Oh, and chickenshit for dessert.
A synapse triggered a sense of déjà vu when I read Gareth Porter's account (diaried by Meteor Blades) of the tensions between Admiral William Fallon, Commander of CENTCOM, and "surge"-in-Iraq commander General David Petraeus. Admiral Fallon reportedly was so put off by General Petraeus' sycophantic manner at their first meeting that he derided Petraeus to his face as an “ass-kissing little chickenshit.”
Whether or not Porter's sources at the Pentagon relayed with perfect accuracy the dialogue, the story reminded all of us of real “ass-kissing little chickenshits” that we have encountered in our workplaces and at social venues.
The relevant memory that Porter's story dredged up for me came from a dinner party that I attended not long ago. At that dinner party the “ass-kissing little chickenshit” was a senior State Department official who works on the Middle East, including Iraq--Near Eastern Affairs in State Department jargon.
Follow me below the break as I recall a portion of the dinner conversation. I think that it laid bare a small slice of reality that merits some reflection.
The dinner party was hosted by one of those Republican multi-multi-millionaires who raise huge amounts of money for the Republican Party and who are rewarded with invitations to the “ranch” in Crawford and are granted the personal attention of President Bush, sometimes including a political appointment.
This particular multi-multi-millionaire is a cordial, decent human being, though he has a relatively low information level. He does not spend his days reading news and books and reflecting on the course of events, or even talking to people who do such reading and reflecting, except perhaps for an occasional neoconservative luminary whom he encounters at Republican venues. But he is not stupid. It is just that he spends the bulk of his time with other rich Republicans at clubs, restaurants, and boardrooms in order to make deals and and accumulate additional wealth. He knows how to do this well. He also is a generous volunteer of time and money to various nonprofit and charitable organizations. One can make multi-millions of dollars and move in high society, or one can work with ideas, seek to understand reality, and grapple with policy issues. It is extremely rare to find someone with the time and energy to do both competently. But although the host may be a “corporatist,” he is not by any stretch a malevolent capitalist ogre out of a 1917 Bolshevik cartoon.
Attending the dinner was a senior State Department official directly in the firing line for implementing U.S. policy in the Middle East, including of course Iraq, which is certainly the State Department's primary focus these days. Let us call the official "A-K" for...well, you can guess what for. Those initials obviously are not the actual ones.
Before this current assignment, A-K had absolutely no experience in the history, politics, or culture of any country in the Middle East, yet now on a daily basis A-K makes decisions to try to implement the Bush Administration's policies toward the region. The bench is becoming thinner and thinner across the Bush Administration, not that the starting units are displaying much talent, either.
During the main course the host, who in the past has voiced loyal and credulous support for the invasion of Iraq to “bring democracy” to its people, asked A-K: “What about Iraq?” One perhaps should not “blink” too fast and make too snap a judgment based on a simple question, tone of voice, and demeanor, but I read into the host's question a subtext: “What on earth can we do now to resolve this mess?”
A-K should not have considered himself to be dining with a hostile group of guests. There were no journalists present. There were no foreigners. No one (except for my spouse) had any idea that I try to scan the WWW and the blogosphere for a dose of reality most days and occasionally post a pseudonymous comment as “FMArouet.” In short, A-K had every reason to feel sufficiently comfortable to be candid. Yet he began his response to the host's question by asserting that "there is always hope." At the utterance of "hope" there was literally a spontaneous snort around the table (I was sitting nearby and almost spat out a mouthful). Recognizing the collective derision, A-K quickly retreated to acknowedge that “hope is not a policy,” but he nevertheless proceeded to deliver a litany of talking points typical of Tony Snow or Dana Perino spinning desperately behind the podium in the White House briefing room. One could as well have been listening to the evening news on Fox.
Another guest had the commendable courage to ask: “But what is the endgame? What will success look like?” To that key, penetrating question A-K's response was simply a continued, utterly thought-free recitation of the neocon liturgy. The thrust of it went like this: “If only we keep doing what are doing and stay there long enough, perhaps the Iraqis can organize themselves, pass the right laws, and bit by bit take over security duties so that U.S. forces can draw down.” The whole discourse was sheer pablum, pure Bush Administration orthodoxy, with nary a mention of Big Oil as a reason for invading or staying. It reminded me of a passage from Orwell:
Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.... As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down, Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man's brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.
