5: IS ANYONE ACCOUNTABLE?
1. Quoted in Eric Bradner, Elise Labott, and Dana Bash, “50 GOP National Security Experts Oppose Trump,” August 8, 2016, at www.cnn.com/2016/08/08/politics/republican-national-security-letter-donald-trump-election-2016/index.html.
2. As Kenneth Waltz pointed out in 1967, “We are misled by the vision of dominoes. States in the area of the fighting lack the solidity, shape, and cohesion that the image suggests. Externally ill-defined, internally fragile and chaotic, they more appropriately call to mind sponges; and sponges, whatever their other characteristics, do not from the transmission of impulses neatly fall down in a row.” See his “The Politics of Peace,” International Studies Quarterly 11, no. 3 (September 1967), p. 205.
3. See Jerome Slater, “The Domino Theory and International Politics: The Case of Vietnam,” Security Studies 3, no. 2 (1993); idem, “Dominos in Central America: Will They Fall? Does it Matter?” International Security 12, no. 2 (Fall 1987); and Ted Hopf, Peripheral Visions: Deterrence Theory and American Foreign Policy in the Developing World, 1965–1990 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).
4. Thus the pro-war Wall Street Journal approvingly quoted Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi’s 2009 prediction that a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan “will be disastrous … you will lose credibility … Who is going to trust you again?… Why did you send so many billions of dollars and lose so many lives? And why did we ally with you?” U.S. troops were still fighting in Afghanistan when Obama left office. See “U.S. Credibility and Pakistan,” The Wall Street Journal, October 1, 2009, at www
5. See Elliott Abrams, “Haunted by Syria,” Weekly Standard, January 13, 2014. Barack Obama used military force in many countries throughout his presidency, yet François Heisbourg maintains that his decision not to intervene in Syria did “enormous, perhaps irretrievable” damage to U.S. credibility. Quoted in Celestine Bohlen, “A Turning Point for Syria, and for U.S. Credibility,” The New York Times, February 22, 2016.
6. See Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
7. As enunciated by former JCS chairman and secretary of state Colin Powell, the Powell Doctrine consists of a series of eight questions that must be answered in the affirmative before committing U.S. forces to battle: (1) Is a vital national security interest threatened? (2) Do we have a clear attainable objective? (3) Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed? (4) Have all other nonviolent policy means been fully exhausted? (5) Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement? (6) Have the consequences of our action been fully considered? (7) Is the action supported by the American people? and (8) Do we have genuine broad international support?
8. See Paul D. Miller, “Obama’s Failed Legacy in Afghanistan,” The American Interest 11, no. 5 (February 2016); Rick Brennan, “Withdrawal Symptoms,” Foreign Affairs 93, no. 6 (November/December 2014); and Danielle Pletka, “What Obama Has Wrought in Iraq,” U.S. News and World Report, June 13, 2014.
9. Not to be outdone, Jeb Bush said that “the premature withdrawal was the fatal error”; former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani called withdrawal “the worst decision so far of the 21st century”; and the neoconservative pundit Max Boot, an outspoken advocate of the original invasion, termed the decision to withdraw “tragic.” See “Rubio: Iraq Invasion ‘Was Not a Mistake,’” The Hill, May 17, 2015, at http://
10. See in particular Alexander Downes and Jonathan Monten, “FIRCed to be Free: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Rarely Leads to Democratization,” International Security 37, no. 4 (Spring 2013); and Stephen M. Walt, “Why Is the US So Bad at Promoting Democracy in Other Countries?” Foreign Policy, April 25, 2016; at http://
11. See John Judis’s interview with Landis, “America’s Failure—And Russia and Iran’s Success—in Syria’s Cataclysmic Civil War,” TPMCafe, January 10, 2017, at http://
12. See Sopan Deb and Max Fisher, “Seeking Lessons on Syria, but Taken to Task Instead,” The New York Times, September 18, 2017.
13. See Philip Shenon, The Commission: The Uncensored Story of the 9/11 Commission (New York: Hachette, 2008), pp. 25–26, 29–30, 214–19.
