Mysteries of the NATO Syria-Iraq intervention

This PBS Newshour report includes an interview with the British Defense Secretary Michael Fallon on the muddled multiple-party intervention in Syria and Iraq around Daesh/ISIS, UK accelerating pace of anti-ISIS missions, says defense secretary (transcript link) 12/11/2015:

It's a good illustration of the difficulty for the public to understand who's backing whom and what the goals of the various sides may be.

Fallon on Britain's Parliamentary authorization to start bombing Syria:

Well, I think a growing recognition that this border between Iraq and Syria is not recognized by ISIL itself, and it’s completely artificial and rather odd to be carrying out airstrikes on one side of the border, but the Royal Air Force having to turn back at the border and not follow through the other side of the border.

Change the border to the one between Vietnam and Cambodia and the Royal Air Force to US Air Force, and it takes on an very uncomfortable historical resonance. For that matter, make the border the one between North Korea and China, and we get another one, also very unpleasant.

This does not fill me with confidence.

He continues:

It was also a response to France and the United States and other countries that wanted Britain to step up its contribution to the campaign. And I’m delighted we’re now able to do that. We have doubled the number of strike aircraft that we have in theater. And we’re upping the tempo of our missions.

This gives me unpleasant memories, too, of the Clinton Administration's eight years of maintaining no-fly zones and sanctions against Iraq, which set the stage for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 after the 9/11 attacks gave the Cheney-Bush Administration an opportunity to promote jingoism and war with fewer questions being asked than might otherwise have been the case. The Obama Administration is sensible and restrained on the Syrian civil war and Daesh/ISIS compared to the Republican side. But, in his usual fashion, he frames his position as having the same goal as the Republicans (to the extent that the latter is discernible). He wants to destroy Daesh/ISIS but also wants to unseat their main opponent, the Bashar al-Assad regime in Damascus. The other fighting force playing a major role on the ground seems to be the Al-Nusra Front, part of the current Al-Qaeda franchise. And while it may bear no especially meaningful relation to Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda of 2001, it's still Islamic fundamentalist and bitterly anti-American.

Judy Woodruff in her introduction to the interview said, "Meanwhile, today in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke about his country’s war in Syria. For the first time, he said that Russian aircraft are now helping a rebel group, the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army."

Say what? I thought we gave up on them after they started defecting to Daesh/ISIS and Al-Nusra. And taking their American-supplied training and weapons with them.

And while we're strolling Memory Lane, the Pentagon may be up to one of its favorite tricks, from the days of padding "body counts" in the Vietnam War, as Daniel DePetris reports in Is the Pentagon Feeding Obama Bogus Intel on ISIS? The National Interest 12/11/2015. It was said of the Vietnam War that the US never lost a battle but still lost the war. Do you remember the Pentagon admitting to losing any battles in Iraq? Me neither.

Prolonging the Afghanistan War and repeating old failures

The announcement that the Obama Administration is intervening militarily in Cameroon was bad. This is far worse: Michael Pizzi, Obama scraps Afghan troop withdrawal, passing war on to next president Aljazeera America 10/15/2015. Pizzi reports:

President Barack Obama on Thursday announced the U.S. will scrap its plan for a rapid withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2016 and will instead maintain a force of thousands in the country to assist with an increasingly fragile security situation, indefinitely prolonging a military engagement he was once eager to end. ...

The new plan, which follows months of deliberations among Obama, military leaders and the Afghan government, will leave the current U.S. force of 9,800 in Afghanistan through 2016 and a residual force of 5,500 until he leaves office in 2017. Stationed at four bases across the country, the troops will carry on their dual missions in Afghanistan: counterterrorism operations against Al-Qaeda and the country’s upstart ISIL franchise and training and advising the Afghan military in its fight against the Taliban.

What could possibly go wrong?

I wonder what the supposed presence of the Islamic State in Afghanistan means. This was the first I've heard of it.

This is already a bad omen: "Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who accused Obama of pursuing a 'politically motivated withdrawal' in Afghanistan, said Thursday that he was 'pleased' the president was reconsidering the rapid drawdown."

John McCain approves. This is definitely a grim portent.

Corey Dickstein and Josh Smith reports the story for Stars and Stripes, Obama to keep 5,500 American troops in Afghanistan into 2017 10/15/2015:

The Afghan forces progress has been slower than the U.S. had hoped when it ended the American role in combat operations at the end of last year.

Obama said the Afghans, who now have sole responsibility for the security of their country, will benefit from the continued presence of U.S. advisers “this fighting season and into next fighting season.”

It's a good time to pay attention to Andrew Bacevich's reflections of the US record on training local forces in situations like Vietnam and Afghanistan, omgram: Andrew Bacevich, Vietnamization 2.0 TomDispatch 10/13/2015. Nick Turse observes in an introduction to Bacevich's article:

After the United States toppled Saddam Hussein's government in April 2003, L. Paul Bremer III, the top American civilian official in occupied Iraq, took a bold step. He dissolved Iraq’s military, deciding to replace Saddam’s 350,000-man army with a lightly-armed border protection force that would start with 12,000 troops and eventually peak at around 40,000 soldiers, supplemented by various police and civil defense forces.

Bremer’s best-laid plans imploded as an insurgency blossomed from the roiling mass of well-trained Iraqi military veterans he had ushered to the unemployment line and a civil war soon wracked the country. A bloodbath ensued and never ended, even as the U.S. surged in more troops and pumped in tens of billions of dollars to build what eventually became the 930,000-man strong Iraqi security forces. (That’s not much smaller than the South Vietnamese Army the U.S. built up in the late 1960s!) Along the way, there was plenty of progress. “Every single day, the Iraqi security forces are getting bigger and better and better trained and better equipped and more experienced,” said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2005. “You know, the one thing -- the one thing we have seen is that Iraq has developed a very good capability to be able to defend itself,” said Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta six years later. “And I think that's a reflection of the fact that the Iraqis have developed a very important capability here to be able to respond to security threats within their own country.”

And yet by 2014, the Iraqi military had (and was paying) more ghost soldiers -- troops who existed only on paper -- than the number of real soldiers Bremer had envisioned to secure the whole country back in 2003. As it happened, Iraq was anything but secure. Today, it’s a half-failed state, riven by sectarian strife, and has lost a significant portion of its territory to an extremist group incubated in U.S. prison camps. The country is now far worse off than the one the U.S. invaded in 2003.

Bacevich's article itself is titled, "On Building Armies (and Watching Them Fail): Why Washington Can’t “Stand Up” Foreign Militaries." Bacevich recalls the Vietnam War, which provided a model for the current stages of failure of the American interventions in both Afghanistan and Iraq:

The United States had, of course, attempted this approach once before, with unhappy results. This was in Vietnam. There, efforts to destroy North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces intent on unifying their divided country had exhausted both the U.S. military and the patience of the American people. Responding to the logic of events, Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had a tacitly agreed upon fallback position. As the prospects of American forces successfully eliminating threats to South Vietnamese security faded, the training and equipping of the South Vietnamese to defend themselves became priority number one.

Dubbed “Vietnamization,” this enterprise ended in abject failure with the fall of Saigon in 1975. Yet that failure raised important questions to which members of the national security elite might have attended: Given a weak state with dubious legitimacy, how feasible is it to expect outsiders to invest indigenous forces with genuine fighting power? How do differences in culture or history or religion affect the prospects for doing so? Can skill ever make up for a deficit of will? Can hardware replace cohesion? Above all, if tasked with giving some version of Vietnamization another go, what did U.S. forces need to do differently to ensure a different result?

At the time, with general officers and civilian officials more inclined to forget Vietnam than contemplate its implications, these questions attracted little attention. Instead, military professionals devoted themselves to gearing up for the next fight, which they resolved would be different. No more Vietnams -- and therefore no more Vietnamization.

JFK and withdrawing from Vietnam, again

Godfrey Hodgson revisits one of the perennial what-if questions of US history in The ’60s great what-if: What would John F. Kennedy have done about Vietnam? Salon 06/07/2015.

Hodgson takes a skeptical position on whether JFK would have withdrawn from Vietnam.

But he had ordered a reduction in the number of US troops there. And I think the evidence leans toward the conclusion that he intended to continue to pull back from that war.

Jaime Galbraith did an article several years ago making that case. He based it not only on Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's memoirs but also on John Newman's JFK and Vietnam (1992) and Howard Jones' Death of a Generation (2003). Both of which are good reads as well as good history.

I blogged about this in my first few months of blogging, JFK and Withdrawing from Vietnam 11/24/2003.

