ALL THE SHAH’S MEN   AN AMERICAN COUP AND THE ROOTS OF MIDDLE EAST TERROR, by Stephen Kinzer. Wiley, 2003.

Stephen Kinzer is arguably the top foreign correspondent for the New York Times, with extensive experience reporting from Central America and Europe during those regions’ recent eras of turmoil. His new book, ALL THE SHAH’S MEN  is a chilling narrative of the successful overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in August, 1953.

ALL THE SHAH’S MEN is a stellar treatment of modern Iranian history. Kinzer fills in many of the blanks in our knowledge of the profoundly destructive role America has played in Iran.

All The Shah's Men -- Review Part II

(With more thanks to Bonnie)

In this important book, Kinzer provides information that should give even the most fervent anti-communist reason to doubt that the U.S. action in Iran was either intelligent or necessary. (Kinzer also provides a useful, and arguably sympathetic, discussion of Shiism, the version of Islam predominant in Iran. When the Arabs conquered Persia, they forced Islam on the population, but this Islam was modified by the precepts of Persia’s original, much older religion, Zoroastrianism. Kinzer notes the Zoroastrian emphasis on social justice and just rule, which is a major element of Shiism.)

First, we learn that after failing to intimidate Mossadegh into returning the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company under effectively the same rules that led to its nationalization in the first place, Britian's newly re-elected, super-imperialist Prime Minister Winston Churchill tried mightily to persuade the Truman administration to join Britain in a covert action to remove him from power. Truman and his Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, rejected Churchill’s underhanded request out of hand. Truman and Acheson held British imperialism in contempt, and while recognizing that Mossadegh was a frustratingly difficult national leader to deal with, they also approved of his progressive reforms and his democratic aspirations for Iran. Contrary to the British, they also took seriously the fact that Mossadegh had been democratically elected and enjoyed the genuine support of the vast majority of Iranian citizens. In essence, they wanted to see Mossadegh succeed.

Second, we learn that the British did not once invoke a "communist threat" to the entire Middle East and beyond if Anglo-Iranian was not returned to them. In fact, the British and the Russian monarchy had in 1907 formally partitioned Iran between them, with the Russians taking the north sector. During WWII, the U.S., the British, and the Soviet Union worked together in Iran for crucially important strategic purposes. In 1944, the pro-Soviet wing of Iran’s first true political party, Tudeh, gained control of the party, and in 1946 even succeeded in winning a majority in Iran’s parliament. Tudeh implemented significant progressive reforms: limitations on child labor, a 48-hour workweek, guaranteed maternity leaves, and a minimum wage. Tudeh’s growing political strength led Stalin to attempt a takeover of Northern Iran in early 1946. He envisioned a "People’s Republic of Azerbaijan" run by Tudeh. Azerbaijanis resisted, and the Iranian Prime Minister at the time, Ahmad Qavam, persuaded Stalin to withdraw his troops as required by the agreement reached before the end of the war. "Jubilant Azerbaijanis celebrated by summarily executing all the Tudeh leaders they could find," writes Kinzer.

Tudeh also suffered in Iran proper. In 1949, a attempt was made to assassinate Mohammad Reza Shah. In spite of the evidence that the would-be assassin was a religious fanatic, the Shah blamed Tudeh, and took repressive measures against it. Thenceforth, Tudeh was only one of several players on the Iranian political field.

This history hardly speaks of a Soviet Union that presented a dire threat to Iranian sovereignty, or even to British commercial interests. The British knew this, and President Truman and Secretary of State Acheson, both savvy and far more scrupulous, knew it. In fact, Kinzer makes it clear that Truman and Acheson believed that the most effective way to forestall a communist Iran was to bring more democracy, more education, more freedom, and higher living standards to the Iranian people. They thought Mossadegh was the man for the job. Thus the British had no choice but to keep their mouths shut regarding a non-existent "communist threat." (More on Kinzer’s treatment of the "communist threat" in Part III of this review.)

Truman chose not to run for re-election, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, running as a Republican on a strong anti-communist platform, won the Presidency in 1952. Even before the inauguration, the British, knowing of the rabid anti-communist sentiments of Secretary of State-designate John Foster Dulles, purposefully played the "communist threat" card. Dulles and his younger brother Alan, who had been appointed to lead the Central Intelligence Agency, easily manipulated Eisenhower into approving a coup against Mossadegh. (Poor Ike: going into his Presidency, he held the same view of Mossadegh as did Truman and Acheson. "I’d like to give the guy ten million bucks," he told British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden before the Dulles brothers worked their magic on him. Our current President, George W. Bush, is clearly as manipulable as Eisenhower was, but in Bush a humanity comparable to Eisenhower’s is much less in evidence.)

Following are a few pertinent tidbits from All The Shah’s Men. Kinzer in double quotes, others in single quotes or italics. My clarifications are in brackets.

