|
CounterPunch
January
6, 2003
Ellsberg's "Secrets"
and Bush's War:
An Intersecting History
by BERNARD WEINER
American politicians have a vested interest in
carrying out their true agendas away from public scrutiny. Only
on rare occasions do we ordinary citizens get a glimpse of how
things really operate -- the Army-McCarthy hearings in the '50s,
the Watergate investigation in the '70s, Iran/Contra in the '80s,
and so on -- and then the curtain snaps shut.
Two best-selling books -- one published
in mid-2002, the other just recently released -- take us believably
into that mysterious world, because both are written by former
highly-placed insiders, who know how the game was played, where
the bodies were buried, and who did what to whom. The first was
David Brock's "Blinded by the Right," an account of
how this character-assassin-for-hire became the rightwing's journalistic
hatchetman, smearing Anita Hill and Bill Clinton, among others,
before coming to his senses and telling the world what he knew
of the actual rightwing forces that employed him for so long.
The current best-seller is Daniel Ellsberg's
"Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers."
It should be required reading for anyone interested in what really
goes on behind the scenes of the American political stage. Ellsberg,
formerly a high-ranking analyst for the State and Defense Departments
and an independent consultant with the Rand Corporation, focuses
almost exclusively on the Vietnam War/Watergate era decades ago,
but what he reveals, alas, is just as relevant to our current
Constitutional/war crises.
Ellsberg became a hero to many when he
leaked the so-called "Pentagon Papers" to the New York
Times in 1971 -- the secret history of the Vietnam War that was
prepared for the Secretary of Defense but withheld from Congress
and the American people.
What Ellsberg learned from first-hand
experience (he was a Marine company commander in Vietnam, and
visited that country often as a civilian consultant later), and
as a result of researching and diving into the Pentagon Papers
history, was mind-blowing for him. As it should be for us as
well.
Since the late-1940, the conventional
wisdom had been that the U.S. drifted into the war in Vietnam
following the French colonial period, and that American Presidents
were given bad information by their advisors and thus made mistakes
in policy that led to deeper and deeper involvement. Ellsberg
discovered that this view was incorrect.
Contrary to this version of events pushed
by the government, the U.S. didn't "drift" into anything.
The closest advisers to five presidents (Truman, Eisenhower,
Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon) told their bosses the truth from
the outset, that there was no way the U.S. could win a victory
against post-colonialist Vietnamese nationalism; the best that
could be hoped for was endless stalemate. Despite the warnings,
those Presidents not only embraced the war but kept expanding
it. Millions died as a result.
The key to carrying on that insane, immoral
war was that the decisions always were made in secret by the
President, away from scrutiny by the Congress, the press, and
certainly by the American people.
In other words, both Republican and Democratic
Presidents and their closest advisers lied for decades to the
citizenry, to the press, to the Congress -- the result of which
was untold misery for both U.S. military troops and Vietnamese
civilians.
The common wisdom is that "you can't
keep secrets in Washington," and that someone always deliberately
leaks or inadvertently blabs. But, says Ellsberg, who was privy
to some of the most top-secret material for years, "the
fact is that the overwhelming majority of secrets do not leak
to the American public. This is true even when the information
withheld is well known to an enemy and when it is clearly essential
to the functioning of the congressional war power and to any
democratic control of foreign policy...Secrets that would be
of the greatest importance to many of them can be kept from them
reliably for decades by the Executive Branch, even though they
are known to thousands of insiders."
And who is in charge of the current government's
secrets today? The HardRightists who control American policy
and who have made the Bush Administration the most secretive,
closed shop -- isolated from the real world in which most of
us live -- of any administration in modern times. (Senator Patrick
J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat first elected in 1974, said, "Since
I've been here, I have never known an administration that is
more difficult to get information from." Senator Charles
E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said things are getting worse,
and "it seems like in the last month or two I've been running
into more and more stonewalls.")
To carry on and enlarge the Vietnam war,
administrations provoked violent responses from the Vietnamese
enemy, or even worse concocted false claims of violence against
U.S. troops -- and then simply lied about their actions. In those
days, citizens tended to believe what their officials told them
and so the untruths rarely were caught.
