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THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW - November 5, 2009
What Obama Is Up Against
by: Russ Baker
truthout News Analysis
The first anniversary of Barack Obama's historic election
finds many of his supporters already grousing. Fair enough:
Obama has been more vigorous in some areas than others.
But one essential question goes unasked: How much can any
president accomplish against the wishes of recalcitrant
power centers within his own government?
We Americans harbor a quaint belief that a new president
takes charge of a government that eagerly awaits his next
command. Like an orchestra conductor or perhaps a football
coach, he can inspire or bludgeon and get what he wants.
But that's not how things work at the top, especially
where "national security" is concerned. The Pentagon and
CIA are powerful and independent fiefdoms characterized
by entrenched agendas and constant intrigue. They are
full of lifers, who see an elected president largely as
an annoyance, and have ways of dealing with those who
won't come to heel.
Compound that with the Bush-Cheney administration's
aggressive seeding of its staunch loyalists throughout
the bureaucracy, and you have a pretty tough situation.
Obama, then, has to contend not only with the big donors
and corporate lobbies. His biggest problem resides right
inside his "team."
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The internal battles between American presidents and their
national security establishments are not much reported.
But if it is an invisible game; it is also a devious and
even deadly one. Our civilian leaders end up mirroring
the chronically nervous chiefs of state of the fragile
democracies to our south.
Those who do not kowtow to the spies and generals have had
a bumpy ride. FDR and Truman both faced insubordination.
Dwight Eisenhower, who had served as chief of staff of the
US Army, left the White House warning darkly about the
"military industrial complex." (He of all presidents had
reasons to know.) John Kennedy was repeatedly countermanded
and double-crossed by his own supposed subordinates. The
Joint Chiefs baited him; Allen Dulles despised him (more
so after JFK fired him over the Bay of Pigs fiasco), and
Henry Cabot Lodge, his ambassador to South Vietnam,
deliberately undermined Kennedy's agenda. Kennedy called
the trigger-happy generals "mad" and spoke angrily to
aides of "scattering the CIA to the wind." The evidence
is growing that he suffered the consequences.
In the 1950s, the late Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, a high-
ranking Pentagon official, was assigned by CIA Director
Allen Dulles to help place Dulles's officers under
military cover throughout the federal government. As a
result, Dulles not only knew what was happening before
the president did, but had essentially infiltrated every
corner of the president's domain. One Nixon-era Republican
Party official told me that in the early 1970s, there
were intelligence officers everywhere, including the White
House. Nixon was unaware of the true background of many of
his trusted aides, particularly those who helped drive him
from office. Remember Alexander Butterfield, the so-called
"military liaison," who told Congress about the White
House taping system? Years later, Butterfield admitted to
CIA connections.
In December 1971, Nixon learned of a military spy ring,
the so-called Moorer-Radford operation, that was piping
White House documents back to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The Chiefs were wary of secret negotiations the president
and Henry Kissinger were conducting with America's
enemies, including North Vietnam, China and the USSR, and
decided to keep tabs on this intrusion upon their domain.
Jimmy Carter came into office as revelations of CIA abuses
made headlines. He tried to dismantle the agency's dirty
tricks office, but wound up instead a victim of it - and
a one-term president.
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Those who avoided problems - Johnson, Reagan, Bush Sr. and
Jr. - were chief executives that made no problems for the
Pentagon and intelligence chiefs. All embraced military
and covert operations, expanded wars or launched their
own. The agile Bill Clinton was a special case - no babe
in the woods, he focused on domestic gains and pretty much
steered clear of the hornets' nest.
As for the Bushes, their ascension represented a seizure
of power by the national security state itself. Their
family had profited from arms manufacturing for decades.
The patriarch, Prescott Bush, monitored US assassination
plots against foreign leaders as a senator; and records
indicate that the elder George Bush had been a secret
agency operative for decades before he became CIA director
- and then, 12 years later, president.
Obama seems to understand his narrow range of movement,
and to be carefully picking his fights. He retained many
of Bush's top military brass, and even Bush's Defense
Secretary Robert Gates, who himself had served as a CIA
director for Bush's father. He has trod very carefully
with the spy agency, and has declined to aggressively
investigate Bush administration wrongdoing on torture and
wiretapping. Obama's campaign rhetoric about disengaging
from Iraq seems a long time ago, and the war in Afghanistan
is taking on the hues of permanency.
The old boys' network is very much in place, and it
is hard at work to force Obama's hand, a la Vietnam.
Witness the leaking of Gen. Stanley McChrystal's supposed-
ly "confidential report" calling for escalation in
Afghanistan. The leak was, not surprisingly, to the
reliable Bob Woodward. The reporter was himself in Naval
Intelligence shortly before he went to work at the
Washington Post, where he soon built a career around leaks
from the military and spy establishment. The White House
was furious at the McChrystal release. But what could it
do? Presidents come and go, and the security folks have
ways to hasten the latter.
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Covert alliances and payments to corrupt foreign allies
continue, making creative diplomacy more difficult. In
late October came a front-page story that the brother of
Afghan President Hamid Karzai, suspected of being a major
figure in that country's opium trade, has been on the
CIA's payroll for eight years. Anyone who finds this
shocking should go back and read about the CIA and the
drug trade in Southeast Asia.
Throughout its six-decade history, the CIA has resisted
accountability, with even some of its own nonspook
directors kept in the dark about the agency's most
troubling activities. As for the public's elected
representatives, Nancy Pelosi is the most recent in a
long line of legislators to accuse the CIA of deliberately
misleading Congressional overseers.
None of this is likely to change soon, and not without a
huge fight. Half a century after Ike's famous admonition,
conflict and intrigue remain the engine of our economy,
and everyone from private equity firms to missile makers
to car and truck manufacturers count on that to continue.
The homeland security industry, the most recent head to
grow on this hydra, is now seeking permanency.
So Barack Obama is boxed in. But so are the American
people, and so, really, is democracy itself. Bringing
this inconvenient truth out in the open is the essential
first step toward taking back control of our government
- and our future. For all the reasons laid out here,
Obama will need help. He may, in the rote formulation,
hold "the most powerful office in the world." However,
the extent to which he controls the government he heads,
is another matter.
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