… cut deep to avoid thermal detection

by Chris Bertram on May 5, 2011

The estimable Flying Rodent “has a post on”:http://flyingrodent.blogspot.com/2011/05/cons-and-conspiraloons.html the people who are slagging off Adam Curtis in the wake of the Bin Laden killing. The scene he refers to of Rumsfeld and Russert at 20′ 30″ of the video is priceless. Watch and enjoy.

{ 115 comments }

1

Steve LaBonne 05.05.11 at 5:41 pm

This bit is very well said:

The contention is that the Terrorwarriors of the west mistook a small but fanatical gang of terrorists for a freedom-crushing Empire of Death – a label that al Qaeda were more than happy to appropriate and wear with pride. This has never struck me as a particularly controversial thesis, given that it raises few hackles when variations on it come from AQ specialists like Jason Burke.

I would say not just not particularly controversial, but completely fucking obvious to anybody with a three digit IQ.

2

Substance McGravitas 05.05.11 at 5:47 pm

3

BenSix 05.05.11 at 6:03 pm

Did it remind anyone else of Tracy Island? (And, while I’m being facetious, the lie should have been clear: after all, they had all of those gun-filled caves and yet no bathrooms.)

I’d disagree that it was just a misidentification. Sure, that’s true of fearful or ideological supporters of it (and I’m not trying to pompous in saying that – I’d have had to place myself among the latter at one time) but I look on all these intricate fictions of bombers chilling inside caves; their heads crammed with Jihadism; their underpants stuffed with anthrax and think, “Jesus, what bullshit.”

4

Alex 05.05.11 at 6:15 pm

Meanwhile, Juan Cole continues to jump the shark:

The house could well have been booby-trapped, and rapid movement toward walls could be toward switches to set off bombs.

http://www.juancole.com/2011/05/top-ten-myths-about-bin-ladens-death.html#comment-63887

5

BenSix 05.05.11 at 6:26 pm

Perhaps they thought she was a hypnotist.

6

The Modesto Kid 05.05.11 at 6:44 pm

McGravitas: “Passenger missile” is an evocative term.

7

dsquared 05.05.11 at 6:44 pm

The thing that amazes me is that Adam Curtis does huge amounts of research and then makes incredibly dense and complex films which set Al Qaeda in the context of nearly everything else that was going on in the second half of the twentieth century, and then he gets accused of “oversimplifying” by people whose alternative theory is “Evil Man Hates Freedom”. Curtis “oversimplifies” issues that most of his critics not only ignore, but would never have heard of if Adam Curtis hadn’t told them.

8

mds 05.05.11 at 6:58 pm

The contention is that the Terrorwarriors of the west mistook a small but fanatical gang of terrorists for a freedom-crushing Empire of Death

My own contention would be that the Terrorwarriors of the west got their start as a small but fanatical gang of terrorists, and eventually gained control of a freedom-crushing Empire of Death. But the original works really well, too.

9

bob mcmanus 05.05.11 at 7:00 pm

I watched about half the linked piece. I am in the camp that says Curtis, while superb in detail, didn’t go half far enough.

One common criticism of Curtis that Alex Massie doesn’t pick up on is that he portrays the neo-Conservatives and al-Qaeda as being equally evil, and yet… Where is that coming from? He implies that they’re both wrong, as in, incorrect and mistaken about reality. The Americans’ War on Terror was no conspiracy. It was only human beings making grievous errors in plain view. [4] …last of the linked Rodent piece

No, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Perle, and Wolfowitz are not fools, idiots, and crazy. They are, apparently, much smarter than you all.

The WoT was and still is about American Imperialism.
The Cold War was about American Imperialism.
The Empire has its subtleties and subterfuges (neo-liberalism is about not needing an army), but is now a triumphant fact, nearly dominant.
They did not really stumble blindly into global hegemony, or domestic control without resistance.
That is all.

10

bob mcmanus 05.05.11 at 7:14 pm

“But the Soviet Union really was evil” – “But bin Laden really was evil.”

This is how they get you.

Simple enough. When I was a kid 50 years ago:Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran had militaries and other means (terrorism) to project force and defend their interests and ideologies.

After the “democracies” come about will these nations have anything? Will anybody?

Will America? Of course. Is this a happy accident fallen into by psychotics and fools? Apparently you think so.

11

Matthew 05.05.11 at 7:22 pm

Was that graphic of the lair really in the Times (of London)?

12

Keith 05.05.11 at 7:37 pm

Mathew@11:

They swiped it from an old issue of the Fantastic Four.

13

Henri Vieuxtemps 05.05.11 at 7:47 pm

Didn’t Saddam too have miles and miles of underground tunnels and luxurious bunkers? Can’t be an evil mastermind without a good bunker.

14

Alex 05.05.11 at 8:00 pm

Can’t be an evil mastermind without a good bunker.

Too true:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10459886

15

piglet 05.05.11 at 8:14 pm

This is one of those posts that I wish would include a sentence indicating what it is about, so that one can decide right away whether it’s worth while following the hyper links.

16

Ciarán 05.05.11 at 8:42 pm

Not to worry. The Sun’s found us a new Osama. Just on time too.

17

Ben Alpers 05.05.11 at 8:49 pm

Slightly OT, but Curtis totally overestimates the importance of Leo Strauss and the Straussians in the development of neoconservatism.

18

Earwig 05.05.11 at 9:15 pm

Now we are here.

Hidari attempted to bring Curtis to the “After OBL” thread, with little success. The only response there was mine, where I seemingly joined “the people who are slagging off Adam Curtis.” Only seemingly, as I was slagging from another direction than the crowd.

“America and the coalition invaded Afghanistan with the simple aim of destroying the terror camps and setting up a democracy that would allow the country to be ruled by good people,” Curtis says.

Was that really the goal of invading Afghanistan? On what evidence?

Or is it just unimportant that Curtis can ascribe such a gentle motive to US military action?

19

Phil 05.05.11 at 10:35 pm

I think it’s a gentler version of a rhetorical trope Chomsky uses a lot – the “let’s ascribe entirely worthy motives to our opponent and then see how their actions bear them out” move. (In Chomsky’s hands it’s more like “let’s start with entirely worthy motives, then discard them and try entirely unworthy motives for size, then demonstrate that our opponent’s actions were even worse than that”.)

20

LFC 05.05.11 at 10:45 pm

Would be helpful to have the date of the Russert/Rumsfeld clip, which just going to it in the video doesn’t get you. Presumably it was shortly after the Tora Bora operation(?).

21

Andrew 05.05.11 at 11:40 pm

Try 56:40 for Curtis’s absurd theory of the genesis of Islamists and Neoconservatives as an example of what many call his oversimplifications.

The film itself is shoddy, and consists of a pastiche of news clips, footage from old movies, and bits of interviews with those sympathetic to Curtis’s views. This hodgepodge is loosely connected by Curtis’s overarching narrative: politicians needed a way to stay relevant, and so seized upon al-Qaeda as an awesomely terrifying threat to the very existence of the West – even though al-Qaeda never really was so, and in fact never really existed as a “coherent” organization.

But the narrative is actually absurd. AQ has long been described as a loose network by terrorism analysts, and not as some all-powerful, rigidly hierarchical organization, which is the view Curtis ascribes to “the neoconservatives” and “politicians like Tony Blair.” Completely absent in the film is any discussion of estimations of AQ’s likely numbers, affiliated and friendly organizations, access to finances, or support in Pakistan and elsewhere. In place of such discussion, we are presented with clipped video of soldiers looking at small openings in the ground. Completely absent in the film is any discussion of actual counterterrorism strategy. Instead Curtis shows us a few soundbites from Bush and Rumsfeld, as though these soundbites summarized such strategy. And completely absent is any support whatsoever for Curtis’s contention that Islamists and AQ were finished by December 2001. Curtis simply tells us that this is so.

What carries the film forward is not sound argument, but Curtis’s simplistic and false narrative. Perhaps unwittingly, the film turns itself into an example of how simplistic narratives can nonetheless prove emotionally powerful to some audiences, all the while relying on little more than iconic images, soundbites, and innuendo.

If you always believed that Neoconservatives were evil, that the “war on terror” as a slogan should be taken as a literal description of counterterrorism, and that one needn’t bother with any analyses of AQ beyond a few soundbites from Bush to understand what the US and British governments thought of AQ, then this is the film for you.

If you want reality, seek elsewhere.

22

Earwig 05.05.11 at 11:56 pm

But Curtis seems to leave any question of motives, well, unquestioned. Sure, we see that the “goal” didn’t get achieved. But in Curtis’ account that’s down to mistakes, stupidity. I can see the appeal of that approach — and it’s one we see universally applied by powerful actors. Vietnam war as mistake, not punishment of those who didn’t do what we wanted. So let’s leave that behind us, turn the corner, and do better now as we surely intended all along.

Considering from the start that those weren’t the goals after all might provide both some explanatory power when we look at what has happened and some predictive power going forward in other arenas (say, Libya). It’s possible, at least.

I see an attempt at that proposed here (call it the mcmanus version), which, though needing some flesh on the bones, is I think a contender. Naturally, considering this view doesn’t require that we say no errors or mistakes are ever made by “Empire” (a useful strawman version of this argument). And we’ll want to be wary of simply fitting assumed motives to the facts — “x occurred, therefore Empire wanted x” isn’t going to be very helpful, obviously.

