I've long been proud of the fact that KC Johnson is one of the founding members of Cliopatria. He is featured in Kurt Anderson's"Rape, Justice, and the ‘Times'," New York Magazine, 16 October, an article that rips into the Times' coverage of the Duke lacrosse case. My favorite paragraphs:

In the movie, Tom Hanks would play K. C. Johnson. He's the most impressive of the"bloggers who have closely followed the case," in the Times' tacitly pejorative construction. But Johnson is the Platonic ideal of the species—passionate but committed to rigor and facts and fairness, a tenured professor of U.S. history (at Brooklyn College), a 38-year-old vegetarian who lives alone in a one-bedroom Bay Ridge apartment and does pretty much nothing but study, teach, run, and write.

Johnson has no connection to Duke. (His B.A. and Ph.D. are from the Harvard of the Northeast.) His attention was grabbed in April by the"deeply disturbing" public comments of Duke faculty that righteously indulged in invidious stereotypes and assumed the lacrosse players' guilt."One area that the academy, especially since McCarthyism, is supposed to stand up is cases where due process is denied," he says.

He usually posts at least once a day—not standard autoblog rim shots, but carefully argued, deeply researched essays running 1,000 words or more."I need to ensure that it meets what I consider to be an acceptable level of academic quality." He has traveled to Durham several times. When he wanted to find out if Nifong's unfair photo lineups were standard provincial practice—they're not—he spent days talking to fifteen North Carolina police departments and prosecutors.

People assume he's a right-winger."I'm a registered Democrat who has never voted for a Republican in my life." Not that he doesn't wildly speculate—he is a blogger. I wondered why, after Nifong won his primary, the D.A. didn't start tacking away from the case, setting himself up to drop the charges. Because, Johnson argues, if it doesn't go forward, he would be vulnerable to civil suits from the indicted players, and disbarment."This is someone whose career is on the line. He has no choice."

The Times has not addressed any of this. For the past few years, I've tended to roll my eyes when people default to rants about the blindered oafishness or various biases of"the mainstream media" in general and the Times in particular. At the same time, I've nodded when people gush about the blogosphere as a valuable check on and supplement to the MSM—but I've never entirely bought it. Having waded deep into this Duke mess the last weeks, baffled by the Times' pose of objectivity and indispensably guided by Johnson's blog, I'm becoming a believer.

You can find KC's postings on the Duke lacrosse case at Durham-in-Wonderland. They are marked by his characteristically thoughtful and relentless energy. I'll be a happy man when the Duke lacrosse case is resolved and KC will be posting regularly with us again.

Like many Americans of Iranian descent, Hamid Dabashi read an article in the April 17 issue of The New Yorker with anxious dismay.

In that article, Seymour Hersh reported that President Bush's administration was preparing an airstrike against Iran, including the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons.

The president himself dismissed the report as "wild speculation." But Mr. Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University who has been active in the antiwar movement since the attacks of September 11, 2001, heard a call to action.

The article prompted him to dust off an essay that he had written a few years before and publish it in the June 1 edition of the Egyptian English-language newspaper Al-Ahram. His target? Not President Bush or the Pentagon, but Azar Nafisi, author of the best-selling memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran and a visiting fellow at the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, in Washington.

Ms. Nafisi's memoir, published by Random House in 2003, blended a harrowing portrayal of the life of women in post-revolutionary Iran with a powerful personal testimony about the power of literary classics. The book found a wide audience, and its success made Ms. Nafisi a celebrity.

Gazing at the book through the lens of literary theory and politics, Mr. Dabashi had a much less favorable reaction to it. His blistering essay cast Ms. Nafisi as a collaborator in the Bush administration's plans for regime change in Iran. He drew heavily on the late scholar Edward Said's ideas about the relationship between Western literature and empire and the fetishization of the "Orient" to attack Reading Lolita in Tehran as a prop for American imperialism. He also pilloried Ms. Nafisi personally for what he described as her cozy relationship with prominent American neoconservatives.

"By seeking to recycle a kaffeeklatsch version of English literature as the ideological foregrounding of American empire," wrote Mr. Dabashi, "Reading Lolita in Tehran is reminiscent of the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India, when, for example, in 1835 a colonial officer like Thomas Macaulay decreed: 'We must do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, words and intellect.' Azar Nafisi is the personification of that native informer and colonial agent, polishing her services for an American version of the very same project."

In an interview published on the Web site of the left-wing publication Z Magazine on August 4, Mr. Dabashi went even further, comparing Ms. Nafisi to a U.S. Army reservist convicted of abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. "To me there is no difference between Lynndie England and Azar Nafisi," he told the magazine.

"The reason that I decided to publish [the essay] was fear," says Mr. Dabashi over a cup of tea in his office at Columbia University. "Fear of another war."...