--George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
A few weeks later I encountered one of the other dinner guests at a social function and asked him about A-K's “corridor file” at the State Department. Until receiving this senior appointment, A-K apparently was regarded as a solid, competent professional. He had never, for example, done anything quite so transparently self-advancing as the young West Point Cadet David Petraeus had done in wooing the daughter of West Point's Superintendent and then marrying her within two months of graduation from the Academy.
But the story is not so simple: one of A-K's relatives had been given help by the multi-multi-millionaire host to find a job in the private sector. So there we have it: someone rich and powerful does a favor for someone in a subordinate status, who thereupon feels that he owes fealty to his liege. The vassal would not want to risk offending the liege by offering a view failing to be fully supportive of official policy. And what if the vassal has ambitions to be rewarded someday with a political appointment to a posh ambassadorship or even to a more senior State Department position? He would certain want to retain the political support of his liege and patron. And if a posh ambassadorship does not await, perhaps a good word from the liege could help the vassal find a lucrative job in corporate America upon retirement from the government.
This other dinner guest had encountered A-K a few days after the dinner party and had raised questions about such optimistic views regarding Iraq in general and Baghdad in particular. This other guest had spoken with Americans who had recently been in the Green Zone, and they had described a desperate security situation, with frequent blasts from incoming mortar rounds. He mentioned those accounts to A-K. Yet even in this private encounter, with no dinner table patron or audience to impress, A-K responded to the proffered dose of reality with a curt, dismissive: “Well, those people should just stop complaining and suck it up.”
That is easy to say, I suppose, when one works at a desk in a plush State Department office at Foggy Bottom and does not have to worry personally about incoming mortar rounds.
It obviously served A-K's personal career interest to parrot the Administration's line. A-K probably did so at the dinner in front of someone rich and powerful in the hope of remaining in the good graces of a past and future patron. And at least at some level, A-K even appeared to have convinced himself that the Bush Administration's policy toward Iraq is correct. Another passage from Orwell seems apt:
In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones; but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world.
...
The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.
--George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
In short: fear, fealty, and hierarchy. A-K simply was following what he perceived to be the most sure-fire, age-old formula for self-preservation and self-advancement, i.e., behaving like an “ass-kissing little chickenshit” as vassal to liege, just as General Petraeus reportedly tried, but failed, to do with Admiral Fallon.
And who knows? Maybe the multi-multi-millionaire who was hosting the dinner was thinking all the time: “What an ass-kissing little chickenshit this A-K has become. I wouldn't trust him now even to empty my chamber pot, much less offer any candid, worthwhile advice on policy.” One does not, after all, become a multi-multi-millionaire by being a bad judge of character.
("OK," you may ask, "then why did the corporatists and multi-multi-millionaires finance the election of the intellectually impaired, incurious, and millennialist George W. Bush, as well as the authoritarian, paranoid, and malevolent Richard Cheney--not merely once, but twice?" Ask George Shultz, who was the Republican Party's Don King in producing the Republican top card for the main event in 2000.)
Many former and even current Republicans (though apparently very few in the Senate or House) are actually tethered to reality. Consider, for example, John Dean, Bruce Fein, Lt. Gen. William G. Odom, Senator James Webb (D-VA) and even--on some issues such as Iraq--columnists George F. Will and William F. Buckley, Jr.
I would not be surprised to see more and more wealthy Republican donors--at least those not directly involved in building wealth through Big Oil, Big Guns, or Big Contracting--keep their wallets in their pockets for the election in 2008.
At the same time, the more knowledgeable and reality-based among them will surely distance themselves from their heretofore robotic support for the Bush Administration's suicidal compulsion to self-immolate over Iraq.
Of course, there is also a clear danger here. These very same wealthy yet reality-based Republicans will likely conclude that because the Republican Party is approaching a state of historic collapse, they should turn their focus toward co-opting more Democrats to become Blue/Bush Dogs in support of corporatist interests.
Presto! Change-o! If it is not careful, the Democratic Party could end up adopting by default the mantle of Republican corporatism, rather than promoting the genuine public interest, i.e., the greatest good for the greatest number.
And Democrats would thereby fumble the chance for a genuinely progressive, transformational election victory in 2008, a chance that comes around only once every generation or two.