Another war in which the United States committed American troops to combat was the Vietnam War. Beginning in 1961, President Kennedy began to send military advisors to Saigon to explore the question whether local Vietnamese forces could, by training, be brought up to the level of expertise required to fight a guerilla war against troops from Hanoi. His Secretary of Defense was Robert S. McNamara, one of the so-called Whiz Kids at the Ford Motor Company. In 1995, he completed and Times Books published his memoirs, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. This book had unanticipated consequences, since it revived all the anger of those sent to Vietnam and were lucky enough to have survived. Some 58,000 Americans and over a million Vietnamese died in this bloody conflict. McNamarra now says "Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why."
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US Army helicopters in Vietnam |
Robert McNamara was wrong from the very beginning of his term as Secretary of Defense. President Kennedy who had just been found wrong in the Bay of Pigs Cuban disaster was not well served by his new man at the Pentagon. On pp 32-33, McNamara wrote "The irony of this gap -- Asian experts -- was that it existed largely because the top East Asian and China experts in the State Department -- John Paton Davies, Jr., John Stewart Service, and John Carter Vincent -- had been purged during the McCarthy hysteria of the 1950s. Without men like these to provide sophisticated, nuanced insights, we -- certainly I -- badly misread China's objectives and mistook its bellicose rhetoric to imply a drive for regional hegemony." Blaming others for his mistakes was a theme appearing in McNamarra's book throughout its pages.
The late and unlamented Senator Joseph McCarthy (Rep. Wisc.) was seen by McNamara as the person with the responsibility for this purge of the State Department. However, there were many experts in America's universities fully capable of advising McNamara about pitfalls in Vietnam. Elected to the Senate in 1946, McCarthy must bear the responsibility for ruining the careers of many innocent people by naming them as Communists without a shred of evidence to support his unprincipled and vicious charges. His activities and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) left behind them a trail of ruined lives and some who went to jail for contempt of Congress. They had asserted the First Amendment in their defense. In Kent v. Dulles, 357 U.S. 116 (1958), the Supreme Court held that the State Department could not deny passports to Americans alleged to be communists. The right of Americans to travel across national frontiers was a part of the "liberty" protected by the Fifth Amendment. Eight years later, however, the court held that restrictons on travel to certain countries were still permissible. Zemel v. Rusk, 381 U.S. 1 (1965). Even today, echoes of the Red Scare may still be heard. During the 1988 presidential campaign, George Bush reminded voters almost daily that Michael Dukakis was a "card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union," equating the ACLU with subversion. In 1993, Fortune magazine assailed a Clinton nominee, Lani Guinier, for being related to her father, a "devotee of Joseph Stalin." In any event, the war in Vietnam was widely seen, at least in the very beginning, as a war against Communism.
The late Barbara Tuchman, author of numerous books, including March of Folly, had a view quite different from McNamarra's. In this book, she included three chapters all entitled "America Betrays Herself in Vietnam." She noted that President Truman was the first president to send advisors to Vietnam. They were designated as the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) which grew to include 200 men advising the French how to use American military hardware. The advice was resented and finally ignored. Barbara Tuchman listed dozens of experts that McNamara could have consulted before any decisions were made by President Kennedy. The list was long and had many well-informed East Asian and China experts. She also mentioned university professors in the United States who might disabuse McNamara of his obvious illusions in a country that never really showed the enthusiasm or will to rise to American expectations.
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Search and Destroy Mission Bien Hoa, Vietnam |
The regime in Saigon was corrupt, something McNamara could have learned for himself. Ho Chi Minh was a Vietnamese nationalist rebelling against French colonialism, a fact that no one in authority could possibly fathom. The Chinese knew this and capitalized on their knowledge. The ever-present CIA even carried on illegal operations in Vietnam, made illegal by the Geneva Agreement of 1954. As Tuchman says many times, neither Kennedy nor Lyndon Johnson ever had a realistic formulation of clear objectives, Both, including McNamara, were mesmerized by their anti-Communist stance on virtually all policy decisions. Johnson was to lose his presidency because he failed to see the consequences of his own actions. He announced in 1968 that he would not seek reelection, thus abandoning the field to Richard Nixon. Elected in 1968, Nixon authorized the secret bombing of Cambodia. Anger spiraled out of control, even to the point where four students at Kent State University were killed by panic-stricken National Guard personnel.
In 1974, Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment arising out of his role in the Watergate scandal. See United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683 (1974) for a full explication of his misdeeds. This decision was a major constitutional landmark. It established the conditional nature of presidential immunity, bringing in as it did, the extravagant assertions of Nixon's lawyers. They claimed presidential power to be unlimited. A unanimous court disagreed. His successor in office was Gerald Ford who promptly pardoned Nixon. However, Ford finally settled Vietnam. in 1975 on terms less than satisfactory to the United States. This country had been defeated by Ho Chi Minh's ragtag army and its persistence. In 1996, President Clinton authorized limited diplomatic relations with a reunited Vietnam.