[Tom Reiss is the author of “The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life.”]

In November 2005, Fritz Stern received an award for his life’s work on Germans, Jews and the roots of National Socialism, presented to him by Joschka Fischer, then the German foreign minister. With a frankness that startled some in the audience, Stern, an emeritus professor of European history at Columbia University, peppered his acceptance speech with the similarities he saw between the path taken by Germany in the years leading up to Hitler and the path being taken by the United States today. He talked about a group of 1920’s intellectuals known as the “conservative revolutionaries,” who “denounced liberalism as the greatest, most invidious threat, and attacked it for its tolerance, rationality and cosmopolitan culture,” and about how Hitler had used religion to appeal to the German public. In Hitler’s first radio address after becoming chancellor, Stern noted, he declared that the Nazis regarded “Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life.”

Stern was of course not suggesting an equivalence between President Bush and Hitler but rather making a more subtle critique, extending his idea that contemporary American politics exhibited “something like the strident militancy and political ineptitude of the Kaiser’s pre-1914 imperial Germany.” At 80, Stern has just published a sprawling memoir, “Five Germanys I Have Known,” and as with that speech, he does not file away his experiences of Nazism in a geographical or temporal box....

... When Stern needs to pick a college major, he tags along with his mother, who is interviewing Albert Einstein at Princeton, and he asks Einstein whether he should pursue medicine or history. The discoverer of relativity does not hesitate: become a doctor.

Ignoring Einstein’s advice, Stern studies European history and literature under Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling, and he begins to sense his mission as a historian. Outraged by the facile interpretations of Nazism floating around in the 1950’s — “all the tomes and slogans about Germany’s inevitable path ‘from Luther to Hitler’ ” — he charts his own, more subtle interpretation of what caused the Third Reich. Over the years Stern protests the ways radicals abuse the memory of Nazism to support their present-day political agendas, whether the 1960’s students who called authority figures fascists and Nazis, or those today who compare foreign leaders they dislike to Hitler and cry “Munich” at every diplomatic gesture.

Yet the value of Stern’s work is precisely that it has refused to keep Nazism safely on the other side of a historical and geographic chasm. His first book, “The Politics of Cultural Despair” (1961), is one of the durable masterpieces of 20th-century history because it seems to locate the roots of a peculiarly modern malaise. As he explained in a later edition of the work, “I attempted to show the importance of this new type of cultural malcontent, and to show how he facilitated the intrusion into politics of essentially unpolitical grievances.”

Rather than looking for obvious parallels among contemporary dictators who ape the style of the Nazis, Stern looks for the nihilistic undercurrents in our own educated, commercial societies. Hunger and poverty have little to do with the politics of cultural despair. It thrives especially well at moments of plenty and prosperity, when people have enough social advantages to dwell on their inner alienations and resentments.

By probing history for answers to how Germany progressed from radical illiberalism to Nazism, Stern has created a cumulative canon of warning signs for the degeneration of any great nation’s politics. The more personal history in this book adds power to an argument that has been a lifetime in the making.

I have been thinking, with some agitation, about Bettina Aptheker's astonishing revelation of incest, as reported by Chris Phelps' review in the _Chronicle of Higher Education_ ever since it was posted yesterday. I find it even more astonishing that the review accepts this and her other claims against her father (low pay for black help, criticism of Jewish passivity in the Holocaust) at face value. Moreover, as some other commentators have noted, it is passing strange that she waited until her parents' death to tell the world. But what I find most shocking is the review's credulity. Nor did the review see the revelation as vindictive, or possibly antisemitic. (The anti-Semitic stereotype includes Jews as excessively carnal, cheap, and cowardly.) Where is scholarly skepticism? Where is common sense?

The putative child abuse was not the only trial the heroic Bettina Aptheker has endured. Here is how Professor of Women's Studies Aptheker described her educational background for Out In The Redwoods (easily located through Google):

[Aptheker:] I arrived in Santa Cruz in the fall of 1979 to begin my graduate studies in the History of Consciousness Program. I had two young children, and I was finalizing a divorce from my husband of thirteen years. I was also struggling to claim my lesbian identity. Brutalized by the police and FBI because of my Communist affiliation and radical activism in the 1960s and 1970s, ?coming out? for me was at once traumatic and exhilarating.

