Bill's Big Diamond Blog

Walter Cronkite

The death of Walter Cronkite at 92 leaves Americans contemplating the changes in our media since his heyday as our preeminent television news anchor.  It is hard to imagine that we once looked to a network news broadcast as a digest of the nation’s daily experience, that one voice was ever regarded as, “the way it is.”  We have so many ways to get our news now, but none are so central to the American experience as the CBS Evening News was in Cronkite’s day.

 The first distinct remembrances I have of Cronkite are from the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, where he commented on Mayor Richard Daley’s security tactics against reporters by calling them “thugs” on the air and where he threatened to “pack up our cameras and go home.”  I also remember his coverage of the Apollo landing on the Moon, which was informatively detailed and yet still inspirational.  And finally, when the Watergate scandal began to wane because the facts seemed too arcane for most Americans to follow, Cronkite demanded, and got, a 22-minute, two-segment report on the nightly news to illustrate the money trail that led from Cuban burglars invading the Democratic National Committee headquarters directly to the White House and the Presidency of Richard Nixon.

 One of the ways to understand the profound difference that good television journalism made in Cronkite’s era is to reflect on his coverage of the war in Vietnam.  Cronkite was initially a proponent of the American escalation there, and his coverage of the war reflected his orthodoxy for a while.  But as his reporters began to bring back stories that contradicted the military and White House perspective on the conflict, Cronkite decided to go see Vietnam for himself.  After the 1968 Tet Offensive, Cronkite journeyed to the war zone and saw the protracted civil war for what it was, a stalemate that couldn’t be won by intervening American forces.

 As a respected combat journalist, not only did Cronkite’s on-air assessment strike a chord with a broad swath of the American public, but his reportage was apparently pivotal to President Lyndon Johnson, who decided shortly thereafter not to seek re-election in 1968.  Johnson told his press secretary, Bill Moyers, that if he had lost Cronkite, he had lost Middle America.  Negotiations with the North Vietnamese began shortly thereafter.

 It’s hard to imagine Americans, high and low, responding to a media figure today the way the country listened to Cronkite during the 1960’s.  The firewall between news and entertainment had not yet fallen at the networks— and there was a sense of pride among the CBS news staff that they were carrying a public trust— to present the events of the day to the nation fairly.  Cronkite was the voice of that organization and it was trusted to put journalistic standards largely above selling soap.

 Another part of the work Cronkite and his colleagues did was to unpack more investigative stories in long-form documentary shows, aired in prime time.  Pieces like “The Selling of the Pentagon,” which detailed some of the scandalous ways that military contractors used political connections and former military officers to get incredibly lucrative contracts out of the Defense Department drew huge audiences of American viewers and caused changes to be made in government policies.  One can’t remember Cronkite without keeping in mind the organization he had behind him at CBS.

 It would be worth thinking long and hard as we remember Cronkite about how we bring stories today to the public that the powers-that-be would still rather relegate to the backwaters of our media.  It won’t be through an organization at the major networks.  That day is over, as is Walter’s.  But it’s a legacy that should and must live on.  As we miss Cronkite, we should also remember that his standards should be his legacy to his country.

(Bill Kavanagh cross-posts at Buck Naked Politics.)

Robert McNamara

Robert McNamara’s death this week at age 93 brings up a host of emotions that haunt most Americans of a certain age.  His role as the primary architect of American involvement in the Vietnam conflict during the 1960’s will be, despite all his other work, McNamara’s historical legacy.  Reflecting on that role also appears to have been the ethical shadow that preoccupied the latter half of McNamara’s life.

The decision to send half a million American boys to Vietnam in 1965 to fight a major Cold War conflict over a continuing civil war had consequences far beyond that country’s borders over the intervening decades.  The fierce resistance of the Vietnamese, a growing American domestic disillusionment with our involvement, and an increased press scrutiny of the escalation led to a decision by Lyndon Johnson not to stand for re-election in 1968, to the rise of an American political insurgency, to a questioning of an Imperial Presidency, and to the fall of many another American icon.   

The continued war effort after McNamara and Johnson, fought over years of drawn-out peace negotiations by President Nixon and his Vietnam guru, Henry Kissinger, brought forth myriad additional moral questions.   Their ‘larger’ goal— to put an American defeat at a ‘decent interval’ from a drawdown of U.S. troops—finally ended with 58,000 American and two million Vietnamese dead by time the war was over in 1975.  Many of those casualties were taken for peace terms that were already on the table in negotiations begun in 1968.