In the last fifteen years, the country has had to deal with secrecy in the way foreign policy was made based on the old colonial theory that the United States must deal with the leaders of other countries as somehow benign and troubled by the presence of Communists in their midst. All that is really needed is a program to provide urban renewal, the infrastructure to support it, such as better housing, waste disposal and clean water, political and economic freedom and a police force, rather than the corrupt rule of the military, better agriculture by land reform and technical assistance to make it all work.
El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Haiti are examples of this approach to policy. Noam Chomsky has recently written a book entitled World Orders Old and New published in 1994 by the Columbia University Press. Mr. Chomsky has written this book as a radical critique of America's post-Cold War role in the world, though he describes a half-millennium of global domination by the West. He challenges traditional policies and unmasks illegitimate authority.
Nicaragua, and American intervention in that Latin American nation was a case in point. In the early 1980s, Nicaragua was challenging Haiti for the unwanted distinction of being the most destitute country in the Western hemisphere. In 1979, President Anastasio Somoza Debayle was overthrown by local nationalists, ie., guerillas under the leadership of Augusto Sandino. The Sandinistas established a government not welcomed by the United States. The new government had an estimated 200 Cuban military advisers and sent some of its pilots to Cuba for flight training in obsolete Soviet Migs. According to Robert Gates, the Sandinistas were also sending arms to El Salvador, at the time a right wing military dictatorship with death squads. Gates' recent book, From the Shadows, relates the role played by the CIA in Nicaragua. "These right wing death squads," Gates wrote, "had killed a number of opponents of the military government in El Salvador since the 1970s, and their murder of Archbishop Romero and later of four Catholic nuns evoked outrage in the United States." Interdiction of arms flowing from Nicaragua to El Salvador was only one plot initiated by Casey who recommended a Sandinista defector, Eden Pastora, operating out of Costa Rica do the job. Any glimpse at a map would show that El Salvador and Costa Rico were separated by Nicaragua. Bobby Inman, then Deputy Director, wondered "how Pastora's actions in Costa Rica could be aimed at interdiction of weapons flowing from Nicaragua to El Salvador...." Gates also faulted Reagan for being unable or unwilling to establish a domestic constituency in support of overt action against Nicaragua. So, according to Gates, the only realistic option was CIA-directed covert operations. The late William Casey, then Director of the CIA planned an outrageous covert operation in 1983. He authorized the mining of Nicaraguan waters, and a firestorm of media criticism occurred when some nine vessels, one of them Russian, were damaged by these mines.
The war on drugs has become an issue in the presidential campaign of 1996. Statistics seem to show a growing use of substance abuse amongst teenagers. The origins of the war on drugs were part of the Contra war against Nicaragua beginning in 1979. Allegations of links between drug traffickers and the Contras were aired in 1986 by the Senate Committee Report on Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy, chaired by Senator John Kerry. The report also noted that Reagan's Department of Justice "...was slow to respond to these allegations..." Furthermore, the CIA "...categorically denied that the Neutrality Act violations... had in fact taken place... In fact, the FBI had already assembled substantial information confirming the Neutrality Act violations... had taken place" The full report of this Senate Committee -- some 25 pages -- makes for interesting reading now that Senator Dole has opened the Pandorra's box on drugs and their origin outside the United States.
