[Marxism] Robert Baer: Iran did it

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Robert Baer's memoir served as the basis for the misbegotten "Syriana". I 
am not sure whether to blame this on the memoir (since I have not read it) 
or on the adaptation. In any case, it falls into the category of the 
literature that has sprung up since the occupation of Iraq turned sour, 
namely one that calls for a more "intelligent" use of our spies and our 
military. Richard Clarke wrote one of these books as have Michael Gordon 
and Bernard Trainor. One can only assume that if the invasion of Iraq had 
been as successful as that of Grenada or Panama, these characters never 
would have lifted pen to paper. In Baer's latest book, a novel of all 
things, he blames Iran for 9/11. I guess that's only a little less loopy 
than blaming the CIA or the Jews.

====

The New York Times, June 30, 2006
Books of The Times | 'Blow the House Down'
A Superspy on the Border Between Fact and Fiction
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

In his colorful 2002 memoir, "See No Evil," the former C.I.A. officer 
Robert Baer portrayed himself as a brash, swashbuckling agent, more Tom 
Clancy operative than geeky technocrat: someone at home in the dark places 
of the globe, someone who knew how to "mix up a potent cocktail called 
methyl nitrate" or make a bus disappear with 20 pounds of C-4. He emerged 
from that book as a tough-talking critic of today's C.I.A. and a 
shoot-from-the-hip maverick who attributed the failure to thwart the 
terrorist attacks of 9/11 to the agency's cautious post-cold-war mind-set, 
its defanged, deskbound, red-tape-ridden ethos.

In Mr. Baer's dubious new thriller, "Blow the House Down," the hero ? one 
Max Waller by name ? is a colorful, swashbuckling agent, more Bond than 
bureaucrat, someone equally at home in the third world and a Four Seasons 
hotel, and equally adept at romancing the ladies, tailing terrorists and 
transferring millions of dollars between secret bank accounts. He is a 
fierce critic of his careerist colleagues and political-minded bosses, and 
his cowboy attitude and obsession with nailing the identity of an Iranian 
terrorist get him suspended from the C.I.A.

"Blow the House Down" belongs to that limboland of fact and fiction, 
pioneered by E. L. Doctorow's "Ragtime." Mixed in with fictional characters 
are real people like John O'Neill, the former F.B.I. counterterrorism 
chief, who was killed in the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center; and 
William Buckley, the C.I.A. station chief in Beirut, who died in captivity 
after being taken hostage in 1984. No doubt these real people have been 
dropped into this novel to pump up the air of verisimilitude supplied by 
Mr. Baer's inside knowledge of C.I.A. operations, but his decision to use 
their deaths as plot points in a high-decibel thriller feels cynical in the 
extreme.

In an interview with the investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh (sent out 
by the publisher's publicity department), Mr. Baer has said that he tried, 
in "Blow the House Down," to provide "an alternative scenario" to the 
events leading up to 9/11, a scenario "which may be true and which the 9/11 
Commission could never go into that deep."

The scenario that he sets forth reads in these pages like an alarming 
hodgepodge of the plausible, the speculative and the absurd. The novel's 
fictional characters speculate that Iran might have had something to do 
with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11; that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, one of 
the central planners of those attacks, might have had links to Iran's 
Revolutionary Guards; that a mysterious Iranian (who might have had 
something to do with the kidnapping of William Buckley) might have had a 
mysterious meeting with Osama bin Laden in Pakistan before 9/11; and that a 
dastardly American businessman ? who supposedly had close ties to Khalid 
Shaikh Mohammed, assorted Washington neoconservatives and a right-wing 
member of the National Security Council ? used the attacks to make a 
killing on the stock market.

In real life the Sept. 11 commission and numerous newspaper and magazine 
articles have looked into Iran's links with terrorism, including ties 
between Al Qaeda and the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah, and evidence 
suggesting that members of Al Qaeda, including some of the 9/11 hijackers, 
might have used Iran as a safe transit point in their travels to and from 
Afghanistan. The former counterterrorism czar Richard A. Clarke wrote in 
his 2004 book, "Against All Enemies," "When the Bush administration talked 
about Iraq as a nation that supported terrorism, including Al Qaeda, and 
was developing weapons of mass destruction, those comments perfectly suited 
Iran, not Iraq." And in "See No Evil" Mr. Baer asserted that "the Islamic 
Republic of Iran had declared a secret war against the United States, and 
the United States had chosen to ignore it."

But if Mr. Baer's intention in his new novel is to goad readers into a 
serious consideration of Iran's possible terrorist connections (a timely 
subject, given current worries about Iran's nuclear program), he fails in 
this mission by cavalierly mixing fact and fiction, the credible and the 
preposterous.

While there are some bravura set pieces in "Blow the House Down" and some 
suspenseful sequences that suggest Mr. Baer could one day produce a 
genuinely thrilling thriller, his story is painfully hobbled by its 
cartoonish central villain: the tycoon David Channing, a fire-breathing 
nihilist who embodies virtually every ugly trait imaginable (greed, 
bigotry, sexism, cruelty, hubris and contempt, not to mention an eager 
willingness to kill thousands of people in order to fill his own pockets) 
and who spews a disgusting stream of misogynist, anti-Semitic, homophobic 
vitriol.

There are other credibility problems as well. Although Mr. Baer uses his 
firsthand knowledge of tradecraft and out-of-the-way places in the Middle 
East to create some gritty, tension-filled scenes reminiscent, at best, of 
John le Carré's work, he creates an equal number of ridiculous scenes in 
which his hero seems to misplace his training and his common sense.

Would an experienced case officer, convinced that he is being trailed by 
treacherous enemies, sit down on an airplane, scribble notes to himself on 
a napkin and then leave that napkin in the seat pouch? Would he then pull 
out his laptop, type out more notes about the case he is working on and 
then stow the computer in the overhead rack while he goes off to get a drink?

Such ludicrous scenes, combined with Mr. Baer's more ridiculous inventions 
in his story, not only make for an unbelievable thriller but also subvert 
the more serious points he wants to make about terrorism, intelligence 
missteps and Sept. 11.


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