by Norman Solomon
(Tuesday June 07 2005)
"Like Richard Nixon, the current president insists that he wants peace. And, in a twisted sense, he does. As the Prussian general Karl von Clausewitz remarked two centuries ago: “A conqueror is always a lover of peace.”
You wouldn’t know it from the media focus on Deep Throat last week, but the lies that Richard Nixon told about the Watergate break-in were part of his standard duplicity for the Vietnam War. It wasn’t just that the Nixon administration engaged in secret illegal actions against a wide range of peace advocates -- including antiwar candidate George McGovern, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1972. Deception was always central to Nixon’s war policy. Thirty-three years after Watergate, echoes of his fervent lies for war can be heard from George W. Bush.
From the outset, President Nixon falsely claimed to be seeking an end to the war. “I know that peace does not come through wishing for it -- that there is no substitute for days and even years of patient and prolonged diplomacy,” he declared in his first inaugural address. The great independent journalist I.F. Stone commented days later, “It’s easier to make war when you talk peace.”
A year into his first term, Nixon told the nation: “I pledged in my campaign for the presidency to end the war in a way that we could win the peace. I have initiated a plan of action which will enable me to keep that pledge. The more support I can have from the American people, the sooner that pledge can be redeemed.”
In 1971, Nixon “was increasing deceptively labeled ‘protective reaction strikes’ against the North to a level that amounted to the resumption of
Johnson’s bombing,” Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg recalls. “Starting the day after Christmas 1971 , he launched a thousand U.S. bombers during five days of bombing against North Vietnam, in the heaviest raids since 1968.”
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