Right Wing Reading Rainbow VII: The Management of Savagery
Hammurabi’s tablets got busted during the looting in Iraq. But we’re marching into Syria behind George Bush’s back.
In his 2018 memoir The Restless Wave, John McCain said: “The [Iraq] war, with its cost in lives and treasure and security, can't be judged as anything other than a mistake, a very serious one, and I have to accept my share of the blame for it.”
A strange position to take, considering that in December of 2017, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi had proclaimed the country’s final victory over the Islamic State. The puppet army that the US created out of Saddam’s enemies was now fully capable of driving out the second most vile group of bronze-age perverts in the Middle East.
Not only this, but instead of a rogue state, Iraq was now in a nearly unprecedented state of peace, economic integration, and regional cooperation with all of its neighbors. In theory, this should have vindicated the whole project. The problem is that one of those neighbors is Iran.
Most of of the leg work was being done by Iran and Hezbollah. By the end of the war, Iraq had its own Hezbollah franchise. Like the original, its size and armaments made it a peer competitor to the actual national army. Unlike the original, it is controlled from top to bottom by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Iraq entered the 21st century as a regional buffer between Saudi Arabia and Iran, casting about for a way to reach some kind of reconciliation with the United States. Twenty years later, it is a full-fledged member of the Iranian Axis of Resistance. Iraq, just like Iran, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, and Gaza, is a launchpad for strikes against Israel.
How did this happen? How did a twenty year crusade to make the Middle East safe for Israel create an alliance from Khorasan to the Upper Galilee?
The Book
The Terror War and its consequences were generation-defining disasters for the human race. Over four million dead, and forty million displaced. Many were displaced into Turkey and Iran. More than a few were displaced into Europe. Now, it’s over. It’s been Wikipedia Official since the liberation of Kabul in August 2021. Safely in the rearview, Max Blumenthal’s The Management of Savagery is the best way to look at how we got there.
The book isn’t everything you need to know about the Middle East, because the situation is evolving even as I write this article, but it is a rock solid foundation. As I said when I first started this article series:
It doesn’t take much to be more informed than the average person. Reading a single book on a topic beyond that required in school will makes you more informed on it than 80% of people. Two books, 95%. Three books, 99%.
The book starts just after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and ends with the 2018 Midterms. Max explains it all. Things you’ve maybe heard of, but didn’t fully understand.
What exactly does it mean, that America “gave weapons to the Taliban” in the 1980s? Who exactly is Osama bin Laden, and what exactly is al-Qaeda? Who were these guys, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi? Were there actually al-Qaeda sleeper cells in the United States? Was that totally made up or was lib media gaslighting people? How did it work, that al-Qaeda tried to bring down the towers in the 90s? What exactly was Osama’s plan? Were there Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, or at least an al-Qaeda affiliate? Was 9/11 done by the Saudis? Why do people make these jokes about dancing Israelis?
And the book keeps going. Counter-Jihad. Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller and Patrick Fitzgerald. Steve Bannon. The Arab Spring. The Libya War. The Syrian Civil War. Benghazi. Hillary Clinton, the mother of ISIS.
By far, my favorite part of this book is the story of Ali Abdul Saoud Mohamed. Bin Laden’s Spy in the Defense Department, and the Captain America of Jihad. Even if you don’t read this book, you should watch the documentary Triple Cross.
It wouldn’t even be right to say that he outplayed the US government; the government outplayed itself. Ali was openly discussing how much he loved Jihad and hated America and how he was meeting Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, they had him translating classified documents (which he promptly copied for al-Qaeda) and recruiting for the Afghan and Bosnian Muhjahideen (during which time he set up al-Qaeda sleeper cells.) At one point, with the full confidence of the FBI, Ali Mohamed took Ayman al-Zawahiri on a speaking tour of California!
Nobody did a thing about it. In the most egregious case, U.S. Attorneys Patrick Fitzgerald and Andrew McCarthy actually had the FBI help him evade a federal subpoena during the El Sayyid Nosair trial.1 Both men appear in the documentary, but fail to mention this detail. Today the both of them are regulars on Fox News and Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast as “counter-terror experts!”
Max Blumenthal pulls no punches in naming names, pointing fingers, and drawing institutional connections. He applies the full force of his cynicism as much against Barack Obomber and Killary Clinton as against Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney. More importantly, he properly identifies men like Scooter Libby, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle as the true brains between the aggression against Iraq, and he does not hesitate to identify their alternative allegiances.
