by Thom Hartmann
What if there really was no need for much - or even most - of the Cold
War? What if, in fact, the Cold War had been kept alive for two decades
based on phony WMD threats?
What if, similarly, the War On Terror was largely a scam, and the
administration was hyping it to seem larger-than-life? What if our
"enemy" represented a real but relatively small threat posed by rogue
and criminal groups well outside the mainstream of Islam? What if that
hype was done largely to enhance the power, electability, and stature
of George W. Bush and Tony Blair?
And what if the world was to discover the most shocking dimensions of
these twin deceits - that the same men promulgated them in the 1970s
and today?
It happened.
The myth-shattering event took place in England the first three weeks
of October, when the BBC aired a three-hour documentary written and
produced by Adam Curtis, titled "The Power of Nightmares"
If the emails and phone calls many of us in the US received from
friends in the UK - and debate in the pages of publications like The
Guardian are any indicator, this was a seismic event, one that may have even
provoked a hasty meeting between Blair and Bush a few weeks later.
According to this carefully researched and well-vetted BBC documentary,
Richard Nixon, following in the steps of his mentor and former boss
Dwight D. Eisenhower, believed it was possible to end the Cold War and
eliminate fear from the national psyche. The nation need no longer be
afraid of communism or the Soviet Union. Nixon worked out a truce with
the Soviets, meeting their demands for safety as well as the US needs
for security, and then announced to Americans that they need no longer
be afraid.
In 1972, President Richard Nixon returned from the Soviet Union with a
treaty worked out by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the beginning
of a process Kissinger called "detente." On June 1, 1972, Nixon gave a
speech in which he said, "Last Friday, in Moscow, we witnessed the
beginning of the end of that era which began in 1945. With this step,
we have enhanced the security of both nations. We have begun to reduce
the level of fear, by reducing the causes of fear-for our two peoples,
and for all peoples in the world."
But Nixon left amid scandal and Ford came in, and Ford's Secretary of
Defense (Donald Rumsfeld) and Chief of Staff (Dick Cheney) believed it
was intolerable that Americans might no longer be bound by fear.
Without fear, how could Americans be manipulated?
Rumsfeld and Cheney began a concerted effort - first secretly and then
openly - to undermine Nixon's treaty for peace and to rebuild the state
of fear and, thus, reinstate the Cold War.
And these two men - 1974 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Ford
Chief of Staff Dick Cheney - did this by claiming that the Soviets had
secret weapons of mass destruction that the president didn't know
about, that the CIA didn't know about, that nobody but them knew about.
And, they said, because of those weapons, the US must redirect billions
of dollars away from domestic programs and instead give the money to
defense contractors for whom these two men would one day work.
"The Soviet Union has been busy," Defense Secretary Rumsfeld explained
to America in 1976. "They've been busy in terms of their level of
effort; they've been busy in terms of the actual weapons they 've been
producing; they've been busy in terms of expanding production rates;
they've been busy in terms of expanding their institutional capability
to produce additional weapons at additional rates; they've been busy in
terms of expanding their capability to increasingly improve the
sophistication of those weapons. Year after year after year, they've
been demonstrating that they have steadiness of purpose. They're
purposeful about what they're doing."
The CIA strongly disagreed, calling Rumsfeld's position a "complete
fiction" and pointing out that the Soviet Union was disintegrating from
within, could barely afford to feed their own people, and would
collapse within a decade or two if simply left alone.
But Rumsfeld and Cheney wanted Americans to believe there was something
nefarious going on, something we should be very afraid of. To this end,
they convinced President Ford to appoint a commission including their
old friend Paul Wolfowitz to prove that the Soviets were up to no good.
According to Curtis' BBC documentary, Wolfowitz's group, known as "Team
B," came to the conclusion that the Soviets had developed several
terrifying new weapons of mass destruction, featuring a nuclear-armed
submarine fleet that used a sonar system that didn't depend on sound
and was, thus, undetectable with our current technology.
The BBC's documentarians asked Dr. Anne Cahn of the U.S. Arms Control
and Disarmament Agency during that time, her thoughts on Rumsfeld's,
Cheney's, and Wolfowitz's 1976 story of the secret Soviet WMDs. Here's
a clip from a transcript of that BBC documentary:
"Dr ANNE CAHN, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1977-80: They
couldn't say that the Soviets had acoustic means of picking up American
submarines, because they couldn't find it. So they said, well maybe
they have a non-acoustic means of making our submarine fleet
vulnerable. But there was no evidence that they had a non-acoustic
system. They're saying, 'we can't find evidence that they're doing it
the way that everyone thinks they're doing it, so they must be doing it
a different way. We don't know what that different way is, but they
must be doing it.'
"INTERVIEWER (off-camera): Even though there was no evidence.
"CAHN: Even though there was no evidence.
