By David K. Shipler
Donald
Trump, the hot-air balloon who floats and weaves untethered to facts, is poised
to create foreign policies (there will be many simultaneously) based on his
fantasies and myths, which he will sell convincingly to a plurality of adoring Americans
and spineless Republicans in Congress. He is even less curious about the world than
George W. Bush. Into this knowledge vacuum will flow the imaginary demons and
fairies conjured up by officials in modern America’s most extreme right-wing
government, which he is now assembling.
It will be a
dangerous time. But let’s not pretend that fantasy-based foreign policy is
unprecedented. It induced the United States to overthrow legitimate,
nonthreatening governments and enter at least two losing wars: Vietnam and
Iraq, with more to come, undoubtedly. Paranoia is one of America’s most
prominent afflictions.
The New York Times columnist James Reston
used to call the State Department the Fudge Factory, an apt name to any
reporter who tried to cover it. Attempting to pin down a hard fact of policy
was like nailing a custard pie to the wall. Only occasionally would you come
across a candid foreign service officer, usually in a US embassy abroad, who
would share insights openly into the country that you both were working to
understand. I treasured those folks and still count one of them from the
embassy in Moscow, Ken Yalowitz, as a close and trusted friend, who went on to
become an ambassador himself, to Belarus and Georgia.
One key mission of both the State Department
and intelligence agencies is to act as fact-gathering machines. They are
populated with experienced people who speak the local languages, know local
history, and are charged with reporting back to Washington. It’s hard to think
that Trump will ever listen to them. Indeed, all signs point to ideological
pressure for subordinates to avoid thinking differently from his latest tweets,
lest they lose their positions.
This is likely to increase the
weight of the fudge factor. It occurs not just at State but also at Defense,
the CIA, and elsewhere, partly because officials are averse to open
conversation with the American public through the press, but partly also when they
succumb to an atmosphere of self-deception about a policy. At critical
junctures, too many good people who value their careers have been malleable in
what they perceive and report. Under ideological or political pressure from on
high, they have manipulated the facts, tailored their observations, and
withheld recommendations they sensed would damage their standing.
That
happened in Saigon as the South Vietnamese army began to crumble in 1974 and
early 1975. The South Vietnamese military position was eroding as Washington
swirled with disaffection about the war. But stepping into the US embassy in
Saigon was like walking into a time warp. None of that Washington disaffection
could be felt, except in small pockets of honesty in the office of one or
another diplomat or spy. Instead, you were carried back to an earlier, upbeat
time, from the mid- to late 1960s, before all the defeats and disillusionments,
when hopeful determination prevailed that South Vietnam could be secured
against a North Vietnamese and Vietcong victory.
As the war was being lost, however,
the official bubble of unreality at the Saigon embassy was inflated by the
arrival of Graham Martin, the imperious US ambassador who brooked no dissent
from his officers in the field. Some had their feet on the ground, but he ordered
them to talk neither to reporters nor to Washington. He even had one
transferred out of South Vietnam after the man evaded the chain of command to
send a downbeat assessment directly to the State Department.
Martin also
barred the CIA station chief, Thomas Polgar, from the weekly briefings of
correspondents he had been conducting. Polgar had been refreshingly open about
the battlefield reverses, the army’s corruption, and the slim chances of saving
the South. Indeed, of all the government agencies I had mined for
information—State, Defense, etc.—the CIA was the most forthright and
informative. Its analysts produced clean assessments untainted by policy.
This purity did not extend to the
CIA’s covert actions, of course—the assassinations, the overthrow of
democratically elected governments, the kidnapping and torture of prisoners,
which extended into the administration of Bush II. The dirty behavior has sullied
the agency’s name. But CIA analysts were mostly a different breed from the
covert operators—at least as far as I could determine by limited interviews of
agency experts. They seemed actually interested in what was going on, and so, unlike
some of their colleagues in other agencies, they did not try to fit the facts
to an ideological or political precept.
Sometimes
the manipulation of the truth—or, to put it more gently, the selection of which
of many truths you use for policymaking—comes not so much out of fabrication as
from a more diffuse worldview, one that history ultimately demonstrates as
misguided. Vietnam was such a case, for in the throes of the Cold-War
competition between communism and capitalism, or between leftist
authoritarianism and liberal democracy, North Vietnam was sincerely seen in
Washington as a pawn of Soviet and Chinese expansionism, an advancing lip of
the red stain that panicky maps of the day depicted as the sinister spread of
the communist menace.
That the
North Vietnamese did not see themselves quite that way was lost on Washington.
The point was emphasized during a remarkable 1997 conference in Hanoi where
former American and North Vietnamese officials reviewed the war to ask whether
opportunities to resolve it had been missed.
The North Vietnamese kept
explaining, over and over again, that theirs was an anti-colonialist fight for
independence, not an internationalist battle on behalf of communism. Their
receipt of aid from the Soviet Union was pragmatic, and from their gargantuan
Chinese neighbors it was unavoidable. Centuries of warfare and durable
antipathy toward China should have been enough to show the Americans that North
Vietnam would resist becoming a Chinese vassal state. But Cold-War ideology
blinded the Washington policymakers; even years later, some at the 1997
conference, led by former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, had trouble
getting their minds around the notion that they had been fighting an
essentially nationalist movement.
The other disastrous war, Iraq,
also came out of a nebulous anxiety following 9/11, but was then propelled by
outright lies about Iraq’s supposed possession of “weapons of mass destruction,”
meaning chemical and biological weapons, and efforts to acquire nuclear
weaponry in the near future. Here, the CIA was culpable, yielding to pressure
from political figures to distort the intelligence and suppress dissenting
assessments.
It was interesting during the
presidential campaign to watch both candidates trip over themselves to insist
that they had opposed the Iraq war: Hillary Clinton by regretting her Senate
vote to authorize the invasion, Trump by pretending that he’d never said, on
Howard Stern’s radio show, “Yeah, I guess so,” when asked in 2002 whether he agreed
that Iraq should be attacked. “You know, I wish the first time it was done
correctly,” a reference to the Gulf War of 1990, which left Saddam Hussein in
power.
Michael Morell, former deputy CIA
director, has denied that the agency was pressed politically on the WMD
assessment, but he also says, “Intelligence gets politicized all the time in
this town.” Writing in his book The Great
War of Our Time, he targets for special indictment Cheney’s chief of staff,
Scooter Libby, for trying to get the CIA to withdraw a paper finding no
evidence of a working relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Libby’s pressure,
Morell declares, “was the most blatant attempt to politicize intelligence that
I saw in 33 years in the business, and it would not be the last attempt by
Libby to do so.”
In this and other areas of policy, Trump seems
conveniently oblivious to context. Instead of placing the blame for the 2003
invasion squarely where it belongs—on President Bush, Vice President Dick
Cheney, and other Republican extremists—Trump indicts the intelligence agencies
alone, a handy way of dismissing everything else they report, including the
CIA’s recent finding that Russia had hacked Democratic National Committee
emails, to Trump’s election advantage.
His effortless contempt for facts
he doesn’t like could easily get us into a new war somewhere, sometime, as he
whips up the public’s fears with phantoms of danger. Let’s just hope it’s not a
war with China or Russia.
Next: Trump on Israel.
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