Galbraith's articles and related material from that time on this topic include:

Kennedy, Vietnam and Iraq Salon.com 11/22/2003

Exit Strategy: In 1963, JFK ordered a complete withdrawal from Vietnam Boston Review 09/01/2003

In a letter to Boston Review, Noam Chomsky challenged Galbraith's position, Letters from Chomsky and Galbraith on JFK and Vietnam 12/01/2003.

Galbraith said in his response:

In October 1963 there were 17,000 U.S. military “advisers” in Vietnam. They were doing some fighting, and taking some losses, but in the main their mission was to train and assist the South Vietnamese army, which was more than 10 times larger. They faced an insurgency involving as yet few North Vietnamese forces. U.S. withdrawal at that time would not have meant the early collapse of South Vietnam. It would not have ended the war—except from the point of view of direct involvement of U.S. soldiers.

It is therefore reasonable that, into the early fall of 1963 when official military forecasts were still fairly optimistic, the administration should simultaneously plan to “intensify the war effort” and plan for withdrawal of our soldiers. Three key facts that have since emerged are these. First, the official optimism was disbelieved at the very top of the Kennedy administration, notably by McNamara. Second, Kennedy set a course for a decision to withdraw, from which he was not deterred by what then became a deteriorating official military prospect. This explains Kennedy’s concern, evident on the tapes, that the withdrawal be implemented in low key and not be tied to the perception of military progress. Third, the decision to withdraw was taken and then carefully, but not altogether completely, edited out of the record available to historians until the late 1990s. [my emphasis]

Galbraith also notes:

Kennedy’s October 1963 decision to withdraw happened. But Kennedy was nevertheless prepared to leave U.S. soldiers in harm’s way for two more years, mainly (I believe) to reduce the political consequences of pulling them out before the 1964 election. This should have, as my essay states, an ambiguous effect on his reputation.

George Herring in his Ameria's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975 (2nd edition 1986) wrote:

Sometime in the early summer of 1963, [South Vietnamese leaders Ngo Dinh] Diem and
[Ngo Dinh] Nhu began to explore the possibility of a settlement with Hanoi which would result in an American withdrawal from Vietnam.
Kennedy appears to have been thinking along the same lines. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had initiated long-range planning on troop levels in 1962 to ensure a balance between the Vietnam commitment and America's other global requirements, and in 1963 had produced a plan calling for a phased withdrawal of American advisers to begin later in the year and to end in 1965. The plan seems to have reflected the Pentagon's persisting optimism about progress in containing the insurgency. Some members of Kennedy's staff have since argued, however, that the President's approval of it indicated his determination to avoid an open-ended commitment. Indeed, Hilsman and White House staff member Kenneth O'Donnell claim that by the summer of 1963 Kennedy had recognized the futility of American involvement and was prepared to liquidate it as soon as he had been reelected. "If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam," he reportedly explained to Mansfield, "we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands." The extent to which Kennedy had committed himself remains unclear, but the plan for a phased withdrawal does seem to reflect his growing concern about Vietnam and the increasingly strained relationship with Diem. (pp. 94-5)

In the end, though, whether Kennedy would have withdrawn all troops from Vietnam is by definition a matter of speculation. John Prados in Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945-1975 (2009) is cautious on the question, arguing that "concrete evidence for the Kennedy withdrawal is sparse and subject to interpretation." He then notes, "There is, however, hard proof for a McNamara withdrawal." (p. 78) Prados notes that Kennedy authorized escalation of CIA operations in Laos in 1963 and his public statements in the weeks before his death, Kennedy was explicitly saying withdrawal would be "a great mistake" and reaffirming his support for the infamous and always badly mistaken "domino theory."

As I said, it seems to me that the bulk of the evidence argues that Kennedy in late 1963 had the intention to withdrawn US troops from Vietnam. But it was a very fluid situation and the Cold War consensus in both parties heavily favored supporting the Southern Vietnamese government in that conflict. And, obviously, Kennedy could have changed his mind as time progressed and conditions changed.

Reason to be cautious on pinning blame for airline shootdowns

The bipartisan consensus on increasing hostility toward Russia, in the US and largely in Europe as well, is not something I'm thrilled to see.

There have been some recent reminders that people not thrilled about increasing the prospects of war need to take into account full account over the official reaction to the shootdown of Malaysian Flight MH17.

Fred Kaplan recalls a previous American shootdown in America’s Flight 17 Slate 07/23/2014:

But before accusing Russian President Vladimir Putin of war crimes or dismissing the entire episode as a tragic fluke, it’s worth looking back at another doomed passenger plane—Iran Air Flight 655—shot down on July 3, 1988, not by some scruffy rebel on contested soil but by a U.S. Navy captain in command of an Aegis-class cruiser called the Vincennes. ...

The Malaysian Boeing 777 wandered into a messy civil war in eastern Ukraine, near the Russian border; the Iranian Airbus A300 wandered into a naval skirmish—one of many clashes in the ongoing "Tanker War" (another forgotten conflict)—in the Strait of Hormuz. The likely pro-Russia rebel thought that he was shooting at a Ukrainian military-transport plane; the U.S. Navy captain, Will Rogers III, mistook the Airbus for an F-14 fighter jet. The Russian SA-11 surface-to-air missile that downed the Malaysian plane killed 298 passengers, including 80 children; the American SM-2 surface-to-air missile that downed the Iranian plane killed 290 passengers, including 66 children. After last week’s incident, Russian officials told various lies to cover up their culpability and blamed the Ukrainian government; after the 1988 incident, American officials told various lies and blamed the Iranian pilot. Not until eight years later did the U.S. government compensate the victims’ families, and even then expressed "deep regret," not an apology. [my emphasis]

The Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have put out a cautionary statement, Obama Should Release Ukraine Evidence Consortium News 07/29/2014:

We see an eerie resemblance to an earlier exercise in U.S. “public diplomacy” from which valuable lessons can be learned by those more interested in the truth than in exploiting tragic incidents for propaganda advantage. We refer to the behavior of the Reagan administration in the immediate aftermath of the shoot-down of Korean Airlines Flight 007 over Siberia on August 30, 1983. We sketch out below a short summary of that tragic affair, since we suspect you have not been adequately briefed on it. The parallels will be obvious to you. ...

Hours after the tragic shoot-down on August 30, 1983, the Reagan administration used its very accomplished propaganda machine to twist the available intelligence on Soviet culpability for the killing of all 269 people aboard KAL007. The airliner was shot down after it strayed hundreds of miles off course and penetrated Russia’s airspace over sensitive military facilities in Kamchatka and Sakhalin Island. The Soviet pilot tried to signal the plane to land, but the KAL pilots did not respond to the repeated warnings. Amid confusion about the plane’s identity – a U.S. spy plane had been in the vicinity hours earlier – Soviet ground control ordered the pilot to fire.

The Soviets soon realized they had made a horrendous mistake. U.S. intelligence also knew from sensitive intercepts that the tragedy had resulted from a blunder, not from a willful act of murder (much as on July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian civilian airliner over the Persian Gulf, killing 290 people, an act which President Ronald Reagan dismissively explained as an “understandable accident”).

To make the very blackest case against Moscow for shooting down the KAL airliner, the Reagan administration suppressed exculpatory evidence from U.S. electronic intercepts. Washington’s mantra became “Moscow’s deliberate downing of a civilian passenger plane.” Newsweek ran a cover emblazoned with the headline "Murder in the Sky." (Apparently, not much has changed; Time’s cover this week features “Cold War II” and "Putin’s dangerous game." The cover story by Simon Shuster, "In Russia, Crime Without Punishment," would merit an A-plus in William Randolph Hearst’s course “Yellow Journalism 101.”)

When KAL007 was shot down, Alvin A. Snyder, director of the U.S. Information Agency’s television and film division, was enlisted in a concerted effort to "heap as much abuse on the Soviet Union as possible," as Snyder writes in his 1995 book, "Warriors of Disinformation."

He and his colleagues also earned an A-plus for bringing the "mainstream media" along. For example, ABC's Ted Koppel noted with patriotic pride, “This has been one of those occasions when there is very little difference between what is churned out by the U.S. government propaganda organs and by the commercial broadcasting networks.”

Things like this have happenbed in the past. This month is also the 50th anniversary of the "Tonkin Gulf incident," which became one of the most notorious propaganda concoctions to justify war in history. Daniel Ellsberg and Gareth Porter talk about that event's lasting significance in these two video interviews from The Real News.

