Ideal Illusions Part 1

Ideal Illusions.

Peck, James.

INTRODUCTION.

"Follow an idea through from its birth to its triumph," Bertrand de Jouvenel observed in his 1948 volume On Power, "and it becomes clear that it came to power only at the price of an astounding degradation of itself. The result is not reason which has found a guide but pa.s.sion which has found a flag."1 The widely heralded rise of human rights is not free of such complications. For the history of human rights in the United States-as a movement, as an impa.s.sioned language of good intentions, and as an invocation of American idealism-owes far more to the inner ideological needs of Washington's national security establishment than to any deepening of conscience effected by the human rights movement. Thousands of national security doc.u.ments (from the CIA, the National Security Council, the Pentagon, think tanks, and U.S. government development agencies) reveal how Washington set out after the Vietnam War to craft human rights into a new language of power designed to promote American foreign policy. They shed light on the way Washington has shaped this soaring idealism into a potent ideological weapon for ends having little to do with human rights-and everything to do with extending America's global reach.

This obviously isn't the way human rights leaders have understood the movement's history. For years they extolled its rise as the triumph of a compelling new moral vision that began with the United Nations' Universal Declaration on Human Rights in 1948. Out of the reaction to n.a.z.i atrocities, goes the popular narrative, came human rights. Never again would the world stand by in the face of wholesale torture and murder. As human rights became the vocabulary of a vibrant new conception of public good, it promised a sense of solidarity beyond borders, a voice raised on behalf of victims everywhere. By the late 1970s, these early hopes and aspirations had come to flourish in a vigorous movement developing in think tanks, foundations, law schools, UN forums, congressional committees, professional a.s.sociations, and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

The United States, with its longstanding ideals and its traditional respect for civil liberties, was a natural ally, a powerful force for global human rights, according to Amnesty International USA.2 The greatest advantage of Human Rights Watch, wrote its longtime director, Aryeh Neier, was its "identification with a country with a reputation for respecting rights."3 Of course, the movement's leaders note, Washington itself has committed some terrible human rights violations-CIA-fomented coups, renditions, Guantanamo. But these and similar "mistakes" or "shortsighted strategic calculations" could not permanently tarnish Washington's moral authority. When mistakes or crimes occurred, those committed to opposing such egregious acts saw their task as shaming Washington into changing its ways.

At the same time, the willingness of American citizens to expose their own government's brutalities offered further evidence of freedom at work. For the movement's leaders and for many ordinary citizens, the ability to criticize was inextricably paired with the nation's deeper virtue. No other country enjoyed such immunity. Indeed, where the countless human rights abuses committed by the Soviet Union, China, and other nations exposed who they really were, our own were aberrant-a reflection of who we really weren't. Whatever moral equivalence there was among atrocities did not extend to the parties committing them. American policies were fundamentally progressive. With all these views Washington's foreign policy leaders heartily concurred.

Of course, when a government and its critics share the same language, they are not necessarily saying the same thing. But adept leaders, as Harold La.s.swell noted in his cla.s.sic 1927 study Propaganda Technique in the World War, know that "more can be won by illusion than coercion."4 And no ideological formulation has been more astutely propagated by Washington for the past four decades than the notion that a "rights-based" United States is the natural proponent of human rights throughout the world. In part, the rise of human rights recapitulates the old tale of popular idealism seeking to affect power, and power, in turn, shrewdly subverting that idealism to its own ends. Even as the human rights community has methodically focused on Washington's-and others'-many violations, it has largely recoiled from a.n.a.lyzing the fundamental structures of American power. As a result, it has unwittingly served some of Washington's deepest ideological needs.

Not enough attention has been paid to the interweaving of idealism and national security concerns, yet it is here that the real history of human rights can be found. Human rights erupted into the mainstream of public debate only because two quite distinct needs came together. On one side, a profound revulsion over the Vietnam War led to the weakening of the anticommunist consensus. Appalled by Cold War rationales and tactics (overthrowing regimes, a.s.sa.s.sinating leaders, training torturers, supporting dictatorships), human rights advocates mobilized against both American "excesses" and Soviet "crimes," doc.u.menting in particular the atrocities of American-backed military regimes throughout Latin America, from Guatemala to Chile. On the other side, Washington was desperate for new ideological weapons to justify-both at home and abroad-its global strategies. Human rights advocates sought to infuse Washington's policies with their high-minded ethos just as Washington was fashioning a rights-based vision of America to support its resurgent global aims.

A central question is: who influenced whom? Human rights leaders are convinced they pressured Washington into taking up their cause. Yet in truth their movement gained much of its momentum from Washington's subtle promotion of what they think of as their own agenda. Before the major American rights groups were created, Washington's national security managers had been discussing the desirability of a national organization to offset the "foreign" influence of the London-based Amnesty International. Before human rights leaders began advocating for extending the laws of war to outlaw abuses by antigovernment guerrilla forces, Washington pursued the same goal as a way of discrediting almost all insurgency movements. And a new humanitarian ethos legitimizing ma.s.sive interventions-including war-emerged in the 1990s only after Washington had been pushing such an approach for some time. In short, the vocabulary and the arguments of the human rights movement almost all have significant precursors in Washington's national security concerns.

From Washington's perspective, the fierce Cold War ideological battles between the "Free World" and its adversaries necessitated lumping together a wide array of radical movements, dissident ideas, and nationalist struggles-all perceived to be inimical to the demands of an America-centered world-in order to dismiss them. But Washington knew all too well that the Free World could hardly restrict its const.i.tuents to free countries; it had to align itself with various dictators and brutally repressive regimes. Still, the great "war of ideas" demanded a line be drawn between democratic societies-with free inst.i.tutions, representative government, and free elections-and those that denied freedom and individual rights.

From the earliest years of the Cold War, Washington predicated its war of ideas on a set of deep divisions: between freedom and equality, reform and revolution, self-interest and collective interests, the free market and state planning, and pluralistic democracy and ma.s.s mobilization. American human rights leaders largely, if unknowingly, built on this divide. They usually felt more at ease a.s.sociating human rights with civil rights and political freedoms, the individual, the market, and pluralistic openness, while seeing the perils in revolution and concentrations of state power. They preferred not to dwell on what might compel populations, as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights warned, "to rebellion against tyranny and oppression"; nor did they acknowledge that it often takes militant ma.s.s movements, both violent and nonviolent, to pressure states and powerful interests into acquiescing to programs promoting greater social justice. They considered the struggle for human rights largely apart from peace movements and efforts toward disarmament and the banning of nuclear weaponry, and they took no stand on issues of war and aggression. They mostly viewed resistance movements through the prism of individual rights rather than considering the role of resistance and ma.s.s mobilizations in the creation and nourishment of rights.

