Thank you, Mr. Ellsberg, for continuing your witness. This is a beautiful piece of writing, and you're indispensable.

Please take good care of yourself: I'm afraid you'll be needed for some time to come.

http://www.votestrike.com/general_strike

I will read it Mr. Ellsberg. Thank you for bringing it to out attention.

One point: You cannot possibly expect GWB to read anything more complex than My Pet Goat and understand it. As for others -- they have something to gain by not learning from the past. They have something to gain by repeating what normal people can easily see are catastrophes. The question is, what do they gain? What has been gained by the destruction of Iraq? Perhaps that it is now in no position to kick out the Americans or protect its oil from our rapacious oil companies? Of course, you have to wonder what we gained from destroying Viet Nam. There, I have no idea. Maybe it was just to make big bucks for the Military-Industrial Complex. Those bastards made out like bandits. Just like in Iraq. Open-ended lucrative contracts all over the place. If we'd done the invasion of Iraq intelligently (oxymoron) we'd all be home now and the spigots would be turned off. Too many people making too much money off Iraq. More money off Afghanistan and Iran. Though I really think if we mess with Iran we will be putting our big fat American feet in a real bear trap. The consequences will outweigh any possible benefit to the MIC.

But there's another possibility. Arrogance. Don't tell me that ass Kissinger isn't arrogant. Why should he read what someone else has learned when he is so intelligent and informed and wise himself? Bush has the arrogance of the exceedingly stupid man. He's too dumb to know how dumb he really is. It's pitiful, really. But people who lust for power and reach positions of power tend to think well of their abilities, and poorly of the abilities of others. There's no telling what motivates a scumball like Cheney but he doesn't strike me as the sort to take advice from anyone, past or present.

Sorry Dr. Ellsberg. You're right on. It's the world that's off.

Vietnam did not prevent Iraq. Iraq will not prevent the next attempt at imperial expansion and conquest, whereever and whenever that takes place. If the gooks and the wogs didn't think Uncle Sam's dick is long enough and thick enough, despite repeated viewings, then perhaps there is some other seemingly weak and helpless nation where we can pull our pants down and pathetically and lethally attempt to impress. As long, of course, as there's a buck in it.

ACC,
you got it, this country keeps fighting wars of agression to fill the pockets of the MIC. There is not better explanation.

Iraq is worse than Vietnam. There is money there, trillions of it, and the president's friends have been given the keys to it. It is up to our young brave soldiers to secure all of it for these greedy animals. This will keep us in Iraq much much longer than Vietnam and the consequences for ordinary Americans will be a catastrophe, but not for these greedy animals. They will skim the best of the profits at the cost of much blood, then retire to the beaches of Dubai.

ACC: Why look for either or answers, it's both and more! Arrogance, profit-seeking, and... the stories the generations tell each other, as July 4 demonstrates. So long as fathers glorify war to their sons, MANY will follow in their foot steps. So long as the parallels are not drawn with respect to the folly of war from land to land, time to time, the insanity may continue. But the profit motive is most obscene, as since WW II seems to me the merchants of doom have realized that if and when the US economy falters, killing is always HOW to make a KILLING ($).

Mr. Ellsberg also sets a VITAL example. Because he lived to see the error of his pro-militarism initial ways/stance, he provides a basis for "recovery" for other war-beltway insiders. Let us hope more and more follow his example.

In addition, his stating that BOTH political parties supported M.A.D one way or another tells us without hyperbole that our so-called representatives have put the MIC first, and thus compromised safety, sanity and sustainability for all.

I'm sure that :Flirting With Disaster" will be a worthwhile read but sadly, the whole notion that society can learn from past mistakes is (IMO) both futile and wishful thinking. Only a "person" can learn from past mistakes, because the consequences are personal. Society does not think as a person. In fact, society does not think at all - society simply follows "persons" who lead them. Society does not think it terms of having made mistakes. It thinks in terms of leaders who made mistakes. Sometimes the leaders do get punished but American society has yet to be truly punished, for their leader's mistakes - as have others like the Europeans and the Japanese. Americans will only learn from mistakes when they themselves suffer (personally) the consequences of those mistakes.

There is no question in my mind that the mistake of Vietnam and Iraq will be repeated in Iran and again and again until America truly gets its nose bloodied badly.

People, generally, do not learn from their "mistakes." Organizations are nothing more than groups of people. The organization is not the problem.

And it's more about people and their egos and their inability to admit mistakes than some sort of "anti-learning" phenomenon. When Clifford warned Johnson that his plan was destined to fail catastrophically, Johnson's ego was so dented, he felt he had to prove he was "right." And when he finally realized he wasn't, he quit in disgrace, which was the only way of admitting he totally f**ked up without having to actually admit it.

