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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
The man who leaked the Pentagon Papers talks about why five American presidents lied about Vietnam -- and how to get the truth on Iraq.
Nov 19, 2002 | In times of war, Americans tend to give the president the benefit of the doubt. They assume he's acting rationally, on the basis of access to classified information they can't know about. But in his new book "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers," former Defense Department analyst Daniel Ellsberg demonstrates that such assumptions can be false.
"Secrets" describes, as no book has before, exactly how American leaders deceived the public about a war plan that they knew could not win in Vietnam -- even as they sent increasing numbers of soldiers to fight and die there. As the U.S. prepares for a war against Iraq whose outcome no one can foresee, many will ask if we're doomed to repeat this history of deception. Few people are more qualified to explore this question than Ellsberg, who risked prison in 1971 by leaking the Pentagon Papers, 7,000 pages of top-secret memoranda by Vietnam policymakers, to the New York Times.
Ellsberg understands U.S. Vietnam policy perhaps better than any living American. In his New Yorker review of "Secrets," Nicholas Lemann joked that Ellsberg was the Forrest Gump of the war, turning up everywhere, from remote hamlets in Vietnam to the inner sanctums of the Defense Department. Ellsberg was at the Pentagon reading cables from the destroyer Maddox when it reported being attacked by the North Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin on Aug. 4, 1964, the incident that convinced Congress to give President Lyndon Johnson a blank check to wage war in Vietnam. He was on an airplane with U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara when the latter exclaimed privately that U.S. forces were losing in Vietnam -- and then publicly declared that "I'm glad to be able to tell you that we're showing great progress in every dimension of our effort" at a press conference when they landed. And he risked his life on the ground in Vietnam in a quest to understand the real war, driving roads with U.S. advisor John Paul Vann that no other Americans would dare travel, observing U.S. helicopter pilots hunting Vietnamese peasants like animals, and engaging in combat himself against Viet Cong forces.
But Ellsberg is also one of America's foremost experts on Vietnam policy because of his insatiable curiosity about the war, and the culture that spawned it. He has spent much of the past 40 years trying to understand how U.S. policymakers could have waged America's first losing war at a cost of the death of 58,000 Americans and 2-3 million Indochinese. He goes beyond his book in this Salon interview to speculate on the motives of American leaders, and to draw the parallels he sees with today's U.S. policy toward Iraq.
The issue is not whether Iraq is "another Vietnam," a slogan opponents have used to discredit American military adventures from Central America to Afghanistan. The Iraqi army enjoys nothing like the popular support the Vietnamese communists enjoyed, and the war is unlikely to last for a decade. But any number of reasons why the U.S. failed in Vietnam could have relevance in Iraq -- most notably, cultural and historical ignorance on the part of U.S. policymakers. As McNamara observed in his 1995 Vietnam memoir, "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam," "Our misjudgments of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders." Ellsberg believes that our present leaders are equally ignorant of Middle Eastern politics, and worries that a unilateral American strike against Iraq could turn the Muslim world even more against the U.S., costing the support of Muslim countries in the war on terror and helping create a new generation of terrorists.
Whether or not one agrees with Ellsberg's analysis, reading "Secrets" makes clear that Vietnam is not merely history. Presidents are still capable of acting irrationally and distorting the truth, and Congress is still too willing to cede war-making power to the executive branch. Even more disturbing, it reminds us that American leaders have made wartime decisions that weakened rather than strengthened national security -- but that asking questions about our war aims is patriotic, not subversive.
What are the major lessons from Vietnam that today's young people, who may not know very much about the war, should know?
Very smart men and women can adopt and pursue wrongful and crazy policies, and get those policies adopted and followed. And they can keep the basic illegitimacy and craziness obscured, at least, by secrecy and lies about its causes and prospects. The Pentagon Papers show that all U.S. presidents over a 23-year period lied, virtually continuously, about what they were doing, what they intended to do, what the costs were expected to be, what they actually had done, and about what the reasons for doing it were.
The 7,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers prove that nothing our leaders said should have been taken at face value. It's naive and even irresponsible for a grownup today to get her or his information about foreign policy and war and peace exclusively from the administration in power. It's essential to have other sources of information, to check those against one's own common sense, and to form your own judgment as to whether we ought to go to or persist in war.
