New Delhi, 03
April 2003
Mohan
Guruswamy traces the history of conflicts initiated by USA post WWII
–– Vietnam, Cuba,
Guatemala et al and concludes that history is merely repeating
itself. He traces the reason for this as 'Hubris' which
Webster's New World dictionary describes as ––
hubris
(hyoo' bris also hoo') n. "to rush at impetuously"
"wanton insolence or arrogance resulting from excessive pride
or from passion".
The
Sin of Hubris
By
Mohan Guruswamy
The
word hubris is described in the dictionary to simply mean
“excessive pride or self-confidence; arrogance” But it really
means much more than that. In classical Greek ethical and religious
thought hubris or hybris meant an “overweening presumption
suggesting impious disregard of the limits governing human action in
an orderly universe. It is the sin to which the great and gifted are
most susceptible, and in Greek tragedy it is usually the hero’s
tragic flaw.” In the Greek tradition the sin of hubris was
punishable by a super Olympian law to which even Zeus had to submit.
The
epic poem Persians, by Aeschylus about the defeat of a great Persian
army in 480BC by the Greeks led by Athens, is as much about the
hubris of King Xerxes. The sin of hubris has been a continuing theme
that has captured the imagination of historians, philosophers and
theologians alike.
The
biblical saying “pride cometh before the fall” applies equally
well to Ravana, the great king of the Rakshasas whose long
years of penance secured him the favor of Brahma, who rendered him
invulnerable to the gods and demons alike. We know what happened to
him. The lesser Hindus also know that it is not necessary to be
tyrant to attract the malefic attentions of the gods. Bali the
celebrated Daitya rose to such an eminence that Indra and the
other gods had to seek the interference of Vishnu, who once again
obliged the gods by consigning Bali to patala or the
netherworld. But Bali, unlike Ravana was not as guilty of hubris as
he was of aspiring greatness. In that he was punished nevertheless,
lies another moral. Perhaps the greatness of the gods is not meant
for others, especially mere mortals. People like Saddam Hussein and
those before who aspired greatness?
On
April 19, 1959 Fidel Castro made his first post revolution trip to
Washington and met with then Vice President Richard Nixon for three
and a half hours. Following this meeting Nixon appraised him thus:
“The one fact we can be sure of, is that he has those indefinable
qualities that make him a leader of men. Whatever we may think of
him, he is going to be a great factor in the development of Cuba and
possibly of Latin American affairs generally.” In October that
year President Eisenhower authorized a plan to oppose Castro. The
CIA then set up a task force to plot the overthrow of Fidel Castro.
Among the options is assassination, “possible removal” in
officialese.
On
October 7, Senator John Kennedy running for president attacked the
Republican administration for “permitting a communist menace to
arise just ninety miles from the shores of the United States.” A
week later Kennedy again attacked, “If you can’t stand up to
Castro, how can you be expected to stand up to Khrushchev?”
Ironically it was Richard Nixon who protested Kennedy’s hawkish
position on Cuba and charged him with being “reckless and
irresponsible” and argued that an attack on Cuba would be
condemned in the United Nations and would transgress international
law.
But
Nixon knew otherwise too. All along the CIA was planning the
invasion of Cuba. The plan was to stage landings by Cuban émigré
troops, which would then trigger off a massive upsurge among the
Cuban people to overthrow Castro’s dictatorship. Studying the
details of the plan the legendary Col. Edward Lansdale, an
acknowledged expert on guerilla warfare expressed doubts whether the
Cuban people would rise up in the face of the landings?
Like
Al Gore last year, Nixon lost a closely fought election in 1960,
which many say was stolen in Chicago, just as Bush won because of
“malfunctioning” voting machines in Florida under brother Jeb
Bush. In 1961 John Kennedy inherited this CIA plan, a plan crafted
by another legendary master of international skullduggery, Richard
Bissell, Director of Operations at CIA. A Yale trained economist,
Bissell had earned a reputation as a brilliant and successful
spymaster who had overthrown inconvenient regimes in Iran and
Guatemala, and had overseen the U-2 spy plane project. He introduced
himself to Kennedy saying: “I am your man eating shark, Mr.
President!” Kennedy fell under his spell and went along with the
plan.
The
plan called for a landing in Cuba of a force of Cuban émigré
fighters armed and trained by the CIA. This force was then meant to
storm its way inland releasing in its wake a popular upsurge that
would topple Castro, just like he did the dictator Fulgencio Batista.