In 1951 Iranian Prime Minister and British lackey Ali Razmara tried, unsuccessfully, to hold the line against nationalization of Anglo-Iranian.

In August 1952 Truman finally caved in to Churchill’s pressure and asked Mossadegh to return Anglo Iranian to the British and submit to the opinion of the World Court, into which the British had dragged the nationalization controversy. Truman offered a bribe, in the form of a $10 million aid package and the end of the British embargo of Iranian oil, which was literally strangling Iran. Mossadegh rejected the offer in a scornful address to the Iranian parliament.

After the initial coup attempt appeared to fail, the CIA agent in charge, Kermit Roosevelt, regrouped and decided on his own to make another attempt. Just as his second effort appeared on the brink of success, Roosevelt received a cable from Washington, ordering him to "flee immediately. "

After the coup succeeded:

Those who opposed the coup were right after all:

Finally, Kinzer’s own statement:

In 1984, I heard former CIA agent John Stockwell speak at a meeting of activists opposing President Reagan’s war against the people of Nicaragua. Stockwell had been the CIA station chief in charge of the not-so-covert action against Angola, conceived by President Nixon and his Secretary of State – or National Security Advisor, I don’t recall which – Henry Kissinger. Stockwell later wrote a book about the Angola operation, In Search Of Enemies.

In his talk, Stockwell said that CIA recruits were taught how to get a handle on the enemy-designate’s core persona and values by imagining him or her as a 5-year-old child. Kinzer’s description of Kermit Roosevelt and the Cold War CIA agents makes clear that this method is also useful in understanding many of America’s so-called defenders of freedom.

As Roosevelt surreptitiously entered Iran:

Children at play: cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians. To those who opt for violence as the first response to serious international issues, the advice of peace activist Alice Walker will forever be unintelligible:

"Look carefully at the present you are constructing.
It should look like the future you dream of."

All The Shah's Men -- Review Part III

All The Shah’s Men was obviously a labor of love for Kinzer. Early in the book he reveals his respect for the famously eccentric Mossadegh, and for the Iranian people: "In intellect and education he towered above almost all of them [his countrymen], a drawback for a politician in some countries but not in Iran, where those who do not live the life of the mind have always admired those who do." (Alert readers will naturally wonder what countries Kinzer had in mind.)

In 2002, Kinzer went to Iran "looking for traces of Mohammad Mossadegh." On August 19, 49 years to the day Mossadegh was overthrown, he is alone at the compound where the incorruptible Iranian democrat spent the last eleven years of his life, under house arrest. Leaning against a back wall of the compound, Kinzer finds "the tall double doors of a sturdy iron gate." It is the only artifact remaining of Mossadegh’s home in Tehran. "What history this gate has seen!" Kinzer writes. "The house before which this gate stood was wrecked and burned on the night of August 19, 1953, and later the debris was bulldozed to make way for an apartment building. All that remains is the gate. This gives it great historical importance, ... an almost spiritual aura. I placed my hand on it and held it there for a long time." [I was quite moved by Kinzer’s words myself. B.B.]

All The Shah’s Men is a very painful read, but it is of enormous value just because it presents in one compelling narrative a monumental event in U.S. foreign policy, and because it comes at a time when Americans are critically in need of understanding such events. I recommend it without reservation.

Nevertheless, All The Shah’s Men cannot be entirely satisfying to those of us who had already become familiar with much of the information Kinzer presents. For reasons we will probably never know — and to the detriment of his account — Kinzer withholds useful information.

As noted earlier, John Foster Dulles and his younger brother Allen joined the Eisenhower administration as Secretary of State and Director of the CIA, respectively. In fact, Kinzer gives an inadequate account of their history. Kinzer correctly reports that the brothers were born into wealth. Later, before being tapped by Eisenhower for government work, he tells us that they were both lawyers for the "legendary firm of Sullivan & Cromwell." Kinzer notes that "the Dulles brothers developed a special interest in Iran," and that "Foster always mentioned Iran when he spoke about countries he believed might soon fall to communism." What Kinzer fails to reveal is that Sullivan & Cromwell represented two of the world’s largest companies, Exxon and Mobil (each controlled by the Rockefeller family), and that each company had large contracts for oil with Anglo-Iranian, the super-greedy, and blatantly exploitative British oil company nationalized by Mossadegh. No wonder the Dulles Brothers were so concerned about Mossadegh.

The cynical reader will say "So? Nothing new here. Everyone knows that self-interest is what drives businessmen. That’s just politics as usual." Just so. Nevertheless, it is certain that many of Kinzer’s readers will be well-meaning, uncynical Americans who might naively attribute the Dulles brothers’ anti-communism to a sincere desire that the Iranian people be truly free. Contrasted with Truman’s, Acheson’s, and even Eisenhower’s original view that patience, and even assistance to Mossadegh was the best way to prevent a communist take-over in Iran (which, as we will see, under Mossadegh was not in the cards in any case) the Dulles brothers’ choice of violent covert action against him comes across as pathological. There is no valid reason for leaving this information out of any account of the coup. (The lamest excuse would be that there wasn’t room for it.)

