The Billion Dollar Runway

(I am rescheduled to appear on Jonathan Capehart’s show on MSNBC this morning at approximately 925a CDT. I will be talking about the Texas governor and our Covid crisis, but today’s rather long piece below is about American misadventure, war and money. Please share and consider subscribing; it’s free or paid. I like readers of any kind).

“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.” – President Theodore Roosevelt

All wars are about money. To think otherwise, is simply naïve or foolish. When diplomats and international politicians speak about geo-politics, they are really talking about natural resources and labor and what country and corporations will be enriched by forcible acquisition. Historically, America has executed its political will by insisting we are bringing democracy to oppressed peoples. Instead, we often create oppression by trying to deliver democracy at the end of a gun barrel. You simply cannot undo thousands of years of culture by exerting brute force.

There are too many examples of America’s misadventures in the Post World War II era to cover in this one brief note but let me begin with a few that clearly reflect our imperialistic hubris. Because Americans tend to ignore history and run a government that is more reactive than proactive, we often lack context for the antipathy other nations have for our country. We are given a view of Iran, for instance, as a crazed theocratic state that is obsessed with obtaining nuclear technology. While there is no shortage of uncontrolled religious zealots in Iran, the United States has a great responsibility for their rise to power.

Our covert international adventures practically began in Iran under the guidance of President Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson, Kermit. The president, who had an almost unabashed fondness for war, encouraged his sons to enlist and fight in World War I. One of his more repeated quotes claims, “No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war.” The president believed so greatly in the edifying powers of combat that he encouraged his youngest, and by all contemporary accounts, most favorite son, Quentin, to enlist. Quentin became an acclaimed aviator and was shot down over France on Bastille Day. The Germans circulated a picture of his mutilated body to propagandize how easy it was to bring down America’s best pilots. His father, weakened by an infection he had picked up in the Amazon, lost his will to live after Quentin’s death, and was dead within six months. Quentin remains the only son of a U.S. president to ever die in combat.

The family, however, was not exactly politically chastened. Roosevelt’s grandson Kermit joined the CIA to help America shape the post war world and engineered a coup in Iran by overthrowing a democratically elected prime minister. In 2013, the agency finally released classified documents about the plot that tossed out Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and reinstated Shah Reza Pahlavi. Mossadegh had become popular by instituting secular reforms that were social and economic, which included nationalizing Iran’s oil fields to keep the wealth in his country and not in the hands of international extraction industries. The vast reserves had been controlled for decades by the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

England appealed to the U.S. for help, and Roosevelt was dispatched to foment unrest and create a coup. Using American tax dollars, he bought off the media, paid informants, co-opted military leaders, and generally undermined an already democratic nation that was beginning to act pro-western. After Roosevelt and coup planner Donald Wilber succeeded in their meddling, the Shah’s return to power led to a brutal reign of imprisonment and torture. America created and trained his secret police, the SAVAK, which was feared and hated and accused of killing thousands of Iranians who were politically opposed to the Pahlavi regime. In exchange for renewing his control, Pahlavi bought hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of U.S. weapons and provided unfettered access to the rich energy fields of Southwest Iran. His royal house would not have approved such an arrangement without receiving a percentage of the purchase price of every barrel.

When the Iranian Revolution began in 1979, American citizens were both stunned and oblivious. How could the Iranians hate the U.S. so deeply that they would raid our embassy in Teheran and hold 52 of our citizens as hostage for 444 days? The fact that the Shah’s twenty-five-year reign had been about the torture and murder of his countrymen and the plunder of Iran’s natural resources, all facilitated by the CIA, would never occur to Americans busily commuting to work and enjoying backyard barbecues. Their government had laid the foundation for the rise to power of the religious extremist the Ayatollah Khomeini, who founded the current Islamist republic and once said that democracy is the equivalent of prostitution.

We are still dealing with the consequences of that coup. Jimmy Carter was the first political victim. The president ordered an attempted rescue mission by the Marines, but helicopter crashes killed eight of the American servicemen and the plan was cancelled. The attempt elevated Carter to the personification of Satan in the West, a title he already bore because he was president when revolution was launched. Nonetheless, using Algerian diplomats as intermediaries, Carter negotiated a deal with Teheran for the release, which happened on Ronald Reagan’s inauguration day. The failed rescue mission had much to do with Carter’s loss to Reagan and Iran’s timing on the hostage release accrued to the new president’s benefit, by Iranian design. America, ultimately, became infected with a new form of conservatism that has been mutating for decades and has kept the country spinning down a toilet that had Donald Trump at the bottom.

