “Soviet leaders are first and
foremost offensively rather than defensively minded…. In
sum, the issue was one of understanding a different
culture.”30 Kissinger’s response to the
revelation of the Team B project — that the Team B
report was “aimed at sabotaging a new treaty limiting
arms” — and call for a “rational” debate on the issue of
nuclear strategy was dismissed by Pipes, who added
sarcastically, “rational presumably being defined as
concurring with (Kissinger’s) view that it was
irrational to strive for nuclear
superiority”.31
In the Reagan
administration, the principals of Team B became, as it
were, the A Team, scattered in mid-level positions
throughout the bureacracy. Wolfowitz was an assistant
secretary of state, Pipes served on the National
Security Council staff, and Perle was an assistant
secretary of defense. On the occasion of Reagan’s death,
Perle remembered Reagan’s “valiant” refusal to abandon
the Strategic Defense Initiative even though it crippled
the 1986 Reykjavik summit.32 Wolfowitz too
waxed eloquent, comparing Reagan’s response to the
continuing threat of communism to Bush’s stance on
Islamism, a “different kind of threat,.. a kind of
totalitarian ideology that has more in common with
fascism and communism than it does with the religion
that it claims to represent but which it really
desecrates.”33 But government service was,
ironically, restrictive to the young neoconservatives.
After the failure of the Iran-Contra adventure there was
far less room for bold and imaginative strategic
gambits. Perle would retreat to the lucrative private
sector and advisory positions (like the Pentagon’s
Defense Policy Board) and Richard Pipes observed that
“nine-tenths of government work is a waste of time; one
simply spins one’s wheels in
place.”34
Even Wolfowitz, who embraced
government work into the Bush administration, would
eventually be frustrated by the limitations of public
accountability on grand strategy. In 1992, as
undersecretary of defense for policy, he drafted (with
the help of his own protégé, one Irving Lewis Libby) a
document that circulated in Dick Cheney’s Defense
Department envisioning a one-superpower world. The
document, which became known as the “Lone Superpower”
plan, was leaked to The New York Times “by an official
who believes this post-cold-war strategy debate should
be carried out in the public domain.” The
defense-planning document posited the need for
“convincing potential competitors that they need not
aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive
posture to protect their legitimate interests.” It
constituted “a rejection of collective
internationalism.” Wolfowitz, largely unknown up to that
point, came briefly into the limelight when the “lone
superpower” policy paper was vigorously attacked by both
the right and left.35 Grand strategy was
better carried out in relative
obscurity.
Eventually Wolfowitz too moved away
from government and back to mainstream academia as the
dean of the Johns Hopkins University’s Paul Nitze School
of Advanced International Studies. There he was again on
the sidelines and had the distance to observe and learn
from the Clinton administration’s foreign-policy
successes and blunders.36 But, by and large,
academia had changed and was not much more comfortable
than government for the radical strategists.
In
the 1980s, academic Middle Eastern studies was very much
under the influence of Edward Said’s paradigm-shifting
critique, Orientalism.37 From the perspective
of Richard Pipes’s son Daniel, who had just finished a
Harvard dissertation that was published as “Slave
Soldiers and Islam: The Genesis of a Military
System,”38 Edward Said’s broadside was a
successful academic nuclear first strike. In the
aftermath of Said’s critique, someone like Pipes, Jr.,
was practically unemployable in the mainstream except at
military institutions like the Naval War College. These
military colleges only had limited slots for regionally
specialized military historians.
The Middle East
Center founded by Hamilton Gibb at Harvard combined old
orientalism with an interest in modernization theory;
for this reason, it was “ground zero” of Said’s impact.
When the response to the broad, withering, surprising,
but poorly planned Saidian critique came, it was from
the pre-modernist historians at Bernard Lewis’s
Princeton.39 The experience of Nadav Safran,
director of Harvard’s Middle East Center in the early
1980s, drove home the inhospitable nature of
post-Saidian Middle East studies, even as the Reagan
foreign-policy team was gaining ascendancy in
Washington. Safran came under fire for accepting
$150,000 of CIA funding for a book project on Saudi
Arabia and a conference on political Islam.40
Harvard’s rules prohibited outside sponsors from
financing secret research at Harvard, but it was the
prevailing climate in the field that to a large extent
brought public and professional pressure demanding
Safran’s resignation.41 Daniel Pipes, by then
a professor of strategy at the Naval War College, was
one of the few scholars to attend the controversial
conference acknowledging the CIA funding. With the
exception of Martin Peretz, the editor of The New
Republic, Safran’s other students would not become
public figures for a decade and a half. But, as students
of the East and servants of empire, John Abizaid (future
head of military operations in Iraq) and Laurie Mylroie,
famous for doggedly asserting links between Saddam
Hussein and Islamist extremism (in collaboration with
New York Times journalist Judith Miller) , made Edward
Said look more like an oracle than a
historian.