A President in waiting was kept ready in Florida, just as Ahmed
Chalabi, a fugitive on bank fraud charges now waits in a CIA rented
villa in Teheran.
On
April 15, 1961 the plan went into operation with an air strike by
eight B-26 bombers ostensibly belonging to the Cuban Expeditionary
Force, which hit three Cuban airfields in a bid to neutralize
Castro’s air power. They partly succeeded. Fortunately for Castro,
the Bay of Pigs, the chosen place for the landing suffered from two
crucial disadvantages. The beach was close to Castro’s favorite
holiday home and hence had a Cuban military unit garrisoned on it.
The shallow waters of the bay also concealed shoals that
necessitated the landing force to wade ashore from a great distance,
making them sitting ducks. That is precisely what happened. As US
warships watched helplessly, Kennedy realized that he was led up the
path and that the CIA’s urgent pleas for US air strikes would
strip whatever was left of the fig leaf of innocence donned by the
USA. He abandoned the landing force to its fate. The few who
survived ended up in Cuban jails. When asked what went wrong
Kennedy’s National Security Advisor, McGeorge Bundy replied,
“Hubris!”
In
February 1961, Robert McNamara a brilliant Harvard MBA and former
President of Ford Motor Company took over as the US Defense
Secretary. He took with him an equally brilliant team of systems
analysts who were to transform the way the USA fought its wars in
the future. The generals at the Pentagon were ready to snow McNamara
under tons of detail to go about with business as usual. The
briefing presentations went on forever and the new Defence Secretary
studied each slide intently. He was quiet till he reached slide
seven hundred something when he cried, “Stop!” and pointed out
that this slide contradicted slide fifty something seen the previous
day.
The
brass lost the match at that moment and McNamara and his whiz kids
took full charge of the Pentagon. The systems analysts quantified
everything. Every weapon system ordered was subject to a
cost-benefit analysis. Even military results were quantified in
terms of “area pacified” and “body count.” When the USA went
into Vietnam these two result goals took an entirely different and
sinister meaning. “Area pacified” became area cleared of all
Vietnamese, innocent or otherwise, and body count became just the
production of dead bodies. Since the dead tell no tales they were
all either Vietcong or North Vietnamese Army.
There
is that apocryphal story of a senior officer visiting a small town
reduced to rubble by US artillery fire asking the officer in charge,
“What happened here?” He was told; “We had to destroy this
place to save it!” When Clark Clifford who took over from McNamara
as Defense Secretary toted up all the “body count” figures of
the war, he found that it had exceeded all intelligence estimates of
enemy combatants by over fifty percent! When he asked, “Why are we
then fighting?” Lyndon Johnson knew that he too was led up garden
the path. Some years ago I met Robert McNamara at a seminar
organized by Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. I
asked him as to how he got it so wrong. He replied with one word,
“Hubris.”
Now
that the war on Iraq is not going as anticipated and the drive up to
Baghdad along the Euphrates river rather than being an easy
excursion in the countryside has become a military nightmare and a
logistical logjam, the thieves have begun to fall out. The invasion
of Iraq has become Rumsfeld’s war. According to Seymour Hersh
writing in latest ‘The New Yorker’, “Several senior war
planners complained to me in interviews that Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld and his inner circle of civilian advisers, who had
been chiefly responsible for persuading President Bush to lead the
country into war, had insisted on micromanaging the war’s
operational details. Rumsfeld’s team took over crucial aspects of
day-to-day logistical planning, traditionally, an area in which the
uniformed military excels, and Rumsfeld repeatedly overruled the
senior Pentagon planners on the Joint Staff.” Hersh further
writes: “Rumsfeld’s faith in precision bombing and his
insistence on streamlined military operations has had profound
consequences for the ability of the armed forces to fight
effectively overseas.” Hubris again?
On
the first night of the war a CNN military analyst obviously ecstatic
with the hitech communications system that gave the decision makers
in the Pentagon and White House a continuous stream of video data on
the progress of the war called it, “Gods view of the war.” That
God, if there be one, should be thought to have such a still limited
and linear view of unfolding events itself is testimony to the
arrogance of people who matter now in Washington.
It
is true that in the post WWII world, if there is a repository of
supreme power on earth it must be the US President. And if every US
President is but a different avatar of the same power, then
George W. Bush must be its vamana-avatar or dwarf
incarnation.
The
only problem is that Saddam Hussein is no Bali readily offering his
head for the dwarf to place his foot on and stamp him down into the
nether world.
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