Chomsky ponders Trump 'False Flag' Op

As you may know, I'm a big advocate of the work of Noam Chomsky. His writing and talks changed my political outlook. I discovered Chomsky when I was 17 and it quickly set me on the course to where I am today. Though I am no longer a left-wing libertarian, I am still a socialist and I think there are important lessons to be drawn from the anarchist tradition. Chomsky is a key figure in contemporary anarchism.

One of the main attractions of Chomsky's work is the level of moral clarity and intellectual honesty. He cuts through the bone to the marrow with precision. Going to the fundamentals of a political question is the cornerstone of radical thought. As an analytical critic Chomsky takes apart US foreign policy and unravels its claims before our eyes. It's a thankless task in many ways. Another side of this has been Chomsky's opposition to 9/11 conspiracism on the left.

Yet in a recent interview Noam Chomsky contradicts his past record on combating conspiracy theories. He suggests that the Trump administration may opt for a 'false flag' operation to save its right-wing agenda. When I first heard about this I didn't believe it until I read the Alter-Net interview. In his own words, Chomsky says: "I think that we shouldn't put aside the possibility that there would be some kind of staged or alleged terrorist act, which can change the country instantly."

I was very surprised to read these words and I even feared the old man may be losing his touch. If you want the full context, here it is for your judgement:

JF: Do you think there will ever be a moment of awakening, or a disconnect for Trump's supporters of his rhetoric and what he's been doing in Washington, or can this just keep going? 

NC: I think that sooner or later the white working-class constituency will recognize, and in fact, much of the rural population will come to recognize, that the promises are built on sand. There is nothing there.

And then what happens becomes significant. In order to maintain his popularity, the Trump administration will have to try to find some means of rallying the support and changing the discourse from the policies that they are carrying out, which are basically a wrecking ball to something else. Maybe scapegoating, saying, "Well, I'm sorry, I can't bring your jobs back because these bad people are preventing it." And the typical scapegoating goes to vulnerable people: immigrants, terrorists, Muslims and elitists, whoever it may be. And that can turn out to be very ugly. 

I think that we shouldn't put aside the possibility that there would be some kind of staged or alleged terrorist act, which can change the country instantly.

Now let's break this down. It's certainly true that the Trump administration is increasingly unpopular and isolated. President Trump's approval rating stands 35% - a historically low precedent for a new president. Even George W Bush only reached 25% at his lowest point, just as Nixon reached 36% after Watergate. In these conditions, it is plausible that the administration would want something, anything to shore up support for the government. But this is not the basis for a false flag operation.

I should add I'm not saying the US government has not been guilty of false flags in the past: the Gulf of Tonkin being the obvious example. It's now uncontroversial that the Johnson administration leapt on Tonkin to expand the war against Vietnam. It's also true that there are real conspiracies in history. Look up COINTELPRO or the Iran-Contra affair, if you want to see a real conspiracy in action. There are even questions around Pearl Harbour and the extent to which FDR provoked Japan.

So, what is the problem with Chomsky's points here? Professor Chomsky might be defended on the grounds that this was a throw-away remark - one line in a full interview, with little clarification. There are gradients of what a 'staged' or 'alleged' attack could mean. Many of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists accept the case that the Bush administration had "advance knowledge" and simply allowed the attacks to go ahead. A more plausible theory is that the administration was so incompetent that it failed to act on the information it had about the plot.

This is a long way from the Ickean dimension of reptilian lizards, the whackjob theory that the Twin Towers falling was CGI, or the blatant anti-Semitism behind the idea that it was all staged by Mossad. However, the view that the US government had some role in the 9/11 attacks still belongs to the conspiracists. Chomsky has dealt with these theories well in the past. He would point out that the 9/11 attackers were mostly Saudi citizens. If it was an 'inside job', it would make little sense to frame Saudi Arabia if the aim was to invade Iraq. This is still a major hole in the theories.

I have yet to hear an account of the 9/11 attacks which can account for this hole. Most conspiracy theorists don't even talk about it because it's outside the reach of their assumptions. The politics of conspiracism are uncritical of the surrounding world, in fact, the point of such theories is to reinforce passivity and provide excuses for inaction. Why try to change the world when the Illuminati run everything? They're all powerful. So any attempt to challenge them is doomed to failure. This is why there are no movements or parties based on these theories.

Serious political action and theory requires hard work. It requires commitment. Naturally the online 'truthers' have jumped on Chomsky's comments, while the remarks have left many of Chomsky's friends and fans perplexed. I am not alone in this regard. Israel-based journalist Jonathan Cook has criticised Chomsky's comments. Here's what Cook posted on his Facebook page:

One doesn't need to be convinced that Bush-Cheney or the US security services were implicated in 9/11 to see that there is a deep problem with Chomsky adopting his new position. He has previously suggested in different places both that a major false-flag operation in the US would be almost impossible to conceal and that it is a waste of the left's energies, and its credibility, to indulge in this kind of speculation. 

That was at least a plausible position for him to adopt. But it is entirely inconsistent with his new position that we should expect Trump to carry out a false-flag operation and even accuse him of intending to do so before it occurs.

