by John Gray
The idea that Strauss’s work sanctions deception is questionable. To say that great philosophers write in code is one thing, to maintain that deception is essential in politics another. Strauss always insisted there was a wide gap between philosophy and practice, writing ‘the philosopher ceases to be a philosopher when certainty of a solution becomes stronger than his awareness of the problematic character of the solution.’41 In the spirit of this maxim he wrote very little about contemporary politics, and it is hard to envision him endorsing any modern political project. His forebodings about the future of liberal democracy cannot be squared with the neo-conservative programme of exporting democracy throughout the world, while the ardent neo-conservative faith in progress is at odds with his mistrust of Enlightenment hopes. While Strauss is celebrated as a defender of the current American regime, he could more accurately be described as one of its most merciless critics. Like Schmitt, Strauss was an anti-liberal. In the vernacular discourse of American politics, neo-conservatives are enemies of liberalism in all its forms. But neo-conservatism is itself a fundamentalist version of liberalism, and – as his account of Hobbes and Schmitt shows – Strauss viewed liberalism as a symptom of the failure of the ‘modern project’. His work does not support any very specific political stance and is consistent with a variety of political positions.42 Yet if there is one movement in contemporary politics this profoundly sceptical thinker would have mistrusted and condemned it is neo-conservatism.
While Strauss cannot be held accountable for the behaviour of a political movement that claims his authority, that does not mean his thought had no influence on it. Strauss’s claim that philosophical writings often contain a hidden meaning, different from or opposed to their manifest sense, is a licence for undisciplined thinking. He failed to supply any method of interpretation whereby the claim to have identified a hidden meaning could be tested, and judged by accepted standards of scholarship some of his claims are highly implausible. For example, Strauss interprets Plato not as a utopian thinker but as a critic of utopianism who aimed to show that an ideal state is impossible. However, as classical scholars have demonstrated, this interpretation has no basis in the texts.43
The trouble with Strauss’s theory is that it allows virtually any interpretation to be advanced. There is a parallel here with the claim of the deconstructionist school that texts have no inherent meaning. In both cases rational inquiry is replaced by arbitrary judgement, and while he may have believed he was recovering a classical way of thinking, Strauss’s method has more in common with post-modern thought. In practice Strauss interpreted texts by appealing to subjective intuitions whose authority seemed to depend on a claim to possess some kind of special insight. It is a claim to privileged access to the truth that has led some of his followers into calamitous errors. As applied in government, it helped bring about the Iraq war.
THE POSSESSED
Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrived at unlimited despotism. Shigalyov in Dostoyevsky’s The Devils44
Neo-conservatism is a stance in American policy-making as well as a body of ideas. Its origins as a political movement are in the conflicts surrounding American defence policies in the 1970s and 1980s. The neo-conservative network that had such a deep influence on George W. Bush is a by-product of the Cold War. Many of its errors come from applying habits of thought acquired during that time to the different conditions prevailing today.
The first beginnings of neo-conservatism may be glimpsed in the alarm felt by figures such as Patrick Moynihan and Norman Podhoretz during the Vietnam War. Worried by the lack of patriotism they believed was exhibited by protestors against the war, they objected to the idea that the US was in any sense evil. Flawed, no doubt – but still the best society that had ever existed. The idea that America is the best – perhaps the only truly legitimate – regime in history remains a mainstay of neo-conservative thinking. But neo-conservatism as an identifiable political force emerged later, in an attempt to alter US defence policies.
The key figure in this project was Albert Wohlstetter, like Leo Strauss a professor at the University of Chicago – and far more important in the genesis of neo-conservatism than Strauss. A mathematician who had worked as a defence analyst at the RAND Corporation, Wohlstetter spearheaded a powerful challenge to the policies of arms control and détente that were pursued during the Nixon administration. He identified the importance of the precision weapons that were becoming feasible with new technologies, criticized accepted theories of deterrence and actively supported the defence build-up that gathered speed during the Reagan era.
