If you want to be really afraid, read Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, a prize-winning history of the CIA based heavily on recently declassified internal documents and hundreds of interviews with former and current agents, including most living directors and some dead ones (the author has been covering the intelligence beat for quite a while). Legacy is a tragic and depressing read, but a good read for any citizen. It’s what I would call a “managerial” or “administrative” history of the CIA in the sense that it floats mostly on the level of policy and general direction and doesn’t get deeply into the details of CIA operations. In some way that’s disappointing, but it’s an eye-opening overview of the CIA.

I always knew that the CIA’s “successes” had deeply damaged American security (I mean Iran, Iraq, Guatemala, Chile, Honduras, and so forth), but I never realized how many catastrophic and damaging failures there were that they managed to keep under wraps during the Cold War. Nor did I fully understand the structural reasons for the idiocy of overthrowing governments and installing dictatorships (i.e. it goes beyond Cold War ideology and to the fact that the CIA was incapable of producing any useful intelligence on the Soviets or the Chinese, who had much more disciplined spy agencies).

The Bay of Pigs is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s also Indonesia, abysmal intelligence on the Soviets and the Chinese (worse than worthless). Not to mention fact that the CIA inadvertently supplied much of the operating budget for the Italian communist party for over a decade!
The book gives little hope that the CIA has gotten better or even can as currently structured. Virtually every president has asked the CIA to operate illegally and spy on US citizens within the US in direct violation of its mandate.

That said, Nicholas Dujmovic has a very long review of Legacy of Ashes that calls into question many of Weiner’s basic assertions and has some compelling demonstrations of Weiner’s fast and loose style that mistrepresents facts and quite often simple gets them wrong. In other words, these errors concern not complex matters of interpretation where careful scholars might reasonably disagree, but simple, verifiable facts like what year the president made a given speech. Carelessness is one of the cardinals sins of a historian and Dujmovic’s corrections are constitute an important critique of Weiner’s work.

Dujmovic is a CIA historian and his review appears on the CIA site. Despite the obvious bias inherent in that position, I do think there is a difference between a historian and a journalist, no matter how serious the journalist is. The standard for proof and how far one is willing to go from the facts, and the level of immersion in the specialty are different. In general, this is what makes historians more accurate and more boring than journalists. Of course, there are good historians and bad, good journalists and bad, but historians write primarily for other historians, so the impulse is to get it right even at the cost of being complex, boring and perhaps difficult to follow. Journalist write for non-specialists readers, so the impulse is to make the story compelling and readable and have an interesting narrative arc. Often scrupulous adherence to the facts suffers.

Being only a casual reader here, I can only guess at who to believe, but when it comes to basic facts, I would bet on Dujmovic. When it comes to broader interpretation, though, it’s an open question that I don’t feel qualified to answer. And thought Dujmovic quibbles with Weiner’s facts and his blanket judgements, in between is what I think are the essential conclusions of the book:

• the CIA was generally poor at intelligence, especially human intelligence and that was not just a recent failing. It has always been true. The US was never able to get decent intelligence on what was happening within the Soviet Union or China. Dujmovic would add that the CIA was good at surveillance intelligence (satellites and spy planes).
• Presidents need good, ideologically neutral intelligence and need to act on it, but that has never happened either because of the CIA’s inability to provide it or because of the president’s unwillingness to accept it. I think both authors agree on that.
• The CIA has been a weak institution, adept at creating mayhem, but not at keeping operations secret, except from the American public. I think they more or less agree on that, but would put it in starkly different terms and lay the blame in very different places.
• covert ops have, overwhelmingly been damaging to the United States and have achieved little of value. Perhaps the one exception, the ultimate outcome of which remains debatable of course, is arming the Afghanis, which played a significant role in bankrupting the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War. Since neither the future of Russia nor Afghanistan has been worked out, we can’t really know the legacy of those operations. Clearly, the covert ops in Iran, Chile, Indonesia, Cuba, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador were deeply damaging both to the people of those nations and to the long-term interests of the US. Dujmovic would disagree, no doubt, but then that conclusion is as much a matter of philosophy and the long view versus short view as it is a matter of fact in any way.

When it gets down to more specifics, Dujmovic certainly gives me pause to question many of Weiner’s assertions and, me being in journalist mode, or even worse, “journaling mode” here, this is from memory… so caveat lector. But here are some of Weiner’s other assertions as I recall them:

• Until Nixon, every president says he’s opposed to the covert service and just wants intelligence, and then quickly becomes drunk on the power of overthrowing governments and throwing elections and they all behave pretty much the same. With Johnson, and then with Nixon, intelligence, however, becomes entirely subservient to politics, a trend that of course had tragic consequences during the Bush admin. Dujmovic has some quibbles about Weiner’s assertions that the CIA more or less conned presidents into covert ops, but that critique, I think, supports the idea that the presidents could not resist the thrill of covert ops.
• The US overthrew governments and controlled or attempted to control elections in more countries than you can count: Guatemala, Honduras, Iran, Iraq, Chile, all the ones you know about. But the US also controlled the elections in Italy for twenty years through cash infusions and propaganda. Johnson actually spent more per voter on the elections in Chile than he did on his own presidential campaign. I’m not sure how one can prove that the US controlled democratic elections, but certainly money has its influence.
• Through the 1960s, the CIA had few intelligence successes. They predicted that the Soviets were at least three years from an atomic weapon and probably more like seven. Within the week the Soviets exploded a nuclear warhead. They said that the Indonesian government would not respond militarily to the CIA coup attempt for at least six months. As they were giving that briefing to the president, the president received a cable saying that the Indonesian army, [b]with intelligence help from the US military who still regarded Indonesia as a valued ally[/b], had bombed the CIA proxy forces to smithereens. Dujmovic particularly takes issue with the idea that the CIA intelligence was worthless and notes that Weiner gets some of his basic facts wrong, like saying that a CIA report from 1960 grossly understimated the number fo Soviet ICBMs, when in fact the report was from 1957, projecting ICBM levels for 1961.
• The CIA was full of loose canons and for many years the head of covert ops did not even report to the head of the CIA, but straight to our beloved Attourney General Bobby Kennedy. Dujmovic takes issue with many of the claims here as well though not specifically with regard to Kennedy.
• After failing utterly to gather intelligence on the Soviets (fact partly disputed by Dujmovic), the CIA got its act together in SE Asia and started getting good, actionable intelligence. Unfortunately, what their intelligence said, as early as 1964, was that the war was not winnable and we should get out. This was completely unacceptable to the hawks in the Kennedy and Johnson admins (Bobby, MacNamara, Bundy, all those). At one point, the CIA estimated there were at least 500,000 VC in South Viet Nam and probably more. The response from the White House and the Pentagon was that number was unacceptable and needed to be below 400,000 or the entire hiearchy of the CIA would be on the chopping block. The report was rewritten to say that there were only 399,000 VC in SVN.
  With Nixon it just gets worse and intelligence is put to political purposes to a degree previously unseen, at least in Weiner’s account.
• And Dujmovic essentially agrees with the tragic account of US intelligence in the Clinton and Bush years, that we all know too well.
• And then there’s the legendary incompetence and bumbling of the CIA (and Dujmovic would say that Weiner exaggerates). For decades, the covert ops service sent agents into Eastern Europe, North Korea and China with money and guns to organize local cells. Every one was rounded up and executed. During the 1950s, Kim Philby was passing coordinates of the drops to the Soviets. They rounded up these hapless “commandos”, had them radio back reporting a successful rendez-vous with the partisans, then executed them and took the gold bars and sent them to the Italian Communist Party. For over a decade, most of the funding for the ICP came from CIA gold.

One thing Weiner’s book brought home and Dujmovic’s review did little to dissuade was the feeling that Bobby Kennedy was an evil man. Of course, we know that he got his political start as a lawyer for HUAC hunting communists with another young, ambitious attourney, Richard M. Nixon. Bobby was also, of course, a foot dragger and obstructionist on civil rights issues who got religion on that issue late as well. Now, from Weiner’s book, one can see Bobby really coming into his own as Attourney General when he gets into his elbows with running covert ops, knocking off foreign leaders, throwing elections and generally usurping the power of the Director of Central Intelligence. I don’t know what was in JFK’s mind regarding Viet Nam, but I think this thing about how great the world would have been if John had lived or Bobby had gotten elected is a canard and the one thing the CIA got right is that we didn’t belong in Viet Nam and we weren’t going to win.

Meanwhile, every president ordered the CIA to conduct missions that were illegal by the terms of the CIA charter – spying domestically on peace activists, black civil rights leaders and so on. All the files on the CIA secret drug programs tested on Americans were destroyed because Helms felt that if released they would destroy the agency. Secret prisons and torture have always been a part of the CIA.

Anyway, as I said at the outset, and I am little dissuaded by Dujmovic’s critique, I always knew the “successes” of the CIA had had tragic consequences for the world, but I had never realized that their failures had done so much damage. And finally, I never realized that when they finally did have some intelligence successes, as in Viet Nam, it made no difference because the politicians didn’t want to get out.

At least there’s the Democrats right? Now we have Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, essentially the real current leader of the Democratic Party. Now we learn that here she is attacking the Bush administration for torture while back in 2002 she was briefed in detail on the torture techniques used by the CIA. According to the Washington Post report, an administration official who was present at the briefings said:

“In fairness, the environment was different then because we were closer to Sept. 11 and people were still in a panic,” said one U.S. official present during the early briefings. “But there was no objecting, no hand-wringing. The attitude was, ‘We don’t care what you do to those guys as long as you get the information you need to protect the American people.’ “

Fairness? Screw that! Like I said in the opening sentence, I do not care how close we were to September 11. I said earlier that I would not vote for Hillary Clinton because of her failure of moral courage on the Iraq vote. Now I feel like Nancy Pelosi and everyone who is tainted with anything like seeing torture briefings and not speaking out, voting to give Bush unlimited authority to use military force or any other action that makes them complicit in the debacle of the last seven years should just be kicked out of office.