But I’d be happy enough, as a start, if I could see my question about Curtis’ account addressed. What, exactly, is the evidence that US goals were as he stated them? What would even count as such evidence? My prejudice is that Curtis has no such evidence, or that it amounts to nothing more than official assertion — in other words the kind of evidence we’d rightly deride if it came from a Qaddafi, Hitler or bin Laden.

(I’d as soon leave Chomsky out of it, until we have something concrete from him bearing on the topic at hand. Maybe someone does?)

23

Earwig 05.06.11 at 12:07 am

To be clear, my #22 above was a reply to Phil’s comment, not Andrew’s.

24

Strategist 05.06.11 at 2:57 am

#17 “Was that graphic of the lair really in the Times (of London)?”

I don’t see why not – that kind of thing is meat & drink to a trashy Murdoch tabloid. Don’t ever mistake the Times of London for the New York Times. It’s long past being a paper of record.

25

Alex 05.06.11 at 3:21 am

Earwig, if you actually watched the series, Curtis describes the neoconservative propaganda not as stupidity, but as a Straussian noble lie. How accurate that assertion is, is another matter, but its not true to state that Curtis is arguing that US foreign policy is at heart, good.

26

Alex 05.06.11 at 3:45 am

Try 56:40 for Curtis’s absurd theory of the genesis of Islamists and Neoconservatives as an example of what many call his oversimplifications.

You idiot. 56:40 is the start of his conclusion. Of course it’s simplified. You see the bit on the video player that says “Part 3”? That’s there because there are two previous parts. These have the detail on his “theory of the genesis of Islamists and Neoconservatives”.

Go watch.

The film . . . consists of a pastiche of news clips, footage from old movies

And this is bad because . . .?

and bits of interviews with those sympathetic to Curtis’s views

You must have missed Richard Perle. And it would be a strange political documentary that didn’t include interviews with those whose views were consistent with the views advocated the documentary itself.

But the narrative is actually absurd. AQ has long been described as a loose network by terrorism analysts

If terrorist analysts (surely the source for Curtis’ views on AQ anyway) have long said what Curtis is saying, then how can what he’s saying be absurd?

Perhaps unwittingly, the film turns itself into an example of how simplistic narratives can nonetheless prove emotionally powerful to some audiences, all the while relying on little more than iconic images, soundbites, and innuendo.

How you can make this statement and not get Curtis’ point, I don’t know.

If you always believed that Neoconservatives were evil, that the “war on terror” as a slogan should be taken as a literal description of counterterrorism, and that one needn’t bother with any analyses of AQ beyond a few soundbites from Bush to understand what the US and British governments thought of AQ, then this is the film for you.

So Bush and Blair were puppets and your “terror analysts” have had all the real power? This is going to take quite some argument to show.

27

Alex 05.06.11 at 3:48 am

It’s interesting to line up quotes by Curtis critics next to each other:

Andrew: “If you always believed that Neoconservatives were evil . . . then this is the film for you”.

Earwig: “But Curtis seems to leave any question of motives, well, unquestioned”.

28

Thers 05.06.11 at 4:27 am

Completely absent in the film is any discussion of actual counterterrorism strategy. Instead Curtis shows us a few soundbites from Bush and Rumsfeld, as though these soundbites summarized such strategy.

Bush and Rumsfeld had a “counterterrorism strategy”?

“Invade the next country over, and botch the job” — that was the strategy…?

29

dsquared 05.06.11 at 4:51 am

It’s an interesting idea – to summarise a three hour film in a paragraph, then complain that your summarised version is simplistic – but I think unlikely to convince.

30

Hidari 05.06.11 at 7:34 am

Just to be clear, I ‘quoted’ Curtis in a previous thread because I think his views are interesting and worthy of debate, and because I think his basic point in the article linked to (that ‘we’ need Completely Evil Villains to hate and that after OBL ‘we’ will surely create another) was correct: not because I agree with every single thing Curtis has ever said.

31

Phil 05.06.11 at 7:59 am

Earwig – one of these days I will write my Long-Awaited Critique Of Chomsky, and in the process either demonstrate to the world that he’s a sleeve-tugging rhetoric-monger who can’t be trusted or prove to myself that he’s actually pretty good and the rhetoric is no big deal. So look out for that. In the mean time I too would rather leave him out of it.

As for Curtis, I agree with Alex – Curtis starts with taking propaganda claims at face value, then tracks both forward to what happened on the ground as a result and back to who made the propaganda claims and why. To my mind this is a much more powerful method than simply saying “an imperialist nation did what imperialist nations do, and their propagandists lied about it because that’s what propagandists do” – even though that may also be true.

32

Earwig 05.06.11 at 11:17 am

Alex, if you read what I wrote, you’d see it was a question about something Curtis wrote, not about his film.

Maybe you think it’s “not true to state that Curtis is arguing that US foreign policy is at heart, good,” but that’s really not what I attributed to him.

“America and the coalition invaded Afghanistan with the simple aim of destroying the terror camps and setting up a democracy that would allow the country to be ruled by good people.”

If you can show me why I should accept Curtis’ claim, go ahead. If you can’t, well, that’s what I expect really since I don’t think the claim makes any sense at all.

33

Earwig 05.06.11 at 11:39 am

Phil, if you’re talking about the film, too, which is fine by me (I may perhaps be slightly off-topic, dragging in something he wrote a couple of days ago), then we’re not discussing the same thing.

There is no basis for saying the statement of Curtis’ that I quote is an instance of him starting by “taking propaganda claims at face value” — that’s his own voice. He doesn’t attribute that claim to someone else as propaganda.

34

Andrew 05.06.11 at 12:17 pm

If terrorist analysts (surely the source for Curtis’ views on AQ anyway) have long said what Curtis is saying, then how can what he’s saying be absurd?

The narrative Curtis presents of AQ, and US and British beliefs about AQ, is absurd. Curtis resorts to a thin storyline about a neoconservative need to create a great common enemy and a sense among politicians that they were becoming irrelevant, which together drove these groups to conceive of, describe, and create a counterterrorist strategy around, the idea of AQ as an all-powerful organization able to “strike anywhere and at any time,” when in fact AQ was never a coherent organization and always had very little power. That narrative, Curtis’s narrative, is what I called absurd.

The lack of balance in the film is problematic, first, because it deprives the film’s more controversial claims of credibility. I enjoy hearing viewpoints that challenge what I think I know, but I prefer those viewpoints to actually engage with the reasons I have for thinking as I do. I end the film with the sense that Curtis never engaged the opposing viewpoints, because he never does – notwithstanding the soundbite from Perle. The lack of balance is problematic, second, because it enables the extremely weak narrative. If Curtis had enriched the film, I think he might have taken an intuition that many have had about terrorism – that it sparks a reaction in magnitude that seems disproportional to its actual threat – and made something really interesting. Instead we’re left with a storyline that, I sense, he created before doing much research on AQ capabilities as an organization, how it related to international terrorism, or counterterrorism generally.

Flying Rodent says that Curtis gets a few details wrong, but is right on the broad strokes. I think Curtis is actually strongest in the handful of areas where he drills down a little and gets some key details right, and weakest when he attempts to string together those few details into a broader picture.

So Bush and Blair were puppets and your “terror analysts” have had all the real power? This is going to take quite some argument to show.

The counterterrorism policies of the US and Britain aren’t encapsulated by a few soundbites from Bush and Blair. The policies adopted by Bush and Blair were complex, in great part a continuation of an existing approach to counterterrorism (but with much greater magnitude of resources along additional lines of effort), and fit much less with Curtis’s views of neoconservatives than they fit with an influential view of post Cold War security that the biggest short-term and medium-term threats were rogue states, failed states, and non-state actors.

There is an extent to which aspects of that counterterrorism strategy fit with a neoconservative view of human nature and foreign policy, and that confluence helped produce the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But the ideology of neoconservatives had little to do with the threat assessment of AQ and related organizations, either in the government or in the public.

It’s an interesting idea – to summarise a three hour film in a paragraph, then complain that your summarised version is simplistic – but I think unlikely to convince.

The neat thing about simplistic narratives is that they can be so succinctly summarized. That their proponents can make long documentaries built around these narratives isn’t very surprising. Conspiracy theories – which Curtis’s narrative is not, but approaches – depend on the same trick: take a simple story that rests heavily on cui bono, add lots of details and sub-plots, and never seriously engage with opposing narratives.

35

Earwig 05.06.11 at 12:21 pm

Hidari, welcome back to the debate you tried to start! It’ll be easy for me to stay away from bringing in everything he’s ever said — I’m really aware of nothing he’s said, other than the Guardian column you linked. Thanks for it. I agree Curtis has views worth debating.

The phrase I keep quoting includes another idea that may be worthy of debate: Curtis seems to be saying setting up a democracy by invading is a simple aim, and if that works, democracy allows “good people” to run things. (I can accept that maybe Curtis only intended “simple” to modify “destroying,” but that would make him a very poor writer indeed — I don’t see other examples of such grammatical problems.)

The rest of his schema amounts to a caution that an invading power having this simple aim of destroying and setting up just has to beware of being deluded by simplified views of the world as it goes about its democratising mission.

To me, that’s a strange view, or combination of views. The more I think about it, the less trouble I have with having said he comes across as a simpleton.

36

dsquared 05.06.11 at 12:51 pm

Curtis resorts to a thin storyline about a neoconservative need to create a great common enemy and a sense among politicians that they were becoming irrelevant, which together drove these groups to conceive of, describe, and create a counterterrorist strategy around, the idea of AQ as an all-powerful organization able to “strike anywhere and at any time,” when in fact AQ was never a coherent organization and always had very little power. That narrative, Curtis’s narrative, is what I called absurd.