But despite the compounding crimes of the Nixon years, the Vietnam experience is forever stamped with the brilliant, but calculating mind of Robert McNamara, a young business leader with a background in military strategy and targeting during World War II.  McNamara was a rational numbers man—and everything about America in Vietnam was done by the numbers: casualty counts, troop strengths measured, tons of armaments dropped, dollars spent, lives diverted.  The problem was that the war wasn’t about numbers for the Vietnamese.  For them, it was about fighting for their country.

No amount of rational calculation would have helped McNamara arrive at the simple conclusion he finally saw by the time history had been written about the conflict: that no war can be understood solely as a mathematical and ideological enterprise.  The Americans had only been the last great power to realize that the Vietnamese would not stop fighting for their independence until they had won; Ho Chi Minh’s troops weren’t mainly a faction of a global ideological movement, but primarily a nationalist movement with an ideological and strategic connection to our global opponents.

McNamara’s War, as it became known, was unwinnable by a foreign power and to make matters worse, America’s chosen Vietnamese allies were the most corrupt and least connected to the people of all the forces at play there.  No amount of propping up the likes of Diem, Ky, and Thieu was going to change their distance from Vietnam’s peasants, who were doing most of the dying out in the rice paddies of the country.  But to McNamara, the war was seen as part of a global war against Communism, a beachhead in a greater battle for freedom.  His frame of reference was almost totally at odds with the reality of the situation on the ground in Southeast Asia.

There is evidence that even McNamara had private doubts about the whole adventure.  He claimed to have expressed them to President Johnson in a prelude to the escalation decision in 1965, asking the President to think twice about committing American troops to a jungle war a world away.  But in the end, McNamara fell prey to professional loyalty to the Presidency and the to the institutional belief that he could make a flawed policy work with overwhelming force.  In so doing, he became another of the many American leaders who put their Vietnam qualms aside to achieve a “larger goal.”

The two most important lessons to be learned from the McNamara experience in Vietnam are that war is to be waged only when it is forced upon us, not when it is optional, and that rational calculation is a sad second to a moral compass where matters of life, death, and country are concerned.  Anyone forgetting these lessons is likely bound to repeat the mistakes McNamara made in thinking that Vietnam could be won with numbers and that the Vietnamese would see their best interests in rational compliance with the wishes of a superior force.

Errol Morris, the documentarian whose important film on McNamara, “The Fog of War,” should be required viewing for foreign policy and government students, quoted a 1966 speech McNamara gave in Montreal in his obituary blog on the former Defense Secretary.  The way that McNamara chose to honor rationality and yet to implicitly acknowledge the massive failure men make when placing their larger aims ahead of the means used to achieve them is sadly evident in Morris’ chosen McNamara quotation:

“… All the evidence of history suggests that man is indeed a rational animal but with a near infinite capacity for folly. His history seems largely a halting, but persistent, effort to raise his reason above his animality. He draws blueprints for utopia, but never quite gets it built. In the end he plugs away obstinately with the only building material really ever at hand: his own part-comic, part-tragic, part-cussed, but part-glorious nature.”

(Bill cross-posts at Buck Naked Politics.)

The Honduran Coup and the U.S.

The question that comes to mind here regarding the recent coup in Honduras is, “What role will the US government play in either restoring democracy or in allowing the Honduran military to rule?”  As most readers know, the history of US support for coups in Latin America is a long and shameful one.  Now that one has taken place during the Obama Administration, we wonder what will distinguish his reaction to it from that of past US presidents.

The Bush Administration supported the last attempted Latin American coup against an irritant of the US, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, in 2002.  Bush’s support backfired when the coup was overturned quickly and decisively by Chavez’ supporters, earning the US further condemnation in the region.  Even stated opposition to coups by the US has historically been halfhearted and sometimes merely a show for international audiences.

 In fact, the joke question one hears frequently in those parts is, “Why has there never been a military coup in the United States?”  The answer is, “Because the United States is the only country in the Americas without a US Embassy.”  Militaries across the region have always taken the pulse of US diplomats before acting to overthrow their governments by coup.  It appears that in Honduras as well, the military calculated that, at worst, the US will not act decisively against their actions.

 So will Obama let the Honduran coup pass into record, even while the country’s neighbors have united to shut down trade and called for the restoration of the elected President?  What means would the US employ to convince the Honduran military, which has historically lived on aid from the US, that their coup must be reversed?  Will the Administration put its prestige on the line to stand on the side of democracy in its own backyard, even as it is powerless to do so on the other side of the globe in Iran?

 We're interested to see.

(Bill Kavanagh cross-posts at Buck Naked Politics.)

