OBAMA & THE UNSPEAKABLE

President Barack Obama is finding that his ability as Commander in Chief to direct our military and diplomatic affairs is seriously restricted by groups within his own Administration. The CIA and the Pentagon, supported by very powerful political and corporate interests, are able to manage his access to strategic data and can threaten political havoc should he take certain initiatives they do not approve. These include direct discussions with Iran to reduce tensions, seriously pressuring Israel to eliminate illegal settlements on Palestinian land, proposing substantial reductions in nuclear missile inventories, setting dates for the withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, and diverting funds from our war machine to domestic needs. He seems to be in a position similar to that of John Kennedy in the early 1960s.

JOHN KENNEDY'S DOOMSDAY DILEMMA
Back almost 50 years ago, John Kennedy found himself alone in the White House surrounded by foreign policy advisers, Pentagon brass, and Central Intelligence Agency professionals whose fix on the Cold War was that the president must be unyielding in demonstrating unswerving strength and determination in the face of mad dog Russia. They were driven by fear of losing a doomsday nuclear war, by the pressure from the military/industrial complex that thrived on military buildup, by the potential loss of dominance in world markets, by cutoffs in oil supplies, and by the inevitable economic decline that would result should we lose the cold war. JFK found surprisingly few advisers willing to seriously consider negotiation with the Soviet bloc to ease tensions, to reduce nuclear weapons stockpile, or to find a way to accommodate one other short of outright victory or defeat.

Nevertheless, he undertook a number of incredibly courageous actions totally opposed by the Pentagon, the CIA and most of the Department of State. These actions eventually resulted in his having the back of his skull shot off by an assassin's bullet in Dallas, Texas. The theologian and author James Douglass, in his book “JFK and the Unspeakable” (Verso 2008), says that “for turning towards peace with our enemy, Kennedy was murdered by a power we cannot easily describe but whose unspeakable reality can be traced, suggested, recognized and pondered.” He describes JFK's gradual turning away from nuclear confrontation as follows:

1.Refusing to directly support the Bay of Pigs invasion with US troops, ships and planes.
2.Dismissing CIA Director Allen Dulles after the Bay of Pigs debacle.
3.Negotiating for the neutralization of Laos.
4.Reducing US troops in Vietnam and establishing a timetable for complete withdrawal of US forces.
5.Encouraging peace negotiations with North Vietnam.
6.Refusing to bomb Cuba and initiating back-channel talks with Castro.
7.Conducting over a year of secret back-channel negotiations with Khrushchev for reduction of tensions and armaments.
8.Signing the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with Russia.
9.Backing away from a military confrontation with Russian tanks along the Berlin Wall.
10.Negotiating for the removal of US missiles from Turkey in exchange for Russia's pullout of missiles from Cuba.
11.Proposing complete and general disarmament.
12.Totally frustrating the military-industrial power structure during his first 1000 as Commander in Chief. These people were accustomed to having their way.

Do we today find ourselves with another President equally caught between his campaign rhetoric, his aspirations for peace, and the military-industrial bloc's insistence upon total global domination? Is Obama frustrated by his impotence to seriously address domestic ills in a weakened economy that spends 53% of every tax dollar on wars and armaments even though no credible challenger to US global dominance exists? Obama's attempts to right the situation appear half-hearted: one cannot help but think that he must reflect upon JFK's fate when he considers negotiation with Iran or with the Taliban.

The Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, saw evidence back in the early 1960s that the world had been stricken by the presence of The Unspeakable. (Peace in the Post-Christian Era" Orbis Books 2004) He saw the interlocking murders of the Kennedy brothers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and the escalating war in Vietnam as signs of Unspeakable forces within the US national security state. His work was read carefully by Kennedy. In his poem: “Chant to be Used in Processions Around the Site with Furnaces” Merton asks: “Do not think yourself better because you burn up friends and enemies with long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have done”. Since WWII, our government has found that the most heinous crimes against the innocent, starting with atomic obliteration of two entire cities, and including the firebombing unprotected civilians from Dresden to Fallujah, could be justified as a lesser evil than defeat or subjugation to a foreign enemy or terrorist band. Nuclear deterrence is still seen today as a reasonable way of preserving the peace and is under active discussion as a means to prevent Iran's achieving some sort of nuclear parity with Israel.

Every President since Kennedy has avoided direct confrontation over the relentless growth of the national security state and its insistence upon massive armed violence as the only credible response to those who would challenge us. Raymond McGovern, a 27-year CIA analyst, has described the covert arm of the CIA as operating entirely according to its own rules and without any oversight. He feels that this makes even the new CIA Director, Leon Panetta, afraid to confront them.

WHO DOES THE CIA REPORT TO?
The National Security Act of 1947 placed the CIA under the National Security Council to “acquire, evaluate and coordinate information collected through espionage and concerning the national security of the United States. They were also allowed “to perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the NSC may from time to time direct”. This turned the CIA into a personal, secret, unaccountable army of the president. (“Nemesis” by Chalmers Johnson, Henry Holt 2006). Clandestine or covert operations although nowhere specifically mentioned in the Act, quickly became the agency's main activity. The question thus arises: How did an agency set up to provide the President with a source of information become instead a tool whereby groups within his own government could restrict and flavor the intelligence channeled to the President in ways that did not serve his interests?

The CIA assured JFK in 1961 that Cubans would welcome American-supported insurgents invading their island during the planned Bay of Pigs operation. They never told JFK that they had just polled Cubans, found that Castro actually enjoyed overwhelming popularity and concluded that a popular uprising against Castro was very unlikely.. In Vietnam, estimates of enemy troop strength were deliberately distorted to make it appear that the US war was very winnable. On the Cold War front, the Pentagon and intelligence agencies had been deliberately over-estimating the strength of the Soviet economy and its ability to sustain itself in a new war. If, in many instances, the CIA was not acting under orders of the President nor carrying out stated US policy, then who actually does run this massive intelligence operation and what is their purpose? James W. Douglass' recent book (“JFK and the Unspeakable” Verso 2008) describes the JFK dilemma most clearly and shows how his adamant stand against the CIA probably cost him his life.

