Tag Archives: Vietnam

Vietnam Déjà Vu, by Eric Margolis

Posted on September 30, 2017 | 1 comment

PBS’s Vietnam series doesn’t look very closely or critically at the US government’s motives there, according to Vietnam veteran Eric Margolis. From Margolis at lewrockwell.com:

Much of America, including yours truly, has been watching the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) series, ‘Vietnam.’  Instead of clarifying that confusing conflict, the series has ignited fiery controversy and a lot of long-repressed anger by soft-soaping Washington’s motives.

This march to folly in Vietnam is particularly painful for me since I enlisted in the US army at the height of the war.  Gripped by youthful patriotism, I strongly supported the war.  In fact, the TV series even showed a pro-war march down New York’s Fifth Avenue that I had joined.  Talk about déjà vu.

At the time, 1967, the Cold War was at full force.  We really believed that if the US did not make a stand in Vietnam the Soviets and Chinese would overrun all of South Asia.

No one in Washington seemed to know that China and the Soviet Union had split and become bitter enemies.  As ever, our foreign human intelligence was lousy. We didn’t understand that Vietnam deserved independence after a century of French colonialism.  Or that what happened in Vietnam was of little importance to the rest of the world.

Three American presidents blundered into this war or prolonged it, then could not back out lest they lose face and risk humiliation.  I don’t for a moment believe that the ‘saintly’ President John Kennedy planned to end the war but was assassinated by dark, rightwing forces, as is claimed.  This is a charming legend.  Richard Nixon, Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson all feared that a withdrawal from Vietnam would lose them the next election.   Republicans were still snarling over ‘who lost China’.

The current 17-year old US war in Afghanistan has uncanny resemblances to the Vietnam War.  In Kabul and Saigon, the US installed puppet governments that command no loyalty except from minority groups. They were steeped in drugs and corruption, and kept in power by intensive use of American air power.   As in Vietnam, the US military and civilian effort in Afghanistan is led by a toxic mixture of deep ignorance and imperial arrogance.

To continue reading: Vietnam Déjà Vu

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Yes Congress, Afghanistan is Your Vietnam, by Andrew J. Bacevich

Posted on August 14, 2017 | Leave a comment

Fortunately, there are a lot fewer dead in Afghanistan, among both the US military and the native population, than in Vietnam. That is the only positive thing you can say about the US’s engagement in Afghanistan. From Andrew J. Bacevich at theamericanconservative.com:

Does any member have the courage and vision to take responsibility?

20th Century “Angel of Mercy.” D. R. Howe (Glencoe, MN) treats the wounds of Private First Class D. A. Crum (New Brighton, PA), “H” Company, 2nd Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, during Operation Hue City, Vietnam, 1968. (Public Domain/USMC)

Just shy of fifty years ago on November 7, 1967, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by J. William Fulbright, Democrat of Arkansas, met in executive session to assess the progress of the ongoing Vietnam War. Secretary of State Dean Rusk was the sole witness invited to testify. Even today, the transcript of Rusk’s remarks and the subsequent exchange with committee members make for depressing reading.

Responding to questions that ranged from plaintive to hostile, Rusk gave no ground.  The Johnson administration was more than willing to end the war, he insisted; the North Vietnamese government was refusing to do so. The blame lay with Hanoi. Therefore the United States had no alternative but to persist. American credibility was on the line.

By extension, so too was the entire strategy of deterring Communist aggression. The stakes in South Vietnam extended well beyond the fate of that one country, as senators well knew. In that regard, Rusk reminded members of the committee, the Congress had “performed its function…when the key decisions were made”—an allusion to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution,  a de facto declaration of war passed with near unanimous congressional support. None too subtly, Rusk was letting members of the committee know that the war was theirs as much as it was the administration’s.

Yet Fulbright and his colleagues showed little inclination to accept ownership. As a result, the back-and-forth between Rusk and his interrogators produced little of value. Rather than illuminating the problem of a war gone badly awry and identifying potential solutions, the event became an exercise in venting frustration. This exchange initiated by Senator Frank Lausche, Democrat from Ohio, captures the overall tone of the proceedings.

Senator Lausche:  “The debate about what our course in Vietnam should be has now been in progress since the Tonkin Bay resolution. When was that, August 1964?

Senator Wayne Morse (D-Ore.):  “Long before that.”

Senator Albert Gore, Sr. (D-Tenn.):  “Long before that.”

Senator Fulbright:  “Oh, yes, but that was the Tonkin Bay.”

Senator Lausche:  “For three years we have been arguing it, arguing for what purpose? Has it been to repeal the Tonkin Bay resolution? Has it been to establish justification for pulling out? In the three years, how many times has the Secretary appeared before us?

