It is a name
every American
should know.
Five hundred four
Vietnamese villagers
slaughtered
by American troops
that day in My Lai
fifty years ago.
Lt. Calley was given
house arrest,
then pardoned by Nixon.
No one went to prison
for the massacre
of children, women, old men.
That’s what happens
in war, they say.
That’s what they say.
David Krieger
March 2018
“From Ia Drang to Khe Sanh, from Hue to Saigon and countless villages in between, they pushed through jungles and rice paddies, heat and monsoon, fighting heroically to protect the ideals we hold dear as Americans. Through more than a decade of combat, over air, land, and sea, these proud Americans upheld the highest traditions of our Armed Forces.”
OK, I get it. Soldiers suffer, soldiers die in the wars we wage, and the commander in chief has to, occasionally, toss clichés on their graves.
The words are those of Barack Obama, five-plus years ago, issuing a Memorial Day proclamation establishing a 13-year commemoration of the Vietnam War, for which, apparently, about $65 million was appropriated.
Veterans for Peace calls it money allocated to rewrite history and has begun a counter-campaign called Full Disclosure, the need for which is more glaring than ever, considering that there is close to zero political opposition to the unleashed American empire and its endless war on terror.
Just the other day, for instance, 89 senators quietly voted to pass the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, signing off on a $700 billion defense budget, which ups annual military spending by $80 billion and, as Common Dreams reported, “will dump a larger sum of money into the military budget than even President Donald Trump asked for while also authorizing the production of 94 F-35 jets, two dozen more than the Pentagon requested.”
And of course there’s no controversy here, no media clamor demanding to know where the money will come from. “Money for war just is. Like the tides,” Adam Johnson of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting tweeted, as quoted by Common Dreams.
Oh quiet profits! The Full Disclosure campaign rips away the lies that allow America’s wars to continue: GIs slogging through jungles and rice paddies to protect the ideals we hold dear. These words are not directed at the people who put Obama into office, who did so believing he would end the Bush wars. The fact that he continued them mocks the “value” we call democracy, indeed, turns it into a hollow shell.
The U.S. Air Force dropped over 6 million tons of bombs and other ordnance on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia between 1964 and 1973, more than it expended in World War II, Howard Machtinger notes at the Full Disclosure website. And more than 19 million gallons of toxic chemicals, including the infamous Agent Orange, were dumped on the Vietnam countryside.
“Accurate estimates are hard to come by,” he writes, “but as many as three million Vietnamese were likely killed, including two million civilians, hundreds of thousands seriously injured and disabled, millions of internally displaced, croplands and forests destroyed: incredible destruction — physical, environmental, institutional, and psychological. The term ecocide was coined to try to capture the devastation of the Vietnamese landscape.”
And: “All Vietnamese, as a matter of course, were referred to as ‘gooks.’ So the distinction between combatants and non-combatants, which had been eroding throughout 20th century warfare, virtually disappeared.”
And then there was the war’s effect on the soldiers who fought it and the “moral damage” so many suffered: “To date,” Machtinger writes, “estimates of veteran suicides range from a low of 9,000 to 150,000, the latter almost triple the number of U.S. deaths during the actual conflict.”
So I pause in the midst of these numbers, this data, letting the words and the memories wash over me: Agent Orange, napalm, gook, My Lai. Such words link only with terrible irony to the clichés of Obama’s proclamation: solemn reverence . . . honor . . . heads held high . . . the ideals we hold dear.
The first set of words sickened a vast segment of the American public and caused the horror of “Vietnam Syndrome” to cripple and emasculate the military-industrial complex for a decade and a half. Slowly, the powers that be regrouped, redefined how we fought our wars: without widespread national sacrifice or a universal draft; and with smart bombs and even smarter public relations, ensuring that most of the American public could watch our clean, efficient wars in the comfort of their living rooms.
What was also necessary was to marginalize the anti-war voices that shut down the Vietnam War. This was accomplished politically, beginning with the surrender of the Democratic Party to its military-industrial funders in the wake of George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign. Eventually, endless war became the new normal, and blotting the shame of our “loss” in Vietnam from the historical record became a priority.
The Full Disclosure campaign is saying: no way. One aspect of this campaign is an interactive exhibit of the 1968 My Lai massacre, in which American soldiers rounded up and killed more than 500 villagers. The exhibit was created by the Chicago chapter of Vets for Peace, which hopes to raise enough money to take it on a national tour and rekindle public awareness of the reality of war.
A slice of that reality can be found in a New Yorker article written in 2015 by Seymour Hersh, the reporter who broke the story some four and a half decades earlier. In the article, Hersh revisits the story of one of the GI participants in My Lai, Paul Meadlo:
After being told by (Lt. William) Calley to ‘take care of this group,’ one Charlie Company soldier recounted, Meadlo and a fellow-soldier ‘were actually playing with the kids, telling the people where to sit down and giving the kids candy.’ When Calley returned and said that he wanted them dead, the soldier said, ‘Meadlo just looked at him like he couldn’t believe it. He says, “Waste them?” When Calley said yes, another soldier testified, Meadlo and Calley ‘opened up and started firing.’ But then Meadlo ‘started to cry.’
