נחום
2011-09-06 07:18:59 UTC
Edward Luttwak is a rare bird whose peripatetic life and work are the
envy of academics and spies alike. A well-built man who looks like he
is in his mid-50s (he turns 70 next year), Luttwak—who was born in
1942 to a wealthy Jewish family in Arad, Romania, and educated in
Italy and England—speaks with a resonant European accent that conveys
equal measures of authority, curiosity, egomania, bluster, impatience,
and good humor. He is a senior associate at the Center for Strategic
and International Studies at Georgetown University, and he published
his first book, Coup d’Etat: A Practical Handbook, at the age of 26.
Over the past 40 years, he has made provocative and often deeply
original contributions to multiple academic fields, including military
strategy, Roman history, Byzantine history, and economics. He owns a
large eco-friendly ranch in Bolivia, and can recite poetry and talk
politics in eight languages, a skill that he displayed during a recent
four-hour conversation at his house, located on a quiet street in
Chevy Chase, Maryland, by taking phone calls in Italian, Spanish,
Korean, and Chinese, during which I wandered off to the porch, where I
sat and talked with his lovely Israeli-born wife Dalya Luttwak, a
sculptor.
The walls of Luttwak’s donnish study—which is by far the nicest room
in the Luttwaks’ house, with the best view, and might otherwise have
served as the dining room, if Edward and Dalya were more like their
neighbors—are lined with bookshelves containing the Roman classics,
biographies of Winston Churchill, works on military history and
strategy, intelligence gathering, Byzantine art, old atlases, and
decorations and plaques from foreign governments. Luttwak’s work as a
high-level strategic and intelligence consultant for the U.S. Defense
Department, the National Security Council, the State Department, the
Japanese government, and the defense departments and intelligence
services of other countries in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the
Middle East (he appears to be spending a lot of time in South Korea
and China) is also augmented by a parallel life as an “operator,”
about which he is both secretive and obviously proud.
While the details of Luttwak’s life as a private intelligence
operative are sketchy, he has been actively involved in military and
paramilitary operations sponsored by the U.S. government, foreign
governments, and various private entities. By his own admission, he
has been directly involved in attacks on physical targets,
interdiction efforts, and the capture and interrogation of wanted
persons—although “admission” is clearly the wrong word here, since he
is almost boyishly eager for visitors to understand his familiarity
with the nuts and bolts of special ops, and cites his own field
experience to support his estimations of people like Gen. David
Petraeus, whose reputation as counter-insurgency genius he dismisses
as a fraud. He is also careful to state that his activities have never
violated U.S. law. The Walter Mitty-ish component of Luttwak’s
enthusiasm for his other life—academic by day, special operator by
night—seems less significant in his psyche than a driving appetite for
physical risk that has helped him understand military strategy and
related policy questions in a way that the current generation of
Western policymakers often do not.
Loved and loathed, and capable of living multiple lives, any one of
which would quickly tire out a less intellectually and physically
robust man, Luttwak glories in the undeniable fact that he is not the
usual Washington think-tank product. His instinctive tendency to
reject common wisdom as idiotic, combined with his need to prove that
he is the smartest person in every room, has deprived him of the
chance to shape events in the way that every policy intellectual not-
so-secretly craves. Yet his first allegiance is clearly to the habits
of mind that have made him one of the most brilliant strategic
thinkers in America, capable of understanding the psychological and
practical necessities that drive human action in a highly original,
insightful and counter-intuitive way.
We met last month, at the height of a rainstorm. What follows are
selectively edited portions of the transcript of our interview, during
which I made a point of not asking him about his childhood experience
as a Jewish refugee in Europe, which seemed like a subject for a
different conversation.
I think that if America had been able to tolerate a second Henry
Kissinger, that person would have been you.
Kissinger at 88 is writing brochures for Kissinger Associates. His
last book on China is one such work written by the staff at Kissinger
Associates. It is designed to curry favor with the Chinese authorities
and nothing else.
I know him personally very well, but he is such a deceptive person;
he’s a habitual liar and dissembler. Although I’ve spent a lot of time
talking to him, I have no insight on him at all. His book ends with a
paean to U.S.-Chinese friendship and how every other country has to
fit in. I have to review it for the TLS but I’ve been delaying it by
weeks because I don’t know whether it is a case of senility or utter
corruption.
There are two differing interpretations of the events of Arab Spring.
The dominant one is: “Here is this marvelous wave of popular
revolutions where everyone uses Facebook and Twitter to spread
democratic ideas.” The other is that “Rickety state structures held
together by repressive police and state apparatus are now collapsing
into tribal bloodshed.”
Well, any dictatorship creates an unnatural environment, analogous to
that of taking peasants from the field and putting them in an army,
where they get uniforms and are drilled and disciplined. Dictatorships
attempt to turn entire populations into well-drilled regiments. The
North Korean regime takes it to the logical extreme of actually having
the entire population drilled in regiments. The Ben Ali and Mubarak
dictatorships were attempting to regiment their populations by having
state structures imposed on them. Both of them, for example, were able
to create loyal police forces.
Once the regiment dissolves, then the people are released and they
revert to their natural order. They stop wearing uniforms, they put on
the clothes they want and they manifest the proclivities that they
have. A few Egyptians are Westernized, hence they have exited Islam
whatever their personal beliefs may be. But otherwise, there is no
room for civilization in Egypt other than Islam, and the number of
extremists that you need to make life impossible for the average
Westernized or slightly Westernized Egyptian who wants to have a beer,
for example, is very small. The number you need to close all the bars
in Egypt is maybe 15 percent of the population.
Do you think stepping away from Mubarak was a mistake or it made no
difference?
I think it made no difference. The regime was senile. Literally.
How much of a role do you think the so-called “democracy promotion”
efforts of the United States under President George W. Bush, including
the invasion of Iraq, played in the increasing instability of the Arab
regimes, and how much of their collapse was the result of their own
senility?
