DEADLY MISTAKES? Viewer Guide Walter Miale DEADLY MISTAKES? Viewer Guide Walter Miale This Guide accompanies the Deadly Mistakes? DVD's from Bullfrog Films: http://www.bullfrogfilms.com/catalog/dm.html For further information on Deadly Mistakes? and Democracy Dialogues: http://www.greenworldcenter.org 4 DEADLY MISTAKES? Viewer Guide Acknowledgements Thanks to those who consulted with me in the preparation of this Guide: Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, Bruce Blair of the Center for Defense Information, Philip Brenner, Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch, Noam Chomsky, Erik K. Gustafson of tthe Education for Peace in Iraq Center, Adam Isacson of the Center for International Policy, Peter Kornbluh of National Security Archive, Steven Kosiak of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Malea Lazu of the Institute for Policy Studies, Carl LeVan, Joshua Muravchik of the American Enterprise Institute, John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, Amy Quinn of the Institute for Policy Studies, Marcus Raskin of the Institute for Policy Studies, Gene Sharp of the Albert Einstein Institute, and Peter Weiss of the Lawyers Committee for Nuclear Policy. Needless to say, any errors or shortcomings in the Guide are mine, not theirs. Thanks also to the authors and editors who allowed me to use their material: Peter Davis, Joshua L. Dratel, Jim Hershberg, Jim Lobe, Ray McGovern, Glen Pedersen, and Matthew Rothschild. And especially heartfelt thanks to Art Nuko for his painting of Uncle Sam at the crossroads. I would welcome, and will publish in future editions of this Guide or on the Deadly Mistakes? web pages, comments and suggestions for other sources. - WM 1.5 © Walter Miale, 2005 DEADLY MISTAKES? Viewer Guide 5 Table of Contents Dialogues - Main Disk Interviews - Bonus Disk page page Intro Deadly Mistakes? (Intro) 7 James Loewen Lies My Teacher Told Me 84 Foreign Policy and Sausage 8 Lawrence Eagleburger Foreign Policy and Sausage 85 Lies My Teacher Told Me 9 Gene La Rocque Creating Terrorists 90 The Past - Were These Mistakes? Ray McGovern We Called Them "The The Overthrow of the Government of Iran 10 Crazies" 94 Intervention and Genocide in Guatemala 13 Robert White It's Not Much More The Cuban Missile Crisis 15 Complicated Than That 97 The Vietnam War 17 Marcus Raskin Institutional Insanity is Somoza and the Contra War Approximately What in Nicaragua 22 We Have 105 The Cold War: The Cynics and the Believers 28 Guidelines for videotaping contributions The 21st Century - Are These Mistakes? to the Dialogues by viewers 107 Nuclear Weapons on a Hair Trigger 29 Preventive War and the Invasion of Iraq 32 The War in Colombia 52 Table of Contents continues on next page It's Your Future Mistakes or Crimes? 54 Why do States Pursue Homicidal Policies? 82 It's Your Future 83 6 DEADLY MISTAKES? Viewer Guide Table of Contents continued page Appendix I Robert Kennedy's meeting with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin during the Cuban Missile Crisis - James Hershberg 109 Appendix II Where is Nicaragua? - by Peter Davis - excerpt from the book 117 Appendix III The Moments Between September 25 and 26, 1983 - Glen Pedersen Soviet Colonel Stanislav Petrov had a few short minutes to act when a warning showed that a nuclear missile attack on the Soviet Union was underway 119 Appendix IV The Smoking Gun - by Ray McGovern 123 Appendix V Excerpts of the text of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 127 Appendix VI Nonviolent Struggle in the American Revolution - Gene Sharp talks with Walter Miale 141 Appendix VII On the Pentagon's “Black Budget” 143 DEADLY MISTAKES? Viewer Guide 7 Deadly Mistakes? (Intro) To learn more Re: The six interventions James Loewen Clarification Robert McNamara states that there speaks of: See KILLING HOPE by William Blum, were "170 nuclear warheads on the soil of Cuba, Intervention and Revolution by Richard J. roughly 60 or 70 [of which were] strategic warheads Barnet, and other books under Iran and Guate- to attack cities on the East Coast. Had we attacked, mala, below those nuclear warheads would have been used. Without any question. How would it have ended? In utter catastrophe...." Re the 1979 and 1980 incidents of false warnings of nuclear attack, Bruce Blair According to Philip Brenner, it is likely that many or recommends: most of the missiles that could have launched those warheads would have been destroyed before they The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, were fired, and that the number of U.S. cities and Nuclear Weapons, by Scott D. Sagan destroyed would probably have been lower, or much (Princeton University Press | Paper | 1995) lower. It is quite unpredictable, since for one thing Winner of the 1993 Best Book Award of the Science, the missile launchers in Cuba were mobile, making Technology, and Environmental Studies Section of them hard to find and hit. Regarding the outcome in the American Political Science Association any event, of course McNamara was right: an "utter "...by far the most carefully researched and catastrophe." painstaking study of nuclear weapons safety ever written."