by Mitchell Plitnick
In his speech at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Professor Steven Salaita, who was “de-hired” quite suddenly after the university’s chancellor faced strong pressure from major donors objecting to Salaita’s tweets about Israel’s massive military campaign in Gaza, issued this warning: “As the Center for Constitutional Rights and [...]]]>
by Mitchell Plitnick
In his speech at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Professor Steven Salaita, who was “de-hired” quite suddenly after the university’s chancellor faced strong pressure from major donors objecting to Salaita’s tweets about Israel’s massive military campaign in Gaza, issued this warning: “As the Center for Constitutional Rights and other groups have been tracking, this is part of a nationwide, concerted effort by wealthy and well-organized groups to attack pro-Palestinian students and faculty and silence their speech. This risks creating a Palestinian exception to the First Amendment and to academic freedom.”
At Ohio University, the disturbing reality of the different treatment accorded to pro-Israel, as opposed to pro-Palestinian views supports Salaita’s statement. Of course, the treatment of Salaita is, itself, rock-solid evidence of this point. That is especially true since the university’s chancellor, Phyllis Wise, has backed off her initial claim that Salaita’s de-hire was caused not by his views but by the allegedly “uncivil” way he expressed them. She has since admitted that she faced pressure from influential figures around the university, i.e. major donors.
But a report today in Ha’aretz on an incident at Ohio University offers an even clearer view. The president of the student senate at OU, Megan Marzec, used the opportunity of taking the ALS Ice-bucket challenge to make a statement about Gaza. She wore a shirt that urged divestment from Israel, stated that the blood in her bucket (which was, of course, fake) represented the Palestinians that Israel had “murdered and displaced,” and dumped the bucket over her head.
The response from the organized Jewish community on the OU campus was swift and quite typical. Ha’aretz quotes the leader of a pro-Israel campus group, Becky Sebo: “Her video has kind of torn the campus apart. My initial response was complete shock. We’ve never had any BDS [boycott, divestment and sanctions] movement on our campus, have always had a very open, welcoming community.” Now, she said, “Jewish students in particular are feeling very singled out by the video. Many Jewish students are feeling concerned about their safety and how other students will respond to these accusations against Israel.”
This hyper-sensitivity represents a complete reversal of reality, among other things. There is not a single report of Jewish students being harassed, much less assaulted, as a result of Marzec’s video. But Marzec herself has drawn death threats and hate mail. So much so that Homeland Security has gotten involved on campus. Of course, the pro-Israel groups, no doubt quite sincerely, condemned and called for an end to such acts. But let us ask the question: who has legitimate reason to fear for their safety?
There are also other dimensions to this story. Consider the words of Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) Center on Extremism. “The students who want to present a non-biased pro-Israel view have their work cut out for them because there are going to be a lot of efforts to delegitimize their point of view. I anticipate we’ll see more anti-Israel activities than ever before.”
Just read those words, and the thinking is revealed. “A non-biased pro-Israel view.” That is an obvious oxymoron. If the view is pro-Israel, or if it is pro-Palestinian, it is, by definition, biased. What Segal implies here is that any unbiased view would be pro-Israel and any other conclusion can only come about as the result of bias.
And then there’s this whole argument about “de-legitimizing,” whether it is about Israel or of points of view. The working definition of this “de-legitimization” seems to be centered around any argument against Israeli policies, against Zionism, or against any kind of support for the Palestinians. The point of debate, of argument, is to establish that your view has more merit than the opposing one. That should be encouraged (as, indeed, Jewish tradition does), not feared. And certainly, it must not be stamped down.
The shallow arguments get even better. The Director of the OU’s Hillel (a national Jewish student organization), Rabbi Danielle Leshaw, demonstrated just how far the so-called “pro-Israel community” has departed from Jewish traditions and more universal values of open discussion and debating difficult issues.
“Your video marginalizes and isolates students,” Leshaw wrote in an open letter to Marzec published in The Post. “It makes Jewish parents want to bring their kids back home to the safety of the Jewish suburbs …. you need to step down, and give somebody else the chance to lead our Ohio University student population. Somebody that won’t polarize, or divide, or marginalize, or ‘other,’ or cause hysteria, or make students feel unsafe.”
Leshaw, it must be noted, is far from a conservative voice, and she is, herself, no stranger to criticizing pro-Israel programs. She also strongly disagrees with Marzec’s view of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Her call for Marzec to resign as student senate president is “Not because of your politics, but because of your lack of awareness, compassion, and mostly, because of your lack of vision.”
Let’s unpack Rabbi Leshaw’s thinking. Just how does Marzec’s video “marginalize and isolate students?” She presents a political statement, at a time when the Israeli military was acting in so brutal a manner that even their American colleagues, who are themselves quite familiar with killing civilians, were shocked. One wonders: If someone had done the exact same video during Russia’s aggression against Chechnya 15 years ago, would anyone have been concerned that Russian students were marginalized and isolated? Of course not, mostly because they wouldn’t have been and because everyone would have been applauding the strong statements against the massive damage being done to civilians, and rightly so.
Marzec’s video, Rabbi Leshaw says, “…makes Jewish parents want to bring their kids back home to the safety of the Jewish suburbs?” That is a familiar and tired argument, one that got badly worn out during the battles for school integration and during the civil rights movement. Just substitute “White” for Jewish, and the sentence says the very same thing. It is irrational fear of the other, something that needs to be confronted, not accommodated.
Rabbi Leshaw also says that Megan’s video makes “alumni want to pull their funding.” I wonder if she thought about that complaint before putting it in her letter. An apparently liberal woman believes that donors should have the ability to stop students from making controversial political statements? Would she have said the same about protests against the Vietnam War or for women’s rights back in the 1960s and 70s? Because surely there were those alumni who took similar offense to bra-burning demonstrations back then. No, it is only opposition to Israeli policies that merits such kowtowing, I suspect.
