This time next week one of the most extraordinary of meetings will have just begun. Fidel Castro is the host. The guests: Robert McNamara and the one other surviving member of president John F Kennedy’s executive committee at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, his adviser Ted Sorenson. Also sitting at the Havana table will be Castro’s long-time foreign
minister, his brother Raul, and American historian Arthur Schlesinger — a national institution himself.
McNamara was secretary of defence at the moment, in autumn 1962, when the world came closest — possible minutes away — to nuclear war. The Castros will declassify and release, under their 40-year rule, all the records from the Cuban-Soviet side.
Where the documents from both sides are unclear and there are gaps, McNamara and the Castros will fill them, under the pre-eminent guidance of Schlesinger.
This remarkable gathering has been arranged by Tom Blanton, director of the Washington DC-based organisation, the National Security Archive, which specialises in piecing together security history. Blanton tells me that the documents are likely to be sensational — shedding new light on Soviet president Nikita Kruschev’s strategic thinking and revealing for the first time the existence and exact placement of certain nuclear-armed submarines.
Even more important, this group of men will examine vivid questions: how was it that the world came so close to catastrophe? What psychological or other human factors contributed to the crisis? Which diplomatic or other channels of international communication failed, and which succeeded? What saved the world? What lessons for human conflict and international relations can be extracted for the future? And, one might add: for the present.
The people who should be sitting opposite Castro, but whose closed-minded, Othello-esque blindness to the tragic consequences of their decision-making means that they would never do so, are President George W Bush and his own powerful Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld.
The timing of the meeting is poignant. The missile crisis is the ultimate symbol of the Cold War. Thirteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there is a new Cold War. This time, there may not be a nation-state competitor to the military hegemony of the United States, but after September 11 no one can doubt the US’s sense of vulnerability.
Whatever its “asymmetry” — the clever word applied by clever analysts after the World Trade Centre crime — the threat is as dangerous. This feeds the paranoia that drives the foreign policy making of Washington. Instead of learning from the failed policies that promoted an attack such as 9/11, the US appears determined to pursue a policy on Iraq that can in the longer term only serve to further stimulate anti-American feeling around the globe.
The rumour going around progressive circles in DC is that Bush’s ruthless and brilliant adviser Karl Rove — the contemporary Ted Sorenson — wrote a memo in July advising his boss to turn his military attention on Iraq to distract from the increasingly disastrous domestic political and economic arena. Real Wag The Dog stuff.
Perhaps they actually believe in the moral rectitude of their own rhetoric (as British Prime Minister Tony Blair does). If so, Bush and his national security team are falling foul of what the brilliant international relations scholar Irving Janis calls “group-think”, a concept that has, I believe, been applied to all manner of modern management courses and the like.
Group-think goes beyond the absence of independent thinkers from within the decision-making group, but captures the nuance of a situation in which a leader uses a process for decision-making that serves not to interrogate policy options but to merely cement the preconditioned group tendency towards one single option.
Thus, in the missile crisis Kennedy applied a different decision-making process to that used the previous year in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, removing himself from the circle at times, dividing the group up into smaller groups, requiring each to pursue different hypotheticals. To his credit, Kennedy had learned from the group-think flaws of the Bay of Pigs surrogate invasion decision, when the US provided CIA-inspired support to an anti-Castro Cuban force.
I fear that Bush lacks this wisdom and Iraq may prove to be his Bay of Pigs. There is a widely held view that Secretary of State Colin Powell is the voice of sane reason and that his wise head will avert group-think contamination in the policy-making. This misunderstands — and overrates — Powell. Quite apart from his inexcusable meekness in the face of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s murderous intent towards the Palestinians, Powell’s track record is not quite as squeaky clean as his carefully manicured public image would suggest.
The National Security Archive has accumulated security documents from the 1980s that show that Powell was party to the decision in 1987 to share intelligence with Saddam Hussein that enabled him to use chemical weapons on both the Kurds and the Iranians. Powell, then deputy to national security adviser Frank Carlucci, was a recipient of the White House e-mail from Defence Secretary Casper Weinberger that described the need to help Saddam in this way.
Thus did the White House — and Powell — knowingly participate in Baghdad’s chemical warfare. As Blanton puts it: “Powell helped design the policy of the late 1980s knowing that Saddam would use the weapons on his own people. Today, that is the story that they don’t want known.”
It is the crudeness of this policy-making that is hardest to stomach, as much as the hypocrisy. It has drawn sharp criticism from former US president Jimmy Carter, who earlier this year, showing both courage and imagination, made the first visit to meet with Castro by an American president past or present. Writing in The New York Times, Carter condemned the “belligerent and divisive voices” that “now seem to be dominant” and which he argues are betraying America’s traditional commitments to human rights and peace. Citing “peremptory rejections” of new ideas developed within the wider international community, such as the International Criminal Court, Carter argues that the US is pursuing a course of increasingly unilateral isolation.
Washington’s approach to international justice is such a contrast to the sophisticated symbolism of global justice to be found in the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague.
The world is learning that war criminals must be brought to account. If we accept this proposition then why not the concept of “regime change”. The left reacts in knee-jerk fashion. The veteran Labour MP Tam Dalyell, for example, called last week for regime change in Downing Street — at least for all its faults the Labour Party still permits such outspoken criticism of its leader; Thabo Mbeki and Jeremy Cronin take note.
Contempt for the Bush administration should not be confused with pacifism. Human rights requires strength not weakness. Rescuing the rule of international law from the Bush administration’s rewriting of what constitutes sensible security policy-making is a job for the United Nations. In this way, it offers sanctuary to the left. But is it up to the job? In October 1962 the UN was an anxious bystander. From what vantage point will it gaze this time?
Archive: Previous columns by Richard Calland