Reprinted from my article at ConsortiumNews.com.
It was rather horrifying to wake to hear that the Obama administration is considering sending hunter-killer teams into Yemen in hopes of seeking out and killing suspected terrorists.
First, there’s no guarantee that the people the CIA has identified are, in fact, terrorists. There is no court for assessing evidence and no appeal process if mistakes are made. If some CIA analyst decides someone is a terrorist, that’s it. That’s horrific to me, as a lover of truth and justice.
Second, imagine telling your children that if they have a disagreement with another child at school, they shouldn’t talk, they shouldn’t appeal to higher authorities, they should just kill them. That’s essentially what the United States is doing and teaching by these actions. Shame.
Third, I’ve been reading a lot about President John F. Kennedy’s foreign policy in the last few weeks. He knew that you’d never win a war by firepower alone. If your enemy is hungry, first feed them, then seek common ground. Violence only ever begets more violence.
I talked to someone whose hardcore Republican parents nonetheless talked with great fondness for President Kennedy and felt he was the best president we ever had.
Why? They were immigrants from El Salvador, and remembered how where Reagan had sent guns, Kennedy had sent care packages – caritas – of food to give away to the starving people. That bought more goodwill for America than violence ever did.
His “Alliance for Progress” started as a program to bring economic support to Latin America. The perversion of that program to include police and military training came about after Kennedy’s death. (You can read Kennedy’s original vision for the program, as outlined in this speech, given in the first 100 days of his administration.)
In Indonesia, Kennedy created a plan of economic stimulus and support, which was reversed after his assassination.
Kennedy was so certain that the way to a better future came from educating and feeding people, rather than killing them, that he created the Peace Corps with the goal of doing just that.
Yemen is so poor its capital city may run out of water within a decade. A third of its population is malnourished. I can’t think of anything more likely to breed terrorism than a population that has no choice but to kill to survive.
That kind of terrorism I understand. I certainly don’t condone it, but I understand that terrorism does not feel like a choice when people are that desperate.
Where Kennedy would have sent food and water, the Obama administration is considering sending “hunter-killer” teams. And the fact that the media can talk so openly about this shows how far we’ve fallen from Kennedy’s vision of America as a benevolent leader. Where is the outrage?
And does it even make sense that anyone in Yemen would be trying to attack the United States?
Yemen is already in conflict with its neighbor, Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is rich, so it would at least make sense that Yemenese terrorists would target their rich neighbor in the hope of winning concessions.
It makes little sense that they would instead take whatever tiny resources they could scrape together in an effort to target the U.S. half a world away. [Indeed, the director of Yemenia Airways has denied that any UPS cargo plane or packages had left Yemen in the 48 hours prior to the alleged bomb shipment.]
I suspect this latest counter-terrorism operation isn’t about trying to end terrorism, which has supplanted “anticommunism” as the excuse du jour for enacting whatever policies Washington wants overseas. As with anticommunism, counter-terrorism is the excuse used for going after other countries’ resources.
When the CIA helped overthrow Iran’s democratically elected leader Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, the explanation at the time was that he was suspected of being a communist, but the CIA’s official history gives the first reason as Mossadegh’s nationalization of Iran’s oil industry.
When the CIA then overthrew Guatemala’s democratically elected leader Jacobo Arbenz, another non-communist, it was to reclaim nationalized farmlands for American businesses and to show Latin America that further nationalizations would not be tolerated.
In 1990, after Saddam Hussein got an apparent “green light” from President George H.W. Bush’s ambassador to invade Kuwait, the Iraqi invasion became an excuse to put U.S. troops permanently in the oil-rich region.
But President George W. Bush’s “war on terror” changed everything. While the United States used to do its empire building covertly, now it’s just a bald imperialist power, trying to establish military bases in other countries all over the world and not surprisingly upsetting many of the locals.
Imagine if China established a military base on American soil. Would Americans become sudden fans of the Chinese? Or would we be angry, fearing our nation had been in part taken over by a foreign power we never invited in? How is it that Americans do not understand that nearly every “victory” abroad won with guns ensures a long-term loss for America?
The Democratic Party’s severe losses on Tuesday were in part a reflection of President Obama’s failure to follow the moral vision President Kennedy once outlined. He showed Americans how to lead with our hearts and thus how to win the hearts of people from other nations.
Unfortunately, those who feel that the only way to lead is with guns now run the show.
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“Calls by some Papuan nationalists to have US president Barack Obama “buy us back” from Indonesia by Dec. 1, 2009 as his predecessor John F. Kennedy “sold” it.”
Sukarno on the other hand wanted to use the Japanese to free Indonesia: “The Lord be praised, God showed me the way; in that valley of the Ngarai I said: Yes, Independent Indonesia can only be achieved with Dai Nippon…”
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."that second link has it wrong. Kennedy didn’t ‘sell’ West Papua to Sukarno. He helped free it from being a Dutch colony ONLY UNDER THE PROVISION that Indonesia allow the West Papuans to vote in 1969 on whether they wanted independence from Indonesia or not. At the time, Kennedy was supporting progressive measures in Indonesia, which were reversed in one of LBJ’s first acts after he took office in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination.
RFK visited Indonesia after JFK’s death but did not have the power to change LBJ’s policy there. The vote in 1969 ended up being a sham, ‘observed’ by the Indonesian military. But that wouldn’t have happened under Kennedy’s watch. He was serious about their vote for independence.
