Did the West Sow the Seeds of ISIS?

[Riaz Haq]

The Middle East continues to threaten global peace a century after British and French representatives, Sir Mark Sykes and Francois Georges Picot, signed the Sykes-Picot agreement named after them. This accord, concluded on May 19, 1916, divided the region extending from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean between the two colonial powers.

Following the fall of the Ottoman Empire after the first World War, the British and the French colonial masters created a variety of states whose borders were drawn with little regard for ethnic, tribal, religious or linguistic considerations.

Today, Daish (ISIS) militants are erasing the border between Iraq and Syria and pushing to get rid of all the region's frontiers created by Sykes-Picot. It is ironic that the Kurdish foes of ISIS share the goal of dismantling the borders that divide ethnic Kurds into several nations today.

The West's actions since Sykes-Picot have further exacerbated the wounds inflicted on the peoples of the region during the European Colonial rule of the Middle East. Examples include the CIA-supported restoration of the Shah of Iran to power, the creation and the unconditional support of the State of Israel, the Suez crisis and the US invasions of Iraq.

In an interview with Vice News, President Barack H. Obama acknowledged that the rise of ISIS was directly linked to the 2002 American invasion and occupation of Iraq during President George W. Bush's administration.

 “Two things: One is, ISIL is a direct outgrowth of Al-Qaeda in Iraq that grew out of our invasion,” Obama said in an interview with VICE News. “Which is an example of unintended consequences. Which is why we should generally aim before we shoot.”

In an earlier testimony to the US Congress, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said very candidly that "the terrorists we are fighting today we funded 20 years ago".

I hope the Sykes-Picot centenary causes the West, particularly the United States as its leader, to introspect about the West's actions in the Middle East in the past and the dangerous consequences of such actions we together face today.  I hope the leaders of the West will ponder the unintended consequences before starting more wars in the region.

Related Links:

Haq's Musings

Unintended Consequences of Charlie Wilson's War

Jihadis Growing After Afghan & Iraq Wars

US Invasion of Iraq

Global Power Shift After Industrial Revolution

Seeing Bin Laden's Death in Wider Perspective

Straight Talk by Gates on Pakistan

What If Musharraf Had Said No to US After 911? 

Who Are the Haqqanis?

Creation of the State of Israel

[Riaz Haq]

How the Middle East was invented
By Nick Danforth May 19 at 3:00 AM

Much has been made of how European imperial powers reshaped the Middle East after World War I, a transformation often said to have begun 100 years ago this week when France and Britain signed the Sykes-Picot agreement. But fewer people realize that, in addition to creating the map of the modern Middle East, postwar European imperialists actually created the concept. The region we recognize as the Middle East today, a roughly defined but distinct swath of territory stretching from Turkey to Egypt to Iran, only came into being with the end of the Ottoman Empire and the disappearance of the older, now antiquated-sounding “Near East.”

The British used to think of the region that roughly corresponds to today's Middle East as two entities: the Near East (the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean) and the Middle East (the region around Iran and the Persian Gulf). By Nick Danforth, based on A. Keith Johnston's 1852 "Chart of the World Showing the Forms and Directions of the Ocean Currents."
During the 19th century, the British mentally divided what most of the world now considers the Middle East into the Near East (the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean) and the Middle East (the region around Iran and the Persian Gulf). There was a certain geographic and strategic logic to this division. The Near East was, well, nearer than the Middle East, and the Middle East was in the middle of the Near and Far Easts. For British colonial administrators, the Middle East was the region that was crucial to the defense of India, while the Near East was largely under the control of the Ottoman Empire.

This all changed after the Ottoman Empire’s collapse a century ago. The Balkans and then modern Turkey began to seem more Western, while other parts of the Near East came under British control and fell victim to that empire’s bureaucratic reorganization. Winston Churchill, as secretary of state for the colonies, created a “Middle Eastern Department” covering the newly acquired territories of Palestine, Jordan and Iraq. Now this region, too, became part of Britain’s plans for defending its colonial holdings everywhere east of the Suez Canal. In the dramatic words of the historian Roderic Davison, “In this fashion the Middle East burst onto the Mediterranean Coast.”

or several decades, the new usage remained confined to obscure branches of the British government. But, as this chart shows, it spread to the broader English-speaking public during World War II, when people suddenly started reading daily news reports about military developments in the area. Then, when Americans took a newfound interest in the region with the advent of the Cold War, they adopted the then-prevalent British term for it.

