[Peace-discuss] Could a "Great Negotiation" End the War in Afghanistan?

[C. G. Estabrook]

It's certainly worthwhile to think about ways out of the US government's Long 
War in the Middle East, but there are a number of things wrong with this 
proposal. Here are some examples.

       [1] It ignores the reason for the Long War.  All recent US 
administrations have been determined to control the 1500-mile radius around the 
Persian Gulf - the Greater Middle East, as the Pentagon says - where the bulk of 
the worlds' hydrocarbons (oil & gas) are found.  Not because the US needs them 
domestically - in fact we import very little gas and oil from the Mideast - but 
because of the advantage that control over them gives the US in competition with 
its real economic rivals in Europe and Asia. SW Asia is far more important to 
the US economic elite than SE Asia (where we killed many more people) ever was: 
no US administration will leave willingly.

      [2] It ignores the fact that the US wants war, and the Afghans (and the 
other people of the region) don't.  War gives the US an excuse for having its 
military occupy the Greater Middle East in one form or the other (alliance, 
intimidation, subversion, military occupation).  The Afghans and others simply 
want the invaders to leave. Since its real reasons for domination are 
inadmissible, the US has to pretend it's "fighting terrorism," when all can see 
that US attacks simply produce more "terrorists" (i.e., armed resistance to 
American domination).

There's a further legal problem for Obama; the only Constitutional authority he 
has for making war in the Mideast - since there is no congressional declaration 
of war - is the "Authorization for the Use of Military Force" passed by Congress 
a week after 9/11. It said, "...the President is authorized to use all necessary 
and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he 
determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that 
occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in 
order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United 
States by such nations, organizations or persons." So if he's going to kill 
people in the Mideast, Obama must contend that they are connected to the 9/11 
attacks! Stopping terrorism in the Mideast is what stopping Communism was in 
Vietnam - not the reason for mass murder, but the excuse.

      [3] The account of the Cuban missile crisis - and the heroic efforts of 
John Kennedy to avoid war - is pure fantasy (and American propaganda). The call 
for attention to history is admirable - but the history has to be accurate.

The Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 was "the most dangerous moment in human 
history," as Arthur Schlesinger, historian and former adviser to President John 
F Kennedy, observed in October 2002 at a retrospective conference in Havana. 
The world "came within a hair's breadth of nuclear disaster," recalls Robert 
McNamara, Kennedy's defense secretary, who also attended the retrospective. He 
concluded that we should today speak of "apocalypse soon".

In 1962 the Kennedy administration brought the world very close to total 
destruction in order to establish the principle that we had a right to have 
missiles on the borders of the Soviet Union while they did not have the same 
right to have missiles on our border. One finds little mention of the criminal 
insanity of those willing to risk nuclear war to defend such a principle within 
mainstream American opinion.

In the 2002 conference it became clear that the world was saved from nuclear 
devastation by one Russian submarine captain, Vasily Arkhipov, who blocked an 
order to fire nuclear missiles when Russian submarines were attacked by US 
destroyers near Kennedy’s “quarantine” line.  Had Arkhipov agreed, the nuclear 
launch would have almost certainly set off an interchange that could have 
“destroyed the Northern hemisphere,” as Eisenhower had warned.

President Kennedy was willing (according to Ted Sorensen, Kennedy's brains 
trust, who wrote his books for him) to accept a probability of 1/3 to 1/2 of 
nuclear war, in order to establish that the United States alone has the right to 
maintain missiles on the borders of a potential enemy. The probabilities are 
meaningless with respect to the objective situation, but not with respect to the 
mentalities of those who use them as a guide to action. If anything can be more 
frightening than the behavior of the self-styled "pragmatic" and "tough-minded" 
policy makers of the Kennedy administration in this crisis, it is the attitude 
that remains, long after the crisis has cooled, that this was Kennedy's "finest 
hour," in which he demonstrated his skill at the game of "nuclear chicken" (as 
presidential historian Thomas Bailey wrote in 1965).

