Black Mass: How Religion Led the World into Crisis

by John Gray

  The distinctive features of the OSP were its adherence to a view of the world set in advance of empirical inquiry, its heavy reliance on information provided by Chalabi’s INC and its close links with the vice-president, Dick Cheney.55 The principal result was to leave US policy heavily reliant on unverified intelligence from INC sources. The INC produced Iraqi defectors who made large claims about Saddam possessing weapons of mass destruction. These claims were disputed by the CIA and conflicted with evidence obtained from UN weapons inspections; but they were used repeatedly by Cheney and president Bush to bolster the case for war until the absence of WMD in Iraq could no longer be denied.

  It is often said that Cheney and Bush ‘cherry-picked’ from the intelligence available to them, using items that supported their beliefs while neglecting others that were not useful. In order to suggest a link between Iraq and 9/11, Cheney referred to a meeting that had taken place in Prague between Mohamed Atta (one of the leading 9/11 hijackers) and Iraqi intelligence. He also claimed that ‘intelligence sources’ advised that Saddam had attempted to purchase aluminium tubes for the production of nuclear weapons. In making these claims Cheney was not selecting some intelligence while passing over the rest in silence. As the American writer Joan Didion has noted:

  The White House had been told by the CIA that no meeting in Prague between Mohamed Atta and Iraqi intelligence had ever occurred. The International Atomic Energy Agency and the US Department of Energy had said that the aluminium tubes in question ‘were not directly suitable’ for uranium enrichment … What the vice-president was doing, then, was not cherry-picking the intelligence but rejecting it, replacing it with whatever self-interested rumour better advanced his narrative.56

  Along with Bush, the vice-president dismissed known facts because they did not support a decision to go to war that had already been made. When Bush and Cheney rejected intelligence that conflicted with the case for war they were not – in their own eyes or those of their advisors in the OSP – suppressing the truth. Like Mr Blair when he argued for war on a basis of disinformation in Britain, they were advancing what they saw as a higher truth. In their book Silent War, Schmitt and Shulsky made clear that ‘truth is not the goal’ of intelligence operations but instead ‘victory’.57 Actually, for these seers victory was the same as truth – not truth of the ordinary kind, to be sure, but the esoteric truth that is concealed in the deceiving mirror of fact.

  The problem with this methodology was that it left its practitioners open to deception of the kind against which they warned. Those in charge at the Office of Special Plans based their belief in the existence of WMD in Iraq on the claims of Iraqi defectors, but in doing so they omitted to consider the possibility that these defectors might have been dispatched to foster the belief (which some of them may have believed to be true) that Saddam had an active weapons programme, when in fact he did not. Insofar as it projected an image that enhanced his power in Iraq and throughout the Arab world it was a belief that served Saddam’s interests. At the same time the Iranian regime had a strategic interest in overthrowing the Iraqi dictator. Not only had there been a savagely fought war between the two countries but the Iranians knew that if Saddam was toppled the upshot would be Shia power in what remained of Iraq. Destroying Saddam’s regime could make Iran the dominant power in the region. Against this background it would have been prudent to guard against the danger that the INC could be used as a channel for Iranian as well as Iraqi disinformation.58 The CIA had long warned against the dangers of reliance on Iraqi émigré sources. The theorists who were running the OSP dismissed these warnings. Relying on their capacity to divine the truth, they were confident they could do without empirical verification. As far as they were concerned the defectors only confirmed what their own special methods had already shown to be true. The faith-based methodology of the OSP freed it from the cumbersome procedures of the established American intelligence agencies. It also made the OSP a prime target for strategic deception.

  The notion that a type of occult insight into a regime or a person removes the need for factual inquiry is a perilous basis for action. President Bush may have believed that when he met Vladimir Putin in June 2001 he was ‘able to get a sense of his soul’.59 Subsequent events appear to have altered Mr Bush’s perception and one might have expected developments in post-Saddam Iraq to dent confidence in faith-based intelligence, but this is far from the case. In The New York Times in February 2004 the neo-conservative columnist David Brooks renewed the attack on American intelligence methods, writing, ‘For decades, the US intelligence community has propagated the myth that it possesses analytical methods that must be insulated pristinely from the hurly-burly world of politics.’ Rather than rely on ‘a conference-load of game theorists or risk assessment officers’, Brooks declares, ‘When it comes to understanding the world’s thugs and menaces … I’d trust anyone who has read a Dostoyevsky novel over the past five years.’60 Once again, an esoteric insight into the soul of the regime is presented as a superior alternative to the laborious analysis of evidence.

