Document created: 19 September 03
Air University Review, January-February
1974
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General Parrish continues his thesis begun in the |
Brigadier General
Noel F. Parrish, USAF (Ret)
While Richard J. Barnet has a special place outside his heart for Presidents and their advisers, especially the recent ones, in Roots of War he broadens the attack to scorn Americans as a people, along with the nation and its history. “American self-righteousness” is linked to “American obsession with communism.” The only possible reason, he maintains, for American interest in the government of Vietnam or of other nations is that Americans “are made uncomfortable by diversity.” They have an “insatiable desire for prestige abroad” which manifests “a neurotic need for affection. . . . Compassionate giving on a group basis without expectation of gain or avoidance of some loss is almost unknown.”
Since Americans are sick, selfish, and savage in Barnet’s view, it is not surprising that he sees the nation as equally evil, although the problem of which is the original cause trips him now and then. The national security managers have so much power and are so busy exercising it to mislead the powerless citizen that they know even less than he knows: “One of McNamara’s subordinates has advanced the thesis that the national security managers were more obtuse about the war than the average citizen because they worked straight through the Huntley-Brinkley show and stayed out too late at parties to catch the eleven o’clock news.” But what does the less “obtuse” American citizen get out of the news? Something awful: “. . . the powerless can become a lawful, vicarious killer simply by switching on the 6:30 news and listening to the daily body count.”
The extreme radical views every nation as evil but none as quite so reprehensible as his own. He sees reflected in the eyes of others a bitterness toward his nation that matches and justifies his own disgust: “In its frustration the United States showed itself to be a homicidal menace for millions of innocent people of Indochina. . . . the number one nation is surpassed by none in the fear and hatred it has inspired around the world.”
Almost never in this type of literature is the United States compared favorably with another nation. The rather obvious oversight is somewhat obscured by repeated statements that similarities exist between our leaders and those of past Nazi or present Communist governments. The three most recent Presidents (other than President Nixon, a moving target whom Barnet chooses to ignore) have complained about difficulties in getting orders implemented, just as Hitler did. More fantastically: “When the truth about the Vietnam War began to come out in 1967 and 1968 and the national security managers were forced to defend their policy at dinner parties,” some began getting sick and “to show such signs of strain as snapping at subordinates and succumbing to fits of depression.”
This reminds Barnet of the behavior of the Nazi “political operators,” as Albert Speer describes them, at the bitter end “when the bubble of illusion bursts and they come to see themselves as conspirators.” This picture hardly jibes with Barnet’s own observation of American political operators humorously calling each other “war criminals” at Cambridge cocktail parties.
Equally inconsistent is Barnet’s use of words. In the Alice’s Wonderland of his Institute for Policy Studies, the lexicographer could well say with Humpty Dumpty, “in a rather scornful tone: ‘When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean.’” When Barnet propounds an observation such as “The roots of the new isolationism are as old as the republic,” he is not saying what he seems to say. “New isolationists” commonly means those who newly cry, “Come home, America.” This would include Barnet, decidedly, but the word “isolationist” has a sad history since the once unopposed spread of Hitler’s power. Barnet arbitrarily changes its meaning and applies it to others. He holds that the new isolationist is one who calls himself “internationalist,” but not vice versa, because the “genuine internationalist” is something else again—something resembling himself.
If this begins to sound like George Orwell’s description in the novel 1984 of a dictator reversing the meanings of important words, Barnet already has an answer. The meanings were already “Orwellian,” or reversed (a situation which might be expected in the ‘American Empire’): “In the postwar period, swarms of Americans have gone abroad, a good many of them soldiers. American power has been engaged over vast regions of the earth. But this phenomenon can be described as ‘internationalism’ only in an Orwellian sense. Americans are never more isolationist than when they go abroad to kill foreigners. Using foreign lives and property as a backdrop for projecting American power is the epitome of national egoism.” Neat, is it not? And cool enough, this new way of thinking, and especially appealing to bright young minds looking for new ways of thought!
Other words that must be given new meanings in Barnet’s vocabulary, which is to say contradictory meanings, include “religion,” “patriot,” “ethical,” “democracy,” “flag,” and others that have symbolic as well as literal significance. Thus: “All nations preach the ethic of national superiority but the United States has made a religion of it. . . . The old patriots brandished the flag. . . . The young patriots began shredding the flag. . . as if their claim to a piece of America depended upon making a full-scale assault on the national religion.” On the other hand, words with derogatory associations are always allowed to stand when they are used by others or applied to others.