Does any of this matter?

Some have suggested that the term “Middle East” is problematic because it is, undeniably, a Western term reflecting a Western perspective. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, once observed that the region should really be called West Asia, and there have been occasional efforts to adopt terms like “Southwest Asia” in academic circles. Yet there are plenty of countries whose names imply a relative geography that we hardly notice — Norway (north) and Austria (east), for example. And Arabic speakers have long referred to North Africa as the Maghreb — from a word meaning west — because it is on the western side of the Arabic-speaking world.

Anti-imperialist critics of the concept might also take comfort from knowing that no less an imperialist than Churchill never much liked the term he helped create. In 1950, he lamented: “I had always felt that the name ‘Middle East’ for Egypt, the Levant, Syria, and Turkey was ill-chosen. This was the Near East.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/05/19/the-mo...

[Riaz Haq]

Shadi Hamid: Will #Muslims follow western trajectory: Reformation, Enlightenment, Secularism, Liberal Democracy?

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/06/the-meanin...

Perhaps his most provocative claim is this: History will not necessarily favor the secular, liberal democracies of the West. Hamid does not believe all countries will inevitably follow a path from revolution to rational Enlightenment and non-theocratic government, nor should they. There are some basic arguments for this: Islam is growing, and in some majority-Muslim nations, huge numbers of citizens believe Islamic law should be upheld by the state. But Hamid also thinks there’s something lacking in Western democracies, that there’s a sense of overarching meaninglessness in political and cultural life in these countries that can help explain why a young Muslim who grew up in the U.K. might feel drawn to martyrdom, for example. This is not a dismissal of democracy, nor does it comprehensively explain the phenomenon of jihadism. Rather, it’s a note of skepticism about the promise of secular democracy—and the wisdom of pushing that model on other cultures and regions. 

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Green: You open the book by asking about this inscrutable yearning for violence that seems to be felt among a small minority of Muslim extremists. What do you make of this yearning?

Hamid: On a basic level, violence offers meaning. And that’s what makes it scary. In the broader sweep of history, mass violence and mass killing is actually the norm. It’s only in recent centuries that states and institutions have tried to persuade people to avoid such practices.

That also reminds us that when institutions and social norms are weakened, those base sentiments can rise up again quite easily. And that’s what I saw.

-----

Green: You also frame violence as a way of grappling with theodicy, or the problem of evil. How does this play out in the Islamic tradition?

Hamid: That is the question many Muslims have been asking not just recently, but for centuries, ever since the fall of the various caliphates and empires: Why is God doing this? Why is God permitting this fall from grace? The Muslim narrative you hear a lot is that when Muslims were good, God rewarded them with success and territory. When Muslims went astray, then perhaps God decided to send them a message to encourage them to return to the straight path.


A question I get a lot is, “Wait, ok, is Islam violent? Does the Quran endorse violence?” I find this to be a very weird question. Of course there is violence in the Quran. Muhammad was a state builder, and to build a state you need to capture territory. The only way to capture territory is to wrest it from the control of others, and that requires violence. This isn’t about Islam or the Prophet Muhammad; state building has historically always been a violent process.

Green: On that point, you observe that the state-building impulses of the Islamic State actually make it much more terrifying than other groups. Why?

Hamid: ISIS has gone well beyond the al-Qaeda model of terrorism and destruction. Of course, ISIS does that, too, but it attempts to build something in the place of what it has destroyed. It has an unusually pronounced interest in governance. And they are not just making things up as they go along. There does seem to be a method to the madness; they are drawing from certain strains of Islamic history and tradition. They are perverting them, I would argue, and distorting them, but it is not as if they are just making it up out of the air.

[Riaz Haq]

#Hollywood's Oliver Stone’s #American History: ‘We’re Not under Threat. We Are the Threat’ https://shar.es/1x6sgt via @grtvnews #terrorism


As he launches his new TV series offering a critical view of US overseas exploits, the film director tells MEE he didn’t always see it that way

American controversies are Oliver Stone’s forte.

The Hollywood movie director has turned his cameras on the assassination of John F Kennedy, the Vietnam War and the 9/11 attacks.

But, when researching his television series, The Untold History of the United States, it was American exploits in the Middle East that left him with the most lasting impression, he told Middle East Eye on Wednesday.

“When I studied the untold history, one thing that really hit me hard was the history of our involvement in the Middle East,” Stone said.

“It was a nefarious involvement.”

