lunes, 31 de agosto de 2015
domingo, 30 de agosto de 2015
viernes, 28 de agosto de 2015
C'en est fait
Les mains impatientes de l'hiver ne viendront point dépouiller la terre avec barbarie. Point de vents qui arrachent, point de coupantes gelées, point d'eaux qui noient. Mais plus tendrement qu'en mai, ou lorsque l'insatiable juin adhère à la source de la vie dans la possession de la douzième heure, le Ciel sourit à la Terre avec un ineffable amour. Voici, comme un coeur qui cède à un conseil continuel, le consentement ; le grain se sépare de l'épi, le fruit quitte l'arbre, la Terre fait petit à petit délaissement à l'invincible solliciteur de tout, la mort desserre une main trop pleine ! Cette parole qu'elle entend maintenant est plus sainte que celle du jour de ses noces, plus profonde,plus tendre, plus riche : "C'en est fait!" L'oiseau dort, l'arbre s'endort dansl'ombre qui l'atteint, le soleil au niveau du sol le couvre d'un rayon égal, le jour est fini, l'année est consommée.A la céleste interrogation cette réponse amoureusement "C'en est fait" est répondue.
Paul ClaudelOctobre
No woods still echoing to my lay?
Shall I then wait the autumn wind,
Compelled to seek a milder day,
And leave no curious nest behind,
No woods still echoing to my lay?
Compelled to seek a milder day,
And leave no curious nest behind,
No woods still echoing to my lay?
Henry David Thoreau
The Poet's Delay
jueves, 27 de agosto de 2015
Israel’s Thug at the UN
Nazareth.
The appointment by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu of one of his most hawkish and outspoken rivals as Israel’s new ambassador to the United Nations has prompted widespread consternation.
As one Israeli analyst noted last week, Danny Danon’s appointment amounts to a “cruel joke” on the international community. The new envoy “lacks even the slightest level of finesse and subtlety required of a senior diplomat”.
Last year Netanyahu sacked Danon as deputy defence minister, describing him as too “irresponsible” even by the standards of Israel’s usually anarchic politics. Danon had denounced the prime minister for “leftist feebleness” in his handling of Israel’s attack on Gaza last summer.
Danon is a UN official’s worst nightmare. He is a vocal opponent of a two-state solution and has repeatedly called for the annexation of the West Bank.
Back in 2011, days before the UN General Assembly was due to vote on Palestinian statehood, Danon dismissed the forum as irrelevant: “Even if there will be a vote [in favour], it will be a Facebook state.”
On the face of it, Netanyahu’s timing could not be worse. Danon is to represent Israel as the Palestinians are expected to step up efforts at the UN to entrench recognition of their statehood. He will also be a leading spokesman as Israel tries to fend off war crimes investigations at the International Criminal Court in the Hague.
The generally accepted explanation is that Netanyahu’s move is driven by domestic, not diplomatic, calculations. Danon is the Israeli right’s poster boy, one who makes the prime minister look too cautious and conciliatory.
The two faced off for the Likud party leadership last November. Danon lost but Netanyahu doubtless fears, as his party and the Israeli public shift ever rightwards, that his rival’s time is coming.
The posting removes Danon as head of the Likud’s powerful central committee, dispatches him to a distant land, and should provide him with opportunities aplenty to self-harm.
But that is not the whole story. Danon’s appointment reveals something more significant about Israel’s deteriorating relations even with its international supporters.
It is hard nowadays to recall that Israel once took the UN very seriously indeed. It had to.
In the decade following 1948, Abba Eban, the country’s foremost diplomat, sought to carve out international recognition and respectability for Israel at the UN.
Eban often used deceit and misdirection – he is reported to have avowed that “diplomats go abroad to lie for their country”. But he never forgot the importance of creating a façade of moral justification for Israel’s actions, even as it launched wars of aggression in 1956 at Suez and again against Egypt in 1967.
Reality caught up with Israel when the UN adopted a resolution in 1975 equating Israel’s official ideology, Zionism, with racism. The resolution was only revoked 16 years later, after the Soviet Union collapsed and the United States emerged as the world’s sole superpower.
Washington arm-twisted the General Assembly with promises that Israel would engage in a peace process with the Palestinians, culminating a short time later in the Oslo Accords.
But as Oslo slowly unravelled, and Israel’s leaders – not least Netanyahu himself – were exposed as the true rejectionists, Israel was forced on to the back foot again.
Today, the consensus in Israel is not only that the UN is a bastion of anti-Israel prejudice but that it is an incubator of global anti-semitism, much of it supposedly spawned by Arab states. Israel is blameless, so this story goes, but the world has fallen under the haters’ spell.
The parting shot of Danon’s predecessor, Ron Prosor, last week was to accuse yet again a leading UN official, Jordan’s Rima Khalaf, of anti-semitism for pointing out the untold misery caused by Israel’s near-decade blockade of Gaza.
Earlier this year, after stepping down as Israel’s ambassador to the US, Michael Oren went further, arguing that the plague of anti-semitism had infected even America’s leading Jewish journalists. Their critical coverage of Israel was proof of self-hatred, he claimed.
The need for such desperate diplomacy has grown as Israel’s moral image has tarnished, even for its allies. But the hectoring and intimidation by seasoned diplomats like Prosor and Oren has produced diminishing returns.
Danon’s posting is part of a discernible pattern of recent appointments by Netanyahu that reflect a growing refusal to engage in any kind of recognisable diplomacy. Confrontation is preferred.
The trend started with Netanyahu’s decision in 2009 to let the thuggish Avigdor Lieberman lead the foreign ministry and Israel’s diplomatic corps.
Notably, Netanyahu picked Ron Dermer, a high-profile partisan of the US Republican party, to replace Oren in 2013. Dermer is widely credited with engineering Netanyahu’s provocative address earlier this year to the US Congress, in an undisguised effort to undermine President Barack Obama’s talks with Iran.
Danon’s appointment, like Dermer’s, indicates the extent to which the Israeli right has abandoned any hope of persuading the international community of the rightness of its cause – or even of working within the rules of statecraft.
Just as Dermer has turned Obama’s White House into a diplomatic battlefield, Danon can be expected to barrack, abuse and alienate fellow ambassadors at the UN in New York.
An Israel that has no place for negotiations or compromise wants only to tell the world that it is wrong and that Israelis don’t care what others think. Danon is the right man for that task.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
S.:http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/25/israels-thug-at-the-un/
The Economics of Exploitation: Indigenous Peoples and the Impact of Resource Extraction
by Mark Kernan
In 1937 George Orwell said that coal mining was the ‘metabolism’ of western civilisation. What he meant by this striking metaphor was that coal was the catalyst for an earlier industrial revolution, just as enzymes act as the life-sustaining catalyst within the cells of living organisms to maintain life. If Orwell were alive today however he would have good cause to reformulate his perceptive observation. For modern mining-the extraction of oil, gas and rich minerals, including, again, coal-is now the alchemic catalyst driving the metabolism of 21st century economic globalisation. Unfortunately however the consequences and effects of modern mining take on a very grim symbolism in relation to the chemical metaphor referenced above. For rather than sustaining life on the planet, instead, much of 21st century resource extraction now acts as the catalyst in obliterating unique and diverse life systems- in particular, traditional peoples and societies- by harmful extractive processes and practices, and the cumulative social, environmental and cultural impact of those processes.
In 1937 George Orwell said that coal mining was the ‘metabolism’ of western civilisation. What he meant by this striking metaphor was that coal was the catalyst for an earlier industrial revolution, just as enzymes act as the life-sustaining catalyst within the cells of living organisms to maintain life. If Orwell were alive today however he would have good cause to reformulate his perceptive observation. For modern mining-the extraction of oil, gas and rich minerals, including, again, coal-is now the alchemic catalyst driving the metabolism of 21st century economic globalisation. Unfortunately however the consequences and effects of modern mining take on a very grim symbolism in relation to the chemical metaphor referenced above. For rather than sustaining life on the planet, instead, much of 21st century resource extraction now acts as the catalyst in obliterating unique and diverse life systems- in particular, traditional peoples and societies- by harmful extractive processes and practices, and the cumulative social, environmental and cultural impact of those processes.
As a result, and this is where the symbolism becomes really grim, the incredibly rich biocultural diversity integral to indigenous peoples’ cultures is now under threat from exploitative commercial extraction as never before. The symbiotic relationship between culture, ecology and biology in indigenous societies, cultivated by thousands of years of iterative ecological knowledge, collective resilience, and complex adaptive strategies to diverse environments, is now disappearing at an accelerating rate. This cataclysmic loss, if we are not careful, could even become irreversible.
A growing global demand for natural resources, fuelling large-scale resource development
Since the advent of the current round of economic globalisation, in the last quarter of a century, there has been a full-scale pursuit by mining companies for increasingly scarce fossil fuels and mineral resources. This pursuit has lead the extractive industry into ever more vulnerable and remote regions of the planet, where indigenous groups predominately live. Fast growing global demand for natural resource commodities along with years of historically high prices particularly in the 2000s has generated scores of mega extractive projects. Many of these extractive projects are built near or on the lands of indigenous peoples- see here for example.
Mega mining-projects are highly capital intensive, the cost of extraction is huge and it can take many years to yield significant returns on investment. And returns on investments are highly uncertain as the price of oil is inherently unstable. But when energy projects do become commercially operational, the payoff in profits is huge. A lot therefore is riding on their success. But moreover, failure entails huge loss not of only immediate profits but also of future market share for extractive firms.
Consequently, in a highly competitive market, commercial failure impacts on not only corporate status but also, increasingly, on national and geopolitical status.
For governments the stakes are also high, even higher in fact. Revenue from the extractive sector contributes significantly to GDP in developing countries. Extractive revenues can be used to fund social programmes for education and poverty alleviation, Brazil and Venezuela being cases in point. But unfortunately, more often than not, they also fund corruption, conflict and in the case of indigenous peoples, a slow ‘cultural genocide’. And, just as culture and biology form a symbiotic relationship in indigenous societies, that relationship is mirrored, darkly, by an opaque parallel relationship between resource rich governments and profit-hungry extractive firms. That relationship is one which has been frequently characterised by corruption, intimidation and violence, and in some of the worst excesses, murder of activists.
Just recently, in a not untypical illustration of this Faustian relationship, a group of Indonesian villagers were permitted by a Washington judge under the Alien Tort Claims Act to further their claims of serious human rights abuses against high ranking members of Exxon Mobil Corporation. The villagers allege that top figures in the oil and gas company may have known that local military forces in Aceh province tortured, raped and killed villagers. The company hired military and paramilitary forces to protect its profitable asset, knowing well that the Indonesian military/state apparatus has a horrendous human rights record, dating back to at least the 1960s as Joshua Oppenheimer’s extraordinary documentaries-the Act of Killing and The Look of Silence attests to.
Whether or not the plaintiff’s case proceeds through the American judicial system remain to be seen though. In 2010, a similar human rights claim, brought by Nigerian citizens, against Royal Dutch Petroleum for corporate liability for similar crimes, was ruled against in a judgment by the US Supreme Court. The ruling was a significant blow against corporate culpability for crimes committed in their names abroad, particularly the culpability of the extractive sector-the climate of impunity across the globe from legal sanction has continued ever since.
The New Enclosure Movement
The ‘upstream’ phase of extractive production-the initial stage of exploration, drilling and extracting raw materials-is where much of capital investment is concentrated. Huge amounts of capital is needed for the purchasing and exploration of hydrocarbon reserves, oil platforms, drilling equipment, and the installation of pipes. In 2013, the big five publicly traded companies-Sinopec, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, BP and PetroChina-all in the top twenty largest public companies in the world and with a combined revenue of almost $2.15 trillion, spent hundreds of billions on upstream projects. The Mega- extractive project cycle on average costs between $3 billion and $15 billion, and can take anything up to 10 years, or more, to complete.
In other words, and at the risk of merely stating an elementary truism: transforming raw commodities into shareholder value and government revenue is big business-very, very big business.
Many governments in the global South, and increasingly in the North, are turning to private sector investment in mining as a way to develop unexploited regions which are rich in natural resources; regional ecosystems that are also often rich in cultural and bio-diversity. These regions are usually geographically isolated and culturally unique: tropical rain forests in the Amazon region, open prairie lands in Alberta, Canada and expansive rangelands in Tibet for instance. It is in these areas where much sought after sub-surface fossil fuels and rich minerals are now ever more concentrated.
As global demand for finite and non-renewable mineral and hydrocarbon resources has increased, so too, has there been a direct inverse effect: the communal lands of indigenous groups have become highly prized as commercially profitable commodities. Unsurprisingly, in this unequal relationship between international extractive firms and traditional societies the power dynamic lies decisively with the extractive corporations. Consequently, communal lands are being expropriated, “enclosed” and mined for commercial profit. Thus indigenous and nomadic communal cultures, rich in spiritual and temporal wealth and knowledge, are being slowly decimated.
The initial process of procuring access to natural resources, although often protracted and opaque in how it is achieved, is straightforward. Extractive companies secure exploration licences, concessions, titles and leases from central governments in far off capital cities, frequently illicitly. A licence or a title has been the preferred method as it entails unilateral permission from governments to the extractive industry to exploit resources, a scenario which has been much more beneficial to companies than to governments. Although contracts between both actors, involving a mutually binding set of agreements among the contracting parties, is preferred by governments.
From then on, in the initial upstream phase of production, the crucial phase in the extraction cycle of oil, gas and valuable minerals, the brute economic imperative is clear for governments and industry: the process must proceed with as little interference from anything which might slow production.
Again at the risk of stating an obvious truism; time wasted, is profit lost.
Moreover, central governments are often literally and metaphorically hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles away from culturally distinct indigenous groups and the regions in which they live. The problem of literal and metaphorical distance is also compounded by mutual distrust. The central state, controlled often by national elites with a vested interest in the extractive process (powerful families, corrupt politicians, and military commanders), is not only distant it is also largely absent, and usually antagonistic to indigenous resistance to resource extraction, for the above reasons.
There are enormous amounts of money to be made by excavating fossilised carbon, and there are enormous amounts to be lost worrying about such nebulous concepts such indigenous livelihoods and cultural integrity, ancient mountains and forests regarded as sacred, and the collective rights of traditional peoples to have a say on whether their territories are to be exploited. The calculation by governments and the extractive industries is clear: at best pay lip service to the idea of human rights, at worst, send in the men with guns to quieten and quell the restless natives. It is a calculated formula that Joseph Conrad understood well over a hundred years ago in in the Heart of Darkness, his excoriation of European imperialism and the scramble for ivory in the Belgian Congo. The book’s main protagonist, the narrator Marlow, in discussing the brute force of the conquerors, and their addiction to profit and economic efficiency, makes it clear what the true motives of the colonists were:
“They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence… The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”
International Human Rights Law to the Rescue?
The problem then for indigenous peoples when the extraction process begins becomes one of proving legal ownership of land-lands are held communally in indigenous societies, meaning at least in theory that customary ownership should be possible. If ownership cannot to be proven however, communities will not receive royalty payments when the revenue from extraction flows. Under international law indigenous groups are entitled to free, prior and conformed consent. Yet, time and time again, many communities are not consulted before exploration by mining companies begins.
Unfortunately community land rights relating to indigenous groups are weak, often non-existent, in most developing countries; as a result there is little legal protection and invariably even less formal legal title to community lands. Although great work is being done by many global legal advocacy groups, including Lawyers for Resource Justice, invariably, human rights violations follow. Including: physical displacement (forced evictions) and dispossession of lands as a result of land grabs, destruction of property and livelihoods, dumping of untreated chemical waste leading to environmental degradation, and, often when communities fight back violent death , as discussed above in the face of indigenous opposition to the corporate/state extractive industry nexus.
Although an international legal framework exists which can, and often does, defend human rights relating to land and community rights, it is largely weak in its ability to implement enforcement mechanisms, and, critically, post hoc justice in remedying human rights violations. Moreover, although states have obligations under international law, large extractive firms have only voluntary responsibilities. Consequently, they are ‘encouraged’ but not legally obliged to respect human rights in other words. A crucial distinction and one that makes it very difficult to force extractive firms to admit any social or environmental liability, whether directly or indirectly, in human rights abuses.
A growing global demand for natural resources, fuelling large-scale resource development
Since the advent of the current round of economic globalisation, in the last quarter of a century, there has been a full-scale pursuit by mining companies for increasingly scarce fossil fuels and mineral resources. This pursuit has lead the extractive industry into ever more vulnerable and remote regions of the planet, where indigenous groups predominately live. Fast growing global demand for natural resource commodities along with years of historically high prices particularly in the 2000s has generated scores of mega extractive projects. Many of these extractive projects are built near or on the lands of indigenous peoples- see here for example.
Mega mining-projects are highly capital intensive, the cost of extraction is huge and it can take many years to yield significant returns on investment. And returns on investments are highly uncertain as the price of oil is inherently unstable. But when energy projects do become commercially operational, the payoff in profits is huge. A lot therefore is riding on their success. But moreover, failure entails huge loss not of only immediate profits but also of future market share for extractive firms.
Consequently, in a highly competitive market, commercial failure impacts on not only corporate status but also, increasingly, on national and geopolitical status.
