December 19, 2019 • 7
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An influential D.C. network of
military interventionists placed Mayor Pete on an inside track to power,
reports Max Blumenthal.
In his quest for front-runner
status in the 2020 presidential campaign, Pete Buttigieg has crafted an image
for himself as a maverick running against a broken establishment.
On the trail, he has invoked
his distinction as the openly gay mayor of a de-industrialized Rust Belt town,
as well as his experience as a Naval reserve intelligence officer who now claims to oppose “endless
wars”. He insists that “there’s energy for an outsider like me,”
promoting himself as “an unconventional candidate.”
When former Secretary of State
John Kerry endorsed Joe Biden this December, Buttigieg went
full maverick. “I have never been part of the Washington establishment,” he
proclaimed, “and I recognize that there are relationships among senators who
have been together on Capitol Hill as long as I’ve been alive and that is what
it is.”
But a testy exchange between
the South Bend mayor and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard during a Nov. 20 Democratic primary
debate had already complicated Buttigieg’s branding campaign.
Like Buttigieg, Gabbard was a
military veteran of the 9/11 generation. But she had taken an entirely
different set of lessons from her grueling stint in Iraq than “Mayor Pete.” Her
campaign had become an anti-war crusade, with opposition to destructive regime
change wars serving as her leitmotif.
After ticking off her foreign
policy credentials, Gabbard turned to Buttigieg and lit into him for stating
his willingness to send U.S. troops to Mexico to crack down on drug
cartels.
A visibly angry Buttigieg
responded by accusing Gabbard of distorting his record, then quickly deflected
to Syria, where he has argued for
an indefinite deployment of occupying U.S. troops.
Rehashing well-worn criticism
of Gabbard for meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during a
diplomatic visit she took — her trip was devoted to de-escalating the
U.S.-backed proxy war that had ravaged the country’s population — Buttigieg
attacked the congresswoman for engaging with a “murderous dictator.”
Throughout the exchange,
Buttigieg appeared shaken, as though his sense of inviolability had been
punctured. Gabbard had clearly struck a vulnerable point by painting the
self-styled outsider as a conventional D.C.-style politician unconsciously
spouting interventionist bromides.
How could someone who served
in the catastrophically wasteful U.S. wars in the Middle East, and who had seen
their human toll, be reckless enough to propose sending U.S. troops to fight
and possibly die in Mexico? “But Assad!” was the best response he could muster.
The remarkable dust-up
highlighted a side of the 37-year-old political upstart that has been scarcely
explored in mainstream U.S. media accounts of his rise to prominence. It revealed
the real Buttigieg as a neoliberal cadre whose future was carefully managed by
the mandarins of the national security state since almost the moment that he
graduated from Harvard University.
After college, the Democratic
presidential hopeful took a gig with a strategic communications firm founded by
a former secretary of defense who raked in contracts with the arms industry. He
moved on to a fellowship at an influential D.C. think tank described by its
founder as “a counterpart to the neoconservatives of the 1970s.” Today,
Buttigieg sits on that think tank’s board of advisors alongside some of the
country’s most accomplished military interventionists.
Buttigieg has reaped the
rewards of his dedication to the Beltway playbook. He recently became the top
recipient of donations from staff members of the Department of
Homeland Security, the State Department and the Justice Department – key cogs
in the national security state’s permanent bureaucracy.
His Harvard social network has
been a critical factor in his rise as well, with college buddies occupying key
campaign roles as outside policy advisers and strategists. One of his closest
friends from school is today the senior adviser of a specialized unit of the
State Department focused on fomenting regime change abroad.
That friend, Nathaniel “Nat”
Myers, was Buttigieg’s traveling partner on a trip to Somaliland, where the two
claimed to have been tourists in a July 2008 article they wrote for The
New York Times.
Their contribution to the
paper was not any typical travelogue detailing a whimsical safari. Instead,
they composed a slick editorial that echoed the Somaliland government’s call
for recognition from the U.S. government. It was Buttigieg’s first foreign
policy audition before a national audience.
Short, Strange Trip to
Somaliland
Under public pressure for more
transparency about his work at the notoriously secretive McKinsey consulting
firm, the Buttigieg campaign released some background details this December.
The disclosures included a timeline
of his work for various clients that stated he “stepped away from the
firm during the late summer and fall of 2008 to help full-time with a
Democratic campaign for governor in Indiana.”
How Buttigieg’s “full-time”
role on that gubernatorial campaign took him on a nearly 8,000-mile detour to Somaliland
remains unclear.