This was brought to mind last week when Fresh Air replayed an interview with the televangelist D. James Kennedy on the occasion of his death. Asked the question of whether a judge who believes abortion is wrong should decide based on the law or based on his conscience, he invoked a simple analogy. He said that in Nazi Germany, Jews were denied all rights, including eventually the right to live, so there was no law against killing a Jew. Thus, a judge who threw out a murder case against someone who killed a Jew, or a million Jews, would be acting entirely within the law. By the principles of the Nuremberg court, however, the killer would be guilty of crimes against humanity and a judge who pushed, promoted and actively abetted these killings by his activities in his court might also be guilty depending on his actual actions and degree of complicity. According to the Nuremberg court, it was not just those who gave the orders or those who carried them out, but also those in between who greased the wheels who could be guilty of crimes against humanity. Furthermore, the fact that a crime is not punishable by internal law does not, according to Principle II, exempt a person from international law. The definition of crimes against humanity used in Nuremberg included "Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts". They don’t specifically mention torture, but mass torture would not doubt constitute a crime against humanity (which does, by the way, have a connotation of scale that could not be realized through a single act against a single individual).

Now, let’s imagine that all the laws concerning crimes against humanity were applied not just to men in Germany and Serbia, but also to, well, Americans. This is totally abstract, though, right? Not exactly. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales and others worked hard to make torture possible. There is the nasty little matter of "aggressive" interrogation techniques like waterboarding which would, almost undoubtedly, meet the test as torture in almost any context except the fanatic milieu of the Bush administration. In the initial “torture memos” out of the White House Office of Legal Counsel, they defined torture as limited to something that caused major internal bleeding or organ failure and damage like that. This was an absurdity caused because the statutes against torture prohibit causing great pain, but failed to define pain. So they looked to totally unrelated and irrelevant statutes governing medical care which said that organ failure can cause great pain. This was absurd and allowed many practices that any reasonable court would find to be torture, as Gonzales successor found when reviewing the legal underpinnings of administration actions.

But let’s say they get away with torture actually committed by Americans (and they have and they will). There is also the dirty little matter of “renditions” where the US has turned over at least 150 foreign nationals, often in the absence of any damning evidence, to foreign governments known to practice torture during interrogations (Jordan, Syria, Egypt). Extraordinary rendition violates the UN Convention Against Torture which the US finally signed in 1992 after much hand-wringing and foot-dragging for fear of exactly this situation: that US officials would be culpable under the terms of the treaty (and justifiably so, it would appear, in light of recent events). In addition to the UN Convention Against Torture and the basic principles laid out by the Nuremberg trials, it turns out that one can also try to stop these practices through the Alien Tort Statute, passed by Congress in 1789 in order to guarantee foreign nationals access to the US court system. This, then is a long-standing protection in in international law and in US Statute, both clearly violated by the Bush administration and their helpers (is that me? I paid taxes).

Still think this is just abstract? The American Civil Liberties Union has recently brought suit against Jeppesen Dataplan, the company that aids and abets the CIA by providing flights for renditions and whose unfortunate motto in light of these accusations is: "Making Every Mission Possible". Apparently that includes CIA torture flights, flights that apparently the CIA did not think that more closely-watched institutions like the Air Force could make possible. The ACLU are presenting a case on behalf of a handful of unhappy Jeppesen passengers. These are people such as Abou Elkassim Britel, an Italian who was bound and blindfolded and flown from Pakistan to Morocco and held and tortured for eight months without being allowed to contact anyone. He has permanent damage to his left eye and other body parts and was never even charged with anything. Upon release, he was arrested by the Moroccans and sentenced to six years in prison. Binyam Mohamed was blindfolded, shackled and repeatedly had his head beaten against a wall until he bled. He was beaten to the point that several bones were broken. They put small cuts on his genitals and then poured stinging liquid over them. He is now held without charge at Guantanamo. So the ACLU is brigning suit against those who transported these victims at the behest of the CIA.

Is there precedent for trying people who organize transportation that contributes to crimes under international law? Well, yes, there is. Adolph Eichmann, Nazi transportation minister for Jewish affairs was treated to his own extraordinary rendition in 1962. Discovered in Argentina, the Israeli Mossad kidnapped Eichmann, drugged him, and smuggled him out of Argentina and off to Israel. There Eichmann was tried and exectued. There were some protests in the UN for the violation of Argentinian sovereignty, but more or less the incident was allowed to pass.

You might balk at equating Jeppesen Dataplan with the Nazi minister of transportation for Jewish affairs, but I would say it’s just a question is one of scale. Yes, scale does matter, but it reminds me of the joke where a man turns to a woman at a bar and asks if she would have sex with a stranger for ten million dollars.
“Sure, she says.”
“Well, then, will you have sex with me for $100?”
“Certainly not! Do you think I’m a whore?” she replied indignantly.
“My dear lady,” the man replies, “we’ve already established that you’re a whore. Now we’re just haggling over price.”