For governments the stakes are also high, even higher in fact. Revenue from the extractive sector contributes significantly to GDP in developing countries. Extractive revenues can be used to fund social programmes for education and poverty alleviation, Brazil and Venezuela being cases in point. But unfortunately, more often than not, they also fund corruption, conflict and in the case of indigenous peoples, a slow ‘cultural genocide’. And, just as culture and biology form a symbiotic relationship in indigenous societies, that relationship is mirrored, darkly, by an opaque parallel relationship between resource rich governments and profit-hungry extractive firms. That relationship is one which has been frequently characterised by corruption, intimidation and violence, and in some of the worst excesses, murder of activists.
Just recently, in a not untypical illustration of this Faustian relationship, a group of Indonesian villagers were permitted by a Washington judge under the Alien Tort Claims Act to further their claims of serious human rights abuses against high ranking members of Exxon Mobil Corporation. The villagers allege that top figures in the oil and gas company may have known that local military forces in Aceh province tortured, raped and killed villagers. The company hired military and paramilitary forces to protect its profitable asset, knowing well that the Indonesian military/state apparatus has a horrendous human rights record, dating back to at least the 1960s as Joshua Oppenheimer’s extraordinary documentaries-the Act of Killing and The Look of Silence attests to.
Whether or not the plaintiff’s case proceeds through the American judicial system remain to be seen though. In 2010, a similar human rights claim, brought by Nigerian citizens, against Royal Dutch Petroleum for corporate liability for similar crimes, was ruled against in a judgment by the US Supreme Court. The ruling was a significant blow against corporate culpability for crimes committed in their names abroad, particularly the culpability of the extractive sector-the climate of impunity across the globe from legal sanction has continued ever since.
The New Enclosure Movement
The ‘upstream’ phase of extractive production-the initial stage of exploration, drilling and extracting raw materials-is where much of capital investment is concentrated. Huge amounts of capital is needed for the purchasing and exploration of hydrocarbon reserves, oil platforms, drilling equipment, and the installation of pipes. In 2013, the big five publicly traded companies-Sinopec, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, BP and PetroChina-all in the top twenty largest public companies in the world and with a combined revenue of almost $2.15 trillion, spent hundreds of billions on upstream projects. The Mega- extractive project cycle on average costs between $3 billion and $15 billion, and can take anything up to 10 years, or more, to complete.
In other words, and at the risk of merely stating an elementary truism: transforming raw commodities into shareholder value and government revenue is big business-very, very big business.
Many governments in the global South, and increasingly in the North, are turning to private sector investment in mining as a way to develop unexploited regions which are rich in natural resources; regional ecosystems that are also often rich in cultural and bio-diversity. These regions are usually geographically isolated and culturally unique: tropical rain forests in the Amazon region, open prairie lands in Alberta, Canada and expansive rangelands in Tibet for instance. It is in these areas where much sought after sub-surface fossil fuels and rich minerals are now ever more concentrated.
As global demand for finite and non-renewable mineral and hydrocarbon resources has increased, so too, has there been a direct inverse effect: the communal lands of indigenous groups have become highly prized as commercially profitable commodities. Unsurprisingly, in this unequal relationship between international extractive firms and traditional societies the power dynamic lies decisively with the extractive corporations. Consequently, communal lands are being expropriated, “enclosed” and mined for commercial profit. Thus indigenous and nomadic communal cultures, rich in spiritual and temporal wealth and knowledge, are being slowly decimated.
The initial process of procuring access to natural resources, although often protracted and opaque in how it is achieved, is straightforward. Extractive companies secure exploration licences, concessions, titles and leases from central governments in far off capital cities, frequently illicitly. A licence or a title has been the preferred method as it entails unilateral permission from governments to the extractive industry to exploit resources, a scenario which has been much more beneficial to companies than to governments. Although contracts between both actors, involving a mutually binding set of agreements among the contracting parties, is preferred by governments.
From then on, in the initial upstream phase of production, the crucial phase in the extraction cycle of oil, gas and valuable minerals, the brute economic imperative is clear for governments and industry: the process must proceed with as little interference from anything which might slow production.
Again at the risk of stating an obvious truism; time wasted, is profit lost.
Moreover, central governments are often literally and metaphorically hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles away from culturally distinct indigenous groups and the regions in which they live. The problem of literal and metaphorical distance is also compounded by mutual distrust. The central state, controlled often by national elites with a vested interest in the extractive process (powerful families, corrupt politicians, and military commanders), is not only distant it is also largely absent, and usually antagonistic to indigenous resistance to resource extraction, for the above reasons.
There are enormous amounts of money to be made by excavating fossilised carbon, and there are enormous amounts to be lost worrying about such nebulous concepts such indigenous livelihoods and cultural integrity, ancient mountains and forests regarded as sacred, and the collective rights of traditional peoples to have a say on whether their territories are to be exploited. The calculation by governments and the extractive industries is clear: at best pay lip service to the idea of human rights, at worst, send in the men with guns to quieten and quell the restless natives. It is a calculated formula that Joseph Conrad understood well over a hundred years ago in in the Heart of Darkness, his excoriation of European imperialism and the scramble for ivory in the Belgian Congo. The book’s main protagonist, the narrator Marlow, in discussing the brute force of the conquerors, and their addiction to profit and economic efficiency, makes it clear what the true motives of the colonists were:
“They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence… The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”
International Human Rights Law to the Rescue?
The problem then for indigenous peoples when the extraction process begins becomes one of proving legal ownership of land-lands are held communally in indigenous societies, meaning at least in theory that customary ownership should be possible. If ownership cannot to be proven however, communities will not receive royalty payments when the revenue from extraction flows. Under international law indigenous groups are entitled to free, prior and conformed consent. Yet, time and time again, many communities are not consulted before exploration by mining companies begins.
Unfortunately community land rights relating to indigenous groups are weak, often non-existent, in most developing countries; as a result there is little legal protection and invariably even less formal legal title to community lands. Although great work is being done by many global legal advocacy groups, including Lawyers for Resource Justice, invariably, human rights violations follow. Including: physical displacement (forced evictions) and dispossession of lands as a result of land grabs, destruction of property and livelihoods, dumping of untreated chemical waste leading to environmental degradation, and, often when communities fight back violent death , as discussed above in the face of indigenous opposition to the corporate/state extractive industry nexus.
Although an international legal framework exists which can, and often does, defend human rights relating to land and community rights, it is largely weak in its ability to implement enforcement mechanisms, and, critically, post hoc justice in remedying human rights violations. Moreover, although states have obligations under international law, large extractive firms have only voluntary responsibilities. Consequently, they are ‘encouraged’ but not legally obliged to respect human rights in other words. A crucial distinction and one that makes it very difficult to force extractive firms to admit any social or environmental liability, whether directly or indirectly, in human rights abuses.
Unfortunately, as in so many other areas of international human rights law the practice of human rights does not live up to the principles. The reality, you could say, more than often not trumps the lofty theoretical rhetoric.
Resource nightmare
It is not a resource curse which these communities face but rather it is a resource nightmare, a more accurate description, and one which better captures the multiplicity of social and cultural consequences and effects which befall indigenous communities in the wake of resource development. The extraction of resources does not just leave an ugly physical imprint, the scarred landscapes of indigenous and nomadic lands are also mirrored by an equally negative cultural and social imprint-endemic poverty, low level conflict and ecological collapse, amongst other serious effects.
Indigenous societies are often racialised by governments with reductive mischaracterisations such as ‘backward’, ‘primitive’ and ‘uncivilised’. They are deemed to be literally and metaphorically in the way of development-and to obstruct development, at least in the official ideological development narrative so beloved by the IMFs, World Banks and neoliberal governments of this world, is to impede progress. Subsequently, it is a short step to consider them as superfluous, and if they are superfluous-cultural, socially and in every other conceivable way- it is even a shorter step to discard and, ultimately, destroy them. Arundhati Roy has written of this phenomenon movingly and with great conviction in her 1999 essay the Greater Common Good. In one particularly memorable phrase she evocatively talks of indigenous peoples in India (scheduled tribes) being “sacrificed…at the altar of national progress”, carelessly dispossessed and displaced by dams, highways, and of course, by energy companies. The Indian state, a fully paid up member of the neoliberal juggernaut, in its march to modernity absolves itself of responsibility (unless it is forced to act by global and domestic civil society) to its thoroughly marginalised indigenous citizens by the neat ideological trick of conflating industrial development as progress for the common good.
At best indigenous peoples will be perhaps low-cost labour; at worst, the human flotsam, jetsam, and derelict of contemporary economic globalisation. The above shipwreck metaphor is especially apt, particularly derelict. Derelict is the cargo which fell to the bottom of the ocean, away from any possibility or hope of reclamation-in maritime law not worth saving. Due to their rapacious pursuit into Indigenous land, the extractive sector-the engine of contemporary economic globalisation- deems indigenous peoples and their cultures to be expendable, the inexorable commercial logic of neoliberal globalisation demands it so. This may be an overly pessimistic prognosis. For all our sakes, let’s hope it is not.
Resource nightmare
It is not a resource curse which these communities face but rather it is a resource nightmare, a more accurate description, and one which better captures the multiplicity of social and cultural consequences and effects which befall indigenous communities in the wake of resource development. The extraction of resources does not just leave an ugly physical imprint, the scarred landscapes of indigenous and nomadic lands are also mirrored by an equally negative cultural and social imprint-endemic poverty, low level conflict and ecological collapse, amongst other serious effects.
Indigenous societies are often racialised by governments with reductive mischaracterisations such as ‘backward’, ‘primitive’ and ‘uncivilised’. They are deemed to be literally and metaphorically in the way of development-and to obstruct development, at least in the official ideological development narrative so beloved by the IMFs, World Banks and neoliberal governments of this world, is to impede progress. Subsequently, it is a short step to consider them as superfluous, and if they are superfluous-cultural, socially and in every other conceivable way- it is even a shorter step to discard and, ultimately, destroy them. Arundhati Roy has written of this phenomenon movingly and with great conviction in her 1999 essay the Greater Common Good. In one particularly memorable phrase she evocatively talks of indigenous peoples in India (scheduled tribes) being “sacrificed…at the altar of national progress”, carelessly dispossessed and displaced by dams, highways, and of course, by energy companies. The Indian state, a fully paid up member of the neoliberal juggernaut, in its march to modernity absolves itself of responsibility (unless it is forced to act by global and domestic civil society) to its thoroughly marginalised indigenous citizens by the neat ideological trick of conflating industrial development as progress for the common good.
At best indigenous peoples will be perhaps low-cost labour; at worst, the human flotsam, jetsam, and derelict of contemporary economic globalisation. The above shipwreck metaphor is especially apt, particularly derelict. Derelict is the cargo which fell to the bottom of the ocean, away from any possibility or hope of reclamation-in maritime law not worth saving. Due to their rapacious pursuit into Indigenous land, the extractive sector-the engine of contemporary economic globalisation- deems indigenous peoples and their cultures to be expendable, the inexorable commercial logic of neoliberal globalisation demands it so. This may be an overly pessimistic prognosis. For all our sakes, let’s hope it is not.
lunes, 24 de agosto de 2015
Iran Is Not the Greatest Threat to World Peace
There’s a clear way to ensure a nuclear-free Middle East, but Washington is not interested.
By Noam Chomsky
Throughout the world there is great relief and optimism about the nuclear deal reached in Vienna between Iran and the P5+1 nations, the five veto-holding members of the UN Security Council and Germany. Most of the world apparently shares the assessment of the US Arms Control Association that “the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action establishes a strong and effective formula for blocking all of the pathways by which Iran could acquire material for nuclear weapons for more than a generation and a verification system to promptly detect and deter possible efforts by Iran to covertly pursue nuclear weapons that will last indefinitely.”
There are, however, striking exceptions to the general enthusiasm: the United States and its closest regional allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia. One consequence of this is that US corporations, much to their chagrin, are prevented from flocking to Tehran along with their European counterparts. Prominent sectors of US power and opinion share the stand of the two regional allies and so are in a state of virtual hysteria over “the Iranian threat.” Sober commentary in the United States, pretty much across the spectrum, declares that country to be “the gravest threat to world peace.” Even supporters of the agreement here are wary, given the exceptional gravity of that threat. After all, how can we trust the Iranians with their terrible record of aggression, violence, disruption, and deceit?
Opposition within the political class is so strong that public opinion has shifted quickly from significant support for the deal to an even split. Republicans are almost unanimously opposed to the agreement. The current Republican primaries illustrate the proclaimed reasons. Senator Ted Cruz, considered one of the intellectuals among the crowded field of presidential candidates, warns that Iran may still be able to produce nuclear weapons and could someday use one to set off an Electro Magnetic Pulse that “would take down the electrical grid of the entire eastern seaboard” of the United States, killing “tens of millions of Americans.”
By Noam Chomsky
Throughout the world there is great relief and optimism about the nuclear deal reached in Vienna between Iran and the P5+1 nations, the five veto-holding members of the UN Security Council and Germany. Most of the world apparently shares the assessment of the US Arms Control Association that “the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action establishes a strong and effective formula for blocking all of the pathways by which Iran could acquire material for nuclear weapons for more than a generation and a verification system to promptly detect and deter possible efforts by Iran to covertly pursue nuclear weapons that will last indefinitely.”
There are, however, striking exceptions to the general enthusiasm: the United States and its closest regional allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia. One consequence of this is that US corporations, much to their chagrin, are prevented from flocking to Tehran along with their European counterparts. Prominent sectors of US power and opinion share the stand of the two regional allies and so are in a state of virtual hysteria over “the Iranian threat.” Sober commentary in the United States, pretty much across the spectrum, declares that country to be “the gravest threat to world peace.” Even supporters of the agreement here are wary, given the exceptional gravity of that threat. After all, how can we trust the Iranians with their terrible record of aggression, violence, disruption, and deceit?
Opposition within the political class is so strong that public opinion has shifted quickly from significant support for the deal to an even split. Republicans are almost unanimously opposed to the agreement. The current Republican primaries illustrate the proclaimed reasons. Senator Ted Cruz, considered one of the intellectuals among the crowded field of presidential candidates, warns that Iran may still be able to produce nuclear weapons and could someday use one to set off an Electro Magnetic Pulse that “would take down the electrical grid of the entire eastern seaboard” of the United States, killing “tens of millions of Americans.”
The two most likely winners, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Wisconsin Governor Scott
Walker, are battling over whether to bomb Iran immediately after being elected or after the first Cabinet meeting. The one candidate with some foreign policy experience, Lindsey Graham, describes the deal as “a death sentence for the state of Israel,” which will certainly come as a surprise to Israeli intelligence and strategic analysts—and which Graham knows to be utter nonsense, raising immediate questions about actual motives.
Keep in mind that the Republicans long ago abandoned the pretense of functioning as a normal congressional party. They have, as respected conservative political commentator Norman Ornstein of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute observed, become a “radical insurgency” that scarcely seeks to participate in normal congressional politics.
Since the days of President Ronald Reagan, the party leadership has plunged so far into the pockets of the very rich and the corporate sector that they can attract votes only by mobilizing parts of the population that have not previously been an organized political force. Among them are extremist evangelical Christians, now probably a majority of Republican voters; remnants of the former slave-holding states; nativists who are terrified that “they” are taking our white Christian Anglo-Saxon country away from us; and others who turn the Republican primaries into spectacles remote from the mainstream of modern society—though not from the mainstream of the most powerful country in world history.
The departure from global standards, however, goes far beyond the bounds of the Republican radical insurgency. Across the spectrum, there is, for instance, general agreement with the “pragmatic” conclusion of General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the Vienna deal does not “prevent the United States from striking Iranian facilities if officials decide that it is cheating on the agreement,” even though a unilateral military strike is “far less likely” if Iran behaves.
Former Clinton and Obama Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross typically recommends that “Iran must have no doubts that if we see it moving towards a weapon, that would trigger the use of force” even after the termination of the deal, when Iran is theoretically free to do what it wants. In fact, the existence of a termination point 15 years hence is, he adds, “the greatest single problem with the agreement.” He also suggests that the United States provide Israel with specially outfitted B-52 bombers and bunker-busting bombs to protect itself before that terrifying date arrives.
“The Greatest Threat”
Opponents of the nuclear deal charge that it does not go far enough. Some supporters agree, holding that “if the Vienna deal is to mean anything, the whole of the Middle East must rid itself of weapons of mass destruction.” The author of those words, Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Javad Zarif, added that “Iran, in its national capacity and as current chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement [the governments of the large majority of the world’s population], is prepared to work with the international community to achieve these goals, knowing full well that, along the way, it will probably run into many hurdles raised by the skeptics of peace and diplomacy.” Iran has signed “a historic nuclear deal,” he continues, and now it is the turn of Israel, “the holdout.”
Israel, of course, is one of the three nuclear powers, along with India and Pakistan, whose weapons programs have been abetted by the United States and that refuse to sign the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).
Zarif was referring to the regular five-year NPT review conference, which ended in failure in April when the United States (joined by Canada and Great Britain) once again blocked efforts to move toward a weapons-of-mass-destruction-free zone in the Middle East. Such efforts have been led by Egypt and other Arab states for 20 years. As Jayantha Dhanapala and Sergio Duarte, leading figures in the promotion of such efforts at the NPT and other UN agencies, observe in “Is There a Future for the NPT?,” an article in the journal of the Arms Control Association: “The successful adoption in 1995 of the resolution on the establishment of a zone free of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the Middle East was the main element of a package that permitted the indefinite extension of the NPT.” The NPT, in turn, is the most important arms control treaty of all. If it were adhered to, it could end the scourge of nuclear weapons.