I have no doubt that Chomsky was right to argue that conspiracy theories are a dead-end for the left. So it's disappointing to read these comments, even in their full context. This isn't a reason to discard everything Chomsky has ever written. Demanding infallibility is unrealistic and ultimately puerile and rather conservative. Let's be mature about this. Furthermore, it is more in line with Chomsky's free thinking to disagree with him than it is to blindly follow him.

Vietnam, 50 Years on.

Kennedy – The Beginning

In 1961 the Kennedy administration came into office and inherited the Eisenhower policy of sending military advisors to South Vietnam in support of the Saigon government. The American presence in Vietnam had reached 800 by the close of the Eisenhower era and by 1963 President Kennedy would increase the number of military advisors to 16,000. The first strikes came in 1961 as the Kennedy administration sent war planes with South Vietnamese markings against rural targets where 80% of the population lived and the Viet Cong insurgency had taken root in South Vietnam. The war planes were manufactured in the United States.

When John F. Kennedy first took his seat in the Oval Office, the Viet Cong numbered 300,000. The insurgency was composed of a broad coalition united in opposition to the Saigon government. Its demands included the ouster of American military advisers and the reunification of Vietnam. The Diem regime had banned public assembly, political parties, and even public dancing; its demolition of pagodas and preferential treatment of Catholics had drawn the ire of the mostly Buddhist population. The US began bombing to defeat the resistance to President Diem as it seemed that the regime was not succeeding in defeating the Viet Cong.

By 1962 the US had begun to establish “strategic hamlets” in the country where peasants were held behind barbed-wire enclosures under the watch of South Vietnamese troops. By 1970 5 million Vietnamese peasants were displaced in this way. The pretext was to protect the peasants from the insurgents. At the same time the first use of the so-called rainbow herbicides - most infamously, Agent Orange - was initiated. The aims of the programme were to rapidly defoliate the forestry and kill crops with the hope of denying the Viet Cong cover and food.

Eventually the repressive rule of the Saigon government provoked protests from Buddhist monks. A catalytic moment came in May 1963 when South Vietnamese armed forces fired upon Buddhist protestors in the city of Hue on Phat Dan. The Buddhists had been protesting against the ban on their flag on a holy day. The armed forces opened fire on the crowd with live ammunition and killed nine people. Yet more demonstrations followed with President Diem denying his forces had any responsibility for the deaths.

The civil unrest would last until November 1963 at which point the generals of South Vietnam plotted a coup against the sitting government. Popular opposition grew over those six months. In one act of defiance Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc self-immolated to protest the brutality of the regime. He left a letter reading: “Before closing my eyes and moving towards the vision of the Buddha, I respectfully plead to President Ngo Dinh Diem to take a mind of compassion towards the people of the nation and implement religious equality to maintain the strength of the homeland eternally. I call the venerables, reverends, members of the sangha and the lay Buddhists to organise in solidarity to make sacrifices to protect Buddhism.”

The Kennedy administration understood that this situation was unsustainable and withdrew its aid to the Saigon government in a direct rebuff to President Diem. As the protests continued the US government began to encourage the coup plotters in the South Vietnamese military elite to take action. In November 1963 President Diem was arrested by the army, after an overnight siege of the presidential palace, before being shot and repeatedly stabbed by his bodyguards. His death signalled the end of the Diem government and gave way to direct military rule. The US role is confirmed by the Pentagon Papers: “We maintained clandestine contact with [the plotters] throughout the planning and execution of the coup and sought to review their operational plans and proposed new government”.

Johnson – Escalation

The end of the Diem regime did not signal the end of US commitments, in fact, according to the Pentagon Papers, “our complicity in his overthrow heightened our responsibilities”. Not long after this Kennedy was assassinated on November 22 1963. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson assumed the responsibilities of the presidency and would go on to strengthen the war effort even further. Before the shooting President Kennedy spoke at a breakfast held at the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce:

 

We have increased the defence budget of the United States by over 20%; increased the programme of acquisition for Polaris submarines from 24 to 41; increased our Minutemen missile purchase programme by more than 75%; doubled the number of strategic bombers and missiles on alert; doubled the number of nuclear weapons available in the strategic alert forces; increased the tactical nuclear forces deployed in Western Europe by over 60%; added five combat ready divisions to the Army of the United States, and five tactical fighter wings to the Air Force of the United States; increased counter-insurgency forces which are engaged now in South Vietnam by 600%.

Less than a year later the Gulf of Tonkin incident took place. On August 2, 1964 the USS Maddox was on an intelligence mission along North Vietnam’s coastline. The vessel was allegedly fired upon and retaliated by firing on three North Vietnamese torpedo boats that had been talking it in the Gulf of Tonkin. There were no American casualties. The second incident came on August 4 in which the USS Maddox returned to the coastline and engaged in what were believed to be North Vietnamese torpedo boats. The crew had acted on the basis of sonar evidence that had picked up two vessels. But there was no wreckage or bodies found.