Recall that the review describes her sudden recollection, previously repressed, as having come to her while writing her memoir. Does this seem plausible to anyone here? Let us assume that father committed incest with young Bettina for years, yet she had no memory of what had to be traumatic. The cynic in me wonders if she is not beefing up her history to demonstrate that she has overcome yet another assault by authority, undeserved and extreme, of course. Why would she do that? Nothing like a famous and controversial father to expose as a way of getting attention from reviewers for her book, published by Seal Press, described on the internet as a small feminist press. The historian in me recalls that the feminist theory informing women's studies requires that patriarchy be viewed as the primary social contradiction, and indeed there was a job posting for teaching Women's Studies at UC San Diego while I was in graduate school, stating that adherence to feminist theory was a prerequisite for hiring. What could be more dramatic proof that the male desire to control women trumps class and other forms of illegitimate domination?

At the upcoming Atlanta conference of the American Historical Association, a group of historians will propose a strongly worded resolution (shown below) opposing the use of speech codes to restrict academic freedom. The vote will take place at the business meeting for the general membership on Saturday, January 6, 2007 in the Fulton/Cobb Room at the Atlanta Hilton. To get the resolution on the agenda, however, twenty-five paid-up members have to sign it before October 13.

Those AHA members who are willing to do so should write as soon as possible to David T. Beito at dbeito@bama.ua.edu Please respond today. There is no margin for error. RESOLUTION ON SPEECH CODES AND ACADEMIC FREEDOM Whereas, The American Historical Association has already gone on record against the threat to academic freedom posed by the Academic Bill of Rights; and v Whereas, Free and open discourse is essential to the success of research and learning on campus; and

Whereas, Administrators and others have used campus speech codes and associated non-academic criteria to improperly restrict faculty choices on curriculum, course content, and personnel decisions; and

Whereas, Administrators and others have also used speech codes to restrict free and open discourse for students and faculty alike through such methods as"free speech zones" and censorship of campus publications; therefore be it

Resolved, The American Historical Association opposes the use of speech codes to restrict academic freedom.

[Christopher Phelps, an associate professor of history at the Ohio State University at Mansfield, is the author of Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist, published last year in a new paperback edition by the University of Michigan Press.]

... Now we have knowledge of a far more painful contradiction in the life of Herbert Aptheker than his simultaneous defense of black freedom and Soviet authoritarianism, one long buried in silence. Intimate Politics (Seal Press), the stunning new memoir by Bettina Aptheker, a professor of feminist studies and history at the University of California at Santa Cruz, will prompt a re-examination of her father, whom American historians now tend to honor as a pioneer in recognizing the centrality of the black past to American history.

Aptheker enjoys at least a fraction of her father's notoriety. She is listed in David Horowitz's book The Professors, for example, which purports to identify the "101 most dangerous academics in America." (The entry, regrettably, is replete with errors, such as the claim that she was expelled from the Communist Party in 1991, when in fact she had resigned from it a full decade earlier.)

Born in the year following publication of American Negro Slave Revolts, Bettina Aptheker was a sole child whose father was at the center of the family's Brooklyn household and of her own perception of the world's possibilities. Her mother, Fay, was her father's first cousin (their fathers were brothers), and she kept his social calendar between the tours she chaperoned to the Soviet Union.

"When I was a little girl I wanted to be just like my father," writes Bettina Aptheker. "Whatever he did, I did, or tried to do."

This powerful evocation of a child's boundless love makes the book's central revelation, conveyed in an indelible paragraph, all the more devastating:

"My father and I played other games too, besides baseball. I was three or four years old when we began playing choo choo train. We were in the living room in the apartment on Washington Avenue, crawling around on the Persian rug my mother treasured. Many years afterward, this memory came to me: My father was behind me, and then the train arrived 'at the station,' and we had to wait for the 'passengers' to get off and on. Our train rocked back and forth, back and forth, and my father had his right arm tightly around me. He was the 'locomotive' even though he was behind me. Our train shuddered just before it was supposed to leave 'the station,' except it didn't leave. I was wet and sticky and I remember my father was crying and I was sitting on the floor next to him and he had put a towel down so we wouldn't dirty the rug. I remember stroking his hair and saying 'It's okay, Daddy. It's okay.' And then he stood me up and we went into the bathroom and he washed me off, very gently. It didn't hurt. He never hurt me. And I knew not to tell. As I grew bigger we played different games, but they always had the shudder. Older still, I knew it was not a game. I still knew not to tell because he told me 'terrible things will happen.' My father stopped molesting me when I was thirteen and we had moved to a new house."

Incest is only the most painful of a series of hard truths about Herbert Aptheker that we confront in Intimate Politics. We discover that he underpaid the family's black housecleaners. We learn that his celebrations of black resistance were attempts "to compensate for his deep shame about the way, he believed, the Jews had acted during the Holocaust." We are told that to cope with Stalin, the war, the party, and his family, he "lived much of the time in a fantasy world of his own making."

