Senators Obama and McCain, President Hoover and the War in Afghanistan

        C.B. Curtis was U.S. Ambassador to the Dominican Republic. On April 21^st, 1930, he sent this query to his superiors in Washington: “Can’t you persuade Al Capone to offer him (Rafael Trujillo) more money than he is making here to come to the United States as his instructor? That ought to attract Trujillo.”

     I found this message in files at the President Hoover library. Curtis wanted the President to intervene – “a naval vessel should be sent without delay”-and overthrow Trujillo, who had just overthrown the regime of Horacio Vasquez.

     The State Department responded with this message: The U.S. government would recognize whoever achieved power in the Dominican Republic. As Assistant Secretary of State Francis White explained to Curtis, “the President feels, I may say confidentially that our interventions in the past have not been very successful and he does not want to land forces nor even to send a ship unless it is absolutely essential for the protection of American lives.”

     In a sharp break with the policies of President Wilson, Hoover recognized the limits of American power. In 1930 the Haitian occupation was still in place and the eight year Dominican intervention(1916-1924) paved the way for Trujillo. He was trained by the Marines. Hoover wanted no part of more interventions but he did make one concession. Trujillo’s mentor was in Haiti; let Colonel Cutts see if he had any influence. In a long memo Cutts explained that Trujillo was “the most Americanized” of all the Dominicans; he copied us with great delight. But, even after all our money and training, Trujillo would install a “dictator type of government”. Cutts could do nothing about a man who had “a Jekyll and Hyde personality”.

              Herbert Hoover was an educated pessimist. We trained Trujillo; he was the “most Americanized” of all the Dominicans and look what we got: A dictator, a killer and a thief. For example,Trujillo always kept $600,000 in cash in a small bag –just in case.

      Trujillo ruled with viciousness for thirty years and his reign should be a warning light for those demanding more U.S. troops for Afghanistan. We can offer the best training available; we can Americanize them by spending, as in Iraq, millions for a system of zip and area codes. We can even try and fund (again in Iraq) a no smoking campaign. But if the interests of our clients and proxies are different than our own, they are going to use our training to further their survival, not ours.

       Both of our Presidential candidates want to substantially expand our involvement in Afghanistan. But, as former U.S.Ambassador Thomas Schweich stressed in the New York Times Magazine on July 27^th,2008, the Taliban are at least partially funding themselves via the opium trade;and while Afghan President Karzai may be against the Taliban, his reelection chances rest on turning a blind eye to the trade that is so essential to hiselectoral constituency. The government, judicial, police, and military corruption that is endemic to any Narco-State (i.e., Colombia) is likely tocontinue in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future. We can use our troops; we can train and arm the Afghans as we are doing in Iraq; but if Obama and McCain expect outcomes that transform the Afghan nation they are, to use a phrase of Max Weber’s, political infants.

    This is, admittedly a pessimistic assessment. Unfortunately it is rooted in a history of one failed intervention after another. Recall, for example, that in 1965 President Lyndon Johnson also intervened in the Dominican Republic. That went so well that Johnson sent down “bag men”carrying sacks of dollars to pay off the police chiefs who paid for hundreds of phantom officers. The cash flew up to Miami and when Johnson justified the intervention on the basis of insurgents producing “1500” headless bodies he engaged in the same kind of exaggeration as President Bush in 2003. We never found the weapons of mass destruction and we never found the headless bodies.However, Johnson actually had Ambassador Bennett and Ellsworth Bunker search through hundreds of photos looking for headless corpses. They finally found one but, as they sheepishly told Johnson, they had no way to know if the person was a good guy or a bad guy.

        Hoover was right. Our interventions almost overwhelmingly end in failure and farce. ThinkCuba in 1898 and think twenty-one years later when General Enoch Crowder wrote a new constitution for Cuba while he lived on the U.S. battleship Minnesota floating off the Cuban coast.Cuba got its constitution and the people got General Gerado Machado, a brute to rival Trujillo.

       Senators Obama and McCain: Root policy in pessimism. Our history demands it.  In addition, remember that, one, it is easy to start a war; and, two, you may get in for one reason and stay for another. A January 1965 memo in the Pentagon Papers makes this point: Seventy percent of the reason we were then in Vietnam was to avoid humiliation. The public rhetoric stressed anti-communism; theprivate reality was that we blew it and we did not want to admit that fact tothe rest of the world.

   And finally, think of Iraq. True or false,we went in to get rid of weapons of mass destruction. Five years later we have a predicament which has nothing to do with the reasons for the intervention. As Terrill and Crane note in a monograph published by the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, “we can’t stay, we can’t leave and we can’t fail.” In essence, our occupation produced only one “success”: We managed (as Juan Cole puts it) to destabilize the cockpit of the world economy and it is costing us lives and $12 billion a month to try and discover some way to end an occupation that is even more farcical than our century of cruelty and idiocy in the Caribbean.

     Senator Obama: You often remind us that you made a good call when you opposed the Iraq intervention. Use that common sense in Afghanistan. It is an extraordinarily complex society, full of devilish divisions, including religion, tribe, ethnicity, drugs and geography. The Dominican Republic, Haiti and Cuba were cultural picnics compared to the complexity of Afghanistan. Yet we failed miserably in each and every instance.

    So, remember, not the Maine, but Herbert Hoover. He knew a bad thing when he saw it so he refused to spit in the wind.