Condoleezza Rice, a well-paid Cold Warrior when the Berlin Wall fell, is also among movers and shakers in the new "war on terra." Befitting her fashion image, she is busily engaged in the military-industrial complex effort to make terrorism the new communism much as the fashion industry tried to make brown 'the new black.'
In this context, I am re-posting part of a January 17, 1993, article by journalism luminary Don Oberdorfer. Titled "US Studied Possible Soviet Demise in '89," it reminds us that many in the military-industrial complex could, in fact, foresee that the Soviet Union was headed for a fall:
"HEADLINE: U.S. Secretly Studied Possibility of Gorbachev Coup, Soviet Collapse
BYLINE: Don Oberdorfer, Washington Post Staff Writer
BODY:
The Bush administration began secret contingency studies of a possible coup against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and the collapse of the Soviet Union in September 1989, nearly two years before those events occurred, according to current and former administration officials.
Those discussions, organized by the National Security Council staff, were among the best-kept secrets of the administration that dealt with the coup against Gorbachev in August 1991, the demise of the Soviet Union the following December and the end of the Cold War.
Secrecy was essential, said a participant still in office, because any word of the studies could have been taken as "a vote of no confidence" in Gorbachev and "actually create a self-fulfilling prophecy."
Stanford University professor Condoleezza Rice, senior NSC expert on the Soviet Union during the first two years of the Bush administration, recalled last week being assigned to start the studies. Robert M. Gates, then deputy chief of the NSC and now CIA director, "called me into his office late one night in September 1989, and said, 'Things are looking bad' in the Soviet Union," Rice said.
Gates proposed to "get some people together on an off-the-record basis" to discuss the future of Gorbachev and of the Soviet system and how the United States should react to sudden change in Moscow, she said.
In an interview earlier this month, Gates said the "very, very secret contingency planning effort focused very directly on the possibility of the collapse of the Soviet Union" and specifically on "what do we look for, what directions might it go [and] what are the options the United States would have."
. . . Gates said that in May 1989, the CIA reported that the problems in the Soviet Union were so serious and the situation so volatile that Gorbachev had only a 50-50 chance of surviving the next three to four years unless he retreated from his reform policies . . .
Gates disclosed the contingency planning in an interview in which he defended the CIA's controversial reporting record on the Soviet Union.
Gates conceded that "we were late" in not reporting until around 1989 that "the country was coming apart and the system might not survive."
However, he said, the contingency planning and the reports that prompted it show that the CIA was not out of touch with the Soviet reality later, as has been often charged.
In addition to Rice, participants in the contingency planning included Dennis Ross, a key aide to Secretary of State James A. Baker III and director of State Department policy planning; Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz; and Fritz Ermarth, a leading CIA expert on the Soviet Union. Four or five other officials participated in periodic meetings in 1989, 1990 and early 1991, but the effort was so secret that some officials did not list the meetings on their office calendars . . .
Historian Michael R. Beschloss . . . said the administration seemed "surprisingly unprepared" to deal with the coup against Gorbachev when it developed in August 1991. Beschloss, who said he did not learn of the secret contingency planning during his research, said the effort should have prepared U.S. officials . . ."
So, now we know: a group of neocons headed by Condoleezza Rice surmised as early as 1989 that the Soviet Union was spending itself into a decline.
What a pity they, and the first Bush administration, did not swiftly convert some of our Cold War money and resources to peaceful uses, to shore up our prosperity and the stability of our large and self-confident middle class. But perhaps that was exactly the reverse of their mandate.
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