Monday, February 23, 2015

On American Exceptionalism

Fellow Conquistadores,

Time passes, snow melts, spring is suddenly possible.  Yet somehow the same old self-destructive reflexes appear to be animating our foreign policy, the extraordinary presumption that ours is the responsibility to meddle worldwide in societies we do not begin to understand, to manipulate outcomes and advance hidden interests wherever that serves our unacknowledged commercial purposes.  I will be getting into aspects of all this as a speaker at the 2015 St. Petersburg Conference on World Affairs at the St. Petersburg campus of the University of South Florida on Friday, February 27 at 9AM.  Subject of our exchange:  Can We Keep Our Rights and Protect Our Country Too?

The public-relations justification we have been putting out lately to explain our maneuvering is time-honored American Exceptionalism.  We know better, we can do more.  The cultures and historical experience of the subjects of our attentions seem beside the point, and are rarely mentioned.  It remains quite enough that we are able to "project power," and we do. It remains impolite and worse to bring up the interests whose profit is almost always out there driving these calamitous decisions.  What seems to be lacking in so many discussions is some sense of how we got historically into the role we now find ourselves assuming and where all this is taking us -- all of us, not merely a few special interests.

Throughout the Middle East we are attempting to impose our own terms, political and commercial, on a culture that as recently as 1917 regarded itself as a great, tolerant center of civilization, an achievement comparable with China at its height, or nineteenth century Europe.  The collapse and utter dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 left it to assorted Western governments to draw the borders of new states in the wreckage and impose self-serving commercial conditions on the entire region. In Iran, for example, as oil became the prize throughout the area, the British moved in and demanded a monopoly of the resources for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the predecessor to British Petroleum. When Dr. Mohammed Mossodegh, the country's sickly premier, took steps in 1953 to nationalize Iran's oil fields, the British Secret Service and the CIA sent  in the Agency's top operative in the region, Kermit Roosevelt, with a car trunk full of currency, to pay for a revolution in the streets that brought the corrupt Shah back to run the country as the foremost U.S. military base in the Middle East.   The U.S. oil majors moved in immediately and grabbed important concessions.  When another revolution under the Ayatollahs evicted the Shah in 1979 and nationalized the oil reserves, the grinding enmity between Iran and America began which persists to this day.  Several long afternoons spent with a disheartened Kermit Roosevelt while I was researching my book The Old Boys filled in a lot of the details.

There is an analogous process behind what happened more recently in Iraq.  When Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party came to power in Iraq they nationalized the Iraqi oil fields.  We lived with that and actively assisted Hussein throughout his war with Iran.  Ultimately, we invaded Iraq on the WMD pretext and left the shaky and vulnerable Shiite government  that presides at the moment.  Meanwhile, oil drillers from many places, especially the American majors and Halliburton, are back in Iraq and hard at work.

The notion that we are the disinterested Good Guys around the planet, righting international wrongs and feeding the needy, is overdue for an infusion of reality.  If the exponents of "Radical Islam" are insane and predatory throughout the region, the policies of Western governments and corporations helped  bring a lot of this on.  Highest regards to some of the apologists for our power projections throughout the last several decades, but the fact is we did not go to war over Rwanda, an example of our restraint commonly cited, mostly because there was not enough potential economic profit in an adventure like that to convince our senior policymakers to take their chances and risk paying the price.  Bill Clinton  might have preferred to have intervened retroactively, but at the time the rewards simply did not approach the political risks.

 If we can stop repeating the mistakes of the past, and confront out true motives, perhaps it will not prove necessary to take our beatings in one unproductive and depleting war after another. Or put our constitutional rights in danger by attempting to suppress dissent.  For more, attend our discussion at the St. Petersburg campus of the University of South Florida on Friday, February 27.  We will be taking names.

Cheers, always,

Burton Hersh

Monday, February 2, 2015

Other Peoples' Wars

Countryconspirators,

Again, leading with my apologia.  I have not been active on this blog for a while, and don't I know it?  The novel I have been working on, Comanche Country, picked up so much momentum and whipsawed its own plot with so many surprises that it absorbed my days and nights until I finally finished it last week.  All you aficianados can get a running start toward this last book in the Landau saga by ordering a copy of the first book in the trilogy, The Hedge Fund, either from Amazon or by buying it directly -- and inexpensively -- at Haslams in St. Petersburg, FL or Gibsons in Concord, NH.  If you want to understand, grinning all the way, why what happens happens let the misadventures of the Landaus clue you in.

What prompts this outburst today is word in The New York Times this morning that the administration is considering supplying "lethal weaponry" to the Ukraine government in Kiev.  However duplicitous the involvement of Moscow in Ukraine may be, there is a large population in the Eastern section of the country that prefers to rejoin Russia, and what is playing out there is in essence a civil war. Meddling in other peoples' civil wars has cost us heavily and set us back throughout most of the last half century, and before we back ourselves into another disaster we ought to reconsider.

I remember well the heartbreaking background details of our misadventure in Viet Nam.  Pushed through by John Foster Dulles, whose evangelistic imperialism inclined him to want to send troops into the Hungarian revolution and the collapsing French efforts in Viet Nam until Eisenhower stepped on both proposals, a program was developed that led to the dispatch of the U.S. Navy to cart over a million North Vietnamese Catholics down the coast to Saigon once the provisional peace treaty was signed in 1954.  Dulles had agreed to abide by the countrywide vote scheduled for 1956, which installed Ho Chi Minh.  Dulles reneged.  Instead, prodded by Cardinal Spellman, the Diems, strict Catholics, were pushed into office by American planners and replaced the local Buddhist administrators all over South Vietnam with Catholic refugees from the north,  The Buddhists were incensed and began to form the cadre of what became the Viet Cong.  I got a lot of this from my friend Nick Natsios, who was the CIA station chief in Saigon before we began to intervene militarily.

Civil war broke out.  I remember how angry President Kennedy was at David Halberstam, the N.Y. Times upstart in country and a classmate of mine in college, when he began to report on the "Buddhist  barbecues"  -- self-immolations -- and the corruption of the Diems, longtime Kennedy family friends. When another of my classmates and a personal friend, Sam Adams, a CIA analyst, concluded that there were many times as many Viet Cong around as our projections would admit he was bounced from that Agency.  To admit that would have meant hugely augmenting U. S. troops on the ground, politically unacceptable for Lyndon Johnson.  Years later Richard Helms, head of CIA operations at the time, told me that Adams was right, but who wanted to confront LBJ with those numbers?

As it all played out there were millions of Vietnamese killed, 60,000 U.S. dead, hundreds of thousands of GIs permanently ruined, if not with wounds with drugs, and a national debt it took decades to pay down, at the expense of all public services and efforts to rebuild the national infrastructure.  And still, we lost, utterly.  Their little civil war set us back a generation.  And obviously the same can be said of our stumbling around in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Must we do this again?  So soon, so avoidably?  We ought to be very, very careful about electing a warhawk to the presidency if a cold-blooded peacenik like Obama is tempted to intervene in Ukraine.

Think about all that.  Meanwhile, if you live in or are visiting the Tampa Bay Area I would be very pleased to meet any of y'all at the St. Petersburg Conference on World Affairs, presented on the St. Petersburg campus of the University of Southern Florida.  University Student Center, 200 Sixth Ave. S.  I will be on a panel on Friday, February 27 at 9 AM on the subject:  Can We Keep Our Rights and Protect  Our Country Too?

Meanwhile, buy The Hedge Fund.  It will be the best $13 you ever spent.

Cheers,

Burton Hersh