Why The Gulf of Tonkin Matters 50 Years Later (1/2) 07/31/2014:

Why The Gulf of Tonkin Matters 50 Years Later (2/2) 08/01/2014:

Michael Lind in Beware the neocon exaggerators: They were wrong on Russia and the Mideast before — and they’re wrong about the threat now Salon 08/02/2014 also sounds a note of caution, reminding us how shamelessly the neoconservative warmongers exaggerated the power and hostile intentions of the Soviet Union. He doesn't buy the present-day warmongering form the usual suspects:

The truth is that post-Soviet Russia is different in kind from the Soviet Union. The USSR was a superpower with a population and economy rivalling that of Western Europe and the U.S. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a second-tier regional power, roughly equivalent in its economic weight and military might with any one of the four other European powers: Germany, France, Britain and Italy (five great powers, if Turkey, a member of NATO and a candidate for accession to the EU, is counted as a European power).

Russia’s economy, amounting to 2.5 trillion dollars according to the purchasing power parity (PPP) standard, is significantly smaller than that of Germany at 3.27 trillion. The Russian economy is comparable to that of the UK (2.4 trillion) and France (2.3 trillion) and somewhat larger than the economy of Italy (1.8 trillion).

But the fact that Russia has an economy the same size as those of Britain or France with more than twice as many people means that the median Russian is much poorer. Russia’s per capita income is only $18,100 — higher than that of Turkey ($15,300) but much lower than the per capita income of Germany ($39,500), the UK ($37,300), France ($35,700) and Italy ($29,600).

It’s true that Russia has inherited the world’s second-largest nuclear arsenal from the defunct Soviet Union. But unlike the Soviet Union, which spent 15 percent or more of its national budget on defense in its final years, Putin's Russia spends about the same share of its GDP on defense that the U.S. does — between 4 and 5 percent. Both the U.S. and Russia spend more on the military than do the other major European powers, among which Britain (2.5 percent) and France (2.3 percent) spend the most.

Because today’s Russia is so much smaller than today’s U.S., similar defense spending as a percentage of GDP buys much less military for Russians than for Americans. The Russian military budget, estimated to be about $70 billion, is dwarfed by that of the combined EU countries ($236 billion) and the U.S. (more than $600 billion).

Tags: neoconservatives, russia, ukraine, vietnam war

Obama, Eisenhower and Syria

Jon Western at the foreign policy blog Duck of Minerva draws a comparison between Obama's decision-making on the recent attempt at a military invention in Syria and Dwight Eisenhower's during the French crisis at Dienbienphu, Obama's Dienbienphu Moment? 09/12/2013.

President Dwight Eisenhower, King Saud of Saudi Arabia, Vice President Richard Nixon, 1957

One might get the impression reading about the anti-Vietnam War movement that it was an unprecedented moment of unpopularity for a foreign war.

But the Korean War was also unpopular, though it didn't generate the same kind of protests the Vietnam War would a decade and a half later. Still, Westerns's piece reminds us that the general public in those early Cold War years wasn't in some wild warmongering mood all the time. Writing about the 1953-4 period when France's troubles in holding out in Indochina became acute, he says that Eisenhower faced a real barrier in public opinion to more active involvement in support of the French:

The problem was that public opinion was overwhelming opposed to intervention. In September of 1953, Gallup polling revealed that only 9% of the public supported fighting in Indochina. George Gallup made a striking notation by footnoting an editorial comment in the release of the September poll: "The size of the disapproval vote is unusually significant. Rarely in the polling annals has opinion divided in such a lopsided fashion as it does in the case of the troops to Indochina issue." That number ran consistently below 15% support throughout the spring of 1954 as the crisis escalated. Other polls suggested wider support, but only if the action included broad international support and active contribution from others.

That opposition came from multiple sources. First, in the wake of Korea (and the legacy of a bad war) there was a strong aversion in the public – and among the Never Again crowd in the U.S. Army – against launching another limited land-war in Asia. Second, there was a general opposition on the basis of estimated costs of war. Korea had been initially sold as likely to be a relatively cheap and easy effort, it wasn't. And, finally, there were many who opposed intervening on behalf of French colonialism – both for moral and prudential reasons. Many saw Ho Chi Minh's rebellion more as a nationalist inspired, not communist driven, campaign. [my emphasis]

And there were other times in which public reluctance to getting drawn into war was particularly strong:

There are many cases where we’ve seen the constraints of public opinion on presidential decisions: Roosevelt faced a deeply embedded isolationist Congress and public on the war in Europe from September of 1939 until Pearl Harbor; Clinton, and much of the international community, clearly floundered on Bosnia because of concerns of widespread public opposition to intervention; and, Reagan desperately believed that the United States should do more to support the Contras in Nicaragua – and despite his popularity, landslide victory in 1984, and his label as the "Great Communicator," he was blocked by Congress and overwhelming public opposition in his efforts to shift American policy to support the Contras – a constraint [that] ultimately led to the administration’s attempt to do an end run on Congress and the Iran-Contra crisis.

Western's piece is also a reminder that Eisenhower as President was not the kind of dove some liberal and progressive commentators now try to make him out to be. Yes, he was right about the military-industrial complex and had more pragmatic restraint in foreign policy than some later Presidents. But Western argues that he would liked to have been able to intervene directly to save the French colonial cause in Indochina.

Tags: barack obama, cold war, eisenhower, syria, vietnam war

Segregation 2.0 and income inequality

"While outright race-based segregation in schools was banned, in reality, educational segregation has worsened in recent decades, as Gary Orfield and other scholars have documented." Joseph Stiglitz, How Dr. King Shaped My Work in Economics New York Times 08/27/2013

The end of officially-sponsored school segregation in the South was a milestone in the dismantling of the Segregation 1.0 (Jim Crow) system. Formally racially segregated schools were official institutions promoting, teaching and literally embodying the separation of the races. It was the Brown v. Board of Education decision on segregated public schools that put Segregation 1.0 into its long, final defensive phase. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was more central, because denial of the vote to African-American citizens was the real political core of the segregation system. But the end of school segregation forced whites in the South, and somewhat later in other sections of the country, to confront the changed realities in their lived experience in a new way.

I'm modest about my ability to declare new eras as having begun. But whether Segregation 2.0 is beginning, impending or already a well-established reality, it's here for the United States. The Segregation Five of the Roberts Supreme Court have gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. The Republicans are escalating rapidly on voter suppression measures. Some of the rulings of the Supreme Court in recent years have may have effectively eliminated the practical force of the Brown decision. And, as Stiglitz points out, de facto racial segregation of schools in on the rise.

As he and others have been careful to point out, the famous "I Have A Dream" march whose anniversary we've been celebrating was called the "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom." Martin Luther King was intensely aware that class injustice was intimately connected with racial discrimination and put that reality at the center of his message.

Stiglitz in his piece talks about how his involvement in the civil rights movement lead him to become an economist and to specialize in problems of distribution:

It was because I hoped that something could be done about these and the other problems I had seen so vividly growing up in Gary, Ind. — poverty, episodic and persistent unemployment, unending discrimination against African-Americans — that I decided to become an economist, veering away from my earlier intention to go into theoretical physics. I soon discovered I had joined a strange tribe. While there were a few scholars (including several of my teachers) who cared deeply about the issues that had led me to the field, most were unconcerned about inequality; the dominant school worshiped at the feet of (a misunderstood) Adam Smith, at the miracle of the efficiency of the market economy. I thought that if this was the best of all possible worlds, I wanted to construct and live in another world.

In that odd world of economics, unemployment (if it existed) was the fault of workers. One Chicago School economist, the Nobel Prize winner Robert E. Lucas Jr., would later write: "Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution." Another Nobel laureate of the Chicago School, Gary S. Becker, would attempt to show how in truly competitive labor markets discrimination couldn’t exist. While I and others wrote multiple papers explaining the sophistry in the argument, his was an argument that fell on receptive ears.

Like so many looking back over the past 50 years, I cannot but be struck by the gap between our aspirations then and what we have accomplished.

Rick Perlstein has been quoted several places I've seen for his perceptive comment on the neutralizing of King's image by turning him into a plastic saint: "Frankly, Martin Luther King had to be forgotten before he could be remembered." (See Joan Walsh, The right's outrageous MLK ignorance Salon 08/28/2013)

Fortunately, like with other leaders that played an important role in pushing democracy forward, trying to redefine them into harmless, vaguely inspirational figures is a tricky business. Some people growing up hearing their conservative families and the political leaders they follow talk about King's "content of their character" speech with the present-day conservative spin will actually look one of these days to understand more of what King was about. They will be surprised to see what the plaster saint of conservative mythology who was opposed to any and all laws to prevent racial discrimination actually had to say!