Barnet says that James Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defense, once predicted “the recurrence of attacks such as the Nye investigation [referring to Senator Nye’s committee of the 1930s, which was assisted by Alger Hiss], to prove that the Army and Navy and American business were combining on a neo-fascist program of American imperialism.” Forrestal, who seems more and more prophetic, called such efforts “communist propaganda” and called for “countermeasures.” Barnet regrets only that “such countermeasures, including the highly developed Pentagon public relations effort. . . were so skillfully employed, the predicted attacks were inaudible for more than twenty years.”
The word communist is used by Barnet almost interchangeably with socialist, despite a fundamental and historic difference of meaning in the Western world. After agreeing with Communist Rosa Luxemburg that capitalist nations arm themselves to stimulate economic activity, he disagrees with Lenin’s argument that “if socialist states had to go to war it would be to defend themselves against the remaining capitalist powers.” As with most radicals outside the iron curtain and the Communist Party line, this break with the radicals of the twenties and thirties is unavoidable. “Since 1945 Soviet armies have been used only against socialist states. . . . [Therefore,] war cannot be automatically ended by getting rid of capitalism.”
Since the dominant theme of Barnet’s writing is the abolition or perhaps the disappearance of war, his hope, or prescription, for this happy eventuality is of more than passing interest. The Library of Political Affairs, the leading book club in its field, refers to Roots of War as “the first comprehensive investigation of the forces that propel the U.S. toward international violence” by the “founder of the Institute for Policy Studies.” Roland Steel, in his highly favorable review of the book, also refers to the Institute which Barnet founded ten years ago and which he “has helped to transform into a brain trust of the radical left.” The radical left, then, has despaired of political action for now, since each political party “is controlled by forces in our society which have benefited or have thought they benefited from permanent war.” This surprising assumption was demolished by the Democratic Party campaign of 1972, but the election may have restored it.
Radical doctrines are even more loaded with such imperatives than are most doctrines: “Americans must engage in serious self-examination of those drives within our society that impel us toward destruction.” His book, says Barnet, offers “a framework for such a social self-analysis, which, it is hoped, may lead to concrete acts of political and social reconstruction.” What kinds of acts? Here the radical plan is so vague as to be almost nonexistent. However, Barnet provides a clue in his effort to establish, despite contradictions among polls on the subject, that the common majority is as pacifist as the elite. If not, democracy must go. Should we have to accept that the “passion of the majority” pushes toward “military adventurism and nuclear war, perhaps we should look upon democracy as a dangerous luxury.”
Could there be a majority “peace party”? Hardly, if the radicals write its platform. “A politically effective peace party would have to . . . be honest with the American people about how little national security there is to be purchased in the modern world through military power. It would have to develop a vision of a new world economy based on fairer distribution of resources and power across the planet and to discuss candidly what sacrifices in standard of living Americans must make. . . .” Understandably concerned about the immense and scattered resources required to maintain American economic and military strength, Barnet proposes to buy security by giving these resources away. Is this a salable alternative?
Now appears the fist beneath the soft glove of radical pacifism and generosity. “The solution must be more radical than socialism as it has been preached. Only a government prepared to sell the American people on a very different value system or one prepared to coerce them into austerity can hope to reduce the national dependence on foreign resources.” (Italics added.) Barnet fails to note that democratic governments have uniformly failed to accomplish such goals by preaching. Only dictatorships have achieved them, and Communist dictatorships have coerced their people into austerity only to arm themselves against capitalist states. In any case Barnet does not pretend to have faith in the pacifism of Communist nations, which is to his credit.
What, then, is to be done, even by a coercive American government that would dismantle its military strength, if it depends upon that strength for continued access to foreign materials? Barnet honestly admits that security without armaments means abandoning dependence on the foreign trade that is basic to the present standard of living. Yet even this self-inflicted weakness may not save us: “We are not saying that if American society were organized for peace, there would be no war. Obviously other nations also have it in their hands to plunge the world into war. But unless American society is organized for peace, the continuation of our generation of war is inevitable. The number one nation is in the strongest position of all to set the tone for international relations and to create the climate under which other nations deem it practical or impractical to organize themselves for peace.” Barnet is willing to gamble all on one desperate maneuver which, if proved “impractical” by any strong nation’s action, would surely discredit pacifist doctrines for a thousand years as was the case in Western Christendom after its near-destruction by Saracen and barbarian invaders during the Dark Ages.