To continue reading: Yes Congress, Afghanistan is Your Vietnam 

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Anticipating the Forthcoming PBS Documentary, ‘The Vietnam War’, by Camillo Mac Bica

Posted on July 20, 2017 | Leave a comment

Famed documentarian Ken Burns and Lynn Novick have created a 10-part documentary on Vietnam. Camillo Mac Bica is hoping it document the reality of Vietnam, not simply regurgitate the propaganda, but early indications are not good. From Bica at antiwar.com:

Much has been written and many documentaries made about the American War in Vietnam including the highly acclaimed 1983 effort by PBS, Vietnam: A Television History. Though not without its shortcomings, this 13-part documentary series was well crafted, meticulously researched, carefully balanced and thought-provoking.

In September 2017, PBS will air the highly anticipated – seemingly touted as the definitive documentary – about the Vietnam War, directed by respected documentarians Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. The goal of this 10-episode, 18-hour project is, according to the directors, to “create a film everyone could embrace” and to provide the viewer with information and insights that are “new and revelatory.” Just as importantly, they intend the film to provide the impetus and parameters for a much needed national conversation about this controversial and divisive period in American history.

The film will be accompanied by an unprecedented outreach and public engagement program, providing opportunities for communities to participate in a national conversation about what happened during the Vietnam War, what went wrong and what lessons are to be learned. In addition, there will be a robust interactive website and an educational initiative designed to engage teachers and students in multiple platforms.

In an interview and discussion of the documentary on Detroit Public TV,Burns describes what he hopes to accomplish as a filmmaker, “Our job is to tell a good story.” In response and in praise of Burns’ work, the interviewer offers his view of documentary. “The story that filmmakers like yourself, the story that storytellers create, are the framework that allows us to understand the truth because the truth is too unfathomable to take in all at once.” To which Burns quickly adds, “And there are many truths.”

My hope is that Burns and Novick, in “creating their story” of the Vietnam War, will demonstrate the same commitment to truth and objectivity as did their PBS predecessor. That they will resist the urge and the more than subtle pressure from what many historians and veterans see as a Government sponsored effort to sanitize and mythologize the US involvement in this tragic war, as illustrated in President Barack Obama’s proclamationestablishing March 29 as Vietnam Veterans Day.

To continue reading: Anticipating the Forthcoming PBS Documentary, ‘The Vietnam War’

 

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The Phoenix Template, Part One, by Robert Gore

Posted on March 29, 2017 | 19 comments

The American police state has been a work in progress for seventy years.

Part One of two parts.

Click for Part Two

Most Americans don’t pay much attention to what the government does in foreign nations, and even less attention to what it has done in the past. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this focus on the here-and-now, but contemplation beyond the usual horizons is well-advised. Not for the usual high-minded reasons offered by multiculturalist do-gooders, but because what the government—and those who pull its strings—have done in foreign lands for the past seventy years is their template for what they plan here at home.

The group that led the US through World War II was determined to preserve, perpetuate, and extend its global dominance. With the establishment of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), centralized, coordinated intelligence had come into its own. After the war President Truman dissolved the OSS, but signed the National Security Act of 1947, which established the CIA. With a secret executive order in 1952, he also established the NSA. Although the agencies were sold to Truman as necessary instruments for gathering and analyzing foreign intelligence, rather than operational assignments, they soon were engaging in both domestic and foreign operations. In 1963, a month after President Kennedy’s assassination, former president Truman’s letter to the Washington Post deplored what the CIA had become.

For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.

Later, Truman told biographer Merle Miller that setting up the CIA was “a mistake.”

Truman did not mention what the CIA’s disturbing operational and policy-making roles had been, or in what “explosive areas.” The CIA had sponsored coups in Syria (1949), Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Congo (1960), the Dominican Republic (1960), and attempted coups in Indonesia (1958) and Cuba (1961, the Bay of Pigs). While the phrase “regime change” didn’t seep into the popular consciousness until the US’s second Iraq invasion in 2003, it had been standard CIA policy for over five decades. To the limited extent its involvements were acknowledged in the 1950s and 1960s, they were generally characterized as necessary efforts in the struggle against global communism.

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What has never been acknowledged is what would have been—if the CIA was involved—a domestic coup, President Kennedy’s assassination. The assassination and its aftermath illustrate the psychological obstacles among the public for those attempting to uncover and expose the intelligence community’s misdeeds. Notwithstanding gaping holes in the official story, and obvious questions about the motives of Lyndon Johnson and Alan Dulles, the former director of the CIA who had been fired by Kennedy and stage-managed the Warren Commission investigation, most Americans bought the story and asked no questions. For the few that did, the CIA coined the pejorative, “conspiracy theorist.”

