Antiwar.com Blog

In January and February 1966, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, J. William Fulbright, held a series of televised public hearings to discuss the deepening military involvement of the United States in Vietnam. Fulbright summoned to testify three pro-Administration witnesses (Secretary of State Dean Rusk, AID Administrator David E. Bell, and General Maxwell D. Taylor, Ret.) and two non-Administration witnesses (Lieutenant General James M. Gavin and Dr. George F. Kennan, former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union). An abridged transcript was published under the title The Vietnam Hearings (Random House, 1966).

Historians have been struck in particular by the prescience of Kennan’s warning against the use of American arms to prop up a government that lacks the popular support to defend itself. In the comment reprinted here, prompted by a question from Senator Frank Carlson (R-KS), the only changes necessary for a translation to the present war are to substitute Afghanistan for Vietnam, and to substitute the Taliban for the Communists. ~DB

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from Testimony of the Honorable George F. Kennan, Thursday, 10 February 1966

SENATOR CARLSON: This morning you stated in response to a question, and this is not an exact quote but as I took it down, “We cannot order the political realities or views of other nations by our military power.” Would you want to elaborate a little on that? If we are not going to do it by military power in this age when we are confronted with nations who seem to respect only military might, what can we do?

KENNAN: I am talking about the internal affairs of other peoples here, and about the—our entering into those internal affairs and deciding what sort of political conditions shall prevail, and this gives me opportunity to say something that I feel very strongly about. When it comes to helping people to resist Communist pressures of all sorts—whether you call them aggression or whatever you call them—it has been my conviction for many years that no assistance of this sort can be effective unless the people themselves have a very high degree of determination and a willingness to help themselves. The moment they begin to place the bulk of the burden on us, I think the whole situation is lost. So strongly do I feel about this that I have often said publicly that the only people worth helping in this world are the people who say, “We propose to survive whether you help us or not, and just because you don’t help us doesn’t mean we are going to go under. It means that we are going to fight to the last ditch anyway but it may be a little easier if you help us.”

Now, the people who take that standpoint, there is something you can latch onto. But I am extremely suspicious every time I hear it said that “If you Americans don’t give us more than you have given us or if you slacken your efforts on our behalf, we will become fainthearted, and then what will become of you?” And I think there is only one answer to this, and that is, “Whatever becomes of us will not be as bad as what becomes of you yourselves if you become fainthearted.”

In other words, I do not believe in the possibility of helping people when it comes to problems that are partly problems of their internal political life, unless they themselves have a very high degree of determination and of internal self-discipline; and if things have deteriorated so far in these countries that they can’t mobilize this sort of public morale and determination, I don’t think any foreign force can put it into them. I think, then, the entry of a foreign force into the situation confuses it and creates new confusing elements which make it all the more difficult, and I think this is what has happened inVietnam, and I have seen it happen in other situations in history.

It now appears that the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act (IRPSA), Howard Berman’s sanctions bill targeting Iran’s refined petroleum sector, is likely to come up for a vote in the near future. AIPAC and other hawkish “Israel lobby” groups have made the sanctions bill their top priority for months now, and today brought news that the more moderate J Street is planning to go along with the sanctions bill.

For a comprehensive overview of why this is such bad news, see this post by Lara Friedman of Americans for Peace Now (APN). She includes a very thorough table summarizing all the flaws with the bill and recommendations for how it could be improved. The upshot, she writes, is that the Berman bill “leads to the very problematic conclusion that the US is seeking to inflict widespread suffering on the Iranian people in order to force them to put pressure on their government.”

Sanctions proponents’ reasoning is based on the rather dubious belief that if the U.S. starves the Iranian civilian population of resources they will blame their own government rather than ours. It is much the same logic that has led Israel to blockade Gaza for the past two and a half years, only to see Hamas become stronger than ever as a result; similarly, sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s killed hundreds of thousands of civilians (by the most conservative estimates) while doing nothing to weaken Saddam Hussein’s hold on power.

Of course, the overwhelming evidence suggests that unilateral sanctions will prove ineffectual in any case. In recent years the Iranian government has moved to decrease its reliance on refined petroleum imports in anticipation of sanctions, and without Russian and Chinese cooperation the measure is likely to have virtually no bite. But since “effective” sanctions would mean in practice “successful in inflicting hardship on the Iranian civilian population,” then “ineffectual” would seem to be the best that we can hope for — better ineffectual than actively pernicious. Of course, best of all would be to do no harm in the first place. While some seem to be calculating that acquiescing on sanctions is necessary to stave off war, it is hard to see what positive result could possibly come from the deeply misguided Berman bill.

