Page 2 of
3 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The week the world stood
still By Noam
Chomsky
The US might have been "in even a
worse position" if the world had known more about
what it was doing at the time. Only recently was
it learned that, six months earlier, the US had
secretly deployed missiles in Okinawa virtually
identical to those the Soviets would send to Cuba.
These were surely aimed at China at a moment of
elevated regional tensions. To this day, Okinawa
remains a major offensive US military base over
the bitter objections of its inhabitants who,
right now, are less than enthusiastic about the
dispatch of accident-prone V-22 Osprey helicopters
to the Futenma military base, located at the heart
of a heavily populated urban center.
An
indecent disrespect for the opinions of
humankind The deliberations that followed
are revealing, but I will put them
aside here. They did
reach a conclusion. The US pledged to withdraw the
obsolete missiles from Turkey, but would not do so
publicly or put the offer in writing: It was
important that Khrushchev be seen to capitulate.
An interesting reason was offered, and is
accepted as reasonable by scholarship and
commentary. As Dobbs puts it, "If it appeared that
the United States was dismantling the missile
bases unilaterally, under pressure from the Soviet
Union, the [NATO] alliance might crack" - or to
rephrase a little more accurately, if the US
replaced useless missiles with a far more lethal
threat, as already planned, in a trade with Russia
that any "rational man" would regard as very fair,
then the NATO alliance might crack.
To be
sure, when the Soviets withdrew Cuba's only
deterrent against an ongoing US attack - with a
severe threat to proceed to direct invasion still
in the air - and quietly departed from the scene,
the Cubans would be infuriated (as, in fact, they
understandably were). But that is an unfair
comparison for the standard reasons: We Americans
are human beings who matter, while they are merely
"unpeople", to adapt George Orwell's useful
phrase.
President Kennedy also made an
informal pledge not to invade Cuba, but with
conditions: not just the withdrawal of the
missiles, but also termination, or at least "a
great lessening", of any Soviet military presence.
(Unlike Turkey, on Russia's borders, where nothing
of the kind could be contemplated.) When Cuba is
no longer an "armed camp", then "we probably
wouldn't invade", in the president's words. He
added that if it hoped to be free from the threat
of US invasion, Cuba must end its "political
subversion" (Stern's phrase) in Latin America.
"Political subversion" had been a constant
theme for years, invoked for example when
Eisenhower overthrew the parliamentary government
of Guatemala and plunged that tortured country
into an abyss from which it has yet to emerge. And
these themes remained alive and well right through
Ronald Reagan's vicious terror wars in Central
America in the 1980s. Cuba's "political
subversion" consisted of support for those
resisting the murderous assaults of the US and its
client regimes, and sometimes even perhaps -
horror of horrors - providing arms to the victims.
The usage is standard. Thus, in 1955, the
Joint Chiefs of Staff had outlined "three basic
forms of aggression". The first was armed attack
across a border, that is, aggression as defined in
international law. The second was "overt armed
attack from within the area of each of the
sovereign states", as when guerrilla forces
undertake armed resistance against a regime backed
or imposed by Washington, though not of course
when "freedom fighters" resist an official enemy.
The third: "Aggression other than armed,
ie, political warfare, or subversion." The primary
example at the time was South Vietnam, where the
United States was defending a free people from
"internal aggression", as Kennedy's UN ambassador
Adlai Stevenson explained - from "an assault from
within" in the president's words.
Though
these assumptions are so deeply embedded in
prevailing doctrine as to be virtually invisible,
they are occasionally articulated in the internal
record. In the case of Cuba, the US State
Department Policy Planning Council explained that
"the primary danger we face in [Fidel] Castro is
... in the impact the very existence of his regime
has upon the leftist movement in many Latin
American countries ... The simple fact is that
Castro represents a successful defiance of the US,
a negation of our whole hemispheric policy of
almost a century and a half", since the Monroe
Doctrine announced Washington's intention, then
unrealizable, to dominate the Western Hemisphere.
Not the Russians of that moment then, but
rather the right to dominate, a leading principle
of foreign policy found almost everywhere, though
typically concealed in defensive terms: during the
Cold War years, routinely by invoking the "Russian
threat", even when Russians were nowhere in sight.
An example of great contemporary import is
revealed in Iran scholar Ervand Abrahamian's
important upcoming book of the US-UK coup that
overthrew the parliamentary regime of Iran in
1953. With scrupulous examination of internal
records, he shows convincingly that standard
accounts cannot be sustained. The primary causes
were not Cold War concerns, nor Iranian
irrationality that undermined Washington's "benign
intentions", nor even access to oil or profits,
but rather the way the US demand for "overall
controls" - with its broader implications for
global dominance - was threatened by independent
nationalism.
