Print

Mail

wiki links

The US in Iraq: when forewarned gets ignored

For some years now it has been my pleasure and privilege to call upon Professor JK Galbraith on my way home from the annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund when they are held in Washington -- which is two years out of three.

I have interviewed the great man many times over the years, but last year he just took over the interview and launched into a series of incredulous questions as to why on earth the British prime minister had been so foolish as to support US President George W Bush's invasion of Iraq.

Every time I tried to get Galbraith back on to the subject of the economy, he fired another salvo, and ended up by presenting me with a bumper sticker displaying the face of Bush and the slogan "some things were never meant to be recycled."

This was a slogan fetched from no farther than the Democrat Senator John Kerry's election campaign -- Galbraith, of course, being a long time supporter of, and adviser to, the Democratic Party.

This was early last October. Since then Bush has been recycled and so, for that matter, has UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. Iraq has gone from bad to worse and far from being greeted with open arms, the British and the US have encountered firearms and arms glued suicidally to the steering wheel of car bombs; so far from walking tall bearing willingly bestowed garlands, they are bogged down in a quagmire from which they see no obvious escape route.

It's a different part of the world -- more sand, less jungle -- but the parallels with Vietnam are inescapable. And Galbraith could have told them.

For, although well known as the oldest (97), tallest (estimates vary from 2.02m to 2.07m, but how can interviewers who forget their tape-measures possibly know?) and best-selling economist in North America, Galbraith has also been closely involved in foreign policy over the years, and if his advice had been heeded the US might never have got bogged down in Vietnam.

In a fascinating biography of Galbraith recently published in the US -- John Kenneth Galbraith, by Richard Parker -- we get chapter and verse on just how a close and valued an adviser Galbraith was to former US president John F. Kennedy -- and the lengths the professor went to, alas in vain, to prevent his protegee from bowing to his hawkish advisers such as Walt Rostow and Robert McNamara, not to say the entire US military-industrial complex.

The phrase "military industrial complex" was coined not by some witness to the Congressional Committee on Un-American Activities, but by none other than former president Dwight Eisenhower himself, a man with impeccable military credentials.

Galbraith has made a lifetime's study of American Business and its links with Government -- his most famous works in this sphere being American Capitalism and The New Industrial State.

On the verge of his 98th birthday this month, he is still working on the subject. He has recently been ill and when I called upon him at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Monday last week, he was confined upstairs and obviously not fit enough for a full-scale interview.

He is also these days a little hard of hearing -- but not hard of speaking. Having greeted me with the words "I won't get up -- those days are gone," he immediately stated that the (British ) Labour Party should not have associated with Bush. Did he wish to talk about Bush? "I don't want any more of Bush."

Then came: "Bush is an aspect of something that goes much deeper. The economy is dominated by the large corporations ... our military operations both at home and abroad, including notably Iraq, are under corporate direction through Rumsfeld and a compliant military staff."

"In the absence of corporate initiative and power we would not be in Iraq. And, a more poignant matter, we would not have George Bush," he said.
This story has been viewed 1086 times.