But the world doesn't stand still. And Segregation 2.0 is just as much a plague against democracy as the 1.0 Jim Crow version was.

Joan Walsh has a moment of liberal guilt about comparing Obama as President to King as civil rights leader. But then she goes ahead and does it anyway:

I admit, during this commemorative week, I've come to think it's wrong for white people in particular to deploy King as a weapon against our first black president. It simplifies the context in which both men have had to struggle, against staggering odds. It cheapens them, and us – especially on this day. History will no doubt compare them, but historians will have more information and more wisdom than we have today. Obama is the president, of everyone, charged with advancing liberty and justice as well as keeping us safe. He has disappointed me, profoundly at times, but I will not find him wanting, at least not today.

Still, were he alive, I have no doubt but that King would still be marching. He got a holiday after he was silenced; had he never been silenced, I'm not so sure he'd have gotten a holiday, because he would have kept pushing us, all of us, to live up to our highest ideals.

I actually think the comparison between the two Nobel Peace Prize winners is especially relevant right now. The living one is getting ready to launch an act of undeclared war against Syria, a country that has not attacked the United States. The long-decreased one was a very sharp critic of American militarism in general and its Vietnam War manifestation in particular.

Here's the living Nobel Peace Prize winner on Wednesday, Obama at March Anniversary: Goals of Economic Opportunity Have Fallen Short 08/28/2013:

Here is the other Nobel Peace Prize winner talking about the Vietnam War, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. - April 4, 1967 - Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence [Full Speech]:

Tags: civil rights movement, martin luther king jr., syria, vietnam war, white racism

The Vietnam War and the US "destiny" as a "Great Power"

Chester Coioper makes a telling statement about the nature of the United States as a superpower pursuing a strategy of global hegemony in his 1970 book, The Lost Crusade: America in Vietnam. That global posture was then being pursued in the context of the Cold War, where the US faced a major "peer competitor" (to use current terminology) in the Soviet Union.

This is from the first chapter of his book. And its fitting that he should quote Irving Kristol, the godfather of neoconservatism in support of his point:

The fruits of Vietnam (win, lose or draw) are likely to be sour, not only for America but for many other countries who have, or thought they had, an American "commitment." We may be able to demonstrate that we honored our commitment to Vietnam , but will the American people, at least in this generation, rush to honor others? Will this war, which had been justified as a demonstration of American concern for international order, lead to a new form of American isolationism? In the light of South Vietnam's experience, will other threatened small nations seek American "protection," or will they prefer to passively succumb to Communist pressure?

This is one of the crucial questions. Its answer will shed light on the role and destiny of the United States over the next decade and perhaps beyond. In trying to engage with this fundamental problem we must resign ourselves to the fact that there are only two knowns, neither of which is very helpful: the first is that the United States will remain a Great Power; the second is that virtually nothing else can be predicted with a high degree of confidence. Irving Kristol is right, I think, when he says, "because we are a Great Power, we are a 'committed nation' without knowing what our commitments precisely are. Our commitments are necessarily defined, to a considerable extent, by circumstance and contingency."

Several things are striking here, things which continue to plague American foreign policy:

• The foreign policy specialist frets that the American people may be reluctant to go to war to honor stupid commitments made largely in secret by the foreign policy elite, often in pursuit of unworthy aims.
• The bogeyman of "isolationism" is used to stigmatize anyone that questions such dubious commitments and unjustified wars.
• Justifications for bad policies shift freely: the Vietnam War was "justified as a demonstration of American concern for international order"? (!?) Actually, it was more that the Communists would soon be killing us in our beds if we didn't fight for the "anti-Communist," corrupt, authoritarian regime in South Vietnam. Also, there was that supposed attack in the Tonkin Gulf ...
• Substitute "Al Qaeda" for "Communist" and a lot of the exaggerated, tendentious justifications for foreign adventurism can still be used almost word-for-word.
• The unthinking chest-thumping over the US "destiny" as a Great Power still substitutes for good sense and reasonable judgment.
• Clowns like the late Irving Kristol - and now his son Bill - are still taken to be Very Serious People on foreign affairs, not matter how spectacularly and consistently wrong they are; "we are a 'committed nation' without knowing what our commitments precisely are"? No wonder we create so many disasters when this kind of thing passes for thinking, much less a serious variety.

In fairness to the author, the above passage is not entirely representative of Cooper's book, which was and remains an important work on the US involvement in Vietnam, with particularly attention to the diplomacy of that involvement from the Second World War on. He describes in detail many of the policy dilemmas and calculations that were part of that process, and includes descriptions of the very real problems the US intervention there faced.

But the paragraphs quoted above do convey a sense of general Cold War conventional wisdom in framing such matters. And it is striking how many of the lazy assumptions behind it still seem so current today.

Tags: vietnam war, us foreign policy

The Vietnam War stalemate machine

Paul Rosenberg looks at George McGovern and his opposition to the Vietnam War in George McGovern: The road not taken Aljazeera English 10/25/2012.

What particularly caught my attention about this article was a reference he makes to Robert Mann's A Grand Delusion: America's Descent Into Vietnam:

With the release of LBJ's White House tapes, it became clear why McGovern's private entreaties had no effect: LBJ did not need to be convinced that the Vietnam War was bad policy. He already knew and believed that himself, but he believed even more that he'd be impeached if he failed to fight.

Mann's book clearly established the origins of Johnson's thinking: How the Democrat's dramatic -though brief - loss of the Senate in the wake of the Korean War, elevated Johnson to Minority Leader, making him the point man responsible for regaining the majority. There were many more actors than two in Mann's book. But the contrast between these two is most instructive. Both men knew what was right, and both men did what seemed politically expedient for a time.

I haven't read Mann's book yet, so I don't know what may be distinctive about his findings.

But the fact that Presidents, including Johnson, feared very bad political repercussions if they didn't press forward with policies they knew to be bad policy in the larger scheme of things isn't a new analysis. The longest chapter in Daniel Ellsberg 1972 book Papers on The War was titled, "The Quagmire Myth and The Stalemate Machine." There he shows that Presidents from Truman through Johnson made decisions on the Vietnam War that were aimed at preventing immediate military disaster and the bad domestic political repercussions they expected that would involve. He argued in the introduction to the book, quoting a 1969 memo of his own, "that the long-run goal four Presidents [Truman, Ike, JFK, LBJ] had chosen to pursue in Indochina - the permanent exclusion of the Indochinese Communist party from open politics, and ultimately its destruction as an organization - had always been beyond their reach. What was always likely to result from their efforts was what had happened: defeat in the North, stalemate in the South."

Ellsberg discussed six decisive decision-making points:

• Truman's decision in 1950 to subsidize the French colonial war in Indochina
• Eisenhower's choice in 1954 to forego direct American military intervention accompanied by a progressively hardening defense of South Vietnamese strongman Ngô Đình Diệm (0901-1963)
• Kennedy's decision in 1961 to send military advisers to support Diem's South Vietnamese military effort
• Kennedy's ill-fated 1963 decision to back the overthrow of Diem, which resulted in Diem's assassination
• Johnson's decision in 1964 to bomb North Vietnam after the infamous Tonkin Gulf incident
• Johnson's decision in 1965 to undertake massive, continuing bombing and "to accept open-ended ground force commitment" to preserve a non-Communist South Vietnam

As 1950 opened, Mao Zedong's Communists had taken full power in China, with the exception of the island of Taiwan. A full-blown Red Scare was already under way even before Sen. Joseph McCarthy announced his still-undisclosed alleged list of Communists in the State Department in Wheeling, West Virginia, of February 9, 1950. Ellsberg quotes from that speech of the alcoholic Senator who managed to produce a great deal of political malpractice over the next four years, "How can we account for our present situation ulesss we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man."

No, that stuff didn't start with Glenn Beck.

McCarthy claimed in a Senate speech of March 30, 1950, "It was not Chinese democracy under Mao that conquered China, as Acheson, Lattimore, Jessup and Hanson contend. Soviet Russia conquered China and an important ally of the conquerors was this small left-wing element in our Department of State." Not matter how slim the probability of "winning," there was little debate within the

McCarthy was sleazier and more dishonest than most. But there was bipartisan consensus on much of this attitude, and not just from Dixiecrats, either. Ellsberg quotes Congressman John F. Kennedy in a speech of January 25, 1949:

Mr. Speaker, over this weekend we have learned the extent of the disaster that has befallen China and the United States. The impressibility for the failure of our foreign policy in the Far East rests squarely with the White House and the Department of State.

