Many neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz are disciples of a philosopher who believed that the elite should use deception, religious fervor and perpetual war to control the ignorant masses.

What would you do if you wanted to topple Saddam Hussein, but your intelligence agencies couldn’t find the evidence to justify a war?

A follower of Leo Strauss may just hire the "right" kind of men to get the job done – people with the intellect, acuity, and, if necessary, the political commitment, polemical skills, and, above all, the imagination to find the evidence that career intelligence officers could not detect.

The "right" man for Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, suggests Seymour Hersh in his recent New Yorker article entitled ‘Selective Intelligence,’ was Abram Shulsky, director of the Office of Special Plans (OSP) – an agency created specifically to find the evidence of WMDs and/or links with Al Qaeda, piece it together, and clinch the case for the invasion of Iraq.

Like Wolfowitz, Shulsky is a student of an obscure German Jewish political philosopher named Leo Strauss who arrived in the United States in 1938. Strauss taught at several major universities, including Wolfowitz and Shulsky’s alma mater, the University of Chicago, before his death in 1973.

Strauss is a popular figure among the neoconservatives. Adherents of his ideas include prominent figures both within and outside the administration. They include ‘Weekly Standard’ editor William Kristol; his father and indeed the godfather of the neoconservative movement, Irving Kristol; the new Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Stephen Cambone, a number of senior fellows at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) (home to former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle and Lynne Cheney), and Gary Schmitt, the director of the influential Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which is chaired by Kristol the Younger.

Strauss’ philosophy is hardly incidental to the strategy and mindset adopted by these men – as is obvious in Shulsky’s 1999 essay titled "Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous)" (in Greek philosophy the term nous denotes the highest form of rationality). As Hersh notes in his article, Shulsky and his co-author Schmitt "criticize America’s intelligence community for its failure to appreciate the duplicitous nature of the regimes it deals with, its susceptibility to social-science notions of proof, and its inability to cope with deliberate concealment." They argued that Strauss’s idea of hidden meaning, "alerts one to the possibility that political life may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception."

Rule One: Deception

It’s hardly surprising then why Strauss is so popular in an administration obsessed with secrecy, especially when it comes to matters of foreign policy. Not only did Strauss have few qualms about using deception in politics, he saw it as a necessity. While professing deep respect for American democracy, Strauss believed that societies should be hierarchical – divided between an elite who should lead, and the masses who should follow. But unlike fellow elitists like Plato, he was less concerned with the moral character of these leaders. According to Shadia Drury, who teaches politics at the University of Calgary, Strauss believed that "those who are fit to rule are those who realize there is no morality and that there is only one natural right – the right of the superior to rule over the inferior."

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If you work hard, you get ahead. That’s the American Dream in a nutshell — no matter what your race, color, creed or economic starting point, hard work will improve your life and increase your children’s opportunities. Yet, this widely held dream is out of reach for an increasing number of working Americans.

Roger Weisberg’s alarming and heart-wrenching new documentary, "Waging a Living," puts a human face on the growing economic squeeze that is forcing millions of workers into the ranks of the poor. Shot in the Northeast and California, the film profiles four very different Americans who work full-time but still can’t make ends meet. Despite their hard work and determination, these four find themselves, as one of them observes, "hustling backwards."

One in four American workers — more than 30 million people — are stuck in jobs that pay less than the federal poverty level for a family of four. (i) Housing costs, to name just one of several essential living expenses, have tripled since 1979, (ii) while real wages for male low-wage workers are actually less than they were 30 years ago. (iii) But the new face of the working poor is overwhelmingly that of a woman struggling to support her children. Only 37 percent of single mothers receive child support, and that support averages just $1,331 per year. (iv) Nearly a quarter of the country’s children now live below the poverty line. (v)

What do these numbers mean in human terms? What is it really like to work full-time and remain poor? "Waging a Living" provides a sobering answer. Filmed over three years, the documentary offers intimate profiles of four working Americans — Jean Reynolds, Jerry Longoria, Barbara Brooks, and Mary Venittelli — as they struggle to lift their families out of poverty.

