The Cold War

Most of us here came of age under the so-called Cold War.

But, what was it? Was it actually a balancing act between Communism and whatever we want to label its opposite (democracy does not work as an opposite, because, strictly speaking, democracy is a form of government and Communism is an economic system) or was it just the name for the post-World War II American foreign policy?

I want to post a bit of David Halberstam's, "The Fifties." "The national security complex became, in the Eisenhower years, a fast-growing apparatus to allow us to do in secret what we could not do in the open. This is not just an isolated phenomenon but part of something larger going on in Washington -- the transition from an isolationist America to America the international superpower; from Jeffersonian democracy to imperial colossus. A true democracy had no need for a vast, secret security apparatus, but an imperial country did. As America's international reach and sense of obligation increased, so decreased the instinct to adhere to traditional democratic pocedures among the inner circle of Washington policymakers. Our new role in the world put us in conflict not only with the Communists but with our own traditions. What was evolving was a closed state within an open state."

This is part of the chapter on a fraudulent coup staged by the Dulles brothers, John Bedall Smith, Eisenhower himself, and, a few others, in Guatemala. It involved that all-purpose villain, United Fruit; a handful of native military types; an actor and an effort to silence the NYTimes. The coup -- although it took place in this and not the eastern hemisphere -- was a microcosm of the so-called Cold War. Halberstam's reportage is, alternately, hilarious, cheering (in the sense that it shows the left to have been correct all along), ire-raising.

Reading this chapter drives home the fact that the US has been stuck in an amoral rut for more than half a century and makes plain what a slow learner this country is. Substitute the names of dozens of other nation states -- including Iraq -- that this alleged-super power has toyed with for decades and you have a political "Ground Hog Day."

The current administration -- or, maybe it was the Raygun administration -- has tried to put forth the idea that the Cold War ended, most likely, to allow it to continue to act as horrendously toward those less powerful as the Dulles brothers did. The Cold War has ended only insofar as the enemy was once the Communist states of Eastern Europe and while today's enemy is international terrorism. The more things change, the more they remain mired in the mud of deception and mired in a web of lies.