It would seem that such a likelihood of sacrificing his one consistent ideological goal, the establishment of world pacifism, would deter Barnet from urging that the risk be taken. As with many ideologues, he demonstrates a lack of concern for any people or country except as they might function in his prescription for salvation. While the United States is branded as the most greedy and destructive of nations, all nations are bureaucracies designed to inflict violence against their own citizens as well as against other states. He reports that nations have seen their day: “The nation-state is obsolete. Patriotism is old-fashioned. . . the shrewd executive believes that national identification is an encumbrance. . . . George Ball, Herman Kahn, and other celebrators of the multinational corporation proclaim the dawn of a new era in international relations. The corporation has outgrown the state, ushering in what Robert Heilbroner calls a ‘businessman’s peace’. . . .”
It must be all over for the nation-state when “even national security managers admit that the nation-state is obsolete.” Barnet fails to document this last discovery, and he does admit that nations can still make trouble even for international corporations. Despite his enthusiasm for the new “businessman’s peace,” he decides that multinational corporations are the “new imperialists,” since they do not need the international poor and “have no idea what to do with this underclass other than to encourage it not to breed so fast.” This leaves no hope for peace unless the obsolete number-one nation-state will exercise a kind of global patriotism to sacrifice its strength and perhaps its democracy. It would then no longer be number one, but the process of its sacrifice may have inspired other nations to do likewise.
The desire of a few individuals for symbolic martyrdom may become a radical creed as they work to confer true martyrdom upon their nation. It is a natural progression, since the process of recruiting other martyrs and then drafting the entire nation into the role greatly reduces the inconvenience of one’s original sacrifice. Peace is a perpetual hope that enlists wider sympathy than any other, so it is normal for professional preachers of peace to grasp at straws. Barnet repeats an optimism that may have an ominous sound for those who can remember beyond the present generation: “National economies are now so entangled with one another that no one can afford to go to war.” This bromide was common just before World War I and also before World War II. Over the past century no one could afford to go to war—or to abandon allies, or to surrender.
What hope, then, for such a slogan as “Peace and poverty through military and economic reductions”? Barnet’s friendly critics, who are practically the only critics to be found, are skeptical on this point. The Saturday Review admits that “unfortunately his apocalyptic formulas for the future do not possess the cogency of his critiques of the past.” The admiring Roland Steel regrets that “like most critics of foreign policy, Barnet is stronger on the attack than on the solution.” Steel thinks war is much more likely than Barnet’s remedy, and, strangely enough, Barnet feels the same way: “Whether the Nixon Doctrine or some Democratic equivalent works will depend entirely upon what foreigners do. . . . But it seems more likely that before a generation of peace comes to pass other nations will feel strong enough to challenge the revised concept of American supremacy, thus raising the specter of war.” This is likely even when war-like American security managers are gone, if Barnet is correct: “The Soviets have developed . . . a national security bureaucracy that looks remarkably like the American, and . . . behaves much like its counterpart too.” Interesting if true, for the upcoming Chinese security managers may well outdo both. Barnet avoids discussing the Maoist operators who are still practicing violence on each other and are deeply committed to aggressive violence in their doctrines.
Were we to cease our examination of the radical plan for peace at this point, we might be deceived that, since few radicals really believe it could be attempted in this country, it is of no more than academic interest. Sincerely pacifist radicals such as Barnet are willing to admit that our present economic strength depends upon access to many foreign materials in great quantities. Equally obvious, without their discussing it, is the fact that only an economically and militarily powerful nation can bargain on even terms. Communist nations, other than China, do not bargain with Russia on equal terms. It is the cold reality of accepting the penalties for sacrificing strength that makes the radical plan unsalable. Yet Barnet hopes to inflict it.
How would our nation “organize for peace”? Barnet insists upon this throughout the book, but explains it only at the end. These are the steps proposed by the director of the “radical brain trust”:
“The first, and most important, is to shrink the military bureaucracies [read ‘forces’] in size so that the balance of power in government once again passes to those agencies which are in the business of building and healing instead of killing and destroying.” Regardless of the rhetoric, it is obvious that this step has already been taken. This year’s budget message states that fact specifically. And Barnet’s next step?
“The second is to re-establish some form of popular control over the national security managers. . . . Congress must reassert the constitutional prerogatives it gave up so long ago in the area of foreign affairs. There should be a constitutional limit on the President’s right to commit troops abroad without a declaration of war.” This part of the plan, like the previous one, has been proposed many times in the past, but unlike the previous one it has failed of adoption. Now, since Roots of War was written, this second step is well under way.
