The Power of Nightmares: Fool me twice, shame on me.
I'm watching more of "The Power of Nightmares" and made another comparison that blew my mind. In the 60s Kissinger signed treaties limiting production of weapons of mass destruction, producing an era of detente. As SecDef of the Ford administration, Donald Rumsfeld felt that american military dominance would be good for the world, but he knew he couldn't sell a huge military buildup to an already confident public. He announced that Russia was secretly building huge supplies of WMDs to use against America. The CIA called this asseasment "complete fiction", so he created an independent civilian group called "Team B" which would re-examine intelligence and prove that ignoring the soviet threat would produce "mushroom clouds" over American cities. When they couldn't find direct evidence of those weapons they argued that this meant that the enemy must be fiendishly clever about hiding them. Then he organized the Committee on the Present Danger, a group of leaders who would speak to the public about the dangers of their enemy? The Committee on the Present Danger mythologized an "Evil Empire" from which America must rescue the world. They even claimed that the rising problem of international terrorism was coordinated by this evil regime, which the CIA dismissed. William Casey, Reagan's head of the CIA, ordered the CIA to produce a report connecting that country to terrorism. Does this story sound familiar to anyone?