Rabbi Leshaw also says that Megan’s video “makes people threaten” the university and its programs, a disturbing echo of Israel’s self-serving and unsellable (outside of the US and Israel, that is) claim that all those Palestinian deaths were Hamas’ fault. Defying such bullying is why Rabbi Leshaw thinks Marzec should step down, rather than seeing it for what it is: precisely the sort of action that a student leader must take if they are to ever be leaders for social change outside the university. The same would be true if this was a pro-Israel statement. Those who support Israel’s policies or feel they must defend Israel should also not give in to any attempts to intimidate them into silence. It is not the opinion that matters, and on that point, Rabbi Leshaw claims to agree. So would she have the same objections if the issue was not Israel? Given her professed values, it seems doubtful.
Megan Marzac sees the Israeli occupation and then the shockingly brutal onslaught on Gaza. She believes that these should be opposed and future incidents prevented, and believes that the global Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement is the best way to achieve that. She lacks neither awareness nor compassion. Her statement was one of condemnation of repeated and ongoing human rights violations. That demonstrates considerable awareness and compassion, whether you agree with her views or not.
Is it Marzac’s lack of vision then? Well, it is fair to say that her identification as student senate president gives the impression that she was doing this with some sort of sanction from the senate, which apparently was not the case. That’s an error, but such a mistake is hardly grounds for her removal, especially since she subsequently made it clear that this was her own action.
In any case, the notion that strong support for the Palestinians and even harsh criticism of Israel is somehow threatening to Jews has to be challenged. It is a false accusation, but more importantly, it is one in a long list of bullying tactics that seek to silence support for the Palestinians on campus and more broadly, in the public discourse. Those tactics include attempts to legislate against boycotts of Israel (all of which have failed thus far), manipulating organizations by threatening their funding, harassing media outlets when they give space for pro-Palestinian views, and claiming victimhood when they themselves are the victimizer.
Megan Marzac did what student activists should do: she made a bold statement. The response from the allegedly pro-Israel community has been nothing short of the worst kind of bullying, even aside from the extremists who have threatened her with physical harm. Do these people believe that Israel’s case is so weak that it cannot withstand public debate? It seems so, but that is only true because they are making the wrong argument. They are working to make Israel an exception to international laws of war, and supporting Israel’s regular violation of Palestinian rights through Israel’s occupation regime (as thoroughly documented by many Israeli human rights groups like B’Tselem, Yesh Din, Gisha and others). These so-called pro-Israelis are trying to defend Israeli military actions that regularly kill far more civilians than combatants, leave infrastructure devastated and make already impoverished people even more desperate.
What if they tried making the honest case that what is really needed is, quite simply, equal rights for all and a homeland where Jews and Palestinians can flee to if they are facing persecution and where both peoples can express and live their national identity, in whatever political configuration? Maybe then they wouldn’t resort to bullying tactics because they’re so terrified of an honest, open discussion in the public arena.
Photo: Megan Marzec, president of Ohio University’s student senate, at a Sept. 1o meeting.
]]>by Henry Precht
Two significant anniversaries this month: the 1914 beginning of fighting in World War I in Europe and the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident in Vietnam.
The outbreak of conflict 100 years ago followed a period of intense diplomacy within and between two alliances. Germany and Austria on one side; [...]]]>
by Henry Precht
Two significant anniversaries this month: the 1914 beginning of fighting in World War I in Europe and the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident in Vietnam.
The outbreak of conflict 100 years ago followed a period of intense diplomacy within and between two alliances. Germany and Austria on one side; Russia, France and Britain on the other. Everyone feared German armed forces on land, Britain’s at sea and Russia’s quickly developing potential for both. Better to strike now rather than wait until the other side becomes more powerful; that was the dominant analysis. Statesmen and politicians engaged in stale, cliché-formed, fruitless wheeling and dealing. Both sides were confident a quick victory would be theirs. “Home by Christmas,” was the motto. Few and easily drowned out were the voices of doubt, delay and debate.
The naval incident off Vietnam in which an American ship was allegedly attacked led quickly to a congressional resolution giving the Johnson administration unfettered authority to wage war against the enemy we inherited from the French colonialists. No members of the House and only a couple of senators voted against it; they were both later defeated for re-election. Some time later convincing doubt was cast on the authenticity of the reported incident and accusations of misleading Congress were cast on LBJ. Never mind, as the incident was reported by the government-fed press, the public stood squarely behind their leader, confident of victory. Their support for the expanded conflict was the product of government fraud.
History is replete with euphoric moments at the start of a foreign adventure. Think of Afghanistan and Iraq. “Missions [Still Not] Accomplished.” Cheers — then terrible consequences, then condemnation.
How wrong, how tragically wrong initially were the leaders and their people. The four years of World War I became an utter disaster for its participants and for the future development of all nations: depression, fascism, communism, World War II and the Cold War. Vietnam became perhaps the single greatest unnecessary disaster for the US — economically and politically and for the future course of our national progress — to say nothing of the Vietnamese casualties.
Why did the enthusiastic support for war lead to deep frustrations and perverse choices? The key elements were two, in my opinion: First was the ease of going into war — much easier than taking the risks for peace, less taxing than applying creative imaginations to the issues at hand. Second was the absence of doubt, of questioning, of debate. No one asked: Could the leaders be wrong in committing forces; might there be another choice, a peaceful solution? It’s hard to be coldly analytical when surrounded by mobs calling your dissent traitorous.
Which brings me to two new statistics this month: In the Gaza war, eighty to ninety per cent of Israel’s population endorsed the actions of its army in severely punishing that hapless land. In Washington, one hundred percent of the Senate and House voted their backing for Israel without a single word of regret for the suffering of the Palestinian victims. Plus, they threw in an extra $225 million in military aid for Israeli defense. (Never mind the defense of our own borders or pressing domestic needs.)