“The third structural change in the national security bureaucracy would be to change the system of rewards and to introduce the notion of personal responsibility for official acts. . . . There must be a new operational code. . . that rewards peacemakers instead of warmakers. It is in this connection that serious discussion of the issue of war crimes in Vietnam is so important.” This somewhat muted suggestion for the final step should not be overlooked, for Barnet is not referring here to the “little” men in uniform who claimed to be carrying out orders but to all who “planned” the war and those who participated at higher levels of command. Here the repeated drawing of parallels with Nazis and other dictators reaches a climax in the recommendation for a new Nürnberg trial, this time in America for Americans.
Why such a shocking proposal as this? Barnet explains bluntly: “Those who strive for peace other than by military means do so at great personal risk; those who engage in bureaucratic homicide do so with impunity.” In plain words, those who constantly call themselves peacemakers are persecuted, dangerously so, while those who serve their country in war get away with murder. Barnet and his doctrinal colleagues who professedly “strive for peace” want those who “got away with murder” tried, and they want them punished. Once tolerated and respected as conscientious objectors, they now demand rewards for themselves and punishment for all whose conscience leads them into lines of duty. The sword is more merciful than the radical pen.
Despite the disturbing revelation of that ultimate step, all the emphasis is on the necessary first step of the radical plan: shrink the military “until the excessive power of that bureaucracy is broken.” If that is accomplished to the degree demanded by many far less radical than Barnet, the second step—reducing the President’s power—may not matter a great deal anyway. Of course, the President will still be expected to protect freedom of the seas, freedom to trade with willing partners, and other rights that are essential to American survival as a free nation among other free nations. These rights are more likely to be challenged as we are militarily weakened; and even the radical planners admit this could mean war. Therefore, their now attainable goal, if they are doctrinaire pacifist radicals, is that the United States shall be unprepared. Their voluminous and widely praised writings, such as Roots of War, are dedicated to reductions in strength and in spirit. The warning is not veiled. The full meaning is there for all to read. Many do read, but few comprehend the full meaning.
Why men who recognize that their own nation’s independence and influence depend upon maintenance of its military and economic strength will counsel the abandonment of that strength to achieve a most precarious peace is difficult to fathom. Yet we know from the history of radical reformist movements, just as we observe in the present instance, that even as they despair of their ever distant goals such zealots provide blueprints and guidance for uncritical sympathizers who know not to what dead end they follow.
Barnet deprecates the capacity of “American leadership” for “understanding and empathy”: “Within a few days, I talked to Pham Van Dong, the Premier of North Vietnam, in Hanoi, and to Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s national security adviser, in the White House. . . . The Premier had the ability to put himself in Nixon’s place. Kissinger, on the other hand, while evidencing respect and even a little admiration for his adversary’s skill, seemed to have no genuine understanding of what motivated him.” Whether Kissinger understood what motivated Barnet is not mentioned, but Barnet’s own comments invite us to try.
This latest book offers within itself no real basis for understanding, but it does indicate the social ideal to which Barnet is passionately committed and the model governmental system he favors. Considering the first, the social ideal, we are aware that the intensity of a commitment may be revealed by how desperate is the search for justification and precedent. Choosing the Shoshone Indians as an example to prove a point is a startling ploy: “Despite the efforts of the apologists of American policy to justify permanent war by invoking pop anthropology, the view that militarism is a biologically determined aspect of the human condition cannot stand serious scrutiny. War . . . is unknown among some of the most primitive men—the Great Basin Shoshone Indians, for example, who are about as close to a biological ‘state of nature’ as one can find.” Except for the fact that the Shoshone have not existed in a truly primitive state for at least a century, both statements are true, but at what cost to his argument! Peter Farb’s famous book, Man’s Rise to Civilization, treats these Indians sympathetically and credits them with “having achieved one of the noblest aspirations of civilized man. They did not engage in warfare.” Farb also calls them “pitiful and impoverished,” too much so to defend themselves. They were not practitioners of war but were nevertheless its victims: “Whenever other Indians invaded their lands and attacked them, the Shoshone did not fight back but simply ran away and hid.” In fleeing, they often left their women to the invaders’ mercy.
After horses arrived with the Spanish, the Shoshone could not maintain them in their desert hideouts because they and the horses ate the same food and there was not enough. Their mounted relatives, the Utes, captured many Shoshone each spring when they were weak from hunger and “fattened them as slaves for sale to the Spaniards in Santa Fe.” Such is the example of peace through self-denial that Barnet chose to cite in the introduction of his book on the subject, and such is the backfire, upon examination, of his own excursion into what he scorned as “pop anthropology.” Surely Barnet knew the pitiful fate of the famous “Digger Indians,” but in not bringing it up, he relied upon his readers’ ignorance of some very pertinent details. Examples that might offer some support for his ideal proposals are obviously hard to come by, but a dedicated zealot will not be denied.
