Bill Colby and Political Madness

  

Bill Colby and Political Madness

Peter Schultz

 

Two reflections inspired by John Prados’s excellent biography of William Colby, Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby.

 

Here are two sentences from John Prados’s biography of William Colby referring to his sending people into North Vietnam under Project Tiger, even though they disappeared or were “doubled”, I.e., captured and used by the North Vietnamese unbeknownst to Colby, et. al. “From one point of view,  Colby’s stance could be considered one of steadfast determination. From another it could be seen as ignorant and naive.” (81) 

Sounds like a dichotomy: Colby as virtuous or Colby as ignorant/naive. But why should we think of “steadfast determination” as a virtue? Or, put differently: why not recognize that being morally virtuous in this way, being steadfastly determined, leads to what were deadly or cruel results? 

Most assume that being morally virtuous always leads to proper results. But Aristotle argued that being morally virtuous leads to being magnanimous, with results that seem less than desirable, viz., haughtiness, vanity, injustice even. By being “steadfastly determined,” i.e., by being morally virtuous, Colby in fact was sending men to their deaths, to torture, or to captivity. Being morally virtuous doesn’t always lead to proper or humane results. Sometimes, e.g., in Vietnam or the war on terror, it leads to inhuman cruelty. 

 

 

 

 

 

“Frustration drove Bill Colby after the Diem assassination. He…and the CIA might have lost the policy battle in Washington, but Colby emerged determined to effect change directly…in Vietnam. This became the subtext of his post-coup swing through Southeast Asia. That trip [led] to new CIA initiatives, greatly increasing the agency’s role in the Vietnam war….Colby created some of these projects while energizing or becoming instrumental in others. In a way he…submerged his loss of friends in the Ngo family with frantic activity that might avenge them by winning the Vietnam war.” (132 Lost Crusader) 

 

Madness through and through. It wasn’t frustration that drove Colby; he was delusional. As if doing more of what he had been doing would have different results. Definition of insanity: keep doing the same things while expecting different results. As if “frantic activity” is a virtue. As if “determining to effect change” is a virtue. As if “steadfast determination” is a virtue. As if “avenging loss” is a virtue. 

 

We can’t see the madness because its elements are taken to be moral virtue. And, so, because we can’t see it, we don’t question moral virtue, its ambiguous value as reflected by its often untoward results.

 

 [What would have happened if Darcy had dealt with Lydia and Wickham moralistically, rather than mercifully? What might have transpired – or not transpired – in Vietnam if the US had treated the Vietnamese mercifully rather than moralistically?] 

 

Politics: The Seduction of Crime

  

Politics: The Seduction of Crime

Peter Schultz

 

“Beyond the specific individuals involved, the Epstein scandal reveals the character of a social class. The American oligarchy has amassed its wealth through parasitism, speculation and fraud. It is, in its social being, in its mode of acquisition, a criminal class at the summit of American politics. Its fortunes are the product of financial manipulation, corporate swindling, war profiteering and the exploitation of billions of people.

 

“The oligarchy feels itself above the law. Trump is the personification of this class—brazenly criminal, contemptuous of democratic norms, openly inciting fascist violence and plotting war. His administration views the Constitution as a worthless piece of paper, international law as irrelevant. It declares the right to murder individuals, citizen or non-citizen, with, in the words of Vice President JD Vance, “absolute immunity.”

 

“The American ruling class is wallowing in political, social, legal and moral degradation. The Epstein scandal holds up a mirror to itself.”

 

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/02/wepr-f02.html

 

The statement above does not go far enough, because not only does “the Epstein scandal reveal the character of a social class,” it also reveals the character of the political. Criminality is intrinsic to politics. In fact, politics may be said to involve, always and everywhere, socially approved criminality. For example, consider what is called “the war on terror” which has revolved around “targeted assassinations.” Certainly, these “targeted assassinations” would be crimes, would be “murders,” if committed by, say, Tony Soprano or any other mafioso. It is, in brief, impossible to imagine politics devoid of such socially approved criminality, or to imagine that politicians aren’t attracted to politics, to a political life because it involves, revolves around socially approved criminality. You may even say that politics involves, intrinsically, the seduction of crime.