The CIA has a chilling catalogue of countermeasures against the US government’s enemies, most developed during the Vietnam War. The heart of the CIA effort was Operation Phoenix, begun in 1965. Phoenix was designed, coordinated, and executed by the agency jointly with the US military and its intelligence units, the South Vietnamese military and its secret police, and Australian special operations forces. Its mission was to neutralize the infrastructure of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF or Viet Cong) through infiltration, capture, counter-terrorism, interrogation, and assassination.

Identification of NLF cadres was problematic. Anyone with a score to settle could misidentify enemies as Viet Cong, who would then be captured or killed by US and South Vietnamese troops. Prisoners were taken to interrogation centers, indefinitely detained, tortured, and sometimes murdered. The interrogations were supposedly done by the South Vietnamese under the supervision of the military or CIA, but the torture was an open secret and often performed by US personnel. Prisoners were converted to the South Vietnamese cause and reinserted into the local population or turned into double agents. They had to produce intelligence about the NLF: their families, friends, and hamlets were essentially hostages securing their performance. Prisoners who produced no information or false information under torture were murdered. Undoubtedly some had no “worthwhile” information to give because they weren’t NLF, but innocence was not a recognized defense.

Phoenix terrorized both the North and South Vietnamese. It was essentially a CIA and US military-imposed police state (with the South Vietnamese government as a junior partner) employing standard police-state tactics: surveillance, informants, propaganda, repression, rubber-stamp judicial supervision, indefinite detention, interrogation, torture, and murder. Like all police states, Phoenix was rife with corruption. South Vietnamese officials, CIA agents and contractors, and US military officials made fortunes from blackmail, extortion, bribery, theft, murder-for-hire, black market arms sales, money laundering, drug running, and other illicit endeavors.

During the war the CIA maintained its usual shroud of plausible deniability, helped by the captive US media, which in many cases had been infiltrated by CIA operatives under the auspices of Operation Mockingbird. Many of Phoenix’s more sordid aspects were not revealed until after the US left Vietnam, and while nobody claims Phoenix wasn’t dirty (even an anodyne Wikipedia article acknowledges the misdeeds), the extent of the dirtiness remains—as so much of what the CIA does—murky. However, a string of CIA engagements after Vietnam retroactively confirmed the nefarious nature of Phoenix—the program was the template for that later criminality.

It should have raised eyebrows when Ronald Reagan nominated a former director of the CIA, George H.W. Bush, as his vice president, but it didn’t. The evolving Deep State saw Bush, and other “vetted” members of Reagan’s administration, as checks on some of Reagan’s more “radical” impulses and initiatives. CIA operatives had been involved in Watergate. Congressional committees had revealed CIA skullduggery in Vietnam, involvement in political assassination, and illegal domestic surveillance of the war’s critics by many of the intelligence agencies and the FBI. Yet most Americans still held a generally benign view of the intelligence complex.

The Iran-Contra affair should have been a wake-up call. The scandal’s many disturbing skeins and offshoots—the CIA’s subversion of governments and sponsorship of political assassination in Latin America, involvement in the drug trade and money laundering through a shadowy network of financial institutions, and covert weapons transactions—cried out for further investigation, which would have revealed a Phoenix program gone global. Instead, Reagan’s popularity and his begrudging acceptance of responsibility, the administration’s stonewalling of investigations and refusal to release documents on national security grounds, and George W. Bush’s pardons in the final days of his presidency for Reagan administration officials still under indictment managed to shove Iran-Contra down the American memory hole. Reagan and Bush served the Deep State well.

Next: Phoenix in the United States

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The Day Zero Hedge Goes Dark, by Robert Gore

Posted on September 20, 2016 | 16 comments
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The mainstream media’s (MSM) coverage of Hillary Clinton’s medical travails offers yet another instance of its blatant bias, and its distortion and outright suppression of the news. The roots of the captive MSM stretch back to the 1940s, which helps explain the waning prospects for dissemination of the truth in 2016.

Veracity is the first casualty of war. During World War II, the government openly co-opted the media, including Hollywood, as propaganda organs. Radio and television stations and networks had to obtain permission from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to operate. They toed the government’s World War II line. A few newspapers and individual journalists, notably H.L. Mencken and John T. Flynn, challenged it, but Roosevelt pretense of being against US involvement in the war, Pearl Harbor’s vulnerability, the alliance with Joseph Stalin, who was at least as bloodthirsty and tyrannical as Hitler, massive fire bombing of civilian populations in Germany and Japan, and the decision to deploy the atomic bomb should have raised far more questions than they did.

