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Making sense of covert foreign policy
I say this now, because I find myself admiring the brave and cogent attempt to make sense of it all by Marie K. in her "The Database, part 1" piece. Making sense of covert foreign policy really IS the proper business of amateurs. We all need to be at least trying to make sense of all this non-sense even while we become ever more convinced of the futility of this Sisyphean effort. I had done a fair amount of reading about international politics and conspiracies prior to heading to Viet Nam in 1966, but nothing I read prepared me for the reality I encountered on the ground as a civilian witness. Please believe me, examining any slice of this reality is like taking a trip down the rabbit hole with Alice. The only reasonably certain thing is that where there is a lot of covert activity a lot of money is at stake, treasure to be protected, future wealth to be pursued and denied to competitors. Beyond that all is murky. Think about it. Even with the perspective of a century and a half and countless lifetimes of research we still have no clear idea of what was involved in the assassination of Lincoln. And things were much more transparent then than they are now. The urge is to just back away in confusion. That is a mistake. Refusing to try to make sense of this stuff as it plays out on the world stage is to just become an enabler of the criminally insane that are caught up in it. I find a good place to start in my thinking about all this stuff is to recognize that what we are used to thinking of as "the US Government" is largely myth and disinformation. The Church Committee made a college try toward trying to understand this murky world, they tried to collar it and bring it to heel, but by any measure, they failed. When the details of how so many appropriated funds are beyond the understanding of our elected representatives (Chalmers Johnson, for instance points out that 40% of the defense budget is "black") how can we say that our ostensible government has any reasonable degree of control over events presumed to be under their supervision? What we actually have as a result of all this is a full scale, anarchistic riot. A good introduction to the nitty gritty of the covert world can be had, I think, by reading "The Politics of Heroin (May 2003)" by McCoy, which discusses the covert politics around the heroin trade, and Charlie Wilson's War by George Crile, which discuses the history of the establishment of the Mujahadeen army in Afghanistan by the CIA. The latter book will be available in a new edition in October '07. And, of course, the two recent illuminating books by John Perkins, Confessions of An Economic Hit Man and The Secret History of the American Empire. All anyone can really do in trying to make sense of all this is to make educated guesses and keep revising one's views, maybe even all the way down to the core, as new "data" emerges. The real answer to these problems, as it always has been, is to establish civil and democratic controls over all great concentrations of private power and wealth, break them up, and force the remnants to act transparently, under the rule of uncorrupted law. If this seems impossible then survival of our species must also seem impossible. I continue to root for us as there is no reasonable alternative.
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