1. Since you can’t actually simplify it any more than that, I think you should give up on “simplistic”

2. You also appear to be using “thin” where “coherent” is needed as a description. In general, your argument relies to a distressing extent on the use of pejorative adjectives which haven’t really been earned.

3. The fact that you called it absurd doesn’t make it absurd; you have to earn that too. In fact, it isn’t absurd; it might be right or wrong, but Curtis assembles a lot of material to back up his thesis. You’re accusing him of “not engaging with the opposing viewpoints”, but why should he, if their method of arguing with him is to say that it is “absurd” to question the motivations of people whose bad faith and lack of candour is a matter of copious public record.

At present your argument appears to be:

a) Curtis says that Al Qaeda has been portrayed by politicians as a major threat to the world for insidious reasons.

b) But actually Al Qaeda is quite weak and politicians knew this

c) Therefore, Curtis’ thesis is absurd.

It doesn’t really gel.

37

Torquil Macneil 05.06.11 at 1:15 pm

” In fact, it isn’t absurd; it might be right or wrong, but Curtis assembles a lot of material to back up his thesis.”

What sort of thing would count as evidence that Curtis’s thesis was wrong?

38

Phil 05.06.11 at 1:35 pm

Earwig – that’s his own voice. He doesn’t attribute that claim to someone else as propaganda.

No it isn’t, and yes he does. It makes more sense if you include the previous paragraph.

We are beginning to realise that this simplification has led to completely unreal fantasies about who we are really fighting. Fantasies that only persist because they justify our presence there. For the fundamental problem with this simple story of good versus evil is that it does not permit a proper critical framework that allows you to properly judge not only those you are fighting, but also your allies.

America and the coalition invaded Afghanistan with the simple aim of destroying the terror camps and setting up a democracy that would allow the country to be ruled by good people.

‘Simplification’ … ‘simple’ … ‘good versus evil’. What he’s saying is that “America” believed its own propaganda, not that he believes it. Besides which, you can take it from me that the portion of the British political spectrum where people could make that statement straight is infinitesimal – more than usually stupid populist Tories, basically – and Adam Curtis isn’t part of it.

39

Phil 05.06.11 at 1:41 pm

Curtis seems to be saying setting up a democracy by invading is a simple aim, and if that works, democracy allows “good people” to run things.

No. He’s saying that the US went into Afghanistan with that simple aim, and in the belief that success would enable “good people” to run things. He also refers to “completely unreal fantasies about who we are really fighting”.

a caution that an invading power having this simple aim of destroying and setting up just has to beware of being deluded by simplified views of the world as it goes about its democratising mission.

You’re mangling what Curtis wrote, which was quite carefully phrased. The point is that having this simple aim is, precisely, a case of “being deluded by simplified views of the world”.

(I’m this close to saying something about British writers and irony…)

40

dsquared 05.06.11 at 1:57 pm

What sort of thing would count as evidence that Curtis’s thesis was wrong?

Evidence that neoconservatives were not as influential as he claimed they were. Evidence that neoconservatives did not believe the things he said they did. Evidence that Al Qaeda was a bigger threat than he said it was. Am I missing something here or is this a bit of a daft question to ask?

41

Torquil Macneil 05.06.11 at 2:32 pm

” Am I missing something here or is this a bit of a daft question to ask?2

You are missing something. He says Al Qaeda was a lesser threat than was claimed by the conspirators but what would prove that that was wrong? Another major attack? Two? Three? The position is endlessly amorphous.

Evidence that neoconservatives were less influential than he claimed they were? What evidence would prove that? A memo that showed Bush disregarded Wolfowitz? How many times? Once enough? The fact that many of the so-called ‘neoconservatives’ did not accept that label or consider themselves as any kind of group?

If he made substantial claims this would be easier to manage, but he doesn’t. He amasses facts and give the impression of substance which isn’t really there. This is how conspiracy theorists progress, of course., and why he comes over as such a close cousin to the truthers and others.

42

dsquared 05.06.11 at 2:53 pm

I don’t think the implicit invitation for me to write a “How To Refute Adam Curtis” instruction manual is one I’m going to take up, but it’s pretty obvious that one could be written. The claims in “Power of Nightmares” are as specific as they need to be (and the specific claims are not limited to the clearly falsifiable ones I happened to pick on above). It really looks like you’ve just heard of this thing called “unfalsifiability” and decided that you were going to use it.

43

Michael Drake 05.06.11 at 3:46 pm

“He says Al Qaeda was a lesser threat than was claimed by the conspirators but what would prove that that was wrong?”

If the claim that AQ was a “lesser threat” is problematically vague, than the claim that it was a threat of any particular degree at all is problematically vague. (An analogous point can be made about each of the other verification challenges you pose.)

44

Alex 05.06.11 at 4:21 pm

If one group of people could bullshit about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein (and that seems to be the consensus belief across most of Europe at least), then why would it be so absurd that that same group of people would also exaggerate about the threat posed by AQ?

45

Alex 05.06.11 at 4:28 pm

And now that I think about, those two issues were interrelated. The Bush administration (can’t remember if Blair did this too) alleged that Saddam was helping AQ. For Curtis’ thesis to be absurd, evidence should be obtainable showing that this allegation was true. That’s a very clear evidential line that should make Torquil Macneil happy.

So Andrew, what are you waiting for?

46

Earwig 05.06.11 at 4:33 pm

Phil, you have Curtis’ point being that “this simple aim is, precisely, a case of ‘being deluded by simplified views of the world.'”

I don’t see that in Curtis’ words however. Maybe you really don’t either because you also say “[Curtis is] saying that the US went into Afghanistan with that simple aim, and in the belief that success would enable “good people” to run things,” which is a fairly accurate paraphrase of his statement.

What I’m asking is How Can Curtis Know That Was The Aim?

An observation that there were “fantasies about who we are fighting,” doesn’t show Curtis didn’t himself say what he clearly said. So, still no evidence that “America and the coalition invaded Afghanistan with the simple aim of destroying the terror camps and setting up a democracy” is not something Curtis claimed. The previous paragraph, the entire article, contain no reference to that supposed aim as being merely someone else’s propaganda claim. (It obviously was a claim from time to time by US officials, and I agree that it is nothing more than propaganda. I don’t see evidence Curtis questions it, though.)

You mention at #25 “the noble lie.” Do you think Curtis is saying the neocon “noble lie” is that we wanted to establish democracy? I don’t see that in his text, and I have always understood the concept quite differently. It goes: Of course we want to establish democracy, but we may have to engage in some lying to get it done. It is because our goal is noble that the lie is an acceptable means.

How doubtful is it really that Curtis has some unquestioned faith in at least the noble intentions of US planners?

“The power of this simple story propelled history forward. It allowed the neocons – and their liberal interventionist allies – to set out to try to remake the world and spread democracy.” Curtis says that the (false, deluded) story allowed the goal (democracy) to be pursued. He doesn’t question that that was the goal. You haven’t found anything to show that he does, for the obvious reason that it isn’t there.

47

bert 05.06.11 at 4:52 pm

“Don’t ever mistake the Times of London for the New York Times” [#24]

Remember Judy Miller and WMD? Scooter Libby cultivates a sympathetic hack. His off-record briefings are transcribed in the paper. The administration then hits the airwaves with a “even-the-liberal-New-York-Times-says-so” campaign.

It’s safe to assume that the same sourcing methods were used in this case.
That and Marvel Comics, of course.

48

David 05.06.11 at 5:35 pm

Cool cave! Turns out Rummy and company were reading Tom Swift Jr. as well as Ayn Rand.

49

Phil 05.06.11 at 6:02 pm

Phil, you have Curtis’ point being that “this simple aim is, precisely, a case of ‘being deluded by simplified views of the world.’”

I don’t see that in Curtis’ words however. Maybe you really don’t either because you also say “[Curtis is] saying that the US went into Afghanistan with that simple aim, and in the belief that success would enable “good people” to run things,” which is a fairly accurate paraphrase of his statement.

Eh? One is not inconsistent with the other. A simple aim can also be a deluded aim. A sincere belief can also be a deranged fantasy.

How doubtful is it really that Curtis has some unquestioned faith in at least the noble intentions of US planners?

Having unquestioned faith in the noble intentions of US planners would be 100% inconsistent both with my reading of the passage and with everything else I’ve ever seen or read from Curtis, so I’d say it’s pretty damn doubtful.

Sorry, but you really do need to learn about irony. Curtis’s work is saturated with it.

50

Phil 05.06.11 at 6:08 pm

“The power of this simple story propelled history forward. It allowed the neocons – and their liberal interventionist allies – to set out to try to remake the world and spread democracy.” Curtis says that the (false, deluded) story allowed the goal (democracy) to be pursued. He doesn’t question that that was the goal.

He doesn’t question that that was the goal they were ostensibly pursuing, and which some of them – and their allies – genuinely believed in. And nor should he, because it plainly was. He doesn’t step out in front of the camera like Rod Serling every five minutes to say “oh, by the way, you do realise that these people are imperialist bastards?”. And nor should he, because he doesn’t need to. At least, I didn’t think he did.

51

Tim Wilkinson 05.06.11 at 6:28 pm

The trouble with Curtis is that like other conspiracist fellow-travellers, he ignores Occams’ Razor.

