Among the plethora of books which Christmas tends to bring, there were two which attracted immediate attention. The one by Eric Alterman carried the title of this essay and its subtitle is “A History of official deceptions and its consequences.” In view of the Bush administration’s mendacious conduct I read it immediately. Another one of equal interest “Soviet Policy in Austria 1945-1955 Documents from Russian Archives” was published by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. This was a joint effort of Austrian and Russian historians and carries the original documents in the Russian language on the even pages and the German translation on the odd ones. Although I have not yet had the time to study the more than a thousand pages of this tome a quick perusal of key items made it clear that some of the contents as to the origin of the Cold War support Mr. Alterman’s views as expressed in his book.

            Alterman limits his investigations to four Presidencies: Roosevelt-Truman and the Yalta conference; Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis; Johnson and the Gulf of Tonkin Incidents; Reagan and the Iran-contra Scandal. “George W. Bush and the Post-Truth Presidency” receives only 20 pages because it is still on-going and simply forms the Conclusion of the book. The essential thesis is that when Presidents do not tell the truth to the country they do so for very personal motives which basically boil down to a fear of losing political support and an attempt to appear better than the facts warrant.

            It is now generally agreed that the Yalta conference in February of 1945 was a disaster for Europe because Roosevelt had handed over major portions of Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the Balkans apart from Greece, to the tender mercies of Uncle Joe. While we in Europe, who knew the facts on the ground, were appalled at that cave in by the Western powers the American Press had vigorously applauded FDR for his diplomatic skills. He enjoyed a brief spurt of Wilsonian type glory for having brought peace and democracy to the world but it was cut short by his death a few months thereafter. The lie, as Alterman saw it, was that he did not tell Congress and the American people all the concessions he had to make to Stalin to achieve this piece of paper and the creation of the United Nations. FDR realized these shortcomings but as he is reported to have said, “it was the best I could do.” This was true in a way because the major concessions had already been made at the Teheran conference in 1943 and Roosevelt could not go back on his word to Stalin. Although he was in better health at the end of 1943 than at Yalta, when he was obviously ill, he had been motivated by the fear that Stalin would make once again a deal with Hitler. If Stalin had dropped out of the war the U.S and Britain could not have invaded Europe and a compromise peace would have to have been achieved. This was also the reason for the demand of “unconditional surrender” which prolonged the war and caused so much misery. But it was the Realpolitik of the time and the idea was that “we’ll fix it later.”

            Truman had been in the exact opposite situation from Dick Cheney. While the latter is apparently the de facto President who makes policy which George W ratifies, Truman was kept entirely out of the loop. When the enormity of the consequences in form of population dislocations where millions of people lost their homes dawned on him in Potsdam there was nothing he could do about it. As Alterman maintains it was not Stalin who went back on his word, he didn’t need to, but the U.S. when it became obvious what was happening in Europe after Potsdam. We knew at the time that Hitler and Stalin were soul mates and driving out the devil with Beelzebub doesn’t solve any problems, but the American media never understood either one of them. This fundamental lack of knowledge coupled with America’s conviction of its moral mission in the world and the consequent belief in the invincibility of its rectitude led in a direct line from WWII to the Cold War, the missile crisis, Vietnam, Iran-Contra and now Iraq.

            For the American people communism was monolithic, authoritarian, bent on world revolution and therefore a direct threat that had to be crushed. What Americans, by and large, were not told was that there were actually two competing ideas in the Soviet Union about how to achieve the triumph of socialism over capitalism. This was the basis for the struggle between Trotsky and Stalin, which was in a way pre-ordained by their different backgrounds. Lev Davidovich Bronstein who was born in 1879, came from a middle class Jewish family, was arrested for revolutionary activity, sent to Siberia, escaped and fled to England with a forged passport under the name of Trotsky. The name is meaningful in the German language (just as stein is) and translates into “defiance.” Joseph Vissarionovich Dzugashvili was also born in 1879 as the son of a poor shoemaker. His devoted mother wanted him to become a priest and he received his education at a seminary in Tbilisi from which he was expelled later for his revolutionary activities. He fell under the spell of the nine year older Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, which led him to adopt the name Stalin – steel. One may wonder about my penchant for bringing up the birth names of these politicians but I am firmly convinced of the truth of the German dictum: Man musz das Kind beim richtigen Namen nennen; which means that the child should be called by its proper name. This is not an academic exercise because the etymology of names, as well as words in general, can provide insights into meanings that might otherwise remain obscure. 

