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July 23, 2015

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Saying no to the warmongers

The Iran nuclear accord struck in Vienna has warmongers fulminating.

Many of the warmongers are to be found in US President Barack Obama’s own government agencies. Most Americans struggle to recognize or understand their country’s permanent security state, in which elected politicians seem to run the show, but the CIA and the Pentagon often take the lead — a state that inherently gravitates toward military, rather than diplomatic, solutions to foreign-policy challenges.

Since 1947, when the CIA was established, the US has had a continuous semi-covert, semi-overt policy of overthrowing foreign governments. In fact, the CIA was designed to avoid genuine democratic oversight.

Soon after Kennedy assumed the presidency in 1961, he was “informed” by the CIA of its plot to overthrow Fidel Castro. Kennedy felt stuck: Should he sanction the planned CIA invasion of Cuba or veto it? New to the gruesome game, Kennedy tried to have it both ways, by letting it proceed, but without US air cover.

The CIA-led invasion, executed by a motley group of Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs, was a military failure and a foreign-policy disaster, one that led to the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year. During the missile crisis, most senior security officials advising the president wanted to launch military action against Soviet forces, a course that could well have ended in nuclear annihilation. Kennedy overruled the warmongers, and prevailed in the crisis through diplomacy.

By 1963, Kennedy no longer trusted the advice of the military and the CIA. Indeed, he regarded many of his putative advisers as a threat to world peace. That year, he used diplomacy relentlessly and skillfully to achieve a breakthrough nuclear agreement with the Soviet Union, the Limited Test Ban Treaty. The American people strongly — and rightly — supported Kennedy over the warmongers. But three months after the treaty was signed, JFK was assassinated.

Lens of history

Viewed through the lens of history, the main job of US presidents is to be mature and wise enough to stand up to the permanent war machine. Kennedy tried; his successor, Lyndon Johnson, did not, and the debacle of Vietnam ensued. Jimmy Carter tried; Reagan did not (his CIA helped to unleash death and mayhem in Central America throughout the 1980s). Clinton mostly tried (except in the Balkans); George W. Bush did not, and generated new wars and turmoil.

On the whole, Obama has tried to restrain the warmongers, yet he has given in to them frequently — not only by relying on weaponized drones, but also by waging covert wars in Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere. Nor did he truly end the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; he replaced troops on the ground with US drones, air strikes, and “private” contractors.

Iran is surely his finest moment. The political difficulty of making peace with Iran is similar to that of JFK’s peacemaking with the Soviet Union in 1963. Americans have been suspicious of Iran since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. But their suspicion also reflects jingoistic manipulation and a lack of perspective on US-Iran relations. Few Americans know that the CIA overthrew a democratic Iranian government in 1953.

Likewise, following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the US armed Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to go to war with Iran, resulting in hundreds of thousands of Iranian deaths in the 1980s. And US-led international sanctions, imposed from the 1990s onward, have aimed to impoverish, destabilize, and ultimately topple the Islamist regime.

Today, the warmongers are trying to scuttle the Vienna accord.

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development, Professor of Health Policy and Management, and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, is also Special Adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2015.www.project-syndicate.org




 

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