ON POLITICAL BOOKS: Doves' Tales
Easterbrook, Gregg
Doves’ Tales Does American intervention a broad always involve cynical motives? by Gregg Easterbrook Did you believe The New York Times story that the Bush administration was maneuvering to...
...The 1989 invasion of Panama, for instance, continues to be one of our country’s dark hours...
...Saddam, he says, had “specific grievances” against Kuwait...
...MacArthur retreated in the early months not invaded Afghanistan, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, because North Korean troops were pressing him but and underwrote wars in Angola, Ethiopia, and Vietas a trick to create sympathy in Washington for the nam...
...the United Nations should have allowed him to resolve them in his own colorful way...
...In the standard The Ruses for War does a fine job of interpreting catch-22 arrangement, the White House refused to events in the light least favorable to Washington, but comment on what the breached information might rarely rebuts or even mentions opposing interpretahave been...
...ing Quigley’s master plan theory, is not analyzed...
...vealed national security information...
...Quigley makes World War I1 is not a pleasant thing to behold...
...Somehow this makes his attack on Kuwait okeydokey...
...Five weeks later, “President Bush launched a ground assault on Iraqi forces...
...He even finds outrage in the posting of Marines off Liberia during the rebellion against Samuel Doe, though the Marines were there only to help Americans escape, and ended up remaining aboard ship...
...authorizations for use of force...
...The the premise universal by asserting, for example, that United States has bombed, invaded, used force in, or the Korean War was entirely a cynical gimmick...
...forces not atOhio State University and author of Law After Revo- tempt to cross the Yalu before the Chinese attacked Zution and other books, argues that every American them, there is no evidence that President Truman use of force or proxy force in the postwar era has ever authorized a crossing-a fact that, not supportbeen venal...
...The northern army pursued invent a pretext to bomb Iraq during the Re- MacArthur only with contrition...
...Quigley is at his worst when analyzing the Gulf war...
...Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe gives the old USSR, overall, the less attractive record, but it is Atlantic, and The Washington Monthly...
...In The Ruses for War, action against Saddam was strictly an American vendetta...
...War II...
...If corporate plutocrats are inherently sinister, why did their puppet Bush support the democrat Aquino over the military that sought to replace her...
...Doves’ Tales Does American intervention a broad always involve cynical motives...
...But not only did U.S...
...What about the U.N...
...Maybe it was understandable that the Chinese If you presume that vulgar motives normally un- didn’t believe American assurances, diplomatic or derlie great affairs of state, The Ruses for War* is the military, that U.S...
...forces would never cross the Yalu book for you...
...In his closest approximation of an explanation, Quigley writes, “The United States has fashioned a set of interests for itself around the globe, largely stemming from commercial activity...
...We like to think that American troops always behave in a moral fashion, as they did during the Gulf war...
...What business interest did we have in Grenada...
...Saddam was merely trying to redress these grievances...
...Credibility Gulf In the end, after depicting American use of force as invariably corrupt and in service of secret ends, Quigley offers no explanation of the purpose of the conspiracy...
...In it, John Quigley, a law professor at River into China...
...side...
...In underwritten wars in Angola, Cambodia, the Congo, Quigley’s view, the Soviet Union had no interest in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, GrenaNorth Korea...
...Our companies are everywhere, buying and selling, making investments, digging mines, cultivating cash crops, and setting up assembly lines that employ cheap labor...
...Saddam’s buildup of forces on the border to Saudi Arabia was an innocent military training exercise unrelated to any craven thoughts...
...It’s distressingly easy to show crass American Quigley’s instinct for his book topic is a sound conduct in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, one, for a scorecard of American intervention since Laos, and Cambodia, to name a few...
...Unprepared for an publican National Convention...
...There were several cases of summary execution of Panamanians...
...In Panama they did not...
...so why should its right-wing royalist dictators have international protection...
...after all, it could have seized the whole da, Guatemala, Indonesia, kin, Iraq, Korea, Kuwait, Korean peninsula in 1945 if it had really wanted to...
...On January 16, 1991, “the [Bush] administration launched a blistering aerial attack against Iraq...