I will pretend that this is an easy question; it’s not. The easy
answer is that Bush and the Bush Administration for a brief period of
less than two years were on a democracy-promotion binge. They used a
pickax and attacked a wall, seemingly making an impression, and
perhaps they caused some structural damage. The Iraq War, with the
defeat, humbling, and execution of a dictator, was a big blow with a
pickax. On the other hand, when the regime becomes sufficiently
involuted as to become hereditary, which is what happened in Syria and
appeared to be happening in Egypt, then you are dealing with senility
of the regime embodied: “the dictator is old.” So both answers are
true.
There have been many different explanations given over the past ten
years for the strength of the American-Israeli relationship, ranging
from the idea that Israel has the best and most immediately deployable
army in the Middle East, to the idea that a small cabal of wealthy and
influential Jews has hijacked American foreign policy.
You mean the ZOG? The Zionist Occupied Government?
Yes.
Personally, from an emotional point of view, myself, as me, I prefer
the Z.O.G. explanation above all others. I love the idea that the
Zionists have sufficient power to actually occupy America, and through
America to basically run the world. I love the idea of being a member
of a secretive and powerful cabal. If you put my name Luttwak together
with Perle and Wolfowitz and you search the Internet, you will get
this little list of people who run the American government and the
world, and I’m on it. I love that.
Anytime you need an added jolt of ego gratification, you open your
laptop and confirm the fact that you rule the world.
In Pakistan, there are millions of people who go to schools where they
are taught that I am the ruler of the universe. So, emotionally
speaking, I would explain everything that happens by referring to the
Z.O.G., the Zionist Occupied Government, which is run by a small cabal
of people, and that I am one of them.
Now, if I’m forced to actually think about this question, I would say
that the cleanest analytical way of understanding the American-Israeli
relationship is to say that the post-1945 career of the United States
as a world-meddling, imperialist power has forced Americans to be very
foreign-oriented. Many American families have had their sons killed
overseas, and many other Americans have become foreign oriented for
many reasons. Among them there is a group of Christians who read the
Bible, who believe in the Bible to some degree as a document that
registers God’s will. For them, Israel is the proof of the truth of
the Bible. Hence, the notion that the United States should be
supporting rather than opposing Israel has now become expected, which
was absolutely not true in 1948 when the United States did every
possible thing to prevent the existence of Israel by systematically
intercepting arms flows to the Jews.
Luttwak Q&A
Therefore, if we in the Z.O.G. didn’t really run everything, and there
was no Zionist influence, then this solid mass of foreign-aware
Americans, who also happen to be Bible-believers—we’re talking 50
million people—to them, the only foreign policy that counts is
America’s support for Israel. Period.
Many American Jews are viscerally uncomfortable with this kind of
support. They say “Oh, look at these Bible-thumping Christians who
want to make us kiss Jesus. The only reason they like Israel is so
they can turn it into a landing strip for their God.”
You are now invoking a second constant—
Why are so many Jews so stupid about politics?
They have not had a state for 2000 years, they have had no power or
responsibility and it will take centuries before they catch up with
the instinctive political understanding that any ordinary Englishman
has. They don’t understand politics, and of course they confuse their
friends and their enemies, and that is the ultimate political proof of
imbecility.
When you look at the current conduct of American policy in the Middle
East, do you see any coherent policy or strategy?
Obama is no different than most previous administrations that come
into office with ready-made solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Jimmy Carter was the first one, and his plan was redacted by Zbignew
Brzezinski. It led to Sadat’s journey to Jerusalem because his
brilliant idea was to subject Egyptians and Israelis to a Soviet-
American condominium, which was a terrible idea, and so Sadat created
his own reality. It was really one of the funnier moments in history.
The national security adviser officials, and I believe Brzezinski
himself, came out with a lot of negative statements when Sadat first
made his announcement because he was ruining their policy scheme,
which was, of course, impossible.
Obama is in that tradition. He came in with an impossible policy
scheme, which is first you get Israelis to stop agreeing to
settlements, and then you proceed. Of course, that doesn’t make any
sense. When you draw a border that is what matters. The Israelis
removed all the settlements from Sinai without any American
involvement in two minutes after the agreement was made with Egypt.
[The phone rings. Luttwak breaks into impossibly perfect Italian. I
wander out onto the porch to talk to Dalya, and return 20 minutes
later, as he is finishing up the call.]
There’s nobody involved who is anti-Israeli like there were in the
past, when there was a strong Arabist position in the State
Department. The people in the Obama Administration read the New York
Times and they don’t know Arabic, and therefore they are operating
systematically with false categories. The fundamental error with
regard to settlements is a very simple one: when borders are
established, borders are established, and settlements are neither here
nor there. This notion that when some faction of Israelis puts a
camper on a hilltop that this changes anything is a fantasy.
A fantasy both on the part of the people who put the campers on the
ground and also American policymakers.
They’re both equally deluded.
Do you anticipate violence this fall between the Israelis and the
Palestinians?
I don’t anticipate violence this fall. War leads to peace. Peace leads
to war. So now logically we should have war. And the Iranians, of
course, would love to pay for one. But the moment there is an
intifada, the Palestinian regiment collapses and gangsters take over.
So the moment the violence escalates they stop fighting and they start
talking peace. The moment the talking appears to be approaching an
actual peace, they start an intifada.
Do you think the cost of the violence and other social ills that come
out of the stalemate you are describing is something Israeli society
can easily afford, or do you think there is any alternative to it?
I’m not sure it’s a cost.
Because the strategic depth that it affords and the control over those
borders is more important?