Good-humored and strong-willed, Jean Reynolds is a 51-year-old certified nursing assistant in Keansburg, N.J., who supports three children, including her cancer-stricken eldest daughter, Bridget, and two of Bridget’s four children. She receives no help from her ex-husband. After 15 years working at the same nursing home, providing care to the infirm and dying, Jean earns the maximum wage the home pays — $11 per hour. Without health insurance, Jean is losing the battle to cover her daughter’s medical bills and her own everyday household expenses. It isn’t the life she was born into, and Jean grieves that she can’t give her children what her parents gave her. Ironically, Jean leads a successful drive for wage increases that do not ultimately benefit her; she’s already at "the max." So when she is forced to take emergency custody of Bridget’s two other children, her situation becomes dire. Evicted from her home, with seven dependents in tow, Jean desperately turns to public assistance for the first time in her life and receives emergency aid. As grateful as she is, Jean knows all too well that the reprieve is only temporary.

Jerry Longoria is a 42-year-old security guard, whose $12 hourly wage barely covers the basics, including a tiny room in an SRO hotel in a blighted San Francisco neighborhood. A recovering alcoholic and drug addict, now four years sober, Jerry is nothing if not a dreamer. He dreams of finding better work, meeting someone special and finding a decent place to live. Although he manages to make child support payments every month, his fondest dream is to see his children in North Carolina after a nine-year absence. Jerry also jumps into union activism, speaking at rallies and meetings in support of a successful campaign for regular, yet modest, pay increases and health benefits for the city’s security guards. With remarkable discipline, Jerry saves enough money to travel cross-country for a warm reunion with his children, but when he returns home, he loses his job after an argument with his boss. He finds another job, but at lower pay, and laments that it will take eight years just to get back to the salary he used to earn.

Barbara Brooks is a 36-year-old single mother of five living in Freeport, N.Y. Her story most graphically illustrates the hazards of what she calls "hustling backwards." Barbara, raised in abusive and homes, is poised and determined. In "Waging a Living," she’s in a grueling struggle to balance her responsibilities as a mother, full-time worker and student. As a counselor at a juvenile detention facility where she herself was placed as a teenager, she earns $8.25 per hour and relies on a range of government services to make ends meet. Barbara dreams of a better life, which is why she continues her education despite the almost unbearable demands it places on her. The first blow comes when a favorable job evaluation brings her a promotion to $11 per hour, but the additional $450 she earns each month will cost her $600 a month in lost government aid. Though being off government assistance is part of her dream, she is falling behind financially even as she succeeds at work. More determined than ever to find the answer in education, Barbara earns her associate’s degree and gets a $15-an-hour job as a recreational therapist at a nearby nursing home. But, once again, she finds her income gains are wiped out by the elimination of government benefits. Unable to support her family on her new salary, she returns to a grueling work-and-school schedule, this time to earn a bachelor’s degree.

A 41-year-old single mother of three living in southern New Jersey, Mary Venittelli once led a comfortable middle-class life until it was derailed by a bitter divorce. When Mary re-enters the workforce, the only job she finds is a waitress position paying $2.13 per hour plus tips. In her own version of "hustling backwards," Mary must now hire babysitters who eat up a major portion of her earnings. There are nights she comes home with $30 in tips and owes the sitter $28. Without financial help from her husband while the divorce is being settled, she relies on local food pantries to feed her family, borrows money from friends and runs up $15,000 in credit card debt. She loses her car and is in danger of losing her home. She also sees the impact the situation is having on her children, especially her son Quinn, who begins throwing violent tantrums. At the last possible moment, a divorce settlement and a new relationship help prevent Mary and her kids from joining the ranks of the working homeless. But Mary, having experienced how easily the coin of middle-class life can flip, is determined to rely on herself to secure her future. She returns to school to acquire new computer skills.