Casey's CIA was determined to overthrow the Sandinista government. Predictably, the CIA saw the Sandinistas as communists. Secretary of State George Schultz saw the problem differently. If national security was involved, we should send in the marines. If it were merely tending to our backyard, then the United States should pursue a political solution.In 1984, Daniel Ortega Saavedra was elected president of Nicaragua, and the United States resorted to efforts to destabilize the Sandinista government. A civil war ensued in which Washington backed the opposition to the Sandinistas, the so-called Contras. President Reagan, a militant anti-Communist, described the Contras as "freedom fighters," when in fact many of the Contras were Somoza supporters. Reagan's attitude was no better than the institutional myopia in Washington. Its bureaucrats opposed any development in Nicaragua antithetical to corporate America's interests. Finally, Reagan allowed Nicaraguan policy to get out of control. That country sued the United States in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), a court established by the United Nations. This action charged the United States with numerous violations of international law and of the Charter itself. The United States argued that the ICJ was without jurisdiction to entertain the suit captioned Case Concerning Military and Paramilitary Activities in and Against Nicaragua. The text of the court's ruling on the merits appears at 25 International Legal Materials 1023 (1988). The text is a stunning indictment of American policy with respect to Nicaragua. The United States was in clear violation of Article 2 (4) of the United Nations Charter. Among other things, American mercenaries mined Nicaraguan harbors, intervened in the internal affairs of Nicaragua, committed aerial trespass into Nicaragua's airspace, infringed on freedom of the seas, and killed and/or kidnapped citizens of Nicaragua. In the economic field, the United States withdrew foreign aid to Nicaragua, drastically reduced Nicaragua's sugar quota, imposed a trade embargo and used its influence in the Inter American Bank for Reconstruction and Development to block loans requested by Nicaragua. The ICJ awarded Nicaragua reparations to be paid by the United States for the wrongs committed by it. They were never paid. However, in 1993 the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, both virtually controlled by the United States, presented new demands of unusaul severity to Nicaragua. Noam Chomsky's book, World Orders Old and New, summarized them in part. "Unlike many others, Nicaragua will receive no relief from its crushing debt. It must eliminate credits from the Bank of Industry and Commerce, one of the remaining state banks, and privatize enterprises and government operations. These included such services as postal, energy, and water to ensure that poor people really feel the pain -- they are for example unable to give their children water to drink, if they cannot pay, thanks to 60 percent unemployment. Nicaragua must also cut public expenditures by $60 million, eliminating what little remains of health and welfare services -- a figure that was selected for its symbolic value; that was the sum shipped out of Nicaragua during the previous year by the already privatized banks." The other side of this coin shows a callous disregard for what happens in Nicaragua. In September, 1993 the Senate voted 94-4 to ban any aid to Nicaragua if it failed to return or provide compensation for the properties seized when Somoza was ousted. In fact, Nicaragua is probably bankrupt. When the Sandinistas ousted Somoza, they never anticipated financing a war against the retread Somozans and American mercenaries who also happened to get financial help from Iran indirectly via Washington. Oliver North was involved in an unsuccessful and probably illegal effort to get the hostages in Lebanon released. The terrorists were in Beirut, and their operations were financed by Iran. He has never told the entire story of the Iran-Contra affair. One of George Bush's last acts upon leaving office was to pardon all those involved in this scandal. One of the difficulties encountered by historians is governmental reluctance to disclose accurate information in cases not covered by any of the exemptions of the Freedom of Information Act. A recent case is instructive. American Historical Association et al v. Trudy Peterson, Acting Archivist, 876 F. Supp.1305 (DC 1995). Before leaving office, George Bush worked out an agreement with Wilson, the Archivist dealing with disclosure of certain computer-generated files. The District Court held that the Bush Wilson Agreement could not be sustained under the Presidential Records Act or Article II of the Constitution. See also Armstrong v. Executive Office of the President, 1 F.3rd 1274 (D.C. Cir. 1993). That case dealt with the status of records under the Federal Records Act. There, the Court of Appeals held that all backup tapes and computer hard drives containing data from electronic communications used by the National Security Council and White House Situation Room staff during the Bush Administration were improperly withheld. These NSC backup tapes were held subject to the court's injunction "to the extent that they were not created solely to advise and assist the president." Before he left office on January 20, 1993 President Bush pardoned all the defendants either awaiting trial in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra scandal or actually convicted. Historians and scholars might find a gold mine of information were the records of this shabby affair released for examination. Using the Freedom of Information Act is not always productive. An estimated 60 percent of all District Court judges have been appointed by Presidents Reagan and Bush. In cases that might reflect unfavorably on either, the result is often in doubt. Senator Dole has announced he would make a campaign issue out of Clinton's judicial appointments; they are too "liberal" claimed Dole. The courts of the United States sometimes have a way of appearing dedicated to the agenda of a particular judge, or Justice in the Supreme Court. The most recent such case was United States v. Lopez, 115 S. Ct. 1624 (1995). Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote for the majority. He held that the Gun Free School Zones Act "exceeds the authority of Congress to regulate commerce," citing the absence or inadequacy of an administrative record to support its enactment. This law made it a felony to carry a gun within 1000 feet of a public school. In effect, Chief Justice Rehnquist said we will not look at the statute unless Congressional intent is ambiguous. However, in several places in his opinion, he chose to castigate the dissenting opinion of Associate Justice Steven Breyer, the newest member of the court. Evidently, Justice Breyer had the temerity to disagree with the Chief Justice, although this dissent was elegant. The Chief Justice had missed the point of Justice Breyer's trenchant opinion. In an earlier case, Chief Justice Rehnquist had placed his own agenda on public display in Nolan v. City of Tigard, Oregon, 114 S. Ct. 2309 (1994). In a 5-4 decision, he converted an essentially environmental issue into a Fifth Amendment "taking" requiring compensation to the person whose property was "taken" for a public use. The City Planning Commission of Tigard, Oregon had imposed legally required environmental conditions on a proposal to expand a hardware store owned by Florence Dolan, Petitioner. Both the State Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court of Oregon sided with the city, but not the Chief Justice. Almost casually, he reversed the Planning Commission and two state appellate courts. For about forty years, the environment has had a long and distinguished history of surviving attacks on it by corporate America. Virtually every major public utility has at one time or another has been a defendant in actions under the Clean Air Act. These companies have aggressively resisted compliance with this and other laws enacted by Congress since 1968. Almost without exception, they have lost, paying fines or being enjoined from any further violations of law. The Clean Water Act of 1972 is under attack now, not by those who pollute rivers and streams, but by Congress itself. Another law enacted by Congress is in danger of repeal, the Endangered Species Act (ESA). It has been used by environmental groups, such as the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund to halt clear cutting old-growth timber stands in Washington, Oregon, and California. The Northern Spotted Owl, specifically protected by the ESA, has been more than a symbol of resistance to this practice which leaves grotesque areas barren of any trees. The result has caused soil erosion to the detriment of agriculture and commercial fisheries. The soil is washed down hills by normal rainfall and fills streams. Fish may no longer swim upstream to spawn, and with virtually no topsoil left, the land cannot support agriculture. In mid-May, 1995 the National Academy of Sciences issued a timely report concerning the Endangered Species Act. "To sustain a viable future for our descendents," this report said, "we must find ways to preserve both species and ecosystems. The Endangered Species Act is a critically important part of our efforts. Any coherent, successful program to prevent species' extinction and to protect the nation's biological diversity is going to require more enlightened commitments on the part of all major parties to achieve success." The report continued: "Because habitat plays such an important biological role in endangered species' survival, some core amount of essential habitat should be designated for protection at the time of listing a species as endangered, as an emergency stopgap measure. It should be identified without reference to economic impact." The panel convened in 1992 by the scientific advisory council at the request of Congress, included 17 experts on various disciplines. It was headed by Michael T. Clegg, a geneticist who is dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of California at Riverside. Agricultural pesticides are often toxic, and in the lower Mississippi River, agricultural pesticides have so polluted this river that there is a huge and growing area in the Gulf of Mexico in which fish cannot survive. This pollution killed off the local commercial fishing industry that offers shrimp to the public. Corporate America has also polluted the air, water and earth with toxic wastes from radioactive residue from defense plants that manufacture the plutonium for nuclear weapons. Even disposal of radioactive uranium rods from power plants has proved nearly impossible. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has listed priority sites scheduled for cleanup at a cost determined by the Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA), another Act of Congress. California's Central Valley has recently been in the news. A toxic chemical used in some pesticides has been found infiltrating water wells and springs used by humans. The water used in this huge agricultural area may be so polluted it is no longer usable, for either agriculture or human consumption. Environmental organizations have studied how best to secure equal environmental justice for minorities in poor and urban areas polluted by nearby industry. The inhabitants suffer in silence; they are too poor to move elsewhere or to sue the company. I saw one paper mill in West Point, Virginia earlier in 1995. It has been there emitting hazardous sulphur fumes since 1937. About half the population of West Point is black. Equal justice under the law is the birthright of every American; it is the legal equivalent of a human right. Over the last three decades, the protection of the environment from degradation has become a necessity so widely recognized that environmental concerns have pervaded most fields of international law, including the international law of human rights. But not in the United States which consistently ignores even fundamental human rights. The United Nations Charter and various resolutions demand more from its member states. China, for example, demanded most favored nation status for trade purposes, but its leaders refused to even acknowledge its flagrant violations within China itself. In Tibet, a country it occupied in 1950, Chinese troops killed off large numbers of its Buddhist population. Political dissidents within China are routinely imprisoned for speech considered offensive to its leaders and the Communist Central Committee which decrees the norms of political discourse. Some of those students present at the June demonstration in Tiannamen Square in 1989 are still in jail. High unemployment, inflation, and official corruption