Listen, my wife is a very good cook. And we have a housekeeper, who is
an even better cook. It’s a weird situation, but I think my
housekeeper is a better cook than any restaurant in Washington. She is
a simple woman with no education, from Chile, and she just happens to
have a superhuman talent. She being such a good cook, she achieves
wonderful effects with very strange ingredients, and strange
combinations of ingredients. Israel’s success as a state has been made
possible by Arab threats of different kinds. Arab violence or threats
of violence are part of the Israeli soup. There are certain levels of
violence that are so high that they’re damaging and there are also
levels that are so low they are damaging. There is an optimum level of
the Arab threat. I would say for about nine days of the 1973 war, the
level of violence was much too high. Even when Israelis were
successful, the level of violence was destroying the tissue of the
state. Most of the time, the violence is positive.
When you say that the effects of Arab violence are positive, you mean
that they generate social cohesion inside Israel?
Lenin taught, “Power is mass multiplied by cohesion.” Arab violence
generates Jewish cohesion. Cohesion turns mass into power. Israel has
had very small mass, very high cohesion. If only the Palestinians
understood that, they would have attacked the Jews with flowers.
Shimon Peres says, “Iran is a decaying corpse of a country and the
idea that they are any long-term threat to anybody, based on
demographics and based on the rickety state of their economy, is a
joke. So yes, it would be terrible if they ended up with an atomic
bomb, but otherwise, Iran is not a long-term strategic threat to
anybody.”
I think to get a good view on Iran you have to put yourself in the
shoes of Hezbollah. Hezbollah is wholly dependent on Iran. Without
Iran, Hezbollah is just a band of hotheads with a few thousand highly
trained men. So view Iran from Hezbollah’s point of view. What do you
see? It’s a regime that has been around since 1979 in one way or the
other. Is it consolidated? Is functioning better and better and
getting more and more support? It’s not. Is it getting more dependent
on police repression or less? The answer is more. So, from the
Hezbollah point of view, you realize that your days are counted
because the regime is in a downward spiral.
There is a good measure of social control in Iran and that is the
price of genuine imported Scotch whiskey in Tehran, because it’s a)
forbidden, and b) has to be smuggled in for practical purposes from
Dubai, and the only way it can come from Dubai is with the cooperation
of the Revolutionary Guard. The price of whiskey has been declining
for years and you go to a party in north Tehran now and you get lots
of whiskey. And it’s only slightly more expensive than in Northwest
Washington.
But on the other hand, the regime is doing something for which they
will have my undying gratitude—that is, they have been manufacturing
the one and only post-Islamic society. They created a situation in
which Iranians in general worldwide, not only in Iran, are
disaffiliated. They are converting Muslim Iranians into post-Muslim
Iranians.
What do you make of the Obama Administration’s increasingly close
diplomatic alliance with Turkey? There seems to be this effort to
build up the Turks as an alternative hegemon to Iran in the region,
even as Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, is trying
his best to create an Islamic one-party state.
Hillary Clinton and her staff are not fools. Therefore, they must know
that the Turkish foreign minister is a fool. I know him personally.
The man is an idiot. Hillary Clinton and her advisers are not idiots.
No advantage would be served for the United States to recognize where
Erdogon is really going. It’s much better to pretend that he’s a
member of NATO and North Atlantic Alliance and all the rest of it.
One way to look at the place of Israel in this landscape is “Wow, you
have a functioning neo-liberal state with a tech economy second to
Silicon Valley amidst the rubble of all these failed Arab states.
Imagine the Syrian army trying to attack anybody. Egypt’s army is
incapable of doing anything despite $10 billion worth of American
weapons, Iran is falling to pieces, Lebanon is still a mess, Jordan is
a joke of a country with a Palestinian majority.” On the other hand,
you could look at it and say, “Israel is a tiny country in a chaotic
neighborhood where it will always get sucked into conflicts with its
neighbors, and will never have a moment of peace.”
Luttwak Q&A
Yes, everything you say is correct, but there is a third element you
are omitting. The very innermost circle of Israeli security is
actually within the 1967 borders. And there you have almost 1.5
million Arabs, some Christian, some Muslim. The current situation is
helping consolidate their loyalty to the Israeli state. If you ask
them “Are you loyal to the Israeli state?” They will say “Oh no, we
hate them all.” Are they involved in terror plots? The answer is that
out of the 1.5 million, the ones involved in terror plots or even
plain criminality of any sort, they could all sleep in my house. Or if
not, they could sleep in a motel.
But there is even a more fundamental issue within Israel, which is the
functioning of the Israeli economy and its impact on Israeli society.
What’s happened, as you know from these latest demonstrations, is that
the Israeli economy has become so successful that it has generated big
numbers of millionaires, which means that four room apartments in Tel
Aviv cost as much as they do in New York. Israel is becoming Aspen,
Colorado, where normal people have to travel 20 miles to go to sleep
because they can’t live anywhere within Aspen proper.
Are strategic minds nurtured through upbringing and education, or is
the ability to think strategically an inborn gift, like mathematics?
It’s a gift like mathematics. The paradoxical logic of strategy
contradicts the logic of everyday life, it goes against all normal
definitions of intelligence we have. It only makes sense if you
understand the dialectic. If you want peace, prepare for war. If you
actively want war, disarm yourself, and then you’ll get war. Virile
and martial elites understand that kind of thinking instinctively.
Here’s an easily falsifiable statement, but there’s something in it
that interests me and I want you to pick it apart. I would start with
the moment when George W. Bush met Vladimir Putin and said “I looked
into his eyes and saw this was a man I could really trust.” So my
thesis is this: If you’re Vladimir Putin, and you rise to the top of
this chaotic and brutal society after going through the KGB, you must
be some kind of strategic genius with amazing survival skills, because
the penalty for failure may be torture or death. This kind of
Darwinian set-up exists in many countries around the world. What does
it mean to be head of the security services in Egypt? It means that
you had to betray your friends but only at the right time, and you had
to survive many vicious predators who would have loved to kill you or
torture you, or otherwise derail your career. By the time you become
Vladimir Putin or Omar Suleiman, your ability to think ahead and
analyze threats has been adequately tested.
