The Ruses for War: American Intervention Since World War II. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Oct, 1992 by Gregg Easterbrook

Does American intervention abroad always involve cynical motives?

Did you believe The New York times story that the Bush administration was maneuvering to invent a pretext to bomb Iraq during the Republican National Convention? The notion seemed so absurdly transparent that it was tempting to accept White House assertions that the story was a fantasy. Yet while complaining that the Times had hit below the belt by suggesting vulgar political motives in war, Bush officials also said something that escaped further notice: They protested that the Times account revealed national security information. In the standard catch-22 arrangement, the White House refused to comment on what the breached information might have been. But what security information could possibly have been in that story--except the operational details of a plan to bomb Iraq on pretext during the Republican National Convention?

If you presume that vulgar motives normally underlie great affairs of state, The Ruses for War(*) is the V book for you. In it, John Quigley, a law professor at Ohio State University and author of Law After Revolution and other books, argues that every American use of force or proxy force in the postwar era has been venal.

It's distressingly easy to show crass American conduct in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Laos, and Cambodia, to name a few. Quigley makes the premise universal by asserting, for example, that the Korean War was entirely a cynical gimmick. In Quigley's view, the Soviet Union had no interest in North Korea; after all, it could have seized the whole Korean peninsula in 1945 if it had really wanted to. The Korean War itself was provoked by the grasping South. MacArthur retreated in the early months not because North Korean troops were pressing him but as a trick to create sympathy in Washington for the idea of dispatching a large offensive force to punish the godless Communists. The northern army pursued MacArthur only with contrition. "Unprepared for an extended campaign in the South, [northern forces] needed a full week to regroup after taking Seoul.... [T]his lack of preparation for a sustained offensive cast doubt on whether the northern army had initiated the fighting," Quigley writes. The Chinese didn't want to fight either, but were suckered as part of an American master plan.

The Ruses for War does a fine job of interpreting events in the light least favorable to Washington, but rarely rebuts or even mentions opposing interpretations. That the North Korean army was busily destroying another country's cities and seizing its territory sounds rather like a venal motive on the other side. Maybe it was understandable that the Chinese didn't believe American assurances, diplomatic or military, that U.S. forces would never cross the Yalu River into China. But not only did U.S. forces not attempt to cross the Yalu before the Chinese attacked them, there is no evidence that President Truman ever authorized a crossing--a fact that, not supporting Quigley's master plan theory, is not analyzed.

Quigley's instinct for his book topic is a sound one, for a scorecard of American intervention since World War II is not a pleasant thing to behold. The United States has bombed, invaded, used force in, or underwritten wars in Angola, Cambodia, the Congo, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Grenada, Guatemala, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Korea, Kuwait, Laos, Lebanon, Libya, Panama, the Philippines, and Vietnam. During the same period the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, and underwrote wars in Angola, Ethiopia, and Vietnam. Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe gives the old USSR, overall, the less attractive record, but it is an unhappily close comparison.

And Quigley is right to be angry about the occasions on which American idealism has been shunted aside. The 1989 invasion of Panama, for instance, continues to be one of our country's dark hours. It is amazing both how little outrage the invasion engendered from the American population and the media, and that Panama has no standing whatsoever as an issue in the 1992 presidential campaign, though it is a leading item on which George Bush's record ought to be judged.

Between 400 and 2,000 civilians died in our attack on Panama: unarmed, innocent citizens of a country we like. Though the invasion was, for public relations purposes, named Operation Just Cause, Bush has never explained in a convincing way what the Cause was, and if the presidential campaign is any indication, he will never be pressured to explain. There were several cases of summary execution of Panamanians. Our side razed damaged civilian houses to prevent them from being photographed. U.S. forces dug mass graves to bury civilian casualties of the fighting around the Panamanian Defense Force headquarters building, concealing the bodies before they could be identified and counted.

U.S. forces dug mass graves. We like to think that American troops always behave in a moral fashion, as they did during the Gulf war. In Panama they did not. Yet Bush and the Pentagon shrugged this off by refusing to comment on casualty figures, and the media promptly dropped the question. The strongest chapters of The Ruses for War demonstrate Quigley's wrath about both Panama and the continuing silence of even Democrats about this shameful episode.