The CIA’s “’estimates’ have always been inherently political documents, and its executive summaries are written to be leaked,” says Angelo M. Codevilla in a review of George Tenet’s At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA (HarperCollins) and John Prados’s Safe For Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Ivan R. Dee) in Claremont Review of Books, Summer, ‘07.
Prados’s title, says Codevilla, “masks the Left’s perennial agenda of encouraging its own ends by depriving America of coercive means.”
He calls “transparent projection” Prados’s contention that in the Truman years the U.S. “cheapened the coin of its appeal by covert actions that, to foreign populations, did not represent American policies democratically arrived at.”
The reader is supposed to believe that foreigners-none of whom, including the British, have any say in their countries’ foreign policies-look askance at America because not all the details of its foreign policies are decided “democratically.”
This is too much for Codevilla, a Boston U. international relations teacher, who notes that “these very foreigners . . . are supposedly shocked that Americans do not live in perfect equality and sometimes speak unkindly about one another. It is clear enough that Prados is expressing his own judgment on America, not that of any foreigners.”
Having it in for the U.S., he assumes others do too.
Blithe Spirit 