Even though it appeared that there had been no attack the Johnson administration quickly decided to retaliate. The bombing of North Vietnam began immediately and President Johnson began to raise the number of US ground troops. The Tonkin Resolution was fast-tracked and passed on August 7. It would signal a change in US policy as the Johnson administration initiated hostilities with North Vietnam to bypass the congressional restraints on the government. The US government now had free rein in its bombing of the North.

By 1965 South Vietnam had been so devastated that the war correspondent and military historian Bernard Fall claimed that the existence of Vietnam (in particular South Vietnam) was “threatened with extinction”. The US sent 200,000 US troops to South Vietnam that year and in 1966, 200,000 more were sent. By 1968 the US troop presence had exceeded 500,000 soldiers at a cost of $2 billion per month. Up until 1969 the military operations in Vietnam had been conducted by the Democratic administration. Originally President Kennedy had hoped that the US would be able to withdraw from Vietnam in 1965, provided that the war had been won; the change in government would lead to the war being extended further.

Nixon – Enter the Mad Man

By 1968 the Johnson administration was in negotiations with North Vietnam in Paris. Henry Kissinger was an adviser to the US negotiators. The negotiations came in election season. Lyndon B. Johnson had made clear he would not be seeking re-election, a shock to the public; instead his vice president Hubert Humphrey would seek the presidency. Richard Nixon had emerged as the Republican contender. He had pledged “peace with honour” in south east Asia, but secretly he feared that the Democratic government would reach a settlement in Paris and win the election.

Dr. Kissinger was in contact with negotiators as well as the Nixon campaign. He was expecting to work for whoever won the election and ingratiated himself with both campaigns. Henry Kissinger told the Nixon campaign that the US negotiators were close to securing a settlement. The prospect of peace would give Humphrey an advantage over Nixon. The Nixon campaign had opened a secret line with the South Vietnamese regime and persuaded them to withdraw from the negotiations thereby scuppering the possibility of a settlement. Richard Nixon had offered South Vietnam much more support than the Johnson administration and a better deal in the future.

The Nixon administration not only set out to extend the war in North Vietnam they intensified the bombing of Laos and launched an illegal bombing campaign against Cambodia. The Nixon administration claimed that the North Vietnamese were stationing their forces and supplies across the border in Cambodia and pursued the bombing on such grounds. By 1970 President Nixon was growing frustrated that the war showed no sign of coming to an end.

In 1972 Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger flew to China and met with Chairman Mao. The US government aimed to open up relations with China to secure its long-term strategic interests. The Sino-Soviet split had left Maoist China isolated on the world stage and if China aligned itself with the US (which it would eventually do) then the Vietnamese would have to choose the side of the Soviet Union over China. The original pretext of US involvement in Vietnam was to contain China and, as the Pentagon Papers confirm, the decision to bomb North Vietnam only made sense in the context of containing communist China.

As the election approached President Nixon began to look at the war effort as an electoral means once again. “I went them to hit everything,” Mr. Nixon told Henry Kissinger. Dr. Kissinger on the orders to General Alexander Haig: “[Nixon] wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn’t want to hear anything. It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies, on anything that moves.”

Immediately after re-election was secure the White House sanctioned the Christmas bombing campaign, spanning twelve days, targeting Hanoi and Haiphong. The campaign constituted the heaviest bombing campaign of the entire war and it provoked international outcry. Negotiations resumed soon after and by January 1973 Richard Nixon had announced the end of the war. The terms were settled along the lines that had been negotiated back in 1968. Even still, Henry Kissinger would win the Nobel peace Prize for his efforts and the fighting between North and South Vietnam wouldn’t reach a conclusion for two more years.

The Paris Peace Accords were signed not long after the announcement and the US military withdrew its ground forces in March. The North Vietnamese respected the ceasefire agreement as the US government pledged support to the South Vietnamese and further bombing if the North resumes its operations. The President and Dr. Kissinger were planning a resumption of bombing by April, but the orders for further bombing were rescinded as the Watergate scandal broke out. Richard Nixon could not fight the US Congress and Vietnam at the same time. He would become the first US President to be impeached and Gerald Ford succeeded him in August 1974.

The bombing of Cambodia had not ended with Operation Menu. The bombing continued throughout the early 1970s. This eventuated in the collapse of the delicate balance of social forces and classes in Cambodian society. First this led to the dictatorship of Lon Nol, who seized power in 1970, but this would later be swept aside by then the Khmer Rouge in April 1975. Not long after Phnom Penh fell to Pol Pot the North Vietnamese seized Saigon. The US withdrawal had left little force to resist the offensive and the South Vietnamese army were quickly overwhelmed.

By early 1976 Vietnam was officially reunified and declared a socialist republic. Its main ally was the Soviet Union as China had shifted its allegiance to the Khmer Rouge seeing Cambodia as a counterweight to Soviet influence in South-East Asia. This state of affairs would lead to two more wars in which Vietnam would overthrow Pol Pot and defend itself from Chinese retaliation.

On the Khmer Rouge trial.