Iran's Future

The continuing uprising in Iran is a hopeful sign for that beleaguered nation, but hardly a sure bet that the regime will fall anytime soon.  It’s inspiring that the activism of ordinary Iranians has kept even an old pol like Moussavi from abandoning claims to legitimacy in the face of the overwhelming power of the state.  However, the Revolutionary Guard has the force to make the streets of Tehran unsafe for protest and it is clearly willing to use violence on Moussavi’s supporters— and possibly on him as well.  

The nightly shouts from the rooftops of “God is Great” and “Death to the Dictator” remind the Iranian people that they are not alone but simultaneously that they cannot protest in the bright light of day without severe consequences.  The resistance to the Supreme Leader and to the militarization of Iranian life is now entering a precarious phase, during which reform leaders must decide how to sustain themselves and their movement in the face of increased repression and further violence.

As for Americans who support the Iranian people, there is much we can learn about their country’s history, but little we can do to change it.  It’s instructive to remember that our meddling in Iran has already led to decades of dictatorship there.  In 1953, the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh was deposed by a CIA and MI6 sponsored coup.  Mohammed Reza Palevi, known in the West as the Shah, was installed from abroad in what became a brutal 26-year rule against the will of the Iranian people.  The cries of Iranians against the US do not come out of nowhere.

While the 1979 Iranian revolution had the wide support of the people, from socialists to hard core Islamists, theocracy and the exigencies of war with Iraq soon took a heavy toll on more secular groups.  During the 1980’s, religious fundamentalists in Iran tired of the messiness of democracy after the revolution and blood ran in the streets while the Revolutionary Guard accumulated power during Iran’s long war with their neighbor Saddam Hussein.  The dictatorship of the military and the Ayatollahs today stems from that period of reaction and battle.

What happens now?  We don’t know, but we can keep lines of communication open, people to people.  What we can’t do is to ask our government to become involved.  With our country’s history in Iran, the US government can only cause harm to the Iranian democracy movement by demanding it be recognized.  Condemning state violence against protest is about as far as our government should go in inserting itself where it clearly cannot change the balance of power inside Iran.

Gail Collins has this to say about the US Administration’s limitations:

…Obama has to be very, very careful not to offer any kind of encouragement that might lead some of the dissidents to believe that the United States has their back if they take to the streets. That would be incredibly cruel, not to mention dangerous. We all remember what happened to the Shiites in Iraq in 1991 when they thought that the first George Bush would come to their rescue if they rose up against Saddam Hussein.

As people, however, we can help spread news out of Iran and let the sunshine of truth help thwart the repression against the Iranians. It’s not much help to a student being beaten bloody or being shot for his/her resistance, but the ripples of our solidarity may have unforeseen consequences down the line.  Let’s hope that by staying in touch and speaking out internationally, we as citizens can show some small reflection of the courage of Iran’s people as they face their own struggle.

(Bill Kavanagh cross-posts at Buck Naked Politics.)

Cole on Iranian Election Fraud

Juan Cole’s post and Salon.com article on the fixed election in Iran are both worthwhile reading. There’s lot’s of good detail there on the probably hastily-organized and clumsy doctoring of the results— and why they are so improbable. He sees the “soft coup” holding and Moussavi probably backing down from sending his supporters into the streets.  The memories of the bloody civil strife of the 1980’s are key for his generation of reformers in shying away from direct conflict.

 Cole also notes his support for the Obama overtures to Iran, regardless of the real outcome.

FBI Agent to Testify About Amateur Torture 'Experts' Today

Look for Ali Soufan, who was the FBI’s agent in charge of debriefing Abu Zubaydah until he discovered a coffin had been brought to Zubaydah’s cell by the CIA, to testify today before Congress about the torture techniques that CIA “experts” employed with high-value Al Qaeda prisoners. 

Soufan claims that Zubaydah confided to him that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, once his “rapport building” technique had begun to pay off—and before the CIA’s own outsourced amateur consultants arrived in Thailand to take over with their torturous methods.  Der Spiegel’s article on the CIA's outsourcing of interrogation and torture to civilian psychologists is available at the link.  Many thanks to David Martin, who pulled this article from the internets.

Real News Video on Historic Salvadoran Election

The video here tells a bit of the story about the recent election of Mauricio Funes as President of El Salvador.   This historic electoral shift represents the first opportunity for the FMLN to carry out its program in a country ruled by the Right since the bitter decade-long Civil War in the 1980's.

New Times in El Salvador

 Yesterday was a transformative day for the people of the tiny Latin American country of El Salvador.  Eighteen years after the civil war of the 1980s, the nation finally moved past its most brutal era by electing a new generation and context of leadership.  In a campaign characterized by very tough accusations, huge turnout, and high hopes on the Left, Salvadorans elected a former television journalist as their new President.  Mauricio Funes will become the first candidate of the FMLN coalition to head the government since they came out of the mountains and entered electoral politics in the 1990’s.

