Regis Debray, French Socialist and mentor to deceased communist guerrilla Che’ Guevara, was asked about contradictions between Socialist goals and the oppressive results. Debray replied “We don’t tell the people the truth. We take dissembling to a fine art.” When does dissembling become outright lying? Some American examples defy credulity:
In 1898 “Remember the Maine!” headlined national newspapers after the USS Maine exploded in a Cuban harbor. Newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst had been pressuring the president and Congress to start a war with Spain so he could monopolize the sugar market. The explosion’s cause was later determined to have been coal dust detonation – not a Spanish mine as advertised. A fortuitous coincidence at best. This was followed by America’s “Banana Wars” throughout Central America in which Dole and Dupont corporations played major parts.
In response, former Commandant of the Marine Corps, Major General Lejeune conducted a series of national speaking engagements themed “War is a Racket.” “The biggest racketeers were Washington politicians, arms merchants, Wall Street bankers, and corporate America” he said. MG Lejeune was solicited by high-powered representatives of a group called The Liberty League for help in a conspiracy to overthrow the president of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt. In November 1934, he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee about the plot by such corporate icons as the Dupont brothers and J.P. Morgan. Despite irrefutable evidence, Congress chose to do nothing citing irreparable damage to the nation’s infrastructure. In other words, they were “too big to fail.”
Then there’s the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident in which North Vietnamese gunboats were alleged to have conducted an unprovoked attack on a US navy destroyer. The non-existent attack was used as a pretext for the Vietnam War. Secretary of State Kissinger commissioned a RAND Corporation’s exhaustive two-year study of the Viet Cong in the very early stages of that war. Results showed the VC to be nationalists and they would never quit fighting for independence. Kissinger replied “it doesn’t matter.” The Pentagon Papers proved President Johnson and staff lied to the American people about the progress of the war to further selfish political interests. This prolonged the war -and killed more American troops- for years.
On August 13, 1996 UnoCal (subsequently coopted in Chevron) and Delta Oil of Saudi Arabia came to an agreement with state companies in Turkmenistan and Russia to build a natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan via Afghanistan. The agreement was finalized the next year. In 1997 former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski portrayed Central Asia’s vast oil reserves as the key to domination of Eurasia. He wrote for the US to maintain its global primacy, it must prevent any possible adversary from controlling that region. He noted because of “popular” resistance to US military expansionism his strategy could not be implemented “except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.”
During the spring of 2001 a series of military and government policy documents sought to In the spring of 2001 a series of government and military publications sought to legitimize US military force in the pursuit of oil and gas. One article by a former staff member of the Senate Armed Services committee argued the legitimacy of “shooting in the Persian Gulf on behalf of lower gas prices.” He also “advocated the acceptability of presidential subterfuge in the promotion of a conflict” and “explicitly urge(s) painting over the US’s actual reason for warfare as a necessity for mobilizing public support for a conflict.”
Before Afghan Prime Minister Hamid Karzai took power in Afghanistan he had been a paid consultant for Unocal as well as Deputy Foreign Minister for the Taliban. Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv noted “If one looks at the map of the big American bases created [in the Afghan War], one is struck by the fact that they are identical to the route of the projected oil pipeline to the Indian Ocean.” Recently a U.S. congressman complained of “classified information” brainwashing members of Congress in closed session to vote for a war in which America has no real strategic interest. Brainwashing was the term Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater used to describe the Johnson Administration upon returning from a fact finding trip to Vietnam. What a coincidence.
America should never go to war to fatten the pockets of politicians, corporations or contractors. Sending the best of American youth to die for any other reason than a clear and present danger to America’s true national security interest is criminal. We can thank Kerry’s bumbling -and Putin’s political astuteness- for avoiding a war with Syria. Can future wars still be avoided by an informed, participative democracy? Not with dissembling at an all-time fine art.