in China still exist as of mid-1995, and China still exports products of child and prison labor. On May 28, 1993, however, President Clinton, while mentioning these abuses of human rights by China, did not terminate that country's Most Favored Nation (MFN) status. Assistant Secretary of State Winston Lord rationalized this decision by saying in part, "The objective is to use MFN in an effort to make progress with the Chinese on the key issues [human rights, piracy of intellectual property rights, the occupation of Tibet and the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty] and particularly in human rights where we have little other leverage except diplomatic pressures." In the session following this press release, Mr. Lord was quite evasive in responding to questions put by individual members of the White House press corps. The entire transcript may be retrieved from the America Online (AOL) database. In 1994 and 1995, President Clinton once again renewed China's MFN status. Congress may terminate MFN in 1996, and there may be enough votes to override a Clinton veto. Ever since its recognition of China in 1978, the United States had walked a precarious line with Chinese rulers in Beijing. By agreement with China, the United States did not recognize Taiwan. Beijing claimed this offshore island as its own territory. When its president had requested a visa to attend a Cornell reunion in 1995, President Clinton's State Department treated the request as one for a private, not an official visit. Beijing was so angry, it threatened unspecified retaliation if Taiwan's president was allowed to visit the United States. In 1992, Beijing reacted violently to a campaign speech by President George Bush. In Texas, Bush promised to deliver some jet fighter aircraft to Taiwan in violation of the agreement between the United States and the Peoples' Republic of China (PRC). Its leaders in Beijing threatened retaliation on the grounds the sale of military aircraft to Taiwan was prohibited by agreement. Amongst other things, Article 7 of the Agreement for cooperation concerning the peaceful use of nuclear energy [with China and ratified by the United States in 1985] provided that: "Each party shall endeavor to avoid taking any action that effects cooperation under this agreement. If either party at any time following entry into force of this agreement does not comply with the provisions of this agreement, the parties shall promptly hold consultations on the problem, it being understood that the other party shall have the rights to cease further cooperation under this agreement." President Bush gave them good reason to invoke Article 7. However, the PRC itself may have violated a related international agreement, the Missile Technology Control Regime, by transferring missile technology to Pakistan. Beijing has repeatedly equated its exports to Pakistan to the American sale in 1992 of F-16 military jets to Taiwan. However, it has taken three years for the PRC to act. The PRC is now selling weapons grade uranium and technology, including missile technology to Iran and Pakistan. Essentially, Bush left President Clinton to deal with an issue he had used for political purposes during the 1992 presidential campaign. Bush tried to save Texas jobs at a time when job security at the manufacturer's plant was a crucial political consideration. Job security is still a crucial consideration. However, the Clinton Administration seems reluctant to impose sanctions on China as it is required by law to do on a showing of China's violation of the agreement. Imposition of sanctions would force the White House to cut off billions of dollars of trade with China. That country is not an ideal trading partner. It is the world's worst thief of intellectual property (software and compact disks), and it has become a major dumper. China sells goods here at artificially low prices aimed at driving American competitors out of business. In 1990, President Bush signed a law requiring the United States to halt export permits and to impose a ban on many imports from countries that engage in the transfer of missile technology. The imposition of sanctions would have domestic political and economic consequences. Failure to impose them would also have consequences; the security of the United States might be endangered with nuclear missiles in the hands of rogue states, like Iraq. The president might have to dispatch American troops to some remote country attacked by another in a collision of interests that threatens to spill over into other neighboring nations, eg., Yugoslavia. At one time, Yugoslavia was a collection of republics with Tito, also known as Josip Broz, ruling this unruly collection of ethnic groups. Tito died in 1989, and matters went from bad to worse. A collision of religious and ethnic groups became inevitable In 1991, all this ended with secession of the republics beginning with Slavonia and followed by Croatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina Montenegro, and Macedonia. Serbia was left, and its dream of a Greater Serbia ruled from Belgrade seemed over. But Slobodan Milocevic, president of Serbia had other ideas. He armed the Serbian irregular army which promptly seized large portions of Croatia, shelling open cities in the process, from Dubrovnik to Sarajevo in Bosnia with a heavily Muslim population. The Serbian irregular forces presided over murder, torture, and sundry other crimes, all labeled by them as "ethnic cleansing" which shocked the world. The European Community dithered, with France and England declining to commit troops except to protect humanitarian deliveries of food and medicine. These soldiers wore the blue berets of the United Nations. However, the United Nations also imposed an embargo on any arms destined for the army defending Bosnia and Herzegovina. This embargo was probably in violation of Article 51 of the UN Charter. Article 51 preserved to UN member states the inherent right of self-defense against an armed attack. Under both presidents Bush and Clinton, the United States also vacillated. Neither was willing to commit American troops to defend the so-called safe havens, cities and large towns where food and medical supplies could be delivered by airlift. By mid-August of 1995, Serb forces in both Croatia and Bosnia Herzegovina may have extended themselves too far. Croatia's president Franjo Tudgman decided to make his move to recover territory lost to Serbia in the Krajina region. Croatian troops did recover this region and continued their drive to push the Serbia forces further south and out of artillery range of Dubrovnik. The Croats wanted to encourage tourism to this walled city on the Croatian sea coast, where Tito once owned a summer home. Were President Clinton to commit troops to defend the UN peacekeeping forces in the event their withdrawal became necessary, two constitutional provisions would apply. One appears in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11. "The Congress shall have the power.... to declare war." Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution makes "The President [shall be].... Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States...." The United States ratified the United Nations Treaty in 1945, and Congress enacted the United Nations Participation Act in the same year. Additionally, the North American Treaty Organization (NATO) was created in 1947 and the treaty was ratified by the Senate. Its original objective was to defend Germany against an armed attack by the Soviet Union. The likelihood of such an attack has all but disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-90. So the military elements of NATO have been looking, so far without success, for an alternative mission. Some thought the war in Yugoslavia might offer a reason for NATO to intervene there. On two occasions, NATO did intervene by sending its aircraft to bomb the Serbian irregulars, much to the chagrin of the UN's civilian adviser who was given a veto power over the use of NATO airpower. For his part, President Clinton has opposed lifting the arms embargo to permit the Bosnian Muslims to defend themselves against the Serbs. He argues that sending arms to Bosnia would "Americanize" an already complex situation, and both France and Great Britain would withdraw if the embargo were lifted. Withdrawal would be complicated, and forces already there would need protection to withdraw. However, in the closing days of 1995, the principals in the war worked out an agreement in Dayton, Ohio to settle this long-standing ethnic war. NATO forces, including 20,000 American troops, arrived in Bosnia to maintain peace while the substance of the Dayton Agreement was worked out on the ground. Congress reluctantly consented to this use of American troops. All this complexity suggests that President Bush had an opportunity to reduce the level of conflict in 1991 but lost it by indecision. He may have been too preoccupied by the war in the Persian Gulf where actual fighting was over in February, 1991. However, Iraq's war against the Kurds continued using weapons shipped to Baghdad from the United States. Before Saddam Hussein marched into Kuwait, American weapons manufacturers asked for and obtained permits from the Bush Department of Commerce. These permits allowed the arms manufacturers to ship arms to Iraq at a time when it was being attacked by Iran in a war that ended in 1988 with no real winner. The war in the Persian Gulf was noteworthy for another reason. President Bush used his presidential platform to proclaim a "New World Order" dedicated to peace, security and the rule of law. However, President Bush at that time was the only head of state to stand condemned by the International Court of Justice for the "unlawful use of force" in Nicaragua. The opinion of the International Court of Justice appears at 25 International Legal Materials 1023 (1986). The court found that the United States -- Bush was Vice President -- was in violation of the United Nations Charter for, among other things, mining Nicaragua's harbor, violating its airspace, arming and financing the contras as an armed force operating against the sovereignty of Nicaragua and as an agent of the United States and bombing oil storage depots within Nicaragua. Reagan described the contras as "freedom fighters," whereas they were former members of the National Guard used by Somoza, a displaced dictator. Bush also opened the post-Cold War era in December, 1989 by invading Panama. The UN General Assembly denounced the invasion of Panama as "a flagrant violation of international law and of the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of states." The United States installed a puppet régime in Panama of bankers, businessmen and "narcotraffickers," effectively denying its population any semblance of democracy with an occupying force of American troops. In 1989, these troops managed to capture General Manual Noriega. He was sent to Miami, indicted for drug-related crimes, tried, convicted and imprisoned in the United States. Whether the bill for at least $2 billion for damages during the invasion of Panama has ever been paid by the United States appears nowhere in accounts of this invasion. In another part of the world, Asia, there are two Chinas. One is the People's Republic of China or mainland China. It does not recognize Taiwan as a separate entity. In fact, Chinese leaders in Beijing consider Taiwan to be a breakaway province of China, and they expect unification of the two at some future time. In 1950, Tibet, conquered by the PRC, became an autonomous province, not the independent nation it once was. Reminding Chinese leaders of China's occupation of Tibet since 1950 and its genocidal slaughter of Tibetans has so far produced no movement toward human rights. In the mid-1990s, trade with China had expanded enormously only to run into the question of prison and slave labor in unsafe conditions. More than 11,000 Chinese workers died in industrial accidents during the first eight months of 1992, more than double the 1991 rate. Chinese officials claim the accidents occurred because of the abysmal working conditions, combined with long hours, inadequate pay and even some physical beatings. This combination produced tensions between workers and their [sometimes] American joint venture bosses. Chinese workers had great difficulty in grasping a simple fact. Foreign capital was not invested in China to improve living and working conditions for the workers; it was invested in plant and equipment to capitalize on the benefits of cheap Chinese labor. Most of corporate America is quite indifferent to violations of human rights in China; observance of these niceties of international conduct would interfere with the development of sound business relations that enabled everyone involved to profit from exploitation of