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From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Wed Dec 08 2010 - 03:30:28 EST
consortiumnews.com
The Seduction of Ambassador Rice
By Lawrence Davidson
November 1, 2010
*E**ditor’s Note: There is an “invasion of the body snatcher” component to
how free-thinking individuals are socialized into the powerful institutions
of Washington, whether the government or the news media. One day a person is
independent and idealistic, the next he or she has been absorbed into the
acceptable “group think” that justifies pretty much whatever the
powers-that-be want.*
*In this guest essay, Professor Lawrence Davidson explores the
transformation of a senior diplomat working for President Barack Obama and
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:*
Dr. Susan Elizabeth Rice, who earned a doctorate of philosophy at Oxford in
1990, is United States Ambassador at the United Nations. She is a
professional diplomat and foreign policy consultant as well as a protégée of
former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
Rice, who is unrelated to Condolezza Rice, had a reputation of being a free
thinker and a stubborn defender of what she thought to be proper and right.
This tendency to be independent of mind meant she had trouble with other
older career diplomats when, in the second half of the Clinton
administration, she served as Assistant Secretary of State for African
Affairs.
No doubt she soon learned that, in the world of diplomacy as in most well
established bureaucracies, too much independent thinking makes you a square
peg surrounded by round holes. In the long term, one either conforms or
leaves for a more accommodating career (usually in academia). It appears
that Dr. Rice has done the former.
Evidence of this choice came on Oct. 28 when Ambassador Rice stepped out of
the UN Security Council chamber in New York and began scolding the Syrian
government for a "flagrant disregard" of Lebanese sovereignty. Syria is
supposedly doing this by "continuing to provide increasingly sophisticated
weapons to Lebanese militias, including Hezbollah."
Dr. Rice’s charge is only superficially true and that is where she left it.
For instance, she omitted the context of the situation and the whole recent
history of the country of Lebanon.
She made no mention of Lebanon’s right-wing factions and the role of the
United States and France in supporting their continuing divisive
independence. She did not deem to mention that Lebanon’s horrible history of
civil wars was finally brought to an end only with Syrian intervention.
And, she did not tell of Hezbollah’s role as protector of the country’s
majority Shi’ite population as well as defender of the entire nation from
the rapacity of the United States’ main ally, Israel.
No, she did not put things in perspective, but rather got her orders from
Washington to play the sovereignty card and thereby distort things for the
sake of a highly partisan American position. And so, like a good soldier,
she carried out those orders. She is now an official team player.
And what of those who gave the orders? No doubt Jeffrey Feltman, the
pro-Israel Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, had a hand
in this. He too has made a career of disregarding the context of situations.
The question I would like to ask both Ambassador Rice and Secretary Feltman
is, when did the United States government start taking seriously any state’s
sovereignty other than its own or its allies? Neither could answer this
question seriously (at least not in public) for to do so would reveal that
they are loyal agents of a government that practices a murderous hypocrisy.
For example, consider just a few recent historical events (there are of
course many more) involving the U.S. and the issue of other people’s
national sovereignty.
1. On Aug. 4, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson told the American people that
U.S. naval ships had twice been attacked in international waters by the
North Vietnamese navy. As it turned out Johnson’s address was knowingly
inaccurate and misleading. There had been only one engagement and not two,
and the real engagement had come about as a result of U.S. sponsored and
supported South Vietnamese commando attacks along the North Vietnamese
coast.
Nonetheless, the announcement was used to get the Tonkin Gulf Resolution out
of Congress and this led to the dramatic escalation of what would become the
Vietnam War. Johnson, who imagined he was in a fight with international
communism, would have scornfully laughed if, at that time, anyone had
mentioned the sacrosanct nature of Vietnamese sovereignty (North or South).
It was irrelevant as he proceeded to set the U.S. on a course that largely
destroyed Vietnam and killed approximately two million of its people.
2. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan began a covert program to support the
overthrow of the left-leaning government of Nicaragua, even after it won a
democratic election in 1984. This involved military and financial aid to the
Contras, a coalition of right-wing guerrilla groups that became known for
their brutality and human rights violations.
By 1986, the Congress had forbade any further aid to the Contras largely
because they were such barbarians. But Reagan, just like Johnson, was sure
he was in a fight with international communism, and so he continued to aid
the Contras illegally and this led to the Iran-Contra Affair.
In the process, Reagan never gave serious thought to Nicaraguan sovereignty.
