Dumber and Dumber and Dumbest
Nick Kristof on the noble history of containment:
So it’s useful to conjure a conservative war hero like Dwight Eisenhower and consider what he would do if he were president today. After his experience with Hitler, Ike would stand up to the lily-livered pussy-footing peaceniks and squish Saddam Hussein like a bug, right?
No, probably not.
Eisenhower, who led the European Allies to victory in World War II and was president from 1953 to 1961, faced a crisis in Egypt similar to today’s and effectively chose containment rather than invasion. Likewise, even when faced with the threat of weapons of mass destruction, President John F. Kennedy chose to contain Cuba rather than invade it, and President Ronald Reagan chose to contain Libya rather than invade it. I hope we have the courage and discipline to emulate such restraint by Eisenhower, Kennedy and Reagan today and choose containment over war for Iraq.
Eqypt was “effectively contained” by Eisenhower?!? The same Eqypt whose same leader, Nasser, went on to launch two wars of aggression against Israel? If anyone kept Egypt contained, it was defeat at the hands of the Israeli Defense Forces in ’67 and ’73 — and the 1973 war was a very close call.
Kennedy chose to contain Cuba? The same Kennedy who gave the go-ahead to the Bay of Pigs invasion? The same Kennedy who plotted with his brother, the attorney general, the kill Castro? The same Kennedy who threatened to land Marines on Cuban beaches?
Reagan chose to contain Libya? Libya finally cut down on the mischief-making when Reagan very nearly and very personally killed Khadaffy’s very own person in a 1986 bombing raid.
Nick might want to read a newspaper now and then. I hear he works for one — just not very hard.
Perhaps a dictionary would be a better investment for him?
Although, you have to admit, his creative writing skills are top notch.
Which two wars? 56 and 67? I think not.
You might want to read a newspaper now and then. The Bay of Pigs invasion and the attempts on Castro’s life failed. Castro is still in power, but contained.
I gotta add – The same Kennedy who chucked the Monroe Doctrine in a secret deal with Kruchev. There’s more, but what the hell.
To be accurate, the Yom Kippur War in ’73 was launched by Sadat, not Nasser. Nasser “faded away” because of a heart attack in 1970. What took his place wasn’t much better, at least not until several years later.
I think we’re going to look back at this time in astonishment at the willful way nukes are simply airbrushed out of any discussion like this, so that containment (which has, in a sense, worked since 1991) remains equally workable forever because gee whiz, it sure is lucky nobody has invented a bomb which lets the dictator out of the box by its very existence and gives him the chance to start calling the shots!
I just hope that the reason we don’t look back at this time in astonishment is because there are 50 Saddams with bombs causing endless trouble (or trouble that does, finally, come to an end).
Well said, Stephen.
Clark: Yes, they failed. But they were attempts at a polciy other than containment, which is the point, is it not? Not what happened, but what was tried.
(Kristof’s article has significant problems in its analogies, as well. Iraq is different from Egypt and Cuba in important ways – Sadat wasn’t gassing people and (at the time – Ike was in power before the attacks on Israel) attacking his neighbors. And, well, Cuba was a proxy of KJruschev’s nuclear-armed USSR. One of the points of intervening in Iraq is to prevent nuclear proliferation. Honestly, what’s Kirstof thinking?)
It would be nice if folks remembered something:
We accepted containment as a policy, because the presence of a nuclear-armed Soviet Union gave us little other choice. At the end of the day, we were not prepared to run the risk of losing one or more cities in the United States, and probably several cities in Western Europe.
Containment was not exactly chosen because it was the most desirous, “best” policy, but because it was the most desirous, “best” policy available.
Moreover, the debate between relatively loose containment (originally proposed by Kennan) and tight containment (as actually done) rested in no small part on the idea of REGIME CHANGE. As in, we wanted it to lead to REGIME CHANGE of the Soviet Union. Isn’t that surprising? Not long-term living w/ the same leadership, certainly not just accepting that leadership ad infinitum, but containment for the sake of changing a leadership, because we can’t afford to risk blowing them off the map.
Before everyone starts gettin’ nostalgic for containment, too, it might be useful to remember a few words, like “Berlin” and “duck-and-cover”.
Or, how about Vietnam? As in a war fought, in order to show we were credible, so that our nuclear deterrent was viewed as credible? ‘Cuz, remember kiddies, containment ain’t free. There’s a price you pay, called “supporting your credibility.”
Or Pershing II and cruise missiles? Remember Greenham Common? All those 1980s protests over the nuclear freeze? And why we did all that? It was called “credibility” and “containment.”
Amazing how short the human memory is sometimes…..
Very trenchant, Dean….
Well said Dean. In a very real sense, we were contained into not invading Cuba by Soviet missiles, much as we are similarly blocked from action in North Korea by their nuclear arsenal. We didn’t blockade Cuba because Kennedy had a greater respect for international law than Bush, but because we would have lost Berlin and perhaps a lot more if we would have invaded.