            The fight between Stalin and Trotsky was inevitable not only because each one wanted power but Jews tend to have a global world outlook while Russian orthodox seminarians tend to be more parochial. Thus, after Lenin’s death, when the struggle for succession became paramount, Trotsky was convinced that the triumph of socialism could only be achieved by world revolution while the pragmatic Stalin insisted on “socialism in our country first.” It was internationalism against nationalism. This fundamental difference led to Stalin’s campaign against “rootless internationalists” which was the cover word for “Jews,” and which was interpreted in the U.S. as anti-Semitism. Jews in the U.S. and Europe held an international world view and when it came to a choice between socialist systems they sided with Trotsky. His brand of communism became the only one that was espoused until the Hitler invasion forced them to come to terms with Stalin for the sake of the endangered party. This analysis makes the Hitler-Stalin pact perfectly understandable because both were nationalists as well as socialists at heart and thereby found common ground against international capitalism. FDR may or may not have been aware of this commonality but his fear of Stalin jumping ship, who was not very happy that his Russians were bleeding while the Americans dallied with opening a second front in France where it counted, was very real.

            After this digression, we can return to 1945 and the start of the Cold War. Americans did not understand Stalin’s nationalism and saw his brutal dictatorship in the countries conquered by the Red Army as a betrayal of democratic principles which he had ostensibly espoused. That the word had a different meaning for Stalin than for Americans escaped them. Stalin saw himself, just as Hitler did, as the embodiment of the will of his people and Russia had to be restored to its Czarist greatness. He was, therefore, engaged in building a cordon sanitaire around his country and in essence tried to restore the Russian sphere of influence, as much as possible, to the August 1914 borders in Europe and in Asia regaining the territories which had been lost to the Japanese in the 1904-1905 war. He had no other interests in Europe or Asia and certainly, just as Hitler, none in America. But Americans did not see Stalin’s goals, they saw Trotsky’s and this fundamental misunderstanding, which created fear, made a meaningful dialogue impossible. While Stalin was not averse to providing other communist parties around the world with financial assistance he had his hands full with rebuilding the Soviet Union which had been thoroughly devastated by the war. America on the other hand had emerged not only virtually unscathed but triumphant and this spirit of “the greatest generation” which had liberated the world from evil and will continue to do so into the distant future has become enshrined as official history and policy.

            As Alterman points out FDRs unwillingness to admit to the country that it was really the Russians who had borne the major burden to assure the victory over Hitler, created an unwarranted sense of superiority here. Furthermore, abominable as the Soviet political system was it did not directly affect the well being of Americans unless we made it so. The mistaken equation of communism with world revolution was the cause of the Cold War and its hot offspring the Vietnam War. Alterman points out that if Kennedy had admitted that the missile crisis was not solved, as our media proudly proclaimed, because “Khrushchev blinked,” but that it was in fact a “tit for tat” much evil, including possibly the Vietnam War, could have been avoided. Kennedy had not stared Khrushchev down but a deal was reached where we agreed to pull our missiles out of Italy and Turkey in exchange for the Soviets taking theirs out of Cuba in addition to our guarantee that we would not invade the island. This fear had been the purpose of sending the missiles in the first place. Moscow believed that Castro was on shaky grounds and although the Bay of Pigs landing had misfired, another invasion appeared imminent. On the other hand this was not just a Kremlin fantasy, but a plan under active consideration by members of the Kennedy administration.    

This attitude of having stood up successfully to the mighty Soviet Union was part of the reason why Lyndon Johnson allowed himself to be sucked into the Vietnam quagmire. As Alterman explains, Johnson, having suddenly had Kennedy’s mantle thrust upon him, was surrounded by Kennedy’s “brain trust” whom he tried to please by continuing the Kennedy policy in Southeast Asia. He remembered the outcry that had followed when China fell to Mao, the McCarthy hearings, the constant drumbeat of having to be tough on communism because “that’s the only language they understand” and the hubris about having gotten Khrushchev to knuckle under. Consequently he was not about to give his enemies on the Republican side of the isle, and even those in his own party, any ammunition. He would have his Great Society and a small enough war in Asia that could easily be managed. He would not lose Southeast Asia to the communists, as China was lost, because America wins wars and doesn’t lose any.

