Our Creeping Commitments

...Pure deception" kept the American people from knowing about the financial arrangements entered into with this country's Asian "allies...

...The Symington inquiry paved the way, too, for the revealing hearings on U.S...

...It was the Symington Subcommittee that disclosed how the United States had bribed its "allies" in the Philippine Republic, South Korea, and Thailand to dispatch armed forces to South Vietnam...

...Basic institutions are being challenged both at home and abroad...

...Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad, report of the Symington Subcommittee mire, Wisconsin Democrat...

...The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing As the final report noted, the inquiry developed "much information . . . unknown to members of Congress at the time they, through various pieces of legislation, were, in effect, supporting these programs...

...American troops and arms— including an unknown number of nuclear weapons—have been dispatched to some 375 major U.S...

...Their reports served as the basis for thirty-seven days of hearings which have been published in transcripts running to more than 2,500 pages—transcripts which were, unfortunately, heavily "sanitized" at the insistence of State Department and Pentagon censors...

...By the very nature of these activities, the United States has become closely identified with the existing governments, and oftentimes its materials are used to suppress insurgents whether or not they are Coinmunist...

...Should the Soviet Union or Communist China ever seek parity with the United States in the overseas deployment of tactical nuclear weapons, the report warns, "we could face an international crisis comparable to that of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962...

...The United States went to the brink of nuclear war when faced with the possibility that the Soviet Union was placing missiles in a country ninety miles from the United States...

...See editorial, "War Is Peace" on Page 9 of this issue...

...tactical nuclear warheads have been and are stationed in countries all around the world, a pattern of deployment which results in arousing deep concern in both the Soviet Union and Communist China...

...Initially, the Subcommittee found, many of America's "creeping commitments were swaddled in secrecy at the request of foreign governments, which wanted to keep their own subjects in the dark...

...Today the United States is at an important crossroads in its history," the Symington Subcommittee declared...

...In Spain, the Subcommittee found, joint military exercises were carried out "to help meet a hypothetical insurgency" against the Franco regime...

...Stone has observed, the Symington Subcommittee's report would have fallen into better focus if it had begun "by saying plainly that the United States since World War II has become the biggest empire the world has ever known...

...If the Congress had fulfilled its constitutional obligations then, the United States and the world might have been spared the unspeakable agony of Vietnam...

...With reference to the deployment of American nuclear weapons abroad, the report notes that "the Executive branch refused to cooperate with the Subcommittee in its continuing attempt to have the matter examined in depth...

...A great deal more of the information now made public through these hearings was unknown to either legislators or voters who, directly or indirectly, have been passing judgment on policies which not only involved their tax dollars, but also the lives of their sons...

...Senator Proxmire, Senator Symington, Foreign Relations Chairman J. W. Fulbright, who served with distinction on the Symington Subcommittee, and a few others, can be expected to continue their close scrutiny of the military apparatus in the new Congress...

...The nation's wealth and, if need be, the lifeblood of its young men have been pledged to no less than forty-three foreign governments, many of them among the world's most corrupt and dictatorial regimes...

...On this, at least, we can all agree...

...Notwithstanding the general authority which is contained in treaties and in Congressionally authorized programs, no U.S...

...It is not surprising that Senator Symington, himself a former Secretary of the Air Force and a member of the elite, stopped short of drawing such blunt conclusions...

...United States military assistance programs, which began as efforts to bolster countries on or near the periphery of what was then the Sino-Soviet bloc, have changed substantially in their approach," the report notes...

...It is," says the Symington Subcommittee, "one of the worst offenses a supposedly free and democratic government can commit against its own people, because it tends to destroy the trust which is an indispensable element of self-government...

...National Security' Blanket Nonetheless, the report clearly implies that nuclear arms are widely deployed, and under circumstances that could lead to catastrophic consequences...

...The Subcommittee's chief recommendation is that the Congress "take a realistic look at the authority of the President to station troops abroad and establish bases in foreign countries...

...More recently, however, the process has been reversed...

...The Symington Subcommittee discovered that while Washington was making public overtures for better relations with Communist China, U.S...

...Given the attitude of the Executive branch as developed during our inquiry, it is difficult to deal with the question responsibly in this report...

...more has been known abroad than at home about the understandings entered into by the United States...

...What is urgently needed, however, is a permanent Congressional mechanism to carry on the work begun by the Symington Subcommittee...