Stone traces Washington’s hand in the region back to the 1930s, but he says it reached a peak when President George HW Bush sent hundreds of thousands of US troops to liberate Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion of 1990.

The Soviet Union had recently collapsed and the region was wide open to a lone superpower, he said.

“We never got out of there. Once we were in, we’re in forever,” Stone said.

“We’ve destabilised the entire region, created chaos. And then we blame ISIS for the chaos we created,” he added, referring to the Islamic State (IS) group that now rules swathes of Iraq and Syria.

Stone researched and wrote the series and book with Peter Kuznick, a scholar at the American University who specialises in the US nuclear strikes on Japan that ended the Second World War.

“It’s all about the oil. You remember the bumper sticker: What is our oil doing under their sand?” Kuznick told MEE.

Washington’s hunger for fuel underpins its alliance with Saudi Arabia, the CIA-backed coup against Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 and its support for anti-Soviet religious militants in Afghanistan in the 1980s, he said.

“We create these messes, then we have a grand military plan to solve them. And the military solutions just don’t work,” he said.

The views of Stone and Kuznick are not likely to raise eyebrows on the streets of Cairo, Moscow or Paris.

But in the US they are not mainstream.

The way Stone tells it, Americans live in a bubble and are spoon-fed information by a school system, politicians and a media that portrays the US as a beacon of stability and a force for good in the world.

In one famous example, former President Ronald Reagan called the US a “shining city on a hill”.

“It’s very comforting to be an American,” Stone said.

You get the sense that you are safe and have prosperity of material goods, and that you have enemies everywhere – Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.

You get into this cocoon where you have a big country, two oceans, but that you’re always under threat.

Stone says he understands this well because he lived it himself.

He was raised in New York, the son of a Republican stockbroker, Louis Stone. He was always creative – he often wrote short plays to entertain his family – but never questioned how his history teachers puffed up the US, he said.

“I had only gotten a part of the story, which emphasised American exceptionalism, America as a selfless and beneficial country to the world,” he said.

In 1967, Stone volunteered to fight in the US Army and served in Vietnam. He was wounded twice and was honoured with a Bronze Star for heroism and a Purple Heart for his service.

“I came back from Vietnam puzzled, completely confused about what was going on there,” he said.

“But I did get a heavy dose of the doublespeak, the militarese talk.”

He started asking questions and reading up on “progressive history” at the same time as he studied filmmaking at New York University under Martin Scorsese and other teachers, he said.

These ideas fed his politically orientated filmmaking in the 1980s.

Salvador (1986) was set in a 1980s war in Central America. Platoon (1986), Stone’s directorial breakthrough movie, dramatised a young soldier’s tour of duty in Vietnam, starring Charlie Sheen.

He continued probing that war in Born on the Fourth of July (1989), starring Tom Cruise. JFK (1991) showed his conspiracy theories about the former president’s killing; movies such as Nixon (1995) and W (2008) tackled subsequent commanders-in-chief.

The release of his movie about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has been delayed until 2016, he said.

He has also interviewed foreign statesmen who defy Washington – from the Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro to the ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Untold History of the United States, a 10-part documentary series and a 750-page book, offers Americans an alternate perspective on US history from the Second World War through the Cold War to the present day.

Stone says he wants to counter the “educational crime” of misleading American schoolchildren.

“American exceptionalism has to be driven out of our curriculums,” he said.

“We’re not under threat. We are the threat.”

[Riaz Haq]

#CIA Interrogator Reveals Saddam Hussein Predicted Rise of #ISIS & #America's Failure in #Iraq https://www.democracynow.org/2016/12/28/part_2_cia_interrogator_rev... … via @democracynow

Democracy Now's Amy Goodman in conversation with former CIA analyst John Nixon, author of the new book, "Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein."


JOHN NIXON: Yes, I was. Back in 2002, 2003, I believed that if we removed him from power and then made Iraq a better place, that the Iraqis would—you know, that would be better for Iraq and that we could help turn the country into a functioning, hopefully democratic, country that, you know, would be as good as what the Iraqi people deserved.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you change your view?

JOHN NIXON: A hundred percent. When people ask me, you know, "Was it worth taking him out of power?" I say, "You know, look around you. Show me something that is positive that happened." Iraq, right now, is a country that has 2 million displaced people. Parts of its territory are held by ISIS. You have a dysfunctional government that is probably more corrupt than Saddam’s government was. And if ask the average Iraqi—Sunni, Shia or Kurd—you know, "Were things better back then? Were services better? Did the government do more for you?" I think they would say yes. I can’t find one thing. And if you said, "Well, maybe, what about the Kurds? They’re almost independent now," that was happening already. I can’t find one thing positive that came out of his removal from power.