 

So, yes, “the oligarchy feels itself above the law” and, yes, “Trump is the personification of this class.” The oligarchy feels itself above the law because it is above the law or outside of the law, and Trump is its personification because he proudly asserts, over and over, that he is not bound by law, that he engages in socially approved criminality. So too did Ollie North, when he became a national hero during Iran-Contra. And, of course, Dick Cheney embraced lawlessness when he took the United States to “the dark side” after the attacks on 9/11. But it is a mistake to think that “The American ruling class is wallowing in political, social, legal and moral degradation.” They are not “wallowing” in anything, nor are they experiencing any kind of “degradation.” Their criminality is socially approved. Expose it as much as you like, but do not expect that that exposure will lead to their demise. In fact, expect that it will not only maintain but that it will fortify their power.

 

So it goes.

 

House of Imperialism

  

House of Imperialism

Peter Schultz

 

                  Katheryn Bigelow’s movie House of Dynamite created quite a stir, and rightfully so. And this led me to think about a similar, yet very different movie on the same theme but that might be called House of Imperialism. The following passages are from a book, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, by Daniel Immerwahr.

 

                  “The Japanese [after WW II] were right to be nervous. Despite all the duck and cover warnings about Soviet strikes on Cincinnati and Dubuque, the real lines of nuclear confrontation were the overseas bases and territories. Hundreds of nuclear weapons, we now know, were placed in South Korea, the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. Throughout most the sixties, there were more than a thousand on Okinawa. Johnston Island, one of the guano islands Ernest Gruening had recolonized, bristled with nuclear armed Thor missiles. An unknown number of nuclear weapons were stored in Hawai’I, Alaska (including on the Aleutian Islands), and Midway.

 

                  “Yet while the nukes on bases protected the mainland, they imperiled the territories and host nations. Flying nuclear weapons around the bases – something the military did routinely – risked catastrophic accident. Even when the weapons stayed put, their presence turned the bases into tempting targets, especially since overseas bases were easier to Moscow to hit than the mainland was. Arming the bases was essentially painting bright red bull’s-eye on them.

 

                  “A sense of the risk can be gained by considering the Arctic base at Thule in Greenland…. The virtue of Thule was that it was close enough to the Soviet Union that from there, the United States could lob missiles over the North Pole at Moscow. The drawback was that the Soviets could fire missiles back. The Soviet premier warned Denmark that to allow the United States to house its arsenal at Thule – or anywhere on Danish soil – would be ‘tantamount to suicide.’ Nervous Danish politicians incorporated a ‘no nuclear’ principle into the platform of their governing coalition: the United States could have its base, but no nukes.

 

                  “… Washington pressed the issue. When the Danish prime minister didn’t explicitly object, U.S. officials took his silence for winking consent and secretly moved nuclear weapons to Thule. Soon the air force began covertly flying nuclear armed B-52s over Greenland daily. This was part of airborne alert program to keep armed planes aloft and ready to strike the Soviet Union at all times – the subject of Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove….

 

                  “The general responsible for the program readily conceded how much danger this placed Greenland in. Thule, he told Congress, would be ‘one of the first ones to go’ if war came. Even without war, it faced peril. In 1967, three planes carrying hydrogen bombs made emergency landings in Greenland. The next year, a B-52 flying near Thule with four Mark 28 hydrogen bombs crashed, hard….

 

                  “The accident at Thule didn’t set off a nuclear explosion. It did, however, spew plutonium all over the crash site. The air force scrambled to clean up the mess before the ice thawed and carried radioactive debris into the ocean. The recovered waste filled seventy-five tankers. Had an accident of that scale happened over a city, it would have been mayhem.

 

                  “Could that have happened? Yes…. Two years before the Thule accident, a B-52 crashed over the Spanish village of Palomares while carrying four hydrogen bombs, each seventy-five times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. Part of the plane landed 80 yards from an elementary school, another chunk hit the earth 150 yards from a chapel. The conventional explosives went off in two of the bombs, sowing plutonium dust into the tomato fields for miles.”

 

                  It isn’t inaccurate to say, as a character in Bigelow’s movie does say, that we’ve created a house of dynamite. But it should be noted that what makes that house of dynamite so bloody dangerous, even makes it a madhouse, is that the United States has created a house of imperialism, one that requires it to subject other nations to the possibility of nuclear catastrophes.

Politics and Justice

  

Politics and Justice

Peter Schultz

 

                  If, as many believe, politics is about justice, why are the results so very often injustice? Could it be that injustice is more firmly established in the political arena than justice? Ruminate on the following passages from the book, No Good Men Among the Living, and see what you can see regarding justice, injustice and the political.

 

                  “Across the country … the story repeated itself. In a way…, retribution should have been expected. After all, the Taliban’s human rights record … inspired no sympathy. The problem was not so much that the Taliban were targeted but that they were uniquely targeted: the men allied with the US [had] similarly deplorable records…, yet their crimes went unpunished. A true reconciliation process would have required bringing justice to people from across the political spectrum, or pardoning them all. To the Taliban, justice unequally applied felt like no justice at all.

