The Long View: The Scorpion's Gate
Richard Clarke was often featured on The Long View, as a hostile insider to the Iraq policies of President George W. Bush. Re-reading this review of the novel, The Scorpion’s Gate [Amazon link] by Clarke, I feel that Clarke didn’t necessarily have quite as terrible a grasp of the Middle East as John sometimes claimed, but this is really the meat of John’s criticism of this book:
More generally, Clarke underestimates the degree to which the problems of the Arab world are autochthonous. Al Qaeda and its affiliates object to the presence of American forces less because those forces are an affront to local sensibilities than because they are a barrier to Islamist ambitions. Yes, various nationalist and jihadist groups want to overthrow the government of Saudi Arabia, and perhaps for good reason, but not chiefly because the Saudi government allowed US troops to remain on its soil while the situation in Iraq was unresolved in the 1990s.
Clarke is right in his belief that we would not be worrying much about the Middle East at all if we had developed alternative energy technologies, but his Islamyah character is wrong when he says the conflicts in the oil-producing Middle East are therefore the fault of the oil-importing countries in the developed world. Other countries control vital commodities without turning into geopolitical freak shows. Commodity-based economies present special dangers to a political system, but not all exporting countries succumb to them. The fact is that all post-Ottoman Arab countries have a legitimacy deficit. Oil is not the cause of the deficit; oil is why we notice the deficit.
John also astutely noticed that Clarke’s book was an accurate description of the slow envenomization of American politics:
On a less dramatic level, however, the opposition to the Secretary is in fact something like the way that the intelligence agencies function in national politics today. If they don’t like a policy of the President or of a cabinet member, they subvert it by leaking information to the press. The information may relate to the substance of the policy, or it may be personal information that would embarrass the policy’s proponent. Most worrisome of all has been the tendency to criminalize policy debates; Executive Branch officials who are out of favor with certain editorial pages will find that they have been indicted for something or other.
The Scorpion’s Gate
By Richard A. Clarke
Putnam, 2005
305 Pages, US$24.95
ISBN 0-399-15294-6
No man is on oath when writing a thriller. On the other hand, when the man has been in various jobs in the State Department and the Pentagon for three decades and has served two recent presidents (W. J. Clinton and G. W. Bush) as an advisor on terrorism, we should perhaps pay attention when the caption on the thriller’s dust jacket reads “Sometimes you can tell more truth through fiction.” Since the author has already written two non-fiction books about his career and his views, we already know that he is less than pleased with G. W. Bush’s handling of the terrorist threat against the United States and with the launching of the Iraq War. The thriller form allows Clarke to drop a little bureaucratic gossip and to make appalling accusations against fictional officials who, he insists, should in no way be confused with the actual public servants they loosely resemble. More important, the book points to a dangerous dysfunction at the highest level of the American government that would be too shocking to reveal in a frank memoir. Unfortunately, the dysfunction to which the book points is not the one that author wants us to notice.
One of the other advantages of fiction is that you can set the story a few years in the future, when the folly of present policy has become manifest to all. In this future, the new Iraqi government ordered all American forces out of the country in 2006. Iraq promptly became a Shia satellite of Iran. The House of Saud has been driven from Riyadh to the tonier suburbs of Los Angeles, and Saudi Arabia has been renamed “Islamyah” by a new regime that contains moderate-religious, secularist, and Islamist elements. Meanwhile, the economic and political heft of China has grown to the point where the commanding American admiral in the Persian Gulf regards with grave misgivings the prospect of a Sino-American confrontation in the Indian Ocean.
The book is about an international crisis that results from a collision of two hare-brained schemes: the Islamists in Islamyah plan to bring in Chinese troops and nuclear-armed missiles to forestall an American invasion, while an aggressive American Secretary of Defense plans to launch just such an invasion. That outrage would nominally seek to limit the scope of an invasion of eastern Islamyah by Iran, but the Secretary is secretly in league with Iran to coordinate the invasion through a wonkish State Department official nicknamed “Dr. Evil.”
We learn a lot of details about the American government. There is a tour of the West Wing of the White House, which turns out to be cramped, badly lit, and staffed by twelve-year-olds (well, very young people). For those of us who did not know, the Secretary of Defense shares National Command Authority with the President, including the authority to launch a nuclear strike. There is a deluge of security-agency acronyms. (The book’s editor nodded: Wild Bill Donovan’s OSS was the “Office of Strategic Services,” not the “Office of Special Services.”) The island of sanity in the Executive Branch, however, is Clarke’s as-yet-unfounded dream-organization, which is called the “Intelligence Analysis Center.” The IAC is a small, analytical organization with the power to make any other agency of government tell it what it wants to know, so it can tell the President and other officials what is really happening. That is all it is supposed to do. Such an organization would be a good idea, though in fact its members in this book take steps far beyond the hypothetical agency’s brief.
The protagonists are American and British spooks, journalists, and military officers who conspire to restrain the lunacy of their governments. (There really is a Travellers Club in London, by the way, though one may question whether the shadow of Carroll Quigley’s Anglophile network meets there.) The story starts with a shower of blood and glass, perhaps to lessen the danger that the book might read like a 300-page briefing. There is a quite detailed description of an assault by Special Forces to recover a Liquefied Natural Gas tanker. Clarke is now chairman of Good Harbor Consulting; he is keen to remind us that an LNG tanker explosion would be as destructive as a small nuclear weapon.
