U.S. Interventionism

...The momentum generated by prior commitments, however, fails to explain how involvement got rolling in the first place...

...the Navy proposed a "quarantine" of the harbor at Haiphong, and the Army, a large-scale "search-and-destroy" operation in the South...

...Barnet offers a trenchant critique of their policy premises that they might do well to read...

...In a theme resonant with Galbraith's analysis of the market behavior of private bureaucracies, Mr...

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...In Vietnam," Barnet writes, "the US intervention steadily deepened in the 1950's as US officials tried to protect earlier investments...

...Predictably, Defense won the fight over military strategy for Vietnam, and the fact that none of the nationalsecurity bureaucracies had a vested interest in peace is hardly a reassuring thought...

...He never quite distinguishes between the cause of initial decisions to intervene and what accounts for increased commitments of resources once intervention is under way...

...Analysis of bureaucracy provides considerable insight into the reasons for America's most recent policy failure...

...More than that, violence contradicts the Managers' "urge to achieve stability and control over the world environment...

...IF THE VESTED interests of the bureaucracy account for gradual escalation, the value preferences of bureaucrats are crucial for understanding the decision to intervene and the "quantum jumps" in the scale of involvement that followed...

...For instance, to consider the July 1965 decision dispatching 100,000 troops to Vietnam as the product of bureaucratic momentum in the same sense as was the November 1963 decision broadening BOOKS Ike's commitment to the Diem regime to include all succeeding Saigon governments is to ignore the distinctiveness of the later decision...

...Barnet's central thesis...

...In Intervention and Revolution Richard Barnet eschews the analyses and prescriptions of both groups and seeks to explain America's policy predilections in terms of the values and interests of the national security bureaucracy and to offer arguments for an alternative set of values...

...Barnet discerns in American policy a consistent pattern of unilateral interventionism to suppress insurgent movements around the world...

...RADICAL CRITICS of American foreign policy often look to America's socio-economic structure for the source of recent foreign policy failures, while reformist critics blame the decision-making structure...

...The critics' prescriptions range from altering the pattern of ownership of the means of production to giving Congress more authority to make policy...

...Perhaps revolution in some places will mean repression and starvation...

...Contrasting the Weltanschauung of the Revolutionary with that of the NationalSecurity Manager, Mr...

...This may have been due to the tendency of officials to push those policies their organizations were accustomed to executing rather than those policies the war demanded...

...and third, that these movements tend to be violent, and that violence is per se undesirable...

...To define the war as insurgency rather than as aggression from the North would have implied rejection of these three conventional-war strategies...

...Barnet, moreover, characterizes the Vietnam intervention as "a series of quantum jumps...

...He proceeds from a detailed examination of four postwar interventions (Greece, Lebanon, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam), plus brief glimpses at others (Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, British Guiana, the Congo), to the conclusion that a "bureaucratic imperialism," not economic imperia1...

...A rambling presentation and little relationship between cases and analysis often obscures the brilliance of Mr...

...It has the money and power at its disposal todevelop within very broad limits its own conception of the national interest...

...His is a radical critique aimed at "the hearts and minds" of reformers...

...Although logistical preparations for a largescale build-up had been set in motion in February 1965, the July decision constituted a major shift in the course of American policy, and the disunity of the President's advisers and subsequent resignations indicate that Washington regarded the change as significant...

...second, that insurgent movements are fomented and/or supported by "international communism" and thus are antagonistic to America's "national interest...

...These investments included not only the vast sums of prior years but also their personal reputations...

...But these are judgments which US officials sitting in Washington have neither the capacity nor the right to make for others...

...He writes, If, as the National-Security Managers see it, the inevitable involvement of international communism is the key factor that makes US intervention against revolutions ultimately necessary for national survival, the use of violenceby the insurgents is the key factor that makes it legally justifiable and morally right...

...The Vietnam case study is illuminating...

...Perhaps revolution in the end will turn out to be worse than starvation bred of economic and social stagnation...

...As time passed, for instance, Washington's policies became more and more remote from Vietnam's realities...

...American intervention abroad usually entails the takeover of some functions of foreign governments by American bureaucrats...

...hence the theory of aggression was bolstered...

...Mr...

...Barnet argues that this urge is "probably inherent in the hierarchical character of the foreign-policy bureaucracy...

...INTERVENTION AND REVOLUTION: AMERICA'S CONFRONTATION WITH INSURGENT MOVEMENTS AROUND THE WORLD, by Richard J. Barnet...

...Reviewing the ideology of the NationalSecurity Managers, Mr...

...New York: New American Library (World Publishers...

...Furthermore, what made peace talks all the more improbable the next February was that the State Department, which might have been expected to favor negotiations by virtue of its institutional role, instead housed advocates of a counterinsurgency strategy...

...He concludes that "from the standpoint of a President of the United States thinking about reelection, concerned with solving domestic problems and assuring himself a decent place in history, unilateralism is proving to be a disastrous policy...

...Sunk costs, both institutional and personal, may propel bureaucracies into spending still more in order to justify the initial outlays...

...For officials who consider a "can-do" mentality and acceptance of novel gimmickry a valid response to the complexity of the social environment, a message of skepticism emerges from Intervention and Revolution: It is not only that the national-security bureauc racy lacks the power to make revolutionary developments around the world conform to an American model, although this is true, but that it lacks the wisdom to play God to other societies...

...Since the overseas bureaucracy totals some twoto four million individuals, it constitutes in itself an impressive group with a vested interest in keeping the mechanics of foreign relations much as they are...

...He evaluates unilateral interventionism not only from a "world order" perspective, but also from the more restricted outlook of the "national security" espoused by the Managers themselves...

...The Defense Department was divided along predictable lines: the Air Force advocated precision bombing of the "Ho Chi Minh Trail...

...This new role has its reward for officials and its consequences for policy pressures: Many Americans have found an outlet for social and political experimentation on newfrontiers abroad that is denied them at home...

...ism, fuels America's drive in the world arena: Classic theories of economic imperialism, whichview the state as an agent of the most powerful domestic economic interests, underestimate the independent role of the national-securitybureaucracy, which in the United States hastaken on a life and movement of its own...

...Unfortunately, he fails to elaborate this point...

...The discreteness that "quantum jumps" implies might suggest the inappropriateness of the "bureaucratic momentum" metaphor as an explanation of some decisions leading to deeper immersion in the quagmire...

...During the summer of 1964 various policy alternatives percolated up through bureaucratic channels...

...Barnet cites essential premises that underlie the latter's predisposition to intervene: first, that America has a responsibility to police the world...