Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (30 page)

“That’s the world I grew up in. The approach still applied to issues, even terrorism. Then these people come in, and they already have the answers, how to spin it, how to get the rest of the world on board. I thought, ‘Wait a minute, that isn’t analysis. It’s the important issues where we really need analysis.’

“In the area of terrorism, there’s a huge potential for emotional reaction. The one thing I told my team [on September 11]—they were mad and they were crying, the whole range of emotions—was that we didn’t have time for emotion that day.”

It ought not to have shocked anyone that a government that deliberately put itself at odds with empirical science would go to war in the way that it did and expect to succeed. The Bush administration could sell anything. Remember the beginning, when it was purely about the Gut, a bone-deep call for righteous revenge for which Afghanistan was not sufficient response. (Donald Rumsfeld lamented that there wasn’t enough in the country to blow up.) In Iraq, though, there would be towering stacks of chemical bombs, a limitless smorgasbord of deadly bacteria, vast lagoons of exotic poisons. Nukes on the gun rack of every pickup in Baghdad. Our troops would be greeted with candy and flowers. The war would take six months—a year, tops. Mission Accomplished. “Major combat operations are over.”

“Part of the problem was that people didn’t want the analytic process because they’d be shown up,” Clarke says. “Their assumptions would be counterfactual. One of the real areas of expertise, for example, was failed-state reconstruction. How to go into failed states and maintain security and get the economy going and defang ethnic hatred. They threw it all out.

“They ignored the experts on the Middle East. They ignored the experts who said [Iraq] was the wrong target. So you ignore the experts and you go in anyway, and then you ignore all the experts on how to handle the post-conflict.”

The worst thing you could be was right. Today, there are a lot of shiny Washington offices housing people who got it right and got left behind. They form a kind of underground. Some of them failed to press their case as hard as they could have. Some of them did press their case, and were punished for doing so. They were ignored, many of them, because they knew too much. They were punished, many of them, because they knew too much and spoke out about what they knew. They see where the country went on automatic pilot. They’re a government in exile representing the reality-based community.

Four thousand lives later, they remember the beginning. A career neoconservative ideologue named Michael Ledeen made himself famous by espousing a doctrine by which, every few years or so, the United States should “throw a small nation up against the wall” to prove that it meant business in the world. And Idiot America, which was all of us, was largely content to put the country on automatic pilot and, cheering, forgot to disengage the mechanism.

Goddamn right. Gimme another. And see what the superpowers in the backroom will have.

THE
office is neat, which is to say that the books are arranged in an orderly fashion as they overwhelm the shelves, and the great stacks of paper are evenly stacked, one next to another, on the desk and on the various tables. Tucked into a brick rowhouse in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., the office is every bit as full as the usual academic’s landfill, but it is nowhere near
as chaotic. It is a busy place, but there’s nothing random about it. Every pile has its purpose.

In 2002, Paul Pillar was working for the Central Intelligence Agency as its national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia. One of Pillar’s duties was to assess and evaluate intelligence regarding, among other places, Iraq. In October 2002, the CIA produced two documents in which Pillar had had a hand. The first was a National Intelligence Estimate that the agency presented to Congress regarding what the Bush administration argued was the overwhelming evidence that Iraq had stockpiled a vast number of dangerous weapons. There were mobile biological laboratories: a captured spy codenamed Curveball said so. There was a deal to buy uranium from the African nation of Niger. There were documents that said so, produced by the Italian government and vetted by British intelligence. There were aluminum tubes that could only be used for building centrifuges for the production of nuclear bombs.

The NIE also contained within its fine print the information that a number of government agencies thought the whole case was a farrago of stovepiped intelligence, cherry-picked data, wishful thinking, and utter bullshit. For example, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research thought the tale of the aluminum tubes was a bunch of hooey. The Air Force pooh-poohed the threat of Iraqi “drone aircraft” that could zoom in through U.S. air defenses, spraying anthrax. The whole Niger episode read to the people who knew the most about Niger, uranium, Iraq, or all three like comic-opera Graham Greene. “There were so many ridiculous aspects to that story,” says one source familiar with the evidence. “Iraq already had five hundred tons of uranium. So why would they bother buying five hundred tons from a country in remote Africa? That would raise the profile in such a high way.”

According to the investigative journalists David Corn and Michael Isikoff, one staffer for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee read the NIE for the first time and determined, “If anyone actually takes time to read this, they can’t believe there actually are major WMD programs.” The staffer needn’t have worried. Hardly anyone in the Congress read the NIE.

Instead, two days later, the CIA released a white paper on the same subject. The white paper was produced with congressional lassitude in mind. It was easy to read. It had color maps and charts and it was printed on glossy paper. All the troublesome caveats in the NIE were gone. In their place were scary skull-and-crossbones logos indicating where the scary weapons were. The thing looked like a pesticide catalog. Seven months after the release of the NIE and the white paper, the United States launched the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Ever since, Pillar has written and spoken about the climate within which those two documents were produced—an environment in which expertise was devalued within government for the purpose of depriving expertise of a constituency outside government. “The global question of whether to do it at all,” he muses. “There never was a process that addressed that question. There was no meeting in the White House or in the Situation Room. There was no policy options paper that said, ‘Here are the pros and cons of invading. Here are the pros and cons of not invading.’ That never happened. Even today, with all the books that have been written, and with some great investigative reporting, you still can’t say, ‘Ah, this is where the decision was made.’”

