The CIA and Me

wv wrote:

See this right here is one reason why i use the term “deep state.” To me, this is a big part of why I think we are dealing with something ‘different’ than at any time in the past:

“…In 2010, almost a decade into this secret war with its voracious appetite for information, the Washington Post reported that the national security state had swelled into a “fourth branch” of the federal government — with 854,000 vetted officials, 263 security organizations, and over 3,000 intelligence units, issuing 50,000 special reports every year.
Though stunning, these statistics only skimmed the visible surface of what had become history’s largest and most lethal clandestine apparatus. According to classified documents that Edward Snowden leaked in 2013, the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies alone had 107,035 employees and a combined “black budget” of $52.6 billion, the equivalent of 10% percent of the vast defense budget…”

w
v

I know you like the term and I know you know I don’t. Here’s why. Does “deep state” just mean intel people? Cause if it does, why not just say intel. If it doesn’t just mean intel people then what mechanism is at work making all the longterm employees at the State Dept, in intel, in the pentagon, and so on, come out uniformly thinking the same? Because if fact often those groups are at odds.

I think it’s just a muddled term. If you mean intel agencies are full of people who have been there a while and have particular policy perspectives and agendas, okay.

If you mean US foreign policy has tended certain directions without a lot of mainstream scrutiny, okay. That’s true.

It originally was used to discuss countries which were basically directly ruled by the military in spite of thin outward facades seemingly indicating otherwise. It then got applied to the USA by (in my mind, weak) analogy. I think a hard look at the US situation means, it;s not like that. It’s much messier than that.

None of which is an argument against you using it as a term, obviously. So you can just take this as cantankerous mutterings.

Meanwhile yes that was an interesting read. As a sign though of just how messy things are, he’s around to tell his story and there;s still a chance to shine scrutiny on that kind of covert war issue and make it known and maybe end it. It’s just factual historical reality that we are that messy in the USA.

The ideological side of it is that people believed things like that kept us safe from “communism” so they let it all happen with a shrug.

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Billy_T wrote:

But we’ve been an empire from the moment we added new “states” beyond the original thirteen.

I think it’s a messy situation and deserves an analysis, which would not be easy, that fully accounts for its messiness.

Going by modern, 17th-19th century versions, empires are extensions of commerce and don’t justify themselves much if they are expensive and not profitable. So leaving out the Romans and Chinese and the Mongols and the Persians and so on, looking at modern versions, they grab land and resources, and come along with various justifications having to do with progress, Christianity, and modernity and so on. But they turn a profit.

That does not describe Afghanistan. Among many other things it does not describe.

So to me there’s something too crude and simple to the notion that this is an empire. If it is it’s a completely different thing and the whole concept of “empire” has to be re-thought accordingly.

Another example is Nicaragua in the 80s. There was no profit in it. It was driven by something else. Or Saudi Arabia. Old versions of empire, if you craved a resource (oil) you just took it on the ground. Went in, took it. Like the Ottomans. That does not describe the american/saudi (complicated) neo-alliance.

So to me the key is ideological motives, not crude simple easy to understand ordinary “they profit and therefore act this way” views.

And when you enter into ideological motives, you are at the level of fears and wishes and so on. Not material gain. You’re inside people’s eyes seeing how they see the world.

I’d highly recommend The Making of Global Capitalism, by Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch. It goes through the history (in detail, with copious sourcing) of America as the leading exporter of the ideology of capitalism. I think it helps us understand how America became a different kind of empire, once we had physically expanded enough to turn our attention to the business of expanding the capitalist system itself.

My only quibble with the book is that I think it underplays the role of the military and intel. Not a huge amount. But enough to make a sequel a good idea.

https://www.versobooks.com/books/1527-the-making-of-global-capitalism

Billy_T wrote:

So, your “it’s messy” is very true. But that’s been a constant throughout the history of empires.

Then I am not yet communicating and we;re not on the same page, because you;’re not responding to what I mean, which I take to be my fault in not being clear.

