Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet – James Mann

Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet – James Mann, Viking/Penguin Group, (2004) 426 pp. (S) ***

During every administration, for every journalist who will try to give you the story straight, there seems to be always a thousand well-paid stenographers, the more savvy ones being those who seek to address the concerns of the political opposition under the guise of contextualization and moral relativism. Sadly, James Mann belongs to this breed. As a paid apologist for the Bush administration and its radical foreign policy of aggressive war and rampant disregard for international law, Mann has assumed the role of semanticist – the logic being, it really isn’t all that bad, if you sprinkle your text with enough euphemisms and comparisons to the Clinton administration’s foreign policies, no matter how erroneous or non-existent such correlations may be. (Astute observers will recall a cavalier Paul Wolfowitz justifying the unprovoked invasion of Iraq by suggesting that the policy was really no different than that of his administration’s predecessor – it being only a continuation thereof.) To be fair, Clinton was no friend to the Iraqi people given the rigors of a tightly controlled economic embargo and periodic air raids a la “Desert Fox” and other such operations. But despite the urging of the vocal neo-con right, most notably in their 1999 manifesto for securing U.S. global dominance called “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (which goes oddly absent without mention in Mann’s text) the pressure was always there, be it the Iraqi National Accord or the PNAC (the Project for a New American Century) for Clinton to fully take the bait and chomp down on the bit of an all out invasion, a temptation he wisely took a pass on.

What this book essentially tells us is the story of four neoconservatives, who for all intents and purposes are better called chickenhawks than the more regal sounding “vulcans;” I speak here of Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz, none of whom have ever heard the proverbial “shot fired in anger” – with the possible exception of Mr. Wolfowitz who once ran into some unpleasantness at a Baghdad hotel – who are long on ideology and short on resources and relevant experience, and two combat veterans (Powell and Armitage) who in fact do have the experience to know something of what they are talking about, but who have come to be nearly ignored in the pretense ridden administration of George W. Bush (and who subsequently, by no accident, no longer serve in their positions). (So long to the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force, that had no room in Rummy’s leaner, meaner program.) Toward the end of his book, Mann makes this telling observation, “the invasion of Iraq was in many ways Dick Cheney’s war, just as the George W. Bush administration had been in many respects Cheney’s administration.”(p.369) With that said, this reviewer can’t help himself from making a plug for one of his favorite books, John Nichols Dick: The Man Who Is President. For a man who headed up the vice-presidential search committee only to conclude that he himself was most qualified for the job, is a man that necessarily must be held to the closest of scrutiny. By now it should be no secret that much of the administration’s foreign policy turns on the Cheney/Rumsfeld axis, an axis of two men who have a long history of close government service together going back to Nixon and Ford..

The one over-riding grievance this reviewer must bring to your attention is the very use of the word “Vulcan,” God of steel, forger of armor. This gives an unnecessary and undeserved austerity and if you will, gravitas, to a group of people we could better dispense with by using the moniker “paper tigers.” For all their ideological hot air, they’re really nothing but the bluster of empty suits. Men who played too much Axis and Allies in their youth and read too many World War II history books (hence the tsunami of misnomer comparisons of the “war on terror” to World War II), makes one long for the days when “the wise men” from Wall Street and “the best and the brightest” from academia ran the show, even though sometimes with calamitous results (i.e. the Vietnam escalation). After reading Mann’s work, one comes away with the sense that what we see in the chickenhawk/vulcan contingent are at heart a bunch of amateurs, hell bent on using all the coarseness of hard, military power, without any regard for the subtlety and nuance of what was once called “soft power” (a.k.a. diplomacy). So we get ridiculous phrases like the “axis of evil,” even when North Korea, Iraq, and Iran have signed no security pacts with one another. One can only hope that the next generation will bring new blood and fresh ideas to the table without all the kool-aid and rose colored glasses – that is if the present neo-con set doesn’t completely upset the apple cart, leaving no table to return to. (On a recent airing of The McClaughlin Group, Washington Times writer Tony Blankly, stated point blank without any sense of irony or reserve that the goal of the Bush administration’s foreign policy in the Middle East was in fact to “destabilize” the entire region, as a prelude to mystically ushering in a new generation of “democracy.” [What a relief to finally have the real scope and aim of the neo-con agenda out in the open in all its ugly nakedness.] However, this can only leave one scratching his head wondering exactly what part of “neo-conservative” is actually “conservative.”)

A final mention of Mann’s excellent notation, much of it derived from interviews with neo-cons, is warranted. On an aside, interestingly, there is only one lone mention of the 2000 presidential election, which via the Supreme Court ushered in Bush, but there is no statement as to how a president who lost the popular vote, feels compelled that this fact should have absolutely no bearing on moderating his radical foreign policy of aggressive war. After all, what’s democracy to the ideologically driven? Oh, that’s right, it’s only “spreading” “democracy” abroad that only matters with this crowd.