Janine Wedel - Shadow Elite - How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market

More important, none, save Scooter Libby, has suffered serious consequences for his actions. Libby was convicted of felonies in March 2007 including obstruction of justice and perjury in the Plame-CIA case, but his sentence was quickly commuted by President Bush. Libby soon found a perch at the conservative Hudson Institute (where Feith and Meyrav Wurmser are now also affiliated). 119And one can rest assured that his fellow core members will continue to help rehabilitate his reputation and ensure him a comfortable livelihood; after all, they created a multimillion-dollar fund to aid in his defense. 120

Chalabi, their buddy, is a veritable Energizer bunny. While the Neocon core failed to install him as president of the new Iraq, Chalabi has played a number of formal roles there, from member of the Iraqi Governing Council to head of the services committee, a consortium of service ministries, and two Baghdad municipal posts. No doubt many of Chalabi’s informal roles have yet to come to light. Through it all, Chalabi has floated in and out of U.S. administration grace, but to date has always come back. In 2004 the FBI undertook an investigation after respected U.S. intelligence sources concluded he was a double agent for Iran. Tellingly, while still under active investigation by the FBI for alleged espionage during a November 2005 visit to Washington, he was apparently not interrogated by its agents. Instead he had audiences with Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, National Security Advisor Hadley, and other high officials, despite allegedly then being out of Bush-administration favor. Through it all, he was publicly backed by Perle. During this same visit, I heard Chalabi speak at AEI, the same platform from whence two and a half years earlier he had called for the removal of Saddam Hussein. Chalabi was received as a respected statesman, even as he claimed, fantastically, that the Iraqi “government has stopped 95 percent of the corruption.” Democracy and transparency are taking hold in the country, he declared. In October 2007 Malaki’s naming of Chalabi as head of the services committee prompted the spokesperson for General David Petraeus, the highest U.S. military commander in Iraq, to say that Chalabi “is an important part of the process.” 121By May 2008, however, U.S. officials in Baghdad once again announced they had severed ties with him. 122

While the track record as experts of members of the Neocon core and their trusted brokers is weak, to put it generously (having been wrong about everything from the existence of WMD’s in Iraq to American troops being greeted as “liberators” to the creation of democracy in Iraq), for the most part their status as players remains strong.

The fact that they identify themselves as fellows at neutral-sounding think tanks, and exude an aura of intellectual expertise and objectivity in their writings and public appearances, helps make these players more convincing than if they were to present themselves as current or former operatives. Even now, the public is frequently exposed to Perle’s “analysis” as a supposedly disinterested observer on the Middle East and U.S. foreign affairs on mainstream news programs and in widely respected newspapers. 123

Not only do the stars of individual Neocon core members and their associates continue to rise. As a group, their influence may appear to wane with the close of the Bush II era, but there is no reason to believe they will stop pushing their agenda forward from whatever perches they organize. What, then, does the story of the Neocon core tell us about the ability of U.S. government to operate in the public interest and to push back in the face of such effective fusions of state and private power? What does it mean when individuals can no longer be embarrassed or shamed? In the next chapter, we shall explore these questions.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Accountability in the Age of Flex Nets

THE NEW SYSTEM OF POWER AND INFLUENCE AND THE PLAYERS who thrive in it have transformed our world. The consequences are well illustrated by the global economic meltdown that became incontrovertible in the fall of 2008. At the root of the crisis and the heart of the new system is a decline in loyalty to institutions. This decline is reflected in the proliferation of players who swoop in and out of the organizations with which they are affiliated—who operate in them, but are not of them—and create “coincidences of interest” that serve their own goals at the expense of their organizations and the public. The greed that Wall Street high fliers symbolize is merely an egregious expression of such lack of loyalty and disdain for the public good—outcomes of the four transformational developments at work. This recalls the cross-pollinating institutional nomads of Poland and especially the plundering clans of 1990s Russia. In such a moral universe, ethics becomes a matter of individual choice, with the only real control being social pressure exerted by the network. Ethics are disconnected from a larger public or community and detached from the authority that states and international organizations, boards of directors, and even shareholders once provided. With the players removed from the input and visibility of these institutions, not to mention that of voters, the consequences to the public are multiple and serious.

As the political economist Susan Strange astutely observed more than a decade ago, “In a world of multiple, diffused authority each of us shares Pinocchio’s problem: our individual consciences are our only guide.” While Strange lived only long enough to observe the fruits of the first two transformational developments, the reinvention of bureaucracy and the end of the Cold War, she saw how they undermined accountability and made the public more reliant on the vicissitudes of individual conscience. 1

The public is vulnerable because of the greater potential for players who are supposed guardians of official information and public policy to further their own rather than the public interest, and to do so unnoticed. States, international organizations, and all manner of institutions face a daunting responsibility: ascertaining the allegiances of the consultants and even the executives who work for them. The problem is that these are the very institutions that are diluted by divided loyalties and undermined by flex activity.

Think back, for instance, to the retired military professionals retained by major television networks as ostensibly unbiased commentators on the war in Iraq. The quintessential example is General Barry McCaffrey. They presented themselves, and were presented by the media, as impartial analysts. Yet they had overlapping roles as undisclosed beneficiaries of exclusive Pentagon briefings and perks, which they had incentives to avail themselves of because of their potential usefulness in their business consulting—as well as for enhancement of their status. These benefits afforded them other incentives to maintain their access and good standing with the Pentagon. Their coincidences of interest could well have affected their ability to call the facts as they saw them. Yet how could the public, trying to understand events in Iraq, know that their information was coming from commentators of questionable objectivity? No institution—from the Pentagon to its contractors to the media—had an incentive to be anything but complicit. While the military men’s activities might not pass a smell test, they were mostly beyond the reach of auditors. (Government auditors, adhering to their specified narrow focus, looked into certain activities under their jurisdiction involving money and possible conflicts of interest and found no wrongdoing.)