The continued insistence that aid would not be forthcoming unless a coalition government with the Communists was formed was a crippling blow to the National Government.

So concerned were our diplomats and their advisers, the Lattimores and the Fairbanks, with the imperfection of the democratic system in China after twenty years of war and the tales of corruption in high places that they lost sight of our tremendous stake in a non-Communist China.

Our policy, in the words of the Premier of the National Government, Sun Fo, of vacillation, uncertainty, and confusion has reaped the whirlwind.

This House must now assume the responsibility of preventing the onrushing tide of Communism from engulfing all of Asia. [my emphasis]

The Kennedys were generally on friendly terms with Joe McCarthy, but that's another story.

Obviously, the ability of foreign policy opinion-makers to inflate threats and scare the hoo-hoo out of themselves and the public also didn't begin with the planes that crashed into the Twin Towers on 09/11/2001. As Ellsberg wrote, "Fear of McCarthy's and McCarthyism's power at the polls may always have been overdrawn, even in 1950-52, and still more3 so today. ... From one point of view, of course, what matters in explaining the behavior of Congressmen and officials is what they believe their risks to be, and what risks they are willing to take." On the other hand, looking at things from the perspective of 2012 when the Republican Party sounds more every day like the White Citizens Council circa 1960, it would be hard to say that those fears were entirely irrational.

This was the ugly, panicky, poisoned political context in which the Truman Administration decided to extend $10 million of aid to South Vietnam in May, 1950, at a time when $10 million was serious money. Ellberg wrote:

No matter how slim the probability of "winning," there was little debate within the government as to whether the open-ended direct aid policy we commenced in May, 1950, with a first installment of $10 million, was worthwhile. It could - and did - buy a stalemate; and the alternative was to add the Democrats' "loss" of Indochina to their "loss" of China. that was enough to know. To postpone the loss of Tonkin [Vietnam] beyond the tenure of the Truman Administration evidently seemed worth more than the several billion dollars - and the French and Vietnamese lives - that it cost. [my emphasis]

As an example from the Kennedy Administration, he cites a much quoted article by Kenneth O'Donnell, "LJB and the Kennedys" from Life magazine 08/07/1970. It is usually referenced in connection with Kennedy's second-term intentions with regard to Vietnam. But Ellsberg cites it in the context of Kennedy's judgment of the McCarthyist political danger he perceived was involved:

The President told Mansfield that he had been having serious second thoughts about [Sen. Mike] Mansfield's argument and that he now agreed with the Senator's thinking on the need for a complete military withdrawal from Vietnam.

"But I can't do it until 1965-after I'm reelected," Kennedy told Mansfield.

President Kennedy felt, and Mansfield agreed with him, that if he announced a total withdrawal of American military personnel from Vietnam before the 1964 election, there would be a wild conservative outcry against returning him to the Presidency for a second term.

After Mansfield left the office, the President told me that he had made up his mind that after his reelection he would take the risk of unpopularity and make a complete withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam. "In 1965, I'll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don't care. If I tried to pull out completely now, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I'm reelected. So we had better make damned sure that I am reelected." [my emphasis]

Kennedy had a more realistic-minded view on foreign policy than he had shown as a Congressman in 1949. As Ellsberg noted, "Mansfield was subsequently quoted in interviews as confirming in substance this report."

Ellsberg didn't elaborate as much on what Johnson's particular political fears were on the Vietnam War. But he made it clear that he saw LBJ continuing the previous pattern:

In brief: A decade before what [Arthur] Schlesinger[, Jr.] calls Kennedy's "low-level crisis" in South Vietnam, the right wing of the Republican Party tattooed on the skins of politicians and bureaucrats alike some vivid impression of what could happen to a liberal administration that chanced to be in office the day a red flag rose over Saigon. ...

Many of the paradoxical features of U.S. escalating decisions as seen from the inside - the "discrepancies" between chosen policies, on the one hand, and internal predictions, recommendations, and long-term aims on the other - can thus be seen to reflect conflict between domestic political requirements on outcomes and domestic political constraints on means.

He adds in a footnote that he is "not saying that only calculations of domestic political interest enter or determine these decisions; nor would I deny that such calculations, themselves, may reflect class or corporate interests."

I should add here that Ellsberg's chapter that I've been citing is, from a poli-sci geek viewpoint, a brilliant piece of analysis, not only of the Vietnam-related decision-making itself but also of the institutional pressures for just-good-enough solutions to difficult problems. I'm impressed with that every time I go back to it.

In Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (1976), Doris Kearns [Goodwin] quotes from what she represents as verbatim notes of his extensive post-Presidential interviews with Johnson on the subject of his domestic political calculations on the Vietnam War:

Oh, I could see it coming all right. History provided too many cases where the sound of the bugle put an immediate end to the hopes and dreams of the best reformers: the Spanish-American War drowned the populist spirit; World War I ended Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom; World War II brought the New Deal to a close. Once the war began, then all those conservatives in the Congress would use it as a weapon against the Great Society. You see, they'd never wanted to help the poor or the Negroes in the first place. But they were having a hard time figuring out how to make their opposition sound noble in a time of great prosperity. But the war. Oh, they'd use it to say they were against my programs, not because they were against the poor-why, they were as generous and as charitable as the best of Americans - but because the war had to come first. First, we had to beat those Godless Communists and then we could worry about the homeless Americans. And the generals. Oh, they'd love the war, too. It's hard to be a military hero without a war. Heroes need battles and bombs and bullets in order to be heroic. That's why I am suspicious of the military. They're always so narrow in their appraisal of everything. They see everything in military terms. Oh, I could see it coming. And I didn't like the smell of it. I didn't like anything about it, but I think the situation in South Vietnam bothered me most. They never seemed able to get themselves together down there. Always fighting with one another. Bad. Bad.

Yet everything I knew about history told me that if I got out of Vietnam and let Ho Chi Minh run through the streets of Saigon, then I'd be doing exactly what Chamberlain did in World War II. I'd be giving a big fat reward to aggression. And I knew that if we let Communist aggression succeed in taking over South Vietnam, there would follow in this country an endless national debate-a mean and destructive debate - that would shatter my Presidency, kill my administration, and damage our democracy. I knew that Harry Truman and Dean Acheson had lost their effectiveness from the day that the Communists took over in China. I believed that the loss of China had played a large role in the rise of Joe McCarthy. And I knew that all these problems, taken together, were chickenshit compared with what might happen if we lost Vietnam.

"For this time there would be Robert Kennedy out in front leading the fight against me, telling everyone that I had betrayed John Kennedy's commitment to South Vietnam. That I had let a democracy fall into the hands of the Communists. That I was a coward. An unmanly man. A man without a spine. Oh, I could see it coming all right. Every night when I fell asleep I would see myself tied to the ground in the middle of a long, open space. In the distance, I could hear the voices of thousands of people. They were all shouting at me and running toward me: 'Coward! Traitor! Weakling!' They kept coming closer. They began throwing stones. At exactly that moment I would generally wake up ... terribly shaken. [my emphasis]

Kearns explained of this passage:

Did Lyndon Johnson believe all this? Yes ... some of the time. Was it true? Some of it; and the rest was not simply pure illusion. For even Johnson's most grotesque exaggerations were always constructed on some fragment of reality, so that they could never be totally disproven by factual evidence or unanswerable logic alone, only by rejecting his judgment for one more reasonable, more consonant with the known facts.

Johnson's description of the nature of the challenge in Vietnam was, of course, a product of his unique personal qualities. But it is important to remember that many others shared this view, although they would not have expressed it with such color or hyperbole. And they, like Johnson, derived their convictions from historical experience. [my emphasis]

Tags: daniel ellsberg, lyndon johnson, vietnam war

McGovern, Nixon and the peace issue in 1972

The 1972 Presidential election turned out to be a watershed for the Democratic Party, with corporate Democrats still using it as a cautionary tale against the perils of "the left," no matter how popular the positions of the the Democratic Party "left" on major issues may be.

So it's worth considering a more real-time evaluation of the 1972 election from Daniel Yankelovich for The New York Times/Yankelovich Election Survey, published in the New York Review of Books 11/30/1972 issue:

It was not what happened during the Presidential campaign itself that won the election for Richard Nixon. Throughout the campaign the press and television concentrated on Eagleton, Watergate, Mr. McGovern’s “radical” image, his campaign style, and the “he-can't-win” psychology purportedly generated by the opinion polls. These events affected Mr. McGovern’s standings in the polls during the campaign but had little bearing on why Mr. Nixon won the election. As the polls taken by my own organization, as well as others, showed, Nixon had a majority of three to two from the very start—a majority that never wavered throughout that long campaign. In a sense, the campaign proved to be irrelevant. [my emphasis]

What Yankelovich explains is that foreign policy took a central role in the campaign: the Vietnam War, detente with the USSR, the diplomatic opening with China.