I dislike second-guessing Ike, but given the mischief that Nasser managed to cause in the fourteen years after the Suez crisis, I don’t have much of a problem saying that he might have made the wrong call this particular time. The Bay of Pigs wasn’t exactly one of his finer moments either, since it was mostly planned on his watch. JFK deserves his share of the blame for not giving the plan adequate support once he decided to go ahead with it, but it probably would have failed regardless of the presence of air support. Great men can make blunders, and Ike had his share of them.
When I read this yesterday, I did a quick scan through it and didn’t find the word “soviet” anywhere. How anyone could talk about the “containment” of Cuba, or even Egypt for that matter, without it amazes me…
We “contained” Cuba.
But when Cuba threatened us with weapons of mass destruction, we risked nuclear war to get them removed. Cuba is no longer a threat. But Iraq is a threat, and one that won’t be stopped by threatening mutual assured destruction. (WMD will be of course delivered by a third party, not by Iraqi missles which could be tracked).
Unlike Iraq, which can “import” illegally thru Syria and Jordan, cuba was an island. So quarantine worked. Sanctions did not stop WMD being hidden in Iraq, nor verify that they were removed. It’s easier to see a large Russian missle with a U2 than a 1 inch vial of monkeypox….
Since 12 years have not removed WMD, then perhaps war is the only answer
He’s also wrong about Ike. Whatever people want to read into Ike’s “military-industrial complex” speech, he was hardly an isolationist — he threatened nukes all but publically during the 1958 Taiwan crisis.
And, to be sure, the CIA in the 1950s was at their… how can we say…. most controversial. We pushed over a lot of governments in the 1950s because Ike, among others, thought that it was far preferable to actual warfare.
Ike wouldn’t have contained Saddam, he’d have orchestrated a coup.
Ike’s treatment of the Suez Canal crisis had much more to do with the U.K. and France than Nasser. As Dean wrote above, our “credibility was at stake” in controlling the counter-productive actions of a couple of countries in our coalition who were still in the death throes of their colonial empires.
The most important thing on his plate at the time was the Soviets. Basically, Kristof’s comparison of that situation to this one is completely off base.
As has been said, the reason we didn’t invade Cuba was NOT because JFK didn’t want to (or that it wasn’t the right thing to do). It was because the Soviets would have responded with nuclear weapons against us. So it was nuclear blackmail that prevented us from asserting our right to self defense (and in the process prevented us from liberating Cuba from a tyrannical, murderous dictator who still plagues that nation with his very existence).
Imagine how life in Cuba would be today if we had liberated Cuba from Castro in the 60′s…
What Kristoff fails to factor in is the cost of inaction (or containment). In the case of Cuba, the price of ‘containment’ has been decades of oppression, tyranny, torture, and
remaining a third (or fourth) world country.
Cubans in Angola? Didn’t happen. 30,000 Cuban troops in 1976. Just a little puff of the imagination. Just a little dream cloud of folly. Cuba was, after all, contained.
Kristof needs to be moved to the comic pages. His writing is pure fiction.
There is/was nothing *to* contain in Cuba. The missiles were Soviet and the blockade prevented shipment. Without Soviet nukes Castro’s Cuba is a worthless hunk of rock. That’s why so many of its residents are in Florida now.
Libya wasn’t contained, it was more or less scared straight. A massive bombing raid showed a two bit dictator that WMD wasn’t in his best interest. Result: a quiet Libya, nothing to contain.
You only contain countries that have something to contain, and when it’s too dangerous to go in and take it out. (such as the USSR) Iraq is on the brink of developing long range nukes. Are we going to “contain” them until they have the opportunity to finish?
Kristof is not only historically inaccurate, his argument doesn’t even make sense.
“Reagan chose to contain Libya? Libya finally cut down on the mischief-making when Reagan very nearly and very personally killed Khadaffy’s very own person in a 1986 bombing raid.”
Is that what the Reagan administartion told you? If you mean Muammar Qadafi, he is alive and kicking, having recently consoled a sobbing Californian(?) beauty queen. Looked very touching on the TV. The raid killed his 15 months old adoptive daughter.
Re Miranda
It’s not what the Reagan administration told us – it is what it did to Qadafi.
I rather like the way Grenada and Panama were contained. Not Ike
>?!? The same Eqypt whose same leader, Nasser, went on to launch two wars of aggression against Israel? If anyone kept Egypt contained, it was defeat at the hands of the Israeli Defense Forces in ’67 and ’73 — and the 1973 war was a very close call.
Nasser died in 1970. Sadat was responsible for the Yom Kippur War.
Miranda,
I saw that too. Kadaffy is still alive, but the air raids did kill K-daffy’s son or daughter (I can’t remember which). I assumed that Green simply had a typo and meant to type “son” rather than “person”.
very nearly.. some of you guys have reading problems…
reagan very nearly and very personally killed khddaffy (who the f knows how to spell arab names)
as in reagan ordered it personally, it was purely an assassination attempt, and it came really fing close to working…
oh wait, us doesn’t assassinate leaders (hahahahha)
get the shot, take the shot… us needs to take more shots… it’ll keep people’s heads down!