An estimated 50,000 people died as a result of Reagan’s Contra policy.
3. From 1998 through 2004, both the Clinton and Bush-43 administrations
built up the claim that Iraq possessed dangerous levels of weapons of mass
destruction despite the fact that United Nations weapons inspectors deployed
in Iraq could never find them.
The truth is that Iraq had given up its WMD programs in the mid 1990s and
both administrations had intelligence evidence of that fact. Nonetheless,
they chose not to credit that information and instead persisted in
misleading the American people.
By doing so they gained support for an embargo of Iraq that cost the lives
of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi children. Finally, in March of
2003, using scare tactics that again involved alleged WMDs, President Bush
brought the Congress into line behind his invasion of Iraq.
Only in April 2005, with the U.S. in control of the country and having
completed an exhaustive hunt for such weapons did the CIA report that
nothing of significance had been found. As with Vietnam, Iraq was invaded on
a contrived pretext and its sovereignty was a non-issue. Subsequently Iraq
was largely destroyed and civilian deaths probably exceeded half a million.
Just what sort of career is it that leads its practitioners to follow the
orders of those promoting policies that kill millions? In other words, just
what have Dr. Rice and Mr. Feltman gotten themselves into?
These are very serious questions for they and their bosses are the Pied
Pipers the general population invariably follows, and sometimes right off a
high cliff. How does this happen to Rice, to Feltman, and to us? Here are
some possible answers:
A. We have never grown out of our in-group/out-group view of things. There
is a "hard-wired" evolutionary aspect to this. As the cognitive psychologist
Keith Oatley reminds us, "our [evolutionary] forebears had a tendency to
treat members of out-groups...with contempt and sometimes murderous
aggression" (see his short book, *Emotions: A Brief History*, 2004, p. 29).
He represents this as an instinctual tendency. Yet, human beings are not
necessarily slaves to these impulses and, if we chose, we can control them.
But to do so is made all the harder by the fact that government
bureaucracies and military organizations, among many others, function as
profoundly persuasive in-groups.
They encase their employees and members in lines of command and concepts of
loyalty that turn them from independent thinking beings into the followers
of commands – the tools of someone else’s thinking.
Of course, we do not normally think of our government and our military in
this way. But both history and sociology suggest that these entities do
shape our behavior in just this sort of dangerous fashion. For we are
communal creatures and this is one of the costs of being so, unless we
control the tendency toward in-group myopia.
It is exactly this myopia that both Susan Rice and Jeffrey Feltman have
bought into.
B. The majority of people are easily manipulated due to their wholly
understandable but nonetheless dangerous ignorance of matters beyond their
local sphere. How do you know that this or that out-group is dangerous? How
do you know that Syria is a threat to Lebanese sovereignty or that Hezbollah
is a "terrorist organization"?
The vast majority of us know it because our government officials and media
spokespersons tell us so. We assume that these people actually know what
they are talking about, that they have no hidden agendas, that they do not
lie or mislead us.
How many of us consider the possibility that they, the officials and
spokespersons, have themselves been misled or corrupted by special-interest
groups and lobbies? Some of us do, but not enough to matter.
Most of us assume the honesty of the "experts" or just never really think
about this problem at all. And, it is this naive act of faith that the rest
of us have bought into.
None of this represents a new problem. Indeed, it is age old, but that is no
excuse. To the extent that the above propositions are true, we must face
facts and seek ways to moderate their impact.
There are many tools to this end. One of them is education of which we could
make much better use in teaching our children to value tolerance and
diversity, just as we now teach them to value nationalism and patriotism.
But first there has to be a general recognition of the need to do so. Will
that ever come about?
I have no prophetic answer to this question, but there was a 19th century
Russian poet who once said that "providence has given human wisdom the
choice between two fates: either hope and agitation, or hopelessness and
quiescence." I vote for the former. **
*Lawrence Davidson is a history professor at West Chester University in
Pennsylvania. He is the author of Foreign Policy Inc.: Privatizing America's
National Interest<http://www.kentuckypress.com/viewbook.cfm?Category_ID=I&Group=55&ID=1490>
; America's Palestine: Popular and Offical Perceptions from Balfour to
Israeli Statehood<http://www.upf.com/authorbooks.asp?lname=Davidson&fname=Lawrence>;
and Islamic Fundamentalism <http://www.greenwood.com/catalog/GR2429.aspx>.*