The Democrats and antiwar activists rightly saw a very sharp difference between McGovern's and Nixon's positions on the war. And they were also right in their intense distrust of Nixon's intentions and his level of lying, which in the days before the Cheney-Bush seemed staggering.

But the general public perception was different. "Only Nixon could go to China" and "Nixon goes to China" have become standard figures of speech - even on the planet Vulcan! - meaning a leader having credibility on reversing a long-held position that would be lacking in one that had always held the position.

The concept is a little squishy, when you think about it. It's a bit like the professional anti-Communists of the 1940s and 1950s. Bernard DeVoto, in some essay I have been able to find recently, characterized their position something like this: Let me see, you tell me that as a Communist, you were willing to betray your country, lie, cheat, steal, break the law, even kill people if required. Now you've repented and you tell me that I should trust what you say about Communists now more than I trust people who were always against Communism.

Because entrepreneurial self-promoting ex-Communists like Whittaker Chambers were prone to make the most lurid, sweeping, exaggerated claims about the supposed threat from Communism, not unlike the self-promoting ex-Islamists that are today so popular on the Christian Right speaking circuit. (The more things change, the more they stay the same, etc., etc.)

Nixon had been considered a hardliner on China and the Soviet Union, too, from the beginning of his dubious and generally destructive political career. But in 1971-2, he broke with the position that was especially strong in the Republican Party that there should be no formal US relations with "Communist China" or "Red China" (red was the color for Communists in those days, not Republicans). And his arms-control negotiations with the USSR and normalizing relations with China were generally perceived - including by Democrats and McGovern himself - as leading to a more peaceful world.

Yankelovich refers to an incident that was a harrying moment in US-Soviet relations. He had mined the harbors of Haiphong, North Vietnam (DRV), which carried a serious risk that Russian ships providing supplies to the DRV would be damaged:

The Vietnam issue was generally conceded to be McGovern’s main source of strength.

Then the mining of Haiphong happened. We must remember that the decision to mine Haiphong harbor was made at a time when the military situation in Vietnam was deteriorating badly. Our interviews shortly afterward showed that people expected the worst. In the past, most decisions on Vietnam made in times of crisis—such as the Cambodian "incursion" — had proved disastrous. This time Mr. Nixon confronted the communists with a challenge that even Lyndon Johnson at his most combative had not dared to make.

The days that followed reminded voters of the Cuban Missile Crisis. People were anxious: “How would the Russians react?” “Would they cancel the Summit?” “Would they try to break the blockade by force?” even “Would there be a nuclear confrontation?” When the Russians announced that the Summit would go on as planned, the public, as our surveys later showed, was vastly relieved. With mounting confidence, they watched the drama unfold on television: Mr. Nixon being greeted coolly but correctly at the Moscow airport; meeting in a somewhat more cordial atmosphere with Brezhnev; being toasted at Soviet banquets; addressing the Russian people; laying a wreath at the grave of a little Russian girl orphaned by the war; signing documents and treaties of historic importance with the head of the Soviet state.

Nixon's policy of "Vietnamization" of the war, which is similar to what we did in Iraq and are doing now in Afghanistan, going through the motions of transferring responsibility for the war to the locals on Our Side in South Vietnam was highly controversial. But by the 1972 election, the number of American troops in Vietnam was drastically reduced from what it had been when he took office in 1969. Even though more Americans would be killed in Vietnam during Nixon's Presidency than during Lyndon Johnson's, and even though the war became progressively less popular even as US troops were being withdrawn, a large portion of the public perceived that Nixon's policies were ending the Vietnam War and doing it "with honor," as he continually said:

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the message got through to the American public: Nixon had faced the Russians down, and the danger to the US from the war—the danger of a big power confrontation—had been defused. The war in Vietnam would now soon be over. Or, even if it did not end right away, it would no longer be seen as a military threat to Americans. Soviet/Chinese acquiescence in the Haiphong mining had handed Mr. Nixon an overwhelming diplomatic victory, containing the seeds of his subsequent political victory at home. Vietnam, we found, is the issue of greatest concern to the American public, and in the public mind it was almost as if the war had ended at the Moscow Summit.

The results of the Soviet trip were dramatically reflected in the opinion polls. By early July, Mr. Nixon had rebuilt public confidence in his handling of the Vietnam war by an almost two to one margin. Simultaneously, he had undermined McGovern’s major source of public support by converting what had been McGovern’s issue into his own principal source of strength among the voters. During the campaign, an unwavering 62 percent of the voters said, “Mr. Nixon is doing everything he can to end the war.” They voted for him largely, if not exclusively, for this reason. (Domestic issues also played a part but we found they were not nearly so important.) [my emphasis]

Now, Nixon's intentions as expressed in the elections were deceptive. He still expected to be able to use air power to pummel North Vietnam into submission. His Christmas Bombing campaign of 1972 was hugely controversial at home and a flat-out failure as a way to force the DRV to accept less favorable peace terms. When the 1973 Paris Peace Accords were signed soon after the turn of the year, they were the same basic terms to which the DRV had already been willing to accept before the Christmas Bombing.

The duplicity and bad faith Nixon showed in the remainder of his term before his resignation in 1974 was been chronicled extensively. To give just a few examples: Gareth Porter, A Peace Denied : The United States, Vietnam, and the Paris Agreement (1975); George Harrington, America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, 4th edition (2001); John Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945-1975 (2009). McGovern was unable to convince enough people to distrust Nixon's war policy, though he tried, e.g., George McGovern Commercial 1972 ElectionWallDotOrg.flv:

Campaigns do matter. And McGovern's missteps, especially the selection of Thomas Eagleton as his Vice Presidential candidate, increased the already serious challenges he faced in that election. He tried hard to make the complex of corruption now known as "Watergate" an issue, but the revelations that eventually pushed Nixon into resigning didn't come until after the 1972 election. See this campaign ad, 1972 George McGovern Presidential Election Ad:

Yankelovich's findings in 1972 don't in themselves constitute a decisive judgment on the outcome of that election. But they are an important reminder that hating on the hippies was not what was decisive in that election. Nixon had taken substantial action in the real world to build an image of himself as the man to produce an optimal peace in Vietnam and the wider world. The fact that he had to scam the public and the media on what his real intentions were in Vietnam to achieve that image is itself a sign of a how shady the product (himself) that he was marketing in that election really was.

Tags: george mcgovern, richard nixon, vietnam war

The Aurora shooting and possible roots of violence in the US

The problem of violence was one much discussed in the 1960s in the United States, often in connection with urban riots, rising violent crime, police brutality, violent police and vigilante actions in the South against civil rights protesters, political assassinations and a rise in militant groups advocating some form of violence or armed self-defense.

Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., gave an address at Columbia University shortly after the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968. That was an eventful year at Columbia because of the now-legendary student strike and occupation there. It was also the year of urban riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.; if one wants to call those riots a kind of spontaneous uprising, it was the largest of its kind in American history. (The Confederate States of America represented the largest armed rebellion.) It was published in edited form under the title "Existential Politics and the Cult of Violence" in Sept 1968 Phi Delta Kappan.

The world today is asking a terrible question - a question which every citizen of this republic should be putting to himself: What sort of people are we, we Americans?

And the answer which much of the world is bound to return is that we are today the most frightening people on this planet.

We are a frightening people because for three years we have been devastating a small country on the other side of the world in a war which bears no rational relationship to our national security or our national interest.

Those paragraphs are the kind that conservative culture warriors like to call Blame American First talk. And the stigmatizing of such observations has been effective in discouraging many Democrats from pointing to ways in which America's actions as perceived by the rest of the world produce sometimes bad impressions and unpleasant consequences. After the 09/11/2001 terrorist attack, "Why do they hate us?" was a favorite question for many people. Conservatives only wanted to answer that "they hate us for our freedoms."

Popular or not, Schlesinger's advice is still worth remembering: "We can not take the easy course and blame everyone but ourselves for the things we do."