That Washington has sought to fashion both the conceptual basis and the direction of the human rights movement is hardly surprising-which is not to say that Washington controls the agenda, or that the national security establishment is not constantly competing with Congress, the media, and highly contentious interests abroad. Washington continually has to scramble, searching for ways to refine its strategies and bend ways of thinking to its own ideological ends. Still, it has remained as adept as it was during the Cold War at molding concepts, ideas, and code words. Understanding this process is key to understanding why the human rights movement has developed as it has.

The popular view of a rights-based, democratic American power not only obfuscates the way Washington operates but also advances a rather one-dimensional and parochial vision of human rights. We might more usefully look at human rights as two currents-sometimes contending, sometimes complementary. The first current largely embodies the popular American view, which emphasizes civil and political rights and embraces a moderate, democratic, step-by-step incorporation of human needs into a kind of rights-based legalism. Perhaps such rights are easier to understand in terms of individual freedom: they do more to liberate individuals from the deprivations of caste than of cla.s.s, freeing them from archaic restraints and traditions but not from economic subjugation. And the outcome is paradoxical. Violations of women's rights, gay rights, and civil rights of all kinds are increasingly attacked while inequality grows. Diversity and multiculturalism are lauded even as the concentration of wealth and power reaches historic levels. The "laws of war" are applauded and efforts to protect the rights of noncombatants flourish even as wars rage and the larger issues of aggression and occupation are ignored.

The second current has less to do with individual freedom and more to do with basic needs. It is a.s.sociated with popular ma.s.s movements, revolution by populations in desperate straits, and resistance. From this perspective, the human rights movement emerged not only as a response to the savagery of World War II and the Holocaust but, more significantly, out of the movements for independence that broke the grip of European colonialism. Central to the second current are challenges to corporate power, state repression, foreign occupation, and global economic inequality, as well as the protection of collective means of struggle, from labor unions to revolution. Historically, this current affirms the ma.s.s-based challenges that allowed human rights to emerge in the first place. It is the drive for both freedom and equality, so deeply embedded in diverse revolutionary traditions and popular struggles for emanc.i.p.ation and justice, that galvanizes this vision of human rights. Today, this current is far more prevalent outside the dominant Western spheres of power.

The first current tends to speak in terms of victims and perpetrators. The second judges a society by how well it treats the poor and the weak. It challenges power by asking why, in large areas of the world where civil liberties and the "rule of law" do hold sway, so little is done to meet the most basic economic, medical, and educational needs of the populace. The second current, then, is less about infusing rights into preexisting structures of power than about fundamentally altering how power works; it is more about transforming the inst.i.tutional apparatus and the military basis of political power than about invoking rights to control it.

There have been laudable, if infrequent, efforts to honor both currents together. Martin Luther King Jr., for example, fiercely opposed the Vietnam War, insisting that the civil rights and peace movements needed each other to bring about a better world. But there has been little subsequent support for such a merger either in Washington or in the human rights movement. Instead, the prevailing individual-freedom view of human rights has repeatedly been invoked to condemn the "dark underside" of revolution, the corruptions of unchecked state power, the lip service to equality paid by hypocritical leaders busily suppressing freedom-but not to condemn aggression or crimes against peace.

For most human rights leaders today, the long travails of decolonialization and revolution and the search for alternatives to market-driven economic development represent little more than the backwaters of old Cold War battles that were hardly about rights at all. One looks almost in vain for accounts that show how Western power long subordinated the development of the Southern Hemisphere to its own needs and desires, how challenges in the non-Western world propelled the development of human rights laws and ideas, and how ma.s.s mobilizations broke the Gordian knot of colonialism and liberalism. Nor do human rights textbooks devote many pages to the great ma.s.s movements-not even the civil rights movement in the United States or the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa.5 The major studies of human rights law spend their time instead debating how to enforce UN p.r.o.nouncements and covenants. The language of law dominates the discussion. But law is the language of inst.i.tutions, courts, and politicians. The teachings of Mohandas Gandhi and King and the language of impa.s.sioned justice are notably absent.

The movement's deep uneasiness with all forms of radical and revolutionary social change was already evident in 1961, when the newly founded Amnesty International p.r.o.nounced that no prisoners who advocated violence could be considered prisoners of conscience: thus no revolutionaries-not Nelson Mandela in South Africa, nor even the Berrigan brothers (who had destroyed draft-board records) in the United States. The movement has generally criticized revolutions and decolonializing rebellions as human rights travesties. No insurgency, including those in Vietnam and El Salvador, has escaped its censure for the killing of innocent civilians and the use of terror. No state redistributions of wealth and power have failed to rack up human rights violations; the Chinese Revolution is regarded as one huge atrocity. The Iranian Revolution is attacked as little more than a precursor to further repression. The upheavals of decolonialization are blamed for having opened the way to repressive authoritarian states.

Meanwhile, the virulent hostility of the United States in all these situations is either ignored in human rights reports or else dismissed as irrelevant to judging the violations. The black book of Communism is long and richly ill.u.s.trated, and the crimes of the new human rights abusers are quickly added in the appendices. But where, we might ask, is the corresponding black book of anticommunism, of United Statesbacked "nation building" and "counterinsurgency," with their countless human rights violations, of invocations of the "rule of law" used to legitimize such systemic injustices as wars, occupations, and the economic violence of the marketplace?