52

Alex 05.06.11 at 6:58 pm

Tim Wilkinson, science has moved on a bit since the 14th Century.

You mention at #25 “the noble lie.” Do you think Curtis is saying the neocon “noble lie” is that we wanted to establish democracy? I don’t see that in his text, and I have always understood the concept quite differently. It goes: Of course we want to establish democracy, but we may have to engage in some lying to get it done. It is because our goal is noble that the lie is an acceptable means.

1. I was the one that said “noble lie”, not Phil.

2. If you want to understand what Curtis is saying vis-a-vis “noble lie” (note, this is my term, I don’t know if he has actually used it) then you should watch the Power of Nightmares, particularly part 1.

53

Earwig 05.06.11 at 7:14 pm

Phil.

Curtis doesn’t say ostensibly. He says democracy was their goal. He says they had no hope of achieving it in reality because, he says, they believed their own stories. One natural conclusion of that (wrong, I maintain) view is the one he begins to draw — that now, with Obama, we may be finally turning the corner and we can now pursue the noble ends without recourse to mistaken simplifying narratives.

Irony? Please, just some reading comprehension. (We were talking about the text, though you seem to be going back to the film, for your own reasons, which I have to believe are related to the fact that there is No Evidence in Curtis’ column that he questions the motives of the US war team.)

If you’re now saying Curtis doesn’t need to call into question the actual motives of the US, we should just take for granted that he does question them, that too is nonsense. He explicitly, in his voice, says a bogus story allowed the goal (democracy) to be pursued.

He questions the means. Only.

54

Earwig 05.06.11 at 7:22 pm

Alex (& Phil), please forgive me. I see I was mistaken on who mentioned “noble lie.”

I understand the concept perfectly well. It works as I stated: It is because our goal is noble that the lie is an acceptable means. Neither you or Strauss invented the concept.

If you’ve found Curtis somewhere saying that the lie is that we wanted to establish democracy, please say so.

I’ve seen Power, part 1 and to my recollection that doesn’t happen. It definitely doesn’t happen in the column.

55

Phil 05.06.11 at 7:25 pm

Irony? Please, just some reading comprehension.

Amen to that.

He explicitly, in his voice, says a bogus story allowed the goal (democracy) to be pursued.

Curtis doesn’t write in “his own voice” – that’s not what he does. (The “not being Rod Serling” image applies to his written work as well as the films.) His work is saturated with irony, as I said before. If you don’t get that you’re liable to some absurd misreadings.

56

Earwig 05.06.11 at 7:39 pm

No, Phil, it’s not all irony. He has his own voice. He says there’s dangerous simplifying, even false stories. That’s not irony. That’s him saying so.

That’s also him saying the other stuff I quoted him saying, too.

Maybe you want him questioning the motives, saying the motives were wrong, or too simple, but you don’t have him doing it.

57

Earwig 05.06.11 at 7:41 pm

The best part of these threads is usually where someone says “unless you have something really to add to this, I’m off.”

Yup, it’s arrived.

58

Phil 05.06.11 at 7:54 pm

Maybe you want him questioning the motives, saying the motives were wrong, or too simple, but you don’t have him doing it.

No, so all I have to go on in order to interpret what he’s written is every other thing he’s ever written, the cumulative evidence of which tells me that either (a) Adam Curtis has had a brain transplant which has transformed his political views while miraculously leaving his prose style unchanged or (b) this person was right the first time.

59

Cranky Observer 05.06.11 at 8:37 pm

> Evidence that neoconservatives were less influential than he claimed they
> were? What evidence would prove that? A memo that showed Bush disregarded
> Wolfowitz? How many times? Once enough? The fact that many of the
> so-called ‘neoconservatives’ did not accept that label or consider
> themselves as any kind of group?

“did not consider themselves any kind of group”? Seriously? You are I presume familiar with The Project for a New American Century

http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm

and their membership list (at the bottom of that page) including Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Libby among others? Not surprisingly the infamous “stir the beehive theory” white paper has been scrubbed from that site, but they have actually left this 1998 “letter” to Lott and Gingrich up:

=====
http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqletter1998.htm
[…]
U.S. policy should have as its explicit goal removing Saddam Hussein’s regime from power and establishing a peaceful and democratic Iraq in its place. We recognize that this goal will not be achieved easily. But the alternative is to leave the initiative to Saddam, who will continue to strengthen his position at home and in the region. Only the U.S. can lead the way in demonstrating that his rule is not legitimate and that time is not on the side of his regime. To accomplish Saddam’s removal, the following political and military measures should be undertaken:

— We should take whatever steps are necessary to challenge Saddam Hussein’s claim to be Iraq’s legitimate ruler, including indicting him as a war criminal;

— We should help establish and support (with economic, political, and military means) a provisional, representative, and free government of Iraq in areas of Iraq not under Saddam’s control;

— We should use U.S. and allied military power to provide protection for liberated areas in northern and southern Iraq; and — We should establish and maintain a strong U.S. military presence in the region, and be prepared to use that force to protect our vital interests in the Gulf – and, if necessary, to help remove Saddam from power

Although the Clinton Administration’s handling of the crisis with Iraq has left Saddam Hussein in a stronger position that when the crisis began, the reality is that his regime remains vulnerable to the exercise of American political and military power. […]
===

Are you seriously going to advance the theory that the group of very powerful hard-right Republicans, most of whom met the standard definition of neoconservative, who met as a group, published white papers and sent letters as a group, and put their names on their group’s web site as a group, were not a group? Or is this just another example of the kind of blatant reality-denial that dsquared refers to?

Cranky

60

Martin Bento 05.06.11 at 10:46 pm

Only tangential to this thread, but I just saw Lawrence Wilkerson, second at State under Collin Powell at this time of the Iraq invasion state point black on MSNBC Live (Cenk Uygar) the following:

1) We were at war in Iraq because of the oil.

2) Dick Cheney, not George Bush, was really running foreign policy at the time.

Now, I know a lot of people will say “duh”, but those people, like me, have all been considered “paranoid conspiracy theorists”, as well as “dirty hippies”, including in the more moderate parts of the liberal blogosphere, for “actually” believing such things. Guess Larry has been hitting the ‘ole bong. Hope this is not too much of a tangent.

61

ovaut 05.07.11 at 12:23 am

Curtis’ weakness — particularly in The Trap — is causation. To be convincing on causation, you need your evidence shiny-tight. But Curtis is profligate with his linkages, like a conspiracist.

Also in the Guardian piece he seems to assume it’s actually possible to ‘understand the world’. True, there can be better and worse attempts on it, but the goal itself is unattainable. No secularist should forget it.

Incidentally, John Dolan’s always a romp.

62

Andrew 05.07.11 at 1:12 am

3. The fact that you called it absurd doesn’t make it absurd; you have to earn that too. In fact, it isn’t absurd; it might be right or wrong, but Curtis assembles a lot of material to back up his thesis. You’re accusing him of “not engaging with the opposing viewpoints”, but why should he, if their method of arguing with him is to say that it is “absurd” to question the motivations of people whose bad faith and lack of candour is a matter of copious public record.

Well let’s take something in particular then. Curtis claims that the neocons and “politicians like Tony Blair” presented AQ as a rigidly hierarchical organization, able to strike “at any time and anywhere,” and threatening to the very existence of the West. That’s a pretty extreme view to ascribe to anyone. You rephrased Curtis’s contention in far more reasonable terms, saying that he ascribed the view that AQ was a “major threat” to politicians. Curtis goes well beyond that.

In support of this contention, we’re given short soundbites, such as one from Bush’s 9/20/01 address to Congress. Curtis quotes Bush as saying al Qaeda is to terror what the Mafia is to crime.

But Curtis doesn’t quote Bush’s more telling description just two sentences earlier in the speech: Americans are asking: Who attacked our country? The evidence we have gathered all points to a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations known as al Qaeda. “A collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations.” Does that sound like a view of a rigidly hierarchical, all-powerful organization that Curtis ascribes to US policy? Of course not.

AQ was described, both before and after 9/11, as a loose organization, with international reach, that had access to funds, safe havens, training camps and expertise, and connections to other local, regional, and international terrorist organizations. Its place as an enabler, ideologically, financially, and militarily, in addition to its own operations, and its interest in generating mass-casualties, is what rendered it a threat. It is described this way in numerous US policy documents before, and after, 9/11. It is described this way in the accounts, as far as I’m aware, of every prominent terrorism analyst to have researched them. Curtis’s alternative account of what Bush and the US government claimed or believed is, being wildly at odds with these facts, absurd.

Nor did Bush, or US policy generally, speak of AQ as the single enemy of amazing power, the caricature of policy Curtis repeatedly attacks. Instead AQ was emphasized to be one loose network of international terrorism – an important one and a threatening one – but just one. How many times did Bush mention al Qaeda by name in his 2002 State of the Union address? Once. The same number of times he references Jaish-i-Mohammed, Hezbollah, and others. The conflict was described, repeatedly, as one against the threat of international terrorism generally, with the goal of reducing the magnitude of the threat to that of a criminal problem – of a law enforcement problem.

Curtis also conveniently omits that Bush’s call to the US following 9/11 was not to join up in a new cause, nor to fear for their lives, but instead to go on living their lives – advice he gave more than once. He suggested a complete return to normalcy in as soon as a few months. Where Curtis strangely attributes the so-called “war on terror” to a neoconservative desire to move American society beyond normalcy, to a new (or perhaps old) paradigm of struggle against evil, we find that the statements of Bush and the US government are rather, again and again, in favor of normalcy. The very point of US policy is precisely to preserve normalcy in American life. Stunningly, Curtis misses this obvious aspect of US policy.