Kinzer compounds this narrative lacuna by failing to make proper journalistic use of his long-departed New York Times predecessor, Kennett Love. Love was the Iran correspondent for the Times at the time of the coup, and Kinzer’s highly selective, even mysterious, references to him make for an interesting story in itself.

Mossadegh’s tolerance of Tudeh, the Iranian communist party, played right into the hands of the rabidly anti-communist Dulles brothers. Kennett Love, on the other hand, was equally clear that Mossadegh was firmly anti-communist, and that he had severely suppressed Tudeh when the occasion called for it. But the reader will not learn about this from Kinzer.

To learn more, and more that is interesting, of Kennett Love’s experience in Iran, we must go to a different book, written by Wall Street Journal reporter Jonathan Kwitny seventeen years before the "fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York": Endless Enemies -- The Making of an Unfriendly World. (Congdon & Weed, New York, 1984.)

In the chapter Upsetting the Balance: Iran and Afghanistan, Kwitny tells us that in 1960, Kennett Love wrote a forty-one page report on the coup. We learn that the report was not published, but was instead handed over to then Director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, the same man who directed the coup from Washington seven years earlier. Ultimately, Love’s paper disappeared, with all of Dulles’s papers, into the bowels of the Princeton University archives. At the time Kwitny wrote, the Dulles papers were administered by a panel headed by a former CIA legal counsel. They were made available only to selected researchers, on condition that "any articles to be based even indirectly on material from the papers" be submitted to advance review (read: prior censorship). Kwitny says that the Wall Street Journal was refused access to the papers several times, just because it would not agree to advance review.

But, the truth will out, as the saying goes. Kwitny received a copy of Love’s paper from an independent source, and thus did not feel bound to submit Endless Enemies to prior censorship, In fact, Kwitny and Congdon & Weed were pretty gutsy.

Kwitny did not give the title of the Love document in his possession, but Kinzer’s bibliography refers to it follows:

As we will see below Kinzer is familiar with Love’s paper.

On May 28, 1953, Mossadegh asked President Eisenhower for help in breaking the British-led boycott of Iranian oil, which was strangling Iran. Instead of helping Mossadegh, Eisenhower waits until June 29 to suggest that he cave in to the British. In the following sections from Endless Enemies — indented, Love is in double quotes, with Kwitny’s clarifications in square brackets. Italics are Kwitny’s, for emphasis; they do not appear in Love’s original paper. My intervening text is full-left-justified.:

After a nicely objective presentation of the self-serving theories of Mossadegh’s foreign and domestic enemies, Love suggests, au contraire:

Further on, Love reinforces the impression that Mossadegh was a nationalist first and foremost:

Later, Love describes the behavior of Tudeh, the communist bogey-man that Washington evoked to justify the coup. Mr. Carroll is the CIA agent in charge of recruiting street thugs to create the chaos that would be blamed on the communists:

So far, then, we have a report by the New York Times’s man in Iran that Mossadegh opposed communism as much as he opposed British hegemony, and that the communist party in Iran might well have been a paper tiger. While certain of Love’s conjectures may well have been the product of seven years’ hindsight, the events on the ground in 1953 Iran were known to him, and these conclusions might easily have been drawn then. At the least, it is certainly of interest to the modern reader of All The Shah’s Men to know that even in 1960, Love’s observations suggested that the fanatical American anticommunists were wrong; wrong about the Soviet Union and wrong about Mossadegh. It is of interest to know that these observations were, and still are, being kept under lock-and-key. Truman and Acheson were right, and Kinzer does us a disservice by not giving them stronger posthumous support for their views through Love’s comments.

It gets worse. Kinzer refers to the Love paper just twice in the notes, each time conjoined with a public reference to the same event. (Interestingly, in the notes Kinzer also refers to Love’s forty-one page paper for Dulles as an "article.") The first reference is about a CIA-recruited Iranian thug, Shaban the Brainless. Kinzer includes with it the reference to Love’s New York Times article of August 23, 1953, in which he mentioned Shaban. The second reference to Love’s "article" is about Love’s secret meeting with Ardeshir Zahedi, the son of General Fazlollah Zahedi, Mossadegh’s replacement-designate. Included with it is a reference to a book by Stephen Dorril, M16: Inside the World of Her Majesty’s Secret Service (New York: Free Press, 2000). (Dorril does not appear anywhere in All The Shah’s Men, but he apparently revealed Love’s meeting with Zahedi in his book.) Let us now look at how Kinzer and Kwitny treat this event. (The two authors are either indented and/or in double quotes. My comments within quotes are in square brackets.)

