The Impending Failure in Afghanistan
America’s neocon-driven foreign policy is more about political one-ups-man-ship
in Official Washington than the realities on the ground in countries like
Afghanistan where the U.S. military is then expected to do more than is
possible, leading to failure after failure, as Independent Institute’s Ivan
Eland describes.
By Ivan Eland
As U.S. forces withdraw from parts of Afghanistan, the Taliban is making gains
in several areas of the country. The Afghan police and army are slowly giving
way, despite the United States spending 13 years and tens of billions of dollars
training those forces.
When the United States completes its withdrawal from ground combat at the end of
this year, this unfavorable trend will undoubtedly accelerate, that is, if the
Afghan security forces don’t collapse altogether, as did similarly U.S. trained
Iraqi forces in that country. Thus, in the longest war in American history, the
U.S. military has failed to pacify Afghanistan, as had the mighty British Empire
three times in the 19th and early 20th centuries and the Soviet superpower more
recently in the 1980s. In fact, an outside force has not pacified Afghanistan
since Cyrus the Great of Persia did it in ancient times.
Why did the United States have the hubris to think it could succeed in taming
Afghanistan, when all of these other strenuous efforts had failed? Because many
in the American foreign policy elite, media and citizenry believe in “American
exceptionalism.” As propounded by politicians of both parties, for example,
Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright in the Democratic Party and people such
as John McCain and his sidekick Lindsay Graham in the Republican Party, America
is the “indispensable nation” to a world that cannot do without its solving most
major problems using military power.
Yet despite the current public fawning over military personnel and veterans of
American wars, the U.S. military has been fairly incompetent in most major
engagements since World War II that required significant ground forces, with
only Desert Storm in 1991 being an unvarnished success in recent years. The U.S.
armed forces are probably more powerful than any other military in world
history, both absolutely and relative to other countries, yet their battlefield
performance has not been that great, especially against irregular guerrilla
forces in the developing world.
In the post-World War II era, the U.S. military managed to fight the then-poor
nation of China to only a draw in the Korean War (1950-1953); lost the Vietnam
War (1965-1973) to ragtag Viet Cong guerrillas and North Vietnamese; and made
the same mistakes of Vietnam in Iraq and Afghanistan, initially using excessive
firepower and alienating the population, the allegiance of which is key to
fighting guerrillas.
Even in lesser ground operations against small weak foes, the U.S. military has
not performed all that well. Although successful, the invasions of Grenada and
Panama exhibited embarrassing snafus, such as friendly fire casualties caused by
the inability of U.S. services to adequately communicate and coordinate and the
wanton destruction of civilian areas and excessive casualties in what was
supposed to have been a surgical operation, respectively.
The hostage rescue mission conducted in Iran in 1980 had to be aborted. Finally,
U.S. interventions in Lebanon and Somalia under the Reagan and the George H.W.
Bush/Clinton administrations, respectively, led to ignominious cutting and
running from those countries after successful enemy attacks, inspiring Osama bin
Laden to believe he could compel U.S. withdrawal from overseas interventions by
launching terrorist attacks against U.S. military forces (the U.S.S. Cole) and
facilities overseas and even American territory.
Whenever the U.S. military has a setback, it usually hints around that the
civilian leadership of the country was more to blame. And civilian leaders are
partly to blame in most of these instances, but the military should not escape
public scrutiny for these disasters, which it largely has. The problem is that
the American public feels guilty for the alleged abuse of returning Vietnam-era
veterans and for the fact with an all-volunteer Army, it doesn’t have to
sacrifice much during all these American military adventures overseas.
Of course, if the public really wanted to do something to support American
service personnel, it should put a stop to them fighting and dying in faraway
developing nations to allegedly combat much exaggerated threats to the United
States. However, sufficient public outrage needed to end the conflicts was not
evident for either Afghanistan or Iraq.
But what exactly went wrong in Afghanistan? As in Vietnam and Iraq, the U.S.
military has not been fighting conventional armies, such as Iraqi forces during
Desert Storm, which it is best at. Instead, in all three places, it was
conducting what amounts to military social work. U.S. armed forces are fighting
guerrillas that melt back into an all-important supportive indigenous civilian
population. In Vietnam, initially, U.S. forces used excessive firepower, which
alienated civilians; in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. military, forgetting the
lessons of Vietnam, did the same thing.
But American citizens ask, “Aren’t our forces more benevolent than the brutal
Taliban? Why does the Taliban still get so much support in Afghanistan?” The
answer: because they are Afghans. As my book, The Failure of Counterinsurgency:
Why Hearts and Minds Are Seldom Won, notes, when fighting indigenous insurgents,
the foreign invader never gets the benefit of the doubt.
This central point makes it difficult for great powers to win wars against
insurgents, no matter how nice they try to be to the civilian populace. And the
U.S. military is usually fairly unfamiliar with the language and culture of
distant lands in which they intervene, thus making it difficult to get good
information about who is a guerrilla and who is not.
Often the only way to win a counterinsurgency is to annihilate the entire
country with indiscriminate and potent violence; yet the Soviets used such
scorched-earth policies in Afghanistan and didn’t win. Furthermore, the U.S.
military would have difficulty selling such a morally bankrupt policy, which
amounts to “destroying a country in order to save it,” in a republic.
America is exceptional, however in a way the nation’s Founders realized but has
long been forgotten. Being far away from the centers of world conflict, the
United States has probably the best intrinsic security of any great power in
world history. Thus, the Founders had the luxury of being suspicious of standing
armies in a republic.
Furthermore, as in any other public bureaucracy, when people are spending other
people’s money, things often go awry. Thus, sending the military to war should
only be done in the most dire cases of national security. Military restraint was
the Founders’ vision, but we have drifted far from it into a militaristic
society in constant war.
Ivan Eland is Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent
Institute. Dr. Eland has spent 15 years working for Congress on national
security issues, including stints as an investigator for the House Foreign
Affairs Committee and Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget
Office. His books include The Empire Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy
Exposed, and Putting “Defense” Back into U.S. Defense Policy. [This story
originally was published as a blog post at HuffingtonPost.]
Why JFK Still Matters
Since John F. Kennedy’s death, there’s been little presidential rhetoric that
was not either bombastic and self-serving Reagan’s “tear down this wall” or
cringingly dishonest Nixon’s “I am not a crook” or Clinton’s “I did not have
sexual relations with that woman.” Which may be why JFK still inspires many,
writes Beverly Bandler.
By Beverly Bandler
The special quality of John Fitzgerald Kennedy still defies those who would
diminish him. He touched something in the American spirit. It lives on 51 years
after his death.
And, in an era when many Democrats shy from a political fight and reject the
“liberal” label as somehow too controversial, it is worth recalling the more
courageous attitude of John F. Kennedy.
“What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label ‘Liberal’?” Kennedy
asked in accepting the New York Liberal Party’s presidential endorsement in
1960. “If by a ‘Liberal’ they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind,
someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about
the welfare of the people, their health, their housing, their schools, their
jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties, someone who believes we can
break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad,
if that is what they mean by a ‘Liberal,’ then I’m proud to say I’m a
‘Liberal.’”
John Fitzgerald Kennedy also said the essential question everyone wants to know
about a president is, “What’s he like?” quotes journalist John Dickerson.
JFK has been described as charming, witty, contradictory, elusive, inspiring.
The respected American journalist Hugh Sidey (1927-2005) covered the White House
and the American presidency for Time Magazine for close to half a century. Said
Sidey: “The special quality of John Kennedy that still defies those who would
diminish him is that he touched something in the American spirit and it lives
on.”
That mix of personal magnetism and practical idealism made Kennedy the iconic
leader who inspired millions although his presidency was cut short after less
than three years by an assassin’s bullet.
Journalist, friend and neighbor Ben Bradlee (1921-2014) described Kennedy as
“graceful, gay, funny, witty, teasing and teasable, forgiving, hungry, incapable
of being corny, restless, interesting, interested, exuberant, blunt, profane,
and loving. He was all of those and more.”
For those of us who came of age in the repressive 1950s, an era of not only
McCarthyism but unabashed hypocrisy, double standards and deadening conformity,
the urbane and charismatic Jack Kennedy represented a welcome new generation of
youth, vigor, and optimism, one dedicated to public service and to country in
the best sense of the word “patriotism.”
The aura of youth and vigor JFK conveyed is even more amazing given the extent
of his medical issues, which were hidden from the public. According to one of
his doctors, Dr. Jeffrey A. Kelman, “The most remarkable thing was the extent to
which Kennedy was in pain every day of his presidency.”
John Kennedy suffered from severe health problems all his life. His childhood in
the 1920s was a constant saga of childhood maladies, bronchitis, chicken pox,
ear infections, German measles, measles, mumps, whooping cough. He came down
with scarlet fever when he was three months shy of three years of age. “His
illnesses filled the family with anxiety about his survival,” writes historian
Robert Dallek.
At 13, Kennedy was afflicted with an undiagnosed and unsolved illness, suffering
from dizziness and weakness, fatigue, and abdominal pains. At 15, he weighed
only 117 pounds.
By the end of January 1936 at 19, he was more worried than ever about his
health, though he continued to use humor to defend himself against thoughts of
dying: “Took a peak [sic] at my chart yesterday and could see that they were
mentally measuring me for a coffin. Eat drink & make Olive [his current
girlfriend], as tomorrow or next week we attend my funeral. I think the
Rockefeller Institute may take my case…”
Reading John F. Kennedy’s medical history is reading a profile in constant
suffering. Serious back problems added to Kennedy’s health miseries from 1940.
“For all the accuracy of the popular accounts praising Kennedy’s valor on
PT-109,” writes Dallek, “the larger story of his endurance has not been told.”
Except for his chronic back pain, which he could not hide, neither his
commanding officer nor his crew were aware of the challenge of constant illness
and pain. Despite his medical difficulties fatigue, nausea and vomiting
“symptoms of the as yet undiagnosed Addison’s disease,” Kennedy “like a
skeleton, thin and drawn” ran successfully for a House seat in 1946.
Kennedy was diagnosed with Addison’s disease, a hormonal deficiency that affects
the kidneys, while in London in 1947. The doctor predicted that “he hasn’t got a
year to live.” According to Dallek: “On his way home to the United States, on
the Queen Mary, Kennedy became so sick that upon arrival a priest was brought
aboard to give him last rites before he was carried off the ship on a
stretcher.” By 1950 he was suffering almost constant lower-back aches and
spasms.
Dallek continues the litany of John F. Kennedy’s medical tribulations: “In 1952,
during a successful campaign to replace Henry Cabot Lodge as senator from
Massachusetts, Kennedy suffered headaches, upper respiratory infections, stomach
aches, urinary-tract discomfort, and nearly unceasing back pain.
“He consulted an ear, nose, and throat specialist about his headaches; took
anti-spasmodics and applied heat fifteen minutes a day to ease his stomach
troubles; consulted urologists about his bladder and prostate discomfort; had
DOCA pellets implanted and took daily oral doses of cortisone to control his
Addison’s disease; and struggled unsuccessfully to find relief from his back
miseries.
“Dave Powers, one of Kennedy’s principal aides, remembers that at the end of
each day on the road during the [1952] campaign, Kennedy would climb into the
back seat of the car, where ‘he would lean back … and close his eyes in pain.’
At the hotel he would use crutches to get himself up stairs and then soak in a
hot bath for an hour before going to bed. ‘The pain,’ Powers adds, ‘often made
him tense and irritable with his fellow travelers.’ ”
“From May of 1955 until October of 1957,” notes the historian, “as he tried to
get the 1956 vice-presidential nomination and then began organizing his
presidential campaign, Kennedy was hospitalized nine times, for a total of
forty-five days, including one nineteen-day stretch and two week-long stays. The
record of these two and a half years reads like the ordeal of an old man, not
one in his late thirties, in the prime of life.”
Dallek quotes Powers’s whisper to another Kennedy aide, Kenneth O’Donnell in
February of 1960 when, during the presidential campaign, Kennedy stood for hours
in the freezing cold shaking hands with workers arriving at a meatpacking plant
in Wisconsin: “God, if I had his money, I’d be down there on the patio at Palm
Beach.”
The full extent of Kennedy’s medical maladies was not known until 2002, the
result of
Dallek’s being entrusted with the review of a collection of JFK’s
papers for the years 1955-1963. The historian writes that after reaching the
White House, Kennedy believed it was more essential than ever to hide his
afflictions.
That a rumored “legendary love life,” “obsessive womanizing,” the many tales of
sexual “hijinks” or “sexual escapades” were attributed to him (consistently kept
alive by the amazingly self-righteous, and perhaps envious, members of the
“conservative” Noise Machine) makes JFK more remarkable in the 24 hours a day by
which he, like the rest of us, was limited.
There have been many “second assassination” attempts by various right-wing hit
men and seekers of quick bucks who seduce the gullible with the salacious and
sensational (historian Garry Wills dispatches “investigative reporter” Seymour
Hersh’s book on “Camelot” in the recommended reading list below).
The sex stories may or may not be true, in part or in whole, but there seem to
be far more rumors, gossip and allegations without evidence spun for political
purposes than documented history. Wills points out that health, not sex, was the
real Kennedy secret.
Dallek makes the assessment that: “There is no evidence that JFK’s physical
torments played any significant part in shaping the successes or shortcomings of
his public actions, either before or during his presidency. Prescribed medicines
and the program of exercises begun in the fall of 1961, combined with his
intelligence, knowledge of history, and determination to manage presidential
challenges, allowed him to address potentially disastrous problems sensibly.”
The story that the Right does not want Americans to know: “a story of ironwilled fortitude in mastering the difficulties of chronic illness,” Dallek
succinctly puts it.
The anti-Kennedy spinning continues more than 50 years since JFK’s assassination
in a non-ending effort of the Right to diminish the Kennedy legend. What is
important in his painfully aborted presidency: the serious challenges he faced
and how he faced them, and indeed, the challenges were serious.
Not open to dispute is John Kennedy’s interest in history and in words. In
response to the charge that Barack Obama’s rhetorical skills during his 2008
campaign were “just words,” Ted Sorensen, JFK’s speechwriter, right hand, alter
ego and “intellectual blood bank”: told the Boston Globe: “‘Just words’ is how a
president manages to operate how he engages the spirit of progress for the
country.”
To know John Fitzgerald Kennedy is to know his words, and while Sorensen’s
wordsmithing brilliance playing a key role in many, if not most of Kennedy’s
speeches, as Sorensen himself said, all the words reflected Kennedy’s philosophy
and policies.
To count which words originated with Sorensen or which came from Kennedy is not
as important as the words used, the ideas conveyed, the messages made effective
in his letters, speeches and news conferences. The words he spoke, the words he
wrote were John Kennedy’s words.
One of his most memorable speeches, and some consider his “finest moment,” was
JFK’s June 11, 1963 televised speech to the nation in which a U.S. president for
the first time framed civil rights as a national “moral issue.”
Peniel E. Joseph, founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and
Democracy and Tufts University history professor, believes the June 1963
televised speech “might have been the single most important day in civil rights
history.”
The President responded to the attempt by Alabama’s Governor George Wallace to
block the integration of the University of Alabama with the enrollment of two
black students. Joseph reminds us that:
“It seems obvious today that civil rights should be spoken of in universal
terms, but at the time many white Americans still saw it as a regional, largely
political question. And yet here was the leader of the country, asking ‘every
American, regardless of where he lives,’ to ‘stop and examine his conscience.’ ”
Just after midnight and a few hours after JFK’s speech, Mississippi civil rights
activist Medgar Evers, who had fought in World War II from 1943 to 1945 in the
European Theater and the Battle of Normandy, was shot in his own driveway in
Jackson. NAACP T-shirts that read “Jim Crow Must Go” were in his arms.
Initially refused entry at the local hospital because of his color, he died
there 50 minutes later. Arrested for Evers’ murder on June 21, 1963, white
supremacist Byron De La Beckwith lived as a free man for much of the three
decades following the 1963 killing because of failure to reach a verdict in two
trials. In 1994, based on new evidence, De La Beckwith was convicted of Evers’
murder. He died in prison in 2001.
Civil Rights was just one of the major crises that John F. Kennedy faced in the
1,036 days of his presidency. Others included:
The Berlin Crisis of 1961 (4 June – 9 November) is considered the last major
politico-military European incident of the Cold War. The three-year crisis
evolved from the 1958 Soviet Union ultimatum that the Western powers withdraw
from Berlin. Complex negotiations were made more so by the fallout from Gary
Powers’s failed U-2 spy flight on May 1, 1960.
Kennedy met with Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna June 4, 1961. The serious
confrontation (JFK briefly considered a nuclear first-strike plan in case the
crisis turned violent) culminated with the city’s de facto partition with the
East German erection of the Berlin Wall.