What makes Intimate Politics remarkable, however, is that none of its damning truths are told with rancor. Bettina Aptheker is a powerful witness to her father's contradictions precisely because of her emotional honesty. Her baring of her own shortcomings makes the book far more shattering than any shot ever fired by Eugene Genovese. Intimate Politics could not have been published, one senses, when Herbert and Fay Aptheker were still alive, but it is not governed by a spirit of vindictiveness....

The following are a series of questions and answers with Mark Moyar that will provide further understanding of his revolutionary argument in Triumph Forsaken:

Q: You argue in Triumph Forsaken that much of what is traditionally believed about the Vietnam War is not true. Let’s start with your views on South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem. The traditional thinking is that he was unpopular among the South Vietnamese people and that, after his crackdown on the Buddhist monks, the United States administration was happy to see him go and gave Diem’s generals their blessing for the coup against him in 1963. You believe that this school of thought is misguided. What do you think is the more accurate assessment of Diem and why?



A: Diem enjoyed the respect of many Vietnamese because of his asceticism, personality, and dedication to the welfare of his country. He governed in an authoritarian way because he considered Western-style democracy inappropriate for a country that was fractious and dominated by an authoritarian culture. The accuracy of this belief would be borne out by the events that followed his assassination, events that heretofore have not been covered adequately. Diem was not as heavy-handed as the Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh, and Diem’s traditional, but not reactionary, ideology had more appeal among the Vietnamese people than Ho Chi Minh’s radical ideology. Diem did not kill tens of thousands in the process of redistributing land or stifle religion as Ho Chi Minh did. For most of Diem’s tenure, the South Vietnamese government outfought the Vietnamese Communists. In the late 1950s, Diem succeeded in eliminating most of the Communist agents who had remained in the South after the partition of Vietnam in July 1954. During 1960 and 1961, however, the Viet Cong made considerable headway in launching a large-scale insurgency. The war took another dramatic turn in 1962, with the Diem government regaining the upper hand. Relying on young leaders whom Diem had begun cultivating in the 1950s, the South Vietnamese government fortified its local militia forces and its mobile units during 1962 and 1963. It inflicted numerous defeats on the Viet Cong’s armed forces and re-established control over most of the territory where the Viet Cong had made inroads in 1960 and 1961.

Diem’s critics believed that the Buddhist protest movement of 1963 stemmed from popular dissatisfaction with a government guilty of religious intolerance. The Buddhist protesters were, in reality, a small, politically-minded group that made false charges in an effort to unseat the government. The leaders had close ties to the Communists or were themselves Communists, and Communist secret agents participated extensively in their protest activities. In Vietnam, where a government lost face if it condoned strident public protest, Diem ultimately had to suppress the Buddhist movement in order to preserve his government. He suppressed it very effectively on August 21, 1963, by arresting its leaders and clearing the pagodas where it was headquartered. This maneuver was actually proposed and executed by Diem’s generals, a critical fact lost on those Americans who sought to remove Diem for suppressing the protesters. Most remarkably, the anti-Diem Americans decided that Diem should be replaced with these very generals. While Diem’s generals thought that he remained the best man for the Presidency, the ensuing renunciations of Diem by the U.S government and press ultimately caused some of them to remove him from power. President Kennedy did not personally consent to the coup that ousted Ngo Dinh Diem; U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge instigated the coup without notifying Kennedy and in direct violation of Presidential orders. A few days before the coup was to commence, according to previously untapped documents and presidential audio recordings, Kennedy learned that Lodge was encouraging the conspirators behind his back and he sent messages of protestation to Lodge but did not take decisive action to reign him in, primarily because Lodge was a leading candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination in the 1964 election. Lodge’s incitement of the coup that overthrew Diem in November 1963 was by far the worst American mistake of the Vietnam War. As the title of the book indicates, the coup negated the great military and political gains that the Diem government had made in 1962 and 1963. Contrary to later assertions by the coup’s advocates, the South Vietnamese war effort had not entered into a period of decline during the last months of Diem’s rule, as is proven by previously unexamined North Vietnamese sources. The deterioration did not begin until the period immediately following Diem’s overthrow, when the new leaders failed to lead, feuded with each other, and arrested untold numbers of former Diem supporters.



Q: You come down harshly on President Lyndon Johnson and his administration for not taking a stronger stance against the North Vietnamese more quickly. Can you discuss this a bit more?


A: Previously unexamined North Vietnamese sources reveal that Lyndon Johnson’s lack of forcefulness in Vietnam in late 1964 and early 1965 squandered America’s deterrent power. Johnson’s generals favored striking North Vietnam quickly and powerfully, but he chose to follow the advice of his civilian advisers, who advocated an academic approach employing small doses of force to convey America’s resolve without provoking the enemy. Johnson made only a token attack on North Vietnam following the Tonkin Gulf incidents of 1964 and undertook no military action thereafter. Instead of inducing the North Vietnamese to reciprocate with self-limitations as advocates of the academic approach had predicted, however, the limited character of the American response convinced Hanoi that the Americans would not mount a major defense of Vietnam in the near future. This perception, in concert with the disintegration of the South Vietnamese government following Diem’s demise, led the North Vietnamese to invade South Vietnam with North Vietnamese Army units for the purpose of winning the war swiftly.