"INTERVIEWER: So they're saying there, that the fact that the weapon
doesn't exist.
"CAHN: Doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. It just means that we
haven't found it."
The moderator of the BBC documentary then notes:
"What Team B accused the CIA of missing was a hidden and sinister
reality in the Soviet Union. Not only were there many secret weapons
the CIA hadn't found, but they were wrong about many of those they
could observe, such as the Soviet air defenses. The CIA were convinced
that these were in a state of collapse, reflecting the growing economic
chaos in the Soviet Union. Team B said that this was actually a cunning
deception by the Soviet regime. The air-defense system worked
perfectly. But the only evidence they produced to prove this was the
official Soviet training manual, which proudly asserted that their
air-defense system was fully integrated and functioned flawlessly. The
CIA accused Team B of moving into a fantasy world."
Nonetheless, as Melvin Goodman, head of the CIA's Office of Soviet
Affairs, 1976-87, noted in the BBC documentary,
"Rumsfeld won that very intense, intense political battle that was
waged in Washington in 1975 and 1976. Now, as part of that battle,
Rumsfeld and others, people such as Paul Wolfowitz, wanted to get into
the CIA. And their mission was to create a much more severe view of the
Soviet Union, Soviet intentions, Soviet views about fighting and
winning a nuclear war."
Although Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld's assertions of powerful new Soviet
WMDs were unproven - they said the lack of proof proved that
undetectable weapons existed - they nonetheless used their charges to
push for dramatic escalations in military spending to selected defense
contractors, a process that continued through the Reagan
administration.
But, trillions of dollars and years later, it was proven that they had
been wrong all along, and the CIA had been right. Rumsfeld, Cheney, and
Wolfowitz lied to America in the 1970s about Soviet WMDs.
Not only do we now know that the Soviets didn't have any new and
impressive WMDs, but we also now know that they were, in fact, decaying
from within, ripe for collapse any time, regardless of what the US did
- just as the CIA (and anybody who visited Soviet states - as I had -
during that time could easily predict). The Soviet economic and
political system wasn't working, and their military was disintegrating.
As arms-control expert Cahn noted in the documentary of those 1970s
claims by Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Rumsfeld:
"I would say that all of it was fantasy. I mean, they looked at radars
out in Krasnoyarsk and said, 'This is a laser beam weapon,' when in
fact it was nothing of the sort. ... And if you go through most of Team
B's specific allegations about weapons systems, and you just examine
them one by one, they were all wrong."
"INTERVIEWER: All of them?
"CAHN: All of them.
"INTERVIEWER: Nothing true?
"CAHN: I don't believe anything in [Wolfowitz's 1977] Team B was really
true."
But the neocons said it was true, and organized a group - The Committee
on the Present Danger http://www.fightingterror.org/ - to promote their
worldview. The Committee produced documentaries, publications, and
provided guests for national talk shows and news reports. They worked
hard to whip up fear and encourage increases in defense spending,
particularly for sophisticated weapons systems offered by the defense
contractors for whom neocons would later become lobbyists.
And they succeeded in recreating an atmosphere of fear in the United
States, and making themselves and their defense contractor friends
richer than most of the kingdoms of the world.
The Cold War was good for business, and good for the political power of
its advocates, from Rumsfeld to Reagan.
Similarly, according to this documentary, the War On Terror is the same
sort of scam, run for many of the same reasons, by the same people. And
by hyping it - and then invading Iraq - we may well be bringing into
reality terrors and forces that previously existed only on the margins
and with very little power to harm us.
Curtis' documentary suggests that the War On Terror is just as much a
fiction as were the super-WMDs this same group of neocons said the
Soviets had in the 70s. He suggests we've done more to create terror
than to fight it. That the risk was really quite minimal (at least
until we invaded Iraq), and the terrorists are - like most terrorist
groups - simply people on the fringes, rather easily dispatched by
their own people. He even points out that Al Qaeda itself was a brand
we invented, later adopted by bin Laden because we'd put so many
millions into creating worldwide name recognition for it.
Watching "The Terror of Nightmares" is like taking the Red Pill in the
movie The Matrix.
It's the story of idealism gone wrong, of ideologies promoted in the US
by Leo Strauss and his followers (principally Wolfowitz, Feith, and
Pearle), and in the Muslim world by bin Laden's mentor, Ayman Zawahiri.
Both sought to create a utopian world through world domination; both
believe that the ends justify the means; both are convinced that "the
people" must be frightened into embracing religion and nationalism for
the greater good of morality and a stable state. Each needs the other
in order to hold power.
Whatever your plans are for tonight or tomorrow, clip three hours out
of them and take the Red Pill. Watch Curtis' BBC documentary.
But be forewarned: You'll never see political reality - and certainly
never hear the words of the Bush or Blair administrations - the same
again.
Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored
Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated
daily progressive talk show. http://ThomHartmann.com/