Interesting as all this is, the point of the novel is to outline the religious and political complexity of the Persian Gulf and to stress that the rise of new oil-hungry powers makes America’s traditional relationship with that region unsustainable. The problem is that so many people in Clarke’s American government go beyond their brief that you start to wonder what else might be unsustainable. Consider the naval officers who are supposed to carry out the Secretary of Defense’s orders in the Gulf and in the Indian Ocean:
“Andy, what we’re doing here is on the razor’s edge of insubordination. Look, I believe in civilian control of the military. It’s what has kept us from having coups and the kind of chaos other nations have had. But when the civilians’ decisions aren’t subject to checks and balances, when they distort information, when they cow the media into going along with their shit, I dunno,” Brad mused.
What makes mutiny thinkable, we may infer from Clarke’s story, is the necessity to return to the American policy of the 1980s, when everybody saw that the real danger to the region was Iran. If we may take the opinion of one of the Islamyah moderates as a reflection of the author’s own views, the single greatest strategic mistake the United States made in recent decades was the failure to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia in the wake of the Gulf War of 1990-1991. Leaving them in that country roused up Islamist and nationalist hatred of the United States to such a degree that, in Clarke’s future, Iraqi suicide squads are still making attacks on American forces in the region.
The more recent Iraq War only made things much worse, if we can take the word of an inebriated Marine officer:
“But I do know this. I went into Fallujah with my brigade in ’04 and I saw what we did. You know the three-star Marine in charge of all us jarheads in Iraq recommended against assaulting the city; ju’ know that? They didn’t have no WMD there. They weren’t hiding Saddam or Osama. When we went inta Fallujah the second time, we fuckin’ leveled the place. City a quarter million people, gone-ski. Did we fuckin’ think that would make us popular? No wonder you got Iraqis still trying to blow up your headquarters in Bahrain.”
We forgive Marines their mental problems, but anyone who did not see why a nation-building campaign could not leave an alternative capital city unsubdued should not have his strategic judgment taken seriously about any military question in the whole world. Moreover, the imaginary horribles in this scenario are incompatible. One might imagine irate Fallujans strapping dynamite around their waists for many years to come and looking for Americans to blow up. However, they would do that only if the Americans were supporting a government the Fallujans found unacceptable. In the situation that Clarke describes, the Iraqi Sunnis would more likely be keen to consult with Dr. Evil on the best way to evict the fire-worshipers from Baghdad.
More generally, Clarke underestimates the degree to which the problems of the Arab world are autochthonous. Al Qaeda and its affiliates object to the presence of American forces less because those forces are an affront to local sensibilities than because they are a barrier to Islamist ambitions. Yes, various nationalist and jihadist groups want to overthrow the government of Saudi Arabia, and perhaps for good reason, but not chiefly because the Saudi government allowed US troops to remain on its soil while the situation in Iraq was unresolved in the 1990s.
Clarke is right in his belief that we would not be worrying much about the Middle East at all if we had developed alternative energy technologies, but his Islamyah character is wrong when he says the conflicts in the oil-producing Middle East are therefore the fault of the oil-importing countries in the developed world. Other countries control vital commodities without turning into geopolitical freak shows. Commodity-based economies present special dangers to a political system, but not all exporting countries succumb to them. The fact is that all post-Ottoman Arab countries have a legitimacy deficit. Oil is not the cause of the deficit; oil is why we notice the deficit.
Scarier than the politics of the Middle East, however, is the politics of America, at least in Clarke’s telling. Scariest of all is the means that the spooks and the journalists adopt to make sure that their policy preferences prevail in the Gulf over those of the Secretary of Defense:
Kate picked up her notepad again and opened it. “Okay, so what’s the dirt on him?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe al Saud money and his buyout company. Maybe the exiled royals and the Secretary buying support on the Hill. I have a well placed friend on the Hill who may know more. He wouldn’t tell me everything before, but I think I may now know enough to persuade him to talk to you, persuade him that we need to throw a little sand in the gears.” Rusty got up, walked over to the makeshift bar and added a shot of vodka to his tomato juice. “Maybe throw a little mud.”
In this fiction, there is quite a lot of mud to throw: the Secretary seems to be nothing less than a paid agent of the exiled Saudi princes, and he and his hench-wonk arrange with the Iranians to have an American Awak [AWACS I assume BIE] plane shot down in order to launch the new war in Arabia. On a less dramatic level, however, the opposition to the Secretary is in fact something like the way that the intelligence agencies function in national politics today. If they don’t like a policy of the President or of a cabinet member, they subvert it by leaking information to the press. The information may relate to the substance of the policy, or it may be personal information that would embarrass the policy’s proponent. Most worrisome of all has been the tendency to criminalize policy debates; Executive Branch officials who are out of favor with certain editorial pages will find that they have been indicted for something or other.
This corruption of the political culture began before the Administration of President G. W. Bush, but certainly the Iraq War has greatly exacerbated the evil. In this novel, we have not only a disturbing description of how it’s done, but the example of a former White House official actually doing it.
Copyright © 2006 by John J. Reilly
Support the Long View re-posting project by downloading Brave browser, and then trying it out. With Both Hands is a verified Brave publisher, you can leave me a tip too!
Comments ()