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The fog of war

By Sudhanshu Ranade

Truth is said to be the first casualty in a war, as contending parties seek to manipulate perceptions to their advantage. This explains the muddied debate over the impending war in Iraq. For example: the fabricated ``evidence'' that the U.K. and the U.S. made available to the United Nations weapons inspectors about Iraq trying to acquire uranium from Niger, and its supposed acquisition of high strength aluminium tubes for constructing centrifuges for uranium enrichment; the deluge of arguments for going to war, of which Shakespeare would probably have said: ``methinks they protest too much;'' and the American argument that it has the right to attack Iraq, with or without the approval of the Security Council, because the U.N. Charter gives every member country the right to ``defend itself'' (in the case of ``clear and present danger''). In response to a pointed question on this in the course of an interview to the BBC on Tuesday, the U.S. Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, replied in effect that ``Iraq is a threat to the entire world; so naturally it is a threat to us as well.''

The second, potentially calamitous, casualty in a war (and in the events leading up to it) is the ability to make sound judgments: because passions run high and the truth is rarely known; because so many players are involved and so many reputations are at stake; and because events happen one after another in rapid succession, giving very little time for busy decision-makers to calmly think things over.

What the future has in store for us is anybody's guess. But there are some things we definitely know about the last time America fought an uncompromising war to protect the ``liberty and freedom of the civilised world.'' These facts are important because despite the deluge of information that we are presently being flooded with, it will take another twenty or thirty years before real news becomes available about what actually happened yesterday, today and tomorrow.

What follows is taken from the testimony of Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defence under the former U.S. President, John F. Kennedy, and his successor, Lyndon Johnson. McNamara and others like him were convinced that attempts to get rid of President Diem of South Vietnam would cause a great setback to the effort of the U.S. to lay the foundation for peace and stability; the alternative would be a painful and purposeful anarchy in which there is no one you can usefully address. He notes that though Diem's regime was indeed repressive, it had been making progress militarily — and enjoyed the support of the masses in Vietnam as a whole. Diem was, therefore, by far, the best bet, and might even have eventually become the instrument for the reunification of a ``free'' Vietnam.

But he was outvoted by the "don't just stand there, do something" lobby. Diem, it said, was old and losing his grip. And so the lobbyists sent forth a proposal in the ``Fateful Fall of 1963'' for his ``replacement,'' arguing that it was an ``even bet that the next government would not bungle and stumble as much as the present one.'' The then Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs presented the proposal to the next rung of the hierarchy, the Under-Secretary of State, George Ball, who was playing golf in Washington. Speaking over the phone to Kennedy at Cape Cod, the Under-Secretary was told by the President that he ``would agree if his senior advisors concurred.'' Whereupon, still at the golf course, the Under-Secretary ``immediately telephoned the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, in New York, and told him the President agreed.'' Mr. Rusk endorsed the proposal, despite his lack of enthusiasm.

Meanwhile, Averell Harriman, who was Under-Secretary of State, Political Affairs, and had himself already approved of the proposal, sought clearance from the CIA. The Director being absent, he talked to Richard Helms, the Deputy Director for Plans. Helms was reluctant, but, like Rusk, went along ``because the President had already done so.''

The CIA, therefore, arranged a ``coup'' in Saigon, at the hands of a coalition of the willing. Diem, though, was not to be harmed. Having expressed a willingness to surrender, he and a senior colleague waited in a church in downtown Saigon. General Minh, who later became President, dispatched two jeeps and an armoured personnel carrier to pick them up. The two were pushed into the van, had their hands tied behind their backs, and were locked in. When the convoy arrived at the Joint General Staff Headquarters, and the doors were unlocked, both were dead. Both had been shot; Diem's colleague had been knifed several times as well.

Many months later, in response to the question on why Diem had been killed, Minh told the Americans that ``we had no alternative. Diem could not be allowed to live because he was too much respected among simple, gullible people in the countryside.''

According to McNamara, it was this that sowed the seeds for the ultimate rout of the U.S., in the region and elsewhere. As things went from bad to worse, Diem's successors spent most of their time squabbling for the reins of power. The Secretary of Defence says, too, that President Kennedy ``soon'' regretted the decision.

The moral of the story is that the ``fog of war'' has to be taken seriously. Things rarely go according to plans, especially when they are made in a hurry by small cliques and their camp followers, even though so much is at stake. More than a million Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian civilians were killed in the carnage that followed the spread of anarchy. The U.S. commemorates only the 30,000 or so American soldiers who died in the line of ``duty.''

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