Without missing a beat the government transferred its World War II rationales for “managing” the news and media to the Cold War. The key figure of the era was Allen Dulles, the Director of the CIA from 1953 until 1961. In 1977, Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, detailed the CIA’s relationship with the press in the 1950s and 1960s in a lengthy expose for The Rolling Stone. Dulles instituted a partnership, Operation Mockingbird, between the agency and the media. The agency would supply journalists with information and access to situations that would have been otherwise inaccessible in exchange for on-the-ground intelligence and the occasional performance of agency requests. Implicit in the arrangement: journalists would hew to the CIA line.

A veritable who’s who of the media elite embraced the arrangement. Per Bernstein: “By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.” No questions were asked in the bland reports that the duly elected leaders of Iran and Guatemala had been deposed, CIA-orchestrated operations. Nor were they asked in the early days of Vietnam, as the CIA set up shop in Saigon and the press worried about falling dominoes in Southeast Asia.

Some of the agency’s screw-ups were too big to whitewash. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, President Kennedy asked Dulles for his resignation. Dulles’ subsequent membership on the Warren Commission, where he stage-managed the investigation to its preordained conclusion, raised eyebrows. However, the raised-eyebrow set were disparaged as “conspiracy theorists,” a term invented by the CIA to discredit anyone questioning the official version of anything.

The Vietnam War was too extensive and lengthy to hide. As the years rolled on and the body count mounted, questions were asked. Journalists had remarkable latitude to roam, often accompanying military units to battle zones. They saw fighting first-hand and talked directly to the fighters. Their stories were a sharp contrast to the military’s bland briefings in Saigon. That Vietnam was, at best, a hopeless quagmire and probably a lost cause was a bottom-up realization; the soldiers and the in-the-field press covering them knew it long before the brass and its house-broken reporters. Publication of The Pentagon Papers in 1971 marked the media’s finest hour in Vietnam. Its revelations of duplicity reinforced America’s mood; by then all it wanted from Vietnam was a graceful exit.

After a ten-year hiatus dating from the end of the Cold War in 1991, the US establishment acquired a new enemy. Despite the pyrotechnics of 9/11, the terrorists presented orders of magnitude less of a threat than the Axis powers in World War II or the Soviet Union during the Cold War. However, a war on a tactic—terrorism—can be waged anywhere and against anybody the government chooses. It can and apparently will go on forever; victory in such a conflict being impossible to define, much less achieve. All this was obvious before the US ventured into Afghanistan and Iraq, but few in the media questioned the conceptual basis of those forays.

Judging by restrictions on civil liberties embedded in the Patriot Act, subsequent legislation, and judicial interpretations, rag-tag terrorists whose main weapons are stolen artillery and firearms, improvised explosive devices, and blowing themselves up pose a greater threat than the US’s World War II and Cold War foes. A measure of how captive the MSM has become: it labeled Edward Snowden a traitor for exposing the government’s Orwellian surveillance in the name of “fighting terrorism.” Snowden should have been hailed. Such surveillance makes a free press impossible; if it cannot shield its secrets from the government it cannot operate.

For the press and freedom of press to mean anything, the media must be outside the government, looking in. Currently, that characterization only applies to the independent segments of the media, mostly the Internet, that takes a reflexively adversarial stance towards the powers that be, including the MSM. Call it the alternative media. What it lacks in the docile MSM’s cherished “access” it more than makes up for in pugnacity.

The Drudge Report made a name for itself publicizing Bill Clinton scandals the MSM ignored. It is the most powerful and widely viewed alternative site. Zero Hedge, like the Drudge Report, aggregates news, analysis, and commentary from a variety of sources, but it also features its own analyses and comments (Zero Hedges has reposted Straight Line Logic articles). Financially oriented, Zero Hedge made its bones during the last crisis, which it saw coming well before it arrived. Its commentary and stories since on the government and Federal Reserve’s responses—the bailouts, stimulus, and quantitative easing—have been scathing.

These two sites are the vanguard of the alternative media: hundreds, perhaps thousands, of sites worldwide that probe virtually every idiocy and prevarication emanating not just from governments and central banks, but large corporations, academia, militaries, intelligence services, and the MSM itself. The alternative media has little capacity to generate original news coverage (although leaks, hacking, and videos have been invaluable), but publicly available material is virtually inexhaustible. It has become a giant thorn in the side of what it variously calls the establishment, the powers that be, the deep state, the Empire, globalists, or the new world order. Although not all in the alternative media support Donald Trump, they are united in their contempt for Hillary Clinton. Their relentless skepticism, disclosures, and editorializing have been bastions for the Trump campaign. It’s probably not an overstatement to say that campaign wouldn’t be where it is without the alternative media.