Kennet Love appears in All The Shah’s Men three days before the coup succeeds. On Sunday, August 16^th Kermit Roosevelt was desperately trying to recover from an attempt that had failed the night before. He had in his possession two firmans, "decrees that the Shah had signed dismissing Prime Minister Mossadegh and naming Zahedi to replace him." The firmans were of questionable legality, but the army was used to respecting royal power, and "the firmans gave the plotters of Operation Ajax a way to wrap themselves in that tradition." (Much as American politicians wrap themselves in Old Glory when they want to deflect attention from their questionable behavior.) The plotters decided to distribute the firman naming Zahedi prime minister "throughout the city, especially in the tough southern neighborhoods where mobs were recruited [by CIA operatives]." As Kinzer tells it:

Upon arriving at the safe house, Kennett Love and Don Scwhind of the Associated Press were surprised:

Here Kinzer leaves us hanging. We do not learn from him if, or how, the two newsmen helped to ensure that "the firman reached as wide an audience as possible." Kwitny is more forthcoming (Love in double quotes):

We can be sure that some copies of this firman found their way to the streets, where CIA hooligans could force passers-by to read them and shout their hearty approval. Too bad Kinzer doesn’t let us in on this little secret, too.

The reader may think that I am being too hard on Kinzer. Me too, at first. After my initial annoyance with him, my softer instincts kicked in and I surmised that he had probably agreed to the same requirement of prior censorship that Kwitny had successfully skirted, and was thus forced — reluctantly, I hoped — to omit unsavory details of Love’s "article." Then I reviewed some materials I had downloaded from the New York Times archives in anticipation of this review.

On April 16, 2000, the New York Times printed a by-line by Kinzer’s colleague, James Risen: C.I.A. Tried, With Little Success, to Use U.S. Press in Coup. There, Risen fearlessly shares with Times readers precisely the same information found in Endless Enemies. Risen is indented, Love in double quotes:

Risen checked with Love on this meaty item:

According to Kwitny, "Kennett Love later explained, rather lamely perhaps, that he acted as he did because of ‘misguided patriotism.’" In any case, if Risen can quote Love without fear, so Kinzer could have quoted him in far more depth than he did.

But Kinzer, clever guy that he is, does indeed refer to Love’s direction of the tanks to Mossadegh’s house. In the text, the event is sandwiched between CIA chief Kermit Roosevelt listening to the takeover of Tehran Radio by his minions, and his departure to "fetch" General Zahedi for a triumphal entrance as the new premier. As Kinzer describes the action (my italics):

Virtually every jot and tittle of Kinzer’s narrative has a reference note. He provides such a note for Roosevelt’s listening to the takeover of Tehran Radio, and for his "fetching" of General Zahedi. Why then, is there no reference note at all given for the arrival of "friendly army units ... with tanks of their own" — obviously the same tanks Kennett Love has publically admitted directing to Mossadegh’s house. How did Kinzer know that "the assailants gave a great cheer" upon their arrival? Kwitny doesn’t mention it. Did Kinzer learn of it in an interview with Kennett Love while researching for the book? Did he make it up to provide some extra color? Whatever the case, we must admit that Kinzer’s little gambit here is very, very slick.

(Patience, dear reader; the end of this review is in sight.)

In his penultimate chapter, wherein he discusses the joy felt by the Dulleses and other plotters at the success of the coup, Kinzer shows signs of the strain he has been under while presenting such an overwhelmingly dark picture of U.S.-British greed and duplicity. It is as if there is a program running in his head that tells him he has gone too far. There is a danger that readers of All The Shah’s Men might conclude that the coup was actually a mistake. Even worse, they might conclude that it was morally wrong. So, Kinzer "goes academic." He presents a masterfully "objective" and "unbiased" account of why the Dulles’s violent approach was chosen over Truman’s and Acheson’s recommendations of patience and assistance. He uses what I call the "he believed, she believed" variant of the "he said, she said" school of reporting. Here is how he does it:

We then read somewhat over a page of accurate presentations of what Eisenhower’s plotters [purportedly] believed, and suggestions by other analysts that they were mistaken. The scales are perfectly balanced. Thus, Kinzer is able to conclude:

Of course it must. All conclusions following counterfactual historical premises are by definition speculative. It is also speculation that I will roll snake eyes with each of my next 100 throws of the dice. In fact, there is nothing in either Kinzer’s or in Love’s narratives that suggest the Soviets were planning a coup, or that they would have had the chutzpah to even make an attempt in the face of honest and massive U.S. support for Mossadegh.

In effect, Kinzer seriously proposes here that if Eisenhower had squashed the British oil embargo, had helped Mossadegh and his millions of passionately devoted supporters build Iran into a modern nation, had let it be known that America would defend true democracy in Iran (as opposed to corporate-friendly oligarchy or tyrannical monarchy), the Soviets would nonetheless have found the same fertile ground for subversion as if America had remained at arm’s length. This is preposterous on its face, and I think Kinzer knows it.