14. Rice and Zelikow worked together on the NSC staff under George H. W. Bush and later coauthored a book on their experience. Zelikow attended briefings on U.S. counterterror policy as a member of Bush’s transition team, and Rice hired him to draft the White House’s National Security Strategy in 2002. After Rice was appointed secretary of state in 2005, she picked Zelikow as her counselor at the State Department. Given these close professional ties, Zelikow was hardly the ideal person to help determine if Rice, Bush, or other administration officials bore significant responsibility for failing to prevent the September 11 attacks.
15. Ernest May, “When Government Writes History: The 9/11 Commission Report,” History News Network, June 24, 2005, at http://
16. See Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008), p. 245.
17. The key reports are: Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade, available at https://
18. “Abu Ghraib, Whitewashed,” editorial, The New York Times, July 24, 2004.
19. Eric Rosenburg, “Abu Ghraib Is Like ‘Animal House,’ but Rumsfeld Should Not Resign,” Deseret News, August 25, 2004, at www
20. “Pentagon Panel: Top Brass Was Lax in Abu Ghraib Oversight,” NBC News, August 8, 2004, at www
21. “Getting Away with Torture: Command Responsibility for the U.S. Abuse of Detainees,” Human Rights Watch, April 2005, p. 21.
22. See Seymour M. Hersh, “The General’s Report,” The New Yorker, June 25, 2007.
23. Bush admitted approving the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and Vice President Cheney said publicly that he had been a “big supporter” of the same technique. See David Cole, “Obama’s Torture Problem,” NYRBlog, November 18, 2010, at www
24. Charlie Savage, “Obama Reluctant to Look into Bush Programs,” The New York Times, January 11, 2009.
25. See especially Mark Danner, Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), and Mayer, The Dark Side.
26. See Paul Farhi, “Bill Kristol Knows His Predictions Have Been Bad, but He’s Going to Keep Making Them,” The Washington Post, February 17, 2016; and Stephen M. Walt, “The Shattered Kristol Ball,” The National Interest 97 (September/October 2008).
27. See Steven R. Weisman, “Wolfowitz Resigns, Ending Long Fight at World Bank,” The New York Times, May 18, 2007.
28. In that role Abrams frequently colluded with Israeli officials seeking to derail peace initiatives pushed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and others. See Jim Lobe, “US/Mideast: Rice Faces Formidable Mideast Foe,” InterPress News, February 21, 2007, at www
29. See David Rose, “The Gaza Bombshell,” Vanity Fair, April 2008; “Hamas Coup in Gaza,” International Institute for Strategic Studies, Strategic Comments 13, no. 5 (June 2007); and “Elliot Abrams’ Uncivil War,” Conflicts Forum (2007), at www
30. See Eric Alterman, “The Rehabilitation of Elliott Abrams,” The Nation, March 13, 2013. Tellingly, Alterman writes, “What does it say about our most influential and important institutions that this lifelong embarrassment to American democracy can be embraced as one of their own?”
31. See Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Weisman, and Eric Lichtblau, “Trump Overrules Tillerson, Rejecting Elliott Abrams for Deputy Secretary of State,” The New York Times, February 10, 2017.
32. See Stephen M. Walt, “So Wrong for So Long: Why Neoconservatives Are Never Right,” Foreign Policy (online) at http://
33. Miller, Malley, Indyk, Kurtzer, and Ross have all written conflicting accounts of the Oslo process, placing blame for its failure on a number of culprits (including the Palestinians). See Robert Malley and Hussein Agha, “Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors,” New York Review of Books, August 9, 2001; Dennis Ross, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004); Aaron D. Miller, The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace (New York: Bantam, 2008); Martin Indyk, Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009); and Daniel B. Kurtzer et al., The Peace Puzzle: America’s Quest for Israeli-Palestinian Peace 1989–2011 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).
34. The Israeli journalist Barak Ravid called Ross “one of the most central people in the White House in everything that has to do with the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. He has whispered in the ear of U.S. President Barack Obama, maintained a secret and direct channel with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his envoy Isaac Molho, and undermined U.S. Mideast envoy George Mitchell … Despite the fact that he is considered to be Netanyahu’s man in the White House, he did not manage to get almost anything from the Israeli prime minister. In Ramallah, his status is even worse. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas pushed him aside and effectively declared him a persona non grata. As far as Washington was concerned, he had a far greater impact: mainly a negative one.” See “Dennis Ross Discovers Palestine,” Ha’aretz, January 9, 2009, at www
35. Ross believed that the United States should be ready to use force to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, and he cosigned a public letter expressing doubts about the emerging agreement in June 2015. See “Public Statement on U.S. Policy Toward the Iran Nuclear Negotiations,” Washington Institute for Near East Policy, June 24, 2015, at www
36. On Indyk’s support for the Iraq War, see Martin S. Indyk and Kenneth M. Pollack, “How Bush Can Avoid the Inspections Trap,” The New York Times, January 25, 2003; and Martin S. Indyk and Kenneth M. Pollack, “Lock and Load,” Los Angeles Times, December 19, 2002.
