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The Secret To Trump’s Ratings

The Secret To Trump’s Ratings

This article originally appeared in The Washington Spectator.

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Gimme Shelter: Hatred Of Refugees Is An American Tradition

Gimme Shelter: Hatred Of Refugees Is An American Tradition

This piece originally appeared in The Washington Spectator.

Republican governors and presidential candidates are tripping over each other to pronounce their horror at the prospect of accepting Syrian refugees, lest some terrorist slips through. Which is, of course, insane: what aspiring suicide bomber would submit himself to the 18-month to three-year vetting process it takes to get refugee status when a simple tourist visa would do the trick in a day? (Shhhhh! Don’t tell Ted Cruz. He’ll want to outlaw tourism to the United States. Wait, editor, stop the presses! Mike Huckabee already went there.)

Meanwhile, people are beginning to draw useful historical parallels—such as this outstanding piece in the San Francisco Chronicle reminding us that in 1939, 67 percent of Americans eschewed a plan to resettle children orphaned by Nazi Germany, seven years later 59 percent opposed a plan to accept European Jews, and that, in 1975, Jerry Brown, during his first go-round as governor of California, tried to prevent refugee planes from Vietnam from landing at Travis Air Force Base in California, lest they take natives’ jobs: “We can’t be looking 5,000 miles away and at the same time neglecting people who live here.”

Great stuff, but the Chronicle missed one important San Francisco-based detail: a warehouse providing temporary housing for Vietnamese orphans had to be kept under armed guards, for fear of vigilante attack.

In my 2015 book The Invisible Bridge, I wrote about America’s hate-filled reaction to refugees arriving here in 1975 fleeing another U.S. military failure that had made their lives at home impossible. In my hope against hope that history not repeat itself, let me present some of the relevant passages here.

First, the nightmare they faced back home when Saigon fell to the Communists, all too familiar to those of us reading the news today:

One and a half million refugees poured south to coastal cities they were told were impregnable to the enemy—“from one end of a sinking ship to another,” wrote The New Yorker’s Jonathan Schell—endless columns of women and children, old men in conical hats, clogging dusty roads to the sea. Along these roads civilians were massacred—not by their ostensible enemy, but by South Vietnamese soldiers, driven by directionless rage. A country, Schell wrote, “tearing itself apart in a frenzy of self-destruction.”

Other refugees boarded ships—“crowding together,” NBC News reported, “without food, without water, starving, dying on the slow voyage south.” Children falling overboard, mothers diving after them; people being thrown overboard, by soldiers desperate to flee themselves—scorpions-in-bottle scrambles for scarce resources….

On March 28 South Vietnamese Marines clamored aboard the last ship to depart the city, the U.S.S. Pioneer Commander, and slaughtered twenty-five civilians. All told, there were 4,000 passengers aboard—but only a few barrels of water. “One woman’s baby had died in her arms while she waited on a barge for four days without water or shelter,” read an Associated Press dispatch. “She became hysterical as she came aboard the freighter and leaped overboard.”

There were airplanes for the refugees, too. But only three civilians made it aboard the last one to lift off. …

And here’s something of the welcome those who made it to America enjoyed when they arrived:

Some of the South Vietnamese who made it to the United States were preliminarily resettled at Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida panhandle—in defiance of a hastily assembled petition got up by residents of the base’s host city, which was called Niceville. A radio poll found that 80 percent of Niceville’s residents didn’t want them. The Associated Press reported, “Children in one school joked about shooting a few.” High school kids spoke in class of plans to organize a “Gook Klux Klan.” A twelfth grade psychology class told their teacher they were worried the refugees would try to convert them to Communism.

“Disease, disease, disease, that’s all I’ve heard,” complained a congressman representing another relocation site, the San Diego County Marine base Camp Pendleton, of the phone calls he was getting. “They think of the Vietnamese as nothing but diseased job seekers.” In Arkansas, at Fort Chaffee, which admitted 25,000 refugees, the compound so well-guarded that a radical journalist compared it to the “strategic hamlets” the U.S. military used to build in South Vietnam. A recently returned veteran told him, “I don’t like the people personally. I didn’t see anything worth saving and I don’t now.” The protest placards read “Gooks Go Home.”

