America’s University of Imperialism: The RAND Corporation

A Litany of Horrors
America’s University of Imperialism
by Chalmers Johnson

This essay is a review of Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire by Alex Abella (Harcourt, 400 pp., $27)




The RAND Corporation of Santa Monica, California, was set up immediately after World War II by the U.S. Army Air Corps (soon to become the U.S. Air Force). The Air Force generals who had the idea were trying to perpetuate the wartime relationship that had developed between the scientific and intellectual communities and the American military, as exemplified by the Manhattan Project to develop and build the atomic bomb.

Soon enough, however, RAND became a key institutional building block of the Cold War American empire. As the premier think tank for the U.S.’s role as hegemon of the Western world, RAND was instrumental in giving that empire the militaristic cast it retains to this day and in hugely enlarging official demands for atomic bombs, nuclear submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers. Without RAND, our military-industrial complex, as well as our democracy, would look quite different.

Alex Abella, the author of Soldiers of Reason, is a Cuban-American living in Los Angeles who has written several well-received action and adventure novels set in Cuba and a less successful nonfiction account of attempted Nazi sabotage within the United States during World War II. The publisher of his latest book claims that it is “the first history of the shadowy think tank that reshaped the modern world.” Such a history is long overdue. Unfortunately, this book does not exhaust the demand. We still need a less hagiographic, more critical, more penetrating analysis of RAND’s peculiar contributions to the modern world.

Abella has nonetheless made a valiant, often revealing and original effort to uncover RAND’s internal struggles — not least of which involved the decision of analyst Daniel Ellsberg, in 1971, to leak the Department of Defense’s top secret history of the Vietnam War, known as The Pentagon Papers to Congress and the press. But Abella’s book is profoundly schizophrenic. On the one hand, the author is breathlessly captivated by RAND’s fast-talking economists, mathematicians, and thinkers-about-the-unthinkable; on the other hand, he agrees with Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis’s assessment in his book, The Cold War: A New History, that, in promoting the interests of the Air Force, RAND concocted an “unnecessary Cold War” that gave the dying Soviet empire an extra 30 years of life.

We need a study that really lives up to Abella’s subtitle and takes a more jaundiced view of RAND’s geniuses, Nobel prize winners, egghead gourmands and wine connoisseurs, Laurel Canyon swimming pool parties, and self-professed saviors of the Western world. It is likely that, after the American empire has gone the way of all previous empires, the RAND Corporation will be more accurately seen as a handmaiden of the government that was always super-cautious about speaking truth to power. Meanwhile, Soldiers of Reason is a serviceable, if often overwrought, guide to how strategy has been formulated in the post-World War II American empire.

...

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/30/8625/

RAND Corporation

The RAND Corporation, according to the corporate web site, is a "nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis."

"Covert foreign policy became the standard mode of operation after World War II, which was also when Ford Foundation became a major player for the first time. The institute most involved in classified research was Rand Corporation, set up by the Air Force in 1948. The interlocks between the trustees at Rand, and the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations were so numerous that the Reece Committee listed them in its report (two each for Carnegie and Rockefeller, and three for Ford). Ford gave one million dollars to Rand in 1952 alone, at a time when the chairman of Rand was simultaneously the president of Ford Foundation."<1>

"Two-thirds of Rand's research involves national security issues. This is divided into Project Air Force, the Arroyo Center (serving the needs of the Army), and the National Defense Research Institute (providing research and analysis for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, and the defense agencies). The other third of Rand's research is devoted to issues involving health, education, civil and criminal justice, labor and population studies, and international economics."<2>

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=RAND_Corporation

http://www.counterpunch.org/isenberg05022008.html

RAND's New Doomsday Monograph

The Return of Limited Nuclear War?


By DAVID ISENBERG

Recent news has brought nuclear weapons back into the political picture, just as a new report suggests that the United States will have difficulty denying nuclear weapons to regional powers that seek them.

