Chain of Command
By Seymour M Hersh
Published by Penguin
My review for The Nation, published in August 2005.

Eyebrows don’t stay raised

Sy Hersh’s ‘expose’ on the war on terror is hardly a book of revelations, though it struggles hard to make us still care.

“We found the enemy on the first day,” the Los Angeles Times quoted a US Army division commander as saying after a 2002 assault on a Taleban position in the mountains of Afghanistan. The assessment draws a sneer from Seymour Hersh in “Chain of Command”, “It was a novel way to describe an ambush,” he says, having established that the raid was a bloody disaster for the ill-prepared Americans. (Fortunately some Australians who were doing undercover reconnaissance nearby prevented it from getting even bloodier.)
There are a few good stories like this in the eighth book by Hersh, the sometimes ravaged, usually revered investigative reporter who uncovered the 1968 My Lai massacre, then definitively trashed Henry Kissinger in “The Price of Power” before losing the plot in pointless muck about JFK. He regained journalistic integrity in 2003 by breaking the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal in The New Yorker magazine, from which much of this book extends.
But “Chain of Command” has little to offer that hasn’t already been covered at length in the daily press (though Hersh complains fitfully about media complacency). In fact, I probably wouldn’t have bought the 2005 Penguin edition had I known that its 2004 subtitle under HarperCollins was “The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib”. Penguin – cleverly or deviously, depending on your point of view – replaced that with “The international bestseller that exposed the truth about Iraq”, a much more sweeping promise.
The problem with any book on Abu Ghraib, even one that so adroitly puts it in the perspective of the Yankee mindset behind the war on terrorism itself, is that Abu Ghraib is a dead issue. “Saddam tortured and killed his people,” Hersh has said elsewhere, “and now we’re doing it.”
But even if you believe that George W Bush and Donald Rumsfeld knew full well that the brutal and systematic humiliation of Iraqi prisoners of war was a matter of policy they had approved, they and their generals got away with it and today very few people care.
You can fret all you want about the average guy’s bad-news fatigue, but the fact is that a handful of soldiers who did the actual manhandling, dog-baiting and electroshocking lost their commissions and are doing time and, even if more pictures emerge – Hersh says American troops took videos of Iraqi guards buggering young boys at the prison – it won’t cause the slightest pause in the march of White House war-mongering.
To be sure, Hersh presents an astonishing behind-the-scenes account – about Abu Ghraib, the WMD farce, the pre-9/11 intelligence fiasco, Pakistani duplicity and much more – but (the specious “bestseller” claim notwithstanding) is anyone in the West still listening?
Hersh is good at being the lone voice demanding our attention in a stadium full of bombast and bombings, and is convincing, despite wall-to-wall denials, that Washington has a team of covert operatives out there on SAPs – special access programmes – snatching and sometimes killing suspects in this war on terror.
And in this context it’s good to be reminded, of course, that in 1975 a Senate committee, jolted by the CIA’s admission that it had tried to kill Fidel Castro, insisted that America must not act “by the standards of totalitarians” and that the following year President Gerald Ford banned covert assassinations. Still, Bush is convinced that, damn the law and global opinion, terror can only be fought with terror, and thus a rocket fired at a suspect in his vehicle from a Predator drone aircraft is entirely justifiable – and more than half of Americans agree. Once again, eyebrows do not stay raised.
Of far more compelling interest is the chapter on Washington’s strange bedfellows and revolting dance partners, such as Abdul Rashid Dostum and the other Afghan warlords, and Pervez Musharraf.
Pakistan’s president, Hersh notes, not only has a tenuous grip on the power he seized, he stands to lose it – and control of his nukes – to security-service fundamentalists who have long been allied with the Taleban. If he’s knocked off, Hersh claims, both the US and India have squads ready to rush in and grab the warheads before they can be deployed. Meanwhile Musharraf plays both sides against the middle.
Best of all in “Chain of Command” is what Hersh digs up in the way of speculation among analysts around the globe about what comes next, the potential blood-spilling that will occupy tomorrow’s headlines.
Included in this appraisal are the Saudi government’s repulsive hypocrisy, Iran’s determination to have the bomb (a process begun in the 1970s by the last shah), Syria’s messy fence-straddling and Israel’s Plan B – they’re already training Iraqi Kurds to crush the Sunni and Shiite insurgents if, as the Israelis fully expect, the Americans fail to do so.
This last endeavour is fraught with peril, as Hersh explains. The Kurds sprawl far beyond Iraq, and the governments of Turkey, Syria and Iran have become united at the prospect of any attempt by the Kurds to undermine them. Kurdish independence will trigger fresh warfare.
It’s a shame there isn’t more like this in “Chain of Command”. Certainly in his speeches and interviews, Hersh is always engaging on other issues, for example, Musharraf’s undisclosed knowledge about the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, or that Bush isn’t making war for economic reasons, but because he really does believe the world is full of bad guys he has to sort out on behalf of Jesus and/or democracy. Bush, Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney are utopians, he argues.
Elsewhere you will read tirades against Hersh, most notably in the ultra-conservative National Review, where he has been called, with inadvertently comic fury, “a terrible reporter” who invents things when the facts won’t fit, but these are merely lame dismissals by liars who want to make more money (or Christian converts?) in the Mideast. Chief among the critics is government adviser Richard Perle, who didn’t care for his characterisation in this book, called Hersh “the closest thing America has to a terrorist” and threatened a libel suit that never came.
Instead, the big problem with “Chain of Command” is relevancy. Does it make any difference now that for top Washington officials “avoiding prosecution was literally a theme” in White House communiqués about the prison abuse, as an insider told him? Is it really a revelation that many news outlets buy into the Pentagon’s version of events without checking the facts? Does it worry anyone that esteem for America has all but vanished in the Arab world?
What is the truth worth these days, and where does it get us when we find it?