The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire

by Matt Taibbi

  So a “new Pearl Harbor” was needed to justify the invasion of Iraq? Not according to “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” which not only did not argue for a need to overthrow Saddam Hussein, but confidently asserted that little needed to be done to ensure security in the region. “Kuwait itself is strongly defended,” the paper’s authors conclude. “With a minor increase in strength, more permanent basing arrangements, and continued ‘no fly’ and ‘no drive’ zone enforcement, the danger of a repeat short-warning Iraqi invasion…would be significantly reduced.”

  The paper moreover argued that the strong ground presence in Kuwait obviated the need for increased naval activity in the region. “With a substantial permanent Army ground presence in Kuwait,” PNAC writes, “the demands for increased Marine presence in the Gulf could be scaled back as well.”

  The paper made a wide variety of suggestions with regard to its vision for a “transformation” of the armed forces, including but not limited to:

  1. Reducing the size of the National Guard.

  2. Reducing or eliminating spending on aircraft carrier programs.

  3. Reducing or eliminating spending on the Joint Strike Fighter.

  4. Instituting a global missile defense system (this is heavily emphasized in the paper).

  Yes, the paper argued for increased spending on defense, using the ageold Republican trick of showing how defense spending as a percentage of GDP had fallen in the Clinton years. And yes, the paper argued vaguely for an increased emphasis on building capability to fight “constabulatory” wars to police potential challenges to American preeminence. But when they talked about America needing a “new Pearl Harbor” to “transform” the military, what they were talking about was transforming the old cold war military designed for combat against the Russians in Europe into a new, modern military designed to fight localized wars across the globe against nonstate actors like terrorists and rogue groups, particularly those that might acquire long-range missiles.

  Yet after 9/11 occurred, did this “transformation” take place? Did we reduce the size of the National Guard? Reduce spending on aircraft carriers? Remove carrier groups from the Gulf? Institute a global missile defense system? No. In fact, in some cases, 9/11 actually scuttled these very plans. Condoleezza Rice, for instance, was scheduled on 9/11 to give a speech at Johns Hopkins outlining the need for missile defense—but the speech was postponed. A year later, Rice finally gave her Johns Hopkins speech, but this time only mentioned missile defense, which by then had fallen off the Washington radar completely, in passing. If PNAC and its neocon villains bombed the Trade Center in order to institute a missile defense system, they sure gave up on their dreams pretty quickly.

  Moreover, the actual sentence so frequently referenced in the document is taken completely out of context. If you read the entire passage, you’ll find that it says that the “transformation” is probably going to take a long time. “Domestic politics and industrial policy will shape the pace and content of transformation as much as the requirements of current missions,” it reads. “This report advocates a two-stage process of change—transition and transformation—over the coming decades.” They then go on to outline “transition” and “transformation.”

  Does this sound like the work of a group of people planning the “next Pearl Harbor”? Or was this laborious outlining of the decades-long two-stage process just a clever cover story, designed to throw readers off the trail of the senselessly candid admission about a “new Pearl Harbor” made two sentences previously? Any way you look at this, it’s lunacy.

  But beyond that…what the fuck? Only a generation born and raised on the Internet could possibly believe that the motive for a political mass killing would be paraded openly in a document like “Rebuilding America’s Defenses.” Who would think that the likes of Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz would openly confess their motives for a monstrous criminal conspiracy in a position paper? How could anyone think such a thing would even get into print? Did Dick Cheney sidle up to report authors Thomas Donnelly, Don Kagan, and Gary Schmitt after a meeting and mumble something like, “You know, I think this World Trade Center thing is a go. Write us up a paper saying that the only thing we need to transform the military is a new Pearl Harbor or something.”

  Or was it the other way? Did Donnelly, Kagan, and Schmitt write their paper first, only to have Cheney/Wolfowitz/Bush read it later and think, Dangit, they’re right! We do need a new Pearl Harbor! And then immediately start hitting the phones, calling their munitions people, arranging fake passports and stick-on beards, etc.