None of the movement's uneasiness with violence and radical struggle translates into a commitment to nonviolence or pacifism. The conventional conception of human rights accepts certain kinds of controlled violence, "justified violence,"6 "proportionality" in warfare, and the legalization of some forms of violence against others. It seeks to moderate war by protecting civilian noncombatants, regulating occupations and counterinsurgency campaigns, and controlling the excesses of governments and resistance movements alike. In other words, the idea is to impose the laws of war, not to outlaw war. Worthwhile as this undertaking may be, it tends to deflect attention from the larger truth that wars, occupations, and aggressive interventions are responsible for much of the violence in the world today. For there is only a thin line between advocating for the laws an occupying power should follow and tacitly legitimizing an occupation by lauding the rights-based methods that sustain it. It is bad enough to legalize some forms of violence with the "laws of war" while ignoring the larger underlying issue of aggression. It is still worse to accept some forms of state violence while outlawing almost all forms of nonstate violence that arise in reaction to it.

Today we look with perplexity at how slavery could coexist with the belief that all men are created equal, how liberalism could rise hand in hand with colonialism and brutal forms of exploitation, how calls for freedom could ignore women's rights, how the antislavery movement in England could coincide with the Opium Wars against China, and how democracies could fight colonial wars. We like to think these contradictions reflected incomplete developments. Indeed they did. But in various ways such blindness remains with us, a reminder of how tightly interwoven the competing and sometimes conflicting claims of human rights always are.

If we really begin to contend with the contradictions posed by these two currents, we will understand why later generations may look back on our present vision of human rights with the same perplexity. For the rise of the American human rights movement since the 1970s has coincided with an unprecedented increase in inequality, with brutal wars of occupation, and with a determination to establish American preeminence via the greatest concentration of military power in history. In the future, the downplaying of the issues of aggression and crimes against peace may not go unnoticed, for it fits with the character of Washington's power and its half-century-long war of ideas.

The world is changing profoundly. Yet the tectonic shifts in global power now under way have barely registered on either the Obama administration or human rights leaders. But as the old world gives way, it is urgent that we rethink the meaning of human rights. And nothing presents a greater hurdle to this task than the human rights community's close if often unwitting links to Washington. Without such a reexamination, the human rights movement may well continue to serve Washington's ideological needs. In the end, the movement must decide: Can it find a way to truly confront the abusive operations of wealth and power in all their many forms? Or will it consent to being a weapon of privileged power seeking to protect its interests-and its conscience?

1.

WASHINGTON'S WORLD BEFORE THE RISE OF HUMAN RIGHTS.

There is an oft-told, much-cherished story of how in the early Cold War years Washington's wise and talented national security leaders, confronted with a war-ravaged world, put together a sweeping and magnanimous program to transform Europe and much of the rest of the globe. World War II had created an unmatched opportunity. The old colonial empires were crumbling. Britain, previously the center of the world's largest trading bloc, was bankrupt. Germany and j.a.pan were defeated and occupied, their economies in ruins. The Soviet Union was economically weak and faced the immense task of rebuilding. Alert to the possibilities at hand and drawing on the reforming ethos of the New Deal, Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, Robert Lovett, John McCloy, and other colleagues dedicated themselves to a dynamic internationalism, advocating the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. Having emerged largely from the financial and business elite, these moderate, practical men, the story continues, rallied themselves to this near-Herculean task, steeling their nerves to wage Cold War against a Communist foe that sought to stymie their every effort, an enemy so relentless and so ideologically adept at stoking the widespread embers of hatred and conflict that it took utmost vigilance and dedication just to "contain" it.

Not since the Founding Fathers, the tale goes on, had America been so providentially blessed with such a surplus of political talent. With greatness thrust upon them, they brilliantly seized the moment, bringing together the best wisdom of their era to create a new, progressive international order.1 They treated the Germans and the j.a.panese with unstinting evenhandedness, reforming their societies and leading them toward democracy. They recognized the cost of America's isolationist retreat after World War I and vowed that the nation would never again abdicate its global responsibilities. Having witnessed the devastating economic protectionism of the Great Depression and the discrediting of capitalism-disasters that had sp.a.w.ned the virulent nationalisms of n.a.z.ism and j.a.panese Fascism-they were determined to prevent such calamities from happening again. Whatever criticisms their policies garnered later on, "at the creation" (as Acheson liked to say) these leaders skillfully laid the foundation for America's globe-spanning power and provided the ideas and the vision to fight for it.

Of late, a somewhat mournful series of questions has been added as a coda: Where are the comparable wise men today? Where are the leaders innovative enough to guide an America-centered world in ways that would make us truly respected, if not always loved? Where, in short, is that saving touch of moderation untainted by hubris and the arrogance of power that would enable leaders to wage fierce struggles against frightening foes while upholding the Const.i.tution and building a world order in which freedom, democracy, and human rights might flourish?2 * * *

Augustus Caesar, Edward Gibbon wrote in the opening pages of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was wise because he "relinquished the ambitious design of subduing the whole earth," introduced "a spirit of moderation into the public councils" of Rome, and limited the size of the empire.3 Such was not the case with the "wise men," as Acheson and his colleagues were called by later generations. Notwithstanding the popular myth, they introduced policies that const.i.tuted one of history's most audacious and astonishing imperial undertakings. At the center of U.S. foreign policy making, enshrouded in the often obfuscating ethos of national security, labored men whom Dean Acheson described without embarra.s.sment in biblical language: in the beginning was chaos, out of which the Americans would create a global order unlike any ever seen before.

In reality, the wise men were anything but the moderates they saw themselves as. Nor did their views reflect an emerging consensus in America about the nation's postWorld War II international role. They well knew that there were strong opposing conceptions of the national interest, and they saw their situation as precarious-a minority undertaking widely popular neither at home nor abroad. Yet they triumphed by claiming that they embodied the national interest for the presidents they served. What they sought and, to a remarkable extent, managed to do was capture the pinnacle of the American state for their own distinct vision of the world-one that has evolved but still holds sway.

Their approach was fervently visionary, using antic.i.p.ation and prediction as a way of guiding forces and bureaucracies toward their objectives. Though sometimes inchoate as a source of policy, their intensely felt and intuited globalism-visionary globalism, in short-nevertheless offered a coherent faith that has provided the context for international policy discussions ever since.

Toward the end of his life, George Kennan, looking back on this emerging Cold War globalism, commented: "Do you know what Acheson's problem was? He didn't understand power."4 In Kennan's eyes, Acheson and the other wise men's mistake-and their extraordinary hubris-lay in their conviction that Washington could actually fashion and coordinate a global system that would leave it as capable of controlling its allies as of confronting its enemies. Instead, Kennan said, they would find in the end that Washington was no more able to prevent the emergence of independent centers of power than the Russians were in Eastern Europe. Refusing to understand the limits of power, as Augustus perceived several millennia ago, was not to understand power at all.