37. Dennis Ross and David Makovsky, Myths, Illusions, and Peace: Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East (New York: Viking, 2009).
38. Experts disagree on whether the relevant agencies failed to do an adequate job of collection and analysis in the run-up to war in Iraq, or whether they allowed themselves to be politicized and manipulated by a White House determined to go to war. Either way, it was a significant analytic failure. For alternative perspectives, see Joshua Rovner, Fixing the Facts: National Security and the Politics of Intelligence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Robert Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Paul R. Pillar, Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Thomas Powers, “How They Got Their Bloody War,” New York Review of Books, May 27, 2010; and Fulton Armstrong (with reply by Thomas Powers), “The CIA and WMDs: The Damning Evidence,” New York Review of Books, August 19, 2010.
39. See Adam Goldman, “Ex-C.I.A. Officer Suspected of Compromising Chinese Informants Is Arrested,” The New York Times, January 16, 2018.
40. See Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo, “CIA Officers Make Grave Mistakes, Get Promoted,” NBC News, February 9, 2011, at www
41. Clapper later told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell that his answer was the “least untruthful” he could give in an open hearing.
42. A signature strike is an attack on a suspect whose behavior fits the assumed profile of terrorist activity, even if the identity of the target is not known. See Amy Davidson, “John Brennan’s Kill List,” The New Yorker, January 7, 2013.
43. www
44. Carrie Johnson and Joby Warrick, “CIA Destroyed 92 Interrogation Tapes, Probe Says,” The Washington Post, March 3, 2009.
45. See Marisa Taylor and Jonathan Landay, “After CIA Gets Secret Whistleblower Email, Congress Worries About More Spying,” July 25, 2014, at www
46. See Jonathan S. Landay and Ali Watkins, “CIA Admits It Broke into Senate Computers; Senators Call for Spy Chief’s Ouster,” at www
47. After the initial reports of CIA monitoring, Brennan accused lawmakers of making “spurious allegations about C.I.A. actions that are wholly unsupported by the facts.” He subsequently added, “I think a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong.” See Mark Mazzetti and Carl Hulse, “CIA Admits Penetrating Senate Intel Committee Computers,” The New York Times, July 31, 2014.
48. Dustin Volz and Lauren Fox, “CIA Review Clears Its Spies of Wrongdoing,” National Journal, January 15, 2015.
49. Carl Hulse and Mark Mazzetti, “President Expresses Confidence in CIA Director,” The New York Times, August 1, 2014. On the negative effects of the torture regime, see Douglas Johnson, Alberto Mora, and Averell Schmidt, “The Strategic Costs of Torture,” Foreign Affairs 95, no. 5 (September/October 2016).
50. On the pervasive weakness of congressional oversight, see Michael Glennon, National Security and Double Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 52–57.
51. Glennon, National Security and Double Government, pp. 61–64.
52. See Katrina Manson, “The Undercover Spy Picked as CIA Chief,” Financial Times, March 17, 2018.
53. See Dan Lamothe, “Top Two Officers and Other Sailors Aboard the USS Fitzgerald to Be Disciplined Following Deadly Collision at Sea,” The Washington Post, August 17, 2017.
54. See Thomas Ricks, “Whatever Happened to Accountability?” Harvard Business Review, October 2012; James Fallows, “The Tragedy of the American Military,” The Atlantic, January/February 2015; William Astore, “An Army of None,” Salon.com, March 23, 2016; at www
55. Thomas E. Ricks, The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today (New York: Penguin, 2012), pp. 388–94.
