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One autumn afternoon a few years ago, I took the subway from my Brooklyn apartment to a mansion on the Upper East Side. I was nervous. I had never met President Obama before, and it wasn't clear to me why I'd been selected to meet with his National Security Council and brief him on the situation unfolding in Iraq. I had no special knowledge of the country. All I knew was what I had been given in my prepared materials. ISIS forces, represented by a bright-red arrow, were making a push toward Baghdad, sending in suicide bombers and threatening the US Embassy. Iraq's prime minister was asking Obama to reinsert American troops into an active ground war.
When I arrived at the mansion, of course, I didn't brief the real Obama. Playing the role of the president that day was Max Boot, a seasoned think-tank veteran who, like almost every other self-appointed member of America's foreign-policy elite, had championed the invasions of both Iraq and Afghanistan. The scenario was an exercise, part of a conference I attended as a newly appointed associate at a leading think tank. As the word "exercise" implies, it was a game, but a serious one, part of a larger campaign by the foreign-policy leaders of the reigning generation to indoctrinate their successors. Over the next several years, I would attend events hosted by the Aspen Institute, the New America Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Atlantic Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Brookings Institution, among others. I had a formal luncheon with a Middle Eastern ambassador, a buffet breakfast with Thomas Friedman, and a guided tour of an Ohio-class nuclear submarine. At a conference table inside the headquarters of SEAL Team 6, I was told that SEAL Team 6 did not exist. I flew over the White Sands Missile Range in a Black Hawk helicopter, where I did my part for civilian-military relations by vomiting all over the seats and floor.
What I didn't do was actually go to Iraq or Afghanistan. Instead, I ate free buffet lunches, collected business cards, and mainlined off-the-record propaganda that both of America's long-running wars were worthy undertakings, steered by capable hands. Much of what we did included participation by the military, but that didn't strike any of us as odd. In fact, the uniforms and armaments are what made the whole thing seem real, something more than a bunch of kids in suits and ties playing Model United Nations. We weren't just drafting foreign-policy resolutions; we were helping guide our country to a better understanding of whom to kill, and how to kill them.
I didn't know it at the time, but I was being absorbed into what Ben Rhodes, Obama's speechwriter and longtime policy advisor, called the "Blob," the amorphous pro-war Washington establishment that Obama was supposed to oppose. In the Blob's view, it's the role of the Blob, not the voters or even the White House, to decide when America goes to war. The internal mechanics of those decisions are a black box, but we do know something about the inputs and outputs. Into one end of the Blob goes the money — gifts from corporations, wealthy individuals, and, in some cases, foreign governments. Out the other end comes white papers, books, op-ed articles, salaries, fellowships, and panel discussions. The content of the output varies widely, and contains occasional notes of disagreement, which is what makes it so much more slippery and effective than the classical authoritarian propaganda of the 20th century, which was intended to awe and manipulate crowds by playing to their basest emotions. Call it blobaganda, a process through which intelligent people are gently led to a preordained conclusion, brought to you by Raytheon and General Dynamics.
"Propaganda" is a loaded word, but I think it's appropriate to apply it here. The foreign-policy think tanks that hosted the military-adjacent events I attended take great pains to present themselves as neutral organizations, where diverse groups of officials and scholars and opinion writers can exchange views without fear of being quoted in The Times or shouted down by Code Pink protesters. But as I learned from the five years I spent inside the bubble of the foreign-policy establishment — all the off-the-record gatherings and the cozy meet-and-greets I attended — the neutral deliberations that take place behind closed doors occur within carefully managed boundaries. You can't work in Washington and not cross paths with smart, influential people who have been paid substantial amounts of money from a foreign-policy think tank, or the powerful dons who sit on one of their boards. If you have control over who's in the room, and who gets to sit onstage, there's no need to script the action. The ideologically correct opinion will organically percolate through the network. This is known as social contagion, and it goes a long way to explaining why America's leading foreign-policy experts keep producing disasters like Afghanistan.
