I Love Me Some New Nixon Tapes

Another batch was released yesterday, and I wish I could fast-forward 40 years in time so I could drive down to Yorba Linda and spend the day listening to them all. Actually, I could telecommute, as the tapes, from 1973, can be heard right here.

One thing I love about the Nixon White House is the impression that they did almost nothing. Somebody would wander into the Oval Office, and Nixon and that figure, either Colson, Haldeman, Kissinger or Ehrlichman, would just shoot the bill with the President for about 45 minutes or so. It sounds less like the White House and more like The Office. I mean, this, from the Nixon Library, sums it up:

Other notable individuals on these tapes included Republican National Committee Chairman (and future President) George H. W. Bush, House Minority Leader (and future President) Gerald R. Ford, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, journalist Barbara Walters, film director John Ford, professional golfer Arnold Palmer, conductor of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra Eugene Ormandy, “Truck driver of the year” Curtis C. Stapp, and Washington Redskins football coach George Allen and his family.

Obviously the big news hook has been Nixon's comments on abortion:

The tapes also caught his reaction to Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion. In a Jan. 22 conversation with aide Chuck Colson, Nixon can be heard saying: "There are times when abortions are necessary -- I know that. . . . Suppose you have a black and a white, or a rape."

Nixon and Colson agreed that legalized abortion encouraged permissiveness.

"It breaks the family," Nixon says.

Please note that Loving v. Virginia was the law of the land for Nixon's entire Presidency.

But more interesting is this:

Nixon had promised "peace with honor" and pledged to withdraw American forces only when South Vietnam could defend itself. But if Nixon couldn't persuade Thieu to agree to his peace agreement, Hughes said, the American president would have had difficulty justifying his continuation of the war during his first four-year term, during which 20,000 American troops died.

"For domestic political reasons, Nixon needed to conceal the failure of his strategy of Vietnamization and negotiation," Hughes said. "If people realized that he had added 20,000 additional American casualties to the war, and the communists were going to win anyway, then it would have proved his critics right that he should have ended the war at the start of his (first) term."

And this, which is just classic Nixon:

On Feb. 23, 1973, he placed a call to future President George H.W. Bush, then the Republican National Committee chairman.

The call was "nothing of great importance," Nixon says, but he wanted to inform Bush of what he witnessed during his recent visit to the South Carolina state Legislature.

"I noticed a couple of very attractive women, both of them Republicans, in the Legislature," Nixon tells Bush. "I want you to be sure to emphasize to our people, God, let's look for some. . . . Understand, I don't do it because I'm for women, but I'm doing it because I think maybe a woman might win someplace where a man might not. . . . So have you got that in mind?"

"I'll certainly keep it in mind," Bush replies.

"Boy, they were good lookin' and bright," Nixon continues. And he had been informed, further, that "they're two of the best members of the House."

"Well, that's terrific," Bush says.

In addition to releasing tapes, the Nixon Library released a cache of documents, one of them showing that Mississippi Democrat John Stennis secretly approved of the bombing of Cambodia before Nixon carried it out in 1970.

In an April 24, 1970, telephone conversation with Sen. John C. Stennis (D-Miss.), who was then chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Nixon said the administration was going to provide arms to the Cambodian government to prevent its overthrow by a pro-communist element, and continue secret B-52 bombing raids, "which only you and Senator Russell know about." Richard Russell (D-Ga.) was the former committee chairman.

"We are not going to get involved in a war in Cambodia," Nixon reassured Stennis. "We are going to do what is necessary to help save our men in South Vietnam. They can't have those sanctuaries there" that North Vietnam maintained.

Stennis replied, "I will be with you. . . . I commend you for what you are doing."

ConservaDems, then as now...

Nixon is just a fascinating character sketch, and I wish I could marinate in all this material for a long while.

Now We Know What Bush Was Spending All That Time in The National Guard Doing!

He was studying Vietnam!

President Bush plans to argue today that a hasty "retreat" from Iraq would lead to the kinds of bloodbaths that followed U.S. withdrawals from Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1970s.

In a speech he is to deliver here at the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention, Bush will also say that the recent increase of U.S. troops is producing military progress in the war-racked country.