By contrast, what does it take to become a U.S. Senator? You have to
eat rubber chicken dinners, you have to impress some rich people who
are generally pretty stupid about politics, and smile in TV
commercials. The penalties for failure are hardly so dire. And so,
American leadership generally sucks, and America is perennially in the
position of being the sucker in the global poker game. That’s the
thesis. So tell me why it’s wrong.
Even if your analysis is totally correct, your conclusion is wrong.
Think about what it means to work for a Putin, whose natural approach
to any problem is deception. For example, he had an affair with this
athlete, a gymnast, and he went through two phases. Phase One: He
concealed it from his wife. Phase Two: He launched a public campaign
showing himself to be a macho man. He had photographs of him shooting
a rifle, and as a Judo champion, and therefore had the news leaked
that he was having an affair. Not only an affair with a young woman,
but a gymnast, an athlete. Obviously such a person is much more wily
and cunning and able to handle conflict than his American counterpart.
But when such a person is the head of a department, the whole
department is actually paralyzed and they are all reduced to serfs and
valets. Therefore, what gets applied to a problem is only the wisdom
of the aforementioned wily head of the department. All the other
talent is wasted, all the other knowledge is wasted.
Now you have a choice: you can have a non-wily head of a department
and the collective knowledge and wisdom of the whole department, or
else you can have a wily head and zero functioning. And that is how
the Russian government is currently working. Putin and Medvedev have
very little control of the Russian bureaucracy. When you want to deal
with them, and I dealt with them this morning, they act in very
uncooperative, cagey and deceptive ways because they are first of all
trying to protect their security and stability and benefits from their
boss. They have to deceive you because they are deceiving their boss
before he even shows up to work. And they are all running little
games. So that’s the alternative. You can have a wily Putin and a
stupid government. Or an intelligent government and an innocent head.
There’s always is a trade-off. A Putin cannot be an inspiring leader.
One final question. When I heard the Bin Laden news and you look at
the circumstances surrounding his place of residence, and the length
of his stay there, it seems clear that he was sold to the U.S. by
somebody inside the Pakistani security apparatus, no?
I don’t believe that at all.
You think that the CIA independently developed this information?
First of all, it was not the CIA because the CIA doesn’t run
interrogations in Guantanamo.
You believe the story about the courier?
I believe it and I believe it categorically. Look, the Pakistanis had
been sheltering Bin Laden. But in these matters, the only way to
proceed is to develop thoughts that are based only on uncontroversial
facts. Any analysis of the Bin Laden story tells you that there was
active Pakistani complicity simply because people cannot go to
Abbottabad and live in a compound without somebody asking questions.
For one thing, Pakistan has this system where foreign citizens have to
obtain the residence permits and renew them, and there are foreigners
including Arabs living there, and they would be asked to show their
papers. Pakistani complicity is certain. That’s point one. Point two:
The guy uses couriers. Therefore, if you’re going to find him, you had
to find the courier. The courier story is not the cover story.
The proof of this is that if they got the information from some
Pakistani guy, if one of the protectors of Osama decided to sell out,
they would have known what was in the compound, and if they had known
what was in the compound, they would not have attacked it the way they
did. The attack against the compound reflected the central fact they
did not know what they would find inside. The only thing that they
hoped to find was Osama Bin Laden, among other objects, furniture,
walls, people. Had a Pakistani provided the information, they would
have provided two pieces of information, not just one. One is that
Osama Bin Laden is there and two, a platoon is not there.
You understand the thing that keeps bothering me.
Now you are entering an area that is highly technical and I’m not at
liberty to speak because I’m in this line of business myself so there
are limits to what I can tell you. But tell me what bothers you?
What bothers me is that you have a secret that was obviously known by
more than one person. Let’s say that only three people in the ISI knew
that Bin Laden was there.
The people who knew that he was in Abbottabad were a minimum number of
some 12 people and the reason is that you had to keep telling the
police not to enter, you had to communicate with the other parts of
the Pakistani state. But I repeat, but if American information had
come from inside Pakistan, and there was knowledge of what was in the
compound, they would have not attacked the compound in this way.
If 12 people know a secret, then there are also many people
surrounding those 12 people who might also have access to some part of
that information.
So in other words, there are fragments of that secret.
With that many people knowing a big secret over that long a period of
time, something must have leaked.
I know the courier information would tell you that Osama Bin Laden is
in that space and nothing else. And the military operation that was
mounted reflects that fact. Whoever designed that military operation
had the kind of information that is consistent with the courier and is
not consistent with any other story.
If I am in the receipt of information about Bin Laden’s whereabouts
from a source in the ISI who wanted to submarine his boss, or gain the
support of America, or pay off his mistress, I might design an
operation that would match my cover story about the courier, who
definitely existed, but might not have led anyone back to Bin Laden’s
house.
No, no, no. It’s a very technical thing. It has to do with how you
attack a target when you know that there are maximum of two people who
will shoot at you or three people who will shoot at you, neither of
the three being trained gunmen, versus how you design an attack on a
target when you think there might be 25 people shooting at you. That’s
all. The official word is that there was a courier and I’m inclined to
believe it. Because when somebody tells you how something happened,
operationally speaking, do not disbelieve it until you have evidence
that tells you that it’s wrong. Then you can pursue some other theory.
All the information I have is consistent with the courier story
because the courier story would tell you that there’s the bad guy in
the space but nothing else.
Why kill him?
They were under orders to kill him.
Wouldn’t Osama Bin Laden be a source of useful intelligence?
Alternately, one good reason to kill him is that you have a deal with
the Pakistanis—“we’re gonna get rid of this problem”—then you need to
kill him, because otherwise he might start talking about who protected
him for the past ten years.
There was no deal with the Pakistanis. There’s no institutional
integrity. Therefore you cannot make deals with the Pakistani system.
They would betray each other. There was no deal.
They killed Bin Laden simply because of the inconvenience of a trial?
They killed him because of the fact that if we captured Bin Laden,
every Jihadist in the world would have been duty-bound to kidnap any
American citizen anywhere and exchange him for Bin Laden.
