Lyndon Johnson was a conflicted man about Vietnam almost from the time he took office.  As early as May, 1964, he confessed his doubts about the conflict to his good friend Senator Richard Russell in one of the many phone calls he taped in the Oval Office.  That was three months before the fateful Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave him congressional authorization for military action in Southeast Asia without needing a formal declaration of war for it.  Later that year, he privately acknowledged the Tonkin Gulf incident never happened and told Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara “we concluded maybe they hadn’t fired at all.”  He was referring to the claimed attacks by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on two US destroyers which, on its face, seemed preposterous but which propelled this country deeply into the Vietnam conflict that didn’t end until President Gerald Ford evacuated the last of the US forces and a few South Vietnamese collaborators in humiliation from the rooftop of the US Embassy in Saigon 11 years later in April, 1975.  They left behind a nation in ruins, its landscape devastated and chemically poisoned that remains so today, and a few million dead Southeast Asians in three countries showing the kind of men Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were – imperial war lords who never had to answer for their war crimes as they never do under a system of victor’s justice.  The only compensation the victims got was their freedom from US aggression when realizing it couldn’t win it decided to give up a futile fight and pull out.

 

Long before he left office, Johnson knew the war was unwinnable, and in 1965 told Secretary McNamara “I don’t believe they’re ever going to quit.  And I don’t see….that we have any….plan for victory – militarily or diplomatically” –  spoken as he was about to escalate the conflict dramatically by shipping over many thousands more US forces that would eventually exceed a half million before things began to be scaled down in preparation for the final exodus in disgrace and defeat.  Johnson did it even while confiding to his closest Senate friend, Richard Russell, that he was on the horns of his greatest dilemma.  He had to find a way out of the Vietnam mess he felt was pointless but said he couldn’t do it without being impeached – for Johnson, a classic Hobson’s choice or in his own words “I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t.”  He asked his savvy friend for advice, but Russell told him he had none.  Johnson felt trapped, and in May, 1964, (when the US commitment stood at a 16,000 troop strength level) he told Russell “We’re in quicksand up to our necks, and I just don’t know what the hell to do about it.”   

 

He did a lot about it, but made a criminal and coward’s choice that destroyed him.  It was apparent on March 31,1968, two months after the momentous Tet offensive  showed how hopeless things were and how pointless it was to pursue an agenda certain to fail.  Johnson addressed the nation on national television that night saying he wouldn’t seek reelection for another term.  His only way out was to “cut and run” because he was so unpopular he had no chance to win.  Lyndon Johnson left office in January, 1969 a disgraced and defeated man.  This powerful, bigger-than-lfe figure was never the same again, and four years later he was dead.

 

Audible Echoes of Vietnam Today

 

Today, echos of Vietnam are heard again resonating from the Middle East more loudly than 30 years ago.  Does anyone in Washington high circles understand George Santayana’s famous dictum that “those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it?”  And do people in those circles know about British playwright George Bernard Shaw who said “We learn from history that we learn nothing from history” and could have explained how doomed this adventure would be from the start?  There are just as many damn fools now as in the past, but the most dangerous ones are those who won’t admit they got it wrong till it’s too late and then it’s someone else’s problem.  The only debate now is whether it’s already beyond fixing, and no solution acceptable to Washington will work.

 

The elite there should read all 1000  pages of noted longtime Middle East-based British journalist Robert Fisk’s new book called The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East and learn how they’re making the same mistakes that doomed the British occupiers after WW I.  In a recent discussion of his book, Fisk compared today with then and explained: (today in Iraq) “It is not just similar, it is ‘fingerprint’ the same.”  During the “war to end all wars” the UK under Prime Minister Lloyd George (the Tony Blair of his time) invaded Iraq in 1917 and claimed, like George Bush, we (the UK) come “not as conquerors but as liberators.”  After the war, the Brits arbitrarily carved out the territory they called Iraq from the former greater Mesopotamia that was under Ottoman rule for almost 400 years until the war ended it.  They told Iraqis they would have “democracy,” held a referendum to prove it, and “elected” a puppet monarch who understood who was really in charge.  In 1920, there was an insurrection, and  Fallujah was the first town bombed followed by a siege against Najaf.  Lloyd George defended his actions on the floor of the House of Commons (which British PMs must do unlike in the US) and claimed “if British troops leave Iraq there will be civil war.” Sound familiar?