I've written about Cambodia and the period of Angkar rule (1975-79) in the past. So I felt it necessary to cover the recent verdicts at the trial of Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea. It is an obscenity that the core of the leadership has gotten away with it all. Khieu Samphan may be the biggest prize here, but it would have been a great day to see Saloth Sar (a.k.a. "Pol Pot") in the dock. It would have been even better to have seen Henry Kissinger in the dock with him for his part in sanctioning the illegal bombing of Cambodia which precipitated the rise of the Khmer Rouge. Here's a snippet:

The Khmer Rouge got off easy. No act of genocide is as misunderstood as the murderous campaign that the Maoist revolutionaries undertook during the second half of the 1970s. Two million Cambodians were murdered in the space of four years. The scale of the killings, and the ruthlessness with which they were conducted, shocked the West, which was still struggling to get its head around the Holocaust, just three decades earlier.


The idea that an anti-colonial conflict, so soon afterwards, had turned so barbarous, was particularly difficult to digest, especially in the context of popular resentment against the war in Vietnam. The people, so to speak, had proven no better than the imperialists, first the French, and then the Americans, who had spent the better part of the post-war period trying to stamp out the threat of socialism in Southeast Asia, killing millions, themselves.

There are many inconvenient truths about the Khmer Rouge. Like the fact that Prince Sihanouk embraced Pol Pot as an ally, along with Ronald Reagan, and George HW Bush, against the Vietnamese forces which removed the Khmer Rouge in 1979. That the Western powers provided food and training as long as they were 'resisting' Vietnam's occupation. John Pilger and Peter Jennings have both covered this.

Kennedy's words on November 22nd 1963.

I've just been flicking through Ira Stoll's book on John F Kennedy. The Stoll thesis is that the Kennedy administration was a conservative rather than a liberal government. He points to Kennedy's record in economics, as well as in foreign policy, to support his case. This seems to me to be at least healthy in terms of historical inquiry. The American empire, if it is in long-term decline, should be at the beginning of a lot of self-reflection that may not be very pleasant, but it is necessary medicine. The way in which the Vietnam war is conceptualised is key to this. The Kennedy legend is a big part of that and has to be dislodged for a proper critique of imperialism. Not that I expect that, or should expect such a thing, from an intelligent conservative columnist and analyst such as Mr Stoll. It is not to herald Kennedy as a conservative icon, but to deal with the hagiography around him.

A good chapter in Stoll's book is on the day of the assassination itself. Kennedy was set to deliver a speech prating on the fortunes of tax-cuts (for the upper-crust) and the boost to the war budget. That was the speech that the assassination prevented. Nothing a peacenik ought to scoff at. Fortunately, Kennedy did manage to speak publicly and proudly of his achievements earlier that day. It was at a breakfast at the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce that the President stated:

We have increased the defense budget of the United States by over 20%; increased the program of acquisition for Polaris submarines from 24 to 41; increased our Minutemen missile purchase program by more than 75%; doubled the number of strategic bombers and missiles on alert; doubled the number of nuclear weapons available in the strategic alert forces; increased the tactical nuclear forces deployed in Western Europe by over 60%; added five combat ready divisions to the Army of the United States, and five tactical fighter wings to the Air Force of the United States; increased counter-insurgency forces which are engaged now in South Vietnam by 600%.

So there goes the line that the President was a dove looking to slam the breaks on the American war-machine. I've already stated my position on the various theories around the assassination, and Stoll's book interests me precisely because I don't see Kennedy as a heroic liberal figure. I think this quote supports the line that I have taken up. Specifically, that the Kennedy administration was completely wedded to the imperial project of asserting the power that the US had gained in the climax of WW2. The Vietnam war is to be considered a part of the efforts to maintain this hegemonic stance and to snuff out the currents of independence in the region. In fact, the US more or less accomplished this aim by installing dictatorships in Indonesia and the Philippines while bombing Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam into the Jurassic period. The ripples off of these events would leave millions dead in Cambodia and Indonesia (including a genocide in East Timor) on top of the bloodbath in Vietnam. It was all for stability. You can tell it went well because the East Asian economies almost fell into an abyss in the 1990s.

The Bullet that Saved JFK.

To many, John F Kennedy was a hero. The pretensions of the Great Man are always a worthwhile target and the Kennedy cult is one such prime case. The legend of John F Kennedy is a tightly inflated balloon that has been wafting across the discourse since the young man defeated Nixon in 1960. Fifty years since the man was gunned down under circumstances of considerable fixation the time is more than ripe to take aim at that balloon and fire. Kennedy is not remembered for the details of his foreign policy, his efforts in the subversion of Latin American governments, his anti-Communist crusade against Cuba and his escalation of the Vietnam war. And yet there is a plethora of theories floating along with the personality cult.

The trouble with conspiracy theories in general is the tendency to apply Occam's Razor in reverse, slitting through all the simple answers to the end. The preference is always for building a vast and intricate theory. If there is a simple explanation, or a rational explanation, then it is to be rejected as a rule in favour of unfounded speculation of the wildest variety. It can lead anywhere after that point of no return. Like the conspiracy theorists who believe the attacks on the World Trade Centre were either achieved with a) US missiles or b) the attacks were a hologram. Once you've accepted such a proposition you're left with the problem of where all those people - in the planes, in the towers, in the Pentagon - have really gone. So why not suppose they were all gassed in Chicago? Or taken out to Nebraska to be shot on orders from Cheney? The degrees of nuttiness know no bounds.