Buttigieg and Nathaniel Myers
spent only 24 hours in the autonomous region of Somaliland. In that short time,
they interviewed unnamed government officials and faithfully relayed their
pro-independence line back to the readers of The New York Times in
a July
2008 op-ed.
The column read as though
crafted by a public relations firm on behalf of a government client. In one
section, the two travelers wrote that “the people we met in Somaliland were
welcoming, hopeful and bewildered by the absence of recognition from the West.
They were frustrated to still be overlooked out of respect for the sovereignty
of the failed state to their south.”
Since declaring its
independence from Somalia in 1991, Somaliland has campaigned for recognition
from the U.S., EU, and African Union. It even offered to hand its deep water
port over to AFRICOM, the U.S. military command structure on the African
continent, in exchange for U.S. acceptance of its sovereignty.
Several months after Buttigieg
traveled to the autonomous region, Al Jazeera reported,
“The Somaliland government is trying to charm its way to global recognition.”
And just a few weeks before
Buttigieg’s visit, the would-be republic inked a
contract with an international lobbying firm called Independent Diplomat, presumably
to help oversee that charm offensive.
Founded by a self-described
anarchist named Carne Ross, Independent Diplomat represents an array of non and
para-state entities seeking recognition on the international stage. Ross’s
client list has included
the Syrian Opposition Coalition, which tried and failed to secure power
through a Western-backed war
against the Syrian government.
Independent Diplomat did not
respond to questions from The Grayzone about whether it had any role
in facilitating the trip Buttigieg and Myers took to Somaliland.
According to John Kiriakou, a
former CIA case officer, ex-senior investigator for the Senate Intelligence
Committee, and celebrated whistleblower, Somaliland is an unusual destination
for tourism.
“There really is nothing going
on in Somaliland,” Kiriakou told The Grayzone. “To say you go to
Somaliland as a tourist is a joke to me. It’s not a war-torn area but nobody
goes there as a tourist.”
Kiriakou visited Somaliland in
2009 as part of an investigation for the Senate Intelligence Committee on what
he described as the phenomenon of “blue-eyed” American citizens converting to
Islam, traveling to Somalia and Yemen for training with Salafi-jihadist groups,
then returning home on their U.S. passports.
To reach Somaliland, Kiriakou
said he took an arduous seven-hour journey from the neighboring state of Djibouti.
His junket was coordinated by the U.S. ambassador to Djibouti, a regional
security officer of the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service and an embassy
attaché.
“It is not the easiest place
to reach and there’s no business to do there,” Kiriakou said.
Whether or not Buttigieg’s
trip was coordinated without the assistance of lobbyists, the trip offered him
and Myers an opportunity to weigh in on international affairs on the pages of
the supposed newspaper of record – and on an absolutely non-controversial issue.
In his bio, Nathaniel Myers
identified himself simply as a “financial analyst based in Ethiopia.” According
to his resume, which is available online at Linkedin, he was working at the
time as a World Bank consultant on governance and corruption.
By 2011, Myers had moved on
from that neoliberal international financial institution to a specialized
government at the center of U.S. regime change operations abroad.
Imperial Social Network
Nathaniel Myers’ relationship
with the presidential hopeful began at Harvard University. There, they formed
two parts of “The
Order of Kong,” a close-knit group of political junkies named jokingly
for the Chinese restaurant they frequented after intensive discussion sessions
at the school’s Institute of Politics.
Like most members of the
college-era “order,” Myers and Buttigieg have remained close. When the mayor
married his longtime partner in 2018, Buttigieg chose him as his best man.
Myers currently works as a
senior advisor for the United States Agency for International Development’s
Office of Transition Initiatives (USAID-OTI) in Washington, D.C. The OTI is a
specialized division of USAID that routinely works through contractors and
local proxies to orchestrate destabilization operations inside countries
considered insufficiently compliant to the dictates of Washington.
Wherever the U.S. seeks regime
change, it seems that USAID’s OTI is involved.
In a 2015 op-ed arguing for a
loosening of bureaucratic restraints on USAID’s participation in counter-terror
operations, Myers revealed that he had “specialized in programming in places
like Yemen and Libya” – two conflict zones destabilized by U.S.-led
regime-change wars. (Myers was working as a fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations at the time, but would return to USAID’s OTI the following year.)
USAID’s OTI has also fueled
Syria’s brutal proxy war, coordinating U.S.
government assistance to supposed civil society groups like the White Helmets that
were attached
to the armed extremists who ruled over portions of the country for
several years.