On this?

Billy_T wrote:

I think sometimes people just look at the map and see the United State stretching from sea to shining sea, and think, “This can’t be an empire. It fits so naturally between oceans.” But as you well know, we wouldn’t have been able to push west and south (or try in the north) without massive military power

I have to admit to not caring about it. There is not a single square inch of earth that isn’t now occupied by people who took it from someone else who in turn had taken it from someone else and so on.

To me it doesn’t factor into the analysis of what is going on now. Well, to correct that, the history of slavery and its aftermaths has a direct bearing on today’s living history, but mostly because of the narratives still being told about it and what that allows to continue in terms of racial conflict.

But no I don’t use the word empire like you do even remotely. Reading yet another book about it won’t change that either. The USA is a nation state and just as Gaul and the Celts, then the Romans, and the Franks, and so on eventually became France, it arose from conflict and conquest. The terms of that are so different now this century that I just look at that past with the cold indifferent eye of an historian.

The USA does not profit from Afghanistan. Therefore the analysis has to catch up with the reality. Whatever the deal is, and so far no one in this thread is approaching what I would call a decent analysis of it (that;s both us and the readings we’re posting), it needs to be thought in terms that are more real.

You explain Afghanistan in different terms than you explain yet one more conquest of land in the world (old USA history). The thing has changed. Analysis has to keep up.

And, again, capitalists most definitely profit from our endless war in Afghanistan. If by “we” you mean the American people, no. But then again, few of us “profit” from ANY of our foreign ventures.

There has never been a war for the expansion of empire anywhere in the world, at any time in history, that could claim it was “profitable” for all citizens. Each attempt at empire got a huge number of those citizens killed, and their rulers always forced massive tax increases on those least able to handle it. The only people who “profited” from the expansion of empire, from the Sumerians, through the Egyptians, through the Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans and so all, all across the globe, were the ruling classes of those nations and a bit of “trickle down” to the peasantry. But because the cost was always deadly for that same peasantry, no one can really claim they made out overall. Not once. There isn’t once single case in the history of ancient, Dark Ages, Medieval or modern era empire making that can make that claim.

It’s always been a few reaping the rewards, and they usually don’t fight on the ground.

Anyway, I’m guessing we’re at one of those impasses. No worries, as the Aussies like the say.

Billy_T wrote:

And, again, capitalists most definitely profit from our endless war in Afghanistan.

Balance that against net loss of military expenditure and aid and so on then ask why it’s happening. There was no such thing in the old British empire as net overall national loss and economic drain against some profit just for some (that did not balance the loss). The entire thing was economically viable in a thousand ways. So you have to ask, what kind of ideological notions are at work to make this situation, the present, seem justifiable to people.

The old explanation does not hold up.

Any more than it did with Vietnam. (I actually debated people in high school who said Vietnam was about oil.)

The old narratives are not working BT. Time for better ones. And I was saying that during Vietnam.

zn wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

And, again, capitalists most definitely profit from our endless war in Afghanistan.

Balance that against net loss of military expenditure and aid and so on then ask why it’s happening. There was no such thing in the old British empire as net overall national loss and economic drain against some profit just for some (that did not balance the loss). The entire thing was economically viable in a thousand ways. So you have to ask, what kind of ideological notions are at work to make this situation, the present, seem justifiable to people.

The old explanation does not hold up.

Any more than it did with Vietnam. (I actually debated people in high school who said Vietnam was about oil.)

The old narrative are not working BT. Time for better ones. And I was saying that during Vietnam.

From my readings, yes, the British Empire also subsidized private profit and the nation as a whole, back home, did not benefit nearly as much as capitalist interests. It was the first capitalist nation, and it’s first attempts to colonize other nations to expand capitalism were in Ireland and India. It could, at first, steal enough from those countries — tea, rubber, newly privatized land from ancient commons (India), herbs and oil, to name a few commodities, to trees and agricultural goods in Ireland, and very cheap labor in both countries. It expanded from there. But the nature of capitalism always, without exception, means the benefits are concentrated at the top and the nation as a whole sees little of that . . .