Is it necessary to say that it makes no difference whether or not these people are guilty or plotting terrorism or not? As John McCain said so brilliantly when criticizing the Bush administration for promoting torture, “This is not about who they are. This is about who we are.” The goal should not be first and foremost to protect our country, but first and foremost to have a country worth protecting. A country and government that does not protect civil liberties, engages in torture, approves torture at the highest levels, and has willing corporations who, for a few dollars, are willing to engage in crimes against humanity is, I’m sorry to say, not worth protecting. The country that government represents may be worth protecting, but not the government. As Mark Twain said: Loyalty to your country always. Loyalty to your government when it deserves it.

Is there a meaningful difference between a government that, at the highest levels, approves torturing a few hundred people and a government that, at the highest levels, approves torturing a few million people? On just that one criterion, I don’ think so. That isn’t to say that I think there is no difference between Eichmann and Jeppesen, no difference between the US and Nazi Germany. That would be an obscene trivialization of Nazi crimes and a gross exaggeration of the Bush administration crimes. And for a long time, that gap made me oppose impeachement and criminal prosecution Bush officials, but in pondering the Kennedy interview and thinking over Eichmann and Nuremberg, I’ve changed my mind. I now feel that if we have a country worth protecting, we need to prove it by holding people at the highest levels accountable for their crimes against humanity.

I’m reading the somewhat disappointing book Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America 1789-1989 by Michael Beschloss. I’ll have to do a complete review, but in brief, the disappointing part is that in most episodes, I get to the end and think “Oh, it’s over.” Somehow it reads a bit like a core dump and the storytelling could be much more compelling. That said, there are interesting tidbits here and there, such as a brief discussion (a couple of sentences) regarding the Ludlow Amendment, which would have dramatically changed the way the US went to war.

In brief, the Ludlow Amendment was a constitutional amendment introduced several times between 1935 and 1940 by Louis Ludlow, a Democrat from Indiana. He proposed that the constitution be amended to say that the neither the president nor the Congress be allowed to take the United States to war. Rather, for the US to go to war, the government would have to hold a referendum and get a majority vote. There was a provision for our elected leaders to take us to war if we were directly “attacked” (in the Democratic version, “invaded” in the Progressive version). Public support for such an amendment was high, running at 75% in 1935. It was endorsed by such radical outlets as Good Housekeeping magazine.

The “attack” provision meant that the amendment ultimately would not have come into play in WWII or perhaps even in Vietnam (despite the fact that the Gulf of Tonkin attacks were entirely fabricated, they probably would have been used to circumvent the amendment). Korea would have been a more difficult proposition. The war in Afghanistan would of course have been justified by virtue of the September 11 attacks.

There are, of course, obvious problems with such a process for entering war. Namely, the jingoism and idiocy of large portions of the population makes it possible for demagogues to manoeuvre a nation into war by manipulating public opinion. Given the widespread support for going to war with Iraq, perhaps the Ludlow Amendment would have made no difference. Perhaps we would be going to war all over the place. But I do wonder whether the act of voting would make people more thoughtful and would have required a more judicious investigation of the intelligence. Perhaps that’s unrealistic, especially in a nation of brain-dead rednecks driving around with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks (as we recently noticed while driving from coast to coast).

In addition, in the current climate, for the Ludlow Amendment to have a hope of being useful, the United States would need to return to a non-volunteer, conscripted military. When Ross Perot was campaigning during the Gulf War, he asked every assembly of businessmen he spoke to whether or not they had any children serving in the Gulf. In speaking to thousands and thousands of businesspeople over several months, he saw only two hands go up. In short, wealthy and educated businesspeople in America simply no longer have children who are likely to be risking their lives when our country goes to war.

Meanwhile, in 1940, when Roosevelt was preparing for war and Ludlow was still trying to make it more difficult for him to do so, Joseph Kennedy, father of the future president, was ambassador to Great Britain. Kennedy opposed going to war because even as an ambassador, he feared for the lives of his three eldest sons, Joe, Jack and Bobby, all of whom were or soon would be eligible to serve and who could not be shielded by privilege (Bobby was only 15 in 1940). Of course, Joe Kennedy, the eldest brother, did die in the war. John came very close when his PT boat was sunk.

In absence of a universal draft, we effectively end up with a mercenary army that is easy to send to war since the wealthy and powerful have no personal stake in the war. The difference between a universal draft on the one hand and either a draft with many exceptions or no draft at all on the other is neatly illustrated by the two George Bushes: the wealthy and privileged father who was shot down and almost died in combat in the Pacific, and the wealthy and privileged son who used a combination of deferements and special treatments to get into the National Guard and then not even show up for duty. If we had a universal draft, I wonder how many Senators with draft age children or grandchildren would have blindly voted to approve the administration’s military adventurism in Iraq.