We find the same with Lee Harvey Oswald. There are inconvenient facts, such as the fact that Oswald owned the guns involved in the events of November 22nd 1963 - not just the assassination, but the murder of a police officer as well - and the fact that the paraffin test at least demonstrated that he had fired a hand gun (though not the rifle, which doesn't discharge a residue). Why would an innocent man shoot a police officer as he ran out of a building? Of course, to answer such a question one first has to be open to a certain array of possibilities. If you have already decided that the captured shooter was a 'patsy' for a high-level conspiracy to ratchet up the war in Vietnam, then why bother? There are more important matters at hand. For instance, if the Mafia was involved (and this goes for the CIA too) then why would Oswald be left to try and hail a taxi to escape from the scene? Ignorance is sometimes all too invincible. Nevertheless, the assumptions behind these theories are always particularly revealing.

The first possibility to be written-off from the outset by the 9/11 'Truth' movement is that Arabs are perfectly capable of hatching such a complex plan and carrying it out. That has a lot in common with the tradition of European anti-Arab racism. Just as Western historians couldn't comprehend that the Arabs could have raced to the straits of Gibraltar from the Middle East and crossed over to the Iberian peninsula. The racist assumption that the Arabs are a race so primitive as to be incapable of a modicum of self-defence ran right into the mid 20th Century. It was a convenient myth for the European empires. It was with the emergence of General Nasser and the crisis of Suez that the Arabs were recognised as capable fighters. After that the new myth would soon be that the Arabs are bloodthirstily savages. The 9/11 'Truthers' simply revert to the early racial myth.

The JFK cult has assumptions no less worthy of unpicking. Jack Kennedy was fortunate to die before the 1964 election. The bullet preserved the memory of a charming and glamorous Kennedy, a fallen angel and martyr for American liberalism. It is all too outlandish to believe that the Kennedy administration posed a serious threat to the intelligence sector, the military-industrial complex and the capitalist system in any way. Really the system should work, it's merely an aberration - if only Kennedy hadn't been shot by perpetrator X (take your pick: the Mafia, Castro, Johnson, the CIA, the anti-Castro Cubans, the rogue CIA and so on to infinite regress). It is a reassuring vision for someone who doesn't really believe social change is possible and doesn't really want to pursue it. It reaffirms passivity and so it should. These theories always seem to arise around events which threaten the pretensions of invincible and invulnerable power.

The fact that Kennedy was a Cold War liberal who saw withdrawal from Vietnam as only acceptable after victory - a victory he may have believed would come in 1965 - which puts him on the same wavelength as Lyndon B Johnson and Richard Nixon. He thought it was fine to invade Cuba and snuff out its push towards independence. When the CIA botched the invasion, Kennedy was angry at the prospect of a tarnished record for his time in office. It was the failure of the mission, not the mission  itself, which was the problem. Kennedy took responsible publicly, and then fired Allan Dulles. This was when he made his famous remark expressing a willingness to "shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces". Of course, the Emperor would be furious when his minions fuck up what should have been a routine operation (or worse, as they were defeated in the case of the Bay of Pigs).

As for the rest of the record: Kennedy cut taxes for the wealthiest slice of American society, bringing down the New Deal rate of income tax from 90% to 70%; while pouring yet more cash into the war budget and had mostly empty gestures on civil rights. He was a strident anti-Communist who spent his spare moments sketching the uniforms of soldiers. The conservative writer Ira Stoll has reviewed the Kennedy Presidency in time for the 50th year since the Great Man was vanquished. The Stoll thesis is that the Kennedy legacy ought to belong to conservative hagiographers and not their liberal counterparts. It was the bullet that saved the Kennedy myth. If Kennedy had lived we would remember him as an ugly war criminal, the Vietnam war would have robbed him of his angelic innocence and Addison's disease would have done the rest.

You Got More With Gore.

There is a lot one could say about Gore Vidal so naturally Nicholas Wrathal found himself spoilt with access to rolls of archive footage. That was on top of the footage Wrathal accumulated of the late author over several years. There would’ve been plenty of substance for United States of Amnesia even without the interviews conducted. By this time, Gore Vidal was in what he described as the ‘bright spring of my senility’ though even as an octogenarian he was still confident that there was no problem that could not be solved if people would only listen to him. All in all Wrathal seeks to strike a balance between the personal and the political. Of course, the personal is political but in the case of some the character and private life follow through into politics and chime together in unison.

It would be impossible to cover one and not the other. The film opens with Gore at the grave of his partner – a grave he now shares, as he knew he would then – speaking with some solemnity and distinctive witticism. Vidal was not one to give away too much on private matters, certainly not the five decades he spent with Howard Auster. The word ‘love’ was conspicuously absent in his vocabulary, instead he described his relationship with Auster as a business arrangement and even as platonic. As he himself put it “I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon, but I cannot understand the love affair.” And yet we find a very different Gore Vidal penned love letters to Anaïs Nin in his early twenties. “You are quite necessary to me as you know” he wrote before offering marriage and a new life together. This was not a subject included in the film.

