Enough to Make One Angry - or Cry

I've been reading A Legacy of Ashes by Timothy Weiner, a history of the CIA. If those in power in 2002-03 had known this much about the CIA, they would have run the other way when they were told that there were WMDs in Iraq. There's an old line that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. The history of the CIA as past behavior would give any intelligent person more than a moment of pausing.

From the word "Go!" the CIA has been fraught with ideological, philosophical, and political in-fighting, preconceptions and a plain old grandiose arrogance. The earliest leaders truly believed their own hype about themselves and what they were doing. They truly and unshakably believed that their way was THE RIGHT WAY and every one else's was worse than wrong- it was bad.

They set up straw enemies to knock down. If they didn't like someone that person became a communist. They believed their own rhetoric and facts? Well, why bother with something so trivial. Their intelligence was based on guesses and ideological biases about what they believed the world just had to be like. They invented information to feed to the President and press and tried hard to make it real.

I would be angry one minute at their style and hubris and just plain old stupidity. Then I would want to cry at how they clearly ruined many people and nations. They caused the deaths of many naive or innocent people. And they did it in my name- in the name of America.

It was not a surprise to me, then, that from time to time little comments were dropped that indicated that these men loved their alcohol. Alcoholism and grandiosity are so intimately related that when you find one you almost always find the other. Now I know that there are people who think that those of us who work with addiction are prone to over-react and find alcoholism under every bush and tree. It can't be that common.

Well, it isn't "common" in the sense that everyone has it. But it is "common" in that where it shows up it has a far greater impact on the world around it than just about anything else. It is powerful and powerfully undermines common sense. Only alcoholics could do what they did and believe it.

Which in the end gave me the deepest sense of fear and relief. Fear that comes from knowing that alcoholics in such places of power can literally blow us out of the sky and believe they were saving us. Fear that they may still be there in some new incarnation doing the same things that the CIA has been doing for so long.

And then the relief that they didn't do worse and that in spite of their best efforts, we survived. Some higher power was certainly protecting our world. It is the only possible answer.

Read this book with fear and trepidation but read it to see how lucky, how very lucky we truly are to still be here.