Attention ‘New Democrats’: The New Republic Explains Why Tony Lake Should Not Head The CIA

(Washington, D.C.): In its 24 March
1997 edition, the magazine reputed to be required
reading for President Clinton, Vice
President Al Gore and other
self-described “New Democrats”
argues persuasively against the
nomination of Anthony Lake to become the
next Director of Central Intelligence.

To be sure, the author of the New
Republic‘s cover story
entitled “The Great
Equivocator: Why Tony Lake Should Not
Head the CIA,” Jacob
Heilbrunn, takes pains to disassociate
himself from the nominee’s
more-conservative critics. The portrait
that emerges from four pages filled with
excerpts of Lake writings, speeches and
illuminating anecdotes from his career,
nonetheless, largely jibes with the
critique offered by the Center for
Security Policy⁽¹⁾
and others:

The Problem With Tony

Tony Lake’s record is one
marked by dismal policy judgments, a lack
of vision or the courage of his
convictions and a seeming inability to
make tough, to say nothing of sound,
decisions — qualities that would be
undesirable in a DCI under any
circumstances. More to the
point, such an individual is
clearly an unacceptable candidate for
that post under the very difficult
circumstances in which the U.S.
intelligence community is currently
operating. href=”97-D39.html#N_2_”>⁽²⁾

This conclusion emerges from
Heilbrunn’s devastating examination of
what he calls Anthony Lake’s “blind
spot”:

“Lake’s view of the
world, decisively shaped by the
central event of his young
adulthood, the Vietnam War, is
rooted in moral ambiguity and
ambivalence. From
Cambodia to the Soviet Union,
from Bosnia to the Middle East,
Lake’s career-long penchant has
been to evade unpleasant
realities and elide the
differences imposed by clear
moral choices.”

A Bill of Particulars

In practice, as Heilbrunn documents,
this penchant has translated into a
classic — and seemingly irremediable —
case of moral equivalence. For example:

• Lake came to embrace the
  “standard liberal line”
  about Vietnam, namely as
  civil war in which — as
  Heilbrunn paraphrases —
  “both sides were
  nationalists [and] the U.S.
  should view the struggle with
  equanimity. The North might even
  be morally superior to the
  South.”
• Ditto Cambodia.
  Lake described Pol Pot’s
  murderous Khmer Rouge as
  “nationalists” and
  urged “an immediate,
  peaceful turning over of
  power” to them. “This
  would stop the final, useless
  killing.”
• Lake authored the notorious
  speech given by President Jimmy
  Carter in 1977 at Notre Dame
  decrying America’s “inordinate
  fear of communism.”
  He believed that conflicts in the
  Third World demonstrated
  “the limits to the influence
  of both the Soviet Union and the
  United States.” Lake never
  seemed to appreciate that the
  Soviets did not perceive those
  limits in the same light.
• Lake wrote sympathetically in
  1984 of the Soviet Union‘s
  walkout of the negotiations on
  intermediate-range nuclear forces
  saying, “[Moscow] seemed to
  be sending a message to the
  American electorate: there could
  be no genuine arms control while
  Reagan remained president.”
  Heilbrunn notes that even four
  years later in an New York
  Times op.ed. applauding the
  completed INF Treaty, “Lake
  could not bring himself to admit
  that an approach he regarded as
  fundamentally wrong — and worse,
  impolite — had worked….He
  applauded the results, but failed
  to recognize an important cause
  — Reagan’s intransigence.”
• Having positioned Clinton in the
  1992 campaign to George Bush’s
  right as a proponent of a hawkish
  response to Serbian
  aggression in Bosnia,
  once installed as National
  Security Advisor, Lake reverted
  to his practice of viewing the
  conflict through the prism of
  moral equivalence, as one
  involving only nationalists
  engaged in a messy civil war.
• Heilbrunn writes: “Lake
  never did come up with a strategy
  [on Bosnia], nor did he come to
  terms with the hard choice at
  hand….Lake was still trapped in
  what might charitably be called
  wishful thinking just weeks
  before the Serbs overran the
  ‘safe havens’ in Srebrenica and
  Zepa: ‘One thing we can hope is
  that whole event will have led
  all the parties to take a look at
  what going over the edge could
  mean,’ Lake said. They looked and
  they did.”
• Heilbrunn notes that “Lake’s
  ambivalence about confronting
  American enemies abroad was not
  confined to Bosnia. It also
  manifested itself toward Islamic
  fundamentalists in the Middle
  East and North Africa.
  [In an article published in Foreign
  Affairs in 1994,] Lake
  singled out economic misery and
  the exclusion of militants from
  the political sphere as the
  causes of terrorism. The hope was
  to reach an accommodation with
  the rebels in the event they came
  to power. The Clinton
  Administration’s brief flirtation
  with the Islamic Salvation Front
  not only threw Algeria into a
  panic, but Egypt and Saudi Arabia
  as well.”
• It is worth noting that this
  portentous initiative — with its
  strong echoes of Tony Lake’s
  tenure at the Carter State
  Department and that
  Administration’s contribution to
  the toppling of the Shah of Iran
  — was a pet project of Mr.
  Lake’s long-time friend and
  colleague, Morton
  Halperin. At the time,
  Halperin was responsible for
  “enlarging democracy”
  on the Lake National Security
  Council, a post he was given by
  Lake after Halperin’s nomination
  to a senior Defense Department
  post failed to pass muster in the
  Senate.
• Heilbrunn observes that, “as
  one of the architects of the
  [Clinton] Administration’s China
  policy, Lake has been at the
  forefront in coddling
  Beijing. Lake, who has
  adopted the Clintonite obsession
  with markets — the term appeared
  forty-one times in a recent
  speech — has insisted that the
  U.S. refrain from exposing
  Chinese efforts to export nuclear
  materials to Third World
  countries. No country will loom
  larger in the CIA’s future
  calculations than China.”
• Lake’s worst instincts were much
  in evidence in what was billed as
  a major Lake address before a
  George Washington University
  audience on 6 March 1996.
  Heilbrunn reports that “Lake
  attempted to define when
  force should be used. He
  declared that there are ‘seven
  circumstances, which, taken in
  some combination or even alone,
  may call for the use of force.’
  But, of Lake’s seven categories,
  only one would automatically
  trigger military action. Which
  one? A direct attack against the
  U.S. or its allies. Yes, of
  course. Where is the nation that
  would not respond militarily if
  it were attacked?”

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy
welcomes the timely contribution of this
damning bill of particulars on the Lake
nomination from a publication highly
regarded by sensible Democrats and many
others. It could not agree more with
Jacob Heilbrunn’s bottom line:

“Lake’s record on foreign
policy cannot be dismissed.
During the Cold War, CIA
directors could come and go, but
the basic mission of combating
communism remained the same. No
American mission so morally
clear-cut and universally
accepted exists now. Instead the
CIA, like the government and the
Nation, is groping its way toward
a new definition of self-interest
and morality in America’s conduct
abroad.

“At a time like this, Anthony
Lake is a curious choice to head
the agency responsible for
monitoring and challenging
America’s foes. He has, after
all, been reluctant to
acknowledge that foes even exist.“

– 30 –

1.
See, for example, the following
Center products: Why Tony
Lake Is In Trouble in the Senate
(No. 97-D 36, 3
March 1997); ‘In Lake We
Trust’? Confirmation Make-Over
Exacerbates Senate Concerns About
D.C.I.-Designate’s Candor, Reliability
(No. 97-T 04, 8
January 1997); and U.S.
Counter-Intelligence Failures Suggest the
Nation Urgently Needs Someone Other
Than Tony Lake As D.C.I.
(No. 96-T
133, 23 December 1996).

2. It is worth
noting that Lake’s management style might
be a disqualifying factor for his
appointment as DCI, even if his other
credentials were impeccable. Heilbrunn
reports that “Lake became famous for
chairing deliberations that never arrived
at conclusions. Participants in NSC
meetings still say that the meetings only
ran smoothly and produced coherent
results when they were headed by Lake’s
former deputy (and current National
Security Advisor) Sandy Berger.”