FEAR IS REAL, DEAL WITH IT
George Friedman, the founder of Stratfor, a global team of US intelligence professionals, sees a thoroughly apocalyptic world out there, and describes a reality that we peaceniks prefer to screen from sight. Friedman repeatedly shows that the other side is hell-bent upon our destruction, whether by full-fueled airliners, by nuclear suitcase bombs and biological weapons, or by shoe bombers and underpants igniters. He argues that we cannot prevent our adversaries from mounting such attacks merely by demonstrating our power to bomb their towns and cities to rubble, or by liquidating their rural wedding parties. Islamic radicals may be so hell-bent with righteous fervor as to risk all, sacrificing their individuals lives if necessary, to bring paradise closer. (George Friedman “America's Secret War” Doubleday 2004).

Our most hard headed military planners feel we must clearsightedly look into the reality of massive destruction and be prepared to use it when sufficiently provoked. They point out that humankind already lives under the threat of natural disasters like typhoon, flood, volcanic eruption, and another ice age. They see their ability to threaten total destruction with nuclear bombs as disaster by another means. But, it is what it may take to prevent our own obliteration. Holding up peace signs is a futile gesture in their view. It really gets down to kill or be killed sometimes. There may indeed be times when the threat of annihilation will temper a country's aggressiveness, when the fear of mutually assured destruction (MAD) can result in Cold War type stasis. But not right now.

In the Cuban missile standoff of 1962, the military and intelligence community was concerned that these two soft-headed leaders, Kennedy and Khrushchev, would leave the US in a more precarious position than before: a fear that the US would give away too much, get too little in return, and bring the next Armageddon even nearer. Kennedy's agreement to disband the Turkish ICBM missile sites and promise never to invade Cuba was seen as totally foolhardy capitulation. Similarly, his earlier refusal to support the Bay of Pigs invasion force with US air and sea cover not only doomed the invaders but helped assure Castro's being a fly in our eye forever. It proved for them JFK's unreliability as President.

In our current decade, where Al Qaeda has already engineered the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers and attacked the Pentagon, if they had not experienced immediate retaliation, then we could be assured that they would not hesitate to attack again, and with even more disastrous consequences. Thus, the immediate bombing of Afghanistan's pathetic little military machine was essential as a demonstration of our political will to use overwhelming power. While that war which slogs on, it now seems a very hollow demonstration of our retaliatory resolve. Friedman feels it may actually prevent another commando group from attacking our Homeland. While this is questionable to most of us, it is not to the military planners in Washington. After all, even the Palestine Liberation Organization became convinced that hijacking airplanes and ocean liners, or bombing Olympic athletes was not very productive. They learned that they would just have to live a life of fear and humiliation within their impoverished land for there seems no alternative. We have set back Iraqi civilization many decades, caused over one million casualties and inflicted unspeakable suffering amongst the innocent. Yet the military planners view it as a necessary war for it has brought military stability to the region, and assured the west of continued unchallenged access to the energy resources of the entire Middle East for decades to come. These were the gains and they are considerable, viewed from a geopolitical perspective. Were there alternatives to invasion? Could stable oil and gas production and market access have been assured by other means? Will continued pounding at remote bases in the AfPak mountains keep Al Qaeda at bay and the Pashtun resigned to living quietly in their tribal areas?

Is President Obama a wholehearted believer in this strategy, or is he merely restraining the Pentagon and the CIA from embarking upon even bigger offensives such as the 80,000 troop buildup in Afghanistan originally proposed by McCrystal (Obama bought him off with 30,000), and perhaps a subsequent military takeover of the unstable and thoroughly corrupt government of Pakistan? Will this demonstration of Presidential bloody-mindedness in Afghanistan be sufficient warning to Tehran not to pull on the United States' chain too hard about their right to produce enriched uranium. Equally, will this display of US determination continue to restrain Israel's President Netanyahu and his most frightening Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in Tel Aviv from pre-emptive attack against Iran? Obama must wake up seeing, as JFK saw each morning during the Cuban missile crisis, how close we all are to the apocalypse. A few rogue raids upon Iranian nuclear plants, an Iraqi missile attack against Israel, and retaliatory missiles fired upon Iranian sites from the US 5th Fleet in the Gulf, could well lead to the Iran's blockage of the Straits of Hormuz and the loss of the oil supply and the price stability we have won in the region since the 2003 invasion.

It was reassuring to hear General Petraeus complain the other day that: “Israel's total impunity for its intransigence is becoming a liability for the advance of US interests around the world.” (Andrew Sullivan in Atlantic Magazine – 3/04/10). Petraeus sent a team of top CENTCOM officers to brief Admiral Mullen (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) on the topic and asking that the region be made a part of Petraeus' command. The briefers reported that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM's mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region, and that Obama's Special Envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, was "too old, too slow and too late."

It is all well and good to demand our troops withdraw from Afghanistan now and spill no more blood needlessly, but are we simply ignoring the realities of the global power struggle we are fully engaged in? Is Obama merely a captive of the CIA and Pentagon planners or can he somehow restrain and divert them while using all of his talents to pacify the radicals and calm down all the saber rattlers? We are watching a drama far more complex than we can clearly see through the fog spread before us on the evening news and reinforced by our politicians. Will we have to wait 45 years for another book like Douglass' to explain what really was going on back in 2010? Will we still be here to read it?