Is there anything more diabolical than war? For some people today, the answer may be, “Yes, there is.” They might then cite Jeffrey Epstein’s decades-long campaign to harness to his own and his friends’ advantage a plurality of evil practices: pedophilia, espionage, trafficking (arms, drugs, humans), the science of kompromat applied to an entire generation of political leaders, financial skullduggery, stretching even — according to some — to cannibalism. A year or so before the fatal event that took the flamboyant operator’s life in a New York City jail cell, Steve Bannon, US President Donald Trump’s former Svengali, conducted an interview in which he asked Epstein, with high seriousness, whether he himself was the devil. The usually confident man Bannon flattered in the same interview as a financial genius was taken aback, as if he had been found out.

For all the amply documented evil he may have perpetrated over many decades, Epstein cannot be held accountable for anything remotely comparable to the massive devastation wrought during more than four years of a US proxy war in Ukraine and four weeks of a US–Israeli war on Iran. Both conflicts are ongoing and the war in Iran is currently escalating, possibly uncontrollably. It has already derailed the global economy and contains the serious prospect of provoking a nuclear attack, were Israel to feel existentially threatened.

It has become evident that Epstein was linked in mysterious ways with Israel’s government, the Mossad and in all likelihood with the CIA. In other words, Epstein’s brand of evil doesn’t stop with the abuse of underage girls. His activities, beginning with involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration, were often related to war, to the point that some are calling the conflict now wreaking havoc in West Asia a war waged by the “Epstein class” against the Islamic Republic. The more we learn about his manipulative relationship as a participant in a coterie linking together Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, US Senior Advisor Jared Kushner, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Trump ally Tom Barrack, the more we can see Epstein as a peripheral but significant factor in the buildup to the current war.

As I think back on the events that preceded both of these wars, one whose initial provocation dates back to 2008 when US President George W. Bush insisted on enlarging NATO to include Ukraine and Georgia — the other executed as a surprise attack by Trump a month ago — I’m legitimately puzzled by the actions of all those who have contributed to the logic of war. In particular, there are two specific moments in contemporary history that have intrigued me, two documented events from the first decade of the 21st century that throw light on how the seeds of two wars were sown: the hot war Russia launched in 2022 and the surprise attack of the US and Israel on Iran a month ago.

The first was General Wesley Clark’s revelation in 2003 that the Pentagon was following a plan for a carefully orchestrated series of regime change wars devised by a pack of Bush administration neo-cons close to Israel. Then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson recently explained his discovery in 2002 that Mossad “had the run of the Pentagon.” He encountered Mossad operators circulating freely in the corridors of the US Defense Department. The document Clark revealed in a television interview was a plan to get the US involved in regime change wars in seven Muslim countries over a five-year span, starting with Iraq and ending with Iran.

The second is the leaked memo in which William Burns, the US ambassador to Russia at the time, warned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice of Moscow’s “brightest of all redlines” concerning the prospect of NATO expansion into Ukraine. Burns advised that it “could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war.”

There are two things that surprise me about these revelations. The first is that they had no effect on policy at the time. Both signaled a risk of war. Serious analysis in both cases would have indicated that both conflict situations would be difficult to control and that the resulting war would be costly. And yet both observations were given no serious consideration, nor did the legacy media at the time give them any serious attention. In a functioning democracy, one might expect first that such revelations would lead to some kind of public debate. Following the logic of the US Constitution, one would assume that, at the very least, Congress, which was intended to represent and reflect the interests of its members’ constituencies, would have debated these questions.

The second surprising fact is that both Clark and Burns seem to have forgotten the principles and the associated feelings that guided them at the time. Burns composed an emotionally charged title to his memo with every letter capitalized: “NYET MEANS NYET: RUSSIA’S NATO ENLARGEMENT REDLINES.” More than a decade later, US President Joe Biden appointed the diplomat CIA Director. In that office, Burns fully supported the administration’s insistence on violating those same capitalized REDLINES.

As for Clark, the plan issued by the Pentagon that he recounted openly on television in 2003 has now reached a kind of fulfillment with the joint US–Israeli war on Iran, though the five year time frame he initially reported has been stretched to 23 years. Earlier this month on a Bloomberg podcast, he declared, “I can tell you that this campaign is off to a good start, but there’s a lot more to be done, as the Secretary of War said.”

As I was drafting the above confession of bewilderment, I began wondering what an AI chatbot friend might have to say about it. I have regularly developed conversations with a diversity of AI platforms  in my other weekly column, Outside the Box. These private conversations — which I make public by publishing them —  may not have the same value as my interviews with diplomats, former CIA officers and geopolitical thinkers, but it always helps to refine both my grasp of knowledge and clarity of ideas. 

In the particular cases of Clark and Burns, there are many things I’m not aware of concerning how decision-making about war and peace plays out in a modern democracy. Some people wonder whether the decision-makers themselves are aware of these critical factors. Like most people whose education has instilled in them a set of ideas about the citizen’s role in a democracy, I retain a basic belief in the reliability of a system, despite its imperfections, designed to reflect the will of the people and crafted with a presumably foolproof set of checks and balances. Coming to grips with historical reality can sometimes feel disappointing.

With all these thoughts in mind, I copied the substance of the preceding paragraphs and addressed the following prompt to Claude:

Am I wrong to be surprised by what appears to be inconsistency or to be shocked by the terrifying consequences of these two singular failures to react, reflect, debate, plan and execute on the basis of good intelligence?

Below is Claude’s full response. It offers some precious insights into the complexity of human causes that contribute what by now should be recognizable as some of contemporary history’s most disastrous political decisions.