From Day One of the British Empire, yes, they lost more than they gained, if you’re talking about the British people, as opposed to individual corporate interests and individual fat cats.

So, America in Afghanistan is no different from past empires. It helps a few key movers and shakers, and hurts the nation back home overall, and it projects power. We taxpayers subsidize the military ventures, and our young die over there, as do thousands and thousands of innocent Afghanis.

Vietnam? It was much more than oil. It was also rubber and a host of other specific natural resources. But mostly it was a matter of preventing any kind of blockage from our capitalists, period. Our military was engaged to prevent that. To make sure no nation — and no series of dominoes — could decide that they wanted to control their own economic destiny. As far as our movers and shakers were concerned, that wasn’t up to them. It was up to us.

Taxpayers and young soldiers were tasked with keeping the shipping lanes open for American capital, primarily, but also European and Asian. So it went well beyond individual corporate interests and into ensuring the sustainability of the system itself. Its Prime Directive to Grow or Die.

Cheap labor, natural resources, new markets. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan . . . all of these ventures were about individual profit-making and the wider protection of the capitalist system itself. It made no difference if it was a net loss back home. Taxpayers would foot the bill, and they always have.

Were any of the “solutions” to the crash of 2008 in our best interests? No. Expecting foreign adventures to add up doesn’t make much sense when our domestic policies never do, either.

From my readings, yes, the British Empire also subsidized private profit and the nation as a whole, back home, did not benefit nearly as much as capitalist interests.

That really has nothing to do with my point.

Overall the national economy benefitted.

Now, with Afghanistan, that is simply not true. No private profit equals or surpasses the expenditure. Plus in old empire, there was an outlet for the population to become settler s and administrators, to the point where there was a general economic benefit. It overbalanced anything that was spent at the governmental level to obtain and secure possessions. In fact there was no point in doing it otherwise.

That is simply not the case with Afghanistan, and not even a little bit.

THEREFORE the explanation for this can’t be the same as the explanation for the old situation.

We;re talking way past each other BT. Either I;m not clear enough or you;’re just missing my points.

I will make a stab at answering my own question. What goes on now is played out with different kinds of motives than the past. Now, in the post-colonial era when it’s no longer possible to directly and explicitly argue that there are superior and inferior races, and there is a general acknowledgement in principle anyway of the universality of human rights and of a people’s right to self-determination, you can’t just do the old British empire thing of spotting a resource and then competing to possess it on the ground.

So the USA does the next thing, which is to dominate the resources through military alliances. This means that ideologically they act in the name of what they call “stability.” Of course “stability” is as free-floating and unfixed a word as any you can think of in the political landscape. But it more or less amounts to being this–the region in question is not openly “unfriendly” or hostile.

Stability takes on an ideological imperative of its own, just as anti-communism did in the cold war. One reason Vietnam happened, for example, was because the american political system had people competing to distance themselves from being “soft on communism.” That competition had a force in its own right that just determined things. So for example, people in power or in the public eye or who supported people in power and so on were stuck with the “monolithic communism” view of world geo-politics. Any gain for anyone anywhere allied with “communism” was therefore directly tied to Soviet gains in the world. From that perspective you had to “stop it from spreading.” Vietnam couldn’t be seen as an independent entity in that view–and TO SEE IT as an independent entity in that view was to fall into the death spiral of being “soft on the Soviets.” You had to fight, or perish politically–the american world was dominated by the ideological imperatives of “don’t be soft on communism.” In fact leadership always pre-selected people who simply thought that way. You couldn’t enter public life without competing at that game.

Now, “stability” has much the same ideological power. That means what you dominate is alliances. You have to be “containing” Iran and bolstering the Saudis. This leads to the idea that you can CREATE allies out of unstable places like Iraq or Afghanistan. Go in and replace hostile regimes with pro-western, alliance regimes.