Since the 1968 Presidential campaign, though, Democrats came to consider it toxic for them to talk about any kind of larger sociological causes for any kind of violence. The United States began a long period of treating crime and violence in a "law and order" framework, eventually developing a practice Jonathan Simon describes as "governing through crime," i.e., using the fear of crime as a central organizing principle of daily governance. Simon at his blog (also called Governing Through Crime) posted on President Obama's speech in Aurora after the shootings there earlier this month, Full Force of our Justice System? 07/23/2012. He was struck by the sentences Obama used in a presentation that was otherwise in his Pastor-in-Chief mode, "In the end, after he has felt the full force of our justice system, what will be remembered are the good people who were impacted by this tragedy." Simon characterized that statement this way:

It is an unsettling reminder that even (or especially) at a time of unending national economic woes, retribution and especially capital punishment remain esssential [sic] to our national political culture (for why, see [Simon's book] Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear). The President, after all, has nothing to say legally about what kind of punishment (full force, or otherwise), the killer (if that is who is in custody) will face. He does get to execute people by direct order through drone strikes, of course, as well as deport tens of thousands of others, some to death or worst; and make no mistake, this President has done so with relish and he wants you to know that. While he probably can't do either to James Holmes right now, nobody could miss the parallel with President W's promise to the 9/11 terrorist that they would "hear from you" soon. The President as vengeance-seeker. Why bother with a written Constitution, we should just rule by Icelandic Sagas.

Simon notes, obviously not in approval, that our Nobel Peace Prize President "has never missed an opportunity to dip his robes in the symbolic blood of capital punishment."

Schlesinger's speech in 1968 focused on his criticism of Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse's social theory, and his essay Repressive Tolerance in particular. Maybe I'll deal with Schlesinger's comments on that in a later post. Here I'll just note that he shows a fundamental misunderstanding of Marcuse's viewpoint in calling it a kind of "existential politics" that "springs much more from Sorel than from Kierkegaard." Whatever existential elements may have been in Marcuse's politics, it didn't stem for Sorel or very much from Kierkegaard. Fourier and Hegel would have been closer to the mark.

But what is striking about Schlesinger's discussion of violence is that he straightforwardly names the Vietnam War as a likely source:

The causes of student insurgency vary from college to college, and from country to country. It would seem likely that the primary incitement in our own nation has been the war in Vietnam - a war which has tempted our government into its course of appalling and insensate destruction, a war which, through the draft, has demanded that young Americans kill and die where they can see no rational relationship between personal sacrifice and national interest. But the cause is also more than the Vietnam war. For that war has come for many to prefigure a larger incomprehensibility, a larger absurdity, even a larger wickedness, in our official society. For some it has come to seem, not an aberration, but the inevitable result of the irremediable corruption of the American system.

I cannot share the belief that there was something foreordained and ineluctable about the war in Vietnam - that the nature of American society would have compelled any set of men in Washington to pursue the same course of folly. This really seems determinist nonsense. [Schlesinger is referring there to some of the more simplistic theories of imperialism popular at the time.] One can still understand, though, why the contradictions of our society weigh so heavily on the young - the contradictions between the righteousness of a Secretary of State and the ruthlessness of a B-52; between the notion that violence is fine against simple folk ten thousand miles away and shocking against injustice in our own land; between the equality demanded by our constitutional structure and the equality denied by our social structure; even between the accepted habits of one generation and the emerging habits of the next, as when a parent tipsy on his fourth martini begins a tirade against marijuana. [my emphasis]

As advocates of domestic arms proliferation have been quick to point out since the mass gun murders in Aurora, violent crime has declined in the United States in recent years. Not having looked closely at the statistics lately, I would assume that the aging of the population has been a major factor. If there is any causal relationship between the proliferation of guns and the reduction in violent crime, I haven't seen it documented. There is a correlation, but there's also a correlation between the reduction of violent crime in the US and the growth of population in India. Correlation doesn't equal causation.

But there are violent crimes going on and enough mass murders that our political elites and mass media have essentially accepted them as routine parts of American life, more worthy of coverage than jaywalking or burglary, but not much worthy of special concern.

I've pretty much always been very skeptical about violence in movies, TV or even comic books somehow being a significant cause of real-life violence. (Schlesinger around that time was also pointing to such sources as likely causes.) People over the age of around six can tell the difference between stories and real life.

Military violence, and the mass reverence for it in American society, are very much real life. So is capital punishment. And the fact that it's now considered perfectly acceptable to fantasize out loud about slaughtering military foes, assassinating even American citizens from the air without an indictment much less a trial, and putting convicted criminals to death must be having some kind of real-world effect in changing standards toward violence.

Forensic psychologist Karen Franklin offered some very helpful reminders after the Aurora shooting about jumping to conclusions or looking for simple explanations for such events or easy solutions for the problem, Aurora massacre: To speak or not to speak? In The News 07/22/2012.

In the longer term, though, it's well worth considering what role the psychological militarization of American political discussion, and the long-term effects of the military preparedness rhetoric Cold War which has now morphed into the Long War has on incidents of violence and mass murder in the United States.

Tags: arthur schlesinger jr, aurora shooting, vietnam war

Tet Offensive and counterinsurgency wars

Richard Falk writes at Al Jazeera English on The Tet Offensive's parallels to Afghanistan 08/23/2011.

One of the fundamental myths of our current military interventionism is that the military actually won the Vietnam War. The Tet Offensive of 1968 represented yet another glorious victory for our invincible generals. And the only reason that North Vietnam eventually won the war was that the gutless politicians and dirty hippies cut off funds to our brave allies and let the Commies win. There are more sophisticated versions. But they come to the same thing.

We can at least hope that time will eventually wear away even the most deeply-rooted historical analogies. But "time" needs all the help it can get in this case. As Falk points out, the tale is superficially true. In military terms, both the North Vietnamese and the Americans saw it rightly as a victory for the US-South Vietnam side. The purpose of the Tet Offensive was to promote a popular uprising in the South which did not occur.

But it wrecked the political support for the war in the United States, something neither the US nor the North Vietnamese had intended or anticipated. Why? Because our magnificent generals and the Johnson Administration had been telling the American public over and over and over that everything was going wonderfully in the war. Falk:

But what made these US casualties so important was not the loss of life. What made these death so deeply disturbing was their unsettling impact on both backers and opponents of the war in Washington, the backers because their belief that victory was at hand was shattered and the critics because the lies emanating from Washington had been finally exposed.

If General Westmoreland was not deceived or lying, the American casualties sustained during the Tet Offensive could not have happened given the supposed decimation of the Vietnamese enemy. If these expectations of an imminent victory had not been discredited by the Tet Offensive, the dramatic event would have been coolly diagnosed as a desperate lost gamble by the Vietnamese, and rather than turning attention to an exit strategy would have led to an intensified effort to achieve total victory on behalf of the Vietnamese regime in Saigon that had welcomed the American intervention. [my emphasis]

There are two levels of important narrative here. One is the narrative of the loss of political support for the Vietnam War and the reasons for it. Falk's description in that regard is sound. Obviously, it's an analysis and judgment on a set of facts.

The triumphalist narrative agrees on the basic series of events: technical military victory for the US side in the Tet Offensive, a decisive drop in political support for the war in US public opinion. But the triumphalist version blames it on the cowardice of the public and the Congress, who weren't worthy of the victorious generals. In this narrative, the fact that the generals destroyed their own credibility by lying to civilian officials and the public, and that the Johnson Administration wrecked its credibility in turn in the same way, is either conveniently ignored or somehow justified.

Falk's narrative just makes more historical sense. And he makes a plausible counterfactual speculation in saying that without the lies, for the general public "the dramatic event would have been coolly diagnosed as a desperate lost gamble by the Vietnamese and rather than turning attention to an exit strategy would have led to an intensified effort to achieve total victory on behalf of the Vietnamese regime in Saigon that had welcomed the American intervention."

The second level of narrative would assume this counterfactual and ask whether further support for the war would have been a good idea. And here the counterfactual starts to break down. Because the over-estimation of American power in that situation and the corresponding under-estimation of the nationalist potential of the Vietnamese Communists had always been part of the justification for escalation. President Kennedy had lost faith in those optimistic estimates in the months before he was killed. But Johnson was willing to accept them to the point of military and political catastrophe. If military and civilian officials had been telling the public the truth all along, public support for the war would almost surely have been far lower than it was at the beginning of 1968.

As a question of managing public opinion in the more technical sense, there was a better lesson to learn than the predominant one that the Pentagon took from that experience: that they had to be more effective in deceiving the public and managing the press.

And the current US counterinsurgency faith is based on the deeply flawed triumphalist narrative. As Falk explains:

To this day, counterinsurgency professionals in Washington think tanks and the Pentagon contend that the United States snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. This distorted reading of history partly explains why US policymakers have failed (and refused) to learn the defining lesson of the Vietnam War: the virtual impossibility in the early 21st century of turning military superiority on the battlefield enjoyed by an intervening party into a favourable political outcome against an adversary that effectively occupies the commanding heights of national self-determination. That is, in this century, the symbols of legitimacy count in the end for more than drone technology and the weaponry of destruction.