Wouldn’t it have been a better outcome for the future of two peoples, if Israelis and Palestinians had sat together and talked through their differences — rather than hurling missiles at each other and breeding fear, distrust and hatred? Wouldn’t it have been wise if Secretary Kerry had been willing to sit and talk with Hamas, rather than keeping them at arm’s length as a “terrorist” band? It might, just might, have advanced his goal of reaching a two-state solution. Of course, while talking, it would have been necessary to deal firmly with Palestinian and Israeli extremists and essential to stand up to the super-loyal fans of Israel in the Congress. No easy options there.
In fact, generous and always reliable American support for Israel makes it unnecessary for the hardline regime even to contemplate compromise with its Palestinian antagonists.
The lessons of World War I and Vietnam are plain for all of us to read. If the public is willingly led by self- and special-interest politicians with neither courage nor vision, worse times impend. Not just for the regimes directly involved, but also unhappily for their loyal but misled and fearful citizens.
]]>by Robert E. Hunter
What have we learned in the last half-century about America’s role in the world, and especially about going to war? A neat question, and one that is framed from my own experience, if readers will indulge me.
Exactly 50 years ago today, I was working in the Lyndon [...]]]>
by Robert E. Hunter
What have we learned in the last half-century about America’s role in the world, and especially about going to war? A neat question, and one that is framed from my own experience, if readers will indulge me.
Exactly 50 years ago today, I was working in the Lyndon Johnson White House, on the domestic side — mostly on education and other aspects of the Great Society, as deputy to Douglass Cater, one of the giants of the trade. I was 24, though with two years of foreign policy under my belt, as a Fulbright Scholar at the London School of Economics. I cite my tyro status only as partial exculpation for not foretelling the tragedy that was about to ensue for the United States as it became more deeply embroiled in a conflict, to borrow from Neville Chamberlain, “in a far-away country between peoples of whom we know nothing.”
A half-century ago, I read in my White House office the press release just put out by the White House that talked of an attack by North Vietnam on two US destroyers, the Maddox and the Turner Joy, in a place called the Tonkin Gulf. From that point on, to use a common but in retrospect bitter phrase, “we were off to the races.” The Tonkin Gulf Resolution — technically the Southeast Asia Resolution — followed, and the US became mired in a conflict the purposes of which are still being debated.
But as a White House staff person with top-secret security clearance, I had an advantage over the average American. Rummaging through the files after I joined the staff in July 1964, I came across a draft that had been sitting there for some time which, with emendations, became — you guessed it — the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Ready to be used, just waiting for an “incident” to set it in motion.
It is now generally understood that the “attack” on the two US destroyers was likely a radar blip and the “fog-of-not-quite-war,” and that, in any event, the US had been engaged in provocative naval actions against North Vietnam.
But so what? I do not ask that question to be cynical, but to introduce another important fact: the US entry into what became the Vietnam War (with sidebars in Laos and Cambodia) was at first immensely popular in the country. It was even more popular in Congress, with a unanimous vote for the Resolution in the House and with only two negative votes in the Senate: Ernest Gruening of Alaska and Wayne Morse of Oregon (both Democrats), and both were defeated in their next re-election campaigns. The floor manager for the resolution in the Senate was the Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. J. William Fulbright. Later he argued loud and long that he had been lied to, and that was most likely true. Yet again, so what? He, like the rest of Congress, was primed for such an incident and a full-throated response, which implemented a pledge from President Kennedy’s Inaugural Address: “we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
It was only after, when the magnitude of the war became apparent — in particular the impact of the draft on the American middle class and the disproportionate Vietnam service by African-Americans on Great Society programs — that the pendulum of public opinion began to swing.
Another fact worth considering: the actual decisions on the US escalation in Vietnam (given that the first “advisors” were sent under Eisenhower and the first “escalation” took place under Kennedy) were taken by a small group of people in the administration; almost all of them had been appointed by President John F. Kennedy. They included Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy (and, in time, his State Department brother, William Bundy), and the brothers Rostow — Walt Whitman and Eugene Debs. Lyndon Baines Johnson’s leading speechwriter for the Vietnam escalation was Richard Goodman who, like many of the other Kennedy holdovers in the Johnson administration, later turned against the war (a good thing, I believe) and also personally against Johnson (a bad thing, given their early role in pushing Johnson to escalate — though, of course, a president is ultimately responsible).
One irony is that a decade earlier, when the French were besieged at Dien Bien Phu and asking for US military help, President Eisenhower consulted with Congress. The Democratic leader in the Senate gave Eisenhower the answer he wanted (“Don’t even think about it”). That was Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Fast-forward to 2003. A small group of people in the George W. Bush administration, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputies, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice — aided-and-abetted by Secretary of State Colin Powell — drove the inexperienced President Bush into what was clearly the worst foreign policy mistakes by the United States since Vietnam: the invasion of Iraq.
But also think of the background. While the margins were narrower in Congress and in the nation than at the time of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, invading Iraq still had majority support, and an overwhelming majority of the US media formed a cheerleading section for the invasion. The “incident” then did not have the immediacy of the Tonkin Gulf attack, but it was a delayed and secondary reaction to 9/11 — and, as with the purported attack on US vessels 40 years before, it was viewed as an affront to America.
So what does all this mean for us, now? Have we learned anything from these two events, which have done much to shape America’s role in the world during the last half-century, and which, in the case of invading Iraq, continues to pose a serious challenge to US foreign policy? Would that I could say that we have been chastened by both developments. At least it is possible to say that the current president, Barack Obama, has not let himself be bamboozled or buffaloed by those in the Congress, the media, and in some parts of the country — but not even a plurality — who want him to get the US again embroiled in wars that do not directly impact US security. He has been getting the US out of Iraq and Afghanistan, though neither looks very good right now — but how much does the current course of events in these countries directly impact US security? The debate on this question has not even begun.