"In making ‘Waging a Living,’ I wanted viewers to understand what it’s like to work hard, play by the rule and still not be able to support a family," says producer/director Roger Weisberg. "It’s easy to take for granted the janitors and security guards in the offices where we work, the waiters and bus boys in the restaurants where we eat, and the nurses and caregivers in the facilities where we place our children and elderly. I wanted to bring viewers inside the daily grind of the nameless people we encounter every day who struggle to survive from paycheck to paycheck."

"My goal," he concludes, "was to get people to take a new look at the prevailing American myth that hard work alone can overcome poverty."

"Waging a Living" is a production of Public Policy Productions in association with Thirteen/WNET New York, with funding provided by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Ford Foundation, David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).

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(i) Thirty million Americans make less than $8.70 an hour, the official US poverty level for a family of four. Source: Business Week, May 31, 2004 p.61. Authors relied on Economic Policy Institute and the Census Bureau for their statistics.

(ii) Housing costs have tripled since 1979. Source: Kaufman, Leslie. "Surge in Homeless Families Sets Off Debate on Cause." National Report, The New York Times, Tuesday, June 29, 2004. Statistics from Economic Policy Institute.

Mortgage payments, percent change graph (for families with children): increase 282 percent btw.1978-2001. Source: "Working Families with Children: A Closer Look at Homeownership Trends" by Center for Housing Policy, May 2004, p.5 graph.

Annual new home prices: 1980: $64,600 2003: $195,000. Source: National Association of Home Builders, "Annual New Home Prices, 1980-2003" www.nahb.org.

Annual existing single family home prices: 1989: $89,500 2003: $170,000. Source: National Association of Home Builders, "Annual Existing Single Family Home Prices, 1989-2003" www.nahb.org.

(iii) Real hourly wages for male workers in the bottom quintile: 1973 = $9.70; 2003 = $9.22. There has been a decrease of 4.95 percent, or 5 percent. Source: Conlin, Michelle and Aaron Bernstein. "Cover Story: Working and the Poor," Business Week. May 31, 2004. Statistics from the Economic Policy Institute.

(iv) In 1997, only 37 percent of custodial mothers received child support from nonresident fathers, and the amounts they received were small, averaging only $1,331 for the entire year (Lerman and Sorensen 2001). Source: Johnson, Richard and Melissa Favreault "Economic Status in Later Life among Women who Raised Children Outside of Marriage," The Urban Institute, February 2004, p. 4.

(v) Number of low-wage workers: 28,280,343; Total number of workers: 116,288,910. Source: The State of Working America, Table 5.12: Characteristics of low-wage workers, 2003. Economic Policy Institute.

PBS

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Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed, based in the UK, is the executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development. He is the author of Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy & the Struggle for Iraq.

BARSAMIAN: Let’s talk about your book. What is the Western secret strategy in Iraq?

AHMED: It goes back to the beginning of the 20th century, when the British and the French went into the Middle East and interfered in the operation of the Ottoman Empire, with the very clear design on the huge oil reserves in the region. They manufactured the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Previously, the Middle East was united, more or less, under this empire. They basically co-opted various factions that didn’t have popular support and used them to create conflict and division. It was a very bloody process. In the end, they carved the Middle East into 12 previously nonexistent nation states—Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Syria. This is the legacy that we live with today. They gave a lot of financial and military support to these regimes. The result was a great deal of repression because the Arab people didn’t like this. It was a way of getting control of regional energy.

One of the interventions occurred in 1953 in Iran, when the conservative parliamentary democracy of Mohammad Mossadeq was overthrown by a British-U.S. operation—MI6 and the Central Intelligence Agency. What happened in Iran in 1953?