The established order recognizes the threat. Hillary Clinton’s recent speeches condemning the alt-right and the “basket of deplorables,” and President Obama’s comments Monday about unspecified blogs “churning out a lot of misinformation” confirm the apprehension. The alt-right is part of the alternative media and takes a politically incorrect perspective on the mainstream’s racial, ethnic, sexual, and gender catechism. As such, it makes the easiest target, however, it is not the establishment’s real target. Obama gave up the game with the word “misinformation.” He’s not worried about misinformation—if he were Obamacare never would have become law—he’s worried about correct information, also known as the truth.

The alternative press shatters the cozy arrangement midwifed by Allen Dulles’ between the government and the MSM. The biggest threat to powers that be is always the truth. Just as they will steal everything you’ve got (see “You Will Be Poor”), they will suppress the truth. The alternative media has gone from success to success, but if Trump is elected, it will probably mark an apotheosis. The establishment will neither forgive nor forget, and sooner or later the alternative media will train its sights on Trump himself. It’s hard to believe that he won’t give it reason to do so—power does corrupt—especially for that segment of the alternative media with a more libertarian perspective.

Alternative media hubris is an unaffordable luxury. The counterattack is coming—take Hillary and Barack’s word for it—and the alternative media is extraordinarily vulnerable. It can be silenced by someone pulling the plug on the Internet or parts thereof. Like a “Funds Inaccessible” message on our bank accounts, a “Site Not Available” message may well greet us one morning when we try to pull up Zero Hedge . The rationale could be “deplorable” racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, or Islamophobia, or peddling what has been officially deemed “misinformation,” but make no mistake, the truth that emerges from the alternative media poses a grave threat to those who would rule us, and they know it.

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Is Scarborough Shoal Worth a War? by Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted on May 24, 2016 | 1 comment

Does the US really want to go to war with China over some rocks in the South China Sea at the behest of a communist regime in Vietnam and a nut job in the Philippines? Choose wisely. From Patrick Buchanan at buchanan.org:

If China begins to reclaim and militarize Scarborough Shoal, says Philippines President Benigno S. Aquino III, America must fight.

Should we back down, says Aquino, the United States will lose “its moral ascendancy, and also the confidence of one of its allies.”

And what is Scarborough Shoal?

A cluster of rocks and reefs, 123 miles west of Subic Bay, that sits astride the passageway out of the South China Sea into the Pacific, and is well within Manila’s 200-mile exclusive economic zone.

Beijing and Manila both claim Scarborough Shoal. But, in June 2013, Chinese ships swarmed and chased off a fleet of Filipino fishing boats and naval vessels. The Filipinos never came back.

And now that China has converted Fiery Cross Reef and Mischief Reef into artificial islands with docks and air bases, Beijing seems about to do the same with Scarborough Shoal.

“Scarborough is a red line,” says Gregory Poling of the Center for Strategic and International studies. To allow China to occupy and militarize the reef “would clearly change the balance of power.”

Really? But before concluding that we must fight to keep China from turning Scarborough Shoal into an island base, there are other considerations.

High among them is that the incoming president of the Philippines, starting June 30, is Rodrigo Duterte, no admirer of America, and a populist authoritarian thug who, as Mayor of Davao, presided over the extrajudicial killing of some 1,000 criminals during the 1990s.

Duterte, who has charged Aquino with treason for abandoning Scarborough Shoal, once offered to set aside his country’s claim in exchange for a Chinese-built railroad, then said he might take a jet ski to the reef to assert Manila’s rights, plant a flag and let himself be executed to become a national hero.

In a clash with China, this character would be our ally.

Indeed, the rise of Duterte is yet another argument that, when Manila booted us out of Subic Bay at the Cold War’s end, we should have dissolved our mutual security pact.

This June, an international arbitration tribunal in The Hague will rule on Manila’s claims and China’s transgressions on reefs that may not belong to her. Beijing has indicated she will not accept any such decision.

So, the fat is in the fire. And as the Chinese are adamant about their claims to the Spratly and Paracel Islands and virtually all the atolls, rocks and reefs in the South China Sea, and are reinforcing their claims by creating artificial islands and bases, the U.S. and China are headed for a collision.

U.S. warships and reconnaissance planes passing near these islets have been repeatedly harassed by Chinese warplanes.

Vietnam, too, has a quarrel with China over the Paracels, which is why President Obama is being feted in Hanoi and why he lifted the ban on arms sales. There is now talk of the Navy’s return to Cam Ranh Bay.

But before we agree to support the claims of Manila and Hanoi against China’s claims, and agree to use U.S. air and naval power if needed, we need to ask some hard questions.

To continue reading: Is Scarborough Shoal Worth a War?