Not to limit himself to primitives, Barnet provides a modem example: “The descendants of the ferocious Swedes who terrorized northern Europe in the eighteenth century are now professional peacemakers.” One wonders just how many “professional peacemakers” any nation could support. Barnet fails to mention that Sweden has a military establishment more powerful than that of all the other Scandinavian countries combined. A better example might have been Switzerland, the nation that for more than a century has turned peacemaking and neutralism into a major national asset. It would not do to mention, though, that Switzerland trains its entire male population for war and has seriously considered making its own nuclear weapons.
Barnet is himself an erudite man in many fields. His examples and illustrations are obviously not intended for such as he, but rather for the uninformed and inexperienced idealist who already leans toward commitment to some worthy cause. His radical pacifism is not specifically a political cause, despite its use as such. None are more anxious to see American military retrenchment than are the militarily expanding Communist nations, but the Institute for Policy Studies is no nest of Communist propaganda. The American philosophical revolutionary no longer weights himself with the millstones of Russian, Chinese, or even Cuban behavior. He simply minimizes the threats they pose and blames his own country’s policies, whatever they may have been, as the original cause. In this effort he specializes in pilfered papers, insiders’ secrets, anonymous revelations, frequently distorted history, and supposedly applicable observations by great international “thinkers” of the past.
Barnet lists among the most influential for this book such well-known names as Freud, Fromm, Lippmann, Machiavelli, Marx, C. Wright Mills, and, last but not least, William Appleman Williams. Except for the last two, these are recognized innovators in several types of theory. More interesting by far is Barnet’s opening sentence, which attributes to Mikhail Bakunin (along with Sigmund Freud) the observation that “the role of the state is to assert a monopoly on crime.” Barnet adds, “The very meaning of sovereignty which states guard so jealously is the magical power to decide what is or is not a crime. The ‘state’ is of course an abstraction. . . .” Throughout the book Barnet repeatedly castigates all “bureaucratic structures” which compose that “criminally homicidal” authority, the “state.” Certainly this is not liberalism, socialism, communism, or any other philosophy that recognizes the need or necessity for effective social organization, which in the modern world means “bureaucracy.”
What is the philosophy? It is anarchism, a late nineteenth century movement in which Mikhail Bakunin was the early “giant.” The goal of anarchism was the destruction of every authority and of all government, since the “state,” as Barnet complains, has the “power to decide what is or is not a crime. “
His objection is that governments rule by “criminal violence” over individuals who should follow only their own consciences, since nothing matters but “the self,” a philosophy expressed in the novel and movie A Clockwork Orange. The “bureaucratically homicidal” state must be destroyed, by violence, of course, all of which is justified since the end is nonviolence. Barnet wants American “war criminals” (bureaucrats) punished. But in general he appears satisfied with activism such as that of priests Philip and Daniel Berrigan,”who preached symbolic violence against draft records as the means of stopping real violence against human beings in Indochina.”
In the early days the action of anarchist revolt was known as “propaganda by the deed.” These deeds were always destructive and were often murderous, but all was in accord with Bakunin’s most famous statement: “The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.” Freud and his followers helped explain the spirit of anarchism and its defiant destructiveness as springing from hatred of parental or other authority figures in childhood. The current recrudescence of anarchism is seldom indiscriminately violent, as was the original. With few exceptions, it is expressed in sublimated form as “symbolic” defiance and as persistent denunciation of all symbols of authority and power.
To say or even to imply that Barnet is “an anarchist” would be as pointless and as inexcusably defamatory as his own repeated application of epithets such as “criminal,” “homicidal,” and “killer” to various individuals. Yet to say that the philosophy of nongovernment which he begins by approving and continues to express throughout the book resembles anarchism is simply to agree with Webster.
A distinguishing characteristic of that philosophy is to be weak and vague on all constructive efforts but intensely specific and direct “on the attack”. Here we approach the second favorite target of Barnet’s spleen, after his blood-smearing dissection of the national security managers. His repetitive castigation of all things military, which he arbitrarily calls “militaristic,” is of course far less adept than his verbal butchery of his erstwhile friends and associates, the national security managers.
