Students like Bob Gates were to be something of a remedy for the CIA’s first generation of men, so uneducated about a world they manipulated with such careless and brutal abandon. In widening recruitment efforts, and requiring a gamut of substantive and psychological tests (even a psychiatric interview for its new officers), the CIA seemed to acknowledge that its ranks lacked a certain professionalism — in terms of diploma knowledge of the world as well as certifiable sanity.
By 1965, the Agency was also responding to a national mobilization of education as a Cold War weapon. This had been underway for years in the aftershock of the spectacular 1957 launch of the Soviet Sputnik, the orbiting little satellite neither the CIA, nor the American public had expected from their caricature Russians. Worse yet, it sat atop a prototype intercontinental ballistic missile. Much of Gates’ career would be shaped by that sobering event — a Commie rocket that could reach Wichita — when he was only 14, still parboiling cats and ardently rising in the Boy Scouts.
Sputnik’s launch began a craze in the U.S. to spur military-related science and technology from grade school to graduate school. The 1958 National Defense Education Act also allotted unprecedented millions for ‘foreign area training,’ part of a vast effort to create well-informed specialists on the Soviet Bloc and the Third World, a know-thine-enemy vogue shared by foundations as well as Congress. Thus, the irony of government-financed graduate study to ward off the socialist menace, and Carnegie and Ford Foundation philanthropy to save capitalism by paying serious young Americans to read Marx and Lenin.
Universities like Indiana with more than the usual offerings in Russian history and Slavic languages were ready reservoirs for CIA recruiters and Bob Gates was their ideal target. It all seemed to promise a new worldliness — for Wichita as well as Washington. But lurking like a lethal gene was that old Baltic Syndrome, with its reactionary animus and blindfolds, in which America’s would-be specialists in the Soviet regime had always been schooled.
No independent American expertise on the Soviets would magically appear, despite the post-Sputnik infusions of money. In the 1960s, knowing students mordantly called bucolic little Bloomington, Indiana, ‘Novocherkassk’ — after the Cossack town that had been the capital of the monarchist ‘Whites’ in Russia’s Civil War. The name was sadly fitting. In 1965, Indiana’s Soviet Affairs faculty was still so dominated by émigrés, or the émigré-indoctrinated, that courses given when Gates arrived amounted to little more than the usual worn tour of Kremlin horrors.
Indiana was hardly alone. Harvard was much the same — its own prestigious and lavishly supported Russian studies program dominated by figures like historian Richard Pipes, a reactionary of East European descent whose lectures riveted undergraduates with an unrelieved demonology of the Bolshevik Revolution. ‘We’ll be reading Karl Marx who is not now and never has been a member of the Communist Party,’ celebrated Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith would dryly announce in his course on economic development. But such irreverence was rare, and his course was not often required for ‘specialists.’
Other reputed centers of area studies — most prominently Columbia with young ex-Harvard Russophobe Zbigniew Brzezinski, a star lecturer in Soviet affairs — were similar bastions of Baltic Syndrome orthodoxy. The narrowness of most curricula in the 1960s moved even a timorous, still McCarthy-era-cowed State Department to react. Its cultural affairs officers recommended, albeit quietly, that U.S. graduate students heading for Moscow or Leningrad on a new exchange program with the USSR (with language prepping beforehand at Indiana) read Wright Miller’s otherwise ignored little classic Russians As People. (‘What,’ asked a puzzled Russian student at Moscow State University on seeing the book in 1964, ‘did you think we were?’)
Money now gushed into ‘area specialization,’ not just in Soviet affairs, but in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East — all those contested areas of a contested planet where the loyalties of restless natives now seemed to be of some practical importance. Like learning math to catch the Russians in space, the logic seemed unexceptionable. To save the world from communist clutches, some knowledge of that world would obviously be helpful.
A World of ‘Slopes’ and ‘Towel Heads’
In practice, none of this had much effect on root prejudice. An American Army in Vietnam lost to a foe (and defended an ally) its commanders as well as the ranks generally referred to as ‘gooks,’ ‘dinks,’ and ‘slopes,’ and whose politics it never grasped. It would be much the same three decades later, when U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, commanded in part by erstwhile junior officers from the Vietnam War, were effectively defeated by two of history’s most momentous, if seemingly ragtag, insurgencies made up of ‘hajis,’ ‘sand niggers,’ and ‘towel heads’ of similarly baffling mind and motivation.
As usual, bigotry ran bottom to top, civilian no less than military. In the Vietnam-era White House, President Nixon commonly deplored ‘jigs’ and ‘Jew boys,’ while Harvard’s Kissinger (with a young aide of like mentality named John Negroponte) planned savage carpet bombings of North Vietnam on the premise, as Kissinger put it, that ‘I can’t believe a fourth-rate power doesn’t have a breaking point.’ It was typical of the quaint anthropology of the famous diplomat and many of his staff, including future secretaries of state Alexander Haig and Larry Eagleburger. (Told during the Nigerian Civil War that Biafra’s Ibos tended to appear more Negroid than northern Nigerians, Kissinger blurted out in unguarded surprise, ‘You always said Ibos were so gifted and accomplished. How could they be more Negroid?’)