—Bruce G. Blair, Security Studies Blair also recommends the Hart-Goldwater report to the Senate Armed Services Committee Re the background of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor: http://www.chomsky.info/books/ dissent03.htm 8 DEADLY MISTAKES? Viewer Guide Foreign Policy and Sausage Question to the reader/ There is a tradition in Western culture according to which the conduct of viewer: Does this make foreign policy is not subject to the moral constraints to which personal Western civilization an conduct is subject. oxymoron? The Prince by Machiavelli is a basic work on the principles and methods by means of which leaders or "princes" accumulate and maintain power, and it provides some background for understanding Noam Chomsky's political writing, much of which consists of exposure and indictment of state violence and crime. As Lawrence Eagleburger and Marcus Raskin and Stansfield Turner remark in the course of Deadly Mistakes?, it is a mistake to single out the United States and its leaders for doing what others have done down through the ages. I would add that it is also a mistake to exempt the United States and its leaders from critical scrutiny because of our virtues and strengths, or because it is our own country. In fact I would say that, citizens as we are of a democracy in which officials are to some degree responsible to us, we should hold ourselves and our representatives to higher standards than we hold others. There are several factors that make the Unites States particularly interesting and significant with respect to the Western tradition in which states and leaders are considered to have license to kill. The most obvious is that the United States has by far the most vast and powerful military machine in the world. Another factor is that as citizens of a democracy we in the United States have a tradition of righting social wrongs, and the liberty, most of us, to act to do so. DEADLY MISTAKES? Viewer Guide 9 Lies My Teacher Told Me "If we are to recover our sanity James Loewen's book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, could itself as a nation and to earn again the be used as an American history textbook. It would appear to decent respect of those with be based on a principle articulated by Howard Zinn, in The whom we share the planet, Politics of History, namely that the purpose of learning history including our own children, is not because knowledge of the past is an end in itself, but Americans must engage in mainly because history is an indispensible tool for serious self-examination of those understanding our present and making choices for our future. drives within our society that Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is impel us toward destruction." another fundamental work of American history. It looks at Richard J. Barnet in The Roots history not mainly from the point of view of Presidents and of War leaders, but of ordinary people. This is a fundamental distinction, which sets history in a new light. See also: The Politics of History, by Howard Zinn. A third fundamental work on American history I would recommend is Year 501 - The Conquest Continues, by Noam Chomsky (Boston, South End Press, 1993). This book is available free online at http://www.chomsky.info/ , Chomsky's own website, as are several other important books and numerous articles by Chomsky. In Year 501, Chomsky describes the ongoing process of domination of the peoples of the Americas and Africa and Asia by Europeans and people of European descent which began with Colombus and which continues. 10 DEADLY MISTAKES? Viewer Guide The Overthrow of the Government of Iran To learn more Mohammed Mossadegh was the Prime Minister of Iran. He All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and was deposed in a coup instigated by the United States. the Roots of Middle East Terror by Stephen Kinzer, a senior correspondent for the New Lawrence Eagleburger seems to justify the overthrow of York Times (John Wiley and Sons, 2003) is Mossadegh by implying that had the United States not "an up-to date-book, based on the best re- done so, bad consequences might have ensued. The cent scholarship." (Philip Brenner) There is a holocaust of the Second World War, Eagleburger remarks, clear and detailed summary of this book, and could have been prevented had the United States and of the major issues regarding the overthrow, Britain opposed Hitler in 1936 or 1937 or particularly in by Masoud Kazemzadeh at http:// 1938. This latter point is true, except that Hitler could have www.politicalreviewnet.com/polrev/reviews/ been opposed with diplomacy: MEPO/R_1061_1924_066_1004711.asp .