Shortly after the wall was erected, a standoff between U.S. and Soviet troops on
either side of the checkpoint led to one of the tensest moments in the Cold War
in Europe. The standoff ended peacefully when Kennedy made use of back channels
to suggest that if Khrushchev removed his tanks, the U.S. army would
reciprocate.
The 1962 Clash with Big Steel
Kennedy was 44 and had been in office 16 months
when he had a confrontation with Big Steel. The President invested a great deal
of effort in brokering an unwritten, complex deal between the powerful U.S.
steel industry and the United Steelworkers of America on March 31 that called
for a modest wage increase as the government sought to hold down inflation.
Ten days later, however, Roger M. Blough, leader of U.S. Steel and Big Steel’s
principal spokesperson, flew to Washington and handed Kennedy a press release
announcing the intention of the U.S. steel industry to unilaterally raise a
basket of steel prices by a scale averaging $6 a ton. Kennedy was furious and
was said to have felt he was doubled-crossed. He denounced the increase as
“unjustifiable and irresponsible.”
In his nationally televised press conference of April 11, 1962, Kennedy
described Blough as one of: “a tiny handful of steel executives whose pursuit of
private power and profit exceeds their sense of public responsibility.” Seeing
the action by Big Steel as not only inflationary but as an effort to challenge
his authority and discredit him, Kennedy responded aggressively with a counter
attack. Big Steel rolled back the proposed price hike.
The 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion
The Cuban Revolution (1953-1959), led by Fidel
Castro, ousted President Fulgencio Batista, a corrupt and brutal anti-communist
dictator who had turned Cuba into a police state. Batista had lucrative
relationships with the American mafia and large multinational American
corporations operating in Cuba, and was supported by the U.S. until 1959.
The U.S. was alarmed by the establishment of the first communist state in the
Western Hemisphere. In March 1960, President Dwight Eisenhower approved the topsecret covert action against the Castro regime, known as JMARC, and allocated
$13.1 million to the CIA in March 1960 for the plan, which was supported by the
Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Kennedy inherited the plan already well developed, and in April 1961, about
1,400 Cuban exiles trained and funded by the CIA landed near the Bay of Pigs
with the intent of overthrowing Castro. The invasion ended in disaster,
partially because a first wave of U.S. bombers missed their targets and a second
air strike was called off.
Reportedly, Kennedy began to suspect that the plan the CIA had promised that
would be “both clandestine and successful” was “too large to be clandestine and
too small to be successful.” The conclusion of historians is that JFK was
manipulated, deliberately led into a trap, that the CIA and Joint Chiefs knew
that the invasion would falter and Kennedy would be forced to send in U.S.
military.
The invasion did falter. The President rejected the proposal to send in U.S.
military fearing an ignition of World War III. The invasion failed in less than
a day — 114 were killed and over 1,100 were taken prisoner. Kennedy took
responsibility for the disaster but was bitter at what he considered a deadly
deception: “I want to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to
the winds.”
While some believe that Kennedy wanted to oust Castro to prove that he and the
U.S. were serious about winning the Cold War, others believe the President found
himself trapped in a CIA-Joint Chiefs of Staff subterfuge. According to the JFK
Library, the Bay of Pigs fiasco was the basis for the initiation of Operation
Mongoose, a plan to sabotage and destabilize the Cuban government and economy.
It has been argued that the Bay of Pigs gave rise to the Cuban Missile Crisis,
the Vietnam War, and quite possibly, the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
[]
Operation Northwoods
After the 1961 failure of the Bay of Pigs, the Joint
Chiefs of Staff (General Lyman Lemnitzer, Chairman) proposed Operation
Northwoods to Kennedy in the spring of 1962. Northwoods was a plan to create
domestic terrorist events that included shooting down Americans in the streets
of Miami and Washington, D.C., stirring up American fear and hatred of Castro
sufficient to build support for a war against Cuba. JFK rejected the plan.
The Cuban Missile Crisis
The crisis lasted for 13 terrifying days. In October
1962, at the height of Cold War tensions, the United States and the Union of the
Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) came close to nuclear war. Earlier in
September, U-2 spy planes discovered that the Soviet Union was building surfaceto-air missile (SAM) launch sites and that Soviet ships were arriving in Cuba it
was feared carrying weapons.
The SAMS were considered defensive in Cuba. The US considered the SAMS
offensive. Oct. 15 photographs revealed that the Soviet Union was placing longrange missiles in Cuba. Politically, Kennedy was burdened with the Bay of Pigs
disaster fallout and faced opposition from a combination of Republicans and
conservative southern Democrats in Congress who were trying to make Cuba a
midterms campaign issue.
Kennedy met with the Executive Committee of the National Security Council.
Strategies considered: Do nothing. Negotiation. Invasion. Blockade. Bomb Missile
Bases. Use Nuclear Weapons. The CIA and military favored a preemptive attack on
the missile sites and tried to pressure Kennedy. The majority gradually began to
favor a naval blockade, which he accepted. The President refused to be pushed
into bombing Cuba even when a U-2 plane had been shot down over Cuba.
Remarkable and secret correspondence between Soviet premier Khrushchev and
Kennedy in which they grew to trust one another (the letters were smuggled)
resulted in a deal: the Soviets would remove their missiles in Cuba. The
Americans would remove their nuclear bases in Turkey and would promise not to
invade Cuba.
It is to the credit of both Kennedy and Khrushchev that the possibility of a
nuclear holocaust that would have multiplied the explosive power of the
Hiroshima bomb thousands of times was avoided. The missile crisis is considered
probably the most dangerous moment in human history. The peaceful resolution
through diplomacy resulted in some constructive developments of the Cold War.
JFK and Vietnam War
In its entirety, the Vietnam war lasted from 1946 to 1975.
For America, one historian calls it “America’s longest war,” dating it from
1950, with the fateful U.S. pledge of $15 million worth of military aid to
France to help them fight in Vietnam, to 1975. The official American phase: 1964
(Gulf of Tonkin Incident) to 1973.
This long and costly armed conflict between the communist regime of North
Vietnam and its southern allies, the Viet Cong, against the South Vietnamese
government and the latter’s principal ally, the United States, ended with the
withdrawal of U.S. forces in 1973 and the unification of Vietnam under communist
control two years later. More than 3 million people, including 58,000 Americans,
were killed in the conflict. The monetary cost to the U.S. between 1965 and 1975
is estimated at $111 billion, around $800 billion in today’s dollars.
Kennedy inherited the legacies of President Eisenhower, and the mindset of
advisors who saw Vietnam as a continuation of World War II with the new enemy
our old ally, the Soviet Union. This worldview was oblivious to the anticolonialism forces born in the late 19th century that would flower in force
following 1945.
History reveals that Kennedy was the focus of a power struggle within his own
administration advisors, who included the CIA and the military that possessed a
kind of “Dr. Strangelove” mentality and who consistently conspired to deceive
him and push the U.S. into combat (Kennedy criticized Eisenhower and John Foster
Dulles for contemplating the use of atomic weapons at Dien Bien Phu to bail out
the French in 1954).
Kennedy visited Saigon in 1951 and met with diplomacy expert Edmund Gullion, the
U.S. consul, who told him it would be a disaster to follow the French example in
Vietnam. Diplomat Gullion is given credit for altering Kennedy’s view on the
Cold War and the muscular way it was being fought in the Third World. Kennedy
subtly changed foreign policy to break the “Eisenhower/Dulles Cold War
consensus” after he gained office, not only on Vietnam but in Laos, Indonesia
and Congo.
According to one historian: “Ironically, while Eisenhower’s supposedly cautious
approach in foreign policy had frequently been contrasted with his successors’
apparent aggressiveness, Kennedy spent much of his term resisting policies
developed and approved under Eisenhower. In spite of some hawkish speeches to
the contrary, perhaps for the purpose of showing that he was willing to escalate
American involvement if necessary to placate the politically aggressive hard
right, his strategy for Vietnam was really a counter-insurgency strategy in
which Americans would act as trainers and supporters of the South Vietnamese. He
resisted a full-fledged combat role for the U.S., which in fact, was eventually
pursued and that proved disastrous.
That President Kennedy made the decision on Oct. 2, 1963, to begin the
withdrawal American forces from Vietnam is thoroughly documented. One historian
admitted to his surprise: “What strikes anyone reading the veritable mountain of
documents relating to Vietnam, is that the only high official in the Kennedy
administration who consistently opposed the commitment of U.S. combat forces was
the president.”
Ben Bradlee once quoted Kennedy as saying: “The first advice I’m going to give
my successor is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that just because
they were military men their opinions on military matters were worth a damn.”
That attitude was reinforced by the growing casualty lists among the U.S.
military advisers sent to Vietnam. On Nov. 21, 1963, a day before his death,
Kennedy was quoted as saying, “I’ve just been given a list of the most recent
casualties in Vietnam. We’re losing too damned many people over there. It’s time
for us to get out. The Vietnamese aren’t fighting for themselves. We’re the ones
who are doing the fighting. After I come back from Texas, that’s going to
change. There’s no reason for us to lose another man over there. Vietnam is not
worth another American life.”
Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
On Aug. 5, 1963, after more than eight years of
difficult negotiations, the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet
Union signed the limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. It was the first arms control
agreement of the Cold War.
The destruction of two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by U.S. atomic
bombs in August 1945 that killed 70,000 people instantly and another 70,000 in
five years, all mostly innocent noncombatants, marked the beginning of the
nuclear age. In 1959, radioactive deposits were found in wheat and milk in the
northern United States. Scientists and the public gradually became aware of
radioactive fallout and began to raise their voices against nuclear testing.
Kennedy had supported a ban on nuclear weapons testing since 1956. He believed a
ban would prevent other countries from obtaining nuclear weapons, and took a
strong stand on the issue in the 1960 presidential campaign. Kennedy’s strong
stand that called for a shift in nuclear policy faced strong opposition.
In August, polling showed 80 percent of the public opposed the treaty. Working
with a Citizens Committee, the President succeeded in reversing the public’s
attitude in little over a month. Although it would be another quarter of a
century before the global Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty would end below-ground
nuclear tests, the partial test ban was an historic achievement.
In addition, there was the creation in late 1960 of the innovative Peace Corps
of “talented men and women” who would dedicate themselves to the progress and
peace of developing countries. The Alliance for Progress initiated in 1961 aimed
at establishing economic cooperation between the U.S. and Latin America. Kennedy
appointed his brother Robert Kennedy as Attorney General who would fight “the
enemy within” — organized crime. Organized crime convictions increased from 14
in 1960 to 373 in 1963.
Kennedy told the nation on May 25, 1961, that “this nation should commit itself
to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon
and returning him safely to earth.” Eight years later two American astronauts
walked on the Moon.
It is perplexing that so many continue to be cavalierly dismissive of Kennedy’s
extraordinary accomplishments, and when the latter are seen in the light of his
own medical challenges, they become significantly more extraordinary.
Also amazing is how some journalists and historians seem incapable of
understanding who Kennedy was and who are determined to re-write history. That
he has been characterized as “always hawkish,” a “functional representative” of
American elites, and that he was not “the ardent liberal hero” his admirers have
made of him since 1963 are attacks contradicted by both his words and his
actions.
It is clear that Kennedy was consistently on the side of economic, political and
social progress. He was a New Dealer who tried to “restart” FDR’s New Deal,
which had been “betrayed” by Truman and “put on ice” by Eisenhower, moving it
further along the path of science and technology. He believed that “if we can’t
help the poor we can’t save the rich.”
JFK was not a “free marketer” nor a “Keynesian,” but has been described as a
“Hamiltonian dirigiste” who supported the nation-state’s role in maximizing
economic progress, producing full employment, rising standards of living, and
scientific and technological innovation. He was a man of enormous political
courage on the side of peace, his own “portrait in courage.”
Kennedy was a threat to powerful forces, especially the military/industrial
complex, Big Business, social conservatives, all determined to eliminate
government, determined to kill liberalism, progressivism and the New Deal, the
“invisible hands” identified by historian Kim Phillips-Fein. “Invisible hands”
of right-wing extremism were Kennedy’s and progressivism’s implacable enemies.
“To the Establishment, JFK was a threat. He did represent change, right up until
the moment the shots rang out in Dealey Plaza,” wrote author and JFK
assassination expert Gary L. Aguilar. Indeed, there is evidence that suggests
his murder November 22, 1963, was connected to these reactionary “will to power”
pro-war forces. The same reactionary forces continue to be Kennedy’s enemies
today, the enemies of progress and peace, of democracy itself.
American journalist and political commentator E.J. Dionne Jr. quoted journalist
and historian Theodore H. White:
“The dogmas of his antagonists made clear the quality of the protagonist. For
John F. Kennedy, above all, was a man of reason, and the thrust he brought to
American and world affairs was the thrust of reason. Not that he had a blueprint
of the future, ever, in his mind. Rather his was the reason of the explorer, the
man who probes to learn, the man who reaches and must go farther to find out. …
He was always learning; his curiosity was total; no one could come out of his
presence without coming away combed of every shred of information or impression
the President found interesting.”
Kennedy’s own words, spoken in his famous address at American University on June
10, 1963: “I have chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which
ignorance too often bounds and the truth is too rarely perceived, yet it is the
most important topic on earth: world peace. What kind of peace do I mean? What
kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American
weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave.
“I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth
worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to
build a better life for their children, not merely peace for Americans but peace
for all men and women, not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.
“I am not referring to the absolute, infinite concept of peace and good will of
which some fantasies and fanatics dream. Let us focus instead on a more
practical, more attainable peace based not on a sudden revolution in human
nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions on a series of concrete
actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned.
“There is no single, simple key to this peace no grand or magic formula to be
adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations,
the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the
challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process a way of solving
problems.
“Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all
breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all
mortal.”
Beverly Bandler’s public affairs career spans some 40 years. Her credentials
include serving as president of the state-level League of Women Voters of the
Virgin Islands and extensive public education efforts in the Washington, D.C.
area for 16 years. She writes from Mexico.
Resources
The American Presidency Project. John F. Kennedy.
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/index.php
JFK Press conferences. All 64.
(1961-1963) http://jfk-press-conferences.blogspot.mx/
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. http://www.jfklibrary.org/
JFK 50 years. http://www.jfk50.org/
History.com
John F.
Kennedy http://www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/john-f-kennedy
Biography.com http://www.biography.com/people/john-f-kennedy-9362930#synopsis
The History Place. http://www.historyplace.com
BBC
History: John F. Kennedy.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/people/john_f_kennedy/
Mary Ferrell Foundation. http://www.maryferrell.org
Miller Center. John F. Kennedy
(19171963)
http://millercenter.org/president/kennedy
Harvard University: John F. Kennedy School of
Government. http://www.hks.harvard.edu/
Of Interest
AUDIO:
World Crisis Radio.
(Washington, D.C.) Interview: “Donald Gibson on JFK Against
Wall Street.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjBWciMcsok
The 1957 recording of Senator John F. Kennedy reading the Declaration of
Independence. The recording was made exclusively for New York radio station
WQXR’s 1957 July 4th observance. The Kennedy Library received the recording in
January 1964 from WQXR, which is owned by the New York Times
Company. http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/baqMml0WVkGizO7zH9tmKg.aspx
VIDEO:
John F. Kennedy. “Commencement Address at American University,” June 10, 1963.
JFK Library and
Museum. http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/BWC7I4C9QUmLG9J6I8oy8w.aspx
“Last Word: Theodore C. Sorensen.” Presidential Strategist, Confidant and
Speechwriter. The New York
Times, 2010-11-01. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_h0–MWhpRw
Sources and Recommended Reading
Altman, Lawrence K. and Todd S. Purdum.
“In J.F.K. File, Hidden Illness, Pain
and Pills.” New York Times, 2002-11-17.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/17/us/in-jfk-file-hidden-illness-pain-and-pills.h
tml
BBC News. “Files depict JFK’s life of pain.”
2002-11-1. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2485429.stm
Bernstein, Irving. Promises Kept: John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier. Oxford
University Press; First Edition edition (January 17, 1991). A provocative
account of Kennedy’s domestic achievements, the first of a two-volume study of
the social and economic reform programs of the 1960s, that challenges right-wing
revisionism. Bernstein (1916-2001), was emeritus professor of political science
at the University of California, argues that “the revisionists are dead wrong,”
that JFK was “a very successful President”
and that by 1963, Kennedy had become
a very effective leader. He suggests that had he not been assassinated, his
whole program would have been enacted by 1965.
Boyer, Paul S. Ed. The Oxford Companion to United States History (Oxford
Companions). Oxford University Press, USA (July 4, 2001).
Boyer, Paul. Bradlee, Benjamin C.
Conversations with JFK. 1st ed. 1975. W. W.