This US and NATO learning disability has led directly to subsequent failed interventions, especially in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks: Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. Military superiority succumbs over time to the strong historical tides of the past seven decades favouring the forces aligned with the politics of self-determination. Among other explanations for this conclusion that cuts against the grain of political realism is this: the intervening side gets tired of an unresolved struggle long before fatigue sets in for the side defending national territory. An Afghan aphorism expresses this insight: "You've got the watches, we've got the time." Since 1945, nationalist endurance consistently outlasts and outwits geopolitical endurance, and by so doing eventually offsets the asymmetries of military capabilities. [my emphasis in bold]

Realistically, it's probably too early to declare the Libya intervention failed. But from all appearances, it's a long way from over.

Tags: richard falk, lessons of vietnam, vietnam war

Martin Luther King, Jr. on the Vietnam War

MLK, Jr.: "A man of conscience cannot be a consensus leader." (From Part 2 below) The civil rights leader was not a devotee of what we now know as High Broderism, the worship of bipartisanship and "moderation" as the highest values in public life - especially when it means liberals going along with conservatives.

The third part of this three-part set of videos has King talking about his philosophy of militant nonviolence. His approach was pacifist, not passive.

Part 1:



Part 2:



Part 3:



King definitely did not see his mission as one to comfort the comfortable.

Tags: martin luther king jr., vietnam war

Vietnam and Afghanistan

Reasoning by historical analogy is dangerous. But the American approach to counterinsurgency wars didn't spring full-grown from the brow of David Petraeus. It is heavily conditioned, if not completely dominated, by the experience of the Vietnam War.

I've seen a couple of good analyses lately of the Vietnam War that provide useful critical perspective on Obama's current decision on how much to escalate the Afghanistan War. One is Bill Moyers Journal of 11/20/09, this past Friday, which looks at Lyndon Johnson's decision-making process from November 1963 when he assumed the Presidency to the decision to Americanize the war in 1965 by committing to a direct US ground combat role. Some of the background assumptions and habits of the military establishment from those pre-Internet days sound awfully familiar today.

The other is The Fifty-Year War by Jonathan Schell The Nation 11/11/09 (11/30/09 edition). Schell looks at the decision-making on the Vietnam War against the background of the Cold War that after the fall of the Soviet Union morphed into the Long War. He calls special attention to the effect of McCarthyism and the Republican hysteria after 1949 over "who lost China", the "lost" referring to the victory of the Chinese Communists in 1949 in mainland China. He writes:

In short, in strictly political terms, the Vietnam dilemma has been handed down to Obama virtually intact. Now as then, the issue politically is whether the United States is able to fail in a war without coming unhinged. Does the American body politic have a reverse gear? Does it know how to cut losses? Is it capable of learning from experience? Or must it plunge unchecked over every cliff it approaches? And at the heart of these questions is another: must liberals and moderates always bow down before the crazy right when it comes to war and peace? Must presidents behave like Johnson, of whom his attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach, later said, "It would not have made any difference what anybody advised him--he would have done what he did [in Vietnam].... It was fear of the right wing." What is the source of this raw power, this right-wing veto over presidents, Congresses and public opinion? The person who can answer these questions will have discovered one of the keys to a half-century of American history--and the forces that, even now, bear down on Obama as he considers what to do in Afghanistan. [my emphasis]

And because of that "right-wing veto", it appears that actually withdrawing from Afghanistan isn't even an option the White House is seriously considering.

William Polk in Let America be America, and Depart Afghanistan Informed Comment 11/22/09 writes about a different and more recent historical experience of counterinsurgency that is also worth considering around the American role in Afghanistan now. He's talking in particular about the historical role of village, tribal and national assemblies called jirga, or loya jirga at the national level:

The Russians were, obviously, opposed to the very concept of the loya jirga and managed to by-pass or suppress it. They did so, however, at great cost because without such a legitimating authority, they could not find an Afghan counterpart with which to negotiate an end to their occupation. The puppet government they set up lacked the imprimatur of the loya jirga and was not regarded by the people as legitimate. So the Russians left with their tail between their legs.

As the current Russian ambassador and long-time KBG expert on Afghan affairs, Zamir N. Kabulov, has commented, there is no mistake the Russians made that has not been copied by the Americans. He was right about the way we approached the jirga. In 2002, nearly 2/3rds of the delegates to a loya jirga signed a petition to make the exiled king, Zahir Shah, president of an interim government to give time for the Afghanis to work out their future. An interim government might have avoided the worst of the problems we have faced in the last seven years. But we had already decided that Hamid Kara was “our man in Kabul” and did not want the Afghanis [sic] to interfere with our choice. So, as Thomas Johnson and Chris Mason reported, “massive US interference behind the scenes in the form of bribes, secret deals, and arm twisting got the US-backed candidate for the job, Hamid Kara [Karzai], installed instead. [They] then rode shotgun over a constitutional process that eliminated the monarchy entirely. This was the Afghan equivalent to the 1964 Diem Coup in Vietnam; afterward, there was no possibility of creating a stable secular government.” While an Afghan king could have conferred legitimacy on an elected leader in Afghanistan; without one, as they put it, “an elected president is a on a one-legged stool.” Then, as Selig Harrison wrote in the New York Times, our proconsul, Zalmay Khalilzad, “had a bitter 40-minute showdown with the king, who then withdrew his candidacy.” [my emphasis]

Tags: afghanistan war, vietnam war

Stab-in-the-back keeps on stabbing

Mark Moyar elaborates a version of the stab-in-the-back history of the Vietnam War in Disastrous Lessons Foreign Policy Online 10/19/09. That would be the version in which our brilliant generals brilliantly won the Vietnam War but were undercut by the gutless wimpy politicians and cowardly civilians back home.

This should be read in conjunction with this article from Rick Perlstein from a couple of years ago, which Digby recently highlighted: The Best Wars of Their Lives The Nation 09/27/09 (10/15/09 edition). Rick analyzes a couple of examples of books elaborating a stab-in-the-back viewpoint, one of them by Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (2006), which he describes as follows:

Here is right-wing Vietnam revisionism at its most respectable.

Moyar's method is simple: Take what the "orthodoxy" says and revise it 180 degrees hard to starboard. For instance, in 1954 the insurgent Communist forces of Ho Chi Minh beat French colonial forces (whom the United States backed) at the French garrison of Dien Bien Phu. Most have discerned in France's humiliating defeat a classic example of a hubristic colonial power foolishly underestimating a nonwhite enemy. Not Moyar. He cites Communist sources--more on this move later--to argue that France barely lost.

He walks through Moyar's fantasy version of the Vietnam War in more detail, noting that there are distinct and incompatible versions of the stab-in-the-back myth. In Moyar's version, it was William Westmoreland who had brilliantly won the war as chief commander in Vietnam.

In another version, represented in Rick's essay by Lewis Sorley, it was Westmoreland's successor, Gen. Creighton Abrams, who instituted a brilliantly brilliant counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy that recognized the need to secure the population and etc., etc. We've heard quite a bit of this version lately from advocates of endless war in Afghanistan and Iraq as alleged historical evidence for the magic virtues of COIN thinking. Which for the US military in practice has been a less-preferred method of justifying heavy use of bombing and artillery on largely civilian targets.

I don't want to dismiss the value of COIN thinking. I've quoted before Steven Metz' Rethinking Insurgency (June 2007), which makes a realistic argument for recognizing different types of COIN situations and adopting approaches appropriate to the practical possibilities presented by each one. But as we saw in some the footage from Frontline's recent program on the "AfPak" conflict, Obama's War, in a war now into its ninth year with no end in sight, American COIN approaches to winning the confidence of the population involves heavily armed American soldiers going out to talk to Afghan peasants in English, relying on an interpreter may not be able to communicate that well with the soldier in English to communicate the soldier's message to the Afghans. In other words, the current McCrystal COIN strategy is to a large extent a marketing ploy for the American public and Congress, not a dramatic change from the strategy of the previous eight years.

This 10/22/09 interview with Tom Hayden at Antiwar.com also goes into the reality of COIN as it is being implemented in our current wars.

Here's a real-time news report: U.S. forces kill four Afghans in car: police by Ismael Sameem and Golnar Motevalli, Reuters 10/24/09.

Tags: afghanistan war, afpak war, stab-in-the-back, vietnam war