What America’s covert operatives did in the post war landscape was to solidify the positioning of communism as an evil construct that wanted global domination, which was not always far from the truth. There was a certain political convenience, however, which meant that if there were an adversary then there was also a demand for weapons. Preparedness meant profit for defense contractors.

The red threat manifested itself on the Korean Peninsula, and we were back to war about six years after the end of the great global conflict. President Eisenhower, who had articulated fear of the coming military-industrial complex, was concerned about the “Domino Theory,” an unfounded notion that the fall of one country to communism or authoritarianism of any kind would lead to its neighboring nation collapsing under the same political pressures, and would, eventually, bring those dangers to our shores.

The argument was used to justify America’s presence in Vietnam, too. John F. Kennedy, another president who had served in a war, was also concerned about the security of Southeast Asia, and believed there was some credibility to the existential dangers facing American allies in that part of the world. JFK, at a secret meeting in Honolulu in October of 1963, had, however, ordered the beginning of a drawdown of U.S. troops by the end of that year. His National Security Action Memorandum #263 ordered that 1000 American troops be brought home. Historians and cabinet members argued through the years whether the statement signified the president’s intention to pull out of Vietnam, but the memo is clearly not a commitment to increasing presence of combat troops. A copy of the Top-Secret memo was delivered by the CIA to the Secretaries of State and Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was dated the day before JFK was murdered in Dallas.

When LBJ assumed the presidency, American political and military posture changed regarding Vietnam, which was clearly divided into two political entities along the 17th parallel. Our country had not committed to war yet, but President Johnson and his advisors appeared to be looking for an excuse to increase American military presence. On August 4, 1964, they made up a phony rationale with the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. A confused naval commander and inexperienced sonar operators misread radio signals in bad weather as if they were torpedo boats attacking from North Vietnam. The captain of the USS Maddox asked for air support as his guns began to fire at phantom enemy boats.

A pilot from the carrier Ticonderoga, Captain James Bond Stockdale, searched from above as he watched the Maddox firing at nothing. He said the destroyer was “just shooting at phantom targets, there were not PT boats there, nothing but black water and American firepower.” Although an after-action report from the destroyer captain clarified the confusion and indicated the North Vietnamese had done nothing aggressive, LBJ used the incident to get Congress to approve the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to authorize war, which Stockdale decried as patent bullshit.

“We were about to launch a war under false pretenses,” Stockdale said, “In the face of the on-scene military commander’s advice to the contrary.”

LBJ knew the truth but did not care. Stockdale was ordered to lead 18 fighter jets to attack an oil facility along the coast in North Vietnam, which became the first historic assault against the country by the U.S. When government documents and recordings were released in 2005, the American Commander-in-Chief had been proved to be ridiculing the men serving under him.

“Hell, those damn, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish,” LBJ was recorded as saying.

The timing of the Tonkin incident was probably not coincidental. Johnson was about to launch his first campaign for reelection after succeeding JFK and becoming a war time president was certain to rally the country he was leading. He won the biggest popular vote margin by any president since 1820. His dirty little war did not just destroy his presidency, however. More than 58,000 Americans were killed over a decade of guerilla warfare along with an estimated 2 million Vietnamese civilians, 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers, and around 250,000 South Vietnamese troops.

Not because of the Domino Theory, though. They died because of money, and a president who lied to them and the nation they were sworn to protect. They died because of the profit of making Huey helicopters, M-16 rifles, bombs, fighter jets, napalm, building harbors and runways and bases, deploying jeeps, tanks, and half-tracks, manufacturing bullets and grenades, missiles, and rocket launchers. There will never be an accurate measure of the money made by defense contractors on the War in Vietnam. Devoted and courageous American service members, called to the colors, were sacrificed for phony nonsense, betrayed by a president who ridiculed them and used them as grease in a political and military economic machine that needed a war to sustain itself.