Again, the similarities to contemporary
times are instructive: An administration needs an enemy, needs
a war, in order to carry out its hidden agenda with the support
of the American people, and so the true motives are concealed
and lies are dispensed. Not quite as many citizens are inclined
these days to believe everything they're told by their government
leaders, but the pattern is still there. And still works. As
Ellsberg says of Vietnam but which can apply to our current situation
as well: "The President was determined to mislead the public...to
conceal that he was taking the country into a major, prolonged
war."
In Vietnam, Ellsberg writes, there was
a "general failure to study history or to analyze or even
to record operational experience, especially mistakes...There
were situations -- Vietnam was an example -- in which the U.S.
government, starting ignorant, did not, would not learn."
Five Presidents in the Vietnam case didn't
want to believe what their "best and brightest" advisors
had told them -- that the war was doomed to stalemate and there
was little the U.S. could do about it -- because the Presidents
believed they knew what was best for U.S. interests and they
might, unlike their predecessor, just luck out and somehow snatch
a victory from the jaws of defeat. (As Ellsberg writes, each
President "thought that history started with his administration
and that they had nothing to learn from earlier ones.")
Most of these advisors, their advice having been ignored, continued
to serve and mouth the "we-will-prevail' attitude of their
bosses -- including Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara -- but
they knew better.
And the key to these Presidents' peculiar
form of denial was a belief in the various "truisms"
that had been battered into their heads for decades: "better
dead than red," "the domino theory" (that if Vietnam
communism was victorious, the entirety of Asia would fall to
communism), "worldwide communist domination" (failing
to understand that the communist movement was not monolithic
but was rife with nationalistic divisions), and the fear that
politically they'd be regarded as unpatriotic if they didn't
bring off a victory and thus would damage their chances for re-election.
Underlying U.S. policy at that time was
a belief that America knew what was best for other countries.
"To presume to judge what was best for them, with life and
death at stake, was the height of imperial arrogance, the 'arrogance
of power,' as Senator Fulbright later called it." This observation
has a certain ring of familiarity about it, as the Bush Administration
arrogantly moves around the globe today like a big bully, informing
other countries and their leaders what should be done and if
they won't do it voluntarily, the U.S. will make sure it happens,
one way or another.
Ellsberg warmed to his theme of the dangers
of Executive Branch arrogance in a 1971 interview with CBS's
Walter Cronkite: "Executive officials, the Executive Branch
of government, has fostered an impression that I think the rest
of us have been too willing to accept over the last generation,
and that is that the Executive Branch is the government, and
that indeed they are leaders in a sense that may not be entirely
healthy, if we're to still think of ourselves as a democracy.
"I was struck, in fact," said
Ellsberg, "by President Johnson's reaction to these [Pentagon
Papers] revelations as 'close to treason,' because it [suggested]
that what was damaging to the reputation of a particular administration,
a particular individual, was in effect treason, which is very
close to saying 'I am the state.' And I think that quite sincerely
many Presidents, not only Lyndon Johnson, have come to feel that."
Sound like any White House resident you know today?
Since the closest advisors to Presidents
were having no effect on ending the war in Vietnam, Ellsberg
came to believe "that only if power were brought to bear
upon the executive branch from outside it," might the inexorable
grind toward more slaughter be halted. That meant, in his case,
leaking the Pentagon Papers to the public, and so he turned them
over to the New York Times, whereupon the Nixon Administration
went to court and, for the first time in American history, tried
to prohibit a free press from publishing. It lost. The hidden
history was revealed for how America got into Vietnam, and, as
a result, this information helped eventually get the war stopped
through negotiations -- but at a high price: the thousands of
U.S. dead, the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese dead, who
would have survived if the negotiations urged years before by
presidential advisors had been carried through.
It was the Administration's obsession
with wrecking Ellsberg's reputation and career -- and its hubris
that it could get away with anything under the claim of "national
security" -- that led inexorably to the crimes of the Watergate
scandal (breaking and entering, covering up a raft of these and
other felonies, interminable lying), which brought down the house
of Nixon.
