By their name you shall know them

Guest Voice by BlueGirl

"Team B II"? Seriously?

Wow. Why not just come right out in the preface and say "we aren't even going to pretend to have any credibility. We are just going to go ahead and make sweeping, fearmongering pronouncements because we don't give a rats ass about facts, we just want to scare the shit out of as many people as possible so they will keep funding the terrorism-industrial complex and call anyone a traitor who opposes the resulting redistribution of wealth to shadowy companies like Xe, nee Blackwater."

The original Team B reports were intelligence assessments put together by outsiders, not current, practicing intelligence professionals, and they wildly overstated Soviet capacity. Remember when terms like "missile gap" and "bomber gap" and "windows of vulnerability" were talked about in serious, somber tones? Those were Team B constructs. They were farcical in just how far they overstated the Soviet threat. The names of some of the players will be familiar to you. Names like Paul Wolfowitz, Norman Podhoretz, Richard Perle and Richard Mellon Scaiffe. Names that have earned a place in history under the category "exactly wrong about absolutely everything."

They were mocked by the professionals back then, and everyone mocks them now. That is why my jaw hit the floor when I saw that the wingnut "think tank" The Center for Security Policy (a Frank Gaffney joint) is set to issue a series of reports on the threat posed to this country (cue ominous middle-eastern music here...) by Shariah law.

Like the "Committee on the Present Danger" before it, the CSP has nary a "realist" on the rolls, and this so-called group of "experts" (they keep using that word, but I don't think it means what they think it means...) this group of people that calls themselves experts (no one else is calling them that except people as batshit-crazy as they are) voluntarily calls themselves "Team B II." Voluntarily! Not a name that was applied by some smartass blogger like me in the hopes it would stick and people would be smart enough to get it, but volun-fucking-tarily.

Yes. They embrace and emblazon upon themselves the name of one of the most ridiculous, discredited pieces of foreign policy of the entire Cold War - and there was some fucked-up shit going on back then - and they wear it proudly. Might as well make their mission statement "Jingoism r Us!"

This study is the result of months of analysis, discussion and drafting by a group of top security policy experts concerned with the preeminent totalitarian threat of our time: the legal-political-military doctrine known within Islam as "shariah." It is designed to provide a comprehensive and articulate "second opinion" on the official characterizations and assessments of this threat as put forth by the United States government.

Let me translate that for you. "A group of far-right ideologues who want nothing more than to bomb the fuck out of Iran is intent on ramping up the Islamophobia that has been latent-but-present, simmering just below the surface in this country, since - if we are being honest - the Islamic Revolution of November, 1979. But why just go hating on the Iranians and the "nuclear threat" they represent? Whip up anti-Muslim bigotry and you can marginalize and dehumanize all Muslims, not just the Iranians. It's what craven, cowardly, war-mongering assholes like Frank Gaffney call a two-fer."

The authors, under the sponsorship of the Center for Security Policy, have modeled this work on an earlier "exercise in competitive analysis" which came to be known as the "Team B" Report. That 1976 document challenged the then-prevailing official U.S. government intelligence estimates of the intentions and offensive capabilities of the Soviet Union and the policy known as "d�nte" that such estimates ostensibly justified.

Again, allow me to translate: "The original Team B reports were not at all factual, but they were nonetheless effective in convincing the American people that there was no expense too great, we had to have more nukes than the Soviets, and the result was massive defense spending and the further strengthening of the stranglehold the MIC already had on the nation's proverbial throat."

As with the original Team B analysis, however, this study challenges the assumptions underpinning the official line in the conflict with today's totalitarian threat, which is currently euphemistically described as "violent extremism," and the policies of co-existence, accommodation and submission that are rooted in those assumptions.

The wingnut-decoder software translates that to read "We have no interest in these things called "facts" or "empirical evidence" as they have a well-known liberal bias. We have our premise, and we will instead work backward from there to assure we end up supporting same."

Of course, history - and the opening of the Soviet archives - have proven that d�nte and diplomacy were not pie-in-the-sky liberal feel-good policy that didn't work in the real world. They were what worked. That isn't my opinion. It's empirical. You can look it up.

In 1983, when I was a young Air Force wife, the nuclear threat clock moved closer to midnight than it had ever been before. I called someone I knew who had a quarter century in counter-intelligence against the Soviets and asked if this was it? No, I was assured. All would be fine, and the Soviet Union would be collapsing in about a decade. I said "Thank God. I've lived under a mushroom cloud of threat my entire life. I'll be glad when it's over and we can relax."

Now I paraphrase the words that were tossed off oh-so-casually, but which still resonate and make me question all conventional military and security thinking to this day..."Oh, you won't get to relax. A whole new threat is looming - stateless actors and Islamic terrorism will fill that void promptly. We are creating them in Afghanistan right now, and they will make the PLO look like boy scouts in comparison. Also - depending on how the Soviet Union dissolves, we are going to overnight have between three and seven nuclear armed powers where we now have one. Trans-Asia and the Steppes are going to be a problem well into the middle of the next century. That die was cast long ago. We're on the ride, we can't get off until it's over."

That conversation gave me a heads up to what would come down the pike in the Chechen region and some of the other breakaway regions - like Abkhazia and Ossetia. I had a good decade head start on the realization that the enemy of my enemy - be it Moscow or Baghdad or Tehran or Damascus - is not necessarily my friend. In fact, the odds are really slim that a copacetic relationship will stay that way. Remember, Saddam Hussein was our ally before we hanged him.

This "Team B II" nonsense is of a piece with the ramping up of hate and hostility directed at the "other" - in this case Muslims - ever since 53% of this country scorned and spurned the right-wing by electing a black guy with an African father and the middle name Hussein. And worse yet, he has proven to be up to the job. That really makes them nuts. "Them" being people like Jerry "My God is bigger than their God" Boykin, and Gaffney (of course), and Andy McCarthy, and William Woolsey and an assortment of people who have earned the right to call themselves by a military rank. Of course, that doesn't make for automatic credibility. Quite the opposite, in fact.

The fearmongering is stupid, harkening back as it does to a past that never existed outside a few wingnut fantasies and the soundstage for Leave it to Beaver. But it is dangerous, too. And it must be countered - firmly, forcefully and factually. If it isn't we risk becoming something unrecognizable. We risk becoming something far worse than the ideological foe we have already defeated. Sharia is no threat to us. Listening to people like this, however, is.

Today's guest voice, Blue Girl, blogs at They Gave Us A Republic where this post was originally published.