Wohlstetter was pivotal in the neo-conservative network that developed from the 1970s onwards. Among his protégés are Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle (who dedicated a book he co-authored, An End to Evil, to Wohlstetter). Wohlstetter introduced Perle to Senator ‘Scoop’ Jackson, a strongly anti-communist Democrat, who in 1974 co-sponsored legislation that denied normal trade relations with countries that restricted freedom of emigration (as the Soviet Union did in relation to Jews who wished to emigrate to Israel). Assisted by Perle, Jackson also lobbied vigorously against the SALT II arms control treaty. In the mid-seventies Wohlstetter put one of his students, Zalmay Khalilzad, in a think tank he had formed to advise the US government, and assisted by Wohlstetter, Khalilzad soon made useful connections in Washington.45 By 1984 he was working for Paul Wolfowitz at the State Department, and by the early nineties he was a senior Defense Department official working with Donald Rumsfeld. Khalilzad had long argued that if the US assisted the mujahadeen, Soviet forces could be defeated in Afghanistan, and in the wake of Soviet withdrawal he was among those policy-makers who viewed the Taliban regime as being friendly to American interests. He altered this view after the 9/11 attacks when he was appointed US ambassador to the country, and went on to be US ambassador in Iraq. In 1985 Wohlstetter introduced Perle (then under-secretary for international security in the Reagan administration) to Ahmed Chalabi, a secular Iraqi Shi’ite from a wealthy banking family and a fellow-mathematician who had studied under Wohlstetter at Chicago. Chalabi was a major player in the run-up to the Iraq war as head of the American-backed Iraqi National Congress (INC), touted by neo-conservatives as a potential leader of post-Saddam Iraq and used as a source of intelligence assessments that conflicted with those being produced by the CIA and other American intelligence agencies.
The network that sprang up around Wohlstetter continues to the present day. Many of its members were signatories of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a Washington-based think tank established in 1997 to promote the belief that America must act to retain its global primacy. With chairman William Kristol, son of Irving Kristol and editor of the Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard, and chief executive Gary Schmitt, a Chicago graduate who had worked as aide to Patrick Moynihan, PNAC advocated large increases in US defence spending to maintain unchallengeable American military pre-eminence. Several members of PNAC served in the Bush administration including Dick Cheney, Zalmay Khalilzad, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby (Cheney’s former chief of staff who in March 2007 was convicted on a number of charges arising from the illegal outing of a covert CIA officer, Valerie Plame, whose husband had criticized the Bush administration). The central thesis of PNAC as presented in its report on Rebuilding America’s Defenses, published in 2000, was not new. The idea that America must maintain its global supremacy was present in earlier documents, including papers published by the then defence secretary Dick Cheney in the early nineties, and continued ideas about American national security developed by Wohlstetter in the early seventies.
The cardinal fact about the defence intellectuals who composed the neo-conservative policy network from the 1970s onwards is that they were opposed to the military doctrines of the time. If there was a figure that embodied everything they rejected in American foreign policy it was Henry Kissinger, whose brand of realpolitik they abhorred. Kissinger argued that despite its ideological origins, the So
viet Union had become something like a normal state with interests that need not be always opposed to those of the United States. Against this, the neo-conservatives insisted that because of its totalitarian structure the USSR would always be hostile.
In the view of neo-conservatives, Kissinger’s belief that the US could work with the Soviets was wishful thinking, and it was not only Kissinger who suffered from this failing. According to Wohlstetter the CIA had a chronic tendency to misread the Soviet regime. In an article published in 1974 Wohlstetter accused the CIA of systematically underestimating Soviet missile capabilities, thereby allowing the USSR to achieve military superiority.46 Wohlstetter’s article triggered a concerted rightwing attack on the CIA, which in 1976 resulted in the establishment of what came to be known as the B Team. Set up as a rival source of intelligence for the US government (the CIA was Team A), the B Team operated through the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and was organized into three sections, dealing with Soviet low-altitude air defence capabilities, Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and Soviet strategy. The formation of the B Team was resisted by William Colby, director of the CIA, but when George Bush Snr became CIA chief in 1976 the team was launched with president Gerald Ford’s backing. The B Team was composed of hard-line opponents of détente and arms control. Key members were Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pipes, the Harvard historian of Russia, and Edward Teller, a nuclear physicist sometimes called ‘the father of the H-bomb’ because of his involvement in the Manhattan Project in which the first nuclear weapons were developed, who was later a powerful advocate of the ‘Star Wars’ Strategic Defence Initiative (and upon whom the film character of Dr Strangelove is believed to have been based).
