The Next War ........... By Daniel Ellsberg

[RedEarth]

The Next War
Posted on Thursday, October 19, 2006. Originally from Harper's Magazine, October 2006. By Daniel Ellsberg.
SourcesA hidden crisis is under way. Many government insiders are aware of serious plans for war with Iran, but Congress and the public remain largely in the dark. The current situation is very like that of 1964, the year preceding our overt, open-ended escalation of the Vietnam War, and 2002, the year leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

In both cases, if one or more conscientious insiders had closed the information gap with unauthorized disclosures to the public, a disastrous war might have been averted entirely.

My own failure to act, in time, to that effect in 1964 was pointed out to me by Wayne Morse thirty-five years ago. Morse had been one of only two U.S. senators to vote against the Tonkin Gulf resolution on August 7, 1964. He had believed, correctly, that President Lyndon Johnson would treat the resolution as a congressional declaration of war. His colleagues, however, accepted White House assurances that the president sought “no wider war” and had no intention of expanding hostilities without further consulting them. They believed that they were simply expressing bipartisan support for U.S. air attacks on North Vietnam three days earlier, which the president and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had told them were in “retaliation” for the “unequivocal,” “unprovoked” attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on U.S. destroyers “on routine patrol” in “international waters.”

Each of the assurances above had been false, a conscious lie. That they were lies, though, had only been revealed to the public seven years later with the publication of the Pentagon Papers, several thousand pages of top-secret documents on U.S. decision-making in Vietnam that I had released to the press. The very first installment, published by the New York Times on June 13, 1971, had proven the official account of the Tonkin Gulf episode to be a deliberate deception.

When we met in September, Morse had just heard me mention to an audience that all of that evidence of fraud had been in my own Pentagon safe at the time of the Tonkin Gulf vote. (By coincidence, I had started work as a special assistant to an assistant secretary of defense the day of the alleged attack—which had not, in fact, occurred at all.) After my talk, Morse, who had been a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1964, said to me, “If you had given those documents to me at the time, the Tonkin Gulf resolution would never have gotten out of committee. And if it had somehow been brought up on the floor of the Senate for a vote, it would never have passed.”

http://harpers.org/TheNextWar.html

[nashville_brook]

1. ack! i've been waiting for this to be posted!

thanks!

[whistle]

2. Daniel Ellsberg's plea is for someone, anyone in government

...with insider information to become a "U.S. suicide bomber". That is not likely to happen and I think Ellsberg knows that.

<snip>
The personal risks of doing this are very great. Yet they are not as great as the risks of bodies and lives we are asking daily of over 130,000 young Americans—with many yet to join them—in an unjust war. Our country has urgent need for comparable courage, moral and civil courage, from its public servants. They owe us the truth before the next war begins.

[bobbie]

6. Suicide would pretty much apply

'Cause opposing the war machine will make someone dead.

That's exactly what happened to JFK, RFK, MLK...

But I suspect Ellsberg knows that. He's no fool. He spent some time on Nixon's enemys list, and he understood what that meant. Luckily Watergate came along and saved his hide.

[lyonn]

3. Ellsberg know of what he speaks!

Just read the article and he is pleading for someone to put their career on the line to stop a "Gulf of Tonkin" reason for going to war with Iran! No one stopped Iraq from happening even tho way too many intel knew it bs that Iraq was connected to Al Queda, Saddam didn't have WMD's .....

Now we have a group of ships following a newly overhauled Carrier to the Gulf, due to arrive Oct. 28th. I know, it is just routine maneuvers, right? The only people that are fearful are people on this site and a few other bloggers who repeat Sy Hearsh's stories about what some intel people are telling him concerning the activities on the Gulf and the administrations quest to attack Iran. The masses think Korea is important at the moment and Condi is keeping that story going!

Sy Hearsh mentions the possibility of another gulf of tonkin type adventure in the gulf. The big boys have all kinds of clever ideas about how to make it look like Iran attacked one of our ships, etc. and then Let the Games Begin.

[teryang]

4. Excellent commentary -resistance lies in wait for failure

No one will go public until the failure of the belligerent campaigns is fully apparent.

I like the point about the soldier on the ground risking his life and limb in an unwanted war while bureaucrats won't consider jeopardizing their career prospects to prevent hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths.

[BlueEyedSon]

5. F*cking Brilliant

BTW, since these guys surround themselves will equally greedy, callous and co-opted lackeys, I don't expect anyone to come forward.

More from Ellsberg

In both cases (Vietnam and Iraq), the president and his top Cabinet officers consciously deceived Congress and the public about a supposed short-run threat in order to justify and win support for carrying out preexisting offensive plans against a country that was not a near-term danger to the United States. In both cases, the deception was essential to the political feasibility of the program precisely because expert opinion inside the government foresaw costs, dangers, and low prospects of success that would have doomed the project politically if there had been truly informed public discussion beforehand. And in both cases, that necessary deception could not have succeeded without the obedient silence of hundreds of insiders who knew full well both the deception and the folly of acting upon it.

[bobbie]

7. Wow this is a helluva good article

Thank you for posting it RedEarth.