  The neo-conservative idea that one can understand terrorist violence by reading the novels of Dostoyevsky is entertainingly ironic, since what Dostoyevsky describes is the mentality of neo-conservatives themselves. Neo-conservatives believe much of the world as it currently exists is irredeemably bad. As the neo-conservative analyst Michael Ledeen wrote soon after the 9/11 attacks, the ‘war on terror’ is all of one piece with the ‘global democratic revolution’:

  We should have no misgivings about our ability to destroy tyrannies. It is what we do best. It comes naturally to us, for we are the only truly revolutionary country in the world, as we have been for more than 200 years. Creative destruction is our middle name … In other words, it is time once again to export the democratic revolution. To those who say it cannot be done, we need only point to the 1980s, when we led a global democratic revolution that toppled tyrants from Moscow to Johannesburg.61

  Here a celebrated dictum of the nineteenth-century Russian anarchist Bakunin – ‘The passion for destruction is a creative passion’ – is restated in neo-conservative terms. Bakunin’s disciple, the divinity student Sergey Nechayev, applied this maxim in his ‘Catechism of a Revolutionary’ (1868), where he argued that in advancing the revolution the ends justified any means – including blackmail and murder. A year later Nechayev murdered one of his comrades for failing to carry out orders. Bakunin severed relations with Nechayev after this episode but Nechayev had revealed the logic of Bakunin’s project. Terror followed from the goal of a total revolution.

  Ledeen’s project of militarily enforced democracy has a similar logic. Nechayev never doubted his was the cause of the people, and Ledeen takes for granted that the countries that have regime change imposed on them will welcome the overthrow of their governments. If they do not they must be purged of retrograde elements. Only then can there be any assurance that forcible democratization will be accepted for what it is: liberation from tyranny. Torture and terror are acceptable if they assist in the global war against evil.

  This neo-conservative catechism is the latest incarnation of the revolutionary mind Dostoyevsky dissected a century and a half ago. In his novel The Possessed, Dostoyevsky presents a picture of the Russian revolutionaries of his time and their fellow travellers on the intellectual Left. His portrait of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, the sheltered aristocratic radical who fills his leisure time by toying with revolution, is a masterpiece of cruel insight. In pursuit of a new world, revolutionaries end up as criminals (as happened in the case of Nechayev, whose involvement in murder was used as the basis for part of the plot of the novel). The dream of Utopia ends in squalid horror.

  Dostoyevsky wrote his novel as an attack on the leftwing revolutionaries of mid-nineteenth-century Russia. As a description of the radical movements of the period it may be overdrawn, but as an account of the psychology of the revolutionary mind it has lasting value. As the Polish poet and writer Czesiaw Milos
z commented, ‘The Russian Revolution found its prediction in The Possessed, as Lunacharsky openly admitted.’ Milosz goes on to criticize Dostoy-evsky, ‘the Russian millennialist and messianist’,62 and there can be no doubt that when Dostoyevsky strayed into the politics of his day the results were ridiculous and at times repellent. His belief that a revival of Russian spirituality could save the world was messianic thinking at its worst. Yet, because he was himself a millennialist, Dostoyevsky understood the dangers of revolutionary movements inspired by millenarian beliefs.

  Beginning with limited goals, revolutionaries have time and again come to accept violence as an instrument for cleansing the world of evil. The ideologues that have shaped the foreign policies of the Bush administration exemplify this pathology. Like Dostoyevsky’s deluded visionaries, neo-conservatives embraced force as a means to Utopia.

  5

  Armed Missionaries

  The most extravagant idea that can be born in the head of a political thinker is to believe that it suffices for people to enter, weapons in hand, among a foreign people and expect to have its laws and constitution embraced. It is in the nature of things that the progress of reason is slow and no one loves armed missionaries; the first lesson of nature and prudence is to repulse themas enemies. One can encourage freedom, never create it by an invading force.

  Maximilien Robespierre,

  speech to the Jacobin Club, Paris, 17921

  To some extent the origins of the Iraq war will always be obscure. The reason is not that it was the product of a conspiracy, as some have come to believe. Many strategic objectives were presented in its justification, some of them seemingly rational. Yet when the history of the war comes to be written it will show that none of the groups that supported it had goals that were achievable. If the Bush administration had an overall strategy it assumed regime change in Iraq would promote American interests while curbing terrorism and furthering democracy in the region; but these are not facets of a single programme that can all be realized together. They are disparate and competing objectives and in acting on the belief that they were one the Bush administration revealed its distance from reality.