The B Team revealed some lasting traits of neo-conservative thinking. It mistrusted empirical research, rejecting analysis of the kind carried out by the CIA and other US intelligence agencies on the ground that available evidence – whether derived from open sources or covertly acquired – was liable to be disinformation and could not be used as a reliable guide to Soviet abilities or intentions. To some extent this was an echo of the paranoid world-view associated with James Jesus Angleton, for a time CIA chief of counter-intelligence. Under the influence of the KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn, Angleton came to believe that the Soviet Union had been engaged for many years in a global campaign of strategic deception in which it projected a view of itself as weak. For Angleton – an intricate personality who had edited a literary magazine at Yale that published T. S. Eliot and other contemporary poets – intelligence was a branch of the theory of knowledge. The aim was to find out the truth about Soviet conditions, but given the Soviet record of disinformation the normal rules for assessing evidence had to be suspended. Any attempt to assess Soviet behaviour using standard empirical methods led into a ‘wilderness of mirrors’ (a phrase he borrowed from Eliot’s poem Gerontion).47 In this area nothing could be believed or trusted, for even facts could be planted. Acting on this belief, Angleton instigated damaging mole-hunts in the CIA and made wild accusations against several western leaders (including prime minister Harold Wilson, against whom the British intelligence ‘spycatcher’ Peter Wright conspired on the basis of Angleton’s allegations). Discredited within the CIA, Angleton resigned in December 1974.
Because they disdained empirical inquiry, the B Team had no procedures for checking its assessments, and as a result they were wide of the mark. Dr Anne Cahn, who worked in the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency from 1977 to 1980 and who on examining the Team assessments found them ‘all wrong’, has described how the B Team’s failure to detect a Soviet non-acoustic anti-submarine system was viewed by members of the Team as evidence that such a system could well exist. In other words, the Team viewed the absence of evidence as evidence in favour of its view. A methodology of this kind contains no means of detecting actual disinformation. The B Team was vulnerable on this count, and its belief in Soviet military superiority was in part a result of its being fooled by CIA black propaganda. There was an enormous Soviet military-industrial complex, but much of it was a rustbelt like the rest of the Soviet economy. The reality revealed after the Soviet collapse was closer to the CIA’s estimates than it was to the claims the CIA had concocted for public consumption. The theorists of strategic deception in the B Team were themselves among its dupes.48
The disregard of evidence displayed by the B Team reflected a systematic rejection of empiricism, and here we find a link with Strauss. Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt have consistently attacked America’s intelligence agencies, invoking the method of hermetic interpretation practised by Leo Strauss as a superior alternative to empirical procedures. Shulsky studied under Strauss, and in a paper he co-authored with Schmitt on ‘Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous)’49 he suggested that Strauss’s doctrine of the hidden meaning of texts ‘alerts one to the possibility that political life may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm.’ The authors describe Strauss as ‘resembling, however faintly, the George Smiley of John Le Carré’s novels in his gentleness, his ability to concentrate on detail, his consequent success in looking below the surface and reading between the lines, and his seeming unworldliness’. While noting that he wrote nothing on intelligence matters, they argue that his insight into the ways in which different political systems operate demonstrates the limited usefulness of social science in intelligence work. Strauss rejected the idea that politics could be understood by ‘an empirical method that observed behaviour, tallied it, calculated correlations between particular actions and particular features of the context in which they occurred, and so on’, on the ground that ‘the regime shapes human political action in so fundamental a way that the very souls appear different’. Schmitt and Shulsky go on to maintain that failure to understand this damaged American policy in the Cold War, when ‘American intelligence analysts were generally reluctant to believe that they could be deceived about any critical question by the Soviet Union or other Communist states. History has shown this view to be extremely naïve.’ In this view, only a method that allows analysts to peer into souls can give the guidance needed for effective policies.50
When Schmitt and Shulsky rejected empirical inquiry they confused a critique of scientism with a rejection of evidence. Strauss’s attack on the belief that the study of society could be conducted by the methods of natural science was well founded. Differences between cultures, unique historical processes and the intermingling of facts and values will always make the study of society different from any natural science. That does not mean facts can be dispensed with, though. History is not a science but there is a difference between good history and bad that reflects how evidence is used. There is also a difference between a type of thinking that is based on historical knowledge and one that lacks any sense of history. Neo-conservative thinking falls into the latter category, and many of the policy blunders committed under neo-conservative influence are the result of a wilful ignorance of the past.