Repeatedly, implementation of the resolution has been blocked by the United States, most recently by President Obama in 2010 and again in 2015, as Dhanapala and Duarte point out, “on behalf of a state that is not a party to the NPT and is widely believed to be the only one in the region possessing nuclear weapons” a polite and understated reference to Israel. This failure, they hope, “will not be the coup de grâce to the two longstanding NPT objectives of accelerated progress on nuclear disarmament and establishing a Middle Eastern WMD-free zone.”
A nuclear-weapons-free Middle East would be a straightforward way to address whatever threat Iran allegedly poses, but a great deal more is at stake in Washington’s continuing sabotage of the effort in order to protect its Israeli client. After all, this is not the only case in which opportunities to end the alleged Iranian threat have been undermined by Washington, raising further questions about just what is actually at stake.
In considering this matter, it is instructive to examine both the unspoken assumptions in the situation and the questions that are rarely asked. Let us consider a few of these assumptions, beginning with the most serious: that Iran is the gravest threat to world peace.
In the United States, it is a virtual cliché among high officials and commentators that Iran wins that grim prize. There is also a world outside the United States and although its views are not reported in the mainstream here, perhaps they are of some interest. According to the leading western polling agencies (WIN/Gallup International), the prize for “greatest threat” is won by the United States. The rest of the world regards it as the gravest threat to world peace by a large margin. In second place, far below, is Pakistan, its ranking probably inflated by the Indian vote. Iran is ranked below those two, along with China, Israel, North Korea, and Afghanistan.
“The World’s Leading Supporter of Terrorism”
Turning to the next obvious question, what in fact is the Iranian threat? Why, for example, are Israel and Saudi Arabia trembling in fear over that country? Whatever the threat is, it can hardly be military. Years ago, US intelligence informed Congress that Iran has very low military expenditures by the standards of the region and that its strategic doctrines are defensive—designed, that is, to deter aggression. The US intelligence community has also reported that it has no evidence Iran is pursuing an actual nuclear weapons program and that “Iran’s nuclear program and its willingness to keep open the possibility of developing nuclear weapons is a central part of its deterrent strategy.”
The authoritative SIPRI review of global armaments ranks the United States, as usual, way in the lead in military expenditures. China comes in second with about one-third of US expenditures. Far below are Russia and Saudi Arabia, which are nonetheless well above any western European state. Iran is scarcely mentioned. Full details are provided in an April report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which finds “a conclusive case that the Arab Gulf states have…an overwhelming advantage of Iran in both military spending and access to modern arms.”
Iran’s military spending, for instance, is a fraction of Saudi Arabia’s and far below even the spending of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Altogether, the Gulf Cooperation Council states—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE—outspend Iran on arms by a factor of eight, an imbalance that goes back decades. The CSIS report adds: “The Arab Gulf states have acquired and are acquiring some of the most advanced and effective weapons in the world [while] Iran has essentially been forced to live in the past, often relying on systems originally delivered at the time of the Shah.” In other words, they are virtually obsolete. When it comes to Israel, of course, the imbalance is even greater. Possessing the most advanced US weaponry and a virtual offshore military base for the global superpower, it also has a huge stock of nuclear weapons.
To be sure, Israel faces the “existential threat” of Iranian pronouncements: Supreme Leader Khamenei and former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad famously threatened it with destruction. Except that they didn’t—and if they had, it would be of little moment. Ahmadinejad, for instance, predicted that “under God’s grace [the Zionist regime] will be wiped off the map.” In other words, he hoped that regime change would someday take place. Even that falls far short of the direct calls in both Washington and Tel Aviv for regime change in Iran, not to speak of the actions taken to implement regime change. These, of course, go back to the actual “regime change” of 1953, when the United States and Britain organized a military coup to overthrow Iran’s parliamentary government and install the dictatorship of the Shah, who proceeded to amass one of the worst human rights records on the planet.
These crimes were certainly known to readers of the reports of Amnesty International and other human rights organizations, but not to readers of the US press, which has devoted plenty of space to Iranian human rights violations—but only since 1979 when the Shah’s regime was overthrown. (To check the facts on this, read The U.S. Press and Iran, a carefully documented study by Mansour Farhang and William Dorman.)
None of this is a departure from the norm. The United States, as is well known, holds the world championship title in regime change and Israel is no laggard either. The most destructive of its invasions of Lebanon in 1982 was explicitly aimed at regime change, as well as at securing its hold n the occupied territories. The pretexts offered were thin indeed and collapsed at once. That, too, is not unusual and pretty much independent of the nature of the society—from the laments in the
Declaration of Independence about the “merciless Indian savages” to Hitler’s defense of Germany from the “wild terror” of the Poles.
No serious analyst believes that Iran would ever use, or even threaten to use, a nuclear weapon if it had one, and so face instant destruction. There is, however, real concern that a nuclear weapon might fall into jihadi hands—not thanks to Iran, but via US ally Pakistan. In the journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, two leading Pakistani nuclear scientists, Pervez Hoodbhoy and Zia Mian, write that increasing fears of “militants seizing nuclear weapons or materials and unleashing nuclear terrorism [have led to]…the creation of a dedicated force of over 20,000 troops to guard nuclear facilities. There is no reason to assume, however, that this force would be immune to the problems associated with the units guarding regular military facilities,” which have frequently suffered attacks with “insider help.” In brief, the problem is real, just displaced to Iran thanks to fantasies concocted for other reasons.
Other concerns about the Iranian threat include its role as “the world’s leading supporter of terrorism,” which primarily refers to its support for Hezbollah and Hamas. Both of those movements emerged in resistance to US-backed Israeli violence and aggression, which vastly exceeds anything attributed to these villains, let alone the normal practice of the hegemonic power whose global drone assassination campaign alone dominates (and helps to foster) international terrorism.
Those two villainous Iranian clients also share the crime of winning the popular vote in the only free elections in the Arab world. Hezbollah is guilty of the even more heinous crime of compelling Israel to withdraw from its occupation of southern Lebanon, which took place in violation of UN Security Council orders dating back decades and involved an illegal regime of terror and sometimes extreme violence. Whatever one thinks of Hezbollah, Hamas, or other beneficiaries of Iranian support, Iran hardly ranks high in support of terror worldwide.
“Fueling Instability”
Another concern, voiced at the UN by US Ambassador Samantha Power, is the “instability that Iran fuels beyond its nuclear program.” The United States will continue to scrutinize this misbehavior, she declared. In that, she echoed the assurance Defense Secretary Ashton Carter offered while standing on Israel’s northern border that “we will continue to help Israel counter Iran’s malign influence” in supporting Hezbollah, and that the United States reserves the right to use military force against Iran as it deems appropriate.
The way Iran “fuels instability” can be seen particularly dramatically in Iraq where, among other crimes, it alone at once came to the aid of Kurds defending themselves from the invasion of Islamic State militants, even as it is building a $2.5 billion power plant in the southern port city of Basra to try to bring electrical power back to the level reached before the 2003 invasion. Ambassador Power’s usage is, however, standard: Thanks to that invasion, hundreds of thousands were killed and millions of refugees generated, barbarous acts of torture were committed—Iraqis have compared the destruction to the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century—leaving Iraq the unhappiest country in the world according to WIN/Gallup polls. Meanwhile, sectarian conflict was ignited, tearing the region to shreds and laying the basis for the creation of the monstrosity that is ISIS. And all of that is called “stabilization.”
Only Iran’s shameful actions, however, “fuel instability.” The standard usage sometimes reaches levels that are almost surreal, as when liberal commentator James Chace, former editor of Foreign Affairs, explained that the United States sought to “destabilize a freely elected Marxist government in Chile” because “we were determined to seek stability” under the Pinochet dictatorship.
Others are outraged that Washington should negotiate at all with a “contemptible” regime like Iran’s with its horrifying human rights record and urge instead that we pursue “an American-sponsored alliance between Israel and the Sunni states.” So writes Leon Wieseltier, contributing editor to the venerable liberal journal the Atlantic, who can barely conceal his visceral hatred for all things Iranian. With a straight face, this respected liberal intellectual recommends that Saudi Arabia, which makes Iran look like a virtual paradise, and Israel, with its vicious crimes in Gaza and elsewhere, should ally to teach that country good behavior. Perhaps the recommendation is not entirely unreasonable when we consider the human rights records of the regimes the United States has imposed and supported throughout the world.
Though the Iranian government is no doubt a threat to its own people, it regrettably breaks no records in this regard, not descending to the level of favored US allies. That, however, cannot be the concern of Washington, and surely not Tel Aviv or Riyadh.
It might also be useful to recall—surely Iranians do—that not a day has passed since 1953 in which the United States was not harming Iranians. After all, as soon as they overthrew the hated US-imposed regime of the Shah in 1979, Washington put its support behind Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who would, in 1980, launch a murderous assault on their country. President Reagan went so far as to deny Saddam’s major crime, his chemical warfare assault on Iraq’s Kurdish population, which he blamed on Iran instead. When Saddam was tried for crimes under US auspices, that horrendous crime, as well as others in which the United States was complicit, was carefully excluded from the charges, which were restricted to one of his minor crimes, the murder of 148 Shi’ites in 1982, a footnote to his gruesome record.
Saddam was such a valued friend of Washington that he was even granted a privilege otherwise accorded only to Israel. In 1987, his forces were allowed to attack a US naval vessel, the USS Stark, with impunity, killing 37 crewmen. (Israel had acted similarly in its 1967 attack on the USS Liberty.) Iran pretty much conceded defeat shortly after, when the United States launched Operation Praying Mantis against Iranian ships and oil platforms in Iranian territorial waters. That operation culminated when the USS Vincennes, under no credible threat, shot down an Iranian civilian airliner in Iranian airspace, with 290 killed—and the subsequent granting of a Legion of Merit award to the commander of the Vincennes for “exceptionally meritorious conduct” and for maintaining a “calm and professional atmosphere” during the period when the attack on the airliner took place. Comments philosopher Thill Raghu, “We can only stand in awe of such display of American exceptionalism!”
After the war ended, the United States continued to support Saddam Hussein, Iran’s primary enemy. President George H.W. Bush even invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to the United States for advanced training in weapons production, an extremely serious threat to Iran. Sanctions against that country were intensified, including against foreign firms dealing with it, and actions were initiated to bar it from the international financial system.
In recent years the hostility has extended to sabotage, the murder of nuclear scientists (presumably by Israel), and cyberwar, openly proclaimed with pride. The Pentagon regards cyberwar as an act of war, justifying a military response, as does NATO, which affirmed in September 2014 that cyber attacks may trigger the collective defense obligations of the NATO powers—when we are the target that is, not the perpetrators.
“The Prime Rogue State”
It is only fair to add that there have been breaks in this pattern. President George W. Bush, for example, offered several significant gifts to Iran by destroying its major enemies, Saddam Hussein and the Taliban. He even placed Iran’s Iraqi enemy under its influence after the US defeat, which was so severe that Washington had to abandon its officially declared goals of establishing permanent military bases (“enduring camps”) and ensuring that US corporations would have privileged access to
Iraq’s vast oil resources.
Do Iranian leaders intend to develop nuclear weapons today? We can decide for ourselves how credible their denials are, but that they had such intentions in the past is beyond question. After all, it was asserted openly on the highest authority and foreign journalists were informed that Iran would develop nuclear weapons “certainly, and sooner than one thinks.” The father of Iran’s nuclear energy program and former head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization was confident that the leadership’s plan “was to build a nuclear bomb.” The CIA also reported that it had “no doubt” Iran would develop nuclear weapons if neighboring countries did (as they have).
All of this was, of course, under the Shah, the “highest authority” just quoted and at a time when top US officials—Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Henry Kissinger, among others—were urging him to proceed with his nuclear programs and pressuring universities to accommodate these efforts. Under such pressures, my own university, MIT, made a deal with the Shah to admit Iranian students to the nuclear engineering program in return for grants he offered and over the strong objections of the student body, but with comparably strong faculty support (in a meeting that older faculty will doubtless remember well).
Asked later why he supported such programs under the Shah but opposed them more recently, Kissinger responded honestly that Iran was an ally then.
Putting aside absurdities, what is the real threat of Iran that inspires such fear and fury? A natural place to turn for an answer is, again, US intelligence. Recall its analysis that Iran poses no military threat, that its strategic doctrines are defensive, and that its nuclear programs (with no effort to produce bombs, as far as can be determined) are “a central part of its deterrent strategy.”
Who, then, would be concerned by an Iranian deterrent? The answer is plain: the rogue states that rampage in the region and do not want to tolerate any impediment to their reliance on aggression and violence. In the lead in this regard are the United States and Israel, with Saudi Arabia trying its best to join the club with its invasion of Bahrain (to support the crushing of a reform movement there) and now its murderous assault on Yemen, accelerating a growing humanitarian catastrophe in that country.
For the United States, the characterization is familiar. Fifteen years ago, the prominent political
analyst Samuel Huntington, professor of the science of government at Harvard, warned in the establishment journal Foreign Affairs that for much of the world the United States was “becoming the rogue superpower…the single greatest external threat to their societies.” Shortly after, his words were echoed by Robert Jervis, the president of the American Political Science Association: “In the eyes of much of the world, in fact, the prime rogue state today is the United States.” As we have seen, global opinion supports this judgment by a substantial margin.
Furthermore, the mantle is worn with pride. That is the clear meaning of the insistence of the political class that the United States reserves the right to resort to force if it unilaterally determines that Iran is violating some commitment. This policy is of long standing, especially for liberal Democrats, and by no means restricted to Iran. The Clinton Doctrine, for instance, confirmed that the United States was entitled to resort to the “unilateral use of military power” even to ensure “uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources,” let alone alleged “security” or “humanitarian” concerns. Adherence to various versions of this doctrine has been well confirmed in practice, as need hardly be discussed among people willing to look at the facts of current history.
These are among the critical matters that should be the focus of attention in analyzing the nuclear deal at Vienna, whether it stands or is sabotaged by Congress, as it may well be.
Walker, are battling over whether to bomb Iran immediately after being elected or after the first Cabinet meeting. The one candidate with some foreign policy experience, Lindsey Graham, describes the deal as “a death sentence for the state of Israel,” which will certainly come as a surprise to Israeli intelligence and strategic analysts—and which Graham knows to be utter nonsense, raising immediate questions about actual motives.
Keep in mind that the Republicans long ago abandoned the pretense of functioning as a normal congressional party. They have, as respected conservative political commentator Norman Ornstein of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute observed, become a “radical insurgency” that scarcely seeks to participate in normal congressional politics.
Since the days of President Ronald Reagan, the party leadership has plunged so far into the pockets of the very rich and the corporate sector that they can attract votes only by mobilizing parts of the population that have not previously been an organized political force. Among them are extremist evangelical Christians, now probably a majority of Republican voters; remnants of the former slave-holding states; nativists who are terrified that “they” are taking our white Christian Anglo-Saxon country away from us; and others who turn the Republican primaries into spectacles remote from the mainstream of modern society—though not from the mainstream of the most powerful country in world history.
The departure from global standards, however, goes far beyond the bounds of the Republican radical insurgency. Across the spectrum, there is, for instance, general agreement with the “pragmatic” conclusion of General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the Vienna deal does not “prevent the United States from striking Iranian facilities if officials decide that it is cheating on the agreement,” even though a unilateral military strike is “far less likely” if Iran behaves.
Former Clinton and Obama Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross typically recommends that “Iran must have no doubts that if we see it moving towards a weapon, that would trigger the use of force” even after the termination of the deal, when Iran is theoretically free to do what it wants. In fact, the existence of a termination point 15 years hence is, he adds, “the greatest single problem with the agreement.” He also suggests that the United States provide Israel with specially outfitted B-52 bombers and bunker-busting bombs to protect itself before that terrifying date arrives.
“The Greatest Threat”
Opponents of the nuclear deal charge that it does not go far enough. Some supporters agree, holding that “if the Vienna deal is to mean anything, the whole of the Middle East must rid itself of weapons of mass destruction.” The author of those words, Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Javad Zarif, added that “Iran, in its national capacity and as current chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement [the governments of the large majority of the world’s population], is prepared to work with the international community to achieve these goals, knowing full well that, along the way, it will probably run into many hurdles raised by the skeptics of peace and diplomacy.” Iran has signed “a historic nuclear deal,” he continues, and now it is the turn of Israel, “the holdout.”
Israel, of course, is one of the three nuclear powers, along with India and Pakistan, whose weapons programs have been abetted by the United States and that refuse to sign the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).
Zarif was referring to the regular five-year NPT review conference, which ended in failure in April when the United States (joined by Canada and Great Britain) once again blocked efforts to move toward a weapons-of-mass-destruction-free zone in the Middle East. Such efforts have been led by Egypt and other Arab states for 20 years. As Jayantha Dhanapala and Sergio Duarte, leading figures in the promotion of such efforts at the NPT and other UN agencies, observe in “Is There a Future for the NPT?,” an article in the journal of the Arms Control Association: “The successful adoption in 1995 of the resolution on the establishment of a zone free of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the Middle East was the main element of a package that permitted the indefinite extension of the NPT.” The NPT, in turn, is the most important arms control treaty of all. If it were adhered to, it could end the scourge of nuclear weapons.