  Because if you seriously believe that this paper is evidence of motive, it has to be one or the other. Either they used the release of this policy paper as an occasion to confess spontaneously to their own criminal conspiracy for absolutely no reason whatsoever, or they first published it and then were suddenly and innocently inspired by their own literature to a previously unimagined plan that less than a year later would turn out to be the most monstrous—and most seamlessly executed—crime in American history. No other explanation makes sense.

  “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” is cited everywhere in the 9/11 Truth world. It was mentioned prominently in the seminal Internet documentary Loose Change. It’s been referenced by all the major priests of the movement: Alex Jones, John Pilger…Hell, leading 9/11 “scholar” David Griffin even named his 9/11 conspiracy book The New Pearl Harbor. Yet not once anywhere do any of these people explain why a group of extremely rich and powerful people bent on murdering thousands of innocent Americans would decide to voluntarily shine a light on their evil plan in a publicly circulated document a year before the attack.

  But this kind of thing is all over the 9/11 Truth Movement. The movement is really distinguished by a kind of defiant unfamiliarity with the actual character of America’s ruling class. In 9/11 Truth lore, the people who staff the White House, the security agencies, the Pentagon, and groups like PNAC and the Council on Foreign Relations are imagined to be a monolithic, united class of dastardly, swashbuckling risk-takers with permanent hard-ons for Bourne Supremacy–style “false flag” and “black bag” operations, instead of the mundanely greedy, risk-averse, backstabbing, lawn-tending, half-clever suburban golfers they are in real life. It completely misunderstands the nature of American government—fails to see that the old maxim about “the business of America is business” is absolutely true, that the federal government in this country is really just a low-rent timeshare property seasonally occupied by this or that clan of financial interests, each of which takes its four-year turn at the helm, tinkering with the tax laws and regulatory code and the rates at the Fed in the way it thinks will best keep the money train rolling.

  The people who really run America don’t send the likes of George Bush and Dick Cheney to the White House to cook up boat-rocking, maniacal world-domination plans and commit massive criminal conspiracies on live national television; they send them there to repeal PUHCA and dole out funds for the F-22 and pass energy bills with $14 billion tax breaks and slash fuel-efficiency standards and do all the other shit that never makes the papers but keeps Wall Street and the country’s corporate boardrooms happy. You don’t elect politicians to commit crimes; you elect politicians to make your crimes legal. That is the whole purpose of the racket of government. Another use of it would be a terrible investment, and the financial class in this country didn’t get to where it is by betting on the ability of a president whose lips move when he reads to blow up two Manhattan skyscrapers in broad daylight without getting caught.

  But according to 9/11 Truth lore, the financial patrons of democratic government were game for exactly that sort of gamble. According to the movement, the Powers That Be in the year 2000 spent $200 million electing George Bush and Dick Cheney because they were insufficiently impressed with the docility of the American population. What was needed, apparently, was a distraction, a gruesome mass murder that would whip the American population into a war frenzy. The same people w
ho had managed in the 2000 election to sell multimillionaire petro-royalist George Bush as an ordinary down-to-earth ranch hand apparently so completely lacked confidence in their own propaganda skills that they resorted to ordering a mass murder on American soil as a way of cajoling America to go to war against a second-rate tyrant like Saddam Hussein. As if getting America to support going to war even against innocent countries had ever been hard before!

  The truly sad thing about the 9/11 Truth Movement is that it’s based upon the wildly erroneous proposition that our leaders would ever be frightened enough of public opinion to feel the need to pull off this kind of stunt before acting in a place like Afghanistan or Iraq. At its heart, 9/11 Truth is a conceit, a narcissistic pipe dream for a dingbat, sheeplike population that is pleased to imagine itself dangerous and ungovernable. Rather than admit to their own powerlessness and irrelevance, or admit that they’ve spent the last fifty years or so electing leaders who openly handed their tax money to business cronies and golfed in Scotland while Middle America’s jobs were being sent overseas, the adherents to 9/11 Truth instead flatter themselves with fantasies about a ruling class obsessed with keeping the terrible truth from the watchful, exacting eye of the People.