Just as Truman did not know that Stalin was a nationalist at heart, Johnson didn’t know that Ho Chi Minh was a Vietnamese first and a communist second. Washington had it backwards and this led to tragedy. There was no South Vietnam in the national conscience, just as there were no East or West Germans and there still is basically only one Korea. These divisions are lines drawn at a table by politicians. They assign people to different political overlords who are protected by Moscow, Beijing or Washington but that does not erase the people’s sense of past common history and of belonging together.

 The Saigon government never enjoyed popular support and since John Foster Dulles knew that in a free election Ho Chi Minh would have gotten the votes, the election as agreed to in Geneva in 1954, was not allowed to take place. This made the second Indochina war as it is officially called (the first one had ended with the victory over the French) inevitable. By 1964 it had become apparent that the generals who had usurped power in the South could not effectively govern and they had to be propped up with increasingly more military and financial aid. This much is widely known but the role the CIA played in the Gulf of Tonkin incident is not. Yet it is this incident that launched the Joint Resolution by Congress to give President Johnson essentially carte blanche to pursue a full scale war. When one realizes that President Bush’s Iraq authorization followed the Johnson model of the Tonkin resolution, which was passed in the Senate with only two nays, it needs to be re-examined. It is full of righteous indignation and because of its relevance for today it is reprinted below for a new generation of Americans from The Pentagon Papers, Gravel Edition, Volume 3, pp. 722

 Text of Joint Resolution, August 7, Department of State Bulletin, 24 August 1964, p. 268:

"To promote the maintenance of international peace and security in Southeast Asia.

"Whereas naval units of the communist regime in Vietnam, in violation of the principles of the Charter of the United Nations and of international law, have deliberately and repeatedly attacked United States naval vessels lawfully present in international waters, and have thereby created a serious threat to international peace; and

"Whereas these attacks are part of a deliberate and systematic campaign of aggression that the communist regime in North Vietnam has been waging against its neighbors and the nations joined with them in the collective defense of their freedom; and

"Whereas the United States is assisting the peoples of Southeast Asia to protect their freedom and has no territorial, military or political ambitions in that area, but desires only that these peoples should be left in peace to work out their own destinies in their own way: Now, therefore, be it

"Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the Congress approves and supports the determination of the President, as Commander in Chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.

"Sec. 2. The United States regards as vital to its national interest and to world peace the maintenance of international peace and security in Southeast Asia. Consonant with the Constitution of the United States and the Charter of the United Nations and in accordance with its obligations under the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty, the United States is, therefore, prepared, as the President determines, to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom.

"Sec. 3. This resolution shall expire when the President shall determine that the peace and security of the area is reasonably assured by international conditions created by action of the United Nations or otherwise, except that it may be terminated earlier by concurrent resolution of the Congress."

* * *

            This is an amazing document. To promote the peace you have to make war and as the common saying went in those days: to save the village you have to burn it. The first justification in the “Whereas” was based on false information. There had indeed been a confrontation in the Gulf of Tonkin during the morning of August 2, 1964 between the U.S. destroyer Maddox and 3 Vietnamese PT boats, but who fired first has never been established. The USS. Maddox was not just on a peaceful cruise in the Gulf but was on a spy mission to survey the North Vietnamese coast. It zig-zagged throughout the night of August 1- August 2  under orders to stay at least 8 miles from shore and 4 miles from the offshore islands. When the PT boats appeared from behind the island of Hon Me, which was under North Vietnamese sovereignty (seven miles offshore), the Maddox turned to the open sea. When the PT boats kept up the pursuit, Captain Herrick radioed the Ticonderoga which sent up four jets. They sank one of the PT boats and disabled the other two which limped home. Only one round of machine gun fire had hit the Maddox and nobody was injured.  The entire affair was over in twenty minutes. The so called second attack never did take place and resulted from a nervous sailor who mistook engine noises for incoming torpedoes. That was the evidence on which the joint resolution was based. Now ask yourself: What would the U.S. Coast Guard have done if a Russian destroyer began zig-zagging 8 miles off the New Jersey coast in 1964? 