In a way this is appropriate as it would go too far in one direction and serve to over-humanise the subject. We are what we pretend to be, as Vidal’s friend Kurt Vonnegut once remarked. This astute observation captured the extent to which the performative fictions we undertake are constitutive of our reality. It’s not just that it was the work he produced and the ideas he kept as a reservoir are what drew people to him. It was that the show he put on – as we all do – was more who he was than the vulnerable and desperate letters of a nascent writer in the 40s. It was more becoming when Gore remarked “I am exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside.” It was this Gore who was on show in the public feuds with William F Buckley, Jr., Norman Mailer and Truman Capote.

The love letters to Anaïs Nin were written around the same time as The City and the Pillar (1948) which shocked readers in its depiction of homosexuality not only as a kind of sexual conduct but as a form of love as well. It was a love affair between two all-American boys, no deviants or fairies to be found. It provoked quite a storm and Gore found himself effectively blacklisted by The New York Times. He would write for television and theatre to make money as he was effectively ostracised by the literary establishment. In his own words Wrathal wanted to look at the US in the last half of the 20^th Century through the eyes of Gore Vidal – a viewpoint often neglected. Rightly then Wrathal includes not just the way in which Vidal contributed to the changing perceptions of homosexuality, but the celebratory inventions he devoted to ‘triumphant women’ in books like Myra Breckenridge (1968) as the prospects of sexual liberation flourished.

Gore Vidal had become a litterateur by this point and was thoroughly embroiled in the American political discourse, especially when it resembled nothing more than a bloodsport. Under the slogan ‘You’ll Get More With Gore’ he ran for office in 1960 and won more votes than any other Democrat in decades. Shocked further left by the Kennedy administration and its depredations in Cuba and Vietnam he became involved in the People’s Party in an effort to break the duopoly. The Party had called for a maximum wage and maintained a tough stance on the Vietnam War. He would later reflect that this made sense given that the last potentially revolutionary moment in the US was in the 1930s. In the end Gore threw his weight behind the McGovern campaign – probably the last liberal progressive campaign to be waged – and once the McGovernites were vanquished Vidal later ran against Jerry Brown in California to challenge the Reagan era as it was ushered in.

The way he had refused to concede any ground to the thuggish anti-Communism of the Cold War was admirable to put it mildly. With this in mind Wrathal arranged for Gore Vidal to meet with Mikhail Gorbachev and take a boat ride in Venice. The film charts Vidal’s opposition to Vietnam through to his historical fiction and the controversial view he takes of Roosevelt’s entry into WW2. To the accusations of being a ‘conspiracy theorist’ on such matters Wrathal lets Gore speak for himself. It is in these clips that the journalist he once considered his ‘dauphin’ appears on screen to contribute. Wracked with cancer Christopher Hitchens gives his viewpoint and we are shown the last meeting between the two of them where Gore shows some reluctance to engage. By then the late Hitchens had broken with his former comrades on the invasion of Iraq and Vidal was among those who denounced him. Not surprisingly we find the passing of Hitchens was much more mourned by the liberal intelligentsia than Gore. The reason is obvious: the Hitch had conceded in principle where Vidal remained stern. Vidal saw the American Republic in ruin, or approaching it at least, its institutions crumbling and an economy heavily militarised. It was a system to be criticised and even condemned, but not defended in such dark times.

This article was originally written for Red Monthly.

Obama's Killing Machine.

 

Not even a week into his first term, President Obama sent a clear message to the world when it came to the ‘War on Terror’ re-declared by Bush in 2001. On January 23^th 2009 Obama authorised the first of many military operations conducted within Pakistani territory to take place during his time in office. It was a double-strike carried out by a remotely piloted American aircraft – one of the so-called ‘drones’ – killing at least 15 people in western Pakistan.[1] As far as we know it was the first of more than 300 of these operations to be conducted by the CIA in Pakistan over the last four years. It was as much a sign of things to come as it was the first sign of what looks like continuity between Obama and Bush. Actually the truth is even worse than that.

The policy of drone strikes was initially launched under the shameful first term of President Bush only five months before the 2004 election. Under Bush the campaign of assassination was supplemented, at first, with the kidnapping and torture of ‘terror suspects’ only for this campaign to be upped under Obama. It was Bush who saw the Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF, rammed through Congress after the attacks on the Twin Towers. Pentagon officials have claimed that the AUMF gives the President the power to wage an endless war anywhere on earth; with one official predicting that the operations against al-Qaeda could go on for 20 years.[2] Even so, the Bush administration only authorised around 50 strikes in Pakistan compared with the more than 300 strikes authorised by Obama.[3] With the passing of the National Defence Authorization act the US can now feel free to murder its own citizens at a whim if they are ‘associated’ with terror. The world remains the battlefield for these airborne death squads and no one appears to be safe.
 

