Use of lying - by US presidents - in foreign policy and about CIA. Endless Enemies - presidents' lies & US's destructive policy of waging wars the past 35 years - Kwitny and detractors in a debate. 3 Sep 08 #002
Source - with more of Kwitny's and the other participants' statements
Taunt to Kwitny by Melvin Lasky (Editor, Encounter Magazine)
Man sometimes tells the truth; man occasionally mixes the truth with some deception and self-interest. This is the history of Western civilization. I cannot understand this schoolboy glee of discovering that occasionally Talleyrand, or Napoleon, or Churchill, or - dare I say it in these holy halls? - the Pope, over the last two thousand years, has told something not strictly true. Why all of a sudden do you find - and obviously enjoy - a pattern of mendacity everywhere in the world?
Kwitny's response
"The question is, have we produced a safe world in which we can trade freely and in which we have friends? Or have we produced a world in which our embassies are blown up because we have troops in countries where the people don't want us, in which we have to put up concrete road barriers around the White House, in which every three months we discover an enemy against whom we have to take military action - or think we do?
"One of the problems is in not recognising the difference between a country and the government that rules that country. We are spoiled here. We have a democracy, and our government tends to represent a consensus of what the people think. In most countries of the world, that is not true. And by confusing- a leadership faction with the popular will of those countries, we have met one disaster after another.
"We have been lied to about Iran, about Lebanon, about the Gulf of Tonkin, about Chad, about Shaba, about Angola, about one crisis after another. We are told by these liars that we are fighting for free enterprise. Not only did we cut our own economic throats by preserving monopoly control and killing free enterprise over Iran's oil, Guatemala's fruit, Zaire's diamonds, and so on, but we have killed free enterprise among our potential allies and friends in all of these countries by creating socialist military dictatorships. If you travel the world, you will see that more socialist dictatorships have been created by the United States than have ever been created by the Soviet Union.
"For the past thirty-five years/the United States has suffered through a needless series of wars in places most Americans had never heard of until our military force was committed there. And, by and large, the people we fought against have been no threat to us. Letting these people alone would often have brought our country great commercial benefit. To fight these wars against this endless series of distant and manufactured enemies, we have lost more than one hundred thousand American lives, and killed millions of those of other nations; we have sacrificed billions of dollars - a waste that today and for the foreseeable future continues to cause economic suffering in this country. We have ripped our country apart in a decade of disruption by disputes over the wars we fight abroad, while destroying our government's ability to wage war on poverty and other problems of our own people. Our foreign policy for those thirty-five years has been stupid and self-defeating.
"I did not come to these conclusions easily or early. Twenty years ago, I believed in what we were doing in Vietnam under President John F. Kennedy, and in the early days under President Lyndon Johnson. I used to argue this point with my much wiser father, who warned me that Kennedy and Johnson were lying. My teachers had taught me that the President of the United States doesn't lie, and that our government is good and democratic. And I believed them.
"In the intervening twenty years I have traveled through more than eighty countries on the continents where we fought these wars. I have lived and worked in many of those countries, and I have stayed in hundreds of homes of ordinary people there, and tried to share their food and their lives and their truths. I have done this as a Peace Corps volunteer, as an unemployed backpacker, and as a reporter for the largest newspaper in the country.
"I have also waded through hundreds of thousands of pages of government and corporate documents - classified and unclassified - including a lot of State Department cables. I have interviewed thousands of government officials. And I can tell you that Presidents do lie. They have lied consistently about the reasons we were fighting these wars. They have either known nothing or said nothing about local struggles over tribe, religion, and region, in which we have intervened constantly, causing great harm to ourselves and others. They have made up phony stories about Soviet and Chinese intervention, which, if you go to the scene and look for it, isn't there. Secretaries of State lie. UN Ambassadors lie."
These statements by Jonathan Kwitny appeared in the transcript of a discussion held in 1985 at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, and is reprinted from The Center Magazine, March-April, 1985. Jonathan Kwitny's book Endless Enemies had been published the previous year.
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