Robert Scheer: Speaking Ill of ‘the Best and the Brightest’

[marmar]

from truthdig:



Speaking Ill of ‘the Best and the Brightest’
Posted on Dec 22, 2010

By Robert Scheer


One of “the best and the brightest” died last week, and in Richard Holbrooke we had a perfect example of the dark mischief to which David Halberstam referred when he authored that ironic label. Holbrooke’s life marks the propensity of our elite institutions to turn out alpha leaders with simplistic world-ordering ambitions unrestrained by moral conscience or intellectual humility.

Fresh from Brown University, Holbrooke marched off as a foreign service officer to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese, who were not buying it. He quickly became involved with the pacification program that herded peasants off their land into barbed-wire encampments while we bombed the surrounding areas.

Holbrooke was later so successful in the infamous CIA Phoenix program to kill Vietnamese civilians thought to be sympathetic to the Viet Cong that at the age of 24 he was brought back to Washington to work under the head of that program, R.W. Komer, on a top-level White House command to save Vietnam from the Vietnamese.

While in Washington, Holbrooke came to write a chapter of the secret Pentagon Papers study that exposed the falsehoods justifying the war. Shades of the WikiLeaks disclosures—when Daniel Ellsberg, who also worked on that report, revealed it to the world, the lies stood exposed. As Defense Secretary Robert McNamara acknowledged decades after commissioning the study, 3.5 million Indochinese died in a war that had little if anything to do with our national security. He concluded that he could indeed be judged a “war criminal,” except that appellation is reserved for leaders of lesser states, like the Serbian and Iraqi leaders whose war crimes Holbrooke would later trumpet as excuses for other U.S. wars.

Holbrooke not only failed to learn from the U.S. mistakes in Vietnam; he repeated them in working for every Democratic president to follow. When Jimmy Carter was elected, there was Holbrooke as an assistant secretary of state supporting the Islamic mujahedeen in Afghanistan, a group fighting the Soviet-backed secular government in Kabul. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/speaking_ill_of_the_best_and_the_brightest_20101221/

[Demeter]

1. Shakespeare said it best

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him;
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones,
So let it be with Caesar...

But I wouldn't include the jujitsu that Marc Antony uses to turn this opening paragraph on its head and defend Caesar. I don't have much respect for any of the apparatchik of the Vietnam era. They were all wrong, sometimes honestly, sometimes in the most corrupt way possible. And today, it's all corrupt.

[bemildred]

2. Yep. They lose and lose and lose, and fuck things up and fuck things up and fuck things up ...

And never change, never adjust, never get a clue. And we all are supposed to be grateful for their "service".

[FlyByNight]

3. Is it me or do "the best and the brightest" seem to be...

...the most psychopathic/sociopathic when it comes to foreign policy and finance? "Holbrooke was influential in getting the Obama administration to commit to the folly of the U.S. surge in Afghanistan." I wonder how much Holbrooke had invested with the MICC.

Good for Mr. Scheer for exposing Holbrooke's record.

[Recursion]

6. That was the point. "The best and the brightest" was coined as sarcasm...

...in the intervening generation or so, it's started to be taken seriously.

[tblue37]

8. Like the title of the documentary _The Smartest Guys in the Room_, about the

screw-ups that ran ENRON.

[Doctor_J]

4. Well, at least Kennedy was TRYING

I would rather have them than the idiocracy we're stuck with now.

[BlueMTexpat]

5. +1000!

I was personally not a big fan of Holbrooke's actions. Except perhaps with the Dayton Accords, where he actually did bring peace of a sort to an area that needed it desperately.

[COLGATE4]

7. Holbrooke's efforts to bring about the Dayton accords deserves

a lot of praise. Remember the insane killing and ethnic cleansing that was going on before that. Now, good,bad or indifferent there is no more bloodshed.

[BlueMTexpat]

9. As noted previously, about the Dayton Accords, I absolutely agree. nt