Repeatedly, implementation of the resolution has been blocked by the United States, most recently by President Obama in 2010 and again in 2015, as Dhanapala and Duarte point out, “on behalf of a state that is not a party to the NPT and is widely believed to be the only one in the region possessing nuclear weapons” a polite and understated reference to Israel. This failure, they hope, “will not be the coup de grâce to the two longstanding NPT objectives of accelerated progress on nuclear disarmament and establishing a Middle Eastern WMD-free zone.”
A nuclear-weapons-free Middle East would be a straightforward way to address whatever threat Iran allegedly poses, but a great deal more is at stake in Washington’s continuing sabotage of the effort in order to protect its Israeli client. After all, this is not the only case in which opportunities to end the alleged Iranian threat have been undermined by Washington, raising further questions about just what is actually at stake.
In considering this matter, it is instructive to examine both the unspoken assumptions in the situation and the questions that are rarely asked. Let us consider a few of these assumptions, beginning with the most serious: that Iran is the gravest threat to world peace.
In the United States, it is a virtual cliché among high officials and commentators that Iran wins that grim prize. There is also a world outside the United States and although its views are not reported in the mainstream here, perhaps they are of some interest. According to the leading western polling agencies (WIN/Gallup International), the prize for “greatest threat” is won by the United States. The rest of the world regards it as the gravest threat to world peace by a large margin. In second place, far below, is Pakistan, its ranking probably inflated by the Indian vote. Iran is ranked below those two, along with China, Israel, North Korea, and Afghanistan.
“The World’s Leading Supporter of Terrorism”
Turning to the next obvious question, what in fact is the Iranian threat? Why, for example, are Israel and Saudi Arabia trembling in fear over that country? Whatever the threat is, it can hardly be military. Years ago, US intelligence informed Congress that Iran has very low military expenditures by the standards of the region and that its strategic doctrines are defensive—designed, that is, to deter aggression. The US intelligence community has also reported that it has no evidence Iran is pursuing an actual nuclear weapons program and that “Iran’s nuclear program and its willingness to keep open the possibility of developing nuclear weapons is a central part of its deterrent strategy.”
The authoritative SIPRI review of global armaments ranks the United States, as usual, way in the lead in military expenditures. China comes in second with about one-third of US expenditures. Far below are Russia and Saudi Arabia, which are nonetheless well above any western European state. Iran is scarcely mentioned. Full details are provided in an April report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which finds “a conclusive case that the Arab Gulf states have…an overwhelming advantage of Iran in both military spending and access to modern arms.”
Iran’s military spending, for instance, is a fraction of Saudi Arabia’s and far below even the spending of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Altogether, the Gulf Cooperation Council states—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE—outspend Iran on arms by a factor of eight, an imbalance that goes back decades. The CSIS report adds: “The Arab Gulf states have acquired and are acquiring some of the most advanced and effective weapons in the world [while] Iran has essentially been forced to live in the past, often relying on systems originally delivered at the time of the Shah.” In other words, they are virtually obsolete. When it comes to Israel, of course, the imbalance is even greater. Possessing the most advanced US weaponry and a virtual offshore military base for the global superpower, it also has a huge stock of nuclear weapons.
To be sure, Israel faces the “existential threat” of Iranian pronouncements: Supreme Leader Khamenei and former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad famously threatened it with destruction. Except that they didn’t—and if they had, it would be of little moment. Ahmadinejad, for instance, predicted that “under God’s grace [the Zionist regime] will be wiped off the map.” In other words, he hoped that regime change would someday take place. Even that falls far short of the direct calls in both Washington and Tel Aviv for regime change in Iran, not to speak of the actions taken to implement regime change. These, of course, go back to the actual “regime change” of 1953, when the United States and Britain organized a military coup to overthrow Iran’s parliamentary government and install the dictatorship of the Shah, who proceeded to amass one of the worst human rights records on the planet.
These crimes were certainly known to readers of the reports of Amnesty International and other human rights organizations, but not to readers of the US press, which has devoted plenty of space to Iranian human rights violations—but only since 1979 when the Shah’s regime was overthrown. (To check the facts on this, read The U.S. Press and Iran, a carefully documented study by Mansour Farhang and William Dorman.)
None of this is a departure from the norm. The United States, as is well known, holds the world championship title in regime change and Israel is no laggard either. The most destructive of its invasions of Lebanon in 1982 was explicitly aimed at regime change, as well as at securing its hold n the occupied territories. The pretexts offered were thin indeed and collapsed at once. That, too, is not unusual and pretty much independent of the nature of the society—from the laments in the
Declaration of Independence about the “merciless Indian savages” to Hitler’s defense of Germany from the “wild terror” of the Poles.
No serious analyst believes that Iran would ever use, or even threaten to use, a nuclear weapon if it had one, and so face instant destruction. There is, however, real concern that a nuclear weapon might fall into jihadi hands—not thanks to Iran, but via US ally Pakistan. In the journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, two leading Pakistani nuclear scientists, Pervez Hoodbhoy and Zia Mian, write that increasing fears of “militants seizing nuclear weapons or materials and unleashing nuclear terrorism [have led to]…the creation of a dedicated force of over 20,000 troops to guard nuclear facilities. There is no reason to assume, however, that this force would be immune to the problems associated with the units guarding regular military facilities,” which have frequently suffered attacks with “insider help.” In brief, the problem is real, just displaced to Iran thanks to fantasies concocted for other reasons.
Other concerns about the Iranian threat include its role as “the world’s leading supporter of terrorism,” which primarily refers to its support for Hezbollah and Hamas. Both of those movements emerged in resistance to US-backed Israeli violence and aggression, which vastly exceeds anything attributed to these villains, let alone the normal practice of the hegemonic power whose global drone assassination campaign alone dominates (and helps to foster) international terrorism.
Those two villainous Iranian clients also share the crime of winning the popular vote in the only free elections in the Arab world. Hezbollah is guilty of the even more heinous crime of compelling Israel to withdraw from its occupation of southern Lebanon, which took place in violation of UN Security Council orders dating back decades and involved an illegal regime of terror and sometimes extreme violence. Whatever one thinks of Hezbollah, Hamas, or other beneficiaries of Iranian support, Iran hardly ranks high in support of terror worldwide.
“Fueling Instability”
Another concern, voiced at the UN by US Ambassador Samantha Power, is the “instability that Iran fuels beyond its nuclear program.” The United States will continue to scrutinize this misbehavior, she declared. In that, she echoed the assurance Defense Secretary Ashton Carter offered while standing on Israel’s northern border that “we will continue to help Israel counter Iran’s malign influence” in supporting Hezbollah, and that the United States reserves the right to use military force against Iran as it deems appropriate.
The way Iran “fuels instability” can be seen particularly dramatically in Iraq where, among other crimes, it alone at once came to the aid of Kurds defending themselves from the invasion of Islamic State militants, even as it is building a $2.5 billion power plant in the southern port city of Basra to try to bring electrical power back to the level reached before the 2003 invasion. Ambassador Power’s usage is, however, standard: Thanks to that invasion, hundreds of thousands were killed and millions of refugees generated, barbarous acts of torture were committed—Iraqis have compared the destruction to the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century—leaving Iraq the unhappiest country in the world according to WIN/Gallup polls. Meanwhile, sectarian conflict was ignited, tearing the region to shreds and laying the basis for the creation of the monstrosity that is ISIS. And all of that is called “stabilization.”
Only Iran’s shameful actions, however, “fuel instability.” The standard usage sometimes reaches levels that are almost surreal, as when liberal commentator James Chace, former editor of Foreign Affairs, explained that the United States sought to “destabilize a freely elected Marxist government in Chile” because “we were determined to seek stability” under the Pinochet dictatorship.
Others are outraged that Washington should negotiate at all with a “contemptible” regime like Iran’s with its horrifying human rights record and urge instead that we pursue “an American-sponsored alliance between Israel and the Sunni states.” So writes Leon Wieseltier, contributing editor to the venerable liberal journal the Atlantic, who can barely conceal his visceral hatred for all things Iranian. With a straight face, this respected liberal intellectual recommends that Saudi Arabia, which makes Iran look like a virtual paradise, and Israel, with its vicious crimes in Gaza and elsewhere, should ally to teach that country good behavior. Perhaps the recommendation is not entirely unreasonable when we consider the human rights records of the regimes the United States has imposed and supported throughout the world.
Though the Iranian government is no doubt a threat to its own people, it regrettably breaks no records in this regard, not descending to the level of favored US allies. That, however, cannot be the concern of Washington, and surely not Tel Aviv or Riyadh.
It might also be useful to recall—surely Iranians do—that not a day has passed since 1953 in which the United States was not harming Iranians. After all, as soon as they overthrew the hated US-imposed regime of the Shah in 1979, Washington put its support behind Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who would, in 1980, launch a murderous assault on their country. President Reagan went so far as to deny Saddam’s major crime, his chemical warfare assault on Iraq’s Kurdish population, which he blamed on Iran instead. When Saddam was tried for crimes under US auspices, that horrendous crime, as well as others in which the United States was complicit, was carefully excluded from the charges, which were restricted to one of his minor crimes, the murder of 148 Shi’ites in 1982, a footnote to his gruesome record.
Saddam was such a valued friend of Washington that he was even granted a privilege otherwise accorded only to Israel. In 1987, his forces were allowed to attack a US naval vessel, the USS Stark, with impunity, killing 37 crewmen. (Israel had acted similarly in its 1967 attack on the USS Liberty.) Iran pretty much conceded defeat shortly after, when the United States launched Operation Praying Mantis against Iranian ships and oil platforms in Iranian territorial waters. That operation culminated when the USS Vincennes, under no credible threat, shot down an Iranian civilian airliner in Iranian airspace, with 290 killed—and the subsequent granting of a Legion of Merit award to the commander of the Vincennes for “exceptionally meritorious conduct” and for maintaining a “calm and professional atmosphere” during the period when the attack on the airliner took place. Comments philosopher Thill Raghu, “We can only stand in awe of such display of American exceptionalism!”
After the war ended, the United States continued to support Saddam Hussein, Iran’s primary enemy. President George H.W. Bush even invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to the United States for advanced training in weapons production, an extremely serious threat to Iran. Sanctions against that country were intensified, including against foreign firms dealing with it, and actions were initiated to bar it from the international financial system.
In recent years the hostility has extended to sabotage, the murder of nuclear scientists (presumably by Israel), and cyberwar, openly proclaimed with pride. The Pentagon regards cyberwar as an act of war, justifying a military response, as does NATO, which affirmed in September 2014 that cyber attacks may trigger the collective defense obligations of the NATO powers—when we are the target that is, not the perpetrators.
“The Prime Rogue State”
It is only fair to add that there have been breaks in this pattern. President George W. Bush, for example, offered several significant gifts to Iran by destroying its major enemies, Saddam Hussein and the Taliban. He even placed Iran’s Iraqi enemy under its influence after the US defeat, which was so severe that Washington had to abandon its officially declared goals of establishing permanent military bases (“enduring camps”) and ensuring that US corporations would have privileged access to
Iraq’s vast oil resources.
Do Iranian leaders intend to develop nuclear weapons today? We can decide for ourselves how credible their denials are, but that they had such intentions in the past is beyond question. After all, it was asserted openly on the highest authority and foreign journalists were informed that Iran would develop nuclear weapons “certainly, and sooner than one thinks.” The father of Iran’s nuclear energy program and former head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization was confident that the leadership’s plan “was to build a nuclear bomb.” The CIA also reported that it had “no doubt” Iran would develop nuclear weapons if neighboring countries did (as they have).
All of this was, of course, under the Shah, the “highest authority” just quoted and at a time when top US officials—Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Henry Kissinger, among others—were urging him to proceed with his nuclear programs and pressuring universities to accommodate these efforts. Under such pressures, my own university, MIT, made a deal with the Shah to admit Iranian students to the nuclear engineering program in return for grants he offered and over the strong objections of the student body, but with comparably strong faculty support (in a meeting that older faculty will doubtless remember well).
Asked later why he supported such programs under the Shah but opposed them more recently, Kissinger responded honestly that Iran was an ally then.
Putting aside absurdities, what is the real threat of Iran that inspires such fear and fury? A natural place to turn for an answer is, again, US intelligence. Recall its analysis that Iran poses no military threat, that its strategic doctrines are defensive, and that its nuclear programs (with no effort to produce bombs, as far as can be determined) are “a central part of its deterrent strategy.”
Who, then, would be concerned by an Iranian deterrent? The answer is plain: the rogue states that rampage in the region and do not want to tolerate any impediment to their reliance on aggression and violence. In the lead in this regard are the United States and Israel, with Saudi Arabia trying its best to join the club with its invasion of Bahrain (to support the crushing of a reform movement there) and now its murderous assault on Yemen, accelerating a growing humanitarian catastrophe in that country.
For the United States, the characterization is familiar. Fifteen years ago, the prominent political
analyst Samuel Huntington, professor of the science of government at Harvard, warned in the establishment journal Foreign Affairs that for much of the world the United States was “becoming the rogue superpower…the single greatest external threat to their societies.” Shortly after, his words were echoed by Robert Jervis, the president of the American Political Science Association: “In the eyes of much of the world, in fact, the prime rogue state today is the United States.” As we have seen, global opinion supports this judgment by a substantial margin.
Furthermore, the mantle is worn with pride. That is the clear meaning of the insistence of the political class that the United States reserves the right to resort to force if it unilaterally determines that Iran is violating some commitment. This policy is of long standing, especially for liberal Democrats, and by no means restricted to Iran. The Clinton Doctrine, for instance, confirmed that the United States was entitled to resort to the “unilateral use of military power” even to ensure “uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources,” let alone alleged “security” or “humanitarian” concerns. Adherence to various versions of this doctrine has been well confirmed in practice, as need hardly be discussed among people willing to look at the facts of current history.
These are among the critical matters that should be the focus of attention in analyzing the nuclear deal at Vienna, whether it stands or is sabotaged by Congress, as it may well be.
S.:http://www.thenation.com/article/iran-is-not-the-greatest-threat-to-world-peace/
viernes, 21 de agosto de 2015
jueves, 20 de agosto de 2015
Mieux vaut ne pas guérir si c'est pour rentrer sagement dans la vie et ses devoirs....
C'est aussi que la recherche scrupuleuse de la vérité, l'absurde prétention à tout dire sont des instances auxquelles se soumettre reviendrait à s'enfermer dans les limites d'un dessein et manquer du même coup par souci de probité ce que les seules forces du hasard sans cesse remises en jeu à la faveur du langage et conditionnées par lui désignent au point le plus reculé comme le centre actif, la substance souterraine dont l'être se nourrit, quelle que soit la perte d'intensité qu'entraîne une représentation approximative qui, liée à la durée changeante d'une vie, doit varier ses reprises et s'en remettre pour chacune d'elles aux occasions de la chance, hors de toute sujétion à un ordre préétabli ou de conformité respectueuse à la réalité des faits derrière laquelle se dissimule comme la braise sous la cendre ce que les mots ont pour mission de ranimer.
(...)
De ce chaos désolé tout cependant l'engagerait à se détourner, si ce n'était ruiner le mouvement qui l'y a conduit, signer son échec avant même d'avoir échoué. Il lui faut donc aller son chemin jusqu'aux bornes extrêmes de l'endurance, dût-il se déchirer cruellement aux épines, traverser en suffoquant tous les feux de l'enfer pour ne déclarer forfait qu'à la veille d'en toucher le terme qui sera le moment de mourir comme chacun sans avoir établi sa preuve.
(...)
Quiconque refuse le fait accompli entre en hostilité avec lui-même et, livré sans rémission à tous les raffinements de la conscience et de son malheur, ne retrouvera jamais le repos, à moins de tabler par un lâche calcul sur les effets thérapeutiques du temps pour empêcher qu'elle le commande et le détruise, mais même si le besoin de souffler un peu devait un jour y conduire, comment vouloir d'un tel repos qui aurait le sens d'une trahison ?
De ce chaos désolé tout cependant l'engagerait à se détourner, si ce n'était ruiner le mouvement qui l'y a conduit, signer son échec avant même d'avoir échoué. Il lui faut donc aller son chemin jusqu'aux bornes extrêmes de l'endurance, dût-il se déchirer cruellement aux épines, traverser en suffoquant tous les feux de l'enfer pour ne déclarer forfait qu'à la veille d'en toucher le terme qui sera le moment de mourir comme chacun sans avoir établi sa preuve.
(...)
Quiconque refuse le fait accompli entre en hostilité avec lui-même et, livré sans rémission à tous les raffinements de la conscience et de son malheur, ne retrouvera jamais le repos, à moins de tabler par un lâche calcul sur les effets thérapeutiques du temps pour empêcher qu'elle le commande et le détruise, mais même si le besoin de souffler un peu devait un jour y conduire, comment vouloir d'un tel repos qui aurait le sens d'une trahison ?
Mieux vaut ne pas guérir si c'est pour rentrer sagement dans la vie et ses devoirs où, toute vision disparue, il n'y aurait d'autre lien entre eux que la distance infranchissable qui les sépare, d'autres recours contre les larmes qu'une volonté de désaffection, un sombre renoncement, la soumission aux réalités contraignantes dont l'esprit profondément atteint s'était détourné, opposant au monde étroit de la raison sa douleur infinie.