Norton & Company (November 17, 1984). “This is a record of conversations I had
with John F. Kennedy during the five years that I knew him,between 1959, when he
was a senator running for president, and 1963, when he died on the 1007 day of
his presidency.””The release brought Bradlee much attention and cost him a
valued friend, Jacqueline Kennedy, who thought the book a violation of privacy
and stopped speaking to
Bradlee.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/21/ben-bradlee-dead-dies_n_60249
62.html?ref=topbar Amazon reviewer:” I was facinated by the intimate details and
facts revealed by the author. It allowed me to see Kennedy as a man and not only
as a legend.”
Brinkley, Alan.
John F. Kennedy: The American Presidents series: The 35th
President, 1961-1963. Times Books; First Edition edition (May 8, 2012).
Bzdek, Vincent. The Kennedy Legacy: Jack, Bobby and Ted and a Family Dream.
Palgrave Macmillan Trade; 1 edition (April 28, 2009).
Butigan, Ken.
“The Miracle of the First Nuclear Test Ban.” Common Dreams,
2013-10-10.
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2013/10/10/miracle-first-nuclear-test-ban
Cuff, Daniel F.
“Roger M. Blough, 81 Dies; Led U.S. Steel for 13 years. New
York Times, 1985-10-10.
http://www.nytimes.com/1985/10/10/us/roger-m-blough-81-dies-led-us-steel-for-13years.html
Dallek, Robert.
An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963. Little, Brown
and Company; First Edition edition (May 13, 2003).
_______“The Medical Ordeals of JFK.” The Atlantic, December 2002.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/12/the-medical-ordeals-of-jfk/3
05572/
DiEugenio, Jim.
“JFK’s Embrace of Third World Nationalists.” ConsortiumNews,
2013-11-25. https://consortiumnews.com/2013/11/25/jfks-embrace-of-third-world-na
tionalists/
_______Caro’s Flawed Tale of LBJ’s Rise.” ConsortiumNews, 2012-07-28.
https://consortiumnews.com/2012/07/28/caros-flawed-tale-of-lbjs-rise/
Dionne, Jr.,
E. J. “The Making of Democracy 2006: How the New Media and the Old
Media Could Live together Happily and Enhance Public Life.” The Huffington Post,
12-19-06.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/e-j-dionne-jr/the-making-of-democracy-2_b_36754.ht
ml
Douglass, James W.
JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters.
Touchstone; Original edition New York: Simon & Schuster, April 2008. Touchstone
edition (October 19, 2010). “Douglass’s 12 years of research led him to conclude
that the president was killed because he was beginning to shed the protective
armor of the Cold Warrior, at the height of the Cold War, and decided, instead,
to become a peacemaker.”
Fay, Paul. The Pleasure of His Company. This is the story of the author’s 21year friendship with John F. Kennedy. Harper & Row; 1st edition (1966).
Galbraith, James K.
Letter to the Editor, New York Times,
2013-11-10. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/books/review/letters-searching-for
-kennedy.html
_______”JFK’s Plans to Withdraw.” The New York Review of Books,
2007-12-06. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/dec/06/jfks-plans-to-w
ithdraw/
_______ “Exit Strategy.” In 1963, JFK ordered a complete withdrawal from
Vietnam. Boston Review, October/November
2003. http://new.bostonreview.net/BR28.5/galbraith.html
Gibson, Donald E.
Battling Wall Street: The Kennedy presidency. Progressive
Press (January 15, 2014).
_______Battling Wall Street: The Kennedy Presidency Part 1. Daily Kos,
2007-02-11.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/02/11/300743/-Battling-Wall-Street-The-Kenned
y-Presidency-Part-1# Battling Wall Street: The Kennedy Presidency Part 2. Daily
Kos, 2007-02-12.
http://www.rbguy.dailykos.com/story/2007/02/12/301305/-Battling-Wall-Street-The
-Kennedy-Presidency-Part-2
_______Audio: Interview. World Crisis Radio.
(Washington, D.C.) “Donald Gibson on JFK Against Wall
Street.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjBWciMcsok
Giroux, Henry A.
“Remembering Hiroshima in an Age of Neoliberal
Barbarism.” Truthout, 2014-09-10.
http://truth-out.org/news/item/26086-remembering-hiroshima-in-an-age-of-neolibe
ral-barbarism
Golway, Terry.
JFK: Day by Day: A Chronicle of the 1,036 Days of John F.
Kennedy’s Presidency. Running Press; 50th anniversary ed edition (October 5,
2010).
Herring, George. America’s Longest War: The United States and
Vietnam, 1950-1975. McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages; 5 edition
(September 4, 2013).
History. “Fidel Castro.” http://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/fidelcastro
“Bay of Pigs
Invasion.” http://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/bay-of-pigs-invasion
Jones, Howard. Death of a Generation. How the Assassinations of Diem and JFK
Prolonged the Vietnam War. Oxford University Press, October 14, 2004.
Joseph, Peniel E.
“Kennedy’s Finest Moment.” Op-Ed, New York
Times, 2013-06-11. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/opinion/kennedys-civil-righ
ts-triumph.html
Kaiser, David.
American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the
Vietnam War. Belknap Press (March 1, 2002).
Kennedy, John F. (author), Martin W. Sandler (editor). The Letters of John F.
Kennedy. Bloomsbury Press (October 29, 2013). “Drawn from more than two million
letters on file at the [Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum]many never
before published–this project presents readers with a portrait of both Kennedy
the politician and Kennedy the man, as well as the times he lived in.”
_______ A Nation of Immigrants. Easton (1992) Posthumously published. Harper
Perennial; Reprint edition (January 8, 2008).
_______ Profiles in Courage. 1st ed. 1956. Harper Perennial Modern Classics;
(April 11, 2006). Written by Kennedy while recovering from back surgery in 1954
that almost killed him.
_______ Why England Slept. 1st ed. 1961. Praeger (October 16, 1981). Written by
John F. Kennedy in 1940 when he was still in college and reprinted in 1961 when
he was president, this book is an appraisal of the tragic events of the thirties
that led to World War II. It is an account of England’s unpreparedness for war
and a study of the shortcomings of democracy when confronted by the menace of
totalitarianism. “Unlike many writers at that time, but like his father, who was
soon to resign as US Ambassador to Great Britain, JFK did not castigate England
for their early policy of appeasement. He donated the English proceeds from this
book to Plymouth, England, which had been bombed by the Luftwaffe, and brought a
Buick convertible with his US royalties.”- Reigle.
Lincoln, Evelyn.
My Twelve Years with John F. Kennedy. D. McKay Co; Fifth
Printing edition (1965).
Mary Ferrell Foundation. “Operation Northwoods.”
http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/Operation_Northwoods
Mahoney, Richard D.
The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and
Bobby. Arcade Publishing; Reprint edition (May 1, 2011).
_______JFK: Ordeal in Africa. Oxford University Press; First edition
(November 17, 1983). Arcade Publishing; Reprint edition (May 1, 2011).
Newman, John M.
JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for
Power. Warner Books; First Edition edition (February 1992). “His book’s thesis
is that Kennedy “would never have placed American combat troops in Vietnam” and
that he was preparing for the withdrawal of the military advisers by the end of
1965.”
O’Donnell, Kenneth P. and David F. Powers.
Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye: Memories
of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Little, Brown; 1st edition (1972); Open Road Media
(October 1, 2013).
Phillips-Fein, Kim. Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New
Deal. W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (January 11, 2010).
Pierce, Charles P.
“Just Words.”
BostonGlobe, 2009-01-11. http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/200
9/01/11/just_words/
Rasenberger, Jim.
The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America’s Doomed
Invasion of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. Scribner; Reprint edition (April 10, 2012). The
author had access to newly declassified sources: the National Security Archives
and the CIA Inspector General’s report on the invasion.
Reeves, Richard. The Kennedy Years: From the Pages of the New York Times. Harry
N. Abrams (October 22, 2013).
Riegle, Rosalie G.
“Talking Long into the Night: JFK meets Dorothy Day.” In
1940 two Kennedy boys met Catholic peace activist Dorothy Day.
http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2013/85/riegle-day.htm
“Sometime between July 29
and August 4, 1940, two young heirs of the large Kennedy fortune visited Dorothy
Day at the simple Catholic Worker house on Mott Street in Manhattan. Dorothy Day
was 43 and the Catholic Worker movement she co-founded with Peter Maurin was
only seven years old. Jack Kennedy was 23 and his older brother Joe,the one
originally slated by the family to become the first Catholic president,was
25when Dorothy asked the two Kennedys to stay for dinner, they quickly asked her
to dine out with them instead. In her autobiography, Loaves and Fishes, Dorothy
wrote, “We went out to a little restaurant around the corner. We had a wonderful
conversation and talked long into the night, of war and peace and of man and the
state.”
Sachs, Jeffrey D.
To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Peace. Random House (June
4, 2013).
Scott, Len. The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Threat of Nuclear War: Lessons in
History. Bloomsbury Continuum (23 Jan 2008).
Spartacus Educational. (John Simkin) “John F. Kennedy.”
http://spartacus-educational.com/USAkennedyJ.htm
_______ “Bay of Pigs.” http://spartacus-educational.com/COLDbayofpigs.htm
_______ “Cuban Missile
Crisis.” http://spartacus-educational.com/COLDcubanmissile.htm
_______ “Robert
McNamara.”
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmcnarmara.htm
_______ “The Vietnam War.”
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/VietnamWar.htm
Theodore C. Sorensen (introduction) (1991). ‘Let the word go forth’: the
speeches, statements, and writings of John F. Kennedy,
1947-1963 (Reprint. ed.). New York: Laurel.
_______The Kennedy Legacy. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1970).1947-1963
(Reprint. ed.). New York: Laurel.
_______Kennedy. Harper & Row. 1965.
Wikipedia. John F.
Kennedy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy
“Berlin Crisis of
1961.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Crisis_of_1961
“Roger M.
Blough.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Blough
Wills, Gary.
“A Second Assassination.” New York Review of Books, 1987-12-18.
Wills reviews The Dark Side of Camelt by Seymour M.
Hersh
on/
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1997/dec/18/a-second-assassinati
“Is there nothing of use in this book? Practically nothingIt is an
astonishing spectacle, this book. In his mad zeal to destroy Camelot, to raze it
down, dance on the rubble, and sow salt on the ground where it stood, Hersh has
with precision and method disassembled and obliterated his own career and
reputation.”
How Many Islamic State Fighters Are
There?
Exclusive: As the United States slides back into war in the Middle East, the
specter of Vietnam hovers over the endeavor with some observers wondering if
wishful thinking will again replace hardheaded analysis about the risks and the
costs, writes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
By Ray McGovern
Why was I reminded of Vietnam on Saturday when Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited Iraq to “get a firsthand look at the
situation in Iraq, receive briefings, and get better sense of how the campaign
is progressing” against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL?
For years as the Vietnam quagmire deepened, U.S. political and military leaders
flew off to Vietnam and were treated to a snow job by Gen. William Westmoreland,
the commander there. Many would come back glowing about how the war was
“progressing.”
Dempsey might have been better served if someone had shown him Patrick
Cockburn’s article in the Independent entitled “War with Isis: Islamic militants
have an army of 200,000, claims senior Kurdish leader.”
Fuad Hussein, the chief of staff of Kurdish President Massoud Barzani, told
Cockburn that “I am talking about hundreds of thousands of fighters because they
are able to mobilize Arab young men in the territory they have taken.”
Hussein estimated that Isis rules about one-third of Iraq and one-third of Syria
with a population from 10 million to 12 million over an area of 250,000 square
kilometers, roughly the size Great Britain, giving the jihadists a large pool of
potential fighters to recruit.
While the Kurdish estimate may be high it certainly exceeds “the tens of
thousands,” maybe 20,000 to 30,000 that many Western analysts have claimed the
possibility that the Islamic State’s insurgency is bigger than believed could
explain its startling success in overrunning the Iraqi Army around Mosul last
summer and achieving surprising success against the well-regarded Kurdish pesh
merga forces, too.
So, on his flight back to Washington, Dempsey will have time to ponder whether
he has the courage to pass on this discouraging word to President Barack Obama
about ISIS or whether he will put on the rose-colored glasses like an earlier
generation of commanders did about Vietnam, where Westmoreland insisted that the
number of enemy Vietnamese in South Vietnam could not go above 299,000.
Unfortunately, those obstinate Vietnamese Communists would not observe that
artificial, politically inspired limit. Westmoreland was aware of the troubling
reality but knew that acknowledging it would have undesired consequences in the
United States where many Americans were souring on the war.
The inconvenient truth finally became abundantly clear during the Tet offensive
in late January and early February 1968, but still the misbegotten war went on,
and on, ultimately claiming some 58,000 U.S. lives and millions of Vietnamese.
Westmoreland’s gamesmanship with the numbers was known to some CIA officials
first and foremost, a very bright and courageous analyst named Sam Adams but CIA
Director Richard Helms silenced them out of fear of political retribution. “My
responsibility is to protect the Agency,” Helms told them, “and I cannot do that
if we get into a pissing match with a U.S. Army at war.”
Today’s CIA Director John Brennan is similarly at pains to protect the Agency on
a number of fronts. Is he likely to tell the truth about ISIS if it means the
prospects for a renewed war in Iraq and a new war in Syria are especially
grim? If not, are there no Sam Adamses left at the CIA?
Honest Analysts?
Honest intelligence analysts played a key role in the November 2007 National
Intelligence Estimate, “Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities,” which helped
thwart Bush/Cheney plans to apply Iraqi-type “shock and awe” to Iran during
their last year in office. The NIE concluded, unanimously and “with high
confidence,” that Iran had stopped working on a nuclear weapon in late 2003.
In his memoir, Decision Points, President George W. Bush called the NIE’s
findings “eye-popping.” He openly bemoaned how the estimate deprived him of the
military option, writing “How could I possibly explain using the military to
destroy the nuclear facilities of a country the intelligence community said had
no active nuclear weapons program?”
The NIE on Iran was issued seven years ago. One has to hope that a few honest
analysts on the Near East have survived the CIA directorships of Michael Hayden,
Leon Panetta, David Petraeus and John Brennan and have the courage to tell the
truth about ISIS including how U.S. military intervention now is swelling ISIS’s
ranks, much as the Bush/Cheney invasion of Iraq in 2003 created the conditions
for the group’s birth, then called “Al-Qaeda in Iraq.”
If honest intelligence analysts are silenced, as Sam Adams was 47 years ago,
they need to plumb their consciences and see if they have the guts to make
public both the undercounting of enemy forces AND the fillip given to their
multiplication by further U.S. military involvement.
Though having worked within the system to get the real enemy troop estimates to
senior U.S. officials, Sam Adams went to an early, remorse-filled death, unable
to overcome the thought of what might well have happened to shorten the war if
he had broken with the CIA’s demands for secrecy and made the actual enemy
numbers public.
Possibly, the armed conflict might have ended in 1968. Or, to put it another
way, the Vietnam Memorial in Washington would have no need for a western wall
since there would be no names to chisel into the granite.
If Gen. Dempsey decides to ape Westmoreland and dissemble about the realistic
obstacles to military success against the Islamic State fighters and about the
counterproductive effects of U.S. intervention, well, our country will need a
new Sam Adams willing, this time, to blast the truth into the open.
Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence
Sam Adams’s memory is invoked each year as Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in
Intelligence make their annual award for integrity. SAAII is a movement of
former CIA colleagues of former intelligence analyst Sam Adams, together with
others who hold up his example as a model for those in intelligence who would
aspire to the courage to speak truth to power.
SAAII confers an award each year to a member of the intelligence community or
related professions who exemplifies Sam Adam’s courage, persistence and devotion
to truth, no matter the consequences.
It was Adams who discovered in 1967 that there were more than a half-million
Vietnamese Communists under arms, roughly twice the number that the U.S. command
in Saigon would admit to, lest Americans learn that claims of “progress” were
bogus.
Gen. Westmoreland had put an artificial limit on the number Army intelligence
was allowed to carry on its books. And his deputy, Gen. Creighton Abrams,
specifically warned Washington that the press would have a field day if Adam’s
numbers were released, and that this would weaken the war effort.
A SECRET/EYES ONLY cable from Abrams on Aug. 20, 1967, stated: “We have been
projecting an image of success over recent months,” and cautioned that if the
higher figures became public, “all available caveats and explanations will not
prevent the press from drawing an erroneous and gloomy conclusion.”
The Communist countrywide offensive during Tet made it clear that the generals
had been lying and that Sam Adams’s “higher figures” were correct. Senior
intelligence officials were aware of the deception, but lacked the courage to
stand up to Westmoreland. Sadly, Sam Adams remained reluctant to go “outside
channels.”
A few weeks after Tet, however, former Pentagon official Daniel Ellsberg rose to
the occasion. Ellsberg learned that Westmoreland was asking for 206,000 more
troops to widen the war into Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam, right up to the
border with China, and perhaps beyond.
