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

[C. G. Estabrook]

[1] That's what was revealed at the 2002 Havana conference:

"In October 2002, a summit meeting took place in Havana on the fortieth
anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, attended by key participants from
Russia, the US, and Cuba. Startling information was revealed: the world was
saved from possibly terminal nuclear war by a Russian submarine commander who
countermanded an order to fire nuclear-armed missiles when the subs were under
attack by US destroyers at the tensest moment of the missile crisis – ‘the most
dangerous moment in human history’, Arthur Schlesinger observed, realistically.
The current Iraq crisis ‘was a recurrent theme at the meeting’, the press
reported, ‘with many participants accusing Bush of ignoring history . . .
[saying] they had come to make sure it does not happen again, and to offer
lessons for today’s crises, most notably President George W. Bush’s
deliberations about whether to strike Iraq.’54 [54 Marion Lloyd, ‘Soviets close
to using A-bomb in 1962 crisis, forum is told’ Boston Globe, 13 October; Kevin
Sullivan, ‘Nuclear War, One Word Away’, Washington Post, 14 October 2002.]"

--Noam Chomsky, "Commentary: moral truisms, empirical evidence, and foreign
policy," Review of International Studies 29 (2003) 605–620, p. 615 and n. 54.

[2] The story is told at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov>, the
Wikipedia article I mentioned:

"On October 27, 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a group of eleven United
States Navy destroyers and the aircraft carrier USS Randolph trapped a
nuclear-armed Soviet Foxtrot class submarine B-59  near Cuba and started
dropping practice depth charges, explosives intended to force the submarine to
come to the surface for identification. Allegedly, the captain of the submarine,
Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky, believing that a war might already have
started, prepared to launch a retaliatory nuclear-tipped torpedo.

"Three officers on board the submarine — Savitsky, the Political Officer Ivan
Semonovich Maslennikov, and the Second in command Arkhipov — were authorized to
launch the torpedo if they agreed unanimously in favor of doing so. An argument
broke out among the three, in which only Arkhipov was against the launch,
eventually persuading Savitsky to surface the submarine and await orders from
Moscow. The nuclear warfare which presumably would have ensued was thus averted...

"At the conference commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Cuban Missile
Crisis held in Havana on 13 October 2002, Robert McNamara admitted that nuclear
war had come much closer than people had thought.

"In Aleksandr Mozgovoy's 2002 book, Cuban Samba of the "Foxtrot" Quartet: Soviet
Submarines during the Year 1962 Caribbean Crisis, a participant of the events,
retired Commander Vadim Pavlovich Orlov, presents the events less dramatically
(the captain lost his temper, but the two other officers calmed him down)..."

[3] "The most surprising new evidence revealed that we were even closer to
nuclear war than the policymakers knew at the time, and that's saying something,
because on Saturday, October 27, Robert McNamara thought he might not live to
see the sunrise. At the time, there was a crescendo of bad news: a U-2 shot down
over Cuba, another U-2 straying over Siberia with US Air Force jets (also armed
with nuclear air-to-air missiles) scrambling to head off possible MIG
interception. The Joint Chiefs had recommended air strike and invasion of Cuba,
as of 4 p.m. The Cubans were firing on all the low-level US recon flights. At
the conference, we found out that exactly at that moment, US destroyers were
dropping signaling depth charges on a Soviet submarine near the quarantine line
that was carrying a nuclear-tipped torpedo -- totally unbeknownst to the US
Navy. The Soviet captain lost his temper, there could be a world war up there,
let's take some of them down with us, etc. Cooler heads prevailed, specifically
the sub brigade deputy commander named Vasily Arkhipov, who was onboard and
calmed the captain down. The sub came to the surface about 15 minutes after
Soviet ambassador Dobrynin left Bobby Kennedy's office carrying RFK's urgent
message to Khrushchev, time is running out, invasion in 48 hours, if you take
the missiles out, we will pledge not to invade Cuba, plus we'll take our
missiles out of Turkey as long as you don't mention that part of it publicly.
Early the next morning, Khrushchev announced the Soviet missiles would be coming
out.

--"The Cuban Missile Crisis: 40 Years Later" With Thomas S. Blanton, Executive
Director, National Security Archive, Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2002; The Washington
Post <http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/zforum/02/sp_world_blanton101602.htm>.


On 7/14/10 10:56 AM, Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> 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