Garry Wills: Iraq & Vietnam
[Editor's Note: The following excerpt is drawn from Garry Wills's review of Taylor Branch's biography of Martin Luther King.]
... Of course, Branch had all but completed At Canaan's Edge before the war in Iraq began. But no one read-ing his account now can fail to see resemblances between King's protest against the war and those now criticizing ("almost traitorous") what is going on in the Middle East. Even more striking are the defenses made for the present war and what was said to justify continuing the Vietnam struggle. In both cases, secrecy played a great part in making the war leaders unaccountable to the public. We can watch with a kind of fascinated horror what is going on today as it developed back then. When this volume begins, the American dead in Vietnam were only 402, but they mount inexorably as we read on. The very next year, the number would exceed 2,500—this after six years of combat. We have almost reached that number in Iraq after only three years of war.
The need to keep the American people from knowing what was going on was a constant concern. There were efforts to suppress or minimize the number of the dead—like the hiding of the caskets returned from Iraq. Johnson tried to obscure the first introduction of marines into Vietnam by calling them "MPs." He used a quiet exercise of executive authority to expand the draft, to keep it out of Congress and the newspapers. When he authorized 100,000 new troops for Vietnam, he announced only 50,000. In Iraq, the government has kept the number and nature of contract agents secret, in order to understate our presence there.
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Critics of the Vietnam War were timorous for a long time. Each began his criticism with the mantra that "we cannot withdraw instantly"—the same thing we hear now. It was said by Arthur Schlesinger, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, and by King himself. But Johnson was soon lumping all his critics together as saboteurs of his good-faith efforts. He spurred Hoover on to find Communist ties in the peace movement. He fumed at the academic teach-ins with their type of professor, "the man with the beard...with no responsibility" talking to "the little shits on the campuses." He complained to King that people "got the impression...that you're against me in Vietnam...[but] I want peace as much as you do, and more so, because I'm the fellow that had to wake up this morning with fifty Marines killed."
Though Johnson knew and resented the fact that he had been forced down a no-win road, he used every device he could to hide that fact, even drawing from his pocket a soldier's letter, written to his "Mom," praising the war effort. (Sound familiar?) This encouraged the many people who were ready to say that all the critics were undermining the troops. King was accused on CBS's Face the Nation of encouraging the enemy. Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut issued a rebuke: "It is nothing short of arrogance when Dr. King takes it upon himself to thus undermine the policies of the President." Citizens must just shut up and follow their betters. James Reston wrote in The New York Times that war critics "are not promoting peace but postponing it"—while Johnson was postponing a recognition of the reality in Vietnam with palliatives and delusive cures (interdiction, search-and-destroy, model villages, shield areas—many of the same tactics used or recommended in Iraq).
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For a long time in the Iraq war, almost every doubt about it was prefaced with the assurance that "this is no Vietnam." But it always was. The resemblances are all too clear. We were lied into both wars (the Tonkin Gulf attack, the WMD threat), with the expectation that we would be there a short time, welcomed as liberators, staving off a world threat (communism, terrorism). We went into Vietnam without understanding the culture, the national history, the relation of our puppets (largely Catholic Vietnamese) to the hated French colonizers. We thought we would be seen as different from the colonizers since we had what Pyle in Graham Greene's The Quiet American calls "clean hands." We went into Iraq not understanding the relation of the religious groups to Saddam's secular government, or the relation of Iraq to Muslim powers.
One resemblance between the two wars, admittedly, is a kind of inverse one. In Vietnam we thought we could create two countries out of one, with two different cultural bases—Catholic in the South, Communist in the North. In Iraq we thought we could create one country out of what is in fact three. The Kurds and Sunnis and Shiites had only been held together by Saddam's despotism. Remove that, and the three revert to their uncoerced differences. If we do not get a three-way war between them with oil at stake and terrorists from other countries joining it, the best we can hope for is a new despotism, of Shiites over the two minorities, but with this difference: Saddam's was a secular despotism, the Shiites' will be an Islamic fundamentalism. Our staying there does not thwart these results, any more than our staying in Vietnam thwarted the takeover by the North—it just makes the probable outcome all the more likely and more costly.
5.
