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U.S. Repeating Foreign Policy Blunders of The Past, Law School Dean Writes

Written by Sherwood Ross

Thursday, 17 January 2008

SHERWOOD ROSS ASSOCIATES Media Consultants
U.S. REPEATING DESTRUCTIVE PATTERNS LEADING TO FOREIGN POLICY BLUNDERS
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Historian David Halberstam’s new book on the Korean War provides fresh insight that the United States since then has repeated a pattern of costly foreign policy blunders from which it has learned nothing, according to Lawrence Velvel, dean of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover.

“The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War”(Hyperion), documents how the U.S. swallowed dubious intelligence estimates, consistently underestimated its Korean and Red Chinese opponents, and wound up fighting their kind of war. What’s more, the U.S. ignored its own history of seeking to keep foreign powers from its borders when it allowed General Douglas MacArthur to pursue the retreating North Koreans right up to the Chinese border, not believing Mao Tse-tung’s massing armies would respond by attacking.

According to Velvel, the U.S. public fails to see the repetitive pattern in its costly wars against Viet Nam and Iraq, or in the war President Bush is threatening against Iran. This pattern is “most important” because “if we were willing to learn from the past…we could avoid making the same mistakes over and over again.”

“Not only do patterns repeat themselves in history in ‘big’ ways…but also within given fields and across fields, sometimes across all fields it seems, and they, too, have consequences,” Velvel writes. “Yet we pay little attention to this existence across fields,” he continues, “partly because of lack of ready intellectual access to this phenomenon and partly because of failure to recognize its importance.”

In Korea, Viet Nam, and currently in Iraq (after Baghdad), “We keep getting into wars where we will inevitably have to fight the other guy’s kind of war…where opponents can neutralize our cultural advantages (technology) and employ theirs against us,” Velvel writes in his blog, “Velvel on National Affairs” (see January 4th).

Over and again during the past 60 years, and even though many administration figures in Washington come from legal backgrounds, in practice they have not put serial thinking to the test that lawyers are routinely taught to use. Lawyers, dean Velvel says, are taught to consider the consequences of each action, for example, “If we do A, what happens next?”

In Korea, MacArthur seems “not to have considered what might happen next and what to do if it did,” Velvel writes. After MacArthur’s military masterstroke invasion at Inchon, he “seems to have done all the wrong things, the things guaranteed to cause the Chinese to come in as they were threatening and guaranteed to enable them to smash his army in their first great attack.”

Late in 1950, the Chinese infiltrated more than 250,000 men into North Korea and lured the pursuing U.S. forces northward by not blowing up a key bridge at Funchilin Pass that suggested they were baiting a trap. First Marine Division commander General O.P. Smith knew it was a trap “but was required by the higher brass to keep going north anyway,” Velvel noted.

In Viet Nam, the U.S. underestimated North Viet Nam’s manpower resources and ability to take major losses and yet sustain the war indefinitely, Velvel points out. In Iraq, President Bush failed to employ serial thinking by invading without giving sufficient thought to “how to control and govern Iraq after defeating Saddam,” including how many soldiers would be needed for this and how other countries would react.

Secrecy, Velvel writes, is another pervasive pattern in American life that enabled U.S. leaders to commit outrageous blunders behind the public’s back. “We had secret Johnsonian plans to escalate in Viet Nam, a secret Nixon plan for peace (that was nonexistent), secret Nixonian wars in Laos and Cambodia, extensive secret CIA spying on Americans…secret torture, secret prisons, secret renditions, secret spying on Americans and the rest of the litany of secret horrors associated with (President) G.W. Bush and (Vice President Dick) Cheney.”

“Fakery and lies have been one of those patterns that have gotten us into trouble time and time again. They continue. But does anyone study…the pattern of, or impact of… (lies) as a continuing matter of conduct in American foreign policy, not to mention domestic affairs and everyday life as well?” Velvel asks. “And this despite the fact that lies and dishonesty are probably the major cause of disaster.”

The same pattern has held in Iraq, Velvel contends, starting with the lie that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. “The lack of planning for the war’s aftermath was not only stupid in itself, but apparently was based on the preposterous miscalculations that we would be welcomed in Iraq and the middle east— where many have long hated us as well as our predecessors, the British and French —and that (Hussein opposition leader Ahmed)Chalabi and his gang would be effective,” Velvel writes.

“So the miscalculating stupidities that Halberstam shows to have been the case in Korea descended upon us again in Viet Nam and Gulf II,” Velvel continues. “Sometimes the stupidities were identical, sometimes different. But that there is a pattern of miscalculating stupidities of one type or another is inarguable.”

Velvel points out the U.S. political leaders have learned nothing from 19th Century American history when the U.S. repeatedly acted to keep foreign powers from holding territories along its borders. He notes that Russia and Red China acted no differently in the 20th century backing North Korea because both their countries adjoined it. Iran, Velvel says, is helping the Iraqi insurgents because “it does not want on its borders a far distant major power which could, and has even threatened to, attack it, just as we didn’t want England, France or Spain on our borders.”

Velvel writes that just as it was the right wing “that caused much of the difficulties” the U.S. faced in Korea, so today it is the right wing, now called neocons, that “cooked up and were the driving force of the current Iraq war, who again turned the Democrats into jelly legs on the subject of war, and who have now replaced their crusade against anti-communism with a crusade against Islamism, or, as they put it, Islamofacism.”

Discussing a key point raised by Halberstam who used the example of a U.S. pilot in Korea that repeatedly risked his life to help GIs on the ground — Velvel writes the nation today lacks “a concern for the other guy” and “a culture of honesty”— crucial to any decent society. This can be summed up “by whether or not (the individual) has a decent internal code of honor.”
Velvel concludes: “There is no decent internal code of honor among the big shots, who care for success alone. The absence of such a code, and of the elements comprising it, in the big shots and many others is, I think, the single most profound tragedy of our country, because it causes so many others.” #

(To arrange for interviews with Dean Velvel please contact Sherwood Ross, Ross Associates, Suite 403, 102 S.W. 6th Avenue, Miami, FL, 33130, (or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ).

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Scooter - Other Mistakes

| 68.17.10.xxx | 2008-01-17 14:27:28

Golly, I know it's popular to be against enforcing UN sanctions when the UN continually prove itself to be ineffective, but geez.

Might it have been a mistake to trust the League of Nations to address Germany's continued violation of the Treaty of Versailles. I mean that did result in World War II.

Would it have been prudent to not confront Communism's violent spread around the world? We will never know and that is why we can all sit around pontificating about repeating mistakes.

Please, tell me where I am wrong here; Saddam defied the world for 13 years, the last four of which he banned UN Inspectors from his country. After Saddam stalled in the UN Security Council for months he produced a 5000 page weapons declaration that even the UN said was BS. Then, only because we went into Iraq did we learn the UN's Oil for Food Program (O.F.F.) had been corrupted by Saddam. To me the fact he exerted the energy necessary to corrupt the O.F.F. Program indicated that he was in no way c...

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