‘Dialogue Works’: edition of 18 September 2024
I heartily recommend today’s discussion with host Nima Alkhorshid because of the variety of the subject matter. This included my critical view of what is being said by fellow alternative media experts in recent days and why our various differences in interpretation of current events must be aired without unnecessary deference to one another if you, the public, are to come to a sensible and well-founded understanding of what is going on in the world.
I have in mind in particular my remarks on what was missing from the otherwise excellent discussion of the Deep State in a chat between professors John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs on the All-in podcast that was put on line yesterday. To my mind it is essential to mention that the Deep State, which, as these gentlemen say, is normally a force for continuity in the government of any of the Great Powers as they deal with the complexities of the world, lost all balance of skills and judgment back in 2002 when it was gutted by Vice President Dick Cheney. At that time, in the wake of 9/11 and in the midst of the War on Terror, Cheney carried out a purge of the State Department and of the intelligence services with a view to making them highly partisan, which is to say, bastions of Neocon thinking.
At this same time, whatever objectivity in the CIA and similar that one might expect from lifelong bureaucrats, was destroyed when whole swathes of that bureaucracy were forcibly retired, ostensibly to replace now superfluous expertise (Sovietologists, Russianists) with much needed expertise on current threats (Middle East experts). The situation was made still worse by the decision of Cheney and his colleagues to hasten the process of acquiring expert advice by outsourcing a large proportion of all intelligence work to commercial suppliers working from Open Sources and therefore needing no high- level security clearances. It is not that the new contractors lacked skills, because many of them actually had been Government employees before being made redundant. What matters is that the experts hired within the context of short-term contracts necessarily tailor their reports to the known desires of those signing their contracts in order to get extensions and new contracts. Net net: what they provide in their reports is what they know the Bosses want to hear, whether or not it is objectively correct.
As you will find viewing this interview, we talked about a great many topics of the day such as the latest assassination attempt on Donald Trump. I stand by my remark that would-be assassin Ryan Routh is probably not long for this world. I fully expect him to meet the fate of JFK’s assassin Oswald.
We also talked about the recent interest in Washington in negotiating a cease-fire and possibly a settlement for the Ukraine war. Then we moved on to the differences in approach to the way forward between the United States, which is now split 50-50 between Trump and Harras supporters, and the European Union where the split is 95-5, with only a couple of states, Hungary and Slovakia, voting against the overwhelming majority in favor of the war’s prosecution to a successful conclusion for Ukraine. I am especially satisfied with my likening the EU member states to the Бурлаки на Волге (Volga Boat Men) painting by Ilya Repin that hangs in the Russian Museum, St Petersburg. They are bound together by rope as they pull the barge. Only their barge is headed downstream, not upstream, and they are walking on the banks of the Niagara river just before it hits the Falls.
I took pleasure in explaining my professional historian’s skepticism of the scientific nature of the discipline studied by most of the foreign policy experts in our media who were not students of some Journalism School. To my way of thinking, “political science” is a contradiction in terms. Why I think so will be clear to any reader of my 2010 collection of essays in which I tried to get my mind around the writings of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger, Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, Noam Chomsky and two others: Great Post-Cold War American Thinkers on International Relations. Call it the revenge of an historian against those in the parallel profession who tend to raid history for “lessons” to support their latest theories. Notwithstanding the shortcomings of that book owing to its being my first self-published opus, I think it may still be the best I have written.
But for now, enjoy today’s show!
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024
Dr. Gilbert Doctorow: Russia Prepared for Worst-case Scenario in Ukraine!