It gets worse. Neither Congress nor the media were told that two days prior to the first incident South Vietnamese commandoes under American direction had landed on that island in an attempt to destroy its radar installation. They were repulsed and it is hardly surprising that the North Vietnamese were on their guard thereafter to prevent a recurrence. Thus the first “whereas” was clearly false. For the second there was likewise no appreciable evidence because the major infiltration from the North into the South began only after the American bombing campaign which was the answer to the Maddox incident. The third “whereas” which stated that we only desire to have the people in the area work out their destinies in their own way, ignores the fact that we prevented free elections ten years earlier. The statement that we have no “political ambitions in that area” was equally untrue because we were busy propping up a regime that would do our bidding rather than that of Moscow or Beijing. Thus the Vietnam War was based on a fraud and it set a precedent. The President could get the potential power of going to war from Congress without an official declaration of War, and in absence of consultation with the United Nations, whose Charter forbids unilateral war making by nations. There is a principle at stake here: as long as we are a member state of the UN we have to abide by its rules. If we don’t like the rules then we can leave the UN, just as Hitler left the League of Nations, but under those circumstances any hope for future peace in the world is lost.

It has been argued that Lyndon Johnson who rushed this resolution through Congress within a few days did actually not want to widen the war but merely intimidate Ho and his comrades by demonstrating American might and will. It backfired because Asians have infinitely more patience than Americans. They were willing to fight on their own soil against Americans as long as it took just as they had been willing to fight the French a few years earlier. That was the real reason why we lost this war and why we will not be able to win militarily in Iraq.

The way the Vietnam disaster was created and how it played out should have been a lesson for our politicians but they seem to be incapable of learning because George W Bush used the same technique to stampede Congress into the Iraq Resolution 38 years later. In 1964 Congress acquiesced because its members believed that we had indeed been attacked and in 2002 they voted to give the President latitude so that his voice might be more authoritative when he addressed the United Nations and demand action from that forum. It is not clear whether they really wanted a ground war in the desert, just as their predecessors didn’t want a ground war in the jungle. What they may have wanted in both instances was “war on the cheap.” Namely bombing the Vietnamese or the Iraqis, as “Bush 41” once so eloquently put it, “back into the stone age.” That this is not the way to spread democracy and win the hearts and minds of the oppressed has not yet fully registered.

Congress and the American people have again been deceived. The Iraq invasion has not panned out the way it had been sold to Congress and the public and the major unresolved question remains: what do we do now? Last month’s election is played up as the latest indication that the situation is now finally getting under control. But there is also a precedent in a New York Times article of September 4, 1967

“United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of the turnout in South Vietnam’s presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting. According to reports from Saigon, 83 percent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong. A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson’s policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam.”

One is tempted to paraphrase our current President’s mangled syntax: Is our politicians learning? Obviously not. In 1964 Lyndon Johnson was worried about the November election where he had to appear as a decisive but peace-loving leader against the belligerent Barry Goldwater. In 2002 George W. Bush was worried about midterm elections and how to consolidate Republican gains in Congress. This year elections are coming around again and they are likely to hinge on Iraq. These domestic events drive policies regardless of what the facts are and what the public is being told. Although the President keeps assuring us, in repeated speeches during the past couple of months, that there is no time table for troop withdrawals from Iraq, it is obvious that it is highly unlikely that there will still be more than 150,000 of our troops in Iraq on Election Day in November, regardless of what happens in Baghdad and the rest of that unfortunate country.

We have read already in the local paper a headline “Signs point to major pullout. In Iraq, Rumsfeld talks up hand-over of military mission.” The idea of “war on the cheap” namely getting most of our boots out and returning to the air war to bomb the insurgents into submission, is again being floated (Up in the Air by Seymour Hersh. The New Yorker, December 5, 2005).  This disregards the fact that all the bombing in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, which exceeded the tonnage dropped during WWII, could not prevent the victory of the communists