Q: One of the justifications for the US involvement in Vietnam was the so-called “domino theory,” the idea that if Vietnam fell to the Communists, then the rest of Asia would succumb as well, dangerously shifting the balance of power in the Cold War. While many claim that history has proven the domino theory to be false, you assert that it was indeed a legitimate theory. How so?


A: The U.S. government’s fear of falling dominoes in Asia was based on a sound understanding of the countries in Southeast Asia and the surrounding areas, not on simple-mindedness or paranoia as is usually alleged. For most of the region’s countries, the evidence available both then and since overwhelmingly indicated that South Vietnam’s defeat would have led to either a Communist takeover or the switching of allegiance to China. Some of these countries were strategically vital for the United States, most notably Indonesia and Japan. In 1965, China and North Vietnam were aggressively trying to topple many of the dominoes, and the dominoes were very vulnerable to toppling. Asia’s leaders believed that if the United States pulled out of Vietnam, then most of Asia would lose all confidence in the United States and would have to bow before China or face destruction. Every country in Southeast Asia and neighboring territory, aside from the few that were already allied with the North Vietnamese and Chinese Communists, advocated U.S. intervention in Vietnam, and most of them offered to assist the South Vietnamese war effort. American intervention in Vietnam would contribute to changes that would prevent the dominoes from falling when South Vietnam fell in 1975, including the widening of the China-Soviet split, the onset of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the civil war in Cambodia. Unbeknownst to previous historians, America’s willingness to hold firm in Vietnam played a critical role in convincing Indonesian generals to take power from the pro-Communist Sukarno and destroy the Indonesian Communist Party in late 1965 and early 1966, one of the most momentous events of the Cold War.



Q: You are critical of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations for not recognizing the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos as vital for the maintenance of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong supply lines into South Vietnam. Many historians let Kennedy and Johnson off the hook but you assert that disrupting the Ho Chi Minh Trail early in the war was essential. Can you discuss this further?


A: The Joint Chiefs of Staff repeatedly recommended putting U.S. ground forces into Laos to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but both presidents rejected the recommendations. While some historians have endorsed the view that the Ho Chi Minh Trail was not essential to the Communist war effort, new evidence on the trail and on specific battles disprove this contention. The Viet Cong insurgency always depended heavily on North Vietnamese infiltration of men and equipment, and it could not have brought the Saigon government close to collapse in 1965, or defeated it in 1975, without heavy infiltration of both. Other historians have argued that an American ground troop presence in Laos would not have stopped most of the infiltration, but much new evidence contradicts this assertion as well. American, North Vietnamese, and Soviet experts all have said that a few American divisions could have shut down the infiltration routes. In 1960, when the North Vietnamese infiltration had involved no motorized traffic, a South Vietnamese force
roughly the size of one division had severed the first Ho Chi Minh Trail—which lay within Vietnamese territory—by controlling the South Vietnamese section of Route 9, a stretch that comprised one-fourth of the entire route. In 1964, with the infiltration effort heavily reliant on trucks, the United States could have detected and stopped most infiltration of materiel much more easily because trucks could cross the Laotian segment of Route 9 at only a few intersections.



Q: Could the United States have won the war by invading North Vietnam?


A: After the overthrow of Diem, as the South Vietnamese war effort deteriorated, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other U.S. military leaders repeatedly advocated an invasion of North Vietnam. Johnson and his civilian advisers, however, rejected this advice, in the belief that such an invasion could spark a war between the United States and China. Historians have generally concurred in the assessment that Chinese intervention was likely. The evidence, however, shows that until at least March 1965, the deployment of U.S. ground forces into North Vietnam would not have caused the Chinese to intercede. Having suffered huge losses in the Korean War, the Chinese had no more desire than the Americans for a war between their country and the United States. The North Vietnamese and Chinese agreed that in the event of an American invasion, North Vietnamese forces would retreat into the mountains rather than stand and fight, for they knew that superior U.S. firepower would annihilate North Vietnamese forces defending fixed positions. The United States would not have won the war quickly had it invaded the North, but it would have faced a far better strategic scenario than the one it ultimately accepted by not invading.



Q: You believe that many journalists at the time, including David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, were inaccurate in their assessment of the Diem regime in South Vietnam and that their reporting in major media outlets in the US did tremendous damage. Can you expand on this a bit more?