And that’s the war, and those are our values, buried with the dead villagers in a mass grave.
Dear Wall,
Your polished surface deceives.
You appear serene, yet you are bursting with anguish and lost potential.
You are a wall of great sadness.
You remember the young, whose lives were engulfed in the flames of war.
They wanted to live and love, but the cruel war stopped them.
They had lives before the lies of their leaders took them to war.
Their mistake was to trust.
And they never returned to their loved ones.
Wall, their names are carved into you.
Their hearts flutter around you.
These young who died are sentinels, warning of danger,
Reminding us that war is a fool’s game,
A game in which everyone loses,
Except for the arms merchants.
Wall, you reflect war’s human price.
Let the old and gray pay the price, if they must.
But youth, be wary of war.
Vaya aquí para la versión española.
Today, 40 years after the American war in Vietnam ended in ignominious defeat, the traces of that terrible conflict are disappearing.
Traveling through Vietnam during the latter half of April 2015 with a group of erstwhile antiwar activists, I was struck by the transformation of what was once an impoverished, war-devastated peasant society into a modern nation. Its cities and towns are bustling with life and energy. Vast numbers of motorbikes surge through their streets, including 4.2 million in Hanoi and 7 million in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon). A thriving commercial culture has emerged, based not only on many small shops, but on an influx of giant Western, Japanese, and other corporations. Although Vietnam is officially a Communist nation, about 40 percent of the economy is capitalist, and the government is making great efforts to encourage private foreign investment. Indeed, over the past decade, Vietnam has enjoyed one of the highest economic growth rates in the world. Not only have manufacturing and tourism expanded dramatically, but Vietnam has become an agricultural powerhouse. Today it is the world’s second largest exporter of rice, and one of the world’s leading exporters of coffee, pepper, rubber, and other agricultural commodities. Another factor distancing the country from what the Vietnamese call “the American war” is the rapid increase in Vietnam’s population. Only 41 million in 1975, it now tops 90 million, with most of it under the age of 30 — too young to have any direct experience with the conflict.
Vietnam has also made a remarkable recovery in world affairs. It now has diplomatic relations with 189 countries, and enjoys good relations with all the major nations.
Nevertheless, the people of Vietnam paid a very heavy price for their independence from foreign domination. Some 3 million of them died in the American war, and another 300,000 are still classified as MIAs. In addition, many, many Vietnamese were wounded or crippled in the conflict. Perhaps the most striking long-term damage resulted from the U.S. military’s use of Agent Orange (dioxin) as a defoliant. Vietnamese officials estimate that, today, some 4 million of their people suffer the terrible effects of this chemical, which not only destroys the bodies of those exposed to it, but has led to horrible birth defects and developmental disabilities into the second and third generations. Much of Vietnam’s land remains contaminated by Agent Orange, as well as by unexploded ordnance. Indeed, since the end of the American war in 1975, the landmines, shells, and bombs that continue to litter the nation’s soil have wounded or killed over 105,000 Vietnamese — many of them children.
During the immediate postwar years, Vietnam’s ruin was exacerbated by additional factors. These included a U.S. government embargo on trade with Vietnam, U.S. government efforts to isolate Vietnam diplomatically, and a 1979 Chinese military invasion of Vietnam employing 600,000 troops. Although the Vietnamese managed to expel the Chinese — just as they had previously routed the French and the Americans — China continued border skirmishes with Vietnam until 1988. In addition, during the first postwar decade, the ruling Vietnamese Communist Party pursued a hardline, repressive policy that undermined what was left of the economy and alienated much of the population. Misery and starvation were widespread.
Nevertheless, starting in the mid-1980s, the country made a remarkable comeback. This recovery was facilitated by Communist Party reformers who loosened the reins of power, encouraged foreign investment, and worked at developing a friendlier relationship with other nations, especially the United States. In 1995, the U.S. and Vietnamese governments resumed diplomatic relations. Although these changes did not provide a panacea for the nation’s ills — for example, the U.S. State Department informed the new U.S. ambassador that he must never mention Agent Orange — Vietnam’s circumstances, and particularly its relationship with the United States, gradually improved. U.S.-Vietnamese trade expanded substantially, reaching $35 billion in 2014. Thousands of Vietnamese students participated in educational exchanges. In recent years, the U.S. government even began funding programs to help clean up Agent Orange contamination and unexploded ordnance.