 

Winston Churchill was Secretary for War and Air for a time under George in the 1920s and thought it was a waste of British soldiers putting down tribal or sectarian revolts.  Instead he advocated using the new Royal Air Force to bomb villages and was unconcerned if it targeted innocent civilians along with the legitimate resistance struggling (like today) to be free from a repressive occupation.  He also authorized what Saddam was condemned for – using poison gas for the first time ever against a civilian population and at the time wrote: “I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against ‘uncivilised’ tribes.”  In a 2002 BBC poll, this “uncivilised” war criminal was voted the greatest-ever Briton, and his bust is now prominently displayed in the Oval Office occupied by the current war criminal ensconced in it.

 

British rule in the country was turbulent and harsh until Iraq became nominally independent in 1932 and later finally freed itself from British control after the Baathists expelled the Brits for good in the late 1950s, 40 years after they first arrived and not long after Saddam Hussein joined the party he would lead 22 years later. It took the Brits all that time to learn what the Bush administration should already know – Iraqis won’t tolerate a foreign occupation, especially one as harsh as the one now imposed on them.  This hopeless adventure was doomed the moment George Bush signed off on it, but the arrogance of imperial power blinded the neocons in Washington to what should have been obvious to them and eventually will be – the battle of Iraq can’t be won, and the only alternative is a full, unconditional and immediate withdrawal along with reparations paid to help rebuild the country we pillaged and destroyed.

 

That happening is wishful thinking even though many in high places understand the futility of “staying the (present) course” and are scrambling for an alternate solution. It remains to be seen what they have in mind and if they can get the ruling neocon cabal to accept it or manage to sidestep them if they don’t.  It won’t be any easier convincing an administration nominally headed by a man who believes he’s on a messianic mission to decide he made a mistake and be willing to change course than it was to get a former president with a working brain to do it in 1969.  He and his successor “stayed their course” for another blood-soaked six years that scarred this nation and the people of Southeast Asia who paid the greatest price and won’t ever fully recover until they reject the chains of neoliberalism that allow the dominant West to strangle them.

 

How Bad Is It in Iraq and On the Home Front

 

First consider the enormous and growing economic cost according to an estimate by Joseph Stiglitz – 2001 economics Nobel laureate, former Chairman of Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors and chief economist at the World Bank until he quit his job in November, 1999 to speak publicly about his opposition to bank policies,  and Linda Bilmes who teaches public finance at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.  In January, 2006, they estimated the war’s cost could reach $2 trillion but now believe that figure is low and may go much higher because of current and estimated future budgetary costs, the economic impact of lives lost, jobs interrupted, the risk premium in oil prices from uncertainty in the Middle East, the growing cost of veterans’ long-term medical care and disability benefit obligations, the human and capital investment needed to “reset” or restore the military to its pre-war strength and preparedness, and a host of other direct and indirect costs including the most accurate measure of the amount eventually to be needed for the war when all budgetary items are included now and into the future.

 

The government doesn’t calculate the total cost as Stiglitz and Bilmes say it should because of the way the it does its accounting. It uses a “cash accounting” system that would make a CPA wince (and likely lose his accreditation) and only reports expenses when payments are made, not when they’re committed for as most all businesses must do by “accrual accounting” methodology that includes future obligations assumed but unpaid.  Add it all up according to Stiglitz and Bilmes and it comes to $2 trillion   and counting because future obligations not yet in reported budgets are huge for years to come that will drain many billions of dollars from the federal treasury and put an enormous strain on an economy already reeling from massive deficits that are far greater than the phony numbers reported to hide how bad the country’s fiscal condition really is. 

 

Stiglitz and Bilmes also point out that going to war with Iraq (and Afghanistan) was a matter of choice and so is staying there that raises the cost the longer the conflict continues (as well as in Afghanistan not included in their calculations).  And they go much further saying as overwhelming as the $2 trillion

 

budgetary, social and macroeconomic costs are already, more must be added to them such as the expenses incurred by other nations and this country’s intangible ones that include the following:

 

— the cost of our reduced capability to respond to national security threats in other parts of the world.