Obama has also so far resisted going to war with Iran (despite heavy pressure to do so from Israel and its Congressional and media supporters). He did not go to war to get Syria to get rid of its chemical weapons (and has received virtually no credit for achieving that result without firing a shot). He has also kept the US out of war in various other places including Gaza, Yemen and Pakistan (though the US is engaged with drones in the latter two places), kept the US from putting “boots on the ground” in Libya, and resisted meeting (Russian) fire with (NATO) fire in Crimea and elsewhere in Ukraine. The “jury may still be out” in regard to each of these developments, but so far Obama has not taken steps that would be irrevocable, that would enlist the unthinking passions of the US Congress and American people, and that would represent his losing control of his own administration, as was (arguably) true with Johnson and (certainly) true with George W. Bush.
This is at least a start on the major debates we need to have about the proper role of the US in the world, especially regarding issues of war and peace, the impact of our actions on America’s standing as “the indispensable nation,” and the renewal of our capacity for genuine strategic thinking that died soon after the end of the Cold War and that is still absent even in the Obama administration.
]]>by Daniel Luban
Earlier this year, William Saletan published a typically contrarian piece titled “In Defense of Drones”. The subtitle — “they’re the worst form of war, except for all the others” — gives a good indication of the general line of argument; Saletan suggested that the collateral damage of the [...]]]>
by Daniel Luban
Earlier this year, William Saletan published a typically contrarian piece titled “In Defense of Drones”. The subtitle — “they’re the worst form of war, except for all the others” — gives a good indication of the general line of argument; Saletan suggested that the collateral damage of the drone war has been far smaller than in past US military campaigns, and that drones remain a necessary evil far preferable to conventional bombing.
This view of drones as comparatively precise and surgical may be too optimistic; one recent study of the war in Afghanistan by a US military adviser suggested that drone strikes were actually “an order of magnitude more likely to result in civilian casualties per engagement” than attacks from manned aircraft. And there is also some evidence to suggest that drones exact a psychological toll on civilian populations over and above conventional bombing that is not reflected in raw casualty statistics.
But for all that, I think there’s something to Saletan’s argument. That’s not to say (as he seems to) that we should be okay with the way the US is waging the war on terror. It’s merely to say that we shouldn’t attribute all the evils of the war on terror to one specific weapon (drones) in a way that implies that conventional bombers or cruise missiles or commando raids would somehow be gentler or more humane. (In fact, all of these remain key parts of the US repertoire.) Similarly, we should be wary of insisting on the unprecedented brutality of the drone war in ways that minimize the far greater tolls exacted by conventional military actions in the past.
Any critique of the war on terror, in other words, should focus less on means and more on ends. The key question is whether the US should be engaged in assassinating large numbers of suspected militants around the world; the weapons by which it does so are of secondary importance. Public discomfort with drones makes it tempting to put them at the center of the debate — but if the upshot is simply that the US should stop killing targets with Predators and double down on killing them with special forces, this would be a hollow victory or even a Pyrrhic one.
I get into these issues in more depth in a recent review essay for Dissent, where I tried to put the war on terror in a somewhat broader historical perspective by examining three very good recent books: Nick Turse’s Kill Anything That Moves, Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars, and Mark Mazzetti’s The Way of the Knife. A brief excerpt:
[T]here is some risk of fetishizing The Drone at the expense of a wider view of the American War on Terror. The visceral creepiness of the new technology has been crucial in raising awareness of the human consequences of this war, but it can distract us from the fact that Predators and Reapers are simply one type of weapon by which it is being waged. Americans may shiver at the thought of Hellfire missiles falling out of a clear blue sky, but most continue to thrill to the exploits of Seal Team Six, and the latter is just as fundamental a feature of the new American way of war as the former. So, too, are the Kalashnikov-wielding militiamen on the payroll of U.S.-backed warlords in Somalia and the programmers conducting cyber-sabotage against the Iranian nuclear enrichment program. Technological innovation has been key to American military policy since 9/11, but it has by no means been the only driver of change. As the books under review make clear, we might better view these years as a story of the U.S. national security apparatus gradually breaking free of the restraints—both of law and of public scrutiny—imposed on it in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate. It is also a story of the military and intelligence wings of this apparatus becoming increasingly intertwined and indistinguishable from one another. A wider view of the War on Terror may be necessary, but it is by no means more comforting.
Those interested should read the whole thing.
]]>by Robert E. Hunter
Now, after careful deliberation, I have decided that the United States should take military action against Syrian regime targets. This would not be an open-ended intervention. We would not put boots on the ground. Instead, our action would be designed to be limited in duration and scope.
I’ve [...]]]>
by Robert E. Hunter
Now, after careful deliberation, I have decided that the United States should take military action against Syrian regime targets. This would not be an open-ended intervention. We would not put boots on the ground. Instead, our action would be designed to be limited in duration and scope.
I’ve made a second decision: I will seek authorization for the use of force from the American people’s representatives in Congress….this morning, I spoke with all four congressional leaders, and they’ve agreed to schedule a debate and then a vote as soon as Congress comes back into session.
–President Barack Obama, August 31, 2013
President Barack Obama’s announcement this weekend that he has “decided that the United States should take military action against Syrian regime targets” is remarkable for many reasons, in particular because he coupled it with a commitment to “seek authorization for the use of force from…Congress.”
The first remarkable element is that he has already taken the decision to strike before fully engaging Congress, instead of the usual practice of reserving judgment on possible military action until that process is complete. This immediately begs the question “What if Congress balks?” Does the president go ahead anyway? And if Congress turns him down — after all, he is not “consulting” but “seek[ing] authorization” — does that affect his (and America’s) credibility, as the author of the “red line” against the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government? Proponents of a military strike are already making that point, although, in this writer’ judgment, it is grossly overdrawn, and no one who wishes us ill should put much weight on this proposition.
The best counterargument is that, at a time when the UN and others are still assembling evidence on the use of chemical weapons (undeniable) and “who did it” (probably the Syrian government), waiting awhile is not a bad thing. Obama covered the point about risk of delay by citing the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff “…that our capacity to execute this mission is not time-sensitive; it will be effective tomorrow, or next week, or one month from now.” Taking the time “to be sure” is thus useful; as is the value in trying to build support in Congress, especially given the clarity of memory about the process leading up to the US-led invasion of Iraq a decade ago, when the intelligence “books” were “cooked” by Bush administration officials, as well as by the British government.
