Moles In The White House?

Is it possible to imagine an administration that could do more harm to America's ideals and America's national interests than the current incumbents?

At every stage, in every way, they have managed to demolish what the world believed America stood for and have shamelessly violated their own promises in doing so.

Take Pakistan, for instance, and what it says about US support for regimes which back terrorists, proliferate nuclear technology and trample on democracy. The LA Times editorial today gets it:

President Bush...argues that radical Islam showed that where freedom and opportunity were squelched — as in much of the Middle East — extremism would flourish. "We will encourage reform in other governments by making clear that success in our relations will require the decent treatment of their own people," Bush declared in his second inaugural address. "America's belief in human dignity will guide our policies, yet rights must be more than the grudging concessions of dictators; they are secured by free dissent and the participation of the governed."

Yet Bush is failing to live up to his own standard, acting instead very much under Cold War rules...President Pervez Musharraf, who seized power in a coup more than seven years ago, continues to squelch his democratic domestic opposition and appears determined to engineer his reelection as president while retaining his post as army chief, in violation of the constitution. Yet so long as he mouths anti-terrorism bromides, Washington seems loath to mention his anti-democratic behavior — even as it shells out billions in aid to Pakistan each year. This flawed notion that there is no alternative to the friendly dictator, even when he is behaving like, well, a dictator, is the same logic that led the U.S. to cozy up to such anti-communist leaders as Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua and the shah of Iran .

The Bush administration's unwillingness to distance itself from Musharraf, or to at least express disapproval of his behavior, is shortsighted in the extreme. To sacrifice U.S. values to fight terrorism is to lose the broader struggle.

At home too, the Bush years have been characterized by a totalitarian push that is more reminiscent of Soviet Russia than anything Americans would recognise as being the "heart and soul" of their national experiment in freedom. Today, Glenn Greenwald has yet another example of the Gulag Mentality:

The documents disclosed by the DOJ shed very interesting light not only on the process by which the U.S. attorneys were fired, but also on the related conduct of federal law enforcement agencies. One of the claims made by the DOJ as to why it fired Arizona U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton is that Charlton wanted to institute a policy of requiring law enforcement agents to tape record or videotape interrogations and confessions of criminal suspects -- a request which the DOJ refused and, shortly thereafter, fired him.

...the Justice Department denied Charlton's request, concluding that it did not want mandatory recording of interrogations and confessions. The DOJ solicited the views of all federal law enforcement agencies -- the FBI, ATF, DEA, U.S. Marshall's Service -- and each of them vigorously opposed mandatory recording. In doing so, one of the principal arguments was that they wanted to conceal from jurors the conduct of law enforcement agents in interrogating defendants and obtaining confessions, because that conduct would appear coercive and improper to jurors.

And we're all familiar by now with the underbelly of corruption which has led to so many cases of coverups and obsessive secrecy. Far from being a transparent and free experiment in democracy, the Bush administration has turned American government into KrelminWatch D.C.

Then there's Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran. Nicholas Kristoff writes for the New York Times today that if Dick Cheney were an Iranian mole, the Bush administration could hardly have done a better job than their incompetence has managed at making Iran the regional victor of American misadventures. It's Times Select material, but luckily Ron at Middle Earth Journal has the meat of Kristoff's article. Kristoff concludes:

Mr. Cheney isn’t an Iranian mole. Nor is he a North Korean mole, though his we-don’t-negotiate-with-evil policy toward North Korea has resulted in that country’s quadrupling its nuclear arsenal. It’s also unlikely that he is an Al Qaeda mole, even though Al Qaeda now has an important new base of support in Iraq.

...Our national interests are as vulnerable to incompetence as to malicious damage. So we must identify and abandon the policies that backfired so catastrophically. The common threads of those damaging policies are clear: a refusal to negotiate with “evil”; an aggressive willingness to use military force to solve problems; contempt for our allies; and the bending of legal and moral principles to allow indefinite detention and even torture, particularly for anyone with olive skin and a Muslim name.

Whenever we’ve suspected a mole in our midst, we’ve gone to extreme lengths to find the traitor. This time, betrayed not by a mole but by failed policies, let’s be just as resolute. It’s time to uproot policies that in the last half-dozen years have damaged American interests incomparably more than any mole or foreign spy ever has in the last 200 years.

I believe Kristoff is correct in this. But in idle moments I remember that all of the prominent original leaders of the neoconservative movement were originally communist Trotskyites - a fact they've been at pains to cover up. Disillusioned by the Soviet failure to bring about a Trotskyite victory and hegemony over the world, they jumped from the extreme Left to the extreme Right, where their Soviet thinking and habits of totalitarian thinking found a fertile ground...and thus to the Bush White House and the current situation.

So yes, there's little doubt that Cheney at al are just out to line their own pockets and those of their cronies, and in so doing have had a short-sighted incompetence in preserving the national interest. The asset-strippers don't care about the people who work for USA Inc.

But maybe, just maybe, there are some old-style Soviet moles among the neoconservative Wormtongues whispering in White House ears - still pursuing their mission of destabilizing and wrecking America long after their spymasters in the Kremlin have passed on. If so, they must be laughing up their sleeves.