Saying that the US “contained” Cuba is a little like saying that NATO contained Czechoslovakia. Those were Soviet missles, not Cuban. This real issue was between the US and the USSR.
Besides, looking at it another way, those missles, despite their eventual removal, served to contain the US. They kept Casto from suffering the same fate as his counterparts in Panama and Grenada.
Well, it’s a whole lot worse than, as Mr. Green puts it, Nick failing to read newspapers. Indeed, the very problem is that he did read one; he then shamelessly ripped it off, without attribution. Maybe not plagiarism in a literal sense, but it’s close enough.
The particulars: on 2/17/03 Barry Rubin wrote in the Jerusalem Post: “Perhaps the most interesting historical analogy I can think of, which I have never seen cited by anyone else, is the 1956 Suez war. In that year England, France, and Israel, each for its own reasons, came to the conclusion that Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser was a threat to the region’s stability and must be stopped lest he become leader of the entire Arab world and set off a series of wars, revolutions and coups.” (link here, and scroll down: http://www.aijac.org.au/updates/Feb-03/180203.html#Article%203)
Rubin, because he’s more sensible, had a more sensible observationthan Kristof: “And despite the fact that he had been saved by the US, Nasser promoted anti-Americanism throughout the region. The ideology he promoted radical Pan-Arab nationalism continues to dominate the Arab world 33 years after his death.” But that is hardly the point, which is that the analogy is due to Rubin’s heavy lifting, and that Kristof’s lifting was of a much different sort.
Someone mentioned Granada above, but did not mention that that invasion was fundamentally a battle between the U.S. and Cuba. The casualty figures speak to this: ~20 Americans dead, ~50 dead Granadians, and 30 dead Cubans.
Watching the leaps and flips of dopey newspaper columnists is more fun than the Olympics.
Kristof’s next career — a pretzel twister.
Containment failed period. The Communist block expanded for thirty odd years. No country taken by the communists regained its freedom till Reagan ended the policy and hit back in the 80s. Once confronted they folded. But the list of countries that fell after “containment” began is immrepessive-China. Tibet, NVietnam, SVietnam, Loas, Cambodia, Cuba, Somilia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Mozambique, Angola, etc.
Nassar fought two wars against the state of Isreal and also enbgaged in wars in Yemen and Aden. In Cuba’s case the failure was seen in tens of thousands of Cuban troops in Africa, the wars of liberation in Peru, Boliva, Columbia, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador. Gee what would he have accomplished had he not been contained?
It was the failure of Eisenhower and Kennedy’s policies that allowed radical Arabism and the communist penetration of the Western hemisphere. In 1980 there were few, least of all in the politboro who did not feel that the tide of history was not flowing in Communism’s favor. It is amazing that the clear vision and insight of one man aided by a few other noble leaders changed the course of history despite the ‘Realpolitic” of Nixon, Kissenger, Ford, Carter and Clinton.
So the right-wing jumps on Kristof. And right off, the lead jumper gets his facts wrong. Even after someone points our the factual error, more right-wingers repeat the factual error. Typical right-wing stuff.
And toward the end, there is this: “Watching the leaps and flips of dopey newspaper columnists is more fun than the Olympics. ”
Yes, but not as much fun as reading right-wing misstatement of facts and the general excitement.
Actually, that’s wrong, it’s tedious.
Fred wrote:
“As has been said, the reason we didn’t invade Cuba was NOT because JFK didn’t want to…. It was because the Soviets would have responded with nuclear weapons against us.”
Actually, the problem was Soviet missiles pointed at Turkey, not at us. Sort of a tit-for-tat: we go after Cuban missiles in the name of “self-defense” and they go after Turkish missiles.”
“Imagine how life in Cuba would be today if we had liberated Cuba from Castro in the 60′s…”
Maybe like it was under Batista? Or maybe not. Are we supposed to guess, or just imagine.
BTW, Hudson wrote that “Libya wasn’t contained, it was more or less scared straight.”
I’m not sure what you think the difference is. If you mean that the U.S. kept Libya from expanding by exerting all sorts of pressure on it, then it was contained, right? If you mean that Qadafi completely stopped sponsoring terrorism and engaging in other adventures, then you might want to review the post-Reagan history of U.S. complaints against Libya.
Ahh, Mr. Jackson, a fellow Reagan man. The short stick he gets for saving the freakin world astonishes me. M
I saw this email on a list. I don’t live in TX anymore but would love to hear about this event – if you report on it send me the URL and I’ll post it on Kesher Talk. Feel free to forward to other TX bloggers.
Judith
Good job. Kristof is a fatuous ass.
A few weeks ago he suggested diverting money into our educational system in lieu of invading Iraq as a way of shoring up national security!