WASHINGTON REPORT: Mystiques And Mystagogues

...In explaining the veto to the nation, Carter said, for example, that a more rational and efficacious defense system could be built, distributed and maintained by spending the money ea.rmarked for .the supercarrier on other things, implicitly on a larger number of smaller naval vessels, explicitly on strengthening .the NATO forces under the command of A1 Haig, the loyalest loyalist of the Old Nixonians and one of the all-time great military-political climbers and survivors...

...Heavy military expenditu,re ranks right up there with Mom's apple pie and The Star-Spangled Banner and i.s better than both because it costs so much money, much of which somehow always ends up spent in the states or districts of strategically placed senators and representatives...

...The truth is that ever since the end of World War II--a couple of years later, actually--the principal value of the American defense establishment has been symbolic and mystical, not ,rational or efficacious...

...In performing those duties, Haig's high point in ptrblic was his pronouncement that the famed eighteen-and-a-half minute gap in the tape had been caused by "sinister forces...

...Basically, infantrymen don't go in for mysticism because they actually do the fighting...

...Kissinger...

...The great thing about the supercarrier is that it is great...

...It is interesting that ground warfare at present has no equivalent at all of the mystical carrier for the Navy, the mystical bomber for the Air Force...

...The first thing to be said about that is obviously that if you think the American defense system is supposed to be either rational or efficacious, you just don't understand what it is you are Commander-in-Chief of...

...actually, they ~were lost because they were mistakes...

...So .there it was steaming up and down the coast performing its mystical functions for naval and other military personnel in the area but especially for the hierarch and his mystagogue in the White House...

...For our purposes here, however, it is clear that Nixon and Kissinger were dealing with pu.rely mystical values having only a symbolic relationship to the actual conduct of war...

...It will be recalled that later, when the mystagogue w)ent to work for another, decidedly non-mystical President, Ford, he persuaded him into another celebration of naval mysticism in the ill-fated Mayaguez affair...

...Once the discussion is shifted onto its proper plane, it becomes quite clear that the admirals are righ.t, the President wrong...

...As the slaughter, looting and rape mounted, the neighboring Indians went to the assistance of Bangladesh, put an end .to the attempted genocide and eventually helped establish an independent state in what had been the east part of Pakistan...

...The defense establishment in those years has actually been used to fight two wars 15 September 1978:580 against small nations offering no rationally perceptible threat to this country, namely Korea and Vietnam...

...The political interpretation of this act of courage was commonly that Carter needed a veto to show he could stand up to Congress...

...Always have been, always will be...

...this is the very same thing that is great about the great bomber, the B-1...

...The West Pakistanis fell upon the East Pakistanis, or .the Bangladesh people in what was evidently an attempt to wipe them out, making all Pakistan the exclusive property of t.he West Paks...

...Despite his own formal naval education and his friendship with and admiration for the father of the nuclear Navy, Admiral Rickover, Carter in that veto and in his attack on the proposed new supercarrier showed almost no understanding of the real purposes of our armed forces in general, of the Navy in particular, and of the aircraft carrier especially...

...This is easily demonstrated...

...FRANK GETLEIN Conmzonweal...

...In the middle oLthis essay in nostalgia---quite possibly derived ultimately from Nixon's acknowledged pas?sion for the television show, "Victory at Sea"---~war ~broke out in the Indian subcontinent...

...Pakistan~ of course, was an ally of this country and widely regarded as more reliable, both mi!itarily and ideologically, than India, which showed discomforting signs of wishing to decide for itself who its enemies are and what should be done about them...

...The wars were mistakes not just because they were lost...

...581...

...For purely mystical reasons Kissinger and his master, Nixon, had sent a full-fledged, rip-roaring, old-timey battleship to the waters off Indochina...

...A more sharply focused demonstration of the symbolic nature of Naval vessels took place during the war against Indochina in a kind of side show essentially unrelated to the main attraction but linked both mystically and through the conscious manipulation of the leading arms and intelligence mystagogue of the day, Dr...

...It's like trying to herd sheep with a crozier...

...Since .the principal duty of any NATO commander has to he the discernment of sinister forces and invoking against them the mystical powers of the United States Treasury, Haig was a natural for the job...

...Thatdispatch involved taking the battleship out of "mothballs," that is out of dead storage, where it had been for many years because considerations of rationality and efficacy taught 'Naval phlilosophers that the battleship would never again have the practical wartime importance it once did...

...Certainly if rationality or efficacious'ness 'had anything to do with our men and maChines of war, they could have won both...

...The tank never really did it, although perhaps, for s0me~Patton comes to mind--it had a modicum of mysticism in World War H. In that war, too,: some dedicated public-relations general tried to invest the humble M-1 rifle wtih mysticism, composing a kind of prayer to the rifle, but it never caught on...

...Carter's fatal flaw, then, in dealing with the military is the effort to be rational and efficacious when he is basically confronted with a philosophical, even aesthetic, field of knowledge...

...Anyway, in the midst of all this, the hierarch and his mystagogue, after issuing vague warnings and vowing to "tilt" in favor of genocide, dispatched the golden oldie from the Indochinese waters to those of India and Bangladesh, where it was directed again to cruise up and down, presumably in the belief that its mere presence would cause the Indians to ,retire and leave the Bangladesh people once more at the mercy of their atta.ckers, the Pakistani...

...At a: guess, the theory was that the battleship would emit:rays of American puissance dismaying to the Indians...

...A nuclear aircraft carrier is marvelous for the morale of gold-braided people and that's as close as the question comes to any remotely practical consideration of war...

...The defense establishment nevertheless managed to lose both wars...

...He was aces at seeing sinister forces and warning against them and that's what NATO and, for .that matter, the rest of the American defense establishment, needs a lot more than it needs someone who actually knows how to command armies and navies...

...WASHINGTON REPORT MYSTIQUES AND MYSTAGOGUES There were a lot of old salts around town you could have knocked over with a belaying pin when President Carter not only vetoed the military procurement budget but did so specifica}Iy in order to evade the budget's decree that yet another nuclear powered aircraft .carrier be built...

...Haig, .it will be recalled, fearlessly took over the management of Nixon's defenses against the Republic when Kissinger prudently retired to the higher ground of statesmanlikeness...

...They were mistakes because they used highly symbolic, even mystical, organizations for extremely practical purposes and that rarely works...

...It is no accident that Kissinger's head acolyte, the unspeakable Haig, is the chief mystagogue of NATO and in that position is lobbying for more numerous and more puissant (and expensive) symbols with which to perform his ceremonies against all evil...

...His extremely limited and low level experience in the actual conduct of war-,with guns and casualties and all that--was irrelevant...

...If he did, the military veto was a good one, since ever-growing military budgets are both gospel and food and drink to a clear, permanent and bipartisan majority of 'both houses...