This also leads to things like the USA being involved in funding the war in Yemen. The Saudis see Yemen as being in danger of becoming an Iranian proxy/ally, and they will quite simple fight to prevent that, and the nature of our alliance in the name of “stability” doesn’t give us any latitude—you support the Saudis or risk losing them, and/or put them in a position where they see US as the main alliance that keeps them from being encircled by pro-Iranian interests.

It’s indirectly economic. So, the whole point of “stability” is to protect the flow of a resource that is crucial to the economy. But then that means doing what you can to spread “stability.” Iran is hopeless, they can only be contained, but Afghanistan presents a possible “stable regime allied with us” if we stick around to preserve it. That is Afghanistan is seen as contestable, Iran isn’t, and you contest where you can. All in the hopes of “maintaining stability.”

I would argue that the “stability” motifs ideologically dominate thinking to the point where the problem is that those motifs dictate actions. It’s as much purely ideological as it is crudely materially economic, and if anything, probably more so.

What energizes the “stability” ideology is the public fear of “terrorism.” Now looked at historically, with a colder eye, “terrorism”–both the kind we support (Saudis in Yemen) and the kind we fear (Muslims shooting up american night clubs) are both just symptoms of one very significant development—the tumultuous effects of post-colonialism. The post-colonial world is dominated by former colonized places trying to figure out just exactly who and what they are as nations and peoples, with wildly extreme ways of presumably settling that. So basically, for centuries, europeans drew arbitrary borders around the world, and then left and said “okay you;re a country now.” What might not have been a country or nation state in ordinary organic history becomes one arbitrarily. So who is the power over these divided places, and where does each place stand in a world still dominated by the more subtle effects of first world power? Institutions emerge to answer that–military, civil/democratic, religious. And then there are minorities and often majorities trapped in those power lines. They resist the religious, political, ethnic, military and so on dominator. They too develop ideological imperatives that go beyond simple obvious goal achievement. The Iraqi shiites want to dominate formerly sunni Iraq. ISIL goes into power vacuums and wants to establish a sunni caliphate. Kurds want a Kurdistan.

We walk around in that mess trying to establish (our idea of) “stability.”

That’s what I mean when I say that to me, ideological notions (eg. “stability”) dominate things far more than any crudely direct economic interests. The economic interests are far more INDIRECT (is oil coming from “stable” places? etc.)

Anyway, that’s just some ideas tossed into the ring.

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zn wrote:

That’s what I mean when I say that to me, ideological notions (eg. “stability”) dominate things far more than any crudely direct economic interests. The economic interests are far more INDIRECT (is oil coming from “stable” places? etc.)

Anyway, that’s just some ideas tossed into the ring.

…

But I think it’s clear that “stability” is desired because it helps profits, which help plutocrats maximize their own compensation packages. It really does come back to economic gain.

And, unless I misread you misreading me . . . I’m not saying it’s necessary to be in a white supremacist mode for any of this, nor is it necessary for that to be a pillar of “empire.” Empire is now in service of THE empire: capitalism — and has been for more than a century. And America, working with dozens of other nations, seeks “stability” in order to do capitalist business. To make it flow. To ensure it dominates all.

The major difference with modern age empires is that the people pulling the strings are from several nations, working together, not from any one nation, and their loyalties are to “growth” and profits, which wind up multiplying their own compensation packages.

They all use the various countries, especially America, as the hammer to make sure they can pad their own wallets, and borders don’t matter anymore. But it’s really a false distinction, in my view, to say that because now, today, “empire” is international, it can’t exist, that it must have national boundaries, and be solely within those boundaries, or it can’t be called an “empire.”

In the ancient empires, yes, the ruling class expanded their territories for their own gain, not the masses. So they kept this “in house” and within their own borders, which they hoped would expand on the map. They competed against other nations, dynasties, empire for land.