Although, in part, this U.S.-Vietnamese détente resulted from the growing flexibility of officials in both nations, recently it has also reflected the apprehension of both governments about the increasingly assertive posture of China in Asian affairs. Worried about China’s unilateral occupation of uninhabited islands in the South China Sea during 2014, both governments began to resist it — the United States through its “Pacific pivot” and Vietnam through an ever closer relationship with the United States to “balance” China. Although both nations officially support the settlement of the conflict over the disputed islands through diplomacy centered on the ten countries that comprise the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, officials in Vietnam, increasingly nervous about China’s ambitions, appear to welcome the growth of a more powerful U.S. military presence in the region. In the context of this emerging agreement on regional security, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, and U.S. President Barack Obama will be visiting Vietnam later this year.
This shift from warring enemies to cooperative partners over the past 40 years should lead to solemn reflection. In the Vietnam War, the U.S. government laid waste to a poor peasant nation in an effort to prevent the triumph of a Communist revolution that U.S. policymakers insisted would result in the conquest of the United States. And yet, when this counter-revolutionary effort collapsed, the predicted Red tide did not sweep over the shores of California. Instead, an independent nation emerged that could — and did — work amicably with the U.S. government. This development highlights the unnecessary nature — indeed, the tragedy — of America’s vastly destructive war in Vietnam. It also underscores the deeper folly of relying on war to cope with international issues.
Dr. Lawrence Wittner (http://lawrenceswittner.com) is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany. His latest book is a satirical novel about university corporatization and rebellion, What’s Going On at UAardvark?
Perhaps you thought you were doing the right thing, fighting in a small distant country for president and country. It is the way we were all indoctrinated. When the country calls, you must answer. But the leaders of the country were dead wrong about fighting in Vietnam, and this wall with your names etched on it speaks to the terrible loss of each of you in that savage, brutal and unnecessary war. I mourn your loss. I mourn the loss of possibilities that were cut off when your lives ended in that war. You might have stayed home to live and love, to have children and grandchildren, to follow your dreams, but for that war.
The war was so wrong in so many ways. It was wrong for you, for the people you were ordered to kill, and for the soul of America. It was a war that was neither legal nor moral and, as such, set the tone for future US wars. After that war, I don’t see how we can ever be proud of our country again.
Some three million Vietnamese were killed in the war. Some were fighting for their independence. Others were innocent civilians. Many were women and children. You and other Americans were sent half way around the world because American leaders feared the communists, feared that countries in Southeast Asia would fall like dominoes to the communists. But Ho Chi Minh was more than a communist. He was a nationalist, leading his country to independence from colonial rule. He was a nationalist who admired Thomas Jefferson, and he had once asked the United States for help in seeking that independence. We turned him down, turning our backs on our own history and on your future.
Once Lyndon Johnson became president it was all escalation in Vietnam. General Westmoreland always wanted more men. He kept upping the ante in his calls for more American soldiers, and LBJ and McNamara kept obliging him. They kept pulling young Americans from their lives and dreams to fight in the jungles of Vietnam. You know better than I do that it was a hopeless war, a war in which you were sent to kill and die for no good reason, for the delusions of American leaders who didn’t want to lose a war. Of course, that’s exactly what happened in the end, and by that time Nixon and Kissinger had joined the Johnson and Westmoreland team in failure. According to the rigged body counts on the nightly news, we were winning the war, but that was only until we lost.
One slogan stands out in my mind, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” We’ll never know how many there were, but there were many. The war drove LBJ from office, but it brought in Richard Nixon. He said he had a plan to end the war. This turned out to be massive bombing of North Vietnam, and secret and illegal bombing of Laos and Cambodia. It was shameful, but not as shameful as Kissinger receiving a Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the shape of the table for peace talks with the Vietnamese.
What kind of a country could pursue such a war against peasants fighting for their freedom? Answer: The same kind of country that could drop atomic bombs on civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sadly, in the years since you’ve been gone, our country has learned little about compassion. We have fought new wars, including one in Iraq, based upon presidential lies having to do with illusory weapons of mass destruction.
America has continued to waste its treasure in fighting wars around the world, as well as its dignity, its goodwill, its youth and its future. I wish I could give you a more positive report on what America learned from the Vietnam War, but most of what it has learned seems intended to make wars easier to prosecute, such as ending conscription, relying on a poverty-driven volunteer army, embedding reporters with the troops, and not allowing photographs of returning coffins. Incidentally, no dominoes ever fell.
America has yet to learn that war is not the answer, that bombs do not make friends and military power does not bring peace. Our military budget is immense. When all is added in, it amounts to over a trillion dollars annually. Imagine what a difference even a fraction of those funds would make in fulfilling basic human needs for Americans and people throughout the world.
I wish you were here to stand up and speak out for peace and justice, for a better, more peaceful country and world. We need you.
*This article is the foreword to the book Flirting with Disaster: Why Accidents are Rarely Accidental by Dr. Marc Gerstein with Michael Ellsberg.