These are a few of the particular reasons why I view Curtis’s account of US beliefs about AQ, and his account of the “war on terror” generally, to be absurd. There are others of course. His account is at odds with the facts to a degree that renders the documentary slightly surreal. It’s almost as though he became so deeply invested in his story of neoconservatives as a group who, like Islamists, sought to reject what society had become, that he ignored the richer complexity of motives and institutions that inform the views of the US Government.

63

ovaut 05.07.11 at 1:25 am

I’m not actually sure I buy the concept of ‘simplification’. The world’s pretty complex, isn’t it? Pretty near inconceivably so. And if it is there’s always room to accuse someone of simplification, relative to a slightly fuller account they might have rustled up. You could call language a ‘ simplification’ — all of written history — or thought itself.

So what is the charge? This simplification is simpler than that one! That one hits a sweetspot of simplicity that makes its account more likely to be true! Hence the ‘over’, I guess.

But how do you know what degree of simplification is the best?

You get this problem when people accuse poetry of being ‘difficult’, and then poets reply that well the world is difficult, and then critics reply that well your poetry’s not very much closer to the unbounded difficulty of the world than is the stuff I can at least bloody read without a visit to a copyright library, and anyway it’s the expression that’s the issue, I’m sure you wouldn’t seem as profound as you evidently think you are without all those words in the way, and the poet realises that the answer he was about to give — to the effect that (on the contrary) if he had simplified his language, he would have debased the thought — just reflects a humbling rift between his assumptions and the critic’s, where the critic takes it for granted that if one aspires to work at the limits of one’s understanding, it is possible so to speak to reconstruct this work in clear language, and the poet that language must be implicated in the work from conception, and it is necessary to embody and to honour its difficulty by means of ‘difficult’ form.

64

Alex 05.07.11 at 2:15 am

we find that the statements of Bush and the US government are rather, again and again, in favor of normalcy. The very point of US policy is precisely to preserve normalcy in American life. Stunningly, Curtis misses this obvious aspect of US policy.

If anything can be characterized as “absurd”, it’s this description of the Bush administration as “in favor of normalcy”. Were you on Mars or just asleep until November 2008?

65

Martin Bento 05.07.11 at 2:19 am

Correction: the Bush Undersecretary of State who said today that we invaded Iraq for the oil is Lawrence Wilkerson.

66

bert 05.07.11 at 2:24 am

Splendid, Andrew. A fellow fan of Bush’s speeches.
My personal favourite is the Second Inaugural, a hymn to the moral force of universal freedom. But I also have a soft spot for the following:

”The Clinton-Gore administration has been the most relentlessly partisan administration in our nation’s history,” Texas Gov. Bush charged in a speech to a Republican fund-raising dinner. ”But sometimes some in our party have responded in kind. Americans have seen a cycle of bitterness: an arms race of anger. The legacy is cynicism, a generic distrust.” Bush said he would break that cycle by setting ”a different tone” that restores ”civility and respect to our national politics.”

Any alternative account of what Bush claimed or believed is, being wildly at odds with these facts, absurd.
And as for the rest of you rabble, attempt to escape my remorseless logic if you must. You shall not succeed.

67

bert 05.07.11 at 2:26 am

As for causation, if there’s one consistent theme of Curtis’ films, its the fragility and mutability of conceptual frameworks and explanatory schemes. Not material that lends itself to claims of airtight causation.

68

bt 05.07.11 at 3:07 am

Great Video.

Loved the spooky / dramatic music!

69

Chris Bertram 05.07.11 at 6:04 am

I’ve got no particular axe to grind on Curtis’s behalf (‘The Trap” was pretty daft imho). But his reception (including in this comments thread) illustrates a recurrent phenomenon. Critics of power get their every statement pored over by the likes of Aaronovich and any absurdities endlessly recycled to discredit them. The powerful (Blair, Rumsfeld) can come out with all kinds of inanities and get a free pass. Whether or not Rumsfeld and co literally said that AQ was a rigid hierarchical organization that was a major threat to the West, there’s no doubt that he said what he said in the clip talking to Russert (complete with diagram). *This* is what the bunker is like AND there are lots and lots of them …. I submit that only a pretty major hierarchical organization gets to have lots of multi-tier bunkers with space for tanks to drive in and out and computer systems and sophisticated anti-surveillance features etc. So either Rumsfeld believed that AQ was an organization of this kind or he sought to induce such a belief in the viewer. Either way he should be called on it. But no. It is the critics who get fact checked by the likes of Aaro and Rummy et al who get to carry on with their BS.

70

flyingrodent 05.07.11 at 9:58 am

Already said this in comments on my own blog, but… Only half of TPoN was about the rise of the neo-conservatives; the other was about the extreme wackiness of al Qaeda; their Qutbist forebears and their mad belief that they’d almost single-handedly destroyed the Soviet Union for Allah. It’s funny how none of Curtis’s critics ever pick holes in his theories about their ideological nuttery, and are always offended on behalf of Donald Rumsfeld.

71

Shay Begorrah 05.07.11 at 11:16 am

I could not agree more with bert@66, we have to judge the Bush administration by the clarity of expression and sincerity of its speech writers, trying to ascribe different motives to the administration on the basis of its actions is mere speculation and a prime example of the intellectual dishonesty and disingenuity so prevalent among the opponents of freedom.

Now I can understand how some conspiracy theorists and fellow travellers might imagine that The Power of Nightmares was about illustrating the tensions between what various agents said and did and between what they believed to be true and historical fact and then, absurdly, trying to explain these tensions by analysing the agents beliefs and philosophical backgrounds. However this is an overly complex analysis of an overly simplistic documentary.

Are we all clear?

72

dsquared 05.07.11 at 11:16 am

AQ was described, both before and after 9/11, as a loose organization, with international reach, that had access to funds, safe havens, training camps and expertise, and connections to other local, regional, and international terrorist organizations.

As Chris points out, it was also described as an organisation with a headquarters building, sophisticated computer systems and tanks. Bush and Cheney said lots of inconsistent things about Al Qaeda, because they were often lying.

And I second Alex’s view that the idea that Bush policy was in favour of normalcy in American life is very strange indeed.

73

bert 05.07.11 at 11:24 am

I agree with you about The Trap, Chris.
Seen this?
It’s a trailer, so judgement should be reserved, but it’s not immediately encouraging.

I think It Felt Like A Kiss offers an insight into what’s going on with Curtis. It was extremely loose and allusive, and was presented as conceptual art rather than documentary. Taken on those terms, it was perfectly fine, but the contrast with the terrific and engrossing Pandora’s Box, The Living Dead or Century of the Self does it no favours.

I suspect the poor man may be suffering from degenerative woodyallenitis, and before long the default response to questions about Adam Curtis will be “I liked the early ones”.
Hard to overstate how much I hope I’m wrong.

74

bert 05.07.11 at 11:41 am

The talk about a return to normalcy was motivated by economic worries. There were fears about a collapse in consumer confidence.
Take Rudy Giuliani, for instance. What you can do, he said, is come to New York and go shopping. “You might even be able to get tickets to The Producers now.” In every other respect, however, “9/11 changed everything”.

75

Andrew 05.07.11 at 1:30 pm

Whether or not Rumsfeld and co literally said that AQ was a rigid hierarchical organization that was a major threat to the West, there’s no doubt that he said what he said in the clip talking to Russert (complete with diagram). This is what the bunker is like AND there are lots and lots of them …. I submit that only a pretty major hierarchical organization gets to have lots of multi-tier bunkers with space for tanks to drive in and out and computer systems and sophisticated anti-surveillance features etc.

No, you need money, access to personnel and construction equipment, engineers, and a friendly government, all of which bin Laden had. Rumsfeld and Russert are discussing all of this on 2 Dec 2001, just before the start of the battle of Tora Bora, and they’re talking about the combined fight against the Taliban + AQ fighters. The area of the battle of Tora Bora is dominated by limestone mountains (Spin Ghar, I believe), which have a natural cave system. These were used, in fact, during the 1980s in the fight against the Soviets. It was speculated that these natural features were augmented during the 1980s, and further augmented by the Taliban and AQ.

The argument is NOT about whether the contingent of AQ in Afghanistan was hierarchical; the argument is about whether the transnational organization as a whole is. Obviously within Afghanistan, there was a leadership, and a chain of command. AQ forces worked with, and had a unit (the 55th Arab Brigade) that coordinated with the Taliban military. That’s not contested by Curtis, or anyone else as far as I know.

What Curtis attributes is the far more extreme claim that AQ as a whole was rigidly hierarchical – not simply individual elements in various countries, but the entire network – and that this network was an all-powerful existential threat. Hence his misleading, highly selective quotation of Bush comparing AQ to the Mafia, after showing clips of interview in which it is argued that the US constructed the fantasy of AQ as a rigidly hierarchical organization in order to prosecute them.

Not only did Bush never make such a claim, he explicitly said otherwise. Nor does Rumsfeld, anywhere in that interview, come remotely close to such a claim. A story about a fortified cave complex doesn’t cut it.

And I second Alex’s view that the idea that Bush policy was in favour of normalcy in American life is very strange indeed.