Another surprising book was
circulating at Princeton’s Department of Near Eastern
Studies in 1979-80: a dog-eared, pirated copy of
Ayatollah Khomeini’s Vilayet I-Faqih.42 Even
as those who were most invested in an old-fashioned
orientalism linked to the U.S. imperial destiny were
feeling the heat of political correctness in the
academy, the message of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter
was being lived out for those who could perceive the
signal through the noise. The shock of the Iranian
Islamic revolution was the embodiment of Wohlstetter’s
warnings. The mainstream diplomatic corps and
intelligence agencies seemed never to have seriously
considered the possibility of an Islamic revolution
because it was improbable and unpleasant. Everyone was
still busily preparing for the Middle Eastern equivalent
of “western-preferred Soviet responses.” The signals
that were clear in hindsight had been drowned in a sea
of noise. The blow to U.S. global interests came out of
left field, with the graphic ugliness of the U.S.
embassy hostage ordeal.
Even as the threat from
the Soviet Union diminished with the Afghan quagmire —
also dating from 1979 — and ended with the fall of the
Berlin Wall in 1989, the new enemy was clear. Princeton
historian Bernard Lewis’s career-long suspicions of the
Islamic world culminated in their most distilled and
pointed form in his 1990 essay in The Atlantic Monthly,
“The Roots of Muslim Rage.”43 The phrase he
coined in that essay — the “clash of civilizations” —
was picked up by Harvard political scientist Samuel
Huntington in 1993 for a global theory based on the
empirically weak proposition of discrete and
oppositional civilizational blocks.44 This
concept gave theoretical panache to the stereotypes of
Muslims and Arabs that continued to circulate in the
popular culture and imagination, in spite of Said’s
highbrow and intellectually challenging attacks on them.
It effectively combined Wohlstetter’s “opposed systems
analysis” — discrete, monolithic players spoiling for a
fight — with the simplistic culturalism of the elder
Pipes regarding the Russians. Bloodied but not bowed by
Said’s paradigm shift, validated in their methods and
ideologies by the Iranian shock, unjustifiedly
self-congratulatory (like the Afghan freedom fighters)