What made the wise men extremists was what made their visionary globalism so total: they antic.i.p.ated a complete reorganization of the globe from the top down, as opposed to the traditional American expansionism that moved from the bottom up. The notion George Washington laid out in his Farewell Address of "extending our commercial relations" with other countries while having "as little political connection as possible" was turned upside down: commercial relations were to become dependent on a new global politics centered on American power. America's long tradition of expansionism also came in for serious revision. For expansionism proceeds incrementally, as the state adds on pieces of territory and military bases; there is no direct path from this process to a doctrine of organizing the globe from the top down. Visionary globalism came about when American elites utilized the highly centralized system of presidential power that emerged out of World War II to order the world around the needs and interests of the United States. As President Harry Truman put it in a talk to the CIA: "You may not know it, but the Presidential Office is the most powerful office that has ever existed in the history of this great world of ours. Genghis Khan, Augustus Caesar, great Napoleon Bonaparte, or Louis XIV-or any other of the great leaders and executives of the world-can't even compare with what the President of the United States himself is responsible for when he makes a decision."5 Or as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told the Senate in 1955: "One man, and one man alone is so situated as to have the complete, overall picture. He is the President of the United States. He comprehends both the domestic and the international aspects of the problem."6 The national security establishment rapidly grew under this presidential aegis, its authority expanding into a wide network that came to include the National Security Council (NSC), the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the State and Defense departments, among other groups. The new national security managers fervently believed that only presidents and their advisors really had enough information to consider the national interest as a whole, and their task, as they saw it, was to rise above bureaucratic and parochial battles in order to formulate the real national interest for the president. Their mission was to help the president stand above special interests and limited ways of thinking, to bear in mind the big picture, the global perspective. And presidents, of course, came and went. In emphasizing the president's centrality, the managers reinforced their own, for their power flowed directly from his.

The globalism the national security managers embraced did have its ideological precursors-in Wilsonian rhetoric about the League of Nations, in the one-world vision of Wendell Willkie, in Henry Luce's American Century, in the financial "internationalism" of corporate circles in the 1920s7-but never before had there been an opportunity to transform them into a comprehensive mission for the American state. This globalism did not develop "in a fit of absence of mind," as the British sometimes viewed the rise of their own empire.8 Wartime planning was meticulous and ongoing. Franklin Roosevelt's vision of the postwar world has often been interpreted as an extension of his New Deal to the world at large, but more accurately it was a response to the New Deal's weaknesses at home: the way to go about countering the Depression and possible economic and social turmoil was to restructure the world capitalist system via the international inst.i.tutions that were designed to reinforce American interests. Dean Acheson exhorted conservative businessmen during the war that they had it all wrong when they denounced the coming postwar globalism he advocated. Such "global responsibility," he told them, was precisely the way to undercut the statist economic tendencies of the New Deal and protect their corporate power in the coming world.

Yet the gap between their fervent aspirations to build a new America-centered global order and the ideological means to justify it was enormous. At home, the national security managers confronted the withering criticism of numerous opponents-from conservatives such as Senator Robert Taft of Ohio and former President Herbert Hoover to ardent New Deal advocates still fighting for major social and economic changes-whom they regarded as isolationists at heart, preoccupied with their own problems. The country "was being flooded with isolationist propaganda," Truman wrote in his memoirs;9 it was "going back to bed at a frightening rate," lamented Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal in October 1945.10 The idea of using American power to impose order on a chaotic world also confronted frightful obstacles abroad. The burgeoning decolonialization movement and revolutionary upheavals were largely hostile to Washington's global agenda. Even in Europe, the United States confronted nationalist resentment from leaders who criticized the "a.s.sertion of U.S. world hegemony" that would make them "protectorates of the United States, deprived of some of the traditional attributes of sovereignty and equality."11 The disintegrating British Empire was torn between its need for American financial a.s.sistance and opposition to American plans to destroy its system of preferential trade. Most critically, the Soviets, though war-weary and devastated, offered a military and ideological alternative in a tumultuous world, their developmental strategies increasingly resonant with the desperate needs of emerging new nations.

The ethos of World War II (the era of the "common man," the four freedoms, the four policemen of the world) provided no ideological weapons potent enough to promote American globalism against these obstacles. Such slogans had been fine for waging a world war in alliance with the Russians, but for the new tasks at hand they were hopelessly inadequate. Nor was there any equivalent of the French mission civilatrice or the British Imperial ethos available to Americans searching for a vision to draw on-as one CIA memo later put it-to "steady the nerves" and provide "the hardness and decisiveness" their mission required.12 "Political warfare is foreign to our tradition. We have never done it before. We are not skilled in this. Many of our people don't understand it,"13 George Kennan told the National War College.

To the wise men the task was clear: A great power needed "a persuasive ideological ethos" of worldwide significance, a "global psychological strategy" to rally support at home and win the "war of ideas" abroad.14 The country required a "firm, well defined ideology which must be messianic and scientific at the same time-not purely nationalistic."15 Communists were "providing the people of all parts of the world with a fighting faith."16 The United States might stand for freedom, but how could we present our political philosophy in a way that could compete favorably with Communism's appeal?17 Not easily. "Take a look at our propaganda apparatus-and our ideological message. It is pitiful. It is really appalling,"18 said Kennan, then head of the Policy Planning Board of the State Department, in 1947. In particular, he added, "we should cease to talk about vague and-for the Far East-unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistics slogans, the better."19 Kennan need not have worried. In State Department deliberations during World War II, the term "human rights" played only a modest role, usually appearing in discussions of the rule of law, a new internationalism, and the United Nations. FDR's New Deal, with its concern for social and economic problems, was occasionally evoked as contributing to human rights, but rights remained largely cast in the language of the individual-and rarely placed in the world of revolution or the desperation of the have-nots. One notable exception came from Gandhi, who wrote to Roosevelt in July 1942 that "the Allied Declaration that the Allies are fighting to make the world safe for freedom of the individual and for democracy sounds hollow, so long as India, and for that matter, Africa are exploited by Great Britain, and America has the Negro problem in her own home."20 Though historians often focus on the importance of the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in reality human rights played virtually no role in American strategic policy in the early Cold War years. When the concept did appear, it was usually in the context of relatively secondary discussions over how to handle the internationally embarra.s.sing problem of Southern segregation. So, for example, Truman administration leaders told Eleanor Roosevelt, who was chairing the UN Commission on Human Rights, that it was all well and good to produce a list of rights to inspire Americans so long as she made sure they could not be invoked on behalf of African-Americans. Truman feared that if the UN Declaration of Human Rights were to be used to challenge Jim Crow laws (as W. E. B. Du Bois, in fact, tried to do), he would be faced with a rebellion by Southern senators over a host of his other policies.