The second remarkable element is that the president did not ask Congress to reconvene in Washington in the next day or two, but is content to wait until members return on September 9th. This provides time for the administration to build its case on Capitol Hill, supporting a decision the president says he has already taken; but it also risks diminishing the perceived sense of importance that his team, notably Secretary of State John Kerry, here and here, has been building about the enormity of what has been done.
A related factor is that the United States will not be responding to a direct assault on the United States or its people abroad, civilian or military, and the case for America’s taking the lead is less about our interests than what, at other times, has been called America’s role as the “indispensable nation.” As has been made clear by all and sundry, if the US does not act, no one else will shoulder the responsibility. But this lack of a direct threat to the nation heightens the president’s need to make his case that the US must take the lead.
The need to make the case to Congress was hammered home by the British parliament’s rejection of a UK role in any attack on Syria, despite the lead taken by Prime Minister David Cameron and Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary William Hague in pressing for military action — and thus helping to “box in” the US president. No doubt, what Parliament did influenced Obama’s decision to get the US Congress firmly on record in supporting his decision to act.
A third remarkable element, though not surprising, is that the administration has apparently given up on the United Nations. To be sure, Russia and China would veto in the Security Council any resolution calling for force; but it would have been common practice — and may yet be done — for the US to apply to the recognized court of world opinion by at least trying, loud and long, to establish an international legal basis for military action, even it fails to achieve UN agreement. There is precedent for this approach, notably over Kosovo in 1998, where the UN failed to act (threat of vetoes), but the US at least made a “college try” and demonstrated the point it sought to make. This made it easier for individual NATO allies to adopt the fudge that each member state could decide for itself the legal basis on which it was prepared to act.
But the most remarkable element of the President’s statement is the likely precedent he is setting in terms of engaging Congress in decisions about the use of force, not just through “consultations,” but in formal authorization. This gets into complex constitutional and legal territory, and will lead many in Congress (and elsewhere) to expect Obama — and his successors — to show such deference to Congress in the future, as, indeed, many members of Congress regularly demand.
But seeking authorization for the use of force from Congress as opposed to conducting consultations has long since become the exception rather than the rule. The last formal congressional declarations of war, called for by Article One of the Constitution, were against Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary on June 4, 1942. Since then, even when Congress has been engaged, it has either been through non-binding resolutions or under the provisions of the War Powers Resolution of November 1973. That congressional effort to regain some lost ground in decisions to send US forces into harm’s way was largely a response to administration actions in the Vietnam War, especially the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of August 1964, which was actually prepared in draft before the triggering incident. The War Powers Resolution does not prevent a president from using force on his own authority, but only imposes post facto requirements for gaining congressional approval or ending US military action. In the current circumstances, military strikes of a few days’ duration, those provisions would almost certainly not come into play.
There were two basic reasons for abandoning the constitutional provision of a formal declaration of war. One was that such a declaration, once turned on, would be hard to turn off, and could lead to a demand for unconditional surrender (as with Germany and Japan in World War II), even when that would not be in the nation’s interests — notably in the Korean War. The more compelling reason for ignoring this requirement was the felt need, during the Cold War, for the president to be able to respond almost instantly to a nuclear attack on the United States or on very short order to a conventional military attack on US and allied forces in Europe.
With the Cold War now on “the ash heap of history,” this second argument should long since have fallen by the wayside, but it has not. Presidents are generally considered to have the power to commit US military forces, subject to the provisions of the War Powers Resolution, which have never been properly tested. But why? Even with the 9/11 attacks on the US homeland, the US did not respond immediately, but took time to build the necessary force and plans to overthrow the Taliban regime in Afghanistan (and, anyway, if President George W. Bush had asked on 9/12 for a declaration of war, he no doubt would have received it from Congress, very likely unanimously).
As times goes by, therefore, what President Obama said on August 29, 2013 could well be remembered less for what it will mean regarding the use of chemical weapons in Syria and more for what it implies for the reestablishment of a process of full deliberation and fully-shared responsibilities with the Congress for decisions of war-peace, as was the historic practice until 1950. This proposition will be much debated, as it should be; but if the president’s declaration does become precedent (as, in this author’s judgment, it should be, except in exceptional circumstances where a prompt military response is indeed in the national interest), he will have done an important and lasting service to the nation, including a potentially significant step in reducing the excessive militarization of US foreign policy.
There would be one added benefit: members of Congress, most of whom know little about the outside world and have not for decades had to take seriously their constitutional responsibilities for declaring war, would be required to become better-informed participants in some of the most consequential decisions the nation has to take, which, not incidentally, also involve risks to the lives of America’s fighting men and women.
Photo Credit: Truthout.org
]]>via Tom Dispatch
For half a century we have been arguing about “the Vietnam War.” Is it possible that we didn’t know what we were talking about? After all that has been written (some 30,000 [...]]]>
via Tom Dispatch
Now, in Kill Anything that Moves, Nick Turse has for the first time put together a comprehensive picture, written with mastery and dignity, of what American forces actually were doing in Vietnam. The findings disclose an almost unspeakable truth. Meticulously piecing together newly released classified information, court-martial records, Pentagon reports, and firsthand interviews in Vietnam and the United States, as well as contemporaneous press accounts and secondary literature, Turse discovers that episodes of devastation, murder, massacre, rape, and torture once considered isolated atrocities were in fact the norm, adding up to a continuous stream of atrocity, unfolding, year after year, throughout that country.