Someone else promptly leaked to the New York Times Westmoreland’s troop request,
emboldening Ellsberg to do likewise with Sam Adams’ story. Ellsberg had come to
the view that leaking truth about a deceitful war would be “a patriotic and
constructive act.” It was his first unauthorized disclosure. On March 19, 1968,
the Times published a stinging story based on Adams’s figures.
On March 25, President Lyndon Johnson complained to a small gathering, “The
leaks to the New York Times hurt us. … We have no support for the war. This is
caused by the 206,000 troop request [by Westmoreland] and the leaks. I would
have given Westy the 206,000 men.”
On March 31, 1968, Johnson introduced a bombing pause, opted for negotiations,
and announced that he would not run for another term in November.
Sam Adams continued to press for honesty and accountability but stayed “inside
channels”, and failed. He died at 55 of a heart attack, nagged by the thought
that, had he not let himself be diddled, many lives might have been saved. His
story is told in War of Numbers, published posthumously.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church
of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was a close colleague of Sam Adams;
the two began their CIA analyst careers together during the last months of John
Kennedy’s administration. During the Vietnam War, McGovern was responsible for
analyzing Soviet policy toward China and Vietnam.
The Iraq War’s Pricy Ticket
For American taxpayers, the Iraq War is a gift that keeps on taking, with new
plans to spend tens of billions of dollars to retrain the Iraqi army whose
initial training cost tens of billions before the army collapsed against a few
thousand militants, a pricy dilemma cited by ex-U.S. diplomat William R. Polk.
By William R. Polk
Most readers of the media today are too young to have closely followed the slide
into the Vietnam War in the early 1960s. We began in 1961 with less than 2,000
“advisers” and even as late as 1965, the estimated cost of the war was going to
be only $100 million.
Four years later, the estimate had grown to almost $29 billion. The war ended up
costing America three quarters of a trillion dollars and our little band of
advisers had grown to half our army. The moral of the story is that even if the
price of admission seems cheap staying through the performance can be huge.
So turn to the current venture in Iraq. After we pulled out most of our troops,
we spent somewhere between $25 billion and $26 billion to train and equip the
Iraqi army. That is roughly $10,000 for each ostensible soldier. So what did we
get?
In the first bout of combat, the supposedly best units of the 250,000-man force
were routed by less than 5,000 untrained and poorly armed militants. In fact,
the debacle was worse than those figures indicate.
First, the 250,000 turns out to include large numbers of “ghosts.” Many
“soldiers” existed only as names on official reports. They were the Iraqi
equivalent of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls. Gogol’s hero, you will remember,
wanted their government records. Even though they were actually dead, they were
“officially” alive so on their behalf he could claim their benefits.
Keeping the Iraqis’ names on the organizational charts similarly has enabled
senior officers to draw the pay and rations as though the “ghost” soldiers were
still manning their posts. No believable audit has so far been made but some
observers guess that perhaps as many as a third of the Iraqi soldiers were like
Gogol’s “dead souls,” just names.
And, second, many of those who actually did exist were effective only in
robbing, raping or killing civilians. That was what “our man in Baghdad” used
them for — to terrorize his enemies. Their attitude toward performing against
those who could fight back was shown by their preparation for combat.
As an American senior officer reported to Congress, even in relatively safe
Baghdad, it was not uncommon for a “soldier” to wear civilian clothes under his
uniform. Then, if he got into danger, he could strip off the uniform, pretend to
be an ordinary civilian and run away.
I started with a mention of Vietnam. Like the Iraqis, the South Vietnamese
officers found ways to make away with our money. Many of them sold their
ammunition and even arms to the Viet Minh and exercised great care not to get
into “harms way.” We learned, at great pain and huge cost, that if our local
ally does not care enough to fight for his homeland, we could not “win” for him.
We all know what the result was in Vietnam. South Vietnam’s half million man
army, trained to world-class standards and equipped with the most lethal weapons
then known, was defeated time after time by poorly armed bands of guerrillas.
Even when backed up by the bulk of the American army and air force, it lost.
So now we are being told that what is needed in Iraq is another $15 billion to
$20 billion to once again arm and train the same Iraqi soldiers (and also, as in
Vietnam, add some “stiffening” by American “advisers”). The “entry ticket” is
now quite a bit more costly than in the early days in Vietnam. What does it
amount to?
Fifteen or twenty billion dollars would fund at least 45 new hospitals (a 320bed hospital in Massachusetts recently cost $300 million) or 200 schools (the
national average for a school for a thousand students is about $26 million).
Even such massive projects as the new bridge across the Hudson River in New York
is cheap by comparison. For the additional costs of the Iraqi venture, we could
have built five of them!
And, just as in Vietnam, I predict that the cost of
the “performance” will be a multiple of the entry ticket and will stretch out
for years.
I don’t begrudge the Iraqis support, but Vietnam taught me two things: first,
support is different from replacement and, second, fighting is seldom the
answer. The Iraqis must work out their own answer. Then our help might not even
be needed..
William R. Polk is a veteran foreign policy consultant, author and professor who
taught Middle Eastern studies at Harvard. President John F. Kennedy appointed
Polk to the State Department’s Policy Planning Council where he served during
the Cuban Missile Crisis. His books include: Violent Politics: Insurgency and
Terrorism; Understanding Iraq; Understanding Iran; Personal History: Living in
Interesting Times; Distant Thunder: Reflections on the Dangers of Our Times; and
Humpty Dumpty: The Fate of Regime Change.
Behind the USS Liberty Cover-up
For decades, Israel has exercised strong influence over U.S. policies in the
Mideast via its highly effective Washington lobby, but that power was tested in
1967 when Israeli warplanes strafed the USS Liberty killing 34 American crewmen,
an incident revisited in a new documentary reviewed by Maidhc Ó Cathail.
By Maidhc Ó Cathail
“The Day Israel Attacked America,” an investigation into Israel’s deadly June 8,
1967 attack on the USS Liberty at the height of the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War,
was aired recently on Al Jazeera America.
Directed by British filmmaker Richard Belfield, the documentary confirms not
only that the attack on the U.S. Navy spy ship was deliberate, an undisputed
fact long accepted by all but the most shameless Israeli apologists, but
reveals, perhaps for the first time, how Tel Aviv was able to induce the U.S.
government to cover up an attack that killed 34 and injured 171 of its
own seamen by a supposed “ally.”
“It was especially tough for Lyndon Johnson, to date the most pro-Israeli
American president in history,” the film’s narrator observed. According to Tom
Hughes, the State Department’s director of intelligence and research at the time
of the Liberty attack, “Johnson was in a very tough mood.”
As an indication of Johnson’s initial firm stance, Hughes recalled that Johnson
briefed Newsweek magazine off the record that the Israelis had attacked the
Liberty, suggesting that they may have done so because they believed that the
naval intelligence-gathering ship had been intercepting Israeli as well as
Egyptian communications.
A post-interview leak revealing that it was the President himself who had
briefed the media about the attack on the Liberty alarmed the Israeli embassy in
Washington and its friends in the major Jewish organizations, who intimated that
Johnson’s Newsweek briefing “practically amounted to blood libel.”
The documentary’s narrator said declassified Israeli documents now show that
“they were going to threaten President Johnson with ‘blood libel’, gross antiSemitism, and that would end his political career.”
“Blackmail!” retired U.S. Navy admiral Bobby Ray Inman frankly summed up
Israel’s strategy to deal with Johnson. “[T]hey know if he is thinking about
running again he’s going to need money for his campaign,” said Inman, who from
1977 to 1981 directed the National Security Agency, the U.S. intelligence agency
under whose aegis the USS Liberty had been dispatched to the eastern
Mediterranean. “So alleging that he’s blood-libeling is going to arouse the
Jewish donors.”
The Israeli government hired teams of lawyers, including close friends of
Johnson, the narrator added, and began an “all-out offensive” to influence media
coverage of the attack, leaning on them “to kill critical stories” and slant
others in Israel’s favor.
“There was a campaign mounted to see what could be done about returning Johnson
to his normal, predictable pro-Israeli position,” Hughes said. “Efforts were to
be made to remind the President of the delicacy of his own position, that he
personally might lose support for his run for reelection in 1968.”
Israelis Bearing Gifts
Noting the cleverness of Israel’s tactics, the documentary revealed that after
having identified the Vietnam War as Johnson’s “soft spot” it quietly provided
him with “two extraordinary gifts.”
The first addressed the President’s bitterness toward many American Jewish
organizations and community leaders over their opposition to his Vietnam policy.
But as the Liberty crisis unfolded, Hughes said, “they were suddenly becoming
more silent on Vietnam.” Johnson was made to understand that taking a more
“moderate” position toward Israel over the attack would benefit him politically.
The second gift was a vital military one. The U.S. military attaché in Tel Aviv
received a surprise visit. “I think I have something you might be interested
in,” a senior Israeli intelligence officer told him. The Israelis had just
crossed the Red Sea to capture the Egyptian military’s Soviet-supplied surfaceto-air missiles, the same ones the North Vietnamese were using to bring down
American aircraft on a daily basis.
As a show of gratitude, the U.S. government gave the Israelis two gifts in
return. The Johnson administration resupplied them with the weapons they had
used in their six-day land grab of territory from Egypt, Jordan and Syria. The
White House also decided to water down the Defense Department’s inquiry into the
attack on the Liberty.
As Hughes explained, “Soon Johnson did respond, and took a much more lenient
line and wished that the whole incident could be put behind us as soon as
possible.”
Johnson’s “softer approach” to Israel was reflected in the U.S. Navy inquiry
then underway onboard the Liberty. As one of the survivors recalled, the
Liberty’s crew began to realize that “a cover-up was descending” upon them.
Among key testimony ignored was the strafing of the Liberty’s deck with napalm
and the machine-gunning of the sinking ship’s lifeboats.
Without interviewing any Israelis involved in the attack, the U.S. court of
inquiry rushed out a report, hurriedly completed in a mere 20 days, exonerating
Israel from blame. Tel Aviv quickly followed up with its own report that
concluded that the whole incident was “a series of mistakes, and that no one was
to blame.”
Ignoring a secret telegram from its ambassador in Washington advising that Tel
Aviv admit its guilt in light of America’s possession of an incriminating audio
tape of the attack, Israel instead shifted its focus to repairing the damage to
its relationship with the U.S.
“The Israelis have always been very skillful at tracking what the U.S.
government is doing, saying, thinking, and effort[s] to influence it,” Inman
pointed out. “And the great advantage they have as compared to other countries
is their influence on the Congress.”
A timely Washington Post report noted that “the Jewish lobby could help
determine the outcome of 169 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White
House.”
As Johnson considered his re-election prospects, Hughes said the “emotive”
language used in earlier Pentagon press releases disappeared and was replaced by
“a much more bland and neutral-sounding discourse.”
“But whatever was said to journalists,” the narrator added, “every U.S.
intelligence head believed that the attack was intentional.” As one of them
colorfully wrote at the time, “a nice whitewash for a group of ignorant, stupid
and inept xxxxxxxx.” Though shown but not mentioned in the film, the next
sentence of the intelligence chief’s letter stated the obvious: “If the
attackers had not been Hebrew there would have been quite a commotion.”
“The Jewish community has always been more generous than many of their other
counterparts in supporting financially elections, political causes,” Inman
observed. “In the process, that does translate into influence.”
Israel’s White House Friends
Israel’s influence inside the White House was even more significant. “Many of
Johnson’s closest friends and advisors were pro-Israeli, and they reported back
to Tel Aviv on his every move,” the film asserted.
If anything, this understated Israeli influence. As Grace Halsell, a staff
writer for Johnson, later wrote, “Everyone around me, without exception, was
pro-Israel.”
Thanks to its supporters surrounding Johnson, the narrator claimed that the
Israeli government was able to constantly shift its story “to counter whatever
new intelligence the White House received.”
To protect their contacts’ identity, the Israelis used codenames in their
communications with them. “The Day Israel Attacked America,” however, revealed
for the first time the identities of four of these pro-Israeli eyes and ears
inside the Johnson administration.
“Hamlet” was Abe Feinberg, one of the most influential fundraisers ever in
Democratic Party politics, whose phone calls Johnson couldn’t afford to ignore;
“Menashe” was Arthur Goldberg, the U.S ambassador to the United Nations;
“Harari” was David Ginsberg, a prominent Washington lawyer who represented the
Israeli embassy; and “Ilan” was Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, a longtime
Johnson confidant who had dined with the President on the eve of the Six-Day
War.
It would hardly be an overstatement to say that the President owed his political
career to “Ilan”/Fortas. As biographer Robert A. Caro has written, Johnson
“largely through the legal genius of his ally Abe Fortas, managed, by a
hairbreadth, to halt a federal court’s investigation into the stealing of the
1948 election,” in a reference to LBJ’s first Senate race.
According to the documentary, it was “Menashe”/Goldberg who supplied Israel with
the key intelligence. Goldberg warned the Israelis that the U.S. had an audio
tape that confirmed the Israeli pilots knew the Liberty was an American ship
before they attacked.
“The strategy worked,” concluded Belfield’s documentary. “The U.S.-Israeli
relationship proved to be stronger than the killing and injuring of more than
200 Americans.”
But it wasn’t always a foregone conclusion. As Hughes put it, “The AmericanIsraeli relationship was very much at stake, and it was brought back from the
precipice.”
“The Day Israel Attacked America” ends with a scene of surviving veterans of the
USS Liberty laying a wreath on their murdered comrades’ memorial headstone and a
prescient observation by the U.S. undersecretary of state at the time of the
attack.
“It seemed clear to the Israelis that as American leaders did not have the
courage to punish them for the blatant murder of American citizens,” George Ball
noted, “they would let them get away with anything.”
Maidhc Ó Cathail is a widely published writer and political analyst. He is also
the creator and editor of The Passionate Attachment blog, which focuses
primarily on the U.S.-Israeli relationship.
Shaping the Vietnam Narrative
Controlling the narrative is a key tool for propagandists who realize that how
people understand a foreign conflict goes a long way toward determining their
support or opposition. So, the U.S. government’s sanitizing of the Vietnam War
is not just about history, but the present, as Marjorie Cohn writes.
By Marjorie Cohn
For many years after the Vietnam War, we enjoyed the “Vietnam syndrome,” in
which U.S. presidents hesitated to launch substantial military attacks on other
countries. They feared intense opposition akin to the powerful movement that
helped bring an end to the war in Vietnam. But in 1991, at the end of the Gulf
War, George H.W. Bush declared, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once
and for all!”
With George W. Bush’s wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, and Barack Obama’s drone
wars in seven Muslim-majority countries and his escalating wars in Iraq and
Syria, we have apparently moved beyond the Vietnam syndrome. By planting
disinformation in the public realm, the government has built support for its
recent wars, as it did with Vietnam.
Now the Pentagon is planning to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam
War by launching a $30 million program to rewrite and sanitize its history.
Replete with a fancy interactive website, the effort is aimed at teaching
schoolchildren a revisionist history of the war. The program is focused on
honoring our service members who fought in Vietnam. But conspicuously absent
from the website is a description of the antiwar movement, at the heart of which
was the GI movement.
Thousands of GIs participated in the antiwar movement. Many felt betrayed by
their government. They established coffee houses and underground newspapers
where they shared information about resistance. During the course of the war,
more than 500,000 soldiers deserted. The strength of the rebellion of ground
troops caused the military to shift to an air war.
Ultimately, the war claimed the lives of 58,000 Americans. Untold numbers were
wounded and returned with post-traumatic stress disorder. In an astounding
statistic, more Vietnam veterans have committed suicide than were killed in the
war.
Millions of Americans, many of us students on college campuses, marched,
demonstrated, spoke out, sang and protested against the war. Thousands were
arrested and some, at Kent State and Jackson State, were killed. The military
draft and images of dead Vietnamese galvanized the movement.
On Nov. 15, 1969, in what was the largest protest demonstration in Washington,
DC, at that time, 250,000 people marched on the nation’s capital, demanding an
end to the war. Yet the Pentagon’s website merely refers to it as a “massive
protest.”
But Americans weren’t the only ones dying. Between 2 and 3 million Indochinese –
in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia – were killed. War crimes – such as the My Lai
massacre – were common. In 1968, U.S. soldiers slaughtered 500 unarmed old men,
women and children in the Vietnamese village of My Lai. Yet the Pentagon website
refers only to the “My Lai Incident,” despite the fact that it is customarily
referred to as a massacre.
One of the most shameful legacies of the Vietnam War is the U.S. military’s use
of the deadly defoliant Agent Orange/dioxin. The military sprayed it unsparingly
over much of Vietnam’s land. An estimated 3 million Vietnamese still suffer the
effects of those deadly chemical defoliants. Tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers
were also affected. It has caused birth defects in hundreds of thousands of
children, both in Vietnam and the United States. It is currently affecting the
second and third generations of people directly exposed to Agent Orange decades
ago.
