[lbo-talk] Lobe: Another for the Straussian honor roll: Shulsky

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Mon May 19 17:45:21 PDT 2003


[The excerpts from Shulsky's article on intelligence are almost too perfect to be true. And IMHO Lobe even manages to squeeze an extra few drops of outrage out of the material all lboer's are now familiar with thanks to Jim F. and Justin and Jeet and Chuck and . . .]

Leo Strauss' Philosophy of Deception

By Jim Lobe, AlterNet

May 19, 2003

What would you do if you wanted to topple Saddam Hussein, but your

intelligence agencies couldn't find the evidence to justify a war?

A follower of Leo Strauss may just hire the "right" kind of men to get

the job done - people with the intellect, acuity, and, if necessary,

the political commitment, polemical skills, and, above all, the

imagination to find the evidence that career intelligence officers

could not detect.

The "right" man for Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, suggests

Seymour Hersh in his recent New Yorker article entitled 'Selective

Intelligence,' was Abram Shulsky, director of the Office of Special

Plans (OSP) - an agency created specifically to find the evidence of

WMDs and/or links with Al Qaeda, piece it together, and clinch the

case for the invasion of Iraq.

Like Wolfowitz, Shulsky is a student of an obscure German Jewish

political philosopher named Leo Strauss who arrived in the United

States in 1938. Strauss taught at several major universities,

including Wolfowitz and Shulsky's alma mater, the University of

Chicago, before his death in 1973.

Strauss is a popular figure among the neoconservatives. Adherents of

his ideas include prominent figures both within and outside the

administration. They include 'Weekly Standard' editor William Kristol;

his father and indeed the godfather of the neoconservative movement,

Irving Kristol; the new Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence,

Stephen Cambone, a number of senior fellows at the American Enterprise

Institute (AEI) (home to former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard

Perle and Lynne Cheney), and Gary Schmitt, the director of the

influential Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which is

chaired by Kristol the Younger.

Strauss' philosophy is hardly incidental to the strategy and mindset

adopted by these men - as is obvious in Shulsky's 1999 essay titled

"Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean

Nous)" (in Greek philosophy the term nous denotes the highest form of

rationality). As Hersh notes in his article, Shulsky and his co-author

Schmitt "criticize America's intelligence community for its failure to

appreciate the duplicitous nature of the regimes it deals with, its

susceptibility to social-science notions of proof, and its inability

to cope with deliberate concealment." They argued that Strauss's idea

of hidden meaning, "alerts one to the possibility that political life

may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception

is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the

expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is

the exception."

Rule One: Deception

It's hardly surprising then why Strauss is so popular in an

administration obsessed with secrecy, especially when it comes to

matters of foreign policy. Not only did Strauss have few qualms about

using deception in politics, he saw it as a necessity. While

professing deep respect for American democracy, Strauss believed that

societies should be hierarchical - divided between an elite who should

lead, and the masses who should follow. But unlike fellow elitists

like Plato, he was less concerned with the moral character of these

leaders. According to Shadia Drury, who teaches politics at the

University of Calgary, Strauss believed that "those who are fit to

rule are those who realize there is no morality and that there is only

one natural right - the right of the superior to rule over the

inferior."

This dichotomy requires "perpetual deception" between the rulers and

the ruled, according to Drury. Robert Locke, another Strauss analyst

says,"The people are told what they need to know and no more." While

the elite few are capable of absorbing the absence of any moral truth,

Strauss thought, the masses could not cope. If exposed to the absence

of absolute truth, they would quickly fall into nihilism or anarchy,

according to Drury, author of 'Leo Strauss and the American Right'

(St. Martin's 1999).

Second Principle: Power of Religion

According to Drury, Strauss had a "huge contempt" for secular

democracy. Nazism, he believed, was a nihilistic reaction to the

irreligious and liberal nature of the Weimar Republic. Among other

neoconservatives, Irving Kristol has long argued for a much greater

role for religion in the public sphere, even suggesting that the

Founding Fathers of the American Republic made a major mistake by

insisting on the separation of church and state. And why? Because

Strauss viewed religion as absolutely essential in order to impose

moral law on the masses who otherwise would be out of control.

At the same time, he stressed that religion was for the masses alone;

the rulers need not be bound by it. Indeed, it would be absurd if they

were, since the truths proclaimed by religion were "a pious fraud." As

Ronald Bailey, science correspondent for Reason magazine points out,

"Neoconservatives are pro-religion even though they themselves may not

be believers."

"Secular society in their view is the worst possible thing,'' Drury

says, because it leads to individualism, liberalism, and relativism,

precisely those traits that may promote dissent that in turn could

dangerously weaken society's ability to cope with external threats.

Bailey argues that it is this firm belief in the political utility of

religion as an "opiate of the masses" that helps explain why secular

Jews like Kristol in 'Commentary' magazine and other neoconservative

journals have allied themselves with the Christian Right and even

taken on Darwin's theory of evolution.

Third Principle: Aggressive Nationalism

Like Thomas Hobbes, Strauss believed that the inherently aggressive

nature of human beings could only be restrained by a powerful

nationalistic state. "Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has

to be governed," he once wrote. "Such governance can only be

established, however, when men are united - and they can only be

united against other people."

Not surprisingly, Strauss' attitude toward foreign policy was

distinctly Machiavellian. "Strauss thinks that a political order can

be stable only if it is united by an external threat," Drury wrote in

her book. "Following Machiavelli, he maintained that if no external

threat exists then one has to be manufactured (emphases added)."

"Perpetual war, not perpetual peace, is what Straussians believe in,"

says Drury. The idea easily translates into, in her words, an

"aggressive, belligerent foreign policy," of the kind that has been

advocated by neocon groups like PNAC and AEI scholars - not to mention

Wolfowitz and other administration hawks who have called for a world

order dominated by U.S. military power. Strauss' neoconservative

students see foreign policy as a means to fulfill a "national destiny"

- as Irving Kristol defined it already in 1983 - that goes far beyond

the narrow confines of a " myopic national security."

As to what a Straussian world order might look like, the analogy was

best captured by the philosopher himself in one of his - and student

Allen Bloom's - many allusions to Gulliver's Travels. In Drury's

words, "When Lilliput was on fire, Gulliver urinated over the city,

including the palace. In so doing, he saved all of Lilliput from

catastrophe, but the Lilliputians were outraged and appalled by such a

show of disrespect."

The image encapsulates the neoconservative vision of the United

States' relationship with the rest of the world - as well as the

relationship between their relationship as a ruling elite with the

masses. "They really have no use for liberalism and democracy, but

they're conquering the world in the name of liberalism and democracy,"

Drury says.

Jim Lobe writes on foreign policy for Alternet. His work has also

appeared on Foreign Policy In Focus and TomPaine.com.

© 2003 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.



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