That’s precisely what it was though. Not normalcy for those in counterterrorism, or certain parts of law enforcement, or the military, but normalcy for most of society.

Remember that Curtis’s thesis is that the neocons, who had taken control of the administration’s response, wanted to use this story about AQ as an existential threat to reform society, to elevate society about its selfish and normal way of life. That the Bush Administration instead pushed Americans to not disrupt their existing lives, to continue on as always, and set a return to normalcy as the objective, completely contradicts Curtis’s thesis.

76

Chris E 05.07.11 at 2:24 pm

That the Bush Administration instead pushed Americans to not disrupt their existing lives, to continue on as always, and set a return to normalcy as the objective, completely contradicts Curtis’s thesis.

Normalcy in terms of economics. Yes. But how many times was the GWOT trotted out to justify this or that bit of legislation or foreign policy.

Even support for Israel during the Gaza episode was couched in these terms.

77

Cranky Observer 05.07.11 at 2:49 pm

> Normalcy in terms of economics. Yes. But how many
> times was the GWOT trotted out to justify this or that
> bit of legislation or foreign policy.

In fairness, the Obama Administration is currently contending that the upcoming international copyright treaty is necessary due to the requirements of “Homeland Security” (one of the justifications for refusing to publish drafts), so it was just GWB who used this line of attack.

Cranky

78

Shay Begorrah 05.07.11 at 2:59 pm

Oh Andrew@75, I know I should not feed you but I will.

Al Quaeda’s secret underground bases were of a piece with Iraq’s imaginary weapons of mass destruction, both noble lies prepared the American people for the vast expansion of the military industrial complex that was going to be required to fulfil the wider Neocon project (and line the pockets of the murdering classes).

On Bush’s idea of normalcy and using AQ as an existential threat to reform society.

That’s precisely what it was though. Not normalcy for those in counterterrorism, or certain parts of law enforcement, or the military, but normalcy for most of society.

The changes that “the project” required for society were of course not about structural or behavioural changes (it is neoconservative after all), it was about enforcing a new cultural norm that viewed dissent as unpatriotic and war, torture and assassination as legitimate tools of foreign policy.

The new normal was to be unquestioning, ultra-patriotic, militarism with just a taste of manifest destiny and it needed, and needs, fear to keep it stoked. Why you could almost say it depended on the power of nightmares.

79

Substance McGravitas 05.07.11 at 4:18 pm

No, you need money, access to personnel and construction equipment, engineers, and a friendly government, all of which bin Laden had.

And still, HA HA HA HA. One wonders why Saddam did not end the Gulf war by raining down laser fire from his orbital platform.

80

Andrew 05.08.11 at 2:37 pm

Shay @78: Your comment begins by making a claim that differs substantially from Curtis’s. You say that the notion of fortified caves was a “noble lie” intended simply to expand the US military. But your comment ends with the claim – much closer to Curtis’s – that the neocons wished to bring about a “new normal” of “unquestioning…militarism.”

First, the idea that fortified caves was a noble lie intended to prepare the US for an expansion of the US military is dubious. Americans were prepared to expand the military because 3000 people had been killed on US soil just two months earlier. Americans wanted to utterly destroy those responsible for 9/11, and anyone associated with them. There were no qualms or reservations about augmenting military capability to do so. “Fortified caves” was certainly not an important part – indeed any part as far as I can remember – of a debate for expanding the military. Nor were they a remotely important part of an American perception of threat from AQ; 9/11 had made crystal clear what analysts had been warning about for years. And I don’t believe the speculation about fortified caves received much discussion after the battle of Tora Bora.

Second, a “new normal” of “unquestioning…militarism” isn’t normalcy in American life. Far from it. If this – not merely military expansion – was the neocons’ goal, it conflicted greatly with the Bush Administration’s repeated calls to resume life as normal, and indeed to set normalcy as an objective.

Remember that Curtis’s claim isn’t simply that the neocons wanted to expand the US military abroad. His claim is that they wished to use the noble lie of an all-powerful, existential threat to the US – AQ – to elevate society above the failures of liberal individualism, and that the Bush Administration put this wish into action.

The recurring theme in these comments is a re-interpretation of Curtis’s more extreme claims into more reasonable ones. Curtis’s assertion that the Bush Administration presented AQ as an all-powerful, rigidly hierarchical, existential threat becomes in various comments an assertion that the administration presented AQ as a “major threat” or an assertion that the administration presented AQ as strong and hierarchical within Afghanistan.

Unfortunately Curtis isn’t quite that reasonable in the documentary.

Chris E @76: I agree with you.

Substance @79: Yes, but this isn’t about Iraq in 2003. It’s about Curtis’s storyline regarding AQ, and the administration’s presentation of AQ.

81

Substance McGravitas 05.08.11 at 3:55 pm

Substance @79: Yes, but this isn’t about Iraq in 2003. It’s about Curtis’s storyline regarding AQ, and the administration’s presentation of AQ.

Right, which was an absurd portrait of villains with comic-book-style super-competence.

82

Consumatopia 05.08.11 at 4:07 pm

Andrew’s being Andrew again.

“Fortified caves” are just a particularly hilarious example of the Bush Administration hyping the Al Qaeda threat into cartoon supervillians. This example was pointed out not because fortified caves, by themselves, significantly changed the public viewpoint, but because it illustrates the sort of thing that they were both willing and able to get away with saying at the time. No one, not Curtis, not anyone on this thread, is saying that “fortified caves” were the most important component of Bush propaganda during the time–and it’s bizarre that you would read them as saying that.

Second, a “new normal” of “unquestioning…militarism” isn’t normalcy in American life.

Not all definitions of “militarism” preclude the “keep shopping” message of the Bush Administration.

Curtis’s assertion that the Bush Administration presented AQ as an all-powerful, rigidly hierarchical, existential threat becomes in various comments an assertion that the administration presented AQ as a “major threat” or an assertion that the administration presented AQ as strong and hierarchical within Afghanistan.

The essential claim is that the Bush Administration presented global AQ as much more capable, much more dangerous, and more tightly organized than they actually were.

You seem to keep misunderstanding what people are saying in highly convenient ways. Assuming that you’re posting in good faith (and there is certainly lots of good faith reason one might disagree with Curtis), then a bit more humility on your part would be recommended given that you’re kind of prone to mistaken (at best) readings.

83

Cranky Observer 05.08.11 at 4:14 pm

> Andrew @80
> Second, a “new normal” of “unquestioning…militarism” isn’t
> normalcy in American life. Far from it. If this – not merely
> military expansion – was the neocons’ goal, it conflicted
> greatly with the Bush Administration’s repeated calls to
> resume life as normal, and indeed to set normalcy as an objective.

Telling people to “keep shopping” [1] whilst simultaneously ramming through the unPatriot Act, instituting universal spying on US citizens’ e-mail and Internet traffic (AT&T case), shoveling billions of dollars to Blackwater and similar mercenary organizations (who we later met again in New Orleans post-Katrina and on the beaches of the Gulf coast last year), using the national media as a tool to excoriate anyone who criticized excessive militarism and unjustified military adventurism (e.g. Iraq), well, the shopping part does not exactly overwhelm the militarism does it?

Cranky

(which was totally unsuccessful by the way; it was General Motors that finally restarted the economy with their ‘Keep America Rolling’ campaign)

84

Henri Vieuxtemps 05.08.11 at 5:04 pm

What? Militarism isn’t normalcy in American life? Do you know what the military budget is?

85

bert 05.08.11 at 6:04 pm

Noone’s mentioned Curtis’ excellent blog by the way.
Maybe start with the Afghanistan stuff, if you haven’t seen it:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/afghanistan/

86

ajay 05.08.11 at 10:45 pm

Chris Bertram: the graphic is rather silly, but Rumsfeld’s description is pretty good.

The mujahedin during the Soviet occupation constructed large fortified logistic bases in the Afghan/Pakistan border area, used for collecting and treating casualties and distributing ammunition and weapons. These tended – for obvious reasons of defence and concealment – to be partly underground; IIRC Soviet troops mounted airborne assaults on these in 1986-7 in particular which often turned into massive pitched battles. Bin Laden’s value to the muj was mainly that he was good at organising the construction of these bases.

If you would like to read about these, read any decent book about the Soviet/Afghan War – their existence is a matter of record. It’s not saying anything about Rumsfeld or Curtis in general to say that, in the clip you suggest, Rumsfeld’s telling the exact truth.

87

Tim Wilkinson 05.09.11 at 12:57 am

Rumsfeld was describing Muj military installations? That’s funny, I thought he was presenting ‘AQ’ as using such installations, per the admin.’s war propaganda that (literally) painted it as a large centralised military force of the kind associated with pitched territorial battles.

The idea that trucks were driving in and out of teeming hives of Islamowarriors was after all an integral part of banking the advantage gained from 9-11. That narrative was geared to securing full commitment from the populace (and perhaps, perhaps more importantly, lower echelons of government and military) for a full military invasion (or 2), rather than detective work etc. (The FBI didn’t even regard UBL as wanted for 9-11.) implicitly the associated military build-up, Rummy’s zany pet scheme of hi-tech hands-off ‘precision’ bombing warfare, etc.

Otherwise one might suppose that a few more of them might have wondered whether this was an apt response to 9-11. That’s especially so since there was a different story being dogwhistled: the chance in a million shoestring 9-11 attack, the assymetric ‘warfare’ of terrorism, the looseness of the ‘affiliations’ of disparate cells, the insidiously pervasive small-scale operations which mean you had better keep an eye on your neighbours, and familiar objects like a drinks bottle become threatening.