As I said above, I am deeply, and personally grateful to Kinzer for giving us this fine book. But, the coup against Mossadegh was a monstrous crime, even given the ambiguities of the day. In my view Kinzer should have said so. My best guess is that he has spent too long a stretch as a New York Times reporter.

Buy and read All The Shah’s Men, and Endless Enemies. (Get either the Viking or Congdon & Weed version of Endless Enemies — even without the references to Love, the Viking version is highly educational. It would be a nice tribute to one of America’s finest journalists. Tragically, and at great loss to our country, Jonathan Kwitny died of cancer in 1998. ) Draw your own conclusions.

I consider the role of the mainstream press in reporting U.S. foreign policy over the years to be a scandal in itself. How better to close this review than with an observation by Oswald Spengler:

"And as for the modern press, the sentimentalist may beam with contentment when it is constitutionally ‘free’
— the realist merely asks at whose disposal it is."
The Decline Of The West, by Oswald Spengler. Abridged edition, Oxford, 1991. p. 388.

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Post date: August 31, 2003

Since the early 1990s, America’s political discourse has been framed and dominated by the secular and Christian right. Toward understanding this phenomenon in more depth than my aging brain can recall, I recently finished some very informative books, each of which addresses some aspect of this disturbing growth in right wing political power. I list them below in publication order, with discussion of each, not necessarily in that order, following. (I’ve loaned these books out, so I’m working from memory here. Some of my comments may be somewhat jumbled in chronology or even attribution, so don’t quote me. Nevertheless, I believe that whatever "corrections" might be needed in no way detract from the significance of the various items and themes to which I refer. If you read the books, any errors I make below will be clarified without damaging my case.)

The Real Anita Hill, by David Brock. Free Press, 1994

Strange Justice: the Selling of Clarence Thomas, by Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson. Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

Storming the Gates: Protest Politics and the Republican Revival, by Dan Balz and Ronald Brownstein. Little, [Brown & Co.(?)] 1996.

The Seduction of Hillary Rodham, by David Brock. Free press, 1997.

Speaking Truth to Power, by Anita Hill. Anchor, 1997.

Blinded by the Right: the Conscience of an ex-Conservative, by David Brock. Crown, 2002.

Storming the Gates is an encyclopedic description of the socio-political environment that led to the Republican takeover, orchestrated by right-wing Republican Newt Gingrich, of the House of Representatives in 1994. At the time of writing, Dan Balz was the political reporter for the Washington, D.C. bureau of the Washington Post, and Ronald Brownstein was his counterpart at the Los Angeles Times.

The authors identify the wellspring of the takeover: President Ronald Reagan’s message that the source of America’s problems is government itself. They go on to trace the rage felt by the government-hating, tax-hating true-believing right when Reagan’s successor, President George Bush Sr., went back on his campaign pledge: "read my lips -- no new taxes," and signed a large Democrat-inspired tax increase. During the Bush term, there was little the right could do but complain, so Democrat Bill Clinton’s victory over Bush came as a God-send. An informal pact was made between the various sectors of the right to patiently build its power base by disabling the Clinton presidency. Storming the Gates makes clear that Hillary Clinton’s accusation of a "vast, right-wing conspiracy" was precisely on target, and the term has now become accepted by at least some of the mainstream print media. Right-wing talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh played an essential role in promoting the anti-Clinton agenda, and anti-tax organizers like Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform worked behind the scenes. Right-wing legislators like Dick Armey; Tom DeLay , and Newt Gingrich all played key roles in Congress. David Brock, discussed below, was also a major player in the conspiracy. Even as the right became more powerful, its passions were further inflamed whenever Clinton proved himself adept at maneuvering around it, or even co-opting it in some areas.

Storming the Gates is a disturbing book. Writing before the 1996 presidential election, Balz and Brownstein do not attempt to predict what course the anti-government, anti-tax, Clinton-hating movement will take. Their narrative is worth reading today just because, at a 7-year remove, we can see clearly how the power of the right has grown. Several, if not many, of these right-wing "conspirators" are now dutifully serving in the Bush administration. Grover Norquist recently praised Bush for his three tax reductions to date, and confidently predicted both Republican House and Senate majorities through 2012, and a tax reduction package passed every year that Bush is president.

David Brock was a so-called "journalist" for the right-wing bi-monthly The American Spectator. He had become the darling of the right for breaking the "Troopergate" story, which led a woman named Paula Jones to accuse Bill Clinton, as Governor of Arkansas, of sexual harassment. The media feeding frenzy triggered by Troopergate and the Jones accusation led to the Congressional inquiry into the Clintons’ real estate investments (Whitewater); to the Republican-driven, highly pornographic investigation of Clinton’s sexual encounters with intern Monica Lewinsky; and then to Clinton’s impeachment.