Louis-René des Forêts
Ostinato
lunes, 17 de agosto de 2015
American Democracy Has to Do Better Than This
And we’re the ones who are going to have to change it.
by William Greider
The horse race started earlier this time, and political reporters are having a good time keeping up with the goofiness. On the right, sixteen wannabes are prancing around the paddock. On the left, the Clinton dynasty claims the throne as rightful inheritance of primogeniture. The media mob, meanwhile, gets to play racetrack tout nearly every day, scolding flawed performances and concocting what-if scenarios about how various miscues and errors might affect the election returns in 2016.
These dope stories are known among older reporters as “thumb-sucking.” Not much reporting is needed, because who will remember half-baked predictions fifteen months later, when the nation actually votes?
This new column for the election season, Naked Democracy, will not spend too much time on horse-race chatter. Instead, I have in mind a running inquiry into things the political order won’t talk about. I mean the big issues and ideas, the neglected opportunities and deliberate falsehoods that confront the nation. The deeper disorders are abundantly visible, but largely evaded or even actively concealed by the money-drenched campaigns. Their advisers reduce citizens to data, then carefully test-market issue content so prudent candidates will know what not to mention.
Getting naked means peeling away the folklore and cardboard characters, the distorting propaganda and trivial political intrigues, so we can see the bare bones of our larger predicament. (The column title is also an admiring nod to Yves Smith’s Naked Capitalism blog.)
The soaring birth rate for GOP candidates actually reflects the breakdown of the party system. In olden days, when the political parties were real organizations of real people and not mere mail drops for donor money, regional and national party bosses used to screen potential candidates. Now the billionaires fill that role. The reason we have so many Republicans running for 2016 is that so many billionaires want to finance their own personal racehorse.
The golden-haired Prince of Trump has created his own spotlight, and he’s scaring the crap out of party regulars. The Donald took up some of the GOP’s favorite prejudices and repackaged them as woozy barstool bigotry. His harsh talk should make Democrats nervous too, because it is broadly appealing.
Trump is performing a wicked parody of America’s dysfunctional democracy, mocking a system in which candidates do their best to avoid saying what they really think. If a wannabe should accidently speak the truth, the media will punish his “gaffe.”
Who says you can’t dump on Mexicans? Or brag obnoxiously about your personal wealth? Candid Donald even admits he is a superior guy, smarter and tougher, more fun to be around. Lots of people get the joke and laugh along with him. Voting for him, maybe not. My only prediction for 2016 is that at some point Prince Trump will turn back into a frog.
But The Donald is on to something true when he ridicules the unconvincing burlesque of presidential politics. People are not in awe when both political parties have become wobbly institutions, confused and insecure and divided internally. Their core constituencies no longer trust the leaders and rebel against a political establishment that has repeatedly misled or betrayed them. The largest pool of available voters is now the people who stay home. They learned their indifference and confusion from the babble of election campaigns.
According to newsies, Hillary Clinton has already won the Democratic nomination. But Hillary has to tiptoe through a minefield of doubt. She must make nice to her party’s skeptical lefties, but without disturbing the Wall Street money guys who finance Clinton campaigns. Her cautiously crafted statements of purpose sound like somebody watered her drink.
illary is not bad,” Representative Michael Capuano of Massachusetts observed. “It’s just, all of us know she is having an excitement problem. We all know that. It’s not a secret.”
Actually, I think it is American democracy that has the “excitement problem.” The smoke and mirrors of candidates and campaigns have lost their thrill. Too many Americans have figured out the game is not about them. People have been burned before by the peppy slogans and mendacious promises. They are on stage merely as extras. People know presidential elections matter greatly, but they also know governing elites are not telling the hard truth about the American predicament.
Our great national sickness is the deteriorated condition of American democracy itself. Politicians don’t bring this up. It’s a turn-off for voters. How can they ask people to vote for them if they have to explain that the promise of self-governing citizens is a nostalgic remnant, no longer practical? The permanent subculture of political professionals resembles a family that has contracted a dread disease but doesn’t want to tell the neighbors. Too late. People already know the system is failing.
One fundamental reality that gets virtually no mention by regular politicians is the implosion of American domination. For half a century, Washington steered the world, for better or ill, but that proud role is effectively obsolete. Our sprawling military presence drags the nation into occasional wars, and taking sides in other people’s enmities is a costly burden. But how does the United States gracefully back away without looking like just another declining empire?
The globalized economic sphere, led for decades by Washington, has shifted economic power in similar ways and deepened inequalities at home. The American exceptionalism touted by right-wing patriots has taken on morbid meanings: declining industrial influence, burgeoning debts, deteriorating middle class. Liberal Democrats are pushing a promising agenda to improve the condition of workers and families, but they don’t mention that these proposals are attempting to catch up with social guarantees that other developed nations have provided their citizens for many years.
The next American era does not need to be hard times. It could be vastly liberating and prosperous for all. But first the political order has to let go of the past. We are at an end-of-era reckoning. Ordinary people seem to grasp this better than most leaders.
A vibrant democracy would be arguing over these matters and proposing deeper reforms. Serious citizens who yearn for honest discussion are mostly provided advertising slogans and tough-guy promises. Every four years, we tell ourselves (or are assured by political cheerleaders) that the next president will start over and save us from errors and evasions. I subscribe to a sterner kind of optimism.
We will not be saved, I suggest, unless the people step up for themselves and actively challenge the power and orthodoxy of the reigning interests. Things will change only if people decide to take personal responsibility for transforming the country and creating a more promising future. This is highly unlikely in 2016. It will take more than one election to get over the national hubris and find new directions for our pride and ingenuity. But perhaps people can start digging out in this election cycle, regardless of what politicians try to tell us or which ones win higher office.
I believe this is possible, despite awesome concentrations of wealth and power. Cynics would say it’s impossibly dreamy, but look closely at the course of American history and you will find that society’s greatest breakthroughs in social progress and economic equity were achieved only when people mobilized and struggled massively on behalf of radical departures from the status quo. Sometimes winning elections, but also sometimes losing. The “great men” celebrated by conventional historians were powered by people in motion—popular uprisings that altered the social fabric and expanded the obligations of government to we, the people.
I will go further and suggest that our country is once again approaching a fundamental turning point. Popular mobilizations are already under way on numerous fronts, both inside and outside party ranks. They are driven by people of every stripe and color—both angry and idealistic. The outcome of next year’s elections is unlikely to satisfy these disparate new energies from below, but the elections won’t turn them off, either.
I propose a slightly different way of looking at 2016. On the surface, it looks like same-old, same-old—the familiar contest of Rs against Ds with a few well-known family names thrown in. But this time I can imagine formations of disparate people at large, though scattered and without a proper name, emerging as a new “third rail” in American politics. An unorganized, rump aggregation of angry idealists, whether from left or right or both, people who still believe in small-d democracy and get a kick out of talking back to power. Their formless power threatens both of the entrenched and deteriorating parties.
But how could I imagine democratic revival if so many dispirited Americans no longer believe democracy is possible? Cynics have it wrong. The great paradox of our time is that while the formal democracy of elections and parties was being captured and enfeebled by wealthy economic interests, the people who made their own politics in the streets were scoring astonishing victories.
Think of the civil rights movement in the springtime of its great triumph. Or the feminists who taught us a generation ago that the personal is political. Or the social liberation engineered by gays and lesbians from ancient prejudices that blighted their lives. Or the mobilization of Latinos, fighting to overcome exploitative immigration laws with or without an act of Congress.
Yes, these movements had some friends in power who assisted, but in every case, it was the people who liberated themselves. How did they do it? Through hard struggle, of course, as well as endless internal arguments over strategy.
But the essential quality in all these movements was, first, they never lost intimate identification with their own rank and file, and, second, they never stopped confronting the people in power—including friendly allies and presidents—with hard-nosed demands. In other words, they refused to act like bleeding-heart supplicants begging for favors. They acted like citizens. They made life difficult for the powerful. Think of Martin Luther King Jr. staring down Lyndon Johnson. Think of today’s Latino leaders nose-to-nose at the White House with Barack Obama.
Ordinary people can find the strength to do hardball politics against the mighty when they know the struggle is not just about “politics” but about life itself. From my years of experience as a reporter, I got to know a lot of these principled agitators. On the whole, they are a tough crowd—used to losing but not to giving up.
These dope stories are known among older reporters as “thumb-sucking.” Not much reporting is needed, because who will remember half-baked predictions fifteen months later, when the nation actually votes?
This new column for the election season, Naked Democracy, will not spend too much time on horse-race chatter. Instead, I have in mind a running inquiry into things the political order won’t talk about. I mean the big issues and ideas, the neglected opportunities and deliberate falsehoods that confront the nation. The deeper disorders are abundantly visible, but largely evaded or even actively concealed by the money-drenched campaigns. Their advisers reduce citizens to data, then carefully test-market issue content so prudent candidates will know what not to mention.
Getting naked means peeling away the folklore and cardboard characters, the distorting propaganda and trivial political intrigues, so we can see the bare bones of our larger predicament. (The column title is also an admiring nod to Yves Smith’s Naked Capitalism blog.)
The soaring birth rate for GOP candidates actually reflects the breakdown of the party system. In olden days, when the political parties were real organizations of real people and not mere mail drops for donor money, regional and national party bosses used to screen potential candidates. Now the billionaires fill that role. The reason we have so many Republicans running for 2016 is that so many billionaires want to finance their own personal racehorse.
The golden-haired Prince of Trump has created his own spotlight, and he’s scaring the crap out of party regulars. The Donald took up some of the GOP’s favorite prejudices and repackaged them as woozy barstool bigotry. His harsh talk should make Democrats nervous too, because it is broadly appealing.
Trump is performing a wicked parody of America’s dysfunctional democracy, mocking a system in which candidates do their best to avoid saying what they really think. If a wannabe should accidently speak the truth, the media will punish his “gaffe.”
Who says you can’t dump on Mexicans? Or brag obnoxiously about your personal wealth? Candid Donald even admits he is a superior guy, smarter and tougher, more fun to be around. Lots of people get the joke and laugh along with him. Voting for him, maybe not. My only prediction for 2016 is that at some point Prince Trump will turn back into a frog.
But The Donald is on to something true when he ridicules the unconvincing burlesque of presidential politics. People are not in awe when both political parties have become wobbly institutions, confused and insecure and divided internally. Their core constituencies no longer trust the leaders and rebel against a political establishment that has repeatedly misled or betrayed them. The largest pool of available voters is now the people who stay home. They learned their indifference and confusion from the babble of election campaigns.
According to newsies, Hillary Clinton has already won the Democratic nomination. But Hillary has to tiptoe through a minefield of doubt. She must make nice to her party’s skeptical lefties, but without disturbing the Wall Street money guys who finance Clinton campaigns. Her cautiously crafted statements of purpose sound like somebody watered her drink.
illary is not bad,” Representative Michael Capuano of Massachusetts observed. “It’s just, all of us know she is having an excitement problem. We all know that. It’s not a secret.”
Actually, I think it is American democracy that has the “excitement problem.” The smoke and mirrors of candidates and campaigns have lost their thrill. Too many Americans have figured out the game is not about them. People have been burned before by the peppy slogans and mendacious promises. They are on stage merely as extras. People know presidential elections matter greatly, but they also know governing elites are not telling the hard truth about the American predicament.
Our great national sickness is the deteriorated condition of American democracy itself. Politicians don’t bring this up. It’s a turn-off for voters. How can they ask people to vote for them if they have to explain that the promise of self-governing citizens is a nostalgic remnant, no longer practical? The permanent subculture of political professionals resembles a family that has contracted a dread disease but doesn’t want to tell the neighbors. Too late. People already know the system is failing.
One fundamental reality that gets virtually no mention by regular politicians is the implosion of American domination. For half a century, Washington steered the world, for better or ill, but that proud role is effectively obsolete. Our sprawling military presence drags the nation into occasional wars, and taking sides in other people’s enmities is a costly burden. But how does the United States gracefully back away without looking like just another declining empire?
The globalized economic sphere, led for decades by Washington, has shifted economic power in similar ways and deepened inequalities at home. The American exceptionalism touted by right-wing patriots has taken on morbid meanings: declining industrial influence, burgeoning debts, deteriorating middle class. Liberal Democrats are pushing a promising agenda to improve the condition of workers and families, but they don’t mention that these proposals are attempting to catch up with social guarantees that other developed nations have provided their citizens for many years.
The next American era does not need to be hard times. It could be vastly liberating and prosperous for all. But first the political order has to let go of the past. We are at an end-of-era reckoning. Ordinary people seem to grasp this better than most leaders.
A vibrant democracy would be arguing over these matters and proposing deeper reforms. Serious citizens who yearn for honest discussion are mostly provided advertising slogans and tough-guy promises. Every four years, we tell ourselves (or are assured by political cheerleaders) that the next president will start over and save us from errors and evasions. I subscribe to a sterner kind of optimism.
We will not be saved, I suggest, unless the people step up for themselves and actively challenge the power and orthodoxy of the reigning interests. Things will change only if people decide to take personal responsibility for transforming the country and creating a more promising future. This is highly unlikely in 2016. It will take more than one election to get over the national hubris and find new directions for our pride and ingenuity. But perhaps people can start digging out in this election cycle, regardless of what politicians try to tell us or which ones win higher office.
I believe this is possible, despite awesome concentrations of wealth and power. Cynics would say it’s impossibly dreamy, but look closely at the course of American history and you will find that society’s greatest breakthroughs in social progress and economic equity were achieved only when people mobilized and struggled massively on behalf of radical departures from the status quo. Sometimes winning elections, but also sometimes losing. The “great men” celebrated by conventional historians were powered by people in motion—popular uprisings that altered the social fabric and expanded the obligations of government to we, the people.
I will go further and suggest that our country is once again approaching a fundamental turning point. Popular mobilizations are already under way on numerous fronts, both inside and outside party ranks. They are driven by people of every stripe and color—both angry and idealistic. The outcome of next year’s elections is unlikely to satisfy these disparate new energies from below, but the elections won’t turn them off, either.
I propose a slightly different way of looking at 2016. On the surface, it looks like same-old, same-old—the familiar contest of Rs against Ds with a few well-known family names thrown in. But this time I can imagine formations of disparate people at large, though scattered and without a proper name, emerging as a new “third rail” in American politics. An unorganized, rump aggregation of angry idealists, whether from left or right or both, people who still believe in small-d democracy and get a kick out of talking back to power. Their formless power threatens both of the entrenched and deteriorating parties.
But how could I imagine democratic revival if so many dispirited Americans no longer believe democracy is possible? Cynics have it wrong. The great paradox of our time is that while the formal democracy of elections and parties was being captured and enfeebled by wealthy economic interests, the people who made their own politics in the streets were scoring astonishing victories.
Think of the civil rights movement in the springtime of its great triumph. Or the feminists who taught us a generation ago that the personal is political. Or the social liberation engineered by gays and lesbians from ancient prejudices that blighted their lives. Or the mobilization of Latinos, fighting to overcome exploitative immigration laws with or without an act of Congress.
Yes, these movements had some friends in power who assisted, but in every case, it was the people who liberated themselves. How did they do it? Through hard struggle, of course, as well as endless internal arguments over strategy.
But the essential quality in all these movements was, first, they never lost intimate identification with their own rank and file, and, second, they never stopped confronting the people in power—including friendly allies and presidents—with hard-nosed demands. In other words, they refused to act like bleeding-heart supplicants begging for favors. They acted like citizens. They made life difficult for the powerful. Think of Martin Luther King Jr. staring down Lyndon Johnson. Think of today’s Latino leaders nose-to-nose at the White House with Barack Obama.
Ordinary people can find the strength to do hardball politics against the mighty when they know the struggle is not just about “politics” but about life itself. From my years of experience as a reporter, I got to know a lot of these principled agitators. On the whole, they are a tough crowd—used to losing but not to giving up.
Odd as it sounds, I came to realize that what motivated them was love. They were not sentimentalists. But first they had to learn to love themselves. Once they could take themselves seriously as human beings, then they could love their family and friends, then their community, then their country.
What’s love got to do with it? Maybe love is what’s missing from our democracy.
What’s love got to do with it? Maybe love is what’s missing from our democracy.
S.:http://www.thenation.com/article/american-democracy-has-to-do-better-than-this/
Exposing Nixon’s Vietnam Lies
Exclusive: After resigning over the Watergate political-spying scandal, President Nixon sought to rewrite the history of his Vietnam War strategies to deny swapping lives for political advantage, but newly released documents say otherwise, writes James DiEugenio.
By James DiEugenio
Richard Nixon spent years rebuilding his tattered reputation after he resigned from office in disgrace on Aug. 9, 1974. The rehabilitation project was codenamed “The Wizard.” The idea was to position himself as an elder statesman of foreign policy, a Wise Man. And to a remarkable degree – through the sale of his memoirs, his appearance with David Frost in a series of highly rated interviews, and the publication of at least eight books after that – Nixon largely succeeded in his goal.
There was another aspect of that plan: to do all he could to keep his presidential papers and tapes classified, which, through a series of legal maneuvers, he managed to achieve in large part. Therefore, much of what he and Henry Kissinger wrote about in their memoirs could stand, largely unchallenged.