"Will their elected leaders in Washington pull the rug out from under them just as they are gaining momentum and changing the dynamic on the ground in Iraq?" Bush says in prepared remarks released by the White House late Tuesday.

Here's what the actual quote was: One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of Americas withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like “boat people,” “re-education camps,” and “killing fields."

Actually, that is eminently mistakable! First of all, no reasonable historian believes that the reaction to an unwinnable war in Vietnam was to stay longer.

"We were in Vietnam for 10 years. We dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we did in all of World War II in every theater. We lost 58,700 American lives, the second-greatest loss of lives in a foreign conflict. And we couldn't work our will," he said.

"What is Bush suggesting? That we didn't fight hard enough, stay long enough? That's nonsense. It's a distortion," he continued. "We've been in Iraq longer than we fought in World War II. It's a disaster, and this is a political attempt to lay the blame for the disaster on his opponents. But the disaster is the consequence of going in, not getting out."

Second of all, he uses "killing fields" cavalierly, when they didn't exist in Vietnam but in Cambodia. And here this is wingnut historical error like no other. In fact, Cambodian genocide was a direct result of our own aggression in that country.

Bush's invocation of the Cambodian genocide, however, is both predictable and disgusting. Rather than simply wallowing in counter-factual satisfactions (e.g., what if FDR hadn't simply "given away" a region of Europe his nation didn't actually control?) it actually inverts history by pretending that the killing fields were a consequence of American weakness rather than an effect of American aggression. The history on this is pretty unambiguous. Without four years of American and South Vietnamese bombardment of eastern Cambodia, and without the illegal invasion of the country in 1970, the preconditions for the ascent of the Khmer Rouge would not have existed. More importantly, as the Khmer became embroiled in a xenophobic campaign against ethnic Vietnamese and sought -- improbably -- to regain lands lost to Vietnam centuries before, the United States had little to say in the way of official complaint against Pol Pot's regime. Indeed, the "reasonable" position set forth by Kissinger (under Ford) and Brzezinski (under Carter) held that Pol Pot -- though detestable -- was at least useful so long as he threatened the Communists in Vietnam. And when the Khmer Rouge was deposed by a Vietnamese invasion and replaced by a Vietnamese puppet states, both Carter and Reagan continued to insist that the Khmer Rouge be acknowledged as the legitimate government of Cambodia.

Allow me to put it even more simply: to the extent that the United States abetted the Cambodian genocide, those contributions were made not by people who called for an end to the war in Vietnam but instead by those who insisted that the war be expanded into another nation; that the war could be brought under control with a massive, short-term escalation; and that domestic opposition to the war was irresponsible and meretricious.

In other words, the only historical parallel to Cambodia would be us attacking Iran and destabilizing that country, leading perhaps to another ethnic genocide. Not to mention the fact that 1.7 million Vietnamese died while we were there, suggesting that the cause of mass death was not us leaving, but us going in.

Bush also lied about the capture of "al Qaeda leaders" in Iraq, but that's familiar. Using Vietnam to BOLSTER support for staying stuck in an endless occupation is just lunacy. Most of the Democratic candidates have come out to trash this muddled logic. But this is one of those zombie wingnut lies that will never die. When we do leave the disaster of Iraq with our goals unfulfilled, these guys will claim that our troops were stabbed in the back.

Democracy At 30,000 Feet

A British general had the courage to call out the United States.

A senior British commander in southern Afghanistan said in recent weeks that he had asked that American Special Forces leave his area of operations because the high level of civilian casualties they had caused was making it difficult to win over local people.

Other British officers here in Helmand Province, speaking on condition of anonymity, criticized American Special Forces for causing most of the civilian deaths and injuries in their area. They also expressed concerns that the Americans’ extensive use of air power was turning the people against the foreign presence as British forces were trying to solidify recent gains against the Taliban.

We really are Borat in the antique shop, aren't we?

It's an article of wingnut faith that our pulling out of Vietnam indirectly caused the rise of Pol Pot and the genocide of a million Cambodians. In fact, it was the heavy Cambodian bombing campaign that destabilized the country and gave rise to the murderous dictator. Bombing to stop a counter-insurgency is a sign of desperation. And it's not possible to be successful. You alienate far more of the good guys to make up for the bad guys (and civilian collateral damage) that you kill.