Nevertheless, he knows more about high-level military discrepancies than might be expected, and his barbs are not always beside the mark. He is in some degree correct in saying that each service looks to its own interests and that “each military service has also worked out a view of the world that justifies its own self-proclaimed mission.” (Barnet’s military sophistication does not include the Key West Agreements.) “For the Army, the job is to preserve a ‘balance of power’ and to keep order around the world through counterinsurgency campaigns and limited wars. . . . The Air Force view of the world is much more alarmist. . . . It is essential to have an enemy worthy of your own weapons and your own war plans. . . . In the 1950’s the Air Force and the Army struggled over control of the missile program. The counterinsurgency obsession of the early sixties was in large part a campaign by the U.S. Army to get ‘a piece of the action’ back from the CIA and the Air Force, which reigned supreme all through the Eisenhower era.” All this is difficult for an honest military man to deny, but again the value of Barnet’s analysis is diluted when he gets carried away by his theme: “There are tens of thousands of mysterious objects in the Soviet Union which the Army is convinced are tanks but which any Air Force intelligence officer knows are really airplanes.”
Little else is contributed in Roots of War to the neglected subject of interservice conflicts, although the problem has reached the stage of open warfare in several countries. Barnet fails to attack his favorite target, McNamara’s militarized civilians, for their divide et impera (“divide and rule”—Machiavellian precept) policy in halting all progress toward true unification of the military services. In fact, as a student of bureaucratic homicide, he welcomes “public display” of costly interservice conflict. Generally his effort to pillory indiscriminately all persons military results in wild jabs in all directions, so erroneous as to be humorous were the intent less serious.
Senator Goldwater, a pet hate, is accused of advocating the nuclear bombing of Cuba because in one secret paper he advised the use of the Strategic Air Command there. Barnet charges: “In 1961 the Strategic Air Command was capable of carrying out nuclear strikes only, a fact of which Goldwater, an Air Force Major General, was aware.” Elementary logic to the effect that planes which carry large bombs can also carry small ones would have avoided this blooper.
Elsewhere Barnet refers to “the Goldwater-LeMay wing of the radical right.” He must have meant Wallace-LeMay, yet not even these political partners were in quite the same wing. Other names that always appear in books of this type appear here, and the always-leading name, that of Dr. Stefan T. Possony, is misspelled “Possoney.” Though he heads a research agency somewhat more respected than Barnet’s, Possony is labeled “Professor.” Other familiar names listed as “Goldwater’s advisers” include William Kintner, Robert Strausz-Hupé, Warren Nutter, and David Abshire. Two Air Force general officers are listed, just as they are listed on almost every radical “nailing” list for the past ten years (to the envy of some of their colleagues): Dale O. Smith and Robert C. Richardson III. Barnet quotes but fails to credit their sensible advice to candidate Goldwater, unfortunately unheeded, which was to avoid making nuclear weapons a campaign issue.
Such antimilitary gaucheries abound in Barnet’s as in other hate-all-uniforms anthologies of wrongly charged evils and errors. The principal target is quite naturally the U.S. Air Force, it being responsible for the principal target system. He condemns especially “the mass air raid and the repeated air strike,” which are surely opposites, and reminisces that” Americans, along with Germans and British to a lesser degree, have been engaged in this form of bureaucratic homicide for almost thirty years, since the decision in 1942 to bomb Germany into submission.” Evidently the Allied ground forces never got word of any such lifesaving achievement, and Barnet appears ignorant of the sixty-year history of concentrated air attacks, which originated in 1914, not in 1942.
The term “bureaucratic homicide” for all military action is not out of place Barnet’s peculiar phraseology, since he says “the bureaucratic killer looks at an assigned task as a technical operation much like any other.” By such distortions of meaning he is able to indulge the radical penchant for comparing Americans with Nazis, and in this case for comparing American airmen with Gestapo chief Adolph Eichmann, also a “dispassionate long-range killer who. . . hated to visit the camps” despite his “insatiable killing intention.”
Comparisons with Chinese leaders (“killers”) are avoided, and Russians are seldom mentioned except when Barnet follows the lead of better-known “historians” of the new left who blame Russian bad behavior on American influences. Thus, “The invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 was executed and justified to the world in terms remarkably similar to the American invasion of the Dominican Republic three years earlier.” That the two “invasions” were almost totally different in nature, purpose, and outcome is scarcely recognized in “mod” academic circles today and completely ignored among radicals. That President Johnson used fewer troops on this excursion than President Kennedy mobilized to cover the registration of James Meredith at the University of Mississippi is little known anywhere. Undistorted history is the corrective most feared by radical polemicists, so ideological “historians” have been widely touted by radicals in recent years.