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AMY GOODMAN: Did Saddam Hussein predict the rise of ISIS?

JOHN NIXON: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: How?

JOHN NIXON: Yes. He had—there’s a passage in my book where he talks about, you know, saying that Sunni jihadism is going to—Iraq is a playing field for this, and it’s—now that he’s out of power, it’s going to be made worse, and that we’re going to have to deal with this issue. He was very concerned. Saddam was not afraid of almost anything, but he was very concerned about the threat that Sunni jihadists had for his regime, largely because they came from within his own community, and it was harder to sort of get—through tribal networks, it was harder to kind of root them out than it would be if they were from the Shia or the Kurds. And also, he understood that this current of Wahhabism that emanated from Saudi Arabia had been infiltrating Iraq for some time, and he was less and less powerful to do something about it. And he also knew that—Saddam was not a jihadist himself, and he didn’t have any alliances with al-Qaeda or—you know, or Sunni fundamentalists. But—

AMY GOODMAN: What did you feel when you continually heard the U.S. media repeat this, making no distinctions and saying he was a haven for terrorists?

JOHN NIXON: It’s ridiculous. You know, it is—and I even asked him about this, and he just—he just kind of laughed. And he said, "You know, these people are my enemies. And, you know, why would you think that I’m allied with"—and then he would use this counterfactual. He’d say, "Well, who was on the plane that flew into the World Trade Center? How many Iraqis were on that plane? But who were they? There were Saudis. There were Egyptians. There was an Emirati. Those are all your friends. Why do you think that they’re doing that?" And then he would also say—one of the things that was most compelling was he would say, "You know something? When I was a young man, everybody admired America. Everybody wanted to go to America." You know, he used to say he would see at the American Embassy in Baghdad people lining up to get visas. And he said, "And now, look at you. Look at—you know, no one likes you. No one trusts you." And that was based on the policies of our government.

[Riaz Haq]

Trump's national security advisor Gen Michael Flynn has said the rise of Islamic State was “a willful decision” and defends accuracy of US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) 2012 Memo:


In Al Jazeera’s latest Head to Head episode, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Michael Flynn confirms to Mehdi Hasan that not only had he studied the DIA memo predicting the West’s backing of an Islamic State in Syria when it came across his desk in 2012, but even asserts that the White House’s sponsoring of radical jihadists (that would emerge as ISIL and Nusra) against the Syrian regime was “a willful decision.”

-------

While holding up a paper copy of the 2012 DIA report declassified through FOIA, Hasan reads aloud key passages such as, “there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in Eastern Syria, and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime.”
Rather than downplay the importance of the document and these startling passages, as did the State Department soon after its release, Flynn does the opposite: he confirms that while acting DIA chief he “paid very close attention” to this report in particular and later adds that “the intelligence was very clear.”
Lt. Gen. Flynn, speaking safely from retirement, is the highest ranking intelligence official to go on record saying the United States and other state sponsors of rebels in Syria knowingly gave political backing and shipped weapons to Al-Qaeda in order to put pressure on the Syrian regime:

(Aljazeera's Mehdi) Hasan: In 2012 the U.S. was helping coordinate arms transfers to those same groups [Salafists, Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda in Iraq], why did you not stop that if you’re worried about the rise of quote-unquote Islamic extremists?
Flynn: I hate to say it’s not my job…but that…my job was to…was to to ensure that the accuracy of our intelligence that was being presented was as good as it could be.
The early reporting that treated the DIA memo as newsworthy and hugely revelatory was criticized and even mocked by some experts, as well as outlets like The Daily Beast. Yet the very DIA director at the time the memo was drafted and circulated widely now unambiguously confirms the document to be of high value, and indicates that it served as source material in his own discussions over Syria policy with the White House.
As Michael Flynn also previously served as director of intelligence for Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) during a time when its prime global mission was dismantling Al-Qaeda, his honest admission that the White House was in fact arming and bolstering Al-Qaeda linked groups in Syria is especially shocking given his stature.

https://levantreport.com/2015/08/06/former-dia-chief-michael-flynn-...

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/headtohead/2015/07/blame-isil-1... 