In the years since the war began, more than a few people have said that the invasion of Iraq was a foregone conclusion the moment that the Supreme Court ruled on the case of
Bush v. Gore
in 2000. The incoming administration was stacked to the
gunwales with people who’d been agitating for over a decade to “finish” what they believed had been left undone at the end of the first Gulf War. Lost in the now endless postmortems of how the country got into Iraq as a response to the attacks of September 11 is the fact that the country had been set on automatic pilot years earlier.

Madison warned at the outset how dangerous the war powers could be in the hands of an unleashed executive. “War,” he wrote in 1793, “is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement.” As the years went by, and the power of the presidency grew within both government and popular culture, Madison looked even more prescient. Writing in the aftermath of the Lyndon Johnson presidency, which collapsed like a dead star from the pressure of an ill-conceived war, Johnson’s former press secretary George Reedy limned the perfect trap that a president can set for himself:

“The environment of deference, approaching sycophancy, helps to foster an insidious belief: that the president and a few of his trusted advisors are possessed of a special knowledge that must be closely held within a small group lest the plans and designs of the United States be anticipated and frustrated by enemies.”

Reedy cites the decisions that were made regarding the bombing of North Vietnam. As he concedes, “it is doubtful that a higher degree of intelligence could have been brought to bear on the problem;” the flaw lay in the fact that “none of these men [Johnson’s pro-bombing advisers] were put to the test of defending their position in public debate.” Even then, President Johnson solicited the opinion of Under Secretary of State George Ball, who thought the whole Vietnam adventure a bloody and futile waste. Johnson wanted Ball’s opinions even when those opinions sent him into paroxysms of rage. Pillar sees inevitable, if imperfect, parallels in the meetings he sat through during the
period between September 11, 2001, and the invasion of Iraq. He recalls walking face-first into a foregone conclusion.

“The only meetings and discussion were either, How do we go about this? or, most importantly, How do we sell this, and how do we get support for this?” he says. “It was a combination of a particular bunch of people who were really determined to do this thing, with a president who seized on the post-9/11 environment and thought, ‘Oh, I’m going to be the war president.’ That’s my thing, after sort of drifting theme-less for a while. There was a synergy there. They came into office with even greater contempt for the bureaucracy and for all the sources of expertise beyond what they considered their own.

“I look at the work of the people who would have been my counterparts … during the Vietnam era, and I admire the courage of some of them. On the other hand, they had it a lot easier than people like me in Iraq, because they were asked and their opinions were welcome. In Iraq, our opinions were never asked. Your opinion clearly wasn’t welcome.”

Elsewhere, the country had become accustomed to confronting self-government through what the historian Daniel Boorstin called “a world of pseudo-events and quasi-information, in which the air is saturated with statements that are neither true nor false, but merely credible.” The effect on the country’s leaders was that they began to believe their own nonsense. The effect on the country was that citizens recognized it as nonsense and believed it anyway. A culture of cynical innocence was born, aggrieved and noisy, nurtured by a media that put a premium on empty argument and Kabuki debate. Citizens were encouraged to deplore their government, ridicule its good intentions, and hold themselves proudly ignorant of its functions and its purposes. Having done so, they then insisted on an absolute right to wash their hands of the consequences.

Cynics bore even themselves eventually. However, as a land
of perpetual reinvention and of many frontiers, and founded on ideas and imagination, America had a solution within its genome. It could create fictions to replace the things from which cynicism had drained its faith. It could become a novelized nation.

Novelizations are so preposterous an idea that they only could have been hatched as an art form here. They are based on the assumption that people will read a book that fills in the gaps of the screenplay of a movie they’ve already seen. A novelization is pure commerce, a salesman’s delight. Few writers brag about writing them; one online critic referred to them memorably as “flipping burgers in someone else’s universe.”

The very first one, written by Russell Holman in 1928, was aimed at promoting a Clara Bow film called
Follow the Fleet.
Since then, science fiction fans have come to dote on them as treasure troves of previously unknown arcana, the movies themselves having spent little time on Han Solo’s childhood bout with Rigellian ringworm. The most successful of the genre was William Kotzwinkle’s best-selling rendition of Steven Spielberg’s
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
, which sold more than a million copies on top of the tens of millions of people who saw the actual movie, but in which, as the film writer Grady Hendrix pointed out in a piece for
Slate
, Kotzwinkle grafted onto the story a genuinely creepy obsession on the part of the lovable little alien with the mother of the children who take him in. Some gaps are best left unfilled.

As art, novelizations are almost completely worthless. As commerce, they make perfect sense. They are creatures of the First Great Premise, by which anything has value if it moves units. And their principles are ready to be applied to almost every endeavor in a country dedicated to using whatever raw material is at hand to create vast vistas of abject hooey.

Once, when there were still actual frontiers, novelizing the country helped explain the new parts of the country to the old. Now, though, all frontiers in America are metaphorical, and the novelization of the country serves to give the national cynicism an America it can believe in. In this, the presidency came to represent a comforting counterfeit. If you sold a presidency well—and it was all about selling—the easy cynicism about “government” could be abandoned with respect to the president, who was the one part of “the government” over whom citizens seemed proud to claim common ownership.