Of the Russian power-wielders, Khrushchev has become a favorite folk hero among many Americans, perhaps because remembering to put enough “h’s” into the name is a mark of some erudition. Barnet’s principal statement about him displays a complete lack of erudition on the explosive subject of nuclear weapons: “Since the ouster of Khrushchev the Soviet Union for the first time in the postwar era has been engaged in a serious effort to catch up to the United States in nuclear arms.” Without puzzling over the superfluous term “in the postwar era,” one is truly baffled to guess what Barnet could have had in mind. As a champion of nuclear weaponry, Khrushchev outperformed Secretary Dulles and Admiral Radford combined. He ridiculed nonnuclear weaponry, threatened to use nuclear weapons, prepared Cuba for nuclear warheads, broke his nuclear test-ban agreement with Eisenhower, and tested the superbomb that hopefully will stand as the monster weapon of all time.
The revisionist version of history is full of surprises for anyone who has the most elementary knowledge or recollection of what really happened. But courses in recent history are rare, and those who remember are now in the minority. Barnet’s statement that in 1952 “the Soviet Union has yet to develop a way of delivering the atomic bomb on the United States” is used to prove a point, yet false by at least two years. With equal recklessness Barnet charges that, despite the self-serving claims of Air Force generals, intelligence shows the Soviets consistently behind in the arms race—a familiar canard which is now countered by arms limitation agreements that allow the Russians certain nuclear advantages.
Right-wingers who are opposite in extremes become favorite targets for Barnet and his school: “Men such as Dr. Fred Schwarz, the Reverend Billy James Hargis, and the Reverend Carl McIntyre preached global conversion by means of the Bomb. Their crusades were well financed by such fierce anticommunists as the dog-food millionaire H. L. Hunt and some of the oil-rich Texans.”
While these fundamentalist evangelists are sometimes as careless with facts as is Barnet, they have never preached any such doctrine. Roots of War is scarcely read in Texas beyond a coterie at the big University, but if it were and oilman Hunt heard of Barnet’s silly description of him, the old gentleman would probably bark right back. McNamara’s famous whiz kids might well respond with the intellectual equivalent of a bark at Barnet’s claim that they suggested “using the supersonic boom of B-52’s to break windows in Hanoi,” since not even these brain-busters wanted the B-52s to shed their wings.
Did Kennedy campaigners in 1960 cry “missile gap” because of “erroneous intelligence estimates leaked by the Air Force”? This would be an interesting pot-versus-kettle case if true, but Kennedy’s statements on this subject were drafted by once-hawkish Senator Stuart Symington, who had access to all the information.
Is the Democratic Party “the party of arms race”? Do generals covet deployed bases “because famous bases build military morale”? If you question these and many other such statements, then you have no proper appreciation for researcher Richard Barnet, nor for the Institute for Policy Studies, nor for the strong antiwar thrust of the new left, revisionist, and radical movements. In this event, you would probably be in the minority on the faculty of a large, recently expanded university; it is the kind of information that is most believable to “involved” faculty members and students.
No longer is it considered wise to spell America with a “k” or to wave Viet Cong flags, since, as Barnet observes, such actions tend to alienate people: “No one who hates America or appears to hate it can change this country.” This would be the most encouraging statement in the book if it were true, but Barnet continues: “There is much to hate about America, and nothing so much as American militarism from which so many other evils flow.” Again he is not following accepted definitions, for militarism in the current radical lexicon—and Barnet’s—is not an aggressive attitude or policy such as most Americans oppose but is all things military, or as Webster puts it, “of or relating to soldiers, arms, or war.” To this Barnet and his ideological brethren would add all civilians of whatever occupation who do not display, as he does, hostility and suspicion, if not fear, of all military personnel in this country or any other, with the possible exception of “people’s” soldiers such as the Viet Cong.
Take the case of Leonard Sullivan in the Office of Defense Research and Engineering, who testified that in a few years electronic instrumentation will enable us “to tell when anybody shoots, what he is shooting at, and where he was shooting from.” Now, it would be difficult to imagine anything more attractive to a man of peace who really wants to stop the shooting than such a device, but somehow the very existence of scientist Sullivan so infuriates Barnet that he writes: “One need only listen to the testimony. . . to appreciate that this professional killer is embarked on an intellectual adventure.” Ordinarily Barnet reserves the epithet “professional killer” for men in uniform and “bureaucratic killer” for civilians in the Departments of Defense and State, but he seems to provide a special place in his inferno for scientists who work on anything that might connect with a weapon.
