Page 2 of 4 THE GATES INHERITANCE, Part 3 The world that Bob made
By Roger Morris
In their place were new men, apparently chastened by Vietnam. The national
security adviser was Zbigniew Brzezinski. As an academic he had been the
epitome of a Baltic-syndrome Russophobe, but in presidential politics, as an
adviser to Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and Carter in 1976, he had been circumspect
while angling for high office.
Brzezinski in any case looked to be outnumbered by the new administration's
declared "moderates" - secretary of state Cyrus Vance, an establishment elder
who had emerged from the John F Kennedy-Lyndon Johnson era quagmire-averse,
committed to
detente, and to a further Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II); at the
Pentagon, a defense-establishment scientist, Harold Brown, who abhorred the
thought of foreign military entanglements while he rebuilt Vietnam-shattered
department morale; and, at the CIA, a navy prodigy who had been first in his
(and the new president's) class at Annapolis, "Admirable Admiral Stansfield
Turner", as the New Republic called him, a thoughtful, even reforming exception
to the increasingly well-known horrors of the agency's history.
At the outset, the New York Times editorially praised this regime as "rightly
unruffled by the old politics of Cold War confrontation". The right-wing
National Review was likewise sure that Washington would "now shrink from battle
with the enduring enemy". Both were wrong. No one reckoned with the 52-year-old
Georgia governor and former peanut farmer, whose provincial political freshness
and moral uprightness were welcomed by a Watergate- and Vietnam-weary public.
Nor did they reckon with Brzezinski and an energetic assistant named Gates.
As with so much else, the United States' barely surface-scraped history has yet
to show the tragic complexity that was Carter, whose presidency one scholar
would sum up as "snatching defeat from the jaws of victory". There were omens
of what was to come even before he took office - his long-held support for the
Vietnam War, his campaign-trail vagueness (like Brzezinski's), his
administrative equivocations as governor, his steely religiosity born of a
conversion following an electoral defeat. Whatever the causes, the effects
would be all too plain.
Brzezinski and aide Gates knew their man. With earnest conviction, habitual
vacillation and chaotic management of his soon splintering regime, Carter -
behind what the doomed shah of Iran once described as his "frozen blue eyes" -
would prove among the coldest of Cold Warriors. Four years later, when the
incessant bureaucratic infighting for the president's favor was over, Vance (no
pussycat) was a broken man; Brown and Turner had been sidelined; and even a
victorious Brzezinski was uneasy with the wreckage they had wrought.
By then, the precedents had been set for the imperial excesses that would make
the 1980s the preamble to the United States' own post-September 11, 2001, era.
Though glad to see them go, at least one beneficiary of their rule was happy
with the result. "Great continuity between Carter's approach ... and that of
his successor, Ronald Reagan," was how Gates would proudly describe it.
'Competition' trumps 'cooperation'
When it came to the Soviet Union, Carter was typically inconsistent in his
first months in office, veering between one tactic and another in arms control
while a bureaucratic war over SALT II erupted around him. On Gates'
recommendation, the new president met with perennial hawk Paul Nitze, now
representing the Committee on the Present Danger, the latest right-wing,
military-industrial front fielded to attack detente.
Soon, Brzezinski and Gates had won a defining victory. They had persuaded
Carter to bring in the national security adviser's old friend and onetime
co-author, Samuel Huntington, as a special consultant on strategic policy. The
Harvard reactionary would later become one of the gurus of the neo-conservative
movement (and author of the ueber-Orientalist book The Clash of
Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order).
In the summer of 1977, his cohorts would leak to the Washington Post that
Huntington's job was "to scare the Carter administration into greater respect
for the Soviet Union". Working in liaison, Huntington, Gates and hardliners in
and out of government promptly did just that - a process that culminated in
Presidential Review Memorandum No 10 (in which both Brzezinski and Gates were
instrumental). A time-honored "study" using flawed or confected intelligence
and meant to channel presidential policy, the infamously shallow PRM-10 nodded
to detente, while legitimizing the fraudulent premise of the old Team B, that
1976 group of right-wing outsiders a Reagan-nervous Ford had commissioned to
counter the CIA's non-existent underestimation of Soviet strength.