That is what we discover over
and over by investigating particular cases,
including Cuba (not surprisingly), though the
fanaticism in that particular case might merit
examination. US policy toward Cuba is harshly
condemned throughout Latin America and indeed most
of the world, but "a decent respect for the
opinions of mankind" is understood to be
meaningless rhetoric intoned mindlessly on July 4.
Ever since polls have been taken on the matter, a
considerable majority of the US population has
favored normalization of relations with Cuba, but
that too is insignificant.
Dismissal of
public opinion is of course quite normal. What is
interesting in this case is dismissal of powerful
sectors of US economic power, which also favor
normalization, and are usually highly influential
in setting policy: energy, agribusiness,
pharmaceuticals, and others. That suggests that,
in addition to the cultural factors revealed in
the hysteria of the Camelot intellectuals, there
is a powerful state interest involved in punishing
Cubans.
Saving the world from the
threat of nuclear destruction The missile
crisis officially ended on October 28, 1962. The
outcome was not obscure. That evening, in a
special CBS News broadcast, Charles Collingwood
reported that the world had come out "from under
the most terrible threat of nuclear holocaust
since World War II" with a "humiliating defeat for
Soviet policy". Dobbs comments that the Russians
tried to pretend that the outcome was "yet another
triumph for Moscow's peace-loving foreign policy
over warmongering imperialists", and that "the
supremely wise, always reasonable Soviet
leadership had saved the world from the threat of
nuclear destruction".
Extricating the
basic facts from the fashionable ridicule,
Khrushchev's agreement to capitulate had indeed
"saved the world from the threat of nuclear
destruction".
The crisis, however, was not
over. On November 8, 1962, the Pentagon announced
that all known Soviet missile bases in Cuba had
been dismantled. On the same day, Stern reports,
"a sabotage team carried out an attack on a Cuban
factory", though Kennedy's terror campaign,
Operation Mongoose, had been formally curtailed at
the peak of the crisis. The November 8 terror
attack lends support to Bundy's observation that
the threat to peace was Cuba, not Turkey, where
the Soviets were not continuing a lethal assault -
though that was certainly not what Bundy had in
mind or could have understood.
More
details are added by the highly respected scholar
Raymond Garthoff, who also had rich experience
within the government, in his careful 1987 account
of the missile crisis. On November 8, he writes,
"a Cuban covert-action sabotage team dispatched
from the United States successfully blew up a
Cuban industrial facility", killing 400 workers
according to a Cuban government letter to the UN
secretary general.
Garthoff comments: "The
Soviets could only see [the attack] as an effort
to backpedal on what was, for them, the key
question remaining: American assurances not to
attack Cuba," particularly since the terrorist
attack was launched from the US. These and other
"third-party actions" reveal again, he concludes,
"that the risk and danger to both sides could have
been extreme, and catastrophe not excluded".
Garthoff also reviews the murderous and
destructive operations of Kennedy's terrorist
campaign, which we would certainly regard as more
than ample justification for war if the US or its
allies or clients had been victims, not
perpetrators.
From the same source we
learn further that, on August 23, 1962, the
president had issued National Security Memorandum
No 181, "a directive to engineer an internal
revolt that would be followed by US military
intervention", involving "significant US military
plans, maneuvers, and movement of forces and
equipment" that were surely known to Cuba and
Russia.
Also in August, terrorist attacks
were intensified, including speedboat strafing
attacks on a Cuban seaside hotel "where Soviet
military technicians were known to congregate,
killing a score of Russians and Cubans"; attacks
on British and Cuban cargo ships; the
contamination of sugar shipments; and other
atrocities and sabotage, mostly carried out by
Cuban exile organizations permitted to operate
freely in Florida. Shortly after came "the most
dangerous moment in human history", not exactly
out of the blue.
Kennedy officially
renewed the terrorist operations after the crisis
ebbed. Ten days before his assassination in
November 1963, he approved a Central Intelligence
Agency plan for "destruction operations" by US
proxy forces "against a large oil refinery and
storage facilities, a large electric plant, sugar
refineries, railroad bridges, harbor facilities,
and underwater demolition of docks and ships". A
plot to assassinate Castro was apparently
initiated on the day of the Kennedy assassination.
The terrorist campaign was called off in 1965, but
reports Garthoff, "one of [president Richard]
Nixon's first acts in office in 1969 was to direct
the CIA to intensify covert operations against
Cuba".
We can, at last, hear the voices of
the victims in Canadian historian Keith Bolender's
Voices from the Other Side, the first oral
history of the terror campaign - one of many books
unlikely to receive more than casual notice, if
that, in the West because the contents are too
revealing.
In the current issue of
Political Science Quarterly, the professional
journal of the association of American political
scientists, Montague Kern observes that the Cuban
missile crisis is one of those "full-bore crises
... in which an ideological enemy (the Soviet
Union) is universally perceived to have gone on
the attack, leading to a rally-'round-the-flag
effect that greatly expands support for a
president, increasing his policy options".
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