It was not until years after his death that the bulk of the Nixon papers and tapes were opened up to the light of day. And Kissinger’s private papers will not be declassified until five years after his death. With that kind of arrangement, it was fairly easy for Nixon to sell himself as the Sage of San Clemente, but two new books based on the long-delayed declassified record – one by Ken Hughes and the other by William Burr and Jeffrey Kimball – undermine much of Nixon’s rehabilitation.
For instance, in 1985 – at the peak of President Ronald Reagan’s political power – Nixon wrote No More Vietnams, making several dubious claims about the long conflict which included wars of independence by Vietnam against both France and the United States.
In the book, Nixon tried to insinuate that Vietnam was not really one country for a very long time and that the split between north and south was a natural demarcation. He also declared that the Vietnam War had been won under his administration, and he insisted that he never really considered bombing the irrigation dikes, using tactical nuclear weapons, or employing the strategy of a “decent interval” to mask an American defeat for political purposes.
Nixon’s Story
In No More Vietnams, Nixon said that after going through a series of option papers furnished to him by National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, he decided on a five-point program for peace in Vietnam. (Nixon, pgs. 104-07) This program consisted of Vietnamization, i. e., turning over the fighting of the war to the South Vietnamese army (the ARVN); pacification, which was a clear-and-hold strategy for maintaining territory in the south; diplomatic isolation of North Vietnam from its allies, China and the Soviet Union; peace negotiations with very few preconditions; and gradual withdrawal of American combat troops. Nixon asserted that this program was successful.
But the currently declassified record does not support Nixon’s version of history, either in the particulars of what was attempted or in Nixon’s assessment of its success.
When Richard Nixon came into office he was keenly aware of what had happened to his predecessor Lyndon Johnson, who had escalated the war to heights that President Kennedy had never imagined, let alone envisaged. The war of attrition strategy that LBJ and General William Westmoreland had decided upon did not work. And the high American casualties it caused eroded support for the war domestically. Nixon told his Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman that he would not end up like LBJ, a prisoner in his own White House.
Therefore, Nixon wanted recommendations that would shock the enemy, even beyond the massive bombing campaigns and other bloody tactics employed by Johnson. As authors Burr and Kimball note in their new book Nixon’s Nuclear Specter, Nixon was very much influenced by two modes of thought.
First, as Vice President from 1953-61, he was under the tutelage of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and President Dwight Eisenhower, who advocated a policy of nuclear brinksmanship, that is the willingness to threaten nuclear war if need be. Dulles felt that since the United States had a large lead in atomic weapons that the Russians would back down in the face of certain annihilation.
Nixon was also impressed by the alleged threat of President Eisenhower to use atomic weapons if North Korea and China did not bargain in good faith to end the Korean War. Nixon actually talked about this in a private meeting with southern politicians at the 1968 GOP convention. (Burr and Kimball, Chapter 2)
Dulles also threatened to use atomic weapons in Vietnam. Burr and Kimball note the proposal by Dulles to break the Viet Minh’s siege of French troops at Dien Bien Phu by a massive air mission featuring the use of three atomic bombs. Though Nixon claimed in No More Vietnams that the atomic option was not seriously considered (Nixon, p. 30), the truth appears to have been more ambiguous, that Nixon thought the siege could be lifted without atomic weapons but he was not against using them. Eisenhower ultimately vetoed their use when he could not get Great Britain to go along.
Playing the Madman
Later, when in the Oval Office, Nixon tempered this nuclear brinksmanship for the simple reason that the Russians had significantly closed the gap in atomic stockpiles. So, as Burr and Kimball describe it, Nixon and Kissinger wanted to modify the Eisenhower-Dulles brinksmanship with the “uncertainty effect” – or as Nixon sometimes called it, the Madman Theory. In other words, instead of overtly threatening to use atomic bombs, Nixon would have an intermediary pass on word to the North Vietnamese leadership that Nixon was so unhinged that he might resort to nuclear weapons if he didn’t get his way. Or, as Nixon explained to Haldeman, if you act crazy, the incredible becomes credible:
“They’ll believe any threat of force that Nixon makes because it’s Nixon. I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that ‘for God’s sake you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry — and he has his hand on the nuclear button.’”
Nixon believed this trick would work, saying “Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”
Kissinger once told special consultant Leonard Garment to convey to the Soviets that Nixon was somewhat nutty and unpredictable. Kissinger bought into the concept so much so that he was part of the act: the idea was for Nixon to play the “bad cop” and Kissinger the “good cop.”
Another reason that Nixon and Kissinger advocated the Madman Theory was that they understood that Vietnamization and pacification would take years. And they did not think they could sustain public opinion on the war for that long. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird and Secretary of State William Rogers both thought they could, their opinions were peripheral because Nixon and Kissinger had concentrated the foreign policy apparatus in the White House.
Playing for Time
Privately, Nixon did not think America could win the war, so he wanted to do something unexpected, shocking, “over the top.” As Burr and Kimball note, in 1969, Nixon told his speechwriters Ray Price, Pat Buchanan and Richard Whalen: “I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no way to win the war. But we can’t say that, of course. In fact we have to seem to say the opposite, just to keep some degree of bargaining leverage.”
In a phone call with Kissinger, Nixon said, “In Saigon, the tendency is to fight the war for victory. … But you and I know it won’t happen – it is impossible. Even Gen. Abrams agreed.”
These ideas were expressed very early in 1969 in a document called NSSM-1, a study memorandum – as opposed to an action memorandum – with Kissinger asking for opinions on war strategy from those directly involved. The general consensus was that the other side had “options over which we have little or no control” which would help them “continue the war almost indefinitely.” (ibid, Chapter 3)
Author Ken Hughes in Fatal Politics agrees. Nixon wanted to know if South Vietnam could survive without American troops there. All of the military figures he asked replied that President Nguyen van Thieu’s government could not take on both the Viet Cong and the regular North Vietnamese army. And, the United States could not help South Vietnam enough for it to survive on its own. (Hughes, pgs. 14-15)
As Hughes notes, Nixon understood that this bitter truth needed maximum spin to make it acceptable for the public. So he said, “Shall we leave Vietnam in a way that – by our own actions – consciously turns the country over to the Communists? Or shall we leave in a way that gives the South Vietnamese a reasonable chance to survive as a free people? My plan will end American involvement in a way that will provide that chance.” (ibid, p. 15)
If the U.S. media allowed the argument to be framed like that — which it did — then the hopeless cause did have a political upside. As Kissinger told Nixon, “The only consolation we have … is that the people who put us into this position are going to be destroyed by the right. … They are going to be destroyed. The liberals and radicals are going to be killed. This is, above all, a rightwing country.” (ibid, p. 19)
Could anything be less honest, less democratic or more self-serving? Knowing that their critics were correct, and that the war could not be won, Nixon and Kissinger wanted to portray the people who were right about the war as betraying both America and South Vietnam.
Political Worries
Just how calculated was Nixon about America’s withdrawal from Vietnam? Republican Sen. Hugh Scott warned him about getting out by the end of 1972, or “another man may be standing on the platform” on Inauguration Day 1973. (ibid, p. 23) Nixon told his staff that Scott should not be saying things like this in public.
But, in private, the GOP actually polled on the issue. It was from these polls that Nixon tailored his speeches. He understood that only 39 percent of the public approved a Dec. 31, 1971 withdrawal, if it meant a U.S. defeat. When the question was posed as withdrawal, even if it meant a communist takeover, the percentage declined to 27 percent. Nixon studied the polls assiduously. He told Haldeman, “That’s the word. We say Communist takeover.” (ibid, p. 24)
The polls revealed another hot button issue: getting our POW’s back. This was even more sensitive with the public than the “Communist takeover” issue. Therefore, during a press conference, when asked about Scott’s public warning, Nixon replied that the date of withdrawal should not be related to any election day. The important thing was that he “didn’t want one American to be in Vietnam one day longer than is necessary to achieve the two goals that I have mentioned: the release of our prisoners and the capacity of the South Vietnamese to defend themselves against a Communist takeover.” He then repeated that meme two more times. The press couldn’t avoid it. (Hughes, p. 25)
Still, although Nixon and Kissinger understood they could not win the war in a conventional sense, they were willing to try other methods in the short run to get a better and quicker settlement, especially if it included getting North Vietnamese troops out of South Vietnam. Therefore, in 1969, he and Kissinger elicited suggestions from inside the White House, the Pentagon, the CIA, and Rand Corporation, through Daniel Ellsberg. These included a limited invasion of North Vietnam and Laos, mining the harbors and bombing the north, a full-scale invasion of North Vietnam, and operations in Cambodia.
Or as Kissinger put it, “We should … develop alternate plans for possible escalating military actions with the motive of convincing the Soviets that the war may get out of hand.” Kissinger also said that bombing Cambodia would convey the proper message to Moscow.
If anything shows that Kissinger was as backward in his thinking about Indochina as Nixon, this does. For as Burr and Kimball show — through Dobrynin’s memos to Moscow — the Russians could not understand why the White House would think the Kremlin had such influence with Hanoi. Moscow wanted to deal on a variety of issues, including arms agreements and the Middle East.
So far from Kissinger’s vaunted “linkage” theory furthering the agenda with Russia, it’s clear from Dobrynin that it hindered that agenda. In other words, the remnants of a colonial conflict in the Third World were stopping progress in ameliorating the Cold War. This was the subtotal of the Nixon/Kissinger geopolitical accounting sheet.
Judging Kissinger on Vietnam
Just how unbalanced was Kissinger on Vietnam? In April 1969, there was a shoot-down of an American observation plane off the coast of Korea. When White House adviser John Ehrlichman asked Kissinger how far the escalation could go, Kissinger replied it could go nuclear.
In a memo to Nixon , Kissinger advised using tactical nuclear weapons. He wrote that “all hell would break loose for two months”, referring to domestic demonstrations. But he then concluded that the end result would be positive: “there will be peace in Asia.”
Kissinger was referring, of course, to the effectiveness of the Madman Theory. In reading these two books, it is often hard to decipher who is more dangerous in their thinking, Nixon or Kissinger.
In the first phase of their approach to the Vietnam issue, Nixon and Kissinger decided upon two alternatives. The first was the secret bombing of Cambodia. In his interview with David Frost, Nixon expressed no regrets about either the bombing or the invasion. In fact, he said, he wished he had done it sooner, which is a puzzling statement because the bombing of Cambodia was among the first things he authorized. Nixon told Frost that the bombing and the later invasion of Cambodia had positive results: they garnered a lot of enemy supplies, lowered American casualties in Vietnam, and hurt the Viet Cong war effort.
Frost did not press the former president with the obvious follow-up: But Mr. Nixon, you started another war and you helped depose Cambodia’s charismatic ruler, Prince Sihanouk. And because the Viet Cong were driven deeper into Cambodia, Nixon then began bombing the rest of the country, not just the border areas, leading to the victory of the radical Khmer Rouge and the deaths of more than one million Cambodians.
This all indicates just how imprisoned Nixon and Kissinger were by the ideas of John Foster Dulles and his visions of a communist monolith with orders emanating from Moscow’s Comintern, a unified global movement controlled by the Kremlin. Like the Domino Theory, this was never sound thinking. In fact, the Sino-Soviet border dispute, which stemmed back to 1962, showed that communist movements were not monolithic. So the idea that Moscow could control Hanoi, or that the communists in Cambodia were controlled by the Viet Cong, this all ended up being disastrously wrong.
As Sihanouk told author William Shawcross after the Cambodian catastrophe unfolded, General Lon Nol, who seized power from Prince Sihanouk, was nothing without the military actions of Nixon and Kissinger, and “the Khmer Rouge were nothing without Lon Nol.” (Shawcross, Sideshow, p. 391)
But further, as Shawcross demonstrates, the immediate intent of the Cambodian invasion was to seek and destroy the so-called COSVN, the supposed command-and-control base for the communist forces in South Vietnam supposedly based on the border inside Cambodia. No such command center was ever found. (ibid, p. 171)
Why the Drop in Casualties?
As for Nixon’s other claim, American casualties declined in Indochina because of troop rotation, that is, the ARVN were pushed to the front lines with the Americans in support. Or as one commander said after the Cambodian invasion: it was essential that American fatalities be cut back, “If necessary, we must do it by edict.” (ibid, p. 172)
But this is not all that Nixon tried in the time frame of 1969-70, his first two years in office. At Kissinger’s request he also attempted a secret mission to Moscow by Wall Street lawyer Cyrus Vance. Part of Kissinger’s linkage theory, Vance was to tell the Soviets that if they leaned on Hanoi to accept a Nixonian framework for negotiations, then the administration would be willing to deal on other fronts, and there would be little or no escalation. The negotiations on Vietnam included a coalition government, and the survival of Thieu’s government for at least five years, which would have been two years beyond the 1972 election. (As we shall see, this is the beginning of the final “decent interval” strategy.)
The Vance mission was coupled with what Burr and Kimball call a “mining ruse.” The Navy would do an exercise to try and make the Russians think they were going to mine Haiphong and five other North Vietnamese harbors. Yet, for reasons stated above, Nixon overrated linkage, and the tactic did not work. But as Kissinger said, “If in doubt, we bomb Cambodia.” Which they did.
As the authors note, Nixon had urged President Johnson in 1967 to extend the bombing throughout Indochina, into Cambodia and Laos. Johnson had studied these and other options but found too many liabilities. He had even studied the blockading of ports but concluded that Hanoi would compensate for a blockade in a relatively short time by utilizing overland routes and off-shore unloading.
But what Johnson did not factor in was the Nixon/Kissinger Madman Theory. For example, when a State Department representative brought up the overall military ineffectiveness of the Cambodian bombing, Kissinger replied, “That doesn’t bother me … we’ll hit something.” He also told an assistant, “Always keep them guessing.” The problem was, the “shock effect” ended up being as mythical as linkage.
In 1969, after the failure of the Vance mission, the mining ruse, the warnings to Dobrynin, and the continued bombing of Cambodia, which went on in secret for 14 months, Nixon still had not given up on his Madman Theory. He sent a message to Hanoi saying that if a resolution was not in the works by November, “he will regretfully find himself obliged to have recourse to measures of great consequence and force.”
What were these consequences? Nixon had wanted to mine Haiphong for a long time. But, as did Johnson, he was getting different opinions about its effectiveness. So he considered massive interdiction bombing of the north coupled with a blockade of Sihanoukville, the Cambodian port that was part of the Ho Chi Minh trail apparatus on the west coast of Cambodia.
Plus one other tactic: Kissinger suggested to his staff that the interdiction bombing use tactical nuclear weapons for overland passes near the Chinese border. But the use of tactical nukes would have created an even greater domestic disturbance than the Cambodian invasion had done. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird objected to the whole agenda. He said it would not be effective and it would create too much domestic strife.
Backing Up Threats
So Nixon and Kissinger decided on something short of the nuclear option. After all, Nixon had sent a veiled ultimatum to Hanoi about “great consequence and force.” They had to back it up. The two decided on a worldwide nuclear alert instead, a giant nuclear war exercise that would simulate actual military maneuvers in attempting to mimic what the U.S. would do if it were preparing for a nuclear strike.
As Burr and Kimball write, this was another outmoded vestige of 1950s Cold War thinking: “It was intended to signal Washington’s anger at Moscow’s support of North Vietnam and to jar the Soviet leaders into using their leverage to induce Hanoi to make diplomatic concessions.” (Burr and Kimball, Chapter 9)
It was designed to be detected by the Soviets, but not detectable at home. For instance, the DEFCON levels were not actually elevated. The alert went on for about three weeks, with all kinds of military maneuvers at sea and on land. Finally, Dobrynin called for a meeting. Kissinger was buoyant. Maybe the ploy had worked.
But it didn’t. The ambassador was angry and upset, but not about the alert. He said that while the Russians wanted to deal on nuclear weapons, Nixon was as obsessed with Vietnam as LBJ was. In other words, Dobrynin and the Soviets were perceptive about what was really happening. Nixon tried to salvage the meeting with talk about how keeping American fatalities low in Vietnam would aid détente, which further blew the cover off the nuclear alert.
Burr and Kimball show just how wedded the self-styled foreign policy mavens were to the Madman Theory. After the meeting, Nixon realized he had not done well in accordance with the whole nuclear alert, Madman idea. He asked Kissinger to bring back Dobrynin so they could play act the Madman idea better.
The authors then note that, although Haiphong was later mined, the mining was not effective, as Nixon had been warned. In other words, the Madman idea and linkage were both duds.
Nixon and Kissinger then turned to Laird’s plan, a Vietnamization program, a mix of U.S. troop withdrawals, turning more of the fighting over to the ARVN, and negotiations. The November 1969 Madman timetable was tossed aside and the long haul of gradual U.S. disengagement was being faced. Accordingly, Nixon and Kissinger started sending new messages to the north. And far from isolating Hanoi, both China and Russia served as messengers for these new ideas.
The White House told Dobrynin that after all American troops were out, Vietnam would no longer be America’s concern. In extension of this idea, America would not even mind if Vietnam was unified under Hanoi leadership.