Brock’s first book was The Real Anita Hill I have not read it yet (I just ordered it) but its significance has been made clear by Brock himself, as I explain below. The purpose of the book was to discredit Anita Hill, who, after much soul-searching and hesitation, accused Clarence Thomas, President Bush Sr.’s nominee for the vacant seat of retired Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, of sexually harassing her when she worked for him some 8 years earlier at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency in charge of enforcing anti-discrimination laws and of promoting fair hiring practices in the private sector. Hill’s charges against Thomas, and the fact that a large percentage of Americans polled, if not a majority, tended to believe her story over Thomas’s denials, resulted in a right-wing thirst for Hill’s blood, notwithstanding Thomas’s eventual confirmation in October 1991. (Hill did receive death threats during, and well after the hearings.) Thus, The Real Anita Hill, in which Brock coined the quip that Hill was "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty." Notwithstanding -- more likely because of -- Brock’s near-total neglect of accepted standards of journalistic integrity, the American right trembled in ecstasy as it read The Real Anita Hill. Brock’s standing as the pre-eminent "investigative hit man" of right wing "journalism" went stratospheric.

The problem was that Brock was gay, and that in the face of the vehement homophobia of the people whose agenda he served so enthusiastically, he had not "come out." (The story of how he became a gay right-winger, and how he reconciled his work for the virulently homophobic community are best explained by Brock himself in Blinded by the Right, discussed below.) Either just before, or just after, publication of The Real Anita Hill, Brock was forced to reveal his sexual orientation. Instead of being ostracized, as he expected and feared, he was warmly embraced by those who had no problem bashing gays in general, or promoting anti-gay legislation. Hugs all around, literally. Nevertheless, Brock had begun to have some doubts about his work: doubts about his methods – he did no comprehensive research, and according to him, the Spectator’s editor never checked a single item he presented as a "fact" – and even about the goals of those whose approval he had so assiduously sought and won.

Also in 1994, Wall Street Journal reporters Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson published Strange Justice, about the packaging of Supreme Court Justice nominee Thomas by the right wing conspiracy and the Bush administration. Strange Justice makes clear that virtually all of Hill’s confirmable charges, including the charge that Thomas was an avid consumer of pornography, were true. This made the plausibility of her unconfirmable charges -- unwitnessed episodes of harassment -- pretty much bullet-proof. Indeed, when Strange Justice came out, one of Clinton’s "best haters," a woman who played a significant role in the vast conspiracy, immediately called Brock to say "He [Thomas] did it, didn’t he?"

Strange Justice shook Brock to the core, because he had deluded himself that even if his journalistic methods were well below par, he at least was reporting the truth. Nevertheless, Strange Justice called for refutation, and Brock went to work. Brock ultimately failed to refute Mayer’s and Abramson’s meticulously researched work, and he became even more disillusioned with his own unscrupulousness.

But, the glory brought by the success of The Real Anita Hill led Brock to write his second book, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham. Seduction was intended to "demolish" Hillary Rodham Clinton just as Anita Hill had been "demolished." Unfortunately for the right, Brock had by now decided to be a journalist with some measure of integrity, and Seduction was published as a balanced, generally well-received biography of a woman of truly awesome power; and with deeply-held, humanitarian instincts solidly based on liberal Christian values. My own reading of Seduction left me much impressed with Brock’s display of fair, sensitive, and perceptive treatment of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Luckily for Brock, the advance he had received from the publisher was not refundable, and publication was guaranteed.

Finally, where Brock’s homosexuality had not turned his homophobic right-wing fans and patrons against him, his gift to them of a book that presented Hillary Rodham Clinton as a flesh and blood human being, instead of a vampire, was too much for them. Brock was disowned by his former "friends," and he soon re-registered as an Independent. In his article The Fire This Time -- I started it by introducing Paula Jones to the world. Now I’m trying to stop it, (Esquire Magazine, April 1, 1998), Brock apologized to President Clinton for his past knavish motives and methods. Brock closes his mea culpa with the words ".. If sexual witch-hunts become the way to win in politics, if they become our politics altogether, we can and will destroy everyone in public life."

Speaking Truth to Power is Anita Hill’s account of her sexual harassment by Clarence Thomas, and of her later ordeal suffered in the Hill/Thomas Senate hearings. The Republicans on the hearing committee were out to destroy her, and committee Democrats, the majority party, essentially rolled over for them. Hill comes across as a serious woman of high integrity. She presents nicely written explanations of the culture of sexual harassment and the devastating effects it has on its victims. She is at her best in discussing the law prohibiting sexual harassment.