about the fall of the Soviet Union, the academic
orientalists who had now also effectively been “mugged
by reality” would turn their full attention to the
Middle Eastern theater, working in relative obscurity
from the sidelines. Daniel Pipes and Bernard Lewis’s
protégé, Martin Kramer, were preparing to mount a second
strike at the Saidian academy. The institutional
infrastructure they were building was designed, rather
like Wohlstetter’s ideal system of military bases around
the Soviet Union, to both deter the enemy from a first
strike and “to support a counterattack which could blunt
the strength of an enemy follow-up attack, and so reduce
the damage done….”45
For the
strategists uncomfortable in government and academia, a
better model of institutional intellectual collaboration
with policy making and security tactics was available in
Israel. In that embattled state, there were few qualms
about collaboration between military, security,
intelligence, policy making and orientalism. Martin
Kramer was Bernard Lewis’s student at Princeton and
spent two decades as a research associate and director
at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle East Studies. Named
after the famous Israeli general and politician, the
Dayan center is “an interdisciplinary research center
devoted to the study of the modern history and
contemporary affairs of the Middle East.” It was founded
in 1983 under the auspices of the Reuven Shiloah Center,
named for the founder of the Israeli intelligence
services.46 Other models may have included
Benjamin Netanyahu’s Jonathan Institute, a private
foundation for the study of terrorism, established in
1979 by the future Likud prime minister and active for
the better part of a decade, and the Jewish Institute
for National Security Policy, a U.S. “non-profit,
non-partisan educational institute dedicated to
explaining the need for a prudent national security
policy for the United States” and “addressing the
security requirements of both the United States and the
State of Israel.” It was founded in the aftermath of the
1973 Yom Kippur War.
A range of American Middle
East studies centers located outside universities,
focused on strategy and policy, and similar in style and
orientation to these Israeli institutes began to emerge
in the 1980s. The Washington Center for Near East Policy
(WINEP), founded in 1985 as an “educational foundation
supporting scholarly research and informed debate,”
maintained a liberal, orientalist, educational cast with
key ties to Israel and — later — the Clinton
administration. It was from here that Kramer launched
his new “Ivory Towers” attack on the field of Middle
East studies. Daniel Pipes would make a home in his
Middle East Forum, founded in 1990. It formed the far
right to WINEP’s center right. The Middle East Forum,
which worked to “define and promote American interests
in the Middle East,” was less concerned with education
and more overt in its ideological assertiveness. The
growth of mini think tanks continued within the major
U.S. public-policy organizations. The liberal Brookings
Institution, the conservative American Enterprise
Institute, the Center for Strategic and International
Studies (formerly associated with Georgetown University)
and the Hudson Institute (founded by Wohlstetter’s
strangelovian RAND colleague Herbert Kahn) came later to
the field of Middle East studies, anchoring and housing
programs that fit within their larger mandates. Each
maintains a commitment to Israeli security along with
programmatic interests in Arab and Islamic reform,
democratization and extremism, and rosters of staff,
governing boards and “experts” which pad cores of
neoconservative insiders with outsiders and
newcomers.47
Middle East think tanks
provide institutional affiliations for far more
specialists than could be accommodated in traditional
academic positions. They provide in-house publishing
capabilities and credentialing; their numbers,
productions and connections in the media are such that
they crowd the media market for Middle East expertise,
filling the range from center to far right, often
debating each other on the nightly news. There are
liberal, conservative and libertarian think tanks. There
are educational, policy and security-oriented think
tanks. There are even nascent Arab and Islamic think
tanks, whose electronic presence is promoted by the
older brick-and-mortar institutions through internet
links and features. But if the physical think tanks
provide shelter, funding and identity for experts
outside of academia, the virtual think tank environment
allows for the multiplication of institutions or
“projects” within existing institutions and a division
of labor along the principles outlined by the
Wohlstetters: assymetrical deterrence, noise,
attack.
Some, like the Campus Watch offshoot of
Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Forum, preemptively attack
the potential advocates of cultural and historical
approaches in the name of improving area studies and
protecting free speech. In effect, Campus Watch, like
David Horowitz’s campaign for ‘campus diversity’ and the
David Project, appear to be oriented to deterring the
surprising rise of a figure on the model of Edward Said,
who was able to change the field of area studies,
address audiences across the disciplines, and survive
decades of academic criticism and ideologically
motivated attack. In its early phase, Campus Watch
prepared dossiers on individual professors; following
criticism, it toned down its more McCarthyesque
practices to institutional monitoring, requests for
students to monitor professors on their campuses, and
limp but persistent attempts to ridicule or smear
high-profile academics.48 Campus Watch seems
to function — in Wohlstetterian terms — to discourage
the academic “enemy” from mounting a first strike or
effectively responding to one.
This function was
amply demonstrated in the attacks on Dr. Joseph Massad
at Columbia University. A bold, critical, sophisticated
and productive scholar in the tradition of Edward Said,
he was initially targeted by something called the David
Project, which solicited denunciations of Massad from
Columbia University students, most of whom had not
participated in his classes. These denunciations were
made into a film which has never been publicly shown.
Pipes’ Campus Watch publicized and amplified the
baseless accusations of antisemitism and intimidation.
Campus Watch followed up with a so-called “Columbia
project” designed to pressure the institution associated
with this outspoken and gifted scholar through e-mail
campaigns and boycotts against critical or dissenting
speech. In effect, the think tanks mobilized in apparent
support of aggrieved students. If this case was not
chilling for some Middle East scholars, it certainly
alarmed many of the institutions they work
in.49
The centrality of noise in
distracting the mainstream from the signals that will
become clear in hindsight is done by a think tank called
MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute. MEMRI
is an “independent, non-partisan, non-profit”
tax-deductible-status organization that claims to bridge
the language gap between the Middle East and the West
with timely translations from the Arabic, Farsi and
Hebrew media. Founded by a former Israeli-intelligence
counterterrorism adviser to two Israeli prime ministers,
and run by Meyrav Wurmser, the head of the Hudson
Institute’s Middle East program, and Richard Perle, it
sends out translations of inflammatory and extremist
journalism from the Arabic press to a list serve of
journalists and politicians.50
MEMRI’s
critics claim that only the negative is translated,
never the positive. In the aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina, MEMRI translated comments from the Kuwaiti
paper al-Siyassa asserting that Katrina was Allah’s
revenge on the United States. The comments were
subsequently translated into stories at The World
Tribune, The New York Sun and Newsmax.com. MEMRI did not
find articles in the Kuwaiti press about the $100
million of hurricane relief offered to the United States
by Kuwait, or editorials in the Israeli press
attributing Katrina to divine displeasure with U.S.
support for Ariel Sharon’s evacuation of 9,000 illegal
Israeli settlers from the Gaza strip. MEMRI
simultaneously highlights stories emphasizing the most
extreme stereotypes of clashing Arab and Islamic
civilization, which would not otherwise come to light.