For a brief moment the Eisenhower administration looked for a way to charge the Soviets with human rights violations without appealing to the United Nations Declaration. UN Amba.s.sador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. asked the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB), a group that had been set up to devise psychological warfare strategies against the Soviets, for "hot journalistic items," "sensationalistic individual compelling stories of human rights violations" in which "factual certainty is desired, but should not be made a fetish."21 But like Truman, Eisenhower and Dulles became alarmed at the domestic risk of having foreigners "prying around in human rights conditions in the United States"22 and quickly put an end to any ideological warfare involving the UN human rights protocols.

Even setting aside the civil rights problem, there is little to indicate that human rights were ever intended to be a central weapon in the American ideological a.r.s.enal. They smacked too much of a "flabby, defenseless idealism." Speaking of political morality and "fuzzy minded rights," Senator J. William Fulbright remarked, was seen as "a sure sign that you didn't have the hard edged ferocity to fight communism" or to deal with other sources of global disorder.23 The language might be fine for Eleanor Roosevelt, but not for the battle against the Soviets. Something fiercer, more aggressive was required to build the new global order. That was anticommunism.

ANTICOMMUNISM AND THE ORIGINS OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY ESTABLISHMENT.

What anticommunism offered was a nearly instantaneous rationale for globalism. The connection is clear in a top-secret 1950 National Security Council doc.u.ment that bluntly summed up the ensuing Cold War outlook: "In a shrinking world, which now faces the threat of atomic warfare, it is not an adequate objective merely to seek to check the Kremlin design, for the absence of order among nations is becoming less and less tolerable. This fact imposes on us, in our own interests, the responsibility of world leadership." While anticommunism focused on the immediate confrontation with the Soviets, the globalist commitment emphasized the "absence of order" that imposed the task of "world leadership."24 The national security managers understood the difference between the two. "Since the Free World does not yet exist as a political or even a psychological community," went a typical 1952 p.r.o.nouncement, one of our major objectives "should be to create it, and then give it the leadership it needs to survive."25 Washington's grand strategy was to create an integrated, cooperative global capitalism under U.S. leadership. About this there is no ambiguity; the goal was never far from the calculations of policy makers, and it remains a remarkably fundamental and consistent objective. However bitter the policy controversies at the highest levels of the American government, there was always agreement on the need for defending such a globalist esprit.26 Not surprisingly, the formulators of this strategy never saw themselves as anything but realists dealing with brutal necessities and the specific interests of American power-hard-headed, cold-blooded men who made their decisions unenc.u.mbered by ideology.

National security managers became the custodians and exponents of the globalist faith, fervent proselytizers of its tenets at home and abroad. In studies of the managers, this fervor, with its obsessive anticommunism, has usually been dismissed as an embarra.s.sing eruption of purple prose rather than as the authentic expression of an underlying ethos. "Who were the authors preaching to?" one researcher puzzles after examining early Cold War National Security Council doc.u.ments,27 and another observes, "This is not what one would expect in a top secret doc.u.ment destined not to be made public for a quarter of a century."28 Instead of attempting to understand the hortatory calls in policy doc.u.ments, historians have too often viewed them as marginal. They have seen American leaders using ideology to manipulate others without acknowledging how deeply the tenets of the faith gripped these leaders themselves. Yet from the earliest days of the Cold War, the doc.u.ments demonstrate a dynamic of elite self-persuasion whereby the making of policy and the propagation of a globalist faith became inseparable in the formulation of American foreign relations. In reality, the national security establishment was a center of both a.n.a.lysis and ideological warfare. Globalism's true believers stood at the apex of the American state, where their unrelenting effort to persuade (or "educate" or sometimes, frankly, "indoctrinate")29 Congress and their fellow citizens as to the virtues of an America-centered world paralleled their own ardent self-indoctrination. They internalized the code words, the a.n.a.logies, the ways of thinking that they would then insist were their utterly nonideological means of strategizing.

Because anticommunism insisted upon a close connection among events in vastly different regions of the world, it perfectly meshed with the aspirations of globalism. Onto the flesh-and-blood Stalin, anticommunism projected a Genghis Khanlike world conqueror (which he never was) instead of the ma.s.s murderer of his own people that he really was, carving out a defensive zone by occupying countries around him. "Today Stalin has come close to achieving what Hitler attempted in vain," an early NSC report averred.30 Communism was a fanatical, messianic creed-a "20th century Islam," a G.o.dless faith in modern guise that fought to annihilate the "foundations of Western civilization."31 Its "spiritual appeal" became a near obsession with the national security managers. "To me the fundamental question" in respect to our relations with Russia, Secretary of the Navy Forrestal stated in 1945, "is whether we are dealing with a nation or a religion."32 Communism's claim to be "scientific and infallible" and its invocation of the "predetermined pattern of world history" made it a mighty ideological force. Moreover, the Soviets were highly organized-"unified in thought, unified in command, unified in action and unified in the goal they are seeking." Their tactics shrewdly subordinated diverging objectives to the imperatives of global strategizing, "joining together a "world plan of operations" with an "international crusading ideology."33 Only a counter-globalism, an equally "integrating ethos," could hope to defeat such an opponent. Each American action thus had to be considered "in the light of overall Soviet objectives." Contrary to the "time honored custom" of regarding "'European policy,' 'Near Eastern Policy,' 'Indian Policy,' and 'Chinese Policy'" as "separate problems to be handled by experts in each field,"34 it was understood that every localized political, economic, ideological, sociological, and military event "affects what happens in every other" area. "In the world we are living in, there are no 'things in themselves.' It is all tied together."35 ("To ignore the inter-connection of events was to undermine the coherency of all policy," Henry Kissinger wrote in his memoirs.)36 "We should not be too proud to learn from the enemy where profitable," one memo admonished.37 Mastering Soviet brilliance at creating "global strategy" and a "world plan of operations"38 was at the top of the list. But Fulbright was closer to the heart of the matter when he asked, "Isn't it true that we very often tend to accuse someone with whom we are a rival of the very thing that we have in mind ourselves?"39 The managers often portrayed themselves as rather reactive latecomers, but their view of the "enemy," as Fulbright shrewdly came to see, reflected the agenda they had set for themselves more than it did any objective perception of their Soviet opponent.40 Their depiction of an omnipresent, spiritually alluring Communist enemy thus led to a search for strategies to wage the "battle for men's minds." One was Truman's creation, in April 1951, of the Psychological Strategy Board, comprising the undersecretary of state, the director of central intelligence, and the deputy secretary of defense. Gordon Gray, later Eisenhower's national security advisor, was its first director. Its task was to coordinate and plan psychological warfare programs and to shape the American message for the ideological Cold War. Managers had to learn-as C. D. Jackson, special a.s.sistant to President Eisenhower, put it in 1953-that "psychological warfare ... does not exist apart from the policies and above all the acts of governments." Policies and propaganda had to be tightly bound, the former shaping the latter.