56. See Andrew Bacevich, “Winning: Trump Loves to Do It, but American Generals Have Forgotten How,” TomDispatch.com, at www
57. The Defense Department defines “unwanted sexual contact” as “completed and attempted oral, anal, and vaginal penetration with any body part or object, and the unwanted touching of genitalia and other sexually-related areas of the body.” Based on surveys, the Pentagon estimates that at least nineteen thousand servicemen or -women experienced an incident of this type in recent years. Total reported assaults are much lower, but still exceed three thousand cases per year. See Department of Defense Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military, FY 2012 at www
58. The perpetrators of the Haditha massacre received light sentences under a plea agreement; Sergeant Bales was given a life sentence. See Charlie Savage and Elisabeth Bumiller, “An Iraqi Massacre, a Light Sentence, and a Question of Military Justice,” The New York Times, January 27, 2012; and Michael E. Miller, “U.S. Army Mass Murderer: ‘The Hate Grows Not Only for Insurgents, but Towards Everyone Who Isn’t American,’” The Washington Post, June 8, 2015.
59. “Beginning in 2010,” notes Seth Jones of the RAND Corporation, “there was a rise in the number of Salafi-jihadist groups and fighters, particularly in Syria and North Africa. There was also an increase in the number of attacks perpetrated by al Qa’ida and its affiliates.” See Seth G. Jones, A Persistent Threat: The Evolution of Al Qa’ida and Other Salafi Jihadists (Washington, DC: RAND Corporation, 2014), p. x. See also International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic at Stanford Law School and Global Justice Clinic at NYU School of Law, Living under Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians from U.S. Drone Practices (2012); and Hassan Abbas, “How Drones Create More Terrorists,” The Atlantic, August 20, 2013.
60. Ricks, The Generals, p. 392; Barton Gellman and Thomas E. Ricks, “U.S. Concludes Bin Laden Escaped at Tora Bora Fight; Failure to Send More Troops Termed Major Error,” The Washington Post, April 17, 2002.
61. Associated Press, “Sex Is Major Reason Military Commanders Are Fired,” January 21, 2013; at www
62. For a careful campaign analysis suggesting that deploying U.S. troops would have worked, see Peter John Paul Krause, “The Last Good Chance: A Reassessment of U.S. Operations at Tora Bora,” Security Studies 17, no. 4 (2008).
63. Civilians in the Pentagon and the White House bear primary responsibility for failing to plan the occupation, but Franks did not challenge their rosy assessments or inadequate preparations. See Ricks, The Generals, chap. 27.
64. See Dexter Filkins, “The Fall of the Warrior King,” The New York Times Magazine, October 23, 2005; Ricks, The Generals, pp. 422–25.
65. See “Marine to Serve No Time in Haditha, Iraq Killings Case,” USA Today, January 24, 2012; and “Squad Leader in Haditha Killings Discharged from Marine Corps,” Los Angeles Times, February 21, 2012.
66. Nor is it clear how innovative the surge really was, insofar as many of the tactical innovations Petraeus adopted had been developed by units serving in the field. On this point, see James A. Russell, Innovation, Transformation, and War: Counterinsurgency Operations in Anbar and Ninewa Provinces, Iraq, 2005–2007 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).
67. When he announced the “surge,” President Bush said its aim was “to put down sectarian violence and bring security to the people of Baghdad” to “help make reconciliation possible … these [U.S.] teams bring together military and civilian experts to help local Iraqi communities pursue reconciliation.” See “President’s Address to the Nation,” January 10, 2007; at http://
68. Bacevich explains: “Without pertinent standards, there can be no accountability. Absent accountability, failings and weaknesses escape notice. Eventually, what you’ve become accustomed to seems tolerable. Twenty-first-century Americans inured to wars that never end have long since forgotten that bringing such conflicts to a prompt and successful conclusion once defined the very essence of what generals were expected to do.” See “Winning.”
