Does the U.S. Always Need an Enemy?
President Joe Biden’s nomination of career diplomat William Burns as the new CIA chief must be seen as a moral upgrade. Trump’s CIA director was notorious “war on terror” torturer Gina Haspel. And Biden’s first choice for DCI, Mike Morrell, was also associated with the intelligence agency’s “enhanced interrogation” regime. In recent years, the CIA — which has engaged in dark war methods including kidnapping, torture, assassination and mind-control throughout its history — has become even more of a death squad, running drone-kill operations with little governmental or legal oversight. So Burns’s tenure as CIA director, after more than three decades in the Foreign Service and the leadership of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, will hopefully mark a sharp break with the past.
But during his Wednesday confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee — which was described as a bipartisan “coronation” with even Senator Lindsey Graham heaping praise on the nominee — Burns felt predictably compelled to drop his diplomatic posture and brand China and Russia as enemies of the U.S. Burns rightly described Russia as a falling power, but one still capable of wreaking cyber havoc — as is the U.S. The Putin regime continues to display its despotic character by imprisoning dissident leader Alexei Navalny. But the Biden administration has made clear it will continue to hound political prisoner Julian Assange to the ends of the Earth.
Likewise, China is ruled by a loathsome dictatorship, but the U.S. is less concerned about the Beijing regime’s systematic human rights violations than it is about the rising power’s challenge to U.S. economic, technological and military hegemony.
The U.S. also has a long and tragic history in its relations to Iran, a dark past again rooted in the Allen Dulles-era CIA, when the U.S worked secretly with British espionage to overthrow that country’s democratic government (see the recent documentary Coup ‘53) and install a repressive monarchy in its place. And yet Burns, as a diplomatic envoy for President Obama, was able to hammer out a nuclear treaty with even hardline Iranian mullahs.
President Biden, echoing JFK, has said that America must lead by the power of its example instead of the power of its fearsome arsenal. Let’s hope that the Biden administration — including even the lethal and illegal CIA — lives up to that lofty rhetoric.
After four years of Donald Trump, and the much longer decline of American democracy, isn’t it time to finally stop imposing “freedom” on weaker countries and focus instead on our own corrupted institutions? The “enemy” does not hunker primarily outside of our borders. As the Pogo cartoon strip once famously declared, “We have met the enemy — and he is us.”
