I'm afraid I'm getting rather demoralized. I heard in the last couple of days that it's now standard wisdom in the UK that the appeasement strategy of England during the run-up to WWII was "by design," and intentional. It was all part of a plan to fool Hitler into thinking England wasn't preparing for war. Part and parcel of this theory is the idea that the woeful condition of England's defense establishment during the period of the Nazi buildup was, somehow, inevitable. That is, it wasn't the result of bumbling and short-sighted policies or wishful thinking, but simply a matter of economic necessity. (Never mind that the Nazis or Fascists didn't seem so constrained by "inevitable reality.") It's a kind of insidious revisionism that now passes for wisdom. Breathtaking. Well, I'm hardly breathing anyway.
Because it's not unlike the conventional wisdom that's about to be promoted again in an interview with former White House Terrorism Advisor, and current Daniel Ellsberg wannabe, Richard Clark.
I've just seen the teasers for the interview on Sunday night's 60 Minutes, but he apparently casts Rumsfeld as something of an idiot who focussed on Iraq for much the same reason that a dope searches for his keys where the light is better. Clark, who has given some devastating interviews to Vanity Fair, is (how shall I put this) "infinitely dismissive" of any sort of notion that there was an actual link between Al Qaeda and Saddam, even though recent articles in the Weekly Standard and Slate, suggest that the CIA now has a virtual consensus that such a link not only existed, but goes back to 1993. So up is down, and forward is reverse, apparently.
It doesn't matter. The conventional wisdom is that no such link ever existed, that Iraq is totally unrelated to the War on Terror, and that even now the terrorist "insurgency" in Iraq is unrelated to global terrorism. This is now the dominant view folks, so get used to it. And Richard Clark is about to be trotted out to put a few more nails in the coffin of this not-quite-dead notion that the Middle Eastern Nazi-Fascist-Islamist milleau (which is a polite word for "swamp," I guess) and global terrorism are of-a-piece. God forbid we wouldn't be able to dismember a problem to justify a few more blinder-induced "area specializations" that can't see the forest for the trees. What the heck is the world coming to, besides World War Four, I mean?
Posted by Demosophist at March 20, 2004 09:37 AM | TrackBackThis is a powerful illusion. When the truth is unpleasant, there is a great temptation to ignore it. I believe that this explains why this view is widely held. Reality has a way of crashing the party, however. I just hope that we are not caught too unprepared when it happens.
Posted by: Ben at March 21, 2004 04:33 PMClarke was the exemplar of pre-911 conventional wisdom. He was one of the guys in charge. Was there any doubt that he'd say these things? Of course he's going to be pushing the non-state-sponsored view of the new terrorism - it's his paradigm.
Posted by: Mitch H. at March 22, 2004 09:01 AMYes, although I think I was giving Clarke too much credit in my layman's ignorance. From the current buzz, it sounds as if Clarke was far more interested in goofy cyberterror issues than anything as pedestrian as non-state-sponsored terrorism. Apparently his one and only pre-911 briefing of the president was about cybersecurity issues?
Posted by: Mitch H. at March 23, 2004 10:56 AM