The conveniently have-it-both-ways Huntington-Brzezinski-Gates document
combined "cooperation and competition" into a single US policy toward Russia -
the first half to be honored with pledges of faithfulness by diplomatic day;
the second indulged with a serial philanderer's abandon by covert-action night.
Among other historic effects, PRM-10 would be the basis for what would develop
into Carter's "rapid deployment force" in the Persian Gulf, meant to protect US
"access" to Middle Eastern oil, and eventually into a full-fledged Gulf
military command, CENTCOM.
It would signal the beginning of what historian Andrew Bacevich has labeled the
United States' "oil wars" in the region. More generally, the "report"
sanctioned, for a new era, the use of trumped-up "special" panels or
consultants to incite political alarm in the body politic whenever militarism -
and especially military spending - was thought to be in danger of waning.
Against the continuing obstruction of Brzezinski and Gates, Vance would coax
SALT II, which had seemed imminent at Carter's inauguration, to a cheerless
Vienna signing at a summit meeting in July 1979. By then, however, the
negotiations had been eviscerated by congressional opposition that emerged
ineluctably out of the growing mood of confrontation with the USSR; and the
agreement would die just six months later without Senate ratification when
Carter withdrew the treaty as part of his outraged reaction to the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan. Meanwhile, just as all the hawks had prodded him to do
from the first weeks of his presidency, Carter went on to approve major new
weapons programs - what the Soviets, in mounting alarm, saw as "an endless
buildup of power" - that made the shell game of "cooperation" a travesty.
A shallow Congress, aided by a diffident media - along with an ever uninformed,
distracted public - would never deal with the realities of the Carter-launched
arms buildup that would become epochal in the Reagan years. No matter that it
involved hundreds of billions of precious taxpayer dollars, venal interests
holding hostage crucial public needs for generations to come, and, in the
process, the ever-increasing danger of national extinction in nuclear war by
accident or provocation. "Don't worry, boys," Mississippi senator John Stennis
once told the staff of the Armed Services Committee he chaired, "nobody ever
takes a hard look at the real numbers here."
As Rumsfeld had admitted when he left as secretary of defense in 1977, despite
the Soviet push toward nuclear parity, the US retained more than a 2:1
advantage in warheads, a preponderance that would continue into the 1980s.
Given the fast-multiplying nuclear missiles on US submarines, as well as the
Strategic Air Command's bombers and multiple-warhead, land-based missiles,
Moscow's counter-force capacity (its ability to destroy the US deterrent) fell
far short of any conceivable first-strike option.
In the most fevered right-wing scenarios, with the Soviet strategic force
taking out 90% of US missile silos, only 18% of the US strategic array would
have been lost. On the other hand, the US could calculably destroy some 40% of
the Russian deterrent force, and Carter's decision to deploy new Pershing II
missiles in Europe in the late 1970s put some of that US first-strike capacity
10 minutes from Soviet command-and-control centers.
Meanwhile - the point of it all - Pentagon budgets rose steadily. In part, that
spiral was the price for congressional backing of SALT II, and it was
invariably justified, as it always had been during the Cold War, by inaccurate
or knowingly false claims about the rate of increase in Russian military
spending. (Moscow's expenditures actually leveled off after 1976.) It was
madness - and business as usual.
Great games
On a dark, cold December night in 1979, an elite unit of Soviet troops,
Kalashnikovs blazing, dashed up the slanting drive to Darulaman Palace, a 1920s
citadel on the western outskirts of Kabul. Their mission was to kill the
communist president of Afghanistan, feared to be conspiring with the Americans.
They found him upstairs with his little boy in his arms and cut them both down
in a withering crossfire. Murdered, too, was an epoch in world politics, and
launched was another with unprecedented dangers we still face.
The very post-Vietnam detente-restraint of most of Carter's advisers - and the
president's own inner hawkishness - opened the way for his presidency to become
(contrary to conventional wisdom) a precedent-setting period for covert
intervention. And Gates, as Brzezinski's hardline staff officer for Soviet
affairs, and later his personal outer-office assistant in the White House West
Wing, was at the center of it all.