It has been Turse’s great achievement to see that, thanks to the special character of the war, its prime reality — an accurate overall picture of what physically was occurring on the ground — had never been assembled; that with imagination and years of dogged work this could be done; and that even a half-century after the beginning of the war it still should be done. Turse acknowledges that, even now, not enough is known to present this picture in statistical terms. To be sure, he offers plenty of numbers — for instance the mind-boggling estimates that during the war there were some two million civilians killed and some five million wounded, that the United States flew 3.4 million aircraft sorties, and that it expended 30 billion pounds of munitions, releasing the equivalent in explosive force of 640 Hiroshima bombs.
Yet it would not have been enough to simply accumulate anecdotal evidence of abuses. Therefore, while providing an abundance of firsthand accounts, he has supplemented this approach. Like a fabric, a social reality — a town, a university, a revolution, a war — has a pattern and a texture. No fact is an island. Each one is rich in implications, which, so to speak, reach out toward the wider area of the surrounding facts. When some of these other facts are confirmed, they begin to reveal the pattern and texture in question.
Turse repeatedly invites us to ask what sort of larger picture each story implies. For example, he writes:
“If one man and his tiny team could claim more KIAs [killed in action] than an entire battalion without raising red flags among superiors; if a brigade commander could up the body count by picking off civilians from his helicopter with impunity; if a top general could institutionalize atrocities through the profligate use of heavy firepower in areas packed with civilians — then what could be expected down the line, especially among heavily armed young infantrymen operating in the field for weeks, angry, tired, and scared, often unable to locate the enemy and yet relentlessly pressed for kills?”
Like a tightening net, the web of stories and reports drawn from myriad sources coalesces into a convincing, inescapable portrait of this war — a portrait that, as an American, you do not wish to see; that, having seen, you wish you could forget, but that you should not forget; and that the facts force you to see and remember and take into account when you ask yourself what the United States has done and been in the last half century, and what it still is doing and still is.
Scorched Earth in I Corps
My angle of vision on these matters is a highly particular one. In early August 1967, I arrived in I Corps, the northernmost district of American military operations in what was then South Vietnam. I was there to report for the New Yorker on the “air war.” The phrase was a misnomer. The Vietnamese foe, of course, had no assets in the air in the South, and so there was no “war” of that description.
There was only the unilateral bombardment of the land and people by the fantastic array of aircraft assembled by the United States in Vietnam. These ranged from the B-52, which laid down a pattern of destruction a mile long and several football fields wide; to fighter bombers capable of dropping, along with much else, 500-pound bombs and canisters of napalm; to the reconfigured DC-3 equipped with a cannon capable of firing 100 rounds per second; to the ubiquitous fleets of helicopters, large and small, that crowded the skies. All this was abetted by continuous artillery fire into “free-fire” zones and naval bombardment from ships just off the coast.
By the time I arrived, the destruction of the villages in the region and the removal of their people to squalid refugee camps was approaching completion. (However, they often returned to their blasted villages, now subject to indiscriminate artillery fire.) Only a few pockets of villages survived. I witnessed the destruction of many of these in Quang Ngai and Quang Tinh provinces from the back seat of small Cessnas called Forward Air Control planes.
As we floated overhead day after day, I would watch long lines of houses burst into flames one after another as troops moved through the area of operation. In the meantime, the Forward Air Controllers were calling in air strikes as requested by radio from troops on the ground. In past operations, the villagers had been herded out of the area into the camps. But this time, no evacuation had been ordered, and the population was being subjected to the full fury of a ground and air assault. A rural society was being torn to pieces before my eyes.
The broad results of American actions in I Corps were thus visible and measurable from the air. No scorched earth policy had been announced but scorched earth had been the result. Still, a huge piece was missing from the puzzle. I was not able to witness most of the significant operations on the ground firsthand. I sought to interview some soldiers but they would not talk, though one did hint at dark deeds. “You wouldn’t believe it so I’m not going to tell you,” he said to me. “No one’s ever going to find out about some things, and after this war is over, and we’ve all gone home, no one is ever going to know.”
In other words, like so many reporters in Vietnam, I saw mainly one aspect of one corner of the war. What I had seen was ghastly, but it was not enough to serve as a basis for generalizations about the conduct of the war as a whole. Just a few years later, in 1969, thanks to the determined efforts of a courageous soldier, Ron Ridenhour, and the persistence of a reporter, Seymour Hersh, one piece of the hidden truth about ground operations in I Corp came to light.
It was the My Lai massacre, in which more than 500 civilians were murdered in cold blood by Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, of the Americal Division. In subsequent years, news of other atrocities in the area filtered into the press, often many years after the fact. For example, in 2003 theToledo Blade disclosed a campaign of torture and murder over a period of months, including the summary execution of two blind men by a “reconnaissance” squad called Tiger Force. Still, no comprehensive picture of the generality of ground operations in the area emerged.
It has not been until the publication of Turse’s book that the everyday reality of which these atrocities were a part has been brought so fully to light. Almost immediately after the American troops arrived in I Corps, a pattern of savagery was established. My Lai, it turns out, was exceptional only in the numbers killed.
Turse offers a massacre at a village called Trieu Ai in October 1967 as a paradigm. A marine company suffered the loss of a man to a booby trap near the village, which had in fact had been mostly burned down by other American forces a few days earlier. Some villagers had, however, returned for their belongings. Now, the Marine company, enraged by its loss but unable to find the enemy, entered the village firing their M-16s, setting fire to any intact houses, and tossing grenades into bomb shelters.
A Marine marched a woman into a field and shot her. Another reported that there were children in the shelters that were being blown up. His superior replied, “Tough shit, they grow up to be VC [Vietcong].” Five or ten people rushed out of a shelter when a grenade was thrown into it. They were cut down in a hail of fire. Turse comments:
“In the story of Trieu Ai one can see virtually the entire war writ small. Here was the repeated aerial bombing and artillery fire… Here was the deliberate burning of peasant homes and the relocation of villagers to refugee camps… Angry troops primed to lash out, often following losses within the unit; civilians trapped in their paths; and officers in the field issuing ambiguous or illegal orders to young men conditioned to obey — that was the basic recipe for many of the mass killings carried out by army soldiers and marines over the years.”