In 2017, for example, the Aspen Institute invited a small group of ambassadors and cabinet-level officials to "a private breakfast conversation" with "representatives from Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company." According to an internal list of invitees, John Brennan, Michael Chertoff, Avril Haines, and Antony Blinken all RSVP'd that they would be there. I was not in the room, but I do have a copy of the outline for the discussion. It expresses worry about things like "the capacity surge of rising powers" and the maintenance of "critical security pacts." These are reasonable concerns. But it's worth asking why Lockheed Martin spent money for access to that particular group of people, and what it got in return. At that same conference, Gen. Joseph Dunford, then the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave a public talk to a large gathering. In 2019, when he retired, he joined Lockheed Martin's board.
To understand how blobaganda works, you have to look for what isn't there. Not much airtime is given to dissent from what's often called "the rules-based order" or "the liberal international order." These terms sound technical and boring and unobjectionable; perhaps that is by design. In plain English, "rules-based order" has effectively come to mean "war is good." The foreign-policy establishment is ideologically committed to the faith-based proposition that America can use force against a country thousands of miles away and, if not remake it in our own image, then at least leave it better than we found it. "Liberal" and "rules" are strange words to apply to campaigns that rely so heavily on drone strikes and covert CIA operations. At one event hosted by the Blobosphere, I remember one of my peers raising his hand to ask how we could convince the American public that it was worth going to war to defend Montenegro, as we are obliged to under Article 5 of the NATO treaty. The room turned and looked at him as if he'd gone insane.
To understand how the Blob gave us Afghanistan — and why it wanted thousands of American troops to remain there indefinitely — we need to unpack the terms foreign policy and national security. They're euphemisms. What we're really talking about here is war and peace. It was much easier to argue for the moral value of aggressive militarism during the years after World War II, when US firepower underwrote sustainable democracies in Germany, Japan, and South Korea. Interventionism remained a guiding light during the Cold War, and it somehow survived the US defeat in Vietnam. But today, for someone of my generation, it sounds crazy, even as it continues to walk the earth, a zombie worldview that is endlessly promoted by the legacy media and establishment stalwarts.
Article I of the US Constitution states, "Congress shall have power … to declare War." That sounds like a political process. The Blob's raison d'être is to control the conversation around war by putting it on a plane above politics, in the domain of experts who supposedly know something about the world that voters and elected officials do not. Some politicians, especially august senators like John Kerry and John McCain, have traditionally played a role in these high-level conversations. But the most important parts happen between the military, the White House's national security apparatus, and the array of private interests whose livelihoods depend on the conversation's outcome.
After 9/11, the Blob united behind the invasion of Iraq, working to manufacture false justifications and secure endorsements from The New Yorker and The New York Times. When the invasion went south, and the promised weapons of mass destruction failed to appear, the Blob threw a few scapegoats overboard (Judith Miller, George Tenet) and disavowed the worst excesses (Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib). Then, with freshly soaped hands, the Blob turned its attention to preserving the "good war" in Afghanistan.
Trump was a problem. He was the first president since Jimmy Carter who didn't care about the Blob. He wanted to leave Afghanistan, but he couldn't find a secretary of defense or a national security advisor who would help him to do it. So he wound up settling for a deal with the Taliban that passed the question of withdrawal on to his successor. The Blob, meanwhile, claimed that Trump was an illegitimate exception and that the normal transatlantic warmongering under a Blob-aligned president would resume as soon as he was out of office. As long as the war in Afghanistan continued, even in an extremely limited form, the national security elite could go on pretending that foreign policy wasn't beholden to politics, that it was still their private domain.
The Blob's seductive power was clearest to me on the evening of June 20, 2019. I was at a reception at a prominent think tank a couple of blocks away from the White House, as Trump was considering how to respond to Iran shooting down a US drone. One of my fellow Blobsters passed on a well-sourced tidbit. Trump had ordered a series of missile strikes as reprisal, which meant that war with Iran — a long-standing dream of the Blob — might finally be underway.
Trump wound up calling off the strikes at the last minute. But the fact that the attacks never took place didn't matter. As we stood around munching on roast-beef crostinis, it was the real deal, and what should have been a moment of fear or solemnity was instead charged with excitement. We knew, a couple of hours in advance, what was going to happen. It was easy to confuse that feeling with participation, or even control.