Chinese labor. Exploitation of cheap labor is not the only benefit enjoyed by American companies that have invested about $3 billion in plants in China. Because the same companies may manufacture components for their own goods or sell them to others in the United States, a net loss of American jobs occurs. Furthermore, the United States buys about 40 percent of China's exports, and the dollars earned by China helps finance industrial, military, and infrastructure modernization. The Three Gorges Dam, for example, planned and under construction, will harness the hydroelectric power of the Yangtse River. This project will also displace 1.5 million inhabitants of the area to be flooded on completion. Many observers of this project see it as an unbelievably destructive environmental disaster. In fact, the Export Import Bank in Washington has declined to support or finance its construction on environmental grounds. There are likely to be political consequences during construction and upon completion. China need to feed its teeming millions, and removing so much land from use in agriculture may compel the Chinese rulers to buy food abroad. In early 1996, its government agency bought 2 million metric tons of wheat from America. American business concerns are eager to import goods manufactured by cheap Chines labor. They are pouring money into Chinese special economic zones to build plants where workers are paid less than a living wage to turn out everything from toys to clothing for export to the United States. China also looks to Boeing for commercial jets in the passenger trade. Beijing however, extorts know-how and high-skill jobs from Boeing and other manufacturers of technology. As a condition of sales, Beijing forces these companies to manufacture parts of their products within China and to execute technology transfer agreements of great importance to local industry. Eventually, Boeing and other companies with plants in China are expected to replace American concerns with companies run from Beijing. Chinese leaders are planning for self-sufficiency at just about every level. With the exception of self-sufficiency, the same trend exists in Mexico under the umbrella of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). It was approved by Congress in 1994 over the opposition of union labor. Labor officials predicted that the provisions of NAFTA would allow the export of American jobs to Mexico. Its workers are often paid less than $1 an hour for a fifty-hour work week. The beneficiaries of these low wages and unsafe working conditions are often American fashion boutiques. The print media ran stories critical of those American retail outlets that sold goods made cheaply in Mexico. In addition, the mass media showed a few television documentaries filmed to show the poverty exploited by American companies. There is nothing new about exploitation of its workers by corporate America. They are merely repeating the same pattern in China. These companies have no interest in improving the lot of Chinese workers. Building plants in China is only an investment, and the products, made by underpaid workers, will be exported to and sold within the United States. Even television documentaries showing the wretched working conditions of workers are unlikely to end this profitable business. The new, but almost uniformly conservative international economists offer historians a rationale for the cultural differences that held up domestic development in favor of furthering foreign relations often based on suspicion. China is still a developing nation that will need huge amounts of capital to expand its trade with the west. Together with building infrastructure, the Chinese must either grow enough food to feed the teeming millions along the coast and inland, or buy wheat, for example, on the international market. The overseas Chinese supply a great deal of the capital for infrastructure construction, such as the unbelievably destructive Three Gorges Dam planned for the Yangtse River. For the sake of hydroelectric power, the managers of this enterprise have created an environmental disaster. An estimated 1.5 million people will be displaced by construction of the dam. It will create a huge inland sea large enough to require relocation of Chinese living in homes to be flooded. The Chinese military occupation of Tibet in 1950 followed Mao's rise to power by only one year. Since then, Chinese leaders have moved slowly to eliminate Tibetan culture by genocidal murder of Tibetans only intermittently noted by the American press. The leaders in Beijing are guilty of the most heinous record of human rights, violating them constantly. American television captured scenes of military violence most recently in 1989 with the arrest and imprisonment of thousands of students during the Tiananmen Square disturbances. In 1995, the arrest and imprisonment of Wei Jiang for threatening to overthrow the government with his words was widely reported in the Western press.American business, eager to import goods manufactured with cheap Chinese labor, are competing with European business free of any guilt over human rights. They are pouring money into Chinese special economic zones to build plants where local workers are paid less than a living wage to turn out everything from toys to clothing for export to the United States. Yet China has not joined the World Trade Organization, principally because of its failure to act like a decent international citizen by threatening Taiwan with warlike conduct.There is nothing new about all this. The same trend is occurring under the umbrella of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This agreement was approved by Congress in 1994. Union labor opposed NAFTA, predicting it would "export" American jobs to Mexico. Mexican workers are often paid less than $1 an hour for a fifty-hour work week. For the most part, the beneficiaries have been retail boutiques offering clothing to the American market. Mexican workers are paid less than $1 per hour for a fifty hour work week, so American labor has been unable to compete in certain markets. Film documentaries have been produced showing the exploitation of Mexican labor. To entertain and inform all those people with or without jobs because they were "exported," The Walt Disney Company acquired Capital Cities/ABC in 1996. The acquisition was valued at $19 billion. This combination will offer merchandise, theme