The Cold War, thankfully, is receding into history like a bad but distant memory. I was born about a decade after the Cold War began and I was in my early thirties before the Soviet Union finally collapsed, which of course ended the Cold War. For a few wonderful years afterward Americans lived largely free of the fear of imminent nuclear attack.
Of course, we have not given up our nuclear weapons. We still have nuclear missiles on standby. We still think nuclear weapons are a deterrent. Instead of building nuclear arsenals to destroy the planet, now we develop smaller yield tactical nuclear weapons designed to drill deep underground and destroy hardened bunkers. Nor has the end of the Cold War diminished interest in nuclear weapons. The cost of entry into the nuclear club has dropped dramatically. It seems that every rogue state with sufficient means, and even many mainstream states like India, also wants the bomb.
The threat of nuclear war thus only receded a bit with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now it has morphed and become a different and arguably far more complex chessboard. Today we are beginning to understand that the Cold War never wholly left, but instead it has mutated. What have changed are its players. Use of a nuclear weapon today, if it occurs, has only one small redeeming aspect: it is less likely to start a worldwide thermonuclear war and the United States is less likely to be its first victim.
Therefore, in a way the Cold War seems almost nostalgic. For all its immense cost the problem of nuclear deterrence was, in some respects, simple. Our strategy was to show that if attacked we could also attack our foes with equally lethal force, meaning that neither state would survive to claim victory. Was it luck, the hand of God or enlightened leaders that kept us from Armageddon? While we may never know for sure, former Air Force Secretary Thomas C. Reed would argue it was the latter. In his 2004 book, At the Abyss, An Insider’s History of the Cold War he walks us through its long history.
Mr. Reed though does bring some unique insight to the Cold War. He was one of our nuclear program managers, and managed the development of a number of nuclear weapons as a young Air Force officer. It is in his description of the development of these weapons and his witnessing of their testing that this book shines. There is no substitute for a first hand account of a thermonuclear test in the Pacific. Mr. Reed gives us insight into what a real thermonuclear war would be like. I would say it would be chilling, except it would be just the opposite. The reality is hellish:
There’s the light, a brightness that simply does not stop. People talk about a flash, but a thermonuclear detonation is not a flashbulb event. The sun starts to burn on earth; darkness seems never to return. There are the colors- purples and other hallucinogenic hues that confirm Shakespeare’s observation about the next world: “What dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause.” There’s the heat. It makes no sense to the brain, because the explosion being observed is almost over the horizon, as far away as Baltimore is from Washington. Yet the first flash gives way to an oppressive, lingering heat whose persistence is unnerving. And then there’s the all-enveloping roar of the savage beast unleashed… So much else happened that the senses are numb. The first shock wave is not a crack or a pop, as one hears from a gun fired far away. It is the opening of a roar encompassing the senses, seeming to continue forever.
Reed’s first hand accounts of thermonuclear tests, along with his recollections of what it was like working in the nation’s premier nuclear laboratories at Los Alamos in New Mexico and Lawrence Livermore in California are fascinating and insightful, as well as very scary. I was struck by the utter sobriety of those engaged in this ghastly nuclear weapons business, as well as their ingenuity in making such arrays of nuclear devices work from so many platforms: from submarines that lurked beneath the seas, from airplanes, and from all sorts of land based missiles. This was done while also ensuring that they would remain inert unless very complex permission schemes were used. Reed does us a favor by giving us a very intimate glimpse of these years. It is fascinating and sobering reading.
Eventually Reed got out of the nuclear weapons business and the Air Force. Politics attracted him. In particularly he was a devoted follower of a certain former actor and governor of California. No, I do not mean Arnold Schwarzenegger, but Ronald Reagan. Reed was a friend of Reagan during his years as governor, and acted as his chief of staff during those years. He also assisted in his many campaigns and won Reagan’s personal respect and friendship. He served as the Secretary of the Air Force under President Ford, and then went to work on Reagan’s National Security Council, ably assisted by a certain Major named Oliver North. Consequently, Reed also brings us some unique insights into the back stage shenanigans at the Reagan White House. We learn that the White House was broken into two sets of key players, the Old Guards of which Reed was a member, and a newer and more politically savvy set, epitomized by James Baker. Reed was an unabashed admirer of Reagan. He gives him full credit for ending the Cold War, although he is certainly respectful toward most of the presidents who developed the strategies and exercised the leadership needed during our long Cold War. He does not even mention Reagan’s fiscal and environmental wreckage.
While this book has many merits, it also has some detractions. Where Reed has personal insights, it shines. When he has no first hand experiences, like the Vietnam War, we tend to get short histories of the sort you can read free on Wikipedia. You can also tell that he chooses to walk a fine line. He is in awe of Reagan’s leadership and personal character, but he is less enamored with Nancy Reagan, who he portrays as “The Queen of Hearts”. On the other hand, even when he gets into sensitive areas, like Nancy Reagan’s behavior, he manages to do so in a way that is mildly gossipy, yet offers little in the way of new revelations.