[Riaz Haq]

#Europe's century old mistake: Shifting #Islam's theological-political power from Ottoman #Turkey to #SaudiArabia

https://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/2016/07/ottoman-caliphs

"As Mr Laurence sees things, the abolition of the old caliphate created a vacuum that has been filled, over the subsequent century, by much darker substitutes, up to and including the new caliphate proclaimed by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of Islamic State. Even where they stop short of fomenting anti-Western violence, global networks of religious fundamentalism and puritanism, such as those linking preachers from say, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, have replaced the relatively emollient tone set by the Ottoman caliphs, who were connoisseurs of Western art and music, as a colleague has written.
Is this anything more than an intriguing detail of history? Yes, much more, in Mr Laurence's view. It's naive to imagine that today's European Islam can be hermetically sealed from the countries where Islam predominates. One way or another, Muslims in Europe are going to be touched by ideas and styles that emanate from countries where their faith predominates. Today's European governments need to have a sophisticated understanding of how that influence works, and above all to understand the risk of unintended consequences. By staunching one stream of cultural or theological influence, they may be opening the way for much worse ones."

[Riaz Haq]

Prince Charles: “I know there are so many complex issues, but how can there ever be an end to terrorism unless the causes are eliminated?” .....“Surely some US president has to have the courage to stand up and take on the Jewish lobby in the US? I must be naive, I suppose!”

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/prince-charles-blames-jews-mid...

[Riaz Haq]

#WW1 may have ended a century ago - but not for #MiddleEast.The secret Sykes-Picot Treaty of May 1916, is blamed for drawing up the "artificial" borders. Actually it happened a year after the #Armistice in the San Remo Treaty of 1920. https://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/world-war-one-ended-century-a... via @MiddleEastEye

In reality what 11/11/1918 meant for Middle Easterners was that each individual’s borders of belonging would be reconfigured, since the empire that had ruled them and their ancestors since they could remember had collapsed. For many Arabs a search for identity would ensue, once a search for survival had been satiated, having endured famines and dislocations from Lebanon to Iraq during the conflict.

One example of these shifting identities would be my grandfather's. As of 11 November 1918 he would have thought of himself as a Muslim from Najaf who happened to be a subject of the Ottoman Empire. He did not resent the Ottomans because they were Turks and he was an Arab. The latter described "ethnic" differences – a newly minted word he had not heard in the Arabic language in those days. Nonetheless, by the end of the war, the Ottoman Empire, which he belonged to, had relinquished its claims to the lands in which he lived. 

My grandfather would have lived in a territory that was in limbo, waiting to see what fate the British occupiers had in mind. 

When the British declared the formation of the Iraq Mandate in 1920, my grandfather picked up a rifle and joined the 1920 Iraqi Revolt, launched by a growing number of "Iraqis" disenchanted with the occupation after the armistice and willing to sacrifice their lives to expel the British. It was opposition to British rule that made him an Iraqi.

The Arab Revolt
Having lived as an Arab in Turkey, I had often heard the phrase that "the Arabs stabbed the Turks in the back" during World War I, referring to the Arab Revolt of Lawrence of Arabia. Popular historical memory traces the beginning of Arab nationalism to the revolt. Both of these assumptions are shrouded in myth, challenged recently by Turkish and Arab historians. 

For example, Arab soldiers fought tenaciously on behalf of the empire during the Battle of Gallipoli. In 1916, 102 out of 132 of Ottoman prisoners of Arab origin refused to make a deal with their British captors to join the Arab Revolt, perhaps out of loyalty to the Ottoman Empire, or just weariness with the fighting.

Most Arab officers of the Ottoman military stayed loyal to the empire throughout the war, yet were jobless as of 11 November 1918. During the British mandate of Iraq, the new state had a pool of around 600 former Ottoman officers available to join the new army. Of this number 450 served in the Ottoman military throughout the duration of the 1914-18 war, while 190 defected to serve in the anti-Ottoman Army of the Arab revolt.

[Riaz Haq]

Two Decades After 911, #Militants Have Only Multiplied. As many as 230,000 #Salafi jihadist fighters in nearly 70 countries, with the largest numbers in #Syria, #Afghanistan and #Pakistan, says the Center for Strategic and International Studies. @CSIS https://nyti.ms/2DBia6P

Nearly four times as many Sunni Islamic militants are operating around the world today as on Sept. 11, 2001, despite nearly two decades of American-led campaigns to combat Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, a new independent study concludes.

