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CULTURE OF SECRECY
BACKFIRES
(by) Dean
Velvel
Secrecy really “took off” after the
Korean War “with the creation of the
American national security state, and
got us into trouble time and time
again,” observes Lawrence Velvel, dean
of the Massachusetts School of Law at
Andover in his new book “America 2008”(Doukathsan.)
“We had (President Lyndon) Johnson’s
secret plans to escalate in Viet Nam, a
secret (President) Nixon plan for peace
whose actual nonexistence was hidden by
its purported secrecy but which helped
this disaster get elected, we had secret
Nixonian wars in Laos and Cambodia,
extensive secret CIA spying on Americans
which finally was disclosed in the mid
1970s, secret torture, secret prisons,
secret renditions, secret spying on
Americans and the rest of the litany of
secret horrors associated with
(President) G.W. Bush and (Vice
President Dick) Cheney,” Velvel writes.
Not confined to government, secrecy
American-style exists everywhere, writes
Velvel, an award-winning essayist. As
examples, he cites pharmaceutical houses
that keep undesirable results of
pharmaceutical trials secret and the
suppression by Congress of testimony
whose disclosure could prevent the
repetition of military blunders.
By allowing Gen. Douglas MacArthur to
testify in secret, Velvel writes, the
Congress failed to unmask his gross
incompetence. “MacArthur was arrogant,
racist, delusional (the word “madness”
is often used with regard to him and his
top commanders…), not infrequently a
liar (like Bill Clinton, he believed the
truth was whatever served his purpose at
the moment), a demander of yes men and
sycophants, and concerned obsessively
with his own public relations and image,
which were polished by a never ceasing
P.R. machine,” Velvel writes.
As a result of his delusions, MacArthur
insisted on pursuing the North Koreans
across the peninsula to the Yalu River
when he could have stopped at a
defensible line midway; he also believed
the Red Chinese would not invade Korea
to oppose his troops and when they did
the casualties on all sides were
horrific. “The whole (Korean) war was an
object lesson in the fact that war is
not merely death and horrible injury, it
is also death and horrible injury by
stupidity,” Velvel writes.
Over and again, Velvel writes, it has
been the right-wing of the American
political spectrum that has failed to
learn the lessons of history. Its
advocates’ pushed for allowing MacArthur
to march north in Korea into what turned
out to be a trap set for his troops near
the Yalu River; and it was the
right-wing again which, years later,
crusaded for the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
“We keep getting into wars where we will
inevitably have to fight the other guy’s
kind of war, as in the guerrilla war in
Viet Nam and the insurgency in Iraq,”
Velvel writes. “We keep playing the
opponents’ game by getting into war
after war where opponents can neutralize
our cultural advantages (technological
superiority) and employ theirs against
us.”
The same kind of delusional thinking
MacArthur exhibited was repeated by
President George W. Bush in his attack
on Iraq. “The WMD miscalculation was
simply hoked up bovine defecation,”
Velvel writes. What’s more, “The lack of
planning for the war’s aftermath was not
only stupid in itself, but apparently
was based on the preposterous
miscalculations that we would be
welcomed in Iraq and the Middle
East---where many have long hated us as
well as our predecessors, the British
and French---and that (Ahmed) Chalabi
(later deputy prime minister) and his
gang would be effective. Our leaders
never figured on a fantastic insurgency
though there were a few people who
warned of the possibility---including,
obliquely but in retrospect
unquestionably, Saddam (Hussein)
himself.”
Velvel charges further U.S. leaders
failed to learn from a time in their own
history when Americans bridled at having
European troops stationed in Mexico, yet
today they appear surprised that Iran,
once Iraq’s military opponent, switched
to befriend the Iraq insurgency when
U.S. troops invaded that country
“because it does not want on its borders
a far distant major power which could,
and has even threatened to, attack it,
just as we didn’t want England, France
or Spain on our borders.”
Author Velvel is dean and cofounder of
the Massachusetts School of Law at
Andover, founded in 1988 for the express
purpose of providing a quality,
affordable legal education to
minorities, immigrants, and students
from low-income households who otherwise
could not afford to attend law school.
Velvel has been honored for his
contributions to legal education and his
books of essays have won several
publishing industry awards. |
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