Certain cancers, diabetes, and spina bifida and other serious birth defects can
be traced to Agent Orange exposure. In addition, the chemicals destroyed much of
the natural environment of Vietnam; the soil in many “hot spots” near former
U.S. army bases remains contaminated.
In the Paris Peace Accords signed in 1973, the Nixon administration pledged to
contribute $3 billion toward healing the wounds of war and the post-war
reconstruction of Vietnam. That promise remains unfulfilled.
Despite the continuing damage and injury wrought by Agent Orange, the Pentagon
website makes scant mention of “Operation Ranch Hand.” It says that from 1961 to
1971, the U.S. sprayed 18 million gallons of chemicals over 20 percent of South
Vietnam’s jungles and 36 percent of its mangrove forests. But the website does
not cite the devastating effects of that spraying.
The incomplete history contained on the Pentagon website stirred more than 500
veterans of the U.S. peace movement during the Vietnam era to sign a petition to
Lt. Gen. Claude M. “Mick” Kicklighter. It asks that the official program
“include viewpoints, speakers and educational materials that represent a full
and fair reflection of the issues which divided our country during the war in
Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.”
The petition cites the “many thousands of veterans” who opposed the war, the
“draft refusals of many thousands of young Americans,” the “millions who
exercised their rights as American citizens by marching, praying, organizing
moratoriums, writing letters to Congress,” and “those who were tried by our
government for civil disobedience or who died in protests.”
And, the petition says, “very importantly, we cannot forget the millions of
victims of the war, both military and civilian, who died in Vietnam, Laos and
Cambodia, nor those who perished or were hurt in its aftermath by land mines,
unexploded ordnance, Agent Orange and refugee flight.”
Antiwar activists who signed the petition include Tom Hayden and Pentagon Papers
whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. “All of us remember that the Pentagon got us into
this war in Vietnam with its version of the truth,” Hayden said in an interview
with The New York Times. “If you conduct a war, you shouldn’t be in charge of
narrating it,” he added.
Veterans for Peace (VFP) is organizing an alternative commemoration of the
Vietnam War. “One of the biggest concerns for us,” VFP executive director
Michael McPhearson told the Times, “is that if a full narrative is not
remembered, the government will use the narrative it creates to continue to
conduct wars around the world – as a propaganda tool.”
Indeed, just as Lyndon B. Johnson used the manufactured Tonkin Gulf incident as
a pretext to escalate the Vietnam War, George W. Bush relied on mythical weapons
of mass destruction to justify his war on Iraq, and the “war on terror” to
justify his invasion of Afghanistan. And Obama justifies his drone wars by
citing national security considerations, even though he creates more enemies of
the United States as he kills thousands of civilians.
ISIS and Khorasan (which no one in Syria heard of until about three weeks ago)
are the new enemies Obama is using to justify his wars in Iraq and Syria,
although he admits they pose no imminent threat to the United States. The
Vietnam syndrome has been replaced by the “Permanent War.”
It is no cliché that those who ignore history are bound to repeat it. Unless we
are provided an honest accounting of the disgraceful history of the U.S. war on
Vietnam, we will be ill equipped to protest the current and future wars
conducted in our name.
Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and former
president of the National Lawyers Guild. A veteran of the Stanford anti-Vietnam
War movement, she is co-author (with Kathleen Gilberd) of Rules of
Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent. Her latest
book, Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral and Geopolitical Issues, will be
published in October. She is also co-coordinator of the Vietnam Agent Orange
Relief & Responsibility Campaign. Copyright, Truthout.org. Reprinted with
permission.
Ellsberg Sees Vietnam-Like Risks in ISIS
War
Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department official who leaked the Pentagon
Papers exposing the Vietnam War lies, is alarmed at the many parallels between
Vietnam and President Obama’s new military campaign against ISIS in Iraq and
Syria, as Barbara Koeppel reports.
By Barbara Koeppel
At a recent talk at the National Press Club in Washington DC, Daniel Ellsberg,
who released the Pentagon Papers in 1971, says he believes there’s not one
person in the Pentagon who would agree that President Obama can achieve his aim
of destroying ISIS in Iraq and Syria with air strikes, along with training and
arming local military forces.
Nor, he says, can the Administration do it even if the U.S. sends ground troops,
contrary to Obama’s repeated assurances.
Ellsberg described the similarities with Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, and the
near-certainty of comparable failure. I interviewed him after his talk, and
updated the discussion this week, after the U.S. airstrikes inside Syria had
begun. In his Press Club talk and with me, he read from some documents, as
indicated below, and cited Web-links.
Q.
Why are you urging Americans to be warned by what happened in Vietnam, half
a century ago?
A.
Well, that was my war.
That makes me pretty old. And at 83, I am. This
means I know what Vietnam means as well as Iraq, unlike most members of
Congress. The New York Times noted on Sept. 18 that only a third of those voting
on authorizing American advisers, arms and trainers for Syrian rebels were in
Congress the last time there was a vote on war, which was for Iraq, in 2002. It
would be interesting to know what they learned from the earlier vote.
As the Times wrote, “That 2002 vote hung heavily over the six hours of debate on
Tuesday and Wednesday. Several veterans of the Iraq War stood against the
President’s request. Older Democrats recalled with bitterness their vote to back
the invasion of Iraq, a vote that ended many careers.”
“The last time people took a political vote like this in this House, it was on
the Iraq War,” Rep. Loretta Sanchez, D-California, said, “and many of my
colleagues say it was the worst vote they ever took.”
One member of the House who voted against the new authorization, Rep. Barbara
Lee, D-California,, was the one member of Congress who voted against the
authorization of military force (AUMF) in Afghanistan in 2001, then, as now,
because there was inadequate discussion and too many questions left unanswered.
And the next year, with Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, she helped organize 133 votes
in the House against the AUMF 2002 on Iraq.
She says the earlier request was “an overly broad authorization which I could
not vote for because it was a blank check for perpetual war.”
She was right. That authorization is still on the books, and the Obama
Administration still cites it (along with the AUMF 2002), 13 years later, as
sufficient authority for further escalation in Syria and Iraq. Lee says it
should be repealed.
Both times Lee echoed Senators Wayne Morse, D-Oregon, and Ernest Gruening, DAlaska, the only two members of Congress who voted against the Tonkin Gulf
Resolution in 1964. Morse warned that it was an unconstitutional, undated blank
check for war in Vietnam, and which President Lyndon Johnson used after
deceiving other senators that he would not escalate without coming back to
Congress.
In 2002, the only two senators who were in office long enough to have been
deceived into voting for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, Senators Ted Kennedy, DMassachusetts, and Robert Byrd, D-West Virginia,, said they were ashamed of
their 1964 votes and pleaded with colleagues not to make their mistake, which
they said they regretted for almost 40 years.
Twenty-one other senators listened, which, incidentally, didn’t include
Kennedy’s junior colleague from Massachusetts, Vietnam veteran Sen. John Kerry,
who had reason to regret his yes vote which helped lose him the presidency just
two years later. I believe he will come to regret his present, shameful role
with respect to this war for the rest of his life.
I have my own mistake to regret, not being the whistleblower I could have been
in the Pentagon in 1964. Like Byrd and Kennedy in 2002, I’m calling on people in
comparable positions to save themselves from such remorse, that they didn’t do
what they could to warn and inform Congress and the public now, before decisive
escalations occur.
Q. How do U.S. actions in Vietnam compare with what the U.S. is doing today,
with advisers in Iraq and air strikes in Iraq and Syria, to destroy ISIS?
A. There are countless parallels. As in Vietnam, the U.S. is heading towards an
American ground combat war under a president who assures us, before an election,
that it isn’t going to happen. And as in Vietnam, his generals claim he can’t
achieve his goal without boots on the ground.
Gen. Raymond Odierno, the Army Chief of Staff, says you can’t defeat ISIS
without ground troops. Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, testified he will recommend U.S. ground forces in Iraq if and when air
power alone is not sufficient. That day is certain to come, sooner than later,
although not before the November elections.
In fact, I doubt there’s a single person in the Pentagon or the CIA who believes
Obama can achieve his goals to destroy ISIS in Iraq and Syria with air strikes
and advisers alone.
High-level officers can’t contradict the President publicly, without resigning
or being fired. But retired officials can, and have. A former Commandant of the
Marine Corps, General James Conway, put it succinctly: The President’s current
strategy “doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell” of succeeding. I’m sure
Odierno and Dempsey give it the same odds.
It may be that people in the Pentagon are telling the President and each other
that the U.S. can defeat ISIS if you let us do a bigger war, including sizeable
numbers of American ground troops. If so, I believe they’re wrong, just as the
JCS were in Vietnam and the first Iraq War.
On the other hand, they may not believe that. Either way, here’s where truly
honest testimony to Congress is critical. And that’s not likely to happen unless
it’s triggered by leaks from inside whistleblowers of internal, classified
analyses, estimates and projections of the sort that should have occurred but
didn’t before the escalation in Vietnam or earlier in Iraq.
In any case, as Barbara Lee said, the consequences even of Obama’s recent first
steps will be to further expand our involvement in a sectarian war, without
Congress considering the implications of the larger war that’s coming.
Q. When generals, like Odierno, say ground troops will be needed, whose ground
troops do they mean?
A. “Ideally,” General Dempsey has said, they would be Iraqi, Kurdish or Syrian.
But he’s also said that half the Iraq army isn’t competent to partner with the
U.S. against ISIS. And, the other half has to be partially rebuilt and
retrained. How long will that take, since the last 12 years of U.S. training
failed so dramatically?
Regarding Syria, Dempsey says there will need to be 12,000 to 15,000 Syrian
ground troops, properly trained by the U.S., to take back territory from ISIS.
But the President just asked, and Congress authorized, U.S. training for only
5,000 Syrian troops, which is supposed to take six months to a year or more. Who
but the U.S. is going to fill that gap?
Obama’s former Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, dismissed these fantasies. He
insists the U.S. will not succeed against ISIS “strictly from the air, or
strictly depending on the Iraqi forces, or the Peshmerga [the Kurds], or the
Sunni tribes acting on their own.” He adds “some small number of American
advisers, trainers, Special Forces and forward spotters, forward air
controllers, are going to have to be in harm’s way.”
Q.
Doesn’t that contradict President Obama’s assurances of “no American boots
on the ground”?
A. Yes. That is almost certain to happen. And a question we should ask, based on
what we know about Vietnam is “When General Dempsey recommends, and the
President agrees, that U.S. advisers, trainers and air spotters should leave
their bases and accompany Iraqi troops in combat getting in harm’s way will we
be told that’s happening? If so, when?
I vividly recall reading a memo in the Pentagon on April 6, 1965, from McGeorge
Bundy, Johnson’s national security adviser, that the President had authorized a
change in mission for the Marines at Danang.
They’d been sent there, the first
American combat units in Vietnam, ostensibly to defend the base from which we
were conducting air operations.
Supposedly, they were politically harmless , just “advisers”, which didn’t
involve large U.S. casualties and get us committed the way ground combat units
do. Like what we’re doing now, in Iraq and Syria. But in 1965, LBJ had secretly
decided as early as April 1 to allow them to leave the base for offensive
patrols in the field, precisely the kinds of actions I’d been trained to lead as
a rifle company platoon leader and company commander in the Marines.
The memo said, as I noted in my 1972 book, Papers on the War, “The President
desires that premature publicity be avoided by all possible precautions. The
actions themselves should be taken as rapidly as practicable but in ways that
should minimize any appearance of sudden changes in policy. The President
desires that these movements and changes in combat mission should be understood
as being gradual and wholly consistent with existing policy.”
I remember writing a memo to my boss, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for
International Security Policy, that “This is dangerous. You can’t keep that
secret. There are reporters over there. They’ll know what the Marines are doing
and we’ll be shown to be concealing it. You know, we’re actually changing the
nature of the war. We’re going to be taking over the war from the South
Vietnamese. I don’t think you can keep that secret very long.”
I was wrong. That was April. And by July, about 100,000 troops were over there,
doing offensive operations. But until then, there was no word or leak about
this.
So on July 28, when President Johnson finally announced we were sending 50,000
more troops, it was actually 100,000, but he lied and said 50,000 to hide where
this was heading, a reporter asked, “Mr. President, does the fact you are
sending additional forces to Vietnam imply any change in the existing policy of
relying mainly on the South Vietnamese to carry out offensive operations and
using American forces to guard installations and to act as an emergency backup?”
Johnson answered, “It does not imply any change in policy whatever. It does not
imply change of objective.”
And that was true! This was the end of July. He didn’t just change the policy.
He changed it four months earlier. He just hadn’t announced it.
To bring us to the present, instead of saying “relying mainly on the South
Vietnamese,” insert Syrians, Iraqis and Kurds. When those first steps are taken
towards making this mainly an American war steps Obama and his generals and
Gates already hint at should we expect to hear about that from the White House?
Why? Because Obama is more transparent, less secretive than Johnson, Nixon or
George W. Bush? He isn’t.
During the Vietnam build-up was when I could have alerted the American people
about what was happening, and I didn’t. That’s why I’m calling on insiders who
know that we’re being misled to do better.
However, the big issue now is not the combat role for advisers, intelligence and
support units, Special Forces and air spotters. Rather, given the air war, it’s
in the cards they will be in harm’s way probably before the end of the year,
perhaps even before the election. The real issue will be the deployment of tens
if not hundreds of thousands of U.S. ground troops.
And whether they total 1,600 troops on the ground, what we already have in Iraq,
or 16,000 (what LBJ had in Vietnam before the start of the air war and the major
ground escalation in 1965), that “small force of Americans” Gates describes
won’t be remotely enough to “destroy” ISIS. Both Gates and the generals know it
will take a lot more. But even if the number soared to 550,000, as in Vietnam in
1968, or even a million, I believe they still won’t eliminate ISIS permanently.
They’ll be back.
Q. Does Obama realize the generals are sure to ask him for tens of thousands or
more combat troops?
A. I don’t know. I suspect they’ve told him that, secretly. Just as Johnson knew
his generals would ask for that in Vietnam, while he was still promising the
electorate “no wider war” in 1964, and saying he wouldn’t send American boys to
do what Vietnamese boys should be doing.
Does Obama foresee right now that he’s likely to grant that request? Is he,
then, just kidding when he promises, over and over, that we’ll defeat ISIS
without his sending American combat units? Or does he think he can and will keep
his military under control despite frustrating them and saddling them, as they
see it, with stalemate and failure?
That’s what Johnson sought to do, and to some extent did, though the war got
much larger than he’d promised or even initially wanted. He gave the Chiefs just
enough of what they wanted, in troop levels and bombings, to keep them from
resigning, though never close to what they said was essential to succeed. He
didn’t really believe that meeting their full demands would make the difference,
and he feared war with China. And he was right on both counts. But still, he
didn’t want to be accused of “losing” a region for want of “doing nothing.”
He avoided that accusation, but at the cost of a lot of lives: 58,000 American
and several million Vietnamese.
I
suspect that same concern is driving Obama right now. I see him doing what he
has to do to keep from being accused of doing “nothing.” But does he really mean
to stop at that? Or could he, even if he wanted to?
Gates recommends that President Obama scale down his present objective of
“destroying” ISIS, which Gates describes as “very ambitious,” which I translate
to mean unattainable.
That’s almost sure to happen. But even with lesser aims, like containment, or,
as Gates suggests, driving ISIS out of Iraq, with embedded advisers and Special
Forces alone, even with forward air spotters, this won’t be enough. When Gates
says it will, he’s either lying about what he believes or he’s a fool. And I
don’t think he’s a fool.
I think the Joint Chiefs will recommend to Obama that he bring large numbers of
American ground combat units to Iraq in the coming months. One difference from
Vietnam is that in those days, when Johnson lied, saying he gave the generals
everything they’d asked for and that there was no conflict between the civilians
and military in the administration (as the Pentagon Papers were to reveal, year
after year),
the military kept their mouths shut. They hoped he would come
around to their point of view eventually, and they didn’t want to preclude that
by contradicting him and getting fired.
Now, many of them think that was a mistake, even a “dereliction of duty.” This
time, the generals will do their own leaking about what they asked (as happened
in 2009, when Obama confronted “top secret” recommendations for a surge in
Afghanistan). Will the President, as he now implies, reject their recommendation
every time they make it? I think he should, but I doubt that he will, any more
than LBJ did.
The public doubts it too. The latest polls show that 72 percent of the public
expects him to deploy ground combat units in Iraq, contrary to his assurances. I
think the generals are of the same mind. It might be almost irrelevant, the way
things work, what the President himself thinks about that, privately, at this
moment.
Q. Where is Congress and its powers to declare war on this? Will the
Administration keep it informed about its military actions and ask for a formal
vote?
