Yet Again a New Nixon
by Eqbal Ahmad
It is customary for the living to praise the dead. That is
a harmless practice because the rights and wrongs of private lives
do not normally affect the public interest. But to extend this
courtesy to public figures is to distort history, and deny the
benefits of truth and analyses to future generations. The death
of Richard Nixon has provided a grist to the mill of right wing
revisionists intent on putting the ex-president in the pantheon
of this century's greatest statesmen.
Henry Kissinger leads the pack. In an eulogy published in
hundreds of dailies the world over (see Dawn, May 3, 1994), he
credited Nixon with: (i) ending the Vietnam war, (ii) initiating
the peace process in the Middle East, (iii) starting negotiations
and the process of arms control with the Soviet Union, (iv) resuming
relations with China, and (v) contributing to the collapse of
the Soviet Empire. "Beyond all this", writes Kissinger
"Nixon's most impressive accomplishment was as much moral
as political: to lead from strength at a moment of apparent weakness;
to foster the nation's resilience through the nightmare of Vietnam
and thus to lay the basis for victory in the cold war."
Both the assertions and the sweeping prose are quintessential
Kissinger. But how much truth is there? Whatever adjectives one
may use to describe the remarkable career of Nixon the word moral
is most unlikely. Richard Milhaus was a devious, venal, and violent
man. He began his political career as a witch hunter, in 1946,
falsely charging his electoral opponent Jerry Voorhis, a five
term Democratic congressman, of being a communist sympathizer.
His next quarry was Alger Hiss, a State Department official whom
Nixon hunted in behalf of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
After purportedly discovering a hollowed out pumpkin containing
microfilms of State Department papers, Nixon had himself photographed
studying the films with a magnifying glass although it is impossible
to read microfilms with magnifying glasses. Nixon manufactured
an image to substantiate a false charge, an art he shall perfect
in later years.
His career was built on red baiting and image making. During
the 1950 congressional campaign he labelled his opponent Helen
Douglas "the pink lady". She fought back with "Tricky
Dick" which stuck forever. To Stephen Ambrose, historian
of the cold war, Nixon "was a McCarthyite before McCarthy."
He appealed to the dark side of the American psyche -- its capacity
to be mobilized by the demons of manifest destiny and imagined
menaces to life, liberty, and property. Nixon fed also on what
Richard Hofstadter has described as the paranoid style in American
politics. The cold war, with its facile bipolar division of the
world between the evil empire and enlightened free world, provided
fertile soil for his brand of politics.
The Vietnam war broke the spell of the cold war in America.
It exposed anti-communism to be a cover for imperialism; as such
it brought forth some of the liberal and the humanist in American
culture. Richard Nixon was the first victim of this change just
as Jimmy Carter was its first undeserving beneficiary. The connections
between Vietnam and Watergate -- the extra-legal habits associated
with covert and illicit war making, the paranoid view of domestic
opponents which led to illegal break-in and wiretaps, the chickens
of counter-insurgency returning home to roost -- were close and,
in some respects, direct. Nixon's conduct had been unbecoming
of a politician in a democracy ever since he entered politics
in 1946. But it became intolerable only in the 1970s because Vietnam
exposed him full blown to a critical public. He lied, manipulated,
cheated, played dirty tricks, broke laws, obstructed justice,
created the first constitutional crisis in the U.S. since the
civil war, and became in 1973 the only President in American history
who resigned in order to escape impeachment.
It is obscene to credit Nixon -- or Kissinger -- with ending
the Vietnam war. The war ended long after Nixon had resigned and
only because the Vietnamese won and Americans lost it. To claim
anything else is to do injustice to the dead and wounded. If justice
were to prevail both Nixon and Kissinger would have been tried
under the Nuremberg Laws for crimes of war and crimes against
humanity. Nixon campaigned for President in 1968 claiming that
he had a "secret plan" for peace. He continued, rather
escalated the war on becoming president. Under Nixon and Kissinger's
government alone the American war machine used on Indo-China more
TNT than the total expended during world war 11. Their excessive
violence included the secret bombings and invasion of Cambodia,
the mining of Haiphong harbor, the indiscriminate and unbelievably
heavy Christmas bombings of North Vietnamese cities and villages,
and repeated attempts at nuclear black mail. Millions perished.