In effect, it amplifies the noise that most effectively
distracts from the projects of engagement and
negotiation. This is compounded by the interlinked
series of websites, blogs and forums on the right wing
of the think-tank periphery. Like the Israeli
disinformation site Debka.com, MEMRI produces and
amplifies noise, while buttressing the weak “clash of
civilizations” theory with selective extremist
writing.
Meanwhile, even more disembodied think
tanks, like the American Enterprise Institute’s Project
for the New American Century, have pursued projects that
appear so improbably far from the center of power that
there is no need to hide them.51 It is useful
to contrast the Defense Planning Document of 1992
authored by Wolfowitz in government service with the
PNAC statement of principles in 1997 and the series of
letters on Iraq in 1998 that brought together a
bipartisan array of signatories. The former, produced by
an accountable government official, was subject to
unwelcome scrutiny and critique, while the PNAC’s shrill
calls for the ouster of Saddam Hussein in the late
1990s, which are in hindsight a clear roadmap for the
U.S. invasion of Iraq in the aftermath of the September
11 attacks, were understandably ignored as irrelevant
barking. The signatories are a who’s who of the future
Bush administration’s power elite, announcing their
intentions clearly. But who was looking for that
particular signal or could see it at the time? Like its
probable model, then Israeli prime ministerial candidate
Netanyahu’s roadmap, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for
Securing the Realm” of 1996, the PNAC project benefited
from being planned and presented outside government. The
strategy was no less “real” for originating in the think
tank periphery.
The strategic paradigm of
knowledge founded by the Wohlstetters has had a
catastrophic success. Its offspring have multiplied,
built institutions, purveyed information to the American
political machine, and had little effective competition.
The erstwhile members of the Project for the New
American Century quietly form and implement their
policies in the shadowy, oblique, informal bases of the
Bush administration’s Office of the Vice President, the
Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, the Defence Policy
Advisory Board and the American Enterprise Institute’s
Wohlstetter Conference Room. They got their improbable
and shocking war in Iraq. With Elliot Abrams, Paula
Dobriansky, Zalmay Khalilzad, Vin Weber, Robert
Zoellick, et al. positioned strategically throughout the
Bush administration and its ideological partners (like
the National Endowment for Democracy), they have
achieved and will continue to achieve subsidiary goals.
But the cost of their success has been very high. Its
price in blood, treasure, credibility — and as we now
see in this hurricane season —opportunity costs have
been staggering.
The catastrophic success of the
strategic paradigm has been so rapid that we can begin
to see only too well the dangers of anticipating the
perfect enemy. The issue of mirror imaging came up in
Wohlstetter’s late writings in a rather ambiguous New
York Times op-ed from 1979, “The Uses of Irrelevance,”
arguing for the deployment of force in regional
conflicts and affairs like the Iranian revolution. He
began the essay with the metaphor of a musical canon, in
which point and counterpoint are exactly the
same.
“In the musical form known as a canon, two
voices state the same theme, note for note interval by
interval, one slightly after another. To the untrained
ear they may sound different, but they are
not.”52
He could have been describing
Richard Pipes’ doublespeak response to accusations of
nuclear brinkmanship in the Reagan administration: “I
was amused to see how readily American liberals adopted
the communist habit of attributing communist views to
the critics of communism.” The Orwellian nature of
Daniel Pipes’s attacks on the Middle East studies
profession in the name of freedom of speech, or MEMRI’s
claim to “bridge the language gap between the Middle
East and the west” are not lies but a strange distortion
of real relationships — a counterreality. And as the
United States continues to play a dangerous baiting game
with Iran, while asserting its own right to use nuclear
weapons preemptively, one wonders if the strategists
have not, as Ibn Khaldun might have predicted, become
the very enemy they imagined.
1 Ron
Suskind, “Without a Doubt,” New York Times
Magazine, October 17, 2004.