In Detroit, a black autoworker told The New York Times, “People are losing their cars, houses, jobs. Let them stay there until we do something for people here.” In Valparaiso, Indiana, a salesman asked, “How do you know we’re not getting the bad guys? You can’t say for sure. Nobody can, and Lord knows we’ve got enough Communist infiltration now.”  President Ford implored, “we can afford to be generous to refugees” as “a matter of principle.” Mayor Daley of Chicago responded, “Charity begins at home.” The Seattle City Council voted seven to one against a pro-settlement resolution. Governor Jerry Brown said Congress’s refugee bill should be amended with a “jobs for Americans first” pledge. Explained Harvard sociologist David Riesman, “the national mood is poisonous and dangerous and this is one symptom—striking out at helpless refugees whose number is infinitesimal.”

Of course, conservatives won’t find in such behavior today any reason to revise their opinions of America as a generous nation bathed in God’s divine grace. As in all things, they will find inspiration in the example of Ronald Reagan, who in one of his daily radio broadcasts in 1975 spun an allegory that let people pretend the cruelty did not exist at all.

Reagan began a broadcast entitled, “Letters to the Editor”:

In these times when so many of us have a tendency to lose faith in ourselves it’s good now and then to be reminded of the good-natured, generous spirit that has been an American characteristic as long as there has been an America.

He then recounted a letter he claimed to have seen from an unnamed American missionary in Vietnam to an unidentified publication.

The reverend described a 20 foot craft adrift in the Gulf of Thailand with no fuel, no food, no water, barely afloat and sinking with its cargo of 82 refugees.

Towering over it was the aircraft carrier the USS Midway. The reference described the Midway as tired. It had already deposited some 2,000 refugees on other ships, refugees who had arrived in more than 500 flights. One flight was a light observation plane not designed for carrier landings. The Midway had moved to up to top speed to enable the pilot to land with an entire family jammed inside the tiny fuselage. There were forty coppers on the deck, brand new F5E fighters and A37s that had carried people who preferred not to be ‘liberated’ by the Communists….

Once onboard they had one question: would they be handed over to an unfriendly government, perhaps to be eventually murdered? The executive office of the ship told him this would not happen. He said, “Our job is to keep you as comfortable as possible, heal the sick, and feed you to your hearts’ content.” That was the official policy of our nation and therefore of the Midway.

He then described a miracle of the loaves and fishes, straight out of the Gospel According to Reader’s Digest:

A tiny baby with double pneumonia was cured. People without clothes were given American clothing. Sailors took the old clothing and washed them for their guests. Pretty soon homeless children were being given piggyback rides on the shoulders of American seamen, and Navy T-shirts bearing the Midway decal began appearing on the little ones… Ads went into the ship’s paper asking for toys. Charity begat more charity.

He concluded: “In the dark days right after World War II, when our industrial power and military power were all that stood between a war-ravaged world and a return to the dark ages, Pope Pius XII said, ‘America has a genius for great and unselfish deeds. Into the hands of America God has placed the destiny of an afflicted mankind.’”

“I think those young men on the Midway have reassured God that he hasn’t given us more of an assignment than we can handle.”

In its eight years in Southeast Asia, the USS Midway had served as a death-dealing juggernaut—a launching pad for air strikes responsible for killing thousands, perhaps millions, of civilians. Listening to Ronald Reagan, you could imagine its only role had been rescuing widows and orphans. That the entire war had been about rescuing widows and orphans. Others told you Vietnam was a crime, a waste—or, at best, something very, very complex. It took Ronald Reagan to explain how simple the whole thing was. Charity begetting more charity: how could it have happened any other way?

The Invisible Bridge is now available in paperback, by the way. Pick up a copy, and read tomorrow’s news today, in just the way it went down 40 years ago.

Rick Perlstein is the Washington Spectator’s national correspondent.

This piece originally appeared in The Washington Spectator.

Photo: Pakistani migrants and other refugees and migrants walk off an overcrowded raft at a beach on the Greek island of Lesbos November 16, 2015. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis

Back To The Dark Side: Dick Cheney’s Pax Americana

Back To The Dark Side: Dick Cheney’s Pax Americana

This book review originally appeared in The Washington Spectator.