Then there is another way in which the volunteer army makes it easier to go to way. Personally, I was in the first cohort of males in the post-draft era who were required to register for a draft and it looked like Reagan might well push to reinstitute the draft and send us to war in Central America. When it became clear, though, that Reagan would rattle his swords without ever requiring a draft, it also became clear that the venues for protest were much more limited and the impetus to do so was too. Whereas I could have protested the Vietnam War simply by refusing to report, no such option exists in the world of an all volunteer army.

For those who don’t know much about the work of Machiavelli beyond the name, Machiavelli is usually associated with despotic politics of The Prince but in fact he was a staunch republican (that is a believer in republics rather than, for example, monarchies), much better represented by the Discourses of his earlier life before trying to suck up to the Medici. In the Discourses, Machiavelli speaks of the risks of depending on a mercenary army. Namely, the non-citizen army does not have a vested interest in preserving the republic, because it’s ultimately not their country. We currently have the reverse situation: the non-military citizenry has no vested interest in preserving the lives of soldiers, because most people in most places don’t actually have family or close friends who are put in harm’s way. That’s bad for the cause of peace, but if we remain a country that invades countries at the drop of the hat, with a mercenary army, one can well imagine that after a century of that activity, the republic itself will be in danger as the military sees itself increasingly as separate from the citizenry and, more to the point, as the less-privileged who give their lives for the more-privileged. No society can survive forever if those who wield the raw power of firearms are so separate from those who wield the abstract power of, politics, economy and finance. One can well imagine that after enough disastrous Iraq wars, the military might decide that in order to save itself, it needs to overthrow George Bush. And as much as I would rather have seen President Powell rather than President Bush, I really don’t want to see generals work their way into the White House in a coup d’etat.

Of course, like the Ludlow Amendment, there are lots of problems with a universal draft. It makes for an extremely expensive, inefficient and poorly trained army, as the Swiss have discovered. Constant referenda on all sorts of topics can also lead to a bit of democracy burnout, where people get resentful of voting all the time as, again, the Swiss can attest. That said, it is worth remembering that when the Swiss armies were largely mercenary units built of local citizens, it was one of the most warlike countries in the world, incurring huge losses by sending its citizens into foreign wars. Now, as a nation with constant referenda, a constitution that prevents it from going to war unless attacked, and an army that requires every male to serve, they have not exactly become an interventionist country. And yes, I realize that the situations are not comparable and that conclusion is absurd, but then so is the reality we are dealing with right now.

Was Appeasement Bad in 1938?

Rumsfeld takes it as axiomatic that it was a mistake to appease Hitler in 1938 when he retook the Sudentland for Germany. However, the situation was relatively complex. Britain had suffered incredible losses in World War I, both in blood and treasure. The Great War had drained the British treasury and Winston Churchill himself had cut military spending dramatically through the 1920s, which meant the the British weren’t really armed and ready to go toe to toe with the Germans. Only a year passed before the Allies declared war and within the year after that, the disasterous performance of the French and British underscores that they were not ready to go to war in 1938. True, in 1938 the Germans were still limited in their buildup by terms of the Treaty of Versailles, but one can’t forget that though the Germans used the intervening time to rearm, so did the British and it isn’t clear that an earlier strike against the Germans would have gone any better.
From a political perspective, it was clear that the Treaty of Versailles was unfair to the Germans. President Wilson had forseen that it would lead to a future war, but could not stop the French from foisting it on the Germans. So it was not entirely unreasonable to think that the Germans were within their rights to try to redress the inequity of the treaty and that they might stop there. In other words, Chamberlain wasn’t completely delusional, but reasonably believed that it was better to give a tyrant an inch to avert a war and to leave war as a last resort. Not a bad lesson for Rumsfeld and Bush.
Furthermore, psychologically, the British were still recovering from the Great War and had a deep aversion to going to war except in absolute necessity. Americans had developed this healthy perspective in the wake of Vietnam, but unfortunately that mentality waned in the face of the smashing success of the first war against Iraq. Unfortunately, the debacle in Somalia did little to brace Americans to the reality of war.
So in short, Chamberlain could see that war with Germany was no slam-dunk in terms of military capability, political will and foreign policy. He preferred to wait until war was unavoidable before spending British blood and treasure on a gamble (war is always a gamble). The idea that much blood and treasure could have been saved by going to war with Germany in 1938, that is to say declaring war just one year earlier, would have changed anything is purely hypothetical. Furthermore, it is based on certain knowledge that appeasement did not work, and that knowledge was of course unavailable to British diplomats of the period. All in all, I would much prefer to be ruled by Chamberlain than by Bush.

