by Oliver Stone
The authors also conjectured about the real reasoning behind U.S. insistence on a missile defense shield. Such a shield would not, as typically assumed, be of value in a defense context as a “stand-alone shield” against a large-scale Russian missile barrage. Its value would come in an offensive context, protecting the United States against a retaliatory attack by the tiny number of Russian or Chinese weapons that might survive a U.S. first strike.195
Lieber and Press had actually been floating these ideas for a couple of years in academic circles. But their publication in Foreign Affairs hit like a sledgehammer. The Washington Post reported that the article “sent heads spinning” in Russia “with visions of Dr. Strangelove.”196 Russian economist and former acting Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar wrote in the Financial Times, “The publication of these ideas in a respectable American journal has had an explosive effect. Even those Russian journalists and analysts who are not prone to hysteria or anti-Americanism took it as an outline of the official position of the U.S. Administration.”197
Putin immediately announced that Russia would spend whatever was necessary to maintain its deterrent capability. But the publication was “a major blow to Putin’s prestige,” said Vitaly Shlykov, a strategic analyst formerly with the Soviet military intelligence agency GRU. “Now he will pull out all the stops and spend whatever necessary to modernize Russia’s nuclear deterrent,” Shlykov predicted. Some Russian experts pointed to the fact that a new generation of nuclear missiles capable of penetrating the U.S. missile defense system was about to come on line. They had been developed in response to Bush’s abrogating the ABM treaty in 2001 and included Topol-M ICBMs and, a little later, Bulava missiles for nuclear submarines.198
Russian experts debated the article’s timing and the message the CFR was trying to convey. “Many people think it’s not a coincidence that such an article was ‘ordered’ by someone,” explained Dmitri Suslov, an analyst with the independent Council on Foreign and Defense Policy in Moscow. Because it was substantially true, he said, it had made security experts “very nervous.” He thought it odd that with all the nuclear powers in the world, only the United States and Russia still had arsenals pointed and primed to wipe each other out. But publication of the article meant that the situation was not about to change. “At the very least,” he noted, “this article has postponed any chance of talking about removing the MAD framework from our relations with the US.”
Others thought it was designed to send a warning about Russia’s growing ties with China. Viktor Mikhaylov, director of the Institute of Strategic Stability and a former Russian nuclear energy minister, dismissed allegations that Russia’s capabilities had deteriorated and offered an alternative explanation: “This was done during our president Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin’s visit to the People’s Republic of China . . . the Americans probably look at this drawing closer together by our two countries maliciously and malignly. . . . But it exists and it will be developing.” If that was the intention, Gaidar thought, it would backfire. “If someone had wanted to provoke Russia and China into close cooperation over missile and nuclear technologies, it would be difficult to find a more skilful and elegant way of doing so,” he wrote.199
The Bush administration scrambled to calm the tense situation. Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy Peter Flory released a statement in a follow-up forum in the September–October Foreign Affairs that took issue with both the article’s accuracy and its interpretation. He claimed that the United States was actually weakening its first-strike capability. Keith Payne, deputy assistant secretary of defense for forces policy from 2002 to 2003, insisted that the United States had consistently rejected developing a “credible first-strike capability” since the days when Robert McNamara was secretary of defense. Payne charged angrily, “They cherry-pick and misstate information about U.S. force developments . . . to fit the policy they have so miscast, while ignoring or dismissing U.S. force reductions and glaring deficiencies that do not fit their characterization. . . . their message is a gross distortion of U.S. policy, and that distortion is destabilizing U.S.-Russian relations.”200
Alexei Arbatov, director of the Center on International Security Studies at the Institute for World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences, thought that Lieber and Press were making a very important point. He acknowledged that Russian nuclear weapons were mostly Cold War relics that had outlived their usefulness and would soon be removed from service. The modern arsenal consisted of three or four new ballistic-missile submarines and a hundred Topol-M missiles, which would suffice as a minimal deterrent but only if kept on dangerous hair-trigger alert. In light of this growing strategic imbalance, Arbatov feared that a crisis could easily result in an accidental nuclear war. He warned, “if Russia feared a U.S. first strike, Moscow might make rash moves (such as putting its forces on alert) that would provoke a U.S. attack. . . . Lieber and Press,” he concluded, “are rightly concerned about that risk.”201
Lieber and Press replied convincingly to Flory and Payne, as well as to Pavel Podvig, a Stanford expert on Russia’s nuclear program, who argued that Russian capabilities were far more potent than suggested. Lieber and Press conceded that the Pentagon had cut the size of the ballistic-missile submarine fleet but pointed out that the yield of SLBM warheads had more than quadrupled and their accuracy had markedly increased. As a result, an SLBM warhead used to have a 12 percent chance of destroying a hardened Russian missile silo, whereas now one type of SLBM warhead had a 90 percent chance and the other had a 98 percent chance. A similar situation prevailed with the upgraded Minuteman III ICBMs.
