[Peace-discuss] From NYT obituary of Holbrooke

[C. G. Estabrook]

An important point on who are rulers are. The close connection of Wall Street 
and US foreign policy is enacted by Holbrooke.

He graduated from Brown in 1962, went immediately to the Foreign Service and 
(probably) the CIA. (Recruitment for the former was by an examination - like the 
ACT or GRE - and interview by employed agents.) A year later, after Vietnamese 
language training, he was sent to Vietnam as a civilian representative for the 
Agency for International Development (the standard CIA cover) working on the 
rural Pacification Program (part of the notorious "Strategic Hamlets" program, 
which turned villages in to concentraion camps in order to keep the population 
away form the "Viet Cong," the Vietnamese resistance to the American directed 
governmetn).

Holbrooke then moved to the US Embassy, Saigon where he became a staff assistant 
to Ambassadors Maxwell Taylor and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. During this time, he 
served with many other young diplomats who would play a major role in American 
foreign policy in the decades ahead, including John Negroponte, Anthony Lake, 
Frank G. Wisner, Les Aspin, and Peter Tarnoff (war criminals all). As the US 
"escalated" the killing in Vietnam, President Lyndon Johnson formed a team of 
Vietnam experts to work in the White House under the former head of the Phoenix 
Program, R.W. Komer - an admitted mass-murderer - in an operation that was 
separate from the National Security Council. As a rising young diplomat with 
significant experience in the country, Holbrooke was asked to join the group 
when he was only twenty-four years old. (Why?)

Holbrooke's later record is increasingly awful, not so much Yugoslavia, but 
earlier. For example, In the Indonesian atrocities in eastern Timor, where he 
was the official in charge, and evaded demands to stop the US support for them.

In Kosovo, preparation for war crimes trials began in May 1999, in the midst of 
the NATO bombing campaign, expedited at the initiative of Washington and London, 
which also provided unprecedented access to intelligence information. In East 
Timor, investigations were discussed at leisure, with numerous delays and 
deference to Jakarta's wishes and sensibilities. "It's an absolute joke, a 
complete whitewash," Lucia Withers, a spokeswoman for Amnesty International, 
informed the British press: it will "cause East Timorese even more trauma than 
they have suffered already"; a leading Indonesian role "would be really 
insulting at this stage." Few seriously expected that the U.S. or U.K. would 
release vital intelligence information, and the Indonesian generals were 
reported to feel confident that their old friends will not let them down - if 
only because the chain of responsibility might be hard to snap at just the right 
point. By mid-January, UN officials said that a tribunal was unlikely. U.S. 
Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and others "are pinning their hopes on an internal 
tribunal held by Indonesia, whose military controlled East Timor from 1975 until 
August and is blamed by human-rights groups for the atrocities." It was claimed 
that China and Russia were blocking a tribunal, an obstacle that the West cannot 
think of any way to overcome, unlike the case of Serbia. [NYT, Boston Globe]

Daniel Southerland reported that "in deferring to Indonesia on [the East Timor] 
issue, the Carter administration, like the Ford administration before it, 
appears to have placed big-power concerns ahead of human rights." Southerland 
referred particularly to the role of UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who had 
direct responsibility for implementing Carter's policy, and was so little 
concerned by the consequences - by then, some 200,000 killed - that he could 
find no time to testify before Congress about East Timor, Southerland reports, 
though "he did have the time, however, to play host at a black-tie dinner later 
the same day."  [Butler, The Eye (Australia), 1999. ]

The guiding principles were well understood by those responsible for 
guaranteeing the success of Indonesia's 1975 invasion. They were articulated 
lucidly by UN Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan ... The Security Council 
condemned the invasion and ordered Indonesia to withdraw, but to no avail. In 
his 1978 memoirs, Moynihan explains why:

"The United States wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring 
this about. The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove 
utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to 
me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success."

Success was indeed considerable. Moynihan cites reports that within two months 
some 60,000 people had been killed, "10 percent of the population, almost the 
proportion of casualties experienced by the Soviet Union during the Second World 
War." A sign of the success, he adds, is that within a year "the subject 
disappeared from the press." So it did, as the invaders intensified their 
assault. Atrocities peaked as Moynihan was writing in 1977-78. Relying on a new 
flow of U.S. military equipment, the Indonesian military carried out a 
devastating attack against the hundreds of thousands who had fled to the 
mountains, driving the survivors to Indonesian control. It was then that RC 
Church sources in East Timor sought to make public the estimates of 200,000 
deaths that came to be accepted years later, after constant denial and ridicule 
of the "propagandists for the guerrillas."

In the propaganda preparation for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, at the liberal 
end of the spectrum, Richard Holbrooke stressed "the very important point" that 
the population of the eight original members of New [eastern] Europe is larger 
than that of Old Europe [the EU], which proves that France and Germany are 
"isolated." So it does, if we reject the radical left heresy that the public 
might have some role in a democracy: the populations were overwhelmingly opposed 
to the war, mostly even more so than in those countries dismissed as Old Europe.

Holbrooke was an apparatchik for wealth and power, responsible with others of 
his generation for millions of deaths, from Southeast Asia though Indonesia to 
the Middle East.  His interview with the Most High may have been a good deal 
more difficult than that with the Foreign Service officers in his youth.  --CGE


On 12/14/10 6:18 PM, David Green wrote:
>
>  Mr. Holbrooke also made millions as an investment banker on Wall
>  Street. In the early 1980s, he was a co-founder of a Washington
>  consulting firm, Public Strategies, which was later sold to Lehman
>  Brothers
> 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/lehman_brothers_holdings_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org>.
>  At various times he was a managing director of Lehman Brothers, vice
>  chairman of Credit Suisse First Boston and a director of the American
>  International Group.

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