I didn’t think of that.
http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/76739/qa-edward-luttwak/?all=1
envy of academics and spies alike. A well-built man who looks like he
is in his mid-50s (he turns 70 next year), Luttwak—who was born in
1942 to a wealthy Jewish family in Arad, Romania, and educated in
Italy and England—speaks with a resonant European accent that conveys
equal measures of authority, curiosity, egomania, bluster, impatience,
and good humor. He is a senior associate at the Center for Strategic
and International Studies at Georgetown University, and he published
his first book, Coup d’Etat: A Practical Handbook, at the age of 26.
Over the past 40 years, he has made provocative and often deeply
original contributions to multiple academic fields, including military
strategy, Roman history, Byzantine history, and economics. He owns a
large eco-friendly ranch in Bolivia, and can recite poetry and talk
politics in eight languages, a skill that he displayed during a recent
four-hour conversation at his house, located on a quiet street in
Chevy Chase, Maryland, by taking phone calls in Italian, Spanish,
Korean, and Chinese, during which I wandered off to the porch, where I
sat and talked with his lovely Israeli-born wife Dalya Luttwak, a
sculptor.
The walls of Luttwak’s donnish study—which is by far the nicest room
in the Luttwaks’ house, with the best view, and might otherwise have
served as the dining room, if Edward and Dalya were more like their
neighbors—are lined with bookshelves containing the Roman classics,
biographies of Winston Churchill, works on military history and
strategy, intelligence gathering, Byzantine art, old atlases, and
decorations and plaques from foreign governments. Luttwak’s work as a
high-level strategic and intelligence consultant for the U.S. Defense
Department, the National Security Council, the State Department, the
Japanese government, and the defense departments and intelligence
services of other countries in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the
Middle East (he appears to be spending a lot of time in South Korea
and China) is also augmented by a parallel life as an “operator,”
about which he is both secretive and obviously proud.
While the details of Luttwak’s life as a private intelligence
operative are sketchy, he has been actively involved in military and
paramilitary operations sponsored by the U.S. government, foreign
governments, and various private entities. By his own admission, he
has been directly involved in attacks on physical targets,
interdiction efforts, and the capture and interrogation of wanted
persons—although “admission” is clearly the wrong word here, since he
is almost boyishly eager for visitors to understand his familiarity
with the nuts and bolts of special ops, and cites his own field
experience to support his estimations of people like Gen. David
Petraeus, whose reputation as counter-insurgency genius he dismisses
as a fraud. He is also careful to state that his activities have never
violated U.S. law. The Walter Mitty-ish component of Luttwak’s
enthusiasm for his other life—academic by day, special operator by
night—seems less significant in his psyche than a driving appetite for
physical risk that has helped him understand military strategy and
related policy questions in a way that the current generation of
Western policymakers often do not.
Loved and loathed, and capable of living multiple lives, any one of
which would quickly tire out a less intellectually and physically
robust man, Luttwak glories in the undeniable fact that he is not the
usual Washington think-tank product. His instinctive tendency to
reject common wisdom as idiotic, combined with his need to prove that
he is the smartest person in every room, has deprived him of the
chance to shape events in the way that every policy intellectual not-
so-secretly craves. Yet his first allegiance is clearly to the habits
of mind that have made him one of the most brilliant strategic
thinkers in America, capable of understanding the psychological and
practical necessities that drive human action in a highly original,
insightful and counter-intuitive way.
We met last month, at the height of a rainstorm. What follows are
selectively edited portions of the transcript of our interview, during
which I made a point of not asking him about his childhood experience
as a Jewish refugee in Europe, which seemed like a subject for a
different conversation.
I think that if America had been able to tolerate a second Henry
Kissinger, that person would have been you.
Kissinger at 88 is writing brochures for Kissinger Associates. His
last book on China is one such work written by the staff at Kissinger
Associates. It is designed to curry favor with the Chinese authorities
and nothing else.
I know him personally very well, but he is such a deceptive person;
he’s a habitual liar and dissembler. Although I’ve spent a lot of time
talking to him, I have no insight on him at all. His book ends with a
paean to U.S.-Chinese friendship and how every other country has to
fit in. I have to review it for the TLS but I’ve been delaying it by
weeks because I don’t know whether it is a case of senility or utter
corruption.
There are two differing interpretations of the events of Arab Spring.
The dominant one is: “Here is this marvelous wave of popular
revolutions where everyone uses Facebook and Twitter to spread
democratic ideas.” The other is that “Rickety state structures held
together by repressive police and state apparatus are now collapsing
into tribal bloodshed.”
Well, any dictatorship creates an unnatural environment, analogous to
that of taking peasants from the field and putting them in an army,
where they get uniforms and are drilled and disciplined. Dictatorships
attempt to turn entire populations into well-drilled regiments. The
North Korean regime takes it to the logical extreme of actually having
the entire population drilled in regiments. The Ben Ali and Mubarak
dictatorships were attempting to regiment their populations by having
state structures imposed on them. Both of them, for example, were able
to create loyal police forces.
Once the regiment dissolves, then the people are released and they
revert to their natural order. They stop wearing uniforms, they put on
the clothes they want and they manifest the proclivities that they
have. A few Egyptians are Westernized, hence they have exited Islam
whatever their personal beliefs may be. But otherwise, there is no
room for civilization in Egypt other than Islam, and the number of
extremists that you need to make life impossible for the average
Westernized or slightly Westernized Egyptian who wants to have a beer,
for example, is very small. The number you need to close all the bars
in Egypt is maybe 15 percent of the population.
Do you think stepping away from Mubarak was a mistake or it made no
difference?
I think it made no difference. The regime was senile. Literally.
How much of a role do you think the so-called “democracy promotion”
efforts of the United States under President George W. Bush, including
the invasion of Iraq, played in the increasing instability of the Arab
regimes, and how much of their collapse was the result of their own
senility?