They next responded to Payne by showing that the United States had retained first-strike options in its nuclear war plans, pointing to a recently declassified 1969 document containing five full-scale nuclear attack options, three of which were preemptive. In response to Podvig, they argued that the gap in Russia’s early-warning system was large enough for the United States to launch SLBMs through and hit targets across Russia.202 Their response did nothing to calm Russians’ fears. Nor did U.S. plans to install a missile defense system in Eastern Europe.
Russia also took sharp issue with Bush administration efforts to weaponize space. Bush appeared to be realizing the vision of the head of the U.S. Space Command, who had predicted in 1996, “We will engage terrestrial targets someday—ships, airplanes, land targets—from space. . . . We’re going to fight from space and we’re going to fight into space. . . . That’s why the U.S. has development programs in directed energy and hit-to-kill mechanisms.”203 The rest of the world united in opposition to U.S. plans to expand the realm of conflagration. In 2000, the United Nations, by a vote of 163–0, passed a resolution on the Prevention of an Outer Space Arms Race, with Micronesia, Israel, and the United States abstaining. Defying world opinion, in January 2001, a commission led by Rumsfeld warned that the United States could face a “Space Pearl Harbor” if it didn’t dominate space and recommended that the military “ensure that the president will have the option to deploy weapons in space.”204 That year, Peter Teets, undersecretary of the air force, told a space warfare symposium, “We haven’t reached the point of strafing and bombing from space—nonetheless, we are thinking about those possibilities.”205
In 2006, UN members voted 166–1 in favor of the resolution, with only the United States opposed. At the UN Conference on Disarmament, the United States consistently thwarted efforts by Russia and China to ban weaponization. Among the more bizarre programs the air force was looking into was one called “Rods from God,” which would deploy solid tungsten cylinders, twenty or thirty feet long and one or two feet in diameter, that would be fired from satellites at tremendous speeds, easily destroying any target on the earth.206
Between NATO expansion, U.S. nuclear and space policies, and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S.-Russian relations took a sharp turn for the worse. The hopes for Russian-American friendship and a different world so eloquently ar
ticulated by Gorbachev had now definitively been relegated to the junk heap of history. It was as if the Bush administration were creating the nightmarishly militarized nation that Eisenhower had so poignantly warned about in 1961. During Bush’s years in office, military spending more than doubled to reach $700 billion. The Pentagon had increasingly usurped the role of the State Department in foreign policy making, a process that had begun under the Kennedy administration.
It also encroached upon CIA intelligence gathering and had become increasingly involved in overseas covert operations. After marginalizing the agency in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Bush largely completed the decades-old process of destroying the nation’s intelligence-gathering capabilities when he appointed Congressman Porter Goss to replace George Tenet in July 2004. Goss had joined the Agency as a Yale undergraduate forty-five years earlier. But he had become an unbridled critic who, according to Howard Hart, denounced the agents as “a bunch of dysfunctional jerks” and “a pack of idiots.”207 As director, he undertook the biggest purge in the Agency’s history. According to Tim Weiner in his Pulitzer Prize–winning history of the CIA, “The new director surrounded himself with a team of political hacks he had imported from Capitol Hill. They believed they were on a mission from the White House—or some higher power—to rid the CIA of left-wing subversives.”208 The agency was further emasculated later that year when Bush appointed John Negroponte to the newly created position of director of national intelligence (DNI).