Always on the attack, moving fast and firing from the hip, Barnet neglects no targets, civilian or military. He accuses McNamara of deception to “neutralize bureaucratic opposition,” this time the opposing “bureaucrats” being the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In another situation, after the Tet offensive, “. . . Secretaries McNaughton and Enthoven, were arguing that to accept the recommendations for more troops would amount to giving the JCS a ‘blank check’.” Johnson was so taken aback by the JCS request for seven hundred thousand troops for two more years that he began to back away from the war and from the Presidency. Strangely, however, Barnet tells in another passage that the same prediction was made two years earlier, with opposite results: “When, in 1996, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told President Johnson. . . that it would take seven hundred thousand U.S. troops at least five years to achieve victory, the President told the general he was crazy and walked out of the room.”
Apparently it is impossible to “process and vent without intermission all today’s ugly secrets” without getting crossed up on some of them. These stories indicate Johnson refused to believe the Joint Chiefs at all, despite the complete consistency of their estimates in 1996 and in 1968. Then whom did he trust? Did McNamara, McNaughton, and Enthoven persuade Johnson in 1966 that JCS estimates were insanely high and in 1968 that they were too low to be credible, even though the second estimate was a vindication of the first? It is almost unbelievable that these responsible civilians could have remained influential after such inconsistency and that the Joint Chiefs should have lost influence after they were so accurate in their judgments through the two worst years of the war.
For all this the military leaders are given no credit in the book and it becomes obvious that here is, after all, a pattern to Barnet’s random attacks. The national security managers are favorite targets because Barnet was among them, as was Ellsberg with his xerox eyes and tape-recorder brain that “recalled” innumerable conversations word for word. These conversations were with friends and associates who trusted him at the time. Since few if any military men trusted him, they are less prominent in “under-the-dryer gossip.”
In this scenario of scandal, the military are the managed rather than the managers, but their evil practices are basic to the value system of the story. In the radical account, all who worked with the military were wrong and all who worked against them were right. Barnet’s basic target is revealed in his most sweeping and inaccurate pronouncement concerning the war’s residue: “The Air Force already has its version of the ‘stab in the back’ myth: The civilian leaders were unwilling to kill enough people fast enough to win the war.”
Such a statement distorts the Air Force’s long-established concept of its mission. Despite Barnet’s admonition to understand one’s enemy, he makes no effort to understand or even to analyze the institution that is his most constant target. It represents to him the culmination of evil, not its roots. The particular national security managers whom he could pillory so mercilessly because he was among them—he lists his culminating title as “consultant to the Department of Defense” —are gone now, back to their various schools, research organizations, and other “academic cover.” The military remain, to pick up the pieces and prepare against whatever threat may next prove too forceful to be parried by words.
There is no occasion for any “stab in the back” attitude, despite the frustrations and fruitless sacrifices of the earlier years in Vietnam and the humiliating bluster and bungle of a few public officials. Pilots and crews of all services were able ultimately to move toward an end of the war, and they did what had to be done for this purpose. As compared with other military miseries of American history, such as the culpable mismanagement of the 1812 war, the forfeited campaigns of the Civil War, the repeated futilities of the Indian wars, and recently the consecutive embarrassments by North Korean and Chinese armies, the Vietnam war was reasonably well handled in the field. Considering both the unprecedented pressures upon them in the field and the indifference at home, the men who performed effectively through the last years and months of Vietnam deserve a special honor as veterans among veterans.
Indifference and even hostility at home will not suddenly disappear. Roots of War is but an example, and not an extreme one, of a mounting attack that is already more influential than is generally believed. Yet its message is simple and is the obverse of what Barnet calls an “inanity” once uttered by Secretary of State Rusk: “We must project our power.” The total message of Roots of War is, strangely but clearly: “We must reject our power.” For good or ill, Rusk has had his day. Now Barnet and his cohorts have theirs, but there is a difference. They are not in positions of authority and can only try to persuade. The targets of their persuasion are known: the young academics and certain vulnerable men in public office. Counterpersuasion, to be most effective, must be based upon an understanding of radical motivations, philosophies, methods of argument, and use or misuse of words and meanings. For this purpose, Roots of War is an outstanding revelation.
San Antonio, Texas
Brigadier General Noel F. Parrish, USAF (Ret), (Ph.D., Rice University), is an assistant professor of history at Trinity University, San Antonio. Commissioned from flight training in 1932, he served as flying instructor and supervisor and as Commander, Tuskegee Army Flying School. Other assignments were as Special Assistant to the Vice Chief of Staff, Hq USAF; Air Deputy, NATO Defense College, and Deputy Director, Military Assistance Division, Europe; Assistant for Coordination, DCS/Plans and Programs, Hq USAF; and Director, Aerospace Studies Institute, Air University, 1961-64.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this
document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression,
academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official
position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air
Force or the Air University.
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