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Saturday's
Lagniappe
The
Next War
Jock
McDonald
Daniel Ellsberg
By
Daniel Ellsberg
Public
in the Dark about Government's Plans for War in Iran
A hidden crisis is under way. Many government insiders are aware
of serious plans for war with Iran, but Congress and the public
remain largely in the dark. The current situation is very like
that of 1964, the year preceding our overt, open-ended escalation
of the Vietnam War, and 2002, the year leading up to the U.S.
invasion of Iraq.
In
both cases, if one or more conscientious insiders had closed
the information gap with unauthorized disclosures to the public,
a disastrous war might have been averted entirely.
My
own failure to act, in time, to that effect in 1964 was pointed
out to me by Wayne Morse thirty-five years ago. Morse had been
one of only two U.S. senators to vote against the Tonkin Gulf
resolution on August 7, 1964. He had believed, correctly, that
President Lyndon Johnson would treat the resolution as a congressional
declaration of war. His colleagues, however, accepted White
House assurances that the president sought "no wider war"
and had no intention of expanding hostilities without further
consulting them. They believed that they were simply expressing
bipartisan support for U.S. air attacks on North Vietnam three
days earlier, which the president and Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara had told them were in "retaliation" for the
"unequivocal," "unprovoked" attack by North
Vietnamese torpedo boats on U.S. destroyers "on routine
patrol" in "international waters."
Each
of the assurances above had been false, a conscious lie. That
they were lies, though, had only been revealed to the public
seven years later with the publication of the Pentagon Papers,
several thousand pages of top-secret documents on U.S. decision-making
in Vietnam that I had released to the press. The very first
installment, published by the New York Times on June 13, 1971,
had proven the official account of the Tonkin Gulf episode to
be a deliberate deception.
When
we met in September, Morse had just heard me mention to an audience
that all of that evidence of fraud had been in my own Pentagon
safe at the time of the Tonkin Gulf vote. (By coincidence, I
had started work as a special assistant to an assistant secretary
of defense the day of the alleged attack-which had not, in fact,
occurred at all.) After my talk, Morse, who had been a senior
member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1964, said
to me, "If you had given those documents to me at the time,
the Tonkin Gulf resolution would never have gotten out of committee.
And if it had somehow been brought up on the floor of the Senate
for a vote, it would never have passed."
He
was telling me, it seemed, that it had been in my power, seven
years earlier, to avert the deaths so far of 50,000 Americans
and millions of Vietnamese, with many more to come. It was not
something I was eager to hear. After all, I had just been indicted
on what eventually were twelve federal felony counts, with a
possible sentence of 115 years in prison, for releasing the
Pentagon Papers to the public. I had consciously accepted that
prospect in some small hope of shortening the war. Morse was
saying that I had missed a real opportunity to prevent the war
altogether.
My
first reaction was that Morse had overestimated the significance
of the Tonkin Gulf resolution and, therefore, the alleged consequences
of my not blocking it in August. After all, I felt, Johnson
would have found another occasion to get such a resolution passed,
or gone ahead without one, even if someone had exposed the fraud
in early August.
Years
later, though, the thought hit me: What if I had told Congress
and the public, later in the fall of 1964, the whole truth about
what was coming, with all the documents I had acquired in my
job by September, October, or November? Not just, as Morse had
suggested, the contents of a few files on the events surrounding
the Tonkin Gulf incident-all that I had in early August-but
the drawerfuls of critical working papers, memos, estimates,
and detailed escalation options revealing the evolving plans
of the Johnson Administration for a wider war, expected to commence
soon after the election. In short, what if I had put out before
the end of the year, whether before or after the November election,
all of the classified papers from that period that I did eventually
disclose in 1971?
Had
I done so, the public and Congress would have learned that Johnson's
campaign theme, "we seek no wider war," was a hoax.
They would have learned, in fact, that the Johnson Administration
had been heading in secret toward essentially the same policy
of expanded war that his presidential rival, Senator Barry Goldwater,
openly advocated -a policy that the voters overwhelmingly repudiated
at the polls.
I
would have been indicted then, as I was seven years later, and
probably imprisoned. But America would have been at peace during
those years. It was only with that reflection, perhaps a decade
after the carnage finally ended, that I recognized Morse had
been right about my personal share of responsibility for the
whole war.
Not
just mine alone. Any one of a hundred officials-some of whom
foresaw the whole catastrophe-could have told the hidden truth
to Congress, with documents. Instead, our silence made us all
accomplices in the ensuing slaughter.
*
* *
The
run-up to the 1964 Tonkin Gulf resolution was almost exactly
parallel to the run-up to the 2002 Iraq war resolution.
In
both cases, the president and his top Cabinet officers consciously
deceived Congress and the public about a supposed short-run
threat in order to justify and win support for carrying out
preexisting offensive plans against a country that was not a
near-term danger to the United States. In both cases, the deception
was essential to the political feasibility of the program precisely
because expert opinion inside the government foresaw costs,
dangers, and low prospects of success that would have doomed
the project politically if there had been truly informed public
discussion beforehand. And in both cases, that necessary deception
could not have succeeded without the obedient silence of hundreds
of insiders who knew full well both the deception and the folly
of acting upon it.