—

The former vice president’s latest book smacks of sedition.

Exceptional, the new book from former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, Liz, is not. It is nothing more than an unhinged rant that smacks of sedition.

“The children need to know the truth about who we are, what we’ve done, and why it is uniquely America’s duty to be freedom’s defender,” the prologue proclaims. The book, however, is not about who we are but who Cheney wants us to become. It is a call for Americans to reject constitutional government and those values that have guided our nation for 227 years and replace it with imperial rule in the name of “freedom”––even when that rule includes wars of choice, intrusive violations of our privacy and civil liberties, and of course, an aggressive regime of torture.

Part One begins with Uncle Dick recounting how “the American Century” has been marked by a fight that he and a few other white-hatted cowboys have waged to keep the world safe for “freedom.” In Cheney’s telling, pro-war and wartime leaders were strong and “right,” and the others weak and feckless. World War II is reduced to: “We liberated millions and achieved the greatest victory in the history of mankind, for the good of all mankind. America––the exceptional nation––had become freedom’s defender.”This review assumes that Exceptional represents Dick Cheney’s ideas, and so we will refer to the author only in the singular. (To the extent the book reflects Liz’s original thinking, consider it a mind meld.)

Manichean World View

In Cheney’s Manichean worldview, Truman was right to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, and Eisenhower’s farewell speech was not a warning of the growing power of the military-industrial complex as is commonly understood, but, rather, a strong endorsement of it. Reagan’s unwillingness to give up America’s right to missile defense (SDI) was “an exercise of diplomacy that should be studied by all future policy makers.” Obama’s foreign policy strategy is simply, “don’t do stupid stuff.”

Left out of Cheney’s idyllic tale of American exceptionalism in that era are such inconvenient freedom-defending events as the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953 and the imposition of the oppressive Shah who ruled with an iron fist until his downfall in 1978; the overthrow of the democratically elected Allende government in Chile, replaced by the military dictator, Pinochet; the Reagan administration’s support of the Contras in Central America in the 1980s; and the slavish support of African dictators like Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko.

Cheney conflates the Gulf War, conducted when he was George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense, with the Iraq War (“We were right in 1991 and we were right in 2003.”) but without noting important differences. The Gulf War was a true coalition off the willing, with 32 nations contributing forces operating under the authority of the United Nations and very specific Security Council resolutions, and the rest of the world paying 90 percent of the war’s costs. At its conclusion, the United States was at the pinnacle of its power, which it used to advance the cause of conflict resolution in the region. By contrast, the Iraq War was essentially a United States operation to remove Saddam with limited support, no U.N. resolution, and the entire cost borne by the United States. The consequences are abundantly clear: the region is in chaos, overrun by the same brutal terrorists and radical forces that the Cheney doctrine was supposed to eliminate.

Cheney’s selective memory is again on display as he recounts the events surrounding 9/11. Absent are the infamous CIA memo of August 2001,“Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US,” the reports of missed signals such as suspicious pilot training, and the fact that the CIA was on the highest possible alert while Bush was cutting brush in Texas and Cheney fishing in Wyoming.

The recounting of the war on Afghanistan is rich in bravado (“we have to work the dark side”) and ultimatums (“the Taliban will turn over the terrorists or share their fate”), but poor on facts. Cheney omits the meeting at Camp David where Paul Wolfowitz kept turning the conversation from Afghanistan to Iraq; the directive Bush gave to Richard Clarke to go back and find some link between 9/11 and Saddam; and Donald Rumsfeld’s observation that there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan and that we should consider bombing Iraq. There is no discussion of the pivot to Iraq just when we were on the verge of finding Bin Laden.

Defending Torture

Cheney then turns to a vigorous defense of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the torture policies he championed. Rather than share with the reader the influence he and his key staffers exerted on the decision-making process, Cheney instead recounts the statements of Democrats who voted to support the war, spreading the blame. He neglects to mention the massive propaganda operation directed by the White House or the fact that the whole case was built on lies. Other omissions: Yellowcake, aluminum tubes, mobile bioweapon labs, 9/11 attacker Atta’s supposed meeting with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague, and intelligence conclusions cooked up in the Pentagon Office of Special Plans and foisted on Colin Powell by Cheney’s chief of staff Scooter Libby for presentation to the United Nations. Instead, “History will be the ultimate judge of our decision to liberate Iraq,” Cheney tells us, “and it is important for future decision makers that those debates be based on facts.” But only those facts he cares to share.