Initially the very term "psychological warfare" was "intentionally dreamed-up to conceal" its covert aspects.41 The overtones were unpleasant, but as Eisenhower's psychological warfare expert put it, "just because Dr. Goebbels and the Kremlin have debased it, that is no reason why we cannot elevate it."42 Cold Warriors had to counter the Communist talent for offering both ideals that had a "certain universality of appeal" and "deceptively simple solutions."43 Unlike the n.a.z.is, who embraced no such attractive Enlightenment ideals, the Communists had shrewdly "perverted" Western values to their own ends. The "Soviets appropriate, degrade, and b.a.s.t.a.r.dize the words ... liberty, equality, fraternity, independence, justice, freedom, democracy,"44 one official complained. They used the "words of the West" as "bullets aimed at the brains of their targets to nourish confusion, doubt, suspicion, fear and incite hate, greed, venom and thereby appeal to the lowest instincts of man,"45 another added. The Soviets had "succeeded, through clever and systematic propaganda, in establishing throughout large sections of the world certain concepts, highly favorable to their own purposes,"46 agreed a third. And they were armed with categories of a.n.a.lysis that appealed to the discontented everywhere: cla.s.s, imperialism, colonialism, revolution, capitalism, as well as a model for rapid industrial development.

In response, the national security managers created alternative theories to interpret global processes. They, too, had to learn to "present their conclusions in broad settings and historical perspectives," to engage in a "historical-philosophical dialogue about the current state of the world," as Zbigniew Brzezinski later summed up the challenge.47 They, too, needed to evolve categories of a.n.a.lysis: neutralism, fifth columnists, dominos, credibility, containment, and so on. Such apparent mirroring was both conscious and unconscious. Kennan, for example, puzzled over the contradiction between the Soviets' realism and their fanaticism. "I must say I admire" the Communist leaders, he said in his lectures to the National War College in 1947, "for the realism with which they look to the essential features of power and do not allow themselves to be carried away by the more petty sorts of human vanity."48 And yet, inexplicably, the Kremlin held fast to an ideological prism, distorting reality to suit its own needs (the cla.s.s struggle, capitalism's decline, the certainty of revolution and of the economic development of Communist society). How could these men be at once so objective and yet so ideological? This was "the key question to understanding the whole system," Kennan concluded, "and I am frank to say I don't know what the answer is."49 Greater self-awareness might have suggested a place to start.

Tellingly, Truman spoke of similarities between the two sides, although he kept his views private. "You know Americans are funny kids," he wrote in his diary. "They are always sticking their noses into somebody's business which isn't any of theirs. We send missionaries and political propagandists to China, Turkey, India, and everywhere to tell those people how to live.... Russia won't let 'em in. But when Russia puts out propaganda to help our parlor pinks-well that's bad-so we think. There is not any difference between the two approaches except one is 'my approach' and the other is 'yours.' Just a 'moat and beam' affair."50 The resemblance between the working world the Cold War managers were building for themselves and the way they depicted the Kremlin is striking. In 1946 Clark Clifford wrote admiringly to Truman about the "small group of able men" at the Kremlin's center, men endowed "with a remarkable ability for long-range forethought." To survive, America needed the same thing.51 The United States was the one "source of power capable of mobilizing successful opposition to the communist goal of world communism"52-but only because the trained eye of the national security manager could see the underlying global conflict playing out in every part of the world.

These officials became archgeneralists in the hard, lean thinking of power. They exercised their skill in finding mobilizing code words, reductive phrases, and a.n.a.logies that reduced the world to viable policy alternatives. "Credibility" was a favorite word, shorthand for the primacy of Washington's global commitments. Anticommunism nourished the language of credibility, of keeping our word, of defending the world order and civilization, of linking developments within any country to U.S. interests. Seeing the dangers of Communism everywhere was a way of seeing American global interests everywhere; obscure events and countries a.s.sumed their places in a familiar ideological landscape. A conflict in a faraway state was a test of Washington's credibility. Cuba, Korea, and Berlin were all, as Acheson so often warned, tests of the American will. Like their Communist opponents, the national security managers understood what power required, how to control it, how to manage it in endless crises. Power was about filtering out the welter of conflicting information and molding what remained into actionable choices that made sense of the world. They could spot a power vacuum, a domino, a failing state, or aggression and instantly link it with America's credibility, intuitively sensing the dangers of being "soft" or negotiating too quickly.