A: Halberstam and Sheehan repeatedly filed erroneous reports on military events, regularly overemphasizing the South Vietnamese government’s shortcomings. John Paul Vann, the central figure in Sheehan’s book A Bright Shining Lie and a leading critic of the Diem government, was more dishonest in dealing with the press than Sheehan ever acknowledged. Halberstam and Sheehan presented grossly inaccurate information on the Buddhist protest movement and on South Vietnamese politics, much of which they unwittingly received from Communist secret agents. Ignorant of cultural differences between the United States and Vietnam, they criticized the Diem government for refusing to act like an American government when, in fact, Diem’s political methods were far more effective than American methods in treating South Vietnam’s problems. The reporting of Halberstam and Sheehan did much to turn Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and other influential Americans against Diem. South Vietnam’s elites regularly read Vietnamese translations of American press articles and they viewed the New York Times and other U.S. newspapers as mouthpieces for the U.S. administration, so negative articles on the Diem government also undermined South Vietnamese confidence in Diem and encouraged rebellion. Although the American journalists hoped that their reporting would bring about the installation of a better South Vietnamese government, it actually led to the installation of a series of ineffective governments, inflicting enormous damage on South Vietnam and on American interests. Once the coup that they had promoted led to political and military disaster, exposing them to blame for the crippling of South Vietnam, Halberstam and Sheehan and Stanley Karnow falsely disparaged Diem so as to claim that South Vietnam was already weak beyond hope before the coup. Their writings popularized the negative images of Diem.



Q: Do you believe that the war could have ended without a major deployment of US military personnel if the United States had fully supported the Diem regime?


A: Yes. Because of Diem’s accomplishments in 1962 and 1963, the Viet Cong lacked the ability to defeat the government at the time of Diem’s death, and for a considerable period thereafter. Had Diem remained in power, the Viet Cong could have kept the war going as long as they continued to receive new manpower from North Vietnam and maintained sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos, but it is highly doubtful that the war would have reached the point where the United States needed to introduce several hundred thousand of its own troops to avert defeat, as it did under Diem’s successors. South Vietnam might well have survived under Diem without the help of any U.S. ground forces. The men who led South Vietnam from November 1963 to the time of the American intervention prosecuted the war much less effectively than Diem had, and this weak performance helped overcome Hanoi’s great reluctance to send the North Vietnamese Army into South Vietnam. If the North Vietnamese Army had invaded the South at some later date with Diem still in power, South Vietnam might have withstood the onslaught with the help of U.S. air power but without U.S. ground troops, as it would in 1972.



Q: What does your book tell us that is relevant to the current conflict in Iraq?


A: I did not mention Iraq in the book because my objective was not to make points about Iraq but to render the history of the Vietnam War accurately. That being said, there are some important similarities, as well as some important differences, between what is described in the book and what is taking place today in Iraq. In 1954, the armed forces of South Vietnam faced some of the same challenges that the Iraqi security forces face now. South Vietnamese President Diem removed numerous officers from the South Vietnamese Army, though the armed forces were not dismantled completely as was the case with the Iraqi army after the defeat of Saddam Hussein. American advisers arrived early in the development of the South Vietnamese
Army and they did much to improve its proficiency. The most important factor in the effectiveness of a South Vietnamese Army unit, however, was always the quality of its leadership. In a culture with authoritarian traditions, such as Vietnam or Iraq, effective leadership is especially important. Advisers could impart knowledge and they could embolden through the display of courage, but they could not teach charisma, intelligence, and other key leadership attributes. Oftentimes the most important contribution of an American adviser was his assessment of South Vietnamese leaders, for it could help convince the South Vietnamese national leadership to replace ineffectual personnel. Because Diem inherited a weak corps of officers who had been trained by the French, he set out to develop his own leadership corps. He succeeded in creating a new generation of dedicated nationalist leaders, but it would take seven years before these individuals came into key positions and had a major impact. The South Vietnamese experience, therefore, suggests that strong Iraqi leadership can only be developed over a prolonged period of time. It is also not clear at this time that Iraq has a person or group that can effectively orchestrate the cultivation of new leaders as Diem did; Diem had greater freedom of action than Iraq’s leaders do today, for he was not confronted with democratic or legal constraints, or with rampant assassination of prospective leadership candidates.