When former CIA Director Robert Gates became secretary of defense late in 2006, generals were ensconced as director of the CIA, both undersecretary and deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, chief of the State Department’s counterterrorism operations, and head of CIA covert operations—all positions long held by civilians. Retired Admiral Mike McConnell soon replaced Negroponte as DNI.
The Pentagon also owned or leased over 75 percent of all federal buildings.209 And it ran a vast, far-flung network of over 700, by some counts over 1,000, bases in some 130 countries that spanned every continent but Antarctica, plus 6,000 bases in the United States and its territories. The Department of Defense Base Structure Report for FY 2008 stated, “The Department of Defense (DOD) remains one of the world’s largest ‘landlords’ with a physical plant consisting of more than 545,700 facilities (buildings, structures and linear structures) located on more than 5,400 sites, on approximately 30 million acres.”210 Its thirteen naval task forces patrolled the oceans and seas. The American Enterprise Institute called for turning this network of overseas bases into a system of “frontier stockades,” housing a “global cavalry,” which, “like the cavalry of the Old West, . . . is one part warrior and one part policeman.”211
Douglas Feith outlined the new military posture: “We are performing the most thorough restructuring of U.S. military forces overseas since” 1953, he informed the House Armed Services Committee. “We want . . . greater flexibility for our forces, their ability to deploy powerful capabilities rapidly anywhere in the world where they are needed.” Feith regretted that September 11 had made the current posture obsolete. “Much of our current posture,” he testified, “still reflects the mentality and reality of the Cold War—forward deployed forces configured as defensive, tripwire units and expected to fight near where they were based.” But now those forces would be required to “project power into theaters that may be far from where they are based.” “The lessons of the last 15 years tell us,” he elaborated, “that we often are required to conduct military operations in places that were not predicted. . . . Our goal is to have forces deployed forward in such a way that they can quickly reach crisis spots as necessary in the future.” This would require a rethinking of current basing arrangements. He noted, for example, “Our plans for our posture in Europe include lighter and more deployable ground capabilities, leading-edge air and naval power, advanced training facilities, and strengthened special operations forces, all positioned to deploy more rapidly to the Middle East and other hot spots.”212
“The administration has instituted what some experts describe as the most militarized foreign policy machine in modern history,” wrote James Sterngold in the San Francisco Chronicle. “The policy has involved not just resorting to military action, or the threat of action, but constructing an arc of new facilities in such places as Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Qatar and Djibouti that the Pentagon calls ‘lily pads.’ They are seen not merely as a means of defending the host countries—the traditional Cold War role of such installations—but as jumping-off points for future ‘preventive wars’ and military missions.”213
The United States was not only the world’s policeman, it was also the world’s arms supplier, often fueling the conflicts in which it ultimately intervened on “humanitarian” grounds. In 2008, it signed agreements to sell $37.8 billion in arms, representing over 68 percent of the world total. Italy came in second at $3.7 billion. Almost $30 billion of that total went to developing nations, which purchased over 79 percent of their arms from the United States.214
It fell to none other than Zbigniew Brzezinski to accurately assess the toll taken on American democracy by Bush’s disastrous war on terrorism. Brzezinski was in a good position to know, having played a similar role in stirring up Cold War fears of the Soviet Union. He wrote in March 2007 that the so-called war on terror, by deliberately creating a “culture of fear,” had had a “pernicious impact on American democracy, on America’s psyche and on U.S. standing in the world.” The damage was “infinitely greater” than that inflicted on 9/11. He worried that the administration was exploiting public fear to justify war with Iran and contrasted the United States’ “five years of almost continuous national brainwashing on the subject of terror” with the “more muted reactions of” other victims of terrorism, including Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Japan. He mocked Bush’s “justification for his war in Iraq” and his absurd claim “that he has to continue waging it lest al-Qaeda cross the Atlantic to launch a war of terror here in the United States.” Bush’s fearmongering was reinforced by “terror entrepreneurs . . . experts on terrorism [whose] task is to convince the public that it faces new threats. That puts a premium on the presentation of credible scenarios of ever-more-horrifying acts of violence.” As a result, “America has become insecure and more paranoid.” For proof, he pointed to Congress’s ever-growing list of potential targets across the United States for would-be terrorists. He also deplored the madness of proliferating “security checks,” “electronic billboards urging motorists to ‘Report Suspicious Activity’ (drivers in turbans?),” and television shows with “bearded ‘terrorists’ as the central villains” that “reinforce the sense of the unknown but lurking danger that . . . increasingly threaten[ed] the lives of all Americans.” Television and films had stereotyped Arabs, he regretted, “in a manner sadly reminiscent of the Nazi anti-Semitic campaigns,” opening Arab Americans to harassment and abuse.
