Steve has been on a tear recently about the “deep state” in Pakistan. So when reading more of Chris Coyne’s “After War”, it occurred to me that bits of it illuminate who has influence within our own government.
“Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, as well as other key members of the Bush administration, initially favored the quick transfer of power to Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi. In contrast, the CIA voiced their support for Ayad Allawi, a Baath Party defector in the 1970s. Finally, some in the State Department favored Adnan Pachachi, another Iraqi exile, as the next leader of Iraq.”
So what happens when we roll the tape? Chalabi was interim oil minister for a couple of months and deputy prime minister for a year. Allawi was president of the governing council for a month, and for a year was the first prime minister of the new Iraqi government. I had never heard of Pachachi, he apparently refused the position of president when a U.N envoy nominated him and became the oldest man in the Iraqi parliament. So it looks like the CIA is the most powerful of these factions. It has also been said that CIA opposition was important in blunting the later push for war with Iran, but I don’t put as much weight on that for now. Greenwald headlined Petraeus’ move to CIA and Panetta’s move to DOD as “A more militarized CIA for a more militarized America“, but maybe it’s wrong to think of the CIA as helpless victim of DOD colonization (recall also that outgoing DOD secretary Robert Gates is ex-CIA). On a contrary note, Coyne quotes Robert Dreyfuss saying about the run-up to the Iraq war “The war over intelligence is a critical part of a broader offensive by … the Bush administration against virtually the entire expert Middle East establishment in the United States – including State Department, Pentagon and CIA area specialists and leading military officers.”
I was disappointed in the section on Halliburton. Coyne details that among major Iraq contractors, they received the most money (almost 11 million, with the runner-up getting a bit over 5) despite being middling in terms of campaign contributions (2.4 million over 12 years, while two others gave over 3 and two gave just over 1). He then notes that in the three election cycles prior to Cheney joining Halliburton in 1993, their total campaign contributions were 740K. In the next three they spent 1.6 million and received 2.3 billion in contracts. What’s the obvious piece of data that could have been presented but was left out? The contracts they received in the three prior election cycles under a different head.
Entitled to an Opinion 
May 12, 2011 at 3:24 pm
I prefer to think of it as “The Circular State” or “The Feedback State”.
I think Sailer gets the Deep State concept somewhat wrong. It isn’t necessarily about who is “really pulling the strings” in a government. It is about the loyalties of the people already working in government, and especially in the military.
The point of The Deep State is to act as a informal supervisory junta and unofficial check against the potential excesses (and usually focused on one particular ideological problem) of the formal system by threatening the activation of a “conspiracy of patriots” of a what is essentially a permanent “coup in waiting”.
The Greek junta of 1967 is a decent example – taking control, as, apparently, they had planned to do for a long time, when it appeared that the Communists would rise to power. In Turkey (and the broader Muslim world) the threat is Islamism, though it would appear that Erdogan’s (and the AKP’s) strategic effort is to gradually eliminate the pro-secular Deep State and entrench a substitute pro-Islamist Deep State in its place – to check the secularists should the AKP fall from power. A dicey situation!
In more advanced Democratic countries like the US, however, there usually is no such “Deep State” in the sense of “potential coup”. What there are instead are the Moldbug-esque “Red Government” (mostly National Security related) and the “Blue Government” (Welfare State, Regulation, and Diplomacy).
Key players in the competitive governments are committed and loyal to wildly different and incompatible (and semi-religious) visions of “What is Good Policy, What is Best for America’s Future, What is the American Interest, etc..”.
Those visions are inextricably tied up with ideology and therefore their loyalty to one of the political parties. The Feedback State is basically how the old Political Machines and Tammany Hall used to work, with the cycle of power, money, votes, etc. except that we’re a multi-machine system, and the Courts, as well as the whole Blue unofficial influence sector, are in on the game too.
What ends up happening eventually in any particular agency is that “company culture” becomes highly homogeneity-selective and self-similar-associative, and essentially ideologically tribal and adversarial towards opponent agencies. The old State-vs-Pentagon game is the quintessential example of this.
May 12, 2011 at 7:57 pm
I never bought into the idea that Red and Blue permanent government were at war with one another. I think all parts of the permanent government basically accept the status quo. There isn’t even that much of a difference in reality between politicians of opposite parties.
May 13, 2011 at 7:45 am
It depends at what level of permanent bureaucrat one is talking about, and what career track they are on. There is, of course, a great army of status-quo lifers out there who are counting days to retirement and just want to avoid rocking the boat, but there are also key cadres of higher level policy-influencers (in other words, “real power wielders”) with very different motives.
I never really believed or understood it until I saw it at a high level in person a few times. I wish I could give specifics, but alas, I’ve got some important self-preservation pseudonymity to maintain.
I can tell you that Blue, in this case, was a fairly senior guy from State during Bush’s second term, and I’m almost certain that none of what he was trying to accomplish on his Department’s behalf bore any resemblance to what the administration wanted done. It certainly was the opposite of what Red wanted.
So, in my youthful naivete, I thought this was a perfect opportunity for “taking it higher for deconfliction”, but, bizarrely, to me, no such deconfliction was ever accomplished, and both Red and Blue agencies just continued doing what they wanted to do, and very much directly counter to the other’s goals. The end-states and visions were just as completely contrary as those of opposing armies.
This often involves treating the same foreign individuals as best-friends and targeted-enemies at the same time, and foreigners learn quickly that they are not working with, or against, “Americans”, but that rampant inconsistency in their treatment reflects the actions and attitudes of something more like two independent powers.
The fundamental question is “Who actually makes ‘policy’ and what drives them to make it that way?”
I used to believe in the fiction that the President and the inner-circle “administration” and his high-level loyalist political-appointee executives actually ran and set the policies for the bureaucracy (which is embarrassing and just goes to show how sincerely and innocently believing in a fiction tends to shape the way you see the world to accord with that fiction, and creates blind spots to blatant inconsistencies with that narrative).
But, actually, this is not only untrue, it’s probably not even possible given the current institutional setup and lack of real accountability. Politicians simply must defer to the competence (and also influence, relationships, networks, empires, etc.) of long-term expert insiders, and it’s almost impossible for them to really go to war with the preferences of an agency because of passive-resistance – which is just a ridiculously effective strategy.
The essence of the thing is that the government is full of Red and Blue individuals and birds of a feather flock together (and also recruit, promote, etc.) and thus the Blueness and Redness tends to become purer and more intense as one goes up the ladder. If you put a bunch of Reds together, they’ll want “Red Empire”, and the same for the Blues.
“Flipping” an agency or “Capturing” another department’s scope-of-authority turf is considered a major coup. A Red coup is usually accomplished by “detailing” a large number of military folks into an agency and putting generals in the leadership. Blue Coups use the law, the press, the academy to turn public and elite opinion against a Red Agency and hamstring Red actions and gradually force them out or de-authorize their positions.
(CIA is a good example of such a battleground, but itself has become split into Red operators and Blue analysts, with stove-piped managements, also often working at cross-purposes.)
Politicians have the opposite centralizing force of having to win elections in an increasingly politically bi-modal nation, and also defer to the same bureaucracies in many matters, and so, on the surface, their differences may not seem so “substantive”.
But in the unseen belly of the beast, Red and Blue are real, they both think it’s their job to run the world, but they are very different indeed and they hate each other.
At any rate, I wish I could tell you more, but I guess you have to take my word for it.
May 17, 2011 at 12:06 am
I would of course like more details, but I won’t push you.