 

— the cost of high and rising anti-American sentiment in Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere – most everywhere.

 

— the price paid for the sham notion that this country defends and supports human rights and democracy.

 

— the cost of the sharp decline of America’s “soft power” from the Bush administration having tarnished the country’s credentials, reducing Washington’s ability to influence or prevail on crucial issues like trade, global warming, the international criminal justice system and much more. 

 

Stiglitz and Bilmes don’t say it, but they seem to  suggest the “empire” is in decline economically and politically, and the Bush administration and its war on the world agenda had a lot to do with it.  They may also be saying, or at least hinting, that this administration’s budgetary recklessness did enormous fiscal damage to the country that by some estimates now place the national debt as high as $70 trillion when all future financial obligations are included; it also ran up a true 2005 budget deficit of $760 billion, not the fictitious $318 billion it reported; and it exacerbated a huge current account deficit now exceeding $800 billion and rising – meaning the nation leached at least $1.5 trillion in 2005 from these two sources alone plus whatever is hidden and so far unknown including from other government reported data that was cooked to look better than it is.

 

In a recent interview, Stiglitz went even further saying….”in this current administration, the defense industries and the energy industries have really been running the show and it has been disastrous.”  He discussed the mismanagement and ominous signs of a housing bubble now deflating.  It was generated by a tsunami of irresponsible Federal Reserve generated printing press created prosperity under Alan Greenspan and still ongoing under the radar because the Fed stopped publishing overall M3 monetary aggregate figures in March, 2006 it wants to conceal.  And that was exacerbated by the administration’s reckless spending policies that now set up the possibility of a global economic depression Stiglitz believes can only be avoided by implementing big changes in how the US economy is managed going forward.  He added how hard it will be to do it because of the entrenched interests in the administration saying….”this has been perhaps the worst six years of mismanagement of the macro economy,” and that an implosion can only be avoided with careful management, but if the present course continues to be followed a global depression will result in 12 – 24 months.

 

The news isn’t any better in the November 20, 2006 issue of Business Week in which writer Michael Mandel points out another startling fact in his feature article called “Can Anyone Steer This Economy?”  In it he says sometime around a year from now “the US will hit a milestone.  For the first time in recent memory” this country will import a dollar value of goods and services exceeding what the federal government collects in revenues that now amounts to $2.4 trillion a year.  He goes on to say the US economy was once an “800 pound gorilla,” but that’s not true anymore because the global economy is overtaking us.  The forces of globalization “have overwhelmed Washington’s ability to control the economy.”  In today’s brave new world order environment, giant corporations, called transnationals for a good reason, are free to offshore their manufacturing and other activities anywhere in the world and do it where the cost of doing business is cheapest – meaning, as Stiglitz and Blimes would likely conclude, this country is slowly sinking economically and the enormous financial obligations and burgeoning debt it’s run up is only making it happen faster.  Writer Mandel seems to agree saying “Washington is no longer the center of the economic universe”…….or New York, Chicago or Los Angeles either.

 

The Pentagon may know a thing or two about this, worries about what effect it eventually will have on its future operations as well as a lot about its current impossible one in Iraq it likely wants to wash its hands of.  It showed in a mid-October classified briefing leaked to the New York Times in which high-level military officials said conditions in Iraq are in a state of chaos beyond its control.  This came out of the US Central Command in charge of the Middle East. It reported Iraqi government security forces can’t cope with the violence that’s “at an all-time high, spreading geographically.” 

 

When the most powerful military force in the history of the universe throws up its hands and effectively cries uncle, it shows how bad things are in the Kafkaesque maelstrom of Iraq.  It also shows how hopeless this adventure was that should have been brain-dead and stillborn from the start – but you’d never know it from the head-in-the-sand comments of the “stay-the-coursers” in Washington that includes the president, vice-president and Democrat leadership even when their language changes.  They’re willing to fine-tune the tactical management of the operation as they’re now about to do but never willing to give up the prize they’ve already invested so much in and can’t afford to give up because the cost of doing it is so great.  It’s what journalist Robert Fisk meant when he said “the US must get out (of Iraq), they will get out, and they can’t get out.”

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