I was a boy not yet coming of age when my country began to frighten me. On my eleventh birthday, October 22, 1962, President Kennedy spoke to the nation about the Cuban Missile Crisis. How is a child supposed to understand the entire world was at risk of nuclear devastation because Russia had put missiles in Cuba and JFK had encircled the island with warships to stop further emplacements? The president’s voice on our fluttering black and white TV was stern, almost threatening, and when I tried to get to sleep that night, I lay awake listening to airplanes passing over our little house. We were on the flight path to the airport and every plane that passed over and feathered its engines for approach made me wonder if it were Russian and readying to release a nuclear bomb. We had spent many mornings in elementary school watching defense films and practicing hiding under our desks when air raid sirens sounded, as if the wood and Formica might protect us from nuclear immolation.

I was no less frightened a little over a year later when I climbed the steps onto my school bus and discovered the driver slumped over the steering wheel and crying while listening to her radio.

“What’s wrong, Mrs. Stevens?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

“No.” She did not look up and her voice was muffled in her arms cradling her head. “President Kennedy was murdered in Dallas.”

“What? You can’t kill a president, can you?”

“They did,” she sobbed. “Right in the street in Texas.”

I was not sure what this meant. Did the country stop? Would she even drive the bus? Did we keep going to school? How is there a country without a president? Did my mom still have a job at the restaurant?

The president’s death was probably the reason I began to examine politics, even as a teenager. I wanted to know how such a thing might happen. The assassination was completely without context to a boy coming of age in a land that was supposed to offer security and opportunity. I was fortunate, thought, to have a precocious friend named Gary, and by the time we enrolled in our first year of high school, we were going door to door in our all-white neighborhood of Southern diaspora, handing out anti-war literature. We had no idea of the rigorous conservatism in those households but the pamphlets we were being provided by the growing resistance movement offered a startling education not truly available in newspapers or broadcasts. The literature was how I first became aware of the relationship between LBJ and Brown and Root of Houston and the way the construction company made billions creating infrastructure in Vietnam to prosecute the war.

When I reached the university in East Lansing, the air was alive with politics and music and the streets were often filled with protestors. I doubted that screaming college students might affect American foreign policy and end the War in Vietnam, but LBJ had clearly been forced to leave office because of the attendant controversies and pressure. Nixon was a different political creature, though, and seemed oblivious to the domestic damage and waste of young lives and treasure being wrought by the war he had inherited and escalated. I felt compelled to participate in the street marches in Washington, D.C. and hitchhiked out to camp with tens of thousands of others in Potomac Park before walking up Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. If Nixon experienced any personal doubts about the war he was waging, they were not publicly known.

As night fell that warm May Day, we migrated toward the Washington Monument, most half stoned or drunk, for a concert. The great musicians and groups of our generation had agreed to perform for free. I was hardly close enough to discern their profiles on stage, but the lyrics and the music were an unmistakable part of my life, and, in many ways, define it still. Country Joe and the Fish performed their ballad, “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die-Rag,” and the lyrics of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” rang in my ears like an American mantra. The song was about privilege, and who was able to avoid the draft and fighting in a losing war.

“It ain't me, it ain't me
I ain't no senator's son, son
It ain't me, it ain't me
I ain't no fortunate one.”

I was not even a congressman’s son, which meant the draft for the war was going to get me. Because I had enrolled in college, I was able to land a student deferment that protected me until my date of graduation. Shortly after completing my education and getting a diploma, though, I was to be handed a gun. The unfairness of the draft, however, which was helping to accelerate war resistance, had prompted President Nixon to institute a lottery; a random drawing with hollow capsules that were to be opened to show dates of the year written on paper inserted into the small containers. On a sunny day in July of 1970, I watched the fuzzy TV images as grief-stricken as if I were experiencing my own funeral. My birthdate was the 36th number pulled from the tumbler. In the initial lottery the previous year, the first 125 plus dates were required to report for induction if they had no deferments. I was almost certainly bound for the jungles of Southeast Asia.

