WHO IS RESPONSIBLE? IN ONE OF HIS COLUMNS, EDGAR ANSEL MOWRER PROTESTS About the use of we in such statements as We older people have made a mess of world affairs and should now shut up and leave matters to the younger generation. Whos we, anyhow? he inquires. At the most, it was they who made the errors, though we all pay the price for those errors. But who are they? In an earlier presidential race, candidate Kennedy lashed out with a body blow at his opponent: U.S. prestige today is at an all-time low! he claimed. There was a logical counter for candi- date Nixon. Yes, and when did it all start? The discussion would have gone on to show that the original errors were made under Roosevelt, compounded under Truman; that the sell-out of Yalta and other similar meetings with Stalin, followed by the spirit of Potsdam and Good old Joe, followed by the lack of support for Chiang Kai-shek in China, followed by the sabotaging of victory in Korea, could only lead to the subsequent and conse- quent errors committed under Eisenhower, who gave us an armistice in Korea, the Suez fiasco in Egypt, the Russian tanks in Hungary, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, Castro in Cuba. Instead, candidate Nixon chose to fight it out on the old Union line with the claim that American prestige abroad had never been higher, something that made even the chickens laugh. Two sayings come to mind. One is The evil that men do lives after .thern. The other one is in the form of a childrens jingle that starts: For want of a nail the shoe was lost, and goes on to the loss of the horse, the rider, the message, the battle, the war and the nation. In foreign policy, we have made one mistake after another. Mistake, of course, is a charitable interpretation. There was no need for concessions to Stalin during the war. Stalin had far more to fear from the Nazis than we did, and he knew it. We could have insisted on the liberation of all of Europe, instead of giving up the eastern half to Communism. We could have taken all of Germany and reunified it (or not reunified it) to nuit ourselves. We could have occupied Berlin, Prague and Budapest. We could have insisted that the Russians stay out of the Japanese war, of which they had wanted no part until Japan was ready to capitulate. Why didnt we? No one knows. Later on, we could at least have stopped the Chinese Reds at the line of the Yangtze, by sending some real naval forces, not just: the two British gunboats that had to run the gauntlet, up that river. I recall making the suggestion to a liberal friend, and the look of shocked surprise that overspread his face. Oh, we couldnt do that! he protested. Why not? Some people had the idea of taming Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Reds, just as later they had the idea of turning Castro into a tower of democracy. Neither worked out. We had our second chance at the Chinese Reds when they joined the North Korean aggressors. We could have unleashed our bombs on their bases beyond the Yalu, and Chiang Kai-shek on their southern flank. We preferred a stalemate. This time the blame went to our allies, because Korea was, after all, a UN police action, not an American enterprise. Then we wondered why our soldiers in Korea were confused, demoralized, and an easy prey for Communist propaganda. They had foolishly thought they were risking their lives to win a war, as America had always won all wars, not just to hold a parallel. The story continues with an anticolonialism policy that resulted in Dien Bien Phu and a divided Vietnam, Sukarno (the self-pro- claimed Lenin of Southeast Asia) in Indonesia, Nasser in Egypt, Nkrumah in Ghana, Ben Bella and Boumedienne in Algeria. There was the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, the invasion to overthrow Castro that apparently had the support of our CIA but not of our Air Force, withdrawn at the last moment because somebody was afraid of the bad impression it would make on the Latin nations. So we later had Russian missiles in Cuba. There was a teetering that has cost us or may cost us Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. There is an Alliance for Progress that proves only that the more aid we give the more they dislike us. There is an American UN policy that antagonizes good allies who are also founding members of that organization, Belgium and France and Holland and Portugal and South Africa, in favor of nations that are either uncommitted or hostile, and that should not have been admitted for another fifty years at least, until they had had time to grow up. After each one of these mistakes, after the loss of each new land to Communism, the official attitude is: Too bad! Something went wrong! Well, better luck next time! So far, we have been lucky enough to have had a next time. One never gets to find out exactly who is responsible for each mistake. Ultimate responsibility rests with the President who hap pens to be in the White House, but the President has to be ad- vised. By whom? There are countries where the punishment for errors is the same as for treason. Fortunately, we are not that kind of country. But is it too much to ask that the people responsible for the errors get out, and let someone else have a try at running the foreign policy? Or must we go on from one error to the next until we are worn down to the point where nobody trusts, re- spects or fears us, and the Communists take us over by default?
Posted on: Wed, 29 Oct 2014 03:40:10 +0000
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