2 Martin
Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand:The Failure of Middle
Eastern Studies in America (Washington Institute
for Near East Policy, 2001).
3 Ibn Khaldun
and Franz Rosenthal, The Muqaddimah: an Introduction
to History, 2nd ed., with corrections and augmented
bibliography (Princeton University Press,
1967).
4 “9/11 Commission Chimera,” at
TomPaine.com [database online], June 13 [cited
2004]. Available from
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/911_commission_chimera.php.
5
Department of Defense, Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz,
interview with Sam Tannenhaus, Vanity Fair, May
9, 2003, available at
www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030509-depsecdef0223.html;
see also Ben Wattenberg’s PBS Think Tank show,
Richard Perle: The Making of a Neoconservative,
at
http://www.pbs.org/thinktank/show_1017.html.
6
Albert Wohlstetter, “The Delicate Balance of Terror,”
RAND Corporation, November 6, 1958.
7 Eyal
Press, “Neocon Man,” Nation 278, no. 18, 2004,
pp. 18-23.
8 Wolfowitz, Vanity
Fair.
9 Ibid.
10
Khurram Husain, “Neocons: The Men Behind the Curtain,”
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 59, no. 6,
2003, pp. 62-71.
11 Wohlstetter,
1958.
12 Ibid.
13
Ibid.
14 Jim Mann, Rise of the
Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (Viking,
2004), p. 426).
15
Wattenberg.
16 Ibid.
17
Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and
Decision (Stanford University Press,
1962).
18 Ibid., p. 387.
19
Ibid., p. 389.
20 Ibid., pp.
393-397.
21 Ibid.
22 Mann.
p. 426.
23 Robert Burns, “Rumsfeld:
Preparing for Surprises Key for U.S. Plans,”
Associated Press, May 24,
2001.
24 Wattenberg,
2003.
25 Lara Bain, “CIA Seizes,
Classifies Already-Public Papers,” The Miami
Herald, February 15, 2005.
26 Richard
Pipes, Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger (Yale
University Press, 1981), p. 264.
27 Anne
Hessing Cahn, “Team B: The Trillion Dollar Experiment,”
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 49, no. 3,
1993.
28 Ibid.
29 Pipes,
2003, p. 136.
30 Ibid.,
p.137.
31 Ibid., p. 138.
32
R. Perle, “The Reagan I Knew,” Benador Online,
June 11, 2004.
33 Paul Wolfowitz 2004,
Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz Interview with CNN
International Business, in U.S. Department of Defense
[database online], 2004 [cited 9/22 2005]. Available at
http://www.dod.mil/transcripts/2004/tr20040607-depsecdef0841.html.
34
Pipes. 2003.
35 P. Tyler, “Lone
Superpower: Ammunition for Critics?” The New York
Times, 1992.
36 Paul Wolfowitz,
“Clinton’s First Year,” Foreign Affairs 73, no.
1, 1994.
37 Edward Said,
Orientalism (Vintage, 1994), p.
394.
38 Daniel Pipes, Slave Soldiers
and Islam: The Genesis of a Military System (Yale
University Press, 1981), p. 264.
39
Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” Atlantic
Monthly 266, no. 3, 1990, p. 47.
40
Nadav Safran, Saudi Arabia: The Ceaseless Quest for
Security (Belknap Press of Harvard University,
1985), p. 524.
41 “Which Research Grants
are Clean?” Time Magazine 127, no. 2, 1986, p.
62.
42 Martin Kramer, personal
communication.
43 Lewis, p.
47.
44 Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of
Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3,
1993, p. 22.
45
Wohlstetter.
46 Zackary Lockman, “Behind
the Battles Over Middle East Studies,” Middle East
Report Online, January 2004, available at
www.merip.org/mero/interventions/lockman_interv.html.
47
Brian Whitaker, “U.S. Think Tanks Give Lessons in
Foreign Policy,” in the Guardian, August 19,
2002, available at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,777100,00.html.
48
Lockman, 2004.
49 For an introduction to
the Massad affair see Monique Dols, “Smearing Joseph
Massad, Scapegoating Columbia,” April 11, 2005,
available at
http://www.counterpunch.org/dols04112005.html.
50
Brian Whitaker, “Selective Memri” in The Guardian
Unlimited, August 12, 2002.
51
http://www.newamericancentury.org/lettersstatements.htm.
52
Albert Wohlstetter, “Uses of Irrelevance,” The New
York Times, 1979.
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