My first reaction was to apply for conscientious objector status. My conscience on the wrongness of the war had been publicly exercised for several years and I hoped I might be given alternative service. The draft board was slow to act, however, and I was twice summoned for induction physicals, which I failed to report for. The crisis ended for me just a few months before scheduled college graduation after the draft had been halted, and the Paris Peace Accords were signed in January of 1973. I still think almost daily of my contemporaries who were less fortunate.

A quarter century later I found myself writing about a “fortunate one.” George W. Bush, the son of a president and prime draft age during Vietnam when his father was a congressman, managed to avoid the war. During a debate in Dallas where I served as a panelist, he had told me that he had been “lucky” and applied to become a pilot at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston when there was an opening. If there were such an opening, it had been created for him at the request of his father. The Air National Guard was awash in pilots coming home from combat who wanted to keep their licenses current and volunteered to fly for their hometown units. It did not need to train people like Bush, which cost taxpayers close to a million dollars to get a new pilot ready to command a jet aircraft.

In my hometown, I tried a similar artful dodge. I knew my CO status was tenuous, but I was willing to risk enlistment in the National Guard against the slight chance I might be called up to combat if the war escalated. The commander of our unit in Flint, Michigan, informed me that it was a two-year wait to join his outfit as an infantryman and up to five years to be considered for a pilot. I am sure it was only coincidental that Bush’s unit in Texas was populated by an actual senator’s son, members of the Dallas Cowboys football team, and the heirs of several of Houston’s wealthiest families.

Even circumstantially, Bush’s enlistment in pilot training ought to have been politically unseemly, and his growing entourage of experts expected it to be a problem as they contemplated his ascension to the national stage. After I had asked the National Guard question at the 1994 gubernatorial debate against Ann Richards, I was later surrounded by two key aides intent on intimidation and making sure the subject was never again broached, but I had already been filing FOIA requests to get my hands on available public records regarding his service.

In my mind, someone had gone to Vietnam instead of Bush, and died for him. I kept thinking of an athlete I became friends with through track and field. Roy Raymond Dukes was a quarter miler with Olympic speed, the kind of athlete that the rest of us stopped to watch run. I expected him to be showered with scholarship offers and someday return to our factory town with a gold medal around his neck. Instead, I came home for a weekend from my university and saw a brief clip in the newspaper that Roy had been accidentally wounded and died from non-combat injuries. Details have never been made clear.

His memory had much to do with me spending ten years trying to find the truth about George W. Bush’s military service. The book I finally wrote about his lies and going AWOL helped to launch the controversy that dogged his campaign. CBS News and other media had, eventually, launched parallel investigations, and the network acquired a copy of a document I had never been provided. While the letter appeared official and seemed to confirm suspicions that Bush had been grounded from flying for incompetence before he took off without permission to Alabama, there was no real way to verify its authenticity. My book foundered but Dan Rather asked me to come on the air and talk about my findings to buttress his reporting, which had been roundly vilified. Unfortunately, the attacks against Rather and his producer were unrelenting, and he stepped down from his prestigious post.

There was no reason for any American to believe George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks when he said we needed to invade Iraq. His entire life had been spent failing upwardly through bankrupt oil companies and family connections that facilitated investments in his bad management and his involvement in a major league baseball team. There was always an excuse, ever a soft place to fall. Iraq, too, was about money, and a touch of revenge for his father’s refusal to march on Baghdad in the Gulf War. The problem, though, was Bush’s administration could not prove Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or had been funding terrorism. In fact, he had been an ally and had shaken Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s hand when the U.S. gave Saddam sarin gas missiles in the mid 80s to fire into Iran.

Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney drove Bush’s disinformation campaign on weapons of mass destruction. I was one of many journalists deconstructing their lies and calling out the reporters who fell for the nonsense, especially Judy Miller of the New York Times. Miller virtually parroted every false assertion she was fed by the White House, but it was Rumsfeld’s deputy Paul Wolfowitz who finally let slip the truth. “We had virtually no economic options with Iraq,” he explained, “because the country floats on a sea of oil.” There are now about 50 international oil companies operating in Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan, and their numbers are dominated U.S. brands and those from our allies. Saddam, it must always be stated, dictatorial beast that he was, had nothing to do with 9/11 and no proof of WMD was ever found in his country, nor was there any evidence he was trying to develop such weapons.

