Page 3 of
3 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The week the world stood
still By Noam
Chomsky
Kern is right that it is
"universally perceived" that way, apart from those
who have escaped sufficiently from the ideological
shackles to pay some attention to the facts. Kern
is, in fact, one of them.
Another is
Sheldon Stern, who recognizes what has long been
known to such deviants. As he writes, we now know
that "Khrushchev's original explanation for
shipping missiles to Cuba had been fundamentally
true: the Soviet leader had never intended these
weapons as a threat to the security of the United
States, but rather considered their deployment a
defensive move to protect his Cuban allies from
American attacks and as a desperate effort to give
the USSR the appearance of equality in
the nuclear balance of
power".
Dobbs, too, recognizes that
"Castro and his Soviet patrons had real reasons to
fear American attempts at regime change,
including, as a last resort, a US invasion of Cuba
... [Khrushchev] was also sincere in his desire to
defend the Cuban revolution from the mighty
neighbor to the north."
'Terrors of the
Earth' The American attacks are often
dismissed in US commentary as silly pranks, CIA
shenanigans that got out of hand. That is far from
the truth.
The best and the brightest had
reacted to the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion
with near-hysteria, including the president, who
solemnly informed the country: "The complacent,
the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about
to be swept away with the debris of history. Only
the strong ... can possibly survive."
And
they could only survive, he evidently believed, by
massive terror - though that addendum was kept
secret, and is still not known to loyalists who
perceive the ideological enemy as having "gone on
the attack" (the near-universal perception, as
Kern observes).
After the Bay of Pigs
defeat, historian Piero Gleijeses writes, John F
Kennedy launched a crushing embargo to punish the
Cubans for defeating a US-run invasion, and "asked
his brother, attorney general Robert Kennedy, to
lead the top-level interagency group that oversaw
Operation Mongoose, a program of paramilitary
operations, economic warfare, and sabotage he
launched in late 1961 to visit the 'terrors of the
Earth' on Fidel Castro and, more prosaically, to
topple him".
The phrase "terrors of the
Earth" is Arthur Schlesinger's, in his
quasi-official biography of Robert Kennedy, who
was assigned responsibility for conducting the
terrorist war, and informed the CIA that the Cuban
problem carried "the top priority in the United
States government - all else is secondary - no
time, no effort, or manpower is to be spared" in
the effort to overthrow the Castro regime.
The Mongoose operations were run by Edward
Lansdale, who had ample experience in
"counterinsurgency" - a standard term for
terrorism that Americans direct. He provided a
timetable leading to "open revolt and overthrow of
the communist regime" in October 1962. The "final
definition" of the program recognized that "final
success will require decisive US military
intervention", after terrorism and subversion had
laid the basis. The implication is that US
military intervention would take place in October
1962 - when the missile crisis erupted. The events
just reviewed help explain why Cuba and the Soviet
Union had good reason to take such threats
seriously.
Years later, Robert McNamara
recognized that Cuba was justified in fearing an
attack. "If I were in Cuban or Soviet shoes, I
would have thought so, too," he observed at a
major conference on the missile crisis on the 40th
anniversary.
As for Russia's "desperate
effort to give the USSR the appearance of
equality", to which Stern refers, recall that John
F Kennedy's very narrow victory in the 1960
election relied heavily on a fabricated "missile
gap" concocted to terrify the country and to
condemn the Eisenhower administration as soft on
national security. There was indeed a "missile
gap", but strongly in favor of the US.
The
first "public, unequivocal administration
statement" on the true facts, according to
strategic analyst Desmond Ball in his
authoritative study of the Kennedy missile
program, was in October 1961, when deputy
secretary of defense Roswell Gilpatric informed
the Business Council that "the US would have a
larger nuclear delivery system left after a
surprise attack than the nuclear force which the
Soviet Union could employ in its first strike".
The Soviets of course were well aware of their
relative weakness and vulnerability. They were
also aware of Kennedy's reaction when Khrushchev
offered to reduce offensive military capacity
sharply and proceeded to do so unilaterally. The
president failed to respond, undertaking instead a
huge armaments program.
