House of War

"Yes, and this gives it an intimacy which other books of this genre don’t necessarily have. He does a great job of twinning his own experiences and memories with the towering personalities of the Cold War, like Curtis LeMay. LeMay figures very heavily in my book, because he is the ultimate militarist who was also in the military. In my book I am very careful to point out that most of the militarism that goes on in Washington is done by civilians, because we still have a civilian-led military. The book is very well written – it’s a very uninhibited account of what it was like for him growing up and, through his father, being part of the Pentagon bureaucracy. It’s very subversive. I read it before I was serious about writing the book that would ultimately become State vs. Defense , and I thought to myself, “Why should I write a book about foreign policy militarisation when Carroll has done such a great job of doing it?” He’s talking about LeMay, and it has to do with the Gaither Report , which President Eisenhower commissioned, in part to protect his own right flank from anti-communist hawks in Congress. We’re talking about Eisenhower here, the hero of Normandy! So he commissioned an investigation into accusations that America had fallen behind in missile production. Carroll takes us into the room where some members of the committee are interviewing LeMay. They say, “Here’s your scenario. You just received an urgent message that Soviet bombers have flown past the distant early-warning line in Canada, and they’re about to launch an attack. How many bombers can you get off the ground before they come under attack themselves?” And LeMay says, “None, because it is my policy to maintain my own intelligence sources. The minute I think the Soviets have scrambled I am going to retaliate pre-emptively.” Which of course would be a giant act of insubordination. It’s not the military that orders attacks, it’s the president of the US. I was struck by just how cavalier this individual was when it came to something so vital and what it said about the system, that it could produce someone who would act so rashly. Yes, my book is quite harsh on Rumsfeld, because he was the architect of Iraq and he’s a perfect example of a militarist who was a civilian, when he was in the process of militarising US policy after 9/11. Cavalier and contemptuous of the people around him. It was appalling the way he humiliated his own generals. He would wire-brush subordinates if their reports were not up to his liking. That’s one of the leitmotifs of my book. Every time that there is a president or a secretary of defence or a senior official who is driving the country towards war against a perceived threat, there is always someone in the bureaucracy – whether it’s a diplomat or a military attaché, or a spymaster – sitting in an embassy where the perceived threat is apparently emerging, saying, “No, this is not a major threat and we should not be getting involved in this.” That’s when you see the disconnect between how the world is and how Washington perceives it. Rumsfeld’s perception of the world was completely at odds with the way it was, and unfortunately that is a myopia that is way too common in this town [Washington DC]. It’s one of the reasons why the US keeps getting into conflicts and quagmires that it could have avoided had it just listened to its area experts. That’s a theme that resonates in The Best and the Brightest , and Legacy of Ashes , which is the next book on the list. I was in Washington writing a book when 9/11 happened. I was personally stunned at the level of ignorance about the Middle East, the complete misinterpretation of what the attacks were all about, and the extent to which it was a wilful ignorance, spread largely by domestic politics. That just became a barrier to any kind of thoughtful inquiry as to what the attacks meant, and more importantly, how to respond to them. It’s still unfashionable to say this, but when George Bush addressed Congress he said the terrorists hate us not for what we do, but who we are, our democracy, our values, our way of life. But anybody who Googled Bin Laden would have seen that the first entry was his 1996 fatwa or declaration of war, against what he called the “Zionist crusader alliance”. That tells you right there that it’s not about American democracy, it’s about American policies. US support of Israel was one of those policies that so outraged Bin Laden. The other thing was the US residual force of troops in Saudi Arabia after Operation Desert Storm, which Bin Laden, like a lot of Muslims, regarded as an apostasy. And because it was the Saudi monarchy that abetted that deployment, that put the monarchy within his crosshairs as well. Ditto US support for secular dictators like Hosni Mubarak. You can argue about whether or not these policies are legitimate and in America’s interest. But to suggest that they somehow did not play a role in Bin Laden’s motivation was duplicitous. It created the environment where such a massive and misplaced military response to 9/11 could happen. A “War on Terror”: In retrospect, it sounds ridiculous. But it made something as reckless and disproportionate [as the American response to 9/11] possible and even fashionable. Because if they’re attacking our way of life, we have no choice but to resist. I’d spent a lot of time in Iraq, and I’d seen what the sanctions had done to these extraordinary people. I believed then, as I do now, that it was an absolutely inhumane thing to do, to punish 24 million Iraqis while enriching Saddam and the kleptocracy that had congealed around him. But when it became clear that the US was going to war in Iraq, it became obvious to me that it was not about the Iraqis. It was about remaking the Middle Eastern map in a way that would make Israel more comfortable. That was quite a revelation. I don’t think I’ll ever really recover from that. Once my book was completed I was hired by The Boston Globe . One of the things that I took on my own initiative was to cover how the White House was going to handle the post-conflict side of the Iraq war, the rebuilding. That’s when I got a pretty intimate look at how Rumsfeld was neglecting it, and how he was locking out the civilian side. He was obstructing NGOs from doing what they normally do in the run-up to a war, which is to try to pre-empt a refugee crisis and cholera outbreaks, and to make sure there is no deprivation. He pretty much kept the NGOs from doing their jobs. Also, I remember interviewing a former ambassador to Egypt, who informed me that he had just been tapped by Colin Powell to help assist in the shadow interim government, so it was going to be his job to oversee the foreign ministry. There were a couple of dozen of these people, all of whom had considerable Arab expertise. Within days it was announced that Rumsfeld had vetoed Powell’s team. It showed just how out of control this man was, but it was also just another example of Washington discrediting or neglecting the very people who know a lot about the parts of the world we profess to be a great national security concern. Yes, the idea of divided loyalties, or “gone local”. One thing I learned in researching my book is that you cannot exaggerate the damage that Joe McCarthy did to American statesmanship. Maybe if it hadn’t been him, it would have been something else. But his shadow still looms. Now it’s not communists, it’s Muslims."