Historical memory: In the run-up to the American War in Vietnam, there was considerable debate within LBJ's government about the best strategy to pursue. There was almost no debate about whether or not to escalate the war, despite the fact that Johnson had run for election on the grounds that Goldwater would dangerously escalate the American involvement in Vietnam. The JCS wanted an all-out war from the start, including the option to use nuclear weapons, while the civilians in DOD favored a slow build-up. While it is always dangerous to argue from historical parallels, it is nevertheless instructive to recall that debate today, in the context of the current run-up to war with Iraq. I am a student of the Vietnam War(s) & while there are a number of texts we might consult (particularly Jeffrey Record's The Wrong War) nothing I have read traces the internal politics of the Johnson administration's war planning with anything approaching the detail & nuance of Daniel Ellsberg's memoir, Secrets. Even while denouncing Goldwater's suggestion that field commanders be given authority to use tactical nuclear weapons, Johnson had already given his military a (more limited) authority to use such weapons under particular circumstances, such as an inability to communicate with Washington. Several members of Johnson's Joint Chiefs of Staff, especially Curtis LeMay, secretly supported Goldwater's position. Throughout this process, many civilian analysts in the Defense Department, including, according to Ellsberg, Robert McNamara, not only opposed the use of nuclear force, but also took seriously LBJ's declaration, "We seek no wider war." The picture Ellsberg pains is of an administration that at its highest levels was bent on pursuing a policy of escalation even while many (though by no means all) of its own policy intellectuals were deeply skeptical of such a policy.

The mendacity & duplicity that resulted from this situation effectively shut the Congress & the American people out of the debate. Guys like Ellsberg (he says) saw the Congress as an obstacle to be circumvented rather than as a representative of the American people. In fact, the one thing that all the participants in the debate agreed on was that democratic institutions were not all that well-suited to their agendas, whatever they were. And so everybody who knew anything simply lied to the people's representatives & to the press. Secrecy was seen as a virtue closely allied with loyalty. Reading Ellsberg's account, it becomes clear that all of the significant debate about the war took place within the executive branch of the government, the legislative branch having been effectively frozen out of the process. What's more, information about the war was manipulated in order to achieve political ends. When the Viet Cong attacked American interests at Pleiku & Qui Nhon in February of 1964, plans had already been developed for systematic bombing of North Vietnam. That is, the US government was looking for a pretext to attack, despite the fact that LBJ had not authorized any action except tit-for-tat raids in response to specific incidents. Ellsberg reports that after the Qui Nhon raid, he spent the night in the Joint Chiefs War Room in the Pentagon, where he was given an open line to Saigon so that he could gather atrocity stories for McNamara to take to Johnson the next morning.

I do not mean to minimize the loss of lives, American & Vietnamese, that occurred in Vietnam at this time; the point I'm trying to make here is political. Instead of a debate about the merits of escalating American commitment in Southeast Asia, there was a defense establishment that, despite its own lack of unanimity, configured itself to expand the war even while the world was being told that was not the case [The Pentagon Papers, Vol 3 pp 193, 559]. Ellsberg says he acted out of loyalty & that only later did he come to see that this loyalty was misplaced. He thought, he says, that McNamara & the president were committed to a limited war, a war of containment that would avoid large-scale bombing campaigns.

Now, from what we poor citizens can tell, there is also a debate going on in the highest reaches of our government. And the news this week seems to indicate that the administration is looking for an excuse to start a war in Iraq. The roles appear to be reversed this time, with the military showing considerably more reluctance to go to full-scale war than the civilians in DOD. One can debate the merits of the war & it is dangerous to draw historical analogies; the similarity here is mendacity. Then & now, the American government, especially the executive branch, demonstrated a profound lack of faith in the democratic institutions that are the foundation of American liberties. We have been down this road before.