In his 1996 memoir, he would write contemptuously (and, in the case of
secretary of state Vance, falsely), "Because Vance was unwilling to use
diplomatic leverage against the Soviets, and [secretary of defense] Brown and
others wanted no part of US military involvement in the Third World, their
standoff gave Brzezinski an enormous opportunity to put forward covert action -
which was under the purview of the NSC - as a means of doing something to
counter the Soviets."
Gates and Brzezinski promptly impressed on Carter that "it is his CIA", as
Gates described it. Within weeks of his inauguration, at the urging of the
national security adviser and his Soviet affairs specialist, the new president
approved the first covert actions inside the USSR. These operations were aimed
at inciting religious discontent in Soviet Central Asia by smuggling in tens of
thousands of Korans, as well as radical Islamic literature. In that and other
actions to come, it would be Carter who first fanned Islamic fundamentalism -
which would have devastating consequences.
By July 1977 - less than two weeks after the Sandinista rebels took power from
the 43-year Somoza-dynasty dictatorship in Nicaragua, a long-favored Washington
client in Central America - they would begin mounting the first covert actions
against the popular, and populist, new regime in Managua, as they would soon be
shoring up a ruling oligarchy that faced a mounting leftist insurgency in
neighboring El Salvador.
There would be similar interventions and intrigues in the Horn of Africa, on
the Arabian Peninsula, and elsewhere, always justified by the Soviet (or proxy
Cuban) menace. "On the march" was the way both Gates and his boss were fond of
describing the communist hordes. The result would be a rash of secret wars,
assassinations, terrorist acts and manifold corruptions around the world by the
administration of the "human rights" president. Moreover, these acts preceded,
sometimes by several years, the vaunted covert actions of the Reagan regime,
which were often only continuations of Carter policy, in some cases even on a
lesser scale. "Jimmy Carter was the CIA's first wholly owned subsidiary," an
agency operative would boast to a friend later, "and the beauty of it was that
so few people, even on the inside, ever knew it."
Nowhere would their penchant for the covert prove more fateful than in the
remote Hindu Kush. To an already seedy history of US covert intervention there,
they now added their own bloody chapter.
At the behest of Pakistan, communist China and the shah of Iran (and their
intelligence services), the CIA had begun offering covert backing to Islamic
radical rebels in Afghanistan as early as 1973-74. The explanation for this was
that the right-wing, authoritarian regime of Mohammed Daoud, then in power in
Kabul, might prove a likely instrument of Soviet military aggression in South
Asia. This was a ridiculous pretext. Daoud had always held the Russians, his
main patron when it came to aid, at arm's length, and had savagely purged local
communists who supported him when, in 1973, he overthrew the Afghan monarchy.
For their part, the Soviets had not shown the slightest inclination to use the
notoriously unruly Afghans and their ragtag army for any expansionist aim.
Support for the anti-Daoud religious insurgents, far more anti-American than
the Kabul regime, actually served distinctly local interests. The Pakistanis
and Iranians wanted to fend off Afghan irredentism on their disputed borders
and Pakistan was eager to secure a pliant regime in Kabul on its western flank
as it faced rival India in the east. The Richard Nixon administration casually
supported these aims in deference to its clients with little or no thought for
the Afghans, a policy atrocity that would be repeated for the next
quarter-century.
All the backing ceased, however, after an abortive rebel uprising in 1975, as
Daoud launched his own detente policy with Iran and Pakistan. Then, in April
1978, his blundering crackdown on Afghanistan's small Communist Party provoked
a successful coup by party loyalists in the army. This happened in defiance of
a skittish Moscow, which had stopped earlier coup plans. Aware of these facts,
Vance's State Department coolly adopted a wait-and-see attitude toward the new
regime.
But with predictable alarm bells ringing in Iran, Pakistan, and Russophobic
China, Carter's covert interventionists at the NSC saw an irresistible
"opportunity", as Gates put it, "to counter the Soviets". Three weeks after the
Kabul coup, Brzezinski was in Beijing discussing, among other matters of state
in his Kissingeresque debut as a diplomat, the "Soviet peril" in Afghanistan.
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