The Blob was optimistic that Biden, like Trump, could be deterred from following through on his campaign promise to exit Afghanistan. Like Trump, Biden could not find a secretary of defense who shared his vision. He chose Lloyd Austin, a retired general who had made as much as $1.7 million from serving on the board of Raytheon, one of the biggest contractors in Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, Austin wanted Biden to extend the deadline for withdrawal past September 11. In April, according to the Times, Biden had to personally tell Austin that he expected the military to carry out his decision.
But the Blob wasn't done with Biden. Towards the end of Trump's presidency, Congress had established the Afghanistan Study Group, a private body of retired generals, senators, and business executives. The quasi-official nature and neutrality of such groups make them indispensable in public-relations campaigns. And yet the Study Group was anything but independent. Its 15 members held seats on the boards of major contractors and think tanks, including Caterpillar, Raytheon, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, the Atlantic Council, and the Council on Foreign Relations. In an 88-page report published two months into Biden's presidency, they recommended that the US postpone its departure without giving a concrete timeline for withdrawal. The report was rolled out in a congressional hearing and in a Washington Post op-ed article coauthored by a Study Group member, Meghan O'Sullivan, who also sits on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations. "It's wrong to pull US troops out of Afghanistan," the headline declared. The Post neglected to mention that O'Sullivan held a seat on the board of Raytheon. It also neglected to mention that it had accepted money from Raytheon for a customized ad campaign, as well as a series of "Post Live" discussions with national security luminaries.
Joe Biden and Richard Haass appear on a panel at the Council on Foreign Relations.
President Joe Biden speaks with Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, about Russia, in 2018. Haass has since become a vocal critic of Biden's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. Alex Brandon/Associated Press
Despite its concerted effort to keep Biden in Afghanistan, the Blob lost. It had issued a public veto, and the president had gone ahead and overridden it. Control of the White House national security apparatus is the Blob's core product. This was like Apple losing the rights to the iPhone.
Even in defeat, though, the Blob has refused to surrender. Richard Haass, who receives $1.7 million in annual compensation as president of the Council on Foreign Relations, remains a leading critic of the Afghanistan withdrawal. "The foreign policy establishment has gotten a lot right," he told the Times. "History suggests there's just as much risk in under-reaching as overreaching." The war in Afghanistan, as his oddly revisionist take made clear, was no longer about Afghanistan. It was about maintaining the reputations and interests of the people who wanted us there.
In retrospect, it's astonishing that the Blob was able to keep the war in Afghanistan going for so long. A decade ago, Obama vowed that the final withdrawal would begin in July 2011. The following year, during a vice-presidential debate, Biden declared, "We are leaving in 2014, period." Two years later, Obama promised to "turn the page" and exit by the end of his second term in 2016. The Pentagon claimed it was using the repeated extensions to build up the Afghan military, investing billions in something that was exposed, in the moment of withdrawal, to be nothing but a fantasy. The Blob wasn't learning what it needed to learn about Afghanistan, but it was perfecting its mastery of the US political process. What may have started as an earnest bid for victory evolved into a domestic opinion-managing campaign to perpetuate an expensive war that voters did not want, without much to show in the way of progress or results. We're seeing the tail end of that campaign now, as the Blob insists that Biden should have kept a small force in place, in perpetuity. If victory was not an option, at least no one had to know that we had already been defeated.
The Blob's pro-war tilt was evident in the Iraq simulation I took part in. The prepared materials we were given laid out five options: maintain the status quo, deploy one of three "force packages" — sized small, medium, or large, like french fries — or withdraw. I instinctively pushed for withdrawal. It was, after all, one of the official "options for POTUS," and I remained unclear about the purpose of our being in Iraq in the first place.
But when it came time for us to debate the options, the Army colonel who was guiding our deliberations quickly relegated my view to the margins. I don't recall precisely what he said, but the gist was that this was a crisis. Conditions on the ground were rapidly deteriorating and would continue to do so until we did something or ISIS came crashing through our front door.
We wound up recommending the small-force package. Today, that colonel is a two-star general.
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cherdano, on 2021-August-31, 08:07, said:
