Is Washington Reading The RIGHT Books?

Well, it’s official. What we are blowing off in the Gulf is now the biggest oil spill in American history. We see it beginning to clog up the fisheries and wild life preserves along the Louisiana coast, it is threatening to take a ride on the Gulf Stream and wreck a few beaches on the Atlantic side. Nobody seems to have a handle on how to stop it.
Obama has just ordered a halt to all deep sea drilling—and without it our dependence on our Arab friends (in places terrorists come from) is increasingly total. It would be like finding, in the throes of World War II, that we were dependent on the Axis for our ammunition.
Oh, goodness gracious, would we work to find a substitute! (We got caught in such a bind during the Civil War when none-too-friendly England was in a position to cut off our munitions and threatened to do so. The South would have won instantly.)
You would think being at the mercy of a few mercurial Arab states would inspire us to start serious work at finding a substitute for petroleum. (No! I don’t necessarily think building more windmills or growing more corn is going to do it. Got a windmill that will propel your car?)
I mean finding a substitute for petroleum itself. Something that burns in an eight cylinder engine just as effectively as gasoline. After all, the Germans came up with a recipe for synthetic oil during the Second World War. They had very little fuel.
So they came up with something that would fly an airplane engine that burned 100 octane gas with great efficiency. Where is that recipe? As I’ve written before, it was brought to Washington after the war—but never translated. I don’t think anyone in Washington even remembers that such a thing exists. Or perhaps “existED is the more apt word.
It seems our schools aren’t the only place where no one reads. They don’t seem to do a whole lot of it at the Pentagon, the White House or Congress. I’ve written before how, during Vietnam, no one in charge seemed to have ever read the official evaluation of strategic bombing during WWII. (If they had, they never would have imagined they could lick North Vietnam with bombs.)
They bombed—more tons that we dropped on Europe or Japan throughout the big war. They accomplished nothing beyond killing a few people. Nobody read the report on what bombing could actually accomplish—and what it could not do.
No one in the State Department ever read DeGaulle’s “Memoirs” after they were translated. If they had, they never would have been surprised—shocked, I mean, SHOCKED—when De Gaulle threw us and NATO out of Paris in the 1960s.
I hear about each president that he busies himself reading about what past presidents wrote and thought about life. Interesting and sometimes useful. But how much time do you think either Bush or Obama spent poring over intelligence reports on the backgrounds of people running the training camps in Yemen or Pakistan?
Has anybody got any kind of a fix on the nuclear armed, saber rattling North Koreans? I’d be reading intensely on what it would take for us to stop them if they pulled another 1950 on us. That time they pinned us into a tiny little corner of southeastern Korea.
Who’s reading up on the Chinese military? What are its real capabilities. What kind of weapon systems are they building? Stuff aimed at Tibet and the western wastes—or stuff that could carry them all the way to Hawaii. In how many years?
What’s our backup plan if we ever lost our bases in Britain? What do we plan to do if Canada splits into warring factions? Does it spill over into Vermont and New York? Do we live without the St. Lawrence Seaway? Whom do we back? What’s the price of neutrality?
Again, what can we use as an alternative to petroleum that can actually run my Buick or my wife’s Dodge Caravan? Those are the matters we should be reading about—and trying to figure out.
It’s not just Johnny who doesn’t read.

War and Myth XI

The world we remembered from before 1939 had just seemed so much safer and reliable. The French controlled those North African Berbers who used to send pirates after our ships. British ships kept Malay pirates at bay.
Africa and the Middle East gave no one any problems because various European Colonial Affairs offices kept things quiet there. Central Americans picked bananas peacefully and sent the receipts to either London or Washington. From Suez to Hanoi, the underbelly of Asia was safely in the reliable hands of people like the French, the British, the Dutch and even the Portuguese. No problems there to speak of.
We could and did make preachments about the evils of imperialism (ignoring our own) and watch breathlessly to see if the next hunger strike might really kill Gandhi (I’m old enough to recall his last one). But it was a quiet, safe neighborhood. You could walk down the street with minimal fear of getting mugged.
The planet got a lot rowdier when the imperialists went home. It was fashionable to say that we had somehow “lost” all those places—that the Communists were doing this all, with no serious help from the native populations, just to spite us.
Who lost China? Silly question. An indigenous group of Chinese Communists who allied themselves very momentarily with the Soviet Union won it. The strength of their appeal was that they were not seen to be allied with ANY of the former imperialist powers who had dabble in Chinese affairs and claimed zones of interest for over a century.
Memories of imperialism, memories of days when China stood alone as the technology giant whose goods were coveted all over the Asian, European, African land mass, unhappy memories of a weakened giant being bullied by half a dozen European powers all much smaller than she was—that’s what cost us China.
Throw into the mix the fact that China’s basically pro-Western “Democratic” government between 1911 and 1949 became hopelessly corrupt and ineffective and I can imagine no way we could possibly have hung on to China.
But the myth that we had lost it—that something illegitimate, something that didn’t really speak for China, had taken it away from us would haunt our policies for decades. We wouldn’t even recognize the fact that Mao’s government existed for over twenty years.
Experiences like we had in China, Indo-China (Vietnam/Cambodia /Laos), the southern Philippines, Cuba, Iran, Iraq (I’m talking the 1950s), or Egypt all worked to convince us that any revolutionary, anywhere—anyone who wanted economic, military or political independence for his nation was de facto a very bad person.
This assurance, rising out of the myth that we had lost all of these places, led to our belief that it was our mission to wage war against any uprising of any sort. This became a reflex. We were no longer capable of sitting down rationally and deciding: What are our true interests here? What’s best for the US in the long run?
(We came a horrible cropper in Vietnam when we failed to take into account that Ho Chi Minh LIKED America. He based his whole revolution on our Declaration of Independence. In any case, he hated China far more than he did us!
We had to bomb the living daylights out of him to make an enemy out of him. If we had played our hand more sanely, the worst that might have happened is that we would have had an Asian Tito to annoy and worry the Chinese. And no dead G.I.s.)
Myth is a dreadful thing to build a foreign policy on. Especially if you are trying to hold down the potentially bloodthirsty exuberance of a newly liberated planet.
A few more words on myth next.