 

Over the next four years Obama would extend the drone operations to a whole new precedent, past Pakistan across West Asia and even onwards to Africa. By the summer of 2011 the White House had given the ‘okay’ to bomb Somalia, the justification being to combat the Islamists in the country who had forged ties to Yemen’s al-Qaeda.[4] The US had been conducting operations against Yemen, where they would later assassinate Anwar al-Awlaki – the American and online face of radical Islamism – only to continue the strikes and kill (as of May 20^th 2013) somewhere between 1,100 and 1,800 people.[5] Then the arms that had flowed readily into the hands of Berbers and Tuareg fighters in Libya’s civil war made it to Northern Mali in 2012. The Tuaregs, now rearmed, carved out Azawad from the African state only for the military junta in Bamako to request French assistance. The Islamist presence in North Africa provided yet another pretext to the ever extending bloodbath from above. Soon the US government had responded in its own way and American troops were deployed in 35 African countries.[6] By January 2013, Niger had agreed to let the US drones swarm into their sovereignty to kill yet more targets.[7]
 

The exact numbers of those killed in these operations are not so much disputed as the precise composition of the slain. At CounterPunch, Jeffrey St. Clair estimates the death toll as more than 3,000 with something like 900 civilian deaths including at least 176 children.[8] That’s if we assume that the muddy distinctions of ‘civilians’ from ‘terror suspects’ or even ‘associated forces’ (of al-Qaeda) can be sustained. At the Brookings Institution, in July of 2009, Daniel L Byman estimated that the body count from the drone strikes came to ten civilians for every militant killed.[9] It’s worth keeping in mind that the US government defines ‘suspected militant’ as all military-age males in a strike zone.[10] There are worthy victims and unworthy victims, those killed by the enemy and those we have killed. Such a distinction is to be maintained through whatever legal wrangling necessary in this bizarre age.
 

Come the second term, President Obama had resorted to using past precedents of American war crimes in Indochina to further legitimise the swarm of Predator drones.[11] Operation Menu was the name for the systematic bombing of selected targets (supposedly Viet Cong strongholds) within neutral Cambodia. This campaign was actually just a worse version than the less intense operations carried out under Lyndon Johnson.[12] It was called Menu because of the order of bombing: first breakfast, then lunch, snack, dinner, supper and dessert. With this flippancy the US effectively invaded Cambodia in 1970 and out of the inferno emerged the Khmer Rouge stronger than ever from the fallout. The example of Operation Menu is useful because international law would rule out extending conflict outside of the battlefield. At the time the State Department lawyer claimed legitimacy in extending the war in Vietnam to its neutral neighbour because there were Vietnamese forces in Cambodian territory.[13]
 

It is a befitting analogy for Obama’s drone wars, given the destabilising effect on Pakistan with the potential for civil war and even nuclear disaster in the country. With this in mind we may add that the assassination of Osama bin Laden, originally named Operation Geronimo, was carried out by US forces with the prior expectation that if the situation gets out of hand with nearby Pakistani soldiers they would have to fight their way out of the country. These unsanctioned actions against a supposedly sovereign country have provoked incredible anger in Pakistan. Let alone the authorised actions to repeatedly bomb villages and towns in Pakistan’s territory. Even if we accept the premises of the ‘War on Terror’ we cannot be blind to the sheer futility of these bloody operations. The latest drone strike in Pakistan was on May 29^th of this year, left Walier ur-Rehman, second-in-command of the Taliban, dead among three others in North Waziristan.[14] The next day the Pakistani Taliban replaced this prominent commander with Khan Said. No doubt the Islamists of Pakistan have plenty of new recruits to hoover up in the wake of drone strikes.
 

The attempts by the White House to find a loophole around the criminal nature of this conduct are especially revealing. Obama is much less comfortable than his predecessor when it comes to disregarding international law. Where the Bush-Cheney gang couldn’t give a damn about international law this lawyer-cum-politician looks for the legal grounds to commit mass-murder. Bush had the audacity to pass the ‘Netherlands invasion act’ in 2002, which gave the US the right to invade to prevent any trial of an American citizen taking place in The Hague.[15] Obama is looking to find a more subtle way out of any possible allegations of crimes against humanity. In short, we find that the Democrats offer a better and more civilised George Bush with his finger on the button.

 

This article was written for the Third Estate and posted on June 4th 2013.

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[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/24/world/asia/24pstan.html?_r=0

[2] http://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/17/astoundingly_disturbing_obama_administration_claims_power

[3] http://natsec.newamerica.net/drones/pakistan/analysis

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/02/world/africa/02somalia.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
[5] http://yemendrones.newamerica.net/
[6] http://johnpilger.com/articles/the-real-invasion-of-africa-is-not-news-and-a-licence-to-lie-is-hollywoods-gift
[7] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/29/niger-approves-american-surveillance-drones
[8] http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/03/the-game-of-drones/
[9] http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2009/07/14-targeted-killings-byman
[10]http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/asia/item/15453-obama-orders-drone-strikes-killing-of-6-suspected-militants-in-yemen
[11] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/22/opinion/obamas-nixonian-precedent.html?_r=0
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/29/senior-talibans-killed-us-drone-pakistan
[15] http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-becomes-law

 

 

Neocons and Stalinists.

