Networks Actual and Potential: Think Tanks, War Games and the Creation of Contemporary American Politics

The months leading up to the U.S. incursion into Iraq in 2003 witnessed one of the largest protest movements in world history, unprecedented in its international scope, with rallies being held simultaneously in over forty countries across four continents. Even as the protests were building momentum, a group of us from Johns Hopkins University, peripherally involved with the anti-war movement, began to feel a different kind of anxiety.¹ What would be the future orientation of this movement once the invasion began and the initial momentum of the protests began to subside? Would it be simply to re-iterate that Bush is, and had been, unusually stupid? Beyond a point there seemed nothing particularly radical about that. And, despite our continued participation in the movement, we were equally worried by the intellectual and moral certainties of the anti-war rhetoric, which left very little room for future (anticipatory?) thought except to demand punitive or reparative action a posteriori and to await the next crisis. The present, it seems, had fallen out of our grasp. How did such a situation emerge?

At the same time within the United States, as in several parts of the world, the problem of Homeland Security has come to be surrounded by a distinctive sense of panic, which we ourselves came to feel at various moments. News of the deteriorating situations in Afghanistan and in Iraq are accompanied by reports of the “largest Executive Branch transformation in half a century with the Department of Homeland Security” in the United States. ² “The state of emergency has now become the rule rather than the exception.” We hear this claim across the entire political spectrum, in progressive journals of social theory and philosophy, conservative manuals of public policy, government legislations, activist reports, and op-ed pieces, although each may attribute the cause of this apparent shift to a different source. Such a claim is repeatedly, urgently mobilized with the body politic being trained to embody the currently endorsed level of anxiety in yellow, orange and red.

Within such an atmosphere, of certainty conjoined with panic, what constitutes a radical perspective? What tasks might radical scholarship set for itself? Words such as Democracy, Justice, Freedom, and Revolution have been used so often, by so many people, first and foremost by the Bush administration, that it would be completely disabling if the only work left to do were to adjudicate their “correct” or “truthful” application. Finding ourselves at a loss, as a first step we felt it crucial to address that which lay closest to us, which, given our location within the academy, meant returning to the question of intellectuals and power, or the intellectual life of power, in all its specificity, within the American context. With such an inquiry in mind we began to investigate the set of networks and institutions known as think tanks, seemingly the most crucial intellectual node in what is commonly known as the military-industrial complex.

Having set ourselves this task, the question arises: hasn’t such an inquiry been undertaken several times before? Indeed, all the empirical material for this argument, including think tank reports and self-descriptions, government documents and news archives, are publicly available, often less than a click away on the Internet. And there is no lack within existing social science literature or, more recently, on activist listservs of detailed descriptions of think tanks, of their politically implicated histories, and the neo-conservative takeover of American politics. Although motivated by many of these same concerns, our essay enters this terrain of inquiry at a slightly different angle of participation. We might present our mode of engagement as follows: In 1993, immediately after his tenure as Secretary of Defense in the administration of George Bush (Sr.), the current Vice-President Richard Cheney joined the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a think tank closely linked to the Republican Party since the time of the Reagan administration. Cheney then left the AEI in 1995 to become the Chairman of the Halliburton Company. Recently, under...