Reed is also Republican to the core, so his bias is obvious. In the first chapter, for example, he gives a history of the death and misery inflicted by Communist rulers. It was a tragic chronicle but the numbers of deaths that he asserts were caused by Communism are so large as to seem incredulous. He asserts, for example, that Stalin killed over twenty million Russians and more than thirty million Chinese died in Mao Tse-tung’s Cultural Revolution. Unlike others, like Barbara Tuchman, he thinks our bombing of North Vietnam actually was quite effective.
The book’s title is a bit misleading. I imagine his publisher demanded a florid title to ensure brisk sales. He was never at the abyss, unless that means being fifty miles from a planned thermonuclear explosion. He was not starring down the Russians in the seas off Cuba in 1963. He does however provide plenty of insight and personal experience in significant aspects of the Cold War. This makes his book worthy of the read, in spite of its abject partisanship. For Reed is as much a patriotic American as he is a Republican. He comes across as one of the more eloquent and grounded people in the Republican Party, more of the Barry Goldwater mindset than the Newt Gingrich variety. Books like his are invaluable for historians and scholars. We should be grateful Mr. Reed took the time in the autumn of his life to capture it for us.
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May 9th, 2007 at 11:42pm
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Mark |
Politics 2007 |
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While I was driving home from church today, I was listening to a rebroadcast of NBC’s Meet the Press on CSPAN Radio. NBC reporter Tim Russert was interviewing Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The topic, of course, was our War in Iraq and President Bush’s controversial strategy to add tens of thousands more American troops in Baghdad.
Senator Graham was strictly towing the party line. Of course, he thought President Bush’s strategy deserved a chance to succeed. He decried Congress for trying to micromanage the war. He kept reiterating the same points. If we leave Iraq now there will be a bloodbath. The Middle East will explode into a regional conflict. Al Qaeda will have a new base for the training and recruitment of terrorists. He also said Iraq would become a puppet regime for Iran, Turkey would invade Kurdistan and neighboring Sunni states would support the Sunnis cause in Iraq’s civil war. He implied that all this would lead to the same paranoid conclusion shared by President Bush and many on Capitol Hill: the terrorists would follow us home. They assert that failure to confront the terrorists today in Iraq could then mean goodbye United States of America and hello Islamic Republic of America. Goodbye internets, hello burkas.
Senator Graham needs a reality check. No one knows for sure what would happen if America precipitously withdrew from Iraq. I will grant you that a couple scenarios are more likely than not. If we withdrew, I think you could count on more Sunni vs. Shiite violence in the short term, although arguably there is plenty enough of it going on right now. The de facto partitioning of Iraq, already well underway, would accelerate dramatically. Many of the other scenarios he posed sound dubious at best. I would call some of them ludicrous and ultra paranoid.
With much of Iraq in turmoil and ungovernable, I doubt the Iranian army would want to join in the fray. I also doubt that if a Shiite state emerges from the civil war that it will want to be at any other nation’s beck and call. Iraqi Shiites have lusted for a nation of their own for too long. At best, their army could only partially protect the Shiites. In any event, there are many Shiites in Iraq and armed militias like the Mahdi Army have proven they can fight effectively. Like the United States, Iran has a finite number of soldiers available for messy occupations, and occupying a large part of Iraq would be a tall order. In addition, Iranians are Persians, and Shiite Iraqis are Arabs. Iraqi Shiites speak Arabic and Iranians speak Farsi. This introduces both language and ethnic differences. They may all seem like towel heads to us outsiders, but it is very unlikely that Shiite Iraq could ever successfully work as a client state of Iran. Iran and Iraqi Shiites have religion in common and not a whole lot else. In fact, there is likely quite a bit of animosity that still lingers. Twenty-five years ago, Iran and Iraq were engaged in a bloody war that killed at least 875,000 people.
Turkey could invade Kurdistan, but it would come at a great cost. First, they desperately want to become part of the European Union. Invading another country is not a great way to go about it, particularly since the invasion would be unprovoked. Second, the Kurds are hardly helpless. While the rest of Iraq has descended into anarchy, they have used their relative tranquility to increase their armed forces and readiness; an invasion would hardly be a cakewalk. If Turkey did try to occupy Kurdistan, it would probably devolve into a bloody occupation like the one we are seeing in Iraq. Third, even if American forces did leave Iraq, most likely they would relocate to Kurdistan anyhow. It makes a convenient base to keep track on elements of al Qaeda in Iraq, check Iran’s influence, and dissuade Turkey from invading. At least initially, the Kurds would welcome our presence as a stabilizing influence. In short it is hardly a given that our withdrawal would cause the whole region to explode into conflict.
Why do Senator Graham’s warnings sound so familiar? Tim Russert nailed it: this line of thought is peculiarly reminiscent of the Domino Theory so popular and proven so incredibly wrong that existed during the Cold War. The theory was that if we did not check communism in South Vietnam, it would creep all over South Asia. President Lyndon Johnson himself figured we might have to surrender the Pacific Ocean to the forces of communism if we failed to contain it in Vietnam.