Bush, as we know, claims to have never, ever made a mistake, and every time someone tries to point out that one of his nutty plans is a serious mistake, he doubles-down to prove them wrong; then, no matter what happens, he claims victory.

That's not anti-learning. That's psychosis.

ACC -- Excellent points.

SIOUXROSE -- Excellent expansions to ACC's points.

JOHN C. -- A fine, if unintended, summary of group think dynamics. I assume you meant in your last paragraph to mean something more like: "...until enough Americans truly get their individual noses bloodied badly."

FRANK 1569 -- Fine meta points to everyone else's points.
I would only say to your meta points that I hope the personal pyschoses of our worst rulers don't indicate some kind of built-in trope toward psychotic leadership in the mass of average people.
The evidence adduced to date on this latter question, presented by psychohistorians, suggests it is a culture-based set of non-authoritarian child-rearing norms that determines the grounding of sane humanist values --in any society.

Psychohistorians have an interesting website, easily accessed by Googling the word -- "psychohistory."

RE: IRAQ NOT A "MISTAKE" - THEREFORE, 'LEARNED LESSON' UNLIKELY

I remember watching Daniel Ellsberg speak on the Boston Common, a few months before the so-called "Gulf War." It's a memory I value. Ellsberg is one of a handful of heroes for me. Good man.

But, as others have noted, I question the analogy of 'learning from mistakes.' In my view, the invasion of Iraq - though driven by a number of things - was foremost based on a political calculation that a hot 'war on terror' would - like the Cold War - shut up political opposition and allow the right to drive American politics further to the right.

Not oil, not first, at least - but political calculation. This did not have to be said by the Executive branch - or by mass followers - to be understood and practiced.

The idea comes up, periodically, from other political commentators. See following posts.

IRAQ: NOT 'OIL GRAB' BUT 'DOMESTIC PUTSCH' - NO MISTAKE

THOMAS HARTMANN:

"It wasn't just a war for oil - cheap oil was just a useful secondary benefit.
It wasn't just a war against terrorism - that was just a convenient excuse.
It wasn't just a war to enrich Bush's and Cheney's cronies - those were just pleasant by-products.
It wasn't just a war to show Poppy Bush that Junior was more of a man than him - that was just a personal bonus for Dubya.
It was, pure and simple, well planned years in advance, a war to solidify Bush and the Republican Party's political capital.
It was a war for political power."
MORE:
http://www.thomhartmann.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=82&Itemid=38

IRAQ INVASION - NOT MISTAKE LEADING TO 'DISASTER,' BUT USED FOR POLITICAL PUTSCH

DAVID LINDORFF:

It seems ever more likely to me that this whole mess was no blunder at all.
People are wont to attribute the whole thing to lack of intelligence on the president's part, and to hubris on the part of his key advisers. I won't argue that the president is a lightweight in the intellect department, nor will I dispute that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and that whole neocon gang have demonstrably lacked the virtues of reflection and humility. But that said, I suspect that the real story of the Iraq War is that Bush and his gang never really cared whether they actually would "win" in Iraq. In fact, arguably, they didn't really want to win.
What they wanted was a war.
If the war they started had ended quickly with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, that would have served their purposes, at least for the short term. Bush would have emerged from a short invasion and conquest a national hero, would have handily won re-election in 2004, and would have gone on to a second term as a landslide victor. But if it went badly, as it has, they figured he would still come out ahead. He would be a wartime president, and he'd make full use of that role, expansively misdefining his "commander in chief" title to imply authority over the Congress and the courts, to grab power heretofore unheard of for a president.
This, I suspect, was the grand strategy underlying the attack on Iraq.
MORE: DAVID LINDORFF
http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0120-29.htm

I think it's fairly simple why Johnson went along despite the sdvice urging him to stay out of Vietnam; He wanted to keep his brains where they were, inside his skull. He saw what happened to his predecessor.

Vietnam was no mistake, nor was Iraq. In Vietnam, we left because the oil drilling done off shore under the cover of the war showed Vietnam did not have as much oil as was thought. In Iraq, we know their is oil and we ain't going anywhere. Anybody who thinks otherwise needs to get off the cool aid.

I agree with most of the comments, but a bigger issue is missing, that is the vector that justifies continued catastrophe.

___ B I G G E R ___ I S S U E ___

The MIC is morphing to a more powerful form, and their greed machine is being purposely lead crumb by crumb,

to dismantle whatever residual government representation us non-corporape entities have, while farming out EVERYTHING to outside corporate contractors.

Soon "War Inc" will be more visible in DC, when Halliburton takes over both the US Post Office and Congress.