I have participated in several major organizational catastrophes. The most well known of them is the Vietnam War. I was aware on my first visit to Vietnam in 1961 that the situation there — a failing neocolonial regime we had installed as a successor to French rule — was a sure loser in which we should not become further involved. Yet a few years later, I found myself participating as a high-level staffer in a policy process that lied both the public and Congress into a war that, unbeknownst to me at the time, experts inside the government accurately predicted would lead to catastrophe.
The very word catastrophe, almost unknown in the dry language of bureaucracy, was uttered directly to the president. Clark Clifford, longtime and highly trusted adviser to U.S. presidents, told President Lyndon Johnson in July 1965: “If we lose fifty thousand men there, it will be catastrophic in this country. Five years, billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of men-this is not for us. . . .”
But it was for us, casualties included, after Johnson launched an open-ended escalation just three days later. In time, Clifford’s estimates were all exceeded: Before our ground war was ended in eight years (not five), the cost in dollars was in hundreds of billions, over five hundred thousand men served in Vietnam in a single year (1968) out of three million altogether, and — uncannily close to his predicted figure — more than fifty-eight thousand soldiers had died. Clifford’s prophecy in his face-to-face session with the president at Camp David — “I can’t see anything but catastrophe for our nation in this area” — could not have been more urgent in tone or, tragically, more prescient.
And Clifford’s was not a lone voice. Johnson’s vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey, had used almost the same words with him five months earlier; others, including Johnson’s career-long mentor Senator Richard Russell, had also made the same argument. Yet Johnson went ahead regardless.
Why? I have pondered and researched that question for forty years. (The documentation in the Pentagon Papers provides no adequate answer.) But one seemingly plausible and still widely believed answer can be ruled out. The escalation in Vietnam was not the result of a universal failure of foresight among the president’s advisers, or to a lack of authoritative, precise, and urgently expressed warnings against his choice of policy.
The nuclear arms race, in which I was intimately involved between 1958 and 1964 as a RAND Corporation analyst serving the executive branch, is a moral catastrophe on a scale without precedent in human history, even though its full tragic potential has not yet occurred. The arms race involved — under both Democratic and Republican administrations, soon joined by the USSR — the mutual construction of a physical and organizational capability for destruction of most of the world’s population within a matter of hours. That project — building two matched and opposed “doomsday machines” and keeping them on hair-trigger alert — is the most irresponsible policy in human experience, involving as it does a genuine possibility of creating an irreversible catastrophe for humanity and most other living species on a scale that the world has not seen since the dinosaurs perished sixty million years ago. Even if the system were decommissioned totally — and it is not yet remotely close to being dismantled — such a course of action would not cancel out the fact that over the past sixty years, a moral cataclysm has already occurred, with ominous implications for the future of life on earth.
I have been trying since 1967 — when I realized that the Vietnam War must end — to understand how we got into that war, and why it was so hard to end it. Since 1961, even earlier, I have viewed the nuclear arms race as an ongoing catastrophe that has to be reversed, and a situation that has to be understood. I assumed then, and still believe, that understanding the past and present of these realities is essential to changing them. In my life and work, I have tried to do what Dr. Gerstein’s book is trying to help us do: to understand these processes in a way that will help us avert them in the future.
A major theme to be gained from this important book is that organizations do not routinely and systematically learn from past errors and disasters — in fact, they rarely ever do. This intentional lack of oversight can partly explain why our predicament in Iraq is so precisely close to the Vietnam experience, both in the way that we got into the war, deceptively and unconstitutionally, and in the way the war is being conducted and prolonged.
It might not seem surprising that after thirty years, a generation of decision-makers and voters would have come along that knew little about the past experience in Vietnam. What is more dismaying is to realize that much the same processes — the same foolish and disastrous decision-making, the same misleading rationales for aggression — are going on right now with respect to Iran, with little political opposition, just three years after the invasion of Iraq, and while the brutal and tragic consequences of that occupation are still in front of our eyes every day.
One reason for this folly is that many aspects of disasters in decision-making are known only within the organization, and not even by many insiders at that. The organizations involved tend not to make relevant and detailed studies of past errors, let alone reveal them outside the organization. In fact, the risk that such a study or investigation might leak to the outside is a factor sufficient to keep inquiries from being made in the first place. Making or keeping possibly incriminating documentation earlier, at the time of the decision, or later is similarly sidestepped.
This deliberate decision within organizations not to try to learn internally what has gone wrong constitutes what I have called, with respect to Vietnam, an anti-learning mechanism. Avoiding improved performance is not the point of the mechanism. But because studying present and past faulty decision-making risks may invite blame and organizational, political, perhaps even legal penalties, those outcomes “outweigh” the benefits of clearly understanding what needs to be changed within the organization.