Then as now, we got it mostly wrong. At least that is the opinion of the noted late historian Barbara Tuchman. I am in the final part of her book, The March of Folly (1984). It concludes with a long hard look at the waste of time, lives and resources trying to keep South Vietnam from falling to the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army. It is painful reading, and not just because tens of thousands of Americans needlessly lost their lives there. It is also painful because here we are forty years later and we are repeating the same stupid mistakes. Ironically, the people who put us in Iraq were the very same people who harbored so much resentment that we let Vietnam fall in the first place. Iraq became their ideological battlefield that would prove we could do a Vietnam situation again, only do it right this time.
Of course, many on the right will say that Iraq is not Vietnam. In some respects of course they are right. However, you do not have to get too far into this part of Tuchman’s book to realize that when it came to how the war was executed many of the same strategies were used. These included candid intelligence assessments that were ignored by politicians and trumped up incidents used to justify unilateral escalation of the conflict. Both conflicts also had numerous attempts by the U.N. to keep the solve the conflict before armed force was used, and in both cases we found we would rather fight and prove our manliness than use diplomacy. In both conflicts there was amply warning that we would be entering a Pandora’s Box, yet we let our fears and hubris dictate our actions. In both conflicts, we studiously chose to ignore the history of the region, assumed the best case and supported anemic and corrupt leaders on the assumption that it was better to support the devil you know.
In Vietnam, for example, Tuchman notes that China gave weak support to the Communist North Vietnamese government and the Vietcong. This was because historically the Vietnamese and the Chinese have not gotten along. The USSR’s support of North Vietnam was far more in the moral support area than in advisers and money. Vietnam was just one of many areas of influence around the world that interested them. (One of them was Iran, which led to our engagement in Iraq and providing Saddam Hussein with intelligence and munitions.) Moreover, communism in Vietnam was a logical response to the times. As Tuchman makes clear, France’s interest when Vietnam was its colony was simply to exploit its people and devour its natural resources. The French ruthlessly suppressed any dissent. Little thought was given to bridging the cultural differences between the western and eastern culture. Communism in Vietnam was a generally recognized pragmatic means by the residents of Vietnam to bring about their fondest goal: genuine Vietnamese nationalism and sovereignty.
The result of our hasty exit from Vietnam in 1975 was a united country that had been artificially split in two. The communist menace hardly leached across South Asia. It ended with Laos and Cambodia, and all our massive secret bombings failed to bring stem it. Today Vietnam, like China, is more communist in name than in ideology. Thirty years later, we have diplomatic relations with Vietnam. Cambodia is no longer communist. Laos remains a socialist state with a communist underpinning, yet remnants of the Hmong still wage occasional insurgent strikes to try to end the socialist state.
To me the lesson of Vietnam means we that should now exercise some perspective. Most likely, our worst fears are a result of our own paranoid delirium. For them to be realized depends on many really improbable ifs being executed. It allows for no possibility that other natural events and forces in the region might counteract these forces. It assumes, for example, that groups like al Qaeda can wield more power and influence than historic ethnic forces. Moreover, it assumes that by using our own force there that we can truly achieve our aims. One thing we should have learned to date from this conflict is that our presence (and in particular our use of armed forces) exacerbates the situation and provides much of the animus to keep the conflict going.
What is needed now is exactly what we should have done before we invaded Iraq: a cold, clinical and dispassionate assessment of the likelihood that our imagined risks will play out, as well as a comprehensive understanding of the historical forces at play in the region. Yes, I think further bloodshed is likely if we leave Iraq. I doubt strongly though that the terrorists will follow us home. As I mentioned in another entry we were the domino that fell on 9/11. We acted predictably and precisely the way that al Qaeda wanted us to act to effect a one time aim: inflame the Muslim world when we retaliated. At its heart, the violence underway today in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East is the result of the same thing that drove the conflict in Vietnam: the desire of a people to direct their societies consistent with their own culture and values. Instead, the Arab world is rife with oppression, hopelessness and poverty. “Moderate” states that we support like Egypt are actually secular states where human rights exist on paper, but not in practice. Al Qaeda is a sad example of the effects that extreme oppression can cause over many decades. Al Qaeda though is just one force at work. There are many others. They are already moving their chess pieces. The movement will continue whether we stay or go. It is folly to think that we can contain or redirect the energy of these forces. They must be expressed and they will be expressed whether we wish it or not.
Just as the USSR eventually collapsed under its own bloated weight, so must these oppressive Arab regimes. It is this oppression and not our occupation that is causing the kettle to boil. Our presence simply stirs the cauldron. I am convinced though that although the path to resolution of these feelings in the Middle East may be bloody and messy, it will be resolved most quickly and with the most finality when we come to our senses and allow these natural forces to play out.
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March 4th, 2007 at 08:57pm
Posted by
Mark |
Politics 2007 |
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