If the fate of greatness is to be misunderstood and feared, this was a burden willingly borne by these managers. The resentment of the weak and less well off needed to be understood: "Grat.i.tude is a heavy burden to bear, and good deeds are hard to forgive," concluded one psychological warfare study.53 As John Foster Dulles said to Charles DeGaulle, "In every society a minority always dominated. The question was how to do it. If the minority affronted the majority, it lost influence. If discretely exercised ... the minority influence could be effective and desirable."54 Acheson was more acerbic: "you all start with the premise that democracy is some good. I don't think it's worth a d.a.m.n.... People say, 'If the Congress were more representative of the people it would be better.' I say the Congress is too d.a.m.n representative. It's just as stupid as the people are; just as uneducated, just as dumb, just as selfish."55 Dealing with endless Congressional criticism, the attacks of Senator McCarthy, and frequent election cycles were challenging nuisances for these men but ones they felt ready to handle with almost any means at hand.

The national security managers were thus not hesitant to violate the spirit of America's ideals in waging the Cold War through covert operations. They believed it took brutal methods to deal with recalcitrant opponents and unhappy allies, as even a partial list of U.S. activities from a 1951 account makes clear: propaganda, political action; economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition; escape and evasion and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states or groups, including a.s.sistance to underground resistance movements; guerrillas and refugee liberation groups; support of indigenous anti-communist elements ... deception plans and operations....56 But these were years of deniability: America did not operate as an imperial power; it didn't interfere in the internal affairs of other nations; it didn't act unilaterally to fashion a global order; its actions were "defensive." Washington thus issued bold denials at home that America was engaging in nasty tactics, while secret NSC doc.u.ments insisted that the integrity of the United States was not "jeopardized by any measures, covert, overt, violent or non-violent, which serve the purposes of frustrating the Kremlin Design."57 But if the Communist threat was so demonic, and if America's integrity remained intact, why was deniability of covert warfare so important for Washington? Why did American leaders find it impossible to publicly acknowledge the need to fight fire with fire? Why did their methods demand more secrecy than the renditions and torture that are public knowledge today? After all, the Soviets, not to mention the various nations on the receiving end, were often aware of U.S. covert programs.

Deniability was important because covert warfare was not only about achieving the specific objectives of anticommunism but also about reinforcing and augmenting the globalist policies that lacked support in the United States. Washington's reasons were often duplicitous. Covert warfare, for example, was significantly about discrediting opponents of American foreign policy at home. Some American critics of an emerging globalism were willing to acquiesce in the creation of NATO; but "the reconstruction of the political, economic, and social fabric in the friendly countries of Western Europe and Asia" was something else again. The United States, they charged, was utilizing a well-orchestrated effort to "bring about revolutionary changes in friendly countries without the knowledge or the consent of the peoples of the majority elements in the governments concerned." This was a policy of "forced internationalization," charged an in-house CIA critic, part of a "crusade to remake the world"58 about which there was hardly consensus in the United States.

Promoting capitalist reorganization was not easy even in Western Europe. National security leaders knew that the notion of development on an American scale was neither popular nor inevitable there.59 That "economic expansion is the driving force upon which US strength is based" remained uncontested in Washington,60 but, as Dulles put it, "All the Western powers, except the U.S., are acting like shattered 'old people' who just want to spend their remaining days in peace.... Their hope is that the Soviets, like Genghis Khan, will get on their little Tartar ponies and ride back whence they came...."61 The idea of a "concept of Europe" offered Washington a way to recruit a like-minded European elite: friendly European leaders and intellectuals could invoke it to overcome the "nationalistic parochialism" and "socialist inclinations" of their domestic adversaries. The national security managers' aim was to propagate a European capitalism that would break down state control over trade and make the United States the ultimate arbiter of economic integration; but they recognized that this was neither a popular goal nor an inevitable outcome.62 By the early 1950s, Washington could report considerable progress. As a CIA report to the Psychological Strategy Board concluded, "Major accomplishment of political action and propaganda operations in Western Europe have been in the area of European unification along the lines of the Atlantic unity concept."63 DEVISING A CONVINCING NARRATIVE AT HOME AND ABROAD.

A global power, the national security managers reasoned, must have not just a creed but a satisfying historical narrative as well. The "cunning of history" requires the cunning of historiography, and a new historical narrative was sorely needed in America. Charles and Mary Beard's epochal Rise of American Civilization (1927) had focused on America's revolutionary ferment, its social conflicts, and its deep-rooted struggles for equality and democracy. The Beards and others like them in the 1930s warned against the false prophets of internationalism, whose ideas, if adopted, would "redound more to the advantage of one nation than another, owing to differences in industrial advance and natural resources ... in cruel truth, internationalism may be a covering ideology for the aggressive nationalism of one or more countries."64 By 1945, views such as this were under attack as defeatist, isolationist, and un-American.

As the Director of Truman's Psychological Strategy Board phrased it, after World War I "America preferred to slough off its responsibilities." The widespread acceptance of the economic interpretation of history and life together with a revisionist approach to World War I led the average American to view all wars as "profit and persuasion: bankers and munitions makers reaped the profit and plied their fellow citizens and world opinion with appealing propaganda to increase their gains."65 In the 1920s and 1930s Wall Street financiers and arms manufacturers were widely depicted as manipulators of public opinion, concerned less with making the world "safe for democracy" than with profits and the protection of their interests. World War I turned out to be more complicated than an evil Germany versus virtuous Allies; and the mobilized wartime idealism took on the appearance of a sham. These views, Cold War propagandists concluded-whether prompted by Senate investigations such as the Nye Committee (the mid-1930s Senate panel that looked into business influence on our involvement in the war) or spread by the popular media-made "Americans become isolationist" and thus "basically indifferent to world developments."66 In the early Cold War years, shifts in key words and ideas signaled a sweeping process of ideological transformation. Psychological warfare experts, for example, thought it was fine to laud "American freedom" and "American ideals," but they drew the line at "American civilization." To speak of "Western civilization" and of the United States as the leader of the "Western world" was acceptable, but calling the United States a civilization, as the Beards had, would remind Americans of the particularities of their culture and history and of longstanding debates over what, exactly, the "spirit of the American people" was. There could be a French or a Chinese or an Indian civilization, but Cold War American exceptionalism demanded that the United States be imbued with ideals appropriate for all humanity. Henceforth the phrase "American civilization" all but disappears from official rhetoric, and the United States becomes the embodiment of humanity's universal longing for freedom.