The valuable cases studies, analyses, and information in the pages of this book were not provided by the organizations involved. This compendium arose from the accounts of individual whistle-blowers, journalistic investigations, and in some cases congressional action- and from Dr. Gerstein’s own initiative in collecting and analyzing the data. Did any one of the organizations detailed herein conduct a comparable study? Quite possibly not a single one. And even if they did, they certainly didn’t publish the results in a way that would allow other organizations and individuals to learn from their mistakes.
Societally, then, we don’t have an easy way to learn from organizational mistakes of the past. That’s one reason that disasters are so likely, and why comparable disasters occur again and again, across organizations and even within the same organizations. In the case of Vietnam, Americans did not learn from the French or Japanese occupations before ours. Nor did Republicans under Nixon manage to learn from Democratic missteps before theirs. Specifically, there was no systematic study of the Pentagon Papers, which were available within the Defense Department to the Nixon administration, but no one ever admitted to having read them or even to directing their staff to analyze possible lessons from them. (I personally urged Henry Kissinger, in a discussion at the Western White House in 1970, to do both of these, or at least the latter, but he later claimed he had never read anything of them or about them, though he had a copy available to him.) As far as we know, Secretary of Defense Laird, Henry Kissinger, and others had no interest in the documentary record and analysis of twenty-three years of decision-making in the same geographic area, against precisely the same adversaries. And so they ended up committing many of the mistakes made by those who’d gone before, with the same results.
This “anti-learning” phenomenon also explains why it is possible to reproduce our experience in Vietnam years later in Iraq, and now, from Iraq to Iran. In sum, there is strong and successful resistance within many organizations to studying or recording past actions leading to catastrophe — because doing so would reveal errors, lies, or even crimes.
There is no substitute for the kind of comparative study analysis Dr. Gerstein shares on these pages. I hope this book is read widely; if we are to avoid the kinds of disasters and catastrophes described, we first need to understand them. Flirting with Disaster is a pathbreaking, indispensable step toward such a goal.
Daniel Ellsberg Berkeley, California July 2007
What did we not hear from President Bush when he spoke last week at the United States Naval Academy about his strategy for victory in Iraq?
We did not hear that the war in Iraq, already one of the costliest wars in American history, is a running sore. We did not hear that it has taken more than 2,000 precious American lives and countless – because we do not count them – Iraqi civilian lives. We did not hear that the struggle has dragged on longer than our involvement in either World War I or the Spanish-American War, or that by next spring it will be even longer than the Korean War.
And we did not hear how or when the president plans to bring our forces back home – no facts, no numbers on America troop withdrawals, no dates, no reference to our dwindling coalition, no reversal of his disdain for the United Nations, whose help he still expects.
Neither our military, our economy nor our nation can take that kind of endless and remorseless drain for an only vaguely defined military and political mission. If we leave early, the president said, catastrophe might follow. But what of the catastrophe that we are prolonging and worsening by our continued presence, including our continued, unforgivable mistreatment of detainees?
Each month that America continues its occupation facilitates Al Qaeda’s recruitment of young Islamic men and women as suicide bombers, the one weapon against which our open society has no sure defense. The president says we should support our troops by staying the course; but who is truly willing to support our troops by bringing them safely home?
The responsibility for devising an exit plan rests primarily not with the war’s opponents, but with the president who hastily launched a pre-emptive invasion without enough troops to secure Iraq’s borders and arsenals, without enough armor to protect our forces, without enough allied support and without adequate plans for either a secure occupation or a timely exit.
As we listened to Mr. Bush’s speech, our thoughts raced back four decades to another president, John F. Kennedy. In 1963, the last year of his life, we watched from front-row seats as Kennedy tried to figure out how best to extricate American military advisers and instructors from Vietnam.
Although neither of us had direct responsibility on Vietnam decision-making, we each saw enough of the president to sense his growing frustration. In typical Kennedy fashion, he would lean back, in his Oval Office rocker, tick off all his options and then critique them:
Renege on the previous Eisenhower commitment, which Kennedy had initially reinforced, to help the beleaguered government of South Vietnam with American military instructors and advisers?
No, he knew that the American people would not permit him to do that.
Americanize the Vietnam civil war, as the military recommended and as his successor Lyndon Johnson sought ultimately to do, by sending in American combat units?
No, having learned from his experiences with Cuba and elsewhere that conflicts essentially political in nature did not lend themselves to a military solution, Kennedy knew that the United States could not prevail in a struggle against a Vietnamese people determined to oust, at last, all foreign troops from their country.
Moreover, he knew firsthand from his World War II service in the South Pacific the horrors of war and had declared at American University in June 1963: “This generation of Americans has had enough – more than enough – of war.”
Declare “victory and get out,” as George Aiken, the Republican senator from Vermont, would famously suggest years later?