 

                  “For the top Taliban leadership, the apparent inequity of a ‘war forced on us’ … was so great that there seemed no choice but to organize resistance…. In late 2002, the leadership met … and voted in favor of a last-ditch effort to come to accord with Kabul. Emissaries were sent … but with reconciliation still a toxic idea in Washington and in Northern Alliance circles, the effort fizzled.

 

                  “The course now seemed set. Mullah Omar organized … a dozen top Talibs … [in] a new leadership body…. Mullah Obaidullah took on the task of resurrecting dormant Taliban networks in Afghanistan. He and others reached out to communities … where the resentment was steadily building over the killings, the night raids, the abductions, the torture, the broken alliance, and the fractured hopes. In these communities, the American presence was … seen as an occupation, and Karzai’s government … as Washington’s venal and vicious puppet.

 

                  “From this point on, there would be no turning back.” [195-96]

 

                  Where did the pursuit of justice lead? Retribution is a kind of justice, but it led to injustice. The pursuit of justice short-changed any possibility of reconciliation, ultimately leading to a rebirth of the Taliban and, hence, renewed violence and further injustices. Could it be that despite the claims of many, injustice is intrinsic to politics and what’s required for human decency is to turn away from seeking justice and a turn toward caring and/or reconciliation? Human life is more humane to the extent that caring supplements or displaces justice.

 

                  Machiavelli taught that political greatness, the peak of political virtue, rested on inhuman cruelty. Empires, that is, the greatest political achievements, rest on cruelty, as has been illustrated time and again throughout human history. The greatest political actions, the greatest human actions are the cruelest and bloodiest of wars. Their victors are celebrated with fame, a kind of immortality. When Socrates went in search of justice in the Republic, he ended up recommending the banning of the poets and the exiling of everyone over the age of ten. When Aristotle went in search of the best regime, he ended up with slavery joined with a powerful warrior mentality. As Rousseau said: “Man is born free but everywhere he is chains.” And Huck Finn had to flee “sivilization” in order to be happy, while Tom Sawyer had to manipulate and obfuscate in order to displace and become “the model boy of the village.”

 

                  The line between being president and being criminal is a fine line indeed – as we are witnessing today. In fact, being criminal seems intrinsic to being great politically. Politics may be defined as socially acceptable criminality. And isn’t that one thing that draws people to organizations like the CIA or the FBI? It certainly draws people into the military, as socially approved killing offers fame and glory for those who are most proficient at it, e.g., Chris Kyle, “the most lethal sniper in U.S. history.”

 

                  So, ironically, the pursuit of justice has ambiguous consequences, including the encouragement or production of injustice. As is emphasized in No Good Men Among the Living, Americans engaged in combating the Taliban in Afghanistan were led, again and again, to embrace cruelty. “… the political has a way of making a virtue of necessity, [which meant] that soon suicide bombers became the outgunned Taliban’s answer to B-52s and up-armored Humvees.” [208] Politics also has a way of making a virtue out of injustice, and even of cruelty.

American Savagery

  

American Savagery

Peter Schultz

 

                  The following, which is from the book, No Good Men Among the Living, by Anand Gopal, is an account of US allies in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, called the

“mujahedeen.”

 

“Like victors in a medieval battle, the mujahedeen attacking Afshar hauled captives and booty away. Some…were forced into slavery…. After two days of bloodshed, most of the population of Ashar was dead or missing….Sometimes [the] killing was not enough. A man named Fazil Ahmed was decapitated and his limbs sawed off; his body was found with his penis stuffed in his mouth.

 

“What is certain, however, is the Ashar violence had clear enough political motives: to eliminate a Hazara militia stronghold….At the top of the chain of responsibility sat the operation’s architects, Massoud and Sayyaf….A number of their sub-commanders bear direct culpability, yet every one of them has emerged politically unscathed. Marshal Muhammad Fahim, who oversaw the operation and commanded an important outpost during the siege, became a key American ally during the 2001 invasion, earning himself millions in CIA dollars. Eventually, he became vice president of Afghanistan. Baba Jan, who also helped plan and execute the siege, became a key Northern Alliance commander. After 2001, he grew extravagantly wealthy as a logistics contractor for the US military. Mullah Izzat, who commanded a group that led house searches, also struck gold after the invasion….Zulmay Tofan, complicit in the house searches and forced labor, reaped his post-2001 windfall by supplying fuel to US troops.