The Bush administration finds itself in the situation of Churchill in 1921 when he took over as Colonial Secretary. Rebellions had broken out in Mesopotamia, Kurdistan, Palestine and Transjordan. Arabs wanted “Arabia for the Arabs,” then and they want it now. The British occupation of the Middle Eastern countries after WWI was bankrupting the Empire and cost cutting was the top priority. The way to achieve this, as Churchill saw it, was to govern Mesopotamia from the air and with some armored cars. Fromkin in “A Peace to End all Peace” quoted from Gilbert (Churchill: The Stricken World): “A few well protected air bases (he wrote at the time) would enable the Royal Air Force ‘to operate in every part of the protectorate and to enforce control, now here, now there, without the need of maintaining long lines of communications eating up troops and money.’” Churchill succeeded in cutting costs by 75 percent per annum but he didn’t bring peace and prosperity to the region. When he saw that success was elusive he wanted to unburden the problem onto the Americans but they were smart enough in those days to resist the lure. In 1922 Churchill lost his seat in the Cabinet and in the Commons. His career seemed finished until Hitler helped him to a renaissance and ultimate glory.

Churchill couldn’t solve the Middle East problem in 1922 and there is little likelihood that George W, and whoever his successor is going to be, will fare better. To create a nation in Iraq out of tribes which hate not only each other but especially foreigners will take considerably longer than a few years and Americans are simply not cut out for a task like that. In addition the idea that there can be peace in the Middle East by regime changes in Damascus, Teheran and other places, while Israel continues not only the Palestinian occupation but also expands its illegal settlements by expropriating Arab lands is so fantastic that one wonders why it is entertained at all.

The hypocrisy and mendaciousness of our politicians is perhaps best exemplified by our relations with Israel. Ostensibly we invaded Iraq because Saddam not only had WMDs but because he had defied numerous UN Resolutions. There were no WMDs in Iraq as we now know, but there are numerous ones in Israel and that country has also continuously defied, with American help, UN Security Council Resolutions. If Israel does not like the UN it could withdraw from that body and if Israel were to be seriously concerned about creating peace in the Middle East it could offer to dismantle its nuclear arsenal in exchange for an iron-clad guarantee that the Muslim countries would do likewise. Under those circumstances we would “give peace a chance,” but that is a forlorn hope and the lying will continue.

The question now is how long will the American people condone the lies we are subjected to on a daily basis and where does this leave us for the upcoming year? At each New Year one is supposed to be optimistic, but 2006 is bound to be a year of more turmoil. It’ll be time to shorten sails and batten down the hatches for all of us. The pigeons may be coming home to roost in the White House when the numerous scandals that have been mentioned in the December installment will become grist for the mill of the major news media. But there is an additional one that has so far been swept under the rug. Throughout his Presidency George W Bush has acted as if he had been inaugurated on September 12, 2001 instead of January 20. His current insistence on his right to use any and all means to protect us from terrorists rings hollow. Where was he in August of 2001 when the catastrophe was brewing? We know the answer; he was vacationing in Crawford and had ignored the Security Brief of August 6. Not only has he never admitted to his potential co-responsibility for the 9/11 catastrophe but he has used it, and continues to use it, for political gain. It now appears that even this landmark of history requires re-examination.

I am not a fancier of conspiracy theories but I know enough about human nature to realize when I am being lied to. The Internet is full of sites on 9/11, many of them scurrilous, but there are also serious ones that need to be taken into account. While it is agreed that the North and the South Tower were hit by two separate planes their steel construction should have withstood the damage. It is argued that the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission is wrong because for steel to melt higher temperatures are required than burning jet fuel can provide. While the Towers were damaged, they should not have collapsed at the time and in the manner they did. In addition Building 7, which was not hit by a plane, also imploded into dust and ashes. It is well known that President Bush opposed the creation of the 9/11 Commission for more than a year but eventually the victim’s families forced the issue. The supposedly bipartisan and non-political Commission was, however, seriously flawed. Its Executive Director Philip D. Zelikow was a friend of administration officials and had co-authored with Condi Rice a book in 1997 on the Reunification of Germany. He was a member of the President’s transition team, and in 2005 he became a member of the State Department as Senior Advisor to Condoleeza Rice. These facts have raised doubts about his impartiality towards the administration.

I am not a physicist, nor an architect who can verify the claims about the conditions required to melt steel; but the video, which can be accessed below, is sufficiently convincing to warrant the conclusion that the events of  September 11, 2001 need to be re-investigated. If this were done, by international experts, in a truly scientific and unbiased manner the country and the world may well be in for a considerable surprise. The whole world was affected by our response to 9/11 and, therefore, the whole world has a stake in the clarification of what really happened on that fateful day.