If You Can't Walk the Walk ... Don't Talk the Talk

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," wrote George Santayana. The war in the Persian Gulf brought my past back with a vengeance. Don't get me wrong: I was a hawk in a time of hawks. I supported our troops in the Gulf 110 percent. But that is not the point.

My past has been sitting like a specter in my living room for the past few months, reminding me with a cynical smile that something is happening here that I have seen before: In the Persian Gulf war, and particularly in Kurdistan, our Government has repeated its long-standing pattern of abandoning certain people after it has secretly motivated them into revolt and revolution--and death and destruction.

This is definitely bad news. It is an irresponsible policy, applied covertly at the time of its execution, administered by a foreign-policy bureaucracy that sits far outside the reach of American public opinion. It brings up serious questions about our Government's accountability, both to us and to the people it manipulates and then abandons overseas. Most troubling, this is not a new issue in our nation's history.

Let me start with a personal remembrance. It is a story of how I was conned into risking my life at the instigation of some very persuasive individuals who later abandoned me. It is the story of how a naïve young man with stars in his eyes was wooed into political action--and was then left totally vulnerable to the forces of chance and circumstance.

Cut to a forest of pine trees in West Germany. It is the night before I am to cross the border into Communist East Germany, officially known as the German Democratic Republic. I am somewhere north of the city of Bad Hersfeld, lying on a bed of pine needles and soft earth. It is raining lightly. The year is 1956. The month is August. I have just celebrated my 20th birthday.

I consider myself on a mission from God. The east European refugees whom I met earlier that summer in Paris have given me money, maps, lists of specific targets and an East German Exakta camera with a telephoto lens and a lot of 35mm film.

The refugees want me to do some amateur spying for them in East Germany. They report rumors of a potential revolution. They say that East Germany is a Communist country seething with discontent.

I am to go into East Germany, sneak off the autobahn in my Simca, snoop around in various places, then drive back out and tell them what is happening in their native country.

To recruit me for this task, the refugees say that they need me. They say that my American passport will allow me to go through East German customs more easily. According to them, the spirit of democracy needs me, America herself needs me, all the freedom-loving peoples of the world need me. Am I available?

I am available. For one thing, I love being needed. For another, I enjoy the sense of danger inherent in the assignment. And, finally, I want very much to see what I can see in East Germany.

My curiosity about the Communist world is natural. I attended both high school and college in the Fifties and am a young man who has been indoctrinated by his own Government in certain beliefs; among them, that communism is the root of all evil in the universe. A mere college student, I suddenly have a chance to check that story out. Such a deal! How can I resist?

To put it bluntly, I am a fool on a fool's errand. Whatever happens to me will be insignificant to the people in Paris, who have smiled and toasted me with champagne. Those charming refugees who are sending me into East Germany to check on the Russian bear will continue their comfortable lives in exile, whether I go back to them or not.

I do not think about that side of it. But once through customs, the chase is on. I turn off the autobahn illegally and head for Eisenach and points east. As I do so, I feel a rush of incredible joy. This is life on the edge.

I scout and scour the landscape, count convoys of Russian troops, chart tank parks, map army barracks, dodge the police, get to know a few people in what remains of the underground, take photographs and collect information.

I find a countryside filled with the uncleared rubble of World War Two, an oppressed people much more impoverished than their West German counterparts, a client state of the U.S.S.R. occupied by numerous Russian troops and an efficient and ruthless secret police. I understand that the prospects for open political rebellion are very slim.

With the luck of the shanty Irish, I complete my trip successfully. On the last day, I take some pictures of the industries, as instructed, and slip through customs. My fling at amateur espionage is finished.

When I show up at the front door of the people who sent me, they seem slightly surprised. They are happy to get the film, but after some intense debriefing, they are far less sociable than they were before. A coldness creeps into their manner. It is clear that they want to be rid of me. I have served my purpose, and that is that. I am deeply hurt and angry, but I am also too proud to argue. I go back to the United States, a sadder and wiser young man.