Secrecy
But the great and overarching resemblance between Vietnam and Iraq is the way they were wrapped in unaccountability and secrecy. Johnson had a great exemplar of secrecy in J. Edgar Hoover. Branch admires the mature objectivity of the SCLC activist Diane Nash (to whom this volume is dedicated): asked whether she resented Hoover's efforts against the movement, she said that, no, "I blame us." The American people gave Hoover unchecked power, based on secrecy, for almost half a century. What can anyone expect but the misuse of that power? Since Hoover controlled the secrets, he could use or withhold the secrets, or feign what he had learned but "could not reveal." He was at liberty to roam anywhere, rolling over citizens' rights. After getting authority to tap King's phones, he was forbidden to plant bugs in his rooms—but he did so anyway. His excuse? The same that President Bush uses for unauthorized NSA surveillance—there was not time to get authorization.
One of the first and most common uses of secrecy is to cover up one's own misdeeds or mistakes. Hoover was embarrassed that one of his Ku Klux Klan "plants" was in the car with the man who murdered Viola Liuzzo. He hid this fact as long as he could, and then misrepresented the man's role. He spread a series of lies to change the subject. He not only told Johnson that Liuzzo was in a high-speed "necking party," but claimed that she "had indications of needle marks in her arms where she had been taking dope" (the only punctures were from the car's shattered glass). Hoover tried to prevent the President from talking to Liuzzo's husband (who could contradict his lies) by saying that he was a pretty bad man, "one of the Teamsters' strong arm," as if that were reason not to talk to a man who has lost his wife, the mother of his five children. Blackening reputations was an automatic reflex with Hoover.
One of the marvels of King's life is that he stood up to probably the most intense and sustained of Hoover's campaigns of character assassination. Hoover had King tapped (legally), bugged (illegally), deprived of advisers, vilified in planted stories, left unprotected in danger. He quietly undermined him in every available forum. He had colleges cancel honorary degrees, senators cancel honorary dinners. He tried to block the Ford Foundation from giving his program a grant. To prevent King's receiving the Nobel Prize, he tried to provoke him into committing suicide before leaving for Oslo.[3] He refused to inform King of death threats the FBI knew about, something the organization regularly did for others. Hoover had reached such a berserk extreme that he was hoping for an assassination. King was this crazed Ahab's Great Black Whale....
Read entire article at NY Review of Books
... Of course, Branch had all but completed At Canaan's Edge before the war in Iraq began. But no one read-ing his account now can fail to see resemblances between King's protest against the war and those now criticizing ("almost traitorous") what is going on in the Middle East. Even more striking are the defenses made for the present war and what was said to justify continuing the Vietnam struggle. In both cases, secrecy played a great part in making the war leaders unaccountable to the public. We can watch with a kind of fascinated horror what is going on today as it developed back then. When this volume begins, the American dead in Vietnam were only 402, but they mount inexorably as we read on. The very next year, the number would exceed 2,500—this after six years of combat. We have almost reached that number in Iraq after only three years of war.
The need to keep the American people from knowing what was going on was a constant concern. There were efforts to suppress or minimize the number of the dead—like the hiding of the caskets returned from Iraq. Johnson tried to obscure the first introduction of marines into Vietnam by calling them "MPs." He used a quiet exercise of executive authority to expand the draft, to keep it out of Congress and the newspapers. When he authorized 100,000 new troops for Vietnam, he announced only 50,000. In Iraq, the government has kept the number and nature of contract agents secret, in order to understate our presence there.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Critics of the Vietnam War were timorous for a long time. Each began his criticism with the mantra that "we cannot withdraw instantly"—the same thing we hear now. It was said by Arthur Schlesinger, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, and by King himself. But Johnson was soon lumping all his critics together as saboteurs of his good-faith efforts. He spurred Hoover on to find Communist ties in the peace movement. He fumed at the academic teach-ins with their type of professor, "the man with the beard...with no responsibility" talking to "the little shits on the campuses." He complained to King that people "got the impression...that you're against me in Vietnam...[but] I want peace as much as you do, and more so, because I'm the fellow that had to wake up this morning with fifty Marines killed."
