It is not a coincidence that we find Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney at the apex of these policies. Theirs has been a close relationship bred of a mutual belief in American military, political and economic supremacy and a myopic assurance that the best way to accomplish the realization of policies intended to facilitate this supremacy on a global level is to create an environment of fear that welcomes with open arms these designs on global dominance.
The factual distortions and inflammatory rhetoric that are part of the Bush administration’s strategy to win the hearts and minds of the American people are but echoes of a past that because of the players and strategy draw remarkable parallels (and hopefully provide lessons) between the events of forty years ago and today.
The month after Gerald Ford was sworn in as the thirty-eighth President in September 1974, he brought Donald Rumsfeld back from NATO as the White House chief of staff. Rumsfeld quickly installed his protégé, Dick Cheney, as his deputy, the same aide-de-camp role that Cheney had played under Rumsfeld in the Nixon administration. The two men held these positions for more than a year, until 1975 when Ford appointed Rumsfeld his secretary of defense and named Cheney to be Rumsfeld's successor as White House chief of staff.
Rumsfeld, already possessed of a reputation as one of the toughest “in fighters” in government, quickly turned his attention to undoing some of the mistakes he believed to have been committed during the Nixon presidency, most notably, the lessening of tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. In late 1975 and early 1976, Rumsfeld began a frontal challenge to then-Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger's policies of dÈtente and arms control (SALT) with the Soviet Union that he had negotiated while in the Nixon White House by claiming, without valid bases, that the Soviet Union remained a significant and gathering threat to the United States. In a press conference given at the DOD in 1976, for example, Rumsfeld told the media:
“The Soviet Union has been busy. 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."
Replace the words, “Soviet Union” and “they” with “Saddam Hussein” and “the Iraqis”, and you have one of the speeches Don delivered from the same podium twenty five years or so later. Remarkable.
A major component of Rumsfeld’s strategy was the creation of Team B, a committee comprised of “outside experts” gathered to assess the quality and validity of threat assessments being circulated by the CIA. Ironically, it as W’s father, as then-director of the CIA who approved the creation of Team B at the behest of a number of conservative cold warriors and hard liners, chief among them, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Cheney, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz (might we call them Bush’ “A” Team?).
Given the opportunity to undertake an objective analysis of the data being produced by the CIA, Team B consistently interpreted the information in its worst light drawing conclusions that invariably led to a near-Dooms Day scenario. It reported, for instance, that the Soviets would have 500 intercontinental Backfire bombers capable of striking the United States by 1984. In reality, only 235 were ever deployed. Team B also claimed that the Soviets were working on an anti-acoustic submarine, though they failed to find any evidence of one. The hawks of the time explained away this lack of evidence by stating that ‘the submarine may have already been deployed because it appeared to have evaded detection.’" (“Its Time To Bench ‘Team B’”, Lawrence Korb, Aug. 18, 2004, Center for American Progress)
Team B also contended that the CIA was consistently underestimating Soviet military expenditures. With the advantage of hindsight, we now know that Soviet military spending increases began to slow down precisely as Team B was writing about "an intense military buildup in nuclear as well as conventional forces of all sorts, not moderated either by the West's self-imposed restraints or by SALT." 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. Trillions of dollars were poured into the military-industrial complex. It was ultimately proven, however, that they -- Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz -- had been wrong all along about Soviet weapons of mass destruction and their intention to use them and that the CIA had been right. 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 had indicated in its threat analyses and National Intelligence Estimates. “For more than a third of a century, assertions of Soviet superiority created calls for the United States to "rearm." In the 1980s, the call was heeded so thoroughly that the United States embarked on a trillion-dollar defense buildup. As a result, the country neglected its schools, cities, roads and bridges, and health care system. From the world's greatest creditor nation, the United States became the world's greatest debtor--in order to pay for arms to counter the threat of a nation that was collapsing.” (“Team B: The trillion-dollar experiment”, Anne Hessing Cahn, April 1993 pp. 22, 24-27 (vol. 49, no. 03) © 1993 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists).
The suspicions and fear-mongering that surrounded the deliberate over-estimate of the Soviet threat during the ‘70s and early ‘80s morphed into the fear mongering by many of the same persons about the threat posed by Iraq we are currently facing. Though Team B’s work ultimately ended during the Clinton administration, its effort to impose its distorted world view was taken up by “The Committee on the Present Danger” and ultimately by the “Project for the New American Century” (PNAC). As with Team B’s advocacy during the ‘70s and ‘80s, PNAC, in 1998, urged then-President Clinton to recognize the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and immediately remove him from power by strategic means. The signatories of that letter included old Team B’ers, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle with an assist from the now notorious, John Bolton. Though PNAC has sponsored the authorship of a large number of position papers since its inception in 1997, it was its blueprint for global domination, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century”, authored by former Team B member, Wolfowitz and others in 2000, which has garnered the most attention for PNAC because of its contention that an overthrow of Hussein and the establishment of an American presence in Iraq was essential first step to preserving and protecting American interests and superiority abroad.
Most assuredly, the echoes of the past are continuing to reverberate through our lives. If there is a distinction to be drawn it is in the success realized by Rumsfeld and Cheney in gaining access to an administration that is not simply open to their ideology but one that embraces its principles and the means of imposing this ideology upon the American people by any means necessary including fear, intimidation and demagoguery.
One can only hope that as with any echo, its reverberations will grow faint and eventually become silent.
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