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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Bush's brain trust had a grand plan for the Middle East. The results are coming home every day in body bags.
Apr 8, 2004 | Vice President Dick Cheney; Secretary of State Colin Powell; National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice; Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. What kind of people are they, these viceroys of American foreign policy who serve at the behest of the Emperor George III, second ruler of the Bush Dynasty? James Mann tries to answer that question in his ambitious new book "Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet." Yet for all its obvious high-minded seriousness -- indeed, largely because of it -- this is a frustrating though valuable read.
At its best, Mann's book is essential reading for background on the Bush team, how they came together, how they think and what they think -- when they think at all. Mann, now senior writer-in-residence at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies, built an enviable and deserved reputation as one of the most respected, thorough and reliable reporters in Washington, especially on East Asian affairs, during his years with the Los Angeles Times, and this book reflects these virtues. It is solidly researched and highly readable; it is also filled with important and valuable judgments.
It is important to note, as Mann does, that Bush's "Vulcans," named after the Roman god of heavy industry and weapons of war, are all still Cold Warriors in the recesses of their souls. The bulk of Mann's book deliberately does not deal with the changed world of 9/11 and what resulted from it. Some 80 percent of his text is devoted to the rise and shaping of his protagonists in the 35 years that preceded recent dire events.
Mann is duly respectful of his subjects. But like Bob Woodward in "Bush at War," his low-key style may obscure to the casual reader crucial points and devastating trends that he documents. For all their long résumés in appointed positions, none of his subjects, to use Sam Rayburn's famous phrase about President Johnson's Vietnam hawks, could ever win a contested election for dogcatcher.
Cheney and Rumsfeld, Mann notes, both hoped to run for president -- the first in the '80s and the second in the '90s -- but for all the "wealth of experience in Washington" that both could boast, at least on their résumés, "they did not attract the money, the name recognition or the core base of supporters that provide the ingredients of success in presidential politics." Both men had successfully run for election and reelection to Congress, but in safe seats that for conservative Republicans required as much charisma and electoral skill as winning election as a Communist Party candidate in Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union.
There is of course a cleavage in the inner circle of these Vulcans. It is the dividing line between traditional cautious internationalism as advocated by Powell and his deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, and the sweeping, triumphal, Tom Clancyesque fantasies of power advocated -- and, under Bush II, practiced -- by the rest of the group. That cleavage follows another defining fault line. Powell and Armitage, so often decried contemptuously as wimps by the armchair warriors of the neocon Op-Ed columns, are brave men who served in combat in Vietnam. None of the rest ever saw action. Rumsfeld was a Navy pilot in the '50s, but never had to experience the dangers and messiness of war. Mann notes the contrast in defining life and experience between Armitage and Wolfowitz. "Wolfowitz's training ground," he writes, "was in the world of academia, while Armitage's was in the mud of Vietnam."
It is also revealing about the truly archaic and romanticized worldview of the hawks among this "Superior Six" that they have an obsessive reverence for Winston Churchill to the point of childishness. "In times of adversity many of the Vulcans instinctively sought inspiration from Winston Churchill," Mann writes. He further rightly points out the irony that "among the Vulcans" Churchill's contemporaneous war leader, America's own President Franklin D. Roosevelt, "did not enjoy the same iconic status."
Indeed, Mann documents how Churchill's words and example evoke the same infantile worship and slavish identification as sightings of Elvis among the True Believers. Right after the al-Qaida terrorists flew their planes into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, Mann relates, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's fawning neocon chief of staff, applied to his boss Churchill's famous lines on assuming the premiership of Britain in 1940: "I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial."
However, it is unfortunately all too typical of this book that far from questioning the maturity, or even sanity of such flights of fancy, Mann takes them at face value. "The underlying meaning made sense," he solemnly writes.
If a ghostly, ironic presence hovers over every page of "Rise of the Vulcans," it is the memory of "The Best and the Brightest," David Halberstam's famous skewering of a former foreign policy establishment -- that of the administrations of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson who gave us Vietnam. For what Mann has produced is a "Best and the Brightest"-lite; a description of a foreign policy elite even more pleased with itself and the narcissistic reflection of its own imagined brilliance than the tragic team led by Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy. Yet this "Best and Brightest II," unlike Halberstam's exercise in focused, controlled fury and disdain, is written without anger and irony. Mann takes his subjects at their own face value and estimation.
Where Halberstam focused on the fierce internal debates and rivalries between his subjects, Mann plays them down, going out of his way to present Powell as a hawk not so different from Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. Mann acknowledges "the many bitter disputes between the Pentagon and the State Department." But one does not get a sense from this book of the sheer ferocity with which Powell and Armitage were repeatedly attacked, undercut and humiliated during the Bush II administration or the degree to which their colleagues in government coordinated so closely with their media allies outside it to ridicule and disparage those who tried to stand up to them.
But Mann has been doubly fortunate in the timing of publication. His volume was still fresh in the bookstores when Richard A. Clarke, the president's former counterterrorism chief, made his explosive allegations two weeks ago before the 9/11 commission, ultimately forcing Bush's national security advisor Condoleezza Rice to testify under oath before the commission. This serendipitous timing could only boost the book's sales.
Mann was even more fortunate that the book was already out when Clarke electrified the nation with his charges of the administration's gross complacency and incompetence about the al-Qaida terrorist threat in the eight months before the terrible attacks of 9/11. Otherwise, he would have had to add at least a chapter, if not heavily revise the entire book. As it is, Mann's book is suddenly heavily dated, even while still fresh on the newsstands. Clarke, for example, does not rate a single mention in the index.