Sen. Hillary Clinton recently confirmed that as president she would be willing to use nuclear weapons against Iran if it were to launch a nuclear attack against Israel. In an interview Mrs. Clinton affirmed that she would warn Iran’s leaders that “their use of nuclear weapons against Israel would provoke a nuclear response from the United States.”

And last week the Bush administration told Congress that North Korea was helping Syria build a plutonium-producing nuclear reactor before Israel bombed the site last September.

Such news assumes that efforts at preventing nuclear proliferation will be, at least partially, unsuccessful. This is why a new report from the RAND Corporation says, “prudence dictates that the United States and it allies prepared for the possibility that they might, in the not-too-distant future, confront regional adversaries with deliverable nuclear arsenals.”

The monograph, “The Challenge of Nuclear-Armed Regional Adversaries” released April 15, 2008 was written by RAND analysts David Ochmanek and Lowell H. Schwartz. Ochmanek is a former Air Force officer and served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy from 1993 until June 1995. Before coming to RAND, Schwartz was a former business analyst at The Boeing Company.

http://impeachthem.com/files/police_state17dec07lendman_crg.pdf

— By Stephen Lendman — The president can now claim a public emergency, effectively declare martial law, suspend the Constitution for “national security,” and deploy federal and National Guard troops on the nation’s streets to suppress whatever he calls disorder. That means First Amendment guaranteed peaceful public demonstrations and all organized acts of dissent are no longer constitutionally protected. Neither is the republic in “police state America.” This article begins and ends with the same chilling thought. If past is prologue, the outlook isn’t good in “police state America” under neocon rule that won’t appreciably change when the White House has a new occupant in 2009. The nation is at war and laws are in place that end constitutional protections, militarize the country, repress dissent, and our government is empowered to crush freedom and defend privilege from beneficial social change it won’t tolerate.
It’s the price of imperial arrogance we the people are paying, and that won’t end until the spirit of resistance gets aroused enough to stop it in our own self-defense. We better hope that happens in time with potentially little of it left. — Click Bush’s pics to read it all —

— YEAR END IS A GOOD TIME TO LOOK BACK AND REFLECT ON WHAT’S AHEAD. IF PAST IS PROLOGUE, HOWEVER, THE OUTLOOK ISN’T GOOD, and nothing on the horizon suggests otherwise. Voters last November wanted change but got betrayal from the bipartisan criminal class in Washington. Their attitude shows in an October Reuters/Zogby (RZ) opinion poll with George Bush at 24% that tops Richard Nixon’s worst showing of 25% at his lowest 1974 Watergate point. And if that looks bad, consider Congress with “The Hill” reporting from the same RZ Index that our legislators scored a “staggering 11%, the lowest congressional rating in history,” but there’s room yet to hit bottom and a year left to do it. Why not with lawmakers’ consistent voter sellout and failure record that keeps getting worse. It's been that way ever since 9/11 with both sides of the aisle complicit with the administration. This article looks back at the record, and year end is a good time to review it. It’s hard imagining another as bad with a President defiling the law and once telling Republican colleagues the Constitution is “just a goddamned piece of paper.” He didn’t just say it. He governs by it, gets away with it, and former Defense Department analyst Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, says “a coup has occurred, with another to come from the next 9/11....that completes the first that’s seen a steady assault on every fundamental aspect of our Constitution to create an executive government to rule by decree” no different from a police state.

Author Naomi Wolf spells it out in her April, 2007 Guardian article — "Fascist America, In 10 Easy Steps." In it, she argues the Bush administration is following the same script any "would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms," and she lists them. They range from "invoking a terrifying internal and external enemy" to "creating a gulag," to spying on everyone, to harassing opposition, to controlling the media, to calling dissent treason, to "suspending the rule of law." She also notes how much "simpler" it is to shut down democracy than "to create and sustain" it, and that's today's threat.