That is why the first priority of his second term
has been the elimination of the few government sources of information
that could challenge the images he wants to project to the public. Bush
doesn’t want the State Department or the Central Intelligence Agency
portraying his Iraq and other foreign policies as abject failures or
reckless adventures.
So, by attacking these remaining pockets of
analytical resistance, Bush is moving to ensure that his administration
can keep much of the U.S. population seeing a near-empty cup as almost
entirely full, a concept known in the intelligence world as “perception
management.”
On a personal level, Bush appears to have found in
his electoral victory a validation of his public-relations strategy of
casting his foreign policy as a black-and-white war between good and
evil. In this tough-talking approach, Bush has been helped immeasurably
by the powerful conservative news media, ranging from AM talk radio to
Fox News, from right-wing newspaper columnists to Internet bloggers.
Indeed, it is impossible to understand why
Americans have grown so detached from reality without appreciating the
combined impact of this conservative media – built over the past quarter
century – and Bush’s personal insistence on loyalty over almost all
other values. These two factors have made the United States a kind of
ultimate test for the Orwellian intelligence theories of “perception
management.”
Controlling Opinions
“Perception management” – also known as “public
diplomacy” – is a propaganda strategy for controlling how a target
population views political events. Refined by intelligence services as
they tried to manipulate foreign populations, the practice eventually
seeped into domestic U.S. politics as a way to manipulate
post-Vietnam-War-era public opinion.
In the early 1980s, the Reagan-Bush administration
saw the “Vietnam Syndrome” – a reluctance to commit military forces
abroad – as a strategic threat to robust Cold War policies. So the
administration launched an extraordinary effort to influence how the
American people perceived overseas events, essentially by exaggerating
threats from abroad and demonizing selected foreign leaders.
Psychological warfare experts from the CIA and Army
Special Forces played key roles in implementing the strategy, which was
carried out from offices in President Ronald Reagan’s National Security
Council and a “public diplomacy” bureaucracy set up at the State
Department.
The strategy, which included bullying the U.S. news
media into line over issues such as the conflicts in Central America,
proved remarkably successful. [For more on this history, see Robert
Parry’s
Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq
or Parry’s
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press and ‘Project Truth.’]
These lessons were not lost on Dick Cheney and
other Republicans who had lived through both the difficult post-Vietnam
years and the Reagan-Bush era of the 1980s. With the second Bush
administration, these experienced Republicans recognized that
controlling the flow of government information – and the public’s
perception of overseas reality – would again be vital in implementing
their vision of a new American Empire for the 21st Century.
During the buildup to the Iraq War, Cheney even
went to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to bang heads with
intelligence analysts who doubted White House claims about Iraq’s
weapons of mass destruction. Many of these mid-level bureaucrats
acquiesced to Cheney’s demands, but others resisted. After the Iraq
invasion failed to find WMD, some of these suppressed CIA doubts began
surfacing and causing Bush embarrassment, especially during Campaign
2004.
Four More Years
Now, however, with a fresh lease on four more
years, Bush is inflicting payback on the CIA, especially its analytical
division and its intelligence-gathering network, and on the State
Department, whose analysts also questioned Bush’s Middle East policies.
Acting through new CIA Director Porter Goss, the
Bush administration read the riot act to Langley’s intelligence
professionals that they must get behind Bush’s policies or get out. The
demands have led to an exodus of senior CIA officials, including deputy
CIA chief John E. McLaughlin and deputy director of operations Stephen
R. Kappes.
Bush then replaced Secretary of State Colin Powell,
who was pliable but at least known for protecting the department’s
bureaucracy. Powell’s successor is the famously compliant national
security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s ultimate “yes” woman who is so
cozy with her boss that she once slipped up at a dinner party and
referred to Bush as “my husb…” before catching herself and replacing
that with “President Bush.”
The end result will almost surely be that Bush will
hear even fewer contradictions to his judgments, while Congress and the
news media will be cut off from internal government sources of
information that could be used to question Bush’s decisions.
The powerful conservative news media played an
important role, too, in setting the stage for these ongoing purges.
Conservative columnists, including Robert Novak and David Brooks, pushed
the dubious claim that the CIA’s only rightful role is to serve the
president. They accused the CIA of disloyalty in trying to sabotage
Bush.
“Now that he’s been returned to office, President
Bush is going to have to differentiate between his opponents and his
enemies,” wrote Brooks in the New York Times. “His opponents are found
in the Democratic Party. His enemies are in certain offices of the
Central Intelligence Agency.”
To Brooks, the justification for Bush going after
the CIA was the release of information that made Bush look bad.
