[Peace-discuss] Norman Soloman

[C. G. Estabrook]

..."only lacking," in other words, the reason that Americans are killing people 
around the world and inviting reprisals at home.  Some omission.

Norman Solomon [sic], rather desperately, puts up an insanity defense for 
Obama's war policy.  To do so, he enlists the help of the late Barbara Tuchman 
and her book, "The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam" (1984).

But Tuchman's analysis is unreliable. Hers is a Vietnam book, another version of 
the "quagmire" myth -- that US policymakers didn't know what they were getting 
into in SE Asia. That's nonsense, and it's disturbing that it's being belched 
out again to provide a liberal smokescreen over the Long War in SW Asia.

About the time of her Folly book (yes), Tuchman was one of the promoters of the 
embarrassing hoax by Joan Peters, "From Time Immemorial," proving that there 
were no Palestinians...

(I'd also like to contest her account of the Reformation, but Mort tells us that 
"all this discussion about what might have been [is] rather silly [because] no 
one knows what the future might have been, in the short or the long run, if 
other actions/policies had been taken ... It's what's called idle speculation, 
that leads to nowhere."  But apparently not, when Tuchman talks about Vietnam, etc.)

To return to the facts, US policy in the 1500-mile radius around the Persian 
Gulf -- goals and strategies -- has been consistent for two generations, and 
it's quite rational in the Weberian sense of fitting means to ends.  But both 
the ends -- US colonial control of Mideast energy resources, as an advantage 
over our economic rivals in Europe and Asia -- and the means to them, are 
vicious.  (See "The Torture Memos and Historical Amnesia," recently posted here.)

Solomon writes that Tuchman "devotes the closing chapters of 'The March of 
Folly' to the long arc of the U.S. war in Vietnam. The parallels with the 
current escalation of the war in Afghanistan are more than uncanny; they speak 
of deeply rooted patterns."  But the patterns are not in some trick of mind but 
in the consistency of US policy.

It's right that Obama is like Kennedy in that their "brain power" is devoted to 
"counterinsurgency," but counterinsurgency needs to be called by its right name: 
terrorism.  As the Kennedy intellectuals invented death squads for Latin America 
and then used them to kill tens of thousands in the "Phoenix Program" in 
Vietnam, so Obama has put an assassin in charge of his AfPak terrorism -- which 
he has increased substantially over Bush's (e.g., 16 drone strikes in the first 
four months of 2009 compared with 36 in all of 2008; ordering the end of the 
peace deal in Swat).

Tuchman and Solomon are wrong to say that "cognitive dissonance" was the reason 
the USG remained in Vietnam.  Imperialism was -- the US set out to demonstrate 
in Vietnam that no country in the Third World would be allowed to pursue its own 
path of development outside US control. (It would be a bad example to others.) 
And it should be clear that the US won the war in Vietnam -- in sense of 
preventing an example of alternative development, at astonishing human and 
environmental cost.  Vietnam today begs for new Nike plants.

The "unhinged process that Barbara Tuchman charts" and that Solomon applies to 
the Obama White House is a chimera -- and a propaganda cover.  With Tuchman's 
ambiguous help, Solomon thinks (after Napoleon's police chief) that Obama's 
policy in Afghanistan is "worse than a crime -- it's a blunder."  But in spite 
of their myth-making, it's not a blunder -- unfortunately, American policy 
makers know what they're doing.  It's a crime.  --CGE


Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> A interesting commentary, only lacking, I think, what may be the roots of the
> Obama administration's policies, i.e., what the "pros" think is the value of
> controlling S and SW Asia.  --mkb
> 
> Published on Thursday, May 21, 2009 by CommonDreams.org 
> <http://www.commondreams.org/>
> 
> 
> The March of Folly, Continued
> 
> by Norman Solomon
> 
> To understand what's up with President Obama as he escalates the war in 
> Afghanistan, there may be no better place to look than a book published 25
> years ago. "The March of Folly 
> <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345308239?ie=UTF8&tag=commondreams-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0345308239>,"
>  by historian Barbara Tuchman, is a chilling assessment of how very smart 
> people in power can do very stupid things -- how a war effort, ordered from
> on high, goes from tic to repetition compulsion to obsession -- and how we,
> with undue deference and lethal restraint, pay our respects to the dominant
> moral torpor to such an extent that mass slaughter becomes normalized in our
> names. 
> <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345308239?ie=UTF8&tag=commondreams-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0345308239>
> 
> 
> What happens among policymakers is a "process of self-hypnosis," Tuchman 
> writes. After recounting examples from the Trojan War to the British moves
> against rebellious American colonists, she devotes the closing chapters of
> "The March of Folly" to the long arc of the U.S. war in Vietnam. The
> parallels with the current escalation of the war in Afghanistan are more than
> uncanny; they speak of deeply rooted patterns.
> 
> With clarity facing backward, President Obama can make many wise comments
> about international affairs while proceeding with actual policies largely
> unfettered by the wisdom. From the outset of U.S. involvement in Vietnam,
> Tuchman observes, vital lessons were "stated" but "not learned."
> 
> As with John Kennedy -- another young president whose administration "came
> into office equipped with brain power" and "more pragmatism than ideology" --
> Obama's policy adrenalin is now surging to engorge something called
> counterinsurgency.
> 
> "Although the doctrine emphasized political measures, counterinsurgency in
> practice was military," Tuchman writes, an observation that applies all too
> well to the emerging Obama enthusiasm for counterinsurgency. And 
> "counterinsurgency in operation did not live up to the high-minded zeal of
> the theory. All the talk was of ‘winning the allegiance' of the people to
> their government, but a government for which allegiance had to be won by
> outsiders was not a good gamble."
> 
> Now, as during the escalation of the Vietnam War -- despite all the 
> front-paged articles and news bulletins emphasizing line items for civic aid
> from Washington -- the spending for U.S. warfare in Afghanistan is 
> overwhelmingly military.
> 
> Perhaps overeager to assume that the context of bombing campaigns ordered by
> President Obama is humanitarian purpose, many Americans of antiwar
> inclinations have yet to come to terms with central realities of the war
> effort -- for instance, the destructive trajectory of the budgeting for the
> war, which spends 10 dollars toward destruction for every dollar spent on
> humanitarian programs.
> 
> From the top of the current administration -- as the U.S. troop deployments
> in Afghanistan continue to rise along with the American air-strike rates --
> there is consistent messaging about the need to "stay the course," even while
> bypassing such tainted phrases.
> 
> The dynamic that Tuchman describes as operative in the first years of the
> 1960s, while the Vietnam War gained momentum, is no less relevant today: "For
> the ruler it is easier, once he has entered a policy box, to stay inside. For
> the lesser official it is better, for the sake of his position, not to make
> waves, not to press evidence that the chief will find painful to accept.
> Psychologists call the process of screening out discordant information
> ‘cognitive dissonance,' an academic disguise for ‘Don't confuse me with the
> facts.'" Along the way, cognitive dissonance "causes alternatives to be
> ‘deselected since even thinking about them entails conflicts.'"
> 
> Such a psycho-political process inside the White House has no use for the
> report from the Congressional Progressive Caucus that came out of the
> caucus's six-part forum on Capitol Hill this spring, "Afghanistan: A Road Map
> for Progress."
> 
> Souped up and devouring fuel, the war train cannot slow down for the 
> Progressive Caucus report's recommendation that "an 80-20 ratio 
> (political-military) should be the formula for funding our efforts in the
> region with oversight by a special inspector general to ensure compliance."
> Or that "U.S. troop presence in the region must be oriented toward training
> and support roles for Afghan security forces and not for U.S.-led
> counterinsurgency efforts."
> 
> Or that "the immediate cessation of drone attacks should be required." Or
> that "all aid dollars should be required to have a majority percentage of
> dollars tied or guaranteed to local Afghan institutions and organizations, to
> ensure countrywide job mapping, assessment and workforce development process
> to directly benefit the Afghan people."
> 
> The policymakers who are gunning the war train can't be bothered with such
> ideas. After all, if the solution is -- rhetoric aside -- assumed to be
> largely military, why dilute the potency of the solution? Especially when, as