Though Johnson knew and resented the fact that he had been forced down a no-win road, he used every device he could to hide that fact, even drawing from his pocket a soldier's letter, written to his "Mom," praising the war effort. (Sound familiar?) This encouraged the many people who were ready to say that all the critics were undermining the troops. King was accused on CBS's Face the Nation of encouraging the enemy. Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut issued a rebuke: "It is nothing short of arrogance when Dr. King takes it upon himself to thus undermine the policies of the President." Citizens must just shut up and follow their betters. James Reston wrote in The New York Times that war critics "are not promoting peace but postponing it"—while Johnson was postponing a recognition of the reality in Vietnam with palliatives and delusive cures (interdiction, search-and-destroy, model villages, shield areas—many of the same tactics used or recommended in Iraq).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For a long time in the Iraq war, almost every doubt about it was prefaced with the assurance that "this is no Vietnam." But it always was. The resemblances are all too clear. We were lied into both wars (the Tonkin Gulf attack, the WMD threat), with the expectation that we would be there a short time, welcomed as liberators, staving off a world threat (communism, terrorism). We went into Vietnam without understanding the culture, the national history, the relation of our puppets (largely Catholic Vietnamese) to the hated French colonizers. We thought we would be seen as different from the colonizers since we had what Pyle in Graham Greene's The Quiet American calls "clean hands." We went into Iraq not understanding the relation of the religious groups to Saddam's secular government, or the relation of Iraq to Muslim powers.
One resemblance between the two wars, admittedly, is a kind of inverse one. In Vietnam we thought we could create two countries out of one, with two different cultural bases—Catholic in the South, Communist in the North. In Iraq we thought we could create one country out of what is in fact three. The Kurds and Sunnis and Shiites had only been held together by Saddam's despotism. Remove that, and the three revert to their uncoerced differences. If we do not get a three-way war between them with oil at stake and terrorists from other countries joining it, the best we can hope for is a new despotism, of Shiites over the two minorities, but with this difference: Saddam's was a secular despotism, the Shiites' will be an Islamic fundamentalism. Our staying there does not thwart these results, any more than our staying in Vietnam thwarted the takeover by the North—it just makes the probable outcome all the more likely and more costly.
5.
Secrecy
But the great and overarching resemblance between Vietnam and Iraq is the way they were wrapped in unaccountability and secrecy. Johnson had a great exemplar of secrecy in J. Edgar Hoover. Branch admires the mature objectivity of the SCLC activist Diane Nash (to whom this volume is dedicated): asked whether she resented Hoover's efforts against the movement, she said that, no, "I blame us." The American people gave Hoover unchecked power, based on secrecy, for almost half a century. What can anyone expect but the misuse of that power? Since Hoover controlled the secrets, he could use or withhold the secrets, or feign what he had learned but "could not reveal." He was at liberty to roam anywhere, rolling over citizens' rights. After getting authority to tap King's phones, he was forbidden to plant bugs in his rooms—but he did so anyway. His excuse? The same that President Bush uses for unauthorized NSA surveillance—there was not time to get authorization.
One of the first and most common uses of secrecy is to cover up one's own misdeeds or mistakes. Hoover was embarrassed that one of his Ku Klux Klan "plants" was in the car with the man who murdered Viola Liuzzo. He hid this fact as long as he could, and then misrepresented the man's role. He spread a series of lies to change the subject. He not only told Johnson that Liuzzo was in a high-speed "necking party," but claimed that she "had indications of needle marks in her arms where she had been taking dope" (the only punctures were from the car's shattered glass). Hoover tried to prevent the President from talking to Liuzzo's husband (who could contradict his lies) by saying that he was a pretty bad man, "one of the Teamsters' strong arm," as if that were reason not to talk to a man who has lost his wife, the mother of his five children. Blackening reputations was an automatic reflex with Hoover.
One of the marvels of King's life is that he stood up to probably the most intense and sustained of Hoover's campaigns of character assassination. Hoover had King tapped (legally), bugged (illegally), deprived of advisers, vilified in planted stories, left unprotected in danger. He quietly undermined him in every available forum. He had colleges cancel honorary degrees, senators cancel honorary dinners. He tried to block the Ford Foundation from giving his program a grant. To prevent King's receiving the Nobel Prize, he tried to provoke him into committing suicide before leaving for Oslo.[3] He refused to inform King of death threats the FBI knew about, something the organization regularly did for others. Hoover had reached such a berserk extreme that he was hoping for an assassination. King was this crazed Ahab's Great Black Whale....