Michael Chertoff says you should be afraid, very afraid. He’s right. Why? Because he’s our Homeland Security chief and he’s deranged.

A little less than a month ago, former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote a scathing Washington Post op-ed piece taking the Bush administration to task for parlaying the genuine national distress immediately following 911 into a perpetual, artificial climate of fear which they’ve used to justify the regime’s excesses, including the invasion of Iraq and various assaults on the Constitution. His focus was the “War on Terror;” not just the presumed execution of it but the phrase itself, which he rightly says is inherently meaningless and into which, because it’s so amorphous, can be fitted almost any activity. He also notes the use of strained historical anologies — the conflation of al Qaeda with Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union — and the associated demonization of political opponents.

The administration has finally issued a formal response, via Chertoff, and it’s fabulous: Chertoff demonizes Brzezinski, makes a strained historical analogy ‘twixt the war on terror and those 20th century exercises against enormous, heavily-armed totalitarian states, and variously distorts Brzezinski’s comments and lies about them.

Here’s what Brzezinski said in his lead paragraphs:

The “war on terror” has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration’s elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy, on America’s psyche and on U.S. standing in the world. Using this phrase has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us.

The damage these three words have done — a classic self-inflicted wound — is infinitely greater than any wild dreams entertained by the fanatical perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks when they were plotting against us in distant Afghan caves. The phrase itself is meaningless. It defines neither a geographic context nor our presumed enemies. Terrorism is not an enemy but a technique of warfare — political intimidation through the killing of unarmed non-combatants.

But the little secret here may be that the vagueness of the phrase was deliberately (or instinctively) calculated by its sponsors. Constant reference to a “war on terror” did accomplish one major objective: It stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear. Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue. The war of choice in Iraq could never have gained the congressional support it got without the psychological linkage between the shock of 9/11 and the postulated existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Support for President Bush in the 2004 elections was also mobilized in part by the notion that “a nation at war” does not change its commander in chief in midstream. The sense of a pervasive but otherwise imprecise danger was thus channeled in a politically expedient direction by the mobilizing appeal of being “at war.”

And here’s Chertoff’s response:

As the rubble of the Twin Towers smoldered in 2001, no one could have imagined a day when America’s leaders would be criticized for being tough in protecting Americans from further acts of war.

Now, less than six years later, that day has arrived.

Since Sept. 11, a conspiracy-minded fringe has claimed that American officials plotted the destruction. But when scholars such as Zbigniew Brzezinski accuse our leaders of falsely depicting or hyping a “war on terror” to promote a “culture of fear,” it’s clear that historical revisionism has gone mainstream.

Brzezinski stated the obvious in describing terrorism as a tactic, not an enemy [”Terrorized by ‘War on Terror,’ Outlook, March 25]. But this misses the point. We are at war with a global movement and ideology whose members seek to advance totalitarian aims through terrorism. Brzezinski is deeply mistaken to mock the notion that we are at war and to suggest that we should adopt “more muted reactions” to acts of terrorism.

In a few short sentences, Chertoff neatly confirms Brzezinski’s thesis, not least by lying about Brzezinski’s comments — Brzezinski didn’t say that the US was too tough on terrorists — and equating Brzezinski’s complaints with those of people who accuse the Bush administration of perpetrating 911. It’s comedic, or would be if Chertoff weren’t heading up our organ of state security and acting as the representative of the administration committing the rhetorical felony (along with innumerable actual ones) that set Brzezinski off.

He also takes an inadvertently revealing cheap shot at Brzezinski’s stint as Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, saying that “the impulse to minimize the threat we face is eerily reminiscent of the way America’s leaders played down the Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary fanaticism in the late 1970s. That naive approach ultimately foundered on the kidnapping of our diplomats in Tehran.”

Well, hmmm. Maybe there is a lesson or two we can learn from that situation. Khomeini led a revolution against a police state run by the Shah of Iran, who was installed by a US-led coup against Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953 and who ruled with an iron fist — developing one of the most brutal internal security forces around at the time — and continuing US support for the next 25 years. The revolution did indeed involve the kidnapping of US embassy personnel, who were then brutally slaughtered released unharmed by the new government following protracted negotiations. Iran was attacked shortly thereafter by Iraq, which the US assisted while shielding it from international pressure over its use of chemical weapons against Iran and its own population, and Iran has since invested considerable effort in bedeviling, on occasion violently, US projects in the region.

A sane person might conclude that there are consequences to US foreign policy that roughly correspond to the nature of the policy in question. People who benefit from US policies — the Shah, say, and his supporters and others who flourished under his regime — will appreciate the policies, while those who don’t — the people, for instance, who were tortured, imprisoned, exiled or otherwise inconvenienced by the Shah — won’t. And when the latter gain power, they’re understandably disinclined to trust us.

But Chertoff, and the nasty little narcissists for whom he works, don’t see it that way. They want what they want, what they want is intrinsically good because they want it, and people who don’t want it are intrinsically bad.

It’s actually pretty remarkable that more people don’t dislike us; we’ve been fortunate, until recently, that the reaction to US follies has as often as not been bewilderment rather than hostility. We’ve been seen as likeable if heavily armed galumphs, sometimes clumsy and ignorant but generally pleasant, frequently helpful and very rarely malevolent. After going on six years of the War on Terra^®, we no longer enjoy that presumption of good intent; Brzezinski’s highlighting of that circumstance probably irritated Chertoff and his masters and minions as much as anything else he said.

Brzezinski went a bit astray in his contrast of the atmosphere during World War II and the Cold War with that prevailing since 911, saying that we are not “the calm America that waged the Cold War with quiet persistence despite the knowledge that a real war could be initiated abruptly within minutes and prompt the death of 100 million Americans within just a few hours.” We had McCarthy during the Cold War, and Hoover’s domestic security excesses, and the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam, and CIA operations such as the one that installed the Shah. We had the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. But we also had a genuine existential threat, and no matter how much Chertoff and Cheney and especially our dear leader want or need to believe so, we don’t face that now.

So no wonder Chertoff had to call Brzezinski names. Neener neener neener.

UPDATE: I was remiss in failing to mention Chertoff’s absolutely breathtaking gall in accusing Brzezinski of historical revisionsim. This is the same administration that attempted to minimize the importance of the insurgency in Iraq by repeatedly insisting that post-WWII Germany was a hotbed of Nazi resistance.

UPDATE 2: I was also remiss in failing to mention that with his reference to Iran, Chertoff seems to be telling Brzezinski that if the US does attack that country, it’s Brzezinski’s fault for being such a wuss when he was in office. Since Brzezinski’s primary concern was that the administration is using the fear factor to boost prospects for an attack on Iran, the reference is, as they say, replete with irony.

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