The savagery often extended to the utmost depravity: gratuitous torture, killing for target practice, slaughter of children and babies, gang rape. Consider the following all-too-typical actions of Company B, 1st Battalion, 35th infantry beginning in October 1967:
“The company stumbled upon an unarmed young boy. ‘Someone caught him up on a hill, and they brought him down and the lieutenant asked who wanted to kill him…’ medic Jamie Henry later told army investigators. A radioman and another medic volunteered for the job. The radioman… ’kicked the boy in the stomach and the medic took him around behind a rock and I heard one magazine go off complete on automatic…’
“A few days after this incident, members of that same unit brutalized an elderly man to the point of collapse and then threw him off a cliff without even knowing whether he was dead or alive…
“A couple of days after that, they used an unarmed man for target practice…
“And less than two weeks later, members of Company B reportedly killed five unarmed women…
“Unit members rattled off a litany of other brutal acts committed by the company… [including] a living woman who had an ear cut off while her baby was thrown to the ground and stomped on…”
Pumping Up the Body Count
Turse’s findings completed the picture of the war in I Corps for me. Whatever the policy might have been in theory, the reality, on the ground as in the air, was the scorched earth I had witnessed from the Forward Air Control planes. Whatever the United States thought it was doing in I Corps, it was actuallywaging systematic war against the people of the region.
And so it was, as Turse voluminously documents, throughout the country. Details differed from area to area but the broad picture was the same as the one in I Corps. A case in point is the war in the Mekong Delta, home to some five to six million people in an area of less than 15,000 square miles laced with rivers and canals. In February 1968, General Julian Ewell, soon to be known by Vietnamese and Americans alike as “the Butcher of the Delta,” was placed in charge of the 9th Infantry Division.
In December 1968, he launched Operation Speedy Express. His specialty, amounting to obsession, was increasing “the body count,” ordained by the high command as the key measure of progress in defeating the enemy. Theoretically, only slain soldiers were to be included in that count but — as anyone, soldier or reporter, who spent a half-hour in the field quickly learned — virtually all slain Vietnamese, most of them clearly civilians, were included in the total. The higher an officer’s body count, the more likely his promotion. Privates who turned in high counts were rewarded with mini-vacations. Ewell set out to increase the ratio of supposed enemy soldiers killed to American soldiers killed. Pressure to do so was ratcheted up at all levels in the 9th Division. One of his chiefs of staff “went berserk,” in the words of a later chief of staff.
The means were simple: immensely increase the already staggering firepower being used and loosen the already highly permissive “rules of engagement” by, for example, ordering more night raids. In a typical night episode, Cobra gunships strafed a herd of water buffalo and seven children tending them. All died, and the children were reported as enemy soldiers killed in action.
The kill ratios duly rose from an already suspiciously high 24 “Vietcong” for every dead American to a completely surreal 134 Vietcong per American. The unreality, however, did not simply lie in the inflated kill numbers but in the identities of the corpses. Overwhelmingly, they were not enemy soldiers but civilians. A “Concerned Sergeant” who protested the operation in an anonymous letter to the high command at the time described the results as he witnessed them:
“A battalion would kill maybe 15 to 20 a day. With 4 battalions in the Brigade that would be maybe 40 to 50 a day or 1200 a month 1500, easy. (One battalion claimed almost 1000 body counts one month!) If I am only 10% right, and believe me its lots more, then I am trying to tell you about 120-150 murders, or a My Lay [My Lai] each month for over a year.”
This range of estimates was confirmed in later analyses. Operations in I Corp perhaps depended more on infantry attacks supported by air strikes, while Speedy Express depended more on helicopter raids and demands for high body counts, but the results were the same: indiscriminate warfare, unrestrained by calculation or humanity, on the population of South Vietnam.
Turse reminds us that off the battlefield, too, casual violence — such as the use of military trucks to run over Vietnamese on the roads, seemingly for entertainment — was widespread. The commonest terms for Vietnamese were the racist epithets “gooks,” “dinks,” and “slopes.” And the U.S. military machine was supplemented by an equally brutal American-South Vietnamese prison system in which torture was standard procedure and extrajudicial executions common.
How did it happen? How did a country that believes itself to be guided by principles of decency permit such savagery to break out and then allow it to continue for more than a decade?
Why, when the first Marines arrived in I Corps in early 1965, did so many of them almost immediately cast aside the rules of war as well as all ordinary scruples and sink to the lowest levels of barbarism? What chains of cause and effect linked “the best and the brightest” of America’s top universities and corporations who were running the war with the murder of those buffalo boys in the Mekong Delta?
How did the gates of hell open? This is a different question from the often-asked one of how the United States got into the war. I cannot pretend to begin to do it justice here. The moral and cognitive seasickness that has attended the Vietnam War from the beginning afflicts us still. Yet Kill Anything that Movespermits us, finally, to at least formulate the question in light of the actual facts of the case.
Reflections would certainly seem in order for a country that, since Vietnam, has done its best to unlearn even such lessons as were learned from that debacle in preparation for other misbegotten wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here, however, are a few thoughts, offered in a spirit of thinking aloud.
The Fictitious War and the Real One
Roughly since the massacre at My Lai was revealed, people have debated whether the atrocities of the war were the product of decisions by troops on the ground or of high policy, of orders issued from above — whether they were “aberrations” or “operations.” The first school obviously lends itself to bad-apple-in-a-healthy-barrel thinking, blaming individual units for unacceptable behavior while exonerating the higher ups; the second tends to exonerate the troops while pinning the blame on their superiors.
Turse’s book shows that the barrel was rotten through and through. It discredits the “aberration” school once and for all. Yet it does not exactly offer support for the orders-from-the-top school either. Perhaps the problem always was that these alternatives framed the situation inaccurately. The relationship between policy and practice in Vietnam was, it turns out, far more peculiar than the two choices suggest.