One group who he mentions individually but does not pull together to describe collectively is the Kagan family.
It starts with Donald Kagan. Donald was born a little too late (1932) to have involved himself in outright Trotskyite movements, settling instead for being a left-liberal college professor in the 1950s. In the 1960s, Kagan followed the likes of David Horowitz into neoconservatism after the USSR aligned itself with Arab Nationalism against Zionism surrounding Israel’s 1967 aggression against the UAR. You will have read about this process in Reclaiming The American Right. His “mugged by reality moment” was the 1969 armed student occupation of Cornell University’s Willard Straight Hall. You will have read about this incident in The Age of Entitlement. This is why we read multiple books. While Donald aligned himself with Reaganism and was both PNAC signatory and a resident scholar at the Hudson Institute alongside Nikki Haley, his broader clan walked a slightly different path than the other neoconservatives. They held back from hitching their wagons directly to the Republican party, and worked the exact same operation but from the other side.
Next up, Donald’s two sons: Frederick and Robert Kagan. Both of them joined their father as signatories to the PNAC manifesto. Donald worked at the American Enterprise Institute, a neocon-republican think tank, and was a leading “intellectual architect” of the Iraqi troop surge. Even under the Obama administration, he was a policy advisor to General Stanley McChrystal.
Robert Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and co-founded PNAC along with Bill Kristol. Robert was John McCain’s foreign policy advisor in the 2008 election, only to work for the Obama Administration’s State Department Foreign Affairs Policy Board under Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. The only person he couldn’t bear to work under was Donald Trump. He formally left the Republican Party in 2016 (after working for a Democrat administration for eight years) to join the anti-Trump “resistance.”
So you can see that, unlike other neocons, the Kagans don’t even really pretend to be conservatives. This is a family of unapologetic regime shills, as at home with Democrats as Republicans. But it gets crazier. You think the Kagan Brothers are bad, their wives are downright odious!
Fred Kagan’s wife, Kimberly Kagan, is the founder of Institute for the Study of War. Kimberly Kagan was a leading advocate for the Democrat Biden administration to use the tools granted to DHS by the Republican Bush administration to clamp down on online disinformation. Furthermore, she was a major champion for Syria’s head-chopping “Moderate Rebels,” providing policy briefs to both the Republican John McCain and the Democrat John Kerry during the bipartisan push to turn Syria into an al-Qaeda Emirate.
And finally, there is Victoria Nuland, Robert’s wife. What a career of service. During the Bush years, as US Ambassador to NATO, Nuland "worked very hard with allies to reduce caveats" that constrained their commitment to America's disastrous occupation Afghanistan, and "get ready for this higher-intensity mission for NATO."
In 2020, Nuland wrote an article explaining that creating conflict in Eastern Europe is a means to weaken the Kremlin’s ability to support brownoid commie libtard anti-white duginist eurasianist third-worldist governments like Libya, Syria, and Iran. Let me make that absolutely clear: America provoked the Russia-Ukraine War in the service of Israeli foreign policy objectives, and we have that straight from the words of the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs. By her own words, she was a key figure in orchestrating the 2014 coup in Ukraine, which in turn led to Russia's annexation of Crimea, the Russian-backed uprisings in Donestsk and Luhansk, and so on and so forth.
Deposed Pakistani PM Imran Khan specifically named Nuland as having threatened the Pakistani Ambassador in Washington DC that if Khan won the 'no confidence vote' the consequences for Pakistan would be dire. Nuland doesn't think that a foreign backed coup is never cause for invasion. When Niger's military toppled its puppet government and asked US troops to leave, Nuland was on the ground in Niger's capital to threaten them if they didn't cut that talk out.
In the end, on 5 March 2024, Nuland announced her retirement from being America’s “third-highest ranking diplomat.”
Follow Up Readings
At the risk of retreading ground, I’m going to recommend three more books about the Terror War. You may find them a tad redundant:
Behind Enemy Lies: War, News and Chaos in the Middle East, by Patrick Cockburn. Something of a “sequel” to the Management of Savagery, advancing our story to 2020. The book explains the defeat of ISIS, the fall of the Kurds, the conflict with Iran including the killing of Soleimani. Note that the book was originally published as “War in the Age of Trump,” but the 2021 softcover edition has a different title.
America's War for the Greater Middle East, by Andrew Bacevich. Blumenthal is more interested in the political than the military. Bacevich more extensively elaborates on the military decisionmaking behind the dozens of armed interventions America has carried out across the Middle East and North Africa since 1980. Interestingly, Bacevich discusses how the US military has for decades routinely covered for its unrealistic ambition and lack of invincibilty by blaming any and all failures on either bad equipment or bad leadership.