Mohammad Mossadeq was a popular, democratically elected leader. He wasn’t any kind of Islamic fundamentalist. He nationalized the oil industry, which previously the United States and Britain had monopolized. Both governments were extremely worried about this because it occurred in the context of the Cold War. That was the justification for trying to remove Mossadeq—that Mossadeq had connections to communism. In reality, there was no meaningful Soviet presence in Iran. According to declassified British Foreign Office documents, they were fully aware that the communist Tudeh Party was marginal and had no real relationship to Mossadeq. So this was, as one document mentions, the Mossadeq brand of nationalism. That was the key problem.

It also represented a wider threat to the region because if Iran was able to successfully come out of the grip of this imperial system, it would serve as the threat of a good example. Many other nations could be inspired to do the same. So they arranged this military coup installing the Shah of Iran, essentially reinstalled him. The Shah went on to reverse everything that Mossadeq had done. He opened the country up, under so-called free market principles, to the West, which allowed them to have free rein over the entire country, undercutting business, industries, and development. Most notoriously, with the help of Israel, the United States and Britain set up the Savak secret police, which imposed horrendous human rights conditions. It was a police state. They were spying on anybody who said anything against the regime.

That period culminated with the Islamic revolution of 1978 and 1979.

There is no doubt that this policy of the United States and Britain ultimately generated the grievances that led to that revolution, because the Shah of Iran was very similar in some ways to Kemal Ataturk. It was all justified that this was a secular democracy. Of course, it wasn’t. It was a complete dictatorship. This is what partly fueled the response of the Iranian people, that we have to go back to our own culture, which is why it expressed itself in Islamic terminology. As the revolution intensified, the Shah’s response intensified as well, to the point that 10,000 Iranian civilians were killed by Iranian troops firing into crowds of protesters. There was one time when the demonstrations were very huge and the Shah had completely cracked down on them, firing into crowds. Then the Shah went to Washington and met with President Carter who said something like Iran is an island of stability in a turbulent part of the world. You could hardly imagine a clearer statement of support for state terrorism.

One of the explanations that the U.S. gives for its invasion and occupation of Iraq is that by establishing democracy there, it will have a domino effect. What kind of confidence can people have in those kinds of expectations?

They can have absolutely zero confidence in that. There is no doubt that the United States and Britain have never had any concern for democracy. It’s been the opposite. There are quite candid admissions about this in documents that have come out in both the state department and the foreign office.

Almost all of the discussion in the United States on the events of September 11—and that has been amplified during the hearings of the September 11 commission—have been on the mechanics: How did it happen? Where were the failures of intelligence? Why weren’t different agencies communicating? What about some of the whys?

Nobody discusses the why very much. Why did terrorists attack on September 11? If you look at the transcripts of some of Osama bin Laden’s speeches, you can see what he’s talking about. He’s highlighting very specific grievances about the Middle East—the sanctions on Iraq, which killed—there is no disagreement about this—over one million civilians, half of them children. He talks about the occupation of Palestine by Israel and the apartheid. He talks about the occupation of Saudi Arabia, considered by Muslims to be a holy land. It’s very clear that U.S. and British policy in the region, by oppressing the populations, by denying them the right of self-determination and exploiting their resources, has created extreme anti- Americanism and resentment. That’s not a case of legitimizing the attacks; that’s an analysis to understand the causes, the social and psychological causes, behind them.

Let’s talk a little about Spain and what happened in the election there in March 2004. Trains were bombed. Tragically, almost 200 people died. A few days later, the ruling pro-war party was voted out and Zapatero, who promised to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq, was elected. This election has been described in the liberal New York Times, by its columnist, Thomas Friedman, as appeasement.

This is absurd. We actually heard stuff like this in the British press as well. The Madrid bombing was a backlash, which arose as a consequence of the war on terror. It’s very important to understand that the Spanish people experienced what it means when you go into a country and you invade and you occupy them: there is going to be resistance. As a result of that experience, they said, “We don’t want our troops in Iraq.” They voted for the guy who said, “We’re going to get our troops out.” It’s insulting to the Spanish people to say that this is appeasement because they were the ones who suffered.