In Venezuela, the OTI
has spent tens of millions of dollars cultivating and training
opponents of the late President Hugo Chavez and his successor, Nicolas
Maduro. It has done the same in Nicaragua, serving as the linchpin of a
U.S. effort to “lay
the groundwork for insurrection.”
In Cuba, meanwhile, the OTI attempted to
stir up civil unrest through a fake, Twitter-style social media site
called ZunZuneo, hoping to turn the public against the country’s leftist
government through coordinated flash mobs. To populate the phony social media
platform, the OTI contracted a D.C.-based firm called Creative Associates that
had illicitly obtained half a million Cuban cellphone numbers.
USAID and Creative Associates
attempted to place ZunZuneo
into private hands through a Miami foundation called Roots of Hope,
which was founded by students at Harvard University. Twitter founder Jack
Dorsey was even solicited by
the State Department to operate the platform. (Roots of Hope board member Raul
Moas, who personally trained ZunZuneo employees, is today the director
of the Knight Foundation.)
The devious operation and its
eventual exposure revealed the extent to which covert operations historically
associated with the CIA had been outsourced to private contractors and NGOs.
And the role of the
Harvard-founded “Roots of Hope” in the scheme demonstrated how much USAID and
its contractors depended on the same Ivy League talent pool that produced
Buttigieg and Myers.
A lengthy paper Myers authored
for the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace in 2015 indicated that he had
special knowledge of the ZunZuneo scheme and had been invested in its success.
Myers took the journalists who
exposed the USAID-OTI program to task, claiming that “individual grants were
pulled out of context and described as failures without heed to their actual
goals,” provoking an unfair “Capitol Hill pillorying.”
He lamented that the exposure
of covert programs like these had forced USAID officials to pursue “the
opposite of the programming most likely to produce real impact in a hard aid
environment.” In other words, fear of public scrutiny had complicated efforts
to subvert societies targeted by the U.S. for regime change – and he didn’t
like it one bit.
To Syracuse University
professor of African American studies Horace Campbell, youthful cadres like
Myers were a symptom of the American university’s transformation into a
neoliberal training ground.
“Many idealistic graduates
from elite centers such as the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
University, the Maxwell School of Citizenship of Syracuse University or the
Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton
University among others had been seduced” into careers with USAID contractors
like Creative Associates, Chemonics, and McKinsey, Campbell lamented in a
lengthy 2014 survey
of the OTI’s sordid record.
“It has been painful,” the
professor wrote, “to see the ways in which the so called NGO initiatives have
been refined over the past twenty years to support neoliberalism and to
depoliticize idealistic students.”
Campbell’s comments painted a
clear portrait of Myers, who earned his master’s degree at Princeton’s Woodrow
Wilson School on his way towards becoming a “hard aid” specialist at USAID.
They also captured the
psychology of Buttigieg, who celebrated
Bernie Sanders as a hero when he was a high school senior, and spoke
out against the Iraq war as a Harvard junior before being absorbed
into the culture of McKinsey and D.C. institutions like the Truman Center.
The Truman Show
When Pete Buttigieg made his
journey to Somaliland in 2008, he had just earned a fellowship at the Truman
Center, a Washington-based think tank that provided a steppingstone for
national security-minded whiz kids like him to leadership positions in the
Democratic Party.
Buttigieg likely earned the
fellowship after answering an ad like the one the
Truman Center published on the website of the Harvard Law School Student
Government in 2010. Soliciting applicants for its security fellowship,
the center declared that it was seeking “exceptionally accomplished and
dedicated men and women who share President Truman’s belief in muscular
internationalism, and who believe that strong national security and strong
liberal values are not antagonistic, but are two sides of the same coin.”
This was not the first time
Buttigieg had dipped his toes into Washington’s national security swamp. After
graduating from Harvard, he worked at the Cohen Group, a consulting firm
founded by former Secretary of Defense William Cohen that maintained an
extensive client
list within the arms industry. (As The
Grayzone reported, the Cohen Group has been intimately involved
in the Trump administration’s bungling regime change attempt in Venezuela).
But it was Buttigieg’s
fellowship at the Truman Center that placed him on the casting couch before the
Democratic Party’s foreign policy mandarins.
A Tablet
Magazine profile of Truman Center founder Rachel Kleinfeld described
her as a “gatekeeper and ringleader” whose network of former fellows spanned
Congress and the Obama administration’s National Security Council. Her career
trajectory mirrored Buttigieg’s.