Today’s empires, OTOH, after the map has largely been solidified — another aspect of “stability” — are now free to work on behalf of international movers and shakers, without concern for national boundaries. Yes, they have to be careful to give the appearance of patriotic planning, lest their own populations kick them out of power. But I have no doubt that what really matters to the governing class is pleasing the internationalist list of plutocrats and oligarchs, and those a bit below them on the wealth and power ladder. They do their bidding and they craft policy with them in mind. But American officials have a much easier time faking the patriotic stuff for this reason, especially:

Most of the movers and shakers, the plutocrats and oligarchs, happen to BE American. And America’s economy overall is still roughly in the neighborhood of a quarter to a fifth of the total. As in, we still dominate the world on total share of the world’s wealth and economic activities, so it’s much easier for American governments to play the game of appearing to work on behalf of one nation. In reality, that governing class doesn’t care about boundaries. It cares about Capital, which crosses all of them.

Apple is Number One on that list:

Stock performance this year: +14.93%
1. Apple
1. Apple
Markets Insider

Total cash: $261.5 billion

Overseas: $246 billion

Overseas as percentage of total: 94.1%

Stock performance this year: +36%

Billy_T wrote:

But I think it’s clear that “stability” is desired because it helps profits

No. I don’t think that is “clear” at all.

Without fuel the entire economy collapses at the ordinary, everyday level. That “deep need” is far more powerful than any worrying about “profits.”

The USA could nationalize all oil companies and still be in the same ideological boat when it comes to the “stability” imperatives.

What I want to do is get out of the old simpler narratives with conpirators in them and look at how complex and different this really is.

There is no direct profit in Afghanistan. The costs outweigh any direct benefits. And no one who is into sustaining the policy is sitting around thinking about “profits.”

Plus of course one of the things driving all this are the fears that come from the symptoms of tumultuous post-coloniality. Ignore those fears or try to act counter to them and you end up in trouble or swimming upstream. That has nothing to do with “profits” either.

We left a purely economic world a while back. Trying to frame it in those terms, IMO, will always lead to answers that are cut short and simply do not account for things.

Some made arguments like that during Vietnam too. It’s the arms companies that foster this, it was said, for money. I always thought that had 2 problems. One is that it makes the people directly responsible for policy these crudely manipulated puppets dominated by conspirators. And no theory of that kind will ever hold up. The other is that that view just simply does not account for the strangely irrational force and power of ideological imperatives. That is, “monolithic communism” was this weird nightmare that created reality for people in power. That had nothing to do with the arms industry. Again they could have nationalized the arms industry and the same ideological imperatives would still be there.

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An aside:

What I’m talking about is basically an attempt at the Big Picture, the bird’s eye view, the system and systems in play. It’s not meant to dismiss individual actors who do their own thing for quite different reasons. Logically, with 320 million Americans, you’re going to have a host of different motivations, rationales, strategies, backgrounds and so on . . . and with 7.5 billion worldwide, all of that blows up even more.

That said, we humans have a lot in common, and it’s possible to overvalue our differences and undervalue our commonalities. But, the bottom line is, for me, systems and environments and so on have a huge impact on all of that, so it’s fair game to talk about them.

I think another interesting topic to toss around is the frequent difference in worldview between leftists, on the one hand, and liberals and conservatives on the other, with their respective views on “individualism,” “free will,” “collectivism,” the impact of systems and so on. It’s one of the major schisms between what might be called the far left . . . and the center-left, center, center-right and far-right. Nothing is as easy as a simple left to right progression or regression, but I think the impact of systems is taken far more seriously by those left of liberal, and as you move rightward, less and less seriously until they seem to be almost rejected out of hand.

Misreadings on all sides, of course. From right to left and back again. Misunderstandings even within the various parts of the political spectrum. But, generalized, I think the way we see systems and individuals in context is one of those dividing lines. A topic for another day, perhaps.