A serious priority of the apologists for empire is to vilify the opposition which may emerge into the public space from time to time to challenge established power in its aggressive designs. There is a variation of the cases, just as there are liars who have understood what Goebbels knew all too well - specifically, that a big lie will be swallowed more easily than a small one. This is what we find when Alan Dershowitz had the effrontery to accuse Norman Finkelstein's deceased mother of being a kapo - a Nazi collaborator - while she was at Auschwitz. That happens to be a particularly sordid and extreme case, Dershowitz is a good lawyer for guilty candidates. Another instance would be when Andrew Sullivan accused Noam Chomsky of being a supporter of the Soviet Union on the Bill Maher show. This level of slander is nothing new. Chomsky has been accused of everything from supporting radical Muslims killing Americans to supporting nationalist Serbs killing Muslims. I'm writing of this because I recently came across this (unsurprisingly) in the work of Douglas Murray:

"Eleven days into the American forces' action in Afghanistan, on October 18, 2001, Chomsky excelled even himself in a broadcast speech: 'The New War Against terror.' In it he spoke of what American forces were doing in Afghanistan declaring "Looks like what's happening is some sort of silent genocide." He alleged that there was a concerted American attempt to starve and kill between three and four million Afghan people."

Actually the Professor opened the talk on the so-called 'War on Terrorism' with a look at what The New York Times had pointed out about the war of Afghanistan. He covers this in the first 10 minutes, or so, of the aforementioned talk and you can see it all on YouTube. Chomsky picked the estimates of the number of Afghans who were at danger of falling into starvation out of The New York Times, the basis of which came from the United Nations. He emphasises that the millions in Afghanistan on the verge of starvation were dependent on international aid, and that this issue predates the events of 9/11. Chomsky quotes The New York Times in noting that the US demanded from Pakistan the elimination of truck convoys to Afghanistan. This would cut-off the flow of food to the civilian population. He notes that there was no reaction in the US to this demand. Incidentally, this is similar to what the US and Britain imposed on Cambodia in the aftermath of the crimes of Pol Pot and the subsequent Vietnamese occupation. Something that Chomsky was vilified over once again.

Another round of quoting followed as Chomsky notes the threat of military strikes forced out the aid workers, which crippled the assistance programmes. He quotes an evacuated aid worker who says "The country was on a lifeline and we just cut the line." The UN food programme were able to resume food shipments to Afghanistan after a few weeks, this was suspended during bombing. It was the arithmetic of the UN that calculated around 7.5 million Afghans would be left in acute need for 'even a loaf of bread' given the conditions. Chomsky observes that this tells us that Western civilisation is anticipating the slaughter of three to four million. Nevertheless, Murray goes on to dismiss Chomsky's claims as 'lunatic' while he refers us to hacks David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh who ascribe to Chomsky the motive of depicting Americans as "moral monsters" planning on killing millions of Afghans. These self-described "democratic revolutionaries" prefer to conflate anticipation with intention. There is no such thing as subtlety in their worldview.

The real point that Chomsky made was that the conditions of policy-decisions were conducive in potentia to a massive famine in Afghanistan. It was the UN that called on the US to stop the bombing to avert the famine. At this point in the talk Chomsky says "It looks like what's happening is some kind of silent genocide" before adding that this indicates that the US is implementing policies under the assumption that they might kill several million people. The Professor is keen to emphasise that, at this point, we don't know what will happen. That point is not referred to at all in Murray's book. What we do find in the book, strangely, is that Murray can quote Chomsky's reaction when he was faced with the accusation of predicting a "silent genocide". What's strange is that the author is too thick to realise that he's allowed Chomsky to explain what he means quite clearly. Yet Murray ascribes an 'opaque' quality to Chomsky's words in this instance, perhaps his words are only opaque coming after a barrage of lies from right-wing degenerates:

"That is an interesting fabrication, which gives a good deal of insight into the prevailing moral and intellectual culture. First, the facts: I predicted nothing... All of this is precisely accurate and entirely appropriate. The warnings remain accurate as well, a truism that should be unnecessary to explain. Unfortunately, it is apparently necessary to add a moral truism: actions are evaluated in terms of the range of anticipated consequences."

The moral case against the war can't easily be dismissed by hacks. So it has to be reduced to a point that can easily be dismissed by a body-count in Afghanistan that conveniently leaves assumptions about the war untouched. The wretched Stephen Sakur challenged Chomsky on this point a couple of years ago. In response Chomsky aptly pointed out that the fact the "silent genocide" didn't happen because the conditions under which the policies were implemented remain the same. Whether or not the millions lived or died is separate to Chomsky's point, he was talking about the reasonable expectations of the impact of policy at the time. As Chomsky observed, the Stalinist hacks of the Soviet Union could defend Khrushchev's decision to put nuclear weapons in Cuba on the grounds that the move did not lead to a nuclear war and the end of days. To do so takes the decision in separation from its consequences, while conveniently falling back on what actually came after. In this way highly questionable assumptions are guarded from any critical reflection.