“Everyone is concerned about civilian casualties,” the senior British commander said. “Of course it is counterproductive if civilians get injured, but we’ve got to pick up the pack of cards that we have got. Other people have been operating in our area before us.”

After months of heavy fighting that began in early 2006, the British commanders say they are finally making headway in securing important areas such as this town, and are now in the difficult position of trying to win back support among local people whose lives have been devastated by aerial bombing.

There's a sense of denial here, that as long as you rack up body counts you must be winning. It's simply untrue.

Slaying Giants

I had heard that the increasingly pathetic John McCain had given a speech on the Senate floor talking about all the progress and the ponies to be found in Iraq, but I didn't know that he took on the greatest force in liberal politics today:

"I've seen this movie before from the liberal left in America, who share no responsibility for what happened in Cambodia when we said no," said McCain, whose campaign has lost support partly because of his advocacy of the war. He singled out Mike Gravel, a Vietnam War-era senator from Alaska who strongly opposed that mission and is waging a long-shot antiwar candidacy for the 2008 Democratic nomination.

Biden jumped in. "Give me a break! Quoting Gravel as the voice of the left?" he exclaimed.

When the only person you can manage to pick on is Mike Gravel, you're, in a word, irrelevant.

By the way, Gravel released a statement in response:



Incidentally, what McCain is babbling about with regard to Cambodia is that the Senate cut off funds for troops there in 1970... because, you know, we weren't at war with Cambodia at the time. Also, we ended up bombing the crap out of them the next year. And we installed a puppet government led by Prince Lon Nol in 1970, one that proved completely unpopular and led to the Khmer Rouge's rise. In other words, it was our meddling in foreign affairs that CAUSED the Cambodian genocide, not our isolation. And who ended up invading Cambodia and stopping the violence? COMMUNIST VIETNAM.

This is a familiar right-wing lament, that our leaving Vietnam caused millions of dead. It's the stabbed-in-the-back routine. I'm completely unsurprised that John "What you gonna do about it, Mike Gravel" McCain is employing it. Pathetic.

Iraq in Fragments

• One Sunni minister in Parliament was arrested for ordering a hit on another minister.

• Even American military commanders now agree that Iraqis will not be able to hold any ground gains made by US troops during the surge. The culture of dependency that we've fostered over there leads to this reality. The Iraqis in the insurgency are fighting for their country; the ones in the Army are taking a paycheck. Big difference.

• Yet another suicide attack in Eastern Turkey by the Kurdish separatist group PKK. The Turkish air force responded with bombing raids. We're not going to be able to hold off a Turkish incursion into Kurdistan forever.

• Some really good analysis about what's really happening in Al Anbar:

The US is currently enrolling in Iraqi police and military units tribesmen who were, ten months ago, part of the insurgency. The loyalty of such individuals can hardly be taken for granted; the tribal elite may decide, six months from now, that they are no longer pleased with the US and shift against us.

Even if the tribal elites remain loyal, the alliance poses a larger problem for basic US war aims. The alliance with these tribes serves, necessarily, to strengthen them as political units. Strengthening the tribes invariably weakens the central government. As the tribes are also among the least progressive and least interested in democracy of any Iraqi political constituencies, strengthening them also helps undercut efforts towards democratization. So, to the extent that the US goal remains the creation of a strong, democratic central government, the deal with the Sunni tribal leaders is almost completely at odds with the end that we'd like to see.

The White House is, of course, doing it because they're so desperate to promote any semblance of victory that they don't care what kind of deals they make. Just like when they set conditions to put the theocratic Shiites in charge of the government in the first place.

Finally, this rationalization by Michael Gerson is disgusting, as well as one of those zombie lies that will never die. In explaining how we can never leave Iraq ever ever ever, he claims that antiwar liberals were to blame for the Khmer Rouge's slaughter of 3 million in Cambodia (funny, they always blame "al Qaeda" for their own failures, but when they want it to look like liberal failures, they go ahead and neglect the perprtrators themselves). This is transparently stupid:

Why yes, that is a sympathetic quote from Henry Kissinger about Cambodia. You know, the very nation that Kissinger had secretly bombed when he was the National Security Advisor during the Nixon Adminstration, which bombing so destablized the country that it led to the rise of the evil Pol Pot regime, which the US continued to prop up for years afterward. And yet Gerson treats Kissinger as some sort of Cambodian savior. Revisionist history, anyone?