  Whereas the real conspiracy of power in America is right out in the open and always has been, only nobody cares, so long as Fear Factor and Baseball Tonight come on at the right times. A conspiracy like the one described by 9/11 Truth would only be necessary in a country where the people are a threat to actually govern themselves effectively.

  But none of that even matters nearly as much as what 9/11 Truth says about the mental state of the population. The whole narrative of the movement is so completely and utterly retarded, it boggles the mind. It’s like something cooked up by a bunch of teenagers raised on texting, TV, and Sports Illustrated who just saw V for Vendetta for the first time and decided to write a Penguin History of the World on the strength of it. A genius on the order of a Mozart or a Shakespeare would be hard-pressed to dream up the awesome comedy that is the alleged plot from the point of view of the plotters. If there was such a conspiracy, remember, something like the following conversation would have had to have taken place:

  April 1999, World Trade Center building 7, New York, NY. A secret meeting of the Project for the New American Century. In attendance are Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Irv Kristol, and…others. Cheney, standing at the head of the table and glaring downward, addresses the group:

  CHENEY: Gentlemen, we stand at a crossroads.

  KRISTOL (whispering to Feith): I love it when we stand at a crossroads!

  FEITH (giggling): Me too. But I never know what to wear.

  CHENEY: Do you assholes mind?

  KRISTOL: Sorry, Dick.

  FEITH: Me too.

  CHENEY: Okay. (clears throat) As I was saying, gentlemen, we stand at a crossroads…

  KRISTOL (in Bill Murray fashion, mimicking suspense-movie soundtrack): Dunh-dunh-dunh!

  FEITH: Dunh-dunh-dunh! Dunh…duh-duh-dunh!

  CHENEY: Oh, for fuck’s sake.

  KRISTOL (laughing): Okay, seriously, Dick, I’m sorry.

  FEITH (still laughing): Duh-duh-duh…

  KRISTOL: Shhh!

  FEITH: Okay, okay. (to Cheney) No, it’s okay, Dick, you can go on.

  CHENEY: You’re sure? No more jokes to make? Guys want to do your goddamn Katharine Hepburn impersonations or something?

  KRISTOL (channeling On Golden Pond): Come on, Norman! Hurry up! The loons, the loons!

  FEITH (whispering): Shut up, for Christ’s sake! (to Cheney) Our lips are sealed, Dick. Honest.

  CHENEY: Okay. Jesus. As I was saying, I think we all know about Marion King Hubbert’s projections about the future of oil reserves. We all know the deal: in every oil field there comes a time when half of the field’s reachable oil has been extracted. After that point, exploitation becomes more and more expensive; as time goes on, it requires more and more energy just to extract one barrel of oil. Eventually, oil extraction becomes uneconomic, which is to say it requires a barrel of oil’s worth of energy to extract a barrel of oil. When that time comes, gentlemen, our oil-based empire is fucked. And the clock begins ticking in that direction once we pass that halfway point with the world’s oil reserves. Once oil “peaks,” America—an empire whose power is based almost entirely upon its oil dominance—will officially be on the decline.

  FEITH: Yeah. And it doesn’t help that the only reason the dollar is worth more than the peso is that OPEC still trades in dollars.

  CHENEY: Exactly. Without oil, we’re like Bangladesh with fat people. And here’s the problem: that fail-safe point is upon us. I think we all know that oil production in the lower forty-eight states peaked in 1970, that Alaskan oil production peaked in 1988, Russia around the same time. Saudi Arabia may be just years from peaking, and in any case our political situation there is tenuous at best. Our guys at Halliburton now estimate that worldwide oil and gas production from existing reserves is declining by about 4 to 6 percent every year.

  WOLFOWITZ: So what’s your point? We’re all old anyway. Who cares what happens twenty years from now?

  CHENEY: The point, Paul, is that the American empire as we know it will collapse within twenty to thirty years unless we find massive new supplies of oil and find them fast. By 2010 we’re going to need to find fifty million additional barrels of oil per day. And there’s only one place where we can get that much oil…

  KRISTOL: Sweden!