In Blinded by the Right, Brock completes his metamorphosis from right-wing attack dog to real human being. He describes how he became a gay right-winger; how he had suppressed his earlier, more basic liberal, humanitarian values; and how those values finally resurfaced. Blinded by the Right, and its author, were trashed by both the right and the left, but mainstream commentators generally accepted the book, as I do, as a sincere effort to make amends. For example, Brock explains how his scurvy efforts to refute Strange Justice to his decision to be fair to Hillary Clinton in The Seduction of Hillary Rodham. On another level, Blinded by the Right is important because it confirms, through an insider, the fundamental message of Storming the Gates, written 6 years earlier. Brock’s change of heart justifies the hope that all may not be lost to America’s liberal community. Nevertheless, Blinded by the Right is also a disturbing book, in its description of a superbly organized, well-funded, and increasingly dangerous political right wing.

Post date: August 23, 2003

Rogue Nation   American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions

By Clyde Prestowitz Basic Books, 2003. $26 US.

[Note: Most quoted material is indented without quotation marks. So as not to mislead the reader, I try to identify all of Prestowitz’s commentary as specifically his, and thus distinguish it from my own opinions. (Prestowitz is a much nicer guy than I am.) I hope I have not done him injustice. B.B.]

          "To A Louse," (1786)        Robert Burns, Scottish poet

If ever a nation needed the Pow’r to see itself as others see it, it is America today. And, we’re in luck. In Rogue Nation, Clyde Prestowitz makes it his mission to provide that vision out of his own extensive and expert experience with the diplomats and peoples of other countries. This book is a gift of incalculable value, and we ignore its message at our peril. Rogue Nation is a compact trove of facts, arranged in a sequence of chapters with telling titles and catchy subtitles. A sample:

At Odds with the World – and Ourselves;

The Unacknowledged Empire;

America’s Game: including Do as I say, not as I do, Steel is forever, But America owns the sandbox, Backlash;

Running on Empty: including Bubba’s Birthright, Bubba Mortgages His Freedom, Changing Bubba’s Ways;

Who Lost Kyoto;

In Arms We Trust: including Sowing the fields with mines, Sovereignty trumps human rights, The armed economy, Teach them to fight–not to write;

Peaceful People, Endless War;

Wagging the Dog: Two Tales [about the U.S. relationships with Israel and Taiwan];

Footnotes are plentiful, and Prestowitz provides a comprehensive recommended reading list.

Clyde Prestowitz is president of the Economic Strategy Institute in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Trading Places (Basic Books, 1989). He lives in Potomac Maryland.

Rogue Nation is important not only for what it tells us about how we are seen abroad, but because of who wrote it. In Prestowitz’s own words:

. . . . . . . . . .

Thus, Rogue Nation is not a rant by a mush-headed, bleeding-heart liberal like yours truly. Hillary-haters are out of luck, though – Prestowitz does not mention Hillary Clinton even once in the book.

This review is organized around two themes emphasized in Rogue Nation: first, How Others See Us; and second, Why They See Us As They Do.

How Others See Us

The Guardian of London, writing in the spring of 2001 in response to President Bush’s decision to reject the Kyoto treaty on global warming:

A British ambassador:

Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf:

Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt:

French columnist Dominique Moisi:

Prestowitz, on America’s self-image as a peace-loving nation:

Prestowitz, on remarks by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir,

America’s current violent streak is the primary reason why millions of people around the world, consider President Bush to be a greater threat to peace than was Saddam Hussein. But the loss of respect for America, the sense that America has turned its back on its most hallowed values (at least on what America says are its hallowed values), has a different source: the clear understanding by foreigners – an understanding of many decades duration -- that the U.S. is fundamentally a hypocrite. Three major themes make this clear: The Paternal Attitude; Subsidies; and Violence.

The Paternal Attitude.

An important subtext of the Bush administration’s reasoning in deciding that America will "go-it-alone" in dealing with the terrorist issue (and many others as well), is the accusation that the rest of the world is really not "grown-up" enough to handle important global problems. Only the U.S. has the maturity; the means; the will; and above all, the moral force, to tackle these problems (on behalf of all the world’s people’s, of course). Bush is not alone in this attitude. For example, in spite of her popularity as a vacation destination, Europe is held in contempt by millions of American patriots, who note that we "saved Europe’s ass" twice, but since WWII, she has been content to prosper behind the American defensive shield even while bashing American prosperity and culture. Ungrateful SOBs. The hell with Europe, they snort.

The truth is, though, that while historic inter-European rivalries and hostilities have delayed European unification, the U.S. has purposefully kept Europe in a state of arrested development, much as a neurotic father might stunt the growth of a son who he fears might someday challenge his authority. As Europe stumbles its way toward unification, the U.S. imperialist lobby makes it clear that no rival to U.S. power should be tolerated.

