Part 10

Having in the last installment addressed gender as the unacknowledged psychic and cultural nitro-fuel of the sociopolitical dynamic, we now need to study how the gender dynamics of the Global War on Terror (GWOT) correspond to the role gender plays in the economic evolution of the United States.

When we last left the question of post-WWII development in the US, we took a detour through money-theory and gender. We wanted to make sure that these lenses were available to readers as we leap, from the Cold War industrial-security state inaugurated by Truman and the Bretton Woods international monetary system, forward into Vietnam.

This was when the United States began the radical transformation from core-power as creditor and exporter to core-power as debtor and importer.

The Bretton Woods framework of dollar hegemony worked successfully for about 25 years because it was premised on the unparalleled economic strength of the US, and the idea that the world economy would grow fastest in an environment of stability and predictability.

This was written in 1987 for New Perspectives Quarterly, by Howard Wachtel, then-professor of economics at the American University. So neither the notion of dollar hegemony, nor the recognition of monetary imperialism is new. It is being kept secret by the gatekeepers of both the Establishment and much of the Left, because it undermines their orthodoxies.

What happened to the success Wachtel cites was that the Marshall Plan of Keynesian reconstruction in Europe and Japan — conceived of as building a bulwark against communism — worked so well that, Europe and Japan — neither now burdened with an internationally deployed and immensely expensive military — quickly grew into serious economic competitors with the United States.

By 1960, European and Japanese bankers — still gun-shy from Great Depression about any surfeit of currency — found themselves awash in dollars, so many that the term “Eurodollars” came into use. Given the capacity for monetary impunity in the US, the worst-case scenario for European and Japanese finance capital was that the US might abandon the Bretton Woods regime of Gold-Dollar-Fixed Exchange, and leave them with mountains of devalued US currency. So they began then assuring that this prophecy would be fulfilled. They started cashing dollars in for gold.

So the US was about to be challenged by the emerging industrial powers in its role as chief exporter; and its subaltern Pinocchios were turning into real boys who could play the currency-exchange game.

Enter recalcitrant France.

From Wachtel’s article, “Adventures of the Dollar“:

In 1959 and 1960, the desertion of the dollar for gold became headlines. The Gold War had begun. In 1963, French President Charles DeGaulle, feeling that the glory of France could not be rebuilt as long as the American dollar remained paramount, announced he would undermine the dollar by cashing in all of his dollars for gold. That set off a panicky series of crises throughout the ’60s that resulted in a hemorrhage of American gold.

The war in Vietnam exacerbated the problem by accelerating the outflow of dollars from the United States. Many of the dollars which financed the US buildup in Vietnam found their way into the coffers of French banks which had an historical connection to Indochina. No matter how much gold he bought, DeGaulle always seemed to have more dollars. When Kennedy came to office in 1960, the US had $18 billion in gold. By 1968, we had lost half of our gold stock, falling for the first time below the psychological barrier of $10 billion. Lyndon Johnson had lost the Gold War because the rest of the world economic players were saying the value of the dollar was not justified by the relative competitiveness of the US economy.

Vietnam and Counterinsurgency

The logic of the Cold War and the logic of Bretton Woods entered into an irreconcilable contradiction with each other.

Returning for a moment to Men (gendered use) and their machines in the build-up of the industrial capitalist system (and its state-socialist correlative), the leadership of the fossil-energy takeoff of the US industrial economy that had inherited imperial power after WWII became immensely influential in American politics. One of those men was an electrical engineer from Ohio named Charles Erwin Wilson.

Graduating from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1909, by the beginning of WWII, he was the CEO of General Motors… which had made a killing — not meaning to be too clever — on the war. In 1953, President (and former Supreme Commander of Allied Forces) Dwight David Eisenhower appointed Wilson to be the Secretary of Defense.

For all the brouhaha about Eisenhower’s warning at the end of his presidency about the “military-industrial complex,” Ike hired Wilson knowing full well that Wilson had become economically famous in 1944 for his statement (echoing an argument put forth by Walter Oaks, an early Cold Warrior who was already preparing for the US-Soviet arms race) that the only way to avoid another Depression was to establish a “permanent war economy.”

His argument was convincing to Eisenhower, because Eisenhower had been left holding the bag on the debacle of Korea, where US military readiness levels had dropped dramatically in the period of post-WWII euphoria, only to have Truman commit these ill-trained and ill-equipped US forces into the first Cold War military adventure.

Eisenhower had also inherited another East Asian reshuffle, in a place referred to as Indochina by Europeans and Vietnam by natives. The Kuomintang>/a> Chinese government and the British split the country for administration immediately after Japan surrendered in 1945, to the chagrin of a heterodox communist political leader who had worked with the Allied Office of Strategic Services during WWII to fight the Japanese: Ho Chi Minh.

Ho wanted independence, and he had built an organization during WWII to facilitate it, called the League for the Independence of Vietnam (shortened to Viet Minh). His chief military adviser was a young man who would live to become one of the most widely recognized military geniuses in history: Vo Nguyen Giap. Ho attacked the British and the Chinese, inaugurating a guerrilla war. The Brits had no interest in getting bogged down in Indochina with India becoming restive, and the Chinese government was engaged in a civil war against the Chinese Communists.

The French, who were the former colonial administrators (even as Vichy allies of the Japanese during WWII), offered to retake control over Indochina. Ho even acquiesced to this arrangement, famously saying, “The last time we were occupied by the Chinese, they stayed for a thousand years. I’d rather smell French shit for five years than eat Chinese shit for another thousand.”

It actually took Ho and Giap eight years to throw the French out. US advisers, sent in 1950 as the US became regionally alarmed by the Korean War outbreak, assisted the French in small numbers, while the US supplied them, until Giap crushed the French military during the three-month Battle of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. A UN-sponsored negotiation in Geneva then granted independence to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, and partitioned Vietnam along the 16th Parallel, pending elections in 1956.

Indications were that Ho Chi Minh, who was wildly popular among Vietnamese, would have won the elections by a landslide, so the US puppet in South Vietnam, Prime Minister The Domino Theory.

[Y]ou have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the “falling domino” principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.

The “domino theory.” This mechanical notion would come to dominate US policy for three more administrations.

Meanwhile, the US giants of industry were plugging in to the “permanent war economy,” making war materiel, and researching new war materiel for the Cold War arms race. As things turned out, with Vietnam they would have a new testing ground for all of it.

In 1950, to oversee support for the French, the US established the United States Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG), Vietnam. After Geneva in 1955, these advisers were used to train Diem’s military, even as Diem opened up a brutal offensive against his political enemies in the South, which was called anticommunist, but became anti-Buddhist as well (Diem was Catholic).

Ho’s political cadres in the South responded with a series of guerrilla offensives against Diem’s forces.

Between 1955-60, the numbers of American advisers never exceeded 1,500.

Then John F. Kennedy was elected President of the United States. As an American blue-blood who had studied the exploits of the Ivy League-ruled Office of Strategic Services (OSS, parent organization of the CIA) in WWII, Kennedy fell on the idea of expanding the role of “Special Forces” to increase American control over the fight against Ho and his sympathizers in South Vietnam.

In 1961, Kennedy awarded th Green Beret as the unique headgear of the Special Forces, whereupon a John Wayne movie was made as well as a top-40 pop music hit… giving the “Green Berets” a mystique that carries over to this day.

The Special Forces’ primary strategic operation was the Strategic Hamlet Program, and by 1962, US troops numbered 12,000 there, a tenfold increase in two years.

The Strategic Hamlet Program (SHP) was part of a new doctrine that was emerging: counterinsurgency.

In its implementation, it was naive, Orientalist, and it almost immediately overstretched the Diem regime’s ability to follow up. The SHP was a massive population control program that displaced hundreds of thousands of peasants, placed them in these jerry-built bases (strategic hamlets), forced them to labor in the construction, then impressed them into involuntary irregular military service against an “enemy” (the “Vietcong”) with which they largely sympathized.

By September of 1962, more than 4 million Vietnamese had been displaced by this program, garrisoned in more than 3 thousand of these occupying force bases. By 1963, the numbers almost doubled. The peasants hated them; and they were recruited massively by guerrilla intelligence. The strategic hamlets were vulnerable to attack by guerrillas if they participated in the paramilitary activities run by Special Forces. Meanwhile, Diem’s Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) grew daily more brutal, corrupt, and incompetent.

In 1963, the US itself arranged a coup d’etat against Diem, in which Diem was kidnapped and assassinated in the back of an armored personnel carrier, and replaced him with another puppet, General Duong Van Minh… a co-architect of the coup.

Diem was killed on November 2, 1963. Kennedy himself was assassinated less than three weeks later in Dallas, Texas.

Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in that day; and he had inherited (1) a war in which US allies were losing politically and militarily in Vietnam, (2) a burgeoning social movement to break racial segregation in the US South, (3) a protracted French buyout of US gold reserves, (4) a US industrial base that was further and further integrated with the Pentagon, and (5) a firm belief in the domino theory.

I was in the 7th Grade at St. Charles Junior High School the day Kennedy was assainated; and I would live to be an infantryman in the US occupation of Vietnam.

Gender matters. It is a typically male perception that “backing down” constitutes a loss of credibility or respect.

The Unites States had already been fought to a standstill in Korea. Johnson was a bare-knuckle veteran of Texas politics, where male “credibility” mattered big time, and he determined immediately that he would not be the president who “lost Vietnam.” This same twisted political logic prevails today with Iraq.

In July 1964, the Republican Party nominated war hawk Barry Goldwater to run against Johnson in the next election. Goldwater baited the Democrats for not being aggressive enough in Vietnam. Three weeks later, President Lyndon Johnson engineered a highly publicized lie to shock the American public and Congress into giving Johnson unlimited war-making authority in Southeast Asia, called the “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.” From Wikipedia:

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was a joint resolution of the U.S. Congress passed in August 1964 in direct response to a minor naval engagement known as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. It is of historical significance because it gave U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson authorization, without a formal declaration of war by Congress, for the use of military force in Southeast Asia. The Johnson administration subsequently cited the resolution as legal authority for its rapid escalation of U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam conflict.

Sound familiar?

In fact, contrary to what the timid Wiki entry states, there was likely no engagement at all. The US warships were not (as claimed) in international waters; they were supporting covert operations directed against North Vietnam. The US ships were not attacked, and in one instance apparently fired at nothing when a sonar man wrongly-interpreted the sound of his own ship’s screw.

It was a pretext for escalation, and Congress passed the resolution with only two nay votes: Senators Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska.

Sound familiar? The press raked Morse and Gruening across the coals for their “lack of patriotism.”

Out of this war grew a doctrine of counter-insurgency that would be transplanted to the domestic front, and one that in some respects prevails in the thinking of today’s political leadership. That doctrine is already being directed in limited ways against political dissidents inside the US.

No doctrine, however, in a constitutional democracy — no matter how manipulated — can survive without an ideological justification that resonates with a strong popular political base.

By the 1960s, that base had grown out of developments in the built environment of the United States, an environment I will call Suburbia.

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Part 7
Part 8
Part 9

Posted by stan in Analysis