One
insider aware of the Iraq plans, and knowledgeable about the
inevitably disastrous result of executing those plans, was Richard
Clarke, chief of counterterrorism for George W. Bush and adviser
to three presidents before him. He had spent September 11, 2001,
in the White House, coordinating the nation's response to the
attacks. He reports in his memoir, Against All Enemies, discovering
the next morning, to his amazement, that most discussions there
were about attacking Iraq.
Clarke
told Bush and Rumsfeld that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11,
or with its perpetrator, Al Qaeda. As Clarke said to Secretary
of State Colin Powell that afternoon, "Having been attacked
by al Qaeda, for us now to go bombing Iraq in response"-which
Rumsfeld was already urging-"would be like our invading
Mexico after the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor."
Actually,
Clarke foresaw that it would be much worse than that. Attacking
Iraq not only would be a crippling distraction from the task
of pursuing the real enemy but would in fact aid that enemy:
"Nothing America could have done would have provided al
Qaeda and its new generation of cloned groups a better recruitment
device than our unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country."
I
single out Clarke-by all accounts among the best of the best
of public servants-only because of his unique role in counterterrorism
and because, thanks to his illuminating 2004 memoir, we know
his thoughts at that time, and, in particular, the intensity
of his anguish and frustration. Such a memoir allows us, as
we read each new revelation, to ask a simple question: What
difference might it have made to events if he had told us this
at the time?
Clarke
was not, of course, the only one who could have told us, or
told Congress. We know from other accounts that both of his
key judgments-the absence of linkage between Al Qaeda and Saddam
and his correct prediction that "attacking Iraq would actually
make America less secure and strengthen the broader radical
Islamic terrorist movement"-were shared by many professionals
in the CIA, the State Department, and the military.
Yet
neither of these crucial, expert conclusions was made available
to Congress or the public, by Clarke or anyone else, in the
eighteen- month run-up to the war. Even as they heard the president
lead the country to the opposite, false impressions, toward
what these officials saw as a disastrous, unjustified war, they
felt obliged to keep their silence.
Costly
as their silence was to their country and its victims, I feel
I know their mind-set. I had long prized my own identity as
a keeper of the president's secrets. In 1964 it never even occurred
to me to break the many secrecy agreements I had signed, in
the Marines, at the Rand Corporation, in the Pentagon. Although
I already knew the Vietnam War was a mistake and based on lies,
my loyalties then were to the secretary of defense and the president
(and to my promises of secrecy, on which my own career as a
president's man depended). I'm not proud that it took me years
of war to awaken to the higher loyalties owed by every government
official to the rule of law, to our soldiers in harm's way,
to our fellow citizens, and, explicitly, to the Constitution,
which every one of us had sworn an oath "to support and
uphold."
It
took me that long to recognize that the secrecy agreements we
had signed frequently conflicted with our oath to uphold the
Constitution. That conflict arose almost daily, unnoticed by
me or other officials, whenever we were secretly aware that
the president or other executive officers were lying to or misleading
Congress. In giving priority, in effect, to my promise of secrecy-ignoring
my constitutional obligation-I was no worse or better than any
of my Vietnam-era colleagues, or those who later saw the Iraq
war approaching and failed to warn anyone outside the executive
branch.
Ironically,
Clarke told Vanity Fair in 2004 that in his own youth he had
ardently protested "the complete folly" of the Vietnam
War and that he "wanted to get involved in national security
in 1973 as a career so that Vietnam didn't happen again."
He is left today with a sense of failure:
It's
an arrogant thing to think, Could I have ever stopped another
Vietnam? But it really filled me with frustration that when
I saw Iraq coming I wasn't able to do anything. After having
spent thirty years in national security and having been in some
senior- level positions you would think that I might be able
to have some influence, some tiny influence. But I couldn't
have any.
But
it was not too arrogant, I believe, for Clarke to aspire to
stop this second Vietnam personally. He actually had a good
chance to do so, throughout 2002, the same one Senator Morse
had pointed out to me.
Instead
of writing a memoir to be cleared for publication in 2004, a
year after Iraq had been invaded, Clarke could have made his
knowledge of the war to come, and its danger to our security,
public before the war. He could have supported his testimony
with hundreds of files of documents from his office safe and
computer, to which he then still had access. He could have given
these to both the media and the then Democratic-controlled Senate.
"If
I had criticized the president to the press as a special assistant"
in the summer of 2002, Clarke told Larry King in March 2004,
"I would have been fired within an hour." That is
undoubtedly true. But should that be the last word on that course?
To be sure, virtually all bureaucrats would agree with him,
as he told King, that his only responsible options at that point
were either to resign quietly or to "spin" for the
White House to the press, as he did. But that is just the working
norm I mean to question here.
