“I Don’t Know”
June 2, 2016
At the final presidential debate of prospective candidates at the 2016 Libertarian Party National Convention in Orlando, each individual was asked whether they would have supported American intervention in the First and Second World Wars. Gary Johnson, who was later voted the Party’s official nominee, replied “I don’t know.”
As a Libertarian since 1972 and a World History teacher since 1992, I thought this flippant, ignorant or evasive answer unconscionable. If one of my high school students replied like this on an evaluative essay test, they would have failed my course.
So what would have been a proper response to this pointed question?
Johnson, or anyone else, could have succinctly pointed out that history is not static but a dynamic course of study. Events, particularly surrounding savage wars and their origins, are not frozen in time but are constantly being reinterpreted, analyzed, and reassessed by new knowledge and archival revelations.
The question for someone in the present is not whether the US should have intervened in these conflicts but what have we learned from this previous century of war, destruction, and the needless death of millions?
What we now know concerning the horrific wars of the previous century, as well as 21st century conflicts such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, provides us with a historical template to guide us in making future principled decisions concerning intervention or non-intervention.
Briefly, working backwards, what have revelations concerning non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction, deliberately falsified intelligence from the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, and an elaborately coordinated media disinformation campaign done for the case for US intervention in Iraq in 2003? For falsified (and/or still classified) information concerning the September 11th attacks leading to intervention against Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Afghanistan?
What has declassified revelations from the archives of the former Soviet Union and the Venona files in the United States done to totally reshape the narrative story of espionage and the Cold War?
What has archival revelations concerning the Pentagon Papers and the deliberately contrived Gulf of Tonkin Incident done to spurious justification for the massive intervention in the Vietnam conflict?
What has fifty years of revelations concerning the November 22, 1963 coup d’état and brutal murder of President John F. Kennedy by Lyndon Johnson and the highest echelons of the National Security State done to totally reassess the dynamic behind the change in US policy toward Vietnam within days of JFK’s assassination? How have the powerful behind-the-scenes revelations concerning the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 aided in seeing a more complete picture regarding Kennedy’s murder and the subsequent change of policy toward Vietnam?
How have incisive revelations concerning the birth of the National Security State in 1947 impacted the story of the Cold War? How have revelations concerning the use of former Nazi intelligence officers in the Reinhard Gehlen organization grafted upon US military intelligence and the CIA, been shown to have provided unreliable and provocative disinformation which fueled early Cold War tensions?
How have decisive revelations concerning the Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor reshaped the narrative of US intervention into WWII?
How have revelations concerning the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact and the joint German and Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939 affected our historical portrait of the larger story of how the Second World War began?
How have revelations concerning American and British financial, corporate, and political elites substantially aiding and rebuilding the Nazi war machine in the years prior to WWII as a bulwark against the Soviets change our view of the deep historical background?
How have revelations of the decades of joint military training and cooperation by intelligence services between Germany (during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich) and the Soviet Union impact upon the lead up to WWII?
How did the Treaty of Versailles and agreements such as Sykes-Picot affect the interwar course of events leading to the Second World War?
How did the internecine network of secret treaties, entente cordiales, and clandestine military alliances drawn up prior to the First World War lead to this conflagration?
These are the type of interrogatives Johnson should have responded with in his answer.
But I suspect that to an intellectual lightweight without a scholarly interest or curiosity in history or geopolitics such a response was unfathomable.
And it is of such pedestrian stuff that Libertarian presidential candidates are shaped and fashioned.
Market failure, property values, inflation