69. See Petraeus’s testimony in “The Status of the War and Political Developments in Iraq,” Hearing before the Committee on Armed Services, 110th Congress, 1st sess., September 10, 2007 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2008). In a December 2009 hearing on Afghanistan, McChrystal told a congressional committee, “The next eighteen months will likely be decisive and ultimately enable success,” adding that “we can and will accomplish this mission.” The following month, he told ABC’s Diane Sawyer that he “believed we had turned the tide.” Petraeus issued a similarly optimistic assessment a year later, though it was at odds with U.S. intelligence assessments and followed by a major increase in the overall level of violence. See “Afghanistan,” Hearings Before the Committee on Armed Services, U.S. Senate, 111th Congress, 1st sess., December 2 and 8, 2009 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2010), p. 103; “Top General Optimistic About Afghanistan,” ABC News, January 11, 2010, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABdm3bdUeDE; and Josh Rogin, “Petraeus’s Optimism About Afghanistan Not Shared at CIA,” Foreign Policy, April 27, 2011, at http://
70. See Ellen Mitchell, “Top General in Afghanistan Says Taliban Fight Has ‘Turned the Corner,’” The Hill, November 28, 2017, at http://
71. See Paul McCleary, “U.S. Has ‘Turned the Corner’ in Afghanistan, Top General Says,” Foreign Policy, November 28, 2017, at http://
72. See Shawn Snow, “Report: US Officials Classify Crucial Metrics on Afghan Casualties, Readiness,” Army Times, October 20, 2017, at www
73. See Noah Shachtman, “Gates Has a Long, Loooong Record of Firing Generals,” Wired, June 11, 2010, at www
74. See Thom Shanker, “Concern Grows Over Top Military Officers’ Ethics,” The Washington Post, November 12, 2012.
75. These audits are available at www
76. He added: “We also don’t appreciate and enforce personal accountability in the U.S. government. It takes a hell of a lot of screw-ups for someone to get fired. And I dare anybody to show me somebody who’s gotten fired in Afghanistan for wasting 100 million dollars, 300 million dollars, or failing to accomplish a program he or she was given.” See Priyanka Boghani, “‘Nobody’s Been Held Accountable’ for Wasteful Spending in Afghanistan, Says U.S. Watchdog,” Frontline, October 9, 2015, at www
77. See Sapna Maheshwari, “10 Times Trump Spread Fake News,” The New York Times, January 18, 2017, at www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/business/media/trump-fake-news.html?_r=0.
78. See Ruth Marcus, “When All News Is ‘Fake,’ Whom Do We Trust?” The Washington Post, December 12, 2016.
79. See “From the Editors: The Times and Iraq,” May 26, 2004.
80. See Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Great Terror,” The New Yorker, March 25, 2002; and Daniel Lazare, “The New Yorker Goes to War,” The Nation, May 15, 2003.
81. Miller’s coauthor on several of these articles, Michael Gordon, remains in a prominent senior post at the Times. On Miller’s departure, see Katharine Seelye, “Times and Reporter Reach Agreement on Her Departure,” The New York Times, November 9, 2005.
82. In 2010 Goldberg published an alarming cover story suggesting that Israel was likely to launch a preventive strike on Iran’s nuclear program within a year. See his “The Point of No Return,” The Atlantic (September 2010). The deadline passed, and no attack occurred, but Goldberg recycled the same warning in a 2012 Bloomberg View column, saying, “I’m highly confident that Netanyahu isn’t bluffing.” Goldberg seems to have been taken in by a well-orchestrated Israeli campaign to convince the United States that it was prepared to use force, in order to persuade Washington to impose harsher sanctions on Iran and either reject or toughen up the agreement capping Iran’s nuclear program. See Daniel Sobelman, “Signaling Credibility in IR,” unpublished ms. (2016), which describes the Israeli effort in detail.
83. See especially Eric Hananoki, “Where Are the Media’s Iraq War Boosters 10 Years Later?” Media Matters for America, March 19, 2013, at www
84. See Bill Keller, “My Unfinished 9/11 Business,” The New York Times Magazine, September 6, 2011; also Stephen M. Walt, “How Not to Learn from Past Mistakes,” Foreign Policy, September 12, 2011, at http://
85. See James Carden and Jacob Heilbrunn, “The Washington Post: The Most Reckless Editorial Page in America,” The National Interest, January/February 2015.
86. “An Unfinished Mission,” The Washington Post, May 4, 2003.
87. Jackson Diehl, “What the Iraq War Taught Me About Syria,” The Washington Post, March 31, 2013.
88. Subsequent editorials falsely described Iran as actively seeking a nuclear weapon and falsely attributed Iran’s decision to divert some of its stockpile of enriched uranium to an accusatory speech by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu (the diversion had actually taken place several years before Netanyahu’s speech). See Matt Duss, “Washington Post Editors Get Mixed Up on Iran’s Nuclear Program,” http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/04/09/1838431/washington-post-iran/?mobile=nc.