Kissinger told the Chinese that America would not return after withdrawing. In his notebooks for his meeting with Zhou En Lai, Kissinger wrote, “We want a decent interval. You have our assurances.” (Burr and Kimball, Epilogue)
Timing the Departure
But when would the American troops depart? As Ken Hughes writes, Nixon at first wanted the final departure to be by December of 1971. But Kissinger talked him out of this. It was much safer politically to have the final withdrawal after the 1972 election. If Saigon fell after, it was too late to say Nixon’s policies were responsible. (Fatal Politics, p. 3)
Kissinger also impressed on Nixon the need not to announce a timetable in advance. Since all their previous schemes had failed, they had to have some leverage for the Paris peace talks.
But there was a problem. The exposure of the secret bombing of Cambodia began to put pressure on Congress to begin to cut off funding for those operations. Therefore, when Nixon also invaded Laos, this was done with ARVN troops. It did not go very well, but that did not matter to Nixon: “However Laos comes out, we have got to claim it was a success.” (Hughes, p. 14)
While there was little progress at the official negotiations, that too was irrelevant because Kissinger had arranged for so-called “secret talks” at a residential home in Paris. There was no headway at these talks until late May 1971. Prior to this, Nixon had insisted on withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops from South Vietnam.
But in May, Kissinger reversed himself on two issues. First, there would be no American residual force left behind. Second, there would be a cease-fire in place. That is, no withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops. As Kissinger said to Nixon, they would still be free to bomb the north, but “the only problem is to prevent the collapse in 1972.” (ibid, pgs. 27-28) The Decent Interval strategy was now the modus operandi.
And this strategy would serve Nixon’s reelection interests, too. As Kissinger told Nixon, “If we can, in October of ’72 go around the country saying we ended the war and the Democrats wanted to turn it over to the communists … then we’re in great shape.” To which Nixon replied, “I know exactly what we’re up to.” (ibid, p. 29) Since this was all done in secret, they could get away with a purely political ploy even though its resulted in the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians. All this was done to make sure Nixon was reelected and the Democrats looked like wimps.
Kissinger understood this linkage between the war’s illusionary success and politics. He reminded Nixon, “If Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam go down the drain in September of 1972, they they’ll say you went into those … you spoiled so many lives, just to wind up where you could have been in the first year.” (ibid, p. 30)
In fact, the President’s February 1972 trip to China was directly related to the slow progress on Vietnam. Kissinger said, “For every reason, we’ve got to have a diversion from Vietnam in this country for awhile.” To which Nixon replied, “That’s the point isn’t it?” (ibid, p.32)
A Decent Interval
In preparations for China, Kissinger told Zhou En Lai that Nixon needed an interval of a year or two after American departure for Saigon to fall. (ibid, p. 35) He told Zhou, “The outcome of my logic is that we are putting a time interval between the military outcome and the political outcome.” (ibid, p. 79)
But aware of this, Hanoi made one last push for victory with the Easter Offensive of 1972. Remarkably successful at first, air power managed to stall it and then push it back. During this giant air operation, Nixon returned to his Foster Dulles brinksmanship form, asking Kissinger, should we “take the dikes out now?”
Kissinger replied, “That will drown about 200,000 people.”
Nixon said, “Well no, no … I’d rather use a nuclear bomb. Have you got that ready?”
When Kissinger demurred by saying Nixon wouldn’t use it anyway, the President replied, “I just want you to think big Henry, for Christ’s sake.” (Burr and Kimball, Epilogue)
The American press took the wrong message from this. What it actually symbolized was that Saigon could not survive without massive American aid and firepower. (Hughes, p. 61) But even with this huge air campaign, the Pentagon figured that the north could keep up its war effort for at least two more years, even with interdiction bombing.
The political ramification of the renewed fighting was that it pushed the final settlement back in time, which Nixon saw as a political benefit, a tsunami for his reelection.
Nixon: “The advantage, Henry, of trying to settle now, even if you’re ten points ahead, is that that will ensure a hell of a landslide.”
Kissinger: “If we can get that done, then we can screw them after Election Day if necessary. And I think this could finish the destruction of McGovern” [the Democratic presidential nominee].
Nixon: “Oh yes, and the doves, which is just as important.”
The next day, Aug. 3, 1972, Kissinger returned to the theme: “So we’ve got to find some formula that holds the thing together a year or two, after which — after a year, Mr. President, Vietnam will be a backwater… no one will give a damn.” (Hughes, pgs. 84-85)
All of this history renders absurd the speeches of Ronald Reagan at the time: “President Nixon’s idealism is such that he believes the people of South Vietnam should have the opportunity to live under whatever form of government … they themselves choose.” (Hughes, p. 86) While Reagan was whistling in the dark, the Hanoi negotiator Le Duc Tho understood what was happening. He even said to Kissinger, “reunification will be decided upon after a suitable interval following the signing.”
Kissinger and Nixon even knew the whole election commission idea for reunification was a joke. Kissinger called it, “all baloney. … There’ll never be elections.” Nixon agreed by saying that the war will then resume, but “we’ll be gone.” (ibid, p. 88)
Thieu’s Complaint
The problem in October 1972 was not Hanoi; it was President Thieu. He understood that with 150,000 North Vietnamese regulars in the south, the writing was on the wall for his future. So Kissinger got reassurances from Hanoi that they would not use the Ho Chi Minh Trail after America left, though Kissinger and Nixon knew this was a lie. (ibid, p. 94)
When Thieu still balked, Nixon said he would sign the agreement unilaterally. How badly did Kissinger steamroll Thieu? When he brought him the final agreements to sign, Thieu noticed that they only referred to three countries being in Indochina: Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam. Kissinger tried to explain this away as a mistake. (Hughes, p. 118)
When Kissinger announced in October 1972 that peace was at hand, he understood this was false but it was political gold.
Nixon: “Of course, the point is, they think you’ve got peace. . . but that’s all right,. Let them think it.” (ibid, p. 132)
Nixon got Senators Barry Goldwater and John Stennis to debate cutting off aid for Saigon. This got Thieu to sign. (ibid, p. 158)
In January 1973, the agreement was formalized. It was all a sham. There was no lull in the fighting, there were no elections, and there was no halt in the supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. As the military knew, Saigon was no match for the Viet Cong and the regular army of North Vietnam. And Thieu did not buy the letters Nixon wrote him about resumed bombing if Hanoi violated the treaty.
But Nixon had one more trick up his sleeve, which he pulled out as an excuse for the defeat in his 1985 book, No More Vietnams. He wrote that Congress lost the “victory” he had won by gradually cutting off aid to Indochina beginning in 1973. (Nixon, p. 178)
It’s true that the Democratic caucuses did vote for this, but anyone can tell by looking at the numbers that Nixon could have sustained a veto if he tried. And, in fact, he had vetoed a bill to ban American bombing in Cambodia on June 27 with the House falling 35 votes short in the override attempt.
Rep. Gerald Ford, R-Michigan, rose and said, “If military action is required in Southeast Asia after August 15, 1973, … the President will ask congressional authority and will abide by the decision that is made by the House and Senate.”
The Democrats didn’t buy Ford’s assurance. So Ford called Nixon and returned to the podium to say Nixon had reaffirmed his pledge. With that, the borderline Republicans joined in a shut-off vote of 278-124. In the Senate the vote was 64-26. (Hughes, p. 165)
Having Congress take the lead meant that Nixon did not have to even think of revisiting Vietnam. He could claim he was stabbed in the back by Congress. As Hughes notes, it would have been better for Congress politically to double the funding requests just to show it was all for show.
As Hughes writes, this strategy of arranging a phony peace, which disguised an American defeat, was repeated in Iraq. President George W. Bush rejected troop withdrawals in 2007 and then launched “the surge,” which cost another 1,000 American lives but averted an outright military defeat on Bush’s watch. Bush then signed an agreement with his hand-picked Iraqi government, allowing American troops to remain in Iraq for three more years and passing the disaster on to President Barack Obama.
Hughes ends by writing that Nixon’s myth of a “victory” in Vietnam masks cowardice for political courage and replaces patriotism with opportunism. Nixon prolonged a lost war. He then faked a peace. And he then schemed to shift the blame onto Congress.
As long as that truth is masked, other presidents can play politics with the lives hundred of thousands of innocent civilians, and tens of thousands of American soldiers.
At Nixon’s 1994 funeral, Kissinger tried to commemorate their legacy by listing their foreign policy achievements. The first one he listed was a peace agreement in Vietnam. The last one was the airing of a human rights agenda that helped break apart the Soviet domination in Eastern Europe. These two books make those declarations not just specious, but a bit obscene.
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.
By James DiEugenio
Richard Nixon spent years rebuilding his tattered reputation after he resigned from office in disgrace on Aug. 9, 1974. The rehabilitation project was codenamed “The Wizard.” The idea was to position himself as an elder statesman of foreign policy, a Wise Man. And to a remarkable degree – through the sale of his memoirs, his appearance with David Frost in a series of highly rated interviews, and the publication of at least eight books after that – Nixon largely succeeded in his goal.
There was another aspect of that plan: to do all he could to keep his presidential papers and tapes classified, which, through a series of legal maneuvers, he managed to achieve in large part. Therefore, much of what he and Henry Kissinger wrote about in their memoirs could stand, largely unchallenged.
It was not until years after his death that the bulk of the Nixon papers and tapes were opened up to the light of day. And Kissinger’s private papers will not be declassified until five years after his death. With that kind of arrangement, it was fairly easy for Nixon to sell himself as the Sage of San Clemente, but two new books based on the long-delayed declassified record – one by Ken Hughes and the other by William Burr and Jeffrey Kimball – undermine much of Nixon’s rehabilitation.
For instance, in 1985 – at the peak of President Ronald Reagan’s political power – Nixon wrote No More Vietnams, making several dubious claims about the long conflict which included wars of independence by Vietnam against both France and the United States.
In the book, Nixon tried to insinuate that Vietnam was not really one country for a very long time and that the split between north and south was a natural demarcation. He also declared that the Vietnam War had been won under his administration, and he insisted that he never really considered bombing the irrigation dikes, using tactical nuclear weapons, or employing the strategy of a “decent interval” to mask an American defeat for political purposes.
Nixon’s Story
In No More Vietnams, Nixon said that after going through a series of option papers furnished to him by National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, he decided on a five-point program for peace in Vietnam. (Nixon, pgs. 104-07) This program consisted of Vietnamization, i. e., turning over the fighting of the war to the South Vietnamese army (the ARVN); pacification, which was a clear-and-hold strategy for maintaining territory in the south; diplomatic isolation of North Vietnam from its allies, China and the Soviet Union; peace negotiations with very few preconditions; and gradual withdrawal of American combat troops. Nixon asserted that this program was successful.
But the currently declassified record does not support Nixon’s version of history, either in the particulars of what was attempted or in Nixon’s assessment of its success.
When Richard Nixon came into office he was keenly aware of what had happened to his predecessor Lyndon Johnson, who had escalated the war to heights that President Kennedy had never imagined, let alone envisaged. The war of attrition strategy that LBJ and General William Westmoreland had decided upon did not work. And the high American casualties it caused eroded support for the war domestically. Nixon told his Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman that he would not end up like LBJ, a prisoner in his own White House.
Therefore, Nixon wanted recommendations that would shock the enemy, even beyond the massive bombing campaigns and other bloody tactics employed by Johnson. As authors Burr and Kimball note in their new book Nixon’s Nuclear Specter, Nixon was very much influenced by two modes of thought.
First, as Vice President from 1953-61, he was under the tutelage of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and President Dwight Eisenhower, who advocated a policy of nuclear brinksmanship, that is the willingness to threaten nuclear war if need be. Dulles felt that since the United States had a large lead in atomic weapons that the Russians would back down in the face of certain annihilation.
Nixon was also impressed by the alleged threat of President Eisenhower to use atomic weapons if North Korea and China did not bargain in good faith to end the Korean War. Nixon actually talked about this in a private meeting with southern politicians at the 1968 GOP convention. (Burr and Kimball, Chapter 2)
Dulles also threatened to use atomic weapons in Vietnam. Burr and Kimball note the proposal by Dulles to break the Viet Minh’s siege of French troops at Dien Bien Phu by a massive air mission featuring the use of three atomic bombs. Though Nixon claimed in No More Vietnams that the atomic option was not seriously considered (Nixon, p. 30), the truth appears to have been more ambiguous, that Nixon thought the siege could be lifted without atomic weapons but he was not against using them. Eisenhower ultimately vetoed their use when he could not get Great Britain to go along.
Playing the Madman
Later, when in the Oval Office, Nixon tempered this nuclear brinksmanship for the simple reason that the Russians had significantly closed the gap in atomic stockpiles. So, as Burr and Kimball describe it, Nixon and Kissinger wanted to modify the Eisenhower-Dulles brinksmanship with the “uncertainty effect” – or as Nixon sometimes called it, the Madman Theory. In other words, instead of overtly threatening to use atomic bombs, Nixon would have an intermediary pass on word to the North Vietnamese leadership that Nixon was so unhinged that he might resort to nuclear weapons if he didn’t get his way. Or, as Nixon explained to Haldeman, if you act crazy, the incredible becomes credible:
“They’ll believe any threat of force that Nixon makes because it’s Nixon. I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that ‘for God’s sake you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry — and he has his hand on the nuclear button.’”
Nixon believed this trick would work, saying “Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”
Kissinger once told special consultant Leonard Garment to convey to the Soviets that Nixon was somewhat nutty and unpredictable. Kissinger bought into the concept so much so that he was part of the act: the idea was for Nixon to play the “bad cop” and Kissinger the “good cop.”
Another reason that Nixon and Kissinger advocated the Madman Theory was that they understood that Vietnamization and pacification would take years. And they did not think they could sustain public opinion on the war for that long. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird and Secretary of State William Rogers both thought they could, their opinions were peripheral because Nixon and Kissinger had concentrated the foreign policy apparatus in the White House.
Playing for Time
Privately, Nixon did not think America could win the war, so he wanted to do something unexpected, shocking, “over the top.” As Burr and Kimball note, in 1969, Nixon told his speechwriters Ray Price, Pat Buchanan and Richard Whalen: “I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no way to win the war. But we can’t say that, of course. In fact we have to seem to say the opposite, just to keep some degree of bargaining leverage.”
In a phone call with Kissinger, Nixon said, “In Saigon, the tendency is to fight the war for victory. … But you and I know it won’t happen – it is impossible. Even Gen. Abrams agreed.”
These ideas were expressed very early in 1969 in a document called NSSM-1, a study memorandum – as opposed to an action memorandum – with Kissinger asking for opinions on war strategy from those directly involved. The general consensus was that the other side had “options over which we have little or no control” which would help them “continue the war almost indefinitely.” (ibid, Chapter 3)
Author Ken Hughes in Fatal Politics agrees. Nixon wanted to know if South Vietnam could survive without American troops there. All of the military figures he asked replied that President Nguyen van Thieu’s government could not take on both the Viet Cong and the regular North Vietnamese army. And, the United States could not help South Vietnam enough for it to survive on its own. (Hughes, pgs. 14-15)
As Hughes notes, Nixon understood that this bitter truth needed maximum spin to make it acceptable for the public. So he said, “Shall we leave Vietnam in a way that – by our own actions – consciously turns the country over to the Communists? Or shall we leave in a way that gives the South Vietnamese a reasonable chance to survive as a free people? My plan will end American involvement in a way that will provide that chance.” (ibid, p. 15)
If the U.S. media allowed the argument to be framed like that — which it did — then the hopeless cause did have a political upside. As Kissinger told Nixon, “The only consolation we have … is that the people who put us into this position are going to be destroyed by the right. … They are going to be destroyed. The liberals and radicals are going to be killed. This is, above all, a rightwing country.” (ibid, p. 19)
Could anything be less honest, less democratic or more self-serving? Knowing that their critics were correct, and that the war could not be won, Nixon and Kissinger wanted to portray the people who were right about the war as betraying both America and South Vietnam.
Political Worries
Just how calculated was Nixon about America’s withdrawal from Vietnam? Republican Sen. Hugh Scott warned him about getting out by the end of 1972, or “another man may be standing on the platform” on Inauguration Day 1973. (ibid, p. 23) Nixon told his staff that Scott should not be saying things like this in public.
But, in private, the GOP actually polled on the issue. It was from these polls that Nixon tailored his speeches. He understood that only 39 percent of the public approved a Dec. 31, 1971 withdrawal, if it meant a U.S. defeat. When the question was posed as withdrawal, even if it meant a communist takeover, the percentage declined to 27 percent. Nixon studied the polls assiduously. He told Haldeman, “That’s the word. We say Communist takeover.” (ibid, p. 24)
The polls revealed another hot button issue: getting our POW’s back. This was even more sensitive with the public than the “Communist takeover” issue. Therefore, during a press conference, when asked about Scott’s public warning, Nixon replied that the date of withdrawal should not be related to any election day. The important thing was that he “didn’t want one American to be in Vietnam one day longer than is necessary to achieve the two goals that I have mentioned: the release of our prisoners and the capacity of the South Vietnamese to defend themselves against a Communist takeover.” He then repeated that meme two more times. The press couldn’t avoid it. (Hughes, p. 25)
Still, although Nixon and Kissinger understood they could not win the war in a conventional sense, they were willing to try other methods in the short run to get a better and quicker settlement, especially if it included getting North Vietnamese troops out of South Vietnam. Therefore, in 1969, he and Kissinger elicited suggestions from inside the White House, the Pentagon, the CIA, and Rand Corporation, through Daniel Ellsberg. These included a limited invasion of North Vietnam and Laos, mining the harbors and bombing the north, a full-scale invasion of North Vietnam, and operations in Cambodia.