Owning the
world, then and now The two most crucial
questions about the missile crisis are: How did it
begin, and how did it end? It began with Kennedy's
terrorist attack against Cuba, with a threat of
invasion in October 1962. It ended with the
president's rejection of Soviet offers that would
seem fair to a rational person, but were
unthinkable because they would have undermined the
fundamental principle that the US has the
unilateral right to deploy nuclear missiles
anywhere, aimed at China or Russia or anyone else,
and right on their borders; and the accompanying
principle that Cuba had no right to have missiles
for defense against what appeared to be an
imminent US invasion. To establish these
principles firmly, it was entirely proper to face
a high risk of war of unimaginable destruction,
and to reject simple and admittedly fair ways to
end the threat.
Garthoff observes that "in
the United States, there was almost universal
approbation for president Kennedy's handling of
the crisis". Dobbs writes, "The relentlessly
upbeat tone was established by the court historian
Arthur M Schlesinger Jr, who wrote that Kennedy
had 'dazzled the world' through a 'combination of
toughness and restraint, of will, nerve and
wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly
calibrated'."
Rather more soberly, Stern
partially agrees, noting that Kennedy repeatedly
rejected the militant advice of his advisers and
associates who called for military force and the
dismissal of peaceful options.
The events
of October 1962 are widely hailed as Kennedy's
finest hour. Graham Allison joins many others in
presenting them as "a guide for how to defuse
conflicts, manage great-power relationships, and
make sound decisions about foreign policy in
general".
In a very narrow sense, that
judgment seems reasonable. The ExComm tapes reveal
that the president stood apart from others,
sometimes almost all others, in rejecting
premature violence. There is, however, a further
question: How should JFK's relative moderation in
the management of the crisis be evaluated against
the background of the broader considerations just
reviewed?
But that question does not arise
in a disciplined intellectual and moral culture,
which accepts without question the basic principle
that the US in effect owns the world by right, and
is by definition a force for good despite
occasional errors and misunderstandings, one in
which it is plainly entirely proper for the US to
deploy massive offensive force all over the world
while it is an outrage for others (allies and
clients apart) to make even the slightest gesture
in that direction or even to think of deterring
the threatened use of violence by the benign
global hegemon.
That doctrine is the
primary official charge against Iran today: It
might pose a deterrent to US and Israeli force. It
was a consideration during the missile crisis as
well. In internal discussion, the Kennedy brothers
expressed their fears that Cuban missiles might
deter a US invasion of Venezuela, then under
consideration. So "the Bay of Pigs was really
right", JFK concluded.
These principles
still contribute to the constant risk of nuclear
war. There has been no shortage of severe dangers
since the missile crisis.
Ten years later,
during the 1973 Israel-Arab war, national security
adviser Henry Kissinger called a high-level
nuclear alert (DEFCON 3) to warn the Soviets to
keep their hands off while he was secretly
authorizing Israel to violate the ceasefire
imposed by the US and Russia. When Reagan came
into office a few years later, the US launched
operations probing Soviet defenses and simulating
air and naval attacks, while placing Pershing
missiles in Germany with a five-minute flight time
to Russian targets, providing what the CIA called
a "super-sudden first-strike" capability.
Naturally this caused great alarm in Russia, which
unlike the US has repeatedly been invaded and
virtually destroyed. That led to a major war scare
in 1983.
There have been hundreds of cases
when human intervention aborted a first strike
minutes before launch, after automated systems
gave false alarms. We don't have Russian records,
but there's no doubt that their systems are far
more accident-prone.
Meanwhile, India and
Pakistan have come close to nuclear war several
times, and the sources of the conflict remain.
Both have refused to sign the Non-Proliferation
Treaty, along with Israel, and have received US
support for development of their nuclear-weapons
programs - to this day in the case of India, now a
US ally. War threats in the Middle East, which
might become reality very soon, once again
escalate the dangers.
In 1962, war was
avoided by Khrushchev's willingness to accept
Kennedy's hegemonic demands. But we can hardly
count on such sanity forever. It's a near-miracle
that nuclear war has so far been avoided. There is
more reason than ever to attend to the warning of
Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, almost 60
years ago, that we must face a choice that is
"stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put
an end to the human race; or shall mankind
renounce war?"
Noam Chomsky is
Institute Professor Emeritus in the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology department of linguistics
and philosophy. A TomDispatch regular, he is the
author of numerous best-selling political works,
most recently Hopes and Prospects, Making the
Future and Occupy.
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