These psychopaths in charge have NO OFF button, shame, nor conscience. They want it all …

Namaste « Presence »
« We must be the change we wish to see in the world » — Gandhi
« There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed » — Gandhi
« We adopt the means of nonviolence because our end is a community at peace with itself » — ML King

This time it is control the oil before some other country gets it.
NOTICE HOW MANY OIL companies were in IRAQ BEFORE the invasion but NO American? China, Russia lost billions in the development they sunk into IRAQ. It has nothing to do with costs or how many lives it is control oil at all costs.

Remember what Russia said attack IRAN and it is like attacking Russia.

gutprobe08 say:

"JOHN C. — A fine, if unintended, summary of group think dynamics. I assume you meant in your last paragraph to mean something more like: "…until enough Americans truly get their individual noses bloodied badly."

Yes - that's what I meant. And unfortunately, that only lasts a generation or two. It's why I'm afraid there will never be "peace on earth"

Thank you Daniel for sharing your excellent insight. You are one of the genuine war heroes of the American war against the Vietnamese People.

Analysts like you, and policy makers make rational decisions (right or wrong- good or bad) based upon their world view, however, people will more often than not, follow their leaders, even if it means their own death. People will fight the enemy so designated by their leaders. Emotions like fear and hate pre-empt reason.

During the 1970's when I was in college, I remember listening to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the origins of the American involvement in Vietnam. This was the first time I had heard about the French colonial war of occupation against the Vietnamese People, and the American blunder.

But, in talking with, and listening to returning soldiers and the American public- all they knew was that our war was against World Communism, and we were there to help the Vietnamese. Dis-information and its dissemination were critical to the continuation of that conflict. The American People failed their own system of "democracy" by re-electing Richard Nixon.

Yes. Some people like Atwater, Rove, and Murdock did learn from the Vietnam conflict. They learned that people are easily controlled by withholding information (control the press), and by feeding the emotions of fear and hate.

A few years back I co-taught a course called America's Vietnam War, at a major university in New England. All of the students read two books, with Ellsberg's Secrets being one of them. Like most of the students, I was born after U.S. forces finally withdrew from Viet Nam. We all kept asking ourselves, How can adults who lived through that era go along with what is happening today? History does not repeat itself but people can and do learn from past events. It is just a question of what they do with that knowledge.

I agree wholeheartedly with Ellsberg's analysis---but you can say the same thing for ALL of history and American history. They are full of wisdom paid for in blood---but shit, if we LEARN, we can't go on getting fat on the worst of it! Americans are lazy cowardly sadomasochistic slobs and even prefer what they're doing when they find out that other ways are in fact easier and more rewarding. They would rather die than really learn anything or change, and they are going to get their wish.

Dan says:

"Yes. Some people like Atwater, Rove, and Murdock did learn from the Vietnam conflict."

They also learned from Hitler and Goebbels

" They learned that people are easily controlled by withholding information (control the press), and by feeding the emotions of fear and hate."

Yes - and they also learned those lessons from the Nazis, the Fascists, the Communists, and the many past American governments that certainly practiced the same methods.

Why do we keep thinking that the Bush crowd are different from the governments of Lincoln, T.R., Wilson, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, Reagan,
Bush #1, and Clinton,? They were all the same with respect to "WAR". The Bushes have simply taken it all a "step further".

And historically, it is those kind of people who almost always gravitate to leadership in most nations.

It is obvious that it takes a mentally violent person to become a national leader in this world. True "men of peace" never make it.

So what does that tell us about "us"?

The value of institutional memory is lost in disaster mitigation if the truth is kept out of the current equation, for how can past lessons be applied usefully when they are considered in reference to false pictures of reality? Perhaps this is the very reason that the neocon strategy is to keep the role of the petrodollar out of the public discussion of mideast policy. When we consider the economic reality within which the petrodollar gives value to the US Dollar and thus keeps the US economy afloat despite massive debt, we understand why we are in Iraq, why we are threatening to enter Iran, why we permit speculators to drive the price of oil up as the petrodollar fades. And if the public discussion was permitted to reflect these realities, then we'd immediately see the neocon goal has always been to produce chaos in the mideast and so push the price of oil ever-upwards, and so insulate the US economy, and so we, the public would have the option of calling an end to this and looking for a new and moral basis for policy, one not driven by the interests of wealthy fascists and their corporate bosses.

Thank you, Daniel, for an historical perspective on historical perspective itself. The democratic process must always be heuristic since we are seeking inclusion and also expeditious policy, and history shows that the democratic process is circumvented when the big lie is employed because the lie makes effective timeliness impossible and so the citizenry is disheartened and defers to "deciders" . The good news is that democracy has not failed in modern history - it hasn't been given a chance; the bad news is that America is losing faith in democracy in favor of corporate mediacracy.