At the beginning of their paper on Strauss and intelligence, the authors admit that their topic ‘must appear at first a very strange one’, and the link between ‘the tumultuous world of spies and snooping paraphernalia, on the one hand, and the quiet life of scholarship and immersion in ancient texts, on the other’ is far from obvious. Certainly it seems unlikely that an eccentric method of textual interpretation could assist intelligence gathering, but something like this method was used at the highest levels of American government. The Bush aide who scoffed at what he called the ‘reality-based community’ who believe that ‘solutions emerge from judicious study of discernible reality’, and boasted ‘That’s not the way the world really works any more. We’re an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality,’ may have been doing no more than voice the witless triumphalism that was common among neo-conservatives at one time.51 But he was also disclosing a view of truth that shaped some of the administration’s most ill-advised
policies, which Schmitt and Shulsky shared.
It is impossible to give a complete account of the disinformation that surrounds the Iraq war. The whole story may not be known for many years, if ever.52 What can be done is to illustrate the attitude to truth – at once hieratic and instrumental – that informed some of the most important episodes of deception. Those who engineered the Iraq war believed they knew the truth and in deceiving others were only promoting it. But their belief that they could decipher the hidden meaning of events was a delusion, and they may well have ended by being deceived themselves.
This process may be seen at work in the operations of a body set up under the direction of Abram Shulsky to supply intelligence supporting the decision to go to war in Iraq. Shulsky had been a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee in the early 1980s and served in the Pentagon under Richard Perle in the Reagan administration. In 2002 he was made head of the Office of Special Plans (OSP), a Pentagon unit created by Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld and reporting to Bush’s under-secretary for defence Douglas Feith, a protégé of Richard Pipes and Richard Perle. Much of what was done in this Office of Special Plans remains obscure. As George Packer, author of an exhaustive account of the machinations leading up to the war, has written, ‘for the Office of Special Plans, secrecy was not only convenient. One could even say that it was metaphysically necessary.’53 Following Shulsky’s hermetic methods, the OSP rejected established procedures for evaluating intelligence and ‘stove-piped’ their own version of events directly to the White House. Like the B Team the OSP had a definite agenda that featured overriding and discrediting the intelligence provided by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). The OSP became the chief source of claims about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction and links with al-Qaeda that were used by Bush to justify the attack on Iraq. Partly because of criticism of its role in the war the unit was renamed in July 2003, when it resumed its original title of Northern Gulf Affairs. (The OSP seems to have been granted another lease on life. In mid–2006 an ‘Iranian Directorate’ was set up in the Pentagon that is run by a number of OSP veterans including the unit’s former director Abram Shulsky. Around the same time the ‘Iran desk’ at the State Department, which reports to the daughter of the vice-president Elizabeth Cheney, was increased to task force size.54)
