(Updated: Originally published October 29, 2006)
Fit's in VERY NICELY with the two post immediately below this one, no?
The profile is allegedly that of a bureaucratic dissenter, and yet the piece sheds interesting light on the activities of State Dept. counselor Philip Zelikow.
"Rice’s Counselor Gives Advice Others May Not Want to Hear" by HELENE COOPER and DAVID E. SANGER
WASHINGTON, Oct. 27 — For the last 18 months, Philip D. Zelikow has churned out confidential memorandums and proposals for his boss and close friend, Condoleezza Rice, that often depart sharply from the Bush administration’s current line.
One described the potential for Iraq to become a “catastrophic failure.” Another, among several that have come to light in recent weeks, was an early call for changes in a detention policy that many in the State Department believed was doing tremendous harm to the United States.
Others have proposed new diplomatic initiatives toward North Korea and the Middle East, and one went as far as to call for a reconsideration of the phrase “war on terror” because it alienated many Muslims — an idea that quickly fizzled after opposition from the White House.
Such ideas would have found a more natural home under President George H. W. Bush, for whom Mr. Zelikow and Ms. Rice worked on the staff of the National Security Council. They reflect a sense that American influence is perishable, and can be damaged by overreaching, as allies and other partners react against decisions made in Washington. They form a kind of foreign policy realism that was eclipsed in Mr. Bush’s first term, in favor of a more ideological, unilateral ethos, but that has made something of a comeback in his second term.
Whether Mr. Zelikow, 52, is giving voice to Ms. Rice’s private views, or simply serving as an in-house contrarian, remains unclear. Some of his ideas have become policy: he had called for the closure of secret prisons run by the Central Intelligence Agency a year before the Supreme Court decision that prodded the Bush administration to empty them.
The United States offered North Korea a chance to negotiate a permanent peace treaty, per Mr. Zelikow’s advice, and he, along with Ms. Rice, was one of the backers of the Iran initiative, in which President Bush offered to reverse three decades of American policy against direct talks with Tehran if Iran suspended its uranium enrichment.
Neither North Korea nor Iran has bitten on the initiatives, but America’s allies have applauded them. Mr. Zelikow’s assessments of the Iraq war, first disclosed in Bob Woodward’s book “State of Denial,” were presented to Ms. Rice in 2005.
Ms. Rice keeps Mr. Zelikow close at hand, and the fact that his memorandums have surfaced in recent books and news articles suggests, at a minimum, that he and his allies are aggressively lobbying for his ideas. Mr. Zelikow (pronounced ZELL-i-ko) is being talked about inside the State Department as an outside shot for the vacant job of deputy secretary of state, but some believe that his management style is too combative for the job.
This is where the turn in is, and very interesting.
Read the front page and you'd think Zelikow is some sort of persona non grata at the White House; however, the turn in gets it going.
Friends of both officials say that Ms. Rice appears to regard Mr. Zelikow as a kind of intellectual anchor during what has been a turbulent period for American foreign policy, in Iraq and beyond.
An "intellectual anchor during what has been a turbulent period for American foreign policy?"
I'd say! As I will soon demonstrate.
Mr. Zelikow is hardly a household name, even at the State Department, where his title is counselor to the secretary of state. He has few staffers, no line authority, and occupies an office at the very end of the hall on the seventh floor, where Ms. Rice and other top officials also have their offices. He is a sometimes-geeky intellectual known for fingernails that are bitten down to nubs.
Zelikow "hardly a household name," but he should be!
He was the executive director of the 9/11 Commission and decided what evidence the Commission would consider, and what evidence would be kept secret (the caveat being that ALL the evidence was provided by the Bush Administration).
Why is this important?
Thanks to author Mike Whitney's research, we now know:
"In researching the Bush administration’s manipulation of public perceptions, I came across an interesting summary of the State Department’s Philip Zelikow, who was Executive Director on the 9-11 Commission, that greatest of all charades. According to Wikipedia:
"Prof. Zelikow’s area of academic expertise is the creation and maintenance of, in his words, 'public myths’ or 'public presumptions’ which he defines as 'beliefs (1) thought to be true ( although not necessarily known with certainty) and (2) shared in common within the relevant political community.’ In his academic work and elsewhere he has taken a special interest in what he has called 'searing’ or 'molding’ events (that) take on transcendent’ importance and therefore retain their power even as the experiencing generation passes from the scene….He has noted that 'a history’s narrative power is typically linked to how readers relate to the actions of individuals in the history; if readers cannot make the connection to their own lives, then a history may fail to engage them at all." ("Thinking about Political History" Miller center Report, winter 1999, p 5-7)
Isn’t that the same as saying there is neither history nor truth; that what is really important is the manipulation of epochal events so they serve the interests of society’s managers? Thus, it follows that if the government can create their own "galvanizing events", then they can write history any way they choose.
If that’s the case, then perhaps the entire war on terror is cut from whole cloth; a garish public relations maneuver devoid of meaning."
And yet the Times presents Zelikow as if he is just a harmless "geeky intellectual" known for biting his fingernails.
But questions about his role were sharpened last month after Mr. Zelikow gave a speech at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in which he offered what many believed was an oblique criticism of the decision by Mr. Bush and Ms. Rice not to push Israel to return to the negotiating table with the Palestinians. He also said progress in that conflict was essential to forming a consensus among the United States, moderate Arabs and Europeans on Iran.
The address may have been an example of what Mr. Zelikow, in two speeches last year, called “practical idealism.” But it did not go over well. The State Department quickly distanced itself from the speech, issuing a statement denying any linkage, and Israeli officials, flustered by Mr. Zelikow’s remarks, said Ms. Rice later assured the Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, that the United States saw the Iranian and Palestinian issues as two separate matters.