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"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Oui you have raised a very significant point. The Japanese were greeted as liberators in parts of SE Asia because they drove out the European oppressors.
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"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."It’s important not to look at Democratic Presidents as being thoroughly aligned with their rhetoric. JFK has an advantage over Obama; Henry Luce’s Time-Life empire was promoting JFK because he and his wife were photogenic in a way that Nixon and Pat never were. So we tend to view JFK through the veil of a very sympathetic media.
For a view of Kennedy’s relationship with the Pentagon, see James Carroll, The House of War. Carroll’s dad was a general, in fact the first commander of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The book is both historical and personal. Carroll is now a reporter for the Boston Globe.
To understand the election, you have to look at who lost. I don’t think that it is true that the election turned on “President Obama’s failure to follow the moral vision President Kennedy once outlined.” It was all about the geography of the vulnerable districts and the perception of Democrats’ failure to significantly deal with the economy.
What Obama’s policies might tell us is not about moral vision but the extent to which the President today no longer has the power (especially the media power) to make decisions out of any moral vision. And even within his supposed authority over executive departments, the attitude in the bureaucracy seems to have become, “Presidents come and go; what we are doing remains the same.”
Back to JFK and the 1962 election. That election was distorted by the fact that it came shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, a confrontation that ended October 28, before the election in November. One can never know whether civil rights would have dominated the election had it not been for that crisis. Or what the results of the election would have been if it had, most of the Dixiecrats still being in the Democratic Party.
I think Henry Luce was personally charmed by JFK’s personality, plus the playing the ref effort by Joe Kennedy in ’60 to prevent Luce from being too pro-Nixon in coverage — more all that than your notion of added sales from having Jack and Jackie’s faces on their covers. And in the end, HL’s strong cold warriorish and pro-business attitudes trumped any favorable personal views of Kennedy, especially after JFK confronted Luce’s Big Steel executive friends, and, in the FP area, as JFK refused to play ball with Pentagon-CIA cold warriors over Laos, Vietnam, Cuba and the USSR.
But “sympathetic media” for JFK? Not so sympathetic since the 70s and all the attention about mistresses, prescription drug use, and other silliness that began about then, like the canard, repeated often in the MSM about Ich Bin Ein Berliner being a grammatical faux pas of laughable proportions. Lots of negativity, false facts and cynicism from various anti-Kennedy quarters, while at the same time only a few notable non-MSM researchers and writers have looked into the actual positive Kennedy record of achievement and strong moral vision, some of which was kept hidden in gov’t secrecy until new fed law forced documents to be released.
Predictably, however, the Kennedy haters have largely either ignored or deliberately misread the new docs so as to protect their dated versions of the fictional “cold warrior” Kennedy who allegedly achieved little.
As to the Carroll book, I liked it too, and he has an overall favorable view of Pres Kennedy, though Carroll is rather a tough critic to please. A better book on JFK and the Pentagon, more up to date, thorough and more courageous in looking at the reasons behind Kennedy’s murder and a possible connection to his bold anti-cold war FP, is James Douglass’ recent JFK and the Unspeakable. Clearly showing JFK was more than just a president of powerful and moving rhetoric, he outlines and details how Kennedy post-Missile Crisis was taking steps to begin détente with the USSR then, with Khrushchev’s increasing cooperation, end the Cold War. That and not sending combat troops to VN, and making the Moon effort a joint one with the Soviets, and undertaking a new friendlier relationship with Castro, all these efforts were real and all went against powerful Pentagon-CIA interests.
Moral vision, substance and courage, fighting against some very powerful entrenched domestic foes.
As for your comments about the 1962 midterms and civil rights, recall that Kennedy didn’t send up his CR bill until mid-63, while before that there were the conflicts in MS over integration, but it’s my view that CR in Nov ’62 was largely a regional (Deep South) matter, which wouldn’t become a national concern until a year later. In late 62 the economy was okay, there were no wars, except the ongoing cold one, and JFK’s job and personal approval numbers were solid. So I suspect that even w/o a favorable missile crisis outcome, Kennedy’s Dems still would have done better than most in-power parties do at that juncture.
Luce and his press were in fact harsh on Kennedy. Luce was a rabid right-winger and friend of Allen Dulles. Yeah, he made money off his pictures, but he did NOT paint a sympathetic, or even very accurate view of Kennedy.
No one should judge Kennedy by what was reported in the press. I certainly do not! I judge him by the documents he signed, original, primary sources from his administration. Drafts of memos and NSAMS. The accounts of the very few he trusted (Rusk was not in the circle of trust, for example).
Everyone knows JFK died almost 50 years ago, right?
This is akin to discussing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
nalbar
Counter terrorism and counter insurgency planners and practitioners do not consider what is neeeded to win, undermine or solve problems associated with terrorists/freedom fighters/guerillas/resistances/movements. They purely consider the military side, which means it is lost in the first instance. It does however, insure continued importance of the military aspect in such matters and associated funding.
The military way is now the only way it seems and it will continue to be the way of utter failure dressed up as success. There is no military solution to terrorism or insurgency. At best it can only be a (small) part of a strategy that must involve manuy other non-military aspects and ones that are not only take.
Of course reverting to use of military in the first instance makes the use of other methods that have more traditionally been tried before waving sabers around a lot lot more difficult after inevitable military defeat that is of course described as a success in some ludicrous terms of “although we achieved absolutely none of our war aims we never lost an engagement of company up level and hence we won.”