Or as Kissinger put it, “We should … develop alternate plans for possible escalating military actions with the motive of convincing the Soviets that the war may get out of hand.” Kissinger also said that bombing Cambodia would convey the proper message to Moscow.
If anything shows that Kissinger was as backward in his thinking about Indochina as Nixon, this does. For as Burr and Kimball show — through Dobrynin’s memos to Moscow — the Russians could not understand why the White House would think the Kremlin had such influence with Hanoi. Moscow wanted to deal on a variety of issues, including arms agreements and the Middle East.
So far from Kissinger’s vaunted “linkage” theory furthering the agenda with Russia, it’s clear from Dobrynin that it hindered that agenda. In other words, the remnants of a colonial conflict in the Third World were stopping progress in ameliorating the Cold War. This was the subtotal of the Nixon/Kissinger geopolitical accounting sheet.
Judging Kissinger on Vietnam
Just how unbalanced was Kissinger on Vietnam? In April 1969, there was a shoot-down of an American observation plane off the coast of Korea. When White House adviser John Ehrlichman asked Kissinger how far the escalation could go, Kissinger replied it could go nuclear.
In a memo to Nixon , Kissinger advised using tactical nuclear weapons. He wrote that “all hell would break loose for two months”, referring to domestic demonstrations. But he then concluded that the end result would be positive: “there will be peace in Asia.”
Kissinger was referring, of course, to the effectiveness of the Madman Theory. In reading these two books, it is often hard to decipher who is more dangerous in their thinking, Nixon or Kissinger.
In the first phase of their approach to the Vietnam issue, Nixon and Kissinger decided upon two alternatives. The first was the secret bombing of Cambodia. In his interview with David Frost, Nixon expressed no regrets about either the bombing or the invasion. In fact, he said, he wished he had done it sooner, which is a puzzling statement because the bombing of Cambodia was among the first things he authorized. Nixon told Frost that the bombing and the later invasion of Cambodia had positive results: they garnered a lot of enemy supplies, lowered American casualties in Vietnam, and hurt the Viet Cong war effort.
Frost did not press the former president with the obvious follow-up: But Mr. Nixon, you started another war and you helped depose Cambodia’s charismatic ruler, Prince Sihanouk. And because the Viet Cong were driven deeper into Cambodia, Nixon then began bombing the rest of the country, not just the border areas, leading to the victory of the radical Khmer Rouge and the deaths of more than one million Cambodians.
This all indicates just how imprisoned Nixon and Kissinger were by the ideas of John Foster Dulles and his visions of a communist monolith with orders emanating from Moscow’s Comintern, a unified global movement controlled by the Kremlin. Like the Domino Theory, this was never sound thinking. In fact, the Sino-Soviet border dispute, which stemmed back to 1962, showed that communist movements were not monolithic. So the idea that Moscow could control Hanoi, or that the communists in Cambodia were controlled by the Viet Cong, this all ended up being disastrously wrong.
As Sihanouk told author William Shawcross after the Cambodian catastrophe unfolded, General Lon Nol, who seized power from Prince Sihanouk, was nothing without the military actions of Nixon and Kissinger, and “the Khmer Rouge were nothing without Lon Nol.” (Shawcross, Sideshow, p. 391)
But further, as Shawcross demonstrates, the immediate intent of the Cambodian invasion was to seek and destroy the so-called COSVN, the supposed command-and-control base for the communist forces in South Vietnam supposedly based on the border inside Cambodia. No such command center was ever found. (ibid, p. 171)
Why the Drop in Casualties?
As for Nixon’s other claim, American casualties declined in Indochina because of troop rotation, that is, the ARVN were pushed to the front lines with the Americans in support. Or as one commander said after the Cambodian invasion: it was essential that American fatalities be cut back, “If necessary, we must do it by edict.” (ibid, p. 172)
But this is not all that Nixon tried in the time frame of 1969-70, his first two years in office. At Kissinger’s request he also attempted a secret mission to Moscow by Wall Street lawyer Cyrus Vance. Part of Kissinger’s linkage theory, Vance was to tell the Soviets that if they leaned on Hanoi to accept a Nixonian framework for negotiations, then the administration would be willing to deal on other fronts, and there would be little or no escalation. The negotiations on Vietnam included a coalition government, and the survival of Thieu’s government for at least five years, which would have been two years beyond the 1972 election. (As we shall see, this is the beginning of the final “decent interval” strategy.)
The Vance mission was coupled with what Burr and Kimball call a “mining ruse.” The Navy would do an exercise to try and make the Russians think they were going to mine Haiphong and five other North Vietnamese harbors. Yet, for reasons stated above, Nixon overrated linkage, and the tactic did not work. But as Kissinger said, “If in doubt, we bomb Cambodia.” Which they did.
As the authors note, Nixon had urged President Johnson in 1967 to extend the bombing throughout Indochina, into Cambodia and Laos. Johnson had studied these and other options but found too many liabilities. He had even studied the blockading of ports but concluded that Hanoi would compensate for a blockade in a relatively short time by utilizing overland routes and off-shore unloading.
But what Johnson did not factor in was the Nixon/Kissinger Madman Theory. For example, when a State Department representative brought up the overall military ineffectiveness of the Cambodian bombing, Kissinger replied, “That doesn’t bother me … we’ll hit something.” He also told an assistant, “Always keep them guessing.” The problem was, the “shock effect” ended up being as mythical as linkage.
In 1969, after the failure of the Vance mission, the mining ruse, the warnings to Dobrynin, and the continued bombing of Cambodia, which went on in secret for 14 months, Nixon still had not given up on his Madman Theory. He sent a message to Hanoi saying that if a resolution was not in the works by November, “he will regretfully find himself obliged to have recourse to measures of great consequence and force.”
What were these consequences? Nixon had wanted to mine Haiphong for a long time. But, as did Johnson, he was getting different opinions about its effectiveness. So he considered massive interdiction bombing of the north coupled with a blockade of Sihanoukville, the Cambodian port that was part of the Ho Chi Minh trail apparatus on the west coast of Cambodia.
Plus one other tactic: Kissinger suggested to his staff that the interdiction bombing use tactical nuclear weapons for overland passes near the Chinese border. But the use of tactical nukes would have created an even greater domestic disturbance than the Cambodian invasion had done. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird objected to the whole agenda. He said it would not be effective and it would create too much domestic strife.
Backing Up Threats
So Nixon and Kissinger decided on something short of the nuclear option. After all, Nixon had sent a veiled ultimatum to Hanoi about “great consequence and force.” They had to back it up. The two decided on a worldwide nuclear alert instead, a giant nuclear war exercise that would simulate actual military maneuvers in attempting to mimic what the U.S. would do if it were preparing for a nuclear strike.
As Burr and Kimball write, this was another outmoded vestige of 1950s Cold War thinking: “It was intended to signal Washington’s anger at Moscow’s support of North Vietnam and to jar the Soviet leaders into using their leverage to induce Hanoi to make diplomatic concessions.” (Burr and Kimball, Chapter 9)
It was designed to be detected by the Soviets, but not detectable at home. For instance, the DEFCON levels were not actually elevated. The alert went on for about three weeks, with all kinds of military maneuvers at sea and on land. Finally, Dobrynin called for a meeting. Kissinger was buoyant. Maybe the ploy had worked.
But it didn’t. The ambassador was angry and upset, but not about the alert. He said that while the Russians wanted to deal on nuclear weapons, Nixon was as obsessed with Vietnam as LBJ was. In other words, Dobrynin and the Soviets were perceptive about what was really happening. Nixon tried to salvage the meeting with talk about how keeping American fatalities low in Vietnam would aid détente, which further blew the cover off the nuclear alert.
Burr and Kimball show just how wedded the self-styled foreign policy mavens were to the Madman Theory. After the meeting, Nixon realized he had not done well in accordance with the whole nuclear alert, Madman idea. He asked Kissinger to bring back Dobrynin so they could play act the Madman idea better.
The authors then note that, although Haiphong was later mined, the mining was not effective, as Nixon had been warned. In other words, the Madman idea and linkage were both duds.
Nixon and Kissinger then turned to Laird’s plan, a Vietnamization program, a mix of U.S. troop withdrawals, turning more of the fighting over to the ARVN, and negotiations. The November 1969 Madman timetable was tossed aside and the long haul of gradual U.S. disengagement was being faced. Accordingly, Nixon and Kissinger started sending new messages to the north. And far from isolating Hanoi, both China and Russia served as messengers for these new ideas.
The White House told Dobrynin that after all American troops were out, Vietnam would no longer be America’s concern. In extension of this idea, America would not even mind if Vietnam was unified under Hanoi leadership.
Kissinger told the Chinese that America would not return after withdrawing. In his notebooks for his meeting with Zhou En Lai, Kissinger wrote, “We want a decent interval. You have our assurances.” (Burr and Kimball, Epilogue)
Timing the Departure
But when would the American troops depart? As Ken Hughes writes, Nixon at first wanted the final departure to be by December of 1971. But Kissinger talked him out of this. It was much safer politically to have the final withdrawal after the 1972 election. If Saigon fell after, it was too late to say Nixon’s policies were responsible. (Fatal Politics, p. 3)
Kissinger also impressed on Nixon the need not to announce a timetable in advance. Since all their previous schemes had failed, they had to have some leverage for the Paris peace talks.
But there was a problem. The exposure of the secret bombing of Cambodia began to put pressure on Congress to begin to cut off funding for those operations. Therefore, when Nixon also invaded Laos, this was done with ARVN troops. It did not go very well, but that did not matter to Nixon: “However Laos comes out, we have got to claim it was a success.” (Hughes, p. 14)
While there was little progress at the official negotiations, that too was irrelevant because Kissinger had arranged for so-called “secret talks” at a residential home in Paris. There was no headway at these talks until late May 1971. Prior to this, Nixon had insisted on withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops from South Vietnam.
But in May, Kissinger reversed himself on two issues. First, there would be no American residual force left behind. Second, there would be a cease-fire in place. That is, no withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops. As Kissinger said to Nixon, they would still be free to bomb the north, but “the only problem is to prevent the collapse in 1972.” (ibid, pgs. 27-28) The Decent Interval strategy was now the modus operandi.
And this strategy would serve Nixon’s reelection interests, too. As Kissinger told Nixon, “If we can, in October of ’72 go around the country saying we ended the war and the Democrats wanted to turn it over to the communists … then we’re in great shape.” To which Nixon replied, “I know exactly what we’re up to.” (ibid, p. 29) Since this was all done in secret, they could get away with a purely political ploy even though its resulted in the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians. All this was done to make sure Nixon was reelected and the Democrats looked like wimps.
Kissinger understood this linkage between the war’s illusionary success and politics. He reminded Nixon, “If Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam go down the drain in September of 1972, they they’ll say you went into those … you spoiled so many lives, just to wind up where you could have been in the first year.” (ibid, p. 30)
In fact, the President’s February 1972 trip to China was directly related to the slow progress on Vietnam. Kissinger said, “For every reason, we’ve got to have a diversion from Vietnam in this country for awhile.” To which Nixon replied, “That’s the point isn’t it?” (ibid, p.32)
A Decent Interval
In preparations for China, Kissinger told Zhou En Lai that Nixon needed an interval of a year or two after American departure for Saigon to fall. (ibid, p. 35) He told Zhou, “The outcome of my logic is that we are putting a time interval between the military outcome and the political outcome.” (ibid, p. 79)
But aware of this, Hanoi made one last push for victory with the Easter Offensive of 1972. Remarkably successful at first, air power managed to stall it and then push it back. During this giant air operation, Nixon returned to his Foster Dulles brinksmanship form, asking Kissinger, should we “take the dikes out now?”
Kissinger replied, “That will drown about 200,000 people.”
Nixon said, “Well no, no … I’d rather use a nuclear bomb. Have you got that ready?”
When Kissinger demurred by saying Nixon wouldn’t use it anyway, the President replied, “I just want you to think big Henry, for Christ’s sake.” (Burr and Kimball, Epilogue)
The American press took the wrong message from this. What it actually symbolized was that Saigon could not survive without massive American aid and firepower. (Hughes, p. 61) But even with this huge air campaign, the Pentagon figured that the north could keep up its war effort for at least two more years, even with interdiction bombing.
The political ramification of the renewed fighting was that it pushed the final settlement back in time, which Nixon saw as a political benefit, a tsunami for his reelection.
Nixon: “The advantage, Henry, of trying to settle now, even if you’re ten points ahead, is that that will ensure a hell of a landslide.”
Kissinger: “If we can get that done, then we can screw them after Election Day if necessary. And I think this could finish the destruction of McGovern” [the Democratic presidential nominee].
Nixon: “Oh yes, and the doves, which is just as important.”
The next day, Aug. 3, 1972, Kissinger returned to the theme: “So we’ve got to find some formula that holds the thing together a year or two, after which — after a year, Mr. President, Vietnam will be a backwater… no one will give a damn.” (Hughes, pgs. 84-85)
All of this history renders absurd the speeches of Ronald Reagan at the time: “President Nixon’s idealism is such that he believes the people of South Vietnam should have the opportunity to live under whatever form of government … they themselves choose.” (Hughes, p. 86) While Reagan was whistling in the dark, the Hanoi negotiator Le Duc Tho understood what was happening. He even said to Kissinger, “reunification will be decided upon after a suitable interval following the signing.”
Kissinger and Nixon even knew the whole election commission idea for reunification was a joke. Kissinger called it, “all baloney. … There’ll never be elections.” Nixon agreed by saying that the war will then resume, but “we’ll be gone.” (ibid, p. 88)
Thieu’s Complaint
The problem in October 1972 was not Hanoi; it was President Thieu. He understood that with 150,000 North Vietnamese regulars in the south, the writing was on the wall for his future. So Kissinger got reassurances from Hanoi that they would not use the Ho Chi Minh Trail after America left, though Kissinger and Nixon knew this was a lie. (ibid, p. 94)
When Thieu still balked, Nixon said he would sign the agreement unilaterally. How badly did Kissinger steamroll Thieu? When he brought him the final agreements to sign, Thieu noticed that they only referred to three countries being in Indochina: Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam. Kissinger tried to explain this away as a mistake. (Hughes, p. 118)
When Kissinger announced in October 1972 that peace was at hand, he understood this was false but it was political gold.
Nixon: “Of course, the point is, they think you’ve got peace. . . but that’s all right,. Let them think it.” (ibid, p. 132)
Nixon got Senators Barry Goldwater and John Stennis to debate cutting off aid for Saigon. This got Thieu to sign. (ibid, p. 158)
In January 1973, the agreement was formalized. It was all a sham. There was no lull in the fighting, there were no elections, and there was no halt in the supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. As the military knew, Saigon was no match for the Viet Cong and the regular army of North Vietnam. And Thieu did not buy the letters Nixon wrote him about resumed bombing if Hanoi violated the treaty.
But Nixon had one more trick up his sleeve, which he pulled out as an excuse for the defeat in his 1985 book, No More Vietnams. He wrote that Congress lost the “victory” he had won by gradually cutting off aid to Indochina beginning in 1973. (Nixon, p. 178)
It’s true that the Democratic caucuses did vote for this, but anyone can tell by looking at the numbers that Nixon could have sustained a veto if he tried. And, in fact, he had vetoed a bill to ban American bombing in Cambodia on June 27 with the House falling 35 votes short in the override attempt.
Rep. Gerald Ford, R-Michigan, rose and said, “If military action is required in Southeast Asia after August 15, 1973, … the President will ask congressional authority and will abide by the decision that is made by the House and Senate.”
The Democrats didn’t buy Ford’s assurance. So Ford called Nixon and returned to the podium to say Nixon had reaffirmed his pledge. With that, the borderline Republicans joined in a shut-off vote of 278-124. In the Senate the vote was 64-26. (Hughes, p. 165)
Having Congress take the lead meant that Nixon did not have to even think of revisiting Vietnam. He could claim he was stabbed in the back by Congress. As Hughes notes, it would have been better for Congress politically to double the funding requests just to show it was all for show.
As Hughes writes, this strategy of arranging a phony peace, which disguised an American defeat, was repeated in Iraq. President George W. Bush rejected troop withdrawals in 2007 and then launched “the surge,” which cost another 1,000 American lives but averted an outright military defeat on Bush’s watch. Bush then signed an agreement with his hand-picked Iraqi government, allowing American troops to remain in Iraq for three more years and passing the disaster on to President Barack Obama.
Hughes ends by writing that Nixon’s myth of a “victory” in Vietnam masks cowardice for political courage and replaces patriotism with opportunism. Nixon prolonged a lost war. He then faked a peace. And he then schemed to shift the blame onto Congress.
As long as that truth is masked, other presidents can play politics with the lives hundred of thousands of innocent civilians, and tens of thousands of American soldiers.
At Nixon’s 1994 funeral, Kissinger tried to commemorate their legacy by listing their foreign policy achievements. The first one he listed was a peace agreement in Vietnam. The last one was the airing of a human rights agenda that helped break apart the Soviet domination in Eastern Europe. These two books make those declarations not just specious, but a bit obscene.
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.
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