A. On the day Congress voted on the Administration’s request to authorize
sending advisers, arms and trainers for Syrian rebel troops, Minority Leader
Nancy Pelosi, D-California, said, in supporting it, the bill “is not to be
confused with any authorization to go further.” She said, “I will not vote for
combat troops to be engaged in war.”
But will she ever be asked by the Administration to vote on that? Every
indication is that the White House believes the President can expand this war
with the authority Congress granted the Executive in earlier bills, before the
U.S. invaded Afghanistan or Iraq, and feels no need to come back to Congress.
Once again, that’s reminiscent of Vietnam. Both the House and Senate approved
the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in August 1964, which authorized President Johnson to
use military force without a formal declaration of war. He said he needed it to
retaliate against a North Vietnamese attack on our destroyers, which, in fact,
didn’t happen.
At that time, Sen. William Fulbright, D-Arkansas, assured the Senate that the
Administration did not intend to expand the Vietnam War without returning to
Congress. But he was duped by the White House, which never again appealed to
Congress for consent, and used the Tonkin Gulf Resolution as an open-ended
declaration of war.
This time, the White House hasn’t even bothered to assure Congress, however
deceptively, that it concedes the need for further authorization. To the
contrary, it is asserting that the 2002 authorization of military force which
was based on the Bush Administration’s lies about WMDs, as blatantly as was the
Tonkin Gulf Resolution is sufficient for anything the President wants to do in
the Middle East, along with the even earlier AUMF of 2001.
For that same reason, Rep. Lee is now demanding a real vote on the war before it
expands further. She’s saying: “Don’t do this again.” Of the recent
authorization, she said “I am reminded of the failure to have a thorough debate
in the wake of 9/11, that act of atrocity, that act of terrorism, which
frightened people into a very hasty and premature delegation of their powers;
now we have two beheadings on television to do that and call for a revenge act ”
Of this recent request, though it’s much more limited than the Tonkin Gulf
Resolution or the two AUMFs, she said, “The consequences of this vote, whether
it’s written in the amendment or not, will be a further expansion of a war
currently taking place and our further involvement in a sectarian war,” again
“without adequate debate or any vote in Congress having to do with the larger
issues here of the war.”
She’s right. We should be telling Nancy Pelosi to follow her counsel, and to use
every constitutional power to force that vote, and precede it with adequate
debate.
Q. So many ask, isn’t it better to do something against ISIS — these murderers,
fanatics —
than do nothing? How do you answer that?
A. ISIS is not the only murderous, fanatic group in that region but they may
well be the most extreme so far, and most successful. But that’s a reason for
not doing something that actually strengthens them in their rivalry with others.
But that’s exactly what we are doing, with our airpower.
Even before the Syrian airstrikes, FBI Director James Comey testified on Sept.
17 that ISIS’ “widespread use of social media and growing online support
intensified following the commencement of U.S. air strikes in Iraq.”
Another news report, in the Israeli daily Haaretz, states, ‘The Islamic State
jihadist organization has recruited more than 6,000 new fighters since America
began targeting the group with air strikes last month, according to the U.K.based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. At least 1,300 of the new recruits
are said to be foreigners, who have joined IS from outside the swathes of Syria
and Iraq that it controls.”
Do we think ISIS hasn’t noticed this? We have to ask, why does ISIS want to show
off its public beheadings of Americans on international television? Our ally
Saudi Arabia doesn’t televise its beheadings, 19 in August, one for sorcery, nor
do our favored rebels, the Free Syrian Army.
But ISIS chose exactly now to boast them to the world. Why? Because they need
and welcome U.S. air strikes and the flood of recruits they bring, despite the
losses ISIS has to expect. Getting the U.S. to publicize ISIS as the number one
American enemy, while U.S. airstrikes are killing Muslim civilians along with
ISIS troops and leaders, stamps ISIS as leading the fight against the U.S. and
its allied Arab regimes that ISIS believes are infidels.
I watched this happen in Vietnam. Each time we bombed a village in South
Vietnam, the young men who survived the attack joined the Viet Cong. In fact,
the VC would fire on American planes from a village precisely for that reason.
They could count on the retaliatory bombing, and the recruits. I wrote a report
for the RAND Corporation about that when I came back, with the title,
“Revolutionary Judo.”
History repeated itself in Iraq and Afghanistan, where Matthew Hoh the Marine
and then senior State Department official who served in both countries and who
resigned his post saw exactly the same thing.
As I noted before, by doing this something, we’re strengthening ISIS and making
things worse. But that’s nothing new. Indeed, all the military actions and
expenditures of the last 13 years in the Middle East have led to creating,
strengthening and expanding ISIS and other militant groups. It’s time to stop.
As Sen. Joe Manchin III, D-West Virginia, said to his colleagues, “Our past
experience, after 13 years, everything that we have tried to do has not proven
to be at all beneficial. So what makes you think it’s going to be different this
time? What makes you think we can ask a group of Islamists to agree with
Americans to fight another group of Islamists, as barbaric as they may be?”
With the air strikes in Syria, we are radicalizing moderates who then join ISIS,
as the New York Times has noted. It has also allowed Syria’s President Bashar
al-Assad, who led the fight against ISIS until now, to stop his air strikes
against it and concentrate on the moderate rebels we support who oppose both
Assad and ISIS. Why is he doing this?
Because the U.S. is attacking ISIS, doing
his work for him. Then, if he can take moderates off the board, he calculates
the U.S. will have to accept him as the only effective ally against ISIS.
Q. What can we do that would be useful?
A. Since ISIS won’t be stopped with military actions alone, not ours or those of
groups that join us, including Iraqis and Syrians, and are in fact counterproductive, we should have learned that if there’s ever to be an answer, it has
to be largely diplomatic.
In particular, this could mean changing our close relationship with Saudi Arabia
and other Mideast allies whose citizens and regimes have long been financing and
supplying ISIS and other radical groups at the same time they provide pilots
whose attacks also help strengthen ISIS. If we ceased tolerating that
ideological and financial support for extremists, this would be a major step to
containing and eroding ISIS. But I doubt this will happen.
Serious diplomacy would also mean changing our relationship with Russia and
Iran, exploring through direct negotiations the positive contributions they
could make to stabilize the region, rather than, as at present, demonizing them.
This, too, isn’t likely. But if we don’t face what we need to do to escape the
madness we suffered and inflicted in Vietnam and Iraq, we will be mired in war
in the Middle East for decades.
Q. There are posters of you around Washington DC urging those with inside
information about the Pentagon’s plans, to leak it. The headline is: “Don’t Do
What I Did.” What do you hope will happen?
A. In 1964 and 1965, the lack of whistleblowers caused Vietnam to happen. I was
in the Pentagon then and didn’t come forward with what I knew. So I helped
Vietnam happen. I very much regret that I didn’t provide information when it
would have done the most good, when Congress was voting on this and when the
escalation was occurring. In 2002 and 2003, the lack of a Manning or Snowden
with high-level access caused Iraq.
Actually, in 1964, many in the Pentagon could have put out the information the
public and Congress needed to know. Not random documents. Just one drawer of
selected documents showing that President Johnson was deceiving people and
leading them into a hopeless war that his own Joint Chiefs believed could never
be won at the level he was willing to do it. (The heart of the Pentagon Papers
took up about one drawer of a top secret safe in my office at RAND, or earlier
in my office in the Pentagon).
I’m sure that comparable documents exist in safes in Washington and Arlington
and McLean, Virginia, right now. I’m just as sure that dozens if not hundreds of
insiders could provide the information in those documents from their own safes
to Congress and the public, if they’re willing to take the risks.
In 1971, after I put out the Pentagon Papers, Sen. Morse told me that if I had
given him the documents from my Pentagon safe while he was on the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee in 1964, “The Tonkin Gulf Resolution would never have come
out of Committee. And if they bypassed the committee and sent it to the floor,
the resolution would never have passed.”
That put a lot of weight on my shoulders, not unfairly. I’m urging insiders now
to do better than I did then, and now is the time.
Q. What do you and ExposeFacts.org aim to do?
A.
To encourage whistle-blowing that will lead people to press their
congressional representatives, this month, while they’re in their home districts
campaigning for votes, to demand hearings, debates and a vote in an effort to
block continued and escalated U.S. military involvement in Middle East
conflicts.
Just a year ago, constituents did almost exactly that, button-holing
representatives at home in their districts to demand “No war on Syria!” The
effect on Congress was electrifying, perhaps unprecedented.
It confronted a President who was committed to an attack at the end of August,
because of gas attacks in Syria whose perpetrators are still a murky and
controversial topic, and who had just remembered that he was head of the
“world’s oldest republic” with a duty to get consent from Congress to go to war.
Indeed, he could have lost the vote in both Houses. That caused him to make a
sharp turn and embrace a Russian proposal to eliminate Assad’s gas menace by
peaceful, negotiated means.
We need something like that now. Unlikely as it is, after the ISIS gains, the
public beheadings, and, not mentioned by the President before our air attacks
but quickly labeled a critical target, the emergence of the dreaded “Khorasan.”
On Khorasan we need serious investigative reporting, fueled by whistleblowing.
Could the “classified” leaks about Khorasan just before and after the Syrian
airstrikes, a group allegedly more of an imminent danger to the U.S. than ISIS,
be designed to manipulate the media and public? Could they be a fraud, just as
the all-too-successful fraudulent, authorized classified leaks in 2002 about
Saddam Hussein’s supposed nuclear cylinders? Did these recent Khorasan leaks
provide a self-defense motive for U.S. air attacks on Syria?
They sound eerily like the alleged Aug. 4, 1964 “attack” on our destroyers in
the Tonkin Gulf, 50 years ago this August, an attack that never happened, which
gave us the Tonkin Gulf Resolution and 11 years of war.
Is there really solid
evidence, as Administration officials have claimed and others leaked, of “an
advanced state of planning” for imminent attacks on U.S. airliners, by a group
called Khorasan or by any other?
Or might it have been a hoax like that floated
by the Bush Administration as Dick Cheney picked up various forgeries and
fantasies, to justify our aggression against Iraq 12 years ago?
Could this administration really be re-playing the Bush and Johnson script that
closely? And the media applauding the performance just as credulously?
Glenn Greenwald and Murtazsa Hussain make a strong case for this with Khorasan.
This cries out for leaked or congressionally-demanded documents.
As the posters put up by ExposeFacts.org say, and one is quite near the Iraq
embassy, “Don’t wait until a new war has started.
Don’t wait until thousands
more have died before you tell the truth with documents that reveal lies or
crimes or internal projections of costs and dangers. You might save a war’s
worth of lives.”
State Department, Pentagon, CIA, NSA or White House staff who follow that advice
will risk unjust prosecution under the Espionage Act, as I did. Unjust because
the Espionage Act was designed to deter or punish spies, not whistleblowers. It
was never intended to be used against disclosures to the American public, and
never used that way until my own prosecution, which was the first in American
history for a leak.
Legal scholars argued then that it was an unconstitutional violation of the
First Amendment to use the Espionage Act against whistleblowers. It’s unjust
because it doesn’t allow defendants to tell the jury and public about their
motives. [See Melville B. Nimmer, “National Security Issues v. Free Speech: The
Issues Left Undecided in the Ellsberg Case,” Stanford Law Review (vol. 26, No.
2, January 1974, 311-333).]
Treating sources of leaks, classified or not, like spies, is exactly what’s
happened under President Obama, who has brought more Espionage Act indictments
for leaking than any other president, in fact, more than all of them together.
And he’s leaving that precedent to his successors.
The risk whistleblowers take is very great. That’s why I think they should
remain anonymous, if possible. ExposeFact.org, which sponsored the Washington
press conference and encourages whistleblowers, proposes to facilitate their
anonymity by the use of encryption.
There will always be a risk of identification, and if classified information is
involved (even if it’s evidence of Executive Branch crimes or other
malfeasance), there will likely be prosecutions. Until Congress rescinds the
wording of certain clauses in the Espionage Act and passes laws to defend the
public interest, or as Harvard Law Professor Yochai Benkler proposes to call it,
a “public accountability defense,” they will probably be convicted. They could
suffer years in prison, perhaps a life sentence, as I faced (a possible 115
years) but escaped on grounds of governmental criminal misconduct. Chelsea
Manning faced the risks and now is serving 35 years. [See Benkler’s recent
article, “A Public Accountability Defense for National Security Leakers and
Whistleblowers,” Harvard Law and Policy Review, Vol. 8, Summer 2014.]
A heavy prospect. Worth considering only for the grimmest of circumstances. But
we face them now, when a war’s worth of lives might yet be saved by courageous,
patriotic truth-telling.
John Kerry, as a young, just-returned Vietnam veteran, was admired by many as an
outstanding whistleblower, with his unsparing account of U.S. war crimes in
testimony on April 22, 1971, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
That’s when he famously asked, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die
for a mistake?”
As things are now heading, he will not have to ask that of an American soldier
in Iraq or Syria while Secretary of State. Nor will President Obama The last
American combat death there is not now remotely possible within the next two,
four or even eight years.
The Pentagon is reported to be planning for a campaign of 36 months, but I don’t
think Obama’s and Kerry’s successors will be any more ready over the next decade
to admit a mistake.
The final American casualty, or last deaths inflicted in the Middle East by
Americans, will not come about unless the American people tell Congress and the
Executive what Lt. John Kerry said to the Senate in 1971, speaking for the
newly-formed Vietnam Veterans Against the War: “We want this to stop.”
Barbara Koeppel is a freelance investigative reporter based in Washington DC.
Obama’s Risks of Escalation
As President Obama launched the first waves of U.S. airstrikes against Islamic
State and other targets in Syria, the risks of further military escalation or
other expected developments abound, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar explains.
By Paul R. Pillar
The wisdom of any application of military force will involve much more than the
goals initially laid out and the resources initially applied to achieve those
goals. Those initial conditions are only a snapshot in time of what is
inevitably a dynamic process.
History has repeatedly shown that overseas military endeavors have a way of
becoming something much different from what they began as. History also has
repeatedly shown that the dominant type of change is escalation to something
bigger and costlier than originally intended, sometimes even to the point of
expanding to blunders of tragic proportions.
Several processes, working together or independently, drive the process of
escalation. Some of these processes are, considered in isolation, logical and
reasonable. Some of them are rooted in universal human nature; some are more
characteristically American.
The “Win the War” Objective. A distinctively American (and non-Clausewitzian)
way of approaching the use of military force is to believe that if something is
worth fighting for, then we ought to realize that we are “at war” and ought to
do whatever it takes to “win” the war. This mindset has had a huge influence
through the years on discourse in the United States about using the military
instrument in foreign affairs, including in more recent years with a so-called
“war on terror.”
The attitude severs the use of force from all other calculations about the costs
and benefits of using it in particular ways and particular circumstances. There
thus is no limit to potential escalation as the sometimes elusive “win” is
pursued.
Standard Procedures and the Military’s Operational Requirements. Military
forces, for quite understandable reasons of operational security or
effectiveness, insist that if they are called on to perform certain missions
then they must be permitted to use certain minimal levels of forces, to put
their troops in certain places, or to operate in certain other ways regardless
of the political or diplomatic side-effects.
Some of the classic and most consequential examples occurred at the onset of
World War I, when mobilization schedules of armies helped to push statesmen into
a much bigger armed confrontation than they wanted, and when German troops
violated Belgian neutrality because that’s what a military plan called for. More
recent U.S. military history has had many more modest examples of military
requirements driving escalation, such as ground forces being needed to provide
security for air bases. In the interest of force security, a remarkably large
amount of firepower has sometimes been used in support of quite small objectives
(such as the deposition and capture of Manuel Noriega in Panama in 1989).
Hoping That Just a Little More Will Do It. If a given level of force does not
accomplish the declared objective, then an understandable and quite reasonable
next question is whether a bit more force will be sufficient to do the trick. It
may be logically sound to decide that it is worth trying some more force. The
calculation of the moment weighs the marginal costs of doing so against the
marginal benefits.
The marginal cost of a slight escalation may be low, with the benefit being the
chance of a significant breakthrough. But a series of individual decisions like
this, while they may be individually justifiable, can result in escalation to
total costs that are far out of proportion to any possible benefit. The U.S.
escalation of the Vietnam War from 1965 to 1968 is an example.
One Objective Leads to Another. The nature of some objectives is such that if
they are to be achieved, or as a consequence of being achieved, some other
objective needs to be pursued as well. Or even if it does not really need to be
pursued, it comes into play naturally and is not easily dismissed amid the
momentum and fog of war. This is the process that often is given the name
mission creep. An example is how Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan,
which began as an offensive to oust the Taliban, became a long-term nationbuilding effort.
Responding to the Adversary’s Escalation. It takes two to tango and to make war.
The adversary has many of these same reasons to escalate a conflict against us,
and perhaps other reasons as well. When he does, we are apt to counter-escalate,
not only for emotional reasons of revenge but also perhaps for more justifiable
reasons of deterrence. This is the chief type of escalation that was the subject
of much strategic doctrine developed during the Cold War.