  Liberal democracy cannot be established in most of the countries of the Middle East. In much of the region the choice is between secular despotism and Islamist rule. In attempting the forcible democratization of the Middle East, the Bush administration assumed the result would be regimes like the United States. It overlooked the likelihood that they would be illiberal democracies. Illiberal democracy rests on the belief that the common good is self-evident. Everyone who is not deluded or corrupt will support the same policies so there will be no need to protect personal freedom or the rights of minorities. It is enough that the popular will, which is identical with the common good, can be fully expressed. In practice the people need guidance, which in Rousseau’s theory is provided by the Legislator – a shadowy figure who steers them from behind the scenes. Rousseau’s Legislator has something in common with the Grand Ayatollah, whose obscure interventions shape theocratic Iran. The type of regime that exists in that country is an Islamist version of Rousseau’s illiberal dream, and when the remaining authoritarian regimes in the Middle East are overthrown it is likely to be this type of democracy that will succeed them. The process is already underway in much of Iraq, where a Shia-dominated popular theocracy along the lines of Iran is slowly emerging. Twenty years from now most of the Middle East looks set to be ruled by Islamist versions of illiberal democracy. In some ways these may be more legitimate regimes than those they replace, and accepting them as such will be necessary if they are to have any prospect of defusing some of the forces behind terrorism. Over time some countries may evolve into something more like the pluralist democracies of Europe (a version of which seemed to be re-emerging in Lebanon until the process was derailed by war). But these countries will not be clones of any western political system, and the idea that a ‘new Middle East’ is on the horizon that will accept the United States as a model of government is fantasy.

  The belief that terror can be eradicated is equally delusive. The US and other countries lecture Islamic countries on the need to ‘modernize’ – that is, to repeat the pattern of development of western countries. They have overlooked the fact that wherever an attempt has been made to impose a western model of development on non-western countries it has involved mass terror, while twentieth-century Europe was itself a site of unprecedented state murder. Terror has been an integral part of the modern West. Where modern states have existed in the Middle East – as in Iraq under Saddam, which before it was destroyed by thirteen years of economic sanctions and the subsequent American attack was one of the most highly developed Arab countries – they have also practised terror. Even if liberal democracy could be installed it would not end terrorist violence. Many liberal democracies – the UK, Spain, Italy, Germany, Japan and the US, for example – have faced serious threats. In Russia terrorism has worsened since democratization, while in China it remains under control. Political processes can help cope with terror, but democracy is not a panacea. In conditions of the kind that prevail throughout much of the Middle East terrorist organizations are not isolated factions lacking popular support – in Lebanon, in the aftermath of the latest conflict with Israel, Hezbollah speaks for the majority of the population, while in Palestine Hamas has formed an elected government. Throughout the region terrorism is a by-product of unresolved, in some cases perhaps irresolvable, conflicts.

  Among these regional conflicts, that between Palestine and Israel may be the most intractable, but there are large clashes looming between Islamic countries as well. Saudi Arabia and Iran are competitors for hegemony in the Gulf – a rivalry that could acquire a dangerous edge if, as seems likely, both are nuclear powers in a decade or so – and the Shia awakening that has followed the destruction of Saddam will be strongly resisted by Sunni regimes. In many countries political instability will be accentuated by rapid population growth. The population of the Gulf will double in around twenty years – a process that will leave unemployed many millions of young males whose attitudes have been shaped by fundamentalist schooling. In these conditions peace is unachievable. Periods of truce may be secured by patient diplomacy and opening up links with Islamist regimes that have some leverage over the irregular militias that commit terrorist violence. But stability is a remote prospect, and while terrorist violence can be reduced, it looks set to be a chronic condition.

  Installing liberal democracy and eliminating terrorism are distinct goals, neither of which can be realized in much of the Middle East. Any advance towards greater stability in the region is made difficult by blurring these objectives and by their conflation with American geo-political interests. In Iraq this confusion has had predictably calamitous results.

  IRAQ: A TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY UTOPIAN EXPERIMENT

  With the doctrine of pre-emptive war, the Bush administration went far beyond the utopian credos of America’s founders – or even of Wilson, Roosevelt, and Reagan. It is, fundamentally, a doctrine of endless war.

  David Rieff2

  Many impulses led to war in Iraq, not all of them conscious or rational. The invasion was meant to secure American energy supplies; at the same time it was intended to remake Iraq as a model of liberal democracy for the rest of the region. The first of these objectives was compromised by the war, while the second was unrealizable. A third – dismantling Saddam’s WMD programme – was a pretext.

  In an attempt to legitimate an act of aggression the Bush administration, along with the Blair government, represented the attack on Iraq as a response to a threat posed by a developing weapons programme, but their argument was incoherent. If there was a weapons programme under development it could be dealt with without war –by intrusive inspection procedures and other methods. If Saddam already possessed biological or chemical weapons there was no reason to think they posed a danger to the United States – as analysis released by the CIA concluded, he was likely to use them a
gainst the US only in the context of an American invasion. A predictable effect of the war was to demonstrate to ‘rogue states’ around the world that they would be better off having the WMD that Saddam lacked – otherwise, like Iraq, they would be vulnerable to American attack. Rather than slowing it down the war accelerated the proliferation of WMD. There was, in fact, no cogent argument for the war in terms of American or global security.