Yeah, but here they were making plans to murder american citizens for propaganda purposes in order to justify a war with cuba that couldn’t have been justified otherwise. Wouldn’t you agree that sort of plan is (or ought to be) completely unnecessary because we would (hopefully) never implement it in any circumstances whatsoever?
This wasn’t just a purely internal exercise for the DoD, or some “just in case” plan though. It was sent to McNamara as an actual proposal to consider as a reaction to events that were actually happening in Cuba. Happily Kennedy and McNamara don’t seem to have been interested, but I don’t think its correct to group it in with US plans to attack Canada*, for example, which was basically just theoretical practice exercises.
*IIRC, the whole point of using Canada was because no one would actually believe the US was seriously considering doing it, so there was less worry about the plans leaking and causing a diplomatic incident. Obviously that’s not true of Cuba in the 1960’s
No, the United States had plans for wars against lots of countries: Canada was just one of them. And the plans were considered “real” - not just a hypothetical training exercise. Who knows what the future might have held? Suppose a fascist government had been established in Britain rather than Germany and a fascist-allied Canada was being turned into a forward base for the Anglo-Nazis? Personally, I expect that there are still plans being made for an invasion of Canada today.
Accordng to Cecil, the plan was “primarily an academic exercise”, were internal to the DoD and was done in part because unlike other more realisitic scenarios against say, Geremany, it could be “brushed off as a mere exercise if the newspapers got wind of it”.
The Northwood thing wasn’t in the same category. It was a specific plan drawn up in response to events that were actually taking place and sent to the Civilian leadership as an actual recommendation.
Cite?
And you mean this in all seriousness?
Couldn’t have been justified?! The Cuban govt (i.e. Castro) willingly allowed & encouraged the Soviet Union to essentially make them a nuclear power, the only nuclear power besides the US in the entire Western hemisphere! Sure, the Russians would have ‘kept the keys’ to them (hopefully) but still, the Cuban Missile Crisis was not Vietnam. It was not merely the somewhat theoretical containment of communist ideology, it was preparation for a potential nuclear Pearl Harbor. It was a deliberate, unacceptable, and ultimately unsuccessful provocation and the Soviets knew it (because they lost). They backed down and agreed to remove the missiles in exchange for a guarantee that we wouldn’t invade Cuba. The fact that they used that as a legitimate bargaining chip meant that Russia knew we were serious and that they had gone too far.
As to the reference to the Arab world not being able to build skyscrapers, I certainly don’t mean that in any racially, genetically-inferior sort of way. That would be ridiculous. I mean that essentially every bit of complex modernity their societies possess was basically bought with oil money & imported lock, stock & barrel from The West. Plus, the absolute fact that the Twin Towers were primarily targeted because radical muslims saw them as a symbol of the decadent West. A symbol which, again, oil money had brought to their part of the world, which was something they hated seeing.
No, you miss the point. You’re saying the missiles in cuba justified war, and OK, that’s a valid opinion (although it ignores the double standard of why it was OK for the US to keep missiles in Turkey but not OK for the USSR to keep missiles in cuba). But then the justification for the war is the missiles – use THAT justification to convince the american people to support a war. Make THAT case to congress, to the people, etc. But if the american people then still don’t accept the missile threat as a justification for war, then it’s not ok to lie to them to invent some OTHER fake justification instead – especially if it involves a plan to murder american citizens in a fake terrorist attack.
In the case of Operation Northwood, somebody cleared thought they couldn’t get support for a war just on the missile crisis alone; so they considered “inventing” other excuses to justify support for a war. That’s what I was referring to when I said they couldn’t have justified the war otherwise.
Not really relevant in anycase, since the plan predates the agreement between the Soviets and Cuba to put missiles in the latter.
And plans to defend. The military would destroy infrastructure while retreating north, then wait for winter. Civilians are left in the hands of occupying forces. They are very familiar with American society and blend right in. A particularly nasty insurgency.
We’d lose, but damn it would be an ugly, miserable war for America. An instant recession. Imports lost from ground gained would be felt by American society. Actions like bombing hydro plants would cause brown outs in the US.
Well, it appears to be a bit more solid than that.
I never get worked up about threads like this. A crazy person brainstormed an idea, everyone saw it was batshit, and they shot it down immediately. There are too many real problems in this world for us to get excited about stuff that did NOT happen.
The CIA at that time was basically insane, anyway. Remember, we are talking about the same organization that went around murdering its own people with LSD and deliberately injecting black people with syphilis just to see what would happen. I always laugh when the older generation talks about how they lived in the “Good ol’ days” because the government was pretty depraved (and it was easier to keep secrets).
The Crazy People in this case turned out to be the Chairman and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and presented to the Secretary of Defense.
This is many magnitudes above some Captain in an office somewhere playing games of what-if.
There are some who claim that USS Liberty happened following similar scenario – idea to engage up that point a neutral US in wider ME conflict by engineering an attack by the side you want to align with and then blame the other side.
Just curious – what would you get worked up about your Government doing?
The afforementioned LSD and syphilis things.
Not to hijack the thread, but it’s far more likely the Liberty was taken out to prevent the US from monitoring the IDF push into Gaza and Golan until the forces were fully in control.
To clarify, I agree that this was a Bad Thing. I just don’t get agitated over things that never came to pass and are 50 years old. I see people writing threads where they have an emotional response to historical events, and I don’t understand why.
It’s not a hijack - many people have a difficulty accepting that US Government might do something that 3rd rate dictatorships do to their own people (excluding AA’s, Latinos, Catholics and Japanese, of course).
I’d argue exact opposite.
There are two lines of argument to consider: (1) Israel did this for their own reasons as you suggest, to prevent US monitoring IDF push or (2) Israel did this in collusion with US governments to create a public image for support of US entering a war on behalf of Israel (and take Israel “away” from Russian influence).
To me, (1) sounds extremely poor logic whereby Israel is risking US retaliation - as there were US service members killed for no apparent provocative reason - or at least risk a hostile US attitude from that point onward. At that time, such an action of open hostility with no prior warning or a threat by any country in ME including Israel, under normal circumstances (i.e. if what we see is what really went on) would warrant a 10 times harsher response. Yet, US Government response was pretty much cover up (i.e. in my book, cover up is any action short of full Congressional investigation).
Which means that (2) seems like a logical conclusion because opening a Congressional investigation would probably expose all the details so it’s best to pretend it never happened and chalk it up as another Cold War (mis)adventure.
I mean really – what would be the other reason for US Government pretty much a non-response to such a bloody attack? Can you name one other reason why US government did not retaliate? In my mind, has nothing to do with who did it but rather with how it came about. I mean it’s effin 1967 – war in Vietnam started over much smaller (albeit also fabricated) incident.
Because we have no reason at all to believe the same sort of people are proposing and maybe doing the same sort of shit. Like starting wars on known false pretexts and who know what else we’re unaware of.
Because, as always, maintaining relations with Israel trumps everything else.
It was also not an era in which the US would have cared to have *Liberty *exposed as a spook ship, since such things didn’t exist and we wouldn’t use them to spy on our allies.
I tend to buy the fuckup theory of history over the conspiracy theory of history in most cases; I think this was far more fuckup (on our part) coupled with a calculated move/risk by Israel than a US-Israel conspiracy. Israel, AFAIK, never disclaimed responsibility for the attack, claimly lamely that they thought it was a rustbucket Arab horse transport less than one-half Liberty’s size.