The Iron Triangle - Inside The Secret World Of The Carlyle Group - By Dan Briody

At the dawn of the third millennium, as the nation prepares for its
second war in the Persian Gulf in little more than 10 years, the same
debate rages in this country that has defined it for the last three
centuries: What exactly does it mean to be an American? Is America
a place or a state of mind?
The British may love their language, and the French may love their
gold, but Americans love more than anything to argue over who they
really are. And in all that time, and all that arguing— from the
dueling essays of Jefferson and Hamilton, to the confused politics of
the Reform Party and Pat Buchanan—the American story has
ultimately never strayed very far from the plotline that has energized it
from the start.
You may devote a lifetime to peeling back the onion skins of the
American Experience, as so many scholars have done, and no matter
where you stop you will always encounter the same basic question that
frames our history: In a democracy, what are the limits to legitimate
power?
At its core, that is the question that informs The Iron Triangle: Inside the
Secret World of the Carlyle Group—-just as it eventually seems to inform
our understanding of everything that ever happens in
American public life, from the XYZ Affair to the Pentagon Papers. It
is why one generation of Americans enacts the Sherman Antitrust Act,
and a later generation eviscerates it. At the start of the 1950s, a
screenwriter named Ring Lardner, Jr. was imprisoned as a Communist
sympathizer; a generation later he was lionized in Hollywood as the
screenwriter of M*A*S*H. Of such moments is the history of this country eventually told, as
Americans engage in the ceaseless pursuit of midcourse corrections
to get where we want to go as a nation without becoming a
tyranny in the process. When Richard Nixon lamented the nation's
seeming obsession with "wallowing in Watergate," he missed the
key point: As a nation and a people, we really had no other choice.
Now, in the winter of 2003, with America's wrath once again poised
to strike down Iraq, a palpable sense is abroad in the land— not
shared by all, but shared by enough—that we have somehow drawn a
line in the sand where we never really intended to stand. How did we
get to this moment anyway? In the visible mechanism of political cause
and effect, part of what's happening feels hidden from view. We see
the cause, and we see the effect. But the assembly of gears that
transmits the power seems off somewhere else, in another room.
It is the work of scholarship—and in particular, of that uniquely
American kind of contemporary scholarship that we call investigative
journalism—to enter those darkened rooms and switch on the light so
that all may see what is actually taking place. When the work is done
well, and the message is true, we find ourselves in a diorama we never
imaged could exist. One thinks in that regard of Jacob A. Riis's How
the Other Half Lives, or more recently, and on a different stage entirely,
Wise and Ross's Invisible Government. At other times, the exposes
connect invisible dots, and in fairly short order are deservedly
consigned to the ash bin of history as conspiracy theory. (Want to
find yourself standing alone at a cocktail party? Then try suggesting
that you have it on good authority that the Trilateral Commission
actually runs the world.)
Briody's scholarship will meet no such fate, for not only are the facts
of The Iron Triangle accurate, but the picture they present is also true.
And just as Invisible Government in 1964 helped bring depth to our
understanding of some of the missing gears that soon drove America
into the jungles and highlands of Indochina, so too does The Iron
Triangle introduce us to the men (and they are mostly just that) whose
role in the geopolitics of the Middle East is now only glimpsed
fleetingly, and never by design.