...The notion seemed so extended campaign in the South, [northern forces] absurdly transparent that it was tempting to accept needed a full week to regroulp after taking Seoul...
...This is the standard leftist explanation for American misbehavior, and because cases like Guatemala show that it contains an element of truth, the notion cannot be dismissed easily...
...Quigley has not a single negative comment to offer about Saddam’s human rights record, his dictatorship at home, or his atrocities against Kuwaiti, Kurdish, and Shiite civilians...
...forces dug mass graves...
...During the same period the Soviet Union South...
...To slant his case further, Quigley discards the international aspects of the Gulf war...
...White House assertions that the story was a fantasy...
...Tlhis lack of preparation for a sustained offensive Yet while complaining that the Times had hit below cast doubt on whether the northern army had initiated the belt by suggesting vulgar political motives in war, the fighting,” Quigley writes...
...A book that gives equal weight to the good and bad of American motives would, ultimately, make a stronger case against the bad than a one-sided work like The Ruses for War...
...Quigley notes that Kuwait was created by the British at the end of the Ottoman days and might very well be a natural province of Iraq...
...support for Israel...
...sions on which American idealism has been shunted Gregg Easterbrook is a contributing editor at Newsweek, The *The Ruses for War: American Interventionism Since World And QuigleY is right to be angry about the occasions on which American idealism has been shuntedaside...
...an unhappily close comparison...
...John Quigley...
...The strongest chapters of The Ruses for War demonstrate Quigley’s wrath about both Panama and the continuing silence of even Democrats about this shameful episode...
...forces dug mass graves to bury civilian casualties of the fighting around the Panamanian Defense Force headquarters building, concealing the bodies before they could be identified and counted...
...Our side razed damaged civilian houses to prevent them from being photographed...
...A better hypothesis is that the military policies of a flawed but generally idealistic country like the United States are driven by a variety of forces, some admirable, some less than admirable...
...Prometheus, $25.95...
...What about the British, the French, the Italians, the Pakistanis, and everybody else who sent aircraft and soldiers to the Gulf...
...Though the invasion was, for public relations purposes, named Operation Just Cause, Bush has never explained in a convincing way what the Cause was, and if the presidential campaign is any indication, he will never be pressured to explain...
...But what commercial purpose was served by the bombing of Libya...
...And lest we forget, Saddam was revered in the Gulf as “the first Arab leader in a generation to stand up to the humiliation represented by continuing U.S...
...The Chinese didn’t Bush officials also said something that escaped fur- want to fight either, but were suckered as part of an ther notice: They protested that the Times account re- American master plan...
...But Quigley does not mention that Saddam’s objective was to replace Kuwait’s royalist elite with his own, even worse form of dictatorship...
...by Gregg Easterbrook Did you believe The New York Times story that the Bush administration was maneuvering to the godless Communists...
...It is amazing both how little outrage the invasion engendered from the American population and the media, and that Panama has no standing whatsoever as an issue in the 1992 presidential campaign, though it is a leading item on which George Bush’s record ought to be judged...
...Between 400 and 2,000 civilians died in our attack on Panama: unarmed, innocent citizens of a country we like...
...Yet Bush and the Pentagon shrugged this off by refusing to comment on casualty figures, and the media promptly dropped the question...
...But what security information could pos- tions...
...The Ruses for War falters badly, however, when it attempts to depict the sort of dishonorable behavior of the Panama invasion as a ubiquitous theme in American military action...
...Laos, Lebanon, Libya, Panama, the Philippines, and The Korean War itself was provoked by the grasping Vietnam...
...Quigley is angry not just about Panama and Guatemala, but about Bush’s sending fighters to buzz Manila in support of Corazon Aquino, an action that harmed no one and kept a popularly elected leader in power against a military coup...
...That the North Korean army was busily desibly have been in that story-except the operational stroying another country’s cii:ies and seizing its temdetails of a plan to bomb Iraq on pretext during the tory sounds rather like a venal motive on the other Republican National Convention...
Vol. 24 • October 1992 • No. 10