A highly particularized construction of "freedom" became the key ideological weapon. The "idea of freedom is the most contagious idea in history ... peculiarly and intolerably subversive of the idea of [Soviet] slavery," a cla.s.sified 1950 doc.u.ment proclaimed to managers being initiated into the national security culture. In addition to "opposition to the communist goal of world conquest," freedom meant "free enterprise," the "rights of the individual," and the right of the United States to organize the "free world" against Communism.67 This freedom had great emanc.i.p.atory powers for the individual from repressive regimes and traditions of all kinds, but it was abstract and largely unconstrained by other values. It was what political economist Max Weber once described as the freedom of capital: liberating for some individuals, breaking the bonds of the old, attacking tradition, using whatever it can on the way to profit.68 It should be no surprise that "freedom" was the supreme value in Cold War national security doc.u.ments: the nascent "ordering" of the world was inseparable from American-style capitalism. Freedom and the market are ultimately inseparable in these doc.u.ments; indeed, the international market is the only force capable of promoting freedom's further development.

Encoded in the word "freedom," then, was an agenda that stood apart from and often against such other core values as equality, community, solidarity, and redistributive forms of justice. In the war of ideas against Communism and other radical faiths,69 "freedom" made for a crusading ethos expressed in a language of good-versus-evil, white-versus-black, free-versus-unfree-all variants of us-versus-them.70 To turn aspects of humanity's great emanc.i.p.atory traditions against one another, to use freedom to attack a plethora of diverse values and appeals for social justice-this was what the national security managers' war of ideas was all about. They were fond of arguing that "populist Manichaeanism reflected the propensity of the ma.s.ses to demonize foreign affairs,"71 but in reality they were the Pied Pipers leading the procession at every step.

Before the 1940s it would have been hard for such a singular vision of freedom to triumph. But World War II, and then the Cold War, changed the picture. In the depths of the Great Depression, as the historian William Leuchtenburg put it, "the businessman had lost his magic and was as discredited as a Hopi rainmaker in a prolonged drought";72 now his path to resurrection lay in a "consensus society" speaking the language of freedom and free enterprise as a cornucopia of consumer goods beckoned it forward.73 Business leaders were deeply fearful that the popularity of the New Deal at home and the spread of socialism abroad signaled drastic changes to the American economic system, and they organized enormous financial reserves to fight back.74 They also relied on the new reach of ma.s.s communication. "We have within our hands the greatest aggregate means of ma.s.s education and persuasion the world has ever seen-namely the channels of advertising communication.... Why not use it?" asked the director of the War Advertising Council during World War II.75 And Big Business did-sometimes subtly, sometimes boldly, crafting an updated "business creed" whose hallmark of productivity and free enterprise was partly designed to ward off criticisms of unfair distribution and corporate concentration.

And not just Big Business. When during the war government propagandists in the Office of War Information's "Project America" program set out to define America, they, too, immediately gravitated toward a vision of freedom that stressed the h.o.m.ogenizing, standardizing, advertising-based consumerism of a business civilization.76 "Our sympathies are universal," argued Robert Sherwood, then a speechwriter for FDR, "because we are ourselves composed of many racial and national strains." Freedom "makes us one." And if the "American idea" embraced a "nation of nations," uniting diverse ethnic, religious, cla.s.s, and racial backgrounds, then American freedom could be "increasingly able to reach the non-elites of the world."77 The possibilities for foreign relations were breathtaking because "the extraordinary development of electric communication has made foreign relations domestic affairs," Archibald MacLeish said.78 With new ways to penetrate other societies appearing, most notably radio and the attractions of ma.s.s consumerism, elites were no longer the sole targets of propaganda; the ma.s.ses could be reached as well.

From a propaganda point of view, the language of markets, advertising, rights, ma.s.s media, and law offered powerfully simplifying and formulaic descriptions within which American power could pursue quite specific agendas. Such "universalism," however, was never about just any culture but specifically a market-driven one; never about a civilization except one with "universal" traits; never about what was difficult to communicate among cultures but only what could be easily expressed. "The unprecedented American opportunities have always tempted us to confuse the visionary with the real," Daniel Boorstin warned.79 Anticommunism adeptly and shrewdly fused two overlapping but distinguishable aims: the efforts of Big Business to advertise its way back into the good graces of American public opinion after the Great Depression and the needs of the new national security managers to discredit rival visions of America.80 Tolerance among cla.s.ses, religious freedom, and individual freedom were part of the emerging catechism. The new consensus had significant emanc.i.p.atory qualities and would prove itself amenable, in time, to a greater acceptance of civil rights, social diversity, women's rights, and racial justice. Yet this vision of freedom came at a cost. When Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma, the cla.s.sic study of racism and the American creed, entered intellectual debate in the mid-1940s, it did so largely stripped of its impa.s.sioned warning that only a powerful reaffirmation of equality could counter the "unbridled freedom" that in the United States so often "provided an opportunity for the stronger to rob the weaker."81 Myrdal was not alone. James Truslow Adams, who in the depths of the Depression popularized the phrase "the American Dream," had urged his fellow citizens to take control of the processes unleashed by the industrial and corporate organization of America.82 Like many of his contemporaries-Lewis Mumford, Van Wyck Brooks, John Dos Pa.s.sos, Sinclair Lewis-Adams saw the American Dream as a humanizing vision at war with a business civilization that was subordinating everything to the dictates of profit, destroying the natural resources of the land, and turning its back on equality, cultural vibrancy, even the guarantee of basic social securities.

The swift replacement of these essentials by anticommunism and by dreams of an America-centered world underlines just how powerful the globalist vision had become. There is no question that in an America scarred by racism and s.e.xism, an individualistic vision of rights had deeply appealing and profoundly emanc.i.p.atory qualities. But locked into a globalist ethos, it encouraged a new American exceptionalism that would, in time, turn the United States from a soulful city on a hill into the glittering capital of the world.

HOW TO CONVINCE THE HAVE-NOTS?.

If anticommunism legitimized the fundamental a.s.sumptions of the national security establishment, it was far less effective in providing a positive message for the rest of the world.83 Fear was the organizing emotion of anticommunism: fear of a terrifying other, of conspiracy at home, of nuclear nightmare, of near apocalyptic conflict. "The negative task of exposing the gigantic hoax of Soviet Communism is important, and in many ways, more persuasive than any honest picture that can be painted of democracy and freedom," said a.s.sistant Secretary of State Edward Barrett. "Hatred of a devil" has usually