People like Bush, Powell, Rice, Cheney, and Rumsfeld now say that they are quite surprised that there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but, regardless, Iraq has now been liberated and the Iraqi people and the world are better off without Saddam Hussein because the world is a lot safer. Is it?

Absolutely not. First off, in relation to the whole WMD thing—they knew there weren’t any WMDs. There is a famous defector, General Hussein Kamel, that everybody always quotes. In 1995 Kamel was head of the WMD program in Iraq and he defected. He had this massive pile of documents making clear what Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction were. That’s what Powell quotes him as saying: Saddam Hussein has this much anthrax now, blah, blah, blah. But what they don’t say is that when Hussein Kamel was interviewed by UNSCOM officials about the same documents, he said: Saddam Hussein destroyed these weapons. He said, I ordered the destruction of these weapons before the Gulf War because Saddam Hussein was afraid of what would happen when people realized and it became public knowledge that this is what happened. So he wanted to eliminate them so he didn’t get too incriminated. They knew from the start that there was no threat.

But, pundits say, Iraq has been liberated. Aren’t the Iraqis better off without Saddam Hussein?

That’s the most interesting line that I could imagine to justify this war, the lie that this is a war of liberation. If you look at reality, what is happening on the ground in Iraq now, after they removed Saddam Hussein and his immediate entourage, they didn’t go about dismantling the Ba’athist apparatus. They always said they were going to remove the Ba’athist regime. But this was rhetoric. In reality, the war was won by buying off the entire Ba’athist establishment. They paid money to key generals in the Republican Guard, for example—people who were implicated in war crimes and genocide and mass murder of the Iraqi people—to switch sides. I think it was General Vincent Brooks, one of the generals in Iraq, who basically said, some of these people, when they switch sides, they’re going to have positions in the new Administration. This is what has happened. For example, Saddam’s former head of the interior ministry has been installed as the head of the police in Baghdad. Six thousand Ba’athist loyalists, who were former police—the Ba’athist police are notorious for torture—have been unleashed, again, into the streets of Baghdad.

One of the demands that al-Qaeda and bin Laden made was that U.S. troops should get out of Saudi Arabia. Well, they’ve gotten out, but most of them have relocated to Iraq.

If you look at the reasons why they got out of Saudi Arabia, it seems to be because of the increasing unrest in that country. There are reports about Saudi officials saying that there have been contingency plans to grab the oil fields. The Pentagon has done studies of this, to grab the oil fields in case of a coup. There has been more and more unrest, not only on the streets, but also among members of the royal family. There is the possibility that the current regime might topple. There is a  feeling within Saudi Arabia that the United States is controlling the regime, controlling the repression. That they are responsible for the torture, because they’re the ones, as many reports document, providing the regime with weapons. Pulling out of Saudi Arabia is a bit of a PR stunt. It’s like saying, “Look, we are conceding. We’re pulling out of Saudi Arabia.” But by establishing a military occupation in Iraq, they’re hoping that they can transform the geopolitical order in the region to one where the United States plays the role of a regional imperial power.

There are some very schizophrenic tendencies in U.S.-Saudi relations. For example, Saudi Arabia, which has a particularly virulent form of Islam, Wahabism, has been financing a lot of the international terror. But at the same time the U.S. is a very close ally with the ruling emirs in Riyadh.

It says to me that the war on terror is very much a facade, because if this was really about fighting terrorism, they would put sufficient pressure on Saudi Arabia to crack down on the financial arteries of terrorism. They have known since 1996. There was a report in the New Yorker which revealed that National Security Agency intercepts had revealed communications among Saudi royal family members—obviously not the whole family, but people within it—which proved, essentially, that they were funding al-Qaeda to the tune of millions of dollars. Clinton knew about this, Bush knew about this. But Saudi Arabia is consistently being protected.

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