Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta

Gore Vidal

New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2002; Pp. 197.

Much better than his vitriolic Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, Gore Vidal's latest rail against the abuses of the US government treads on a territory that is not only more familiar to people who follow his writing, but that is also both less polemic and much more troubling. The litany of violations of personal rights and civil liberties to which the government regularly subjects its citizens needs no retelling. (This is the troubling part, as I discuss below.) The fact that the only entities that Congress is representative of are the corporations should also come as no surprise (although Vidal's rather benign view of the corrupt mess that Europe is in, is somewhat puzzling). What needs more light and more telling, is the story of the iron-and-oil junta, as Vidal calls the Bush-Cheney presidency.

The first, and I think strongest set of essays, deals with the nefarious links of the Bush family, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condoleezza, and the rest, with the big oil companies, Unocal (United Oil of California, headquartered in Texas), Chevron, and the like. More troubling are the now-established connections of the Bushies with Osama's family and the cozy relations with various unsavory characters in the Middle East that perpetuate the grim cycle of violence there. I am not talking about Israel --- this topic is too difficult to handle here --- but about Saudi Arabia, not to mention Iraq and Iran, and even our new staunch ally and friend, Pakistan. All implicated in the struggle for mastery of Asian oil in service of US (and sometimes British and Dutch) companies. This is a study that needs to be written and documented.

However, the most troubling about all these conspiracies is that they are not conspiracies at all. Everything is, and has been, in plain sight for every interested and curious person to see. (Well, almost everything.)

Before I dive into the conclusion, let me say a few words about the weaker essays in this collection. Vidal spends time gloating about his (doubtless correct) telling of history, especially when it comes to the Pacific War and the Cold War. He may be overstating his case in claiming how controversial his narratives were (or, he may have been right, but it is certainly not the case anymore, so why bring it up?). For example, hardly anyone these days believes that FDR did not provoke Japan in 1941. It is plain to see that the US did successfully goad that island nation in its suicidal attack on Perl Harbor. (What still puzzles me, however, Vidal's explanation notwithstanding, is the reason Hitler made FDR's day by declaring war on the US several days later. Even though FDR did get a war, he did not get the war he wanted until Hitler's blunder.)

As regards the Japanese surrender in 1945, Vidal is shortchanging some pertinent research in claiming that the peace party (which did exist and was forever trying to find ways to conclude the war) could actually do so. Prince Konoe and Emperor Hirohito were in favor of peace early on, so much is true. But they did not decide policy to the extent that they could dictate a solution to the military. The persistent myth that the final surrender was somehow less than unconditional because the Japanese were allowed to retain the Emperor is just a myth. The United States always demanded full unconditional acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration and refused to even hint about the possibility of allowing Hirohito to keep his throne. Even though the nukes were not necessary to bring the war to and end (the Soviet declaration of war and their invasion of Manchuria accomplished that), one does not have to accept Vidal's sinister interpretation that Truman somehow refused an early Japanese surrender just to play with the nukes. (Also, for some reason everyone who persists in the myth about the Emperor's retention somehow conveniently forgets to mention that he was forced to give up his divinity, an absolutely devastating blow to the imperial line and its mythology.)

I like Vidal's emphasis on America's culpability in the outbreak of the Cold War. Still, anyone who has been keeping track of the documents published by the Cold War Project, or who has read a standard references, like Walter LaFeber's excellent book, would hardly be surprised by that. One does not even have to read the revisionist school (e.g. Gaddis) to see how the United States literally forced the Soviet Union to become the great Communist peril (although it did take the USSR about 40 years to do it and it collapsed right after succeeding in the 1980s).

All of this is no longer new (this, of course, is not Vidal's fault; it's due in part to efforts of honest historians like him that we now have a better look at the unflattering past). I, for one, teach the history of the Cold War in my undergraduate classes at UCSD, and here's what I find most alarming. When I was going over my lectures, I realized that they were devastatingly critical of the post-World War II policies of each and every US administration. Every lecture must have sounded like a laundry list of the excesses of the imperial presidency. I warned that the current policy-making that has been taking place in the last two years eerily resembles Truman's approach in 1947 that turned the United States into a garrison state. The same tactics of manipulation were used back then with great success. The great scramble for empire in the Middle East has been won hands down not by Turks, Russians, or the British, but by the United States, which now has entered its Third Age of Empire (the first was its extension into the Pacific and the Western Hemisphere, the second was the post-1945 global extension into Eastern Asia and Europe).

Why I am saying this? Because I was traumatized by the response of the huge undergraduate audiences. They sat, they listened... and they blinked with nary an emotion on their faces. I fully expected to be stoned on at least four occasions going to class, or at least being branded a Communist, or a threat to America (perhaps even reported under the Patriot Act). Instead, I got nothing. Not even a bewildered question! This is the troublesome and deplorable state of affairs today. Even students who are supposed to be the most liberal-minded and radical members of society, are conditioned that the university does not equal education and enlightenment, but is simply a provider for a certificate that is necessary to get a job. There was no moral outrage, there was not call to arms (although that would be stupid and pointless), there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. So it's not that people do not know. It's that people do not care.

I think that Vidal is wrong in imagining that the United States has become a prison state along the lines of Orwell's 1984 nightmarish world. Although there's little doubt that it has become a garrison state, the best metaphor still remains the one of the circus state. As long as there's entertainment, the show will go on, with the befuddled and amused audience mindlessly staring at the extravagant fireworks. Everyone can be drowned in the flood of delicately biased, mostly useless, but abundant information. It is not that there's secrecy. It's that there is much unusable transparency.

The biggest mistake that the Ashcroft-led assault on freedom can produce (for the government) is that people might wake up from their dream-world (courtesy of Disney) to find out that the Bill of Rights had ceased to exist as far back as 1947 when the Truman Doctrine set the country on war footing in peace time, created the first great villain (with more to follow), and reduced the United States to the status of the next in the long line of conquering empires.

This would be a grave mistake. I suggest that the government adhere to Aldus Huxley's Brave New World idea instead. Declassify all scary documents, like NSC-68, for all to see. Except for the handful of specialists, no one would care. Let prying historians loose in the archives. Their books will surely top the New York Times' Best-Seller List... and stop right there. For the people will do nothing. They will rest assured that theirs is a true democracy (after all, would an evil government allow such incriminating evidence to emerge?) and as long as they can pay less than $2.00 per gallon of gas to drive 40 miles to a job that pays a little more than minimum wage, they will think they're in paradise on Earth. Never mind the abysmal public education or the atrocious health care system. One must know that better alternatives are available to want them.

Therefore, the most sensible thing to do, is to keep the public in an ''enlightened darkness''. That is, inundate it with information that it can make no use of. Teach it nothing that will enable it to make sense of the world it lives in. Then, in good Truman tradition, "scare hell" out of it. It will then support the conquest of the last dismal village, even if it cannot find its own country on the map.

All in all, Dreaming War is a worthwhile read. Vidal is a gifted writer who is second to none. There are many extremely funny and witty moments in the book although his personal attacks on his detractors can be somewhat tiring at times. Even though this book will not convince anyone that has not thought about these issues before (it is not documented enough to do that) and will invariably piss off those who are convinced otherwise, it may be a useful start for someone who wants to think about these issues. And much thinking has to be done. And after thinking, something has to be done, for, as the Chinese philosopher said, "To know and not to act is not to know at all."

December 29, 2002

@book{vidal-dreaming-war,
    title     = {Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta},
    auhtor    = {Gore Vidal},
    year      = {2002},
    publisher = {Thunder's Mouth Press},
    address   = {New York},
    isbn      = {1-56025-502-1}
}