Public Comment

Commentary: Yale Goes to War: How Disasters Happen

By Michael Katz
Tuesday August 01, 2006

The Bush administration’s foreign policy—whatever it is—is in ruins. Iraq and neglected Afghanistan are sinking into macabre violence. Israel has launched a bloody regional war, with conspicuous support from a diplomatically isolated United States. India is recovering from a major terrorist atrocity. Terror plots against North America are an apparent growth industry. 

Meanwhile, North Korea has developed nukes (with help from our very good friend Pakistan) and now a missile that may someday reach U.S. territory. Should this, or anything else, emerge as a genuine threat to American security, don’t expect our military to respond. It’s far too bogged down in an Iraqi quagmire that this nation imposed on itself for no real reason. 

How again did we get into this mess? 

A few upper-crust Yalies—all notably successful in staying far away from their own generation’s war in Vietnam—got the keys to the White House in 2001. And after a deceptively easy game of capture-the-flag in Kabul, they thought it would be fun to play at war. 

Yalie-in-Chief George W. Bush thought it would be keen-o to settle his daddy’s old score with Saddam Hussein. He beheld the power and courage of the U.S. armed forces and saw toy soldiers at his disposal—playthings, the way medieval boy nobles saw their private armies.  

W. had never seen an actual war, of course. He’d spent his Vietnam draft-eligible years in (and AWOL from) a safe, coveted spot in the Air National Guard “Champagne Corps.” 

Vice Yalie Richard Cheney, who’d dropped in and out of New Haven twice as prologue to his epic “academic” draft deferment, was happy to order up a second Iraq war for the Bush family. He’d messed up the first one, and he could mess up a second. Either way, it would benefit Halliburton—whose $20 million severance gift was a lifelong reminder that what was good for Halliburton was good for Richard Cheney. 

Eager to concoct an intellectual justification for this fool’s errand was Cheney’s old Pentagon protégé, former Yale nutty professor Paul Wolfowitz. Channeling Dr. Strangelove, Wolfowitz solemnly informed us that reigniting the Bush/Hussein clan pissing match would somehow “transform” and “democratize” the Middle East, and that Iraqis would “greet us as liberators.” 

In assuming that any civilization would willingly transform itself at swordpoint, Wolfowitz and fellow neoconservatives remarkably mirrored a mad tenet of the extremist Wahabbi sect of Islam that rules Saudi Arabia. Wahabbism is what incubated Osama bin Laden. The Wahabbi notion of conversion through killing continues to fuel lethal Sunni Muslim violence against Shiites. 

Strategic acumen like Wolfowitz’s isn’t won easily. During Vietnam, the future warlord fought valiantly on the battlefields of the University of Chicago’s graduate school, earning the Purple Onion for irony.  

Cheney’s longtime Yalie consigliere, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, handled backroom jobs like promoting fabricated claims about Saddam’s alleged arsenals—and retaliating against truth-telling debunkers like Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Libby now awaits a perjury trial. 

But it’s not like four guys from Yale can run, or wreck, a country alone. It takes a virtual residential college. Stephen Hadley, a Yale Law School graduate now making us less secure as Bush’s National “security” [sic] advisor, helped Cheney and Libby spread fabrications linking Saddam to a 9/11 plotter and to African uranium. 

Fellow Yale Law graduate John Yoo cooked up the Bush administration’s judicial rationales for torture. He’s now teaching Constitutional Law at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall. (Lovely thought.) Another far-right product of Yale Law, Samuel Alito, is dismantling our civil liberties as Bush’s latest Supreme Court appointee. 

Shredding American goodwill at the United Nations is U.S. Ambassador John Bolton, a Yale twofer (he sat out Vietnam at Yale College and then Yale Law). Bolton once famously declared: “If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.” 

Destroying the CIA from within—Al Qaeda, just drool—was Spy Kid Yalie Porter Goss. Until his recent forced resignation as agency director, Goss shoved out knowledgeable veteran spooks, replacing them with incompetent, often shady cronies. 

Black Bag Yalie John Negroponte, the new director of national “intelligence” [sic], will keep enforcing mistaken espionage groupthink. It’s all in the club, actually: Negroponte and Goss have been friends since Yale’s Class of 1960, where they were even fraternity brothers. Talk about casting the widest possible net for talent! 

So there you have it. A bunch of cosseted ruling-class pips who’d made damn sure they’d never seen a real war—Cheney once said he’d “had other priorities” than serving in Vietnam—decided that, by Jove, it would be princely fun to throw one. So they sent our nation’s steerage class off on a desert suicide mission. 

The cost so far: some 2,570 of our little people dead, and counting; untold tens of thousands of Iraqis killed; and our nation’s international reputation shattered. 

Now in tracing these old school ties, I don’t mean to suggest some occult Old Blue agenda behind this self-selecting group of red-state-oriented ghouls. Nor do I mean to slam Yale itself, one of the world’s great universities. Its students are whip-smart and unusually hard-working. Under today’s more meritocratic admissions standards, W. or Cheney probably wouldn’t get in, let alone out. 

Yale is hardly the only distinguished university to have led the nation astray. Harvard’s “best and brightest” in the Kennedy cabinet marched us into the Vietnam quagmire. The University of Chicago originally miseducated neocons like Wolfowitz. 

But there’s something spookily efficient about the Old Blue pipeline to power. Besides the pack around W., other big dogs who attended Yale College and/or Yale Law School include Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham, John Kerry, Howard Dean, Joseph Lieberman, Clarence Thomas, and Anita Hill. 

A Yale graduate has occupied the president’s and/or vice president’s office throughout the last generation. A Yalie has been at either the top or bottom of the last two Democratic presidential tickets. 

It’s not that Yale has distinctively failed to endow its graduates with moral character befitting public service. It’s failed at a distinctively high level, because its old-boy network is so strong. 

I’ll confess that even the little backwoods Ivy League college I attended (Dartmouth) could challenge Yale in promoting the pursuit of power unbound by moral considerations. Dartmouth’s public-affairs office busily celebrated any student or grad who scored a plumb D.C. internship or job. But I remember far less discussion of the ends to which power was put.  

Fortunately for the nation and its sobriety, the highest office a Dartmouth graduate has ever held is the ceremonial vice presidency (Nelson Rockefeller, 1974-77). But I can only assume that Yale students get simmered in a similar sense of privilege and entitlement to “lead.” 

Many have been genuine leaders. When America faced real threats not of our own making, Yalies heroically rushed to serve, rather than sending the uncredentialed to fight their battles. (See Marc Wortman’s recent book The Millionaires’ Unit for stunning World War I examples.) At home, Yale students have struggled prominently for peace in Vietnam, civil rights, and justice for janitors. 

But given who runs the country, let’s just hope that by next fall, the spreading disaster in the Middle East is recognized as a “teachable moment” in New Haven’s classrooms. 

 

Michael Katz may actually be a Skull and Bonesman, writing under an elaborate disguise to divert attention from an unimaginably darker conspiracy.