September 10, 2003
Everything Old Is New Again
A new essay by Chalmers Johnson (author of the prescient and indispensable Blowback: The Costs And Consequences Of American Empire) offers an enlightening overview of the dissolution of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire.
Noting the similarities to the current moment in history, Chalmers concludes that, "Roman history suggests that the short, happy life of the American republic is in serious trouble -- and that conversion to a military empire is, to say the least, not the best answer."
So, while we're on the subject of history repeating itself, let's have an all-too-cursory look at two historians' accounts of Vietnam and its consequences. This blog must stress that this exercise is for entertainment purposes only, and that any meaningful inferences will be drawn only by preverts [sic], conspiracy theorists, or pinko wreckers.
We turn first to Gabriel Kolko's Anatomy Of A War. First published in 1985, it's regarded by even the hawks as the definitive general history of the "conflict". In a chapter concerning the economic impact of the war on the United States can be found the following passages:
Economic factors of imperialism cannot be divorced from the political context in which they operate, and immediate economic consequences may quickly subvert the long-range economic rationality of its action.
Recognition of one's weaknesses is more difficult for a nation than for an individual, since states have conflicting interests and ample means of procrastinating. In 1965 the United States chose to do so, falling into an economic imbroglio...which only a quick victory could keep from evolving into a prolonged military and political struggle whose economic costs would greatly accelerate America's defeat.
Most important in making the war budget a source of potential economic mishaps was McNamara's explicit premise in the annual Pentagon requests to Congress that the Revolution's level of military activity would not increase and that the war would be over by the end of June of each fiscal year! Since this meant too little money -- which was politically more palatable -- after 1966 the Pentagon returned to Congress annually for special supplementals for the war...
By the end of 1965 Johnson was ignoring warnings from his Council of Economic Advisers that the war's cost would require a tax increase if a vast budget deficit was to be averted, but even then no one in Washington was fully aware of how high the costs might be. For political reasons the President chose to press for domestic reforms as well as for war...
...by the end of 1966, when Johnson realized that McNamara had underestimated [the war's costs] by $11 billion, the President had lost confidence in his defense secretary and was stuck with a major economic problem. When in the following January the executive asked Congress for a $12 billion supplemental for which it had no funding mechanism, it was clear that it had lost control of the war's costs and of the internal economy at one and the same time. In the process it had also deliberately misled Congress for the sake of its own political advantage.
...success in Vietnam was as remote as ever, and the economy entered into the most complex phase of its history since before World War Two.
Time, above all, is America's most dangerous nemesis, for it will provoke countless difficulties which can only interesect and compound each other. At the beginning of 1968 the Johnson administration had yet to learn this lesson.
Moving right along, let's sample Noam Chomsky's 1970 take on the Pentagon Papers and other aspects of the war, For Reasons Of State. Recently re-released by The New Press, here are some selections from the Pantheon original's introduction:
When the Presdient comments that "you have to let them have it when they jump on you," few of the critics of his infantile rhetoric emphasize the crucial point: they are "jumping on us" in their land, not in Kansas or Hawaii or even Thailand.
One might think that it is self-defeating for official spokesmen to insist that only military targets are struck, when observers on the scene can prove the opposite. ... The government does not really hope to convince anyone by its arguments and claims, but only to sow confusion, relying on the natural tendency to trust authority and to avoid complicated and disturbing issues.
Shortly after the Pentagon Papers appeared, Richard Harwood wrote in the Washington Post that a careful reader of the press could have known the facts all along, and he cited cases where the facts had been truthfully reported. He failed to add that the truth had been overwhelmed, in the same pages, by a flood of state propaganda.
It has long been a deeply rooted premise in American political culture that the United States has the right to intervene in the internal affairs of others. Writing in 1947, A. A. Berle, a typical member of the American ruling elite, presented the "revolutionary" thesis that the world is entering a new stage in which the rights of peoples take precedence over the rights of sovereign governments. The United States must serve as the guarantor of the rights of peoples, intervening if necessary to defend these rights, acting with the same solicitude it has always shown to the nations protected from harm by the Monroe Doctrine... Why are we justified in taking on this exalted role, replacing even the United Nations if it proves ineffective? The reason is simple. Along with Great Britain, the United States is more representative of the people than other powers, and therefore naturally pursues the popular demand for world peace...
With regard to the Vietnam war, there are the "optimists", who believe that with persistence we can win, and the "pessimists", who argue that the United States cannot, at reasonable cost, guarantee the rule of the regime of its choice in South Vietnam.These are the two positions that appear in the secret "Kissinger Papers", released by the Washington Post April 25, 1972. The pessimists expect "pacification success in 13.4 years", while the interpretation of the optimists "implies that it will take 8.3 years to pacify the 4.15 million contested and VC population of December 1968." As always, the pessimists differ from the optimists in their estimate of how long it will take to beat the Vietnamese resistance into submission -- nothing more.
One mark of a culture in the firm grip of ideological controls is that what must be believed to justify state policy will be believed, regardless of the facts.
Posted by Eddie Tews at September 10, 2003 05:29 PM
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