The
U.S. government may pretend to respect a “rules-based” global
order, but the only rule Washington seems to follow is “might makes
right” — and the CIA has long served as a chief instigator and
enforcer.
by
Nicolas J.S. Davies
Part
1
As
the recent PBS documentary on the American War in Vietnam
acknowledged, few American officials ever believed that the United
States could win the war, neither those advising Johnson as he
committed hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, nor those advising
Nixon as he escalated a brutal aerial bombardment that had already
killed millions of people.
As
conversations tape-recorded in the White House reveal, and as other
writers have documented, the reasons for wading into the Big Muddy,
as Pete Seeger satirized it, and then pushing on regardless, all came
down to “credibility”: the domestic political credibility of the
politicians involved and America’s international credibility as a
military power.
Once
the CIA went to work in Vietnam to undermine the 1954 Geneva Accords
and the planned reunification of North and South through a free and
fair election in 1956, the die was cast. The CIA’s support for the
repressive Diem regime and its successors ensured an ever-escalating
war, as the South rose in rebellion, supported by the North. No U.S.
president could extricate the U.S. from Vietnam without exposing the
limits of what U.S. military force could achieve, betraying widely
held national myths and the powerful interests that sustained and
profited from them.
The
critical “lesson of Vietnam” was summed up by Richard Barnet in
his 1972 book Roots of War. “At the very moment that the number
one nation has perfected the science of killing,” Barnet wrote,
“It has become an impractical means of political domination.”
Losing
the war in Vietnam was a heavy blow to the CIA and the U.S. Military
Industrial Complex, and it added insult to injury for every American
who had lost comrades or loved ones in Vietnam, but it ushered in
more than a decade of relative peace for America and the world. If
the purpose of the U.S. military is to protect the U.S. from the
danger of war, as our leaders so often claim, the “Vietnam
syndrome,” or the reluctance to be drawn into new wars, kept the
peace and undoubtedly saved countless lives.
Even
the senior officer corps of the U.S. military saw it that way, since
many of them had survived the horrors of Vietnam as junior officers.
The CIA could still wreak havoc in Latin America and elsewhere, but
the full destructive force of the U.S. military was not unleashed
again until the invasion of Panama in 1989 and the First Gulf War in
1991.
Half
a century after Vietnam, we have tragically come full circle. With
the CIA’s politicized intelligence running wild in Washington and
its covert operations spreading violence and chaos across every
continent, President Trump faces the same pressures to maintain his
own and his country’s credibility as Johnson and Nixon did. His
predictable response has been to escalate ongoing wars in Syria,
Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and West Africa, and to threaten
new ones against North Korea, Iran and Venezuela.
Trump
is facing these questions, not just in one country, Vietnam, but in
dozens of countries across the world, and the interests perpetuating
and fueling this cycle of crisis and war have only become more
entrenched over time, as President Eisenhower warned that they would,
despite the end of the Cold War and, until now, the lack of any
actual military threat to the United States.
Ironically
but predictably, the U.S.’s aggressive and illegal war policy has
finally provoked a real military threat to the U.S., albeit one that
has emerged only in response to U.S. war plans. As I explained in a
recent article, North Korea’s discovery in 2016 of a U.S. plan to
assassinate its president, Kim Jong Un, and launch a Second Korean
War has triggered a crash program to develop long-range ballistic
missiles that could give North Korea a viable nuclear deterrent and
prevent a U.S. attack. But the North Koreans will not feel safe from
attack until their leaders and ours are sure that their missiles can
deliver a nuclear strike against the U.S. mainland.
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