Domestic Political Vulnerability. Statesmen do not make their decisions about
military force in a political vacuum. They have domestic political flanks to
protect. Mitigating charges of weakness or wimpiness is an added, and possibly
even the principal, motivation to escalate the use of force against what is
widely perceived as a threat.
The emerging military campaign against ISIS will not become another World War I
or Vietnam War, but all of the above factors are seeds of escalation of that
campaign, possibly to levels well above what either the Obama administration or
its more hawkish critics are talking about. Some of the factors are already
quite evidently in play.
The absolutist vocabulary about being at war and having to win the war is very
prevalent. The President already has been pushed by the political and rhetorical
forces this vocabulary represents toward greater use of military force than he
otherwise would have preferred. The dynamic of each side in the armed conflict
escalating in response to the other side’s escalation also has already begun.
A major stimulant for the American public’s alarmist and militant attitude
toward ISIS was the group’s intentionally provocative videotaped killings, which
the group described as retaliation for U.S. military strikes against it.
The military’s operational requirements are also starting to come into play as a
mechanism of escalation, as we hear military experts telling us how air and
ground operations really are inseparable, and how effective air strikes depend
on reliable spotters on the ground. There also will no doubt be decision points
ahead about whether a little more use of force will do the job, as the United
States pursues the impossible to accomplish declared objective of “destroying”
ISIS.
Finally, the potential for mission creep is substantial, with unanswered
questions about what will follow in the countries in conflict even if ISIS could
be “destroyed.” Perhaps the most glaring such question is in Syria, where, given
the anathema toward dealing with the Assad regime, it remains unclear what would
fill any vacuum left by a destroyed ISIS, and what the United States can,
should, or will do about it. The much-discussed “moderate” forces are far from
constituting a credible answer to that question
There is significant danger of the campaign against ISIS and the costs it incurs
getting far, far out of proportion to any threat the group poses to U.S.
interests.
Paul R. Pillar, in his 28 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, rose to be
one of the agency’s top analysts. He is now a visiting professor at Georgetown
University for security studies. (This article first appeared as a blog post at
The National Interest’s Web site. Reprinted with author’s permission.)
Fleshing Out Nixon’s Vietnam ‘Treason’
Exclusive: Out of the Watergate scandal came a favorite mainstream media saying:
“the cover-up is always worse than the crime.” But the MSM didn’t understand
what the real crime was or why President Nixon was so desperate, as James
DiEugenio explains in reviewing Ken Hughes’s Chasing Shadows.
By James DiEugenio
One of America’s great political mysteries continues to come into sharper focus:
Did Richard Nixon sabotage President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks in
1968 to win that election and did Nixon’s fear of exposure lead him to create
the burglary team that got caught at Watergate in 1972?
Pieces of this puzzle began to fall into place even in real time as Beverly
Deepe, the Christian Science Monitor’s Saigon reporter, got wind of Nixon’s
treachery before the 1968 election although her editors spiked her article when
they couldn’t get confirmation in Washington. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The
Almost Scoop on Nixon’s ‘Treason.’”]
In the ensuing years, other journalists and historians began assembling the
outlines of Nixon’s peace-talk sabotage with the story getting its first big
splash of attention when Seymour Hersh made reference to it in his 1983
biography of Henry Kissinger, The Price of Power.
Then, in 2012, investigative reporter Robert Parry discovered that Johnson’s
long-missing file on Nixon’s 1968 operation, which was later turned over to the
Johnson library, helped explain another mystery: why Nixon launched his
Plumbers’ operation in 1971 and thus set in motion a series of burglaries that
led to the Watergate scandal in 1972.
Nixon had been told by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that Johnson had evidence
from wiretaps about Nixon’s peace-talk sabotage, but an alarmed Nixon couldn’t
find the file whose absence became critical after the Pentagon Papers’ history
of the Vietnam War was leaked in 1971. Nixon knew there was a potential sequel
somewhere that could end his presidency. [See Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen
Narrative.]
Now, journalist Ken Hughes, a resident scholar at the Miller Center at the
University of Virginia, has filled out the story even more in his new book,
Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair and the Origins of
Watergate.
Johnson’s Peace Initiative
Hughes begins his book with the dramatic day of March 31, 1968, when President
Johnson announced on national television that he would not run for reelection
that fall. Or, as he put it, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the
nomination of my party for another term as your President.”
But Johnson said something else: he intended to end the Vietnam War before
leaving the White House. Since his election in 1964, Johnson had overseen a
massive military escalation of the war, inserting 550,000 American troops in
theater and ordering the greatest bombing campaign in the history of warfare,
called “Rolling Thunder.”
Despite all the carnage, Johnson finally concluded that a military victory in
Vietnam was illusory. He therefore announced a limited bombing halt over 90
percent of North Vietnam and promised a complete bombing halt if the North
Vietnamese would show some reciprocal restraint.
Though many Vietnam War critics were dubious about Johnson’s peace initiative,
the historical record is now clear that Johnson was sincere about his plan. He
wanted peace talks to begin as soon as possible. He was seeking a U.S. exit
strategy.
As Hughes notes, there had always been advisers around Johnson who told him it
was futile to fight in Vietnam. As early as 1964, Sen. Richard Russell, DGeorgia, advised his former protégé, “It isn’t important a damn bit. I never
did want to get messed up down there. I do not agree with those brain trusters
who say this thing has tremendous strategic and economic value and that we’ll
lose everything if we lose Vietnam.”
Russell said the problem was how to get out of Vietnam without looking weak, a
dilemma that Johnson a classic Cold Warrior who believed in the Domino Theory
could not overcome. But the war’s futility and its political damage had become
apparent to Johnson by the time of the Viet Cong’s Tet Offensive in JanuaryFebruary 1968, leading to his decision to withdraw from the presidential race
and his plan to end the war.
Johnson also sought to be fair to the major candidates running to replace him:
Vice President Hubert Humphrey, former Vice President Richard Nixon and
independent candidate, Gov. George Wallace of Alabama. Johnson promised to keep
them equally informed of developments in the peace process. And, Hughes writes,
that as far as the declassified record reveals, Johnson kept that promise.
Nixon’s Dilemma
But the political problem from Johnson’s peace initiative soon grew acute for
Nixon, who remained bitter about his narrow loss to John Kennedy in 1960. During
the late summer of 1968, Nixon had a big lead over Humphrey, swelling to about
15 points after the disastrous Democratic convention in Chicago.
But Nixon recognized that the Democrats were likely to unify especially if the
anti-war faction thought that Johnson was making progress on a peace deal.
Humphrey also began reaching out to disaffected Democrats with increasingly
clear overtures on resolving the war. If Johnson could deliver on a full bombing
halt and the start of a U.S. withdrawal, Nixon might again be denied his dream
of the presidency.
Whatever one thinks of Richard Nixon, the man had the (deserved) reputation of a
consummate infighter in the political arena. This went back to his smearing of
Congressman Jerry Voorhis in 1946, his 1948-50 destruction of State Department
diplomat Alger Hiss from Nixon’s seat on the House Committee on Un-American
Activities, and his tarring of senatorial candidate Helen Gahaghan Douglas in
1950. In fact, on now-declassified Nixon tapes that Hughes cited, Nixon admits
that he unethically had access to grand jury proceedings against Hiss, and he
used them to convict Hiss in the press before trial.
Thus, Nixon might have viewed Johnson’s peace initiative as just one more
political obstacle to overcome. And Nixon had in his campaign apparatus people
like China Lobby figure Anna Chennault who could sink Johnson’s negotiations by
getting the South Vietnamese government to stay away from the Paris talks.
Anna Chennault was the widow of legendary Flying Tigers pilot Claire Chennault,
who was 32 years her senior when they were married in 1947.
The Chennaults were
part of the China Lobby, the campaign that smeared President Harry Truman and
the Democrats for “losing China” to the communists in 1949. The Chennaults also
suffered financially with the fall of China since they were planning on running
the CIA-related airline Civil Air Transport under Chiang Kai-shek, but the
operation was forced to move to Taiwan.
The Chennaults and the China Lobby were quite effective in portraying the
Democrats as being soft on communism in the 1952 election. Chennault died in
1958 but his widow remained active in Republican politics and in Washington’s
social life. She rented a suite at the Watergate Hotel and became a founder of
the Flying Tiger Line, a freight loading operation.
Helping Nixon
Because of her political effectiveness, her wealth and her status as a woman
ethnic, Anna Chennault became involved in the 1968 Nixon campaign under campaign
chief John Mitchell. She was co-chair of the Women’s Advisory Committee and
raised over $250,000 for Nixon, the top sum by a female fundraiser.
By early July 1968, Anna Chennault was already in contact with Bui Diem, the
South Vietnamese ambassador to the United States, about her work for the Nixon
camp, according to a memo by Nixon’s foreign policy adviser Richard Allen, cited
by Hughes.
In her 1980 memoir, The Education of Anna, Chennault also described a meeting in
New York City involving herself, Bui Diem, Nixon and Mitchell on July 12, 1968,
a get-together corroborated by Bui Diem’s memoir, In the Jaws of History. At
this meeting, Nixon anointed Anna Chennault, “the sole representative between
the Vietnamese government and the Nixon campaign headquarters.”
As the back-channel between the Nixon campaign and the South Vietnamese
government, Chennault passed a series of messages to Bui Diem, President Thieu
and other senior officials in Saigon essentially promising them a better deal if
Nixon won. Chennault told Thieu through Diem that Johnson’s peace talks were
simply a ploy to get Humphrey elected president and that Humphrey opposed the
Americanization of the war.
Chennault indicated that Nixon favored more direct American intervention, an
appealing message to convey to Thieu because without U.S. support, Thieu’s
regime could not last long against the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese.
Nixon’s Assurances
While Nixon was putting in motion his plan to disrupt the peace talks, Johnson
continued to brief all three candidates. On July 26, Johnson told them that he
was pushing to have a four-point negotiation at the table, involving the U.S.,
North Vietnam, Thieu’s government and the National Liberation Front (NLF), the
political arm of the Viet Cong.
Nixon assured Johnson that he was in full support of the peace initiative and
that the President’s emissaries in Paris should be able to speak with the
confidence and authority of the U.S. government. Nixon said nothing should be
done in the political arena that might undermine the effort.
Hughes shows Nixon’s hypocritical side again when he points to Nixon’s
acceptance speech at the GOP convention in Miami in August, saying: “We all hope
that there’s a chance that current negotiations may bring an honorable end to
that war, and we will say nothing during this campaign that might destroy that
chance.” (italics added)
Meanwhile, Humphrey trying to rebuild the shattered Democratic unity began to
suggest that peace was possible and that U.S. troops could be coming home as
early as 1969. Johnson responded by saying that although everyone hoped to see
the day the troops come home no one could predict when that day would come. He
added, “We are there to bring an honorable, stable peace to Southeast Asia, and
no less will justify the sacrifices that our men have died for.”
Later, Humphrey went even further, saying he would stop the bombing for good in
return for good-faith negotiations from the North. Though Humphrey’s public
peace talk annoyed Johnson, it helped the Vice President cut into Nixon’s onceformidable lead what had been a 15-point margin shrank to 8 points. The stakes
for Nixon were raised.
The first warning that Johnson got about Nixon’s sabotage of the peace talks
came from Wall Street. In late October, banker Alexander Sachs told State
Department official Eugene Rostow that Nixon was alerting his allies on Wall
Street that he had a plan to “block” Johnson’s peace talks and they should place
their investment bets accordingly. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Profiting Off
Nixon’s Vietnam ‘Treason.’”]
Thieu’s Resistance
When Eugene Rostow’s information was passed to Johnson by his national security
aide Walt Rostow (Eugene’s brother), Johnson had just learned that South
Vietnamese President Thieu had decided not to send a delegation to Paris to
negotiate.
Johnson also had a second source who revealed that Mitchell, Nixon’s campaign
manager, was working to frustrate Johnson’s attempt at peace talks and a truce.
Mitchell had been heard to say words to the effect that they would foul up these
peace talks as they had frustrated Johnson’s attempt to make Abe Fortas the
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
Johnson revealed this information to his friend Sen. Russell in a phone
conversation. Johnson said he had ways to confirm whether or not the rumors were
true. What he meant was that he could use the surveillance powers of the FBI,
CIA and NSA to monitor certain communications necessary to carry out the
subversion of the peace process.
Johnson did just that. The NSA placed a bug inside Ambassador Bui Diem’s office
in Washington, and the CIA did the same in the office of President Thieu in
Saigon. Even though Hughes writes that these partially declassified cables are
still heavily redacted, it’s clear from them that Johnson told Russell that Anna
Chennault was in contact with Bui Diem. LBJ was convinced she was the go-between
from the Nixon camp to the South Vietnamese representatives.
NSA intercepts revealed that Ambassador Bui Diem told Thieu that the longer the
situation dragged out the more it would favor the Republicans and South Vietnam.
Bui Diem added that he was in direct contact with the Nixon entourage, which
meant, of course, Chennault.
In fact, the FBI knew that Chennault had visited Bui Diem at the embassy on Oct.
30 for 30 minutes. Besides the wiretap, Johnson ordered the FBI to report on
anyone entering or leaving the embassy and to tail Chennault. He also wanted her
phone tapped at the Watergate, but the FBI didn’t go that far.
Trying to pressure Nixon to back off, Johnson called Republican Senate Leader
Everett Dirksen and asserted that he (Johnson) knew what was going on. “I really
think it’s a little dirty pool for Dick’s people to be messing with the South
Vietnamese ambassador and carrying messages around to both of them, and I don’t
think the [American] people would approve of it if it were known,” Johnson told
Dirksen with the implicit threat to expose publicly what Johnson privately
called Nixon’s “treason.”
Hughes writes that Johnson never told Humphrey specifically about what Chennault
was doing. He only mentioned some interference from the “China Lobby” and
“Nixon’s entourage.” Nor did Johnson show Humphrey the intelligence cables he
had from the FBI, NSA, and CIA.
The Final Days
Despite Johnson’s warning to Dirksen, Chennault did not stand down. On Nov. 2,
just three days before the election, another embassy message was intercepted
revealing that she told Ambassador Bui Diem to convey to his superiors, “hold
on, we are gonna win.”
Thieu followed up by telling the South Vietnamese legislature that he would
boycott the negotiations. At the same time, Nixon announced that he had been
assured that the peace talks would begin. The combination of the two public
announcements made Johnson look like either a con man or someone who had lost
control of his own negotiations (which he had).
On Sunday, Nov. 3, Johnson asked Nixon about his knowledge of the Republican
interference, and Nixon told Johnson that he was fully behind the President’s
efforts to bring the war to an end as quickly as possible. Nixon would lie about
his role in the sabotage to the end.
There was one last twist to the story, playing out the day before the election.
The Christian Science Monitor’s Saigon correspondent Beverly Deepe filed a story
based on her local sources describing the Republican gambit to prevent the peace
talks. In Washington, the Monitor’s Saville Davis ran Deepe’s information past
Bui Diem, who denied it, and then past the White House.
President Johnson considered confirming the story but consulted with several of
his top advisers national security adviser Walt Rostow, Secretary of State Dean
Rusk and Defense Secretary Clark Clifford who all urged him to stay silent.
Clifford warned that if the story was published and Nixon still won, Nixon might
be unable to lead the country. With the White House declining comment, the
Monitor decided not to go with Deepe’s scoop.
Humphrey ended up losing the election by less than one point in the popular
vote, leaving history to ponder the painful question of whether the disclosure
of Nixon’s operation might have cost him the election and brought the war to an
end years earlier saving countless lives.
The Watergate Tie-in
But there was another reason to expose Nixon’s covert operation. Hughes concurs
with journalist Robert Parry’s revelations two years ago that it was probably
Nixon’s awareness of Johnson’s knowledge about the sabotage that inspired the
formation of the Plumbers and set the stage for the Watergate scandal which
destroyed Nixon’s presidency.
After Nixon won the election in 1968, FBI Director Hoover flew to New York for a
private conference with Nixon and his chief of staff H. R. Haldeman. During the
meeting, Hoover revealed the bugging operation ordered by Johnson over the
Chennault affair. But the Director exaggerated its extent, claiming that the FBI
had bugged Nixon’s campaign plane, which was not true. Hoover also said the FBI
had wiretapped Chennault’s phone at her home, which Johnson had sought but which
was not done.
There could have been a reason for Hoover’s falsehoods. By claiming that Nixon’s
plane had been bugged, Hoover may have wanted Nixon to believe that he himself
had been caught on tape directly implicated in the sabotage scheme. That could
have led Nixon to think that Hoover had something politically lethal on him. By
hyping the story, Hoover also undercut one of his younger FBI rivals, Cartha
“Deke” DeLoach, by telling Nixon that some of the bugging had been DeLoach’s
idea.