 Funes is also the first candidate of the former rebels to be recruited from a moderate background outside the party’s historical leadership.  His assurances that a Funes government would not eliminate private property or the market economy, but would instead address market failures and severe unemployment made his candidacy more viable to moderates and less frightening to business than leftist FMLN candidates of the past.

 His campaign included a call to vote against the narrow elitism of the ARENA Party, which has ruled the country since the end of the war and has constantly inveighed against the FMLN opposition as terrorists and followers of Hugo Chavez.  In his speech to the convention that nominated him last summer, Funes said:

 To those gentlemen that are in the government, to those who have kidnapped the apparatus of the state for their own benefit and for that of a few friends, to those who have put their stingy and egotistical self interests above the common interest, I say to you, I insist of you: your time has ended; now is the hour of change.

 Now Funes will have a chance to show what he is made of— and whether the FMLN has embraced change itself.  The new President will take charge of a party which is historically more radical than its new  leader and which has never had to coalesce around a government, but has been always in the opposition.  The new challenges of building an agenda from a position of power will be magnified by the global financial crisis confronting all governments today.

 However this experiment turns out, the fact that Salvadorans have walked away from two decades of  government by the right wing ARENA party is significant.  ARENA consistently ran on references to the  the civil war and by inciting fears that the polarization of society required their strong hand to prevent more strife.  In bad economic times, ARENA ran more against the FMLN than on its own record.  The party even changed its slogan during the last campaign from one that portrayed its good stewardship of government to one that emphasized that “wisdom” required their continued rule.

 Funes has emphasized his similarities in seeking change to the new President of the United States.  His advertisements took on the slogans of Barack Obama and Funes made parallels between the two during the campaign.  Last night, the crowd at his headquarters even chanted, “Yes we could!” as he took the stage to declare victory.  His supporters are hopeful that he will be able to deliver on his promises to revitalize the economy and advocate for the poor in a country with extremely tough economic, crime and social problems to confront as he takes office.

Zimbabwe's Death Spiral

As our President-Elect said during the campaign (while his opponent was ‘suspending’ his campaign to save the economy), the President often has to deal with more than one thing at a time.  There’s no doubt that our imploding domestic economy is Job One for the incoming Chief Executive, but there are other crises he must address— and the death spiral in Zimbabwe is one that requires urgent attention from world leaders.

 Bob Herbert’s column today in the NY Times details, anecdotally, the extent of the ongoing epidemics in Zimbabwe, accompanied by an almost total lack of health services in this country, which is still today under dictator Robert Mugabe’s iron fist, despite elections and an unfulfilled agreement to share power with the victor.  The situation there strains belief in its seriousness.  Every day that it remains unaddressed involves a mounting— and preventable— loss of life.

 According to a Zimbabwean obstetrician, quoted in an emergency report by the organization, Physicians for Human Rights:

 

“A major problem is the loss of life and fetal wastage we are seeing with obstetric patients. They come so late, the fetuses are already dead. We see women with eclampsia who have been seizing for 12 hours. There is no intensive care unit here, and now there is no intensive care in Harare.
“If we had intensive care, we know it would be immediately full of critically ill patients. As it is, they just die.”

 

Herbert excerpts the report in his column at length and paints a picture as frightening as any international crisis on the world scene, most of which are covered daily, unlike Zimbabwe’s:

 

 “This emergency is so grave that some entity needs to step in there and take over the health delivery system,” said Susannah Sirkin, the deputy director of Physicians for Human Rights.

I encourage readers to look at Herbert’s excellent piece and to go directly to the organization’s report itself at the link.  If you are moved to do so, there are a number of ways to let the incoming Administration know that you share the group’s concern about the disaster in Zimbabwe.  Here are some links that can be useful:

Obama Transition e-mail:

Change.gov- Foreign Policy

 

Mail:

President Barack Obama

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Washington, DC 20500

 

White House Phone (after 12 PM 1/20):

Comments:   202-456-1111

Switchboard: 202-456-1414

 

White House e-mail (after 12 PM 1/20):

[email protected]

 

Mail to Secretary of State:

Secretary Hillary Clinton

U.S. Department of State

2201 C Street NW

Washington, DC  20520

 

e-mail to Secretary of State (after 12 PM 1/20):

At this link 

Gaza Attacks Lower Bar For Who Are Considered Combatants

According to Tim Butcher, the scope of attacks against Hamas in Gaza is unprecedented.  Apparently, just being a police officer in Gaza is now enough grounds to be targeted with a missile from Israel. 

 Not a good sign for the future.