Jeebus, are these people so utterly used to their subordinates taking marching orders that they think the rest of the world will ignore history altogether?

The answer, of course, is yes.

Oh, NOW It's Vietnam

Seeing war apologist John O'Sullivan on Real Time with Bill Maher, it occurs to me how fundamentally dishonest these people are, how they'll use any justification to serve their needs, even one they reject wholeheartedly in other contexts.

O'Sullivan, a think-tank habitué who's never so much as touched a battlefield, pressed the now-familiar argument that, if we leave Iraq, the violence will be catastrophic and horrible. As opposed to, you know, NOW. Maher's standing parry to this is asking why anyone should trust the predictions of the same people that have been wrong about absolutely everything relating to this war since the day it began, even before. So O'Sullivan attempted to prove his point through past experience, and he cited two examples: the end of the British Raj in 1947, which preceded a violent conflict between India and Pakistan that, in many ways, continues to this day; and the American pullout of Vietnam, which (according to O'Sullivan) occasioned the indiscriminate murder of millions of Cambodians under the Khmer Rouge and further violence as the North Vietnamese crushed the South.

First of all, I object to the notion that American withdrawal was in any responsible for the rise of the Khmer Rouge, which was happening since the mid-1950s, which was also virulently anti-Vietnamese (ethnic Vietnamese were among those targeted for death), and which was eventually stopped by the Vietnamese Army in 1979. (And we gave AID to Cambodia when they raided Vietnamese villages in late 1978). Maybe America bombing supply lines in Cambodia and turning the people in the countryside against imperialist forces and into the waiting hands of the Communists had something to do with it, but we didn't have a garrison of Marines in Phnom Penh. Second, in the case of India and Vietnam, the logical conclusion of O'Sullivan preferred policy is that we stay as a colonial occupier forever. Which, considering he's a Thatcher-era Brit, doesn't surprise me.

But that's all besides the point. It consistently amazes me that Bush defenders will go to their deaths denying that Iraq is similar to Vietnam until the MINUTE their critics make the decision that we should leave. THEN it's Vietnam all over again, and leaving will wrest great victory from our hands just when it was almost complete. The idea that Iraq isn't Vietnam until you want to leave is so deeply dishonest that it shows there's no possible argument with these people. The vows that you must take at the altar of conservatism are so twisted and deluded that it's difficult to make sense of them at all.

This is essentially an extension of the theory of Republican Dolschstoss, which suggests that stupid Republican foreign policy decisions have never lost a war, but the leftist-liberal-elite complex have always just taken total victory away by stabbing the war effort in the back. This was the conservative lesson in Vietnam, and it will be the conservative lesson in Iraq when we eventually leave that country. They are so convinced of their own righteousness that this can be the only possible explanation. They don't see mistakes and bad judgment and flawed assumptions, they only see cabals and conspiracies and betrayal.

O'Sullivan also used a dubious lesson of history to defend the announcement that we're building a wall between the Sunnis and the Shiites in Baghdad, a wall that the Iraqi government does not want and will move to end construction on. He cited the wall in Belfast as an example of this kind of decision working. Right, because for 25 years, there was no safer place on Earth than Northern Ireland.

Really, it's this latest tactic, taken along with the news that the US has abandoned the "stand up-stand down" strategy, which proves that the administration isn't even serious about counterinsurgency, which can only be accomplished through the marshaling of national power. Separating those powers, and sidelining them, only moves the country closer to isolation, alienation, and the inevitable paroxysm of violence. The Administration really doesn't care what they unleash in the region, they're just concerned with keeping the lid on until January 2009. So they'll put up prefab walls and stand sentry until they can send the helicopters off the roof of the White House. In truth, they're just prepping the ground for their own withdrawal, a withdrawal of responsibility.