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

[Morton K. Brussel]

Thanks for your research into this, but i would like specific references to two points mentioned, namely the attack on the Soviet submarine (what kind of attack, for instance) and the orders to that submarine to fire a nuclear missile. Where, exactly, do these pieces of information come from? I understand that this is water already over the dam, but these are key points…

--mkb

On Jul 13, 2010, at 8:50 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

> Wikipedia as usual is a good place to start for references; e.g., its article on the Soviet submarine commander explains how (as the director of the National Security Archive Thomas Blanton expressed it in 2002) "a guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world".
> 
> A contemporary account of the 2002 Havana conference in the Boston Globe is found at <http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/cold-war/sovietsbomb.htm>. Arthur Schlesinger's writings on the subject are unavoidable. He was the very model of a modern historian when I was taking history as an undergraduate, and I did all I could to avoid him (and Kissinger).
> 
> Before the 2002 conference, the best single summary is probably Raymond Garthoff, "Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis" (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1987). (I went to school with his brother.)
> 
> Historian Thomas Bailey's contemporary praise for Kennedy's "finest hour," in which he demonstrated his skill at the game of "nuclear chicken," was published in the New York Times Magazine, November 6, 1965. The phrase has been used elsewhere - see "The Reader's Companion to Military History" by Robert Cowley and Geoffrey Parker (formerly of this faculty).
> 
> Theodore C. Sorensen ("Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History," 2008) was named by Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara as one of the "true inner circle" members who advised Kennedy during the missile crisis, the others being Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, General Maxwell D. Taylor (the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs), former Ambassador to the Soviet Union Llewellyn Thompson and McNamara himself. Sorensen even drafted Kennedy's correspondence with Nikita Khrushchev and Kennedy's speech about the crisis on October 22.
> 
> On Kennedy's terrorist attacks on Cuba, see Garthoff and (another acquaintance) Jules Benjamin, "The United States and Cuba" (Pittsburgh UP 1977); much subsequent information through the National Security Agency, especially "Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962: A National Security Archive Documents Reader" by Laurence Chang, Peter Kornbluh, and National Security Archive (1999); subsequent material at <http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/>.
> 
> I'm told that the best thing on the fall of Khrushchev is William Taubman, "Khrushchev: The Man and His Era" (2003), but I haven't read it.  Khrushchev's son was at Brown when I was a post-doc there.  I'm still looking for a good analysis of the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it seems clear that it began with the missile crisis.
> 
> The National Security Archive has National Security Memorandum No. 181 at <www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/.../620823%20Memorandum%20No.%20181.pdf>.
> 
> My penultimate paragraph is almost verbatim from Chomsky, "Hegemony or Survival" (2003), pp. 84-87, with references. (It's too close to publish.)  --CGE
> 
> 
> On 7/12/10 10:50 PM, Morton K. Brussel wrote:
>> This is quite an impressive response to what Naiman wrote. Much is familiar but
>> some is not. It would be useful if your could addend references to what was
>> going on before, during, and after the Cuban missile crisis. For example, I was
>> not aware that a Soviet submarine had been attacked by U.S. forces, or that the
>> submarine commander had *orders* to fire his nuclear missiles. It is in
>> particular your last three paragraphs that could use references (where they are
>> not given).
>> 
>> --mkb
>> 
>> On Jul 12, 2010, at 9:00 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>> 
>>> 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
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