 

“The twin dislocations of the Soviet invasion and CIA patronage of the mujahedeen irrevocably reconfigured Afghan society, leading directly to the horrors of the civil war, then to the Taliban, and ultimately to the shape of Afghan politics after 2001. Still, when Zbigniew Brzezinski…was asked in the late 1990s whether he had any regrets, he replied: ‘What is more important in the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?” [66-67]

 

Brzezinski seems to think that his answers are, self-evidently, the correct ones and indisputable. But, of course, the USSR was on its way to collapsing and probably would have done so even it had not been attacked by the US and its mujahedeen allies in Afghanistan. But let’s say it did not collapse. Wouldn’t the world and Afghanistan have been a better place if the savagery created by the USSR, the US, and mujahedeen had not occurred? Had the USSR prevailed in Afghanistan, women would have been much better off, as would many Afghan men. The Taliban would not have appeared, and its tyranny would be unknown. In fact, it would seem that the best outcome for Afghanistan would have been the rule of the Communists. It would also have meant that the 9/11 attacks would not have occurred. Brzezinski tries to turn the US involvement with the mujahedeen into a melodramatic turning point in world history. Maybe it was, but it is far from clear that if it was, it was a turning point that improved the human condition. It certainly did not improve the condition of Afghanistan and Afghanis as savagery was imposed upon them. But, then, savagery is precisely what realists like Brzezinski embrace, even taking it as proof of their virtues.

From Fire in the Lake, Frances Fitzgerald

 

From Fire in the Lake

Peter Schultz

 

                  “The United States might leave Vietnam, but the Vietnam War would now never leave the United States. The soldiers would bring it back with them like an addiction. The civilians may neglect or try to ignore it, but those who have seen combat must find a reason for that killing; they must put it in some relation to their normal experience and to their role as citizens. The usual agent for this reintegration is not the psychiatrist, but the politician. In this case, however, the politicians could give no satisfactory answer to many of those who had killed or watched their comrades killed. In 1971 the soldiers had before them the knowledge that President Johnson had deceived them about the war during his election campaign. All his cryptic signals to the contrary, he had indicated that there would be no American war in Vietnam, while he was in fact making plans for entering that war. They had before them the spectacle of a new President, Richard M. Nixon, who with one hand engaged in peaceful negotiations with the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China and with the other condemned thousands of Americans and Indochinese to die for the principle of anti-Communism. To those who had for so long believed that the United States was different, that it possessed a fundamental innocence, generosity, and disinterestedness, these facts were shocking. No longer was it possible to say, as so many Americans and French had, that Vietnam as a ‘quagmire,’ the ‘pays pourri’ that had enmired and corrupted the United States. It was the other way around. The U.S. officials had enmired Vietnam. They had corrupted the Vietnamese and, by some extension, the American soldiers who had to fight amongst the Vietnamese in their service. By involving the United States in a fruitless and immoral war, they had corrupted themselves.” [511-512]

 

The appropriate designation for the war wasn’t “the Vietnam problem.” It was “the American imperialism problem.” American imperialism corrupted both Vietnam and the United States. The corruption of the United States continues to the present day.

The Morally Virtuous

 

The Morally Virtuous

Peter Schultz

 

                  Here are two passages from Frances Fitzgerald’s Fire in the Lake, that reward some attention.

 

“To admit that the war was excessive, destructive or that it was not being won was to admit to personal as well as institutional failure….” [457]

 

“’Don’t you realize that everything the Americans do in Vietnam is founded on a hatred of the Vietnamese?’” An embassy official.

 

                  The first passage points to the fact that Americans in Vietnam did not differentiate institutional and personal virtue. There was a “sense of righteous mission that led the United States deeper and deeper into Vietnam. So, the Americans in Vietnam saw themselves as possessing a moral infallibility that justified their actions, their killing and destruction.

 

                  But what if the second passage is correct? What if what the Americans were doing in Vietnam was, in fact, fueled by “a hatred of the Vietnamese?” Insofar as the passage is correct, it means that those who saw themselves as on a righteous mission were delusional. If their moral virtue were fueled by hatred, then the status of that virtue is called into question. Somehow, some way, the moral virtue of the Americans was fueled by a hatred of the Vietnamese.

 

                  “What had looked like an attempt to ‘save Vietnam from the Communists’ was rather an attempt to save American ‘prestige’ around the world.” [472] And American prestige needed “saving” because America’s virtues covered over American hatred, of the Communists and of the Vietnamese. At bottom, it was hatred that drove American foreign policies during the Cold War.