What Nixon didn’t know was that Johnson removed the Chennault file when he left
office in January 1969 and entrusted the top-secret information to Walt Rostow,
rather than ship it to the Johnson presidential library in Austin, Texas. The
missing file and the paranoia instilled in Nixon by Hoover’s exaggerated account
had huge consequences for history.
When Nixon took office he assigned Haldeman to find the Chennault file, a task
that was passed on to Thomas Charles Huston, who later became famous for the
Huston Plan proposing more domestic surveillance of leftist anti-war groups.
Huston’s recommendations went too far even for Hoover. But Huston’s work on
national security issues made him a natural for Haldeman’s assignment to locate
the Chennault file.
Huston couldn’t find the file but believed that some of the information about
why the peace talks had failed might have ended up in a Defense Department study
supervised by Clifford, Paul Warnke and Leslie Gelb. When Gelb left office for
the Brookings Institution, he supposedly took the report with him, Huston
believed. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “An Insider’s View of Nixon’s ‘Treason.’”]
Confusion Reigns
As Hughes notes, this information conveyed by Huston seems, at best, garbled. It
more accurately describes the Pentagon Papers, which Gelb was actually involved
in, rather than the Chennault affair, which Gelb had no role in. But even though
Huston’s information was dubious on its face, Haldeman conveyed it to Nixon, who
predictably replied: “I want that goddamn Gelb material and I don’t care how you
get it!”
But as yet, Nixon lacked his own team for conducting illegal break-ins. So, the
issue of the missing Chennault material was pushed to the proverbial back
burner. But an historic event in 1971 returned this concern to the center of
Nixon’s paranoid mind.
On June 13, 1971, the New York Times started publishing the Pentagon Papers, a
secret study of the Vietnam War commissioned by former Defense Secretary Robert
McNamara tracing the conflict from its beginning to 1967. The American public
was suddenly riveted by disclosures about how various presidents, mostly
Democrats, had deceived the country about the Vietnam War.
Four days later, Nixon returned to the issue of the missing file and the
possibility that Gelb had taken it to the Brookings Institution and placed it in
the think tank’s safe. On June 17, 1971, Nixon summoned Haldeman and national
security advisor Henry Kissinger into the Oval Office and pleaded with them
again to locate the missing file. “Do we have it?” Nixon asked Haldeman. “I’ve
asked for it. You said you didn’t have it.”
Haldeman: “We can’t find it.”
Kissinger: “We have nothing here, Mr. President.”
Nixon: “Well, damnit, I asked for that because I need it.”
Nixon then added that he wanted a break-in of Brookings “implemented. Goddamnit,
get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.”
On June 30, 1971, Nixon again berated Haldeman about the need to break into
Brookings and “take it [the file] out.” Nixon even suggested using former CIA
officer E. Howard Hunt to conduct the Brookings break-in. “You talk to Hunt,”
Nixon told Haldeman. “I want the break-in.”
Nixon’s Paranoia
From here in the book, Hughes draws a portrait of a man who is a victim of his
own past and his own prejudices. Nixon begins to compare those who leaked the
Pentagon Papers with the communist conspiracy he railed about back in his HUAC
days.
Feeling under pressure regarding leaks or potential leaks Nixon starts scheming
about leaking negative information about former Democratic icons. He wanted to
get the goods on Franklin Roosevelt’s prior knowledge about the Japanese attack
on Pearl Harbor. Nixon wanted files on President Kennedy because he thought
there might be some dirt about the Bay of Pigs fiasco or the Cuban Missile
Crisis.
In effect, Nixon wanted a dual-track program: 1.) He wanted to break into
private institutions to save himself from potential political damage from the
Chennault affair, and 2.) He wanted to disclose damaging classified materials on
the Democrats, possibly to muddy the waters just in case his 1968 peace talk
sabotage was exposed.
Nixon soon brought onboard Hunt to oversee the creation of a Special
Investigations Unit, better known as the Plumbers. The unit would be governed
from above by Nixon, Haldeman, and White House aide John Ehrlichman, but it
would have support from the FBI and the CIA.
At this point, with the Plumbers formed and their target list forming, Hughes
reveals another Nixon pathology: his hatred of the Harvard People. Nixon did not
come from a privileged background and did not get into an Ivy League college. He
seemed to resent those who did, like Hiss, Kennedy and Roosevelt.
Nixon began to demand head counts in certain agencies of government like
Treasury and Justice of, respectively, Jews and Ivy Leaguers. Incredibly, his
subordinates actually compiled these counts. Fred Malek was put in charge of
finding the Jewish cabal inside government after Nixon said, “I really feel that
I want the Jews checked.”
In a conversation with White House counsel Chuck Colson about the Treasury
Department, Nixon said: “Well. Listen are they all Jews over there?” Colson
replied, “Every one of them. Well, a couple of exceptions.” This conversation
concludes with Nixon saying that they have to find a man who is not Jewish to
control the Jews in the administration.
Haldeman later wrote that he understood the dark pathology of Nixon’s mind and
would not follow through on some of his wilder demands. The problem, as Haldeman
saw it, was that Colson would. Colson and Nixon would then do things that
Haldeman would not know about until afterwards. In other words, Colson enabled
the worst in Nixon.
Acting on Nixon’s worst impulses, Colson and G. Gordon Liddy, a leader of the
Plumbers, thought up a wild scheme to burglarize Brookings in pursuit of the
missing file. They would first firebomb the building. Then, after the fire
engines were called in, a burglary team would take advantage of the confusion
and bust open the safe.
But after John Caulfield and Anthony Ulasewicz, veteran detectives working for
Nixon, heard about the scheme, they counseled against it and Ehrlichman canceled
the operation. As Hughes notes, Ehrlichman then lied under oath about Nixon’s
approval of the project, which was the only burglary that Nixon clearly
authorized on tape.
On to Watergate
Still, the Plumbers continued to undertake other illegal break-ins, including
rifling files and planting bugs inside the Watergate offices of the Democratic
National Committee in late May 1972. When five burglars returned on June 17,
1972, to do more espionage, they were caught by Washington D.C. police, setting
in motion the Watergate scandal. That, in turn, created a constitutional crisis
as Nixon refused to surrender his White House tapes to investigators.
On July 24, 1974, when the U.S. Supreme Court ordered Nixon to surrender the
tapes, it spelled the doom for Nixon’s presidency by corroborating allegations
from ex-White House counsel John Dean and others that Nixon had overseen a
criminal cover-up of the Watergate break-in. Nixon resigned on Aug. 9, 1974.
However, Nixon’s sabotage of Johnson’s peace talks although it may have extended
the war for four years and caused the deaths of some 20,000 U.S. soldiers and a
million Vietnamese never received the attention that the Watergate cover-up did.
Nor has Official Washington ever come to grips with the new evidence suggesting
that the two scandals were actually one.
Hughes ends the book deftly. In the David Frost interviews with Nixon in 1977,
Frost asked him about the Chennault affair. Nixon replied that he did nothing to
undercut Johnson’s attempts at negotiations. About Chennault’s interference, he
said that he did not authorize these attempts at subterfuge.
Building on the investigative work of Robert Parry and other researchers, Ken
Hughes has written a well-documented, incisive and hard-hitting book. He takes
us up close to a man who never should have been president and who appears to
have gotten into the White House through an act approaching treason. Nixon then
lied about the crime for the rest of his life.
James DiEugenio is a researcher and writer on the assassination of President
John F. Kennedy and other mysteries of that era. His most recent book
is Reclaiming Parkland.
The Heinous Crime Behind Watergate
Exclusive: The mainstream media’s big takeaway from Richard Nixon’s Watergate
resignation is that “the cover-up is always worse than the crime.” But that’s
because few understand the crime behind Watergate, Nixon’s frantic search for a
file on his 1968 subversion of Vietnam peace talks, reports Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
To fully understand the Watergate scandal, which led to President Richard
Nixon’s resignation 40 years ago, you have to know the back story starting in
1968 when candidate Nixon took part in a secret maneuver to scuttle the
Vietnam peace talks and salvage a narrow victory over Vice President Hubert
Humphrey.
In essence, what Nixon and his campaign team did was to contact South Vietnamese
leaders behind President Lyndon Johnson’s back and promise them a better deal if
they stayed away from Johnson’s Paris peace talks, which President Nguyen van
Thieu agreed to do. So, with Johnson’s peace talks stymied and with Nixon
suggesting that he had a secret plan to end the war, Nixon edged out Humphrey.
After his election, Nixon learned from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that
President Johnson had amassed a detailed file on what Johnson called Nixon’s
“treason,” but Nixon couldn’t locate the file once he took office and ordered an
intensive search for the material that explained why the Paris peace talks had
failed. But the material stayed missing.
Nixon’s worries grew more acute in mid-June 1971 when the New York Times and
other major U.S. newspapers began publishing the Pentagon Papers leaked by
former Defense Department official Daniel Ellsberg. Though the Pentagon Papers
covering the years 1945 through 1967 exposed mostly Democratic deceptions, Nixon
knew something that few others did, that there was a potential sequel that could
be even more explosive than the original.
By mid-1971, an increasingly angry and radical anti-war movement was challenging
Nixon’s continuation of the conflict. In early May, a series of demonstrations
had sought to shut down Washington. Some 12,000 protesters were arrested, many
confined at RFK Stadium in a scene suggesting national disorder.
In June, the Pentagon Papers further fueled the anti-war fury by revealing many
of the lies that had led the nation into the bloody Vietnam quagmire. So, Nixon
recognized the political danger if someone revealed how Nixon’s pre-election
maneuvers in 1968 had prevented President Johnson from bringing the war to an
end. Nixon became desperate to get his hands on the missing report (or file)
about the failed peace talks.
In a series of tape-recorded meetings beginning on June 17, 1971, Nixon ordered
a break-in (or even a fire-bombing) at the Brookings Institution where some
Nixon insiders believed the missing material might be hidden in the safe.
“I want it implemented,” Nixon fumed to his senior aides, Henry Kissinger and
H.R. “Bob” Haldeman. “Goddamnit, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and
get it.”
On June 30, 1971, Nixon returned to the topic, berating Haldeman about the lack
of action and suggesting that a team be formed under former CIA officer E.
Howard Hunt to conduct the Brookings break-in. “You talk to Hunt,” Nixon told
Haldeman. “I want the break-in. Hell, they do that. You’re to break into the
place, rifle the files, and bring them in. Just go in and take it. Go in around
8:00 or 9:00 o’clock.”
There was even talk about fire-bombing the centrist Washington think tank, but
the break-in never apparently happened, although Brookings’ historians say there
was an attempted break-in during that time frame. The historians also say that
Brookings never possessed the missing file or report.
Nevertheless, Nixon and his advisers had crossed an important Rubicon, creating
a team of burglars who would become known as the Plumbers.
This team, under Hunt’s command, would break into the office of Ellsberg’s
psychiatrist seeking information to discredit the whistleblower and into the
Democratic National Committee at the Watergate building on May 28, 1972, to
plant bugs and rifle through files. On June 17, 1972, when the team returned to
the Watergate to plant more bugs, five of the burglars were arrested by
Washington police.
Though Nixon and his team were able to keep a lid on the scandal until the
November election, which he won handily over Sen. George McGovern, the cover-up
eventually proved to be Nixon’s undoing. As investigators closed in on Nixon’s
use of hush money and other obstructions, some insiders, such as White House
counsel John Dean, began to talk.
When Congress learned that Nixon had taped many of his Oval Office
conversations, the President faced demands for these recordings, which Nixon
fought furiously to protect. Eventually, however, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered
the tapes be turned over and Nixon’s political fate was sealed. On Aug. 8, 1974,
he announced to the nation that he would resign and, on Aug. 9, he signed the
official papers and departed from the White House aboard a Marine helicopter.
But the mistaken lesson that the U.S. mainstream media derived from the scandal
was that “the cover-up is always worse than the crime,” a silly saying that
reflected the media’s ignorance about what the underlying crime was. In this
case, the historical record now shows that Nixon set the Watergate scandal in
motion in 1971 out of fear that perhaps his greatest crime would be exposed how
he sabotaged Vietnam peace talks to gain a political edge in an election.
Of the 58,000, U.S. soldiers who died in Vietnam more than 20,000 died during
Nixon’s presidency. Possibly a million more Vietnamese died in the Nixon years.
But, in the end, Nixon accepted a peace deal in late 1972 similar to what
Johnson was negotiating in 1968. And the final outcome was not changed.
After U.S. troops departed, the South Vietnamese government soon fell to the
North and the Vietcong.
The Missing File
Several years ago, I located the missing file at the LBJ Library in Austin,
Texas. Before leaving office in January 1969, Johnson had ordered his national
security adviser Walt Rostow to take the top secret material out of the White
House with instructions to hold it until after Johnson died and then decide what
to do with it.
Rostow labeled the file “The X-Envelope” and retained possession until after
Johnson’s death on Jan. 22, 1973, just two days after Nixon began his second
term. Eventually, Rostow decided to turn over the file to the LBJ Library with
instructions to keep it sealed for at least 50 years. However, library officials
decided to open “The X-Envelope” in 1994 and began the process of
declassification.
The documents many based on FBI wiretaps show that Johnson had strong evidence
about Nixon’s peace-talk sabotage, particularly the activities of campaign
official Anna Chennault who passed messages to South Vietnamese Ambassador Bui
Diem in Washington urging the South Vietnamese leaders to maintain their boycott
of the Paris peace talks.
On Nov. 2, the FBI intercepted a conversation in which Chennault told Bui Diem
to convey “a message from her boss (not further identified),” according to an
FBI cable. Chennault said “her boss wanted her to give [the message] personally
to the ambassador. She said the message was that the ambassador is to ‘hold on,
we are going to win’ and that her boss also said, ‘hold on, he understands all
of it.’ She repeated that this is the only message ‘he said please tell your
boss to hold on.’”
That same day, Thieu recanted on his tentative agreement to meet with the Viet
Cong in Paris, pushing the incipient peace talks toward failure.
Several years ago, the National Archives released tape recordings of Johnson’s
phone calls further clarifying the depth of Johnson’s knowledge and anger. On
the night of Nov. 2, Johnson telephoned Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen
of Illinois and urged him to intercede with Nixon.
“The agent [Chennault] says she’s just talked to the boss and that he said that
you must hold out, just hold on until after the election,” Johnson said. “We
know what Thieu is saying to them out there. We’re pretty well informed at both
ends.”
Johnson then issued a thinly veiled threat to go public. “I don’t want to get
this in the campaign,” Johnson said, adding: “They oughtn’t be doing this. This
is treason.”
Dirksen responded, “I know.”
Johnson continued: “I think it would shock America if a principal candidate was
playing with a source like this on a matter of this importance. I don’t want to
do that [go public]. They ought to know that we know what they’re doing. I know
who they’re talking to. I know what they’re saying.”
Though Johnson personally spoke with Nixon about the Chennault issue, Nixon
simply denied doing anything wrong and the peace stalemate continued through the
final days of the campaign. On the day before the election, Johnson had one last
chance to expose Nixon’s “treason” when the White House was asked by the
Christian Science Monitor to respond to a Saigon-datelined article drafted by
correspondent Beverly Deepe who had discovered the Republican obstruction from
her South Vietnamese sources.
Johnson consulted with Rostow, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Defense
Secretary Clark Clifford in a Nov. 4 conference call. Those three pillars of the
Washington Establishment were unanimous in advising Johnson against going
public, mostly out of fear that the scandalous information might reflect badly
on the U.S. government.
“Some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I’m wondering
whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly
have a certain individual [Nixon] elected,” Clifford said. “It could cast his
whole administration under such doubt that I think it would be inimical to our
country’s interests.”
Johnson concurred with their judgment. An administration spokesman refused to
confirm or deny the story, leading the Christian Science Monitor’s editors to
spike Deepe’s scoop.
Nixon’s interference with the Paris peace talks remained secret as Americans
went to the polls, many believing that Nixon did have a plan to end the war.
Instead, once in the White House, Nixon escalated the war with heavier bombing
of North Vietnam and an invasion of Cambodia. U.S. combat involvement would
continue for four more years.
Yet, even as the historical record has become clearer in recent years, the old
conventional wisdom about Watergate as a “third-rate burglary” that only proved
politically devastating to Nixon because he engaged in an ill-advised cover-up
remains the prevailing narrative. If you ask most mainstream U.S. journalists
about the prime lesson of Watergate, they’ll probably tell you that it shows
that “the cover-up is always worse than the crime.”
[For more on this topic, see Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative, or go to
Consortiumnews.com’s “LBJ’s X-File on Nixon’s ‘Treason’” or “An Insider’s View
of Nixon’s ‘Treason’.”]
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for
The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book,
America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon
and barnesandnoble.com). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry’s
trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives
for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on
this offer, click here.