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War, Football, and Realism: If Any, by Fred Reed

Posted on April 15, 2016 | Leave a comment

War is not a football game. From Fred Reed, an excellent article via theburningplatform.com:

War may be thought of in two ways. First, as a football game between armies, in which the function of the citizenry is to cheer for the home team. In football, success is measured in points scored, yardage gained, brilliance of play, and time of possession. In war as football, it is battles won, enemies killed, territory conquered. The crucial goal is to defeat the other side’s armed forces. Doing so constitutes victory.

To one who sees war in this wary, as militaries invariably do, America will always come out ahead on points since we fight only countries hopelessly inferior in military terms. In Vietnam, Laos, Iraq, and Afghanistan the US killed vastly more people than it suffered dead, won almost all battles by overwhelming material superiority, and easily captured any territory it chose.

By this reasoning, it can be argued that America won in Vietnam. When the GIs pulled out, the South was a functioning country by the standards of the Third World. The Viet Cong were still blowing up bridges, but Saigon was repairing them. The VC had no chance of conquering the country unaided. America had won.

One may also view war otherwise, as an element in a struggle in which one country seeks to make another country do something it wants. Victory consists in accomplishing this. In Vietnam, America–or, important distinction, the US government–wanted to prevent South Vietnam from falling to the Communists. The North wanted the US to go away so that it could conquer the South. The US went, and the North conquered. It got what it wanted. The North won, QED.

From the footballer’s point of view, the United States won in Iraq. It killed huge numbers of people while losing few, destroyed whole cities, and never lost a battle. Yet it got none of the things it wanted: a puppet government, permanent large military bases, and the oil. A dead loss. If anybody won, they were Israel and Iran. In Afghanistan, America as usual devastated the country and killed hugely and with impunity, thus winning the football game–but accomplished nothing.

To those who see war as football, the principal target is the enemy’s military. To those who see war as a means of making the other side do something, the aim is to destroy the enemy’s will to fight. This includes the will of the enemy’s population.

In Vietnam, the North knew it had no chance of decisively defeating American forces. It might, however, drag the war on and on, and on, and on, steadily inflicting casualties, until the enemy’s will to fight collapsed. In the North, this was a deliberate strategy. To win in the sense of making the US do what it wanted, it didn’t have to win militarily. It just had to keep from losing–and inflict casualties, and casualties, and casualties. It suffered many more dead than it inflicted, but it had the will to keep fighting. And inflict casualties. And casualties.

There were about sixty kids in my graduating class at King George High School , Virginia, in 1964. Doug Grey died with a 12.7 round through the head. Studley Franklin, paraplegic. Ricky Reed, face full of shrapnel and severe eye damage. Chip Thompson, neck wounds. At least two others, whom I won’t name, became severe alcoholics. Many others went. Everyone knew all of these kids.

The military, with its football mindset, expects the public to rally round the flag and support the wars. As the antiwar rallies grew and became huge, and kids fled to Canada and sought deferments and hid in the Navy, the military felt betrayed. To this day many veterans remain bitter at what they see as treason, cowardice, lack of patriotism. They were fighting and dying, seeing friends bleeding to death, choking on their own blood, burned alive in flaming Amtracs–and college kids were smoking dope and getting laid and chanting “Hell no, we won’t got.” The vets were, and are, embittered. They won, they believe, but the hippies and lefties stabbed them in the back.

And this was what the North Vietnamese counted on. They couldn’t bomb American cities, as America was bombing theirs, but they could keep the body bags flowing. Two hundred dead a week was a modest figure, with others mutilated, and they came back to towns and cities in bags or wheel chairs. Many of them told friends, “Don’t go. It’s godawful. It’s pointless. Don’t go.” It added up. It was a Cold Warrior’s war, and a high-school kid’s fight.

To continue reading: War, Football, and Realism: If Any

See also “Much More Than Trump,” SLL

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The Peace Movement’s War Story, by Ira Chernus and Tom Englehardt

Posted on February 3, 2016 | Leave a comment

Ira Chernus has some lessons from the successful opposition to the Vietnam War that can used by those of us who oppose the US’s Middle East and Northern Africa forays. From Chernus, with an introduction by Tom Englehardt, at tomdispatch.com:

Who even remembers the moment in mid-February 2003, almost 13 years ago, when millions of people across this country and the planet turned out in an antiwar moment unique in history? It was aimed at stopping a conflict that had yet to begin. Those demonstrators, myself included, were trying to put pressure on the administration of George W. Bush not to do what its top officials so visibly, desperately wanted to do: invade Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, garrison it for decades to come, and turn that country into an American gas station. None of us were seers. We didn’t fully grasp what that invasion would set off, nor did we imagine a future terror caliphate in Iraq and Syria, but we did know that, if it was launched, some set of disasters was guaranteed; we knew beyond a doubt that this would not end well.