When Appeasement Works

Churchill and Roosevelt are often seen as the opponents of appeasement, the strong leaders as opposed to the weak Chamberlain. They were, however, practical men who chose to appease Stalin at the Yalta conference and essentially tell him that they would let him take the Baltics and other regions into the Soviet orbit and we would do nothing to oppose him. Certainly Stalin was no less cruel, tyrannical and dangerous than Hitler. He had visions of world domination, hoped to overthrow the US and UK, and mercilessly starved millions of “his own people” (as they always say about Saddam poisoning the Kurds) to death on purpose. These were undoubtedly the most deadly intentional famines in history. The famines under Mao were larger, but it seems that Mao’s advisors hid from him the extent of the problem until it was too late. In other words, Mao was essentially delusional, whereas Stalin instituted famine as policy to get rid of the “reactionary” elements in his society at the cost of millions of death. Ultimately, Stalin also killed as many people in the Gulags as Hitler killed in the death camps (actually, twice as many by Solzhenitsyn’s reckoning in The Gulag Archipelago if I remember correctly; by the way, Gulag is still a great read and an important book for all free people, though I would recommend the abridged edition).
So was it a mistake to appease Stalin? Should we have gone straight from WWII into an invasion of the Soviet Union, though the greatest armies of the modern world had destroyed themselves and bled their countries dry on the Russian plains? It seems to me that Churchill and Roosevelt made the right call there, a call to appease a tyrant in hopes that the tyranny would eventually crumble under its own corruption. We could make a long list of successful appeasement. Should we have attacked Mao? I don’t think so. In fact, “detente” and opening relations with China were great successes. If Nixon had not been a complete paranoiac and power monger himself, he would probably be remembered primarily for his great statesmanship that laid the groundwork for winning the Cold War without going to full-scale total nuclear or conventional war. What about Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Pik Botha, Pinochet, why didn’t we overthrow them? Well, of course in the last case it’s because we put him in power and in the second to last case a segregated America couldn’t really go to war on that issue… but I digress. The point is that tyrants eventually fall under their own weight. Isolating them diplomatically and economically (which eventually worked in South Africa), in short appeasement, has in fact typically been more successful than pre-emptive strikes.

So let’s take the lessons that history offers, but please quit make universal axioms from one tired old canard.

Dear Representative Radanovich,

I recently read an article in the New York Times entitled “The Cost of Doing Your Duty.” The article details how

“Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift was assigned to represent Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni citizen accused of being a high-ranking member of Al Qaeda — for the sole purpose of getting him to plead guilty before one of the military commissions that President Bush created for Guantánamo Bay. Instead of carrying out this morally repugnant task, Commander Swift concluded that the commissions were unconstitutional. He did his duty and defended his client.”

Lt. Cmdr. Swift has been denied promotion which means that in the Navy’s “up or out” system, he will be forced to retire (according to the article anyway). As established since the Nuremberg trials, the first duty of all soldiers is to obey the constitution, law and their moral conscience rather than blindly doing their duty when asked to do something that is wrong and unconstitutional.

Based on the information I have, Swift is a true American hero, a soldier who took the hard road of doing the right thing in the service of his country and, like the New York Times, I wonder whether he is being punished for doing something that was right, but unpopular.

I would hope that someone in your office could investigate Lt. Cmdr. Swift’s situation and verify that he was fairly treated and that he was not denied promotion as a means of retribution.

Sincerely,

Thomas A. Lambert.

Write to your representative at Congress.org

This made big headlines – “600,000 civilians have died in violence across Iraq since the 2003 American invasion,” 56% of them from gunshots. There is a wide range in the estimate (from 426,369 to 793,663 with 600,000 simply being near the middle of the range).

The mortality rate before the American invasion was about 5.5 people per 1,000 per year, the study found. That rate rose to 19.8 deaths per 1,000 people in the year ending in June.

Well, at least they’re free, right? Full article

American Mercenaries

The Army met its recruiting goals this year. How? More recruiters and bonuses of $40,000 to those willing to drive convoys (full article). As citizens, we have to ask whether it is moral to allow our military to recruit this way. In the Civil War, the wealthy could essentially pay their way out of service and it seems we’ve come to that again. There’s no doubt in my mind that if we once again instituted a draft and compelled everyone to serve, it would be much much more difficult for our leaders to force us into war. Currently, most Americans are simply too complacent about watching our hired mercenaries go off to battle, “because it’s their job”. As Machiavelli argues in his republican “Discourses” (before his authoritarian “Prince” which was out of character for him), a citizen-militia is the bulwark of democracy and nothing threatens it more than a large standing army of mercenaries.

The Cost of War, Chapter II

In human tragedy: Already 400,000 American soldiers may end up claiming disability benefits even if the war ended tomorrow.
In dollars: recipients will be eligible for anywhere from a few hundred to over $1,000 per month. Taking $500 per month as an average, that’s $2.4 billion per year in expenses that don’t go away after the war is over. Furthermore, that does not include lost productivity (1 in 10 are 100% disabled). Full article

Soldier Sentenced to Three Months for Going AWOL

Sgt Ricky Clousing, a born-again Christian who went to Iraq to serve God and his country, was sentenced to three months in prison for failing to show up for duty. After what he say in Iraq, Clousing said he could not longer in good conscience serve. Clousing

said he saw American soldiers shoot and kill an unarmed Iraqi teenager, and rode in an Army Humvee that sideswiped Iraqi cars and shot an old man’s sheep for fun — both incidents Sergeant Clousing reported to superiors. He said his work as an interrogator led him to conclude that the occupation was creating a cycle of anti-American resentment and violence.

