This might very well suck

But eh, it's for the Russians so I'm not terribly concerned

The Gargantuan American National Security State

And its increasing toll on both the finances and freedoms of Americas citizens

The Washington Post, usually the most reliably staid, obsequious, deferential, and power-worshipping of the major American newspapers, has published a remarkable series of articles this week titled Top Secret America. Reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin have preformed an invaluable public service by documenting the startlingly rapid expansion of the US intelligence apparatus in the years since 9/11. They depict what can only be called a parallel world: a group of 854,000 odd Americans (no one knows the actual number of people employed by the intelligence agencies, a fact which Defense Secretary Robert Gates sheepishly admitted in a recent interview) whose lives are marked by background investigations, polygraph examinations, drug tests, psychological evaluations, and any number of other things that render them completely unrecognizable to most Americans.

Terrifyingly, Priest and Arkin depict a government apparatus that is so huge, expansive, secretive, and complicated that is beyond any effective oversight and supervision. Certain parts of the series read as if they have been ripped out of random sections of Catch-22 or Kafkas The Trial: classified briefings in which note taking is forbidden, bureaucratic turf fights over information that cannot even be discussed, four star generals who are prohibited, without any apparent logic whatsoever, from learning the details of operations run by their subordinates, commanding officers who are not permitted to know the details of the budgets they oversee, and, most absurdly, an entire agency, with thousands of employees and a budget of billions of dollars, tasked with coordinating other agencies but which lacks the legal authority to actually order them to do anything. Indeed some individual agencies, such as the Department of Defense, have so many secret divisions and subprograms that only a few super users are even permitted to know of their existence, let alone their day-to-day operations.

For someone with a sick sense of humor its hard not to laugh at the whole spectacle: hundreds of thousands of people scurrying about spending hundreds of billions of US taxpayers dollars in ways so totally impenetrable and unaccountable that an honest assessment of the systems performance is literally impossible because, to put it crudely, the left hand doesnt know what the right is doing. As but one more example of the lunacy begotten by the proliferation of data systems, computer networks, and sub-agencies, one of the poor officials (anonymously) interviewed for the series had an office cluttered with four computer monitors and six separate hard drives. Why? Because he was a tech geek? No, because the dozens of databases which fed him the information he needed to do his job were totally incapable of interacting with one another. This image, a hassled middle manager is an anonymous office in the Washington suburbs frantically flipping between six different computers, none of which actually works, is hardly the romantic image of a spy projected by James Bond, but perfectly captures the Kafkaesque existence of an American intelligence officer.

Again the main point is that Americas government is now so vast, secretive, and opaque that it is practically unaccountable even to itself. That was the resounding image of the articles; not simply that the American public was not capable of exercising any sort of control over the behemoth that is the contemporary surveillance state (the American public, like most publics, has long been effectively sidelined from most important considerations of statecraft), but that no one was. Examples abounded of heads of sizable intelligence sections simply doing as they saw fit for months or years at a time with their conduct only being revealed post facto if there had been a major catastrophe. As one particularly glaring example the Fort Hood shooting would almost certainly have been stopped before it occurred if the intelligence unit tasked with supervising the US army hadnt gone rogue and arbitrarily decided that it should track foreign terrorists instead.

Perhaps Im just excitable or maybe, going off of the theory that if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail, because Ive studied Russia I unfailing try to compare everything to it, but reading through Priest and Arkins work I couldnt help but be reminded of some of the worst features of the old Soviet system (and to a lesser degree, of the contemporary Russian government). I see the same paranoia, the article detailed that in the aftermath of 9/11 dozens of US generals were granted sizable personal security details that were not justified by any conceivable need, the same compartmentalization and hoarding of information, the same arrogance, the same separation from the lives of ordinary citizens, and the same egregious wastefulness.

Indeed having read the article and tried to digest its contents, I wonder whether it might not be time to dust off yet another idea that the end of history in the 1990s had supposedly discredited but that seems increasingly appropriate and relevant: convergence. Convergence you will surely remember was the idea that the political and economic systems of the United States and Soviet Union were fated to inexorably become more similar and be drawn to a middle ground: the Soviets would become less repressive and dictatorial and the Americans would embrace central planning. Perhaps, though, the original theorists had it precisely backwards, perhaps it is the market that will reign supreme but democracy that will be increasingly seen as both anachronistic and naive.

Judging by history, there clearly wasnt convergence towards a Sweden-like Eurosocialism that was democratic but heavily regulated by the state. However one can, unfortunately, make a very plausible case that there has been, and will continue be, convergence towards some sort of vaguely autocratic state capitalism. This is particularly true if America, historically a government that was famous for its small footprint and its unbreakable commitment to traditional liberalism, has suddenly acquired a massive, intrusive, totally unaccountable, and ruinously expensive security apparatus with barely a peep from its citizens. As Priest and Akin show this apparatus has, like cancer, spread its sinews into virtually every corner of the country and in the process has produced an entire class of Americans which is heavily invested in its continuation (in what was a shocking revelation for me, the article reveals that 6 of the 10 richest counties in America have large intelligence installations in them).

It is endlessly fascinating that precisely as America became obsessed with violently exporting democracy in the years after 9/11 that the foundations of its own democracy started to rot at an accelerated clip. Adam Smith once said that there is a lot of ruin in a nation, so perhaps all is not lost, but I will confess that seeing the American government in so stark and so unflattering a light was a deeply disturbing experience.