We had an analysis of the disaster to come and you could glimpse it on the handmade signs we carried to those vast demonstrations (some of which I recorded at the time): “Remember when presidents were smart and bombs were dumb?”; “Contain Saddam — and Bush”; “Use our might to persuade, not invade”; “How did USA’s oil get under Iraq’s sand?”; “Pre-emptive war is terrorism”; “We don’t buy it, liberate Florida”; and so on. We felt in our bones that it was no business of Washington’s to decide what Iraq should be by force of arms and that American imperial desires in the Greater Middle East were suspect indeed. And we turned out to make that point so impressively that, on the front page of the New York Times, journalist Patrick Tyler referred to us as the planet’s second superpower. (“The fracturing of the Western alliance over Iraq and the huge antiwar demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.”)

Of course, this vast upsurge of global opposition would prove to be right on the mark, while all the brilliant policymakers and pundits in Washington who beat the drums loudly for war were desperately wrong. And yet the invasion did happen and, in its disastrous wake, we, not they, were wiped out of history. None of us would be consulted when the retrospectives began. No one would want to hear from those who had been right about the invasion (only officials and “experts” who had been dismally wrong). In the process that pre-war movement of ours would essentially be erased from history.

Mind you, we knew that, whatever we did, George W. Bush was bound and determined to invade Iraq. As I put it that February, “I’m not a total fool. I know — as I’ve long been writing in these dispatches — that this administration is hell-bent for a war. The build-up in the Gulf during these days of demonstrations has been unceasing. I still expect that war to come, and soon. Nonetheless, I find myself amazed by the variegated mass of humanity that turned out yesterday… The world has actually spoken and largely in words of its own. It has issued a warning to our leaders, which, given the history of ‘the people’ and the countless demonstrations of the people’s many (sometimes frightening) powers from 1776 on, is to be ignored at the administration’s peril.”

On that, unfortunately, I was wrong. We were indeed ignored and it didn’t prove to be “at the administration’s peril” (not in the normal sense anyway). The large-scale antiwar movement barely made it into the war years. There were a couple of massive demonstrations still to come, but as time went on, as things got worse, as the situation in Iraq devolved and those millions of demonstrators were proven to have been unbearably on the right side of history, the antiwar movement itself essentially disappeared, except for scattered veterans’ groups and heroic protesters like the members of Code Pink.

At a time when Americans should have been in the streets saying hell no, we better not go, the Bush administration and then the Obama administration were repeating the same militarized mistakes endlessly, while turning the Greater Middle East into a charnel house of failure. Today, as Pentagon officials prepare for their next set of forays, interventions, drone assassination campaigns, and special ops raids in, among other places, Libya — and what could possibly go wrong there? — next to no one is pressuring or opposing them, next to nothing is in their way. As a result, TomDispatch regular Ira Chernus’s latest post on what’s missing from the missing antiwar movement in America couldn’t be more timely. Tom

America’s New Vietnam in the Middle East
A Civil War Story About the Islamic State Might Spark a Peace Movement
By Ira Chernus

It was half a century ago, but I still remember it vividly. “We have to help South Vietnam,” I explained. “It’s a sovereign nation being invaded by another nation, North Vietnam.”

“No, no,” my friend protested. “There’s just one Vietnam, from north to south, divided artificially. It’s a civil war. And we have no business getting involved. We’re just making things worse for everyone.”

At the time, I hadn’t heard anyone describe the Vietnam War that way. Looking back, I see it as my first lesson in a basic truth of political life — that politics is always a contest between competing narratives. Accept a different story and you’re going to see the issue differently, which might leave you open to supporting a very different policy. Those who control the narrative, that is, are likely to control what’s done, which is why governments so regularly muster their resources — call it propaganda or call it something else — to keep that story in their possession.

To continue reading: The Peace Movement’s War Story

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Tourists of Empire America’s Peculiar Brand of Global Imperialism, by William Astore

Posted on October 28, 2015 | Leave a comment

The US comes, sees, stays a long time, tries to conquer, doesn’t do so, and gets out. From William Astore  at TomDispatch via antiwar.com:

The United States is a peculiar sort of empire. As a start, Americans have been in what might be called imperial denial since the Spanish-American War of 1898, if not before. Empire – us? We denied its existence even while our soldiers were administering “water cures” (aka waterboarding) to recalcitrant Filipinos more than a century ago. Heck, we even told ourselves we were liberating those same Filipinos, which leads to a second point: the U.S. not only denies its imperial ambitions, but shrouds them in a curiously American brand of Christianized liberation theology. In it, American troops are never seen as conquerors or oppressors, always as liberators and freedom-bringers, or at least helpers and trainers. There’s just enough substance to this myth (World War II and the Marshall Plan, for example) to hide uglier imperial realities.