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The president proposed that in place of the vague language of the Decalogue, that US forces be bound by a new code that would spell out exactly which acts constituted coveting thy neighbor’s wife and killing. “Just because a few thousand people end up dead, does that mean they were killed?” asked the president. He proposed language that would make it clear that US forces acting on command of a superior officier in a combat situation would not be in transgression of the Ten Commandments. Similarly, soldiers and presidents who copped a look at the cute butt of another man’s wife would not necessarily be in violation of the Decalogue. Asked specifically about oral sex, the president replied “See, now that’s why we need this spelled out. We think that oral sex with another man’s wife would be covered under the the ‘thou shalt not covet’ rule, but the previous administration had a different interpretation of that particular rule.”

In the summer of 1959 there occurred a series of events which demonstrated our national ignorance in a shameful and nearly fatal manner. Briefly, the United States threatened intervention in a foreign country for reasons which, it turned out, had no basis in fact… Our Secretary of State called the situation grave; our ambassador to the U.N. called for world action; our press carried scare headlines; our senior naval officer implied armed intervention and was seconded by ranking Congressmen, including the Chairman of the National Committee of the Republican Party, which was then in power (p. 12-13)…. In the eyes of the world, the United States looked very foolish at best, and very dangerous at worst (p. 28)…. We have thrown away our good will and political strength by an ignorance which led to false confidence and corruption. We have clumsily alienated potential supporters by neglecting them for a few “pets” and have repelled others by maladroitness (p. 30).

Those are excerpts from William Lederer’s 1961 account of how the United States almost went to war in Laos in 1959, which he took to be “an omen with the most frightening implications.” His book, A Nation of Sheep (only $0.47 from Amazon at last check and well worth it), was intended to be a call to action, a warning to the American people so that such foolishness would not result in war. Of course, it has on at least two occasions now: 1) Vietnam, which went to full-scale US involvement because of faked “intelligence” about the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident and 2) the WMD fiasco in Iraq. It’s frightening to read Sheep and realize that in most cases, if the dates and countries were changed, it could have been written today.

Lederer details how the US ignorance of foreign affairs and foreign languages was playing into the hands of the communists in Vietnam and playing against us in Taiwan. For example, he notes that the US educational exchange programs usually only targeted those students with a decent command of English and typically only the privileged sons of the powerful who used their crony connections to get scholarships for their children. Furthermore, we doled out scholarships as a means to reward loyalty. Meanwhile, the communists offered a full scholarship to the top student from every village in Vietnam, regardless of language skills (Russian or Chinese) and party affiliation. These students, not surprisingly, often returned to their villages as ardent communists and thus it was that we lost the battle for the hearts and minds. That, of course, was unknown to Lederer in 1961 and rather than predict that it would happen, he suggested how it could be stopped. Nobody listened and, in case you weren’t paying attention, we lost that war.

The book is about Southeast Asia rather than the Middle East, about communists rather than Islamic fundamentalists, political schools rather than madrasas, about the 1950s rather than the 2000s, but there would not be much real difference in the message if it were written today. He details how Americans threw away our good money and good will for little return in nations we didn’t bother to understand. Sure, in retrospect our industrial resources allowed us to spend the Soviets into the ground and win the Cold War, but Lederer shows how poorly that money was spent and how much more effective we could have been had we bothered to send diplomats and journalists who actually knew the local language rahter than ones that had to depend utterly on translators who often fed them a line of bull, as just one example.

Lederer then outlines how our government uses misinformation and secrecy to keep information from citizens. At that time, he warned that the cult of secrecy was growing and that one out of every 180 Americans had the ability to classify information as secret. Frequently this was done, as it is today, for the most specious of reasons, often simply to protect politicians and bureaucrats. For example, Lederer discovered that “pictures of plush furnishings inside military transport planes, requested by Rep. Daniel J. Flood, were stamped ‘secret’ and then even the Congressman’s letter of request was stamped ‘secret’”. In other words, the secret was that taxpayer money was being misspent.

Not even guessing at where we would be today with an army of press secretaries and lobbyists and fewer and fewer resources for investigative journalism, Lederer noted that there were twice as many government public relations men as there were journalists in Washington. “Officials try by selective information releases to have us accept what they believe is proper; as if fearing the decisions we might make on our own if we had all of the truth.”

On the leading edge in his time, Lederer feared then, as most thinking people fear now, that the cult of secrecy and the spin in Washington is killing democracy. The American government seems to fear its own people, which is a hallmark of a failing democracy. It has gotten worse. Recall that the Clinton administration gave the order to declassify as much material as possible and not to classify materials unnecessarily. One of Bush’s first actions was to rescind that order. Of course, it is a matter of degree and there was still far too much spin and secrecy under Clinton, but at least things were headed in the right direction. Lederer envisions a future which could save democracy in America (and I’m not exaggerating, Lederer believed that the cult of secrecy and government by press release was edging us toward totalitarianism).