The Obama administration is conducting a workshop on government openness for federal employees today.

It is, of course, closed to the public and the media.

While the White House has tried to make the point that the public has a right to know, they have been secretive about many things, including those having nothing to do with national security:

Those include what cars people were buying using the $3 billion Cash for Clunkers program (it turned out the most frequent trades involved pickups for pickups with only slightly better gas mileage); how many times airplanes have collided with birds (a lot); whether lobbyists and donors meet with the Obama White House (they do); rules about the interrogation of terror suspects (the FBI and CIA disagreed over what was permitted); and who was speaking in private with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (he has close relationships with a cadre of Wall Street executives whose multibillion-dollar companies survived the economic crisis with his help).

Just last week, a State Department deputy assistant secretary, Llewellyn Hedgbeth, said at a public conference that “as much as we want to promote transparency,” her agency will work just as hard to protect classified materials or information that would put the United States in a bad light.

Before the House of Representatives, December 2, 2009:

This is the 150th anniversary of the hanging of John Brown. When he attacked Harper’s Ferry with a handful of followers, the butcher of Kansas helped sow the seeds of the Civil War. Few things would have made Brown happier than the thought of hundreds of thousands of people dying for his own Scorched Earth method of moral salvation.

The New York Times op-ed page has a piece today touting Brown as an American hero. It seeks to vindicate him:

He was held in high esteem by many great men of his day. Ralph Waldo Emerson compared him to Jesus, declaring that Brown would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross.” Henry David Thoreau placed Brown above the freedom fighters of the American Revolution.

The fact that Emerson and Thoreau turned into cheerleaders for John Brown was among the worst failings for each of them. Both Emerson and Thoreau started out denouncing politics as a snare and a fraud. And both fell for Brown and his vision of progress via slaughtering innocent people.

Brown’s attempt to create a bloody uprising in Virginia helped close the final door to compromise between the North and the South. His name should be as odious today as those of other people whose violence sparked mass killing.
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Update 12/03: There have been some excellent revisionist histories in the last 20 years on how the Civil War could have been averted and how slavery would have been phased out without a national bloodbath. While some of the deep South states saw slavery as their essence, upper South states like Virginia were not so mindlessly attached to the odious institution.
Those who believe that a war was necessary to end slavery often fail to realize that much of the dire plight of freed slaves was the result of northern armies relying on Scorched Earth tactics in the final year of the war. When almost everything has been destroyed, it is difficult for anyone (except Carpetbaggers) to survive.
[Comments also welcome at my blog here]

One day out from Obama’s long-awaited announcement on troop deployments to Afghanistan the White House is getting plenty of criticism from both sides of the aisle.

Democrats, including Rep. David Obey (D-WI), the influential chair of the House Appropriations Committee, have expressed concerns about both the cost of the war and the difficulty of achieving victory in defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Republicans, such as John McCain (R-AZ), have hammered Obama for setting a timeline for troop withdrawals beginning in 18 months.

Despite the widespread lack of enthusiasm, however, the White House has made striking progress in turning around Weekly Standard editor and outspoken Obama critic (and Sarah Palin booster) Bill Kristol.

On November 23rd, Kristol wrote in the Weekly Standard:

”Just what is Barack Obama as president making of our American destiny? The answer, increasingly obvious, is … a hash. It’s worse than most of us expected. His dithering on Afghanistan is deplorable, his appeasing of Iran disgraceful, his trying to heap new burdens on a struggling economy destructive,’’

But in today’s Washington Post Kristol was hailing the new “War President”.

“By mid-2010, Obama will have more than doubled the number of American troops in Afghanistan since he became president; he will have empowered his general, Stanley McChrystal, to fight the war pretty much as he thinks necessary to in order to win; and he will have retroactively, as it were, acknowledged that he and his party were wrong about the Iraq surge in 2007 — after all, the rationale for this surge is identical to Bush’s, and the hope is for a similar success. He will also have embraced the use of military force as a key instrument of national power.’’

The extent to which Kristol’s reassessment reflects his political agility, or Obama’s, remains unclear.