Ellsberg discovered a truth that is exactly
to the point today: "The concentration of power within the
Executive Branch since World War II had focused nearly all responsibility
for policy 'failure' upon one man, the President. At the same
time, it gave him enormous capability to avert or postpone or
conceal such personal failure by means of force and fraud. Confronted
by resolute external resistance, as in Vietnam, that power could
not fail to corrupt the human who held it."
Oddly enough, it was H.R. Haldeman, President
Nixon's chief of staff, who noted the full impact of what happens
when the truth leaks out, as it did in the case of the Pentagon
Papers: "To the ordinary guy, all this [the revelations
about what leaders do behind the scenes] is a bunch of gobbleedygook.
But out of the gobbleedygook comes a very clear thing: you can't
trust the government; you can't believe what they say; and you
can't rely on their judgement. And the implicit infallibility
of Presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is
badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the
President wants to do even though it's wrong, and the President
can be wrong."
Five Presidents were tragically wrong
with regard to Vietnam; and our current resident in the White
House is wrong with regard to his secretive war policies. The
lock on secrets must be broken once again, before we become permanently
engaged in an imperial foreign policy that will bring death and
destruction down upon the world and that will leave our own society
morally adrift and, as in the Vietnam era, close to a political
civil-war. Let us learn from history and stop our leaders before
it's too late.
We must all become Ellsbergs.
Bernard Weiner,
Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught
at Western Washington State, San Francisco State and San Diego
State Universities; he was with the San Francisco Chronicle for
nearly 20 years, and is co-editor of The
Crisis Papers.
Yesterday's
Features
Jeffrey St. Clair
Something
About Butte
Saul Landau
The Bush Vision and the Culture of Power
Annie Higgins
Six Soldiers
Michael Ortiz Hill
Bush's Armageddon Obsession
Francisco Armada and Carlos Mutaner
Venezuela: Chomsky's Tropical Nightmare
James T. Phillips
Targeting Americans
Jack Bice
A Fresh World Vision
Robert Fisk
Double Standards in the War on Terror
Chris Clarke
Is a Blue Rose a Rose?
Frank Fugate
How the West (Bank) Was Won
Anis Shivani
Bleak Prospects for Dems
Ben Tripp
Does Bush Know Korean?
Adam Engel
Les Miserable and the Hackers from Hell
Keep CounterPunch Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- CounterPunch Special:
The Persecution of Gershon Legman by Susan Davis: Smut, the Post Office, Commies
and the FBI;
- Reeling Democrats: Is Pelosi the Answer?
- Gandhi v. Hitler: the Secret Race for the Nobel
Prize;
- Sullying Mario Savio's
Memory;
- Lynching Then and Now;
- Earn While You Learn: Chris Whittle and Child Labor;
The Case of the Pompous
Professor;
- The Class Struggle in
Boston: All that
Effort, But What Did They Get?
Remember, the CounterPunch website is
supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. Our worldwide
web audience is soaring , with about seven million hits a month
now. This is inspiring, but the work involved also compels us
to remind you more urgently than ever to subscribe and/or make
a (tax deductible) donation if you can afford it. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe
Now!
Or Call Toll Free 1 800 840 3683
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|
December 24,
2002
Joanne Mariner
Refusing
to Fight in Israel
Jeffrey St.
Clair
The Drug
War According to Dr. Mengele: Agent Green Over the Andes
Gavin Martin
Joe Strummer
is Dead: Long Live the Clash!
Daniel Wolff
From Gospel to the Birth of Soul: Sam
Cooke & the Soul Stirrers
David Vest
Stirred and Shaken
Ben Tripp
Yuletide
Saul Landau
The Quiet American Returns
Michael Wolff
X-mas in Zone One
Kevin Begley
Nestlé and a Nation in Famine
Francis Boyle
O Little Town of Bethlehem
Linda Heard
Where are the Wise Men?
Philip Farruggio
On the First Day of X-mas
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By
Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
|