We come now to Afghanistan, which Bush should have ordered invaded immediately after 9/11 instead of fretting over the tinpot madman in Baghdad, but there was that oil. Once dispatched, American troops quickly brought down the Taliban, but Osama bin Laden had been given sufficient time to slip back across the border and find safe harbor in Pakistan. U.S. generals and politicians started talking about security for the Afghan people and creating a democracy in a country where the concept has rarely gotten more than passing interest. A tidy little war might emerge, one that could be easily managed with airborne weapons platforms and without a draft. Afghanistan had up to three trillion dollars in natural resources of rare earth minerals needed by the wider world. Wanted by the wider world was the opium production; Afghanistan accounts for about 90 percent of the global consumption, which is estimated to be around 10 percent of that country’s gross domestic product.

We ought to have been, instead, in Saudi Arabia. The money for the 9/11 attackers and the overwhelming majority of the non-state actors came from the kingdom. The royal family simply ignored the fact that the cash it was sending to the mullahs was also being shared with the young jihadists, often urged at Friday night prayers to join the battle against the west. The Saudis, though, were a stable supply of oil for America and had enriched many of our country’s most powerful people and corporations. Washington hardly pressed the issue with the kingdom.

Instead, pallets of American taxpayer cash began being shipped to Afghanistan. The prospects for profit were quite seductive. Defense contractors would build bases, airports, runways, buildings, and supply aircraft and weapons and munitions, just like in Southeast Asia a half century earlier. The Department of Defense had learned after Vietnam how to best manage the media and keep bad news and controversy away from the home front. Reporters were now embedded and escorted, just as they were in authoritarian Third World Countries. They rode in American tanks and saw what our troops were experiencing but rarely witnessed what damage was done and whose lives were being destroyed by our munitions exploding down range.

Afghanistan might not have happened or lasted twenty years had there been a draft. When every young person is exposed to potential military service in a war, resistance increases, almost exponentially. DoD no longer needs a selective service process, though, because there are sufficient volunteers. Opportunities in small town America are vanishing, college grows more expensive, blue-collar jobs became harder to find in a culture that reduced the value of tradesmen and skilled crafts. The military offered training, good pay, educational benefits after separation, and a sense of adventure for a rural kid who might not ever make it to downtown Lubbock without external motivation. Volunteers keep our country safe and sustain our military adventurism. A draft, though, was a significant element in the political end of the War in Vietnam.

Money is always the proximate cause of war. The billion-dollar runway might just be a figure of speech, but we cannot really know the costs at the bases in Bagram and Kandahar. The DoD was slinging so much cash to contractors that one bid was for $8 billion dollars just to put up two warehouses at Bagram to store food for troops. The three contractors who won the bid were later indicted for trying to shave costs by shipping steel through Iran. If two warehouses cost American taxpayers $8 billion, how much are runways with more than 100 blast protective revetments for parking aircraft? One report indicated $96 million for an extended runway but that may only be the reported expenditure before graft and corruption. In Afghanistan, we will never know.

The twenty-year war cost the U.S. $300 million dollars a day. We could have written a check for $50,000 to every man, woman, and child in the country, approximately 40 million people, and walked away after bin Laden’s killing without spilling another drop of blood. Brown University estimated the American expenditure at $2.26 trillion, and George W. Bush, who evaded the War in Vietnam, managed to repeat its central mistake. The Vietnamese that American troops dealt with during the day were often members of the Viet Cong who slipped into their “black pajamas” and went into the jungle to fight at night. They were not going to betray the VC leaders in their villages. Arming, training, and trying to persuade Afghan soldiers to go to battle against the Taliban, whose commanders and organizers often lived in their communities, was every bit the folly of our misguided endeavors in Vietnam.

Someone may need to answer the question of what this was all for, but that’s not Joe Biden’s responsibility. While Bush cries crocodile tears for the Afghan women his policies have put into harm’s way, Biden’s administration struggles with executing our departure, and has performed more capably than America did in Vietnam under Gerald Ford. The decision to leave, though, was correct. When victory cannot be defined, it becomes impossible. The Taliban that melted away into Pakistan and the mountains of Afghanistan were always going to come back, and America was always going to leave.

After we had made a little money.