Senator Jesse Helms called the proposed "Euro army" a "dangerous and divisive dynamic within NATO."  President Bush’s transition team "called the rapid reaction force [apparently another term for the 'Euro army'] a dagger aimed at NATO’s heart." (NATO, of course, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the U.S.) National Review editor John O’Sullivan warns of Europe’s "drift to a rival and hostile set of policies." According to O’Sullivan,

Prestowitz presents a corrective to the popular view. He explains how the U.S. "systematically moved to hobble European weapons development," and how the U.S. "uses NATO as a way of trumping he E[ropean]U[nion] in Europe." He observes that "if the Europeans are living in fantasy land, it is a fantasy land created and maintained by the United States," and suggests "if we are not willing to let them take on the responsibilities of full-fledged sovereign powers, we can’t simultaneously gripe that they are wimps." Prestowitz sums up the hypocrisy of U.S. paternalism:

The U.S. mantra today is that, among other policies under the rubric of what is called the "Washington consensus," the "free flows of capital, goods, and services" between nations will bring peace and the good life even to the tiniest Third World hamlet.

Secretary of State Colin Powell:

Concomitantly, the U.S., and millions of its citizens, demand that other countries open their markets to U.S. products, and that the governments of these nations refrain from subsidizing their own agriculture and industry.

Too bad that all this lofty rhetoric is part of a massive scam. Two examples from Rogue Nation make the point.

Prestowitz points out that America is the largest exporter of cotton in the world, competing with poor cotton farmers in countries like West Africa’s Mali. This in spite of the fact that American cotton is the highest production cost cotton in the world. American subsidies make up the difference between the American cotton farmers production cost and the world price. As a result of a recent agricultural subsidy act signed by president Bush, Mississippi Delta cotton farmer Ken Hood expects to receive a nearly $1 million subsidy. While the family of the poor cotton farmer in Mali goes hungry, subsidies bring the "average net worth of American cotton-farming households" to $800,000.

And, as if to rub salt in the wound, figuratively speaking, it is not uncommon for conservative American patriots (very likely including Mr. Hood) to look with contempt on the failure of poorer nations to "lift themselves up by the bootstraps" as we did. As if to prove American good-will, this same patriotic American might well point to the annual $40 million in annual aid that the U.S. spends in Mali on "education, health, and other development programs." But, says Prestowitz, "that sum is almost totally negated by the state cotton company’s loss of $30 million caused by sinking world cotton prices."

"So much for trade, not aid," as another critic remarks in a different context. 

Prestowitz suggests that America’s economic hypocrisy should not be dismissed lightly:

He quotes the fall 2002 comment, made directly to him, by former Mexican Finance Minister Angel Guria:

As suggested above, Americans who believe that the United States is a peaceful nation, which resorts to force only as a last resort, are living in a dream world. The examples of U.S. military pro-activity are also too numerous for this space, but one from Rogue Nation suffices to capture the whole of U.S. methods and goals. That it occurred over 100 years ago does not detract from its symbolism, as many of today’s Third World countries can affirm. In 1898, Prestowitz writes

My own experience is as an opponent of President Reagan’s Central America policy, particularly the contra war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. There America’s methods were somewhat different: instead of directly attacking our so-called enemies, we hired thugs and human rights violators of the meanest stripe to do our dirty work for us. And dirty it was. Naturally, it was all sold to the American people as unfortunate, but necessary to contain the Soviet Union.  In pursuit of the contra war, the Reagan Administration was more than willing to destroy Costa Rica’s democracy, with the virtually certain result that the only nation in Latin America without an army would probably have become a military dictatorship–willing to dance to Washington’s tune, of course. Now, it is universally understood that these movements, like that of the Vietnamese, were nationalistic in character.  The only threat that Nicaragua, for example, posed to the U.S., was the threat of a "good example," namely a government that actually cared about its people.  Reprise: Elliott Abrams and Admiral John Poindexter, former architects of Reagan’s violent Central America policy, and serious players in the Iran-Contra scandal, are now serious players in the present Bush administration. That does not bode well for the world.

Finally, the hypocritical U.S. rejection of the International Criminal Court, which Prestowitz addresses in the book.

Prestowitz opens Rogue Nation with an epigraph by Governor John Winthrop, who led the Puritans to Massachusetts:

He closes with the chapter, City on a Hill, in which he summarizes his eloquent plea for a more decent, more honest American foreign policy, and for  less jingoism from the American public. On the moral cost of Washington’s intent to impose American values on the world:

Prestowitz closes the book with something like a prayer:

America needs more patriots like Clyde Prestowitz.

Hegemony or Survival America’s Quest For Global Dominance, by Noam Chomsky. (New York, Metropolitan Books, 2003)

The Sorrows of Empire Militarism Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, by Chalmers Johnson. (New York, Metropolitan Books, 2004)

Metropolitan is an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, and both are printed as part of Holt’s subdivision, The American Empire Project.It seems to me that [the owner(s) of] a major American publishing house is concerned enough about the direction president Bush and his advisors are leading the country that they have decided to name it. This is highly significant.

Very useful information on both Hegemony and Sorrows, including links to interviews with the authors, can be found on the AEP website (see link above).