And so, in 1956, I learn the hard way--and not for the last time--that certain sponsors can abandon anybody they choose. Is it such a leap, then, to understand that our Government can abandon the very people it incites to rebellion? Some Hungarians I know would say it is no leap at all.

A revolt against the Russian occupation of eastern Europe occurred in Hungary in the fall of 1956. As it began, the U.S. propaganda machine turned its attack to full blast. Promises were made, all sorts of incitements created. "They were telling us to cut the Russians up and throw them into the rivers," a Hungarian friend of mine reported to me. "We were fighting in the streets, we were throwing Molotov cocktails at their tanks, and for a few days, we thought the Russians were running away from us."

But then, something happened: The Russians decided to play hardball. They ordered their tanks and troops back into Budapest with a fury. There was blood in the streets, most of it Hungarian. The promises of direct aid and intervention that the U.S. had been covertly broadcasting to the Hungarians disappeared from the airwaves like smoke from a gun barrel. Our country bugged out and left the Hungarian freedom fighters holding the bag. It was no contest. Brave as they were, they were still annihilated by Russian firepower.

I was back in college in America by that time and later interviewed scores of Hungarian refugees. I did not feel proud of our country for abandoning the people I was talking with. It was a bitter lesson in the world of Realpolitik, a lesson that would be repeated throughout my life.

When secret policy makers in high places in America abandon our friends in other countries after urging them to revolt, and when people die for us in combat while we sit on our hands, I have a problem. If you can't walk the walk, I say, don't talk the talk.

I submit that our foreign-policy establishment's recent behavior in the Persian Gulf--particularly our use of psychological warfare to incite the Kurds and others to open rebellion in Iraq--deserves rigorous examination.

Ironically, I have had a peripheral but personal connection on several occasions with the hidden improvisations of America's shadow masters. For example, I knew some of the Cubans who were trapped at the Bay of Pigs when President Kennedy withheld significant air cover during the attack that the U.S. Government engineered against Cuba in 1961. Without the general public's knowledge, America recruited and trained a brigade of exiled Cuban warriors to invade Cuba and overthrow Fidel Castro. We sheltered them in special camps in Florida and Central America, we pumped them up with fat promises and inflated rhetoric and we delivered them to the beaches of Cuba ready to fight and conquer communism.

But Castro's troops did not wilt and run. With our Cuban recruits pleading from the beaches of the Bay of Pigs for close air support, and with Castro's militia putting up stiffer resistance than predicted, the President suddenly withheld our planes, canceled the air strikes and looked the other way. Men to whom we had pledged our allegiance died in brutal combat. The invasion failed.

By any reasonable standard, it was a major abandonment of good and brave men. I happened to know one of the American intelligence officials who were responsible for the investigation of that abortive action after the fact, and while J.F.K. tried to soften our perception of the failure with patriotic speeches, and while the real story of the reasons for the disaster took a long time to surface, America still looked very incompetent and irresponsible. Who was to blame for the Bay of Pigs failure? Ultimately, J.F.K. took the burden on himself, but he was not operating in a political vacuum. It would not be the last time we had encouraged, then abandoned insurgents.

I served in the Marine Corps with some of the Southeast Asians (and Americans) who died in Laos when America abruptly absented itself from the secret war it had been fighting there--a covert war that began in earnest in the late Fifties. Our country had equipped, trained and commanded many of the Hmong tribe of Laos, used them to harass and obstruct those using the Ho Chi Minh Trail (among other missions), convinced them that America's fight against communism would continue until we were victorious, then left them to displacement and death when our political leaders decided to cut and run.

I doubt that we have ever had a more sequestered and unacknowledged war than the war in Laos. To give you some sense of its scope, the United States dropped 1,600,000 tons of bombs on Laos--more than the 1,360,000 tons dropped on Germany in all of World War Two. Today, more than 50,000 of the Hmong live in refugee camps in Thailand (another 50,000 live in the United States--many of them brought here through private efforts, not through Government accountability). Certain operations in Laos will never be revealed. The names of some of the men killed there will never be made public.