Smearing Obama

By the end of Part One Cheney has fully transitioned from defender of the indefensible to bare-knuckled attacker of President Obama. The Cheney snarl is on full display as he engages in an extended personal smear, complete with dog-whistle comments questioning the president’s patriotism and allegiance. The tirade is a new low, even for those of us who have personally experienced the depths to which Cheney will go to destroy an adversary. The opening paragraph of Part Two says it all: “The . . . level of self-regard was apparent, as was his underlying belief that America had played a malign role in the the world . . . . He [Obama] assessed the last fifty years of American foreign policy through the lens of Indonesia, a nation he called ‘the land of my childhood.’”

“Where some see an exceptional nation, unmatched in the history of the world in our goodness and our greatness, in our contributions to global freedom, justice and peace,” Cheney writes, “Barack Obama sees a nation with at best a ‘mixed’ record.”

Cheney combs the record for every quote and factoid that might be used to undermine the authority and legitimacy of the administration. Former senior intelligence officials are selectively quoted to criticize President Obama’s decision to end the torture program. Cheney would have us believe that

Ending programs that kept us safe, revealing the details about those programs to the terrorists, and spreading untruths about our policies was misguided, unjust, and highly irresponsible. . . . President Obama, having so consistently distorted the truth about the enhanced interrogation program and the brave Americans who carried it out, is in no position to lecture anyone about American values.

The personal attacks are unremitting and obnoxious, but they have a purpose: to whip up resentment, hatred, and every other base emotional reaction that makes civil discourse impossible. It is sedition, plain and clear.

One example is the Benghazi tragedy, where Cheney cannot resist offering his own interpretation: “At the most fundamental level it is the difference between being honest about what happened in Benghazi . . . and adopting a false narrative because it serves political purposes. It is the difference between lying to the American people and dealing with them truthfully—which is what we deserve.” The irony drips from the words.

Cheney saves his harshest attack for the Iran nuclear deal, flatly accusing the president of lying to the American people. The most comprehensive arms control deal with the most intrusive inspection regime ever negotiated, it is a deal not just between the United States and Iran but between the world and Iran, unanimously approved by the U.N. Security Council and lauded by nuclear arms specialists worldwide. To Cheney it is presidential “falsehoods.”

After concluding “In the seventy years since World War II, no American president has done more damage to our nation’s defenses than Barack Obama,” Cheney’s solution to Obama’s perfidy is simple but profoundly disturbing: return to the past failed policies. He advocates massive additional infusions of money to the Pentagon, abandonment of key agreements, further attacks on civil liberties, and imposition of an American Diktat on the rest of the world, by force of arms if necessary. It is difficult to imagine a more ill-advised approach to American national security or international relations.

Exceptional deserves to be dismissed and ignored, except that to ignore it is to risk that the subversive ideas therein actually gain some currency, if left unchallenged. They are an affront to our history, to our values, to our culture, and must be fought.

—

Valerie Plame is the author ofFair Game: How a Top CIA Agent Was Betrayed by Her Own Government,and two works of fiction.

Joe Wilson is a retired career United States diplomat and author ofThe Politics of Truth: A Diplomat’s Memoir: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity. In 2003, Plame’s identity as a covert CIA officer was betrayed in retaliation for an article by her husband, Ambassador Wilson, critical of the Bush administration’s lies that led to the Iraq war. Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, was later convicted on four counts of obstruction of justice and perjury in the matter.

Photo: Former Vice President of the United States Dick Cheney, presenting former United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, at CPAC 2011 in Washington, D.C, the “Defender of the Constitution Award.” Taken on February 10, 2011. (Gage Skimore via Flickr.)

This originally appeared in the October 1, 2015 print edition of The Washington Spectator.

Trumping One Too Many Bankruptcies

Trumping One Too Many Bankruptcies

[This piece originally appeared inThe Washington Spectator.]

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