TheMillerCircle.org

Geoffrey Perret’s recent book “Commander in Chief: How Truman, Johnson and Bush Turned Presidential Power into a Threat to America’s Future” attempts to capture the essence of how these leaders looked and dealt with our major armed conflicts since WW II and in doing so have put us into a corner of deep liability. This is the one book that I would recommend if you are interested in this topic, that is, the history of how we developed our militarism fed by an irrational view of communism and a complete inability to understand the real world. Devastation to the World driven by American ideology. Indeed, for that purpose I look at Perret’s book as essential reading: he deals specifically with three wars and the presidents who ran them, including Truman and Korea, Johnson and Vietnam and G.W. Bush and Iraq. Perret brings a high degree of insight and knowledge, with many previous books on history and historical figures that have been highly rated. But more importantly he brings new research to the table. In this book, Perret illustrates how naive American leaders have been and how we couldn’t have picked three worse presidents than Truman, Johnson and Bush II for these conflicts, which should never have been conflicts in the first place. Yet the manner with which these conflicts have been pursued and eulogized has generated a huge right-wing constituency that wants to believe we did everything just right. What binds each of these presidents is their ideological view of America as an invincible country of manifest destiny coupled to a lack of sophistication about the real world and the truly naive adoption of creating behemoth monsters out of simple challenges. None of these three presidents ever grasped the essence of their adversary and for each of them, it was or will be, the defining tragedy of their presidency. For Truman and Johnson, communism was a universal, monolithic juggernaut that would consume the free world if we didn’t resist it at every opportunity, no matter how preposterous and disadvantaged we were in facing the challenges: for them communism was controlled by Russia as the master and China as the slave. The result was millions of lives needlessly lost, huge wasted treasury and the need to further advance mythology about ourselves coupled to the essential component of creating more enemies, windmills or not. This book is all about how we have faced unwinnable wars and why we will continue to fight them, even though the world itself is unwinding from centuries of armed conflict. In this modern world our own history of critical events has been reduced to mythology that we cannot escape. We have to continue with the dream until someone learns to pull the plug. Who will do it, if it is every done? Are we inescapably Rome or is there a way out? Perret, like Chalmers Johnson doesn’t think so; these two are the distant bookends of declinism in America. I think they are much closer to the truth about us and our future than any other writers on this topic of today and I have lots of company.

Each of these three wars were and are unwinnable. With one possible exception (that turns out not to be a real exception in Malaya by the British) no single conflict in the 20th century was ever won by an occupying country that tried to enforce their brand of hegemony and prevent true sovereignty from taking place: the 20th century was the great awakening of nationalism and the need for indigenous people to assume control of their own country and their own lives. Oddly enough, our own constitution, the instrument of government that we have set aside, was the springboard of nationalist arousal for many third-world countries including Ho Chi Minh of North Vietnam who used Jefferson’s words and American ideology to plead with Truman for help in keeping the French out of Vietnam following WW II. What a different world it would be today if only Truman had responded positively, as FDR had promised, and not let the French back in after WW II. But Truman sided with the hardliners and never answered the letter. Insurgencies have always won the conflicts on their own turf and for America, every time we have lost one of these non-declared wars, we have badly diminished our ability to project strength based on those things that we do well. The world looks upon us today as a monster, a frightening war machine that is out of control and will use any methods necessary to win or prevent us from losing. We are the only country to ever drop an atomic bomb on another country and we did it twice. Those outside of the U.S. have no doubt that we will do it again and perhaps for trivial reasons.

Fighting wars against insurgencies is not one of our skills, but it has never been a skill of anyone else either, whether it was the French, British or Russians. But the difference between these other countries and us is that they (eventually) had the wisdom and insight to understand that these kinds of conflicts cannot be won and, in contrast, we are still fighting them and there is no indication that we learned anything other than to swallow our own propaganda and create units like the Swift Boat People of America. The persistent heavy consumption of our own mythology encourages us to believe that we have either won these conflicts, or we would have won them if it were not for cowardice on the home front. In the post WW II era, we have probably had only one president, John F. Kennedy, who had enough insight and sophistication about the world to grasp what was going on and possibly prevent us from getting into these kinds of conflicts. Yet, despite conversations Kennedy had with several colleagues that have titillated us and hinted at Kennedy’s willingness to stop the escalation of Vietnam (Kennedy only had “advisors” in Vietnam, but he was a Catholic and for that reason alone he had some affinity for the Diem regime), he did not have any specific plans to get us out of Southeast Asia, as we had been involved in the affairs of that country beginning with our support of the French right after WW II. For each of these wars, our country has become increasingly divided along a military (and industrial) fault line. It was vital to those who believe that America is the “shining city on the hill” to invent the mythology that we either won the war (Korea) or we were stabbed in the back by the defeatists (Vietnam and Iraq) at home. The Korean war was badly lost and the winner was China and Russia. Vietnam was badly lost and the winner was Russia, but more so China. Iraq will be badly lost and the winner will be Iran, but more so China. In each of these military disasters, our own state of national naivete helped us escape the real reasons behind our defeat by promoting the conflict outcome as a lack of internal resolve or even outright treachery by the cowardly left. As a result, the divisive impact on our own culture has been overwhelmingly destructive, yet still incalculable. The most recent gift to our arsenal of imagination has been kindly provided by George W. Bush who has converted millions of Americans into a voting constituency that believes torture and murder are good tools to apply in warfare. For them, Abu Ghraib is a badge of courage, not a reason for shame. With the possible exception of Dennis Kusinich, no current presidential candidate has enough sophistication or courage to understand what has happened to America and why these conflicts have been so one-sided, so victorious for one side, so disastrous for America. (to be continued)