I will pretend that this is an easy question; it’s not. The easy
answer is that Bush and the Bush Administration for a brief period of
less than two years were on a democracy-promotion binge. They used a
pickax and attacked a wall, seemingly making an impression, and
perhaps they caused some structural damage. The Iraq War, with the
defeat, humbling, and execution of a dictator, was a big blow with a
pickax. On the other hand, when the regime becomes sufficiently
involuted as to become hereditary, which is what happened in Syria and
appeared to be happening in Egypt, then you are dealing with senility
of the regime embodied: “the dictator is old.” So both answers are
true.
There have been many different explanations given over the past ten
years for the strength of the American-Israeli relationship, ranging
from the idea that Israel has the best and most immediately deployable
army in the Middle East, to the idea that a small cabal of wealthy and
influential Jews has hijacked American foreign policy.
You mean the ZOG? The Zionist Occupied Government?
Yes.
Personally, from an emotional point of view, myself, as me, I prefer
the Z.O.G. explanation above all others. I love the idea that the
Zionists have sufficient power to actually occupy America, and through
America to basically run the world. I love the idea of being a member
of a secretive and powerful cabal. If you put my name Luttwak together
with Perle and Wolfowitz and you search the Internet, you will get
this little list of people who run the American government and the
world, and I’m on it. I love that.
Anytime you need an added jolt of ego gratification, you open your
laptop and confirm the fact that you rule the world.
In Pakistan, there are millions of people who go to schools where they
are taught that I am the ruler of the universe. So, emotionally
speaking, I would explain everything that happens by referring to the
Z.O.G., the Zionist Occupied Government, which is run by a small cabal
of people, and that I am one of them.
Now, if I’m forced to actually think about this question, I would say
that the cleanest analytical way of understanding the American-Israeli
relationship is to say that the post-1945 career of the United States
as a world-meddling, imperialist power has forced Americans to be very
foreign-oriented. Many American families have had their sons killed
overseas, and many other Americans have become foreign oriented for
many reasons. Among them there is a group of Christians who read the
Bible, who believe in the Bible to some degree as a document that
registers God’s will. For them, Israel is the proof of the truth of
the Bible. Hence, the notion that the United States should be
supporting rather than opposing Israel has now become expected, which
was absolutely not true in 1948 when the United States did every
possible thing to prevent the existence of Israel by systematically
intercepting arms flows to the Jews.
Luttwak Q&A
Therefore, if we in the Z.O.G. didn’t really run everything, and there
was no Zionist influence, then this solid mass of foreign-aware
Americans, who also happen to be Bible-believers—we’re talking 50
million people—to them, the only foreign policy that counts is
America’s support for Israel. Period.
Many American Jews are viscerally uncomfortable with this kind of
support. They say “Oh, look at these Bible-thumping Christians who
want to make us kiss Jesus. The only reason they like Israel is so
they can turn it into a landing strip for their God.”
You are now invoking a second constant—
Why are so many Jews so stupid about politics?
They have not had a state for 2000 years, they have had no power or
responsibility and it will take centuries before they catch up with
the instinctive political understanding that any ordinary Englishman
has. They don’t understand politics, and of course they confuse their
friends and their enemies, and that is the ultimate political proof of
imbecility.
When you look at the current conduct of American policy in the Middle
East, do you see any coherent policy or strategy?
Obama is no different than most previous administrations that come
into office with ready-made solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Jimmy Carter was the first one, and his plan was redacted by Zbignew
Brzezinski. It led to Sadat’s journey to Jerusalem because his
brilliant idea was to subject Egyptians and Israelis to a Soviet-
American condominium, which was a terrible idea, and so Sadat created
his own reality. It was really one of the funnier moments in history.
The national security adviser officials, and I believe Brzezinski
himself, came out with a lot of negative statements when Sadat first
made his announcement because he was ruining their policy scheme,
which was, of course, impossible.
Obama is in that tradition. He came in with an impossible policy
scheme, which is first you get Israelis to stop agreeing to
settlements, and then you proceed. Of course, that doesn’t make any
sense. When you draw a border that is what matters. The Israelis
removed all the settlements from Sinai without any American
involvement in two minutes after the agreement was made with Egypt.
[The phone rings. Luttwak breaks into impossibly perfect Italian. I
wander out onto the porch to talk to Dalya, and return 20 minutes
later, as he is finishing up the call.]
There’s nobody involved who is anti-Israeli like there were in the
past, when there was a strong Arabist position in the State
Department. The people in the Obama Administration read the New York
Times and they don’t know Arabic, and therefore they are operating
systematically with false categories. The fundamental error with
regard to settlements is a very simple one: when borders are
established, borders are established, and settlements are neither here
nor there. This notion that when some faction of Israelis puts a
camper on a hilltop that this changes anything is a fantasy.
A fantasy both on the part of the people who put the campers on the
ground and also American policymakers.
They’re both equally deluded.
Do you anticipate violence this fall between the Israelis and the
Palestinians?
I don’t anticipate violence this fall. War leads to peace. Peace leads
to war. So now logically we should have war. And the Iranians, of
course, would love to pay for one. But the moment there is an
intifada, the Palestinian regiment collapses and gangsters take over.
So the moment the violence escalates they stop fighting and they start
talking peace. The moment the talking appears to be approaching an
actual peace, they start an intifada.
Do you think the cost of the violence and other social ills that come
out of the stalemate you are describing is something Israeli society
can easily afford, or do you think there is any alternative to it?
I’m not sure it’s a cost.
Because the strategic depth that it affords and the control over those
borders is more important?
Listen, my wife is a very good cook. And we have a housekeeper, who is
an even better cook. It’s a weird situation, but I think my
housekeeper is a better cook than any restaurant in Washington. She is
a simple woman with no education, from Chile, and she just happens to
have a superhuman talent. She being such a good cook, she achieves
wonderful effects with very strange ingredients, and strange
combinations of ingredients. Israel’s success as a state has been made
possible by Arab threats of different kinds. Arab violence or threats
of violence are part of the Israeli soup. There are certain levels of
violence that are so high that they’re damaging and there are also
levels that are so low they are damaging. There is an optimum level of
the Arab threat. I would say for about nine days of the 1973 war, the
level of violence was much too high. Even when Israelis were
successful, the level of violence was destroying the tissue of the
state. Most of the time, the violence is positive.