That parallel narrative was required because it was less blatantly made up, so when challenged the administration could Rummage around in the bottom drawer of the propaganda bureau and pull out something vaguely sensible as ‘proof’ that they were not making up silly stories. Andrew is still doing the same after all these years, carrying on the fight long after the jig is up, like some WW2 veteran stranded on an isolated island.

So the two AQs reflect the two aspects of the War on Terror: the justification of invasions and military build up on the one hand, and on the other, HUAC-like paranoia and the domestic security state. (The Cold War had these two better integrated thanks to the ICBM, as well as a rather better foothold in reality; even the unsatisfactory stopgap of the War on Drugs was able IIRC to perform both functions in a vaguely consistent way.)

The scaremongering and demonisation about Saddam of course was only geared to the casus belli side of things, which is why it was so cursory, fleeting and lacking in lurid pulp artwork.

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Substance McGravitas 05.09.11 at 1:26 am

I suppose, given the project-onto-your-enemy-the-thing-you’re-doing nature of the Bush-era right, they have to have built some super-cool hideouts.

89

Cranky Observer 05.09.11 at 1:51 am

> What? Militarism isn’t normalcy in American life?
> Do you know what the military budget is?

I am currently reading Ulysses Grant’s description of the US-Mexico war, I am aware of our long history of wars declared and undeclared in Central America, and I consider the changes to our law and culture to abridge civil rights, quell dissent, and build the foundations of what is now known as the National Security State(tm) during and after The Great Ware to be a critical inflection point in US society post-Civil War. So yes, I am aware that militarism is not exactly a new feature of the US experience.

However, I don’t think that any group prior to Bush/Cheney/neocons made such a planned, organized, and concerted to replace the fundamental attitude and outlook of the United States with those of Sparta. And even if there was a previous attempt that I am not familiar with, it was nowhere near as successful as the Bush gang’s (admittedly the modern media/persuasion system didn’t exist in the past, which provides a huge advantage).

Cranky

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ajay 05.09.11 at 8:11 am

Rumsfeld was describing Muj military installations? That’s funny, I thought he was presenting ‘AQ’ as using such installations

Both. They were built by the muj (including OBL, as I mentioned) in the 1980s and used by AQ in 2001. The bunkers and cave positions at Tora Bora, for example, dated from the 1980s.

There is actually an entire book on this subject, “Afghanistan cave complexes 1979-2004” by Mir Bahmanyar. These were very large complexes – they were dug with heavy plant and explosives, and defended by garrisons up to 500 strong with anti-aircraft guns and artillery. The Soviets had a very, very hard time cracking them.

91

Phil 05.09.11 at 9:56 am

So basically what you’re saying is that, when it comes to the specific point the OP picked up on – “they said it was Tracey Island but when they got there it was just a load of caves” – Curtis is flat wrong.

But what about the evidence that when they got there (and bombed the crap out of it) it was just a load of caves?

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dsquared 05.09.11 at 11:59 am

Well, you start with “a cave complex manned by 500-strong garrisons and defended by anti-aircraft guns and artillery”, you march the garrison out, take out the AA guns and take out the artillery, what are you left with?

If England decided to invade Wales again, I daresay that some of the partisans might hole up in Caernarfon Castle, but anyone suggesting that Ap Qaeda was capable of building crenellated battlements would be having a laugh.

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Tim Wilkinson 05.09.11 at 12:09 pm

[left this lying around while diverted by a browsing binge on topic of critical discourse analysis; so, longer dsquared:]

No doubt a toned down version of the story can be reconstructed which only says that ‘AQ’ holed up in disused Soviet-era enhanced cave facilities.

Stories like this Indy one from after the invasion bury the concessions to reality fairly deep (to avoid casual detection?), but if you read with sufficientloy strenuous charity, can seem quite reasonable. As Phil points out, that is not to say actually accurate, and actual evidence of what was found would be rather relevant here.

But whether or not some ‘AQ’ went to a place which had previously been a Muj base, the main point (and this was maybe slightly unclear) is that by ‘military installation’ in

Rumsfeld was describing Muj military installations? That’s funny, I thought he was presenting ‘AQ’ as using such installations

I had in mind the installation of a military, as in your

defended by garrisons up to 500 strong with anti-aircraft guns and artillery

or my

large centralised military force of the kind associated with pitched territorial battles

and

trucks…driving in and out of teeming hives of Islamowarriors.

Or indeed, to return to CB’s point, the silly graphic that we all remember so well from the first time round (still image), with its vast arsenal of CIA/Muj era Stinger missiles, etc.

As an aside, on a general vaguely critical discourse analysis-related note, I’d point out that the principle of charity in interpretation needs to be radically discounted or qualified when assessing the effects of a propaganda campaign – it’s what permits dogwhistling and two-step/bottom-drawer manoeuvres.

Cf. (yes it’s) the janus-faced ‘Conspiracy theory’ designation. “This is a conspiracy theory” (charitably: a theory about a conspiracy; check) “and conspiracy theories are ridiculous” (charitably: overblown paranoid confabulations are ridiculous; check) “therefore this is ridiculous” (whoops-a-daisy, fallacy of equivocation, another one bites the duster).

94

Henri Vieuxtemps 05.09.11 at 12:16 pm

I downloaded “Afghanistan cave complexes 1979-2004”. It says this:

…The multi-layered complex cave systems able to accommodate tucks or even tanks as seen in the media graphics are mere speculation and none have actually been discovered thus far. One complex at Zhawar Kili in the hotly contested Paktia Province did prove an exception as Lester Grau points out:

As the base expanded, Mujahideen used bulldozers and explosives to dig at least 11 major tunnels into the south-east facing ridge of Sodyaki Ghar Mountain. Some of these huge tunnels reached 500 meters and contained a hotel, a mosque, arms depots and repair shops, a garage, a medical point, a radio center and a kitchen. A gasoline generator provided power to the tunnels and the hotel’s video player. This impressive base became a mandatory stop for visiting journalists, dignitaries and other “war tourists”. Apparently, this construction effort also interfered with construction of fighting positions and field fortifications.

Lester Grau’s piece here: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/2001/010900-zhawar.htm

95

bert 05.09.11 at 12:24 pm

96

Walt 05.09.11 at 12:33 pm

I was actually wondering the other day if in the twentieth century you had cases of soldiers holing up in medieval fortifications. Maybe it’s not that effective of a hiding place from modern artillery, but it seems like it would be better than nothing.

97

bert 05.09.11 at 12:49 pm

Other bits of twentieth century engineering have come in handy for insurgent fighting. Have a look at the end of this post.

98

bert 05.09.11 at 12:56 pm

Just occurred to me – if you’re outside the UK, the BBC might not serve you video.
(You can get round it by using a UK proxy. A little fiddly, but maybe worth it.)

99

Lemuel Pitkin 05.09.11 at 1:56 pm

The post linked to by Bert @97 is really extraordinary. I am sold on Adam Curtis, he’s doing great stuff.

Can’t help but be reminded, too, that Libya was at one point the world’s number one per capita recipient of US military aid. It’s funny how liberal interventionists (what ever happened to Conor Foley?) so systematically ignore all the previous US interventions in the countries they want to exercise their humanitarianism on today.

100

Andrew 05.09.11 at 2:08 pm

“Fortified caves” are just a particularly hilarious example of the Bush Administration hyping the Al Qaeda threat into cartoon supervillians. This example was pointed out not because fortified caves, by themselves, significantly changed the public viewpoint, but because it illustrates the sort of thing that they were both willing and able to get away with saying at the time.

Chris brought up the caves back @69, in defense of the claim that the administration was presenting AQ as an all-powerful, rigidly hierarchical organization. The idea @69 was that only a powerful, hierarchical organization would have been able to construct such bunkers; therefore to claim that AQ made the complexes is to claim that they are a powerful, hierarchical organization.

As I pointed out @75, the area in which Tora Bora was fought, the Spin Ghar, had natural limestone cave complexes, which had been used during the 1980s as bunkers, and, it was speculated, had been further augmented by AQ during its long stay in Afghanistan. One doesn’t need an all-powerful transnational organization to continue augmenting them, and the idea that these caves existed certainly wasn’t ridiculous. So the fortified caves speculation wasn’t a ridiculous attempt to transform AQ into an all-powerful enemy. Most importantly though, the caves speculation doesn’t imply that AQ is a rigidly hierarchical, all-powerful transnational network – much less, to use your words, super-villains. It’s not evidence that supports Curtis’s thesis.

The essential claim is that the Bush Administration presented global AQ as much more capable, much more dangerous, and more tightly organized than they actually were.

This is another attempt to reinterpret Curtis’s claims into something more reasonable. His claim is not simply that AQ wasn’t as powerful or as much a threat as was suggested. Curtis instead attempts to maximize the space between Bush’s claims, and reality, by painting both – Bush and reality – in extremes. Bush becomes the proponent of a view that we were fighting against an enemy, AQ, that was rigidly hierarchical, all-powerful, and able to strike anywhere and at any time. Reality, in Curtis’s telling, is that AQ never existed as an organization at all; it was a phantom enemy, a small, loose association of little consequence.

But of course Bush doesn’t make the extreme claims Curtis strives to attribute to him, and in reality AQ wasn’t quite the phantom that Curtis claims. Of course, without the extreme claims Curtis makes, it’s doubtful as to whether he would have been able to use those little amusing clips from old movies to drive his point home.