He noted the impact that the Bush administration’s appalling civil rights records had had on citizens at home and the grave damage the war on terror had done to the United States internationally. “For Muslims,” he wrote, “the similarity between the rough treatment of Iraqi civilians by the U.S. military and of the Palestinians by the Israelis has prompted a widespread sense of hostility toward the United States in general.” He singled out “a recent BBC poll of 28,000 people in 27 countries” that ranked Israel, Iran, and the United States “as the states with ‘the most negative influence on the world.’ Alas, for some,” he emphasized, “that is the new axis of evil!”
Brzezinski concluded by asking “Where is the U.S. leader ready to say, ‘Enough of this hysteria, stop this paranoia’?” and urged that “even in the face of future terrorist attacks, the likelihood of which cannot be denied, let us show some sense. Let us be true to our traditions.”215 As Brzezinski repeatedly made clear, terrorism was a tactic, not an ideology, and declaring war on a tactic made absolutely no sense.
Meanwhile, behind the id
eological veil of free-market capitalism, the richest Americans continued to plunder the national wealth. Bush and Cheney did everything they could to facilitate the effort, knowing the consequences full well. Shortly before the 2000 presidential election, Bush joked with some of his wealthy followers, “This is an impressive crowd—the haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elite; I call you my base.”216
Within months of taking office, Bush signed a bill cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans. He passed additional tax cuts in 2002 and 2003. Meanwhile, federal spending rose sharply, increasing 17 percent in his first term alone. Under Clinton, federal spending had increased by 11 percent in constant dollars over two terms. By 2004, Bush had turned the $128 billion surplus he inherited into a $413 billion deficit. The New York Times reported that for Wall Street, the Bush years were the new Gilded Age. Bankers, the Times revealed, celebrated their obscene bonuses with five-figure dinners.217 The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that between 1998 and 2005, two-thirds of American corporations, at least a quarter of which had assets in excess of $250 million, paid no income taxes.218 These years saw the sharpest rise in income inequality in the nation’s history. The 44.3 percent of the nation’s income that went to the top 10 percent in 2005 exceeded the 43.8 percent that had gone to the top 10 percent in 1929 and was a far cry from the 32.6 percent of 1975.219 In 2005, the richest 3 million had as much income as the bottom 166 million, who comprised more than half of the population.220 The ranks of American billionaires swelled from 13 in 1985 to more than 450 in 2008. Two hundred twenty-seven thousand people joined the ranks of millionaires in 2005 alone. But workers’ wages barely kept pace with inflation, and 36 million were below the poverty line. Almost all the new wealth created went directly to the top 10 percent of the population, with most going to the top one-tenth of 1 percent. In 2006, the twenty-five top U.S. hedge fund managers earned an average of $570 million each.221 In 2007, their average earnings jumped to $900 million.222