The secret war in Laos is a perfect example of undeclared American foreign policy. A vital question follows: Was our truncated commitment to Laos orchestrated by a series of American Presidents, Democratic and Republican, acting on their own? Were we victimized by the folly of a few untutored individuals who happened to hold the highest office in the land? Or did our foreign-policy experts advise our Presidents to continue their long-term and eventually disastrous efforts in Laos?

Guess what, good reader. We will never really know. The information to make those judgments will never be made available to us. It never is.

I toured Central America as a journalist in 1985, visited Nicaragua (as well as El Salvador and Honduras), went north from Managua into the territories of Jinotega and Matagalpa to see the war firsthand. I met some of the Contras who later died under our covert sponsorship in the hills of Nicaragua; and while I was opposed to that American-financed insurgency, I still understood the tragedy of the situation, the senseless waste of lives. We funded the Contras, trained them, gave them aid and advice, provided them with airstrips, ammunition, uniforms and rations, and then left them to twist not so gently in the wind when it became impolitic to continue our clumsy and not-so-secret war against the Sandinistas.

Finally, and most personally of all, I lived in the Middle East for three years in the mid-Sixties. My older son was born in Istanbul, and my first serious attempts at writing began in a house on a hill overlooking the Bosporus. Because of these deep, personal roots in the region, the war in the Persian Gulf had intimate significance for me. It involved the fate of some of my lifelong friends.

The Turks and the Kurds (and the Armenians, and all the other people in that complex and conflicted region) are not vague, impersonal abstractions to me. They are flesh-and-blood human beings. They are colorful, energetic, imaginative and gracious people with a great deal to offer the world. They have faces, names, humor, histories, children, songs and traditions.

People from Turkey and Kurdistan and other areas of the Middle East are not always well understood or well reported here in America, but that does not make them any less valuable to the world. When we abandon people like the Kurds after we've coaxed them into combat, I think we give up our exemplary-nation status.

During the recent action in the Persian Gulf, America did not have to deliberately incite a tribal population to rise up and confront the Republican Guard and Saddam Hussein--and be slaughtered. We had all the firepower, precision weapons, troop strength and intelligence capabilities we needed. Yet our shadow masters gambled again with impoverished lives. They did not need to promise a people heaven and then leave them in hell, but that is exactly what they did.

Who among us voted on that decision? Who is accountable? No one has stepped forward. The stage is suddenly dark, the podium unoccupied. Isn't it mysterious? Our President denies any involvement in the matter. He says he never incited anybody. So who is to blame? To whom do we complain? Is anybody out there?

Guess what again, good reader. We will never know the answers. The information will not be there. The invisible hand of an invisible component of the American shadow Government reached out and stroked the Kurdish psyche and said in seductive tones, "Rise up, revolt, Saddam must go, we are with you, your freedom is at hand, take arms against this evil man and overthrow him."

The architects of this secret foreign policy drive to work every day, like most civil servants. They are irritated by traffic jams, burdened by credit-card debt, as concerned about their children as the rest of us. Yet they are also at play in the fields of their agencies, think tanks and bureaucracies, and they have no direct accountability to the American electorate. Not all of those experts supported the cynical manipulation of the Kurds in Iraq. But the right ones, the powerful ones, the winners for the moment did.

The cost of these surreptitious policy decisions is incalculable. There are men and women overseas who believe our Government's enticing words of encouragement and who will, in the final desperation of the last hours of their lives, attack enemy tanks, planes and artillery with only rocks and rifles in their hands. These people waited for the support our Government had confidentially pledged, and when that support did not come, they died trying to fulfill the dream our propaganda gurus had handed them.

Let's cut the rhetoric, the false promises, the gamesmanship--and save some lives. True, we may miss a few opportunities to cause trouble in certain societies our analysts distrust, but those missed opportunities are small potatoes compared with the damage we do when we play psychological war games with dissident populations in times of crisis. It's very simple: As a nation and as a people, we can do better than that. One day, maybe, we can even have a foreign policy that is open to public accountability on all levels.

Inshaalah, as they say in a certain part of the world; God willing.