That amounts to as many as 230,000 Salafi jihadist fighters in nearly 70 countries, with the largest numbers in Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to the study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

The report’s conclusions, drawing on multiple databases dating to 1980 to compile one of the most extensive studies of its kind, underscore the resiliency of these terrorist groups, and the policy failures by the United States and its allies in responding. The findings also highlight the continuing potency of the groups’ ideology and social-media branding in raising money and attracting new recruits as they pivot from battlefield defeats in strongholds like Iraq and Syria to direct guerrilla-style attacks there and in other hot spots.

“Some of these groups do want to target Americans overseas and at home, particularly the Islamic State and Al Qaeda,” said Seth G. Jones, the director of the center’s transnational threats project and one of the report’s six authors. “All this indicates that terrorism is alive and well, and that Americans should be concerned.”

----------

“The good news is that there has not been an attack anywhere near the scale of 9/11 in the U.S. since that day, a significant achievement,” the center said. “The bad news is that the ideology that leads someone to fly a plane into a building or drive a car into a crowded sidewalk seems to have metastasized.”

“Many of the conflicts that comprise America’s global counterterrorism campaign have a fiercely local component to them, meaning there is little that a Western country and its military can actually do to impact events on the ground for a sustained period of time,” the center added.

Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged at a security conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on Saturday that the fight against the Islamic State and other Salafi jihadist groups was far from over. General Dunford said that the United States must maintain sufficient forces and political will “to make sure that we’re putting pressure on and disrupting these terrorist networks.”

But at what cost? Last week, Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs released its annual report, the Costs of War study, in which it calculated that the United States will have spent $5.9 trillion on activities related to the global counterterrorism campaign by October 2019.

[Riaz Haq]

Donald #Rumsfeld’s Fog of Memos. He was ambitious, driven — also lucky. And, as we all know, he was one of the chief architects of the disastrous #IraqWar. #Afghanistan #saddamhussein #GeorgeWBush #MiddleEast https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/opinion/errol-morris-donald-rums...


By Errol Morris

Mr. Morris is the director of a 2013 film about Donald Rumsfeld, “The Unknown Known.”

It is impossible for me to write about Mr. Rumsfeld, the former U.S. secretary of defense who died on Tuesday, without writing about his memos. He played a role in making memo-writing the new frontier in governmental accountability. He also pioneered the memo as an obfuscatory instrument. Write one memo saying one thing, write another memo saying the exact opposite.

As I interviewed Mr. Rumsfeld for my documentary about him, “The Unknown Known,” it became (at least for me) a story about a man lost in his endless archive, adrift in a sea of his own verbiage.

In 1966, early in his public service career, Representative Rumsfeld, Republican of Illinois, co-sponsored the Freedom of Information Act, a vehicle for understanding the intentions of high political figures. Then, as a member of President Gerald Ford’s administration — first as the president’s chief of staff, then as secretary of defense — he found a way to effectively undermine it.


President Richard Nixon was undone by his attempts to conceal and excise the official record. Mr. Rumsfeld knew better by the time he was serving under Mr. Nixon’s successor. The trick was to marginalize the record, to litter it with so many contradictions that a rebuttal to any future historian could always be found. His memos (known as “yellow perils” in the Nixon administration and “snowflakes” under Ford) would pile up in drifts, disguising the underlying historical landscape. It’s a level of genius that has not been acknowledged in the press — the founder of the Freedom of Information Act is the guy who figured out how to render it almost totally worthless.

And what accounts for his seeming change of heart? The metamorphosis from a liberal Rockefeller Republican congressman, a confidant of the civil rights and antiwar activist Allard Lowenstein, to one of the most reviled neoconservatives?

It’s easy to blame everything on opportunism, a swiftly changing environment of success and more success. Vocational greed … I don’t know. But whatever the reason, a new Donald Rumsfeld emerged during the Ford administration.

His first stint as secretary of defense is the start of the story — Team B, in particular. That was an exercise in which a dozen or so defense industry wonks and Russia hawks were given carte blanche to undermine and effectively rewrite the latest National Intelligence Estimate on the Soviet Union, which they argued didn’t reflect the true peril facing America. They called it a “competitive stress assessment” — more confusing verbiage.

How does it work? Put simply, you have a body of evidence. You don’t trust it. Or maybe you don’t like it. It conflicts with other beliefs you have. So you create another body of evidence, supporting your alternative view. I’m tempted to say, an alternative view of the facts. But just what the facts are is exactly what comes into question.