Enough Already: Time To End The War on Terrorism, by Scott Horton. Scott Horton runs antiwar.com as the successor to Justin Raimondo. Horton’s book is practically an encyclopedia of neocon lies. Blumenthal focuses primarily on America’s peculiar relationship with the jihad groups it claims to fight. Horton, on the other hand, gives you everything, similar to Bacevich. Country after country after failure after failure. He snows you under with a deluge of information on the myriad ways America has wrecked countries you’ve never even heard of before.
On the other hand, you may be interested in more focused books about other key players in the Middle East:
Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America's Future by Stephen Kinzer. I’ve mentioned Stephen Kinzer before as the author of Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. Here, Kinzer makes something of a novelty argument. For America to pursue a foreign policy balancing national security and democracy promotion, it shouldn’t center the Tel Aviv-Riyadh axis, but rather Ankara-Tehran. The Israel-Saudi relationship can be described at best as a Cold War relic. America, Iran, and Turkey have a shared foreign policy interest in keeping Salafi-Jihadism out of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Were it not for the prevailing American policy of toppling the Iranian government and providing weapons to Kurds and Jihadis in Syria to make the Levant safe for Israel, all three would enjoy limiting Russia's bargaining posture as the sole bulwark against America’s demonic ambitions for the Middle East.
Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen: Egypt’s Road to Revolution by Hazem Kandil. Make sure you get the 2014 Edition, which provides the background necessary to understanding how the military rebranded itself as the defender of democracy and ousted Mubarak’s successor, Muhammad Morsi. I don’t just recommend these books so that you will have a better understanding of the Middle East. The point of this article series is to improve your understanding of real life political mechanisms and interest groups. It’s one thing to think of “the people” versus “the deep state.” Maybe you even have some notion that there are different “factions” of the deep state. Kandil’s book demonstrates what that actually looks like. Those familiar with Yuri Bezmenov’s description of Soviet government will find elements of Kandil’s framework highly familiar.
Hezbollah: The Political Economy of Lebanon's Party of God, by Joseph Daher. This probably won’t surprise you but it’s very hard to find a good book on Hezbollah. This book is not about the Resistance Operations that Hezbollah conducts against the Zionist Occupation. Instead, it explores in a non-histrionic way the party’s relationship with Iran and Syria, as well how the organization has enmeshed itself in Lebanon’s government, military, and civil society. If you are the kind of person who takes politics seriously, you will find it highly informative. Daher argues that in terms of its political operations, Hezbollah has become a “Bourgeoisie-Conservative” party first and a “Revolutionary-Islamist” party second, trading subsidies and favorable media coverage to wealthy Shi’a and Christians in exchange for absolute loyalty. If you want to know even more about Hezbollah, I’d recommend two more books:
Hizbu'llah: Politics and Religion, by Amal Saad-Ghorayeb. Writing ten years earlier, Saad-Ghorayeb argues opposite to Daher. The book expounds on how Hezbollah’s particularly Shi’a character compels it to think and act distinctly from Sunni Islamist groups. She argues, effectively, that it is an Islamist political party organized internally along Marxist-Leninist operating principles.
Voice of Hezbollah: The Statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. Exactly what it says it is.
And Something Fun
Galaxy’s Edge: Legionnaire, by Jason Anspach and Nick Cole. The Galaxy’s Edge series is essentially Star Wars meets the Global War on Terror. Along those lines, the first book is something like Black Hawk Down or 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. The general idea of this universe is that at the end of the 21st century, all of the Coastal Liberal Elites left Earth behind on massive sublight space arks. Then a few decades after that, the Deplorables on Earth invented the warp drive and began to colonize the stars and make first contact. After a few decades, the libs arrived on what were expected to be empty planets with tons of wonder-weapons. There was a war, it concluded with the reorganization of the federation, and that federation is trying to maintain coexistence with (or hegemony over) the Galaxy’s various xeno races. The first book is pretty “mundane” in that there are no psykers and the xenos are pretty normal, but it’s not long into the series that it becomes clear that we aren’t quite dealing with Hard Sci-Fi here.
This is the seventh in a series of eight articles on right-wing book recommendations.
The next article will be about Russia, Russia, Russia.
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Nosair killed Rabbi Meir David Kahane. You may remember that I quoted Kahane at length in the footnotes of Gang Weed Conservatism V.