When you say that the effects of Arab violence are positive, you mean
that they generate social cohesion inside Israel?
Lenin taught, “Power is mass multiplied by cohesion.” Arab violence
generates Jewish cohesion. Cohesion turns mass into power. Israel has
had very small mass, very high cohesion. If only the Palestinians
understood that, they would have attacked the Jews with flowers.
Shimon Peres says, “Iran is a decaying corpse of a country and the
idea that they are any long-term threat to anybody, based on
demographics and based on the rickety state of their economy, is a
joke. So yes, it would be terrible if they ended up with an atomic
bomb, but otherwise, Iran is not a long-term strategic threat to
anybody.”
I think to get a good view on Iran you have to put yourself in the
shoes of Hezbollah. Hezbollah is wholly dependent on Iran. Without
Iran, Hezbollah is just a band of hotheads with a few thousand highly
trained men. So view Iran from Hezbollah’s point of view. What do you
see? It’s a regime that has been around since 1979 in one way or the
other. Is it consolidated? Is functioning better and better and
getting more and more support? It’s not. Is it getting more dependent
on police repression or less? The answer is more. So, from the
Hezbollah point of view, you realize that your days are counted
because the regime is in a downward spiral.
There is a good measure of social control in Iran and that is the
price of genuine imported Scotch whiskey in Tehran, because it’s a)
forbidden, and b) has to be smuggled in for practical purposes from
Dubai, and the only way it can come from Dubai is with the cooperation
of the Revolutionary Guard. The price of whiskey has been declining
for years and you go to a party in north Tehran now and you get lots
of whiskey. And it’s only slightly more expensive than in Northwest
Washington.
But on the other hand, the regime is doing something for which they
will have my undying gratitude—that is, they have been manufacturing
the one and only post-Islamic society. They created a situation in
which Iranians in general worldwide, not only in Iran, are
disaffiliated. They are converting Muslim Iranians into post-Muslim
Iranians.
What do you make of the Obama Administration’s increasingly close
diplomatic alliance with Turkey? There seems to be this effort to
build up the Turks as an alternative hegemon to Iran in the region,
even as Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, is trying
his best to create an Islamic one-party state.
Hillary Clinton and her staff are not fools. Therefore, they must know
that the Turkish foreign minister is a fool. I know him personally.
The man is an idiot. Hillary Clinton and her advisers are not idiots.
No advantage would be served for the United States to recognize where
Erdogon is really going. It’s much better to pretend that he’s a
member of NATO and North Atlantic Alliance and all the rest of it.
One way to look at the place of Israel in this landscape is “Wow, you
have a functioning neo-liberal state with a tech economy second to
Silicon Valley amidst the rubble of all these failed Arab states.
Imagine the Syrian army trying to attack anybody. Egypt’s army is
incapable of doing anything despite $10 billion worth of American
weapons, Iran is falling to pieces, Lebanon is still a mess, Jordan is
a joke of a country with a Palestinian majority.” On the other hand,
you could look at it and say, “Israel is a tiny country in a chaotic
neighborhood where it will always get sucked into conflicts with its
neighbors, and will never have a moment of peace.”
Luttwak Q&A
Yes, everything you say is correct, but there is a third element you
are omitting. The very innermost circle of Israeli security is
actually within the 1967 borders. And there you have almost 1.5
million Arabs, some Christian, some Muslim. The current situation is
helping consolidate their loyalty to the Israeli state. If you ask
them “Are you loyal to the Israeli state?” They will say “Oh no, we
hate them all.” Are they involved in terror plots? The answer is that
out of the 1.5 million, the ones involved in terror plots or even
plain criminality of any sort, they could all sleep in my house. Or if
not, they could sleep in a motel.
But there is even a more fundamental issue within Israel, which is the
functioning of the Israeli economy and its impact on Israeli society.
What’s happened, as you know from these latest demonstrations, is that
the Israeli economy has become so successful that it has generated big
numbers of millionaires, which means that four room apartments in Tel
Aviv cost as much as they do in New York. Israel is becoming Aspen,
Colorado, where normal people have to travel 20 miles to go to sleep
because they can’t live anywhere within Aspen proper.
Are strategic minds nurtured through upbringing and education, or is
the ability to think strategically an inborn gift, like mathematics?
It’s a gift like mathematics. The paradoxical logic of strategy
contradicts the logic of everyday life, it goes against all normal
definitions of intelligence we have. It only makes sense if you
understand the dialectic. If you want peace, prepare for war. If you
actively want war, disarm yourself, and then you’ll get war. Virile
and martial elites understand that kind of thinking instinctively.
Here’s an easily falsifiable statement, but there’s something in it
that interests me and I want you to pick it apart. I would start with
the moment when George W. Bush met Vladimir Putin and said “I looked
into his eyes and saw this was a man I could really trust.” So my
thesis is this: If you’re Vladimir Putin, and you rise to the top of
this chaotic and brutal society after going through the KGB, you must
be some kind of strategic genius with amazing survival skills, because
the penalty for failure may be torture or death. This kind of
Darwinian set-up exists in many countries around the world. What does
it mean to be head of the security services in Egypt? It means that
you had to betray your friends but only at the right time, and you had
to survive many vicious predators who would have loved to kill you or
torture you, or otherwise derail your career. By the time you become
Vladimir Putin or Omar Suleiman, your ability to think ahead and
analyze threats has been adequately tested.