It’s often said that truth is the first casualty of war. In Vietnam, however, it was not just that the United States was doing one thing while saying another (for example, destroying villages while claiming to protect them), true as that was. Rather, from its inception the war’s structure was shaped by an attempt to superimpose a false official narrative on a reality of a wholly different character.
In the official war, the people of South Vietnam were resisting the attempts of the North Vietnamese to conquer them in the name of world communism. The United States was simply assisting them in their patriotic resistance. In reality, most people in South Vietnam, insofar as they were politically minded, were nationalists who sought to push out foreign conquerors: first, the French, then the Japanese, and next the Americans, along with their client state, the South Vietnamese government which was never able to develop any independent strength in a land supposedly its own. This fictitious official narrative was not added on later to disguise unpalatable facts; it was baked into the enterprise from the outset.
Accordingly, the collision of policy and reality first took place on the ground in Trieu Ai village and its like. The American forces, including their local commanders, were confronted with a reality that the policymakers had not faced and would not face for many long years. Expecting to be welcomed as saviors, the troops found themselves in a sea of nearly universal hostility.
No manual was handed out in Washington to deal with the unexpected situation. It was left to the soldiers to decide what to do. Throughout the country, they started to improvise. To this extent, policy was indeed being made in the field. Yet it was not within the troops’ power to reverse basic policy; they could not, for instance, have withdrawn themselves from the whole misconceived exercise. They could only respond to the unexpected circumstances in which they found themselves.
The result would combine an incomprehensible and impossible mission dictated from above (to win the “hearts and minds” of a population already overwhelmingly hostile, while pulverizing their society) and locally conceived illegal but sometimes vague orders that left plenty of room for spontaneous, rage-driven improvisation on the ground. In this gap between the fiction of high policy and the actuality of the real war was born the futile, abhorrent assault on the people of Vietnam.
The improvisatory character of all this, as Turse emphasizes, can be seen in the fact that while the abuses of civilians were pervasive they were not consistent. As he summarizes what a villager in one brutalized area told him decades later, “Sometimes U.S. troops handed out candies. Sometimes they shot at people. Sometimes they passed through a village hardly touching a thing. Sometimes they burned all the homes. ‘We didn’t understand the reasons why the acted in the way they did.’”
Alongside the imaginary official war, then, there grew up the real war on the ground, the one that Turse has, for the first time, adequately described. It is no defense of what happened to point out that, for the troops, it was not so much their orders from on high as their circumstances — what Robert J. Lifton has called “atrocity-producing situations” — that generated their degraded behavior. Neither does such an account provide escape from accountability for the war’s architects without whose blind and misguided policies these infernal situations never would have arisen.
In one further bitter irony, this real war came at a certain point to be partially codified at ever higher levels of command into policies that did translate into orders from the top. In effect, the generals gradually — if absurdly, in light of the supposed goals of the war — sanctioned and promoted the de facto war on the population. Enter General Ewell and his body counts.
In other words, the improvising moved up the chain of command until the soldiers were following orders when they killed civilians, though, as in the case of Ewell, those orders rarely took exactly that form. Nonetheless, the generals sometimes went quite far in formulating these new rules, even when they flagrantly contradicted official policies.
To give one example supplied by Turse, in 1965, General William Westmoreland, who was made commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam in 1964, implicitly declared war on the peasantry of South Vietnam. He said:
“Until now the war has been characterized by a substantial majority of the population remaining neutral. In the past year we have seen an escalation to a higher intensity in the war. This will bring about a moment of decision for the peasant farmer. He will have to choose if he stays alive.”
Like his underlings, Westmoreland, was improvising. This new policy of, in effect, terrorizing the peasantry into submission was utterly inconsistent with the Washington narrative of winning hearts and minds, but it was fully consistent with everything his forces were actually doing and about to do in I Corps and throughout the country.
A Skyscraper of Lies
One more level of the conflict needs to be mentioned in this context. Documents show that, as early as the mid-1960s, the key mistaken assumptions of the war — that the Vietnamese foe was a tentacle of world communism, that the war was a front in the Cold War rather than an episode in the long decolonization movement of the twentieth century, that the South Vietnamese were eager for rescue by the United States — were widely suspected to be mistaken in official Washington. But one other assumption was not found to be mistaken: that whichever administration “lost” Vietnam would likely lose the next election.
Rightly or wrongly, presidents lived in terror of losing the war and so being politically destroyed by a movement of the kind Senator Joe McCarthy launched after the American “loss” of China in 1949. Later, McGeorge Bundy, Lyndon Johnson’s national security advisor, would describe his understanding of the president’s frame of mind at the time this way:
“LBJ isn’t deeply concerned about who governs Laos, or who governs South Vietnam — he’s deeply concerned with what the average American voter is going to think about how he did in the ball game of the Cold War. The great Cold War championship gets played in the largest stadium in the United States and he, Lyndon Johnson, is the quarterback, and if he loses, how does he do in the next election? So don’t lose. Now that’s too simple, but it’s where he is. He’s living with his own political survival every time he looks at these questions.”
In this context, domestic political considerations trumped the substantive reasoning that, once the futility and horror of the enterprise had been revealed, might have led to an end to the war. More and more it was understood to be a murderous farce, but politics dictated that it must continue. As long as this remained the case, no news from Vietnam could lead to a reversal of the war policies.
This was the top floor of the skyscraper of lies that was the Vietnam War. Domestic politics was the largest and most fact-proof of the atrocity-producing situations. Do we imagine that this has changed?
Jonathan Schell is a Fellow at The Nation Institute, and the peace and disarmament correspondent for the Nation magazine. Among many other works, he is the author of The Real War, a collection of his New Yorkerreportage on the Vietnam War.
[Under review in this essay: Nick Turse, Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (Metropolitan Books, 2013). Jonathan Schell’s classic Vietnam books, The Village of Ben Suc and The Military Half, are now collected in The Real War (Da Capo Press).]
This is a joint TomDispatch/Nation article and appears in print in the Nationmagazine.
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