Forming a government that can develop a leadership corps and adopt the necessary security measures will also require that Iraqis overcome intense internecine strife, something that South Vietnam faced on several occasions. In an effort to surmount such strife, the United States pressed for political liberalization in South Vietnam as it has in Iraq, though it was much less aggressive in pushing for complete democratization than in Iraq. In both the South Vietnamese and Iraqi cases, many Americans were too hasty to assume that liberal government could easily be transplanted into places with no liberal democratic traditions. Americans tended to project their own worldview onto others, and they paid too much heed to local elites who advocated liberalization but were out of touch with the masses in their own country. Enacting liberalization in South Vietnam would have prevented the Diem government from undertaking the stern measures needed to suppress subversives and gain the respect of the masses. When Diem first assumed power in 1954, he faced several large groups that possessed their own armed forces and did not want to submit to the authority of the central government. The U.S. embassy urged Diem to reach a compromise, not understanding that by trying to compromise and by tolerating open defiance from these groups, Diem would lose face with the masses. Ignoring American advice, Diem used force to compel these groups to submit to his authority. Rather than leading to alienation or civil war, as the Americans had predicted, he strengthened his power and won the respect of the masses. He then proceeded to build strong national armed forces. This particular episode suggests that the central government should control all armed forces during a period of civil strife, in order to ensure their loyalty to the central government and increase the government’s prestige. Such centralization, however, may no longer be possible in Iraq, or at least in
northern Iraq, where the Kurds enjoy autonomy and possess very formidable armed forces of their own.

In the period after Diem’s assassination, an array of South Vietnamese factions struggled with each other for influence. American prodding induced the South Vietnamese government to permit freedom of speech and freedom of protest, which facilitated subversion by the South Vietnamese government’s mortal enemies, and the same problem is now recurring, to some degree, in Iraq. The United States pressured South Vietnam’s rulers to make their government more “inclusive” by bringing in individuals from all groups in society. When the South Vietnamese did so, however, the results were discouraging, for the new individuals often were unqualified for their jobs and were more concerned with serving their own group’s interests than with operating an effective national government. Nor did inclusiveness or the promise of elections do much to reduce the hostility among the different groups. In terms of governmental effectiveness, a dedicated minority may be best suited to national leadership, in Iraq as well as in South Vietnam; Saddam Hussein’s government, like Diem’s government, was more effective in maintaining internal security and administering the country than its successors. Of course, the United States has already done a great deal to eliminate the power of the Sunnis and others who held power under Saddam Hussein and it is not clear that another dedicated elite is prepared to step in. Although the United States is inherently reluctant to support something short of democracy in a country for which it bears responsibility, many Americans at this point would be content with non-democratic rule in Iraq if it meant that the Iraqi government would be strong enough to enable the United States to withdraw its troops. By the middle of 1965, the United States had become so frustrated with governmental instability and ineffectiveness in Vietnam that it consented to a military dictatorship, which restored political stability and led to gradual rehabilitation of the government’s capabilities. In South Vietnam, and in many other countries with no democratic traditions, authoritarian rule was more effective than liberal rule in quelling internal subversion. The difficult process of liberalization generally succeeds only once the subversives have been suppressed, and it usually requires a gradual transition, not an abrupt change.

The differences of opinion between the U.S. civilian and military leadership over Vietnam resemble those of the past few years over Iraq. President Lyndon Johnson, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and other leading civilians disregarded advice from top military officers to strike North Vietnam harder and insert U.S. troops into Laos to block the Ho Chi Minh Trail, either of which would have given the United States enormous strategic advantages. The civilians believed that their smarts and their youthful vigor trumped the experience and accumulated knowledge of the military officers. Under the administration of George W. Bush, leading civilians have shown similar disregard for the military’s views on Iraq, especially during the planning and initial execution of the occupation of Iraq, with similarly unfortunate results. While the judgments of military officers are not infallible, they deserve greater attention from civilian leaders, particularly those with visions of dramatic departures from past military practices.

SCOTLAND'S most pro-British historian has performed a remarkable about-face and declared his support for Scottish independence.

Michael Fry, a former Scottish candidate for the Conservative and Unionist Party, says the break-up of Britain is essential if Scotland is to thrive.

His conversion is a symptom of the growing support north of the border for a separate Scotland, with more people now saying they would back independence rather than the status quo in a referendum.

Fry's epiphany came as he was writing a book on the union between Scotland and England, with the 300th anniversary falling on May 1 next year.

The tercentenary comes two days before Scottish parliament elections due on May 3, in which the Scottish National Party is expected to make its strongest challenge for power so far.

As a Conservative candidate in the 1980s and 1990s, Fry was a staunch defender of the union with Britain - but now he is a nationalist. "I have changed my mind," he says. "I believe in an independent Scotland. I will do what I can to bring it about."

His change of heart was brought about by the failure of the devolution of power from London to Edinburgh, he said. "Devolution has proved to be completely hopeless, if anything making Scotland a worse country rather than better. You can do more, and do better, under independence than you can by basically rattling the begging bowl at the British Government, saying, 'Can we have some more money'."...

The ethnic cleansing of Palestine, Publication date: October 19th 2006 Hardcover, £16.99, 336pp, 1-85168-467-0

The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.