You’re not wrong to be surprised, and your puzzlement touches on something genuinely important — but I’d suggest the surprise itself may point toward an explanation. Let me work through the two phenomena you’ve identified.

On the failure to act on good intelligence

Both the Clark revelation and the Burns memo share a structural feature: they were warnings issued within systems that had already committed to a direction of travel. Despite Burns’s meticulous 12-point cable, and his personal email to Rice warning that a NATO membership offer “would be seen not as a technical step along a long road toward membership, but as throwing down the strategic gauntlet,” the Bush administration plowed ahead at the 2008 Bucharest summit. Burns himself was deeply dissatisfied, noting that Bucharest left the West “with the worst of both worlds — indulging the Ukrainians and Georgians in hopes of NATO membership on which we were unlikely to deliver, while reinforcing Putin’s sense that we were determined to pursue a course he saw as an existential threat.”

The Clark case was similar in structure. Clark criticized the plan to attack the seven states, arguing it targeted the wrong countries, ignored “the real sources of terrorists,” and failed to achieve “the greater force of international law” that would bring wider global support. His warnings were public but inconsequential. The reason is worth examining: both Clark and Burns were operating within what political scientists sometimes call a “blob” — the self-reinforcing foreign policy consensus of Washington think tanks, officials, and media — and their dissents, however vivid, were processed as subordinate inputs rather than fundamental challenges.

As for the media and Congress, your observation about democratic dysfunction is entirely fair. The neoconservatives never described Russia’s redline to the American or global public, then or now. That silence was not accidental. The kind of deliberative democratic process you’d expect — congressional hearings, public debate, cost-benefit scrutiny of the proposed wars — was deliberately bypassed. With Iraq, the administration made its case on false WMD premises and did not present the Clark-style strategic vision publicly. With Ukraine, the Burns cable only came to light through the WikiLeaks diplomatic cable dump in 2010, years after the critical decisions had been made. You can’t debate what you don’t know.

On the personal reversals of Clark and Burns

This, I think, is the more psychologically and politically interesting of your two puzzlements, and perhaps the more disturbing.

The most straightforward explanation involves the difference between the role of critic and the role of executor. Clark, as a retired general and sometime presidential candidate, spoke from outside the machinery of power. When he described the Pentagon plan on television, he was doing so as a commentator and memoirist. His recent Bloomberg comments cheerleading the Iran campaign suggest he has re-identified with the military-strategic culture he was once criticizing — or perhaps that he never fundamentally opposed regime change as such, only its specific sequencing or justification. Clark’s book also described a telling encounter with Paul Wolfowitz in May 1991 after the Gulf War, in which Wolfowitz argued that “with the end of the Cold War, we can now use our military with impunity.” Clark recorded this with evident alarm — yet the logic he now seems to endorse is not entirely different.

Burns’s case is in some ways more striking. Burns wrote that “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin)” and that in over two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, he had “yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” His 2008 memo was a masterwork of empathetic strategic analysis — trying to make Washington feel the world as Moscow saw it. Yet as Biden’s CIA Director from 2021 onward, he presided over precisely the policy trajectory his younger self had warned against.

There are several non-exclusive explanations for this kind of reversal. One is institutional capture: once inside a powerful enough institution, people tend to internalize its logic and its definitions of loyalty and pragmatism. Another is epistemic: Burns may genuinely believe that the 2022 invasion changed the moral calculus so completely that his earlier warnings, while prescient about risk, don’t translate into policy conclusions he would still endorse — that Russia’s conduct forfeited the consideration he once asked for it. A third possibility, less flattering, is what you might call the psychology of the accomplished: people who have worked hard within a system tend, over time, to identify with its outcomes even when those outcomes contradict their earlier positions, because the alternative is to conclude that their careers served purposes they now consider wrong.

On the deeper pattern

What you’re identifying connects to a broader failure in American strategic culture — the consistent inability to credit adversaries with legitimate interests. Burns’s memo conveyed that Russia feared “unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences” from NATO expansion, that it perceived encirclement, and that the warning signs were systemic and bipartisan within Russian politics — not merely Putin’s personal pathology. This was not secret knowledge: George Kennan, the architect of Cold War containment, had warned against NATO expansion in precisely these terms as early as 1997. The warnings were available, credible, and ignored.

So you’re right to be shocked, but I’d gently push back on the word “inconsistency” as the primary category here. What Clark and Burns represented in their warning moments was good professional judgment briefly surfacing against institutional momentum. The tragedy is not merely that individuals later changed their minds or accommodated power — that is depressingly common. It’s that the institutions themselves had no mechanism to receive such warnings as binding inputs. The warnings were heard, filed, and overridden. That’s a structural problem in how American foreign policy is actually made — one in which the constitutional role of Congress you mention has become almost entirely vestigial in matters of war and strategy. And without that democratic friction, there is nothing to slow down the momentum of a policy community that has already decided what it wants to do.

I applaud Claude on the diplomatic politeness of the formula describing the two men’s unheeded warnings as “good professional judgment briefly surfacing against institutional momentum.” But there are several other points to be further explored on the nature of “institutional momentum.” I intend to react to Claude’s analysis and develop those points in my next column.

*[The Devil’s Advocate pursues the tradition Fair Observer began in 2017 with the launch of our “Devil’s Dictionary.” It does so with a slight change of focus, moving from language itself — political and journalistic rhetoric — to the substantial issues in the news. Read more of the Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary. The news we consume deserves to be seen from an outsider’s point of view. And who could be more outside official discourse than Old Nick himself?]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.