No, in 1963 in Vietnam, despite assurances from field commanders, there was no more semblance of “victory” than there was in 2004 in Iraq when the president gave his “mission accomplished” speech on the deck of an aircraft carrier.
Explore, as was always his preference, a negotiated solution?
No, he was unable to identify in the ranks of the disorganized Vietcong a leader capable of negotiating enforceable and mutually agreeable terms of withdrawal.
Insist that the South Vietnamese government improve its chances of survival by genuinely adopting the array of political, economic, land and administrative reforms necessary to win popular support?
No, Kennedy increasingly realized that the corrupt family and landlords propping up the dictatorship in South Vietnam would never accept or enforce such reforms.
Eventually he began to understand that withdrawal was the viable option. From the spring of 1963 on, he began to articulate the elements of a three-part exit strategy, one that his assassination would prevent him from pursuing. The three components of Kennedy’s exit strategy – well-suited for Iraq after the passage of a new constitution and the coming election – can be summarized as follows:
Make clear that we’re going to get out. At a press conference on Nov. 14, 1963, the president did just that, stating, “That is our object, to bring Americans home.”
Request an invitation to leave. Arrange for the host government to request the phased withdrawal of all American military personnel – surely not a difficult step in Iraq, especially after the clan statement last month calling for foreign forces to leave. In a May 1963 press conference, Kennedy declared that if the South Vietnamese government suggested it, “we would have some troops on their way home” the next day.
Bring the troops home gradually. Initiate a phased American withdrawal over an unannounced period, beginning immediately, while intensifying the training of local security personnel, bearing in mind that with our increased troop mobility and airlift capacity, American forces are available without being stationed in hazardous areas. In September 1963, Kennedy said of the South Vietnamese: “In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it.” A month later, he said, “It would be our hope to lessen the number of Americans” in Vietnam by the end of the year.
President Kennedy had no guarantee that any of these three components would succeed. In the “fog of war,” there are no guarantees; but an exit plan without guarantees is better than none at all.
If we leave Iraq at its own government’s request, our withdrawal will be neither abandonment nor retreat. Law-abiding Iraqis may face more clan violence, Balkanization and foreign incursions if we leave; but they may face more clan violence, Balkanization and foreign incursions if we stay. The president has said we will not leave Iraq to the terrorists. Let us leave Iraq to the Iraqis, who have survived centuries of civil war, tyranny and attempted foreign domination.
Once American troops are out of Iraq, people around the world will rejoice that we have recovered our senses. What’s more, the killing of Americans and the global loss of American credibility will diminish. As Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a Republican and Vietnam veteran, said, “The longer we stay, the more problems we’re going to have.” Defeatist? The real defeatists are those who say we are stuck there for the next decade of death and destruction.
In a memorandum to President Kennedy, roughly three months after his inauguration, one of us wrote with respect to Vietnam, “There is no clearer example of a country that cannot be saved unless it saves itself.” Today, Iraq is an even clearer example.
Theodore C. Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. were, respectively, special counsel and special assistant to President John F. Kennedy.
Originally published by the New York Times.
President Bush’s explanation Tuesday night for staying the course in Iraq evoked in me a sense of familiarity, but not nostalgia. I had heard virtually all of his themes before, almost word for word, in speeches delivered by three presidents I worked for: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. Not with pride, I recognized that I had proposed some of those very words myself.
Drafting a speech on the Vietnam War for Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara in July 1965, I had the same task as Bush’s speechwriters in June 2005: how to rationalize and motivate continued public support for a hopelessly stalemated, unnecessary war our president had lied us into.
Looking back on my draft, I find I used the word “terrorist” about our adversaries to the same effect Bush did.
Like Bush’s advisors, I felt the need for a global threat to explain the scale of effort we faced. For that role, I felt China was better suited as our “real” adversary than North Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh, just as Bush prefers to focus on Al Qaeda rather than Iraqi nationalists. “They are trying to shake our will in Iraq — just as they [sic] tried to shake our will on Sept. 11, 2001,” he said.
My draft was approved by McNamara, national security advisor McGeorge Bundy and Secretary of State Dean Rusk, but it was not delivered because it was a clarion call for mobilizing the Reserves to support an open-ended escalation of troops, as Johnson’s military commanders had urged.
LBJ preferred instead to lie at a news conference about the number of troops they had requested for immediate deployment (twice the level he announced), and to conceal the total number they believed necessary for success, which was at least 500,000. (I take with a grain of salt Bush’s claim that “our commanders tell me they have the number of troops they need to do their job.”)
A note particularly reminiscent in Bush’s speech was his reference to “a time of testing.” “We have more work to do, and there will be tough moments that test America’s resolve,” he said.
This theme recalled a passage in my 1965 draft that, for reasons that will be evident, I have never chosen to reproduce before. I ended by painting a picture of communist China as “an opponent that views international politics as a whole as a vast guerrilla struggle … intimidating, ambushing, demoralizing and weakening those who would uphold an alternative world order.”