parks, sound track albums, and books. Westinghouse Electric Corporation acquired control of CBS for $5.4 billion, Time Warner Inc. acquired Turner Broadcasting Company for $7.5 billion. After regulatory approval, Time Warner was the world's largest media-entertainment combine. NBC, not wishing to be upstaged, was also acquired by corporate behemoth,General Electric Company. Fox Television, owned by Rupert Murdoch, announced a 24-hour all-news service competing with CNN. So did CBS and NBC. However, without adequate control of content by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), these networks, satisfied to deliver news alone are not expected to deliver educational television for the benefit of children. Diversity in programming will be sacrificed to the bottomline mentality.Paramount Communications and Viacom, Inc. joined forces in 1994, and the various subsidiaries like Simon & Schuster are being digested. Paramount Pictures is a subsidiary of Viacom, Inc. and Paramount designed a "home page" on Internet. In 1995, it allowed a user to download a movie trailer and preview its content, the Paramount film itself. Disney and Universal both had "home pages" on the Internet, and the latter invited users to lift off with Apollo 13 -- http://www.mca.com. In 1996, Congress rewrote the laws governing communications by television, cable, and radio. Telephone companies like American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), MCI will continue to compete but in a new market. The Baby Bells spun off in 1982 as the result of an antitrust consent decree and forbidden to enter the long distance market, were permitted to compete for entry into the cable and television business using their own phone lines. By 1997, most of these companies will have been converted to fiber optic lines carrying huge amounts of data into homes or offices. Wireless technology offers still another technology for rapid communication, and modems were built to accelerate the speed of communications. ISDN could handle over 120,000 bytes per second, and still faster transmission will be available by 1997.These very high speeds are essential now to accommodate the growing size of the Internet. On June 11, 1996 a three-judge federal court in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania found the Communications Decency Act violated certain free speech guarantees of the First Amendment. American Civil Liberties Union v. Janet Reno, Attorney General of the United States, et al (E.D. Pa. 1996). The court also made findings of fact. "Today, over 9,400,000 host computers of which 60 percent are located in the United States....In all, reasonable estimates are that as many as 40 million people around the world can and do access the....Internet. That figure is expected to grow to 200 million Internet users by the year 1999."However, the real story of 1996 was the struggle between Speaker Newt Gingrich and the Clinton White House, the outcome of which would determine who occupied it for the last four years of the 20th Century. Republican intransigence ultimately shut down the federal government on three occasions. The Constitution stipulates that Congress must enact a bill raising the debt ceiling, which at the end of 1995, was $4.9 trillion. The Congress could shut down the government by refusing to enact such a measure. It did so on December 15, 1995, principally because Gingrich could not control the firebrands of his own party. These seventy-three Republican freshmen wanted a balanced budget by 2002 together with a tax cut of at least $320 billion spread out over seven years. Clinton refused to budge, unless Congress met his concerns about Medicare, education, and the environment. With the government shut down at midnight on December 14, 1995 here's what Daniel Schorr, a news analyst for National Public Radio said on December 20 as federal employees faced a bleak Christmas:Daniel Schorr: If and when a squabble over stop-gap spending authority is resolved it will be Dayton time in the battle of the budget. That is to say that the adversaries, having civilian population, the leaders on both sides see nothing to be gained from prolonging the conflict and are ready to seek a combat-weary settlement. Like Dayton [Ohio], the Clinton-Dole-Gingrich understanding on the budget starts as an agreement on a negotiating process, and then comes the hard part. That involves coming out of dug-in positions with no [Under-Secretary of State] Holbroke or [Secretary of State] Christopher to knock heads together. President Clinton says there are policy differences on 80 to 90 issues, but the central issue is on whose back does the burden mainly fall for achieving a budget theoretically balanced over seven years. And at the core of that question is the question of cuts in the growth of health care programs, Medicare and Medicaid, versus cuts in come taxes. The president's most entrenched position is that he will protect the health programs from the deep cuts that the Republicans want, but it is almost impossible to do that and and cut taxes by $240 billion without virtually gutting most other and domestic programs, which mainly serve the middle class and the poor. Mr. Clinton has dug another hole for himself by saying he also favors a tax cut, but only by $98 billion, but opening the way to being obliged to bargain on a compromise figure.
You may have noticed that the so-called Blue Dogs, the group of some 20 conservative Democrats, who officially call themselves The Coalition, have come up with a plan proposing compromise figures on Medicare and Medicaid and no tax cuts. The Coalition and some other Democrats have tried to get the administration to drop its tax cut proposal. One of its leaders, Gary Condit of California says: 'We are not against tax cuts, but a tax cut at this time is not in the best interest of setting the priorities for balancing the budget.' The administration has so far been unwilling to reverse itself on cutting taxes. Mr. Clinton may by now be sorry he ever proposed it, but was described as being fearful of being perceived as engaging in another of his famous flip flops. Sometimes it takes courage to flip flop.
The arithmetic is pretty stern. To get a balance budget will require relinquishing some firmly-held positions. Maybe it can be done with the grace of Ronald Reagan who signed a tax increase saying: 'The sound you hear is the sound of concrete cracking around my feet.'