His
unperceived alternative, I wish to suggest, was precisely to
court being fired for telling the truth to the public, with
documentary evidence, in the summer of 2002. For doing that,
Clarke would not only have lost his job, his clearance, and
his career as an executive official; he would almost surely
have been prosecuted, and he might have gone to prison. But
the controversy that ensued would not have been about hindsight
and blame. It would have been about whether war on Iraq would
make the United States safer, and whether it was otherwise justified.
That
debate did not occur in 2002-just as a real debate about war
in Vietnam did not occur in 1964-thanks to the disciplined reticence
of Clarke and many others. Whatever his personal fate, which
might have been severe, his disclosures would have come before
the war. Perhaps, instead of it.
*
* *
We
face today a crisis similar to those of 1964 and 2002, a crisis
hidden once again from the public and most of Congress. Articles
by Seymour Hersh and others have revealed that, as in both those
earlier cases, the president has secretly directed the completion,
though not yet execution, of military operational plans-not
merely hypothetical "contingency plans" but constantly
updated plans, with movement of forces and high states of readiness,
for prompt implementation on command-for attacking a country
that, unless attacked itself, poses no threat to the United
States: in this case, Iran.
According
to these reports, many high-level officers and government officials
are convinced that our president will attempt to bring about
regime change in Iran by air attack; that he and his vice president
have long been no less committed, secretly, to doing so than
they were to attacking Iraq; and that his secretary of defense
is as madly optimistic about the prospects for fast, cheap military
success there as he was in Iraq.
Even
more ominously, Philip Giraldi, a former CIA official, reported
in The American Conservative a year ago that Vice President
Cheney's office had directed contingency planning for "a
large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional
and tactical nuclear weapons" and that "several senior
Air Force officers" involved in the planning were "appalled
at the implications of what they are doing- that Iran is being
set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack-but no one is prepared
to damage his career by posing any objection."
Several
of Hersh's sources have confirmed both the detailed operational
planning for use of nuclear weapons against deep underground
Iranian installations and military resistance to this prospect,
which led several senior officials to consider resigning. Hersh
notes that opposition by the Joint Chiefs in April led to White
House withdrawal of the "nuclear option"-for now,
I would say. The operational plans remain in existence, to be
drawn upon for a "decisive" blow if the president
deems it necessary.
Many
of these sources regard the planned massive air attack-with
or without nuclear weapons-as almost sure to be catastrophic
for the Middle East, the position of the United States in the
world, our troops in Iraq, the world economy, and U.S. domestic
security. Thus they are as deeply concerned about these prospects
as many other insiders were in the year before the Iraq invasion.
That is why, unlike in the lead-up to Vietnam or Iraq, some
insiders are leaking to reporters. But since these disclosures-so
far without documents and without attribution-have not evidently
had enough credibility to raise public alarm, the question is
whether such officials have yet reached the limit of their responsibilities
to our country.
Assuming
Hersh's so-far anonymous sources mean what they say-that this
is, as one puts it, "a juggernaut that has to be stopped"-I
believe it is time for one or more of them to go beyond fragmentary
leaks unaccompanied by documents. That means doing what no other
active official or consultant has ever done in a timely way:
what neither Richard Clarke nor I nor anyone else thought of
doing until we were no longer officials, no longer had access
to current documents, after bombs had fallen and thousands had
died, years into a war. It means going outside executive channels,
as officials with contemporary access, to expose the president's
lies and oppose his war policy publicly before the war, with
unequivocal evidence from inside.
Simply
resigning in silence does not meet moral or political responsibilities
of officials rightly "appalled" by the thrust of secret
policy. I hope that one or more such persons will make the sober
decision-accepting sacrifice of clearance and career, and risk
of prison-to disclose comprehensive files that convey, irrefutably,
official, secret estimates of costs and prospects and dangers
of the military plans being considered. What needs disclosure
is the full internal controversy, the secret critiques as well
as the arguments and claims of advocates of war and nuclear
"options"-the Pentagon Papers of the Middle East.
But unlike in 1971, the ongoing secret debate should be made
available before our war in the region expands to include Iran,
before the sixty-one-year moratorium on nuclear war is ended
violently, to give our democracy a chance to foreclose either
of those catastrophes.
The
personal risks of doing this are very great. Yet they are not
as great as the risks of bodies and lives we are asking daily
of over 130,000 young Americans-with many yet to join them-in
an unjust war. Our country has urgent need for comparable courage,
moral and civil courage, from its public servants. They owe
us the truth before the next war begins.
Daniel
Ellsberg
is a political activist, a former American military analyst
employed by the RAND Corporation who precipitated a national
uproar in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, is the
author of "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon
Papers". Ellsberg is the recipient of the Inaugural Ron
Ridenhour Courage Award; a prize established by The Nation Institute
and The Fertel Foundation. On September 28, 2006 he was awarded
the Right Livelihood Award.
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