“We are being tested,” I wrote. “Have we the guts, the grit, the determination to stick with a frustrating, bloody, difficult course as long as it takes to see it through….? The Asian communists are sure that we have not.” Tuesday, Bush said: Our adversaries “believe that free societies are essentially corrupt and decadent, and with a few hard blows they can force us to retreat.”
His speechwriters, like me, then faced this question from the other side. To meet the enemy’s test of resolve, how long must the American public support troops as they kill and die in a foreign land? Their answer came in the same workmanlike evasions that served Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon: “as long as we are needed (and not a day longer) … until the fight is won.”
I can scarcely bear to reread my own proposed response in 1965 to that question, which drew on a famous riposte by the late U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson during the Cuban missile crisis: “There is only one answer for us to give. It was made … by an American statesman … in the midst of another crisis that tested our resolution. Till hell freezes over.”
It doesn’t feel any better to hear similar words from another president 40 years on, nor will they read any better to his speechwriters years from now. But the human pain they foretell will not be mainly theirs.
Daniel Ellsberg is a member of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Advisory Council and is currently a Foundation Fellow. He worked in the State and Defense departments under Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. He released the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971. Daniel Ellsberg is the recipient of the Foundation’s 2005 Distinguished Peace Leadership Award.
After 17 months observing pacification efforts in Vietnam as a state department official, I laid eyes upon an unmistakable enemy for the first time on New Year’s Day in 1967. I was walking point with three members of a company from the US army’s 25th Division, moving through tall rice, the water over our ankles, when we heard firing close behind us. We spun around, ready to fire. I saw a boy of about 15, wearing nothing but ragged black shorts, crouching and firing an AK-47 at the troops behind us. I could see two others, heads just above the top of the rice, firing as well.
They had lain there, letting us four pass so as to get a better shot at the main body of troops. We couldn’t fire at them, because we would have been firing into our own platoon. But a lot of its fire came back right at us. Dropping to the ground, I watched this kid firing away for 10 seconds, till he disappeared with his buddies into the rice. After a minute the platoon ceased fire in our direction and we got up and moved on.
About an hour later, the same thing happened again; this time I only saw a glimpse of a black jersey through the rice. I was very impressed, not only by their tactics but by their performance.
One thing was clear: these were local boys. They had the advantage of knowing every ditch and dyke, every tree and blade of rice and piece of cover, like it was their own backyard. Because it was their backyard. No doubt (I thought later) that was why they had the nerve to pop up in the midst of a reinforced battalion and fire away with American troops on all sides. They thought they were shooting at trespassers, occupiers, that they had a right to be there and we didn’t. This would have been a good moment to ask myself if they were wrong, and if we had a good enough reason to be in their backyard to be fired at.
Later that afternoon, I turned to the radio man, a wiry African American kid who looked too thin to be lugging his 75lb radio, and asked: “By any chance, do you ever feel like the redcoats?”
Without missing a beat he said, in a drawl: “I’ve been thinking that … all … day.” You couldn’t miss the comparison if you’d gone to grade school in America. Foreign troops far from home, wearing helmets and uniforms and carrying heavy equipment, getting shot at every half-hour by non-uniformed irregulars near their own homes, blending into the local population after each attack.
I can’t help but remember that afternoon as I read about US and British patrols meeting rockets and mines without warning in the cities of Iraq. As we faced ambush after ambush in the countryside, we passed villagers who could have told us we were about to be attacked. Why didn’t they? First, there was a good chance their friends and family members were the ones doing the attacking. Second, we were widely seen by the local population not as allies or protectors – as we preferred to imagine – but as foreign occupiers. Helping us would have been seen as collaboration, unpatriotic. Third, they knew that to collaborate was to be in danger from the resistance, and that the foreigners’ ability to protect them was negligible.
There could not be a more exact parallel between this situation and Iraq. Our troops in Iraq keep walking into attacks in the course of patrols apparently designed to provide “security” for civilians who, mysteriously, do not appear the slightest bit inclined to warn us of these attacks. This situation – as in Vietnam – is a harbinger of endless bloodletting. I believe American and British soldiers will be dying, and killing, in that country as long as they remain there.
As more and more US and British families lose loved ones in Iraq – killed while ostensibly protecting a population that does not appear to want them there – they will begin to ask: “How did we get into this mess, and why are we still in it?” And the answers they find will be disturbingly similar to those the American public found for Vietnam.
I served three US presidents – Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon – who lied repeatedly and blatantly about our reasons for entering Vietnam, and the risks in our staying there. For the past year, I have found myself in the horrifying position of watching history repeat itself. I believe that George Bush and Tony Blair lied – and continue to lie – as blatantly about their reasons for entering Iraq and the prospects for the invasion and occupation as the presidents I served did about Vietnam.