The roots of the missile crisis lay in US terrorist attacks against Cuba, which 
began shortly after Castro took power in 1959 and were sharply escalated by 
Kennedy, leading to a very plausible fear of invasion, as Robert McNamara has 
acknowledged.  Kennedy resumed the terrorist war immediately after the crisis 
was over; terrorist actions against Cuba, based in the US, peaked in the late 1970s.

In 1954, when Khrushchev became Soviet premier, he had offered Eisenhower a 
proposal to the effect that both sides should reduce military spending and cut 
back offensive military forces. The Eisenhower Administration disregarded it, 
but Khrushchev did it anyway, unilaterally and over the objections of the 
Russian generals. Later, he cut back Soviet offensive military forces quite 
sharply and asked the Kennedy Administration to do the same. Instead, the 
Kennedy administration escalated military spending. (Kennedy had quite 
consciously lied about a "missile gap" during the 1960 campaign.) Then came the 
Cuban missile crisis in which the Kennedy Administration did as much as it could 
to humiliate Khrushchev, and it worked: the Russian military in response threw 
Khrushchev out and went into a mad arms race that closely matched the US in 
military spending (on a much smaller economic base) - and ruined the economy. 
It's in the 1960's that the Soviet economy started to stagnate - e.g., health 
statistics started to decline. It was the Kennedy Administration that drove them 
into bankruptcy.

On August 23, 1962, President Kennedy issued National Security Memorandum No. 
181, "a directive to engineer an internal revolt that would be followed by U.S. 
military intervention," involving "significant U.S. military plans, maneuvers, 
and movement of forces and equipment" that were surely known to Cuba and Russia. 
Also in August, terrorist attacks were intensified, including speedboat strafing 
attacks on a Cuban seaside hotel "where Soviet military technicians were known 
to congregate, killing a score of Russians and Cubans"; attacks on British and 
Cuban cargo ships; the contamination of sugar shipments; and other atrocities 
and sabotage, mostly carried out by Cuban exile organizations permitted to 
operate freely in Florida. A few weeks later came "the most dangerous moment in 
human history."

In the middle of the crisis, President Kennedy and his brother are on record as 
saying that one of the big problems Cuban missiles posed was, "They might deter 
an invasion of Venezuela, if we decide to invade." Terrorist operations 
continued through the tensest moments of the missile crisis. They were formally 
canceled on October 30, several days after the Kennedy and Khrushchev agreement 
but went on nonetheless. On November 8, "a Cuban covert action sabotage team 
dispatched from the United States successfully blew up a Cuban industrial 
facility," killing 400 workers, according to the Cuban government. One historian 
of the events  writes that "the Soviets could only see [the attack] as an effort 
to backpedal on what was, for them, the key question remaining: American 
assurances not to attack Cuba." After the crisis ended, Kennedy renewed the 
terrorist campaign. Ten days before his assassination he approved a CIA plan for 
"destruction operations" by US proxy forces "against a large oil refinery and 
storage facilities, a large electric plant, sugar refineries, railroad bridges, 
harbor facilities, and underwater demolition of docks and ships." A plot to kill 
Castro was initiated on the day of the Kennedy assassination.

Kennedy may well be Obama's model for peace in Afghanistan, I'm sorry to say. 
Obama's policy seems almost as lunatic as Kennedy's. --CGE


On 7/12/10 12:52 PM, Robert Naiman wrote:
> A key obstacle to moving the debate on negotiations to end the war in
> Afghanistan is that most Americans don't know much diplomatic history. This
> ignorance makes us vulnerable to facile slogans: for the neocons, it's a
> noun, a verb, and Neville Chamberlain. But Fredrik Stanton has published a
> corrective: "Great Negotiations: Agreements that Changed the Modern World"
> shows how U.S. leaders entered successful negotiations with realistic goals
> for their adversaries. If President Obama engages Taliban leaders as
> President Kennedy engaged Premier Khrushchev, we could end the war.
>
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/could-a-great-negotiation_b_643147.html
>
>  http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/7/12/133610/993
>
> http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/node/645
>
> --