  FEITH: Of course. Let’s invade! I hate those speed skaters anyway.

  CHENEY: No, you assholes, not Sweden. Iraq. It’s the only major oil-rich state whose reserves haven’t mostly been exploited. There’s probably seven million barrels a day minimum just sitting in those fields—and the worst thing is, unless we get in there soon, it’s all going to go to the French, the Russians, and the Germans, since Saddam will sell to all of them long before he deals with us, assuming his UN sanctions get lifted at some point.

  WOLFOWITZ: My God.

  CHENEY: So it’s clear we’ve got to get in there. Are we agreed on this?

  ALL: Agreed.

  CHENEY: All right. Well, I’ve got a plan.

  WOLFOWITZ: We get George elected in 2000 and go in, right? Tell the public Saddam’s in violation of his UN restrictions or some shit like that? He is anyway, isn’t he?

  CHENEY: No, that would never work. The public would never stand for it. (Everyone bursts out laughing.)

  CHENEY: Seriously.

  WOLFOWITZ: Oh, wait—you’re serious?

  CHENEY: Absolutely. No, I think the way to go is to cook up some kind of justification. Something that will really get the public behind the invasion.

  FEITH: I know! We go to the UN, show bogus photos of Saddam’s secret store of chemical and biological weapons, evidence of his nuclear weapons program. Tell the world he’s planning to attack.

  CHENEY: No. Not emotional enough. I mean something really hot.

  KRISTOL: It could be a human-rights thing. Some emergency, like he’s gassing Kurds again or something. That worked for Clinton in Kosovo. I mean, who gave a shit about Albanians, right? I wouldn’t know an Albanian if I caught one in bed with my wife. But that whole rape-camp thing was good enough by a mile to start that war.

  CHENEY: No, no, that’s not vivid enough, not Band of Brothers enough. We need the people all lathered up, their mouths full of spittle, howling for blood, like pit bulls. You guys need to think to scale, think big, think like Michael Bay.

  FEITH: Michael Bay, Jesus. Okay, okay, what then?

  CHENEY: We attack the World Trade Center.

  KRISTOL: Perfect! And blame it on Saddam!

  CHENEY: No, we bomb the World Trade Center and blame it on Osama bin Laden.

  FEITH: Oh. How?

  CHENEY: Easy. First, we cultivate nineteen suicidal Muslim patsies from a variety of Middle Eastern countries, I’d say mostly from Saudi Arabia. We bring them to the U.S., train them at U.S. flight sc
hools. They should be high-profile terrorist suspects who are magically given free rein by the security agencies to travel back and forth to various terrorist training camps to study passenger jet piloting. Actually, that process is already under way now. Our friends in the Clinton administration are seeing to it that four groups of Arab men are being brought along by the FBI and the CIA.

  WOLFOWITZ: How is it that the Clinton administration is already helping us with this, when we haven’t even planned this yet?

  CHENEY: They just are. Okay?

  WOLFOWITZ: Okay, fine. And what do we do with these hijackers?

  CHENEY: We sit idly by while they plot to hijack a series of passenger jet planes and crash them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the White House.

  WOLFOWITZ: And how do we get them to do that?

  CHENEY: We just do. You see, we worked with these people back in the old mujahideen days in Afghanistan. So naturally we’re still thick as thieves with them.

  FEITH: Oh, of course. So we get them to fly into these buildings. And the impact from the planes will bring down the World Trade Center.

  CHENEY: No, Doug, dammit, you’re not following me. The impact from the planes most certainly won’t be sufficient to knock down the towers. We know this because we’ve privately conducted studies that show that the towers will easily be able to withstand impact by two jets loaded to the gills with jet fuel. That said, the jets will likely cause skyscraper fires hot enough to kill everyone above the point of impact; we’re going to have to assume, of course, that the exits from the higher floors to the lower floors will be mostly blocked after the collisions. So assuming we crash the planes about two-thirds of the way up each of the towers early on a business day, we’re looking at trapping and killing a good three, four, maybe even five thousand people on the upper floors.