> we're repeatedly made to understand, there's so much at stake.
> 
> During the mid-1960s, while American troops poured into Vietnam, "enormity of
> the stakes was the new self-hypnosis," Tuchman comments. She quotes the
> wisdom -- conventional and self-evident -- of New York Times military
> correspondent Hanson Baldwin, who wrote in 1966 that U.S. withdrawal from
> Vietnam would bring "political, psychological and military catastrophe,"
> signaling that the United States "had decided to abdicate as a great power."
> 
> Many Americans are eager to think of our nation as supremely civilized even
> in warfare; the conceits of noble self-restraint have been trumpeted by many
> a president even while the Pentagon's carnage apparatus kept spinning into
> overdrive. "Limited war is not nicer or kinder or more just than all-out war,
> as its proponents would have it," Tuchman notes. "It kills with the same
> finality."
> 
> For a president, with so much military power under his command, frustrations
> call for more of the same. The seductive allure of counterinsurgency is apt
> to heighten the appeal of "warnography" for the commander in chief; whatever
> the earlier resolve to maintain restraint, the ineffectiveness of more
> violence invites still more -- in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as in Vietnam,
> Laos and Cambodia.
> 
> "The American mentality counted on superior might," Tuchman commented, "but a
> tank cannot disperse wasps." In Vietnam, the independent journalist Michael
> Herr wrote, the U.S. military's violent capacities were awesome: "Our machine
> was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop."
> 
> And that is true, routinely, of a war-making administration.
> 
> The grim and ultimately unhinged process that Barbara Tuchman charts is in
> evidence with President Obama and his approach to the Afghan war: "In its
> first stage, mental standstill fixes the principles and boundaries governing
> a political problem. In the second stage, when dissonances and failing
> function begin to appear, the initial principles rigidify. This is the period
> when, if wisdom were operative, re-examination and re-thinking and a change
> of course are possible, but they are rare as rubies in a backyard.
> Rigidifying leads to increase of investment and the need to protect egos;
> policy founded upon error multiplies, never retreats. The greater the
> investment and the more involved in it the sponsor's ego, the more
> unacceptable is disengagement."
> 
> A week ago, one out of seven members of the House of Representatives voted
> against a supplemental appropriations bill providing $81.3 billion to the
> Pentagon, mainly for warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan. An opponent of the
> funding, Congressman John Conyers, pointed out that "the president has not
> challenged our most pervasive and dangerous national hubris: the foolhardy
> belief that we can erect the foundations of civil society through the
> judicious use of our many high-tech instruments of violence."
> 
> Conyers continued: "That belief, promoted by the previous administration in
> the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, assumes that the United
> States possesses the capacity and also has a duty to determine the fate of
> nations in the greater Middle East.
> 
> "I oppose this supplemental war funding bill because I believe that we are
> not bound by such a duty. In fact, I believe the policies of empire are
> counterproductive in our struggle against the forces of radical religious
> extremism. For example, U.S. strikes from unmanned Predator Drones and other
> aircraft produced 64 percent of all civilian deaths caused by the U.S., NATO
> and Afghan forces in 2008. Just this week, U.S. air strikes took another 100
> lives, according to Afghan officials on the ground. If it is our goal to
> strengthen the average Afghan or Pakistani citizen and to weaken the radicals
> that threaten stability in the region, bombing villages is clearly
> counterproductive. For every family broken apart by an incident of
> ‘collateral damage,' seeds of hate and enmity are sown against our nation. .
> . .
> 
> "Should we support this measure, we risk dooming our nation to a fate similar
> to Sisyphus and his boulder: to being trapped in a stalemate of unending
> frustration and misery, as our mistakes inevitably lead us to the same failed
> outcomes. Let us step back; let us remember the mistakes and heartbreak of
> our recent misadventures in the streets of Fallujah and Baghdad. If we honor
> the ties that bind us to one another, we cannot in good faith send our fellow
> citizens on this errand of folly. It is still not too late to turn away from
> this path."
> 
> /Norman Solomon is a journalist, historian, and progressive activist. His
> book "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death 
> <http://www.amazon.com/dp/047179001X?tag=commondreams-20&camp=0&creative=0&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=047179001X&adid=04HBF8066AX9NX1TM5C8&>"
>  has been adapted into a documentary film of the same name. His most recent
> book is "Made Love, Got War. 
> <http://www.amazon.com/dp/0977825345?tag=commondreams-20&camp=0&creative=0&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0977825345&adid=19Q58Q2H7J4MHS54RYPG&>"
>  He is a national co-chair of the Healthcare NOT Warfare 
> <http://pdamerica.org/articles/misc/2008-02-29-14-19-42-misc.php> campaign.
> /In California, he is co-chair of the Commission on a Green New Deal for the
>  North Bay;www.GreenNewDeal.info <http://www.greennewdeal.info/>.
> 
> 
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