Anthony Lake, now the national security advisor to President Clinton,
was an aide to Kissinger at the time. When he and a colleague
protested the illegal attacks on Cambodia, security taps were
put on them. They resigned.
This is not the first time Henry Kissinger has claimed for
himself and Richard Nixon the kudos of initiating the Middle Eastern
`peace process'. Nothing is farther from the truth. What they
did do was to transform Israel from an ordinary client state into
a strategic ally in the Middle East. American arming of Israel
began under them. From 1949 to 1968 total U.S. arms flow to Israel
was just below $500 million. Between 1969 and 1976, Israel had
received from America a whopping $22 billion worth of sophisticated
arms. In the largest logistical operation in history, Washington
air lifted $1.5 billion in arms to Israel during the most crucial
week of the Arab-Israeli war in October 1973. Israel felt free
thereafter to proceed with its ambition of colonizing parts and
dominating all of the Arab world. The nearly total dispossession
of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, the multiple invasions
and occupation of Lebanon, annexation of Golan and Jerusalem,
expulsion and incarceration of thousand upon thousands of hapless
people had for the coming decades the full material support of
Washington. With such a `peace process' who needs peace?
The claim that Nixon and Kissinger initiated a process of
arms control is not new. Both men asserted it repeatedly and assigned
it a name -- detente. In fact, the process began earlier under
Dwight Eisenhower. Summitry was already a feature of U.S.-Soviet
relations when Nixon became President. What he and Kissinger did
was to give detente a high profile and, under its cover, escalated
the arms race. It was under them that the American nuclear doctrine
shifted from Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) to Flexible Targeting
Options. The shift signalled a race on the one hand for first
strike capabilities (counter-force weapons) from B-1 bombers to
Strategic Defence Initiative (star wars) and, on the other hand,
battle field weapons -- tac-nukes, mini-nukes. The escalation
in the arms race had an unintended consequence: it put additional
burdens on both the strong American and weak Soviet economies;
gradually the one slid into a protracted recession and the other
fell in virtual depression. It is only in this context that one
may credit Nixon's policies with the collapse of USSR, and also
with America's economic decline. And yes, Nixon and Kissinger
did finally end America's irrational boycott of China. For that,
all the donuts they want!
Given his administration's criminal record and the harm his
policies did especially to the muslim world, it is amazing how
widely Nixon was praised in our media as a statesman and friend
of Arabs and Muslims. One after another columnists and editorialists
in Pakistan have mentioned his support for them specially with
reference to his professed pro-Pakistan "tilt" during
the East Pakistan crisis in 1971. Beyond repeating whatever Kissinger
and Nixon conveyed through calculated gestures and leaks such
as the Anderson papers, none of the commentators offered any evidence
of Nixon's lasting friendship toward Pakistan.
In fact, during the East Pakistan crisis Nixon and Kissinger
played a sickeningly manipulative game with Pakistan's deluded
leaders. They withheld from Pakistan significant material support,
but with their verbal tilt fed the worst illusions of Yahya Khan
and his generals. For months in advance, they knew of India's
plan to invade; two weeks before the invasion, they even knew
its timing and did nothing to prevent it. When the deluge came,
Pakistan's foolish leaders waited for the Seventh Fleet to rescue
them. But the Enterprise did not sail until the Pakistan army
had surrendered in Dhaka. Washington then claimed that it had
saved West Pakistan from being conquered by India. Unbelievably,
there are still Pakistanis, educated ones, who believe this falsity
to be the truth.
Hegemony entails the dominance of a given discourse even among
those who are not its beneficiaries. It is the cultural arm of
imperialism. Nixon's passing brought, as the London weekly Economist
put it, "the first revisionist phase of Nixonology to its
climax." It would be a shame if it is perpetuated by the
very people -- Vietnamese, Cambodians, Arabs, Pakistanis -- who
were victims of Nixon's and his deputy's immoral and inhuman `grand
design'.
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