How could Bush learn? He even says he doesn't read. I love how he used the BS line I listen to the generals on the ground. But what he doesn't say is that any general who doesn't say what he wants to hear is fired.

Come on Amerika let's elect another Moron in Chief in 2008.

LOCALVORE: Excellent post!

To this interesting discussion I'd like to add something that could well be a blindspot for my intelligent male contributors: machismo. War may count upon the skimpiest circulation of crumbs ($) to the laboring masses, but it equally fuels itself on the false glory of the macho ideal of heroism. (Hillary tried to wear that shirt in her campaign, as an example.) Until a better balance between the relative Divine endowments of BOTH genders is taken into account (that is to say, things as intangible as the "price" of nurture and caring for) this manipulation of the concept of greatness will cleave towards force first, muscular politics, gunboat "diplomacy," a worship of the oily muscle, and Mars rules!

Social sciense have been around for more than a century now. To the benefit of whom?

Who pays the scientists salary? Who employs the best and brightest? Who grants scholarships? Who controls knowledge?

You can learn a lot by watching this intervew with Norman Dodd:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=C8cC21jB9EE&feature=related

ty, rose, nice to see somebody read it :)

the feminine/passivist (not necesarily pacifist) voice is present with Kucinich, as it has been with Gandhi, King, and Mandela, but the corporate mediacracy overwhelms it. how can the message of strength through peace be heard when the feminine is mocked? The macho voice says "no" to "the other", claiming all authority for itself. American politics is now divided between the party of inclusion and the party of exclusion. The Dem/inclusive position is problematic when the media is served by defining issues divisively since inclusiveness denies the idea of a single voice - a single leader: there is no voice of the left, and to the degree that a Dem, such as Obama, attempts to be THE voice he disenfranchises the base, and this is exactly how he is portrayed in the media's horserace. If Obama instead defines change as a resurgence of inclusiveness, where the people are heard and empowered, then perhaps we the people have a chance for greatness once again.

A little off the track of the fine and thoughtful proceeding comments, but something I've been thinking about lately is the place "organization" and "can do" fill in the U.S. psyche.

"Get the job done", American "can do"; or, locally over an issue of a proposed environment damaging dam, "Build it, Dam it!" It's all thoughtless, or I should say thought stops before rational conclusions are reached. The soldiers (all levels) interviewed in Iraq..."We have a job to do" That's it. It covers (or rather ignores) almost everything and defines a peculiar and attenuated version of active "machismo" (thank, Siouxrose) which is somehow tied into U.S. citizens' images of themselves as proudly not requiring more than this characteristic.

This truncated way of thought is easily translated into "business is business"; in fact all of corporate culture is devoted to a worldview that is mostly blind (and, for that reason, destructive). Naturally, those who profit most have no reason, from their point of view, to throw off the blinders anywhere.

To get really philosophical, doing a job without regard to the ultimate consequences or human circumstances *is* an easy way of relating to the world directly and, therefore, has the value of meaning. I'm sure corporate executive Mr. McNamara was happy as a lark drawing up his plans for Southeast Asia. He was "doing his job", "getting things done", feeling like a powerful doer, everything that "makes America great".

When the simple-minded meets the consolidating class of power, massive destruction is the result.

Take a look at Barbara Tuchman's book "The March of Folley". She takes you from the Trojan War (why did they ever bring the horse inside?) to Vietnam (why did Johnson keep pressing a failed policy?). Much has to do with admitting a mistake in the first place. Would Bush ever say "OK. It was a mistake. A gazillion dollars lost and over 4,000 lives tossed away."? So he keeps pressing a failed policy. Watch the guy strut and ask yourself, could he learn anything from his past?

From the Archives- Ellsberg v. Kristol:

The Lost Kristol Tapes: What the New York Times Bought
By Jonathan Schwarz
TomDispatch.com

Thursday 14 February 2008

snip......
"At the time Kristol was merely the son of prominent neoconservative Irving Kristol, former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle (aka "Quayle's brain"), the editor of Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard, and a frequent Fox News commentator. He hadn't yet added New York Times columnist to his resumÈ. Opposite Kristol on the segment was Daniel Ellsberg, famed for leaking the Pentagon Papers in the Vietnam era. Their discussion jumped back and forth across 40 years of U.S.-Iraqi relations, and is easiest to understand if rearranged chronologically......"

http://www.truthout.org/article/jonathan-schwarz-the-lost-kristol-tapes-what-new-york-times-bought