Neither Ms. Rice nor Mr. Zelikow would comment for this article.
But friends of both Ms. Rice and Mr. Zelikow say her initial decision to appoint Mr. Zelikow to the counselor post last year reflects her openness to views at odds with the more ideological approach that has been dominant under President Bush.
Once again selling Zelikow as being at odds with the PNAC crowd.
Ms. Rice had to expend a substantial amount of her own political capital to get the White House to support her choice, friends say, given Mr. Zelikow’s previous job as staff director of the 9/11 Commission, where he played a major role in writing the report that took both the Clinton and Bush administrations to task for failing to act with sufficient seriousness against the threat from Al Qaeda.
Zelikow played "a major role in writing the 9/11 report."
What exactly might Zelikow -- the designer of cultural myths -- have been thinking when he sat down to write the report?
Back to Whitney:
"In the Nov-Dec 1998 issue of Foreign Affairs he (Zelikow) co-authored (with the former head of the CIA) an article entitled "Catastrophic Terrorism" in which he speculated that if the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center had succeeded 'the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it. Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America’s fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. Like Pearl Harbor, the event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects and use of deadly force."
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_D._Zelikow )
That was written in 1998!?!
Amazing. It is almost like Zelikow knew what was going to happen on 9-11 and was drawing attention to the "draconian measures" (scaling back civil liberties) which may seem attractive to ruling elites in the policy establishment.
Now, (coincidentally) everything has evolved almost exactly as Zelikow predicted. Just like Pearl Harbor, 9-11 has "divided our past and future into a before and after". The post-9-11 world relates to a world in which personal liberty is no longer protected, and where surveillance, detention and the use of deadly force are all permitted. It is a world in which "America’s fundamental sense of security" has been shattered and will continue to be shattered as a way of managing public opinion.
As Zelikow presciently implies, the post 9-11 world depends entirely on "public myths"; fairy tales invented by society’s supervisors which perpetuate the illusion of democracy, freedom and the rule of law."
Isn't that the DEVIL'S PISS?
A guy who specializes in creating cultural myths WROTE the "official" version of the 9/11 attacks?
Do you STILL believe, reader?
Ms. Rice arrived at the State Department insistent that she would surround herself with her own people, friends say. Vice President Dick Cheney wanted her to appoint his former deputy national security adviser, Eric S. Edelman, as her political director; she balked and instead chose R. Nicholas Burns, a friend who had worked for her at the security council during the administration of the first President Bush. Likewise, in choosing Mr. Zelikow as her counselor, she eschewed Elliott L. Abrams, a darling of neoconservatives and the pro-Israel lobby.
Mr. Zelikow and Ms. Rice co-authored a book about Germany’s reunification, “Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft” (Harvard University Press, 1995). It is not exactly light reading, but at its core it is a study in realpolitik, examining — and admiring — the tempered, carefully managed American response to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
It is a book that Mr. Zelikow could write again today, but one that Ms. Rice could not, friends and associates of both say. Ms. Rice herself has said that she went through something of a transformation after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, in which she moved away from the classical realism of her own roots and Mr. Zelikow’s, and closer to the neoconservatives who dominated policy discussions in the first term. Ms. Rice has told friends that President Bush has had a major impact on her thinking in terms of reintroducing values-based politics and ideology.
An example of the distance between Mr. Zelikow and his boss emerged this summer, at the start of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict. The position adopted by Ms. Rice — that Israel be permitted to continue its bombardment of Hezbollah despite the mounting civilian death toll in Lebanon — satisfied conservatives in the administration, including Mr. Cheney, who were pushing for strong American support of Israel.
That support also included the decision by the administration to heed Israel’s desire that America not push it to resolve the Palestinian conflict until the Palestinian Authority improved security and cracked down on attacks by groups considered to be terrorist entities by Israel and the United States.
But in his speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Mr. Zelikow implicitly acknowledged that that stance does not win America any friends in the Muslim world, and thwarts other American foreign policy objectives.
Joseph Nye, the former dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and one of Mr. Zelikow’s friends, said, “If you look at the distance where the administration went away from the realism of the 2000 campaign, Philip never went on that kind of excursion.”
Again, as if Zelikow is somehow out of the policy circles and discussions, not part of the crew.
Mr. Zelikow sat out the first Bush term, running the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. But Ms. Rice turned to him for key tasks, and he drafted much of the 2002 “National Security Strategy of the United States,” the document that fundamentally reordered American national security doctrine after the Sept. 11 attacks.
He became the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, from where he pressured Ms. Rice to turn over highly classified intelligence estimates and testify in front of the commission. Officials who worked with him marveled at his industry and precision, but described him as far more opinionated than his gather-the-numbers approach might first suggest. Staffers on the commission said other colleagues were assigned the task of smoothing over the bruised egos of those who had crossed Mr. Zelikow.
The allegedly impartial 9/11 executive director searching for truth was "far more opinionated than his gather-the-numbers approach might first suggest?"
That he "bruised egos of those who had crossed" him?
That he later "drafted much of the 2002 “National Security Strategy of the United States,” the document that fundamentally reordered American national security doctrine after the Sept. 11 attacks?"
This article is diversionary disinformation.
Zelikow is right with them, not a renegade realist!
As for his current position of counselor to the secretary of state, it allows Mr. Zelikow to fly under the radar."
Doesn't that make me feel safe?
The cultural myth creator Zelikow is flying under the radar like a hijacked jet on 9/11!
Incidentally, Zelikow admits the Iraq war was for Israel!
"Zelikow told a crowd at the University of Virginia on Sep. 10, 2002, speaking on a panel of foreign policy experts assessing the impact of 9/11 and the future of the war on the al-Qaeda terrorist organization:
"I'll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990 -- it's the threat against Israel. And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don't care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell."