89. Marc Thiessen, “A Dark Winter of Ebola Terrorism,” The Washington Post, October 20, 2014; see also Louis Jacobson, “Could Terrorists Use Ebola to Attack the United States?” Politifact, October 23, 2014, at www
90. On Williams, see Elliot Hannon, “NBC Suspends Brian Williams Without Pay for Six Months,” Slate.com, February 10, 2015, at www
91. After a pioneering career as a White House correspondent, the eighty-nine-year-old Thomas was fired after she was recorded saying, “Jews should get out of Palestine,” and “go home” to Europe. For an eyewitness account, see Paula Cruickshank, “42 Seconds That Sullied Helen Thomas—and New Media,” Real Clear Politics, July 31, 2013. Clancy was fired after a Twitter exchange in which he accused an online critic from the pro-Israel Foundation for Defense of Democracies of being “part of a campaign to do PR for #Israel … Nothing illegal—but PR not HR: Human Rights.” Nasr was dismissed for a single tweet expressing sympathy after the death of the Hezbollah cleric Sayyed Fadlallah. Despite apologizing for her tweet and clarifying that she sought only to acknowledge Fadlallah’s support for women’s rights and opposition to honor killings, Nasr was promptly terminated.
92. See Gabriel Sherman, “Chasing Fox,” New York Magazine, October 10, 2010; Elias Isquith, “Phil Donahue’s Vindication,” Salon.com, July 10, 2014.
93. See Art Swift, “Americans’ Trust in Mass Media Sinks to New Low,” Gallup Organization, September 14, 2016, at www
94. Full disclosure: I helped draft the text and recruit signatories for the ad.
95. Yingling’s original article—which he forthrightly chose not to publish anonymously—was “A Failure in Generalship,” Armed Forces Journal (May 2007). See also Paul Yingling, “Why an Army Colonel Is Retiring Early—To Become a High School Teacher,” The Washington Post, December 2, 2011; and Ricks, The Generals, pp. 441–44.
96. Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, Going to Tehran: Why America Must Accept the Islamic Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2011).
97. Michael Crowley, “Iran Contrarians,” The New Republic, February 10, 2010; and Daniel B. Drezner, “Your Humble Blogger Was So Wrong,” Foreign Policy, August 30, 2010, at http://
98. See Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, “Iran’s Presidential Election Will Surprise America’s So-Called ‘Iran Experts,’” Huffington Post, June 6, 2013, at www
99. For example, the Leveretts were too pessimistic about the Obama administration’s ability to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran.
100. In particular, picking fights with political opponents does not seem to have hurt many neoconservatives.
101. See Kelley Vlahos, “Washington Doesn’t Forgive Whistleblowers,” The American Conservative, July 30, 2014.
102. Hoh’s story has a happy ending, as he was eventually appointed a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for International Policy. See www
103. After Irving “Scooter” Libby was convicted of lying to the FBI and to a grand jury regarding his role in exposing the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame, a veritable “who’s who” of influential insiders—including Henry Kissinger, Leonard Garment, Donald Rumsfeld, Eric Edelman, Christopher DeMuth, Leon Wieseltier, Robert Blackwill, and many more—wrote letters to the presiding judge, urging clemency. See Sidney Blumenthal, “The Libby Lobby’s Pardon Campaign,” Salon.com, June 7, 2007. A few years later a similar campaign may have helped David Petraeus secure a plea bargain after admitting that he had given his mistress classified information and lied to the FBI about it. See Andrew V. Pestano, “Report: Government Elite Officials Wrote to Keep Petraeus Out of Prison,” UPI, June 9, 2015, at www
104. Elizabeth Warren, A Fighting Chance (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), p. 106. Ironically, Summers has ignored his own advice of late, accusing Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin of making “irresponsible” statements about tax reform and at one point tweeting that Mnuchin “may be the greatest sycophant in Cabinet history.” Summers’s “insider status” is probably safe, however, and he may no longer aspire to hold a top job in Washington. If so, then criticizing a fellow “insider” carries fewer negative consequences.