After last night, more proud
than ever to support @PeteButtigieg
- for those who missed it, a few reasons why: https://medium.com/@jensenholmespa/is-pete-buttigieg-ready-to-be-president-look-no-further-than-his-campaign-4021051c16a1 …
She had earned degrees at
elite institutions (Yale and Oxford, where Buttigieg pursued his Rhodes
scholarship) before accepting a job at a private contractor, Booz Allen
Hamilton, that performed
an array of services for the U.S. military and private
spying for intelligence agencies.
Kleinfeld’s boss at the
company was James Woolsey, the neoconservative former CIA director who has lobbied
aggressively for U.S. military assaults on Iraq and Iran.
According to Tablet, “Woolsey
positioned Kleinfeld to work on sensitive government projects the company was
pursuing in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, including one that involved
working as a researcher for the military’s Defense Science Board, investigating
information-sharing between intelligence and law-enforcement agencies.”
When Kleinfeld founded her
think tank in 2005, she named it for the president who oversaw the detonation
of nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities, threats of another nuclear assault on
North Korea and the killing
of 20 percent of that country’s population. The Truman doctrine, which
called for “containing” the Soviet Union through internal destabilization and
relentless pressure on its periphery, was the basis of Washington’s Cold War
policy. (Following Kleinfeld’s lead, Buttigieg
named one of his two pet dogs Truman).
“We decided there really was a
need to create a movement of Democrats to stand up for these ideas and to
really start to think about it, very much as a counterpart to the
neoconservatives of the 1970s,” she told The
Forward at the time.
To fill the center’s board of advisers, Kleinfeld
assembled a cast of Democratic foreign policy heavyweights whose
accomplishments included the devastation of entire countries through regime
change wars.
Among the most notable Truman
advisors were Madeleine Albright, the author of NATO’s destruction of
Yugoslavia and president of an
influence-peddling operation known as the Albright Stonebridge Group;
the late Council on Foreign Relations President Les Gelb, who once proposed
dividing Iraq into three federal districts along sectarian lines;
former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who oversaw
record levels of migrant deportations; and Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former
State Department policy planning director who conceived the Responsibility To
Protect (R2P) doctrine deployed by
the Obama administration to justify NATO’s disastrous intervention in Libya and
drum up another
one against Syria.
“The Truman Project mobilizes
Democrats who serve the conventional interventionist agenda,” journalist Kelly
Vlahos wrote. “Beyond
that, they are part of a broader orbit of not so dissimilar foot soldiers on
the other side of the aisle.”
Buttigieg listed
his fellowship at the Truman Center as one of the credentials that
qualified him for Indiana State treasurer when he ran for the position in 2010.
Though he lost in a landslide,
Buttigieg won election as mayor of South Bend the following year. “Mayor Pete”
had not only secured his future in the Democratic Party, he had won a place in
its foreign policy pantheon with a
seat on the Truman Center’s advisory board.
Balancing Opposition to
Endless Wars
This July 11, Buttigieg rolled
out his foreign policy platform in a carefully
scripted appearance at Indiana University. Introduced by Lee Hamilton,
a former Indiana congressman who was a fixture on the House Foreign Affairs and
Intelligence Committees, Buttigieg blended a call to “end endless wars” with
Cold War bluster directed at designated enemies.
Before an auditorium packed
with the national press, he rattled off one of the more paranoid talking points
of the Russiagate era, blaming
President Vladimir Putin for fueling racism inside the U.S. He then
attacked Trump for facilitating peace talks in Korea, slamming the president
for exchanging “love letters” with “a brutal dictator,” referring to North
Korean leader Kim Jong-Un.
You will not see me exchanging
love letters on White House letterhead with a brutal dictator who starves and
murders his own people @PeteButtigieg
More recently, Buttigieg’s
campaign pledged to
“balance our commitment to end endless wars with the recognition that total
isolationism is self-defeating in the long run.” This was the sort of Beltway
doublespeak that defined the legacy of Barack Obama, another youthful,
self-styled outsider from the Midwest who campaigned on his opposition to the
Iraq war, only to sign off on more calamitous wars in the Middle East after he
entered the White House.
On the presidential campaign
trail, “Mayor Pete” has done his best to paper over the instincts he inherited
from his benefactors among the national security state. But as the campaign
drags on, his interventionist tendencies are increasingly exposed. Having
padded his resume in America’s longest and most futile wars, he may be poised
to extend them for a new generation to fight.
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