“At the height of the campaign, CIA officials, who
are supposed to serve the president and stay out of politics and policy,
served up leak after leak to discredit the president’s Iraq policy,”
Brooks wrote. “In mid-September, somebody leaked a CIA report predicting
a gloomy or apocalyptic future for the region. Later that month, a
senior CIA official, Paul Pillar, reportedly made comments saying he had
long felt the decision to go to war would heighten anti-American
animosity in the Arab world.” [NYT, Nov. 13, 2004]
Bush as Victim
In other words, conservative commentators were
afraid that plainly accurate analyses by CIA officials represented a
threat to Bush’s power and justified his exacting retribution against
these out-of-step analysts. It seems that no matter how much power Bush
and the Republicans amass, their media apologists always make them out
to be the victims.
It’s also a misunderstanding of history to claim
that the CIA exists to “serve the president.” While it may be true that
the “operations directorate” was created as a secret paramilitary arm
for the U.S. executive, the CIA’s analytical division was established to
provide unvarnished information to both the president and other parts of
the U.S. government, including Congress.
Even at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and
1960s, the CIA’s analytical division took pride in telling presidents
what they didn’t want to hear – such as debunking Eisenhower’s “bomber
gap” or Kennedy’s “missile gap” or Johnson’s faith in the air war
against North Vietnam.
Though never perfectly applied, the ethos of
objective analysis continued through the mid-1970s. Then, CIA analysis
began to come under sustained attack from conservatives and
neoconservatives who insisted that the Soviet Union was a rapidly
expanding military menace with its eye on world conquest. The CIA
analytical division held a more nuanced view of the Soviet threat,
viewing Moscow as a declining superpower struggling to keep pace with
the West while coping with fissures inside its own empire.
This CIA analysis was the backdrop for the “détente
strategy” followed by President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger, who sought to negotiate arms control agreements with
the Soviet Union.
Reagan’s Emergence
Nixon’s ouster over the Watergate scandal and
Ronald Reagan’s entrance on the national stage in 1976, however, altered
the political dynamic. Scared by Reagan’s successes in the Republican
primaries, President Gerald Ford ordered the word “détente” dropped from
the White House lexicon and let then-CIA Director George H.W. Bush open
up the CIA’s analytical division to an unprecedented challenge from
right-wing intellectuals, known as “Team B.”
The “Team B” assessment, involving a young academic
named Paul Wolfowitz, accused the CIA analytical division of
systematically underestimating the growing Soviet threat. In late 1976,
accommodating this conservative wing of the Republican Party, Bush
adopted a more alarmist CIA estimate of Soviet power.
When Reagan became president in 1981, with Bush as
his vice president, the assault on the CIA’s analytical division resumed
in earnest. Analysts who balked at the new administration’s ideological
vision of the Soviet Union as a 10-foot-tall behemoth were shunted aside
or forced out of the CIA.
The CIA’s once proud Soviet division took the brunt
of the attacks. The surviving analysts began ignoring the mounting
evidence of a rapid Soviet decline, so as not to contradict the
Reagan-Bush justification for an expanded U.S. military and for bloody
interventions in Third World conflicts from Nicaragua to Afghanistan.
‘Perception Management’
Having fitted the CIA with these ideological
blinders, the Reagan-Bush administration next turned to whipping the
American people into line. There, the magic words were “perception
management,” as propagandists developed “themes” to frighten American
citizens about threats from leftist-ruled Nicaragua or from peasant
rebellions in El Salvador and Guatemala.
Rather than internal civil wars against corrupt
oligarchies, these conflicts were pitched as “beachheads” for a Soviet
assault on the southern border of the United States.
In reality, Moscow couldn’t even keep control along
its own borders. But the Reagan-Bush intimidation of the U.S.
intelligence system proved so effective that CIA analysts wouldn’t dare
let themselves see the signs of the Soviet crackup.
Ironically, when the Soviet Empire collapsed in the
late 1980s, the CIA took the blame for “missing” one of the most
important political events of the Twentieth Century. Ironically, too,
Reagan, who was most responsible for building up the Soviet straw man,
got the most credit when it fell down. [For details on this intelligence
failure, see Parry’s
Secrecy & Privilege.]
Since then, I have talked with CIA veterans who
acknowledge that they overstated the Soviet threat despite valid
intelligence from their own agents inside the Soviet bloc who were
describing the internal problems. But this U.S. intelligence failure was
not just one of misjudgments; it was one of ideological pressure that
distorted the reality that then became the basis for U.S. government
policies and was sold to the American people as how they should perceive
the world.
That pattern is now recurring. Intelligence is
being manipulated to justify policy, rather than letting objective
analysis inform policy. Bush makes his decisions based on his “gut”
instincts and then the evidence is compiled to justify his decisions.
The next step will be the continued management of
the perceptions of the American people. As U.S. intelligence agencies
sing along to Bush’s tune, the propaganda will be amplified through the
vast conservative media echo chamber. The mainstream press can be
counted on to join the chorus.
Reality was on the ballot on Nov. 2. It seems to
have lost.