However, I don’t think that any group prior to Bush/Cheney/neocons made such a planned, organized, and concerted to replace the fundamental attitude and outlook of the United States with those of Sparta.

But Cranky, none of the examples you gave – the Patriot Act, or warrantless wiretapping, or spending money on private contractors – supports the idea of such a social transformation. They don’t come close.

101

bert 05.09.11 at 2:27 pm

Loyalty oaths at election rallies?
Ich schwöre bei Gott diesen heiligen Eid, daß ich meinem Volk und Vaterland allzeit treu und redlich dienen und als tapferer und gehorsamer Soldat bereit sein will, jederzeit für diesen Eid mein Leben einzusetzen.
So much snappier in German, I find.

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bert 05.09.11 at 2:27 pm

103

bert 05.09.11 at 2:29 pm

</godwin>

104

bert 05.09.11 at 2:33 pm

Can’t post markup.
Nevermind.

105

Consumatopia 05.09.11 at 4:22 pm

Chris brought up the caves back @69, in defense of the claim that the administration was presenting AQ as an all-powerful, rigidly hierarchical organization. The idea @69 was that only a powerful, hierarchical organization would have been able to construct such bunkers; therefore to claim that AQ made the complexes is to claim that they are a powerful, hierarchical organization.

This doesn’t contradict anything I said. Where did this imply that the claims regarding fortified caves “significantly changed the public viewpoint”, or “were the most important component of Bush propaganda during the time”?

I’d say that approximately 80% of the content of all your posts consists of mis-stating what someone else said. You need to understand–when comes to disagreements over what somebody else said, you have worked very hard to establish an absence of credibility on your part.

This is another attempt to reinterpret Curtis’s claims into something more reasonable. His claim is not simply that AQ wasn’t as powerful or as much a threat as was suggested. Curtis instead attempts to maximize the space between Bush’s claims, and reality, by painting both – Bush and reality – in extremes.

He claims the distance between them is very great, and attributes that difference to political/ideological motivation. Perhaps the distance between them is not as great as he says, or perhaps he is not correct regarding the motivation. But in any event, his thesis doesn’t rest on a claim that Bush claimed AQ was absolutely hierarchical, or literally omnipotent. (“Strike anywhere at anytime”, though, is definitely a fair characterization of the way people looked at Al Qaeda at the time, whether or not Bush or neocons were responsible for that viewpoint.) You are straw-manning, as is your well-established habit.

106

Consumatopia 05.09.11 at 4:27 pm

Of course, without the extreme claims Curtis makes, it’s doubtful as to whether he would have been able to use those little amusing clips from old movies to drive his point home.

Curtis’s point was the difference between the fantasy and reality of those days was very great–humorously great, even, as shown in the diagram in the video. It is not that those differences are somehow maximal, which I guess would be OBL not existing and Bush launching nuclear weapons to destroy a nonexistent enemy.

107

mds 05.09.11 at 6:48 pm

As someone who: (1) spent years under a color-coded Terror! alert system; (2) observed the abrupt last-minute loss of momentum for a presidential challenger once a bin Laden recording hit the airwaves; (3) heard my government brazenly admit to illegal spying on my fellow countrymen; (4) is currently being bombarded with right-wing hacks howling that bin Laden’s death completely vindicates torture; and (5) avoids flying because I don’t like being the subject of nude photography and crotch groping without being bought a nice dinner first, I’m still laughing contemptuously at Andrew’s mention of “normalcy.” Thanks to Professor Bertram’s observation @ 69, something about motes and beams comes irresistibly to mind.

108

JP Stormcrow 05.09.11 at 7:45 pm

One of the most hardball political moments in the campaign and one where Bushco counted on attacks from the echo chamber and passivity from the mainstream. And of course they got the latter. Here’s the “he said, she said” account from the NY Times. Contrast with this detailed account of the timeline from Joe Lockhart. My gloss:

Bush
Prez briefed AM
Subsequently attacks Kerry on GWOT in speech.
Gives a unifying “Presidential” statement on the tape.
Resumes attacking Kerry including accusations of shameful politicization of the OBL tape.

Kerry
Afternoon:
First gets “news” that there is tape during interview where he mentions Tora Bora.
Gets full briefing afterwards.
Makes a formal statement.

109

JP Stormcrow 05.09.11 at 7:51 pm

108 amplifying mds’s 107.2.

110

Andrew 05.09.11 at 11:58 pm

Consum: Where did this imply that the claims regarding fortified caves “significantly changed the public viewpoint”, or “were the most important component of Bush propaganda during the time”?

No one said you made such an implication. Shay @78 wrote: Al Quaeda’s secret underground bases were of a piece with Iraq’s imaginary weapons of mass destruction, both noble lies prepared the American people for the vast expansion of the military industrial complex that was going to be required to fulfil the wider Neocon project (and line the pockets of the murdering classes).

To this I responded @80. I did not attribute Shay’s claim to Curtis. Instead I quoted Shay’s comment, and responded to it. Consum, next time you wish to lard a comment with insults, take better care to read. Or better yet, try conversing without insults. That’s all I have for you.

mds @107: I understand. Certain things did change after 9/11. But for the most part – for most – life went on normally. There were no calls for Americans to enlist. There was no draft. I don’t really regard color codes or close frisks at airports as important changes to our way of life. The controversies – questions about interrogation techniques or wiretapping – were argued by Americans, for the most part, from a distance. And that’s why neither controversy – not interrogation and not wiretapping – played any significant role in any national election.

111

Consumatopia 05.10.11 at 1:23 am

Andrew, here’s what you said @80.

First, the idea that fortified caves was a noble lie intended to prepare the US for an expansion of the US military is dubious. Americans were prepared to expand the military because 3000 people had been killed on US soil just two months earlier. Americans wanted to utterly destroy those responsible for 9/11, and anyone associated with them. There were no qualms or reservations about augmenting military capability to do so. “Fortified caves” was certainly not an important part – indeed any part as far as I can remember – of a debate for expanding the military. Nor were they a remotely important part of an American perception of threat from AQ; 9/11 had made crystal clear what analysts had been warning about for years. And I don’t believe the speculation about fortified caves received much discussion after the battle of Tora Bora.

I have bolded the portion that you seem to think contradict what you quoted from @78, but does not actually contradict it (78 called the fortified caves, as portrayed above, a noble lie, it did not make any claims about how significant or important this particular “noble lie” was to either the general public or to the administration propaganda, which seems to be what the bolded portion is addressing). I tried to explain this to you before, but, of course, you not only misrepresented or misunderstood 78, you also misunderstood me.

The point of these “insults”, is not to make you feel bad, it’s to point out a systematic error in a large number of your posts, so that either you can fix it or the rest of us can adjust to it.

112

bert 05.10.11 at 1:43 am

Loyalty oaths. You’re keeping to yours, evidently.

Are you seriously arguing that the threat of Terror and the Global War didn’t affect most Americans because of a successful Bush policy of calming things down? It was played for political advantage, to the hilt, in the national elections of ’02 and ’04.

The mismatch between the absurdity of your views and the ploddingness of your delivery is wonderful somehow. There’s a Python sketch lurking somewhere in there.

113

Chris Bertram 05.10.11 at 7:25 am

bert and Andrew: you are welcome to continue to comment at Crooked Timber, but please comply with our comments policy and supply a genuine email address when you do so. (This may go for others too.)

114

Andrew 05.10.11 at 12:24 pm

Chris: Done, and thanks.

Bert: I’m generally wary of associating “success” with “Bush.” My theory as to why Bush desired a return to normal is that Bush was not much interested in neoconservative ideology, and he didn’t feel any lack of relevance – the rather strange motive Curtis attributes to “politicians like Tony Blair.” Bush was interested in winning re-election in 2004, and he had to contain the economic repercussions of 9/11 to do so. That meant, in the US, preventing any sense of fear or siege that would stop Americans from going out, socializing, shopping, traveling, and so forth. It meant talking the US public down somewhat from the very high levels of fear and anger following 9/11. It meant a return, mostly, to normalcy.

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bert 05.10.11 at 3:09 pm

I finally provoked a response, and it’s polite and to the point – it’d be churlish not to acknowledge it.

I’m glad we agree that the calls for normalcy were primarily economic. Modern economies require a biddable mass of consumers – it’s no different here in the UK. I think however you seriously misread the political picture. Karl Rove is the key figure to concentrate on. His general strategy is straightforward to summarize: establish clear lines of division, use these to define the contest, intensify the commitment and motivation of your supporters, and drive turnout to push your vote over 50%. Fear and anger are useful for this kind of strategy. The campaigns after 9/11 saw the GOP channelling fear and anger towards its political opponents. Look for example at the way Max Clelland was taken down in 2002.

I also agree that, the Second Inaugural notwithstanding, an exclusive focus on neoconservatism misses much of the picture. Some say the Iraq policy was all about oil. Some focus on the pathologies of nationalism. Others reach for freudian explanations of father/son neurosis. The precise mixture is unknowable, probably even to Bush.

To expand on your observation, I think Bush himself wasn’t much interested in anything much, beyond the chore of delivering spoils to his backers and the constant challenge of winning cock-wagging contests with everyone he met. He was driven by vanity and prickliness, and is actually rather a dull figure. To flirt once more with Godwin territory, much of the nastiness of the Bush years arose from the use of the Führerbefehl by those below him, beginning with the Vice President.

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