The President should assume that his fellow countrymen are tough-minded and patriotic. We will not become timorous or demoralized if told the truth about our blunders, failures and defeats. Quite the contrary, we will respond with strength and intelligence. But first we must have the truth.

Lederer is not, of course, suggesting that truly sensitive strategic of purely personal information be released to the public, but merely that the people should be kept informed rather than having to wait for the scandalous photos to appear on the internet, smuggled out by some insider, before the government fesses up to what happened.

All of this is rather old hat at this point. What Lederer showed to a Nation of Sheep in 1961 has become commonplace knowledge among thinking people (but what percentage is that?). The troubling aspect is that 45 years on, we still appear to be a Nation of Sheep, led into conflicts we don’t understand for reasons that turn out to have been false. Maybe it’s time to look at Lederer’s advice seriously:

• Badger your Senators and Representatives and make sure that they understand that you don’t think secrecy for secrecy’s sake is okay.
• Badger the same and perhaps local university officials to build scholarhips programs that include English-language instruction and target promising kids from lost villages throughout the Middle East. True, some will fail and some will stay here, but some will return and the overall cost will be cheaper than sending standing armies over there, not to mention that fewer people get killed.
• Demand that our diplomats speak the local language. No more ambassadorships handed out as political favors. When ambassadors come up for confirmation, if they don’t speak the local language, (or at least one local language) write your politicians and tell them to block the nomination, simple as that!

No, that’s not a quote from The Ranter’s close friends Dubya or Rummy. That’s from David Maraniss’ book They Marched Into Sunlight (Simon & Schuster, 2003). Maraniss follows two parallel stories, that of a battle in Vietnam and that of a student protest in Madison, Wisconsin. The two stories converge on October 19, 1967, when they appear side by side on the front page of the paper. For Maraniss, that was the beginning of the real slide in public opinion in favor of the war. Why bring this up now? Because the administration’s assessment of the situation in Vietnam in 1967 appears chillingly like the current administration’s assessment of Iraq today.

A few quick quotes from the book speak volumes.

We are losing support in this country. The people just do not understand the war.

   — Lyndon Johnson (p. 187).

[The embassy has developed a plan to] demonstrate to the press and the public that we are making solid progress and are not in a stalemate… [T]he enemy is losing control of the people for his side. His recruitment has dropped off sharply…

   — Eugene Locke, deputy ambassador to South Vietnam (p. 187).

If we don’t stop them in Vietnam, we are going to be fighting them in the streets of Lodi [a town near Madison].

   — Bob Hope (p. 315).

We should shoot them if necessary. I would. I would. Because it’s insurrection.

   — WI Senator Leland McParland regarding student protesters (p. 397).

In October 1967, General Westmoreland, President Johnson and the hawks in the administration still believed not only that the war was winnable, but that we were actually winning. Westmoreland felt that if he just had more troops, he could turn the tide. His strategy was one of attrition: if he could kill enemy soldiers faster than the enemy could replace them, he woudl eventually win. Westmoreland demonstrated that victory was at hand with the most specious of statistics. In the book’s main battle, the Americans get ambushed and kill 22 to 25 enemy soldiers. Westmoreland and Hay, general of the First Division, insist despite all evidence that there was no ambush and that the enemy lost 103 men. Not only was this not born out by the men in the field or the military investigator sent in to do the followup to the battle, Maraniss also managed to track down two of the commanders from the other side, who confirm that Westmoreland’s analysis and body count were tragically wrong.

In fact, the drop off in enemy activity was due to reasons that Westmoreland could not even suspect: they were gathering strength for the major Tet offensive. The only reason that the North Vietnamese did not stay put to wipe out the entire US battalion, was that they were being counted on for another battle and were in a hurry to get to their appointed rendez-vous. The vicious battle that caught up Delta Company and the Black Lions was just a shape of things to come.

Meanwhile, back on the home front, students in Madison had decided that 1967 was the year to get serious about stopping the war. Dick and Lynne Cheney, though they were on campus, were not among the protesters, but Dick was happy to stay in grad school on military deferment while he supported sending other young men off to fight, which seems to be a deeply ingrained MO for Cheney. In 1967, the protests in Madison transitioned from peaceful to violent, setting the campus on the trajectory that would end in the bombing of the Army Math Research Center which killed a grad student working there.

I don’t believe that history repeats itself, so there are only so many lessons one can take from Vietnam, but the clear one from Maraniss is that the generals on the ground and the president in the White House can be foolishly optimistic about their war effort.

This is, by the way, a fun read. Maraniss does a great job of introducing you to the cast of characters and getting you attached to men you know will die (or go on to be mayor of Madison, as the case may be). At times the book drags and feels like it was written by a historian, rather than a journalist, but the “action scenes” (the battle in Vietnam and the battle in the Commerce building) are gripping and well worth the read.