Yet there was something more insidious than crude Eurocentric racism at work. Imbibed by a new generation of bureaucrats and analysts with winning-hearts-and-minds, career-making fervor was another kind of bigotry dressed in the clothes of scholarly authority and of knowledge in service to power. It took an eminent literary critic and expatriate from one of the most abused ‘areas’ of the world to expose it.
A revolutionary book when it appeared in the late 1970s, Orientalism by Palestinian Edward Said revealed the intellectual hollowness of the predominant Western view of the Arab world (and, by implication, of much of the rest of the globe as well). Professor Said’s naked emperor proved to be the views of two centuries of Western academics and novelists, clerks and clerics, soldiers and tourists, diplomats and dilettantes that created a collective, stereotypical, paradoxical Muslim Orient — stagnant yet ever-roiling; childlike yet cunning; femininely weak yet no less macho-menacing for that; indolent but agitated; always prone to feudal despotism, though available for capitalist liberation; congenitally terrorist and genocidal by nature; presumptively inferior; endlessly devious; and, above all, relentlessly alien. Said’s Orient of Western mythology was what one author aptly called ‘the quintessential ‘Other.”
‘They’re our boys bought and paid for, but you always gotta remember that these people can’t be trusted,’ said Archie Roosevelt, Kermit’s cousin and a CIA deputy for the Middle East in the later 1960s. His weary exasperation with the supposedly innate Arab traits of treachery and corruptibility — he was speaking of Iraqi Ba’ath Party officers on his payroll in the 1963 and 1968 Baghdad coups — caught an American official mood extending from the 1940s to 2007, from Iraq to Vietnam to Afghanistan and back to Iraq again. It was part of the territory, diplomats and spies understood, a cost of doing business beyond the English Channel with what many called, in the privacy of inter-agency meetings, the ‘rug merchants.’
Long embedded in American prejudice — from Holy Land travelogues to pulp novels and action movies, coin of the realm from foreign affairs professionals to Capitol Hill plebeians — no preconception, not even the anti-Soviet mania, shaped U.S. policy more than the now-subtle, now-brazen stereotypes of the Arab world. (This was, of course, intimately related to an unquestioning affinity for Israel, though even as that costly penchant frays, the Orientalism Express barrels on.)
As in academia or the media, government had its exceptions to Orientalism’s sway — analysts, spies, or diplomats of wider perception. There is, however, no evidence that they carried a single significant day in the last 60 years in a Washington gripped by Orientalist fervor.
Authentic intelligence was absent when needed most, which was most of the time, and knowledge scant in any guise. CIA veterans recall that there were rarely more than three to five officers ranked as Arabic-fluent ‘Arabists’ on Agency desks at any time prior to 1991. Though there might have been more Arabists in the field, even fewer there focused on Arab politics as distinct from the CIA’s primary target worldwide: Soviet missions and their relations with host regimes. In the Islamic world as elsewhere, unrest was seen far less as legitimate grievance emerging from local or regional situations than yet more evidence of Kremlin machinations. Politics in the Arab world, as in the Third World generally, was not so much a matter of history-in-the-making as of dreary pawns being manipulated by great powers.
The colonial sociology of knowledge of the specialists, when placed alongside the cultural illiteracy of senior bureaucrats, policy-makers, and politicians — to say nothing of a blanketing pro-Israeli bias — produced a half-century of American patronage of repressive regimes in North Africa and the Middle East. There would be year after year of watery smiles as dickering over ephemera went on with ruling strata, while American officials remained oblivious to what later came to be called ‘the Arab Street.’ Diplomatic and intelligence dispatches of the era would breathe a monotonous triviality, a climate without weather as storms billowed.
As 9/11 and the years to follow made plain, what was missed was momentous. Gathering largely beyond Washington’s ken were tides sweeping the Arab world in the latter twentieth century — a slow, sure popular mobilization, not to speak of a fundamentalist reaction to inequitable modernization by U.S.-purchased oligarchies. That mobilization was at once populist, authoritarian, and divisively sectarian.
From the 1950s on, in a fetish of ‘progress’ and as a Cold War counter to the Russians, U.S. officials exhorted Arab regimes to headlong ‘development,’ buttressing some, but pushing most beyond their means. With oil prices sagging in the late 1970s and the right-wing version of ‘free enterprise’ and ‘supply-side economics’ seizing the White House and Congress by the throat, the U.S. then began to wield the International Monetary Fund and other whips to force Arab governments to cut welfare programs throughout the Middle East.
This abdication of responsibility for their own people inevitably left ever-growing excluded populations to the socio-economic, as well as sectarian religious, rescue of the fundamentalists. Their resulting appeal — to Washington’s shock, though any old urban-machine pol could have predicted it — grew exponentially. It was an American policy in which, from Carter to Reagan to Clinton, every step was taken with indivisible neo-liberal/neo-conservative obliviousness.
Meanwhile, intelligence remained essentially blind to defining ev
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