Interesting to compare nv.cc.va.us with the recent speeches on Iraq.
And this article contains interesting parallels:
What do Iraq, Vietnam, Bay of Pigs have in common?
BY WALTER PINCUS
It has all the elements of a summer potboiler: a president obsessed with overthrowing a foreign leader, an intelligence chief on the hot seat, and the clash of cultures between American soldiers abroad and the people of a proud foreign nation.
But the book I've been reading is no potboiler. It's A Look Over My Shoulder, the recently published memoir by the late Richard Helms, the legendary CIA director who died last October and whose retrospective account of the use and misuse of intelligence during his experience with Cuba and Vietnam four decades ago bears a sobering resemblance to what appears to be happening today with Iraq.
The word that comes to mind about U.S. policy when reading Helms isn't ''quagmire.'' It's ignorance or maybe arrogance -- combined with a willful disregard of facts that do not correspond with the personal or political priorities of American decision makers. And for this reason, Helms' story is one that deserves attention, not just on the pages of book review sections, but in the White House itself.
Helms, who took over the running of Cuban covert operations during the Kennedy administration, describes how President John F. Kennedy and his brother, then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, were fixated on ousting Fidel Castro almost to the exclusion of other, more serious, world problems. To readers today, there is an obvious parallel to President Bush and his administration's singular focus on Saddam Hussein and regime change in Iraq while pushing aside the war on terrorism and other international issues.
JFK's fixation on Castro stemmed from the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. The Bush fixation arises in part from his view and the view of those around him that his father should have taken out Saddam in 1991 at the time of the first Gulf War. Bush is also settling a score over the alleged 1993 Iraqi plot to kill the senior Bush.
''It was the ouster of Castro and his unelected government that interested the president,'' Helms wrote of the early 1960s. ``The agency's operational arm was stretched taut and thin. Our response to President Kennedy's demands had already resulted in what must have been the largest peacetime secret intelligence operation in history.''
Yet Kennedy failed in a task that many thought would be, to borrow a more recent phrase, a cakewalk. Helms quotes then-CIA inspector general Lyman Kirkpatrick, who back in 1962 attributed the Bay of Pigs failure to a series of miscalculations:
• An overall lack of recognition on the part of the U.S. Government as to the magnitude of the operation required to overthrow Fidel Castro.
• ``The failure on the part of the U.S. Government to plan for all contingencies at the time of the Cuban operation including the necessity for using regular U.S. military forces in the event that the exiled Cubans could not do the job themselves.
• ``The failure on the part of the U.S. Government to be willing to commit to the Cuban operation as planned and executed those necessary resources required for its success.''
Sounds familiar, particularly when you substitute Iraq for Cuba.
The U.S. focus on Cuba as a potential communist threat in the midst of the Cold War became self-fulfilling as the Soviets arrived with their missiles, creating a major confrontation. The Bush administration's unproven allegations of Iraqi links with terrorists who threatened the United States also have become self-fulfilling. The charges helped justify the U.S. invasion and now Islamic fighters from throughout the Middle East are attacking Americans inside Iraq.
Perhaps the most distressing parallels arise from Helms' retelling of incidents from the Vietnam War period. In both cases, there was a tendency to accentuate the positive -- and suppress the negative.
When Helms' deputy testified before Congress and mentioned the high number of civilian casualties caused by the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam military and industrial targets, President Johnson got hold of the CIA director the next day and told him, '`The next time you or one of your fellows plans to mention civilian casualties in North Vietnam, I want you both to come down and have a drink with me before you go to testify on the Hill.' There was no more sensitive subject for President Johnson than civilian casualties in that war,'' Helms writes.
When was the last time anyone heard a Bush administration official discuss Iraqi civilian casualties?
CIA Director George Tenet has probably suffered the same discomfort over Bush's public statements about Iraq that Helms had when Johnson repeatedly publicized the good news about the war in Vietnam.
Like Helms, Tenet has, at times, tried to play the honest interpreter in the National Security Council and other White House meetings. Tenet spoke up when intelligence was going to be misused in one of Bush's speeches on Iraq in October 2002, but it is less clear what interventions the CIA director made later.
Tenet has another dilemma that Helms also faced. As CIA director dealing with the Vietnam War, Helms had what he describes as ''two quite different responsibilities.'' The analysts in his Directorate of Intelligence had ''to judge the success or lack thereof of the U.S. military and civilian activities designed to win the war,'' he writes. On the other hand, his clandestine operatives, in the Directorate for Plans (now the Directorate for Operations) were ``to spy upon and penetrate North Vietnam; to monitor and penetrate the Viet Cong operations in South Vietnam; to train the South Vietnamese in counterinsurgency techniques . . . to go all-out to maintain the conviction that there was -- in the worn phrase of those days -- light at the end of the tunnel.''
The dilemma came when it became apparent that the intelligence analysts ''held a pessimistic view of the military developments'' while the operations personnel ''remained convinced that the war could be won.'' The latter group had to feel that way because, he wrote, ``Without this conviction, the operators could not have continued their difficult face-to-face work with the South Vietnamese, whose lives were often at risk.''
As Helms described it, ''In Washington, I felt like a circus rider standing astride two horses, each for the best of reasons going its own way.'' The question today is how is Tenet handling those two horses.
Walter Pincus covers intelligence issues for The Washington Post. |