Denying that we’re an empire while cloaking its ugly side in missionary-speak are two enduring aspects of the American brand of imperialism, and there’s a third as well, even if it’s seldom noted. As the U.S. military garrisons the planet and its special operations forces alone visit more than 140 countries a year, American troops have effectively become the imperial equivalent of globetrotting tourists. Overloaded with technical gear and gadgets (deadly weapons, intrusive sensors), largely ignorant of foreign cultures, they arrive eager to help and spoiling for action, but never (individually) staying long. Think of them as the twenty-first-century version of the ugly American of Vietnam-era fame.

The ugliest of Americans these days may no longer be the meddling CIA operative of yesteryear; “he” may not even be human but a “made in America” drone. Think of such drones as especially unwelcome American tourists, cruising the exotic and picturesque backlands of the planet loaded with cameras and weaponry, ready to intervene in deadly ways in matters its operators, possibly thousands of miles away, don’t fully understand. Like normal flesh-and-blood tourists, the drone “sees” the local terrain, “senses” local activity, “detects” patterns among the inhabitants that appear threatening, and then blasts away. The drone and its operators, of course, don’t live in the land or grasp the nuances of local life, just as real tourists don’t. They are literally above it all, detached from it all, and even as they kill, often wrongfully, they’re winging their way back home to safety.

Imperial Tourism Syndrome

Call it Imperial Tourist Syndrome, a bizarre American affliction that creates its own self-sustaining dynamic. To a local, it might look something like this: U.S. forces come to your country, shoot some stuff up (liberation!), take some selfies, and then, if you’re lucky, leave (at least for a while). If you’re unlucky, they overstay their “welcome,” surge around a bit and generate chaos until, sooner or later (in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, much, much later), they exit, not always gracefully (witness Saigon 1975 or Iraq 2011).

And here’s the weirdest thing about this distinctly American version of the imperial: a persistent short-time mentality seems only to feed its opposite, wars that persist without end. In those wars, many of the country’s heavily armed imperial tourists find themselves sent back again and again for one abbreviated tour of duty after another, until it seems less like an adventure and more like a jail sentence.

The paradox of short-timers prosecuting such long-term wars is irresolvable because, as has been repeatedly demonstrated in the twenty-first century, those wars can’t be won. Military experts criticize the Obama administration for lacking an overall strategy, whether in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, or elsewhere. They miss the point. Imperial tourists don’t have a strategy: they have an itinerary. If it’s Tuesday, this must be Yemen; if it’s Wednesday, Libya; if it’s Thursday, Iraq.

To continue reading: Tourists of Empire

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He Said That? 5/30/15

Posted on May 30, 2015 | Leave a comment

There have been doubts about US hubris, about the idea that smart Americans with Ivy League degrees can manage not just the US, but the entire world, since even before Vietnam served as comeuppance, but did not, regrettably, occasion repentance.  From The Best And The Brightest, David Halberstam’s history of Vietnam:

It would not be the last time Riesman [Harvard sociologist David Riesman] was prophetic: In 1961, when the Kennedy team was already on board and there was great enthusiasm over the new theories of counterinsurgency…and Vietnam had been chosen as a testing ground, Riesman remained uneasy. In mid-1961, he had lunch with two of the more distinguished social scientists in the Kennedy government. On the subject of Vietnam the others talked about limited war with the combativeness which marked that particular era, about the possibilities of it, about the American right to practice it, about the very excitement of participating in it. All of this smacked strongly of the arrogance and hubris of the era, and Riesman became more and more upset with the tone and the direction of the conversation, until finally he stopped them and asked if they had ever been to Utah. Utah! No, they said, not Utah, but why Utah, had Riesman ever been there? No, Riesman answered, but he had read a great deal about the Church of the Latter-day Saints, and it occurred to him that his friends did not know much about America, about how deep the evangelical streak was. “You all think you can manage limited wars and that you’re dealing with an elite society which is just waiting for your leadership. It’s not that way at all,” he said. “It’s not an Eastern elite society run for Harvard and the Council on Foreign Relations.”

He left them after lunch, uneasy about the direction the country was taking. He had made a hobby of studying the American Civil War and he had always been disturbed by the passions which it had unleashed in the country, the tensions and angers just below the surface, the thin fabric of the society which held it all together, so easy to rend. They were, he thought, provincials. Brilliant Atlantic provincials.

Nothing has changed.

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