-- David Ben-Gurion writing to his son, 1937

There is no such thing as a Palestinian people... It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn't exist.

-- Golda Meir, statement to The Sunday Times, 15 June, 1969

As Israel stands accused by Amnesty International of committing war crimes in Lebanon following its almost 5-week bombardment of that country, which left over a thousand civilians dead and almost a million displaced, a prominent Israeli historian at Haifa University revisits the formative period of the State of Israel to investigate the treatment of the indigenous Palestinians.

In this controversial new book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ilan Pappe uses recently declassified archival sources to investigate the fate suffered by the indigenous population of 1940s Palestine at the hands of the Zionist political and military leadership, whose actions led to the mass deportation of over a million Palestinians from their cities and villages, over 400 villages wiped from the map, and hundreds of civilians dead.

Exploring both the planning and the execution of the Jewish operations during the British Mandate period and the run-up to independence, Pappe focuses in particular on the activities of the Hagana, the Irgun, and the Palmach. Drawing on such meticulously-researched documents as the minutes from meetings of Ben-Gurion’s unofficial "war cabinet" as well as the personal diaries and memoirs of a large number of key officials in all sectors of the Jewish leadership of the day, Pappe pieces together and re-examines the attitudes and motivations that influenced the conduct of the Jewish community towards the indigenous population. He goes on to offer a detailed account of the events of 1947-8 that eventually led to one of the biggest refugee migrations in modern history. This is no moral rant against the past, but a passionate plea to acknowledge the Nakba, as Palestinians call the catastrophe that befell them in 1948, as the root cause of the ongoing Palestine-Israel conflict.

Many political commentators and historians trace the roots of the recent stages of the conflict back only so far as Israel’s occupation of the West Bank following the 1967 war, rightly regarding the occupation, the settlements and the Security Barrier as a violation of international law.

The first and second Intifadas may be seen as protests against the continuing occupation and a reflection of the deep despair of the Palestinians, who feel they have been severely let down by their own leaders, by Israel, by Arab states, by the United Nations, and by western powers.

Pappe argues persuasively, however, that the continued denial of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 and the consequent dispossession of a million native Palestinians from their homeland represents a gross injustice that requires redress. The refusal to acknowledge this event, and allow those dispossessed the right of return to their ancestral lands and homes, are not only an abuse of their human rights, but a rejection from the peace process of the essential foundation for a lasting peace in the Middle East and beyond.

An incisive, important and timely book, on an issue of continuing global concern.

Advance praise for The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Ilan Pappe is a senior lecturer of Political Science at Haifa University. He is also Academic Director of the Research Institute for peace at Givat Haviva, and Chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian Studies, Haifa. His previous works include the bestselling A History of Modern Palestine, The Modern Middle East and The Israel/Palestine Question.

Ilan Pappe is Israel’s bravest, most principled, most incisive historian.

-- John Pilger

The first book to so clearly document the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in

1948 of which the massacre at Deir Yassin was emblematic. Political Zionism has always been premised on the elimination of non-Jews who even today account for more than half of the population living within the borders controlled by Israel. Will the West continue to ignore this textbook example of ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity?

-- Daniel McGowan, Executive Director, Deir Yassin Remembered, Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Ilan Pappe has written an extraordinary book of profound relevance to the past, present, and future of Israel/Palestine relations.

-- Richard Falk, Professor of International Law and Practice, Princeton University

This is an extraordinary book - a dazzling feat of scholarly synthesis and Biblical moral clarity and humaneness.

-- Walid Khalidi, Former Senior Research Fellow, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University

An instant classic. Finally we have the authoritative account of an historic event which continues to shape our world today, and drives the conflict in the Middle East. Pappe is the only historian who could have told it, and he has done so with supreme command of the facts, elegance, and compassion. The publication of this book is a landmark event.

-- Karma Nabulsi, a research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford University

If there is to be real peace in Palestine/Israel, the moral vigour and intellectual clarity of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine will have been a major contributor to it.

-- Ahdaf Soueif, author of The Map of Love

Fresh insights into a world historic tragedy, related by a historian of genius.

-- George Galloway MP

Groundbreaking research into a well-kept Israeli secret. A classic of historical scholarship on a taboo subject by one of Israel's foremost New Historians.

-- Ghada Karmi, author of In Search of Fatima

Ilan Pappe is out to fight against Zionism, whose power of deletion has driven a whole nation not only out of its homeland but out of historic memory as well. A detailed, documented record of the true history of that crime, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine puts an end to the Palestinian "Nakbah" and the Israeli "War of Independence" by so compellingly shifting both paradigms.

-- Anton Shammas, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern Literature, University of Michigan