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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 4/28/17

Part II - How Neocons Push for War by Cooking the Books

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An 1898 cartoon features newspaper publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst dressed as a cartoon character of the day, a satire of their papers' role in drumming up U.S. public opinion for  war.
An 1898 cartoon features newspaper publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst dressed as a cartoon character of the day, a satire of their papers' role in drumming up U.S. public opinion for war.
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This article is Part II of a four-part series on Truthdig. Read Part 1 .

Most Americans outside of Washington policy circles don't know about Team B, where it came from or what it did, nor are they aware of its roots in the Fourth International, the Trotskyist branch of the Communist International. Lawrence J. Korb, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and assistant secretary of defense from 1981 to 1985, attributed the intelligence failure represented by 9/11 to Team B and had this to say about it in a 2004 article for the Los Angeles Times.

"The roots of the problem go back to May 6, 1976, when the director of Central Intelligence, George H.W. Bush, created the first 'Team B'. The concept of a 'competitive analysis' of the data done by an alternative team had been opposed by William Colby, Bush's predecessor as CIA director and a career professional. Although the Team B report contained little factual data it was enthusiastically received by conservative groups such as the Committee on the Present Danger. But the report turned out to be grossly inaccurate. Team B was right about one thing. The CIA estimate was indeed flawed. But it was flawed in the other direction."

Korb went on to explain that a 1978 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence review concluded; "that the selection of Team B members had yielded a flawed composition of political views and biases. And a 1989 review concluded that the Soviet threat had been 'substantially overestimated' in the CIA's annual intelligence estimates. Still, the failure of Team B in 1976 did not deter the hard-liners from challenging the CIA's judgments for the next three decades."

Now long forgotten, the origins of the Team B "problem" actually stretched back to the radical political views and biases of James Burnham, his association with the Communist Revolutionary Leon Trotsky and the creation of powerful eastern establishment ad hoc groups; the Committee on the Present Danger and the American Security Council. From the outset of the Cold War in the late 1940s an odd coalition of ex-Trotskyist radicals and right-wing business associations had lobbied heavily for big military budgets, advanced weapons systems and aggressive action to confront Soviet Communism. Vietnam was intended to prove the brilliance of their theories, but as described by author Fred Kaplan, "Vietnam brought out the dark side of nearly everyone inside America's national security machine. And it exposed something seamy and disturbing about the very enterprise of the defense intellectuals. It revealed that the concept of force underlying all their formulations and scenarios was an abstraction, practically useless as a guide to action." (Wizards of Armageddon page 336.) Kaplan ends by writing, "The disillusionment for some became nearly total." Vietnam represented more than just a strategic defeat for America's defense intellectuals; it represented a conceptual failure in the half-century battle to contain Soviet-style Communism but for Team B, that disillusionment represented the opportunity of a lifetime.

Trotskyist Intellectuals become The New York Intellectuals become Defense Intellectuals

Populated by an inbred class of former Trotskyist intellectuals, the Team B approach represented a radical transformation of America's national security bureaucracy into a new kind of elitist cult. In the 1960s Robert McNamara's numbers and statistics justified bad policy decisions, now personal agendas and ethnic grudges would turn American foreign policy into an ideological crusade. Today those in control of that crusade fight desperately to maintain their grip, but only by de-encrypting the evolution of this secret "double government" can anyone understand America's unrelenting post-Vietnam drift into despotism over the last 40 years.

Rooted in what can only be described as cult thinking, the Team B experiment tore down what was left of the CIA's pre-Vietnam professional objectivity by subjecting it to politicization. Earlier in the decade, the CIA's Office of Strategic Research (OSR) had been pressured by Nixon and Kissinger to corrupt their analysis to justify increased defense spending but the Team B's ideological focus and partisan makeup so exaggerated the threat, the process could never return to normal.

The campaign was driven by the Russophobic neoconservative cabal which included Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pipes, Richard Perle and a handful of old anti-Soviet hardliners like Paul Nitze and General Danny Graham. It began with a 1974 article in the Wall Street Journal by the famed nuclear strategist and former Trotskyist Albert Wohlstetter decrying America's supposed nuclear vulnerability. It ended 2 years later with a ritualistic bloodletting at the CIA, signaling that ideology and not fact-based analysis had gained an exclusive hold on America's bureaucracy.

The ideology referred to as Neoconservatism can claim many godfathers if not godmothers. Roberta Wohlstetter's reputation as one of RAND's preeminent Cold Warriors was equal to her husband's. The couple's infamous parties at their Santa Monica home acted as a kind of initiation rite for the rising class of "defense intellectual". But the title of founding-father might best be applied to James Burnham. A convert from Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky's inner circle, Burnham's 1941, The Managerial Revolution and 1943's The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom championed the anti-democratic takeover then occurring in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy while in 1945's Lenin's Heir he switched his admiration, if only tongue in cheek, from Trotsky to Stalin.

George Orwell criticized Burnham's cynical elitist vision in his 1946 essay Second Thoughts on James Burnham, writing "What Burnham is mainly concerned to show [in The Machiavellians] is that a democratic society has never existed and, so far as we can see, never will exist. Society is of its nature oligarchical, and the power of the oligarchy always rests upon force and fraud... Power can sometimes be won and maintained without violence, but never without fraud."

Orwell is said to have modelled his novel 1984 on Burnham's vision of the coming totalitarian state which he described as "a new kind of society, neither capitalist nor Socialist, and probably based upon slavery."

As a Princeton- and Oxford-educated English scholar (one of his professors at Balliol College was J.R.R. Tolkien), Burnham landed a position as a writer and an instructor in the philosophy department at New York University just in time for the 1929 Wall Street crash. Although initially uninterested in politics and hostile to Marxism, by 1931 Burnham had become radicalized by the Great Depression and, alongside fellow NYU philosophy instructor Sidney Hook, drawn to Marxism.

Burnham found Trotsky's use of "dialectical materialism" to explain the interplay between the human and the historical forces in his History of the Russian Revolution to be brilliant. His subsequent review of Trotsky's book would bring the two men together and begin for Burnham a six-year odyssey through America's Communist left that would in this strange saga, ultimately transform him into the agent of its destruction.

As founder of the Red Army and a firebrand Marxist, Trotsky had dedicated his life to the spread of a worldwide Communist revolution. Stalin opposed Trotsky's views as too ambitious and the power struggle that followed Lenin's death splintered the party. By their very nature the Trotskyists were expert at infighting, infiltration and disruption. Burnham reveled in his role as a Trotskyist intellectual and the endless debates over the fundamental principle of Communism (dialectical materialism) behind Trotsky's crusade. The Communist Manifesto approved the tactic of subverting larger and more populist political parties (entrism) and, following Trotsky's expulsion from the Communist party in November 1927, his followers exploited it. The most well-known example of entrism was the so called "French Turn" when in 1934 the French Trotskyists entered the much larger French Socialist Party, the SFIO, with the intention of winning over the more militant elements to their side.

That same year the American followers of Trotsky in the Communist League of America, the CLA did a French turn on the American Workers Party, the AWP in a move that elevated the AWP's James Burnham into the role of a Trotsky lieutenant and chief advisor.

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Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story and Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire and The Voice,a novel. Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband (more...)
 

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