By the time I released to the press in 1971 what became known as the Pentagon Papers – 7,000 pages of top-secret documents demonstrating that virtually everything four American presidents had told the public about our involvement in Vietnam was false – I had known that pattern as an insider for years, and I knew that a fifth president, Richard Nixon, was following in their footsteps. In the fall of 2002, I hoped that officials in Washington and London who knew that our countries were being lied into an illegal, bloody war and occupation would consider doing what I wish I had done in 1964 or 1965, years before I did, before the bombs started to fall: expose these lies, with documents.
I can only admire the more timely, courageous action of Katherine Gun, the GCHQ translator who risked her career and freedom to expose an illegal plan to win official and public support for an illegal war, before that war had started. Her revelation of a classified document urging British intelligence to help the US bug the phones of all the members of the UN security council to manipulate their votes on the war may have been critical in denying the invasion a false cloak of legitimacy. That did not prevent the aggression, but it was reasonable for her to hope that her country would not choose to act as an outlaw, thereby saving lives. She did what she could, in time for it to make a difference, as indeed others should have done, and still can.
I have no doubt that there are thousands of pages of documents in safes in London and Washington right now – the Pentagon Papers of Iraq – whose unauthorised revelation would drastically alter the public discourse on whether we should continue sending our children to die in Iraq. That’s clear from what has already come out through unauthorised disclosures from many anonymous sources and from officials and former officials such as David Kelly and US ambassador Joseph Wilson, who revealed the falsity of reports that Iraq had pursued uranium from Niger, which President Bush none the less cited as endorsed by British intelligence in his state of the union address before the war. Both Downing Street and the White House organised covert pressure to punish these leakers and to deter others, in Dr Kelly’s case with tragic results.
Those who reveal documents on the scale necessary to return foreign policy to democratic control risk prosecution and prison sentences, as Katherine Gun is now facing. I faced 12 felony counts and a possible sentence of 115 years; the charges were dismissed when it was discovered that White House actions aimed at stopping further revelations of administration lying had included criminal actions against me.
Exposing governmental lies carries a heavy personal risk, even in our democracies. But that risk can be worthwhile when a war’s-worth of lives is at stake.
*Daniel Ellsberg is the author of Secrets: a Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers and is a member of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Advisory Council.
This article was originally published in the The Guardian
In a lecture in late 1967 over the Canadian Broadcasting Company, Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed the subject of “Conscience and the Vietnam War.” His conscience was clearly telling him that this was a war that made no sense and must be stopped.
“Somehow this madness must cease,” King said. “We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative of this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.”
King went on to say in his speech, “The war is Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.” Within a few months, that malady would result in King’s assassination, and over the years since King’s death that malady would lead America into other wars in other places.
Today, King’s words could be transposed from Vietnam to Iraq: “I speak as a child of God and a brother to the suffering poor of Iraq….” And it is still the “poor of America” who are paying the greatest price, the ultimate price on the battlefield and the loss of hope at home, while corporations such as Halliburton reap obscene profits.
Over the decades the “malady within the American spirit” that King named persists. It is a malady of power, arrogance and greed, a malady that takes our high ideals and smashes them in the dust, along with human life, by bombs dropped from 30,000 feet. With the power to wage war, our leaders have again thumbed their noses at the international community and sent our young soldiers to fight and die in an illegal war, authorized neither constitutionally nor under international law.
King concluded his speech by saying, “We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and for justice throughout the developing world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.”
The world warned the US against going to war in Iraq. The UN Security Council refused to be forced into war or to authorize it, and the US president called the UN irrelevant. Millions of people throughout the world took to the streets, and the US Administration dismissed them as irrelevant.
Today, the US Administration has had its way, and the terrible scourge of war has again been unleashed. Thousands have died, including more than 500 American soldiers. Tens of thousands have been injured and maimed, including thousands of American soldiers. Saddam Hussein has been pulled from power and his statues toppled, but Iraq is in chaos as a result of the US invasion and occupation, and experts are predicting that a terrible civil war lies ahead. No weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, although the US president assured us they were there, and American soldiers are being confronted daily by bullets, bombs and scorn.
What would King say to us today? Would he be resilient, or would he be broken by the “shameful corridors” through which our leaders have dragged us? Surely, he would be resilient. He knew the pain of struggle and he knew that war and violence only breed more war and violence. But how his heart would ache for the lost promise of those destroyed by this war and for the poor who bear the burden most. How his heart would ache if he could see how little we have progressed in overcoming the maladies of power, arrogance and greed. Surely, King’s message would be constant, and he would be leading a nonviolent struggle today to find the way to peace and respect for human dignity in America, Iraq and throughout the world.
*David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He is the co-author of Choose Hope: Your Role in Waging Peace in the Nuclear Age and Peace: 100 Ideas.