...Confronted with a military-foreign policy oligarchy that has shown itself able and willing to resort to deception as well as secrecy, Congress must equip itself with the strongest possible means of fostering open discussion and debate —a fiercely independent committee and a competent staff to keep the nation's overseas commitments under continuing, public scrutiny...

...Released a few days before Christmas, the twenty-eight page report constitutes a damning indictment of the process by which the United States has "assumed, almost inadvertently and without notice, a role that has been described as the policeman of the free world...

...Confronted with the Ethiopian build-up, Somalia sought military aid from the United States, was refused, and turned to the Soviet Union...

...The elite that engineers America's foreign adventures is apparently convinced that if the people knew the facts, the nation's policies and practices would be radically changed...

...Even before the Subcommittee had issued its final report, the Senate took some first steps toward implementing this recommendation...

...the Soviet Union, the other...

...Confirming and expanding the Symington findings, Proxmire elicited the information that the actual outlay for foreign military assistance in the last fiscal year was about $4.8 billion—eight times the amount formally specified in the President's budget—and that some of it is disguised under such innocuous headings as "Food for Peace...

...It would have helped, too, if the Subcommittee had Comm itments made explicit the major conclusion implicit in its findings: that the conduct of American foreign and military policy is controlled entirely by a self-perpetuating elite whose members have no intention of entrusting the people of this democracy with the facts, let alone the power to affect decisions...

...military aid programs conducted in January by Senator William Prox'Absurd, Unconstitutional' Most people here are unaware of the fact that U.S...

...Thus our policies, by proxy, have set up a miniature cold war situation in the eastern portion of Africa...

...The Subcommittee believes this position is obviously absurd, is used to cover up questionable policy and practice, is unconstitutional, and is against the best interests of the United States...

...Our Creeping Commitments by a process of stealth and deliber-ate deception, the Government of the United States has, over the past two and a half decades, committed the American people to an incredibly tangled network of military alliances around the world...

...The Subcommittee uncovered the fact that American bombing missions in Laos were directed against Pathet Lao insurgents in the North, though Senate leaders had been assured that raids were directed at the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the South to cut off supplies to Vietnam...

...The Subcommittee's two able staff investigators, attorney Roland Paul and journalist Walter Pincus, traveled to twenty-three countries for on-the-scene investigation of American commitments and installations...

...The groundwork has been laid not only for the war that continues to exact its daily toll in Southeast Asia, but for new Vietnams that could erupt at any time on any continent...

...and Nationalist Chinese special forces were conducting joint exercises designed to rehearse a "return to the mainland" by Chiang Kai-shek...

...In a classic case study, the report tells how the United States agreed to build up the Ethiopian army to a level of 40,000 men, at a time when that country's chief threat—neighboring Somalia—had an army of 2,000...

...Nonetheless, his Subcommittee's two-year study produced an immensely valuable mass of information, and one that has already begun to have a profound impact on the Senate's attitude toward its responsibilities...

...The Executive branch claimed that this subject is of such high classification it could not be discussed before this Foreign Relations Subcommittee under any circumstances...

...We must assume that the Soviets, as they view our placement of tactical nuclear weapons in countries far closer to their border than Cuba is to ours, will seek to break out of the nuclear ring that has been drawn around them...

...In two very significant areas, the Symington Subcommittee's report falls considerably short of total candor...

...They are now more often used to bolster governments which face insurgencies of one sort or another...

...military bases in foreign countries and 3,000 lesser military facilities...

...Accordingly," the report points out, "as of today the United States is supporting one country...

...In their overseas travels, investigators Paul and Pincus found that even American ambassadors claimed to have no knowledge of whether nuclear weapons were stationed in their countries...

...A dramatic, if only partially complete, accounting of these "creeping commitments" has been rendered in the final report of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's special Subcommittee on Security Arrangements and Commitments Abroad, which was headed by Senator Stuart Symington, Missouri Democrat...

...As I.F...

...Symington's disclosures deserve some of the credit for the repeal of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, the enactment of the Cooper-Church Amendment, and the protracted but eminently useful debate over Cambodia which tied up the Senate in the final days of the last session...

...If we are to sustain the strength of our democratic institutions, we meet these challenges with open discussion and debate—the tools of democracy—rather than with administrative secrecy and a closed decision-making process, the weapons of oligarchy...

...In its twenty-two months of work, the Subcommittee uncovered facts that should have been made known to Congress—and to the American people, more than a decade ago...

...forces should be stationed abroad or bases established abroad without specific prior authority of the Congress in each case...