By contrast, what does it take to become a U.S. Senator? You have to
eat rubber chicken dinners, you have to impress some rich people who
are generally pretty stupid about politics, and smile in TV
commercials. The penalties for failure are hardly so dire. And so,
American leadership generally sucks, and America is perennially in the
position of being the sucker in the global poker game. That’s the
thesis. So tell me why it’s wrong.
Even if your analysis is totally correct, your conclusion is wrong.
Think about what it means to work for a Putin, whose natural approach
to any problem is deception. For example, he had an affair with this
athlete, a gymnast, and he went through two phases. Phase One: He
concealed it from his wife. Phase Two: He launched a public campaign
showing himself to be a macho man. He had photographs of him shooting
a rifle, and as a Judo champion, and therefore had the news leaked
that he was having an affair. Not only an affair with a young woman,
but a gymnast, an athlete. Obviously such a person is much more wily
and cunning and able to handle conflict than his American counterpart.
But when such a person is the head of a department, the whole
department is actually paralyzed and they are all reduced to serfs and
valets. Therefore, what gets applied to a problem is only the wisdom
of the aforementioned wily head of the department. All the other
talent is wasted, all the other knowledge is wasted.
Now you have a choice: you can have a non-wily head of a department
and the collective knowledge and wisdom of the whole department, or
else you can have a wily head and zero functioning. And that is how
the Russian government is currently working. Putin and Medvedev have
very little control of the Russian bureaucracy. When you want to deal
with them, and I dealt with them this morning, they act in very
uncooperative, cagey and deceptive ways because they are first of all
trying to protect their security and stability and benefits from their
boss. They have to deceive you because they are deceiving their boss
before he even shows up to work. And they are all running little
games. So that’s the alternative. You can have a wily Putin and a
stupid government. Or an intelligent government and an innocent head.
There’s always is a trade-off. A Putin cannot be an inspiring leader.
One final question. When I heard the Bin Laden news and you look at
the circumstances surrounding his place of residence, and the length
of his stay there, it seems clear that he was sold to the U.S. by
somebody inside the Pakistani security apparatus, no?
I don’t believe that at all.
You think that the CIA independently developed this information?
First of all, it was not the CIA because the CIA doesn’t run
interrogations in Guantanamo.
You believe the story about the courier?
I believe it and I believe it categorically. Look, the Pakistanis had
been sheltering Bin Laden. But in these matters, the only way to
proceed is to develop thoughts that are based only on uncontroversial
facts. Any analysis of the Bin Laden story tells you that there was
active Pakistani complicity simply because people cannot go to
Abbottabad and live in a compound without somebody asking questions.
For one thing, Pakistan has this system where foreign citizens have to
obtain the residence permits and renew them, and there are foreigners
including Arabs living there, and they would be asked to show their
papers. Pakistani complicity is certain. That’s point one. Point two:
The guy uses couriers. Therefore, if you’re going to find him, you had
to find the courier. The courier story is not the cover story.
The proof of this is that if they got the information from some
Pakistani guy, if one of the protectors of Osama decided to sell out,
they would have known what was in the compound, and if they had known
what was in the compound, they would not have attacked it the way they
did. The attack against the compound reflected the central fact they
did not know what they would find inside. The only thing that they
hoped to find was Osama Bin Laden, among other objects, furniture,
walls, people. Had a Pakistani provided the information, they would
have provided two pieces of information, not just one. One is that
Osama Bin Laden is there and two, a platoon is not there.
You understand the thing that keeps bothering me.
Now you are entering an area that is highly technical and I’m not at
liberty to speak because I’m in this line of business myself so there
are limits to what I can tell you. But tell me what bothers you?
What bothers me is that you have a secret that was obviously known by
more than one person. Let’s say that only three people in the ISI knew
that Bin Laden was there.
The people who knew that he was in Abbottabad were a minimum number of
some 12 people and the reason is that you had to keep telling the
police not to enter, you had to communicate with the other parts of
the Pakistani state. But I repeat, but if American information had
come from inside Pakistan, and there was knowledge of what was in the
compound, they would have not attacked the compound in this way.
If 12 people know a secret, then there are also many people
surrounding those 12 people who might also have access to some part of
that information.
So in other words, there are fragments of that secret.
With that many people knowing a big secret over that long a period of
time, something must have leaked.
I know the courier information would tell you that Osama Bin Laden is
in that space and nothing else. And the military operation that was
mounted reflects that fact. Whoever designed that military operation
had the kind of information that is consistent with the courier and is
not consistent with any other story.
If I am in the receipt of information about Bin Laden’s whereabouts
from a source in the ISI who wanted to submarine his boss, or gain the
support of America, or pay off his mistress, I might design an
operation that would match my cover story about the courier, who
definitely existed, but might not have led anyone back to Bin Laden’s
house.
No, no, no. It’s a very technical thing. It has to do with how you
attack a target when you know that there are maximum of two people who
will shoot at you or three people who will shoot at you, neither of
the three being trained gunmen, versus how you design an attack on a
target when you think there might be 25 people shooting at you. That’s
all. The official word is that there was a courier and I’m inclined to
believe it. Because when somebody tells you how something happened,
operationally speaking, do not disbelieve it until you have evidence
that tells you that it’s wrong. Then you can pursue some other theory.
All the information I have is consistent with the courier story
because the courier story would tell you that there’s the bad guy in
the space but nothing else.
Why kill him?
They were under orders to kill him.
Wouldn’t Osama Bin Laden be a source of useful intelligence?
Alternately, one good reason to kill him is that you have a deal with
the Pakistanis—“we’re gonna get rid of this problem”—then you need to
kill him, because otherwise he might start talking about who protected
him for the past ten years.
There was no deal with the Pakistanis. There’s no institutional
integrity. Therefore you cannot make deals with the Pakistani system.
They would betray each other. There was no deal.
They killed Bin Laden simply because of the inconvenience of a trial?
They killed him because of the fact that if we captured Bin Laden,
every Jihadist in the world would have been duty-bound to kidnap any
American citizen anywhere and exchange him for Bin Laden.
I didn’t think of that.
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